The ten thousand things of the human life entangle us,--the touch of
sickness, the expressions of so-called sin,--the baffling consequences of
our seeming mistakes,--all these draw us from the cradle of
unconsciousness out into the vital power of a self-conscious life, and
push us onward to our union with Cosmic Consciousness, or the risen
Christ.

On the self-conscious plane life goes on, driven on every side by human
experiences and at last turns back upon itself, and then in the Gethsemane
of its own making, it stands where earth and its perplexing joys are lost
and heaven and its hidden joys are yet unknown, and then facing the
expressions of its now half-revealed consciousness it cries out from the
depth of its soul's despair, "If it is possible, let this cup pass," and
it does not see the purpose in Gethsemane.

Human life at this stage of unfoldment has _fixed laws_, and the soul
meets in them the inexorable command to pass on to its own crucifixion,
the worked out sentence of its own judgments, and it goes onward bearing
its own cross which is built from the consequences of the laws with which
it has related.

The laws of human self-consciousness are hard to work out; each life faces
sometime, somewhere the proof of itself. There comes a day to all when
anything that is less than the truth slips off, and the soul stands bare
at the bar of the universal justice ready to be judged by the laws which
it has made for itself.

There are hours of human crucifixion that it were well to die on, for the
soul that wanders back from these fierce Mounts of Transfiguration has
paid the price of human transgression of law by human pain, and is purged