in the measure in which each one feels Him and loves Him.  “If of two men,” says Kierkegaard, “one prays to the true God without sincerity of heart, and the other prays to an idol with all the passion of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to an idol, while the second really prays to God.”  It would be better to say that the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires.  And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in theology.  The venerable Father of the long beard and white locks who appears among the clouds carrying the globe of the world in his hand is more living and more real than the ens realissimum of theodicy.

Reason is an analytical, that is, a dissolving force, whenever it transfers its activity from the form of intuitions, whether those of the individual instinct of preservation or those of the social instinct of perpetuation, and applies it to the essence and matter of them.  Reason orders the sensible perceptions which give us the material world; but when its analysis is exercised upon the reality of the perceptions themselves, it dissolves them and plunges us into a world of appearances, a world of shadows without consistency, for outside the domain of the formal, reason is nihilist and annihilating.  And it performs the same terrible office when we withdraw it from its proper domain and apply it to the scrutiny of the imaginative intuitions which give us the spiritual world.  For reason annihilates and imagination completes, integrates or totalizes; reason by itself alone kills, and it is imagination that gives life.  If it is true that imagination by itself alone, in giving us life without limit, leads us to lose our identity in the All and also kills us as individuals, it kills us by excess of life.  Reason, the head, speaks to us the word Nothing! imagination, the heart, the word All! and between all and nothing, by the fusion of the all and the nothing within us, we live in God, who is All, and God lives in us who, without Him, are nothing.  Reason reiterates, Vanity of vanities! all is vanity!  And imagination answers, Plenitude of plenitudes! all is plenitude!  And thus we live the vanity of plenitude or the plenitude of vanity.

And so deeply rooted in the depths of man’s being is this vital need of living a world[42] illogical, irrational, personal or divine, that those who do not believe in God, or believe that they do not believe in Him, believe nevertheless in some little pocket god or even devil of their own, or in an omen, or in a horseshoe picked up by chance on the roadside and carried about with them to bring them good luck and defend them from that very reason whose loyal and devoted henchmen they imagine themselves to be.

The God whom we hunger after is the God to whom we pray, the God of the Pater Noster, of the Lord’s Prayer; the God whom we beseech, before all and above all, and whether we are aware of it or not, to instil faith into us, to make us believe in Him, to make Himself in us, the God to whom we pray that His name may be hallowed and that His will may be done—­His will, not His reason—­on earth as it is in heaven; but feeling that His will cannot be other than the essence of our will, the desire to persist eternally.