"Please understand, I have no theses to nail to a door," says Laertes. "My thoughts begin to take shape, the longer I spend here, but they are as yet ill-formed as fresh-dug clay."
He sits back, sipping his wine, considering how best to frame his convictions. "If the world is a prison," he says, "if it is some grey promontory from which we behold damnation, and despair--then of course there is no hope for us but to beg for salvation. But instead, God hath given us a world of incomparable sweetnesses. What kind of God would lay before us a banquet, and require that we never taste it so that we might earn the great feast hereafter? What kind of God would make us with a love for pleasure, and then ask that we absent ourselves from it?" Another slow, considered sip. "What kind of God would see His people, mired in all the urgent duties of the mortal world, and say, 'Turn thee from it; thou hast a higher charge'?"
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He sits back, sipping his wine, considering how best to frame his convictions. "If the world is a prison," he says, "if it is some grey promontory from which we behold damnation, and despair--then of course there is no hope for us but to beg for salvation. But instead, God hath given us a world of incomparable sweetnesses. What kind of God would lay before us a banquet, and require that we never taste it so that we might earn the great feast hereafter? What kind of God would make us with a love for pleasure, and then ask that we absent ourselves from it?" Another slow, considered sip. "What kind of God would see His people, mired in all the urgent duties of the mortal world, and say, 'Turn thee from it; thou hast a higher charge'?"