Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/101

Rh expectant people! How must astonishment, exultation, doubt, shame, fervour have mingled!—truly, a subject for a great artist!) It was Paul's highest eulogium of his Saviour that he had paved the way to immortality for everybody—he did not yet believe in the resurrection of the non-saved; nay, in consequence of his doctrine of the impossibility of fulfilling the law and of death as a result of sin, he suspected that, heretofore, nobody (or very few people, and then only through grace and without their own desert) had become inmortal; only thenceforth immortality would begin to open its gates—and finally only very few be selected: as the overbearing pride of the elect cannot refrain from adding.In other parts, where the craving for life was not so great as among Jews and Jewish Christians, and where the prospect of immortality appeared more valuable than the prospect of "total annihilation," that pagan and yet not quite un-Jewish addition of hell was most welcome tool in the hands of the missionaries: then arose the new doctrine that even the sinner and non-saved is immortal, the doctrine of the eternally damned, which was more powerful than the henceforth fading belief in the total annihilation. Science alone could reconquer it, at the same time repelling all further ideas about death and a life hereafter. We are poorer by one interest: “The Life after death” does not concern us any longer! an inexpressible blessing which is only too new to be felt far and wide as such And again Epicurus is triumphant.