During the various stages of progress, the pain aspect of sacrifice is clearly seen. Nevertheless, a soul’s passionate grip upon things physical and sensuous relaxes, and a day arrives when to give spontaneously, freely, lavishly, is purest joy. Then is man’s life merging into Divine life, and sacrifice is no more pain. Vital dissonances cease to rend man’s heart, for his inner consciousness has soared above the selfish separateness of phenomenal existence into realms of nature where unity and love are the all-prevailing principles of life. We know these principles in action through the beautiful, selfless earthly pilgrimage of Him we call the Saviour of Mankind, whose whole career was an At-one-ment with the Divine. The “Vicarious Atonement” doctrine of Western faiths to-day is both an ecclesiastical device for increasing priestly power and a misapprehension of the law we have been considering—the law of sacrifice, by which the worlds are made, by which the worlds are living now, and by which alone the union of man with God is brought about. That noble doctrine of antiquity was changed by Mediæval Christianity into a picture of the Godhead—Father and Son, in opposition to one another—a picture that “shocks all reverence, and outrages reason by bringing all manner of legal quibbles into the relationship between the Spirit of God and man.” (_Four Ancient Religions_, Annie Besant, p. 166.) Again, a race whose reasoning faculties are developed must needs repudiate the Church’s dogma of “Imputed Righteousness”—a righteousness not inwrought or attained to, but applied externally—a covering to what is corrupt and base, yet deemed sufficient to secure a perfunctory pardon of sin, a non-merited Divine favour. The real At-one-ment with the Divine, whereof Jesus the Christ is our Archetype, admits of no substitutions, no subterfuges, makes no fictitious claims. It signifies an actual transformation or process of change, the inner consciousness passing from the lower to function on higher levels of being.