"Elementary Lessons in Christian Philosophy and Transcendental Medicine." It was our aim to furnish the teachers and pupils of the spiritual philosophy of healing, with a text-book which should elevate the subject into the dignity of a science. The themes discussed are occasionally of an abstruse nature, but have been expressed in the clearest language at our command. It is not intended to wholly supplant the living teacher, but rather to aid his work by suggesting many things it does not say. The work is written also in the interest of self-healing, and contains the essential features of the instruction which the author has given to numerous persons during the last twenty years. There is a large number of people in the world whose life has been a perpetual struggle with disease, and who have been able to discover no pathway of light that unerringly conducts them out of their troubles. The various systems of materialistic medication have been successively tried, and all have failed. To them the volume is sincerely commended and respectfully dedicated, with the hope that they may find in it somewhere the saving power of the right word at the right time. There is in the minds of men, at the present day, an inward thirst, an unsatisfied craving for spiritual light. We wish it was in our power to fully meet this heart-felt want. But we can only promise, in the following pages, to bring to you, "in the name of a disciple," a single cup of water, while we point you to the inexhaustible fountain whence all living, saving truth flows, the universal Christ, the boundless, everywhere-present realm of pure spirit. Standing by this fountain and well of living water, on which God has never placed a seal, nor stationed around it an armed guard, we would say, in the language of the sublimest of the old prophets, "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk, without money and without price." (Isa. lv: 1.) For, surely, spiritual truth ought not to be classed among the luxuries which a poor man cannot afford to buy, but rather among the commonest necessaries of life, as air and water, which the Supreme Goodness has scattered, with amazing and beneficent profusion, all over the world, and placed within the reach of all. Of the true water of life, the old symbol of spiritual truth, God has opened a fountain in the inmost region of our own being, and which springs up into everlasting life, if we only knew it. To convince the reader of this will be one of the aims of the present volume. If we succeed in doing this, the book itself will no longer be needed. For when we find the Christ within, "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," we have access to more of life and light than all the libraries of the world can give us. When the reader shall have made the grandest discovery ever made in our earthly existence, the finding of his true self, and has identified it with the Christ, of whom it is but a personal limitation, - we will gladly step down from the platform of the teacher, and take our place by your side as a fellow-disciple or pupil. We will no longer open our mouth to speak, but open the inner ear to receive the deep and calm revealing. The education of the future will be a system more in harmony with the true meaning of the word, an educing or guid The signs of ing out of what is already in us in a state of latency. Spiritual and saving truth is not a foreign exotic which has to be imported from abroad, but is a divine plant, with both flower and fruit, which exists as in its native habitat, in the inmost soul of every man. the times point unerringly to the coming of a fuller recognition of this ancient truth, and it is the faint light in the east, indicating the approach of a better day for humanity. There are, within the enclosure of our inner being, certain dormant, because unused, spiritual energies and potencies that can save the soul and heal the body of its maladies. To guide these out into conscious and intelligent action, is the end we shall keep steadily in view in these elementary lessons in transcendental philosophy. We have endeavored to restore the ancient doctrine of faith to its primitive meaning, as a saving, healing power. How far we have succeeded, we must leave the reader to judge. 3 BEACON STREET, BOSTON, Dec. 25, 1884. The Real and the Apparent in Thought, or the Impossible and Contradictory to Sense is True to the Spirit, 47 |