This excerpt from a sermon on Genesis 1:26 is included in our free booklet, Poetry and Meditation: The Worshipful Art of John Donne.
If Origen could lodge such a conceit, that in heaven at last all things should ebb back into God, as all things flowed from him at first; and so there should be no other essence but God, all should be God, even the devil himself: how much more may we conceive an unexpressible association (that is too far off) an assimilation (that is not near enough) an identification (the School would venture to say so) with God in that state of glory! Whereas the sun by shining upon the moon, makes the moon a planet, a star as well as itself, which otherwise would be but the thickest, and darkest part of that sphere: so those beams of glory which shall issue from my God, and fall upon me, shall make me (otherwise a clod of earth, and worse, a dark soul, a spirit of darkness) an angel of light, a star of glory, a something that I cannot name now, not imagine now, nor to morrow, nor next year; but even in that particular, I shall be like God: that as he that asked a day to give a definition of God, the next day asked a week, and then a month, and then a year; so undeterminable would my imaginations be, if I should go about to think now, what I shall be there: I shall be so like God, as that the devil himself shall not know me from God, so far as to find any more place to fasten a temptation upon me, then upon God; not to conceive any more hope of my falling from that kingdom, then of God’s being driven out of it; for though I shall not be immortal as God, yet I shall be as immortal God. And there is my image of God; of God considered altogether, and in his unity, in the state of grace.
Image: A bust of John Donne (Source).
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