The soul selects its own society, then shuts the door; on its divine majority obtrude no more. The grace of God helps us every day. However, God has not revealed everything that he has in mind for us, as we cannot yet fully conceive of what it means to be fully glorified. The immediate certainty of reality is present in our consciousness of God as it is present in our perception of objects. Through this belief we have the capacity of intuiting God. God reveals himself to us by grace and it draws us irresistibly, yet mysteriously towards him. This love for God is pure and noble. The purest love is the effect of the most perfect, internal beauty in union with the perfect internal beauty of the heart. The love of God calls forth noble and delightful feelings in ourselves, silences every desire, and renders us happy by its presence. It is a perfect union of the most beautiful in us with the miraculous nature of God. God’s grace removes a void in the heart, and is the bloom of our intellectual life and humanity, so love will render manifest the ideal of beauty and loveliness, and the kind of lid which a person expresses to others one comes in contact with. Such love excites us to virtuous and magnanimous actions, and many amiable qualities. It is the soul of fellowship that animates and redeems us, preparing that way for the reign of infinite Love. However, no one can return to the presence of God without divine grace. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

God strengthens us to do good works we could not do on our own. The Lord promised that if we humble ourselves before him and have faith in him, his grace will help us overcome all our personal weaknesses. Someday we will see clearly—just as clearly as God sees everything about us. It is worthy it to seek God’s Kingdom rather than sinful pleasures. God has assured us that his promise of eternal life is more than worth the effort, struggles, and disappointments we may face on our journey. Therefore, do not lose heart. Even when it seems we have given our all, our inner being is being renewed day by day. Everlasting life is, after all, a matter of faith. Faith is not just a warm, vague feeling. Faith is a frame of mind that is expressed by the kind of person one chooses to be, the actions that express what one believes. Just as we grown in our spiritual understanding of life, so we must grow in our spiritual understanding of grace. Scriptural statements about grace are clear and faith-promoting to those who understand the gospel. Grace is God’s love in action. It is his doing for what we cannot do ourselves. With God’s infinite wisdom, power, and love, God willingly condescends to extend that infinite wisdom, power, and love to bless and save his children. God’s grace consists in his love, mercy, and condescension toward his children. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

All things that exist are manifestations of the grace of God. The creation of the Earth, life itself, the plan of salvation, kingdoms of immortal glory hereafter, and the supreme gift of eternal life—all these things come by the grace of God. It is all part of the World’s concrete fulness. We are preparing ourselves for a World of pure experiences. Salvation means to be saved in the celestial kingdom. This context includes the collection of all our established truths as well as the exigencies of our affective and intellectual natures. Understanding should always know before the will decides. We must at least believe in our faith sufficiently to bestir ourselves to test it; without our active interest in and partisanship of belief the enterprise of God’s grace would come to a silent, ghostly end.  The doctrine of the will to believe, with all its genial encouragement of risking belief, is balances. We cannot save ourselves by our own work. “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, least any person should boast,” reports Ephesians 2.8-9. Belief must continue to justify itself for it to be definitive, once and for all certification. We cannot save ourselves, we cannot resurrect ourselves. The resurrection comes by the grace of God; all people are resurrected, and in that sense, all are saved by grace alone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

No human being can raise oneself unto eternal life; one cannot create a state of salvation and provide the means to obtain it. Humans cannot create the kingdom of God, nor can one save oneself in such a kingdom. If it were not for the grace of God, there would be no eternal life. There is a higher part of the Universe, which, though is beyond the immediate deliverance of the senses, is nevertheless effective in the World in a way that makes a noticeable difference. This assertion that the higher part makes concrete and local differences constitutes the famous piecemeal supernaturalism. This means that divine God—is not accessible in its entirety, but only piece by piece. This piecemeal ontology grants the varieties of religious experiences culminating in the experiences of being empowered and authorized from the divine to keep life worth living free from the abysses of the divided self. By means of making experiences to live a life worth living, each person has to access to a piece of the divine. Thinking and speaking about God implicitly is speaking and thinking about life worth living and capable actions worthy to be undertaken. Or, thinking and speaking about the value experiences of life implicitly is thinking and speaking about God. Drawing near God is a magnetic field of an empowering force of the divine influencing the individual in its energetic center. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

The higher part of this World is perhaps impossible to define given the present state of our knowledge. The subconscious must interpret the incursion of the divine into the self and moving the self in the direction of conversation. The magnetism is super-naturalistic proof that the divine is really working, and illustrating the higher part of the Universe. “Wherefore, redemption comes in and through the Holy Messiah; for he is full of grace and truth,” reports 2 Nephi 2.4-6. Though salvation is free (fully available and not withheld from anyone because of time, location, or lineage), we must reconcile ourselves to God. “We labour diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do,” Reports 2 Nephi 25.23. Divine grace is needed by every soul because of our weaknesses and shortcomings. However, grace cannot suffice without total effort on the part of the recipient. Hence the explanation, “It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.” We are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all people, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the adversary,” reports 2 Nephi 2.27. We have the power to keep God’s commandments and must do so in order to be saved in his kingdom. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

Our personal, peculiar vision counts must in philosophy; not surprisingly, it is vision, not method, which is primary. Reality dictates the method by which it may be known. The gross encounter with the World is primary in the determination of what character the World will have for us. Theories of knowledge and method, existing at a high level of abstraction, are second to the ineluctable fact of experience breaking in upon us. Believing truly is the compulsion of fact or the unavoidability of a residual nonplastic pole in determination of what is true. It is here that we find truth’s authority and importance. Truth is what we must somehow take account of if we are not to perish. People cannot in the long run believe what is false not because truth extracts from the, a categorical imperative in its own behalf but because reality compels people in spite of themselves, and it is from this that the authority of truth is derived. Agreement with reality as a criterion of truth cannot be taken to indicate any fixed structural relation (such as copying relation). The truth relation is characterized not by stasis but by fluid resourcefulness of functional harmony. The character of the harmony itself may be anything that is compatible with survival. There is more than one way to survive as truth. We have the power to keep God’s commandments and must do so in order to be saved. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

God is willing to save us (which we cannot do for ourselves) if we are willing to do what we have to do, which is to receive Christ as our Saviour, repent of our sins, and continue in a life of righteousness and obedience to the end of our probation on Earth. However, God’s grace will not do for us what we can do for ourselves. Accountable people have the power to do what is right. Accountable people can endure to the end by living a life of righteousness and service. When we are willing to do all this, God’s grace cleanses us from our sins, gives us the gift of the Holy Ghost, and blesses us to enable us to dwell in peace and holiness in the celestial kingdom forever. Our future, though continuous with our past, is not determined by it. Just so the future World; although it grows out of the total past, it is not a mere result of the past. If I am creative—that is, if human freedom is effectual—then the World is creative, if for no other reason than that I am part of the World. What is constant in my behaviour is the result of habits which never entirely lose their flexibility. In the same way the constancies charted by the laws of science are only inveterate habits. After all of our efforts, after all of our struggles with sin and carnal aspects of the World, God, though his grace will bestow upon the faithful his divine nature. We have to keep the commandments and dwell with God. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

Bad conscience is consciousness directed not unreflectingly forward but regretfully backward toward its own past, which is irremediable because time is irreversible. The problem posed is how to restore the flow of living that tends to be halted by retrospective brooding. How is consciousness freed and time unfrozen? A form not favoured detachment from one’s predicament is effected by irony, precisely because it intellectualizes and detemporalizes that predicament. Time alone, in its flow, frees us. Virtues of the interval, fidelity and justice—are inferior to the creative virtues of the instant, courage and charity. The nature of the self is discovered through illumination of existence (Existenzerhellung), which discloses the possibilities of humans, that is, the possibilities of an entity seeking understanding of self an of being. The real and valuable, that is, the authentic, in an individual is called Existenz. Existenze, the genuine self, is nonobjective and unique. It is infinitely open to new possibilities and inaccessible to traditional philosophical investigations. Although Existenz is that crucial aspect of human existence that cannot be conceptually delimited, it is nonetheless clearly experiences: It can be lived; it is illuminated through philosophical reflection; it can be communicated. Existenz is the experience of the total freedom that defines a person; it is the experience of the infinity possibilities for styles of life; it is, finally, the experience of loneliness that cries in the wilderness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8