Miscellaneous Writings E-Book

Harriet Emilie Cady

• Herausgeber: Andura Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Experience the life-changing power of Harriet Emilie Cady with this unforgettable book.

Leseprobe

Miscellaneous Writings

Harriet Emilie Cady

FOREWORD

Responding to the oft-repeated requests of many friends who have been helped by reading the various booklets and magazine articles of the author, it has seemed best to publish them all under one cover as a more convenient way for readers to have the helps always at hand. The papers which make up this volume have been written from time to time as a result of practical daily experience. In none of them is there anything occult or mysterious; neither has there been any attempt at literature. Each number is so plain and simple that “a wayfarer though a fool need not err therein.”

In revising the articles herein contained there have been a few nonessential changes; yet the Principle and its application remain the same. Truth is that which is so, and it can never change. Every true statement here is as true and as workable today as it was when these papers were written. We ask no one to believe that which is here written simply because it is presented as Truth. “Prove all things” for yourself, for it is perfectly possible to prove every statement in this book. Every one has been proven before it was written. No book or author can solve another’s problem for him. Each must work out his own salvation. Here are some effectual rules, suggestions and helps thereto; but results to oneself all depend on how faithfully and persistently one uses the helps given.

Christ, the Anointed. So each one of us has two regions of being—one the fleshly, mortal part, which is always feeling its weakness and insufficiency in all things, always saying, “I can’t;” and then at the very center of our being there is a something which, in our highest moments, knows itself more than conqueror over all things; it always says, “I can, and I will.” It is the Christ-child, the Son of God, the Anointed in us. “Call no man your father on earth,” said Jesus, “for One is your Father which is in heaven.”

The author is grateful for the many words of appreciation which have come to her from time to time. These words are encouraging to one who is trying to solve her own life’s problems, as you are trying to solve yours, by the teachings of the Master.

“Lessons in Truth,” because of their effective helpfulness, have been sought for and published in five languages besides in embossed point for the blind. Let us hope that this book now sent forth with the same object of being a practical living help in daily life,

may meet the same fate. H. E. C.

January 1, 1916.

FINDING THE CHRIST IN OURSELVES

Throughout all His teachings, Jesus tried 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. Over and over again He tried in different ways to explain to them that God lived within them, that He was a “God of the living and not of the dead.” And never once did He assume to do anything as of Himself, always saying: “Of mine own self I can do nothing. The Father that dwelleth in me. He doeth the works.” But it was very hard then for people to understand, just as it is very hard for us to understand today, There were in the person of Jesus two distinct regions.

There was the fleshly, mortal part which was Jesus, the son of man; then there was the central, living, real part which was Spirit, the Son of God — that was the Christ, the Anointed. So each one of us has two regions of being — one the fleshly, mortal part, which is always feeling its weakness and insufficiency in all things, always saying, “I can’t;” and then at the very center of our being there is a something which, in our highest moments, knows itself more than conqueror over all things; it always says, “I can, and I will.” It is the Christ-child, the Son of God, the Anointed in us. “Call no man your father on earth,” said Jesus, “for One is your Father which is in heaven.”

He who created us did not make us and set us off apart from Himself, as a workman makes a table or a chair and puts it away as something completed and only to be returned to the maker when it needs repairing. Not at all. God not only created us in the beginning, but He is the very Fountain of Life ever abiding within us, from which Fountain constantly springs up new life to re-create these mortal bodies. He is the ever- abiding Intelligence which fills and renews our minds. His creatures would not exist a moment were He to be or could He be separated from them. “Ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them and walk in them.”

Let us suppose a beautiful fountain which is supplied from some hidden, but inexhaustible source. At its center it is full of strong, vigorous life bubbling up continually with great activity; while out around the circumference the water is so nearly motionless as to have become impure and covered with scum. This exactly represents man. He is composed of a substance infinitely more subtle, more real than water. “We are also His offspring.” Man is the offspring—or the springing forth into visibility—of God the Father. At the center he is pure Spirit, made in the image and likeness of the Father, substance of the Father, one with the Father, fed and renewed continually from the inexhaustible Good which is the Father. “In Him we live, move and have our being.” At the circumference, where stagnation has taken place (which is man’s body), there is not much that looks God-like in any way. We get our eyes fixed on the circumference, or external of our being. We lose consciousness of the indwelling, ever active, unchanging God at the center, and we see ourselves sick, weak and in every way miserable. It is not until we learn to live at the center, and to know that we have power to radiate from that center this unceasing, abundant life, that we are well and strong and powerful.

Jesus kept His eyes away from the external altogether, and kept His thoughts at the central part of His being, which was the Christ. “Judge not according to appearances,” He said, that is, according to the external, “but judge righteous judgment,” according to the real truth, or from the Spirit. In Jesus, the Christ, or the Central Spark which was God, the same as lives in each of us today, was drawn forth to show itself perfectly over and above the body, or fleshly man. He did all his mighty works not because He was given some greater or different power from that which God has given us—not because He was in some different way a Son of God and we only children of God—but just because this same Divine Spark which the Father has implanted in every child born, had been fanned into a bright flame by His prenatal influences, early surroundings, and by His own later efforts in holding Himself in constant conscious communion with the Father, the Source of all love, life and power.

To be tempted does not mean to have things come to you which, however much they may affect others, do not at all affect you because of some superiority in you to them. It means to really be tried, to suffer and to have to make effort to resist. Paul speaks of Jesus as “one tempted in all points like as we are.” And Jesus himself confessed to having been tempted when He said to His disciples, “Ye are they which have continued with me in my temptations” (Luke 22:28). The humanity of the Nazarene “suffered being tempted,” or tried, just as much as you and I suffer today because of temptations and trials, and in exactly the same way.

We know that during His public ministry Jesus spent hours of every day alone with God; and none of us know what He went through in all the years of His early manhood—just as you and I are doing today—in overcoming the mortal, His fleshly desires, His doubts and fears, until He came into the perfect recognition of this indwelling Presence, this “Father in me,” to whom He ever ascribed the credit of all His wonderful works. He had to learn as we are having to learn; He had to hold fast as we are having today to hold fast; He had to try over and over again to overcome as we are doing, or else He was not “tempted in all points like as ye are.”

We must all recognize, I think, that it was the Christ within which made Jesus what He was; and our power now to help ourselves and to help others, lies in our getting to comprehend the truth, for it is a truth whether we realize it or not, that this same Christ lives within us as it lived in Jesus. It is the part of Himself which God has put within us, and which ever lives there with an inexpressible love and desire to spring to the circumference of our being, or to our consciousness, as our sufficiency in all things. “The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; He will save [or He wills to save]; He will rejoice over thee with joy; He will rest in His love; He will joy over thee with singing” (Zeph. 3:17). This Christ within us is the “well beloved Son” the same as it was in Jesus. It is the “I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect,” of which Jesus spoke.

In all this we would detract nothing from Jesus. He is still our Savior in that He went through suffering unutterable, through the perfect crucifixion of self, that He might lead us to God; that He might show us the way out of our sin, sickness and trouble; that He might manifest the Father to us, and teach us how this same Father loves us and lives in us. We love Jesus and must ever love Him with a love which is greater than all others, and to prove our love would follow His teachings and life closely. In no other way can we do this so perfectly as by trying to get at the real meaning of all that He said, and let the Father work through us as He did through Him, our perfect Elder Brother and Savior.

In speaking, Jesus sometimes spoke from the mortal part of Him, but he lived so almost wholly in the Christ part of Himself, so consciously in the center of His being, where the very essence of the Father was bubbling up in ceaseless activity, that He usually spoke from that part.

When He said, “Come unto Me, and I will give you rest,” He could not have meant come unto His personal, mortal self, for He knew of the millions of men and women who could never reach Him. He was then speaking from the Christ self of Him, meaning not “Come unto me, Jesus,” but “Come unto the Christ.” Nor did He mean, “Come unto the Christ living in me,” for comparatively few could ever do that. But He said, “The words I speak are not mine, but the Father’s in Me.” Then it was the Father saying not “Come unto Jesus,” but “Come unto Me;” that is, “Come up out of the mortal part of you where all is sickness and sorrow and trouble, into the Christ part where I dwell, and it will give you rest. Come up into the realization that you are One with the Father, that you are surrounded and filled with Divine Love, that there is nothing in the universe real but the good, and that all good is yours, and it will give you rest.”

“No man cometh unto the Father but by me,” means not that God is a stern Father whom we must coax and conciliate by coming to Him through Jesus, His kinder, more easily entreated Son. Did not Jesus say, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father”? or in other words, As I am in love and gentleness and accessibility, so is the Father. These words mean that no man can come to the Father except through the Christ part of himself. You cannot come around through some other person or by any outside way. Another may teach you how to come, and assure you of all that is yours if you do come, but you must retire within your own soul, find the Christ there and look to the Father through the Son for whatever you want.

Jesus was always trying to get the minds of the people away from His personality, and to fix them on the Father in Him as the source of all His power. And when toward the last they were clinging so to His mortal self, because their eyes had not yet been opened to understand about the Christ within their own souls, He said, “It is expedient for you that I go away, for if I go not away the Comforter will not come;” that is, if He remained where they could keep looking to his personality all the time, they would never know that the same Spirit of Truth and Power lived within themselves.

There is a great difference between a Christian life and a Christ life. A Christian life is following the teachings of Jesus, with the idea of God and Christ being wholly outside of us, to be called upon but not always to answer. A Christ life is the same following of Jesus’ teachings with the knowledge of God’s indwelling presence, which is always Life,

Love and Power within us now ready and waiting to flow forth abundantly, aye, lavishly into our consciousness, and through us unto others the moment we open ourselves to it and trustfully expect it. One is a following after Christ, which is beautiful and good so far as it goes, but is always very imperfect; the other is letting Christ, the perfect Son of God, be manifested through us. One is expecting to be saved sometime from sin, sickness and trouble; the other is knowing we are in reality saved now from all these things through this indwelling Christ, and by faith we affirm it until the evidence is manifested in our bodies.

Simply believing that Jesus died on the cross to appease God’s wrath never did or can save anyone from present sin, sickness or want, and was not what Jesus taught. “The devils believe and tremble,” we are told, but they are not saved thereby. There must be something more than this—a living touch of some kind, a sort of intersphering of our own souls with the Divine Source of all good and giving. We are to have faith in the Christ, believe that the Christ lives in us, and is in us God’s Son; that this indwelling One has power to save and make us whole; aye, more, that He has made us whole already. For did not the Master say, “Whatsoever things ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive [present tense], and ye shall have them”?