True, our creed _is_ a stern one, stern with the beautiful sternness of Nature.
But if we be in the right, look to yourselves; laws do not check their action for your ignorance; fire will not cease to scorch, because you 'did not know.'"[17] With equal vigour did I maintain that "virtue was its own reward," and that payment on the other side of the grave was unnecessary as an incentive to right living.

"What shall we say to Miss Cobbe's contention that duty will 'grow grey and cold' without God and immortality?
Yes, for those with whom duty is a matter of selfish calculation, and who are virtuous only because they look for a 'golden crown' in payment on the other side the grave.

Those of us who find joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows, who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the world's wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it--we need no paltry payment after death for our life's labour, for in that labour is its own 'exceeding great reward.'"[18] But did any one yearn for immortality, that "not all of me shall die"?
"Is it true that Atheism has no immortality?
What is true immortality?
Is Beethoven's true immortality in his continued personal consciousness, or in his glorious music deathless while the world endures?
Is Shelley's true life in his existence in some far-off heaven, or in the pulsing liberty his lyrics send through men's hearts, when they respond to the strains of his lyre?
Music does not die, though one instrument be broken; thought does not die, though one brain be shivered; love does not die, though one heart's strings be rent; and no great thinker dies so long as his thought re-echoes through the ages, its melody the fuller-toned the more human brains send its music on.

Not only to the hero and the sage is this immortality given; it belongs to each according to the measure of his deeds; world-wide life for world-wide service; straitened life for straitened work; each reaps as he sows, and the harvest is gathered by each in his rightful order."[19] This longing to leave behind a name that will live among men by right of service done them, this yearning for human love and approval that springs naturally from the practical and intense realisation of human brotherhood--these will be found as strong motives in the breasts of the most earnest men and women who have in our generation identified themselves with the Freethought cause.

They shine through the written and spoken words of Charles Bradlaugh all through his life, and every friend of his knows how often he has expressed the longing that "when the grass grows green over my grave, men may love me a little for the work I tried to do." Needless to say that, in the many controversies in which I took part, it was often urged against me that such motives were insufficient, that they appealed only to natures already ethically developed, and left the average man, and, above all, the man below the average, with no sufficiently constraining motive for right conduct.