to meet him who seeks Him with love and by love, and hides
Himself from him who searches for Him with the cold and loveless reason.
God wills that the heart should have rest, but not the head, reversing
the order of the physical life in which the head sleeps and rests at
times while the heart wakes and works unceasingly. And thus knowledge
without love leads us away from God; and love, even without knowledge,
and perhaps better without it, leads us to God, and through God to
wisdom. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!

And if you should ask me how I believe in God--that is to say, how God
creates Himself in me and reveals Himself to me--my answer may, perhaps,
provoke your smiles or your laughter, or it may even scandalize you.

I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a
particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the
course of my own destiny. And the concept of law--it is nothing but a
concept after all!--tells me nothing and teaches me nothing.

Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended in a trance over
the abyss; once and again I have found myself at the cross-roads,
confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in choosing one I should
be renouncing all the others--for there is no turning back upon these
roads of life; and once and again in such unique moments as these I have
felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious, sovereign, and loving.
And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens out the way of the
Lord.

It is possible for a man to feel the Universe calling to him and guiding
him as one person guides and calls to another, to hear within him its
voice speaking without words and saying: "Go and preach to all peoples!"
How do you know that the man you see before you possesses a
consciousness like you, and that an animal also possesses such a
consciousness, more or less dimly, but not a stone? Because the man acts
towards you like a man, like a being made in your likeness, and because
the stone does not act towards you at all, but suffers you to act upon
it. And in the same way I believe that the Universe possesses a certain
consciousness like myself, because its action towards me is a human
action, and I feel that it is a personality that environs me.

Here is a formless mass; it