And as the heathen identified his destruction with the destruction of the world, so he identified his immortality with the immortality of the world. To the heathen, man was a common, to the Christian, a select being; to the latter immortality was a privilege of man, to the former a common good which he vindicated to himself only because, and in so far as, he assigned to other beings a share in it also. The Christians expected the destruction of the world immediately, because the Christian religion has in it no cosmical principle of development:--all which developed itself in Christendom developed itself only in contradiction with the original nature of Christianity;--because by the existence of God in the flesh, i.e., by the immediate identity of the species with the individual, everything was attained, the thread of history was cut short, no other thought of the future remained than the thought of a repetition of the second coming of the Lord. The heathens, on the contrary, placed the destruction of the world in the distant future, because, living in the contemplation of the universe, they did not set heaven and earth in motion on their own account,--because they extended and freed their self-consciousness by the consciousness of the species, placed immortality only in the perpetuation of the species, and thus did not reserve the future to themselves, but left it to the coming generations. "Veniet tempus quo posteri nostri tam aperta nos nescisse mirentur."--Seneca (Nat. Qu. l. vii. c. 25). He who places immortality in himself abolishes the principle of historical development. The Christians did indeed, according to Peter, expect a new heaven and a new earth. But with this Christian, i.e., superterrestrial earth, the theatre of history is for ever closed, the end of the actual world is come. The heathens, on the contrary, set no limits to the development of the cosmos; they supposed the world to be destroyed only to arise again renovated as a real world; they granted it eternal life. The Christian destruction of the world was a matter of feeling, an object of fear and longing; the heathen, a matter of reason, an inference from the contemplation of nature.