its effect
upon people, corresponds with the effect of Illumination.

The sense of entering into the very heart of things; of growing plants; the
birds and the little wood animals; the intense sympathy and understanding
of life described by him, sounds like the effect of cosmic consciousness,
as related by nearly all who have attained it.

How the world's activities are resumed after the change, and under what
vastly different incentives people work, form a part of the story, which is
written as fiction, but which contains the seed of a great truth.

This truth is expressed in science, as human achievement, and in religion
as fulfilled prophecy, but the truth is the same.

Both religion and science point to a _time_ when this earth will know
freedom from strife and suffering. Even the elements which have hitherto
been regarded as beyond the boundaries of man's will, may be completely
controlled; not _may be_, but _will be_. Manual labor will cease. National
Eugenic societies will put a stop to war, when they come to the inevitable
conclusion, that no race can by any possibility be improved, while the most
perfect physical species are reserved for armies.

Awakening woman will refuse--indeed they are now refusing--to bear children
to be shot down in warfare, and crushed under the juggernaut of commercial
competition.

Those who realize the signs of the times, look for the birth of cosmic
consciousness as a race-consciousness, foreshadowing the new day; the
"second coming of Christ," not as a personal, vicarious sacrifice, but as a
factor in human attainment.

"For I am persuaded," said St. Paul, "that neither death nor life, nor
angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to
separate us from the love of God."

If we interpret this in the light of cosmic consciousness, we realize that
we shall know, and _experience_ that boundless, deathless, perfect,
satisfying, complete and all-embracing love which is the goal of
immortality; which is an attribute (we may say the _one_ attribute) of
God.

We are not looking for the birth of _a_ Christ-child, but of _the_
Christ-child; we are not looking for a second coming of _a_ man who shall
be as Jesus was, but we are anticipating the coming of _the_ man (homo),
who shall be cosmically conscious, even as was Jesus of Nazareth; as was
Guatama, the Buddha.

That there may be one