It was always so to me. I well remember the mingled horror
and pity with which, when a Christian, I regarded the man who had no
personal God, and no hope of a future life. I remember too how I wrote
or spoke of such. I mourned over them as the most hapless and miserable
of all living beings. Yet I myself have come at length, by slow degrees,
after a thousand struggles, and with infinite reluctance, to the dread
conclusion, that a personal God and an immortal life are fictions of the
human mind. Yet existence has not quite lost its charms, nor life its
enjoyments. There is something infinitely grand, and unspeakably
exciting and elevating in the consciousness of having made a sacrifice
of the most popular and bewitching of all illusions, out of respect to
truth. It was an enviable state of mind which prompted, the grand and
thrilling exclamation, "Let justice be done, though the heavens should
fall." And that state of mind is no less enviable which can sustain a
man in the sacrifice of God and immortality at the shrine of truth. Such
a sacrifice, accompanied, as it must be in the present state of society,
with a thousand other sacrifices of reputation, friendships, popular
pleasures, and social favor, is an exercise of the highest virtue, a
demonstration of the greatest magnanimity, and is accompanied or
followed with an intensity of satisfaction which none but the
martyr-spirit of truth can conceive.
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