far from apprehending this, and
for the most part has no perception of spiritual causation. Where some
dim perception of spiritual causation is beginning to emerge, it is very
frequently inverted, because people only apprehend it as giving them an
additional power of exercising compulsion over their fellow-men, and
thus depriving them of that individuality which it is the one purpose of
Evolution to develop. This is because people do not look beyond the
three lower principles of life, those principles which animals have in
common with man; and consequently the higher principle of mind, which
distinguishes man, is brought down to the lower level, so that the man
is distinguished from the beast only by the possession of intellectual
faculties, which by their perversion make him not merely a beast, but a
devil of a beast. Therefore the recognition of psychic powers, when not
safeguarded by the higher principles of Truth, plunges man even deeper
into darkness than does a simple materialism; and so the two go hand in
hand on the downward path. There is abundant evidence that this is
increasingly the case at the present day; and therefore it is that the
Bible Promises culminate in the Promise of the return of Him who offered
himself in order to lay the foundation of Peace. As I have said before,
we must either take the Bible as a whole, or reject it entirely. We
cannot pick and choose what pleases us, and refuse what does not. No
legal document could be treated in this way; and in like manner the
Bible is one great whole, or else it is just--"skittles."

Therefore, if that Divine "Word" was manifested to save the world from
destruction, by opening the way for the _individual_ through recognition
of his true relation to God, then it is only a reasonable carrying out
of the same thought that, when the bulk of mankind fail to realize the
beneficent use of these powers, and persist in using them invertedly,
the same Being should again appear to save the race from utter
self-destruction, but not by the same method, for that would be
impossible.

The individual method is that of individual self-recognition in the
light of Truth; but that cannot be _forced_ upon any one. The headlong
downward career of the race as a whole cannot therefore be stopped _vi
et armis_, and this can only be done by first letting it have a bitter
experience of what intellect, depraved to the service of the Beast in
Man, leads to, and then forcibly restrai