th. For
if we note the vital expressions of religion wherever it occurs, we find
above all one thing as its most characteristic sign, indeed as its very
essence, in all places and all times, often only as a scarce uttered wish
or longing, but often breaking forth with impetuous might. This one thing
is the impulse and desire to get beyond time and space, and beyond the
oppressive narrowness and crampingness of the world surrounding us, the
desire to see into the depth and "other side" of things and of existence.
For it is the very essence of religion to distinguish this world from, and
contrast it as insufficient with the real world which is sufficient, to
regard this world which we see and know and possess as only an image, as
only transiently real, in contrast with the real world of true being which
is believed in. Religion has clothed this essential feature in a hundred
mythologies and eschatologies, and one has always given place to another,
the more sublimed to the more robust. But the fundamental feature itself
cannot disappear.

In apologetics and dogmatics the interest in this matter is often
concentrated more or less exclusively upon the question of "immortality."
Wrongly so, however, for this quest after the real world is not a final
chapter in religion, it is religion itself. And in the religious sense the
question of immortality is only justifiable and significant when it is a
part of the general religious conviction that this world is not the truly
essential world, and that the true nature of things, and of our own being,
is deeper than we can comprehend, and lies beyond this side of things,
beyond time and space. To the religious mind it cannot be of great
importance whether existence is to be continued for a little at least
beyond this life. In what way would such a wish be religious? But the
inward conviction that "all that is transitory is only a parable," that
all here is only a veil and a curtain, and the desire to get beyond
semblance to truth, beyond insufficiency to sufficiency, concentrate
themselves especially in the assertion of the eternity of our true being.

It is with this characteristic of religion that the spirit and method of
naturalism contrast so sharply. Naturalism points out with special
satisfaction that this depth of things, this home of the soul is nowhere
discoverable. The great discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton have
done away with the possibility of that. No empyrean,