“Every one must feel that,” said Marian.
“The other day, Marian,” I went on, “you said: ‘If we can never reach the goal, what is the good of anything?’ Now, I, for one, believe in infinite good; I believe that no matter how far we go, we shall long to go farther, so that what now would seem unimaginably good to us might one day seem bad. Can you imagine stagnant perfection?”
“I think,” said Marian, “that a perfectly good world would be terribly monotonous.”
“That is what I think, too,” I answered. “What we love is the going forward, the achieving, the striving.”
Henry said: “It is like travelling toward the horizon, and we think that is the end. But when we reach it, we see another horizon.”
Ruth asked: “How can we strive for anything, if we don’t expect to reach it? Is not God what we long to reach? Is not God the ideal?”
“Is not God, the real, here, now?” I answered her. “I cannot understand Infinity or Eternity, so I say Infinity is here and Eternity is now, because I am always here and now. So I cannot understand infinite good and unity, but I know that here and now I must strive for it, and that the constant striving, and getting more and ever more, is my greatest joy. Now, Ruth, do you admit that we cannot go forward alone, that all must go together to be complete?”
“Yes.”
“Then the whole is one, and every man and creature is a part of me.”
“If every one believed that,” said Marian, “how different, how much better the world would be! People could not criticize each other.”