318 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, xvi 



belief that stealing damaged him as much as swallowing 

 arsenic would do (and it does), would not the dissuasive 

 force of that belief be greater than that of any based on 

 mere future expectations? 



And this leads me to my other point. 



As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other 

 day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, 

 the officiating minister read, as a part of his duty, the 

 words, " If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, 

 for to-morrow we die." I cannot tell you how inexpres- 

 sibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, 

 or he must have known that his alternative involved a 

 blasphemy against all that was best and noblest in 

 human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. 

 What ! because I am face to face with irreparable loss, 

 because I have given back to the source from whence it 

 came, the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through 

 all my life the blessings which have sprung and will 

 spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, 

 and, howling, grovel in bestiality ? Why, the very apes 

 know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor 

 brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek 

 distraction in a gorge. 



Kicked into the world a boy without guide or training, 

 or with worse than none, I confess to my shame that few 

 men have drunk deeper of all kinds of sin than I. 

 Happily, my course was arrested in time before I had 

 earned absolute destruction and for long years I have 

 been slowly and painfully climbing, with many a fall, 

 towards better things. And when I look back, what do 

 I find to have been the agents of my redemption ? The 

 hope of immortality or of future reward ? I can honestly 

 say that for these fourteen years such a consideration has 

 not entered my head. No, I can tell you exactly what 

 has been at work. Sartor Resartus led me to know that 

 a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire 

 absence of theology. Secondly, science and her methods 



