THE ANTIQUITY OF NEW THOUGHT
W. John Murray
The Astor
Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.
So Abraham prayed to God, and God
healed Abimelech, and his wife, and his
maid servants.
-- Gen. 20:17.
[29] At a
time when so-called New Thought is on
trial, it is especially comforting to
know that in reality there is no New
Thought. Thus it is, that the words of
the text appear with a special
significance at this time. The Wise Man
of old said, “The thing that hath
been, it is the thing that shall be; and
that which is done is the thing which
shall be done, and there is no new thing
under the sun. Is there anything whereof
it may be said, See, this is new? It hath
been already of old time, which was
before us.”
In its most
spiritual aspect, New Thought is not a
modern invention. Neither is it a
discovery, as some people would have us
believe. It is the uncovering of a Truth
that is as old as the ancient of days. It
is the scientific application of a force,
which is not only instructive, but which
is inherent in every human soul. This is
the force of Prayer. Four thousand years
ago when afflication came upon the house
of Abimelech the King, Abraham prayed
unto God, and Abimelech and his entire
household were healed. [30] Moses healed
his sister Miriam of that dread disease,
leprosy, by the power of prayer. By this
same power did Elijah and Elisha both
heal the sick and raise the dead. From
those ancient times down to the day of
the Great Nativity, there is no reason to
believe that the prayers of the faithful
remained unanswered.
So far as
Biblical History informs us, the first
great New Thought came to human
consciousness when Abraham conceived the
idea of the oneness of all things, or the
unity of Causation. The Talmud tells us
that his father was a manufacturer of
pagan deities. Abraham was a man much
given to meditation, and after much
thinking he came to the conclusion that
“gods many,” or plurality of
Causes was inconsistent with pure reason,
or, as we call it today, “exact
science.” He knew that for Cause to
be Cause at all, it must be One,
otherwise it is a “house divided
against itself.” To the people of
that time, who had been taught to believe
in gods of war, gods of harvest, gods of
love, and all sorts of gods, this was
indeed a New Thought. This was such a
radical departure from the old ways of
thinking that it immediately separated
Abraham from his kindred and his people,
and drove him into a far country he knew
not of. Yet it was in this far country
that he was to become the father of a
multitude, whose numbers should be as the
“sands of the sea.”
What do we
understand by this “God of Abraham,
and of Isaac, and of Jacob”? Was it
another [31] new god the patriarchs had
discovered, in addition to all the other
big and little gods of their ancestors?
If Abraham objected to the belief in many
gods, it does not seem reasonable that he
would have added to the number by
inventing a God of his own. But the God
of the patriarchs was not a new God, but
a new revelation of God to the
spiritually awakened consciousness of him
who was afterward to be called the
“Father of the Faithful.” It
was not a new God, but a New Thought of
the One and Only God, that came to
Abraham. After he had awakened to this
larger consciousness of God, it was most
natural that he should have instructed
his son in the same New Thought, and he
in turn should have handed it down to his
son. Thus we are introduced to a New
Thought interpretation of an old phrase,
“The God of Abraham, and of Isaac,
and of Jacob.”
For a long
time subsequent to the revelation to this
New Truth, men turned to God in prayer as
naturally as a babe turns to the maternal
breast in its hunger. The great wave of
human thought advanced in the direction
of a newer and higher conception of the
Infinite, and then, like the billows of
the sea, it receded to the depths of
materialism. Through trust and faith in
God, the Children of Israel had
demonstrated power and prosperity, but as
soon as they forgot God, they became
separated from the “fruits of the
Spirit” as well. Thus enfeebled,
they were easily conquered by the
Egyptians, and for four hundred years
[32] they remained in bondage to the
Pharaohs, during which time they
gradually drifted back into the Old
Thought of paganism with its plurality of
gods. One day there arose among them one
who was versed in all the arts and
sciences of Ancient Egypt. Beyond the Old
Thought of accepted slavery, Moses saw
the New Thought of possible emancipation,
and under the stimulus of this enlarged
vision, the Children of Israel, through
vicissitudes and misfortunes, followed
their great leader back to the paths of
peace, power and prosperity.
Once again
the thought wave receded, and lust took
the place of Law. The flesh-pots of Egypt
were more attractive than the
“fruits of the Spirit,” and
the sacred practice of prayer once more
degenerated into vain pleading. Then came
Elijah, thundering forth his denunciation
of the Old Thought, and proclaiming the
necessity of a New Thought and a New
Life! The prayers of the people had lost
their power, for they knew only the
letter, and not the Spirit--when this
prophet of the Lord proclaimed the New
Order, the restoration of the prayer of
Faith. It was by this prayer, by this
knowledge of Divine Principle that he
healed the sick, and this it was that he
imparted to his follower and disciple,
Elisha. This New Thought and new practice
persisted for a time with varying degrees
of success and failure until he came, who
spake as never man had spoken.
The Church
of Judah had settled down into a sense of
false [33] comfort. The prayer of faith
had given way to “vain
repetitions” and doubtful
disputations.” Suddenly there
appeared a weird personality from the
heart of the desert. The greatest of all
the prophets had arrived, dressed in
raiment of camel’s hair, and
subsisting on locusts and wild honey. He
proclaimed the message of the New Order,
of the need for repentance from sin. A
new interpretation was necessary, and
John was “the voice of one crying
in the wilderness” for the
reception of it. The old system of
thought had served its purpose, and the
New and Larger Thought was already
appearing over the mental horizon, and
presently the world was to be startled by
the physical embodiment of it in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth.
If men had
come to believe that the answer to prayer
was more or less uncertain as a result of
their experiences, they were to be
awakened from their self-hypnosis through
repentance and reformation. Repentance
comes through the recognition of the fact
that the Old Thought and the old life are
alike inadequate to produce that joy,
love and happiness for which every human
heart craves. Reformation comes through
open-mindedness, and a willingness to
accept the New Thought if it be an
improvement on the old philosophy of
life. For this reason, we read, that,
“In many places Jesus did no mighty
works, because of their unbelief.”
Yet, “The common people heard him
gladly,” because his New Thought
was the answer to their long-continued
[34] prayers. It was to them a
proclamation of emancipation, the
restoration of the glorious heritage of
the children of God. If the Old Thought
had taught them that God was a mighty
monarch ruling the earth from a place
beyond the skies, the New Thought of
Jesus was to reveal to them a loving
Father, nearer to them than hands and
feet. Moreover, they were to learn that
it was not the will of God that the
sinner should die, as their forefathers
had believed, but that he should be
converted and live. If the Old Thought
had taken justice into its own hands and
stoned the adulterous woman outside the
city walls, the New Thought of Jesus was
to teach them that in her they could find
the “image and likeness of
God,” and with the spirit of real
understanding say, “I will not
condemn thee.”
The change
from human justice to Divine Love was so
radical that this new system of
philosophy was considered a form of
insanity. It aroused suspicion and fear
in the minds of those who always see
calamity in any meditated change of the
established order. This New Thought
became a menace to existing institutions,
ecclesiastical and medical, and so these
two great bodies conspired to undermine
its teachings. Consequently, they
instituted false charges against Jesus,
and accused him of consorting with
sinners, and associating with loose
women. They called him a hypnotist
because, “He casteth out devils by
Beelzebub, the prince of devils.”
They could not understand that he could
go down to [35] sinners in order to lift
them up; that he could find more
spiritual comfort in the companionship of
a reformed Magdalene than in the society
of a self-righteous Pharisee, or that he
could heal the sick by the power of his
own spiritual consciousness. Their Old
Thought could not grasp such tremendous
possibilities, and so they placed a
construction on his acts consistent with
their own states of mind. To their minds
the New Thought was a passing disturbance
to be dealt with by law and to be
hindered in every possible way. They
could not see in it the beginning of a
new civilization, neither could they see
that the stone which the builders
rejected was to be the head of the
corner. All they could see in the
philosophy and practice of Jesus was a
new and a strange doctrine, in contrast
to their previous theories and antiquated
beliefs. If he were right, they were
wrong, and this they were not willing to
admit. However, the centuries have proved
that the New Thought of Jesus is the only
scientific explanation of the will of
God, as well as the best system of ethics
the world has ever known.
Two thousand
years have passed, and the tide of human
thought has again receded. Men admit the
grandeur and the necessity of the
spiritual life, but they find themselves
quite unable to live it, because of many
worldly distractions. The Old Thought has
saturated them with the belief that they
“are of few days, and full of
trouble,” and that they are
surrounded by all sorts and [36]
conditions of hampering limitations. The
only pathway they know leads through the
“vale of tears,” and with a
hopeless sigh, they try to make the best
of it. The man with the fatalistic view
of the Old Thought says, “We are
here, and what can we do about it?”
while he of the larger vision answers,
“We are here, and we can do a great
deal about it.” It is our first
duty to use our God-given faculty to
investigate the Law of Life, to
understand it and to co-operate with
it.
We are here
for a specific purpose; and that is to
prove our Divine Sonship. That is the
only reason we are here. We have work to
do, and it must be done intelligently in
accordance with the principles which
Jesus laid down and demonstrated. If Old
Thought says that human existence is a
game of chance, New Thought declares that
it does not have to remain so. If there
is a state of existence, we must know
that there is a great Supreme Law which
governs it. And if there is this
All-governing Law, then there must be a
science by which it can be understood and
administered. The Old Thought may not
admit this, but the New and Larger
Thought insists that the Great Lawgiver
has not left Himself without a law
through which to express Himself. This is
the Law which Abraham, Moses and Jesus
perceived working in the midst of a world
which seemed to be lost in utter chaos
and confusion. It was through the
knowledge of its operation that they
performed [37] all their mighty deeds. It
was their willingness to co-operate with
it that makes them stand on the pinnacles
of human attainment. This is the message
of New Thought. That what these great
master minds have done, we too, working
in the knowledge of the same Law, can do.
That we, as they, can so model our lives
and thoughts that, with this Great
Omnipotent Law, we shall become One, and
standing on these celestial heights, we
shall be able to aid in this Eternal
Progress and be a Divine Instrument in
aiding humanity in its struggle to
“Come up higher.”
Next: Race Belief
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The Astor Lectures
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
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