The Master tells us that the Queen of the South came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and if we turn to 1 Kings 10:1, we find that the fame of Solomon's wisdom, which induced the Queen of Sheba to come to prove him with hard questions, was "concerning the Name of the Lord". This accords with the immemorial tradition of the Jews, that the knowledge of the secret Name of God enables him who possesses it to perform the most stupendous miracles.
This Hidden Name — the "Schem-hammaphoraseh" — was revealed, they say, to Moses and taught by him to Aaron and handed on by him to his successors. It was the secret enshrined in the Holy of Holies and was scrupulously guarded by the successive High Priests. It is the supreme secret, and its knowledge is the supreme object of attainment. Thus tradition and Scripture alike point to "The NAME" as the source of Light and Life, and Deliverance from all evil.
May we not therefore suppose that this must be the veiled statement of some great Truth? The purpose of a name is to call up, by a single word, the complete idea of the thing named, with all those qualities and relations that make it what it is, instead of having to describe all this in detail every time we want to suggest the conception of it. The correct name of a thing thus conveys the idea of its whole nature, and accordingly the correct Name of God should, in some manner, be a concise statement of the Divine Nature as the Source of all Life, Wisdom, Power, and Goodness, and the Origin of all manifested being.
For this reason the Bible puts before us "the Name of the Lord" not only as the object of supreme veneration, but also as the grand subject of study, by means of which we may command the Power that will provide us with all good and protect us from all ill. Let us, then, see what we can learn regarding this marvellous Name.
I think most people will agree that the specially personal Name by which the Divine Being is called in the Bible is Jehovah. If any Name, throughout the entire range of Scriptures, seems to invest the Divine Being with a distinct individuality, it is this one; and yet when we come to inquire into its meaning, we find that it is precisely the most emphatic statement of a universality which is the very antithesis of all that we understand by the word "individual".
The clue to this discovery is contained in the statement that God revealed Himself to Moses by the Name Jehovah (Ex. 6:3); for since the Bible contains no statement of any other revelation of the Divine Name to Moses, except that made at the burning bush, we are at once put upon the track of some connection between the Name Jehovah and the command received by Moses to tell the children of Israel that I AM had commissioned him to deliver them.
Now, the Name which in English is rendered "Jehovah" is composed of four Hebrew letters — Yod, Hé, Vau, Hé — thus spelling "Yevé", and this is the word which we have to analyse. And this brings us to the fact that the whole Hebrew alphabet is invested with a certain symbolical character because, in the estimation of learned Jews, it exemplifies the great principle of Evolution; for they rightly consider that Evolution is nothing else than the working of the Divine Spirit through all worlds, whether visible or invisible.
It would require a long study to take the reader through the detailed examination of every letter, but the general idea may be stated as follows: The letter Yod is a minute mark of a definite shape, though little more than a point, and a careful inspection of the Hebrew alphabet shows that all the other letters are combinations of this initial form. It is thus the "generating point" from which all the other letters proceed, each letter being in some way or other a reproduction of the Yod; and accordingly, it has not inaptly been regarded as a symbol of the All-originating First Principle.
If, therefore, a Name was to be devised which should represent the mystery of the Divine Being as at once the Unity which includes all Multiplicity, and the Multiplicity which is included in the Unity, the logical sequence of ideas required that the Hebrew form of such a word should commence with the letter Yod. The name of the letter is suggested by the sound of the indrawing of the breath and thus indicates self-containedness. The opposite conception is that of the sending forth of the breath, which is represented by the sound Hé, and this letter indicates that which is not self-contained, but which emanates from the Source of Life. Yod thus represents essential Life, while Hé represents Derived Life.
The letter Vau, taken alone, signifies "and" and thus conveys the idea of a "Link". This is followed by a repetition of the "Hé", so that the second portion of the Sacred name conveys the idea of a plurality of derived lives connected together by some common link and is, therefore, the symbol of the Unity passing into manifestation as the Multiplicity of all individual beings.
The whole name thus constitutes a most perfect statement of the Divine Being as that Universal Life which, to use the apostolic words, is "over all, and through all, and in all" (Eph. 4:6); so that once more we are brought back to what the Master said was the fundamental statement of all Truth, namely, that God is THE ONE, this indicating that Unity of Spirit from which all individualities proceed and in which they are included.
We have already seen from the story of "the Fall" that Eve represents the soul as distinguished from the body; and just as the Bible opens with this assertion of the feminine nature of the Soul, so it closes with it, and a large portion of the magnificent symbolism of Revelation is occupied in depicting, under the form of two mystical "Women", the generalised history of the adulterous soul and of the faithful soul which, as "the Bride", joins with "the Spirit" in the Universal invitation to all who will, to drink of the water of Life and live forever.
It is, then, this mystery of the femininity of the soul as a general principle of Nature, and its necessary relation to the corresponding Masculine principle, that is the great truth enshrined in the Sacred Name Jehovah. The first letter of the name implies "self-containedness", the statement in the universal of all that we mean individually when we speak of ourselves as "I"; and the remaining portion is the form of a verb expressing continuous Being; and the whole Name therefore is the exact statement of "I AM" which was made to Moses at the burning bush.
But further, this Name is a statement that the passing of the Unity into that infinite galaxy of Life which, though now sometimes sorrowing, is destined to become one glorious rose of myriad petals, each of which is a rejoicing creative being, can take place only through Duality. Is this a mystery? Yes, the greatest of mysteries, including all others, for it is that Universal mystery of Attraction upon which all research, even in physical science, eventually abuts; and yet, that Duality must be established before Unity can pass into all the powers and beauties of external manifestation is a proposition so self-evident as to be almost absurd in its simplicity; indeed, the very simplicity of the great universal truths is a stumbling-block to many who, like Naaman (2 Kings 5), expect something sensational.
Now this very simple proposition is that, in order to do any kind of work, there must not only be something that works but also something that is worked upon; in other words, there must be both an active and a passive factor. The scope of this book will not allow me to discuss the process by which the Duality is evolved from Unity, though physical science supplies us with very clear analogies. But in general terms, the Universal Passive is evolved by the Universal Active as its necessary complement and provides all those conditions which are required to enable the Active Principle to manifest itself in the varied forms that constitute the successive stages of Evolution; and the interaction of these two reciprocal principles throughout Nature is as clearly indicated by the Sacred Name as the principle of Unity itself.
And the Threefold nature of all defined being at once follows from the recognition of these two interacting principles, for whatever is produced by their interaction can be neither a simple reproduction of the Active principle alone nor of the Passive alone, but must be an intermingling of the two, combining in itself the nature of both, and thus possessing an independent nature of its own, which is not exactly that of either of the originating principles.
Other and very important deductions again follow from this one, but they cannot be adequately entered upon in an introductory book like the present; still, enough has now been said to show that the Name "Jehovah" contains in itself the Three Fundamental Principles of the Universe — the Unity, the Duality, and the Trinity — and by their inclusion in a single word affirms that no contradiction exists between them, but that they are all necessary phases of the Universal Truth, which is only ONE.
But now the tide is beginning to turn, and improved methods of scientific research are approaching, from the physical side, that One Great Centre in which all lines of truth eventually converge; and so the fast-spreading recognition of Man's spiritual nature is leading once more to the search for "the Word of Power". And rightly did the old Hebrew builders and their followers in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries connect this "Lost Word" with the Sacred name; but whether because they purposely surrounded it with mystery, or because the simplicity of the truth proved a stumbling-block to them, their open writings only indicate a search through endless mazes, while the clue to the labyrinth lay in the Word itself.
Are we any nearer its discovery now? The answer is at once Yes and No. The "Lost Word" was as close to those old thinkers as it is to us, but to those whose eyes and ears are sealed by prejudice, it will always remain as far off as though it belonged to another planet. The Bible, however, is most explicit upon this subject; and as in the children's game the hidden thimble is concealed from the seekers by its very conspicuousness, so the concealment of the "Lost Word" lies in its absolute simplicity.
Nothing so commonplace could possibly be it, and yet the Scripture plainly tells us that its intimate familiarity is the token by which we shall know it. We need not say, "Who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea that thou shouldst say, Who shall go over the sea for us and bring it unto us, that we hear it and do it? But the Word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it" (Deut. 30: 12-14). Realise that the only "Word of Power" is the Divine Name, and the mystery at once flashes into light.
The "Lost Word" which we have been seeking to discover with pain and cost and infinite study has been all the time in our heart and in our mouth. It is nothing else than that familiar expression which we use so many times a day: I AM. This is the Divine Name revealed to Moses at the burning bush, and it is the Word that is enshrined in the Name Jehovah; and if we believe that the Bible means what it says when it tells us that Man is the image and likeness of God, then we shall see that the same statement of Being, which in the Universal applies to God, must in the individual and particular apply to Man also.
This "Word" is always in our hearts, for the consciousness of our own individuality consists only in the recognition that I AM, and the assertion of our own being as one of the necessities of ordinary speech is upon our lips continually. Thus the "Word of Power" is close at hand to everyone, and it continues to be the "Lost Word" only because of our ignorance of all that is enfolded in it.
Each is necessary to the correct understanding of the other, and thus Jesus came not to abrogate the work of Moses, but to complete it. The "I AM" is ever in the forefront of his teaching: "I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life" [John 14:6 — Ed.]; "I AM the Resurrection and the Life" [John 11:25 — Ed.]; "Except ye believe I AM ye shall perish in your sins" [John 8:24 — Ed.]. These and similar sayings shine forth with marvellous radiance when once we see that he was not speaking of himself personally, but of the Individualised Principle of Being in the generic sense which is applicable to all mankind.
What is wanted is our recognition of that innermost self which is pure Spirit, and therefore not subject to any conditions whatever. All conditions arise from one combination or another of the two original conditions, Time and Space; and since these two primary conditions can have no place in essential being and are only created by its Thought, the true recognition of the "I AM" is a recognition of the Self, which sees it as eternally subsisting in its own Being, sending forth all forms at its will and withdrawing them again at its pleasure.
To know this is to know Life-in-itself; and any knowledge short of this is only to know the appearance of Life, to recognise merely the activity of the vehicles through which it functions, while failing to recognise the motive power itself. It is recognising only "EVE" without "YOD". The "Word of Power" which sets us free is the whole Divine Name, and not one part of it without the other. It is the separation of its two portions, the Masculine and the Feminine, that has caused the long and weary pilgrimage of mankind through the ages.
The separation of the two elements of the Divine Name is not true in the Heart of Being, but Man, by reasoning only from the testimony of the outward senses, forcibly puts asunder what God forever joins together; and it is because the Bridegroom has thus been taken away that the children of the bride-chamber have been starved upon meagre fare, coarse and hardly earned, when they ought to have feasted with continual joy.
But the Great Marriage of Heaven and Earth at last takes place, and all nature joins in the song of exultation, a glorious epithalamium [a song celebrating the joining together in marriage — Ed.] whose cadences roll on through the ages, ever spreading into fresh harmonies as new themes evolve from the first grand wedding march which celebrates the eternal union of the Mystical Marriage.
When this union is realised by the individual as subsisting in himself, then the I AM becomes to him personally all that the Master said it would. He realises that it is in him a deathless principle and that though its mode of self-expression may alter, its essential Beingness, which is the I Myself consciousness in each of us, never can; and so this principle is found to be in us both Life and Resurrection. As Life, it never ceases; and as Resurrection, it is continually providing higher and higher forms for its expression of Itself, which is ourself.
No matter what may be our particular theory of the specific modus operandi [method of operation — Ed.] by which this renewal takes place, there can be no mistake about the principle; our physical theory of the Resurrection may be wrong, but the Law that Life will always provide a suitable form, for its self-expression is unchangeable and universal and must, therefore, be as true of the Life-Principle manifesting itself as the individuality which I AM, as in all its other modes of manifestation.
When we thus realise the true nature of the I AM that I AM — that is, the Beingness that I Myself AM — we discover that the whole principle of Being is in ourselves — not "Eve" only, but "YOD" also; and this being the case, we no longer have to go with our pitcher to draw temporary draughts from a well outside, for now we discover that the exhaustless spring of Living Water is within ourselves.
Now we can see why it is that except we believe in the I AM, we must perish in our sins, for "sin is the transgression of the Law" [1 John 3:4 — Ed.], and ignorant infraction of the Law will bring its penalty as certainly as wilful infraction. "Ignorantia legis nominem excusat" [Ignorance of the law is no excuse — Ed.] is a legal maxim which obtains throughout Nature, and the innocent child who ignorantly applies a light to a barrel of gunpowder will be as ruthlessly blown up as the anarchist who perishes in the perpetration of some hideous outrage. If, therefore, we ignorantly controvert the Law of our own Being, we must suffer the inevitable consequences by our failure to rise into that Life of Liberty and Joy which the full knowledge of the power of our I AM-ness must necessarily carry with it.
This is the meaning of the Scriptural saying, "His reward is with him and his work before him" (Isaiah 40:10 and 62:11). Ordinarily, we should suppose it would be the other way; but when we see that the possibilities of self-expansion are endless and depend on our intelligent study and work, and that at every step of the way we are bound to derive all present benefit from the degree of knowledge we are working up to, it becomes clear that the sacred text has kept the right order, and that always our reward is with us and our work before us; for the reward is the continually increasing joy and glory of perpetually unfolding Life.
All along the line our progress depends on working up to the knowledge we possess, for what we do not act up to we do not really believe; and the power which will overcome all difficulties is confidence in the Eternal Life-in-ourself, which is the individualised expression of the ONE I AM that spoke to Moses at the burning bush.
The Bible is the picture-book of the evolution of Man, and this particular picture of the "burning bush" is that of human individuality in its unity with the all-enveloping Fire of the Universal Spirit of Life. The "bush" represents "Wood", which under its Greek name of "hulé", we recognise as the generic term for "Matter"; and the "burning bush" thus signifies the union of Spirit and Matter into a single whole, that perfectness of manifested Being in which the lower principles of the individual are recognised as forming the vehicle for the concentrating of the All-originating Spirit. The "bush" still remains a bush, but it is a glorified bush sending forth a glorious aura of warmth and light, from the midst of which proceeds the creative voice of the I AM. This is the great truth symbolised by the revelation to Moses as he fed his father-in-law's flock in the wilderness and, as the same revelation comes to each of us now, the words of that other Prophet of whom Moses spoke become clear to us, and we see that by realising the true being of the I AM in ourselves, we grasp that principle which will put an end to our infraction of the Law, because it is the very Law itself forever becoming personal with our own personality.
This, then is the great truth we learn from the Name "Jehovah". As the Name is infinite, so also will be the expansions of its meaning; but this book not being infinite, I have been able only to touch on the broad outlines of its vastness; still, enough has been said to give the clue we were seeking, to elucidate the meaning of other forms of the Sacred Name.
But we have already found that the Great Name of the Old Testament is something very different from a merely personal appellation, and the same is true of the Great Name of the New Testament also. It is, indeed, the name of that Prophet of the I AM whom Moses predicted as completing the work which he had begun; but precisely because he is the Representative Man of all ages, his Name must represent all that constitutes Perfected Humanity.
And it is so with a Divine simplicity. It is the combination of the earthly name with the heavenly: Jesus, at the time a very common name among the Jews, and Christ, which is not a name but a description, "the Anointed One". Each name is the proper complement of the other, and together they indicate the sublime truth that the anointing of the Divine Spirit is the birthright of every human being, only awaiting our recognition of our true nature to show Itself with power. The carpenter — the workman with his everyday name — is the Christ; and the lesson to be learned is that the ONE I AM is in every man, and that that forming of Christ in us which St Paul speaks of is a personal development in accordance with recognisable laws inherent in every human being. If Christ is the Great Example, it must be as the Example of that which we have it in us to become, and not of something entirely foreign to our nature; and it is because of this community of nature that he is "the first-born among many brethren" [Rom. 8:29 — Ed.].
The space at my disposal will not allow me to enter here into the deeply important questions of the Nativity and the Resurrection. The Bible affirms them both, and they are necessary and logical results of that specialised and selective line of Evolution of which I have spoken [see Involution and Evolution — Ed.]; but to show the sequence of cause and effect by which this is brought about, and its dependence upon the initial Impersonal nature of the Universal Mind, is not to be done in a few pages.
If, however, I should meet with sufficient encouragement from the readers of the present volume, I hope to follow it up with another in which these topics will be discussed [see The Creative Process in the Individual — Ed.], and in the meanwhile we may learn from the generalisation contained in the Great Name of the New Testament that lesson of the Brotherhood of Humanity which the Master has impressed upon us in the words, "The King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me" (Matt. 25:40). The Name of Jesus Christ is, therefore, the proclamation of the inherent Divine nature of Man, with all its limitless possibilities, and is thus once more the statement of the Bible's initial proposition that Man is made in the image and likeness of God.
And these thoughts recall yet another of the Divine Names which teaches the same lesson: Immanuel, "God with us", or, as it might perhaps be rendered, "God in us", "Immanent God", the finding of God in ourselves, which is in exact accordance with the Master's teaching that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. This Name, which occurs in Isaiah 7:14, speaks for itself, and should be compared with the description given in Isaiah 9:6-7, which is the old familiar Christmas text, "Unto us a child is born", etc. Now, whoever the "us" may be, the prophet clearly speaks of the Wonderful Child as being born to them. They are the parents and He is their child. But in the description which follows, we are told equally clearly that He is "the Everlasting Father"; and the teaching of Jesus leaves us in no doubt that "the Father" is the Divine All-creating Spirit, which is therefore "the Father" of the "us" who are the parents of the child.
This lands us in a curious paradox. There can be no reasonable doubt that the word "us" is here spoken of human personalities, and that in the same breath the Divine Being who is spoken of as their Father is announced to them as their Child. We have therefore here a sequence of three generations: the Father of the parents, the "us" who are the parents, and the Child who is born to them; and since the Father of the parents and the Child of the parents is said to be the same Being, there is no avoiding the conclusion that the wonderful Child is his own Grandfather, and vice versa.
This is one of those sacred puzzles of which many instances occur in the Bible, and whose meaning is clear enough when we know the answer, and the purpose of which is to lead us to look for an answer which will put us in possession of the great truth which it is the purpose of all Scripture to teach us. The riddle propounded by Isaiah, "What is it which becomes its own grandson?" is substantially the same with which the Master posed the scribes when he asked them how David's son could at the same time be his Lord (Luke 20:41); and the identity of the question is apparent from the fact that in the passage in Isaiah we are told that this wonderful child shall sit on the throne of David.
A further description of him occurs in Isaiah 11:1, where we again find the same three stages — first Jesse, next the stem proceeding out of Jesse, and lastly the Rod or Branch growing out of the stem. Now Jesse is the father of David, and therefore "the Branch" is the same person regarding whom Isaiah and Jesus propounded their conundrums. Placing these four remarkable passages together, we get the following description of the wonderful child:
His name is Immanuel.
His father's name is David.
His grandfather's name is Jesse.
And He is His own grandfather and Lord over His father.
What is it that answers to this description? Again we find the solution of the enigma in the names. "Jesse" means "to be" or "he that is", which at once brings us back to all we have learned concerning the Universal I AM — the ONE Eternal Spirit which is "the Everlasting Father".
"David" means "the Beloved", or the man who realises his true relation to the Infinite Spirit; and the description of Daniel as a man greatly beloved and who had set his heart to understand (Daniel 10:11) shows that it is this set purpose of seeking to understand the nature of the Universal Spirit and the mode of our own relation to it that raises the individual to the position of David or "the Beloved".
This is in strict agreement with the Master's teaching to the woman of Samaria [John 4 — Ed.], that the Eternal Spirit, which is "the Father", seeks those who will worship, not according to this or that form, but in spirit and in truth, having a real knowledge of what it is they worship and of the true nature of the mental act they perform. "We know what we worship" is the mark by which Jesus distinguishes the worship of the "Israelites indeed", the "People of the I AM", from that of the Samaritans, though fully recognising the right intention of their worship of the "unknown God" [Compare John 4:22 with Acts 17:23 — Ed.].
It was after his successful wrestling with the Divine Being, and in consequence of his determination not to let go until it had been fully revealed, that Jacob obtained the name of "Israel" [see Jacob and Personal Struggle — Ed.].
Then from the individual's illuminated recognition of the Truth of Being — the discovery that he himself is the concentration of the Universal Spirit into particular personality — there necessarily arises the reproduction of the Universal Spirit in the Individual Mind. This is re-generation; that is to say, the second generating of the Divine UNIT as another Unity or manifestation of itself in the form of the Individual, in no way differing in nature from the original All-embracing Unit, but only in the mode of expression, having now become individual personality with all the attributes of personality.
On the plane of the Universal, the place of these more highly specialised attributes was held by a generic tendency towards life-givingness, increase, and beauty; and this generic tendency the reproduced Unit now follows up with the additional powers it has evolved by the attainment of self-recognising individuality.
The new personality thus generated may be considered as the child of the individual soul which gives birth to it; and since there is only ONE Spirit anywhere and everywhere, it can be only another mode of the original ONE. Consequently, the "Son" who is thus born to David, "the Beloved", is himself "the Everlasting Father", and thus the answer to the sacred puzzle is that the man who has really learned the inner meaning of the words "know thyself" discovers that the true I AM in himself is one with the Universal I AM, which is the root of all individualised being.
Therefore it is written, "to them gave He power to become the Sons of God, even to them that believe in His Name" [John 1:12 — Ed.] and the word rendered "power" may also be rendered as "right", so that this passage assures us both of our power and right to take possession of our inheritance as sons and daughters of the Almighty. Now mark well that this promise is not held forth as a reward for the acceptance of some theological speculation which conveys no real meaning to us and which by its very terms must be incapable of proof; but it is the natural and logical outcome of the initial proposition with which the Bible opens, that Spirit is the ONE and Only Source, Origin, and Substance of all things, a self-evident truth the contrary of which it is impossible to conceive.
What I here call "Spirit" you may, if you please, call "the Unknowable", or x, or denote it by a single stroke; the name or symbol we choose is quite immaterial, so long as we grasp the fact that the initial Originating Power must of necessity reproduce Itself all the way down the scale, no matter how different the forms under which it does so. In whatever way we may denote It, It is always the Great Expressor; and all that is, we ourselves included, is Its Expression of Itself, so that the whole teaching of Truth may be summed up in the words, "The Expressor and the Expressed are ONE".
Work out the problem in any way you will and you will never arrive at any other final result than this; and so we always come back to that fundamental axiom which Jesus announced as the supreme statement of the LAW. This is the great truth enshrined in every form of the Sacred Name; and therefore it is that every form of the Great Name, when rightly understood, is found to be "the Word of Power".
One of the most remarkable of these is found in Hosea 2:16: "And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call Me Ishi, and shalt call me no more Baali". What is the meaning of this change of Name? Realise that a name has a meaning, and it becomes clear that some radical change must be intended. But this cannot be any change in the Divine Being, for from first to last the Scripture bears emphatic testimony to the unchangeableness of "God". "I AM the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed", says the Old Testament (Malachi 3:6); "The Father of light with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning", says the New (James 1:17).
The change cannot, then, be in the nature of "God", and therefore cannot be a change in the Law by which that nature expresses itself; consequently, it can only be a change in the conditions under which the Law is working. Now this is precisely the sort of change that is spoken of. "Baali" means Lord, the master of a servant, the proprietor of a slave. "Ishi", on the other hand, means "Husband", and the change of name therefore indicates a change in the condition of some feminine element towards its correlative masculine element.
This corresponding change is stated in Isaiah 62:4: "Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken, neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate, but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah; for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married". The word "Hephzibah" is rendered in the margin "my delight", which is sufficiently significant, but its derivation is from the Semitic root "hafz", which in all its combinations always carries the idea of protection or guarding; and the name Hephzibah may therefore be more accurately rendered "a guarded one", thus at once recalling the words in which the New Testament describes those "who by the power of God are guarded through faith unto salvation" (1 Peter 1:5, R.V.).
Now the change indicated by these names is that of a female slave who is set free by her master and then married by him, and I think it would be impossible to hit upon a more accurate analogy for describing the emancipation of the soul from bondage and its establishment in a relation of confidence and love towards the Divine Universal Mind.
We must never forget the feminine nature of the soul relatively to the Universal Mind. Their Union produces the Wonderful Child who shall rule all things, and who is the Essential Male called in the Bible "the Son"; but the soul itself is, and always must be, feminine. Until she becomes illumined, the soul can only conceive of God as a master whom she is bound to obey, and hence she strives to keep in His good graces by sacrifices, ceremonies, and observances of all sorts — He is "Baali" and must be propitiated. But when the liberating light breaks upon her, she discovers that the Universal Principle has hitherto held this relation to her because she had conceived of It only in this way and had thus provided It only with such conditions as compelled It to exhibit Itself in this form.
Now she learns that these conditions are not imposed by the Universal Principle Itself, but that it must of necessity follow that line of expression which each particular individuality opens up for It; and when this is clearly perceived, with all the consequences that flow from it, the soul finds that she is no longer a slave but is in perfect Liberty, and that her relation to the Great Mind is that of a beloved wife, guarded, honoured, and treated on terms of equality.
This is the truth illustrated, as St Paul tells us, in the allegory of Sarah and Hagar. Hagar, the slave, is expelled, and Sarah, the Princess, takes her place. These two symbolical women, like the two "women" of Revelation, indicate two opposite conditions of the soul; and similarly their "sons", like the offspring of those two other "women", represent the respective powers which these two conditions of soul generate — the one living in the wilderness of secondary causes and becoming an archer — that is, relying upon the use of external means, not understanding the true nature of causation, and therefore dependent for his results upon just happening to make a good shot, and often making very bad ones — the other, like Isaac, the acknowledged heir of all the Father's possessions, assuming gradually more and more of his powers and responsibilities until, by the combined influence of natural growth and careful training, he at last attains that mature development which qualifies him to participate in the administration of the paternal authority.
The true relation of the individual soul to the Universal Principle could not be more perfectly depicted than by the names Ishi and Hephzibah. We have only to turn to any well-ordered family to see the force of the illustration. The respective spheres of the husband and wife as the heads of such a household are clearly defined. The husband provides the supplies and the wife distributes them, and each has that confidence in the other which renders any interference with one another's action quite unnecessary.
This is the precise analogue of the relation between the individual and the Universal Mind. The individual mind is not the creator of power, but the distributor of it, just as in physical science we realise that we do not create energy, but only change its form and direction. But exactly as the Universal store of Nature from which we draw physical energy does not dictate to us in what form, in what quantities, or for what purpose we shall use it, so in like manner the Universal principle does not dictate the specific conditions under which it is to be employed, but will manifest itself according to any conditions that we may provide for it by our own mental attitude; and therefore the only limitations to be laid upon our use of it are those arising from the Law of Love. Liberty without Love is Destruction, and Love without Liberty is Despair.
Just as in photography we need for the production of a perfect image the combined action of an accelerator and a restrainer [i.e. of the chemical reactions — Ed.], so to produce perfect images of the Divine strength, beauty, and gladness, we require a self-projecting force which is the full liberty of Creative Power, combined with a directing and restraining force which is the tenderness of wisdom and love; and so in the description of the Perfect Woman we read that in her mouth is the Law of Kindness. Hephzibah, the Perfect Woman, rules her household wisely in love and so applies the raw material, which she can draw from her husband's storehouse without stint, that, by her diligence and understanding, she converts it into all those varied forms of use and beauty which are indicated under the similitudes of domestic provision and merchandise in the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs.
What may be the nature of the Divine Self-consciousness in itself is a matter on which we can in no way profitably speculate; to do so is trying to analyse that which, as the starting-point of all else, must necessarily be incapable of analysis for the simple reason that there can be nothing before the First. But what we can realise is the mode in which we experience our own relation to the Originating Spirit, and this will be found to form a threefold recognition of it, corresponding with what I have said above. Our primary recognition of the Spirit is that of an All-embracing Universal Principle, a simple Unity; but gradually we shall come to find that our perception of this Unity contains enfolded in It a threefold relation to our personality which implies the existence of a corresponding threefold aspect in the Unity. We must always recollect that all we can know of God is our own consciousness of our relation to Him, and eventually we shall find that this relation is, first, generic, as to the Creating Spirit; secondly, specific, as forming a particular class of individuals holding a special relation to the Spirit; and thirdly, individual, as differentiated units of this particular class. Thus by a Law of Reciprocity, we realise "the Father" or Parent Spirit, "the Son" or Divine Ideal of Human Personality, and "the Holy Spirit" as the operation of the Original Spirit upon the individual, resulting from the individual's recognition of his relation to the Father in a Divine Sonship. Seen in this light, the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity ceases to be either a contradiction in terms or the conception of a limiting anthropomorphism, but on the contrary it is found to be the statement of the highest experiences of the human soul.
The Biblical account of creation represents the work as completed by the appearing of Man; that is to say, the evolutionary process culminates in the Creative Principle expressing Itself in a form differing from all lower ones in its capacity for reasoning. Now reasoning implies the use of words either spoken or employed mentally, for whether we wish to make the stages of an argument plain to another or to ourselves, it can only be done by putting the sequence of cause and effect into words.
The first idea suggested by the principle of Speech is, therefore, that of individual intelligence, and next, as following from this, we get the idea of expressing individual will; then, as we begin to realise the reciprocal relation between the Universal Mind and the individual mind, which necessarily results from the latter being an evolution from the former, our conception of intelligence and volition becomes extended from the individual to the Universal, and we see that because these qualities exist in human personality, they must exist in some more generalised mode in that Universal Mind, of which the individual mind is a more specialised reproduction; and so we arrive at the result that the Speech-principle is the highest expression of the Divine Wisdom, Power, and Love, whose combined action produces what we call Creation.
In this sense, then, the Bible attributes the creation of the world to the Divine Word, and it therefore rightly says that "In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with God, and The Word was God", and that without The Word "was not anything made that was made"; and from this commencement, the natural sequence of evolution brings us to the crowning result in the manifestation of The Word as Man, at first ignorant of his Divine origin, but nevertheless containing all the potentialities which the recognition of his true nature as the image of God will enable him to develop. And when at length this recognition comes to anyone, he arises and returns to "The Father", and in the discovery of his true relation to the Divine Mind finds that he also is a child of the Almighty and can speak "the Word of Power".
He may have been the prodigal who has wasted his substance, or the respectable brother who thought that only limited supplies were doled out to him; but as soon as the truth dawns upon him, he realises the meaning of the words, "Son, thou art always with Me, and all that I have is thine" [Luke 15:31 — Ed.]. In Its Third aspect as "the Word", the Universal Principle becomes specialised. In its earlier modes it is the Life-Principle working by a Law of Averages, and thus maintaining the race as a whole, but not providing special accommodation for the individual. And it is inconceivable that the Cosmic Power, as such, should ever pass beyond what we may call the administration of the world in globo [i.e. in a global sense — Ed.], for to suppose It doing so would involve the self-contradiction of the Universal acting on the plane of the Particular without becoming the particular; and it is precisely by becoming the particular, or by evolution into individual minds, that it carries on the work beyond the stage at which things are governed by a mere Law of Averages.
It is thus that we become "fellow-workers with God" and that "the Father" is represented as inviting His sons to work in His vineyard. By recognition of his own true place in the scheme of evolution, Man learns that his function is to carry on the work which has been begun in the Universal to still further applications in the Particular, thus affording the key to the Master's words, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work" [John 5:17 — Ed.]; and the instrument by which the instructed man does this is his knowledge of the Sacred Name in its Threefold significance.