A man, we will say, has written a book which
delights or displeases thousands of whom he knows nothing, and who know
nothing of him. The book, we will suppose, has considerable, or at any
rate some influence on the action of these people. Let us suppose the
writer fast asleep while others are enjoying his work, and acting in
consequence of it, perhaps at long distances from him. Which is his
truest life--the one he is leading in them, or that equally unconscious
life residing in his own sleeping body? Can there be a doubt that the
vicarious life is the more efficient?
"Or when we are waking, how powerfully does not the life we are living in
others pain or delight us, according as others think ill or well of us?
How truly do we not recognise it as part of our own existence, and how
great an influence does not the fear of a present hell in men's bad
thoughts, and the hope of a present heaven in their good ones, influence
our own conduct? Have we not here a true heaven and a true hell, as
compared with the efficiency of which these gross material ones so
falsely engrafted on to the Sunchild's teaching are but as the flint
implements of a prehistoric race? 'If a man,' said the Sunchild, 'fear
not man, whom he hath seen, neither will he fear God, whom he hath not
seen.'"
My father again assures me that he never said this.
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