very centre of his own
life and being.
And so on through every degree, from the lowest depths of ignorance to
the greatest heights of intelligence, a man's life must always be the
exact reflection of that particular stage which he has reached in the
perception of the divine nature and of his own relation to it; and as we
approach the full perception of Truth, so the life-principle within us
expands, the old bonds and limitations which had no existence in reality
fall off from us, and we enter into regions of light, liberty, and
power, of which we had previously no conception. It is impossible,
therefore, to overestimate the importance of being able to realise the
symbol _for_ a symbol, and being able to penetrate to the inner
substance which it represents. Life itself is to be realised only by the
conscious experience of its livingness in ourselves, and it is the
endeavour to translate these experiences into terms which shall suggest
a corresponding idea to others that gives rise to all symbolism.
The nearer those we address have approached to the actual experience,
the more transparent the symbol becomes; and the further they are from
such experience the thicker is the veil; and our whole progress consists
in the fuller and fuller translation of the symbols into clearer and
clearer statements of that for which they stand. But the first step,
without which all succeeding ones must remain impossible, is to convince
people that symbols _are_ symbols, and not the very Truth itself. And
the difficulty consists in this, that if the symbolism is in any degree
adequate it must, in some measure, represent the form of Truth, just as
the modelling of a drapery suggests the form of the figure beneath. They
have a certain consciousness that somehow they are in the presence of
Truth; and this leads people to resent any removal of those folds of
drapery which have hitherto conveyed this idea to their minds.
There is sufficient indication of the inner Truth in the outward form to
afford an excuse for the timorous, and those who have not sufficient
mental energy to think for themselves, to cry out that finality has
already been attained, and that any further search into the matter must
end in the destruction of Truth. But in raising such an outcry they
betray their ignorance of the very nature of Truth, which is that it can
never be destroyed: the very fact that Truth is Truth makes this
impossible. And again they exhibit their ignorance of the first
principle of Life--namely, the Law of Growth, which throughout the
universe perpetually pushes forward into more and more vivid forms of
expression, having expansion everywhere and finality nowhere.
Such ignorant objections need not, therefore, alarm us; and we should
endeavour to show those who make them that what they fear is the only
natural order of the Divine Life, which is "over all, and through all,
and in all." But we must do this gently, and not by forcibly thrusting
upon them the object of their terror, and so repelling them from all
study of the subject. We should endeavour gradually to lead them to see
that there is something interior to what they have hitherto held to be
ultimate Truth, and to realise that the sensation of emptiness and
dissatisfaction, which from time to time will persist in making itself
felt in their hearts, is nothing else than the pressing forward of the
spirit within to declare that inner side of things which alone can
satisfactorily account for what we observe on the exterior, and without
the knowledge of which we can never perceive the true nature of our
inheritance in the Universal Life which is the Life Everlasting.
What, then, is this central principle which is at the root of all
things? It is Life. But not life as we recognise it in particular forms
of manifestation; it is something more interior and concentrated than
that. It is that "unity of the spirit" which _is_ unity, simply because
it has not yet passed into diversity. Perhaps this is not an easy idea
to grasp, but it is the root of all scientific conception of spirit; for
without it there is no common principle to which we can refer the
innumerable forms of manifestation that spirit assumes.
It is the conception of Life as the sum-total of all its undistributed
powers, being as yet none of these in particular, but all of them in
potentiality. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract idea, but it is
essentially that of the centre from which growth takes place by
expansion in every direction. This is that last residuum which defies
all our powers of analysis. This is truly "the unknowable," not in the
sense of the unthinkable but of the unanalysable. It is the subject of
perception, not of knowledge, if by knowledge we mean that faculty which
estimates the _relations_ between things, because here we have passed
beyond any questions of relations, and are face to face with the
absolute.
