In
the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
God
always was, and
always is, and always will be. Or rather, God always Is. For Was and
Will be are fragments of our time, and of changeable nature, but He
is Eternal Being. And this is the Name that He gives to Himself when
speaking to Moses from the Burning Bush. For in Himself He sums up
and contains all Being, having neither beginning in the past nor end
in the future; like some great Sea of Being, limitless and unbounded,
transcending all conception of time and nature, only outlined by the
mind, and that very dimly and scantily, not by His Essentials, but by
His Environment.
Many
images and ideas of God abound, one image being gotten from one
source and another from another,. Combined into some sort of
presentation of the truth, it escapes us before we have caught it,
and takes to flight before we have conceived it. It blazes forth upon
our soul, even when that is cleansed, as the lightning flash which
will not stay its course, does upon our sight. That part of it which
we can comprehend draws us to Himself (for that which is altogether
incomprehensible is outside the bounds of hope, and not within the
compass of endeavor).
By
that part of It which we cannot comprehend to move our wonder, and as
an object of wonder to become more an object of desire, and being
desired to purify, and by purifying to make us like God; so
that when we have thus become like Himself, God may, to use a bold
expression, hold converse with us as Gods, being united to us.
