rmation was begun and ended before your
'spiritual' Luthers appeared."

"Not so," said Fellowes, "for the eagerness with which the Christian
pursues the world, while he condemns it, is, as Mr. Greg has
recently insisted, gigantic hypocrisy': it is founded on a lie. They
say this world is not to be the great object for which we are to
live and in which we are to find our happiness; we say it is: they
say it is not our 'country' or our 'home'; we say it is: they say
that we are to live supremely for the future, and in it; we say,
for and in the present; that if there be a future world (of which
many doubt, and I, for one, have not been able to make up my mind),
we are to hope to be happy there, but that the main business is to
secure our happiness here,--to embellish, adorn, and enjoy this our
only certain dwelling-place,--and, in fact, to live supremely for
the present. Such is the constitution of human nature."

"I shall not be at the trouble," replied Harrington, "to defend the
inconsistencies of the Christian; but your system, I fear, is
essentially a brutal theology, and, I am certain, a false philosophy.
All the analogies of our nature cry out against it. All, even with
regard to the 'present,' as you call this life, man is perpetually
living for and in the future. This 'present' (minute as it is) is
itself broken up into many futures, and it is these which man truly
lives for, when he is not a beast; and not for the passing hour. It
is not to-day, it is always to-morrow, on which his eye is fixed; and
his ever-repining nature perpetually confesses its impatient want of
something (it knows not what) to come. The child lives for his youth,
and the youth is discontented till he is a man; every attainment and
every possession pails as soon as it is reached, and we still sigh for
something that we have not. It is simply in analogy with all this that
the Christian and every other religion says (absurdly, if you will,
but certainly with a deeper knowledge of human nature than you), that,
as every little present has its little future for which we live, so
the whole present of this life has its great future, which must, all
the way through, be made the supreme object of forethought and
solicitude; just as we should despise any man who, for a moment's
gratification to-day, perilled the happiness of the whole of to-morrow.
If Christians are inconsistent in this respect, that is their affair;
but I am sure their theory is mo