‘Day by day Science, which you despise too much, is enlarging the area of human health. Think what has been done, even within the last decade, to abolish both physical and social disease! Think what has yet to be done to make life freer, purer, safer, happier!
I grant you the millennium of the Grand Être is still far off; but it is most surely coming, and we can all aid, more or less, that blessed consummation--not by idle wailing, by useless dreams, or by selfish striving after an impossible personal reward, but by duty punctually performed, by self-sacrifice cheerfully undergone, by daily and nightly endeavours to ameliorate the condition of Man.
‘Men perish; Man is imperishable. Personal forms change; the great living personality abides. And the time must come at last when Man shall be as God, certain of his destiny, and knowing good and evil.
‘“A Job’s comforter!” I seem to hear you cry. Well, after all, you must be your own physician.
But I wish that you, in your distracted wandering after certainty, would turn your thoughts _our_ way, and try to understand what the great Founder of our system has done, and will do, for the human race. I am sure that the study would bring you comfort, late or soon.
‘P.S.--What are you doing in Munich? I hear of curious doings this year at Ober-Ammergau, where that ghastly business, the Passion Play, is once more in course of preparation.’
Bradley read this characteristic epistle with a gloomy frown, which changed before he had finished to a look of bitter contempt; and, as he read, he seemed once more conscious of the babble of literary club-land, and the affected jargon of the new creeds of the future. Returning the letter to his pocket, he continued to smoke till it was almost too dark to see the wreaths of fume from his own pipe.
The night had completely fallen before he rose and proceeded on his way.
Come, slay thy victim, and prepare thy fires;
Plunged in thy depths of mercy let me die
The death which every soul that lives desires.
‘I AM writing these lines in my bedroom in the house of the Widow Gran, in the village of Ober-Ammergau. They are the last you will receive from me for a long time; perhaps the last I shall ever send you, for more and more, as each day advances, I feel that my business with the world is done.