with a
definite purpose, which means that it is the employment of one of our
natural faculties upon its proper object in an intelligent manner. The
ignorant Samaritan worship is better than no worship at all, for at
least it realises the existence of some centre around which a man's life
should revolve, something to prevent the aimless dispersion of His
powers for want of a centripetal force to bind them together; and even
the crudest notion of prayer, as a mere attempt to induce God to change
his mind, is at least a first step towards the truth that full supply
for all our needs may be drawn from the Infinite. Still, such worship as
this is hampered with perplexities, and can give only a feeble answer to
the atheistical sneer which asks, "What is man, that God should be
mindful of him, a momentary atom among unnumbered worlds?"

Now the teaching of Jesus throws all these perplexities aside with the
single word "knowledge." There is only one true way of doing anything,
and that is knowing exactly what it is we want to do, and knowing
exactly why we want to do it. All other doing is blundering. We may
blunder into the right thing sometimes, but we cannot make this our
principle of life to all eternity; and if we have to give up the blunder
method eventually, why not give it up now, and begin at once to profit
by acting according to intelligible principle? The knowledge that "the
Son," as individualised Spirit, has his correlative in "the Father," as
Universal Spirit, affords the clue we need.

In whatever way we may attempt to explain it, the fact remains that
volition is the fundamental characteristic of Spirit. We may speak of
conscious, or subconscious or super-conscious action; but in whatever
way we may picture to ourselves the condition of the agent as
contemplating his own action, a general purposeful lifeward tendency
becomes abundantly evident on any enlarged view of Nature, whether seen
from without or from within, and we may call this by the general name of
volition. But the error we have to avoid is that of supposing volition
to take the same form in Universal Spirit as in individualised Spirit.
The very terms "universal" and "individual" forbid this. For the
universal, as such, to exercise specific volition, concentrating itself
upon the details of a specific case, would be for it to pass into
individualisation, and to cease to be the Absolute and Infinite; it
would be no longer "the Father," but "the Son.