world must be sent headlong forth. It poisons life to its lowest
depths; it spreads over all things the blackness of death; it leaves
no pleasure unalloyed." I match the Roman with the phrase of a recent
orator of this school who spoke of the soldiers dead, as now "sleeping
beneath the shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of
storm, each in the windowless palace of rest." There was no window in
the grave when more illustrious and original skeptics talked about it.
Modern infidelity has many expressions on the future after death which
sound like the old Roman distich, "I was not, and became; I was, and
am no more."

Its orator, bending over the body of his dear brother, said nothing
more touching than did Tacitus over the grave of Agricola, as he
wrote: "If there is a place for the spirits of the pious; if, as the
wise suppose, great souls do not become extinct with their bodies;
if"--oh, that age of "if" ought to have been an age when every brain
was free and no thought or sentiment were a chain. The Bible of
Christianity was not powerful enough to throttle anybody. Its pages
were not all written; its authors were hunted and outcast. Morals,
too, ought to have been all right, for we are told that they are
independent of God and Christ.

But what is the fact? Strangely enough, in that age, when nearly every
monarch, or poet, or philosopher was a humorous skeptic and they had
no Christian religion to "bind their hands," in an age when nothing
but this sort of infidelity was supreme, Seneca, to whom connoisseurs
in ethics blandly turn when they grow weary of the strenuous Paul or
the pensive John, Seneca, while he wrote a book on poverty, has a
fortune of $15,000,000, with a house full of citrus tables made of
veined wood brought from Mount Atlas. While he framed moral precepts