"Either purposely or inadvertently you mix up the physical and the moral law," interposed the vicar.
"The physical and the moral are but one law, articles of the one universal code of nature."
"True," said the vicar. "I forgot that you denied man his immortal soul, as you deny him his divine sonship. And so you are content to believe that man is born to live, labour, suffer, and perish."
"Concede that God is content that such should be man's destiny," replied Mr. Haldane, "what then?"
"What then?" echoed the vicar, rising from his chair with flashing eyes and agitated face; "why, then life is a fiendish mockery!"
Mr. Haldane's face wore a grim smile as he heard the bitter emphasis of the vicar's reply.
"Ah, my worthy friend," he said, "you illustrate how necessary it is that when one has his hand full of truth he should only open it one finger at a time. If you revolt thus angrily against the new gospel, what can be expected from the ignorant and the vicious? The meaning and purpose of life does not depend on whether the individual man shall perish or shall be immortal. If perish he must, he may at least perish heroically. Annihilation or immortality does not affect the validity of religion, whose paramount aim is not to prepare for another world, but to make the best of this--to realize its ideal greatness and nobility. If life should suddenly appear a mockery, contrast the present with that remote past of the naked savage of the stone age, or the brutal condition of his more remote sylvan ancestor, learning to walk erect and to articulate; and then summon up a vision of the possible future, when superstition shall have ceased to embitter man's life, when a knowledge of natural law shall have made men virtuous, when disease shall have vanished from the world, and the nations shall, in a golden age of peace and perfected arts, have learnt the method of a patriarchal longevity. Millions of individuals have wept and toiled and perished to secure for us the present; we and millions shall weep and toil and perish to secure the future for them."
"And that you take to be the significance of life, the progress of the race?"
"And is not that at least as noble a significance as a heaven peopled with the penitent thief, the drunkard, the gallow's-bird, the harlot, the thousand bestial types of humanity redeemed by vicarious agony--the thousand brutes of civilization who, in this age, are not fit for life even on this earth, to say nothing of an enlarged immortality?"