models. A sick body is evolved from sick thoughts. Evil, disease, and death arise from wrong vision. Sensualism evolves bad physical and moral conditions.
Images of mortal thought are transmitted through belief to the body. Immortal models — pure, perfect, and enduring — are transmitted through Science, which corrects error with the ideals of Truth, and demands right thoughts, to the end that they may produce harmonious results.
Through many generations children must be improved. and human thoughts attain diviner conceptions, before we can approach the immortal and perfect model of God's thought.
When mortals gain more correct views of God and man, multitudinous objects of creation, that before were invisible, will become visible. The crude creations of mortal thought must finally give place to the glorious forms that we sometimes behold in the camera of Mind, where the mental picture is more real.
The fading forms of matter are the fleeting thoughts of mortal mind, that have their day before the permanent perfection of Spirit shall appear. We shall behold and understand His creation, all the glories of earth and heaven and man, when we learn our way in Science, up to our spiritual origin.
When we realize that Life is Spirit, and never in or of matter, this understanding will expand into self-completeness, — finding all in God, and needing no other communion.
Scientific existence is the universe of Spirit, peopled with spiritual characters. Man is the offspring, not of the lowest, but the highest qualities of Mind. We shall understand spiritual existence, in proportion as our treasures are laid up in heaven. We gravitate Godward as our affections and aims grow spiritual, as we near the broader interpretations of being, and gain some proper sense of the Infinite.
The effect of mind on health and happiness is seen in this: if one turns away from the body with such absorbed interest as to forget it, the body experiences no pain.
Under the strong impulse of a desire to fill his part, a noted actor used night after night to go upon the stage and sustain his appointed work, walking about as spry as the youngest member of the company. This old man was so lame that every day he hobbled to the theatre, and sat aching in his chair till his cue was spoken, — the signal that made him as oblivious of physical infirmity as if he had inhaled chloroform, though he was in the full possession of his senses.
Note the unspeakable peace that is felt from an all-absorbing spiritual love.
Selfishness and sensualism are educated in us by thoughts ever-recurring to one's self, by conversation about the body, and by the expectation of perpetual pleasure or pain from it; and this education is at the expense of spiritual growth. If we array thought in mortal vestures it must cease its immortal flight.
We cannot fathom the nature and quality of God's creation through the shallows of mortal fancy. We must reverse our feeble flutterings, our efforts to find Life and Truth in person or in matter, and appeal above man, to God. We must rise to clearer views, that inspire the God-man, and thus reach the centre of being.
Job said, “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth Thee.” Mortals will echo Job, when the supposed pains of matter cease to predominate. They will then drive away false estimates of life and happiness, and attain the bliss of loving unselfishly, working patiently, and conquering all that is unlike Him.
There can be but one Creator, who has created all. Whatever seems to be a new creation, or being, is but a new discovery of something old, — new multiplication, or a self-division of mortal thought, — as when some finite sense peers out from its cloisters with amazement, and attempts to pattern the Infinite.
Multiplication of a human and mortal sense of persons or things is not creation. Personal and material man, like an atom of dust thrown into the face of spiritual immensity, is a flickering sense, instead of an abiding consciousness of being.
Mortals must look beyond fading, finite forms, if they would gain the true sense of things. Where shall the gaze rest, in the unsearchable realm of Mind? We must look where we would walk, and we must act as possessing all power from Him in whom we have our being.
Starting from a higher standpoint, one progresses spontaneously, even as light emits light without effort; for “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Distrust of one's ability to gain the good desired, and bring out better and higher results, often hampers the trial of one's wings, and ensures defeat at the outset.
A scientific view of progress admits the possibility of every good achievement, and first sets about discovering what God has already done for us.
Our mortal beliefs defraud us. They make man an involuntary creator, — producing evil when he would create good, forming deformity when he would outline grace and beauty, injuring those he would bless. He becomes a general mis-creator, whose “touch turns hope to dust.” He might say in Bible language, “The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
The senses say that man's birth is sometimes untimely, and his death lamentable; that weeds grow apace, and choke the flowers not already scorched by the sun, or nipped by untimely frosts. Such are not the facts of God's creation. The Truth of things is perennial, and the error is seen only as we look from wrong points of observation.
Mortals are egotists. They fancy themselves independent workers, personal authors, and even privileged originators of something that Deity would not or could not create.
The foundation of mortal discord is a false sense of man's origin. To begin rightly is to end rightly. Every calculation that starts from the body, starts wrongly. Immortal Mind is the only Cause and impersonal Principle. Cause does not exist in matter, in mortal mind, or in personality.
Because we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain. For Life, we find death; for Truth, we find error; and for Spirit, its opposite, called matter. Now reverse this action. Look away from the body, into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality. Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, good and true, and you will bring these into your experience, proportionately to their occupancy of your thoughts.
Detach the sense from the body, or matter, only attached to it through human belief, and you may learn the meaning of God, or good, and the nature of the immutable and immortal. Breaking away from the mutations of time and sense, you will neither lose the solid objects and ends of Life, nor your own identity. Fixing the gaze on the arch of heaven, you may fly as the bird flies, that has burst from the egg and preened its wings for a skyward flight. In this line of thought is Sir John Bowring's translation from the Russian: —
Though but an atom midst immensity,
Still I am something, fashioned by Thy hand.
I hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth,
On the last verge of mortal being stand. —
Close to the realm where angels have their birth,
Just on the boundaries of the Spirit-land!
Life and blessedness are the only proofs of existence, whereby you can recognize it. The scientific sense of being, forsaking matter for Spirit, by no means suggests man's absorption into Deity, and the loss of his own identity, but confers upon him an enlarged individuality, a wider sphere of thought and action, a more expansive benevolence, a higher and more permanent being.
We should forget our bodies, in remembering God and the human race. Good demands of man every hour, wherein to work out the problem of being. Consecration to God lessens not man's dependence
