Happiness is not something that can be secured by wealth or by health. It is something that exists in the human heart as a gift from God and man has only to reach out and take it and know when he has it. It was a quietistic philosophy but it cut sharply across the social and political views of the time and the more Skovoroda tried to fit himself into the world, the more he became technically less dangerous to the established order, the more bitter and unflinching was his indirect criticism of it. Perhaps Skovoroda was greatly influenced by the western Protestant teachings that he met on his travels. Perhaps he was in contact with the Masonry of the day, for it was the Masonic lodges that first printed many of his works. Perhaps he drew upon certain intangible strains of human motivation that had inspired the early Kozaks to seek for liberty in the wilderness and which led him as a scholar to try to attain the same kind of intellectual freedom that they had sought by force of arms and by emigration from their homes. His thought was deeply affected by the classical authors whom he had read and still more by the Bible. Yet from childhood, while he knew the Bible thoroughly, he refused to accept it literally and he sought from it an inner meaning which alone could satisfy him. He practically rejected both theology and the Church in their conventional forms and yet he was profoundly religious and highly ethical in his outlook on life. There was a certain pantheism in his teachings. “The greatest truth has no specific name. To the ancients God was the Supreme Reason. He had among them different names as Nature, the Essence of Words, Eternity, the Hour, Necessity, Fate. And among Christians His most common names are Spirit, Lord, Tsar, Father, Reason, Truth.” Elsewhere He is also Nature and Love. Skovoroda saw in the universe the macrocosm which revealed God’s greatness and power. God was likewise in the microcosm, in the nature of the individual man, in his heart and in his innermost being. It is for this reason that happiness is to be found inside a man and not outside among acts, rewards, or possessions. He lived according to his theories and so the people grasped his message without reading his philosophical dialogues. Their very titles are suggestive. There is _Narcissus or a discussion about self-knowledge_, _The book Ashkan on the knowledge of one’s self_, _A friendly Conversation on spiritual peace_, etc. They were constructed in the form usually of a Platonic dialogue but they expressed in written and permanent form the ideas that he was expounding in his constant talking and traveling.