If anybody should be, then, so ill-willed towards us and so lamentably ignorant of spiritual truth himself as to seek to exercise the power of malicious suggestion against us, I pity the person who tries to do it. He will get nothing out of it, because he is firing peas out of a pea-shooter against an iron-clad war vessel. That is what it amounts to; but for himself it amounts to something more. It is a true saying that "Curses return home to roost." I think if we study these things, and consider that there is a reason for them, we need not be in the least alarmed about negative suggestion, or malicious magnetism, of being brought under the power of other minds, of being got over in some way, of being done out of our property, of being injured in our health, or being hurt in our circumstances, and so on.

Of course if you lay yourself open to that kind of thing, you will get it. "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." That is why the Scripture says, "He that breaketh through a hedge, a serpent shall bite him." That is the serpent that some of us know something about, that is our old enemy Nahash. Some of you, at any rate, are sufficiently trained in the inner sciences to know the serpent Nahash. Break down the hedge, that is to say, the conscious control of your own mind, and above all the hedge of the Divine love and wisdom with which God himself will surround you in the personality of His Son, break down this hedge and of course Nahash comes in. But if you keep your hedge—and remember the old Hebrew tradition always spoke of the Divine Law as "the hedge"—if you keep your hedge unbroken, nothing can come in except by the door. Christ said, "I am the door, by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved."

I have spoken of the two great mysteries, the mystery of godliness and the mystery of iniquity, the mystery of Christ and the mystery of anti-Christ. Now, it is not necessary, mind you, that you should understand these mysteries in full in order to get into your right position. If it were necessary that we should fully understand these mysteries, either to get away from the one or to get into the other, I think all of us would have an uncommonly bad chance. I certainly should. I can touch only the fringe of these things, but we can realise the principle of the affirmative and the principle of the negative which underlies them both; one is the mystery of light, the other is the mystery of darkness.

I do not say do not study these mysteries; they are exactly what we ought to study, but do not think that you remain in a state of danger until you have completely fathomed the mystery. Not a bit of it. You can quite get on the right side without understanding the whole thing, exactly as you travel on a railway without understanding the mechanism of the engine which takes you along.

So then we have these two mysteries, that of light and that of darkness, and therefore what we have to do is to exercise our will to receive the mystery of light, and then that will make for itself a centre in our own hearts and beings, and you will become conscious of that centre. Whether you understand it or not, you will become conscious of it—and then from that centre, that centre of light in yourself, you can start everything in your life, whether spiritual or temporal. You do not have to go further back; you do not have to analyse the why and the wherefore of these things in order to get your starting point. It may interest you afterwards, it may strengthen you afterwards to do so, but for a practical starting point you must realise the Divine presence in yourself, which is the son of God manifested in you, that is the Divine principle of personality speaking within yourself.

So then, having realised this as your centre, you carry the all-originating affirmative power with you, all through everything that you do and everything that you are; day and night it will be there, it will protect you, it will guide you, it will help you. And when you want to do so you can consciously apply to it and it will give you assistance, and because you take this as your starting point, it will manifest itself in all your conditions; because, remember, it is a very simple law of logic that whatever you start with will manifest itself all down the sequence which comes from it. If you start with the colour red you can make all sorts of modifications and bring out orange, purple and brown, but the red basis will show itself all down the scale of colour, and so if you start with a basis of blue, blue will show itself all down the scale of various colours.

Therefore, if you start with the affirmative basis, the one starting point of the Divine spirit, not taking it lower down the stream, but going to the fountain head, that affirmative principle of life will flow all through, showing its own quality to the very tips of your fingers and beyond that out into all your circumstances. So that the divine presence will be continuously with you, not as a consequence of your joining this Church or that, following this idea, or that teacher, but because you know the truth for yourselves, and you have realised it as an actual living experience in your own mind and in your own heart; and therefore it is that this personal recognition of the Divine love and wisdom and power is what St. Paul calls "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

Each one who recognises this, is one who answers the Biblical description of a true Israelite indeed. That word "Israelite" in the Bible is a very deeply symbolical word, and carries an immense amount of meaning with it. So get this recognition as the real working fact that each one of you is an Israelite indeed, and if so, then make yourselves perfectly happy with the everlasting statement, which is as true now as it was on the day on which it was uttered: "There is no divination or enchantment against Israel."

1909.