a second appearance on the earth of the Envoy of the Father, come to
remedy the errors and omissions of his former pilgrimage. For we find
that the man who abandons the regimen of meat abandons alcohol also;
and to do this is to renounce most of the coarser and more degraded
pleasures of life. And it is in the passionate craving for these
pleasures, in their glamour, and the prejudice they create, that the
most formidable obstacle is found to the harmonious development of the
race. Detachment therefrom creates noble leisure, a new order of
desires, a wish for enjoyment that must of necessity be loftier than
the gross satisfactions which have their origin in alcohol. But are
days such as these in store for us--these happier, purer hours? The
crime of alcohol is not alone that it destroys its faithful and poisons
one half of the race, but also that it exercises a profound, though
indirect, influence upon those who recoil from it in dread. The idea
of pleasure which it maintains in the crowd forces its way, by means of
the crowd's irresistible action, into the life even of the elect, and
lessens, perverts, all that concerns man's peace and repose, his
expansiveness, gladness and joy; retarding, too, it may safely be said,
the birth of the truer, profounder ideal of happiness: one that shall
be simpler, more peaceful and grave, more spiritual and human. This
ideal is evidently still very imaginary, and may seem of but little
importance; and infinite time must elapse, as in all other cases,
before the certitude of those who are convinced that the race so far
has erred in the choice of its aliment (assuming the truth of this
statement to be borne out by experience) shall reach the confused
masses, and bring them enlightenment and comfort. But may this not be
the expedient Nature holds in reserve for the time when the struggle
for life shall have become too hopelessly unbearable--the struggle for
life that to-day means the fight for meat and for alcohol, double
source of injustice and waste whence all the others are fed, double
symbol of a happiness and necessity whereof neither is human?
6
Whither is humanity tending? This anxiety of man to know the aim and
the end is essentially human; it is a kind of infirmity or
provincialism of the mind, and has nothing in common with universal
reality. Have things an aim? Why should they have; and what aim or
end can there be, in an infinite organism?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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