How Do I Find the Christ?

Please take me literally. Humanity—that is to say, civilised humanity—has a ‘thorn in the flesh’ today. St. Paul has much to say about this ‘thorn.’[^11] He speaks prophetically, as an especially advanced man; the thorn was in him already in his own day. To others it was given in the real sense only later on, in the seventh century. But its effects will become more and more widespread, more and more significant. A man today who surrenders wholly to this thorn, to this sickness—for in the physical body this thorn is an actual sickness—becomes an atheist, one who denies God, who denies the Divine. In every human being belonging to modern civilisation there is, fundamentally speaking, the tendency to atheism; the question is only whether a man lends himself to it. He has within him the sickness which incites him to deny the Divine, whereas if he obeyed the promptings of his true nature he would acknowledge God. His nature was, as it were, mineralised to a certain extent at that time, retarded in its development, with the result that we have within us the sickness which gives rise to the denial of Divinity.