which is the Great Original in whose image and likeness we are made. In
proportion as we grow into the recognition of _this_ our own personality
will explain, and the creative power of our thought will cease to work
invertedly until at last it will work only on the same principles of Life,
Love and Liberty as the Divine Mind, and so all evil will disappear from
our world. We shall not, as some systems teach, be absorbed into Deity to
the extinction of our individual consciousness, but on the contrary our
individual consciousness will continually expand, which is what St. Paul
means when he speaks of our "increasing with the increase of God"--the
continual expanding of the Divine element within us. But this can only take
place by our recognition of ourselves as _receivers_ of this Divine
element. It is receiving into ourselves of the Divine Personality, a result
not to be reached through human reasoning. We reason from premises which we
have assumed, and the conclusion is already involved in the premises and
can never extend beyond them. But we can only select our premises from
among things that we know by experience, whether mental or physical, and
accordingly our reasoning is always merely a new placing of the old things.
But the receiving of the Divine Personality into ourselves is an entirely
New Thing, and so cannot be reached by reasoning from old things. Hence if
this Divine ultimate of the Creative Process is to be attained it must be
by the Revelation of a New Thing which will afford a new starting-point for
our thought, and this New Starting-point is given in the Promise of "the
Seed of the Woman" with which the Bible opens. Thenceforward this Promise
became the central germinating thought of those who based themselves upon
it, thus constituting them a special race, until at last when the necessary
conditions had matured the Promised Seed appeared in Him of whom it is
written that He is the express image of God's Person (Heb. I: 3)--that is,
the Expression of that Infinite Divine Personality of which I have spoken.
"No man hath seen God at any time or can see Him," for the simple reason
that Infinitude cannot be the subject of vision. To become visible there