But all this discussion has a practical side to it, and is not mere idle and useless speculation. We have seen that the knowledge (so called) of the psychical man or mind is inverted, and things are seen bottom side up. We must turn them over, and contradict them, in order to come to the perception of the real truth. The knowledge of the sensuous mind is only a false seeming, and is never the real truth, or Paul's righteousness of faith, or rectitude of intellectual judgment. In common language a man says, "I am sick," or in suffering or trouble. This is an illusion, as much as when he says the sun rises and sets. His real self, his spiritual entity, and immortal Ego, is not subject to disease, but this may always affirm, I am well and happy. To come to an intuitive perception of this, and hold to it with a divine stubbornness, in spite of the senses, and even reason, is to reach the summit of faith,- -a faith that makes us whole. To the sensual man or mind,

"It would seem

Less a thing to name or own,
Than an echo overblown

From a dream,"

but is nevertheless an eternal reality.

Finally, one of the most impossible and unreasonable conceptions to the psychical or soul-man, and consequently one of the most sublime spiritual truths in the universe is, that all pain is a positive good and pleasure in the region of our true being. It is an inner divine good, struggling into a birth in the external range or sensuous plane of our existence. If accepted without opposition, and its outward birth is effected, it ceases as pain, and becomes a pleasure. It is then transmuted into a spiritual delight. The highest spiritual development is born of suffering. When we come to a clear recognition of this, and can view the pain as an interior good, it is instantly alleviated. Here the whole mystery of evil is solved. All evil or pain is an inward, divine, spiritual

good, that struggles to ultimate or externalize itself in us, and is opposed and obstructed, consciously or unconsciously, by the soul. But when, by a supreme act of faith, I can bring myself to be willing to suffer, I then cease from suffering, by one of the deepest laws of my being.

If it be true that our spiritual entity is the real man, and son of God, and is, by virtue of its divine and immortal nature, exempt from disease, then the belief of disease is but a dream, an illusion, a false seeming. Make it appear to yourself that it is so, and "thou art freed from thine infirmity.” Demonstrate this grand truth of faith clearly to a patient, and he is cured. What men call disease is not disease at all, but only nature's method of curing it. It is a medicine and not a disease. This is a truth that is capable of an extended illustration.

55

CHAPTER VII.

DISEASE EXISTS ONLY IN THE MIND ON THE PLANE OF SENSE, WHICH IS THE REGION OF DECEPTIVE APPEARANCES.

It should be our steady aim in all that we do and say, to raise a patient's mind and our own above the mere plane of sense, with its deep-seated illusions. The external body, with all its diseases, exists only on that lower range of thought. To elevate the mind above the plane of sense is to exalt our conscious being into the region of faith, where pain and disease cannot exist. This is done to some extent in what is called reverie or a waking dream, also in the condition of absent-mindedness, where the mind is withdrawn from external things, and we think in ourselves independent of organic conditions. The first point to be gained is to know our self; the next to forget the body and become spirit. The natural or psychical man, or the mind that habitually acts on a level with the body and the senses, sees everything in an inverted order, which is the direct opposite of the real truth. He does not receive (or apprehend) the things of the spirit, nor can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned or judged, as Paul affirms. What men call knowledge, derived from the testimony of the senses, is not knowledge at all, but only error and delusion. When we examine the matter more closely, we are astonished to learn how little we know from sensation. When I say I hear the bell in the church tower, it is not strictly true. All that I hear is a sound which has no meaning in and of itself, but I have learned by associa

tion to connect that particular sound with a bell. But if I were hearing it for the first time, it would be impossible for me to know what it was. It is an act of judgment, that is, a decision of the mind on the plane of pure intellect, or what is called in the New Testament and in Plato, faith, which teaches me that a particular sound is connected with a bell, or a coach on the street, or an engine on the railroad. It is one of the offices of faith, or the higher intellect, to interpret the meaning of a sensation. If we have a sensation of discomfort, we can make it signify disease, and this meaning it will bear to us, or we can give it the opposite meaning, and it will bear that signification to us. This is a practical principle. A wrong interpretation of our sensations is a fruitful source of disease.

All that we ever see by the sense of vision, as Berkeley proved long ago, is a sensation of light and its modification in the various colours. Everything else which we attribute to vision is only an act of judgment. Sensation in itself teaches us nothing. As long as the mind is fettered by the senses, true knowledge, which is only another name for faith, is impossible. In disease the senses give us no real knowledge of our true condition. We must learn to disbelieve them, and hearken to the voice of the higher wisdom. Their testimony must be ignored, their fallacies rejected, and the interior mind must assert its divine rights. A true faith, which saves a man body and soul, begins where sensation ends, and is the "evidence of things not seen." In order for faith to become a living power to heal ourselves or others, it must be emancipated from the bondage of the senses. Their clamorous voice must be silenced, and their testimony must be ruled out. This is the true freedom from matter that constitutes us spiritual, and essentially and distinctively human. Things look quite different to the mind when it views them from the spiritual plane of thought and perception from what they do when seen only through the underground window of

the dungeon of the prison of sense. To cure ourselves of disease, and remain under the blindness of the senses, is like a shipwrecked mariner trying to keep afloat with a rock attached to him instead of a life-preserver. Disease, having existence only in the mind on the sensuous plane, is so far like all our sense-perceptions a fallacious appearance, and not the reality we suppose it to be. The spiritual man will learn to treat it as he does all other illusions. But you will ask me, if the corn on your toe is not as real as the toe itself? To this the answer is, that neither of them has any real existence except as a thought on the lower range of the mind, and a false belief; and neither of them is any part of the real Ego or self. Both of them could be removed by surgery and the inner man not be mutilated or touched. Nothing has been subtracted from our true being. When will the world come to the consciousness of the truth, that it is the pneuma or spirit, and not the body, that is the man. In its inmost essence it is divine, and, like Milton's angels, immortal in every part. It is never separated from God. The last words of Gautama, when, under the Sâl-tree or sycamore, he was entering into Nirvana, were: "Spirit is the sole, elementary, and primordial unity, and each of its rays is immortal, infinite, and indestructible. Beware of the illusions. of matter." The spirit is never separated from God. It is like a wave or ripple on the ocean of being that is never disjoined from the ocean, but is one with it. Or, as the divine Christ in Jesus declares, “I am the vine; ye are the branches, and apart from me, ye can do nothing." 4, 5.) There is a fundamental error which it is important that we correct, for it is the parent of a large class of illusions. I refer to the false belief, the illusive appearance of the existence of life and sensation, of pleasure and pain, of health and disease, in the material body. Even motion in its reality or on the spiritual side of it, is not in the body. It is only

(John xv.