“What does it mean?” he asked; “in God’s name, what does it mean?”
THE MAN WHO GAVE HIS SOUL
To
Walter H. Mudie
DMITRI passed his life in doing good. In that lay all his happiness. In the whole of Salonika there was no man or woman so vile, so incorrigibly steeped in iniquity, as to fail to stir his compassion. All men were his brothers: all men, he sometimes thought, were himself.
He preached in the streets and in the markets, and this is the gospel the young man brought to his hearers.
“All forms of consciousness are God. If the trees are conscious, then they are part of God. If lions are conscious, they also are God. The more alive a man is—the more conscious he is of himself and his environment—the more of God’s spirit does he possess. For God is a vast, infinite, potential Intelligence that is conscious of itself only through us—and, perhaps, through forms of life that are not human, and, maybe, through certain minerals and gases that appear to have some of the attributes of consciousness. Of these last things I do not speak with certainty. But sure it is that each man and woman has within him and her something of the Holy Spirit. God sees through our eyes and hears with our ears. Therefore, we are all God: we are all the same. Between the ‘wicked’ man and the ‘good’ man there is no shadow of difference. If one hates another, he is hating himself.”
His pleasant, eager smile, his vehement eyes, and his tall, athletic frame made many women desire him, but he went to bed with none, for all the grosser appetites of his body seemed to have been sublimated into an ecstatic spiritual passion that spent itself in a thousand deeds of compassionate love.