in money; but rather imparts to all who will receive without money and without price. Spiritual gifts, among which is the gift of healing, God has never thrown into the markets of the world. The first recorded attempt to buy a spiritual gift was a disastrous failure, and the speculator in heavenly things purchased to himself only a severe rebuke. (Acts viii. 20.) To bring down the celestial life of the spirit into the disgusting scramble for wealth is like inviting our angelic visitors to aid us in ditching our swamp. The most spiritual men the world has ever held, including Jesus, have been poor, in the ordinary sense of the word. But while poor in that sense, they possess all things. They may have no legal title to the land, but they own the whole landscape. They have in themselves as an everlasting inheritance all that the goodly things of earth spiritually signify and represent. They seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness (right thinking), and all other things are thrown in, like the wrapping paper of the merchant. (Matt. vi. 33.) Gold and silver are symbols of celestial good and truth. Having in ourselves the latter, we possess all that is of value in the former. This is the teaching of Jesus the Christ, and is Christian science and true metaphysics. This word was introduced into philosophy by Aristotle, and is composed of two Greek words which signify after physics. In a system of education, it was supposed that the study of physics, or of visible nature, came first, and the study of the spiritual side of nature and of the mind came last, or, as Paul expresses it, first that which is natural or psychical, then that which is spiritual. (1 Cor. xv. 46.) To seek the achievement of spiritual development, in order to employ our powers in making money, is a total perversion of the divine order of life, and such a person becomes spiritually blind by an immutable law of our being. If we are now in the full light of the noonday sun, when the earth is fully inverted and we with it, we find ourselves in midnight darkness. So the spirit of man, which is full to overflowing of an irrepressible love and goodwill to all men, is the light side. The selfish animal soul is the dark side. We must see to it that our microcosm, or little world, does not turn bottom side up, but ever remain in its true position. BE TRUE. "Thou must be true thyself, If thou the truth wouldst teach; "Think truly, and thy thoughts Live truly, and thy life will be CHAPTER XII. SPIRITUAL TRUTH THE BEST REMEDY FOR DISEASE. As disease exists only on the mental plane of sense, as we have before shown, and this is the region in us which is subject to illusions and deceptive appearances, and as the disease itself for which we are often called to administer a remedy is in many cases only a sensuous seeming, so spiritual truth, which is only another name for faith, is the most efficient remedy in nature. It is a specific having a divine sanative virtue and potency in it. This should never be forgotten. Spiritual truth expresses the reality of things, or that which is, and when vocally expressed, or silently suggested and by a thought impulse projected into the mind of an invalid, is an infallible antidote to that sin (or error, or false belief), which is the underlying cause of disease, which is often unreal and in itself no-thing. In the case of a given disease, we are first to find out what is false and unreal in regard to it in the mind of the patient, and all this counts for nothing. It is a minus quantity. Subtract it from the diagnosis, and there is often no remainder -nothing which amounts to a concrete reality. Physicians frequently feel this, but may deem it inexpedient to say so. To ascertain what a so-called nervous patient thinks about his own case is in nine cases out of ten the best statement of the sensuous delusions which are to be corrected. This he is only too willing to give us, and to pour it into the listening ear of every visitor. His statement of his condition is the one to be combated, and his confirmed ideas are to be expunged from his mind-not by reasoning merely, for that often only confirms him in them. His reason (so-called) is the head of the serpent that the seed of the woman, or the truths of wisdom, is to crush. Having heard his statement of the case, he should be instructed ever after to keep silent, as it is a law of our being that to express a feeling in words gives intensity and fixedness to it. When I say "I am sick," my thought or existence is run into a different mould from what it is when I say "I am well." How a change in our mode of thought reaches the body through an intermediate form, organism, or medium is told us by Swedenborg, which we quote not as an authority, but as an illustration. He says: "There was a philosopher who ranked among the more celebrated and sane, who died some years ago, with whom I discoursed concerning the degrees of life, and that one form is more interior than another, but that one exists and subsists from another; also that when an inferior or exterior form is dissolved, the superior or interior form still lives. It was further said that all operations of the mind are variations of the form; in the purer substances these variations are in such perfection that they cannot be described; and that the ideas of thought are nothing else; and that these variations exist according to changes of the state of the affections. How the most perfect variations are given in the purer forms may be concluded from the lungs, which fold themselves variously, and vary their forms according to every expression of speech, every note of a tune, every motion of the body, and according to every state of thought and affection; what then must be the case with interior things which, in commparison with so large an organ, are in the most perfect state? The philosopher confirmed what was said, and declared that such things had been known to him when he lived in the world, and that the world should apply philosophical things to such uses, and should not be intent on bare forms of expression, and on disputes about them, and thus labour in the dust. ("Arcana Celestia," 6326.) According to this philosophy, when expressed more clearly, a change of thought-as an act of faith, or imagination, or any modification of the mind, on its higher plane-adjusts the form of the intellectual soul into its representative image, and this latter moulds the animal soul-principle and psychical body into its expression, and through this it passes outward to the physical organism. So a morbid and fixed idea forms the lower soul into its image, and this by a law of correspondence changes the outward body into a condition that expresses the idea on a material plane. Here it can go no further, as it has reached the outside boundary of existence. The term "body," in its radical sense, signifies that which is fixed or set. Hence the human body, in its different. conditions, is always only the fixedness of an idea. This is also true of all matter, as all the endless variety of plants. They are divine ideas printed in the book of nature by the demiurgic intellect. So an act of faith, or a perception of spiritual truth, by supplanting the idea of disease, passes outward into a psychical or soul manifestation, and finally is translated into a bodily expression. Since every idea of the mind forms the soul and interior body, which are the inward man, into its expression, it has been affirmed, and is eternally true, that in the other life, as we call it, the whole quality of a man is exquisitely perceived from a single idea of his thought, for every idea is an image of the man. ("Arcana Celestia," 301.) And by those whose inner vision is unveiled, and who have emancipated the intellectual soul from the body, the same can be seen now. When the Christ as the primal Light and Life comes to a man,—and he may come every day and not merely at the end of the world to us, the veil of sense is removed. "He comes from thickest films of vice, To clear the mental ray, And on the orbs oppressed with night, To pour celestial day." If we have a man's ruling idea and his central love, we have the whole man, all that he is or can be for the time |