As the earth, in its first efforts at organization, combined but few of its principles, and presented the crudest form, and as time rolled on and its combinations continued to include more and more of the several principles, so with man; in his infancy his spiritual manifestations were crude in the extreme, but there has constantly been brought into co-operative combination, more and more of the spiritual principles, and higher and higher types of spiritual manifestations have been the result.
If man, as a unit, were analyzed to-day, he would be found to be made up spiritually of the elements corresponding to that age of the development of the physical world of which he is now the representative; that is to say, in his manifestations spiritually, he exhibits the same ratio of spiritual elements that the earth did in her manifestations in material elements at the time in her growth corresponding with the present condition and growth of man.
If cool and deliberate reason, unbiased by mythological and theoretical dogmas, be applied to the correspondence between the material and spiritual elements, the conclusion can scarcely fail to be arrived at, that each primary element of the material universe is the external expression and representative of a spiritual attribute of God; and as there are a definite number of elements in nature, forming the perfect material whole, so there are an equal number of analagous spiritual elements that constitute the spiritual whole.
As the elements and their corresponding interior principles are susceptible of infinite combinations and associations, the varied manifestations of nature and man are readily accounted for. Nor should it be forgotten that each of the manifestations is the legitimate and inevitable result of the combination out of which it springs; and, as the combination is not self-creative, but the result of the action of progressive law, so the effect of the combination is but the outward expression of the purposes contained within the law, behind the formation of the combination, and is thus the result of God’s operative law of progress.
Having argued thus far to show that the present age, material, mental and spiritual, is the legitimate result of the law of progressive development, the following propositions are deduced therefrom, forming a basis or platform from which to ask of the present—What of the future? Whither doth it lead?
First—All power, wherever manifested, is a unit.
Second—God is the source of all power, and the elements the subject of its application.
Third—Each attribute of God has its corresponding material element.
Fourth—All the material elements constitute the material world; all the spiritual elements, God.
Fifth—There is nothing contained in creation outside of the power of God, on the one hand, and the elementary principles on the other—the first positive, the last negative.