"The world rolls round forever like a mill,
It grinds out death and life and good and ill,
It has no purpose, heart, or mind or will."
When from poetry one turns to philosophy, he can see good reasons why
hymnals and unbelief should be uncongenial. There is little to make
life worth while in a creed which holds as Haeckel does that morality
in man, like the tail of a monkey or the shell of a tortoise, is
purely a physiological effect, and that man himself is "an affair of
chance; the froth and fume at the wave-top of a sterile ocean of
matter." Shall the practical unserviceableness of such an idea for the
purpose of life, awaken no suspicion as to its truth?
Upon the other hand, suppose that by some strange chance the
principles of Jesus should over night take possession of mankind. Even
as it is, when one starts his thought with the Stone Age, the progress
of mankind has obviously been immense. From universal cannibalism
after a battle, to massacre without cannibalism marked one great
advance; from massacre of all prisoners taken in war to enslavement of
them marked another; and when slavery ceased being a philanthropic
improvement, as it was at first, and became a sin and shame, humanity
took another long step forward. With all our present barbarity, a far
look backwards shows a clear ascent. As for the influence of Jesus,
Lecky, the historian, tells us that "The simple record of three short
years of Christ's active life has done more to regenerate and soften
mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the
exhortations of moralists." What if this process were brought to its
fulfilment between sunset and dawn, and the new day came with every
one sure of God's fatherhood and life eternal, of the law of love and
the supremacy of character and with everyone living as though these
were true? Whatever intellectual perplexities of belief a man may
have, he knows that such a world would be divinely great. No war, no
evil lust, no covetous selfishness, no drunkenness! Mankind, relieved
of ancient burdens which have ruined character and crushed endeavor,
confident of faiths that give life infinite horizons and deathless
hopes, in cooperative international fraternity would be making the
earth a decent home for God to rear his children in. One finds it hard
to believe that ideas which, incarnate in life, would so redeem the
world are false.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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