Chapter XI
THE WILL TO BE WELL
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“There is nothing good or
evil save in the will.”
--Epictetus
“The star of the conquered
will,
He rises in my breast,
Serene, and resolute, and still,
And calm and
self-possessed.”
--Longfellow
[117]
Dealing with the will to be well, I am
not unmindful of the fact that there are,
in the metaphysical world today, many
depreciating the use of the will. It is
spoken of by some as that which is blind,
stubborn and headlong. This is probably
because we are apt to look upon only one
side of the picture. We are prone to see
only the negative aspects of the human
will, or perhaps those positive aspects
of it which are blind, stubborn and
headlong.
But simply
because the human will exhibits these
peculiarities from time to time, there is
no reason for deprecating or abrogating
or repudiating it altogether. The human
will plays a most [118] important part in
the whole scheme of progressive
evolution. Indeed, without it there would
be no progressive evolution at all.
Modern psychology tells us that man
ascends through three progressive stages
of mental development: the first being
that of knowing; the second, feeling; and
the third, willing. Man is differentiated
from the animals principally, if not
entirely, by willing. That is, he is the
only animal,--if we are pleased so to
term him,--who exercises this divine
function in mundane affairs.
The
biologist, who observes life on its
lowest plane of visible manifestation,
credits this life with knowledge, i.e.,
he says we assume that the protoplasm in
the initial cell knows just enough to
divide itself, and just enough to
increase itself by and through
self-division. We also assume that it
feels, because there is every evidence of
this state of consciousness, in that it
feels cold and heat. It responds to one
and dies in the presence of the other.
The very lowest forms of what we are
pleased to call physical life are thus
credited with knowing and feeling, but
never with willing. Will, as you know, is
the exercise of the function of volition,
and it is because of this that the will
is something that must be exercised, if
we would be well.
There is no
realm in which the exercise of will is so
clearly demonstrated as in art. How oft
we read the criticism of a man who knows
music technically, but who has no
feeling. He is engaged by a daily paper
or magazine. His one [119] and only
function in life seems to be that of
critic. We read his criticisms but they
leave us cold and unsympathetic and
unresponsive. He knows all the tricks of
technique in music, but he has no
personal inner feeling. Another person
has that inner musical feeling, but lacks
technique. Everything he hears in the
world of music or sees in the world of
art inspires him. The futurist
intoxicates him, and he tells of this
revolution of art, this new manifestation
of music and when we do not enthuse he is
astonished. He has feeling but no
knowledge, and so he, too,
notwithstanding the fact that he is very
musical in soul, should not be considered
to have the final word. But when the
knowing of the critic unites with feeling
in the critic, we have a teacher who
elevates us.
It is, then,
this knowing and feeling in art which
gives will to the artist. It is out from
this will that there is production and
reproduction, because it is worthy of
note that the critic is rarely ever a
creator. He is, for the most part, when
devoid of feeling, a destroyer of hopes
and ambitions; he sits in judgment on
young artists, often blasts their hopes
and ruins their prospects, and all
because he knows music, but does not feel
it. So it is in the scientific phases of
the world. Knowing and feeling must be
united with will, else the man who
conceives a patent will carry it with him
to the grave. He may know a great deal
about mechanics and feel the great urge
borne in upon him by a hungry world
waiting [120] for improvements, but if
there be no will, his idea of that
opportunity of meeting human need and
requirements will be like a stillborn
infant, assuming a certain growth, but
never breathing itself into visible
manifestation.
So it seems
that the will is a very, very necessary
factor. The trouble with the will does
not lie in the will itself. Trouble
arises only when the human will would be
something of itself and independent of
the universal divine will. That is the
only mistake the human will ever makes.
It is like the human intellect. Both
essay to be something of themselves,
independent of the great Source of all
Intelligence and Wisdom and Love. It is
when the will seeks to operate divorced
from the Divine Will, which is God, that
it becomes arrogant, offensive, brutal
and despotic.
I find no
one in the metaphysical world, ancient or
modern, who lays such tremendous stress
on the will as does Jesus of Nazareth,
and surely we students of Divine Science
can take him at his word. See how he
stresses the use of the will. While
reading the fifth chapter of John we feel
Jesus standing by the pool of Bethesda,
the ancient Lourdes, the healing waters,
and we find one brought there. Year after
year he had been taken there and borne
away again with no visible sign of
improvement, and his only explanation for
it was that when the angel came to
trouble the water, there was no one to
put him into the pool. And Jesus said,
after listening to this, “Wilt thou
be made whole?” The man’s
view of [121] healing was very
circumscribed, as is ours today. We limit
it to some particular thing; if not a
pool of healing water, it is a glass of
hot water in the morning. If it is not
one thing, it is another, and always
external or mechanical. There he was,
waiting for the troubling of the water
when, all the while, the great healing,
cleansing, purifying, energizing water of
life was ready to flow through every
artery of his being, to cleanse and
purify and invigorate him.
And so Jesus
sought to instill into this man’s
mind a great truth. But first he must get
the man’s consent, or co-operation,
for the only way the individual can
co-operate with the universe is through
the will, and Jesus knew this.
“Wilt thou be made whole?”
Having once secured the invalid’s
will and his co-operation, however
unintelligent it was, all that remained
for Jesus to do was to say: “Take
up thy bed and go thy way.” And the
man took up his bed. He was rebuked for
carrying it, because the day happened to
be Sunday. We are very conventional
today, so that we have no criticism to
offer of the Jew of yesterday. The point
I wish to make is that there is a
necessity for the will to be active
before the man can be well.
I remember
as a young student of Divine Science
being called to see what was a very
critical, so-called incurable case. All
the schools of materia medica had been
tried to no avail. Scientists after our
own faith had been tried, with no [122]
result, save to bring a certain sense of
mental comfort and fortitude. This man
had fortitude, the kind which says
“what can’t be cured must be
endured,” but there is nothing that
cannot be cured by Christ. This man had
reached that place where, after trying
all the systems, new, medieval, or
ancient, he was bending his head to what
he believed to be the inevitable. I was
too young in this science to feel that I
could do what my predecessors and older
confreres had failed to do. Moreover, I
was too humble concerning my own
knowledge of Divine Science to feel for a
single moment that I could succeed where
the best practitioners in the field had
failed, and there I sat in all humility
and in all my self-confessed ignorance of
Divine Principle. For a moment I was
helpless in the presence of this error.
Then it dawned upon me that, since the
condition under treatment was an error,
and not at all the production of God,
that very man in the room with me could,
if he wished, exercise dominion over this
belief. This idea grew during treatment
and for several days, but there was no
visible change at all.
He always
sat with his face to the window looking
out into the street. The door opened from
the back into a little hall, so that when
I was ushered into his room, it was
always to face his back and meet with the
words, “Good morning,” but
never a move. He was like an ossified
thing, which he believed himself to be. I
do not [123] know whether it was
impatience in me and a certain
irritability born of failure up to that
point, but I exclaimed to him on the
fifth or sixth morning: “Now my
dear fellow, it is useless for me to talk
to you about Divine Science. You know as
much about the letter of it as I do, and
we are not making any headway. I am going
to treat you this morning and we will
spend our time realizing that God is the
source of movement. We are going to
realize this in our silence, and we will
do nothing else, and if we do not do it,
it will be useless for me to come
tomorrow.”
I was the
last hope he had in the world, and
perhaps he thought I was arrogating to
myself too much personal importance. When
our silence was over, we declared:
“God is the source of all movement.
There is no inaction.” It seems to
me that what we affirm in the silence we
ought to be able to declare audibly, and
in no uncertain tone, so I said:
“There is a clock on the
mantel-piece to the left and unless you
turn to it this morning, I am not coming
tomorrow.” As well as he could look
out of the corner of his eye, he did so.
“I really mean it,” I added;
“if God is the source of all
movement, there is no time better than
the present to put this to a test.”
That involved will. Prior to this,
the man had known what was right, but was
quite unwilling to do anything.
I shall
never forget his effort to see that
clock. It was like a huge cathedral door
that has not been opened in years being
swung upon its rusty [124] hinges by the
force of great mechanical strength. His
neck creaked, just the fraction of an
inch at each move. I do not remember how
long it took, but he saw the clock and
also the door leading into the bathroom
on the right. Would all the knowing and
feeling in the world have done for that
man what knowing and feeling united to
will accomplished?
Christ was
saying: “Wilt thou be made
whole?” He was not saying:
“Do you know the truth and feel the
force of the truth?” That was taken
for granted. The man had been under
treatment for years, but he did not will
to do anything on his own account, but
waited for the practitioner to make his
neck swing around comfortably. If the man
at the pool of Bethesda had waited to
take up his bed and walk, he would be
waiting there still, if human life could
last so long. The question Christ is
asking of you and me today is:
“Wilt thou be made whole?”
Thousands are asking to be made whole,
but are not willing to do anything toward
its accomplishment.
I recall a
case of so-called genuine locomotor
ataxia, which I had quite failed to do
anything with, and on which others also
had failed. It was the case of a woman
who, for eight years, had been confined
to her bed. I was called away from that
city to a distant town and I turned my
practice over to another, including this
case, one of the most serious I ever had.
And when that other took hold of the case
with all of her resoluteness, [125] she
decided that knowing and feeling were not
quite enough. This sufferer read her
Bible, and "Science
and Health", and studied
faithfully, but she never moved. The
practitioner said to her: “Now, my
dear woman, we are going to try different
methods, you and I, and we will make the
best of the time given to us during Mr.
Murray’s absence.”
If I seem to
be personal, I am not intentionally so,
but I want you to understand how the will
to be well must be exercised. She said to
the patient: “I am going to treat
you this morning with all the
understanding that I possess, and ask you
to unite with me in prayer to the end
that movement, being a spiritual, divine
force, manifests itself in every bone, in
every muscle, in every nerve and every
sinew of your body.” So they prayed
and the healer announced: “I am
coming to see you tomorrow at 10
o’clock, and I hope you will be
sitting in your chair.” She looked
up in pitying alarm. It was absurd; she
had been years in this condition and was
growing worse, instead of better. At 10
o’clock the following morning, the
woman was still in bed. “Oh, you
are still in bed,” was the
healer’s greeting. And the patient
looked at her as much as to say:
“Where did you think I should
be?” “I expected you would be
up this morning. I am going to pray for
you, and at the close of this treatment I
want you to get up.” Fifteen
minutes later the practitioner turned to
her and said: “In the name of Jesus
Christ of Nazareth, stand up and
walk,” and she looked at [126] her.
The woman knew and felt, but she would
not will.
Summoning
the great burly nurse, the healer said:
“Will you see to it that this
patient gets up at once?” The nurse
walked over from her corner of the room,
and as it looked as if she were going to
seize the patient violently, the woman
indignantly sprang out from the other
side of the bed.
You have
only to read Dr. A.T. Schofield’s
work to see cases illustrative of it
operating in the material, physical and
medical worlds. Under stress of strong
emotion paralytics have jumped from their
beds; sufferers from rheumatism have run
out from burning buildings and never
suffered again from paralysis or
rheumatism. What does it prove? Simply
that the will, under stress of strong
impulse, is almighty. It is a derivative
spiritual quality from that universal
divine will, which men call God,
operating in the human organism, and
making for real action where there seems
to be inaction, and movement where there
seems to be a cessation of movement. All
power comes from identifying ourselves
with the origin of movement, because will
is the cause of all action. You exercise
will in order to leave your homes. You
exercise it to sit on a chair. Will is
the motive power and it is only
despicable and imperfect when it thinks
it is of itself something. It is grand
and glorious when it knows that it is
identified with the great operating will
of infinite intelligence. It is then the
will, co-operating [127] with the divine
will, becomes a power of right to
liberate men. “Wilt thou be made
whole?” said Jesus to the man.
“I will.” “Be thou
clean.” There was the will of the
man to be healed, and the will of the one
who could heal to heal, and those two
wills, conjoined and brought into
immediate spiritual contact with the will
of the universe, precipitated what men
have since called a miracle.
But there
are no miracles. It is not a miracle when
you will to touch a button on the wall to
bring a light. But suppose you sat in
darkness until the end of the year, with
all the buttons in the room touchable and
you did not will to leave your seat to
press one, would you have light? Why
should we belittle will, simply because
will is occasionally blind and stubborn
and headlong? The child has will, but he
uses it destructively, is stubborn and
self-conceited, and so he can accomplish
nothing, because his own will,
independent of divine will, leads to
self-conceit and personal egotism. But is
that any reason why we should set it
aside altogether?
Shall we
repudiate the energy of electricity
simply because tomorrow morning a man may
be electrocuted at Sing Sing? Shall we
repudiate all electrical energy because
one scorches her cambric handkerchief
while ironing it? Shall you repudiate the
whole thing because of the few erroneous
uses of it to which you put it in your
ignorance? The Divine Will can never work
for us save as [128] we work with
ourselves through the exercise of our
will in the direction of the Divine
Will’s method. God will never do
for us, as Judge Troward says,
what He can only do through
us.
The
Universal can do through the individual
only through the individual’s
willing co-operation. We must will to be
well. A man who knew nothing about Divine
Science lay in Bellevue Hospital next to
a man weighing 200 pounds. He weighed
only 135 pounds and the doctor shook his
head and said: “My dear fellow, if
you are a Protestant, you would better
send for your minister, or a
Catholic,--for your priest.” The
little man realized what the doctor meant
and this was his reply: “Doctor,
don’t fool yourself. I am not going
to die. I have a wife and three children
dependent upon me, and my insurance is so
small, they could not live a month.
Kindly excuse me,--I am going to get
well.” He was having the same
specific remedies, so-called, that the
man in the next cot had been having, but,
with all his manifest bulk, the man in
the next cot passed away.
What is the
average man’s mental picture when
he says in sorrow, distress and poverty
and pain and unhappiness: “Thy will
be done”? It is the picture of one
who thinks that God has just “given
it to him good,” and he is trying
to cultivate as much fortitude as he can.
Every day I am brought into contact with
so-called incurable diseases in men and
women who have been saying all the days
of their so-called incurable malady,
[129] “Thy will be done,” but
all the time they have been thinking it
is the will of God that they should be
thus afflicted.
What is the
will of God? Interpret it as Jesus did.
Listen to his marvelous words. Prior to
his time there existed the same idea
concerning the will of God which exists
today. Was a man afflicted? It was the
will of God. Did a child die and leave a
sorrowing, heart-broken mother? It was
the will of God. Did a woman die and
leave a man with children that he could
not raise morally? It was the will of
God. But there came this great and
wonderful Teacher, this marvelous Seer of
Divine Truth, this man who knew that God
alone is. By the exercise of a divinely
anointed will to heal humanity, he
gathered a little group about him and
said in substance: “If a child ask
his father for bread, will the father
give him a stone? Or if he ask for a
fish, will the father give him a serpent,
which may look like an eel, for instance?
Or for an egg, will the father give him a
scorpion, which is formed very much like
some eggs? Will the father, when the
child asks for some particular
benefaction, withhold that, provided it
is consistent with his physical, mental
and moral requirements?”
And he also
said: “If ye, being evil (in the
sense that you do not know the eternal
law of God), know how to give good gifts
to your children, how much more shall
your Heavenly Father give to them that
ask Him?” And then he added: [130]
“It is not the will of my Father
that one of these little ones should
perish,” that the child should die;
but rather that he should live. And then,
speaking of a sinful man, against whom
everybody believed that God had a grudge
and was awaiting only a favorable
opportunity to put out of
existence,--Jesus said: “It is not
the will of my Father which is in heaven,
that the sinner should die, but rather
that he should be converted and
live.”
What an
interpretation to place upon the will of
God! And how shall we avail ourselves of
it today? By willing to be like Him.
First, says modern psychology, comes
knowing, then feeling and then volition,
or will. We accept these statements that
the first activity of the mind is
expressed in knowing,--that the child
knows by what it is surrounded and then
feels an interest and constructs things.
And then it begins to will, to construct
more things and to use more intelligently
such materials as it is surrounded by. In
Divine Science, the first thing that we
know intellectually is that we are the
children of the Lord, that God is the
Author of our being and, therefore, our
being is spiritual, because God is
Spirit. And then, if we grow, we begin to
sense this, as the musician feels music,
as the artist feels art, in addition to
all the things they know about music and
art. It becomes an unquestioned idea
firmly fixed in our very soul. We know it
to be a truth. Shall it rest there? Is
there no volition? The will to be well?
The will to be [131] pure? We know we are
the children of God, and the will comes
in to prove it.
To repudiate
the little degraded will, because
occasionally it is blind and stubborn and
ignorant and headlong, is absolutely
foolish. “All morality,” said
Seneca, “rests upon the exercise of
the will.” Where there is no
exercise of will, there is no morality.
Where there is no exercise of will, there
is no health. Where there is no exercise
of will, there is no wisdom. Human will
is the means by which man turns on the
tap which contacts him with the universal
will, which is ever seeking to express
itself through him, and through his will
in terms of life and joy and health and
strength.
Oh, let us
pray to identify our wills with the great
Will of God and say: “Thy Will be
done.” But let us know what the
Will of God is. Let us think of the
interpretation of Jesus. He negates the
old idea of the will of God and says it
is not the will of God that one of these
little ones should perish, but that all
should have everlasting life; it is not
the will of God that the sinner should
die, but become converted and live. It is
not the will of God that the sick man
should continue to sicken and die. It is
the Will of God that all men should be
well, but they must will to be
well. So let us know that the Divine Will
is working in us to will and to do of its
good pleasure, and it is the Will of
God’s good pleasure to externalize
itself in health, strength, joy,
gladness, peace, power, plenty and
prosperity.
[132] Be
still, and know that the Will of God is
operating in you, as the blood is flowing
through your veins without any personal
effort on your part. The blood surges
through your arteries and veins, but you
must will to move, otherwise you will
sit, like the Hindoos, until you
atrophy.
Take up your
bed and walk. Those of you who are afraid
to do something lest it hurt you, do
it. That which you fear to do, do.
Therein lies demonstration. Do, providing
it is right. Did Jesus abrogate will? He
said: “My will is to do the will of
Him that sent me.” That is
precisely what you are to do today and
every day.
Chapter
12
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
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