The proudest, the serenest, the most successful life of vice, must be miserable when compared with the most painful life of virtue, and miserable in a very high degree; for morality is momentous exactly in proportion to the interval between the things to be gained and escaped by it.

And unless this interval be a very profound one, the language at present current as to the importance of virtue, the dignity of life, and the earnestness of the moral struggle, will be altogether overstrained and ludicrous.
Now is such a happiness a reality or is it a myth?
That is the great question.

Can human life, cut off utterly from every hope beyond itself--can human life supply it?
If it cannot, then evidently there can be no morality without religion.

But perhaps it can.

Perhaps life has greater capacities than we have hitherto given it credit for.
Perhaps this happiness may be really close at hand for each of us, and we have only overlooked it hitherto because it was too directly before our eyes.