the way that will bring out the infinite possibilities of good which the Law, rightly employed, contains.  If it were possible to do this by an automatic Law, doubtless the Creative Wisdom would have made us so.  This is why St. Paul says:  “If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law” (Gal. iii, 21).  Note the words “a law given,” that is to say, imposed by external command; but it could not be.  The laws of the Universe are Cosmic.  In themselves they are impersonal, and the infinite possibilities contained in them, can only be brought out by the co-operation of the Personal Factor.  It is only as we grasp the true relation between Jachin and Boaz, that we can enter into the Temple either of our own Individuality, or of the boundless Universe in which we live.  The reason, therefore, why God did not make us mechanically incapable of wrong thinking, is simply because the very idea involves a contradiction in terms, which negatives all possibility of Creation.  The conception lands us in a reductio ad absurdum.

Therefore, we are free to use our powers of Personality as we will, only we must take the consequences.  Now one error we are all very apt to fall into, is the mistaken use of the Will.  Its proper function is to keep our other faculties in line with the Law, and thus enable us to specialize it; but many people seem to think that by force of will they can somehow manage to coerce the Law; in other words, that by force of will they can sow a seed of one kind and make it bear fruit of another.  The Spirit of Life seeks to express itself in our individuality, through the three avenues of reason, feeling, and will; but as in the Masonic legend of the murder of Hiram Abif, the architect of Solomon’s Temple, it is beaten back on the side of reasoning, by the plummet of a logic based on false premises; on the side of feeling, by the level of conventional ideas; and on the side of will, by the hammer of a short-sighted self-will, which gives the finishing blow; and it is not until the true perception of the Principle of Life is resurrected within us, that the Temple can be completed according to the true plan.

It should be remembered that the will is not the Creative Faculty in us.  It is the faculty of Conception that is the creative agent, and the business of the Will is to keep that faculty in the right direction, which will be determined by an enlightened Reason.  Conception creates ideas which are the seed, that, in due time, will produce fruit after its own kind.  In a broad sense we may call it the Imaging Faculty, only we must not suppose that this necessarily implies the visualizing of mental images, which is only a subsidiary mode of using this faculty.  An “immaculate conception” is therefore the only means by which the New Liberated Man can be born in each of us.  The sequence is always the same.  The Will holds the Conception