t sympathy, the warmest admiration to
those who, bereft of belief and of hope, yet cling tenaciously to moral
goodness.[5] 'What is to become of us,' asks the pensive Amiel, 'when
everything leaves us, health, joy, affections, the freshness of
sensation, memory, capacity for work, when the sun seems to us to have
lost its warmth, and life is stripped of all its charms? ... There is
but one answer, keep close to Duty. Be what you ought to be; the rest
is God's affair.... And supposing there were no good and holy God,
nothing but universal being, the law of the all, an ideal without
hypostasis or reality, duty would still be the key of the enigma, the
pole star of a wandering {56} humanity.'[6] Who does not see that it
is the lingering faith in God which gives strength to this conviction
and that, were the faith obliterated, the natural conclusion would be
for the cultured, 'Vanity of vanities: all is vanity'; and for the
multitudes, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' 'I remember
how at Cambridge,' says Mr. F. W. H. Myers of George Eliot, 'I walked
with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity on an evening of rainy
May: and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text
the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet
calls of men--the words _God, Immortality, Duty_--pronounced with
terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the _first_, how
unbelievable the _second_, and yet how peremptory and absolute the
_third_. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty
of impersonal and uncompromising Law. I {57} listened and night fell:
her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a sibyl's in the
gloom, and it was as though she withdrew from my grasp one by one the
two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with
inevitable fates. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that
columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twilight of
starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on
vacant seats and empty halls, on a sanctuary with no presence to hallow
it, and heaven left lonely of a God.'[7]

Withdraw belief in a God above and in a life beyond, the only reason
for obedience to Duty and Morality will be either our own pleasure, the
doing what is most agreeable to ourselves; or sympathy, the bearing of
others' burdens, in the hope that when we have passed away there may be
some on earth who will