Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/283

 new birth which will be glorious beyond all my expectations.’

It would be unworthy of our picture of Religion were we still specially to repeat and insist that to it there is no longer anything displeasing and deformed in the world, but that all things there, without exception, are to it a source of the purest Blessedness. Whatever exists, as it exists and because it exists, labours in the service of the Eternal Life, and in the system of this development so it must be. To desire, wish, or love anything otherwise than as it is, would be either to desire no Life at all, or else to desire Life in a less perfect manifestation.

Religion elevates him who is devoted to her service above Time as such, above the Transient and the Perishable, and puts him in immediate possession of Eternity. On the one original Divine Life his eye reposes; there his love is rooted; whatever seems to be beyond this one original Life, is not beyond it but within it, and is merely a temporary form of its development according to an absolute Law which likewise lies within itself; he sees all things only in and through this one original Life, and in every individual life he sees the whole Infinite Universe of Being. His view is thus always the view of the Eternal, and what he sees, he sees as Eternal and in the Eternal: nothing can truly be which is not, even on that very account, Eternal. Every fear of perishing in death, every effort to discover an artificial proof of the immortality of the soul, lies far beneath him. In every moment of his existence he has immediate possession of the Eternal Life with all its Blessedness; and he needs no argument or inference to prove the truth of that which he possesses in ever-present consciousness. There is no more striking proof that the knowledge of the True Religion has hitherto been very rare among men, and that in particular it is a stranger in the prevailing systems, than this, that they universally