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Show Each Generation Has Own Viewpoint of the Problem of Immortality By REV. HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, New York. Each generation approaches the problem of immortality in its own way. As far back as we can look men have believed in immortality, but age after age has constructed its own special reason for doing so. What, then, is the particular approach which our generation makes to this question ques-tion ? Unless we understand that we cannot understand either our cur-lent cur-lent philosophy or our current suicide. That our way of getting at the problem is different from our fathers' approach is evident. Only a little while ago the major interest in immortality im-mortality concerned reaching heaven and escaping hell. Then a great change came. It came in the generation just behind us. Man got his hand firmly on his new scientific control of nature's law-abiding forces and began making amazing changes here and now. The voices which most typically spoke for the generation just behind us were full of expectation, but not about a post-mortem heaven. They had brought to earth the paradise of their desires. The Isles of the Blessed were no longer in the West, they were only a few years ahead. In 'that chorus of mid-Victorian optimisms, both poets and scientists, hymnologists and sociologists, joined. Even the churches' Irymnals began to include more songs about the kingdom of heaven on earth than about the kingdom of heaven in a future paradise. |