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great inexpressible being, whom we with stammering tongue wish to call God? It was a fearful, a terrible event, when before the beginning of time, created spirits in their arrogance rebelled against him, and would be God and ruler and crush and annihilate him. Then he withdrew himself from the rebels through the whole heaven of heavens, through all the stary infinities, through the immensity of space, which thought alone can reach, presentiment alone can fathom, and the audacious ones lonely and abandoned, in their malice, bitter as gall in their wrathful fire, in impotent fury, were transfixed and turned to stone and in their dark interior their last, their expiring consciousness is lost, those are the cliffs, the stony rocks, the deep masses of granite, which reach far into the centre of the earth and still rise up in defiance over clouds and vapour: that is the flesh and bone of the arrogants that the earth is now compelled to bind together as with a cramp iron. Then malice, wrath
