reme
anguish. And in reaching this zero he is beyond the reach of the misery
that kills. "Be not, and thou shalt be mightier than aught that is,"
said Brother Juan de los Angeles in one of his _Dialogos de la conquista
del reino de Dios_ (Dial. iii. 8).

And there is something still more anguishing than suffering. A man about
to receive a much-dreaded blow expects to have to suffer so severely
that he may even succumb to the suffering, and when the blow falls he
feels scarcely any pain; but afterwards, when he has come to himself and
is conscious of his insensibility, he is seized with terror, a tragic
terror, the most terrible of all, and choking with anguish he cries out:
"Can it be that I no longer exist?" Which would you find most
appalling--to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your senses on
being pierced through with a white-hot iron, or to see yourself thus
pierced through without feeling any pain? Have you never felt the
horrible terror of feeling yourself incapable of suffering and of tears?
Suffering tells us that we exist; suffering tells us that those whom we
love exist; suffering tells us that the world in which we live exists;
and suffering tells us that God exists and suffers; but it is the
suffering of anguish, the anguish of surviving and being eternal.
Anguish discovers God to us and makes us love Him.

To believe in God is to love Him, and to love Him is to feel Him
suffering, to pity Him.

It may perhaps appear blasphemous to say that God suffers, for suffering
implies limitation. Nevertheless, God, the Consciousness of the
Universe, is limited by the brute matter in which He lives, by the
unconscious, from which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us.
And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him. God suffers in each and
all of us, in each and all of the consciousnesses imprisoned in
transitory matter, and we all suffer in Him. Religious anguish is but
the divine suffering, the feeling that God suffers in me and that I
suffer in Him.

The universal suffering is the anguish of all in seeking to be all else
but without power to achieve it, the anguish of each in being he that he
is, being at the same time all that he is not, and being so for ever.
The essence of a being is not only its endeavour to persist for ever, as
Spinoza taught us, but also its endeavour to universalize itself; it is
the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity. Every created being
tends not only to pres