Page:Is Life Worth Living?.djvu/47

Rh of honor?” Are we not bound to do some self-denying service with our lives in return for all those lives upon which ours are built? To hear this question is to answer it in only one possible way, if one have a normally constituted heart!

Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to religion and its more positive gifts. A poor halfway stage, some of you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instincts which are our nature’s best equipment, and to which religion herself must in