rament, for it is more than the magnetisation previously explained,
though this also is wrought. We have here a special instance of a
general law.

By the occultist, a visible thing is regarded as the last, the physical,
expression of an invisible truth. Everything is the physical expression
of a thought. An object is but an idea externalised and densified. All
the objects in the world are Divine ideas expressed in physical matter.
That being so, the reality of the object does not lie in the outer form
but in the inner life, in the idea that has shaped and moulded the
matter into an expression of itself. In the higher worlds, the matter
being very subtle and plastic, shapes itself very swiftly to the idea,
and changes form as the thought changes. As matter becomes denser,
heavier, it changes form less readily, more slowly, until, in the
physical world, the changes are at their slowest in consequence of the
resistance of the dense matter of which the physical world is composed.
Let sufficient time be given, however, and even this heavy matter
changes under the pressure of the ensouling idea, as may be seen by the
graving on the face of the expressions of habitual thoughts and
emotions.

This is the truth which underlies what is called the doctrine of
Transubstantiation, so extraordinarily misunderstood by the ordinary
Protestant. But such is the fate of occult truths when they are
presented to the ignorant. The "substance" that is changed is the idea
which makes a thing to be what it is; "bread" is not mere flour and
water; the idea which governs the mixing, the manipulation, of the flour
and water, that is the "substance" which makes it "bread," and the flour
and the water are what are technically called the "accidents," the
arrangements of matter that give form to the idea. With a different
idea, or substance, flour and water would take a different form, as
indeed they do when assimilated by the body. So also chemists have
discovered that the same kind and the same number of chemical atoms may
be arranged in different ways and thus become entirely different things
in their properties, though the materials are unchanged; such "isomeric
compounds" are among the most interesting of modern chemical
discoveries; the arrangement of similar atoms under different ideas
gives different bodies.

What, then, is this change of substance in the materials used in the
Eucharist? The idea that makes the object has been changed; in