The Worship of God
It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend.
The man who permits you to injure him deserves
your vengeance;
He also will receive it. Go, Spectre! obey my most secret desire,
Which thou knowest
without my speaking. Go to these Fiends of Righteousness,
Tell them to obey their Humanities, and
not pretend Holiness,
When they are murderers. As far as my Hammer and Anvil permit,
Go tell them
that the Worship of God is honouring His gifts
In other men, and loving the greatest men best, each
according
To his Genius, which is the Holy Ghost in Man: there is no other
God than that God who is the
intellectual fountain of Humanity.
He who envies or calumniates, which is murder and cruelty,
Murders
the Holy One. Go tell them this, and overthrow their cup,
Their bread, their altar-table, their incense, and
their oath,
Their marriage and their baptism, their burial and consecration.
I have tried to make friends by
corporeal gifts, but have only
Made enemies; I never made friends but by spiritual gifts,
By severe contentions
of friendship, and the burning fire of thought.
He who would see the Divinity must see Him in His Children,
One
first in friendship and love, then a Divine Family, and in the midst
Jesus will appear. So he who wishes
to see a Vision, a perfect Whole,
Must see it in its Minute Particulars, organized; and not as thou,
O Fiend
of Righteousness, pretendest! thine is a disorganized
And snowy cloud, brooder of tempests and destructive
War.
You smile with pomp and rigour, you talk of benevolence and virtue;
I act with benevolence and
virtue, and get murder'd time after time;
You accumulate Particulars, and murder by analysing, that you
May
take the aggregate, and you call the aggregate Moral Law;
And you call that swell'd and bloated Form
a Minute Particular.
But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars; and every
Particular is a Man, a
Divine Member of the Divine Jesus.