Question: "There seems to be lots of ways in which men have expressed God," said the lad, "all different, but none very satisfactory."
Answer: "That is true, answered the guide without a moment's pause. "What you have to remember is that men are subject to growth, that they are always enlarging the horizon of their minds. Boundaries are constantly being removed. All the advances of knowledge bring a greater understanding of the universe and that which it contains.

"In the early times, when men knew little about their surroundings, when they had no understanding of the natural phenomena of life and thought them all due to the activities of gods, they could think of these gods only in terms of magnified human beings. And so you had the original idea of sacrifice. They thought that when the thunder rolled and the lightning flashed that the gods were angry and that the way to subdue that wrath was to make offerings to them.

Gradually these crude conceptions gave way to larger ideas, and man, as he struggled, groping towards the light, emerging from the darkness of ignorance through the mists of superstition towards the dawn of knowledge, realised that the cause, the great cause, was something far beyond his imaginaton. But ancient ideas die hard, and this picture of a magnified man, a person who created the universe, has persisted for centuries.

Now we come along and say that the divine architect, the supreme ruler of the universe is not a man, not a woman, not a being at all. It is not a person. The universe is ruled by laws, and these laws are infinite in their scope and application. They are the result of divine love and wisdom, perfect, unfailing, never subject to error or to mistake. Spirit is infinite, without beginning, without end; spirit cannot be compressed into matter; matter is but a poor reflection of spirit. People who live in a material world, compelled to think of everything that happens in terms of the five senses -- sight, touch, smell, feeling and hearing -- cannot possible comprehend the essence of all life which is beyond these five senses.

You cannot in any way, whilst you are subject to this limitation, understand that which is beyond limitation. So it comes to this: we say there is a universe ruled by natural laws, that the intelligence behind the laws is perfect, but that man cannot comprehend that perfection because he is imperfect. Man, being personal, cannot understand the impersonal. I hope this helps you because it is not an easy subject.

Each one of you, all the human beings, not only on your planet but on millions of other planets, helps to constitute what I call the Great Spirit, others call God, for the Great Spirit is the sum total of all spirit that is in the universe. That is not hard to understand?"

Question:"Don't you think," said Ruth, "that as man progresses he gets more complicated ideas of God, and the more complicated his mind gets, the further he grows away from the truth?"

Answer:"Not if he is really progressing," said the guide. "What does happen is that sometimes there is a development of the brain, but not a development of the mind or the spirit, and then you have people who are intellectual, but it does not follow that because they are intellectual they are great souls or that they have great minds.

It is progress that is limited striclty to the physical thing, the brain, and sometimes it is true that amongst those people there are those who reject anything but the complicated. But where there is true progress, the progress of the mind and the soul, then that progress brings a greater awareness of spiritual realities, for it is a mental and spiritual development. In those cases you get a discarding of the former erroneous conceptions and a closer approximtion to the truth.

You must always remember that it is impossible for the whole of the Great Spirit, which is infinite, to be explained in language which is finite and therefore limited. You cannot put the larger into the smaller; that must be clear."