W
W W W
World
Wide Web Witness
Inc. Home Page Contents
Page for Volume What is New
Chapter 1
ONE ONLY - THE ONLY ONE!
GETTING DOWN TO ONE AND THE REALITY OF IT ALL
There are NOT many gods, nature gods, semi-urge, maxi-dirge, psycho-template gods, gods of war, gods of chance, a mere contradiction in terms; and there are not many creator-gods, call them forces or realms of inventive courses, or anything else, for force can do things with things, but when there are no things, and there is only force, what is to be moved ? and what does it matter how fast, when it is not there!
There are not many saviours, many contributors to the well-being of man, who after all is not, in a massive disproportion of cases, doing well. Country by country, it is a shambles, and though some still like to be rich, when you get the guilt-ridden ones like Australia, busy making many kinds of shrines for national guilt, while implying damning indictments for those not following the very latest craze, there is a frenzy to self-destruct.
There is only one Judge, and there is only One who is coming back to BE it!
God has not forsaken this earth, but this world in its vast enterprise and subterfuge, lying and vying, perceptions and reflections is with God, like an asteroid about to collide with the earth, or the earth with a planet much more sizeable, with impending collision. He cannot leave God to remain and come to Him as a Rock, for with many this is not at all pleasing; but from the festering fertility of misled mind, he invents even a new saviour, from the psychic dynamics, or the natural workwork, or the workmanship of God by distorting Christ (not AGAIN! - yes again, but this time, perforce, NOT in body, just in the body of would-be believers), and making even of this sacrificed Saviour, something new, clinging to the name and fame, forsaking the Person who came and saved.
There is to be a someone, vague, unrehearsed, evidently stolen from the Old Testament which long preceded by many centuries all this invention. Believe 'the lie' (Romans 1:25) if you want to do so, but it is a vapid, vague, undefined, rasping realisation of what is in fact there, distorted by disbelief, persisted in by impenitence, lassooed from truth and bound in bonds of illusion.
There is one God who has one declaration and one will and is not subjectible to hope, but declared with wisdom. What then of the human developments which assert a thousand things untested, unverified, indistinguishable from dreams, which is what Jeremiah calls them categorically, while advising us from that distant date, that in the end of the Age, this sort of dreaming would increase to epidemic proportions, in this, that then you would have it 'perfectly', that is to its utmost measure, which has now happened! (Jeremiah 23:21-24, 28-32).
Indeed in Jeremiah 23:20-22
"The anger of the LORD will not return, until He has executed,
and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart:
in the latter days you will consider it perfectly."I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran: I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied.
"But if they had stood in My counsel, and had caused My people to hear my words,
then they should have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their doings."Am I a God at hand, says the LORD, and not a God afar off?
Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? says the LORD.
Do not I fill heaven and earth? says the LORD."I have heard what the prophets said, that prophesy lies in my name, saying,
I have dreamed, I have dreamed."How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that prophesy lies?
yes, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart;
who think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams
which they tell every man to his neighbour ..."
Naturally, this leaves out the salvation, just as water, named honey, leaves out the sweetness. Unsaved, and hindering those who would go in to its operating theatre, man even makes fun of God, of Christ, of salvation, of truth, and does it as comically as a suicidal clown (of which there seemed to have been a few - as illustrated in the sad comedy which has a clown see a psychiatrist who tells him to see such and such a clown, but who responds that he, himself, IS that clown!).
Unsaved, and destroying the avenue to salvation by philosophic presumptions, stomach rumbles of spiritual indigestion, wrought by indigestible preoccupations, immoral drugs, unaesthetic art, unjust social reforms, clinging to this or that nostrum while forgetting the nature and end of life, man continues to DEMONSTRATE very nicely and tidily, that IF you reject the salvation of the ONE God, then you go unsaved, however savage your philosophy of might is right, or darkness is light, or man as the model of eternity, or of survival as the ultimate 'right', or other perversions of fact you may wish. WHICH man ?
Force, might, is not even moral at all, far less right. How CAN a meaningless power to move things, to impart acceleration, have a quality of a moral kind ? Explosion is good, if it destroys rubbish, perhaps; but not if it ruins a well planned edifice, used for help to the weak, to become strong as a person should be, for action in alliance with that for which man is made.
For what then is man made ? For that, you would have to ask the Inventor of thought, logic, matter, mind and spirit, and the power to contradict Him. This is used by many. Thus, even when there is no truth, as in atheism, and its model, they presume to tell you what is is, this without any basis to know anything to be true, in a whirled world of no known truth. It is parallel to agnosticism, which not knowing what is what, or not having found it, or believing that it cannot be found, merely makes a business of not knowing it, and SO does not know it. Either way you do not get it, and so have no valid idea about what is right, good, in accord with what should be, what is the right direction, for man.
It does not matter what is alleged to happen, happening is what is; right is what ought to be, and never the former will be parent to the latter.
There is however one way out, so easy, so simple, so divinely blessed and so innocuous, so harmless and so kind, so apt BECAUSE it is true, that were it not that its inherent and indeed explicit diagnosis of mankind, of the human race, which makes it hard for many to TAKE, it might have won many more long ago. It is this. Nothing made nothing. End of nothing for I for one, am not nothing: for example, it does not write. Even if I were an illusion, that is something, and something is not nothing.
When however I think, then I am something that thinks. It does not matter what you may imagine is the status of this something that thinks, think it does, for I am doing it now, whatever may be the assigned basis for this action, I as a cognisant action source, coherent in contemplation as agent, am doing it. You may choose to make it an alter ego, not at all what it thinks it is; but to think it is, at all, it has to think.
I find, as I think, that there is a right and a wrong: 2 plus 2 makes 4 and that is how numbers work, by a definition which fits what happens. If I err in logic, I find it because the results, sooner or later, sting. If I am zealous for evidential grounds and logical means, I find I get somewhere, in practice and in thought. For example, moving relentlessly in thought, from cause to effect as I see happening in the perceived world, I find that nothing has no power to cause (for a power to cause is not nothing, and nothing is the extent of its empire, which of course is not really an empire, except for imagining this in order to dismiss it, and there is no 'it' since this is not nothing). It becomes clear that whatever brought everything to pass, must have been there: always, since the alternative of nothing would not only NOT have been there, but having no potential, NEVER COULD BE.
What is there cannot be inadequate for the results, since by definition, that will never produce them. It must be adequate. If I try to avoid causality, dispense with cause and effect and pout at logic, it pouts right back and tells me that removal of cause into subjectivity will never have any objective results; and to try to be logical ABOUT removing it, merely means that you cheat, for if logic fails, being logical about the reasons for this is built on a fallacy, using what you deny in order to affirm (cf. Causes, SMR Ch. 5). If I follow causal necessity I find the everlastingly present being - or better still, the Everlasting Cause. It is not the First Cause. THAT would imply a causal system for a first existent, and we look for the first, original basis.
Such a situation as would seek for a 'first cause' is simply a constrained operating system, with no cause. It has limitations and delimitations imposed. It needs logically a source for these constraints.
For such a thing, therefore, there is no cause. It is the Reality which Causes, bringing what is not itself, commonly called creation, into being, and this including our kind of causality, which is there. Causality does not contain this Reality, for nothing has the arms to contain it; it chooses causality of our kind, as a chosen mode for our operative world. In this kind, without Reality intervention, you have normally to wait for occurrences to proceed from cause to effect. With the intervention, again, commonly called miracle, this waiting is either shortened or removed. That is one advantage of being the Author.
OUR causality, then, moves in what is already there. It and its world has to BE there first, with all its limitations, orders and constraints, for any firstness of such causative events to PROCEED. So we proceed from First Cause, inadequate formulation, to that of the Eternal Being. This Being has nothing there but its own existence, for otherwise there would be more than one. If that were so, then you would need the cause of the system of co-operation which would make them able to act jointly, being brought into a system where they could do things. But if they were brought there, what did the bringing and made the system ? If you want to account for all, you are left with ONE.
Testing the evidence, you find ONE language throughout every living thing, that is, the materiality of every living thing. It is called DNA. This has the commands of causative character for the subjected operational systems which arise in response to this verbalised system of direction. This of course fits with the word in Genesis, that the Lord spoke and it was done, to a specialised degree.
You find, likewise, one logical system which accounts happily and without self-contradiction for this procedure within creation. You have forms of being: the rational, the commanded, the optative and the ethical, the mathematical and the empirical, the aesthetic and the moral*1. You find ONE account for this in ONE book which gives MANY opportunities to test IT *2just as you test theories.
It is the ONE which gives an account of wilful severance from the knowledge of the Eternal Being, from the start. If the case were otherwise, then man would have been made in such a style that he COULD do evil without knowing it, COULD wreak havoc in his systems (of body, mind, morality, will), without knowing otherwise. This would have meant that the Eternal Being made a misfit, something which would bring evil on itself for no sound reason: it was just made that way. That would indicate a certain ambivalence, self-contradiction; for having nothing to gain, no desire to meet, since this would imply being given set conditions, and then by whom ? we would simply be talking of what was NOT the Eternal Being, but something else, of no logical relevance to the origination.
Ruining what you make implies 1) that you make an inadequate experiment, being ignorant or 2) that you get some desirable resultant in yourself from doing this - implying an unsatisfied nature, trying to overcome its deficiencies or 3) that you want to teach it a lesson, remove its presence because it ceases to please you or make a mistake. But these are not things which a Being without any limitation or system or environment to which to adapt or adjust, will make. Even if it were to be assumed that such a Being were patchy in psychology, and variable, rather odd, still it all comes down to one relevant conclusion: it is assumed to be lacking in the relationship between what it does and what it wants, so that it is subjected to limitations, defects, things on a scale not its own, which judge it.
Yet this would, once again, merely relegate it to a made thing, having to put up with, or endure, defects which bring ruin. If however it were interested in making something like itself, having a will of its own, since without will, and with nothing but this Being with power to make all that is, there would be no results, such as ourselves, very definitely not such an eternal being. For logical failure, however, we do not seek; but what resounds to the reality of its investigations.
You may say, Why should not the Eternal Being who is One, have to put up with defects, or limitations which would call for aborting what He makes - unless He chooses to make wills that can act for themselves ? It is because to HAVE to put up with things MEANS that there are things to put up with, and this implies that there is a GIVEN for this BEING, other than its own self. It is the same if it be assumed that this Being enjoys or desires being contradicted, misrepresented of maligned. If so, there is an internal lack, in need of such an income, and this argues a delimitation as so often before. It has to be so made, or CAUSED to endure.
That means that you have not logically accounted for everything, since you start with a system of two, one CAPABLE for all, and something else. These have to be set up for capacity to co-operate, for capacity to move as an operative overall system (or else nothing would happen, but something did: we are part of it).
Where is the outside cause for this ? where is the overall causal system which would even enable it to be caused ? If it is THERE, then this and the One capable of all, live in a unison of operational sufficiency, and both they and the system have to be accounted for; and if this is junked, then the rationality ceases, and the hypothesis goes; but if it is not, then we have to find that ground for this whole set up and its units of being, and for that we look again at the Eternal Being, now realised to lack any such limits.
If then the Eternal Being decides to invent a WILL not its own, not merely furniture for its preferred operations, then it may indeed find things it would not like, and scrap them. However, if it did not KNOW about this, then it would have more power than wisdom, so having a deficiency, so that it would be limited by a given set-up, and who or what invented that! We are back to the irresolvable conflict with reason, and so dismiss this thought.
Why then is man so harassed and so hurt and so vile so often and so negative towards his own good, his own efficiency, his own children, his own physical, mental and spiritual being, the one that wills and imagines and directs and oversees and considers things in terms of vision and meaning and causality, using mind to deploy its desires ? Why is this so ?
If the Eternal Being makes a man with power to cheat and steal and mock and cavil and deceive himself and others, OR NOT, that is a will of its own, of man's own: then that is certainly freedom so long as man does not HAVE to do this. If he had to do so, then the Eternal Being would have made man such that evil to the creation, contrariety to its welfare and well-being would be implicit and fixed, so that there would have to be some resultant desired by man's pain and confusion and boasting and self-blighting. This could not be for man, merely subverting him, and if for the Being, this also could not be, since it would be contrary to no need as a criterion in the Being, to have to have this, and self-contradictory to make what ruins itself.
This would be so UNLESS such a situation were for some internal advance or advantage. But IF this were so, then the Eternal Being would lack something which needed filling, and if this were so, then it would be subject to limitation and who did the limiting ? We then would return to the irrational situation.
IF however man were made, to take our own case as a race, with a liberty to will, and an imagination to think, and a spirit with which to devise, and a wisdom with which to see, or access to it at will, under understood conditions, and WILLED to reject the Eternal Being or its rules, wisdom, means of access or route for living the life accorded, then if it did not use that liberty, how would it be there ? Is a mind never to think, a will never to act ? If however it should resolve on a separation for trial, or for rebellion, or for presumption, or for envy or for self-fulfilment, or for ambition or any other thing, purpose or reason, then what we get is accounted for, a divestment indeed; and this is precisely what the ONLY verified and validated book in the world, purporting to come from the Eternal Being, has to say 3
This being so there is no problem IF this book, this testable and sufficiently static presentation of propositions and schema, for analysis, provides a remedy for the human ruins made by the initial misuse of freedom, in wilfulness: that is, in mere abstract desire to BE something else, by some OTHER way than that sufficiently provided. It does.
There is then no problem IF you are willing to follow that remedial course of action.
If however your ruin includes the very source, your spirit, of the imaginations which misled, using will as given, then how will it WANT and be ABLE to want redress! Foul the result and that is one thing; foul the spirit which does the choosing, and that is another. God states in this Book, that He does the choosing of what is to be remedied (John 1:12). He also makes it very clear that the BASIS of HIS choosing about restoring some of the ruined members of the human race has several principles that operate. He shares this information with us, as in Colossians 1:19ff., John 3, I Timothy 2, Ezekiel 33:11, I Timothy 4:10, Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:41ff..h
One: He so loves the world that He sent His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ that Son, into history in order to offer His life as a ransom for many, sufficient for all, covering all who come on His terms: which are free, but involve regeneration to overcome the messed manhood, womanhood, childhood. He foreknows those who, being so loved, in due exercise of their wills, which can be envisaged as before spoilt, are seen to be His. Love DOES want all, but only in terms of itself, for God reveals that what is not based on love is not able to live with Him (I John 4:7-11. I Corinthians 13). Than any such sort of life, than that of love, He is other. Divorce intact in seeming marriage, is liable to become a type of hell: especially spiritually. Those who are known to want will, not God, that is a separate and discordant and inventive will which would make life as given into an abortion, a clash with its schema of liberty in the only way it can be given, are left out. They are not violated. They get what they want.
Moreover, since God knows all, He knows these things, apart from and logically prior to any system in which man might be placed: so it has nothing to do with actual history, for it is the very prelude to history. If you want to call it meta-history, you can; but since this may be confused with something else, we will call it here THE FOREKNOWLEDGE BASE. Since however this could be confused with knowing what is going to happen in a causal system where sin already is, we make this: THE FOREKNOWLEDGE IN WISDOM BASE.
Since God, who lacks nothing and has no limits, foreknows not what the fallen man or woman will do merely, but why it would be done, and further, what is the essence of the nature of such being, it is not at this level a matter of IF you could, what WOULD you do, for that assumes the prior creation, with its fall of two, the originals of the race, whereas this is FOREKNOWLEDGE, not just prior perception. God tells us that it is based on this foreknowledge (Romans 8:29ff.), and this being underivative, total and original knowledge, it appertains not to a fallen, and hence morally diversified and thus diversely estimable series of characters, but to man unbred, unfallen, KNOWN.
In history, the IF may indeed be, as it is found to be as in Proverbs 1, very definitely relevant.
In foreknowledge however, it is an assessment not of merit, since this has no diversity yet, where sin has found no place, but of reality. In history as in Revelation 22:17 and 3:17ff., the will becomes apparent, as liberated for the purpose by God. SINCE this liberation depends on what the being really is, with its will intact as BEFORE GOD WHO KNOWS IT, not as before itself, then the liberation of the will is part of the integrity of choice. Since God does it, fallen though man would become, it represents in view of His love to save ALL, man's free and true choice. Indeed, God's choice in this way guarantees the actuality of man's choice. So God triumphs as always, this time in the realisation of who, amid a fallen race, will be His.
Why however would God want to make a being with liberty of will ? You cannot love without liberty, since if you tried to do so, you would merely be implementing the will of the one who so formed you; and it would be no more loving than an alarm clock in this, that it is made to ring when so set up, or 'love' in man's case. Since God reveals that He is love, that is that He wants nothing that is contrary to this and will implement nothing of that kind, then freewill in man, in the original specifications and with their noble limitations is as necessary as guaranteed.
Freedom, of course has its limits outside God, or He would not BE God. Thus, for example, you CANNOT make GOD since He is eternal and what is made, is not, because of what went prior to the making, NOR can you be made INTO God, for the same reason. Yet liberty TOWARDS GOD is necessary for such love. Would God decide that since some would want to be other than to live amid such limitations, for example, to be gods in their own right, and there is no such right, that giving such liberty would be wrong and unworkable ? and if so, is He bowing to circumstances beyond His control, painfully bowing to extrinsic necessity and hence not God, leaving a contradiction in terms!
Far from it. If such an elemental reality of love in His Being is 1) what He wants to be 2) what He is (so that there is no limit imposed from outside), then the doing what is of the nature of love not only is possible but to be understood. If love does not force, then its very nature is such that force would spoil what it is, and so is not desired. If force is not used, and liberty is the way for love: then this is the nature of things, not in divorce from their grounding, but in conformity to it. This brings up the point that if YOU want to love, then it is not a blind alley to move amid freedom, and to endure its displays for a time, since this is what love is disposed to do. However, since freedom when in revolt from its source, limitations and nature, a thing available to man as a creation, made for the purposes of love, involves conflict before the ways part, then there is a limit. This is the end of the Age of grace: grace being the attitude of love in relationship to rebellion.
When the time comes for the segregation, then it is made. John 3:16 then moves on to John 3:36.
In the meantime, in the CHURCH of Jesus Christ, you do not wait till this time comes, that judgment of ONE, over all, when TRUTH is the criterion for the judgment as it was for the selection (or divine election as it is called). The parable of Jesus, concerning the wheat and the tares is not about the Church, but statedly about the world, the generic, not the particular (Matthew 13:38). In the Church, the sound and wholesome words of Jesus Christ rule (I Timothy 6), and where they do not, you have a new form of revolt and rebellion, in a soon-to-be-misnamed body called a "Church of Jesus Christ" when it is in fact, then become a lurch from Jesus Christ. It is better named, then, The Lurch from Jesus Christ, but few are honest enough, who travel that path, to admit it, or are so confused that they scarcely know what they are doing.
What then ? For such bodies to be called 'churches' after such movements: This is merely a spoilt nomenclature> It becomes a hidden dream of invading the Church from outside, to create confusion, to bolster up false hope or any other rebellious, insidious, invidious purpose that man, in his fallen liberty, may devise. That, right there, is part of the pathos of the situation. Wanting to have it both ways, to rebel and to be redeemed, at the same time, some allow themselves to become confused, as people sometimes do in seeking to marry a rich man or woman, pretending or even imagining love when not the person but the wealth may be what is the genesis of the 'love', and what in the end IS loved. Hence such unnatural spiritual affiliates, lodged in 'churches' can even imagine themselves great, when exceedingly small. This was the case with the excoriated Pharisees (Matthew 23), which Christ regarded in some such way, perhaps one could say, as a pastoralist would regard fly infection in sheep, and the human 'flies' that spread it. After all, his characterisation of such is not unclear (Matthew 23:24,27), as is the case with the more legally minded scribes (Luke 11:52).
Indeed, when Christ is present, such things are MADE clear, and when He is absent in a 'church', then whose is it!
It has to be purged, and in His Church there is ground given for this (as in Romans 16:17, II Timothy 3,II John cf. Separation 1997). If this is carried out, the Church may be reduced, so that some who believe in something like ecclesiastical dominion or even imperialism, will refuse to do this, and thus, using another phase of the functioning of the Church, join the rebels, perhaps without clearly knowing this, a new facet of self-deception coming into focus. God exposes this in II Thessalonians 2:10ff.. Unclaimed for the Christ who came, while at best 'another Jesus' is installed (II Corinthians 11:1ff.), such bodies become 'synagodues of satan' very readily, as seen in name, in Revelation 2:9, 3:9, being run very often by wolves in sheep's clothing' (Matthew 7:15).
Indeed Christ calls such 'ravenous wolves', and those who want their children to say in such religious bodies might as well leave them out in some SIberian forest one night, to face savage wolves. The principal, after all, is the same! It is not recommended.
How COULD God exclude people from Himself, if they suffer for it ? some might ask. But if He did not, then love would be warped. You cannot KEEP BY YOU what wants to be far FROM YOU, except by force. Love, the love of God, does not use this in its inter-relationship of will with creation. Hence they go. In going, they leave their basis, their operational and functional service station and originator; and hence of course there is woe. If you want to leave and not have woe, you want to quench thirst and not drink; and it cannot be done. You have to take the consequences of choice, or what is there to choose ? If the consequence of not wanting the love of God is not having it, then what would you ? THAT is precisely what you want; and if the result of being a cut-off branch is unlovely (John 15), yet this is what love does with a person opts out. It does not force it to stay in and be a sort of ulcerous relationship, or if you want plant disease in this case, a virally vitiated continuation.
There is ONLY ONE BASIS for judgment, receiving the Redeemer who IS THE ONLY SAVIOUR, as He is, without addition or subtraction or impediment or mental sediment, or NOT. There are not various bitsies of helpers to get along somehow, when they come, somehow, for some reason or other, things drawn from creation and raised up a little, things coming from God, but put down a bit: there is ONE GOD and there is ONE JUDGE and He is the NAMED ONE, and there is no adoption of creation in all of this process whatever, bodhisvettas or Mahdis or Coming Universal Thought, or whatever. It starts where it ends, comes where it goes: from God to God. For all things are of Him and through Him and to Him, and they are His to whom be glory for ever. This is what Paul declares in Romans 11:36, and there is NO CHANGE, not not ONE! NO ONE but God CAN save you. NOTHING but His word can tell you. Jesus Christ has SHOWN you. You are without excuse if you dive into spiritual divans instead of taking up your Cross and following the ONLY ONE who ever came and spoke and said the did what was needing, both authenticating Himself as the level of God Almighty, and performing the office of love in a entirely necessary redemption.
So don't look for Matreiyas and Mahdis and Cultural King and Culture Capitals, and HUMAN RACISM and MYSTERIOUS ODDITIES. Look to "the Rock who begot you" (Isaiah 51:1, Deuteronomy 32:18), to "the Rock from which you are hewn" and to God your Saviour; for there is no other (Isaiah 43:10-11, Isaiah 45:22). Indeed, "there is no other Rock", as Peter soon enough found out (Matthew 16:22), despite being well-intentioned; so don't be deceived by human manipulators who say there is (Isaiah 44:6-8). Don't become confused about Jews and Gentiles: God has used Israel, and still in historical testimony does so, though the Gospel has passed from its prelude in sacrificial symbols to its culmination in the human sacrifice needed. This is not MERELY human, but also of God AS man, so that man being bought back, as many as receive Him, may find by faith the fulness for which he was made (John 10:10-12).
In all charity, there could not be more clarity.
There is ONE God and ONE Judge and ONE coming for His elect, and ONE judgment for all, and ONE set of things made, and ONE Maker, and ONE Gospel of grace for return to God, as Galatians 1 thunders audibly enought; there is and ONE way which it prescribes, and ONE Bible in which these propositions are contained, and ONE Saviour who implemented what was to be done to save any of our race, and there is ONE opportunity to return.
It is not somewhere else, but right here where there Gospel is being presented, and wherever else this is wrought by the pity and mercy of God. NO ONE will be left out whom love would find; and NO ONE will be taken in by being 'taken in', that is by being first deceived. God KNOWS the ONE truth about all, and if YOU want to come in, you have the door, right in front of you, with His desire that you should; and you simply need to enter by it. DON'T try ANY ONE window, since this is not the way that love has presented for life (John 10:1). Where you are invited, if you want to come, come there! If you do NOT want that one way, then do not grieve about it: it is still there and so are you. Enter then.
I
NOTES
See for example, Dizzy Dashes ... and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth, especially
Ch. 6, as marked.
See for example:
LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST
WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES
AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS.
If exclusion from light is darkness, as when people turn off their bedside light at night, for sleep, then it is not dissimilar, except that in this case, they go to sleep during the day. Light does not cease to exist and many others at this very same time may have on their lights, delighting in them; but by this action the light, here not for the night but for this world, ceases to impinge, and when the artificial substitutes are gone, there is a darkness that misses out on what God is, which is magnificent, a grievous option. You may also wish to see Ch.2 below.