Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/112

was to be saved in spite of everything, what would be the final use of life in time? Why not, from the beginning, lead an immortal life in Paradise? Reason cannot comprehend how salvation can be both necessary and future, since the future is essentially only compatible with the contingent, and that which by its very nature is necessary, is present.

If man were destined to pass, without any transition, out of nothingness into eternity, and from the moment of his creation lead a glorified life, time, space, and the entire creation made for man, who is its king, would be annihilated. If his kingdom was not to be of this world, why create this world? If it was not to be temporal, why does time exist? If it was not to be local, why create space? And, without time and space, why were things created in time and space? We therefore see, in the suppositions we have admitted, that the contradiction between the power to lose one's self and the necessity of salvation, leads to the absurdity of suppressing, at one blow, the existence of time and space; and this, in turn, logically involves the suppression of all things created with man, for man, and on account of man. Man cannot substitute a human for a divine idea, without causing the immediate destruction of the entire plan of creation, and being himself crushed beneath its gigantic ruins.

Regarding this question under another aspect, we may affirm that, when man claims the absolute right to save himself, at the same time that he admits the power to lose himself, he falls into even a greater absurdity, if this is possible, than when he complains of God because He has given him the faculty to lose himself; because if, under the latter assumption, he would become as God,