question of Christ manifest in the flesh as the criterion of the
whole matter (I. John iv., 2). If the Spirit can create at all
then you cannot logically limit the extent or method of its
working; and since the basis of our expectation of individual
expansion is the limitless creative power of the Spirit, to
reject the Christ of the Gospels as an impossibility is to cut
away the ground from under our own feet. It is one thing to say
"I do not understand why the Spirit should have worked in that
way"--that is merely an honest statement of our present stage of
knowledge, or we may even go the length of saying that we do not
feel convinced that it did work in that way--that is a true
confession of our intellectual difficulty--but certainly those
who are professedly relying on the power of the Spirit to produce
external results cannot say that it does not possess that power,
or possesses it only in a limited degree: the position is
logically self-destructive. What we should do therefore, is to
suspend judgment and follow the light as far as we can see it,
and bye-and-bye it will become clearer to us. There are, it
appears to me, occult heights in the doctrine of Christ designed
by the Supreme Wisdom to counteract corresponding occult depths
in the Mystery of Darkness. I do not think it is at all
necessary, or even possible, for us to scale these heights or
fathom those depths, with our present infantile intelligence, but
if we realize how completely the law of our being receives its
fulfilment in Christ as far as we know that law, may we not well
conceive that there are yet deeper phases of that law the
existence of which we can only faintly surmise by intuition?
Occasionally just the fringe of the veil is lifted for some of
us, but that momentary glance is enough to show us that there are
powers and mysteries beyond our present conception. But even