Author of “The Law of Correspondences,” “The ‘World’s Fair Text Book of Mental Therapeutics,” “Old and New Psychology,” Etc.
There are moments in the life of every one when the soul seems to be stirred by some inner force; when the mind becomes illuminated by new ideals, new hopes, new desires. What has caused this state? Who can tell? It may be in a moment of rest and repose, when mind and body are relaxed and for a brief space of time the duties and cares of the world are lost sight of, that such an awakening comes—for thus we might speak of it. During this brief interval we see things as we never have seen them before. Power, or earthly greatness, has no place in our thoughts; but we see, dimly though it may be, something of cur own inner greatness—something that, if it once could be fully realized, would change the whole tenor of our lives, and the world with all its allurements would occupy a minor place in our thoughts. —Charles Brodie Patterson
The Spiritual Man—His Powers and Privileges
When entering upon a consideration of human nature, it is essentially necessary to consider, first, exactly what we mean to convey by the special terms we are intending to employ. The title of this chapter provokes inquiry, as the adjective Spiritual qualifies the substantive Man. The reader will naturally ask, are there then in your estimation two or more distinct kinds of human nature of which that variety entitled Spiritual is the highest, or do you simply mean that human nature is in essence Spiritual? As just such a question has frequently been put to the writer of these pages, the following reply seems an appropriate introduction to all that is to follow:
Human nature is distinctly what we mean when we speak of spiritual nature, for by human we signify humane as distinguished from brutal, which we designate inhuman. When the word humanity is employed it at once suggests two meanings. First, it is a designation applied to the human race as distinct from and superior to all other types of animate existence on earth. Second, it is the synonym of kindliness, gentleness and all the mild and gracious attributes which the purest and most elevated friends of religious thought ascribe to Deity. The much-contested first chapter of Genesis, when read with unprejudiced candor, suggests the beautiful idea of human divinity and of equally divine humanity. Theomorphism and anthropomorphism unite in the sublime declaration that human nature is in the image of Divine Being; for to no less august a cause than Deity is the origin of human life attributed. Chronology and geography cannot be called into court to testify concerning what lies entirely beyond their province, nor can astronomy and geology bear testimony to what lies far beyond their ken. All the varied stages and kinds of biblical criticism from the highest to the lowest unitedly fail to touch in one way or the other the primal conviction imbedded in the deepest consciousness of the most gifted of Israel’s ancient seers—the divinity of human nature and it is this doctrine and this alone which glorifies the commencement of the Pentateuch and constitutes it in a sense unique. This consciousness of God as the author of human life is far too deeply rooted in human reason to be eradicated by any assaults which may be directed against it. Man conceives of himself as divine offspring and presumes in consequence to call the Almighty Power which sustains the universe his parent, not simply his Creator and Sovereign. If it be contended, as it often is, that today’s thought of God differs widely from that current some thousands of years ago, supposing it does, it is surely not a lower but a vastly higher idea of Deity which is taking the place of earlier conceptions; and by so much as the God-idea rises does the Man-idea rise also, for if we still claim that our origin is divine, our views of the Divine Original cannot improve or advance without our thought of the dignity and splendor of human nature advancing equally.
The theomorphic view of Man blends with the anthropomorphic view of God. The statement put forcibly, and to some minds perhaps shockingly, reads thus: God is Human, Man is Divine; and reverse wise, Man is Divine, God is Human. This statement which is an extremely bold one, is by no means irreverent, and unless we are prepared to stand by it we cannot teach the Fatherhood of God and the Sonship of
Mankind.
If God be the author and cause of humanity then the child and effect must resemble the source whence it proceeded, and it is impossible for us to sustain the relation of children to a Divine Parent unless we are possessed of kindred Divine attributes; we must not hesitate, therefore, to claim our birthright and enter upon our inheritance. Faith, so greatly extolled by name, is often seriously objected to, directly an attempt is made to translate it out of the realm of vague abstractions into a domain of practical application. Have faith in God as your Father, means, have faith in yourself as divine offspring; and so strongly imbued was the apostle Paul with this assurance that Man is one with his Source that he uttered the startling prayer that we might be filled with all the fullness of God. Though this is an age of transition somewhat overshadowed with doubt and tainted with pessimistic theories of existence, optimistic conclusions are steadily gaining ground, as evidenced by the self-evident fact that the brighter the view a writer or speaker takes of men and things in general, the wider does his or her influence extend, and the larger the number of really thoughtful people found ready to pay tribute to what Matthew Arnold might have called the “sweet reasonableness” of so encouraging a set of propositions. The truth of it all is, we are beginning to realize how totally absurd a philosophy must be which is found self-contradictory and which leads to the exaction of tasks which cannot be fulfilled. Everything depends upon the view taken of human nature at the outset of any topical inquiry into the scope of human duties, responsibilities, and privileges; therefore, we propose to base all we have to suggest concerning practical methods for the improvement of human conditions on a radical foundation properly impregnable. It stands to reason that no such reconstruction of a human individual as would necessitate an entire change in the essential constitution of said individual can be looked upon as feasible, and surely no thoughtful or intelligent reformer would ever attempt the self-evidently impossible task of converting a man, woman or child into a sort of being other than human even though the ideal being were of a much higher type than the present actual human. At this point it is well to pause and remark upon the impossibility of our conceiving of superhuman entities in any other than a human manner or regarding them in any other than a human light, seeing that we ourselves are human and by the very limitations of our humanity necessarily circumscribed to a human view of the universe. This thought is an immense help in the direction of our ascertaining how far we can reasonably pursue our studies and carry our reflections Godward.
The universe as seen through human eyes is necessarily a human universe and the conception of Deity inherent in human nature is perforce a human concept. Of abstract Deity we know nothing; of absolute unconditioned Being we can form no idea. It is through ourselves that we view all things; therefore from lowest to highest, from crudest to most sublime, our interpretations of universal life mark stages in our own growth or evolutionary development.
It is in this connection that the differing theories of revelation bearing upon natural and revealed religion come into play, and around this focal centre all theologies and philosophies revolve. We are told by surface students of the career of religious ideas that natural and revealed religion are diametrically opposed, and many a fierce battle of words has been waged over the question. How far is natural religion reconcilable with revealed truth?
In the first place it is absolutely necessary to determine exactly what is meant by the respective terms, for without precise definition of terms employed there can be no clear understanding of what is aimed at.
By natural religion we mean all those conceptions of a spiritual order which have seemingly arisen out of the natural consciousness of human beings, without supposing there to have been any extraneous pressure brought to bear or any tidings furnished from without.
Animism, ancestor worship and all so-called primitive forms of worship are catalogued as natural by those who are sticklers for the widest possible discrimination between natural and revealed, while everything contained in what people are pleased to term the Bible is included in the revealed category. This arbitrary separation has brought about an immense amount of belligerence manifested toward the very book thus over-highly extolled as well as against all institutions and persons committed to its support. The simple Deism of Voltaire, Thomas Paine and other “Radicals” or “Liberals” of the eighteenth century, as well as nearly all the opposition to so-called revealed religion expressed in the writings of Renan and other scholars of the nineteenth century, has largely taken rise in this foolish separation of religious instincts into two diametrically opposed camps; the one inspired and the other not inspired from Heaven.
Though what has borne the name of Secularism is now waning and the professed leaders in the avowed “Liberal” camp are confessing the necessity of devoting more energy to constructive philanthropy and far less than formerly to destructive onslaught upon ecclesiastical institutions, it cannot fairly be said that the failure of simple iconoclasm as a basis for permanent union among thinkers and reformers indicates a return to an old order of thought which popular modern authors do not hesitate to call “that wicked old Calvinistic Theology.” Present signs clearly point to reconstruction along new lines; lines far broader and in every way more comprehensive than the old. Old theological positions have been abandoned, and what is more, they never were the positions occupied by the best thinkers in the days of our forefathers.
The best type of orthodoxy is the very oldest and the newest heterodoxy is often more largely a revival of the best statements in the old orthodoxy than anything else. The divinity of human nature is declared in the first chapter of Genesis, and primal statements are often the work of greater intellects serving as instruments for more unfolded consciences than are any of those superstructures which are built partly of valuables and partly of rubbish upon the first foundation which is immovable.
Paul, the farsighted apostle, saw that wisely and clearly enough many a time as recorded in his epistles, especially when he referred to there being but one abiding foundation upon which people could build whatever they choose, whatever wisdom in one case and folly in another case may prompt. There will surely come a time of judgment, and when that day of disclosure breaks there will be a perfectly impartial sifting out of refuse, while honor will be paid to every fraction of what is worthy to be preserved.
Simple natural religion may be too small a term to use in order to convey the full meaning which today’s best thinkers are seeking to make plain, because the word nature has been downgraded very considerably through many successive centuries, and the process of its legitimate upgrading is of course gradual and by no means finished yet. Natural means that which is born; it is therefore quite as exact to speak of that which is born of God as natural as to use the word in connection with that which claims an origin lower than essential Deity. Revealed religion may be quite as natural as any other
variety of religion, for on close inspection we find that revelation and discovery are so closely allied that we can scarcely dissever them; they may almost be compared to Siamese twins; they grow together; one can hardly exist without the other. Discovery of truth is the human, or objective, aspect of the situation. Revelation of truth is the divine, subjective side of the question.
What constitutes revelation? Revelation necessitates not only a revealer and something to be revealed, but a third factor also, viz.: someone to whom the revelation can be made or by whom the revelation can be understood. If this latter be lacking there is no revelation, for the picture presented requires an observer to behold it; therefore it is, as we may say, uselessly presented to space when no human eye beholds it and no human reason comprehends it. God cannot be revealed to the cattle in the fields as to the reverent human observer of the celestial galaxies, yet sun by day and stars by night are as visible in the field where the cattle are grazing as in an adjoining field where a company of students of astronomy are discussing the glories of the Milky Way or the possibilities of human existence on Sirius or Aldebaran.
“The heavens declare the glory of God,” to whom? To whom does the star-bespangled firmament declare God’s glory? Verily hath the foolish man even while contemplating the skies said, “There is no God.” To Plato, God geometrizes; to John the Evangelist, God is Love; and both are right: one approaching the divine through reason and the other through affection. If, as Swedenborg has told us, Divine Love and Wisdom constitute the totality of real Being, and if as Greek bards, quoted by Paul at Athens, have assured us, we are ourselves Divine offspring, there can be no other basis for the idea of divine revelation except in the consciousness of man responsive to the breath of God.
We cannot reasonably or humanely contend that revelation is arbitrary, nor will we ever be justified in teaching that the God who is “no respecter of persons” does respect certain persons and show marked disrespect to others after the manner of a tyrannical autocrat who as a Sovereign dispenses favors on the one hand and metes out cruelty on the other. We may well rejoice that the eclipse has nearly ended, that pessimistic views of divine government are in their death struggle, while the birth cry of a glorious optimism already finds the air tremulous with promise of better, brighter days to come. Let not the reaction against the dying misbelief blind any of us to the verity which underlies it, for the worst features of time-honored error were only incrustations, and excrescences are never integral parts of an anatomy.
We might easily picture to ourselves some ignorant students of anatomy and physiology, dissecting a body and finding an unnatural growth therein, straightway proceeding to speculate upon the place in the structure of that supposed “organ.” How the learned doctors would laugh if such well-meaning tyros were to publish a new work on Structural Anatomy or Comparative Physiology in which place was given to a large tumor in the breast, mentioning it as though it were one of the natural parts of the human mechanism with functions difficult to determine, as, for example, the spleen, which is really a useful organ though not very clearly comprehended.
The excrescences which we find depending upon religious systems are exactly like the faults we detect in others and in ourselves likewise; they exist at the present moment but they are no necessary or even legitimate portions of human character, and, like all parasites, they can be exterminated. We do not in artistic circles confound dust and candle smoke with a rare old painting, though a priceless Murillo found somewhere in Italy may have been brought home to a modern studio in so blackened a condition that the original features of the picture were scarcely discernible.
Restoration removes the dirt and shows up again the original beauty of the painting as it came fresh from the hand of the marvelous artist. How often in religious meetings do we hear the words Redeemer and redemption. And what do they mean when all glosses and subtleties are removed from them? To redeem is to buy back or to restore, and that was the original thought when the word entered the ecclesiastical vocabulary. The orthodox Jew addressing the Eternal Being with no thought of mediator or intercessor in his mind says in words of ancient song, “Thou art our Redeemer.” How shall we apply such a phrase directly to our present subject? If God is the original Creator of humankind and we are the makers, shapers, or fashioners of our ulterior existence, then we have turned away from the divine pattern in the soul and made an outward semblance which instead of being a true resemblance is a non-semblance. It behooves us to acknowledge our mistake, confess our error and turn willingly, gladly and submissively to the fountainhead of all wisdom in a spirit of voluntary co-operation with divine activity as expressed in the words of the great Teacher of humanity, “My Father worketh hitherto and I work.” There is no apparent limit to the conflicting views expressed at present concerning the need of reliance upon God and the necessity of self-reliance. Like all other extremists, those to whom we now refer are on either side making the fatal blunder of looking only upon one side of the two-sided shield; and like the Knights of old they are prepared to fight each other to the death for the honor of one inscription, heedless of the fact that there are two inscriptions upon the same shield though upon opposite sides of it.
To trust in God, to place reliance in boundless goodness, to repose confidence in eternal wisdom, is to prepare ourselves for the actual work we are called upon to do. Instead of trust in God weakening men and making them less self-reliant, it invariably makes them more so, and this is abundantly proved by history and confirmed by the experiences of daily life. “God and I constitute a majority,” but one alone constitutes a wretchedly feeble minority. One alone may be a stubborn egotist, but he is no healthy egoist, and there is a vast difference between these two words, though in literal construction there is but the consonant “t” to distinguish them. To place one’s self in a receptive attitude toward Divine influx is to harmonize with the Infinite Life all about us, above, below, around, within; and only as we harmonize with our environment are we safe, happy, strong, or free.
The Western world is learning much today from Oriental visitors, and at no point are the Indian teachers more helpful than where they insist that the truly spiritualized man could walk safely through the jungles and not be molested by lion, tiger or any other ferocious beast.
The Apocalyptic book of Daniel is familiar to all Bible readers. In its opening chapters that book informs us of four young Hebrews at the court of Babylon who were superior to all things because they had subdued entirely their own animal propensities. Here looms up in gigantic proportions the mountain of limitation which is yet to be cast down and driven into the sea by the power of omnipotent faith. By beginning at the wrong end we are constantly informing others of our failures, and depressing ourselves at sight of our lack of achievement in directions where our energies have been earnestly and at first enthusiastically put forward. We should never fail or grow discouraged or suffer from a sense of disappointment did we but realize that all development must be from within outward, never in reverse order. Why is it that we trust ourselves so little? Is it not because we have so poor a conception of ourselves, a conception based not on the thought of spirituality, but materiality? What are we? Who are we? Why are we here? What is our mission? These are searching questions, and on the answers to such questions as these our hopes must necessarily depend. If we really are God’s image, if we are truly of the same nature with Deity, if we do truly partake of all Divine attributes, and these are infinite, then the “Don’t Worry” people have eternal right on their side, or, to phrase it better, they are in harmony with eternal right when they declare God to be infinite and every human individual a part of God’s infinite plan.
All outward achievements are gradually evolved; therefore, the Eastern sages who tell us of modern Daniels now alive in Asia must explain step by step to their Western audiences how the heights of attainment of which they speak may progressively be scaled. It is always line by line that we advance in knowledge.
It is ever best to hold steadily before us the highest of all the high ideals of which we can conceive, and declare that these ideals of ours are verily ours^ not merely some one’s else. We can outwork in action all that we feel we inwardly possess. We must do justice in thought to our own containment and not let false humility figure as a virtue when it is a vice in any right esteem.
There is a proper pride and there is an improper humility; therefore, though the former is generally considered a fault and the latter a virtue, their relative values are by no means thus easily determinable. “Be temperate in all things” is the most salutary counsel. Think no more highly of yourself than of your neighbor. Love your neighbor as you love yourself, neither more nor less. This is the golden path of equity, for we are so indissolubly connected one with others that there can be no safe deflection from the exact road of absolute impartiality.
Let us neither condemn in ourselves what we praise in others nor condone in self what we blame in others, but, ever seeking honorably to discriminate between the real human nature which often lies concealed and the surface appearances which when unlovely are entirely parasitic, learn to summon forth the divine in the humanity we encounter anywhere, through practical application of that truly ideal philosophy which, while never confounding changeless being with varying existence, takes for its motto the brave, true words of Pope, “Whatever is, is right.” All that is, is right, furnishes food for endlessly profitable meditation; then, having defined to ourselves wherein we conceive existence to be but an expression of being, we are ready to set bravely and intelligently to work to make our external operations conform in all respects with the Divine ideal.
The Threefold Man—The Full Development and Right Use of All Functions, Faculties, and Powers—The Ideal Life
Having already outlined the dignified, exalted view of human nature which the inspired teachers of all ages have unanimously sought to present to the world, and which all the wisest and clearest among modern thinkers are working earnestly to confirm, we may now pass to a consideration of that ancient threefold idea of human nature which, though permanently emphasized by the Christian Church, by no means entered the world with the commencement of the Christian Era. It is by no means our purpose to discuss any doctrine of divine and human trinity in a dogmatic spirit or with the slightest intention of seeking finally to settle the age-long controversies which had, perhaps, better be abandoned than renewed ; however, as this question is forever rising, What are we? or, How are we constituted? we shall make at least a slight attempt to point out by what clearly natural, and, at the same time, truly spiritual processes the idea of three in one has fastened itself upon human thought; yea, more, has deeply and seemingly ineradicably imbedded itself in human consciousness.
Egyptians of long ago, though they held the circle and the winged globe in highest veneration among their sacred emblems, placed the triangle only second to the circle. As the number one represents Life itself, or being per se in all its infinite eternal entirety, the triangle reveals by a mathematical device the threefold properties of Unity. Turn wherever we may we shall find the union of two producing a third; therefore, father, mother, and child are the persons of the original trinity. The most recent archaeological discoveries in Egypt are leading explorers in the direction of accepting far more traditions as historical than was their wont even a few years ago. Osiris and Isis, Horus and Set, and many another “divinity of ancient Thebes or Heliopolis,” is now being reinvested with historic garments; and the latest Egyptologists do not hesitate to declare that there are strong evidences now accumulating that we can soon read without difficulty records fully ten thousand years old. The God-Kings of whom Manetho and other historians have written are therefore probably not anything like so fabulous as many scholars have long supposed. Be this, however, as it may, the religious concepts of the learned in Egypt in the long ago were certainly intended to deal with far more than simply historical matters, though history has always served to illustrate and embody transcendental ideas.
Human nature alone reveals the universe to man; therefore, however sublime may be the dazzling disc of the solar orb, however inspiring the incessant march of a myriad constellations, it is only in, by, and through human nature that human entities can learn to interpret the universe. And as all results in nature are brought about through strict undeviating conformity to one changeless order commonly called LAW, we must of necessity advance to something like a clear comprehension of how this order works in and through us before we can in any manner solve the riddle of existence.
The Jewish Creed given to the world in the twelfth century of the present era by Moses Maimonides—one of the greatest philosophers Europe has ever known—contains the following highly suggestive and expressive statement: “There never arose in Israel a prophet like unto Moses, who beheld God’s similitude.” Mark well the words; the philosopher does not say that Moses saw absolute Deity face to face as one man may behold the visage of another: he wisely and reasonably confines himself to the statement that it was the divine similitude which the great prophet actually beheld. What can God’s similitude be if it is not human nature? To see the image of God is to be so wise an anthropologist that human nature is no longer a blank mystery to itself. What enigmas we are to ourselves until we become experts in the field of self-discovery! But just to the extent that we have come to know ourselves does everything about us become transparent and luminous. The true scientists of ancient days taught unity and trinity in man and in the universe in the following manner.
There are three great elements, said they—Spirit, Force, Matter; and in man there are three distinct and discrete planes of operation—Spiritual, Intellectual, and Physical: and these three planes are always operative.
So-called death does not—according to the teachings of the mystics or of any who are versed in esoteric philosophy—destroy or remove any one of these three planes of conscious human operation, because the real abiding body is not the physical shape seen with mortal eyes, which is only a correspondential representative.
From Hermes Trismegistus to Emanuel Swedenborg, the great seers and sages of the whole world have all taught essentially the same doctrine couched exactly in such sentences as the famous Hermetic axiom, “As it is above, so is it below” and vice versa.
Cause and effect, inner and outer, must be in correspondence, therefore one must resemble the other; no matter then whether you range yourself with Platonists or Aristotelians, the inductive and deductive philosophers reach the same conclusion finally though they start from diametrically opposite starting-points. To the dreamy introspective visionary of the Orient, the soul (Atman) is primal; all beside it being only expression, but to the externally alert business-driver of the Occident the body is the focal point, and the soul, when first mentioned, seems like some vague, dim abstraction which no one knows where to place or how to define. Among the most modern of metaphysicians, a good deal of haziness prevails, particularly in the use of terms; and as we are apt any day to encounter materialists who declare that matter is everything, and also Christian Scientists, one of whose cries is there is 7io matter, it will be well for all of us to seek to become clear in our own thought as regards this highly perplexing problem.
Without seeking to dogmatize, it may be helpful to suggest that the three words—Spirit, Force, and Matter—may be treated as notes in a descending scale. Spirit contains Force, Force contains Matter. Were all that we call material to be dissolved, nothing would be destroyed; if force is the larger and matter the smaller fraction, then it is not difficult to comprehend how the lesser can disappear in the greater while the same lesser can not by any stretch of the imagination be supposed to contain or include the greater. Spirit is greater than Force, and Matter is the lowest of the designated elements. In the human economy our spiritual plane of consciousness is the highest; our intellectual plane is intermediary and our physical is the lowest.
These three are good; it is utterly erroneous to teach or even insinuate that spirit is good and matter is evil, though it is perfectly right to insist that the lower must bend to and obey the higher. While man as man contains all the kingdoms of nature, the mineral, vegetable and animal expressions of life are respectively smaller and larger fractions of what is contained in humanity, as they are definitely lower and higher expressions of the universal life-principle. The Oriental teachers now in America often astonish their audiences by statements which must sound at first utterly outlandish to undiscipHned ears because they enforce the above propositions, though not always in the same language. Truly the Western races have
prized the Hebrew Scriptures, and in them particularly in the prophetic portions—do we recognize teachings and declarations in perfect consonance with the most extravagant claims of the Brahmins, Buddhists, Jainists or Parsees who may be among us; at the same time it must be remembered that to the bulk of Bible readers such stories as that of Daniel and his three companions in the Babylonian Empire are either fairy tales or else accounts of miraculous or supernatural phenomena which, though occasionally possible thousands of years ago, are impossible today, though nobody has ever been able to tell why the law of nature which is said to be unchangeable has changed thus radically in its bearing upon human experience.
The book of Daniel is a correct setting forth of esoteric science and philosophy, but the key to unlock its similitudes must be found, and that key is in ourselves. No amount of simple learning has ever made a man a magician or wonder-worker because nothing short of a consecrated life—a life dedicated to a chosen ideal—can ever suffice to develop the singularly august power over the forces of surrounding nature which our Oriental informants assure us characterize the true magician, differentiating him (or her) from the common throng. To be soberly told in a fashionable hall on Fifth avenue, in New York City, that a really pious or worthy man can walk safely through the jungles of Bengal, because no Hon, tiger or other ravenous beast could or would molest him, is to experience either a thrill or a shock until one begins to realize the standard of piety to which the man or woman must have attained before the words of the Eastern lawyer can be accepted as true or reasonable; but once come to understand exactly what is implied in such a startling teaching, and, the mystery beginning to vanish, the seemingly incredible statement becomes comprehensible.
Not alone the teachers who represent distinctly Oriental faiths and schools of philosophy but (in measure) all who have ever sincerely attempted to explain the science of self-mastery have contended for the same ultimate result of psychical development.
In the first place it would be well for the Christian student of the Mysteries to read carefully those portions of the epistles of Paul to the Galatians, Ephesians, Romans and Corinthians in which that true adept of eighteen centuries ago points the way to victory over carnality which is possible for all who seriously undertake it. Paul’s threefold classification of human nature is familiar to all readers and churchgoers. Body, Soul and Spirit is the conventional translation. By soul in this connection is meant simply psyche, from which the very popular word psychical is directly derived, not zoe, which is the higher term for life in Greek.
There are clearly three planes of consciousness in every one of us, and according as one or the other predominates in action are we masters of circumstance or slaves of fate. Swedenborg’s teaching concerning the three loves is perfectly clear, for however much people may dispute over such scholastic terms as soul, mind and spirit, the love of God, of neighbor, and of self are easily definable without recourse to scholasticisms. The love of God is a purely spiritual affection which may be defined as love of goodness per se. Lovers of righteousness there arc among us today who are so devoted to ideals that no personal considerations weigh heavier than thistle-down with them if placed in the balance with fidelity to conviction or loyalty to equity itself. This highest love is absolutely universal, it transcends all personalities and is in nature absolutely equitable and equable. To the one who loves goodness itself all else seems paltry and contemptible in contrast therewith. Such a love defies temptation of every sort and serenely surmounts every allurement of the senses, as it conquers completely every sophistication of the intellect and subdues to itself every passion of
the flesh.
To the earnest student of philosophy who can never rest content until he discovers how to make transcendent teachings apply to daily living, Swedenborg’s treatises concerning the subjugation of lower to higher affections cannot fail to afford the sublimest satisfaction, living as we do in the midst of all varieties of conflicting and depressing theories, tending to favor a reversion to Buddhistic pessimism rather than a true advance to the ideal condition which the greatest teachers of all the earth have acknowledged as one of complete expression, never of enforced repression or restraint.
There are as many different theories of life promulgated in Asia as in Europe or America, and while it is well that we should become acquainted with all theories it is highly essential that we should learn to discriminate between misconceptions and beautiful ideals. Though there are many who contend that the main difference between Oriental and Christian philosophy is that the former denies while the latter insists upon individual immortality, it is not by any means true that the doctrine known as absorption into Deity is anything more than a tenet of one school of Oriental dreamers unendorsed by the brightest Asiatic thinkers.
Sir Edwin Arnold’s poems have received the cordial endorsement of eminent Buddhists in Ceylon, and wherever that distinguished English bard has traveled in the East he has been welcomed most cordially as a worthy and truthful exponent of the faith of the native Hindus. In “The Light of Asia” we are introduced to Buddha as a young man practicing rigid asceticism, but as an older and wiser man recanting self-imposed torture and counseling his faithful and devoted disciples to practice all the virtues indeed, but at the same time to partake freely of those right and useful pleasures pertaining to the external state which are not sinful, but, on the contrary, virtuous.
There are several intimations in the New Testament that Jesus was no ascetic or recluse, though John the Baptist was undoubtedly an anchorite of the desert, and on some occasions the great hierophant of Galilee, the Man of Nazareth, was severely censured because he did not throw in his lot with those who considered the practice of physical austerities the only road to spiritual emancipation. At the base of the austere and forbidding view of life which builds monasteries and confines men and women in silent solitary cells lies the poisonous belief that the flesh is an enemy to be destroyed, instead of a servant to be governed or an instrument to be employed by the dominating spirit.
The ascetic who spends his time in flagellations and other equally useless self-imposed tortures is as much a sensualist in one sense as the rou6 or libertine who lives only for sensuous enjoyment, for, though the one hates the flesh and makes war upon its appetites while the other idolizes and pampers it, one is no freer from constant thought about the flesh than is the other.
The ideal life is a life that travels along a reasonable road between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-destruction, and though we may safely say that of the two the recluse is the less dangerous person to society, we cannot hold up as an ideal any state that has some negative but no positive virtue to recommend it. The ideal life is that which understands how the spirit which is the life can make itself manifest in the threefold manner which we call moral, intellectual, and physical perfection, and though perfection seems very far off from even the most advanced among us, it must be steadfastly adhered to as obtainable.
Be ye perfect is ever the Master’s Word whose wonder-working power no mind short of a Master’s can duly estimate; and this command would never have been given to disciples by the wisest of Adepts had it not been possible for us all to profit by holding it before us as a beacon-light to guide us on our way to the harbor of celestial accomplishment. The three planes of our nature denominated moral, intellectual, and physical are alike good, but they must be rightly subordinated one to the other. This is a truth which needs reiteration.
Moral impulses are necessary to guide intellectual force aright, and reason must at all times hold the rein and compel the flesh to serve its legitimate superior. The Oriental teachings which divide man into seven parts are very ancient and not at all difficult to understand so soon as anyone has mastered the esoteric meaning of seven days of the mystical week, seven rainbow colors, seven musical notes, seven churches of Asia, seven spirits of God, etc., etc., all of which seemingly mysterious lore is clearly capable of scientific elucidation. But though the septenary constitution of humanity is a favorite theme with those who drink in wisdom through Oriental channels, the whole drift of Oriental Theosophy tends only to an ultimate admission that there is a higher and there is also a lower division of human nature, rendering possible the alchemical work of transmutation, mystically viewed.
The higher triad is to govern the lower quaternary—so say the advocates of the sevenfold idea. As the sevenfold classification is rather complex and bewildering to Western ears, it is always best when speaking to general audiences in America or England to endeavor to unlock existence with a fourfold key, and as the square is a symbol which all appreciate, as it is the symbol of equity and certainly of concord, we will confine ourselves to a fourfold terminology in our present endeavors to make plain the basis on which we may cause to rest an edifice of culture of which none need feel ashamed.
Spirituality is the first and highest of the four necessary terms. This must be apprehended in some such appreciation of divine truth as that which made possible the writings of Jacob Boehme, Fenelon, Mme. Guyon, and indeed all the mystics. The conception of divine immanence as well as transcendence has made possible the sublime poetry of William Cullen Bryant, who could not otherwise have written his Thanatopsis, and of all who have ever apprehended in any sense something of the rich vein of inner meaning in the mighty words, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
No crude belittling thought of measureless divinity is voiced in so magnificent a phrase, for truly the sight of God does not consist in any petty vision of a monarch on a gorgeous throne, but in the intense realization that all is good essentially, and that, no matter in what direction events may move seemingly, in reality all paths are winding onward and upward into ever-brightening light.
Spirit means strength, energy, force, power, breath, air; it comes in English from the Latin Spiritus and the Greek Pneuma. In Old Saxon the word Gast and in German Geist, means about the same, and it is from those two words that the term Holy Ghost has entered the English ecclesiastical vocabulary. To be high-spirited, brave-spirited, noble-spirited, etc., is to be strong, vigorous, energetic and capable in the extreme.
There is surely nothing resembling weakness in Spirit, which is the very breath of life. The term low-spirited correctly means possessed of very little spirit, i. e., of very slight energy or power.
When Bulwer Lytton wrote “The Coming Race”—in some respects the most marvelous of all his strange romances—he called the people, who were further advanced in many ways than we of today, Vril-Ya, and surely it is not difficult to trace the etymological origin of the term Vril, so close of kin is it to the Latin Vir, meaning the superior man, contradistinguished from homo, the ordinary man.
Hebrew contains two words of similar import, viz.: Ish, the superior or spiritual man, and Odom, the earthly man. Though both are good, each in his proper place, the one must dominate the other, just as the vril sticks in the hands of Lytton’s heroes enabled them to control all nature around them, as well as preserve health in their own organisms and rid their country of all noxious and dangerous creatures, such as the monstrous Grec, which the boy of twelve reduces to a little pile of cinders with a move of his enchanter’s wand.
Magic, stripped of all its superfluities, is only the knowledge and practice of that true Occultism which is by no means made up of terrible secrets and weird incantations, but consists truly of knowledge how to gain complete mastery over all the inferior planes of consciousness which the spirit must finally completely rule. As the spirit expands to take the scepter of government in hand, it masters all inferior things, reducing to perfect obedience whatever has aforetime seemed incorrigibly insubordinate.
Morality, which we regard as the first of the three planes on which the jurisdiction of the indwelling spirit is to be made manifest, is not by any means spirituality itself, and it is for this reason that theologians have clung (though often very blindly) with such amazing tenacity to their favorite doctrine that mere morality is utterly inadequate for salvation. Faith has been the theological term which has been made to do duty for spirituality, and this has occasioned much misunderstanding among many honest people largely on account of the diverse meanings attaching to the word faith, and most of all by reason of its being so frequently identified with belief—a term which is by no means correctly employed as synonymous with it. It is only when we rise to the higher meaning of the word faith that we can intelligently connect it with spirituality, which truly signifies capability for discerning spiritual realities through an opening up of those interior faculties which enable us to enjoy intromission to the spiritual state which is immortal.
If faith in this sense be understood as the evidence of things unseen by mortal eyes or the substantial realization of what we have long been hoping for, there is no difficulty whatever in comprehending the province and use of intelligent faith considered as a means of introducing us to the palpable realities of the spiritual realm.
Agnostics and even materialists may be thoroughly ethical in conduct and therefore faithful in the restrictive moral use of the term, but though moral and therefore exemplary in their lives they are painfully destitute of spiritual perception, and from that cause experience far less joy, and consequently far more depression, than would fall to their portion were they convinced of spiritual realities.
Morality is often legal, compulsory and sometimes almost entirely conventional, and though a good thing as far as it goes, if it is unillumined with light from spiritual perception, it can scarcely be trusted to stand the test of any severe strain upon it, though it must honestly be confessed that many people are far more spiritually unfolded than they know. True spirituahty shines through every thought, word, and deed, but though luminous as the brightest light and all-pervasive as radiant heat, it is entirely unassuming and equally unobtrusive.
Swedenborg was unmistakably correct when he averred that truly regenerated people do not know of their own regeneration, meaning that they are so entirely simple and natural in their way of living as to be entirely free from every disagreeable phase or variety of self-consciousness.
An ideal life must in some way resemble the pattern described in the Gospel narratives, for no matter how widely scholars may differ as to the authority, genuineness or authenticity of one or all of the four evangels, and regardless also of the many seeming discrepancies in all accepted or authorized texts, there is something in the amazing versatility of the character of the Ideal Man which calls forth supremest admiration from all who allow their hearts and minds together to be touched by the sublime beauty of the matchless narrative of the life of Jesus.
Ernst Renan and other skeptical writers have paid magnificent tributes to the Christ ideal, and if the picture as presented in the New Testament be imperfect (as it doubtless is) the reality which inspired it must be infinitely more glorious than the transcript in the world’s possession. It is not, however, necessary to settle any historic controversy or to look back 1,900 years to view humanity’s ideal. Look within is ever wiser counsel than gaze without. History may be partly fabulous; some facts may have been suppressed and others altered, but the light within ever points the road to the highest imaginable
attainment. It is not to the outward but to the inner Horeb, Sinai, Tabor, and Olivet that we must ever turn for completest guidance in the heavenward direction.
An ideal life is not a copy: it is an original; and therein lies the vital distinction which forever separates immortal genius from mortal talent, the work of the great masters from the imitations thereof by their followers. No two human lives can be precisely identical. No one individual can live through all the experiences of the race, but wherever any of us may be situated in the anatomy of the Grand Man we may be healthful, happy, noble, useful, and in every way contributive to the general weal.
The Kingdom of Heaven cannot be a republic because the citizens of a republic must be equals, and all men and women can be esteemed equals, but the heavenly kingdom which is to be set up first in individual lives, then in special institutions, and finally in the entire world, is a state or condition of affairs in which the true order of life must be acknowledged and openly declared.
Moral impulses must direct the intellect so that it in turn may exercise rightful and beneficent sovereignty over all physical conditions.
The Spiritual Realm per se may be regarded as the all-containing sphere out of which all expressions of life proceed. The moral region is the seat of all that we mean by conscience and whatsoever else directs us to obey the moral law, without which we should be utterly unable to live together in any organized social conditions.
The intellectual plane is the abode of executive ability, the seat of all that we call reason—the storehouse of practical knowledge; while the physical condition is one of final expression or ultimate embodiment in which all things perceived by understanding can be wrought out in corresponding forms of use.
An ideal life socially considered, i. e., an ideal communal life, is a life which expresses all varieties of possible human excellence, but an ideal individual life may be devoted to but a single aim and fulfill but a solitary purpose, but it must so fulfill whatever it has undertaken as to make its influence felt for good as a vital part of the Great Life in which it finds itself enclosed. This teaching concerning life is in no sense offered to the world as a completed system of philosophy so far as particular details are concerned, but in bold, general outline we claim for it universal acceptance sooner or later, because it is based not on doubtful speculations concerning what may be, but is evolved out of actual experience of what human nature really is, as that nature reveals itself in every instance of unfolding humanity.
Conscience, Intuition, and Interior Illumination
The three terms which head this chapter are often used indiscriminately, without much if any attempt so far to disengage them one from another as to cause them to convey definitely distinct ideas to the mind; it seems therefore helpful at the outset to make an endeavor to differentiate their meanings clearly. The word conscience though a very common term is very rarely analyzed, but no sooner do we divide it into the two words con and science than we find that it necessarily signifies what we know collectively or concretely or what we all know together. The syllable con and the noun science need to be considered first apart and then together, in order to lead to a clear understanding of what must have originally been the thought of those lexicographers who introduced conscience into the dictionary. When we speak of cons as distinct from pros we mean arguments against instead of for, but when we use such words as congregation, consociation and other terms of kindred import we intend to suggest cooperation or confederation, i. e., more than one, generally quite a considerable number of persons (ten or more) working together with a common end in view and united in the bonds of intellectual and moral fellowship. Individual conscience is properly the sum of individual knowledge, which the word science signifies. A social or corporate conscience is the sum of the knowledge possessed by a community. It is therefore equally correct to speak of private and public or of particular and general conscience. Is conscience or the sum of knowledge a matter for education? is often asked. Of course it must be if by education we mean development, but not if education is degraded in our esteem to the base level of something nearly approaching cramming. Conscientiousness is one of the commodities of the brain expressed through one of the organs clearly discernible through the skull and easily traced by any or all who have even a superficial knowledge of phrenology or who can delineate character by means of cranial diagnosis.
This organ like all others contracts or develops, expands or shrivels accordingly as it is stimulated to increased expression or permitted to become dormant through lack of exercise. Though conscience may be determinable as to its essential nature or distinctive quality, no one is justified in stating that it is equally developed in all persons; therefore, two or more persons following equally the dictates of their own consciences may display very different and widely unequal degrees of moral excellence. If one person is highly conscientious while another is far less so, it is but reasonable to declare that the conscientious act of the one will be a very much higher or more truly moral act than the equally conscientious act of the other; the one who has undergone but slight expansion in the region of conscientiousness may be as conscientious as the other intentionally, though the actual conduct of the one might be repellant to the moral feeling of the other. To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him the non-action or reverse action is sin, but without knowledge there cannot be the responsibility that comes only with knowledge. The foregoing proposition suffices to account in a thoroughly logical manner for very much that frequently causes great embarrassment among such as listen to controversies concerning the nature and functions of conscience without having reached anything like a clear decision of their own. Wherever there is room for controversy there is assuredly some truth on both sides of the debate; neither the one who takes the affirmative nor the one who takes the negative ever being wholly in the right, for self-evident propositions or axiomatic certainties such as go to make up the multiplication table do not admit of discussion. Debatable ground must be to a certain extent terra incognita or undiscovered country. Honest debaters are explorers seeking fresh supplies of truth rather than priggish egotists vainly imagining that their bucketful of information on a given subject exhausts the reservoir or ocean of ascertainable knowledge.
Conscience is an infallible guide to its possessor so far as it extends, just as mathematical knowledge is infallible to the extent that one possesses it, but no further. Because a child knows that 12 X 12=144 does not prove that the same child can give a correct answer to the examiner’s question: What is 13 times 13? Conscience may be compared to knowledge of the multiplication table, which everybody learns as far as 12 times 12, but often no further. Questions may need to be decided requiring answers to such advanced queries as what is 83 times 947? And though there is an answer to the more advanced as well as to the less advanced inquiry, it by no means follows that because you can reply accurately to the one you know the answer to the other.
Here comes in the doctrine of the infallibility of ascertained truth and the companion doctrine of the limitless progress in the discovery of truth possible to all humanity. Truth is necessarily unalterable in character but our apprehension of it is necessarily progressive; therefore, though our knowledge of truth cannot alter, it enlarges. This distinction between alteration and enlargement is surely a vital and most important one.
An architect designs a building say seven stories in height; he submits his plans to a builder who employs workmen to erect the edifice in exact accord with the predetermined plan; this they do, continuously erecting one story upon another till the seventh story is finished and the roof put on. Digging for the foundation is the first stage of the process, roofing in the structure is the last. Between the first and the last there must be many stages of the work arrived at, each in successive order, but no one process is any more important or better than any other, seeing that all are alike necessary to the completion of the pile. In like manner we are all building our temple of character; raising the house from its foundation upward, step by step, logically and consecutively, for in no other way can the temple be upreared.
Our conscience is not by any means so large in development at the beginning as at the end of this process, for only as we practically build do we evolve our inherent or involved ability to acquire knowledge. Potentially we do not change but actually we grow constantly, and as the lower stages must be passed through as we journey toward the higher the degree of light obtainable below is far less than that which we shall clearly discern as we mount above.
Faulty because inadequate, as all illustrations must be, analogies frequently help to suggest a truth otherwise obscure. Our illustration of the gradual building of a structure is at least suggestive and may serve the useful end of helping some incipient thinkers along the road of reasoning to a point where they will be able to revise their terminology or at least retranslate it, so that “an accusing conscience,” “a guilty conscience” and similar phrases will mean something far more definite than they may have signified hitherto.
Conscience cannot be guilty, but conscience does upbraid. Through the very act of upbraiding it bids us to rise to higher moral levels; it should therefore be regarded far more in the light of a monitor than in that of an accuser. The doctrine of evolution which is now applied to morals and religion fully as much as to purely intellectual and physical development has threatened to make complete havoc of all time-honored theologic views of conscience, for instead of conscience appearing as it formerly appeared as the direct voice of God upbraiding rebellious man by reason of his transgressions, it is relegated to a position of equality with other human faculties and along with all the rest is coming to be regarded as simply a product of education or of evolution.
On closer examination we shall, however, discover that only the harsh and forbidding phases of the old idea are becoming obsolete. Such pleasing phrases as “A good conscience,” “A conscience void of offense,” and many others of similar import are to be constantly encountered in the course of Paul’s epistles, from which letters the entire body of orthodox Christianity has been deduced. Paul is a much overrated as well as underrated man. To the eyes of his devoted admirers this remarkable Saul of Tarsus ranks fully as high as, if not higher than, even John the beloved disciple, while to those who are distinctly unfriendly to his claims he appears as a cruel fanatic, his fanatic cruelty being just as evident on the one hand after his conversion to Christianity as it was on the other prior to his change of intellectual front and moral aspect.
Paul’s views on conscience like all his other opinions are various; he cannot be other than uneven in the expression of his sentiments, for he is too intrepid a character to be a calm, dispassionate philosopher, and only the utterly unprejudiced or entirely dispassionate can so calmly and clearly weigh all matters submitted to their judgment that their views on every subject, though not infallible, are at any rate sane. With the Paul type of individual, life is a conflict, the world a battle ground; fleshly lusts are constantly warring against the soul, therefore what is known as conscience plays an intensely real and sometimes a cruelly formidable part in the experiences of such a person’s interior or subjective existence.
It is interesting to note that Paul’s letters contain numerous allusions to bodily infirmities, and his pathetic mention of “a thorn in the flesh” is a characteristic instance of how keenly he felt his physical derangements.
As so very large a portion of the modern Christian doctrine concerning conscience has been derived from the Pauline epistles, it is well to remember that their author was by no means a perfect type of vigorous, healthy manhood, and though at least four of those epistles are beyond doubt “genuine” in the scholastic or critical sense, it by no means therefore follows that the teaching they contain is untinctured with unduly pessimistic views of life. We are living in days when bodily and mental action and reaction are being analytically considered as never before, and though many physiologists attribute altogether too much to the influence of the flesh upon the spirit, there are not lacking those among metaphysicians who are too narrowly-exclusive in their dealing with mental states, seeing that they entirely overlook reflex action in their passionate zeal for the honor of the cult of mental healing.
Primarily it is always true that mental states are responsible for physical conditions, but so many questions pertaining to heredity and outside influence upon sensitive natures must be taken into account in addition to one’s own mental activity that a wholesale statement of an utterly unqualified character is apt to be misleading.
Such eminent women as Harriet Martineau and others equally conscientious in the highest moral sense did not hesitate to attribute a large portion of their mental despondency to physical disabilities, while the noble English preacher, Frederic Robertson, told his congregation that when he was suffering acutely from physical distemper he saw everything as through a thick, black crepe veil.
How frequently it occurs that people condemn themselves for the commission of all manner of crimes of which they are innocent by reason of the disordered states of their physical organisms! Conscience and health are vitally related, and one cannot be fairly treated without considering the other. It is far juster as a rule to attribute wrong-doing alike in children and adults to illness (and then seek to aid them on the road to health) than it ever can be to resort to ferocious punishments which are unmistakable souvenirs of barbarism even though intelligent people are not found wanting who sanction and advise them.
When, however, benevolently-disposed people advocate barbaric measures it is never because they prefer such measures to milder means, but always by virtue of their belief (which is false) that no better way exists for protecting society or reforming the aggressor. When you say to some people that it would be better to appeal to the consciences of evil-doers, their answer is apt to be the manifestly unfair and unkind one—”Such people have no consciences.” Truly the consciences of such are dormant, possibly embryotic, but germs of conscience at any rate are theirs. Much confusion exists in many places concerning the attitude which a conscientious person feels called upon to take in a disputed religious matter where cruel persecution of others is frequently involved. Consciences may be enlightened by reason, or unenlightened; therefore the act of a conscientious person is largely determined by his intelligence, though the motive which prompts the act belongs to conscience per se.
In days of fierce passionate struggle for the ascendency of some particular dogma against all opposition, conscientious fanatics may burn and imprison “heretics,” believing they are doing God and humanity a righteous service. Such people are ignorant and belligerent, and have carried ignorance and belligerence into the field of religious controversy. They are unreasoning; therefore, while they speak of acting conscientiously, we shall find them too much blinded by prejudice and too much excited by partisan feeling ever seriously to question the right or wrong of their intrepid acts.
It is at this point that we would take decided issue with many gifted orators and writers concerning the place occupied by conscience in the work of persecution. In many a professedly religious person strong animal appetites are simply held in check by the command of a creed, but they are not conquered; therefore whenever the subterfuge can be resorted to that the cause of religion will be served by indulging those passions to the utmost, they are given unrestricted freedom and in the name of religion brutality is enthroned. In war times the savage instinct to go out and kill something is let loose
to a terrible extent, and even though some of the causes leading up to war are justifiable, war itself is nothing other than a venting of the lowest spleen in human nature.
We very much prefer the doctrine that there are different degrees in the unfoldment of conscience as manifested by different individuals, and that conscience may be spoken of in terms of more or less, than the theory that conscience itself is ever unethical.
Turning from conscience to Intuition we pass to decidedly higher ground and reach a plane of thought where all the doubtful workings of what may or may not be correctly designated conscience are left far below. Intuition however is a vaguely translated word, though its etymology is plain. It is simply tuition with the prefix in. All ordinary training through the senses might rightly be termed extuition, as the tutor is generally one who relies altogether upon external sources of information and employs equally exterior means to reach the understanding of the pupil. It is in the school of Plato rather than in that of Aristotle that we learn of the workings of intuition.
The daemon of Socrates need not have been an extraneous guardian spirit, but may well be considered as the “higher self” or anima divina of the great philosopher. Plato, the faithful scribe and devoted disciple of his illustrious teacher, though he pays ample tribute to the influence exerted by his personal master, goes very much further than could any mere follower or imitator in expanding the Socratic theory. Innate ideas are not acceptable to the materialistic reasoner, therefore the typical West which is essentially materialistic in its mode of thought and action has taken very kindly to the views of Aristotle, while Plato has been regarded chiefly as a classic dreamer, a master of style,
but not a practical guide for the young thinkers of Europe or America.
The East, essentially mystical and contemplative, recognizes intuition and along with it telepathy, psychometry and all else that the West is investigating at the present time with more or less of thoroughness. It is, however, in the spiritual region of consciousness that intuition finds its stronghold. Not only Emerson, but James Martineau as well, may be cited as an example of confidence in intuition, though the latter if not also the former has again and again proved himself a very close intellectual reasoner. Dr. Martineau’s great book, written as late if not later than his eightieth year, “The Seat of Authority in Religion,” is in one sense extremely rationalistic, as in some places it suggests the conclusions of Lecky in his” History of European Morals,” but when the final test is to be applied and the soul of the subject is to be revealed, Martineau, with consummate skill, uses rationalism to defeat agnosticism and comes forth solidly as an advocate of the religion of the indwelling spirit. Such a book is a noble study, and particularly helpful must it be to those who are tossed and buffeted upon the desolate ocean of doubt, unable to accept any historic evidences of Christianity or any other formulated system of theology, and yet deeply conscious within themselves of an indwelling spirit which not only makes for righteousness in the ethical sense, but also testifies to the reality of God and the certainty of human immortality. Martineau’s exquisite poem, which begins with the well-known lines:
“He who himself and God would know
Into the silence let him go
And lifting off pall after pall
Reach to the inmost depth of all,”
is one of the most beautiful specimens of modern sacred verse in any language. So noble a hymn agrees well with the conclusions reached by its scholarly author, who, fifty years ago, was a fine specimen of conservative English Unitarianism, as his old collection of hymns still used in some chapels abundantly testifies. Later on in his ministerial and literary career his “lo Services for Christian Worship” show still the conservative spirit permeated with a deep extra-theological spiritual consciousness, while his more recent hymnal, “Hymns of Prayer and Praise” (for the last twenty years a great favorite in England), breathes an ever- widening spirit and shows that the compiler of so fine a collection of sacred songs knew how to cull the finest gems of psalmody from all sources, and while not by any means avoiding distinctively Christian sentiment, could minister equally well to devout thinkers and aspiring hearts outside as well as inside any denominational fold.
The most vulnerable places in all ecclesiastical armors are the most external. Popular Biblical criticism even of the “higher” order deals almost entirely with matters which are after all historical rather than spiritual. Were there two or three Isaiahs? How many psalms out of the one hundred and fifty which constitute the accepted psalter were written by David? Who wrote the Fourth Gospel or the Epistle to the Hebrews? All such questions, which could be multiplied indefinitely, in no way touch the essence of religion, though they are of great historic interest and the answers to them are not to be despised. The new polychrome Bible is the latest, most ambitious and most useful of the many attempts yet made to familiarize the reading public with the results of late Biblical scholarship, but after examining specimen pages of this great new work—a monumental undertaking—one does not feel at all indisposed to turn again to Joseph Parker’s “People’s Bible” and listen to a pastoral rather than to a rigidly-scientific rendering of the venerated text.
Suppose Joseph’s coat was “long-sleeved” rather than many-colored, and Abraham’s wife was afraid of being “laughed at” instead of expecting to be “laughed with,” as an old version phrased it, it is gratifying in the extreme to see how little difference all these changes and revisions make in the general trend of the moral instructions suggested by the narratives.
Intuitive people are apt to be somewhat regardless of textual criticism, as they do not depend on literature (even the best) for illumination. Authors before books; painters must exist prior to paintings; therefore, should all the venerable volumes now extant be looked upon as forgeries, the soul would not be dismayed because it never depends upon books for its enlightenment.
If the seat of authority in religion be not outward, but inward, intuitive and prophetic, not sacerdotal and ecclesiastic, then should all hierarchies be found to rest on sand; the solid rock of interior certitude would forever constitute the stable base for all abiding religious consciousness. The scholastic theologians have always admitted that God can be revealed to man in two ways, viz.: either by direct divine action within the individual human soul, or through the agency of an appointed hierarchy. Because individual perceptions differ, the plea is made that God has ordained the hierarchy; a claim easy to assert but very difficult to substantiate if we study facts of history.
Intuition of course varies in degree in different persons, also in the same people at various times; but though this may be taken as an accepted fact based on science and verified by innumerable experiences, such an admission by no means invalidates the claim of intuition itself to high regard as the chief factor in conveying truth to the innermost consciousness of humanity.
Intuition is in no sense whatever a substitute for reason—a faculty which it certainly is never destined to supplant—because reason is appealed to in all normal cases to act upon the information brought to it through intuition’s gateway. An illustration here may prove helpful. Picture to yourself an auditorium to which there are two entrances, one from the outer street, a busy public thoroughfare; the other from a college or private residence like a bishop’s house attached to a cathedral. Access is gained to the center of the audience-room through both apertures, but those who enter by these respective doors face while entering in opposite directions. Two sets of information can be given by these two distinct classes of people, who, if they are both intelligent and truthful, will say nothing contradictory to each other’s statements, though they will furnish news respectively which could only have been gained in the quarters whence they had come.
Question the spokesman of the one party concerning the affairs of the street, and he, fresh from the marts of trade, may readily acquaint you with the transactions of the marketplace though he can know absolutely nothing of the private or collegiate life to which he has not been admitted; the spokesman on the other side who has entered from the bishop’s palace or the seminary behind the church can give information of a totally different kind, but knows nothing of the outer world.
The testimony of the senses and also of intuition like that of these two sets of people can be submitted to the reason for analysis and application, but it must always continue to be the case that whatever enters the house where reason sits enthroned from the outside must pertain to the realm of sense, while demonstrations of spiritual truth can only enter through the gate that leads within.
It has been commonly supposed that, because intuition has been esoterically termed feminine and reason masculine, therefore females are more intuitive than males. This is not necessarily the case, though it is a recorded fact that more women than men have been hitherto distinguished by the possession and exercise of a very reliable and helpful intuitive faculty. Woman’s quieter and more domestic mode of life has not militated against her intuitive development as it has against her brother’s, and as it must always be the province of women to be the mothers of the race, and maternity greatly fosters the intuitive side of human nature, there will probably always remain a majority of intuitive women and of intellectual men until the stage in common growth is reached where there will be such an equalization of human development as the world hitherto has never realized or seen.
Business of an entirely secular kind is perforce conducted in an atmosphere not very highly conducive to spiritual culture; at the same time it needs to be enforced that we need not continue to be as blatantly materialistic in our business methods in future as we have been in the past and still are in the present.
Commerce, when it is righteous commerce, is no drawback to the leading of a noble moral life, and the day will surely come when no phase of spiritual experience will be hampered by engaging in any form of secular employment. But as yet the time has not fully come when business methods are spiritual methods, therefore only in occasional instances—marked exceptions to the general rule—do we find the leaders in commerce palpably dowered with a very large supply of intuition.
It must not be inferred from what has just been said that we are arguing against the introduction of intuitive guidance into the field specially occupied by worldly duties; on the contrary, our contention is that not unless and never until intuition inspires commerce will the business of the world be successfully accomplished.
Intuition is insight, seership, ability to detect motives and witness the operation of underlying causes which give forth physical effects. Consider, then, how great a boon would be conferred on honest workers and how greatly discomfited dishonorable schemers would be if insight, penetration, or interior discernment could throw a flashlight on the crooked dealings of Jim the Penman” and his ilk. Of what use are letters of introduction, “gilt edged” or “A I” references, unless one can be assured of their genuineness? And it is surely admitted everywhere that history has proved again and again that counterfeiting in many directions has been brought to such a pitch of perfection as to almost defy the skill of the most accomplished experts.
Intuition can never be enjoyed where prejudice of any sort prevails, for wherever there is present a fixed idea, an intuitive revelation, unless it accord therewith, is almost certain of rejection. The intuitive man or woman is transparently honest, keen, shrewd, discerning, but never in the least suspicious. Suspicion is allied to jealousy and many another vice and weakness, therefore Othello, who was suspicious, was deceived by the treacherous Iago; while Emilia, who was pure, was penetrative enough to know that Desdemona was entirely innocent of the fault of which she was cruelly accused. Shakespeare, in his Moor of Venice, has shown us very clearly how extremely liable to become deception’s prey is a suspicious spirit, because the willingness to accuse a person of a wrong on hearsay evidence gives proof of an undiscerning, undiscriminating temper.
Interior illumination is, if we may use such an expression, intuition raised to its highest power. Simple intuition may concern and often does concern matters of personal or private interest chiefly, but spiritual illumination is nothing less than a flooding of the understanding with celestial light to such an extent that dark problems become luminous; and, where once there was no guiding star above, the heavens have become radiant with the glory of the Star of Bethlehem and the air vocal with the songs of heaven’s choristers.
In olden times there were three classes of acknowledged superior people, respectively designated Literati, Inspirati and Llluminati. The first were what we understand today by the literary fraternity, only by reason of literature being confined within very much narrower limits than at present; men of letters were rare birds in a sense in which they are certainly not rare today, albeit the highest type of literature is even now scarce and at a premium.
The second of the three classes mentioned contained all those singularly gifted people who furnish food for special thought and give opportunity for particular investigation by reason of their “psychical” endowments. The third class, and the third only, was composed of those who realized within themselves the truth of what some of our recent poets have referred to as “the inward light and living word.”
The first division embraces the lettered; the second, the specially “mediumistic;” the third,
the divinely enlightened. All have their place and work; all are honorable, useful, and necessary if they are but faithful; but however much the world may be indebted to the two former classes for instruction, it would be vain to deny that only the third comprises such teachers of the race as deserve to rank as masters and who have learned to possess themselves at all times and in all ways.
Let no one think that earlier and feebler stages of attainment can safely be despised because the higher far transcends the lower in point of dignity and use alike. Those who have been faithful over a few things are promised rulership over much; those who have used one talent are soon found to possess two, while those who decline to honor a small trust or fulfill a trifling opportunity are after awhile deprived of the little they have scouted.
Fidelity to seemingly insignificant obligations is the certain stepping-stone to eventual illumination, for no matter how small a duty may appear it must never be considered unimportant. The true road to prophetic heights is traversed by all who in any capacity, no matter how humble or obscure, diligently live up to the highest truth perceived by them. The world’s standards of measurement are often radically false, therefore there are no exterior criteria whereby the adept of the ages can be judged. Illumination may radiate over the earth from a temporal throne as in the tradition of Zoroaster, or it may proceed from despised Nazareth as in the legend of the Christ. Wisdom is justified of all her children, regardless of their birthplaces or their occupation.
The story of the twelve apostles is marvelously impressive when read in the light of universal knowledge. Several of the disciples, who become apostles, are fishermen, and there is no hint in any one of the four Gospels that they relinquish their business after they have received illumination from on high. One apostle (Luke) is a physician, another (Matthew) is taken from the receipt of custom; he is therefore a tax collector; and in no instance are we told that occupation or previous training had ought to do with qualifications necessary for the work of an apostle. As the world’s population is made up of all varieties of people it is essential that all classes and descriptions should be reached by teachers specially competent in their respective fields of industry. The scholarship of Oxford or Cambridge is not needed for the east end of London, nor is the dialect of Whitechapel adapted to the drawing-rooms of Belgravia. Let us steer absolutely clear of attempted uniformity on which so many narrow-minded workers wreck their vessels and lose their fish. Unity of spirit we do require; uniformity of method is a drawback, not a help. Rejoicing in our special capacities to do useful service in some given direction (no matter what), we can heartily cooperate in heart with all sincere philanthropists the wide world over, and, if we are but absolutely faithful, illumination may assuredly be ours regardless altogether of our outward state.
Sleep, Dreams, and Visions—How We May Gain the Most From Them
Though sleep is one of the commonest or most matter-of-fact experiences in our lives, it is very rarely that we encounter any one in these excited days who is inclined to take the view of sleep and its spiritual benefits taken by many of the worthies of olden times, whose experiences during sleep form the topic of a considerable portion of the Biblical narrative alike in the Old and New Testaments. The well-known text, “He giveth his beloved sleep,” has formed the suggestive headline of many a touching hymn, but beautiful though the sentiment in its ordinary rendering unquestionably is, by no means the full value of the original is brought out in the conventional translation. “He giveth to his beloved while they are sleeping” is a much fuller interpretation, carrying the thought as it does very much further than the familiar reading suggests. If we are wearied and in need of sleep, sleep is a precious blessing; but if our idea of it rises no higher than the ordinary conception of temporary repose or cessation of activity, we cannot take that ennobling and satisfying view of sleep which those seers and sages have ever taken to whom the spiritual world has been a vivid reality—not a phantom of hope or at best a remote ideal for the future.
Sleep, when regarded solely as a means for needed mental and physical recuperation, is looked upon by many active, enterprising people as only one step removed from actual waste of time; they consequently grudge time to sleep, and as a result bring themselves into a hypernervous condition which soon degenerates into hyperesthesia or some other perilous form of nervous excitability entirely incompatible with normal health and corresponding mental and moral vigor. Sleep must be assigned its rightful place as a means of spiritual education before we can appreciate anything of the psychic import of the tranquil words, “If he sleep he shall do well.” How true that saying is, is well known to every nurse and watcher by the bedside of the sick and suffering; but though in its merely outward sense it is universally admitted, such an admission as is merely called forth by physical experience leaves all higher questions relative to sleep still decidedly in the background.
Insomnia is a disease of the mind and nerves resulting finally in complete nervous prostration and mental overthrow. To induce natural sleep anaesthetics or physical hypnotics are powerless and generally worse than nothing, as their tendency is to debilitate and depress rather than to exhilarate and sustain either the mental or physical organism.
As the word Hypnotism is now very greatly in vogue, and this term is more or less connected in popular esteem with what is technically known as artificial somnambulism it often becomes necessary to divide hypnosis under two distinct heads and seek thereby to disillusionize that large section of the public which is ever on the outlook for some new form of danger or else some novel mode of charming away disease and suffering by recourse to magic or mystery in one or other of its myriad forms. The popular belief concerning hypnotic or sleep-inducing treatment is very largely erroneous; on scarcely any subject does more general misconception prevail, and that chiefly on account of the difficulty commonly experienced on the part of the multitude to comprehend the part played by the will in the field of psychic experimentation.
The first thought which strikes the average person who hears of hypnotism is that someone has been mysteriously compelled to yield to the mental domination of someone else, and that in a manner often calculated to inspire terror in the breasts of the excitable and timid who usually form a large element in any population.
The second idea connected with hypnotism which strikes that section of the public which is willing to reason out a conclusion is that hypnotism is very likely a good substitute for chloral and other opiates, and if handled cautiously may become a great boon in nervous cases to say the least. The first position mentioned is so largely untenable that we do not think it necessary to discuss it at any length, in this volume at any rate, because it has been so well disposed of by Hudson, Flower, and other able writers whose efforts have been to dispel illusions and place the subject in its true light before the public. The second position referred to bears so closely upon normal sleep and how to induce it that it deserves more than passing notice.
Sleep need never be induced by artificial means if we are in a well-regulated mental and bodily condition, but in times of physical sickness and mental distress the kindly help of an outside person is often necessary when one is in no condition successfully to practice auto-suggestion. Sleep and fatigue are by no means so closely allied as is commonly supposed, therefore we look to see allusions to tiring out the patient by repeated monotonous suggestions give place to a superior terminology. People are not at all unscientific in the use of language when they say they are too tired to sleep, for it is an incontrovertible fact that we need to get rested before we fall asleep, otherwise we are deprived of sleep through restlessness, or if we fall asleep our dreams are apt to be even more fatiguing than prolonged wakefulness.
There are temperaments which require very little sleep comparatively, while others require a great deal; but something of a misapprehension usually comes in when such a statement is unqualified, especially when Napoleon and other noted characters are cited as examples of requiring very little.
Quality rather than quantity of sleep is the more important consideration, and as quality where sleep is concerned refers to depth or profundity of repose we may safely conclude that Napoleon I., and the other extraordinary characters who did whatever they did with great thoroughness, slept actually more in four hours than average people do in eight.
Length of time passed in slumber is largely unimportant, though the Masonic division of time into three equal parts daily is fairly reasonable. It is a safe general rule to recommend eight hours steady work at one’s regular occupation, eight hours’ sleep, and eight hours for eating, dressing, and recreation. But however excellent general rules may be, and however well adapted they may prove to a large percentage of the human family, we are sure to find some natures to which they do not prove congenial. A safe attitude to affirm is one that succeeds in steering clear of bigotry on the one hand and indifferentism on the other; one, in a word, which embodies the following widely-accepted maxims:—In things essential, unity; in things doubtful, liberty; in all things, charity. To lay down hard and fast rules for all to follow in any spiritual direction works even less desirably than when that mistaken course is pursued in simply physical directions, consequently the instructions given by Oriental Swamis and Asiatic teachers in America and England cannot be followed very particularly by the bulk of any Western population. The Oriental is usually a person of much greater leisure than falls to the lot of the average Occidental, therefore the rules for retiring and resting easily obeyed in Asia are extremely difficult to observe in Europe or America. To rise at 4 A. M., and retire at 8 p. m, is regarded as ideal by some professors of hygiene who desire to have as much sleep before midnight as after.
Were we all farmers living in rural districts we might conform to that regulation quite conveniently and do a good day’s work every day and thrive upon it; but seeing that among us are those who are night editors, night clerks, and others who cannot possibly observe such a law, it is not wise to hold it up as one of the necessary aids to spiritual development,—a question in which we are all interested regardless of our occupations.
Similar remarks apply equally to stated times for retirement for the purpose of meditation. It is not feasible that all should observe 1 2 m. or 9 p. M. or any other stated time appointed by certain fraternities or societies, because business and domestic engagements often make such an act impracticable. The theory we uphold is not open to any such objection, because every one sleeps at some time, and our counsel is to take your last waking moments, whenever they occur, as the special time you devote to meditation, for by so doing you strike the right chord which will go on reverberating the whole time you are asleep.
Du Maurier’s “Peter Ibbetson” is in some respects a masterly production, immeasurably superior to the somewhat questionable “Trilby,” which far exceeded it in popular recognition. In “Peter Ibbetson,” the author shows how sleep can be employed for the most perfect telepathic communion between two devoted friends whom a relentless fate had cruelly separated on the eternal plane. For nearly thirty years a man in prison and a woman traveling at will in some of the most beautiful parts of the world were consciously united and even after one had dropped the mortal frame tidings came to the other from beyond the Styx. In such a narrative as that a suggestion is made even to the most casual reader in strict accordance with the noble lines, “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.”
We can never be quite sure what our exterior circumstances may be; we cannot quite guarantee that untoward conditions shall never hold our bodies captive, but we can learn to apply in more senses than one the memorable words, “He is a free man whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves beside.” Imagine the bliss of realizing that no matter what our outward fate may be, eight hours out of every twenty-four are entirely our own to do exactly as we please with, go where we like and associate with whom we choose.
Fantastic though such an idea may seem at first to many, the very fascination of its possibility is such that whoever begins, however vaguely, to grasp the thought of its practicality is sure to take some steps to test its certainty.
The Bible is very positive in its delineations of great dreamers and interpreters of dreams. The two Josephs were in every sense great men possessed of unusual force of character, and both Testaments tell us of what use their dreams were to themselves and others. Time and space necessarily vanish when we consider problems of world-wide application. Egypt and Palestine are no more favored climes than ngland
and America. The days of old were no more conducive to spiritual unfoldment than are the passing hours through which we are now traveling. We can be Joseph-like and learn to sleep and dream as did the Joseph of whom we have often read in ancient story. One of the best phases of modern thought is that which annihilates distance and period and confronts us with mental and moral states instead. To be a
“just” man, like unto Joseph, is to be ever on the alert for heavenly guidance, especially in times of difficulty and danger, v/hen outward aids are vain and exterior intellect has proved totally inadequate to meet a pressing need. Three times was the gospel Joseph, we are told, specially warned of God in a dream through the agency of an angel. This “angel” may have been his own higher self or an outside ministrant, but in either case the angel was revealed to the super-conscious state of the sleeper.
Even in such ordinary affairs as concerts, lectures and other public entertainments, the experience to be gained during sleep is altogether outside the limits of general belief.
Whenever people go to sleep in public places they are apt to be thought inattentive or else extremely tired, whereas, in many instances known to the writer, highly sensitive people (but in excellent health) have gone sound asleep at the very point of their greatest interest in what was going on, and during sleep have dreamed out grander music and heard far more instructive discourses and far profounder than any which were being given at the time to the outward ears of the waking audience.
We, of course, do not mean to imply that all we have to do is to go to sleep during the progress of public exercises in order to get interior enlightenment; such a conclusion would be erroneous in the extreme, for unless you are in a receptive condition you receive no ennobling influx, nor do you see any glorious visions or hear any wise discourse because you are oblivious to the outer world around you. We must center our thoughts on a special subject in a particularly definite way before we are in a state to receive special illumination; therefore, intense interest in the theme being discussed or in the music performed is clearly a desideratum.
On one occasion the writer had agreed to report a very important sermon delivered by a celebrated preacher on a topic of great interest to the entire community, and attended the church with notebook and pencil prepared to take copious notes in the exact words of the speaker or as nearly that as possible. What was the writer’s surprise may well be imagined, when sleep instantly overtook him after he had taken down the text, and the sermon had just ended when he awoke feeling extremely mortified and considerably embarrassed. The sequel, however, was most satisfactory, for the substance of the entire discourse soon welled up from the depths of inner consciousness, and the epitome furnished to the newspapers was pronounced by many, who had kept wide awake during its delivery, an unusually good abstract of the discourse.
The sub-self ox suggestive mind, as some people call our inner self, acts like a phonograph and treasures up by means of psychic cylinders whatever impressions are made upon us when we are peacefully asleep. Like all other faculties, the faculty of dreaming true, as Du Maurier has styled it, needs cultivation in most people, though in many children and also in adults who are of sedate temperament and live much alone, it asserts itself largely without any special invitation.
The reason why the ancient Orient has bequeathed to us so rich a legacy of narratives of portentous dreams while the West during recent centuries has been rather barren of such histories, is because the mode of life of the Eastern races is quieter than that of Western peoples, and in olden times the stress of material existence was not usually so great as it is today. Could the records of mediaeval monasteries be revealed we should find therein a mass of evidence in favor of psychical experiences beside which the records of modern Psychical Research Societies would pale into utter insignificance; and even were we to go no further afield than the Scotch Highlands we could easily collect an enormous amount of well authenticated testimony of the undoubted reality of such visions as the one which furnishes the theme for the popular Scotch song, “The Campbells are Coming,” and many others in similar strain.
The Scotch Covenanters and many other austere companies of people, not excepting the Puritans and Pilgrims of New England, have borne witness to the reality of “special teachings” during sleep, and though their harsher types of theology are giving way to milder and sweeter religious views today, their arguments in favor of their interior experiences are far too strong to be refuted. The higher word vision which after all is only sight, goes beyond in its significance the more ordinary term Dreams, though in teachers’ Bibles and in many commentaries on the Bible text the two words are employed as very nearly synonymous.
There are three clearly separable kinds of dreams: First, the commonplace dream which is never definite, and when at its worst becomes nightmare. Secondly, the dream to which we instinctively attach some significance because it leaves a decided impression upon us after waking. Thirdly, the prophetic dream, which borders very closely on the seer’s vision. The commonplace dream is simply the result of ordinary thinking; therefore, what we feel ourselves to be going through with during sleep differs in no sense widely from the pursuits of mind and body in which we are commonly engaged during the day. Distressing dreams would never afflict us were we to keep ourselves free from confusion and worry while awake, but as it seems too much to expect just yet that people should abstain entirely from worry—so
deep has the worrying habit become ingrained—it is surely not unreasonable to propose the following simple exercise just before retiring (or just after) as a preventive of any disagreeable
dreams which might otherwise encumber sleep.
If you have been annoyed or worried over anything during the day and find it difficult to perform an evictive mental act, you have always the good counsel to fall back upon—concentrate your whole attention upon some pleasing, helpful suggestion made to you either by reading, contemplating a beautiful object, uplifting conversation with a congenial friend, or simply by direct inward determination to rivet mental gaze upon a solitary selected ideal. If you are sufficiently at home in the abstract, you need have no concrete symbol in your thought; for in that case such a word as hope, faith, peace, success, or any other you may elect will suffice. If, however, you can not realize the abstract and feel the need of something concrete, you can employ subjectively whatever it would be useful to introduce objectively. Here comes in the good of a high degree of development of the
visualizing faculty, the successful visualizer being one who can at any time summon at will just that sort of image he would like to have externally within his range of vision.
We cannot always be in beautiful places or surrounded with objects exactly suited to our tastes, therefore if we are not adepts or experts at mental picturing, we are often sadly disturbed by surrounding inelegancies and incongruities, and when we go to sleep dwelling upon sordid or distasteful circumstances, we are extremely apt to dream of whatever they naturally lead up to. Fix your mental eye on some object which gives you pleasure, especially on one which affords instruction and embodies a high ideal. Let this be your last thought at night; fall asleep thinking of it and your dreams will soon cease to be unpleasant. As food and creature comforts generally have something to do with
mental states as well as with physical conditions, do not go to bed hungry, but if you feel the need of something to eat, take any light refreshment which is most palatable and which experience has proved to be in every way agreeable. The temperature of the sleeping room, the coverlets of the couch, and all other accessories of a night’s repose should be attended to with reasonable forethought; but as so much is always being written on this, the purely external side of hygienic science, we feel called upon to devote a preponderance of thought to those internal exercises which far outweigh in importance and influence all superficial aspects of sanitary law.
The Bible informs us that the prophets were usually called of God during sleep, and we can well understand what the ancient writers must have meant to convey by this expression when we take careful note of our own highest experiences. The day is usually occupied with exacting duties, the fulfillment of which keeps the attention fixed on things without. Night brings respite from these engagements and thus allows freedom to the spirit to answer to a celestial call.
It must be remembered that the term “Angel of the Lord” is an elastic one and legitimately covers a great deal of territory. Angel only signifies messenger, thus anyone or anything employed in ministration may be included in the collective noun angels. Whatever or whoever may have been the speaker and the voice which the Samuel type of child heard in the silence of the night, it is clearly something which is capable of endowing him with more than ordinary knowledge and enabling him to predict coming events with accuracy.
At this point in our discussion of dreams and visions we are surely confronted with one of the most perplexing of problems to the general mind. Foreordination seems clearly revealed in foresight, for it is argued that unless our future is mapped out for us it cannot be foreseen; therefore if prevision be possible, predestination must be regarded as a truth. Such at first sight seems unanswerable, but on closer examination we find a weak point in the chain of reasoning, and especially do we discover a false note in the prevailing idea of what foreordination means. In the realm of vision to which we may be intromitted during sleep, we may discern the operation of causes already set in motion which are working toward inevitable effects which, though certain, cannot possibly be discerned in the outward region of effects which they have not yet visited.
The seer (one who sees into things, through them, and below their surface) is one who has more opportunity by far for calculating coming events on the mundane plane than the best reasoner could possibly enjoy were he confined to the realm of material observation. Suppose you are traveling through the fields and by means of clairvoyance you are capable of beholding buried grain so that you can actually see the sprouting wheat, barley, oats or corn beneath the surface of the soil; you are certainly in position to declare that certain varieties of harvest will make their appearance on plots of ground which you can indicate. In like manner if you are able to pierce the veil of outer sense and see what has already taken place in the subjective or causative world, you can play the part of prophet quite successfully without importing into your work any miraculous or alleged supernatural claim. Even the word supernormal is unnecessary, for we are presumptuous in the extreme when we dare to affix limits to the normal and pronounce definitely upon what lies beyond its realm. Coming events cast their shadows on a lower or outer plane of action when they are actually traveling toward ultimation from a more interior plane where they have previously occurred; thus “coming” is not a misnomer.
Another highly important reflection is that though events like weather may often be predicted months or even years ahead there is no justification whatever for absolute fatalism on this account. The old Buddhistic proverb is a very wise one where it says: “Rain soaks through an ill-thatched roof, but through a well thatched roof it cannot penetrate.” We may well decide that in a very real sense “whatever is to be, will be;” but the important question for us is—Are we prepared to meet what needs must come in such a spirit that its advent to us shall prove a blessing? Opportunities present themselves, but we must take advantage of them for it is ours to fulfill them, and if we fulfill them not we have lost them. Talents are bestowed as trusts, but upon our use, nonuse, or misuse of them depends our promotion to honor, or our discomfiture whenever a time of reckoning arrives. Days of judgment are perennial; we cannot say that any special period for judgment is appointed. “The day and the hour knoweth no man,” but results are sure; and as all depends for us upon the nature of the
seed we are continually sowing and the use we are making of our opportunities, it is worse than useless to talk of “unlucky stars,” “adverse fate,” or aught else that shifts responsibility for conduct from our own shoulders where it rightfully belongs, by placing it in our imagination entirely beyond our own control and completely outside the range of our conscious vision.
A charming, pathetic little story appeared in Godey’s Magazine for May, 1898, titled “His Life’s Failure,” by Frederick H. Dewey, in which the probable judgment of heaven upon many human lives is beautifully portrayed. The man, who had seemingly failed, had in reality succeeded, because he had lived the best life possible in the circumstances in which he had been placed. The author of that brief touching romance may not have presented in that particular story all the elements necessary to spiritual success, but at least one of them is graphically portrayed.
The belief that greatness can only be achieved along certain narrow or conspicuous lines is a fatal error because it cripples many a life which would otherwise be far brighter and more useful than it has yet proved to be, because it would be far more hopeful, and without hope it is impossible to make real progress. Horoscopes and other astrological inventions can be used or abused, and the same may be said of character-reading by head, face, or hand, as the case may be. There are certain things undoubtedly in store for us just as there were seven years of plenty and seven years of dearth ahead of Egypt in the time of the Joseph of the book of Genesis. Joseph no more than Pharaoh could prevent the seasons being as they were going to be, but the lower type of mind (Pharaoh’s) could only dimly and allegorically foresee that future as presented to him in nightly vision, while the superior penetrativeness of the Joseph type could and did successfully read the astral hieroglyphic. Daniel alone could interpret the writing at Belshazzar’s feast which all the guests could see, and so it ever goes. Signs and omens are all about us and they are intended for our service, but the true oracles are only in the keeping of those who can correctly decipher the calligraphy of Nature. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. To know that storms are coming suggests to the men in charge of stations to hoist signals and prevents many a captain ‘from making rash plunges into a tempestuous ocean with whose waves a frail craft is in no condition to do battle.
Our best wisdom often consists in lying low; there are times for silence, as well as for speech; and for retirement as well as for public action. The wise are they who read and interpret signs aright, neither discarding the aid of prophecy nor so perverting belief in seership as to build up a system of blind fatalism, than which there can be nothing more disheartening or depressing. Practically everything depends upon being ready to meet a crisis when it comes; if we are prepared for emergencies our experiences are not terrible, though many around us prove utterly discomfited.
Fires break out, storms arise, earthquakes shake the ground; but to those who are fortified against calamities, what others call calamities are not such to them. Further is it true that boiler explosions, railway and steamboat collisions and many other so-called accidents are often entirely preventable. They are not foreordained, but only liable to occur; and were it not that warnings could be utilized they could not be given, for a bald prediction would not possess anything in the nature of a warning which must of necessity be precautionary.
As we grow less and less anxious about material affairs, we shall become increasingly sagacious, even in the conduct of secular business, because insight goes with foresight; the ability to look below the surface of people as well as of things must prove of incalculable benefit in all commercial as well as other undertakings.
The intuitive faculty may or may not assert itself in a prescribed manner, but whoever quietly and diligently sets to work to allow this inherent faculty to develop (and it needs no forcing) will soon come to find that what has long been regarded as the exceptional endowment of a few is the real obsession of the many.
Mental Suggestion—The Human Aura—How We May Attract the Highest Influences From Both the Seen and Unseen Sides of Life
The title which heads this chapter is a somewhat formidable one, dealing as it does with some of the most perplexing and intricate phases of what is commonly known today as “psychic experience.” In the four preceding essays in this volume we hope we have done something in the way of clearing the road for a definite statement of what is meant by Suggestion. As we define the nature of suggestion, it is in no way to be identified in thought with coercion, command, control, or any other word which stands for an idea incompatible with the fullest individual liberty or personal freedom, which is never to be confounded with lawlessness or license both those terms involving disregard of the common requirements of the social order. There are practically no limits to the exercise of beneficial suggestion, though the area in which adverse suggestions can be made to operate is distinctly limited. It becomes necessary at this point again to refer to what we understand to be the natural quality of human nature regardless of its plane of development, so as to present an intelligible base on which to erect the structural edifice of Suggestive Treatment. Our most earnest contention and most serious proposition is that we are all open to good suggestions, while only some of us are open to such as are of inimical varieties; this ground is taken safely as a necessary correlative of our perception of what Nature is in general and human nature in particular. Certain desires and tendencies are common to all living beings, and these all of us certainly share, but none of these are evil; on the contrary, each is good, but only in its rightful place and time. Extreme individualism is far less civilized or advanced than intelligent mutualism, but the rankest individualist professes no shade of ill-will to another; he only claims good for himself Perversions of self-preservative and kindred instincts must never be confounded with the instincts themselves; the instincts are good, though the perversions are evil. There are no evil instincts per se, but we often encounter perverted instincts; these, by means of practically applied suggestive treatment, are all vincible.
We do not say that no disorder exists because we pronounce no disease or discord incurable. It is not the honest detection of error and our protest against its continuance that interferes with our success as moral reformers and mental healers, but only our frequent pessimistic attitude toward a victim of error which disqualifies us from helping a captive to release himself from unseen fetters.
Now that Suggestive Therapeutics is a popular phrase in medical circles, and Bernheim’s valuable treatise bearing that caption is being carefully studied in America as well as in Europe, the time is certainly ripe for a sober commonsense discussion of the theme in which the “laity,” as well as professional physicians, surgeons and dentists, have a sovereign right to take part. Sidney Flower, editor of the Journal of Medical Hypnotism, issued in Chicago, has taken decided exception to the narrow cliqueism of a fraction of the medical fraternity, as he very wisely urges that not only doctors and professional nurses, but all parents and teachers should have some thorough knowledge of suggestive methods,—not chiefly, perhaps, for vanquishing bodily ailments, but certainly to aid them in the highly necessary work of training the rising generation to live worthy of any high vocations to which they may be called. A right knowledge and practice of suggestion in the nursery and in the schoolroom will go very far indeed toward banishing every vestige of barbarity which has so long hung like a nightmare over educational efforts, all of which have been greatly impaired by lack of knowing how to make learning a delight and the schoolroom and playground merely two harmonious dimensions of an educational center. It is interesting and always profitable to observe how incessantly we express different ideas in closely similar language; that we do so proves that we have by no means lost lingual traces of a time when no such arbitrary distinctions between work and play were imagined as are now far too common. Playing upon musical instruments includes performing in a manner which calls into expression the fullest knowledge of technique, and embraces what in other words might be called extremely hard work. The harmonious play of our varied faculties, and many similar expressions, such as bringing latent forces or capabilities into play, shows that the original idea of play was inseparable from that of work, and vice versa. We need now to restore the original connection and identify the thought of doing good work with the fullest and freest enjoyment of all that pertains to our normal existence. Suggestion in the infant schoolroom, nursery, or kindergarten must commence with the root idea of pleasantry and easy stimulating to action of a dormant, though really present and ready-to-become-active, power. A phrenological bust or chart is often very helpful because it embodies abstract ideas in concrete imagery so that everyone can see what is meant by giving a mental treatment in a scientific manner. At the present moment certain faculties, or commodities of the brain as they are sometimes called, are very active in some persons but very inactive in others. The most effective suggestion can always be made by one in whom a certain quality is strongly in evidence to one in whom that quality is as yet only in a state of dormancy. It is, of course, much easier in a large percentage of cases successfully to suggest to another person than it is to help yourself; and that for the following among other easily comprehended reasons. Primarily, when you are in need of some special helpful suggestion, you are usually in a state of mental or moral darkness or depression, even when not suffering from any conscious physical disability. To treat yourself when you are in the deep shadows is no easy task, and you are really in no condition to do it. Your extremity is another’s opportunity, just as at some future time another’s need will constitute your similar opportunity. We must stand ever ready to help and to be helped, and as it is no disgrace to render aid, it is no disgrace to receive assistance. This is a portion of the general subject which needs strong ethical treatment, because too many people are to be found who enjoy the dignified, self-important feeling which comes with rendering help to others, but are too proud to place themselves as they should on a footing of equality with others by taking as a life motto (than which none better can be selected), “I’ll help you and you’ll help me.” It is exactly this sense of mutuality of which we stand sorely in need at present everywhere. Beggar and lord as pictured in the old song, “London Bridge,” are still amongst us in feeling as well as in outward expression, and no matter how many ulterior steps may be taken to relieve actual poverty, so long as a domineering spirit prevails on the one hand and a beggarly servile temper on the other, would-be reformers will inveigh in vain against the piteous inequalities which today prevail, many of which are easily remedied and quite unnecessary.
Suggestions are often made quite unconsciously, and just as unconsciously are they taken up and acted upon.
The scientific investigation of the psychic realm now being undertaken is very praiseworthy and is productive of real good in many a community; but, useful though such investigation be, it must not for a moment be imagined, though suggestions can be given and taken at will and also rejected at pleasure, that the entire ground or even the major portion of territory covered by suggestion is traversed when we allude exclusively to that noble philosophic aspect of suggestive action which happily promises to inaugurate a new era in education and medicine alike.
Suggestions are made very powerfully upon little children and unborn babes quite without the knowledge or desire of either the one making or the one receiving the suggestion. So much is this the case that the whole story of heredity can be written from this standpoint and truthfully from no other. The Greek mothers, yea, and fathers also, in the palmiest days of Greek supremacy, knew much of this, and turned their knowledge to excellent account by treating the wives of their race with almost divine honors, as well as with tender affection and unfaltering esteem. The real ego, the essential entity or primal soul (sol), is not affected from the standpoint of what it truly is by heredity or any other environment; but, though this essentially divine center of universal consciousness cannot be intrinsically impaired or unaltered, it would be contrary to all human experience to deny that the mind (mens)—from which we derive such words as mental and mentality—is influenced both by antenatal and postnatal impressions made upon it.
The primal nature, the pure, changeless, in- corruptible essence of life, is untarnishable, but the intellectual and physical media through which entities are expressed are built up by suggestion from the moment of conception on- ward. The babe in the womb is more susceptible than even the infant at the breast; then on through all stages of adolescence susceptibility lessens on the involuntary side, till, with the approach of what we call maturity, voluntary susceptibility begins commandingly to assert itself The strong-willed young man or woman scorns and repulses the thought of being compelled to do anything, no matter how good the thing proposed in itself may be; but exactly in proportion as compulsory obedience ends, voluntary submission asserts itself with matchless power. It is the budding maturity, the incipient manhood or womanhood in your children, which makes them what you call so headstrong and rebellious. Great is the error of supposing that what is called self-will or willfulness is wrong, and ought to be mastered. Never should we attempt to repress or suppress it. It needs training or directing, but never ought we to make war upon it or regard it as other than a necessary, indeed a highly important, element in our economy.
The right sort of suggestion is always an appeal to will, never from it. Will is that which gives us strength of character and the disposition to be, as Longfellow puts it, not “dumb driven cattle,” but “heroes in the strife.” What this strife is may be a little problematical, and as the word suggests battle and seems to justify the crude idea of a “sinful” nature to be overcome, we prefer to give it a purely alchemical or Rosicrucian interpretation. The lower must die; the lamb must be slain; we must celebrate our own Passover and accomplish our exodus or journey out of a lower into a higher state of conscious life. As we are making the transit we find ourselves in a perplexed, unsettled condition because we are ignorant as yet of the true worth and meaning of the material at our disposal. The most awkward and uncomfortable periods in our career are those which we may well call “moving-times.” We sit down in the lowest place at the banquet of life, and then we are called in due season to “come up higher.” Though the call is to promotion, we are confronted with doubt and mystery; the untrodden future we shrink from, even though assured that it is an advance upon its past. At such times or in such crises we need the help of those who have taken the step which we are about to take; a good midwife is required to cut the umbilical cord which binds us to the past and set us free to have a freer life than was aforetime possible.
All natural, orderly external processes correspond precisely to some interior state; therefore, the intelligent mental scientist is also a physical scientist, one who can appreciate both sides—the inside and outside—of a complex experience. There can be no legal divorce between the seen and the unseen, for the two are only different sides of the same thing.
All situations can be viewed psychically or inwardly, also physically or outwardly, and it needs to be taught that what is good on the one side is never bad on the other, and vice versa. Negative suggestions are often harmful even when well-intentioned, because they offend and confuse in places where affirmative statements to the same intentional effect would be kindly received and help to unravel a tangled and perplexing skein of trying experiences.
Suggestions to be truly valuable must be, not only affirmative in general, but also in specific character, though even the most general statements on the right side of things are by no means to be despised. Suggestions are of several varieties, among which silent and oral suggestions play an almost equally important part. Sometimes the one and sometimes the other sort will prove the more effective. For instance, should you desire to help a friend at a distance who cannot enjoy a personal interview with you, if you can but annihilate the sense of distance in your consciousness you can just as readily communicate with a person, telepathically, a thousand or more miles away, as with one who stands physically at your elbow. If, however, you cannot get rid of the feeling of remoteness, you are probably not able to effect the needed thought-transfer. Some persons will receive suggestions from you immediately, even though they are total strangers to you, while others whom you number among your oldest and best friends may prove totally non-receptive.
There are several reasons for this seeming discrepancy, among which the following are frequent. According to the idea of Emerson—as stated in his essay on Circles—and of many other gifted seers, there are persons who belong to us and to whom we belong in a specially close degree or far more intimate manner than that in which we all belong to one another in the Grand Circle of Humanity. As in Ezekiel’s vision wheels are found within wheels, so are there families within families and states within states. One brother or sister certainly is nearer to you than another, and that on account of some subtle spiritual relationship, often difficult to define. As these relationships exist and prove themselves far beyond the limit of family connections, it often is discovered that two persons utterly unknown to each other except spiritually will succeed in communicating mentally in the most convincing manner, while the nearest of blood relations will be unable thus mentally to correspond.
Suggestions made to you by any one of these, your spiritual relatives, are apt to be very acceptable, because of the genial accompaniment you distinctly feel, even though you may be unable to define it or explain it. Another (and less remote from the ordinary) explanation of success in one case and not in the other in the suggestive field is that some people are magnetically agreeable to each other; again, in other instances, intellectually companionable in consequence of something distinctive in their personal condition or cast of thought. As we grow in the faculty of discrimination we outgrow all harsh repulsions; we never feel unkindly to people; therefore, in a very true sense we are repelled by none; but, though ill feeling becomes extinct, good feeling becomes more clearly defined, and we learn to find and keep our proper places in society instead of blindly dropping in anywhere, and vainly imagining because we can all do something useful there is no need of symmetry.
Symmetry is that delightful blending, that veritably divine concord of excellencies which robs a noble life of all semblance to monotony and affords perfect scope for the fullest possible expression of every faculty with which we are severally and collectively endowed. So mysterious to many people appears the question of human aura, so mixed up has the subject been with the most fantastic varieties of occultism, that it needs much skill on the part of one who writes for the public at large to deal intelligently with this somewhat obscure mystery. We cannot hope in brief space to do more than point toward an explanation of this mysterious reality, but if we approach its consideration entirely free from prejudice or preconception, we shall find much of the mystery quickly vanish as we employ well-known words in which to elucidate this problem. Effluvium, exhalation, and emanation are common words; nimbus and aureola are familiar to all art students and many others. The above five words—all of which are in general use—will suffice to introduce the reader into the very heart of the topic of our respective auras : what these auric emanations are, and how we can and do vary them, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, often quite unconsciously, but occasionally as a direct act of our volition.
The fragrance of a flower suggests the actual giving forth from a plant which has produced the flower of something inseparable from its peculiar nature; consequently one variety of vegetable cannot possibly give forth the aroma peculiar to another. So powerful are the mental or psychic as well as physical effects produced by different varieties of plant life, that the use of herbs has always been extensive among those who have sought by outward means to induce clairvoyance, ecstasy, or some other phase of psychical activity.
The animal possesses a much more powerful aura than any plant, and so strongly do many people feel the influence of animal emanations—and so diversely are different people affected by them—that the presence of a large, powerful animal of any species may be delightfully agreeable to one person and most distressing to someone else within the radius of its exhalations.
When Oriental teachers tell us that the Adepts of the East can with impunity invade the jungle and suffer no harm, even though they make the close acquaintance of lions, tigers, and other ferocious animals, they are not romancing, because if there be just such people living on earth as they call Adepts, these singularly developed men and women can certainly dominate all animal propensities external to themselves, seeing that they have first completely mastered the entire animal kingdom or economy within themselves. It is equally true that such highly developed men and women must be wonderful healers of the sick and reformers of the vicious, because from them must go forth a healing and elevating elixir—the natural and inevitable outcome of their interior condition.
Many of the finest painters have been clairvoyant to such an extent that they have seen the nimbus or glory with which they have encircled the head of a saint and which they have placed around the entire person of one whom they intend should represent a perfected humanity. The most curious mistake made by Angelo in his painting of Moses was the introduction of horns, which are grotesque, upon the forehead of the glorious leader of the host of Israel through the wilderness. This extraordinary and thoroughly inartistic disfigurement of an otherwise noble painting proves how strangely misled must these translators of the Pentateuch have been, from whose mistranslation Angelo drew material for a picture of Moses, who is said to have been in so radiant a condition after receiving the Law on Sinai that the people begged him to veil his countenance when he addressed them, because they could not bear the dazzling light proceeding from it.
This ancient story is one that closely concerns the human aura, which becomes so intensely luminous, owing to states of great interior elevation, that some glimpses are caught of the literal meaning of the account of the transfiguration of Jesus when it is said that on Mount Tabor the whole person of the Master became so illumined that his three nearest disciples, Peter, James and John, fell, with their faces to the earth, unable to endure the brightness of his glorified presence.
The spiritual body, which is the real organic structure to which the physical shape simply corresponds, becomes so luminous when the divine soul fully possesses it that this true form, after which the physique is patterned, so transfigures its inferior facsimile as to render that for the nonce too bright for ordinary vision to endure. These transcendental stories of the great and pure minds which have specially illumined the world by their work and influence are no idle dreams of rhapsodic poets, but actual histories and still more glowing prophecies.
Our aura it is that protects us against the inroads of disease by rendering whoever generates it in abundant measure and of high quality no super-susceptible to all forms of germs or bacilli which can find entrance into unprotected bodies, but are effectually excluded from well-defended temples. How easy it is to illustrate the profoundest scientific verities by simple allusions to everyday occurrences on the most external planes of action, if we do but resolutely set to work to trace the obvious correspondence between the seen and unseen or the inner and outer aspects of existence! Negative, unprotected persons who have simply failed to develop any powerful or characteristic auric belt around them, are in a chronic condition resembling that of unscreened windows in summer time, through which all kinds of insects can enter the house.
When you suggest to a housekeeper to employ wire blinds or mosquito netting, you are not telling her that there is something in her dwelling which attracts flies, gnats, or other insects; you merely advise her to put up a barrier over which they cannot pass. The above commonplace illustration has proved helpful to hundreds of students who have been all “at sea” and grievously perplexed by trying to find what special sinful or erroneous thoughts they have been encouraging to invite the distressing disorders which afflict them.
Rays of practical comfort and help shine on their darkened pathway immediately you make to them, in all kindness, the helpful and not unpleasant or fault-finding suggestion that, though they may not have been doing any particular things which they ought not to have done, they have been ignorantly omitting to do some simple necessary things which they ought to have done and can begin to do directly.
So much for that branch of the inquiry, from which we now turn to the positive effects of encouraging right or righteous thoughts, all of which have a drawing power peculiarly their own. There are three things we need to remember: First, all thoughts attract their own kind, and in proportion to the intensity of a thought is its attractive force. Second, it is impossible to think of nothing; therefore, it is indispensable to our highest welfare to cultivate that excellent state of mind recommended by the apostle Paul and strongly insisted upon by Gladstone when addressing young men who applied to him for counsel, “Whatsoever things are excellent” think on these things!’ Third, the unseen universe encloses the visible, for it is a case of the larger including the smaller; consequently we need not concern ourselves about the how, though the why of our attracting certain definite sorts of influence is a matter of paramount importance.
When the three foregoing propositions are mastered to something like an adequate degree, the mystery of “mediumship” and much else that is today cloudy will have grown transparent. Always let us suggest the highest to ourselves and others, and the results cannot be other than progressively beneficial in every case in which suggestion is employed in any appropriate manner to the case in hand.
The Attractive Power of Thought—How We May Use It Most Effectively—The Influence of the Mind in Molding the Everyday Conditions of Life
There are two texts or mottoes which suggest themselves immediately upon writing the headlines for this meditation. The first of them is the beautiful Biblical words, “As he thinketh in his heart so is he.” The other is the fine sentence from Shakespeare, ”There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” The Bible words are the plainest, the most readily understood, because they carry us at once into the very heart of the subject, and we all know that by heart is not simply meant one of the most vital organs of the body, but the center of all our affections, which are the roots whence proceed all expressions in speech and conduct.
What do we mean by mind? In the highest of all senses in which this great word is employed we are led to exclaim: There is but one Mind, the Infinite; but in all lesser and commonly-accepted uses of the term we must agree with the proverbialist who says, “Many men, many minds.” In the latter, which is the lower, rather than in the former, which is the transcendent meaning of the word, we will now discuss the operations of mind considered as a magnet possessing power to draw unto itself whatever is in affinity with its condition.
The quotation from Shakespeare, Hke many another profound statement, is easily liable to misinterpretation; so much so that it would be by no means difficult to fabricate upon its letter, used as a foundation, a system of immoral teaching diametrically opposed to Shakespearian and all other reasonable systems of ethics. It is quite within the province of the unthinking to declare that such a sentence as the one quoted denies that there is any real distinction between vice and virtue; for, according to the theory apparently set forth in the quotation, things or forms of conduct are only good or bad provided we choose so to regard them. Such a doctrine is, of course, pernicious and mischievous in the extreme, and we do not believe that it is seriously entertained, or ever can be honestly held by any sane or sober thinker. A very much higher meaning suggests itself to the student of this seemingly enigmatical passage, “There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” viz., that whatever is good (harmonious) or bad (discordant) in the realm of things is clearly a result of the rightful or wrongful thought of the fashioner or manufacturer of the thing made. We are makers of things, though we are not creators of primal elements. All the elements are good whether we reckon only the four or five acknowledged by the ancients, or the nearly seventy known to the modern chemist. As oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen enter into all living organisms, and we can detect the presence of these four and of some other elements in every living organism—though in differing proportions in differing instances—we take it for granted that the elements themselves are altogether good, and, on the basis of this assumption (if such it be), we proceed to explain logically and rationally the presence of temporary discord or evil during the chaotic stages of a planet’s growth while surely wending its way to ultimate cosmic harmony.
When we speak of the contrasting terms, health and sickness, we find them equivalent to order and disorder. Happiness is orderly, while unhappiness is both cause and result of disorder. The relation between causes and their effects Ii necessitates the phenomena of existence as we behold it, and though all causes are primarily mental, or at least pertaining to the unseen side of nature, there is so much of reflection or reflex action (literally, flowing back) in all that we perceive sensuously, that it is next to impossible clearly to determine at all times exactly where original cause melts into effect, and where effect, acting as secondary cause, produces in its turn similar consequences inevitably true to its own nature. Our thinking has no power, it is true, to add to or take from the number or vary the nature of the primal elements, be they few or many; but, though we confront the inflexible, and face the inevitable, directly we come to deal with originals or primates, these are all under our control to manipulate, arrange, combine and classify exactly as we please directly we have grown wise enough to understand and apply the law whereby they will serve us at our pleasure. Let no one fear that the thought of God or divine omnipotence and sovereignty can ever be affected by a rational comprehension and intelligent application of the rules of exact science, no matter whether you call your aspect of science spiritual or physical. Science’s only knowledge; knowledge systematized and applied in use is scientific knowledge—a common but somewhat tautological expression. God reigns in changeless order, in immutable law; and no professed atheist even professes to believe that the order of the universe can ever be made to vary by the decree of man. We are living in curious times. Modern thought is singularly inconsistent, and it cannot be otherwise so long as we continue in a period of transition, which is always more or less (in seeming at least) an interregnum. In these remarkable days of ever-multiplying inventions we are learning daily more and more through practical experience of the power of human genius to compel the forces and elements of Nature to obey the human will, and this knowledge is sometimes apt at first to puff us up with foolish self-conceit and cause us to imagine that we can safely indulge in lawlessness, because, forsooth, there is no law outside our own capricious will. The presence of this tendency toward irrational license is today’s special menace; it is the danger par excellence against which we need to be especially on guard, but so utterly unscientific is this dangerous mental attitude that we need entertain no shade of fear on the score of its eventual triumph; for science counsels obedience to law and submission to order at every turn. The question, however, will not be dismissed. What is law and what is its sanction? If, by law, is meant some king-made or priest-made statute, some petty ecclesiastical or civil mandate originating in tyranny, and therefore essentially hostile to human freedom, we are ready for anarchy; on the other hand, if by the law that we must obey is signified nothing less than the eternal order of the universe revealed in the changeless constitution of nature, wisdom in the persons of all her children counsels us to acquaint ourselves with God and become at peace. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” is an old proverb, the sound of which grates unpleasantly today on some “emancipated” ears; and there are those who even dare to pronounce the fear of God the commencement of folly. Such quibblers quibble over a translation rather than over a root idea; their criticism is by no means profound, for when another rendering of the same passage is given, viz.: “Respect for righteousness is the beginning of wisdom,” all who wish to be moral among them cease to demur.
Fear is an ugly word in one of the conventional senses in which it is most commonly employed; therefore, we are told by experience as well as by precept that it is tormenting, and perfect love coming in casts it out forever.
Reverence for order is the first great step toward the scientific life; and the truly scientific life melts into the spiritual or regenerate, which the deeper and higher life, by an easy method of transition.
We study chemistry and acquaint ourselves with chemical formulae; we address ourselves to electrical studies and experiment with that most volatile and subtle of all ascertained agents in the objective universe, and we grow into a deeply reverent and intelligent appreciation of the sovereignty of order. Divine purpose or method stands plainly revealed to all who are willing to see—disclosed beyond peradventure in the supremacy of a law which all may discover and obey but none can break no matter how hard they try, and which none can resist with impunity.
This fixed order is the stone rejected by foolish builders whose carefully reared structures quickly crumble into dust, but accepted by all wise artificers who plan their edifices in strict accordance with the ascertained law of construction by which the universe is built.
The Law of Attraction is no substitute for the idea of God, but is, when rightly viewed, neither more nor less than an intelligent acknowledgment of the working of immutable sequence. The time has come for a much demanded solution of theologic phrases in scientific terms, and among the most needed interpretations is a reasonable explanation of that nightmare of theology, the dogma of endless punishment as the necessary corollary of equally endless reward. Universalists and other religionists of a liberal school have had much difficulty in popular esteem in their endeavor to explain how happiness can be everlasting and misery less than everlasting when the same Greek adjective, aionion is applied to both. Of course, you can translate aionion as agelong or long-enduring, instead of eternal or everlasting, without doing violence to etymology, but such a translation only shifts, it does not obviate the difficulty. The scientific solution is thoroughly consistent and in no way destroys the “larger hope” or denies the ultimate salvation of every human being, though it refuses to beg the question at any point or to make eternal issues hang on the translation of an adjective.
Consequence is changeless. In that sentence we have the nexus—the meeting-place between Oriental and Occidental philosophy. The Buddhist doctrine of Karma and the Christian doctrine of forgiveness meet here and find that they are by no means irreconcilable or hard to reconcile. The same cause invariably produces the same effect, says the Buddhist. “If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all iniquity,” quotes the Christian. How can both the foregoing statements be true? The law of attraction, when clearly comprehended as to its universal workings, supplies the answer. The relation between cause and effect is irrefragable; there can be no divorce between mental acts and the results thereof. But it does not follow from the foregoing that any one will perpetually persist in error and therefore everlastingly continue to reap its fruitage. Our past is in one sense irrevocable, but in no other sense than that it is of course impossible to bring back past time. To say that we cannot undo past work or make reparation for the faults or mistakes of the past is absurdly contrary to all experience; for such a statement would be equivalent to saying that we cannot pick out false stitches in our needlework or erase blots in our copy-books. It is well indeed to declare that he who sins must suffer, but the suffering is an effect of the sin beneficently intended to erase the error—not perpetually to punish the one who has done foolishly. When St. George Mivart stirred up a great deal of controversy by teaching the somewhat unusual, though by no means entirely novel, doctrine that souls could be happy in hell, he laid himself open to attack from many quarters, for though the thought of happiness in hell is not so dreadful as the belief in endless misery, it is clearly a misconception which must be swept away by the rising tide of intelligence. The connection between cause and consequence, no matter how dark it may appear, is purely beneficent; and those ill-informed “agnostics,” who persist in declaring that there is evil in the very constitution of the universe which can never be eliminated, are simply endorsers of the errors of a mistaken theology unlighted with any rays of hope and comfort (for at least a portion of mankind) that every system of religion (even the darkest) assuredly supplies.
There seems an invincible ignorance in many quarters concerning the nature of being, as distinct from existence; and we verily believe if this one egregious blunder can be removed, daylight will break where now Cimmerian darkness reigns. It seems as though every child might early begin to learn this vital distinction; for it is a distinction we need to make in every cooking-school, as well as in every chemical laboratory, and, indeed, there is no kind of trade to which any boy or girl may be apprenticed where this lesson does not have to be learned very early in the apprentice’s career. In medical circles the term disorder applied universally to diseases of all varieties furnishes the key to the entire situation; for what does disorder mean but confusion or derangement, applying as it does not to the intrinsic character of any element, but only to the present inharmonious combination of elements, occasioning distress as an inevitable consequence. So long as we think erroneously or disobediently we are sure to take the consequences of such inharmonious thinking quite regardless of the place where we may be residing. Though it is not necessary to deny locality to spiritual spheres in one sense, it is highly important to press home the thought continually that happiness and unhappiness are never primarily due to locality, though it is not unreasonable to urge that in congenial surroundings with friendly associates we stand a better chance of enjoying life anywhere, than though our environment was not to our taste and the people about us not in sympathy with our aspirations. The demonstrated proofs of telepathy everywhere rapidly accumulating go far to obviate many an old time difficulty by introducing to our notice palpable experiences which distinctly prove that we are capable of communicating very fully with our truly congenial spiritual associates, no matter where we or they may be at the time of communicating. This feeling at a distance, as telepathy means, practically annihilates distances and thus does away with the necessity of resorting to strange and weird theories advanced by some schools of occultists concerning traveling in “astral bodies ” and much else that strikes the average hearer as uncanny even though it may not be untrue.
The law of attraction, as it is found operating in the case of demonstrated telepathy and mental healing accomplished through absent treatment as well as in many other ways, clearly proves that it is quite possible to send out one’s thought-force and enter into intelligent communion with distant persons and places without taking a literal journey in any sense of the word. People are often prone to attribute psychic phenomena to the functioning of a sixth sense; and though not prepared to deny the existence of such a sense or even of a seventh in addition to it, we think it advisable to make the endeavor to account for phenomena on the basis of more generally comprehended allusions whenever practicable before resorting to remoter bases for explanation.
Unless the five senses are clearly proved incapable of accounting for telepathic and kindred phenomena we need not have recourse in argument to a hypothetical sixth sense. Let us see how far we can illustrate this subject on the basis of the five senses without entrenching upon what is to many people the decidedly uncertain territory of a sixth sense.
Clairvoyance and clairaudience are two French words which by this time have become quite as acceptably English as the vast array of Latin terms which are on all our tongues continually, and which no one refuses to accept as ordinary English words. These two words literally mean clear vision (clairvoyance) and clear hearing (clairaudience). A clear seer or a clear hearer is all, then, that we mean when we use the epithets clairvoyant and clairaudient intelligently. The employment of the detestable word abnormal in connection with enlarged perception in any direction has invested a beautiful and thoroughly rational subject with an air of uncanny mystery highly repulsive to healthy unromantic persons though weirdly fascinating to many of neurotic tendency. The more recent substitution of the adjective supernormal has proved a decided gain, as it does not convey anything unhealthy or undesirable; at the same time it implies an undue restriction of the normal, a word properly signifying healthy. And it is not true, because certain psychic tendencies have manifested themselves in an aberrant manner in connection with catalepsy and other nervous diseases, that the psychic functions are properly other than truly natural—as natural indeed as any of the ordinary physical functions which, though equally wonderful, do not call forth amazement simply because of their universal presence among us.
To be self-centered is to be strong; to scatter one’s forces is an infallible sign of weakness. The stronger our sense of sight or hearing becomes, and the more quietly attentive observers and listeners we come to be, the further we can see and the further we can hear. Distance becomes more and more annihilated, till at length we astonish our less enlightened neighbors by describing to them objects and sounds which, with their more limited perceptions, they can know nothing about. But furnish your friends with some mechanical device or scientific appendage as an aid to vision or as a transmitter of sound, and though you have not appealed to any new sense, but confined yourself strictly to dealing with the ordinary senses of sight and hearing, you have proved that even by artificial means the ability to hear and see afar off can be thus artificially developed. Directly we remove the unnatural or supernatural element from the discussion, we perceive how thoroughly rational it is that, as we cultivate the much-to-be desired habit of mental concentration, we shall soon find ourselves in actual everyday possession of abilities which aforetime we looked upon as either nonexistent or else entirely removed from the proper field of normal activity.
Have you ever watched a cat or a dog listening intently or exercising the sense of smell in some high degree ? If so you cannot fail to have been struck with the perfect attitude of entire concentratedness displayed by the animal in question. Our opinion concerning ancient forms of nature-worship is that the Egyptians and other ancient peoples venerated certain animals, including the dog and the cat, on account of the display of remarkable ability by these animals in directions where they themselves lacked any such measure of unfoldment; and as worship cannot exist without concentration of thought or riveting of mental gaze upon a venerated object or idea, there was a very practical side to ancient forms of so-called idolatry, altogether too much overlooked by those zealous missionaries and their followers, who, in their determination to destroy idolatrous abuses, lack intellectual acumen, and fail to peer below the surface of a degraded cult to discover its primal excellencies. To understand a system and acknowledge that there is some good in it does not necessitate “going over” to it and becoming its partisan champion. Quite the reverse must be the outcome of a fearless, impartial examination of the various systems of ancient thought and practice now being opened to our modern vision; we shall see so much of good and so much of error in every restricted system that our examination of systems one by one will land us in a broad field of universal philosophy, where we can appreciate, admire and utilize whatever is really worthy in every system without committing ourselves in any way to the specific advocacy of any contracted cult.
To the average person, even yet, some concrete image seems a necessity. Some picture or statue, or else some book or well selected text or motto, is a great help to those who are traversing any portion of the wide domain covered by the eclectic phrase. Suggestive Therapeutics. Mental Scientists and others are rapidly coming to see that no single method can reasonably be adopted and adhered to in all cases. The human mind is reached through the corporeal senses, and also independently of them, unless they are so far more extensive than we have been led to believe that telepathy, thought transference, mind reading, absent healing, etc., etc., are all to be accounted for on the basis of an appeal to these senses in some superior or interior manner—a conclusion which, if reached at all, can scarcely land us very far away from Swedenborg’s doctrine of a spiritual body, to which the physical structure exactly corresponds, part to part and function to function. Swedenborg’s career, viewed in the light of the latest psychical revelations, takes on additional interest and removes the view-point to somewhat higher ground than that occupied by Emerson in one portion of his essay on that truly representative man. It can never be forgotten that Swedenborg was one of Europe’s greatest scientific men, and that, many years before he claimed any special illumination, he elaborated his famous theory of correspondences which was afterwards used as an exact means for expressing all that he had to teach concerning the spiritual universe.
The clairvoyance of Swedenborg is a matter of indisputable history, and it is a very noteworthy fact that extreme psychical perceptiveness co-existed in his case with unfaltering devotion to the pursuit of the natural sciences and a rigid adhesion to the scientific method of experimental research and precise employment of language in all his writings.
Though the very elaborate and amazingly definite descriptions of the world of spirits, given to the public through the course of the voluminous writings of Scandinavia’s greatest sage and seer, may provoke incredulity, or at least excite great questioning on the part of a multitude who cannot seem to believe that we can any of us know much of the “vague hereafter,” there is so much food for thought in the general plan of the teaching, which bears directly on our immediate topic at this time, that we know not how to enforce our own teaching or suggest our own conclusions—fortified as they are by considerable experience and corroborated by widely extended testimony—better than by taking Swedenborg’s philosophy as to its general outline as a basis on which to erect a structure of consecutive and easily assimilated doctrine on the subject of the working of the law of attraction in everyday affairs.
A sudden leap from the universal to the particular is never a reckless jump; it is a warranted philosophical transition, agreeing in all particulars with the discoveries and logical inferences of the most exact sciences. There can be no break in the continuity of logical reasoning; it therefore does not matter whether you are engaged in estimating the colossal or the minute, you are subject to the same order of procedure in all instances. The analytical chemist can so deal with a drop of liquid or a grain of substance as to reach a completely satisfactory conclusion regarding an immense mass of the same liquid or solid which in its entire bulk it would be quite impossible for him to handle; so is it when we come to deal with a moment of time, a point in space, or a separated individual, selected from the enormous mass of human beings which we cannot possibly deal with in totality. Whenever we deal with a unit we are dealing with an efficient sample and are getting ready to soar into the as-yet-unknown, after having dealt with the already-known, which was once for us the unknown. There are two varieties of agnosticism and it is necessary to discriminate thoughtfully between them, as the one variety deserves profound respect while the other deserves to be treated with derision. The adjective agnostic is simply ignorant, and agnosticism has been called “the philosophy of ignorance” by some of its supporters; not as a term of reproach, but as a confession of modesty when employed by deep thinkers and earnest students of universal order who feel overwhelmed with the immensity of the seemingly unfathomable universe.
Tennyson at one time broke forth in the plaintive words: “Alas, we know not anything;” a very extreme statement, you may say, and not by any means one that England’s gifted laureate adhered to throughout his beautiful “In Memoriam,” but nevertheless an expression not to be looked upon as a confession of total ignorance, but as the exasperated cry of a seeking intellect which felt itself baffled at every turn when struggling to pierce the veil which often most effectually conceals the realm of life immortal from the tear-blinded eyes of those who are suffering from a keen sense of utter earthly bereavement. Tennyson, however, says: “We trust that somehow good will be the final goal of all,” and then note his synthetic philosophy:
“That nothing walks with aimless feet,
That not a worm is cloven in vain,
Or but subserves another’s gain
When God has made the pile complete.”
There is often deep faith in the soul while there is distressing doubt in the intellect, and that soul which only feels knows all the while what the intellect which does not yet know is yearning to know and will surely come to know. We ought to be very respectful to honest doubters, though the preaching of denial as a cult is simply contemptible. No worse rubbish is ever printed than much of the literature of professed agnosticism, because, untrue to its name, it does not admit the plea of invincible ignorance, but boldly asserts that things are “not so” after having started out with the positive declaration that we cannot in our present state know whether there is or is not a spiritual universe. The scientific method to which we should all rigidly adhere, even in the consideration of religious problems, is a most hopeful and encouraging method, as it holds out the blissful expectation of constantly increasing knowledge and treats every human experience as worthy of intelligent attention. It is only the experimental method that is either fair or safe, and we undertake to apply it rigorously to the conundrums of theology as well as to the commonplace matters of culinary art. Take, for instance, a single beatitude, precept or commandment of the moral law and watch its operations. Deliberately trace the progress of events along the line of obedience to the higher counsels of perfection and see how the case stands in everyday life, and you will soon have an excellent reason for all the faith there is in you. Have you read Miller’s “Life of Trust?” If not, procure a copy and study it.
That singular man, who has for so many years operated orphanages at Bristol, in England, on the principle of trust in a never-failing supply, is not known as the advocate of any special religious or other views which would not receive the sanction of a large percentage of reputed Evangelical Christians, but he everywhere has put doctrine into practice and translated theories into conduct, thereby transforming infidel belief into living, working faith. There is no greater absurdity than that of confounding dry intellectual acceptance of dogma with vital working faith as operative in the success of spiritual machinery set going and kept in constant repair and thorough working order. We have heard people say they believed in prayer, but they rarely, if ever, prayed; and they also believed in the supreme good of honesty, but in their business transactions they misrepresented goods to their customers. Such beliefs are an insult alike to intelligence and to conviction, for they stultify the moral sense at the same time they becloud the intellect. People may well say that trees are rightly judged by the fruit they bear, and in order to assist trees to bear much and good fruit it is necessary that they be well planted, watered, and tended. If we gather the fruits in due season we do not impoverish the trees, but rather encourage them to bear even more abundant crops the following summer; because everything is submissive to the law of use and exists for some distinctive end of service.
Let us encourage the growth of the trees in our mental orchards continually by making the most of what little fruit-bearing disposition they have already shown, never forgetting that it is only by making the most of what is already ours that we are on the road to an increase in our possessions.
Thought is the formative, organizing force, whose magnetic potency is incessantly attracting to a nucleic center whatever affinitizes with what is already present at that center. The old saying from the epistle of James, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways,” applies to a great many people who are not hypocrites. Whenever we are seeking to throw all the light which can possibly be thrown on causes of success or failure, it is highly necessary that we should deal in a calm, philosophical manner with states which often confront us as pertaining to ourselves and others, which, though they are by no means “sinful” in the higher meaning of that expression, are decidedly erroneous in the lower meaning of the term.
To expect disaster is to court it, though it is certainly not to wish for it; so is it a means of attracting vice to think about it and brood over it. Unconsciously and unwittingly, therefore, many of the very people who are seeking to dethrone iniquity are enthroning it, because of their habit of constantly dwelling upon its direful prevalence and supposed increasing vigor.
Gladstone could give no wiser counsel to the young men who applied to him as to a venerated father for counsel, than the superb advice offered 1,800 years ago by Paul the apostle in those memorable words which need to be engraven on every mind and should be emblazoned on the wall of every nursery, school, and hospital: “Whatsoever things are excellent and of good repute, think on these things.” People who never apply themselves diligently to the task of testing methods approved by the wisest in all ages may think themselves learned when they are lamentably ignorant; and in the pride of an uncultured intellect they may thoughtlessly declare that they do not believe in the efficacy of measures they have never proved; but the truly truth-seeking are ever inclined to apply themselves earnestly to the work of demonstrating the reality of the stupendous claim made by even the most extravagant of occultists that by constantly meditating on any subject, and confidently expecting a predetermined outcome, we secure the results we desire.
All magicians have attributed their success to conformity with this principle, and as magic ranges all the way from the purest of the whitest to the foulest of the blackest variety, no matter whether the wonder-worker be a reverent worshiper of the Spiritual Deity, who is love and wisdom, or a corrupt Satanist who invokes the shades infernal, he places reliance upon the object of his affection and doubts not the efficacy of his prayers to unite himself with the realm of power.
The scientific aspects of prayer are those which the future will have to deal with rather than the simply religious ones, because while the fervent prayer of the religious devotee is often abundantly answered, it is less than satisfying to be told that Heaven arbitrarily responds to one petition and passes another by unheeded. We must humanize and rationalize our conceptions of divine methods. The Supreme Being acts through undeviating order, and it is therefore according to our word and to our faith that things are unto us.
So say the Evangelists Jesus taught. It seems at first a derogation from the power and dignity of the great healer to attribute the healing of the patients who came to him for succor to their own word and faith, but why should we hesitate to accept the explanation which he is said clearly to have given? Faith is aroused by spiritual appeals; correct words are spoken by patients for themselves as a result of work successfully done by healers on their behalf, but the final act must always be performed by the individual who is to reap the benefit. It is quite rational and highly salutary to think of ourselves as living perpetually in the midst of innumerable spheres or circles of organized intelligences which include the “living” and the “departed” equally. In union there is always strength; in disunion, weakness. To go about in a trembling, halting manner with uncertain mental gait is to reap physically the precarious results of mental unsteadiness, while determinedly to take a mental attitude and hold to it through “thick and thin” is to emphasize the importance of spiritual adhesiveness which weathers storms and comes off victorious in situations where a less resolute position would necessitate disaster. If an animal knows you are in earnest and “mean business,” it will obey you, whereas if you are mentally unsteady the animal feels that you are so, and as you lack the power to enforce respect and compel obedience, you find yourself at the mercy of the whims of a capricious quadruped. Circumstances have to be handled as one should handle horses. Do not seek brutally to coerce, but strongly and lovingly to attract. Brute force is not strength, nor does physical might constitute right. There is a higher energy, impalpable and invisible but intensely real, and that it is which renders it within our power to tap the fountains of spiritual supply and compel fate to bend before us. A good rule for daily conduct is: Never allow yourself to get enraged or discouraged when things are not going to your pleasure. Anger and discouragement are alike signs of weakness. They who would conquer must never lose hope or temper. Our environments are adversaries which we must conquer, but which having subdued become our valued allies and effective auxiliaries. To always anticipate the ideal and consciously work toward it, by doing whatever comes our way to be done as a means to the desired end, is to have started right and to be fairly on the way to eventual triumph over present limitations so complete that the very contemplation of such heights seems “too good to be true,” to all save the few prophetic souls in any race who are the advance guard of Humanity.
The Destructive Influence of Fear and Worry—The Bodybuilding, Success-Compelling Influence of Faith and Courage
So much has been spoken and written of late in the interest of that excellent enterprise, the *’ Don’t Worry Movement,” originated by Theodore Seward, of New York, with the hearty co-operation of many friends, that the deterrent influence of fear on human welfare has been discussed afresh, and we are glad to say is now being approached in a far more intelligent manner than formerly. There are various senses in which the word fear has been used and may still continue to be used, and it is certainly not against the idea of fear in its highest meaning, which is respect or reverence, that we intend to utter any protest. The common acceptance of the word today is not synchronous with its obvious intention in the Book of Proverbs, but it is popularly used precisely as it is employed in the first of the epistles of St. John, in those familiar words, the truth of which we can all endorse, “fear hath torment,” and “perfect love casteth out fear.” Fear and doubt are inseparable. If we feel that anything is left to blind chance, that chaos rules supreme, or that a malignant fate may be in charge of our destinies, we cannot do other than give place to serious misgivings as to the outcome of any undertaking, no matter how laudable the projected enterprise may be. On the other hand, if we accept the consoling optimism suggested in the well-known words attributed to Shakespeare, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will,” we have found a basis for a satisfying, restful philosophy, amply sufficient for any emergency which may arise. It is useless to counsel fearlessness without offering some substantial base on which to build courage. Edifices which repose on sand may be ever so fair to look upon, ever so graceful and ingenious in design, but because they lack a solid base they cannot endure the tempest. So it is with systems of thought which are often beautiful, but practically baseless fabrications; they rest on no solid perception of essential verity, but are tastefully reared on a summer’s day to attract the beauty-loving spectator. Charming but untrustworthy must be every philosophy that bases its optimistic conclusion on an unsubstantial premise.
When Tolstoy wrote that much discussed book of his, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” he narrated a good many plain facts and pressed home a good many practical truths, among which was the incontestable declaration that parents who love their children very dearly may find these darling objects of their tenderest affection sources of much more sorrow than joy to them on account of the entirely physical nature of the love they bear them. Apprehension of impending danger is the bitterest drop in the bitter cup which fear mingles when the dreaded intangible something menaces those upon whom our dearest hopes are set; and how can there be materialistic redemption from this fear when we see all around us abundant evidences of the uncertainty of material things? Endeavor to cultivate trust as we may, trust cannot successfully repose on an insecure foundation. For this reason, if for no other, the safe counsel of the gospel is everlastingly true, “Set not your affections upon the things of earth.” This does not mean that we are to kill out all natural desires and seek to attain a rigidly ascetic mental attitude devoid of all human affection. Quite the reverse is the effect produced in us when we succeed in transferring our love from the perishable to the imperishable side of the object of our affection. There are two sides to every one of us, and mutual affection can surely exist and be well sustained on the higher, which is the abiding, instead of the lower, which is the evanescent, side. When we love attributes of character rather than exterior personalities, we feel instinctively immortal, for such love proceeds from an immortal center and is directed to an immortal object. Let no one be carried away with the totally erroneous impression, honestly entertained by some, that if we do not center our thoughts and affection upon our physical bodies and upon material possessions, we shall have to go weak and poverty-stricken. Experience proves the fallacy of so false a position in the persons of multitudes who resemble the women in the Gospels who had spent all their worldly substance in the vain hope of gaining health and had yet remained feeble, suffering, and constantly growing worse and weaker—in one case for twelve years and in another for thirty-eight years in succession. It has often been noticed that when a person supposed to be dying has made his will and peacefully resigned himself to the change which he and his friends regarded as inevitable, the cessation of fear, worry and anxiety left the body free to get well at the very moment when distress concerning its impending destruction had subsided.
It is not infrequently the case that when a priest has administered the sacrament of extreme unction, which is only given to those who are thought to be very near death, the sufferer recovers through the consoling effect of the sacrament, which is intended to allay fear and produce a state of spiritual tranquility.
The physical body will get well, in many instances, as of its own accord, if it be only permitted to do so; the vital question as concerns the welfare of the fleshly tabernacle not being what to do to prevent dissolution, but how to stop consuming fear and restless anxiety so as to give whatever we vaguely call Nature an unfettered opportunity to act. Medicaments are unnecessary and often harmful in cases of profound exhaustion; it is not stimulation, but repose, which affords freedom for the healing energy in Nature to operate. For this reason, if for no other, a large number of so-called mental treatments are highly successful, which in one sense of the term are actually no treatments at all, but simply absence of treatment or relief from it. So far as abstinence from worry is concerned that is only the negative side of the great hygienic question with which we are all incessantly confronted. It is a negative good to drop care and let go of anxiety, and when we do so we *’ give Nature a chance,” but there are far higher aspects of sanitary science than these which need most serious attention. Bodies can scarcely be said to build themselves; they are buildings in constant course of erection and alteration, for they are never exactly alike two days or even two hours together. So rapid are the transformations of the human physique that physiologists of renown are now declaring that in three months, or even six weeks, the most radical changes are or can be effected in the system. The old theory that it takes seven years to remodel the entire frame, must, if true at all, refer to the osseous structure, which, of course, includes the hardest and most slowly changing bones. The flesh certainly changes with amazing rapidity, and the vital organs are the quickest of all to respond to mental emotions of every sort.
Fear deteriorates everything; it impoverishes the blood, breaks down tissue, destroys nerve cells, lessens resisting power wherewith the insidious attacks of disease can be repelled, and in every way wrecks the organism.
Fear and worry are diseases and must be treated as such; it is useless harshly to condemn those who suffer from these infirmities, and equally foolish is it supinely to declare that people who have inherited such tendencies are much to be pitied, but they cannot be cured. It is often difficult to rid yourself unaided of any bad habit to which you may have become a slave; there are, therefore, many cases in which the good offices of another are of priceless value, and the entire plan of suggestive treatment is based upon an understanding of the good of reciprocity and an intelligent perception of how to apply in the spirit of true co-operation the wise words of an apostle, “Ye that are strong should bear (remove) the burdens of the weak.” It would be absurd to insist that strong people ought to become weak through taking upon themselves the infirmities of their frailer neighbors, but as bear means often to remove or carry away, we can readily see how weaknesses can be removed or borne away through the efficient agency of strength radiated from the stronger to the weaker.
When the public mind is fully delivered from that horrible nightmare—belief in something it is pleased to call malignant hypnotism—the path of the suggestive therapeutist will be much plainer than it yet is, and happily that miserable scarecrow is growing rapidly less formidable.
Creators or engenderers of fear in others can never successfully pose as healers or emancipators of the afflicted, for they are themselves suffering under the very delusion which is tormenting the victims they are seeking to release. Christian Scientists have often been heard to speak of “malicious mesmerism” and its direful consequences when the cases referred to that awful mystery of imagined evil were simply instances of some petty phase of hysteria which by rational mental treatment could have been very quickly relieved, and with a little sound teaching added to the treatment permanently cured.
Obsession, which is the modern equivalent of the ancient belief of demoniacal possession, is another horrid bugbear which occasions untold misery wherever its power is feared. It would be unduly presumptuous to say that the claim is altogether foundationless, or that the alleged phenomena never appear, but it is the fear of devils which gives power to whatever is diabolical, fully as much as the love of error which is of course the first producing cause of Diablerie.
The 23d Psalm has never been surpassed either for soundness of sentiment or beauty of diction, where it reads: “I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” The composer of that canticle is so deeply imbued with a sense of divine protection that he neither can nor will give way to alarms. Enemies may surround him, but God prepares a table before him in the presence of those enemies, so that though the hostile troops exist he can eat and drink in peace and safety, even though a host of foes arc encamped around him, because he is in the blissful realization of the truth that greater is the power on his side than all contrary forces. There is always a balance of power somewhere; one host is always superior to the other, and it is everything to feel, in times of surrounding turbulence, that we are on the powerful and winning side.
The crude attacks on the letter of some gospel sentences, as we find them in King James’ translation of the English Bible—mere quibbles and harpings upon an imperfect rendering of an occasional phrase—are entirely repelled by reading the much better and far more correct translation of the disputed passages in the revised version, which instead of leaving the text open to criticism with the words, “take no thought,” substitutes with complete fidelity to the original Greek, “Be not anxious” and “take no anxious thought for the morrow.” It is certainly true that we cannot do our business H we bestow no thought upon it, and it is also true that in many instances we have to think of the morrow in the affairs which occupy us during the present day. But necessary thought and anxious thought are by no means identical; they are as unlike as clean money and filthy lucre; the former thoroughly legitimate, the latter altogether disreputable. The difference between thinking rightly and thinking wrongly, of the same thing, is patent to every reasoner; and as we all have to think of our work in one way or another it is of supreme importance that we form and keep the good habit of thinking rightly thereon.
Even simple utilitarianism should suffice to set us and keep us right in this direction, for we have only to use common sense and be guided by practical outcomes clearly to behold the results of the two kinds of thought now under discussion. Anxious thought is decrepit and debilitates whoever indulges in it; it is moreover a magnet to attract adversity just as surely as bright, generous, hopeful thought attracts prosperity.
It is what you are in yourself a great deal more than what your accomplishments may be that actually determines the measure of success which in the long run you achieve. Our thoughts build our psychic or unseen bodies, and the radiations from these penetrate vastly further than does merely animal magnetism. Human electricity is a phrase which some writers employ to describe this subtle, clearly felt though unseen radiation from the psychic personality. Fear disintegrates^ while faith organizes; therefore, in the art of body-building faith and courage are two of the most important and influential agents possible to conceive. Faith compels success because of its intense organizing power, and courage, which is proverbially invincible, is so near of kin to faith that the two can scarcely even in fancy be disunited. We have these two pairs to consider: Fear and worry on the wrong side, to be overcome by faith and courage oYi the right side. If we have hitherto been subject to the sway of the twin fiends we can only banish them from our lives by invoking and securing the services of the twin angels, which are their direct antagonists. It is useless to say that we cannot overcome fear and worry, for though it may be true indeed that we cannot if we keep our thoughts fixed on those disastrous and destroying vices, we can assuredly escape from their clutches if we do but persistently concentrate our attention on the opposing virtues.
In this, as in all cases beside, affirmation, not denial, is the keynote to all successful undertakings. Denials or negative statements may have sometimes a secondary value as erasive processes, but there is absolutely no rest or satisfaction secured by seeking to combat errors as such, while nothing can be distinctly more self-evident than that errors are combated successfully and indeed entirely overthrown or finally eliminated by those divinely glorious affirmations which treat of the supremely ” excellent things” upon which we need ever to fix our mental gaze. What teaching can be stronger in this connection than “perfect love casteth out fear”? Love comes in and fear goes out. We do not have to think about fear or fight fear ! We think of whatever most inspires sublime afifection; then as love is born within us fear is eradicated and evicted. It often seems difficult, if not impossible, to love what we feel we do not understand; therefore, when we are directed to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we may sometimes feel like saying. But who or what is this God I am commanded to love?
If there be a Supreme Being, or Infinite Intelligence, directing and pervading the universe, alike immanent and transcendent, how can we love even though we cannot help standing in awe of this almighty power, this infinite living energy? Such questions are not irreverent, and they cannot be lightly dismissed. It is all in vain that we are told by theologic masters that God demands our love, and that it is our duty to love our Creator in return for our acceptance of the boon of life. Is life worth the living; is the game worth the candle? are queries which next arise, and the prevalence of suicide in many places, and the superabundance of pessimistic literature now available, suggest a very gloomy answer to these despairing questions.
Marie Corelli has traced the prevalence of suicide in modern France to the spread of recent atheism and the use of absinthe as a beverage, and her points are well taken alike in ” Wormwood ” and “The Mighty Atom,” but the public may be pardoned for inquiring further into what has led to the absinthe and the atheism. The Christian church has had a great opportunity in France for many centuries, and if Christianity in any one of its myriad forms is really capable of regenerating society, why has it failed to do so in the very countries where it has been officially encouraged and liberally supported? Without attempting to explain all the causes which have led to the seeming failure on the part of any Christian hierarchy truly to uplift the world and stamp out pessimism through the introduction of a sunny optimism, we cannot honestly shut our eyes to at least two of the many causes which might be faithfully enumerated. These two are: first, the lack of purity or spirituality in the practical life of the church itself (an admitted fact, despite magnificent individual exceptions to this rule); secondly, the overstatement of the harsher aspects of the Christian message and the consequent understatement of the milder, gentler, and in every way more winsome aspects of the Christian creed. When devotion to the Sacred Heart was formally introduced into the Roman Catholic service, no secret was made by theologians of the fact that this devotion was specially intended to emphasize the loving human side of divine nature and draw, with the pleadings of love, hearts which would only be repelled by the forbidding doctrines of retribution, which had long occupied a disproportionate place in the bulk of religious teachings, both Catholic and Protestant.
Faber’s beautiful lines:
“But we make God’s love too narrow
By false limits of our own,
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal He will not own.”
And then the glorious outburst of trust in infinite Goodness couched in the heart-satisfying words, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea, and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind,” were addressed by a Catholic priest to his own co-religionists, and they also constitute a living, loving, inspiring message from a noble, saintly soul to all humanity. It is such teachings as these that truly uplift and glorify the vocation of the preacher, and on such high spiritual ground room is found for fraternal co-operation among the purest and wisest representatives of every cult beneath the sun.
We must either be ready to present a loving view of Deity to the Aveary world, or be content to see the masses sink into hopeless apathy or rise in violent revolt against a creed which seems nearly all head and almost no heart. The higher view we take of the Supreme Spirit, the loftier will be our own views of human worth and social relationship.
Nothing can be more pitiful than the barren thought that we are playthings of feelingless force, unless it be the dread of the sempiternal anger of an infuriated infinite potentate, and it is in consequence of the preaching of the “fear that hath torment” that the modern intellectual attitude is so largely atheistic or at least agnostic as it is. It is both interesting and encouraging to peer below the surface of even the most violently iconoclastic of modern utterances, and find at the root of every protest a struggle against the idea of cruelty and injustice enthroned in heaven or incarnate on earth; never is the outcry raised against what appeals to the human heart as either just or loving.
Prof. Park, an eminent teacher in a New England theological seminary, frankly replied to the questions of his class by telling them that salvation depends upon inward holiness, and that no matter what a man could or could not intellectually accept in the line of dogma, if he lived as holily as he could with the light he had, he was on the road to heaven.
We are particularly glad to call attention to such statements when they emanate from the strongholds of historic orthodoxy; because they clearly prove the healthy operations of the true modern Zeitgeist and give promise that the day is fast breaking in which there will no longer be a cloud of hateful fear hanging over the head of humanity and tormenting sensitive natures to become despairingly lawless, or else to sink into such melancholy as results in the death, to all appearance, of every fine and beautiful sentiment which leads to noble outward living.
Fear leads to recklessness and defiance, and it is an acknowledged passport to insanity, which is the ultimate of despair. It is a grave error to surmise that courageous people are reckless; they are, of all others, the most intensely cautious, though they are not careful in any other sense than cautious. Here again we are confronted with the differing uses of the same word producing embarrassed thought until we have swept away the difficulty with the broom of careful discrimination between higher and lower meanings. Carefulness is always eulogized as a virtue, while carelessness is condemned as a vice, and not improperly so if we only take into account the conventional meaning attached to these opposing terms. However, when we come across such sayings in the New Testament as “Be careful for nothing,” and “Casting all your care upon Him, for He careth for you,” we instinctively admire the suggestion of freedom from worry and anxiety with which such sentences are replete.
The freedom from toil of the lilies, and the free life of the birds, is a matter of gospel comment, but no sooner have we yielded to the charm of the sentiment “they toil not,” and listened with speechless delight to the declaration that even Solomon in all his glory was not so beautifully attired as one of the care-free lilies of the field, than we are confronted with the incontestable fact that flowers and birds are intensely industrious. They do not toil, but they do work; they do not labor, but they are incessantly active. Herein consists the practicality as well as the beauty of the gospel message. We are to work but not worry; we are to be ever industrious, but anxiety regarding the outcome is to be always absent from our thoughts. If we do indeed consider how flowers grow and how birds build their nests and sustain themselves generally, we shall soon grow to understand that the feathered tribes of air, which make the groves bright with their splendid plumage and the fields melodious with their charming song, are like their less highly intelligent friends of the vegetable kingdom—workers but not worriers.
Two things are invariably necessary to successful work, no matter what its line may be: first, the love thereof; second, confidence in the success thereof Only as we love can we work beautifully, harmonically, courageously. Courage comes with love; it is love alone that makes tasks easy and fingers fly fast.
Drummond’s exquisite statement, in his “Ascent of Man,” that the story of evolution is a love story on a stupendous scale, has helped many a struggling evolutionist to see how thoroughly possible it is to make an agreement plain between the facts of natural science and the deepest truths of religion. The nineteenth century has scarcely been blessed with a more fervently religious writer than Henry Drummond, but his orthodoxy was of the heart rather than of the head. Right feeling is the root of all righteous speech and conduct. How can we love God if we do not love man, who is in the image of God? It is our view of human nature that really signifies; it is our estimate of human life that really counts. Whatever be true concerning the Ultimate Reality, we are human beings here and now mingling constantly one with another; and all our happiness, as well as all our success, depends upon what our social and industrial relations actually are. How can we feel confidence in others if we have no faith in ourselves; and if we can trust ourselves, why should we doubt our fellows, seeing that we are all essentially alike, however much incidentally we may differ? Love, faith, and courage must ever be a trinity in unity; these three are essentially and eternally one. Primarily Love, Faith, and Courage can be considered distinctively, but not separately. Courage is evidently the child of Faith married to Love. Love, as we all know from every sort of experience, is the root of all things. In love we find the fountainhead of all desire, resolution and determination. Love prompts to every effort of every sort; without its impelling force we should do nothing, for we should have no incentive to action. But love alone is ineffective; it must be united with wisdom, and it is wisdom which nurtures and cradles courage, for wisdom is the animating spirit of faith. Is it not a matter of world-wide experience that fear and ignorance go together in millions of instances? We dread the unknown; we are afraid of darkness. Light dissipates fears, because it reveals and makes manifest; and the manifestation of things as they really are, instead of adding to our terrors, emancipates us therefrom. How much easier it is to be brave in the daytime, when the sun is brightly shining, than through the dark vigils of the night! Knowledge, which is the soul of faith, gives us confidence in the night season.
Things are not worse, but far better than we have supposed. The revelation of the true state of a case will never occasion dismay, but to the quiet, thoughtful mind will always point a way out of difficulty and seeming danger. We are afraid of we know not what. The true healer is one who takes the timid child with him into the very midst of the supposed danger and proves that there is safety there, thus causing injurious as well as needless alarms all to subside.
When we ail agree to give up worrying we shall commence a new era in human progress, an age of infinitely superior enlightenment to the present, for all those mysterious psychic powers about which we hear so much today are perfectly natural, and only await the moment when they are allowed to assert their vigor and prove themselves our faithful servitors. It is an excellent piece of advice to counsel all nervous, timid, fretful, anxious persons quietly to discuss their fancied dangers and perplexities with some strong, experienced, well-nigh fearless friend, one who is sympathetic and comprehending, but noted for far more than the average degree of courage.
In the practice of Suggestive Therapeutics it is invariably proved true that the healthful radiation of force from a courageous person to one not yet so courageous is of inestimable benefit. Courage is contagious, and the same may be said of every conceivable virtue or mental and moral excellence. As the wise builder not only builds himself, but can inspire and teach others to build likewise, so can anyone who is himself or herself free from fear and full of courage, prove a powerful incentive to others to reach a like condition.
The Influence of the Mind Upon the Body—The Science of Health, and What it Signifies—Becoming One’s Own Physician and Thereby Physician to Others
The preceding chapters in this volume have all led up in an unmistakable manner to the idea of man’s eventual conquest over all limitations, and, among the most distressful of these, sickness is certainly the most depressing. How often do we hear it said by one who owns broad acres and estimates his fortune at several million dollars or even pounds sterling. “I would give all I possess in exchange for your health.” The remark may be addressed to a servant in the employ of this multi-millionaire, or it may be made to some contented workman who in his humble capacity of day laborer earns just sufficient to meet the actual expenses of a very modest existence. The remark is not necessarily a thoughtless or impatient one; it may be the serious, well-digested outcome of deep thought and earnest meditation. Why should it not be? In that marvelous old epic poem, the book of Job, Satan is represented as saying to the Lord: “All that a man hath will he give for his health,” for that is the obvious meaning of the word usually translated “life” in the passage referred to. The reasoning of the accuser or accusing angel is that a man may be bereft of all his possessions; houses, lands, cattle may all be destroyed by earthquake, fire or whirlwind, but so long as health remains he has something left to be truly thankful for; but let a loathsome disease affect his body, then, when the calamity is in his own flesh, Satan takes it for granted he will lose all confidence in divine benignity, and, yielding to despair, commit suicide or abandon himself to hopeless blasphemy. Though there is so much sublime optimism in the story of Job that Satan’s prediction is not ultimately verified, the author of that rhythmic tragedy has shown us clearly enough how very hard it is to maintain integrity of thought when disease of a torturing nature is devouring the fleshly tabernacle which a wise spirit will never rashly leave.
The question here arises, how far are we led by science and general experience to regard physical suffering as a cause of mental distress, and to what extent are we justified in attributing physical disorders to a mental cause? That Job had not “sinned” is made very plain throughout the story of his life, but are we ever led by the logic of facts to maintain that, because a career may be an honorable one, therefore no mistakes are made during its entire length? Nothing can be harsher or more unkind, and nothing often further from truth, than the condemnatory assumption that all sickness is the result of sin. We know well enough what popular impression the word “sin” makes on the average listener, therefore it is cruel to apply so opprobrious an epithet as “sinner” to one who, though not guiltless of innocent mistakes, is in no sense of the term a willful transgressor or trespasser. To sin is to act contrary to one’s own sense of right, and as we are not called upon to be keepers of our neighbors’ consciences, we shall never attempt to sit in judgment on the motives of another life. But though we are not at liberty to condemn, we are free to teach, and though it is as unjust as it is ungracious to give way to censoriousness, it is clearly within the bounds of philanthropy to point out to all a more excellent way than the mistaken path in which many of our well-intentioned neighbors in common with our former selves have long been treading. Nowhere in or out of the Bible do we find a clearer discrimination between sin and weakness than in the account furnished in the gospel of a man born blind, receiving sight. Disciples ask their teacher: Who did sin; this man, or his parents ? The Master replies: Neither this man nor his parents. The disciples represent those who, while seeking enlightenment, are nevertheless still committed to certain erroneous theories in which they have been trained, or which they have unthinkingly picked up from their associates and adopted as their own without sober reflection. To the men of old as to the men of today, two aspects of life present themselves vividly. One aspect is covered by the Sanskrit word Karma, the other by the English word Heredity. A man may have sinned in a previous life and be now undergoing a punishment therefore—so say those who take the “Karmic” view of a present situation. “The parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge,” quote the advocates of the prevailing theory of heredity, which is only a modified version of original sin and our participation in Adam’s transgression. A higher view of life than that taken by the advocates of either of the two theories just mentioned disposes of original sin altogether, both in one’s self and in one’s ancestors, and causes us to say, practically: “We are our own Adams; and if we sin, it is after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, not in consequence of the fall of a progenitor or the vice of an ancestor.” But sin aside, it is easy enough to observe that, situated as we are, in the midst of forces we must learn to govern, and material we must learn to control, we can readily bring temporary distress upon ourselves through simple ignorance, and “blindness from birth” is a figure of speech which exactly describes the actual condition. We are blind, i. e., we do not see before we have reached that point in our evolution of involved capability where we begin to see; then at first we see dimly or imperfectly as through a faulty mirror, till at length we come to behold things in their due relations and proportions and are ready to exclaim: “Whereas I was blind, now I see.” Blindness from birth is negative; sight commencing at a period when inner consciousness is awakened is the starting-point of a positive condition.
Now, there are many ailments brought upon us by our weakness and inexperience which are compatible with our blind or non-seeing condition. These ailments are not penalties, but they are necessary experiences connected with our education and are up to a certain point inevitable; just as we cannot avoid making unintentional mistakes when we are experimenting with some force or material which will come to obey us eventually, but which at present must appear rebellious or antagonistic because our experience in the art of subduing it has not yet been great enough to give us the victory over it.
Animals seem dowered with instinct while man boastfully arrogates to himself the exercise of reason instead of instinct. This is where we make our fatal mistake; we oppose reason to instinct when, if we were wiser, we should supplement instinct with reason. Animals are rarely sick in their native wilds, but in captivity they are subject to every ailment which afflicts distorted humanity.
Not understanding the true province of human reason, we have turned aside from the path of nature and taught or compelled many of our friends in fur or feathers to do the same, with the result that we have built up an artificial order of existence, diametrically opposed to sanitary law; therefore, though the devotees of what is called the highest culture and civilization loudly proclaim themselves hygienists, nowhere are the rules of hygeia so ridiculously contravened as in the haunts of fashion where culture is supposed to present its fairest efflorescence.
The rule of health is extremely simple, while our usual manner of life is highly complicated and intensely artificial. As the writer of these pages is constantly in receipt of confidential letters from people in all walks of life who would consider it a breach of trust were we to afford the public even the slightest clue to the identity of our correspondents, and, moreover, as these letters are often too valuable to be passed by in silence, we deal with them anonymously as far as possible in our lessons and writings. The following is a sample: “I am a physician. I am and always have been an agnostic. Lately I have become greatly interested in Idealism, Mental Science, Metaphysics, etc. I have read your work on Psychology and also on Concentration. Have read Henry Wood’s works, Newcomb’s book, ‘All’s Right with the World,’ etc. I like their optimism and recognize their suggestive merit. I would like to believe in the theory of freedom they teach; in mental causation; in immortality, etc. I have been a close student of evolution, but cannot explain phenomena by any hypothesis whatever. I cannot settle on any belief whatever relative to origin or destiny. I know nothing even of the essence of mind itself—whether secondary to matter or primary; whether it has spontaneity and causal efficacy, or is the outgrowth of material changes so called. If disease is mental and of psychic origin, how does the plant become diseased? I wish to believe along your line. Have always so wished, but seem to be an agnostic from necessity, or what seems so to me. Regard this letter as private, and if you can direct me to anything written by yourself or others that will likely put me in another line of thought, I will truly thank you.”
The foregoing epistle is one of many in similar strain; some from physicians, some from lawyers, some from ministers of religion and many from the rank and file of non-professional people, all of whom seem perplexed beyond measure at sight of the mysterious disorder and derangement everywhere prevalent, and seemingly quite unable to formulate any philosophy which satisfies them that there is a solid base for confidence in the optimism of others which they greatly admire but seem powerless to share. The herculean task of convincing these good, honest-hearted people of the truth of a higher system of thought than agnosticism seems quite beyond the power of any simple scribe, and when people ask us to recommend books, though whole libraries stare us in the face replete with the utterances of sages, we always feel some sort of misgiving lest anyone of the carefully selected volumes may have been already read by these very people and sorrowfully dismissed as unconvincing.
The truth has to be faced. You cannot get the spiritual knowledge of which you are in search out of books, no matter how good and helpful they may be. Do you not already begin to see that testimony is not first-hand evidence, and circumstantial proof is always less than thoroughly convincing? Books and teachers are valuable just to the point where they help you to follow clues and pursue the path of knowledge fearlessly and individually, but no further; therefore, those who are in any measure healed become the guides of others on the road of healing. Plants are diseased when placed in an unnatural environment or attacked by invasive foes which they are powerless to resist. But plant life is so much less conscious and so much more negative to its surroundings than human life should be that the very liability of a vegetable to attacks of disorder should be accepted by us as counsel not to vegetate. There is a vegetal system in man, but it needs to be dominated by the higher human principle, or if danger threatens it, it may easily succumb.
We have never knowingly deviated from the teaching which we have for several years consistently (though we hope progressively) given forth, teaching to the effect that liability to sickness is to be overcome in the process of our development. Looking backward can never take the place of looking forward; it is neither to the animal nor to the vegetable, but to the perfected human being that we must ever direct our eyes if we are to succeed in banishing infirmities which pertain to lower stages of growth, but find no continuing place in man’s experience as advance is made toward the goal of ultimate perfection.
It would be a very grave error to suppose that vegetables and animals have attained the heights of exemption from liability to disorder which we are destined to win. Instinct certainly does accomplish for the healthy animal what misunderstood or perverted reason cannot accomplish for man, but, though bird and flower are subjects for study, they are by no means perfect models for imitation.
The Christ may say ”follow me I’ but though he says consider, he does not counsel us to follow the lilies of the field or the birds of the air. If the phrase, Science of Health, is other than a misnomer, we must be conscious that the way to reach that ideal condition we call healthy (which is properly the equivalent of holy) is a path which we must find for ourselves and in which we must individually tread.
When we speak in positive terms of the influence of the mind upon the body, we are too apt oftentimes to overlook the actually existing state of affairs all about us and proceed to argue as though only one mind could possibly affect one body, and that the mind of the individual owning the body. Many people through lack of individuality are as surely victimized by the action of adverse thought around them as a dog may be poisoned by partaking of something cunningly or carelessly thrown in his way, of which he partakes ignorantly. We all run chances or risks as long as we are ignorant, and the more dependent and devoted we are to the mental state of those around us the less resisting power or even protective instinct have we to save us from disorder.
Many very curious systems of alleged hygiene thrive on the confidence reposed in them by their advocates, though as systems they have very little to commend them. Such a fact as this ought to make the masses pause and consider how it can be that opposing systems can accomplish equal good, which they certainly do accomplish in many indisputable instances.
“Lourdes,” by Emile Zola, is an entertaining book, though it shocks the reverential sentiment in the course of many of its pages. The intensely realistic author of this highly rationalistic tale has paid a tribute to auto-suggestion as a factor in healing, but he has almost coarsely repudiated the action of those subtler spiritual forces in which the truly religious world devoutly believes. The commercial element at Lourdes has made a great impression upon Zola. The religion of the place is not sufficiently or exclusively religious to make a convert of the irreligious Frenchman. French realists in particular require to come in contact with unadulterated, unaffected, undiluted piety before they are impressed with it, and at no public healing shrine do we find the enterprising hotel-keeper or the vender of charms and bogus relics absent. Yet Lourdes has an atmosphere which heals a fair percentage of those who breathe it even on the say-so of those who refuse to submit their judgment to its central proposition—the vision of Bernadette and the patronage of Mary Immaculate. Though we believe more than Zola credits and less than some of the most fervid champions of the shrine are wont to vouch for, we cannot doubt that every place on earth which has a large reputation as a seat of the miraculous possesses an atmosphere so impregnated with a certain quality of thought and so alive with a certain type of belief that the air (being literally saturated with an unseen psychical medicament) is efficacious in suggesting to the mind of many a sensitive visitor exactly what is necessary to start that sufferer on the road to health. Everywhere the doctors tell us of nervous cases yielding to mental treatments of even the most fantastic and reasonless varieties; but the staid surgeon and the sober physician whose experience has been great in organic difficulties of long standing and grave import shake their heads and tell you that you must sharply draw the line between nervous or “neurotic” cases which are healed and the pronounced organic troubles which only the surgeon’s knife can cure. We certainly do not feel prepared to testify of broken bones healed by thought without surgical assistance, therefore we are not insolent to those who are careful to fix limits to the scope of psychic healing. Indeed we often contend that when the higher thought of life becomes universal, no bones will get broken and no such conditions will exist as now require serious operations to relieve or extirpate, A moderate position is always far stronger than a blindly extreme one, but though a moderate statement is not apt to arouse any great amount of immediate enthusiasm, it appeals radically to thoughtful people and wears well with them, while sensational rhapsodies please the ear and tickle emotion, but are soon forgotten or repudiated when difficulties have to be met and mastered. Disorders of children are a fruitful source of comment, and even of adverse criticism, when mental healing is on the tapis, and why? Simply because nine at least out of every ten persons one meets are sure vainly to imagine that if you say you believe that mind affects body you mean that you endorse sharply and exclusively the unwarrantable dogma that my mind alone affects my body, while your body is alone affected by j^w;’ thought, and so on universally. When we transfer the thought of how diseases are produced and how they can be cured from the objective or physical to the subjective or psychical plane of action, we are not called upon to do violence to analogy. If you grant that physical distempers are physically carried through the air and reach one person from another wherever susceptibility obtains, you are equally logical if you are considering mental states when you make allowance for psychical contagion where psychical susceptibility exists, and in the case of children and all susceptible persons of both sexes and all ages it exists very largely. The following excerpt from ”The Realm,” an excellent monthly paper issued in Toronto, Canada (June, 1898), is full of suggestive teachings: ”When a hungry man thinks of food, his mouth waters because Nature supplies saliva not only to food but to the very thought of food. Nothing is more curious than this response of the physical system to the operations of the mind. Dr. Matthew Woods, in an admirable pamphlet upon Mimetic Diseases, speaks of the familiar fact that at the close of many discourses delivered from the chair of the Practice of Medicine, the professor is privately consulted by students suffering from all the symptoms described. This imitative peculiarity is not limited to such ailments as disease of the heart, consumption, Basedow’s disease, gall stone, cancer of the pancreas, or appendicitis, but some have been known to become hemiplegic—viz., incapable of motion and sensation in the right or left half of the body—during a realistic lecture on cerebral apoplexy. Others have been seized with violent pain in the knee during an elucidation of the symptoms and pathology of Pott’s disease, while there are reports of students acquiring all the subjective symptoms of dislocation or fracture, because of the impression made upon their minds by the lecturer while discussing these surgical states.
“Physicians and philosophers perfectly understand the effect of * expectant attention^ which has been the cause not only of individual diseases but of marvelous epidemics in various parts of the world. Witness the disease of tarantism, so called because of its supposed origin in the bite of the tarantula, a species of spider. Its victims were sometimes subjected to treatment of the most painful sort, but it could be effectually cured by nothing but music. A bishop, who believed the whole thing to be imaginary, allowed himself to be bitten by the tarantula, and presently fell to dancing with all the delirious grotesquerie of the peasant. By-and-by, when people ceased to think much about the tarantula, tarantism ceased, and at the present day Italian peasants may be bitten again and again by the tarantula with no serious effect whatever. In other words, ‘expectant attention’ being absent, the phenomena, which are no longer expected, do not occur.”
Though the foregoing extract covers very wide ground and deals more with ailments of adults than of infants, it shows plainly enough “how a receptive mental state causes phenomena to appear for which no adequate physical cause can possibly be assigned. Among the most easily communicable of mental states stands worry or anxiety, which is the prolific parent of innumerable sufferings. Sensitive children are so affected by the nervous, anxious, mental states of those around them that fevers and convulsions frequently issue from no other cause than the intense nervous derangement of parents, nurses, or any person upon whom children are specially dependent or between whom and themselves there exists any strong sympathy. The quarrels (suppressed rather than active) between married people have very much to do with the afflictions of childhood, and a very strong case for psychics rather than for physics can be made out, if we carefully observe the superior healthfulness of the children of the “vulgar,” who do not dissemble or cloak their emotions, but blurt out their angry feelings when they have any, and thus get rid of them far sooner than though they nursed them secretly.
We are not admiring or advocating violent outbursts of ungoverned temper by any means, but we do dare to teach, in the name of hygiene, that it is far less poisonous to vent forth ill-will, if one is cursed with unkind feeling toward another, than it is to permit it to prey upon your vitals and eat out the very heart of inward peace and contentment. The truly wise mother is one who makes the only acceptable sacrifice on behalf of her child, and that is the perfect controlling of her own inward emotions.
It is truly said that love gives giant strength and no love can be stronger than a mother’s; therefore, let no one make the weak excuse that she cannot help feeling bad inwardly, however much she may control her speech and conduct. It is exactly here that refined people do worse than those who make no boast of refinement, and for this cause the peasantry of any nation is apt to enjoy better health than the so-called upper classes. It is useless to talk of mental healing and discuss the mysteries of psychic science unless you are ready to take the great initial step by which alone you can enter the path which leads finally to adepthood, which is nothing other than a state of freedom from the long-time belief that our thoughts are our masters, when by right of reason we are theirs. It is of course needless to add, when discoursing upon the salutary effects of a mother’s rightful thought upon her child, that she receives at first hand the inestimable benefits accruing from mental self-mastery which she psychically transmits to her receptive offspring. There are no one-sided blessings; as we bless others we bless ourselves, and every time we pursue a course beneficial to our own interests we are putting ourselves in condition to radiate blessings to all who are in any degree susceptible to our influence.
Self-healing and the work of healing others are not two distinct phases of work so entirely separate that one can be successfully accomplished without the other. So gregarious are our natural instincts and so impossible is it for any of us to get fully rid of social obligations, that though we often talk of treating ourselves and then of treating others as though there were little, if any, connection between the two processes, a little logical reasoning on the matter will suffice to convince even the most skeptical that as we persistently determine to encourage only such thoughts as we feel to be consistent with our own and others’ highest welfare, our lives will truly become transfigured, and, as a result, transfiguring in their influence upon all with whom we are psychically en rapport.
It is not wise to dwell actively on bodily conditions and seek to change them in any direct sense by mental action; a far more excellent way is simply to encourage those mental states which we know to be desirable, and quietly permit their influence to extend to the circumference of our existence and thence shed radiant light upon the path of others. When once the habit of thinking only harmonious thoughts has taken deep root within us, we shall find bodily conditions and worldly affairs transformed as if by magic, and all who are in contact with us will share in the benediction. The following lines exactly express the true thought concerning self-healing and helping others to health:
Live true to your noblest ideals!
You cannot make them too high;
The longer the struggle, the harder the fight,
The grander the by and by.
There’s never a high ideal
But will be the Real some day,
If we follow with patience the Path of Love,
As the true and only way.
The perfect life will come at last
To every human soul;
In living our best we shall find the way
By which we can make life whole.
It’s only because we live but a part
Of the Life we all can live,
That we have but a part of the wonderful gift
That the Perfect Life will give.
So live to your highest Ideals now,
And ye shall be as leaven,
And make for men God’s kingdom here
On earth as it is in Heaven.
Finding the Christ Within—The New Life—Realizing the Atonement
Though fully aware that the immensity of the title of this chapter is simply overwhelming in its scope and majesty, we will nevertheless address ourselves earnestly and fearlessly in these the closing pages, of a volume intended to be of practical service to inquiring humanity, to the consideration of themes of such transcendent moment and apparent difficulty that their elucidation has been well-nigh the despair of theologians through the course of many centuries. What think ye of Christ? is the ever-recurring question in Christendom; and the replies to this query are so far removed from one another that they range all the way from ”Christ is God” to ” I do not believe Christ ever existed.” In the fourth gospel the Christ is identified with the eternal Logos, the everlasting Word, which is the active creative force in the universe. There is a distinct philosophic connection between this first chapter of John’s gospel and the eighth chapter of Proverbs, for while the gospel speaks of the divine masculine principle (love), the author of Proverbs deals with the equally divine feminine (wisdom), which is said to have been with Him in all the work of creation. Love and wisdom together are necessary to creation; the product of their union is the Holy Spirit, or divine breath which sustains and is perpetually recreating all things. Though there is a beginning and also an ending to the career of any world or system of worlds, creation itself is eternal. We must dismiss entirely from our minds the thought of time when we contemplate the self-existent, the underived essence of life which remains unchangeable, though all things change without or external to it. “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever,” suggests the principle back of the personality. The physical shape of the Man of Galilee changed as do all other physical shapes, but the abiding ego changes not at all forever. In the esoteric meaning of the term, Christ is the immortal principle of humanity, which, like Melchisedec, King of Salem, priest of the MOST HIGH, has neither beginning of days nor end of life; being without father or mother, he has no family tree, therefore to such as he genealogy can have no meaning.
Modern as well as ancient Hermetists are wont to turn attention as fully to the esoteric as materialists are disposed to direct our gaze to the exoteric side of every question; and though there is a common resting-place for occultists and externalists, it is not often that this is clearly displayed in a treatise written either by a professed Hermetist or by one who writes avowedly from the standpoint of literalism.
Some years ago great attention was called to the productions of Dr. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, whose collaborated work, “The Perfect Way, or Finding of Christ,” is still the accepted Vade mecum of a by no means insignificant company of Theosophists of a distinctive type in London and elsewhere. The chief difference between the teachings of these authors and those of other schools of theosophical thought, is that they approach in language, though not in sentiment, very much nearer the accepted phraseology of the Christian than do the advocates of a more distinctly Asiatic terminology, such as that employed by Annie Besant and others who have spent some time in India and much more time in the study of Hindu or Sanskrit literature. To average Christian ears the terminology of Orientalism, outside of its Christian aspect, is almost unintelligible; therefore, it simplifies matters greatly when addressing a professedly Christian public to use words and phrases culled from the New Testament rather than from the Vedas or Bhagavad Gita or any other unfamiliar, or at least far less familiar, fount of inspiration. The allusions to Christ in the Pauline epistles are, many of them, of such a character that they are positively incomprehensible if applied to a person, while they grow luminous at once when we understand that they apply to a principle. When Paul speaks of Christ being formed within us, and of our being knit together into the mystical body of Christ, if language means anything as there employed, the allusions must be both spiritual and social; but they cannot have exclusive reference to one personality, no matter how divine and glorious.
The personal Jesus may be accepted throughout Christendom as the perfect embodiment and the complete epiphany or manifestation of the divine through the human, both as an exemplar of the race and as a source of spiritual blessing to all who are reachable by the magnetic radiations from the glorified person. But it will in no way interfere with that view to indorse the Buddhist’s claim and agree to his assertion that India as well as Palestine has witnessed the perfect expression of the divine, through the human, in the life history of a glorified Elder Brother of Humanity. The acceptance of Christ is far more than belief in historic records, the best of which are sometimes dubious. Christ, says Paul, is to be formed within us. What can such a saying mean, if not that the Christ spirit, mind or temper is fully to possess us, and we by virtue of possessing it are to become divinized? The too great pressure often brought to bear upon honest skeptics to accept a personal Christ as Savior and Lord, coupled with threats of future punishment too dreadful to be imagined in the event of their rejection of this sacred person, has often been responsible for the positively anti-Christian character of so-called free thought, radical and liberal utterances. It was Dr. Pusey as much as anybody or anything that caused Mrs. Besant to drift toward Atheism, while Dean Stanley evoked within her a renewed respect for Christianity, though she could not be brought, even by his graciousness, to re-embrace it. It is no doubt largely a matter of temperament in many cases which decides the acceptance or rejection of the distinctively personal element in the Christian thought, and exactly the same is true when Buddhism or some other system is being examined in place of Christianity. There are some intense natures to whom nothing but a concrete image appears real; unless you concretize, you mystify and bewilder such good people, for they are not able, it seems, to revel in the abstract; they must be reached through the agency of the distinctly personal. Do not let us speak or think slightingly of such, for their wants are great and there must be for them an adapted ministry. The personal thought of Christ reaches and satisfies these and they must be led by it and through it to see beyond it, and when they see more than they at present realize they will know, better than they know now, where to place the personal equation in a synthetic system of philosophy. The indwelling Logos, regarded as the life of humanity, the light enlightening every human being, is a sublime conception; one, moreover, in which all prophets and poets of the highest stamp have reveled with intense delight. When we hear Whittier singing “Long sought without, but found within,” we are forcibly reminded of Fenelon and of Mme. Guyon as well as of many other sweet, noble natures whose Christian mysticism was something inexpressibly higher, deeper and purer than the conventional creedism of the average ecclesiastics of their day. Had this higher element prevailed in the Church, in Europe 400 years ago, Savonarola would have been accepted, and Luther would have had no apology for his iconoclasm. The mystic who seeks and finds the Christ within is generally of sweet, simple, meditative nature. To such temperaments the methods of the scholastic theologians are for the most part detestable, because while subtle casuistry delights the intellect it not infrequently offends the heart. The mystic feels, while the casuist argues. One is a poet, the other a lawyer; and though a solicitor or an attorney may be a minstrel, we hardly associate the bard with jurisprudence. There is, of course, nothing incongruous in such a combination, and it would be well for the world if lawyers were seers and poets; but ecclesiastical litigation and sacerdotal wire-pulling are of all legal processes the most odious to the devout soul which takes no interest in defining a dogma, but all interest in inwardly realizing truth. Calvin’s condemnation of Servetus simply proved that Calvin, though a fine logician, had utterly neglected the religion of the heart. No passage in the canonical Gospels, can be cited to prove that Jesus taught that salvation consisted in saying, ” God the Son,” while perdition awaited those who said “the Son of God.” However much of abstract truth there may be in a theologic formulary, it has no vitalizing power. Doctrines presented to the intellect, and accepted by it, have no power to reach the heart; therefore, all creeds and dogmas put together are powerless to uplift the human race because love, not belief, is the fulfilling of the law. We do not necessarily love because we believe. “Devils also believe and tremble,” is a pat phrase and one that theologians would do well to ponder. Christ in the life is not Jesus in the head, though Jesus in the head does not keep Christ out of the life. There are two of every one of us; we are all conscious of a higher and of a lower self, however ill prepared we may be to define these two selves in any clear and philosophically accurate manner. It is because of these two in every one of us that the opposed theories of creation and evolution provoke so much long-drawn controversy—a contention which can never cease so long as either side lays claim to a monopoly of truth.
Creationists postulate God, while evolutionists postulate something. Back of protoplasmic cells is spirit. Spiritual plasm is the truly first (proto) and life (Bio) plasm. Back of evolution is that which is involved and that which is made manifest through those slow and orderly processes we call evolutionary.
The researches of Lamarck and then of Darwin and Wallace led to certain definite, formulable conclusions concerning the method of the working of the law of evolution, which ancient seers may not have exactly anticipated, but it is the height of ignorance and folly for nineteenth century students to arrogate to themselves and to their age all the knowledge concerning evolution extant on earth today. Involution and evolution are unthinkable apart. It is the spiritual side of the theory of evolution which most strongly appeals to the searcher for inward satisfaction, therefore the revelation of the evolution of Man’s spiritual consciousness—which the New Testament conceals beneath the surface of the letter—offers an interpretation of biological phenomena obtainable nowhere else. Paul’s doctrine of ”first the natural^ then the spiritual in the order of expression, tallies precisely with the words in the third chapter of the fourth Gospel, “Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Then, after Nicodemus has heard this declaration, he is told that he must be born of water and of the spirit in logical sequential order, before he can do more than simply behold, even enter into the kingdom of heaven. Jesus addresses this ” Master in Israel ” with the pertinent question, “Knowest thou not these things ?” paying thereby a tribute to the Kabala and other secret or sacred sources of information open to the Chief Rabbis, seventy of whom constituted the Sanhedrin, the highest council in Israel.
The Jewish Kabala is not the only phase of Kabala extant, but it is the most accessible, though it is by no means easy to decipher. The books of greater and lesser Concealed Mystery are full of profound theosophy, which those who speak glibly of “Kabala unveiled” will find very much veiled still after all the attempted unveiling. The legend concerning Kabala is that angels, who form a theosophic school in Paradise, reveal to chosen ones on earth what man unguided by these celestial prompters could never find out for himself This tradition is susceptible of more than one elucidation, for though angelic ministration may be an important factor in human enlightenment, the angel within us must not be overlooked while we pay exclusive honor to the angel without. Until we reach a plane of development where we are capable of appreciating direct inward guidance we should gratefully acknowledge our profound indebtedness to counselors without; but the experience of the soul ultimately must be like to that of Mme. Guyon, who returned heart-weary from her pilgrimage to many famous shrines where she had been to seek for Christ. Fenelon, who was her adviser, said: “My child, you have been looking for Christ everywhere except in the place where you are sure to find him. Seek no longer without; look within.” It is only when we have grown dissatisfied with what is procurable without that we are ready to turn within; therefore it is madness to seek to hurry the process of spiritual growth, which, if not spontaneous, is unreal and artificial. If we are contented with creeds, catechisms, rituals and ordinances, they are the things for us just now; but if these fail to meet our necessities and our deeper needs are sadly unsupplied, if we are growing in wisdom or are even ready to pay heed to wise counselors, we shall shed no tears and experience no regret, but straightway repair to that inward sanctuary of the spirit where the living universal Christ stands ready to supply all needs and give rest to all the weary. Put the matter in any light you please, it is always and only personal experience that satisfies. Hearsay evidence is never finally conclusive. No matter how unimpeachable the witnesses or how strong the testimony, there is no real peace until one can say: ” My own eyes have seen the glory of the Lord, and my own ears have heard the joyful tidings of salvation.” To preach a so-called gospel and leave personal experience out is to feed the multitude on husks instead of bread.
Watch the eager throngs who congregate to listen to Oriental teachers and the crowds who frequent spiritualistic “test” meetings. What is the cause of this flocking to hear Asiatics and this clamoring for clairvoyance and psychometry? Psychical Research is born out of soul hunger. People are not sure of anything. Immortality is too uncertain. Religious teaching is either too dogmatic or too vague. The sacerdotalists appeal to authority which is not authoritative, while the liberalists calmly and rationalistically drift into agnosticism and those of gloomy disposition into pessimism. If something like phenomenal spiritism could satisfy the human soul there would be no further seeking when once phenomena of a psychic character had been proved genuine; but the human being as we know him is not capable of resting in phenomena, however valuable such may be as introductory steps to inward realization.
In spite of the fantastic side of Yoga practice, there is in it all a thinly veiled yearning after union with the divine. Why all this talk of “tatwas;” why all this struggling to govern breath, and to attain to the practice of magic, unless below it all there is a yearning after the hidden divinity which at length may stand revealed? There are too many really earnest, pure-minded men and women seeking through these avenues today for any fair observant critic to dismiss the subject with a sneer; or with an empty toss of the head, exclaim: “Oh, only a sensation; another nine days’ wonder.” Christian Science, Theosophy, Spiritualism, all appeal to the curiosity-seeking on the one hand, and to the desperately earnest “beggars for light” on the other. When we see only the speckled surface of a movement we are apt to say it is nothing but a mushroom growth and will soon be laid aside to make way for a new sensation; but on its deeper side we see that it does more than appeal to our latter-day Athenians, who are forever seeking to regale themselves with novelties. May it not be that underneath all the glamour and confusion of tongues and presentations of ambiguous wonders there is an actual effort being made by the higher self of the race to incarnate itself more fully, so that life shall be no longer the vain frivolous show, or money-grubbing grind, which far too many people make it? The higher self of the race is the esoteric Christ; the unveiling of this Christ is the race’s hope of Glory.
So interwoven are we all, so inseparable are our interests, that, as Pythagoras affirmed, “no soul can be absolutely free as long as one of its companions is in bondage.” Paul’s epistles are wonderfully full of this sentiment, and nowhere is the idea more completely elucidated than in the twelfth chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians, where, after enumerating the many members of the one body, he ends with the declaration, “Even so is Christ.” Jesus, in Paul’s esteem, was a real, loving, glorified individual who appeared to him personally, and addressed direct words to him on his memorable journey between Jerusalem and Damascus. Jesus was to Paul the head of the company of members of the mystical body of the esoteric Christ, which, like the literal human organism, he conceived to be composed of parts and organs wherein all members have their distinctive, but equally honorable, functions. No socialists have ever improved on Paul’s plan; but unfortunately for much avowed socialism, its leaders have altogether failed to realize the sole spiritual basis for a social state which can abide. It is useless to object to leadership. Leaders there are and leaders there still must be, but hereditary leadership is a corruption. The two chief sacraments of the Christian Church, Baptism and the Holy Supper, were originally socializing institutions, and though they certainly had a spiritual significance entirely beyond their external meaning, their influence for good upon social customs was exceedingly significant. All who were baptized, and all who partook of the consecrated elements at the holy table, were accredited members of the primitive Christian commonwealth, which was regarded by early Christians as the nucleus of a world-wide movement for the spiritual and social regeneration of the race. , .”Ye are the light of the world” and “Ye are the salt of the earth” were sentences taken personally by the primitive disciples, who were too ardently enthusiastic in their devotion to the cause for which they were ready to suffer martyrdom to allow any half-hearted allegiance to their Master’s counsels.
William Stead has well said that the Coliseum in Rome remains as a tremendous advertisement for early Christianity. Such books as “Quo Vadis?” and “Shall we Follow Him?” and such plays as “The Sign of the Cross,” intensely popular of late, show that admiration for the heroic spirit of the early martyrs is by no means dead today.
We are all members of a great spiritual community; we all belong to a universal fraternity; therefore, we are in this spiritual-social body as members thereof. That Russian prince who spoke so forcibly on brotherhood at the Congress of Religions held in Chicago during September, 1893, struck the only genuine keynote to the anthem of universal fraternization, when he exclaimed: ” This thought of brotherhood is not the apex, it is the base of the social pyramid;” and then, alluding to the invitation to volunteers to become recruits in an army whose avowed object was the forming of a universal brotherhood, he forcibly replied, ” I cannot enlist in an army into which I was born.” This sense of brotherhood is primal, and it is indeed encouraging to note how such men as Rev. John Watson (Ian MacLaren) in his “Life Creed,” and other noble thinkers, are insisting upon the absolutely universal scope of divine fatherhood and human brotherhood, as against the pitifully narrow conceptions of those misguided teachers who seek to restrict the advantages of belonging to God’s family to those alone who accept their narrow dogmatism and pay respect to their contracted ordinances.
It is a very vital question whether we acknowledge universal or only sectional or partial brotherhood, because upon this issue depends the basis of all our conduct to the great bulk of our fellow-beings. We cannot expect people to be better than their ideals, or more loving and generous than their faith permits; therefore, while it may be correct to say, “It does not matter what a man believes, so long as he lives a noble life,” it is impossible to believe that what one really believes will exert no influence on life. A clear and unexceptionable statement may be as follows: It does not matter what people believe to any greater extent than belief influences character. To call every virtue “Christian,” and then act as though your sense of “Christian” was so. universal that it embraces Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, Parsees, and all the rest, is simply an evidence that “Christian” is a word very dear to you, and so you employ it as the synonym of all that is truly excellent; but if you call every virtue ” Christian,” and then proceed to ostracize every technically non-Christian person, and act as though you believed him to be the prey of all the “heathen” vices, you are so bound and fettered by an adjective that it would be good for you if there were no such word as Christian in your vocabulary. There is always danger in pressing a seemingly sectarian term too far; because though you may use it broadly, others are sure to interpret it narrowly, and there are so many words which are entirely super denominational that it is decidedly preferable to select one of those for general usage in place of the hackneyed terms which always engender in some minds the thought of limitation.
When the Oriental Swamis and other visitors from the Far East are announced to lecture somewhere in the United States, or in England, there are sure to be some narrow-minded people who will contemptuously inquire: “What good do you expect to get from those heathens?” The use of the word “heathen,” as applied to a faithful Brahmin, Buddhist, Jainist, or Parsee, is fully as objectionable as the use of the word “dog,” as applied by a Mohammedan to a Christian, or to anyone who does not subscribe to the creed of Islam. People talk of the ” unspeakable Turk ” as though barbarity in Europe was confined to the Ottoman Empire, when within recent years barbarities and atrocities have been enacted against Jews in several European countries, to say nothing of parts of the African continent, by fanatics who justify their hatred of the Jew because he is not a Christian.
Though we shall never join those ribald iconoclasts, who denounce Christianity in unmeasured terms because of the abuses practiced in its name, we will endeavor to do justice to much of the sentiment which has provoked such violent outbursts of indignation against a time-honored institution. It is not hatred for virtue, but for vice; not opposition to integrity, but to hypocrisy, which has led the atheistic crew to hurl thunderbolts of contumely and derision at all that bears the Christian name. Victor Hugo, in “Les Miserables,” has shown us the exceeding piety and sweet charity of a Catholic Bishop who was a true philanthropist of the divinest type; yet Victor Hugo had so far alienated himself from ecclesiasticism in France that his body could not be buried in the Pantheon (then a church) until the building had been formally de-consecrated or secularized. This separation from the church of a large number of the world’s greatest geniuses, and most deeply spiritual minds, is weakening the church immensely, but it is only proving that religion and ecclesiasticism do not always go hand in hand. The phrase, ” One holy catholic church!’ is large and ample, but how many people believe in it? You are actually obliged to read a Unitarian hymn book to find a correct definition of the universal church, because the phrase is nowhere else so clearly interpreted.
The following lines, by a well-known composer of many exquisite hymns, express the true sentiment of the New Testament:
“One holy church of God appears
Through every age and race;
Unwasted by the lapse of years,
Unchanged by changing place.
Her priests are all God’s faithful sons.
To serve the world raised, up;
The pure in heart, her baptized ones—Love, her communion cup.”
Here we have the gospel of Jesus supplemented by the testimony of ‘Paul, of John, of James and of other apostles, carried through all centuries and countries, and brought up to the living present in a vital application of truth to the actual demands of today. It is utterly impossible for the thinking, growing youth of today to take any other view of the church of the living God than that it is the spiritual incorporation of all who are led by the Spirit of Truth entirely regardless of their outer affiliations or lack of any external affiliation at all.
It is quite possible to accept Jesus as the head of the human race, and therefore take a position consistently Christian, and at the same time to accept thankfully all the joyful tidings brought to light by the most recent studies in Comparative Religion. The mystical body of the Christ is made up of all who are one in spirit—one in love. “The Lord knoweth those who are his,” whether they know him or not. The world may be divided into regenerated and unregenerated people, even as there are the educated and the uneducated; but for our part we are not ready thus arbitrarily to classify humanity under these two heads. That celebrated Swedenborgian minister of Philadelphia, Rev. Chauncey Giles, whose published sermons are still proving of great help to increasing multitudes, used to say when addressing someone in whom the fruits of the divine Spirit were gradually manifesting, not “my regenerated friend,” but “my regenerating friend.” There is a very wide difference between the two sayings. If we were fully regenerated we should have already attained to that state of complete holiness which John and Charles Wesley, and some of their descendants, have regarded as possible here on earth, and which, no doubt, is possible, though the very people who conduct Holiness Meetings and preach Holiness most loudly do not show, as a rule, that they are other than in process of sanctification.
Precisely as generation is gradual, so also is regeneration gradual. No matter how perfect may be the germ and how accurately fulfilled may be every stage in the gestative process which must he between conception and birth, the nine months of gestating life symbolize the progressive action of the Divine Spirit within the human soul. Then after birth twenty years may be passed in infancy, childhood and youth before physical maturity is reached. If the personal recorded life of Jesus be taken as representative, and as pointing the way to perfect spiritual attainment, the doctrine of atonement may be readily understood, and a vast, murky cloud of misconception be removed from a tenet, which, though originally elevating, has become so obscured by the clouds of accumulated error that it resembles today a fine old painting by a great master, which has become so blackened with smoke and disfigured with grime that now, as it is beginning to be restored, we are catching glimpses of its original lineaments, which are fair beyond description and which will shortly reappear in sight of all be holders. Let us not number ourselves among those who fear the results of restoration; neither let us turn from the doctrine, and say we reject the atonement because it has been misinterpreted. The ideal life of Jesus differs from that of other great characters in the Bible, and elsewhere, because’ of its extreme comprehensiveness. Jesus grows naturally, as all children ought to grow, increasing in size and wisdom as he advances in age, then when he is thirty years of age, old enough to commence a public ministry, having conquered temptations in his own practical experience, he leaves the desert or place of seclusion where he has been preparing for his ministry to the masses, and goes everywhere into all walks of life, associating with all sorts of people, leveling all artificial distinctions, working faithfully to democratize society on the basis of man’s acceptance of one God as the Father of all, and the necessary corollary, universal sisterhood and brotherhood. Whether the Gospels are historical or not, they represent Jesus as treating women with fully as much respect as he shows to men; not in any spirit of gallantry or chivalry, but addressing them as the intellectual equals of their brothers, thereby discountenancing every one of those ignorant superstitions and forms of slavery against which the best thinkers of today are vigorously protesting. Jesus goes everywhere and does everything; his methods of teaching and healing are as diverse as human needs, therefore it is true that so eclectic, so composite is the portrait of the ideal man, that you can, if you will, support any system you prefer most by reference to gospel precedent. But how are you going to support it? is the question. Are you doing violence to the narrative by extracting an isolated incident and building up a system on a text, or are you ready thankfully to allow that there is some good to be done with every method, though no method avails on all occasions? It is pitiable to hear some people who think themselves “advanced” attempt ludicrous, belittling and revolting explanations of some of the most beautiful and suggestive narratives of healing in the entire gospel repository.
Take, for example, the account of Jesus making clay of dust and spittle and anointing therewith the eyes of the man blind from birth. In that history we have a fine suggestion of the atonement. Saliva is a common product of the human body possessed by all and shared by animals as well. Dust is the very substance of the common soil, accessible alike to rich and poor—to high and low. The object lesson is where the healer—who is invariably also a teacher—mingles the two, making them one; thereby signifying that health and sight are ours only when we have made peace between what our own natures generate and contain, and the great world around us. Then, when the lesson has been learned, a bath must be taken in Siloam’s pool, i. c, in that particular place to which you are directed by the power that heals you; then after bathing in Siloam, as Naaman bathed in Jordan, you receive sight, as the Assyrian captain parted with his leprosy.
The two cases resemble each other; they are analogous, but not identical. The young man whom Jesus treated, in the instance just referred to, was the unsophisticated youth who had not yet come into the knowledge of truth, therefore he was not a sinner. Lepers are they who by reason of transgression have corrupted their flesh, and to them the words go forth in thunder, “Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.”
Atonement means conciliation and reconciliation. It is the work of the atoner to bring together for the first time those who have not yet met each other; it is his blessed mission also to reconcile those who have become estranged. The atonement is accomplished in two ways, viz.: by moral suasion and by silent spiritual appeal, that is the way of influence; also by mathematical demonstration of truth to human understanding, that is the way of example.
Consider the atonement in the following lights: First, our relation to God; second, our relation to each other; third, the relation of the two selves in every one of us. First as to our relation to Deity. We may have been living without a sense of God and yet in no sense in conscious or willful opposition to Divine Order. We have been born once, but not twice! We have seen earthly but not heavenly things; we are like Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus by night, seeking and ready to receive that fuller light concerning life, without which we may be nominally, but never really, “Masters in Israel.” Then we all know that we often have a sense of alienation from all that is divine; we have groveled in sensuality, or we have sinned grievously against charity. There were times in the past when we felt ourselves near to God and at peace with the MOST HIGH, but now we are estranged from the Eternal Parent and we think God is angry with us. Our errors have caused a smoke or mist to arise murkily from ourselves and blacken the air all about us, and though we can say with Samson: “Total eclipse, no sun, no moon,” the sun and moon are just as bright as though we had not blinded ourselves by our transgressions. Here comes in the imperative need for stating the true doctrine of atonement. God never changes; the Infinite is absolutely immutable, but God seems to change whenever we change.
Jesus never told people to do other than put away their own errors, so that, the scales being removed from their ^yQS, they might see God as a result of their own purity. Did Jesus purify them; did his blood cleanse them? Not by proxy; not as a substitute, and not merely as an example, but in accordance with the changeless law of intercommunication, which makes it possible for one who is lifted up to draw others unto him. Almost at the expense of vulgarizing this intensely sublime subject we feel it necessary to indulge in an almost coarse allusion to personal magnetism so as to make this branch of the subject vivid.
It is now a matter of oft-repeated experiment that one person can so treat another that though the healer takes absolutely nothing of the disease of the patient upon himself he is instrumental in destroying that disorder. It is a hideous thought, and one that is utterly barbaric, that Jesus was contaminated with sin or that he bore disease in his own person. He destroyed sin; error was annihilated through the electric agency of the force emanating from him which extirpated it. Can you not realize how, if your own blindness or deafness is shutting out from you a vision and a song which are perpetual, if some potential healer could dissolve for you the scales over your eyes and the wax in your ears, the landscape and the melody would start into original being for you as an immediate consequence of the successful act of healing? Daylight has come to us, directly we know that changes are wrought in man while God is changeless.
Now, to the second point, viz,: Man’s relation to man. The thought of the need of atonement is again twofold, for there are many cases where not only individuals but whole tribes and even nations are practically unknown to each other. The poet struck home very close to truth who wrote the lines:
“If we knew each other better
We should love each other more.”
The story of Balaam, when read with unprejudiced eyes, is a singularly fine illustration of this verity. Balak wanted to hire Balaam to curse Israel; Balaam, being totally unacquainted with the descendants of Jacob, imagines, no doubt, that they are a very iniquitous people, and feels toward them precisely as some ignorant but well-meaning people feel toward modern Jews, because they have foolishly swallowed the contents of anti-Semitic literary tirades.
Balaam sees the tents of Israel outspread, and proceeds to bless this honorable people whose peaceful agricultural tendencies and devoted home life contrasted very pleasingly with the less civilized conditions which Balaam had seen exhibited elsewhere; and even when Balak finds it impossible to induce Balaam to curse Israel, and he says, “Neither curse them at all nor bless them at all,” Balaam answers that he cannot refrain from speaking the word which the Lord has put in his mouth.
How frequently it occurs that we believe that we actually abhor people of whom we know absolutely nothing ! The relentless fires of reasonless persecution have been many a time kindled in Europe against unoffending Jews, because some malicious tongue started the report, which silly tongues extended, that in Hebrew homes and synagogues the blood of Christian children was mingled with the wine of Passover. No matter how foundationless a tale may be, once let it circulate, and ignorant, credulous people are ready to believe the worst of their innocent neighbors. So long as we remain in ignorance of each other we are sadly apt to condemn each other; therefore, if wars are to be made to cease and the white peace flag is to float over all the nations of the earth, the first step to be taken is to introduce the nations one to the other.
Jesus is neither Greek, Roman, Hebrew, nor aught else that is sectional; he is the “Son of Man”—a title employed in the book of Daniel before we find it in the New Testament. The Son of Man belongs to all races and claims all countries as his own; all flags are his, so wherever he goes he is at home. Birds with private nests and foxes with private holes represent lower states of attainment than the state demanded of those who would take up their cross and follow the ideal Master.
Have you considered well what cosmopolitan means; do you know how great it is to be a cosmopolite—one who though without a special country claims all countries as his own? Though Jesus has no private bed and no private pillow, he can rest in all beds and sleep on all pillows, and woo and win sweet sleep wherever he may be. It is perfectly right that we should acknowledge our special relationships to special places and people, and it may be said of Jesus that he chose twelve companions, and out of the twelve only three were truly intimate with him; and out of the three, only one was a bosom friend.
These closest of all relationships are peculiarly sacred and should never be lightly esteemed, but they must never be permitted to interfere with that perfect good will to all humanity without which the true atonement of man to man can never be consummated. When hostilities have arisen and those who once appeared as friends have drifted wide apart, then the atoning work of the true lover of humanity is to act as peace-restorer and reunite the separated. It is easily conceivable that many diverse temperaments may be attracted to a common focal center, found only in an individuality so large that it embraces all temperaments and is therefore capable of unifying all. Jesus is comparable to the sun—each of the twelve apostles may occupy one out of the twelve signs of the Zodiac through which the sun is seen to travel as it accomplishes its periodic revolutions.
The solar type of man is synthetic, all-embracing; therefore, to him there are no unsolved mysteries in lesser lives, because his greater life comprehends and encloses all those smaller expressions of Hfe. The conscious integer comprehends all fractional statements, but no fraction is large enough to understand the perfect unit. It takes a singularly rounded nature to understand all the petty existences which are displayed on every side of it, and this large nature knows nothing of such base emotions as scorn, impatience, aversion and contempt, but, like a truly wise savant, who includes all the experiences gained in his own youth and childhood, understands feelingly as well as intellectually the joys and sorrows, doubts and difficulties, ambitions and fears of those who are now undergoing the very experiences which he in his time underwent, and out of which he has come to be the glorious sage he now appears. Our feelings of hostility to our neighbors, whom we do not understand and who may not understand us, are hallmarks of our own weakness, and effectual barriers (so long as we permit them to continue) in the path of our own progression.
No amount of advertised Spiritualism, Theosophy, Christian Science, or anything else is of the slightest practical moral value to man, unless the adherents of these pretentious systems translate theory into practice, and make their ethical assertions the basis of sweeter and more harmonious relationships, man with man, family with family, nation with nation. We must not be too ready, however, to take what looks like a pessimistic view of existing situations, no matter how dark they be.
War is nothing new; it is indeed extremely ancient. Prophets tell us the days will dawn when war will be no more known; but no historian informs us of a past epoch when war did not exist. Feuds between individuals, families, tribes, and nations are vestiges of a departing barbarism; they should not now occasion us dire alarm as though they were awful novelties. At the same time it is utterly foreign to the spirit of the gospel to fight with carnal weapons under the vaunted banner of the Prince of Peace, who never counseled warfare, though his prophetic vision caused him to say: “It must needs be that offences come, but woe to him by whom they come.” Paul seems to have taken a trembling, tentative position on the peace question; though he has placed himself on record as a peace advocate, his words are only partially encouraging, where he says: “If it be possible as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.” Such a sentence is a great drop from the beatitude, “Blessed are the peacemakers, they shall be called the children of God.” The tremendous strength of this latter, in contrast with the weakness of the former quotation, is graphically displayed in the fact that the beatitude takes it for granted that we can make peace, and unhesitatingly says that all who have come to the knowledge of divine sonship do make peace, and thereby obtain a great blessing; while Paul’s words are tremblingly hopeful, but too doubtful to be of any great inspiration to the reader.
Compromises and concessions are useless. The grandeur of the gospel is that it is uncompromising and it makes no concessions. Kindness and strength must be united. No one is really helped by a dubious command; only trumpet-thunders are truly helpful. We can live peaceably with all men; such is the ideal state, and that the prize be yet unwon because the race is yet unrun is no argument against our running the race and gaining the prize. We need great spiritual athletes, and great spiritual athletic exercises, to lift us out of the torpid apathy in which the most of us lie discontented, though assumedly content. It is all in vain that we talk of an atonement with God, when we are not at one with our brethren; hypocrisy and hallucination alone continue to persuade us that we are at peace with heaven while we engage in war on earth. Pitiful indeed are the lame excuses made in religious journals for blasphemous prayers.
We have no right to pray that one army may be victorious and another set of troops defeated, but we have the right to pray earnestly and sincerely from the depths of our souls that we may become so open to divine influx and be so illumined with celestial light that our thoughts, words, and deeds may be directed to the glorious end of increasing the sway of righteousness and enlarging the area of peace, good will, and liberty on earth. May right prevail; may equity triumph; may freedom spread; may purity increase. Such ejaculations as these do not warrant attack on prayer, for when the unbeliever shall ask us how we expect to change the purposes of the Eternal by our petitions, we frankly and uncompromisingly reply. We expect to do nothing of the sort; we are simply praying for more wisdom, that our own actions may accord more perfectly with universal order.
Our third question regarding atonement is how to bring our higher and lower selves into full accord, so that discord may cease in our own members, and we may emerge out of sickness into health, out of confusion into order. Perhaps this third question must in our experience come first, for it is not unreasonable to affirm that until we know ourselves we cannot know our neighbors, and until we know our neighbors as well as ourselves we cannot find God. The Greeks have counseled us to know ourselves, and the Egyptians have directed us to know ourselves by ourselves. Swedenborg has informed us that there are three loves in every human heart: the love of God, of neighbor and of self, and he added that wherever these loves are rightly subordinated man is an angel; the inversion of their order being the only thing that makes infernal conditions possible. James Martineau has beautifully insisted that if we know God and ourselves we must go into the silence and strip off all the outer barks of the tree of our existence, and find ourselves children of God at the very root and center of our consciousness. Mabel Collins has told all aspirants for interior enlightenment that they must kill out all sense of separatencss from others, overcome personal ambition with spiritual aspiration and cease that restless hunger for personal growth which eats like a canker at the vitals of reposeless natures, and hinders effectually the growth it is blindly expected to assist. The poet who sings “Love thyself last” has given us a deep word of wisdom, for one individual cannot be of as much value as the whole human family. Yet as the individual is included in the race, the individual deserves to be loved and honored as a member of the great lovable worthy family which includes that particular unit and without whom the whole would be incomplete.
The search for the “Holy Grail,” as recounted by Tennyson, is really the search for that divine essence which makes us all one. We cannot be happy or harmonious so long as we are at war within, and if we would attain to the true end of our existence we must learn so to subordinate the lower personality to the higher ego that instead of mortification or repression we shall have attained unto transfiguration and transmutation.
Lower appetites are transmutable. No natural affection is sinful; but when there are higher uses to which lower energies can be put, is it not the path of wisdom to dedicate the lesser to the service of the greater, instead of leaving the nobler aspirations of our natures unsatisfied while we sacrifice perpetually to the lower side of our existence? Occasional fasting may be beneficial; occasional withdrawal from the business and social realms may be extremely helpful; but the life of a cloister for a permanency is not to be desired, unless in the still retreat, sequestered from the outer world, we realize how to employ psychic agencies for the betterment of the world’s conditions more perfectly than when we are ourselves in the midst of the hurly-burly.
The Christ life is all-embracing; it includes the normal life of all sorts and conditions of people. The needs of all varieties of temperaments, and the requirements of all vocations, are met out of the exceeding copiousness of its inexhaustible richness and variety. It therefore but remains to say that there are doubtless those to whom the sequestration of an occult or mystic fraternity would be most helpful, and such a calm asylum would afford opportunity to those who are adapted to its quietness to fulfill spiritually the highest missions of philanthropy. Martha is too much in evidence everywhere; Mary’s better part is chosen by too few. The intense interest now being taken in all “psychical” studies and pursuits will, we trust, soon lead to a palpable change in the present-day habit of so far overdoing external work as to make housekeeping a toil and hospitality intolerably irksome.
So very much thought and attention bestowed upon externals saps vitality, dissipates energy, robs the vital organs of their necessary food, and results in every variety of brain, nerve and stomach difficulty, and if not stopped shortly must eventuate in some form of insanity.
The very evils over which the pessimists are perpetually sighing, and which they never tire of recounting and exaggerating, are due in the first instance to nothing other than this intense materiality which is quite as conspicuous in churches as elsewhere. The happy, wholesome life is the life that lives so far above externals that it can use and enjoy all, and at the same time be so richly dowered with interior resourcefulness that the absence of external conveniences, even, will cause no pain. Grumbling never remedies or improves anything. Supply and demand will always co-exist; consequently, the only sure road to improvement in any outward direction is to develop and encourage such inward feelings as must in the very course of necessity bring forth spontaneously the exact correspondences in the outer world we most intensely long to see displayed.
The true spiritual healer, or anyone who is determined to make a grand success of practicing any branch of Suggestive Therapeutics, will soon learn by experience to prove that all attacks or onslaughts upon the lower self of a patient or pupil are finally worse than useless, because they arouse antagonism in the lower province instead of exciting to action in the higher realm. The “middle wall of partition” must be broken down and the two must become one. If we realize our own potential greatness, we shall not do right just so long as we are under the psychologic influence of another, and soon backslide into the error, out of which we were seemingly but not really pulled. So-called hypnotic treatment, when adequate and beneficial, is very much higher than what is generally understood by hypnotism; but as that word is of dubious significance, it is not desirable to use it. Moral and mental treatment by means of suggestion is a phrase easy to comprehend, and it sets the average man or woman to thinking. Suggestion to be effective requires not only someone to make a suggestion, but someone to receive and welcome the suggestion made. Let any impartial student read the Bible narratives of healing and then address himself to doing prophetic or apostolic work today, and he will soon find that the same law which governed mental action in bygone ages is operating with equal force today.
The orthodox Christian says, You must accept Christ, or Christ cannot save you. The atonement therefore is not made for us until we make it ourselves. And now, finally, what does the word atonement mean? Its final syllable, ment, is clearly from the Latin mens mentis, mind. Swedenborg, in his “Rational Psychology,” very clearly differentiates mens from spirit, and it would be well if all writers today would be so explicit as to avoid the use of meaningless or else confounding synonyms. It is the intellect that needs to be brought into oneness with the spirit, and unless this is accomplished there is no healing or outwrought salvation. The best criminologists and penologists today are seeking so to treat crime as a disease that criminals may be healed instead of executed, and society thereby become improved as well as effectually protected from marauders. Jesus said in the first of the seven recorded sayings from the cross, “They know not what they do;” he prayed for the conversion and enlightenment of Judas, Caiaphas, and all the rest, and expressed himself in terms of perfect good nature to those who had relentlessly afflicted him. Such is the model for our imitation; we must condemn none, but work to raise all. No harsh thought must ever be tolerated if we are to be successful healers. That is a high standard, but low standards make sublime achievements impossible. Do not think you are wrong in pointing out errors or telling people privately of their faults if you do it lovingly, but even this loving rebuke will prove futile unless you point out a more excellent way. If you are in any sense a portion of today’s Israel; if you consciously belong to any of the twelve widely scattered tribes who are to be ingathered prior to the ultimate harvesting of the multitude innumerable (Rev. VII.); if you in any sense feel that you are here and now members of the true universal church of the first-born, whose names are clearly written in heaven, then remember you are called upon to be cities set on hills, lights to the world, and salt of the earth. In a special manner those who have found their own souls are commissioned to go forth and proclaim the glad tidings to those who have not yet found their souls. The soul is the same in every one of us, but we have not all, as yet, found this higher self which teaches us the divine lesson of universal brotherhood and sisterhood. Never permit a false or misleading phrase to bolster up a fallacy, and never allow a personal antipathy to becloud judgment or prevent you from seeing the highest aspect of a neighbor.
There will never be one fold and one shepherd, but there will be on flock and one shepherd when all the folds are emptied out and the sheep, no longer marked, labeled or circumscribed, graze together in one broad pastureland owned by no man, for it is God’s acre.
We have no right to ask others to join in our Shibboleth, to repeat our prayers, to partake of our ordinances. Everyone must be fully persuaded in his own mind as to what helps him to cultivate the noblest graces and approach the most nearly the ideal life.
But there can always be a common meeting ground, and that place is the temple of philanthropy. It is our identification of ourselves with all humankind, our felt oneness of aim as well as nature, which accomplishes atonement. Then being one on earth, free from every hostile thought, we shall look inward, as well as upward, to heaven, and jubilantly exclaim, God is one; God is Love! Goodness is supreme in the Universe!
The End