The Wrack of the Storm by Maurice Maeterlinck
page 83 of 147 (56%)
page 83 of 147 (56%)
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and which we ourselves, who are far from the field of danger, feel
rising within us without knowing whence they come are nothing but the souls of the heroes gathered and absorbed by our own souls. 3 It is well at times to contemplate invisible things as though we saw them with our eyes. This was the aim of all the great religions, when they represented under forms appropriate to the civilization of their day, the latent, deep, instinctive, general and essential truths which are the guiding principles of mankind. All have felt and recognized that loftiest of all truths, the communion of the living and the dead, and have given it various names designating the same mysterious verity: the Christians know it as revival of merit, the Buddhists as reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, and the Japanese as Shintoism, or ancestor-worship. The last are more fully convinced than any other nation that the dead do not cease to live and that they direct all our actions, are exalted by our virtues and become gods. Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has most closely studied and understood that wonderful ancestor-worship, says: "One of the surprises of our future will certainly be a return to beliefs and ideas long ago abandoned upon the mere assumption that they contained no truth--beliefs still called barbarous, pagan, mediƦval, by those who condemn them out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian, the idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by |
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