[247] Faith leads to
understanding. And what is
understanding as used in Mental
Science? It is simply a comprehension
of the truths I have been trying to
make clear in these lessons. Not
merely a superficial comprehension of
them, but a thorough and organic
comprehension which means the
cementing of body and mind into one
in the thought, and that one mind.
Such a comprehension as this means
nothing less than the atonement--that
atonement spoken of in the Bible by
which man is made whole, or holy.
Do not forget that man is always
whole, or holy--always altogether
mind, because there is nothing in the
visible world but mind. But the
trouble is he does not know this, and
it is his knowledge of this fact that
constitutes the atonement--the
at-one-ment, which means the
at-one-mind --and secures his
salvation.
If the student can accept the fact
that all is good, then faith will
start up out of intuition--which is
the natural knowing--and will in time
make the meaning of every statement
clear. It may take months, or even
longer to do it, but the
understanding will surely come; and
its coming will be rapid or slow in
proportion to the student’s
faithfulness in pursuing the
study.
What faith promises the Law
performs. It is security for every
promissory note that faith can draw.
And this is true because faith is the
connecting link between the
internal--the Law of Attraction--and
the external--which is the
man’s reasoning powers, as
represented in the personality. We
walk by faith until we reach
understanding. This is equivalent to
saying that we believe in the good
until belief finds confirmation in
the knowledge that the good alone
exists. Then we need no more faith so
far as this one item of truth is
concerned. We have achieved it. We
have scaled another flight in upward
growth. We stand on the summit of
another mountain range of thought,
happy beyond any previous condition
of happiness; for nothing lifts us
like a knowledge of truth. No joy
ever comes to us equal to the birth
of a new truth in our organizations.
After we have come into the truth we
are now studying we shall be ready to
prospect for other truths in which
faith, or belief, will again
illuminate the way; for faith in the
possibility of man’s
attainments will never die. All
through the great forever faith will
be our prophet and our guide. It
flows through us always in the
direction of understanding.
Understanding can never fulfill
her perfect work. Man can never know
all there is to be known. To be at
once and forever in the understanding
of all truth would be the complete
externalization of Being in the
entirety of every possibility the Law
contains; and this is impossible. For
we are individuals; that is to say we
are limited by individual beliefs;
and we are travelers through the
universe, and traveling as [248]
rapidly as our beliefs expand by the
recognition of more truth. And it is
in this constant expansion that we
will find our heaven. Heaven is
within. Heaven is the unfoldment of
our faculties to the perception of
new truth. As we perceive new truth
it manifests itself in our bodies and
in our surroundings, because being
mental creatures, that which we know
we become.
Oh, what a wonderful journey we
have started on! How happy we ought
to be for the mere boon of life! For
life is nothing less than the
individual unfoldment on the external
plane of a universe of indescribable
good. Marred and blemished as (in our
ignorance) life seems to us, yet a
fuller understanding of it will show
us the never ending glory of it.
I never valued existence as I do
now, when I see how accessible the
infinite vitality, is, and how it may
be unfolded and lived right here in
this world, until the very
remembrance of our previous ignorant
beliefs of our helplessness, as
expressed in sickness, deformity,
poverty, old age and death, will have
vanished from our minds. Yes, this
vital principle is actually ours to
command in our efforts to overcome
our beliefs in evil; in order to
cleanse, enlighten, purify and
beautify ourselves--first, by denial,
and secondly, by affirmation, which
is appropriation.
And this effect will not be
postponed beyond the grave, as the
preachers would have us believe.
There is neither common sense nor
logic in such an idea as this,
because the man is a whole now, in
the present life, right where he is,
and just as he stands today. Do we
not see that whatever affects him in
one part of his being affects him all
through? You do not touch the man
bodily when you tell him of some
awful occurrence that prostrates his
emotional or affectional nature, and
yet your communication will affect
him bodily, and sometimes kill him
outright. In a lighter degree we see
this a dozen times a day. If a man is
happy, his face is radiant; if
unhappy, it is opaque and heavy as
lead, thus proving him to be all
mind, and of the same stuff all the
way through.
Intuitive, or natural belief, or
faith, is the unconscious clothing
power of desire; the aggregating
principle of individual life. It is
that unconscious or unreasoning
intelligence which says,
“Desire is alright, and I
believe in it and trust it
fully.” And this is the animal
condition slowly growing up, though
clouded by doubt, to the place where
the developed reasoning powers, or
the conscious knowledge, will endorse
it. Intuition is the unconscious or
natural knowing that desire is the
basis of all growth. The full-fledged
reason that has arrived at the same
conclusions is the conscious knowing
of this same truth.
Faith is the light flowing from
the intuitive perception of this
great truth to the reasoning or
conscious knowledge of it. This being
so, do you not see the necessity of
cultivating faith? In the Bible
salvation is made to depend upon
faith, because faith is the
connecting link between man’s
developed, or reasoning intelligence,
and his undeveloped natural
intelligence, that of itself, without
effort, recognizes desire as its
spirit, or soul. Therefore it is
through faith that the conscious
intelligence makes the atonement with
desire, its actuating principle. To
make the atonement is to come
consciously into the understanding
that a man is one; that he is not
part matter and part mind, but all of
a piece; one, or as the Bible
expresses it, whole or holy.
The atonement is the man’s
conscious recognition of the fact
that he, in his personality, is all
mind, every bit of him, and that
there is nothing mortal or perishable
about him. When he understands this
he will shed the exhausted or
devitalized atoms--that he no longer
needs--from himself as he goes on;
always leaving the deadness of old
conditions and reaching forth to
partake of the vitality of the new
conditions ahead of him.
What is man’s condition
before he [249] makes the atonement?
He is as one broken in two
parts--mind and matter; and he
believes these two parts to be out of
harmony with each other. He believes
one part to be perishable and the
other eternal. He believes that it is
out of this inharmonious relationship
that sin, sickness and death are our
portion, and as man is really all
mind, and his beliefs are therefore
real conditions to him, it cannot be
otherwise than that he takes the
consequences of such beliefs. (No
other writer on this subject has ever
explained why it was that a man must
of necessity take the consequences of
his beliefs.) He takes the
consequences of his beliefs because
(being all mind) his beliefs are his
real conditions. “As a man
thinketh (or believes) so is
he.” All is mind, and mind is
the vital desire, either expressed,
as in nature, or unexpressed, as in
the latent forces whose monitions we
feel but do not fully realize.
We are in reality one with our
vitalizing Life Principle, and have
always been; so is everything in
nature; but salvation can come only
to those who recognize the fact. The
recognition of the fact that we,
being all mind, are one with the Law,
or the vital principle, is the
atonement-- the at-one-ment -- that
we are required to make. Salvation
comes only to those who believe.
Believe what? Why, that man is one
with the Law of his Being. Belief
rests on faith until understanding is
reached.
I said that salvation comes only
to those who believe; salvation from
sin, sickness, poverty and death.
These conditions are the hell we are
to be saved from, and therefore it is
that salvation comes only to those
who believe in the omnipresence of
Being, or Life, or the omnipresence
of Law, of which all visible life is
the manifestation. In time all people
will believe; none will be exempt.
All will eventually be saved from the
hell of this world’s darkened
and crude beliefs. All persons will
finally come to a recognition of the
fact that they are but the
externalization of the Law of
Attraction, and are each one
with the Law and inseparable from
it.
The atonement, which is simply the
consciousness of a truth that always
existed, namely, our oneness with
Law, the eternal Life Principle, is
our salvation-- salvation from the
hell of our present erroneous
beliefs; the salvation of our bodies
from sin, sickness, poverty and
death. Do you not see that this
atonement guarantees man immortal
life? What is immortal life but
immunity from death? And what is
immunity from death but immunity from
disease and the frailties of old age?
We are constantly enjoined in the
Bible to be made whole, or holy. (The
two words, “whole” and
holy” mean the same thing, and
whenever they occur they refer to the
atonement.)
To be whole, or holy, simply means
that we are to recognize ourselves as
inseparable from the elementary Life
Principle, which is the Law of
Attraction, or the Law of Love; that
the body and the spirit which infuses
it are one; that the body is
malleable and susceptible to change
without having to die, the same as
the thought is; or at least this
would be the case if the human
consciousness once obtained an
intelligent recognition of the fact.
But until the individual does
recognize it there will continue to
be the same separation of the body
from its finer part--that part we
call its spirit or thought--that
there now is.
The body, if left to itself by
this finer part of itself--its
positive and uplifting part, its
thinking part--will probably seek
higher conditions through the
negative law of disintegration, thus
preparing itself as a rebuilding
factor.
And the time will come when it
will arrive at that degree of
positiveness where, as recognized
spirit or will, it will be able to
take the negative forces into its own
hands and to go on consciously
re-forming itself without any further
loss of individuality. But the body,
which is the same substance as [250]
the spirit, or will, only more
negative, or more crude in its
development, being under the control
of the finer part of itself--the
spirit, or will--will become one with
itself, so that there will never be
any more separation of the finer from
the coarser--the spirit, or
will--from the body as there now is
in death.
The spirit, or will--which means
the more educated thought, and is the
positive degree of personal
development--has unquestionable
control over the body, which is the
negative degree of personal
development; and when the spirit, or
will, actually understands this, it
will become able to snatch the body
from under the dominion of the
negative law--which is the so-called
law of gravity--and will place it
under the positive and only real
law--the Law of Attraction. It is
because the spirit, or will, of the
man is ignorant of its power to do
this that disease and death exist in
the world today.
But the spirit, or will--which is
represented by our higher thoughts,
our imagination--is beginning to
learn its own power even now. Mental
Science has made the discovery and is
spreading the news, and it may
therefore be said that the
understanding of how to conquer death
is now here.
The spirit, or will, not only
recognizes its power over the body,
but its right of mastery, because it
is the body’s superior
intelligence. It has perceptions of a
far-reaching and undying progress
that the body seems to know nothing
of, being too low in the negative to
perceive that which is possible of
attainment.
But it must not be forgotten that
the body is all mind just the same as
the spirit, or will; but it is a
heavier grade of mind, or a cruder
strata of mind. Although it is all
one with spirit, or will, yet it is
of so negative or crude a quality of
spirit, or will, that it does not
recognize itself as such. Neither, as
yet, has the spirit, or will, so
recognized it. The spirit, or will,
has taken it for granted that the
body was dead matter infused by the
vital substance of spirit, or will;
never until within the last few years
having imagined that the two
substances--the body and the
spirit--were one substance, of the
same piece.
But this is so, it has always been
so, therefore the atonement has
always been made, but it has not been
made to the consciousness of man. And
when the atonement, the at-one-ment,
the at-one-mind-- is spoken of, it
has reference to the time when man
shall learn the fact that he is one
with his spirit, or will, and not to
the time when he becomes one with it,
for he has always been one with it.
This truth, like all other truths,
exists; and has always existed, but
it has not existed in man’s
perceptions, and until it does exist
in man’s perceptions it is
non-existent for him.
We join these bodies of ours,
which are not matter, but mind, or
intelligence--a degree of
intelligence at present too coarse to
understand their oneness with our
spirits, or wills--we join them to
our spirits, or wills, by transfusing
them with the fact of their true
relationship, their oneness. And this
is the understanding that makes them
one in our belief; that cements them
forever in our thought, and makes
them all thought, or spirit, or will.
This is being made whole, or
holy--simply recognizing the fact
that we are already whole, or holy.
This is why I said in a previous
lesson that all power is in
recognition.
Then being by the power of
recognition made conscious of our
connection with the fountain-head,
having faith in the connecting pipe,
we may be fed every hour of our lives
with still higher truths; thus
maintaining health and strength,
courage, justice, beauty,
intelligence, and every other good
and desirable attribute. We can
arrest the decay already begun in our
bodies, and begin life anew under the
happy knowledge that death will not
come in a few years to put an end to
the work we are doing.
Man believes himself cut off from
this Life source, and so by this
non-recognition [251] of the source
of Life forever present with him, he
withers and dies. It is just as if
food were in the next room for the
satisfying of his hunger, and there
were no whisperings of faith to tell
him so, and he starves in spite of
his easy communication with all that
he needs.
Let man be joined consciously with
his life-fountain by a knowledge of
the situation (understanding) and he
will not die. And I mean this remark
to apply right here in this external
world.
The creedists say if a man have
faith he shall not die. But because
all men have died, whether they have
faith or not, they have changed the
application of the text--thus
destroying its true meaning--and made
it refer to man’s soul instead
of his body. But the text refers to
his body as well as his soul, for
soul and body are one. Every word in
the scriptures that bears on this
subject, and the great bulk of that
immense work does bear on this
subject and no other, centers all its
force on the point I am now trying to
make clear. The scriptures were all
written with reference to that day
when men should obtain mastery over
physical death. Christ’s
teachings all have reference to this.
He tried to save bodies right here on
this planet. This has been the dream
and prophecy of the ages. As Christ
declared that he brought life and
immortality to light, and immortality
in the body through his conscious
recognition of his oneness with the
Life Principle or the Law of
Attraction, by which he made the
atonement and became understandingly
whole, or holy, it is therefore a
mere apology or “make
shift” of the religion of
Christ that is taught today. It is a
dodge, inadvertent to be sure, but a
dodge nevertheless, a mere
“come off,” caused by the
incapacity of his followers to reach
the same sublime pitch of
understanding that he reached.
Therefore the Christian world has
changed the meaning of the scriptures
and made the words “salvation
from death” apply to the saving
of souls. A fanciful interpretation
has been put upon almost every part
of the Bible. The Bible is a sort of
compendium of all the illuminated
thoughts of the ages; and is, if
properly understood, a plain,
practical guide to the truths now
taught by the sensible branch of
Mental Scientists.
“Believe and live.”
“Have faith and you shall be
saved.” Saved from what? Not
from the imaginary hell of the
future, which has now, in these
latter days, become the standing jest
of intelligence, but from the hell of
ignorance called sin, sickness,
poverty and death which reigns right
here. Saved from the wrath to come by
being saved from the wrath that is.
The whole plan of atonement is as
clear as spring water when viewed by
the light of Mental Science. The
Bible shows man how to live, not how
to die. Any poor, dispirited thing
can die, but it requires courage,
integrity, love, fortitude and
intelligence to live. The reason we
die is because we do not recognize
within ourselves the qualities that
ought to live. The Bible teaches how
to recognize deathless qualities
within ourselves, how to become one
with them by believing in them and
thus living them. Jesus tried to
bring life and immortality to light
in bringing to light the deathless
qualities now latent in man. And for
that purpose he told us to believe in
God--by which he meant the power of
the Law--and to learn that we are one
with it by becoming aware of the fact
that we are all mind, or spirit, or
will. And in this matter he taught us
to save our bodies. Having
demonstrated by the atonement that
body and spirit are one, why should
he have taught us to defer our
salvation by a postponement of the
vital knowledge that saves us?
Jesus knew that our wills were
themselves the saving power. Did he
not say, “Heaven is
within”? Was this not
equivalent to telling us that we must
evolve this internal heaven and make
it a practical reality to live in
right here and now? His whole effort
was [252] to redeem the present, not
the future, for he knew that no
matter how long we were to live, the
present is the only time we can ever
have. This interpretation, which is
the true interpretation of Mental
Science, plants religion on a
practical basis and makes it of use
now in our time of need. Rules of
procedure for future action never did
or will relieve present want. And to
cross bridges before we come to them
has always proved unprofitable
work.
Christ said, “I came not to
bring peace but a sword.” He
said this because he knew that the
truths he spoke would find heavy
opposition from the bigoted
religionists of his time; those men
whose brains had degenerated into
mere fossilized sponges; who, having
ears, heard not; and having eyes, saw
not those things that would have
brought them their greatest
happiness.
Mental Science says, “I give
you food for thought, but you must do
the thinking. I come to arouse you,
not to put you to sleep. You have
slept too long way down in the
negative conditions. You have slept
under all the hopes which the
churches have held out for future
salvation. I now bring you hopes of
present salvation. I tell you that
life is action, and thought is life;
that you must arouse yourself and
concentrate your minds in an effort
to reach the summit of understanding
on this great and vital
subject.”
