The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES destroy himself, is decisive for all eternity. It is by the conquest. of an intelligence eternally clear and of a will eternally just, that he constitutes himself as living for eternal life, since nothing survives injustice and error but the penalty of their disorder. To understand good is to will it, and on the plane of justice to will is to do. For this reason the Gospel tells us that men will be judged according to their works. Our works make us so much what we are, that our body itself, as we have said, receives the modification, and sometimes the complete change, of its form from our habits. A form conquered, or submitted to, becomes a providence, or a fatality, for all one’s existence. Those strange figures which the Egyptians gave to the human symbols of divinity represent the fatal forms. Typhon has a crocodile’s head. He is condemned to eat ceaselessly in order to fill his hippo- potamus belly. Thus he is devoted, by his greed and his ugliness, to eternal destruction. Man can kill or vivify his faculties by negligence or by abuse. He can create for himself new faculties by the good use of those which he has received from Nature. People often say that the affections will not be commanded, that faith is not possible for all, that one does not re-make one’s own character. All these assertions are true only for the idle or the perverse. One can make one’s self faithful, pious, loving, devoted, when one wishes sincerely to beso. One can give to one’s spirit the calm of justness, as to one’s will the almighty power of justice. One can reign in Heaven by virtue of faith, on earth by virtue of science. The man who knows how to command himself is king of all Nature. 269