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 G.o.d outside only by the light of G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.signing 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 abas.e.m.e.nt 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 pet.i.tions that we have asked of Him" (1 John v. 14). Now according to the popular notion of "the will of G.o.d," this pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage is a mere jeering at our incapacity. But when once we realise that "the will of G.o.d" 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 G.o.d," 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 G.o.d." 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 G.o.d. 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 pa.s.sing 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 quant.i.ty 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 quant.i.ty; and hence arises the whole crop of envy, hatred, fraud, and violence, whether between individuals, cla.s.ses, or nations. If people only realised the truth that "good" is not a certain limited quant.i.ty, 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 subst.i.tution 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 compet.i.tor 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 subst.i.tute 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 G.o.d," 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 ident.i.ty 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 a.n.a.logy 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sages 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_: