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16
ESSAYS IN MODERNITY

individuality with a claim for perpetual wages' for having been an honest man—'and what matters science unto men, at least to him? He would not stay!' Oh, no; the game would not be worth the candle! He would be a fool, in such a case, not to freely 'take his pastime.' Why, the only thing that prevents him from such creditable moral courses now is the knowledge that his spiritual banking account, whether debit or credit, is an everlasting one, and has got to be worked out satisfactorily sooner or later 'to the uttermost farthing.' How could a nurse in a hospital 'bear with the sights and the loathsome smells of disease' except she had been told on unimpeachable authority that her ministrations to the patients would count just as much as if they had been to the big Banker himself? Tennyson 'wouldn't live' unless he thought that a profit and loss system like this assured us that 'our griefs were our gains.' 'If the wages of virtue,' he exclaims, 'be dust, would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?' He has not a single idea on the subject; it is the mere primæval religious barter of the infantile savage. He knows of no justification for virtue in itself, in the happiness it affords, in the consciousness that our salvation as individuals and as a community lies demonstratively and scientifically on these lines, and on none other.