bsidises a priest. The enthusiast who
insists that all sins, past and future, were forgiven him when he
believed, approaches far nearer than he supposes to the fanatic of
another creed, who thinks a formal confession and an external absolution
sufficient to wash away sin. All of them hold the grand heresy that one
may escape the penalties without being freed from the power of evil;
that a life may be saved by grace without being penetrated by religion,
and that it is not exactly accurate to say that Jesus saves His people
from their sins.

It is scarcely wonderful, when some men thus refuse to morality the
sanctions of religion, that others propose to teach morality how she may
go without them. In spite of the experience of ages, which proves that
human passions are only too ready to defy at once the penalties of both
worlds, it is imagined that the microscope and the scalpel may supersede
the Gospel as teachers of virtue; that the self-interest of a creature
doomed to perish in a few years may prove more effectual to restrain
than eternal hopes and fears; and that a scientific prudence may supply
the place of holiness. It has never been so in the past. Not only Judaea,
but Egypt, Greece, and Rome, were strong as long as they were righteous,
and righteous as long as their morality was bound up in their religion.
When they ceased to worship they ceased to be self-controlled, nor could
the most urgent and manifest self-interest, nor all the resources of
lofty philosophy, withhold them from the ruin which always accompanies
or follows vice.

Is it certain that modern science will fare any better? So far from
deepening our respect for human nature and for law, she is discovering
vile origins for our most sacred institutions and our deepest instincts,
and whispering strange means by which crime may work without detection
and vice without penalty. Never was there a time when educated thought
was more suggestive of contempt for one's self and for one's fellow-man,
and of a prudent, sturdy, remorseless pursuit of self-interest, which
may be very far indeed from virtuous. The next generation will eat the
fruit of this teaching, as we reap what our fathers sowed. The theorist
may be as pure as Epicurus. But the disciples will be as the Epicureans.

Is there anything in the modern conception of a man which bids me spare
him, if his existence dooms me to poverty and I can quietly push him
over a precipice? It is quite conceivable