Part 13

The spiritual origin of the splendid architecture of the great "white city" and later of the southern expositions is perfectly apparent to the eye of the mystic and the seer, and these vast, concentrated exhibits of the world's work are object lessons of which the influence can never be outlived even by the careless and unobserving. Today the great leaders of men, led by inspiring thoughts which would have appalled their forefathers, perfect schemes for overcoming the obstacles inhering in the vast forces of nature, and harness them into subservience to the growing needs of the race.

What devil-worshippers those old chaps were! To him they ascribed all power over things animate and inanimate, and the effrontery of the man who should have even mentioned the possibility of talking over a wire, thousands of miles, or of utilizing the forces of Niagara, or of hundreds of inventions now in use in the most commonplace surroundings would have been met with condign punishment. Our inventors would be in dungeons instead of their comfortable laboratories, and our great engineers would long ago have lost their heads. What a time we have had getting the devil out of our mechanical life! Now he can only rule in the immaterial world, in the crude imaginations of the ignorant and superstitious.

DEVIL WORSHIP.

The Infinite Mind is in all things, everywhere what we are not. Where we are full of impatience, He is calm and unmoved; wherein we grope blindly, He, seeing the end from the beginning, is well content with his own handiwork, and with the final outcome of the souls of his earthly children. Many of the imperfections and individual shortcomings of people are laid aside in the dark crucible of physical death and the grave. Such of these tendencies as are carried over into the next plane of being, persisting in the spirit, are there dealt with as disease or ignorance, the results of malformation or bad environment. God is love, not hate, and "rejoiceth not in the death of the wicked," nor in the punishment of the wrongly educated; for a large portion of the sin and seeming iniquity of humanity is the result of heredity and of a misunderstanding of the laws of God expressed through nature. Undoubtedly there have been good men and true among those who sought to interpret God's law aright and formulate a code for the guidance and discipline of humanity in accordance with justice and equity. But their premises were all wrong. They took for their foundation the old Jewish history wherein the God of the Hebrews was always represented as a jealous being, rejoicing in revenge and rapine, and in all that the enlightened world can conceive of as characterizing a devil. So the modern world has been committed to a devil worship. Nowhere is the ethical teaching of Jesus recognized in our laws. It is the old Hebraic attitude toward life and God.

FANATICISM.

Physical death is the fulfilling of a natural law everywhere prevailing; a change, which the mutability of all material creations renders necessary, and salutary, and, when received without the prejudices engendered by education, pleasing. Religion has nothing to do with it, and more than that it ought to influence every act of life. No more has religion anything to do with the intercourse of disembodied spirits with those in the form. That also is wholly controlled by laws inherent in the nature of things, and will, when the ridiculous hue and cry raised by sensualistic minds has somewhat abated, resolve itself into a fixed fact having no more direct bearing upon human affairs than any other form of social intercourse. It has taught no new code of morals; it has not overthrown, so much as it has revealed the true state of things. It has revived the spiritual teachings of him by whom the world--called from him Christian--professes to be guided and controlled.

Fanaticism is the law of some minds, and it will display itself in whatever arena they are engaged. In politics the man they vote for is almost a god. In mechanics, they have invented a machine which shall ensure "perpetual motion;" in chemistry, the elixir of life, or a cure for all the ills of human life; in morals, the kingdom of heaven is speedily coming through the intervention of their dead friends.

The truest religion is that which adheres most faithfully to nature's laws; for strive we ever so hard, we must return to them. They are God's will made manifest, and the mind most free from prejudice engendered by false education is the one which secures to itself the most harmony, making possible that removal of "mountains" so often quoted--meaning the inevitable obstacles of spiritual life.

Christ said: "The kingdom of heaven is within you" and he might have added that of hell also. Here is the beginning, if not the ending of all growth and reform. There seems to be a universal tendency or wish to escape from one's self, and most so-called reforms begin at the surface--the ultimate--rather than at the centre. This should be an education to children, teaching them that their temptations are to be dreaded only as they are responded to by something within, and that loses all power with them as they gain self-knowledge and self-control.

TRUTH.

The demand for a knowledge of the truth, God's truth, is as old as the world, the world of intellect and knowledge, the world we know about, and of which we have a more of [Transcriber's note: or?] less true history. This cry of earnest and thoughtful men and women for truth, "nothing but the truth" has rung adown the ages from the pagan, and the nature worshipper through all the countless phases of belief to our modern presentations of inspired faith. Everyone who dares to think must realize how this longing of humanity has been met and exploited in times past by ignorant and self-seeking people, and suffering humanity has been imposed upon by superstitions and false teachings which have left it in sorrowful dissatisfaction, or lost in the mazes of doubt and unbelief.

The fool hath said in his heart "there is no God." Life is too short and too full of interest in other directions for us to turn aside to combat fools of any sort. If we admit into our inner consciousness the absolute recognition of the existence of a supremely loving and wise God whose attributes are more marvelously great and grand than it can ever enter into the heart of man, or the mind of the highest archangel to conceive, we shall have taken the first step toward so positing ourselves toward him, as we perceive him embodied in his works, as to begin to see some faint indications of the divine purpose concerning the souls of men created in his image. All that we know of his laws and his intentions toward us, as indicated by our experiences here and now, embodied as we are in matter, supplies the whole of the data from which we infer truth, the truth as it is in God.

We find, first of all, that we are set here a homogenous race, for as the means of communication between widely separated branches of the family become established and easy, our horizons expand, racial prejudice and antagonisms vanish, new interests and fresh sympathies arise, and we are thus brought to recognize the fact of our common origin.

What a dull and deadly uninteresting place this planet would be without the differentiation of the races! What if the whole united world were Irish or German, Russian, or even loudly pervading, assumptive American! What an awful element of boredom would be added to our existence; and yet there are people so blind to this most wonderful expression of God's Providence, that they limit their sympathetic regards to a chosen few, and virtually cast all other peoples into outer darkness. This applies especially to religious prejudices and beliefs. Let's see about this: your antecedents were, so far as you know, Scotch and English, but by some providential intervention you are now American. You are expected to scorn and despise all other clans and races, and to condone all the faults and crimes of these which have been so honored by you, and this is called patriotism, and makes you feel virtuous and popular, and it is necessary and right--politically considered--but not from the standpoint of the occult, the spiritual side of existence. There is a wise intention and purpose in the blending of the races in their intermarriages, it is for the breaking down of prejudices as old as the race itself, that have ever kept the peoples of the earth apart.

There is but one law of evolution, and that which holds for the individual epitomizes that of a nation, or a world. So as we see people at a certain stage of their unfoldment of individuality exhibit an extreme egotism, amounting almost to an insanity, by isolating them, by confining them to the radius of their own mentality, so it is with the different tribes and races and nations of the world. They are set apart to grow their own peculiar traits of character, possible only to their prescribed environment, that they may thus push forward their own special gifts and endowments to their own ultimates. This is but a phase of their evolutionary process, a class preparation looking toward a wider experience, wherein it shall come to be seen that all the world is akin. Referring again to the unit man. The shibboleth of the just present past time has been individualism which, rightly understood, means simply that the soul of man has progressed to a point where occult forces can lay hold on the crude being and shape it into a worthy likeness of its divine Maker, and it must there stand alone, until it feels its at-one-ment with the Divine and sees and acknowledges the higher law and purpose of its being, and furthermore recognizes why it has been called into existence.

Truth is like certain chemicals. It can only be retained by the mind wherein it finds an adapted affinity, and then it has in each a distinctly individual expression according to the mental and moral status of that mind. But laws and principles are stationary and unchangeable; it is our own personal knowledge which varies and changes with our growth. We may ignore and denounce certain phases of phenomena, but the phenomena work on just the same, unaffected by our beliefs or disbeliefs. The loss is ours if we willfully close our eyes and ears against the enlightening message which it would bring to us in passing our way.

CHRISTS.

Confucius, the moralist, Buddha, the intellectualist, Jesus, the loving. Why reject the teachings of any one of this trinity of inspired and inspiring ones? All are of God, light bringers to a darkened world.

HERO WORSHIP.

All along the individual life, the soul's development through matter, are strewn experiences which mark the dawning force which is finally to culminate in its marked individuality, and separation from the mass of organized, created beings. These experiences are the rare awakenings of the soul to the realization and use of its own native powers which flow from its divine paternity and origin, and which constitute its birthright and ultimate inheritance. At times, the gifts and powers of certain beings burst into bloom and fruition when least expected, and cast a radiance and a halo around the personality, which mark and award it a place among its fellow men, altogether superior to the general trend and outworkings of the recognized character. Around such illuminated points of high expression of the soul's possibilities gather other personalities and, by the action of a natural law, crystalize about the central magnet of the inspired, and the inspiring thought or action, and thus is leadership created. Barely does the entire life outwork itself upon lines which harmoniously express the inspiration which begot the godlike union of the human with the divine, and thus through the natural falling away from the ideal, those who seek the higher life through imitation or emulation of the model so set up are finally forced to put aside their hero worship and seek their own individual growth on the lines upon which they can lawfully unfold.

The varying moods, and idiosyncrasies of the hero or the saint turn away their followers to the contemplation and study of those great moral principles which rule the world and control the universe.

On the physical plane great strides are being made. The suppleness of one, the power of balance of another, the feats of the acrobat, the will of the juggler which commands the action, and the seeming suspension of natural law; all these expressions are ever increasing and varying through the industry and the ingenuity of man, and point to the possibilities of the hitherto undreamed of physical perfection of development, and grand unfolding of unknown powers. Man must master the earth by controlling the laws of the material world. This is the foundation of all things, and upon it shall be built all that the soul must have for its unfoldment, within the aura and the radius of this external plane.

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If there can be one thing more pitiful than all others it is to see little human bugs and reptiles mount their egotistical stilts and declare the non-existence of the Creator.

If the blatant critics would only give over blowing their individual horns, and remark for a little the value of quiet introspection, many mysteries would reveal themselves and much good would be realized.

REASON.

Human reason is the outgrowth of the intuition. In its final analysis, it is the comprehension by the soul of the reality of truth and of its just relationships and values. It is the power of discriminating and deciding between the perception of the intuition and the testimony of facts gathered by observation and experience. The intuition of man is of the will, that of woman is of the affections; thus it is more spiritual than man's. Just as the doctors have prospected and laid out and defined the functions of the physical body, so are the psychologists and the mental scientists seeking a way and method by which the attributes of the real being may be divided off into sections and labelled accordingly. The fact is, the individual soul is all the time struggling to reach its own at-one-ment with itself. When it comes under the tuition and discipline of the gods, and begins to perceive their methods, it can understand the whys and wherefores of the intentions of life's experiences. They are to consolidate and make practical vagrant emotions and tendencies, and lop off and scorch out the idiosyncrasies of heredity and custom, and rouse the soul to a knowledge of its need of harmony with divine law. Into the real soul depths can no divulging line and plummet reach. This domain belongs to its Creator alone. It is only as the tests of living and doing manifest hidden motives and meanings that we catch glimpses of the ego that abides within and through this life, submerged as it is in the flesh. We can know but little of what is now, or of what yet shall be, when the wholeness of the individual is established.

SYMPATHY.