I am ashamed to quote further from that chapter in this place; the ground on which I there tread is too sacred for controversy.  But that a Christian advocate should rise from reading it to tell people that he has a right to ridicule me for holding that “man is most likely born for a dog’s life, and there an end;” absorbs my other feelings in melancholy.  I am sure that any candid person, reading that chapter, must see that I was hovering between doubt, hope, and faith, on this subject, and that if any one could show me that a Moral Theism and a Future Life were essentially combined, I should joyfully embrace the second, as a fit complement to the first.  This writer takes the opposite for granted; that if he can convince me that the doctrine of a Future Life is essential to Moral Theism, he will—­not add to—­but refute my Theism!  Strange as this at first appears, it is explained by his method.  He draws a hideous picture of what God’s world has been in the past, and indeed is in the present; with words so reeking of disgust and cruelty, that I cannot bear to quote them; and ample quotation would be needful.  Then he infers, that since I must admit all this, I virtually believe in an immoral Deity.  I suppose his instinct rightly tells him, that I shall not be likely to reason, “Because God can be so very cruel or careless to-day, he is sure to be very merciful and vigilant hereafter.”  Accepting his facts as a complete enumeration of the phenomena of the present world, I suppose it is better inductive logic to say:  “He who can be himself so cruel, and endure such monsters of brutality for six or more thousand years, must (by the laws of external induction) be the same, and leave men the same, for all eternity; and is clearly reckless of moral considerations.”  If I adopt this alternative, I become a Pagan or an Atheist, one or other of which Mr. Rogers seems anxious to make me.  If he would urge, that to look at the dark and terrible side of human life is onesided and delusive, and that the God who is known to us in Nature has so tempered the world to man and man to the world as to manifest his moral intentions;—­(arguments, which I think, my critic must have heard from Socrates or Plato, without pooling out on them scalding words, such as I feel and avow to be blasphemous;)—­then he might perhaps help my faith where it is weakest, and give me (more or less) aid to maintain a future life dogmatically, instead of hopefully and doubtfully.  But now, to use my friend Martineau’s words:  “His method doubles every difficulty without relieving any, and tends to enthrone a Devil everywhere, and leave a God nowhere.”