The Right Knock Part 31

The mouth that speaks it is the mouth of Heaven.

The power, which in a sense belongs to none, Thus understood belongs to every one."

--_Abraham Coles._

"Thro' envy, thro' malice, thro' hating, Against the world, early and late, No jot of our courage abating-- Our part is to work and to wait."

--_Anon._

MARLOW, October ----.

"Dear ones at home: Your letters were all received this afternoon. Am pleased to know that Mabel is so interested, for it will help her so much in her studies and work. I must begin my daily report at once, as there is not much time before cla.s.s.

"There was no lesson yesterday, and about noon Mrs. Dawn came after me to go with her and Mrs. Browning, her hostess, to the dentist's, as Mrs.

Browning had to have a tooth extracted. We started, treating her all the way with the quieting, rea.s.suring thoughts that allay fear. Before she went in we agreed to hold that thought.

"When Mrs. Browning went into the office, we remained in the waiting room thinking as intently as possible:

"'There is not a thing to fear, Lida Browning, there is no tooth-ache with your real self, there is no sensation in matter. You can entertain nothing but the One Life. The One Mind thinks, and you are His idea, perfect as your Creator. Good is all, Love is all, Peace is already with you, for you are one with the Father.'

... "It was done. The dentist was so amazed that he hardly remembered to give his patient a gla.s.s of water.

"'Well, I never knew a cuspidate to come so hard. Didn't it hurt terribly?' he asked sympathetically.

"'Not a bit except when you first put on the forceps,' was her prompt reply as she rinsed out her mouth....

"I need say no more. You can imagine our pleasure at this victory. We never know how little our faith till we see how astonished we are at the demonstration.

"You ask if Mrs. Pearl has explained your queries. A few questions were handed in yesterday, but I had not time to put them in my letter. One that always puzzled us, was: What is the origin of evil? The questions are written on slips of paper and laid on the table. She answers them before giving the regular lesson. When she read this slip there was not a little stir among the fifty eager questioners. 'What is the origin of evil?' she repeated. 'It has no origin,' was the unsatisfactory answer, after a momentary silence. Oh! the blankness of those faces! 'But,' she resumed presently, 'if you ask how _seeming_ evil originated, I may give you the ideas that came to me as a solution of that mortal mind question.'

"You know we might ask questions of each other forever, but unless our thoughts are tinged with same quality, or run in the same direction, the satisfactory answer to one may not be at all satisfactory to another. In other words, we will not recognize the same phase of truth, unless we are in the same stage of development, so if you are not willing to take my explanation as true, it may be that you are not yet where you can perceive it, or it may be, you require a different ill.u.s.tration to convey the same thought, or, there may be innumerable reasons, but of this one blessed fact be a.s.sured: if you hold yourself in the receptive att.i.tude, and sincerely expect to be guided by the spirit of truth, some day the answer will come to you with such irresistible force and plainness that you can not forget it, or ever be in doubt upon that point again.

"It was in this way the light came to me. That question had puzzled me more than all else, and I asked every healer whom I met as to the correct solution. For several months I pondered and fretted over it. At last, in despair, I let it alone, resolving I would not be further troubled. But one day it unfolded itself so clearly and beautifully I was completely satisfied.

"Here it is: Taking the first account of creation, we find man made in the image and likeness of G.o.d, given dominion over all things. If we believe man to be spiritual and not material, if we know that spirit _can not_ change its character or quality, we must know that spiritually man never fell, but that he _seemed_ to fall through our misconception and misunderstanding of appearances.

"Man now manifests what he believes in; his consciousness of truth is not fully developed and he mistakes appearances for realities. Having all possibilities of recognizing only the good, he is perfect. For every mistake that is made he manifests error, the fallen, or rather the undeveloped state. The Truth and Love that he manifests in his life, is the revealment of his G.o.d-like nature. In the glimpses of his true self he recognizes his inheritance of power, and in his mistaken conceptions forgets to acknowledge G.o.d. He then judges according to appearances, and says things are true because they appear true to the senses.

"The creating principle of life is perfect, but man neglects to acknowledge this divine power in proportion to his selfishness. It is therefore his selfishness that prevents him from recognizing the Good, and causes him to see, name and believe in matter and its consequences; and he thus becomes materially minded, and is known as the 'Adam' in 'whom all die.'

"Adam signifies error, clay, unreality. Christ signifies Truth, Spirit, Reality. If we believe in things that appear to be the creation, we are believing in nothingness, which so proves itself by death and disintegration. If we believe appearances to be the _sign_ of the real, we are acknowledging the spiritual to be the all, hence it proves itself by making even the body its sign, manifest life, health, perfection.

"If we cast out all selfishness, pure love takes its place. We must be purified from the beliefs of the world in selfishness and its consequences by recognizing that our 'sufficiency is of G.o.d.'

"This was very plain to me, John, and I hope you will find it so too, but if you do not, wait, and as soon as you are ready for it, the answer will come to you.

"The lesson to-day was on deception and personal influences. The whole world has been deceived into believing man is fleshly instead of spiritual, so many false thoughts and beliefs have arisen, which are the cause of all disease and trouble. Universally we are deceived, individually we are deceived, and it is not only because we are making our beliefs visible on the body, but because we suffer from them mentally and physically that it is necessary to discover what they are and cast them out.

"The term deception will cover the mistakes believed and made in ignorance, and deceitfulness will include the beliefs in and expression of deceitfulness. On the second day the patient is treated for the world's next greatest beliefs, which are deception and deceitfulness, and as before, we set him free from this belief, as possibly reflected or absorbed through one or more or all of these five avenues we mentioned in the first treatment.

"Because the world has admitted the first great lie, that the material creation is the true one, or synonymous with the true, we have 'yielded ourselves servants to sin,' hence will see the consequences of such false conclusion, until we deny the lie and affirm the truth.

'Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive,'

is a couplet I remember learning long ago, when I was a child, and how applicable it is to this problem of deception. Truly, it is a tangled web, and the only way to get it untangled is to break off the thread and go back to the beginning where we can truly say, I am created free and perfect and whole in His image, and can not be influenced by anything different from Him.

"This is _always_ spiritually true, but if we deal with the worldly beliefs, we find that according to appearances, we are under the influence of our own and every other person's wrong thought. We say of some people, 'how happy I am in their company, how it uplifts me to be in their presence.' With others we feel a nameless depression, a fearful, unhappy feeling, and shun their company. As Emerson so aptly says: 'With some I walk among the stars, whilst others pin me to the wall.'

"Now, in reality, no good ever comes from personal influence, although in the first instance it might seem so. Personal, from the word _persona_, a mask, is only applied to the physical self or carnal mind; therefore we can receive no benefit from the _personal_ quality of our friend, but we are benefited and uplifted by his freedom from personality, or in other words by the divine individuality flowing through him and expressed by his benevolence, his love, his cheerfulness, his wisdom. Inasmuch as he is free from personal or selfish thoughts, he is filled and permeated with gifts from the divine Fountain of _all_ benevolence, _all_ love, _all_ cheerfulness, _all_ wisdom.

"There is a difference between personality and individuality which most people do not recognize. Personality only pertains to the physical, while individuality is the term properly applied to the spiritual self.

'There is but one Mind, the Universal Mind, which, if we can lay hold on, will give us all knowledge, wisdom and power,' said Emerson.

"When we can throw aside a belief in personality, or personal influence, we will be free. The negative thoughts sent out by the world have no power over one who has become filled with positive thoughts of righteousness. When we trust wholly to the Good, and become wholly at one with the Good, recognizing the supremacy of the Good, we are free from all belief in miseries or burdens. We breathe purer air, which is invisible but life-giving; we feed on heavenly manna, the true word that is divinely nouris.h.i.+ng; we escape the awful bondage of fear, knowing the perfect love that casts out fear. We can not fear any false beliefs or wrong thoughts, for we are so filled with true thoughts, no such falsities can enter our mind.

"Some people talk as though we have great cause to tremble at this awful counterfeit power of mortal mind, but if they would not talk of it, nor fear it as having power, it would vanish as mist before the morning sun.

"The great sin is in admitting a lie. Admit the belief of sickness as a reality and you will see many witnesses to prove it. 'Agree with thine adversary quickly, lest he turn and rend thee,' means make haste to dispose of the lie that will throttle you, if you fellows.h.i.+p with it ever so little. Let us not be deceived, but let us 'awake to righteousness and sin not.'

"Another question, and a very important one, was: 'What is the difference between the different teachers of Christian Healing?' I can best give the substance of Mrs. Pearl's reply by reference to Mrs.

Fuller, the healer from Trenton.

"You remember when she gave her parlor lecture at Mrs. Haight's, she said: 'Everything that did not come from her teacher was mesmerism, that it was altogether false, and it was so much of a power that it was indeed to be feared, for there was no telling what its subtlety and cunning would suggest and execute; that no cure effected by it was permanent, but that the patients would sooner or later be worse than before.'

"Oh, dear, I must not rehea.r.s.e it, for of course you remember how my old headache overtook me when I got home, and how wrought up I was all night. Now I know what caused it, and _now_ I know the difference.

"In the first place, these people are taught the pure and beautiful foundation of pure Christian Healing, but instead of holding to their premise that all is good, they begin to talk about people and things that are _not_ good, imputing false motives, and giving false power to those who, as they say, are not in the truth.

"If they would only remember that counterfeits can have no power except as it is delegated to them, that unreal thoughts must disappear in the presence of true thoughts, they would not be troubled and puzzled.

Adhering to the law, they would recognize and talk about the Good only.

"Ah, John, here is the secret of Jesus' words, 'Resist not evil.' If we resist anything, we recognize it as something. If we regard evil as an ent.i.ty, we can not help fearing or fighting it, but if we know it is nothingness claiming to be something, we deal with it accordingly.

"Whoever resists evil or calls evil a power, has not denied the reality of evil faithfully enough. To talk of anything as having power, is to believe in the power and become entangled in its meshes. That explains Mrs. Fuller's remark that she was 'actually afraid to meet one of those false teachers on the street, and always took pains to warn people against them.' I speak of Mrs. Fuller because you know so well what she did and said, that you will understand this explanation better.

"Another remark she made was, that 'this power of mortal mind is wholly ignored by these false teachers, although they secretly use it so effectually and disastrously.' Because they do not talk so much of evil, she thinks they ignore it, while really they silently but earnestly and vigorously deny it, thereby getting a sure control over it. She was taught to call this seeming power of mortal thought Mesmerism, and Animal Magnetism, and after giving it such formidable names, and so mighty a place, it is most natural for her to say that it affects herself and family or her patients, causing them to be slow in yielding to treatment. Thus you can readily see how she accounts for her failures.

"Mrs. Pearl teaches that we can deal with this influence of carnal or mortal mind, by denying for the patient the conscious or unconscious reflection of it from these five different sources. To the patient who is ignorant of truth, mortal thought has a power, because he has acknowledged it as having power, but in our silent conviction of its powerlessness, we speak the true word that sets him free. The whole secret lies in our own freedom from belief in this false power.

"The name Mesmerism or Magnetism makes it seem like some awful monster, lurking in every corner, ready to devour us, while, as Mrs. Pearl says, we go our way, quietly denying all appearance of evil, proving the law of Good by recognizing only the Good in thought and speech.

"How beautiful this teaching is! and how wonderfully the spirit leads us into all truth. But it can not teach us if we talk error, or deliberately judge others. Never till we are faithful in acknowledging the one Principle of Life will it prove itself the only power over us.

"After the questions, Mrs. Pearl spoke of the third treatment. We treat for everything we might have missed in the first two treatments.

Sometimes this is called the sin treatment, for it takes up so many things that belong more or less to everybody, according to the world's belief. A more explicit naming is selfishness.

"Selfishness is the beginning, the mother of all the rest. It reminds one of the seven devils from which poor Mary Magdalen was freed. It is not unlikely these were their names: Selfishness, pride, envy, avarice, jealousy, malice and cruelty. This we deny for the patient through the five different sources, and you can see how apt it will be to touch him, for who is there of all earth's children that is perfectly free from any of these qualities. With our strong faith in the law and power of the word, we st.u.r.dily deny everything that might be the shadow obstructing his light.

"As we go on in this study, we learn the meaning of these outshowings of disease. Every visible thing is the expression of a thought, whether G.o.d-given or man-supposed. We look into a patient's face and read or interpret the signs of his thought. Is he selfish, unkind or severe in his disposition, there are the lines and expressions that betray him. Is he lovely, gentle and kind, a nameless feeling of peace and trust steals over us.