to the coming age conceivable and possible. My life is bound to a limited time; not so the life of humanity. The history of mankind consists of nothing else than a continuous and progressive conquest of limits, which at a given time pass for the limits of humanity, and [P. 153] therefore for absolute insurmountable limits. But the future always unveils the fact that the alleged limits of the species were only limits of individuals. The most striking proofs of this are presented by the history of philosophy and of physical science.” [105F-EOC: p. 152-153]
[106F-EOC: p. 155-156]
[P. 155] “ … only men taken together are what man should and can be. (…) Thus, in the moral as well as the physical and intellectual elements, men compensate for each other, so that, [P. 156] taken as a whole, they are as they should be, they present the perfect man. (…) Man and woman are the complements of each other, and thus united they first present the species, the perfect man.” [106F-EOC: p. 155-156]
[107F-EOC: p. 164-165]
[P. 164] “The unworldly, supernatural life is essentially also an unmarried life. The celibate lies already … in the inmost nature of Christianity. This is sufficiently declared in the supernatural origin of the Saviour … . (…) [P. 165] Thus in heaven there is no marriage; the principle of sexual love is excluded from heaven as an earthly, worldly principle.” [107F-EOC: p. 164-165]
[108F-EOC: p. 167]
“Believers in Christ should regard themselves, according to the admonition of the Apostle Peter, only as strangers or pilgrims on the earth.” [108F-EOC: p. 167]
[109F-EOC: p. 175-176]
[P. 175] “All conceptions of heaven here below are, they [“the more judicious among them … ,” i.e., the more judicious among the faithful] allege, mere images, whereby [P. 176] man represents to himself that future, the nature of which is unknown to him, but the existence of which is certain. It is just so with God. The existence of God, it is said, is certain; but what he is, or how he exists, is inscrutable. (…) Quality is not distinct from existence; quality is nothing but real existence. Existence without quality is a chimera, a spectre. (…) The doctrines that God is not to be known or defined, and that the nature of the future life is inscrutable, are therefore not originally religious doctrines; on the contrary, they are the products of irreligion while still in bondage to religion … .” [109F-EOC: p. 175-176]
[110F-EOC: p. 178]
“An unknown, unimagined future is a ridiculous chimera: the other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfillment of a wish; it is only the removal of limits which here oppose themselves to the realisation of the idea. Where would be the consolation, where the significance of a future life, if it were midnight darkness to me?” [110F-EOC: p. 178]
