dBooks desire

Our measure of rewards and punishments is most
partial and incomplete, absurdly inadequate, utterly worldly, and we
wish to continue it into the next world. Into that next and awful
world we strive to pursue men, and send after them our impotent party
verdicts of condemnation or acquittal. We set up our paltry little
rods to measure Heaven immeasurable, as if, in comparison to that,
Newton's mind or Pascal's or Shakspeare's was any loftier than mine;
as if the ray which travels from the sun would reach me sooner than
the man who blacks my boots. Measured by that altitude, the tallest
and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base,
that I say we should take no count of the calculation, and it is a
meanness to reckon the difference."
"Your figure fails there, Arthur," said the other, better pleased; "if
even by common arithmetic we can multiply as we can reduce almost
infinitely, the Great Reckoner must take count of all; and the small
is not small, or the great great, to his infinity.


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