Pure thought is the summit of our being. It is the Kabalistic Crown, and is spirit; and, by divine appointment, governs and controls all below it. It is the point where our individual existence flows out from the "Unknown." The attainment of the power to think spiritually and spontaneously, in contradistinction from the possession of a set of borrowed opinions, is the "crown of life." Since to think and to exist are one and the same, a man in whatsoever condition he is, whether in health or disease, whether happy or the opposite, is only the expression or external translation of his thoughts and ideas. He is the perpetual creation of his fixed mode of thought. The world and all the things it contains, including the body of man, having no thought in themselves, do not exist in and for themselves, but exist only in us, and, as Schopenhauer has truly said, are to us only what we think and believe them to be. As thought and existence are identical, a change of thought must necessarily modify our existence. To think a change in our bodily condition, and picture it in the mind, and not merely to think about it, will determine all the living forces towards that result, as certainly as a stream issuing from a fountain will flow in another direction when we change the direction of its channel. If thought is the first act of our individual spiritual existence, and a perpetual concomitant of it, and is the primal force and most subtle energy in the universe, the question will arise, is thought free and subject to no law above itself? Can we think when and what we please? In disease, can I think that I am well? In pain, can I think that I have no pain? I answer unhesitatingly, I can. All things are possible to thought. I can think that five plus four is twelve, but may not be able to believe it until the thought is joined with feeling in some degree. A man may think that his dwelling is on fire, when it is not, and he think that his house is not on latter case he feels no alarm. is affected by it; or he may fire when it is, and in the In both cases his thought modifies his existence. A man may think he is dying when he is not; or, when he is passing through what the world calls death, he may both think and feel that it is only a higher form of life, and that there is no death. In sickness, it is possible to think, and even believe, that the disease does not belong to the class of truly existing things, but is only a phenomenon or appearance, a false seeming, an illusion. This thought maintained will vindicate its right to be called the Crown by transforming all below it into its expression. Thought may be subject to certain laws or fixed rules of action, as may be predicated of the Divine nature itself, but is absolutely free; for the laws of its activity arise from its own essence. It knows no higher law than itself. Pure thought is the first emanation from God, as is seen in the Kabalistic scheme of the Ten Sephiroth. It is not a mere attribute or faculty of spirit; it is spirit itself. We cannot abstract thought from spirit any more than a smile can be separated from a human face, and left as an entity in empty space; and the spirit as the first emanation from God, as the Kabala affirms, is the Son of God. And as the Father has life in himself, so he has given to the Son (or the spirit) to have life in himself; and he gave him authority also to execute judgment because he is also the son of man. (John v. 26, 27.) The essential characteristic of spirit, and which inheres in its very essence, as Hegel has said, is freedom and spontaneity. It originates action or motion, as Plato teaches. The essential property of matter is passivity or fatality. Thought is not like the vane on the church tower, turning in every direction from the action of a force existing outside of itself. But the spirit is a wind or breath of God that bloweth where it listeth. (John iii. 8.) It chooses its own direction in which to act. There is nothing above it but the "Unknown God," out of whom it perpetually springs. As the sun is never separated from any of his rays, but acts as one with each and all of them, so the "Father of spirits" always approves and sanctions the action of pure spiritual thought. For pure thought is the Protogonos, the first begotten, the son and perpetual offspring of God, and from him it is never sundered. If thought and existence are identical, then it follows that to think rightly is to be well and happy. All matter including the human body exists only in mind, which is the only substance. It exists from thought and in thought. Hence, the body is to me, and for me, what I think it to be. This is an absolute and irrepealable law of our being, as much so as that all rightangled triangles are equal to each other, or that every circle, great or small, contains three hundred and sixty degrees. How soon a change of thought and feeling, as in passing from melancholy to cheerfulness, translates itself into a bodily expression! So when doubt and despair give place to hope and the full assurance of faith, the change expresses itself immediately in the face, which is the index of our interior states of mind and body. Behold in this the creative omnipotence of thought and feeling. Thought and feeling are the Elohim, the Dii Potentes, the creative potencies in Our microcosm or lesser world, as they are in the macrocosm or greater world of ideas, and they are continually saying in us, "Let us make the body after our image and likeness." In the above short sentence, as in a casket, lies the golden key which unlocks the mysteries of health and disease. That which we most need is to develop into consciousness our inner and higher life, and to give to it what rightfully belongs to it-an absolute sovereignty over all below it. It should be our aim to elevate the principle of thought above the plane of the senses, and free it from their distorting influences. "This elevation above sensual things was known to the ancients, and their wise men said that when the mind is withdrawn from sensual things, it comes into an interior light, and, at the same time, into a tranquil state, and into a sort of heavenly blessedness. Man is capable of being yet more interiorly elevated; and the more interiorly he is elevated, into so much the clearer light does he come, and at length into the light of heaven, which is nothing else but wisdom and intelligence from the Lord. ("Arcana Celestia," 6313.) As thought becomes more internal, or elevated above the body and the external senses, it becomes more potential. This is the true meaning of healing ourselves or others. It is the emancipation of the soul from material thraldom. And, when the soul is saved from its illusions, the body can well be left to take care of itself. Says Paul: τὸ δὲ φρόνημα τοῦ πνεύματος ζωὴ καὶ εἰρήνη, the thought of the spirit is life and peace; but the thought of the fleshly mind (or the habit of thinking on a level with the body) is death. (Rom. viii. 6, 7.) This passage contains, in a small compass, the true philosophy of salvation in the full sense of the word. It will be our work to develop this living germ and fruitful seed of truth into a tree whose leaves shall be for the healing of the nations. We encounter at the outset in our instruction a great evil, and one that has served to hold humanity down and prevent its rising from the plane of sense to the life of faith. I refer to the fact that the church, Catholic and Protestant, has claimed a monopoly of the principle of faith: They have connected it with certain dogmas which are, to many intelligent minds, unreasonable, absurd, and incredible. They have enclosed the divine and saving principle of faith in what looks to many as an unseemly wrapper, like the precious goods of the merchant in coarse paper, and they refuse to deliver the merchandise unless you take it in the unsightly wrapper. The invalid or sinner (as the case may be) desires to be healed or saved, and works himself into a willingness to take the standard theological medicine as the less of two evils, but he cannot avoid saying (or at least thinking) with Whittier : : "I trace your lines of argument; "But still my human hands are weak Against the words ye bid me speak But, at the present time, many people are beginning to feel that they can buy directly of the Christ "gold tried in the fire," and enclose the celestial and enduring good in their own theological envelope. Faith is a philosophical and scientific principle much older than even Plato, and belongs by just right, as an exclusive property to no one sect, but to all mankind, as much so as the light of the sun. In these chapters we shall try and put the reader in possession of this "pearl of great price," and leave him to find his own casket. I can but feel that those persons in the various churches who have unselfishly devoted themselves to the practice of the faith cure, and who include in their number many of the choicest spirits on earth, would find their success still greater if they could divorce more fully the saving principle of faith from un-Christian and mentally unwholesome theological dogmas. In other words, let us give allopathic prescriptions of pure religion, but infinitesimal doses of the popular theology. It is to be hoped this suggestion will be taken in the spirit in which it is given; for, as one has beautifully said: "A bending staff I would not break, Nor even rashly pluck away The error which some truth may stay, |