er, and no limit was to be set to its power or
willingness to work for us. But to those who did not thus realize it, the
Great Mind is necessarily the adversary who casts them into prison until
they have paid the uttermost farthing; and thus in all cases the Master
impressed upon his hearers the exact correspondence of the attitude of this
unseen Power towards _them_ with their own attitude towards _it_. Such
teaching was not a narrow anthropomorphism but the adaptation to the
intellectual capacity of the unlettered multitude of the very deepest
truths of what we now call Mental Science. And the basis of it all is the
cryptic personality of spirit hidden throughout the infinite of Nature
under every form of manifestation. As unalloyed Life and Intelligence it
_can_ be no other than good, it can entertain no intention of evil, and
thus all intentional evil must put us in opposition to it, and so deprive
us of the consciousness of its guidance and strengthening and thus leave us
to grope our own way and fight our own battle single-handed against the
universe, odds which at last will surely prove too great for us. But
remember that the opposition can never be on the part of the Universal
Mind, for in itself it is sub-conscious mind; and to suppose any active
opposition taken on its own initiative would be contrary to all we have
learnt as to the nature of sub-conscious mind whether in the individual or
the universal; the position of the Universal Mind towards us is always the
reflection of our own attitude. Therefore although the Bible is full of
threatening against those who persist in conscious opposition to the Divine
Law of Good, it is on the other hand full of promises of immediate and full
forgiveness to all who change, their attitude and desire to co-operate with
the Law of Good so far as they know it. The laws of Nature do not act
vindictively; and through all theological formularies and traditional
interpretations let us realize that what we are dealing with is the supreme
law of our own being; and it is on the basis of this natural law that we
find such declarations as that in Ezek. xviii., 22, which tells that if we
forsake our evil ways our past transgressions shall never again be
mentioned to us. We are dealing with the great principles of our subjective
being, and our misuse of them in the past can never make them change their
inherent law of action. If our method of using them in the past has brought
us sorrow,