“How so?”

“Do you think that, admitting not only the uncertainty of any future life, but the certainty that there is none, and that nevertheless (as you affirm) man, under that conviction, is just as capable of manifesting a true devotion and piety towards God, any felicity flows from his so doing?”

“The highest, of course,” said he.

“Do you think that the happiness so derived and expected from day to day has any sinister influence on the spiritual life of him who feels it?”

“Of course, none.”

“The contrary, perhaps?”

“I think so.”

“Then neither need the expectation of an eternity of such blessedness be any impediment.  Again; let us come to facts; are not the declarations of those whom Mr. Newman, however oddly, is willing to admit have been the best specimens yet afforded of his true ‘spiritual’ man,—­the Doddridges, the Fletchers, the Baxters, and Paul especially,—­full of this sentiment?  ‘I desire to depart,’ says Paul, ’and to be with Christ, which is far better’; and similar selfish hopes inspired those excellent men whose names still rise spontaneously to Mr. Newman’s memory when he would remind us of examples of his ’spiritual religion!  Tell me, do you not think Paul a ‘spiritual’ man?”

“Yes; with all his blunders,” said Fellowes, “I do; and Mr. Newman’s writings are full of that admission.”

“Very true.  But then Paul is so selfish, you know, as to say, not merely that the immortality of man is true, and that the ’light afflictions which are but for a moment’ are to be despised, because unworthy ’to be compared with the glory to be revealed’; but that, if immortality be not true, Christians, as deluded in such hopes, are of all men most miserable.  All this shows how powerfully the ‘spiritual’ Paul thought that the doctrine of a future state operated and ought to operate on the mind of a Christian; he never supposed that it could possibly have a negative, still less a sinister influence.’

“But then, surely, what Mr. Newman says is true, that many of the saints of the Old Testament exemplified all the heroism of a true faith, and kindled with the ardors of a true devotion, in an ignorance of any such state, and the absence of all such expectations.”

“I answer, that Mr. Newman too often speaks as if his individual impressions were to be taken for demonstration.  That the Old Testament is unpervaded by any distinct traces of expectations of a future life is, at all events, not the opinion of the majority of men, many of them at least as capable of judging as Mr. Newman.  It is not the opinion of the writers of the New Testament, that the Old Testament worthies were in this deplorable darkness; nor of the majority of the Jewish interpreters of their ancestors’ writings; nor is it the impression of the great majority of those who now read them.  How it can be the opinion of any one who has not some hypothesis to serve, is to me a mystery.  Meanwhile