Lessons in Truth · 11 of 12

Unity of the Spirit

Did we not know it as a living reality that behind all the multitude and variety of human endeavors to bring about the millennium there stands forever the Great Master-Mind which sees the end from the beginning, the Great Master-Artist who himself is (through human vessels as his hands) putting here a touch of one color and there a touch of another, according to the vessel used, on the picture, we might sometimes be discouraged.

Were it not at times so utterly ridiculous, it would always be pitiful to see the human mind of man trying to limit God to personal comprehension. However much any one of us may know of God, there will always be unexplored fields in the realms of expression, and it is an evidence of our narrow vision to say, “This is all there is of God.”

Suppose a dozen people are standing on the dark side of a wall in which are various sized openings. Viewing the scene outside through the opening assigned to him, one sees all there is within a certain radius. He says, “I see the whole world; in it are trees and fields.” Another, through a larger opening, has a more extended view; he says, “I see trees and fields and houses; I see the whole world.” The next one, with a still larger opening, exclaims, “Oh! you are all wrong! I alone see the whole world; I see trees and fields and houses and rivers and animals.”

The fact is, each one looking at the same world sees just according to the size of the aperture through which he is looking, and he limits the world to just his own circumscribed view of it. You would say at once that such limitation was only a mark of each man’s ignorance and narrowness. Every one would pity the man who thus displayed—aye, fairly vaunted—his ignorance.

From time immemorial there have been schisms and divisions among religious sects and denominations. And now with the newer light we have, even the light of the knowledge of one God immanent in all men, many still cling to the external differences, so postponing, instead of hastening, the day of the millennium; at least they postpone it for themselves.

I want, if possible, to help break down all seeming “middle walls of partition,” even as Christ, the living Christ, doth in reality break down or destroy all real walls of partition. I want to help you to see that there is no real wall of difference between all the various sects of the new theology, except such as appear to you because of your circumscribed view. I want you to see, if you do not already, that every time you try to limit God’s manifestation of himself in any person or through any person, in order to make that manifestation conform to what you see as truth, you are only crying loudly, “Ho, every one, come and view my narrowness and ignorance!”

I want to stimulate you to lose sight of all differences, all side issues and lesser things, and seek but for one thing—i. e., the consciousness of the presence of an indwelling God in your own soul and life. And believe me, just as there is less separation between the spokes of a wheel the nearer they get to the hub, so you will find that the nearer you both come to the Perfect Center, which is the Father, the less difference will there be between you and your brother.

The Faith Healer, he who professes to believe only in what he terms “divine healing” (as though there could be any other healing than divine), differs from the so-called Spiritual Scientist only in believing that he must ask, seek, knock, importune, before he can receive; while he of the Science teaching knows that he has already received God’s free gift of life and health and all things, and that by speaking the words of it the gifts are made manifest. Both get like results (God made visible) through faith in the Invisible. The mind of the one is lifted to a place of faith by asking or praying; the mind of the other is lifted to the place of faith by speaking the words of truth.

Is there any real difference?

The Mental Scientist usually scorns to be classed with either of the other two sects. He loudly declares that “all is mind,” and that all the God he knows or cares anything about is the invincible, unconquerable “I” within him, which nothing can daunt or overcome.

He talks about conscious mind and unconscious mind and subconscious mind, and fancies he has something entirely different and infinitely higher than either of the other sects. He boldly proclaims, “I have the truth; the others are in error, too orthodox,” etc., and thus he calls the world’s attention to the small size of the aperture through which he is looking at the stupendous whole.

Beloved, as surely as you and I live, it is all one and the same truth. There may be a distinction, but it is without a difference.

The happy Methodist who will from his heart exclaim, “Praise the Lord!” no matter what happens to him, and who thereby finds “all things working together for good” to himself, is in reality saying the “All is good” of the metaphysician. Each one is simply “acknowledging Me [of God, Good] in all thy ways,” which is indeed a magical wand, bringing sure deliverance out of any trouble to all who faithfully use it.

The teachings of Spirit are intrinsically the same, because Spirit is one. I heard an uneducated little colored woman speak in a most orthodox prayer meeting some time ago. She knew no more of “science” than a babe knows of Latin. Her whole face, however, was radiant with the light of the Christ manifest through her. She told how, five or six years before, she was earnestly seeking to know more of God (seeking in prayer, as she knew nothing about seeking spiritual light from people), and one day, in all earnestness, she asked that some special word of his will might be given directly to her as a sort of private message. These words flashed into her mind: “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.…No man can serve two masters.”

She had read these words many times, but that day they were illumined by the Spirit, and she saw that to have an eye “single” meant seeing but one power in her life; while she saw two powers (God and devil, Good and evil) she was serving two masters. From that day to this, though she had passed through all sorts of troublous circumstances, and trials of poverty, illness in family, intemperate husband, etc., she found always the most marvelous, full and complete deliverance out of them all by resolutely adhering to the “single eye”— seeing God only. She would not even look for a moment at the seeming evil to combat it or rid herself of it, because, as she said, “Lookin’ at God with one eye and this evil with the other is being double-eyed, and God tole me to keep my eye single.”

This woman, who had never heard of any “science,” or metaphysical teaching, or laws of mind, was compassing and actually overcoming all the tribulations of this world by positively refusing to have anything but a single eye. She had been taught in a single day by Infinite Spirit the whole secret of how to banish evil, and have only good and joy in her. Isn’t it all very simple?

At center, all is one and the same God forever more. And I believe that the Hottentot, the veriest heathen that ever lived, he who worships the golden calf as his highest conception of God, worships God. His mind has not yet expanded to a place where he can grasp any idea of God apart from a visible form, something that he can see with human eyes and handle with fleshly hands. But at heart he is seeding something higher than his present conscious self to be his deliverance out of evil.

Are you and I, with all our boasted knowledge, doing anything more or different?

The Spirit at the center of even the heathen, who is God’s child, is thus seeking, though blindly, its Father-God. Shall any one dare to say that it will not find that which it seeks— its Father? Shall we not rather say it will find, because of that immutable law that “he that seeketh findeth”?

You have now come to know that at the center of your being God (omnipotent Power) ever lives. From the nature of your relationship to him, and by his own immutable laws, you may become conscious of his presence and eternally abide in him and he in you.

The moment any soul really comes to recognize that which is an absolute fact—viz., that one Spirit, even the Father, who being made manifest in the Son, ever lives at the center of all human beings—he will know that he can cease forever from any undue anxiety about bringing others into the same external fold as himself. If your friend, your son, your husband or brother, does not see the truth as you see it, do not try by repeated external argument to convert him. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” That which is needed is not that you (the mortal which is so fond of talk and argument) try to lift up your brother. The Holy Spirit, or Christ within him, declares, “If I be lifted up, I will draw him.” You can silently lift up this “I” within the man’s own being, and it will draw the man up unto—what? Your teaching? No. “Unto me,” the divine in himself.

If your beloved one seems to you to be going all wrong, you just say nothing at all. Keep your own light lifted up by living the victorious life of the Spirit. And then, remembering that your dear one, as well as yourself, is an incarnation of the Father, keep him silently committed to the care of his own Divine Spirit. You do not know at all what God wants to do in him; you never can know.

You do know, if you have fully recognized the fact of the same God dwelling in all men as dwells in you, that each one’s own Lord, the Christ within himself, will make no mistake. The greatest help you can give to any soul is to silently tell him whenever you think of him, “The Holy Spirit lives within you; he cares for you, is working in you that which he would have you do, and is manifesting himself through you.” Then let him alone. Be at perfect rest about him, and the result will be infinitely more and better than you could have asked or thought.

Keep ever in mind that each living soul in all God’s universe is a radiating center of the same Perfect One, some radiating more and some less, according to the awakened consciousness of the individual. If you have become conscious of this radiation in yourself, keep your thought centered right there, and the Spirit of the living God will radiate itself out from you in all directions with mighty power, doing without noise or words a great work in lifting others up. If you want to help others who are not yet awakened to this knowledge, center your thought upon this same idea for them—i. e., that they are radiating centers of the AllPerfect. Keep your “eye single” for them, as did the little colored woman for herself, and Spirit will teach them more in a day than you could in months or years.

Throughout all the ages man has been prone to the idea of separateness instead of oneness. He has believed himself separate from God and separate from other men. And even in these latter days when we talk so much about oneness, most metaphysical teachers manage again to separate God’s children from himself, by saying that while one suffers the other knows no suffering, nor does he take cognizance of the child’s suffering. We, his children, forever a part of himself, are torn and lacerated, while he, knowing nothing of this, goes sailing on as serenely and coldly as the full moon sails through the heavens on a winter night.

Little wonder, is it, that many to whom the first practical lessons in the gospel of the Christ came as liberation and power, should in time of failure and heartache have turned back to the old limited idea of the Fatherhood of God?

There is no real reason why we, having come to recognize God as Infinite Substance, should be by this recognition deprived of the familiar Fatherly companionship which in all ages has been so dear to the human heart. There is no necessity for us to separate God as substance and God as tender Father; no reason why we should not, and every reason why we should, have both in one; they are one—God-Principle outside of us as unchangeable law, God within us as tender, loving Father-Savior, who sympathizes with our every sorrow.

There is no reason why, because in our earlier years some of us were forced into the narrow Puritanical limits, which stood for a religious belief, we should now so exaggerate our freedom as to fancy we are entirely selfsufficient, and shall never again need the sweet, uplifting communion between Father and child. The created, who ever “lives, moves, and has his being” in his Creator, needs the conscious presence of that Creator, and cannot be entirely happy in knowing God only as cold, unsympathetic principle. Why cannot both conceptions find lodgment in our minds and hearts? Both are true, and both are necessary parts of a whole. The two were made to go together, and in the highest cannot be separated.

God as underlying substance of all things, God as principle, is unchanging, and does remain forever uncognizant of and unmoved by the changing things of time and sense. It is true that God as principle does not feel pain, is not moved by the cries of the children of men for help. It is a grand, stupendous thought that this power is all unchanging law, just as unchanging in its control of our affairs as in the government of the starry heavens. One is fairly conscious of his entire being expanding into grandeur as he dwells upon the thought.

But this is not all, any more than the emotional side is all. True, there is law; but there is gospel also. Nor does gospel make law of none effect; it fulfills law. God is principle, but God is individual also. Principle becomes individualized the moment it comes to dwell in external manifestation in a human body.

Principle does not change because of pity or sympathy, “even as a father pitieth his children.” The “Father in me” always moves into helpfulness when called upon and trusted. It is as though Infinite Wisdom and Power, who is Creator, Upholder, Father, outside, becomes transformed into Infinite Love, which is Mother, with all of warmth and tender helpfulness which that word implies, when he becomes focalized, so to speak, within a human body.

I do not at all understand it, but in some way this Indwelling One does move to lift the consciousness of his children up, and place it parallel with God, Principle, Law, so that no longer two are crossed, but the two—aye, the three—the human consciousness, the indwelling individual Father, and the Holy Spirit—are made one. In every life, with our present limited understanding. ( Jesus with his greater understanding was not yet exempt), there comes times when the bravest heart goes down for the moment under the apparent burdens of life; times when the strongest intellect bends like a “reed shaken in the wind,” when the most self-sufficient mind feels a helplessness which wrings from it a cry for help from the “Rock that is higher than I.”

Every pure metaphysician either has reached, or must in future reach this place: the place where God as cold principle alone will not suffice any more than in the past God as personality alone could wholly satisfy. There will come moments when the human heart is so suddenly struck as to paralyze it, and for the moment make it impossible, with strained effort, to “think right thoughts.”

At such times there will come but little comfort from the thought, “This suffering comes as the result of my wrong thinking; but God, my Father, takes no cognizance of it; I must work it out unaided and alone.” Just here we must have, and we do have, the Motherhood of God, which is not cold principle any more than your love for your child is cold principle. I would not make God-principle less, but Godindividual more.

Your Lord’s (the Father in you) whole business is to care for you, to love you with an everlasting love, to note your slightest cry and rescue you. Then you ask, “Why doesn’t he do it?”

Because you do not recognize his indwelling and his power, and by resolutely affirming that he does now manifest himself as your all sufficiency, call him forth into visibility.

God (Father-Mother) is a present help in time of trouble; but there must be a recognition of this fact, a turning away from human efforts, and an acknowledgment of God only (a single eye) before he becomes manifest.