belief in a particular creed, but
what he realises as the stage which his mind has actually attained in
regard to it.

Has a man's mind only reached the point at which he thinks it is
impossible to know anything about God, or to make any use of the
knowledge if he had it? Then his whole interior world is in the
condition of confusion, which must necessarily exist where no spirit of
order has yet begun to move upon the chaos in which are, indeed, the
elements of being, but all disordered and neutralising one another. Has
he advanced a step further, and realised that there is a ruling and an
ordering power, but beyond this is ignorant of its nature? Then the
unknown stands to him for the terrific, and, amid a tumult of fears and
distresses that deprive him of all strength to advance, he spends his
life in the endeavour to propitiate this power as something naturally
adverse to him, instead of knowing that it is the very centre of his own
life and being.

And so on through every degree, from the lowest depths of ignorance to
the greatest heights of intelligence, a man's life must always be the
exact reflection of that particular stage which he has reached in the
perception of the divine nature and of his own relation to it; and as we
approach the full perception of Truth, so the life-principle within us
expands, the old bonds and limitations which had no existence in reality
fall off from us, and we enter into regions of light, liberty, and
power, of which we had previously no conception. It is impossible,
therefore, to overestimate the importance of being able to realise the
symbol _for_ a symbol, and being able to penetrate to the inner
substance which it represents. Life itself is to be realised only by the
conscious experience of its livingness in ourselves, and it is the
endeavour to translate these experiences into terms which shall suggest
a corresponding idea to others that gives rise to all symbolism.

The nearer those we address have approached to the actual experience,
the more transparent the symbol becomes; and the further they are from
such experience the thicker is the veil; and our whole progress consists
in the fuller and fuller translation of the symbols into clearer and
clearer statements of that for which they stand. But the first step,
without which all succeeding ones must remain impossible, is to convince
people that symbols _are_ symbols, and not the very Truth itself. And
the difficulty consists