tion, or malicious magnetism, of being
brought under the power of other minds, of being got over in some way,
of being done out of our property, of being injured in our health, or
being hurt in our circumstances, and so on.

Of course if you lay yourself open to that kind of thing, you will get
it. "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." That is why the Scripture
says, "He that breaketh through a hedge, a serpent shall bite him." That
is the serpent that some of us know something about, that is our old
enemy Nahash. Some of you, at any rate, are sufficiently trained in the
inner sciences to know the serpent Nahash. Break down the hedge, that is
to say, the conscious control of your own mind, and above all the hedge
of the Divine love and wisdom with which God himself will surround you
in the personality of His Son, break down this hedge and of course
Nahash comes in. But if you keep your hedge--and remember the old Hebrew
tradition always spoke of the Divine Law as "the hedge"--if you keep
your hedge unbroken, nothing can come in except by the door. Christ
said, "I am the door, by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved."

I have spoken of the two great mysteries, the mystery of godliness and
the mystery of iniquity, the mystery of Christ and the mystery of
anti-Christ. Now, it is not necessary, mind you, that you should
understand these mysteries in full in order to get into your right
position. If it were necessary that we should fully understand these
mysteries, either to get away from the one or to get into the other, I
think all of us would have an uncommonly bad chance. I certainly should.
I can touch only the fringe of these things, but we can realise the
principle of the affirmative and the principle of the negative which
underlies them both; one is the mystery of light, the other is the
mystery of darkness.

I do not say do not study these mysteries; they are exactly what we
ought to study, but do not think that you remain in a state of danger
until you have completely fathomed the mystery. Not a bit of it. You can
quite get on the right side without understanding the whole thing,
exactly as you travel on a railway without understanding the mechanism
of the engine which takes you along.

So then we have these two mysteries, that of light and that of darkness,
and therefore what we have to do is to exercise our will to receive the
mystery of light, and then that will make for itself a centre in our own
h