It was from this pure and lofty source that the Persians drew their faith in the better life to be.
Max Müller also quotes as the prayer of a dying Hindu woman, "Place me, O Pure One, in that everlasting and unchanging world where light and glory are found. Make me immortal in the world in which joys, delights, and happiness abide, where the desires are obtained" (Atharda Veda xii. 3, 17).
Cremation itself bore witness to the Hindu faith in immortality, since they held that "the fire which set free the spiritual element from the superincumbent clay, completed the third or heavenly birth," the second birth having been achieved when men set themselves to a faithful discharge of their religious duties.
[23] Just as we speak of this "sublunary world," so "under the sun" is the characteristic designation of the earth throughout this Book.
[24] Dean Perowne, in The Expositor, First Series, vol. ix.
[25] Compare Horace (Od. iv. 7, 9): Pulvis et umbra sumus.
[26] So Marcus Aurelius (Meditt., xi. 1): "They that come after us will see nothing new; and they who went before saw nothing more than we have seen."
[27] Père Lacordaire has a fine passage on this theme. "Weak and little minds find here below a nourishment which suffices for their intellect and satisfies their love. They do not discover the emptiness of visible things because they are incapable of sounding them to the bottom. But a soul which God has drawn nearer to the Infinite very soon feels the narrow limits within which it is pent; it experiences moments of inexpressible sadness, the cause of which for a long time remains a mystery; it even seems as though some strange concurrence of events must have chanced in order thus to disturb its life; and all the while the trouble comes from a higher source. In reading the lives of the Saints, we find that nearly all of them have felt that sweet melancholy of which the ancients said that there was no genius without it. In fact, melancholy is inseparable from every mind that looks below the surface and every heart that feels profoundly. Not that we should take complacency in it, for it is a malady that enervates when we do not shake it off; and it has but two remedies—Death or God." Elsewhere, still quite in the spirit of the Preacher, he says: "Every day I feel more and more that all is vanity. I cannot leave my heart in this heap of mud."
[28] So Goethe's Faust, after having failed to solve the insoluble problems of life by study and research, "plunges deep in pleasure," that he "may thus still the burning thirst of passionate desire."
[29] "One such pleasaunce as this there was at Etam, Solomon's Belvedere, as Josephus informs us (Antiq., VIII. 7, 3). Thither it was the custom of the king, he says, to resort when he made his morning excursions from the city, clad in a white garment, and driving his chariot, surrounded by his body-guard of young men in the flower of their age, clad in Tyrian purple, and with gold dust strewed upon their hair, so that their whole head sparkled when the sun shone upon it, and mounted upon horses from the royal stables, famed for their beauty and fleetness."—Dr. Perowne, The Expositor, First Series, vol. x.