—Robert Browning.
The destiny of each soul is reunion with the Absolute from which it emanated. But this reunion may be accomplished only through yielding the claims of the personal self to the greater Self, the Christos which exists within each personality. A single word gives us the key to the process,—brotherhood.
To this goal there is one royal road and many that are long and terrible. But the royal road may be travelled only by those who are immune from temptation because their consciousness is not centred in the self which may be tempted. Understanding the law, they obey it, for only by obedience may the law be transcended and the soul become free. That is a royal road, indeed. But it is only for the few.
The other, cyclic and steep as the pathway that winds to the summit of the Purgatorio mountain, must for ages be travelled by the multitudes; for it is they who cannot as yet answer the questions, "Whence came I? wherefore do I exist, and whither do I go?"
Spirit, when first differentiated from the Absolute, is simple, not complex, undifferentiated, pure and good because it has not become conscious of evil. To gain the experiences by which alone it may expand its consciousness to infinity and become inclusive of all differentiation, it becomes individualized and embodied. And this earth is the scene of the experiences which the spirit needs and which it can gain only by means of an embodiment of personality.
Cycle after cycle, life after life, the soul tests all the conditions of earthly pleasure and pain by its own standard and measure. If that standard be self, alienation will be swift and certain, and slow and terrible will be the return to the divine. If the measure be brotherhood, service, ministry to others, the soul remains one with God and spiritual consciousness is by so much expanded.
Since brotherhood is the ideal, our very institutions, church, state, and particularly the home, exist for no higher purpose than to develop within the soul of humanity a conscious desire to live for others. It is only because the soul manifests itself as two forces, in two sexes, man and woman, that the institution of the home, as we know it, is made possible. We fancy that these dual forces, incomplete and fluctuating, become completed and stable only through marriage. The novelists have threshed over this old straw for many weary years, for the view commonly taken is superficial and untrue.
Marriage, in its deeper aspect, is a means by which the soul prepares itself, through the joys of limited service, for that wider ministry which includes the world. Emerson expresses it better when he says "the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls." Marriage opens the shortest way by which men and women, self-centred and egotistical, may be compelled, against their will if need be, to become conscious of the joy of sacrifice and the beauty of service.
The child, like the childish race, is, in some respects, very much of a savage. He has neither intellectual nor ethical ideas and, as Froebel expresses it, "the first circle of a child's life is physical nature bound by necessity." The baby cares only to be kept physically comfortable, and he proposes to be kept so at the expense of others as far as possible. He is a little egotist. The world is his oyster. Selfishness, if he be not guided, is far more native to him during the earliest period of his life, than altruism. And it is significant that a large proportion of children grow into manhood and womanhood, particularly in these days of ferment and individualism, with the firm belief that, first of all, they must look out for themselves. They do not voluntarily accept the path of brotherhood, but the law, the wise law, forces them, by few or many hard experiences, to finally see the wisdom of choosing it. By refusing to obey the law they place themselves within the sweep of its mighty arm and are struck down.