To be near unto God - pagina 130

one time.

Therefore we come back to

will presently

it

now and

do so again.

We have tried to explain what We did not undertake to reduce

eternal life is. it to a single definition, neither have we subjected the idea to close analysis. All we essayed to do was, to make the life to be perceived in life itself, and to explain that eternal life means more than mere life without end. Mere endless life would drive us to despair; eternal life, which is altogether different, inspires and rejuvinates. And now to the point. It does not say that he who knows the Father shall have eternal life. It does not say: If you are religious and earnestly seek to know God, your reward after death will be eternal life. On the contrary it declares that to know God is itself eternal life. The difference is seen at once to be heavenwide. To interpret eternal life as a reward for pains taken to know

God is superficial, mechanical and affected. The thought that eternal life is itself the knowledge of God is unfathomably deep. Eternal life as the reward for knowledge is a part of school discipline. First much study, much memorizing, much taking notes of dictations, and then promotion from a passing existence into an endless one. This makes a sort of higher life-insurance, or turns it into a course of mental gymnastics, into the study of a work on dogmatics which is subtly composed, every sentence of which is carefully constructed, and which presents in an orderly way what in the course of centuries has been systematized regardmg the Being, Work, Person and Attributes of the Infinite. And when at length everything has become dry as dust to the eye of the soul, and it all

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