30. It is because the very essence of the Divine is love and wisdom that we have two abilities of life. From the one we get our discernment, and from the other volition. Our discernment is supplied entirely by an inflow of wisdom from God, while our volition is supplied entirely by an inflow of love from God. Our failures to be appropriately wise and appropriately loving do not take these abilities away from us. They only close them off; and as long as they do, while we may call our discernment "discernment" and our volition "volition," essentially they are not. So if these abilities really were taken away from us, everything human about us would be destroyed--our thinking and the speech that results from thought, and our purposing and the actions that result from purpose.

We can see from this that the divine nature within us dwells in these two abilities, in our ability to be wise and our ability to love. That is, it dwells in the fact that we are capable of being wise and loving. I have discovered from an abundance of experience that we have the ability to love even though we are not wise and do not love as we could. You will find this experience described in abundance elsewhere.

23. There is one human God from whom springs all else. All powers of human reason join together and center, so to speak, on the existence of one God, the creator of the universe. Consequently any person possessed of reason, owing to the common sense of his intellect, does not and cannot think otherwise. Tell anyone possessed of sound reason that there are two creators of the universe, and you will encounter an antipathy to you because of it, even perhaps from just the sound of the words in his ear. It is apparent from this that all powers of human reason join together and center on the existence of one God.

For this there are two reasons. The first is that the very ability to think rationally regarded in itself is not a person's own, but is God's gift in him. On it depends human reason in general, and that dependence in general causes it to see, as though of itself, the existence of one God.

The second reason is that through that faculty a person either is in the light of heaven or draws the general tendency of his thought from it, and the universal precept of the light of heaven is the existence of one God.

A different circumstance occurs if a person has used that faculty to corrupt the lower constituents of his intellect. He possesses that faculty indeed, but by a twisting of its lower elements he turns it in another direction so that his reason becomes unsound.