reap the harvest which we have {58} sown; or
public opinion, the views which are prevalent in a particular time in a
particular region; and these reasons are hardly likely to produce a
morality which will be other than that of self-indulgence, of despair,
or of conventionality.[8]

'We can get on very well without a religion,' said Sir James Fitzjames
Stephen, 'for though the view of life which Science is opening to us
gives us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things
to enjoy. The world seems to me a very good world, if it would only
last. It is full of pleasant people and curious things, and I think
that most men find no difficulty in turning their minds away from its
transient character.' If it would only last! But it does not last:
those dearer to us than ourselves are snatched away. Could anything be
more selfish, more despicably base than to go about saying, All that is
of no {59} consequence, so long as I meet with pleasant people and have
an infinite number of things to enjoy? It is true that an infinite
number of my fellow-creatures may not be enjoying an infinite number of
things, may have trouble in recalling almost anything worthy of the
name of enjoyment, but why should I be depressed by that? I find no
difficulty in turning away my mind from the misfortunes of others. 'We
can get on very well without religion.' No doubt without it some of us
can have agreeable society and a variety of pleasures more or less
refined; but this does not prove that religion is no loss. On the same
principle, we can get on very comfortably without honesty, without
sobriety, without purity, without generosity. We can get on very
comfortably indeed without anything except without a heart which is
intent on self-gratification, and which excludes all thought of the
wants and woes of the world. 'Let us eat and drink, for {60} to-morrow
we die,' is the irresistible, though rather inconsistent, conclusion of
that sublime austerity which so indignantly repudiates the merest hint
of reward or hope within the veil, and which so sensitively shrinks
from the mercenariness of the Religion of the Cross.

'The wages of sin is death:
if the wages of Virtue be dust,
Would she have heart to endure for the life
of the worm and the fly!'[9]

What are the facts? What is the growing tendency where men think
themselves strong enough to do without religious beliefs, when they
have been proclaimin