The love of life—and a future life.

"We love life, because God has made it delightful for us to live. How inexpressible is the joy of good health. How tenaciously do men cling to life, and rejoice in the grandeur of sea and sky, wood and mountain, and are made glad by the contemplation of the silent march of moon and stars. Most men, women, and children,—the old and young, the rich and poor, the intelligent and ignorant—may be pardoned for desiring, hoping for, and expecting, a future life. In the good time coming, when 'sense and worth' shall 'bear the gree,' and hopeful poets will be able to do more than ask,—

'When shall all men's good
Be each man's rule, and universal peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the sea.'

"This time, so devoutly to be wished, seems to be drawing nearer, and when it comes it will be unnecessary that religious teachers should endeavour to cajole, hoodwink, and scare the English people or overturn their common sense; by thrusting in absurd and awful dogmas; by asking them to believe in fiendish works, the deeds of demons for the daily delights and nightly splendours of the Deity; by thinking them willing to perform the dreary evolution of a dismal and fatiguing spiritual wandering in Purgatory, and to gratefully acknowledge a Pandemonium as the everlasting home of the vast majority of the human family. With Tennyson we cultivate the larger hope—

"'That nothing walks with aimless feet,
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete.'"

"Theist."