Abram Herbert Lewis - Spiritual Sabbathism

36 SPIRITUAL SABBATHISM
made them cruel. In spite of their noble prayers
to Ahura— prayers in which the note of aspiration,
inquiry, and effort is still to be detected—they could
not know the peace of God which passeth understanding.
If there is action without reflection, or
zeal without knowledge, then progress becomes a
mere beating of the air.
Carlyle complained of our
boasted modern progress that much of it is "all
action and no go."
It may even have dawned upon
the ancient Persians that though they should win
their salvation and escape hell-fire,
they would possibly
be restless in eternity for lack of occupation.
Such a fear may be guessed at from the rise of
a Zoroastrian heresy called the Zervanite.
Zervan
(Zrvan) is time, and this heresy not only makes
time infinite, but deifies it. Of this heresy we shall
hear again, in our third chapter.
As the religious imagination tries to conceive of
God, it is inclined to oscillate between the concept
of time and that of eternity.
And, rightly or wrongly,
it associates with this antithesis various others
—change and permanence,
appearance and reality,
activity and rest. Thus arise two opposing conceptions
of God, or of God and the world.
In one picture, the world is real and time and
space are genuine facts. This is true not only for
us, but for God. To him, as to us, the past is past.