also, that the very God or Life of the World will one day perish,
as all that is born must surely in the end die. But they who fret
upon such grounds as this must be in so much want of a grievance
that it were a cruelty to rob them of one: if a man who is fond
of music tortures himself on the ground that one day all possible
combinations and permutations of sounds will have been exhausted
so that there can be no more new tunes, the only thing we can do
with him is to pity him and leave him; nor is there any better
course than this to take with those idle people who worry them
selves and others on the score that they will one day be unable
to remember the small balance of their lives that they have not
already forgotten as unimportant to them-that they will one day
die to the balance of what they have not already died to. I never
knew a well-bred or amiable person who complained seriously of
the fact that he would have to die. Granted we must all some
times find ourselves feeling sorry that we cannot remain for ever
at our present age, and that we may die so much sooner than we
like; but these regrets are passing with well-disposed people,
and are a sine qua non for the existence of life at all.
For if people could live for ever so as to suffer from no such
regret, there would be no growth nor development in life; if, on
the other hand, there were no unwillingness to die, people would
commit suicide upon the smallest contradiction, and the race
would end in a twelvemonth.

We then offer immortality, but we do not offer resurrection from
the dead; we say that those who die live in the Lord whether they
be just or unjust, and that the present growth of God is the
outcome of all past lives; but we believe that as they live in
God-in the effect they have produced upon the universal life-when