“I came that they may have life and may have it abundantly.
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If we will but let our God and Father work his will with us, there can be no limit to his enlargement of our consciousness. We have no conception of what life might be, of how vast is the consciousness of which we could be made capable. As little as any man or woman would be inclined to call the existence of a dog an existence to be satisfied with, as little could I, looking on the common human endeavor around me, consent to regard them as worthy the name of life. What in them is true dwells amidst an unchallenged corruption, demanding repentance and labor and prayer for its destruction. The condition of most men and women seems to me a life in death, a possession of withering forms by spirits that slumber, and babble in their dreams. That they do not feel it so, is nothing. The day must come when they will hide their faces with such shame as the good man yet feels at the memory of the time when he lived like them. There is nothing for man worthy to be called life, but the life eternal—God’s life, that is, after his degree shared by the man made to be eternal also. For he is in the image of God, intended to partake of the life of the most high, to be alive as he is alive. Of this life the outcome and the light is righteousness, love, grace, and truth. The ignorant soul understands by this life eternal only an endless elongation of consciousness; what God means by it is a being like his own, a being beyond the attack of decay or death, a being which came out of the heart of Life, the heart of God, the fountain of being; an existence having nothing in common, any more than the Eternal himself, with what can pass or cease.