Is it then the conclusion of the whole matter that eternal life is merely the true reading of temporal life?  Is earth, when seen with purged vision, not merely the shadow of heaven, but heaven itself?  If we could fuse past, present, and future into a totum simul, an ’Eternal Now,’ would that be eternity?  This I do not believe.  A full understanding of the values of our life in time would indeed give us a good picture of the eternal world; but that world itself, the abode of God and of blessed spirits, is a state higher and purer than can be fully expressed in the order of nature.  The perpetuity of natural laws as they operate through endless ages is only a Platonic ‘image’ of eternity.  That all values are perpetual is true; but they are something more than perpetual:  they are eternal.  These laws are the creative forces which shape our lives from within; but all the creatures, as St. Augustine says in a well-known passage, declare their inferiority to their Creator.  ‘We are lower than He, for He made us.’  Scholastic theologians interposed an intermediary which they called aevum between time and eternity. AEvum is perpetuity, which they rightly distinguished from true eternity.  Christianity is philosophically right in insisting that our true home, our patria, is ‘not here.’  Nor is it in any place:  it is with God,’whose centre is everywhere and His circumference nowhere.’  There remaineth a rest for the people of God, when their warfare on earth is accomplished.

A Christian must feel that the absence of any clear revelation about a future state is an indication that we are not meant to make it a principal subject of our thoughts.  On the other hand, the more we think about the eternal values the happier we shall be.  As Spinoza says, ’Love directed towards the eternal and infinite fills the mind with pure joy, and is free from all sadness.  Wherefore it is greatly to be desired, and sought after with our whole might.’  But he also says, and I think wisely, that there are few subjects on which the ‘free’ man will ponder less often, than on death.  The end of life is as right and natural as its beginning; we must not rebel against the common lot, either for ourselves or for our friends.  We are to live in the present though not for the present.  The two lines of Goethe which Lewis Nettleship was so fond of quoting convey a valuable lesson: 

    ’Nur we du bist, sei alles, immer kindlich: 
     So bist du alles, bist unueberwindlich.’

‘Death does not count,’ as Nettleship used to say; and he met his own fate on the Alps with a cheerfulness which showed that he believed it.  The craving for mere survival, no matter under what conditions, is natural to some persons, and those who have it not must not claim any superiority over those who shudder at the idea of resigning this ‘pleasing, anxious being.’  Some brave and loyal men, like Samuel Johnson, have feared death all their lives