is nature he has a right to it." And he added:
"The conviction of our persistence arises in me from the concept of
activity. If I work without ceasing to the end, Nature is obliged (_so
ist die Natur verpflichtet_) to provide me with another form of
existence, since my actual spirit can bear no more." Change Nature to
God, and you have a thought that remains Christian in character, for the
first Fathers of the Church did not believe that the immortality of the
soul was a natural gift--that is to say, something rational--but a
divine gift of grace. And that which is of grace is usually, in its
essence, of justice, since justice is divine and gratuitous, not
natural. And Goethe added: "I could begin nothing with an eternal
happiness before me, unless new tasks and new difficulties were given me
to overcome." And true it is that there is no happiness in a vacuity of
contemplation.

But may there not be some justification for the morality of the hermit,
of the Carthusian, the ethic of the Thebaid? Might we not say, perhaps,
that it is necessary to preserve these exceptional types in order that
they may stand as everlasting patterns for mankind? Do not men breed
racehorses, which are useless for any practical kind of work, but which
preserve the purity of the breed and become the sires of excellent
hackneys and hunters? Is there not a luxury of ethics, not less
justifiable than any other sort of luxury? But, on the other hand, is
not all this substantially esthetics, and not ethics, still less
religion? May not the contemplative, medieval, monastic ideal be
esthetical, and not religious nor even ethical? And after all, those of
the seekers after solitude who have related to us their conversation
when they were alone with God have performed an eternalizing work, they
have concerned themselves with the souls of others. And by this alone,
that it has given us an Eckhart, a Seuse, a Tauler, a Ruysbroek, a Juan
de la Cruz, a Catherine of Siena, an Angela of Foligno, a Teresa de
Jesus, is the cloister justified.

But the chief of our Spanish Orders are the Predicadores, founded by
Domingo de Guzman for the aggressive work of extirpating heresy; the
Company of Jesus, a militia with the world as its field of operations
(which explains its history); the order of the Escuelas Pias, also
devoted to a work of an aggressive or invasive nature, that of
instruction. I shall certainly be reminded that the reform of the
contemplative Order