The Altar Fire
PREFACE It will perhaps be said, and truly felt, that the following is a morbid book. No doubt the subject is a morbid one, because the book deliberately gives a picture of a diseased spirit. But a pathological treatise, dealing with cancer or paralysis, is not necessarily morbid, though it may be studied in a morbid mood. We have learnt of late years, to our gain and profit, to think and speak of bodily ailments as natural phenomena, not to slur over them and hide them away in attics and bedrooms. We no longer think of insanity as demoniacal possession, and we no longer immure people with diseased brains in the secluded apartments of lovely houses. But we still tend to think of the sufferings of the heart and soul as if they were unreal, imaginary, hypochondriacal things, which could be cured by a little resolution and by intercourse with cheerful society; and by this foolish and secretive reticence we lose both sympathy and help. Mrs. Proctor, the friend of Carlyle and Lamb, a brilliant and somewhat stoical lady, is recorded to have said to a youthful relative of a sickly habit, with stern emphasis, "Never tell people how you are! They don't want to know."
his reason. It is his own reason that convinces him of the limitations
of his reason. But those limitations are not to be overpassed by a
visionary self-introspection, unless this, too, is subjected to rational
criticism. Mysticism does its true part when it applies this criticism
also to the current forms, conventions, and institutions. Conventions,
forms, and institutions, after all, represent the corporate wisdom,
the accumulated experiences of men throughout the ages. Mysticism is the
experience of one. Each does right to test the corporate experience by
his own experience. But he must not elevate himself into a law even for
himself. That, in a sentence, would summarise the attitude of Judaism
towards mysticism. It is medicine, not a food.
CHAPTER VII
ESCHATOLOGY
That the soul has a life of its own after death was a firmly fixed
idea in Judaism, though, except in the works of philosophers and in
the liberal theology of modern Judaism, the grosser conception of a
bodily Resurrection was predominant over the purely spiritual idea of
Immortality. Curiously enough, Maimonides, who formulated the belief in
Resurrection as a dogma of the Synagogue, himself held that the world to
come is altogether free from material factors. At a much earlier period
PREFACE It will perhaps be said, and truly felt, that the following is a morbid book. No doubt the subject is a morbid one, because the book deliberately gives a picture of a diseased spirit. But a pathological treatise, dealing with cancer or paralysis, is not necessarily morbid, though it may be studied in a morbid mood. We have learnt of late years, to our gain and profit, to think and speak of bodily ailments as natural phenomena, not to slur over them and hide them away in attics and bedrooms. We no longer think of insanity as demoniacal possession, and we no longer immure people with diseased brains in the secluded apartments of lovely houses. But we still tend to think of the sufferings of the heart and soul as if they were unreal, imaginary, hypochondriacal things, which could be cured by a little resolution and by intercourse with cheerful society; and by this foolish and secretive reticence we lose both sympathy and help. Mrs. Proctor, the friend of Carlyle and Lamb, a brilliant and somewhat stoical lady, is recorded to have said to a youthful relative of a sickly habit, with stern emphasis, "Never tell people how you are! They don't want to know."