and preparatory, “the schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ,” our own Divine spirit, or higher personality.  To conceive the difference between these two states is to apprehend exactly what is here meant by the false, temporal, and the true, eternal personality, and the sense in which the word personality is here intended to be understood.  We do not know whether, when that great change has come over us, when that great work* of our lives has been accomplished—­here or hereafter—­we shall or shall not retain a sense of identity with our past, and forever discarded selves.  In philosophical parlance, the “matter” will have gone, and the very “form” will have been changed.  Our transcendental identity with the ‘A’ or ‘B’ that now is** must depend on that question, already disclaimed in this paper, whether the Divine spirit is our originally central essential being, or is an hypostasis.  Now, being “under the law” implies that we do not act directly from our own will, but indirectly, that is, in willing obedience to another will.

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* The “great work,” so often mentioned by the hermetic philosophers, and
which is exactly typified by the operation of alchemy, the conversion of
the base metals to gold, is now well understood to refer to the
analogous spiritual conversion.   There is also good reason to believe
that the material process was a real one.

** “A person may have won his immortal life, and remained the same inner self he was on earth, through eternity; but this does not imply necessarily that he must either remain the Mr. Smith or Brown he was on earth, or lose his individuality.”—­Isis Unveiled, vol. 1. p. 316. ----------

The will from which we should naturally act—­our own will—­is of course to be understood not as mere volition, but as our nature—­our “ruling love,” which makes such and such things agreeable to us, and others the reverse.  As “under the law,” this nature is kept in suspension, and because it is suspended only as to its activity and manifestation, and by no means abrogated, is the law—­the substitution of a foreign will—­ necessary for us.  Our own will or nature is still central; that which we obey by effort and resistance to ourselves is more circumferential or hypostatic.  Constancy in this obedience and resistance tends to draw the circumferential will more and more to the centre, till there ensues that “explosion,” as St. Martin called it, by which our natural will is for ever dispersed and annihilated by contact with the divine, and the latter henceforth becomes our very own.  Thus has “the schoolmaster” brought us unto “Christ,” and if by “Christ” we understand no historically divine individual, but the logos, word, or manifestation of God in us—­then we have, I believe, the essential truth that was taught in the Vedanta, by Kapila, by Buddha, by Confucius, by Plato, and by Jesus.  There is another presentation of possibly the same truth, for a reference to which I am indebted