off, for in Him we live and move and have our being,
_He is the life of our life_, our very life itself. The life of God is
in us, we are in the life of God; but that life transcends us so that it
includes all else,--every person, every animal, every grass-blade, every
flower, every particle of earth, every particle of everything, animate
and inanimate. So that God is _All_; and, if all, then each individual,
you and I, must be a vital part of that all, since there can be nothing
separate from it; and, if a part, then the same in nature, in
characteristics,--the same as a tumbler of water taken from the ocean
is, in nature, in qualities, in characteristics, identical with that
ocean, its source. God, then, is the Infinite Spirit of which each one
is a part in the form of an individualized spirit. God is Spirit,
creating, manifesting, ruling through the agency of great spiritual laws
and forces that surround us on every side, that run through all the
universe, and that unite all; for in one sense, there is nothing in all
this great universe but law. And, oh, the stupendous grandeur of it all!
These same great spiritual laws and forces operate within us. They are
the laws of our being. By them every act of each individual life is
governed.
Now one of the great facts borne ever more and more into the inner
consciousness of man is that sublime and transcendent fact that we have
just noticed,--that man is one with, that he is part of, the Infinite
God, this Infinite Spirit that is the life of all, this Infinite Whole;
that he is not a mere physical, material being,--for the physical is but
the material which the real inner self, the real life or spirit uses to
manifest through,--but that he _is_ this spirit, this spirit, using,
living in this physical, material house or body to get the contact, the
experience with the material world around him while in this form of
life, but spirit nevertheless, and spirit now as much as he ever will or
ever can be, except so far of course, as he recognizes more and more his
true, his higher self, and so consciously evolves, step by step, into
the higher and ever higher realization of the real nature, the real
self, the God-self. As I heard it said by one of the world's great
thinkers and writers but a few days ago: Men talk of having a soul. I
have no soul. I am a soul: I have a body. We are told moreover in the
word, that man is created in the image of God. God is Spirit. What then
must
|