if I must not too literally insist on it, I may still resort as a convenient figure.  To transcend it, he must advance by the discrete degree.  No simple “bettering” of the ordinary self, which leaves it alive, as the focus—­the French word “foyer” is the more expressive—­of his thoughts and actions; not even that identification with higher interests in the world’s plane just spoken of, is, or can progressively become, in the least adequate to the realization of his Divine ideal.  This “bettering” of our present nature, it alone being recognized as essential, albeit capable of “improvement,” is a commonplace, and to use a now familiar term a “Philistine,” conception.  It is the substitution of the continuous for the discrete degree.  It is a compromise with our dear old familiar selves.  “And Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; but everything that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.”  We know how little acceptable that compromise was to the God of Israel; and no illustration can be more apt than this narrative, which we may well, as we would fain, believe to be rather typical than historical.  Typical of that indiscriminate and radical sacrifice, or “vastation,” of our lower nature, which is insisted upon as the one thing needful by all, or nearly all,* the great religions of the world.  No language could seem more purposely chosen to indicate that it is the individual nature itself, and not merely its accidental evils, that has to be abandoned and annihilated.  It is not denied that what was spared was good; there is no suggestion of a universal infection of physical or moral evil; it is simply that what is good and useful relatively to a lower state of being must perish with it if the latter is to make way for something better.  And the illustration is the more suitable in that the purpose of this paper is not ethical, but points to a metaphysical conclusion, though without any attempt at metaphysical exposition.  There is no question here of moral distinctions; they are neither denied nor affirmed.  According to the highest moral standard, ‘A’ may be a most virtuous and estimable person.  According to the lowest, ‘B’ may be exactly the reverse.  The moral interval between the two is within what I have called, following Swedenborg, the “continuous degree.”  And perhaps the distinction can be still better expressed by another reference to that Book which we theosophical students do not less regard, because we are disposed to protest against all exclusive pretensions of religious systems.

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* Of the higher religious teachings of Mohammedanism I know next to
nothing, and therefore cannot say if it should be excepted from the
statement.
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The good man who has, however, not yet attained his “son-ship of God” is “under the law”—­that moral law which is educational