our true position in the scale of the great Creative and Progressive Purpose,—­but in the days of His coming men would not listen,—­nor will they listen even now.  They say with their mouths, but they do not believe with their hearts, that He rose from the dead,—­and they cannot understand that, as a matter of fact, He never died. seeing that death for Him (as for all who have mastered the inward constitution and commingling of the elements) was impossible.  His real life was not injured or affected by the agony on the Cross, or by His three days’ entombment; the one was a torture to His physical frame, which to the limited perception of those who watched Him ‘die,’ as they thought, appeared like a dissolution of the whole Man,—­the other was the mere rest and silence necessary for what is called the ‘miracle’ of the Resurrection, but which was simply the natural rising of the same Body, the atoms of which were re-invested and made immortal by the imperishable Spirit which owned and held them in being.  The whole life and so-called ‘death’ of Christ was and is a great symbolic lesson to mankind of the infinite power of that within us which we call soul,—­but which we may perhaps in these scientific days term an eternal radio-activity,—­capable of exhaustless energy and of readjustment to varying conditions.  Life is all Life.  There is no such thing as Death in its composition,—­ and the intelligent comprehension of its endless ways and methods of change and expression, is the Secret of the Universe.

It appears to be generally accepted that we are not to know this Secret,—­that it is too vast and deep for our limited capacities,—­ and that even if we did know it, it would be of no use to us, as we are bound hard and fast by certain natural and elemental laws over which we have no control.  Old truisms are re-stated and violently asserted—­namely, that our business is merely to be born, to live, breed and arrange things as well as we can for those who come after us, and then to die, and there an end,—­a stupid round of existence not one whit higher than that of the silkworm.  Is it for such a monotonous, commonplace way of life and purpose as this, that humanity has been endowed with ‘infinite faculty’?  Is it for such poor aims and ends as these that we are told in the legended account of the beginning of things, to ‘Replenish the earth and subdue it’?  There is great meaning in that command—­’Subdue it!’ The business of each one of us who has come into the knowledge and possession of his or her own Soul, is to ‘subdue’ the earth,—­that is, to hold it and all it contains under subjection,—­not to allow Its forces, whether interior or exterior, to subdue the Soul.  But it may perhaps be said:—­“We do not yet understand all the forces with which we have to contend, and in this way they master us.”  That may be so,—­but if it is so with any of you, it is quite your own fault.  Your own fault, I say,—­for there is no power, human or divine, that compels you to remain in ignorance.  Each one of you has a master—­talisman and key to all locked doors.  No State education can do for you what you might do for yourselves, if you only had the will.  It is your own choice entirely if you elect to live in subjection to the earth, instead of placing the earth under subjection to your dominance.