Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography · 18 of 34

X. I Will: Be Thou Clean

Faith is absolutely essential. We must believe or we will never move. Doubt and unbelief end in stagnation and death. Positive belief, even if mixed with error, leads by degrees towards truth. Its very positiveness puts it in a process of self-rectification. Will is life. The illumined will is the divine energy, or God in us. It is a manifestation of the Eternal Will, the supreme ego. Nothing can withstand its energy. It takes hold upon forces that are infinite. To live vigorously, we must live by faith. Our nourishment is unseen, but real. Those who are doing the most to uplift the world are those whose intensity of faith first reconstructed their own souls. “I will” is a projectile that hits the mark, a power that “removes mountains.” Doubt is disintegration. It leads into the Slough of Despond. It is leaden, nerveless, and cowardly. “I will” is the pilot that grasps the helm and steers the human craft Godward. Its vitality includes regeneration and even creative power. “Faith is the substance” (present realization) “of things hoped for.” “I will: be thou made clean.”

Insight

Faith is the substance (present realization) of things hoped for — Wood is parenthetically translating Hebrews 11:1, and the gloss he gives (present realization) is doing real interpretive work. The Greek hypostasis there means under-standing, foundation, what stands beneath; the King James substance imports modern materialist connotations that the original did not carry. Wood is correctly pushing the reader back toward the older sense: faith as the experiential foundation, not faith as the conviction-without-evidence the modern usage has flattened it to. The chapter title borrows the leper-cleansing line from Matthew 8:3 (I will: be thou clean), which Wood reads as the projection of will at sufficient intensity to alter outcome. The exegesis is bold; the underlying practice (settled inward orientation accumulates effects over time) has older and humbler versions in the contemplative literature.Hebrews 11:1 (hypostasis); Matthew 8:3; period New Thought reading of biblical healing; cross-ref Cassian Conferences on faith as foundation.