go easily and consistently to such a consummation.

Everything that, under the advantage given by this destitution of
knowledge, operated to the destruction of the true morality, both in
theory and practice, must have had a fatal augmentation of its power in
that part especially of this ignorance which respected hereafter. The
doctrine of a future existence and retribution did not, in any rational
and salutary form, interfere in the adjustment of the economy of life. The
shadowy notion of a future state which hovered about the minds of the
pagans, a vague apparition which alternately came and vanished, was at
once too fantastic and too little of a serious belief to be of any avail
to preserve the rectitude, or to maintain the authority, of the
distinction between right and wrong. It was not denned enough, or noble
enough, or convincing enough, or of judicial application enough, either to
assist the efficacy of such moral principles as might be supposed to be
innate in a rational creature, and competent for prescribing to it some
virtues useful and necessary to it even if its present brief existence
were all; or to enjoin effectually those higher virtues to which there can
be no adequate inducement but in the expectation of a future life.

Imagine, if you can, the withdrawment of this doctrine from the faith of
those who have a solemn persuasion of it as a part of revealed truth.
Suppose the grand idea either wholly obliterated, or faded into a dubious
trace of what it had been, or transmuted into a poetic dream of classic or
barbarian mythology,--and how many moral principles will be found to have
vanished with it. How many things, before rendered imperative by this
great article of faith, would have ceased to be duties, or would continue
such only on the strength, and to the extent of the requirement, of some
very minor consideration which might remain to enforce them, and that
probably in a most deteriorated practical form. The sense of obligation,