What, then, even at the present day, do the ablest of those who reject Christianity propose to offer us instead? Comte would have us to worship humanity. Can we? Comte himself did not believe that we can in any but a very partial and insincere way. If we could, would our worship do either our minds or hearts more good than the worship of Jupiter and Juno did the Greeks of old? Strauss would have us to revere the universe. Is that not to go back to fetichism? Might we not just as wisely and profitably adore a stock or stone? Herbert Spencer would present to us for God the Unknowable. But what thoughts, what feelings, can we have about the Unknowable? Might we not as well worship empty space, the eternal no, or the absolute nothing? Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Mainlander, and others, would have us to go back to Buddhism and welcome annihilation. But it is clear as the light that if the advice were acted on, the springs of intellectual life and social progress would soon be dried up. The philosophy and science on which they exclusively rely have enabled none of these men to find out God; nay, they have left them under the delusion that there is no God to find out, except those strange gods to which I have referred. And being without God in the world, these philosophers, with all their knowledge and accomplishments, are also without any hope of a life beyond the grave. No man need go to them with the question, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Among all their differences--and they are many and radical--on one point they are agreed, and it is that eternal life is but a dream; that the highest hope even of the best of mankind is to survive for a time as a memory and an influence in the minds and conduct of others, after having ceased to be real and personal beings; that the only form in which the aspiration after immortality can be rationally cherished is that which the greatest of contemporary novelists and among the greatest of contemporary poets has expressed in the words:-- "O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues.... This is life to come, Which martyred men have made more glorious For us who strive to follow."