SPIRITUAL HEALING
(Part II)
W. John Murray
The Astor
Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.
[page 151
continued]
In death’s crucible, Life is
separated from the dross of existence,
but not even the most minute ray of Life
ceases to be. Like the little Rose of
Jericho, it transcends existence and
continues its journey in a more spiritual
form to which walls are not impervious,
and which fire [152] cannot harm, a form
more ethereal, as it were, illuminated by
a divine instead of a carnal sense. We
must not limit the mentally deranged to
such unfortunates as are housed in
institutions. These are only those whose
illusions are considered dangerous to the
commonwealth. There are many persons
outside the confines of walls whose
illusions, though less well defined, are
exactly as impervious to the approach of
spiritual Truths.
Death is
often the experience which precedes the
sunrise of a fuller life, a shadow that
hides personality from us but which
reveals the divine ego to those who have
merely fallen asleep. Physical existence
is the chrysalis state which precedes
Being, of which Mind and not matter is
the eternal verity. Creed has made God
appear in the likeness of man, and
endowed Him with similar passions. Truth,
on the other hand, teaches that man will
become godlike in the proportion that he
raises himself from the thraldom of the
senses. Matter is defined as that which
is contrary to Spirit or that which is
extended and which is able to receive
species of shape and movement. Matter,
then, is a film upon which the phenomena
of appearances are photographed, rather
than a likeness of Spirit. “All
that we are is the result of what we have
thought; it is founded on our thoughts;
it is made up of our thoughts.”
Thought, then, is the reality of
existence. The idea of a thing and the
thing itself [153] constitute an
inseparable and indivisible unity. To
remove the idea is, by the law of
necessity, to cause the object to
disappear, for all that exists is a sense
of manifestation or a creation of
thought.
Mind without
form is as inconceivable as mathematics
without numbers; because existence is the
result of thought: “Though we
should soar into the abyss, we never go
out of ourselves.” As a great
materialist, who has unwittingly voiced a
spiritual truth, has said, “Death
is the last call from the dream of
existence, and the dignity of death
commands respect from those who behold
its presence.” Death is not a thing
to be ignored, neither is it to be
despised; instead it is something to be
understood, for it raises the curtain on
a fuller vision of Life. The quality of
our thoughts will determine the form that
the individual mind will assume after
death, but it must be borne in mind that
death is not necessary to spiritual
perfection, as proven by him who was
the Man-God.
Never be
discouraged in well doing, for when the
mists that veil the day are dispersed by
the sunshine of Truth, you will see that
virtue is its own reward. “It is
not enough to help the feeble up, but to
support them after.” Such as are
the new born of Spirit as helpless as
little children. Very often people are
led to accept Truth through the
personality of their teacher, and they
unconsciously lean on the [154] broken
staff of personal attachment instead of
Divine principle. The conscientious
disciple of Truth must ever be pointing
the student away from personality towards
the Principle and fixing his attention on
the philosophy instead of the
philosopher. This will save the painful
retracing of steps. Jesus was the only
philosopher whose life measured up to his
own philosophy; the one man to whom it
could not be said: “God has given
you one pace and you make yourself
another,” for the Judean Prince
always walked with God. Men have a
faculty for construing things
clearly from the purpose of the things
themselves. God is the universal Parent,
and to be like God is to express all the
attributes of God, to be a supreme
unfoldment of Divinity in the form of
humanity.
We are all
children of God, but there are few among
men who recognize their royal descent and
live up to its responsibilities. Now is
always the day of salvation,
“today” is the Lord’s
day: “Let us live in the eternal
now to the glory of God and the
enlightenment of humanity.” For
this cause we came into existence. A
great writer has said in one of his most
exquisite allegories, that on returning
to Nazareth, Jesus went into a home and
“saw in a jasper hall reclining
upon a marble couch one in whose hair was
twined red roses, and whose lips were red
with wine. ‘Why do you spend your
time like this?’ asked the Master.
The man turned, saw him and said ‘I
was a leper once, you healed me; how
should [155] I live?’ The modern
leper still asks, after the influx of the
spirit has freed him from physical
bondage, ‘How shall I live?’
There is but one answer. Paul has given
it: ‘Yield yourselves unto God as
those that are alive from the dead and
your members as instruments of
righteousness unto God.’”
Shall we sin because we are not under the
law, but under grace? God forbid! And as
long as people entertain the possibility
of yielding themselves to
unrighteousness, they are far from having
been spiritually healed, and such
need to guard lest “a worse thing
come upon them.” We have no divine
protection in sin. Sin is a mask that
hides our identity from God, and
therefore we must abandon sin if we would
seek aid of God.
Christ’s method is to heal by
teaching. To restore a man’s
faculties without instructing him in the
divine use of those faculties is to harm
him more than to help him. Therefore heal
by teaching, and then men will know how
to use the gifts of God. The testimony of
“health laws” and
“coated tongue” flees before
the law of Spirit. Behold, God through
His ministering angels supplies all your
needs, whether these are for food or
fuel, material clothing, or spiritual
raiment. Do not try to direct Wisdom by
selecting channels through which to
receive aid. God has infinite resources
that you know not of, and He will not
leave you comfortless. Learn to look at
the Source and away from channels, [156]
for channels vary, but the Source which
is God is an open fount, and unfailing
supply.
Heaven is
not an elevation in space; it is harmony
understood, therefore it is a state of
consciousness and not a place of
residence. “And no man has ascended
up to Heaven but he that came down from
Heaven.” Tagore says: “In sin
man takes part with the finite against
the Infinite that is within him.”
In heaven he takes part with the Infinite
against the finite that is in him. When
the individual becomes sensible of the
fact that he is the visible manifestation
of God, and he assumes the
responsibilities of his divinity, he has
come nigh unto the kingdom which is the
consciousness of the indwelling Christ.
To realize that all things, not some
things, were made by God, would remove
from existence its manifold fears and
establish the kingdom of Heaven on earth,
wherein we would abide under the shadow
of the Almighty, and men would sit
together in heavenly places in Christ
Jesus.
Under the
lens of Spirit there is nothing but God.
Augustine has said: “From a good
man, or a good angel, take away man, and
you find God.” To love God with all
the heart, and one’s neighbor as
oneself, is more than all burnt offerings
and sacrifices. Love is the joy at the
root of all creation. To receive
God’s bounty and not share it with
our fellows, is to make of our souls a
sepulcher. “Whatsoever is, is in
God, and without God nothing can
be,” Spinoza [157] has said, and he
has added to this statement,
“Substance is that which is in
itself and is conceived through
itself.” Man is the substance of
God, and therefore man is Infinite and
Immortal. The finite senses testify of
things visible to partial truths. For
instance, a man at the equator is moving
through space with the revolution of the
earth on its axis at the rate of a
thousand miles an hour. According to the
senses he is at rest. It is true that the
man is at the equator, but it is not true
that he is at rest.
The Infinite
sense testifies of things invisible, the
things that are real and eternal. In the
story of Theseus, the beloved of Ariadne,
is found a striking illustration of the
office of love. When Theseus entered the
bewildering labyrinth out of which no
mortal had ever discovered his way,
Ariadne furnished him with a thread which
unwound as he went.
The finite
senses are the labyrinth. Love is the
slender clew by which we may find our way
back to our divine selfhood in God, no
matter how far we wander into the maze of
ignorance. Love is the invisible bond
which unites man to God. Prayer is
communion between the Creator and the
creature. Sincerity and not ceremony is
the first requirement for acceptable
prayer. Shakespeare has said that,
[158]
“Ceremony was but devised at
first,
To set a gloss on faint
deeds.”
Jesus
substituted sincerity for ceremony, and
his prayer raised the dead. Lives are the
only real test of honesty. A
funnel-shaped mentality, large in
expectation and small in dispensation, is
not a worthy receptacle for prayer. All
external manifestation is preceded by
internal imagination. Imagination
constructs and reconstructs, transforms
and exalts.
Prayer is
the magnet that attracts and converts
that which is mentally conceived into
visible being. Prayer has the power
without any agency external to itself to
efface false images, to destroy disease,
dissolve tumors, and to introduce into
the chamber of imagery ideas which emerge
in the form of the thing petitioned.
Consistency is the essential factor in
prayer. Prayer without preparation is
like faith without works. To pray for
health and prepare for sickness is in
favor of the latter. To pray for strength
while refusing to manifest that which we
have is absurd. What would be thought of
a man who would pray for sight and then
put on a pair of dark glasses to prevent
seeing? Yet we pray for prosperity while
preparing for poverty to the extent of
hoarding God’s abundance. We must
conform our acts to our prayers. If we
pray for peace, we must not prepare for
war. The thing you make ready for will be
the thing you will receive, for you
prepare for [159] that which you
expect to receive. Preparation,
not prayer, attests the proportion of
your faith.
The dividing
line between sickness and sin is that
sickness, unlike sin, is not popular, but
both are out of place in God’s
masterpiece,--Man! St. John headed the
list of vulgar crimes with
“Fear.” To be healed of this
subtle disease subtract your faith in
disease and add it to your faith in
health, and the result will be an
instantaneous cure. “What is
excellent as God lives is permanent.
Health is the real state of man, but fear
would shut his eyes to the real by
attracting his attention to the false,
and when our actions do not, our fears do
make us traitors” to the reality of
being; hence, “the fault is not in
our stars, but in ourselves, that we are
underlings.” [160-161] The silent
realization that God is all and that man
reflects the omnipotence of God would do
more to heal humanity than all the
tropical climates in the world. All
disease is mental; therefore, its cure is
independent of climate. We know that
Jesus never recommended a change of
climate, notwithstanding He healed what
is known as organic and functional
disease by simply removing [162] from the
mind of the patient the fear which had
superinduced these appearances. That was
the best method of healing known nineteen
hundred years ago. In the repetition of
history it has become the best and
highest method of this present time. It
is not what is, but what humanity
believes concerning existence that
causes joy or pain in the individual
breast. When the understanding of Truth
has overcome the belief in disease and
has cast out the demon of fear which has
mistakenly associated illness with death,
sickness will be unknown. The human
system is governed by God, not by
unintelligent torpidity.
Because
everything exists in the Mind of God as
an external idea, nothing can ever cease
to exist, but all things must, by nature
of their divinity, persist throughout
eternity. Nothing can ever be destroyed.
The luminosity of stars extinguished
millions of years ago still lingers in
the imponderable ether, and who knows the
hour that we may see this light and
mistake it for the birth of a new star!
“There is nothing new under the
sun,” for all that is, has always
existed as an idea in the Divine
Mind.
Fever is the
photograph of fear. To destroy fever and
reduce the circulation of the blood,
resort to Truth, not to inert drugs which
at best are tentative and never curative,
and are experiments always costly to
everybody but the doctor. Every man-made
law is nullified by the [163] law of God
and man cannot in reality suffer for
disobedience to a lesser law. Inhuman
codes have no part in the divine degree,
and we live and move and have our being
in the law of God. This is the assurance
of our physical exemption from sin,
disease, and death. Every discord that is
registered in matter is overcome by the
knowledge that God’s law is the law
of harmony, and that all mankind is under
His decree. Jesus rarely suffered from
the fatigues and exposures that attended
his human ministry. We never suffer from
transgressing moral codes in the
establishment of God’s law of Love.
Love, not disease, is contagious. We are
a law unto ourselves, “servants to
whom we yield ourselves to obey”;
therefore, resist evil by the knowledge
of Truth, and the God of peace will come
and make His abode with you.
It is well
known by the medical profession and
admitted by many physicians that medicine
“heals the hurt of people slightly,
if at all.” It is not so generally
known that the reason why medicine is so
ineffectual is that it is impossible to
apply remedies to the seat of disease,
which is mind. In the practice of
medicine, effects are dealt with instead
of the underlying cause of disease. The
idea of a thing is the thing itself;
therefore, all that constitutes sickness
is the individual and universal idea of
ill health, and drugs cannot remove this
idea. If the patient’s faith in
disease can be transferred to faith in
the medicine, a temporary benefit will be
the [164] result, but even in this case
mind, not medicine, produces the change.
In the cure of disease, but one thing is
essential, to efface the idea which
produced the illness. To forget a malady
is to be rid of it, as is proven in
instances where people who have been
confined to the bed for years, helplessly
and hopelessly invalided, who, when
awakened to find their room in flames,
with no time to debate whether or not
walking was possible, have walked and
have thereby healed themselves of
so-called incurable diseases. Also
somnambulists, who, from the effects of
accidents, have been unable to walk in
their waking hours, yet in a state of
somnambulism walked in places where it
would be difficult if not impossible for
persons of sound limbs to move safely
when awake. In sleep the mind moves
independently of the body, and the ego is
always accompanied by form.
Many years
ago, in a speech made by himself,
Kossuth, the governor of Hungary, said:
“At times when I was nailed to my
bed by sickness, news would come from the
army demanding all the strength of my
activity, and I would say to my
body--‘Be well,’ and it would
obey me.” This was not mere will
power; it was the act of faith that
“subdued kingdoms, wrought
righteousness, obtained promises, stopped
the mouths of lions, quenched the
violence of fire, escaped the edge of the
sword, out of weakness was made strong,
waxed valiant in fight, turned to [165]
flight the armies of the
aliens,”--the faith that is the
knowledge of God, the only power and
presence. Faith is prior to the intellect
and is not something which the individual
must get. It is the action of the mind
above the sense plane, a power with which
man came into being. What he needs is to
use it; to cut the cable of sense that
holds him to the earth and its illusions;
to rise like a spiritual bird-man into
the realm of divine ideas, where he will
realize that matter in all its
modifications, shapes, movements,
conditions, and qualities, whether in the
human body or the universal body, is but
the phenomena of existence, in which
there is no reality or true ideality
between the cradle and the grave. Edward
Carpenter speaks of material existence as
for the most part bombast, show and
illusion in the depths of which abysses
lurk either ephemeral passions and
transient pleasures that come to violent
ends, or corroding success interwoven
with internal disappointments and
perplexities.
Love, the
one element that has the power to redeem
existence from the tomb of selfishness,
has been put to flight by commercial
civilization and mistaken
churchianity. These two great
movements have stimulated, if not
developed, in human beings a concentrated
effort to increase their possessions at
the expense of their honor. Civilization
has dethroned Love. Churchianity, by
substituting creed for Christ and dogma
instead of the divine facts of being, has
[166] stripped Love of her royal robes
and has left her standing an unheeded
beggar in the universe of God.
Reason’s courts have become a
battlefield and her offspring murderers
of their brethren. Material existence is
what Jesus referred to when He
said:--“You are of your father the
devil, and the lusts of your father, ye
will do. He was a murderer from the
beginning, and abode not in truth because
there is no truth in him. When he
speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own;
for he is a liar and the father of
it.” “For all that is in the
world, the lust of the flesh and the lust
of the eyes, and the pride of life, is
not of the Father, but is of the world.
And the world passeth away and the lust
thereof, but he that doeth the will of
God abideth forever.”
My brethren,
with your aeroplane of Spirit fly to the
realm of the real, “that ye may
shine as lights in the world.”
The mission of creed seems to be to
discriminate between good and evil, to
draw the line that God has left
untraced!!! What does it matter if the
Divine is not human when it is so evident
that the human is Divine? Jesus, the
Man-God, proved the divinity of humanity
beyond cavil, and to separate divinity
from humanity is like trying to take the
“pigment from the painting, calling
the picture good and the material which
makes it, bad,” or to separate the
autumn from her Pompeian reds and flaming
yellows. Civilization without scientific
religion has descended to barbarism and
[167] massacre, while the chief guardian
of creed can only wring his jeweled
hands, while his priests pray for the
souls of the dead, and prepare their
flocks to slay each other by every
torturous device known to loveless
civilization’s bloody reign. Love
and love alone can heal the world’s
wounds, so pray, my friends, for Love,
the Love that will heal humanity and
raise the dead in ignorance to their
divine responsibilities as ambassadors of
Christ.
The mind
always governs the body, but the body
never affects the mind. As a lighted
candle is the manifestation of the
universal luminiferous principle of
light, so enlightened man is an
individual expression of the universal
life which is God. God is light, and man,
by letting his light shine, is showing to
humanity the goodness of God. The idea in
the mind of the patient that he is
better, is the first step towards
recovery and is often taken prior to any
visible change in the physical condition.
As has been beautifully said, it is the
John the Baptist of thought, appearing in
the wilderness of our disordered
conditions, announcing the approach of
the Kingdom of God within the mind. The
idea of health in the consciousness is
the forerunner bearing the torch with
which to relight the lamp of Spirit in
the tabernacle not made with hands. This
idea is the cause which, with divine
haste, introduces the image and likeness
of health into the body. As a sleeper may
be awakened by a whisper, just so the
inward force of Truth whispered [168]
into a receptive ear will awaken the
patient from the lethargy of existence to
the realization of Life as spiritual and
perfect. This is to “hear the heart
of silence throb with a soundless
word,”--the word of God. A patient
may be helped to the initial idea of
recovery through the influence of others,
hence the necessity for surrounding
invalids with spiritually enlightened
companions. In the case of the
centurion’s servant, Jesus healed
the man through the faith of the
centurion rather than through the faith
of the servant. So it is that the
individual mind, acting on a higher plane
of understanding, may be the channel of
transmission to the patient’s
consciousness of the incipient idea of
recovery. By the communication of a
thought, an impulse may be created in the
direction of health, and it is thus that
the better thought and more hopeful
atmosphere of another adds new fuel to
the smoldering embers of the
patient’s vital fire. “The
sick are healed by Spirit” much as
a withered plant is restored by
absorption of reviving moisture through
the air. To image the true idea of
perfection and hold it unwaveringly is
the method by which true disciples of
Christ heal the sick. To be sure,
“the dragon and his angels”
will fight to hold the prisoner of sense,
but they will not prevail, for right is
might. Emerson has said:--“There is
one mind common to all individual men.
Every man is an inlet to the same, and
[169] to all of the same. Who hath access
to this universal mind is a party to all
that is or can be done.”
This Mind
not only nourishes us, but our
mind may be a medium through which
healing may flow to the betterment of
others. The universal Mind annihilates
time and space, for the Spirit is always
everywhere present. To do good increases
our spiritual power, for all of the power
of God is at our command, to be called
into action on behalf of our Christly
desire to aid humanity. Jesus proved this
fact, and what has been done in any age
of the world can be done now. By the
power of the unspoken thought we can sow
in the consciousness of the sick the
living germ of health, for thoughts are
not “trifles light as air,”
but are the substance of divinely living
things. Many times the mental physician
has the consciousness that the patient
has received his message, in spite of the
fact that the senses of the patient do
not testify to his improved condition; in
such a case, if the practitioner will
persistently hold to his convictions, the
patient will surely be healed. Even Jesus
could not heal those who refused to be
healed, nor is there a system of
spiritual cure which will heal a man and
leave him to live as he lists. Certain
conditions are necessary to the healing
of the sick, whether mind or medicine be
the curative factor.
[170] Prayer
is the means by which divine cures are
wrought, but if the desire for health on
the part of the patient is separated from
his willingness to live righteously, he
is beyond the reach of the Christ cure,
at least spiritually. Every metaphysician
is obliged to admit that he can only
learn and successfully apply the Truth
according to the degree of his moral
attainments and spiritual
development.
Every one
can be taught the principle of spiritual
healing, but each individual must work
out the sums in life according to his own
application of the Truth. He must become
in himself the embodiment of the
principle of goodness. To say “I am
not sick,” is the truth in spite of
the fact that all the demons of sense may
rise up to deny the truth of your
affirmation. You are Spirit because you
are the substance of [171] the Mind which
is God. Sickness is no more a part of you
than the “mold on the plant is the
plant, or the barnacles on a ship are a
part of the ship.” Shape is no more
a part of Spirit than a stain on the
dress is a part of the gown. Spiritual
forces are the only real forces in the
universe. As we are above the animal
creation in the degree of our
intelligence, so there is a realm peopled
by spiritual beings who are, perhaps,
even more above ordinary humanity
spiritually than we are above the animals
intellectually. These are they who have
come out of great tribulation and have
“washed their robes white in the
blood of the lamb.” These are the
invisible helpers who have transcended
existence and have put off the garments
of shape in the dressing room of death
and donned the robes of form made pure by
the life of divine purity.
[172] This
is not spiritualism. It is simply a
reference to a truth resulting from
deductive reasoning. All that ever was,
must be. Not one idea has ever escaped
from the Divine Mind. Existence
presupposes life. All who have existed
now live, and “These are
They” who people the spiritual
realm of which existence is merely a
shadow. It is in this new heaven and new
earth that the inspired John saw
“the Holy City having the glory of
God, wherein nothing entered that
defileth or maketh a lie, the city of God
where there shall be no more death,
neither sorrow nor crying; neither shall
there be any more pain.”
In all
Europe there are few families which have
not supplied one or more “precious
stones” for the foundation of the
city of God in the last two years! But
the martyrs or war have transcended the
illusion of pain! Spirituality is not an
ecstatic state of the emotional nature;
instead it is an inner consciousness of
man’s unity with God. To be
spiritual does not require that we should
entomb ourselves in the solitude of the
mountains, nor within the barred
enclosure of a monastery, but it is
required that we emancipate the mind from
the fetters of sense so that we may be in
the world and not be of it. To consecrate
one’s life to the service of [173]
humanity is the duty of the true Apostle
of Christ.
The ecstatic
visions of the neophyte supported only by
varying emotions lacking the balance of
Spirit are rather more the evidence of
hysteria, for the emotions are like a
balloon that is in constant danger of
collapsing. The Spirit instead is the
foundation whose maker and builder is
God, the house built on a rock which is
impervious to the earthquakes and
tempests of sense. Says one,
“Matter exists in Mind after the
same manner that body exists in place or
that Mind is the place of the body; in
that it is not capable of existing in any
other place.” It is thus that that
which we term matter is nothing more nor
less than an infinite number of qualities
that have no existence apart from the
minds that conceive them.
Physical
existence is a mere phantasmagoria of
fiction of the imagination which our
finite minds mistake for reality. Verily
we live in a world where nothing is that
seems, and all things are of which our
puny sense take no cognizance. To know
this fact is to know the Truth that will
make us free from the domination of sense
illusions. Matter has no existence apart
from Thought, and it only exists there,
while Thought is acting on the sense
plane which is the lowest plane of
action,--the earthworm state. We must
apprehend Truth theoretically before we
are ready to climb its celestial
heights.
Because all
matter exists in mind, it follows [174]
that every mental change produces a
material mutation. This is an invariable
law, for matter is a deceptive appearance
that changes with our ever-varying mental
states. We build our world much as the
spider builds his home, out of ourselves.
The world and our body both are to us
what we believe them to be, and,
therefore, the mental image of health may
be projected by concentration into terms
of physical health and strength. All
manifestation is the projection of mental
images. This fact is as old as the
“ancient of days.”
The first
account of the rise of the science of
mental imaging is given in Genesis. The
grandson of Abraham had been badly used
by his father-in-law, who had defrauded
Jacob in all ways. In the course of time
these two men arrived at a financial
settlement. Laban gave his son-in-law the
spotted and speckled cattle, the brown
sheep, and speckled goats among his
flock, in payment for Jacob’s
services. The payment was not in
proportion to the labor received, but
Jacob was fully aware that, in his
dealings with his father-in-law, he had
always suffered a severe loss, and this
was no exception to the rule. However,
Jacob took the flocks and herds, and
continued to water and feed the rest of
Laban’s flocks which were separated
by three days’ journey from his
herds. Now Jacob understood the science
of mental imagery, so he went to the
woods and collected the shoots of the
silver poplars, hazel, and chestnut
trees. He peeled the bark from the
poplars, [175] making the white wood to
appear in rings. Then he cut the bark on
the other shoots so that a number of
colors appeared between the original
green of the bark, some of which he left
untouched. Next he set these miniature
trees in the canals where he drove his
father’s flock to drink. In the
Latin Bible we read, “ante oculos
haberent virgas et in aspectu earum
conciperent,” which, being
translated, reads that the animals
“had before their eyes these poles,
and they conceived contemplating”
these vari-colored shoots. In Genesis we
are told that all the increase among the
herds were “speckled and
spotted,” and consequently Jacob
added these to his herds and flocks! In
commenting on this incident ancient
writers say that “it happened
naturally through the force of
imagination,” but it remained for
the Christ to reduce the principle of
mental imaging to a science which all the
world could learn and apply in healing
sickness and sin.
The Blood of
the Lamb signifies the living truths of
the Spirit by which we may cleanse our
minds from sin and sickness. To save a
man’s body from the pangs of
disease without trying to save his soul
from the ravages of sin would be like
rushing into a burning house to rescue a
sleeper and to emerge with his clothes,
leaving the sleeper to fate. All that is,
is within you; there is nothing without.
In the divine order Spirit, not matter,
rules. “The laborer is worthy of
his hire,” and “if he has
sown unto you [176] spirited things,
is it a great thing if you should
reap his carnal things?” (I Cor.
9:11) To use the gift of God for personal
ends or self-agrandizement is to part
company with the Christ truth. To attempt
to sell the gift of God is a mistake
fatal to the demonstration of Truth. We
believe, with Plato, that the wings of
the soul were not given to us that we
might use them to wade in the mud.
Spiritual
truths are too costly to warrant placing
them in the world’s mart, therefore
to employ our spiritual powers to make
money for self-gain is a total perversion
of the Christ Law. It is the divine right
of the man who has given up all to follow
Christ, to receive such material
compensation as will enable him to live
and to minister to the physical as well
as the spiritual needs of humanity, but
even such a one has no need to lay up
treasures, “where moth and rust
doth corrupt, and where thieves break
through and steal.” Circulation,
not congestion, is the law of Spirit!
Next: The
Purifying Fire
* * * * *
Previous
Section
* * * * *
The Astor Lectures
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
