Death is the eternal sleep. And it may be met half way, in bouts of contemplation upon Art. But--better--it may be met almost the whole way. Until the will wholly cease in death, its eager impulses, its insistent urgings to self-preservation, self-aggrandisement, may be baulked and rendered futile by deliberately opposing them. In asceticism the eager desires of life could be almost wholly baulked. Through asceticism alone could one refuse to be an accomplice in this designed crime of living--this preying of life upon life. No wonder the medieval churches had gripped the imagination of man! The child need not be born to continue the brutal struggle for life. The ascetic monk and virginal nun sternly refuse to hand on this miserable heritage to further generations. Across the design of life stood the monk and nun; their stern order--thou shalt not. Through a great and profound pity for the suffering and the weak and the losers in the brutal struggle for life, one could oppose one’s self to the cruel order of things. In this sympathy and pity alone could we raise a foundation of ethics that could demand justice against the design--which opposed itself to the triumphant brutality of the life’s struggle. In this great human pity for the down-trodden could one not only find alleviation for the misery of the world, but in it also could we find some balm for the criminal fact of our very existence. The road came out upon the pilgrim’s way. The pessimistic conception of life led to the very gates of Rome. For days Noll haunted the great aisles of the cathedral of Notre Dame--sat within the beautiful interiors of the old medieval churches of Paris--dreamed--brooded over the problem of the Refuge from Life--was thrilled with the thought that the lowly and the meek should inherit the earth.... Amidst the fragrant scent of the swinging incense, to the pathetic sob of the haunting chant, in the emotional atmosphere of prayer, the great pity for all created things welled in his heart and roused in him a passionate desire to be at grips with the cruelty of life. The mystic rites, the emblems, the symbolism of every act of this splendid church--these things held the youth fascinated, drew him, called to him. That a vague, all-seeing, all-creating, all-powerful God, sitting apart somewhere in the blue, had created the worlds out of His omnipotence, had designed this scheme of life that the religious condemned, had designed it from the beginning, and was carrying out phase by phase every detail of it, and was angry with much of the result of His own handiwork--all this was thoroughly atune with the pessimistic conception of things. All these brutalities, were they of God’s deliberate design? Well, there they were. If there had been design, then they were a part.