He who chooses a life of utmost striving for the utmost stake, the vital, matchless stake of God, feels at times as though the spirit of God rested upon the eye-lids—close to the eyes and yet never seen.

Out of the world comes a behest to instill into the air a rapturous song for God, to incarnate in stones a message of humble beauty, and to instill a prayer for goodness in the hearts of all men.

God cannot be distilled to a well-defined idea. All concepts fade when applied to God’s essence. To the pious man, knowledge of God is not a thought within his grasp, but a form of thinking in which he tries to comprehend all reality.

How do we identify the divine?

Divine is a message that discloses unity where we see diversity, that discloses peace when we are involved in discord. God is the One who holds our fitful lives together, who reveals to us that which is empirically diverse in color, in interest, in creeds—races, classes, nations—is one in God’s eyes and one in essence.

When God becomes our form of thinking we begin to sense all men in one man, the whole world in a grain of sand, eternity in a moment. To worldly ethics one human being is less than two human beings, to the religious mind if a man has caused a single soul to perish, it is as though he had caused a whole world to perish, and if he has saved a single soul, it is as though he had saved a whole world.

If in the afterglow of a religious insight I can see a way to gather up my scattered life, to unite what lies in strife; a way that is good for all men as it is for me.