In the course of his Sermon on the Mount, Christ Jesus said, "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" And Shakespeare, that great commentator on human nature, gave the following as part of Polonius' farewell to his son:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Both quotations are arresting: the one a warning; the other a promise. What, exactly, do they mean? Surely, this: if what you are believing and accepting to be true is false and can be proved so, then the prospect for you is confused and constrained, and is likely to become increasingly so; but if, on the other hand, you are cognizant of and are true to your real self, the consciousness which reflects God, the prospect must become brighter and brighter, and falsity, fear, and mere folly will, of necessity, pass forever from your experience. Thus it is correct to say that what we humanly are at the moment, and what we are likely to become as individuals and as nations in the future, depends upon the light that is within us, our true selfhood.
