In Hosea ii. 16 we find this remarkable statement:--"And it shall
be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call Me Ishi, and
shalt no more call Me Baali"; and with this we may couple the
statement in Isaiah lxii. 4:--"Thou shalt be called Hephzibah,
and thy land Beulah; for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy
land shall be married."
In both these passages we find a change of name; and since a name
stands for something which corresponds to it, and in truth only
amounts to a succinct description, the fact indicated in these
texts is a change of condition answering to the change of name.
Now the change from Baali to Ishi indicates an important
alteration in the relation between the Divine Being and the
worshipper; but since the Divine Being cannot change, the altered
relation must result from a change in the stand-point of the
worshipper: and this can only come from a new mode of looking at
the Divine, that is, from a new order of thought regarding it.
Baali means Lord, and Ishi means husband, and so the change in
relation is that of a female slave who is liberated and married
to her former master. We could not have a more perfect analogy.
Relatively to the Universal Spirit the individual soul is
esoterically feminine, as I have pointed out in "Bible Mystery
and Bible Meaning," because its function is that of the receptive
and formative. This is necessarily inherent in the nature of the
creative process. But the individual's development as the
specializing medium of the Universal Spirit will depend entirely
upon his own conception of his relation to it. So long as he only
regards it as an arbitrary power, a sort of slave owner, he will
find himself in the position of a slave driven by an inscrutable
force, he knows not whither or for what purpose. He may worship
such a God, but his worship is only the worship of fear and
ignorance, and there is no personal interest in the matter except
to escape some dreaded punishment. Such a worshipper would gladly
escape from his divinity, and his worship, when analyzed, will be
found to be little else than disguised hatred. This is the
natural result of a worship based upon UNEXPLAINED traditions
instead of intelligible principles, and is the very opposite of
that worship in Spirit and in truth which Jesus speaks of as the
true worship.
But when the light begins to break in upon us, all this becomes
changed. We see that a system of terrorism cannot give expression
to the Divine Spirit, and we realize the truth of St. Paul's
words, "He hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power,
and of love, and of a sound mind." As the true nature of the
relation between the individual mind and the Universal Mind
becomes clearer, we find it to be one of mutual action and
re-action, a perfect reciprocity which cannot be better
symbolized than by the relation between an affectionate husband
and wife. Everything is done from love and nothing from
compulsion, there is perfect confidence on both sides, and both
are equally indispensable to each other. It is simply the
carrying out of the fundamental maxim that the Universal cannot
act on the plane of the Particular except through the Particular;
only this philosophical axiom develops into a warm living
intercourse.
Now this is the position of the soul which is indicated by the
name Hephzibah. In common with all other words derived from the
Semitic root "hafz" it implies the idea of guarding, just as in
the East a hasfiz is one who guards the letter of the Koran by
having the whole book by heart, and in many similar expressions.
Hephzibah may therefore be translated as "a guarded one," thus
recalling the New Testament description of those who are "guarded
into salvation." It is precisely this conception of being guarded
by a superior power that distinguishes the worship of Ishi from
that of Baali. A special relation has been established between
the Divine Spirit and the individual soul, one of absolute
confidence and personal intercourse. This does not require any
departure from the general law of the universe, but is due to
that specializing of the law through the presentation of special
conditions personal to the individual, of which I have spoken
before. But all the time there has been no change in the
Universal Spirit, the only change has been in the mental attitude
of the individual--he has come into a new thought, a clearer
perception of God. He has faced the questions, What is God? Where
is God? How does God work? and he has found the answer in the
apostolic statement that God is "over all, through all, and in
all," and he realises that "God" is the root of his (the
individual's) own being, ever present IN him, ever working
THROUGH him, and universally present around him.
This realization of the true relation between the Originating
Spirit and the individual mind is what is esoterically spoken of
as the Mystical Marriage in which the two have ceased to be
separate and have become one. As a matter of fact they always
were one, but since we can apprehend things only from the
stand-point of our own consciousness, it is our recognition of
the fact that makes it a practical reality for ourselves. But an
intelligent recognition will never make a confusion of the two
parts of which the whole consists, and will never lead the
individual to suppose that he is handling a blind force or that a
blind force is handling him. He will neither dethrone God, nor
lose himself by absorption in deity, but he will recognize the
reciprocity of the Divine and the human as the natural and
logical outcome of the essential conditions of the creative
process.
And what is the Whole which is thus created? It is our conscious
PERSONALITY; and therefore whatever we draw from the Universal
Spirit acquires in us the quality of personality. It is that
process of differentiation of the universal into the particular
of which I have so often spoken, which, by a rude analogy, we may
compare to the differentiation of the universal electric fluid
into specific sorts of power by its passage through suitable
apparatus. It is for this reason that relatively to ourselves the
Universal Spirit must necessarily assume a personal aspect, and
that the aspect which it will assume will be in exact
correspondence with our own conception of it. This is in
accordance with mental and spiritual laws inherent in our own
being, and it is on this account that the Bible seeks to build up
our conception of God on such lines as will set us free from all
fear of evil, and thus leave us at liberty to use the creative
power of our thought affirmatively from the stand-point of a calm
and untroubled mind. This stand-point can only be reached by
passing beyond the range of the happenings of the moment, and
this can only be done by the discovery of our immediate relation
to the undifferentiated source of all good. I lay stress on these
words "immediate" and "undifferentiated" because in them is
contained the secret of the whole position. If we could not draw
immediately from the Universal Spirit our receiving would be
subject to the limitations of the channel through which it
reached us; and if the force which we receive were not
undifferentiated in itself it could not take appropriate form in
our own minds and become to each of us just what we require it to
be. It is this power of the human soul to differentiate
limitlessly from the Infinite that we are apt to overlook, but as
we come to realize that the soul is itself a reflection and image
of the Infinite Spirit--and a clear recognition of the cosmic
creative process shows that it cannot be anything else--we find
that it must possess this power, and that-in fact it is our
possession of this power which is the whole raison d'etre of the
creative process: if the human soul did not possess an unlimited
power of differentiation from the Infinite, then the Infinite
would not be reflected in it, and consequently the Infinite
Spirit would find no outlet for its CONSCIOUS recognition of
itself as the Life, Love, and Beauty which it is. We can never
too deeply ponder the old esoteric definition of Spirit as "the
Power which knows itself": the secret of all things, past,
present, and future is contained in these few words. The self
-recognition or self-contemplation of Spirit is the primary
movement out of which all creation proceeds, and the attainment
in the individual of a fresh centre for self-recognition is what
the Spirit GAINS in the process--this GAIN accruing to the Spirit
is what is referred to in the parables where the lord is
represented as receiving increase from his servants.
When the individual perceives this relation between himself and
Infinite Spirit, he finds that he has been raised from a position
of slavery to one of reciprocity. The Spirit cannot do without
him any more than he can do without the Spirit: the two are as
necessary to each other as the two poles of an electric battery.
The Spirit is the unlimited essence of Love, Wisdom, and Power,
all three in one undifferentiated and waiting to be
differentiated by APPROPRIATION, that is, by the individual
CLAIMING to be the channel of their differentiation. It only
requires the claim to be made with the recognition that by the
Law of Being it is bound to be answered, and the right feeling,
the right seeing, and the right working for the particular matter
we have in hand will flow in quite naturally. Our old enemies,
doubt and fear, may seek to bring us back under bondage to Baali,
but our new stand-point for the recognition of the
All-originating Spirit as being absolutely unified with ourselves
must always be kept resolutely in mind; for, short of this, we
are not working on the creative level--we are creating, indeed,
for we can never divest ourselves of our creative power, but we
are creating in the image of the old limiting and destructive
conditions, and this is merely perpetuating the cosmic Law of
Averages, which is just what the individual has to rise superior
to. The creative level is where new laws begin to manifest
themselves in a new order of conditions, something transcending
our past experiences and thus bringing about a real advance; for
it is no advance only to go on in the same old round even if we
kept at it for centuries: it is the steady go-ahead nature of the
Spirit that has made the world of to-day an improvement upon the
world of the pterodactyl and the icthiosaurus, and we must look
for the same forward movement of the Spirit from its new
starting-point in ourselves.
Now it is this special, personal, and individual relation of the
Spirit to ourselves which is typified by the names Ishi and
Hephzibah. From this stand-point we may say that as the
individual wakes up to the oneness with the Spirit, the Spirit
wakes up to the same thing. It becomes conscious of itself
through the consciousness of the individual, and thus is solved
the paradox of individual self-recognition by the Universal
Spirit, without which no new-creative power could be exercised
and all things would continue to proceed in the old merely cosmic
order. It is of course true that in the merely generic order the
Spirit must be present in every form of Life, as the Master
pointed out when He said that not a sparrow falls to the ground
without "the Father." But as the sparrows He alluded to had been
shot and were on sale at a price which shows that this was the
fate of a good many of them, we see here precisely that stage of
manifestation where the Spirit has not woke up to individual
self-recognition, and remains at the lower level of
self-recognition, that of the generic or race-spirit. The
Master's comment, "Ye are of more value than many sparrows"
points out this difference: in us the generic creation has
reached the level which affords the conditions for the waking up
of the Spirit to self-recognition in the Individual.
And we must bear in mind that all this is perfectly natural.
There is no posing or straining after effect about it. If YOU
have to pump up the Life, who is going to put the Life into you
to pump it? Therefore it is spontaneous or nothing. That is why
the Bible speaks of it as the free gift of God. It cannot be
anything else. You cannot originate the originating force; it
must originate you: but what you can do is to distribute it.
Therefore immediately you experience any sense of friction be
sure there is something wrong somewhere; and since God can never
change, you may be sure that the friction is being caused by some
error in your own thinking--you are limiting the Spirit in some
way: set to work to find out what it is. It is always LIMITING
the Spirit that does this. You are tying it down to conditions
somewhere, saying it is bound by reason of some existing forms.
The remedy is to go back to the original starting point of the
Cosmic Creation and ask, Where were the pre-existing forms that
dictated to the Spirit then? Then because the Spirit never
changes it is STILL THE SAME, and is just as independent of
existing conditions now as it was in the beginning; and so we
must pass over all existing conditions, however apparently
adverse, and go straight to the Spirit as the originator of new
forms and new conditions. This is real New Thought, for it does
not trouble about the old things, but is going straight ahead
from where we are now. When we do this, just trusting the Spirit,
and not laying down the particular details of its action--just
telling it what we want without dictating HOW we are to get it--
we shall find that things will open out more and more clearly day
by day both on the inner and the outer plane. Remember that the
Spirit is alive and working here and now, for if ever the Spirit
is to get from the past into the future it must be by passing
through the present; therefore what you have to do is to acquire
the habit of living direct -from the Spirit here and now. You
will soon find that this is a matter of personal intercourse,
perfectly natural and not requiring any abnormal conditions for
its production. You just treat the Spirit as you would any other
kind-hearted sensible person, remembering that it is always
there--"closer than hands and feet," as Tennyson says--and you
will gradually begin to appreciate its reciprocity as a very
practical fact indeed.
This is the relation of Hephzibah to Ishi, and is that worship in
Spirit and in truth which needs neither the temple in Jerusalem
nor yet in Samaria for its acceptance, for the whole world is the
temple of the Spirit and you yourself its sanctuary. Bear this in
mind, and remember that nothing is too great or too small, too
interior or too external, for the Spirit's recognition and
operation, for the Spirit is itself both the Life and the
Substance of all things and it is also Self-recognition from the
stand-point of your own individuality; and therefore, because the
Self-recognition of Spirit is the Life of the creative process,
you will, by simply trusting the Spirit to work according to its
own nature, pass more and more completely into that New Order
which proceeds from the thought of Him who says, "Behold I make
all things new."