Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 6, 2025
When my mind is unclouded by melancholy, I consider the temporary distresses of this state of being, as "light afflictions ," by stretching my mental view into that glorious after-existence, when they will appear to be as nothing. But present pleasures and present pains must be felt. I lately read Rasselas over again with great satisfaction .
One instant's failure in the probation of life, one momentary syncope of his better nature long years ago, has condemned his whole after-existence to become a climbing of the purgatorial mount, with an agony of pain annually renewed at the season when the earth rejoices. Only a high-strung delicate spirit is capable of such a perennial passion of penitence.
M. de Coulanges observes, in La Cite Antique: "This kind of apotheosis was not the privilege of the great alone. no distinction was made .... It was not even necessary to have been a virtuous man: the wicked man became a god as well as the good man, only that in this after-existence, he retained the evil inclinations of his former life."
For it was as though all the skeletons he had lately seen in the Passage of the Tombs had suddenly clothed themselves with spectral flesh and hair and the shadowy garments of men, and had advanced into broad daylight to surround him in their terrible lifeless ranks, and wrench from him the secret of an after-existence concerning which THEY were ignorant!
Nothing is clearer than that our pre-existence is a dream, having absolutely no basis in anything that we know or can hope to know. Of after-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony, in assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it if it is enjoyable.
But there was one point in the narrative which made me doubt the propriety of accepting it unreservedly, and which suggested the idea of something hidden below the surface. I could not account to myself for the circumstance of the clerk's guilty wife voluntarily living out all her after-existence on the scene of her disgrace.
Of after-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony, in assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it if it is enjoyable. Whether this testimony has actually been given and it is the only testimony worth a moment's consideration is a disputed point. Many persons living this life profess to have received it.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking