and electricity.  We take the immutability of the Law as the basis of these sciences, but we do not expect the immutable Law to produce a photographic apparatus, or an electric train, without the intervention of a reasoning and selective power which specializes the fundamental general Law into particular uses.  We do not look to the Law for those powers of reasoning and selection, through which we make it work in all the highly complex ways of our ordinary commercial applications of it—­we know better than that.  We look to Personality for this.  In our every-day pursuits we always act on the maxim that “Nature unaided fails,” and that the infinite possibilities stored up in the Law, can only be brought to light by a power of reasoning and selection working through the Law.  This co-operation of the Personal with the Impersonal is the Law of the Law; and since the Law is unchangeable, this Law of the Law must also be unchangeable, and must therefore apply on all planes, and through all time—­the Law, that without co-operation of the Law and the Word nothing can be brought into existence, from a solar system to a pin; while on the other hand there is no limit to what can be got out of the Law by the operation of the Word.

If the student will look at the Bible Promises in the light of the general principles, he will find that they are perfectly logical, whether from the metaphysical or from the scientific standpoint, and that their working is only from the same Law through which all scientific developments are made.  If this be apprehended it will be clear that the Word of Faith is not “trying to make ourselves believe what we know is not true,” but, as St. Paul puts it, it is “giving substance to things not yet seen” (Heb. xi, 1, R.V.).

CHAPTER VII

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY

I think most of my readers will agree with me, that the greatest of all the promises is that of the overcoming of death, for, as the greater includes the less, the power which can do that can do anything else.  We think that there are only two things that are certain in this world—­death and taxes, and no doubt, under the ordinary past conditions, this is quite true; but the question is:  are they really inherent in the essential nature of things; or are they not the outcome of our past limited, and often inverted modes of Thought?  The teaching of the Bible is that they are the latter.  On the subject of taxes the Master says:  “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Matth. xxii, 21), but on another occasion he said that the children of the King were not liable to taxation (Matth. xvii, 26).  However we may leave the “taxes” alone for the present, with the remark that their resemblance to death consists in both being, under present conditions, regarded as compulsory.  Under other conditions, however, we can well imagine “taxes” disappearing in a unity of thought which would merge them in co-operation and voluntary contribution; and it appears to me quite possible for death to disappear in like manner.