nd our
human understanding, whatever may be our thoughts, our theories
regarding it. The whole order of life as we see it, all the world of
Nature about us, and we must believe the order of human life, is a
gradual evolving from the lower to the higher, from the cruder to the
finer. The purpose of life is unquestionably unfoldment, growth,
advancement--likewise the evolving from the lower and the coarser to the
higher and the finer.

The higher insights and powers of the soul, always potential within,
become of value only as they are realised and used. Evolution implies
always involution. The substance of all we shall ever attain or be, is
within us now, waiting for realisation and thereby expression. The soul
carries its own keys to all wisdom and to all valuable and usable
power.

It was that highly illumined seer, Emanuel Swedenborg, who said: "Every
created thing is in itself inanimate and dead, but it is animated and
caused to live by this, that the Divine is in it and that it exists in
and from the Divine." Again: "The universal end of creation is that
there should be an external union of the Creator with the created
universe; and this would not be possible unless there were beings in
whom His Divine might be present as if in itself; thus in whom it might
dwell and abide. To be His abode, they must receive His love and wisdom
by a power which seems to be their own; thus, must lift themselves up to
the Creator as if by their own power, and unite themselves with Him.
Without this mutual action no union would be possible." And again:
"Every one who duly considers the matter may know that the body does not
think, because it is material, but the soul, because it is spiritual.
All the rational life, therefore, which appears in the body belongs to
the spirit, for the matter of the body is annexed, and, as it were,
joined to the spirit, in order that the latter may live and perform uses
in the natural world.... Since everything which lives in the body, and
acts and feels by virtue of that life, belongs to the spirit alone, it
follows that the spirit is the real man; or, what comes to the same
thing, man himself is a spirit, in a form similar to that of his body."

Spirit being the real man, it follows that the great, central fact of
all experience, of all human life, is the coming into a conscious, vital
realisation of our source, of our real being, in other words, of our
essential oneness with the spirit of Infinite L