CHAPTER II.

TRUST AS A SAVING OR HEALING POWER.
It is said by Jesus, that " the Son (or the individual spirit and soul of man) can of himself do nothiug, except what he seeth the Father doing." (John v:19, 20.) The uni- versal Christ principle, the first emanation from the " Un- known " is the supreme saving and healing power. It is the manifested God. In his (or its) relation to the Supreme ■v/ Divine Essence, he is the first begotten and only begotten 5onT"Tn his relation to us and to all below him, he is the Father, for aTTmanifested life is in him, and goes forth from him. Its characteristic property is an irrepressible tendency to impart itself, and like heat and light which symbolize it in the world of nature, to radiate itself. In curing others, we can only execute the function of mediators between this universal principle and the diseased and unhappy ones to whom we minister. Through us, as a channel of communi- cation, it may come into them. We can do nothing better than this to heal the souls and bodies of men. An undeviatins: and trustful conformity to the operation of this principle in the world of nature aud mind is the highest law of health. The individual and creaturely will must be surrendered to and be merged in the universal will. For the will is the principle of conjunction, and that by which we come into oneness with the Father. Two persons who will iu opposite directions are not and cannot be one. "Willing in the same direction, they become, as it were, one life in two personalities.
On the subject of trust, the Christian Hindu, Mozoomdar, very truly says: "Trust, as a faculty of the soul, passes
AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 23
almost without recognition. Yet, in spiritual life, it is a cardinal, vital power. It is not a mere feeling. Though its relation to all warmth of sentiment be very deep, it is a positive organ of strength." {Oriental Christ, p. 141.) Blessed is the man who has risen from the life of sense, through the life of faith, to the life of trust. Trust is the opposite of fear, which is the fertile root of most diseases.
It is a truth, and a great truth, that there is a divine saving principle, a universally diffused, and consequently ever acces- sibie intelligent and loving Life, that exhibits an endeavor to impart itself and its saving blessedness to everything that breathes. This universal saving principle (or Divine Per- sonage, if we prefer thus to conceive it) lies beyond the apprehension of the senses, and consequently must be per- ceived and appropriated by faith, and taken up into our individual being by real prayer ; not the noisy supplications that clamorous lips pour forth, but a passive attitude of the mind. It comes to seek and save that which is lost, or to restore to man all that has dropped out of his existence and which is necessary to the idealization of the divine idea in him. It is represented and signified by the name of Jesus. It is a principle (and in thought becomes limited in a person- ality) of pure spiritual intelligence, united to its correlative, pure love, which in conjunction constitute it a living sub- stance and force. If we will assume towards it, or him, an attitude of passive trust, it will save us. But how am I to do this? Suppose I desired and needed to warm myself by the light of the sun, how could I do so? The process is simple. I should expose myself to the light and heat of the sun and let it warm me. I should make no effort to cause it to shine, but simply hold myself passively exposed to its vivifying rays. This is the only effort of will that is neces- sary. If there was any obstruction, any opaque substance, between me and the sun, I should remove it. I should take
24 ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY
away every screen which could obscure the sun's rays ; and then it would shine upon me and penetrate me with its living warmth, even without my asking or entreating it to do so, but by simply trusting it in silence.
This universal saving principle is the same as the to ayaOov of Plato, the supreme and eternal Goodness, the Christ of Paul, " a divine human principle " and person. As it is not only good, but goodness itself, it can do to and for us nothing contrary to its nature. We are to trust in it, as an infant reposes on the bosom of the maternal love. An infant's life is bound up in the life of the mother. So our true being is included in this principle represented by the name of Jesus. It has an affinity for all sinful and diseased humanit}'. It not only can be prevailed upon to save us, but it yearns to save. We need only to hold the soul passively open and upward to imbibe its life.
In our efforts to cure others by the mental and spiritual method, we are to identify ourselves with it, and consecrate ourselves to its use, as an organ of communication between it and the patient. Even though we may not speak ourselves the word of life, we can be the silent telephonic wire, through which the vivifying inner word may be spoken to a patient.
This only saving, healing principle in the universe is identical with the sun of the spiritual world, as described by Swedenborg, and which he defines as the proximate emana- tion from the " invisible God." It is the Kabalistic sun of righteousness (or spiritual truth) which arises in our souls with healing in its wings (or elevating power). (Malachi iv : 2.) Its light is the highest intelligence that can come to men, and its heat is a celestial love ; and the two in con- junction, and set over . against each other in the mystic balance, make it pure life, a divinely vivific principle. (See my Divine Law of Cure, pp. 58-60.)
On the reception of this saving influence by assuming
AND MENTAL THERAPEUTICS. 25
toward it an attitude of passive trust, I said in my Celestial Datum, published twenty-three 3-ears ago, " Let us behold this great truth, this divine arcanum, or heavenly mystery, in an outward symbol addressed to sense. One of the greatest works of ancient Egypt, surpassing even the pyramids, was the Lake of Mceris, an artificial excavation four hundred and fifty miles in circumference, and three hundred feet in depth, and designed to receive the sacred waters of the Nile, to be used in fertilizing the surrounding lauds. Between it and the river there was an obstructing barrier of earth, which was opened by a channel cut through it. Then the waters flowed of their own accord, and by a law of their nature, into the lake and filled it to its utmost capacity. Now the Nile — and the same is true of all rivers — mystically represented the Divinity, and was a symbol of an emanative principle and influence, a rema, as it is called in the Scriptures, a flowing forth from the Deity. In the Hindu religious symbolism rivers had the same significance and sacred character. The Lake of Mceris represents the human soul, made to be a recipient of the divine nature and life." So in esoteric Judaism, rivers were sacred symbols. Says the Psalmist, " There is a river (an emanative principle of pure intelligence and life) the streams whereof (or that go forth from it) shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High." (Psalm xlvi : 4.) And this river, which represents and signifies the outflowing of the divine love and wisdom, is always full of the water of life (Psalm Ixv : 9) ; and when every barrier is removed, and we hold the soul passively and unresistingly open to receive, it will flow in and fill the finite spirit with its illuminating and saving influx.
Jesus, as we have before said, represents the only saving principle in the universe. This is a truth of which we should never lose sioht. In the lower manifestation of this intelli-
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gent principle in nature, it does the best, whatsoever that may be, for the plant, the tree, the animal, and the man. But there is a higher exhibition of its operation in the realm of mind. Jesus, as an individualized expression of the uni- versal saving principle, and as an historic personage, was an ultimate manifestation of the principle of health, in the full sense of the term. He was perfectly well in soul and body, and a sympathetic conjunction with him brings us into rapport with the infinite fountain of health and well of salvation. But Jesus Christ comes in the flesh, or descends to an ultimate manifestation in us. He who believes this is born of God, that is, a divine life is engendered even in his bodily organism. I am not merety to believe in his coming to the world as an event of history (for that faith has only a trifling saving value and efficacv), but that he still comes in the flesh, and in my flesh. (2 John v : 7.) His coming is not a movement through space, but signifies communication by influx. (Arcana Celertia, 5249.) By this coming of the Lord to us in the flesh, our external humanity is made divine. In treating a patient by the method of trust, we should approach him in the name of Jesus, that is, we should iden- tify ourselves with the saving principle, which he represents, and through which he can be ever present with us, and in tranquil silence let him speak the Word, that saving inner "Word, by which he healed, and still heals, the souls and bodies of men. The Divinity still speaks in man, as certainly as he ever did, but in our spiritual deafness and obtuseness, we mistake his voice in us, as did the youthful prophet Samuel. When the young neophyte cams to the aged prophet Eli, un- der the mistake that it was a human voice that called him, he was sent back with instruction to listen to the inner "Word, the sacred and soundless speech which God utters in the solitude and silence of our own spirit. The coming of the secret Logos, the inner voice, is the most important event
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in our life. There are external books enough in the world, both sacred and profane, and of the making of them there is no end ; but no one of them, nor all of them condensed into one, is of so much value in our spiritual development as the inner Word. When this speaks, all other books and voices bhould be silent. In the language of Mrs. Browning : — " Hearken, hearken ! God speaketh in thy soul, Saying, O thou that moves t With feehle steps across this earth of mine, To break beside the fount thy golden bowl
And spill its purple wine — Look up to heaven and see how like a scroll My right hand hath thine immortality In an eternal grasping."
This living Word is, as it is called in the New Testament, a rema, a flowing forth, an efflux or emanation from the manifested God, a divine proceeding and proceeding divine. It will come to every one who will assume toward it an atti- tude of listening and obedience expressed by the words, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." There is more saving virtue in it than in every remedy known to medical science. "He sent forth his Word and healed them." (Ps. cvii:20.) This Word is the diviue Truth proceeding from the Lord. It was, and still is, made flesh and dwells ev y)fuv, in us (uot among us, as if it was something outside of us) , anawe behold its glory, a glory as of the only be- gotten of the Father, full of grace (or secret wisdom) and truth. (John i : 14.) This is not historic, but descriptive of what may be a present experience of the soul. We need to be raised out of the historical sense of the Scriptures into the living spiritual sense. The Bible (and the same is true of all sacred books) is not a history of events outside of our minds, like the books of Herodotus and Tacitus, but is a his- tory of every soul, and of the universal soul. It is the in- side annals of man.
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The inward Word in us is a manifestation of the creative Logos or Word of the Lord by which the heavens were made. (Ps. xxxiii: 6. 2 Pet. iii : 5.) The visible universe is only the outward expression of the Logos, the externalization of the Word. So the inner Word in us seeks and endeavors to come in the flesh, or to manifest itself in a bodily organism in harmony with it. Matter is in itself not evil. In its reality and inmost essence it is divine — the second emana- tive principle from God. It is only when matter has domin- ion over spirit, that it is evil. It then usurps the place of God and is idolatry. Matter as it is in itself, and in its place, is an invisible, divine, and immortal substance. It is the cor- \ relative of spirit — a manifestation of spirit. What we call \ matter is not matter, but is unreal and an illusion.
There is a tradition that Jesus was asked, "When the kingdom of God should come?" and he answered, " When two become as one, and that which is without becomes as that which is within." This might seem at first sight to ex- press an impossibility, that two should become as one. Ac- cording to the Pythagorean symbolic numerals, one is spirit and two is matter. And the kingdom of God comes in us, and with saving power, when spirit and matter are no longer , at war, but become one substance, and the phenomenal is I absorbed into the real. The within, the spirit, is the invisi- ble Reality ; the without, the body, is the illusory Visible. (The Perfect Way, p. 327.) The -apotheosis of matter, and thejglorificatiou of the body, is the highest triumph of faith. This was effected in Jesus, who has gone before us to prepare the way for us, and to open a pathway of light conducting by an unerring straight line to the highest unfoldment of the divine element in man. His life was a life of trust that brought him into such close relations with the Godhead, and indissoluble union with the Father, as to raise his humanity entirely above the plane of sensuous illusion, and the evils
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that grow with more than tropical vigor in such a soil. Let ns follow the path he has marked out for us. In the life of trust millions of souls have found rest, and this " so great cloud of witnesses " still speak to us in the language of Da- vid, in one of the most beautiful and expressive sacred hymns of any age or nation : "I had fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of Jehovah in the land of the living. Wait on Jehovah : be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on Jehovah." (Ps. xxvii:13, 14.)
By trust we rise above the delusion which is natural to the psychical man or mind, that our life is self-originated, in- stead of being perpetually derived from the Deity, and we come into union with the manifested God. Sundered from him, life and spiritual health would be as impossible as would the existence of the body without food and air. Man, as to his inner and true self, is but a part, a fraction, of a grand whole. Sundered from the whole, he is incomplete — is as nothing. To unite man and God is the central design of Christian^ and of all spiritual religions. The whole, the All, that from which all individual life springs, is the Christ, who is called also the Father, as being the parent source of all existences in earth and heaven. Jesus, as an incarnate expression and manifestation of the Christ, came from the supreme realm of spiritual being, and in him was focused the life of the whole. It was concentered in him, and through him we may come into communication with the whole. With- out this mediation and conjunction with the unbroken whole- ness of life, we are like a branch severed from the vine, which withers and dies. Conscious union with God is our natural condition, and consequently is health in the fullest sense of the word. Very truly does the author of that pro- found work, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, say: "It is not a strange thing, then, for the soul to find its life in
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God. This is its native air. God, as the all-surrounding, all-pervading life of the soul, has been the doctrine of all the deepest thinkers in religion. There is a profound saving of Paul, which defines the relation with almost scientific accuracy : ' Ye are complete in him.' In this is summed up the whole of the Bible anthropology — the completeness of man in God, his incompleteness apart from God." But in our fallen and bewildered state we are saying, in the lan- guage of Job : "O that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even unto his seat ! Behold, I go forward, but he is not there ; and backward, but I cannot perceive him : On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him : he hideth himself on the right hand, that I can- not sec him." (Job xxiii : 3, 8, 9.) Yet he is as near to us as we are to ourselves, but cannot be discerned by sense. We never saw the air we breathe, and without which we cannot live on earth. Yret we are in it, and it pervades every part and tissue of our bodies, and its gases form a large proportion of our corporeal structure. Separated from it we die. In a clear day, and beneath the blue dome of the heavens, a man need not institute a search to find the all- pervading atmosphere, for we are in it and are a part of it. Nor need we be constantly trying to breathe. If we cease our volitional effort at respiration, and our attempt to impel by the force of will the physiological machiner}*, our breath- ing will not be suspended, nor will the vital movements come to a halt. We are so interwoven into the very texture of the Divine Existence that we cannot easily be unraveled. Much of our life is wasted in our futile endeavors to live in and from ourselves, apart from God. If we cease all volun- tary effort to breathe, the Divine Life of nature will breathe in us and for us, better than we do ourselves, and we need not exhaust all our energies in trying to breathe the breath of life. Neither do we need to make a constant effort to find God and live in him.
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The Collective Man, the universal Divine Humanity, is the Christ, of whom Jesus is an incarnation. All men, as to their real humanity, the essentially human principle in them, are included in the Christ, and are finite limitations of him. To view ourselves as isolated and disconnected fragments of this Divine Humanity — as disjecta membra, or scattered and disjointed limbs — is unnatural, and an error and illusion into which the soul has fallen and from which it must be re- deemed. Jesus as the Christ, the second Adam, who repre- sents in himself the whole of humanity, came into the world for that very purpose. In him, as a manifestation of the all- inclusive Divine Humanhy, and as the "Lord from heaven," every human being has salvation, in the New Testament sense of the word, if he only comes to the intuitive recogni- tion of it, and accents it. If thejChrist, as Paul affirms, is all and in all (Eph. i : 23), then my true life is his life, and will have no separate destiny, and may be safely and securely trusted to him. Underneath us are the everlasting arms.
" How can I sink with such a prop As the eternal God, Who bears the earth's huge pillars up, And spreads the heavens abroad ? "
Our immortal self is enclosed in the life of God. To edu- cate the world up to this grand conception was the errand of Jesus to mankind. The sphere of his life is in a perpetual conatus, or effort, to save the world from error and disease. He came into the world that the world through him might have life, in the completed sense of that word. He still lays down his life for men. From the exalted sphere of his be- ing, his influence, or the influx of light and life from him, is gradually dispersing the errors and delusions from the minds of men, which are the cause of our disorder and misery, as the fogs and mists of the earth slowly melt away when the sun is shining: above them.
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It is affirmed by Swedenborg that in our fallen state we can have communication -with the life and light of the supreme heavens only by the mediation of celestial spirits and angels, who receive into themselves the life of the whole, aud in conjoining themselves to us connect us with the whole. (Arcana CeleMia, 5983.) Jesus is all this to us, and more. In him the lost link between the highest and lowest in the manifestation of life is restored. In him the perfect ideal, the archet3"pal man, has forever become the actual. The exhibition to the world of a perfect humanity in the life of Jesus has taught one lesson which our systems of theology have overlooked. It has demonstrated that sin and disease are no part of man. They are not constituents of human nature, for in Jesus we have a man perfectly pure, and with- out sin and disease. Hence these are no necessary part of human nature, but are an intrusion, an external accretiou. To separate them from our essential self in our conception of ourselves, has a redeeming influence. They are to be viewed as something foreign to man. This is one great lesson that the incarnation has taught. The great error of the world is, that men believe that their sins, their errors, their maladies, are a part of their humanity. But in the perfect life of Jesus there is for all ages to come a sublime demonstration that it is not so. It is an object-lesson on a grand scale that can never again wholly fade from the religious consciousness. Jesus was externally and wholly what we are in the inmost and un- evolved degree of our being. By beholding him in this light, may we not be changed into the same image, and thus the disciple become as the master? The intuitive recognition of the truth, that sin and disease are no part of the immortal aud real man, is the dawn of our redemption. It loosens the rivet in our chains, and they begin to fall off. In the life of Jesus on earth, brief as it was in a historical point of view, there was a projection of eternity into time, and of the infinite upon
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the plane of the finite, and the depositing of a new and higher life in humanity, the effects of which can never be lost to man. Somehow his life has become connected with the whole of humanity, and what God hath joined together, let not man by a false way of thinking put asunder. The character of Jesus in its freedom from sin and disease, in its spotless purity and healthfnluess, exhibits the possibilities of our own human nature, and is the model idea, the exemplary concep- tion, we are to form of our own inner self. In Jesus the fraction of the Whole, the All, which we call the individual man, while remaining forever distinct like a drop of the dew of heaven forever crystalized, ceases to be a mere broken number, and returns to the unity whence it sprang. And he is drawing the world up to God after him. (John xii:32.) If we are tired out with our vain struggle to save ourselves, let us deliver ourselves up to be saved by him, and by that universal principle which his name represents.
The fall of man, or his gradual descent from the light and blessedness of a spiritual existence, and the entrance of dis- ease and death into the world through sin, or the illusions of sense, is a great fact — a truth of history and of our inner consciousness. But the infinite love and life of God, and his redeeming and saving presence in the world of nature and of mind, is a still greater fact. We live in a world, the deepest reality and only supreme reality of which is spirit, the active presence of God, which is more than a match for sin and disease. Every man's own spirit, owing to its inseparable conjunction with the Universal Spirit, is to him the centre of the universe — the point where our life not merely touches the Divine Life as a tangent comes into proximity to a circle, but where it intersects and interblends with the life of God. By trusting this ever-present saving divine power, the healing process is accelerated in the individual man, and also in the collective race, of which we are a constituent element. God's
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love, which is an incessant impulse to give, to impart good and truth, is a stronger force than sin. The darkest night the world ever saw, and which may have seemed to hold the world in its irresistible embrace, has easily and without resistance yielded to the superior power of the dawning light. So as Paul has affirmed, " Where sin (or the illusions of sense) has abounded, grace (or the celestial wisdom) will abound more exceedingly : that as sin has reigned unto death, even so will grace reign through righteousness (or spiritual illumination) unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Rom. v : 20, 21.) That from which we need to be redeemed is the unnatural bondage to the body and the illu- sions of the animal soul. Says an intelligent Brahmin, Vamadeva Shastiu, in a late number of the Fortnightly Review, "To escape from corporeal fetters, out of the end- less desert of ignorance and delusion, is the soul's supreme concern." And it is the simple lesson of trust taught in this chapter that there is but one power in the universe which can effect our liberation. This truth is well and forcibly expressed by the prophet Isaiah : " I, even I, am the Lord (Yava), and beside me there is no Savior," or health-giver. (Isa. xliii: 11.) We can neither save ourselves nor others. The only saving principle and healing energy is that which is signified and represented by the name of Jesus, and this as the supreme life of angels and men stands forever inclined to save. And the best thing we can possibly do is to let it save us.
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