e of the Spirit never had or could
have any existence, and therefore it creates the sense of inharmony,
opposition, and separation. Of course this is only relatively to ourselves,
for we cannot create eternal principles. They are the Being of God; and as
I have already shown these great Principles of the Affirmative may be
summed up in the two words Love and Beauty--Love in essence and Beauty in
manifestation; but since we can only live from the standpoint of our own
consciousness we can make a false creation built upon the idea of opposites
to the all-creating Love and Beauty, which false creation with all its
accompaniments of limitation, sin, sorrow, sickness, and death, must
necessarily be real to us until we perceive that these things were not
created by God, the Spirit of the Affirmative, but by our own inversion of
our true relation to the All-creating Being.

When, then, we view the matter in this light the Offering once for all of
the Divine Sacrifice for the sin of the whole world is seen not to be a
mere ecclesiastical dogma having no relation of cause and effect, but to be
the highest application of the same principle of cause and effect by which
the whole creation, ourselves included, has been brought into existence--
the Self-Contemplation of Spirit producing corresponding manifestation,
only now working on the level of Individual Personality.

As I have shown at the beginning of this book the cosmic manifestation of
principles is not sufficient to bring out all that there is in them. To do
this their action must be specialized by the introduction of the Personal
Factor. They are represented by the Pillar Jachin, but it must be
equilibriated by the Pillar Boaz, Law and Personality the two Pillars of
the Universe; and in the One Offering we have the supreme combination of
these two principles, the highest specialization of Law by the highest
power of Personality. These are eternal principles, and therefore we are
told that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world; and because
"thoughts are things" this supreme manifestation of the creative
interaction of Law and Personality was bound eventually to be manifested in
concrete action in the world conditioned by time and space; and so it was
that the supreme manifestation of the Love of God to meet the supreme need
of Man took place. The history of the Jewish nation is the history of the
working of the law of cause and effect, under the guidance of the