THE PRACTICE OF IDEALISM
W. John Murray
The Astor
Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.
[251] In the
science of numbers the numeral "nine" is
not derived from the figure "one."
Instead the value of the numeral is
derived from the multiplication of the
value of the unit. Man is not evolved
from an ape; he is rather the highest
effect produced from God's multiplication
of the unit of Life. Man is, therefore,
the highest manifestation of Spirit, the
idea of God.
He is God's
representative and it is to him that his
heavenly Father will give a "white stone,
and in the stone a new name written which
no man knoweth saving he that receiveth
it." In ancient times white stones were
given to those who won in the public
plays, as an emblem of victory. Man,
then, who soars above the phenomenon of
sense, and dwells in the secret place of
the Most High, or the understanding of
God, as the only Reality, will receive
the emblem of victory with the name of
the "Son of God" written therein. And
only he who has received this name can
know its value, worth, and nobility. Only
such as are worthy to receive it are
capable of realizing the richness and
glory of the inheritance of Spirit.
Beloved,
"now are ye the sons of God," and
therefore heirs to the kingdom of heaven,
but [252] it is your obligation to prove
your sonship in order that you may
receive your inheritance. You are a
heavenly pilot. You must mount on the
wings of Spirit and soar to your
birthplace in God; commence today to
prove your divinity by preaching the
gospel and healing the sick.
The aviator
knows that it is not by watching the
swallow's heavenly course that he can
filch the art of her graceful flight
through the ether; full well he knows
that to fly like the swallow he must
imitate her soul. It is even so with the
idealist. It is not by imitation of rites
and ceremonies, but by imaging the
ideal that he arrives at perfection.
His ability
to heal the sick and comfort the
sorrowing indicates the height that he
has attained in his upward flight. To
heal the sick by spiritual means, it is
necessary for the metaphysician to
mentally lift the patient above the
physical morass into which he or she has
fallen. Realize that all action is
spiritual, perfect and painless, because
God is the only Actor. Know that the life
pulsating through your patient emanates
from God, is a manifestation of God. Hold
the idea of perfection for the patient
until it crystalizes into the form of a
new creature. If the case to be treated
is that of an infant, commence your
mental realization by knowing that the
parents of the child are merely the
channels through which God's Fatherhood
and Motherhood are expressed. This
realization establishes the only
inheritance as spiritual and perfect.
[253] Also it destroys the fear that
springs from a human sense of parentage,
the adhesive quality which fastens
disease on the individual. Children are
very receptive to the Truth, because
their minds are not filled with material
suppositions concerning health laws. A
child accepts as facts, statements of
Truth, regardless of the testimony of the
senses. Children see God in everything,
and their little hearts never hold a
grudge. Because of this, it is not
necessary to empty the child's mind
before filling it with the Truth; this is
an untold advantage in treating the
little ones. The mind is God's workshop.
It is the place where divine images are
wrought, and the body as certainly
reproduces these ideas, in the form of
the thing imaged, as a mirror reflects
whatever is placed in front of it. The
mind is the place of conception, but
birth takes place in the body. Make your
perfect image, and the force of mind will
project this image into the consciousness
from whence it will find expression in
the so-called physical.
Children are
born mystics. They live in a make-believe
world and associate with make-believe
friends. They see angels in the wild
flowers and hear God whisper in the night
winds. And they know that it is a
make-believe world. Adults, unlike
children, live in a world of their own
making but believe that it is a real
world, and therefore the grown-up must
become as a little child in order to
apprehend the truths of Spirit. To
illustrate mental treatment, let us [254]
begin at the first step which is to rid
your own mind of fear and
responsibility.
It is God
that gives the increase; therefore, the
responsibility, if there is any, rests on
the divine shoulders. Your single duty is
to see the Truth and nothing else. If you
see anything else it is a sure sign that
you are not seeing the Truth. Assure your
patient mentally that God has not given
him the spirit of fear, but of power and
a sound mind. Close your eyes to the
evidence of the senses and open them to
the Truth of Being. Let us suppose that
the case to be treated is a fibrous
tumor. Subtract in your mind the
things that God made from the
appearances which he did not make.
Thus you arrive at an image of
perfection. Now surround this image by
declarations of Truth. God is the author
of symmetry. This knowledge precludes the
possibility of deformity as a reality.
Image the patient as filled with the Holy
Ghost, which is the All of Spirit. This
realization excludes the presence of
matter. Rest on this declaration; it is
the sublime Truth of creation and will
bring into manifestation the divine
reality of inimitable and eternal
symmetry.
Sense never
made a tumor that will not vanish before
the realization of the presence of the
Holy Ghost. If you persist in this silent
realization of the Divine Presence, your
spiritual light will dissolve the very
appearance of the tumor, which is all
there is or ever will be of deformity.
Every case can be met by the same
understanding, namely, the indwelling
[255] presence of the all of Divinity. In
this consciousness is included the idea
or image which is the divine cause, the
effect of which is perfect form and the
consequence of which is the complete
expression of harmony in the so-called
physical realm. The Trinity is the same
throughout nature. It is always the
three-in-one God, Principle of Being,
Idea, best illustrated by the Christ, and
Expression, or the visible manifestation
of the all of Divinity (God the Father,
God the Son, God the All or Whole of
Spirit), in the Man-God Christ Jesus. All
that exists, from the greatest to the
least of created things, represents a
trinity in unity. Man is God's trinity,
therefore man is Spirit in manifestation.
God is not man, but man in his essence is
God. The oak is not the acorn, but the
acorn is the oak in embryo, the
developing of which results in the mighty
tree. So man, by the development of his
innate divinity, arrives at
Godliness.
This does
not minimize God, but it does increase
Man to the stature of Christ Jesus and
makes it possible for us to come to the
knowledge of the Son of God unto a
perfect measure of the stature of the
fullness of Christ. The unity of God
demands a facsimile in all that which
precedes Divinity. If Jesus were endowed
by God above his fellows, it would be
unfair to expect them to arrive at the
measure of the fullness of Christ, and,
more than that, it would be asking the
impossible.
The birth of
Jesus was an incident in the flesh [256]
which in nowise affected his conception
as an Idea of God. Motherhood in its
divinity is next to Godhood. All
conception is immaculate. It is the
immaculate conception of the omnipotence
of God, as opposed to the belief in the
testimony of the sense, that heals
discord and restores harmony in the realm
of the physical. Mary, the Mother of
Jesus, was chosen to be the channel
through which the idea of God should
crystallize and come into manifestation
in the form of man. Naturally this woman
ascended to the plane of thought where
she could separate the occasion of
begetting from the cause of being. This
was the immaculate conception, and the
question of parentage does not enter into
it. Jesus was conceived by God. You are
conceived likewise. Human parentage was
the channel through which the "son of the
carpenter" made his advent among men, and
this has not detracted from the divine
Cause of which his life was the
beneficent effect; this is likewise true
of the birth of every man. If birth is
produced by cell division, it is an
immaculate conception; if, on the other
hand, it is the result of the fusion of
other elements, it is nevertheless an
Immaculate Conception. We have limited
Universal Truth to an individual
exception and mistaken the occasion of
begetting for the Cause of Being. The
life of Jesus was so thoroughly
one with the life of God that the
line of demarcation between the Man and
the God has never been successfully
drawn. If there is such a thing as
physical regeneration, it has been [257]
preceded by spiritual causation, and
therein lies the brotherhood of man and
the fatherhood of God.
Jesus knew
this verity of being, and, therefore, he
always referred to God as "your
Father and my Father," and by his
works, he proved that God makes no
divisions, and that we are all One in
Christ Jesus. The Mother of Jesus loved
much, and her immaculate conception of
the Son of God was an image that never
grew dim; because of this she will ever
remain an example of perfected
Motherhood.
Wants bear
no relation to need; the latter God will
supply. Mind is never sick, and the body
is only in subjection to Mind. Whatever
exists in the mind will produce its
effect on the physical, to the extent
that the object under the calcium light
takes on the color thrown upon it. The
Greeks understood this law and adopted
it. The result was a noble race. We would
do well in this respect to pattern after
the older nation. Drugs have no part in
metaphysical healing. To teach the
patient to subtract his faith from
remedies and place it to the account of
his faith in Spirit will accelerate his
restoration to health.
"Antidotes
are poison," and others besides
Shakespeare knew this verity. Confidence
in medicine is not engendered by
physicians; it is due rather to the
methods of the drugging system. To such
as believe in the efficacy of surgery, an
operation is generally an effective but
undoubtedly a painful cure. To turn to
the [258] Great Physician, in the first
place, would save retracing toilsome
steps. "The light of the body is the eye;
therefore, when the eye is single, thy
whole body also is full of light, but
when thy eye is defective (evil) thy body
also is full of darkness." In this verse
the eye represents the intention.
Therefore, if your intention is directed
to spiritual things, spiritual
attainments will crown your efforts. But
if your design is imperfect, the body
will register the defect. If you have
everything in one hand, you have nothing
in the other.
So with
faith: the more we have in God the less
we have in matter, and the quality of the
healing depends upon the faith of the
patient. Often-times a patient,
apparently at death's door, will respond
instantly to metaphysical treatment,
while another who is slightly indisposed
will require a much longer time in which
to yield to the truth. The reason for
this is very readily explained. Before a
patient reaches death's door, he has
generally exhausted his faith in drugs.
Therefore, while he may have no conscious
faith in metaphysics, he certainly has
none in physics. Such a condition of mind
is more adaptable to Truth than one
vacillating between an ounce of faith in
God and a pound of confidence in an
untried remedy. When we come to have all
our faith in Spirit, discord will be
unknown.
A lady
writes, "The Bible teaches that there is
only one substance. Foods, drugs and what
are called medicine can be reduced to
their [259] original chemical
constituents and so to the one substance.
I believe that this is true. Therefore I
see no more inconsistency in taking one
than the other. Am I not correct?"
The patient
is right that there is only one
substance. God is substance, and God is
all; all that is visible is a shadow of
the one, invisible substance. If the
patient believes this fact, there is no
more inconsistency in taking one more
than the other, and consequently she will
not change her diet by adding medicine in
case of sickness, nor will she hesitate
to substitute aconite for the usual
demi-tasse. To change a diet indicates
the fact that certain qualities are
attributed to one thing that are not
attributed to another. That which is one
in substance is one in essence. Such men
as have believed in one universal
substance have upheld their theory by
their practice. For example Paul believed
in one elementary substance, God. One
cold rainy day the Apostle was kindling a
fire on the Island of Melita, and as he
gathered a bundle of sticks and laid them
on the fire, there came a viper out of
the heat, and fastened on his hand; he
shook off the beast into the fire, and
felt no harm, when he should have swollen
or fallen down dead straightway. Paul
believed in good to the exclusion of
error. He was not swinging like a
pendulum between a belief in a power for
good and an opposite power for evil; he
practices when he was ill that which he
preached when he was well. Paul had his
mental pendulum caught so firmly in the
mesh [260] of the Spirit that it never
swung back to a belief in materiality.
That is why he raised the dead. When we
have risen to the knowledge of God as the
only substance we shall cease to theorize
and follow the example of the great
martyr Paul. The basis of our universal
substance was the foundation upon which
Jesus built his spiritual healing. The
Nazarene discovered the unity of all
things and the unit in God. The Master
taught that everything about us--trees,
houses, men, etc.--are but different
manifestations of one elementary
substance, and he understood what it is
that causes these manifestations or atoms
to combine with the same regularity of
difference, in order to transmute or
change wood into iron, iron into flesh,
or stones into bread. He was the Master
Alchemist and understood the hitherto
hidden law of the transmutation of
substance. Jesus recognized in Spirit the
uniting force, triumphing in Nature, in
the laws of gravitation, molecular
cohesion, and chemical affinity; in other
words, the force which, through natural
attraction, draws together two chemicals
uniting to form a third, in which are
included the vital qualities of the two.
[Frost, Philosophy of
Integration.] John, the mystic, saw
in Jesus the Word made Flesh or the Human
transmuted into the Divine. By the
application of the law of transmutation
of substance, Jesus raised the dead,
restored carious bones to their original
soundness, and healed the sick, but [261]
all his designs were wrought in the
chamber of imagery before they took form
in the flesh.
We must
enter into the same chamber to do our
designing, and in proportion to the
clearness of our spiritual vision, we
will heal the sick and follow the example
of the Great Teacher. To the man who is
conscious of his unity with God
deprivation is unknown. Such a one
instantly transmutes so-called calamity
into opportunity. He converts his
afflictions into stepping stones by which
he ascends from the miasma of dejection
into the realm of the real.
Suppression
must not be mistaken for demonstration.
To keep back that which wants to make its
appearance is repression and is a
temporary effort, whereas to
demonstrate over it is to prove
specifically the non-existence of such
states of false feeling as do not need
expression. Crucifying the poor
flesh will never resurrect the mind, but
the elevation of the mind above the plane
of the senses will raise the body from
its dungeon of pain. The mind of man is
his ego; the "I" to which Jesus referred
when he said, "If I be lifted up from the
earth (the plane of sense) I will draw
all men unto me." [From the Latin
translation of the text.] The elevation
of the mind above the plane of sense is
the true elevation of the Host! It is a
mental exaltation and not a
material elevation.
It is easier
to prevent disease than it is to overcome
it, but the mental realization that
Spirit governs and harmoniously controls
all the functions [262] of every organ in
the body, will replace chaos with
harmony. In the presence of seeming
discord, hold continually in mind the
facts of Being, namely, the omnipresence
and omnipotence of God. To abide in this
consciousness is to image in the physical
the harmony of your realization.
Cleanliness is essential to decency, but
guard against keeping only the outside of
the platter clean. Daily ablutions are
both refreshing and invigorating, and as
you partake of them, realize that as your
body is submerged in water, even so your
mind and soul are overflowed by Spirit.
Make every act of your life a prayer, and
"whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to
the Lord, and not unto men."
Never look
for symptoms. Nothing emboldens sickness
so much as sympathy. Meet every adverse
condition as the dominator of that
condition. Never make terms with error.
It is a shadow which you can always
dispel by facing the sun of
righteousness. The Verities of Being are
health and wholeness, and it is man's
divine right to be happy, although it is
not the right of one of God's children to
purchase happiness at the expense of
another's suffering. If a thing is right
and proper for one, it is lawful and just
for all, and there is, perhaps, no better
illustration in the history of the fact
that what affects one member of the human
family, affects the entire race, than the
tragic history of Adam's bite of apple
which has flavored the spiritual repast
of all Christians since the beginning of
[263] the world. Inflammation cannot
resist the cooling vapor that arises from
the realization that the waters of life
are flowing and reflowing through every
fiber of your being, refreshing and
invigorating the most minute particles of
your earthly tabernacle.
Fix in the
mind of your patient that Man is the
image and likeness of God, and therefore
is immune from discord, and bear in mind
that every statement of Truth is made in
the present tense of the indicative mood.
In the grammar of Spirit the present
tense is the only one in vogue. There is
no "shall be" or "should be;" it is
always "I am" and "they
are," now spiritual and perfect.
Opiates
relieve pain temporarily, but they never
remove it from its habitation in the
mind. Truth on the contrary dispels
discord without leaving any after
effects; therefore, Truth is the only
scientific remedy for sickness or sin. It
is not what is, but what mankind
believes to be, that affects the
human race for weal or woe. Messages from
the zone of war announcing the death of
certain soldiers have caused their
mothers to die of grief, whereas, the
news being erroneous, the sons were
really alive and well. On this principle
in the proportion that humanity comes to
believe in the eternal Truth of Life,
namely, the Allness of God, all will be
well with the world, for "God is in His
heaven and on earth there is none beside
Him."
To efface
error by arguing with it or denying it is
like trying to "pin down a shadow in
order to [264] take its measure." Affirm
the Truth and error will disappear as
darkness flees before dawn. Let the
patient do most of the talking. You have
enough to do to affirm the Truth. Enter a
sick room cheerfully, but reverently. You
are there to meet God. The sick do not
understand the language of Spirit and you
are come to translate God's Truth in the
form of spiritual healing, and the
patient's recovery largely depends on the
correctness of your translation. Healing
the sick is a sacred responsibility and
one that requires constant
self-immolation and consecration.
Whatever dependence is placed in
materiality is misplaced. It was the
radical reliance that Jesus placed in
Spirit which enabled him to do his mighty
works. To pattern after the Master it is
absolutely necessary to follow the
spiritual design. In no other way can we
attain to the realm of Spirituality which
is the dwelling place of Christ.
In the drama
of existence we can assume the
character of health and wholeness, and
thus become the part we play. The body is
passive and inert clay in the hands of a
noble Potter. To realize this we have to
rend the veil of illusion with the sword
of Spirit, in order that our spiritual
perception may grasp the beauty of
holiness, and in this way remove the
bandage of sense which blinds our mental
vision. Man's lack of faith in his own
God-given dominion and power has made him
go outside of himself in search of the
help that can only be found in the
overflowing [265] storeroom of his own
soul. This is the sin for which we must
atone by forsaking the error of material
dependence. Every feather-weight of
dependence that we place on persons or
things lessens our reliance in God and
weakens our spiritual powers.
We are
spiritually great in the proportion that
we are able to stand alone, and the time
comes when we must stand alone. It
is a terrible position in which to be
placed, but it is the travail which
precedes radical reliance upon God.
When the
child is weaned, it suffers an agony of
despair, it is inconsolable; but unless
it is taken from the maternal fount, it
will not receive the nourishment which is
essential to its larger development. The
same is true of the grown child, the man,
who rarely thinks about cultivation of
his inner, his soul self, until he is cut
off from his material reservoir. Perhaps
it is family ties; it may be friends or
fortune; whatever it is, if it stands in
the way of his spiritual progression it
will be removed. Then will man come face
to face with the wealth of his own soul
and have free access to spiritual
treasures.
God is man's
only dependence. Everything else is in
subjection to his divinity. A person's
sensitiveness is a weapon in the hands of
the unscrupulous; therefore, transmute
sensitiveness to common sense, and
thereby cease to be the prey of low
minds. Life is a sum which we are here to
work out with individuals instead of
[266] numerals. We must liken the
crucifying things in Life's sum to the
zero which is valuable or worthless
according to the relation it bears to the
unit. If sorrow drives you into a closer
relation with the Infinite, it is a
positive quality. If instead it hardens
your heart and makes you bitter, it is
negative and injurious. Adjust the zero,
otherwise you will be required to work
out the same problem with a new
combination of figures. God never accepts
work that is poorly done. Sorrow has its
purpose; it is to turn us from sense to
soul. In the exact proportion that we put
off dependence on personality, we put on
spiritual independence. To part with
sense is to meet God, and it has been
well said, "Life without God is shorn of
its glory and divested of its
meaning."
All physical
derangement is occasioned by mental
inharmony. Mind, not matter, acts;
therefore, to produce physical harmony it
is necessary to adjust the mind. This can
be done only by changing the thought. If
envy, malice, or hate has found lodgment
in the mind, it is necessary to eject
these shadows and substitute love in
their stead. If it is sorrow that has
barred the windows, pull down the bars by
ministering to another's stony grief and
thereby forgetting your own. Ministry
holds the key to forgetfulness. And only
through divine ministry to the needs of
others can we transmute morbid sentiment
into healthy sorrow. Sorrow has its place
in the economy of existence, and a great
sorrow will [267] obliterate a world of
false sentimentalism which forbids
progression, the watchword of Spirit.
Death is the
necessary outlet of existence into Life.
To weep for the so-called dead is to envy
God his guests. Jesus was the greatest
humanitarian that ever lived, and yet in
the early dawn when the sorrow-driven
women arrived at his sepulcher his first
words were a rebuke--"Why seek ye the
living among the dead?" There are no
dead. Life is the great fact of
Being. By death we pass from temporal
existence into life eternal. For death is
the climax of existence. All that appears
to the senses is ephemeral and fleeting
and it vanishes. But that which does not
appear, the spiritual and unseen, is the
only reality, "so that things which are
seen are not made of things that do
appear."
The material
is the unreal and spectral, the
phenomenon of which death is the total
eclipse. It is not the blotting out of
individuality; instead it is the
vanishing of personality which, like a
curtain, hides divine character.
Existence is
the dream stage of eternal life, and our
present joys or sorrows are only the
reality of fleeting visions which seem
true while the vision lasts. The body is
the tomb of the soul. Death rolls away
the stone from the door of the sepulcher.
Instantly the soul is awakened and
commences to soar above the realm of
appearances.
When an
adult "crosses the bar," we suffer for
our loss, but we console ourselves by
thinking [268] of him as at least able to
supply his needs on the new plane of
consciousness, even as he did on this
plane. But when a little one, of all
created things most helpless, sails out
to sea, we imagine the wee personality
"there" as we knew it "here." We forget
that in death's dismantling storm,
material personality has been transmuted
to divine individuality, and we suffer
for our forgetfulness.
We are
weighed down by ignorance, and, instead
of ascending the mountains of Spiritual
Enlightenment in this great crisis of
life, that we might see the soul's flight
with our inner vision, we sit in the
Valley of Despair, wrapped in gloom, our
eyes filled with tears, as we wonder who
is caring for our baby now, or who is
feeding him; and these vain questions
dispel the light and leave the sun to
mock our ignorance. In reality death has
changed shape to form much
as a vision changes play of forces.
Neither are there any dead. Instead there
are liberated souls, beings who have
transcended the thraldom of matter, and
who, having awakened from the dream of
life in matter to the larger vision of
life, come and go at will, with no sense
of birth or death. These phenomena are
the entrance and exit to and from the
earth plane, the entering into a dream
and the awakening from it, as it were.
Birth and death are sense appearances,
and neither is seen in its true
character. Birth necessitates
death; to die necessitates being born. In
the kingdom of heaven, or the realm of
the [269] real, birth and death are
unknown. What appears as the birth of a
child is in reality the coming of an
invisible helper. The infant shape is the
mask which is worn to enable the angel to
enter into the innermost recesses of
misshapen hearts and recast them in the
melting pot of unselfish love.
What appears
to us as growth in the child is really
expansion in our own souls. How else do
we account for the coming of what we term
unusual children? They come and stay
until love has illumined the life of the
parents, and then they "fold their tents
and silently steal away," and with their
going, the parents' love is, in the
furnace of affliction, turned from an
individual to a universal application. It
is thus that through the love for one
child the motherhood and fatherhood of
God is extended to all needy
children.
Life is a
circle, that has neither beginning nor
end. What appears to us as birth is a
form of God in the shape of a child, and
as we awaken from existence to a fuller
consciousness of life, we shall see that
death absolves existence, and
angels bear us up from shadow into the
substance of God. It is thus that we see
"Nature's tears" to be "Reason's
merriment."
In the
Transfiguration, when Jesus took his
three disciples "up into an high mountain
apart by themselves," and showed them
that transformation was wrought by the
renewing of the mind, the Master laid
down shape and put on form
and was transfigured before his students.
[270] In the spiritual illumination that
followed Jesus' ascent upon the spiritual
plane of consciousness, space was
eliminated, and he saw and talked with
Moses and Elias. The patriarchs
had transcended matter through Spirit's
agent, so called death,--Jesus, through
understanding; but the equality of
their spiritual status enabled them to
meet and recognize each other, although
planets rolled between them. This is
sufficient proof to the spiritually
awakened that inequality of mental
conditions is the only barrier between
the so-called dead and the so-called
living. When we reach the fullness of
manhood and womanhood, we shall know and
shall be known by our own.
The little
children, with their unfathomable wisdom,
their absolute freedom from fear, and
their untarnished, unquestioning faith,
bring into the world an inheritance which
their earthly parentage never bestowed
upon them. In the drama of dreams they
play the role of the good angels who are
ever turning the adult mind in the
direction of its Maker. When this is
accomplished, may not some of these
"little ones" doff their masks in the
vestibule of death and assume a new role
in the theater of another's existence?
Who may say that the Isaiah of the old
dispensation was not discernible in the
Jesus of the new? Be that as it may,
"The lives of the two men were gentle
and the elements
So mixed in them that
Nature might stand up
And say to all the world,--these were
men."
[271] And
men are the shadows of God which, by the
alchemy of Spirit, become the
substance of Spirit. It is always
"darkest before the dawn," and it is not
infrequent, under metaphysical treatment,
to find that the greatest physical
disturbance precedes the cessation of all
physical discord.
The line can
never be drawn between cases that should
be metaphysically treated and those that
should be treated by material means.
There are no degrees of error,--and Truth
is as potent to destroy one phase of
discord as another. If the patient has
enough faith, and the practitioner has
sufficient understanding of the Christ
truth, a bone can be set by the Divine
Mind as readily as a case of scrofula can
be healed. Nothing is impossible to God.
Jesus never drew the line between one
discord and another. He effaced all
discord by the realization of the eternal
presence of harmony. Only when people
refused to believe was his power denied
them.
Truth never
fails. The limitation is in our
understanding of Divine principle. All
love resembles what it loves. If we love
the Truth we will become daily more
truthful in our representation of the
ideal, and in the exact proportion that
we put off the false we put on the true,
and as we put off the corruptible we put
on the incorruptible. It is thus that
mortality is submerged [272] in
immortality. Love is the life of the
universe; it is the living reality of
existence, and God is the only perfect
setting that will ever be found for the
jewel of Love. Man's love for God is
measured by his service for humanity. In
matter we find unceasing conflicts; in
Spirit we find rest unto our souls.
From the
wilderness of pain comes the cry--"What
is the difference between a belief
in the thing, and the thing itself, when
the pain is the same?" Explain to the
sufferer that the pain--like a
counterfeit coin--is only the same in
appearance. The person who knows the
unreality of discord, although he may not
yet have dissipated its shadow, is in the
position of one who, although sentenced
for the commission of a crime, has the
indwelling consciousness of his
innocence, and the conviction that he
will be able to establish his freedom
from guilt. The consolation of innocence
supplies the endurance necessary to the
establishment of
innocuousness.
Shakespeare
has said,--
"There are greater storms and
Tempests than almanacs can report."
These are
the struggles that go on between
spiritual knowledge and material
sensation, but it is legitimate warfare
and always results in the splendid
triumph of Spirit. Error is
nothing wearing the mask of
something. In the perpetuation of
sin a partnership is generally formed,
[273] but when the firm fails, as it
always does, the partners are doomed to
pay their debts, alone and without aid.
It is thus that "the sins we do, two by
two, we pay for one by one!"
The space is
so infinitesimal between the place where
virtue ends and where vice begins that
not even Deity has sought to draw a
separation line. In the matter of sinning
Jesus seems only to have considered the
sinner's motives; hence he always forgave
the sinner. The Master realized that,
"Virtue itself turns vice, being
misapplied,
And vice sometimes by action
dignified."
Two spies
were sent by Joshua to Jericho. They
lodged in the house of a sinner. People
gossiped, and the King sent to Rahab, the
sinner, ordering that she deliver the men
to justice. Rahab hid the men among the
stalks of flax which she had laid in
order upon the roof. When the King's men
came to take the spies, Rahab said:
"There came men unto me, but I wist not
whence they were: and it came to pass
about the time of the shutting of the
gate, when it was dark, that the men
went out; whither--I wot not."
This
happened fourteen hundred and fifty-two
years before Jesus. In commenting on the
incident, the brother of Jesus speaks of
this splendid Magdalen as "justified" by
her lovely compassion, in spite of her
negative vice. Likewise [274] Jesus
pardoned the sorrowful Mary who chose the
garish way, because she mistook it for
happiness.
Many are the
lights that have been thrown upon sin in
order that men might see its
non-existence, but the clearest light has
been given by the Great Star in the East
who has said, "Sin is siding with the
finite against the Infinite in us."
[Tagore-Sadhana.] Sin, then, is insanity;
as such it should be regarded, and as
such healed by the Christ-Truth.
In the
rediscovery of the application of Thought
to the cure of disease in the century
just past, some material alchemists have
sought to confuse the power of the Spirit
with the noxious weeds of erroneous
application. This pernicious practice
gave rise, in the minds of the credulous,
to a belief in the potency of the power
of spurious thinking. Fortunately this
heresy has been overthrown by the
knowledge that the purity of Truth is
such that it is not subject to
perversion. As well try to obscure the
sun with darkness as to pervert the
divine power of thinking misapplication.
Therefore the only evil thought we have
to guard against is our own. No one has
power to hurt us but ourselves, and even
our power in that direction is limited,
for we cannot "rough-hew" a shape that,
in the end, is not reformed in the mold
of Spirit by "divinity." This is not one
of the least of the pearls of thought
which we owe to an immortal poet.
[275] To
think right is to be in tune with Deity,
to be at one with God. To think right is
to take part in the mystical union
between the human and the Divine. This is
spiritual communion, the substance of
which is seen in the healing of the sick
and the unmasking of sin, which reveals
the Son of God. The wine we drink is the
wine of the Spirit of Truth that sustains
us unto the end of the illusion which has
become the habitation, not the dwelling
place, of evil, and the hold of every
foul mind, and a place of every unclean
and hateful thought. "Come out of her, my
people. Your substance is in God."
Next:
Existence
and Personality
* * * * *
The Astor Lectures
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
