The New Thought Simplified · 33 of 38

Seventh Suggestive Lesson

Faith is scientific. It is not mere expectation, but present substance. To live vigorously we must live by faith. The illumined will is the divine energy or power exercised in the inner man. Nothing can withstand its might. It takes hold of forces that are infinite. “I will” is a projectile which hits the mark—a power that “removes mountains.”

Unbelief ends, in stagnation and despondency. It is leaden, nerveless, and cowardly. “I will” is the pilot that grasps the helm and steers the human craft Godward.

If I fall, I will not stay down, but arise and push forward.

A victorious life is mine. Back of, and supporting me, are all the real forces in the universe. “If God be for us, who can be against us?” It is not the lower self that guides my life, but the Spirit which worketh in me. There is no uncertainty. I know in whom I have trusted.

In proportion as the Christ is unfolded in us we have a right to speak from the standpoint of the universal. Said Emerson:— “I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year. Of Cæsar’s hand and Plato’s brain, Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakespeare’s strain.”

Insight

Wood quotes Emerson’s quatrain from the Bohemian Hymn — I am owner of the sphere, of the seven stars and the solar year — to make the universal-inheritance point in the loudest possible voice. The line works for him because Emerson is the proximate New England ancestor he keeps reaching back to; the Over-Soul essay (1841) and the Divinity School Address (1838) had laid the theological foundation Wood is building on. The Pauline parallel he is implicitly leaning on is 1 Corinthians 3:21-23 (all things are yours), which is the same chain Wood ends his earlier book Ideal Suggestion on. The pastoral instinct here is sound: the imagination shrinks the inheritance, and the practice is to let it expand. The risk Wood does not name is that imaginative possession of the sphere can become aestheticism — pleasant to feel, no obligation to act. Emerson himself was vulnerable to this; Wood is too.

Ideally, we own every spiritual reality which we can appreciate and assimilate.

Even God is “our God”—that is, our own Good. I have faith in God. I have faith in myself. “According to thy faith be it unto thee.”

I Have Faith.