s more truly be called The
Law of Manifestation, or the Law of Love and of Life, for throughout the
universe, from the highest to the lowest, it is the cause of
manifestation and life."[222]

"Now, if we study this physical world, as being the most available
material, we find that all life in it, all growth, all progress, alike
for units and for aggregates, depend on continual sacrifice and the
endurance of pain. Mineral is sacrificed to vegetable, vegetable to
animal, both to man, men to men, and all the higher forms again break
up, and reinforce again with their separated constituents the lowest
kingdom. It is a continual sequence of sacrifices from the lowest to the
highest, and the very mark of progress is that the sacrifice from being
involuntary and imposed becomes voluntary and self-chosen, and those who
are recognised as greatest by man's intellect and loved most by man's
heart are the supreme sufferers, those heroic souls who wrought,
endured, and died that the race might profit by their pain. If the world
be the work of the Logos, and the law of the world's progress in the
whole and the parts is sacrifice, then the Law of Sacrifice must point
to something in the very nature of the Logos; it must have its root in
the Divine Nature itself. A little further thought shows us that if
there is to be a world, a universe at all, this can only be by the One
Existence conditioning Itself and thus making manifestation possible,
and that the very Logos is the Self-limited God; limited to become
manifest; manifested to bring a universe into being; such
self-limitation and manifestation can only be a supreme act of
sacrifice, and what wonder that on every hand the world should show its
birth-mark, and that the Law of Sacrifice should be the law of being,
the law of the derived lives.

"Further, as it is an act of sacrifice in order that individuals may
come into existence to share the Divine bliss, it is very truly a
vicarious act--an act done for the sake of others; hence the fact
already noted, that progress is marked by sacrifice becoming voluntary
and self-chosen, and we realise that humanity reaches its perfection in
the man who gives himself for men, and by his own suffering purchases
for the race some lofty good.

"Here, in the highest regions, is the inmost verity of vicarious
sacrifice, and however it may be degraded and distorted, this inner
spiritual truth makes it indestructible, eternal, and the fount whence