Mr. Newman himself at least gives some notable passages to the contrary, though he chooses to call them only personal aspirations.  Think of the absurdity, my good friend, of supposing that Job, David, Isaiah, failed to realize a doctrine (imperfectly it may be) which, as you truly affirm, has, in some shape or other, animated all forms of religion! that these brightest specimens of ‘spiritual religion’ in the ancient world somehow missed what many of the lowest savages have managed to stumble upon!”

“Well,” he replied, “but, after all, he who loves God without any thought of heaven must surely be more unselfish than he who hopes for it.”

I laughed,—­for I could not help it.

“Unhappy Paul!” interjected Harrington, who had again entered the library; “unhappy Paul!  Burdened with the hopes of immortality; what an impediment he must have found it in his Christian course!  I wonder he did not throw aside ‘this weight, which so easily beset him.’  Pity that when he became a Christian, and ceased to be a Pharisee, he did not, like so many ‘spiritual’ Christians of our day, know that, when he became a Christian, he might still remain in one of the Jewish sects, and turn Sadducee.”

“Be it so,” said Fellowes, “a Christian Sadducee, caeteris partibus, might perhaps be a more virtuous man having no hopes of heaven by which he can possibly be bribed.”

“Religious love and hope,” said I, “will with difficulty exist in such an atmosphere as you create.  It is a sublime altitude, doubtless, but no ordinary ‘spiritual’ beings can breathe that rarefied air.  It is for the honor of Shaftesbury and some few other Deists, that they aspired to this transcendental virtue!  You are imitating them.  I fear you will not be more successful.  Once leave a man to conclude, or even to suspect, that he and his cat end together, and, if a bad man, he will gladly accept a release from every claim but that of his passions and appetites (the effects being more or less philosophically calculated according to his intellectual power); while the best man would be liable to contemplate God and religion with a depressed and faltering heart.  He would be apt to lose all energy; he would feel it impossible to repress doubts of the infinite wisdom and benignity of Him (whatever he might think of His power) who had given him the soul of a man and the life of a butterfly; conceptions and aspirations so totally disproportioned to the evanescence of his being!  If, however, you really think that the hopes of an immortality of virtuous happiness will stand in the way of a sublime disinterestedness of spirituality, you ought to recollect that any expectation of happiness, even for a day, will, in its measure, have the same effect.  So that the only way in which you can accommodate so ‘spiritual a piety,’ and absolutely insure yourself against ‘spiritual bribery,’ is to deprive yourself of all possibility of being so misled.  If your piety would be absolutely sure