Magick Without Tears

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD? 217 exactly how, or to what end, she did not make clear. An exclamation: "Then there is the Devil!" She went on without a word from me for a long while, tying herself up into fresh knots with every phase . She became irreverent, then downright blasphemous; stopped short and began to laugh at herself. And so forth-but, what struck me as curious and significant, in the main her argument followed quite closely the lines which came naturally to me, at the beginning of this letter! In the end, "curiouser and curiouser," she arrived at a practically identical conclusion: she believed, but what she believed in was Nothing! As to our old criterion of what we imply in practice when we say that we believe, she began by saying that if we "helped" God in His mysterious plan , He would in some fashion or other look after us. But about this she was even more vague than in the matter of intellectual conviction; "helping God" meant behaving decently according to one's own instinctive ideas of what 'decently' means . It is very encouraging that she should have seen, without any prompting on my part, to what a muddle the question necessarily led; and very nice for me, because it lets me out , cara soror! Love is the law, love under will. Yours fraternally, 666 P.S. I thought it a good plan to put my fundamental position all by itself in a postscript; to frame it. My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know; and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such Beings.