VIII - DOES DEATH END ALL? THE NERVES AND THE SOUL

Summary

“It needs not that I swear by the sunset redness,

And by the night and its gatherings,

And by the moon when at her full,

That from state to state ye shall be surely carried onward.”

Koran.

“Die Kraft, die in mir denkt und wirkt, ist ihrer Natur nach eine so ewige Kraft, als jene, die Sonnen und Sterne zuzammenhält. Ihre Natur ist ewig, wie der Verstand Gottes, und die Stützen meines Daseins—nicht meiner körperlichen Ercheinung—sind fest, als die Pfeiler des Weltalls.”

—Herder, Philosophy of History.

PRELUDE OF CURRENT EVENTS.

Safe popular freedom consists of four things, and cannot be compounded out of any three of the four—the diffusion of liberty, the diffusion of intelligence, the diffusion of property, and the diffusion of conscientiousness. In the latter work, the Church is the chief agent; and her most important instrumentality we call the Sabbath. Goldwin Smith very subtly says that it is free religion and hallowed Sundays which explain the average moral prosperity of America. We have had in the last week, in Boston, a somewhat obscure and erratic convention, advising America to do better than she has thus far done in following the New-England ideas concerning Sunday. Give America, from sea to sea, the Parisian Sunday, and in two hundred years all our greatest cities will be politically under the heels of the featherheads, the roughs, the sneaks, and the moneygripes. […]