eart of Silence" of the Egyptian ritual, the "Hidden God." This
sacrifice is the secret of evolution. The Divine Life, cabined within a
form, ever presses outwards in order that the form may expand, but
presses gently, lest the form should break ere yet it had reached its
utmost limit of expansion. With infinite patience and tact and
discretion, the divine One keeps up the constant pressure that expands,
without loosing a force that would disrupt. In every form, in mineral,
in vegetable, in animal, in man, this expansive energy of the Logos is
ceaselessly working. That is the evolutionary force, the lifting life
within the forms, the rising energy that science glimpses, but knows not
whence it comes. The botanist tells of an energy within the plant, that
pulls ever upwards; he knows not how, he knows not why, but he gives it
a name--the _vis a fronte_--because he finds it there, or rather finds
its results. Just as it is in plant life, so is it in other forms as
well, making them more and more expressive of the life within them. When
the limit of any form is reached, and it can grow no further, so that
nothing more can be gained through it by the soul of it--that germ of
Himself, which the Logos is brooding over--then He draws away His
energy, and the form disintegrates--we call it death and decay. But the
soul is with Him, and He shapes for it a new form, and the death of the
form is the birth of the soul into fuller life. If we saw with the eyes
of the Spirit instead of with the eyes of the flesh, we should not weep
over a form, which is a corpse giving back the materials out of which it
was builded, but we should joy over the life passing onwards into nobler
form, to expand under the unchanging process the powers still latent
within.

Through that perpetual sacrifice of the Logos all lives exist; it is the
life by which the universe is ever becoming. This life is One, but it
embodies itself in myriad forms, ever drawing them together and gently
overcoming their resistance. Thus it is an At-one-ment, a unifying
force, by which the separated lives are gradually made conscious of
their unity, labouring to develop in each a self-consciousness, which
shall at last know itself to be one with all others, and its root One
and divine.

This is the primary and ever-continued sacrifice, and it will be seen
that it is an outpouring of Life directed by Love, a voluntary and glad
pouring forth of Self for the making of other Selv