Among the uses of the painful experience we were now undergoing[55] was this one. It put me on a track of thought of high value in enabling me to determine our respective positions in regard to our work. It was clearly the endeavour of the astral influences by which we were being assailed--the "haters of the mysteries" as our Genii called them[56]--to break down our work by destroying that perfect harmony between us which was the first condition of it. And all my endeavours failing to discover in myself the weak point which rendered us accessible to them, carefully as I sought there for it, I was forced to look for it in her, and was disposed to ascribe it to the survival from the far past of some defect of the affectional nature. For, as we were now learning, man has a dual heredity, that of his physical parentage and that of his spiritual selfhood. From the former of which he derives his outward characteristics; and from the latter his inward character. The experience just recited served to confirm the surmise, but it did something else besides. It suggested to me the following explanation of the situation as growing out of the exigencies of our work. That work had for its purpose the accomplishment of the prophesied downfall of the "world's sacrificial system." It meant war to the knife against all the orthodoxies at once, religious, social, scientific. It meant a death-"wrestle, not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." It meant, in short, the destruction foretold by the prophets of "that great city," the world's materialistic system in Church, State, and Society, wherein the "Lord," the divinity in man, is ever systematically crucified, and its replacement by the "Holy City" or system which comes down from the heaven of a perfect ideal.