M. J. Barnett – The Five Redeemers

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter I – Mothers

Chapter II – Teachers

Chapter III – Employers

Chapter IV – Artists

Chapter V – Priests

 

PREFACE

In all ages of the world there have been those who, by a mistaken way of living, have run them­selves spiritually into debt, and they have needed one who was spiritually rich to advance and re­deem their estate, to help them regain their well- nigh lost inheritance.

There have been certain periods in which the great majority in certain parts of the world were thus impoverished, and a great universal redeemer seemed their only salvation.

As soon as we have a spiritual need, that need is sure to be supplied.

When the Persians needed a spiritual teacher, Zoroaster was the response to that need. When the fourth part of the inhabitants of the globe comprised in the Chinese Empire stood in need of a new moral and spiritual stimulus, Confucius was sent to them. At various times, when cer­tain peoples of Asia degenerated into ignorance and vice, a Buddha or Wise One, appeared among them as their redeemer. When the people of Judea and the surrounding countries had become so material that they had lost the spirit of even their own laws, Jesus, the Christ, was sent to teach and redeem them.

Whatever of pure truth is contained in the teachings of any and all of these conspicuous redeemers, who have appeared at various epochs of the world, is truth intended to redeem us to-day; and anyone who can help us in the work of gleaning out from among superadded falsities any of this precious truth is also, though it may be in a lesser degree, our savior, our redeemer.

Although it is true that we must each, in the strictest sense, be our own redeemer yet we can be so aided in our redemption that it would seem as though, if left to ourselves, we would surely be lost. But we never are and never are going to be left to ourselves when we need help. The Ruler of the Universe knows our needs and finds a means of supplying them. If our souls cry out for help, the help is at hand in immediate response to our cry.

If we follow the teachings of the latest and, as we think, the most exalted Redeemer that has even been given to the world, we shall be redeemers to one another. He taught us to be precisely what He was, a Redeemer, a Teacher, a Healer.

If at any time we can help a fellow-being pay off his debts and regain his estate unencumbered with ignorance and sin, it is our duty to go forth bravely and intelligently into the work. As we cannot all work in the same way, we must each discover our own best way.

From our entrance into this present life until our departure from it, we are to some degree under the influence of those more enlightened than ourselves. These enlightened ones are our saviors in the only sense in which anyone other than ourselves can be our saviors. If, after we were once taught truth and set upon the right track, in the beginning, we adhered strictly to that truth, we should need no redeemer, for there would be nothing to redeem, there would be no work to be undone; we should need only more and more teaching. As it is, however, we are constantly stumbling along the way, turning into wrong and rough paths, therefore we need a friendly hand to save us from a fall or to raise us up when we are prostrate.

Blessed is he who recognizes and welcomes all redeemers, all dispensers of truth, in whatever guise these enlightened ones may present them­selves, for he thus finds his salvation. Still more blessed is he, who has himself become a savior of his fellow-beings, for, with no thought of his own salvation, he is surely saved. They who preach the gospel live of the gospel. They who dispense good receive good.

CHAPTER I

MOTHERS

In our divine essence, we all, men and women alike, contain within ourselves the male and fe­male principles. We have an intellectual and an affectional nature, which, when we become rounded out, enable us to be not only fathers and brothers, but mothers and sisters to our fellow-beings. A full and perfect development of our whole being includes all possible human relationships, as an outcome of our divine kinship with our Creator, in whose image and likeness we are.

The boy who does not voluntarily guide the steps of the child younger and weaker than him­self, and protect him from harm, and teach him how to be strong, and initiate him into the mys­teries of his own pleasures and pursuits, is a boy who simply has not yet developed the holy germ of fatherhood that is latent within him.

The man who does not enjoy giving physical support, and intellectual aid, and moral strength to those who are weaker and more ignorant than himself, is a man who has mislaid one of the highest possibilities of his nature, — that of father­hood.

The girl who does not offer love and tender­ness, and whisper the comforting secrets of her own inner nature to those who seem troubled or helpless, — though they may be her pets among animals, or even the pasteboard dolls she presses to her bosom, — is a girl who has not yet dis­covered the divine inheritance of motherhood that is surely hers.

The woman who can go through this world and not twine her arm around those who are fainting, and not take into her heart those who need love, and not sustain and nourish those who hunger, and not shed the light of her spirit upon those who walk in darkness, is a woman who has ignored the intention of her being in sacred motherhood, who has become a travesty of that noble work of God, a true woman.

A man to be wholly and truly a man must to some degree have developed the fatherhood with­in him, just as a woman to be wholly and truly a woman must have developed the motherhood within her.

If one part of God’s creation could be said to be more important than another, we would say that a mother is more important than a father. A mother being more closely related to the spiritual interests of her offspring or her adopted children among her fellow-beings, her work is the higher and more sacred work.

When one is admitted to membership in a col­lege, he is said to be matriculated. That society extends her arms to shelter him. She gives him comfort and sustenance. She takes him into her heart and he becomes her child. And she, although she acts a father’s part in giving him wisdom, still more becomes his mother.

If we could say that God, who is necessary to every avenue of our being, is more important to us in one capacity than in another, we would, with all reverence, say that he does more for us as a mother than as a father; but in him the two are never separated, and the nearer we draw unto him, the more we shall become both father and mother to all humanity.

One of the most evenly and richly developed men we know, who lost his father in infancy, said that his mother had been both father and mother to him. She had unfolded in him both love and wisdom. She had arrived at that advanced stage of development which enabled her to combine in herself the sum of all parental attributes. In her race towards the goal she had simply outstripped the majority of her fellow-women.

There are also men who are so developed that they are both parents in one. To ascribe essen­tially feminine qualities to a man is thought to be a belittling of him; but until a man has, in the highest sense of the word, become feminine as well as masculine, he is not perfectly devel­oped as a man, and more especially as a parent to his children.

There are countless mothers who have never in this material life given birth to offspring who were flesh of their flesh. The highest elements of motherhood reside in the spirit, not in the body. Nevertheless, there is a deep meaning in physical motherhood. There is in it a grand significance, which, when rightly interpreted, becomes an illuminated text full of the highest wisdom.

Those who have been attracted into our at­mosphere, those who have joined our family circle, have a special claim upon us. Our chil­dren come to us to be cared for by us, and the work we ought to do for them can be done by no one else.

The work that a mother can do for her child begins before the child is born into this ex­istence. In fact, the whole previous career of the mother may be regarded as a grand preparation for that work and leading directly up to it. Just what a mother can do for her child depends Upon what she herself is. If, for example, a girl at ten years of age begins to conquer a spirit of jealousy in herself, and continues the good work until she has overcome that error, she is eminently fitted as a mother to help her child by precept and example to overcome a similar fault. All the good spiritual work that a mother has, at any time in her previous career, done for herself, is, in a broad sense, work done for all who may ever thereafter come into her mental sphere; but more especially is it work done for her children, who more than any others are under the dominion of her mind. All the good that she has taken unto herself is laid up in her own spiritual and mental storehouse, but she cannot bestow it upon any one until that one comes within the sphere of her influence. The very moment, however, a child becomes her child, she can bestow upon it either good or evil; and this leads us to that most important, much discussed, but little understood subject: Heredity.

It is said of a human being that the first seven years are the most important period of this life. But spiritual science goes still further back, and asserts that the first nine months before birth comprise the most impressionable and therefore the most important period of this life.

The theosophical view of heredity, as a pos­session chiefly of our own acquiring, does not in any way lessen the importance of parental influence.

We do not consider that because a person has already a character of his own, we can exert no influence over him. We do not feel that in order to move, persuade, lead, or direct him, he must be a newly created blank. We all know that over those who come within our thought sphere, however decided a character they may possess, we can and do exert a powerful influ­ence, and the more nearly they come to us inte­riorly, and the more our minds are in dominion over them, the stronger will be that influence.

As soon as the child becomes the mother’s guest, it has entered into her spiritual and men­tal sphere, and is wholly under the dominion of her mind. The influence of others, even of the father, can work upon the child only mediately through her. The child may have brought with it an inheritance of its own, but it is in the power and within the province of the mother to modify that inheritance. She can add to it or take away from it by means of her spiritual and mental states, and not only by her habitual states, but, in addition, by those which for a definite purpose she is able to induce in herself during the period of gestation.

Spiritual science, instead of denying heredity, asserts it most emphatically; but it asserts that heredity is spiritual and mental, not physical. It asserts that it is by the transfer of thought of spiritual and mental conditions that a repetition of physical results is rendered possible.

Neither a physical environment nor a physical presence which does not impress itself upon the mother’s mind can affect the mind of the com­ing child, and it would therefore be powerless to produce any result in his body. Just to the degree and in the way in which a presence does impress itself upon her mind, whether such im­pression be correct or incorrect, it will tell upon the child.

For illustration, a prospective mother stands in mortal fear of a large family dog that some­times forces its way into the house. She is thinking of this dog, when suddenly the door at her back is burst open, and a neighbor’s little boy rushes into her room. She thinks it is the dog, and screams with terror, and falls into a swoon. Even after she is restored to conscious­ness and is reassured by her friends, her thoughts persistently recur to the dog, which she says she cannot get out of her mind. Now, if heredity were physical and not mental, we would expect that the child in this case, if he were marked by the incident at all, would come into the world bearing a resemblance to the little boy who was the physical cause of the mother’s fright. But such is by no means the case. The child’s fea­tures bear an unpleasant resemblance to those of the dog that was in the mother’s mind, and which her imagination pictured so vividly that it was really present to her, although physically the animal was all the while lying quietly asleep under a tree in the garden.

What an immense field for the working of metaphysics this fact presents to us! Our mind is our kingdom; it cannot be alienated from us; we are its monarch to the end.

If the physical peculiarities of a mother, or even of a remote ancestor, are the possession of a child, they become so by means of a condition of mind in the child.

Just how much of a child’s mental condition is the child’s own inherent property, and how much is gained through the mother’s mind, it is not to our present purpose to speculate upon. But of one thing we may be sure, and that is, if we are a prospective mother, there is an immense work for us to do, and we are only to do it to the best of our ability, without troubling ourselves about just how much we are accomplishing.

It is well known in medical science that physi­cal peculiarities do not necessarily come to us in the line of flesh and blood relationships, but may come from any one in close association with the mother. Spiritual science will add that however close the physical association with the mother, if there is no bond of sympathy in love or fear, if there is no influence brought to bear upon the mother’s mind, there will from that direction be no physical peculiarity transferred to the child. It is through mind that so-called physical hered­ity becomes ours.

There are curious cases on record of children bearing a marked physical and mental resem­blance to a former husband of the mother. The mother’s mind is perhaps little under the domin­ion Of her present husband’s, while her thoughts go back and even unconsciously to herself dwell on the object of a deeper and stronger attach­ment; or, since fear may be as potent as love, perhaps the mother at this sensitive period weakly yields to a retrospect that revives old fears and sufferings associated with a former husband, who was only an object of dread and dislike.

What we fear as well as what we love possesses our minds and governs our thoughts.

There are cases of children resembling some friend physically separated from the mother by mountains and oceans of distance, while these children have been totally unlike the relatives among whom the mother was physically present. In such cases the relatives, though near in body, occupied little of the mother’s thought, while the distant friend was frequently present to her mind.

Jacob of old displayed his knowledge of this metaphysical law in the tending of Laban’s flock. He presented to the vision of those going to bear young certain figures and colors that he wished to impress upon their minds in order to have them reproduced.

It is said that there is frequently a close resem­blance between the color of an animal and the locality in which he lives, caused by the imagina­tion when breeding. By changing the surround­ings at such times the color of the coming animal can be changed at will. The tiger’s stripes are said to resemble the long jungle grass in which he lives, and the leopard’s spots to resemble the speckled light falling through the leaves of the forest in which he roams.

The ancient Greeks understood the impor­tance of surrounding a pregnant woman with such objects as they desired to gain a hold upon her mind and rule her imagination and her thoughts. In their inordinate desire for physical beauty, they directed all their efforts towards keeping before the mind of the woman such per­fect models of the human form, in painting and statuary, as they wished to see reproduced in her child. They were metaphysical as far as they went. Their efforts were not in vain ; but, un­fortunately, working with a view only to exter­nals, and failing to hold moral beauty above physical beauty and as the primal cause of which physical beauty is the effect, they transmitted to their offspring so unstable an inheritance that even physical decline followed upon the moral decay of the nation, and both mind and body sank in the general ruin.

Beautiful thought will in time create a beauti­ful body, even though it may not be directed to that external effect.

Thought rules the universe.

If prospective mothers could realize that the minutest flashes of thought and feeling in which they indulge all bear their part in making up the grand sum total of the inheritance they are transmitting to their children, they would keep watch over their hearts and minds with more dili­gence than they would guard their most costly jewels. They would, at this period as at no other time, be fully alive to their responsibility for the welfare of another being, and instead of yielding more readily to any temptation, any weakness, or error that might assail them, they would feel it their bounden duty to make the most strenuous effort to overcome evil. They would not only abstain from positive vice, but they would also rise up out of a condition of neg­ative error. They would, like sentinels at their post, see to it that innocent sleep — in the form of indifference — crept not upon them unawares to endanger the safety of others.

The monstrous and illogical error, that a preg­nant woman is to some degree morally irrespon­sible, is one which, in spite of its enormity, not only reaches back into past centuries, but flour­ishes among all civilized nations to-day. Why should a woman in that condition be morally irresponsible? She is neither insane nor imbe­cile of necessity from her condition. Why should fulfilling one of the most natural and one of the noblest offices of womanhood weaken the mind or destroy the moral sense? An indulgence in only what is unnatural and ignoble could possibly have such an effect as that.

There is a law of Italy forbidding the arrest of a pregnant woman who has stolen food. Now, while the arrest of a person may not be the method best adapted for correcting evil tenden­cies in mind, yet the making of an exception in such a case, in this legal and public sanction of dishonesty as a supposed necessity, emphasizes and strengthens the revolting error.

A woman during the period of gestation, in­stead of feeling that she is thereby licensed to indulge in evil, should vigorously resist, not only every impure or dishonest act, but even every such desire or thought, lest it injure, not alone herself, but also that other to whom it is trans­mitted, perhaps to be handed down to posterity indefinitely.

Why is there so much dishonesty and crime enacted in the world? Because dishonesty and crime are nourished in mind, and they are fre­quently nourished and perpetuated in minds that have not originally produced these conditions, but have only received them as an inheritance and have been too ignorant or weak to overcome them.

A pregnant woman, like any other woman or any other person, not only should not desire what belongs to another, but she should not permit herself to desire and dwell upon what she can­not obtain, or even what is not right or expedient for her to try to obtain. She should employ a thousand times more effort to direct her thoughts into a right channel than if she were the only one concerned.

When we desire a change of pictures upon the wall, we change the slides in the magic lantern. If a mother does not wish evil to be imprinted upon the mind of her child, let her remove the evil from her own mind.

With a sincere desire to resist evil, all evil can be resisted. A woman is no more cut off from the divine source of strength while she is in that sensitive condition than at any other time. On the contrary, — the winds being tempered to the shorn lamb, — if her necessity is greater, God draws still nearer to her. That is, by her necessity and desire she is enabled to draw still nearer to the fountain of all strength.

She does not realize into what danger for her­self and another she is being led, when she per­mits her mind to cling to an unattainable object of her desire.

Why is it that in grape countries there are so many wine marks upon the people? Wine is by them considered not only desirable, but positively necessary to health, and prospective mothers who are too poor to indulge in it permit themselves to desire it, or those who desire it at an untimely or inconvenient hour permit their minds to dwell upon it. The desire in either case being unsatis­fied, and the thoughts continuing to dwell upon it, these reiterated thoughts imprint themselves upon the mind of the child, and are reflected upon his body. The physical blemish thus pro­duced is, however, much less to be lamented than the less manifest moral effect, which is a love of intoxicating drink or a disposition to covet the unattainable, or perhaps both.

It is curious to note how this widespread belief that wine is a necessity and water injurious extends itself to travelers who visit these wine countries. It has no foundation in truth. If water is impure, let it be purified. If strangers in the Italian cities, for example, would employ as much effort in getting the pure water that can somewhere be found flowing from pure fountains as they devote to getting pure wine, or one-tenth as much as they spend in their distracting search for curiosities, they would enlist an ally to health instead of to fever. If those who, for instance, visit Florence with its many wells of bad water, would seek the few fountains of pure water, the result would be of more value to them than the best wine of a thousand vintages.

It is truly astonishing how easily we yield our­selves up to the inoculation of error.

It is said that you should give a prospective mother just what she desires, in order that her child may escape unharmed. Now, we do not believe that an evil indulged in is ever without an injurious effect, even if there be no external mark upon the child. When there is no mani­fest harm done in such cases, it is because the mother’s desires, as soon as gratified, are silenced, and her mind turned away to something else. But may not this quieting of the desires, this turning away of the thoughts, be accomplished by fair means as well as by foul? Would not the result be far better if the means employed to accomplish such a purpose were in accordance with divine law instead of in direct opposition to it?

If a child cries because he cannot strike his playmate, do we quiet his desire by letting him strike the blow, or do we do so by helping him overcome his wrong desire? It is quite likely that if he were permitted to gratify his malice he would cease crying, and perhaps even be­come amiable; but such amiability would be only the thin covering of a pitfall into which he would at some future time be sure to sink, and it would be less desirable than an unhappy mood.

It is not enough merely to turn our thoughts away from evil; but the evil must be conquered, and the thoughts turned to something good.

If a mother would not bring into the world an impatient or fretful child, let her cultivate pa­tience and tranquility within herself. Her own regeneration will induce a right generation of off­spring. If generation were perfect, there would be no need of regeneration. When a piece of work is well done, it does not need to be done over again. But if we have not come into this life with all the advantages of a perfect inheri­tance, we can nevertheless do our utmost towards supplying that lack for those whom we attract to this mortal plane, so that the world may the sooner arrive at a condition in which perfect generation will be the rule instead of the excep­tion.

Our offspring, like ourselves, have all capabil­ities and all talents within them, and we can aid their development by cultivating our own abil­ities in any desired direction.

We know of a mother who desired above all things that her coming child should possess a talent for music; so, instead of merely directing to the child her desires to that end, she culti­vated music in herself. She listened to the best music accessible, and took lessons in singing until within a few days of the birth of her child. That child possessed not only a marked talent for music, but an inclination to painstaking and study that ensured success in that science.

You may say that you have no talent for music, but you desire your child to have that talent. Then make an effort to unfold the lit­tle ability you have, and bring yourself in con­tact with the talent of others, and your child will perhaps have ten times your ability, and a disposition to cultivate that ability, which will place him on the road to talent, as talent is only highly developed ability.

When we become perfectly developed, all tal­ents which are within us will become manifest externally.

You sometimes hear of those who, late in life, to the surprise of all their friends, have displayed a certain talent. Now, they did not catch this ability in the way of contagion, nor did they take it on as a condition from someone else; but it was all the time within them, only they had not turned their attention to it, and brought it out so that it became manifest to others.

Although physical beauty and intellectual and artistic attainments are both pleasing and desira­ble, yet it should be a mother’s highest aim to help her children to an inheritance in spiritual graces, without which happiness is impossible.

How many people of marked talent we know who have neither happiness nor bodily health! They are morbid, and not because they have tal­ent, but in spite of their talent, and because they have no rightly poised character behind their tal­ent. They have no accompanying spiritual de­velopment to round them out into a more evenly unfolded and harmonious being.

Talent should increase happiness, not detract from it.

It is said that a great genius is the most mor­bid and unhappy creature in existence. This is not so of necessity. When it is so, it is because genius is worked for to the neglect of the more important spiritual graces.

It is greater to command one’s own spirit than to command a musical instrument, or a painter’s colors, or a sculptor’s clay, though one work need never exclude the other.

With spiritual culture comes faith in the do­minion of good over evil. One whose trust is in good will be without fear of any harm that evil can do her or her offspring. Every prospective mother should so trust in the infinite power of good that fear of evil will be ruled out of the mind of her child. She should not fear that he will come into the world with a morbid or unhappy disposition, and she should have no fear of those contagious diseases so mistakenly sup­posed to be necessarily incident to childhood. She will thus infuse into the mind of her child that faith which will bring him safely through childhood without those diseases. She will nat­urally discountenance any such revolting practice as vaccination, whereby the body is ingrafted with loathsome disease, as if mind in error could not entail woes enough on humanity, and it must needs be supplemented by material agency to extend the territory of evil.

We can imagine a metaphysical mother, who, desiring above all things to bring into the world a metaphysical child, so possesses her own soul that she not only denies herself all wrong acts and wrong conditions of mind, but induces in herself that tranquility, patience and courage which enable her to compass all reasonable desir­able things for the child under her dominion.

The nine months allotted to her are her golden opportunity. Let her make the most of them. After her child enters into this life her exclusive reign is over. She must then to some degree share him with the rest of the world. Nurses, companions, and others at once have access to him, and unless the mother carefully interposes herself for his protection, he may — like an Eolian harp exposed to the winds — be played upon to his injury.

She may have done her best towards starting the child on the right road in this life, but her best may have been far from perfect work, or there may have been work to do for him that could not be accomplished in a given time. Now, in the world of externals he may display many perverse inclinations and harmful weaknesses from which he must be saved, and his mother, his first savior or redeemer, must continue the good work she began before his birth.

It is the greatest mistake in the world for a competent mother to give her infant wholly up to the keeping of another, and that other perhaps a woman or girl of whose character and disposi­tion she knows little or nothing. Mothers failing to comprehend the working of a silent mental in­fluence, think that until the child can understand the import of spoken words he is not subject to any mental or moral influence from his nurse, and that if her physical duties are well performed there is nothing more to take into consideration.

If a nurse is to be employed, it is of the utmost importance that she should be carefully and even prayerfully selected from among the many in­competent and even harmful workers in that field.

Whatever the character of the nurse may be, — and by character we do not mean reputation, — the mother should hold the child’s mind as much as possible in her own keeping, unless she feels that the nurse is spiritually higher than herself.

It is more difficult for a mother to hold undi­vided sway over a child’s mind when she in no way ministers to him materially. While a mother’s milk, or a mother’s touch, may not be necessary as a medium to conduct thought to the mind of her child, since thought requires no material medium to conduct it, yet whoever gives nourishment or material service of any kind to the child unavoidably gives spiritual and mental conditions with it; and if it is not the mother who does this, it is someone else who does it. That someone else thereby gains access to his interior nature and shares him with the mother.

Let every mother keep possession of her own child unless she is sure that she can yield him up into more competent hands. She may not find it necessary to supply his every physical need, but she should see to it that she keeps him within the sphere of her spiritual and mental influence.

If a mother desires her child to keep warm, she does not put him into a cold room and expect him to receive the warmth into which he is not introduced, but she puts him into the well-warmed atmosphere of the nursery, which would bear no relation to him if he were not in it.

A mother may think that she can see very little of her child and yet have full dominion over him in mind. Now, if this is possible, it is not ordinarily the case. In the first place, the mind in immediate contact with the child is quite likely to be thrown upon him, and prevent the mother’s mind from reaching him. In the second place, when he is not present with her, other persons or things are present, and are quite likely to attract her attention and possess her thoughts, and a foreign influence thus has opportunity to gain ground with him.

For example, we know that our influence over our friend is not so great now that he is leading a busy life in China as it was when he was here and we were in business together. During his busy hours our thoughts may not always reach him, for his mind is more occupied with Chinese affairs than with anything relating to us, and although our affection has not changed, other minds have come between us. Then, we our­selves are not likely to have him so much in our mind as when he was with us.

It is not that physical presence is necessary in order that one mind may act upon another, but certain conditions in operator and subject are necessary to all mental success, and physical presence frequently aids in giving command over these conditions.

We say, then, to every mother, have your child with you as much as possible. Let good come to him through you. Let evil be warded off from him by you. Be the recipient of his little woes and joys, for these he will confide to you in Nature’s language long before he can express them in words. Every mother understands that lan­guage, and can respond to it mentally as well as in spoken words. Sometimes a gesture or a smile from her is more potent than a thousand words; but that gesture or smile must be the outcome of a feeling that is back of it.

It is difficult to deceive children regarding your state of mind towards them. Their intu­ition is more unerring than the most highly cul­tivated reason. We would not, therefore, advise you to act thus and so towards a child; we would only say, love that child, and gain knowledge so that your love may express itself wisely instead of foolishly.

Love and wisdom should never be separated.

As a mother sees to it that the physical atmosphere her child inhales is kept clear of impurities, so should she see to it that his mental and spiritual atmosphere are kept free from bad psychical emanations. If she brings around her­self those who are in a harmful mental condition, she should protect her child by specially holding him in truth. She should open the windows of his soul and let the heavenly breezes blow in upon him and displace the impurities of error, just as she opens the windows of her room that the fresh air from without may displace the physical impurities within.

For illustration: the mother of an infant son had a frequent visitor in a young girl, who came familiarly into the nursery and fondled the babe, who was attracted to her. The young girl came to pour out her woes, discontent, and repining, that she might receive comfort from the cheery mother. The mother at length observed that after every visit from this girl her child, habit­ually sunny in disposition, became fretful and unhappy. She finally dreaded to see her friend appear, and still more dreaded to see her caress the child. What should she do about it? The young girl needed her friendship and she could not cast her off. She sought and followed the counsel of one wiser than herself. When her friend appeared the mother took her child more closely into her own mental atmosphere.

She argued away all the alleged causes for dis­content that were set forth by the girl, and as­serted that nothing but good could possibly come to her. She thus opened a spiritual window, and let the pure air of heaven flow in, and she was shortly rewarded by seeing that not only her child was protected, but that the girl herself was so benefited that she at length brought with her an atmosphere of positive cheerfulness.

If we would in all cases only think more about benefiting others than about protecting ourselves or our families, we would learn that our protec­tion is generally included in the good we accom­plish in working for others.

There are cases, however, in which a mother might not be sufficiently grounded in truth to warrant her exposing her child to a harmful influence with the hope of being able to battle it away.

Children, being passive, and therefore easily played upon by outside influences, sometimes receive harm from those who are never present with them, but only leave their psychical emana­tions in some room into which the children are admitted.

We were told of a case of this kind in which a family of lovely and amiable children suddenly became quarrelsome and untruthful. The dis­tressed mother at length discovered that this change dated from the arrival of a certain un­truthful and wrong-minded seamstress, whom the children never saw, but who was in the habit of going with her work and sitting by the nursery fire while they were out for their daily walk. There was but one conclusion to arrive at. The bad psychical emanations that the seamstress left in the nursery were absorbed by the sensitive children.

The seamstress was discharged, and the children regained their former truthfulness and amiability.

If bad psychical emanations in the spiritual atmosphere were as visible to us as the tobacco smoke that beclouds the physical air of a room, we would not need to be warned concerning them; but, as it is, we for the most part must learn of them by their effects. There are, how­ever, many among us who are so developed that they see these conditions with a clairvoyant vis­ion, or they intuitively perceive any antagonistic influence, however subtle it may be; and if their condition is one of purity, they are unpleasantly affected by the emanations of anyone who is in an impure mental condition. Children are uncon­sciously affected by such influences, and must be protected from them by a mother’s loving care.

When a child is older, and necessarily goes forth among his companions and others, he is subject to many influences beyond the mother’s control. But she can still be his chief control­ling influence. She can still be his greatest light. When her rightful influence is unceas­ingly maintained, it is to her that he will bring all the good that he receives outside for con­firmation, and all the falsity for denial and de­struction. If she sends him forth well fortified with truth, falsities can make little or no impres­sion upon him. They will glance off from him as small shot from the thickest armor.

If he is upright in character, whatever new ties he may form will be such as will only strengthen the cords that bind him to his mother. As his views of life and his relations to his fellow-beings become enlarged, his appreciation of her redeem­ing influence will increase. His mother will find that she does not lose any of his love, even when she shares it with one who has become a part of himself, for the wider we extend the circle of our love the stronger it becomes.

Many a young man has felt that he did not know the full meaning of the word mother until she who was nearest to him became a mother. Then he has perhaps unconsciously dropped the word wife, and employed the word mother in its stead, feeling that the dear one was even more to him in the light of motherhood than in that of wifehood. He perhaps feels that when a woman becomes a mother, she becomes more complete, although he may not realize that as a woman becomes more complete she becomes a mother in spirit, whether she stands in that physical rela­tionship towards any fellow-being or not.

Even when a child is in an inverted condition, and does not seem to care for his mother’s love, if she gives it to him, he must receive it whether he will or not; and in a condition to care for it least, he is in a condition to need it most, just as we all need God most when we care for him least.

The highest mother love which will not be tainted with ambition, or a desire for her child’s mere worldly aggrandizement, will include the saving elements of desire for his highest good, and faith in his receptivity towards such good; therefore, it must always work for his redemp­tion, however tardy may be the external mani­festation of such work.

A mother’s love is a quickening electric fire that enwraps her child however far he may seem to have departed from her influence.

Suppose your child is at this moment in a benighted condition of mind and spirit, either through the working out of the evil he has in­crusted upon himself, or the great mistakes that you may feel you have made concerning him, or both, the very best and utmost that you can do for him is to hold him always within the sphere of your love. Be as zealous for his good as though you were his only possible redeemer in all the great universe.

A mother sometimes says that her child is going to destruction, and she can do nothing for him, as he is gone beyond the reach of her influence. This is not true. A child cannot get beyond the reach of his mother’s love. It will search him out; it will find him wherever he may be. But let a mother not mingle with that love the harmful elements of fear and despair, if she would redeem her child from error. She must learn to realize that any evil into which he may fall is only a temporary condition. He must and will, at length, rise up out of it; if he does not do so through effort, he will do so through suffering.

When the rich man who fared sumptuously every day, thinking only of his own happiness, had permitted a beggar to lie at his gate and beg for the crumbs from his table,—when this rich man lifted up his eyes in hell, when he found himself in torment, then he began to realize the enormity of his evil. When he had suffered enough he began to think of someone else besides himself. He who had previously lived only for self began now to plead for the welfare of his five brethren.

There will come a time with every one of us when suffering, if not effort, will have raised us up into a higher condition.

Of course you do not want your child to suf­fer. Your only possible way to lessen his suffering is so to flood him with love, with light, that he will be roused up to make an effort to rise above the evil that enslaves him. So open the windows of his soul by means of your trust in infinite and ultimate good, that divine currents will flow in upon him, and purify him of his foulness, how­ever black it may have become. You are always his mother, and can be his redeemer, in however revolting a vice he may now be indulging.

How many cases there are on record in which after years of vice and misery a child has been reformed by means of seed sown by his mother, in his apparently barren mind during childhood! Now if such good can be effected where there is no special understanding of spiritual law, how much more might be accomplished by unceasing intelligent spiritual ministration!

A mother hears perhaps that an absent son has been seen coming out of a den of vice in an intoxicated condition. When he left her he was pursuing a downward course, and she has heard nothing of him for years until these tidings reach her. She has hoped that he might reform, but she hopes no longer. She feels that he is lost. She paints a corresponding picture of him upon the canvas of her mind and allows it to remain there. Whenever she thinks of him it is as he is represented in this picture. She does not realize that by holding on to this view of him she is con­stantly sending forth an energy that works to hold him related to intoxicating drink, and to dens of vice. She should never permit such a picture to remain with her for a moment. She should set her will and imagination to work to form a contrasting picture of her son, for in that way she would be working to relate him to a sphere of thought opposed to vice.

There is no stage of depravity in a child’s life at which a mother may feel justified in making no further effort for his salvation. God never gives us up; why should we ever give up one another? A child is never lost; he has only wandered away from the truth for a time. Let a mother endeavor to shorten this time and bring the wanderer back again sooner than he, in his blindness, could come by himself. Let her follow the example of the Good Shepherd and always work to bring the lost sheep into the fold again.

Let a mother make home the most attractive place in the world, but if a child is in so inverted a condition that he prefers vice to virtue and strays away from her, let her love reach out after him wherever he goes. He may leave her, but she must never leave him.

With a loving and intelligent mother, a child’s salvation seems almost an accomplished deed. But what are we to do with that large class of children who have either injurious mothers, or incompetent mothers, or no mothers at all?

Those of us who are fitted for such work and love such work — as we must do in order to be fitted for it — must become their mothers. We must, in some way according to our ability and means, do for them the mother work that would otherwise be left undone.

There are many noble women, some with ample and others with limited means, who have adopted motherless children, and found their greatest happiness in rightly unfolding the natures of these children.

There are also other women of means, both married and unmarried, engaged in no special life work, who are fond of children, and, having none of their own, would seem to be the very ones to do their share of work in this immense field of labor, yet they shrink from it. They are, per­haps, almost persuaded to adopt a child, but then they find so many objections: Children are such a care; children deprive you of your freedom; to bring up children you need good health; then other people’s children may have inherited such bad qualities.

All these objections can be met and success­fully argued away in spiritual science.

To begin, “Children are such a care.” We all need and want somebody and something to care for. If we love children we love to care for them, not in the sense of being anxious about them, for the best care of a child is interest and attention without anxiety. We heard a lady beautifully ex­press it when she said that a child under her super­vision was a great care but no trouble whatever.

Perhaps these very women, who think they are not equal to the care of a child, lavish any amount of unnecessary interest and attention upon a pet dog, which they thereby render only artificial and ailing. They love to care for some­thing, and they do care for something, but their care is worse than wasted, for the little animal is only injured by that misplaced interest and atten­tion, for which some poor little human waif is pining. We believe in a natural education or development of animals, but not in an injurious pampering of them.

“Children deprive you of your freedom.” One who loves children wants them to enter, as much as is fitting, into all her plans in life. She does not feel that they fetter her movements, for she does not want to make any important movements in which they are not included. If our plans in life refer exclusively to ourselves, we have not yet learned the meaning of the word freedom. Self­ishness is not freedom, but slavery.

“To bring up children you need good health.” Most certainly you need good health for any important work. If, however, you are living in harmony with divine law, there is no reason why you should not have health, and one of the surest means to gain health, if you lack it, is the pursu­ance of some noble life work for which you are adapted. We have known the adoption of a child so to rouse up a woman’s mind to noble effort that she speedily became healed of her bodily infirmities. The fulfillment of duty should never have upon the body any other effect than that of giving an increase of health, and it never will do so if it is accompanied with trust in the supremacy of good over evil.

“Other people’s children may have inherited such bad qualities.” Undoubtedly, they may; but as an important part of our duty in this life is to overcome and destroy our bad inheritances, and to help others to overcome theirs, we ought not to shrink from undertaking such work. The worse a child’s heredity, the more he needs us, who are in the light, to help him overcome it. Spiritual science recognizes nothing fatalistic in heredity, but tells us that it can always, by suffi­cient effort, be overcome. We have known those who were successful and happy in the work of developing the nature of a child who had traits of character unpleasantly foreign to their own.

So many women are, at this very moment, pining in spirit and declining in health, from the lack of something to do, some work for which they are adapted, and which is important enough to bring into exercise their highest powers. Both happiness and health await them in some work, which perhaps only a few groundless fears pre­vent them from undertaking. They need to exorcise these evil spirits in the guise of fears, by a cultivation of trust. If we undertake any noble work with a desire and an intention to benefit a fellow-being, we have no ground for fear. We shall be provided with all necessary means. It is not the work that in such cases harms us, but it is our lack of confidence in God’s willingness and ability to protect us in the midst of wisely directed effort for the welfare of others.

We need not, however, all of us who are child­less become adopted mothers in order to do our share of mother work, for that part of the work which seems to fall in with our line of duty may be very limited. It may consist only in teaching the young a certain number of hours a day, or even a week. It may consist of the care of a child, or children, during some special exi­gency; or in hospitality to young persons sus­ceptible to our influence; or in rare visits among young people on whom we can shed light. It may consist only in that broader but less en­croaching work, in which all women, whatever be their occupation, can engage, viz., that of bestow­ing a kind, motherly spirit upon young persons, of giving them words and thoughts of counsel and encouragement, and of throwing a mantle of charity over all their misdeeds.

If women were inspired with the divine spirit, they could not help assuming the true mother attitude whenever and whenever any possible good might result from so doing. Whatever might be their engrossing life work, they would unconsciously shed abroad the protective love and tenderness of our divine Father and Mother.

CHAPTER II

TEACHERS

Parents and teachers should be one in pur­pose. As a parent should always be a teacher, so a teacher should always work with the loving spirit of a true parent.

The word teacher is a very broad word, and as such includes all the spiritual and intellectual as well as the greater part of the material workers of the world. In its most limited sense, as one who unfolds or develops the powers latent in youth, a teacher should be a supplement to the mother. A teacher should be an additional worker for the child’s unfoldment and redemp­tion; not to unfold only one small part of the child’s capabilities, not to redeem him from only intellectual errors, but to unfold his whole nature, and to redeem him from all error. A teacher should not give merely a book knowledge of material things, as if a pupil were a creature with no divine spirit, and one whose ultimate life was in matter; but he should endeavor to unfold the highest possibilities of his pupil.

The education of the young is, in this material age, a one-sided education, in which their very highest faculties are not taken into considera­tion.

If we see a man with his arms abnormally developed, while his legs are dwindled away and powerless, we pity that man as a deformity. Yet what more pitiable deformity can we find than that of one who, through ignorance of the laws of natural growth and development, has been so unfolded as to have become an intellectual giant and a spiritual pigmy?

How substantial at best is that mighty potency called intellect? An over-exertion of its powers, to which it is always liable without the ballast of a spiritual culture, — and it topples over; and what was once a grand intellect becomes a mere chaos of mad fancies.

How reliable are the discoveries of the intel­lect unaided by higher faculties?

There could be no better illustration of the pitiable futility of material science for discoveries in the realm of causation than that afforded by the post mortem examination of that wonder­fully developed man, Washington Irving Bishop. Did the scientific butchers, when they, with in­decent haste, applied the knife before there was any infallible proof that the spirit had been wholly withdrawn from the body, — did they in their examination of the gray matter of the brain expect to come upon the cause of those abnormal powers exhibited by the living personality? Did they expect to find the secret of a spiritual devel­opment wrapped up in the convolutions of the brain? The cause for which they were so igno­rantly searching in the realm of matter was to be found only in the kingdom of spirit, whence the real being with his psychical unfoldment had — upon the application of the scalpel, if not before,

A first cause in spirit is above the aim of material science, and beyond the unaided powers of the greatest intellect.

That which the most highly cultured intellect discovers and decides upon as truth in one age, it is called upon to deny and denounce in another age. The best intellects of one period discovered the earth to be a flat surface, and the best intel­lects of a later period discovered that theory to be a false one.

Scientific theories do not always wait for a succeeding age to contradict them. Galileo sub­jected himself to insult and imprisonment by declaring that the earth moved around the sun, when his compatriots were fixed in the opinion that the sun moved around the earth. A learned professor of Padua, after beholding through the telescope the new planets discovered by this great astronomer, declared that as they were invisible to the naked eye they were useless, and therefore did not exist. To what sophistries great minds will lend themselves!

So-called men of science, those who fix their gaze on matter and gain what they call knowl­edge by their physical senses and their intellect, seem to learn nothing from the blunders of the great intellects of past ages. Their self-satisfying conclusion regarding their predecessors is that they were unripe and ignorant, while they them­selves have reached the ultimate of truth. They fail to apply their logic to their own case, and inferentially to behold their supposed knowledge crumbling beneath the blows of future ages.

Intellect when left to work alone is a most delusive guide. It persuades itself that it is so great, when all the time it is so very small. As a servant of the spirit it is perfectly good. In the economy of God’s creation it is all that it ever pretended to be. But when it is misplaced it is held up to the same ridicule that a menial would be if he usurped the throne and crown of his king.

The unfolding of the intellectual powers to the exclusion of the spiritual possibilities must of necessity produce monstrosities. Such monstros­ities are every day resulting from the present materialistic education of the young. The tender germs of true manhood and womanhood are choked in the school and the college, and there are forced into existence those one-sided beings, who are blind not only to the whole world of causation, but still more blind to their own de­formity, their own lack of normal development. They are readily convertible into the material scientist, the learned agnostic, the arrogant, con­ceited philosopher of the unknowables, the fash­ionable scoffer, the doubter, the unbeliever, the denier of all things spiritual, and lastly, the crim­inal and the insane.

There is, however, a large class of degraded humanity, prominent in all cities and towns, who have little access to schools and none to colleges. But they readily learn their lessons from their so- called betters. They indirectly gain their school education. The world is their school. It serves as a supplement to the teaching they receive in the dens of misery that give them shelter and food, if there is any for them. They are apt pupils in this, their only college. They learn of the business man who over-reaches his customer, and the acute lawyer who takes advantage of his client, that cleverly managed rascality is more admired than a quiet act of beneficence. They learn from the intriguing fashionable lady that gilded vice is more popular than plain virtue. In sum, they learn that mind, and frequently perverted mind, not moral sense, rules the world to-day, at least, the so-called civilized and Chris­tian world.

Although a perversion of mind ending in crime is not the inevitable result of purely intellectual culture, yet it most certainly is true that an over­estimate of mental ability, and a non-recognition of the capabilities of the spirit leave one with no safeguard against his own passions and selfish inclinations, and render moral nobility a difficult if not impossible achievement. The purely intel­lectual man may or may not be depraved, but he is never grand, he is never noble, in the highest sense of these terms. He may add to the world’s knowledge of material things something that is of value to-day, while we stand in our present rela­tion to material things, and he may offer as a result of his erudition or research many conclu­sions, gratefully received as truth until proved to be falsity; but the world could get on without him, and in just so far as he turns attention from spirit to matter, it could get on better without him than with him. The result of his most assiduous labor appeals only to that part of his fellows which has existence, but no real being.

On the other hand, the spiritual-minded man is a necessity. The world could not get on without him. He may be ever so well developed intellec­tually ; his spirit and his intellect may and should keep equal pace, so as to bear him evenly and safely onward in his evolutionary march. His whole ministry is an offering to mankind of that which they cannot afford to lose, whether they realize the fact or not. What he has to give, however intellectually refined may be its external form, contains the essence of everlasting truth, and will live among the imperishable, eternal verities.

How important it is, then, that in educating or unfolding the capabilities of the young, their school as well as their home training should be a constant endeavor to unfold the whole of them. Or if the work must be one-sided, then let the more important work take the precedence; let the development of the spiritual nature be ranked above that of the intellect. In a properly con­ducted school, one would learn more of morality than of mathematics, more of harmony of spirit than of history, more of purity of purpose than of political economy, more of love to his neighbor than of Latin, and more of self-government than of all the statistics that material science could fur­nish. Such teaching would be religion in its true sense, as it would be a rational and useful expla­nation of the tie that binds man to his fellow-man and to his God.

We think it wholly unadvisable to have our Bible or any other Bible interpreted or—what would more frequently be the case—misinter­preted in our common schools, or to have religion taught in any of its narrow, sectarian, dogmatic forms, in which church or human organization is greater than divine truth itself. But to teach a child how to place his higher nature in dominion over his lower nature, is to give him the highest, and at the same time the most practical and eco­nomical education possible to man. It is furnish­ing him with the tools necessary for successful life work, even in this material sphere, as well as with qualifications for happiness in his ultimate life in spirit. What more than this could any teacher do for a child? Yet no teacher ought to do any­thing less than this.

Under the school system of to-day it would doubtless be difficult to accomplish this work in all its fullness. We refer more especially to pub­lic schools, because in a private school a principal may adopt a system of his own, while a public school hangs upon the civil authorities. It would, no doubt, be difficult for a public-school teacher to introduce new regulations into a school; but no amount of useless routine, no number of profit­less material text books, need prevent a spiritual-minded teacher from imparting spiritual good with every teaching he gives forth. Nothing should prevent him from being keenly alive and intuitive concerning the needs of his pupils, or from using every opportunity for individual influ­ence among them. Nothing will prevent a truly spiritual-minded teacher from seeing wherein re­form is needed in the present school system, and from making unceasing endeavor to bring about such reform. What is it in a democratic country that makes school systems? What is it that makes all reforms, if not the demand of a major­ity? If every teacher had a realizing sense of spiritual reform in the present school system, and courage to live up to his convictions, there would be no minority in the case. What could be done in the city of Boston, for example, by a school committee of twenty-four working against the quiet insistency of some twelve hundred teachers? Then, school committees are not enemies of spir­itual culture; they simply, as a rule, know nothing whatever about it. At worst, they are only igno­rant and blundering. If you can show them what moral teaching, what spiritual unfoldment will do for the young, they will be just as desirous of hav­ing it as you are. If you could once make them understand that the immense influence wielded by the public school would, when purified of its errors and infused with more spirituality, effect a thousand times more of the very good for which they are working, as well as a higher good, they would feel that the school would be defrauded in being deprived of this spirituality.

Competition, that false watchword in schools as well as in all the later experiences of life, is totally destructive of spirituality. How can we rise high morally when we are bent on outdoing our fel­lows ; when our aim is not simply to do well our­selves, but to do better or appear better than someone else; when we even feel it necessary for someone else to be put down in order that we may rise?

Mothers frequently say: “My child learns nothing at home; he needs the competition of a school to urge him forward.” It would be just as rational to say: “My child is ill; he needs poison infused into his system in order that he may have bright eyes and red cheeks.”

The mother is too busy or too indolent, or per­haps, with the best intent, is too ignorant to make an appeal to her child’s higher nature, and there­fore she wishes the work accomplished by an appeal to his lower nature, to his selfishness.

Is it any wonder that the form of egotism called competition flourishes in after life and bears result in strikes, and boycotting, and finan­cial ruin, and a loss of health as a natural recoil of selfishness? Is it any wonder that this plant thrives in the man and in the woman when the seeds of it are so abundantly sown in the child?

We would strike the principle of competition out of the school, and then it would not be likely to govern the office, and the workshop, and the gold market, and the grain market. It would not so possess men as to lead them to trample on their fellows that they themselves might reach the goal the sooner, feeling that the fleetest of foot and the heaviest of tread would be sure of the prize. It would not hold sway in the drawing room and even in the religious assembly, and lead women into household extravagance and into follies of fashion that fill life with pecuniary anxiety, and outrage rationality, and deprave character, and ruin physical health.

If there is in the heart of the child a germ of this noxious weed, competition, it cannot be de­stroyed at too early an age. If the mother has failed in this respect, then let the teacher prove herself or himself the child’s redeemer, and, instead of encouraging competition, endeavor to instill into his mind that altruistic ambition which makes one work more for another’s success than for his own.

You may think that such a condition of mind is impossible. It is impossible on a purely animal plane, and those who are living on that plane fail to discern its possibility for any one. But there are numberless instances among men and perhaps many more among women that prove its possibility.

We have in mind a man whom we know to be more desirous of gaining benefits for others than of gaining them for himself. So far as worldly prosperity is concerned, he does not stand at the top of the ladder, and some of his friends pity him because he has not done more for himself in this respect; but we think it his crown and his glory that he has desired to do more for others than for himself. If those who pity him could re­gard him spiritually, they would see how misplaced their pity was. We do not believe that this man, as a boy, was ever pleased to march ahead of his mates and leave them, envying and unhappy, in the rear.

Children, like their elders, are capable of un­selfishness and heroism if properly appealed to. But if you appeal only to a child’s selfishness, how can you learn anything of his capability for unselfishness?

If prizes are awarded in schools let them not be for standing first best, or second best, or third best, or any best at all; but let them be for attain­ing a certain proficiency in some branch of learn­ing for a certain standard of excellence in con­duct, irrespective of any other one’s attainments in these regards. If a whole class reach the required standard of proficiency in any branch of learning, so much the better: let the whole class have prizes. If the whole school reach the required standard in conduct, so much the better: let the whole school have prizes for conduct. We would say still further, let honor and admi­ration be conferred upon him who is more desir­ous of helping his mates to gain prizes than of gaining them for himself.

A child should never be permitted to feel that in order to stand well with his teachers he must outdo someone else. On the contrary, let him understand that in just so far as he has pushed back or hindered, or wished to hinder, someone else, he has morally degraded himself.

If all children were sorry to enjoy advantages to the exclusion of others, what material would there be among men with which to make mo­nopolists in trade or commerce? The boy is father to the man. If erroneous tendencies are overcome in childhood they will not show them­selves in after life. Even if they cannot be wholly destroyed, but are only successfully battled with, a habit of resistance to these evils will be formed, and strength will thus be gained to meet success­fully the greater temptations of more mature years, and, pursuing this course, there will, in every case, arrive a time when the error will be wholly vanquished.

A system of examinations and grade marks is greatly to be lamented. How frequently a thoughtful student, who has well digested and assimilated his subject, but lacking confidence or ready speech, will be thrown into the shade by some flippant pupil who has only skimmed the surface of his subject!

The ordinary public or semi-public examina­tion is no criterion whatever of one’s unfoldment in any line of thought.

If a decision regarding a pupil’s status is re­quired, let him be examined privately by social and friendly conversation, in which the most shrinking would take courage and the superficial and brazen would find that a glib tongue with no thought back of it was just so much tinsel thrown away.

As to grade marks, they are an incentive to seem rather than to be. Effort is frequently mis­directed to gaining high marks instead of doing good work.

If every mother, instead of feeding her child’s egotism by proclaiming proudly the number of his marks, would instill in him the higher view, that while the system of marks was a part of the school regulations which she was not able to abolish, yet he was to remain indifferent to marks, and strive only to do the very best work of which he was capable, whether anyone knew of it or not; if she would pursue this course, her home work would be perfectly harmonious with the spiritual work of the very best teacher, and she would render that teacher’s work easier to accomplish.

You may say that it is not within the province of a school to give high spiritual teaching. We reply that if teachers were in a high spiritual condition, they could no more avoid in some de­gree giving such teaching than a fragrant flower can avoid giving forth its perfume wherever it may be, whether that perfume is demanded or expected, or even desired or not.

If the present school system renders it difficult to infuse the highest morality into its teachings, or if it even offers a false code of morality, then, as a teacher, bend every energy towards working a change in that system, in the meantime modi­fying it as much as is permissible, in order to har­monize it with your own high convictions.

He must be a very unconscientious or incom­petent teacher who gives nothing but text-book instruction.

How many great men and women have said that whatever was noble in their characters they owed to some teacher of their early years! Of course they have worked for it themselves, but the teacher has been the guiding light to show them the way.

Any public-school system is an indication of the moral and mental condition of that part of the public by which it is enforced. If that part of the public lack light, let teachers, who are the practical workers under them, bring them light.

Any private-school system is an indication of the moral and mental condition of the one in authority over that school. If the principal of that school lacks wisdom, let the teachers, who are his co-workers, give him the benefit of such as they may have gained in their practical appli­cation of his theories.

The principal of a private school can make that school just what he desires it to be. He can raise it up to the level of his highest convic­tions without hindrance outside of himself. He naturally attracts, as pupils and as co-workers, those who are in sympathy with his designs. If he wishes to extend a despotic sway over his teachers, he will be quite likely to attract into his service such teachers as enjoy being enslaved. Lacking courage, he may fear to take a moral stand above the average, lest he thereby dimin­ish his patronage. But by giving the very best of which he is capable, he would be quite likely to find patronage, and he would proba­bly be surprised at the number of parents who would gladly avail themselves of a school sys­tem that promised to be morally above the average.

In all kinds of schools there is so much at­tention directed to externals, and so little recog­nition of those universally possessed interior powers which govern these externals. The fire drill in the public schools is an apt illustration of this sort of teaching. The pupils are trained to march, at the sound of the fire alarm, swiftly and methodically out of their class-rooms, so as to clear the building in the shortest possible period of time. The drill is all well enough, but it is the smallest and most external part of a prepara­tion for the emergency.

Why is it that in any sudden emergency one does not do the wisest thing of which he is capa­ble? Any one will reply that it is because he loses his presence of mind; fright causes him to lose command of his best faculties. This powerful factor, mind, must, then, be taken into considera­tion.

If children were mere automatons (as we can imagine), a habit of proceeding in a certain course at a certain signal might ensure for them a cer­tain invariable result. But it is a condition of mind, and not a habit of body, that governs these things.

If a man at a sudden alarm of fire, believing the fire to be in his own house, throws himself from a third-story window, instead of going down the stairs, as he had opportunity and time to do, it is not because he has not a habit of going down stairs, and perhaps even of going down swiftly at an alarm of fire, when the fire is not quite so near him; but it is because his condi­tion of mind is such as to overcome both habit and reason. So it is with the school children. When there is no fire they can march out orderly enough; but when the fire is really upon them, their condition of mind suddenly changes, and, yielding to a fright which they have not been taught to control, they lose command of their fac­ulties, and their orderly habit goes for nothing.

We speak advisedly, as we know of a case in a public school, in which, after seasons of fire drill, the pupils, when the real fire was upon them, rushed pell-mell from their class-rooms, and dis­tractedly made their way out of the building in the direst confusion, and with great danger and some injury to themselves.

In the fire drill as a protection, mind is, no doubt, taken into consideration so far as this: it is expected that the children will become so ac­customed to marching out in a swift and orderly manner when they hear the fire alarm that they will cease to think whether there is a real fire or not. Or, perhaps it may be hoped that they will always feel confident that there is no real fire, and therefore will never be frightened. In either case, there is only a slender chance on which to build a protection. The children go through this drill time and again with a feeling of perfect security. The alarm sounds, but they are sure there is no fire. This alarm has become only a welcome invitation to a pleasant and exhilarating exercise. Like the fabled cry of wolf, it has for so long been a false utterance that it does not move them. But let them one day smell the smoke or hear someone say that there is a real fire, and a shock comes upon them that changes their condition of mind “in an instant, and as this condition of mind is something that has been left out of consideration in the fire drill, they do not know how to control it.

It may be asked, What sort of teaching would do more for them than is accomplished by the fire drill?

We would reply that while it is well enough to train pupils to march in a swift and orderly man­ner, yet if half the time devoted to this physical exercise were set apart for a metaphysical teach­ing bearing especially upon the point at issue, the result would, we think, be far more satis­factory.

It may be said that we cannot have meta­physics or spiritual science taught in the schools. Why not?

By the fire drill you are endeavoring to teach pupils how to take care of their bodies in case of fire. Now, if you learn that there is another kind of teaching that will accomplish this object better than the fire drill, do you object to it be­cause it accomplishes at the same time a much higher work in fortifying the pupils for any phys­ical or spiritual emergency that may come to them in their present or future career? If the fire drill worked all the good intended (which it does not do), it would provide but for one emergency; whereas, a knowledge and practice of self-control is of universal applicability.

We have known those with whom a fear of fire amounted to a temporary insanity, those who blanched and sickened at an alarm of fire, how­ever distant, who were cured of this mania by spiritual science. If an extreme degree of such a fear can be overcome, all ordinary degrees of it ought readily to yield to the teaching; and with­out fear, a rational course would be pursued; pupils would be quite likely to obey orders.

We are aware that the fire drill has been, in many cases, abandoned as unsuccessful. But why it is unsuccessful, and what sort of teaching might advantageously replace it, is not generally understood.

The science which teaches the dominion of the higher over the lower nature is a branch of learn­ing that should be taught in every school in the land. We think that the time will come when there will in every school be a class in spiritual science, just as infallibly as there will be a class in geography or grammar. As it is a teaching that cannot be given too early in life, it will be modified so as to be adapted to the youngest as well as the oldest pupil, as history and other branches are now modified.

This branch of learning is needed by pupils in schools in order to protect their physical bodies from accident and disease (more especially conta­gious disease, which works such havoc in schools), even if we are not yet so developed as to perceive the higher need of it, — the spiritual, the only real need.

If, instead of teaching children to proceed auto­matically in case of danger, with the hope of their remaining in ignorance of their danger, you would endeavor to give them a habit of self-control and trustfulness, you would find that you had opened them to an inflowing of forces wherewith to meet the danger intelligently, as a human being should do. The method of bringing through danger by hoodwinking may apply to an animal, but there is a higher and more effective mode of protection for a human being, and a method that will apply to youth as well as to age.

There are teachers who have a special talent for instructing very young children. Let such teachers come into a knowledge of metaphysics and give forth its moral and spiritual truths in a form so simple and attractive that the youngest children will anticipate with pleasure the hour devoted to such teaching. Call it by any name that you think appropriate. You may call it ethics; it is ethics: you may call it religion ; it is religion: you may call it individual or political economy; it is both. It offers the cheapest and most effective method of self and state govern­ment. Any one of a thousand names might be appropriate to this science, according to its bear­ing upon any one of a thousand issues of our mortal career.

Let the hour devoted to this science close with a little conference in which the children tell you what they have done for themselves since the last meeting, what temptations they have resisted, and what success they have had in overcoming faults, and in holding themselves calm and doing the wisest thing in an emergency, and, above all, what they have done to give comfort and pleasure to others. Let them tell you how indifferent they have been to physical pain, and how it left them because it gained no attention. If you give them encouragement you will be surprised to see how desirous they will be to gain spiritual heroism. The very atmosphere of such a class would effect a moral uplifting for all of its members. It would tend to give them character rather than book learning, to make them true men and women rather than pedants. By such teaching a teacher would add to the best work of a true mother at home, and begin a redeeming work for mother­less or neglected children.

If any institution or abiding-place is, so far as moral teaching is concerned, better for a child than his home, it is because it is in that respect what his home ought to be, but is not. If any person’s moral supervision is better for a child than his mother’s, it is because that other is in this respect what his mother ought to be, but is not.

We will hear it said that the discipline of a large school is better for a child than home dis­cipline. This is no doubt true where the home is not what it ought to be.

Individual influence, however, cannot tell for so much among a large number as among a few. For that reason, any substitute for a home, as an asylum, a hospital, a house of correction, or re­form, ought, in order to work any great moral good, to resemble a home as much as possible. Let the erring be put together in small numbers with a mother element in supervision over each little group. Let the insane be only one among those who are most sane. We think that of all boarding schools for youth, the one in which the strongest and most lasting influence for good is exerted is what is called the little home school. The word home seems a misnomer for any insti­tution numbering one hundred members.

The majority of these large institutions, how­ever, are a great blessing. They are perhaps the best that can be done under present conditions and in the present state of society. But we think that the time will come when our blessings will find a higher and more effective mode of expres­sion. It is doubtless just now impossible to or­ganize a sufficient number of small institutions for reformation of character or for healing, to say nothing of those for the education of the young, as it would necessitate a much greater number of capable workers in the field. But we think as mankind becomes more advanced and spiritually unfolded, a greater number will take up such work, and then we shall learn that harmony is more easily established among a few than among many. Such would not be the case were those to be brought under influence individually harmoni­ous. Were we each already perfectly harmonious, we might number myriads, and, like the stars in the heavens, move along in perfect harmony. But the very words educate, reform, and heal indicate that latent powers are to be judiciously un­folded, that faults are to be corrected, that vices and errors are to be overcome; in sum, they indi­cate the existence of individual inharmonies, which must affect the collective inharmony of any num­ber brought together under one supervision. Those who have within themselves the elements of discord must discord with others, and the greater the number of such brought together, the more difficult will be the work of establishing and maintaining harmony. They act and react upon one another, morally and mentally. We think that as we progress spiritually, our educational and benevolent institutions, instead of growing to those mammoth proportions which seem to be the delight of a material age, will constantly de­crease in size and increase in number.

Although individual influence is incalculable, yet we do not believe that it extends in equal measure to all the world. The reformation of all mankind does not depend upon any one of us, but upon all of us who have come into light, each to do our own appointed and circumscribed work. If we, any of us, take upon ourselves more work than we are fitted to do, our work is simply not well done. How much individual influence may we suppose is exerted by the dean or president of a college? If this dean or president is a good man, his influence for good over the mass is, we admit, immense, but there will be numberless young men who will leave the college feeling that they have scarcely entered into his sphere at all. His influ­ence is that of the public administrator, but it cannot go out with a special directness and appli­cation to each individual in a way to strengthen the weak and reform the erring.

But as colleges — although they are supposed to uphold ethics and religion — are not for the special work of moral, mental, or physical reform, they can, perhaps better than other institutions, afford to be large.

Still, is it not impossible for the teacher of a large class to adapt even his intellectual teach­ings to each member of that class? A general teaching is given forth, which all, however vary­ing in development, are supposed to appropriate with benefit to themselves. God does not deal with us in this way in our earthly education. In accordance with his wise laws, our own individual spiritual and mental condition compile for us the lessons we are to learn; they build up our circum­stances and bring us the peculiar teaching we individually require, and no two of us are placed under precisely the same circumstances, no two of us require precisely the same teaching. God in his most important teaching deals with us in­dividually, and the nearer we can approximate to his wise plan, the more powerful will be our influ­ence for individual good.

The greatest work that a college professor will accomplish in his large class, will be perhaps the influence he will exert over some one pupil whom he has drawn near to him. This professor, having him much in mind, and learning his men­tal bias, will not only raise him morally, but will, even unconsciously, turn a little out of the beaten path to adapt his intellectual teaching to that one pupil, who will thereby receive more benefit than the rest of the class. Or, sometimes by intimate acquaintance, a professor will learn that a pupil might, with more advantage to himself, pursue some study other than the one he is teaching him, and he will advise him to make a change of class-rooms.

There is a great deal too much automatic teaching and automatic learning pursued in the present school systems. There is too frequently an effort made to unfold the youthful mind in a certain line for which it is not yet ready for unfoldment, to the exclusion of just that unfoldment for which it is ready, and of which it stands in need.

But as an intellectual mistake is of far less importance than a spiritual mistake, so imperfect colleges are less important than imperfect hos­pitals or prisons. Where vice, error, or evil inclinations are to be overcome, something more than a widely diffused attention is required.

There are those who have a special gift for ministering to the masses; their work is essen­tially a public work, and it is perhaps a great work; but for the healing of the spirit, mind, or body of an individual, something more than pub­lic ministration is required.

When a man is diseased, he feels that he must have the individual supervision of the doctor. Spiritual science would advise a similar course in cases of moral or mental ailment; the peculiar case should be studied and the spiritual remedy administered accordingly.

When one man has charge of a reformatory school of two hundred children, what does he know of their individual spiritual needs? Not know­ing them, he is quite likely to fail to attack the root of their ailment and send them forth reformed.

When one woman has charge of two hundred orphans, how can she, even though the wisest and most loving of women, in any way answer their individual cries for a mother’s love? We have known children in such institutions, who were abundantly supplied with good food, clothing, shelter, and amusement, who, nevertheless, pined and sickened for the mother caress which their clinging natures craved. It was not that the matron in charge did not love them collectively as little human beings for whose comfort and happiness she was responsible, but they needed to draw near individually to some warm heart, which for the moment, at least, might seem to belong to them.

We, who are older, may know that our presi­dent, our governor, our doctor, and our minister love us collectively, but we nevertheless need the solace of individual friendship; we need a hand not waved to us among thousands, but one that clasps our very own. The love that the children of such institutions bestow upon one another often proves their salvation. How many caresses could the busy matron of two hundred little beings dispense daily, and how intimately ac­quainted could she become with their several spiritual needs, so as to minister to them accord­ingly?

Where one physician has charge of the healing of five hundred insane patients, what can he pos­sibly know of the individual causes of their men­tal derangement? Not knowing these, can he be so successful in making them sane?

Of course, a giving forth of lofty general truth is always uplifting, and may bring order into the chaos of an unsound mind. We know that the unsound in mind and body have been healed by only the atmosphere of a metaphysical assem­bly, and that the ailing and erring must always to some extent receive good from such an assembly, with even no thought of the cause of their unsoundness; still, we think that all cases are not satisfactorily reached in this general way. It has been said that Jesus, in healing, never inquired into the cause of an ailment. But we believe that, by means of his perfectly developed intuition, he always knew the cause, and sometimes he .openly rebuked that cause, as when he reminded the woman of Samaria of the sin at the back of her infirmity.

The causes of mental and physical infirmity are to-day, as in the time of Jesus, sometimes willful vice and sometimes mere ignorance or weak­ness, and an individual drawing near and going forth of the spirit of the healer is just as essential now as it was then. Jesus never assembled his sick and infirm together and gave them a general treatment. On the contrary, when they came to him in throngs, and were doubtless benefited to some extent as a multitude, each patient was individually addressed, and felt the touch of that healing hand or met the glance of those wondrous, loving eyes, as a token that the spirit of the Healer was for that moment employed in his individual service. This perfect Teacher and Healer, who knew all the sins and weaknesses that had brought his patients low, has emphati­cally taught us to draw near to our patient individually.

All of our public institutions are established on so material a basis. The inmates of lunatic asylums, for example, receive so much well-in­tended thought concerning their bodies, and so little concerning their spirits, whence spring the discords that have unhinged their minds. The physician who takes charge of only bodies has no remedy for a mind diseased. How can one who knows nothing of the laws of mental har­mony help others to resolve their discords into harmony? How can anyone teach what he himself does not know?

We may not just yet be able to reduce the size and increase the number of reform institu­tions, but we can at once make an effort to re­form the systems on which they are at present based. There is, in our community, no more crying need than that of prison reform. The increase of crime in our midst proves the futility, if not the harmfulness, of our present vindictive method of treatment for criminals.

We believe that the time will come when cap­ital punishment will be regarded with the horror that it merits; when State reasons for the taking of life, though now so specious, will be perceived to be pure sophistry, and no more founded’ on justice or divine law than individual reasons for the same atrocity.

Vice, from which springs crime, is a disease that must be understood before it can be cured. If we have a son or a brother who is erring, we do not, if we obey the dictates of an upright soul, treat him with contempt, or offer him food poorer than our own. We approach him with special kindliness. We endeavor to redeem him by love, the only healing power. Why should a crimi­nal be ill fed or be left in idleness, which is the mother of despair? Are we revenging our­selves upon him for the wrong he may have committed, or are we trying to redeem him from error, while we are protecting the public from his influence?

Prisons should never be a bill of expense to the State. They are filled with able-bodied men and women, in whose salvation good work would prove a most effective ally. Not only give them work, but give them a choice of work. Let them do the work they love to do and can do well; for there is always some rational, beneficial work that even the worst criminal can do. If he is a burglar, turn the talent which he has perverted into a legitimate channel, and thus help to bring about in him that harmonious condition of mind which leads to redemption. Let prisoners earn not only their own living, but also that of their families, which they otherwise leave destitute. If they have no families to support, let their sur­plus earnings go to help the needy of their own kin, or of their own town or city, for the State treasury needs nothing more from them than a reimbursement of their cost.

A man could earn just as good a living for his family in prison as out of prison, if suitable work were provided for him; and a man addicted to vices impossible in prison would in many cases provide better for his family than ever he had done before.

Let the same regulations hold for women as for men; and as the earnings of women are less frequently needed in their families, they could do more than men towards relieving general destitution. Would it tend to harden or soften the hearts of men or women, criminals though they might be, to be told of the number of the starving who had been fed, and of the homeless and perishing who had been clothed, and sheltered, and warmed by their surplus wages?

It may be urged that if prison life were made agreeable crime would increase. We do not be­lieve it; and we think that the discharged would be far less likely to return, under such a system, than under the present one.

Let prison life be made just as comfortable and enjoyable as is consistent with the object in view, viz., the uplifting of the fallen. Let pris­oners have hours for work, and hours for mental and physical culture, and hours for recreation. Let them have access to a good library; in sum, let them be so treated that their whole prison life will be a harmonious system of reformatory teaching.

All public institutions for benefiting and uplift­ing humanity should be schools, and those in charge of them should be teachers.

A prison should be only a school to teach the inmates how to conquer their vices or weak­nesses; a hospital, to teach how to overcome sickness and disease of body; a house of reform, to teach how to correct faults, and gain strength of character; and an asylum to teach the blind or the deaf how best to adapt themselves spirit­ually and materially to their conditions, even though the lacking sense may not be restored to them.

We do not include the lunatic asylum in this list, as we think that not even two insane persons should be brought together. Their great inhar­mony would expose them to mutual maltreat­ments that could not be resisted.

We think that in the golden age to come society will be in a condition to offer so many workers in the spiritual field, that wherever there is an atmosphere of spiritual soundness and health, there will be found also some weak or erring one to reap the benefit of that atmosphere; just as where a country is well tilled, every inch of soil is utilized. Then all who are capable of doing good work will exert themselves to do good.

We shall see scattered throughout the land, in favored spots and choice locations, any number of little home schools of perhaps ten or twelve inmates, which may be severally composed of outcasts, or criminals, or blind, or deaf, or aged, or orphans, or waifs, or diseased, and each school under the supervision of some wise and loving teacher, whose spiritual and intellectual unfoldment renders him or her perfectly adapted for the special teaching required. We shall find here and there an insane person a welcome guest in some serene household, in which all the mem­bers are most sane and sound, and possessed of just the sort of courage and ability that makes them love to offer such hospitality to their weaker and more erring fellow-beings.

We shall see no one who has ability to do for others allowing that ability to rust from disuse.

We shall see no one who is not willing to share both his spiritual and material blessings with those poorer than himself.

There will be no drones ; but each will dis­cover his mission and discharge its duties faith­fully. The world will be full of teachers. Everyone will be a teacher for some other one.

We shall see all this, until that teaching classed under the head of reform or cure will have been so perfectly done that prevention will have taken the place of cure and no further reform will be needed. There will be a work of forming, but not of reforming. There will be simply a work of natural, harmonious unfolding to be done.

Such a state of society would most certainly be heaven upon earth; but heaven should be begun on earth.

We need an ideal to work towards. We may not just yet reach the mountain top bearing our banner with the strange device, but we can each of us raise the cry “Excelsior,” and start upon the road.

We can each of us hold fast to our ideal of perfection, and conscientiously work for its attain­ment.

 

Chapter III

EMPLOYERS

In a broad sense, all responsible adults stand in the relation of employers to a great number of their fellow-beings.

In a more limited but usually adopted sense, however, an employer is one who engages another to render some special service for a mutually agreed upon equivalent, ordinarily in money.

Instead of feeling, with that noble but peculiarly developed reformer, Count Tolstoi, that we ought each to supply our own needs, and employ no one in our service, let us feel that the relation of employer should be a reciprocal one; that while we employ others in our service, we should stand equally ready to render our services to others, each of us doing the work for which, from our peculiar unfoldment, we are best fitted. If, for example, a man makes my hats or coats, I may be able to write his books or paint his pictures. An interchange of service is the only rational labor basis for a harmonious community. The animal may be fitted to supply all its individual needs, and what one of a species can do all can do; but man, in his higher and varying degrees and lines of unfoldment, has discovered a wonder­ful economy in assigning to each his own peculiar work.

A large proportion of the young, especially among men, on leaving colleges or schools, as­sume at once the attitude of the employed; and below them in the social status is a large but less prosperous class, who, almost from infancy, rank among the employed. From this we see how large a proportion of the inhabitants of a civilized country are under the direct influence, and, so far as a certain part of their time is concerned, the full control of another. It is within the province and power, and even within the line of duty, of that other to exert over these employed a decided influence for good.

If one has not been fortunate enough in the past to be helped by parent or teacher in the work of self-redemption, it is never too late for an employer to begin that work. If such work has fortunately been already begun, it should be con­tinued; for we all of us, at all times, need the inflowing of good upon us to redeem us from ignorance and save us from error.

It is needless to say to anyone with a fine sense of justice, that an industrial system based upon co-operation instead of competition is the ideal towards which we are to work. Noble exemplifiers of even the financial success of this so considered practically impossible system are fast proving to the world that nothing in the way of good is impossible to those who really desire it.

If we once realized that the plan of our dealing with those in our employ was not based upon justice, we would not have the face to talk of exerting a good influence until we had changed that base.

A system by which an employer — whether a government, a company, or an individual —- first renders full justice to the employed, and then endeavors to raise them up by an unceasing appeal to their higher natures, is a system that permits of the very best influence of which humanity is capable. But how is such a system to become generally adopted?

Like all improved systems, it can be brought about only by individuals who have risen up to its level.

In that earnest and richly suggestive book “Looking Backward” is pictured what to the majority to-day is an unpractical system of social industry. The picture presented is doubtless the nearest approach to perfection of which the author was able to conceive. It is for us to look into it, and wherein we see good, to make that ideal of good practical by working up towards it, knowing that we shall never have such a system until we make it.

To suppose that systems make society is to mistake effect for cause. It is society that makes systems, and as it is individuals that compose so­ciety, any social reform presupposes a majority of individuals who have mentally and morally risen up to the level of such reform.

When a majority of the Italian people, for ex­ample, desired the consolidation of their states, and were in a condition to be freed from a certain tyranny of the Pope, a Victor Emanuel was at hand to lead the reform for them. But if an ade­quate number of them had not been ready for that reform, a hundred Victor Emanuels could not have effected the work, or if by a miracle he had done so, it would not have stood.

To imagine a social system based on altruism introduced into a community of which the major­ity are basely selfish, and drawing them up to its standard, is to look with blurred vision upon a fine team moving beautifully along on a smooth road, and think it is the cart that draws the horse.

What power is there in a selfish community to make an unselfish system? Or if, by any inver­sion of divine order, such a system could be forced upon such a community, how could it stand for a single day? Then, still further to suppose the impossible, if such a system were forced upon such a community, and, by rewards for virtue, and a removal of all incentives to vice, they were held to the pursuance of virtue, how much better for it would be their interior condition?

We do not for a moment mean to intimate that we should not unceasingly do all we can to im­prove our exterior as well as our interior condi­tion, — and the former would be sure to come as an effect of the latter,—but how can such external work be done where there is not an adequate number of individuals who from their interior condition desire to have it done?

We all know that, while it is our duty to remove every external temptation from the path of the young, yet that, by doing this alone, we accom­plish only a small part of our work, which should be so to raise them up spiritually that the only real temptation, which is always within them, would be overcome.

Concerning the temperance question, for exam­ple : while we believe in taking the very highest ground regarding these externals, yet we would never for a moment imagine that by merely re­moving temptation we were working the real reform, which must be accomplished in the spirit­ual, not in the material realm.

As is evident to-day, the best external condi­tions cannot be forced upon us. They cannot be brought about until there is an adequate power in the community to produce them.

We know that even now there are in our midst many men and more women, who on the liquor question take the very highest ground, which is always that of absolute right. They go further back than a prohibition of the sale of intoxicating drink, to a prohibition of its very production. The simple knowledge that it is wrong to pro­duce anything which from its nature and use is an injury to our fellow-beings is all the argument they need on the subject, for absolute right is always so very simple. But, unfortunately, there are not enough such men to work the good they desire. There is a larger but equally sincere class, who are doing good work up to their stand­ard of right, but can see no further than relative right. They are always calculating the conse­quences. They are always taking God’s work out of his hands in their planning for results. So the community must wait until the majority grow up to the standard of absolute right before even these externals can be properly adjusted.

In the meantime, however, it is for the minor­ity, who are spiritually enlightened, to work the real reform by helping the weak, diseased inebri­ate to overcome the love of drink; for vice has its root, not in social systems, but in the heart of the offender.

We cannot afford to sit down and wait in idle­ness for more perfect social systems to be inaugu­rated, for it may be that we -are the very’ individ­uals who, by working for the spiritual elevation of ourselves and others, are generating the motive power to effect such reforms. If we desire them, it will surely be we and such as we who are des­tined to bring them about.

It is often asked what an honest, unselfish man can do in his struggle for life, in the midst of so­cial systems based on greed and selfishness. We reply that he can always work to preserve his own individual integrity, and God will take care of the result. In doing this, he does also a thou­sand times more than this, for he thereby wields an influence for good whose results are beyond human calculation.

It may be argued that such a course is all very well for a man, who has only himself to look out for, but for me, for example, with my family to support, it would not work. We will ask if you have ever given it a thorough trial. Cannot our Heavenly Parent, who has charge of all the vast universe, and who, even to our finite com­prehension, has proved his infinite ability to superintend its whole economy, — can he not be trusted to help you to ways and means to provide food, and clothing, and shelter for your little family, when you render yourself passive to all good by your harmony with divine law? Try the pursuance of absolute right and see what it will bring you. Do not dally with right and waste your energies in arguing that if you do thus and so, such and such results will be likely to ensue, for we know nothing about results except the one truth, that if we pursue good nothing but good can possibly result from it, whether that good lies just within the limits of our little aim or not.

It is the pursuance of absolute right irrespec­tive of results that makes the great man, the godlike man, and such a course has been proved possible even in the midst of the most cor­rupt systems.

All spiritual and moral uplifting must be begun in individuals, extending by individual effort to whole classes, thence to whole nations.

The whole of any one man’s duty lies within the limits of his own individual capability, and it is for the doing of only his own duty that he is responsible, and not for that of the class or nation to which he belongs.

We do not mean by this that we are not to unite our efforts with others, for all who are simi­larly unfolded in any one line of thought should endeavor to come together for the common good of humanity. There is an immense power in co-operation. It is said that energy is propor­tioned to the square, instead of the sum, of the numbers producing it; that the sum of energy produced by six united persons is thirty-six times as great as that evolved by a single person.

A man’s conception of his duty is always in accordance with his degree of intellectual and spiritual unfoldment. This fact is nowhere more plainly manifest than in the different attitudes assumed towards the liquor question. The men, the voting and therefore influential members of our community, who direct these external affairs, stand on all grades of moral ground, from the high mountain top of absolute right, down through the lower grades of relative right, to the low, shadowy valley of gross self-indulgence, regardless of all right.

The result of these varying degrees of unfold­ment, as manifest in the liquor laws of to-day, proves which grade of men are in the majority. Not those of the mountain top, who would forbid the production of what, from its nature and use, injures mankind; not yet those of the next level below, who would forbid its distribution, but those of a still lower grade, who would only lessen its distribution. Well, this little good is better than none at all, and it will be sure to grow into a greater good just as rapidly as the individual voting members of our community become more enlightened.

We, as only one individual member of the community, may not be able to adjust the liquor laws any more than any other laws, in accordance with our sense of right, but we can, nevertheless, perform our individual duty by banishing all intoxicating drink from our business houses and our homes, and from our own lives, wherever and however we may be situated, and, above all, by working to overcome all desire for it in ourselves and in those with whom we are associated.

How can a man have the face to discharge any one in his employ for drinking what he calls too much, when he himself indulges in the same evil, though it may be to a less extent? As it is the nature of evil to grow when nourished, how does this employer know at what precise moment he will arrive at a point at which he will take too much? Any evil at all is too much evil for any of us to indulge in.

Before a man can exert any great influence for good over those in his employ, he must himself become upright. How can an employer have the face to discharge one of his men for stealing money from his safe; when he himself, by what he chooses to consider a legitimate process, is daily defrauding his fellow-men?

Then, there are many employers, who, though temperate, honest, and upright themselves, yet through ignorance or indolence, signally fail in their duty to their employed. They perhaps sincerely desire to do their best by those whose lives they take part in shaping, but they fail to see that best, or they find it so much trouble, or they see so much discomfort or inconvenience to themselves or someone else that might arise from it, that they feel justified in omitting to do it.

A merchant perhaps learns that one of his clerks is leading a bad life; that he so wastes his energies in dissipation that his services are daily becoming of less value. The employer obeys the dictates of his conscience so far as to warn the young man by pointing out the evil of his ways, and threatening to discharge him if he does not do better. The young man does not do better, and he is at length discharged. As he has not committed any flagrant act of dishonesty, the employer gives him a passable recommendation and turns him off on to someone else, with a virtuous feeling that he has done his best by him.

Now, suppose that, instead of warning him and showing him the evil of his ways, he had encour­aged him and shown him the good he was capable of and that he expected of him. Suppose that, in addition, he had taken the trouble to see that he was provided with rational diversion, by per­haps introducing him to some suitable companion who had the time he himself lacked to devote to the case, or in some other way seeing to it that he had wholesome occupation for his mind dur­ing his leisure hours; even though all this might occupy several whole evenings, and take the pros­perous merchant away from his own comfortable fireside for hours at a time, would he not, by so doing, generate a warmth within his own heart that would amply compensate him for his trouble? Suppose, still further, that this employer con­quered within himself all doubts and fears regard­ing the young man’s reform, and persisted in hold­ing a mental picture of him as upright and whole; would he not be sure to see some good result?

Would not even a man who had no knowledge of spiritual things, and was ignorant of the won­der-working power of thought, be able to see that such a course would be likely to make a telling appeal to the weak and erring?

One who was spiritually enlightened would know that such a case was brought to him that he might be an instrument of good, and that the suggested course would be simply a performance of duty, and anything short of it a culpable neg­lect of duty. He would regard such a case as a glorious opportunity for the working of good.

How much opportunity there is also for women to prove themselves the saviors of other women in their employ, either as household servants, or as co-workers in some industrial art, or as clerks, accountants, etc.! A feeling of universal sister­hood is, in these cases, the only basis for mutual benefit. So long as a woman feels herself better than another woman, however more advanced morally, or intellectually, or socially she may be, just so long her influence for good over that woman will be limited, or perhaps destroyed. She may lavish upon her material benefits, intel­lectual teaching, moral counsel, and even spiritual knowledge, but she will never find her way to the inner nature of that woman so as to uplift her and save her from error.

Why should we ever consider ourselves better than another person? Is it because we think that in that person’s place we would do better than they?

There is but one way, and that an impossible one, to prove that we would in any case do bet­ter than another, and that is for us to take upon ourselves the circumstances and the character of that other.

Pride of purse, pride of intellect, pride of so­cial position, pride of race, and pride of family are just so many enormous stumbling-blocks in the way of good to our fellows.

But-there are women who have none of these weaknesses, yet who, through ignorance or indif­ference, signally fail in their duty to their em­ployed.

How frequently what is considered a very good kind of woman will turn her back upon an open sinner, instead of lending her a helping hand! Such a woman never seems to think that one indulging in evident sin may be far less guilty than she herself, with her secret sin. We are neither judge nor jury in the divine tribunal. Our part of the work is to lend our aid towards reformation, and we never did and never can reform any one by contempt or neglect.

A conscientious employer of other women scarcely needs, in this enlightened age, to be re­minded of her duty concerning the physical wel­fare of her employed, but she does need to be re­minded that her responsibility does not end there.

As men need to learn the lesson of universal brotherhood, so women need, and perhaps still more, to learn and practice universal sisterhood.

Every woman should regard every other wo­man as a sister, as one of the same divine origin, and launched out upon the same career, that of perfect development.

The advantages of co-operation in any joint work, as a basis for this feeling of universal sis­terhood, cannot be over-estimated. By a super­ficial view, it may seem that a more equal divis­ion of anything so paltry as money is a small thing on which to base love or friendship; but it is justice, not money, that forms this base.

We have heard women say that they had lost all love and respect for their husbands on account of their meanness in money affairs. Meanness is always injustice. If a man is meanly close with his money, that meanness is a part of his character, a part of himself, that is, a part of his mortal, erroneous self. No just man could possibly be mean with his money in his dealings with any one, much less with one whom he pre­tended to love.

If poor girls saw that their employers desired to mete out full justice to them, they would feel the influence of that love which is always back of true justice, and it would prove the greatest possible incentive to noble effort on their part. For her own interest, as a matter of economy, an employer could do nothing better than to bestow friendly and active unselfishness on those in her employ. By such a course, she and they would be one in purpose and in interest.

That humane woman, Miss Clementina Black, of London, has organized what she calls a con­sumers’ league, a body of people who refuse to thrive on the wrongs of others, and who are able to give information to the public as to what employers are fair and what unfair to their employed.

If anyone in your service should be weak or erring, do not turn her off upon someone else, who may be harder with her than you are; but give her counsel and courage, and an opportu­nity to retrieve her character; above all, school yourself to believe in the highest part of her and to hold her in mind as reformed.

This believing in the good, that is invariably somewhere within even the so-called very worst people, is the most difficult part of our work in the reformation of others.

We need first to reform ourselves, in order to catch a glint of the divine, electric spark, to be found in even the darkest soul, and which may, at any time, under the right conditions, flash forth into a flame of divine fire. We need the vision of one who is pure in heart, for it is only the pure in heart who can see God, or discover good in everything.

If women saw more good and less evil in those whom they employ, that good would speed­ily manifest itself, and the evil would disappear.

Of course, a woman who indulges in a certain evil herself cannot expect to exorcise that evil in another. An ill-tempered and disorderly woman cannot reasonably expect the servants of her household to be orderly or amiable.

A woman who sets intoxicating drink upon her table, and partakes of it herself, can hardly reprimand a servant for intoxication. Yet we have known such a woman feel herself unjustly treated when a poor, weak servant, perhaps pre­disposed to intemperance, yielded to the tempta­tion she daily set before him or her. Then, instead of saying that the sin is hers, and she will remove the temptation and help him reform, she continues in her own error, and turns him off upon someone else.

What kind of a woman is it who can tran­quilly, and even cheerfully, sit at her own table, while the one serving her is perhaps struggling against a terrible temptation, to which she has invited him to yield by the generously replen­ished wine glasses under his charge? Is she necessarily a bad woman? Not at all. She is, perhaps, full of virtues and graces of charac­ter. She is simply undeveloped, and therefore thoughtless. She has not yet wakened up to the truth of the situation. But the time will surely come when she will awaken, — and may it not need to be by some rude and agonizing shock,— and then she will wonder that she never saw the truth clearly before.

We know of a noble woman, who, when a ser­vant otherwise satisfactory proved herself dis­honest, instead of turning her away, worked for her reform. Plainly but kindly she told her of her fault.

“I know just what articles you have taken,” she said. “I am sorry that you have this weakness, and I am going to help you conquer it. There is no reason why you should not become the most honest girl in the world. You do not want to be dishonest, and you are not going to be so.”

The girl manifested in turn the various phases of feeling natural to such an occasion. First she was indignant, then angry, then sullenly obsti­nate. But her mistress firmly but kindly held to the one point, — that she was going to help her reform. Shortly the spirit of truth so worked upon the girl that she confessed her fault with bitter tears of repentance, followed by an appeal for help to overcome the weakness.

Her cry for help was responded to both in the visible and invisible realms, and she became honest.

You may say that in a majority of such cases there would be no such ready response to your efforts. We reply that it is not our concern whether there is response or not. We are simply to do the good work, and to continue to do it irre­spective of results. At the same time, we firmly believe that in the majority of such cases, if the work of reform were persistently continued in a spirit of love and charity, manifest results would not be lacking.

Let all who serve in your household feel that their efforts are not to be directed solely to mak­ing your home comfortable and pleasing, but impress upon them the fact that your home is also their home, and that, by a conscientious fulfillment of duty, they will insure such harmony to the atmosphere of this home as will contribute to their health and happiness equally with your own.

Let a woman as well as a man take an interest in those whom she employs, outside of their working hours, so that they may feel that she enters into their lives.

There are now on record numbers of industrial establishments, both in America and Europe, connected with which are libraries, reading-rooms, gymnasiums, restaurants, etc., in which those who serve feel that their employer enters into their lives, outside of business interests. They feel that they are more to him than the machinery or the tools, from which he turns indifferently away at night, with no further thought of them until the following day, when he expects to find them again ready for use. He is also more to them than a bank, from which they draw their weekly salary.

Such a mutual attitude is the only humane, the only rational one to assume; and when both parties are co-workers in any honorable business, it must be productive of great mutual good.

Of course, there could not be much mutual respect maintained where the business under­taken was a dishonorable one. No man has a moral right to engage in any dishonorable business, in any labor or traffic that works an injury to his fellow-beings, much less, to give such employment to others.

There is a certain class of men who consider any business legitimate that will give them what they call an honest living, that is, one in which they do not literally put their hands into other men’s pockets, or their knives to other men’s throats. Many such men are well-meaning, but simply undeveloped and ignorant.

When some of the members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union visited certain liquor saloons in the western part of our country, they were surprised to find that the saloon keep­ers were not the bad men they expected them to be. They found them in many instances pos­sessed of a heart and a conscience, even if an unenlightened one. They disliked the business they were engaged in, but they alleged that it was their business, and they understood it better than any other, and they must make a living; or, it had been left them by their father, and they could not get rid of it; or, they intended to pursue it only for a few- years, just long enough to secure their families from want, and then they would gladly wash their hands of it forever, etc. One of these men even confessed that to hand a glass of liquor to a man who was ruining himself and his family, was more than he had the heart to do, so he generally stepped aside, and let someone in his employ do it for him.

The noble women referred to — for the strong­est work in the temperance cause is accomplished by the so-called weaker sex — so wrought upon these men as, in some cases, to induce them to discharge their clerks, close their saloons, and actually trust in God, or luck, as they some­times expressed it, to help them to a better means of support.

If a man believes that there is more harm than good in the liquor business, why should he be willing to engage in it, and, still worse, give other men the same dishonorable employment?

If a man believes that wine and tobacco do more harm than good, why should he engage in the importation and sale of wines and tobacco, and thus relate himself psychically with these evils, and work harm to himself and all whom he employs in the same dishonorable business?

If a man believes that tea and coffee effect more evil than good, why should he lend himself to the distribution of these commodities?

Of course, it is not to be expected that a man who still believes these evils to be good will refuse to connect himself with them, or that if he did so, such an external, motiveless act would lead him up into a spiritual discrimination be­tween good and evil.

But what we may reasonably expect is, that as soon as a man becomes aware that an occupation is wrong, he will at once, unconditionally and un­compromisingly, abandon it, and thus sever his material, mental, and moral relation to it.

The man who has even only a dim perception of an evil, and yet continues daily to give that evil countenance, is more guilty, and is harming himself and others more, than the man pursuing the same course of action, who is altogether more degraded, consequently, on his lower plane, sees only a good in the evil.

Men frequently flatter themselves that if their relation to an evil is such that it removes them from contact with its revolting or disagreeable effects, their guilt is thus lessened.

A liquor manufacturer, for example, or a whole­ sale dealer, feels himself morally superior to a grog-shop keeper. He is not obliged to witness drunkenness; he could not endure that. It would tax his sensibilities and disturb his con­science, for he has a little light on the subject, even though he does not intend to live up to it. He is dispensing the evil on a capital of one million dollars, while the grog-shop keeper does so on a capital of a few hundreds. Which con­tributes most largely to the woe of humanity? Does not the large dealer give employment, not only to one, but to many grog-shop keepers? Is he not the first dispenser of the evil?

In the days of slavery in our country, a slave buyer always considered himself morally superior to a slave trader. From his position he was so related to the evil that he was not obliged to witness its most revolting effects. But who gave employment to the slave trader? Would the slave trader have bought slaves if he could not have sold them again? A slave trader was held in utter detestation by the very slave holder who created and sustained him. He was despised for his vocation by the very employer who gave him that vocation.

The people, the law-makers of a country, create the hangman, whom they abhor. Why should they abhor him if he is doing right? Say what we will in favor of taking human or even animal life, or of cruelty in any form, under any pretext whatever, and the fact always remains that such deeds are abhorrent to any one of an upright character; and that they are so is sufficient proof to the enlightened that they are out of harmony with divine law, and therefore wrong. Our finite sense of justice never transcends that of the Divine Being. Neither our Christ nor any other christ ever taught us to commit, or to employ others to commit, any deeds abhorrent to an upright nature, much less has God, as we under­stand him, ever sanctioned such deeds.

It would be totally impossible for a man in a moral condition above brutal selfishness to look with approval or even indifference upon the hor­rors of the gallows, the slave market, or the grog­shop ; yet it has been proved quite possible for men who class themselves among the humane to stand aloof, and, with closed eyes, lend their ser­vices to the maintenance of these evils. In what way is such a man morally — we do not say socially or intellectually — superior to those of the class he despises? If he sins against greater light, he is more guilty than they. We need to realize, also, that our sin is a double one when we not only do wrong ourselves but employ others in the service of that same wrong.

Countless are the sins that we, as employers, are daily committing. Whenever we make use of anything harmful, we have, even though in­directly, employed someone to supply us with it. We have helped to create or swell the demand that governs the supply. We have not only done wrong ourselves, but we have sorely tempted someone else to commit a similar wrong. Every time a man drinks a glass of intoxicating liquor, he has employed men to produce it and to dis­tribute it; he has employed distillers, and whole­sale merchants, and retail merchants in the service of that special evil. Every time a man smokes a cigar, he has employed planters,—of a weed which, if intended for good, has been perverted to evil uses, — and manufacturers, and wholesale and re­tail vendors of an injurious commodity. Every time a woman follows an injurious fashion in dress, she has employed in the service of evil first a designer, then a fashion book editor, then per­haps a dressmaker. Every time she wears a pair of shoes that injure her health by throwing her body into an unnatural position, or that injure her feet by their unnatural form, she has employed a designer, and a wholesale and a retail merchant, and she has led some poor shoemaker into evil by tempting him, in his struggle for existence, to make what is injurious to his fellow-beings.

Suppose that you do find an injurious com­modity already in the market; if you make use of it, it was made for you, and such as you.

We hear of certain rare antique laces, that could be made to perfection only in the atmos­phere of an underground room, artificially lighted, and damp and pestilential. How inexpressibly selfish were the ladies of that age, who, by the purchase or perhaps order, of these laces, gave a health-destroying employment to numbers of tender young girls and fragile women!

If the women of to-day who are eager to gain possession of such lace were gifted with a psycho­metric power, they would behold in connection with it such visions of human woe and misery as would cause them to cast it from them as a noisome, loathsome thing, with which they could not endure to be in any way related.

While we may not at the present day be willing to employ our fellow-beings in just such deadly service as that to which we have referred, yet that sort of selfishness is not wholly confined to past ages. Have we not among our rich the artistically cultivated, and those who would imi­tate them, who are willing to pay if not to offer a tempting price for some exquisitely fine and delicate piece of work, as embroidery or painting, whose production is unavoidably injurious to eye­sight, nerve, and health? Money is no equivalent for what they buy. No human being has a right, at any price, to the life or health of his fellows.

We will go still further, and say that if we took the highest and therefore only absolutely right view of ourselves as employers, we would not desire to make use of any commodity, the pro­duction of which gives to others such employment as of necessity causes suffering to any sentient creature.

What are we that we should adorn or even sus­tain our bodies at the cost of suffering to others of God’s creatures? We are supposed to be the highest of his creatures; then why should we, as the bird upon the worm, and the wolf upon the lamb, prey upon the lower order of creatures? Why should we carry our lust, and selfishness, and cruelty into deeds that outstrip theirs by preying upon our own species? We do not know that even a starving wild beast would devour its fellow beast; yet a human being, without the temptation of famine, will gratify his or her self­ish desires at the expense of the comfort, health, and sometimes life of a fellow-being.

Even though we may employ others to face the ills of our unrighteous occupation, and ourselves stand aloof and remain in ignorance of its revolt­ing details, yet we cannot cast off the responsi­bility of our share in an evil to which we have in any way lent our aid. If we do not know that we are working ill, it is our duty as intelligent, responsible beings to learn the fact. We are not brought into this life to walk through it blindly. We are not, like the silly ostrich, to feel safe be­cause we have run our head into a bush, and can­not see our danger. Danger ever lies in wait for ignorance.

Since all responsible beings must, in the inter­dependent state of civilized society, be employ­ers of others, let it be our highest endeavor to employ them beneficently and nobly, in accord­ance with divine purpose. Let us seek to give such employment to others as shall be ennobling and health-inducing to them, as well as a ben­efit to the community on which its fruits are bestowed.

Let us pursue a similar course also to the ani­mals under our control. Let us not descend to the selfish immorality of giving a poor, innocent brute such occupation as interferes with his life, health or comfort.

One part of the Noble Eightfold Path, men­tioned in the Buddhist Catechism, is Right Means of Livelihood.

As we are all of us employers of ourselves, let us give ourselves, also, only such work as shall render us co-operators with the Ruling Spirit of the universe, in his infinitely wise plan for only the good of his creatures.

Chapter IV

ARTISTS

Literally speaking, an artist is one who joins, puts together, or makes things for use or orna­ment. But such workers have, by usage, been divided into the artist, who engages in the liberal or more intellectual arts, and the artisan, who en­gages in the mechanic or manual arts. It is not, however, always easy to discern at what precise point one becomes the other. The aim of the artist is the beautiful, while that of the artisan is the useful, but they are one in purpose. They both minister to the needs of humanity.

It is a great mistake to suppose that our lowest material wants are our only crying needs; for the gratification of aesthetic and of intellectual tastes are needs of a higher development. Beyond both a material and an intellectual development, how­ever, we must eventually arrive at a spiritual development, in the process of which we are grad­ually led out of all bondage to the things of the two lower planes. We who — the most advanced of us to-day — are just beginning to have a con­ception of spiritual necessities, need to be re­minded of the truth, that in order to advance in accordance with the law of our being, we must make our material and intellectual requirements subservient to those of the spirit. We must so regulate this material life that it shall be a help instead of a hindrance to us in our spiritual growth.

The artist, whose province it is to contribute to the pleasure of his fellow-beings by appealing to their love of the true and beautiful, should en­deavor to make his offering so pure that not even a little evil will be worked into it to militate against its beneficial influence, and he is already beginning to learn this lesson. The superiority in this respect of modern over ancient art is con­spicuously manifest by comparing the two as they exist to-day in the architecture, sculpture, and paintings of the Old World.

Lavishing faultless workmanship upon subjects that are painful or revolting is a mere prostitution of talent. It is pandering to perverted taste, when it should be the aim of the artist to redeem the undeveloped from such error by making an appeal to the purest and highest part of their nature.

Who, for example, was ever benefited by the horrible and revolting frescoes upon the walls of the church of Saint Stefano Rotondo in Rome, in which are depicted the agonies of the Romish martyrs? They were doubtless intended for good, yet the appeal they make is so mistaken a one that they are productive of harm.

We do not need to dwell upon the suffering one undergoes in doing right. That is not the point that is uplifting in any martyrdom. We already realize too much about suffering. What we need is to feel that we are to hold fast to the right in spite of all suffering, ever keeping our thoughts fixed upon truth and divine goodness, that lie beyond and which can help us through whatever may result from our steadfastness to truth.

We are not strengthened in spirit by seeing Saint Paul beheaded, or Saint Margaret torn upon the rack; but rather by beholding these martyrs with a crown upon their heads, and by reflecting upon the good to humanity which they have compassed by their pursuance of right, not by suffering, which was not their aim.

We are not uplifted by witnessing the agony of Jesus upon the cross; but we are encouraged and elevated by beholding him glorified through the salvation he worked for mankind, and not by means of his suffering, which was only an inci­dent, and not a motive of the sacred drama.

We ought no more to desire to behold these representations of the horrible in Roman art, than to desire to go back some years further into darkness, and witness a gladiatorial combat in the Coliseum. We are outgrowing such barbarities.

By dwelling upon pain, we relate ourselves to a sphere of thought, the inflowing from which brings additional pain upon us, and weakens us in the pursuance of good.

In a collection of exquisite ivory carvings in an old museum of Florence is represented a scene of the pest-house of Milan during the terrible scourge of 1630. In delicate and elaborate work are de­picted the agonies of the dying, and dead bodies in the process of decomposition and being de­voured by rats. This minute and finished work of art is the result of talent and infinite painstak­ing, and must have consumed many weary hours, and taxed to the utmost the overstrained eye-sight and nerves of the artist, and all to what purpose? To arouse a thought of the revolting ravages of disease, which is an injury instead of a benefit. Such a prostitution of talent only panders to per­verted taste. It is now happily less in demand than during the cruel and unenlightened reign of the Medici in Italy.

But there is at the present day too great a readiness in art to yield itself to a public demand for the false, instead of a desire to elevate the popular taste. While it may be well for us to know that our ignorance and error result in loath­some bodily disease, yet it is not by dwelling upon this point that we are helped to overcome our destructive conditions of mind.

In any work of art, the subject treated is more important than the workmanship. How often in Catholic countries one may see, for example, a poor grief-stricken woman kneel devoutly before a representation of that world-wide subject, the Virgin Mother, the emblem of pure woman­hood, then rise and gaze upon it, delighted and refreshed. The workmanship may be, and frequently is, so bad as to render the image ludi­crous to cultured eyes, yet it has served its pur­pose in calling forth the thought intended to be expressed, and the stricken woman is helped and comforted.

If an artist is himself in an enlightened condi­tion of mind, he will study to express what will benefit mankind, and then his work will be sure to please ; for there is always in every human heart a love of the true, however latent that love may be. If it is not awakened at the first appeal, it will in time be sure to respond.

There is perhaps nothing in connection with the Paris Salon, that annual exhibition of the latest pictures, more pleasing to the philan­thropic heart, than the spectacle, on a Sunday, of the grand halls thronged with men clad in the dark blue frock of the French artisan. It is his one day out of seven for leisure and rest, and the admission is free. It is all the better for him that this day is avoided by the fine people, who have their twenty-four hours of leisure seven days of the week, for he has all the more room for himself and, perhaps, his family. As he trudges from picture to picture he knows little about workmanship; but he does know just what pic­tures, from their pleasing subjects, call up in his mind cheerful or encouraging thoughts, and if they to any acceptable degree portray the thought intended by the artist, they have served well their purpose to the uncultured artisan. They have led him onward and upward. The quiet and order of the well-filled halls would impress themselves upon any one. The reverential long­ing for something higher than commonplace daily life affords, and the devout reverence for that something when once discovered, pervade the atmosphere and make themselves felt by the psychically sensitive. They generate an influ­ence that compares well with that of some of the fashionable church assemblies who at this mo­ment are engaged in perhaps a more external form of worship and feeling themselves to be superior.

Pure works of art cannot fail to teach religion as well as ethics.

In the paintings of Fra Angelico the most serious defects in drawing are over-balanced by the sublimity of his subjects and the purity of expres­sion in his figures and faces. The intention of the artist so makes itself felt in the hearts of the truly devout that there is no room for cold criticism.

The unpleasant in art is sometimes admitted on the plea of its being true to nature; that is, to our present condition of mingled good and evil. But the true artist will be in advance of his age, and give us representations of only good, which will at some future time be the all in all.

The grotesque in art, even when it is carried to the point of creating disgust, is countenanced as a rich play of the imagination. But why not image something pleasing? why desecrate thus the imagination? What is there ennobling in a fountain in which the pure water from some crys­tal spring is insulted by being made to flow from the mouth of a grinning satyr or a nauseated demon? The marble may be spotless, the chiseling exquisite, but the thought expressed is neither pleasant nor beneficial.

How tranquillizing it is to turn from such works to the beautiful specimens of Greek art of that classic period in which nothing ugly or commonplace was considered worthy of represen­tation!

It is true that the revolting in art gratifies a certain order of taste. So does an opportunity to steal gratify a dishonest nature; but it is not for us to encourage evil by pandering to it, instead of helping to overcome it by teaching its opposite.

If we have talent for painting, sculpture or the drama, it is for us to apply that talent to the uplifting of humanity. If unpleasant subjects treated in marble or upon canvas will attract throngs of the public, to their detriment, so also will a representation of the most lofty subject attract them in throngs, and to their benefit instead of to their injury. If an obscene and immoral play will fill a theatre for one hundred nights, so also will a drama that is pure and ele­vating. This statement is emphatically verified in the immense success of that pure and elevating play “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” which hinges on the beautiful working of metaphysical law.

If our gamins in the pit or gallery will applaud a victory of virtue over vice, why ever offer them vice triumphant, or still less, why ever dwell at length upon pictures of vice, even though they may finally lead to virtue triumphant?

If an actor or an actress should make it a prin­ciple of his or her profession to refuse any engage­ment that necessitated impure teaching, would he or she be left unemployed? We do not think so. If an actor should refuse to prostitute his talent by demoralizing humanity, would he thereby be left to starve? We do not believe it. But even suppose that, at one point in his career, a strict adherence to his principle diminished his income one-half; then let him diminish his ex­penses in proportion, and feel that a grand op­portunity has been given him to teach, strengthen, and benefit the world by his example.

Our material needs are comparative. If we have enough for the simplest food, clothing, and shel­ter, we can live on one sum of money just as well as on another, if we only think so, and when the necessity comes we should make it our duty to think so. We should always regulate our minds in accordance with our circumstances. These circumstances are all of our own making, and the sooner we accept them rightly, the sooner we shall be able to make better ones.

Many a man has failed in his duty for fear of bringing his family into poverty. Why should a man fear that his wife, or even his children, if properly appealed to, will not have as much courage to bear adversity as he has? As a rule, a woman has ten times more moral courage than a man, and children will follow the lead of an upright mother. There are full ten men to one woman who sink down into discouragement, unhappiness, and ill-health from a loss of money.

Whatever our work in life may be, we gain nothing by permitting impurity to enter into it.

Writers form a class of artists who perhaps more than any others have it in their power to do good or harm.

There is an old English stanza that runs thus:

“I pity from my soul unhappy men Compelled by want to prostitute their pen,

Who, like lawyers, either starve or plead,

And follow, right or wrong, where guineas lead.”

We positively deny the existence of any such necessity as these verses imply. But the unhappy men who take such a distorted view of life are assuredly to be pitied for their ignorance of divine law. We are never forced to do evil that good may come to us or to anyone else.

It should be the first aim of a writer to give to the world pure and healthful teaching, even in such work as is intended only for amusement. If the mind of a writer is unpolluted by a desire for popularity or great pecuniary gain, he will work in harmony with truth, and his teaching will approach divine wisdom. An unpretending article or a book that benefits a few is far prefer­able to a more brilliant piece of work, that attracts the attention of thousands without benefiting any one. It is not the number of people who know of us, but the number we redeem from ignorance and unhappiness, that adds gems to our crown. In the very composition of a true work, helpful thought is sent forth into the realm of mind, thereby benefiting the world even before it has reached the printing-press and taken upon itself material form.

This holds true in any kind of work. Any plan for good to humanity begins to work good while it is yet nothing but a plan. The very desire to alleviate the hardships or add to the comfort or pleasure of mankind, even in a ma­terial way, is a feeling that generates good to others. One in such a condition of mind is also, thereby, more sure of success in his plans, for he is in just the condition that relates him to that sphere of thought towards which he is inclined, and from which will come the help he needs in order to develop or correct his vague or defective plans.

If the inventor, in any line of thought, under­stood just how much he could be aided in his plans by purity of purpose and trust in the un­seen forces of nature, he would realize that to develop his own character, his own spiritual powers, was the foundation on which alone his material success could securely rest.

There is some truth in the saying that inventors are always poor. But the cause of their poverty of that long and anxious delay in the perfect­ing of their plans—lies back of their inventive powers, in their character. They are lacking in tranquility, or in trustfulness, or in purity of pur­pose, and sometimes in all three, so that they are not open to the clear ideas for which they are reaching out, and which always seem almost within their grasp.

To invent is to come upon something that is not known in the age and country of the inventor. But in order to come upon something, that some­thing must already have existence somewhere.

We have reason to believe that there are in the universe myriads of perfected beings, who, having finished their material education, know all that can be known concerning the manipula­tion and controlling of matter, and that there are also less advanced beings of all grades, who, though only on the road to perfection in this kind of knowledge, are yet so far beyond us that they can give us new ideas just as soon and as abundantly as we are ready for them. They are teachers in God’s employ, and it is to them that we are appealing when we reach out for knowledge of these material things, even though we may believe that all we need can be generated in our own mind.

Let us not then clamor in vain at a door that we ourselves have closed.

If we are inventors, let us endeavor to feel sure that we are not just trying to do something that will give us a patent, and render us monopo­lists, so that we may be able to make an unjust profit upon our commodity; but let us feel sure that we are working to redeem our fellow-men from some kind of bondage, or to give them some kind of comfort or pleasure.

When we are sure of our pure motive, then let us retire into privacy with our vague plans, and, sitting down in calmness and trust, turn our thoughts in the desired direction. By this method, we relate ourselves to a corresponding thought sphere that is perfectly adapted to our needs and our capacity. We thus open the door for more knowledge to come in.

A man who has in no degree conquered his own lower nature might look in vain for the tranquility and trust required to open wide the door of knowledge. We have never known a great inventor who was a very sensual man. Sensuality relates us to animal spheres, which could never aid us to knowledge concerning any­thing above the animal plane. Animal spheres could perhaps aid a man in becoming a monopo­list, for so far as a man is a monopolist, just so far he is, in that regard, on the animal plane.

If a monopolist could realize that when he looked upon an enclosure of those animals which are representative of selfishness and impurity, and saw them pushing and crowding before their fellows to be the first to reach a well-filled trough, if he could realize that he was gazing upon his own portrait, he would desire to change his ruling spirit, so that he might relate himself to forces that would raise him to a higher plane.

At the present day there are so many minds holding themselves open to knowledge concern­ing matter that the immediate future promises to be rich in marvelous inventions.

Why should not the ancient Pompeians, for example, aid us to knowledge in the art of dur­able coloring? Why should not the wonderful Atlantians answer our appeal for marvels in mechanics?

Both the artist and the artisan are wide awake in this material age, that cries out so loudly for a mastery over the so-called inorganic kingdoms. We are approaching the top of our material lad­der, and we are determined to find all the utility and all the delight with which matter can furnish us. We would bend not only the wind, and the waves, and the blue ether above us to our uses, but we would also entrap and employ for our comfort and delight the most subtle, invisible forces of nature.

The mechanical inventor forms a sort of wedge between the artist and the artisan. His work is more brain work than hand work. He is the great god of the present age, which is one of utility even more than of profuse decoration. When he reaches out to invent or come upon some new idea, he should see to it that the knowl­edge he seeks will be beneficial. When he has perfected his plan, let him not offer it grudgingly to humanity by selling his commodity at an exor­bitant price. The knowledge he has gained by effort is rightfully his; but then it is just as free to anyone else who makes the same effort.

Knowledge is no more to be bought and sold than the sunlight, which is free to all who seek it. If a man opens a sun bath for the public, he does not charge for the sunlight, but only for his time, and outlay, and premises. He does not own the sun. Neither does any man have a monopoly of knowledge. Let the inventor then charge for only his time, his material, his outlay, and his premises.

It is not the inventor alone who among mate­rial workers has it in his power to benefit human­ity. Even the humblest artisan or worker in any line whatever, who may do only what he has been taught to do, can and should be so conscientious that he would not be willing to carry out another person’s injurious ideas.

We knew of a poor shoemaker who said that he did not enjoy making French heels to his shoes because he knew they ruined feet. Now, if he had acted up to the light he most decidedly had, and refused to do what he felt to be wrong, what would have been the probable result? We know the popular cry would be that he would be left to starve. But we think it quite likely that, on the contrary, he would have become noted as a maker of common-sense shoes, and would have had all the work he wanted, for common sense has not yet entirely died out of the world. All he would need to do in such a case would be to pursue the right, and trust God for results. It would not be necessary for him to see just what would come of it, for God has his own ways and means of working, and his plans are not always laid open before us.

What would be thought of a child who dis­obeyed his earthly father, because he did not see how that father would be able to make things come out right unless he himself did wrong? Doing wrong never brings about right.

If there is not yet a demand for what is right, let even the most obscure artisan so ply his trade that he can help to redeem the world from error in that regard. No one can be so unimportant or obscure as not to exert an influence over his fellow-beings. There is a constant emanation from his spirit, whether he wills it or not, that is sure to influence or flow in upon others, to their benefit or their injury.

With every nail and every board that go to make up the sum of details in the construction of our dwelling, may go forth from the builder and his workmen such a conscientious desire to do their best, and so much good-will to us, that we find in that dwelling, from the very first, a cer­tain rest and comfort beyond anything that could be conferred by mere wood and plaster.

We, all of us, are affected more than we are aware by the spirit of those who serve us.

We know of a sensitive lady who suffered from indigestion after partaking of well-cooked food from the hands of a malicious cook, with whom she never came in personal contact, and, when she changed her cook for one superior in character, though inferior in skill, her ailment disappeared.

Now, if evil is so subtly contagious, so also is good, and to a much greater degree.

Whatever may be our occupation, let us put into it so much good intention and good-will to others, that we cannot fail to contribute our mite to the world’s redemption.

Chapter V

PRIESTS

It seems natural to mankind, in passing through the earlier stages of his development, to feel, in his religious aspirations and fears, that he requires some power outside of himself to take him into the good graces of the Almighty. He appears to need someone who shall offer up lip service, or some external sacrifice, to set down to his credit, and thus balance his spiritual account with his Deity. But as he comes into more light, he finds that he needs no such mediator, and that his only sacrifice should be the burning or purifying of his own inclinations. He no longer needs the priest, who offers him a vica­riously obtained salvation. But the order of priest he does need in his more intelligent relig­ious efforts is a minister or pastor, one who shall minister unto him spiritual things, who shall teach and feed him spiritually.

A pastor or shepherd who wisely tends his sheep will offer them such teaching as corre­sponds to their condition. If he is not, at the start, a little in advance of them, and does not grow with their growth, he is not well adapted for the work he has undertaken.

In these enlightened days we are outgrowing the need of a priest whose office it is to set an arbitrary limit to truth. We are every day feel­ing more and more the need of one who shall widen for us our horizon, and be a co-worker with us in our search for divine wisdom; one who shall not only hail with joy any new truth that may present itself, but who shall be willing to regard and investigate any possible truth that is offered him.

We want truth more than we want church organizations. We do not deny the helpfulness, in fact, the gigantic power, of united effort; but united effort to stand still does not, naturally, advance us like united effort to be up and march­ing along.

There are some of us who think that what our fathers knew of truth is enough for us to know; but in this we are not really following their example; for, in order to gain their knowl­edge, which to-day may be ignorance, they made vast strides beyond their fathers. They did not do as we propose doing,—stand still with eyes closed to new truth.

The endeavor to make truth subservient to sect is reversing natural order.

An intelligent Episcopal clergyman, who was much impressed by some cases of spiritual healing that had come under his observation, and whose interest in this phase of truth was thoroughly awakened, said that he should like to learn more about it, but that if he thought it would conflict with any of the beliefs of his church, he would drop it like a hot coal. Is the Episcopal church, then, greater than truth? Is any church greater than truth? Does any church include and con­fine the whole of truth, or is the underlying truth that may be found — even though as a kernel in a hard shell — in any church but an infinitesimal part of universal truth? We hope, and we have every reason to believe, that should the above-mentioned clergyman be brought again into the sphere of the Episcopal church one hun­dred years hence, he would find it, by the drop­ping away of errors, and the addition of new truths, changed beyond recognition. Perhaps the very so-considered essentials to which he clung so tenaciously would rank among ludicrous superstitions.

The truths contained in the science of spiritual healing, or in any other science, can never con­flict with the truths of any church, for truths can never conflict with one another; but a distorted view of truth may conflict with a correct view of truth. If we have any reason to suspect that possibly our views of truth may be distorted, should we not desire to straighten them out rather than cling to them, and, by looking through them, distort everything else?

The desire in the custodians of church doc­trines to close the door upon all new truth, not only keeps their people in darkness, but it stunts their own growth and circumscribes the field of their usefulness. They pity or despise as a ren­egade, one who, knowing more to-day than he knew yesterday, changes his view of truth.

This order of priest may say that if it is a door­keeper’s office to keep a door closed, he cannot be expected to hold it open, which is true. If, however, more light were desired, church doc­trines would not be so narrow and exclusive. They would present open doors to the light, for it is men who make doctrines, and not doctrines who make men. God made religion, but manmade churches.

Jesus said, “Feed my sheep he did not say, “Build fine temples for worship.” He did not establish, or even suggest church organizations to fix boundary lines to truth. In feeding his sheep we are to minister to them in such a way that their hearts and minds will open to light, and they will be strengthened and refreshed. Let a pastor take an interest in his flock individ­ually. Let him draw especially near to the so- called black sheep, for they need him more than the white ones.

The humblest and dullest of a flock are fre­quently blest with an intuition that tells them whether their minister is a mere expounder of doctrines or a live redeemer; whether he is work­ing for his own interest or for the benefit of his flock; in sum, whether he is counterfeit or real.

There are at the present moment many noble workers within the pale of the church organiza­tions, who are live exemplars of the truths taught by Jesus, instead of fossilized custodians of effete church dogma, and they are striving to break down the walls of bigotry and ignorance that hem in the sect to which they belong.

We need more of this kind of ministers. We need true brothers, who, in ministering holy things, would be willing to lift their flock from the foulest mire if need be; for the clean hands that do the bidding of a pure heart cannot become sullied, as they have no affinity with what is unclean. We need a brother who is not only humane, but who is wiser than we, — who is a prophet as well as a priest.

If we needed priests to work vicariously for us when we were in the wilderness of material de­velopment, now that we are emerging from dark­ness into light, we need prophets who will wisely counsel us in working out our own salvation. We need seers of spiritual visions, illuminated pro­gressive teachers, — not those who will merely see a fatalistic rock before us, but those who, seeing the rock, will, by their unerring compass, bring our vessel round that rock and safely into port. We need teachers who will give us all of truth that, at any certain moment, we are able to receive.

Although there may be a stage in our advance at which we will stand at the precise point of some certain church creed, yet we think that all creeds and all doctrines should be adopted with a reser­vation. We should say that to-day we believe thus and so, but to-morrow, if we progress as it is our duty to endeavor to do, we may believe something quite different.

A true minister will lead his people onward instead of. barring up the way to prevent their advance. The giving of intellectual teaching, however, is the smallest part of the work of a pastor. Humanity cannot thrive on only dry doctrines and narrow interpretations of scripture. We need someone to draw near to us in spirit and help us when we are in sin, sorrow, and sick­ness.

There is a lamentable lack of this needful ministry from those appointed to the sacred office.

We have heard many say that they always sought counsel and comfort in their physician, for somehow he seemed to come nearer to them than their minister. A true physician always will come near to his patients in both mind and spirit; but then why is the priest not also a physician? In the olden time the two offices were one; why are they now separated?

Preach the gospel and heal the sick, was the command of Jesus to his followers, who, in obey­ing only half of that command would seem to perform only half of their duty.

Our spiritual teacher should be the one above all others to heal us of our bodily infirmities, since it is spiritual knowledge and the practice of spirituality that alone can raise us to a condition of security in bodily health.

A true minister does not go to the bedside of a patient and tell him what death is, but he tells him what life is. He tells him that he is alive and always will be alive, whether he leaves his material body or not.

Into whatever sphere we may enter, we are still alive. Ever-shifting matter may change its form, but the spiritual power that governs these changes is a living power. There is life everywhere. The whole universe is full of life, and health, and strength.            –

The minister, by turning the attention of his patient to the everlasting life of spirit, has done more for the restoration of his body than could be accomplished in any other way.

In his wisdom, as a true physician, he does not fix a time for the patient to leave the material body, and thus induce all dominating minds to contribute towards the verification of that pre­diction. He knows that only God can foretell such an event. On the contrary, by reanimating the spirit, even when it seems to be losing its hold of the sinking body, he will many times re­call the scattered life forces, and enable that spirit to continue its mundane work, which it had well- nigh cut short, perhaps by its very hopelessness.

Such a minister, such a true healer, would not urge a patient to prepare, in his last moments, for a life in spirit, for he would know that the man’s previous life, as a whole, was the only prep­aration that could be made. He would know that a hasty repentance of leisurely pursued evil, a repentance founded perhaps on fear or self-interest, would, at best, be but a starting-point in the right direction, and would save no one from reaping that which he had sown.

We know of ministers who, in cases of great suffering, pray at the bedside of the patient, that God, if it be his will, may relieve the suffering or remove the sufferer from this life. Now we do not think that we need to feel any anxiety or doubt lest God will not do what is best, and we have nothing whatever to do with the issues, life and death, as they are called. We are not even to desire one way or the other. Our whole effort should be directed to the strengthening of the weak spirit, and thus we invigorate and reanimate the body, or, perhaps, enable that spirit to pass tranquilly on to a higher condition. We have no responsibility whatever concerning the way in which our good work results.

We have no right to wish to cut short an earthly discipline. The last hours of an earthly life, even when full of inevitable anguish, may be doing a work for the spiritual advancement of the sufferer that will tell upon his career throughout all eternity.

The last term of a student at school, even though full of arduous tasks, is frequently said to be of more value to him than years of his previous schooling; and who would wish to deprive him of this last advantage by removing him from school because his way had become less smooth?

There is only one step between the desire to remove a sufferer from this life, and a doctor’s desire that leads him to permit a deformed child to pass out of this life as soon as he enters into it. Then there is only another step between this position and that taken by the physically and artistically cultured ancient Greeks, when they deliberately put to death an infant whose body was not hygienically and perfectly molded in accordance with their models of the human form.

The survival of the fittest is God’s responsi­bility, and not ours.

The minister, who is also a healer, will persist, in spite of all hindrances, in seeing nothing but life for a patient. Though he may be called to a bed­side surrounded with poisonous drugs and imple­ments of destruction, in an atmosphere filled with fears, and false beliefs, and even antagonism to truth, yet he will valiantly hold fast to his idea of life, spiritual life, which is a thousand times more potent than all the so-called obstacles in the world. He will endeavor silently to teach the patient, by the force of his own knowledge, that there is not one physician for the body and another for the soul, but that the healing of the soul includes that of the body, as the shining of the sun includes the quickening of all organized forms upon the earth.

A patient needs to be taught a more excellent way in order to prefer it. But if, as a spiritual healer, our most earnest and conscientious teach­ing seems lost, if the good seed we sow appears to fall on utterly barren ground, even then we shall have done our best, and our all, and we may rest assured that any other line of effort would, as an ultimate effect, have been less and not more powerful.

The Romish church, in all ages of its career, has been full of examples of healing power, con­joined with priestly office, and although falsified and made to redound to the glory of the church, instead of to the glory of spiritual science, it has accomplished marvelous work in the healing of bodily infirmities, and has thus drawn its children more closely into the fold. How much greater work might then be done by one who, in his sacred priestly office, truthfully presented this spiritual method of healing, with no thought of church organization, or of self, and only intent on his mission in its entirety, as preacher of the gospel and healer of the sick!

Jesus, in commanding his disciples to preach the gospel, did not tell them that in doing so they were to see to it that they stood up in fine pul­pits, before richly furnished, monopolized pews, in costly temples, that were open to even the monopolists only four or five hours out of all the seven days of the week, and were never open to all who chose to enter. But he did tell them to go forth among all nations and preach the gospel to every creature, which, even though not taken in a fully literal sense, would not seem to enjoin upon them the maintenance of an aristocracy in religion. If, however, we find it expedient to have handsome temples of worship, whose atmosphere is supposed to be filled with purity, strength, and regenerative power, why not let them daily stand open, so that the most degraded of God’s children may enter, and, without money and without price, bathe in such healing magnetism? It is the most degraded who most need regenerating, and they are quite as likely to need it on a week-day as on the Sabbath.

The closed doors of Christian churches are a shame to a Christian community. There is no word that is so frequently and grossly misused as the word Christian. It is employed to cover the most unchristian thoughts and deeds, — deeds dia­metrically opposed to the teachings of the Christ signified.

Does a minister of the gospel think that, if he really followed the precepts and example of Jesus, his Christ, instead of only pretending to do so, does he think that if, for example, he refused to preach to hired pews, he would be without a pul­pit to preach in?

We know of a noble example in the Episcopal church — perhaps the most exclusive of churches who refused to preach to monopolized pews, and he was not without a pulpit to preach in, and the poor and the rich were seated side by side before him.

If there is any place in the world in which the false barrier between rich and poor should be leveled away, it is in a temple consecrated to the God of all humanity. If there is any individual in the world who should be at the service of the poor, equally with the rich, it is one who pre­tends to be a follower of Jesus, the Friend of all mankind.

If it were the custom for ministers to preside over plain houses of worship, and depend upon the power of spiritual attraction to fill them, we think that the measure of their success would be something of a criterion of their fitness for the work undertaken. Then, if any minister preached to empty seats, it would be because he had nothing to give that was wanted in that commu­nity ; it would be because, however grand his elo­cution, he had no message to deliver, and it should conclusively prove to him that he had either mis­taken his calling or was in the wrong place.

Under the present system of church organiza­tions, the people are ministered to by a fine tem­ple of worship, a fashionable location, the choice music of a choir, or by association with a certain preferred class of society, or by anything, rather than by the love and wisdom of their pastor. Either the love and wisdom are not there, or those who come under the ministry by means of a false attraction are too benighted to discover them.

We Protestants might turn back and learn something from the Romish church, whose errors we so self-righteously feel we have left behind us. In turning away from their errors we have also turned away from some of their virtues.

In the old Catholic countries a church stands open on week-days to the rich and poor alike. Its furnishings are not so perishable and sumpt­uous that they cannot be daily used, although its decorations are generally so artistic and enduring that they are a lasting means of comfort and edu­cation to the people of all social grades. When the so-called lower classes shift their dwellings and crowd in upon the neighborhood of a church, or when it becomes surrounded by busy trade centers, that church does not take up its silken robes and walk away. That church is not then sold for a theatre, that its organization may move to a more fashionable quarter.

Who would not be surprised, on going to Rome, for example, to find St. Peter’s torn down and its people building a new temple in the Via Nazionale; or, on going to Paris, to find Notre Dame converted into a theatre, and its people flocking over to a new edifice near the Arc de Triomphe?

Of course, the church, as a church, is not wholly responsible for the present condition of things among us, for the condition of a church falls back upon other social conditions. These other social conditions have become unnatural by the artifici­ality and unrest of our upper-tendom, who are the ones to support fine churches. Why must the rich, and those who imitate the rich, be forever shifting their dwellings, and then expect their churches and public buildings to follow in their erratic course? The demands of trade could not turn them out of their dwellings or their streets if they did not desire to go. If trade could not find a place in one quarter, it would turn to another, as it does in the city of London and other substantial cities that retain their characters for centuries.

Has the pastor of a church nothing to say to his people on this subject? Can he not endeavor so to minister to them that their souls will be filled with the peace that brings contentment? Can he not give them strength to overcome the worldly emulation and struggle to seem rather than to be? Of course, he cannot so minister to them if he is not above that plane himself. The tranquility which spiritual knowledge and living can impart is needed even more by the rich than by the poor.

As an argument against opening our churches to the poor and uneducated, it has been said that they would not avail themselves of the privilege if they had it, that they would not understand a refined discourse, and would not feel at home in refined surroundings. Well and good; then there is no harm done in making them the offer. But if they would not feel at home in one church and under one sort of ministry, they would be quite likely to do so in another church, and under another ministry, if the choice were left open to them, as it should be. Then there is a universal misjudgment concerning the understanding of the so-called uneducated. We have known many among the unlettered and unschooled, who were so spiritually unfolded that they could seize in­stantly upon a spiritual truth in however scholarly a form it might be presented to them. They were, better educated in the highest sense than the majority of mere intellectual scholars. In­deed, it is sometimes pitiful to witness the utter stupidity of the merely intellectually developed when presented with some high spiritual truth. They simply have no trained faculty by which they can lay hold upon it. It is to them as color to the blind: it does not exist. Its vocabulary has no meaning for them; its essence finds no response within them.

It is not for us to say who shall be able to com­prehend spiritual truth, whether the beggar in rags or the prince in purple and fine linen. As a minister of sacred things, freely offer spiritual truth to all, and those who can be benefited by your rendering of it will be attracted to you by a law that does not depend upon artificial social customs.

An immense field for good is open before one who has undertaken the mission of Christ. Only a small part of his work lies within the walls of his sanctuary. A pastor has charge of his flock, not only on the Sabbath day, but on all the seven days of the week; and since upon him does not devolve the redeeming work for a whole nation or even for a whole city, he can enter into the individual career of his flock. It is within his province to learn the trend of every life placed in his keeping. A true redeemer of his race seeks out the sick, the sinful, and the sorrowing, as one who, however conscientiously he may fulfill the duties of material life, takes a paramount interest in the things of the spirit. He is one who never recoils from the most degraded sinner, for he knows that all error is but ignorance, but a turn­ing out of the true road into toilsome by-paths by those who are groping along in darkness. He only endeavors to shed light all along the way. He sheds such spiritual illumination upon the poorest that they will realize their power for good to others, and will feel rich, for no one can possi­bly be too poor to benefit his neighbor. In the same spirit of love and charity he will approach the rich, for they are frequently in greater dark­ness than the poor.

We are sometimes inclined to pity persons on account of their uninterrupted worldly prosperity, for it seems to be their undoing. But this is only a seeming; the real cause of their destruc­tion is within themselves, and not in anything external, whether poverty or riches. This truth the real minister enjoins upon them. He does not waste his time in lamenting either the pov­erty or riches of his people; but he teaches them how to make a good use of their advantages, and turn to good account either poverty or riches, so that it may prove a blessing instead of a hindrance. The fashionable avenues and the crowded lanes equally need the visits and the ministration of a true redeemer.

The individual redeeming work of a pastor could not be accomplished by one over-crowded with official church duties. If a man in any calling whatever undertakes more work than he can do, his work is not well done. One who does nothing but deliver sermons from a pulpit or desk may be a preacher, but he is not a pastor.

If there were fewer church meetings and con­ventions, less wrangling among ministers, dea­cons, priests and bishops over non-essential church doctrines, or over the defection of a brother from arbitrary dogma, and more practical religion, more individual healing and teaching among the sick and sinful, the world would more speedily become enlightened by clerical effort.

A spiritual-minded clergyman will be quite likely at length to outgrow some of the bigotry of his sect; he will be quite likely to learn to place a higher interpretation upon the truths of his church. He will perhaps believe more in God as a creator and parent, and more in Jesus as a redeemer; but he will believe in a different, a more rational, a more helpful way, than the one in which he was taught, and which was, at the time, sincerely accepted. He has simply grown. Can a plant help growing when its conditions are such as to bring upon it the spiritual life-force it requires? Can a human being help growing when by his own effort he brings upon himself the right conditions?

The clergyman who is growing is perhaps dis­turbed at the change in himself, which means nothing but progress. He feels that he ought to leave his people because he is not in every point one of them.

When we consider how impossible it is that any two members of the same church should interpret or assimilate its doctrines in precisely the same way, we know that a minister could not possibly, in every non-essential, be one with all his people; and it is not necessary that he should do so. We think there are many among the clergy, and more among the laity of the Episco­pal church, who do not, for example, accept lit­erally the fourth of the thirty-nine articles estab­lished by bishops, clergy, and laity as absolute truth. But an enlightened clergyman has some­thing more profitable to talk about to his people than the physical body of the historical person, Jesus, the Christ. Such points are thrown into the background of non-essentials by the glorious and helpful truths he taught, which truths would be in no wise belittled, were he even proved to be a character of fiction, instead of a real histor­ical person.

Why should a clergyman ever leave a certain denomination in which he is doing much good, unless his life and his necessitated utterances have to him become an untruth?

Those who are attracted to you, and continue to desire your ministry, need you just as long as you in all sincerity have anything to offer them; and, if those appointed over you, thinking more of church dogma than of truth, depose you from office while in the midst of your usefulness, so much the worse for them. But they cannot cut off your usefulness, for the whole world is your field. If one pulpit closes to you, another will be quite likely to open to you. Moreover, as spirit­ual food does not necessarily proceed from pul­pits, and as any spot on earth may become your forum, you cannot be prevented from preaching the gospel. As the sick and sinful are always with you, and you can always draw near to them, you cannot be prevented from healing your fellow-beings of their infirmities. Thus, in spite of all anathemas, and excommunications, and curses of whatsoever nature, from man-made ecclesiasti­cal authority, your consecration to divine work cannot be revoked, and you will be sustained in your God-made office of preacher and healer.

Although the true consecrated priest or min­ister is the highest and most significant of those redeemers who walk along with us in our daily life, yet we must not leave all the preaching and healing for him to do. We must realize that we can be priests to one another. Still further, we must realize that we are each our own priest. We have each of us a divine nature illuminated with sacred wisdom, which is, by God’s law, placed in charge of our lower selves. Let us not, in our ignorance, depose that priest from office, for it is above all other redeemers. It is the foundation on which all other redeemers build. Let us listen to its unerring precepts. Let that lower self become illuminated by its quickening rays, so that we shall each of us be a priest forever, after the order of Melchisedec.

 

The End