vol. xxx, no. 4 april 1926 universal brotherhood - a fact in nature

THE END OF THE WORLD
world' would cease to be regarded as the doom pronounced upon the
human race by an implacable god, and would appear as no more catas-
trophic than the coming of winter, the fall of the leaf, or the occurrence
of an eclipse of the sun.
And yet it is unreasonable to expect irrational men to look more
philosophically on the recurrence of the death of the world so long as they
continue to regard the death of a man as a preventable calamity. We
all know that we must die, but nobody believes it. And yet we are
dying all the time. The immortality of man does not imply the immor-
tality of his physical body. The most fanatical religionist will hardly
in our day deny the perishable nature of the fleshly form of man; even
if he should believe that at the day of judgment the bodies of the elect
will be miraculously reassembled in some recognisable form.
It may be said that, on this plane of Nature, death is the law of
life; for as the appearance of a living organism here on earth necessitates
some sort of birth followed by growth, which in its turn gives place to
disintegration and decay; so death is a necessary preliminary to rebirth.
Without death there can be no birth. If the world had a beginning it
must also have an end, but both the end and the beginning may be in-
definitely drawn out. So much so as to justify the old motto of the
Dyers' Co. : "We live by dyeing. "
We may smile at the ignorance of the too literal religionist who
blunders into the error of prophesying definitely the day and hour of
the destruction of the world: but let us beware of laughing overmuch
at his credulity while nursing in some corner of our mind a faith as foolish
in the eternal duration of our &odd and its inhabitants. "Tout lasse,
tout casse, loul passe," and yet we are immortal, for we are souls of spiritual
origin who can smile at Death as at the opening of a door that seems
to block our way.
What need to fear the ending of the world? Are there not plenty
more where that one came from? Where one world ends, another begins.
"LET US disown whatever is unworthy of our name and of our history,
whatever will hide from us the ideals of our own national birth, whatever
will drag us from the heights of our attainment. Let us be assured, too, that
there is no nation too mighty to stand in silence before the Judgment Bar of
history, and that from the verdict of time there can be no appeal."
- Katherine Tingley