Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/8

2 amidst the dreary ebb and flow of life, a spark of immortality dwells in the human breast, an inseverable bond with the unseen.

The story has been ratified by the acceptance of countless generations; it has crystallised into a thousand definite theological systems; it has inspired a wealth of sacred literature in every civilised nation. If then philosophers, from Crates to Fichte, on their cold reasonings, have been led to despise the changeful forms for the enduring realities their mind was thought to have glimpsed, it is not strange that the warmer, more vibrant tone of religion should have taught the same theme with yet deeper effect. For religion has gone far beyond the abstract results of philosophy, and has depicted to the imagination, with presumptuous but impressive vividness, the higher power and the larger life in which we are said to be enfolded. Men have gazed on the clear entrancing vision—its fair integrity and its unchanging joy mocking the precarious fulfilment of their soul’s desire here below—until the attitude of hope and expectancy has satisfied them even now. In the hermit’s cell or in the cloistered abbey they have withdrawn from earth and awaited, with the constancy of the hallucinated, the removal of the veil.

But the religious mind, at least in the western world, has entered upon a more troubled phase of its development. Physical and economical science have drawn its attention more eagerly to its present home: