, and self-sacrificing for his
nation. Life, simply as life, as a continuance of changing existence,
has certainly never possessed value for him apart from this--he has
desired it merely as the source of the permanent. This permanence,
however, alone promises him the independent continuance of the
existence of his nation; and to save this he must even be willing to
die that it may live, and that in it he may live the only life that
has ever been possible to him.

Thus it is. Love, to be really love, and not merely a transitory
desire, never clings to the perishable, but is awakened and kindled
by, and based upon, the eternal only. Man is not even able to love
himself unless he consider himself as eternal; moreover, he cannot
even esteem and approve himself. Still less can he love anything
outside himself, except, that is, that he receive it within the
eternity of his belief and of his soul, and connect it with this
eternity. He who does not, first of all, regard himself as eternal,
has no love whatever, nor can he, moreover, love a fatherland, since
nothing of the sort exists for him. It is true that he who, perchance,
regards his invisible life as eternal, but who does not, therefore,
esteem his visible life as eternal in the same sense, may perhaps
have a heaven, and in this his fatherland, but here on earth he has no
fatherland; for this also is seen only under the metaphor of eternity
and, indeed, of visible eternity, rendered perceptible to the senses;
moreover, he cannot, therefore, love his fatherland. If such a man has
none, he is to be pitied; but he to whom one has been given, and
in whose soul heaven and earth, the invisible and the visible,
interpenetrate, and thus for the first time create a true and worthy
heaven, fights to the last drop of his blood again to transmit the
precious possession undiminished to posterity.

Thus has it been from time immemorial, though it has not been
expressed from time immemorial with this generality and with this
clearness. What inspired the noble spirits among the Romans, whose
sentiments and mode of thought still live and breathe among us in
their monuments, to struggle and to sacrifice, to endure and be
patient, for their fatherland? They themselves state it frequently and
clearly. It was their firm belief in the eternal continuance of their
Rome, and their confident expectation of themselves continuing to live
in this eternity. In so far as this conviction had foundati