explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless
always be directly aware of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in
moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself,
not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and
even though the idea of Him does not enable us to explain either the
existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct
feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this
feeling--mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic
sense of life is founded upon this--this feeling is a feeling of hunger
for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first
instance, as we shall see, to wish that there may be a God, to be unable
to live without Him.

So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of God,
I could not find Him, for I was not deluded by the idea of God, neither
could I take an idea for God, and it was then, as I wandered among the
wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to seek no other
consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and yet for all that
I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational
scepticism on the one hand and into heart's despair on the other, the
hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of spirit made me
feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His reality. And I
wished that there might be a God, that God might exist. And God does not
exist, but rather super-exists, and He is sustaining our existence,
existing us _(existiendonos)_.

God, who is Love, the Father of Love, is the son of love in us. There
are men of a facile and external habit of mind, slaves of reason, that
reason which externalizes us, who think it a shrewd comment to say that
so far from God having made man in His image and likeness, it is rather
man who has made his gods or his God in his own image and likeness,[41]
and so superficial are they that they do not pause to consider that if
the second of these propositions be true, as in fact it is, it is owing
to the fact that the first is not less true. God and man, in effect,
mutually create one another; God creates or reveals Himself in man and
man creates himself in God. God is His own maker, _Deus ipse se facit_,
said Lactantius (_Divinarum Institutionum_, ii., 8), and we may say that
He is making Himself continually both in man and by man. And if each of
us, impelled