The good man who has, however, not yet attained his "son-ship of God" is "under the law"--that moral law which is educational and preparatory, "the schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ," our own Divine spirit, or higher personality. To conceive the difference between these two states is to apprehend exactly what is here meant by the false, temporal, and the true, eternal personality, and the sense in which the word personality is here intended to be understood. We do not know whether, when that great change has come over us, when that great work* of our lives has been accomplished--here or hereafter--we shall or shall not retain a sense of identity with our past, and forever discarded selves. In philosophical parlance, the "matter" will have gone, and the very "form" will have been changed. Our transcendental identity with the 'A' or 'B' that now is** must depend on that question, already disclaimed in this paper, whether the Divine spirit is our originally central essential being, or is an hypostasis. Now, being "under the law" implies that we do not act directly from our own will, but indirectly, that is, in willing obedience to another will. -------- * The "great work," so often mentioned by the hermetic philosophers, and which is exactly typified by the operation of alchemy, the conversion of the base metals to gold, is now well understood to refer to the analogous spiritual conversion. There is also good reason to believe that the material process was a real one. ** "A person may have won his immortal life, and remained the same inner self he was on earth, through eternity; but this does not imply necessarily that he must either remain the Mr. Smith or Brown he was on earth, or lose his individuality."--Isis Unveiled, vol. 1. p. 316. ----------