"A lie can not exist--it only appears. Truth is consciousness
consistent with itself in every relation; error is consciousness
inconsistent with itself in some relation."--_Judge H. P. Biddle._
"And what an end lies before us! To have a consciousness of our own
ideal being flashed through us from the thought of God! Surely, for
this may well give way all our paltry self-consciousness, our
self-admiration and self-worships! Surely, to know what He thinks
about us will pale out of our souls all our thoughts about
ourselves!"--_George MacDonald._
MARLOW, September ----.
"Dear John: I hope you are as anxiously awaiting this letter as I
awaited the second lecture. It was splendid, so comprehensive, and above
all, so practical. It throws light on many puzzling points, and I am
delighted so far with what seems so plain and true.
"Some of the members of the class seemed quite shocked at some of the
statements, but it is not strange that they should seem startling to one
who has never thought on the subject, for indeed, I should think it
would take a good while to get used to reasoning that is directly
opposite the world's first conclusions; still we are looking for results
that are quite contrary to what the world looks for, so we can afford to
collide with its opinions. When Mrs. Pearl came into the class room, all
turned to look at her and every ear was ready to listen.
"In yesterday's lesson we made a statement of God as the only Mind of
the universe, the Great Reality beside whom there is absolutely nothing
in existence; but as we look around at the scenes of suffering and
poverty and ignorance, we are mightily tempted to disbelieve such a
statement.
"'Talk of omnipotent Light in the midst of midnight darkness!' you
exclaim. Ah, but you are to remember we are talking of the real
creation; the invisible and unapparent instead of the visible and
apparent; the changeless and eternal instead of the evanescent and
decaying.
"If God is the only Reality, His creation is the only real creation. The
word real is applied to that which actually exists, which forever is,
not to that which seems or appears; therefore, in speaking of the real
we mean the changeless and invisible.
"If God is the only Mind, His are the only real thoughts, and thoughts
are invisible to the eye, but discernible to the mind or consciousness.
"If God is everywhere, there is no possible place or space in the
universe where God is not; hence He is all there is. One of our modern
prophets wisely wrote: 'Has not a deeper meditation taught certain of
every clime and age that the Where and the When so mysteriously
inseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial adhesions to
thought; that the Seer may discern them where they mount up out of the
celestial Everywhere and Forever. Have not all nations conceived their
God as omnipresent and eternal, as existing in a universal Here, an
everlasting Now?
"'Think well, thou too wilt find that space is but a mode of our human
sense, so likewise Time. There is no space and no time. _We_ are--we
know not what; light sparkles floating in the ether of Deity. So this so
solid seeming world, were, after all, but an air-image--our _me_ the
only reality.'
"This me is the spiritual self, the individual idea of God, His image
and likeness.
"What then, about this body, which is not spiritual, you ask? What about
the material universe?
"Wait a moment. Think of the premise. As God the invisible is the
changeless, what is the variable, fleeting, visible unreality? The real
is everlasting, the unreal is transitory. The real is called Spirit, the
unreal matter.
"What is Spirit? The underlying omnipresent substance that we call God.
"What is matter? The counterfeit, shadow, emblem, showing that Spirit
exists or is.
"We read in a very ancient Hindoo Scripture: 'Those who have
understanding, whose thought is pure, see the entire universe as the
picture of Thy wisdom;' and the thoughtful Carlyle said: 'All visible
things are emblems.... Matter represents some idea and bodies it forth.'
"These thoughts are in perfect accord with the principles laid down in
our premise, hence we find that as we believe matter, believe the body
to be the real creation, we are believing a falsity. This is the idol we
are worshiping instead of the true and only God. The grand visible
universe in which we see so many beauties, so many charms, is but the
mighty object lesson before us by which we may learn of the infinite,
invisible All. As Theodore Parker said: 'The universe itself is a great
autograph of the Almighty.'
"The characters used in mathematics do not constitute the science but
merely represent to the senses the invisible ideas of the principle of
mathematics. The visible does not constitute the invisible, but may
carry its messages as we learn to read its poetic and mystic pages. The
visible speaks to the mortal nature, but the invisible beyond and above,
speaks to the immortal nature.
"Since we find matter to be so totally opposite the real, there is no
other name for it than as the unreal, and the unreal being a counterfeit
of the real, must be a lie, as the nature of a lie is to make false
claims, pretending they are true.
"Matter is a counterfeit because it is not genuine or of God, because it
is changeable and fleeting, because being limited to a visible form, it
must have finite limitations and can merely give finite conceptions.
"Taking it as a _sign_ of something infinite, we learn of the infinite.
All the students, teachers, learned men and women of the world have
added to the world's spiritual ideas revealed by their study of the
finite as well as their intuitive knowledge of the infinite. Charles
Kingsley gives us a hint of how to learn: 'Do not study matter for its
own sake but as the countenance of God. Try to extract every line of
beauty, every association, every moral reflection, every inexpressible
feeling from it.'
"Our ideas of matter must then be entirely changed, and we must learn to
look beyond the seeming, to the true. We have believed in the reality
of matter and material environment because of reasoning from the false
basis that man is material or that he is a mixture of material and
spiritual. To believe that the flesh and blood of our sister or brother
is their real self, is to believe God capable of creating something
utterly unlike himself (John iii, James i.) which may suffer, sin and
die, and if He is all perfection, He can not know imperfection. If He is
all spirit, He can not know or be matter. Keep before your mind the
perfection, omnipotence, omnipresence of Spirit, God or Principle, and
you will see more and more clearly the inconsistency of anything
opposite Him emanating from Him.
"Believing in matter as a reality, we have endowed it with all the power
of the real, have ascribed to it life, substance and intelligence, when
it possesses neither.
"Where is the life when the body dies? If life were inherent in the
physical body, could it ever cease to be? God the eternal life principle
can not cease to be. The life manifested through the body is the life
which is God and can not be affected by the decay or disappearance of
the body.
"The invisible essence of life is also the true substance, the reliable
and changeless something, upon which we may forever depend. We use the
word substance in its etymological sense (from _sub_, under and _stare_,
to stand), and since Spirit or Mind is the reality that underlies every
material or sensible object, there is no substance to the object itself.
"Plato taught that '_ideas_, are the only _real_ things.' Ideas are
expressions of thoughts, and thoughts are expressions of mind, and this
reasoning brings us back to God as Mind and Mind as Cause. Admitting
Mind or Spirit to be the life and substance back of or expressing itself
through the body, we may easily see that intelligence can not exist
apart from Mind, and hence can not belong to matter.
"That the mind or intelligence is seated in the gray convolutions of the
brain, is held by the materialists, and yet Dr. Laycock affirms 'that
matter is fundamentally nothing more than that which is the seat of
motion to ends, of which mind is the source and cause.' Professor Huxley
crowns the statement by saying, 'That which perceives or knows is mind
or spirit, and therefore, that knowledge which the senses give us, is,
after all, a knowledge of spiritual phenomena.' Professor Faraday held
to the immateriality of physical objects.
"In the language of Jesus the Christ, we are told, 'Spirit is all, the
flesh profiteth nothing;' thus from all classes of conscientious but
confessedly diverse thinkers, we find statements of universal truth, and
this is what the hungry, starving world is seeking with more earnestness
than ever before.
"Since there is no life, substance or intelligence in matter, it will be
comparatively easy to prove that there can be no sensation, for where
there is no life in the body, there can be no feeling. Even the
physiologists tell us mind must know pain before it can be located in
the body. We state therefore a theorem which is practically
demonstrated; there is no sensation in matter.
"As we visit penitentiaries, reform schools and hospitals, as we read
and hear the startling statements of press and pulpit, we grow
disconsolate and heavy-hearted over the awful power and reality of evil,
forgetting again that He who is perfect goodness can not behold evil or
in any way permit its existence, any more than heat can permit cold, or
light can permit darkness.
"Granting the omnipotence of Good, where is there any room for its
opposite?
"If there is but one Power, and that omnipotent and perfect, there can
be no evil _in reality_; hence we are dealing with another lie when we
judge according to appearances, which Jesus said we should not do. It is
really disloyalty to God to impute to Him all misery, pain, sickness and
suffering caused by the evil and ignorance of man. We are told: 'Let
your soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of
God.' Because we have not done so, but have believed in every claim
power, we suffer from 'evils which our own misdeeds have wrought,' as
Milton wrote, or, in the words of Emerson, 'we _mis_create our own
evils.'
"Jeremiah said: 'It is your sins that have withholden the good things
from you.'
"According to Webster, 'sin is a transgression of the law of God.' There
is but one law--the perfect and unchangeable Truth. Any deviation from
Truth is error, and error is sin. In proportion as we deviate from the
strictly true, then, we sin. Because we admit things to be true which
are not true, we _admit_, then _commit_ sin, and hence suffer for sin.
'Know ye not that to whomsoever ye yield yourselves servants to obey,
his servants ye are, whether of sin unto death or obedience unto
righteousness,' wrote Paul. We first think wrong. Sin is of the mind,
not of the body.
"To acknowledge the reality of sin or evil is a transgression of the
law, because, according to our established premise, it cannot be true.
"Through a misconception of our relation to God, and a belief in the
power of evil, we are obliged to admit the existence of sin, sickness,
and death, neither of which can be true in the presence of God, as the
only Reality, in which or in whom are all things that eternally are, not
that temporarily appear.
"We have believed in a mind or power of thought opposite and contrary to
God, when in reality there can be nothing opposite or contrary to
eternal Mind. We have believed ourselves endowed with a mind separate
from God, and ourselves subject to temptation from some cause not Good.
We have believed in minds, when there is but one Mind.
"This false force, this false mind, is variously called the evil or
carnal mind, the mind of the flesh, the old man, the serpent, the devil,
the adversary. It is simply the opposite or contradictory of the Good,
the god of evil.
"Beside every true or positive statement there is a false or negative
claim, and in so far as we are ignorant of the true, we are in bondage
to the false. To _believe_ the claims of error is to be bound; to _know_
the reality of truth is to be free. To believe in a mind or power
separate or opposite from God, is to be subject to any suppositions or
beliefs formulated by that mind or negative thought.
"That we are spiritually perfect is true, but it is necessary for us to
prove that fact by 'working out our own salvation,' by manifesting the
positive or God quality of thought through our life and actions, and the
only way to be filled with good thought is to recognize and acknowledge
the Good only as the real.
"This error, tempter or devil, was spoken of by Jesus as having no
truth, as being a liar, and the father or cause of lies (John viii: 44).
Instead of devil (which is only another name for evil or the slanderer),
or 'carnal mind', as Paul called it, we find mortal thought a better
term for the expression of this power of thinking.
"'Why have we this power of thinking wrong thoughts when there is but
one good and only Mind?' you ask. As God's idea, in the image and
likeness of Mind that thinks, we have the power of recognition, the
power to be or not to be, the possibility to become sons of God. We have
the power to distinguish, to judge, to know; we have the spirit that
ever leads us on and on in truth.
"But here is where we fail. In our ignorance or limited state of
unfoldment, we have mistaken the symbol for that which is symbolized
matter is the symbol, as also the body, we have judged according to
appearances instead of righteous or strictly true judgment; we have
yielded to a belief in sin, hence are servants of sin.
"The conception of matter as having power, is based on appearances, and
because we have delegated to it a power, have acknowledged it as an
entity, separate from the eternal mind, it has enslaved us.
"Reasoning in this way we find everywhere two opposites or
contradictories to be recognized and judged, as the visible and the
invisible, the material and the spiritual, the false and the true, the
mortal and the immortal, the unreal and the real, the negative and the
positive.
"Judging of the true by that which is changeless and eternal, we can
decide at once on those qualities or attributes belonging to or
describing what is true, and by knowing what is true, we can readily
distinguish it from the erroneous.
"We have considered these great errors or negatives which the world has
believed and still believes in, and they must be dealt with according to
scientific law.
"Through all the ages of Christianity have been heard the words of the
Master: 'If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up
his cross and follow me;' but who has understood it? The letter of the
law has indeed been observed by many earnest followers of Jesus to a
degree not considered necessary in this age, but what has it
demonstrated? What has come of all the fasting and renunciation, the
cruel asceticism and severe discipline?
"Do these conscientious disciples give an unmistakable proof of their
discipleship by showing the signs that must follow the true believer?
How can they when they talk of sin, sickness and death; of things
contradictory to the nature, power and presence of God?
"Then they must not have understood the spiritual import of these words
of Jesus to 'deny himself.' Deny means, according to Webster, 'to
contradict; to declare not to be true; to disclaim connection with; to
refuse to acknowledge; to disown.' Jesus meant deny the mortal thought,
the false self; refuse to acknowledge it as having any authority; and it
is only as the Christ follower proves this to be the true mode of
denying self, that he can speak with authority as to the scientific
method of dealing with all the errors to which mortal thought gives
birth.
"No other way has brought the desired result; hence we confidently
assert that all these mistakes agreed to and participated in by mankind
must be emphatically, persistently, scientifically denied.
"Systematically and repeatedly we say:
"1. There is no life, substance or intelligence in matter.
"2. There is no sensation or causation in matter.
"3. There is no reality in matter.
"4. There is no reality in sin, sickness or death.
"5. There is no reality in evil.
"6. There is no reality in mortal thought.
"This is denying the self recognized by the world. This is the life that
must be laid down, that must be sacrificed, lost.
"Humanity has proven its subjection to these errors. Now, by its
faithful rejection of them, let it prove them lies, for the force of a
lie is always annulled by rejection. This proves the law referred to by
Jesus when he made a denial of self the first duty of his disciples.
"In denying, it is necessary to say the words over and over again; it
may be mechanically at first, but say them over, several hours at a
time, if possible.
"More is accomplished by concentration than anybody is aware, and the
repetition of the words helps to concentrate the thought. First repeat
the whole list of denials, then select one on which to spend most of the
time for several days. The denial of matter, for instance, makes us more
spiritually minded.
"When denying, try to realize there is no space, but that anywhere you
send your thought it will go, and as you think or say the words, you
will be denying error for the world as well as for yourself, as every
thought is world-wide in its influence, and helps to free or bind
humanity, even as it is truth or error.
"To deny is to put out of mind, to erase, as it were, the false beliefs.
Be earnest, be faithful, and you will have an abundant reward.
"This, dear John, is the substance of the lecture as nearly as I can
give it. After Mrs. Pearl had finished the lesson, she requested the
class to sit in silence a few moments and together hold the thought,
'There is no reality in matter;' after which we were dismissed with this
benediction: 'May we realize that God _is_, that spirit is the only
reality.'
"The lessons are always opened by silent prayer, which I have forgotten
to mention before.
"Please, dear husband, observe these rules and study every assertion as
carefully as though you were in the class. You, and Grace, and Kate, can
accomplish a great deal together; but by all means don't pass judgment
till you have carefully examined all the evidence.
"Tell me all about the children. Such details will greatly comfort me,
for I must confess that to-night I am the least bit homesick.
"Good night,
"Your loving MARION."