ice to a far-off day of reckoning, and it
is ever spurred on by the feeling, "The night cometh, when no man can
work." Bereft of all hope of a personal future, it binds up its hopes
with that of the race; unbelieving in any aid from Deity, it struggles
the more strenuously to work out man's salvation by his own strength.
"To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe's assurance that
'earth's wrongs and agonies' 'will be righted hereafter.' Granting for
a moment that man survives death what certainty have we that 'the next
world' will be any improvement on this? Miss Cobbe assures us that
this is 'God's world'; whose world will the next be, if not also His?
Will He be stronger there or better, that He should set right in that
world the wrongs He has permitted here? Will He have changed His mind,
or have become weary of the contemplation of suffering? To me the
thought that the world was in the hands of a God who permitted all the
present wrongs and pains to exist would be intolerable, maddening in
its hopelessness. There is every hope of righting earth's wrongs and
of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which have
already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to
strive against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the
world. It is in this sense that the Atheist looks on good as 'the
final goal of ill,' and believing that that goal will be reached the
sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each individual, he works in
the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's progress thitherward.
Not dreaming of a personal reward hereafter, not craving a personal
payment from heavenly treasury, he works and loves, content that he is
building a future fairer than his present, joyous that he is creating
a new earth for a happier race."[24]

Such was the creed and such the morality which governed my life and
thoughts from 1874 to 1886, and with some misgivings to 1889, and from
which I drew strength and happiness amid all outer struggles and
distress. And I shall ever remain grateful for the intellectual and
moral training it gave me, for the self-reliance it nurtured, for the
altruism it inculcated, for the deep feeling of the unity of man that
it fostered, for the inspiration to work that it lent. And perhaps the
chief debt of gratitude I owe to Freethought is that it left the mind
ever open to new truth, encouraged the most unshrinking questioning of
Nature, and shrank from no new conclu