his thought modifies his existence. A man may think he is dying when he is not; or, when he is passing through what the world calls death, he may both think and feel that it is only a higher form of life, and that there is no death. In sickness, it is possible to think, and even believe, that the disease does not belong to the class of truly existing things, but is only a phenomenon or appearance, a false seeming, an illusion. This thought maintained will vindicate its right to be called the Crown by transforming all below it into its expression. Thought may be subject to certain laws or fixed rules of action, as may be predicated of the Divine nature itself, but is absolutely free; for the laws of its activity arise from its own essence. It knows no higher law than itself. Pure thought is the first emanation from God, as is seen in the Kabalistic scheme of the Ten Sephiroth. It is not a mere attribute or faculty of spirit; it is spirit itself. We cannot abstract thought from spirit any more than a smile can be separated from a human face, and left as an entity in empty space; and the spirit as the first emanation from God, as the Kabala affirms, is the Son of God. And as the Father has life in himself, so he has given to the Son (or the spirit) to have life in himself; and he gave him authority also to execute judgment because he is also the son of man. (John v 26, 27.) The essential characteristic of spirit, and which inheres in its very essence, as Hegel has said, is freedom and spontaneity. It originates action or motion, as Plato teaches. The essential property of matter is passivity or fatality. Thought is not like the vane on the church tower, turning in every direction from the action of a force existing outside of itself. But the spirit is a wind or breath of God that bloweth where it listeth. (John iii : 8.) It chooses its own direction in which to act. There is nothing above it but the "Unknown God," out of whom it perpetually springs. As the sun is never separated from any of his rays, but acts as one

with each and all of them, so the "Father of spirits " always approves and sanctions the action of pure spiritual thought. For pure thought is the Protogonos, the first begotten, the son and perpetual offspring of God, and from him it is never sundered. If thought and existence are identical, then it follows that to think rightly is to be well and happy. All matter including the human body exists only in mind, which is the only substance. It exists from thought and in thought. Hence, the body is to me, and for me, what I think it to be. This is an absolute and irrepealable law of our being, as much so as that all right-angled triangles are equal to each other, or that every circle, great or small, contains three hundred and sixty degrees. How soon a change of thought and feeling, as in passing from melancholy to cheerfulness, translates itself into a bodily expression! So when doubt and despair give place to hope and the full assurance of faith, the change expresses itself immediately in the face, which is the index of our interior states of mind and body. Behold in this the creative omnipotence of thought and feeling. Thought and feeling are the Elohim, the Dii Potentes, the creative potencies in our microcosm or lesser world, as they are in the macrocosm or greater world of ideas, and they are continually saying in us, "Let us make the body after our image and likeness." In the above short sentence, as in a casket, lies the golden key which unlocks the mysteries of health and disease.

That which we most need is to develop into consciousness our inner and higher life, and to give to it what rightfully belongs to it-an absolute sovereignty over all below it. It should be our aim to elevate the principle of thought above the plane of the senses, and free it from their distorting influences. "This elevation above sensual things was known to the ancients, and their wise men said that when the mind is withdrawn from sensual things, it comes into an interior light, and, at the same time, into a tranquil state, and into

a sort of heavenly blessedness. Man is capable of being yet more interiorly elevated; and the more interiorly he is elevated, into so much the clearer light does he come, and at length into the light of heaven, which is nothing else but wisdom and intelligence from the Lord." (Arcana Celestia, 6313.) As thought becomes more internal, or elevated above the body and the external senses, it becomes more potential. This is the true meaning of healing ourselves or others. It is the emancipation of the soul from material thraldom. And, when the soul is saved from its illusions, the body can well be left to take care of itself. Says Paul: τὸ δὲ φρόνημα τοῦ πνεύματος ζωὴ καὶ εἰρήνη, the thought of the spirit is life and peace; but the thought of the fleshly mind (or the habit of thinking on a level with the body), is death. (Rom. viii: 6, 7.) This passage contains, in a small compass, the true philosophy of salvation in the full sense of the word. It will be our work to develop this living germ and fruitful seed of truth into a tree whose leaves shall be for the healing of the nations.

We encounter at the outset in our instruction a great evil, and one that has served to hold humanity down and prevent its rising from the plane of sense to the life of faith. I refer to the fact that the church, Catholic and Protestant, has claimed a monopoly of the principle of faith. They have connected it with certain dogmas which are, to many intelligent minds, unreasonable, absurd, and incredible. They have enclosed the divine and saving principle of faith in what looks to many as an unseemly wrapper, like the precious goods of the merchant in coarse paper, and they refuse to deliver the merchandise unless you take it in the unsightly wrapper. The invalid or sinner (as the case may be) desires to be healed or saved, and works himself into a willingness to take the standard theological medicine as the less of two evils, but he cannot avoid saying (or at least thinking) with Whittier :

"I trace your lines of argument;

Your logic linked and strong
I weigh as one who dreads dissent,
And fears a doubt as wrong.

But still my human hands are weak
To hold your iron creeds;
Against the words ye bid me speak

My heart within me pleads."

But, at the present time, many people are beginning to feel that they can buy directly of the Christ "gold tried in the fire," and enclose the celestial and enduring good in their own theological envelope. Faith is a philosophical and scientific principle much older than even Plato, and belongs, by just right, as an exclusive property to no one sect, but to all mankind, as much so as the light of the sun. In these lessons we shall try and put you in possession of this "pearl of great price," and leave you to find your own casket. I can but feel that those persons in the various churches who have unselfishly devoted themselves to the practice of the faith cure, and who include in their number many of the choicest spirits on earth, would find their success still greater if they could divorce more fully the saving principle of faith from un-Christian and mentally unwholesome theological dogmas. In other words, let us give allopathic prescriptions of pure religion, but infinitesimal doses of the popular theology. It is to be hoped this suggestion will be taken in the spirit in which it is given; for, as one has beautifully said:

"A bending staff I would not break,
A feeble faith I would not shake,
Nor even rashly pluck away

The error which some truth may stay,
Whose loss might leave the soul without
A shield against the shafts of doubt."

CHAPTER III.

THE TRIUNE CONSTITUTION OF MAN AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE SELF.

It is the object of these lessons to lead gradually, and by successive steps, to the development of the unexplored, and, in modern times, almost universally unrecognized, but really vast powers for good that belong to a truly religious and spiritual faith-a faith that perceives being in opposition to a mere sensuous and illusory appearance. There is a faith that perceives and consciously recognizes those truths and realities which lie beyond the grasp of the animal or psychical man or mind. In the Sanscrit language, in which is locked up the profoundest truths ever revealed to the human mind, the word for truth is sat or satya, which is the participle of the verb as, to be. Hence, truth is that which is, in contradistinction from that which only seems to be. It is the Tò ovtùs ov, or truly existing being of Plato; the amen of Jesus and Paul. Faith is the perception of these supersensuous truths, and says of them, "these are that which really is," and maintains this attitude of thought in opposition to the fallacious and deceptive appearances of the senses.

In order to reach this position of thought, we must first discover our true self. To him who would become spiritual this is of supreme importance. When we discover our real self, we find at the same time God, and health, and heaven. In the philosophy of the Vedas, which means real knowledge, all the ordinary names of God, as the Almighty, the Creator, etc., are laid aside, and the single name Atman, the Self, is used to denote the divine Being. This does not refer to