P1118:1, 102:0.1
To the unbelieving materialist, man is simply an evolutionary accident. His
hopes of survival are strung on a figment of mortal imagination; his fears,
loves, longings, and beliefs are but the reaction of the incidental juxtaposition
of certain lifeless atoms of matter. No display of energy nor expression of
trust can carry him beyond the grave. The devotional labors and inspirational
genius of the best of men are doomed to be extinguished by death, the long
and lonely night of eternal oblivion and soul extinction. Nameless despair
is man's only reward for living and toiling under the temporal sun of mortal
existence. Each day of life slowly and surely tightens the grasp of a pitiless
doom which a hostile and relentless universe of matter has decreed shall be
the crowning insult to everything in human desire which is beautiful, noble,
lofty, and good.
P1118:2, 102:0.2
But such is not man's end and eternal destiny; such a vision is but the cry
of despair uttered by some wandering soul who has become lost in spiritual
darkness, and who bravely struggles on in the face of the mechanistic sophistries
of a material philosophy, blinded by the confusion and distortion of a complex
learning. And all this doom of darkness and all this destiny of despair are
forever
dispelled by one brave stretch of faith on the part of the most humble
and unlearned of God's children on earth.
P1118:3, 102:0.3
This saving faith has its birth in the human heart when the moral consciousness
of man realizes that human values may be translated in mortal experience from
the material to the spiritual, from the human to the divine, from time to
eternity.