Part 8

Nearly all the people of his day followed the letter of his word and not the spirit. When he spoke in parables they interpreted in fact, and even when he said: "I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place, I will come again and receive ye unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also," they believed and interpreted it to mean really material facts, and began to build up their finite hope for a future kingdom, totally blind to the deep subjective law of his spoken word.

They really believed that if they waited a few years, at most, Jesus would return unto them, and in triumph and power gather them together and raise up a community of peace and love in this earth plane. They believed that through this they would become monarchs of a new world. Nothing in their minds revealed the impossibility of material form without fundamental facts beneath them.

The sick and suffering and discouraged of every class, knowing nothing of the higher laws, laid this hope to their hearts, and filled with a courage built on this belief, they taught themselves to stand silent beneath scorn and persecution, feeling inwardly, that when the hour of Christ's return came, their life would suddenly become powerful through some new dispensation.

The years came and went, one after another the apostles died with their hope still in their hearts; at last, only the lengthened life of John was left on which to hang expectancy, then he, too, died and the Jesus of their hope had not returned. Even then the church was reluctant to give up its teaching of the letter and it still held, that even while a few followers remained whose term reached back to Christ's time, it was not too late for his return, and the son of man might yet be sustained in his earthly kingdom.

Time went on until even the oldest memories of the promises passed; change after change came, and man could no longer find a finite place for his faith and trust, and then, as human life was pushed on by the great resistless ebb-tide of the Infinite, those who were still clinging to this false hope, broke forth in a wail of despair, and they cried, "Where is the promise of His coming?" "For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the creation."

We who read their history today and know the truth of Life's finer relationships, cannot but feel a pity for their failure, and the lingering death of their expectancy, even while we see that it was built on superficial human understanding.

In the great unrelated, ignorant hope of these people, we can read in letters of fire, the proof of the certainty of disappointment of every human hope that has not its conscious union with the great universal Laws of Life.

We can see now with the calm vision of those who have no part in their superstition that their hope was never built on the understanding and wisdom of creation, but upon weak, human desires and narrow personal expectation.

It can easily be seen that under the great Law Eternal it was not possible, that after training only a small part of the human race-thought there could be a return, a king of any sort, or that there could follow the perfecting of the race in any such a narrow, limited, personal way.

When Truth has become revealed to the minds of men, they at once see that laws remain, and that the human race is bound to fit itself to these, and looking back over the centuries, and on into the future, we find that Jesus taught us when he said, "I come not to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it."

Today we see how everything waits upon its own cause, and how change is only brought about by the processes of regular unfoldment. We know now that the Whole can only come into expression through the Part, and that the fulfillment of an individual, a nation, or a race must come under the silent operation of those spiritual laws of human understanding which neither the race nor the individual can outstrip.

GOD is LAW, and LAW began when LIFE began and only a deep union with the finer relationships of Life can ever bring us into DOMINION of power.

There has ever been and ever will be many expressions of LAW, and between the Absolute expression and the finite results there must ever be the grinding to dust and ashes of things which oppose either the lesser or the larger unfoldment.

When we look at life from the limited, personal view we can only see from the boundary line of the unfathomed self; but as we come into deeper consciousness, we learn that expectation and promise built on personal hope is one thing, and expectation and promise built on universal understanding of universal action is another.

We are a part of everything in the universe and as we come to look through the personal to the universal, we see clearly the inseparable ONENESS of God-consciousness and man-consciousness, and as we understand and master this relationship, we can read the real answer to our question: "Where are the promises?"

Human life has always been, and always will be, only the unfolding of the personal mind into recognition of the Absolute Mind.

The Universe is under the Law Eternal and in the degree that we know this, we stop our limitations; mankind is free in the Absolute Law, and only seemingly bound in the finite one. Not one jot or tittle of the Law ever passes away; all laws exist to be fulfilled, but human life evolves from level to level of consciousness, and through relationship with higher understanding it escapes the primitive expressions of the lower laws and unites itself with the higher.

The very first truth, then, for any life to learn is, that in this universe of law and order, we get just what we relate with--no more, no less! Nothing happens; everything is the natural expression of the action which produces it.

Jesus came into the world under the law of his own life; he was born to pass along and die expressing the forms of his higher knowledge; he came and went under his own laws, but these were too obscure for the minds of that race to comprehend, and they lived, hoped and died, ignorant of his great Cosmic relationship. Jesus was a son of the planet and his mission was to set laws of race consciousness into activity which would act as a spiritual fulcrum throughout the ages.

What was true in these olden days is still true today; we often go on hoping that fulfillment will come, when by the very nature of what we are doing, we cannot get the higher expression. Take the simple things of our everyday life, our hope of health or our hope of love, wealth, place, happiness, success and usefulness; often we really do hope to be well, and plan in a way for that end, while really at the same time every breath we draw builds for the transitory and fleeting. Like the Christians of old we do not understand higher relationships, and at last, worn out with disappointment we cry, "Where are the promises?" and do not see that until we have perfect thought relationships, we cannot hope for perfect results. It takes deep perception to find the immutable law that all physical phenomena is mental arrangement.

We get everything we find expressing in life through the law of conscious or unconscious thinking! We have, and hold and keep only the things we create for ourselves; there is no other law; no one can take our own away; no one can give us anything, for only what we create is our own, and we alone must create it in consciousness before we can possess it. When we create it in consciousness we really set the law in operation for ourselves and this law will pass it into form.

We make our relationships through the thoughts of our mind. Our mind is the universal mind, and it is inseparably connected with everything in the universe; and whatever we have or have not is a signal of just what we have related with in consciousness. This is the unwritten action of the LAW; no one limits us but ourselves; the Universal Life stands ready with its many levels of relationships to give to every one according to the power he has to create for himself and he is really and truly judged "according to the deeds done in the body."

Jesus could not give an ignorant and undeveloped race the gift of a glorified kingdom; nor could they give it to themselves until they had related in consciousness with the laws that would produce it, the thing we want and our point of attraction must be equal.

We come into life under correct laws; one is not born a Jew, an Assyrian, an Englishman or an American by chance; nor is one born well and rich, and another sick and poor by chance, but EACH is the expression of the LAWS with which he has related in his own consciousness.

Thoughts are things and it is a part of the Universal plan that thoughts from the human mind reach out into the Universal, or Cosmic mind, and there generate an ENERGY which must in time embody in FORM and become the world picture of just what has been stimulated into expression. When thinking passes into a fixed power in our life it can be used to destroy or construct the body or the environment and every thought spoken or unspoken is registered in thought forms in our atmospheric environment and must some day pass into material form.

Health is the expression of a law brought about by a certain line of thinking and disease is another expression. Wealth is one law, poverty is another, and any life can choose this day which he wishes to be under, and choose this hour which law he will serve, and Jesus said, "Whomsoever ye yield yourself servants to obey, his servants ye are, whether it be sin unto death or salvation unto righteousness."

Jesus did not return to his disciples as they expected, because there was no Universal Law for such return. Just so with Health, Wealth, Love, Joy and Happiness. They can never come into expression for us so long as there is not established within us the Law of Natural Relationships.

We are learning at last that "Since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the creation," and it takes more than a fond imagination to pass our life from the law of inharmony, desire and pain, into the higher one of peace, power and happiness.