he Spirit is not
really separate but is part of the divine Life, and knowing no
difference, feeling no separation, the man pours himself forth as part
of the Life Universal, and in the expression of that Life he shares the
joy of his Lord.

It is in the three earlier stages that the pain-aspect of sacrifice is
seen. The first meets but small sufferings; in the second the physical
life and all that earth has to give may be sacrificed; the third is the
great time of testing, of trying, of the growth and evolution of the
human soul. For in that stage duty may demand all in which life seems to
consist, and the man, still identified in _feeling_ with the form,
though _knowing_ himself theoretically to transcend it, finds that all
he feels as life is demanded of him, and questions: "If I let this go,
what then will remain?" It seems as though consciousness itself would
cease with this surrender, for it must loose its hold on all it
realises, and it sees nothing to grasp on the other side. An
over-mastering conviction, an imperious voice, call on him to surrender
his very life. If he shrinks back, he must go on in the life of
sensation, the life of the intellect, the life of the world, and as he
has the joys he dared not resign, he finds a constant dissatisfaction, a
constant craving, a constant regret and lack of pleasure in the world,
and he realises the truth of the saying of the Christ that "he that
will save his life shall lose it,"[230] and that the life that was loved
and clung to is only lost at last. Whereas if he risks all in obedience
to the voice that summons, if he throws away his life, then in losing
it, he finds it unto life eternal,[231] and he discovers that the life
he surrendered was only death in life, that all he gave up was illusion,
and that he found reality. In that choice the metal of the soul is
proved, and only the pure gold comes forth from the fiery furnace, where
life seemed to be surrendered but where life was won. And then follows
the joyous discovery that the life thus won is won for all, not for the
separated self, that the abandoning of the separated self has meant the
realising of the Self in man, and that the resignation of the limit
which alone seemed to make life possible has meant the pouring out into
myriad forms, an undreamed vividness and fulness, "the power of an
endless life."[232]

Such is an outline of the Law of Sacrifice, based on the primary
Sacrifice of the Logos, that Sacri