And exactly the same will be the case with life.  Life will lose just the same qualities that art will—­neither more nor less.  There will be no introduction of any new interests, but merely the elimination of certain existing ones.  The subtraction of the moral sense will not revolutionise human purposes, but simply make them listless.  It will reduce to a parti-coloured level the whole field of pains and pleasures.  The moral element gives this level a new dimension.  Working underneath it as a subterranean force, it convulses and divides its surface.  Here vast areas subside into valleys and deep abysses; there mountain peaks shoot up heavenwards.  Mysterious shadows begin to throng the hollows; new tints and half-tints flicker and shift everywhere; mists hang floating over ravines and precipices; the vegetation grows more various, here slenderer, there richer and more luxuriant; whilst high over all, bright on the topmost summits, is a new strange something—­the white snows of purity, catching the morning streaks on them of a brighter day, that has never as yet risen upon the world below.

With the subtraction, or nullifying, of the moral force, all this will go.  The mountains will sink, the valleys be filled up; all will be once more dead level—­still indeed parti-coloured, but without light and shadow, and with the colours reduced in number, and robbed of all their vividness.  The chiaro-oscuro will have gone from life; the moral landscape, whose beauty and grandeur is at present so much extolled, will have dissolved like an insubstantial pageant.  Vice and virtue will be set before us in the same grey light; every deeper feeling either of joy or sorrow, of desire or of repulsion, will lose its vigour, and cease any more to be resonant.

It may be said indeed, and very truly, that under favourable circumstances there must always remain a joy in the mere act of living, in the exercising of the bodily functions, and in the exciting and appeasing of the bodily appetites.  Will anything, it may be asked, for instance, rob the sunshine of its gladness, or deaden the vital influence of a spring morning?—­when the sky is a cloudless blue, and the sea is like a wild hyacinth, when the pouring brooks seem to live as they sparkle, and the early air amongst the woodlands has the breath in it of unseen violets?  All this, it is quite true, will be left to us; this and a great deal more.  This, however, is but one side of the picture.  If life has its own natural gladness which is expressed by spring, it has also its own natural sadness which is expressed by winter; and the worth of life, if this is all we trust to, will be as various and as changing as the weather is.  But this is not all.  Even this worth, such as it is, depends for us at present, in a large measure, upon religion—­not directly indeed, but indirectly.  This life of air, and nerve, and muscle, this buoyant consciousness of joyous and abounding health, which seems so little to have connection with faiths or