This secret leniency toward our abandoned faith tends to enhance our joy in human comradeship as well as in that of nature. In actuality human affection is so menaced by fate as to resemble the surreptitious whispering in the schoolroom while the teacher’s back is turned. When the loftiest spiritual converse may at any time be broken off by the malevolence of a molecule called a germ, some of us would rather never love anybody as the only means of getting even with being ephemeral. On the other hand, if we can manage to simulate a sense of survival, and can picture death as a mere voyage, we can enjoy comradeship up to the very last minute, and shout confident au revoirs even while the boat is pulling out to sea.
A faith in a future secretly indulged is stimulating to mentality. If we assume for a few minutes even in jest that perhaps our life’s chapter has a meaning, instantly our ingenuity is off to invent other chapters past and future. Before we know it our minds are glowing as we discover some passage of grand and sustained style, or are tingling with the glorious guesswork of an entire synopsis. If we are gifted with any dramatic instinct, we are as likely as not, while we turn the pages, to find ourselves appropriating the hero’s part, and bearing ourselves a bit more nobly, with a dim notion of being destined to still greater actions in the next installment. Pretending that perhaps after all our life has a meaning makes us acquit ourselves rather better than we otherwise should in the tragic episodes, and makes us enjoy the comic scenes with a twinkle kindled at imperishable fires. Even hazarded surmises about the creatorship of our life’s romance sometimes give a sense of rest and relief not as yet afforded by the prevalent doctrine of pure flux.
A little self-indulgence in eternity will not only enfranchise our conversation with our contemporaries and quicken our brains to decipher the book of humanity, but will tend to keep our minds, manners, and morals in trim for association with the great and good of all ages. We used to believe the halls of the dead were thronged with noble spirits toward whose wisdom and beauty our pilgrim feet would surely sometime find the way. This hope helped us to keep ourselves in order, much as the exiled Englishman restrains himself from slumping by donning his dress-suit in the jungle solitude. Of course, when evolution from the eternal to the ephemeral is fully accomplished, nobody will need any fillip to personal prestige, but for us poor intermediates, painfully hobbledehoy, it is a secret education in noble manners to pretend to ourselves that some day we shall be called upon to meet Socrates or Buddha or Christ.
Why not have a little patience with ourselves, we poor devils who have to bear all the brunt of the transition from eternity to evanescence? If we promise not to corrupt advancing youth, if we promise not even to corrupt our own reason by any genuine faith, can’t we safely play that our life’s chapter is going to be continued?
For, after all, what if there should be an Author?
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A