he Bible teaching on this important subject.

The professed object of the Bible is to establish and extend "the
Kingdom of God" throughout the world, and this can be done only by
repeating the process from one individual to another, until the whole
mass is leavened. It is thus an individual process; and, as we have seen
in the last chapter, God is Spirit and Spirit is Life, and, therefore,
the expansion of "the Kingdom of God" means the expansion of the
principle of Life in each individual. Now Life, to be life at all, must
be Affirmative. It is Life in virtue of what it is, and not in virtue of
what it is not. The quantity of life in any particular case may be very
small; but, however small the amount, the quality is always the same:
it is the quality of Being, the quality of Livingness, and not its
absence, that makes it what it is. The distinctive character of Life,
therefore, is that it is Positive and not Negative; and every degree of
negativeness, that is, every limitation, is ultimately traceable to
deficiency of Life-power.

Limitations surround us because we believe in our inability to do what
we desire. Whenever we say "I cannot" we are brought up sharp by a
limitation, and we cease to exercise our thought-power in that direction
because we believe ourselves stopped by a blank wall of impossibility;
and whenever this occurs we are subjected to bondage. The ideal of
perfect Liberty is the converse of all this, and follows a sequence
which does not thus lead us into a _cul-de-sac_. This sequence consists
of the three affirmations: I am--therefore I can--therefore I will; and
this last affirmation results in the projection of our powers, whether
interior or external, to the accomplishment of the desired object. But
this last affirmation has its root in the first; and it is because we
recognise the Affirmative nature of the Life that is in us, or rather of
the Life which we are, that the power to will or to act positively has
any existence; and, therefore, the extent of our power to will and to
act positively and with effect, is exactly measured by our perception of
the depth and livingness of our own Being. Hence the more fully we learn
to affirm that, the greater power we are able to exercise.

Now the ideal of perfect Liberty is the entire absence of all
limitation, and to have no limitation in Being is to be co-extensive
with All-Being. We are all grammarians enough to know that the use of a
predicate is to