Editorial January 28, 1922 Issue

The Inevitable Victory

Frederick Dixon

Life is a struggle. Far more of a struggle than Marcus Aurelius, or any of the other Latin or Greek epigrammatists were capable of conceiving. Yet Marcus Aurelius was more metaphysical than he knew. "As for life," he wrote, "it is a struggle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame which comes after is oblivion." The Hebrew philosopher whom one of Antoninus' predecessors had put to death in Rome could have told the emperor what he was not capable of divining for himself, and that was, why life is a struggle. Human life is a struggle because it is the very antithesis of real existence. It is the material counterfeit of Life, during the possession of which the flesh lusteth perpetually against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh. The world in which this battle takes place likewise is not a true world, but again the counterfeit of the creation of Spirit. In it, as Paul saw, men see riddles in a looking-glass. Naked, as the eastern wiseman said, they come into it, and naked they go out of it again, for it is not the eternity of Spirit in which they are dwelling, but a mere mesmeric dream. Thus, as the great Elizabethan poet summed the matter up:—

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

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