The skirts of Eternity

The spectacle of Time perpetually marching forward over the corpse of a Present that Time’s scythe is perpetually mowing down is so appalling to human minds that they are apt to recoil into a passionate yearning for continuity, in the spirit of the mortal worshipper’s prayer to an immortal God in the Hundred and Second Psalm:

“I said: ‘O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days: thy years are throughout all generations.

“‘Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the Earth, and the Heavens are the work of thy hands.

“‘They shall perish, but thou shalt endure; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed;

“‘But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.

“‘The children of thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall be established before thee.’” [Footnote: Ps. cii. 24-8.]

In this expression of the pathos of Syriac souls in one chapter of the long-drawn-out disintegration of the Syriac Society we see Humanity seeking to win an exemption from the doom of being carried away on the inexorable flow of the Time-stream by catching at the skirts of a divine Eternity which is naïvely conceived of as a Present prolonged into infinity. [Footnote: The yearning that is expressed in this passage is foredoomed to frustration, not because it is utterly impossible under all conditions for the Human Soul to enter into God’s mode of being by attaining union with Him, but because it is not possible to achieve this spiritual transfiguration without rising above the mundane plane of life. The prayer in the last verse is for a continuity of human social life in This World as a miraculous special dispensation from the “law” – truly cited in the three preceding verses – which condemns all the works of God’s creation, qua creatures, to be ephemeral. As a statement, and a magnificent statement, of this “law”, vv. 25-7, without vv. 24 and 28, have already been quoted [...].]

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939