Text of the meditation
Spiritual Principles can be acquired only after long discipline in the pursuit and practice of Virtue. The schoolmaster never attempts to teach pupils the abstract principles of mathematics at the beginning; they know that by such a method teaching would be vain, and learning impossible.
They first place before them a very simple sum, and, having explained it, leave them to do it. When, after repeated failures and ever-renewed effort, the pupils have succeeded in doing it correctly, a more difficult task is set them, and then another and another; and not until the pupils have, through many years of diligent application, mastered all the lessons in arithmetic do they attempt to unfold to them the underlying mathematical principles.
Thus practice ever precedes knowledge even in the ordinary things of the world, and in spiritual things, in the living of the higher life, this law is rigid in its exactions.
James Allen (1864–1912), Book of Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1913) – public-domain text, gently modernised.
The original 1913 text is in the public domain.
