Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/63

 What I have declared in the first place, was once the form of Humanity, and in part is so still: what I have described in the second, is its present form, at least among ourselves. How, by whom, and by what manner of impulses, has this new creation been accomplished?

Who then, in the first place, gave to the countries of Modern Europe their present habitable shape, and made them worthy to be the dwelling-place of cultivated men? History answers the question. It was pious and holy men, who, believing it to be God’s Will that the timid fugitive of the woods should be elevated to civilized life, and thereby to the blessed knowledge of a Godhead full of love to man, left the abodes of civilization and all the physical and intellectual enjoyments to be found there,—left their families, friends and associates, and went forth into the desert wilderness, enduring the bitterest privations, encountering the severest labour, and, what is more, pursuing their end with unwearied patience, that they might win the confidence of untutored tribes, by whom they were persecuted and robbed;—frequently terminating an anxious and weary life by a martyr’s death at the hands of those for whom, and for us their descendants, they died,—rejoicing in the hope that from their ashes a worthier generation should arise. These men, without doubt, gave up their personal life and its enjoyments for their Idea, and in this Idea for the. And should any one offer this objection:—‘They indeed sacrificed the present life for the expectation of an infinitely higher, heavenly, and blessed life, which they hoped to deserve by these sacrifices and sufferings; but still it was only enjoyment for enjoyment, and indeed the lesser for the greater;’—then I would entreat such an objector earnestly to consider with me the following. How inadequately soever they might express themselves in words as to the Blessedness of another world, and with what sensuous pictures soever they might clothe their descriptions of this happiness, I ask only to know how they arrived at this firm