But are the partisans of ways of salvation {15} confined to such serious and unworldly souls as were the early Buddhists and the ancient moralists? No; turn to modern times. Read the stanzas into which Fitzgerald, in a highly modern spirit, very freely translated the expressions of an old Persian poet--Omar Khayyam; or, again, read the great programme of Nietzsche's ethical and religious revolt as set forth only a few years since in his "Zarathustra"; or recall Goethe's "Faust"; remember even Byron's "Manfred"; and these few instances from amongst a vast wealth of more or less recent literary examples will show you that the idea of salvation and the search for salvation are matters that belong to no one type of piety or of poetry or of philosophy. Cynics and rebels, ancient sages and men who are in our foremost rank of time, can agree, and have agreed, in maintaining that there is some goal of life, conceivable, or at least capable of being, however dimly, appreciated--some goal that, if accessible, would fulfil and surpass our lesser desires, or would save us from our bondage to lesser ills, while this goal is something that we naturally miss, or that we are in great danger of missing--so that, whatever else we need, we need to be saved from this pervasive and overmastering danger of failure. "Oh love, could thou and I with fate conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits and then, Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?" {16} Thus Fitzgerald's Omar expresses, in rebellious speech, the need of salvation. "What is your greatest hour?"--so begins Nietzsche's Zarathustra in his opening address to the people. And he replies: "It is the hour of your great contempt"--the hour, so he goes on to explain, when you despise all the conventional values and trivial maxims of a morality and a religion that have become for you merely traditional, conventional, respectable, but infinitely petty. Now, if you observe that St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, despite its utterly different religious ideas, begins with an analogous condemnation of the social world as it was, or as it always naturally is, you may learn to appreciate the universal forms in which the need for salvation comes to men's consciousness, however various their creed. Swinburne's well-known chorus sums up man's life as it is, thus: "He weaves and is clothed with derision, Sows, and he shall not reap; His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep."