My Philosophy and My Religion · 3 of 4

Part III: My Religion

Before the close of this page I am going to make a statement that contains a confession; but I am not ashamed of it. I have been in a quandary as to how to begin and how to deal with this portion of this little volume—for to me Philosophy and Religion are so closely related that I at times scarcely know where the one ends and the other begins. My own point of view in connection with each sees such a slight difference between them, except in definitions. Philosophy— the tracing of effects from their cause; Religion—that which deals or has to do with man’s relations with a higher Power; the essence of religion—the consciousness of God in the soul of man. The essentials of my own philosophy are essentially the same. Here I stopped and seemed to be able to get no farther.

I waited patiently for several days. Several thoughts came as to direction or method of treatment, but no one seemed to predominate. “Oh, Christ within, direct and lead me,” I said— and dwelling earnestly on it in thought—I prayed. Then as a flash came this strong leading—Take your pencil and paper, leave all else behind, and find another spot for work. Seek the largest tree on the mountain side, and help will be there. I obeyed and immediately started, not knowing which direction to go at first, but believing that I would find the spot.

I finally reached it. Aglow with the quickened and deep‑breathing of the climbing, and a little warm, I lay down under the shade of the great tree with the wonderful valley landscape stretching out below me. In the far distance I could see the rows of a vineyard as they ran up and then disappeared beyond the crest of the hill. No sooner had I lain down than the voice said: “Change your place and look to the East—in the direction of the rising sun.” I obeyed and finding there the fallen trunk of a smaller tree, I half reclined with my back against it, with the thought of resting and remaining quiet for a few moments.

There came to my mind and seemed to keep corning this statement or, rather, quotation: In the beginning was the Word. I then recalled that in a little note or vest‑pocket book in which I sometimes jotted things down that I might want to look at again or keep for some future use, I had a thought or a sentence by that gifted seer, Emanuel Swedenborg, on the Word. Valuing him so highly, for truly he was one of the most remarkable and valuable men who has ever lived in the world—I felt drawn to know his thought.

The first thing in the little book that my eye fell upon was: “Behold, I send an angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee in the place which I have prepared.” This was followed by: “And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand and when ye turn to the left.” Following this on the same page was “I am strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.” The page concluded with “Rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him, and He shall give thee thy heart’s desire.”

I am giving these exactly as they came, because they all seem to have a relationship with what follows. On the opposite page, filling it, was a memorandum I had made but a few days before— to me a wonderful statement, and one evincing an unusual power of discernment and of statement. It was a statement by President Harding, his conception of prayer, as follows: “I believe in prayer. I believe in prayer in the closet, for one there faces God alone. I can understand how these prophets of old, in their anxiety, problems, perturbations and perplexities, found courage and strength when they gave their hearts to the ‘Great Omnipotence’ in prayer. The Great Omnipotence is Spirit, and is the Creative Principle of the universe. Consequently the response to prayer is the reaction of Spirit, and is the operation of a Natural Law.”

Then followed—“All good men are of one religion,” a statement by Emerson. Then the entry: Shakespeare’s statue, Leicester Square, London—“There is no darkness but ignorance.” I was then beginning to think that I had better give attention to the thing I had come for, when my eye could not get away from this couplet by Whitman, although I have used it already:

“I laugh at what you call dissolution,

And I know the amplitude of time.”

I then grew strangely patient and turning past several loose things in the little book, the following by a friend held me:1

“If a wren can cling

To a spray a‑swing

In the mad May wind,

And sing and sing

As if she’d burst for joy,

Why cannot I contented lie

In His quiet arms beneath His sky

Unmarred by Life’s annoy?”

1.Robert Haven Shauffler.

With still more patience, and still looking for the Swedenborg statement, there next fell within the vision of my eye that heart‑felt statement by Sidney Smith: “God might have made something better than the strawberry, but He never did.” I said: “Why didn’t God make something better than men?” And the voice said: “There are men and there are men. Follow the lead of the Christ’s mind and heart. Perfectly He understood life and perfectly He revealed it. There will no new revelation come to you men of earth until His revelation in its eternal content, freed from the encrustations of time, is fully understood and lived. The matchless beauty and power of the life He lived and revealed, lived from His divine center, and touched with the Divine fire, will reconstruct every life that builds upon the two‑fold foundation that He taught, and when sufficiently in evidence in individual lives it will reconstruct the world. Present it as you are led—and be brief. Much may be said about religion: He demonstrated religion.”

Religion has but one function—to teach men to live their lives in the life of God, and then joyously and eagerly to bend their lives to helping God in carrying out His purposes and His plans in evolution and life.

All life is the manifestation of the life of God—the same in all nature, in the animal, in the human, in angel and archangel, each in its own peculiar form—and that Life in each is pushing, evolving each to a continually higher form. And while man at his best is wonderful, it is idle for him to think that he is all there is. Every form that is a manifestation of life is dear and of consequence to the Divine mind and heart. To love all, reverence the life in all, protect and care for all, is the motto of the wise. The best friend of God is he who is not only a friend of man, but a friend of all nature, and of every living thing.

While writing this a little lizard has been my companion close beside me here on the trunk of the fallen tree where we both sit. The moment I sat down he came, and stays close beside me. The way he cocks his little head with those eyes that sparkle so when the sunlight glints them, makes me wonder whether he is curious to know what I am doing, and still more when I talk with him.

I love to have him here, and I love the confidence he seems to have in me, although he moves away a bit whenever I try to rub his head—but always back again. There is a comradeship between us. There is a bond—the bond of life, the One life. And as we sit here alone, amid the silence of the centuries, I beside and he upon the old fallen log, looking over my shoulder, the saying of the old Persian writer comes to mind: “He who sees God within himself, sees Him in everything.”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing that distinguished Jesus as a teacher of His time was the fact that He did not cite authority for His teaching, yet spoke always as one having authority. It was this latter characteristic that made Him so powerful both as a personality and as a teacher. The religious teaching of His time was always characterized by “Moses has said.” “The prophet hath said.” “It is written.” It was partly on this account that all vibrating and moving power had gone from religion, and with it had come a low ebb of life. He recognized the truths of the early teachers whom they cited, and through whose authority they claimed to speak; but the truths of His teachings were born of His own innate perceptions.

They were so marked and so startling at times, however, that although He was looked upon by all who knew and heard Him as a regular Jewish Rabbi, they nevertheless perceived a different type and tone In His teaching, and they felt it in His personality. Of humble parentage, whose parents they all knew, as well as His brothers and sisters,1 He nevertheless spoke as of Himself having authority.

They also began to realize in Him unusual powers, which they marveled at but could not understand. Things were done 1. “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and or Jude, and Simon? And are His sisters not here with us?”—Mark 6:3. through His understanding of law which seemed to them as miracles. He was one of them, like unto them, yet they perceived He was different from them. When He said to them: “I am from above,” He did not mean that He had descended from above, but that He was cognizant of a higher consciousness, and it was His purpose to reveal this higher consciousness and its resultant higher life to them. He didn’t mean that He had come down from the heavens above, any more than when at the same time He said: “Ye are from below,” He meant that they had come up from out of the earth. He meant that their plane of consciousness and therefore of life was of a different, a lower state or order, but that an acceptance of the truth and the life that He taught would raise them up to that higher state.

He realized that a new step, a new stage in the evolution of life was due, and must be brought into life and action. He had respect both for their beliefs and their customs. He had respect for the Jewish law which was a part of their religious precepts and teaching. I am come not to destroy but to fulfil the law, He said. By fulfilling it He was to add to it something that was lacking, because it was but dimly and vaguely known.

From time to time various ones of the earlier prophets had divined it, but for a long period no prophet had arisen among them, and the living truth of the earlier prophets had become so encrusted with form and ceremony which had multiplied and grown to an almost infinite degree—so encrusted with “it has been said”—that the spirit had gone and but the shell remained.

There was no upspringing life in the thoughts, the lives, or the teachings of those who purported to be teachers and leaders of the people. A new stage however in man’s consciousness, unfoldment, and life was to begin, and Jesus perceiving it, came to bear witness of it to them, and through them to all the world. It was so great and of such consequence to their lives that it amounted literally to a new birth—“Marvel not when I say unto you ye must be born from above.”

The very opening of His ministry was: The kingdom of heaven is at hand. It became at once the central theme of His teachings, the one thing that He continually reiterated, and so thoroughly it filled His thoughts and His life and occupied His time and His efforts that compared to it one might almost say that He taught nothing else—or, rather, that anything else He taught was but an amplification of this one central theme. To establish the reign of God in the minds and hearts of men, that their lives might show forth the life and the things of God, was His great purpose.

He did this by revealing the most startling fact, that God, whom they worshipped as a power outside, was the power that was within them, and when they realized that God and the kingdom of God was within, their lives would then show forth the works of God. God was not to be worshipped as a person or as an image, for “God is spirit.” Exterior worship was to be replaced with prayer and communion, that their spirits might meet and become one with the Spirit within. Prayer was always to be prayer that would facilitate this—never in public or given to vain repetitions, but a withdrawing into the quiet of their own souls.

The Master repeatedly said that He did not come to destroy or do away with, but to fulfil the law. Were a specific statement even on His part necessary, in view of the reiteration of His one central revelation and theme, to point to us His own conception and mission, it is furnished by His memorable reply when He was teaching one day, His reply to the Lawyer, whose question was: “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus said unto him, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” How truly fundamental this becomes of Jesus’ purpose, mission, and teachings when coupled with the announcement: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.”

These constitute Jesus’ two great fundamentals—Love and service for God; love and service for one’s fellow‑men.

The first is the same as He repeated so many times in presenting His words of truth which were to win His hearers to His Way of Life. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you,” taking care that He made Himself clearly understood by saying: “Say not ‘Lo here’ and ‘Lo there,’ know ye not that the Kingdom of God is within you.”

The second is the same as He reiterated and amplified so often in many varied forms: “A new commandment give I you, that ye love one another, as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” And again: “If any man say, I love God and hateth his brother, he is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?” These are not secondary teachings on the part of Jesus, they are fundamental.

That it was a great principle of truth that was embodied in His expression “the kingdom of God,” the kingdom within, that the Master had uppermost in His mind and purpose, rather than the establishment of an organization, is shown by the fact that we have in the first three gospels alone an account of His use of this term over thirty times.

Anything that could be interpreted as meaning an organization—ecclesia—He uses but twice. It is the whole tenor of one’s teaching and the constantly reiterated statement of truth, that gives one’s real meaning or purpose.

For the sinner the Judean Christ had infinite patience and infinite love. For the sinner as such He never had any condemnation, and His numerous parables indicate that His entire teaching was that this was likewise God’s attitude toward the sinner. His passion was to lead them to a knowledge of God who dwells within, and their fountain of life and light would then be opened up and would transform the life and lift it up, and lift it up to that God‑consciousness that He Himself realized and taught that it is the part of all men to realize.

He pleaded with them to leave the dead formulaism of their time, the ecclesiastical system from which all spirit and life had gone, and that stood as a distinct menace and hindrance, for that spirit of truth and righteousness which is the Divine Principle within, and which awaits recognition to bring it into activity, to lead, to mold, and to beautify the life. The mere observance of form and ceremony, ecclesiastical rites, the offering of sacrifices, was a distinct hindrance, He taught, for it placed the emphasis without, while the one thing and the only thing that did matter, because it opened up the springs of the inner life—the Kingdom of God—was within.

He was so interested in the lives of men and women, and the great truth that He perceived and bore witness to to win them and redeem them to their higher and better selves, and thus bear fruit in their lives and in the great life of His people, that He chose the personal way of presenting it. We find Him where the people were and could be gathered together most naturally, out on the hillside, by the lakeside, out under the open sky, and but rarely in synagogue or temple.

He understood human nature also so thoroughly, and His experience with the conditions which He found prevailing among the people was such that He realized that God’s truth must be kept ever‑flowing, upspringing continually and ever‑freshly in the individual heart, and that when encrustations were formed, by being either deliberately planned or woven, or naturally, it meant always spiritual or moral stultification and degradation or death. The only ones He ever condemned, and these He condemned more than once, and with scathing scorn, were those who formulated systems and said—Here is your truth, subscribe to it—who sought for their own standing or for power or for money to gain control over the minds and therefore the lives of men. Their very keynote was “The prophets have said,” “Moses hath said,” and they sought thus to establish their authority. This is almost invariably true where a system, an organization is formulated and builded upon a free upspringing truth or revelation of any great prophet or teacher, and when it is not kept open to the free and ever‑flowing truth of the present day or hour.

The truth is gone, the shell remains, and on account of the effort made to keep it a close possession it even smells in its decay—or if not this, then it becomes powerless in its influence. It is even worse, being a semblance of the truth, supported many times by casuistry and complacency, it keeps many a one from hearing the Divine voice, and following the Divine guidance that is always imminent in every human soul, waiting to manifest itself and to lead, to beautify and continually to replenish the life, which above all things else is desirable.

The only ones He ever did condemn were those who took the truths of the prophets and inspired teachers and wove them into a system with many furnishings of their own, so that eventually the furnishings exceeded and eclipsed the truths themselves, in order they might gain authority over the minds and lives of men for their own gain.

It was these who flourished then, and who flourish in all times and in connection with all religions of whom He spoke: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.” “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.” “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers; therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.”

There have been times when His great virile message has been almost eclipsed. Other prophets inspired by the singular power and beauty of His truth have arisen to bear witness to it, and are upholding it with clear vision and with fervid and heroic power.

One of the most noted characteristics or facts of this, our time, is the great number of men and women who are going directly to the Master, who are sitting at His feet, and are getting an inspiration and a knowledge directly from His life and His teachings, that they have never been able to get otherwise. They are understanding Him in the simple direct manner in which He spoke, and intended Himself to be understood.

The element of fear has lost its hold on the part of all thinking and really aspiring men and women, and they are eagerly after something that is not deadening, but that is truly constructive and building in their lives. Great numbers are finding it in fuller measure in the life and revelations of the Master—sometimes helped by the occasional light that is flashed to them by one who has understood and grasped His great truths—than they have been able to glean from any other source.

To His question: “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” they reply: There is no profit, for unless the soul is awake so that the life can be actively connected and thereby animated by the Divine life and power, so that it is no longer lived merely as a body under the domination of the senses, it remains a poor, but partly developed, pitiable thing. The eternal law, the law of evolution, is so established in the very life itself, that it can find no real and lasting pleasure except in the highest development that it is capable of.

There was a reason, a very clear‑cut and definite reason for the Master’s statement: “Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” There was the same reason that impelled that matchless Parable of the Lost Son. After he came to his senses, he realized the great losses he was sustaining by living alone in the lower stories of his being, missing thereby the greater good that lay in the stories above, and he said—I will arise and go to my father. The other portion of the parable brings out the father’s attitude and great love, in that he longs for the son’s return, and forgiveness is a part of his nature as soon as he does return.

They see a similar reason in Jesus’ saying: “How hard it is for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.” If a man give all of his thought and time to the mere accumulation and keeping of material things which he’ counts as riches, what inclination and time has he for the mind, the soul, the spirit, the unfoldment of which and the leadership of which is the kingdom of heaven. And, let it be said, many men and many women of riches are realizing this as never before, and are realizing what a wonderful thing it is to have riches, and are using them as well as their own time and ability in efforts to bring about in individual lives and in their communities and in the national life, opportunities for a greater realization and actualization of the Kingdom—and as an incident, are pushing straight into it themselves.

They also realize the reason in Jesus’ statement: “He that is greatest among you shall be your servant.” They realize that there is no such thing as finding greatness, any more than happiness, by seeking for it directly; that it comes always indirectly, through the love and the service that we render to others; and that an added reason for this, in addition to its being written into the very law of human life, is because when one is able to get out of his own little self, and enter into the lives of others, his own life becomes multiplied ten, a hundred, a thousand fold, both through participation in their lives, and through the joy that is their joy.

We hear and read much today of the spiritual life and of spiritual men. Just what is meant is, I am sure, not clear to many. My own conception is this—and it may throw some light on the spiritual life in action, and its relation to and part in the lives of individuals and in great world problems.

The spiritual life is the life that is awake to and is under the leadership of the Spirit within—the God Spirit. The one who is so awake realizes that there is but the One Life, and that what we call individuals are but individual expressions of that Life— that we are therefore all members one of another.

He realizes the fundamental basis of the Master’s statement that the greatest law pertaining to life is: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment,” and that a law equally fundamental is: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” His supreme desire then is deliberately to order his life that the divine life within him, which is the God life, can unfold and lead and dominate his life, thus raising it to its highest, whereby he is pushed out in his desire and his efforts in that every other life can realize likewise its highest.

He realizes that the Divine plan—God’s plan, if you please— is the evolving and the bringing into expression, a continually higher and higher type of life, and his own great purpose is to co‑operate with God in that purpose.

In it he discerns the gradual outgrowing and hence the elimination of the law of the tooth and the claw of the jungle, as pertaining to an earlier and more savage stage of development and life, and supplanting it the law of mutuality—which is love, sympathy, co‑operation. It is the difference primarily between me and mine, and we and ours, because we are all of the same life, members one of another, and therefore co‑operators and helpers one of another.

It is the motive that determines all, and how true one is, whatever one’s conditions are, to that motive. So whatever one’s sphere of action is, humble or large, if he or she has the larger vision, and is animated not by and for self alone, but by the common welfare, which is served alone by love, kindness, care, consideration, sympathy, mutuality, he or she is a co‑operator with God, he or she is a spiritual man or woman—living the truly religious life, although not necessarily professing any religion.

There is a wonderful opportunity here for men of exceptional executive and financial ability and power, that our great natural resources and modern business have brought into being. Can he who has driven and accumulated for self, who has used these wonderful powers for self and for self alone, who sometimes has been a menace and a detriment to the best interests of society at large, be made or become a spiritual man?

Yes, and its rests purely in a change in his motive. Let this new consciousness be born within him—and the awakening of the God consciousness means always the awakening along with it of the social, the neighbor consciousness, and also conscience—and he who formerly was a worker for self with no direct connection with human welfare, becomes at once a co‑operator in the Divine purpose and plan, a co‑worker with God—an engine of power in the cause of truth, righteousness and goodness. Incidentally he steps out from his own little stunted—though apparently to him great—life, into the larger life of God and humanity, whereby it and its worth even to himself become increased many fold.

There is nothing more damning to a man’s own soul, and more damnable in its relations to human welfare, than the idea that the chief end of life is to build, to accumulate, and prosper for one’s self, missing his place in the great human social structure—becoming voluntarily an outcast from the larger life of God—his Father, and from the human kind—his brother.

The greatest man, or, rather, I would say, “the most important” man in his community—the most important man in the world—could it be told who such might be, can drop out of life and thirty days after the ground closes in over his body it will be scarcely remembered that he even lived, unless he has concerned himself with life—so utterly lacking in imagination are those who divorce themselves from life that they become dead to the hopes, the efforts, the problems, the need of help, the heart‑throbs of their fellows.

It is after all the thinker, those most awake to life, those awake to beauty and art, the creator, the teacher, and, above all, those who serve their fellows—which but evidences their interest in life—who get the most out of life while here, and who live on after they have gone.

We get so into ruts—frightful ruts. We give so much attention to the mere physical and outward life and the accessories of life, that we seem to have but little time for the life itself, the big thing and really the only thing.

No wonder we become mentally tired and uncertain, spiritually impoverished and blunted, physically fagged and depleted. Health is the natural and the normal—abounding throbbing health, with a keenness and zest that makes every hour of life enjoyable—and such it would be did we live more natural and normal lives.

We must work for we must have bread, and work, occupation, something useful and valuable to do, is one of the established laws of happiness in life. Our mistake is to think that we can live by bread alone. We become so engrossed in things that we lose the sense of balance in life. We worship bigness, forgetting it has nothing to do necessarily with greatness. “Every man,” said Marcus Aurelius, “is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.”

Life and the things that pertain most directly to it, are after all the things that really count. They are always more interesting than boards, or bricks, or iron, or railroad ties, or lands, or business blocks, and the men and women that are primarily interested in life are always the ones that are the most interesting to others. It was John Burroughs who, in “The Summit of the Years,” wrote: “I am in love with this world; by my constitution I have nestled lovingly in it. It has been home to me. It has been my point of outlook into the universe. I have not bruised myself against it, nor tried to use it ignobly. I have tilled its soil, I have gathered its harvests, I have waited upon its seasons and always have I reaped what I have sown. While I delved I did not lose sight of the sky overhead. While I gathered its bread and meat for my body, I did not neglect to gather its bread and meat for my soul.”

There is no labor problem outside of imagination, sympathy, mutuality, co‑operation. Put this force into operation, select as heads and leaders of labor organizations, and as executives and representatives of capital, those who are big enough to realize this, and our labor problems will be solved almost over night— and, incidentally, hundreds of millions will be saved in annual strikes and lockouts and with a generally fruitless result.

Men—employer and worker—have been working on the basis of self alone, self‑interest, and through it capitalizing antagonism, envy, hatred, the negative forces in life. When they begin to capitalize love, mutuality, cooperation, they will then be dealing with the positive and the true building forces, that will pay active dividends of far greater proportions. And incidentally, but possibly of even greater importance, it will raise their lives from being mean, pitiable specimens of men— because so below their possibilities, below the standard of what men can be, to lives of splendid noble stature, and that will know the joy of love, sympathy, service.

All human relations but await the capitalization of love, sympathy, mutuality, co‑operation, to make them that God‑like thing they can and eventually will be. Why not now? Ignorance alone prevents. Those who have been wise enough to begin, are realizing returns in a two‑fold form—increased dividends, and the satisfaction and joy that results from the observance of one of the fundamental laws of life and conduct.

There are no international problems outside of imagination, sympathy, mutuality, co‑operation—outside of a realization: “Ye are members one of another.” If we haven’t sense enough to realize this yet, and fail to put at the head of affairs in our various nations men who are big enough to know it, un‑self‑centered and direct enough to actualize it, then we must go on with our present blundering methods.

It will mean the periodic destruction of the flower of the world’s young manhood, and eventually a tax‑burden that will drag the entire world into economic ruin, in addition to the burdens that every man, woman and child in the civilized world is laboring under today. Young as we are as a nation a little over ninety per cent of all taxes collected by the Federal Government each year goes for wars—past, present or future.

Out of our blundering chaotic methods, however, a World Court, a world court of right and reason is taking form; but it needs yet the help of men who believe that “God has made of one blood all nations, to dwell on the face of the earth,” and who know that sympathy, mutuality, co‑operation is the ultimate law of all civilized and satisfactory life. It needs their help, that there may be placed and kept at the head of national affairs, men of the type whereby we will reach that state of which President Harding recently spoke when he said: “We shall never be called on to make war so long as God and men rule together.” And when again on the same day he spoke at a Memorial meeting for five thousand war‑dead on the army piers of Hoboken, he said: “It must not be again.”

The women of our country, who have, after all too long a delay, finally come into their civil, political, and thereby property rights, and those of many other countries now, will have a powerful determining influence in this.

Internationalism is above nationalism—and it is what the world must come to. At the same time each citizen has a paramount duty to his own country and its affairs and welfare, in order that it may be politically and economically clean and progressive, and that it may be a nation so righteous, so just, and so powerful that it may become a strong and worthy member of the coming world federation. The weakness of a republican form of government is that you and I, the average citizen, do not take the interest in our own affairs, and by this I mean the affairs of government, that we should take. I am following the impulse to insert here a citizen’s creed, which I prepared sometime ago. I commend its contents to readers in my own country and in all countries.

A Citizen’s Creed

In a Republic whose fundamental law is that there shall be no governing without the consent of the governed, duty must ever take equal rank with privilege.

As eternal vigilance is always the price of liberty, so an intelligent participation in all matters of government on the part of every man and every woman in the nation, is our sole guarantee not only of Democracy in government, but in the promotion of the highest good of all its people. For unless through enlightened self‑interest we make matters of government our business, there are those who inevitably will seek power in and through government to be manipulated for their own aggrandisement and gain.

I am resolved therefore, to become continually better acquainted with my country’s ideals, its history, and all its institutions; and especially those through which the will of the people is enacted into law, in all community, state, and national affairs.

I am resolved to live in peace and good will with my neighbor insofar as in me lies, helping him always to be his best; but I will strike at corruption in business, and at venality in politics whenever they show their heads.

I am equally resolved that whenever the hand of treachery to my country or violence shows itself, to aid in striking it down, realizing that it is only through law and order and continued growth that the nation has been built up, and that any great nation can maintain itself, or can even endure.

I am resolved to be always straight and clean in my personal relations, in business and in public life. My word shall be as good as my bond, and I will seek no advantage for myself to the detriment of my neighbor, knowing that honor and rectitude and a good name are possessions more to be cherished than gold or gain.

I am resolved to do nothing that may bring shame or dishonor upon the fair name of my community, my city, my state or my country, but to serve them always with an intelligent and high‑born zeal, that they may be always worthy of honor, devotion and defense, and that my country may take always supreme rank and may speak always with authority and high honor in the Council of the Nations, and thereby in the Federation of the World.

Said the president of the biggest financial concern of its kind in the world to me some time ago: “Mr. Trine, it is simply appalling, the lack of imagination on the part of many of our big business men.” He is one, self‑made, who has always kept his interest in other things in addition to business, and the immense joy that he gets by reaching out in his quiet but effective way and using those splendid executive and financial abilities for men and women, boys and girls—who are almost of more importance than men and women—increases his life many fold. What power, what beauty, what good, lies in the hands of such men! Their numbers are rapidly increasing.

Love, sympathy, good‑will and the kindly deed that is always ready and on tap, is what expands, multiplies and beautifies life. Hatred, cynicism, ill‑will, self‑seeking, envy and jealousy is what dwarfs and stultifies. How instinctively all men and women are drawn to and seek the company of those whose lives are dominated by the former. How instinctively they shun and even despise the company of those who are embodiments of the latter. And this of itself speaks volumes as to which is the right or the wrong approach to life.

One can never do an act of kindly service for another without in the very act of doing it reaping a corresponding benefit for one’s self. It is not the professional good‑doing; for that many times becomes self‑conscious, conceited, even self‑seeking. It is rather setting the heart aright and keeping the mind open always to seize the opportunity to do the kindly service whenever the need is known, wherever the opportunity presents itself.

There is also a great law of indirectness that operates here. It is this: Whenever we do an act of kindly service for another, forgetful of and with no thought of self or gain, many times it does us more good than the one we do it for. The life is broadened, ennobled, expanded, lifted out of and above the dwarfed and the stunted of the common‑place. So in the last analysis it resolves itself into the formula: We find our own lives in losing them in the larger human service. Why? Eternal Law has so decreed.

Returning again to the individual life, when the rugged old Hebrew prophet said: “Trust ye in the Lord forever, for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength,” which in its import is almost if not identical with: “Rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him, and He shall give thee thy heart’s desire,” he set forth the existence of a law and a force that is existent today in your life and in mine, exactly the same as in his own life so many years ago. A keen observer and able writer in connection with the inner powers and forces—those of the mind and spirit—of our own day, glimpsed the existence of a law and a force pertaining to the same realm when he said: “The hopeful, confident and cheerful attract the elements of success. A mind always hopeful, confident, courageous and determined on its set purpose, attracts to itself out of the elements things and powers favorable to that purpose.” The great multitudes who in this, our day, are making use of this law in connection with the problems and in all the activities of their daily lives, and are reaping the beneficent and even wonderful results of its use, attest the truth of his assertion.

It was a fine poetic fancy, but more than this, that enabled its author to pen the truth‑laden verse:

“’Tis the sweetest to remember

If courage be on the wane,

When the cold, dark days are over—

Why, the birds go north again.” In this she perceived and portrayed the law underlying a force that has been the inspiring and the saving force in untold millions of lives; and were it not a common possession, although “more possessed” by some than by others, life would not be worth the living, and more—it would not be even livable.

These all point to the existence of a force, that becomes a subtle and vital building power in life, that is faith. The older conception of faith made it all too commonly merely a passive state of mind and, therefore, condition of life, even to the extent of enduring with a passive state of resignation any condition that might come about, with no knowledge or even thought of a power within which, perceived, understood, and called into intelligent action, would change or eradicate that condition. In many cases passivity became a virtue and it played its havoc in countless numbers of lives.

In our modern conception of it, supplemented now by some well established laws of modern psychology, faith takes two forms, or, rather, two forms of expression, though the one is practically never independent of the other.

The first is an innate or grown belief in the eternal love and goodness and the over‑ruling providence of a Divine Power, God, or, as the Master put it, our Father in Heaven. And then in a higher state of spiritual development and discernment, it is a belief that the Divine Power works in and through us, for good, for righteousness and for perfect security and therefore serenity of spirit, in the degree that we recognize it as the Source of our life and the Source of our power, and consciously open ourselves to its guidance and its power.

It will awaken within one dormant inner powers of which we are scarcely conscious at present. It will actualize also a sense of security, exactly in the degree that we are able to bring ourselves into unison with this continually inflowing guidance and power. It was foreshadowed by the Prophet when he said: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is staid on Thee.” The next great advance along the lines of Christian life, experience and power, is now being witnessed in this very realm. It is making religion and Christianity as never before a real, vital, practical help to the every‑day lives of those who appropriate and who realize the wonderful revelation of the Kingdom within, of the Divine Teacher.

The other form of faith falls more in the realm of modern psychology and mental science. Its underlying principle is that thoughts are forces, that like creates like and that like attracts like. We are now finding that faith in this sense, is not a mere vague, indefinite, sentimental something; but that faith is a power of mind and spirit of dynamic proportions, and that wonders have been and are daily being accomplished through its intelligent use.

It is a silent but subtle force that is continually changing the plan, the idea, the ideal, into a visible material form. There is no more subtle and powerful force that human life can avail itself of.

With a help of such proportions, the chief thing is to see and then begin. In life the great secret of all advancement and attainment is to set the face in the right direction and then simply to travel on, unmindful of even frequent lapses by the way. He who knows the power and the potency of the brave and intrepid forward look, realizes that unforeseen helps will spring up all along the way for him who makes the start, and who works true to the pattern.

There is a vast army, numbering into the millions, who allow a general atmosphere of gloom and dread and pessimism to dominate almost continually their lives. They arise in the morning under the domination of this spell or habit; they go through the activities of the day in the same way; they go to bed at night under its domination. It has become a habit. The one who allows himself to dwell in this miasmatic mental atmosphere not only loses the joy of many things that each day would bring, but he allows his energies to be so crippled that no work can be done as effectively as it could otherwise be done.

Not only this, but he suffers also the consequences that must result and inevitably result, in connection with his physical, his bodily condition. Fears and forebodings, the same as gloom and despondency, are abnormal mental and emotional states and have a corroding, poisoning and weakening effect upon all vital functions and powers. If long indulged in they not only deplete all healthy action and initiation and undermine and weaken the will, but they in time lead to depleted and weakened bodily conditions. Abounding health and strength cannot co‑exist with them. Many a case of lowered vitality, in time becoming chronic, has ended in distinct diseased bodily conditions.

It is not to be denied that one’s bodily condition has many times a dark and doleful influence upon one’s mental condition and outlook. When we once realize, however, that the power of the mind is the greatest power we have and that whatever power of the spirit we may have acts through the channel of the mind, and when we realize the marvelous extent to which mind builds body, or that mind retards, corrodes, poisons and depletes body, we will then realize that the habit of gloom and pessimism which leads all too surely and inevitably to cynicism and an abnormal outlook on life, should be faced, throttled and should be driven completely from the life, in order that the more valuable habits of expectancy and faith, and therefore of happiness and joy, may take its place.

This is a duty that we owe not only to ourselves, but it is a duty that we owe likewise to others. Buoyancy of spirit, joy, courage, are contagious, the same as are gloom, despondency and, therefore, lowered vitality and general ineffectiveness. There is no one, moreover, whose company is so desired and welcomed by others as the one whose courage is always up, whose fountain of good‑cheer is always on tap, whose faith is founded on clear and constructive thinking and observation, and who radiates continually the products of such a faith and such a life as he or she always and instinctively does who has them.

God feeds the birds, some one as said, but he does not throw the food into their nests. A great merchant once said to a now successful merchant: “Young man, nobody ever gets anything from this business unless he reaches out and takes it.” Those of the brave, intrepid type of thought and therefore of action, are seldom, if ever, the victims of circumstance. Circumstance, excepting good circumstance, seems to keep well out of their way.

It was the same great merchant who also said: “A big business must roll up hill. Only momentum will make anything roll up hill. Momentum means some powerful motive force. Enthusiasm is the best motive force for business. The small merchant who can so enthuse his employees, from office boy to manager, that they will work together as one individual will not long remain a little merchant.”

Enthusiasm is born always of faith and hope and courage—it is the characteristic quality of those who know the power of the forward look. The achievements it has accomplished are sufficient sometimes to make us stand in awe and admiration of the strange and at times not too fully understood thing that we call human life.

Life, every life has its problems, but life isn’t nearly so complex if we do not so continually persist in making it so. We can simplify it and its problems to a marvelous extent by using more intelligently and more persistently our innate— God‑given, if you please—inner forces and powers, that it is undoubtedly intended that we use to far better advantage than we ordinarily do.

Faith and hope engender courage. Courage engenders strength. Strength engenders creative and staying power. Hope and faith and courage are therefore great producers; without them few men or women have attained, and still fewer have accomplished, anything worth while.

But whatever the actual achievement may be—as it is ordinarily measured and reckoned—it is well always to remember that no man or woman can be a failure in life whose mind thinks true and whose heart beats and keeps right. Growth, unfoldment, advancement—life—is achievement. It is the greatest achievement there is.

The Christ of Judea distinctly believed and distinctly taught that the life here is but one phase of the life itself, and that we begin in the other form of life exactly where we leave off here. The quality of the life here determines and with exact precision the quality of the life that we enter upon when we cease functioning through these physical bodies which we use while in this, a physical universe. That He believed in a life that continues after this life, we know.

That He did not lay great stress upon this life, or rather upon the essential importance of this life, other than it should be a life actively clean, useful, of service to one’s fellows, interested— actively interested—in making all conditions of this life fairer for all, we know.

Do you know the revelation that was made to us by that highly illumined seer and man of such superior scientific attainments—Emanuel Swedenborg? There is so much of probability and so much of comfort in it that I will recall it: Those who have been closest and dearest to us here, are the ones Divinely appointed to be on duty to receive and welcome us as we pass into the other form of life; to stay with us and instruct us for a period, until we are fully awake to the conditions on the other plane of life, until we get our bearings and find our rightful places in the activities of that phase of life upon which we enter.

The determination which in time becomes the habit of fixing and keeping the mind on the life rather than on the body that is laid away, makes the passing on of one who is near to us a great deal easier to bear, for it in a sense transmutes death into life. Wise is he or she who keeps the mind always away from that bit of ground, the grave where the body is laid away, and on the life itself. Perhaps the great Apostle to the Gentiles knew whereof he spoke when he said: “There is a natural and there is a spiritual body.” He did not say, there will be.

Anyway the advice—keep out of graveyards—is sound advice. There is good psychology in it. I think one of the strongest arguments for cremation is that automatically as it were it keeps the mind from dwelling on that bit of ground. In like manner the determination not to wear mourning or use any insignia of a depressing or doleful nature, helps rob death of its sting, and enables faith and hope and courage to gain the supremacy and to rule the life—exactly what any one who goes, and who is worthy of remembrance, would have.

Were it not for faith and hope, which in turn engender courage and power, life would not be worth the living, and more, it would not be even livable. If we do not prove ourselves masters of circumstance, it then will master us, and we become the creatures of circumstance. We must rule our world from within, and this we do by our own determination as to the types of thought and emotions we entertain and live with. This power is the greatest possession we have—in a sense our sole possession.

We have a duty moreover not only to ourselves, but to relative, friend and neighbor. Depression, gloom, despondency lead to pessimism, cynicism and weakness. It is then that failure is liable to creep in. We must be brave and carry our part with courage and good cheer straight through to the end.

And whatever one’s actual accomplishment or attainments may be, he or she cannot fail who determines to live always in the brave and cheerful attitude of mind and heart. He or she alone fails who gives up and lies down.

To subscribe to, or to become victims of any custom or any type of thought, that in its train carries gloom or despondency, is to open the door to the entrance of that degree of failure that many times robs life of its best. There is too much to be done in the world, and life is too short to allow any of our energies to be crippled, or our store of courage and its corresponding good cheer, which in turn becomes courage‑bringing to others, to be depleted. This undoubtedly is what Jesus had in mind when He said: Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead. There are some things that we can leave with the Father. They are beyond our understanding now—sometime we will understand.

The only way to find the truth of anything is to go after it in a careful, methodical and determined way. I welcome the work and the purpose of such men as Sir William Barrett, Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge, who, with trained minds and splendid equipment, are seeking the facts that pertain to the life beyond. They and others, after many years of experience and investigation, are believing that we now have tangible evidence of the after life, and that it does not differ in its mode and its interests and its activities from the life here, as much as we ordinarily think, and also that as time passes we shall know still more.

In any case it is quite time that we begin to look upon the transition we call death, inasmuch as it is an integral part of life, in a more intelligent and self‑commanding and expectant manner. Such, indeed, was Whitman’s comprehension when he wrote:

“Joy, Shipmate, Joy!

(Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry)

One life is closed, one life begun,

The long, long anchorage we leave,

The ship is clear at last, she leaps.

Joy, Shipmate, Joy!”

To me, Jesus’ expression, The Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, has a double or rather two‑fold meaning. Primarily it is the identifying of the life with the Divine, the God‑life within, whereby the Divine rule becomes the dominating motive and force in the life.

It is then, and as a concomitant, that one realizes the Divine purpose and plan, in evolving a finer and fairer life in the world, whereby the rule of love, which means sympathy, mutuality, co‑operation, becomes the dominating force in all human relations.

Men and women who realize their kinship with the Divine, realize in a peculiar way their kinship with their fellows; for they realize that it is the One Life that we are all partakers of—with them the law of mutuality becomes supreme. They know that no world condition that will answer to the phrase or the description—the Kingdom of Heaven—can become an actuality until this Divine Law becomes the controlling force in all human, in all world relations.

It was a great modern prophet who had such keen insight into the essentials, who had such almost superhuman discernment in separating the essential from the unessential, the true from the false, and whose spirit vibrated in such harmony with the truth of Jesus’ wonderful pronouncement—the world’s great Spiritual Emancipation Proclamation—Lincoln, who never allied himself with any religious organization, when asked the reason, made the reply: “Because I find difficulty in giving my assent, without mental reservation, to the complicated statements of Christian doctrine which constitute their articles of belief and confessions of faith.

“When any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification of membership, the Saviour’s condensed statement of the substance of both law and gospel: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself,’ that church shall I join with all my heart and soul.”

I am pointing out these principles of the truly religious life, not because I think it is the duty of any man or woman to follow them. I think that no man or woman has any duty in connection with religion with anything that doesn’t appeal to him or her.

I am pointing out the fact that here is a life to be lived, that will bring inestimable gain to any man or woman who can accept it, love it, and who will live it. It was formulated primarily by One who knew life and its laws from A to Z, and who demonstrated the livableness of such a life, who realized and demonstrated the unique and helpful power that it brings in its train, and who taught that it is the life that all men can live and should live—and that if they lived it truly the same insights and powers would come to them as came to Him.

He raised life from its low, mean, pitiable and impotent state, and made it one of indescribable beauty and charm. He raised it from the earthly to the heavenly, from the purely human to the divine in the human, which He taught was the kingdom of heaven—God in man and man in God.

Not by fear, but by its very grandeur and beauty, it will draw thinking men to it. Vast numbers of men and women the world over, now free from the trammels of an enervating blind faith, and who realize that—“He who wishes to cling to the Old that ages not, must leave behind him the Old that ages,” and as the element of fear no longer holds with real men, they are sitting at His feet and are hearing and receiving His teachings in the simple direct manner in which He gave them, out on the hillside or by the lakeside, under those clear Judean skies so long ago. Jesus is coming into His own again, the same as for over two hundred years after His time, and with it is coming life and light and the joy of life, to great numbers of men and women in all lands and among all religions. Men are glimpsing the glory of the truth of the Christ, that when the mind is lifted up, the higher inner laws are revealed to it, and the body and the whole estate is lifted up.

One can’t be mentally or spiritually impoverished without its registering its effects upon the body, robbing it of its normal functioning and its elasticity, engendering in it many times abnormal and diseased conditions so that it becomes depleted and useless and falls by the wayside many times, long before its time.

Let a man know that the life that is his is the Divine life, that the Divine life cannot admit of inharmonies and disease, that it is true and perfect; let him know that the cells in the body are continually dying and being cast off, forming and reforming, and that the subconscious mind which builds for health or disease, is wonderfully exact in its workings, and that it takes its direction from the active thinking mind; let that mind then be the mind of Christ, the true image and manifestation of the Divine mind, and such a flood of energy and power will be sent through the body, that many now diseased and crippled, will leap in abounding health.

I have known in my own experience many such; you have known some. You may be such, or have the God‑given power of being such. When a man takes his pedigree direct from God, and not from Adam and the Adam errors of belief, he enables the truth to make him free.

Coincident with the knowledge of definite facts that we now have, there has been on the part of all men and women who think and who love truth, “a cleaning out of the mind of its useless store of ancestral inhibitions and inherited fallacies.” Jesus’ own truth is breaking through again and is animating the minds and through them the spirits of vast numbers of men and women all over the world.

There is a great spiritual movement, taking several different forms, that had its small beginnings some fifty years ago, that has already some millions of adherents, and that is growing rapidly, and now all over the world—it is surpassing in its growth any other established movements. It is because its adherents are getting to understand the laws underlying the powers and forces that pertain to the realm of the mind and spirit, which they are now applying to the uses and to the problems of their every‑day lives. They are no longer contented to be among those

“Dropping buckets into empty wells,

And growing old in drawing nothing up.” They are going directly to the Master, they are catching His message, His spirit, His truth, and they are finding that His revelation is true. They are taking the step in evolution that an acceptance of His revelation and an embodying of it in their daily lives naturally and inevitably leads to. The Kingdom of the Spirit they are finding, as the Master said, is like a merchant seeking goodly pearls and having found one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he bad and bought it. And again as He said, it is like the tiny mustard seed which though small at first grows into great proportions, so that it affords lodgment even for the fowls of the air. And again as He said, it is like leaven in that it permeates and raises to a higher and more usable level every phase and faculty of their being.

Life and experience should be cumulative. There should be constant gains to balance, or more than balance, whatever losses, or apparent losses, may come about with the passing of the years.

When the period of life is reached, differing somewhat in different people, when the body loses the freshness of youth, and the marks of approaching age make their appearance, there is nothing that will so counter‑balance the freshness that in time goes—and none escape it entirely—as the spirit that gives beauty to feature and to voice, and that gives not only beauty but even fascination to those features from which the bloom and the freshness of youth has gone. This is why many not so attractive in youth become positively beautiful and commanding in later life. The second half of life should be the better half.

To me there is nothing more beautiful in all the world than the face that habitually lights with a kindly smile whenever it meets, passes, or converses with another—the smile that is the natural spontaneous expression of a good mind and a kindly heart. What joy it gives through the years, and what joy it realizes for itself—not the fawning or the simpering kind; but the simple true expression of the kindly heart and mind.

It is the nearest to the realization and the manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven probably, that there is on this earth. It gives added beauty to form and to feature as the years pass—compensation that infinitely outbalances any apparent losses; while the face that is devoid of it, in losing the form and the color of youth, takes on a barrenness that time but accentuates—and for it there are no compensations.

Some day we will perhaps know that love is the fulfilling of the law, and that the one who doesn’t love, hasn’t even begun to live.

A sense of kinship with the Divine and living always from this Divine Center, gives to the life an indescribable attractiveness and charm and power—a sense of genuineness—that all people instinctively recognize, love, are drawn to, and are influenced by. It increases all life values for the one who has it many fold.