“No; I am afraid,” said Beatrice, “all this reasoning drawn from
material things does not touch me. That is how the Pagans made _their_
religions, and it is how Paley strives to prove his. They argued from
the Out to the In, from the material to the spiritual. It cannot be; if
Christianity is true it must stand upon spiritual feet and speak with a
spiritual voice, to be heard, not in the thunderstorm, but only in the
hearts of men. The existence of Creative Force does not demonstrate the
existence of a Redeemer; if anything, it tends to negative it, for the
power that creates is also the power which destroys. What does touch
me, however, is the thought of the multitude of the Dead. _That_ is
what we care for, not for an Eternal Force, ever creating and
destroying. Think of them all—all the souls of unheard-of races, almost
animal, who passed away so long ago. Can ours endure more than theirs,
and do you think that the spirit of an Ethiopian who died in the time
of Moses is anywhere now?”
“There was room for them all on earth,” answered Geoffrey. “The
universe is wide. It does not dismay me. There are mysteries in our
nature, the nature we think we know—shall there be none in that which
we know not? Worlds die, to live again when, after millions of ages,
the conditions become once more favourable to life, and why should not
a man? We are creatures of the world, we reflect its every light and
shadow, we rejoice in its rejoicing, its every feature has a tiny
parallel in us. Why should not our fate be as its fate, and its fate is
so far as we know eternal. It may change from gas to chaos, from chaos
to active life, from active life to seeming death. Then it may once
more pass into its elements, and from those elements back again to
concrete being, and so on for ever, always changing, but always the
same. So much for nature’s allegory. It is not a perfect analogy, for
Man is a thing apart from all things else; it may be only a hint or a
type, but it is something.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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