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 Caesar--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 G.o.d."
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 G.o.d." Jesus said, "Is it not written in your law, I said ye are G.o.ds? If He called them G.o.ds, unto whom the Word of G.o.d 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 G.o.d?" Here we have the first open pa.s.sage 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 mult.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sage in the Psalms with which they were all familiar, pointing out that the very persons to whom the Divine word was addressed were styled "G.o.ds" 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 a.s.signed 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, ent.i.tled 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 G.o.d?" Then St. John writes, "To them gave he power to become sons of G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d and the consequences that must necessarily follow from it; to draw them away from that notion of dualism which puts an impa.s.sable barrier between G.o.d 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 ident.i.ty 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 G.o.d 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 "G.o.d _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 circ.u.mstances.
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 a.s.sume 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 G.o.d or the opposite of G.o.d? 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 G.o.d, 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 ent.i.ty, 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 G.o.d"--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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sociation 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 grat.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mference, 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 a.n.a.lysis, and no a.n.a.lysis is complete without accurate quant.i.tative knowledge; but creation is the very opposite of a.n.a.lysis, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociations: 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.