on in mankind which, from inner, mental, and spiritual beginnings,
{332} renews mankind, and becomes the leaven which, in long periods of
labor, leads it to the goal of perfection; a perfection in which the whole
creation shall participate--with which, indeed, mankind is inseparably
connected on the whole natural side of its existence. But then it also lies
in the nature of the resurrection of Jesus to be single in its kind, and
without analogy, until that time shall have come in the development of
mankind when the last enemy, death, shall be forever removed and overcome.

We quite fail to conceive how those who acknowledge design in the world,
can avoid the acknowledgment of the resurrection of Jesus--supposing the
fact to be historically established: whereof we shall have to speak
hereafter. It is, indeed, quite impossible to speak of a goal of mankind,
if annihilation--annihilation of single personalities as well as of mankind
as a whole--is its certain destiny. Where and what is this end of mankind,
if the last generation of the globe is to perish with the destruction of
this globe, or languish and die even before that destruction, and if
nothing will be left of mankind beyond the soulless material for new
formations in their putrifying corpses and desolate homes and works of art?
Where and what is this goal, if all which once set human minds and hearts
in motion, and which stimulated the intellectual and moral work of the
human races, simply ceases to exist, no longer finds anywhere even a place
of remembrance, and nowhere has a fruit to exhibit, except perhaps in the
mind of a God who once set the cruel play in motion, and now permits it to
cease, in order to procure for himself a change in the entertainment? A
mere immortality of human {333} souls, without resurrection and without the
perfection and transfiguration of the universe, is not afforded us by this
goal, which we certainly need, if we are to think at all of a goal for
mankind. For if all departing souls should be carried into another world
whose only relation to the further course of the earthly history of mankind
was in the fact, that the dead are always gathered in it; into another
world whose only relation to the past of the earthly history of mankind
should be in the fact, that it is divided into a heaven and a hell for
those who reach it; if in this world everything should move on, without
end, in eternal coming and going; and if nothing could be said