Divine
Wisdom, so as to provide the necessary conditions for the greatest event in
the world's history; for if Christ was to appear it must be in _some_
nation, in _some_ place, and at _some_ time: but to trace the steps by
which, through an intelligible sequence of causes, these necessary
conditions were provided belongs rather to an investigation of Bible
history than to our present purpose, so I will not enter into these details
here. But what I hope I have in some measure made clear is that there is a
reason why Christ should be manifested, and should suffer, and rise again,
and that so far from being a baseless superstition the Reconciling of the
world to God through the One Offering once-for-all offered for the sin of
the whole world, lays the immovable foundation upon which we may build
securely for all the illimitable future.

CHAPTER XI

OURSELVES IN THE DIVINE OFFERING

If we have grasped the principle I have endeavored to state in the last
chapter we shall find that with this new standpoint a new life and a new
world begin to open out to us. This is because we are now living from a new
recognition of ourselves and of God. Eternal Truth, that which is the
essential reality of Being, is _always_ the same; it has never altered, for
whatever is capable of passing away and giving place to something else is
not eternal, and therefore the real essence of our being, as proceeding
from God and subsisting in Him has always been the same. But this is the
very fact which we have hitherto lost sight of; and since our perception of
life is the measure of our individual consciousness of it, we have imposed
upon ourselves a world of limitation, a world filled with the power of the
negative, because we have viewed things from that standpoint. What takes
place, therefore, when we realize the truth of our Redemption is not a
change in our essential relation to the Parent Spirit, the Eternal Father,
but an awakening to the perception of this eternal and absolutely perfect
relation. We see that in reality it has never been otherwise for the simple
reason that in the very nature of Being it _could_ not be otherwise; and
when we see this we see also that what has hitherto been wrong has not been
the working of "the Father" but our conception of the existence of some
other power, a power of negation, limitation, and destructiveness, the very
opposite to all that the Creative Spirit, by the very fact of Its
Creativeness,