he were
from the so-called seriousness of life able to return to his
childhood. The adult takes many things seriously with which a child
merely plays, but one who really knows, becomes like a child.
"Serious" values lose their value, looked at from the standpoint of
eternity. Life then seems like a play. On this account does Heraclitus
say, "Eternity is a child at play, it is the reign of a child." Where
does the original fault lie? In taking with the utmost seriousness
what does not deserve to be so taken. God has poured Himself into the
universe of things. If we take these things and leave God unheeded,
we take them in earnest as "the tombs of God." We should play with
them like a child, and should earnestly strive to awaken forth from
them God, who sleeps spellbound within them.

Contemplation of the eternal acts like a consuming fire on ordinary
illusions about the nature of things. The spirit breaks up thoughts
which come through the senses, it fuses them. This is the higher
meaning of the Heraclitean thought, that fire is the primary element
of all things. This thought is certainly to be taken at first as an
ordinary physical explanation of the phenomena of the universe. But no
one understands Heraclitus who does not think of him in the same way
as Philo, living in the early days of Christianity, thought of the
laws of the Bible. "There are people," he says, "who take the written
laws _merely_ as symbols of spiritual teaching, who diligently search
for the latter, but despise the laws themselves. I can only blame
such, for they should pay heed to both, to knowledge of the hidden
meaning and to observing the obvious one." If the question is
discussed whether Heraclitus meant by "fire" physical fire, or
whether fire for him was only a symbol of eternal spirit which
dissolves and reconstitutes all things, this is putting a wrong
construction upon his thought. He meant both and neither of these
things. For spirit was also alive, for him, in ordinary fire, and the
force which is physically active in fire lives on a higher plane in
the human soul, which melts in its crucible mere sense-knowledge, so
that out of this the contemplation of the eternal may arise.

It is very easy to misunderstand Heraclitus. He makes Strife the
"Father of things," but only of "things," not of the eternal. If there
were no contradictions in the world, if the most multifarious
interests were not opposing each other, the world of becoming, o