[1] _Vide_ Sir John Lubbock's "Ants, Bees, and Wasps," pp. 1, 181.
But these are questions of quality; and the moment we pass from quantity
to quality we leave Science behind. In the vocabulary of Science,
Eternity is only the fraction of a word. It means mere everlastingness.
To Religion, on the other hand, Eternity has little to do with time. To
correspond with the God of Science, the Eternal Unknowable, would be
everlasting existence; to correspond with "the true God and Jesus
Christ," is Eternal Life. The quality of the Eternal Life alone makes
the heaven; mere everlastingness might be no boon. Even the brief span
of the temporal life is too long for those who spend its years in
sorrow. Time itself, let alone Eternity, is all but excruciating to
Doubt. And many besides Schopenhauer have secretly regarded
consciousness as the hideous mistake and malady of Nature. Therefore we
must not only have quantity of years, to speak in the language of the
present, but quality of correspondence. When we leave Science behind,
this correspondence also receives a higher name. It becomes communion.
Other names there are for it, religious and theological. It may be
included in a general expression, Faith; or we may call it by a personal
and specific term, Love. For the knowing of a Whole so great involves
the co-operation of many parts.
Communion with God--can it be demonstrated in terms of Science that this
is a correspondence which will never break? We do not appeal to Science
for such a testimony. We have asked for its conception of an Eternal
Life; and we have received for answer that Eternal Life would consist in
a correspondence which should never cease, with an Environment which
should never pass away. And yet what would Science demand of a perfect
correspondence that is not met by this, _the knowing of God?_ There is
no other correspondence which could satisfy one at least of the
conditions. Not one could be named which would not bear on the face of
it the mark and pledge of its mortality. But this, to know God, stands
alone. To know God, to be linked with God, to be linked with Eternity--
if this is not the "eternal existence" of biology, what can more nearly
approach it? And yet we are still a great way off--to establish a
communication with the Eternal is not to secure Eternal Life. It must be
assumed that the communication could be sustained. And to assume this
would be to beg the question. So that we have still to prove Eternal
Life. But let it be again repeated, we are not here seeking proofs. We
are seeking light. We are merely reconnoitering from the furthest
promontory of Science if so be that through the haze we may discern the
outline of a distant coast and come to some conclusion as to the
possibility of landing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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