I have called on the Goddess and found her within myself

There is no sorrow like the memory of love and the knowledge that it is gone forever

They have not forgotten the Mysteries,' she said, ‘they have found them too difficult. They want a God who will care for them, who will not demand that they struggle for enlightenment, but who will accept them just as they are, with all their sins, and take away their sins with repentance. It is not so, it will never be so, but perhaps it is the only way the unenlightened can bear to think of their Gods.'

Lancelot smiled bitterly. ‘Perhaps a religion which demands that every man must work though lifetime after lifetime for his own salvation is too much for mankind. They want not to wait for God's justice but to see it now. And that is the lure which this new breed of priests has promised them.'

Morgaine knew that he spoke truth, and bowed her head in anguish. ‘And since their view of a God is what shapes their reality, so it shall be–the Goddess was real while mankind still paid homage to her, and created her form for themselves. Now they will make for themselves the kind of God they think they want–the kind of God they deserve, perhaps.'

Well, so it must be, for as man saw reality, so it became.

A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower.

She cried aloud, with a great mourning cry for all that she had never known in this life, and the agony of a bereavement unguessed till this moment.

Of all things we mortals are called upon to do, the most difficult is forgiveness; in order to truly do it, you will probably have to behave as if you already have forgiven for quite a while before you have actually done so.