PHILOSOPHY IN ECLIPSE

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21685, 20 January 1936, Page 9

PHILOSOPHY IN ECLIPSE

TCK THE EDITOR OF THE PRESS, Sir, —A passage in a letter from Home gives me my cue to say my few lines before stage-iright sends me flying to the comparative sanctuary of the “wings.” “I can never believe quite in the idea of a great and terrible God of .vengeance.” The writer of the letter is, to my personal knowledge, a professing Christian lady. She is still asking herself that “Why?” of “Woman’s in the Home.” To my mind the attitude is indefensible in a Christian. The soul in intimate touch with its source and purpose does not question its relationship but acclaims it. Such was the perfect stature of the man, Christ Jesus. So taking for granted what cannot be proved, will you please let me place before ycur correspondent one possibility in the philosophic discussion as to the “meaning” of life, which has perhaps become more overshadowed than any other phase of man’s deliberations. Let “Woman in the Home,” who, I gather, will concede a pre-material existence, imagine herself one of such a company in such an environment. Disembodied spirit, harmony of fellowship without co-equality, satisfaction of achievement without fatigue, celestial. free, yet worshipful. Elysian fields bathed in the light of love, laved from the chalice of peace, hushed, ■ serene, the birthplace of the soul. Now intrudes jealousy, hate, lust of power, intrigue, rebellion. There follows disharmony and doubt, dissension and division, sectional betrayal of allegiance. consequential- restraint, essential segregation with a view to eventual reinstatement of offending spirits. The scene changes. Herself, now an enfleshed soul, vaguely conscious of a “Paradise Lost,” dimly aware of a dependence beyond the material, able to discern right from wrong, that is, good from evil, unwillingly erring, convincedly sorry, voluntarily repentant, gratified sometimes though never quite satisfied with her sensible “Is," emotional, hopeful, fearful, dreading, longing, falling, -rising, happy, sad, free to choose her guiding motive in relation to fellow spirit and fellow man, unhindered in way of living, unshackled m mentaL power, mortally supreme, immortally subservient. The scene shifts once more back to its original setting. A trump! A voice! oome to honour, some to dishonour,” some to reinstatement, some to Divine repudiation of relationship. Voices: “When saw we Thee?” A voice: done > good and faithful, enter.” c l a^ a °or of voices: “When saw we inee. The voice; “Depart from Me ye that work iniquity!” “There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And why not? The choice is the soul’s till death; perhaps beyond. ~ 1 confess the scheme goes little further than to suggest a possible reason f or our present existence. It depends upon the Lme factor. Woman in the Home” will be able to satisfy herself as to whether its implications and amplifications! may explain the many obscurities and anomalies with which in bodily frame we wrestle.—Yours, etc., /■■q . . . P. W. HEAL. (Previous signing “Crusader.”) January 19, 1936.