The Directing Power of the Word is inherent in the Word, and we cannot alter it. It is the Law OF the Law, and so, like any other law, it cannot be broken, but its action can be inverted.  We cannot deprive the Word of its efficacy, but our denial of it as the Word of Expansion is equivalent to an affirmation of it as the Word of Contraction, and so the Law acts towards us as a Limitation.  But the fault is not in the Law, but in the way we use the Word.  Now if the reader grasps this, he will see that the less we trouble ourselves about what appear to us to be the visible and calculable causes of things, the freer we must become from the burden of anxiety; and as we advance step by step to a clearer recognition of the true order of Cause and Effect, so all intermediate causes will fade from our view.  Only the two extremes of the sequence of Cause and Effect will remain in sight.  First Cause, moving as the Word, starting a sequence, and the desired result terminating it, as the Word taking Form in Fact.  The intermediate links in the chain will be there, but they will be seen as effects, not causes.  The wider the generalization we thus make, the less we shall need to trouble about particulars, knowing that they will form themselves by the natural action of the Law; and the widest generalization is therefore, to state not what we want to have, but what we want to be.  The only reason we ever want to have anything, is because we think it will help us to be something—­something more than we are now; so that the “having” is only a link in the chain of secondary causes, and may therefore be left out of consideration, for it will come of itself through the natural workings of the Law, set in operation by the Word as First Cause.  This principle is set forth in the statement of the Divine Name given to Moses (Ex. iii, 13-14).  The Name is simply “I AM”—­it is Being, not having—­the having follows as a natural consequence of the Being; and if it be true that we are made in the likeness and image of God, that is to say on the same Principle, then what is the Law of the Divine nature must be the Law of ours also—­and as we awake to this we become “partakers of the Divine Nature” (2 Pet. i, 4).

What we really want, therefore, is to be something—­something more than we are now; and this is quite right.  It is our consciousness of the continually generative impulse of the Eternal Living Spirit, which is the fons et origo (fountain and source) of all differentiated life working within us for ever more and more perfect individual expression of all that is in Itself.  If the reader remembers what I said at the beginning of this book about the Verb Substantive of Being, he will see that each of us is in truth a “Word (verbum) of God.”  Let not the orthodox reader be shocked at this—­I am only saying what the Bible does.  Look up the following passages:  “I will write upon him the name of my God and