Christ in us," the Life of our
lives.[41] Sometimes he calls this triumphant experience the birth of
a new branch in Christ's Life-Tree, sometimes the birth of the Lily in
Christ's garden of flowers, sometimes it is the birth of the immortal
seed. Sometimes it is uniting in life and spirit with Him who is "the
Treader on the Serpent," sometimes it is finding the noble Virgin,
sometimes it is discovering the Philosopher's Stone, sometimes it is
winning the precious Diadem, sometimes it is possessing the key which
unlocks the Door, sometimes it is arriving at the Sabbath Quiet of the
soul. These are only a variety of ways, many of them forgotten
inheritances from alchemy and astrology, of saying that the soul finds
its goal in an experience which binds it into one common corporate life
with Christ and so into an elemental Love-Unity with God: whoever is
born of Christ liveth and walketh in Him, puts Him on in His suffering,
death, and resurrection, becomes a member of Christ's body, is
"tinctured" with His spirit, and has his own human life rooted in the
Love of God.[42] Here, then, in the creation and formation of this
organic Life-Tree the universe attains its ultimate goal. It is wholly
an achievement of free will, of holy choice. The dark Principle is not
annihilated, is not suppressed, but the Heart of God moves ever on in a
steadily growing triumph, binding soul after soul into the divine
Igdrasil Tree of the Light Universe, in a unity that is not now the
unity of negation and undifferentiation--an Abyss that swallows up all
that is in it,--but a unity of many wills united in a spirit of concord
and love, many persons formed by holy desire into one unbroken symphony
as harps of God.

With the change of _centre_ in the inner man corresponds also the outer
life of word and deed, for the outer, here as everywhere, is only the
"signature" of an inner which fits it: "A man must show the root of the
tree out of which spirit and flesh have their origin."[43] When the
will becomes new-born and the soul unites itself as a twig {199} in
Christ's Life-Tree, then it ceases to love sin and will it. When God
brings His will into birth in us, He gives us virtue and power to will
what He wills, and to leave our sins behind.[44] The attitude of hate,
the spirit of war are marks of the old unchanged nature, and are
heathenish and not Christian. When Christ is formed in the inner
ground of the soul, a man leaves the sword i