Eternal universe

“ I want no silent dark eternity in which no world was; for I am a disciple of One who said, 'My Father worketh hitherto.' My sense of eternal order is no longer jarred by the sudden appearance in the universe of a dead, inane substance, foreign to God and spiritual being. ”

“ It is He Who, as the Eternal Word, built the material Temple of the Universe, which is filling the minds of men in successive generations more and more with wonder and astonishment. What a spectacle, for instance, do the starry heavens present to us! The more we contemplate them, the more we are lost in wonder at their immeasurable immensity, and the more do our hearts go up in reverent adoration of the God Whose eternity, glory, power, and wisdom they ceaselessly proclaim in language intelligible to every human heart. ”

“ If this account is true, we must believe that God, existing in infinite space surrounded by eternal nothing, naught and void, created, produced, called into being, willed into existence this universe of countless stars. ”

“ Sooner or later all universe personalities begin to realize that the final quest of eternity is the endless exploration of infinity, the never-ending voyage of discovery into the absoluteness of the First Source and Center. Sooner or later we all become aware that all creature growth is proportional to Father identification. We arrive at the understanding that living the will of God is the eternal passport to the endless possibility of infinity itself. ”

“ His awful tread is in every earthquake and on every angry ocean; and the heavens above us teem with His myriads of shining witnesses. The universe of solar systems whose wheeling orbs course the crystal paths of space proclaim through the dread halls of eternity, the glory, and power, and dominion, of the all-wise, omnipotent, and eternal God.
[147]
"VISIONS AND DREAMS."
The infinite wisdom of Almighty God has made a plane of intelligence, and a horizon of happiness, for every being in the universe, from the butterfly to the archangel. ”

“ When the strife between these and the good angels shall have continued the appointed time, and these Spirits enveloped in darkness shall long and in vain have endeavored to absorb the Divine light and life, then will the Eternal Himself come to correct them. He will deliver them from the gross envelopes of matter that hold them captive, will re-animate and strengthen the ray of light or spiritual nature which they have preserved, and re-establish throughout the Universe that primitive Harmony which was its bliss. ”

“ We have a prospect of the invisible things of God: we see the spiritual world, which is all round about us, and yet no more discerned by our natural faculties, than if it had no being: and we see the eternal world, piercing through the veil which hangs between time and eternity. Clouds and darkness then rest upon it no more, but we already see the glory which shall be revealed. ”

“ And just such a survey, and just such a life, not timeless, but time-inclusive, constitute the eternal, which is real, not apart from time, and from our lives, but in, and through and above all our individual lives. The divine will wills in us and in all this world, with its endless past and its endless future, at once. The divine insight is not lifeless. It includes and surveys all life. All is temporal in its ceaseless flow and in its sequence of individual deeds. All is eternal in the unity of its meaning. ”

“ I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.
Imagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more. The Apostles knew of no other Gospel. ”

“ In the eternity of the past, upon the personalization of the Infinite Spirit the divine personality cycle becomes perfect and complete. The God of Action is existent, and the vast stage of space is set for the stupendous drama of creation—the universal adventure—the divine panorama of the eternal ages. ”

“ One moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity. This exalted view, continued and retained when the Science of Being is understood, would bridge over, with Life discerned spiritually, the interval of death; and man would be in the full consciousness of his immortality and eternal harmony, where sin, sickness, and death are unknown. Time is a mortal thought, whose divisor is the solar year. Eternity is God's measurement of Soul-filled years. ”

“ That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our “immortality,” if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already now and here, which we find so often expressed to-day in certain philosophic circles, finds its support in a “hear, hear!” ”

“ Oh, how admirable the wisdom that embraces all eternity at once, and contains within itself the whole of immensity, that draws to itself all infinity, in which alone all things possess a kind of eternal being, and eternal life, which, lastly, is without beginning and without end, and is in every respect immutable! ”

“ From this unreal world lead us to the real! From darkness lead us to the light! From death guide us to immortality!
"With our hearts purged of all hate, let us worship the Eternal. Our God is the Lord of prayer; he hears the cry of his children. Let all men submit their wills to him, the Resolute. ”

“ We know, and are certain, that this light affliction which endures but for a moment, in comparison with the infinite duration beyond the tomb, will work out a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. We entreat you to look no longer at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal. ”

“ Then stayed the fervid wheels, and in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This Universe, and all created things.
One foot he centered, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said:—'Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just circumference, O World!'231
"Thus God the heaven created, thus the earth,
Matter unformed and void. ”

“ Then my heart comprehended that immortality dwelled in the spaces between the worlds, and death only amongst the worlds. Upon all the suns there walked upright shadows in the form of men: but they were glorified when they quitted these perishable worlds, and when they sank into the sea of light: and the murky planets, I perceived, were but cradles for the infant spirits of the universe of light. In the Zaarahs of the creation I saw—I heard—I felt—the glittering—the echoing—the breathing of life and creative power. ”

“ Thence, reascending through the ages, we watched the slow secular evolution of our humanity, until sunlit days became night and we lived in a new present which, in its turn, seemed unique and eternal.
The world to come is there, in the future eternity, just as the world of long ago is there, in the eternity of the past, and all is present in the Absolute. ”

“ Holding so fast by Thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality. [134]
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is no room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou—Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed. ”

“ This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken. ”

“ Or of the Eternal coeternal beam May I express thee unblamed? since God is light, And never but in unapproachèd light Dwelt from eternity—dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate! Or hear'st thou rather pure Ethereal stream, Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the Sun, Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest The rising World of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless Infinite! ”

“ Have this awakening and deathless experience in the soul, and you will be troubled by no doubts about an everlasting life succeeding the close of the world. But so long as this spiritual resurrection in the breast is unknown, you can have no knowledge of eternal life, no experimental faith in a future entrance from the grave into heaven, no, not though millions of resurrections had crowded the interstellar space with ascending shapes. Rise, then, from your moral graves, and already, by faith and imagination, sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus. ”

“ And with mortal man, only that mind which freely submits itself to the spirit direction can hope to survive the mortal time-space existence as an immortal child of the eternal spirit world of the Supreme, the Ultimate, and the Absolute: the Infinite. ”

“ Has doubt taken away from the glory of the universe? Rather, as the result of the work of these myriad investigators, whose one aim and end was truth, at last we have a universe worthy to be the home of an infinite God, a universe that matches our thought of the Divine, a universe that thrills and lifts us, fills us with reverence, and bends us to our knees in the attitude of worship. ”

“ The eternity of his nature; if he is from everlasting, he will be to everlasting, and we must have recourse to this first principle, when things seen, which are temporal, are discouraging, that we have hope and help sufficient in a god that is not seen, that is eternal. "Art thou not from everlasting, and then wilt thou not make bare thy everlasting arm, in pursuance of thy everlasting counsels, to make unto thyself an everlasting name?" ”

“ But this mysterious universe, through which, half veiled in its own shadow, our dim little planet is wheeling, with its star worlds and thought-wearying spaces, remains. Nature's mighty miracle is still over and around us; and hence awe, wonder, and reverence remain to be the inheritance of humanity; still are there beautiful repentances and holy deathbeds; and still over the soul's darkness and confusion rises, starlike, the great idea of duty. ”

“ At any point of time, he may still resolve to resist the influx of eternal life, and continue in the sphere of death: but eternity surrounds time, and infolds it; and in eternity God's purposes will be realized, and every knee bow, of things in heaven, and in earth, and under the earth. Universal harmony must prevail at last. ”

“ No doubt God is eternal; but can my mind grasp the idea of eternity? Why should I cheat myself with meaningless words? This is what I do understand; before things were—God was; he will be when they are no more, and if all things come to an end he will still endure. ”

“ Though beginning with humanity, they embody the Divine. They expand to their ultimate conceptions in the sublime attributes: the perfections of the God of Love; associating [pg 128] with mortality a divine destiny commencing on earth, extending through time, pausing not at the portals of death, the gateway to eternity, but flowing onward into the realms of eternal day. ”

“ The Father is infinite, the Son is infinite, the Holy Ghost is infinite. The Father is eternal, the Son is eternal, the Holy Ghost is eternal. And yet these are not three eternal Beings but one eternal Being. As also there are not three uncreated beings, nor three infinite beings, but one uncreated and one infinite Being. ”

“ You write primarily as a scientist (though a very human scientist) , and so you are naturally mainly occupied with the facts and conditions of what I may call our earth-life. I, on the other hand, writing as a Catholic, regard our earth-life as essentially and inseparably connected with an eternal existence which reaches out beyond the grave. I look on this life as utterly meaningless in itself, as a period which is simply and solely a means to an end—Eternity—a period of which all circumstances of pleasure and pain can only be explained and rightly used in their relation to this Eternity. ”

“ And concomitant with the eternalization of the triunities the universe stage is set—the potentials are existent and the actuals are present—and the fullness of eternity witnesses the diversification of cosmic energy, the outspreading of Paradise spirit, and the endowment of mind together with the bestowal of personality, by virtue of which all of these Deity and Paradise derivatives are unified in experience on the creature level and by other techniques on the supercreature level. ”

“ To be touched by the Spirit of God, if but for a single moment, produces a million thrills of divine ecstacy, and so great is the joy that one short moment feels as if it were an eternity. In brief, when you are in that sublime state you are in real eternity; time passes no more; every moment appears to be an eternity because it is in eternity; and being in eternity it gives to you an eternity of bliss—unbounded bliss from the highest heaven. ”

“ And this Faith and Knowledge arising thus, in its fulness, at most only on occasion, and never because, of spacial and temporal signs, are conceived as a timeless, Eternal Life, and as one which is already, here and now, an actual present possession. “He who believeth in the Son, hath eternal life”; “He who heareth and believeth My word, hath eternal life”; “We know that we have passed from death unto life” ”

“ ORIGINAL, ACTUAL, AND POTENTIAL The absolute cosmos is conceptually without limit; to define the extent and nature of this primal reality is to place qualifications upon infinity and to attenuate the pure concept of eternity. The idea of the infinite-eternal, the eternal-infinite, is unqualified in extent and absolute in fact. ”