the three avenues of reason, feeling, and will; but as in the Masonic
legend of the murder of Hiram Abif, the architect of Solomon's Temple,
it is beaten back on the side of reasoning, by the plummet of a logic
based on false premises; on the side of feeling, by the level of
conventional ideas; and on the side of will, by the hammer of a
short-sighted self-will, which gives the finishing blow; and it is not
until the true perception of the Principle of Life is resurrected within
us, that the Temple can be completed according to the true plan.

It should be remembered that the will is _not_ the Creative Faculty in
us. It is the faculty of Conception that is the creative agent, and the
business of the Will is to keep that faculty in the right direction,
which will be determined by an enlightened Reason. Conception creates
ideas which are the seed, that, in due time, will produce fruit after
its own kind. In a broad sense we may call it the Imaging Faculty, only
we must not suppose that this necessarily implies the visualizing of
mental images, which is only a subsidiary mode of using this faculty. An
"immaculate conception" is therefore the only means by which the New
Liberated Man can be born in each of us. The sequence is always the
same. The Will holds the Conception together, and the idea thus formed
gives direction to the working of the Law. But this direction may be
either true or inverted; and the impersonal Law will work constructively
or destructively, according to the conception which it embodies. In this
way, then, will-power may be used to hold together an inverted
conception--the conception that our personal force of will is sufficient
to bear down all opposition. But this mental attitude ignores the fact,
that the fundamental principle of creative power is the Wholeness of the
Creation; and that, therefore, the idea of forcing compliance with our
wishes, by the power of our individual will, is an inverted conception,
which, though it may appear to succeed for a time, is bound to fail