time: the refreshing river 



Sir Thomas Browne said, "we live with death and die not in a moment." 

 Or, in the words of the Contakion, *Tor so thou didst ordain when 

 thou createdst us, saying, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou 

 return'; wherefore all we who go down into the grave make our 

 song unto thee, sighing and saying, Give rest, O Christ, to thy 

 servants with thy saints, where sorrow and sighing are no more, 

 neither pain, but life everlasting." The whole realm of thought and 

 feeling embodied in these phrases is fundamentally natural and proper 

 to man, and there is little to be gained by trying to replace it by a 

 eupeptic opium, derived from too bright an estimate of the possibilities 

 of scientific knowledge. Driven out, it will return in the end with 

 redoubled force. 



Fundamentally natural and proper to man, the sense of the holy is 

 as appropriate to him as the sense of beauty. As we have seen, the 

 * 'moral theology" of communism lacks a doctrine of God, but this 

 does not affect the existence of the sense of the holy. After all, the 

 theology of the Gospels was not very complicated — Jesus did not 

 meet disease and hunger by persuading people that blessedness was 

 already theirs if they would accept a dogmatic intellectual system; 

 but by curing sickness and distributing bread. This was the practical 

 aspect of his teaching about love. In the motives of atheist communists 

 we detect, therefore, that which is worthy of numinous respect, for 

 they are working to bring in the World Co-operative Commonwealth. 



Those who deny the importance of the sense of the holy are in 

 an analogous position to those who cannot appreciate music or 

 painting. It is an attitude towards the universe, an attitude almost of 

 respect, for which nothing can be substituted. "The problem of death," 

 it has been said,^ "is not a 'problem' at all, it is due simply to the 

 clash between an idealistic egoistic philosophy and the disappearance 

 of the individual, not in the least to the fact of death." On this epicurean 

 view, science reveals facts to us so clearly as to reconcile us to them.^ 

 But it is not our own death that we are thinking of We may well 

 be content to live on only in the effects which our living has produced 

 on our generation and those that come after.^ The point is that no 

 matter now much we know in the classless State about the biology 

 of death, we shall still suffer when someone that we have loved 



^ Pascal, R., Outpost, 1932, 1, 70. 



2 All sciences have as their aim the transformation of tribulations into temptations, 

 Auden, loc. cit. But the process is asymptotic. 



2 A point of view admirably put in Afinogenov's play Distant Point. 



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