All men deserve to be saved, but, as I have said in the previous chapter, he above all deserves immortality who desires it passionately and even in the face of reason.  An English writer, H.G.  Wells, who has taken upon himself the role of the prophet (a thing not uncommon in his country), tells us in Anticipations that “active and capable men of all forms of religious profession tend in practice to disregard the question of immortality altogether.”  And this is because the religious professions of these active and capable men to whom Wells refers are usually simply a lie, and their lives are a lie, too, if they seek to base them upon religion.  But it may be that at bottom there is not so much truth in what Wells asserts as he and others imagine.  These active and capable men live in the midst of a society imbued with Christian principles, surrounded by institutions and social feelings that are the product of Christianity, and faith in the immortality of the soul exists deep down in their own souls like a subterranean river, neither seen nor heard, but watering the roots of their deeds and their motives.

It must be admitted that there exists in truth no more solid foundation for morality than the foundation of the Catholic ethic.  The end of man is eternal happiness, which consists in the vision and enjoyment of God in saecula saeculorum.  Where it errs, however, is in the choice of the means conducive to this end; for to make the attainment of eternal happiness dependent upon believing or not believing in the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son and not from the Father alone, or in the Divinity of Jesus, or in the theory of the Hypostatic Union, or even in the existence of God, is, as a moment’s reflection will show, nothing less than monstrous.  A human God—­and that is the only kind of God we are able to conceive—­would never reject him who was unable to believe in Him with his head, and it is not in his head but in his heart that the wicked man says that there is no God, which is equivalent to saying that he wishes that there may not be a God.  If any belief could be bound up with the attainment of eternal happiness it would be the belief in this happiness itself and in the possibility of it.

And what shall we say of that other proposition of the king of pedants, to the effect that we have not come into the world to be happy but to fulfil our duty (Wir sind nicht auf der Welt, um gluecklich zu sein, sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu tun)?  If we are in the world for something (um etwas), whence can this for be derived but from the very essence of our own will, which asks for happiness and not duty as the ultimate end?  And if it is sought to attribute some other value to this for, an objective value, as some Sadducean pedant would say, then it must be recognized that the objective reality, that which would remain even though humanity should disappear, is as indifferent to our duty as to our happiness, is as little concerned with our morality as with our felicity.  I am not aware that Jupiter, Uranus, or Sirius would allow their course to be affected by the fact that we are or are not fulfilling our duty any more than by the fact that we are or are not happy.