OUE MONISTIC RELIGION. 353 



teach us that the earth is " a vale of tears," in which 

 we have but a brief period to chasten and torment 

 ourselves in order to merit the life of eternal bliss 

 beyond. Where this " beyond " is, and of what joys 

 the glory of this eternal life is compacted, no revela- 

 tion has ever told us. As long as " heaven " was 

 thought to be the blue vault that hovers over the disk 

 of our planet, and is illumined by the twinkling light 

 of a few thousand stars, the human imagination could 

 picture to itself the ambrosial banquets of the Olympic 

 gods above or the laden tables of the happy dwellers 

 in Valhalla. But now all these deities and the 

 immortal souls that sat at their tables are " houseless 

 and homeless," as David Strauss has so ably described ; 

 for we know from astrophysical science that the 

 immeasurable depths of space are filled with a prosaic 

 ether, and that millions of heavenly bodies, ruled by 

 eternal laws of iron, rush hither and thither in 

 the great ocean, in their endless rhythm of life and 

 death. 



The places of devotion, in which men seek the 

 satisfaction of their religious emotions and worship 

 the objects of their reverence, are regarded as sacred 

 " churches." The pagodas of Buddhistic Asia, the 

 Greek temples of classical antiquity, the synagogues 

 of Palestine, the mosques of Egypt, the Catholic 

 cathedrals of the south, and the Protestant cathedrals 

 of the north, of Europe — all these "houses of God" 

 serve to raise man above the misery and the prose of 

 daily life, to lift him into the sacred, poetic atmosphere 

 of a higher, ideal world. They attain this end in a 

 thousand different ways, according to their various 

 forms of worship and their age. The modern man 

 who "has science and art," and therefore "religion," 



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