d we then wonder that a just and
loving God could permit such and such things. We wonder at what we term
the "strange, inscrutable dispensations of Providence," when all is of
our own making. We can be our own best friends or we can be our own
worst enemies; and the only real enemy one can ever have is the self,
the very self.

It is a well-known fact in the scientific world that the great work in
the process of evolution is the gradual advancing from the lower to the
higher, from the coarser to the finer, or, in other words, from the
coarser material to the finer spiritual; and this higher
spiritualization of life is the great work before us all. All pass
ultimately over the same road in general, some more rapidly, some more
slowly. The ultimate destiny of all is the higher life, the finding of
the higher self; and to this we are either led or we are pushed,--led,
by recognizing and coming into harmony with the higher laws of our
being, or pushed, through their violation, and hence through experience,
through suffering, and at times through bitter suffering, until through
this very agency we learn the laws and come into harmony with them, so
that we thus see the economy, the blessedness of even error, shame, and
suffering itself, in that, if we are not wise enough to go voluntarily
and of our own accord, it all the more quickly brings us to our true,
our higher selves.

Moreover, whatever is evolved must as surely first be involved. We
cannot conceive even of an evolution without first an involution; and,
if this is true, we cannot conclude otherwise than that all that will
ever be brought forth through the process of evolution is already
within, all the God possibilities of the human soul are now, at this
very moment, latent within. This being true, the process of evolution
need not, as is many times supposed, take aeons or even ages for its
accomplishment; for the process is wonderfully accelerated when we have
grasped and when we have commenced to actualize the reality of that
mighty precept, Know thyself.

It is possible, through an intelligent understanding of the laws of the
higher life, to advance in the spiritual awakening and unfoldment even
in a single year more than one otherwise would through a whole lifetime,
or more in a single day or even hour than in an entire year or series of
years otherwise.

This higher spiritualization of life is certainly what the Master had in
mind when he said, It is as har