The Eternal Conflict (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Eternal Conflict

Merely an affair of chronological sequence, or of regular and consistent progression. Rather, it must be viewed under the form of an or ganism which, like every other organism, keeps returning upon itself through successive phases of health and disease. And on close examina tion it will be found that this ambiguous move ment is characteristic of the highest type of spiritual life. For even the saints, if we are to believe their confessions and their prayers, had their moments of temptation and forgetful ness, their moods of uncharitable and bitter judgments when the old stain rose again through the whiteness of their lives. But supposing God had suddenly called them, are we to believe that their struggle and mastery and sainthood would have counted for nothing simply because in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump, they were found unprepared? And what right has any one who believes in God and immortality to believe in the finality of evil even in the case of a man whom death has plucked like a rotten fruit? Under so exalted a view of human destiny it might have been expected that man would not be considered merely like a withering plant which, once it has begun to wither, must only wither away. If this great belief were more to me than only a hope and a fearful looking for.

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