as it is a
teleological value, is of religious origin also.

And to return to our interrogations: Shall not all be saved, shall not
all be made eternal, and eternal not in suffering but in happiness,
those whom we call good and those whom we call bad alike?

And as regards this question of good and evil, does not the malice of
him who judges enter in? Is the badness in the intention of him who does
the deed or is it not rather in that of him who judges it to be bad? But
the terrible thing is that man judges himself, creates himself his own
judge.

Who then shall be saved? And now the imagination puts forth another
possibility--neither more nor less rational than all those which have
just been put forward interrogatively--and that is that only those are
saved who have longed to be saved, that only those are eternalized who
have lived in an agony of hunger for eternity and for eternalization. He
who desires never to die and believes that he shall never die in the
spirit, desires it because he deserves it, or rather, only he desires
personal immortality who carries his immortality within him. The man who
does not long passionately, and with a passion that triumphs over all
the dictates of reason, for his own immortality, is the man who does not
deserve it, and because he does not deserve it he does not long for it.
And it is no injustice not to give a man that which he does not know how
to desire, for "ask, and it shall be given you." It may be that to each
will be given that which he desired. And perhaps the sin against the
Holy Ghost--for which, according to the Evangelist, there is no
remission--is none other than that of not desiring God, not longing to
be made eternal.

As is your sort of mind
So is your sort of search; you'll find
What you desire, and that's to be
A Christian,

said Robert Browning in _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_.

In his _Inferno_ Dante condemned the Epicureans, those who did not
believe in another life, to something more terrible than the not having
it, and that is the consciousness of not having it, and this he
expressed in plastic form by picturing them shut up in their tombs for
all eternity, without light, without air, without fire, without
movement, without life (_Inferno_, x., 10-15).

What cruelty is there in denying to a man that which he did not or could
not desire? In the sixth book of his _AEneid_ (426-429) the gentle Virgil
makes us hear the plaintive voices