This and its
consequences we will now proceed to examine.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Each time that I consider that it is my lot to die, I spread my
cloak upon the ground and am never surfeited with sleeping.
[12] Nietzsche.
IV
THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM
Let us now approach the Christian, Catholic, Pauline, or Athanasian
solution of our inward vital problem, the hunger of immortality.
Christianity sprang from the confluence of two mighty spiritual
streams--the one Judaic, the other Hellenic--each of which had already
influenced the other, and Rome finally gave it a practical stamp and
social permanence.
It has been asserted, perhaps somewhat precipitately, that primitive
Christianity was an-eschatological, that faith in another life after
death is not clearly manifested in it, but rather a belief in the
proximate end of the world and establishment of the kingdom of God, a
belief known as chiliasm. But were they not fundamentally one and the
same thing? Faith in the immortality of the soul, the nature of which
was not perhaps very precisely defined, may be said to be a kind of
tacit understanding or supposition underlying the whole of the Gospel;
and it is the mental orientation of many of those who read it to-day, an
orientation contrary to that of the Christians from among whom the
Gospel sprang, that prevents them from seeing this. Without doubt all
that about the second coming of Christ, when he shall come among the
clouds, clothed with majesty and great power, to judge the quick and the
dead, to open to some the kingdom of heaven and to cast others into
Gehenna, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, may be
understood in a chiliastic sense; and it is even said of Christ in the
Gospel (Mark ix.
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