uilt upon a basis of uncertainty does not and cannot
lie.

And not only do we not believe with reason, nor yet above reason nor
below reason, but we believe against reason. Religious faith, it must be
repeated yet again, is not only irrational, it is contra-rational.
Kierkegaard says: "Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religion
illusion after knowledge. Between poetry and religion the worldly wisdom
of living plays its comedy. Every individual who does not live either
poetically or religiously is a fool" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig
Efterskrift_, chap. iv., sect. 2a, Sec. 2). The same writer tells us that
Christianity is a desperate sortie (_salida_). Even so, but it is only
by the very desperateness of this sortie that we can win through to
hope, to that hope whose vitalizing illusion is of more force than all
rational knowledge, and which assures us that there is always something
that cannot be reduced to reason. And of reason the same may be said as
was said of Christ: that he who is not with it is against it. That which
is not rational is contra-rational; and such is hope.

By this circuitous route we always arrive at hope in the end.

To the mystery of love, which is the mystery of suffering, belongs a
mysterious form, and this form is time. We join yesterday to to-morrow
with links of longing, and the now is, strictly, nothing but the
endeavour of the before to make itself the after; the present is simply
the determination of the past to become the future. The now is a point
which, if not sharply articulated, vanishes; and, nevertheless, in this
point is all eternity, the substance of time.

Everything that has been can be only as it was, and everything that is
can be only as it is; the possible is always relegated to the future,
the sole domain of liberty, wherein imagination, the creative and
liberating energy, the incarnation of faith, has space to roam at large.

Love ever looks and tends to the future, for its work is the work of our
perpetuation; the property of love is to hope, and only upon hopes does
it nourish itself. And thus when love sees the fruition of its desire it
becomes sad, for it then discovers that what it desired was not its true
end, and that God gave it this desire merely as a lure to spur it to
action; it discovers that its end is further on, and it sets out again
upon its toilsome pilgrimage through life, revolving through a constant
cycle of illusions and disillusions. And contin