must seek if we would understand this teaching of the Master's.

Now whether we take the Bible story of the birth of Christ
literally or symbolically, it teaches one great lesson. It
teaches that the All-originating Spirit is the true Parent of the
individual both in soul and body. This is nothing else than
realizing from the stand-point of the individual what we cannot
help realizing in regard to the original creation of the cosmos--
it is the realization that the All-originating Spirit is at once
the Life and the Substance in each individual here and now, just
as it must have been in the origin of all things. Human parentage
counts for nothing--it is only the channel through which
Universal Spirit has acted for the concentration of an individual
centre; but the ultimate cause of that centre, both in life and
substance, continues at every moment to be the One same
Originating Spirit.

This recognition cuts away the root of all the power of the
negative, and so in principle it delivers us from all evil, for
the root of evil is the denial of the power of the Spirit to
produce good. When we realize that the Spirit is finding its own
individualization in us in its two-fold essence as Life and
Substance, then we see that it must be both able and willing to
create for us all good. The only limit is that which we ourselves
impose by denying its operation, and when we realize the inherent
creativeness of Spirit we find that there is no reason why we
should stop short at any point and say that it can go no further.
Our error is in looking on the life of the body as separate from
the life of the Spirit, and this error is met by the
consideration that, in its ultimate nature, Substance must