“The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.”

I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and formalism which still exists nineteen centuries after the Redeemer's proclamation, “it is the letter which killeth”—after his protest against a dead symbolism. The new religion is so profound that it is not understood even now, and would seem a blasphemy to the greater number of Christians. The person of Christ is the center of it. Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell—all these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened, that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the church which is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine, there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters into him, or as Angelus*, I think, said, “the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.”

* [Footnote: Angelus Silesius, otherwise Johannes Soheffler, the German seventeenth century hymn−writer, whose tender and mystical verses have been popularized in England by Miss Winkworth's translations in the Lyra Germanica.]

Amiel's Journal

translation: Mrs Humphrey Ward