Studies in the Thought World

It is clearly obvious that an ideal which may be defined as Omnipresent Love, Law, Life, Spirit, and Goodness is higher, purer, and more ennobling than one which would naturally be conveyed by the term “Person.” This is yet further evident when the word takes on additional limitation from its usual representative pronoun “He.” This comment is only made to call attention to the bald poverty of conventional language. We take cheap terms with commonplace associations, and from force of habit stamp them upon the Infinite. The terms employed should be vehicles for the highest ideals, and, so far as is possible, unweighted by limitations.

But even in sacred literature we find deific appellations which are not only limited, but, by association, unmoral, if not immoral. A few of these are Lord, King, Sovereign, Ruler, Judge, and Potentate. The associations connected with the general personal use of these terms have been largely autocratic, despotic, oppressive, vain, and sensuous. They have humanized God, and not spiritualized man. Oriental monarchs and despots left their stamp upon these official titles long before there was any general idea of human brotherhood and unity. Bearing in mind the wonderful moulding power of thought, what a contrast between the past concept of the “dread Sovereign of the skies” and the supreme consciousness of the Universal Life and our oneness with it! The latter ideal, held in the field of mental vision, sends an influx of vital invigoration even down to the subsoil of the physical organism.

When man turns his gaze God-ward, that which he sees is colored by subjective states and prejudices. Jealousy, wrath, and anger have been looked upon as divine features; and the crude pictures of the Deity that have crowded the human mind have represented him as cruel, as mocking at calamity, fond of flattery, and with innumerable other human foibles and prejudices. Under the discordant and depressing mental idolatries of the past, it is not strange that such a general nightmare has brought into manifestation a great host of mental and physical inharmonies and disorders. The idea, or the ideal, of God shapes the deep formative basis of human expression. A distorted view of the “All in All” produces a universal eclipse of Goodness, and renders normality and sanity almost impossible.

In the light of the great truth that universal law is beneficent, adversity disappears, discord is transformed, evil dissolves, the Sun of righteousness (right thinking) arises, illness is healed, and darkness flees away. We are backed by the forces of the universe if we adopt its methods and vibrate with its harmonies. The host of subjective spectres, demons, and torments are only bats and shadows which disappear into nothingness when the white light of Omnipresent Divinity floods the consciousness. This is not poetic imagery, but belongs to the new scientific recognition of the higher thought. To “practise the presence of God” is no strange, illogical exercise, but a rational, every-day accomplishment.

Everything is secular, and everything divine, and all life is included in the One Life. Heaven is neither more nor less than conformity to law upon every plane. It involves a displacement of all negatives and deficiencies with an overshadowing consciousness of the All-Good. In proportion as divinity at the soul-centre is recognized and held as normal, the visible circumference, with all its dependent relations, will fall into line. In the profoundest sense there is but One Mind and Life, and all individuated expressions of this Universal become dry and barren when out of conscious connection with their great Primal Fountain. With open conduits ever maintained, the supply is perennial and overflowing.