ts
object is defeated. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes
virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make
it more so." The anticipation of heaven can hardly make man a
selfish calculator of profit; because heaven is no reward for
crafty reckoning, but the home of pure and holy souls. Virtue
which resists temptation and perseveres in rectitude because it
has a sharp eye to an ulterior result is not virtue. No credible
doctrine of a future life offers a prize except to those who are
just and devout and strenuous in sacred service from free loyalty
to the right and the good, spontaneously obeying and loving the
higher and better call because it divinely commands their
obedience and love. The law of duty is the superior claim of truth
and goodness. Virtue, yielding itself filially to this, finds in
heaven not remuneration, but a sublimer theatre and an immortal
career. Egotistic greed, all mere prudential considerations as
determining conditions or forces in the award, are excluded as
unclean and inadmissible by the very terms; and the doctrine
stands justified on every ground as pure and wholesome before the
holiest tribunal of ethics. Surely it is right that goodness
should be blessed; but when it continues good only for the sake of
being blessed it ceases to be goodness. It is not the belief in
immortality, but only the belief in a corrupt doctrine of
immortality which can poison the springs of disinterested virtue.

The morality of the doctrine of a future life having thus been
defended from the attacks of those who have sought to destroy it
in the fancied interests either of the enjoyments of the earth or
of the purity of virtue and religion, it now remains to free it
from the still more fatal supports which false or superficial
religionists have sought to give it by wrenching out of it
meanings it never held, by various perverse abuses of it, by
monstrous exaggerations of its moral importance to the present. We
have seen that the supposition of another life, correctly
interpreted, lays no new duty upon man, takes away from him no old
duty or privilege, but simply gives to the previously existing
facts of the case the intensifying glory and strength of fresh
light, motive, and consolation. But many public teachers, not
content to treat the subject with this sobriety of reason, instead
of presenting the careful conclusions of a conscientious analysis,
have sought to strengthen their argumen