but the slave draws for himself a far other picture of home. His is
no passionate cry to be admitted into the eternal city; he murmurs
sullenly, 'Let me rest.'

It was a favourite taunt with the sceptics of old--those Early
Fathers of infidelity, who used to occupy themselves so laboriously
with scraping at the rind of the Christian Faith--that until the
Cross arose men were not afraid of Death. But that arrow has lost
its barb. The Fear of Death, even among professing Christians, is
now comparatively rare; I do not mean merely among dying men--in
whom those who have had acquaintance with deathbeds tell us they
see it scarcely ever--but with the quick and hale. Even with very
ignorant persons, the idea that things may be a great deal worse
for us hereafter than even at present is not generally entertained
as respects themselves. A clergyman who was attending a sick man in
his parish expressed a hope to the wife that she took occasion to
remind her husband of his spiritual condition. 'Oh yes, sir,' she
replied, 'many and many a time have I woke him up o' nights, and
cried, "John, John, you little know the torments as is preparing
for you."' But the good woman, it seems, was not disturbed by any
such dire imaginings upon her own account.

Higher in the social scale, the apprehension of a Gehenna, or at
all events of such a one as our forefathers almost universally
believed in, is rapidly dying out. The mathematician tells us that
even as a question of numbers, 'about one in ten, my good sir, by
the most favourable computations,' the thing is incredible; the
philanthropist inquires indignantly, 'Is the city Arab then, who
grows to be thief and felon as naturally as a tree puts forth its
leaves, to be damned in both worlds?' and I notice that even the