I 



IT DESIRABLE ? 



conduct to more vigorous hands. They have be- 

 come useless and intrinsically unimportant, unprofit- 

 able burdens of the ground at the best, or obstacles 

 that obstruct the path of fitter men. And this feel- 

 ing is both bitter and embittering ; they relax too 

 soon their efforts to preserve their powers of mind, 

 and cling with demoralizing tenacity to whatever 

 fragments of their former glories they can lay hold 

 of. And so they become both intellectually torpid 

 and morally exacting, and frequently cynical, with a 

 cynicism which has lost even the consciousness of 

 the ideals it controverts. 



And all these demoralizing effects of a disbelief in 

 their future are, it should be observed, quite inde- 

 pendent of the emotional stimuli of hopes and fears. 

 If men believed in a future life from which they 

 neither hoped nor feared anything sensational, it 

 would yet be a most salutary belief For it would 

 provide old age with an aim, and redeem it from the 

 undignified futility it so often displays at present. 

 And hence it would be of the greatest service not 

 only to the Individual but also to society, as tending 

 to raise its moral and intellectual tone. Nothing 

 would act as a more powerful tonic to improve the 

 whole moral and spiritual condition of mankind 

 than a belief which would induce men to realize 

 more vividly the solemnity of the Issues involved 

 in human life. 



Thus there are two advantages, at the very least, 

 in the belief in a future life, which no other doctrine 

 can offer; the motive it alone supplies for continuing 

 the activity of life to the last, and the sense it en- 

 genders that life is not a fleeting, senseless, play of 

 feverish appetites, to be hastily glutted with whatso- 

 ever pleasures each passing moment can afford, but 



