Escape is hopeless.
For Love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire. He shall not come
out till he has paid the uttermost farthing.
If the man resists the burning of God, the consuming fire of Love, a
terrible doom awaits him, and its day will come. He shall be cast into
the outer darkness who hates the fire of God. What sick dismay shall
then seize upon him! For let a man think and care ever so little about
God, he does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him,
upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him--making life a good thing
to him. God gives him himself, though he knows it not. But when God
withdraws from a man as far as that can be without the man's ceasing to
be; when the man feels himself abandoned, hanging in a ceaseless
vertigo of existence upon the verge of the gulf of his being, without
support, without refuge, without aim, without end--for the soul has no
weapons wherewith to destroy herself--with no inbreathing of joy, with
nothing to make life good;--then will he listen in agony for the
faintest sound of life from the closed door; then, if the moan of
suffering humanity ever reaches the ear of the outcast of darkness, he
will be ready to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know
life once more, to change this terror of sick negation, of unspeakable
death, for that region of painful hope.
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