This World is not conclusion; a sequel stands beyond, invisible, as music, but optimistic, as sounds, it beckons and it baffles; philosophies do not know, and through a riddle, at last, sagacity must go. To guess it puzzles scholars; to gain it, people have shown contempt of generations, and crucifixion know. Some philosophers who say such things as time is unreal and who presumably in some sense also believe this, also say things and cannot help saying things which indicate that they also do not believe it. The very philosophers who say that time is unreal nevertheless use clocks, complain when their students are late, plan for the future, and engage in the same activities which the ordinary people regards as presupposing the reality of time. Likewise, the World is full of unbelievers, people deny the existence of God, but a great many of these unbelievers feel a strong urge to worship something or somebody and therefore invent all kinds of surrogate deities. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

 Human’s gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. Those who do not believe in God or who believe that they do not believe in Him, believe nevertheless in some little pocket of god or even devil of their own. Religious agnosticism is not a psychological fact, but a self-deception it is an essential law that every finite spirit believes either in God or an idol. These idols may vary greatly. So-called unbelievers may treat the state or a woman, man, or art or knowledge or any number of things as if they were God. What needs explanation is not belief in God, which is original and natural, but unbelief or, rather, belief in an idol. The situation is not infrequently compared with the sexual instinct and what we know about the consequences of its suppression. If the sexual instinct does not find natural gratification, it does not cease to be operative but becomes diverted into others and less wholesome channels. The worship of institutions and human deities is said to be a similarly pathological phenomenon. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

An evaluation of this position, which amounts in effect to an endorsement of the theory of the religious instinct without inferring the existence of God from it, is not possible here because it would involve elaborate discussions of child psychology and the causation of neurosis and alienation. Here we can only observe that in the opinion of many contemporary thinkers there is no reason whatever to suppose that human beings are by nature religious. In their opinion the hunger for God, in its orthodox no less than in its newer substitute expressions, is invariably the result of certain deprivations and traumatic experiences. People who suffer from insufficient contact with other human beings and who do not find the natural World satisfying will tend to experience longings for something supernatural or feel a need to endow human beings with supernatural attributes. Some would go further and maintain that traditional religion, through its life-denying morality and irrational taboos, is itself in no small measure responsible for the existence of the type of personality that displays the hunger for God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

People are the measures of all things. At the very least, computers have forced people to reinterpret the meaning of the measurements. Either the yardstick is not so long as we had thought or the things to be measured are growing longer every day. Every social measure ought to be judged in terms of its effects on the poorest and most numerous class. We should seek a moral order with the beneficial religion enjoining everyone to live for others. There is one, and only one, being in which all pure perfection coexists. Such an infinite being we call God. God is treated as the efficient, the final, or the exemplar cause of all creatures. Since God is the fixed locus in which all possibilities coexist, he must be infinite in knowledge, in power, and therefore in his essence or nature. Since contradictions arise if one assumes that more than one such infinite mind, power, or being exist, there can be but one God. Some still maintain that there are innate ideas, impressed upon the soul at birth, which lie dormant in the storehouse of the mins, to be recalled like forgotten memories when people encounter something analogous in sensible experience. The discovery of God in created things is now people recall the transcendent World of idea.  #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

People have attained to a great perfection learning, and yet remain overbear of the spirit of regeneration and fruits thereof: finding all naturally things common, as well to the stupid pedants as unto them, they assail to vindicate unto them a greater name, by not only knowing the course of things Heavenly, but likewise to climb to the knowledge of things to come thereby. Which, at first face appearing lawful unto them, in respect the ground thereof seeming to proceed of natural causes only: they are so allured thereby, that finding their practice to prove true in sundry of things, they study to know the cause thereof: and so mounting from degree to degree, upon the slippery and uncertain scale of curiosity; they are at last enticed, that where lawful arts of sciences fails, to satisfy their restless minds, even to seek that black and unlawful science of magic. Where, finding at the first, that such drivers forms of circles and conjurations rightly enjoyed thereunto, will raise such drivers forms of spirits, to resolve them of their doubts: and attributing the doing thereof, to the power inseparable tied, or inherent in the circles: and many words of God, confused wrapped in. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

By using magic, they sometimes blindly glorify themselves, as if they and by their quickness of engine, made a conquest of Pluto’s dominion, and were become Emperors over Egyptian rituals. Where, in the mean times (miserable wretches) they are becoming very dead, bonded-slaves to their mortal enemy: and their knowledge, for all that they presume thereof, is nothing increased, except in knowing evil, and the horrors of Hell for punishment thereof, as Adam’s by the eating of the forbidden tree. However, I pray you likewise forget not to tell what are the Devil’s rudiments. His rudiments, I call first in general, all that which is called vulgarly the virtue of words, herbs, and stone: which is used by unlawful charms, without natural causes. As likewise, all kind of practices, fetishes, or other like extraordinary actions, which cannot abide the true touch of natural reason. It is unlawful, being mortal to for tale what is to come, what person shall be fortunate or unfortunate, what side shall win in any battle, what person should obtain victories at a singular combat, what way and of what age shall a person die. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

Instead, this individuating difference is known to God and can only be known to humans in a future life, where one’s intellect is not so dependent upon sense perception. Before creatures are produced, they pre-exist in God’s min as archetypal ideas. Since possible creatures are written into the divine nature itself, in knowing the creature God gives it intelligibility and existence as an object of thought. Like the creative painter or sculptor who produces an idea of his or her masterpiece in one’s mind before embodying it in canvas or stone, God, if he is not to act blindly but intelligently, must have a guiding idea of divine blueprint of the creature that is logically prior to his decision to creature it. The natural life is not spiritual, and it can be made spiritual only through sacrifice. If we do not purposely sacrifice the natural, the supernatural can never become natural to us. There is no high or easy road. Each of us has the means to accomplish it entirely in our own hands. It is not a question of praying but of sacrificing, and thereby performing God’s will. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7