LECTOR. Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend? Is it
not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for
this dream, as you call it?--for what seems to me this sustaining
faith?

SCRIPTOR. Happier? Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy
fashion. But 'better'? Well, so long as we believed in 'eternal
punishment' no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness'
by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were
bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise;
but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of
virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our
theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and
ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can
be moralising I fail to understand. To my mind, indeed, far from being
moralising, this belief in immortality is responsible for no
inconsiderable portion of the wrong and misery of the world. It is the
baneful narcotic which has soothed the selfish and the slothful from
the beginning. It is that unlimited credit which makes the bankrupt.
It simply gives us all eternity to procrastinate in. Instead of
manfully eating our peck of dirt here and now, we leave it and all
such disagreeables to the hereafter.

'He said, "I believe in Eternal Life,"
As he threw his life away--
What need to hoard?
He could well afford
To squander his mortal day.
With Eternity his, what need to care?--
A sort of immortal millionaire.'