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He felt in himself a stronger and fuller manhood, as if the great arteries of the vast universal world-life pulsed in his own being.
It is not self-centred or wholly denominational in spirit, but recognizes itself to be a part of a catholic body of believers, reaches out with friendly coöperation to near-by churches, extends its missionary efforts to other neighborhoods or lands, and partakes of a world-life, a world-love! Ruling religious thinkers should also, by and by, become leaders of national thought and life.
My mind standing on the brink called out, as it were, with an eager waving of hands to the ferryman sailing away across the waves to the other side. For Life longed to start on life's journey. It is not true that my peculiarly isolated social condition was the bar to my plunging into the midst of the world-life.
This ceaseless and sordid anxiety for bread cuts me out of my world-life, my world-toil. I cannot do scientific research-work, or write the books and papers that I ought. My universal labor is interrupted: I cannot be happy until I can take up this larger work again. As the trade of civilization advances, the meaning of bread changes.
This change was the breaking up of the monotonous one-class society of the primitive community with its one agricultural interest, and the formation of a variegated many-class society with manifold interests, such as trade, handicraft, and politics. It was the awakening of Rome into a world-life out of her century-long undisturbed bucolic slumber.
My life in its solitude was simply fretting for want of an invitation to the place where the festival of world-life was being held. Man is overcome by a profound depression while nodding through his voluptuously lazy hours of seclusion, because in this way he is deprived of full commerce with life. Such is the despondency from which I have always painfully struggled to get free.
The conception of such a process, even the dream or vague possibility of it, is sufficiently sublime and fills the mind with a great delight in contemplating the possible cycles through which the material universe is passing. At any rate, we may contemplate the three great stages of world-life with which we are already acquainted that is, the birth stage, the epoch of life and the epoch of death.
The creature and soul are dead to world-life, as in a rapture or ecstasy; but the soul is not the bride, she is the child, and, full of eager and adoring intimacy, she flies into His ever-open arms, and never, never does she miss the way. Oh, the sweetness of it, the great, great glory of it, and the folly of words! If only all the world of men and women could have this joy!
No, thank Heaven! there is no theory or creed or system; and yet there is something as Jefferies prophetically felt and with a great longing desired that CAN satisfy; and that, the root of all religion, has been hinted at in the last chapter. It is the CONSCIOUSNESS of the world-life burning, blazing, deep down within us: it is the Soul's intuition of its roots in Omnipresence and Eternity.
His power, of course, remained with Him, but He was no longer a God outside of the world-life, but an imprisoned God working from within the race, using His mighty power, but bound by the Karmic Law. He became open to influences from which previously He had been immune.
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