faith alone. Your views on faith and on everything spiritual that relates to
the church and religion cause you to see people as logs. You see them as
some inanimate sculpture and not as people created in the image of God
who have been given, and are continually given, the ability to understand
and will, to believe and love, and to speak and act completely as if they
were on their own, especially in relation to spiritual things, because these
are the things that make human beings human.
“‘If people had no ability to think or act in spiritual ways as if they
were acting on their own, what would be the point of the Word? What
would be the point of the church and religion? What would be the point
of worship? You know that doing good to your neighbor from love is
goodwill, but you don’t know what goodwill is. Yet goodwill is the soul
and the essence of faith. And since goodwill is the soul and the essence of
faith, what is faith when you remove goodwill? It is a dead thing. And a
dead faith is nothing but a phantom. I call it a phantom because James
says that faith without good works is not only dead but also diabolical’
[James 2 : 14 – 26 ; 3 : 13 – 15 ].
[ 7 ] “When he heard his faith called dead, diabolical, and phantasmic,
one of the governors became so enraged that he tore the miter off his
head, threw it on the table, and said, ‘I will not put this back on until I
have taken revenge on the enemies of the faith of our church.’ Then
shaking his head he muttered, ‘That James! That James!’
“On the front of the miter there was a thin metal plate with an
inscription: Faith Alone Makes Us Just.
“Then suddenly a monster with seven heads appeared, rising out of the
ground. It had the feet of a bear, the body of a leopard, and the face of a
lion, just like the beast described in Revelation 13 : 1 , 2. We read that people
made an image of that beast and worshiped it (Revelation 13 : 14 , 15 ).
“The ghostly monster snatched the miter from the table, stretched
the brim, and put the miter on its seven heads. Then the ground yawned
open under its feet and it sank back down.
“When he saw this, the governor shouted, ‘We’re being attacked!
We’re being attacked!’
“Then we left. To our surprise, steps appeared before our eyes. We
climbed them. They took us back to the earth, where we had been
before, with its view of heaven.”
The spirit who had come up with a hundred others from the lower
earth told me all this.390 The sixth memorable occurrence.In the northern region of the spiri-
tual world I heard something like a roaring sound of water, so I went in