ng at a thorough understanding of it. Bring its
searching light to bear upon all your habits, your actions, your speech and
intercourse with others, your every secret thought and desire. As you
persevere in this course, the divine Love will become more and more
perfectly revealed to you, and your own shortcomings will stand out in more
and more vivid contrast, spurring you on to renewed endeavor; and having
once caught a glimpse of the incomparable majesty of that imperishable
principle, you will never again rest in your weakness, your selfishness,
your imperfection, but will pursue that Love until you have relinquished
every discordant element, and have brought yourself into perfect harmony
with it. And that state of inward harmony is spiritual power. Take also
other spiritual principles, such as Purity and Compassion, and apply them
in the same way, and, so exacting is Truth, you will be able to make no
stay, no resting-place until the inmost garment of your soul is bereft of
every stain, and your heart has become incapable of any hard, condemnatory,
and pitiless impulse.

Only in so far as you understand, realize, and rely upon, these principles,
will you acquire spiritual power, and that power will be manifested in and
through you in the form of increasing dispassion, patience and equanimity.

Dispassion argues superior self-control; sublime patience is the very
hall-mark of divine knowledge, and to retain an unbroken calm amid all the
duties and distractions of life, marks off the man of power. "It is easy in
the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live
after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps
with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

Some mystics hold that perfection in dispassion is the source of that power
by which miracles (so-called) are performed, and truly he who has gained
such perfect control of all his interior forces that no shock, however
great, can for one moment unbalance him, must be capable of guiding and
directing those forces with a master-hand.

To grow in self-control, in patience, in equanimity, is to grow in strength
and power; and you can only thus grow by focusing your consciousness upon a
principle. As a child, after making many and vigorous attempts to walk
unaided, at last succeeds, after numerous falls, in accomplishing this, so
you must enter the way of power by first attempting to stand alone. Break
away fr