But yearning is therefore not simply suffering, not simply love--of these we have been thinking--it is also life, the true life of man. The man who lives only for himself, and for the passing moment, does not live at all. And this is what Nietzsche says of man--man a transition and an end--yearning always interring an Old, always swinging a bridge across to a New--love loving the most distant and most future--vision sweeping up the ages to higher man. This, then, is man's hour of great self-contempt. All his happiness, his wealth, his knowledge, his virtue, seems too little to fill his soul. There is insufficiency, nausea, as to all that he esteems, a cry of wrath from the deep of his being, a cry that sounds like madness to all who call themselves good and righteous, to all who call their execrable smugness a delight. But this is the great tumultuous yearning, the thunder of whose soaring wings is forever in modern ears. It proffers man a new table of values; forward, not backward, shall he look; love _Kinderland_, the undiscovered land in distant oceans, that he may make amends to the children for their being the children of their fathers! In this song of jubilee of yearning, who does not hear the old ring, which was once preached as glad tidings, as gospel of humanity! There, too, it was the seeking that were saved, the hungering and not the sated, the starving and not the full. And they, too, had their Higher Man--the Christ they called Him, their Yearning, their Love, their Life. They sang: For me to live is Christ; I live, yet not I; Christ lives in me. And as long as this Yearning lived in them, they were creative spirits. They put a new face upon the world. They transformed the world after the image of their Higher Man. A living, a socially organized Yearning, this is what the whole Middle Age was, with its Below and its Above, where each lower man had in each higher man a rung of the heavenly ladder on which he should climb to a higher existence. A yearning hewn in stone, that was their dome; yearning they sang in their most impressive hymns and masses; and yearning breathed all those celestial figures as they lifted their glorified eyes to the Higher Man of Heaven, the Man Thorn-crowned, Crucified and Risen.