present let us look at the situation entirely apart from the only remedy which Paul suggests. A man can possess nothing outside of what he is conscious of possessing. Tons of gold may be buried in his cellar, but if he is unconscious of it he does not possess the gold. Undoubtedly he has powers which he never exercises. Being unconscious of the possession of these powers in his spiritual being, they are useless to him except as his Consciousness develops and becomes aware of them. Stop a moment and look at this. Everything outside of a man's Consciousness is as if it did not exist; it does not, cannot, exist to Him. The air he breathes is useless to him until he takes it into his conscious body. All the water of the Great Lakes cannot slake his thirst until some of it is in his conscious body. All the beauties of heaven and earth are nothing to him till they are brought into his Consciousness by a sense avenue. Outside of his Consciousness he can have no wife, father, mother, sister, children. All the food in the storehouses of the earth cannot satisfy his hunger until some of it comes into his Consciousness. There is no Infinity for him outside of his Consciousness. Outside of his Consciousness there can be no God, no Christ, no Truth-nothing. This cannot be disputed. There is no means of injecting into his Consciousness a thing which is not there.

There is no

one to inject such a thing, as it is the absolute law of the Infinite, a creative fiat, that no Consciousness shall be interfered with except by suggestion. If Paul had been conscious of no means of escaping "the body of this death" he would have been indeed helpless, "without God or hope in the world." His consciousness of deliverance "through Jesus Christ our Lord" gave him hope. Let us examine it.

His Consciousness made him aware of the possession of a Christ, i. e., he had Christ in him. Now we are in the presence of the fundamental weakness of Christianity. That weakness is the Theologizing of Christ as a personage of twenty centuries ago instead of regarding It as a principle which we must personify as ourselves Now. For if Christ be a personage, even a spiritual personage, He cannot be in us and we cannot be conscious of Him. As a personage He cannot enter us. Like the hypnotist, who substitutes his Consciousness for that of his willing subject, He, if He was a personage could, and if He is a spiritual personage can, control our Subconsciousness, but at the expense of our identity. As we must abdicate the throne of our Reason before giving it up to the hypnotist, we cease to be ourselves while under his influence. Is this Paul's idea of conversion-this giving up of our Reason, i. e., abandoning the purpose for which we were expressed

-to be Christ automatons? Is it possible? Is there such a thing as "Divine Hypnotism," commonly called "conversion"? We can only judge of its possibility by the performances of those who believe they have been so treated. If their Consciousnesses have been so replaced by the Christ Consciousness that their thinking, their living, is that of the Christ, the Immaculate, then we can believe that those who profess to have been thus converted have by a loss of their developed identity "put on Christ." What do we find? Are there any perfect men or women, judging them by the Christ standard? There are none who even profess such perfection, to say nothing of the non-existence of anyone possessing such perfection. If we compare the best "converted" with the best "unconverted" man of our acquaintance, we find no difference that cannot be accounted for by temperament and environment. They are equally good husbands, fathers, brothers, neighbors and citizens. Their habits may be different, but that is a matter of the Subconsciousness. Again, take the worst "converted" man of our acquaintance and compare him with the worst "unconverted' man we happen to know. There is no difference that cannot be accounted for by temperament and environment, and again we fail to detect a change of Consciousness. In studying the behavior of a man but recently

"changed" we find no great difference except perhaps in his habits. The most noticeable change is perhaps that in the behavior of the habitual drunkard. For a time at least he changes his habits, but many drunkards reform without being "converted." Reformed men of both classes show their reformation by changing their places of resort. One goes to church instead of to saloons, the other goes about with his wife and temperate friends, and we judge the difference to be only that; in neither case do we see signs of Divine hypnosis.

Let us look at the history of the past, then glance at the condition of things today. What has been known as the "Church"-the dominant expression in each country of Theological Orthodoxy-has consistently refused to recognize Reason in its councils, and Reason, thus rejected, has sought other channels in working out the Infinite Urge to Rightness within it. This has been known as the conflict between Science and Religion. Galileo was imprisoned by the "Church," then having temporal power, for asserting that the sun stood still and the earth moved. All scientific searchers for truth were treated in the same way. Those within the Church or under its domination who dared to express the results of the workings of their Reason for Rightness in Theological matters, were punished

by the pains of the Inquisition or burned at the stake. These openly cruel persecutions ceased as Reason established a firmer foothold, but if we read the lives of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and others who differed with Orthodoxy, we find that they suffered from the ostracisms and penalties inflicted by arrogant Orthodoxy that other men might be discouraged from adopting their views or lines of research. Fortunately the Urge to Rightness in Man has been too strong to be overwhelmed by arrogant assumption-which is but a perverted expression of the Urge to Rightness. The Church has been deprived, by its ostracism of reasoners, of the strength it should have had in developing the real meaning of the Infinite, while other avenues of expression have been chosen by great thinkers to work out their Urge to Rightness. Thus electrical knowledge, astronomy, all the sciences, engineering, hygiene and sanitation, politics and economics, even eleemosynary and educational pursuits of the higher order, have become divorced from the Church and made great progress, while the Church itself has not even been able to maintain anything like its old ascendency, and has even fallen into such a situation as to be regarded very much as a social club, as an easily obtained badge of respectability, or at best as a good organization to keep people away from worse things. It is comforting to the