Chapter XVI
THE LAW OF ATTRACTION
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“For whom He did foreknow,
He also did predestinate to be
conformed to the image of His
Son.”
--Romans 8:29
[183] Two of
the cardinal points in Calvin’s
doctrine of predestination are, first,
that “God elects individuals to be
saved”; second, that “He
designs complete redemption for these
elect only.” The Koran teaches that
“Every event is predestined from
eternity and cannot possibly be
avoided.” From these teachings
there has grown a form of fatalism which
declares that “if a man is born to
be hanged he will never be
drowned.” The old idea of
predestination was most discouraging,
since no man knew whether he was elected
of God to be saved or not, so that
regardless of his efforts to live the
Christian life, he was always more or
less uncertain about the post mortem
consequences. Happily this is changing,
even in the churches which recognize
Calvin as their earthly founder. It is
difficult to reconcile the predestination
of one man to eternal bliss and another
to endless torment with the justice of
[184] that God Whom we now know to be
impartial and universal Love.
If God is no
respecter of persons, as the Scriptures
declare, then it is impossible to
understand how the fate of a man can be
decreed before he is born, so that in
spite of his most earnest endeavors he
must perforce go the way of the flesh
when all that is within him prefers to
follow the spirit. Theologians have tried
to prove, with very indifferent results,
that predestination, as Calvin taught it
and as the Koran teaches it, does not
necessarily interfere with the exercise
of free will. The moment you inject into
the strange theological situation the
element of free will, or free moral
agency, you have something which, if
pushed to the extreme of its possibility,
at once interferes with the preconceived
plan of the Predestinator. Free moral
agency or free will supposes the power of
the individual to save or lose himself,
make or break himself, in the degree that
he follows the law of Righteousness, or
fails to follow it. It is hard,
therefore, to reconcile the doctrine of
predestination with that of free moral
agency, since one has a tendency to
offset the other, and thus balk the
purpose of Him Who knows no defeat.
Free moral
agency is the God-bestowed power by which
man must eventually work out his own
salvation. It is the sublime power of
Thought by which a man may think himself
into negative misfortune or positive
prosperity.
Predestination is a truth, but not as it
is [185] taught, nor as it is commonly
understood. “There is,” as
Shakespeare says, “a divinity which
shapes our ends, rough hew them how we
will.” But it is inconceivable that
a God Who could plan an orderly universe
and create man in His own image and
likeness could not at the same time see
the end from the beginning.
For Infinite
Wisdom to know anything, is for It to
foreknow all things, therefore, in Divine
Science we accept predestination as the
plan of Divine Mind to attract all things
to Itself, and conform all things to
Itself. Not the election of a few to be
saved, but the selection of all, as the
beneficiaries of His love, is the method
of God’s goodness. The most
hardened sinner will one day see the
error of his way and turn unto God, for
it is in accordance with his spiritual
destiny to do so, since it is written
“Through the greatness of Thy power
shall Thine enemies submit themselves
unto Thee.”
The
Australian aborigine hurls his boomerang
so that it will return with unerring
accuracy to the hand which throws it.
This is one form of predestination. Man,
in the process of his spiritual
unfoldment, makes the circuit of human
experiences only to discover that the
place from which he started is the place
in which he must end. Like the
Australian’s boomerang he must,
through science or suffering, return to
the Father’s hand. The length of
time spent in returning to primitive
perfectness depends largely on the manner
in which we use those two most [186]
precious things of time and thought. The
intelligent use of time and thought
depends entirely on what we know of
Truth, since it is Truth which is the
determining factor in all cases. To spend
time and thought in error is merely to
add disappointment to disappointment. So
long as the race spent its energies under
the delusion that the earth was flat, one
continent was ignorant of the existence
of any other continent but itself; but
when the Truth became apparent and men
began to use time and thought in the
pursuit of more Truth, continent was
added to continent. The limited and
bounded gave place to the unlimited and
unbounded, and the explorer still sails
and endures hardships because he knows
that all has not yet been discovered.
Laboring
under the delusion that predestination is
a chart of life which the individual must
follow, and that the events of life,
good, bad, or indifferent, have been
carefully planned by God before
one’s birth, one is apt to become a
fatalist of a foolish sort, arguing that
it matters not at all how one thinks or
acts, since the end will be just the same
after all. On the principle that
“what is to be, will be,” men
have become stoically indifferent when
they might have become pre-eminently
constructive.
Thinking of
the doctrine of predestination on its
negative side only, men have concluded
that the least that could be expected of
them was to be as moral as possible and
leave other matters to a law which they
were not supposed to understand. [187]
But predestination has its positive side,
and it is this side which we in Divine
Science are striving to understand, and
with which we are seeking to
co-operate.
The positive
side of predestination is embodied in the
words of our text: “For Whom He did
foreknow, He also did predestinate to be
conformed to the image of His son.”
The definition of the word conform is
“to make like in form, to bring
into harmony, or correspondence with a
model or example,” and if we accept
this definition we see at once
Paul’s grand conception of the
scheme of universal salvation. If the
word predestination means
“foreordained,” and conform
means to “make like” in every
particular, then we see that the plan of
Divine Wisdom is that all men sometime,
somehow, somewhere, must become like
Jesus in Character and in Power.
It is as if
God put man into this great workshop to
work at the problem of life and develop
character in the process. It is as if one
were put into a studio with all the
necessary elements for creating a work of
art, and with the most perfect model as a
pattern from which to work. And then it
is as if Divine Wisdom had said,
“It is only a question of time when
all men shall prove their
God-likeness.” May not this account
for what we call the great patience of
God? When a teacher knows that it is only
a question of time when all his boys
shall solve all their problems is he not
likely to be patient and gentle? And is
not his mental attitude going to be a
wonderful [188] example to the boys? His
faith in them and his conviction in their
ultimate dominion communicates itself, as
the boys develop in such an atmosphere as
they can in no other. If a schoolmaster
should predestinate or foreordain each
boy in his school to become proficient in
his conformity to all the arts and
sciences, no matter what that boy’s
personal experiences might be in arriving
at this desirable state, and if in
addition to this preconceived plan he had
the power to put it into perfect
execution, what a wonderful schoolmaster
he would be! May it not be that this is
just the kind of schoolmaster God is?
If we can
regard this earth experience as a
schoolroom in which we are to learn the
most important lessons of life, and if we
can realize that we are foreordained or
predestined to become conformed to the
image of the Perfect Man which is the
Christ in us, what a glorious incentive
it will be! To realize that it is only a
question of time when we must become
conformed to the pure, the perfect and
the powerful, and that procrastination on
our part is the only thing which is
delaying the glad day, is to be seized
with the holy desire to enter into heaven
here and now. What an inspiration should
be the consciousness that in all
God’s plan there is nothing that
can be lost, and that the worst, the very
worst, that can happen to even the most
hardened sinner is a more or less painful
postponement of the things we are
entitled to when we earn them!
[189] This
helps us to think of predestination as
Paul puts it. It does two wonderful
things for me. It reveals the eternal
Love of God on the one hand, and the
ultimate perfectness and happiness of man
on the other. It hurts me to think of
predestination as Calvin expressed it,
and as the Koran states it. When I try to
think that only the elect can be saved,
and when I see so few who are elect,
notwithstanding the desires of so many to
be so, it is depressing. I tell this to a
man who believes in “infant
damnation” and he says, “Yes,
it is depressing, but it is nevertheless
true,” and then I turn to Jesus and
he answers the question of my soul by
saying: “It is not the will of my
Father which is in heaven that one of
these little ones should perish, but that
all should have everlasting
life.”
What a
comforting Jesus: and what a different
idea he had of predestination from that
of some modern followers! “It is my
Father’s good pleasure to give you
the kingdom,” said He, and one can
almost hear him add, “and why do ye
so long refuse to partake of it? Since it
is foreordained that ye must become like
Him, why do ye linger and
wait?”
Why do you
accept this erroneous conception of
predestination, which would hypnotize you
into the belief that at the moment of
your birth God placed an invisible tag
about your neck signifying the painful
manner of your life and death and also
your future hopelessness? You believe in
destiny and a cruel fate, but this is
because you [190] see only half the
picture. You see the boomerang leaving
the hand of the thrower and you ask where
it is going. You do not see its return
and you conclude it will be lost. You see
yourselves out here in space, and you
wonder why you are here and what is going
to become of you. You do not see
yourselves slowly but surely returning to
the Father’s house and you become
afraid.
Life is a
great mystery until one understands its
purpose, but so is the schoolroom to the
boy. When one understands, however, what
it is all about, it takes on a new and a
more hopeful significance. When one
realizes that the painful experiences of
this earth journey are not predestined
and unavoidable calamities quite so much
as they are the sharp reminders of a
spiritual ignorance, which may be
rectified through spiritual science, one
takes hope, and “hope maketh not
ashamed.”\
For this
cause came we into the world, namely: to
prove our Divinity, and how can this be
done unless it be in the studio of the
mind? With a picture of oneself destined
to fail, despite efforts to the contrary,
what will the consequence be? Can figs
grow on thistles? Can the fruit of
success and prosperity grow on a tree,
the seed of which is a belief in
predestined poverty? Can a man prove his
divinity so long as he believes that he
is predestined to fill a drunkard’s
grave, no matter how heroically he
struggles against the tendency?
[191] What
is the remedy for all these
pain-producing mistakes? Does it not lie
in a right idea of this much
misunderstood Law of God? Does it not
rest upon a spiritual interpretation of
what predestination really is? When a man
understands that he is predestined,
foreordained to become conformed to the
very image of God, to manifest God in
terms of Life, and Health, and Happiness,
and that here or elsewhere he must
eventually measure up to his foreordained
Perception, he is likely to conclude it
might as well be here as elsewhere.
Since the
end of man, according to Divine Plan, is
to become like God, the individual who
perceives this Truth puts on the garment
of righteousness and the breastplate of
Truth and goes forth to fulfill his
allotted destiny. Knowing that
predestination means that nothing which
God has created can be lost or come to
naught, he regards himself and every
other man in the world as a candidate for
the kingdom of heaven upon earth. Man
cannot utterly destroy himself, even if
he tries, for this would interfere with
predestination; the worst he can do by
such an attempt is to make a temporary
fool of himself.
When man,
the boomerang, has spent his force in the
outward journey, he returns almost
involuntarily, and this is in accordance
with a Destiny which shapes his ends. He
returns from Whence he came. The ends
must unite in Spirit, and they are so
welded together by the fervent [192] heat
of God’s Love that mortal eye
cannot discern the point of union. This,
then, is Predestination: that we shall be
conformed to the Image of Him Who created
us. “The work to be performed is
ours, the strength is all His
own.”
Chapter
17
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
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