Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/37

Rh puzzles used by ancient "Wizards" illustrate the same principle, though less clearly. The principle itself was well known to the writer of the narrative of Abraham's calling. Abraham lived at a time when children were recklessly sacrificed to the gods whenever the parent felt prompted to do so. First he saw there was something wrong about that; children were meant for something better than to be killed. Next, it occurred to him to think that he might be wrong after all; ought he not to hold himself ready to give his son to God if God willed? He prepared to obey—if God should will. Then he was led to see that God wills to accept the offering of our children in a different way; we are to offer them to The Unity; but so as to hold them in trust for the establishment of human society. Thus he was led gradually up the spiral of revelation; at each step giving up something which had seemed (though it had not really been) the essence of some previous revelation.

How Superstition has fastened on that standard narration of spiral progress, of which Abraham is the hero, it is hardly necessary to point out.

The whirling storm-wind forms an accurate diagram for illustrating the relation of the ex-centric to humanity. Having drawn the spiral, with tangents running in various directions, one tells the pupil that the spiral itself represents the methods of the orthodox Ecclesia, the constituted authorities, the recognized teachers. The tangents represent various paths taken by ex-centrics, non-conformists, men who have received the first personal inspiration, the first birth into a new world; who have cared, and dared, to go off on lines