H OF DEVOTION]

_The Response to Devotion._--In Fig. 17 we see the result of his
thought--the response of the LOGOS to the appeal made to Him, the truth
which underlies the highest and best part of the persistent belief in an
answer to prayer. It needs a few words of explanation. On every plane of
His solar system our LOGOS pours forth His light, His power, His life,
and naturally it is on the higher planes that this outpouring of divine
strength can be given most fully. The descent from each plane to that
next below it means an almost paralysing limitation--a limitation
entirely incomprehensible except to those who have experienced the
higher possibilities of human consciousness. Thus the divine life flows
forth with incomparably greater fulness on the mental plane than on the
astral; and yet even its glory at the mental level is ineffably
transcended by that of the buddhic plane. Normally each of these mighty
waves of influence spreads about its appropriate plane--horizontally, as
it were--but it does not pass into the obscuration of a plane lower than
that for which it was originally intended.

[Illustration: FIG. 17. RESPONSE TO DEVOTION]

Yet there are conditions under which the grace and strength peculiar to
a higher plane may in a measure be brought down to a lower one, and may
spread abroad there with wonderful effect. This seems to be possible
only when a special channel is for the moment opened; and that work must
be done from below and by the effort of man. It has before been
explained that whenever a man's thought or feeling is selfish, the
energy which it produces moves in a close curve, and thus inevitably
returns and expends itself upon its own level; but when the thought or
feeling is absolutely unselfish, its energy rushes forth in an open
curve, and thus does _not_ return in the ordinary sense, but pierces
through into the plane above, because only in that higher condition,
with its additional dimension, can it find room for its expansion. But
in thus breaking through, such a thought or feeling holds open a door
(to speak symbolically) of dimension equivalent to its own diameter, and
thus furnishes the requisite channel through which the divine force
appropriate to the higher plane can pour itself into the lower with
marvellous results, not only for the thinker but for others. An attempt
is made in Fig. 17 to symbolise this, and to indicate the great truth
that an infinite flood of the higher type of