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THE RECONCILIATION. 



fluential ones. Even now, for the great mass of men, un- 

 able through lack of culture to trace out with due clear- 

 ness those good and bad consequences which conduct brings 

 round through the established order of the Unknowable, it 

 is needful that there should be vividly depicted future tor- 

 ments and future joys — pains and pleasures of a definite 

 kind, produced in a manner direct and simple enough to be 

 clearly imagined. Nay still more must be conceded. 



Few if any are as yet fitted wholly to dispense with such 

 conceptions as are current. The highest abstractions take so 

 great a mental power to realize with any vividness, and are 

 so inoperative upon conduct unless they are vividly realized, 

 that their regulative effects must for a long period to come 

 be appreciable on but a small minority. To see clearly how 

 a right or wrong act generates consequences, internal and 

 external, that go on branching out more widely as years 

 progress, requires a rare power of analysis. To mentally 

 represent even a single series of these consequences, as it 

 stretches out into the remote future, requires an equally rare 

 power of imagination. And to estimate these consequences 

 in their totality, ever multiplying in number while dimin- 

 ishing in intensity, requires a grasp of thought possessed by 

 none. Yet it is only by such analysis, such imagination, and 

 such grasp, that conduct can be rightly guided in the ab- 

 sence of all other control : only so can ultimate rewards and 

 penalties be made to outweigh proximate pains and plea- 

 sures. Indeed, were it not that throughout the progress of 

 the race, men's experiences of the effects of conduct have 

 been slowly generalized into principles — were it not that 

 these principles have been from generation to generation in- 

 sisted on by parents, upheld by public opinion, sanctified by 

 religion, and enforced by threats of eternal damnation for 

 disobedience — were it not that under these potent influ- 

 ences, habits have been modified, and the feelings proper to 

 them made innate — were it not, in short, that we have been 

 rendered in a considerable degree organically moral; it is 



