The other view that eternity is everything and the present is nothing is the antiquated view, the narrow view; the, I might say, illiterate view.
That view warps the present life; it calls for present self-chastisement, present gloom, present sorrow and present misery.
It takes the tangible definite today, calls it nothing, and accepts the intangible unknown eternity as everything.
It trades the definite for the indefinite. It calls life a bubble, a vapor, a shadow. In fact, it makes gloom on today's sunshine and puts its believers into a purgatory; a dismal unhappy punishment antechamber where man exists and waits peeping out of his cell windows for a little imagined view of eternity.
He waits and endures the unpleasant interval, steeled against definite pleasures and evident life of today, and worried into an intoxicated colored belief in the expected happiness of the undefined future.
He refuses to think of definite life of today and spoils the thought of those who do.
He is a blockade to progress, a disagreeable part of life's picture.
He gets no happiness in the today which is in his hands, he loses this opportunity during his definite existence, and lives on future hopes in a future state which no man today knows what it will be.
Both theories as ultimate beliefs are wrong, yet each has some truth in its conclusion.
By taking the words eternity and present and saying both means everything, we avoid extremes and form a truth that is rational, and harmonious to good reason.