"Thy kingdom come" to us;
so Christ taught us to pray to the Father, not "May we come to Thy
kingdom"; and according to the primitive Christian belief the eternal
life was to be realized on this earth itself and as a continuation of
the earthly life. We were made men and not angels in order that we might
seek our happiness through the medium of this life, and the Christ of
the Christian Faith became, not an angelic, but a human, being,
redeeming us by taking upon himself a real and effective body and not an
appearance of one merely. And according to this same Faith, even the
highest of the angelical hierarchy adore the Virgin, the supreme symbol
of terrestrial Humanity. The angelical ideal, therefore, is not the
Christian ideal, and still less is it the human ideal, nor can it be. An
angel, moreover, is a neutral being, without sex and without country.
It is impossible for us to feel the other life, the eternal life, I have
already repeated more than once, as a life of angelical contemplation;
it must be a life of action. Goethe said that "man must believe in
immortality, since in his nature he has a right to it." And he added:
"The conviction of our persistence arises in me from the concept of
activity. If I work without ceasing to the end, Nature is obliged (_so
ist die Natur verpflichtet_) to provide me with another form of
existence, since my actual spirit can bear no more.
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