Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I THE DIVIDED LIVING CORMLESS, imageless, nowhere, nowhile, non-exist- ent—a Void: and over against this, all that is, that ever was, and ever shall be—a Universe. Everything from nothing. We have no other phrase for the mystery of Creation, save as creation we express it personally in the words Father and Son. For that which, in this contradiction between the essential and the manifest, we call Nothing, for want of a nominative, is the infinite source of all life. When we say of the visible world that it is the expression of Him, we are saying as best we can that the world is because He is; but even this idea of causation falls short of the mystery, of which, indeed, we can have no idea, since our imagination cannot transcend the world of images. How can there be an image of the imageless ? We proceed through a series of negations, abolishing time and the world, existence itself, and when our annihilation is complete, the Void, in our spiritual apprehension, brings us face to face with the Father of Beginnings ; the boundless emptiness becomes the boundless pleroma, or fulness. Therefore it is that Death, which brings to naught,discloses the creative power of life. If this power were simply creative and not re-creative, formative but not transforming, the world would be the seamless, never - changing garment of God. From the first, in all this cosmic weaving, Death is at the shuttle, completing the trope in every movement, every fold ; with his face turned always to the Father, he whispers release to every living thing; and thus he becomes the Leader of Souls, bidding them turn from the world that is, that he may show them a new heaven and a new earth, calling them to repentance and a new birth. He is the strong Israfil, winged for flight, and ever folding his win...