Everything passes! Such is the refrain of those who have drunk, lips to
the spring, of the fountain of life, of those who have tasted of the
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

To be, to be for ever, to be without ending! thirst of being, thirst of
being more! hunger of God! thirst of love eternalizing and eternal! to
be for ever! to be God!

"Ye shall be as gods!" we are told in Genesis that the serpent said to
the first pair of lovers (Gen. iii. 5). "If in this life only we have
hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable," wrote the Apostle (1
Cor. xv. 19); and all religion has sprung historically from the cult of
the dead--that is to say, from the cult of immortality.

The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that the free man thinks of
nothing less than of death; but this free man is a dead man, free from
the impulse of life, for want of love, the slave of his liberty. This
thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come after death is
the very palpitation of my consciousness. When I contemplate the green
serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through
which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the
diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows
about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery
whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me
with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depths of my
spirit with the blood of divinity.

Like Pascal, I do not understand those who assert that they care not a
farthing for these things, and this indifference "in a matter that
touches themselves, their eternity, their all, exasperates me rather
than moves me to compassion, astonishes and shocks me," and he who feels
thus "is for me," as for Pascal, whose are the words just quoted, "a
monster."

It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that
ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions,
and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the
other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and
does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an
animal that guards its dead. And from what does he thus guard them? From
what does he so futilely protect them? The wretched consciousness
shrinks from its own annihilation, and, just as an animal spirit, newly
severed from the womb