If we will have power in the future to look back on to-day's acts, well and good if to-day's acts are worth while.
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 to-day, calls it nothing, and accepts the intangible unknown eternity as everything.
A Cheerless Philosophy.
It trades the definite for the indefinite. It calls life a bubble, a vapor, a shadow. In fact, it throws a pall over to-day's sunshine, and regards our earthly life as a sort of purgatory—a dismal unhappy punishment ante-chamber 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 the definite pleasures of to-day, his whole outlook colored by a fanatical and intoxicated belief in the expected happiness of the undefined future.
He refuses to think of the definite life of to-day that we all know, 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 to-day which is in his hands; he loses his opportunity to be of service here, and lives in the hope of a vague and nebulous future state which has no connection with the realities of every-day life.