It is a fine natural instinct that teaches the hungry and cadaverous to avoid the temples of religion, and a short-sighted and misdirected zeal that would gather them into the sanctuary.  Religion is for the oleaginous, the fat-bellied, chylesaturated devotees of the table.  Unless the stomach be lined with good things, the parson may say as many as he likes and his truths shall not be swallowed nor his wisdom inly digested.  Probably the highest, ripest, and most acceptable form of worship is that performed with a knife and fork; and whosoever on the resurrection morning can produce from amongst the lumber of his cast-off flesh a thin-coated and elastic stomach, showing evidences of daily stretchings done in the body, will find it his readiest passport and best credential.  We believe that God will not hold him guiltless who eats with his knife, but if the deadly steel be always well laden with toothsome morsels, divine justice will be tempered with mercy to that man’s soul.  When the author of the “Lost Tales” represented Sisyphus as capturing his guest, the King of Terrors, and stuffing the old glutton with meat and drink until he became “a jolly, rubicund, tun-bellied Death,” he gave us a tale which needs no h‘c fabula docet to point out the moral.

We verily believe that Shakspeare writ down Fat Jack at his last gasp, as babbling, not o’ green fields, but o’ green turtle, and that that starvling Colley Cibber altered the text from sheer envy at a good man’s death.  To die well we must live well, is a familiar platitude.  Morality is, of course, best promoted by the good quality of our fare, but quantitative excellence is by no means to be despised.  C‘teris paribus, the man who eats much is a better Christian than the man who eats little, and he who eats little will pursue a more uninterrupted course of benevolence than he who eats nothing.  On Death and Immortality.

Did it ever strike you, dear reader, that it must be a particularly pleasant thing to be dead?  To say nothing hackneyed about the blessed freedom from the cares and vexations of life—­which we cling to with such tenacity while we can, and which, when we have no longer the power to hold, we let go all at once, with probably a feeling of exquisite relief-and to take no account of this latter probable but totally undemonstrable felicity, it must be what boys call awfully jolly to be dead.

Here you are, lying comfortably upon your back-what is left of it-in the cool dark, and with the smell of the fresh earth all about you.  Your soul goes knocking about amongst an infinity of shadowy things, Lord knows where, making all sorts of silent discoveries in the gloom of what was yesterday an unknown and mysterious future, and which, after centuries of exploration, must still be strangely unfamiliar.  The nomadic thing doubtless comes back occasionally to the old grave-if the body is so fortunate as to possess one-and looks down upon it with big round eyes and a lingering tenderness.