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Title: The Hidden Power, and Other Papers upon Mental Science

Author: T. Troward

Release date: May 29, 2008 [eBook #25638]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Kevin Handy, John Hagerson, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


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   Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully
   as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings. Obvious
   typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the
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THE HIDDEN POWER

And Other Papers upon Mental Science

by

T. TROWARD

Late Divisional Judge, Punjab. Honorary Member of the
Medico-Legal Society of New York. First Vice-President
International New Thought Alliance







New York
Robert M. McBride & Company

Copyright, 1921, by S. A. Troward
All rights reserved

Sixth Printing September 1936
Printed in the United States of America




PUBLISHER'S NOTE


The material comprised in this volume has been selected from unpublished
manuscripts and magazine articles by Judge Troward, and "The Hidden
Power" is, it is believed, the last book which will be published under
his name. Only an insignificant portion of his work has been deemed
unworthy of permanent preservation. Whenever possible, dates have been
affixed to these papers. Those published in 1902 appeared originally in
"EXPRESSION: A Journal of Mind and Thought," in London, and to some of
these have been added notes made later by the author.

The Publishers wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to Mr. Daniel M.
Murphy of New York for his services in the selection and arrangement of
the material.




CONTENTS


 CHAPTER                                                     PAGE

      I The Hidden Power                                        1

     II The Perversion of Truth                                42

    III The "I Am"                                             59

     IV Affirmative Power                                      63

      V Submission                                             67

     VI Completeness                                           74

    VII The Principle of Guidance                              81

   VIII Desire as the Motive Power                             85

     IX Touching Lightly                                       92

      X Present Truth                                          96

     XI Yourself                                               99

    XII Religious Opinions                                    105

   XIII A Lesson from Browning                                113

    XIV The Spirit of Opulence                                118

     XV Beauty                                                123

    XVI Separation and Unity                                  129

   XVII Externalisation                                       141

  XVIII Entering into the Spirit of It                        146

    XIX The Bible and the New Thought
          I. The Son                                          153
         II. The Great Affirmation                            166
        III. The Father                                       178
         IV. Conclusion                                       185

     XX Jachin and Boaz                                       192

    XXI Hephzibah                                             197

   XXII Mind and Hand                                         204

  XXIII The Central Control                                   209

   XXIV What is Higher Thought                                213

    XXV Fragments                                             215




THE HIDDEN POWER AND OTHER ESSAYS




I

THE HIDDEN POWER


To realise fully how much of our present daily life consists in symbols
is to find the answer to the old, old question, What is Truth? and in
the degree in which we begin to recognise this we begin to approach
Truth. The realisation of Truth consists in the ability to translate
symbols, whether natural or conventional, into their equivalents; and
the root of all the errors of mankind consists in the inability to do
this, and in maintaining that the symbol has nothing behind it. The
great duty incumbent on all who have attained to this knowledge is to
impress upon their fellow men that there is an _inner side_ to things,
and that until this _inner_ side is known, the things themselves are not
known.

There is an inner and an outer side to everything; and the quality of
the superficial mind which causes it to fail in the attainment of Truth
is its willingness to rest content with the outside only. So long as
this is the case it is impossible for a man to grasp the import of his
own relation to the universal, and it is this relation which constitutes
all that is signified by the word "Truth." So long as a man fixes his
attention only on the superficial it is impossible for him to make any
progress in knowledge. He is denying that principle of "Growth" which is
the root of all life, whether spiritual intellectual, or material, for
he does not stop to reflect that all which he sees as the outer side of
things can result only from some germinal principle hidden deep in the
centre of their being.

Expansion from the centre by growth according to a necessary order of
sequence, this is the Law of Life of which the whole universe is the
outcome, alike in the one great solidarity of cosmic being, as in the
separate individualities of its minutest organisms. This great principle
is the key to the whole riddle of Life, upon whatever plane we
contemplate it; and without this key the door from the outer to the
inner side of things can never be opened. It is therefore the duty of
all to whom this door has, at least in some measure, been opened, to
endeavour to acquaint others with the fact that there is an inner side
to things, and that life becomes truer and fuller in proportion as we
penetrate to it and make our estimates of all things according to what
becomes visible from this interior point of view.

In the widest sense everything is a symbol of that which constitutes its
inner being, and all Nature is a gallery of arcana revealing great
truths to those who can decipher them. But there is a more precise
sense in which our current life is based upon symbols in regard to the
most important subjects that can occupy our thoughts: the symbols by
which we strive to represent the nature and being of God, and the manner
in which the life of man is related to the Divine life. The whole
character of a man's life results from what he really believes on this
subject: not his formal statement of belief in a particular creed, but
what he realises as the stage which his mind has actually attained in
regard to it.

Has a man's mind only reached the point at which he thinks it is
impossible to know anything about God, or to make any use of the
knowledge if he had it? Then his whole interior world is in the
condition of confusion, which must necessarily exist where no spirit of
order has yet begun to move upon the chaos in which are, indeed, the
elements of being, but all disordered and neutralising one another. Has
he advanced a step further, and realised that there is a ruling and an
ordering power, but beyond this is ignorant of its nature? Then the
unknown stands to him for the terrific, and, amid a tumult of fears and
distresses that deprive him of all strength to advance, he spends his
life in the endeavour to propitiate this power as something naturally
adverse to him, instead of knowing that it is the very centre of his own
life and being.

And so on through every degree, from the lowest depths of ignorance to
the greatest heights of intelligence, a man's life must always be the
exact reflection of that particular stage which he has reached in the
perception of the divine nature and of his own relation to it; and as we
approach the full perception of Truth, so the life-principle within us
expands, the old bonds and limitations which had no existence in reality
fall off from us, and we enter into regions of light, liberty, and
power, of which we had previously no conception. It is impossible,
therefore, to overestimate the importance of being able to realise the
symbol _for_ a symbol, and being able to penetrate to the inner
substance which it represents. Life itself is to be realised only by the
conscious experience of its livingness in ourselves, and it is the
endeavour to translate these experiences into terms which shall suggest
a corresponding idea to others that gives rise to all symbolism.

The nearer those we address have approached to the actual experience,
the more transparent the symbol becomes; and the further they are from
such experience the thicker is the veil; and our whole progress consists
in the fuller and fuller translation of the symbols into clearer and
clearer statements of that for which they stand. But the first step,
without which all succeeding ones must remain impossible, is to convince
people that symbols _are_ symbols, and not the very Truth itself. And
the difficulty consists in this, that if the symbolism is in any degree
adequate it must, in some measure, represent the form of Truth, just as
the modelling of a drapery suggests the form of the figure beneath. They
have a certain consciousness that somehow they are in the presence of
Truth; and this leads people to resent any removal of those folds of
drapery which have hitherto conveyed this idea to their minds.

There is sufficient indication of the inner Truth in the outward form to
afford an excuse for the timorous, and those who have not sufficient
mental energy to think for themselves, to cry out that finality has
already been attained, and that any further search into the matter must
end in the destruction of Truth. But in raising such an outcry they
betray their ignorance of the very nature of Truth, which is that it can
never be destroyed: the very fact that Truth is Truth makes this
impossible. And again they exhibit their ignorance of the first
principle of Life--namely, the Law of Growth, which throughout the
universe perpetually pushes forward into more and more vivid forms of
expression, having expansion everywhere and finality nowhere.

Such ignorant objections need not, therefore, alarm us; and we should
endeavour to show those who make them that what they fear is the only
natural order of the Divine Life, which is "over all, and through all,
and in all." But we must do this gently, and not by forcibly thrusting
upon them the object of their terror, and so repelling them from all
study of the subject. We should endeavour gradually to lead them to see
that there is something interior to what they have hitherto held to be
ultimate Truth, and to realise that the sensation of emptiness and
dissatisfaction, which from time to time will persist in making itself
felt in their hearts, is nothing else than the pressing forward of the
spirit within to declare that inner side of things which alone can
satisfactorily account for what we observe on the exterior, and without
the knowledge of which we can never perceive the true nature of our
inheritance in the Universal Life which is the Life Everlasting.


II

What, then, is this central principle which is at the root of all
things? It is Life. But not life as we recognise it in particular forms
of manifestation; it is something more interior and concentrated than
that. It is that "unity of the spirit" which _is_ unity, simply because
it has not yet passed into diversity. Perhaps this is not an easy idea
to grasp, but it is the root of all scientific conception of spirit; for
without it there is no common principle to which we can refer the
innumerable forms of manifestation that spirit assumes.

It is the conception of Life as the sum-total of all its undistributed
powers, being as yet none of these in particular, but all of them in
potentiality. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract idea, but it is
essentially that of the centre from which growth takes place by
expansion in every direction. This is that last residuum which defies
all our powers of analysis. This is truly "the unknowable," not in the
sense of the unthinkable but of the unanalysable. It is the subject of
perception, not of knowledge, if by knowledge we mean that faculty which
estimates the _relations_ between things, because here we have passed
beyond any questions of relations, and are face to face with the
absolute.

This innermost of all is absolute Spirit. It is Life as yet not
differentiated into any specific mode; it is the universal Life which
pervades all things and is at the heart of all appearances.

To come into the knowledge of this is to come into the secret of power,
and to enter into the secret place of Living Spirit. Is it illogical
first to call this the unknowable, and then to speak of coming into the
knowledge of it? Perhaps so; but no less a writer than St. Paul has set
the example; for does he not speak of the final result of all searchings
into the heights and depths and lengths and breadths of the inner side
of things as being, to attain the knowledge of that Love which passeth
knowledge. If he is thus boldly illogical in phrase, though not in fact,
may we not also speak of knowing "the unknowable"? We may, for this
knowledge is the root of all other knowledge.

The presence of this undifferentiated universal life-power is the final
axiomatic fact to which all our analysis must ultimately conduct us. On
whatever plane we make our analysis it must always abut upon pure
essence, pure energy, pure being; that which knows itself and recognises
itself, but which cannot dissect itself because it is not built up of
parts, but is ultimately integral: it is pure Unity. But analysis which
does not lead to synthesis is merely destructive: it is the child
wantonly pulling the flower to pieces and throwing away the fragments;
not the botanist, also pulling the flower to pieces, but building up in
his mind from those carefully studied fragments a vast synthesis of the
constructive power of Nature, embracing the laws of the formation of all
flower-forms. The value of analysis is to lead us to the original
starting-point of that which we analyse, and so to teach us the laws by
which its final form springs from this centre.

Knowing the law of its construction, we turn our analysis into a
synthesis, and we thus gain a power of building up which must always be
beyond the reach of those who regard "the unknowable" as one with
"not-being."

_This_ idea of the unknowable is the root of all materialism; and yet no
scientific man, however materialistic his proclivities, treats the
unanalysable residuum thus when he meets it in the experiments of his
laboratory. On the contrary, he makes this final unanalysable fact the
basis of his synthesis. He finds that in the last resort it is energy of
some kind, whether as heat or as motion; but he does not throw up his
scientific pursuits because he cannot analyse it further. He adopts the
precisely opposite course, and realises that the conservation of energy,
its indestructibility, and the impossibility of adding to or detracting
from the sum-total of energy in the world, is the one solid and
unchanging fact on which alone the edifice of physical science can be
built up. He bases all his knowledge upon his knowledge of "the
unknowable." And rightly so, for if he could analyse this energy into
yet further factors, then the same problem of "the unknowable" would
meet him still. All our progress consists in continually pushing the
unknowable, in the sense of the unanalysable residuum, a step further
back; but that there should be no ultimate unanalysable residuum
anywhere is an inconceivable idea.

In thus realising the undifferentiated unity of Living Spirit as the
central fact of any system, whether the system of the entire universe or
of a single organism, we are therefore following a strictly scientific
method. We pursue our analysis until it necessarily leads us to this
final fact, and then we accept this fact as the basis of our synthesis.
The Science of Spirit is thus not one whit less scientific than the
Science of Matter; and, moreover, it starts from the same initial fact,
the fact of a living energy which defies definition or explanation,
wherever we find it; but it differs from the science of matter in that
it contemplates this energy under an aspect of responsive intelligence
which does not fall within the scope of physical science, as such. The
Science of Spirit and the Science of Matter are not opposed. They are
complementaries, and neither is fully comprehensible without some
knowledge of the other; and, being really but two portions of one whole,
they insensibly shade off into each other in a border-land where no
arbitrary line can be drawn between them. Science studied in a truly
scientific spirit, following out its own deductions unflinchingly to
their legitimate conclusions, will always reveal the twofold aspect of
things, the inner and the outer; and it is only a truncated and maimed
science that refuses to recognise both.

The study of the material world is not Materialism, if it be allowed to
progress to its legitimate issue. Materialism is that limited view of
the universe which will not admit the existence of anything but
mechanical effects of mechanical causes, and a system which recognises
no higher power than the physical forces of nature must logically result
in having no higher ultimate appeal than to physical force or to fraud
as its alternative. I speak, of course, of the tendency of the system,
not of the morality of individuals, who are often very far in advance of
the systems they profess. But as we would avoid the propagation of a
mode of thought whose effects history shows only too plainly, whether in
the Italy of the Borgias, or the France of the First Revolution, or the
Commune of the Franco-Prussian War, we should set ourselves to study
that inner and spiritual aspect of things which is the basis of a system
whose logical results are truth and love instead of perfidy and
violence.

Some of us, doubtless, have often wondered why the Heavenly Jerusalem is
described in the Book of Revelations as a cube; "the length and the
breadth and the height of it are equal." This is because the cube is the
figure of perfect stability, and thus represents Truth, which can never
be overthrown. Turn it on what side you will, it still remains the
perfect cube, always standing upright; you cannot upset it. This figure,
then, represents the manifestation in concrete solidity of that central
life-giving energy, which is not itself any one plane but generates all
planes, the planes of the above and of the below and of all four sides.
But it is at the same time a city, a place of habitation; and this is
because that which is "the within" is Living Spirit, which has its
dwelling there.

As one plane of the cube implies all the other planes and also "the
within," so any plane of manifestation implies the others and also that
"within" which generates them all. Now, if we would make any progress in
the spiritual side of science--and _every_ department of science has its
spiritual side--we must always keep our minds fixed upon this "innermost
within" which contains the potential of all outward manifestation, the
"fourth dimension" which generates the cube; and our common forms of
speech show how intuitively we do this. We speak of the spirit in which
an act is done, of entering into the spirit of a game, of the spirit of
the time, and so on. Everywhere our intuition points out the spirit as
the true essence of things; and it is only when we commence arguing
about them from without, instead of from within, that our true
perception of their nature is lost.

The scientific study of spirit consists in following up intelligently
and according to definite method the same principle that now only
flashes upon us at intervals fitfully and vaguely. When we once realise
that this universal and unlimited power of spirit is at the root of all
things and of ourselves also, then we have obtained the key to the whole
position; and, however far we may carry our studies in spiritual
science, we shall nowhere find anything else but particular developments
of this one universal principle. "The Kingdom of Heaven is _within_
you."


III

I have laid stress on the fact that the "innermost within" of all things
is living Spirit, and that the Science of Spirit is distinguished from
the Science of Matter in that it contemplates Energy under an aspect of
responsive intelligence which does not fall within the scope of physical
science, as such. These are the two great points to lay hold of if we
would retain a clear idea of Spiritual Science, and not be misled by
arguments drawn from the physical side of Science only--the livingness
of the originating principle which is at the heart of all things, and
its intelligent and responsive nature. Its livingness is patent to our
observation, at any rate from the point where we recognise it in the
vegetable kingdom; but its intelligence and responsiveness are not,
perhaps, at once so obvious. Nevertheless, a little thought will soon
lead us to recognise this also.

No one can deny that there is an intelligent order throughout all
nature, for it requires the highest intelligence of our most
highly-trained minds to follow the steps of this universal intelligence
which is always in advance of them. The more deeply we investigate the
world we live in, the more clear it must become to us that all our
science is the translation into words or numerical symbols of that order
which already exists. If the clear statement of this existing order is
the highest that the human intellect can reach, this surely argues a
corresponding intelligence in the power which gives rise to this great
sequence of order and interrelation, so as to constitute one harmonious
whole. Now, unless we fall back on the idea of a workman working upon
material external to himself--in which case we have to explain the
phenomenon of the workman--the only conception we can form of this power
is that it is the Living Spirit inherent in the heart of every atom,
giving it outward form and definition, and becoming in it those
intrinsic polarities which constitute its characteristic nature.

There is no random work here. Every attraction and repulsion acts with
its proper force collecting the atoms into molecules, the molecules into
tissues, the tissues into organs, and the organs into individuals. At
each stage of the progress we get the sum of the intelligent forces
which operate in the constituent parts, _plus_ a higher degree of
intelligence which we may regard as the collective intelligence superior
to that of the mere sum-total of the parts, something which belongs to
the individual _as a whole_, and not to the parts as such. These are
facts which can be amply proved from physical science; and they also
supply a great law in spiritual science, which is that in any collective
body the intelligence of the whole is superior to that of the sum of the
parts.

Spirit is at the root of all things, and thoughtful observation shows
that its operation is guided by unfailing intelligence which adapts
means to ends, and harmonises the entire universe of manifested being in
those wonderful ways which physical science renders clearer every day;
and this intelligence must be in the generating spirit itself, because
there is no other source from which it could proceed. On these grounds,
therefore, we may distinctly affirm that Spirit is intelligent, and that
whatever it does is done by the intelligent adaptation of means to ends.

But Spirit is also responsive. And here we have to fall back upon the
law above stated, that the mere sum of the intelligence of Spirit in
lower degrees of manifestation is not equal to the intelligence of the
complex _whole_, as a whole. This is a radical law which we cannot
impress upon our minds too deeply. The degree of spiritual intelligence
is marked by the wholeness of the organism through which it finds
expression; and therefore the more highly organised being has a degree
of spirit which is superior to, and consequently capable of exercising
control over, all lower or less fully-integrated degrees of spirit; and
this being so, we can now begin to see why the spirit that is the
"innermost within" of all things is responsive as well as intelligent.

Being intelligent, it _knows_, and spirit being ultimately all there is,
that which it knows is itself. Hence it is that power which recognises
itself; and accordingly the lower powers of it recognise its higher
powers, and by the law of attraction they are bound to respond to the
higher degrees of themselves. On this general principle, therefore,
spirit, under whatever exterior revealed, is necessarily intelligent and
responsive. But intelligence and responsiveness imply personality; and
we may therefore now advance a step further and argue that _all_ spirit
contains the elements of personality, even though, in any particular
instance, it may not yet be expressed as that individual personality
which we find in ourselves.

In short, spirit is always personal in its nature, even when it has not
yet attained to that degree of synthesis which is sufficient to render
it personal in manifestation. In ourselves the synthesis has proceeded
far enough to reach that degree, and therefore we recognise ourselves as
the manifestation of personality. The human kingdom is the kingdom of
the manifestation of that personality, which is of the essence of
spiritual substance on every plane. Or, to put the whole argument in a
simpler form, we may say that our own personality must necessarily have
had its origin in that which is personal, on the principle that you
cannot get more out of a bag than it contains.

In ourselves, therefore, we find that more perfect synthesis of the
spirit into manifested personality which is wanting in the lower
kingdoms of nature, and, accordingly, since spirit is necessarily that
which knows itself and must, therefore, recognise its own degrees in its
various modes, the spirit in all degrees below that of human personality
is bound to respond to itself in that superior degree which constitutes
human individuality; and this is the basis of the power of human thought
to externalise itself in infinite forms of its own ordering.

But if the subordination of the lower degrees of spirit to the higher is
one of the fundamental laws which lie at the bottom of the creative
power of thought, there is another equally fundamental law which places
a salutary restraint upon the abuse of that power. It is the law that we
can command the powers of the universal for our own purposes only in
proportion as we first realise and obey their generic character. We can
employ water for any purpose which does not require it to run up-hill,
and we can utilise electricity for any purpose that does not require it
to pass from a lower to a higher potential.

So with that universal power which we call the Spirit. It has an
inherent generic character with which we must comply if we would employ
it for our specific purposes, and this character is summed up in the one
word "goodness." The Spirit is Life, hence its generic tendency must
always be lifeward or to the increase of the livingness of every
individual. And since it is universal it can have no particular
interests to serve, and therefore its action must always be equally for
the benefit of all. This is the generic character of spirit; and just as
water, or electricity, or any other of the physical forces of the
universe, will not work contrary to their generic character, so Spirit
will not work contrary to its generic character.

The inference is obvious. If we would use Spirit we must follow the law
of the Spirit which is "Goodness." This is the only limitation. If our
originating intention is good, we may employ the spiritual power for
what purpose we will. And how is "goodness" to be defined? Simply by the
child's definition that what is bad is not good, and that what is good
is not bad; we all know the difference between bad and good
instinctively. If we will conform to this principle of obedience to the
generic law of the Spirit, all that remains is for us to study the law
of the proportion which exists between the more and less fully
integrated modes of Spirit, and then bring our knowledge to bear with
determination.


IV

The law of spirit, to which our investigation has now led us, is of the
very widest scope. We have followed it up from the conception of the
intelligence of spirit, subsisting in the initial atoms, to the
aggregation of this intelligence as the conscious identity of the
individual. But there is no reason why this law should cease to operate
at this point, or at any point short of the whole. The test of the
soundness of any principle is that it can operate as effectively on a
large scale as on a small one, that though the nature of its field is
determined by the nature of the principle itself, the extent of its
field is unlimited. If, therefore, we continue to follow up the law we
have been considering, it leads us to the conception of a unit of
intelligence as far superior to that of the individual man as the unity
of his individual intelligence is superior to that of the intelligence
of any single atom of his body; and thus we may conceive of a collective
individuality representing the spiritual character of any aggregate of
men, the inhabitants of a city, a district, a country, or of the entire
world.

Nor need the process stop here. On the same principle there would be a
superior collective individuality for the humanity of the entire solar
system, and finally we reach the conception of a supreme intelligence
bringing together in itself the collective individualities of all the
systems in the universe. This is by no means a merely fanciful notion.
We find it as the law by which our own conscious individuality is
constituted; and we find the analogous principle working universally on
the physical plane. It is known to physical science as the "law of
inverse squares," by which the forces of reciprocal attraction or
repulsion, as the case may be, are not merely equivalent to the sum of
the forces emitted by the two bodies concerned, but are equivalent to
these two forces multiplied together and divided by the square of the
distance between them, so that the resultant power continually rises in
a rapidly-increasing ratio as the two reciprocally exciting bodies
approach one another.

Since this law is so universal throughout physical nature, the doctrine
of continuity affords every ground for supposing that its analogue holds
good in respect of spiritual nature. We must never lose sight of the
old-world saying that "a truth on one plane is a truth on all." If a
principle exists at all it exists universally. We must not allow
ourselves to be misled by appearances; we must remember that the
perceptible results of the working of any principle consist of two
factors--the principle itself or the active factor, and the
subject-matter on which it acts or the passive factor; and that while
the former is invariable, the latter is variable, and that the operation
of the same invariable upon different variables must necessarily produce
a variety of results. This at once becomes evident if we state it
mathematically; for example, _a_, _b_ or _c_, multiplied by _x_ give
respectively the results _ax_, _bx_, _cx_, which differ materially from
one another, though the factor _x_ always remains the same.

This law of the generation of power by attraction applies on the
spiritual as well as on the physical plane, and acts with the same
mathematical precision on both; and thus the human individuality
consists, not in the mere aggregation of its parts, whether spiritual or
corporeal, but in the _unity_ of power resulting from the intimate
association into which those parts enter with one another, which unity,
according to this law of the generation of power by attraction, is
infinitely superior, both in intelligence and power, to any less fully
integrated mode of spirit. Thus a natural principle, common alike to
physical and spiritual law, fully accounts for all claims that have ever
been made for the creative power of our thought over all things that
come within the circle of our own particular life. Thus it is that each
man is the centre of his own universe, and has the power, by directing
his own thought, to control all things therein.

But, as I have said above, there is no reason why this principle should
not be recognised as expanding from the individual until it embraces
the entire universe. Each man, as the centre of his own world, is
himself centred in a higher system in which he is only one of
innumerable similar atoms, and this system again in a higher until we
reach the supreme centre of all things; intelligence and power increase
from centre to centre in a ratio rising with inconceivable rapidity,
according to the law we are now investigating, until they culminate in
illimitable intelligence and power commensurate with All-Being.

Now we have seen that the relation of man to the lower modes of spirit
is that of superiority and command, but what is his relation to these
higher modes? In any harmoniously constituted system the relation of the
part to the whole never interferes with the free operation of the part
in the performance of its own functions; but, on the contrary, it is
precisely by means of this relation that each part is maintained in a
position to discharge all functions for which it is fitted. Thus, then,
the subordination of the individual man to the supreme mind, so far from
curtailing his liberty, is the very condition which makes liberty
possible, or even life itself. The generic movement of the whole
necessarily carries the part along with it; and so long as the part
allows itself thus to be carried onwards there will be no hindrance to
its free working in any direction for which it is fitted by its own
individuality. This truth was set forth in the old Hindu religion as the
Car of Jaggarnath--an ideal car only, which later ages degraded into a
terribly material symbol. "Jaggarnath" means "Lord of the Universe," and
thus signifies the Universal Mind. This, by the law of Being, must
always move forward regardless of any attempts of individuals to
restrain it. Those who mount upon its car move onward with it to
endlessly advancing evolution, while those who seek to oppose it must be
crushed beneath its wheels, for it is no respecter of persons.

If, therefore, we would employ the universal law of spirit to control
our own little individual worlds, we must also recognise it in respect
to the supreme centre round which we ourselves revolve. But not in the
old way of supposing that this centre is a capricious Individuality
external to ourselves, which can be propitiated or cajoled into giving
the good which he is not good enough to give of his own proper motion.
So long as we retain this infantile idea we have not come into the
liberty which results from the knowledge of the certainty of Law.
Supreme Mind is Supreme Law, and can be calculated upon with the same
accuracy as when manifested in any of the particular laws of the
physical world; and the result of studying, understanding and obeying
this Supreme Law is that we thereby acquire the power to _use_ it. Nor
need we fear it with the old fear which comes from ignorance, for we can
rely with confidence upon the proposition that the whole can have no
interest adverse to the parts of which it is composed; and conversely
that the part can have no interest adverse to the whole.

Our ignorance of our relation to the whole may make us appear to have
separate interests, but a truer knowledge must always show such an idea
to be mistaken. For this reason, therefore, the same responsiveness of
spirit which manifests itself as obedience to our wishes, when we look
to those degrees of spirit which are lower than her own individuality,
must manifest itself as a necessary inflowing of intelligence and power
when we look to the infinity of spirit, of which our individuality is a
singular expression, because in so looking upwards we are looking for
the higher degrees of _ourself_.

The increased vitality of the parts means the increased vitality of the
whole, and since it is impossible to conceive of spirit otherwise than
as a continually expanding principle of Life, the demand for such
increased vitality must, by the inherent nature of spirit, be met by a
corresponding supply of continually growing intelligence and power.
Thus, by a natural law, the demand creates the supply, and this supply
may be freely applied to any and every subject-matter that commends
itself to us. There is no limit to the supply of this energy other than
what we ourselves put to it by our thought; nor is there any limit to
the purposes we may make it serve other than the one grand Law of Order,
which says that good things used for wrong purposes become evil. The
consideration of the intelligent and responsive nature of spirit shows
that there can be no limitations but these. The one is a limitation
inherent in spirit itself, and the other is a limitation which has no
root except in our own ignorance.

It is true that to maintain our healthy action within the circle of our
own individual world we must continually move forward with the movement
of the larger whole of which we form a part. But this does not imply any
restriction of our liberty to make the fullest use of our lives in
accordance with those universal principles of life upon which they are
founded; for there is not one law for the part and another for the
whole, but the same law of Being permeates both alike. In proportion,
therefore, as we realise the true law of our own individuality we shall
find that it is one with the law of progress for the race. The
collective individuality of mankind is only the reproduction on a larger
scale of the personal individuality; and whatever action truly develops
the inherent powers of the individual must necessarily be in line with
that forward march of the universal mind which is the evolution of
humanity as a whole.

Selfishness is a narrow view of our own nature which loses sight of our
place in relation to the whole, not perceiving that it is from this very
relation that our life is drawn. It is ignorance of our own
possibilities and consequent limitation of our own powers. If,
therefore, the evidence of harmonious correlation throughout the
physical world leads irresistibly to the inference of intelligent
spirit as the innermost within of all things, we must recognise
ourselves also as individual manifestations of the same spirit which
expresses itself throughout the universe as that power of intelligent
responsiveness which is Love.


V

Thus we find ourselves to be a necessary and integral part of the
Infinite Harmony of All-Being; not merely recognising this great truth
as a vague intuition, but as the logical and unavoidable result of the
universal Life-principle which permeates all Nature. We find our
intuition was true because we have discovered the law which gave rise to
it; and now intuition and investigation both unite in telling us of our
own individual place in the great scheme of things. Even the most
advanced among us have, as yet, little more than the faintest
adumbration of what this place is. It is the place of _power_. Towards
those higher modes of spirit which we speak of as "the universal," the
law of man's inmost nature makes him as a lens, drawing into the focus
of his own individuality all that he will of light and power in streams
of inexhaustible supply; and towards the lower modes of spirit, which
form for each one the sphere of his own particular world, man thus
becomes the directive centre of energy and order.

Can we conceive of any position containing greater possibilities than
these? The circle of this vital influence may expand as the individual
grows into the wider contemplation of his unity with Infinite Being; but
any more comprehensive law of relationship it would be impossible to
formulate. Emerson has rightly said that a little algebra will often do
far more towards clearing our ideas than a large amount of poetic
simile. Algebraically it is a self-evident proposition that any
difference between various powers of _x_ disappears when they are
compared with _x_ multiplied into itself to infinity, because there can
be no ratio between any determinate power, however high, and the
infinite; and thus the relation between the individual and All-Being
must always remain the same.[1]

    [Footnote 1: X^{2} : X^{n} :: X^{10} X^{n}.]

But this in no way interferes with the law of growth, by which the
individual rises to higher and higher powers of his own individuality.
The unchangeableness of the relation between all determinate powers of
_x_ and infinity does not affect the relations of the different powers
of _x_ between themselves; but rather the fact that the multiplication
of _x_ into itself to infinity is mentally conceivable is the very proof
that there is no limit to the extent to which it is possible to raise
_x_ in its determinate powers.

I trust unmathematical readers will pardon my using this method of
statement for the benefit of others to whom it will carry conviction. A
relation once clearly grasped in its mathematical aspect becomes
thenceforth one of the unalterable truths of the universe, no longer a
thing to be argued about, but an axiom which may be assumed as the
foundation on which to build up the edifice of further knowledge. But,
laying aside mathematical formulæ, we may say that because the Infinite
is infinite there can be no limit to the extent to which the vital
principle of growth may draw upon it, and therefore there is no limit to
the expansion of the individual's powers. Because we are _what_ we are,
we may _become_ what we will.

The Kabbalists tell us of "the lost word," the word of power which
mankind has lost. To him who discovers this word all things are
possible. Is this mirific word really lost? Yes, and No. It is the open
secret of the universe, and the Bible gives us the key to it. It tells
us, "The Word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart." It is
the most familiar of all words, the word which in our heart we realise
as the centre of our conscious being, and which is in our mouth a
hundred times a day. It is the word "I AM." Because I am what I am, I
may be what I will to be. My individuality is one of the modes in which
the Infinite expresses itself, and therefore I am myself that very power
which I find to be the innermost within of all things.

To me, thus realising the great unity of all Spirit, the infinite is not
the indefinite, for I see it to be the infinite of _Myself_. It is the
very same I AM that I am; and this not by any act of uncertain favour,
but by the law of polarity which is the basis of all Nature. The law of
polarity is that law according to which everything attains completion by
manifesting itself in the opposite direction to that from which it
started. It is the simple law by which there can be no inside without an
outside, nor one end of a stick without an opposite end.

Life is motion, and all motion is the appearance of energy at another
point, and, where any work has been done, under another form than that
in which it originated; but wherever it reappears, and in whatever new
form, the vivifying energy is still the same. This is nothing else than
the scientific doctrine of the conservation of energy, and it is upon
this well-recognised principle that our perception of ourselves as
integral portions of the great universal power is based.

We do well to pay heed to the sayings of the great teachers who have
taught that all power is in the "I AM," and to accept this teaching by
faith in their bare authority rather than not accept it at all; but the
more excellent way is to know _why_ they taught thus, and to realise for
ourselves this first great law which all the master-minds have realised
throughout the ages. It is indeed true that the "lost word" is the one
most familiar to us, ever in our hearts and on our lips. We have lost,
not the word, but the realisation of its power. And as the infinite
depths of meaning which the words I AM carry with them open out to us,
we begin to realise the stupendous truth that we are ourselves the very
power which we seek.

It is the polarisation of Spirit from the universal into the particular,
carrying with it all its inherent powers, just as the smallest flame has
all the qualities of fire. The I AM in the individual is none other than
the I AM in the universal. It is the same Power working in the smaller
sphere of which the individual is the centre. This is the great truth
which the ancients set forth under the figure of the Macrocosm and the
Microcosm, the lesser I AM reproducing the precise image of the greater,
and of which the Bible tells us when it speaks of man as the image of
God.

Now the immense practical importance of this principle is that it
affords the key to the great law that "as a man thinks so he is." We are
often asked why this should be, and the answer may be stated as follows:
We know by personal experience that we realise our own livingness in two
ways, by our power to act and our susceptibility to feel; and when we
consider Spirit in the absolute we can only conceive of it as these two
modes of livingness carried to infinity. This, therefore, means infinite
susceptibility. There can be no question as to the degree of
sensitiveness, for Spirit _is_ sensitiveness, and is thus infinitely
plastic to the slightest touch that is brought to bear upon it; and
hence every thought we formulate sends its vibrating currents out into
the infinite of Spirit, producing there currents of like quality but of
far vaster power.

But Spirit in the Infinite is the Creative Power of the universe, and
the impact of our thought upon it thus sets in motion a veritable
creative force. And if this law holds good of one thought it holds good
of all, and hence we are continually creating for ourselves a world of
surroundings which accurately reproduces the complexion of our own
thoughts. Persistent thoughts will naturally produce a greater external
effect than casual ones not centred upon any particular object.
Scattered thoughts which recognise no principle of unity will fail to
reproduce any principle of unity. The thought that we are weak and have
no power over circumstances results in inability to control
circumstances, and the thought of power produces power.

At every moment we are dealing with an infinitely sensitive medium which
stirs creative energies that give form to the slightest of our
thought-vibrations. This power is inherent in us because of our
spiritual nature, and we cannot divest ourselves of it. It is our truly
tremendous heritage because it is a power which, if not intelligently
brought into lines of orderly activity, will spend its uncontrolled
forces in devastating energy. If it is not used to build up, it will
destroy. And there is nothing exceptional in this: it is merely the
reappearance on the plane of the universal and undifferentiated of the
same principle that pervades all the forces of Nature. Which of these is
not destructive unless drawn off into some definite direction?
Accumulated steam, accumulated electricity, accumulated water, will at
length burst forth, carrying destruction all around; but, drawn off
through suitable channels, they become sources of constructive power,
inexhaustible as Nature itself.

And here let me pause to draw attention to this idea of accumulation.
The greater the accumulation of energy, the greater the danger if it be
not directed into a proper order, and the greater the power if it be.
Fortunately for mankind the physical forces, such as electricity, do not
usually subsist in a highly concentrated form. Occasionally
circumstances concur to produce such concentration, but as a rule the
elements of power are more or less equally dispersed. Similarly, for the
mass of mankind, this spiritual power has not yet reached a very high
degree of concentration. Every mind, it is true, must be in some measure
a centre of concentration, for otherwise it would have no conscious
individuality; but the power of the individualised mind rapidly rises as
it recognises its unity with the Infinite life, and its
thought-currents, whether well or ill directed, then assume a
proportionately great significance.

Hence the ill effects of wrongly directed thought are in some degree
mitigated in the great mass of mankind, and many causes are in operation
to give a right direction to their thoughts, though the thinkers
themselves are ignorant of what thought-power is. To give a right
direction to the thoughts of ignorant thinkers is the purpose of much
religious teaching, which these uninstructed ones must accept by faith
in bare authority because they are unable to realise its true import.
But notwithstanding the aids thus afforded to mankind, the general
stream of unregulated thought cannot but have an adverse tendency, and
hence the great object to which the instructed mind directs its power is
to free itself from the entanglements of disordered thought, and to help
others to do the same. To escape from this entanglement is to attain
perfect Liberty, which is perfect Power.


VI

The entanglement from which we need to escape has its origin in the very
same principle which gives rise to liberty and power. It is the same
principle applied under inverted conditions. And here I would draw
particular attention to the law that any sequence followed out in an
inverted order must produce an inverted result, for this goes a long way
to explain many of the problems of life. The physical world affords
endless examples of the working of "inversion." In the dynamo the
sequence commences with mechanical force which is ultimately transformed
into the subtler power of electricity; but invert this order, commence
by generating electricity, and it becomes converted into mechanical
force, as in the motor. In the one order the rotation of a wheel
produces electricity, and in the opposite order electricity produces the
rotation of a wheel. Or to exhibit the same principle in the simplest
arithmetical form, if 10÷2=5 then 10÷5=2. "Inversion" is a factor of the
greatest magnitude and has to be reckoned with; but I must content
myself here with only indicating the general principle that the same
power is capable of producing diametrically opposite effects if it be
applied under opposite conditions, a truth which the so-called
"magicians" of the middle ages expressed by two triangles placed
inversely to one another. We are apt to fall into the mistake of
supposing that results of opposite character require powers of opposite
character to produce them, and our conceptions of things in general
become much simplified when we recognise that this is not the case, but
that the same power will produce opposite results as it starts from
opposite poles.

Accordingly the inverted application of the same principle which gives
rise to liberty and power constitutes the entanglement from which we
need to be delivered before power and liberty can be attained, and this
principle is expressed in the law that "as a man thinks so he is." This
is the basic law of the human mind. It is Descarte's "_cogito, ergo
sum_." If we trace consciousness to its seat we find that it is purely
subjective. Our external senses would cease to exist were it not for the
subjective consciousness which perceives what they communicate to it.

The idea conveyed to the subjective consciousness may be false, but
until some truer idea is more forcibly impressed in its stead it
remains a substantial reality to the mind which gives it objective
existence. I have seen a man speak to the stump of a tree which in the
moonlight looked like a person standing in a garden, and repeatedly ask
its name and what it wanted; and so far as the speaker's conception was
concerned the garden contained a living man who refused to answer. Thus
every mind lives in a world to which its own perceptions give objective
reality. Its perceptions may be erroneous, but they nevertheless
constitute the very reality of life for the mind that gives form to
them. No other life than the life we lead in our own mind is possible;
and hence the advance of the whole race depends on substituting the
ideas of good, of liberty, and of order for their opposites. And this
can be done only by giving some sufficient reason for accepting the new
idea in place of the old. For each one of us our beliefs constitute our
facts, and these beliefs can be changed only by discovering some ground
for a different belief.

This is briefly the rationale of the maxim that "as a man thinks so he
is"; and from the working of this principle all the issues of life
proceed. Now man's first perception of the law of cause and effect in
relation to his own conduct is that the result always partakes of the
quality of the cause; and since his argument is drawn from external
observation only, he regards external acts as the only causes he can
effectively set in operation. Hence when he attains sufficient moral
enlightenment to realise that many of his acts have been such as to
merit retribution he fears retribution as their proper result. Then by
reason of the law that "thoughts are things," the evils which he fears
take form and plunge him into adverse circumstances, which again prompt
him into further wrong acts, and from these come a fresh crop of fears
which in their turn become externalised into fresh evils, and thus
arises a circulus from which there is no escape so long as the man
recognises nothing but his external acts as a causative power in the
world of his surroundings.

This is the Law of Works, the Circle of Karma, the Wheel of Fate, from
which there appears to be no escape, because the complete fulfilment of
the law of our moral nature to-day is only sufficient for to-day and
leaves no surplus to compensate the failure of yesterday. This is the
necessary law of things as they appear from external observation only;
and, so long as this conception remains, the law of each man's
subjective consciousness makes it a reality for him. What is needed,
therefore, is to establish the conception that external acts are NOT the
only causative power, but that there is another law of causation,
namely, that of pure Thought. This is the Law of Faith, the Law of
Liberty; for it introduces us to a power which is able to inaugurate a
new sequence of causation not related to any past actions.

But this change of mental attitude cannot be brought about till we have
laid hold of some fact which is sufficient to afford a reason for the
change. We require some solid ground for our belief in this higher law.
Ultimately we find this ground in the great Truth of the eternal
relation between spirit in the universal and in the particular. When we
realise that substantially there is nothing else _but_ spirit, and that
we ourselves are reproductions in individuality of the Intelligence and
Love which rule the universe, we have reached the firm standing ground
where we find that we can send forth our Thought to produce any effect
we will. We have passed beyond the idea of two opposites requiring
reconciliation, into that of a duality in which there is no other
opposition than that of the inner and the outer of the same unity, the
polarity which is inherent in all Being, and we then realise that in
virtue of this unity our Thought is possessed of illimitable creative
power, and that it is free to range where it will, and is by no means
bound down to accept as inevitable the consequences which, if unchecked
by renovated thought, would flow from our past actions.

In its own independent creative power the mind has found the way out of
the fatal circle in which its previous ignorance of the highest law had
imprisoned it. The Unity of the Spirit is found to result in perfect
Liberty; the old sequence of Karma has been cut off, and a new and
higher order has been introduced. In the old order the line of thought
received its quality from the quality of the actions, and since they
always fell short of perfection, the development of a higher
thought-power from this root was impossible. This is the order in which
everything is seen from _without_. It is an inverted order. But in the
true order everything is seen from _within_.

It is the thought which determines the quality of the action, and not
_vice versa_, and since thought is free, it is at liberty to direct
itself to the highest principles, which thus spontaneously reproduce
themselves in the outward acts, so that both thoughts and actions are
brought into harmony with the great eternal laws and become one in
purpose with the Universal Mind. The man realises that he is no longer
bound by the consequences of his former deeds, done in the time of his
ignorance, in fact, that he never was bound by them except so far as he
himself gave them this power by false conceptions of the truth; and thus
recognising himself for what he really is--the expression of the
Infinite Spirit in individual personality--he finds that he is free,
that he is a "partaker of Divine nature," not losing his identity, but
becoming more and more fully himself with an ever-expanding perfection,
following out a line of evolution whose possibilities are inexhaustible.

But there is not in all men this knowledge. For the most part they still
look upon God as an individual Being external to themselves, and what
the more instructed man sees to be unity of mind and identity of nature
appear to the less advanced to be an external reconciliation between
opposing personalities. Hence the whole range of conceptions which may
be described as the Messianic Idea. This idea is not, as some seem to
suppose, a misconception of the truth of Being. On the contrary, when
rightly understood it will be found to imply the very widest grasp of
that truth; and it is from the platform of this supreme knowledge alone
that an idea so comprehensive in its adaptation to every class of mind
could have been evolved. It is the translation of the relations arising
from the deepest laws of Being into terms which can be realised even by
the most unlearned; a translation arranged with such consummate skill
that, as the mind grows in spirituality, every stage of advance is met
by a corresponding unfolding of the Divine meaning; while yet even the
crudest apprehension of the idea implied is sufficient to afford the
required basis for an entire renovation of the man's thoughts concerning
himself, giving him a standing ground from which to think of himself as
no longer bound by the law of retribution for past offences, but as free
to follow out the new law of Liberty as a child of God.

The man's conception of the _modus operandi_ of this emancipation may
take the form of the grossest anthropomorphism or the most childish
notions as to the satisfaction of the Divine justice by vicarious
substitution, but the working result will be the same. He has got what
satisfies him as a ground for thinking of himself in a perfectly new
light; and since the states of our subjective consciousness constitute
the realities of our life, to afford him a convincing ground for
_thinking_ himself free, is to make him free.

With increasing light he may find that his first explanation of the
_modus operandi_ was inadequate; but when he reaches this stage, further
investigation will show him that the great truth of his liberty rests
upon a firmer foundation than the conventional interpretation of
traditional dogmas, and that it has its roots in the great law of
Nature, which are never doubtful, and which can never be overturned. And
it is precisely because their whole action has its root in the
unchangeable laws of Mind that there exists a perpetual necessity for
presenting to men something which they can lay hold of as a sufficient
ground for that change of mental attitude, by which alone they can be
rescued from the fatal circle which is figured under the symbol of the
Old Serpent.

The hope and adumbration of such a new principle has formed the
substance of all religions in all ages, however misapprehended by the
ignorant worshippers; and, whatever our individual opinions may be as to
the historical facts of Christianity, we shall find that the great
figure of liberated and perfected humanity which forms its centre
fulfils this desire of all nations in that it sets forth their great
ideal of Divine power intervening to rescue man by becoming one with
him. This is the conception presented to us, whether we apprehend it in
the most literally material sense, or as the ideal presentation of the
deepest philosophic study of mental laws, or in whatever variety of ways
we may combine these two extremes. The ultimate idea impressed upon the
mind must always be the same: it is that there is a Divine warrant for
knowing ourselves to be the children of God and "partakers of the Divine
nature"; and when we thus realise that there is solid ground for
_believing_ ourselves free, by force of this very belief we _become_
free.

The proper outcome of the study of the laws of spirit which constitute
the inner side of things is not the gratification of a mere idle
curiosity, nor the acquisition of abnormal powers, but the attainment of
our spiritual liberty, without which no further progress is possible.
When we have reached this goal the old things have passed away and all
things have become new. The mystical seven days of the old creation have
been fulfilled, and the first day of the new week dawns upon us with its
resurrection to a new life, expressing on the highest plane that great
doctrine of the "octave" which the science of the ancient temples traced
through Nature, and which the science of the present day endorses,
though ignorant of its supreme significance.

When we have thus been made free by recognising our oneness with
Infinite Being, we have reached the termination of the old series of
sequences and have gained the starting-point of the new. The old
limitations are found never to have had any existence save in our own
misapprehension of the truth, and one by one they fall off as we advance
into clearer light. We find that the Life-Spirit we seek is _in
ourselves_; and, having this for our centre, our relation to all else
becomes part of a wondrous living Order in which every part works in
sympathy with the whole, and the whole in sympathy with every part, a
harmony wide as infinitude, and in which there are no limitations save
those imposed by the Law of Love.

I have endeavoured in this short series of articles to sketch briefly
the principal points of relation between Spirit in ourselves and in our
surroundings. This subject has employed the intelligence of mankind from
grey antiquity to the present day, and no one thinker can ever hope to
grasp it in all its amplitude. But there are certain broad principles
which we must all grasp, however we may specialise our studies in
detail, and these I have sought to indicate, with what degree of success
the reader must form his own opinion. Let him, however, lay firm hold of
this one fundamental truth, and the evolution of further truth from it
is only a question of time--that there is only One Spirit, however many
the modes of its manifestations, and that "the Unity of the Spirit is
the Bond of Peace."




II

THE PERVERSION OF TRUTH


There is a very general recognition, which is growing day by day more
and more widespread, that there is a sort of hidden power somewhere
which it is within our ability, somehow or other, to use. The ideas on
this subject are exceedingly vague with the generality of people, but
still they are assuming a more and more definite form, and that which
they appear to be taking with the generality of the public is the
recognition of the power of suggestion. I suppose none of us doubts that
there is such a thing as the power of suggestion and that it can produce
very great results indeed, and that it is _par excellence_ a hidden
power; it works behind the scenes, it works through what we know as the
subconscious mind, and consequently its activity is not immediately
recognisable, or the source from which it comes. Now there is in some
aspects, its usefulness, its benefit, but in other aspects there is a
source of danger, because a power of this kind is obviously one which
can be used either well or ill; in itself it is perfectly neutral, it
all depends on the purpose for which it is used, and the character of
the agent who employs it.

This recognition of the power of suggestion is in many instances taking
a most undesirable form, and I commend to your notice, in support of
this observation, numerous advertisements in certain classes of
magazines--many of you must have seen many specimens of that
kind--offering for a certain sum of money to put you in the way of
getting personal influence, mental power, power of suggestion, as the
advertisements very unblushingly put it, for any purpose that you may
desire. Some of them even go into further particulars, telling you the
particular sort of purposes for which you can employ this, all of them
certainly being such uses as no one should ever attempt to make of it.

Therefore, this recognition of the power of suggestion, say even as a
mere money-making power, to leave alone other misapplications of it, is
a feature which is taking hold, so to say, of certain sections of the
public who do not realise a higher platform in these things. It is
deplorable that it should be so, but it is in the nature of things
unavoidable. You have a power which can be used affirmatively, and which
can be used negatively, which can be used for higher purposes, and can
be used for lower purposes, and consequently you will find numbers of
people who, as soon as they get hold of it, will at once think only of
the lower purposes, not of the higher.

In support of what I say--although this is by no means, I suppose,
intended as a low application, probably it is intended as a high
application, but I cannot say I agree with it--but to show you that I
am talking from actual facts I will read you a note which I have made
from the _Daily Mail_, of the 20th January, that I daresay some of you
may have seen. It is an article headed "Killing by Prayer," and the
article goes on to say that a certain circular has been sent round to
the different hospitals and other places where the study of vivisection
goes forward to this effect. In this circular, signed with the letters
"M. C.," the writer says that he accidentally heard of a person who was
in the habit of praying from time to time for the death of one of our
leading vivisectors and that always the man indicated died. That is what
M. C. heard by chance during conversation at a hotel dinner. Then
thinking over this, M. C. goes on to say that he (or she) tried praying
that the man most likely to cause suffering to innocent subjects by his
experiments might be removed, and the consequence was that about a
fortnight later one of our most distinguished medical scientists died.

I do not know who the scientist in question was; I daresay some of you
may be aware of the name. However, that is what the _Daily Mail_ tells
us, and it also states that the Anti-Vivisection Societies were
unanimous in condemning this circular, and very properly so. Now you see
the sender of that circular, whoever he was, obviously thought he was
doing a very good piece of work. I myself am by no means any friend of
vivisection. I do not think any one can have a real knowledge of the
truth and remain in touch with it, but I certainly agreed with the
Anti-Vivisection Societies in condemning such a circular as that. You
see there is the assumption that prayer, or mental power, can be used to
remove a person from the stage of life, and M. C. claims that he did it
in the case of this particular scientist.

That brings back another parallel, almost, I might say, an historical
parallel, to our mind; that of Dr. Anna Kingsford, taking place perhaps
some forty years ago, who claimed--of course she was a very strong
anti-vivisectionist--that by thought-power she caused the death of
Claude Bernard, the great vivisection scientist of France. Certainly at
the time that she put out her forces he did die, but on the other hand,
it has been remarked that it was from that very date that her own
break-up commenced, and never ceased till she herself passed into the
other world. So you see these actions are likely to revert to the
sender, even if they are successful.

Now in these two cases the ultimate object was not a low one, it was one
which was supposed to be for the benefit of humanity and of the dumb
creation. But that does not justify the means. The maxim, "The end
justifies the means," is the greatest perversion of truth, and still
more so if this hidden power, the power of suggestion, is used to injure
any one for a more personal motive than in these cases which I have
cited. The lower the motive, the lower the action becomes, and to
suppose that because mental means are employed they make any difference
in the nature of the act is a very great mistake.

It has been sometimes my painful duty to sentence people to death for
murder, and therefore I claim that I have a very fair knowledge of what
differentiates murder from those cases in which life is taken which do
not amount to murder; and speaking from the judicial experience of a
great many years, and the trial of a large number of cases which have
involved the question whether the death penalty should be passed or not,
I have no hesitation in saying that to kill by mental means is just as
much murder as to kill by poison or the dagger. Speaking judicially, I
should have not the least hesitation in hanging any one who committed
murder by means of mental suggestion. Psychological crime, remember, is
crime just the same; possibly it is more deeply dyed crime, because of
the greater knowledge which must go along with it. I say that the
psychological criminal is worse than the ordinary criminal.

One of the teachings of the Master is on this very point. I refer you to
the miracle of the fig tree. You know that he exhibited his power of
killing not a person, not even an animal, but a tree. And when the
disciples said to him, see how this tree which you cursed has withered
away, he replied, Well, you can do exactly the same thing, and goes on
to say, nothing shall be impossible to you. Therefore if you can kill
fig trees, you can kill people, but, "forgive, if you have aught
against any," that your heavenly Father may forgive you.

He says in effect: now you have seen that this hidden power can be used
to the destruction of life, at your peril use it otherwise than as a
Divine power. Use it with prayer to God and with forgiveness of all
against whom you have any sort of grudge or ill-feeling, and if its use
is always prefaced in this way, according to the Master's directions,
then nobody can use it to injure another either in mind, body or estate.

Perhaps some of you may be inclined to smile if I use the word
"sorcery," but at the present day, under one name or another, scientific
or semi-scientific, it is nothing but the old-world sorcery which is
trying to find its way among us as the hidden power. Sorcery is the
inverted use of spiritual power. That is the definition of it, and I
speak upon authority. I refer you to the Bible where you will find
sorcery takes a prominent place among the list of those things which
exclude from the heavenly Jerusalem; the heavenly Jerusalem not being a
town or a city in this place or that place, but the perfected state of
man. Therefore, use sorcery, and you cannot reach that heavenly state.

It is on this account that we find in Revelations that wonderful
description of two symbolical women; they represent two modes of the
individual soul. Of course they go further, they indicate national
things, race evolution and so on. Why? Because all national movements,
all race evolutions, have their root in the development of the
individual. A nation or a race is only a collection of individuals, and
therefore if a principle once spreads from one individual to another, it
spreads to the nation, it spreads to the race. So, therefore, these two
symbolical women represent primarily two modes of soul, two modes of
thought. You know perfectly well the description of the two women. One,
the woman clothed with the sun, standing with the moon under her feet,
and with a diadem of stars about her head; the other seated upon an
earthly throne, holding a golden cup, and the cup is full of
abominations. Those are the two women, and we know that one of them is
called in the Scripture, Babylon, and we know which one that is. One of
the marks of this woman--mind you that means the class of
individuality--is the mark of sorcery, the mark of the inverted use of
spiritual and mental powers.

But what is the end of it? The end is that this Babylon becomes the
habitation of devils, the hold--or, as the original Greek has it, the
prison of evil, an unclean spirit, the cage of every unclean bird. That
is the development which takes place in each individual who sets out to
misuse this mental power. The misuse may have a very small beginning, it
may be such as is taught in a certain school, which I am told exists in
London, where shop assistants are trained in the use of magnetic power,
in order to decoy or compel unknowing purchasers into buying what they
do not want. I am told there is such a school; I cannot quote you my
authority. That is a trifling matter. I go into a shop and spend two or
three shillings in buying something which, when I get home, I find
absolutely useless, and I say, "How in the name of fortune did I come to
buy this rubbish?" Well, I must have been hypnotised into it. It does
not make much difference to me, but it makes a great deal of difference
to the young man or young woman who has hypnotised me, because it is the
first step on the downward path. It may be only a matter of sixpence,
but it leads on step by step, and unless that path is retraced, the
final end is that of Babylon. Therefore it is that St. John says, "I
heard a voice from Heaven saying, 'Come forth, my people, out of
her'"--and that is out of Babylon--"come forth, my people, out of
her"--that is out of this inverted mode of using spiritual power--"come
forth, my people, out of her, that ye have no fellowship with her sins
and that ye shall receive not of her plague." Therefore, against this
inverted use of the hidden power I warn every one from the first day
when he begins to realise that there is such a thing as mental or
spiritual power which can be exercised upon other persons.

Are we then on this account to go continually in terror of suffering
from malicious magnetism, fearing that some enemy here, or some enemy
there, is turning on this hidden power against us? If so, we should go
in trepidation continually. No, I do not think there is the least
reason for us to go in fear in this way. To begin with there are
comparatively few who know the law of suggestion sufficiently well to
use it either affirmatively or negatively, and of those who do know it
sufficiently to make use of it, I am convinced that the majority would
wish only to use it in all kindness, and for the benefit of the person
concerned. That, I am confident, is the attitude of nine-tenths, or I
might perhaps say ninety-nine hundredths, of the students of this
subject. They wish to do well, and look upon their use of mental power
as an additional means of doing good. But after all, human nature is
human nature, and there remains a small minority who are both able and
willing to use this hidden power injuriously for their own purposes.

Now how are we to deal with this minority? The answer is simple. Just
see them in their true light, see them for what they really are, that is
to say, persons who are ignorant of the real spiritual power. They think
they have it, and they have not. That is what it is. See them in their
true light and their power will fall away from them. The real and
ultimate power is that of the affirmative; the negative is destructive,
the affirmative is constructive. So this negative use of the hidden
power is to be destroyed by the use of the affirmative, the constructive
power. The affirmative destroys the negative always in one way, and that
is not by attacking it, not by running at it like a bull in a china
shop; but by building up life. It is always a building power--it is
building, building, building life and more life, and when that life
comes in, the negative of necessity goes out.

The ultimate affirmative position is that of conscious union with the
source of life. Realise this, and you need not trouble yourself about
any action of the negative whatever. Seek conscious union with the
ultimate, the first cause, that which is the starting point of all
things, whether in the universe or in yourself as the individual. That
starting point is always present; it is the same yesterday, to-day and
forever, and you are the world and the universe in miniature, and it is
always there working in you if you will recognise it. Remember the
reciprocity between yourself and this truly hidden power. The power of
suggestion is _a_ hidden power, but the power which creates all things
is _the_ hidden power which is at the back of all things. Now realise
that it is in yourselves and you need trouble about the negative no
longer. This is the Bible teaching regarding Christ; and that teaching
is to bring about this conscious personal union with the Divine
All-creating Spirit as a present living power to be used day by day.

The Bible tells us there is such a thing as the mystery of iniquity,
that is to say, the mystery of the spiritual power used invertedly, used
from the diabolical standpoint; and when the Bible speaks of the mystery
of iniquity, it means what it says. It tells us there are powers and
principalities in the invisible world which are using precisely these
same methods on an enormous scale; because, remember one thing, there is
never any departure in any part of the Universe from the universal rule
of law; what is law upon earth is law in Heaven, law in Hell, law in the
invisible and law in the visible; that never alters. What is done by any
spiritual power, whether it is a spiritual power of evil or of good, is
done through the mental constitution which you have. No power alters the
law of your own mind, but a power which knows the law of your mind can
use it.

Therefore, it is so essential that you should know the law of your own
mind and realise its continual amenability to suggestion. That being so,
the great thing is to get a standard for fundamental, unchangeable, and
sufficient suggestion to which you can always turn, and which is
automatically impressed upon your subconscious mind so deeply that no
counter-suggestion can ever take its place; and that is the mystery of
Christ, the Son of God. That is why we are told of the mystery of
Christ, the mystery of godliness in opposition to the mystery of
iniquity; it is because both the mystery of the Divine and the mystery
of the diabolical are seeking to work through you, and they can only
work through you by the law of your own mental constitution, that is to
say, by the law of subconscious mind acting and re-acting upon your
conscious mind and upon your body, and so upon your circumstances.

The mystery of Christ is no mere ecclesiastical fiction. People have
distorted it, and made it not clear, by trying to explain what at that
time and in those days was not properly known, by trying to explain what
they did not know; because what is commonly now known regarding the laws
of mind was unknown then. But now this light has come we begin to see
that the Bible teaching regarding Christ has a great and a deep meaning,
and it is for these reasons St. Paul said to the Corinthians: "Little
children of whom I travail again in birth, until Christ be formed in
you." That is why he speaks of "Christ in you the hope of glory," that
is to say, the Christ conception, the realisation of the Christ
principle as exhibited in the Christ person, brings you in touch with
the personal element in the Universal Spirit, the divine creative, first
moving Spirit of the Universe.

Then you see that realising this as your fundamental fact, it is
continually impressed upon your subconscious mind, even when you are not
thinking of it, because that is the action of the subconscious mind to
take in and reason and argue in its own deductive way upon things of
which you are not at the moment consciously thinking. Therefore it is
that the realisation of that great promise of redemption, which is the
backbone of the Bible from the first chapter of Genesis to the last
chapter of Revelations, is according to a scientific law. It is not a
hocus-pocus business, it is not a thing which has been arranged this way
and might just as well have been arranged in some other; it is not so
because some arbitrary Authority has commanded it, and the Authority
might just as well have commanded it some other way.

No, it is so because the more you examine it, the more you will find
that it is absolutely scientific; it is based upon the natural
constitution of the human mind. And it is therefore that "Christ," as
set forth in the Bible--whether in the Old Testament symbology, or in
the New Testament personality--"is the fulfilling of the law," in the
sense of specialising in the highest degree that which is common to all
humanity. As we realise this more and more, and specialise it more and
more, so we shall rise to higher and higher intercourse and more and
more consciousness of reciprocal identity, reciprocal life with the
Universal Power, which will raise us above any possibility of being
touched by any sort of malicious suggestion.

If anybody should be, then, so ill-willed towards us and so lamentably
ignorant of spiritual truth himself as to seek to exercise the power of
malicious suggestion against us, I pity the person who tries to do it.
He will get nothing out of it, because he is firing peas out of a
pea-shooter against an iron-clad war vessel. That is what it amounts to;
but for himself it amounts to something more. It is a true saying that
"Curses return home to roost." I think if we study these things, and
consider that there is a reason for them, we need not be in the least
alarmed about negative suggestion, or malicious magnetism, of being
brought under the power of other minds, of being got over in some way,
of being done out of our property, of being injured in our health, or
being hurt in our circumstances, and so on.

Of course if you lay yourself open to that kind of thing, you will get
it. "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." That is why the Scripture
says, "He that breaketh through a hedge, a serpent shall bite him." That
is the serpent that some of us know something about, that is our old
enemy Nahash. Some of you, at any rate, are sufficiently trained in the
inner sciences to know the serpent Nahash. Break down the hedge, that is
to say, the conscious control of your own mind, and above all the hedge
of the Divine love and wisdom with which God himself will surround you
in the personality of His Son, break down this hedge and of course
Nahash comes in. But if you keep your hedge--and remember the old Hebrew
tradition always spoke of the Divine Law as "the hedge"--if you keep
your hedge unbroken, nothing can come in except by the door. Christ
said, "I am the door, by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved."

I have spoken of the two great mysteries, the mystery of godliness and
the mystery of iniquity, the mystery of Christ and the mystery of
anti-Christ. Now, it is not necessary, mind you, that you should
understand these mysteries in full in order to get into your right
position. If it were necessary that we should fully understand these
mysteries, either to get away from the one or to get into the other, I
think all of us would have an uncommonly bad chance. I certainly should.
I can touch only the fringe of these things, but we can realise the
principle of the affirmative and the principle of the negative which
underlies them both; one is the mystery of light, the other is the
mystery of darkness.

I do not say do not study these mysteries; they are exactly what we
ought to study, but do not think that you remain in a state of danger
until you have completely fathomed the mystery. Not a bit of it. You can
quite get on the right side without understanding the whole thing,
exactly as you travel on a railway without understanding the mechanism
of the engine which takes you along.

So then we have these two mysteries, that of light and that of darkness,
and therefore what we have to do is to exercise our will to receive the
mystery of light, and then that will make for itself a centre in our own
hearts and beings, and you will become conscious of that centre. Whether
you understand it or not, you will become conscious of it--and then from
that centre, that centre of light in yourself, you can start everything
in your life, whether spiritual or temporal. You do not have to go
further back; you do not have to analyse the why and the wherefore of
these things in order to get your starting point. It may interest you
afterwards, it may strengthen you afterwards to do so, but for a
practical starting point you must realise the Divine presence in
yourself, which is the son of God manifested in you, that is the Divine
principle of personality speaking within yourself.

So then, having realised this as your centre, you carry the
all-originating affirmative power with you, all through everything that
you do and everything that you are; day and night it will be there, it
will protect you, it will guide you, it will help you. And when you want
to do so you can consciously apply to it and it will give you
assistance, and because you take this as your starting point, it will
manifest itself in all your conditions; because, remember, it is a very
simple law of logic that whatever you start with will manifest itself
all down the sequence which comes from it. If you start with the colour
red you can make all sorts of modifications and bring out orange, purple
and brown, but the red basis will show itself all down the scale of
colour, and so if you start with a basis of blue, blue will show itself
all down the scale of various colours.

Therefore, if you start with the affirmative basis, the one starting
point of the Divine spirit, not taking it lower down the stream, but
going to the fountain head, that affirmative principle of life will flow
all through, showing its own quality to the very tips of your fingers
and beyond that out into all your circumstances. So that the divine
presence will be continuously with you, not as a consequence of your
joining this Church or that, following this idea, or that teacher, but
because you know the truth for yourselves, and you have realised it as
an actual living experience in your own mind and in your own heart; and
therefore it is that this personal recognition of the Divine love and
wisdom and power is what St. Paul calls "Christ in you, the hope of
glory."

Each one who recognises this, is one who answers the Biblical
description of a true Israelite indeed. That word "Israelite" in the
Bible is a very deeply symbolical word, and carries an immense amount of
meaning with it. So get this recognition as the real working fact that
each one of you is an Israelite indeed, and if so, then make yourselves
perfectly happy with the everlasting statement, which is as true now as
it was on the day on which it was uttered: "There is no divination or
enchantment against Israel."

1909.




III

THE "I AM"


We often do not sufficiently recognise the truth of Walt Whitman's pithy
saying, "I am not all contained between my hat and my boots," and forget
the two-fold nature of the "I AM," that it is at once both the
manifested and the unmanifested, the universal and the individual. By
losing sight of this truth we surround ourselves with limitations; we
see only part of the self, and then we are surprised that the part fails
to do the work of the whole. Factors crop up on which we had not
reckoned, and we wonder where they come from, and do not understand that
they necessarily arise from that great unity in which we are all
included.

It is the grand intelligence and livingness of Universal Spirit
continually pressing forward to manifestation of itself in a glorious
humanity.

This must be effected by each individual's recognition of his power to
co-operate with the Supreme Principle through an intelligent conception
of its purpose and of the natural laws by which that purpose is
accomplished--a recognition which can proceed only from the realisation
that he himself is none other than the same Universal Principle in
particular manifestation.

When he sees this he sees that Walt Whitman's saying is true, and that
his source of intelligence, power, and purpose is in that Universal
Self, which is his as well as another's just because it is universal,
and which is therefore as completely and entirely identified with
himself as though there were no other expression of it in the world.

The understanding which alone gives value to knowledge is the
understanding that, when we employ the formula "I am, therefore I can,
therefore I will," the "I AM" with which the series starts is a being
who, so to speak, has his head in heaven and his feet upon the earth, a
perfect unity, and with a range of ideas far transcending the little
ideas which are limited by the requirements of a day or an hour. On the
other hand, the requirements of the day and the hour are real while they
last, and since the manifested life can be lived only in the moment that
now is, whether it be to-day or ten thousand years hence, our need is to
harmonise the life of expression with the life of purpose, and by
realising in ourselves the source of the highest purposes to realise
also the life of the fullest expression.

This is the meaning of prayer. Prayer is not a foolish seeking to change
the mind of Supreme Wisdom, but it is an intelligent seeking to embody
that wisdom in our thoughts so as more and more perfectly to express
_it_ in expressing _ourselves_. Thus, as we gradually grow into the
habit of finding this inspiring Presence _within ourselves_, and of
realising its forward movement as the ultimate determining factor in all
true healthful mental action, it will become second nature to us to have
all our plans, down to the apparently most trivial, so floating upon the
undercurrent of this Universal Intelligence that a great harmony will
come into our lives, every discordant manifestation will disappear, and
we shall find ourselves more and more controlling all things into the
forms that we desire.

Why? Because we have attained to _commanding_ the Spirit and making it
obey us? Certainly not, for "if the blind lead the blind both shall fall
into the ditch"; but because we are _companions_ of the Spirit, and by a
continuous and growing intimacy have changed, not "the mind of the
Spirit," but our own, and have learned to think from a higher
standpoint, where we see that the old-world saying "know thyself"
includes the knowledge of all that we mean when we speak of God.


      I AM IS ONE

This may seem a very elementary proposition, but it is one of which we
are too apt to lose sight. What does it mean? It means everything; but
we are most concerned with what it means in regard to ourselves, and to
each of us personally it means this. It means that there are not two
Spirits, one which is myself and one which is another. It means that
there is not some great unknown power external to myself which may be
actuated by perfectly different motives to my own, and which will,
therefore, oppose me with its irresistible force and pass over me,
leaving me crushed and broken like the devotee over whom the car of
Jaggarnath has rolled. It means that there is only one mind, one motive,
one power--not two opposing each other--and that my conscious mind in
all its movements is only the one mind expressing itself as (not merely
through) my own particular individuality.

There are not two I AMS, but one I am. Whatever, therefore, I can
conceive the Great Universal Life Principle to be, that I am. Let us try
fully to realise what this means. Can you conceive the Great Originating
and Sustaining Life Principle of the whole universe as poor, weak,
sordid, miserable, jealous, angry, anxious, uncertain, or in any other
way limited? We know that this is impossible. Then because the I AM is
one it is equally untrue of ourselves. Learn first to distinguish the
true self that you are from the mental and physical processes which it
throws forth as the instruments of its expression, and then learn that
this self controls these instruments, and not vice versa. As we advance
in this knowledge we know ourselves to be unlimited, and that, in the
miniature world, whose centre we are, we ourselves are the very same
overflowing of joyous livingness that the Great Life Spirit is in the
Great All. The I AM is One.




IV

AFFIRMATIVE POWER


Thoroughly to realise the true nature of affirmative power is to possess
the key to the great secret. We feel its presence in all the innumerable
forms of life by which we are surrounded and we feel it as the life in
ourselves; and at last some day the truth bursts upon us like a
revelation that we can wield this power, this life, by the process of
Thought. And as soon as we see this, the importance of regulating our
thinking begins to dawn upon us. We ask ourselves what this thought
process is, and we then find that it is thinking affirmative force into
forms which are the product of our own thought. We mentally conceive the
form and then think life into it.

This must always be the nature of the creative process on whatever
scale, whether on the grand scale of the Universal Cosmic Mind or on the
miniature scale of the individual mind; the difference is only in degree
and not in kind. We may picture the mental machinery by which this is
done in the way that best satisfies our intellect--and the satisfying of
the intellect on this point is a potent factor in giving us that
confidence in our mental action without which we can effect
nothing--but the actual externalisation is the result of something more
powerful than a merely intellectual apprehension. It is the result of
that inner mental state which, for want of a better word, we may call
our emotional conception of ourselves. It is the "self" which we _feel_
ourselves to be which takes forms of our own creating. For this reason
our thought must be so grounded upon knowledge that we shall _feel_
the truth of it, and thus be able to produce in ourselves that mental
attitude of feeling which corresponds to the condition which we desire
to externalise.

We cannot think into manifestation a different sort of life to that
which we realise in ourselves. As Horace says, "_Nemo dat quod non
habet_," we cannot give what we have not got. And, on the other hand, we
can never cease creating forms of some sort by our mental activity,
thinking life into them. This point must be very carefully noted. We
cannot sit still producing nothing: the mental machinery _will_ keep on
turning out work of some sort, and it rests with us to determine of what
sort it shall be. In our entire ignorance or imperfect realisation of
this we create negative forms and think life into them. We create forms
of death, sickness, sorrow, trouble, and limitation of all sorts, and
then think life into these forms; with the result that, however
non-existent in themselves, to us they become realities and throw their
shadow across the path which would otherwise be bright with the
many-coloured beauties of innumerable flowers and the glory of the
sunshine.

This need not be. It is giving to the negative an affirmative force
which does not belong to it. Consider what is meant by the negative. It
is the absence of something. It is not-being, and is the absence of all
that constitutes being. Left to itself, it remains in its own
nothingness, and it only assumes form and activity when we give these to
it by our thought.

Here, then, is the great reason for practising control over our thought.
It is the one and only instrument we have to work with, but it is an
instrument which works with the greatest certainty, for limitation if we
think limitation, for enlargement if we think enlargement. Our thought
as feeling is the magnet which draws to us those conditions which
accurately correspond to itself. This is the meaning of the saying that
"thoughts are things." But, you say, how can I think differently from
the circumstances? Certainly you are not required to say that the
circumstances _at the present moment_ are what they are not; to say so
would be untrue; but what is wanted is not to think from the standpoint
of circumstances at all. Think from that interior standpoint where there
are no circumstances, and from whence you can dictate what circumstances
shall be, and then leave the circumstances to take care of themselves.

Do not think of this, that, or the other particular _circumstances_ of
health, peace, etc., but of health, peace, and prosperity themselves.
Here is an advertisement from _Pearson's Weekly_:--"Think money. Big
moneymakers _think_ money." This is a perfectly sound statement of the
power of thought, although it is only an advertisement; but we may make
an advance beyond thinking "money." We can think "Life" in all its
fulness, together with that perfect harmony of conditions which includes
all that we need of money and a thousand other good things besides, for
some of which money stands as the symbol of exchangeable value, while
others cannot be estimated by so material a standard.

Therefore think Life, illumination, harmony, prosperity,
happiness--think the things rather than this or that condition of them.
And then by the sure operation of the Universal Law these things will
form themselves into the shapes best suited to your particular case, and
will enter your life as active, living forces, which will never depart
from you because you know them to be part and parcel of your own being.




V

SUBMISSION


There are two kinds of submission: submission to superior force and
submission to superior truth. The one is weakness and the other is
strength. It is an exceedingly important part of our training to learn
to distinguish between these two, and the more so because the wrong kind
is extolled by nearly all schools of popular religious teaching at the
present day as constituting the highest degree of human attainment. By
some this is pressed so far as to make it an instrument of actual
oppression, and with all it is a source of weakness and a bar to
progress. We are forbidden to question what are called the wise
dispensations of Providence and are told that pain and sorrow are to be
accepted because they are the will of God; and there is much eloquent
speaking and writing concerning the beauty of quiet resignation, all of
which appeals to a certain class of gentle minds who have not yet learnt
that gentleness does not consist in the absence of power but in the
kindly and beneficent use of it.

Minds cast in this mould are peculiarly apt to be misled. They perceive
a certain beauty in the picture of weakness leaning upon strength, but
they attribute its soothing influence to the wrong element of the
combination. A thoughtful analysis would show them that their feelings
consisted of pity for the weak figure and admiration for the strong one,
and that the suggestiveness of the whole arose from its satisfying the
artistic sense of balance which requires a compensation of this sort.
But which of the two figures in the picture would they themselves prefer
to be? Surely not the weak one needing help, but the strong one giving
it. By itself the weak figure only stirs our pity and not our
admiration. Its form may be beautiful, but its very beauty only serves
to enhance the sense of something wanting--and the something wanting is
strength. The attraction which the doctrine of passive resignation
possesses for certain minds is based upon an appeal to sentiment, which
is accepted without any suspicion that the sentiment appealed to is a
false one.

Now the healthful influence of the movement known as "The Higher
Thought" consists precisely in this--that it sets itself rigorously to
combat this debilitating doctrine of submission. It can see as well as
others the beauty of weakness leaning upon strength; but it sees that
the real source of the beauty lies in the strong element of the
combination. The true beauty consists in the power to confer strength,
and this power is not to be acquired by submission, but by the exactly
opposite method of continually asserting our determination not to
submit.

Of course, if we take it for granted that all the sorrow, sickness,
pain, trouble, and other adversity in the world is the expression of the
will of God, then doubtless we must resign ourselves to the inevitable
with all the submission we can command, and comfort ourselves with the
vague hope that somehow in some far-off future we shall find that

    "Good is the final goal of ill,"

though even _this_ vague hope is a protest against the very submission
we are endeavouring to exercise. But to make the assumption that the
evil of life is the will of God is to assume what a careful and
intelligent study of the laws of the universe, both mental and physical,
will show us is not the truth; and if we turn to that Book which
contains the fullest delineation of these universal laws, we shall find
nothing taught more clearly than that submission to the evils of life is
not submission to the will of God. We are told that Christ was
manifested for this end, that he should destroy him that hath the power
of death--that is, the devil. Now death is the very culmination of the
Negative. It is the entire absence of all that makes Life, and whatever
goes to diminish the living quality of Life reproduces, in its degree,
the distinctive quality of this supreme exhibition of the Negative.
Everything that tends to detract from the fulness of life has in it this
deathful quality.

In that completely renovated life, which is figured under the emblem of
the New Jerusalem, we are told that sorrow and sighing shall flee away,
and that the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick. Nothing that obscures
life, or restricts it, can proceed from the same source as the Power
which gives light to them that sit in darkness, and deliverance to them
that are bound. Negation can never be Affirmation; and the error we have
always to guard against is that of attributing positive power to the
Negative. If we once grasp the truth that God is life, and that life in
every mode of expression can never be anything else than Affirmative,
then it must become clear to us that nothing which is of the opposite
tendency can be according to the will of God. For God (the good) to will
any of the "evil" that is in the world would be for Life to act with the
purpose of diminishing itself, which is a contradiction in terms to the
very idea of Life. God is Life, and Life is, by its very nature,
Affirmative. The submission we have hitherto made has been to our own
weakness, ignorance, and fear, and not to the supreme good.

But is no such thing as submission, then, required of us under any
circumstances? Are we always to have our own way in everything?
Assuredly the whole secret of our progress to liberty is involved in
acquiring the habit of submission; but it is submission to superior
Truth, and not to superior force. It sometimes happens that, when we
attain a higher Truth, we find that its reception requires us to
re-arrange the truths which we possessed before: not, indeed, to lay any
of them aside, for Truth once recognised cannot be again put out of
sight, but to recognise a different relative proportion between them
from that which we had seen previously. Then there comes a submitting of
what has hitherto been our highest truth to one which we recognise as
still higher, a process not always easy of attainment, but which must be
gone through if our spiritual development is not to be arrested. The
lesser degree of life must be swallowed up in the greater; and for this
purpose it is necessary for us to learn that the smaller degree was only
a partial and limited aspect of that which is more universal, stronger,
and of a larger build every way.

Now, in going through the processes of spiritual growth, there is ample
scope for that training in self-knowledge and self-control which is
commonly understood by the word "submission." But the character of the
act is materially altered. It is no longer a half-despairing resignation
to a superior force external to ourselves, which we can only vaguely
hope is acting kindly and wisely, but it is an intelligent recognition
of the true nature of our own interior forces and of the laws by which a
robust spiritual constitution is to be developed; and the submission is
no longer to limitations which drain life of its livingness, and against
which we instinctively rebel, but to the law of our own evolution which
manifests itself in continually increasing degrees of life and strength.

The submission which we recognise is the price that has to be paid for
increase in any direction. Even in the Money Market we must invest
before we can realise profits. It is a universal rule that Nature obeys
us exactly in proportion as we first obey Nature; and this is as true in
regard to spiritual science as to physical. The only question is whether
we will yield an ignorant submission to the principle of Death, or a
joyous and intelligent obedience to the principle of Life.

If we have clearly grasped the fact of our identity with Universal
Spirit, we shall find that, in the right direction, there is really no
such thing as submission. Submission is to the power of another--a man
cannot be said to submit to himself. When the "I AM" in us recognises a
greater degree of I AM-ness (if I may coin the word) than it has
hitherto attained, then, by the very force of this recognition, it
_becomes what it sees_, and therefore naturally puts off from itself
whatever would limit its expression of its own completeness.

But this is a natural process of growth, and not an unnatural act of
submission; it is not the pouring-out of ourselves in weakness, but the
gathering of ourselves together in increasing strength. There is no
weakness in Spirit, it is all strength; and we must therefore always be
watchful against the insidious approaches of the Negative which would
invert the true position. The Negative always points to some external
source of strength. Its formula is "I AM NOT." It always seeks to fix a
gulf between us and the Infinite Sufficiency. It would always have us
believe that that sufficiency is not our own, but that by an act of
uncertain favour we may have occasional spoonfuls of it doled out to us.
Christ's teaching is different. We do not need to come with our pitcher
to the well to draw water, like the woman of Samaria, but we have _in
ourselves_ an inexhaustible supply of the living water springing up into
everlasting life.

Let us then inscribe "No Surrender" in bold characters upon our banner,
and advance undaunted to claim our rightful heritage of liberty and
life.




VI

COMPLETENESS


A point on which students of mental science often fail to lay sufficient
stress is the completeness of man--not a completeness to be attained
hereafter, but here and now. We have been so accustomed to have the
imperfection of man drummed into us in books, sermons, and hymns, and
above all in a mistaken interpretation of the Bible, that at first the
idea of his completeness altogether staggers us. Yet until we see this
we must remain shut out from the highest and best that mental science
has to offer, from a thorough understanding of its philosophy, and from
its greatest practical achievements.

To do any work successfully you must believe yourself to be a _whole_
man in respect of it. The completed work is the outward image of a
corresponding completeness in yourself. And if this is true in respect
of one work it is true of all; the difference in the importance of the
work does not matter; we cannot successfully attempt _any_ work until,
for some reason or other, we believe ourselves able to accomplish it; in
other words, until we believe that none of the conditions for its
completion is wanting in us, and that we are therefore complete in
respect of it. Our recognition of our completeness is thus the measure
of what we are able to do, and hence the great importance of knowing the
fact of our own completeness.

But, it may be asked, do we not see imperfection all around? Is there
not sorrow, sickness, and trouble? Yes; but why? Just for the very
reason that we do not realise our completeness. If we realised _that_ in
its fulness these things would not be; and in the degree in which we
come to realise it we shall find them steadily diminish. Now if we
really grasp the two fundamental truths that Spirit is Life pure and
simple, and that external things are the result of interior forces, then
it ought not to be difficult to see why we should be complete; for to
suppose otherwise is to suppose the reactive power of the universe to be
either unable or unwilling to produce the complete expression of its own
intention in the creation of man.

That it should be unable to do so would be to depose it from its place
as the creative principle, and that it should be unwilling to fulfil its
own intention is a contradiction in terms; so that on either supposition
we come to a _reductio ad absurdum_. In forming man the creative
principle therefore _must_ have produced a perfect work, and our
conception of ourselves as imperfect can only be the result of our own
ignorance of what we really are; and our advance, therefore, does not
consist in having something new added to us, but in learning to bring
into action powers which already exist in us, but which we have never
tried to use, and therefore have not developed, simply because we have
always taken it for granted that we are by nature defective in some of
the most important faculties necessary to fit us to our environment.

If we wish to attain to these great powers, the question is, where are
we to seek them? And the answer is _in ourselves_. That is the great
secret. We are not to go outside ourselves to look for power. As soon as
we do so we find, not power, but weakness. To seek strength from any
outside source is to make affirmation of our weakness, and all know what
the natural result of such an affirmation must be.

We are complete _in ourselves_; and the reason why we fail to realise
this is that we do not understand how far the "self" of ourselves
extends. We know that the whole of anything consists of _all_ its parts
and not only of some of them; yet this is just what we do not seem to
know about ourselves. We say rightly that every person is a
concentration of the Universal Spirit into individual consciousness; but
if so, then each individual consciousness must find the Universal Spirit
to be the infinite expression of _itself_. It is _this_ part of the
"Self" that we so often leave out in our estimate of what we are; and
consequently we look upon ourselves as crawling pygmies when we might
think of ourselves as archangels. We try to work with the mere shadows
of ourselves instead of with the glorious substance, and then wonder at
our failures. If we only understood that our "better half" is the whole
infinite of Spirit--that which creates and sustains the universe--then
we should know how complete our completeness is.

As we approach this conception, our completeness becomes a reality to
us, and we find that we need not go outside ourselves for anything. We
have only to draw on that part of ourselves which is infinite to carry
out any intention we may form in our individual consciousness; for there
is no barrier between the two parts, otherwise they would not be a
whole. Each belongs perfectly to the other, and the two are one. There
is no antagonism between them, for the Infinite Life can have no
interest against its individualisation of _itself_. If there is any
feeling of tension it proceeds from our not fully realising this
conception of our own wholeness; we are placing a barrier somewhere,
when in truth there is none; and the tension will continue until we find
out where and how we are setting up this barrier and remove it.

This feeling of tension is the feeling that we are _not using our Whole
Being_. We are trying to make half do the work of the whole; but we
cannot rid ourselves of our wholeness, and therefore the whole protests
against our attempts to set one half against the other. But when we
realise that our concentration _out of_ the Infinite also implies our
expansion _into_ it, we shall see that our _whole_ "self" includes both
the concentration and the expansion; and seeing this first
intellectually we shall gradually learn to use our knowledge practically
and bring our whole man to bear upon whatever we take in hand. We shall
find that there is in us a constant action and reaction between the
infinite and the individual, like the circulation of the blood from the
heart to the extremities and back again, a constant pulsation of vital
energy quite natural and free from all strain and exertion.

This is the great secret of the livingness of Life, and it is called by
many names and set forth under many symbols in various religions and
philosophies, each of which has its value in proportion as it brings us
nearer the realisation of this perfect wholeness. But the thing itself
is Life, and therefore can only be suggested, but not described, by any
words or symbols; it is a matter of personal experience which no one can
convey to another. All we can do is to point out the direction in which
this experience is to be sought, and to tell others the intellectual
arguments which have helped us to find it; but the experience itself is
the operation of definite vital functions of the inner being, and no one
but ourselves can do our living for us.

But, so far as it is possible to express these things in words, what
must be the result of realising that the "self" in us includes the
Infinite as well as the Individual? All the resources of the Infinite
must be at our disposal; we may draw on them as we will, and there is no
limit save that imposed by the Law of Kindness, a self-imposed
limitation, which, because of being _self_-imposed, is not bondage but
only another expression of our liberty. Thus we are free and all
limitations are removed.

We are also no longer ignorant, for since the "self" in us includes the
Infinite we can draw thence all needed knowledge, and though we may not
always be able to formulate this knowledge in the mentality, we shall
_feel_ its guidance, and eventually the mentality will learn to put this
also into form of words; and thus by combining thought and experience,
theory and practice, we shall by degrees come more and more into the
knowledge of the Law of our Being, and find that there is no place in it
for fear, because it is the law of perfect liberty. And knowing what our
whole self really is, we shall walk erect as free men and women
radiating Light and Life all round, so that our very presence will carry
a vivifying influence with it, because we realise ourselves to be an
Affirmative Whole, and not a mere negative disintegration of parts.

We know that our whole self includes that Greater Man which is back of
and causes the phenomenal man, and this Greater Man is the true human
principle in us. It is, therefore, universal in its sympathies, but at
the same time not less individually _ourself_; and thus the true man in
us, being at once both universal and individual, can be trusted as a
sure guide. It is that "Thinker" which is behind the conscious
mentality, and which, if we will accept it as our centre, and realise
that it is not a separate entity but _ourself_, will be found equal to
every occasion, and will lead us out of a condition of servitude into
"the glorious liberty of the sons of God."




VII

THE PRINCIPLE OF GUIDANCE


If I were asked which of all the spiritual principles ranked first, I
should feel inclined to say the Principle of Guidance; not in the sense
of being more essential than the others, for _every_ portion is equally
essential to the completeness of a perfect whole, but in the sense of
being first in order of sequence and giving value to all our other
powers by placing them in their due relation to one another. "Giving
value to our _other_ powers," I say, because this also is one of our
powers. It is that which, judged from the standpoint of personal
self-consciousness, is above us; but which, realised from the point of
view of the unity of all Spirit, is part and parcel of ourselves,
because it is that Infinite Mind which is of necessity identified with
all its manifestations.

Looking to this Infinite Mind as a Superior Intelligence from which we
may receive guidance does not therefore imply looking to an external
source. On the contrary, it is looking to the innermost spring of our
own being, with a confidence in its action which enables us to proceed
to the execution of our plans with a firmness and assurance that are in
themselves the very guarantee of our success.

The action of the spiritual principles in us follows the order which we
impose upon them by our thought; therefore the order of realisation will
reproduce the order of desire; and if we neglect this first principle of
right order and guidance, we shall find ourselves beginning to put forth
other great powers, which are at present latent within us, without
knowing how to find suitable employment for them--which would be a very
perilous condition, for without having before us objects worthy of the
powers to which we awake, we should waste them on petty purposes
dictated only by the narrow range of our unilluminated intellect.
Therefore the ancient wisdom says, "With all thy getting, get
understanding."

The awakening to consciousness of our mysterious interior powers will
sooner or later take place, and will result in our using them whether we
understand the law of their development or not, just as we already use
our physical faculties whether we understand their laws or not. The
interior powers are natural powers as much as the exterior ones. We can
direct their use by a knowledge of their laws; and it is therefore of
the highest importance to have some sound principle of guidance in the
use of these higher faculties as they begin to manifest themselves.

If, therefore, we would safely and profitably enter upon the possession
of the great inheritance of power that is opening out before us, we
must before all things seek to realise in ourselves that Superior
Intelligence which will become an unfailing principle of guidance if we
will only recognise it as such. Everything depends on our recognition.
Thoughts are things, and therefore as we _will_ our thoughts to be so we
_will_ the thing to be. If, then, we will to use the Infinite Spirit as
a spirit of guidance, we shall find that the fact is as we have willed
it; and in doing this we are still making use of our own supreme
principle. And this is the true "understanding" which, by placing all
the other powers in their correct order, creates one grand unity of
power directed to clearly defined and worthy aims, in place of the
dispersion of our powers, by which they only neutralise each other and
effect nothing.

This is that Spirit of Truth which shall guide us into all Truth. It is
the sincere Desire of us reaching out after Truth. Truth first and Power
afterwards is the reasonable order, which we cannot invert without
injury to ourselves and others; but if we follow this order we shall
always find scope for our powers in developing into present realities
the continually growing glory of our vision of the ideal.

The ideal is the true real, but it must be brought into manifestation
before it can be shown to be so, and it is in this that the _practical_
nature of our mental studies consists. It is the _practical_ mystic who
is the man of power; the man who, realising the mystical powers within,
fits his outward action to this knowledge, and so shows his faith by his
works; and assuredly the first step is to make use of that power of
infallible guidance which he can call to his aid simply by desiring to
be led by it.




VIII

DESIRE AS THE MOTIVE POWER


There are certain Oriental schools of thought, together with various
Western offshoots from them, which are entirely founded on the principle
of annihilating all desire. Reach that point at which you have no wish
for anything and you will find yourself free, is the sum and substance
of their teaching; and in support of this they put forward a great deal
of very specious argument, which is all the more likely to entangle the
unwary, because it contains a recognition of many of the profoundest
truths of Nature. But we must bear in mind that it is possible to have a
very deep knowledge of psychological facts, and at the same time vitiate
the results of our knowledge by an entirely wrong assumption in regard
to the law which binds these facts together in the universal system; and
the injurious results of misapprehension upon such a vital question are
so radical and far-reaching that we cannot too forcibly urge the
necessity of clearly understanding the true nature of the point at
issue. Stripped of all accessories and embellishments, the question
resolves itself into this: Which shall we choose for our portion, Life
or Death? There can be no accommodation between the two; and whichever
we select as our guiding principle must produce results of a kind proper
to itself.

The whole of this momentous question turns on the place that we assign
to desire in our system of thought. Is it the Tree of Life in the midst
of the Garden of the Soul? or is it the Upas Tree creating a wilderness
of death all around? This is the issue on which we have to form a
judgment, and this judgment must colour all our conception of life and
determine the entire range of our possibilities. Let us, then, try to
picture to ourselves the ideal proposed by the systems to which I have
alluded--a man who has succeeded in entirely annihilating all desire. To
him all things must be alike. The good and the evil must be as one, for
nothing has any longer the power to raise any desire in him; he has no
longer any feeling which shall prompt him to say, "This is good,
therefore I choose it; that is evil, therefore I reject it"; for all
choice implies the perception of something more desirable in what is
chosen than in what is rejected, and consequently the existence of that
feeling of desire which has been entirely eliminated from the ideal we
are contemplating.

Then, if the perception of all that makes one thing preferable to
another has been obliterated, there can be no motive for any sort of
action whatever. Endue a being who has thus extinguished his faculty of
desire with the power to create a universe, and he has no motive for
employing it. Endue him with all knowledge, and it will be useless to
him; for, since desire has no place in him, he is without any purpose
for which to turn his knowledge to account. And with Love we cannot
endue him, for that is desire in its supreme degree. But if all this be
excluded, what is left of the man? Nothing, except the mere outward
form. If he has actually obtained this ideal, he has practically ceased
to be. Nothing can by any means interest him, for there is nothing to
attract or repel in one thing more than in another. He must be dead
alike to all feeling and to all motive of action, for both feeling and
action imply the preference for one condition rather than another; and
where desire is utterly extinguished, no such preference can exist.

No doubt some one may object that it is only evil desires which are thus
to be suppressed; but a perusal of the writings of the schools of
thought in question will show that this is not the case. The foundation
of the whole system is that _all_ desire must be obliterated, the desire
for the good just as much as the desire for the evil. The good is as
much "illusion" as the evil, and until we have reached absolute
indifference to both we have not attained freedom. When we have utterly
crushed out _all_ desire we are free. And the practical results of such
a philosophy are shown in the case of Indian devotees, who, in pursuance
of their resolve to crush out _all_ desire, both for good and evil
alike, become nothing more than outward images of men, from which all
power of perception and of action have long since fled.

The mergence in the universal, at which they thus aim, becomes nothing
more than a self-induced hypnotism, which, if maintained for a
sufficient length of time, saps away every power of mental and bodily
activity, leaving nothing but the outside husk of an attenuated human
form--the hopeless wreck of what was once a living man. This is the
logical result of a system which assumes for its starting-point that
desire is evil in itself, that every desire is _per se_ a form of
bondage, independently of the nature of its object. The majority of the
followers of this philosophy may lack sufficient resolution to carry it
out rigorously to its practical conclusions; but whether their ideal is
to be realised in this world or in some other, the utter extinction of
desire means nothing else than absolute apathy, without feeling and
without action.

How entirely false such an idea is--not only from the standpoint of our
daily life, but also from that of the most transcendental conception of
the Universal Principle--is evidenced by the mere fact that anything
exists at all. If the highest ideal is that of utter apathy, then the
Creative Power of the universe must be extremely low-minded; and all
that we have hitherto been accustomed to look upon as the marvellous
order and beauty of creation, is nothing but a display of vulgarity and
ignorance of sound philosophy.

But the fact that creation exists proves that the Universal Mind thinks
differently, and we have only to look around to see that the true ideal
is the exercise of creative power. Hence, so far from desire being a
thing to be annihilated, it is the very root of every conceivable mode
of Life. Without it Life could not be. Every form of expression implies
the selection of all that goes to make up that form, and the passing-by
of whatever is not required for that purpose; hence a desire for that
which is selected in preference to what is laid aside. And this
selective desire is none other than the universal Law of Attraction.

Whether this law acts as the chemical affinity of apparently unconscious
atoms, or in the instinctive, if unreasoned, attractions of the
vegetable and animal worlds, it is still the principle of selective
affinity; and it continues to be the same when it passes on into the
higher kingdoms which are ruled by reason and conscious purpose. The
modes of activity in each of these kingdoms are dictated by the nature
of the kingdom; but the activity itself always results from the
preference of a certain subject for a certain object, to the exclusion
of all others; and all action consists in the reciprocal movement of the
two towards each other in obedience to the law of their affinity.

When this takes place in the kingdom of conscious individuality, the
affinities exhibit themselves as mental action; but the principle of
selection prevails without exception throughout the universe. In the
conscious mind this attraction towards its affinity becomes desire; the
desire to create some condition of things better than that now existing.
Our want of knowledge may cause us to make mistakes as to what this
better thing really is, and so in seeking to carry out our desire we may
give it a wrong direction; but the fault is not in the desire itself,
but in our mistaken notion of what it is that it requires for its
satisfaction. Hence unrest and dissatisfaction until its true affinity
is found; but, as soon as this is discovered, the law of attraction at
once asserts itself and produces that better condition, the dream of
which first gave direction to our thoughts.

Thus it is eternally true that desire is the cause of all feeling and
all action; in other words, of all Life. The whole livingness of Life
consists in receiving or in radiating forth the vibrations produced by
the law of attraction; and in the kingdom of mind these vibrations
necessarily become conscious out-reachings of the mind in the direction
in which it feels attraction; that is to say, they become desires.
Desire is therefore the mind seeking to manifest itself in some form
which as yet exists only in its thought. It is the principle of
creation, whether the thing created be a world or a wooden spoon; both
have their origin in the desire to bring something into existence which
does not yet exist. Whatever may be the scale on which we exercise our
creative ability, the motive power must always be desire.

Desire is the force behind all things; it is the moving principle of
the universe and the innermost centre of all Life. Hence, to take the
negation of desire for our primal principle is to endeavour to stamp out
Life itself; but what we have to do is to acquire the requisite
knowledge by which to guide our desires to their true objects of
satisfaction. To do this is the whole end of knowledge; and any
knowledge applied otherwise is only a partial knowledge, which, having
failed in its purpose, is nothing but ignorance. Desire is thus the
sum-total of the livingness of Life, for it is that in which all
movement originates, whether on the physical level or the spiritual. In
a word, desire is the creative power, and must be carefully guarded,
trained, and directed accordingly; but thus to seek to develop it to the
highest perfection is the very opposite of trying to kill it outright.

And desire has fulfilment for its correlative. The desire and its
fulfilment are bound together as cause and effect; and when we realise
the law of their sequence, we shall be more than ever impressed with the
supreme importance of Desire as the great centre of Life.




IX

TOUCHING LIGHTLY


What is our point of support? Is it in ourselves or outside us? Are we
self-poised, or does our balance depend on something external? According
to the actual belief in which our answer to these questions is embodied
so will our lives be. In everything there are two parts, the essential
and the incidental--that which is the nucleus and _raison d'être_ of the
whole thing, and that which gathers round this nucleus and takes form
from it. The true knowledge always consists in distinguishing these two
from each other, and error always consists in misplacing them.

In all our affairs there are two factors, ourselves and the matter to be
dealt with; and since _for us_ the nature of anything is always
determined by our thought of it, it is entirely a question of our belief
which of these two factors shall be the essential and which the
accessory. Whichever we regard as the essential, the other at once
becomes the incidental. The incidental can never be absent. For any sort
of action to take place there must be _some_ conditions under which the
activity passes out into visible results; but the same sort of activity
may occur under a variety of different conditions, and may thus produce
very different visible results. So in every matter we shall always find
an essential or energising factor, and an incidental factor which
derives its quality from the nature of the energy.

We can therefore never escape from having to select our essential and
our incidental factor, and whichever we select as the essential, we
thereby place the other in the position of the incidental. If, then, we
make the mistake of reversing the true position and suppose that the
energising force comes from the merely accessory circumstances, we make
_them_ our point of support and lean upon _them_, and stand or fall with
them accordingly; and so we come into a condition of weakness and
obsequious waiting on all sorts of external influences, which is the
very reverse of that strength, wisdom, and opulence which are the only
meaning of Liberty.

But if we would ask ourselves the common-sense question Where can the
centre of a man's Life be except in himself? we shall see that in all
which pertains to us the energising centre must be in ourselves. We can
never get away from ourselves as the centre of our own universe, and the
sooner we clearly understand this the better. There is really no energy
in _our_ universe but what emanates from ourselves in the first
instance, and the power which appears to reside in our surroundings is
derived entirely from our own mind.

If once we realise this, and consider that the Life which flows into us
from the Universal Life-Principle is at every moment _new_ Life entirely
undifferentiated to any particular purpose besides that of supporting
our own individuality, and that it is therefore ours to externalise in
any form we will, then we find that this manifestation of the eternal
Life-Principle _in ourselves_ is the standpoint from which we can
control our surroundings. We must lean firmly on the central point of
our own being and not on anything else. Our mistake is in taking our
surroundings too much "_au grand serieux_." We should touch things more
lightly. As soon as we feel that their weight impedes our free handling
of them they are mastering us, and not we them.

Light handling does not mean weak handling. On the contrary, lightness
of touch is incompatible with a weak grasp of the instrument, which
implies that the weight of the tool is excessive relatively to the force
that seeks to guide it. A light, even playful handling, therefore
implies a firm grasp and perfect control over the instrument. It is only
in the hands of a Grinling Gibbons that the carving tool can create
miracles of aerial lightness from the solid wood. The light yet firm
touch tells not of weakness, but of power held in reserve; and if we
realise our own out-and-out spiritual nature we know that behind any
measure of power we may put forth there is the whole reserve of the
infinite to back us up.

As we come to know this we begin to handle things lightly, playing with
them as a juggler does with his flying knives, which cannot make the
slightest movement other than he has assigned to them, for we begin to
see that our control over things is part of the necessary order of the
universe. The disorder we have met with in the past has resulted
precisely from our never having attempted consciously to introduce this
element of our personal control as part of the system.

Of course, I speak of the _whole_ man, and not merely of that part of
him which Walt Whitman says is contained between his hat and his boots.
The _whole_ man is an infinitude, and the visible portion of him is the
instrument through which he looks out upon and enjoys all that belongs
to him, his own kingdom of the infinite. And when he learns that this is
the meaning of his conscious individuality, he sees _how_ it is that he
is infinite, and finds that he is one with Infinite Mind, which is the
innermost core of the universe. Having thus reached the true centre of
his own being, he can never give this central place to anything else,
but will realise that relatively to this all other things are in the
position of the incidental and accessory, and growing, daily in this
knowledge he will learn so to handle all things lightly, yet firmly,
that grief, fear, and error will have less and less space in his world,
until at last sorrow and sighing shall flee away, and everlasting joy
shall take their place. We may have taken only a few steps on the way as
yet, but they are in the right direction, and what we have to do now is
to go on.




X

PRESENT TRUTH


If Thought power is good for anything it is good for everything. If it
can produce one thing it can produce all things. For what is to hinder
it? Nothing can stop us from thinking. We can _think_ what we please,
and if to think is to form, then we can form what we please. The whole
question, therefore, resolves itself into this: Is it true that to think
is to form? If so, do we not see that our limitations are formed in
precisely the same way as our expansions? We think that conditions
outside our thought have power over us, and so we think power into them.
So the great question of life is whether there is any _other_ creative
power than Thought. If so, where is it, and what is it?

Both philosophy and religion lead us to the truth that "in the
beginning" there was no other creative power than Spirit, and the only
mode of activity we can possibly attribute to Spirit is Thought, and so
we find Thought as the root of all things. And if this was the case "in
the beginning" it must be so still; for if all things originate in
Thought, all things must be modes of Thought, and so it is impossible
for Spirit ever to hand over its creations to some power which is not
itself--that is to say, which is not Thought-power; and consequently all
the forms and circumstances that surround us are manifestations of the
creative power of Thought.

But it may be objected that this is God's Thought; and that the creative
power is in God and not Man. But this goes away from the self-evident
axiomatic truth that "in the beginning" nothing could have had any
origin except Thought. It is quite true that nothing has any origin
except in the Divine Mind, and Man himself is therefore a mode of the
Divine Thought. Again, Man is self-conscious; therefore Man is the
Divine Thought evolved into _individual_ consciousness, and when he
becomes sufficiently enlightened to realise this as his origin, then he
sees that he is a reproduction _in individuality_ of the _same_ spirit
which produces all things, and that his own thought in individuality has
exactly the same quality as the Divine Thought in universality, just as
fire is equally igneous whether burning round a large centre of
combustion or a small one, and thus we are logically brought to the
conclusion that our thought must have creative power.

But people say, "We have not found it so. We are surrounded by all sorts
of circumstances that we do not desire." Yes, you _fear_ them, and in so
doing you _think_ them; and in this way you are constantly exercising
this Divine prerogative of creation by Thought, only through ignorance
you use it in a wrong direction. Therefore the Book of Divine
Instructions so constantly repeats "Fear not; doubt not," because we can
never divest our Thought of its inherent creative quality, and the only
question is whether we shall use it ignorantly to our injury or
understandingly to our benefit.

The Master summed up his teaching in the aphorism that knowledge of the
Truth would make us free. Here is no announcement of anything we have to
do, or of anything that has to be done for us, in order to gain our
liberty, neither is it a statement of anything _future_. Truth _is_ what
is. He did not say, you must wait till something becomes true which is
not true _now_. He said: "Know what _is_ Truth now, and you will find
that the Truth concerning yourself is Liberty." If the knowledge of
Truth makes us free it can only be because in truth we are free already,
only we do not know it.

Our liberty consists in our reproducing on the scale of the individual
the same creative power of Thought which first brought the world into
existence, "so that the things which are seen were not made of things
which do appear." Let us, then, confidently claim our birthright as
"sons and daughters of the Almighty," and by habitually thinking the
good, the beautiful, and the true, surround ourselves with conditions
corresponding to our thoughts, and by our teaching and example help
others to do the same.




XI

YOURSELF


I want to talk to you about the livingness there is in being yourself.
It has at least the merit of simplicity, for it must surely be easier to
be oneself than to be something or somebody else. Yet that is what so
many are constantly trying to do; the self that is their own is not good
enough for them, and so they are always trying to go one better than
what God has made them, with endless strain and struggle as the
consequence. Of course, they are right to put before them an ideal
infinitely grander than anything they have yet attained--the only
possible way of progress is by following an ideal that is always a stage
ahead of us--but the mistake is in not seeing that its attainment is a
matter of growth, and that growth must be the expansion of something
that already exists in us, and therefore implies our being what we are
and where we are as its starting point. This growth is a continuous
process, and we cannot do next month's growth without first doing this
month's; but we are always wanting to jump into some ideal of the
future, not seeing that we can reach it only by steadily going on from
where we are now.

These considerations should make us more confident and more comfortable.
We are employing a force which is much greater than we believe ourselves
to be, yet it is not separate from us and needing to be persuaded or
compelled, or inveigled into doing what we want; it is the substratum of
our own being which is continually passing up into manifestation on the
visible plane and becoming that personal self to which we often limit
our attention without considering whence it proceeds. But in truth the
outer self is the surface growth of that individuality which lies
concealed far down in the deeps below, and which is none other than the
Spirit-of-Life which underlies all forms of manifestation.

Endeavour to realise what this Spirit must be in itself--that is to say,
apart from any of the conditions that arise from the various relations
which necessarily establish themselves between its various forms of
individualisation. In its homogeneous self what else can it be but pure
life--Essence-of-Life, if you like so to call it? Then realise that as
Essence-of-Life it exists in the innermost of _every one_ of its forms
of manifestation in as perfect simplicity as any we can attribute to it
in our most abstract conceptions. In this light we see it to be the
eternally self-generating power which, to express itself, flows into
form.

This universal Essence-of-Life is a continual becoming (into form), and
since we are a part of Nature we do not need to go further than
ourselves to find the life-giving energy at work with all its powers.
Hence all we have to do is to allow it to rise to the surface. We do not
have to _make_ it rise any more than the engineer who sinks the
bore-pipe for an artesian well has to make the water rise in it; the
water does that by its own energy, springing as a fountain a hundred
feet into the air. Just so we shall find a fountain of Essence-of-Life
ready to spring up in ourselves, inexhaustible and continually
increasing in its flow, as One taught long ago to a woman at a wayside
well.

This up-springing of Life-Essence is not another's--it is our own. It
does not require deep studies, hard labours, weary journeyings to attain
it; it is not the monopoly of this teacher or that writer, whose
lectures we must attend or whose books we must read to get it. It is the
innermost of _ourselves_, and a little common-sense thought as to how
anything comes to be anything will soon convince us that the great
inexhaustible life must be the very root and substance of us, permeating
every fibre of our being.

Surely to be this vast infinitude of living power must be enough to
satisfy all our desires, and yet this wonderful ideal is nothing else
but what we already are _in principio_--it is all there in ourselves
now, only awaiting our recognition for its manifestation. It is not the
Essence-of-Life which has to grow, for that is eternally perfect in
itself; but it is our recognition of it that has to grow, and this
growth cannot be forced. It must come by a natural process, the first
necessity of which is to abstain from all straining after being
something which at the present time we cannot naturally be. The Law of
our Evolution has put us in possession of certain powers and
opportunities, and our further development depends on our doing just
what these powers and opportunities make it possible for us to do, here
and now.

If we do what we are able to do to-day, it will open the way for us to
do something better to-morrow, and in this manner the growing process
will proceed healthily and happily in a rapidly increasing ratio. This
is so much easier than striving to compel things to be what they are
not, and it is also so much more fruitful in good results. It is not
sitting still doing nothing, and there is plenty of room for the
exercise of all our mental faculties, but these faculties are themselves
the outcome of the Essence-of-Life, and are not the creating power, but
only that which gives direction to it Now it is this moving power at the
back of the various faculties that is the true innermost self; and if we
realise the identity between the innermost and the outermost, we shall
see that we therefore have at our present disposal all that is necessary
for our unlimited development in the future.

Thus our livingness consists simply in being ourselves, only more so;
and in recognising this we get rid of a great burden of unnecessary
straining and striving, and the place of the old _sturm und drang_ will
be taken, not by inertia, but by a joyous activity which knows that it
always has the requisite power to manifest itself in forms of good and
beauty. What matters it whither this leads us? If we are following the
line of the beautiful and good, then we shall produce the beautiful and
good, and thus bring increasing joy into the world, whatever particular
form it may assume.

We limit ourselves when we try to fix accurately beforehand the
particular form of good that we shall produce. We should aim not so much
at having or making some particular thing as at expressing all that we
are. The expressing will grow out of realising the treasures that are
ours already, and contemplating the beauty, the affirmative side, of all
that we are _now_, apart from the negative conceptions and detractions
which veil this positive good from us. When we do this we shall be
astonished to see what possibilities reside in ourselves as we are and
with our present surroundings, all unlovely as we may deem them: and
commencing to work at once upon whatever we find of affirmative in
these, and withdrawing our thought from what we have hitherto seen of
negative in them, the right road will open up before us, leading us in
wonderful ways to the development of powers that we never suspected, and
the enjoyment of happiness that we never anticipated.

We have never been out of our right path, only we have been walking in
it backwards instead of forwards, and now that we have begun to follow
the path in the right direction, we find that it is none other than the
way of peace, the path of joy, and the road to eternal life. These
things we may attain by simply living naturally with ourselves. It is
because we are trying to be or do something which is not natural to us
that we experience weariness and labour, where we should find all our
activities joyously concentrated on objects which lead to their own
accomplishment by the force of the love that we have for them. But when
we make the grand discovery of how to live naturally, we shall find it
to be all, and more than all, that we had ever desired, and our daily
life will become a perpetual joy to ourselves, and we shall radiate
light and life wherever we go.




XII

RELIGIOUS OPINIONS


That great and wise writer, George Eliot, expressed her matured views on
the subject of religious opinions in these words: "I have too profound a
conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the
spiritual blight that comes with no faith, to have any negative
propagandism left in me." This had not always been her attitude, for in
her youth she had had a good deal of negative propagandism in her; but
the experience of a lifetime led her to form this estimate of the value
of sincere faith, independently of the particular form of thought which
leads to it.

Tennyson also came to the same conclusion, and gives kindly warning:--

    "O thou who after toil and storm
      May'st seem to have reached a purer air,
      Whose faith has centred everywhere,
    Nor cares to fix itself to form.
      Leave thou thy sister when she prays
    Her early heaven, her happy views,
    Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse
      A life that leads melodious days."

And thus these two great minds have left us a lesson of wisdom which we
shall do well to profit by. Let us see how it applies more particularly
to our own case.

The true presentment of the Higher Thought contains no "negative
propagandism." It is everywhere ranged on the side of the Affirmative,
and its great object is to extirpate the canker which gnaws at the root
of every life that endeavours to centre itself upon the Negative. Its
purpose is constructive and not destructive. But we often find people
labouring under a very erroneous impression as to the nature and scope
of the movement, and thus not only themselves deterred from
investigating it, but also deterring others from doing so. Sometimes
this results from the subject having been presented to them unwisely--in
a way needlessly repugnant to the particular form of religious ideas to
which they are accustomed; but more often it results from their
prejudging the whole matter, and making up their minds that the movement
is opposed to their ideas of religion, without being at the pains to
inquire what its principles really are. In either case a few words on
the attitude of the New Thought towards the current forms of religious
opinion may not be out of place.

The first consideration in every concern is, What is the object aimed
at? The end determines the means to be employed, and if the nature of
the end be clearly kept in view, then no objectless complications will
be introduced into the means. All this seems too obvious to be stated,
but it is just the failure to realise this simple truth that has given
rise to the whole body of _odium theologicum_, with all the persecutions
and massacres and martyrdoms which disgrace the pages of history, making
so many of them a record of nothing but ferocity and stupidity. Let us
hope for a better record in the future; and if we are to get it, it will
be by the adoption of the simple principle here stated.

In our own country alone the varieties of churches and sects form a
lengthy catalogue, but in every one of them the purpose is the same--to
establish the individual in a satisfactory relation to the Divine Power.
The very fact of any religious profession at all implies the recognition
of God as the Source of life and of all that goes to make life; and
therefore the purpose in every case is to draw increasing degrees of
life, whether here or hereafter, from the Only Source from which alone
it is to be obtained, and therefore to establish such a relation with
this Source as may enable the worshipper to draw from It all the life he
wants. Hence the necessary preliminary to drawing consciously at all is
the confidence that such a relation actually has been established; and
such a confidence as this is exactly all that is meant by Faith.

The position of the man who has not this confidence is either that no
such Source exists, or else that he is without means of access to It;
and in either case he feels himself left to fight for his own hand
against the entire universe without the consciousness of any Superior
Power to back him up. He is thrown entirely upon his own resources, not
knowing of the interior spring from which they may be unceasingly
replenished. He is like a plant cut off at the stem and stuck in the
ground without any root, and consequently that spiritual blight of which
George Eliot speaks creeps over him, producing weakness, perplexity, and
fear, with all their baleful consequences, where there should be that
strength, order, and confidence which are the very foundation of all
building-up for whatever purpose, whether of personal prosperity or of
usefulness to others.

From the point of view of those who are acquainted with the laws of
spiritual life, such a man is cut off from the root of his own Being.
Beyond and far interior to that outer self which each of us knows as the
intellectual man working with the physical brain as instrument, we have
roots penetrating deep into that Infinite of which, in our ordinary
waking state, we are only dimly conscious; and it is through this root
of our own individuality, spreading far down into the hidden depths of
Being, that we draw out of the unseen that unceasing stream of Life
which afterwards, by our thought-power, we differentiate into all those
outward forms of which we have need. Hence the unceasing necessity for
every one to realise the great truth that his whole individuality has
its foundation in such a root, and that the ground in which this root
is embedded is that Universal Being for which there is no name save that
of the One all-embracing I AM.

The supreme necessity, therefore, for each of us is to realise this
fundamental fact of our own nature, for it is only in proportion as we
do so that we truly live; and, therefore, whatever helps us to this
realisation should be carefully guarded. In so far as any form of
religion contributes to this end in the case of any particular
individual, for him it is true religion. It may be imperfect, but it is
true so far as it goes; and what is wanted is not to destroy the
foundation of a man's faith because it is narrow, but to expand it. And
this expanding will be done by the man himself, for it is a growth from
within and not a construction from without.

Our attitude towards the religious beliefs of others should, therefore,
not be that of iconoclasts, breaking down ruthlessly whatever from _our_
point of view we see to be merely traditionary idols (in Bacon's sense
of the word), but rather the opposite method of fixing upon that in
another's creed which we find to be positive and affirmative, and
gradually leading him to perceive in what its affirmativeness consists;
and then, when once he has got the clue to the element of strength which
exists in his accustomed form of belief, the perception of the contrast
between that and the non-essential accretions will grow up in his mind
spontaneously, thus gradually bringing him out into a wider and freer
atmosphere. In going through such a process as this, he will never have
had his thoughts directed into any channel to suggest separation from
his spiritual root and ground; but he will learn that the rooting and
grounding in the Divine, which he had trusted in at first, were indeed
true, but in a sense far fuller, grander, and larger every way than his
early infantile conception of them.

The question is not how far can another's religious opinions stand the
test of a remorseless logic, but how far do they enable him to realise
his unity with Divine Spirit? That is the living proof of the value of
his opinion to himself, and no change in his opinions can be for the
better that does not lead him to a greater recognition of the livingness
of Divine Spirit in himself. For any change of opinion to indicate a
forward movement, it must proceed from our realising in some measure the
true nature of the life that is already developed in us. When we see
_why_ we are _what_ we are _now_, then we can look ahead and see what
the same life principle that has brought us up to the present point is
capable of doing in the future. We may not see very far ahead, but we
shall see where the next step is to be placed, and that is sufficient to
enable us to move on.

What we have to do, therefore, is to help others to grow from the root
they are already _living_ by, and not to dig their roots up and leave
them to wither. We need not be afraid of making ourselves all things to
all men, in the sense of fixing upon the affirmative elements in each
one's creed as the starting-point of our work, for the affirmative and
life-giving is always true, and Truth is always _one_ and consistent
with itself; and therefore we need never fear being inconsistent so long
as we adhere to this method. It is worse than useless to waste time in
dissecting the negative accretions of other people's beliefs. In doing
so we run great risks of rooting up the wheat along with the tares, and
we shall certainly succeed in brushing people up the wrong way;
moreover, by looking out exclusively for the life-giving and affirmative
elements, we shall reap benefit to ourselves. We shall not only keep our
temper, but we shall often find large reserves of affirmative power
where at first we had apprehended nothing but worthless accumulations,
and thus we shall become gainers both in largeness of mind and in stores
of valuable material.

Of course we must be rigidly unyielding as regards the _essence_ of
Truth--_that_ must never be sacrificed--but as representatives, in
however small a sphere, of the New Thought, we should make it our aim to
show others, not that their religion is wrong, but that all they may
find of life-givingness in it is life-giving because it is part of the
One Truth which is always the same under whatever form expressed. As
half a loaf is better than no bread, so ignorant worship is better than
no worship, and ignorant faith is better than no faith. Our work is not
to destroy this faith and this worship, but to lead them on into a
clearer light.

For this reason we may assure all inquirers that the abandonment of
their customary form of worship is no necessity of the New Thought; but,
on the contrary, that the principles of the movement, correctly
understood, will show them far more meaning in that worship than they
have ever yet realised. Truth is one; and when once the truth which
underlies the outward form is clearly understood, the maintenance or
abandonment of the latter will be found to be a matter of personal
feeling as to what form, or absence of form, best enables the particular
individual to realise the Truth itself.




XIII

A LESSON FROM BROWNING


Perhaps you know a little poem of Browning's called "An Epistle
Containing the Strange Medical Experiences of Karshish, the Arab
Physician." The somewhat weird conception is that the Arab physician,
travelling in Palestine soon after the date when the Gospel narrative
closes, meets with Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead, and in this
letter to a medical friend describes the strange effect which his vision
of the other life has produced upon the resuscitated man. The poem
should be studied as a whole; but for the present a few lines selected
here and there must do duty to indicate the character of the change
which has passed upon Lazarus. After comparing him to a beggar who,
having suddenly received boundless wealth, is unable to regulate its use
to his requirements, Karshish continues:--

    "So here--we call the treasure knowledge, say,
    Increased beyond the fleshly faculty--
    Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth,
    Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven:
    The man is witless of the size, the sum,
    The value in proportion of all things."

In fact he has become almost exclusively conscious of

    "The spiritual life around the earthly life:
    The law of that is known to him as this,
    His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here,"

and the result is a loss of mental balance entirely unfitting him for
the affairs of ordinary life.

Now there can be no doubt that Browning had a far more serious intention
in writing this poem than just to record a fantastic notion that flitted
through his brain. If we read between the lines, it must be clear from
the general tenor of his writings that, however he may have acquired it,
Browning had a very deep acquaintance with the inner region of spiritual
causes which give rise to all that we see of outward phenomenal
manifestation. There are continual allusions in his works to the life
behind the veil, and it is to this suggestion of some mystery underlying
his words that we owe the many attempts to fathom his meaning expressed
through Browning Societies and the like--attempts which fail or succeed
according as they are made from "the without" or from "the within." No
one was better qualified than the poet to realise the immense benefits
of the inner knowledge, and for the same reason he is also qualified to
warn us of the dangers on the way to its acquisition; for nowhere is it
more true that

    "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,"

and it is one of the greatest of these dangers that he points out in
this poem.

Under the figure of Lazarus he describes the man who has practically
grasped the reality of the inner side of things, for whom the veil has
been removed, and who knows that the external and visible takes its rise
from the internal and spiritual. But the description is that of one
whose eyes have been so dazzled by the light that he has lost the power
of accommodating his vision to the world of sense. He now commits the
same error from the side of "the within" that he formerly committed from
the side of "the without," the error of supposing that there is no vital
reality in the aspect of things on which his thoughts are not
immediately centered. This is want of mental balance, whether it shows
itself by refusing reality to the inward or the outward. To be so
absorbed in speculative ideas as to be unable to give them practical
application in daily life, is to allow our highest thoughts to evaporate
in dreams.

There is a world of philosophy in the simple statement that there can be
no inside without an outside, and no outside without an inside; and the
great secret in life is in learning to see things in their wholeness,
and to realise the inside and the outside simultaneously. Each of them
without the other is a mere abstraction, having no real existence, which
we contemplate separately only for the purpose of reviewing the logical
steps by which they are connected together as cause and effect. Nature
does not separate them, for they are inseparable; and the law of nature
is the law of life. It is related of Pythagoras that, after he had led
his scholars to the dizziest heights of the inner knowledge, he never
failed to impress upon them the converse lesson of tracing out the steps
by which these inner principles translate themselves into the familiar
conditions of the outward things by which we are surrounded. The process
of analysis is merely an expedient for discovering what springs in the
realm of causes we are to touch in order to produce certain effects in
the realm of manifestation. But this is not sufficient. We must also
learn to calculate how those particular effects, when produced, will
stand related to the world of already existing effects among which we
propose to launch them, how they will modify these and be modified by
these in turn; and this calculation of effects is as necessary as the
knowledge of causes.

We cannot impress upon ourselves too strongly that reality consists of
both an inside and an outside, a generating principle and a generated
condition, and that anything short of the reality of wholeness is
illusion on one side or the other. Nothing could have been further from
Browning's intention than to deter seekers after truth from studying the
principles of Being, for without the knowledge of them truth must always
remain wrapped in mystery; but the lesson he would impress on us is that
of guarding vigilantly the mental equilibrium which alone will enable
us to develop those boundless powers whose infinite unfolding is the
fulness of Life. And we must remember above all that the soul of life is
Love, and that Love shows itself by service, and service proceeds from
sympathy, which is the capacity for seeing things from the point of view
of those whom we would help, while at the same time seeing them also in
their true relations; and therefore, if we would realise that Love which
is the inmost vitalising principle even of the most interior powers, it
must be kept alive by maintaining our hold upon the exterior life as
being equally real with the inward principles of which it is the
manifestation.

1902.




XIV

THE SPIRIT OF OPULENCE


It is quite a mistake to suppose that we must restrict and stint
ourselves in order to develop greater power or usefulness. This is to
form the conception of the Divine Power as so limited that the best use
we can make of it is by a policy of self-starvation, whether material or
mental. Of course, if we believe that some form of self-starvation is
necessary to our producing good work, then so long as we entertain this
belief the fact actually is so _for us_. "Whatsoever is not of
faith"--that is, not in accordance with our honest _belief_--"is sin";
and by acting contrary to what we really believe we bring in a
suggestion of opposition to the Divine Spirit, which must necessarily
paralyse our efforts, and surround us with a murky atmosphere of
distrust and want of joy.

But all this exists in, and is produced by, our _belief_; and when we
come to examine the grounds of this belief we shall find that it rests
upon an entire misapprehension of the nature of our own power. If we
clearly realise that the creative power in ourselves is _unlimited_,
then there is no reason for limiting the extent to which we may enjoy
what we can create by means of it. Where we are drawing from the
_infinite_ we need never be afraid of taking more than our share. That
is not where the danger lies. The danger is in not sufficiently
realising our own richness, and in looking upon the externalised
products of our creative power as being the true riches instead of the
creative power of spirit itself.

If we avoid this error, there is no need to limit ourselves in taking
what we will from the infinite storehouse: "All things are yours." And
the way to avoid this error is by realising that the true wealth is in
identifying ourselves with the _spirit_ of opulence. We must be opulent
in our _thought_. Do not "think money," as such, for it is only one
means of opulence; but _think opulence_, that is, largely, generously,
liberally, and you will find that the means of realising this thought
will flow to you from all quarters, whether as money or as a hundred
other things not to be reckoned in cash.

We must not make ourselves dependent on any particular _form_ of wealth,
or insist on its coming to us through some particular channel--that is
at once to impose a limitation, and to shut out other forms of wealth
and to close other channels; but we must enter into the _spirit_ of it.
Now the spirit is Life, and throughout the universe Life ultimately
consists in _circulation_, whether within the physical body of the
individual or on the scale of the entire solar system; and circulation
means a continual flowing around, and the _spirit_ of opulence is no
exception to this universal law of all life.

When once this principle becomes clear to us we shall see that our
attention should be directed rather to the giving than the receiving. We
must look upon ourselves, not as misers' chests to be kept locked for
our own benefit, but as centres of distribution; and the better we
fulfil our function as such centres the greater will be the
corresponding inflow. If we choke the outlet the current must slacken,
and a full and free flow can be obtained only by keeping it open. The
spirit of opulence--the opulent mode of thought, that is--consists in
cultivating the feeling that we possess all sorts of riches which we can
_bestow upon others_, and which we can bestow _liberally_ because by
this very action we open the way for still greater supplies to flow in.
But you say, "I am short of money, I hardly know how to pay for
necessaries. What have I to give?"

The answer is that we must always start from the point where we are; and
if your wealth at the present moment is not abundant on the material
plane, you need not trouble to start on that plane. There are other
sorts of wealth, still more valuable, on the spiritual and intellectual
planes, which you can give; and you can start from this point and
practise the spirit of opulence, even though your balance at the bank
may be nil. And then the universal law of attraction will begin to
assert itself. You will not only begin to experience an inflow on the
spiritual and intellectual planes, but it will extend itself to the
material plane also.

If you have realised the _spirit_ of opulence you _cannot help_ drawing
to yourself material good, as well as that higher wealth which is not to
be measured by a money standard; and because you truly understand the
_spirit_ of opulence you will neither affect to despise this form of
good, nor will you attribute to it a value that does not belong to it;
but you will _co-ordinate_ it with your other more interior forms of
wealth so as to make it the material instrument in smoothing the way for
their more perfect expression. Used thus, with understanding of the
relation which it bears to spiritual and intellectual wealth, material
wealth becomes _one with them_, and is no more to be shunned and feared
than it is to be sought for its own sake.

It is not money, but the _love_ of money, that is the root of evil; and
the _spirit_ of opulence is precisely the attitude of mind which is
furthest removed from the love of money for its own sake. It does not
believe in money. What it does believe in is the generous feeling which
is the intuitive recognition of the great law of circulation, which does
not in any undertaking make its first question, How much am I going to
_get_ by it? but, How much am I going to _do_ by it? And making _this_
the first question, the getting will flow in with a generous profusion,
and with a spontaneousness and rightness of direction that are absent
when our first thought is of receiving only.

We are not called upon to give what we have not yet got and to run into
debt; but we are to give liberally of what we _have_, with the knowledge
that by so doing we are setting the law of circulation to work, and as
this law brings us greater and greater inflows of every kind of good, so
our out-giving will increase, not by depriving ourselves of any
expansion of our own life that we may desire, but by finding that every
expansion makes us the more powerful instruments for expanding the life
of others. "Live and let live" is the motto of the true opulence.




XV

BEAUTY


Do we sufficiently direct our thoughts to the subject of Beauty? I think
not. We are too apt to regard Beauty as a merely superficial thing, and
do not realise all that it implies. This was not the case with the great
thinkers of the ancient world--see the place which no less a one than
Plato gives to Beauty as the expression of all that is highest and
greatest in the system of the universe. These great men of old were no
superficial thinkers, and, therefore, would never have elevated to the
supreme place that which is only superficial. Therefore, we shall do
well to ask what it is that these great minds found in the idea of
Beauty which made it thus appeal to them as the most perfect outward
expression of all that lies deepest in the fundamental laws of Being. It
is because, rightly apprehended, Beauty represents the supremest living
quality of Thought. It is the glorious overflowing of fulness of Love
which indicates the presence of infinite reserves of Power behind it. It
is the joyous profusion that shows the possession of inexhaustible
stores of wealth which can afford to be thus lavish and yet remain as
exhaustless as before. Read aright, Beauty is the index to the whole
nature of Being.

Beauty is the externalisation of Harmony, and Harmony is the
co-ordinated working of all the powers of Being, both in the individual
and in the relation of the individual to the Infinite from which it
springs; and therefore this Harmony conducts us at once into the
presence of the innermost undifferentiated Life. Thus Beauty is in most
immediate touch with the very arcanum of Life; it is the brightness of
glory spreading itself over the sanctuary of the Divine Spirit. For if,
viewed from without, Beauty is the province of the artist and the poet,
and lays hold of our emotions and appeals directly to the innermost
feelings of our heart, calling up the response of that within us which
recognises itself in the harmony perceived without, this is only because
it speeds across the bridge of Reason with such quick feet that we pass
from the outmost to the inmost and back again in the twinkling of an
eye; but the bridge is still there and, retracing our steps more
leisurely, we shall find that, viewed from within, Beauty is no less the
province of the calm reasoner and analyst. What the poet and the artist
seize upon intuitionally, he elaborates gradually, but the result is the
same in both cases; for no intuition is true which does not admit of
being expanded into a rational sequence of intelligible factors, and no
argument is true which does not admit of being condensed into that rapid
suggestion which is intuition.

Thus the impassioned artist and the calm thinker both find that the only
true Beauty proceeds naturally from the actual construction of that
which it expresses. It is not something added on as an afterthought, but
something pre-existing in the original idea, something to which that
idea naturally leads up, and which presupposes that idea as affording it
any _raison d'être_. The test of Beauty is, What does it express? Is it
merely a veneer, a coat of paint laid on from without? Then it is indeed
nothing but a whited sepulchre, a covering to hide the vacuity or
deformity which needs to be removed. But is it the true and natural
outcome of what is beneath the surface? Then it is the index to
superabounding Life and Love and Intelligence, which is not content with
mere utilitarianism hasting to escape at the earliest possible point
from the labour of construction, as though from an enforced and
unwelcome task, but rejoicing over its work and unwilling to quit it
until it has expressed this rejoicing in every fittest touch of form and
colour and exquisite proportion that the material will admit of, and
this without departing by a hairbreadth from the original purpose of the
design.

Wherever, therefore, we find Beauty, we may infer an enormous reserve of
Power behind it; in fact, we may look upon it as the visible expression
of the great truth that Life-Power is infinite. And when the inner
meaning of Beauty is thus revealed to us, and we learn to know it as the
very fulness and overflowing of Power, we shall find that we have
gained a new standard for the guidance of our own lives. We must begin
to use this wonderful process which we have learnt from Nature. Having
learnt how Nature works--how God works--we must begin to work in like
manner, and never consider any work complete until we have carried it to
some final outcome of Beauty, whether material, intellectual, or
spiritual. Is my intention good? That is the initial question, for the
intention determines the nature of the essence in everything. What is
the most beautiful form in which I can express the good I intend? That
is the ultimate question; for the true Beauty which our work expresses
is the measure of the Power, Intelligence, Love--in a word, of the
quantity and quality of our own life which we have put into it. True
Beauty, mind you--that which is beautiful because it most perfectly
expresses the original idea, not a mere ornamentation occupying our
thoughts as a thing apart from the use intended.

Nothing is of so small account but it has its fullest power of
expression in some form of Beauty peculiarly its own. Beauty is the law
of perfect Thought, be the subject of our Thought some scheme affecting
the welfare of millions, or a word spoken to a little child. True Beauty
and true Power are the correlatives one of the other. Kindly expression
originates in kindly thought; and kindly expression is the essence of
Beauty, which, seeking to express itself ever more and more perfectly,
becomes that fine touch of sympathy which is artistic skill, whether
applied in working upon material substances or upon the emotions of the
heart. But, remember, first Use, then Beauty, and neither complete
without the other. Use without Beauty is ungracious giving, and Beauty
without Use is humbug; never forgetting, however, that there is a region
of the mind where the use is found in the beauty, where Beauty itself
serves the direct purpose of raising us to see a higher ideal which will
thenceforward permeate our lives, giving a more living quality to all we
think and say and do.

Seen thus the Beautiful is the true expression of the Good. From
whichever end of the scale we look we shall find that they accurately
measure each other. They are the same thing in the outermost and the
innermost respectively. But in our search for a higher Beauty than we
have yet found we must beware of missing the Beauty that already exists.
Perfect harmony with its environment, and perfect expression of its own
inward nature are what constitute Beauty; and our ignorance of the
nature of the thing or its environment may shut our eyes to the Beauty
it already has. It takes the genius of a Millet to paint, or a Whitman
in words, to show us the beauty of those ordinary work-a-day figures
with which our world is for the most part peopled, whose originals we
pass by as having no form or comeliness. Assuredly the mission of every
thinking man and woman is to help build up forms of greater beauty,
spiritual, intellectual, material, everywhere; but if we would make
something grander than Watteau gardens or Dresden china shepherdesses,
we must enter the great realistic school of Nature and learn to
recognise the beauty that already surrounds us, although it may have a
little dirt on the surface. Then, when we have learnt the great
principles of Beauty from the All-Spirit which is it, we shall know how
to develop the Beauty on its own proper lines without perpetuating the
dirt; and we shall know that all Beauty is the expression of Living
Power, and that we can measure our power by the degree of beauty into
which we can transform it, rendering our lives,

    "By loveliness of perfect deeds,
    More strong than all poetic thought."




XVI

SEPARATION AND UNITY


I

"The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me" (John xiv,
30). In these words the Grand Master of Divine Science gives us the key
to the Great Knowledge. Comparison with other passages shows that the
terms here rendered "prince" and "world" can equally be rendered
"principle" and "age." Jesus is here speaking of a principle of the
present age so entirely opposed to that principle of which he himself
was the visible expression, as to have no part in him. It is the utter
contradiction of everything that Jesus came to teach and to exemplify.
The account Jesus gave of himself was that he came "to bear witness to
the Truth," and in order that men "might have life, and that they might
have it more abundantly"; consequently the principle to which he refers
must be the exact opposite of Truth and Life--that is, it must be the
principle of Falsehood and Death.

What, then, is this false and destructive principle which rules the
present age? If we consider the gist of the entire discourse of which
these are the concluding words, we shall find that the central idea
which Jesus has been most strenuously endeavouring to impress upon his
disciples at their last meeting before the crucifixion, is that of the
absolute identity and out-and-out oneness of "the Father" and "the Son,"
the principle of the perfect unity of God and Man. If this, then, was
the great Truth which he was thus earnestly solicitous to impress upon
his disciples' minds when his bodily presence was so shortly to be
removed from them--the Truth of Unity--may we not reasonably infer the
opposing falsehood to be the assertion of separateness, the assertion
that God and man are not one? The idea of separateness is precisely the
principle on which the world has proceeded from that day to this--the
assumption that God and man are not one in being, and that the matter is
of a different essence from spirit. In other words, the principle that
finds favour with the intellectuality of the present age is that of
duality--the idea of two powers and two substances opposite in kind,
and, therefore, repugnant to each other, permeating all things, and so
leaving no wholeness anywhere.

The entire object of the Bible is to combat the idea, of two opposing
forces in the world. The good news is said to be that of
"reconciliation" (2 Cor. v. 18), where also we are told that "all things
are from God," hence leaving no room for any other power or any other
substance; and the great falsehood, which it is the purpose of the Good
News to expose, is everywhere in the Bible proclaimed to be the
suggestion of duality, which is some other mode of Life, that is not the
One Life, but something separate from it--an idea which it is impossible
to state distinctly without involving a contradiction in terms.
Everywhere the Bible exposes the fiction of the duality of separation as
the great lie, but nowhere in so emphatic and concentrated a manner as
in that wonderful passage of Revelations where it is figured in the
mysterious Number of the Beast. "He that hath understanding let him
count the number of the Beast ... and his number is six hundred and sixty
and six" (Rev. xiii, 18, R.V.). Let me point out the great principle
expressed in this mysterious number. It has other more particular
applications, but this one general principle underlies them all.

It is an established maxim that every unity contains in itself a
trinity, just as the individual man consists of body, soul, and spirit.
If we would perfectly understand anything, we must be able to comprehend
it in its threefold nature; therefore in symbolic numeration the
multiplying of the unit by three implies the completeness of that for
which the unit stands; and, again, the threefold repetition of a number
represents its extension to infinity. Now mark what results if we apply
these representative methods of numerical expression to the principles
of Oneness and of separateness respectively. Oneness is Unity, and
1 × 3 = 3, which, intensified to its highest expression, is written
as 333. Now apply the same method to the idea of separateness. Separateness
consists of one and another one, each of which, according to the
universal law, contains a trinity. In this view of duality the totality
of things is two, and 2 × 3 = 6, and, intensifying this to its highest
expression, we get 666, which is the Number of the Beast.

Why of the Beast? Because separateness from God, or the duality of
opposition, which is also a duality of polarity, which is Dual-Unity,
recognises something as having essential being, which is not the One
Spirit; and such a conception can be verbally rendered only by some word
that in common acceptance represents something, not only lower than the
divine, but lower than the human also. It is because the conception of
oneself as a being apart from God, if carried out to its legitimate
consequences, must ultimately land all who hold it in a condition of
things where open ferocity or secret cunning, the tiger nature or the
serpent nature, can be the only possible rule of action.

Thus it is that the principle of the present age can have no part in
that principle of Perfect Wholeness which the Great Master embodied in
His teaching and in Himself. The two ideas are absolutely incompatible,
and whichever we adopt as our leading principle, it must be to the
entire exclusion of the other; we cannot serve God and Mammon. There is
no such thing as partial wholeness. Either we are still in the
principle of Separateness, and our eyes are not yet open to the real
nature of the Kingdom of Heaven; or else we have grasped the principle
of Unity without any exception anywhere, and the One Being includes all,
the body and the soul alike, the visible form and the invisible
substance and life of all equally; nothing can be left out, and we stand
complete here and now, lacking no faculty, but requiring only to become
conscious of our own powers, and to learn to have confidence in them
through "having them exercised by reason of use."

The following communication from "A Foreign Reader," commenting on the
Number of the Beast, as treated by Judge Troward in "Separation and
Unity," is taken from _EXPRESSION_ for 1902, in which it was first
published. Following is Judge Troward's reply to this letter.

    Dear Mr. Editor.--A correspondent in the current number of
    _Expression_ points out the reference in the Book of
    Revelation to the number 666 as the mark of the Beast,
    because the trinity of mind, soul, and body, if considered as
    unity, may be expressed by the figures 333, and therefore
    duality is 333 × 2 = 666.

    I think the inverse of the proposition is still more
    startling, and I should like to point it out. Instead of
    multiplying let us try dividing. First of all take unity as
    the unit one and divide by three (representing of course the
    same formula, viz., mind, soul and body). Expressed by a
    common fraction it is merely 1/3, which is an incomplete
    mathematical figure. But take the decimal formula of one
    divided by three, and we arrive at .3 circulating, i. e.,
    .3333 on to infinity. In other words, the result of the
    proposition by mathematics is that you divide this formula of
    spirit, soul, and body into unity, and it remains true to
    itself ad infinitum.

    Now we come to consider it as a duality in the same way.
    Expressed as a vulgar fraction it is 2/3; but as a decimal
    fraction it is .6666 ad infinitum. I think this is worth
    noting.

        Yours very faithfully,
              A Foreign Reader.

      Brussels, Aug. 14, 1902.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Dear Editor.--I return with many thanks the very interesting
    letter received with yours, and I am very glad that my
    article should have been instrumental in drawing forth this
    further light on the subject.

    This, moreover, affords an excellent illustration of one
    great principle of Unity, which is that the Unity repeats
    itself in every one of its parts, so that each part taken
    separately is an exact reproduction (in principles) of the
    greater Unity of which it is a portion. Therefore, if you
    take the individual man as your unit (which is what I did),
    and proceed by multiplication, you get the results which were
    pointed out in my article. And conversely, if you take the
    Great Unity of All-Being as your unit, and proceed by
    division, you arrive at the result shown by your foreign
    correspondent. The principle is a purely mathematical one,
    and is extremely interesting in the present application as
    showing the existence of a system of concealed mathematics
    running through the whole Bible. This bears out what I said
    in my article that there were other applications of the
    principle in question, though this one did not at the time
    occur to me.

    I am much indebted to your correspondent for the further
    proof thus given of the correctness of my interpretation of
    the Number of the Beast. Both our interpretations support
    each other, for they are merely different ways of stating the
    same thing, and they have this advantage over those generally
    given, that they do not refer to any particular form of evil,
    but express a general principle applicable to all alike.

        Yours sincerely,
                       T.

      London, Aug. 30, 1902.


II

It may perhaps emphasize my point if I remind my readers that it was the
conflict between the principles of Unity and separation that led to the
crucifixion of Jesus. We must distinguish between the charge which
really led to his death, and the merely technical charge on which he was
sentenced by the Roman Governor. The latter--the charge of opposition to
the royal authority of Cæsar--has its significance; but it is clear from
the Bible record that this was merely formal, the true cause of
conviction being contained in the statement that of the chief priests:
"We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself
the Son of God."

The antagonism of the two principles of Unity and separation had first
been openly manifested on the occasion when Jesus made the memorable
declaration, "I and my Father are one." The Jews took up stones to stone
him. Then said Jesus unto them, "Many good works have I shown you from
my Father; for which of those works do ye stone Me?" The Jews replied,
"For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that
thou, being a man, makest thyself God." Jesus said, "Is it not written
in your law, I said ye are gods? If He called them gods, unto whom the
Word of God came (and the Scriptures cannot be broken), say ye of him,
whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, thou
blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?" Here we have the
first open passage of arms between the two opposing principles which led
to the scene of Calvary as the final testimony of Jesus to the principle
of Unity. He died because he maintained the Truth; that he was one with
the Father. That was the substantive charge on which he was executed.
"Art thou the son of the Blessed?" he was asked by the priestly
tribunal; and the answer came clear and unequivocal, "I am." Then said
the Council, "He hath spoken blasphemy, what further need have we of
witnesses?" And they all condemned him to be worthy of death.

Jesus did not enter into a palpably useless argument with judges whose
minds were so rooted in the idea of dualism as to be impervious to any
other conception; but with a mixed multitude, who were not officially
committed to a system, the case was different. Among them there might
be some still open to conviction, and the appeal was, therefore, made to
a passage in the Psalms with which they were all familiar, pointing out
that the very persons to whom the Divine word was addressed were styled
"gods" by the Divine Speaker Himself. The incontrovertibleness of the
fact was emphasised by the stress laid upon it as "Scripture which
cannot be broken;" and the meaning to be assigned to the statement was
rendered clear by the argument which Jesus deduced from it. He says in
effect, "You would stone me as a blasphemer for saying of myself what
your own Scriptures say concerning each of you." The claim of unity with
"the Father," he urges, was no unique one, but one which the Scripture,
rightly understood, entitled every one of his hearers to make for
himself.

And so we find throughout that Jesus nowhere makes any claim for himself
which he does not also make for those who accept his teaching. Does he
say to the Jews, "Ye are of this world; I am not of this world?" Equally
he says of his disciples, "They are not of the world, even as I am not
of the world." Does he say, "I am the light of the world?" Equally, he
says, "Ye are the light of the world." Does he say, "I and my Father are
one?" Equally he prays that they all might be one, even as we are one.
Is he styled "the Son of God?" Then St. John writes, "To them gave he
power to become sons of God, even to as many as believe on his name;"
and by belief on the name we may surely understand belief in the
principle of which the name is the verbal representation.

The essential unity of God and man is thus the one fact which permeates
the whole teaching of Jesus. He himself stood forth as its living
expression. He appealed to his miracles as the proofs of it: "it is the
Father that doeth the works." It formed the substance of his final
discourse with his disciples in the night that he was betrayed. It is
the Truth, to bear witness to which, he told Pilate, was the purpose of
his life. In support of this Truth he died, and by the living power of
this Truth he rose again. The whole object of his mission was to teach
men to realise their unity with God and the consequences that must
necessarily follow from it; to draw them away from that notion of
dualism which puts an impassable barrier between God and man, and thus
renders any true conception of the Principle of Life impossible; and to
draw them into the clear perception of the innermost nature of Life, as
consisting in the inherent identity of each individual with that
Infinite all-pervading Spirit of Life which he called "the Father."

"The branch cannot bear fruit except it abide in the vine;" the power of
bearing fruit, of producing and of giving forth, depends entirely on the
fact that the individual is, and always continues to be, as much an
organic part of Universal Spirit as the fruit-bearing branch is an
organic part of the parent stem. Lose this idea, and regard God as a
merely external Creator who may indeed command us, or even sometimes be
moved by our cries and entreaties, and we have lost the root of
Livingness and with it all possibility of growth or of liberty. This is
dualism, which cuts us off from our Source of Life; and so long as we
take this false conception for the true law of Being, we shall find
ourselves hampered by limitations and insoluble problems of every
description: We have lost the Key of Life and are consequently unable to
open the door.

But in proportion as we abide in the vine, that is, consciously realise
our perpetual unity with Originating Spirit, and impress upon ourselves
that this unity is neither bestowed as the reward of merit, nor as an
act of favour--which would be to deny the Unity, for the bestowal would
at once imply dualism--but dwell on the truth that it is the innermost
and supreme principle of our own nature; in proportion as we consciously
realise this, we shall rise to greater and greater certainty of
knowledge, resulting in more and more perfect externalisation, whose
increasing splendour can know no limits; for it is the continual
outflowing of the exhaustless Spirit of Life in that manifestation of
itself which is our own individuality.

The notion of dualism is the veil which prevents men seeing this, and
causes them to wander blindfolded among the mazes of endless perplexity;
but, as St. Paul truly says, when this veil is taken away we shall find
ourselves changed from glory to glory as by the Lord the Spirit. "His
name shall be called Immanuel," that is "God _in_ us," not a separate
being from ourselves. Let us remember that Jesus was condemned by the
principle of separation because he himself was the externalisation of
the principle of Unity, and that, in adhering to the principle of Unity
we are adhering to the only possible root of Life, and are maintaining
the Truth for which Jesus died.




XVII

EXTERNALISATION


Who would not be happy in himself and his conditions? That is what we
all desire--more fulness of life, a greater and brighter vitality in
ourselves, and less restriction in our surroundings. And we are told
that the talisman by which this can be accomplished is Thought. We are
told, Change your modes of thought, and the changed conditions will
follow. But many seekers feel that this is very much like telling us to
catch birds by putting salt on their tails. If we can put the salt on
the bird's tail, we can also lay our hand on the bird. If we can change
our thinking, we can thereby change our circumstances.

But how are we to bring about this change of cause which will in its
turn produce this changed effect? This is the practical question that
perplexes many earnest seekers. They can see their way clearly enough
through the whole sequence of cause and effect resulting in the
externalisation of the desired results, if only the one initial
difficulty could be got over. The difficulty is a real one, and until it
is overcome it vitiates all the teaching and reduces it to a mere paper
theory. Therefore it is to this point that the attention of students
should be particularly directed. They feel the need of some solid basis
from which the change of thought can be effected, and until they find
this the theory of Divine Science, however perfect in itself, will
remain for them nothing more than a mere theory, producing no practical
results.

The necessary scientific basis exists, however, and is extremely simple
and reasonable, if we will take the pains to think it out carefully for
ourselves. Unless we are prepared to support the thesis that the Power
which created the universe is inherently evil, or that the universe is
the work of two opposite and equal powers, one evil and the other
good--both of which propositions are demonstrably false--we have no
alternative but to say that the Originating Source of all must be
inherently good. It cannot be partly good and partly evil, for that
would be to set it against itself and make it self-destructive;
therefore it must be good altogether. But once grant this initial
proposition and we cut away the root of all evil. For how can evil
proceed from an All-originating Source which is good altogether, and in
which, therefore, no germ for the development of evil is to be found?
Good cannot be the origin of evil; and since nothing can proceed except
from the one Originating Mind, which is only good, the true nature of
all things must be that which they have received from their
Source--namely, good.

Hence it follows that evil is not the true nature of anything, and that
evil must have its rise in something external to the true nature of
things. And since evil is not in the true nature of the things
themselves, nor yet in the Universal Mind which is the Originating
Principle, there remains only one place for it to spring from, and that
is our own personal thought. First we suppose evil to be as inherent in
the nature of things as good--a supposition which we could not make if
we stopped to consider the necessary nature of the Originating
Principle. Then, on this entirely gratuitous supposition, we proceed to
build up a fabric of fears, which, of course, follow logically from it;
and so we nourish and give substance to the Negative, or that which has
no substantial existence except such as we attribute to it, until we
come to regard it as having Affirmative power of its own, and so set up
a false idea of Being--the product of our own minds--to dispute the
claims of true Being to the sovereignty of the universe.

Once assume the existence of two rival powers--one good and the other
evil--in the direction of the universe, and any sense of harmony becomes
impossible; the whole course of Nature is thrown out of gear, and,
whether for ourselves or for the world at large, there remains no ground
of certainty anywhere. And this is precisely the condition in which the
majority of people live. They are surrounded by infinite uncertainty
about everything, and are consequently a prey to continual fears and
anxieties; and the only way of escape from this state of things is to
go to the root of the matter, and realise that the whole fabric of evil
originates in our own inverted conception of the nature of Being.

But if we once realise that the true conception of Being necessarily
excludes the very idea of evil, we shall see that, in giving way to
thoughts and fears of evil, we are giving substance to that which has no
real substance in itself, and are attributing to the Negative an
Affirmative force which it does not possess--in fact, we are creating
the very thing we fear. And the remedy for this is always to recur to
the original nature of Being as altogether Good, and then to speak to
ourselves thus: "My thought must continually externalise something, for
that is its inherent quality, which nothing can ever alter. Shall I,
then, externalise God or the opposite of God? Which do I wish to see
manifested in my life--Good or its opposite? Shall I manifest what I
know to be the reality or the reverse?" Then comes the steady resolve
always to manifest God, or Good, because that is the only true reality
in all things; and this resolve is with power because it is founded upon
the solid rock of Truth.

We must refuse to know evil; we must refuse to admit that there is any
such thing to be known. It is the converse of this which is symbolised
in the story of the Fall. "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou
shalt surely die" was never spoken of the knowledge of Good, for Good
never brought death into the world. It is eating the fruit of the tree
of a so-called knowledge which admits a second branch, the knowledge of
evil, that is the source of death. Admit that evil has a substantive
entity, which renders it a subject of knowledge, and you thereby create
it, with all its consequences of sorrow, sickness and death. But "be
sure that the Lord He is God"--that is, that the one and Only Ruling
Principle of the universe, whether within us or around us, is Good and
Good only--and evil with all its train sinks back into its original
nothingness, and we find that the Truth has made us free. We are free to
externalise what we will, whether in ourselves or our surroundings, for
we have found the solid basis on which to make the needed change of
mental attitude in the fact that the Good is the only reality of Being.

1902.




XVIII

ENTERING INTO THE SPIRIT OF IT


"Entering into the spirit of it." What a common expression! And yet how
much it really means, how absolutely everything! We enter into the
spirit of an undertaking, into the spirit of a movement, into the spirit
of an author, even into the spirit of a game; and it makes all the
difference both to us and to that into which we enter. A game without
any spirit is a poor affair; and association in which there is no spirit
falls to pieces; and a spiritless undertaking is sure to be a failure.
On the other hand, the book which is meaningless to the unsympathising
reader is full of life and suggestion to the one who enters into the
spirit of the writer; the man who enters into the spirit of the music
finds a spring of refreshment in some fine recital which is entirely
missed by the cold critic who comes only to judge according to the
standard of a rigid rule; and so on in every case that we can think of.
If we do not enter the spirit of a thing, it has no invigorating effect
upon us, and we regard it as dull, insipid and worthless. This is our
everyday experience, and these are the words in which we express it.
And the words are well chosen. They show our intuitive recognition of
the spirit as the fundamental reality in everything, however small or
however great. Let us be right as to the spirit of a thing, and
everything else will successfully follow.

By entering into the spirit of anything we establish a mutual vivifying
action and reaction between it and ourselves; we vivify it with our own
vitality, and it vivifies us with a living interest which we call its
spirit; and therefore the more fully we enter into the spirit of all
with which we are concerned, the more thoroughly do we become _alive_.
The more completely we do this the more we shall find that we are
penetrating into the great secret of Life. It may seem a truism, but the
great secret of Life is its Livingness, and it is just more of this
quality of Livingness that we want to get hold of; it is that good thing
of which we can never have too much.

But every fact implies also its negative, and we never properly
understand a thing until we not only know what it is, but also clearly
understand what it is not. To a complete understanding the knowledge of
the negative is as necessary as the knowledge of the affirmative; for
the perfect knowledge consists in realising the relation between the
two, and the perfect power grows out of this knowledge by enabling us to
balance the affirmative and negative against each other in any
proportion that we will, thus giving flexibility to what would otherwise
be too rigid, and form to what would otherwise be too fluid; and so, by
uniting these two extremes, to produce any result we may desire. It is
the old Hermetic saying, "_Coagula et solve_"--"Solidify the fluid and
dissolve the solid"; and therefore, if we would discover the secret of
"entering into the spirit of it," we must get some idea of the negative,
which is the "not-spirit."

In various ages this negative phase has been expressed in different
forms of words suitable to the spirit of the time; and so, clothing this
idea in the attire of the present day, I will sum up the opposite of
Spirit in the word "Mechanism." Before all things this is a mechanical
age, and it is astonishing how great a part of what we call our social
advance has its root in the mechanical arts. Reduce the mechanical arts
to what they were in the days of the Plantagenets and the greater part
of our boasted civilisation would recede through the centuries along
with them. We may not be conscious of all this, but the mechanical
tendency of the age has a firm grip upon society at large. We habitually
look at the mechanical side of things by preference to any other.
Everything is done mechanically, from the carving on a piece of
furniture to the arrangement of the social system. It is the mechanism
that must be considered first, and the spirit has to be fitted to the
mechanical exigencies. We enter into the mechanism of it instead of into
the Spirit of it, and so limit the Spirit and refuse to let it have its
own way; and then, as a consequence, we get entirely mechanical action,
and complete our circle of ignorance by supposing that this is the only
sort of action there is.

Yet this is not a necessary state of things even in regard to "physical
science," for the men who have made the greatest advances in that
direction are those who have most clearly seen the subordination of the
mechanical to the spiritual. The man who can recognise a natural law
only as it operates through certain forms of mechanism with which he is
familiar will never rise to the construction of the higher forms of
mechanism which might be built up upon that law, for he fails to see
that it is the law which determines the mechanism and not vice versa.
This man will make no advance in science, either theoretical or applied,
and the world will never owe any debt of gratitude to him. But the man
who recognises that the mechanism for the application of any principle
grows out of the true apprehension of the principle studies the
principle first, knowing that when _that_ is properly grasped it will
necessarily suggest all that is wanted for bringing it into practical
use.

And if this is true in regard to so-called physical science, it is _a
fortiori_ true as regards the Science of Spirit. There is a mechanical
attitude of mind which judges everything by the limitations of past
experiences, allowing nothing for the fact that those experiences were
for the most part the results of our ignorance of spiritual law. But if
we realise the true law of Being we shall rise above these mechanical
conceptions. We shall not deny the reality of the body or of the
physical world as facts, knowing that they also are Spirit, but we shall
learn to deny their power as causes. We shall learn to distinguish
between the _causa causta_ and the _causa causans_, the secondary or
apparent physical cause and the primary or spiritual cause, without
which the secondary cause could not exist; and so we shall get a new
standpoint of clear knowledge and certain power by stepping over the
threshold of the mechanical and entering into the spirit of it.

What we have to do is to maintain our even balance between the two
extremes, denying neither Spirit nor the mechanism which is its form and
through which it works. The one is as necessary to a perfect whole as
the other, for there must be an _outside_ as well as an _inside_; only
we must remember that the creative principle is always _inside_, and
that the outside only exhibits what the inside creates. Hence, whatever
external effect we would produce, we must first enter into the spirit of
it and work upon the spiritual principle, whether in ourselves or
others; and by so doing our insight will become greatly enlarged, for
from without we can see only one small portion of the circumference,
while from the centre we can see the whole of it. If we fully grasp the
truth that Spirit is Creator, we can dispense with painful
investigations into the mechanical side of all our problems. If we are
constructing from without, then we have to calculate anxiously the
strength of our materials and the force of every thrust and strain to
which they may be subjected, and very possibly after all we may find
that we have made a mistake somewhere in our elaborate calculations. But
if we realise the power of creating from within, we shall find all these
calculations correctly made for us; for the same Spirit which is Creator
is also that which the Bible calls "the Wonderful Numberer."
Construction from without is based upon analysis, and no analysis is
complete without accurate quantitative knowledge; but creation is the
very opposite of analysis, and carries its own mathematics with it.

To enter into the spirit of anything, then, is to make yourself one in
thought with the creative principle that is at the centre of it; and
therefore why not go to the centre of all things at once, and enter into
the Spirit of Life? Do you ask where to find it? _In yourself_; and in
proportion as you find it there, you will find it everywhere else.
Look at Life as the one thing that is, whether in you or around you; try
to realise the livingness of it, and then seek to enter into the Spirit
of it by affirming it to be the whole of what you are. Affirm this
continually in your thoughts, and by degrees the affirmation will grow
into a real living force within you, so that it will become a second
nature to you, and you will find it impossible and unnatural to think in
any other way; and the nearer you approach this point the greater you
will find your control over both body and circumstances, until at last
you shall so enter into the Spirit of it--into the Spirit of the Divine
creative power which is the root of all things--that, in the words of
Jesus, "nothing shall be impossible to you," because you have so entered
into the Spirit of it that you discover yourself to be _one with it_.
Then all the old limitations will have passed away, and you will be
living in an entirely new world of Life, Liberty and Love, of which you
yourself are the radiating centre. You will realise the truth that your
Thought is a limitless creative power, and that you yourself are behind
your Thought, controlling and directing it with Knowledge for any
purpose which Love motives and Wisdom plans. Thus you will cease from
your labours, your struggles and anxieties, and enter into that new
order where perfect rest is one with ceaseless activity.

1902.




XIX

THE BIBLE AND THE NEW THOUGHT


I

_The Son_

A deeply interesting subject to the student of the New Thought movement
is to trace how exactly its teaching is endorsed by the teaching of the
Bible. There is no such thing as new thought in the sense of new Truth,
for what is truth now must have been truth always; but there is such a
thing as a new presentment of the old Truth, and it is in this that the
newness of the present movement consists. But the same Truth has been
repeatedly stated in earlier ages under various forms and in various
measures of completeness, and nowhere more completely than in the
Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. None of the older forms of
statement is more familiarly known to our readers than that contained in
the Bible, and no other is entwined around our hearts with the same
sacred and tender associations: therefore, I have no hesitation in
saying that the existence of a marked correspondence between its
teaching and that of the New Thought cannot but be a source of strength
and encouragement to any of us who have been accustomed in the past to
look to the old and hallowed Book as a storehouse of Divine wisdom. We
shall find that the clearer light will make the rough places smooth and
the dim places luminous, and that of the treasures of knowledge hidden
in the ancient volume the half has not been told us.

The Bible lays emphatic stress upon "the glorious liberty of the sons of
God," thus uniting in a single phrase the twofold idea of filial
dependence and personal liberty. A careful study of the subject will
show us that there is no opposition between these two ideas, but that
they are necessary correlatives to each other, and that whether stated
after the more concentrated method of the Bible, or after the more
detailed method of the New Thought, the true teaching proclaims, not our
independence of God, but our independence in God.

Such an enquiry naturally centres in an especial manner around the
sayings of Jesus; for whatever may be our opinions as to the nature of
the authority with which he spoke, we must all agree that a peculiar
weight attaches to those utterances which have come down to us as the
_ipsissima verba_ from which the entire New Testament has been
developed; and if an identity of conception in the New Thought movement
can be traced here at the fountain-head, we may expect to find it in the
lower streams also.

The Key to the Master's teaching is to be found in his discourse with
the Woman of Samaria, and it is contained in the statement that "the
Father" is Spirit, that is, Spirit in the absolute and unqualified sense
of the word, as appears from the original Greek, and not "A Spirit" as
it is rendered in the Authorised Version: and then as the natural
correlative to "the Father" we find another term employed, "the Son."
The relation between these two forms the great subject of Jesus'
teaching, and, therefore, it is most important to have some definite
idea of what he meant by these terms if we would understand what it was
that he really taught.

Now if "the Father" be Spirit, "the Son" must be Spirit also; for a son
must necessarily be of the same nature as his father. But since "the
Father" is Spirit, Absolute and Universal, it is evident that "the Son"
cannot be Spirit, Absolute and Universal, because there cannot be two
Universal Spirits, for then neither would be universal. We may,
therefore, logically infer that because "the Father" is Universal
Spirit, "the Son" is Spirit not universal; and the only definition of
Spirit not-universal is Spirit individualised and particular. The
Scripture tells us that "the Spirit is Life," and taking this as the
definition of "Spirit," we find that "the Father" is Absolute,
Originating, Undifferentiated Life, and "the Son" is the same Life
differentiated into particular forms. Hence, in the widest sense of the
expression, "the Son" stands for the whole creation, visible or
invisible, and in this sense it is the mere differentiation of the
universal Life into a multiplicity of particular modes. But if we have
any adequate idea of the intelligent and responsive nature of
Spirit[2]--if we realise that because it is Pure Being it must be
Infinite Intelligence and Infinite Responsiveness--then we shall see
that its reproduction in the particular admits of innumerable degrees,
from mere expression as outward form up to the very fullest expression
of the infinite intelligence and responsiveness that Spirit is.

    [Footnote 2: _Intelligence_ and _Responsiveness_ is the
    Generic Nature of Spirit in _every_ Mode, and it is the
    _concentration_ of this into centres of consciousness that
    makes personality, i. e., _self_-conscious individuality.
    This varies immensely in degree, from its first adumbration
    in the animal to its intense development in the Great Masters
    of Spiritual Science. Therefore it is called "The Power that
    Knows Itself"--It is the power of _Self_-recognition that
    makes _personality_, and as we grow to see that our
    personality is not all contained between our hat and our
    boots, as Walt Whitman says, but _expands_ away into the
    Infinite, which we then find to be _the Infinite of
    ourselves_, the _same_ I AM that I am, so _our personality_
    expands and we become conscious of ever-increasing degrees of
    Life-in-ourselves.]

The teachings of Jesus were addressed to the hearts and intelligences of
men, and therefore the grade of sonship of which he spoke has reference
to the expression of Infinite Being in the human heart and intellect.
But this, again, may be conceived of in infinite degrees; in some men
there is the bare potentiality of sonship entirely undeveloped as yet,
in others the beginnings of its development, in others a fuller
development, and so on, until we can suppose some supreme instance in
which the absolutely perfect reproduction of the universal has been
attained. Each of these stages constitutes a fuller and fuller
expression of sonship, until the supreme development reaches a point at
which it can be described only as the perfect image of "the Father"; and
this is the logical result of a process of steady growth from an inward
principle of Life which constitutes the identity of each individual.

It is thus a necessary inference from Jesus' own explanation of "the
Father" as Spirit or Infinite Being that "the Son" is the Scriptural
phrase for the reproduction of Infinite Being in the individual,
contemplated in that stage at which the individual does in some measure
begin to recognise his identity with his originating source, or, at any
rate, where he has capacity for such a recognition, even though the
actual recognition may not yet have taken place. It is very remarkable
that, thus defining "the Son" on the direct statement of Jesus himself,
we arrive exactly at the definition of Spirit as "that power which knows
itself." In the capacity for thus recognising its identity of nature
with "the Father" is it that the potential fact of sonship consists, for
the prodigal son was still a son even before he began to realise his
relation to his "Father" in actual fact. It is the dawning of this
recognition that constitutes the spiritual "babe," or infant son; and by
degrees this consciousness grows till he attains the full estate of
spiritual manhood. This recognition by the individual of his own
identity with Universal Spirit is precisely what forms the basis of the
New Thought; and thus at the outset the two systems radiate from a
common centre.

But I suppose the feature of the New Thought which is the greatest
stumbling-block to those who view the movement from the outside is the
claim it makes for Thought-power as an active factor in the affairs of
daily life. As a mere set of speculative opinions people might be
willing to pigeon-hole it along with the philosophic systems of Kant or
Hegel; but it is the practical element in it which causes the
difficulty. It is not only a system of Thought based upon a conception
of the Unity of Being, but it claims to follow out this conception to
its legitimate consequences in the production of visible and tangible
external results by the mere exercise of Thought-power. A ridiculous
claim, a claim not to be tolerated by common sense, a trespassing upon
the Divine prerogative, a claim of unparalleled audacity: thus the
casual objector. But this claim is not without its parallel, for the
same claim was put forward on the same ground by the Great Teacher
Himself as the proper result of "the Son's" recognition of his relation
to "the Father." "Ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you";
"Whatsoever you shall ask in prayer, believing, you shall receive, and
nothing shall be impossible unto you"; "All things are possible to him
that believeth." These statements are absolutely without any note of
limitation save that imposed by the seeker's want of faith in his own
power to move the Infinite. This is as clear a declaration of the
efficacy of mental power to produce outward and tangible results as any
now made by the New Thought, and it is made on precisely the same
ground, namely, the readiness of "the Father" or Spirit in the Universal
to respond to the movement of Spirit in the individual.

In the Bible this movement of individualised Spirit is called "prayer,"
and it is synonymous with Thought, formulated with the intention of
producing this response.

    "Prayer is the heart's sincere desire,
     Uttered or unexpressed,"

and we must not let ourselves be misled by the association of particular
forms with particular words, but should follow the sound advice of
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and submit such words to a process of
depolarisation, which brings out their real meaning. Whether we call our
act "prayer" or "thought-concentration," we mean the same thing; it is
the claim of the man to move the Infinite by the action of his own mind.

It may be objected, however, that this definition omits an important
element of prayer, the question, namely, whether God will hear it. But
this is the very element that Jesus most rigorously excludes from his
description of the mental act. Prayer, according to the popular notion,
is a most uncertain matter. Whether we shall be heard or not depends
entirely upon another will, regarding whose action we are completely
ignorant, and therefore, according to this notion, the very essence of
prayer consists of utter uncertainty. Jesus' conception of prayer was
the very opposite. He bids us believe that we have already in fact
received what we ask for, and makes this the condition of receiving; in
other words, he makes the essential factor in the mental action to
consist in Absolute Certainty as to the corresponding response in the
Infinite, which is exactly the condition that the New Thought lays down
for the successful operation of Thought-power.

It may, however, be objected that if men have thus an indiscriminate
power of projecting their thought to the accomplishment of anything they
desire, they can do so for evil as easily as for good. But Jesus fully
recognised this possibility, and worked the only destructive miracle
recorded of him for the express purpose of emphasising the danger. The
reason given by the compilers of the Gospel for the destruction of the
fig-tree is clearly inadequate, for we certainly cannot suppose Jesus so
unreasonable as to curse a tree for not bearing fruit out of season. But
the record itself shows a very different purpose. Jesus answered the
disciples' astonished questioning by telling them that it was in their
own power, not only to do what was done to the fig-tree, but to produce
effects upon a far grander scale; and he concludes the conversation by
laying down the duty of a heart-searching forgiveness as a necessary
preliminary to prayer. Why was this precept so particularly impressed in
this particular connection? Obviously because the demonstration he had
just given of the valency of thought-power in the hands of instructed
persons laid bare the fact that this power can be used destructively as
well as beneficially, and that, therefore, a thorough heart-searching
for the eradication of any lurking ill-feeling became an imperative
preliminary to its safe use; otherwise there was danger of noxious
thought-currents being set in motion to the injury of others. The
miracle of the fig-tree was an object-lesson to exhibit the need for the
careful handling of that limitless power which Jesus assured his
disciples existed as fully in them as in himself. I do not here attempt
to go into this subject in detail, but enough has, I think, been shown
to convince us that Jesus made exactly the same claim for the power of
Thought as that made by the New Thought movement at the present day. It
is a great claim, and it is, therefore, encouraging to find such an
authority committed to the same assertion.

The general principle on which this claim is based by the exponents of
the New Thought is the identity of Spirit in the individual with spirit
in the universal, and we shall find that this, also, is the basis of
Jesus' teaching on the subject. He says that "the Son can do nothing of
himself, but what he seeth the Father do these things doeth the Son in
like manner." It must now be sufficiently clear that "the Son" is a
generic appellation, not restricted to a particular individual, but
applicable to all; and this statement explains the manner of "the Son's"
working in relation to "the Father." The point this sentence
particularly emphasises is that it is what he sees the Father doing that
the Son does also. His doing corresponds to his seeing. If the seeing
expands, the doing expands along with it. But we are all sufficiently
familiar with this principle in other matters. What differentiates an
Edison or a Marconi from the apprentice who knows only how to fit up an
electric bell by rule of thumb? It is their capacity for seeing the
universal principles of electricity and bringing them into particular
application. The great painter is the one who sees the universal
principles of form and colour where the smaller man sees only a
particular combination; and so with the great surgeon, the great
chemist, the great lawyer--in every line it is the power of insight that
distinguishes the great man from the little one; it is the capacity for
making wide generalisations and perceiving far-reaching laws that raises
the exceptional mind above the ordinary level. The greater working
always results from the greater seeing into the abstract principles from
which any art or science is generated; and this same law carried up to
the universal principles of Life is the law by which "the Son's" working
is proportioned to his seeing the method of "the Father's" work. Thus
the source of "the Son's" power lies in the contemplation of "the
Father," the endeavour, that is, to realise the true nature of Being,
whether in the abstract or in its generic forms of manifestation.[3]
This is Bacon's maxim, "Work as God works"; and similarly the New
Thought consists before all things in the realisation of the laws of
Being.

    [Footnote 3: Everything depends on this principle of
    Reciprocity. By contemplation we come to realize the true
    nature of "Spirit" or "the father." We learn to disengage the
    _variable_ factors of particular _Modes_ from the
    _invariable_ factors which are the essential qualities of
    Spirit underlying _all_ Modes. Then when we realize these
    essential qualities we see that we can apply them under any
    mode that we will: in other words _we_ supply the _variable_
    factor of the combination by the action of our Thought, as
    Desire or Will, and thus combine it with the _invariable_
    factor or "constant" of the _essential_ law of spirit, thus
    producing what result we will. This is just what we do in
    respect to physical nature--e. g., the electrician supplies
    the _variable_ factor of the particular Mode of application,
    and the _constant_ laws of Electricity _respond_ to the
    nature of the invitation given to them. This _Responsiveness_
    is _inherent_ in Spirit; otherwise Spirit would have no means
    of expansion into manifestation. Responsiveness is the
    principle of Spirit's Self-expression. We do not have to
    create responsive action on the part of electricity. We can
    safely take this Responsiveness for granted as pure natural
    law. Our desire first works on the Arupa level and thence
    concentrates itself through the various Rupa levels till it
    reaches complete external manifestation.]

And the result of the seeing is that "the Son" does the same things as
"the Father" "in like manner." The Son's action is the reproduction of
the universal principles in application to specific instances. The
principles remain unaltered and work always in the same manner, and the
office of "the Son" is to determine the particular field of their
operation with regard to the specific object which he has in view; and
therefore, so far as that object is concerned, the action of "the Son"
becomes the action of "the Father" also.

Again, there is no concealment on the part of "the Father." He has no
secrets, for "the Father loveth the Son, and showeth him all things that
himself doeth." There is perfect reciprocity between Spirit in the
Universal and in Individualisation, resulting from the identity of
Being; and "the Son's" recognition of Love as the active principle of
this Unity gives him an intuitive insight into all those inner workings
of the Universal Life which we call the arcana of Nature. Love has a
divine gift of insight which cannot be attained by intellect alone, and
the old saying, "Love will find out the way," has greater depths of
meaning than appear on the surface. Thus there is not only a seeing, but
also a showing; and the three terms--"looking, seeing, showing"--combine
to form a power of "working" to which it is impossible to assign any
limit.

Here, again, the teaching of Jesus is in exact correspondence with that
of the New Thought, which tells us that limitations exist only where we
ourselves put them, and that to view ourselves as beings of limitless
knowledge, power, and love is to become such in outward manifestation of
visible fact. Any objection, therefore, to the New Thought teaching
regarding the possibilities latent in Man apply with equal force to the
teachings of Jesus. His teaching clearly was that the perfect
individuality of Man is a Dual-Unity, the polarisation of the Infinite
in the Manifest; and it requires only the recognition of this truth for
the manifested element in this binary system to demonstrate its identity
with the corresponding element which is not externally visible. He said
that He and his Father were One, that those who had seen him had seen
the Father, that the words which he spoke were the Father's, and that it
was the Father who did the works. Nothing could be more explicit.
Absolute unity of the manifested individuality with the Originating
Infinite Spirit is asserted or implied in every utterance attributed to
Jesus, whether spoken of himself or of others. He recognises only one
radical difference, the difference between those who know this truth and
those who do not know it. The distinction between the disciple and the
master is one only of degree, which will be effaced by the expansive
power of growth; "the disciple, when he is perfected, shall be as his
Master."

All that hinders the individual from exercising the full power of the
Infinite for any purpose whatever is his lack of faith, his inability to
realise to the full the stupendous truth that he himself is the very
power which he seeks. This was the teaching of Jesus as it is that of
the New Thought; and this truth of the Divine Sonship of Man once taken
as the great foundation, a magnificent edifice of possibilities which
"eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart
of man to conceive," grows up logically upon it--a glorious heritage
which each one may legitimately claim in right of his common humanity.


II

_The Great Affirmation_

I take it for granted that my readers are well acquainted with the part
assigned to the principle of Affirmation in the scheme of the New
Thought. This is often a stumbling-block to beginners; and I feel sure
that even those who are not beginners will welcome every aid to a deeper
apprehension of this great central truth. I, therefore, purpose to
examine the Bible teaching on this important subject.

The professed object of the Bible is to establish and extend "the
Kingdom of God" throughout the world, and this can be done only by
repeating the process from one individual to another, until the whole
mass is leavened. It is thus an individual process; and, as we have seen
in the last chapter, God is Spirit and Spirit is Life, and, therefore,
the expansion of "the Kingdom of God" means the expansion of the
principle of Life in each individual. Now Life, to be life at all, must
be Affirmative. It is Life in virtue of what it is, and not in virtue of
what it is not. The quantity of life in any particular case may be very
small; but, however small the amount, the quality is always the same:
it is the quality of Being, the quality of Livingness, and not its
absence, that makes it what it is. The distinctive character of Life,
therefore, is that it is Positive and not Negative; and every degree of
negativeness, that is, every limitation, is ultimately traceable to
deficiency of Life-power.

Limitations surround us because we believe in our inability to do what
we desire. Whenever we say "I cannot" we are brought up sharp by a
limitation, and we cease to exercise our thought-power in that direction
because we believe ourselves stopped by a blank wall of impossibility;
and whenever this occurs we are subjected to bondage. The ideal of
perfect Liberty is the converse of all this, and follows a sequence
which does not thus lead us into a _cul-de-sac_. This sequence consists
of the three affirmations: I am--therefore I can--therefore I will; and
this last affirmation results in the projection of our powers, whether
interior or external, to the accomplishment of the desired object. But
this last affirmation has its root in the first; and it is because we
recognise the Affirmative nature of the Life that is in us, or rather of
the Life which we are, that the power to will or to act positively has
any existence; and, therefore, the extent of our power to will and to
act positively and with effect, is exactly measured by our perception of
the depth and livingness of our own Being. Hence the more fully we learn
to affirm that, the greater power we are able to exercise.

Now the ideal of perfect Liberty is the entire absence of all
limitation, and to have no limitation in Being is to be co-extensive
with All-Being. We are all grammarians enough to know that the use of a
predicate is to lead the mind to contemplate the subject as represented
by that predicate; in other words, it limits our conception for the time
being to that particular aspect of the subject. Hence every predicate,
however extensive, implies some limitation of the subject. But the ideal
subject, the absolutely free self, is, by the very hypothesis, without
limitation; and, therefore, no predicate can be attached to it. It
stands as a declaration of its own Being without any statement of what
that Being consists in, and therefore it says of itself, not "I am this
or that," but simply I am. No predicate can be added, because the only
commensurate predicate would be the enumeration of Infinity. Therefore,
both logically and grammatically, the only possible statement of a fully
liberated being is made in the words I am.

I need hardly remind my readers of the frequency with which Jesus
employed these emphatic words. In many cases the translators have added
the word "He," but they have been careful, by putting it in italics, to
show that it is not in the original. As grammarians and theologians they
thought something more was wanted to complete the sense, and they
supplied it accordingly; but if we would get at the very words as the
Master himself spoke them, we must strike out this interpolation. And as
soon as we have done so there flashes into light the identity of his
statement with that made to Moses at the burning bush, where the full
significance of the words is so obvious that the translators were
compelled to leave the place of the predicate in that seeming emptiness
which comes from filling all things.

Seen thus, a marvellous light shines forth from the instruction of the
Great Teacher: for in whatever sense we may regard him as a Great
Exception to the weak and limited aspect of humanity with which we are
only too familiar, we must all agree that his mission was not to render
mankind hopeless by declaring the path of advance barred against them,
but "to give light to them that sit in darkness," and liberty to them
that are bound, by proclaiming the unlimited possibilities that are in
man waiting only to be called forth by knowledge of the Truth. And if we
suppose any personal reference in his words, it can, therefore, be only
as the Great Example of what man has it in him to become, and not as the
example of something which man can never hope to be; an Exception,
truly, to mankind as we see them now, but the Exception that proves the
rule, and sets the standard of what each one may become as he attains to
the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

Let us, therefore, by striking out this interpolation, restore the
Master's words as they stand in the original: "Except ye believe that I
am, ye shall die in your sins." This is an epitome of his teaching.

"The last enemy that shall be overcome is death," and the "sting," or
fatal power, of death is "sin." Remove that, and death has no longer any
dominion over us; its power is at an end. And "the strength of sin is
the Law": sin is every contradiction of the law of Being; and the law of
Being is infinitude; for Being is Life, and Life in its innermost
essence is the limitless I am. Dying in our sins is thus not a
punishment for doubting a particular theological dogma, but it is the
unavoidable natural consequence of not realising, not believing in, the
I am. So long as we fail to realise its full infinitude in ourselves, we
cut ourselves off from our conscious unity with the Infinite Life-Spirit
which permeates all things. Without this principle we have no
alternative but to die--and this because of our sin, that is, because of
our failure to conform to the true Law of our Being, which is Life, and
not Death. We affirm Death and Negation concerning ourselves, and
therefore Death and Negation are externalised, and thus we pay the
penalty of not believing in the central Law of our own Life, which is
the Law of all Life. The Bible is the Book of Principles, and therefore
by "dying" is meant the acceptance of the principle of the Negative
which culminates in Death as the sum-total of all limitations, and which
introduces at every step those restrictions which are of the nature of
Death, because their tendency is to curtail the outflowing fulness of
Life.

This, then, is the very essence of the teaching of Jesus, that unbelief
in the limitless power of Life-in-ourselves--in each of us--is the one
cause of Death and of all those evils which, in greater or lesser
measure, reproduce the restrictive influences which deprive Life of its
fulness and joy. If we would escape Death and enter into Life, we must
each believe in the I am in ourselves. And the ground for this belief?
Simply that nothing else is conceivable. If our life is not a portion of
the life of Universal Spirit, whence comes it? We are because that is.
No other explanation is possible. The unqualified affirmation of our own
livingness is not an audacious self-assertion: it is the only logical
outcome of the fact that there is any life anywhere, and that we are
here to think about it. In the sense of Universal Being, there can be
only One I am, and the understanding use of the words by the individual
is the assertion of this fact. The forms of manifestation are infinite,
but the Life which is manifested is One, and thus every thinker who
recognises the truth regarding himself finds in the I am both himself
and the totality of all things; and thus he comes to know that in
utilising the interior nature of the things and persons about him, he
is, in effect, employing the powers of his own life.

Sometimes the veil which Jesus drew over this great truth was very
transparent. To the Samaritan woman he spoke of it as a spring of Life
forever welling up in the innermost recesses of man's being; and again,
to the multitude assembled at the Temple, he spoke of it as a river of
Life forever gushing from the secret sources of the spirit within us.
Life, to be ours at all, must be ourselves. An energy which only passed
through us, without being us, might produce a sort of galvanic activity,
but it would not be Life. Life can never be a separate entity from the
individuality which manifests it; and therefore, even if we conceive the
life-principle in a man so intensified as to pulsate with what might
seem to us an absolutely divine vitality, it would still be no other
than the man himself. Thus Jesus directs us to no external source of
life, but ever teaches that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, and that
what is wanted is to remove those barriers of ignorance and ill-will
which prevent us from realising that the great I am, which is the
innermost Spirit of Life throughout the universe, is the same I am that
I am, whoever I may be.

On another memorable occasion Jesus declared again that the I am is the
enduring principle of Life. It is this that is the Resurrection and the
Life; not, as Martha supposed, a new principle to be infused from
without at some future time, but an inherent core of vitality awaiting
only its own recognition of itself to triumph over death and the grave.
And yet, again hear the Master's answer to the inquiring Thomas. How
many of us, like him, desire to know the way! To hear of wonderful
powers latent in man and requiring only development is beautiful and
hopeful, if we could only find out the way to develop them; but who will
show us the way? The answer comes with no uncertain note. The I am
includes everything. It is at once "the Way, the Truth, and the Life":
not the Life only, or the Truth only, but also the Way by which to reach
them. Can words be plainer? It is by continually affirming and relying
on the I am in ourselves as identical with the I am that is the One and
Only Life, whether manifested or unmanifested, in all places of the
universe, that we shall find the way to the attainment of all Truth and
of all Life. Here we have the predicate which we are seeking to complete
our affirmation regarding ourselves. I am--what? the Three things which
include all things: Truth, which is all Knowledge and Wisdom; Life,
which is all Power and Love; and the unfailing Way which will lead us
step by step, if we follow it, to heights too sublime and environment
too wide for our present juvenile imaginings to picture.

As the New Testament centres around Jesus, so the old Testament centres
around Moses, and he also declares the Great Affirmation to be the
same.[4] For him God has no name, but that intensely living universal
Life which is all in all, and no name is sufficient to be its
equivalent. The emphatic words I am are the only possible statement of
the One-Power which exhibits itself as all worlds and all living beings.
It is the Great I am which forever unfolds itself in all the infinite
evolutionary forces of the cosmic scheme, and which, in marvellous
onward march, develops itself into higher and higher conscious
intelligence in the successive races of mankind, unrolling the scroll of
history as it moves on from age to age, working out with unerring
precision the steady forward movement of the whole towards that ultimate
perfection in which the work of God will be completed. But stupendous
as is the scale on which this Providential Power reveals itself to Moses
and the Prophets, it is still nothing else than the very same Power
which Jesus bids us realise in ourselves.

    [Footnote 4: The Old Testament and the New treat the I AM
    from its opposite poles. The Old Testament treats it from the
    relation of the _Whole to the Part_, while the New Testament
    treats it from the relation of the _Part to the Whole_. This
    is important as explaining the relation between the Old and
    New Testaments.

    (a) "My Word shall not return unto me void but shall
    accomplish that whereunto I send it."

    (b) The Principle here indicated is that of the Alternation
    and Equation between Absorption and Radiation--a taking-in
    before, and a giving-out.

    (c) "_Order_"--Whatever betrays this is "Disorder."

    (d) "_Conscious_"--It is the degree of _consciousness_ that
    always marks the transition from a lower to a higher Power of
    Life. The _Life_ of _All Seven_ Principles _must_ always be
    present in us, otherwise we should not exist at all;
    therefore it is the degree in which we learn to _consciously_
    function in each of them that marks our advance into higher
    kingdoms within ourselves, and frequently outside ourselves
    also.

    (e) The Central Radiating Point of our Individuality is _One_
    with All-Being.

    (f) _Equilibrium_--Note the difference between the Living
    Equilibrium of Alternate Rhythmic _Pulsation_ (the whole
    Pulsation Doctrine) and the dead equilibrium of merely
    _running down_ to a _dead level_. The former implies the
    Doctrine of the Return, the Upward Arc compensating the
    Downward Arc--The deadness of the latter results from the
    absence of any such compensation. The Upward Arc results from
    the contemplation of the Highest Ideal.

    (g) Spirit cannot leave any portion of its Nature behind it.
    It _must_ always have _all_ the qualities of Spirit in it,
    even though the lower parts of the individuality are not yet
    conscious of it.

    (h) The Great Affirmation is The Guide to the whole Subject.]

The theatre of its operations may be expanded to the magnificent
proportions of a world-history, or contracted to the sphere of a single
individuality: the difference is only one of scale; but the
Life-principle is always the same. It is always the principle of
confident Affirmation in the calm knowledge that all things are but
manifestations of itself, and that, therefore, all must move together in
one mighty unity which admits of no discordant elements. This "unity of
the spirit" once clearly grasped, to say I am is to send the vibrations
of our thought-currents throughout the universe to do our bidding when
and where we will; and, conversely, it is _to_ draw in the vitalising
influences of Infinite Spirit as from a boundless ocean of Life, which
can never be exhausted and from which no power can hold us back. And all
this is so because it is the supreme law of Nature. It is not the
introduction of a new order, but simply the allowing of the original and
only possible order to flow on to its legitimate fulfilment. A Divine
Order, truly, but nowhere shall we find anything that is not Divine; and
it is to the realisation of this Divine and Living Order that it is the
purpose of the Bible to lead us. But we shall never realise it around us
until we first realise it within us. We can see God outside only by the
light of God inside; and this light increases in proportion as we
become conscious of the Divine nature of the innermost I am which is the
centre of our own individuality.

Therefore, it is that Jesus tells us that the I am is "the door." It is
that central point of our individual Being which opens into the whole
illimitable Life of the Infinite. If we would understand the old-world
precept, "know thyself," we must concentrate our thought more and more
closely upon our own interior Life until we touch its central radiating
point, and there we shall find that the door into the Infinite is indeed
opened to us, and that we can pass from the innermost of our own Being
into the innermost of All-Being. This is why Jesus spoke of "the door"
as that through which we should pass in and out and find pasture.
Pasture, the feeding of every faculty with its proper food, is to be
found both on the within and the without. The livingness of Life
consists in both concentration and externalisation: it is not the dead
equilibrium of inertia, but the living equilibrium of a vital and
rhythmic pulsation. Involution and evolution must forever alternate, and
the door of communication between them is the I am which is the living
power in both. Thus it is that the Great Affirmation is the Secret of
Life, and that to say I am with a true understanding of all that it
implies is to place ourselves in touch with all the powers of the
Infinite.

This is the Universal and Eternal Affirmation to which no predicate is
attached; and all particular affirmations will be found to be only
special differentiations of this all-embracing one. I will this or that
particular thing because I know that I can bring it into
externalisation, and I know that I can because I know that I am, and so
we always come back to the great central Affirmation of All-Being.
Search the Scriptures and you will find that from first to last they
teach only this: that every human soul is an individualisation of that
Universal Being, or All-Spirit, which we call God, and that Spirit can
never be shorn of its powers, but like Fire, which is its symbol, must
always be fully and perfectly itself, which is Life in all its unlimited
fulness.

In assigning to Affirmation, therefore, the importance which it does,
the New Thought movement is at one with the teaching of Jesus and Moses
and of the entire Bible. And the reason is clear. There is only one
Truth, and therefore careful seeking can bring men only to the same
Truth, whether they be Bible-writers or any other. The Bible derives its
authority from the inherent truth of the things it tells of, and not
vice versa; and if these things be true at all, they would be equally
true even though no Bible had ever been written. But, taking the Great
Affirmation as our guide, we shall find that the system taught by the
Bible is scientific and logical throughout, and therefore any other
system which is scientifically true will be found to correspond with it
in substance, however it may differ from it in form; and thus, in their
statements regarding the power of Affirmation, the exponents of the New
Thought broach no new-fangled absurdity, but only reiterate a great
truth which has been before the world, though very imperfectly
recognised, for thousands of years.


III

_The Father_

If, as we have seen, "the Son" is the differentiating principle of
Spirit, giving rise to innumerable individualities, "the Father" is the
unifying principle by which these innumerable individualities are bound
together into one common life, and the necessity for recognising this
great basis of the universal harmony forms the foundation of Jesus'
teaching on the subject of Worship. "Woman, believe me, the hour cometh,
when neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, shall ye worship
the Father. Ye worship that which ye know not; we worship that which we
know; for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour cometh and now is
when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth"
(Revised Version). In these few words the Great Teacher sums up the
whole subject. He lays particular stress on the kind of worship that he
means. It is, before all things, founded upon knowledge.

"We worship that which we know," and it is this knowledge that gives the
worship a healthful and life-giving quality. It is not the ignorant
worship of wonderment and fear, a mere abasement of ourselves before
some vast, vague, unknown power, which may injure us if we do not find
out how to propitiate it; but it is a definite act performed with a
definite purpose, which means that it is the employment of one of our
natural faculties upon its proper object in an intelligent manner. The
ignorant Samaritan worship is better than no worship at all, for at
least it realises the existence of some centre around which a man's life
should revolve, something to prevent the aimless dispersion of His
powers for want of a centripetal force to bind them together; and even
the crudest notion of prayer, as a mere attempt to induce God to change
his mind, is at least a first step towards the truth that full supply
for all our needs may be drawn from the Infinite. Still, such worship as
this is hampered with perplexities, and can give only a feeble answer to
the atheistical sneer which asks, "What is man, that God should be
mindful of him, a momentary atom among unnumbered worlds?"

Now the teaching of Jesus throws all these perplexities aside with the
single word "knowledge." There is only one true way of doing anything,
and that is knowing exactly what it is we want to do, and knowing
exactly why we want to do it. All other doing is blundering. We may
blunder into the right thing sometimes, but we cannot make this our
principle of life to all eternity; and if we have to give up the blunder
method eventually, why not give it up now, and begin at once to profit
by acting according to intelligible principle? The knowledge that "the
Son," as individualised Spirit, has his correlative in "the Father," as
Universal Spirit, affords the clue we need.

In whatever way we may attempt to explain it, the fact remains that
volition is the fundamental characteristic of Spirit. We may speak of
conscious, or subconscious or super-conscious action; but in whatever
way we may picture to ourselves the condition of the agent as
contemplating his own action, a general purposeful lifeward tendency
becomes abundantly evident on any enlarged view of Nature, whether seen
from without or from within, and we may call this by the general name of
volition. But the error we have to avoid is that of supposing volition
to take the same form in Universal Spirit as in individualised Spirit.
The very terms "universal" and "individual" forbid this. For the
universal, as such, to exercise specific volition, concentrating itself
upon the details of a specific case, would be for it to pass into
individualisation, and to cease to be the Absolute and Infinite; it
would be no longer "the Father," but "the Son." It is therefore exactly
by not exercising specific volition that "the Father" continues to be
"the Father," or the Great Unifying Principle. But the volitional
quality is not on this account absent from Spirit in the Universal; for
otherwise whence would that quality appear in ourselves? It is present;
but according to the nature of the plane on which it is acting. The
Universal is not the Specific, and everything on the plane of the
Universal must partake of the nature of that plane. Hence volition in
"the Father" is not specific; and that which is not specific and
individual must be generic. Generic volition, therefore, is that mode of
volition which belongs to the Universal, and generic volition is
tendency. This is the solution of the enigma, and this solution is
given, not obscurely, in Jesus' statement that "the Father" seeks those
true worshippers who worship Him in spirit and in truth.

For what do we mean by tendency? From the root of tendere, to stretch;
it signifies a pushing out in a certain definite direction, the tension
of some force seeking to expand itself. What force? The Universal
Life-Principle, for "the Spirit is Life." In the language of modern
science this "seeking" on the part of "the Father" is the expansive
pressure of the Universal Life-Principle seeking the line of least
resistance, along which to flow into the fullest manifestation of
individualised Life. It is a tendency which will take manifested form
according to the degree in which it meets with reception.

St. John says, "This is the boldness that we have towards him, that if
we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us; and if we know
that He heareth us whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the
petitions that we have asked of Him" (1 John v. 14). Now according to
the popular notion of "the will of God," this passage entirely loses its
value, because it makes everything depend on our asking "according to
His will," and if we start with the idea of an individual act of the
Divine volition in each separate case, nothing short of a special
revelation continually repeated could inform us what the Divine will in
each particular instance was. Viewed in this light, this passage is a
mere jeering at our incapacity. But when once we realise that "the will
of God" is an invariable law of tendency, we have a clear standard by
which to test whether we may rightly expect to get what we desire. We
can study this law of tendency as we would any other law, and it is this
study that is the essence of true worship.

The word "worship" means to count worthy; to count worthy, that is, of
observation. The proverb says that "imitation is the sincerest form of
flattery" more truly we may say that it is the sincerest worship. Hence
the true worship is the study of the Universal Life-Principle "the
Father," in its nature and in its modes of action; and when we have thus
realised "the Law of God," the law that is inherent in the nature of
Infinite Being, we shall know that by conforming our own particular
action to this generic law, we shall find that this law will in every
instance work out the results that we desire. This is nothing more or
less miraculous than what occurs in every case of applied science. He
only is the true chemist or engineer who, by first learning how to obey
the generic tendency of natural laws, is able to command them to the
fulfilment of his individual purposes; no other method will succeed.
Similarly with the student of the divine mystery of Life. He must first
learn the great laws of its generic tendency, and then he will be in a
position to apply that tendency to the working of any specific effect he
will.

Common sense tells us what the law of this tendency must be. The Master
taught that a house divided against itself cannot stand; and for the
Life-Principle to do anything restrictive of the fullest expansion of
life, would be for it to act to its own destruction. The test,
therefore, in every case, whether our intention falls within the scope
of the great law, is this: Does it operate for the expansion or for the
restriction of life? and according to the answer we can say positively
whether or not our purpose is according to "the will of God." Therefore
so long as we work within the scope of this generic "will of the Father"
we need have no fear of the Divine Providence, as an agency, acting
adversely to us. We may dismiss this bugbear, for we ourselves are
manifestations of the very power which we call "the Father." The I am is
one; and so long as we preserve this unity by conforming to the generic
nature of the I am in the universal, it will certainly never destroy the
unity by entering upon a specific course of action on its own account.

Here, then, we find the secret of power. It is contained in the true
worship of "the Father," which is the constant recognition of the
lifegivingness of Originating Spirit, and of the fact that we, as
individuals, still continue to be portions of that Spirit; and that
therefore the law of our nature is to be perpetually drawing life from
the inexhaustible stores of the Infinite--not bottles of water-of-life
mixed with other ingredients and labelled for this or that particular
purpose, but the full flow of the pure stream itself, which we are free
to use for any purpose we desire. "Whosoever will, let him take the
water of life freely." It is thus that the worship of "the Father"
becomes the central principle of the individual life, not as curtailing
our liberty, but as affording the only possible basis for it. As a
planetary system would be impossible without a central controlling sun,
so harmonious life is impossible without the recognition of Infinite
Spirit as that Power, whose generic tendency serves to control each
individual being into its proper orbit. This is the teaching of the
Bible, and it is also the teaching of the New Thought, which says that
life with all its limitless possibilities is a continual outflow from
the Infinite which we may turn in any direction that we desire.

But, it may be asked, what happens if we go counter to this generic law
of Spirit? This is an important question, and I must leave the answer
for further consideration.


IV

_Conclusion_

I concluded my last chapter with the momentous question, What happens if
we go counter to the generic law of Spirit? What happens if we go
counter to any natural law? Obviously, the law goes counter to us. We
can use the laws of Nature, but we cannot alter them. By opposing any
natural law we place ourselves in an inverted position with regard to
it, and therefore, viewed from this false standpoint, it appears as
though the law itself were working against us with definite purpose. But
the inversion proceeds entirely from ourselves, and not from any change
in the action of the law. The law of Spirit, like all other natural
laws, is in itself impersonal; but we carry into it, so to speak, the
reflection of our own personality, though we cannot alter its generic
character; and therefore, if we oppose its generic tendency towards the
universal good, we shall find in it the reflection of our own opposition
and waywardness.

The law of Spirit proceeds unalterably on its course, and what is spoken
of in popular phraseology as the Divine wrath is nothing else than the
reflex action which naturally follows when we put ourselves in
opposition to this law. The evil that results is not a personal
intervention of the Universal Spirit, which would imply its entering
into specific manifestation, but it is the natural outcome of the
causes that we ourselves have set in motion. But the effect to ourselves
will be precisely the same as if they were brought about by the volition
of an adverse personality, though we may not realise that in truth the
personal element is our own. And if we are at all aware of the
wonderfully complex nature of man, and the various interweavings of
principles which unite the material body at one end of the scale to the
purely spiritual Ego at the other, we shall have some faint idea of on
how vast a field these adverse influences may operate, not being
restricted to the plane of outward manifestation, but acting equally on
those inner planes which give rise to the outer and are of a more
enduring nature.

Thus the philosophic study of Spirit, so far from affording any excuse
for laxity of conduct, adds an emphatic definiteness to the Bible
exhortation to flee from the wrath of God. But, on the other hand, it
delivers us from groundless terrors, the fear lest our repentance should
not be accepted, the fear lest we should be rejected for our inability
to subscribe to some traditional dogma, the fear of utter uncertainty
regarding the future--fears which make life bitter and the prospect of
death appalling to those who are in bondage to them. The knowledge that
we are dealing with a power which is no respecter of persons, and in
which is no variableness, which is, in fact, an unalterable Law, at
once delivers us from all these terrors.

The very unchangeableness of Law makes it certain that no amount of past
opposition to it, whether from ignorance or wilfulness, will prevent it
from working in accordance with its own beneficent and life-giving
character as soon as we quit our inverted position and place ourselves
in our true relation towards it. The laws of Nature do not harbour
revenge; and once we adapt our methods to their character, they will
work for us without taking any retrospective notice of our past errors.
The law of Spirit may be more complex than that of electricity, because,
as expressed in us, it is the law of conscious individuality; but it is
none the less a purely natural law, and follows the universal rule, and
therefore we may dismiss from our minds, as a baseless figment, the fear
of any Divine power treasuring up anger against us on account of
bygones, if we are sincerely seeking to do what is right now. The new
causes which we put in motion now will produce their proper effect as
surely as the old causes did; and thus by inaugurating a new sequence of
good we shall cut off the old sequence of evil. Only, of course, we
cannot expect to bring about the new sequence while continuing to repeat
the old causes, for the fruit must necessarily reproduce the nature of
the seed. Thus we are the masters of the situation, and, whether in this
world or the next, it rests with ourselves either to perpetuate the
evil or to wipe it out and put the good in its place. And it may be
noticed in passing that the great central Christian doctrine is based
upon the most perfect knowledge of this law, and is the practical
application to a profound problem of the deepest psychological science.
But this is a large subject, and cannot be suitably dealt with here.

Much has been written and said on the origin of evil, and a volume might
be filled with the detailed study of the subject; but for all practical
purposes it may be summed up in the one word limitation. For what is the
ultimate cause of all strife, whether public or private, but the notion
that the supply of good is limited? With the bulk of mankind this is a
fixed idea, and they therefore argue that because there is only a
certain limited quantity of good, the share in their possession can be
increased only by correspondingly diminishing some one else's share. Any
one entertaining the same idea, naturally resents the attempt to deprive
him of any portion of this limited quantity; and hence arises the whole
crop of envy, hatred, fraud, and violence, whether between individuals,
classes, or nations. If people only realised the truth that "good" is
not a certain limited quantity, but a stream continuously flowing from
the exhaustless Infinite, and ready to take any direction we choose to
give it, and that each one is able by the action of his own thought to
draw from it indefinitely, the substitution of this new and true idea
for the old and false one of limitation would at one stroke remove all
strife and struggle from the world; every man would find a helper
instead of a competitor in every other, and the very laws of Nature,
which now so often seem to war against us, would be found a ceaseless
source of profit and delight.

"They could not enter into rest because of unbelief," "they limited the
Holy One of Israel": in these words the Bible, like the New Thought,
traces all the sorrow of the world--that terrible _Weltschmerz_ which
expresses itself with such direful influence through the pessimistic
literature of the day--to the one root of a false belief, the belief in
man's limitation. Only substitute for it the true belief, and the evil
would be at an end. Now the ground of this true belief is that clear
apprehension of "the Father" which, as I have shown, forms the basis of
Jesus' teaching. If, from one point of view, the Intelligent Universal
Life-Principle is a Power to be obeyed, in the same sense in which we
have to obey all the laws of Nature, from the opposite point of view, it
is a power to be used. We must never lose sight of the fact that
obedience to any natural law in its generic tendency necessarily carries
with it a corresponding power of using that law in specific application.
This is the old proverb that knowledge is power. It is the old paradox
with which Jesus posed the ignorant scribes as to how David's Lord could
also be his Son. The word "David" means "Beloved" and to be beloved
implies that reciprocal sympathy which is intuitive knowledge. Hence
David, the Beloved, is the man who has realised his true relation as a
Son to his Father and who is "in tune with the Infinite." On the other
hand, this "Infinite" is his "Lord" because it is the complex of all
those unchangeable Laws from which it is impossible to swerve without
suffering consequent loss of power; and on the other, this knowledge of
the innermost principles of All-Being puts him in possession of
unlimited powers which he can apply to any specific purpose that he
will; and thus he stands towards them in the position of a father who
has authority to command the services of his son. Thus David's "Lord,"
becomes by a natural transition his "Son."

And it is precisely in this that the principle of "Sonship" consists. It
is the raising of man from the condition of bondage as a servant by
reason of limitation to the status of a son by the entire removal of all
limitations. To believe and act on this principle is to "believe on the
Son of God," and a practical belief in our own sonship thus sets us free
from all evil and from all fear of evil--it brings us out of the kingdom
of death into the kingdom of Life. Like everything else, it has to grow,
but the good seed of liberating Truth once planted in the heart is sure
to germinate, and the more we endeavour to foster its growth by seeking
to grasp with our understanding the reason of these things and to
realise our knowledge in practice, the more rapidly we shall find our
lives increase in livingness--a joy to ourselves, a brightness to our
homes, and a blessing expanding to all around in ever-widening circles.

Enough has now been said to show the identity of principle between the
teaching of the Bible and that of the New Thought. Treated in detail,
the subject would extend to many volumes explanatory of the Old and New
Testaments, and if that great work were ever carried out I have no
hesitation in saying that the agreement would be found to extend to the
minutest particulars. But the hints contained in the foregoing papers
will, I hope, suffice to show that there is nothing antagonistic between
the two systems, or, rather, to show that they are one--the statement of
the One Truth which always has been and always will be. And if what I
have now endeavoured to put before my readers should lead any of them to
follow up the subject more fully for themselves, I can promise them an
inexhaustible store of wonder, delight, and strength in the study of the
Old Book in the light of the New Thought.

1902.




XX

JACHIN AND BOAZ


"And he reared up the pillars before the temple, one on the right hand,
and the other on the left; and called the name of that on the right hand
Jachin, and the name of that on the left Boaz." (II Chron. iii, 17.)

Very likely some of us have wondered what was the meaning of these two
mysterious pillars set up by Solomon in front of his temple, and why
they were called by these strange names; and then we have dropped the
subject as one of those inexplicable things handed down in the Bible
from old time which, we suppose, can have no practical interest for us
at the present day. Nevertheless, these strange names are not without a
purpose. They contain the key to the entire Bible and to the whole order
of Nature, and as emblems of the two great principles that are the
pillars of the universe, they fitly stood at the threshold of that
temple which was designed to symbolise all the mysteries of Being.

In all the languages of the Semitic stock the letters J and Y are
interchangeable, as we see in the modern Arabic "Yakub" for "Jacob" and
the old Hebrew "Yaveh" for "Jehovah." This gives us the form "Yachin,"
which at once reveals the enigma. The word Yak signifies "one"; and the
termination "hi," or "him," is an intensitive which may be rendered in
English by "only." Thus the word "Jachin" resolves itself into the words
"one only," the all-embracing Unity.

The meaning of Boaz is clearly seen in the book of Ruth. There Boaz
appears as the kinsman exercising the right of pre-emption so familiar
to those versed in Oriental law--a right which has for its purpose the
maintenance of the Family as the social unit. According to this
widely-spread custom, the purchaser, who is not a member of the family,
buys the property subject to the right of kinsmen within certain degrees
to purchase it back, and so bring it once more into the family to which
it originally belonged. Whatever may be our personal opinions regarding
the vexed questions of dogmatic theology, we can all agree as to the
general principle indicated in the role acted by Boaz. He brings back
the alienated estate into the family--that is to say, he "redeems" it in
the legal sense of the word. As a matter of law his power to do this
results from his membership in the family; but his motive for doing it
is love, his affection for Ruth. Without pushing the analogy too far we
may say, then, that Boaz represents the principle of redemption in the
widest sense of reclaiming an estate by right of relationship, while the
innermost moving power in its recovery is Love.

This is what Boaz stands for in the beautiful story of Ruth, and there
is no reason why we should not let the same name stand for the same
thing when we seek the meaning of the mysterious pillar. Thus the two
pillars typify Unity and the redeeming power of Love, with the
significant suggestion that the redemption results from the Unity. They
correspond with the two "bonds," or uniting principles spoken of by St.
Paul, "the Unity of the Spirit which is the Bond of Peace," and "Love,
which is the Bond of Perfectness."

The former is Unity of Being; the latter, Unity of Intention: and the
principle of this Dual-Unity is well illustrated by the story of Boaz.
The whole story proceeds on the idea of the Family as the social unit,
the root-conception of all Oriental law, and if we consider the Family
in this light, we shall see how exactly it embodies the two-fold idea of
Jachin and Boaz, unity of Being and unity of Thought. The Family forms a
unit because all the members proceed from a common progenitor, and are
thus all of one blood; but, although this gives them a natural unity of
Being of which they cannot divest themselves, it is not enough in itself
to make them a united family, as unfortunately experience too often
shows. Something more is wanted, and that something is Love. There must
be a personal union brought about by sympathetic Thought to complete the
natural union resulting from birth. The inherent unity must be expressed
by the Individual volition of each member, and thus the Family becomes
the ideally perfect social unit; a truth to which St. Paul alludes when
he calls God the Father from Whom every family in heaven and on earth is
named. Thus Boaz stands for the principle which brings back to the
original Unity that which has been for a time separated from it. There
has never been any separation of actual Being--the family right always
subsisted in the property even while in the hands of strangers,
otherwise it could never have been brought back; but it requires the
Love principle to put this right into effective operation.

When this begins to work in the knowledge of its right to do so, then
there is the return of the individual to the Unity, and the recognition
of himself as the particular expression of the Universal in virtue of
his own nature.

These two pillars, therefore, stand for the two great spiritual
principles that are the basis of all Life: Jachin typifying the Unity
resulting from Being, and Boaz typifying the Unity resulting from Love.
In this Dual-Unity we find the key to all conceivable involution or
evolution of Spirit; and it is therefore not without reason that the
record of these two ancient pillars has been preserved in our
Scriptures. And finally we may take this as an index to the character of
our Scriptures generally. They contain infinite meanings; and often
those passages which appear on the surface to be most meaningless will
be found to possess the deepest significance. The Book, which we often
read so superficially, hides beneath its sometimes seemingly trivial
words the secrets of other things. The twin pillars Jachin and Boaz bear
witness to this truth.[5]

    [Footnote 5: The following comment was made by Judge Troward,
    after the publication of this paper in _Expression_:

    "_The Two Pillars_ of the Universe are Personality and
    Mathematics, represented by Boaz and Jachin respectively.
    This is the broadest simplification to which it is possible
    to reduce things. Balance consists in preserving the
    Equilibrium or Alternating Current between these two
    Principles. Personality is the Absolute Factor. Mathematics
    are the Relative Factor, for they merely Measure different
    Rates or Scales. They are absolute in this respect. A
    particular scale having been selected all its sequences will
    follow by an inexorable Law of Order and Proportion; but the
    selection of the scale and the change from one scale to
    another rests entirely with Personality. What Personality can
    not do is to make one Scale produce the results of another,
    but it can set aside one scale and substitute another for it.
    Hence Personality contains in itself the Universal Scale, or
    can either accommodate itself to lower rates of motion
    already established, or can raise them to its own rate of
    motion. Hence Personality is the grand Ultimate Fact in all
    things.

    "Different personalities should be regarded as different
    degrees of consciousness. They are different degrees of
    emergence of The Power that knows Itself."]




XXI

HEPHZIBAH


"Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more
be termed Desolate; but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land
Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married"
(Isaiah lxii, 4). The name Hephzibah--or, as it might be written,
Hafzbah--conveys a very distinct idea to any one who has lived in the
East, and calls up a string of familiar words all containing the same
root _hafz_, which signifies "guarding" or "taking care of," such as
_hafiz_, a protector, _muhafiz_, a custodian, as in the word _muhafiz
daftar_, a head record-keeper; or again, _hifazat_, custody, as
_bahifazat polis_, in custody of the police; or again, _daim-ul-hafz_,
imprisonment for life, and other similar expressions.

All words from this root suggest the idea of "guarding," and therefore
the name Haphzibah at once speaks its own meaning. It is "one who is
guarded," a "protected one." And answering to this there must be some
power which guards, and the name of this power is given in Hosea ii, 16,
where it is called "Ishi." "And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord,
that thou shalt call me Ishi; and thou shalt call me no more Baali."
"Baali" means "lord," "Ishi" means "husband," and between the two there
is a whole world of distinction.

To call the Great Power "Baali" is to live in one world, and to call it
"Ishi" is to live in another. The world that is ruled over by Baali is a
world of "miserable worms of the dust" and such crawling creatures; but
the world that is warmed and lightened by "Ishi" is one in which men and
women walk upright, conscious of their own divine nature, instead of
dodging about to escape being crushed under the feet of Moloch as he
strides through his dominions. If the name Baali did not suggest a wrong
idea there would be no need to change it for another, and the change of
name therefore indicates the opening of the mind to a larger and sounder
conception of the true nature of the Ruling Principle of the universe.
It is no imperious autocrat, the very apotheosis of self-glorification,
ill-natured and spiteful if its childish vanity be not gratified by
hearing its own praises formally proclaimed, often from lips opened only
by fear; nor is it an almighty extortioner desiring to deprive us of
what we value most, either to satisfy its greed or to demonstrate its
sovereignty. This is the image which men make of God and then bow
terrified before it, offering a worship which is the worship of Baal,
and making life blank because all the livingness has been wiped
out of it.

Ishi is the embodiment of the very opposite conception, a wise and
affectionate husband, instead of a taskmaster exploiting his slaves. In
its true aspect the relation of husband and wife is entirely devoid of
any question of relative superiority or inferiority. As well ask whether
the front wheel or the back wheel of your bicycle is the more important.
The two make a single whole, in which the functions of both parts are
reciprocal and equally necessary; yet for this very reason these
functions cannot be identical.

In a well-ordered home, where husband and wife are united by mutual love
and respect, we see that the man's function is to enter into the larger
world and to provide the wife with all that is needed for the
maintenance and comfort of the home, while the function of the woman is
to be the distributor of what her husband provides, in doing which she
follows her own discretion; and a sensible man, knowing that he can
trust a sensible wife, does not want to poke his finger into every pie.
Thus all things run harmoniously--the woman relieved of responsibilities
which are not naturally hers, and the man relieved of responsibilities
which are not naturally his. But let any perplexity or danger arise, and
the woman knows that from her husband she will receive all the guidance
and protection that the occasion may require, he being the wise and
strong man that we have supposed him, and having this assurance she is
able to pursue the avocations of her own sphere undisturbed by any fears
or anxieties.

It is this relation of protection and guidance that is implied by the
word Hephzibah. It is the name of those who realise their identity with
the all-ordering Divine Spirit. He who realises this unity with the
Spirit finds himself both guided and guarded. And here we touch the
fringe of a deep natural mystery, which formed the basis of all that was
most valuable in the higher mysteries of the ancients, and the substance
of which we must realise if we are to make any progress in the future,
whatever form we may adopt to convey the idea to ourselves or others. It
is the relation of the individual mind to the Universal Mind, the
combination of unity with independence which, though quite clear when we
know it by personal experience, is almost inexpressible in words, but
which is frequently represented in the Bible under the figure of the
marriage relations.

It is a basic principle, and in various modes pervades all Nature, and
has been symbolised in every religion the world has known; and in
proportion as the individual realises this relation he will find that he
is able to _use_ the Universal Mind, while at the same time he is guided
and guarded by it. For think what it would be to wield the power of the
Universal Mind without having its guidance. It would be the old story of
Phaeton trying to drive the chariot of the Sun, which ended in his own
destruction; and limitless power without corresponding guidance would be
the most terrible curse that any one could bring upon his head.

The relation between the individual mind and the Universal Mind, as
portrayed in the reciprocally connected names of Hephzibah and Ishi,
must never be lost sight of; for the Great Guiding Mind, immeasurably
as it transcends our intellectual consciousness, is not another than
_ourselves_. It is The One Self which is the foundation of all the
individual selves, and which is, therefore, in all its limitlessness, as
entirely one with each individual as though no other being existed.
Therefore we do not have to go out of ourselves to find it, for it is
the expansion to infinity of all that we truly _are_, having, indeed, no
place for those negative forms of evil with which we people a world of
illusion, for it is the very Light itself, and in it all illusion is
dispelled; but it is the expansion to infinity of all in us that is
Affirmative, all that is really living.

Therefore, in looking for its guiding and guarding we are relying upon
no borrowed power from _without_, held at the caprice and option of
another, but upon the supreme fact of our own nature, which we can use
in what direction we will with perfect freedom, knowing no limitation
save the obligation not to do violence to our own purest and highest
feelings. And this relation is entirely _natural_. We must steer the
happy mean between imploring and ignoring. A natural law does not need
to be entreated before it will work; and, on the other hand, we cannot
make use of it while ignoring its existence.

What we have to do, therefore, is to take the working of the law for
granted, and make use of it accordingly; and since that is the law of
Mind, and Mind is Personality, this Power, which is at once _ourselves_
and above ourselves, may be treated as a Person and may be spoken with,
and its replies received by the inner ear of the heart. Any scheme of
philosophy that does not result in this personal intercourse with the
Divine Mind falls short of the mark. It may be right so far as it goes,
but it does not go far enough, and fails to connect us with our vital
centre. Names are of small importance so long as the intercourse is
real. The Supreme Mind with which we converse is only to be met in the
profoundest depths of our own being, and, as Tennyson says, is more
perfectly ourselves than our own hands and feet. It is our natural Base;
and realising this we shall find ourselves to be in very truth "guarded
ones," guided by the Spirit in all things, nothing too great and nothing
too trivial to come within the great Law of our being.

There is another aspect of the Spirit in which it is seen as a Power to
be used; and the full flow of life is in the constant alternation
between this aspect and the one we have been considering, but always we
are linked with the Universal Mind as the flower lives by reason of its
root. The connection itself is intrinsic, and can never be severed; but
it must be consciously realised before it can be consciously used. All
our development consists in the increasing consciousness of this
connection, which enables us to apply the higher power to whatever
purpose we may have in hand, not merely in the hope that it _may_
respond, but with the certain knowledge that by the law of its own
nature it is bound to do so, and likewise with the knowledge that by
the same law it is bound also to guide us to the selection of right
objects and right methods.

Experience will teach us to detect the warning movement of the inner
Guide. A deepseated sense of dissatisfaction, an indescribable feeling
that somehow everything is not right, are the indications to which we do
well to pay heed; for we are "guarded ones," and these interior
monitions are the working of that innermost principle of our own being
which is the immediate outflowing of the Great Universal Life into
individuality. But, paying heed to this, we shall find ourselves
guarded, not as prisoners, but as a loved and honoured wife, whose
freedom is assured by a protection which will allow no harm to assail
her; we shall find that the Law of our nature is Liberty, and that
nothing but our own want of understanding can shut us out from it.




XXII

MIND AND HAND


I have before me a curious piece of ancient Egyptian symbolism. It
represents the sun sending down to the earth innumerable rays, with the
peculiarity that each ray terminates in a hand. This method of
representing the sun is so unusual that it suggests the presence in the
designer's mind of some idea rather different from those generally
associated with the sun as a spiritual emblem; and, if I interpret the
symbol rightly, it sets forth the truth, not only of the Divine Being as
the Great Source of all Life and of all Illumination, but also the
correlative truth of our individual relation to that centre. Each ray is
terminated by a hand, and a hand is the emblem of active working; and I
think it would be difficult to give a better symbolical representation
of innumerable individualities, each working separately, yet all
deriving their activity from a common source. The hand is at work upon
the earth, and the sun, from which it is a ray, is shining in the
heavens; but the connecting line shows whence all the strength and skill
of the hand are derived.

If we look at the microcosm of our own person we find this principle
exactly reproduced. Our hand is the instrument by which all our work is
done--literary, artistic, mechanical, or household--but we know that all
this work is really the work of the mind, the will-power at the centre
of our system, which first determines what is to be done, and then sets
the hand to work to do it; and in the doing of it the mind and hand
become one, so that the hand is none other than the mind working. Now,
transferring this analogy to the microcosm, we see that we each stand in
the same relation to the Universal Mind that our hand does to our
individual mind--at least, that is our normal relation; and we shall
never put forth our full strength except from this standpoint.

We rightly realise our will as the centre of our individuality, but we
should do better to picture our individuality as an ellipse rather than
a circle, a figure having two "conjugate foci," two equilibriated
centres of revolution rather than a single one, one of which is the
will-power or faculty of _doing_, and the other the consciousness or
perception of _being_. If we realise only one of these two centres we
shall lose both mental and moral balance. If we lose sight of that
centre which is our personal will, we shall become flabby visionaries
without any backbone; and if, in our anxiety to develop backbone, we
lost sight of the other centre, we shall find that we have lost that
which corresponds to the lungs and heart in the physical body, and that
our backbone, however perfectly developed, is rapidly drying up for
want of those functions which minister vitality to the whole system, and
is only fit to be hung up in a museum to show what a rigid, lifeless
thing the strongest vertebral column becomes when separated from the
organisation by which alone it can receive nourishment. We must realise
the one focus of our individuality as clearly as the other, and bring
both into equal balance, if we would develop all our powers and rise to
that perfection of Life which has no limits to its glorious
possibilities.

Keeping the ancient Egyptian symbol before used, and considering
ourselves as the hand, we find that we derive all our power from an
infinite centre; and because it is infinite we need never fear that we
shall fail to draw to ourselves all that we require for our work,
whether it be the intelligence to lay hold of the proper tool, or the
strength to use it. And, moreover, we learn from the symbol that this
central power is generic. This is a most important truth. It is the
centre from which all the hands proceed, and is as fully open to any one
hand as to any other. Each hand is doing its separate work, and the
whole of the central energy is at its disposal for its own specific
purpose. The work of the central energy, as such, is to supply vitality
to the hands, and it is they that differentiate this universal power
into all the varied forms of application which their different aptitudes
and opportunities suggest. We, as the hands, live and work because the
Central Mind lives and works in us. We are one with it, and it is one
with us; and so long as we keep this primal truth before us, we realise
ourselves as beings of unlimited goodness and intelligence and power,
and we work in the fulness of strength and confidence accordingly; but
if we lose sight of this truth, we shall find that the strongest will
must get exhausted at last in the unequal struggle of the individual
against the universe.

For if we do not recognise the Central Mind as the source of our
vitality, we are literally "fighting for our own hand," and all the
other hands are against us, for we have lost the principle of connection
with them. This is what must infallibly happen if we rely on nothing but
our individual will-power. But if we realise that the will is the power
by which we give out, and that every giving out implies a corresponding
taking in, then we shall find in the boundless ocean of central living
Spirit the source from which we can go on taking in _ad infinitum_, and
which thus enables us to give out to any extent we please. But for wise
and effective giving out a strong and enlightened will is an absolute
necessity, and therefore we do well to cultivate the will, or the active
side of our nature. But we must equally cultivate the receptive side
also; and when we do this rightly by seeing in the Infinite Mind the one
source of supply, our will-power becomes intensified by the knowledge
that the whole power of the Infinite is present to back it up; and with
this continual sense of Infinite Power behind us we can go calmly and
steadily to the accomplishment of any purpose, however difficult,
without straining or effort, knowing that it shall be achieved, not by
the hand only, but by the invincible Mind that works through it. "Not by
might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts."

1902.




XXIII

THE CENTRAL CONTROL


In contemplating the relations between body, soul, and spirit, between
Universal Mind and individual mind, the methodised study of which
constitutes Mental Science, we must never forget that these relations
indicate, not the separateness, but the unity of these principles. We
must learn not to attribute one part of our action to one part of our
being, and another to another. Neither the action nor the functions are
split up into separate parts. The action is a whole, and the being that
does it is a whole, and in the healthy organism the reciprocal movements
of the principles are so harmonious as never to suggest any feeling than
that of a perfectly whole and undivided self. If there is any other
feeling we may be sure that there is abnormal action somewhere, and we
should set ourselves to discover and remove the cause of it. The reason
for this is that in any perfect organism there cannot be more than one
centre of control.

A rivalry of controlling principles would be the destruction of the
organic wholeness; for either the elements would separate and group
themselves round one or other of the centres, according to their
respective affinities, and thus form two distinctive individualities,
or else they would be reduced to a condition of merely chaotic
confusion; in either case the original organism would cease to exist.
Seen in this light, therefore, it is a self-evident truth that, if we
are to retain our individuality; in other words, if we are to continue
to exist, it can be only by retaining our hold upon the central
controlling principle in ourselves; and if this be the charter of our
being, it follows that all our future development depends on our
recognising and accepting this central controlling principle. To this
end, therefore, all our endeavours should be directed; for otherwise all
our studies in Mental Science will only lead us into a confused
labyrinth of principles and counter-principles, which will be
considerably worse than the state of ignorant simplicity from which we
started.

This central controlling principle is the Will, and we must never lose
sight of the fact that all the other principles about which we have
learnt in our studies exist only as its instruments. The Will is the
true self, of which they are all functions, and all our progress
consists of our increased recognition of the fact. It is the Will that
says "I AM"; and therefore, however exalted, or even in their higher
developments apparently miraculous, our powers may be, they are all
subject to the central controlling power of the Will. When the
enlightened Will shall have learnt to identify itself perfectly with the
limitless powers of knowledge, judgment, and creative thought which are
at its disposal, then the individual will have attained to perfect
wholeness, and all limitations will have passed away for ever.

And nothing short of this consciousness of Perfect Wholeness can satisfy
us. Everything that falls short of it is in that degree an embodiment of
the principle of Death, that great enemy against which the principle of
Life must continue to wage unceasing war, in whatever form or measure it
may show itself, until "death is swallowed up in victory." There can be
no compromise. Either we are affirming Life, as a principle, or we are
denying it, no matter on how great or how small a scale; and the
criterion by which to determine our attitude is our realisation of our
own Wholeness. Death is the principle of disintegration; and whenever we
admit the power of any portion of our organism, whether spiritual or
bodily, to induce any condition _independently of the intention of the
Will_, we admit that the force of disintegration is superior to the
controlling centre in ourselves, and we conceive of ourselves as held in
bondage by an adversary, from which bondage the only way of release is
by the attainment of a truer way of thinking.

And the reason is that, either through ignorance or carelessness, we
have surrendered our position of control over the system as a whole, and
have lost the element of _Purpose_, around which the consciousness of
individuality must always centre. Every state of our consciousness,
whether active or passive, should be the result of a distinct _purpose_
adopted by our own free will; for the passive states should be quite as
much under the control of the Will as the active. It is the lack of
_purpose_ that deprives us of power. The higher and more clearly defined
our purpose, the greater stimulus we have for realising our control over
_all_ our faculties for its attainment; and since the grandest of all
purposes is the strengthening and ennobling of Life, in proportion as we
make this our aim we shall find ourselves in union with the Supreme
Universal Mind, acting each in our individual sphere for the furtherance
of the same purpose which animates the ruling principle of the Great
Whole, and, as a consequence, shall find that its intelligence and
powers are at our disposal.

But in all this there must be no strain. The true exercise of the Will
is not an exercise of unnatural force. It is simply the leading of our
powers into their natural channels by intelligently recognising the
direction in which those channels go. However various in detail, they
have one clearly defined common tendency towards the increasing of
Life--whether in ourselves or in others--and if we keep this steadily in
view, all our powers, whether interior or exterior, will be found to
work so harmoniously together that there will be no sense of independent
action on the part of any one of them. The distinctions drawn for
purposes of study will be laid aside, and the Self in us will be found
to be the realisation of a grand ideal being, at once individual and
universal, consciously free in its individual wholeness and in its
joyous participation in the Life of the Universal Whole.




XXIV

WHAT IS HIGHER THOUGHT?


Resolution passed October, 1902, by the Kensington Higher Thought
Centre.

    _"That the Centre stands for the definite teaching of
    absolute Oneness of Creator and Creation--Cause and
    Effect--and that nothing which may contradict or be in
    opposition to the above principles be admitted to the 'Higher
    Thought' Centre Platform._

    _"By Oneness of Cause and Effect is meant, that Effect (man)
    does consist only of what Cause is; but a part (individual
    personality) is not therefore co-extensive with the whole."_

This Resolution is of the greatest importance. Once admit that there is
_any_ Power outside yourself, however beneficent you may conceive it to
be, and you have sown the seed which must sooner or later bear the fruit
of "_Fear_" which is the entire ruin of Life, Love and Liberty. There is
no _via media_. Say we are only reflections, however accurate, of The
Life, and in the admission we have given away our Birthright. However
small or plausible may be the germ of thought which admits that we are
anything less in principle than The Life Itself, it must spring up to
the ultimate ruin of the Life-Principle itself. We _are_ It itself. The
difference is only that between the generic and the specific of the
_same_ thing. We must contend earnestly, both within ourselves and
outwardly, for the _one great foundation_ and never, now on to all
eternity, admit for a single instant any thought which is opposed to
this, the Basic Truth of Being.

The leading ideas connected with Higher Thought are (I) That Man
controls circumstances, instead of being controlled by them, and (II) as
a consequence of the foregoing, that whatever teaches us to _rely_ on
power _borrowed_ from a source _outside_ ourselves is _not_ Higher
Thought; and that whatever explains to us the _Infinite_ source of _our
own inherent_ power and the consequent _limitless_ nature of that power
_is_ Higher Thought. This avoids the use of terms which may only puzzle
those not accustomed to abstract phraseology, and is substantially the
same as the resolution of October, 1902.




XXV

FRAGMENTS


  1. God is Love.
     Man, having the understanding of God, speaks the Word of Power.

  2. Man gives utterance to God.

  3. The Father is Equilibrium.
     The Son is Concentration of the _same_ Spirit.
     The Spirit is Projection.

_The Tri-une Relation_--always consists of these Three:

(I) The Potential--(II) The Ideal--(III) The Concrete.

(I) The Potential is Life in its most highly abstract mode not yet
brought into Form even as Thought. Not particularised in _any_ way.

(II) The Ideal is the particularising of the Potential into a certain
Formulated Thought.

(III) The Concrete is the Manifestation of the Formulated Thought in
Visible Form.

What everybody wants is to become _more alive_--as Jesus said, "I am
come that they might have Life and might have it more abundantly"--and
it is only on the basis of realising ourselves as a _perfect unity
throughout_, not made up of opposing parts, and that unity _Spirit_,
that we can realise in ourselves the _Livingness_ which _Spirit is_, and
which we _as Spirit_ ought to be.


HENCE PERFECT DEMONSTRATION.

    "The Truth shall make you Free"
    Life    :
    Love    : = The Truth
    Liberty :

The Ultimate Truth will always be found to consist of these three, and
anything that is contrary to them is contrary to Fundamental Truth.


WORSHIP

Worship consists in the recognition of the _Personal_ Nature of Holy
Spirit, and in the Continual Alternation (Pulsation) between the two
positions of "I am the Person that Thou art," and "Thou art the Person
that I am." The Two Personalities are One.




       *       *       *       *       *




Transcriber's note:


Corrections [in brackets] in the text are noted below:

   page 64: extra word removed

      that we shall _feel_ the [the] truth of it,

   page 102: typographical error corrected

      straining and striving, and the place of the old
      _strum[sturm] und drang_ will be taken, not by inertia, but
      by a joyous activity which knows that it

   page 151: extra word removed

      in proportion as you find it there, you will [will] find it
      everywhere else.





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