In the root of the word "faith" itself... there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we perceive as something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the person that gives us hope, that we believe, not directly or immediately in truth itself or in hope itself.

The intellectual world is divided into two classes - dilettantes, on the one hand, and pedants, on the other.

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.

To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if he existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.

Is there not therefore rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels us to believe in God. And to believe in God - I must reiterate it yet again - is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger for divinity, to be sensible to his lack and absence, to wish that God may exist. And it is the wish to save the human finality of the Universe. For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if it be that our consciousness is based upon Consciousness, if consciousness is the end of the Universe.

In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly - a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat, a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousness akin to our own, and a profound longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves, but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is his finality as we feel it.

And He is the God of the humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (I Cor. i. 27) And God is in each of us in the measure in which 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 the an idol with all the passion of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to the 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.

And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And he is in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is Himself creating the longing for Himself.

Not only are we unable to conceive of the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I, an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of other, and by other I's; I am sprung from a multitude of ancestors. I carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me, potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I to the infinite - or rather I, the projection of God to the finite - must also be a multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God - that is to say, in order to save the living God - faith's need - the need of the feeling and the imagination - of conceiving Him and feeling Him as possessed of a certain internal multiplicity.

And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity into a Quaternity. If... in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? ...And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification with the Word.