Unseen forces and how to use them

Chapter I. Human Progress

The twentieth century promises to be the grandest in point of discovery and achievement that has ever dawned upon the human race. The law of human progress is the law of evolution : " first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." Whether the (i fall of man" is true or false does not concern us at all. This is purely a speculative question of academic interest merely. The old theology dealt with empty problems, and the old theologians spent valuable time and brain energy in shaving into shape inflexible theories with the iron tools of logic — theories utterly void of value. The present age demands facts, and great principles established by the facts.

The facts of history demonstrate that the great principle of progress is evolution, and the method of the progress has been from the visible to the invisible, from the external shell to the internal substance, from the periphery to the hub, from the without to the within.

This gradual progress of man was natural, and in full accordance with the laws of his own being and the circumstances of his environment. It is a matter of no practical value as to when man first appeared on this planet. We know that he must have stepped into the arena of time at some definite period in the distant past because he is here now, and when he came he found himself surrounded with a set of sublime circumstances concerning the nature of which he was in complete ignorance.

With wonderful powers of mind and body man stood forth midst the majestic scenes of nature. Bending over him he beheld the magnificent sweep of heaven's dome, traversed during the day by the sun and bespangled at night with innumerable points of twinkling light. Beneath his feet was the solid earth; yonder towered the mighty mountain ; he hears the roar of the ocean as the surf in snowy spume breaks upon the rocks; the white cataract leaps from the heart of the mountain ; the river rolls onward to the sea ; the great forest • stands in its primeval grandeur ; the earth is covered with grass and flowers ; the wild beasts roar in the forest glades, and the birds sing in the branches.

The majestic scenes in nature and the myriad sounds of life and action must have appealed with power to primitive man's untutored and undisciplined mind, arousing within him an intense spirit of curiosity. He was ignorant of his surroundings ; ignorant of the laws that governed the great forces that he beheld in continual operation around him ; ignorant of the wealth that resided in the soil and the mineral wealth that lay in un fathomed mines beneath the soil ; ignorant of his own splendid powers and the laws that governed these physical and spiritual energies.

This is a purposeful universe, and to my mind the purpose for which man came here was :

1. To find out who he is.

2. To find out what he is.

3. To find out where he is.

4. To find out why he is.

In other words, man was sent here into the planet to find out his relations to the infinite Father and the universe ; to find out his own inward potentialities ; to locate himself in relation to all things, and to learn the supreme lesson that he is placed here to unfold the spiritual man to the highest perfection by right knowledge, right thinking and right action. Now, in solving the problem of the universe and his own nature, it was perfectly natural that man should commence his study by investigating the nature of those objects that appealed most powerfully to his senses. The external objects of nature appealed most powerfully, and he commenced his great task by studying external objects and gaining control over the great forces of the external universe. Old mother Eve was the pioneer of progress in physical science. She was the first who employed experiment as the test of truth. Centuries were consumed in the great work of studying external objects. Primitive man was under the influence of an irrepressible desire to conquer his external environments — " subdue the outer universe" Yonder is the gray and hoary forest that has never as yet heard the sound of the woodman's ax ; go cut it down. Yonder is the mighty ocean; go build your ships, harness the winds to your sails and explore its distant shores. Navigate the rivers, build great cities on their banks, teeming with mighty populations. Tunnel the mountains, bridge the rivers, build great roads, quarry the granite rocks for your great architectural structures. Plunge your shafts and bring from the bowels of the earth the gold, the silver, the iron, the coal and all minerals. Cultivate the soil and let the earth blossom with vegetation. The raw material surrounds you in rich abundance; bring things together and provide yourself with food, fuel, clothing and shelter, was the first imperial command that man felt under obligation to obey.

Did man obey this irrepressible impulse ? Let history answer. He built mighty empires. He marshaled strong armies and went forth upon careers of conquest. He erected great cities with millions of people. He built great pyramids of squared rock, each rock weighing tons, so heavy that the strongest derricks of this age would break down in the attempt to place them in position. He built splendid temples, outrivaling in architectural beauty the finest structures of to-day. He chiseled the marble into forms divine, made the canvas speak, constructed great roads extending for miles over mountain and marsh, over water and wilderness. He explored the continents, slew the wild animals and brought the earth into subjection by his tireless energy. He tunneled the mountains, navigated the rivers, bridled the ocean, put a bit in the mouth of the lightnings, harnessed the steam. He has plunged into the depths of the earth and read from the earth's strata a history of creation. He has studied the laws of light, constructed the telescope, examined the depths of the skies, and with mathematical precision he has measured the orbits of suns and comets, weighed the earth in scales and computed the tonnage of the stars. He has constructed the microscope and has inspected the infinitesimal. He has weighed atoms and discovered the law of their combination. He has analyzed light, found out how to use the X-ray, and by its use photograph the skeleton or the coin in a man's pocket. He has condensed the atmosphere in liquid form with a temperature three thousand degrees colder than zero. He has abolished wires and utilizes the etheric waves to convey his messages across continents and oceans.

In all his marvelous achievements man has dealt exclusively with the objects and forces of the external universe — the objects and forces that stand outside of himself.

Now it is not to be wondered at that this tendency on the part of man to deal with externals should materialize every part of his being and blot out of his vision all knowledge of the unseen universe and its realities. The mission of every reformer and mighty thinker that has ever lived has been to rescue man from the paralyzing grip of externalism and bring him to a keen realization of the facts and forces of the internal and invisible universe.

That great spiritual thinker Paul said concerning the religions of mankind in his day : " For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made even his eternal power and Godhead ; and they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like unto corruptible man and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things ; they changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator."

To this impeachment humanity must plead guilty. The religious systems of Babylon, Greece and Rome furnish unlimited evidence in support of Paul's impeachment. It is not my purpose to enter into a detailed examination of these old religions. Their main features are given in the quotation above.

1. Dealing with external things, man lost sight of the internal and invisible.

2. Having lost sight of the invisible God and the unseen universe, to satisfy his aspirations for the unseen, man worshiped the visible objects around him.

3. He created God in his own image, with human passions and propensities.

4. The visible universe is the invisible God in self-expression, but man lost sight of this and mistook the visible for the invisible, and "worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator." Thus it happened that the old pagan religions became essentially materialistic and dealt exclusively with externals.

Not alone was this true concerning the pagan religions; it was also true concerning Judaism. When Moses gave Judaism to his nation, it was grand in its majestic principles, pure in its revelations of God and man and man's relations to his fellows. The Mosaic conception of the universe — God, man, and man's relations to his environments — was superior to anything that had as yet been given to the world.

But by contact with a material environment and in the hands of men engrossed by the visible this system of religion had become corrupt, and in the days of Christ it had degenerated into unadulterated externalism. The great teacher, in his famous Sermon on the Mount, shows how the simple and majestic principles of the Mosaic law had been mutilated and buried beneath mountains of commentaries. He declared that " he came not to destroy the law" but to unfold its intense spirituality, and to cut away from the law the useless encumbrances wherewith the Jewish rabbis had trammeled it. All through his ministry he opposes and denounces with unsparing intensity the externalism of the religion championed by the religious teachers of his age.

Materialism had taken possession of the temple, the feasts, the sacred altars, the Holy Scriptures and the whole machinery of worship. The knowledge of the infinite Father was lost; spiritual religion was dead. The infamous Annas and his sons held a monopoly of the temple market and farmed out the privileges of the sanctuary to conscienceless robbers, and made millions. The voice of true prayer was stilled and its place was taken by clouds of incense. The priests had cast aside inward righteousness and had substituted therefor splendid ecclesiastical garments studded with diamonds and ornamented with gold fringe. The voice of true worship was not heard, and the temple enclosure was the scene of noisy bargainings, weighing money, demanding heavy discount, and noisy arguments over the price of pigeons and cattle to be offered in sacrifice. The teachers of religion were robbers of widows and despoilers of orphans, who hid their meanness under long robes and longer prayers. The truth of the universe, the truth concerning God, the truth concerning man, had vanished from the mind of man. Every nation had created its own god, and their conceptions of man and the universe were conditioned upon their conception of God, and since their conception of God was false, their conceptions

8 Unseen Forces o/nd How to Use Them.

of man and the universe were utterly false, and the reign of King Delusion, with his subordinates — ignorance, superstition and brutality — was absolute and universal.

Jesus, the divinest individual that ever walked the earth, Jesus the Christ came out of the eternities into time to bring man back to the truth and bring the truth back to man.

(a) He revealed God as the infinite Father. The nations had created gods according to their own limited conceptions, and colored them with their own national prejudices, and limited them to their own national boundaries. A divided God meant a divided world. A quarreling set of gods meant a world of men in boisterous strife. The Jewish mind had created Jehovah ; the Greek mind had created Apollo ; the Roman mind had created Jupiter. These gods were purely human inventions and undiluted falsehoods. Jesus uncovered the truth concerning God and proclaimed him as "the universal Father." A realization of this truth makes all men brothers.

(6) So Jesus uncovered the truth concerning man. Warring gods meant men struggling on the battle-fields; meant the butchery of human life in the coliseum; meant the savagery of law ; meant the utter estrangement of nations, the enslavement of millions, the degradation of woman, the crushing of the weak by the strong, and the savage and intense brutality of the times. Jesus, by revealing the Fatherhood of God, taught the brotherhood of man; that man is God's child, made in his Father's image, invested with splendid possibilities, a creature of eternity dwelling for a little while in time.

(c) Jesus revealed the truth concerning the universe.

He taught that the visible universe is only a transient shifting panorama affording standing room for God the Father and man his son to erect the perfect spiritual temple ; that the body is only an external expression of the inward spiritual man ; that the spiritual man is supreme and eternal ; that the body or external form is temporal and subordinate, and the unfoldment of the spiritual man is the grand end of all things.

Jesus the Christ was in himself the expression of the truth concerning God, man and the universe in visible form. He was the revelation of that which is. That which is is permanent and eternal, for that which is is in conformity with the plan of the universe when it €ame fresh from the hands of the Creator. This is the best possible universe, because it is the expression of the infinite mind. God intended that the spiritual man should be master and the material man servant. God intended that the spiritual man should be unfolded and that the physical man should become subservient to this grand end. God intended that man should live in the inner universe and make the outer universe a ladder whereby he could €limb to higher heights in the realms of the unseen.

Jesus, when he arrived, found humanity absorbed in the material, the very conception of God, the inner universe and the spiritual man blotted out of existence. In all his sermons he emphasized the spiritual and taught that it was supreme, and that all material things were secondary and subordinate. Man had put the outer before the inner ; enthroned the visible and dethroned the invisible ; glorified externals and banished internals. Jesus corrected the whole false philosophy and revealed the divine order of man and the universe, and was therefore " the truth " embodied in a living person.

He walked out of his father's carpenter's shop without any worldly prestige or power, and with perfect soul-poise commenced the gigantic work of his life. The god of a materialistic philosophy of life, the spirit of the times that had governed humanity for ages, met him in the wilderness, penniless and hungry and weary, for he had fasted forty days in demonstration of his belief that the spiritual man was supreme. This spirit said to him: "You are hungry, you have great power, you are invested with creative energy. Use your powers as all others have used them, to gratify your appetites." "Command that these stones become bread." Jesus answered this false spirit thus: " The spiritual man, feeding upon the eternal truth and in vital communion with the infinite Father, can rise superior to the physical man and assert and retain his supremacy." " Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.' r The false spirit again advances and says: "If your philosophy is true, then you can demonstrate it by casting yourself down from one of the pinnacles of the temple. If the spiritual man is supreme and the physical man subordinate, then the spiritual man can suspend the physical man in mid-air, and by thus demonstrating the correctness of your philosophy to the assembled Jews at Jerusalem they will crown you king and the world will accept your teachings." Jesus answered by saying: "An act of this kind would be presuming on the divine goodness. It is supremely true that spirit is master of matter, but it is also true that falling from a lofty height will crush and kill.

It is not necessary, in proving the existence of one law, to demand that another law shall be suspended. It is not necessary, in proving the supremacy of the spiritual, that we ask God to interpose in a miraculous way to save us from an act of wilful and deliberate rashness. The spiritual man is obedient to all law, the laws of matter as well as the laws of spirit." "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve."

The false spirit advances again and brings before his mind a vision of all the kingdoms of the world, their pomp and power and magnificent exterior pageantry, and then says to him: "You are a young man with splendid powers of mind and body. You can take advantage of the conditions of the time. Your own people the Jews are looking for a great leader, a man who can marshal a great army and equip that army with all the enginery of war. You can gratify their national desire and lead this army against the Roman legions and crush them in a single battle. Then this victorious army will lead you to the throne at Jerusalem. Jerusalem will thus become the capital of a conquered world. Millions of money, palaces, honors, unlimited kingly emoluments, will be yours if you will deny your philosophy and fall down and worship me. Live, oh young man, for life's externals; all this philosophy of yours is beautiful, but there is nothing in it. I will give you the golden key to the world's tangible treasures." Jesus waved the tempter aside and said : " Get thee behind me, Satan." "All this glory and honor you have shown me is outward, transient and will vanish like the shadow of a dream when the sleeper awakes. The spiritual alone is real and eternal."

The young Nazarene vanquished the false spirit of the times and marched forward with the quiet step of anticipated triumph to the accomplishment of his world task. He carefully instructed his disciples in his divine philosophy, and told them prior to his departure that it was expedient that he go away, because when he went away " the Spirit of Truth" would come and lead them into all truth and inspire them to lay the foundations of the Kingdom of Truth.

After living a life of unparalleled beauty; a life which was the result of the combination of gentleness and strength, intellectual power and the most translucent simplicity; a life that was the visible expression of truth, beauty, love and goodness, he was seized by the most religious men of his day, condemned by his judges without giving him the chance of defense, for they deprived him of all legal rights, and on the testimony of false witnesses he was condemned to die by crucifixion. He had declared that the spiritual man was supreme, and he had also declared, in the presence of his disciples, that the gates of the grave could not prevail against his claim. By his resurrection from the grave he smashed death's gates and demonstrated that the spiritual man was supreme, that he was the Christ, and that his mission and teachings were divine. He came out of eternity into time. He leaves the realms of time and goes into eternity, and forty days after his departure into the invisible his kingdom was ushered in by the affusion of "the Spirit of Truth" upon his disciples, and they went forth proclaiming " Jesus the Christ" as the sum total of spiritual truth to the conquest of the world. Without learning or rank, without politi-

Unseen Forces and How to Use Them. IB

cal power or intellectual prestige, without social standing and subject to the withering scorn and ostracism of humanity, these men marched forward with a spirit of the utmost intrepidity to the seemingly forlorn task of overwhelming the materialism of that brutal and savage age.

Judaism was mighty, and the reins of ecclesiastical power were in the hands of its defenders in Palestine. Itssynagogues were in every great city ; its history was resplendent with miracles and made brillant by great names. It stood hoary with age, and its creed was woven into the texture of Jewish character.

What could the preachers of a message given to the world by a crucified Galilean peasant hope to accomplish in the presence of this venerable system?

Heathenism was mighty and the reins of supreme political power were in the hands of its champions at Eome and in all the great cities of the empire. Its power was upheld by a mighty army; its votaries were numbered by the million ; its temples lifted their glittering minarets to the skies everywhere; its altars dripped with the blood of numberless animals, and it extended from the banks of the Euphrates to the confines of Britain, and from the German forests to the Nile. It surely looked like folly for the followers of a crucified and disgraced carpenter to face a system like this and demand its abolition.

It would have been folly if Jesus had been nothing save a disgraced and dishonored enthusiast and his message nothing but the vision of a disordered brain. But this Galilean prophet was divine ; he was the incarnation of the highest truth, the richest life, the deepest love. Because he was divine, and because his doctrine was the simplest and divinest truth, it was destined to a speedy and universal victory. The world has never 'in all its history witnessed such a marvelous revolution; a revolution without the shock of battling armies, without the clash of weapons; a revolution wrought by the resistless force of simple truth. Christianity conquered the world, and three hundred years after its immortal Founder entered the invisible it was the dominant force in the Roman empire.

But the inveterate tendency of humanity to drift into externalism again began to manifest itself. History repeats itself. The splendor of the diamond will become <lim and the gold will soon lose its luster. " Eternal vigilance is not alone the price of liberty;" it is the price we must pay to keep truth free from the poison of error. Anything pure suffers in its passage through human hands and heads. Divine truth suffers in its passage to the world through human mediums; it takes on the imperfections and limitations of the human mind; it loses the brilliancy of its luster and the perfection of its form.

The beautiful and simple message which Jesus gave to the world was soon tarnished. The church became a popular and powerful institution; wicked men, men seeking for power, sought for positions in the church. Ambitious men seeking for notoriety occupied her pulpits. The •church joined hands with the State. Ambitious leaders in the church sought to accomplish the impossible — the marriage of divine truth with worldly political policy. Did they succeed? No! The scheme was abortive, and to consummate the union Divine truth was thoroughly corrupted with the poison of human tradition. The pure and .simple message of Jesus had conquered the Roman empire, and then, under the manipulations of wicked and scheming men, the old paganism of the Roman empire entered the church, slew Jesus the Christ, and trampled beneath its feet the simple and holy doctrines he taught.

During the dark and middle ages the spirit of the old Roman paganism under the guise of Christianity held high carnival in Europe and steeped its garments, making them red in the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. For fully one thousand years materialism and selfish tyranny reigned over Europe with a scepter of iron. Knowledge of the infinite Father was lost. Christ was represented in paintings on the walls of the great cathedrals as a giant athlete with a pitchfork in his hands, hurling heretics into a lake of fire and brimstone. Hell was a creation of the authorities in the church of the dark ages to prevent heresy. The spirit of man was dead; spiritual and intellectual freedom was impossible. The Bible was buried in a dead language, and was chained to the cathedral pillars and locked from the free inquiry of man until the lock rusted away in the lapse of time. The midnight of gloom settled down upon the world, and the rankest materialism was lord of the earth.

But truth is divine, and its spirit is irresistible. It may sleep for awhile and its enemies may put out its eyes, and like Samson the Philistines may make it toil in the prison house and torture it for their own delectation. Truth is only waiting for a chance. When its enemies are engaged in roystering merriment, laughing at truth's misfortunes, it seizes the pillars upon which the temple of error rests and brings the heavy roof down upon their devoted heads.

Thus it was in Europe, when the authorities of a corrupt church were resting in supposed security and inventing fearful instruments of torture to destroy the adherents of truth, great movements were silently at work which were destined to give truth a chance to rise in royal power and march forward to the enfranchisement of the human mind and the attainment of liberty. What were these forces ? One of the main factors was the " Revival of Learning." When, in 1483, the Mohammedans besieged Constantinople and gained possession of the city and overran Turkey and Greece, the native inhabitants fled to Italy and carried with them the old Greek literature. This embalmed thought of the old Greek thinkers roused the sleeping intellect of Italy, and the Italian mind, bound for centuries, shook off its chains and marched out of prison, demanding the reason for things. The thrones of tyranny quake and the hosts of superstition shiver with fear when man demands the why t Then came the invention of printing. This brought the mind into contact with all the thought of the past and established communication with millions. This facilitated rapid interchange of thought, and thought is the supreme force in the universe. Then came the discovery of America. This memorable event widened man's horizon and waked his torpid intellect into grander life.

All these events were, however, to my mind subordinate to the supreme factor, and the supreme factor was the rediscovery of the Bible and the proclamation of the spiritual philosophy of Jesus by that rugged German monk, Martin Luther. The simple teachings of Jesus emancipated the mind of Luther, took possession of his whole nature and compelled him to stand forth the champion of human freedom. Luther's message to the world may be stated in three propositions :

1. The Bible is the supreme standard in all matters pertaining to religion. In the presence of this proposition all human traditions and cast-iron creeds and church canons, in short, everything of purely human invention, must go down.

2. Every man has the individual right to interpret the Bible for himself. The doctrine that the church, through her priesthood, is the only and infallible guide in the study of the Bible falls in the presence of this proposition.

3. Man stands justified by faith in Jesus the Christ in the presence of this proposition. The endless penances, masses and sacrifices of the church of Rome go to the winds. The Reformation, inaugurated by the proclamation of these ideas, spread with amazing rapidity. Within the space of forty years it swept from Iceland to the Pyrenees, and from Finland to the summit of the Alps. Considering the marvelous rapidity of its movements, the completeness and suddenness of its victories, one would imagine that it would speedly conquer the earth, abolishing Catholicism forever. This would have happened had the movement not been retarded by hostile forces. What were these hostile forces ?

1. An outside force, the establishment of the Society of Jesus by Ignatius Loyola. The principle upon which this famous society was based was this : The church of Rome is the church of Christ. Its life and perpetuation are in danger. The end justifies the means. The purpose of this society is the preservation of the church of Christ ; therefore any means that we may employ to preserve the life of the church of Rome is sanctified and sacred. The Jesuits have been the most potent force that ever arose within the confines of the church of Rome in preserving its integrity.

Then there were forces hostile to the success of the Reformation that arose within the ranks of the reformers themselves.

(a) The formation of human creeds. Any creed must of necessity be the outcome of controversy on disputed points. A creed is the crystallized opinions of only one of the parties in the controversy; it is therefore fragmentary, incomplete, one-sided and divisive. When controversy lives, love, the very essence of Christianity, dies. The reformers failed to see that no benefit can come from controversy over purely speculative questions that admit of dispute between equally honest men.

(b) The second element hostile to the growth of the Reformation arising within itself was the making of human creeds the condition of entrance to and test of fellowship in the church. Human creeds are human definitions of truth. Truth defies boundaries. You can not frame truth in human language. Truth is living and must have room for perpetual growth. Since these defined systems of human deduction were limited, fragmentary, one-sided, incomplete, the outcome of hot controversy, to make them the condition of entrance to and test of fellowship in the church aroused fierce controversy, and the fierce theological combats of that argumentative age have not as yet ceased, and will never cease until we learn to stand together on the universols y and relegate all matters that can be debated to the realm of freedom.