“Here you should know that your contemporary favorites very often use a notion taken by them from somewhere, I do not know whether instinctively, emotionally, or automatically, and expressed by them in the following words: ‘We are the images of God’. BTG XXXIX

“This same expression of theirs — ‘We are the images of God’ — can here serve us as a very good additional illustration in explanation of how far what is called ‘perceptible logic’, or, as it is sometimes still said, ‘Aimnophnian mentation’, is already distorted in them. BTG XXXIX

“Although this expression corresponding to the truth exists there among them, yet concerning the consideration of its exact sense, as in general concerning every short verbal formulation, they at best always express with their strange shortsighted mentation — even if they should wish with their whole common presence actively and sincerely to reveal their inner representation and essential understanding of this expression of theirs—something as follows: “‘Good . . . if we are “images of God” . . . that means . . . means . . . “God” is like us and has an appearance also like us . . . and that means, our “God” has the same moustache, beard, nose, as we have, and he dresses also as we do. He dresses as we do, doubtless because like us he is also very fond of modesty; it was not for nothing that he expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise, only because they lost their modesty and began to cover themselves with clothes’. BTG XXXIX

“But the principal evil lies in this, that at the present time there, all the ‘Oskianotznel’ of the rising generation, or the education of the children, is rendered and reduced only to the adoption of these innumerable customs which exist among them and engender only immorality. Hence it is that year by year the data crystallized in them by tens of centuries for the Being ‘of an image of God’, and not simply, as they themselves would say, ‘of an animal’, are on the one hand decrystallized, and on the other hand their psyche is already becoming almost such as our dear Teacher defines by the words: “‘There is everything in him except himself’. BTG XLII

I append just this particular lecture, in the first place, because, at the very beginning of the dissemination of the ideas I imported into life, it was specially prepared here on the continent of Europe to serve as the introduction or, as it were, threshold for the whole series of subsequent lectures, by no less than the whole sum of which was it possible both to make clear in a form accessible to everybody the necessity and even the inevitability of a practical actualization of the immutable truths I have elucidated and established in the course of half a century of day-and-night active work and also to prove the actual possibility of employing those truths for the welfare of people; and secondly I append it here, because, while it was last being publicly read, and I happened myself to be present at that numerous gathering, I made an addition which fully corresponds to the hidden thought introduced by Mr. Beelzebub himself into his, so to say, “concluding chord”, and which at the same time, illuminating once more this most great objective truth, will in my opinion make it possible for the reader properly to perceive and assimilate this truth as befits a being who claims to be an “image of God”. BTG XLVIII