The shadow gave an answer like that of
Achilles when Odysseus questioned him. 'So much I tell and aver to
thee, that we who are parted from earthly life have the strongest
desire to return to it again.' He then saluted his friend and
disappeared.
It cannot but be recognized that such views of the state of man after
death partly presuppose and partly promote the dissolution of the most
essential dogmas of Christianity. The notion of sin and of salvation
must have almost entirely evaporated. We must not be misled by the
effects of the great preachers of repentance or by the epidemic
revivals which have been described above. For even granting that the
individually developed classes had shared in them like the rest, the
cause of their participation was rather the need of emotional
excitement, the rebound of passionate natures, the horror felt at great
national calamities, the cry to heaven for help. The awakening of the
conscience had by no means necessarily the sense of sin and the felt
need of salvation as its consequence and even a very severe outward
penance did not perforce involve any repentance in the Christian
meaning of the word. When the powerful natures of the Renaissance tell
us that their principle is to repent of nothing, they may have in their
minds only matters that are morally indifferent, faults of unreason or
imprudence; but in the nature of the case this contempt for repentance
must extend to the sphere of morals, because its origin, namely the
consciousness of individual force, is common to both sides of human
nature.
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