To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of humanity. The systematic examination of the relations of human beings to one another, the conceptions, interests and ideals from which human ways of treating one another, and the systems of value on which such ends of life are based, spring from beliefs about how life should be lived, what men and women should be and do. The fundamental sense of freedom is liberty from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor. Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human. Bringing to pass immortality is essentially a work of creation. God speaks, and Worlds are formed. We are already immortal because of our souls. However, at this time, the body is finite. Eternal life is something altogether different. Immortality is about quantity. Eternal life is about quality. Immortality is how long dinner lasts. Eternal life is what is on the menu and who is with us at the table. Eternal life is the great of all the gifts of God. Those, no doubt, who understand this doctrine, obey some ultimate principle before the bar of which all problems can be brought and solved. Single minded individuals, ruthless fanatics, people possessed by an all-embracing coherent vision do not know the doubts and agonies of those who cannot wholly blind themselves to reality. Eternal life is about the culmination of existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance—these may be cured by reform or revolution. However, people do not live only be fighting evils. They live by optimistic goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. They can only be realized through faith. As spiritual children of God, we are heirs and heiresses to this priceless fortune, benefactors to a glorious future, recipients of grace. If immortality is God’s work, then eternal life is God’s glory. However, eternal life does not come automatically. We must purge our hearts of evil and fill them with the desire to do good continually. Our Heavenly Father, with love that is scarcely within our power to comprehend, desires more than just our immortality. God desires each of us to partake of this greatest of all gifts: eternal life. The light of the Savior is available to everyone who will follow him. This divine light, through repentance, will remove darkness and sin from the soul. We can attain perfection by knowing and loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind. Perfection comes by seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Everything is what it is: liberty is freedom, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. However, to manipulate people, to propel them towards goals which you—the social reformer—see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

The structure of reality that parallels the order of thought: being is the first created and the first known. Being is first created in the sense that it is the proper effect of divine causality, an effect that, in the concrete, is determined by distinct intrinsic principles forming a composition in all created entities. Being is first known in the sense f the simplest concept from which no further abstraction can be made. The analyzing intellect (intellectus resolvens) stops at the notion of being because a nation of being only, not of this or that being, represents the limit of abstraction. However, this abstraction, because it concerns created being, still involves a twofold composition: being plus relation to creator; being plus relations of further determination to particular beings. Hence the only truly and purely simple notion of being lies beyond this abstraction being as its cause: the First Being, God. In God there is no composition, and that which is, essence, and whatever else may be said of God is identified within the Lord. Faith tells us, in the fullness of the reality of the Universe, things are sensible; there is order and not chaos in God is working out a deep purpose that we can only dimly perceived—a purpose that is healing the pain and bringing renewal and re-creation out of the eternity and into the portion of the Universe where there is time and in which we are born and live a finite life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

We have to always remember that God does not see us as a process that is unfolding, but God sees us as what we will become and what we once were. The distinction of agent and possible intellectual powers are not one for all people, but each has one’s own powers of one’s own soul; the effect is the only true separate agent intellect is God, whose light of understanding fortifies the human agent brainpower. Thus, intelligible species are the species of things that are the effects of Divine Ideas. There is a reason and purpose for everything that God does. However, it may be impossible to explain it to beings who cannot perceive the full reality and live within a shadow portion of the whole. God hides the truth from us and expects us to use our minds, the reason that God gifted us at our birth to uncover truth. We are confined to a store of conceptual tools that may be inadequate to the task of eternal comprehension, but we may even forge new conceptual tools and see the World in quite a different way—indeed, the World may be quite different. We have this desire within us to make sense of what is probably, ultimately, un-sensible. It is the pilgrimage, it is the struggled to understand, that transforms us. The whole Universe represents an ordered and hierarchical procession from God. The World is not eternal cannot be proven but is accepted as reveled by God in Genesis. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love and this is the foundation of the new system of reference which will enable us to comprehend the nature and essence of spiritual reality. We do not have to understand an all-seeing God with the creation of life and matter to suspect something wonderfully miraculous is going on in the dimension we call reality. Most of us living in it feel invested in a sense of purpose. God in reality responds redemptively to changing human needs and predicaments. Although the human body owes its production, ultimately, to the same universal causes operative in the whole of the Universe, the human soul is directly created by God. Essentially, the soul is an incorporeal substance: operationally, however, the soul function as the vivifying form of the body, which is accidental to that essence. Since the soul is a substance in itself, it is immortal, surviving the body because it is not dependent upon it. Rather than saying that the soul is in the body, we should say that the body is in (that is, participates in the existence of) the soul. Faith is not about the observation, explanation and prediction of reality. Faith is about vision, orientation and commitment. Faith is not about what once happened, what has now become, or what is going to become, but about what ought to become. Faith is the great nevertheless that flies in the face of experienced reality. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

Faith is trust in the face of disappointment, hope against hope, a rebellious attitude, a defiant protest against the reality we experience and that the sciences explore, in the name of a God with benevolent intentions. God is love; God is light. The World we know is wonderful beyond measure. Life is great. Life is a most unlikely reality, the most unbelievable experience, the most precious gift. There is always a future ahead of us. And our mortal limitations are not the limitation of God. Faith enjoys the wonderful life in a brilliant World, a commitment that is capable of suffering and sacrifice, just as the God it believes in, is characterized by suffering and sacrifice. The fact that the World we know is constrained and that these limitations are built into the fabric of the creation of God does not discourage, but emboldens us to keep trying to open our minds and tap into ultimate reality. We live in a World that is open to growth and transformation, a World that we can impact with our visions, intentions, decisions and actions. Faith is commitment to God’s vision, a commitment that is entirely realistic concerning the ambiguous character and final outcome of the World process, yet it does not give in. With God, faith throws in its weight in the struggle of life against death, justice against injustice, loving concern against indifference and callousness. This is how the true future of faith moves against the real future predicted by science. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

Every human being yearns for meaning, orientation, belonging, participation and ultimate fulfilment. Reality, as we know it, is a relentless struggle against futility, suffering and death. It runs against a barrage of fateful casual networks. It may be tragic to its core, but that is the reality we have, and f which we are part of. However, God’s vision functions like a shifting horizon that constantly reveals new deficiencies in our thinking and concepts of life and reality. God opens up new vistas, challenges and opportunities. God’s perspective on life alerts us, involves us, enlightens us, empowers us and motivates us to reach beyond our World and grasp such concepts as the speed of light, soul, love, and eternity. This is the way God acts creatively and redemptively within a reality that is in flux. A reality in flux has not arrived. It is still on its way to being manifested. It has not yet reached perfection. Heaven is the self-made eternal bliss of realizing oneness with God. When our deepest desire is eternal life with Heavenly Father, we will achieve it by following his commandments and through the grace of our Savior. Only be losing ourselves in this kind of service of the Lord will we learn to know the love of God in its most exalted form. Knowing God means understanding the Lord as he is, his desires and his will and what he expects of us individual and as his covenant people. The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective Heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7