of the
Temple of Delphi is not to be found in the Bible. The Bible maxim is not
"Know thyself" but "Know the Lord." The great subject of Knowledge is not
ourself but "the Lord"; and herein is the great difference between the two
teachings. The one is limited by human personality, the other is based on
the Infinitude of the Divine Personality; and because of this it includes
human personality with all its powers over the Soul of Nature. It is a case
of the greater including the less; and so the whole teaching of Scripture
is directed to bringing us into the recognition of that Divine Personality
which is the Great Original in whose image and likeness we are made. In
proportion as we grow into the recognition of _this_ our own personality
will explain, and the creative power of our thought will cease to work
invertedly until at last it will work only on the same principles of Life,
Love and Liberty as the Divine Mind, and so all evil will disappear from
our world. We shall not, as some systems teach, be absorbed into Deity to
the extinction of our individual consciousness, but on the contrary our
individual consciousness will continually expand, which is what St. Paul
means when he speaks of our "increasing with the increase of God"--the
continual expanding of the Divine element within us. But this can only take
place by our recognition of ourselves as _receivers_ of this Divine
element. It is receiving into ourselves of the Divine Personality, a result
not to be reached through human reasoning. We reason from premises which we
have assumed, and the conclusion is already involved in the premises and
can never extend beyond them. But we can only select our premises from
among things that we know by experience, whether mental or physical, and
accordingly our reasoning is always merely a new placing of the old things.
But the receiving of the Divine Personality into ourselves is an entirely
New Thing, and so cannot be reached by reasoning from old things. Hence if
this Divine ultimate of the Creative Process is to be attained it must be
by the Revelation of a New Thing which will afford a new starting-point for
our thought, and this New Starting-point is given in the Promise of "the
Seed of the Woman" with which the Bible opens. Thenceforward this Promise
became the central germinating thought of those who based themselves upon
it, thus constituting them a special race, until at last when the necessary
conditions had matured th