salvation is inevitable. It is tenable, but it is not specially
favourable to activity or progress. Our fighting and creative society
ought rather to insist on the danger of everybody, on the fact
that every man is hanging by a thread or clinging to a precipice.
To say that all will be well anyhow is a comprehensible remark:
but it cannot be called the blast of a trumpet. Europe ought rather
to emphasize possible perdition; and Europe always has emphasized it.
Here its highest religion is at one with all its cheapest romances.
To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a science
or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian
existence is a STORY, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling
novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten
by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill
that he MIGHT be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak)
be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man,
not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he
didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man
"damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call
him damnable.

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads.
The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug,
all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments.
The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man
take this road or that?--that is the only thing to think about,
if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about,
any one can think about them. The instant is really awful:
and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant,
that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology
dealt much with hell. It is full of DANGER, like a boy's book: