At certain stages of social development, false beliefs are simply inevitable. For example, the Ptolemaic view of the solar system was bound to precede the Copernican. And false beliefs do both good and harm before they are outgrown. How many of the down-trodden have looked to another world to right their wrongs! It gave them hope: but it made them passive and all too meek. Has not the idea of another life encouraged a false perspective in regard to this one? I cannot feel that the belief was ever a very healthy one for the human race. Yet, during the coming period of transition, many who have been trained to hold false expectations will experience grievous pain. People who become used to a narcotic recoil from the idea of giving it up. Their nervous system has been taught to depend upon it. Is there not something parallel to this in ethics? Religious romanticism is a spiritual narcotic which substitutes a dream world for the more humdrum world of every-day existence. It develops a taste for the meretricious and sentimental. In revenge, the enthusiast fails to achieve insight into the significance of common things. Life's real tragedies and triumphs are veiled from his untrained eye. Only a whole-hearted, even joyous, immersion in the sea of struggling human life gives the imagination that iron vigor it needs. The greatest saints have talked the least of heaven.
"Born into life!--who lists May what is false hold dear, And for himself make mists Through which to see less clear; The world is what it is, for all our dust and din.
"Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes--"
Let those who can meet life bravely and joyously. The stage has been planned by no master artist, and the actors are only amateurs compelled to improvise their parts; but the sunlight is sometimes golden and the spoken lines often surprise us with their beauty. What critic can pass assured judgment upon this continuous play?
It is noteworthy that there has never been a problem of good, but always a problem of evil. Man takes the good in his life for granted, while he bewails the presence of evil in all its forms. The Greeks had the myth of Pandora's box to account for the sorrows and ills which afflict the human race; the Hebrews told of the Fall of man from his original state of bliss to a life of toil and sin through the weakness of our first parents and the wiles of the Serpent; the Scandinavians sang of Loki, the Spirit of Deception, whose artful malice led to the death of Balder, the Beautiful. And Christianity has been accustomed to connect evil with a personal devil "who rushes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour." At his door, popular thought has lain those temptations and backslidings that bewilder poor humanity. Even the more physical evils, such as famine, sickness and bodily injury, have been ascribed to his agency.