(p. 7)

FOURTH DAY

LOVE

            Spirit loq. Love is the leading of others to God; the giving them a sense of His presence in their lives. It implies a surrendering of the personality to the individuality in those who love.

            The personality of men and women means all those temporary surroundings and earthly seemings, which minister only to the transient form in which the true individual appears embodied at any particular time.

            The personalities of men and women may or may not be noble and correspondent with their individualities, according as in previous lives, they have, or have not, subjected the lower to the higher self within them. But at all times and in all cases the personality is more or less imbued with its material surroundings, and is liable to fail in its measure of the true stature of things, and in its valuation of earth’s life. Thus is love often impeded by the false action of the personality, and by its inability to see outside its own immediate horizon. Love hath nothing of her own, because she claims all things and all nature as her sphere. She is of God; she is that force which impels God into myriad individualities: she is the essence of individuality; the mainspring of God’s work in Creation, the mainspring of man’s work in Redemption, or return to God through matter. The passing of souls through matter is another term for God’s love as shown in the universe. Creative, impelling, subjective, redeeming, – love is man’s true intuition of God, and until he assimilate this truth into his passing human nature, the latter remains but an imperfect representation of God in matter.

            If ye loved more truly O men, O women, this truth would be as your own lives and would need no showing forth by us. So long as ye confound the clinging

(p. 8)

of sense to sense, of personality to personality, with true love, ye see her only as reflected in, and refracted by, the changing waters of earth’s life; ye see her not in the Heavens as the life-giving Sun of the universe. You ask why God’s love must impel spirit into matter, where are so much evil and so much sorrow. Without the various experiences which matter alone can afford, (from the ray of sunlight to the highest human consciousness) individuality is impossible, and evolution is not. For evolution is the growing towards God individuated of that which went forth from God un-individuated. It is the gradual taking on of Godhead by means of the passage through matter; a returning to God full, concrete, and concentred, of that which went forth from God empty, discrete, and scattered. It is like the putting out to interest of God’s Spirit, like the development of Gold from the rock, of Truth from mystery, of Love from sense, of Individuality from personality.

            For is not evolution the passage through matter of Spirit; is not Faith the clinging of matter to Spirit; is not Love the transfusion of matter by Spirit?