Chapter IV: Part 4

The nature of Human Personality holds the secret of spiritual evolution. It doth not yet appear what man may be; but the increasing knowledge of his powers; the development of those heretofore latent and unrecognized, are combining to throw a new illumination on not only the aspects, but the purposes of life. Man is coming into enlightenment concerning the environment of the spiritual world as one more immediately controlling him, as well as one far more profound and significant, than the environment of matter and of ether. As things go, the chief emphasis has always been placed upon the material environment. Man has not infrequently been willing to sell his soul for a mess of pottage--his chief concern being, not the loss of his soul, but the gain of the pottage. He has been willing to exchange the entire devotion of all his energies for a finer and more resplendent quality of food, clothing, and shelter,--for a palace in which to live, for private cars and steam yachts in which to go about, and all the paraphernalia accessible to the multi-millionaire. But it is not all that these possessions typify which constitutes his most important environment. It is that degree of the spiritual world with which his own quality of spiritual life is fitted to ally itself. "The life of the organism consists in its power of interchanging energy with that of its environment," says Frederic W. H. Myers,--"of appropriating by its own action some fraction of that pre-existent and limitless power. We human beings exist, in the first place, in a world of matter," he continues, "whence we draw the obvious sustenance of our bodily functions. We exist also in a world of ether; that is to say, we are constructed to respond to a system of laws, ultimately continuous, no doubt, with the laws of matter, but affording a new, a generalized, a profounder conception of the Cosmos. On this environment our organic existence depends as absolutely as on the material environment, although less obviously,--but ... within, beyond the world of ether, as a still profounder, still more generalized aspect of the Cosmos, must lie, as I believe, the world of spiritual life."

This world of spiritual life, a deeper reality, a profounder realm of energy than the ethereal world, is the true environment of the spirit even while embodied in physical form; and the secret of all success, of all achievement, of all progress, of all happiness, is to discover increasing means by which we may thus relate ourselves to our native realm. Science and Psychical Research are supplementing Religion; are, indeed, incorporating themselves into Religion as vital factors of the spiritual progress of humanity. Far from being hostile elements to the revelation of the Divine Power given in the Bible, they explain, they extend, they interpret that revelation. As Archdeacon Wilberforce so finely points out, God is ever the same, "but what men see of Him changes,--changes without contradiction of the past conceptions."

* * * * *

"It was a definite promise of God that He should unfold, develop, spiritualize the conceptions of the early Christian faith, revealing gradually, as men should be able to assimilate them, higher, nobler views of the nature, character, and purpose of the Eternal Father," continued Archdeacon Wilberforce in a memorable sermon preached in Westminster Abbey, and he added:--

"It is, I suppose, inevitable that timid hearts, rooted in the
traditions of the past, iron-bound in antiquated definitions,
should imagine that the foundations of faith are shaken. They
forget that the Christ told us that when His visible presence was
removed He would speak by His spirit, as He had only delivered the
preliminaries of His full message; that there were truths yet to be
unfolded which men would receive and assimilate as the generations
succeeded one another,--'as the thoughts of men widened with the
progress of the suns.' I have been told by experts that the
astronomers who built those marvels of antiquity, the Pyramids of
the Nile, pierced a slanting shaft through the larger pyramid which
pointed direct to the Pole-star, and that in those days had you
gazed heavenward through the shaft into the Eastern night, the
Pole-star alone would have met your eye. It was in the ages of the
past, it was when the Southern Cross was visible from the British
Isles. Slowly, imperceptibly, the orientation of the planet has
changed. Did you now look up into the midnight sky through the
shaft in the Great Pyramid you would not see the Pole-star; new
brilliant space-worlds would shine down on you. But the heavens
have not altered, and the shaft of the pyramid is not guilty, so to
speak, of unorthodoxy. A new view of the heavens has quietly come,
for the earth's axis has changed its place. Similarly, it is the
work of the spirit of the ascended Jesus to advance the axis of the
Church of God from glory to glory. Conceptions of the Universal
Soul once prominent before the telescope of human faith and
aspiration grow, enlarge, expand. He changeth not; He is ever the
same. And these conceptions will change until knowledge, in the
sense of the acquisition of facts, shall be no more, and intuitive
perception of the transcendent majesty of the Universal Life shall
fill our souls forever."

In these latter days one may hold all his old faith and add to it knowledge, as Saint Paul himself enjoins. One of these powers of the spiritual man now being rapidly developed is that of telepathy. We shall learn to _talk in thought_, as well as in oral speech. We shall learn to "call up" the friend at a distance, or the friend in the Unseen, as unmistakably as we now call up a friend by telephone. Time and Space are the limits which define the terrestrial life as distinct from the celestial. But man is, primarily, a celestial being. He is, first of all, a spirit, belonging to the spiritual world, and only secondarily and temporarily a denizen of earth. He can regain, to some extent, at least, his celestial faculties. For centuries he has accepted imprisonment in the senses. His release is at hand. He has but to assert his own pre-eminence as a spiritual being with spiritual powers. He has but to exert these in order to prove to himself their existence, and to develop them to their increasing use. Extension of power over the material universe, more wonderful and more potent, and more all-comprehending than even Marconi's wonderful wireless telegraphy, is at hand. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be;" but that man can create and control his destiny to an increasing extent, is true. It is the evolution of religion,--of that faith which has added to itself knowledge. Thought is the highest manifestation of energy; and when man learns to live in thought he acts upon all his environment with energies that are immortal.

Professor Leavenworth of the State University Observatory in Minnesota photographed the new asteroid Eros at a distance estimated to be some thirty-six millions of miles,--a distance that renders it impossible to discern this planet even through the strongest telescope. Exact mathematical calculation had worked out the problem of the location of Eros, and the sensitive photographic plate caught it, even though it is beyond the power of the telescope.

This scientific fact illustrates perfectly the way in which an unseen universe exists about us, registering its existence on the sensitive plate of spiritual impression. Science has long since established the truth of the different rates of vibration that characterize different things. The reason that the psychic (or spiritual) body of those who have passed from the physical to the ethereal world is unseen is simply that the ethereal body is in a state of vibration too high for the eye to follow. Stephen Phillips expresses a deep scientific truth when he says:--

"I tell you we are fooled by the eye, the ear;
These organs muffle as from that real world
That lies about us."

Yet in every human being there lies latent the inner sight and the inner hearing, which can be increasingly developed by psycho-physical culture; by such habits of life as make the physical body more flexible, more subtle, and which thus raise to a far higher rate its degree of vibration, and enable the organs of sight and hearing to be far less "muffled" than they are in those who live more in the mere life of the senses. This unseen world that lies about us may be explored; the unseen friends who encompass us may be recognized by those who will so live as to develop the psychic senses, and so as to allow the psychic body to take greater control of its physical instrument; this unseen world is simply the natural continuation of the physical universe in the scale of evolution. Science is every day penetrating its space, and the horizon line of mystery constantly recedes. What is wireless telegraphy but one of those marvels which a decade ago we should have considered as quite beyond the horizon line of our experimental knowledge, and as belonging to the unrevealed mysteries of the spiritual universe? The ordinary trolley car of to-day--moving without visible means--would have been regarded as a miracle a century ago. There is no hard and fast line between the physical and the ethereal worlds. They melt into one another and are determined only by degrees. Any element may exist as a solid, a liquid, a gas, or in the etheric condition, and one state is no less real than another. The trend of progress is leading humanity constantly into the realm of finer forces; of more subtle forms of expression. The trend of progress is constantly discarding the more ponderous and clumsy for the subtle, the swift, and the more ethereal form of mechanism. Instead of the stage coach, with two, four, or six horses, we have the automobile; instead of the sailing ship, the twin-screw propeller; instead of stoves or fireplaces, with fuel to be carried in and refuse to be carried out, we have the hot-water radiator, and are on the eve of having heat, as we already have light, from electricity.

Now when science provides the explanation of this ethereal universe surrounding and interpenetrating that in which we live and psychic science begins to explore it and formulate its means and methods, there are persons who object on the ground of its "materializing heaven." If one were to inquire as to what this idea of heaven is he would probably receive no more definite reply than that it was supposed to be a condition of playing on golden harps and waving palm branches. The figurative pictures of the New Testament have largely been accepted as literal ones, and it may be an open question as to which condition would be the more "material," that of walking golden streets, waving branches of palms and devoting one's time to the harp, or the life that prefigures itself as a development and expansion of our present intellectual, artistic, and spiritual life.

"Unless some insight is gained into the psychical side of things, some communications realized with intelligences outside our own, some light thrown upon a more than corporeal descent and destiny of man," wrote Frederick W. H. Myers in that monumental work entitled "Human Personality," which offers a rich mine of suggestion, "it would seem that the shells to be picked up on the shore of the ocean of truth will ever become scantier, and the agnostics of the future will gaze forth ever more hopelessly on that gloomy and unvoyageable sea. For vast as is the visible universe, infinite as may have been the intelligence that went to its evolution, yet while viewed in the external way in which we alone can view it--while seen as a product and not as a plan--it cannot possibly suggest to us an indefinite number of universal laws. Such cosmic generalizations as gravitation, evolution, correlation of forces, conservation of energy, though assuredly as yet unexhausted, cannot, in the nature of things, be even approximately inexhaustible."

[Sidenote: Finer Cosmic Forces.]

The entire trend of progress is toward the continued discovery of finer cosmic forces and their utilization in practical affairs. Within the past five years this tendency has strikingly demonstrated itself. The evolution of the ways and means of travel offers, in itself, an impressive illustration of this tendency. The visitor to the Musee Cluny in Paris will find, among the masses of relics of an historic pass, the state carriages used in the time of Louis XV. and Marie Antoinette. They are incredibly clumsy and gigantic,--the carriage itself mounted on four great wheels, two of which are very large, with the two front ones smaller,--the entire vehicle occupying about twice the space of a modern conveyance, and its weight must be something to reckon with. Several of these are standing in the Cluny and offer a strange contrast with the carriages of to-day. But when these, with their lumbering motion, are contrasted,--not merely with the modern carriage, but with the flying automobile,--one realizes, indeed, the evolution in the methods of local transportation.

Again, let one compare the traditions of the sailing vessels on which passengers crossed to Europe within the memory of men still living,--the forty days' passage between Boston and Liverpool which is well within the memory of Doctor Hale,--with the passage on this latest floating palace of the ocean, the Kaiser Wilhelm II.,--and he realizes how far science has penetrated into the more subtle forces, where lightness and speed take the place of clumsy device and slow motion. To go up to the hurricane deck of the wonderful Kaiser Wilhelm and look down through the openings on the six mighty engines, with their intense throb of vibration day and night, is to behold an object lesson in the possibilities of motion. With the precision and the persistence of fate, the great beams fly up--and down. The vibration pervades the entire vast spaces of the great steamer. It becomes like an electric current, a thing of life, to be missed when one leaves the steamer as if one had left there a part of his own life. There is an exhilaration in it that communicates itself to mind and body. It is like a dynamo generating vitality. And still more swift and subtle methods of loco-motion are in the air. Doctor Albertson, an electrical engineer of the Royal University of Denmark, has an invention for a railroad train without wheels to make a speed of three hundred miles an hour. "Two things defeated the attainment of speed above the present maximum (sixty miles an hour)," says a writer in the "New York Herald," and these are specified as "the dead weight of the train, and aerial resistance.

"Now comes the announcement that there has been discovered a method of abolishing the dead weight of the train, leaving only aerial resistance to be contended with. If this can be done, as Mr. Albertson asserts, half of the battle is won, and the world may yet be able to travel on the earth's surface with the much-dreamed-of speed of hundreds of miles an hour. For many years the great principle of magnetism has been known to electricians and used in practical work by laymen. Steel companies have found the magnet useful in lifting huge metal girders. At one end of their lifting apparatuses they have placed a magnet which, when charged, grips the steel bars and lifts them, no matter how great their weight. It has been noticed that a magnet would move to come in contact with the steel bar as soon as it arrived within the drawing radius, carrying any amount of weight with it which happened to be attached at the time.

"It is this principle which Doctor Albertson sought to make use of--the lifting power of a magnet when attracted to a fixed rail of steel. He arranged a series of magnets under a miniature car running on a steel railway track. The magnets were insulated and attached to the bottom of the car so that they came under the rail and about an inch below it. Then he turned on enough electricity to make the magnets active. They rose upward toward the rail, lifting the car bodily in the air. The weight of the train was thus simply overcome!"

The electro-magnetic train has demonstrated its principle to the satisfaction of scientific engineers. Professor Roberts, in charge of the chemical works at Niagara Falls, says of it:--

"It is the electrical discovery of the age, and so simple in
application that the marvel is that it has escaped us so long. The
lightening power of magnetism has been known for years, the
greatest saving power to overcome gravity, but it seems it had to
wait for Doctor Albertson to discover it."

The air-ship promises, however, to eclipse the greatest and swiftest of latter-day steamers. The air, rather than the ocean, is to be navigated.

All these marvellous developments in scientific activity correspond to the developments of man's mental and spiritual powers. Telepathy establishes its communication from spirit to spirit, as wireless telegraphy establishes its sending of messages without visible means. On both planes,--the physical and the psychical,--the subtle and finer forces are being utilized, and the horizon line of the unknown continually recedes before the progress of man.

Sir Oliver Lodge, LL.D., presented a new phase of the problem of personality in an address in London, in the following statement of a speculative belief:--

"To tell the truth, I do not myself hold that the whole of any one
of us is incarnated in these terrestrial bodies; certainly not in
childhood; more, but perhaps not so very much more, in adult life.
What is manifested in this body is, I venture to think likely, only
a portion--an individualized, a definite portion--of a much larger
whole. What the rest of me may be doing, for these few years while
I am here, I do not know, perhaps it is asleep; but probably it is
not so entirely asleep with men of genius; nor, perhaps, is it all
completely inactive with the people called 'mediums.'

"Imagination in science is permissible, provided one's imaginations
are not treated as fact, or even theory, but only as working
hypotheses,--a kind of hypotheses which, properly treated, is
essential to the progress of every scientific man. Let us imagine,
then, as a working hypothesis, that our subliminal self--the other,
the greater part of us--is in touch with another order of
existence, and that it is occasionally able to communicate, or
somehow, perhaps unconsciously, transmit to the fragment in the
body something of the information accessible to it. This guess, if
permissible, would contain a clue to a possible explanation of
clairvoyance. We should then be like icebergs floating in an ocean,
with only a fraction exposed to sun and air and observation: the
rest--by far the greater bulk--submerged and occasionally in
subliminal contact, while still their peaks, their visible peaks,
were far separate."

That which Doctor Lodge expresses in the form of a speculative theory is by many realized as an actual experience; an absolute consciousness that over and above and outside of the ordinary intelligent consciousness is another being more one's self than is his conscious self; with whom he is in a very varied degree of communion; clearer and more immediate at times; clouded, confused, even shut off by some dense state at others; intermittent always, yet often sufficiently clear and impressive to compel his attention to the phenomena and compel recognition of the truth. In fact, as one comes into still clearer recognition of this "other" self,--which is far more the true self than is the lower and lesser manifestation,--one comes to absolutely realize that his larger, higher, more comprehensive life is being lived in this higher realm, or condition, and that his entire being on the plane of the lower consciousness is a series of effects of which the causes lie in this other larger and more real life. That is, the individual has two lives not precisely corresponding in chronological sequence. The experiences of the day are his because, _before the day has dawned_, they have been the experiences of the higher life lived in the larger realm. The spiritual self has realized that train of experiences in the spiritual realm; therefore, and as a result inevitable, these experiences precipitate themselves into the physical life, and are manifested on the physical plane of being. One does a given thing to-day, or meets a given event, _because_ his spiritual or subliminal or even real self has already done that thing or met that event on the higher plane. The real being is all the time dwelling in the more real world. As all planes of life are spiritual planes,--even that which we call the physical, being but the cruder and denser quality of the spiritual,--it makes the theory clearer to designate the realm just above our present one as the ethereal. In this ethereal realm dwells the ethereal body. A certain portion of its consciousness animates the physical structure and works through the physical brain. It lies with ourselves as to how closely we may establish the relation between the higher and the lower self. This relation may constantly be increased in the degree of receptivity of the lower to the higher self by living the life of the spirit. And what is the life of the spirit? The life of joy and peace; and the life of study, thought, and endeavor; the life of both intellectual and spiritual culture; the life in which the physical body is subordinated to its true place as a mechanism, an instrument for carrying out the will of the spiritual self.

Thus, by study, thought, and prayer, may one more and more consciously and entirely control and determine his active life, and constantly refine and exalt it in quality. As this is done its potency increases, for spirit alone is power.

Of telepathy Doctor Lodge says:--

"Telepathy itself, however, is in need of explanation. An idea or
thought in the mind of one person reverberates, and dimly appears
in the mind of another. How does this occur? Is it a physical
process going on in some physical medium or ether connecting the
two brains? Is it a primary physiological function of the brain, or
is it primarily psychological? If psychological only, what does
that mean? Perhaps it may not be a direct immediate action between
the two minds at all; perhaps a third intelligence is in
communication with both."

Will this theory furnish the basis for a true interpretation of telepathy?

The relations between the individual and the forces of the ethereal realm are also determining as regards health.

[Sidenote: Health and Happiness.]

For health and illness are by no means the mere and exclusive consideration of the physical life. Health, in its complete significance, is mental and even moral, and involves, in its higher aspects, the entire question of the spiritual life. Health, successful achievement, and happiness are an indissoluble trinity, when interpreted in their full integrity and in their inter-relations. Ideally considered, they are in closest interpenetration. As a matter of actual fact each is often partially manifest,--good physical health without any special achievement; or a high degree of achievement with defective health; or both, without much resultant happiness; or happiness even, without outward success or physical health, resulting only from a deeper spiritual insight and recognition of eternal laws. Still, ideally considered, as this world goes, health should be the basis of successful achievement, and this achievement should rest on health; and the union of both should produce the inflorescence of happiness; for the true sense of all successful achievement is in that it makes for the forces of righteousness, and a successful swindler or criminal could hardly be included under these general definitions. And so, to have good health, and to achieve good and noble work, must produce a good degree of personal happiness as inevitably as that certain numerical combinations produce certain numerical results. So much we may concede. The question is then before us: How can we secure and hold unvarying, from day to day, from year to year, this basis of physical health on which the superstructure of all endeavor and realization must rest? Just how shall one be well and keep well?

It is certainly a question not restricted to the physician nor yet to the metaphysician. For health is not merely a physical condition. It is the question of the poise, the harmony of the entire psychical being.

Professor John D. Quackenbos has recently said of Hypnotism:--

"Investigations extending over many years have led me to a belief
in the dual personality of man--that is, each human unit exists in
two distinct states of superior consciousness. One of these states
is called the primary or superliminal consciousness,--the
personality by which a man is known to his objective associates,
which takes cognizance through the senses of the outside world, and
carries on the ordinary business of every-day life. The second or
subliminal personality is the superior spiritual self, the man's
own oversoul, which automatically superintends all physical
functions and procedures, and influences mental and moral
attitudes.

"It happens to be a fact of mind that in sleep--natural or
induced--this subliminal or submerged self may be brought into
active control of the objective life. My experiments have forced me
to the conclusion that there is no difference as regards
suggestibility between natural sleep and the so-called hypnotic
trance. In the induced sleep the subject is in _rapport_
exclusively with the operator; in natural sleep only with his own
objective self, perhaps with a multitude of discarnate
personalities, who think and feel in common with him, and, in case
he be of superior parts, possibly with all well-wishing
extra-human intelligences."

Here we have the basis of truth. That condition of vigor, poise, vitality, and harmony which we call good health depends on the degree of control exercised over the physical body by that "second or subliminal personality, the superior spiritual self, the man's own oversoul, which," as Doctor Quackenbos so truly observes, "superintends all physical functions and procedures, and influences mental and moral attitudes."

The problem, then, becomes that of bringing the psychical body into this receptive relation to the physical self? How shall the perfect spiritual supremacy be established? This question reveals, of itself, to how great a degree health is a mental and moral as well as a physical affair.

Perhaps the initial step is that of clearly realizing--of holding the luminous conception--of one's self as a spiritual being in the psychical body, _temporarily inhabiting_ a physical body,--a spiritual being using as its instrument a physical body so long as it is at work in the physical world, or on the physical plane. One may thus conceive of his physical body as being really as objective as is the pen of the writer; the palette and brushes of the painter; the machine, or mechanism, or instrument used by any one. And the moment one learns to thus hold the physical instrument objectively, he thus brings it under the control of thought. He is no longer so a part of it; so entangled and involved in it that he cannot control it. The moment he holds this clear, vivid mental realization of it as his instrument, he is in command. This may be illustrated by an electric car and a motor-man. If the man were bound up and entangled among the cogs and wheels he could not guide and control the car; but in his place, free from all its mechanism, his hand on the motor, the course and the degree of speed obeys his mental direction applied through his control.

This realization of the true relation of the spiritual man to his body is the initial condition of health, and this involves as a matter of course the spiritual relations with the Divine Power, and receptivity to the infinite energy.

It also involves an intelligent care of the physical mechanism. A clogged pen would repress the recording of the noblest sonnet or epic; a defective brush, or pigment, would ruin the picture of the greatest artist; a broken wire would prevent the transmission of the most important telegraphic or cable message. And so, however intelligently and completely one holds the faith of supremacy of the spiritual over the physical, he must realize the absolute necessity of fidelity to hygienic laws. Food, in its quantity and quality; bathing, exercise, fresh air, sleep,--these are the conditions on which the state of the physical mechanism depends, and which involve that perfection of health which determines exhilaration, power, achievement, and happiness.

Canon Scott Holland of St. Paul's Cathedral has ably discussed these new problems of the finer forces in the ethereal realm; and in a discourse entitled "Other World Activities" he drew the following analogy:--

"The text is from the Book of Daniel, a Book which takes us into a
world of visions and trances and mystical imagery. There is a world
within the world; a life beyond life. That world is not only the
sphere of God, but of recognizable beings, meditating presences
subject to rule, with organization and degrees, activities and
authorities. It is a host, a kingdom, swayed by law and purpose. In
the Bible there is much of this, learnt probably by the Hebrews
from their captors. They had gone far afield: their horizon had
been widened: they had been taught how to enter largely into this
mysterious region. But, fortunately, they dealt soberly with this
weltering flood of occult knowledge. These hosts of unseen
presences are marshalled into order: they are not mere genii,
fantastic and magical; they pass under the control of the sole
directive will of the Most High. They are solemn instruments of
spiritual destiny: they are semi-human, and the record is, 'one
like unto a man touched me.'"

Canon Holland proceeds to arraign modern teachings. "We have drifted from this tremendous reality," he says. "We have tried to isolate the field of known experience, and to cut it off from disturbing supernatural imaginings. We have set ourselves to purge out from our scheme of things anything that seemed to interfere with it. The unseen was the unknown and the unknowable. But our agnostic programme has broken down. Facts have been too much for it. The isolation desired by it is impossible. In and out of the life that we can cover with our rationalized experiences, there are influences, forces, powers which are forever at work, and belong to a world beyond our scientific methods. We float in a mysterious ether to which no physical limitations apply. Sounds, motions, transmit themselves through this medium, under conditions which transform our whole idea of what space or time they mean. Through and beyond the semi-physical mystery, a world of spiritual activity opens upon us. It has capacities of which we have never dreamed. It allows of apparent contact of spirit with spirit, in spite of material distance and physical obstruction. There are modes of communication which are utterly unintelligible to our ordinary scientific assumptions, yet which actual experience tends more and more to verify."

Yes, as Canon Holland well says, "Facts have been too much" for those who would cling to the old and the less intelligent ideas of the future life. The ethereal world will even cease to be mysterious before advancing scientific investigation and knowledge. Through the ether, as Canon Holland notes, sounds and motions transmit themselves "under conditions which transform our whole idea of what space or time may mean." In the realm of present life the same assertion may be made. Who can contemplate wireless telegraphy without having opened to him a range of activities and conditions undreamed of heretofore? "We become sure," continues Canon Holland, "that both above and below our normal consciousness we are in touch with mysteries that travel far, and that we lie open to spiritual acts done unto us from a far distance, that we assimilate intimations and intuitions that reach us by inexplicable channels.

"This world of spirit powers and activities has been opened afresh; and now even physical science is compelled to recognize the evidence for it, and a new psychological language is coming into being to describe its phenomena. We are only slowly recovering our hold upon this life of mystic intuition, of exalted spiritual communications; we are only beginning to recognize the abnormal and exceptional spiritual condition with which Saint Paul was familiar, when, whether in the body or out of it, he could not say,--God only knows,--he was transported to the third Heaven and heard unutterable things."

This remarkable sermon is an initiation of a new era of religious teaching. The light is breaking and the full illumination is only a question of time.

Life is exalted in its purpose and refined in its quality by holding the perpetual consciousness of the two worlds in which we dwell; by the constant realization that

"The spirit world around this world of sense
Floats like an atmosphere...."

This atmosphere is all peopled, and it is magnetic with intelligence. Every spirit-call for aid, for guidance, for support, is answered. If a man fall on a crowded street in the city, how instantaneous is the aid that cares for him. He is lifted and conveyed tenderly to his home, or to a hospital, or to some temporary resting-place if the ill be but a slight one. Strangers or friends, it matters not, rush to his rescue. This, which occurs in the tangible and visible world, is but a feeble illustration of the more profound tenderness, the clearer understanding, the more potent aid that is given instantly to man from the unseen helpers and friends in this spirit world which floats like an atmosphere around this world of sense. It is all and equally the help of God; it is the Divine answer to the call; but the Heavenly Father works through ways and means. If a man fall on the street God does not cause a miracle to be wrought and a bed to descend from the clouds, but He works through the sympathies of the bystanders. Is it not equally conceivable that the appeal for leading and for light sent into spirit spheres meets the response of spirit-aid; that it awakens the interest and the infinite tenderness and care of those who have passed from this life into that of the next stage beyond, and that they are, according to their development and powers, co-workers with God, even as we who are yet on earth aim and pray to be?

Now it is just this faith that is so largely pervading the religious world to-day. Spirituality includes all the convictions that constitute ethics. Spirituality is the unchanging quality in all forms of organized religion. And it is found, in greater or in less degree, in every sect and every creed. Outward forms come and go; they multiply, or they decrease, and the change in the expression of religious faith is a matter largely determined by the trend of general progress; but the essentials of religion, under all organized forms, remain the same, for the essential element is spirituality. In and around Copley Square in Boston, within the radius of one block, are several denominations whose order of worship varies, the one from another. The Baptist believes in immersion as the outer sign of the inner newness of life; the Episcopalian holds dear his ritual; the Unitarian and the Presbyterian, and perhaps a half-dozen other sects in close proximity (which express the various forms of what they call "new thought"), each and all exist and have their being by virtue of the one essential faith held in common by all,--the one aim to which all are tending,--that of the spiritualization of life. The larger recognition of the spiritual universe includes the recognition of this interpenetration of the life in the Seen and the Unseen. Every thought and decision is like an action on the spiritual side. A thought has the force of a deed, and there is a literal truth in the line,--

"The good, though only thought, has life and breath;"

and in Lowell's words:--

"Ah! let us hope that to our praise
Good God not only reckons
The moments when we tread His ways,
But when the spirit beckons."

The thought-life is, indeed, the most real of the two lives, and dominates the other. The events and achievements, held in thought and will, precipitate themselves into outer circumstance and action.

To live in this perfect sympathy of companionship with the forces and the powers of the unseen world is to dwell amid perpetual reinforcement of energy, solace, and sustaining aid, and with faith vitalized by spiritual perception.

All scientific problems are ethical, and even spiritual, problems. They are discoveries in the divine laws. "Can man by searching find out God?" Apparently he approaches constantly to this possibility, and finds that

"--through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns."

Every succeeding century brings humanity to a somewhat clearer perception of the nature of the Divine Creation. However slowly, yet none the less surely, does the comprehension of man and his place in the universe and his oneness with the Divine life increase with every century. Jonathan Edwards taught that while Nature might reflect the Divine image, man could not, as he was in a "fallen" state, until he was regenerated. Putting aside the mere dogma involved in the "fall" of man, the other matter--that of regeneration, of redemption--is undeniable, even though we may interpret this process in a different manner from that of the great eighteenth-century theologian. The redemption, the regeneration of man, lies in faith. In that is the _substance_ through which and by means of which man comes into conscious communion with God. It is by the intense activity possible to this mental attitude that he conquers the problems of the universe, that he advances in knowledge, and advances in the increasing capacity to receive the Divine messages and to follow the Divine leadings.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: A New Force.]

Of late years a new force has been discovered in the line of ethico-spiritual aid in the higher order of hypnotism, as discovered and practiced by Doctor Quackenbos, who may, indeed, without exaggeration, be called the discoverer of this higher phase of applied suggestion. "I have been brought," he says, "into closest touch with the human soul. First objectively; subsequently in the realm of subliminal life, where, practically liberated in the hypnotic slumber from its entanglement with a perishable body, it has been open to approach by the objective mind in which it elected to confide, dynamically absorptive of creative stimulation by that mind, and lavish in dispensing to the personality in _rapport_ the suddenly apprehended riches of its own higher spiritual nature."

Of the nature of this power, we again find Doctor Quackenbos saying: "Hypnotic suggestion is a summoning into ascendancy of the true man; an accentuation of insight into life and its procedures; a revealing, in all its beauty and strength and significance, of absolute, universal, and necessary truth; and a portraiture of happiness as the assured outcome of living in consonance with this truth." The learned doctor regards hypnotism, indeed, as "a transfusion of personality."

The truth is that there lies in every nature forces which, if recognized and developed, would lift one to higher planes and induce in him such an accession of activities and energies as to fairly transform his entire being and achievement. This would be effected, too, on an absolutely normal plane. The development of the spiritual faculties is just as normal as is that of the intellectual. And it is to this development that we must look for the true communion with those who have passed into the Unseen. The objective life must be spiritualized. The soul can come into a deeper realization of its own dignity and the worth of its higher nature; can discern the spiritual efficiency, the energy commensurate to every draft upon it.

All, however, that is done by the highest phase of hypnotism, as exerted by Doctor Quackenbos, can be done by auto-suggestion. The soul has only to call upon its own higher forces. It has only to act from love and compassion,--from sympathy and generous aims, and all the infinite power of the Divine world is at its service.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Service of the Gods.]

"We had letters to send; couriers could not go fast enough, not far enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in spring, snowdrifts in winter, heats in summer; could not get the horses out of a walk.

"But we found out that the air and earth were full of Electricity, and always going our way--just the way we wanted to send. _Would he take a message?_ Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do; would carry it in no time. Only one doubt occurred one staggering objection--he had no carpet bag, no visible pockets, no hands, not so much as a mouth, to carry a letter. But, after much thought and many experiments, we managed to meet the conditions, and to fold up the letter in such invisible, compact form as he could carry in those invisible pockets of his, never wrought by needle and thread--and it went like a charm.

"Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor,
to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chores done by the gods
themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might
of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light,
magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing."

With his wonderful insight into conditions, Emerson thus expresses a provision of conditions that are now being realized to an even greater degree than he consciously knew, although he unconsciously foretold them. Now it is wireless telegraphy that is the ultimate fulfilment of what he saw,--the method that will reduce to practical realization his counsel to hitch one's wagon to a star, and "see his chores done by the gods themselves."

It is not only humanity--civilization--the onward sweep and march by the progress of the world, but the individual life also that can take advantage of "the might of the elements." The one irresistible element is the power of will, the power that results from the perfect uniting of the human will with the divine will. People talk of fate, and conditions, and burdens, and limitations. They are all merely negative, and are easily and instantly subject to the infinite and irresistible potency of the will brought to bear upon them.

On the threshold of any endeavor when one takes account of his possessions and conditions,--material and immaterial; when he again, from a new vantage ground, surveys his future, it is his salvation and success to realize the depth and height of his own personal power over his own life.

"There are points from which we may command our life,
When the soul sweeps the future like a glass,
And coming things, full freighted with our fate,
Jut out on the dark offing of the mind."

But when these points appear they must be taken advantage of at the moment. They are the result of an occultation of events that may never occur again within the limits of a lifetime. The swift intuition that leaps over all conceivable processes is the heaven-appointed monitor. It is the divine voice speaking. It is the word which must be obeyed. When one

"... by the Vision splendid
Is on his way attended,"

he must give heed to the vision or it vanishes and returns no more.

We need a new, a deeper, a far more practical realization that the ideals and visions which flash before us are the real mechanism of life; that they are the working model by which one is to pattern his experience, in outward selection and in grouping by means of his own force of will. Somewhere has Emerson said,--

"All is waste and worthless till
Arrives the wise selecting will,"

which is, to the potential circumstances, like a magnet introduced among filings that suddenly attracts to itself and draws all into related and orderly groups. Circumstances are thus amenable to the power of will brought to bear that selects, arranges, combines, after the pattern of the revealed ideal held in view.

Each individual life may "borrow the might of the elements." Man is created, not only in the image of God, but with God-like faculties and potency, which, if he but truly relate them to the divine potency, if he unite his will with God's will, there is then no limit, no bound to that which he may achieve.

In one of the most wonderful creations of Vedder, the artist shows us the figure of a woman whose eyes are closed, and whose hands, lying in her lap, are inextricably entangled amid crewels and threads that bind and hold them. But one sees, also, that she has but to open her eyes, and lift her hands, and all the entanglement would fall off of itself. The picture offers the most typical lesson of life. All imprisonment of conditions is dissolved into thin air the instant one impresses his own will-power on the affairs and circumstances of his life. He _can_ do that which he _desires_ to do. The desire has only to be intensified into conscious, intelligent choice, into absolute will,--and all the minor barriers melt away and are no more. Every life may hitch its wagon to a star. It may borrow the might of the elements. It has but to resolve to hold its ideal firmly and clearly in mind, and it will then be realized as the sculptor's dream in clay is realized in the marble. "All things are yours," said Saint Paul. One has but to take his own; to wisely and clearly select the elements and combine them by that irresistible potency of mental magnetism and energy.

THE POWER OF THE EXALTED MOMENT.

"The salvation of Christ is the complete occupation of the human
life by the divine life."

_It is in our best moments, not in our worst moments, that we are
most truly ourselves. Oh believe in your noblest impulses, in your
purest instincts, in your most unworldly and spiritual thoughts!
You see man most truly when he seems to you to be made for the best
things. You see your true self when you believe that the best and
purest and devoutest moment which ever came to you is only the
suggestion of what you were meant to be and might be all the time.
Believe that, O children of God! This is the way in which a soul
lives forever in the light which first began to burn around it when
it was with Jesus in the Holy Mount._--PHILLIPS BROOKS.

The power of the exalted moment is the very motor of human life. The exalted moment is the dynamo that generates the working energy. The moment itself fades; it passes into the region of memory where its true service is to shine, with the unfailing continuance of radium, as a perpetual illumination of life. It is the greatest, the saddest, the most hopelessly fatal error that can be made,--to cast away from one the exalted moment because it has not fulfilled itself in outer condition and circumstance. Vision and prophecy are given by God for a working model, which the long patient days--days of monotony, of trial, of commonplace work under commonplace conditions, amid commonplace people and events--are yet to fashion and fulfil. These are the material,--the ordinary events, the commonplace daily duty. The perplexity of problems rather than the clear grasping of their significance; the misunderstanding and the misconstruction of motive that make the tragedy of life; the interpretation of evil where one only meant all that was true, and sympathetic, and appreciative, and holy; the torture and trial, where should be only sweetness of spirit and true recognition,--of all these are the days made; all these are a part of "the flowing conditions of life," which it is the business, the responsibility, the personal duty, to transmute into noble living, into poetry and ecstasy and exaltation, and into that perfect faith in God that can truly say, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Though He slay all that made life seem worth the living; the enchantment, the response of sympathy; recognition rather than misconstruction,--though all these be obscured in what may seem a total eclipse,--still let one not forget "The Gleam;" still let one keep faith with the power of the exalted moment. It came from God and held its deep significance. It laid upon its beholder consecration of divinest aspiration and unfaltering effort. "If I could uncover the hearts of you who are listening to me this morning," said Phillips Brooks, in a memorable sermon, "I should find in almost all--perhaps in all--of them a sacred chamber where burns the bright memory of some loftiest moment, some supreme experience, which is your transfiguration time. Once on a certain morning you felt the glory of living, and the misery of life has never since that been able quite to take possession of your soul. Once for a few days you knew the delight of a perfect friendship. Once you saw for an inspired instant the idea of your profession blaze out of the midst of its dull drudgery. Once, just for a glorious moment, you saw the very truth, and believed it, without the shadow of a cloud. And so the question comes,--What do they mean? What value shall I give to those transformation experiences?"

On the personal answer to that question depends all the success or the failure; all the nobleness or the unworthiness of the individual life. No one can estimate too ardently, or too earnestly, the spiritual salvation of keeping faith with the exalted moment,--

"Delayed, it may be, for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse--not a few,
With much to learn and much to forget"--

ere the golden hour of fulfilment shall come; but faith in the exalted moment is but another name for faith in God.

The great truth of life--that which we may well hold as its central and controlling and dominating truth--is that "our best moments are not departures from ourselves, but are really the only moments in which we have truly been ourselves." These moments flash upon the horizon of the soul and vanish; they image themselves before us as in vision, and fade; but the fact of their appearance is its own proof of their deep reality. They are the substance compared with which all the lower and lesser experiences are mere phantasmagoria.

And this fulfilment is not found, but made. It is a spiritual achievement. So let one not reject, or ignore, or be despairing before undreamed-of, unexplained, and incomprehensible forms of trial, but know that it is trial that worketh patience; know that "no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby."

"It was given unto me," wrote Dante in the _Vita Nuova_, "to behold a very wonderful vision; wherein I saw things that determined me."

It may be given to any one at any time to behold the vision. Circumstances are fluidic and impressionable, and take on any form that the mental power has achieved sufficient strength to stamp, and because of this--which is the explanation of the outward phenomena whose significance, on the spiritual side, is all condensed in prayer--one need never despond or despair. At any instant he can so unite his own will with the divine will that new combinations of event and circumstance will appear in his life. A writer on this line of thought has recently said:--

"There is an elemental essence--a strange living essence--which
surrounds us on every side, and which is singularly susceptible to
the influence of human thought.

"This essence responds with the most wonderful delicacy to the
faintest action of our minds or desires, and this being so, it is
interesting to note how it is affected when the human mind
formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish."

There is a phase of occult thought represented at its best by Mr. C. W. Leadbeater of London, and at its worst by a host of miscellaneous writers, whose speculations are more or less grotesque and devoid of every claim to attention, who materialize thought and purpose, and invest it with an organism which they name "an elemental," and one finds Mr. Leadbeater saying things like this, of the results of an intensely held thought:--

"The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought
seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a
living being of appropriate form,--a being which when once thus
created is in no way under the control of its creator, but lives
out a life of its own, the length of which is proportionate to the
intensity of the thought or wish which called it into existence. It
lasts, in fact, just as long as the thought force holds it
together."

Mr. Leadbeater continues:--