The voice eternal; a spiritual philosophy of the fine art of being well

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface 5

I. The Life Within 7

Preface

HpHE purpose of this book is to furnish a -*• statement of the Spiritual philosophy of life with special reference to physical health, as the author's book, "The How and Why of the Emmanuel Movement ' ' was a study of the mental forces having to do with the same subject.

If any apology were needed for a new book it could be found in the fact that every marked advance in human welfare has had its literature, so that those who could not enjoy the instruction and enthusiasm of its leaders might at least be intelligently informed as to the underlying principles and methods of the advance movement. The multiplying of books in the new healing philosophy of truth which has taken so strong a place in modern religious ideas today is justified in the fact that the same truth from a new T view point, or in differing phraseology, as it is projected through different personalities, gives it an acceptance and helpfulness to many which it could not otherwise have.

No claim is made for the originality of any ideas here expressed. The substance of these chapters have been given in the author's lectures, to his classes, and to his patients until their helpfulness has been clearly demonstrated, and many urgent requests have been made to have them put into more permanent and available form.

These chapters are sent forth in the hope that they may bring help to a steadily increasing company of people in the church who are drifting away in search of those material benefits upon

Preface which so little emphasis has been laid by the church that they have felt that the church no longer offers them the comforts so much needed, and which they feel they have a right to expect in this strenuous age of living. Also to the other class in the church whose loyalty to her who is the mother of us all which will not allow them to wander afield in search of the truth and help they need, and who suffer needlessly because they cannot give up so much that is tried and true for that which is not tested by time. The purpose is to interpret the truth in the language of modern thought so that these good people may see that every blessing of the good God, both temporal and spiritual, is available right where they are without the necessity of forsaking the leadership of the trained ministers of religion for that of selfappointed vendors of vagaries, and without depriving themselves of the advice of trained physicians which they often need. Many of the medical profession are using more and more the agencies of mental and spiritual forces, and their contributions to the advance of a sound mental therapeutics is known to anyone who cares to know, although it is usually marked by a conservatism born probably of an instinctive distrust of illogical statement and unreasoning enthusiasm. If these purposes are served the author will feel amply repaid for the effort.

Thomas Parker Boyd.

Berkeley, Cal., 1912.

The Voice Eternal.

CHAPTER X.

THE LIFE WITHIN.

LOVE of life is the primal impulse. Self-preservation is the first law of nature. "As thyself" is the final test of man's noblest impulse — love. The record of Earth's greatest example of altruism does not suppress the fact that it was "for the joy that was set before him" that "he endured the cross." Existence is sweet, and if we consent to its limitation in one sphere it is with the distinct understanding that it will have proportionally larger action in another sphere, for the abundant life is the flying goal toward which we move. This instinct for complete life is constitutional with us; we can no more deny it than we can deny ourselves. The pilgrim across the world of sense and sensation voices only one cry — "life." And what is life? The answer varies according to one's experience of living. "It is a vapour," answers one. " It is the response to environment, ' '

says another. "It is to know God/ 9 is the response of still another. "It is the gratification of every impulse/' "It is only good morning, good night, and good bye" are other answers. "Life is a mode of motion/' says my scientific friend. And what is motion? "A manifestation of force." And what is force? "Active energy" — and that? "The unseen potentiality that fills and constitutes all things — an universal substance out of which all material things appear, and back into which they disappear as unseen elements of energy that defy analysis. Of this infinitely extended substance all things are made and by it they consist." Now this view harmonizes with the statement of that ancient theologian and philosopher who said, "The things which are seen were not made of things which do appear"; and furthermore, "The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. ' ? To this infinite substance acting with beneficent purpose and intelligent procedure, we attribute personality, and say, "of him are all things." Call it Infinite substance, or mind, or spirit, it is the source

The Life Within and the goal of existence. We came from it. We return to it. In this excursion out from it we find set all the elements of a drama, ranging all the way from the comic to the tragic, accordingly as we take life's shifting scenes too lightly or too seriously. It takes most people a lifetime to discover that, to our senses, things stand in inverse ratio to their reality and value. To our sense-perception, matter and its associated sensations of ease, pain, pleasure, etc., are the dominant things, while to mental and spiritual perceptions, mind with its attendant products of thought and truth are the supreme facts. Matter is changing and transient, but substance or spirit is unchanging and eternal.

And this Infinite substance, spirit, mind, life, the source and content of all things, is one. It exhibits itself in myriad forms, but be it star or stone, herb, bird, or man, it is one life, one substance. Just as the ocean whose substance fills, and whose heart-throb pulsates throughout every gulf, bay, cove, and strait, leaving each its individuality and relative importance, according to the volume of ocean it expresses, yet retaining its claim on each as part of the whole, so does this Infinite substance find form and expression in innumerable individual cases, each important according to the degree of the Infinite life finding expression, yet each a part of the One life. And the law of expressing the Infinite life divides these individuals into many varieties of being. For example, the living rock obeys one part of the law of expression, and it has inertia or rest. The worm obeys two parts of the law, and it adds motion to its expression of life. The bird obeys three parts of the law and adds flight and song ; and the more complex the organism, the greater number of laws it can obey, the higher is the order of life, because the larger and richer is the expression and experience of the infinite life. Now man, the most complex of all material organisms, can respond to more of these laws, and hence gives the most complete expression of the Infinite life, for above the animal kind, he adds reason, judgment, imagination, faith, hope, love, and other attributes and qualities of the divine life unknown save in elemental forms

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to the lower orders of existence, Now these faculties go to make up the image of the Creator within us, and these moral and spiritual qualities are concrete expressions in us of the divine character which must otherwise remain a dreamy abstraction.

There is nothing in us that we did not receive from the Infinite source, "the Father of the spirits of all flesh." Nothing has been evolved in man, nor will be, that was not involved in the first living cell. Our entire equipment for expressing the divine life, together with "the power both to will and to do" is of that Infinite substance whose image we are. Yet because of the accident of time or place or condition of birth, the influence of heredity, or other causes, few of us express it in equal degree. We have to confess that one man manifests more of the divine life than another, because he furnishes, consciously or otherwise, a better channel through which the divine life may flow r . He has more avenues of expression, and is able to keep them open, and hence is a better medium through which the divine life may speak. Or to use a technical figure of commercial life, as the amperage and voltage — one having reference to the volume and the other to the intensity of the electric current — determine the action and results of that subtle force, so in a life of large endowment, of many gifts, of ten talents, the amperage is large, and the possibilities for expression of the divine life are great; but if the voltage is low, the sense of duty is blunted, the estimation of privilege is small, the aim of life is ignoble, then the dynamics of the will are inoperative and the results are small. If in another the amperage is small, the capacity limited, the gifts few, yet the voltage is high, sense of duty exalted, ideals noble, purposes inflexible, then the dynamics of the will enable him to blaze and burn his way through the world like a live wire of Omnipotence that he is. Such accomplish more, manifest more of the divine life than the large amperage, but low voltage people. But does the ten-talent man, large amperage, have correspondingly high voltage, we shall find such an expression of the divine life as to brand him a genius, and write his name in the gallery of the immortals.

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In other words, the endowments of a man's life are things determined outside of himself. His native qualifications come into life with him, but the potency of his life for results is determined within himself. The development of his gifts to their utmost capacity, the cultivation of nobility of purpose, the concentration of his energies to the chosen tasks, in fact, all that means the mastery of self, and the mastery of the world forces about him, are contained in the sovereignty of his own will. With the amperage of life he has no concern, with its voltage he has everything to do. He can do anything that he wants to do and believes that he can do, the very fact that he feels the impulse being the sure sign that the life within him inspires the desire, and at the same time promises the power of fulfillment. He can be anything he desires, for his desire is the longing of the Infinite life to find expression * through him in that special way. He has only to call out the forces of the life within and set them to the task, knowing that " faithful is he that hath promised who also will do it." And herein lies the solution to the riddle of existence — To take a part of the Infinite life, give it individuality by incarnating it in human flesh, multiplying and projecting it through human personality, polishing and refining it through the vicissitudes of material environment, until it comes to express so much of the Infinite character that to have seen it is to have seen God. And it must be held as a cardinal principle that the capacity to express life is an expansive thing, as surely as the power to do so is a cumulative force. The latent possibilities of divinity are in us awaiting the task of development. They are unlimited, so that a man knows not what he shall be, but if he accepts his task and does it, he shall be like God.

Chapter II. The Shining Pathway

LIFE is not stationary, nor can be. The living body is forever changing by the ceaseless vibrations of the life within. The mental powers are forever built up or depleted by the thoughts that flow from them, and the truth that is discovered by them, and that reacts upon them. The bronze figure that stands in the midst of the park fountain through whose uplifted fingers a stream of water rises until it breaks into a mist and falls to the pool below, is a picture of a human life through which the tides of the divine life with its truth and power move forever onward. They make no tarrying. Certain byproducts which go to make up character abide, and even character is a progressive thing.

To build up and preserve his body man uses the material forms that are compounds of the infinite substance. In the using it yields up certain elements of life that keep the body living. The food he eats, the water he drinks, the air he breathes, all are yielding up their life to him. This is everywhere true, for the living rock yields up its life to the soil, the soil yields up its life to vegetation, vegetation in turn to the animal, and the animal yields up its life to man, and man yields up his life to and for his fellow, and this but illustrates the method by which the Infinite life ministers to man of its boundless store, and expresses itself in his body, disclosing a shining pathway up which man moves to God, for the mental and spiritual life are ministered after the same principle. Not only was man a thought before he was a thinker but he continues to have his growing mental life by feeding on the living truths which other men have discovered, and for which they have laid down their lives, and also on those which he discovers by responding to the vibrations of that Infinite life within him, and for which he is ready to lay down his life. All his emotions, finer feelings, aspirations, and longing, and the more spiritual activities are responses to the stimulus of the divine character finding expression in him. We are now ready to quote, with the assurance of its meaning and truth, a saying of the apostle,

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"In God we live and move and have our being. ' ' Man lives out his life in the life of God, and he cannot live apart from him. His business in the world is to express the human life in the terms of God. That is his task, although he may make sorry work of it. He may turn his divinity to diabolism, but he can never successfully deny his birthright, nor permanently quench the flame of the divine life, for God cannot die, nor can these divine attributes be so stifled or eradicated that they will not rise again to struggle for mastery, and at last find perfect expression. We are living out our lives in the life of God. Now the converse of the foregoing is also true. God lives out his life in the life of the world and all things therein, his highest expression being man. As the mountain is worn down by erosion until the granite becomes the soil of the valley, clothed with vegetation, radiant with color, fragrant with odors and golden with fruitage, so is the material expression of divinity moved up into its highest form, man, and on him and through him the divine life plays until his animalism, and crudities, and credulities, are smoothed out, and his human consciousness blooms out into God-consciousness, and the fruits of the living spirit in him are manifest. It may sound easy, but the process is difficult. God is not having a good time. It has taken heat and cold, earthquakes and aeons of time to get the earth ready to manifest forth men, and he has been a long time trying to wrestle the world of men up to princedom, and although the task is slow, the end is sure. In every age some man has attained it, such as Enoch, who walked with God, Abraham, who was a friend of God, and Jacob, who was a prince of God.

To make the thought still more definite and significant, it is said at least three times in the Old Testament that "God clothed himself with a man," in each case for a specific purpose, and also to show to their generation, and to us, what God can do for a man who comes to realize his own divine nature, and will allow the Infinite life of God to have full expression in him. The tragedy of it is that few of us accept our birthright in all that it means, and fewer still are bold enough to enter into and claim our heritage of

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God dwelling in us. For in very truth lie lives out his life in the life of the world and of man. In us he lives and moves and has his being. It is in the sons of men that the divine life finds perfect expression in the terms of humanity. Divine love, and pity, and compassion, and all other similar qualities are, and must remain, unknown quantities to us save as we see and know them in the lives of men with whom God clothes himself.

The great teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, kept before his disciples the secret of that life of his, so simple in its setting and so marvelous in its power, by repeatedly declaring that the words which he spoke and the works which he did, were not his but his Father's. Now as God clothed himself with that man of Nazareth, and made him to manifest forth the oneness of the human and the divine life, so Jesus prayed that his disciples might realize their oneness with God as he realized it. Yet with all the perversity of human misunderstanding, we misread the words and try to foster a oneness with our fellows which is impossible until we first realize our oneness with God, which in the mind of Jesus was of supreme importance. This alone could enable them to do the work that he did, and even greater works than he did, so the burden of his most wonderful recorded prayer was for the realization of this oneness. Here, then, is an enigma in the mathematics of spiritual life, that one and one make one, never more, never less, and He is the one, or you are the one as you have the boldness to claim it. This is a flying goal. Man never is, but always to be blest.

Of all those qualities of character that place the stamp of the divine character upon man, such as love, joy, peace, patience, etc., few of us bring to any degree of perfection more than one or two. Of all man's forty and more faculties only one, two or three at most reach any degree of perfection or fruition in this sphere of existence, but we see enough to know what we shall be, when perfect oneness is realized and manifested, when every divine quality shall find perfect expression, and every faculty shall reach its zenith, manifesting the power that worketh in us, for it discloses a shining pathway of attainment which shall share here and hereafter

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the throne of the divine power. Here, because the consciousness of this divine dignity begins here, "Beloved now are we the Sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that we shall be like him when he shall appear." Now this appearance is not some flaming apparition in the sky, appealing to the optic nerve, but rather a subjective apprehension by the person who believes God to be the Supreme Good, and honestly desires to know him, that he may carry out his perfect will. Of such said Jesus, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." Seeing God, he sees everything else in its true proportions. He sees in himself the image of God. He knows that his character, his purposes, and his whole life are at one with God. He sees that divine image in every man. Loving God he must love his image. Hatred can no longer have a place in him. Fear is cast out by a perfect love. Now are we the sons of God. \

A Sunday school teacher described the character of Jesus of Nazareth without calling his name and asked her class who it was, was surprised when one little hand went up and one little voice said, " That's my mamma — it sounds just like her." The child was right for he was "the express image of God's person" and so was mother, for the pure mind of the child could see no difference between the love of God exhibited in mother and the love of God in Jesus of Nazareth, for the simple reason that there is no difference. "It doth not appear what we shall be." The perfect manifestation is here in its inception, and hereafter in its completeness. All of man's faculties are to be brought to completeness. For that purpose all the years of time and the aeons of eternity are God's and ours. All the worlds now and to be, all the potencies now at work and yet to unfold are for this one thing, — to bring man to full Godlikeness. We have entered a way of progress that has no limit to its advance, a shining pathway through the earth and heaven that has no noontide height from which to slowly and sadly decline but that moves onward and upward to the throne of God, and the perfect day.

CHAPTEE III.

THE GOOD MEDICINE

A MAN there was who had lost sight of his parentage and lived for years as an orphan. One day he had an invasion of divine joy when he learned that his father, a wealthy and benevolent man, still lived and yearned for his son that he might bestow upon him the things that were his by right. And the dawn of this truth of the indwelling life of God, the inherent oneness of all life in Him, not only brings to the mind a joy that "doeth good like a medicine/' but it ushers in the full day of an heritage which alone is adequate to meet the demands of the life within us.

Having accepted the fact of his divine heritage, and having fully satisfied himself as to his title, he begins to take an inventory of its content. The first of these is that God is love, truth, health, peace, power, plenty, and that hatred, fear, falsehood, sickness, disease, weakness, and poverty can have no place in the perfectly manifested life of the Infinite God. Apart from his material forms of expression,

God is not sick, neither has he pain, nor disease, nor any such thing.

In connection with this process of working out the Infinite life into material expression, we have to accept the patent fact of pain and disease of the body and distempers of the mind. We can no more deny the fact of them than we can deny the reality of earthquakes in rending the earth's crust and upheaving mountains, or the reality of the pain caused by the tooth of time in wearing down those mountains into fertile valleys, ready for rich harvests. We may turn an intellectual somersault and deny the reality of pain, by denying the reality of the material forms in which pain is felt. Let it be granted for a moment that the seen things are temporal, it does not alter the fact that they are forms of expression of the Infinite Substance or Life, and their reality cannot be questioned even though their forms change or disappear. And even if our philosophy could persuade us of the non-reality of pain, our experiences of toothache, ague, or ptomaine poisoning are sufficient to smash our ideal philosophy, unless we have lost the rational faculties.

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We have to accept pain, etc., as inevitable attendants upon the transformation going on in the material life of God round about us and in us. And this fact becomes at once an interpretation of our experiences and a challenge to us to accept and enter upon our heritage. This was evidently the view of St. Paul when he said, "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain till now . . . waiting for the manifestation of the Sons of God." Everywhere there is the challenge to move up to higher expression of divine life, and alwaj^s that movement is attended with pain. Take the seed you plant in the springtime in the soft, warm loam of earth. It is a life bound up by a shell, narrow and limited. Pretty soon sun and rain and the influences of the earth move upon it, and the life within the seed hears the call to come up into higher life expression, and there is such a response that at last it can be no longer bound, and there comes the pain of a new birth, the seed splits its shell and comes forth out of littleness and narrowness to larger expression of life in beauty, fragrance, and fruitage. So a bird's egg moves up from a life within a shell into the larger expression of life as found in song and flight, but it is attended by the agony of a birth. Now man himself is a creature of time, of the senses, and of animalism. His experiences are mostly of his material life. One day there begins to play upon the life within him the truth that makes men free through a song, a prayer, a beautiful service, or a good life, until he hears the call of the divine life and there comes the hour of decision, the agony of a new birth, and he becomes a citizen of eternity conscious of the indwelling God.

At every step of this moving upward into larger life, from seed to man, pain is seen to be an attendant fact. The seed or bird or man could well say, " Thank you pain; by you I have come into higher, larger life." Pain and disease may be results, but they are not punishments. Rather shall we think of them as signal calls announcing wrong conditions and challenging us to move up out of them. They are things we have received from our ancestors ; or have inherited from past years of wrong thinking and wrong living ; or violations of the laws of life, consciously

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or otherwise, whose penalties have staid with us over-long because we did not learn their meaning, till they have become enthroned in us and obsessed us, and having some psychic quality, they refuse to "go out into the deep" without a struggle, or a mighty, authoritative command.

Accepting the heritage of your oneness with the Infinite life, talk with yourself : "Why pain? God who dwelleth in me has not pain, nor is he sick, nor has he disease. If I have it, it is the infallible symptom that the Infinite life is leading up to some higher expression of itself that as yet it does not fully manifest within me. There is some obstruction in heart, mind, will, or imagination, that impedes the full tides of the Infinite life with His resistless health and perfect peace. It is a call to prepare for a fuller invasion of the divine life. The obstruction must be found and removed. It may be error of thought or action, one or both. I set myself now to the task of setting to right the inner recesses of my life, so that there shall be perfect harmony with the divine life, and hence perfect health. "

In this process of opening up the chaniiels for the flow of the Infinite life, there is as much to unlearn as to learn. A good memory is invaluable, while a good f orgettery is above the price of rubies. The trouble is that we forget the things we should remember, and vice versa. Let us now unlearn some things. Most of our ideas of right and wrong have been learned under the tutelage of "Thou shalt not." As long as we live under this negative motive, we invite fear and worry and the whole brood of attendant ills; and under the reign of fear, the things we fear sooner or later come upon us. Our fear is the invitation to them to come in and stay. We need to shift our point of view, the motiving of our acts over to the positive side of things. "Thou shalt" is the positive, constructive side of the divine law that makes love and not fear the motive, and this is the highest expression of the divine life within you — "God is Love." Dwelling here in the motive of love, you can stand at the gates of the City of Man's Soul and meet all such visitors as fear and worry, with such calmness and assurance of the presence of Infinite love and peace and power that they will vanish away and leave you in peace.

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And this impelling force of love will not be a passing spasm of emotional joy, but a glorious joy of service, a sense of divine right and place in the world. The commonest task becomes clothed with the character of a sacrament ; work will have a new dignity; rest a new refreshment; sleep a sublime renewing; eating will be no longer a bolting of things down with just enough chewing to keep the food from scratching the skin off the throat, or for mere gustatory pleasure, but a process whose thoroughness measures an impartation of the divine life. Keeping the laws of life will not be a perfunctory winning a bonbon, or " getting home to heaven," but the spontaneous action of love that finds obedience to the law the only means of perfectly expressing the divine life in us.