Abram Herbert Lewis - Spiritual Sabbathism

30 SPIRITUAL SABBATHISM
spiritually sacred time. The harshness means the
importance of sacred time. But it must sorely have
puzzled some ancient Egyptian to find that noble
joy could happen to him on an "inauspicious" day.
And on the sabbatum some gloomy Babylonian king,
shut up in his palace, may have said: "Alas that
God should fail me in my utmost need."
§5. The contrast in religion.—To perceive in the
history of religion two opposite tendencies regarding
time and eternity, it is unnecessary to define either
term with strictness. Whether we call time the
measure of motion, or the underlying reality of
phenomena, or a mere illusion of the senses, or a
form under which the human mind constructs experience,
or the form of the human will; whether
we call
eternity an eternal now, or an endless duration,
or the reality behind time, or an unknown something
quite different in its nature from time—the fact
remains that instinctively some religions have valued
time more than others have valued it.
The ancient Persians placed great emphasis upon
time. In the religion of Zoroaster (Zarthusht)
the world is
regarded as having a definite beginning
and a definite end in time, and the history of it is
brief. The entire period is only twelve thousand
years. During the first third of this period the
will of God (Ahura Mazda) is supreme. During