to the embryo, yet becomes a great evil if it continues after birth, for it hinders life's ultimate purpose. Crime is against man, sin is against the divine in us.
What is this divine? It is that which has its right and true meaning in the infinite, which does not believe in the embryonic life of self as the ultimate truth. The travail of birth is upon all humanity—its history is the history of suffering such as no animal can ever realize. All its energies are urging it forward; it has no rest. When it goes to sleep upon its prosperity, binds its life in codes of convention, begins to scoff at its ideals, and wants to withdraw all its forces towards the augmentation of self, then it shows signs of death; its very power becomes the power of destruction,—the power which makes huge preparations for death, not believing in the immortal life.
For all other creatures nature is final. To live, to propagate their race and to die is their end. And they are content. They never cry for salvation, for emancipation from the limits of life; they never feel stifled for breath and knock with all their forces against the boundary walls of their world; they never know what it is to renounce their life of plenty and through privations
