The Realm of Reality E-Book

W. John Murray

• Herausgeber: Andura Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Experience the life-changing power of W. John Murray with this unforgettable book.

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Leseprobe

The Realm of Reality

W. John Murray

CONTENTS

O Son of Spirit, I have created thee rich. How

is it thou art poor? And made thee mighty. How

is it thou art weak? And from the very essence of

Love and Wisdom I have manifested thee. How

is it thou occupiest thyself with someone else?

Turn thy sight to thyself that thou mayest find

ME standing in thee, Mighty — Powerful — Supreme.

From the Hindu.

Chapter I THE UNKNOWN GOD

“Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.” –Acts 17:23.

When a noted scientist spoke of God as “The Unknowable,” either he had never read, or he quite overlooked, the declaration of Jesus that a knowledge of God is an essential necessity. A perception of God is as imperative to the soul as is the knowledge of mathematics in the ordinary affairs of life; for what mathematics is to the regulation of system and order in the outer world, divine metaphysics is to the maintenance of peace and power in the mental realm.

When Job’s comforters asked of him, “Canst thou by searching find out God?” “Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perception?” he answered, “Surely, I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God.” A less courageous soul would have concluded that the ways of the Infinite are past finding out and, like the great majority, Job would have contented himself with the belief that “there is a God,” and let it go at that.

The most common attitude of mind is that which admits the reality of God, but which, at the same time, declares Him to be incomprehensible. If God is, God can be known. Only that is unknown and unknowable which does not exist; for it is alone the non-existent which cannot be known. All discovery and all invention are based upon the conviction that, “if a North Pole exists, it can be discovered,” or, “if a truth exists, it can be understood.”

It has been said that Nature has no secrets which the bold spirit may not learn. The trouble is not with Nature that she does not more readily impart her information; but it is with man that he does not more strenuously wrest it from her. The trouble is not with God, that He does not more frequently make himself known to the children of men; it is that they do not seek after Him with sufficient intensity.

How else does man find out anything except by searching? “He that seeketh, findeth,” whether it be in the kingdom of heaven, in the depths of the earth, or on the other side of the mighty ocean.

If men would seek after the Christ Truth as Columbus sought after this continent they would surely find It; for it is not that Truth is undiscoverable, but that they are not sufficiently intrepid and earnest in their search.

For one man who digs a well a million may drink of its waters, but “the water of Life,” which is the knowledge of God, is a something which no man can drink for us and quench our thirst. Another’s knowledge of mathematics avails me little; I must learn it for myself if I would be proficient. Another’s understanding of a foreign language helps me in so far as it enables me to acquire it also. In like manner it avails me nothing if saints and sages walk and talk with God if I am ignorant of His whereabouts, His character and His law. Something within tells me, as it told Job, that I must “converse with the Almighty.”

I am not satisfied to believe in the existence of God as I believe in the existence of Australia, or as a something afar off; neither am I content to believe that all I shall ever know of God is what I see of Him in nature. When the Bible tells me “Acquaint now thyself with God, and thereby be at peace,” I want to begin this acquaintance, if possible, for peace is the soul’s most sincere desire.

With all the gods that man has worshiped, and in which he has believed, there has always been reserved a place for that in which he believes, but which, so far, he has not discovered.

When Paul was led out to Mars Hill in order that the Greeks might hear something new, since it was their custom to give everything a hearing, even though they rejected it afterward, he was impressed by the great number of altars erected and dedicated to the many gods of Greece. Bacchus, Venus, Pan and many others were distinguished by the inscriptions upon them, and upon one was inscribed “To the Unknown God,” and it was this inscription which particularly attracted Paul’s attention.

With all that the Greeks knew about the gods there was still room in their philosophy for the acceptance of something which they did not know. The very act of dedicating an altar to the Unknown God was, in itself, evidence of the fact that they did not consider that they possessed all knowledge. They are an object lesson to us in modesty, a rebuke to bigotry, and a revelation of the necessity of having always a place in the mind for the reception of a new and higher idea. If Paul had carefully prepared an oration to deliver on the famous hill of Areopagus, he did not deliver it, for the reason that he received an inspiration for a new one, as a result of his observations along the way.

When all were assembled and attentive, Paul said: “Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by and beheld your devotions I found an altar with this inscription: ’To the Unknown God.’ Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.” He then asserted God to be the One eternal Cause, as against the superstitious belief in many causes, represented by the many gods in the religious worship of the Greeks. He declared this Cause to be at work everywhere in the universe, by assuring his hearers that “In Him we live, and move and have our being.” He assured them of man’s relation to this Great First Cause by reminding them of certain statements made by their own poets, which said, “For we are also His offspring.” He admonished them to seek the Lord, if haply ye might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far away from every one of us.”

The proximity of God was Paul’s great declaration. If men sought after God outside of their own spiritual natures they were like men looking for their own spectacles when all the time they had them on their faces. Were Paul here today he might tell us, who, as Christians, feel that we believe in the one true, living God, that we are altogether too superstitious. He might offend our religious sense of things by telling us that God is not what we think He is. He might even ridicule some of the altars which we have dedicated to Him as the “Great Unknowable,” “The Inscrutable,” “The Mysterious.” He might even tell us that the Greeks were more consistent than we, for while they erected an altar to “The Unknown God,” they never felt that He was ”Unknowable.”

He might take exception to our belief in God as an anthropomorphic personality, and he might also explode the theory of three persons in one person as a sufficient explanation of the Blessed Trinity. What a shock it would be to most of us to be told that we are altogether too superstitious, and then to have some of our most precious and time-worn theories about God and man, heaven and earth, exploded by the simple Truth about all of these.

It is said that when Paul concluded his oration on Mars Hill “some mocked, while others clave unto him.” Should it happen that some will mock our method of declaring God, others will accept what seems to them a rational definition of Deity. I know that certain theologians hold to the opinion that “A God defined is a God dethroned,” and that “Deity defies definition;” but when I have learned to my own satisfaction that theology is not the last word on sacred subjects I dare to differ with its dicta whenever these are not consistent with Truth.

If “To know God is Life eternal,” then there is no other way out of it than to know Him scientifically. Deity has been written and spoken of under many titles or synonyms. Prior to the time of Moses God was spoken of as Elohim; after that as Jehovah. To Plato God was known as Mind, or the home of Ideas; to Jesus as Spirit and Father, and to John as Love. From the pagan conception of many gods, these more or less after the likeness of men, and representative of different emotions, to the Jewish conception of one God comprising all these emotions, human thought gradually advanced to the conception of God as a loving Father, the Universal Spirit, and Omnipresent Love. But, like the waves of the sea, the waves of thought receded from the shores of science until superstition again clothed God with human form, endowed Him with human attributes, and banished Him from the earth to a heaven, the whereabouts of which not even theology can explain.

Today, in the stress and storm of things, as never before, men and women are asking if there is a God. To them it seems inconceivable that a good God, who is supposed to be omnipresent and omnipotent, should permit such atrocities as have lately taken place in the objective world. With a conception in the mind of a man-like God, ruling this planet from the center of all the planets, looking upon all this evil and suffering, and yet permitting it to continue when He might, in exercise of His omnipotence, put an instantaneous stop to it all, it is difficult to understand the so-called goodness of God. It is these inconsistencies which drive men either away from God or compel them to seek other interpretations of His nature and law than those which are commonly projected.

As the mind of man evolves in the direction of spiritual consciousness, Calvin’s conception of God, and others like it, become obsolete by reason of their brutality. Just as the damning of unbaptized infants and the consigning of such to eternal torment has become a doctrine too horrible for acceptance, so shall some of our pleasant theories in the light of advancing knowledge become too foolish for consideration.

The day will come when the unknown God, whom we ignorantly worship on the one hand, and fear on the other, shall be declared unto us. If today we worship God as a fickle personality observing all the unholy slaughter that has taken place in Europe, yet doing nothing to end it, the day will come when God shall be declared unto us as that immutable Principle of Being which beholds no evil and cannot look upon iniquity. (Hab.1:13.)

To the man who believes that God sees all the evil that is at present being enacted in this world, and permits it for some wise and inscrutable purpose of His own, it will come in the nature of a shock to have it declared unto him that God knows nothing at all about it. When He, Whom we have ignorantly worshiped as a person, in an anthropomorphic sense, is perceived as the ever changless Principle of all Reality, we shall see that it is no more possible for God to see the evil that so disturbs the world than it is for the principle of mathematics to see, and be moved by, the tears of children at school, or the throbbing brains of expert accountants.

If the word Principle, for Deity, seems cold and abstract, it is so only because we have not become familiar with it; yet, after we accustom ourselves to it we marvel that it has not been used before. We can understand how God can be everywhere in His entirety and omniscience and yet not know iniquity, when we think of the principle of mathematics being everywhere in its entirety–in the school room, counting room, at home, on trains, or on the streets–and yet not conscious of the struggles of the children of men to solve their mathematical difficulties.

If the principle of mathematics seems cold and heartless to those who are experiencing difficulties, the fault is not with the principle of mathematics. On the contrary it is most beneficent, for it places its whole, undivided and omnipresent self at the disposal of all who understand it and use it intelligently. The beauty and strength and usefulness of the principle of mathematics lie not in its knowledge of our mistakes, but in its support of our correct solutions. It neither chides nor rebukes us for our errors, and it is for this reason that we may turn to it again and again after each successive mistake, and find it tirelessly ready to answer every intelligent demand we may make upon it.

When the unknown God Whom we ignorantly worship, and Whom we dread to meet because we believe that He “remembereth our iniquities” and will condemn us for them, is understood as the Principle of eternal Love, we shall know that a sin forsaken is a sin forgiven. God can no more be angry than the principle of mathematics can be angry. When we stop making mathematical mistakes, we will find the principle of mathematics our most efficient helper; when we stop making moral mistakes, commonly called sins, we will find the Principle of Being not a bending reed, but a staff upon which to lean. Until we can view the unknown God from the standpoint of Principle, our forward movements are likely to be interfered with by the belief that God remembers our past.

The individual’s most anxious inquiry is: Can God forget the mistakes of the past? To such an one it must be comforting to know that the hitherto unknown God is the understandable Principle of Life which “forgiveth all our iniquities and healeth all our diseases,” when he applies this Principle and works in harmony with it. The principle of mathematics says to the man who has had no mathematical advantages, or has failed to make use of them, “Learn of me, and I will smooth out all your mathematical difficulties;” and in like manner the Principle of Being says, “Though thy sins be as scarlet, they shall be made whiter than snow.”

When we can understand that God is that omnipresent Principle of Life in which we live and move and have our being, we can, in the measure of our understanding, utilize this Principle, for there is a sense in which man utilizes God, even as God utilizes man. May it not be true that God never utilizes man except as man utilizes God? Every breath we draw, every movement we make, every good deed we perform is a conscious or unconscious using of Divine energy; and this being the case we shall one day use it more consciously, more constructively, more intelligently. Just as we apply the principle of mathematics to the solution of our mathematical problems, we shall apply the Principle of Truth to those moral and physical mistakes which we call sin and sickness. These shall be overcome, not so much by resisting evil as by knowing that God is all in all. By knowing that there is no error in the principle of mathematics, and by obeying its rules, the tendency to err is minimized and finally overcome; by knowing that in the Principle of Being there is neither sin nor sickness, and by applying the rules of right thinking to these mistakes, the tendency to indulge in the one and suffer from the other grows beautifully less.

As the unknown God is made known to us as the Principle of Being from which we sprang, and in which we exist, it becomes closer to us than our nearest friend. It is a covert from the storm, and an ever-present help in time of trouble. To be able to look away from our mistakes and to meditate for one brief moment on that omnipresent Principle in Which there are no mistakes, and to Whom mistakes are unknown, is for us to become refreshed and invigorated. It is to realize that the “tabernacle of God is with men, and that He dwells with them, and that they are His people, and that God Himself is with them, and is their God.” To know God as the Divine Principle of Love is to know that this Principle, when understood and applied, “shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away,” with our former misconceptions of God.

Chapter II THE SECOND COMING

“He came unto His own and His own received Him not.” –St.John 1:11

When Jesus said to his disciples: “It is expedient for you that I go away,” he set forth one of the soul’s greatest necessities. When he promised: “If I go away, I will come to you again,” he voiced that which has puzzled the human mind from that day to this. The second coming has been a hope, an expectation with many, a delusion to a great many more, and, to some, a foolish impossibility.

In 1849 Dr.Chalmers, one of the most noted divines of the Anglican Church, gave it as his opinion, based upon mathematical observation of spiritual truth in the Bible, that in the year 1865, or thereabouts, Jesus would again manifest himself to the earth in person. So careful had Dr.Chalmers been in spiritual investigations and observations, as well as mathematical calculations, that when Jesus did not appear in person in the year 1865, 1866 or 1867, he became discouraged and said on his deathbed that it was one of the greatest disappointments of his life, because everything in the Holy Scriptures pointed to the second advent at that time.

Others prophesied the same thing, and it is very remarkable that these prophecies were made concerning the years about the time that Dr.Chalmers predicted the second coming. The second appearance of Jesus of Nazareth did not materialize, so those who have devoutly hoped for it and fervently prayed for it, from time to time, have become discouraged until, today, the second coming is rather scoffed at by some. Strange to say, there are still others who believe profoundly in its possibility.

Is it not rather astonishing that two thousand years of Christianity, two thousand years of Christian living, have not served to disabuse the human mind of the possibility of the second advent of the Master? Is it not equally astonishing that four thousand years of Judaism have not yet eradicated from the Jewish mind the belief in the first coming of the Messiah? Does not the devout Jew look with just as confident expectation to the first advent of the Messiah as does the devout Christian of the old school to the second advent of Jesus?

What strange hope is this that all of the incrustations of centuries of materiality have not been able to crush successfully? What strange expectation is it, that four thousand years of Judaism and two thousand years of Christianity have not sufficed to kill in the human breast? Is it possible that we have not understood what Jesus meant when he said he would come again? Is it possible that our eyes are holden, that we cannot see? Someone has said that the expectation of a second appearing of Jesus is like looking out upon the horizon by means of a telescope for something which is as near to us as our hands and feet.

These are rather mystical utterances, to be sure, and it is only as we study them and dissect and analyze the words of Jesus himself concerning the second appearing that we begin to catch even a faint glimpse of what he meant. It was expedient for his immediate disciples that he go away, because if he had not gone away he could not have sent the Holy Comforter to them. Personality, ever true to self between human consciousness and its comprehension of Divine Principle, is that opaque bar which ever stands between the soul and its reception of the unadulterated, impersonal truth. It has always been expedient for all men, in all times and all places, that personality disappear in order that principle become the order of the day and the foundation of demonstrable sciences.

It would be deplorable if personality went away without leaving a fitting substitute for itself. It is a sad thing when a teacher leaves a school in which the pupils have loved her. It would be infinitely sadder if, during the time of her office, she had not done her duty. What is the duty, after all, of a personal teacher? Is it not to inculcate living, vitalizing principles? If a teacher is teaching children mathematics, what is she doing–solving their mathematical problems for them? Occasionally; but only by way of example. The time must come when each child must work out his own mathematical salvation, and hence she is a great teacher who impresses the living principles of mathematics upon the plastic mind, so that whether she goes or stays, it is able to work out its own salvation mathematically.

Is not the impressed principle of mathematics a very fair substitute for the personal teacher of mathematics? Is it not better and more efficacious in the economy of the child’s understanding than the personal teacher could ever be? Is it not expedient for them that she do go away occasionally from the classroom and leave them to their own work?

This is what the Great Teacher did, the Teacher of teachers, the greatest Teacher the world has ever seen. During his brief stay of three years, leading the disciples, he had been impressing upon their plastic spiritual mentalities the principle of being. He had been unfolding to them, with mathematical precision, the unity of God; the perfectness of man; and the day came when he saw that all he had ever unfolded to them was mere intellectual quotation. They had heard it with the ears; they had taken it in with the intelligence, and it had become a mental subject to them. But it was not a living, working principle. Just so long as he stayed, they went to him with all their difficult problems like children in a school-room.

“Why could not we cast him out?” “Because,” said Jesus in substance: “you are not applying the principle in your own lives. You feel a sense of great confidence that if you fail, I can succeed; and so you sit down comfortably and wait for the desired end. If that desired end be an application to me in the time of your distress, it is good for the patient, but not good for you; the patient is cured, but you are not using your power. So it is expedient that I go away, but I will come to you again.”

And when did he come to them again? After his ascension these disciples, who had had the glorious privilege of sitting at his feet, listening to his enunciation and elucidation of Divine Principle, revealed by their very loneliness, very depression and discouragement and very willingness to go back to their own vocations, that all he had ever told them had been little more than a mere intellectual acquirement. The very disappearance of Jesus filled them with discouragement. The strongest of them all, the most impulsive of them all, said he was going fishing. He was going back to his nets, concluding too hastily that the letter of Jesus’ teaching was, so far as he personally was concerned, undemonstrated.

But when once a man has put his hands upon the plough, even though he is not ploughing deep furrows and planting seeds of truth, he cannot go back comfortably. When once the human mind has become even partly convinced of the reality and genuineness and demonstrability of Divine Science, it would be impossible for that mind to go back, just as it is impossible for a child to forget its numeration tables when it has advanced in mathematical science.

So they, inclined between doubt and hope, fear and discouragement, marveled what was to become of them, finally coming back again to that which they believed intellectually to be the truth, and holding on to it with grim determination, even though they were not able spiritually to demonstrate it. Every human soul will come to that; it is the wilderness in a man’s life. It is the crystalization of development, when a man is neither a worm nor an angel. It is a necessary period of spiritual evolution, a trial of the soul, and when that has served its purpose, men are really ready for the great event, and this great event takes place usually on a pentecostal morning. They had overcome their doubts; they had overcome their fears; they had become re-integrated with a holy desire to be of service, to promulgate the doctrines of Jesus, to go out into the world and obey his commands, reform the sinner and heal the sick. They were all assembled together in one place and, significantly, they were all of one mind.

All Divine Scientists are sure that spirituality is the only Substance; that Good is the only law; that Love is the only force; and so, when they come together in one place, they are all of one mind on these essential, fundamental principles of Being.

On the pentecostal morning these first Divine Scientists were all in one place and of one mind, and, when men are all in one place and of one mind, something is sure to happen; and the thing which happened on the pentecostal morning was the Second Coming. It was not the reappearance of Jesus, as it had been in the upper chamber after his crucifixion. It was a revelation to their own inner souls of the realization, the genuineness, the demonstrability of the science that he had unfolded to them. It was an inner spiritual conviction infinitely more potent than any verbal utterance to which he had given voice. It was God’s way of talking to them in the language of ideas. No oral sound, no visible personality, but the communication of God Himself through the channels of spiritual receptivity.

The second coming has been experienced all through the centuries wherever minds and hearts and souls have been ready to receive it. It is not like a new comet–a something appearing suddenly so that millions and billions of people may see it. It can be perceived only by the awakened spiritual soul.

It is said in the Scriptures concerning the ascension of Jesus: “And a cloud received him out of their sight.” Our text is thus interpreted: “And when ye see these things”–such things as are now transpiring in Europe and America: famines, strikes, agitations, crimes and perplexities–“look up, and lift up your head; for your redemption draweth nigh,” and “the Son of man cometh in a cloud.”

These clouds are not black spots in the atmosphere; they are the various phases of mental opaqueness–spiritual density–not outside of us, but in us. It is a cloud in us which makes it difficult for us to perceive the presence of Christ, and so it is not without great and deep spiritual significance that “A cloud received him out of their sight” and “he cometh again in a cloud.” What does it mean? Christ has never been absent; it simply means that we have indeed been looking out upon the great and distant horizon with a telescope in order to locate and discover that which is within us. The greatest error of the human mind is a tendency to look out from itself for something that can be found only within itself.

“When shall the Kingdom of Heaven come?” asked the Pharisees. They were looking for a second coming, and Jesus said: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. You shall not say of it, Lo here or Lo there; it cometh not with observation.” It does not appear to the physical eye; it appears to the awakened spiritual senses of man.

What are the signs of the times? Were ever the prophetic utterances of Jesus more significant of any time than they are of the present day? Was ever the world at large in such a state of distress and agitation: nation against nation, brother against brother, father against child? One could easily become discouraged if one could not see the end thereof. One could easily feel that it is indeed the fulfilment of the prophesy, and the second coming of Christ is nothing more than this: the end of the world.

That is another thing which men have prophesied but which has not yet come to pass, because the prophecy has been so variously and almost universally misunderstood. The end of the world has appealed to us as the rolling-up as of a scroll of this physical earth and the disappearance thereof in a mist. I do not think that Jesus was speaking in this sense at all. If one looks up the word world in the Greek lexicons he finds that it means age. Jesus was not speaking of the world quite so much from a physical point of view as he was of the age of materiality–the age of sensuality. And when he was prophesying the end of this age through the second coming of Christ; through the revelation to human consciousness of the fact that Spirit is the only Substance and that matter is an ephemeral presentation–a phenomenal result of irregular and unscientific thinking–he was prophesying the disappearance of materiality–of human consciousness; not the rolling-up of the physical earth and the disappearance thereof, but the destruction in the human mind of everything that is unlike God and, through this destruction in the human mind, the revelation of the New Kingdom–the New Heaven and the New Earth. We have looked for the destruction of this; we have expected some great cataclysm of nature to wipe it out of existence and leave us like specks in a world of etheric space.

What hides the New Heaven and the New Earth from us today? The old idea of Heaven and the old idea of earth form the curtain which now hides from our spiritual vision the presence of the Kingdom of God and the presence of the earth of God’s creation, in which there is nothing poisonous, nor impure, nor imperfect.

The second coming of Christ is the spiritual means and methods by which this curtain of materiality is rolled up and discloses to our present view the Kingdom of God which has always existed and will ever continue; which exists now in all its beauty, harmony, continuity and power.

It is not coming to us from afar off. That is why Jesus said: “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation.” You shall not see it like a floating speck in the atmosphere, coming from afar off. You shall see it when the curtain of materiality is rolled up in your soul; and there you will see, with illumined vision in the presence of God, the reality of Christ, the perfectness of man made in the image of God, and the spiritual universe that is unsusceptible to discord and decay.

Whatever is clouded is in us. The sooner we admit it, the sooner we realize where the cloud is, and the sooner we seek enlightenment in order that it may be dissipated, the better for us. The world has never been nearer to heaven than it is today; it is suffering its way into the Kingdom of God. It is not a difficult matter for a physician who detects the incipient phases of disease to prognosticate the situation and state of its development and to prophesy the hour of its crisis. He can tell you to watch the seventh, or twelfth, day, as the case may be. Once he determines the nature of the malady he can do that with all mathematical exactitude. He is prophesying a thing that has not come to pass, but it will come to pass, from his point of view. The patient’s case must reach a crisis.

If a physician can prognosticate or prophesy by means of his detection of incipient disease in human consciousness the hour or the day at which this disease must reach its crisis, is it not possible by just a little stretch of the imagination to conceive the possibility of Jesus–the Greatest Physician of all physicians–feeling the pulse and taking the temperature of the world’s body and prophesying with mathematical exactness the very things we have read in the text? It requires only a little more knowledge of spiritual anatomy. It requires only a little more understanding of the psychology of the human soul.

The Great Physician prophesied the very thing that is taking place today. The world faces its crisis. Its fever of sensuality and depravity has reached its height. Sometimes patients die when they arrive at this stage, but the Great Physician says: “No, the patient will not die. The world will live. It will live by the grace of God when the hour comes;” the very hour which is upon us. We can lift up our heads; the redemption of the world is nearer than we think, for the war drove men into the solitary seclusions of week-end retreats, forced to their knees women who have not prayed in years, and distilled in the hearts of children a new veneration for God.

It has not happened without purpose. Everywhere you find men turning, in most cases to their old religions, in many to the new. For what? Rest, peace and comfort. When a thing has grown so horrifying that it becomes nauseating and disgusting, men naturally turn from it, and to whom shall they turn? We have cried for centuries: “My Lord delayeth his coming.” A man whose vision is clear sees in the cloud the Son of man; sees already at the door, through the mist of all this carnality and depravity, the manifestation of the Holy Spirit; invisible to most, dimly visible to some, but clearly discernible to others.

“Behold, I stand at the door (of human consciousness) and knock.” Divine Science is clamoring for admission and receptive hearts are taking it in. It is true, as true as God is true.

And now let us come to the prophecy of 1865 and see if Dr.Chalmers was so grievously mistaken. I think the only mistake the dear man made was in believing that the second coming would be personal. In 1865 human thought had reached the place where it was ready for a new revelation of God, and whether it came through P.P.Quimby, or Mary Baker Eddy, or Warren F. Evans; or whether it was floated in on the waves of Emerson’s philosophy, it matters not. The thing arrived in 1865. That was the year in which this new thought of God and man and the universe was born.

Dr.Chalmers was incorrect only in one thing: not his mathematical calculations, not his spiritual observations and expectations, but his material expectation. He looked for spiritual truth to manifest itself in a material way, and it cannot do so. Jesus had done all that he could. He appealed to the sense of man–aroused men to the recognition of an indwelling power in themselves. He had accomplished his purpose.

The Physician had done his best, and now it remained for that which said: “I will come again.” It came again and has been coming again; it came again in our great country with a force that is overwhelming, and what did it meet? Opposition. Was it not scoffed at, ridiculed, sneered at, dragged through the courts? Has it not had to fight for its very breath, and yet has it not succeeded?

That which was born in the cradle in America has grown up and matured in England. The thing is born again and the forces of hell and earth can never stifle it. It is here to stay. It is the second coming; it is the revelation of God to human consciousness, the mathematical presentation of Truth. It is that by which the individual–when he understands it–may solve all the problems of his life.

I believe that prophecy can be so mathematically correct that you can determine the day and the hour of the crisis, just as a physician can foretell the crisis in a fever case. It is a hopeful thing. Let us not despair because of the terrible thing portending; let us rather repeat the encouraging words, the admonition of Jesus: “When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads;–for your redemption draweth nigh”–your salvation is nearer than you think.

Already the fields are white for the harvest. You who are studying this new-old demonstrability of Truth, have in you that which is sacred, that which is sweet, that which is powerful. Hide it not under a bushel; use it not merely to personal purpose: the world has need of it. Circulate your literature, talk whenever you have an opportunity. Be not ashamed; there will come a pentecostal morning when you will tell the Truth to the world. Some may scoff and some may say that you are intoxicated; but if you are it is with the Spirit of God, inflamed with the Master’s compassion for a suffering world.

You mission is a marvelous one. The second coming is taking place every day you study, every day you search the Scriptures, every day you enter into the silence and realize your unity with God.

Chapter III WORKING WITH THE LAW

“My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” –John 5:17

It is a truth as ancient as the ancient days that, though we cannot contract the Infinite, we can expand our own conception of it in such a way as to make the Infinite serve us whenever we draw upon it intelligently. This is only another way of saying that the object of true prayer is not for the purpose of bringing about a change in God, quite so much as it is for the purpose of bringing about a change in men. In order for us to work intelligently with any law we must first understand that law, whether it be that of mechanics, mathematics or metaphysics. One cannot work contrary to any law and accomplish desirable results, and it is for this reason that an intelligent comprehension of law is as necessary in the religious realm as in any other.

When it is better understood that the Law of God, like that of nature, is fixed and permanent, unalterable and unyielding, men will cease to pray for petty benefactions and will seek rather to co-operate with Law, and thus bring into their lives greater blessings than they at present conceive. One cannot have read the Scriptures carefully without realizing how very important work is, for, in some places, it ranks higher than faith. James says, “Faith without works is dead.” Another says, “Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith alone.” Creative work is that which distinguishes the man from the animal, and, more than this, it is that which distinguishes a superior man from an inferior one.