THE CHANGELESS
REALITY
W. John Murray
New
Thoughts on Old Doctrines
Divine Science Publishing Co.
New York, N.Y., 1918
[3] THE CHANGELESS REALITY
"Every
good gift, and every perfect gift is from
above, and cometh down from the Father of
lights, with whom is no variableness,
neither shadow of turning."
JAMES 1:17
When Jesus
said, "O righteous Father, the world hath
not known thee, but I have known thee,"
he set forth in very few words the great
ignorance of the race concerning the most
essential thing in the universe, which is
"To know God aright," for this is Life
eternal.
Divine
Science has come to emphasize the fact
that in order to know God aright we must
study, and meditate upon the essential
Characteristics of deity. It is very
evident that we have not known God
aright, because we have not only not
entered into Life eternal, but we have
not enjoyed the peace and poise and power
and prosperity to which we are told the
"sons and daughters of God" are so richly
entitled.
[4]
"O heavenly
Father, the world hath not known thee,
but I have known thee!" Could it be that
all who had gone before Jesus, and all
who were living contemporaneously with
Jesus, were so densely ignorant of the
true character of God?
Is it not
true that long before Jesus came, God was
a household word all over the world?
True, there were those called pagans who
believed in many gods. Let us examine
some of the beliefs about God. At best
all the race has had are its peculiar
concepts of Diety. No man hath known God
at any time and continued to live as a
mortal, and knowledge of God in the
fullest sense of the word seems to be
quite impossible. But this does not deter
us from the incumbent necessity of
investigating for ourselves what God must
be in his essential characteristics.
When Abraham
came out upon the great scene of
spiritual action, he came out from a
people who believed in many gods. His
father, the Talmud tells us, was a
manufacturer of gods. We say, "Imagine
it! A maker of gods!" And we think that
we [5] are so far removed from
that phase of ignorance that we are not
makers of idols, but if we examine the
question scientifically, we find that we
are just what the pagans were,---makers,
manufacturers of gods.
In other
words, your concept of God is not mine,
and my concept of God is not the orthodox
Christian's concept of God, and the
orthodox Christian's concept of God is
not the Hebrew's concept of God at all.
And so in reality we are makers of gods.
Perhaps not of tin, of wood and of stone
and golden gods, but gods nevertheless.
He was a wise man and a great wit who
said that "Ever since God had created man
in his own image and after his own
likeness, man had been striving to return
the compliment."
In the
infancy of the race, in the attempt to
return the compliment, men made God after
their own image and likeness. They were
brutal, carnal, material, and so they had
a brutal and a carnal and a material God.
If they wished to sweep a personal enemy
out of the way, and had sufficient
physical force, power, and strength to do
it, [6] they did so, and so they
measured the power of God by their puny,
finite power, and said, "If we can remove
one enemy out of the way, God can sweep
an entire nation out of existence," hence
the cry, "O Lord God of Israel, destroy
thine enemies from before thy face." Men
had the idea that His enemies were their
enemies,---or rather that their enemies
were His. So they cried out to this
personal God that He might destroy His
enemies from before His face, when as a
matter of fact they were men's enemies
only, and enemies only in
belief.
Thus men
have begotten in the infancy of the race
a personal God, the Hebrew Jehovah, a
mighty potentate, a selfish, avaricious,
cruel, malicious, wrathful and jealous
God, and also a personal devil. In our
infancy we had two persons, a personal
God and a personal devil, and then we
grew up into our youth where we began to
change our views concerning God. We rose
above the idea of personality connected
with God, and substituted for a personal
God and a personal devil, two great
principles,---the [7] principle of
good and the principle of evil. We felt
that we had made some strides in our
education. We rather smiled at the man
who thought of God in terms of
personality, and rather ridiculed those
theologies which emphasized a personal
devil with horns, hoofs and tail; we felt
that we had grown tremendously. We could
listen no longer to the doctrine of a
personal God and personal devil.
Next we come
to the approaching manhood of the race,
where Divine Science brings to our
consciousness the great mathematical fact
that principle in order to be principle
at all, can only be one. There cannot be
two principles forever warring with each
other. Thus in Divine Science to speak of
God as Principle, a cold, abstract,
mathematical term to apply to this warm
and pulsating Presence which we had been
taught to speak of as God in the past.
Here we incurred the hostility and the
antagonism of those who saw this divine
Principle as a mere speck upon the great
ocean of humanity, as a something that
had come to torment but not [8] to
educate them, and out of this came a
great many discussions and
dissertations.
I remember a
very noted clergyman who, when he found
that certain members of his flock, having
exhausted the systems of materia medica,
and having exhausted the power of their
own prayers and their pastors also, began
to turn to Divine Science for healing and
for health. When the pastor discovered
this departure from his pews of the most
thoughtful people in his church, then
discovered that it was only a question of
time when the church would not be able to
support itself, and he felt that he must
protect his church against this
emigration of his best people, he set
himself the task of presenting to his
congregation the subject of divine
Principle in all the hideousness and
ugliness of a distorted imagination.
I remember
very distinctly one of this man's most
telling points. He said, "These Divine
Principle people have destroyed God. They
have reduced God to a principle. 'They
have taken away the Lord and we know not
where they have laid him.' [9]They
are a godless people. They have reduced
prayer to bold, brazen affirmations. They
consider themselves equal with God. Not
only are they unscientific, but they are
not Christian, and I warn you against
identifying yourselves with them."
This was
some years ago. Happily the pulpit is
becoming more tolerant with the idea that
Divine Scientists "have reduced God to a
principle."
But Divine
Science has not reduced God to anything,
and it cannot reduce God because it
proposes to do the very opposite to that.
The purpose of Divine Science is to
magnify the Lord, and if we do anything
with the Lord, it is that we exalt him.
We exalt God to the Principle of all
principles, to the whole. This is not a
reduction, but an exaltation of God.
But we must
know what we mean when we use the word
principle, and if our clerical friend had
taken the time and the pains to do what
so very few intelligent men ever
do,---because they assume that they know
the meaning of all words that they
use,---if [10] he had taken the
time and the trouble to look up in the
dictionary the term principle, he would
have seen that it is one of the very
finest synonyms that one can use for
God.
What does
principle mean? I have with me the
definition of the word "principle" as it
occurs in the Standard Dictionary so that
you will know that I am not giving you my
own definition:
Principle,
"a source or cause from which a thing
proceeds, a power that acts continuously
or uniformly; a permanent or fundamental
cause that naturally or necessarily
produces certain results on all
occasions."
This is the
definition of principle as it occurs in
your Standard Dictionary. "A source from
which things proceed, a cause, a
changeless reality." Can you give a more
comprehensive title to God than this? The
Only Source, the Only Cause, the Only
fundamental Reality! The one great
all-controlling omnipresent Principle of
Being.
If we were
Hebrews, we would say, "The God of the
Universe." If we were orthodox
Christians, we would say, "The Father of
[11] all mankind." But because we
are striving to be philosophical
Christians, and Christian philosophers,
we say the Principle of Being.
At first, of
course, it is cold and abstract because
it was not a term that was used in our
older order of religious teaching, but
when it is scientifically explained, I am
sure that you will agree that no better
phrase can be used for the God of the
universe, or Father of all mankind, than
the Principle of Being.
We have said
that there are not two principles in the
universe, a principle of good and a
principle of evil. If Principle exists at
all, it must be One, and this Principle
cannot be dual in its operations. That
is, it can not be good on one side of its
being and evil on the other.
Only a few
days ago I read a prayer by one of the
most intelligent men we have in this
country, a devotee of universal peace. He
was talking to God as he might talk to an
ordinary man. He said, "Oh, Lord God, we
ask thee in all thy clemency and
tenderness and affection to intercede
with these conflicting [12]
nations to bring peace instead of war; to
change the hearts of men so that love
will take the place of hate and anger and
malice."
He went on
with this marvelous prayer,---a very good
prayer under the old thought, but not at
all consistent with our text from James
the Apostle. James says that God is not a
variable God, and that with him there "is
no variableness neither shadow of
turning." God is "the same yesterday,
today and forever."
We are
asking God to do for the nations what the
nations alone can do for themselves. Is
it rash to say that God cannot prevent
man from committing a sin if he is bent
upon committing it?
It is a
necessity of the old theological dogma,
that man is a free moral agent, that God,
in bestowing upon man the distinguishing
characteristics of mind, bestowed upon
him, free moral agency. He gave to him
will and domination and then left it to
man to exercise these according to his
own judgment, discretion and wisdom, or
lack of it.
[13]
And so man
in the exercise of these God-given
faculties, wherever he is cooperating
with divine Principle, is living in love
and health and harmony, and not in pain,
sickness, disease and death; and wherever
he has worked in opposition to the rules
growing out of divine Principle, he has
sown the seeds of unhappiness, misery,
ill health and death itself.
Therefore
the responsibility rests largely,---may I
say altogether and exclusively with
man?
There was a
time when we felt that we could sin up to
the very last minute, and then by our
tearful petitions and aided by the
accumulated prayers of our friends, we
might ask God to remit the penalty due to
our sins. Death-bed repentance we called
it. Some of us had very little faith in
it.
The only
destruction of sin there can be is not so
much the remission of the penalty due to
it according to Law, as it is in the
reformation of the sinner himself. There
is a law back of sin. You cannot sin
without suffering, and we cannot sin up
to the last [14] moment and then
ask God to push us unceremoniously into
the arms of Abraham. It is not consistent
with law. It is not consistent with love,
not even the love of God itself.
When we
speak of God as Principle, while at first
it grates harshly upon the ear, we see
presently that it is far more loving than
our old concept of God. Sometimes we are
asked, "How can I pray to a Principle?" I
think that this is one of the most common
questions that is asked of the student of
Divine Science. How can I pray to a
Principle? It seems almost impossible to
pray to a Principle.
In music, in
mathematics, you don't pray to the
principle of these, do you? How do you
acquire musical knowledge, how do you
acquire mathematical proficiency?
Is it not by
conforming to the principle, by
understanding its rules and working
according to them, that you solve your
problems in music and mathematics? It is
identically the same in
metaphysics,---identically the same in
true religion. For it is [15] only
as we understand the Principle of
Being, acquaint ourselves intelligently
with its rules, that we can do what Paul
the Apostle said we must do---"work out
our own salvation," not with fear and
trembling, but with love and courage.
It is only
as we become intelligently acquainted
with God as the Principle of the
universe, that we can acquaint ourselves
with these rules that naturally grow out
of the Principle, and then begin to solve
our own problems. Because I take it, that
this is the work of every man in the
world. He is not to have God solve his
problems for him, but is to solve his own
problems according to the Principle.
Is the
principle of mathematics less loving
because it places its whole self, its
undivided self, as a servant of the child
who is studying arithmetic, or at the
service of the accountant who is working
out some great mathematical problem, or
of the engineer who is doing some very
delicate work according to its rules? Is
the principle of mathematics less loving,
less generous and [16] of less
usefulness because it permits the student
of it to solve his problems on any plane
of mathematical experience with
infallible exactitude? Certainly not.
Is the
Principle of Being, which men call God,
less loving because it enables man
everywhere and anywhere to work out his
own salvation according to its rules? Is
it less loving because it is not a
personal God and more or less
capricious?
Let us
consider the difference between the old
thought God as person, and the New
Thought God as Principle. The old thought
of God as person, leads us into this
peculiar belief, that if it were the will
of God and we pray with sufficient
intensity and earnestness, certain
discomforts, diseases, depressions and
discouragements might be taken away out
of our lives. We talked to God as if he
were a person situated somewhere in a
far-off realm, surveying the world as the
monarch of all he had created, and then
we asked him to remove some terrible
calamity from our lives, and, if we were
very good, sometimes,---almost
invariably, [17] we ended our
prayer with, "if it be thy will, Oh,
God."
It [would
be] presumptuous to ask him to do it if
it were not his will, so we finished our
prayer with that petition, "if it be thy
will, Oh, God."
And I submit
it to you to analyze your own
experiences, and to ask yourself how many
times when you have prayed that prayer
with all the earnestness of your soul,
with all the intensity of your desire to
be freed from something inimical to your
interests or health,---I ask you how many
times you believed that your prayers to a
personal God were really answered?
How often
have you consoled yourself with the
belief that perhaps it were not best for
you to have good health, perhaps it were
not best for you to be freed from the
clanking chains of poverty, perhaps it
were not best for you to live at
all,---and so you have tried to reconcile
your condition with this concept of
God.
Over here
another man without any prayer at all is
perfectly well, perfectly [18]
healthy, perfectly strong and prosperous,
while here you pray and petition, and beg
and whine almost, to God and yet you go
on in the same old way! I ask if you have
had very many answers to prayers along
these lines?
Then is it
wrong, so unchristian to substitute
divine Principle for a personal God, if
by understanding this divine Principle,
we can solve our own problems? Does this
mean that we should cease praying
altogether? Oh no, no, not at all. It
merely means that we change the character
of our prayers.
The prayers
of Jesus were not the prayers of John the
Baptist. The prayers of Jesus were so
wholly unlike anything that had ever gone
up before his time, that we wonder what
mysterious power there was in them,
because they always bore results. Did he
stand at the tomb of Lazarus and pray
silently, and call for Lazarus to come
forth? Lazarus came forth. But before he
came forth Jesus said to those who stood
by, "The Father hath heard me," and he
addressed his [19] heavenly Father
and said, "I thank thee, Father, that
thou has heard me, for I know that thou
hearest me always."
Why was
Jesus so sure, why was he so confident
that God heard him always? Why is the
expert mathematician so sure, so
confident of the principle of
mathematics, that it will support him
whenever he co-operates with its rules?
Because he has tried it. He has tested
it. He knows it is unerring. He never
thinks of accusing the principle of
mathematics for any error that he may
make personally. It never occurs to him
to trace the errors on his ledger to the
principle of mathematics. To him it is
the most unerring thing in the world. And
so it was with Jesus; it never occurred
to him to trace the death of Lazarus to
God. Other men might have thought that it
was the will of God, and that for some
wise and inscrutable purpose of his own
God had taken this wonderful youth from
these two marvelous women, his sisters.
Men might think that, but not so with
Jesus.
The one
fixed idea in the mind of Jesus
[20] was simply this. It is not
the will of my Father that any one should
die, but rather that he should be
converted. Ever and always before the
mind of Jesus was a great fixed fact, and
that fact was based upon the immutable
Principle, the Principle of Life itself.
Jesus understood the definition of
principle. He understood it to mean
"cause, source, origin, that from which
things proceed," and he also understood
it to mean that it was without
"variableness" or "shadow of turning." In
other words, that it was the same
"yesterday, to-day, and forever," and
because it was the Life Principle, it had
no death thought in it. Because it was
the Life Principle it only recognized
things like Itself. If men departed from
Principle and followed the bent of their
imaginations and reaped consequences for
so doing, that could never be traced to
God.
So Jesus
interpreted the will of God according to
divine Principle, and not according to
the Jehovistic idea of God. It never
occurred to Jesus that God could cause
victory to perch upon the banner of one
army [21] over against the
contending army. And yet within your
recollection and within mine, we have
seen armies separated only by a very
narrow river, in the dusk of evening when
firing had ceased, whose chaplains knelt
in prayer asking God that he might
vouchsafe victory to their respective
armies. Could God answer both?
Impossible! That is always the trouble
with going to a personal God.
Indeed, when
we think of a personal God, we think of a
capricious, vacillating Deity, who for
some reason of his own, is going to
confer a blessing upon one and a curse
upon another.
During the
Civil War this happened with us, but it
happens anywhere where men have this idea
of God. One man prays for rain, another
for sunshine. Surely a personal God can
not answer affirmatively both of these
prayers, because they are so
diametrically opposed the one to the
other.
Do we not
see that we have had a very
feeble,---dare I say foolish concept of
God? Have we not as the wit said, been
striving [22] from the beginning
of all time to return the compliment, and
to make God in our own image and
likeness?
And what are
we as we understand ourselves?
Vacillating, changeable, now loving, now
hating, never the same from one day to
another. Now protesting our undying
devotion, and tomorrow as jealous as can
be, changing with every moment of time.
What difference does it make if we have
many gods, or one God of many moods? None
at all.
In order to
have one God scientifically, we must have
divine Principle which knows no change,
which sendeth no evil into the experience
of man, which does not send sickness, nor
poverty, pain nor perplexity; which is
always the same, sending forth the
qualities of its own nature.
That is why
Jesus used the sun as the simile or
symbol of God. It causes its rays to fall
upon the just and the unjust alike. It
glints into the hospital cot, into the
prison cell, into the palace, into the
hovel,---anywhere where men will permit
it, there it radiates [23] for us.
So it is with the great universal
Principle, which is God,---there is no
place where it is not. All we have to do
is to lift the shade. The Esquimaux can
work according to it, the Frenchman, the
Italian, the Swede,---all can work with
it as with the principle of
mathematics.
And one of
the great beauties about it is that we
cannot exhaust it. Every one can be using
this Principle, solving his own
particular problems with it, without
exhausting it.
Is it then
reducing God to a principle? Is it a
reduction of God at all? Is it not rather
an exaltation of God that makes Him
immeasurable, omnipotent,
omnipresent?
These are
questions we must submit to our sane
thought. Divine Scientists are
intelligent. If they were not
intelligent, they could not be Divine
Scientists. There is some difference
between them and other followers. In
other churches we may accept, but in this
we cannot unless we investigate
thoughtfully and prayerfully the very
secrets of being itself. It requires
intelligence [24] to do that.
Non-intelligent men may be healed by it,
but to be a Divine Scientist it requires
intelligence to understand it, and we can
never understand it until we realize that
God is Principle, and that in calling God
Principle, we have not reduced God in the
slightest degree. On the contrary we have
done just what the Psalmist said,---we
have "magnified the Lord."
What does
the word "magnify" mean? I used to think
in my old religious belief, that to
magnify the Lord meant to praise God. The
word "magnify" does not mean praise at
all.
Again we are
forced to look it up in our dictionary,
because as I said before, we use so many
words without realizing what they
actually mean. We take it for granted
that we know because they are in such
common use, and as we use them every day,
we conclude naturally that we understand
them. If a man should say to you, "Do you
know what 'magnify the Lord' means?" you
would say, "Certainly, of course, Praise
the Lord." "Magnify" means, to make
big.
[25]
In Divine
Science we understand this requirement of
the Psalmist, "magnify the Lord," to mean
that you should make God, this Divine
Principle, so big that there is no room
in the universe for anything but God, and
so evil is non-existent; no matter how
real it seems to be. We treat evil just
as we treat errors in mathematics. Not as
realities but as departures from
principle, as the mistakes that men make
in trying to solve the problems of life.
We never think of attributing them to
God. It never occurs to us.
Outside of
Divine Science, every evil and
catastrophe we can explain in no other
way, we say, "It is God's will," don't
we? Of course we do. Divine Science is
the great enlightener. It has come to rub
the sand from our eyes and to pull back
the curtain and reveal this great
Principle, and in the light of these
truths we are to save ourselves.
Because,
after all, that is what we are called
upon to do. It sounds like a harsh
statement to say that God will never save
us. It is a sweeter statement to say that
God has [26] always saved us. For
in the mind of God man does not need
saving, for there we are as
perfect as on the day he brought us into
being. All this seeming imperfection has
grown around us, and is nothing more nor
less than the incrustation of error that
we have indulged in, that we have
believed in as Truth, and now comes the
law of God to us and looses us and sets
us free.
Sometimes I
think the ordinary man,---and I am an
ordinary man,---is very much like a hyena
in a cage, the door of which he thinks is
locked, and he is walking up and down
behind it with ceaseless regularity,
desiring to get out, but believing he is
locked in. That is just where we are, we
desire to get out of our sins,
inclinations and sorrows, and believing
we are locked in, we have to remain where
we are. Then science comes and says, "You
are not locked in at all. The way of
egress is open to you. Put your hand upon
the gate and pull it towards you, and
walk out into the freedom of God."
Realize your oneness with the infinite
Wisdom. Affirm it. Do not ask God to do
[27] something for you that you
can do for yourself. Do not petition God
to save you when He has already placed
within you the potentialities of your own
salvation. God won't do it for us. God
has done all he can for us. He has given
to us power and light and intelligence to
do the thing ourselves.
Can we ask
more of God than this? He has given to us
the very life of His life, the light of
His light, the wisdom of His wisdom, the
intelligence of His intelligence. What
more can we ask? Unless it be a mythical
heaven,---which we do not want.
What we want
is to know that God is here, that the
kingdom of heaven is within us. That is
what Divine Science has come to reveal to
us; and if it has given to us the
Principle of Being instead of the God of
the Hebrews, or the Father of all
humankind,---if it has given to us the
Principle of Being that is within us and
only awaiting our own expansion and
utilization, then I ask you if it has not
given to us all, all!
It has not
robbed us of a single thing except the
things we do not need and do not
[28] require,---fear, discontent,
ignorance. Our ignorances we are
perfectly willing to be shorn of. Our
ignorances are only like Samson's locks,
the signs of foolish, physical strength.
They do not mean anything. What have they
ever done for us except to plunge us into
misery, unhappiness and disease and death
itself?
Then, again,
let us think of the nearness of this
Principle. It is in us now. When we
thought of God as a personal God, was it
not always a distant personage? Was it
ever as near as hands and feet, as a poet
has expressed it? Whenever you thought of
God was it not a symbol that you were
afar off, and that you felt God was far
away? You do not have to look off into
the distance to find the Principle of
Life. It is within. We turn the gaze
inward and find the Principle of Life
there at work, and if it is not there at
work, then we are dead indeed. If the
Principle of Life is not at the very
center and heart and core of your being,
where [29] is it? Is it some
hidden, concealed, mystic energy that is
working within you? That is what we
believe in Divine Science.
It is not a
something that is working or operating
upon us, or outside of us, but something
that is welling up within us like a
well-spring of life. That is what Jesus
meant when he told the Samaritan woman
what he was and said, "If thou hadst
asked me for the water of life, I would
have given it to thee, and if thou hadst
drunk of the water, thou wouldst never
have thirsted again."
We know that
"the water of life" that we draw with a
bucket has to be continually replenished,
but this "water of life" that Jesus spoke
of is the understanding of God, it is
constant communion with the invisible
Force within us.
The
Principle of Being,---I like the
phrase---philosophical, mathematical,
abstract, cold, pulseless, inanimate to
the unthinking---a veritable flood of
Life to those who grasp its real
meaning---a great working Principle, a
something that we cannot [30] be
separated from a single moment and live.
It is very God of very God.
Then have
we, I ask you in closing, have we reduced
God? Simply because we speak of God as
Principle, does this reduce God? Does it
not rather magnify God? Does it not
rather exalt him above the plane of all
personality, and make him the great
universal Reality, which is neither he,
nor she, but It?
You cannot
speak of God as he or she unless you
speak of It as He and She both, the
masculine and feminine Principle of the
universe. Combining the courage, the
strength, the power, the mastery and
domination of the masculine with the
love, the tenderness, the sympathy and
the compassion of the feminine in One,
the one universal Principle, sexless,
neither he nor she, but It, is perceived
as the one Father-Mother God.
The
Principle of Being is nearer to us than
that personal God we believed in
yesterday; the Principle of Being is that
invisible Force that is working within us
for richness of life, for health, for
strength, for [31] peace, for
power. We can no more be separated from
it than a smile can be separated from a
face and left out in space, or a sunbeam
can be separated from the sun and left
standing as a solitary entity! It can no
more be done.
Man is ever
one with the Principle of Being, God is
ever one with us as we sit at home or
walk abroad, yea verily, "In him we live
and move and have our being."
Now we can
understand why it is nearer than our
hands and our feet,---because it is the
very thing by which we live. It is the
very thing by which we move. It is the
very thing by which we breathe.
Separation from God is impossible.
Take with
you, I beg of you, this thought, and if
it seems cold to you, and if it seems
abstract and harsh to you, think over it
soberly, carefully, and then compare it
with your personal God. And remember that
Divine Science does not repudiate, does
not belittle Deity.
If it
repudiates a capricious, a wrathful, and
a jealous God, it does not repudiate
[32] God, it merely repudiates
these attributes, these qualities, as not
having anything to do with Deity; and it
gives back to us the Principle of Life
and Love and the Principle of
Success.
Chapter
2
* * * * *
New Thoughts on Old
Doctrines
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
