remarkable charity and
patience amongst persons who are yet not conscious of any direct
contact with God? They have never known the pains of repentance,
neither have they known the sublime joys of God. Are these the
ninety-and-nine just persons needing no repentance? Instinctively,
and almost unconsciously, they hold to, and draw upon, the
Universal Christ--or Spirit of Righteousness; but they have not laid
hold of nor taken into themselves that Spirit of the Personal Christ,
whom Christians receive and know through Jesus. He is the Door
into the unspeakable joys of God. What are these joys of God? They
are varying degrees of the manifestation and experience of
_reciprocal_ Divine Love.

What is the true aim of spiritual endeavour--an attempt at personal
and individual salvation? Yes, to commence with, but beyond that,
and more fully, it is the attempt to comply with the exquisite Will of
God; and the general and universal improving and raising of the
consciousness of the whole world. Yet this universal improvement
must take place in each individual spirit in an individual manner.
There are those who would deny to individuality its rights, claiming
that the highest spirituality is the total cessation of all individuality;
yet this would not appear to be God's view of the matter, for in the
most supreme contacts of the soul with Himself He does not wipe
out the consciousness of the soul's individual joy, but, on the
contrary, to an untenable extent He _increases_ it. And Jesus teaches
us that life here is both the means and the process of the gradual
conformation of the will of Man to the will of God, and our true
"work" is the individual learning of this process. But this cultivation
of our individuality must not be subverted to the purpose of the mere
gain of personal advantage, but because of the heartfelt wish to
conform to the glorious will of God. The failure of the human will to
run in conjunction with the Divine will is the cause, as we know, of
all sin. In the friction of these opposing wills, forces baneful to Man
are generated.

From its very earliest commencement in childhood our system of
education is based upon wrong ideas. With little or no regard to
God's plans Man lays out his own puny laws and ambitions and
teaches them to his young. We are not taught that what we are here
for is above all and before all to arrive at a sense of personal
connection with God, to identify ourselves with the spiritual w