I stifle back, may reach and stir the plumes (Mrs. Browning.) The universal spiritual realm of light and life is not reluctant to impart, but is waiting to give of its exhaustless stores as soon as we become admissive of its higher life. Jesus but gives voice to it when he says, "I have many things to say unto you; but ye are not able to bear them now. Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all the truth." (John xvi: 12, 13.) The sole condition of receiving is a willingness to receive, and a disposition beneficently to use. Then by assuming an attitude of passivity, or mental inertia, toward it, we may absorb it, as the earth imbibes the light and heat of the sun. or CHAPTER XI. WHAT IS IT TO BE SPIRITUAL? BECOME SO? AND HOW MAY WE THERE is often in the minds of people only a vague idea of what it is to be spiritual. It is to them an indefinite something "somewhat," which they are feeling round in the dark to find, and would hardly recognize it, even if they accidentally laid their hands upon it. It is among religious people usually confounded with a certain devotional frame of mind, and sometimes is viewed as an ecstatic state of the emotional nature. But these may exist, and the subject of those experiences may not have attained to the life of the spirit. They may be only the bubbles, painted by the sun with the hues of the rainbow, and floating on the current of the lower soul. What is it to be spiritual? how may I become so? are questions of the gravest practical importance to every human being. The great spiritual philosopher of the North answers the question by saying that, to think spiritually is to free thought from the limitations of time and space. In the Buddhistic philosophy, these inquiries are answered by teaching that to be spiritual is to be liberated from the bondage of matter. In the Christianity of Jesus, the inquiry is met with the answer, "Judge not according to appearance (õis, sight, sense), but judge righteous judgment," which is the Sanscrit rita, the real truth. (John vii: 24.) This freedom from the bondage of matter and sense is to be accomplished not merely by ascetic mortifications, which are of no value except so far as they give us self-control in the fullest sense of the word, but by reaching a higher mental position, the standing-ground of faith, from which material things are seen and felt as illusions; that is, as an evanescent and deceptive appearance. To emancipate the mind from the fetters of sense, is to be free from disease and sin in the Platonic and New Testament signification of the word. This deliverance, together with the quenching of the lower desires, and a consecration to a life of love and use, is the Nirvana of Buddhism, and the kingdom of the heavens of Jesus. This can never be reached on earth (for it is a state attainable here and now), so long as we view matter as the most real thing in the universe. With this view as a confirmed and governing conviction, we can no more become spiritual than we can sail our ships of commerce in the air. In the most exalted moments of our religious life and feeling we are sometimes borne upward above the plane of sense, and earthly things seem vanity and delusion, "an empty show." But these experiences are often only transient moods, mere flashes of spiritual light in the starless darkness above and around us, instead of permanently established modes of thinking. In these ecstatic visions, which have no unshaken basis on which to rest, but are supported only by our evervarying emotions, and a slender devotional framework, we soon again descend to the dead level of the plane of sense. Thus we alternately rise above the earth and sink into the dismal swamp of materialism. To be carried up by a mere devotional frame of mind, as in a balloon which is in constant danger of collapsing, is a very different position from that occupied by the man who has built his habitation and erected his observatory upon the summit of a mountain, which is an immovable point above the clouds, where the life of the heavens ever meets and mingles with our lower conditions. A philosophical idealism, of which Bishop Berkeley is one of the best exponents, when inwrought into the very texture of the mind, furnishes a secure and permanent foundation for a spiritual mode of thinking. It is the spontaneous philosophy of the interior man, as the current materialistic science is of the psychical or natural mind. The eagle is at home in the lofty atmospheric heights; the earth-worm is equally so in the mud; and both are useful in their proper place. "The great lesson," says Professor Fiske, "which Berkeley taught mankind was, that what we call material phenomena are really the products of consciousness coöperating with some Unknown Power (not material) existing beyond consciousness. We do very well to speak of 'matter' in common parlance, but all that the word really means is a group of qualities which have no existence apart from our minds. Modern philosophers have quite generally accepted this conclusion, and every attempt to overthrow Berkeley's reasoning has hitherto resulted in complete and disastrous failure. We are thus led to a view of things not very unlike the views entertained by Spinoza and Berkeley. We are led to the inference that what we call the material universe is but the manifestation of infinite Deity to our finite minds. Obviously, on this view, matter- the only thing to which materialists concede real existence is simply an orderly phantasmagoria, and God and the soul, which the materialists regard as the fictions of the imagination, are the only conceptions that answer to real existences." (Unseen World, pp. 51, 52.) us. When we come to a clear perception and intuitive conviction of this, a new and higher existence has dawned upon We have attained to the all-satisfying truth, and are made free. (John viii: 32.) In that day the interior soul of man has left the circumference of being, with all its unsubstantial shadows, and has moved up an immense distance toward the Central Life and Supreme Reality. Such a person is not of the world, even as Jesus the Christ was not of the world. (John xvii: 14-16.) He can now act upon the body from within, as God perpetually operates in nature. It is the doctrine of idealism that matter exists only in mind. This was the doctrine of Berkeley, Fitche, Hegel, and Emerson, and is well stated by Rev. Arthur Collier, a contemporary of Berkeley. In the introduction to the "Clavis Universalis," he observes: "I suppose I need not tell my reader that when I affirm that all matter exists in mind, after the same manner that body exists in place, I mean the very same as if I had said, that mind is the place of body, and so its place, as that it is not capable of existing in any other place, or in place after any other manner." Matter, inclusive of the human body, exists for us only in the mind, and in the mind on the plane of sense, its lowest range of action. To elevate our consciousness above that basement story of our being, is to be clear of it. This is faith. We would ask the reader, If all your five senses were closed or were quiescent, would not matter to you be deprived of all its properties, and would there remain for you any external world or any physical body? The same is true of physical disease. It is the office of faith, as defined by Plato, and as the term is used by Jesus, to raise us to a higher plane of thought and perception, where disease as an external entity disappears. I would not affirm that to attain to this spiritual mode of thought is an easy acquirement, nor would I affirm that it is next to an impossible achievement to reach it. To apprehend it as theoretically true is not difficult. And most of us remain here looking up rather than going up. To the great mass of mankind, if they ever think of it at all, it is only a promised land seen in the distance from the mountain summit of our highest spiritual experiences. The humanity of Jesus climbed up to this celestial height, and also to some extent that of Gautama, the Buddha. Jesus, as an incarnation of the universal Christ, represents the whole of humanity, and hence he says, "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me." (John xii: 32.) In the Grecian Mysteries, whose original aim was to lead the |