And as God gathers power he uses it to an end that he is only beginning to apprehend, and that he will apprehend more fully as time goes on.  But it is possible to define the broad outlines of the attainment he seeks.  It is the conquest of death.

It is the conquest of death; first the overcoming of death in the individual by the incorporation of the motives of his life into an undying purpose, and then the defeat of that death that seems to threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun.  God fights against death in every form, against the great death of the race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency, baseness, misconception, and perversion.  He it is and no other who can deliver us “from the body of this death.”  This is the battle that grows plainer; this is the purpose to which he calls us out of the animal’s round of eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling and laughing and weeping, fearing and failing, and presently of wearying and dying, which is the whole life that living without God can give us.  And from these great propositions there follow many very definite maxims and rules of life for those who serve God.  These we will immediately consider.

3.  The crucifix

But first let me write a few words here about those who hold a kind of intermediate faith between the worship of the God of Youth and the vaguer sort of Christianity.  There are a number of people closely in touch with those who have found the new religion who, biased probably by a dread of too complete a break with Christianity, have adopted a theogony which is very reminiscent of Gnosticism and of the Paulician, Catharist, and kindred sects to which allusion has already been made.  He, who is called in this book God, they would call God-the-Son or Christ, or the Logos; and what is here called the Darkness or the Veiled Being, they would call God-the-Father.  And what we speak of here as Life, they would call, with a certain disregard of the poor brutes that perish, Man.  And they would assert, what we of the new belief, pleading our profound ignorance, would neither assert nor deny, that that Darkness, out of which came Life and God, since it produced them must be ultimately sympathetic and of like nature with them.  And that ultimately Man, being redeemed and led by Christ and saved from death by him, would be reconciled with God the Father.* And this great adventurer out of the hearts of man that we here call God, they would present as the same with that teacher from Galilee who was crucified at Jerusalem.

* This probably was the conception of Spinoza.  Christ for him is the wisdom of God manifested in all things, and chiefly in the mind of man.  Through him we reach the blessedness of an intuitive knowledge of God.  Salvation is an escape from the “inadequate” ideas of the mortal human personality to the “adequate” and timeless ideas of God.

Now we of the modern way would offer the following