The Household of God
Volume 1
The early history of mankind
- Chapter 43 -
ENOCH EXPLAINS THE SPEECHES OF ADAM AND KENAN (12th November 1840)
And behold; when Kenan had completed his dream-speech in a most fluent and pleasant form, they all looked at him and bowed to him, for they were amazed and did not know what to make of it.
2
Finally, father Seth overcame his amazement and, gratefully raising his eyes to heaven, began to speak to the children present, as follows: "O Kenan, O children, what is this? What does it mean and what shall become of it?
3
"As yet our senses have hardly grasped the mystical speech of our first patriarch Adam and our hearts, so weak in love, have not been able to clearly interpret any of it. Even Enoch's last fiery speech is still floating before my senses like a dark tangle and now you, dear Kenan, come with a super world of uncanniness the meaning of which God alone can understand. I am even inclined to maintain that a man could hardly survive if the eternal, holy Father gave him so much wisdom that he could comprehend the incomprehensible, most profound meaning of such mystical, exalted things.
4
"O Kenan, Kenan, why did you have to see such a vision and tell us poor, weak fathers and children of it thereby confounding all our senses. You have made us poorer than we were before we were worried by such speeches revealing the ways and decrees of Jehovah's eternal holiness whose meaning cannot be clear to any angel while he is just an angel and will never be like Him Who is our beloved, holy Father, inscrutable in everyone of His holy words.
5
"O children, forget that you have heard such things from the mouth of dear Kenan and admit together with me in the deep contrition and humility of our hearts so weak in love that all of us are incapable of anything. Besides, none of you should ever desire to comprehend such things, but we will leave these incomprehensible things always to God Who will know what He intends with them. He has surely given this to us only as a stumbling block to show us poor weak men first of all how powerful He is even in a mote and then that we may realize in our humility that we ourselves are nothing, but that He, our beloved, holy Father, is at all times All in all.
6
"O children, do heed the words of your father Seth and guard yourselves against any temptation! Amen."
7
And when Seth had ended his well-considered speech, Enoch, the exceedingly pious, stepped forward, bowed to the father and asked permission to say a few words on this subject because he had just received an inner summons to do so.
8
Seth looked at him and said "Oh do speak, you fair, pious son of eternal spring. Even your fiery speeches are only a cooling morning-dew compared to such unheardof blazes of the sun from the mouth of Kenan. It will be good for all of us if you could smother them a bit; so do speak, - actually you should already have done so. Amen."
9
They all assented to the wish of Seth and Enoch began to speak, as follows: "O beloved fathers and all you children of God, do listen well to the words from my mouth.
10
"If you wish to and can, raise your eyes and look up to the boundless heights of the heavens of God, our most holy and best Father, and then again look down into the quite as boundless depths of the same one mighty God Whose reign is forever without end. Ponder on how much there may lie hidden in the heights as well as in the depths of which no human mind could ever have dreamt.
11
"Kenan alone was so fortunate, as far as is known to me now, to see in his spirit a tiny mote partially dissected. And our first patriarch Adam has also shown us a somewhat pulverized mote - not to mention my so-called fiery speech - and that already amazes us so greatly and incomprehensibly. But how is it possible that we are able to see worlds and suns pass before our weak eyes and still remain alive? Who has ever seen the wonders in a blade of grass, which bends under our tread? What greatness and sublimity of God lays in it; yet we tread upon it with our unworthy feet and still live.
12
"Is it not with us spiritually similar to when children are looking at a harder piece of bread they have been given when they still expect a soft milk-pap? Should they then never be given bread because they are used to soft fare? But how will they gain a man's strength with this?
13
"Look, the same applies to us now. While we were babes the Father gave us milk and a suitable soft fare. But now we are to become men in the spirit. Look, there the soft fare is no longer suitable and the Father is giving us now bread that we may become men strong in His grace, and we are no longer meant to just look at things, but we must comprehend them and recognize His great love and wisdom and out of both His most holy will.
14
"If our first father Adam told us of the preliminary ways of his spirit that once lost its way, in and through which also our spirit became lost and confounded, there is truly nothing so incomprehensible in it. For the spirit had to be in existence prior to the body, just as God was there before any creature, which only came forth from Him since He is the First Cause of all things. For whom did this frail structure of clay have to be created if it had not been for the necessarily already long existent spirit for which, for the sake of its freedom test, God, our holy Father, prepared this habitation.
15
"Actually no hen has ever laid an empty egg. Besides we know only too well that the contents of the egg must be there before the white, hard and well-closed shell. Or could anyone with wisdom assume that the spirit comes into existence and develops only in the body? One who could think thus would be a thousand times more stupid than a person who built a hut for someone who does not yet exist being of the crazy opinion that once the hut is ready it would create a resident out of itself.
16
"Why is procreation before coming into existence, why the man before the woman? How do we hear the wind blowing from a distance while our trees are still standing motionless? Once the wind has come upon our trees, all the little branches are moving. Did not the wind have to be there first in order to come to us and stir our trees to such activity? The trees have surely not created the wind, but the wind has freely come upon them and made them alive.
17
"Or could someone maintain that some fruit was created because of the tree or that the tree would have to have been there first so that it might create a fruit out of itself? How is it that you say God had planted all kinds of seeds in the earth out of which then a variety of grasses, plants, bushes and trees had come forth producing the fruits of the seed wherein the living seed is found again, reborn!
18
"If God is showing us, His children, the eternal order in all His countless wondrous works, namely, that life or the force must always precede that which comes into existence only through and, finally, for it, why should it amaze us if Adam, thanks to higher enlightenment, told us the story of his spirit, thereby showing that and how we, too, are, and were, involved and thus will be all our descendants more or less to the end of time. And that he also showed us how holy and great and yet so loving and full of grace and mercy God, our almighty Father, is and how boundlessly forbearing and indulgent.
19
"And since we have experienced this, how could we be afraid, knowing how endlessly good He is Who has given us this experience. Yes, we shall and must fear God, but not because He gives us bread. We shall only fear not to love Him, for he who has for a moment failed in his love for God was dead as long as he was outside the love for God. Therefore, our most urgent striving must be to love God constantly since He has, according to our arch-patriarch Adam, loved us mightily before we were, and what we now are as His children we have become only through His boundless love. And so all our efforts must be directed at the constant strengthening of our love for God.
20
"Behold the countless creatures around us! Although they, too, are and come into existence out of this almighty love, they cannot and may not return this love, as they are not ready and capable of it, just as we withhold the love for each other from our young ones until they are mature for it.
21
"However, all of us have matured towards love and, therefore, let it be our main concern to love Him constantly Who has made us so completely mature for love!
22
"How does a husband say to his wife that she shall love him in all her actions because he loves her in all his entrails? May a virtuous youth say that to an immature maiden? You say: 'By the holiness of God, no; not until the tree has been blessed! Woe betide him who should violate her, for first there must be the maturity, then the blessing and only after that the love!'
23
"O fathers, you are quite right according to the will of God to say this. But answer yourselves the question whether the sin might not be greater if the mature and blessed did as the children do and avoided each other than if immature children slept together.
24
"Through Kenan God showed us our full maturity for a free love for Him. Why then does this amaze us, as if we were immature children, when we should rather wonder why we are all so lukewarm and variable like waves in our love whereby the grace within us is scattered like the sun on the restless surface of the water?
25
"I say: Kenan's dream tells us nothing else but that we must love God, our holy Father, more and more with all our strength and in this love regret every loveless moment which has deadened us during all the time we have been without love; for living and loving is one and the same. He who has life is living in the joyousness of his existence of which he is well aware and is, thus, a friend of life. But someone who has lost the joy about his own life would lose also his life as soon as he lost the inclination to live and would become a suicide, as Cain became a fratricide, and would die twice, first out of the love of God and then out of his own love.
26
"Behold, our life or our love is in God and God alone is our love and life. If we became weak and indifferent in our love for God, our life also would gradually weaken with the result that in this dumbness of life we would see the things in and around us as if we were blind and deaf. And we would not comprehend anything that happened in and around us but think, when the holy Father came to us, who are so lazy and indolent in our love, to awaken us with His grace, that it did not befit us to become awake in love. O dear fathers, far be this from us, for our God is an earnest God and super holy as our most loving Father and does not enjoy teasing and temptations, for why should He Who has counted all our hairs long before they grew on our heads tempt us? As if He did not know what we would do. - Oh, this He does not need!
27
"But we are all the more in need of His grace. His grace is not to tease or tempt us, but it is the pure blessed gift of the holy Father Who wants to more and more strengthen our weakened life in His love. O fathers, do look at the visions of Kenan with the proper love for God, our most holy Father, and you will easily understand that God has thereby only demonstrated to us the dead weakness of our love for Him. Therefore, let us become once more strong in the love in and for Him, then everything will become clear to us, which so far has remained obscure! Amen."