Particularly when virtue seems so difficult and vice so attractive, does the siren voice of doubt creep in. So said St. Paul. If there is no life beyond death, religion holds men in a cruel discipline. It is a gigantic conspiracy, for they all take an afterlife, as their starting point. If there is no afterlife, then the voices from the pulpit are only the hollow ravings of self-justification, and the Ten Commandments are without meaning.
Religion rightly builds upon the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
Its central point is that men have set out upon a journey that will last for all eternity. Doubt upon that one point is possible just as it is possible to have any sort of idea cross the mind. But such doubt is in conflict with every conviction of the human race. The fact of death is indisputable. Everything passes away.