It is the
expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look
upon religion merely as a means of government and whose interest it is
that in the other life there shall be a hell for those who oppose their
worldly interests in this life. This repugnant and Sadducean phrase is
worthy of the time-serving sceptic to whom it is attributed.
No, with all this the deep vital sense has nothing to do. It has nothing
to do with a transcendental police regimen, or with securing order--and
what an order!--upon earth by means of promises and threats of eternal
rewards and punishments after death. All this belongs to a lower
plane--that is to say, it is merely politics, or if you like, ethics.
The vital sense has to do with living.
But it is in our endeavour to represent to ourselves what the life of
the soul after death really means that uncertainty finds its surest
foundation. This it is that most shakes our vital desire and most
intensifies the dissolvent efficacy of reason. For even if by a mighty
effort of faith we overcome that reason which tells and teaches us that
the soul is only a function of the physical organism, it yet remains
for our imagination to conceive an image of the immortal and eternal
life of the soul. This conception involves us in contradictions and
absurdities, and it may be that we shall arrive with Kierkegaard at the
conclusion that if the mortality of the soul is terrible, not less
terrible is its immortality.
Pages:
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201