under the emblem of the New Jerusalem, we are told that sorrow and sighing shall flee away, and that the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick. Nothing that obscures life, or restricts it, can proceed from the same source as the Power which gives light to them that sit in darkness, and deliverance to them that are bound. Negation can never be Affirmation; and the error we have always to guard against is that of attributing positive power to the Negative. If we once grasp the truth that God is life, and that life in every mode of expression can never be anything else than Affirmative, then it must become clear to us that nothing which is of the opposite tendency can be according to the will of God. For God (the good) to will any of the "evil" that is in the world would be for Life to act with the purpose of diminishing itself, which is a contradiction in terms to the very idea of Life. God is Life, and Life is, by its very nature, Affirmative. The submission we have hitherto made has been to our own weakness, ignorance, and fear, and not to the supreme good.

But is no such thing as submission, then, required of us under any circumstances? Are we always to have our own way in everything? Assuredly the whole secret of our progress to liberty is involved in acquiring the habit of submission; but it is submission to superior Truth, and not to superior force. It sometimes happens that, when we attain a higher Truth, we find that its reception requires us to re-arrange the truths which we possessed before: not, indeed, to lay any of them