Part 18

"Every morn is the world made new."

But a purpose that remains unchanged amid all the shifting scenery of perpetual new environments must eventually fulfil itself. The stars in their courses fight for it. The celestial laws insure its final goal.

"Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains? When shows break up, what but one's self is sure?"

One has this sure self only in proportion as he relates his life to the divine life. The only permanence is to be found in the currents of divine energy, infinite and exhaustless.

There are many ways of watching the New Year in; but the somewhat unique personal experience of welcoming it on that eve of 1902, gazing at the vast expanse of the brilliant skies through the windows of a sleeping-car, had its claim to beauty and sacredness. The rush of the train gave a sense of almost floating out into the ethereal spaces. There was a detachment from earth that hardly comes even in the sacred service of the church on that mystic midnight of a New Year. One seemed alone with the infinite Powers, and a new and deeper trust in the Giver of all Good was inspired. The beautiful lines of Whittier came to memory:—

"I know not what the future hath Of marvel and surprise, Assured alone that life and death His mercy underlies."

Thus might one remember and dream while flying on under the New Year's skies, and realize anew that any trend of thought is inevitably creating its future. Auto-suggestion is the most potent of forces, and the assertion that "as a man thinketh so is he," is literally true. As he thinketh, so he shall be, also; and he can thus think himself into new conditions and attract to himself new forces. He has the power to keep his feet set in this upward pathway, and so sure as is the destiny of the stars and the constellations on their course through the heavenly spaces, so sure is his own arrival at the point toward which he is moving, and his achievement of the supreme end he holds steadfastly in view. Thus life will be to him no period of mere "quicksand years," but, instead, a series of advancing realization and beautiful states. Ideals may be swiftly realized by the accelerated energy of concentration and prayer, and the secret of transformation from defeat and denial to the perfect hour of triumph and happiness lies, for each one, within his own keeping.

"One's self must never give way—that is the final substance."

[Sidenote: The Divine Panorama.]

"Do we not all wish that we could live our lives over again in the light of our present experience?" remarked Rev. Doctor Charles Gordon Ames; "but this is just what God lets us do."

Here, in a word, was that divine panorama of the completeness of life revealed; the part of it lived in this present phase of experience being infinitely less in its relation, compared to the whole, than is one day in its relation to the longest life possible on earth. One day out of seventy, eighty, ninety years, would not seem so much; yet this entire period of even the longest life on earth, in its relative proportion to the life of all the eternities, is far less than is one day out of a lifetime in its proportional relation to Immortality. This spiritual panorama suggests its infinite energy of hope; it reinforces courage; it reveals in the most impressive manner the significance of living. For it is the tendency which always determines the result.

There can hardly be a question but that distrust of conditions is a fatal element in all effort and achievement. Depression might, indeed, well take its place among the seven deadly sins that Dante names. There are serious errors whose effect is less disastrous than is that of habitual depression of spirits. Mental power is one's working capital, and the degree of power depends, absolutely, on the quality of thought, or, as the phrase goes, on "the state of mind." Conditions determine events, but conditions are plastic to thought. On them one may stamp the impress. If he persist in regarding himself as a victim to fate and his life as a sacrifice and burnt offering, he can very soon work this conception into actuality. He can—indeed he will, and he inevitably must—become that which he continually sees himself, in mental vision. But if he will take his stand, with poise and serenity, on spiritual truth; if he will amend his life according to spiritual laws; if he will accept failure as merely a stepping-stone to ultimate success,—as "the triumph's evidence,"—ill fortune can establish no dominant power over his life. That things have gone wrong is only, after all, a proof that they may go right. The consequences of error or mistake warn one not to make the same error or mistake again; and therefore the consequences, however unpleasant or sad at the moment, are really educative in their nature, and their very trial or pain becomes, if truly recognized, a friendly and redemptive power. Then, too, time is a variable factor. It is degree, not duration, that it means. The consequences of an error may be accepted and annulled swiftly. Intensity of feeling will condense a year, an eternity, even, into an hour. And the "new day," days in which, as Doctor Ames so charmingly wrote,—

"—God sets for you A fair clean page to write anew The lesson blotted hitherto,"—

a new day may be a new lifetime as well as that "next life" beyond the change we call death.

How wonderfully Emerson unfolds the magic possible to a day. "One of the illusions," he says, "is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. There are days which are the carnival of the year. The angels assume flesh, and repeatedly become visible. The imagination of the gods is excited, and rushes on every side into forms. Yesterday not a bird peeped; the world was barren, peaked, and pining: to-day 't is inconceivably populous; creation swarms and meliorates."

The speculative idea that immortality is an achievement rather than a gift is not new, but whenever it is formulated, as in a recent sermon by Rev. Doctor Parkhurst, it startles many people and arouses antagonism, so far as it is not truly understood. Yet it has its deepest aspects of spiritual truth, and it is the idea constantly, persistently, and most impressively taught by Saint Paul throughout the entire gospels. We are constantly besought to lay hold on the eternal life; to press forward toward immortal things; to be renewed in the spirit; to "put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness; to follow Him, who is the Life, the Truth, the Way." The entire teaching of the gospels is one forcible system of active and unfaltering endeavor in the growing achievement of spirituality, which determines Immortality. It is the exact accountant—measure for measure. So much spirituality, so much immortality. Nor does this assertion partake in the slightest degree of the nature of a metaphysical problem, to be comprehended only by the theologian and the philosopher. It is the most simple, clear, and direct of propositions. We all accept Saint Paul's assertion that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven. So far as one lives only in the processes of the physical life he is not living the life of those spiritual energies which alone lay hold on immortality. There is a certain degree of intelligent consciousness that is inseparable from this physical life; an intelligence that buys and sells, and bargains and calculates on the physical plane, and is sufficient to produce a certain rational status of life. There are not wanting individuals who never rise above this plane. They may, and often do, acquire possessions and even power on the limited plane of the outward life; they may even have some formal and ceremonial religious observances which they mistake for Christianity, but which are the framework ready and able to inspire them if filled with the spirit, but which, to them, remain empty and dead. The man whose body, simply, occupies his church pew on Sunday, and who on Monday proceeds to cheat his neighbor, is not, we will all agree, the man who has really entered into the true privileges offered by the Church. The sacrament of Sunday must become the consecration of Monday. Unless this be true the man has not laid hold on Immortality. So we see that this lower plane of considerable intelligence and consciousness, related exclusively to the visible and the tangible, must be eliminated from our conceptions of Immortality. There is nothing at all in this that can possibly survive death. Doctor John Fiske gives a fine and comprehensive definition of that degree of achievement which is above the level of death when he says:—

"In the highest of creatures the Divine immanence has acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the dissolution of the flesh, and assert an individuality untrammelled by the limitations which in the present life everywhere persistently surround it."

Here we have the initial truth. The acquirement of "sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the dissolution of the flesh,"—and "to assert an individuality untrammelled by the limitations of the present life,"—when man has progressed so far as this, then, and then alone, has he achieved immortality. He has laid hold on its initial phase. For immortality is infinite beyond conception. It is as infinite as space, and as the idea of God. To have achieved enough of this "concentration and steadiness"—which is merely another phrase for spirituality—to survive death, is no more achieving immortality, in its wholeness and completeness, than learning the alphabet is the achievement of scholarship in its infinite resources. It cannot be conceived of as complete, but, instead, as an endless chain of infinite possibilities, of ever new and ever widening vistas.

One of the noblest men and loftiest thinkers of the day, referring, in a private letter, to this sermon of Doctor Parkhurst that inspired such wide discussion, thus wrote:—

"That paragraph from Doctor Parkhurst expresses my idea regarding immortality. There must be a master (good) thought or passion. It is the angel with wings that wafts the soul where the man most longed to be in life,—with the purest and best. 'As one thinks, so he shall be,' is sound doctrine. All this embodies what I once read of Sappho, who counselled her pupils to cultivate their thoughts and grow, or they would have nothing to carry with them, nothing to make a soul of, nothing to survive the grave.

"I believe that on this idea rests the scheme of life through faith in Christ. As He is the highest, the ideal, the supreme, the soul finds rest in Him, and there grows into a life that death cannot annihilate. In the presence of the great master passion, with the soul thrilling with nobleness, as when dying for another, burned at the stake for righteousness' sake, the spirit goes straight to God, into the infinite bosom, an angel fit for only heaven.

"If the soul hungers and thirsts for God it will reach him. If, at the last moment, a man's whole nature cries longingly in faith to Christ,—that will save him, waft him, draw him into the divine abode. And this explains the Christian plan of so-called salvation. Faith in Christ is the master passion, and love the magnet that draws the soul to its own kind. It may be set down as true that vice and sin have no vitality. Wickedness is death. Virtue and love of God are life."

But the question recurs just here, Is there absolutely no possibility of immortality for him who does not advance beyond a certain conscious and partly automatic intelligence on the physical plane? Does the gate of possibilities, does the door of opportunity close with this brief mortal life? To that question science as well as faith answers "no." The law of Evolution is the law of eternal possibility and opportunity. The spark of immortality—the divine spark, implanted by God, when he made man in His image,—this is eternal in its nature, and unquestionably survives death. But immortality is the result of man's co-operation with the Divine. God has implanted the spark. He has placed man in an environment of discipline and of opportunity. The individual may be whatever he, himself, decides and chooses to be. Not all in an hour, or in a year; not, perhaps, even in this entire lifetime; but sometime and somewhere he who is unfaltering in his allegiance to his ideal shall realize it at last. And the degree of immediateness and celerity with which he realizes it depends entirely on the degree of spiritual energy that he brings to bear on his purpose. The higher the potency, the swifter the result.

[Sidenote: Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.]

Science as well as ethics recognizes the reality of the unseen potencies. Science is, indeed, pointing the way. "The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter," says Professor William James, "is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of electro-magnetism," and he adds:—

"The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as an ideal impulse originates in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing it in a way for which we cannot otherwise account); we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in the world. When we commune with it, work is absolutely done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects in another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal."

Not unreal. On the contrary, the unseen is the realm of that which is alone real and abiding. The positiveness of the divine life is a quality that has too little recognition from the world of philosophy and speculation. It is an infinite reservoir of infinite energy, from which may be drawn at any moment, peace, courage, and power. "Man can learn to transcend the limitations of finite thought at will. The Divine Presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague twilight, or semi-conscious experience. It is not an ecstasy. It is not a trance. It is not super-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational, common-sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense perception to the phenomena of seer-ship, from the thought of self to a distinctively higher realm. For example, if the lower self be nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be calm. This is not done by a word simply. Nor is it done by hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely used as the sun's rays can be focussed and made to do work, to set fire to wood."

In these words there is very clearly set forth a certain spiritual achievement of a definite nature. It is simply the act of liberating the spiritual self from entanglement with the lower self,—the summoning into ascendency of the higher powers. This intense degree of spiritual energy may be achieved with the force and suddenness of a special creation.

The physical universe in which man finds himself is not only surrounded by the spiritual universe, but the two are so absolutely interpenetrated that he may live in both, and, as a matter of fact, whoever lives the life of the spirit does live now and here, as an inhabitant of both these realms. The spiritual universe is the reservoir of energy. "The things that are seen are temporal, but those that are unseen are eternal," and faith, as the substance of those things not seen, is a definite potency which is practically related to daily affairs. That is to say, it is an absolute power, by means of which one can fulfil the practical duties of every day. The degree of one's ability to draw from this energy and assimilate it into his life measures his degree of success.

Doctor Ostwald, a German scientist, claims that in energy he has discovered the actual bridge, the missing link, between mind and matter, between the spiritual and the physical worlds; that it is a bridge "which covers the chasm between force and substance," and "which is of a nature sufficiently manifest to embrace the totality of our experiences, the interior as well as the exterior." Doctor Ostwald claims that there is an immaterial factor, one endowed with neither weight nor mass, which in a quantitative way is just as unchangeable as the mass and weight of material substances, and which, exactly like these, can undergo qualitative transformations of all kinds. He holds that energy may be converted from every one of its forms into every other, and its power of transformation is therefore unlimited, and that every change which takes place in the outer world, and every process, may be described by a statement of the kind and amount of energy that has undergone conversion.

This conception of energy is a very clear and remarkable one, placing it as the infinite power from which any form of force, spiritual or mechanical, can be derived.

In the moral universe the true expression of this energy upon which one may draw infinitely lies in service. It is in so enlarging the personal sphere of life as to include the widest possible range of sympathy and comprehension. The mystic spirit is full of value in reaching out into the realm of spiritual forces, but when these forces are gained they must be applied. The old religious idea used to include a great deal of discussion about saving the soul; but the larger spiritual enlightenment of to-day sees that the phrase "saving the soul" implies a present condition,—the state of love, sympathy, service, by which the soul is saved to-day, and not a vague condition to be only realized in some remote eternity. Now is the day of salvation. The success of life lies not in possessions; it lies in keeping the harmonious and perfectly receptive relation with the spiritual realm of forces, and using these forces in every duty and need and opportunity that presents itself. As for always compassing desires, or achieving the possession of this thing or that, is in reality immaterial. The best things in life are often the things one does not have; but they produce effects in the visible world, and often, just in proportion as the things themselves remain in the ethereal realm, is the potency of the effects they produce in the physical realm. This other dimension of existence is one with which the final reckoning must be made. It is no longer length of days, but intensity of energy, that determines results. Not length of time, but intensity of purpose, energy of action,—in these lie the secret of achievement. The power that lies in brief moments is the power required for effective life and work. Emerson truly says that we talk of the shortness of life, but that life is unnecessarily long. Degree and not duration is the test of power in any work, and the application of this truth to the ordinary affairs of life would render it possible to have every day hold in itself the value of a week or a month as usually estimated. The entire trend of progress is toward that intensity of creative energy that fairly speaks things into being. A business man has now on his desk a long-distance telephone, connecting him with far-away cities; he answers his letters by speaking into the phonograph; his typewriting clerk copies them from this, and an hour of his morning represents as much accomplishment as by the old and slower methods would have required days; and thus time is constantly made more valuable.