d having writ,
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wipe out a word of it."

Never repent, unless by repentance you mean drawing lessons from past
experience. Beating against the bars of fate you will only wound
yourself, and mar what yet remains to you. Grief for the past is useful
so far as it can be transmuted into renewed force for the future. The
love of those we have lost may enable us to love better those who
remain, and those who are to come. So used, it is an infinitely precious
possession, and to be cherished with all our hearts. As it leads to
vain regrets, it is at best an enervating enjoyment, and a needless
pain. The figments of theology are a consecration of our delusive
dreams; the teaching of the new faith should be the utilization of every
emotion to the bettering of the world of the future.

The ennobling element of the belief in a future life is beyond the
attack, or rather is strengthened by the aid, of science. Science, like
theology, bids us look beyond our petty personal interests, and
cultivate faculties other than the digestive. Theology aims at
stimulating the same instincts, but provides them with an object in some
shifting cloud-land of the imagination instead of the definite _terra
firma_ of this tangible earth. The imagination, bound by no external
laws, may form what rules it pleases, and may therefore lend itself to a
refined selfishness, or to dreamy sentimentalism. When we rise beyond
ourselves we are most in need of some definite guidance, and in the
greatest danger of following some delusive phantom. The process
illustrated by this case is operative throughout the whole sphere of
religious thought. The essence of theology, as popularly understood, is
the division of the universe into two utterly disparate elements. God
is conceived as a ruler external to the ordinary series of phenomena,
but intervening at more or less frequent intervals; between the natural
and the supernatural, the human and the divine element, there can be no
proper comparison. Man must be vile that God may be exalted; reason must
be folly when put beside revelation; the force of man must be weakness
when it encounters Providence. Wherever, in short, we recognize the
Divine hand, we can but prostrate ourselves in humble adoration. In
franker times, when people meant what they said, this creed was followed
to its logical results. The dogmas of th