losophers, and
which is exactly typified by the operation of alchemy, the conversion of
the base metals to gold, is now well understood to refer to the
analogous spiritual conversion. There is also good reason to believe
that the material process was a real one.

** "A person may have won his immortal life, and remained the same inner
self he was on earth, through eternity; but this does not imply
necessarily that he must either remain the Mr. Smith or Brown he was on
earth, or lose his individuality."--Isis Unveiled, vol. 1. p. 316.
----------

The will from which we should naturally act--our own will--is of course
to be understood not as mere volition, but as our nature--our "ruling
love," which makes such and such things agreeable to us, and others the
reverse. As "under the law," this nature is kept in suspension, and
because it is suspended only as to its activity and manifestation, and
by no means abrogated, is the law--the substitution of a foreign will--
necessary for us. Our own will or nature is still central; that which
we obey by effort and resistance to ourselves is more circumferential or
hypostatic. Constancy in this obedience and resistance tends to draw
the circumferential will more and more to the centre, till there ensues
that "explosion," as St. Martin called it, by which our natural will is
for ever dispersed and annihilated by contact with the divine, and the
latter henceforth becomes our very own. Thus has "the schoolmaster"
brought us unto "Christ," and if by "Christ" we understand no
historically divine individual, but the logos, word, or manifestation of
God in us--then we have, I believe, the essential truth that was taught
in the Vedanta, by Kapila, by Buddha, by Confucius, by Plato, and by
Jesus. There is another presentation of possibly the same truth, for a
reference to which I am indebted to our brother J.W. Farquhar. It is
from Swedenborg, in the "Apocalypse Explained," No. 57:--"Every man has
an inferior or exterior mind, and a mind superior or interior. These
two minds are altogether distinct. By the inferior mind man is in the
natural world together with men there; but by the superior mind he is
in the spiritual world with the angels there. These two minds are so
distinct that man so long as he lives in the world does not know what is
performing within himself in his superior mind; but when he becomes a
spirit, which is immediately after death, he does not know what is
p