while, and at its brightest can throw no light beyond this paltry parish of a world—­is to deprive it of its whole meaning and hold on us.  Or again, even were this not so, and could we believe, and be strengthened by believing, that the good in humanity would one day gain the victory, and that some higher future, which even we might partake in by preparing, was in store for the human race, would our conception of the matter then be any more harmonious?  As we surveyed our race as a whole, would its brighter future ever do away with its past?  Would not the depth and the darkness of the shadow grow more portentous as the light grew brighter?  And would not man’s history strike more clearly on us as the ghastly embodiment of a vast injustice?  But it may be said that the sorrows of the past will hereafter be dead and done with; that evil will literally be as though it had never been.  Well, and so in a short time will the good likewise; and if we are ever to think lightly of the world’s sinful and sorrowful past, we shall have to think equally lightly of its sinless and cheerful future.

Let us pass now to the secondary points.  Opponents of theism, or of religion in general, are perpetually attacking it for its theories of a future life.  Its eternal rewards and punishments are to them permanent stumbling-blocks.  A future life of happiness they think an unmeaning promise; and a future life of misery they think an unworthy and brutal threat.  And if reason and observation are to be our only guides, we cannot say that they do not argue with justice.  If we believe in heaven, we believe in something that the imagination fails to grasp.  If we believe in hell, we believe in something that our moral sense revolts at:  for though hell may be nothing but the conscious loss of God, and though those that lose Him may have made their own hell for themselves, still their loss, if eternal, will be an eternal flaw and disease in the sum of things—­the eternal self-assertion against omnipotence of some depraved and alien power.

From these difficulties it is impossible to escape.  All we can do here, as in the former case, is to show that they are not peculiar to the special doctrines to which they are supposed generally to be due; but that they are equally inseparable from any of the proposed substitutes.  We can only show that they are inevitable, not that they are not insoluble.  If we condemn a belief in heaven because it is unthinkable, we must for the same reason, as we have seen already, condemn a Utopia on earth—­the thing we are now told we should fix our hopes upon, instead of it.  As to the second question—­that of eternal punishment, we may certainly here get rid of one difficulty by adopting the doctrine of a final restitution.  But, though one difficulty will be thus got rid of, another equally great will take its place.  Our moral sense, it is true, will no more be shocked by the conception of an eternal discord in things, but