Demi-god

“ This demi-god, to whom divine honours are often paid after his withdrawal from the earth, is usually the Son of the Sun, or of the Demiurgic Creator, the Great Father, who stands at the head of the primitive pantheons and subordinate only to the Supreme Unity; he is born of an earthly mother, a virgin, and often a vestal of the Sun, who conceives in a mysterious manner, and who, after giving birth to her half-divine son, is herself sometimes elevated to the rank of a goddess. ”

“ This rational and immortal creature in the morning of his existence looked up into the clear sky with reverence, being impressed by the eternal power and godhead that are there, and when he had committed a sin he felt remorseful and guilty; but the very same person now sins recklessly and with flinty hardness of heart, casts sullen or scowling glances upward, and says: "There is no God." ”

“ If, however, they labour to maintain that, while all material things, such as the heaven, and the whole world which exists below it, were indeed formed by the Demiurge, yet all things of a more spiritual nature than these,—those, namely, which are above the heavens, such as Principalities, Powers, Angels, Archangels, Dominations, Virtues,—were produced by a spiritual process of birth (which they declare themselves to be) , then, in the first place, we prove from the authoritative Scriptures [253] that all the things which have been mentioned, visible and invisible, have been made by one God. ”

“ Imagine a Deity under any fashion of existence; how are our dreams concerning him in an imaginary heaven to affect our happiness or our conduct on a tangible earth? Affect it indeed they may for evil, but how for good? The idea of an unseen Being, ever at work around and about us, may afflict the human intellect with idle terrors, but can never guide the human practice to what is rational and consistent with our nature. Grant that, by any possibility, we could ascertain the existence of one god, or of a million of gods: we see them not, we hear them not, we feel them not. ”

“ History shows that our metaphysics is gaining ground; that the arbitrary and unjust pattern for Deity originated in the mortal and not the immortal mind, and has been fading out of this so-called mind for centuries, and will eventually disappear.
If the opposite of God is as real as God, there are two powers, and God is not all-powerful. Is Deity omnipotent, while yet there is another might, another strong arm of sin that He cannot, or does not, restrain? Is Life God, as the Scripture saith, and Life, or God, entering matter, and matter driving it hence, and beating Omnipotence at every point? ”

“ In regard to the last, the thousand varied forms which we every day behold, and the thousand beautiful and minute grades by which matter is led from the simple clod to the most perfect of our conceptions, proves evidently the will of the Deity to vary and employ all that which is within the immensity of his power. To admit that there is a God, is to admit that there is a spirit. ”

“ This sevenfold Deity personalization in time and space and to the seven superuniverses enables mortal man to attain the presence of God, who is spirit. This sevenfold Deity, to finite time-space creatures sometime power-personalizing in the Supreme Being, is the functional Deity of the mortal evolutionary creatures of the Paradise-ascension career. ”

“ The deities resembled men also in form, but they were, with some exceptions, of majestic stature and shone with celestial beauty. They could render themselves invisible at will, and were otherwise endowed with supernatural powers. There was this restraint upon their wonder-working gifts: no divinity was permitted to reverse the act of another. For example, when an offended god subjected a mortal to some cruel transformation, no other deity, not even Jupiter himself, could undo the spell. ”

“ Who prevented any drop from falling from it through so many open holes? They will answer, Some god or some demon. If a god, is he greater than the God who made the world? If a demon, is he mightier than an angel who serves the God by whom the world was made? ”

“ In their beauty these gods appear, therefore, as exalted over their individual bodily shape; we have consequently a kind contradiction or contention between their lofty blessedness, which is, in fact, their spiritual self-exclusiveness and their beauty, which pertains to their external bodily presence. Spirit appears wholly lost in its external form, and yet for all that appears quite as much absorbed in itself from out that form. It is precisely as though we had the moving to and fro of an immortal god among mortal men. ”

“ And where do the multitude of Gods dwell, if heaven itself is a Deity? But when this philosopher says that God is without a body, he makes him an irrational and insensible being. Besides, how can the world move itself, if it wants a body? ”

“ This was the thought in Eden as He trod —
... It is a lonely thing to be a God.
So long! afar through Time He bent His mind,
For the beginning, which He could not find,
Through endless centuries and backwards still
Endless for ever, till His 'stonied will
Halted in circles, dizzied in the swing
Of mazy nothingness. ”

“ We are now face to face with the eternity origin of the Infinite Spirit, the Third Person of Deity. The very instant that God the Father and God the Son conjointly conceive an identical and infinite actions—the execution of an absolute thought-plan—that very moment, the Infinite Spirit springs full-fledgedly into existence. ”

“ Why depict the infinite God as a quiescent and retired spectator of the operation of certain laws which he has imposed upon organized matter, when there are discoverable so many manifest reasons for the special creation of such a being as man? It is hardly in accordance with any rational theory of God's providence, after we have attained a conception of such a being, to liken him intentionally or unintentionally to the Demiurgus of the acute and ingenious Greek philosopher. ”

“ By the Deity we mean—and I suppose everyone means—the all-controlling consciousness of the universe as well as the infinite, unfathomable, and unknowable abyss of being beyond. By divinity we mean the essence of the nature of the immanent God, the innermost and all-determining quality of that nature; we have already seen that according to the Christian religion the innermost quality of the divine nature is perfect love. ”

“ And this I call the contemplative life. In this highest stage the soul is united to God without means; it sinks into the vast darkness of the Godhead." In this abyss, he says, following his authorities, "the Persons of the Trinity transcend themselves"; "there is only the eternal essence, which is the substance of the Divine Persons, where we are all one and uncreated, according to our prototypes." Here, "so far as distinction of persons goes, there is no more God nor creature"; "we have lost ourselves and been melted away into the unknown darkness." ”

“ At that time I was associated with many of the purest and noblest spirits, longing and feeling after God by the dim light of nature; trying to think him out for themselves; finite minds blinded by vain efforts to comprehend the infinite. The first genuine wave of affliction brought me to a standstill on the brink of the abyss that says there is no God. ”

“ But thoughts ever recurring to the body, talking of it, and expecting from it perpetual pleasure or perpetual pain, are educating sensualism, selfishness, and materiality, at the expense of the adornments of mind and spiritual growth. Clothing our thoughts with vestments of mortality, they cease to soar.
If Deity is personality, the forever I AM is not infinite, bounded by and narrowed into limits. It is of little consequence what the person of God is when compared with the greater question, What is this Mind, its character and divine power, that we denominate God? ”

“ Could Spirit evolve its opposite, matter, and Dust. give matter ability to sin and suffer? Is Spirit, God, injected into dust, and eventually ejected at the demand of matter? Does Spirit enter dust, and lose therein the divine nature and omnipotence? Does Mind, God, enter matter, to become there a mortal sinner, animated by the breath of God? The validity of matter is herein opposed, not the validity of Spirit, or its creations. Man represents God; mankind represents the Adamic race, and is a human, not a divine, creation. ”

“ If on the one hand it is impossible for the finite Mind to fathom the Infinite, on the other hand it is practically misleading to apply the term Unknowable to the Deity that is revealed in every pulsation of the wondrously rich and beautiful life of the Universe. ”

“ We are lost, not by Adam's sin, but by our own; and we are saved, not by Christ's historical death, but by our own obedience to the law of the Spirit of Life revealed in Him and by our own death to sin; [61] and the beginning of Heaven is one with the beginning of conformity to the will of God and to our nativity from above. "Heaven is a temper of spirit, before it is a place." [62] {302} There is a Heaven this side of Heaven and there is as certainly a Hell this side of Hell. The most impressive expression of this truth is given in one of his Sermons: "All misery arises out of ourselves. ”

“ Is, then, the anthropomorphic God as momentary and as accidental in the system of the world as that vapoury spectre? The God in whom we live and move and have our being must be far more all-pervasive, more incognisable by the souls of men, who doubt not for one moment of His presence and His power. ”

“ But I am filled with amazement, when I am told, that, in this enlightened age and in the heart of the Christian world, there are persons who can witness this daily manifestation of the power and wisdom of the Creator, and yet say in their hearts, "There is no God." ”

“ The infinite, inaccessible, uncreated God, through His infinite and inconceivable kindness, embodied Himself, and, if I may say so, diminished Himself from His inaccessible glory, to make it possible for Him to be united with His visible creatures, such as the souls of saints and angels, that they might be enabled to partake of the life of Godhead. For each of these, after its kind, is a body, be it angel, or soul, or devil. ”

“ The gods are but the several parts of nature, and they are all lost in one god, who is nature in its entirety.”
The proconsul signified his approval of the words of his brother, and speaking in a serious strain, defined the attributes of divinity.
“God is the soul of the world; this soul spreads to all parts of the universe, infusing motion and life into it. This soul, a creative flame, penetrating the inert mass of matter, gave shape to the world, governing and preserving it. Divinity, an active force, is essentially good. ”

“ For, 'tis natural to ask not so much how it is proved that God is virtually present, though not substantially present, in every part of nature, as what can be meant by being everywhere present by mere energy?" This reasoning can no more make out that the Deity is omnipresent by his virtue, than that he is omnipresent as to his substance.... ”

“ The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the “God” of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary [pg 525] men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be “one and only” and to be “infinite”; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold. ”

“ Such inability to attain God in a final sense should in no manner discourage universe creatures; indeed, you can and do attain Deity levels of the Sevenfold, the Supreme, and the Ultimate, which mean to you what the infinite realization of God the Father means to the Eternal Son and to the Conjoint Actor in their absolute status of eternity existence. ”

“ IF there were gods, how could I endure it to be no God! ”

“ When we study the pagan gods, we find they have now one meaning, now another. Now they belong to the creative essence, and now to the material-dynamic world. First they have one aspect, then another. The greatest god has both aspects. First he is the source of life. ”

“ Our author, besides, stated that the demons are eternal. What remains for us to suppose, then, but that these mediate beings are assimilated to the gods in one of the two remaining qualities, and to men in the other? For if they received both from above, or both from beneath, they should no longer be mediate, but either rise to the gods above, or sink to men beneath. Therefore, as it has been demonstrated that they must possess these two qualities, they will hold their middle place if they receive one from each party. ”

“ I. The human mind, in eternity, will have a distinct and unvarying perception of the character of God. And that one particular attribute in this character, respecting which the cognition will be of the most luminous quality, is the Divine holiness. In eternity, the immaculateness of the Deity will penetrate the consciousness of every rational creature with the subtlety and the thoroughness of fire. God's essence is infinitely pure, and intensely antagonistic to sin, but it is not until there is a direct contact between it and the human mind, that man understands it and feels it. ”

“ The divine mystery consists in the inherent difference which exists between the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, the time-space creature and the Universal Creator, the material and the spiritual, the imperfection of man and the perfection of Paradise Deity. The God of universal love unfailingly manifests himself to every one of his creatures up to the fullness of that creature's capacity to spiritually grasp the qualities of divine truth, beauty, and goodness. ”