SCRIPTOR.  Hopes! wishes! desires!  What of them?  We hope, we desire all things.  Who has not cried for the moon in his time?  But what is the use of talking of what we desire?  Does life give us all we wish, however passionately we wish it, and is Death any more likely to listen to the cry of our desires?  Of course we wish it, wish it with a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise man bravely stifles.  It would all be different if we knew.

LECTOR.  But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of its probability?—­and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been convinced of its truth.

SCRIPTOR.  The promise of a probability!  O my Lector, what a poor substitute is that for a certainty!  And as for the great men you speak of, what does their ‘instinctive’ assurance amount to but a strong sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking?  Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as a fact—­a fact of which he has his own personal proof and knowledge—­a scientific, not an imaginative, theological fact?  Arguments on the subject are naught.  It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact, they are one and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypocritical clutching at that which their writers have not the courage to forgo.

LECTOR.  Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend?  Is it not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for this dream, as you call it?—­for what seems to me this sustaining faith?

SCRIPTOR.  Happier?  Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy fashion.  But ‘better’?  Well, so long as we believed in ’eternal punishment’ no doubt people were sometimes terrified into ‘goodness’ by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise; but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of virtue!  And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity.  How such a belief can be moralising I fail to understand.  To my mind, indeed, far from being moralising, this belief in immortality is responsible for no inconsiderable portion of the wrong and misery of the world.  It is the baneful narcotic which has soothed the selfish and the slothful from the beginning.  It is that unlimited credit which makes the bankrupt.  It simply gives us all eternity to procrastinate in.  Instead of manfully eating our peck of dirt here and now, we leave it and all such disagreeables to the hereafter.

  ’He said, “I believe in Eternal Life,”
  As he threw his life away—­
      What need to hoard? 
      He could well afford
  To squander his mortal day. 
  With Eternity his, what need to care?—­
  A sort of immortal millionaire.’