material conveniences, and its emphatic acceptance of sympathy as
the one supreme virtue.

This is but another way of expressing that our troubles and our
terrors alike are based on selfishness, and that if we are really
concerned with the welfare of others we shall not be much concerned
with our own.

The difficulty in adopting the Christian theory is that God does
not apparently intend to cure the world by creating all men
unselfish. People are born selfish, and the laws of nature and
heredity seem to ordain that it shall be so. Indeed a certain
selfishness seems to be inseparable from any desire to live. The
force of asceticism and of Stoicism is that they both appeal to
selfishness as a motive. They frankly say, "Happiness is your aim,
personal happiness; but instead of grasping at pleasure whenever it
offers, you will find it more prudent in the end not to care too
much about such things." It is true that popular Christianity makes
the same sort of appeal. It says, or seems to say, "If you grasp at
happiness in this world, you may secure a great deal of it
successfully; but it will be worse for you eventually."

The theory of life as taught and enforced, for instance, in such a
work as Dante's great poem is based upon this crudity of thought.
Dante, by his Hell and his Purgatory, expressed plainly that the
chief motive of man to practise morality must be his fear of
ultimate punishment. His was an attempt to draw away the curtain
which hides this world from the next, and to horrify men into
living purely and kindly. But the mind only revolts against the
dastardly injustice of a God, who allows men to be born into the