The truth of a thing is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man’s imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing; and wherever, in anything that God has made, in the glory of it, be it sky or flower or human face, we see the glory of God, there a true imagination is beholding a truth of God...

What is the truth of water? Is it that it is formed of hydrogen and oxygen? Is oxygen and hydrogen the divine idea of water? Or has God put the two together only that man might separate and find them out? He allows his child to pull his toys to pieces; but he were a child not to be envied for whom his inglorious father would make toys to such an end...

If we understand, if we love the flower, we have that for which the science is there, that which alone can equip us for true search into the means and ways by which the divine idea of the flower was wrought out to be presented to us. The idea of God is the flower; his idea is not the botany of the flower. 

Ask a man of mere science, what is the truth of a flower: he will pull it to pieces, show you its parts, explain how they operate, how they minister each to the life of the flower; he will tell you what changes are wrought in it by scientific cultivation; and many more facts about it. Ask the poet what is the truth of the flower, and he will answer: “Why, the flower itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help saying to him who has ears to hear it...” 

Every fact in nature is a revelation of God, is there such as it is because God is such as he is; and I suspect that all its facts impress us so that we learn God unconsciously...

When we come to see that a law is such because it is the embodiment of a certain eternal thought, a fact of the being of God, the facts of which alone are truths, then indeed it will be to us, not a law merely, but an embodied truth. ..

A thing being so, the word that says it is so is the truth. But the fact may be of no value in itself, and our knowledge of it of no value either. Of most facts it may be said that the truth concerning them is of no consequence...

According to the word of the man, however, truth means more than fact, more than relation of facts of persons, more than loftiest abstraction of metaphysical entity—it means being and life, will and action; for he says, “I am the truth.” I desire to help those whom I may to understand more of what is meant by the truth...

Filled with the soul of their Father, men shall inherit the glory of their Father; filled with themselves, they cast him out and rot. The company of the Lord, soul to soul, is that which saves with life, his life of God-devotion, the souls of his brethren. No other saving can save them...

The Lord, the spirit, is but the deeper soul that willed and wills our souls, which rises up, the infinite Life, into the Self we call I and me, but which lives immediately from him, and is his very own property and nature—unspeakably more his than ours...

I am daring to present a shadow of the Lord’s witnessing, a shadow surely cast by his deeds and his very words! If I mistake, he will forgive me. I fear only lest I should fail of witnessing, and myself be, after all, no king, but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with him to the death, but an arguer about the truth...

The Lord will work until the image of the humanity of God is wrought out and perfected in us, the image we were made at first, but which could never be developed in us except by the indwelling of the perfect likeness...

Our mirroring of Christ, then, is one with the presence of his spirit in us. The idea, you see, is not the reflection, the radiating of the light of Christ on others, though that were an image true enough; but the taking into, and having in us, him working to the changing of us...

Consider the words of 2 Corinthians 3:18. “We need no Moses,” Paul is, in essence, saying, “no earthly mediator, to come between us and the light, and bring out for us a little of the glory. We go into the presence of the Son revealing the Father--into the presence of the Light of men... 

“[The Lord’s] design was not to teach any plan of salvation other than obedience to the Lord of Life. Let us see then what Paul teaches us in this passage about the life which is the light of men…”

Of all writers I know, Paul seems to me the most plainly practical in his writing. What has been called his mysticism is at one time the exercise of a power of seeing, as by spiritual refraction, truths that had not, perhaps have not yet, risen above the human horizon...

If the Lord were to appear, he has been so misrepresented by such as have claimed to present him, and especially in the one eternal fact of facts—the relation between him and his father—that it is impossible for many that they should see any likeness. For my part, I would believe in no God rather than in such a God as is generally offered for believing in...

If the Lord were to appear this day in your land as once in Palestine, he would not come in the halo of the painters, or with that wintry shine of effeminate beauty, of sweet weakness, in which it is their helpless custom to represent him...