have, alas! condescended to say but little, supposing that every body would feel that there was no need of solemn counsels on such a subject.  It reminds one of the Christmas sermon mentioned in the ‘Sketch Book,’ preached by the good little antiquarian who elaborately proved, and pathetically enforced on reluctant auditors, the duty of a proper devotion to the festivities of the season.  However, every one must like the complexion of your theology, though its counsels on this subject do not seem to me of urgent necessity.”

“Perhaps,” said Fellowes, “I ought rather to have said that Christians inculcate, theoretically, a contempt of the present life, while, practically, they enter as keenly into its pleasures as the ‘worldling,’”—­uttering the last word with an approach to a sneer.

“You may be sure,” said Harrington, “I shall leave the Christian to defend himself; but if the case be as you now represent it, your new religious system seems to be superfluous as a corrective of any tendencies to Christian asceticism, and can do nothing for us.  It appears that your Reformation was begun and ended before your ‘spiritual’ Luthers appeared.”

“Not so,” said Fellowes, “for the eagerness with which the Christian pursues the world, while he condemns it, is, as Mr. Greg has recently insisted, gigantic hypocrisy’:  it is founded on a lie.  They say this world is not to be the great object for which we are to live and in which we are to find our happiness; we say it is:  they say it is not our ‘country’ or our ‘home’; we say it is:  they say that we are to live supremely for the future, and in it; we say, for and in the present; that if there be a future world (of which many doubt, and I, for one, have not been able to make up my mind), we are to hope to be happy there, but that the main business is to secure our happiness here,—­to embellish, adorn, and enjoy this our only certain dwelling-place,—­and, in fact, to live supremely for the present.  Such is the constitution of human nature.”

“I shall not be at the trouble,” replied Harrington, “to defend the inconsistencies of the Christian; but your system, I fear, is essentially a brutal theology, and, I am certain, a false philosophy.  All the analogies of our nature cry out against it.  All, even with regard to the ‘present,’ as you call this life, man is perpetually living for and in the future.  This ‘present’ (minute as it is) is itself broken up into many futures, and it is these which man truly lives for, when he is not a beast; and not for the passing hour.  It is not to-day, it is always to-morrow, on which his eye is fixed; and his ever-repining nature perpetually confesses its impatient want of something (it knows not what) to come.  The child lives for his youth, and the youth is discontented till he is a man; every attainment and every possession pails as soon as it is reached, and we still sigh for something that we have not.  It is simply in analogy with all this