Part 3

Christian Science, Mind Cure, Faith Cure--their Physical Relations 178

CHAPTER XVI.

What the Immortal State Must Be 188

CHAPTER XVII.

Personal Experience--Intelligence from the Sphere of Light 217

Matter, Life, Spirit.

NECESSITY OF KNOWLEDGE, NOT FAITH.--Guizot forcibly expresses the value of a knowledge of future life when he says: "Belief in the supernatural (spiritual) is the special difficulty of our time; denial of it is the form of all assaults on Christianity, and acceptance of it lies at the root, not only of Christianity, but of all positive religion whatever."

He stands not alone in this conclusion. The difficulty, to a great majority of men of science and leaders of thought, appears insurmountable, and they no longer feel a necessity for defending their want of belief, but smile at the credulity of those who believe anything beyond what their senses reveal.

Not only the infidel world perceives this difficulty; it is well understood by the leaders of Christianity, for they have been taught its strength by the irrepressible conflict which has culminated in the want of belief at the present time. With this result before them, it is idle for the church leaders to assert that revelation in the Bible is sufficient to remove this difficulty, which has grown in the very sanctuary, in the shadow of biblical teachings. While the value of the Bible, as interpreted by theologians, depends on the belief in immortality, it has not proved the existence of man beyond the grave in such an absolute manner as to remove doubt; and yet, of all evidence it is designed to give, that on this point should be the most complete and irrefutable.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ proves nothing, even admitted in its most absolute form. If Christ was the Son of God and God himself, he was unlike ordinary mortals, and what is true of him is not necessarily so of them.

His physical resurrection does not prove theirs. Admitting similarity, his bodily resurrection after three days, while his body remained unchanged, does not prove theirs after they have become dust, and scattered through countless forms of life for a thousand ages. If, with some sects, the resurrection of the body be discarded, then the resurrection of Christ has no significance, for it is expressly held that his body was revivified and taken from the tomb.

Skepticism has increased, because the supporters of religion have not attempted to keep pace with the march of events, but, on the contrary, asserted that they had all knowledge possible to gain on this subject, and that anything outside of their interpretation was false.

Instead of founding religion on the constitution of man, and making immortality his birthright, they have regarded these as foreign to him, and only gained by the acceptance of certain doctrines. They removed immortality from the domain of accurate knowledge; and those who pursued science turned with disgust from a subject which ignored present research for past belief.

Hence, there has been, unfortunately, the great army of investigators and thinkers, in the realm of matter, studying its phenomena and laws, never approaching the threshold of the spiritual; and, on the other hand, the more important knowledge of spirit, of man's future, which retrospects his present life and all past ages, and reaches into the infinite ages to come, was the especial care of those who scorned nature and abhorred reason. Hence the antagonism, which can only be removed by the priest laying aside his books as infallible authority, discarding beliefs, dogmas, and metaphysical word legerdemain, and studying the inner world in the same manner that the outer has been so advantageously explored. When this has been done, it may be found that physical investigators have not the whole truth, even when they have been the most exact.

It may be found that, having omitted the spiritual side in all their investigations, their conclusions are erroneous to the extent of that factor, which may be one of the most important. It may be found that in order to have a complete and perfect knowledge of the external world, the internal or spiritual must be understood.

Here we face the time-old questions: What is matter? What is spirit? The philosophy of nature here rests. There is no middle ground. The materialist starts from the atom, which, he says, has in itself all the possibilities of the universe and outside of which there is nothing.

THE ATOM.--But who knows of the atom, into which matter, at last analysis, is resolved? No one. Aside from the active forces which apparently flow from it, we know nothing, and speculation takes the place of knowledge. That speculation, unfettered by the requirements of accurate science, grew rankly in the minds of the sages of antiquity, and bore the strangest fruits. From that time to the present, speculative thought has not ceased in activity, nor arrived at any certain conclusion.

The atomic theory is one of the most splendid generalizations in the whole circle of sciences. As a working hypothesis its aid is invaluable, and the solution it affords of the most intricate combination of the elements, truly marvelous. Yet it is a conjecture; the existence of the atom a guess. No one ever saw, tasted, or felt the atom. It is absolutely beyond the senses, as it is beyond any instrumental aid thereto. The entire structure of physical science, as expounded to-day, rests on conjecture, the only evidence in support of which is that it explains the phenomena. There is no assurance that other conjectures might not explain them quite as well.

It would be a waste of time to explore this field, wherein the baseless dreams of philosophers and scientists have grown like Jonah's gourd, over-shadowing the barren sands.

The manner in which the nature of the distinct and indestructible atom was arrived at, shows the puerility of the theory. If we take a fragment of matter, we can break it into distinct pieces; these are again divided, and so on, until we reach a point where further division is impossible.

One of these indivisible particles, says the Materialist, is an atom; a conclusion derived from the gross conception of material division, and the limitation of the mind.

Endow this atom with force, or call it a center for the propagation of force, and the materialistic system is complete; yet these conclusions are but dreams. With equal arrogance, the Materialists lead to the higher ground of vitality, of mind and of morals, forgetting that the fundamental proposition on which this system rests is a guess, a surmise, and nothing more.

But investigation by other means than the primitive experience of mechanical division, shows that the atom has no existence as a fixed entity. Professor Crookes has demonstrated that matter has properties unknown to the present race of philosophers.

By way of illustration: If a certain vessel be closed, and the air exhausted, until only one hundred atoms remain, that hundred leave no space, but occupy the entire vessel. If the vacuum be made more perfect, and only ten atoms remain, the ten still occupy the whole space; and if the process could be carried so far that only one remained, it would still fill the space. The atomist might divide it indefinitely, and yet each division fill the space. In short, were there but one atom in the universe, that atom would fill all space.

NEW PROPERTIES.--When matter is thus rarified, or in other words, when the pressure is removed, new properties appear, and the tangible fades into the intangible. The qualities of pure force begin to be manifested. The intimation is made that were it possible to make the vacuum more perfect, there would arise out of this invisible gas, spontaneous manifestation of energy; or matter would be resolved into force.

WHAT IS MATTER?--Having seen that the conception of the atom is immature, and incapable of demonstration, we find matter, of which the atom is supposed to be the foundation, equally incapable of definition. With matter we never come in sensuous contact; we only know its forces, as expressed in phenomena.

The succession of seasons, the recurrence of day and night, the teeming earth, the starry heavens--these are manifestations of matter. Matter here is revealed to us as an appearance. Matter is appearance; phenomena are concrete expressions of force. It may be asked: Do these phenomena create themselves? Do bodies become organic by the confluence of atoms? Rather are they not molded by the force which through them gains expression? What is this force? Is it independent? On ultimate analyses, force resolves itself into motion, which is discernable to the senses only as expressed in phenomena. If we were obliged to explain the phenomena of matter only, some theory might be plausibly maintained; fronting one world we might understand it, but we are fronting two worlds. There is constantly the caused and the cause. We never are satisfied that the caused caused itself. We may receive the beautiful exposition of the doctrine of evolution, and yet we have only the road over which life has been irresistibly forced. Why? Wherefore? By what power? Instinctively we turn to the realm of spiritual causes.

Material science, with all its boasted accuracy and infallibility, breaks down, and utterly fails, when called to explain mental and spiritual phenomena. It boasts of infallibility, when its fundamental theories are conjectures that the advance of thought may to-morrow show to be vagaries of fancy. We must look to the eternal activities of spirit for the final solution of the grossest manifestation of matter.