With as much emphasis she pronounced immortality unbelievable.  She early accepted the theory of Charles Bray and Sara Hennell, that we live hereafter only in the life of the race.  The moral bearings of the subject here also were most effective over her mind, for she felt that what we ought most of all to consider is our relations to our fellow-men, and that another world can have little real effect upon our present living.  In her Westminster Review article on “Evangelical Teaching” as presented in Young’s Night Thoughts, she criticises the following declaration:—­

  “Who tells me he denies his soul immortal,
  What’er his boast, has told me he’s a knave. 
  His duty ’tis to love himself alone,
  Nor care though mankind perish, if he smiles.”

Her comments on these lines of Young’s are full of interest, in view of her subsequent teachings, and they open an insight into her tendencies of mind very helpful to those who would understand her fully.  Her interest in all that is human, her craving for a more perfect development of human sympathy and co-operation, are very clearly to be seen.

We may admit that if the better part of virtue consists, as Young appears to think, in contempt for mortal joys, in “meditation of our own decease,” and in “applause” of God in the style of a congratulatory address to Her Majesty—­all which has small relation to the well-being of mankind on this earth—­the motive to it must be gathered from something that lies quite outside the sphere of human sympathy.  But, for certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious importance to untheological minds,—­a delicate sense of our neighbor’s rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the condition of good to others,—­in a word, the extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature,—­we think it of some importance to contend that they have no more direct relation to the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of worlds.  Nay, to us it is conceivable that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality—­that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to our many suffering fellow-men—­lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence.  And surely it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of mortality, as well as of immortality, be favorable to virtue.  Do writers of sermons and religious novels prefer that we should be vicious in order that there may be a more evident political and social necessity for printed sermons and clerical fictions?  Because learned gentlemen are theological, are we to have no more simple honesty and good-will?  We can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread of common springs; but,