vidual of a creative
power of thought which, in relation to himself, reflects the same power
existing in the Universal Mind, our right employment of this power becomes
a matter of extreme moment to ourselves. Its inverted use necessarily holds
us fast in the bondage from which we are seeking to escape, and equally
necessarily its right use brings us into Liberty; and therefore if any
Divine revelation exists at all its purpose must be to lead us away from
the inverted use of our creative faculty and into such a higher
specializing of it as will produce the desired result. Now the purpose of
the Bible is to do this, and it seeks to effect this work by a dual
operation. It places before us that Divine Ideal of which I have already
spoken, and at the same time bases this ideal upon the recognition of a
Divine Sacrifice. These two conceptions are so intimately interwoven in
Scripture that they cannot be separated, but at the present day there _is_
a growing tendency to attempt to make this separation and to discard the
conception of a Divine Sacrifice as unphilosophical, that is as having no
nexus of cause and effect. What I want, therefore, to point out in these
additional pages is that there is such a nexus, and that so far from being
without a sequence of cause and effect it has its root in the innermost
principles of our own being. It is not contrary to Law but proceeds from
the very nature of the Law itself.

The current objection to the Bible teaching on this subject is that no such
sacrifice could have been required by God, either because the Originating
Energy can have no consciousness of Personality and is only a blind force,
or because, if "God is Love," He could not demand such a sacrifice. On the
former hypothesis we are of course away from the Bible teaching altogether
and have nothing to do with it; but, as I have said elsewhere, the fact of
our own consciousness of personality can only be accounted for by the
existence, however hidden, of a corresponding quality in the Originating
Spirit. Therefore I will confine my remarks to the question how Love, as
the originating impulse of all creation, can demand such a sacrifice. And
to my mind the answer is that God does not demand it. It is Man who demands
it. It is the instinctive craving of the human soul for _certainty_ that
requires a demonstration so convincing as to leave no room for doubt of our
perfectly happy relation to the Supreme Spirit, and consequently t