[111F-EOC: p. 180]
“Man is what he is through Nature, however much may belong to his spontaneity; for even his spontaneity has its foundation in Nature, of which his particular character is only an expression. Be thankful to Nature! Man cannot be separate from it!” [111F-EOC: p. 180]
[112F-EOC: p. 181]
“The natural man remains at home because he finds it agreeable, because he is perfectly satisfied; religion which commences with a discontent, a disunion, forsakes its home and travels far, but only to feel the more vividly in the distance the happiness of home.” [112F-EOC: p. 181]
[113F-EOC: p. 183]
“The soul yearns after its lost half, after its body; as God, the departed soul yearns after the real man. As, therefore, God becomes a man again, so the soul returns to its body, and the perfect identity of this world and the other is now restored.” [113F-EOC: p. 183]
[114F-EOC: p. 185-186]
[P. 185] “Pleasure, joy, expands man; trouble, suffering, contracts and concentrates him; in suffering man denies the reality of the world; the things that [P. 186] charm the imagination of the artist and the intellect of the thinker lose their attraction for him … . (…) God … is essentially an object … of the heart’s necessity, not of the mind’s freedom: in short, an object which is the reflex not of the theoretical but of the practical tendency in man.” [114F-EOC: p. 185-186]
[115F-EOC: p. 187]
“As the involuntary, sensual impulses which flash out from the depths of the nature, and, in general, all those phenomena of moral and physical evil which are inexplicable to religion, appear to it as the work of the Evil Being; so the involuntary movements of inspiration and ecstasy appear to it as the work of the Good Being, God, of the Holy Spirit, or of grace.” [115F-EOC: p. 187]
[116F-EOC: p. 188]
“… the belief in a devil was, until the most recent times, intimately connected with the belief in God, so that the denial of the devil was held to be virtually as atheistic as the denial of God. Nor without reason; for when men once begin to derive the phenomena of evil from natural causes, they at the same time begin to derive the phenomena of good, of the divine, from the nature of things, and come at length either to abolish the idea of God altogether, or at least to believe in another God than the God of religion.” [116F-EOC: p. 188]
