(2) Therefore I must heedfully fulfil my vow; if I labour not this very day, down, down I fall. Numberless are the Enlightened who have passed by in search of all living beings; and through my own fault I have not come into their healing hands. If this day also I shall be as I have been again and again, misery, sickness, death, maiming, dismemberment, and the like will fall to my lot; and when shall I win that most rare boon, the coming of one of the Enlightened, faith, human birth, and fitness to labour in righteousness, a day of health with food and no vexations? Life is a brief instant, and plays us false; the body is like a thing held in precarious tenure. Truly with deeds such as mine have been I shall not again win human birth; and if I win it not, evil awaits me; whence should good come? Since I work not righteousness when I am able, how shall I do it when crazed by the pains of hell? I do no righteous work, and gather sin; the very name of good destiny is lost to me for millions of seons. Therefore the Lord has said that human birth is exceedingly hard to win; hard as for a turtle to pass its neck into the hole of a yoke in the ocean....

(11) All are under the sway of their own works; who am I to undo this? Knowing this, I will strive to do righteousness, so that all may be full of love for one another.

(151) I would willingly take ease and rest in my meekness, if I were not put upon this work; but that God who has made the world is too strong for me, I am the work of his hands, he may set me and place me where he will.

(14) If that should be taken away or become extinct, then all would be dark and cold; neither would there grow any fruit, and neither man nor beast could propagate and increase, because their heat would be extinguished and their seed would be cold and torpid. Of the Quality of the Sun.

(92) Now if it were not for this severe, and cold sharp contracting, compacting power, there would be no natural or corporeal being, neither could the birth or geniture of God subsist, and all would be unsearchable.

(132) And if the divine love were not yet in the whole nature of this world, and if we poor men and creatures had not in and about us the Champion in the fight, we should all perish in a moment, in the hellish horrible abominations.