ation the physical body thus improves. The evolution of life and
form keep pace. Ultimately perfection of form, as well as perfection of
intellect and morality, will be reached and human evolution will be
finished.

The purpose of evolution, then, is clear. Man is a god in the
making--not actually, but only potentially a god, a being to whom all
wisdom, perfect compassion and unlimited power are possible; and by the
process of evolution he changes the latent into the active. He is at
first only an individualized center of consciousness within the
All-Consciousness, a mere fragment of the divine life. His relationship
to God is something like that of a seed to its plant, a product of it
that has latent within it all the characteristics of the plant and the
power to become a plant. It is not a plant and neither is man a god; but
when it has sent out a sprout and taken root in the soil it is a plant
in the making; and when the human being has begun to evolve his latent
spiritual qualities he is a god in the making. The theosophical view is
that man is essentially divine.

Critics sometimes ask why, if man is originally divine, it is necessary
for him to pass through any evolutionary process. Divinity here
indicates merely the essential nature of the human being, not his
possession of either knowledge or power or any degree of spiritual
perfection. It is as though we should say that the infant son of a great
king is royal. The word "royal," like the word "divine," indicates a
relationship. The baby royalist is not a king. But he is a king in the
making. He has much to learn. He must be educated in statecraft and he
must evolve diplomacy. After much experience and development he will, in
time, be capable of ruling an empire. At present this helpless infant
bears little resemblance to a king. Nevertheless, on the day of his
birth he was as much royal as he will ever be. In the same sense the
divinity of man represents potential possibilities rather than an
obvious fact of the moment. Man is an embryo god and, in time, he shall
evolve faculties and powers that his present limited consciousness can
not even comprehend. He is not an ephemeral creature of physical origin
that lives a brief span to catch a glimpse of immortality and perish,
but the deathless son of the living God, and by right divine he walks
the upward way of eternal life.

Some people appear to accept evolution as a matter of course, in a
general way, but the