Compared with what the preaching of St. Paul did for the grand idea, of humanity and fraternity, all that modern science, modern political theories, modern commerce, and modern philosophies have achieved or may yet achieve, can only be counted as a very small supplement. The immortality of the soul, the second coming of Christ, and the final judgment of the world, form together a group of doctrines, the relation of which to moral practice is too deeply felt to require much discussion in this place. Perhaps, however, everybody does not sufficiently consider how peculiarly Christian these doctrines are, and how the belief in them, and the moral issues of such belief, must necessarily stand and fall with the faith in some such historical religion as has hitherto formed the framework of the Churches of Christendom. For however these doctrines might be dimly conceived and vaguely believed by the people who wrote D. M. upon their tombstones, and however solemnly imagined and grandly depicted they were in the eloquent discourses of the great philosopher of Idealism, there are few mistakes greater than to accept these dim conceptions and grand imaginings as a proof that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, as a point of Polytheistic faith, performed the same function in moulding the morality of the ancient Greeks and Romans that it does at the present day among modern Christian peoples. A single quotation--one of the most trite--from Homer {207} will suffice to show how utterly unfounded such an idea is. In the Cimmerian visit to the unseen world, the wandering king of Ithaca is made to encounter the hot thane of Thessaly, pacing with a stately fierceness through the Elysian fields, like a king among the shades. On being complimented to this effect by his visitor, the son of Peleus replies-- “Name me not death with praiseful words, noble Ulysses; I Would sooner be a bonded serf, the labourer’s tool to ply To a small cottar on the heath with wealth exceeding small, Than be the Lord of all the Shades in Pluto’s gloomy hall.”