rational and rationalistic
ethics! pedantry of pedantry, all is pedantry!--yes, this perhaps is
egoism and coldness of heart.

There are some who say that they isolate themselves with God in order
that they may the better work out their salvation, their redemption; but
since sin is collective, redemption must be collective also. "The
religious is the determination of the whole, and everything outside this
is an illusion of the senses, and that is why the greatest criminal is
at bottom innocent, a good-natured man and a saint" (Kierkegaard,
_Afsluttende_, etc., ii., ii., cap. iv., sect. 2, _a_).

Are we to understand, on the other hand, that men seek to gain the
other, the eternal life, by renouncing this the temporal life? If the
other life is anything, it must be a continuation of this, and only as
such a continuation, more or less purified, is it mirrored in our
desire; and if this is so, such as is this life of time, so will be the
life of eternity.

"This world and the other are like the two wives of one husband--if he
pleases one he makes the other envious," said an Arab thinker, quoted by
Windelband (_Das Heilige_, in vol. ii. of _Praeludien_); but such a
thought could only have arisen in the mind of one who had failed to
resolve the tragic conflict between his spirit and the world in a
fruitful warfare, a practical contradiction. "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 h