September 16

Great peace have they that love Thy law, and nothing shall offend them.

"ALL the various peoples", says Hegel, "feel that it is in the religious consciousness that they possess truth, and they have always regarded religion as constituting their true dignity and the Sabbath of their life. Whatever awakens in us doubt and fear, all sorrow, all care, all the limited interests of finite life, we leave behind us on the shores of time; and as, from the highest peak of a mountain, far away from all definite view of what is earthly, we look down calmly upon all the limitations of the landscape and of the world, so, with the spiritual eyes, man, lifted out of the hard realities of this actual world, contemplates it as something having only the semblance of existence, which, seen from this pure region, bathed in the beams of the spiritual sun, merely reflects back its shades of colour, its varied tints and lights, softened away into eternal rest. In this region of spirit flow the streams of forgetfulness from which Psyche drinks, and in which she drowns all sorrow, while the dark things of this life are softened away into a dream-like vision, and become transfigured until they are a mere framework for the brightness of the Eternal."

HEGEL, quoted in The Pathway to Reality, Richard Burdon Haldane

JOY IN GOD