Page:Is Life Worth Living?.djvu/49

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IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?
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involve) means for me essentially his faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained. In the more developed religions this world has always been regarded as the mere scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal world, and affirmed to be a sphere of education, trial, or redemption. One must in some fashion die to this world before one can enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical world of wind and water, where the sun rises and the moon sets, is absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed at and established thing, is one that we find only in very early religions, such as that of the most primitive Jews. It is this natural religion (primitive still in spite of the fact that poets and men of science whose goodwill exceeds their perspicacity keep publish-