All this is a matter of everyday experience. For the sake of what their faith tells them about a Future, which their reason assures them to be almost completely unknowable, men are prepared to sacrifice their only tangible possession, the Present. During the last thirty years about 50 million of Europeans have been liquidated in wars and revolutions. The nationalists and revolutionaries all give the same answer. Just as our Victorian greatgreat-grandfathers solemnly visualized and described the sort of wonderful time we were going to have in the middle years of the twentieth century.
True religion concerns itself with the givenness of the timeless.
And idolatrous religion is one which substitutes time for eternity-either past time, in the form of a rigid tradition, or else future time, in the form of Progress toward Utopia. Spanish Catholicism was a typical idolatry of past time. Before or behind, time can never be worshiped with impunity. And not only must, as a prophecy or an ethical imperative, but also does have a stop, in the present indicative tense and as a matter of brute empirical experience, here and now, for all who so desire. It is only by taking the fact of eternity into account that we can deliver thought from its slavery to life.