Part 3

It has always been so. The early Aryans, 1700 B.C., knew it; but generations of wrong thinking have darkened human minds to their Divine origin as possessors of the "Logos Emphutos." Infinite Mind, therefore, "in the fulness of time," specialized the "Logos Emphutos," for purposes of recognition and observation, in one perfect life-centre. We call this "The" Incarnation, as if the Lord Jesus alone were the Incarnate Son. If so, He would profit us little. He could in no sense be our model and our brother. Incarnation is a universal Principle, of which universal Principle the Lord Jesus is the specialization in absolute perfection. "The Logos," says St. John, "was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory full of grace and truth." That is, the universal principle of the Divinity of humanity, as the outbirth of the Mother God, was manifested in Jesus of Nazareth in such full-orbed completeness that the qualities and perfections of the Parent God were displayed in Him, and the full result upon human character of this Divine Immanence, the realization of which had before been vague and without outline, was shown forth in Him, that men might know what power was in them, and what the indwelling Spirit of God was making of them. This embodiment of the Logos, called Jesus, did not stay long in the limitations of the flesh, but long enough to manifest the splendid Divine potentiality of a man in whom the Logos rules. The human beings that He came to illuminate killed His body. Plato long ago prophesied that if a perfect man appeared the world would crucify Him, and Plato was right. And the Gospel records His farewell. He says: "It is expedient for you that I go away."

Now, before we consider what He meant by that saying, just brush the dust off this foundation-stone—the dust of accumulated dogmatic limitations, and theological "schemes of salvation," and all the rest. The Christian revelation is a complete and intelligible philosophy, and it secures your position. Infinite Mind, brooding Creative Motherliness, has expressed itself by materializing its thoughts in the phenomena of the universe, and body-forming its highest thought in human beings. That man is the highest expression and self-realization of the Creative Mother-mind, is the guarantee that man’s consciousness mirrors the infinite Mother-mind as the dewdrops mirror the sun. It follows that if there were an absolutely perfect human being, that human being would be so God-inhabited that he would be able to say, "I and Infinite Mind are one; he that hath seen Me hath seen Infinite Mind." Now Jesus is this perfect human being. The Divine ideal was specialized, completely expressed, in His individual personality. The Divinity of Jesus means that He was the full embodiment of the qualities and principles of the Creative Motherliness, the Infinite Spirit. So in Jesus, God is no longer a vague abstraction, because I can interpret the Universal Mind through the specialization in Jesus:

"Space and time, O Lord, that show Thee Oft in power, veiling good, Are too vast for us to know Thee As our trembling spirits would; But in Jesus, yes, in Jesus, Father, Thou art understood."

But more; in Jesus I can also understand myself. Infinite Mind sent Jesus to be a complete full-orbed specimen of what I am potentially myself. The principles that He embodied, the "Logos Emphutos" that became flesh in Him, are not peculiar to Him, but universal, so that we can claim identity with Him. St. John says: "As He is, so are we in this world"; St. Paul says: "The Christ"—that is, the "Logos Emphutos"—"is in you the hope of glory"; and He Himself said: "I am in the Father, and ye in Me, and I in you."

That is why He said: "It is expedient for you that I go away." He came to teach that the "inborn Word" is universal; it is the Mother-God repeating Itself in all Souls; and if this truth were to be realized and appreciated, it was expedient that the visible Personality in which it was specialized should be removed, in order that men might mentally universalize the manifestation, and learn that this spirit of Sonship, this Divine nature, this distribution of the Creative Being, belongs to all men, as the hope of their existence, the ideal of their life, the leaven of their humanity, the assurance of their perfection.

He did not really leave us. He said that if He did not go the Comforter could not come. He is the Comforter. He identified Himself completely with the coming of the Holy Ghost; He speaks of Pentecost as His second coming; He says, "I will not leave you comfortless," "I will come unto you"; and St. Paul, in 2 Cor. iii. 17, in emphatic terms, declares, "Now the Lord"—meaning the Lord Jesus Christ—"is that Spirit."

Our Lord also said, "When He is come He will convict the world of sin." Do you know something of this? He meant that when Divine Sonship, the inborn Word that was specialized in Him, begins to stir in a man, to make itself felt, there is a new principle in him which cannot tolerate the lower nature, but torments it. Until the "Logos Emphutos" is awakened there is no real consciousness of sin. Philo taught that where the Logos had not stirred in a man there was no moral responsibility; but "when He has come," when something has taught you that you came out from the Mother-Soul, that you are an expression of God, how you hate yourself for past sin; and if from deeply ingrained habit you are sometimes now selfish, irritable, unkind, impure, the punishment comes quickly in the painful sense of disturbed harmony, and you are miserable till restored. This is "the Spirit of Jesus," "the Christ in you," the "Logos Emphutos," call it the Holy Ghost if you like, convicting you of sin.

One final thought. This very intimate relationship to the Mother-Soul unfolds the limitless capacities of our being. All the power of the Kingdom of Heaven is at our disposal if we will mentally claim it. Remember, the moral issues of life are mental. It is a fundamental law of conscious life that by metaphysical telepathy we can have immediate communion with Infinite Life. Our minds can focus the Divine Presence, and we may speak to the world’s Creator as intimately as a child would prattle to its mother. Then consider what ought our moral life to be? Not obedience to a conventional category of social maxims, but an expression of the Infinite Mind, and our daily prayer should be, "May my conscious mind perceive that Thy life, Thy thoughts, Thy spirit are within me, and that Thou art seeking to realize Thyself and manifest Thy love through me."

Again, inasmuch as the whole must include its parts, and as we can mentally attract the attention of the whole, we can most assuredly attract the attention of any beloved individual personality in the spirit world by wireless thoughtography; not drawing them down into these denser elements that they have left, but lifting our spirit-self into the ethereal element where they abide, for when we are realizing God we are summoning them. That is a communion that breaks down the barrier between two worlds, and enables us to say, "With angels and archangels, and with all the company of Heaven, we laud and magnify Thy glorious name; evermore praising Thee, and saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory; glory be to Thee, O Lord most High."

*Last Words.*

"We live, if ye stand fast in the Lord."—1 THESS. iii. 8.

The last Sunday of a year suggests a moral balancing of accounts. I will not burden you with retrospect; what is the good? Nor will I waste your time with anticipations—always a futile speculation. The only thing that matters is the present. How do we stand—now, to-day? That is important both to pupil and to pupil-teacher. There is something intensely pathetic, something that arouses an echo in my own heart, in the way Paul interweaves the "we" and the "ye" in that sentence. This great prototype, "We live if ye stand fast," of all subsequent ministrants to souls recognizes the close interdependence of spiritual welfare between himself and those he had been commissioned to teach. The truth of human solidarity, and the responsibility of each soul to minister to its neighbour, reaches its climax in such a relationship as that existing between Paul and the Church in Thessalonica. He had laboured to kindle the dormant capacities of their souls, while training his own. His life had not been easy. Festus said he was mad. The magistrates at Philippi scourged and imprisoned him. Demas forsook him, and his colleague Peter withstood him. Moreover, he had constant weakness of health, his thorn in the flesh tormented him, but the one only thing he cared for was that souls awakened under his ministry should not fall back. He speaks as if his very life hung upon their continued perseverance in the truth he had taught. "We live," he says—"we live, if ye stand fast in the Lord." It is as if he had said, "Ye are the very travail of my soul; life will not be worth living to me; it will be darkened by shadow, if ye, the souls whom I have influenced, fall away when I am no longer with you." More than that he felt that he would be measured by the result of his work. I imagine that all ministers must feel the same, and, without presumption, may in the same way suggest to their people, as one additional motive for striving for the grace of perseverance, the motive of contributing to the life-joy of the human instrument through whom they have gained some light. The thought obtrudes itself aggressively at one of these way-marks, these sign-posts in the passage of time, which remind one of the uncertainty as to the continuance of existing conditions. Not that "uncertainty" matters in the least. I dislike the word "uncertainty"; the one certainty is that all is well, as God is All and God is Love; when you know that, you don’t talk about "uncertainty":

"All unknown the future lies—Let it rest. God who veils it from our eyes—Knows best. Ask not what shall be to-morrow—Be content, Take the cup of joy or sorrow—God has sent."

Of course, every pupil-teacher in God’s school knows that he, personally, is nothing—nothing but a voice crying in the Wilderness. Nevertheless, he has one desire in the fulfilment of which his happiness here, and perhaps in the other dimension, is closely concerned; it is that his fellow-pupils should "stand fast in the Lord." "In the Lord," mark you—"in the Lord." Not in fidelity to some ethical standard—not in the shibboleths of some acceptable so-called school of thought, not in the excluding externalisms of some particular denomination—those are all incidents which have their place—but "in the Lord." To define exhaustively the meaning of "in the Lord" would be to recapitulate the whole curriculum; but to be "in the Lord" is a spiritual acquisition attained by systematic thinking into God, and "standing fast in the Lord" is using the will to compel the conscious mind to hold the thought till it becomes a normal attitude. To be "in the Lord" is to have discovered your true relation as an individual to the Infinite Originating Spirit. It is to have recognized that God is known only by the mind, and that mental force is "that you have the likest God within your soul"; and with the aid of that mental force to have thought yourself out of objective Deism into the truth of the universally diffused Creative Mind, Immanent, Transcendent, and Paternal. It is to have realized what Wordsworth calls the Sense Sublime of—

"Something far more deeply interfused, A Motion and a Spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things."

This "sense sublime," which is spiritual consciousness, is a sense which, once awakened, Materialism can never stamp out, though it is very possible to be unfaithful to it. It is a thrilling consciousness of penetrating Divine Mind everywhere. This "sense sublime" is an hereditary instinct in our nature which makes "feeling after God" automatic. This "sense sublime," added to the natural demand for a conception of God under some conditions of personality, has been the foundation of all religions. It was the foundation of the higher Deism of the Jewish theology, which possessed beautiful characteristics in spite of its anthropomorphism. Isaiah was full of the "sense sublime," and he bids us create "thought-forms" and think of Infinite Spirit as men would think of their mothers—"As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you." "Use your imagination," he would say, "to conceive that the tenderness of a mother feebly represents the watchful love, the protecting care, of Jehovah towards the human race; for a human mother may forget her child, ’Yet will I not forget thee,’ saith the Lord."

Beautiful and consoling as is Isaiah’s conception of God as Universal Mother, it is still Deistic, it still leaves the Infinite Intelligence as a Person, which He is not. It does not answer the philosophic problem of how mentally to specialize the Infinite Mind while at the same time preserving mentally the conception of its universality. The Gospel of the "Word made Flesh," the revelation of the Incarnation, solves that problem.

In the Christian revelation the words "Absolute," "Infinite Mind," and the rest, are relieved of impersonality and vagueness. We see that earth’s teeming millions are not created, designed, or fashioned, or even generated in the physical sense. They are to God what words are to thoughts—expressions, utterances of the Infinite Mind of God. Each human being is an individual vehicle or life-centre in which the Infinite Mind expresses, manifests itself. Each human life is the reproduction in an individuality of qualities which the Infinite Creative Mind perceives within itself and desires to realize. Now, if the sum-total of these universally diffused qualities of the Infinite Mind could be specialized in one absolutely perfect individual life-centre, we should be able to recognize the personalness of the Infinite Mind and estimate the qualities and principles of the Originating Spirit. And in Jesus we have this unique specimen, this concentration in one individual life-centre, and we know what God is because in Jesus dwelt "all the fulness of the God-head bodily." More than this. The Universal, specialized in Jesus, enables us to understand how God is immanent in us; for the Lord Jesus declared that our relationship to the Infinite Mind was essentially and potentially of the same nature as His, that we too have "the Father in us." He emphatically declares: "I go to My Father and to your Father." Thus is Jesus the Mediator, or Uniting Medium, between God and man. Thus does "God in Christ reconcile the world to Himself," for in the perfectly God-inhabited man is revealed the transcendent truth that God and man, in inherent eternal unity, are one. When we think into this self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, when we recognize what it implies—namely, that the personality of Infinite Spirit is manifested in the objective Christ, and that the mystic Christ is in all, and that every human being is a potential Jesus—we have realized what it is to be "in the Lord." If only we could stand fast in this truth! If we restless, capricious human beings could but exercise our wills, our power of self-compulsion, in holding our conscious minds fast to this thought, it would reconstitute the whole of our character and being, because it would readjust our mental relations with the material environment and sense-impressions in which we live.

It alters the whole outlook on life to know you personally are an idea in the mind of God, and that you have the power within you to identify yourself with God’s purpose. Your entire theology is expanded; for to begin to know God as He is in Himself is to become a convinced Universalist and a denier of the essentiality of evil, though you hate evil as you never hated it before. So to be "in the Lord" is not to be staggered by the existence of evil. The imperfection that seems to mar the perfection of the economy of the world is recognized as a necessary condition for the production of the highest good, one of its objects being to make you hate it. The proposition which I constantly reiterate is clear, logical, conclusive. God is All, All is God; God is the only _ousia_ (substance) in the universe. This negation of good which we hate, this contrast, either is or is not part of universal order. If it is part of universal order, then, in spite of all seeming paradox, it is of the "all things that work together for good." If it is not part of His universal order, then the philosophy of Infinity is shattered, and we are confronted with another creative originator in the universe, in everlasting antagonism to the good God—a paralyzing Dualism, which is only another name for Atheism. God is All, God is Love, God is Omnipotent, and God is Immanent. Therefore it is certain that a hidden purpose of benevolence and love, incomparably higher than would be accomplished by the abolition of what we call evil, must have actuated the Infinite Mind when He "thought-created" phenomena. Clearly it is an impossibility, even to Omnipotence, to make moral beings, in whom He could realize His highest quality of love, without giving them a measure of volition, which volition had to pass the test of the complex education and temptations of earth-life, with all that it entails; and His purpose is so high and glorious that its ultimate consummation will justify and vindicate all the apparently inexplicable means He adopts in bringing it about.

Once more—though I fear I cause that string to vibrate too often, but out of the heart the mouth speaketh—to "stand fast in the Lord" is to be unspeakably uplifted and supported when crushed under the sorrow of bereavement. "Standing fast in the Lord"—you know that every separate individual human being is a product of the Divine Mind, imaging forth an image of Itself on the plane of the material. Consequently, each Individual and the Originating Spirit are essentially inseverable. Therefore human souls strongly linked by love are inseverable, and, though visibly separated, are merged in one another, and spirit with spirit does meet. "The Communion of Saints" is to you who are "standing in the Lord" not a theological dogma, but a fact of being. You do not believe, you know, that the casting off of the body, the passing out of sight of the temporary corporeal enslavement, causes no separation between you and those who are living now in a world of duller life, where the limitations of the physical do not exist. We may be unconscious of the intensity and reality of this communion, because our spiritual self, our real man, is still in the educative isolation of the flesh; but the beloved departed know that the only real home of the spirit is the Universal, and that there is no limitation of time or space where they are, and that as thought-transference on the physical plane is acknowledged as a scientific fact, nothing can hinder the transmission of mind-impulse on the spiritual plane, especially when we remember that there is a force greater, according to St. Paul, than Faith, and greater than Hope, and that is Love. If Faith can penetrate into the spirit-world, cannot Love? God is Love, and "Love never faileth."

If you are "standing fast in the Lord" the vibration of your love penetrates into God’s hidden world. The method is the mental process of thinking yourself into conscious realization of the Presence of Universal Spirit, and then, with that thought sustained, thinking strongly of the loved one you want in the spirit world. They catch the impulse of your telepathic, God-inspired, love-thought, and respond to your spirit, and sometimes you will be definitely conscious of the response through the percipient mind. Another test of standing fast in the Lord is the increase of your usefulness in the world. The service for others, of one who is standing fast in the Lord, will manifest itself mainly in three spheres: the sphere of action, of example, of intercession. First you will have a new enthusiasm and desire to work in the sphere of definite remedial activity on this temporal, this material plane. You know that there is nothing but God, therefore you recognize that the material plane is one of God’s spheres of love and sacrifice. Being "in the Lord" does not imply a life of indolent contemplation. It implies "coming to the help of the Lord against the mighty," like that consecrated sister of humanity, Sister Dora. You remember, I have often repeated it, how, after a laborious day in her hospital, her rest was constantly broken by the sound of the bell placed at the head of her bed to be rung whenever any sufferer wanted her, and on that bell was engraved the motto, "The Master is come and calleth for thee." I often try to remind myself of that. As every member of the race is God-inhabited, every claim made upon us—though of course we must consider each claim with due discretion—is the Master’s voice saying, "Remember, I in them, and thou in Me, that they may be perfect in us."

Then, again, standing fast in the Lord gives you a new power of expressing, manifesting, the Immanent God by your life, your example. The highest duty in life is manifesting God. You will find that the words in my prayer, "May my highest aim this day be to manifest God and to make others happy," become your normal attitude. It will be as natural to you now to give a gentle answer to a deliberate provocation as formerly it was natural to give an irritable reply. You will take your own line on principles of moral rectitude, heedless of the strife of tongues, but with perfect respect for the expressed opinions of others who wholly differ from you. Then it is hardly necessary to point out that "Standing fast in the Lord" is to be a power in intercession. God has taught us that there is no sphere in which the soul, that really recognizes its relation to Infinite Spirit, can more effectually help and bless others. I cannot define these "thoughtographs" of mental causation on the spiritual plane, but it is impossible to measure the cumulative force of united intercession.

Intercession does not mean that you have importuned an objective Omnipotent Being to do a kindness to one of His subjects, though in human language we seem thus to express it. It is, that having found your true relation as an individual to the Universal Originating Spirit, and your sympathy and pity being drawn to some case of need, you specialize, by the power of your thought, the All-surrounding Infinite Love, and focus it, direct it, to the particular case of need, and Infinite Love thinks, wills, and expresses Himself through you. When Paul said, "Brethren, pray for us," he knew that loving, sympathizing, healing thoughts, projected like wireless-telegraphy vibrations from united God-inhabited hearts, were the life of God in man reaching forth to quicken, stimulate, and support a brother man. I have been upheld in physical and mental weakness by a stream of kindly sympathy, radiating Divine creative energy. I once before expressed my gratitude in the words of an American divine:

"Beneath the shelter which your prayers have reared, Quiet and blest, The storm which struck me down no longer feared, Secure I rest."

That is what this wireless spiritual telegraphy does—it frees the mind from fear. To free the mind from fear is to strike at the root of many a physical and mental trouble.

I have been withheld recently from taking an active part in this Divine work, but I have a sheaf of letters of thanksgiving. I give extracts from two: