RELIGION AND ITS CONTINUITY

The most profound reason for the continuity of religion is that there have always been men, albeit few, who have had their encounter with God; men who knew God and the Kingdom of God from their own, direct, immediate, intimate experience, and not just from "hearing", nor from naive faith in the testimony of others. If no one had had this personal experience, faith itself would be empty and irrational - how empty would be the best plumbing system if no source would supply water.

Just because there were, and there are, initiates, that is, theo-sapient men, does it justify the existence of men who believe in the spiritual world. The believer is a pilgrim who walks on the right path but has not yet reached the end of the journey - whereas the conscious or sapient of God, the initiate, the man of true faith, is a man who, surpassing all “mirrors and enigmas” and all the shadows of spiritual childhood, he entered the light, in the full maturity of spirit, contemplating the divine things “face to face”, as Paul of Tarsus stated in his clairvoyance: “For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

The nonbeliever does not fulfil God's will, but his own.

The believer fulfils the will of God, but with sacrifice and affliction.

The sapient, or initiate, fulfil God's will “as on earth as it is fulfilled in heaven” - since the heavenly inhabitants are all sapient, and not just believers of God; doing the will of God is, for the sapient, as it was for the greatest initiate, Jesus, his “delicacy”, a hearty feast.

If there were no men in the world whose supreme passion consisted of doing the deeds of God, religion would have no solid guarantee of perpetuating itself, because only what is done with joy and enthusiasm has a real guarantee of duration.

The religious enthusiasm of Jesus, the greatest of the theo-sapient has been, over the past twenty centuries, the vast fire from whose heat, hundreds of millions of souls have absorbed their spiritual calories. If this great focus of light and warmth had not appeared in the world, only God knows to what degree mankind's religious thermometer would have lowered.