keeping) has gone to ruin, overmastered omnipotence, and destroyed itself, that then the deathless Principle or Soul may escape from it.
But God has no need to kill a man in order to draw him to Himself, for God Himself is the Life. He is at once the centre and circumference of being. The good we think and do, the virtue we call manhood, — these qualities are real, and reflect God. It is the evil we do and say, the opposite of Life and Love, which is unreal. The notion that God lives in matter is pantheistic. God is not the author of an evil mind. Indeed, evil is not Mind. We are to learn that evil is the awful deception and unreality of being. Without this lesson we equally lose sight of the perfect Father and of the Divine Principle governing man.
Befogged in error (the error of believing that matter can be intelligent for good or evil) we can catch unbiassed glimpses of God only as the mists disperse, or as they melt into such thinness that we can perceive the divine image in some word or deed that indicates the true idea — the supremacy and reality of good, the nothingness and unreality of evil. The Scriptures say: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter; fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man” (the word duty not being in the Hebrew). Well does Myers sing: —
| Therefore, O Lord, I will not fail or falter. |
| Nay, but I ask it, — nay, but I desire: |
| Lay on my lips Thine embers of the altar, |
| Seal with the sting and furnish with the fire. |
The phrase mortal man is really a solecism, for man is immortal, and Truth pierces the error of mortals as a
