suggested by our Brother Mathias,
I would say that God is the primal substance out of which all things
evolve. But these words must not be taken too literally, thereby
refusing to God a personal consciousness, for God knows certainly all
the differences and all the relations, and we should overturn all the
teaching of Scripture and lose ourselves in the errors of Greek
philosophy if we held to the belief of a God, absolute, pure, simple,
detached from all concern with his world and his people. But in what
measure, Manahem asked, laying his scroll upon his knees and leaning
forward, his long chin resting on his hand, in what measure, he asked,
speaking out of his deepest self, are we to look upon God as a conscious
being; if Mathias could answer that question we should be grateful, for
it is the question which torments every Essene in the solitude of his
cell.

Has any other brother here a word to say? Now you, Brother Caleb? I am
sure there is a thought in your heart that we would all like to hear.
Brother Saddoc, I call upon thee! Brother Saddoc seemed to have no wish
to speak, but Mathias continued to press him, saying. Brother Saddoc,
for what else hast thou been seeking in thy scroll but for a text
whereon to base an argument? And seeing that it was impossible for him
to escape from the fray of argument, Brother Saddoc answered that he
took his stand upon Deuteronomy. Do we not read that the Lord thy God
that goeth before thee shall fight for thee, and in the desert thou hast
seen that he bore thee, as a man bears his sons, all the way that ye
went till ye came unto this place. But Saddoc, Eleazar interrupted, has
forgotten that one of the leading thoughts in this discourse is that the
words in Deuteronomy were written for starving tribes that came out of
Arabia rather than for us to whom God has given the land of Canaan. We
were then among the rudiments of the world and man was but a child,
incapable, as Mathias has said, of the knowledge of God as an absolute
being. But then, answered Saddoc, the Scriptures were not written for
all time. Was anything, Mathias murmured, written for all time? Paul was
about to ask himself if Mathias numbered God among the many things that
time wastes away when his thought was interrupted by Manahem asking how
we are to understand the words, the heavens were created before the
earth. Do the Scriptures mean that intelligence is prior to sense?
Mathias' face lighted up, and, foreseein