There is no God for him who cannot find Him within himself.
5. I know within me a spiritual being which is apart from everything else. I equally know the same spiritual being, apart from everything else, in other people. But if I know this spiritual being within myself and in others, it can not but exist within itself. This spiritual being within itself we call God.
6. It is not you who jlive; what you call yourself, is dead. That which animates you is God. Angelus.
7. Do not think that you can earn merit with God by works; all works are as nothing before God. It is needful not to earn merit before God, but to be God. Angelus.
8. If we did not see with our eyes, hear with our ears and touch with our fingers, we could know nothing of what is around us. And if we did not know God within ourselves, we should not know ourselves, we should not know that within ourselves which sees, hears and touches the world around us.
9. He who does not know how to become a son of God, will for ever remain on the plane of the animal.
Angelas,
10. If I live a wordly life, I can do without God. But if I only give thought to what I am, where I came fiom, when I was bom, where I will go when I die, I must admit that there is something from which I sprang and to which I am going. I can not deny that I came into this world from something that is incomprehensible to me, and that I am going to something equally incomprehensible to me.
This incomprehensible something from which I c(nic and to which I am going, I call God.
11. They say that God is Love, or that Love is God. They say also that God is Reason, or that Reason is God. Neither is strictly true. Love and Reason are those characteristics of God which we recognize within ourselves, but what He is within Himself we can not know.
12. It is well to fear God, but it is better to love Him. But best of all it is to resurrect Him within. Angelus.
13. Man must love, but one can truly love only that in which there is no evil. And there is only one Being in whom there is no eviclass="underline" namely God.
14. If God did not love Himself in you, you could never love yourself, God or your neighbor. Angelus.
15. Though men differ as to what is God, none the less all who believe in God, always agree as to what God wants of them.
. 16. God loves solitude. He will enter your heart when He may be there alone, when you think of Him, and of him only. Angelus.
17. The Arabs have a tale about Moses. Wandering in the desert Moses heard a shepherd praying to God. And this is how the shepherd prayed: "God, oh, that I could meet Thee face to face and become Thy servant! With what joy would I wash Thy feet, kiss them, put sandals upon them, comb Thy hair, wash Thy raiment, care for Thy dwelling, bring Thee of the milk of my herd. My heart is longing for Thee." And Moses hearing these words of the shepherd was angry and said: "Thou blasphemer! God has no body. He needs no raiment, nor dwelling, nor the care of servants. Thy words are evil." And the shepherd was saddened. He could not imagine God without body and without bodily needs, and being unable to pray to God and to serve Him as he ought, he fell into despair. Then God said unto Moses: "Why didst Thou turn away from Me my faithful servant? Each man has his own thoughts and his own words. What is good for one, is evil for another. What is poison to thee, may be even as sweet honey to another. Words mean nothing. I see the heart of him who turns to Me."
18. Men speak of God in various ways, but feel and understand Him in the same way.
19. Man can not help believing in God any more than he can help walking on two feet. This belief may assume different forms, it may be suppressed altogether, but without his belief he can not understand himself.
Lichtenberg.
20. Though man may not know that he is breathing air, he knows when he is suffocating that he lacks something without which he can not live. * The same is true of the man who has lost God, although he may not know from what he is suffering.
11.
A Rational Man is Bound to Acknowledge God
1. Some say of God that He dwells in heaven. It is also said that He dwells in man. Both statements are true: He is in heaven, that is, in the limitless universe, and He is also in the soul of man.
2. Sensing the existence within his own individual body of a spiritual and indivisible being—^namely God, and seeing the same God in everything that is living, man asks himself: why has God, a spiritual being one and indivisible, confined Himself within individual bodies of creatures, mine and others? Why has a spiritual being, a Unity, divided itself, as it were, within itself? Why has the spiritual and indivisible become separate and corporeal? Why has the immortal allied itself with the mortal?
And only that man can answer these questions who fulfills the will of Him who has sent him into this world.
"All this is done for the sake of my blessedness," such a man can say, "I thank Him and ask no more questions."
3. That which we call God we see both in the heavens and in every man.
On a wintry night, if you gaze upon the sky and see stars upon stars, and without end, and consider that many of these stars are very much larger than this earth of ours whereon we live, and that behind the stars which we see there are hundreds, thousands, millions of stars as large and larger even, and that there is no end to the stars and the heavens, you must realize that there is something which you can not grasp.
But if we look within our own self, and sense there that which we call our soul, when we see within our own self something that we likewise fail tp grasp, but something which we know more assuredly than anything else, and
through which we know all that is, then we see even in our own soul something still more incomprehensible, something still greater than that which we see in the heavens.
That which we see in the heavens and sense within our own soul is the very thing we call God.
4. At all times and among all peoples there has been a belief in some invisible power sustaining the world.
The ancients called it universal reason, nature, life, eternity; Christians call it Spirit, Father, Lord, Reason, Truth.
The visible, changeable world is like a shadow of this power.
As God is eternal, so is the visible world, His shadow, eternal.
But the visible world is merely the shadow. Only the invisible power—God—truly exists. Scovoroda.
5. There is a being without whom neither heaven, nor earth could exist. This being is serene and incorporeal, his characteristics we call love and reason, but the being itself has no name. It is infinitely remote and infinitely near.
Lao-Tse.
6. A man was asked how he knew that there is a God. He answered: "Does one need a candle to see the sunrise ?"
7. If a man counts himself great, it is a proof that he does not look upon things from the height of God.
Angelus.
8. One may give no thought to the world which is infinite in all directions, or to the soul that is conscious of itself; but if one only gives a little thought to these matters, one can not help acknowledging that which we call God.
9. There is a girl in America, bom deaf, dumb and
blind. She was taught to read and write by the sense of touch. Her teacher was telling her about God, and the child remarked that she had always known about it, but did not know how to call it.
III.
The WUl of God
1. We know God less by our reason than by a feeling akin to that of an infant in his mother's arms.
The infant does not know who is holding him, keeping him warm, feeding him, but knows that someone is doing it, and moreover he not only knows that one, in whose power he is, but loves her. Even so it is with man.
2. The more a man fulfills the will of God, the better he knows Him.
If a man fails altogether to fulfill the will of God, he does not know Him at all, though he might affirm that he knew Him or pray to Him.