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Click for More Free Books by Ralph Waldo

Trine.
 London

G. Bell And Sons, Ltd.

1933
Contents

Foreword ....................................................... 6
Chapter 1: The Silent, Subtle Building Forces
of Mind & Spirit ........................................... 11
Chapter 2: Soul, Mind, Body – The
Subconscious Mind That Interrelates Them . 27
Chapter 3: The Way Mind Through The
Subconscious Mind Builds Body................... 57
Chapter 4: The Powerful Aid Of The Mind In
Rebuilding Body— How Body Helps Mind ... 78
Chapter 5: Thought As A Force In Daily Living
.................................................................. 101
Chapter 6: Jesus The Supreme Exponent Of
The Inner Forces And Powers: His People’s
Religion And Their Condition ..................... 123
Chapter 7: The Divine Rule In The Mind And
Heart: The Unessentials We Drop —The Spirit
Abides........................................................ 144
Chapter 8: If We Seek The Essence Of His
Revelation, And The Purpose Of His Life .... 184
Chapter 9: His Purpose Of Lifting Up,
Energising, Beautifying, And Saving The Entire
Life: The Saving Of The Soul Is Secondary; But
Follows ...................................................... 230
Chapter 10: Some Methods Of Attainment 250
Chapter 11: Some Methods Of Expression 285
Chapter 12: The World War— Its Meaning
And Its Lessons For Us ............................... 315
Chapter 13: Our Sole Agency Of International
Peace, And International Concord ............. 350
Chapter 14: The World’s Balance-Wheel ... 379
Endnotes ................................................... 446
Foreword
We are all dwellers in two kingdoms, the
inner kingdom, the kingdom of the mind
and spirit, and the outer kingdom, that of
the body and the physical universe about
us. In the former, the kingdom of the
unseen, lie the silent, subtle forces that are
continually determining, and with exact
precision, the conditions of the latter.

To strike the right balance in life is one of

the supreme essentials of all successful
living. We must work, for we must have
bread. We require other things than bread.
They are not only valuable, comfortable,
but necessary. It is a dumb, stolid being,
however, who does not realize that life
consists of more than these. They spell
mere existence, not abundance, fullness of
life. We can become so absorbed in
making a living that we have no time for
living. To be capable and efficient in one’s
work is a splendid thing; but efficiency can
be made a great mechanical device that
robs life of far more than it returns it. A
nation can become so possessed, and
even obsessed, with the idea of power and
grandeur through efficiency and
organisation, that it becomes a great
machine and robs its people of the finer
fruits of life that spring from a wisely
subordinated and coordinated individuality.
Here again it is the wise balance that
determines all.

Our prevailing thoughts and emotions

determine, and with absolute accuracy, the
prevailing conditions of our outward,
material life, and likewise the prevailing
conditions of our bodily life. Would we have
any conditions different in the latter we
must then make the necessary changes in
the former. The silent, subtle forces of mind
and spirit, ceaselessly at work, are
continually moulding these outward and
these bodily conditions.

He makes a fundamental error who thinks

that these are mere sentimental things in
life, vague and intangible. They are, as
great numbers are now realising, the great
and elemental things in life, the only things
that in the end really count. The normal
man or woman can never find real and
abiding satisfaction in the mere
possessions, the mere accessories of life.
There is an eternal something within that
forbids it. That is the reason why, of late
years, so many of our big men of affairs, so
many in various public walks in life, likewise
many women of splendid equipment and
with large possessions, have been and are
turning so eagerly to the very things we are
considering. To be a mere huckster, many
of our big men are finding, cannot bring
satisfaction, even though his operations
run into millions in the year.

And happy is the young man or the young

woman who, while the bulk of life still lies
ahead, realises that it is the things of the
mind and the spirit — the fundamental
things in life — that really count; that here
lie the forces that are to be understood and
to be used in moulding the every-day
conditions and affairs of life; that the
springs of life are all from within, that as is
the inner so always and inevitably will be
the outer.
To present certain facts that may be
conducive to the realisation of this more
abundant life is the author’s purpose and
plan.

R.W.T.

Sunnybrae Farm,

Croton-on-Hudson,

New York
Chapter 1: The Silent, Subtle Building
Forces of Mind & Spirit
There are moments in the lives of all of us
when we catch glimpses of a life — our life
— that is infinitely beyond the life we are
now living. We realise that we are living
below our possibilities. We long for the
realisation of the life that we feel should be.

Instinctively we perceive that there are

within us powers and forces that we are
making but inadequate use of, and others
that we are scarcely using at all. Practical
metaphysics, a more simplified and
concrete psychology, well-known laws of
mental and spiritual science, confirm us in
this conclusion.

Our own William James, he who so

splendidly related psychology, philosophy,
and even religion, to life in a supreme
degree, honoured his calling and did a
tremendous service for all mankind, when
he so clearly developed the fact that we
have within us powers and forces that we
are making all too little use of — that we
have within us great reservoirs of power
that we have as yet scarcely tapped.

The men and the women who are awake to

these inner helps — these directing,
moulding, and sustaining powers and
forces that belong to the realm of mind and
spirit — are never to be found among those
who ask: Is life worth the living? For them
life has been multiplied two, ten, a hundred
fold.

It is not ordinarily because we are not

interested in these things, for instinctively
we feel them of value; and furthermore our
observations and experiences confirm us
in this thought. The pressing cares of the
everyday life — in the great bulk of cases,
the bread and butter problem of life, which
is after all the problem of ninety-nine out of
every hundred — all seem to conspire to
keep us from giving the time and attention
to them that we feel we should give them.
But we lose thereby tremendous helps to
the daily living.

Through the body and its avenues of

sense, we are intimately related to the
physical universe about us. Through the
soul and spirit we are related to the Infinite
Power that is the animating, the sustaining
force — the Life Force— of all objective
material forms. It is through the medium of
the mind that we are able consciously to
relate the two. Through it we are able to
realise the laws that underlie the workings
of the spirit, and to open ourselves that they
may become the dominating forces of our
lives.

There is a divine current that will bear us

with peace and safety on its bosom if we
are wise and diligent enough to find it and
go with it. Battling against the current is
always hard and uncertain. Going with the
current lightens the labours of the journey.
Instead of being continually uncertain and
even exhausted in the mere efforts of
getting through, we have time for the
enjoyments along the way, as well as the
ability to call a word of cheer or to lend a
hand to the neighbour, also on the way.

The natural, normal life is by a law divine

under the guidance of the spirit. It is only
when we fail to seek and to follow this
guidance, or when we deliberately take
ourselves from under its influence, that
uncertainties arise, legitimate longings go
unfulfilled, and that violated laws bring their
penalties.

It is well that we remember always that

violated law carries with it its own penalty.
The Supreme Intelligence — God, if you
please — does not punish. He works
through the channel of great immutable
systems of law. It is ours to find these laws.
That is what mind, intelligence, is for.
Knowing them we can then obey them and
reap the beneficent results that are always
a part of their fulfilment; knowingly or
unknowingly, intentionally or
unintentionally, we can fail to observe
them, we can violate them, and suffer the
results, or even be broken by them.
Life is not so complex if we do not so
continually persist in making it so. Supreme
Intelligence, creative Power works only
through law. Science and religion are but
different approaches to our understanding
of the law. When both are real, they
supplement one another and their findings
are identical.

The old Hebrew prophets, through the

channel of the spirit, perceived and
enunciated some wonderful laws of the
natural and normal life — that are now
being confirmed by well-established laws
of mental and spiritual science — and that
are now producing these identical results in
the lives of great numbers among us today,
when they said: “And thine ears shall hear
a word behind thee, saying, This is the way,
walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand
and when ye turn to the left.”

And again: “The Lord is with you, while ye

be with him; and if ye seek him, he will be
found of you; but if ye forsake him, he will
forsake you.” “Thou wilt keep him in perfect
peace, whose mind is stayed on thee;
because he trusteth in thee.” “The Lord in
the midst of thee is mighty.” “He that
dwelleth in the secret place of the Most
High shall abide under the shadow of the
Almighty.” “Thou shalt be in league with the
stones of the field, and the beasts of the
field shall be at peace with thee.” “Commit
thy way unto the Lord: trust also in him and
he shall bring it to pass.” Now these
formulations all mean something of a very
definite nature, or, they mean nothing at all.
If they are actual expressions of fact, they
are governed by certain definite and
immutable laws.

These men gave us, however, no

knowledge of the laws underlying the
workings of these inner forces and powers;
they perhaps had no such knowledge
themselves. They were intuitive
perceptions of truth on their part. The
scientific spirit of this, our age, was entirely
unknown to them. The growth of the race in
the meantime, the development of the
scientific spirit in the pursuit and the finding
of truth, makes us infinitely beyond them in
some things, while in others they were far
ahead of us. But this fact remains, and this
is the important fact: If these things were
actual facts in the lives of these early
Hebrew prophets, they are then actual
facts in our lives right now, today; or, if not
actual facts, then they are facts that still lie
in the realm of the potential, only waiting to
be brought into the realm of the actual.

These were not unusual men in the sense

that the Infinite Power, God, if you please,
could or did speak to them alone. They are
types, they are examples of how any man
or any woman, through desire and through
will, can open himself or herself to the
leadings of Divine Wisdom, and have
actualised in his or her life an ever-growing
sense of Divine Power. For truly “God is the
same yesterday, and today, and forever.”
His laws are unchanging as well as
immutable.

None of these men taught, then, how to

recognise the Divine Voice within, nor how
to become continually growing
embodiments of the Divine Power. They
gave us perhaps, though, all they were able
to give. Then came Jesus, the successor of
this long line of illustrious Hebrew prophets,
with a greater aptitude for the things of the
spirit — the supreme embodiment of Divine
realisation and revelation. With a greater
knowledge of truth than they, he did greater
things than they.

He not only did these works, but he showed

how he did them. He not only revealed the
Way, but so earnestly and so diligently he
implored his hearers to follow the Way. He
makes known the secret of his insight and
his power: “The words that I speak unto you
I speak not of myself: but the Father that
dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.” Again,
“I can of my own self do nothing.” And he
then speaks of his purpose, his aim: “I am
come that ye might have life, and that ye
might have it more abundantly.” A little later
he adds: “The works that I do ye shall do
also.” Now again, these things mean
something of a very definite nature, or they
mean nothing at all.

The works done, the results achieved by

Jesus’ own immediate disciples and
followers, and in turn their followers, as well
as in the early church for close to two
hundred years after his time, all attest the
truth of his teaching and demonstrate
unmistakably the results that follow.

Down through the intervening centuries,

the teachings, the lives and the works of
various seers, sages, and mystics, within
the church and out of the church, have
likewise attested the truth of his teachings.
The bulk of the Christian world, however,
since the third century, has been so
concerned with various theories and
teachings concerning Jesus, that it has
missed almost completely the real vital and
vitalising teachings of Jesus.

We have not been taught primarily to follow

his injunctions, and to apply the truths that
he revealed to the problems of our
everyday living. Within the last two score of
years or a little more, however, there has
been a great going back directly to the
teachings of Jesus, and a determination to
prove their truth and to make effective their
assurances. Also various laws in the realm
of Mental and Spiritual Science have
become clearly established and clearly
formulated, that confirm all his fundamental
teachings.

There are now definite and well-defined

laws in relation to thought as a force, and
the methods as to how it determines our
material and bodily conditions. There are
now certain well-defined laws pertaining to
the subconscious mind, its ceaseless
building activities, how it always takes its
direction from the active, thinking mind, and
how through this channel we may connect
ourselves with reservoirs of power, so to
speak, in an intelligent and effective
manner.

There are now well-understood laws

underlying mental suggestion, whereby it
can be made a tremendous source of
power in our own lives, and can likewise be
made an effective agency in arousing the
motive powers of another for his or her
healing, habit-forming, character-building.
There are likewise well-established facts
not only as to the value, but the absolute
need of periods of meditation and quiet,
alone with the Source of our being, stilling
the outer bodily senses, and fulfilling the
conditions whereby the Voice of the Spirit
can speak to us and through us, and the
power of the Spirit can manifest in and
through us.

A nation is great only as its people are

great. Its people are great in the degree
that they strike the balance between the life
of the mind and the spirit — all the finer
forces and emotions of life — and their
outer business organisation and activities.
When the latter become excessive, when
they grow at the expense of the former,
then the inevitable decay sets in, that spells
the doom of that nation, and its time is
tolled off in exactly the same manner, and
under the same law, as has that of all the
other nations before it that sought to
reverse the Divine order of life.

The human soul and its welfare is the

highest business that any state can give its
attention to. To recognise or to fail to
recognise the value of the human soul in
other nations, determines its real greatness
and grandeur, or its self-complacent but
essential vacuity. It is possible for a nation,
through subtle delusions, to get such an
attack of the big head that it bends over
backwards, and it is liable, in this exposed
position, to get a thrust in its vitals.

To be carried too far along the road of

efficiency, big business, expansion, world
power, domination, at the expense of the
great spiritual verities, the fundamental
humanities of national life, that make for the
real life and welfare of its people, and that
give also its true and just relations with
other nations and their people, is both
dangerous and in the end suicidal — it can
end in nothing but loss and eventual
disaster. A silent revolution of thought is
taking place in the minds of the people of
all nations at this time, and will continue for
some years to come. A stock-taking period
in which tremendous revaluations are
under way, is on. It is becoming clear-cut
and decisive.
Chapter 2: Soul, Mind, Body – The
Subconscious Mind That Interrelates
Them
There is a notable twofold characteristic of
this our age — we might almost say: of this
our generation. It is on the one hand a
tremendously far-reaching interest in the
deeper spiritual realities of life, in the things
of the mind and the Spirit. On the other
hand, there is a materialism that is
apparent to all, likewise far-reaching. We
are witnessing the two moving along,
apparently at least, side by side.

There are those who believe that out of the

latter the former is arising, that we are
witnessing another great step forward on
the part of the human race — a new era or
age, so to speak. There are many things
that would indicate this to be a fact. The
fact that the material alone does not satisfy,
and that from the very constitution of the
human mind and soul, it cannot satisfy,
may be a fundamental reason for this.

It may be also that as we are

apprehending, to a degree never equalled
in the world's history, the finer forces in
nature, and are using them in a very
practical and useful way in the affairs and
the activities of the daily life, we are also
and perhaps in a more pronounced degree,
realising, understanding, and using the
finer, the higher insights and forces, and
therefore powers, of mind, of spirit, and of
body.

I think there is a twofold reason for this

widespread and rapidly increasing interest.
A new psychology, or perhaps it were
better to say, some new and more fully
established laws of psychology, pertaining
to the realm of the subconscious mind, its
nature, and its peculiar activities and
powers, has brought us another agency in
life of tremendous significance and of far-
reaching practical use.

Another reason is that the revelation and

the religion of Jesus the Christ is
witnessing a new birth, as it were. We are
finding at last an entirely new content in his
teachings, as well as in his life. We are
dropping our interest in those phases of a
Christianity that he probably never taught,
and that we have many reasons now to
believe he never even thought — things
that were added long years after his time.

We are conscious, however, as never

before, that that wonderful revelation,
those wonderful teachings, and above all
that wonderful life, have a content that can,
that does, inspire, lift up, and make more
effective, more powerful, more successful,
and happier, the life of every man and
every woman who will accept, who will
appropriate, who will live his teachings.

Look at it, however we will, this it is that

accounts for the vast number of earnest,
thoughtful, forward looking men and
women who are passing over, and in many
cases are passing from, traditional
Christianity, and who either of their own
initiative, or under other leadership, are
going back to those simple, direct, God-
impelling teachings of the Great Master.
They are finding salvation in his teachings
and his example, where they never could
find it in various phases of the traditional
teachings about him.
It is interesting to realise, and it seems
almost strange that this new finding in
psychology, and that this new and vital
content in Christianity, have come about at
almost identically the same time. Yet it is
not strange, for the one but serves to
demonstrate in a concrete and
understandable manner the fundamental
and essential principles of the other. Many
of the Master’s teachings of the inner life,
teachings of “the Kingdom,” given so far
ahead of his time that the people in
general, and in many instances even his
disciples, were incapable of fully
comprehending and understanding them,
are now being confirmed and further
elucidated by clearly defined laws of
psychology.
Speculation and belief are giving way to a
greater knowledge of law. The
supernatural recedes into the background
as we delve deeper into the supernormal.
The unusual loses its miraculous element
as we gain knowledge of the law whereby
the thing is done. We are realising that no
miracle has ever been performed in the
world’s history that was not through the
understanding and the use of Law.

Jesus did unusual things; but he did them

because of his unusual understanding of
the law through which they could be done.
He would not have us believe otherwise. To
do so would be a distinct contradiction of
the whole tenor of his teachings and his
injunctions. Ye shall know the truth and the
truth shall make you free, was his own
admonition. It was the great and
passionate longing of his master heart that
the people to whom he came, grasp the
interior meanings of his teachings. How
many times he felt the necessity of
rebuking even his disciples for dragging his
teachings down through their material
interpretations. As some of the very truths
that he taught are now corroborated and
more fully understood, and in some cases
amplified by well-established laws of
psychology, mystery recedes into the
background.

We are reconstructing a more natural, a

more sane, a more common-sense portrait
of the Master. “It is the spirit that
quickeneth,” said he; “the flesh profiteth
nothing; the words that I speak unto you,
they are spirit and they are life.” Shall we
recall again in this connection: “I am come
that ye might have life and that ye might
have it more abundantly”? When,
therefore, we take him at his word, and
listen intently to Ms words, and not so much
to the words of others about him; when we
place our emphasis upon the fundamental
spiritual truths that he revealed and that he
pleaded so earnestly to be taken in the
simple, direct way in which he taught them,
we are finding that the religion of the Christ
means a clearer and healthier
understanding of life and its problems
through a greater knowledge of the
elemental forces and laws of life.

Ignorance enchains and enslaves. Truth —

which is but another way of saying a clear
and definite knowledge of Law, the
elemental laws of soul, of mind, and body,
and of the universe about us — brings
freedom. Jesus revealed essentially a
spiritual philosophy of life. His whole
revelation pertained to the essential divinity
of the human soul and the great gains that
would follow the realisation of this fact. His
whole teaching revolved continually around
his own expression, used again and again,
the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of
Heaven, and which he so distinctly stated
was an inner state or consciousness or
realisation. Something not to be found
outside of oneself but to be found only
within.

We make a great error to regard man as

merely a duality — mind and body. Man is
a trinity, — soul, mind, and body, each with
its own functions, — and it is the right
coordinating of these that makes the truly
efficient and eventually the perfect life.
Anything less is always one-sided and we
may say, continually out of gear. It is
essential to a correct understanding, and
therefore for any adequate use of the
potential powers and forces of the inner life,
to realise this.

It is the physical body that relates us to the

physical universe about us, that in which
we find ourselves in this present form of
existence. But the body, wondrous as it is
in its functions and its mechanism, is not
the life. It has no life and no power in itself.
It is of the earth, earthy. Every particle of it
has come from the earth through the food
we eat in combination with the air we
breathe and the water we drink, and every
part of it in time will go back to the earth. It
is the house we inhabit while here.
We can make it a hovel or a mansion; we
can make it even a pig-sty or a temple,
according as the soul, the real self,
chooses to function through it. We should
make it servant, but through ignorance of
the real powers within, we can permit it to
become master. “Know ye not,” said the
Great Apostle to the Gentiles, “that your
body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which
is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are
not your own?”

The soul is the self, the soul made in the

image of Eternal Divine Life, which, as
Jesus said, is Spirit. The essential reality of
the soul is Spirit. Spirit — Being — is one
and indivisible, manifesting itself, however,
in individual forms in existence. Divine
Being and the human soul are therefore in
essence the same, the same in quality.
Their difference, which, however, is very
great — though less in some cases than in
others — is a difference in degree.

Divine Being is the cosmic force, the

essential essence, the Life therefore of all
there is in existence. The soul is individual
personal existence. The soul while in this
form of existence manifests, functions
through the channel of a material body. It is
the mind that relates the two. It is through
the medium of the mind that the two must
be coordinated. The soul, the self, while in
this form of existence, must have a body
through which to function. The body, on the
other hand, to reach and to maintain its
highest state, must be continually infused
with the life force of the soul. The life force
of the soul is Spirit. If spirit, then essentially
one with Infinite Divine Spirit, for spirit,
Being, is one.

The embodied soul finds itself the tenant of

a material body in a material universe, and
according to a plan as yet, at least, beyond
our human understanding, whatever may
be our thoughts, our theories regarding it.
The whole order of life as we see it, all the
world of Nature about us, and we must
believe the order of human life, is a gradual
evolving from the lower to the higher, from
the cruder to the finer. The purpose of life
is unquestionably unfoldment, growth,
advancement — likewise the evolving from
the lower and the coarser to the higher and
the finer.

The higher insights and powers of the soul,

always potential within, become of value
only as they are realised and used.
Evolution implies always involution. The
substance of all we shall ever attain or be,
is within us now, waiting for realisation and
thereby expression. The soul carries its
own keys to all wisdom and to all valuable
and usable power.

It was that highly illumined seer, Emanuel

Swedenborg, who said: “Every created
thing is in itself inanimate and dead, but it
is animated and caused to live by this, that
the Divine is in it and that it exists in and
from the Divine.” Again: “The universal end
of creation is that there should be an
external union of the Creator with the
created universe; and this would not be
possible unless there were beings in whom
His Divine might be present as if in itself;
thus in whom it might dwell and abide. To
be His abode, they must receive His love
and wisdom by a power which seems to be
their own; thus, must lift themselves up to
the Creator as if by their own power, and
unite themselves with Him. Without this
mutual action no union would be possible.”
And again: “Everyone who duly considers
the matter may know that the body does
not think, because it is material, but the
soul, because it is spiritual. All the rational
life, therefore, which appears in the body
belongs to the spirit, for the matter of the
body is annexed, and, as it were, joined to
the spirit, in order that the latter may live
and perform uses in the natural world. . .
Since everything which lives in the body,
and acts and feels by virtue of that life,
belongs to the spirit alone, it follows that the
spirit is the real man; or, what comes to the
same thing, man himself is a spirit, in a
form similar to that of his body.”

Spirit being the real man, it follows that the

great, central fact of all experience, of all
human life, is the coming into a conscious,
vital realisation of our source, of our real
being, in other words, of our essential
oneness with the spirit of Infinite Life and
Power — the source of all life and all
power. We need not look for outside help
when we have within us waiting to be
realised, and thereby actualised, this
Divine birthright.

Browning was prophet as well as poet

when in “Paracelsus” he said:

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise

From outward things, whate’er you may

believe.
There is an inmost centre in us all.

Where truth abides in fulness; and around

Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,

This perfect, clear perception — which is

truth.

A baffling and perverting carnal mesh

Binds it, and makes all error: and, to know

Rather consists in opening out a way

Whence the imprisoned splendour may

escape,

Than in effecting entry for a light

Supposed to be without.

How strangely similar in meaning it seems

to that saying of an earlier prophet, Isaiah:
“And thine ears shall hear a word behind
thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it,
when ye turn to the right hand and when ye
turn to the left.”

All great educators are men of great vision.

It was Dr. Hiram Corson who said: “It is
what man draws up from his sub-self which
is of prime importance in his true education,
not what is put into him. It is the occasional
uprising of our sub-selves that causes us,
at times, to feel that we are greater than we
know.” A new psychology, spiritual
science, a more common sense
interpretation of the great revelation of the
Christ of Nazareth, all combine to enable
us to make this occasional uprising our
natural and normal state.

No man has probably influenced the

educational thought and practice of the
entire world more than Friedrich Froebel. In
that great book of his, “The Education of
Man,” he bases his entire system upon the
following, which constitutes the opening of
its first chapter: “In all things there lives and
reigns an eternal law. This all-controlling
law is necessarily based on an all-
pervading, energetic, living, self-conscious,
and hence eternal, Unity. . . . This Unity is
God. All things have come from the Divine
Unity, from God, and have their origin in the
Divine Unity, in God alone. God is the sole
source of all things. All things live and have
their being in and through the Divine Unity,
in and through God. All things are only
through the divine effluence that lives in
them. The divine effluence that lives in
each thing is the essence of each thing.

“It is the destiny and life work of all things

to unfold their essence, hence their divine
being, and, therefore, the Divine Unity itself
— to reveal God in their external and
transient being. It is the special destiny and
life work of man, as an intelligent and
rational being, to become fully, vividly,
conscious of this essence of the divine
effluence in him, and therefore of God.

“The precept for life in general and for

everyone is: Exhibit only thy spiritual, thy
life, in the external, and by means of the
external in thy actions, and observe the
requirements of thy inner being and its
nature.”

Here is not only an undying basis for all real

education, but also the basis of all true
religion, as well as the basis of all ideal
philosophy. Yes, there could be no
evolution, unless the essence of all to be
evolved, unfolded, were already involved in
the human soul. To follow the higher
leadings of the soul, which is so constituted
that it is the inlet, and as a consequence
the outlet of Divine Spirit, Creative Energy,
the real source of all wisdom and power; to
project its leadings into every phase of
material activity and endeavour,
constitutes the ideal life. It was Emerson
who said: “Every soul is not only the inlet,
but may become the outlet of all there is in,
God.” To keep this inlet open, so as not to
shut out the Divine inflow, is the secret of
all higher achievement, as well as
attainment.

There is a wood separated by a single open

field from my house. In it, halfway down a
little hillside, there was some years ago a
spring. It was at one time walled up with
rather large loose stone — some three feet
across at the top. In following a vaguely
defined trail through the wood one day in
the early spring, a trail at one time evidently
considerably used, it led me to this spot. I
looked at the stone enclosure, partly moss-
grown. I wondered why, although the
ground was wet around it, there was no
water in or running from what had evidently
been at one time a well-used spring.

A few days later when the early summer

work was better under way, I took an
implement or two over, and half scratching,
half digging inside the little wall, I found
layer after layer of dead leaves and
sediment, dead leaves and sediment.
Presently water became evident, and a
little later it began to rise within the wall. In
a short time there was nearly three feet of
water. It was cloudy, no bottom could be
seen. I sat down and waited for it to settle.
Presently I discerned a ledge bottom and
the side against the hill was also ledge. On
this side, close to the bottom, I caught that
peculiar movement of little particles of
silvery sand, and looking more closely I
could see a cleft in the rock where the
water came gushing and bubbling in. Soon
the entire spring became clear as crystal,
and the water finding evidently its old
outlet, made its way down the little hillside.
I was soon able to trace and to uncover its
course as it made its way to the level place
below.

As the summer went on, I found myself

going to the spot again and again. Flowers
that I found in no other part of the wood,
before the autumn came were blooming
along the little watercourse. Birds in
abundance came to drink and to bathe.
Several times I have found the half-tame
deer there. Twice we were but thirty to forty
paces apart. They have watched my
approach, and as I stopped, have gone on
with their drinking, evidently unafraid — as
if it were likewise their possession. And so
it is.

After spending a most valuable hour or two

in the quiet there one afternoon, I could not
help but wonder as I walked home whether
perchance the spring may not be actually
happy in being able to resume its life, to
fulfil, so to speak, its destiny; happy also in
the service it renders flowers and the living
wild things — happy in the service it
renders even me. I am doubly happy and a
hundred times repaid in the little help I gave
it. It needed help, to enable it effectively to
keep connection with its source. As it
became gradually shut off from this, it
weakened, became then stagnant, and
finally it ceased its active life.

Containing a fundamental truth deeper

perhaps than we realise, are these words
of that gifted seer, Emanuel Swedenborg:
“There is only one Fountain of Life, and the
life of man is a stream therefrom, which if it
were not continually replenished from its
source would instantly cease to flow” And
likewise these: “Those who think in the light
of interior reason can see that all things are
connected by intermediate links with the
First Cause, and that whatever is not
maintained in that connection must cease
to exist.”

There is a mystic force that transcends any

powers of the intellect or of the body, that
becomes manifest and operative in the life
of man when this God-consciousness
becomes awakened and permeates his
entire being. Failure to realise and to keep
in constant communion with our Source is
what causes fears, forebodings, worry,
inharmony, conflict, conflict that downs us
many times in mind, in spirit, in body —
failure to follow that Light that lighteth every
man that cometh into the world, failure to
hear and to heed that Voice of the soul, that
speaks continually clearer as we accustom
ourselves to listen to and to heed it, failure
to follow those intuitions with which the
soul, every soul, is endowed, and that lead
us aright and that become clearer in their
leadings as we follow them. It is this
guidance and this sustaining power that all
great souls fall back upon in times of great
crises.
This single stanza by Edwin Markham
voices the poet’s inspiration:

At the heart of the cyclone tearing the sky,

And flinging the clouds and the towers by,

Is a place of central calm;

So, here in the roar of mortal things

I have a place where my spirit sings,

In the hollow of God’s palm.

“That the Divine Life and Energy actually

lives in us,” was the philosopher Fichte’s
reply to the proposition — “the profoundest
knowledge that man can attain.” And
speaking of the man to whom this becomes
a real, vital, conscious realisation, he said:
“His whole existence flows forth, softly and
gently, from his Inward Being, and issues
out into Reality without difficulty or
hindrance,”

There are certain faculties that we have

that are not a part of the active thinking
mind; they seem to be no part of what we
might term our conscious intelligence.
They transcend any possible activities of
our regular mental processes, and they are
in some ways independent of them.
Through some avenue, suggestions,
intuitions of truth, intuitions of occurrences
of which through the thinking mind we
could know nothing, are at times borne in
upon us; they flash into our consciousness,
as we say, quite independent of any mental
action on our part, and sometimes when we
are thinking of something quite foreign to
that which comes to, that which
“impresses” us.
This seems to indicate a source of
knowledge, a faculty that is distinct from,
but that acts in various ways in conjunction
with, the active thinking mind. It performs
likewise certain very definite and distinct
functions in connection with the body. It is
this that is called the subconscious mind —
by some the superconscious or the
supernormal mind, by others the subliminal
self.

Just what the subconscious mind is no man

knows. It is easier to define its functions
and to describe its activities than it is to
state in exact terms what it is. It is similar in
this respect to the physical force — if it be
a physical force — electricity. It is only of
late years that we know anything of
electricity at all. Today we know a great
deal of its nature and the laws of its action.
No man living can tell exactly what
electricity is. We are nevertheless making
wonderful practical applications of it. We
are learning more about it continually.
Some day we may know what it actually is.

The fact that the subconscious mind seems

to function in a realm apart from anything
that has to do with our conscious mental
processes, and also that it has some
definite functions as both directing and
building functions to perform in connection
with the body, and that it is at the same time
subject to suggestion and direction from
the active thinking mind, would indicate that
it may be the true connecting link, the
medium of exchange, between the soul
and the body, the connector of the spiritual
and the material so far as man is
concerned.
Chapter 3: The Way Mind Through The
Subconscious Mind Builds Body
When one says that he numbers among his
acquaintances some who are as old at sixty
as some others are at eighty, he but gives
expression to a fact that has become the
common possession of many. I have
known those who at fifty-five and sixty were
to all intents and purposes really older,
more decrepit, and rapidly growing still
more decrepit both in mind and body, than
many another at seventy and seventy-five
and even at eighty.

History, then, is replete with instances,

memorable instances, of people, both men
and women, who have accomplished
things at an age — who have even begun
and carried through to successful
completion things at an age that would
seem to thousands of others, in the
captivity of age, with their backs to the
future, ridiculous even to think of
accomplishing, much less of beginning. On
account of a certain law that has always
seemed to me to exist and that I am now
firmly convinced is very exact in its
workings, I have been interested in talking
with various ones and in getting together
various facts relative to this great
discrepancy in the ages of these two
classes of “old” people.

Within the year I called upon a friend

whom, on account of living in a different
portion of the country, I hadn't seen for
nearly ten years. Conversation revealed to
me the fact that he was then in his eighty-
eighth year. I could notice scarcely a
change in his appearance, walk, voice, and
spirit. We talked at length upon the various,
so-called, periods of life. He told me that
about the only difference that he noticed in
himself as compared with his middle life
was that now when he goes out to work in
his garden, and among his trees, bushes,
and vines — and he has had many for
many years — he finds that he is quite
ready to quit and to come in at the end of
about two hours, and sometimes a little
sooner, when formerly he could work
regularly without fatigue for the entire half
day. In other words, he has not the same
degree of endurance that he once had.

Among others, there comes to mind in this

connection another who is a little under
seventy. It chances to be a woman. She is
bent and decrepit and growing more so by
very fixed stages each twelvemonth. I have
known her for over a dozen years. At the
time when I first knew her, she was
scarcely fifty-eight, she was already bent
and walked with an uncertain, almost
faltering tread. The dominant note of her
personality was then as now, but more so
now, fear for the present, fear for the future,
a dwelling continually on her ills, her
misfortunes, her symptoms, her
approaching and increasing helplessness.

Such cases I have observed again and

again; so have all who are at all interested
in life and in its forces and its problems.
What is the cause of this almost world-wide
difference in these two lives? In this case it
is as clear as day — the mental
characteristics and the mental habits of
each.
In the first case, here was one who early
got a little philosophy into his life and then
more as the years passed. He early
realised that in himself his good or his ill
fortune lay; that the mental attitude we take
toward anything determines to a great
extent our power in connection with it, as
well as its effects upon us. He grew to love
his work and he did it daily, but never under
high pressure. He was therefore benefited
by it. His face was always to the future,
even as it is today. This he made one of the
fundamental rules of his life. He was helped
in this, he told me in substance, by an early
faith which with the passing of the years
has ripened with him into a demonstrable
conviction — that there is a Spirit of Infinite
Life back of all, working in love in and
through the lives of all, and that in the
degree that we realise it as the one
Supreme Source of our lives, and when
through desire and will, which is through
the channel of our thoughts, we open our
lives so that this Higher Power can work
definitely in and through us, and then go
about and do our daily work without fears
or forebodings, the passing of the years
sees only the highest good entering into
our lives.

In the case of the other one whom we have

mentioned, a repetition seems scarcely
necessary. Suffice it to say that the
common expression on the part of those
who know her — I have heard it numbers
of times — is: “What a blessing it will be to
herself and to others when she has gone!”

A very general rule with but few exceptions

can be laid down as follows: The body
ordinarily looks as old as the mind thinks
and feels.

Shakespeare anticipated by many years

the best psychology of the times when he
said: “It is the mind that makes the body
rich.”

It seems to me that our great problem, or

rather our chief concern, should not be so
much how to stay young in the sense of
possessing all the attributes of youth, for
the passing of the years does bring
changes, but how to pass gracefully, and
even magnificently, and with undiminished
vigour from youth to middle age, and then
how to carry that middle age into
approaching old age, with a great deal
more of the vigour and the outlook of
middle life than we ordinarily do.
The mental as well as the physical helps
that are now in the possession of this our
generation, are capable of working a
revolution in the lives of many who are or
who may become sufficiently awake to
them, so that with them there will not be
that — shall we say — immature passing
from middle life into a broken, purposeless,
decrepit, and sunless, and one might
almost say, soulless old age.

It seems too bad that so many among us

just at the time that they have become of
most use to themselves, their families, and
to the world, should suddenly halt and then
continue in broken health, and in so many
cases lie down and die. Increasing
numbers of thinking people the world over
are now, as never before, finding that this
is not necessary, that something is at fault,
that that fault is in ourselves. If so, then
reversely, the remedy lies in ourselves, in
our own hands, so to speak.

In order to actualise and to live this better

type of life we have got to live better from
both sides, both the mental and the
physical, this with all due respect to
Shakespeare and to all modern mental
scientists.

The body itself, what we term the physical

body, whatever may be the facts regarding
a finer spiritual body within it all the time
giving form to and animating and directing
all its movements, is of material origin, and
derives its sustenance from the food we
take, from the air we breathe, the water we
drink. In this sense it is from the earth, and
when we are through with it, it will go back
to the earth.
The body, however, is not the Life; it is
merely the material agency that enables
the Life to manifest in a material universe
for a certain, though not necessarily a
given, period of time. It is the Life, or the
Soul, or the Personality that uses, and that
in using shapes and moulds, the body and
that also determines its strength or its
weakness. When this is separated from the
body, the body at once becomes a cold,
inert mass, commencing immediately to
decompose into the constituent material
elements that composed it — literally going
back to the earth and the elements whence
it came.

It is through the instrumentality or the

agency of thought that the Life, the Self,
uses, and manifests through, the body.
Again, while it is true that the food that is
taken and assimilated nourishes, sustains
and builds the body, it is also true that the
condition and the operation of the mind
through the avenue of thought determines
into what shape or form the body is so built.
So in this sense it is true that mind builds
body it is the agency, the force that
determines the shaping of the material
elements.

Here is a wall being built. Bricks are the

material used in its construction. We do not
say that the bricks are building the wall; we
say that the mason is building it, as is the
case. He is using the material that is
supplied him, in this case bricks, giving
form and structure in a definite, methodical
manner. Again, back of the mason is his
mind, acting through the channel of his
thought, that is directing his hands and all
his movements. Without this guiding,
directing force no wall could take shape,
even if millions of bricks were delivered
upon the scene.

So it is with the body. We take the food, the

water, we breathe the air; but this is all and
always acted upon by a higher force. Thus
it is that mind builds body, the same as in
every department of our being it is the great
builder. Our thoughts shape and determine
our features, our walk, the posture of our
bodies, our voices; they determine the
effectiveness of our mental and our
physical activities, as well as all our
relations with and influence or effects upon
others.

You say: “I admit the operation of and even

in certain cases the power of thought, also
that at times it has an influence upon our
general feelings, but I do not admit that it
can have any direct influence upon the
body.” Here is one who has allowed herself
to be long given to grief, abnormally so —
notice her lowered physical condition, her
lack of vitality. The New York papers within
the past twelve months recorded the case
of a young lady in New Jersey who, from
constant grieving over the death of her
mother, died, fell dead, within a week.

A man is handed a telegram. He is eating

and enjoying his dinner. He reads the
contents of the message. Almost
immediately afterward, his body is a-
tremble, his face either reddens or grows
“ashy white,” his appetite is gone; such is
the effect of the mind upon the stomach
that it literally refuses the food; if forced
upon it, it may reject it entirely.
A message is delivered to a lady. She is in
a genial, happy mood. Her face whitens;
she trembles and her body falls to the
ground in a faint, temporarily helpless,
apparently lifeless. Such are the intimate
relations between the mind and the body.
Raise a cry of fire in a crowded theatre. It
may be a false alarm. There are among the
audience those who become seemingly
palsied, powerless to move. It is the state
of the mind, and within several seconds,
that has determined the state of these
bodies. Such are examples of the
wonderfully quick influence of the mind on
the body.

Great stress, or anxiety, or fear, may in two

weeks’ or even in two days’ time so work
its ravages that the person looks ten years
or even twenty years older. A person has
been long given to worry, or perhaps to
worry in extreme form though not so long—
a well-defined case of indigestion and
general stomach trouble, with a generally
lowered and sluggish vitality, has become
pronounced and fixed.

Any type of thought that prevails in our

mental lives will in time produce its
correspondences in our physical lives. As
we understand better these laws of
correspondences, we will be more careful
as to the types of thoughts and emotions
we consciously, or unwittingly, entertain
and live with. The great bulk of all diseases,
we will find, as we are continually finding
more and more, are in the mind before
being in the body, or are generated in the
body through certain states and conditions
of mind.
The present state and condition of the body
have been produced primarily by the
thoughts that have been taken by the
conscious mind into the subconscious, that
is so intimately related to and that directs
all the subconscious and involuntary
functions of the body. Says one: It may be
true that the mind has had certain effects
upon the body; but to be able consciously
to affect the body through the mind is
impossible and even unthinkable, for the
body is a solid, fixed, material form.

We must get over the idea, as we quickly

will, if we study into the matter, that the
body, in fact anything that we call material
and solid, is really solid. Even in the case
of a piece of material as “solid” as a bar of
steel, the atoms forming the molecules are
in continual action each in conjunction with
its neighbour. In the last analysis the body
is composed of cells — cells of bone, vital
organ, flesh, sinew. In the body the cells
are continually changing, forming and
reforming. Death would quickly take place
were this not true. Nature is giving us a new
body practically every year.

There are very few elements, cells, in the

body of today that were there a year ago.
The rapidity with which a cut or wound on
the body is replaced by healthy tissue, the
rapidity with which it heals, is an illustration
of this. One “touches” himself in shaving. In
a week, sometimes in less than a week, if
the blood and the cell structure be
particularly healthy, there is no trace of the
cut, the formation of new cell tissue has
completely repaired it. Through the
formation of new cell structure the life-force
within, acting through the blood, is able to
rebuild and repair, if not too much
interfered with, very rapidly. The reason,
we may say almost the sole reason, that
surgery has made such great advances
during the past few years, so much greater
correspondingly than medicine, is on
account of a knowledge of the importance
of and the use of antiseptics — keeping the
wound clean and entirely free from all
extraneous matter.

So then, the greater portion of the body is

really new, therefore young, in that it is
almost entirely this year’s growth. Newness
of form is continually being produced in the
body by virtue of this process of perpetual
renewal that is continually going on, and
the new cells and tissues are just as new
as is the new leaf that comes forth in the
springtime to take the place of and to
perform the same functions as the one that
was thrown off by the tree last autumn.

The skin renews itself through the casting

off of used cells (those that have already
performed their functions) most rapidly,
taking but a few weeks. The muscles, the
vital organs, the entire arterial system, the
brain and the nervous system all take
longer, but all are practically renewed
within a year, some in much less time.
Then comes the bony structure, taking the
longest, varying, we are told, from seven
and eight months to a year, in unusual
cases fourteen months and longer.

It is, then, through this process of cell

formation that the physical body has been
built up, and through the same process that
it is continually renewing itself. It is not
therefore at any time or at any age a solid
fixed mass or material, but a structure in a
continually changing fluid form. It is
therefore easy to see how we have it in our
power, when we are once awake to the
relations between the conscious mind and
the subconscious — and it in turn in its
relations to the various involuntary and vital
functions of the body — to determine to a
great extent how the body shall be built or
how it shall be rebuilt.

Mentally to live in any state or attitude of

mind is to take that state or condition into
the subconscious. The subconscious mind
does and always will produce in the body
after its own kind. It is through this law that
we externalise and become in body what
we live in our minds. If we have
predominating visions of and harbour
thoughts of old age and weakness, this
state, with all its attendant circumstances,
will become externalised in our bodies far
more quickly than if we entertain thoughts
and visions of a different type. Said
Archdeacon Wilberforce in a notable
address in Westminster Abbey some time
ago: “The recent researches of scientific
men, endorsed by experiments in the
Salpétrière in Paris, have drawn attention
to the intensely creative power of
suggestions made by the conscious mind
to the subconscious mind.”
Chapter 4: The Powerful Aid Of The
Mind In Rebuilding Body— How Body
Helps Mind
“The body looks,” someone has said, “as
old as the mind feels.” By virtue of a great
mental law and at the same time chemical
law we are well within the realm of truth
when we say: The body ordinarily is as old
as the mind feels.

Every living organism is continually going

through two processes: it is continually
dying, and continually being renewed
through the operation and the power of the
Life Force within it. In the human body it is
through the instrumentality of the cell that
this process is going on. The cell is the
ultimate constituent in the formation and in
the life of tissue, fibre, tendon, bone,
muscle, brain, nerve system, vital organ. It
is the instrumentality that Nature, as we
say, uses to do her work.

The cell is formed; it does its work; it serves

its purpose and dies; and all the while new
cells are being formed to take its place.
This process of new cell formation is going
on in the body of each of us much more
rapidly and uniformly than we think.
Science has demonstrated the fact that
there are very few cells in the body today
that were there twelve months ago. The
form of the body remains practically the
same; but its constituent elements are in a
constant state of change. The body,
therefore, is continually changing; it is
never in a fixed state in the sense of being
a solid, but is always in a changing, fluid
state. It is being continually remade.
It is the Life, or the Life Force within, acting
under the direction and guidance of the
subconscious or subjective mind that is the
agency through which this continually new
cell-formation process is going on. The
subconscious mind is, nevertheless,
always subject to suggestions and
impressions that are conveyed to it by the
conscious or sense mind; and here lies the
great fact, the one all-important fact for us
so far as desirable or undesirable, so far as
healthy or unhealthy, so far as normal or
aging body-building is concerned.

That we have it in our power to determine

our physical and bodily conditions to a far
greater extent than we do is an undeniable
fact. That we have it in our power to
determine and to dictate the conditions of
“old age” to a marvellous degree is also an
undeniable fact — if we are sufficiently
keen and sufficiently awake to begin early
enough.

If any arbitrary divisions of the various

periods of life were allowable, I should
make the enumeration as follows: Youth,
barring the period of babyhood, to forty-
five; middle age, forty-five to sixty;
approaching age, sixty to seventy-five; old
age, seventy-five to ninety-five and a
hundred.

That great army of people who “age” long

before their time, that likewise great army
of both men and women who along about
middle age, say from forty-five to sixty,
break and, as we say, all of a sudden go to
pieces, and many die, just at the period
when they should be in the prime of life, in
the full vigour of manhood and womanhood
and of greatest value to themselves, to
their families, and to the world, is
something that is contrary to nature, and is
one of the pitiable conditions of our time. A
greater knowledge, a little foresight, a little
care in time could prevent this in the great
majority of cases, in ninety cases out of
every hundred, without question.

Abounding health and strength —

wholeness — is the natural law of the body.
The Life Force of the body, acting always
under the direction of the subconscious
mind, will build, and always does build,
healthily and normally, unless too much
interfered with. It is this that determines the
type of the cell structure that is continually
being built into the body from the available
portions of the food that we take to give
nourishment to the body. It is affected for
good or for bad, helped or hindered, in its
operation by the type of conscious thought
that is directed toward it, and that it is
always influenced by.

Of great suggestive value is the following

by an able writer and practitioner:

“God has managed, and perpetually

manages, to insert into our nature a
tendency toward health, and against the
unnatural condition which we call disease.
When our flesh receives a wound, a
strange nursing and healing process is
immediately commenced to repair the
injury. So in all diseases, organic or
functional, this mysterious healing power
sets itself to work at once to triumph over
the morbid condition. . . . Cannot this
healing process be greatly accelerated by
a voluntary and conscious action of the
mind, assisted, if need be, by some other
person? I unhesitatingly affirm, from
experience and observation, that it can. By
some volitional, mental effort and process
of thought, this sanative colatus, or healing
power which God has given to our
physiological organism, may be greatly
quickened and intensified in its action upon
the body. Here is the secret philosophy of
the cures effected by Jesus Christ. . . .
There is a law of the action of mind on the
body that is no more an impenetrable
mystery than the law of gravitation. It can
be understood and acted upon in the cure
of disease as well as any other law of
nature.”

If then, it be possible through this process

to change physical conditions in the body
even after they have taken form and have
become fixed, as we say, isn’t, it possible
even more easily to determine the type of
cell structure that is grown in the first
place?

The ablest minds in the world have thought

and are thinking that if we could find a way
of preventing the hardening of the cells of
the system, producing in turn hardened
arteries and what is meant by the general
term “ossification,” that the process of
aging, growing old, could be greatly
retarded, and that the condition of
perpetual youth that we seem to catch
glimpses of in rare individuals here and
there could be made a more common
occurrence than we find it today.

The cause of ossification is partly mental,

partly physical, and in connection with them
both are hereditary influences and
conditions that have to be taken into
consideration.

Shall we look for a moment to the first? The

food that is taken into the system, or the
available portions of the food, is the
building material; but the mind is always the
builder.

There are, then, two realms of mind, the

conscious and the subconscious. Another
way of expressing it would be to say that
mind functions through two avenues — the
avenue of the conscious and the avenue of
the subconscious. The conscious is the
thinking mind; the subconscious is the
doing mind. The conscious is the sense
mind, it comes in contact with and is acted
upon through the avenue of the five
senses. The subconscious is that quiet,
finer, all-permeating inner mind or force
that guides all the inner functions, the life
functions of the body, and that watches
over and keeps them going even when we
are utterly unconscious in sleep. The
conscious suggests and gives directions;
the subconscious receives and carries into
operation the suggestions that are
received.

The thoughts, ideas, and even beliefs and

emotions of the conscious mind are the
seeds that are taken in by the
subconscious and that in this great realm
of causation will germinate and produce of
their own kind. The chemical activities that
go on in the process of cell formation in the
body are all under the influence, the
domination of this great all-permeating
subconscious, or subjective realm within
us.
In that able work, “The Laws of Psychic
Phenomena,” Dr. Thomas J. Hudson lays
down this proposition: “That the subjective
mind is constantly amenable to control by
suggestion.” It is easy, when we once
understand and appreciate this great fact,
to see how the body builds, or rather is
built, for health and strength, or for disease
and weakness; for youth and vigour, or for
premature ossification and age. It is easy,
then, to see how we can have a hand in, in
brief can have the controlling hand in,
building either the one or the other.

It is in the province of the intelligent man or

woman to take hold of the wheel, so to
speak, and to determine as an intelligent
human being should, what condition or
conditions shall be given birth and form to
and be externalised in the body.
A noted thinker and writer has said:
“Whatever the mind is set upon, or
whatever it keeps most in view, that it is
bringing to it, and the continual thought or
imagining must at last take form and shape
in the world of seen and tangible things.”

And now, to be as concrete as possible, we

have these facts: The body is continually
changing in that it is continually throwing
out and off, used cells, and continually
building new cells to take their places. This
process, as well as all the inner functions
of the body, is governed and guarded by
the subconscious realm of our being. The
subconscious can do and does do
whatever it is actually directed to do by the
conscious, thinking mind. “We must be
careful on what we allow our minds to
dwell,” said Sir John Lubbock, “the soul is
dyed by its thoughts.”

If we believe ourselves subject to

weakness, decay, infirmity, when we
should be “whole,” the subconscious mind
seizes upon the pattern that is sent it and
builds cell structure accordingly. This is one
great reason why one who is, as we say,
chronically thinking and talking of his
ailments and symptoms, who is
complaining and fearing, is never well.

To see oneself, to believe, and therefore to

picture oneself in mind as strong, healthy,
active, well, is to furnish a pattern, is to give
suggestion and therefore direction to the
subconscious so that it will build cell tissue
having the stamp and the force of healthy,
vital, active life, which in turn means
abounding health and strength.
So, likewise, at about the time that “old
age” is supposed ordinarily to begin, when
it is believed in and looked for by those
about us and those who act in accordance
with this thought, if we fall into this same
mental drift, we furnish the subconscious
the pattern that it will inevitably build bodily
conditions in accordance with. We will then
find the ordinarily understood marks and
conditions of old age creeping upon us, and
we will become subject to their influences
in every department of our being. Whatever
is thus pictured in the mind and lived in, the
Life Force will produce.

To remain young in mind, in spirit, in

feeling, is to remain young in body.
Growing old at the period or age at which
so many grow old, is to a great extent a
matter of habit.
To think health and strength, to see
ourselves continually growing in this
condition, is to set into operation the
subtlest dynamic force for the
externalisation of these conditions in the
body that can be even conceived of. If
one's bodily condition, through abnormal,
false mental and emotional habits, has
become abnormal and diseased, this same
attitude of mind, of spirit, of imagery, is to
set into operation a subtle and powerful
corrective agency that, if persisted in, will
inevitably tend to bring normal, healthy
conditions to the front again.

True, if these abnormal, diseased

conditions have been helped on or have
been induced by wrong physical habits, by
the violation of physical laws, this violation
must cease. But combine the two, and then
give the body the care that it requires in a
moderate amount of simple, wholesome
food, regular cleansing to assist it in the
elimination of impurities and of used cell
structure that is being regularly cast off, an
abundance of pure air and of moderate
exercise, and a change amounting almost
to a miracle can be wrought — it may be,
indeed, what many people of olden time
would have termed a miracle.

The mind thus becomes “a silent,

transforming, sanative energy” of great
potency and power. That it can be so used
is attested by the fact of the large numbers,
and the rapidly increasing numbers, all
about us who are so using it. This is what
many people all over our country are doing
today, with the results that, by a great
elemental law — Divine Law if you choose
— many are curing themselves of various
diseases, many are exchanging weakness
and impotence for strength and power,
many are ceasing, comparatively
speaking, are politely refusing, to grow old.

Thought is a force, subtle and powerful,

and it tends inevitably to produce of its kind.

In forestalling “old age” at least old age of

the decrepit type, it is the period of middle
life where the greatest care is to be
employed. If, at about the time “old age” is
supposed ordinarily to begin, the “turn” at
middle life or a little later, we would stop to
consider what this period really means, that
it means with both men and women a
period of life where some simple
readjustments are to be made, a period of
a little rest, a little letting up, a temporary
getting back to the playtime of earlier years
and a bringing of these characteristics back
into life again, then a complete letting-up
would not be demanded by nature a little
later, as it is demanded in such a
lamentably large number of cases at the
present time.

So in a definite, deliberate way, youth

should be blended into the middle life, and
the resultant should be a force that will
stretch middle life for an indefinite period
into the future.

And what an opportunity is here for

mothers, at about the time that the children
have grown, and some or all even have
“flown”! Of course. Mother shouldn’t go and
get foolish, she shouldn’t go cavorting
around in a sixteen-year-old hat, when the
hat of the thirty-five-year-old would
undoubtedly suit her better; but she should
rejoice that the golden period of life is still
before her. Now she has leisure to do many
of those things that she has so long wanted
to do.

The world’s rich field of literature is before

her; the line of study or work she has
longed to pursue, she bringing to it a better
equipped mind and experience than she
has ever had before. There is also an
interest in the life and welfare of her
community, in civic, public welfare lines
that the present and the quick-coming time
before us along women’s enfranchisement
lines, along women’s common sense
equality lines, is making her a responsible
and full sharer in. And how much more
valuable she makes herself, also, to her
children, as well as to her community,
inspiring in them greater confidence,
respect, and admiration than if she allows
herself to be pushed into the background
by her own weak and false thoughts of
herself, or by the equally foolish thoughts
of her children in that she is now, or is at
any time, to become a back number.

Life, as long as we are here, should mean

continuous unfoldment, advancement, and
this is undoubtedly the purpose of life; but
age-producing forces and agencies mean
deterioration, as opposed to growth and
unfoldment. They ossify, weaken, stiffen,
deaden, both mentally and physically. For
him or her who yearns to stay young, the
coming of the years does not mean or bring
abandonment of hope or of happiness or of
activity. It means comparative vigour
combined with continually larger
experience, and therefore even more
usefulness, and hence pleasure and
happiness.

Praise also to those who do not allow any

one or any number of occurrences in life to
sour their nature, rob them of their faith, or
cripple their energies for the enjoyment of
the fullest in life while here. It’s those
people who never allow themselves in spirit
to be downed, no matter what their
individual problems, surroundings, or
conditions may be, but who chronically bob
up serenely who, after all, are the masters
of life, and who are likewise the strength-
givers and the helpers of others. There are
multitudes in the world today, there are
readers of this volume, who could add a
dozen or a score of years — teeming,
healthy years — to their lives by a process
of self-examination, a mental
housecleaning, and a reconstructed,
positive, commanding type of thought.

Tennyson was prophet when he sang:

Cleave then to the sunnier side of doubt,

And cling to Faith beyond the forms of

Faith!

She reels not in the storm of warring words,

She brightens at the clash of “Yes” and

“No,”

She sees the Best that glimmers through

the Worst,

She feels the sun is hid but for a night,

She spies the summer through the winter

bud,

She tastes the fruit before the blossom

falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,

She finds the fountain where they wailed

“mirage.”
Chapter 5: Thought As A Force In Daily
Living
Some years ago an experience was told to
me that has been the cause of many
interesting observations since. It was
related by a man living in one of our noted
university towns in the Middle West. He
was a well-known lecture manager, having
had charge of many lecture tours for John
B. Gough, Henry Ward Beecher, and
others of like standing. He himself was a
man of splendid character, was of a
sensitive organism, as we say, and had
always taken considerable interest in the
powers and forces pertaining to the inner
life.

As a young man he had left home, and

during a portion of his first year away he
had found employment on a Mississippi
steamboat. One day in going down the
river, while he was crossing the deck, a
sudden stinging sensation seized him in
the head, and instantly vivid thoughts of his
mother, back at the old home, flashed into
his mind. This was followed by a feeling of
depression during the remainder of the
day. The occurrence was so unusual and
the impression of it was so strong that he
made an account of it in his diary.

Sometime later, on returning home, he was

met in the yard by his mother. She was
wearing a thin cap on her head which he
had never seen her wear before. He
remarked in regard to it. She raised the cap
and doing so revealed the remains of a
long ugly gash on the side of her head. She
then said that some months before, naming
the time, she had gone into the back yard
and had picked up a heavy crooked stick
having a sharp end, to throw it out of the
way, and in throwing it, it had struck a wire
clothesline immediately above her head
and had rebounded with such force that it
had given her the deep scalp wound of
which she was speaking. On unpacking his
bag he looked into his diary and found that
the time she had mentioned corresponded
exactly with the strange and unusual
occurrence to himself as they were floating
down the Mississippi.

The mother and son were very near one to

the other, close in their sympathies, and
there can be but little doubt that the
thoughts of the mother as she was struck
went out, and perhaps went strongly out, to
her boy who was now away from home. He,
being sensitively organised and intimately
related to her in thought, and alone at the
time, undoubtedly got, if not her thought, at
least the effects of her thought, as it went
out to him under these peculiar and tense
conditions.

There are scores if not hundreds of

occurrences of a more or less similar
nature that have occurred in the lives of
others, many of them well authenticated.
How many of us, even, have had the
experience of suddenly thinking of a friend
of whom we have not thought for weeks or
months, and then entirely unexpectedly
meeting or hearing from this same friend.
How many have had the experience of
writing a friend, one who has not been
written to or heard from for a long time, and
within a day or two getting a letter from that
friend — the letters “crossing,” as we are
accustomed to say. There are many other
experiences or facts of a similar nature,
and many of them exceedingly interesting,
that could be related did space permit.
These all indicate to me that thoughts are
not mere indefinite things but that thoughts
are forces, that they go out, and that every
distinct, clear-cut thought has, or may
have, an influence of some type.

Thought transference, which is now

unquestionably an established fact,
notwithstanding much chicanery that is still
to be found in connection with it, is
undoubtedly to be explained through the
fact that thoughts are forces. A positive
mind through practice, at first with very
simple beginnings, gives form to a thought
that another mind open and receptive to it
— and sufficiently attuned to the other mind
— is able to receive.

Wireless telegraphy, as a science, has

been known but a comparatively short time.
The laws underlying it have been in the
universe perhaps, or undoubtedly, always.
It is only lately that the mind of man has
been able to apprehend them, and has
been able to construct instruments in
accordance with these laws. We are now
able, through a knowledge of the laws of
vibration and by using the right sending and
receiving instruments, to send actual
messages many hundreds of miles directly
through the ether and without the more
clumsy accessories of poles and wires.
This much of it we know — there is perhaps
even more yet to be known.
We may find, as I am inclined to think we
shall find, that thought is a form of vibration.
When a thought is born in the brain, it goes
out just as a sound wave goes out, and
transmits itself through the ether, making
its impressions upon other minds that are
in a sufficiently sensitive state to receive it;
this in addition to the effects that various
types of thoughts have upon the various
bodily functions of the one with whom they
take origin.

We are, by virtue of the laws of evolution,

constantly apprehending the finer forces of
nature — the tallow-dip, the candle, the oil
lamp, years later a more refined type of oil,
gas, electricity, the latest tungsten lights,
radium — and we may be still only at the
beginnings. Our finest electric lights of
today may seem — will seem — crude and
the quality of their light even more crude,
twenty years hence, even less. Many other
examples of our gradual passing from the
coarser to the finer in connection with the
laws and forces of nature occur readily to
the minds of us all.

The present great interest on the part of

thinking men and women everywhere, in
addition to the more particular studies,
experiments, and observations of men
such as Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William
Ramsay, and others, in the powers and
forces pertaining to the inner life is an
indication that we have reached a time
when we are making great strides along
these lines. Some of our greatest scientists
are thinking that we are on the eve of some
almost startling glimpses into these finer
realms. My own belief is that we are
likewise on the eve of apprehending the
more precise nature of thought as a force,
the methods of its workings, and the law
underlying its more intimate and everyday
uses.

Of one thing we can rest assured; nothing

in the universe, nothing in connection with
human life is outside of the Realm of Law.
The elemental law of Cause and Effect is
absolute in its workings. One of the great
laws pertaining to human life is: As is the
inner, so always and inevitably is the outer
— Cause, Effect. Our thoughts and
emotions are the silent, subtle forces that
are constantly externalising themselves in
kindred forms in our outward material
world. Like creates like, and like attracts
like. As is our prevailing type of thought, so
is our prevailing type and our condition of
life.

The type of thought we entertain has its

effect upon our energies and to a great
extent upon our bodily conditions and
states. Strong, clear-cut, positive, hopeful
thought has a stimulating and life-giving
effect upon one’s outlook, energies, and
activities; and upon all bodily functions and
powers. A falling state of the mind induces
a chronically gloomy outlook and produces
inevitably a falling condition of the body.
The mind grows, moreover, into the
likeness of the thoughts one most
habitually entertains and lives with. Every
thought reproduces of its kind.

Says an authoritative writer in dealing more

particularly with the effects of certain types
of thoughts and emotions upon bodily
conditions: “Out of our own experience we
know that anger, fear, worry, hate,
revenge, avarice, grief, in fact all negative
and low emotions, produce weakness and
disturbance not only in the mind but in the
body as well. It has been proved that they
actually generate poisons in the body, they
depress the circulation; they change the
quality of the blood, making it less vital;
they affect the great nerve centres and thus
partially paralyse the very seat of the bodily
activities. On the other hand, faith, hope,
love, forgiveness, joy, and peace, all such
emotions are positive and uplifting, and so
act on the body as to restore and maintain
harmony and actually to. stimulate the
circulation and nutrition.”

The one who does not allow himself to be

influenced or controlled by fears or
forebodings is the one who ordinarily does
not yield to discouragements. He it is who
is using the positive, success-bringing
types of thought that are continually
working for him for the accomplishment of
his ends. The things that he sees in the
ideal, his strong, positive, and therefore
creative type of thought, is continually
helping to actualise in the realm of the real.

We sometimes speak lightly of ideas, but

this world would be indeed a sorry place in
which to live were it not for ideas — and
were it not for ideals. Every piece of
mechanism that has ever been built, if we
trace back far enough, was first merely an
idea in some man’s or woman’s mind.
Every structure or edifice that has ever
been reared had form first in this same
immaterial realm. So every great
undertaking of whatever nature had its
inception, its origin, in the realm of the
immaterial — at least as we at present call
it — before it was embodied and stood forth
in material form.

It is well, then, that we have our ideas and

our ideals. It is well, even, to build castles
in the air, if we follow these up and give
them material clothing or structure, so that
they become castles on the ground.
Occasionally it is true that these may shrink
or, rather, may change their form and
become cabins; but many times we find
that an expanded vision and an expanded
experience lead us to a knowledge of the
fact that, so far as happiness and
satisfaction are concerned, the contents of
a cabin may outweigh many times those of
the castle.
Successful men and women are almost
invariably those possessing to a supreme
degree the element of faith. Faith, absolute,
unconquerable faith, is one of the essential
concomitants, therefore one of the great
secrets of success. We must realise, and
especially valuable is it for young men and
women to realise, that one carries his
success or his failure with him, that it does
not depend upon outside conditions. There
are some that no circumstances or
combinations of circumstances can thwart
or keep down. Let circumstance seem to
thwart or circumvent them in one direction,
and almost instantly they are going forward
along another direction. Circumstance is
kept busy keeping up with them. When she
meets such, after a few trials, she
apparently decides to give up and turn her
attention to those of the less positive, the
less forceful, therefore the less determined,
types of mind and of life. Circumstance has
received some hard knocks from men and
women of this type. She has grown
naturally timid and will always back down
whenever she recognises a mind, and
therefore a life, of sufficient force.

To make the best of whatever present

conditions are, to form and clearly to see
one’s ideal, though it may seem far distant
and almost impossible, to believe in it, and
to believe in one’s ability to actualise it —
this is the first essential. Not, then, to sit
and idly fold the hands, expecting it to
actualise itself, but to take hold of the first
thing that offers itself to do, — that lies
sufficiently along the way, — to do this
faithfully, believing, knowing, that it is but
the step that will lead to the next best thing,
and this to the next; this is the second and
the completing stage of all
accomplishment.

We speak of fate many times as if it were

something foreign to or outside of
ourselves, forgetting that fate awaits
always our own conditions. A man decides
his own fate through the types of thoughts
he entertains and gives a dominating
influence in his life. He sits at the helm of
his thought world and, guiding, decides his
own fate, or, through negative, vacillating,
and therefore weakening thought, he drifts,
and fate decides him. Fate is not something
that takes form and dominates us
irrespective of any say on our own part.
Through a knowledge and an intelligent
and determined use of the silent but ever-
working power of thought we either
condition circumstances, or, lacking this
knowledge or failing to apply it, we accept
the role of a conditioned circumstance. It is
a help sometimes to realise and to voice
with Henley:

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

The thoughts that we entertain not only

determine the conditions of our own
immediate lives, but they influence,
perhaps in a much more subtle manner
than most of us realise, our relations with
and our influence upon those with whom
we associate or even come into contact. All
are influenced, even though
unconsciously, by them.

Thoughts of good will, sympathy,

magnanimity, good cheer — in brief, all
thoughts emanating from a spirit of love —
are felt in their positive, warming, and
stimulating influences by others; they
inspire in turn the same types of thoughts
and feelings in them, and they come back
to us laden with their ennobling,
stimulating, pleasure-bringing influences.

Thoughts of envy, or malice, or hatred, or

ill will are likewise felt by others. They are
influenced adversely by them. They inspire
either the same types of thoughts and
emotions in them; or they produce in them
a certain type of antagonistic feeling that
has the tendency to neutralise and, if
continued for a sufficient length of time,
deaden sympathy and thereby all friendly
relations.

We have heard much of “personal

magnetism.” Careful analysis will, I think,
reveal the fact that the one who has to any
marked degree the element of personal
magnetism is one of the large-hearted,
magnanimous, cheer-bringing, unself-
centred types, whose positive thought
forces are being continually felt by others,
and are continually inspiring and calling
forth from others these same splendid
attributes. I have yet to find anyone, man or
woman, of the opposite habits and,
therefore, trend of mind and heart who has
had or who has even to the slightest
perceptible degree the quality that we
ordinarily think of when we use the term
“personal magnetism.”
If one would have friends, he or she must
be a friend, must radiate habitually friendly,
helpful thoughts, good will, love. The one
who doesn’t cultivate the hopeful, cheerful,
uncomplaining, goodwill attitude toward life
and toward others becomes a drag, making
life harder for others as well as for oneself.

Ordinarily we find in people the qualities we

are mostly looking for, or the qualities that
our own prevailing characteristics call forth.
The larger the nature, the less critical and
cynical it is, the more it is given to looking
for the best and the highest in others, and
the less, therefore, is it given to gossip.

It was Jeremy Bentham who said: “In order

to love mankind, we must not expect too
much of them.” And Goethe had a still
deeper vision when he said: “Who is the
happiest of men? He who values the merits
of others, and in their pleasure takes joy,
even as though it were his own.”

The chief characteristic of the gossip is that

he or she prefers to live in the low-lying
miasmic strata of life, revelling in the
negatives of life and taking joy in finding
and peddling about the findings that he or
she naturally makes there. The larger
natures see the good and sympathise with
the weaknesses and the frailties of others.
They realise also that it is so consummately
inconsistent — many times even
humorously inconsistent — for one also
with weaknesses, frailties, and faults,
though perhaps of a little different
character, to sit in judgment of another.
Gossip concerning the errors or
shortcomings of another is judging another.
The one who is himself perfect is the one
who has the right to judge another. By a
strange law, however, though by a natural
law, we find, as we understand life in its
fundamentals better, such a person is
seldom if ever given to judging, much less
to gossip.

Life becomes rich and expansive through

sympathy, good will, and good cheer; not
through cynicism or criticism. That splendid
little poem of but a single stanza by Edwin
Markham, “Outwitted” points after all to one
of life’s fundamentals:

He drew a circle that shut me out —

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout,

But Love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in!

Chapter 6: Jesus The Supreme Exponent
Of The Inner Forces And Powers: His
People’s Religion And Their Condition
In order to have any true or adequate
understanding of what the real revelation
and teachings of Jesus were, two things
must be borne in mind. It is necessary in
the first place, not only to have a
knowledge of, but always to bear in mind
the method, the medium through which the
account of his life has come down to us.
Again, before the real content and
significance of Jesus’ revelation and
teachings can be intelligently understood, it
is necessary that we have a knowledge of
the conditions of the time in which he lived
and of the people to whom he spoke, to
whom his revelation was made.
To anyone who has even a rudimentary
knowledge of the former, it becomes
apparent at once that no single saying or
statement of Jesus can be taken to indicate
either his revelation or his purpose. These
must be made to depend upon not any
single statement or saying of his own,
much less anything reported about him by
another; but it must be made to depend
rather upon the whole tenor of his
teachings.

Jesus put nothing in writing. There was no

one immediately at hand to make a record
of any of his teachings or any of his acts. It
is now well known that no one of the
gospels was written by an immediate
hearer, by an eye-witness.

The Gospel of Mark, the oldest gospel, or

in other words the one written nearest to
Jesus’ time, was written some forty years
after he had finished his work. Matthew and
Luke, taken to a great extent from the
Gospel of Mark, supplemented by one or
two additional sources, were written many
years after. The Gospel of John was not
written until after the beginning of the
second century after Christ. These four
sets of chronicles, called the Gospels,
written independently one of another, were
then collected many years after their
authors were dead, and still a great deal
later were brought together into a single
book.

The following concise statement by

Professor Henry Drummond throws much
light upon the way the New Testament
portions of our Bible took form: “The Bible
is not a book; it is a library. It consists of
sixty-six books. It is a great convenience,
but in some respects a great misfortune,
that these books have always been bound
up together and given out as one book to
the world, when they are not; because that
has led to endless mistakes in theology and
practical life. These books, which make up
this library, written at intervals of hundreds
of years, were collected after the last of the
writers was dead — long after — by human
hands. Where were the books? Take the
New Testament. There were four lives of
Christ. One was in Rome; one was in
Southern Italy; one was in Palestine; one in
Asia Minor. There were twenty-one letters.
Five were in Greece and Macedonia; five in
Asia; one in Rome. The rest were in the
pockets of private individuals. Theophilus
had Acts. They were collected
undesignedly. In the third century the New
Testament consisted of the following
books: The four Gospels, Acts, thirteen
letters of Paul, I John, I Peter; and, in
addition, the Epistles of Barnabas and
Hermas. This was not called the New
Testament, but the Christian Library. Then
these last books were discarded. They
ceased to be regarded as upon the same
level as the others. In the fourth century the
canon was closed — that is to say, a list
was made up of the books which were to
be regarded as canonical. And then long
after that they were stitched together and
made up into one book — hundreds of
years after that. Who made up the
complete list? It was never formally made
up. The bishops of the different churches
would draw up a list each of the books that
they thought ought to be put into this
Testament. The churches also would give
their opinions. Sometimes councils would
meet and talk it over — discuss it. Scholars
like Jerome would investigate the
authenticity of the different documents, and
there came to be a general consensus of
the churches on the matter.”

Jesus spoke in his own native language,

the Aramaic. His sayings were then
rendered into Greek, and, as is well known
by all well-versed Biblical scholars, it was
not an especially high order of Greek. The
New Testament scriptures including the
four gospels, were then many hundreds of
years afterwards translated from the Greek
into our modern languages — English,
German, French, Swedish, or whatever the
language of the particular translation may
be. Those who know anything of the matter
of translation know how difficult it is to
render the exact meanings of any
statements or writing into another
language. The rendering of a single word
may sometimes mean, or rather may make
a great difference in the thought of the one
giving the utterance. How much greater is
this liability when the thing thus rendered is
twice removed from its original source and
form!

The original manuscripts had no

punctuation and no verse divisions; these
were all arbitrarily supplied by the
translators later on. It is also a well-
established fact on the part of leading
Biblical scholars that through the centuries
there have been various interpolations in
the New Testament scriptures, both by way
of omissions and additions.

Reference is made to these various facts in

connection with the sayings and the
teachings of Jesus and the methods and
the media through which they have come
down to us, to show how impossible it
would be to base Jesus’ revelation or
purpose upon any single utterance made or
purported to be made by him — to indicate,
in other words, that to get at. his real
message, his real teachings, and his real
purpose, we must find the binding thread, if
possible, the reiterated statement, the
repeated purpose that makes them throb
with the living element.

Again, no intelligent understanding of

Jesus’ revelation or ministry can be had
without a knowledge of the conditions of
the time, and of the people to whom his
revelation was made, among whom he
lived and worked; for his ministry had in
connection with it both a time element and
an eternal element. There are two things
that must be noted, the moral and religious
condition of the people; and, again, their
economic and political status.

The Jewish people had been pre-eminently

a religious people. But a great change had
taken place. Religion was at its lowest ebb.
Its spirit was well-nigh dead, and in its
place, there had gradually come into being
a Pharisaic legalism — a religion of form,
ceremony. An extensive system of
ecclesiastical tradition, ecclesiastical law
and observances, which had gradually
robbed the people of all their former spirit
of religion, had been gradually built up by
those in ecclesiastical authority.

The voice of that illustrious line of Hebrew

prophets had ceased to speak. It was close
to two hundred years since the voice of a
living prophet had been heard. Tradition
had taken its place. It took the form: Moses
hath said; It has been said of old; The
prophet hath said. The scribe was the
keeper of the ecclesiastical law. The lawyer
was its interpreter.

The Pharisees had gradually elevated

themselves into an ecclesiastical hierarchy
who were the custodians of the law and
religion. They had come to regard
themselves as especially favoured, a
privileged class — not only the custodians
but the dispensers of all religious
knowledge — and therefore of religion. The
people, in their estimation, were of a lower
intellectual and religious order, possessing
no capabilities in connection with religion or
morals, dependent therefore upon their
superiors in these matters.

This state of affairs that had gradually

come about was productive of two
noticeable results: a religious starvation
and stagnation on the part of the great
mass of the people on the one hand, and
the creation of a haughty, self-righteous
and domineering ecclesiastical hierarchy
on the other. In order for a clear
understanding of some of Jesus’ sayings
and teachings, some of which constitute a
very vital part of his ministry, it is necessary
to understand clearly what this condition
was.
Another important fact that sheds much
light upon the nature of the ministry of
Jesus is to be found, as has already been
intimated, in the political and the economic
condition of the people of the time. The
Jewish nation had been subjugated and
were under the domination of Rome. Rome
in connection with Israel, as in connection
with all conquered peoples, was a hard
master. Taxes and tribute, tribute and
taxes, could almost be said to be
descriptive of her administration of affairs.

She was already in her degenerate stage.

Never perhaps in the history of the world
had men been so ruled by selfishness,
greed, military power and domination, and
the pomp and display of material wealth.
Luxury, indulgence, over-indulgence, vice.
The inevitable concomitant followed — a
continually increasing moral and physical
degeneration. An increasing luxury and
indulgence called for an increasing means
to satisfy them. Messengers were sent and
additional tribute was levied. Pontius Pilate
was the Roman administrative head or
governor in Judea at the time. Tiberius
Caesar was the Roman Emperor.

Rome at this time consisted of a few

thousand nobles and people of station —
freemen — and hundreds of thousands of
slaves. Even her campaigns in time
became virtual raids for plunder. She
conquered — and she plundered those
whom she conquered. Great numbers from
among the conquered peoples were
regularly taken to Rome and sold into
slavery. Judea had not escaped this.
Thousands of her best people had been
transported to Rome and sold into slavery.
It was never known where the blow would
fall next; what homes would be desolated
and both sons and daughters sent away
into slavery. No section, no family could
feel any sense of security. A feeling of fear,
a sense of desolation pervaded
everywhere.

There was a tradition, which had grown into

a well-defined belief, that a Deliverer would
be sent them, that they would be delivered
out of the hands of their enemies and that
their oppressors would in turn be brought
to grief. There was also in the section round
about Judaea a belief, which had grown
until it had become well-nigh universal, that
the end of the world, or the end of the age,
was speedily coming, that then there would
be an end of all earthly government and
that the reign of Jehovah — the kingdom of
God — would be established. These two
beliefs went hand in hand. They were kept
continually before the people, and now and
then received a fresh impetus by the
appearance of a new prophet or a new
teacher, whom the people went gladly out
to hear. Of this kind was John, the son of a
priest, later called John the Baptist.

After his period of preparation, he came out

of the wilderness of Judaea, and in the
region about the Jordan with great power
and persuasiveness, according to the
accounts, he gave utterance to the
message: Repent ye, for the Kingdom of
Heaven is at hand. Forsake all earthly
things; they will be of avail but a very short
time now, turn ye from them and prepare
yourselves for the coming of the Kingdom
of God. The old things will speedily pass
away; all things will become new. Many
went out to hear him and were powerfully
appealed to by the earnest, rugged
utterances of this new preacher of
righteousness and repentance.

His name and his message spread through

all the land of Judea and the country
around the Jordan. Many were baptised by
him there, he making use of this symbolic
service which had been long in use by
certain branches of the Jewish people,
especially the order of the Essenes.

Among those who went out to hear John

and who accepted baptism at his hands
was Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary,
whose home was at Nazareth. It marks
also the beginning of his own public
ministry, for which he evidently had been in
preparation for a considerable time.

It seems strange that we know so little of

the early life of one destined to exert such
a powerful influence upon the thought and
the life of the world. In the gospel of Mark,
probably the most reliable, because the
nearest to his time, there is no mention
whatever of his early life. The first account
is where he appears at John's meetings.
Almost immediately thereafter begins his
own public ministry.

In the gospel of Luke we have a very

meagre account of him. It is at the age of
twelve. The brief account gives us a
glimpse into the lives of his father and his
mother, Joseph and Mary; showing that at
that time they were not looked upon as in
any way different from all of the inhabitants
of their little community, Nazareth, the little
town in Galilee — having a family of several
sons and daughters, and that Jesus, the
eldest of the family, grew in stature and in
knowledge, as all the neighbouring children
grew; but that he, even at an early age,
showed that he had a wonderful aptitude
for the things of the spirit. I reproduce
Luke’s brief account here:

“Now, his parents went to Jerusalem every

year at the feast of the Passover. And when
he was twelve years old, they went up to
Jerusalem, after the custom of the feast
And when they had fulfilled the days, as
they returned, the child Jesus tarried
behind in Jerusalem: and Joseph and his
mother knew not of it. But they, supposing
him to have been in the company, went a
day’s journey; and they sought him among
their kinsfolk and acquaintances. And
when they found him not, they turned back
again to Jerusalem, seeking him. And it
came to pass that after three days they
found him in the temple, sitting in the midst
of the doctors, both hearing them and
asking them questions. And all that heard
him were astonished at his understanding
and answers.

“And when they saw him, they were

amazed: and his mother said unto him,
Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us?
Behold, thy father and I have sought thee
sorrowing. And he said unto them, How is
it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must
be about my father’s business? And they
understood not the saying which he spake
unto them. And he went down with them,
and came to Nazareth, and was subject
unto them: but his mother kept all these
sayings in her heart. And Jesus increased
in wisdom and stature, and in favour with
God and man.”

Nothing could be more interesting than to

know the early life of Jesus. There are
various theories as to how this was spent,
that is, as to what his preparation was —
the facts of his life, in addition to his
working with his father at his trade, that of
a carpenter; but we know nothing that has
the stamp of historical accuracy upon it. Of
his entire life, indeed, including the period
of his active ministry, from thirty to nearly
thirty-three, it is but fair to presume that we
have at best but a fragmentary account in
the Gospel narratives. It is probable that
many things connected with his ministry,
and many of his sayings and teachings, we
have no record of at all.

It is probable that in connection with his

preparation he spent a great deal of time
alone, in the quiet, in communion with his
Divine Source, or as the term came so
naturally to him, with God, his Father —
God, our Father, for that was his teaching
— my God and your God. The many times
that we are told in the narratives that he
went to the mountain alone, would seem to
justify us in this conclusion. Anyway, it
would be absolutely impossible for anyone
to have such a vivid realisation of his
essential oneness with the Divine, without
much time spent in such a manner that the
real life could evolve into its Divine
likeness, and then mould the outer life
according to this ideal or pattern.
Chapter 7: The Divine Rule In The Mind
And Heart: The Unessentials We Drop —
The Spirit Abides
That Jesus had a supreme aptitude for the
things of the spirit, there can be no
question. That through desire and through
will he followed the leadings of the spirit —
that he gave himself completely to its
leadings — is evident both from his
utterances and his life. It was this
combination undoubtedly that led him into
that vivid sense of his life in God, which
became so complete that he afterwards
speaks — I and my Father are one. That he
was always, however, far from identifying
himself as equal with God is indicated by
his constant declaration of his dependence
upon God. Again and again we have these
declarations: “My meat and drink is to do
the will of God.” “My doctrine is not mine,
but his that sent me.” “I can of myself do
nothing: as I hear I judge; and my judgment
is righteous; because I seek not mine own
will, but the will of him that sent me.”

And even the very last acts and words of

his life proclaim this constant sense of
dependence for guidance, for strength, and
even for succour. With all his Divine self-
realisation there was always, moreover,
that sense of humility that is always a
predominating characteristic of the really
great. “Why callest thou me good? There is
none good but one — that is God.”

It is not at all strange, therefore, that the

very first utterance of his public ministry,
according to the chronicler Mark was: The
Kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and
believe the gospel. And while this was the
beginning utterance, it was the keynote that
ran through his entire ministry. It is the
basic fact of all his teachings. The
realisation of his own life he sought to make
the realisation of all others. It was, it is, a
call to righteousness, and a call to
righteousness through the only channel
that any such call can be effective —
through a realisation of the essential
righteousness and goodness of the human
soul.

An unbiased study of Jesus’ own words will

reveal the fact that he taught only what he
himself had first realised. It is this,
moreover, that makes him the supreme
teacher of all time — Counsellor, Friend,
Saviour. It is the saving of men from their
lower conceptions and selves, a lifting of
them up to their higher selves, which, as he
taught, is eternally one with God, the
Father, and which, when realised, will
inevitably, reflexly, one might say, lift a
man’s thoughts, acts, conduct — the entire
life — up to that standard or pattern. It is
thus that the Divine ideal, that the Christ
becomes enthroned within. The Christ-
consciousness is the universal Divine
nature in us. It is the state of God-
consciousness. It is the recognition of the
indwelling Divine life as the source, and
therefore the essence of our own lives.

Jesus came as the revealer of a new truth,

a new conception of man. Indeed, the
Messiah. He came as the revealer of the
only truth that could lead his people out of
their trials and troubles — out of their
bondage. They were looking for their
Deliverer to come in the person of a worldly
king and to set up his rule as such. He
came in the person of a humble teacher,
the revealer of a mighty truth, the revealer
of the Way, the only way whereby real
freedom and deliverance can come. For
those who would receive him, he was
indeed the Messiah. For those who would
not, he was not, and the same holds today.

He came as the revealer of a truth which

had been glimpsed by many inspired
teachers among the Jewish race and
among those of other races. The time
waited, however, for one to come who
would first embody this truth and then be
able effectively to teach it. This was done
in a supreme degree by the Judaean
Teacher. He came not as the doer-away
with the Law and the Prophets, but rather
to regain and then to supplement them.
Such was his own statement.

I It is time to ascend another round. I reveal

God to you, not in the Tabernacle, but in
the human heart — then in the Tabernacle
in the degree that He is in the hearts of
those who frequent the Tabernacle.
Otherwise the Tabernacle becomes a
whited sepulchre. The Church is not a
building, an organisation, not a creed. The
Church is the Spirit of Truth. It must have
one supreme object and purpose — to lead
men to the truth. I reveal what I have found
— I in the Father and the Father in me. I
seek not to do mine own will, but the will of
the Father who sent me.

Everything was subordinated to this Divine

realisation and to his Divine purpose.
The great purpose at which he laboured so
incessantly was the teaching of the
realisation of the Divine will in the hearts
and minds, and through these in the lives
of men — the finding and the realisation of
the Kingdom of God. This is the supreme
fact of life. Get right at the centre and the
circumference will then care for itself. As is
the inner, so always and invariably will be
the outer. There is an inner guide that
regulates the life when this inner guide is
allowed to assume authority. Why be
disconcerted, why in a heat concerning so
many things? It is not the natural and the
normal life. Life at its best is something
infinitely beyond this. “Seek ye first the
Kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added unto
you.” And if there is any doubt in regard to
his real meaning in this here is his answer:
“Neither shall they say, ‘Lo here’ or ‘Lo
there’ for behold the Kingdom of God is
within you.”

Again and again this is his call. Again and

again this is his revelation. In the first three
gospels alone he uses the expression “the
Kingdom of God,” or “the Kingdom of
Heaven,” upwards of thirty times. Any
possible reference to any organisation that
he might have had in mind, can be found in
the entire four gospels but twice.

It would almost seem that it would not be

difficult to judge as to what was uppermost
in his mind. I have made this revelation to
you; you must raise yourselves, you must
become in reality what in essence you
really are. I in the Father, and the Father in
me. I reveal only what I myself know. As I
am, ye shall be. God is your Father. In your
real nature you are Divine. Drop your ideas
of the depravity of the human soul. To
believe it depraves. To teach it depraves
the one who teaches it, and the one who
accepts it. Follow not the traditions of men.
I reveal to you your Divine birthright. Accept
it. It is best. Behold all things are become
new. The Kingdom of God is the one all-
inclusive thing. Find it and all else will
follow.

“Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of

God? Or with what comparison shall we
compare it? It is like a grain of mustard
seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is
less than all the seeds that be in the earth;
but when it is sown, it groweth up, and
becometh greater than all herbs, and
shooteth out great branches; so that the
fowls of the air may lodge under the
shadow of it.” “Whereunto shall I liken the
kingdom of God? Is it like leaven, which a
woman took and hid in three measures of
meal, till the whole was leavened?” Seek
ye first the Kingdom, and the Holy Spirit,
the channel of communion between God
your source, and yourselves, will lead you,
and will lead you into all truth. It will become
as a lamp to your feet, a guide that is
always reliable.

To refuse allegiance to the Holy Spirit, the

Spirit of Truth, is the real sin, the only sin
that cannot be forgiven. Violation of all
moral and natural law may be forgiven. It
will bring its penalty, for the violation of law
carries in itself its own penalty, its own
punishment — it is a part of law; but cease
the violation and the penalty ceases. The
violation registers its ill effects in the illness,
the sickness, of body and spirit. If the
violation has been long continued, these
effects may remain for some time; but the
instant the violation ceases the repair will
begin, and things will go the other way.

Learn from this experience, however, that

there can be no deliberate violation of, or
blaspheming against any moral or natural
law. But deliberately to refuse obedience to
the inner guide, the Holy Spirit, constitutes
a defiance that eventually puts out the lamp
of life, and that can result only in confusion
and darkness. It severs the ordained
relationship, the connecting, the binding
cord, between the soul — the self — and
its Source. Stagnation, degeneracy, and
eventual death is merely the natural
sequence.
With this Divine self-realisation the Spirit
assumes control and mastery, and you are
saved from the follies of error, and from the
consequences of error. Repent ye — turn
from your trespasses and sins, from your
lower conceptions of life, of pleasure and of
pain, and walk in this way. The lower
propensities and desires will lose their hold
and will in time fall away. You will be at first
surprised, and then dumfounded, at what
you formerly took for pleasure. True
pleasure and satisfaction go hand in hand,
— nor are there any bad after results.

All genuine pleasures should lead to more

perfect health, a greater accretion of
power, a continually expanding sense of
life and service. When God is uppermost in
the heart, when the Divine rule under the
direction of the Holy Spirit becomes the
ruling power in the life of the individual,
then the body and its senses are
subordinated to this rule; the passions
become functions to be used; license and
perverted use give way to moderation and
wise use; and there are then no penalties
that outraged law exacts; satiety gives
place to satisfaction. It was Edward
Carpenter who said: “In order to enjoy life
one must be a master of life — for to be a
slave to its inconsistencies can only mean
torment; and in order to enjoy the senses
one must be master of them. To dominate
the actual world you must, like Archimedes,
base your fulcrum somewhere beyond.”

It is not the use, but the abuse of anything

good in itself that brings satiety, disease,
suffering, dissatisfaction. Nor is asceticism
a true road of life. All things are for use; but
all must be wisely, in most cases,
moderately used, for true enjoyment. All
functions and powers are for use; but all
must be brought under the domination of
the Spirit — the God-illumined spirit. This is
the road that leads to heaven here and
heaven hereafter — and we can rest
assured that we will never find a heaven
hereafter that we do not make while here.
Through everything runs this teaching of
the Master.

How wonderfully and how masterfully and

simply he sets forth His whole teaching of
sin and the sinner and his relation to the
Father in that marvellous parable, the
Parable of the Prodigal Son. To bring it
clearly to mind again it runs:

“A certain man had two sons: and the

younger of them said to his father, Father,
give me the portion of goods that falleth to
me. And he divided unto them his living.
And not many days after the younger son
gathered all together, and took his journey
to a far country, and there wasted his
substance with riotous living. And when he
had spent all, there arose a mighty famine
in that land; and he began to be in want.
And he went and joined himself to a citizen
of that country; and he sent him into his
fields to feed swine. And he would fain
have filled his belly with the husks that the
swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.
And when he came to himself, he said,
How many hired servants of my father’s
have bread enough and to spare, and I
perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my
father, and will say unto him, Father, I have
sinned against heaven, and before thee,
and am no more worthy to be called thy
son: make me as one of thy hired servants.
And he arose and came to his father.

“But when he was yet a great way off, his

father saw him, and had compassion, and
ran, and fell upon his neck, and kissed him.
And the son said unto him, Father, I have
sinned against heaven, and in thy sight,
and am no more worthy to be called thy
son. But the father said to his servants,
Bring forth the best robe and put it on him;
and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on
his feet: and bring hither the fatted calf, and
kill it; and let us eat, and be merry; for this
my son was dead, and is alive again; he
was lost, and is found. And they began to
be merry. Now his elder son was in the
field: and as he came and drew nigh to the
house, he heard music and dancing. And
he called one of the servants, and asked
what these things meant. And he said unto
him, Thy brother is come; and thy father
hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath
received him safe and sound. And he was
angry and would not go in: therefore came
his father out, and entreated him, and he
answering said to his father, Lo, these
many years do I serve thee, neither
transgressed I at any time thy
commandment; and yet thou never gavest
me a kid, that I might make merry with my
friends: but as soon as this thy son was
come, which hath devoured thy living with
harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted
calf. And he said unto him, Son, thou art
ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It
was meet that we should make merry, and
be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and
is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”

It does away forever in all thinking minds

with any participation of Jesus in that
perverted and perverting doctrine that man
is by nature essentially depraved,
degraded, fallen, in the sense as was given
to the world long, long after his time in the
doctrine of the Fall of Man, and the need of
redemption through some external source
outside of himself, in distinction from the
truth that he revealed that was to make
men free — the truth of their Divine nature,
and this love of man by the Heavenly
Father, and the love of the Heavenly Father
by His children.

To connect Jesus with any such thought or

teaching would be to take the heart out of
his supreme revelation. For his whole
conception of God the Father, given in all
his utterances, was that of a Heavenly
Father of love, of care, longing to exercise
His protecting care and to give good gifts to
His children — and this because it is the
essential nature of God to be fatherly. His
Fatherhood is not, therefore, accidental,
not dependent upon any conditions or
circumstances; it is essential.

If it is the nature of a father to give good

gifts to his children, so in a still greater
degree is it the nature of the Heavenly
Father to give good gifts to those who ask
Him. As His words are recorded by
Matthew: “Or what man is there of you,
whom if his son ask bread, will he give him
a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him
a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how
to give good gifts unto your children, how
much more shall your Father which is in
heaven give good things to them that ask
him?” So in the parable as presented by
Jesus, the father’s love was such that as
soon as it was made known to him that his
son who had been lost to him had returned,
he went out to meet him; he granted him
full pardon — and there were no conditions.

Speaking of the fundamental teaching of

the Master, and also in connection with this
same parable, another has said: “It thus
appears from this story, as elsewhere in the
teaching of Jesus, that he did not call God
our father because He created us, or
because He rules over us, or because He
made a covenant with Abraham, but simply
and only because He loves us. This
parable individualises the divine love, as
did also the missionary activity of Jesus.
The gospels know nothing of a national
fatherhood, of a God whose love is
confined to a particular people. It is the
individual man who has a heavenly Father,
and this individualised fatherhood is the
only one of which Jesus speaks. As he had
realised his own moral and spiritual life in
the consciousness that God was his father,
so he sought to give life to the world by a
living revelation of the truth that God loves
each separate soul. This is a prime factor
in the religion and ethics of Jesus. It is
seldom or vaguely apprehended in the Old
Testament teaching; but in the teaching of
Jesus it is central and normative.” Again in
the two allied parables of Jesus — the
Parable of the Lost Sheep, and the Parable
of the Lost Coin — it is his purpose to teach
the great love of the Father for all, including
those lost in their trespasses and sins, and
His rejoicing in their return.

This leads to Jesus’ conception and

teaching of sin and repentance. Although
God is the Father, He demands filial
obedience in the hearts and the minds of
His children. Men by following the devices
and desires of their own hearts, are not true
to their real nature, their Divine pattern. By
following their selfish desires they have
brought sin, and thereby suffering, on
themselves and others. The unclean, the
selfish desires of mind and heart, keep
them from their higher moral and spiritual
ideal — although not necessarily giving
themselves to gross sin. Therefore, they
must become sons of God by repenting —
by turning from the evil inclinations of their
hearts and seeking to follow the higher
inclinations of the heart as becomes
children of God and those who are dwellers
in the Heavenly Kingdom. Therefore, his
opening utterance: “The time is fulfilled,
and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent
ye, and believe the gospel.”

Love of God with the whole heart, and love

of the neighbour, leading to the higher
peace and fulfilment, must take the place
of these more selfish desires that lead to
antagonisms and dissatisfactions both
within and without. All men are to pray:
Forgive us our sins. All men are to repent
of their sins which are the results of
following their own selfish desires, — those
of the body, or their own selfish desires to
the detriment of the welfare of the
neighbour.
All men are to seek the Divine rule, the rule
of God in the heart, and thereby have the
guidance of the Holy Spirit, which is the
Divine spirit of wisdom that tabernacles
with man when through desire and through
will he makes the conditions whereby it can
make its abode with him. It is a
manifestation of the force that is above
man — it is the eternal heritage of the soul.
“Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the
Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” And
therein lies salvation. It follows the seeking
and the finding of the Kingdom of God and
His righteousness that Jesus revealed to a
waiting world.

And so it was the spirit of religion that Jesus

came to reveal — the real Fatherhood of
God and the Divine Sonship of man. A
better righteousness than that of the
scribes and the Pharisees — not a slavish
adherence to the Law, with its supposed
profits and rewards. Get the motive of life
right. Get the heart right and these things
become of secondary importance. As his
supreme revelation was the personal
fatherhood of God, from which follows
necessarily the Divine sonship of man, so
there was a corollary to it, a portion of it
almost as essential as the main truth itself
— namely, that all men are brothers. Not
merely those of one little group, or tribe or
nation; not merely those of any one little set
or religion; not merely those of this or that
little compartment that we build and
arbitrarily separate ourselves into — but all
men the world over. If this is not true then
Jesus’ supreme revelation is false.
In connection with this great truth he
brought a new standard by virtue of the
logic of his revelation. “Ye have heard that
it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say
unto you, Love your enemies, bless them
that curse you, do good to them that hate
you, and pray for them which despitefully
use you, and persecute you; that ye may
be the children of your Father which is in
heaven.” Struggling for recognition all
through the Old Testament scriptures, and
breaking through partially at least in places,
was this conception which is at the very
basis of all man’s relationship with man.

And finally through this supreme Master of

life it did break through, with a wonderful
newborn consciousness.
The old dispensation, with its legal
formalism, was an eye for an eye and a
tooth for a tooth. The new dispensation was
— “But I say unto you, Love your enemies.”
Enmity begets enmity. It is as senseless as
it is godless. It runs through all his
teachings and through every act of his life.
If fundamentally you do not have the love
of your fellowman in your hearts, you do not
have the love of God in your hearts and you
cannot have.

And that this fundamental revelation be not

misunderstood, near the close of his life he
said: “A new commandment I give unto
you, that ye love one another.” No man
could be, can be his disciple, his follower,
and fail in the realisation of this
fundamental teaching. “By this shall all men
know that ye are my disciples, if ye love
one another.” And going back again to his
ministry we find that it breathes through
every teaching that he gave. It breathes
through that short memorable prayer which
we call the Lord’s Prayer. It permeates the
Sermon on the Mount. It is the very
essence of his summing up of this
discourse. We call it the Golden Rule.
“Whatsoever ye would that men should do
to you, do ye even so to them.” Not that it
was original with Jesus; other teachers
sent of God had given it before to other
peoples — God’s other children; but he
gave it a new emphasis, a new setting. He
made it fundamental.

So a man who is gripped at all vitally by

Jesus’ teaching of the personal fatherhood
of God, and the personal brotherhood of
man, simply can’t help but make this the
basic rule of his life — and moreover find
joy in so making it. A man who really
comprehends this fundamental teaching
can’t be crafty, sneaking, dishonest, or
dishonourable, in his business, or in any
phase of his personal life. He never hogs
the penny — in other words, he never
seeks to gain his own advantage to the
disadvantage of another. He may be long-
headed; he may be able to size up and
seize conditions; but he seeks no
advantage for himself to the detriment of
his fellow, to the detriment of his
community, or to the detriment of his
extended community, the nation or the
world. He is thoughtful, considerate, open,
frank; and, moreover, he finds great joy in
being so.
I have never seen any finer statement of
the essential reasonableness, therefore, of
the essential truth of the value and the
practice of the Golden Rule than that given
by a modern disciple of Jesus who left us
but a few years ago. A poor boy, a
successful businessman, straight, square,
considerate in all his dealings, — a power
among his fellows, a lamp indeed to the
feet of many — was Samuel Milton Jones,
thrice mayor of Toledo. Simple,
unassuming, friend of all, rich as well as
poor, poor as well as rich, friend of the
outcast, the thief, the criminal, looking
beyond the exterior, he saw as did Jesus,
the human soul always intact, though it
erred in its judgment — as we all err in our
judgments, each in his own peculiar way —
and that by forbearance, consideration,
and love, it could be touched and the life
redeemed — redeemed to happiness, to
usefulness, to service. Notwithstanding his
many duties, business and political, he
thought much and he loved to talk of the
things we are considering.

His brief statement of the fundamental

reasons and the comprehensive results of
the actual practice of the Golden Rule are
shot through with such fine insight, such
abounding comprehension, that they
deserve to become immortal. He was my
friend and I would not see them die. I
reproduce them here: “As I view it, the
Golden Rule is the supreme law of life. It
may be paraphrased this way: As you do
unto others, others will do unto you. What I
give, I get. If I love you, really and truly and
actively love you, you are as sure to love
me in return as the earth is sure to be
warmed by the rays of the midsummer sun.
If I hate you, ill-treat you and abuse you, I
am equally certain to arouse the same kind
of antagonism towards me, unless the
Divine nature is so developed that it is
dominant in you, and you have learned to
love your enemies. What can be plainer?
The Golden Rule is the law of action and
reaction in the field of morals, just as
definite, just as certain here as the law is
definite and certain in the domain of
physics.

“I think the confusion with respect to the

Golden Rule arises from the different
conceptions that we have of the word love.
I use the word love as synonymous with
reason, and when I speak of doing the
loving thing, I mean the reasonable thing.
When I speak of dealing with my fellowmen
in an unreasonable way, I mean an
unloving way. The terms are
interchangeable, absolutely. The reason
why we know so little about the Golden
Rule is because we have not practised it.”

“Was Mayor Jones a Christian?” you ask.

He was a follower of the Christ — for it was
he who said: “By this shall all men know ye
are my disciples, if ye love one another.”
Was he a member of a religious
organisation? I don’t know — it never
occurred to me to ask him. Thinking men
the world over are making a sharp
distinction in these days between
organised Christianity and essential
Christianity.

The element of fear has lost its hold on the

part of thinking men and women. It never
opened up; it never can open up the
springs of righteousness in the human
heart. He believed and he acted upon the
belief that it was the spirit that the Master
taught — that God is a God of love and that
He reveals Himself in terms of love to those
who really know Him. He believed that
there is joy to the human soul in following
this inner guide and translating its impulses
into deeds of love and service for one’s
fellowmen. If we could, if we would thus
translate religion into terms of life, it would
become a source of perennial joy.

It is not with observation, said Jesus, that

the supreme thing that he taught — the
seeking and finding of the Kingdom of God
— will come. Do not seek it at some other
place, some other time. It is within, and if
within it will show forth. Make no mistake
about that, — it will show forth. It touches
and it sensitises the inner springs of action
in a man’s or a woman’s life. When a man
realises his Divine sonship that Jesus
taught, he will act as a son of God. Out of
the heart spring either good or evil actions.
Self-love, me, mine; let me get all I can for
myself, or, thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself — the Divine law of service, of
mutuality — the highest source of ethics.

You can trust any man whose heart is right.

He will be straight, clean, reliable. His word
will be as good as his bond. Personally you
can’t trust a man who is brought into any
line of action, or into any institution through
fear. The sore is there, liable to break out
in corruption at any time. This opening up
of the springs of the inner life frees him also
from the letter of the law, which after all
consists of the traditions of men, and
makes him subject to that higher moral
guide within. How clearly Jesus illustrated
this in his conversations regarding the
observance of the Sabbath — how the
Sabbath was made for man and not man
for the Sabbath, and how it was always
right to do good on the Sabbath.

I remember some years ago, a friend in my

native state telling me the following
interesting incident in connection with his
grandmother. It was in northern Illinois — it
might have been in New England. “As a
boy,” said he, “I used to visit her on the
farm. She loved her cup of coffee for
breakfast. Ordinarily she would grind it
fresh each morning in the kitchen; but when
Sunday morning came, she would take her
coffee-grinder down into the far end of the
cellar, where no one could see and no one
could hear her grind it.” He could never
quite tell, he said, whether it was to ease
her own conscience, or in order to give no
offence to her neighbours.

Now, I can imagine Jesus passing by and

stopping at that home — it was a home
known for its native kindly hospitality — and
meeting her just as she was coming out of
the cellar with her coffee-grinder — his
quick and unerring perception enabling him
to take in the whole situation at once, and
saying: “In the name of the Father, Aunt
Susan, what were you doing with your
coffee-grinder down in the cellar on this
beautiful Sabbath morning? You like your
cup of coffee, and I also like the coffee that
you make; thank God that you have it, and
thank God that you have the good health to
enjoy it. We can give praise to the Father
through eating and drinking, if, as in
everything else, these are done in
moderation and we give value received for
all the things that we use. So don’t take
your grinder down into the cellar on the
Sabbath morning; but grind your coffee up
here in God’s sunshine, with a thankful
heart that you have it to grind.”

And I can imagine him, as he passes out of

the little front gate, turning and waving
another goodbye and saying: “When I
come again, Aunt Susan, be it weekday or
Sabbath, remember God’s sunshine and
keep out of the cellar.” And turning again in
a half-joking manner: “And when you take
those baskets of eggs to town, Aunt Susan,
don’t pick out too many of the large ones to
keep for yourself, but take them just as the
hens lay them. And, Aunt Susan, give good
weight in your butter. This will do your soul
infinitely more good than the few extra
coins you would gain by too carefully
calculating” — Aunt Susan with all her
lovable qualities, had a little tendency to
close dealing.

I think we do incalculable harm by

separating Jesus so completely from the
more homely, commonplace affairs of our
daily lives. If we had a more adequate
account of his discourses with the people
and his associations with the people, we
would perhaps find that he was not, after
all, so busy in saving the world that he
didn't have time for the simple, homely
enjoyments and affairs of the every-day
life. The little glimpses that we have of him
along these lines indicate to me that he
had. Unless we get his truths right into this
phase of our lives, the chances are that we
will miss them entirely.

And I think that with all his earnestness,

Jesus must have had an unusually keen
sense of humour. With his unusual
perceptions and his unusual powers in
reading and in understanding human
nature, it could not be otherwise. That he
had a keen sense for beauty; that he saw
it, that he valued it, that he loved it,
especially beauty in all nature, many of his
discourses so abundantly prove. Religion
with him was not divorced from life. It was
the power that permeated every thought
and every act of the daily life.
Chapter 8: If We Seek The Essence Of His
Revelation, And The Purpose Of His Life
If we would seek the essence of Jesus’
revelation, attested both by his words and
his life, it was to bring a knowledge of the
ineffable love of God to man, and by
revealing this, to instil in the minds and
hearts of men love for God, and a
knowledge of and following of the ways of
God. It was also then to luring a new
emphasis of the Divine law of love — the
love of man for man. Combined, it results,
so to speak, in raising men to a higher
power, to a higher life, — as individuals, as
groups, as one great world group.

It is a newly sensitised attitude of mind and

heart that he brought and that he
endeavoured to reveal in all its matchless
beauty — a following not of the traditions of
men, but fidelity to one’s God, whereby the
Divine rule in the mind and heart assumes
supremacy and, as must inevitably follow,
fidelity to one’s fellowmen. These are the
essentials of Jesus’ revelation — the
fundamental forces in his own life. His
every teaching, his every act, comes back
to them. I believe also that all efforts to
mystify the minds of men and women by
later theories about him are contrary to his
own expressed teaching, and in exact
degree that they would seek to substitute
other things for these fundamentals.

I call them fundamentals. I call them his

fundamentals. What right have I to call
them his fundamentals?

An occasion arose one day in the form of a

direct question for Jesus to state in well-
considered and clear-cut terms the
essence, the gist, of his entire teachings —
therefore, by his authority, the
fundamentals of essential Christianity. In
the midst of one of the groups that he was
speaking to one day, we are told that a
certain lawyer arose — an interpreter of, an
authority on, the existing ecclesiastical law.
The reference to him is so brief,
unfortunately, that we cannot tell whether
his question was to confound Jesus, as
was so often the case, or whether being a
liberal Jew he longed for an honest and
truly helpful answer. From Jesus’ remark to
him, after his primary answer, we are
justified in believing it was the latter.

His question was: “Master, which is the

great commandment in the law?” Jesus
said unto him, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind. This is the first and
great commandment. And the second is
like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour
as thyself. On these two commandments
hang all the law and the prophets.”

Here we have a wonderful statement from

a wonderful source. So clear-cut is it that
any wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot
mistake it. Especially is this true when we
couple with it this other statement of Jesus:
“Think not that I am come to destroy the
law, or the prophets; I am not come to
destroy, but to fulfil.” We must never forget
that Jesus was born, lived, and died a Jew,
the same as all of his disciples — and they
never regarded themselves in any other
light. The basis of his religion was the
religion of Israel* It was this he taught and
expounded, now in the synagogue, now
out on the hillside and by the lake-side. It
was this that he tried to teach in its purity,
that he tried to free from the hedges that
ecclesiasticism had built around it, this that
he endeavoured to raise to a still higher
standard.

One cannot find the slightest reference in

any of his sayings that would indicate that
he looked upon himself in any other light —
except the overwhelming sense that it was
his mission to bring in the new dispensation
by fulfilling the old, and then carrying it
another great step forward, which he did in
a wonderful way — both God-ward and
man-ward.

We must not forget, then, that Jesus said

that he did not come to destroy the Law and
the Prophets, but to fulfil them. We must
not forget, however, that before fulfilling
them he had to free them. The freedom-
giving, God-illumined words spoken by free
God-illumined men, had, in the hands of
those not God-illumined, later on become
institutionalised, made into a system, a
code. The people were taught that only the
priests had access to God. They were the
custodians of God’s favour and only
through the institution could any man, or
any woman, have access to God. This
became the sacred thing, and as the years
had passed this had become so hedged
about by continually added laws and
observances that all the spirit of religion
had become crushed, stifled, beaten to the
ground.

The very scribes and Pharisees

themselves, supposed to minister to the
spiritual life and the welfare of the people,
became enrobed in their fine millinery and
arrogance, masters of the people, whose
ministers they were supposed to be, as is
so apt to be the case when an institution
builds itself upon the free, all-embracing
message of truth given by any prophet or
any inspired teacher. It has occurred time
and time again. Christianity knows it well. It
is only by constant vigilance that religious
freedom is preserved, from which alone
comes any high degree of morality, or any
degree of free and upward-moving life
among the people.

It was on account of this shameful robbing

of the people of their Divine birthright that
the just soul of Jesus, abhorring both
casuistry and oppression under the cloak of
religion, gave utterance to that fine
invective that he used on several
occasions, the only times that he spoke in
a condemnatory or accusing manner: “Now
do ye, Pharisee, make clean the outside of
the cup and the platter; but your inward part
is full of ravening and wickedness. Woe
unto you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! For ye are as graves which
appear not, and the men that walk over
them are not aware of them. . . . Woe unto
you also, ye lawyers! For ye lade men with
burdens grievous to be borne, and ye
yourselves touch not the burdens with one
of your fingers. . . Woe unto you, lawyers!
For ye have taken away the key of
knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves,
and them that were entering in ye
hindered.”

And here is the lesson for us. It is the spirit

that must always be kept uppermost in
religion. Otherwise even the revelation and
the religion of Jesus could be compressed
into a code, with its self-appointed
instruments of interpretation, the same as
the Pharisees did the Law and the
Prophets that he so bitterly condemned,
with a bravery so intrepid and so fearless
that it finally caused his death.

No, if God is not in the human soul waiting

to make Himself known to the believing,
longing heart, accessible to all alike without
money and without price, without any
prescribed code, then the words of Jesus
have not been correctly handed down to
us. And then again, confirming us in the
belief that a man’s deepest soul relation is
a matter between him and his God, are his
unmistakable and explicit directions in
regard to prayer.
It is so easy to substitute the secondary
thing for the fundamental, the by-thing for
the essential, the container for the thing
itself. You will recall that symbolic act of
Jesus at the last meeting, the Last Supper
with his disciples, the washing of the
disciples’ feet by the Master. The point that
is intended to be brought out in the story is,
of course, the extraordinary condescension
of Jesus in doing this menial service for his
disciples. “The feet-washing symbolises
the attitude of humble service to others.
Every follower of Jesus must experience it.”
One of the disciples is so astonished, even
taken aback by this menial service on the
part of Jesus, that he says: Thou shaft
never wash my feet. Jesus answered him,
“If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with
me.”
In Oriental countries where sandals are
worn that cover merely the soles of the feet,
it was, it is the custom of the host to offer
his guest who comes water with which to
wash his feet. There is no reason why this
simple incident of humble service, or rather
this symbolic act of humble service, could
not be taken and made an essential
condition of salvation by any council that
saw fit to make it such. Things just as
strange as this have happened, though any
thinking man or woman today would deem
it essentially foolish.

It is an example of how the spirit of a

beautiful act could be misrepresented to
the people. For if you will look at them
again, Jesus’ words are very explicit: “If I
wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.”
But hear Jesus’ own comment as given in
John: “So after he had washed their feet,
and had taken his garments, and was set
down again, he said unto them. Know ye
what I have done to you? Ye call me Master
and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I
then, your Lord and Master, have washed
your feet, ye also ought to wash one
another’s feet. For I have given you an
example, that ye should do as I have done
to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The
servant is not greater than his lord; neither
he that is sent greater than he that sent
him. If ye know these things, happy are ye
if ye do them.” It is a means to an end and
not an end in itself. The spirit that it typifies
is essential; but not the act itself.

The same could be rightly said of the Lord’s

Supper. It is an observance that can be
made of great value, one very dear and
valuable to many people. But it cannot, if
Jesus is to be our authority, and if correctly
reported, be by any means made a
fundamental, an essential of salvation.
From the rebuke administered by Jesus to
his disciples in a number of cases where
they were prone to drag down his
meanings by their purely material
interpretations, we should be saved from
this.

You will recall his teaching one day when

he spoke of himself as the bread of life that
a man may eat thereof and not die. Some
of his Jewish hearers taking his words in a
material sense and arguing in regard to
them one with another said: “How can this
man give us his flesh to eat?” Hearing them
Jesus reaffirming his statement said:
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat
of the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his
blood, ye have not life in yourselves. . . .
For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood
is drink indeed.” His disciples, likewise,
prone here as so often to make a literal and
material interpretation of his statements,
said one to another: “This is a hard saying;
who can hear him?” Or according to our
idiom — who can understand him? Jesus
asked them squarely if what he had just
said caused them to stumble, and in order
to be sure that they might not miss his real
meaning and therefore teaching, said: “It is
the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth
nothing: the words that I speak unto you,
they are spirit, and they are life.”

Try as we will, we cannot get away from the

fact that it was the words of truth that Jesus
brought that were ever uppermost in his
mind. He said, Follow me, not someone
else, nor something else that would claim
to represent me. And follow me merely
because I lead you to the Father.

So supremely had this young Jewish

prophet, the son of a carpenter, made
God’s business his business, that he had
come into the full realisation of the oneness
of his life with the Father’s life. He was able
to realise and to say, “I and my Father are
one.” He was able to bring to the world a
knowledge of the great fact of facts — the
essential oneness of the human with the
Divine — that God tabernacles with men,
that He makes His abode in the minds and
the hearts of those who through desire and
through will open their hearts to His
indwelling presence.
The first of the race, he becomes the
revealer of this great eternal truth — the
mediator, therefore, between God and man
— in very truth the Saviour of men. “If a
man love me,” said he, “he will keep my
words: and my Father will love him, and we
will come unto him, and make our abode
with him. ... If ye keep my commandments,
ye shall abide in my love; even as I have
kept my Father's commandments and
abide in his love."

It is our eternal refusal to follow Jesus by

listening to the words of life that he brought,
and our proneness to substitute something
else in their place, that brings the
barrenness that is so often evident in the
everyday life of the Christian. We have
been taught to believe in Jesus; we have
not been taught to believe Jesus. This has
resulted in a separation of Christianity from
life. The predominating motive has been
the saving of the soul. It has resulted too
often in a selfish, negative, repressive,
ineffective religion. As Jesus said: “And
why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the
things which I say?"

We are just beginning to realise at all

adequately that it was the salvation of the
life that he taught. When the life is
redeemed to righteousness through the
power of the indwelling God and moves out
in love and in service for one’s fellowmen,
the soul is then saved.

A man may be a believer in Jesus for a

million years and still be an outcast from
the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness. But a man can’t believe
Jesus, which means following his
teachings, without coming at once into the
Kingdom and enjoying its matchless
blessings both here and hereafter. And if
there is one clear-cut teaching of the
Master, it is that the life here determines
and with absolute precision the life to
come.

One need not then concern himself with

this or that doctrine, whether it be true or
false. Later speculations and theories are
not for him. Jesus’ own saying applies
here: “If any man will do his will he shall
know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.”
He enters into the Kingdom, the Kingdom
of Heaven here and now; and when the
time comes for him to pass out of this life,
he goes as a joyous pilgrim, full of
anticipation for the Kingdom that awaits
him, and the Master’s words go with him:
“In my Father’s house are many mansions.”

By thus becoming a follower of Jesus

rather than merely a believer in Jesus, he
gradually comes into possession of
insights and powers that the Master taught
would follow in the lives of those who
became his followers. The Holy Spirit, the
Divine Comforter, of which Jesus spoke,
the Spirit of Truth, that awaits our bidding,
will lead continually to the highest truth and
wisdom and insight and power. Kant’s
statement, “The other world is not another
locality, but only another way of seeing
things,” is closely allied to the Master’s
statement: “The Kingdom of God is within
you.” And closely allied to both is this
statement of a modern prophet: “The
principle of Christianity and of every true
religion is within the soul — the realisation
of the incarnation of God in every human
being.”

When we turn to Jesus’ own teachings, we

find that his insistence was not primarily
upon the saving of the soul, but upon the
saving of the life for usefulness, for service,
here and now, for still higher growth and
unfoldment, whereby the soul might be
grown to a sufficient degree that it would be
worth the saving. And this is one of the
great facts that is now being recognised
and preached by the forward-looking men
and women in our churches and by many
equally religious outside of our churches.

And so all aspiring, all thinking, forward-

looking men and women of our day are not
interested any more in theories about,
explanations of, or dogmas about Jesus.
They are being won and enthralled by the
wonderful personality and life of Jesus.
They are being gripped by the power of his
teachings. They do not want theories about
God — they want God — and God is what
Jesus brought — God as the moving, the
predominating, the all-embracing force in
the individual life. But he who finds the
Kingdom of God, whose life becomes
subject to the Divine rule and life within,
realises at once also his true relations with
the whole — with his neighbour, his
fellowmen. He realises that his neighbour
is not merely the man next door, the man
around the corner, or even the man in the
next town or city; but that his neighbour is
every man and every woman in the world
— because all children of the same infinite
Father, all bound in the same direction, but
over many different roads.

The man who has come under the

influence and the domination of the Divine
rule, realises that his interests lie in the
same direction as the interests of all, that
he cannot gain for himself any good — that
is, any essential good — at the expense of
the good of all; but rather that his interests,
his Welfare, and the interests and the
welfare of all others are identical. God’s
rule, the Divine rule, becomes for him,
therefore, the fundamental rule in the
business world, the dominating rule in
political life and action, the dominating rule
in the law and relations of nations.

Jesus did not look with much favour upon

outward form, ceremony, or with much
favour upon formulated, or formal religion;
and he somehow or other seemed to avoid
the company of those who did. We find him
almost continually down among the people,
the poor, the needy, the outcast, the sinner
— wherever he could be of service to the
Father, that is, wherever he could be of
service to the Father’s children. According
to the accounts he was not always as
careful in regard to those with whom he
associated as the more respectable ones,
the more respectable classes of his day
thought he should be. They remarked it
many times. Jesus noticed it and remarked
in turn.

We find him always where the work was to

be done — friend equally of the poor and
humble, and those of station — truly friend
of man, teaching, helping, uplifting. And
then we find him out on the mountain side
— in the quiet, in communion — to keep his
realisation of his oneness with the Father
intact; and with this help he went down
regularly to the people, trying to lift their
minds and lives up to the Divine ideal that
he revealed to them, that they in turn might
realise their real relations one with another,
that the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness might grow and become the
dominating law and force in the world —
“Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on
earth as it is in Heaven.”

It is this Kingdom idea, the Divine rule, the

rule of God in all of the relations and affairs
of men on earth that is gripping earnest
men and women in great numbers among
us today. Under the leadership of these
thinking, God-impelled men and women,
many of our churches are pushing their
endeavours out into social service activities
along many different lines; and the result is
they are calling into their ranks many able
men and women, especially younger men
and women, who are intensely religious,
but to whom formal, inactive religion never
made any appeal.

When the Church begins actually to throw

the Golden Rule onto its banner, not in
theory but in actual practice, actually
forgetting self in the Master’s service,
careless even of her own interests, her
membership, she thereby calls into her
ranks vast numbers of the best of the race,
especially among the young, so that the
actual result is a membership not only
larger than she could ever hope to have
otherwise, but a membership that
commands such respect and that
exercises such power, that she is
astounded at her former stupidity in being
shackled so long by the traditions of the
past. A new life is engendered. There is the
joy of real accomplishment.

We are in an age of great changes.

Advancing knowledge necessitates
changes. And may I say a word here to our
Christian ministry, that splendid body of
men for whom I have such supreme
admiration? One of the most significant
facts of our time is this widespread
inclination and determination on the part of
such great numbers of thinking men and
women to go directly to Jesus for their
information of, and their inspiration from
him. The beliefs and the voice of the
laymen, those in our churches and those
out of our churches, must be taken into
account and reckoned with. Jesus is too
large and too universal a character to be
longer the sole possession, the property of
any organisation.

There is a splendid body of young men and

young women numbering into untold
thousands, who are being captured by the
personality and the simple direct message
of Jesus. Many of these have caught his
spirit and are going off into other lines of the
Master’s service. They are doing effective
and telling work there. Remember that
when the spirit of the Christ seizes a man,
it is through the channel of present-day
forms and present-day terms, not in those
of fifteen hundred, or sixteen hundred, or
even three hundred years ago.

There is a spirit of intellectual honesty that

prevents many men and women from
subscribing to anything to which they
cannot give their intellectual assent, as well
as their moral and spiritual assent. They do
not object to creeds. They know that a
creed is but a statement, a statement of a
man’s or a woman’s belief, whether it be in
connection with religion, or in connection
with anything else. But what they do object
to is dogma, that unholy thing that lives on
credulity, that is therefore destructive of the
intellectual and the moral life of every man
and every woman who allows it to lay its
paralysing hand upon them, that can be
held to if one is at all honest and given to
thought, only through intellectual
chicanery.

We must not forget also that God is still at

work, revealing Himself more fully to
mankind through modern prophets,
through modern agencies. His revelation is
not closed. It is still going on. The silly
presumption in the statement therefore —
“the truth once delivered.”

It is well occasionally to call to mind these

words by Robert Burns, singing free and
with an untrammelled mind and soul from
his heather-covered hills:

Here’s freedom to him that wad read,

Here’s freedom to him that wad write;

There’s nane ever feared that the truth

should be heared

But them that the truth wad indict.

It is essential to remember that we are in

possession of knowledge, that we are face
to face with conditions that are different
from any in the previous history of
Christendom. The Christian church must
be sure that it moves fast enough so as not
to alienate, but to draw into it that great
body of intellectually alive, intellectually
honest young men and women who have
the Christ spirit of service and who are
mastered by a great purpose of
accomplishment. Remember that these
young men and women are now merely
standing where the entire church will stand
in a few years. Remember that any man or
woman who has the true spirit of service
has the spirit of Christ — and more, has the
religion of the Christ.

Remember that Jesus formulated no

organisation. His message of the Kingdom
was so far-reaching that no organisation
could ever possibly encompass it, though
an organisation may be, and has been, a
great aid in actualising it here on earth. He
never made any conditions as to through
whom, or what, his truth should be spread,
and he would condemn today any
instrumentality that would abrogate to itself
any monopoly of his truth, just as he
condemned those ecclesiastical authorities
of his day who presumed to do the same in
connection with the truth of God’s earlier
prophets.

And so I would say to the Church —

beware and be wise. Make your conditions
so that you can gain the allegiance and
gain the help of this splendid body of young
men and young women. Many of them are
made of the stock that Jesus would choose
as his own apostles. Among the young men
will be our greatest teachers, our great
financiers, our best legislators, our most
valuable workers and organisers in various
fields of social service, our most widely
read authors, eminent and influential
editorial and magazine writers as well as
managers.

Many of these young women will have high

and responsible positions as educators.
Some will be heads and others will be
active workers in our widely extended and
valuable women’s clubs. Some will have a
hand in political action, in lifting politics out
of its many-times low condition into its
rightful state in being an agent for the
accomplishment of the people’s best
purposes and their highest good. Some will
be editors of widely circulating and
influential women’s magazines. Some will
be mothers, true mothers of the children of
others, denied their rights and their
privileges. Make it possible for them, nay,
make it incumbent upon them to come in,
to work within the great Church
organisation.

It cannot afford that they stay out. It is

suicidal to keep them out. Any other type of
organisation that did not look constantly to
commanding the services of the most
capable and expert in its line would fall in a
very few months into the ranks of the
ineffectives. A business or a financial
organisation that did not do the same would
go into financial bankruptcy in even a
shorter length of time. By attracting this
class of men and women into its ranks it
need fear neither moral nor financial
bankruptcy.

But remember, many men and women of

large calibre are so busy doing God’s work
in the world that they have no time and no
inclination to be attracted by anything that
does not claim their intellectual as well as
their moral assent. The Church must speak
fully and unequivocally in terms of present-
day thought and present-day knowledge, to
win the allegiance or even to attract the
attention of this type of men and women.

And may I say here this word to those

outside, and especially to this class of
young men and young women outside of
our churches? Changes, and therefore
advances in matters of this kind come
slowly. This is true from the very nature of
human nature. Inherited beliefs, especially
when it comes to matters of religion, take
the deepest hold and are the slowest to
change. Not in all cases, but this is the
general rule.
Those who hold on to the old are earnest,
honest. They believe that these things are
too sacred to be meddled with, or even
sometimes, to be questioned. The ordinary
mind is slow to distinguish between
tradition and truth — especially where the
two have been so fully and so adroitly
mixed. Many are not in possession of the
newer, the more advanced knowledge in
various fields that you are in possession of.
But remember this — in even a dozen
years a mighty change has taken place —
except in a church whose very foundation
and whose sole purpose is dogma.

In most of our churches, however, the great

bulk of our ministers are just as forward-
looking, just as earnest as you, and are
deeply desirous of following and presenting
the highest truth in so far as it lies within
their power to do so. It is a splendid body
of men, willing to welcome you on your own
grounds, longing for your help. It is a mighty
engine for good. Go into it. Work with it.
Work through it. The best men in the
Church are longing for your help. They
need it more than they need anything else.
I can assure you of this — I have talked with
many.

They feel their handicaps. They are moving

as rapidly as they find it possible to move.
On the whole, they are doing splendid work
and with a big, fine spirit of which you know
but little. You will find a wonderful spirit of
self-sacrifice, also. You will find a
stimulating and precious comradeship on
the part of many. You will find that you will
get great good, even as you are able to
give great good.
The Church, as everything else, needs to
keep its machinery in continual repair. Help
take out the worn-out parts — but not too
suddenly. The Church is not a depository,
but an instrument and engine of truth and
righteousness. Some of the older men do
not realise this; but they will die off.
Respect their beliefs. Honest men have
honest respect for differences of opinion,
for honest differences in thought.
Sympathy is a great harmoniser.
“Differences of opinion, intellectual
distinctions, these must ever be —
separation of mind, but unity of heart.”

I like these words of Lyman Abbott. You will

like them. They are spoken out of a full life
of rich experience and splendid service.
They have, moreover, a sort of unifying
effect. They are more than a tonic: “Of all
characters in history none so gathers into
himself and reflects from himself all the
varied virtues of a complete manhood as
does Jesus of Nazareth. And the world is
recognising it. . . . If you go back to the
olden time and the old conflicts, the
question was, ‘What is the relation of Jesus
Christ to the Eternal?’ Wars have been
fought over the question, ‘Was he of one
substance with the Father?’ I do not know;
I do not know of what substance the Father
is; I do not know of what substance Jesus
Christ is. What I do know is this — that
when I look into the actual life that I know
about, the men and women that are about
me, the men and women in all the history
of the past, of all the living beings that ever
lived and walked the earth, there is no one
that so fills my heart with reverence, with
affection, with loyal love, with sincere
desire to follow, as doth Jesus Christ. . . .

“I do not need to decide whether he was

born of a virgin. I do not need to decide
whether he rose from the dead. I do not
need to decide whether he made water into
wine, or fed five thousand with two loaves
and five small fishes. Take all that away,
and still he stands the one transcendent
figure toward whom the world has been
steadily growing, and whom the world has
not yet overtaken even in his teachings. ...
I do not need to know what his
metaphysical relation to the Infinite is. I say
it reverently — I do not care. I know for me
he is the great Teacher; I know for me he is
the great Leader whose work I want to do;
and I know for me he is the great
Personality, whom I want to be like. That I
know. Theology did not give that to me, and
theology cannot get it away from me.”

And what a basis as a test of character is

this twofold injunction — this great
fundamental of Jesus! All religion that is
genuine flowers in character. It was
Benjamin Jowett who said, and most truly:
“The value of a religion is in the ethical
dividend that it pays.” When the heart is
right towards God we have the basis, the
essence of religion — the consciousness of
God in the soul of man. We have truth in
the inward parts. When the heart is right
towards the fellowman, we have the
essential basis of ethics; for again we have
truth in the inward parts.

Out of the heart are the issues of life. When

the heart is right all outward acts and
relations are right. Love draws one to the
very heart of God; and love attunes one to
all the highest and most valued
relationships in our human life.

Fear can never be a basis of either religion

or ethics. The one who is moved by fear
makes his chief concern the avoidance of
detection on the one hand, or the escape
of punishment on the other. Men of large
calibre have an unusual sagacity in sifting
the unessential from the essential as also
the false from the true. Lincoln, when
replying to the question as to why he did
not unite himself with some church
organisation, said: “When any church will
inscribe over its altar, as its sole
qualification of membership, the Saviour’s
condensed statement of the substance of
both law and gospel: Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all
thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy
neighbour as thyself, that church shall I join
with all my heart and soul.”

He was looked upon by many in his day as

a non-Christian — by some as an infidel.
His whole life had a profound religious
basis, so deep and so all-absorbing that it
gave him those wonderful elements of
personality that were instantly and
instinctively noticed by, and that moved all
men who came in touch with him; and that
sustained him so wonderfully, according to
his own confession, through those long,
dark periods of the great crisis. The fact
that in yesterday’s New York paper —
Sunday paper — I saw the notice of a
sermon in one of our Presbyterian pulpits
— Lincoln, the Christian — shows that we
have moved up a round and are
approaching more and more to an essential
Christianity.

Similar to this statement or rather belief

was that of Emerson, Jefferson, Franklin,
and a host of other men among us whose
lives have been lives of accomplishment
and service for their fellowmen. Emerson,
who said: “A man should learn to detect
and watch that gleam of light which flashes
across his mind from within, more than the
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.
Yet he dismisses without notice his
thought, because it is his. In every work of
genius we recognise our own rejected
thoughts. They come back to us with a
certain alienated majesty.” Emerson, who
also said: “I believe in the still, small voice,
and that voice is the Christ within me.” It
was he of whom the famous Father Taylor
in Boston said: “It may be that Emerson is
going to hell, but of one thing I am certain:
he will change the climate there and
emigration will set that way.”

So thought Jefferson, who said: “I have

sworn eternal hostility to every form of
tyranny over the minds of men.” And as he,
great prophet, with his own hand penned
that immortal document — the Declaration
of American Independence — one can
almost imagine the Galilean prophet
standing at his shoulder and saying:
Thomas, I think it well to write it so. Both
had a burning indignation for that species
of self-seeking either on the part of an
individual or an organisation that would
seek to enchain the minds and thereby the
lives of men and women, and even lay
claim to their children. Yet Jefferson in his
time was frequently called an atheist — and
merely because men in those days did not
distinguish as clearly as we do today
between ecclesiasticism and religion,
between formulated and essential
Christianity.

So we are brought back each time to Jesus’

two fundamentals — and these come out
every time foursquare with the best thought
of our time. The religion of Jesus is thereby
prevented from being a mere tribal religion.
It is prevented from being merely an
organisation that could possibly have his
sanction as such — that is, an organisation
that would be able to say: This is his, and
this only. It makes it have a world-wide and
eternal content. The Kingdom that Jesus
taught is infinitely broader in its scope and
its inclusiveness than any organisation can
be, or that all organisations combined can
be.
Chapter 9: His Purpose Of Lifting Up,
Energising, Beautifying, And Saving The
Entire Life: The Saving Of The Soul Is
Secondary; But Follows
We have made the statement that Jesus
did unusual things, but that he did them on
account of, or rather by virtue of, his
unusual insight into and understanding of
the laws whereby they could be done. His
understanding of the powers of the mind
and spirit was intuitive and very great. As
an evidence of this were his numerous
cases of healing the sick and the afflicted.

Intuitively he perceived the existence and

the nature of the subjective mind, and in
connection with it the tremendous powers
of suggestion. Intuitively he was able to
read, to diagnose the particular ailment and
the cause of the ailment before him. His
thought was so poised that it was
energised by a subtle and peculiar spiritual
power. Such confidence did his personality
and his power inspire in others that he was
able to an unusual degree to reach and to
arouse the slumbering subconscious mind
of the sufferer and to arouse into action its
own slumbering powers whereby the life
force of the body could transcend and
remould its error-ridden and error-stamped
condition.

In all these cases he worked through the

operation of law — it is exactly what we
know of the laws of suggestion today. The
remarkable cases of healing that are being
accomplished here and there among us
today are done unquestionably through the
understanding and use of the same laws
that Jesus was the supreme master of.
By virtue of his superior insight — his
understanding of the laws of the mind and
spirit — he was able to use them so fully
and so effectively that he did in many cases
eliminate the element of time in his healing
ministrations. But even he was dependent
in practically all cases, upon the mental
cooperation of the one who would be
healed. Where this was full and complete,
he succeeded; where it was not, he failed.
Such at least again and again is the
statement in the accounts that we have of
these facts in connection with his life and
work. There were places where we are told
he could do none of his mighty works on
account of their unbelief, and he departed
from these places and went elsewhere.
Many times his question was: “Believe ye
that I am able to do this?” Then: “According
to your faith be it unto you,” and the healing
was accomplished.

The laws of mental and spiritual

therapeutics are identically the same today
as they were in the days of Jesus and his
disciples, who made the healing of sick
bodies a part of their ministration. It is but
fair to presume from the accounts that we
have that in the early Church of the
Disciples, and for well on to two hundred
years after Jesus’ time, the healing of the
sick and the afflicted went hand in hand
with the preaching and the teaching of the
Kingdom. There are those who believe that
it never should have been abandoned. As
a well-known writer has said: “Healing is
the outward and practical attestation of the
power and genuineness of spiritual
religion, and ought not to have dropped out
of the Church.” Recent sincere efforts to re-
establish it in church practice, following
thereby the Master’s injunction, is
indicative of the thought that is alive in
connection with the matter today.1 From
the accounts that we have Jesus seems to
have engaged in works of healing more
during his early than during his later
ministry. He may have used it as a means
to an end. On account of his great love and
sympathy for the physical sufferer as well
as for the moral sufferer, it is but
reasonable to suppose that it was an
integral part of his announced purpose —
the saving of the life, of the entire life, for
usefulness, for service, for happiness.

And so we have this young Galilean

prophet, coming from an hitherto unknown
Jewish family in the obscure little village of
Nazareth, giving obedience in common
with his four brothers and his sisters to his
father and his mother; but by virtue of a
supreme aptitude for and an irresistible call
to the things of the spirit — made
irresistible through his overwhelming love
for the things of the spirit — he is early
absorbed by the realisation of the truth that
God is his father and that all men are
brothers.

The thought that God is his father and that

he bears a unique and filial relationship to
God so possesses him that he is filled,
permeated with the burning desire to make
this newborn message of truth and thereby
of righteousness known to the world.

His own native religion, once vibrating

through the souls of the prophets as the
voice of God, has become so obscured, so
hedged about, so killed by dogma, by
ceremony, by outward observances, that it
has become a mean and pitiable thing, and
produces mean and pitiable conditions in
the lives of his people. The institution has
become so overgrown that the spirit has
gone. But God finds another prophet,
clearly and supremely open to His spirit,
and Jesus comes as the Messiah, the
Divine Son of God, the Divine Son of Man,
bringing to the earth a new Dispensation. It
is the message of the Divine Fatherhood of
God, God whose controlling character is
love, and with it the Divine sonship of man.
An integral part of it is — all men are
brothers.

He comes as the teacher of a new, a higher

righteousness. He brings the message and
he expounds the message of the Kingdom
of God. All men he teaches must repent
and turn from their sins, and must
henceforth live in this Kingdom. It is an
inner kingdom. Men shall not say: Behold it
is here or it is there; for, behold, it is within
you. God is your father and God longs for
your acknowledgment of Him as your
father; He longs for your love even as He
loves you. You are children of God, but you
are not true Sons of God until through
desire the Divine rule and life becomes
supreme in your minds and hearts. It is thus
that you will find the Kingdom of God.
When you do, then your every act will show
forth in accordance with this Divine ideal
and guide, and the supreme law of conduct
in your lives will be love for your neighbour,
for all mankind. Through this there will then
in time become actualised the Kingdom of
Heaven on the earth.

He comes in no special garb, no millinery,

no brass bands, no formulas, no dogmas,
no organisation other than the Kingdom, to
uphold and become a slave to, and in turn
be absorbed by, as was the organisation
that he found strangling all religion in the
lives of his people and which he so bitterly
condemned. What he brought was
something infinitely transcending this —
the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness, to which all men were heirs
— equal heirs — and thereby redemption
from their sins, therefore salvation, the
saving of their lives, would be the inevitable
result of their acknowledgment of and
allegiance to the Divine rule.
How he embraced all — such human
sympathy— coming not to destroy but to
fulfil; not to judge the world but to save the
world. How he loved the children! How he
loved to have them about him! How he
loved their simplicity, and native integrity of
mind and heart! Hear him as he says:
“Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not
receive the Kingdom of God as a little child,
he shall not enter therein”; and again:
“Suffer the little children to come unto me,
and forbid them not; for of such is the
Kingdom of God.” The makers of dogma, in
evolving some three hundred years later on
the dogma of the inherent sinfulness and
degradation of the human life and soul,
could certainly find not the slightest trace of
any basis for it again in these words and
acts of Jesus.
We find him sympathising with and
mingling with and seeking to draw unto the
way of his own life the poor, the outcast, the
sinner, the same as the well-to-do and
those of station and influence — seeking to
draw all through love and knowledge to the
Father.

There is a sense of justice and

righteousness in his soul, however, that
balks at oppression, injustice, and
hypocrisy. He therefore condemns and in
scathing terms those and only those who
would seek to place any barrier between
the free soul of any man and his God, who
would bind either the mind or the
conscience of man to any prescribed
formulas or dogmas. Honouring, therefore
the forms that his intelligence and his
conscience allowed him to honour, he
disregarded those that they did not.

Like other good Jewish rabbis, for he was

looked upon during his ministry and often
addressed as Rabbi, he taught in the
synagogues of his people; but oftener out
on the hillsides and by the lakeside, under
the blue sky and the stars of heaven.
Giving due reverence to the Law and the
Prophets — the religion of his people and
his own early religion — but in spirit and in
discriminating thought so far transcending
them, that the people marvelled at his
teachings and said — surely this a prophet
come from God; no man ever spoke to us
as he speaks. By the ineffable beauty of his
life and the love and the winsomeness of
his personality, and by the power of the
truths that he taught, he won the hearts of
the common people. They followed him
and his following continually increased.

Through it all, however, he incurred the

increasing hostility and the increasing
hatred of the leaders, the hierarchy of the
existing religious organisation. They were
animated by a double motive, that of
protecting themselves, and that of
protecting their established religion. But in
their slavery to the organisation, and
because unable to see that it was the spirit
of true religion that he brought and taught,
they cruelly put him to death — the same
as the organisation established later on in
his name, put numbers of God’s true
prophets, Jesus’ truest disciples to death,
and essentially for the same reasons.

Jesus’ quick and almost unerring

perception enabled him to foresee this. It
did not deter him from going forward with
his message, standing resolutely and
superbly by his revelation, and at the last
almost courting death — feeling
undoubtedly that the sealing of his
revelation and message with his very life
blood would but serve to give it its greatest
power and endurance. Heroically he met
the fate that he perceived was conspiring
to end his career, to wreck his teachings
and his influence. He went forth to die
clear-sighted and unafraid.

He died for the sake of the truth of the

message that he lived and so diligently and
heroically laboured for — the message of
the ineffable love of God for all His children
and the bringing of them into the Father’s
Kingdom. And we must believe from his
whole life’s teaching, not to save their souls
from some future punishment; not through
any demand of satisfaction on the part of
God; not as any substitutionary sacrifice to
appease the demands of an angry God —
for it was the exact opposite of this that his
whole life teaching endeavoured to make
known. It was supremely the love of the
Father and His longing for the love and
allegiance, therefore the complete life and
service of His children. It was the beauty of
holiness — the beauty of wholeness — the
wholeness of life, the saving of the whole
life from the sin and sordidness of self and
thereby giving supreme satisfaction to
God. It was love, not fear. If not, then
almost in a moment he changed the entire
purpose and content, the entire intent of all
his previous life work. This is unthinkable.
In his last act he did not abrogate his own
expressed statement, that the very
essence of his message was expressed, as
love to God and love to one’s neighbour.
He did not abrogate his continually
repeated declaration that it was the
Kingdom of God and His righteousness,
which brings man’s life into right relations
with God and into right relations with his
fellowmen, that it was his purpose to reveal
and to draw all men to, thereby aiding
God’s eternal purpose — to establish in this
world a state which he designated the
Kingdom of Heaven wherein a social order
of brotherliness and justice, wrought and
maintained through the potency of love,
would prevail. In doing this he revealed the
character of God by being himself an
embodiment of it.
It was the power of a truth that was to save
the life that he was always concerned with.
Therefore his statement that the Son of
Man has come that men might have life and
might have it more abundantly — to save
men from sin and from failure, and
secondarily from their consequences; to
make them true Sons of God and fit
subjects and fit workers in His Kingdom.
Conversion according to Jesus is the fact
of this Divine rule in the mind and heart
whereby the life is saved — the saving of
the soul follows. It is the direct concomitant
of the saved life.

In his death he sealed his own statement:

“The law and the prophets were until John;
since that time the Kingdom of God is
preached, and every man presseth into it.”
Through his death he sealed the message
of his life when putting it in another form he
said: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that
heareth my word and believeth on Him that
sent me hath everlasting life, and shall not
come into condemnation: but is passed
from death unto life.”

In this majestic life divinity and humanity

meet. Here is the incarnation. The first of
the race consciously, vividly, and fully to
realise that God incarnates Himself and
has His abode in the hearts and the lives of
men, the first therefore to realise his Divine
Sonship and become able thereby to reveal
and to teach the Divine Fatherhood of God
and the Divine Sonship of Man.

In this majestic life is the atonement, the

realisation of the at-one-ment of the Divine
in the human, made manifest in his own life
and in the way that he taught, sealed then
by his own blood.

In this majestic life we have the mediator,

the medium or connector of the Divine and
the human. In it we have the Saviour, the
very incarnation of the truth that he taught,
and that lifts the minds and thereby the
lives of men up to their Divine ideal and
pattern, that redeems their lives from the
sordidness and selfishness and sin of the
hitherto purely material self, and that being
thereby saved, makes them fit subjects for
the Father’s Kingdom.

In this majestic life is the full embodiment

of the beauty of holiness — whose words
have gone forth and whose spirit is
ceaselessly at work in the world, drawing
men and women up to their divine ideal,
and that will continue so to draw all in
proportion as his words of truth and his life
are lifted up throughout the world.
Chapter 10: Some Methods Of
Attainment
After this study of the teachings of the
Divine Master let us know this. It is the
material that is the transient, the temporary;
and the mental and spiritual that is the real
and the eternal. We must not become
slaves to habit. The material alone can
never bring happiness — much less
satisfaction. These lie deeper. That
conversation between Jesus and the rich
young man is full of significance for us all,
especially in this ambitious, striving,
restless age.

Abundance of life is determined not alone

by one’s material possessions, but
primarily by one’s riches of mind and spirit.
A world of truth is contained in these words:
“Life is what we are alive to. It is not a
length, but breadth. To be alive only to
appetite, pleasure, mere luxury or idleness,
pride or money-making, and not to
goodness and kindness, purity and love,
history, poetry, and music, flowers, God
and eternal hopes, is to be all but dead.”

Why be so eager to gain possession of the

hundred thousand or the half-million acres,
of so many millions of dollars? Soon, and it
may be before you realise it, all must be
left. It is as if a man made it his ambition to
accumulate a thousand or a hundred
thousand automobiles. All soon will
become junk. But so it is with all material
things beyond what we can actually and
profitably use for our good and the good of
others — and that we actually do so use.

A man can eat just so many meals during

the year or during life. If he tries to eat more
he suffers thereby. He can wear only so
many suits of clothing; if he tries to wear
more, he merely wears himself out taking
off and putting on. Again it is as Jesus said:
“For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the
whole world and lose his own life?” And
right there is the crux of the whole matter.
All the time spent in accumulating these
things beyond the reasonable amount, is
so much taken from the life — from the
things of the mind and the spirit. It is in the
development and the pursuit of these that
all true satisfaction lies. Elemental law has
so decreed.

We have made wonderful progress, or

rather have developed wonderful skill in
connection with things. We need now to go
back and catch up the thread and develop
like skill in making the life.
Little wonder that brains are addled, that
nerves are depleted, that nervous
dyspepsia, that chronic weariness, are not
the exception but rather the rule. Little
wonder that sanitariums are always full;
that asylums are full and overflowing —
and still more to be built. No wonder that so
many men, so many good men break and
go to pieces, and so many lose the life here
at from fifty to sixty years, when they should
be in the very prime of life, in the full vigour
of manhood; at the very age when they are
capable of enjoying life the most and are
most capable of rendering the greatest
service to their fellows, to their community,
because of greater growth, experience,
means, and therefore leisure. Jesus was
right — What doth it profit? And think of the
real riches that in the meantime are
missed.

It is like an addled-brain driver in making a

trip across the continent. He is possessed,
obsessed with the insane desire of making
a record. He plunges on and on night and
day, good weather and foul — and all the
time he is missing all the beauties, all the
benefits to health and spirit along the way.
He has none of these when he arrives —
he has missed them all. He has only the
fact that he has made a record drive — or
nearly made one. And those with him he
has not only robbed of the beauties along
the way; but he has subjected them to all
the discomforts along the way. And what
really underlies the making of a record? It
is primarily the spirit of vanity.
When the mental beauties of life, when the
spiritual verities are sacrificed by self-
surrender to and domination by the
material, one of the heavy penalties that
inexorable law imposes is the drying up, so
to speak, of the finer human perceptions —
the very faculties of enjoyment. It presents
to the world many times, and all
unconscious to himself, a stunted,
shrivelled human being — that eternal type
that the Master had in mind when he said:
“Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be
required of thee.” He whose sole
employment or even whose primary
employment becomes the building of
bigger and still bigger barns to take care of
his accumulated grain, becomes incapable
of realising that life and the things that
pertain to it are of infinitely more value than
barns, or houses, or acres, or stocks, or
bonds, or railroad ties. These all have their
place; all are of value; but they can never
be made the life. A recent poem by James
Oppenheim presents a type that is known
to nearly everyone:2

I heard the preacher preaching at the

funeral: He moved the relatives to tears
telling them of the father, husband, and
friend that was dead:

Of the sweet memories left behind him. Of

a life that was good and kind.

I happened to know the man, and I

wondered whether the relatives would
have wept if the preacher had told the truth.
Let us say like this:

“The only good thing this man ever did in

his life, was the day before yesterday:
He died . . .

But he didn’t even do that of his own

volition . . . He was the meanest man in
business on Manhattan Island. The most
treacherous friend, the crudest and
stingiest husband, and a father so hard that
his children left home as soon as they were
old enough. Of course he had divinity:
everything human has, but he kept it so
carefully hidden away that he might just as
well not have had it . . .

“Wife! good cheer! now you can go your

own way and live your own life!

Children, give praise! you have his money:

the only good thing he ever gave you . . .

Friends! you have one less traitor to deal

with . . .
This is indeed a day of rejoicing and
exultation! Thank God this man is dead!”

An unknown enjoyment and profit to him is

the world’s great field of literature, the
world’s great thinkers, the inspirers of so
many through all the ages. That splendid
verse by Emily Dickinson means as much
to him as it would to a dumb stolid ox:

He ate and drank the precious words,

His spirit grew robust,

He knew no more that he was poor.

Nor that his frame was dust;

He danced along the dingy days,

And this bequest of wings

Was but a book! What liberty

A loosened spirit brings!

Yes, life and its manifold possibilities of
unfoldment and avenues of enjoyment —
life, and the things that pertain to it — is an
infinitely greater thing than the mere
accessories of life.

What infinite avenues of enjoyment, what

peace of mind, what serenity of soul may
be the possession of all men and all women
who are alive to the inner possibilities of life
as portrayed by our own prophet, Emerson,
when he said:

Oh, when I am safe in my sylvan home,

I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;

And when I am stretched beneath the

pines,

Where the evening star so holy shines,

I laugh at the lore and pride of man,

At the Sophist schools and the learned
clan;

For what are they all in their high conceit,

When man in the bush with God may

meet?

It was he who has exerted such a world-

wide influence upon the minds and lives of
men and women who also said: “Great men
are they who see that spirituality is stronger
than any material force: that thoughts rule
the world.” And this is true not only of the
world in general, but it is true likewise in
regard to the individual life.

One of the great secrets of all successful

living is unquestionably the striking of the
right balance in life. The material has its
place — and a very important place. Fools
indeed were we to ignore or to attempt to
ignore this fact. We cannot, however,
except to our detriment, put the cart before
the horse. Things may contribute to
happiness, but things cannot bring
happiness — and sad indeed, and crippled
and dwarfed and stunted becomes the life
of everyone who is not capable of realising
this fact. Eternally true indeed is it that the
life is more than meat and the body more
than raiment.

All life is from an inner centre outward. As

within, so without. As we think we become.
Which means simply this: our prevailing
thoughts and emotions are never static, but
dynamic. Thoughts are forces — like
creates like, and like attracts like. It is
therefore for us to choose whether we shall
be interested primarily in the great spiritual
forces and powers of life, or whether we
shall be interested solely in the material
things of life.

But there is a wonderful law which we must

not lose sight of. It is to the effect that when
we become sufficiently alive to the inner
powers and forces, to the inner springs of
life, the material things of life will not only
follow in a natural and healthy sequence,
but they will also assume their right
proportions. They will take their right
places.

It was the recognition of this great

fundamental fact of life that Jesus had in
mind when he said: “But rather seek ye the
kingdom of God; and all these things shall
be added unto you,” — meaning, as he so
distinctly stated, the kingdom of the mind
and spirit made open and translucent to the
leading of the Divine Wisdom inherent in
the human soul, when that leading is
sought and when through the right ordering
of the mind we make the conditions
whereby it may become operative in the
individual life.

The great value of God as taught by Jesus

is that God dwells in us. It is truly
Emmanuel — God with us. The law must
be observed — the conditions must be met.
“The Lord is with you while ye be with him;
and if ye will seek him, he will be found of
you.” “The spirit of the living God dwelleth
in you.” “If any of you lack wisdom, let him
ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally,
and upbraideth not; and it shall be given
him. But let him ask in faith, nothing
wavering.” That there is a Divine law
underlying prayer that helps to release the
inner springs of wisdom, which in turn leads
to power, was well known to Jesus, for his
life abundantly proved it.

His great aptitude for the things of the spirit

enabled him intuitively to realise this, to
understand it, to use it. And there was no
mystery, no secret, no subterfuge on the
part of Jesus as to the source of his power.
In clear and unmistakable words he made
it known — and why should he not? It was
the truth, the truth of this inner kingdom that
would make men free that he came to
reveal. “The words that I speak unto you I
speak not of myself: but the Father that
dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.” “My
Father worketh hitherto and I work. ... For
as the Father hath life in himself; so hath
he given to the Son to have life in himself.
... I can of mine own self do nothing.” As he
followed the conditions whereby this higher
illumination can come so must we.

The injunction that Jesus gave in regard to

prayer is unquestionably the method that
he found so effective and that he himself
used. How many times we are told that he
withdrew to the mountain for his quiet
period, for communion with the Father, that
the realisation of his oneness with God
might be preserved intact. In this continual
realisation — I and my Father are one —
lay his unusual insight and power. And his
distinct statement which he made in
speaking of his own powers — as I am ye
shall be — shows clearly the possibilities of
human unfoldment and attainment, since
he realised and lived and then revealed the
way.
Were not this Divine source of wisdom and
power the heritage of every human soul,
distinctly untrue then would be Jesus’
saying: “For everyone that asketh,
receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and
to him that knocketh, it shall be opened.”
Infinitely better is it to know that one has
this inner source of guidance and wisdom
which as he opens himself to it becomes
continually more distinct, more clear and
more unerring in its guidance, than to be
continually seeking advice from outside
sources, and being confused in regard to
the advice given. This is unquestionably
the way of the natural and the normal life,
made so simple and so plain by Jesus, and
that was foreshadowed by Isaiah when he
said: “Hast thou not known? Hast thou not
heard that the everlasting God, the Lord,
the Creator of the ends of the earth fainteth
not, neither is weary? He giveth power to
the faint and to them that have no might he
increaseth strength. Even the youths shall
faint and be weary, and the young men
shall utterly fall. But they that wait upon the
Lord shall renew their strength; they shall
mount up with wings as eagles; they shall
run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and
not faint.”

Not that problems and trials will not come.

They will come. There never has been and
there never will be a life free from them. Life
isn’t conceivable on any other terms. But
the wonderful source of consolation and
strength, the source that gives freedom
from worry and freedom from fear is the
realisation of the fact that the guiding force
and the moulding power is within us. It
becomes active and controlling in the
degree that we realise and in the degree
that we are able to open ourselves so that
the Divine intelligence and power can
speak to and can work through us.

Judicious physical exercise induces

greater bodily strength and vigour. An
active and alert mental life, in other words
mental activity, induces greater intellectual
power. And under the same general law the
same is true in regard to the development
and the use of spiritual power. It, however,
although the most important of all because
it has to do more fundamentally with the life
itself, we are most apt to neglect. The
losses, moreover, resulting from this
neglect are almost beyond calculation.

To establish one’s centre aright is to make

all of life’s activities and events and results
flow from this centre in orderly sequence. A
modern writer of great insight has said:
“The understanding that God is, and all
there is, will establish you upon a
foundation from which you can never be
moved.” To know that the power that is God
is the power that works in us is knowledge
of transcendent import.

To know that the spirit of Infinite wisdom

and power which is the creating, the
moving, and the sustaining force in all life,
thinks and acts in and through us as our
own very life, in the degree that we
consciously and deliberately desire it to
become the guiding and the animating
force in our lives, and open ourselves fully
to its leadings, and follow its leadings, is to
attain to that state of conscious oneness
with the Divine that Jesus realised, lived
and revealed, and that he taught as the
method of the natural and the normal life for
all men.

We are so occupied with the matters of the

sense-life that all unconsciously we
become dominated, ruled by the things of
the senses. Now in the real life there is the
recognition of the fact that the springs of life
are all from within, and that the inner
always leads and rules the outer. Under the
elemental law of Cause and Effect this is
always done — whether we are conscious
of it or not. But the difference lies here: The
master of life consciously and definitely
allies himself in mind and spirit with the
great central Force and rules his world from
within. The creature of circumstances,
through lack of desire or through weakness
of will, fails to do this, and, lacking guiding
and directing force, drifts and becomes
thereby the creature of circumstance.

One of deep insight has said: “That we do

not spontaneously see and know God, as
we see and know one another, and so
manifest the God-nature as we do the
sense-nature, is because that nature is yet
latent, and in a sense slumbering within us.
Yet the God-nature within us connects us
as directly and vitally with the Being and
Kingdom of God within, behind, and above
the world, as does the sense-nature with
the world external to us. Hence as the
sense-consciousness was awakened and
established by the recognition of and
communication with the outward world
through the senses, so the God-
consciousness must be awakened by the
corresponding recognition of, and
communication with the Being and
Kingdom of God through intuition — the
spiritual sense of the inner man. . . . The
true prayer — the prayer of silence — is the
only door that opens the soul to the direct
revelation of God, and brings thereby the
realisation of the God-nature in ourselves.”

As the keynote to the world of sense is

activity, so the keynote to spiritual light and
power is quiet. The individual
consciousness must be brought into
harmony with the Cosmic consciousness.
Paul speaks of the “sons of God.” And in a
single sentence he describes what he
means by the term — “For as many as are
led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons
of God.” An older prophet has said: “The
Lord in the midst of thee is mighty.” Jesus
with his deep insight perceived the identity
of his real life with the Divine life, the
indwelling Wisdom and Power, — the
“Father in me.” The whole course of his
ministry was his attempt “to show those
who listened to him how he was related to
the Father, and to teach them that they
were related to the same Father in exactly
the same way.”

There is that within man that is illumined

and energised through the touch of His
spirit. We can bring our minds into rapport,
into such harmony and connection with the
infinite Divine mind that it speaks in us,
directs us, and therefore acts through us as
our own selves. Through this connection
we become illumined by Divine wisdom
and we become energised by Divine
power. It is ours, then, to act under the
guidance of this higher wisdom and in all
forms of expression to act and to work
augmented by this higher power. The finite
spirit, with all its limitations, becomes at its
very centre in rapport with Infinite spirit, its
Source. The finite thereby becomes the
channel through which the Infinite can and
does work.

To use an apt figure, it is the moving of the

switch whereby we connect our wires as it
were with the central dynamo which is the
force that animates, that gives and sustains
life in the universe. It is making actual the
proposition that was enunciated by
Emerson when he said: “Every soul is not
only the inlet but may become the outlet of
all there is in God.” Significant also in this
connection is his statement: “The only sin
is limitation.” It is the actualising of the fact
that in Him we live and move and have our
being, with its inevitable resultant that we
become “strong in the Lord and in the
power of His might.” There is perhaps no
more valuable way of realising this end,
than to adopt the practice of taking a period
each day for being alone in the quiet, a half
hour, even a quarter hour; stilling the bodily
senses and making oneself receptive to the
higher leadings of the spirit — receptive to
the impulses of the soul. This is following
the master’s practice and example of
communion with the Father. Things in this
universe and in human life do not happen.
All is law and sequence. The elemental law
of cause and effect is universal and
unvarying. In the realm of spirit law is as
definite as in the realm of mechanics — in
the realm of all material forces.
If we would have the leading of the spirit, if
we would perceive the higher intuitions and
be led intuitively, bringing the affairs of the
daily life thereby into the Divine sequence,
we must observe the conditions whereby
these leadings can come to us, and in time
become habitual.

The law of the spirit is quiet — to be

followed by action — but quiet, the more
readily to come into a state of harmony with
the Infinite Intelligence that works through
us, and that leads us as our own
intelligence when through desire and
through will, we are able to bring our
subconscious minds into such attunement
that it can act through us, and we are able
to catch its messages and follow its
direction. But to listen and to observe the
conditions whereby we can listen is
essential.

Jesus’ own words as well as his practice

apply here. After his admonition against
public prayer, or prayer for show, or prayer
of much speaking, he said: “But thou, when
thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and
when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy
Father which is in secret; and thy Father
which seeth in secret, shall reward thee
openly.” Now there are millions of men,
women, and children in the world who have
no closets. There are great numbers of
others who have no access to them
sometimes for days, or weeks, or months
at a time. It is evident, therefore, that in the
word that has been rendered closet he
meant — enter into the quiet recesses of
your own soul that you may thus hold
communion with the Father.

Now the value of prayer is not that God will

change or order any laws or forces to suit
the numerous and necessarily the diverse
petitions of any. All things are through law,
and law is fixed and inexorable. The value
of prayer, of true prayer, is that through it
one can so harmonise his life with the
Divine order that intuitive perceptions of
truth and a greater perception and
knowledge of law becomes his possession.
As has been said by an able contemporary
thinker and writer: “We cannot form a
passably thorough notion of man without
saturating it through and through with the
idea of a cosmic inflow from outside his
world life — the inflow of God. Without a
large consciousness of the universe
beyond our knowledge, few men, if any,
have done great things.3

I shall always remember with great

pleasure and profit a call a few days ago
from Dr. Edward Emerson of Concord,
Emerson’s eldest son. Happily I asked him
in regard to his father’s methods of work —
if he had any regular methods. He replied
in substance: “It was my father’s custom to
go daily to the woods — to listen. He would
remain there an hour or more in order to get
whatever there might be for him that day.
He would then come home and write into a
little book — his ‘day-book’ — what he had
gotten. Later on when it came time to write
a book, he would transcribe from this, in
their proper sequence and with their proper
connections, these entrances of the
preceding weeks or months. The
completed book became virtually a ledger
formed or posted from his day-books.”

The prophet is he who so orders his life that

he can adequately listen to the voice, the
revelations of the over soul, and who
truthfully transcribes what he hears or
senses. He is not a follower of custom or of
tradition. He can never become and can
never be made the subservient tool of an
organisation. His aim and his mission is
rather to free men from ignorance,
superstition, credulity, from half-truths, by
leading them into a continually larger
understanding of truth, of law — and
therefore of righteousness.

It was more than a mere poetic idea that

Lowell gave utterance to when he said:

The thing we long for, that we are

For one transcendent moment.

To establish this connection, to actualise

this God-consciousness, that it may not be
for one transcendent moment, but that it
may become constant and habitual, so that
every thought arises, and so that every act
goes forth from this centre, is the greatest
good that can come into the possession of
man. There is nothing greater. It is none
other than the realisation of Jesus’
injunction — “Seek ye first the Kingdom of
God and His righteousness, and all these
things shall be added unto you.” It is then
that he said — Do not worry about your life.
Your mind and your will are under the
guidance of the Divine mind; your every act
goes out under this direction and all things
pertaining to your life will fall into their
proper places. Therefore do not worry
about your life.

When a man finds his centre, when he

becomes centred in the Infinite, then
redemption takes place. He is redeemed
from the bondage of the senses. He lives
thereafter under the guidance of the spirit,
and this is salvation. It is a new life that he
has entered into. He lives in a new world,
because his outlook is entirely new. He is
living now in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Heaven means harmony. He has brought
his own personal mind and life into
harmony with the Divine mind and life. He
becomes a co-worker with God.

It is through such men and women that

God’s plans and purposes are carried out.
They not only hear but they interpret for
others God’s voice. They are the prophets
of our time and the prophets of all time.
They are doing God’s work in the world,
and in so doing they are finding their own
supreme satisfaction and happiness. They
are not looking forward to the Eternal life.
They realise that they are now in the
Eternal life, and that there is no such thing
as eternal life if this life that we are now in
is not it. When the time comes for them to
stop their labours here, they look forward
without fear and with anticipation to the
change, the transition to the other form of
life — but not to any other life. The words
of Whitman embody a spirit of anticipation
and of adventure for them:

Joy, Shipmate, joy!

(Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry)

One life is closed, one life begun,

The long, long anchorage we leave,

The ship is clear at last, she leaps.

Joy, Shipmate, joy!

They have an abiding faith that they will

take up the other form of life exactly where
they left it off here. Being in heaven now
they will be in heaven when they awake to
the continuing beauties of the life
subsequent to their transition. Such we
might also say is the teaching of Jesus
regarding the highest there is in life here
and the best there is in the life hereafter.
Chapter 11: Some Methods Of
Expression
The life of the Spirit, or, in other words, the
true religious life, is not a life of mere
contemplation or a life of inactivity. As
Fichte, in “The Way Toward the Blessed
Life,” has said: “True religion,
notwithstanding that it raises the view of
those who are inspired by it to its own
region, nevertheless, retains their Life
firmly in the domain of action, and of right
moral action. . . . Religion is not a business
by and for itself which a man may practise
apart from his other occupations, perhaps
on certain fixed days and hours; but it is the
inmost spirit that penetrates, inspires, and
pervades all our Thought and Action, which
in other respects pursue their appointed
course without change or interruption. That
the Divine Life and Energy actually lives in
us is inseparable from Religion.”

How thoroughly this is in keeping with the

thought of the highly illumined seer,
Swedenborg, is indicated when he says:
“The Lord's Kingdom is a Kingdom of ends
and uses.” And again: “Forsaking the world
means loving God and the neighbour; and
God is loved when a man lives according
to His commandments, and the neighbour
is loved when a man performs uses.” And
still again: “To be of use means to desire
the welfare of others for the sake of the
common good; and not to be of use means
to desire the welfare of others not for the
sake of the common good but for one’s own
sake. ... In order that man may receive
heavenly life he must live in the world and
engage in its business and occupations,
and thus by a moral and civil life acquire
spiritual life. In no other way can spiritual
life be generated in man, or his spirit be
prepared for heaven.”

We hear much today both in various

writings and in public utterances of “the
spiritual” and “the spiritual life.” I am sure
that to the great majority of men and
women the term spiritual, or better, the
spiritual life, means something, but
something by no means fully tangible or
clear-cut. I shall be glad indeed if I am able
to suggest a more comprehensible concept
of it, or putting it in another form and better
perhaps, to present a more clear-cut
portraiture of the spiritual life in expression
— in action.

And first let us note that in the mind and in

the teachings of Jesus there is no such
thing as the secular life and the religious
life. His ministry pertained to every phase
of life. The truth that he taught was a truth
that was to permeate every thought and
every act of life.

We make our arbitrary divisions. We are

too apt to deny the fact that the Lord is the
Lord of the weekday, the same as He is the
Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus refused to be
bound by any such consideration. He
taught that every act that is a good act,
every act that is of service to mankind is not
only a legitimate act to be done on the
Sabbath day, but an act that should be
performed on the Sabbath day. And any act
that is not right and legitimate for the
Sabbath day is neither right nor legitimate
for the weekday. In other words, it is the
spirit of righteousness that must permeate
and must govern every act of life and every
moment of life.

In seeking to define the spiritual life, it were

better to regard the world as the expression
of the Divine mind. The spirit is the life; the
world and all things in it, the material to be
moulded, raised, and transmuted from the
lower to the higher. This is indeed the law
of evolution, that has been through all the
ages and that today is at work. It is the God-
Power that is at work and every form of
useful activity that helps on with this
process of lifting and bettering is a form of
Divine activity. If therefore we recognise
the one Divine life working in and through
all, the animating force, therefore the Life
of all, and if we are consciously helping in
this process we are spiritual men.
No man of intelligence can fail to recognise
the fact that life is more important than
things. Life is the chief thing, and material
things are the elements that minister to,
that serve the purposes of the life. Whoever
does anything in the world to preserve life,
to better its conditions, who, recognising
the Divine force at work lifting life up always
to better, finer conditions, is doing God’s
work in the world — because cooperating
with the great Cosmic world plan.

The ideal, then, is men and women of the

spirit, open and responsive always to its
guidance, recognising the Divine plan and
the Divine ideal, working cooperatively in
the world to make all conditions of life
fairer, finer, more happy. He who lives and
works not as an individual, that is not for his
good alone, but who recognises the
essential oneness of life — is carrying out
his share of the Divine plan.

A man may be unusually gifted; he may

have unusual ability in business, in
administration; he may be a giant in
finance, in administration, but if for self
alone, if lack of vision blinds him to the
great Divine plan, if he does not recognise
his relative place and value; if he gains his
purposes by selfishness, by climbing over
others, by indifference to human pain or
suffering — oblivious to human welfare —
his ways are the ways of the jungle. His
mind and his life are purely sordid, grossly
and blindly self-centred — wholly material.
He gains his object, but by Divine law not
happiness, not satisfaction, not peace. He
is outside the Kingdom of Heaven — the
kingdom of harmony. He is living and
working out of harmony with the Divine
mind that is evolving a higher order of life
in the world. He is blind too, he is working
against the Divine plan.

Now what is the Divine call? Can he be

made into a spiritual man? Yes. A different
understanding, a different motive, a
different object — then will follow a
difference in methods. Instead of self alone
he will have a sense of, he will have a call
to service. And this man, formerly a
hinderer in the Divine plan, becomes a
spiritual giant. His splendid powers and his
qualities do not need to be changed.
Merely his motives and thereby his
methods, and he is changed into a giant
engine of righteousness. He is a part of the
great world force and plan. He is doing his
part in the great world work — he is a co-
worker with God. And here lies salvation.
Saved from self and the dwarfed and
stunted condition that will follow, his
spiritual nature unfolds and envelops his
entire life. His powers and his wealth are
thereafter to bless mankind. But behold! by
another great fundamental law of life in
doing this he is blessed ten, a hundred, a
millionfold.

Material prosperity is or may become a true

gain, a veritable blessing. But it can
become a curse to the world and still more
to its possessor when made an end in itself,
and at the expense of all the higher
attributes and powers of human life.

We have reason to rejoice that a great

change of estimate has not only begun but
is now rapidly creeping over the world. He
of even a generation ago who piled and
piled, but who remained ignorant of the
more fundamental laws of life, blind to the
law of mutuality and service, would be
regarded today as a low, beastly type. I
speak advisedly. It is this obedience to the
life of the spirit that Whitman had in mind
when he said: “And whoever walks a
furlong without sympathy walks to his own
funeral drest in his shroud.” It was the full
flowering of the law of mutuality and service
that he saw when he said: “I saw a city
invincible to the attacks of the whole of the
rest of the earth. I dreamed that it was the
new City of Friends. Nothing was greater
there than the quality of robust love; it led
the rest. It was seen every hour in the
actions of the men of that city and in all their
looks and words.” It is through obedience
to this life of the spirit that order is brought
out of chaos in the life of the individual and
in the life of the community, in the business
world, the labour world, and in our great
world relations.

But in either case, we men and women of

Christendom, to be a Christian is not only
to be good, but to be good for something.
According to the teachings of the Master
true religion is not only personal salvation,
but it is giving oneself through all of one’s
best efforts to actualise the Kingdom of
Heaven here on earth. The finding of the
Kingdom is not only personal but social and
world-affirming — and in the degree that it
becomes fully and vitally personal will it
become so.

A man who is not right with his fellowmen

is not right and cannot be right with God.
This is coming to be the clear-cut
realisation of all progressive religious
thought today. Since men are free from the
trammels of an enervating dogma that
through fear made them seek, or rather that
made them contented with religion as
primarily a system of rewards and
punishments, they are now awakening to
the fact that the logical carrying out of
Jesus’ teaching of the Kingdom is the
establishing here on this earth of an order
of life and hence of a society where greater
love and cooperation and justice prevail.
Our rapidly growing present-day
conception of Christianity makes it not
world-renouncing, but world-affirming.

This modern conception of the function of a

true and vital Christianity makes it the task
of the immediate future to apply Christianity
to trade, to commerce, to labour relations,
to all social relations, to international
relations. “And, in the wider field of religious
thought,” says a writer in a great
international religious paper, “what truer
service can we render than to strip theology
of all that is unreal or needlessly
perplexing, and make it speak plainly and
humanly to people who have their duty to
do and their battle to fight?” It makes
intelligent, sympathetic, and helpful living
take the place of the tooth and the claw, the
growl and the deadly hiss of the jungle —
all right in their places, but with no place in
human living.

The growing realisation of the

interdependence of all life is giving a new
standard of action and attainment, and a
new standard of estimate. Jesus’ criterion
is coming into more universal appreciation:
He that is greatest among you shall be as
he who serves. Through this fundamental
law of life there are responsibilities that
cannot be evaded or shirked — and of him
to whom much is given much is required.

It was President Wilson who recently said:

“It is to be hoped that these obvious truths
will come to more general acceptance; that
honest business will quit thinking that it is
attacked when loaded-dice business is
attacked; that the mutuality of interest
between employer and employee will
receive ungrudging admission; and, finally,
that men of affairs will lend themselves
more patriotically to the work of making
democracy an efficient instrument for the
promotion of human welfare. It cannot be
said that they have done so in the past. . .
As a consequence, many necessary things
have been done less perfectly without their
assistance that could have been done
more perfectly with their expert aid.” He is
by no means alone in recognising this fact.
Nor is he at all blind to the great change
that is already taking place.

In a recent public address in New York, the

head of one of the largest plants in the
world, and who starting with nothing has
accumulated a fortune of many millions,
said: “The only thing I am proud of —
prouder of than that I have amassed a
great fortune — is that I established the first
manual training school in Pennsylvania.
The greatest delight of my life is to see the
advancement of the young men who have
come up about me.”

This growing sense of personal

responsibility, and still better, of personal
interest, this giving of one’s abilities and
one’s time, in addition to one’s means, is
the beginning of the fulfilment of what I
have long thought: namely, the great gain
that will accrue to numberless communities
and to the nation, when men of great
means, men of great business and
executive ability, give of their time and their
abilities for the accomplishment of those
things for the public welfare that otherwise
would remain undone, or that would remain
unduly delayed. What a gain will result also
to those who so do in the joy and
satisfaction resulting from this higher type
of accomplishment hallowed by the
undying element of human service!

You keep silent too much. “Have great

leaders, and the rest will follow,” said
Whitman. The gift of your abilities while you
live would be of priceless worth for the
establishing and the maintenance of a
fairer, a healthier, and a sweeter life in your
community, your city, your country. It were
better to do this and to be contented with a
smaller accumulation than to have it so
large or even so excessive, and when the
summons comes to leave it to two or three
or to half a dozen who cannot possibly
have good use for it all, and some of whom
perchance would be far better off without it,
or without so much. By so doing you would
be leaving something still greater to them
as well as to hundreds or thousands of
others.

Significant in this connection are these

words by a man of wealth and of great
public service:4
“On the whole, the individualistic age has
not been a success, either for the
individual, or the community in which he
has lived, or the nation. We are, beyond
question, entering on a period where the
welfare of the community takes
precedence over the interests of the
individual and where the liberty of the
individual will be more and more
circumscribed for the benefit of the
community as a whole. Man’s activities will
hereafter be required to be not only for
himself but for his fellowmen. To my mind
there is nothing in the signs of the times so
certain as this.

“The man of exceptional ability, of more

than ordinary talent, will hereafter look for
his rewards, for his honours, not in one
direction but in two — first, and foremost, in
some public work accomplished, and,
secondarily, in wealth acquired. In place of
having it said of him at his death that he left
so many hundred thousand dollars it will be
said that he rendered a certain amount of
public service, and, incidentally, left a
certain amount of money. Such a goal will
prove a far greater satisfaction to him, he
will live a more rational, worthwhile life, and
he will be doing his share to provide a
better country in which to live. We face new
conditions, and in order to survive and
succeed we shall require a different spirit of
public service.”

I am well aware of the fact that the mere

accumulation of wealth is not, except in
very rare cases, the controlling motive in
the lives of our wealthy men of affairs. It is
rather the joy and the satisfaction of
achievement. But nevertheless it is
possible, as has so often proved, to get so
much into a habit and thereby into a rut,
that one becomes a victim of habit; and the
life with all its superb possibilities of human
service, and therefore of true greatness,
becomes side-tracked and abortive.

There are so many different lines of activity

for human betterment for children, for men
and women, that those of great executive
and financial ability have wonderful
opportunities. Greatness comes always
through human service. As there is no such
thing as finding happiness by searching for
it directly, so there is no such thing as
achieving greatness by seeking it directly.
It comes not primarily through brilliant
intellect, great talents, but primarily through
the heart. It is determined by the way that
brilliant intellect, great talents are used. It is
accorded not to those who seek it directly.
By an indirect law it is accorded to those
who, forgetting self, give and thereby lose
their lives in human service.

Both poet and prophet is Edwin Markham

when he says:

We men of earth have here the stuff

Of Paradise — we have enough!

We need no other stones to build

The stairs into the Unfulfilled —

No other ivory for the doors —

No other marble for the floors —

No other cedar for the beam

And dome of man’s immortal dream.

Here on the paths of every day —

Here on the common human way,

Is all the stuff the gods would take

To build a Heaven; to mould and make

New Edens. Ours the stuff sublime

To build Eternity in time!

This putting of divinity into life and raising

thereby an otherwise sordid life up to
higher levels and thereby to greater
enjoyments, is the power that is possessed
equally by those of station and means, and
by those in the more humble or even more
lowly walks of life.

When your life is thus touched by the spirit

of God, when it is ruled by this inner
Kingdom, when your constant prayer, as
the prayer of every truly religious man or
woman will be — Lord, what wilt Thou have
me to do? My one desire is that Thy will be
my will, and therefore that Thy will be done
in me and through me — then you are living
the Divine life; you are a co-worker with
God. And whether your life according to
accepted standards be noted or humble it
makes no difference — you are fulfilling
your Divine mission. You should be, you
cannot help being fearless and happy. You
are a part of the great creative force in the
world.

You are doing a man’s or a woman’s work

in the world, and in so doing you are not
unimportant; you are essential. The joy of
true accomplishment is yours. You can look
forward always with sublime courage and
expectancy. The life of the most humble
can thus become an exalted life. Mother,
watching over, cleaning, feeding, training,
and educating your brood; seamstress,
working, with a touch of the Divine in all you
do — it must be done by someone — allow
it to be done by none better than by you.
Farmer, tilling your soil, gathering your
crops, caring for your herds; you are
helping feed the world. There is nothing
more important.

“Who digs a well, or plants a seed,

A sacred pact he keeps with sun and sod;

With these he helps refresh and feed

The world, and enters partnership with

God.”

If you do not allow yourself to become a

slave to your work, and if you cooperate
within the house and the home so that your
wife and your daughters do not become
slaves or near-slaves, what an opportunity
is yours of high thinking and noble living!
The more intelligent you become, the better
read, the greater the interest you take in
community and public affairs, the more
effectively you become what in reality and
jointly you are — the backbone of this and
of every nation. Teacher, poet, dramatist,
carpenter, ironworker, clerk, college head,
Mayor, Governor, President, Ruler — the
effectiveness of your work and the
satisfaction in your work will be determined
by the way in which you relate your thought
and your work to the Divine plan, and
coordinate your every activity in reference
to the highest welfare of the greater whole.

However dimly or clearly we may perceive

it great changes are taking place. The
simple, direct teachings of the Christ are
reaching more and more the mind, are
stirring the heart and through these are
dominating the actions of increasing
numbers of men and women. The
realisation of the mutual interdependence
of the human family, the realisation of its
common source, and that when one part of
it goes wrong all suffer thereby, the same
as when any portion of it advances all are
lifted and benefited thereby, makes us
more eager for the speedier actualising of
the Kingdom that the Master revealed and
portrayed.

It was Sir Oliver Lodge who in this

connection recently said: “Those who think
that the day of the Messiah is over are
strangely mistaken; it has hardly begun. In
individual souls Christianity has flourished
and borne fruit, but for the ills of the world
itself it is an almost untried panacea. It will
be strange if this ghastly war fosters and
simplifies and improves a knowledge of
Christ, and aids a perception of the
ineffable beauty of his life and teaching; yet
stranger things have happened, and
whatever the churches may do, I believe
that the call of Christ himself will be heard
and attended to by a larger part of humanity
in the near future, as never yet it has been
heard or attended to on earth.”

The simple message of the Christ, with its

twofold injunction of Love, is, when
sufficiently understood and sufficiently
heeded, all that we men of earth need to lift
up, to beautify, to make strong and Godlike
individual lives and thereby and of
necessity the life of the world. Jesus never
taught that God incarnated Himself in him
alone. I challenge any man living to find any
such teaching by him. He did proclaim his
own unique realisation of God. Intuitively
and vividly he perceived the Divine life, the
eternal Word, the eternal Christ,
manifesting in his clean, strong, upright
soul, so that the young Jewish rabbi and
prophet, known in all his community as
Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary and
whose brothers and sisters they knew so
well,5 became the firstborn — fully born —
of the Father.

He then pleaded with all the energy and

love and fervour of his splendid heart and
vigorous manhood that all men should
follow the Way that he revealed and realise
their Divine Sonship, that their lives might
be redeemed — redeemed from the
bondage of the bodily senses and the
bondage of merely the things of the outer
world, and saved as fit subjects of and
workers in the Father’s Kingdom.
Otherwise for millions of splendid earnest
men and women today his life-message
would have no meaning.

To make men awake to their real identity,

and therefore to their possibilities and
powers as true sons of God, the Father of
all, and therefore that all men are brothers
— for otherwise God is not Father of all —
and to live together in brotherly love and
mutual cooperation whereby the Divine will
becomes done on earth as it is in heaven
— this is his message to we men of earth.
If we believe his message and accept his
leadership, then he becomes indeed our
elder brother who leads the way, the Word
in us becomes flesh, the Christ becomes
enthroned in our lives, — and we become
co-workers with him in the Father’s
vineyard.
Chapter 12: The World War— Its
Meaning And Its Lessons For Us
Whatever differences of opinion — and
honest differences of opinion — may have
existed and may still exist in America in
regard to the great world conflict, there is a
wonderful unanimity of thought that has
crystallised itself into the concrete form —
something must he done in order that it can
never occur again. The higher intelligence
of the nation must assert itself. It must feel
and think and act in terms of
internationalism. Not that the feeling of
nationalism in any country shall, or even
can be eradicated or even abated. It must
be made, however, to coordinate itself with
the now rapidly growing sense of world-
consciousness, that the growing
intelligence of mankind, aided by some
tremendously concrete forms of recent
experience, is now recognising as a great
reality.

That there were very strong sympathies for

both the Allied Nations and for the Central
Powers in the beginning, goes without
saying, How could it be otherwise, when we
realise the diverse and complex types of
our citizenship?

One of the most distinctive, and in some

ways one of the most significant, features
of the American nation is that it is today
composed of representatives, and in some
cases, of enormous bodies of
representatives, numbering into the
millions, of practically every nation in the
world.
There are single cities where, in one case
twenty-six, in another case twenty-nine,
and in other cases a still larger number of
what are today designated as hyphenated
citizens are represented. The orderly
removal of the hyphen, and the
amalgamation of these splendid
representatives of practically all nations
into genuine American citizens, infused
with American ideals and pushed on by
true American ambitions, is one of the great
problems that the war has brought in a
most striking manner to our attention.

Not that these representatives of many

nations shall in any way lose their sense of
sympathy for the nations of their birth, in
times of either peace or of distress,
although they have found it either advisable
or greatly to their own personal advantage
and welfare to leave the lands of their birth
and to establish their homes here.

The fact that in the vast majority of cases

they find themselves better off here, and
choose to remain and assume the
responsibilities of citizenship in the
Western Republic, involves a responsibility
that some, if not indeed many, heretofore
have apparently too lightly considered.
There must be a more supreme sense of
allegiance, and a continually growing
sense of responsibility to the nation, that,
guided by their own independent judgment
and animated by their own free wills, they
have chosen as their home.

There is a difference between sympathy

and allegiance; and unless a man has
found conditions intolerable in the land of
his birth, and this is the reason for his
seeking a home in another land more to his
liking and to his advantage, we cannot
expect him to be devoid of sympathy for the
land of his birth, especially in times of
stress or of great need. We can expect him,
however, and we have a right to demand
his absolute allegiance to the land of his
adoption. And if he cannot give this, then
we should see to it that he return to his
former home. If he is capable of clear
thinking and right feeling, he also must
realise the fundamental truth of this fact.

There are public schools in America where

as many as nineteen languages are
spoken in a single room. Our public
schools, so eagerly sought by the children
of parents of foreign birth, in their intense
eagerness for an education, that is offered
freely and without cost to all, can and must
be made greater instruments in converting
what must in time become a great menace
to our institutions, and even to the very life
of the nation itself, into a real and genuine
American citizenship. Our best educators,
in addition to our clearest thinking citizens,
are realising as never before, that our
public-school system chiefly, among our
educational institutions, must be made a
great melting-pot through which this
process of amalgamation must be carried
on.

We are also realising clearly now that, as a

nation, we have been entirely too lax in
connection with our immigration privileges,
regulations and restrictions. We have been
admitting foreigners to our shores in such
enormous quantities each year that we
have not been able at all adequately to
assimilate them, nor have we used at all a
sufficiently wise discrimination in the
admission of desirables or undesirables.

We have received, or we have allowed to

be dumped upon our shores, great
numbers of the latter whom we should
know would inevitably become
dependents, as well as great numbers of
criminals. The result has been that they
have been costing certain localities millions
of dollars every year. But entirely aside
from the latter, the last two or three years
have brought home to us as never before
the fact that those who come to our shores
must come with the avowed and the settled
purpose of becoming real American
citizens, giving full and absolute allegiance
to the institutions, the laws, the government
of the land of their adoption.
If any other government is not able so to
manage as to make it more desirable for its
subjects to remain in the land of their birth,
rather than to seek homes in the land with
institutions more to their liking, or with
advantages more conducive to their
welfare, that government then should not
expect to retain, even in the slightest
degree, the allegiance of such former
subjects. A hyphenated citizenship may
become as dangerous to a republic as a
cancer is in the human body. A country with
over a hundred hyphens cannot fulfil its
highest destiny.

We, as a nation, have been rudely shaken

from our long dream of almost inevitable
national security. We have been brought
finally, and although as a nation we have
no desire for conquest or empire, and no
desire for military glory, and therefore no
need of any great army or navy for
offensive purposes, we have been brought
finally to realise that we do, nevertheless,
stand in need of a national strengthening of
our arm of defence. A land of a hundred
million people, where one could travel
many times for a six month and never see
the sign of a soldier, is brought, though
reluctantly, to face a new state of affairs;
but one, nevertheless, that must be faced
— calmly faced and wisely acted upon. And
while it is true that as a nation we have
always had the tradition of non-militarism,
it is not true that we have had the tradition
of military or of naval impotence or
weakness.

Preparedness, therefore, has assumed a

position of tremendous importance, in
individual thought, in public discussion, and
almost universally in the columns of the
public press. One of the most vital
questions among us then is, not so much
as to how we shall prepare, but how shall
we prepare adequately for defensive
purposes, in case of any emergency
arising, without being thrown too far along
the road of militarism, and without an
inordinate preparation that has been the
scourge and the bane of many old-world
countries for so many years, and that quite
as much as anything has been provocative
of the horrible conflict that has literally been
devastating so many European countries.

It is clearly apparent that the best thought

in America today calls for an adequate
preparation for purposes of defence, and
calls for a recognition of facts as they are.
It also clearly sees the danger of certain
types of mind and certain interests
combining to carry the matter much farther
than is at all called for. The question is —
How shall we then strike that happy
balance that is the secret of all successful
living in the lives of either individuals or in
the lives of nations?

All clear-seeing people realise that, as

things are in the world today, there is a
certain amount of preparedness that is
necessary for influence and for insurance.
As within the nation a police force is
necessary for the enforcement of law, for
the preservation of law and order, although
it is not at all necessary that every second
or third man be a policeman, so in the
council of nations the individual nation must
have a certain element of force that it can
fall back upon if all other available agencies
fail. In diplomacy the strong nations win
out, the weaker lose out. Military and naval
power, unless carried to a ridiculous
excess does not, therefore, lie idle, even
when not in actual use.

Our power and influence as a nation will

certainly not be in proportion to our
weakness. Although righteousness
exalteth a nation, it is nevertheless true that
righteousness alone will not protect a
nation — while other nations are fully
armed. National weakness does not make
for peace.

Righteousness, combined with a spirit of

forbearance, combined with a keen desire
to give justice as well as to demand justice,
if combined with the power to strike
powerfully and sustainedly in defence of
justice, and in defence of national integrity,
is what protects a nation, and this it is that
in the long run exalteth a nation— while
things are as they are.

While conditions have therefore brought

prominently to the forefront in America the
matter of military training and military
service — an adequate military preparation
for purposes of defence, for full and
adequate defence, the best thought of the
nation is almost a unit in the belief that, for
us as a nation, an immense standing army
is unnecessary as well as inadvisable.

No amount of military preparation that is

not combined definitely and completely
with an enhanced citizenship, and
therefore with an advance in real
democracy, is at all worthy of consideration
on the part of the American people, or
indeed on the part of the people of any
nation. Pre-eminently is this true in this day
and age.

Observing this principle we could then,

while a certain degree of universal training
under some system similar to the Swiss or
Australian system is being carried on, and
to serve our immediate needs, have an
army of even a quarter of a million men
without danger of militarism and without
heavy financial burdens, and without
subverting our American ideas — providing
it is an industrial arm. There are great
engineering projects that could be carried
on, thereby developing many of our now
latent resources; there is an immense
amount of road-building that could be
projected in many parts of, if not throughout
the entire country; there are great irrigation
projects that could be carried on in the far
West and Southwest, reclaiming millions
upon millions of acres of what are now
unproductive desert lands; all these could
be carried on and made even to pay,
keeping busy a large number of men for
half a dozen years to come.

This army of this number of men could be

recruited, trained to an adequate degree of
military service, and at the same time could
be engaged in profitable employment on
these much-needed works. They could
then be paid an adequate wage, ample to
support a family, or ample to lay up savings
if without family. Such men leaving the
army service, would then have a degree of
training and skill whereby they would be
able to get positions or employment, all
more remunerative than the bulk of them,
perhaps, would ever be able to get without
such training and experience.

An army of this number of trained men,

somewhat equally divided between the
Atlantic and the Pacific seaboards, the bulk
of them engaged in regular constructive
work, work that needs to be done and that,
therefore, could he profitably done, and
ready to be called into service at a
moment’s notice, would constitute a
tremendous insurance against any
aggression from without, and would also
give a tremendous sense of security for half
a dozen years at least. This number could
then be reduced, for by that time several
million young men from eighteen years up
would be partially trained and in first-class
physical shape to be summoned to service
should the emergency arise.
In addition to the vast amount of good
roads building, whose cost could be borne
in equal proportions by nation, state and
county — a most important factor in
connection with military necessity as well
as a great economic factor in the
successful development and advancement
of any community — the millions of acres
of now arid lands in the West, awaiting only
water to make them among the most
valuable and productive in all the world,
could be used as a great solution of our
immigration problem.

Up to the year when the war began, there

came to our shores upwards of one million
immigrants every twelve months, seeking
work, and most of them homes in this
country. The great bulk of them got no
farther than our cities, increasing
congestion, already in many cases acute,
and many of them becoming in time, from
one cause or another, dependents, the
annual cost of their maintenance
aggregating many millions every year.

With these vast acres ready for them large

numbers could, under a wise system of
distribution, be sent on to the great West
and Southwest, and more easily and
directly now since the Panama Canal is
open for navigation. Allotments of these
lands could be assigned them that they
could in time become owners of, through a
wisely established system of payments.
Many of them would thereby be living lives
similar to those they lived in their own
countries, and for which their training and
experience there have abundantly fitted
them. They would thus become a far more
valuable type of citizens — landowners —
than they could ever possibly become
otherwise, and especially through our
present unorganised hit-or-miss system.
They would in time also add annually
hundreds of millions of productive work to
the wealth of the country.

The very wise system that was inaugurated

some time ago in connection with the Coast
Defence arm of our army is, under the wise
direction of our present Secretary of War,
to be extended to all branches of the
service. For some time in the Coast Artillery
Service the enlisted man under competent
instruction has had the privilege of
becoming a skilled machinist or a skilled
electrician. Now the system is to be
extended through all branches of the
military service, and many additional trades
are to be added to the curricula of the trade
schools of the army. The young man can,
therefore, make his own selection and
become a trained artisan at the same time
that he serves his time in the army, with all
expenses for such training, as well as
maintenance, borne by the Government.
He can thereby leave the service fully
equipped for profitable employment.

This will have the tendency of calling a

better class of young men into the service;
it will also do away with the well-founded
criticism that army life and its idleness, or
partly-enforced idleness, unfits a man for
useful industrial service after he quits the
army. If this same system is extended
through the navy, as it can be, both army
and navy service will meet the American
requirement — that neither military nor
naval service take great numbers of men
from productive employment, to be in turn
supported by other workers. Instead of so
much dead timber, they are all the time
producing while in active service, and are
being trained to be highly efficient as
producers, when they leave the service.

Under this system the Federal Government

can build its own ordnance works and its
own munition factories and become its own
maker of whatever may be required in all
lines of output. We will then be able to
escape the perverse influence of gain on
the part of large munition industries, and
the danger that comes from that portion of
a military party whose motives are actuated
by personal gain.

If the occasion arises, or if we permit the

occasion to arise, Kruppism in America will
become as dangerous and as sinister in its
influences and its proportions, as it became
in Germany.

Another great service that the war has

done us, is by way of bringing home to us
the lesson that has been so prominently
brought to the front in connection with the
other nations at war, namely, the necessity
of the speedy and thorough mobilisation of
all lines of industries and business; for the
thoroughness and the efficiency with which
this can be done may mean success that
otherwise would result in failure and
disaster. We are now awake to the
tremendous importance of this.

It is at last becoming clearly understood

among the peoples and the nations of the
world that as a nation, we have no desire
for conquest, for territory, for empire — we
have no purposes of aggression; we have
quite enough to do to develop our
resources and our as yet great
undeveloped areas.

A few months before the war broke, I had

conversations with the heads or with the
representatives of leading publishing
houses in several European countries. It
was at a time when our Mexican situation
was beginning to be very acute. I
remember at that time especially, the
conversation with the head of one of the
largest publishing houses in Italy, in Milan.
I could see plainly his scepticism when, in
reply to his questions, I endeavoured to
persuade him that as a nation we had no
motives of conquest or of aggression in
Mexico, that we were interested solely in
the restoration of a representative and
stable government there. And since that
time, I am glad to say that our acts as a
nation have all been along the line of
persuading him, and also many other like-
minded ones in many countries abroad, of
the truth of this assertion. By this general
course we have been gaining the
confidence and have been cementing the
friendship of practically every South
American republic, our immediate
neighbours on the southern continent. This
has been a source of increasing economic
power with us, and an element of greatly
added strength, and also a tremendous
energy working all the time for the
preservation of peace.

One can say most confidently, even though

recognising our many grave faults as a
nation, that our course along this line has
been such, especially of late years, as to
inspire confidence on the part of all the fair-
minded nations of the world.

Our theory of the state, the theory of

democracy, is not that the state is above
all, and that the individual and his welfare
are as nothing when compared to it, but
rather that the state is the agency through
which the highest welfare of all its subjects
is to be evolved, expressed, maintained.
No other theory to my mind, is at all
compatible with the intelligence of any free-
thinking people.

Otherwise, there is always the danger and

also the likelihood, while human nature is
as it is, for some ruler, some clique, or
factions so to concentrate power into their
own hands, that for their own ambitions, for
aggrandisement, or for false or short-
sighted and half-baked ideas of additions to
their country, it is dragged into periodic
wars with other nations.

Nor do we share in the belief that the state

is above morality, but rather that identically
the same moral ideals, precepts and
obligations that bind individuals must be
held sacred by the state, otherwise it
becomes a pirate among nations, and it will
inevitably in time be hunted down and
destroyed as such, however great its
apparent power. Nor do we as a nation
share in the belief that war is necessary
and indeed good for a nation, to inspire and
to preserve its manly qualities, its virility,
and therefore its power. Were this the only
way that this could be brought about, it
might be well and good; but the price to be
paid is a price that is too enormous and too
frightful, and the results are too uncertain.
We believe that these same ideals can be
inculcated, that these same energies can
be used along useful, conserving,
constructive lines, rather than along lines of
destruction.

A nation may have the most colossal and

perfect military system in the world, and still
may suffer defeat in any given while,
because of those unseen things that
pertain to the soul of another people,
whereby powers and forces are
engendered and materialised that make
defeat for them impossible; and in the
matter of big guns, it is well always to
remember that no nation can build them so
great that another nation may not build
them still greater. National safety does not
necessarily lie in that direction. Nor, on the
other hand, along the lines of extreme!
pacificism — surely not as long as things
are as they are. The argument of the lamb
has small deterrent effect upon the wolf —
as long as the wolf is a wolf. And
sometimes wolves hunt in packs. The most
preeminent lesson of the great war for us
as a nation should be this — there should
be constantly a degree of preparedness
sufficient to hold until all the others, the
various portions of the nation, thoroughly
coordinated and ready, can be summoned
into action. Thus are we prepared, thus are
we safe, and there is no danger or fear of
militarism.

In a democracy it should, without question,

be a fundamental fact that hand in hand
with equal rights there should go a sense
of equal duty. A call for defence should
have a universal response. So it is merely
good common sense, good judgment, if
you please, for all the young men of the
nation to have a training sufficient to enable
them to respond effectively if the nation’s
safety calls them to its defence. It is no
crime, however we may deprecate war, to
be thus prepared.

For young men — and we must always

remember that it is the young men who are
called for this purpose — for young men to
be called to the colours by the tens or the
hundreds of thousands, unskilled and
untrained, to be shot down, decimated by
the thoroughly trained and skilled troops of
another nation, or a combination of other
nations, is indeed the crime. Never,
moreover, was folly so great as that shown
by him or by her who will not see. And to
look at the matter without prejudice, we will
realise that this is merely policing what we
have. It is meeting force with adequate
force, if it becomes necessary, so to meet
it.

This is necessary until such time as we

have in operation among nations a
thoroughly established machinery whereby
force will give place to reason, whereby
common sense will be used in adjusting all
differences between nations, as it is now
used in adjusting differences between
individuals.

Our period of isolation is over. We have

become a world-nation. Equality of rights
presupposes equality of duty. In our very
souls we loathe militarism. Conquest and
aggression are foreign to our spirit, and
foreign to our thoughts and ambitions. But
weakness will by no means assure us
immunity from aggression from without.
Universal military training up to a
reasonable point, and the joint sense of
responsibility of every man and every
woman in the nation, and the right of the
national government to expect and to
demand that every man and woman stand
ready to respond to the call to service,
whatever form it may take — this is our
armour.

All intelligent people know that the national

government has always had the power to
draft every male citizen fit for service into
military service. It is not therefore a
question of universal military service. The
real and only question is whether these or
great numbers of these go out illy prepared
and equipped as sheep to the shambles
perchance, or whether they go out trained
and equipped to do a man’s work — more
adequately prepared to protect themselves
as well as the integrity of the nation. It is not
to be done for the love or the purpose of
militarism; but recognising the fact that
militarism still persists, that with us it may
not be triumphant should we at any time be
forced to face it. There are certain facts that
only to our peril as well as our moral
degradation, we can be blind to. Said a
noted historian but a few days ago:

“I loathe war and militarism. I have fought

them for twenty years. But I am a historian,
and I know that bullies thrive best in an
atmosphere of meekness. As long as this
military system lasts you must discourage
the mailed fist by showing that you will
meet it with something harder than a
boxing glove. We do not think it good to
admit into the code of the twentieth century
that a great national bully may still with
impunity squeeze the blood out of its small
neighbours and seize their goods.”

We need not fear militarism arising in

America as long as the fundamental
principles of democracy are preserved and
continually extended, which can be done
only through the feeling of the individual
responsibility of every man and every
woman to take a keen and constant interest
in the matters of their own government —
community, state, national, and now
international. We must realise and ever
more fully realise that in a government such
as ours, the people are the government,
and that when in it anything goes wrong, or
wrongs and injustices are allowed to grow
and hold sway, we are to blame.

Universal military training has not

militarised Switzerland nor has it Australia.
It is rather the very essence of democracy
and the very antithesis of militarism.

“Let each son of Freedom bear

His portion of the burden. Should not each

one do his share?

To sacrifice the splendid few —

The strong of heart, the brave, the true.

Who live — or die — as heroes do,

While cowards profit— is not fair!”

Many still recall that not a few well-meaning

people at the close of the Civil War
proclaimed that, with upwards of two million
trained men behind him, General Grant
would become a military dictator, and that
this would be followed by the
disappearance of democracy in the nation.
But the mind, the temper, the traditions of
our people are all a guarantee against
militarism. The gospel, the hallucination of
the shining armour, the will to power, has
no attraction for us. We loathe it; nor do we
fear its undermining and crushing our own
liberties internally. Nevertheless, it is true
that vigilance is always and always will be
the price of liberty. There must be a
constant education towards citizenship.
There must be an alert democracy, so that
any land and sea force is always the
servant of the spirit; for only otherwise it
can become its master — but otherwise it
will become its master.
Chapter 13: Our Sole Agency Of
International Peace, And International
Concord
The consensus of intelligent thought
throughout the world is to the effect that just
as we have established an orderly method
for the settlement of disputes between
individuals or groups of individuals in any
particular nation, we must now move
forward and establish such methods for the
settlement of disputes among nations.
There is no civilised country in the world
that any longer permits the individual to
take the law into his own hands.

The intelligent thought of the world now

demands the definite establishment of a
World Federation for the enforcement of
peace among nations. It demands likewise
the definite establishment of a permanent
World Court, backed by adequate force for
the arbitrament of all disputes among
nations — unable to be adjusted by the
nations themselves in friendly conference.
We have now reached the stage in world
development and in world intercourse
where peace must be internationalised.
Our present chaotic condition, which exists
simply because we haven’t taken time as
yet to establish a method, must be made to
give place to an intelligently devised
system of law and order. Anything short of
this means a periodic destruction of the
finest fruits of civilisation. It means also the
periodic destruction of the finest young
manhood of the world. This means, in turn,
the speedy degeneration of the human
race. The deification of force, augmented
by all the products and engines of modern
science, is simply the way of sublimated
savagery.

The world is in need of a new dispensation.

Recent events show indisputably that we
have reached the parting of the ways, the
family of nations must now push on into the
new day or the world will plunge on into a
darker night. There is no other course in
sight. I know of no finer words penned in
any language — this time it was in French
— to express an unvarying truth than these
words by Victor Hugo: “There is one thing
that is stronger than armies, and that is an
idea whose time has come”

Never before, after viewing the great havoc

wrought, the enormous debts that will have
to be paid for between fifty and a hundred
years to come, the tremendous disruptions
and losses in trade, the misery and
degradation stalking broadcast over every
land engaged in the war — scarcely a
family untouched — never before have
nations been in the state of mind to
consider and to long to act upon some
sensible and comprehensive method of
international concord and adjustments. If
this succeeds, the world, including
ourselves, is the gainer. If this does not
succeed, though the chances are
overwhelmingly in its favour, then we can
proclaim to the assembled nations that as
long as a state of outlawry exists among
nations, that then no longer by chance but
by design, we as a nation will be in a state
of preparedness broad and comprehensive
enough to defend ourselves against the
violation of any of the rights of a sovereign
nation. It is only in this way that we can
show a due appreciation of the struggles
and the sacrifices of those who gave us our
national existence; it is only in this way that
we can retain our self-respect, that we can
command the respect of other nations
while things are as they are; that we can
hope to retain any degree of influence and
authority for the diplomatic arm of our
Government in the Council of Nations.

Every neutral nation has suffered

tremendously by the war. Every neutral
nation will suffer until a new world-order
among nations is projected and perfected.

We owe a tremendous duty to the world in

connection with this great world crisis and
upheaval. Diligently should our best men
and women, those of insight and greatest
influence, and with the expenditure of both
time and means, seek to further the
practical working out of a World Federation
and a permanent World Court. Public
opinion should be thus aroused and
solidified so that the world knows that we
stand as a united nation back of the idea
and the plan.

The divine right of kings has gone. It holds

no more. We hear now and then, it is true,
some silly statement in regard to it, but little
attention is paid to it. The divine right of
priests has gone except in the minds of the
few remaining ignorant and herdable ones.
The divine right of dynasties — or rather of
dynasties to persist — seems to die a little
harder, but it is well on the way. We are
now realising that the only divine right is the
right of the people — and all the people.

Never again should it be possible for one

man, or for one little group of men so to
lead, or so to mislead a nation as to plunge
it into war. The growth of democracy
compelling the greater participation of all
the people in government must prohibit
this. So likewise the close relationship of
the entire world now must make it forever
impossible for a single nation or a group of
nations for any cause to plunge a whole
world or any part of it into war. These are
sound and clear-visioned words recently
given utterance to by James Bryce:
“However much we condemn reckless
leaders and the ruthless caste that live for
war, the real source of the mischief is the
popular sentiment behind them. The lesson
to be learned is that doctrines and deep-
rooted passions, whence these evils
spring, can only be removed by the slow
and steady working of spiritual forces.
What most is needed is the elimination of
those feelings the teachings of which breed
jealousy and hatred and prompt men to
defiance and aggression.”

Humanity and civilisation is not headed

towards Ab the caveman, whatever
appearances, in the minds of many, may
indicate at the present time. Humanity will
arise and will reconstruct itself. Great
lessons will be learned. Good will result.
But what a terrific price to pay! What a
terrific price to pay to learn the lesson that
“moral forces are the only invincible forces
in the universe”! It has been slow, but
steadily the world is advancing to that stage
when the individual or the nation that does
not know that the law of mutuality, of
cooperation, and still more the law of
sympathy and good will, is the supreme law
in real civilisation, real advancement, and
real gain — that does not know that its own
welfare is always bound up with the welfare
of the greater whole — is still in the brute
stage of life and the bestial propensities are
still its guiding forces.

Prejudice, suspicion, hatred, national big-

headedness, must give way to respect,
sympathy, the desire for mutual
understanding and cooperation. The higher
attributes must and will assert themselves.
The former are the ways of periodic if not
continuous destruction — the latter are the
ways of the higher spiritual forces that must
prevail. Significant are these words of one
of our younger but clear-visioned American
poets, Winter Bynner:

Whether the time be slow or fast,

Enemies, hand in hand.

Must come together at the last

And understand.

No matter how the die is cast.

Or who may seem to win —

We know that we must love at last —

Why not begin?

The teaching of hatred to children, the

fostering of hatred in adults, can result only
in harm to the people and the nation where
it is fostered. The dragon’s tooth will leave
its marks upon the entire nation and the fair
life of all the people will suffer by it. The
holding in contempt of other people makes
it sometimes necessary that one’s own
head be battered against the wall that he
may be sufficiently aroused to recognise
and to appreciate their sterling and
enduring qualities.

The use of a club is more spectacular for

some at least than the use of intellectual
and moral forces. The rattling of the
machine-gun produces more commotion
than the quieter ways of peace. All of the
powerful forces in nature, those of growth,
germination, and conservation, the same
as in human life are quiet forces. So in the
preservation of peace. It consists rather in
a high constructive policy. It requires
always clear vision, a constantly
progressive and cooperative method of life
and action; frank and open dealing and a
resolute purpose. It is won and maintained
by nothing so much in the long run as when
it makes the Golden Rule its law of
conduct. Slowly we are realising that great
armaments — militarism — do not insure
peace. They may lead away from it — they
are very apt to lead away from it

Peace is related rather to the great moral

laws of conduct. It has to do with straight,
clean, open dealing. It is fostered by
sympathy, forbearance. This does not
mean that it pertains to weakness. On the
contrary it is determined by resolute but
high purpose, the actual and active desire
of a nation to live on terms of peace with all
other nations; and the world’s recognition
of this fact is a most powerful factor in
inducing and in actualising such living.

Our own achievement of upwards of a

hundred years in living in peaceable,
sympathetic and mutually beneficial
relations with Canada; Canada’s
achievement in so living with us, should be
a distinct and clear-cut answer to the
argument that nations need to fortify their
boundaries one against another. This is
true only where suspicion, mistrust, fear,
secret diplomacy, and secret alliances hold
instead of the great and eternally
constructive forces — sympathy, good will,
mutual understanding, induced and
conserved by an International Joint
Commission of able men whose business
it is to investigate, to determine, and to
adjust any differences that through the
years may arise. Here we have a boundary
line of upwards of three thousand miles and
not a fort; vast areas of inland seas and not
a war vessel; and for upwards of a hundred
years not a difference that the High Joint
Commission has not been able to settle
amicably and to the mutual advantage of
both countries.

I know that in connection with this we have

an advantage over the old-world nations
because we are free from age-long
prejudices, hatreds, and past scores. But if
this great conflict does not lead along the
lines of the constructive forces and the
working out of a new world method, then
the future of Europe and of the world is dark
indeed. Surely it will lead to a new order —
it is almost inconceivable that it will not.

The Golden Rule is a wonderful developer

in human life, a wonderful harmoniser in
community life — with great profit it could
be extended as the law of conduct in
international relations. It must be so
extended. Its very foundation is sympathy,
good will, mutuality, love.
The very essence of Jesus’ entire
revelation and teaching was love. It was not
the teaching of weakness or supineness in
the face of wrong, however. There was no
failure on his part to smite wrong when he
saw it — wrong taking the form of injustice
or oppression. He had, as we have seen,
infinite sympathy for and forbearance with
the weak, the sinful; but he had always a
righteous indignation and a scathing
denunciation for oppression — for that
spirit of hell that prompts men or
organisations to seek, to study, to dominate
the minds and thereby the lives of others. It
was, moreover, that he would not keep
silent regarding the deadly ecclesiasticism
that bore so heavily upon his people and
that had well-nigh crushed all their religious
life whence are the very springs of life, that
he aroused the deadly antagonism of the
ruling hierarchy. And as he, witnessing for
truth and freedom, steadfastly and defiantly
opposed oppression, so those who catch
his spirit today will do as he did and will
realise as duty — “While wrong is wrong let
no man prate of peace!”

Peace? Peace? Peace?

While wrong is wrong let no man prate of

peace!

He did not prate, the Master. Nay, he

smote!

Hate wrong! Slay wrong! Else mercy,

justice, truth,

Freedom and faith, shall die for

humankind.6
Nor did the code and teachings of Jesus
prevent him driving the money-changers
from out the temple court. It was not for the
purpose of doing them harm. It was rather
to do them good by driving home to them in
some tangible and concrete form, through
the skin and flesh of their bodies, what the
thick skins of their moral natures were
unable to comprehend. The resistance of
wrongdoing is not opposed to the law of
love. As in community life there is the
occasional bully who has sometimes to be
knocked down in order that he may have a
due appreciation of individual rights and
community amenities, so among nations a
similar lesson is sometimes necessary in
order that it or its leaders may learn that
there are certain things that do not pay,
and, moreover, will not be allowed by the
community of nations.

Making might alone the basis of national

policy and action, or making it the basis of
settlement in international settlements, but
arouses and intensifies hatred and the
spirit of revenge. So in connection with this
great world crisis — after it all then comes
the great problem of reorganisation and
rehabilitation, and unless there comes
about an international concord strong and
definite enough to prevent a recurrence of
what has been, it would almost seem that
restoration were futile; for things will be
restored only in time to be destroyed again.

No amount of armament we know now will

prevent war. It can be prevented only by a
definite concord of the nations brought
finally to realise the futility of war. To deny
the possibility of a World League and a
World Court is to deny the ability of men to
govern themselves. The history of the
American Republic in its demonstration of
the power and the genius of federation
should disprove the truth of this. Here we
have a nation composed of forty-eight
sovereign states and with the most
heterogeneous accumulation of people
that ever came together in one country, let
alone one nation, and great numbers of
them from those nations that for upwards
of a thousand years have been periodically
springing at one another’s throats.
Enlightened self-government has done it.
The real spirit and temper of democracy
has done it. But it must be the preservation
of the real spirit of democracy and constant
vigilance that must preserve it.
Prejudice, suspicion, hatred on the part of
individuals or on the part of the people of
one nation against the people of another
nation, have never yet advanced the
welfare of any individual or any nation and
never can. The world war is but the direct
result of the type of peace that preceded it.
The militarist argument reduced to its
lowest terms amounts merely to this: “For
two nations to keep peace each must be
stronger than the other.”

Representative men of other countries do

not resent our part in pressing this matter
and in taking the leadership in it. But even
if they did, they would have no just right to.
There is, however, a very general feeling
that the American Republic, as the world’s
greatest example of successful federation,
should take the lead in the World
Federation.

This is now going to be greatly fostered by

virtue of one great good that the world war
will eventually have accomplished — the
doom and the end of autocracy. Dynasties
and privileged orders that have lived and
lived alone on militarism, will have been*
foreclosed on. The people in control, in an
increasingly intelligent control of their own
lives and their own governments, will be
governed by a higher degree of self-
enlightenment and mutual self-interest
than under the domination or even the
leadership of any type of hereditary ruling
class or war-lord. In some countries
autocracy in religion, through the free
mingling and discussions of men of various
nationalities and religious persuasions, will
be again lessened, whereby the direct love
and power of God in the hearts of men, as
Jesus taught, will have a fuller sway and a
more holy and a diviner moulding power in
their lives.

It was during those long, weary years

coupled with the horrible crimes of the
Thirty Years’ War that the science of
International Law began to take form, the
result of that notable work, “De Jure Belli ac
Pads,” by Grotius. It is ours to see that out
of this more intense and thereby even more
horrible conflict a new epoch in human and
international relations be born.

As the higher powers of mind and spirit are

realised and used, great primal instincts
impelling men to expression and action that
find their outlet many times in war, will be
transmuted and turned from destruction
into powerful engines of construction.
When a moral equivalent for war of
sufficient impelling power is placed before
men, those same virile qualities and
powers that are now marshalled so easily
for purposes of fighting, will, under the
guidance and in the service of the spirit, be
used for the conserving of human life, and
for the advancement and the increase of
everything that administers to life, that
makes it more abundant, more mutual, and
more happy. And God knows that the call
for such service is very great.

And even now comes the significant word

that the long, the too long awaited world’s
Bill of Rights has taken form. The
intelligence and the will of righteous men,
duly appointed as the representatives of
fourteen sovereign nations, has asserted
itself, and the beginning has been made,
without which there can be neither growth
nor advancement. The Constitution of the
World League has taken form. It is not a
perfect instrument; but it will grow into as
perfect an instrument as need be for its
purpose. Changes and additions to it will be
made as times and conditions indicate.
Partisanship even with us may seek to
defeat it. There is no question, however,
but that the sober sense of the American
people is behind it.

One of the most fundamental results, we

might say purposes of the great world war,
was to end war. It means now that the
world’s unity and mutuality and its
community of interests must be realised
and that we build accordingly. It means that
the world’s peace must be fostered and
preserved by the use of brains and guided
by the heart; or that every brute force made
ghastly and deadly to the nth degree that
modern science can devise, be periodically
called in to settle the disputes or curb the
ambitions that will disrupt the peace of the
world.

The common people the world over are

desiring as near as can be arrived at, some
surety as to the preservation of the world’s
peace; and they will brook no interference
with a plan that seems the most feasible
way to that end. The whole world is in that
temper that gives significance to the words
of President Wilson when a day or two ago
he said: “Any man who resists the present
tides that run in the world will find himself
thrown upon a shore so high and barren
that it will seem as if he had been
separated from his humankind forever.”
Unless, he might have added — he has
and can demonstrate a better plan. The two
chief arguments against it, that it will take
away from our individual rights and that it
will lead us into entangling alliances, no
longer hold — for we are entangled
already. We are a part of the great world
force and it were futile longer to seek to
escape our duties as such. They are as
essential as “our rights.”

It is with us now as a nation as it was with

that immortal group that gathered to sign
our Declaration of Independence, to whom
Franklin said: “We must all hang together,
or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

It is well for Americans to recall that the first

League of Nations was when thirteen
distinct nationalities one day awoke to the
fact that it were better to forget their
differences and to a great extent their
boundaries, and come together in a
common union. They had their thirteen
distinct armies to keep up, in order to
defend themselves each against the other
or against any combination of the others, to
say nothing of any outside power that might
move against them. Jealousies arose and
misunderstandings were frequent. So
zealous was each of its own rights that
when the Constitutional Convention had
completed its work, and the Constitution
was ready for adoption, there were those
who actually left the hall rather than sign it.
They were good men but they were looking
at stern facts and they wanted no idealism
in theirs. Good men, some animated by the
partisan spirit, it is true, earnest in their
beliefs — but unequipped with the long
vision. Their names are now recalled only
through the search of the antiquarian.

Infinitely better it has been found for the

thirteen and eventually the forty-eight to
stand together than to stand separately.
The thirteen separate states were farther
separated so far as means of
communication and actual knowledge of
one another were concerned, than are the
nations of the world today.

It took men of great insight as well as vision

to formulate our own Constitution which
made thirteen distinct and sovereign states
the United States of America. The
formulation of the Constitution of the World
League has required such men. As a nation
we may be proud that two representative
Americans have had so large a share in its
accomplishment — President Wilson, good
Democrat, and Ex-President Taft, good
Republican.

The greatest international and therefore

world document ever produced has been
forged — it awaits the coming days, years,
and even generations for its completion.
And we accord great honour also to those
statesmen of other nations who have
combined keen insight born of experience,
with a lofty idealism; for out of these in any
realm of human activities and relations,
whatever eventually becomes the practical,
is born.
Chapter 14: The World’s Balance-Wheel
It was Lincoln who gave us a wonderful
summary when he said: “After all the one
meaning of life is to be kind.”

Love, sympathy, fellowship is the very

foundation of all civilised, happy, ideal life.
It is the very balance-wheel of life itself. It
gives that genuineness and simplicity in
voice, in look, in spirit that is so instinctively
felt by all, and to which all so universally
respond. It is like the fragrance of the flower
— the emanation of its soul.

Interesting and containing a most vital truth

is this little memoir by Christine Rossetti:
“One whom I knew intimately, and whose
memory I revere, once in my hearing
remarked that, ‘unless we love people, we
cannot understand them.’ This was a new
light to me.” It contains indeed a profound
truth.

Love, sympathy, fellowship, is what makes

human life truly human. Cooperation,
mutual service, is its fruitage. A clear-cut
realisation of this and a resolute acting
upon it would remove much of the
cloudiness and the barrenness from many
a life; and its mutual recognition — and
action based upon it —would bring order
and sweetness and mutual gain in vast
numbers of instances in family, in business,
in community life. It would solve many of
the knotty problems in all lines of human
relations and human endeavour, whose
solution heretofore has seemed well-nigh
impossible. It is the telling oil that will start
to run smoothly and effectively many an
otherwise clogged and grating system of
human machinery.

When men on both sides are long-headed

enough, are sensible enough to see its
practical element and make it the
fundamental basis of all relationships, of all
negotiations, and all following activities in
the relations between capital and labor,
employer and employee, literally a new era
in the industrial world will spring into being.
Both sides will be the gainer — the
dividends flowing to each will be even
surprising.

There is really no labour problem outside of

sympathy, mutuality, goodwill, cooperation,
brotherhood.

Injustice always has been and always will

be the cause of all labour troubles. But we
must not forget that it is sometimes on one
side and sometimes on the other.
Misunderstanding is not infrequently its
accompaniment. Imagination, sympathy,
mutuality, cooperation, brotherhood are the
hand-maidens of justice. No man is
intelligent enough, is big enough to be the
representative or the manager of capital,
who is not intelligent enough to realise this.
No man is fit to be the representative of or
fit to have anything to do with the councils
of labour who has not brains, intelligence
enough to realise this. These qualities are
not synonyms of or in any way related to
sentimentality or any weak-kneed ethics.
They underlie the soundest business
sense. In this day and age they are
synonyms of the word practical. There was
a time and it was not so many years ago,
when heads and executives of large
enterprises did not realise this as fully as
they realise it today. A great change has
already taken place. A new era has already
begun, and the greater the ability and the
genius the more eager is its possessor to
make these his guiding principles, and to
hasten the time when they will be
universally recognised and built upon. The
same is true of the more intelligent in the
rank and file of labour, as also of the more
intelligent and those who are bringing the
best results as leaders of labour. There is
no intelligent man or woman today who
does not believe in organised labour. There
is no intelligent employer who does not
believe in it and who does not welcome it.

The bane of organised labour in the past

has too often been the unscrupulous, the
self-seeking, or the bull-headed labour
leader. Organised labour must be
constantly diligent to purge itself of these its
worst enemies. Labour is entitled to the
very highest wage, or to the best returns in
cooperative management that it can get,
and that are consistent with sound
business management, as also to the best
labour conditions that a sympathetic and
wise management can bring about. It must
not, however, be unreasonable in its
demands, neither bull-headed, nor seek to
travel too fast — otherwise it may lose
more than it will gain.

It must not allow itself to act as a shield for

the ineffective worker, or the one without a
sense of mutuality, whose aim is to get all
he can get without any thought as to what
he gives in return, or even with the
deliberate purpose of giving the least that
he can give and get away with it. Where
there is a good and a full return, there
should be not only the desire but an
eagerness to give a full and honest service.
Less than this is indicative of a lack of
honest and staunch manhood or
womanhood.

It is incumbent upon organised labour also

to remember that it represents but eight
percent of the actual working people of this
nation. Whether one works with his brains,
or his hands, or both, is immaterial. Nor
does organised labour represent the great
farming interests of the country — even
more fundamentally the backbone of the
nation.

The desirable citizen of any nation is he or

she who does not seek to prosper at the
expense of his fellows, who does not seek
the advancement of his group to the
detriment of all other groups — who
realises that none are independent, that all
are interdependent.

He who is a teacher or a preacher of class

consciousness, is either consciously or
unconsciously — generally consciously
and intentionally — a preacher of class-
hatred. There is no more undesirable
citizen in any nation than he. “Do you know
why money is so scarce, brothers?” the
soap box orator demanded, and a fair-
sized section of the backbone of the nation
waited in leisurely patience for the answer.
A tired-looking woman had paused for a
moment on the edge of the crowd. She
spoke shortly. “It’s because so many of you
men spend your time telling each other
why, ’stead of hustling to see that it ain't!”
He is a fair representative of the class-
consciousness, class-hatred type. Again
he is represented by the theorist
constitutionally and chronically too lazy to
do honest and constructive work either
physically or mentally. Again by the one
who has the big-head affliction. Or again by
the one afflicted with a species of insanity
or criminality manifesting of late under the
name of Bolshevism — a self-seeking
tyranny infinitely worse than Czarism itself.

Its representatives have proved

themselves moral perverts, determined to
carry out their theories and gain their own
ends by treachery, theft, coercion, murder,
and every foul method that will aid them in
reducing order to chaos — through the
slogan of rule or ruin. Through brigandage,
coercion, murder, it gets the funds to send
its agents into those countries whose
governments are fully in the hands of the
people, and where if at any time injustice
prevails it is solely the fault of the people in
not using in an intelligent and determined
manner the possessions they already
have. Or putting it in another way, on
account of shirking the duties it is morally
incumbent upon them as citizens of free
governments to perform.

In America, whose institutions have been

built and maintained solely by the people,
our duty is plain, for orderly procedure has
been and ever must be our watch-word.
Vigilance is moreover nowhere required
more than in representative government.
Whenever the red hand of anarchy,
Bolshevism, terrorism raises itself it should
be struck so instantly and so powerfully that
it has not only no time to gain adherents,
but has no time to make its escape. It
should be the Federal prison for any
American who allows himself to become so
misguided as to seek to substitute terrorism
and destruction for our orderly and lawful
methods of procedure, or quick deportation
for any foreigner who seeks our shores to
carry out these purposes, or comes as an
agent for those who would do the same.

Organised labour has never occupied so

high a position as it occupies today. That
the rank and file will for an instant have
commerce with these agencies, whatever
any designing leader here and there may
seek to do, is inconceivable. That its
organisations will be sought to be used by
them is just as probable. Its duty as to
vigilance and determination is pronounced.
And unless vigilant and determined the set-
backs it may get and the losses it may
suffer are just as pronounced. The spirit
and temper of the American people is such
that it will not stand for coercion,
lawlessness, or any unfair demands. Public
opinion is after all the court of last resort.
No strike or no lockout can succeed with us
that hasn’t that tremendous weapon, public
opinion, behind it. The necessity therefore
of being fair in all demands and orderly in
all procedure, and in view of this it is also
well to remember that organised labour
represents but eight percent of the actual
working people of this nation.

The gains of organised labour in the past

have been very great. It is also true that the
demands of organised labour even today
are very great. In true candour it must also
be said that not only the impulse but the
sincere desire of the great bulk of
employers is in a conciliatory way to grant
all demands of labour that are at all
consistent with sound economic
management, even in many cases to a
great lessening of their own profits, as well
as to maintain working conditions as befits
their workers as valuable and honoured
members of our body politic, as they
naturally are and as they so richly deserve.

For their own welfare, however, to say

nothing of the welfare of the nation, labour
unions must purge themselves of all
anarchistic and destructive elements.
Force is a two-edged sword, and the force
of this nation when once its sense of justice
and right is outraged and its temper is
aroused, will be found to be infinitely
superior to any particular class, whether it
be capital or whether it be labour.
Organised labour stands in the way to gain
much by intelligent and honest work and
orderly procedure. And to a degree
perhaps never before equalled, does it
stand in a position to lose much if through
self-deception on its own part or through
unworthy leadership, it deceives itself in
believing itself superior to the forces of law
and order.

In a nation where the people through their

chosen representatives and by established
systems of procedure determine their own
institutions, when agitators get beyond law
and reason and lose sight too completely
of the law of mutuality, there is a power
backed by a force that it is mere madness
to defy. The rights as well as the power of
all the people will be found to be infinitely
superior to those of any one particular
group or class — clear-seeing men and
women in any democratic form of
government realise that the words
mutuality and self-interest bear a very close
relationship.

The greatest gains in the relations between

capital and labour during the coming few
years will undoubtedly be along the lines of
profit-sharing. Some splendid beginnings
are already in successful operation. There
is the recognition that capital is entitled
initially to a fair return; again that labour is
entitled to a good and full living wage —
when both these conditions are met then
that there be an equal division of the profits
that remain, between the capital and the
skill and management back of the capital
invested on the one hand, and labour on
the other. Without the former labour would
have no employment in the particular
enterprise; without the workers the former
could not carry on. Each is essential to the
other.

Labor being not a commodity, as some

material thing merely to be bought and
sold, but the human element, is entitled to
more than a living wage. It has human
aspirations, and desires and needs. It has
not only its present but its own and its
children’s future to safeguard. When it is
thus made a partner in the business it
becomes more earnest and reliable and
effective in its work, less inclined to
condone the shiftless, the incompetent, the
slacker; more eager and resolute in
withstanding the ill-founded, reckless or
sinister suggestions or efforts of an ill-
advised leadership.

Capital or employer is the gainer also,

because it is insured that loyal and more
intelligent cooperation in its enterprise that
is as essential to its success as is the
genius and skill of management.

Taking a different form but proving most

valuable alike for management and capital
on the one hand, and its workers on the
other, is the case of one of our great
industrial plants, the largest of its kind in the
world and employing many thousands of
workers, where already a trifle over forty
percent of its stock is in the hands of the
workers. Their thrift and their good
judgment have enabled them to take
advantage of attractive prices and easy
methods of payment made them by the
company’s management. There are
already many other concerns where this is
true in greater or less proportion.

These are facts that certain types of labour

agitators or even leaders as well as special
pleaders for labour, find it convenient to
forget, or at least not to mention. The same
is true also of the millions that are every
year being paid out to make all working
conditions and surroundings cheerful,
healthful, safe; in various forms of
insurance, in retiring pensions. Through
the initiative of this larger type of employer,
or manager of capital, many hundreds of
thousands both men and women and in
continually increasing numbers, are being
thus benefited — outside and above their
yearly wage or salary.
A new era in connection with capital and
labour has for some time been coming into
being; the era of democracy in industry has
arrived. The day of the autocratic sway on
the part of capital has passed; nor will we
as a nation take kindly to the autocratic
sway of labour. It is obtaining a continually
fuller recognition; and cooperation leading
in many lines to profit-sharing is the new
era we are now passing into.

Though there are very large numbers of

men of great wealth, employers and heads
of industrial enterprises, who have caught
the spirit of the new industrial age upon
which we have already begun to enter, and
who are glad to see labor getting its fairer
share of the profits of industry and a larger
recognition as partners in industry, there
are those who, lacking both imagination
and vision, attempt to resist the tide that,
already turned, is running in volume.

They are our American Bourbons, our

American Junkers. They are, considering
the ominous undercurrents of change,
unrest and discontent that are so apparent
in the entire industrial and economic world
today, our worst breeders and feeders of
Bolshevism and lawlessness.

If they had their way and their numbers

were sufficiently large, the flames of
Bolshevism and anarchy would be so fed
that even in America we would have little
hope of escaping a great conflagration.
They are the ones who are determined to
see that their immense profits are
uncurtailed, whose homes must have ten
bathrooms each; while great numbers of
their workers without whom they would
have to close up the industry — hence their
essential partners in the industry though
not in name — haven’t even a single bath-
room and with families as large and in
many cases larger.

They are they who must have three or four

homes each, aggregating in the millions to
build and to maintain. They are they who
cannot see why workmen should discuss
such things among themselves, or even
question them, though in many cases they
are scarcely able to make ends meet in the
face of continually advancing or even
soaring prices, who never enjoy a holiday,
and are unable to lay up for the years to
come, when they will no longer be
“required” in industry. They are they
therefore who have but little if any interest
or care for even the physical well-being of
their workers, say nothing of their mental
and spiritual well-being and enjoyments —
beyond the fact that they are well enough
fed and housed for the next day’s work.

They are they who when it is suggested

that, recognizing the change and the run of
the tide, they be keen-minded enough to
anticipate changing conditions and
organize their business so that their
workers have some joint share in its
conditions and conduct, and some share in
its profits beyond a mere living wage, reply
— “I’ll be damned if I do.” It doesn’t require
much of a prophetic sense now however,
to be able to tell them — they’ll be damned
if they don’t.

There is reason to rejoice also that for the

welfare of American institutions, the
number of this class is continually
decreasing. Did they predominate, with the
unmistakable undercurrents of unrest, born
of a sense of injustice, there would be in
time, and in a shorter time than we perhaps
realize, but one outcome. Steeped in
selfishness, making themselves
impervious to all the higher leadings and
impulses of the soul — less than men —
they are not only enemies of their own
better selves, but enemies of the nation
itself.

Bolshevism in Russia was born, or rather

was able to get its hold, only through the
long generations of Czarism and the almost
universal state of ignorance in which its
people were held, that preceded it. The
great preponderance and the continually
growing numbers of men with imagination,
with a sense of care, mutuality,
cooperation, brotherhood, in our various
large enterprises is a force that will save
this and other nations from a similar
experience.

I have great confidence in the Russian

people. Its soul is sound; and after the
forces of treachery, incompetence and
terrorism have spent themselves, and the
better elements are able to organize in
sufficient force to drive the beasts from its
borders, it will arise and assert itself. There
will be built a new Russia that will be one of
the great and commanding nations of the
world. In the meantime it affords a most
concrete and valuable lesson to us and to
all other nations — to strike on the one
hand, the forces of treachery and
lawlessness the moment they show
themselves, and on the other hand, to see
that the soil is made fertile for neither their
entrance nor growth.

The strong nation is that in which under the

leadership of universal free education and
equal opportunities, a due watch is
maintained to see that the rights of all
individuals and all classes are nurtured and
carefully guarded. In such a government
the nation and its interests is and must be
supreme. Then if built upon high ethical
and moral standards where mutuality is the
watch-word and the governing principle of
its life, its motto might through right, power
through justice, it becomes a fit and
effective member of the Society of Nations.

Internationalism is higher than nationalism,

humanity is above the nation. The stronger
however the individual nation, the stronger
necessarily will be the Society of Nations.
Love, sympathy, fellowship, is not
inconsistent with the use of force to restrain
malignant evil, in the case of nations as in
the case of individuals. Where goodness is
weak it is exploited and becomes a victim
of the stronger, when, devoid of a sense of
mutuality, it is conscienceless. Strength
without conscience, goodness,
ungoverned by the law of mutuality,
becomes tyranny. In seeking its own ends
it violates every law of God and man.

For the safety therefore of the better life of

the world, for the very safety and welfare of
the Society of Nations, those nations that
combine strength with goodness, strength
with goodwill, strength with an ever-
growing sense of mutuality, which is the
only law of a happy, orderly, and advancing
human life, must combine to check the
power of any people or nation still devoid of
the knowledge of this law, lest goodness,
truth and all the higher instincts and
potentialities of life, even freedom itself
perish from the earth. This can be done and
must be done not through malice or hatred,
but through a sense of right and duty.

There is no more diabolical, no more

damnable ambition on the part of
individuals, organizations or nations than to
rule, to gain domination over the minds and
the lives of others either for the sake of
power and domination or for the material
gain that can be made to flow therefrom. As
a rule, however, it is both. There is nothing
more destructive to the higher moral and
ethical life of the individual or the
organization controlled by this desire,
nothing so destructive to the life of the one
or ones so dominated, and as a
consequence to the life of society itself as
this evil and prostituting desire and
purpose.

Where this has become the clearly

controlling motive, malignant and deep-
seated, if in the case of a nation, then it is
the duty of those nations that combine
strength with character, strength with
goodness, to combine to check the evil
wrought by such a nation. If by persuasion
and goodwill, well and good. If not, then
through the exercise of a restraining force.
This is not contrary to the law of love, for
the love of the good is the controlling
motive. It is only thus that the higher moral
law which for its growth and consummation
is dependent upon individuals, can grow
and gain supremacy in the world.
Intellectual independence and acumen,
combined with a love of truth, goodness,
righteousness, love and service for others,
is the greatest aid there can be in carrying
out the Divine plan and purpose in the
world. The sword of love therefore
becomes the sword of righteousness that
cuts out the cancerous growth that is given
from to by malignant ill will; the sword of
righteousness that strikes down slavery
and oppression; the sword of
righteousness therefore that becomes the
sword of civilization.

It is a weapon that does not have to be

always used; however, for when its power
is once clearly understood it is feared. Its
deterrent power becomes therefore
infinitely more effective than in its actual
use. So in any new world settlement, any
nation or group that is not up to this moral
world standard, that would seek to impose
its will and its institutions upon any other
nations for the sake of domination, or to rob
them of their goods, must be restrained
through the federated power of the other
nations, not by forcing their own beliefs or
codes or institutions upon it, but by
restraining it and making ineffective any
ambitions or purposes that it may plan, or
until its people whatever its leadership may
be, are brought clearly and concretely to
see that such methods do not pay.

That Jesus to whom we ultimately go for

our moral leadership, not only sanctioned,
but used and advocated the use of
righteous force, when malignant evil in the
form of self-seeking sought domination,
either intellectual or physical, for its own
selfish gain and aggrandizement, is clearly
evidenced by many of his own sayings and
his own acts.

So within the nation during this great

reconstruction period, these are times that
call for heroic men and women. Jn a
Democracy or in any representative form of
government an alert citizenship is its only
safety. With a vastly increased voting
population, in that many millions of women
citizens are now admitted to full citizenship,
the need for intelligent action and attention
to matters of government was never so
great. Great numbers will be herded and
voted by organizations as well as by
machines. As these will comprise the most
ignorant and therefore the herdable ones,
it is especially incumbent upon the great
rank and file of intelligent women to see
that they take and maintain an active
interest in public affairs.

Politics is something that we cannot evade

except to the detriment of our country and
thereby to our own detriment. Politics is but
another word for government. And in a
sense, we the individual voter are the
government and unless we make matters
of government our own concern, there are
organizations and there are groups of
designing men who will steal in and get
possession for their own selfish
aggrandizement and gain. This takes
sometimes the form of power, to be traded
for other power, or concessions; but always
if you will trace far enough, eventual money
gain. Or again it takes the form of graft and
even direct loot. The losses that are
sustained through a lowered citizenship,
through inefficient service, through a
general debauchery of public institutions,
through increased taxation to make up for
the amounts that are drawn off in graft and
loot are well-nigh incalculable — and for
the sole reason that you and I, average
citizens, do not take the active personal
interest in our own matters of government
that we should take.

Clericalism, Tammanyism, Bolshevism,

Syndicalism — and all in the guise of
interest in the people — get their holds and
their profits in this way. It is essential that
we be locally wise and history wise. Any
class or section or organization that is less
than the nation itself must be watched and
be made to keep its own place, or it
becomes a menace to the free and larger
life of the nation. Even in the case of a great
national crisis a superior patriotism is
affected and paraded in order that it may
camouflage its other and real activities.

When at times we forget ourselves and

speak of rights rather than duties in
connection with our country, it were well to
recall and to repeat the words of Franklin:
“The sun never repents of the good he
does nor does he ever demand a
recompense.”

Not only is constant vigilance incumbent

upon us, but realising the fact that the boys
and the girls of today are the citizens of
tomorrow — the nation’s voters and law-
makers — it is incumbent upon us to see
that American free education through
American free public schools, is advanced
to and maintained at its highest
possibilities, and kept free from any
agencies that will make for a divided or
anything less than a whole-hearted and
intelligent citizenship. The motto on the
Shakespeare statue at Leicester Square in
London: “There is no darkness but
ignorance,” might well be reproduced in
every city and every hamlet in the nation.

Late revelations have shown how even

education can be manipulated and
prostituted for ulterior purposes. Parochial
schools whether Protestant, Catholic,
Jewish, or Oriental, have no place in
American institutions — and whether their
work is carried on in English or in a foreign
language. They are absolutely foreign to
the spirit of our institutions. They are purely
for the sake of something less than the
nation itself. Blind indeed are we if we are
not history-wise. Criminal indeed are we to
allow any boys or girls to be diverted to
them and to be deprived of the advantages
of a better schooling and being brought
under the influences of agencies that are
thoroughly and wholly American.

American education must be made for

American institutions and for nothing less
than this. The nation’s children should be
shielded from any power that seeks to get
possession of them in order at an early and
unaccountable age to fasten authority upon
them, and to drive a wedge between them
and all others of the nation.

The nation has a duty to every child within

its borders. To fail to recognize or to shirk
that duty, will call for a price to be paid
sometime as great as that that has been
paid by every other nation that did not see
until too late. Sectarianism in education
stultifies and robs the child and nullifies the
finest national instincts in education. It is for
but one purpose — the use and the power
of the organization that plans and that
fosters it.

Our government profiting by the long weary

struggles of other countries, is founded
upon the absolute separation of church and
state. This does not mean the separation of
religion in its true sense from the state; but
keeping it free from every type of sectarian
influence and domination. It is ours to see
that no silent subtle influences are at work,
that will eventually make the same trouble
here as in other countries, or that will thrust
out the same stifling hand to undermine
and to throttle universal free public
education, and the inalienable right that
every child has to it. Our children are the
wards of and accountable to the state —
they are not the property of any
organization, group or groups, less than the
state.

We need the creation of a strong Federal

Department of Education of cabinet rank,
with ample means and strong powers to be
the guiding genius of all our state and local
departments of education, with greater
attention paid to a more thorough and
concrete training in civics, in moral and
ethical education, in addition to the other
well recognized branches in public school
education. It should have such powers also
as will enable it to see that every child is in
school up to a certain age, or until all the
fundamentals of a prescribed standard of
American education are acquired.
A recent tabulation made public by a
Federal Deputy Commissioner of
Naturalization has shown that a little over
one tenth, in round numbers, 11,000,000,
of our population is composed of
unnaturalized aliens. Even this however
tells but a part of the story; for vast
numbers of even those who have become
naturalized, have in no sense become
Americanized.

Speaking of this class an able editorial in a

recent number of one of our leading New
York dailies has said “Of the millions of
aliens who have gone through the legal
forms of naturalization a very large
proportion have not in any sense been
Americanized, and, though citizens, they
are still alien in habits of thought, in speech
and in their general attitude toward the
community.

“There are industrial centres not far from

New York City that are wholly foreign.
There are sections of this city that— except
as the children through the schools and
association with others of their own age
yield to change — are intensely alien.

“To penetrate these barriers and open new

avenues of communication with the people
who live within them is no longer a task to
be performed by individual effort.
Americanization is a work that must be
undertaken and directed on a scale so
extensive that only through the cooperation
of the States and the Federal Government
can it be successfully carried out. It cannot
longer be neglected without serious harm
to the life and welfare of the Nation.”
Some even more startling facts are given
out in figures by the Department of the
Interior, figures supplied to it by the
Surgeon General's Office of the Army. The
War Department records show that 24.9
percent, of the draft army examined by that
department’s agents were unable to read
and understand a newspaper, or to write
letters home. In one draft in New York State
in May 1918, 16.6 percent, were classed as
illiterate. In one draft in connection with
South Carolina troops in July 1918, 49.5
percent, were classed as illiterate. In one
draft in connection with Minnesota troops in
July of the same year, 14.2 percent, were
classed as illiterate. In other words it
means for example that in New York State
we have in round numbers 700,000 men
between 21 and 31 years of age who are
illiterate. The same source reveals the fact
that in the nation in round numbers over
10,000,000 are either illiterate or without a
knowledge of our language. The South is
the home of most of the wholly uneducated,
the North of those of foreign speech. And
in speaking of this class a recent editorial
in another representative New York daily,
after making mention of one industrial
centre but a few miles out of New York City,
in New Jersey, where nearly 16 out of
every 100 cannot read English, has said:

“Such people may enjoy the advantages

America offers. Of its spirit and institutions
they can comprehend nothing. They are
the easy dupes of foreign agitators,
unassimilable, an element of weakness in
the social body that might easily be
converted into an element of strength.
Many of them have the vote, controlled by
leaders interested only in designs alien to
America’s welfare.

“The problem is national in scope. The best

way to keep Bolshevism out of America is
to reduce ignorance of our speech and
everything else to a minimum. However
alert our immigration officers may be,
foreign agents of social disorder are sure to
pass through our doors, and as long as we
allow children to grow up among us who
have no means of finding out the meaning
of our laws and forms of government the
seeds of discontent will be sown in
congenial soil.”

Profoundly true also are the following

words from an editorial in still another New
York daily in dealing with that great army of
700,000 illiterates within the State, or rather
that portion of them who are adults of
foreign birth:

“The first thing to do is to teach them and

make them realize that a knowledge of the
English language is a prerequisite of first
class American citizenship. The wiping out
of illiteracy is a foundation stone in building
up a strong population, able and worthy to
hold its own in the world. With the
disappearance of illiteracy and of the
ignorance of the language of the country
will also disappear many of the trouble-
breeding problems which have held back
immigrants in gaining their fair share of real
prosperity, the intelligence and self-respect
which are vital ingredients in any good
citizenship. Real freedom of life and
character cannot be enjoyed by the man or
woman whose whole life is passed upon
the inferior plane of ignorance and
prejudice. Teach them all how to deserve
the benefits of life in America, and they will
soon learn how to gain and protect them.”

It is primarily among the ignorant and

illiterate that Bolshevism, anarchy, political
rings, and every agency that attempts
through self-seeking to sow the seeds of
discontent, treachery, and disloyalty, works
to exploit them and to herd them for political
ends. No man can have that respect for
himself, or feel that he has the respect due
him from others as an honest and diligent
worker, whatever his line of work, who is
handicapped by the lack of an ordinary
education. The heart of the American
nation is sound. Through universal free
public education it must be on the alert and
be able to see through Bourbonism and
understand its methods on the one hand,
and Bolshevism on the other; and be
determined through intelligent action to see
that American soil is made uncongenial to
both.

Our chief problem is to see that Democracy

is made safe for and made of real service
to the world. Our American education must
be made continually more keenly alive to
the great moral, ethical and social needs of
the time. Thereby it will be made religious
without having any sectarian slant or bias;
it will be made safe for and the hand-maid
of Democracy and not a menace to it.

Vast multitudes today are seeing as never

before that the moral and ethical
foundations of the nation’s and the world’s
life is a matter of primal concern to all. We
are finding more and more that the simple
fundamentals of life and conduct as
portrayed by the Christ of Nazareth not only
constitutes a great idealism, but the only
practical way of life. Compared to this and
to the need that it come more speedily and
more universally into operation in the life of
the world today, truly “sectarian
peculiarities are obsolete impertinences.”

Our time needs again more the prophet

and less the priest. It needs the God-
impelled life and voice of the prophet with
his face to the future, both God-ward and
man-ward, burning with an undivided
devotion to truth and righteousness. It
needs less the priest, too often with his
back to the future and too often the pliant
tool of the organisation whose chief
concern is, and ever has been, the
preservation of itself under the ostensible
purpose of the preservation of the truth
once delivered, the same that Jesus with
his keen powers of penetration saw killed
the Spirit as a high moral guide and as an
inspirer to high and unself-centred
endeavour, and that he characterised with
such scathing scorn. There are splendid
exceptions; but this is the rule now even as
it was in his day.

The prophet is concerned with truth, not a

system; with righteousness, not custom;
with justice, not expediency. Is there a man
who would dare say that if Christianity —
the Christianity of the Christ — had been
actually in vogue, in practice in all the
countries of Christendom during the last
fifty years, during the last twenty-five years,
that this colossal and gruesome war would
ever have come about? No clear-thinking
and honest man would or could say that it
would. We need again the voice of the
prophet, clear-seeing, high-purposed, and
unafraid. We need again the touch of the
prophet’s hand to lead us back to those
simple fundamental teachings of the Christ
of Nazareth, that are life-giving to the
individual, and that are world-saving.

We speak of our Christian civilisation, and

the common man, especially in times like
these, asks what it is, where it is — and
God knows that we have been for many
hundred years wandering in the
wilderness. He is thinking that the Kingdom
of God on earth that the true teachings of
Jesus predicated, and that he laboured so
hard to actualise, needs some speeding
up. There is a worldwide yearning for
spiritual peace and righteousness on the
part of the common man. He is finding it
occasionally in established religion, but
often, perhaps more often, independently
of it. He is finding it more often through his
own contact and relations with the Man of
Nazareth — for him the God-man. There is
no greater fact in our time, and there is no
greater hope for the future than is to be
found in this fact.

Jesus gave the great principles, the

animating spirit of life, not minute details of
conduct. The real Church of Christ is not a
hierarchy, an institution, it is a brotherhood
— the actual establishing of the Kingdom
of God in moral, ethical and social terms in
the world.

Among the last words penned by Dr. John

Watson — Ian Maclaren — good
churchman, splendid writer, but above all
independent thinker and splendid man,
were the following: “Was it not the chief
mistake and also the hopeless futility of
Pharisaism to meddle with the minute
affairs of life, and to lay down what a man
should do at every turn? It was not
therefore an education of conscience, but a
bondage o£ conscience; it did not bring
men to their full stature by teaching them to
face their own problems of duty and to
settle them, it kept them in a state of
childhood, by forbidding and commanding
in every particular of daily life. Pharisaism,
therefore, whether Jewish or Gentile,
ancient or modern, which replaces the
moral law by casuistry, and the enlightened
judgment of the individual by the
confessional, creates a narrow character
and mechanical morals. Freedom is the
birthright of the soul, and it is by the
discipline of life the soul finds itself. It were
a poor business to be towed across the
pathless ocean of this world to the next; by
the will of God and for our good we must
sail the ship ourselves, and steer our own
course. It is the work of the Bible to show
us the stars and instruct us how to take our
reckoning.

“Jesus did not tell us what to do, for that

were impossible, as every man has his own
calling, and is set in by his own
circumstances, but Jesus has told us how
to carry ourselves in the things we have to
do, and He has put the heart in us to live
becomingly, not by pedantic rules, but by
an instinct of nobility. Jesus is the supreme
teacher of the Bible and He came not to
forbid or to command, but to place the
Kingdom of God as a living force, and
perpetual inspiration within the soul of man,
and then, to leave him in freedom and in
grace to fulfil himself.”7

We no longer admit that Christ is present

and at work only when a minister is
expounding the gospel or some theological
precept or conducting some ordained
observance in the pulpit; or that religion is
only when it is labelled as such and is
within the walls of a church. That belonged
to the chapter in Christianity that is now
rapidly closing, a chapter of good works
and results — but so pitiably below its
possibilities. So pitiably below because
men had been taught and without sufficient
thought accepted the teaching that to be a
Christian was to hold certain beliefs about
the Christ that had been formulated by
early groups of men and that had come
down through the centuries.

The chapter that is now opening upon the

world is the one that puts Christ’s own
teachings in the simple, frank, and direct
manner in which he gave them, to the front.
It makes life, character, conduct, human
concern and human service of greater
importance that mere matters of opinion. It
makes eager and unremitting work for the
establishing of the Kingdom of God, the
kingdom of right relations between men,
here on this earth, the essential thing. It
insists that the telling test as to whether a
man is a Christian is how much of the
Christ spirit is in evidence in his life — and
in every phase of his life. Gripped by this
idea which for a long time the forward-
looking and therefore the big men in them
have been striving for, our churches in the
main are moving forward with a new, a
dauntless, and a powerful appeal.

Differences that have sometimes

separated them on account of differences
of opinion, whether in thought or
interpretation8 are now found to be so
insignificant when compared to the actual
simple fundamentals that the Master
taught, and when compared to the work to
be done, that a great Interallied Church
Movement is now taking concrete and
strong working form, that is equipping the
church for a mighty and far-reaching
Christian work. A new and great future lies
immediately ahead. The good it is
equipping itself to accomplish is beyond
calculation — a work in which minister and
layman will have equal voice and equal
share.

It will receive also great inspiration and it

will eagerly strike hands with all allied
movements that are following the same
leader, but along different roads.

Britain’s apostle of brotherhood and leader

of the Brotherhood Movement there. Rev.
Tom Sykes, who has caught so clearly the
Master’s own basis of Christianity — love
for and union with God, love for and union
with the brother — has recently put so
much stimulating truth into a single
paragraph that I reproduce it here:

“The emergence of the feeling of kinship

with the Unseen is the most arresting and
revealing fact of human history.
The union with God is not through the
display of ritual, but the affiliation and
conjunction of life. We do not believe we
are in a universe that has screens and
folds, where the spiritual commerce of man
has to be conducted on the principle of
secret diplomacy. The universe is frank and
open, and God is straightforward and
honourable. In making the spirit and
practice of brotherliness the test of religious
value, we are at one with Him who said:
‘Inasmuch as ye do it unto one of the least
— ye do it unto me.’ We touch the Father
when we help His child. Jesus taught us not
to come to God asking, art Thou this or
that? but to call Him Father and live upon
it. Do not admit that many of our
Brotherhood meetings are in ‘neutral’ or
‘secular* halls and buildings! ‘Where two or
three gather in My name, there am I.’
Where He is, there is hallowed ground.”

We need a stock-taking and a mobilisation

of our spiritual forces. But what, after all,
does this mean? Search as we may we are
brought back every time to this same Man
of Nazareth, the God-man — Son of Man
and Son of God. And gathering it into a few
brief sentences it is this: Jesus’ great
revelation was this consciousness of God
in the individual life, and to this he
witnessed in a supreme and masterly way,
because this he supremely realised and
lived. Faith in him and following him does
not mean acquiring some particular notion
of God or some particular belief about him
himself. It is the living in one’s own life of
this same consciousness of God as one’s
source and Father, and a living in these
same filial relations with him of love and
guidance and care that Jesus entered into
and continuously lived.

When this is done there is no problem and

no condition in the individual life that it will
not clarify, mould, and therefore take care
of; for — do not worry about your life — was
the Master’s clear-cut command. Are we
ready for this high type of spiritual
adventure? Not only are we assured of this
great and mighty truth that the Master
revealed and going ahead of us lived, that
under this supreme guidance we need not
worry about the things of the life, but that
under this Divine guidance we need not
think even of the life itself, if for any reason
it becomes our duty or our privilege to lay it
down. Witnessing for truth and standing for
truth he again preceded us in this.
But this, this love for God or rather this
state that becomes the natural and the
normal life when we seek the Kingdom, and
the Divine rule becomes dominant and
operative in mind and heart, leads us
directly back to his other fundamental:
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
For if God is my Father and if he cares for
me in this way — and every other man in
the world is my brother and He cares for
him in exactly the same way — then by the
sanction of God his Father I haven’t
anything on my brother; and by the love of
God my Father my brother hasn’t anything
on me. It is but the most rudimentary
common sense then, that we be
considerate one of another, that we be
square and decent one with another. We
will do well as children of the same Father
to sit down and talk matters over; and arise
with the conclusion that the advice of
Jesus, our elder brother, is sound:
“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would
that men should do to you, do ye even so
to them.”

He gave it no label, but it has subsequently

become known as the Golden Rule. There
is no higher rule and no greater developer
of the highest there is in the individual
human life, and no greater adjuster and
beautifier of the problems of our common
human life. And when it becomes
sufficiently strong in its action in this, the
world awaits its projection into its
international life. This is the truth that he
revealed — the twofold truth of love to God
and love for the neighbour, that shall make
men free. The truth of the Man of Nazareth
still holds and shall hold, and we must
realise this adequately before we ask or
can expect any other revelation.

We are in a time of great changes. The

discovery of new laws and therefore of new
truth necessitates changes and
necessitates advances. But whatever
changes or advances may come, the
Divine reality still survives, independent of
Jesus it is true, but as the world knows him
still better, it will give to him its supreme
gratitude and praise, in that he was the
most perfect revealer of God to man, of
God in man, and the most concrete in that
he embodied and lived this truth in his own
matchless human-divine life; and stands as
the God-man to which the world is
gradually approaching. For as Goethe has
said — “We can never get beyond the spirit
of Jesus.”

Love it is, he taught, that brings order out

of chaos, that becomes the solvent of the
riddle of life, and however cynical,
skeptical, or practical we may think at times
we may be, a little quiet clear-cut thought
will bring us each time back to the truth that
it is the essential force that leads away from
the tooth and the claw of the jungle, that
lifts life up from and above the clod. Love is
the world’s balance-wheel; and as the
warming and ennobling element of
sympathy, care and consideration radiates
from it, increasing one’s sense of mutuality,
which in turn leads to fellowship,
cooperation, brotherhood, a holy and
diviner conception and purpose of life is
born, that makes human life more as it
should be, as it must be — as it will be.

I love to feel that when one makes glad the

heart of any man, woman, child, or animal,
he makes glad the heart of God — and I
somehow feel that it is true.

As our household fires radiate their genial

warmth, and make more joyous and more
liveable the lot of all within the household
walls, so life in its larger scope and in all its
human relations, becomes more genial and
more liveable and reveals more abundantly
the deeper riches of its diviner nature, as it
is made more open and more obedient to
the higher powers of mind and spirit.

Do you know that incident in connection

with the little Scottish girl? She was
trudging along, carrying as best she could
a boy younger, but it seemed almost as big
as she herself, when one remarked to her
how heavy he must be for her to carry,
when instantly came the reply: “He’s na
heavy. He’s mi brither.” Simple is the
incident; but there is in it a truth so
fundamental that pondering upon it, it is
enough to make many a man, to whom
dogma or creed make no appeal, a
Christian — and a mighty engine for good
in the world. And more — there is in it a
truth so fundamental and so fraught with
potency and with power, that its wider
recognition and projection into all human
relations would reconstruct a world.

I saw the mountains stand

Silent, wonderful, and grand,

Looking out across the land

When the golden light was falling

On distant dome and spire;

And I heard a low voice calling;

“Come up higher, come up higher,

From the lowland and the mire.

From the mist of earth desire,

From the vain pursuit of pelf,

From the attitude of self:

Come up higher, come up higher.”

— James G. Clark

I hope you enjoyed reading The Higher

Powers of Mind & Spirit by Ralph Waldo
Trine.
For More Free PDF Books on the Law of
Attraction and Metaphysics Visit the Law of
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Trine.
Endnotes

1
The Emmanuel Movement in Boston in
connection with Emmanuel Church,
inaugurated some time ago under the
leadership and direction of two well-known
ministers, Dr. Worcester and Dr. McComb,
and a well-known physician, Dr. Coriat, and
similar movements in other cities is an
attestation of this. That most valuable book
under the joint authorship of these three
men: “Religion and Medicine,” Moffat, Yard
and Company, New York, will be found of
absorbing interest and of great practical
value by many. The amount of valuable as
well as interesting and reliable material that
it contains is indeed remarkable.
2
“War and Laughter,” by James
Oppenheim — The Century Company,
New York.

3
Henry Holt in u Cosmic Relations.”

4
From a notable article in the New York
“Times Magazine,” Sunday, April 1, 1917,
by George W. Perkins, chairman Mayor’s
Food Supply Commission.

5
Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary,
the brother of James, and Joses, and of
Juda, and Simon? And are his sisters not
here with us? — Mark 6:3.

6
From that strong, splendid poem
“Buttadeus,” by William Samuel Johnson.
7
''God’s Message to the Human Soul” —
Revell.

8
The thought of the layman in practically all
of our churches is much the same as that
of Mr. Lloyd George when he said: “The
Church to which I belong is tom with a
fierce dispute; one part says it is baptism
into the name of the Father, and the other
that it is baptism in the name of the Father.
I belong to one of these parties. I feel most
strongly about this. I would die for it, but I
forget which it is.”