Te Deums for the welfare of the State, and for military success, are founded on this same conception of the relation of man to the universe.
The third conception of this relation—the Christian one—of which every man of advanced years is involuntarily conscious, and upon which humanity, in my opinion, is now entering, consists in the acknowledgment by man that the meaning of life is not to be found in the attainment of his own individual aim, nor in the attainment of that of any association of individuals, but solely in serving that Supreme Will, which has produced man and the entire universe, for the attainment, not of the aims of man, but of the Superior Will which has produced him. From this conception, the loftiest religious teaching known to us has proceeded, germs of which existed in the teaching of the Pythagoreans, Therapeutics, Essenes, Egyptians, Persians, Brahmins, Buddhists, and Taoists, in their best representatives, but which has only received its final and fullest expression in the true, unperverted interpretation of Christianity. All the ritual of those ancient religions proceeding from this conception of life, all the modern external forms of association of the Unitarians, Universalists, Quakers, Nazarenes, and Russian Spirit-Wrestlers (Doukhobors),[1]
- ↑ A section of the so-called sectarians, having a spiritual conception of life and the Gospels, and who claim to fight against the flesh by the aid of the Spirit.
