In these few paragraphs I have only been able to point out very
briefly the broad lines of enquiry into a subject of national
importance to the British and American peoples, and which
interests us personally, not only as members of these nations,
but as affording proof on the largest scale of the same
specialization of universal laws which each of us has to effect
individually for ourself. But whether the process be individual
or national it is always the same, and is the translation to the
very highest plane--that of the All-originating Life itself--of
the old maxim that "Nature will obey us exactly in proportion as
we first obey Nature"; it is the old parable of the lord who,
finding his servants girt and awaiting him, then girds himself
and serves them (Luke xii. 35 to 37). The nation or the
individual who thus realizes the true principle of the Shepherd
and the Stone, comes under a special Divine guidance and
protection, not by a favouritism incompatible with the conception
of universal Law, but by the very operation of the Law itself.
They have come into touch with its higher possibilities, and to
recur to an analogy which I have already employed, they learn to
make their iron float by the very same law by which it sinks; and
so they become the flock of the Great Shepherd and the building
of the Great Architect, and each one, however insignificant his
or her sphere may appear, becomes a sharer in the great work, and
by a logical consequence begins to grow on new lines of
development for the simple reason that a new principle
necessarily produces new modes of manifestation. If the reader
will think over these things he will see that the promises
contained in the Bible whether national or personal, are nothing
else than statements of the universal law of Cause and Effect
applied to the inmost principles of our being, and that therefore