It is the portico, the

into all the fulness of the Godhead. piazza, and the ante-room of the sacred temple, our Father's house, with many apartments. Here, in finding ourself, we have found God, and, in a deeper quietude than is ever felt in our lower nature, we dwell

"Too near to God for doubt or fear,

And share the eternal calm."

It is the region in us where thought becomes a divine force, for the individual spirit consciously abides under the shadow of the Almighty, or the obstructed and tempered light of the divine Truth, adapted to the reception of the finite intellect. The sacred lamp is only shaded by partially transparent glass. It is the region in us of self-control in the fullest sense of the term, and the central throne of the mind's dominion over the body and its diseases. It is the realm of our being where dwells the light of a higher Wisdom, the inward Christ and Son of God, whom Paul found in himself. As one has said, "There is guidance for each of us, and by low listening we shall hear the right word."

"There syllabled in silence, let me hear

The still small voice that reached the prophet's ear,

Read in my heart a still diviner law,

Than Israel's leader on his tables saw."

In the home of the still small voice, the prayer of faith becomes a saving power issuing from the centre of life. It lies within the compass of our powers thus to retreat inward from disease and our surface troubles, as certainly as it does to fly to our sheltering house from the wintry storm without; and practice will make it easy and repetition a habit.

Things that make us unhappy, and which we call evil, are not so real as they seem; but they are shadows that are magnified out of all due proportion. In the Platonic doctrine of creation, the Supreme Goodness is that from which all things proceed, and is that which contains in itself all exist

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 (1 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, it is 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 represented 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 quick. eneth 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.

I CLIMB TO REST.

Still must I climb if I would rest :
The bird soars upward to his nest ;
The young leaf on the tree-top high
Cradles itself within the sky.

The streams, that seem to hasten down,
Return in clouds, the hills to crown;

The plant arises from her root

To rock aloft her flower and fruit.

I cannot in the valley stay;
The great horizons stretch away!
The very cliffs that wall me round
Are ladders into higher ground.

To work-to rest-for each a time;
I toil, but I must also climb.
What soul was ever quite at ease
Shut in by earthly boundaries?

I am not glad till I have known
Life that can lift me from my own;
A loftier level must be won,
A mightier strength to lean upon.
And heaven draws near as I ascend;
The breeze invites, the stars befriend,
All things are beckoning to the Best;
I climb to thee, my God, for rest!

(Lucy Larcom.)

THE REAL AND THE

SIBLE AND

SPIRIT.

CHAPTER VI.

IMPOS

APPARENT IN THOUGHT, OR THE CONTRADICTORY ΤΟ SENSE IS TRUE ΤΟ THE

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 sense perceptions 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 (óvis, 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