s the entire absence of all that makes Life, and whatever
goes to diminish the living quality of Life reproduces, in its degree,
the distinctive quality of this supreme exhibition of the Negative.
Everything that tends to detract from the fulness of life has in it this
deathful quality.

In that completely renovated life, which is figured under the emblem of
the New Jerusalem, we are told that sorrow and sighing shall flee away,
and that the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick. Nothing that obscures
life, or restricts it, can proceed from the same source as the Power
which gives light to them that sit in darkness, and deliverance to them
that are bound. Negation can never be Affirmation; and the error we have
always to guard against is that of attributing positive power to the
Negative. If we once grasp the truth that God is life, and that life in
every mode of expression can never be anything else than Affirmative,
then it must become clear to us that nothing which is of the opposite
tendency can be according to the will of God. For God (the good) to will
any of the "evil" that is in the world would be for Life to act with the
purpose of diminishing itself, which is a contradiction in terms to the
very idea of Life. God is Life, and Life is, by its very nature,
Affirmative. The submission we have hitherto made has been to our own
weakness, ignorance, and fear, and not to the supreme good.

But is no such thing as submission, then, required of us under any
circumstances? Are we always to have our own way in everything?
Assuredly the whole secret of our progress to liberty is involved in
acquiring the habit of submission; but it is submission to superior
Truth, and not to superior force. It sometimes happens that, when we
attain a higher Truth, we find that its reception requires us to
re-arrange the truths which we possessed before: not, indeed, to lay any
of them aside, for Truth once recognised cannot be again put out of
sight, but to recognise a different relative proportion between them
from that which we had seen previously. Then there comes a submitting of
what has hitherto been our highest truth to one which we recognise as
still higher, a process not always easy of attainment, but which must be
gone through if our spiritual development is not to be arrested. The
lesser degree of life must be swallowed up in the greater; and for this
purpose it is necessary for us to learn that the smaller degree was only
a part