m or comeliness. Assuredly the mission of every
thinking man and woman is to help build up forms of greater beauty,
spiritual, intellectual, material, everywhere; but if we would make
something grander than Watteau gardens or Dresden china shepherdesses,
we must enter the great realistic school of Nature and learn to
recognise the beauty that already surrounds us, although it may have a
little dirt on the surface. Then, when we have learnt the great
principles of Beauty from the All-Spirit which is it, we shall know how
to develop the Beauty on its own proper lines without perpetuating the
dirt; and we shall know that all Beauty is the expression of Living
Power, and that we can measure our power by the degree of beauty into
which we can transform it, rendering our lives,

"By loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought."

XVI

SEPARATION AND UNITY

I

"The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me" (John xiv,
30). In these words the Grand Master of Divine Science gives us the key
to the Great Knowledge. Comparison with other passages shows that the
terms here rendered "prince" and "world" can equally be rendered
"principle" and "age." Jesus is here speaking of a principle of the
present age so entirely opposed to that principle of which he himself
was the visible expression, as to have no part in him. It is the utter
contradiction of everything that Jesus came to teach and to exemplify.
The account Jesus gave of himself was that he came "to bear witness to
the Truth," and in order that men "might have life, and that they might
have it more abundantly"; consequently the principle to which he refers
must be the exact opposite of Truth and Life--that is, it must be the
principle of Falsehood and Death.

What, then, is this false and destructive principle which rules the
present age? If we consider the gist of the entire discourse of which
these are the concluding words, we shall find that the central idea
which Jesus has been most strenuously endeavouring to impress upon his
disciples at their last meeting before the crucifixion, is that of the
absolute identity and out-and-out oneness of "the Father" and "the Son,"
the principle of the perfect unity of God and Man. If this, then, was
the great Truth which he was thus earnestly solicitous to impress upon
his disciples' minds when his bodily presence was so shortly to be
removed from them--the Truth of Unity--may we no