“Let God do it all,” someone will say; but if man folds his arms, God will go to sleep.

This Carthusian ethic and that scientific ethic which is derived from ethical science—­oh, this science of ethics! rational and rationalistic ethics! pedantry of pedantry, all is pedantry!—­yes, this perhaps is egoism and coldness of heart.

There are some who say that they isolate themselves with God in order that they may the better work out their salvation, their redemption; but since sin is collective, redemption must be collective also.  “The religious is the determination of the whole, and everything outside this is an illusion of the senses, and that is why the greatest criminal is at bottom innocent, a good-natured man and a saint” (Kierkegaard, Afsluttende, etc., ii., ii., cap. iv., sect. 2, a).

Are we to understand, on the other hand, that men seek to gain the other, the eternal life, by renouncing this the temporal life?  If the other life is anything, it must be a continuation of this, and only as such a continuation, more or less purified, is it mirrored in our desire; and if this is so, such as is this life of time, so will be the life of eternity.

“This world and the other are like the two wives of one husband—­if he pleases one he makes the other envious,” said an Arab thinker, quoted by Windelband (Das Heilige, in vol. ii. of Praeludien); but such a thought could only have arisen in the mind of one who had failed to resolve the tragic conflict between his spirit and the world in a fruitful warfare, a practical contradiction.  “Thy kingdom come” to us; so Christ taught us to pray to the Father, not “May we come to Thy kingdom”; and according to the primitive Christian belief the eternal life was to be realized on this earth itself and as a continuation of the earthly life.  We were made men and not angels in order that we might seek our happiness through the medium of this life, and the Christ of the Christian Faith became, not an angelic, but a human, being, redeeming us by taking upon himself a real and effective body and not an appearance of one merely.  And according to this same Faith, even the highest of the angelical hierarchy adore the Virgin, the supreme symbol of terrestrial Humanity.  The angelical ideal, therefore, is not the Christian ideal, and still less is it the human ideal, nor can it be.  An angel, moreover, is a neutral being, without sex and without country.

It is impossible for us to feel the other life, the eternal life, I have already repeated more than once, as a life of angelical contemplation; it must be a life of action.  Goethe said that “man must believe in immortality, since in his 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