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:
You prayed for a young girl who was about to face an examination for a
post and who was tormented with nervous headache. The letter says: "It
was a positive miracle; there was not a headache after that night, and
the examination was passed most successfully."
Again, you prayed two Sundays in succession for a youth in the North of
England. The letter says: "He was dying; the doctors had given him up,
and he himself had no thought of recovery. He is well and a new man;
people are expressing the greatest astonishment, declaring that no one
understands it. They do not know the explanation." These cases are not
that an Objective external God did something kind because we asked Him,
but that the Immanent Universal Mind used our sympathy, and our yearning
to help, in bringing about that which He also desired, but for the
fulfilment of which He needed the focussed love and desire of the
individual life-centres in which He is Immanent. That is one way of
"coming to the help of the Lord against the Mighty."
Now these recapitulations imperfectly express my meaning when I ask you
to "Stand fast in the Lord." The end of a year is a time when a
register of results is justifiable, and an occasion for a fresh start is
recognized. I ask you to make a resolution that you will be spiritually
self-supporting, and independent of external aid, and that, whether the
pupil-teacher to whom you have become accustomed is in the flesh or out
of it, you will "Stand fast in the Lord," for his sake as well as your
own. "We live, if ye stand fast." It is so, it must be so, for the
test of a teacher is the perseverance of the taught. To fall away from
a great principle because the temporary enunciator of that principle is
removed, is to condemn that enunciator as a failure, and perhaps to send
him to his account without his golden sheaves.
"Ah, who shall then the Master meet
And bring but withered leaves?
Ah, who shall at the Saviour’s feet,
Before the awful judgment seat,
Lay down for golden sheaves
Nothing but leaves, nothing but leaves?"