Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography · 22 of 34

XIV. I Look Upward

Things which we hold in our consciousness soon become our possession. Universal evolution, which sees all things “in a state of becoming,” is the great modern inspiration. The feeling within us, that conditions, social, political, economic, ethical, and religious, are really growing better, has a wonderful healing power in itself. Temporary, local, and apparent declensions do not affect the universal trend. The imperfection of to-day is the stepping-stone for to-morrow. Life is richer, love stronger, truth more beautiful, nature fairer, music sweeter, art diviner, than we have ever dreamed. God is infinitely better than we can imagine. There is no failure, and pessimism is only the shadow of a disordered dream. An eternal unfolding is going on which shows infinite wisdom, order, foresight, and beneficence. We are on the way towards the “Father’s House.” Evolution interprets all seeming confusion. Present discord will glide into the harmony of the future. We are pressing on towards the supreme ideal, which includes wholeness on every plane, for the individual and the race. I look upward.

Insight

Universal evolution which sees all things in a state of becoming is the great modern inspiration — Wood is doing the late-nineteenth-century theological move of baptizing evolutionary thought into Christian eschatology. Henry Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) had popularized this for the same Protestant readership; Joseph Le Conte’s Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought (1888) is the closer source Wood quotes elsewhere. The kernel that survives: change is the universe’s grammar, and human individuals and societies are not finished products. The piece that 1893 American optimism missed: progress is not a straight line, and the same generation that wrote this lived to see the trenches of the Western Front. The pessimism Wood dismisses as the shadow of a disordered dream is, in some times and places, the more honest reading. Hold this meditation with the period frame.