The

depending upon the latter, for its manifestations. masculine alone cannot create. There was never a higher formation without the two forces-positive and negative.

The progress of matter is through motion, organization, segregation, accretion, disintegration, and re-combinations reaching continually towards higher structural formations. The law is from angles to circles. Progress, so far as legitimately referable to Spirit, relates to the manifestational rather than the absolute. God as the Infinite Soul or the Life-Principle is not progressive. Progress, as applicable to the consciousness and ratiocination of mortals, implies, not only a low condition of imperfection to progress from, but investigation, experiment, defeats and victories.

Matter, or physical substance, does not become essential spirit-does not, as certain French philosophers have taught, "go up into consciousness." If an aggregation of unthinking monads may become thought-if one particle of matter may become spirit-two, ten thousand, all worlds, all matter, may become pure spirit! a method comparable to feet "going up" into limbs-limbs into body-body into brain-and brain into divine mind! This reasoning, carried logically into the actual, would finally ultimate in the transfer of "Mother Nature" into "Father God;" or the consummation contemplated by the Brahminical doctrine of the absorption of individualities, and all else, into the "Oceanic vortex of absolute Spirit." The position is untenable, and destructive to conscious individuality. Spirit must eternally depend upon matter for manifestation and the molding of sensuous forms. Spirit and matter, as substances, are not utterly discreted, as Swedenborg taught; but blended and correlated as the spiritual and physical body-duality in unity. Reduced to the last metaphysical analysis, we have this problem for solution:

Given physical substance, spirit substance, and the Divine Energy, to account for the origin and destiny of cells, worlds, systems and conscious spirits.

The existence of God is not only the logic of intuition; but one of the primary recognitions of human consciousness, which consciousness, therefore, is absolutely inseparable from the Infinite Consciousness.

Napoleon, while upon the ocean, pointed starward, and said—“ Talk, talk much as you please, gentlemen; but who —what made and governs those unnumbered worlds that pasture in the illimitable fields of heaven?"

Only apprehending and comprehending that which is inferior to ourselves, we cannot comprehend God, nor can we fully fathom the measureless possibilities connected with the Divine within ourselves; much less can we reach the perfections of the Infinite through any lengthened series of finite progressions. Until parallel lines meet and circles are squared, never can any continuous number of multiplied finites amount to the sum of an infinite. All human progress is upon the finite plane. All true unfoldment is from the center outward. The ratio of the moral being matheinatical, it is clear that man may progress endlessly without reaching God. Progress is not attributable of God, and no methodical thinker connects progression with the infinite energizing Life-Principle of the universe.

In conic sections there is what is termed the mathematical paradox, where the asymptote continually approaches the curve, but never meets it; otherwise expressed, we have the formula of two mathematical lines, eternally approaching and never meeting; so finite man may forever progress; eternally nearing the infinite fountain of causation without reaching God. If matter, as certain theorists have taught, becomes essential spirit, then progress is ultimately defeated, for man necessarily loses his individuality and consciousness by assimilation with and absorption into, the infinite ocean of Pure Spirit!

Demosthenes is represented to have said through a modern medium:

"Had you asked me concerning God, a thousand years ago, I could have told you all about him; but now, after I have walked the highway of celestial worlds for more than two thousand years, I am so far lost and

overpowered amid the splendors of Infinitude, I can say nothing. Height on height beyond the penetration of finite vision, I see the dim outlines of a deific universe; I feel the flood-tides of Divinity flowing down through all the avenues of my immortal being. I hear peal after peal of archangel elequence ringing through the endless archways of the empyrean, evermore sounding into my ears the name of God, God, God! I am silent, dumb!"

Philo, asserted in the most positive manner the masculinity and femininity of God and the sexual order of creation. He repeatedly represented Wisdom as "spouse of God and mother of all things;" and he further says, "We may rightly call God the Father and Wisdom the Mother of the universe." Also according to Michelange Lanci, the Egyptian Hieroglyphs, interpreted in the light of Egyptian theosophy, taught that both the male and female principles inhered in Deity, spirit and matter, as father and mother. Indian Gymnosophists also admitted, in the most ancient periods, the duality of the Divine Existence. Abraham, a dissatisfied, ambitious Brahmin, inaugurated the worship of a unitive masculine god. Moses built upon the same rock; hence his masculine, blood-thirsty, retaliatory laws, founded upon "Thus saith the Lord." And the popular Pauline Christianity of the past eighteen centuries, is Judaism, only sparingly galvanized.

The paternity and maternity of the Divine Nature, the fraternity of human souls, originating from the same primal fountain, and the progressive evolutions of all the races, are truths that will bloom into wider acceptance as the ages ripen.

The manifestational order of the past demonstrates that God-the Divine Energy-was. The fixedness of law and the uniformity of Nature's processes, prove that God now is. Yea, "of him, and through him, and to him, are all things, to whom be the glory forever." Looking from the mount of vision, we behold Deity enthroned everywhere in majesty and splendor-a holy presence, which is the innermost light and life of all lives. Springing from the paternal and

maternal Source, and divinely allied therewith, upon the loving bosom of God we recline and rest, with a trust so beautiful and a confidence so deep, that nothing can disturb the calm.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE DIVINE IMAGE.

"In me God dwelleth;

I in Him and He in me!

And my yearning soul he filleth,
Here, and through eternity."

Divine and unitive in purpose are manhood and womanhood! In the "divine image made he them." The expression is oriental. Hillel and other scholarly Hebraists may have seen the substance under the symbol.

Man, the crown-flower of Nature's formative forces, stands erect a polished shaft upon the summit of earth's granitic-paved pyramid. In him are focalized the refined and sublimated ultimates pertaining to the whole. Stars may waltz and whirl through space; but they cannot think. Planets, to the music of immutable law, may polka across tesselated floors in the temple of the eternal; but they can neither reason nor love. Man and woman alone, essential equals of a perfect circle, walk forth in the divine image; but this image does not consist in physical formation, for God is not, as we have previously shown, a shaped personality outside the visible universe, rolling and guiding astral worlds mechanically as school-boys roll their hoops; but is Infinite Spirit, containing the elements of all forms, the principles of all forces, and the attributes of all intelligence, acting by unchanging methods for the highest good.