Shadow of Death. Yes, we must go still farther, and say that even should the science of Nature prove pantheism true, this would only array the interests of science against the interests of man — the interests that man can never displace from their supreme seat in his world, except by abdicating his inmost nature and putting his conscience to an open shame. A pantheistic edict of science would only proclaim a deadlock in the system and substance of truth itself, and herald an implacable conflict between the law of Nature and the law written indelibly in the human spirit. The heart on which the vision of a possible moral perfection has once arisen, and in whose recesses the still and solemn voice of Duty has once resounded with its majestic sweetness, can never be reconciled to the decree, though this issue never so authentically from Nature, that bids it count responsible freedom an illusion and surrender existence on that mere threshold of moral development which the bound of our present life affords.
Such a defeat of its most sacred hopes the conscience can neither acquiesce in nor tolerate. Nor can it be appeased or deluded by the pretext that annihilation may be accepted devoutly, as self-sacrifice in behalf of an infinite “fulness of life” for the universe — a life in which the individual conscience is to have no continued living share. The
