The Foundation

Preface.

nations: And conduct these Referring to religious rituals or "Gottes-Dienste" mentioned on the previous page. in a material or elemental manner original: "elementischer Weise"; referring to worship focused on physical elements and outward forms rather than spiritual substance. for their divine services, even though they do not have the slightest vision or feeling of the Spirit of the Lord, which works within the God-fearing soul for the renewal of life. They wish to comfort their inner soul with intellectual imagination original: "vernünfftigen Einbildung"; here meaning a mental construct or "make-believe" created by human reason rather than a direct experience of God. (outside of the holy essence of God). To an enlightened person, it is a lamentable blindness that the noble human essence has surrendered itself to such darkness through the impulses of the flesh! It is so alienated from the essential light of God that it (I say again) neither knows nor feels in the soul that there is a heavenly, essential God who created heaven and earth, soul and body, and who still rules—or at least ought to rule.

3. Therefore, the essential Spirit of Christ now exhorts humanity to wake up from the earthly darkness, in which no light for the life of God can be found. It calls them to perceive the heavenly light within their human essence (so as to live within it) in the spirit of the unified life original: "Einweisigen Lebens"; a mystical term for the "one-fold" or simple, undivided life in God., and to do so according to the working and teaching of God, as is testified hereafter from the life of God.

4. For the time is now fulfilled when God wishes to reveal His holy, heavenly essence, through the life of Christ, as a judgment and a reckoning over the human essence. He does this to fulfill His prophecies in the essential life, according to the perfect, true essence of God—and this through His spiritual working in the soul. In the same way that He, through