Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the Book of Job; a faith which has flashed up in all times and all lands, wherever noble men were to be found, and which passed in Christianity into the acknowledged creed of half the world.  The cross was the new symbol, the divine sufferer the great example, and mankind answered to the call, because the appeal was not to what was poor and selfish in them, but to whatever of best and bravest was in their nature.  The law of reward and punishment was superseded by the law of love.  Thou shalt love God and thou shalt love man; and that was not love—­man knew it once—­which was bought by the prospect of reward.  Times are changed with us now.  Thou shalt love God and thou shalt love man, in the hands of a poor Paley, are found to mean no more than, Thou shalt love thyself after an enlightened manner.  And the same base tone has saturated not only our common feelings, but our Christian theologies and our Antichristian philosophies.  A prudent regard to our future interests, an abstinence from present unlawful pleasures, because they will entail the loss of greater pleasure by-and-by, or perhaps be paid for with pain, this is called virtue now; and the belief that such beings as men can be influenced by any feelings nobler or better, is smiled at as the dream of enthusiasts whose hearts have outrun their understandings.  Indeed, he were but a poor lover whose devotion to his mistress lay resting on the feeling that a marriage with her would conduce to ’his own after comforts.  That were a poor patriot who served his country for the hire which his country would give to him.  And we should think but poorly of a son who thus addressed his earthly father:  “Father, on whom my fortunes depend, teach me to do what pleases thee, that I, obeying thee in all things may obtain those good things which thou hast promised to give to thy obedient children.”  If any of us who have lived in so poor a faith venture, by-and-by, to put in our claims, Satan will be likely to say of us (with better reason than he did of Job) “Did they serve God for nought, then?  Take their reward from them, and they will curse Him to His face.”  If Christianity had never borne itself more nobly than this, do we suppose that those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the fiery warsongs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and themselves into a crusading chivalry?  Let us not dishonour our great fathers with the dream of it.  The Christians, like the stoics and the epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of an effete civilization, and would have passed off and been heard of no more.  It was in another spirit that those first preachers of righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil.  They preached, not enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no promises in this world except of suffering as their great master had