There comes one day a golden age, which every wise and virtuous man
even now enjoys, and when men will find it easier to live well because
they will find it easier to live indeed,--when men will have, not more
pleasure (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf-louse),
but more virtue,--when the people Will take part in thinking, and the
thinker--in working,[294] in order that he may save himself the need of
Helots,--when military and judicial murder shall be condemned, and only
occasionally cannon-balls shall be turned up with the plough. When that
time comes, then will a preponderance of good no more stop the machine
by frictions. When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie in
human nature of degenerating again and again breeding tempests (for
heretofore the noble element has merely kept up a flying fight with the
overpowering evil), just as, according to Forster, even on the hot
island of St. Helena[295] there are no storms.
When this festal day comes, then will our children's children be--no
more. We stand now in the evening and see at the close of our dark day
the sun go down with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last
cloud the still, serene sabbath-day of humanity; but our posterity have
yet to travel through a night full of wind, and through a cloud full of
poison, till at last over a happier earth an eternal morning-wind full
of blossom-spirits, moving on before the sun, expelling all clouds,
shall breathe on men without a sigh. Astronomy promises the earth an
eternal vernal equinox;[296] and history promises it a higher one;
perhaps the two eternal springs may coincide.--
Since man disappears among men, we downcast ones must erect ourselves
before humanity. When I think of the Greeks, I see that our hopes move
faster than fate.--As one travels by night with lights over the icy
Alps, in order not to be terrified at the abysses and at the long road,
so does fate spread night around us, and hands us only torches for the
way immediately before us, that we may not worry ourselves about the
chasms of the future, and the distance of the goal.--There were
centuries when humanity was led with bandaged eyes--from one prison to
another;--there were other centuries when spectres rattled and
overturned all night long, and in the morning nothing was disturbed;
there can be no other centuries except those in which individuals die,
but nations rise, and in which nations decay, but mankind rises: when
mankind itself sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering
of the globe in a dust-cloud ... what shall console us?--
A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite heart beyond
the world. There is a higher order of things than we can
demonstrate,--there is a Providence in the world's history and in every
one's life which reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart
has the boldness to believe;--there must be a Providence, which,
according to other rules than we have hitherto assumed, links this
confused earth as daughter-land to a higher city of God,--there must be
a God, a Virtue, and an Eternity.