Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/168

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THOUGHTS ON GOD
27

Let us endeavour to express that which we know, that which is necessary to us, joyful and certain ; and God (the same whom you think it necessary to evade) will help us. By naming Him I acknowledge my incompleteness; I, His weak, small vessel, endeavour to open myself—that part of me which can receive Him — in order that He may enter into me in so far as I am able and worthy to receive Him.

Above all. He is necessary to me in order that I may express whither I am tending and to whom I go. In this monotonous earthly life I may not feel Him, I may do without this form of thought and expression ; but in relation to the passage from the past life into this one, and from this one into another, I cannot avoid expressing by Him that from whence I come and whither I am going, this being the form of expression nearest to the true character of the case; from God to God, — from that which is outside of time and space to the same again.

.....

The will of God is known to every man much more than the will of society, of the State. Man is not, as those on the lowest plane of understanding think, an individual or social animal only; but man is a particle of the Divine, contained in a bodily shell.