you created them
yourself, and borrowed the material from the sense-world. So long as
you look at outer things in your quality of simply a reasonable being,
you must deny the existence of God; for God is hidden from the senses,
and from that reason of yours which explains sense-perceptions.

God lies hidden spellbound in the world, and you need His own power to
find Him. You must awaken that power in yourself. These are the
teachings which were given to the candidate for initiation.

And now there began for him the great cosmic drama with which his life
was bound up. The action of the drama meant nothing less than the
deliverance of the spellbound god. Where is God? This was the question
asked by the soul of the Mystic. God is not existent, but nature
exists. And in nature He must be found. There He has found an
enchanted grave. It was in a higher sense that the Mystic understood
the words "God is love." For God has exalted that love to its climax,
He has sacrificed Himself in infinite love, He has poured Himself out,
fallen into number in the manifold of nature. Things in nature live
and He does not live. He slumbers within them. We are able to awaken
Him; if we are to give Him existence, we must deliver Him by the
creative power within us.

The candidate now looks unto himself. As latent creative power as yet
without existence, the Divine is living in his soul. In the soul is a
sacred place where the spellbound god may wake to liberty. The soul is
the mother who is able to conceive the god by nature. If the soul
allows herself to be impregnated by nature, she will give birth to the
divine. God is born from the marriage of the soul with nature,--no
longer a "hidden," but a manifest god. He has life, a perceptible
life, wandering amongst men. He is the god freed from enchantment, the
offspring of the God who was hidden by a spell. He is not the great
God, who was and is and is to come, but yet he may be taken, in a
certain sense, as the revelation of Him. The Father remains at rest in
the unseen; the Son is born to man out of his own soul. Mystical
knowledge is thus an actual event in the cosmic process. It is the
birth of the Divine. It is an event as real as any natural event, only
enacted upon a higher plane.

The great secret of the Mystic is that he himself creates his god, but
that he first prepares himself to recognise the god created by him.
The uninitiated man has no feeling for the father of that god, for