August First | Page 6

seen it all plainly.
Just for a second--in a sort of flash. And then it dropped back into this
confusion.
I won't insult you by attempting to discount your difficulties. You have
worked out for yourself a calculation made, at one time or another, by
many more people than you would imagine. And your answer is wrong.
I know that. You know it too. When you say that you are afraid of what
may come after, you admit that what you intend to do is impossible. If
you were not convinced of something after, you would go on and do
what you propose. Which shows that there is an error in your
mathematics. Do you at all know what I mean?
I must make you understand. I can see why you find the prospect
unendurable. You don't look far enough, that is all. Why do people shut
themselves up in the air-tight box of a possible three score years and
ten, and call it life? How can you, who are so alive, do so? It seems that
you have fallen into the strangely popular error of thinking that clocks
measure life. That is not what they are for. A clock is the contrivance of
springs and wheels whereby the ambitious, early of a summer's day
when sane people are asleep or hunting flowers on the hill-side, keep
tally of the sun. Those early on the hill-side see the gray lighten and
watch it flush to rose--the advent of the day-spring--and go on picking
flowers. They of the clocks are one day older--these have seen a sunrise.
There is the difference.
If you really thought that all there is to life is that part of it we have
here in this world--if you believed that--then what you contemplate
doing would be nothing worse than unsportsmanlike. But you do not

believe that. You are afraid of what might come--after. You came to
me--or you came to the rector--in the hope of being assured that your
fear was groundless. You had a human desire for the advice of a
"professional." You still wish that assurance--that is why you promised
to wait for this letter. You told me your case; you wanted expert
testimony. Here it is: You need not be afraid. God will not be
angry--God will not punish you. You said that you did not know much
about God. Surely you know this much--anger can never be one of His
attributes. God is never angry. Men would be angry if they were treated
as they treat Him--that is all. In mathematics, certain letters represent
certain unknown quantities. So words are only the symbols for
imperfectly realized ideas. If by "hell" you understand what that word
means to me--the endlessness of life with nothing in it that makes life
worth while--then, if you still want my opinion, I think that you will
most certainly go there. God will not be angry. God will not send you
there, you will have sent yourself--it will not be God's punishment laid
on you, it will be your punishment laid by you on yourself. But it is not
in you to let that come to pass.
All of the "philosophies of life," as they are called, are, I think, varieties
of two. I suppose Materialism and Idealism cover them. Those who
hold with the first are in the air-tight box of years and call it life. The
others are in the box, too, but they call it time. And they know that,
after all, the box is really not air-tight; each of them remembers the day
when he first discovered that there were cracks in the box, and the day
he learned that one could best see through those narrow openings by
coming up resolutely to the hard necessary walls that hold one in. Then
came the astounding enlightenment that only a shred of reality was
within the cramped prison of the box--just a darkened, dusty bit--that
all the beautiful rest of it lay outside. These are the ones who, pressing
up against the rough walls of the box, see, through their chinks, the
splendor of what lies outside--see it and know that, one day, they shall
have it.
The others, the Materialists, never come near the walls of the box,
except to bang their heads. Their reality is inside. These call life a thing.
The Idealists know that it is a process, and there is not a tree or a flower

or a blade of grass or a road-side weed but proves them right. It is a
process, and the end of it is perfection--nothing less. The perfection of
the physical is approximated to here in this world, and, after that, the
tired hands are folded, and the worn-out body laid away. But even the
very saints of