t losing its name and distinctive qualities.
Individuality, like personal identity, belongs properly to
intelligences. Consciousness reveals it to us that no being can be put
in our place nor confounded with us, nor we with others. I am one and
indivisible. You can not amputate any of the faculties of the mind. It
is a mind which no one dissects or divides. We are assured that we are
the offspring of God. Paul says this truth had been promulgated by one
of the Athenian poets, and it was so correct that Heaven's seal was
placed upon it. Being the offspring of God we are essentially like our
Great Father Spirit, for it is one of the laws of God that the child or
descendant shall always be like its progenitor; not like him in body,
for God is a spirit. A spirit hath not flesh and bone. We are therefore
like Him in spirit. Being the offspring of the divine intelligence
declares the nature of that intelligence, just as the stream declares
the nature of the water in the fountain which feeds it. As the fountain
is the antecedent of the stream, so God is the antecedent of life and
intelligence, from whom all spirits came, and to whom all spirits must
return.

Our studies in respect of mind are wonderfully simplified when we
recollect that in ourselves we see all other men, spirit or mind being
in its essence and attributes essentially the same; but the fountain is
always greater than the stream, so God is more wise and powerful than
any of his offspring. But as each perfect sunbeam, however small or
weak, has all the essential properties of light, and each grain of pure
silver all the properties of that metal, so mind, as the living
offspring of the divine mind, is in the "likeness and image of God."
This branch of study becomes remarkably simple when we reflect that in
ourselves we see all men and women, angels and demons, and even God
himself. The whole universe of mind is reflected in that inner-man
mirror which we call _ourself_. We have guarded this subject by the
language, _the essential attributes of mind_. By this qualifier we wish
it understood that mind, like body, has its accidental or acquired
qualities. Vice, virtue, folly, wisdom, malignity and benevolence are
not essential to mind, but like the accidents of matter known as
roughness or smoothness, softness, hardness, blackness, etc., are merely
qualities or attributes of its conduct. Vice is vicious action and
virtue is virtuous action. But action arises from wil