CHAPTER IV.

THE SAVING POWER OF THE SPIRIT OF MAN.

In the region of our own spirit we come into sympathetic and receptive communication with the collective intelligence, or the universal Christ. There is a unity in the sublime life of the spirit that leaves no room for a mere isolated individuality, a mere personal existence sundered from the grand whole. Each discrete region of our being is connected with a universal principle or sphere of existence, of which it is a personal limitation. The soul of man is a part, so to speak, of the anima mundi, the soul of the world.

The intellectual soul is a personal manifestation of the “intelligible world" of Plato, the Logos of the New Testament. The spirit is an atom, a monad, an item in the universal spirit. The parts are not scattered fragments, but are inseparably included in the whole, and the whole is in each of the parts. This grand whole, made up of innumerable parts, or the universal world of spiritual intelligence, is called in Sanscrit, Addi-Buddha. In the writings of Paul, it is called the Christ. In it there may be distinct, but never separate individualities, any more than there can be separate rays of light.

The spirit has in it the life and power of the sublime unity of spirit. We should never lose sight of this truth. The particular, separate from the universal, is as nothing—it is powerless. The part, sundered from the whole, can do nothing. Even Jesus could say, "the Son can do nothing of himself," or by himself. Echoing this necessary and eternal truth, Emerson says: "The blindness of the intellect begins

when it would be something of itself. The weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself."

ness.

It was a maxim of the Hermetic philosophy, that "power belongs to him who knows," which refers to the true self, or the spirit. Knowledge is power. But what knowledge will give us the greatest power to save ourselves and help us to save others, and how may we reach the highest consciousness of authority over disease and sin? It is only by climbing up to a position of thought where we can see that the self, the immortal Ego, is neither diseased nor sinful, but is already saved, and was never lost except to our own consciousIts inseparable conjunction with God on this plane of our being makes disease and death an impossible conception to it. Can we gain this loftier altitude of being? Or is it, like the summits of the loftiest mountains, inaccessible to the foot of man? That there is in us a region of being in which divinity dwells, and which is never invaded by evil or sin, or any discomfort, we can easily admit as a theory, but how can we make it real to our consciousness? We can apprehend the idea intellectually; how can we feel it to be true? Jesus, as a Son of God, a divinely human spirit, clearly saw and felt this great truth. But the development of sonship in one single person of human history does not fulfil the broadly benevolent design of Christianity. Every one who receives the Logos, the inner divine light and life, becomes also a son of God. (John ii: 12.) That the real self, the spirit of man, and the son of God is exempt from evil and indestructible, is taught in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and the spiritual philosophy of all antiquity. In the Vedanta it is affirmed, "No weapons will hurt the self of man; no fire will burn it; no wind will dry it up. It is not to be hurt. It is imperishable, unchanging, immovable. If you know the self of man to be all this, grieve not." If then we are diseased, and sinful, and unhappy, it is not in

our true self, and these things are not to be classed among realities, but are appearances only. This truth of faith, though dimly seen, like a star from behind a cloud, has in it a redeeming efficiency. For the best remedy for disease and unhappiness is to find out that I am neither sick nor unhappy. This is the knowledge that has in it a saving power. It is a profound truth of Christianity that our true being is included in God, and there is no evil in Him. It was the object of Fichte in his great work, the Wissenschaftlehre, or science of knowledge, to search out and discover the first and absolutely fundamental principle of human knowledge. This was supposed to be unprovable, for the reason that it was a first principle, and consequently there could be nothing lying back of it that could be a subject of cognition. This first principle must be in itself intuitively certain, and must be that which lends certainty to everything else which we know. This absolutely fundamental principle is the Ego, or consciousness of self. The Ego (the I, the myself), was regarded by him as embracing within itself the whole sphere of reality. Outside of it there is absolutely to us nothing. The Ego is the subject and the object. It is that which thinks, and that which is thought, the perceiver and the perceived, the feeling and the felt. The so-called non Ego, or the objects not myself, are known only in myself, and their inmost reality is my thought. This is as far as science can go. It is its ultima Thule. But there is a Beyond, which Fichte himself entered in after life, as unfolded in his Destination of Man and Way to True Blessedness. In the region of religious feeling and intuition, and the transcendental realm of faith, we rise to the recognition of a still more fundamental principle. It is not merely that I am, but this truth arises from another back of it, and out of which it springs,—God is, and I am in Him, and I am because He is. Our individual self is found, as the Vedanta and Plato, and Jesus and Paul all affirm, to be included in the contents of the Absolute Being or Self.

Outside of this all-comprehending Being, we never can be and be anything. He who feels this, not as an empty, shallow, unenlightened, noisy religious enthusiasm, but is forced to it by a philosophical necessity of thought, will be conscious of a power that partakes of the tranquil omnipotence of God. It is a power which cannot otherwise be attained. It is an immovable fulcrum, more stable than the everlasting hills, on which the lever of faith may rest. Such a person will understand as never before the words of the risen Jesus, and the feeling which they express when he affirms that all power in the heavens and the earth was given unto him. (Matt. xxviii: 18.) Having attained to the idea and feeling of oneness with God, being borne up to it by a logical and philosophical necessity, we do not approach disease in ourselves or others, with a curative intention, in our solitary, inflated, but really empty selfhood: but as our individual self plus the Godhead, and the whole power and life of nature.

When we act from the external plane of thought and feeling, as we do in our ordinary life in the world, our spiritual and psychological power is at its minimum. When in favored moments, which by habit and culture might become more frequent and prolonged, we retire inward by an introversion of the mind, we climb to a summit of our being where we act as one with God, and all below us in the scale of life is subject more or less to our influence. In proportion as we act from the inmost degree or realm of our existence, we become possessed of a divine and miraculous energy, meaning by a miracle the control of matter by spirit. In harmony with this idea Paul affirms, "I can do all things in Him who strengtheneth me." (Phil. iv: 13.) There is a profound philosophy, or rather theosophy, in this passage. In man and in the wonderful powers of the mind we see the highest exhibition of the Godhead. To say that man is a part of God does not express the exact truth, nor the highest verity. He is rather a manifestation of God, who

is not divisible into fragments or fractions, but is an indissoluble unity and whole. Says Carlyle, who was imbued with the philosophy of Fichte, "To the eye of vulgar logic, what is man? An omniverous biped that wears breeches. To the eye of pure reason what is he? A soul, a spirit, a divine apparition. Well said Chrysostom, with his lips of gold, the true Shekinah is man.' Where else is the God's-Presence manifested, not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man?" (Sartor Resartus, pp. 63, 64.)

To act in and from God, and thus possess a power above our ordinary energy, is to attain to a deep conviction that “in Him we live, and are moved, and have our being," in other words it is to feel that our life is included in his Life, and that his Being comprises ours in it. Till we make this discovery, and come to the cognition of this eternal verity, we are weak and spiritually poor. Without it, the angels would no longer "excel in strength." (Ps. ciii: 20.) A man may have a mine of gold hidden beneath the surface of his field, but is none the richer for it until he comes to believe it and know it. Then and then only he attains to a mental appropriation and true possession of it. So we may have in the manifested God, the Christ, the Collective Man, wisdom, and righteousness, and health and blessedness, but if we are blinded by our sensuous mind to this truth, it is all the same as if we had it not. The deepest reality in man is spirit, and as a spirit he is an individual, that is, indivisible (as the word means) manifestation of the grand unity of spirit which is God. Even his body, when we take a more penetrating look at it, is a symbol of spirit, and not wholly material. It is a complex of spiritual forces, a combination of ideas and sensations, without which it is to us as nothing, and which are wholly included in the life of the soul. There is a region of thought where we translate matter itself into spirit. "Matter," says Carlyle, following the steps of