Page:Personality (Lectures delivered in America).djvu/112

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94
PERSONALITY

deliberate creations of certain monks and priests, who lived under unnatural conditions in a time of lawlessness. In such a belief we forget that conspiracies are creations of history, but history is no creation of conspiracies. There has been a violent demand upon human nature from its own depth to declare war against its own self. And though its violence has subsided, the battle-cry has not altogether ceased.

We must know that periods of transition have their language which cannot be taken literally. The first assertion of soul comes to man with too violent an emphasis upon the separateness from nature, against which it seems ready to carry out war of extermination. But this is the negative side. When the revolution for freedom breaks out, it takes the aspect of anarchy. Yet its true meaning is not the destruction of government, but the freedom of government.

In like manner, the soul's birth in the spiritual world is not the severance of relationship with what we call nature, but freedom of relationship, perfectness of realization.

In nature we are blind and lame like a child before its birth. But in the spiritual life we are born in freedom. And then because we are freed from the blind bondage of nature she is