ing things. This, of course, cannot include anything that is evil. Good is positive and real; evil is the absence of good, and, consequently, has no real existence, only a seeming existence. It is that which is good inverted, or seen with the empty side uppermost. All things, or, as Plato would say, all truly existing things, are from or out of God (I Cor. xi: 12), and what is from Him is and must be good. If then we view disease as an evil, we are forced to the conclusion that it is no-thing. It is emptiness, vacuity, the absence of true being, and has only an apparent existence, a false and fallacious way of thinking which belongs to the lower animal soul. Yet nothing seems more real to the world at large. And so does a shadow to a child, who sees it on the wall, and attempts to pick it off. The sources of our unhappiness are always some false way of thinking. Truth is that which is, and falsity expresses what is not. Falsity and non-existence are the same, as when I assert that the angles of a triangle are in their sum either more or less than two right angles, I affirm what has no existence. Now if it can be made to appear that all disease and the sources of our unhappiness are illusions or a false seeming, and hence must count as nothing, it will afford us a secure standing-ground for a saving and healing faith. To assist us in climbing up to this exalted summit of thought will be the object of our next lesson. It is of the first importance that we learn to form the true idea of ourselves, and of others whom we would aid into the way of true healing. To form only an intellectual conception of a state, is an incipient creation of it, for certainly the idea is in us, and is a part of us. It may be at first only intellectual; but, between intellect and feeling, as we have before said, there is a law of attraction as between male and female, and the feeling conjoined to the intellectual conception makes it a thing of life, a divine reality. To aid us in this true conception of man, we may look to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. (Heb.

xii: 2.) In him, as an incarnation of the universal Christ, we find the point where humanity in general rises into divinity, the point where the highest heavens meet the earth, and blend their higher life and light with our lower plane of existence. If we look to Jesus as the divine model of the true idea of man, we shall find his humanity the needle of a celestial compass that always points due East, toward God and heavenly blessedness. And as representing and including us, we may confidently ask in his name, and receive that our joy may be full. (John xvi: 24.)

There is a region of mental exaltation, or, if you please, of inspiration, where the emptiness and nothingness of what we call evil, and which is the source of our unhappiness, clearly appears. Emerson, who combined in himself both the poet and the philosopher, undoubtedly reached that higher altitude of thought when he wrote: "Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute; it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity." Again he says: "I think that only is real which men love and rejoice in; not what they tolerate, but what they choose; what they embrace and avow, and not the things which chill, benumb, and terrify them." (Nature: Addresses and Lectures, pp. 120, 256.)

This higher altitude of thought, where the evil and the false shrink into nihility, does not appertain to the animal soul, but belongs to that higher range of the mind, that is on a level with the Logos, the spiritual intelligence which is the New Testament faith. We need an Abrahamic faith, before which the visible to sense disappears, and the "invisible appears in sight" to the spirit, and eternal realities are disclosed to the immortal eye, of which the outward organ is the veil. Abraham represents the principle of faith when it rises into intuition, its highest form. He believed in God for what was scientifically and physiologically impossible, and adhered to it with divine obstinacy, until the thing promised

became not only a possibility but an actuality. He believed in God who quickeneth the dead, and calleth the things that are not as though they were. (Rom. iv: 17.) We must believe in the same divine principle, which is the Logos or inward Word in us, before which the things that have no existence to the animal soul and sense appear as the only realities. For faith is the evidence of things not seen. If it is not this it is only opinion.

CHAPTER VI.

THE REAL AND THE APPARENT IN THOUGHT, OR THE IMPOSSIBLE AND CONTRADICTORY TO SENSE IS TRUE TO THE SPIRIT.

THE source of all real truth is that divine realm of being which we call spirit. But truth in descending (or passing outward) to the plane of the animal soul is inverted. This finds its analogy in the transmission of light through an intermediate lens, as in the camera of the artist, where on the negative plate, which may represent the lower soul, the image is fully inverted, the bottom appearing at the top and the right side on the left. Thus it is in the descent of truth through the three degrees of our being. A glance at our diagram representing the triune constitution of man will make the analogy clearer. This doctrine that our senseperceptions are an inversion of the real truth, and in spiritual things our senses are never to be believed, is the teaching of Jesus, and Paul, and Plato, and is fundamental in the life of faith. When once established and fixed in our consciousness, it is a truth of momentous practical and saving value.

It was the aim of Jesus to raise his disciples or scholars above the range of the sensuous mind to the perception of real truth. His fundamental precept was of far reaching importance to the man who would attain a truly spiritual life. It was (and still is) "Judge not according to appearance (ós, external sight, sense), but judge righteous judgment." (John vii: 24.) This righteous judgment or rectitude of thinking is the Kabalistic justice, and the Sanscrit

rita, real truth, and is identical with Paul's "righteousness of faith." For faith is the elevation of the mind above the

plane of sense. "We walk by faith, not by sight" (óis, appearance, sense) is the maxim of Paul (II Cor. v:7). The words of Jesus above quoted furnish the key to a truly spiritual knowledge. All our sense perceptions are fallacious, and are to be corrected before they are accepted. They never give us the real truth. This was a doctrine of the Hermetic philosophy. On this subject Swedenborg says: "Sensual things, and those which by their means enter immediately into thought are fallacious, and all fallacies which prevail with men are from this source. Hence it happens that few believe the truths of faith, and that the natural man is opposed to the spiritual, that is, the external man to the internal." (Arcana Celestia, 5084.) All the profoundest truths, or truths of the spirit, are contradictions, that is, they are the direct opposites of the first appearances, the illusions, the fallacies of the psychical man. Whatever

the natural man, speaking from the plane of sense, affirms, we are to interpret it by opposites, and we get the real truth, just as darkness makes the hidden light of the stars visible, and shows us worlds we never saw by day. In order to aid us to rise from sense to faith, it will be well to demonstrate that all our sense perceptions are an illusion or false seeming. Hence, in judging rightly, they are to be contradicted, and their testimony ruled out.

To begin with, it is a fundamental illusion that we are in time and space, for the direct opposite is true; that is, time and space are in us as modes of thought and feeling, or subjective forms of sensation, as Kant demonstrated. Time is the succession of ideas in our minds, and motion in space is a change of feeling. In common language, when our feelings are stirred we are said to be moved. Hence distance, as it belongs to time and space, is not an external entity, or something outside of us, but is in us as a state of the soul.