They accept our material civilization, but they reject our creeds.

To preach a prolongation of life appears to them like preaching an extension of sorrow.

At most, Christianity succeeds only in making them doubters of what lies beyond this life.

But though professing agnosticism while they live, they turn, when the shadows of death's night come on, to the bosom of that faith which teaches that, whatever may have been one's earthly share of happiness, "'tis something better not to be." Strange it seems at first that those who have looked so long to the rising sun for inspiration should be they who live only in a sort of lethargy of life, while those who for so many centuries have turned their faces steadily to the fading glory of the sunset should be the ones who have embodied the spirit of progress of the world.

Perhaps the light, by its very rising, checks the desire to pursue; in its setting it lures one on to follow.
Though this religion of impersonality is not their child, it is their choice.