ABSTRACT
the life eternal is not only to be vainly hoped for in a ‘beyond’, but something that we already possess and experience in every action, whenever we know a truth, realise beauty or do a good act. How else would we have come to the thought or name of eternal life’? In every one of such acts we feel that we have put off our corruptible, mortal body, and raised ourselves to the incorruptible and eternal by unifying ourselves with God. For that very reason it is absurd to desire or demand or conceive a life eternal for that part of ourselves which is only instrumental to those other parts in whose service it is worn away. Our bodily, ‘organic’ life is by definition transient and perishable; it is precisely the not-eternal stepping-stone to something higher, constantly abandoned in our advance. The illogical idea or confused picture of an eternal life for our sensuous and emotional nature presents itself with two faces; the one is terrifying and fills us with dismay and horror for a bodily life to go on for ever in a meaningless round of pains and pleasures, a drama without plot and without climax; the other is sweet and comforting by its promise of a pure, unbroken joy, with no shocks of pain in its pleasure, but perpetually self-sustained.
