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 and sobbing of the babes who weep upon the threshold of Hades,

    Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens,
    Infantumque animae flentes in limine primo,

unhappy in that they had but entered upon life and never known the sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their mothers’ breasts, a dark day had cut off and drowned in bitter death—­

    Quos dulcis vitae exsortes et at ubere raptos
    Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo.

But what life did they lose, if they neither knew life nor longed for it?  And yet is it true that they never longed for it?

It may be said that others craved life on their behalf, that their parents longed for them to be eternal to the end that they might be gladdened by them in paradise.  And so a fresh field is opened up for the imagination—­namely, the consideration of the solidarity and representivity of eternal salvation.