Leaves of Healing

Method of Metaphysical Treatment

by Peter V. Ross




Table of Contents




Foreword

When I was a boy on the farm I watched stone masons laying a foundation under the old barn. For each corner they chose a mammoth rock, obviously because of its strength and endurance. Midway between corners they threw in another huge boulder. This done, they filled the intervening spaces with ordinary cobblestone snugly cuddled in the unifying mortar.

There are cornerstones in all structures. There are fundamentals underlying all philosophies. It is none too difficult to locate the latter and drag them out in broad daylight for the observation and profit of him who, perforce, reads as he runs. This is true in that field of investigation, attracting so much attention these times, known as spiritual healing.

It happens that I have been called upon day by day, for two score years, to explain and apply the method whereby mental and spiritual processes can be brought effectively to bear on material problems, disease among them. Naturally therefore the modus operandi holds less mystery than formerly. I have talked it over and reasoned it out with thousands in search of relief. Looking in my office files the other day, I found a bundle of carbon copies of letters written to sufferers and inquirers. A selection of them is here set forth with identification marks so thoroughly expunged that the correspondent need have no apprehension of being linked with the venture.

A letter, as everyone knows, is one of the most fascinating forms of discourse. It is pretty much like the informal conversation, where one at ease suddenly discovers himself and unconsciously if not recklessly divulges what he finds.

When one writes for publication he necessarily takes on a studied if not a stilted manner of speech. In dashing off a letter one not only takes on the free and easy style, but somehow or another, by means he cannot explain, he ascends into a higher than usual level of thought. He taps a mental reservoir which impersonally feeds his pen. He seems to have little to do with the effort. He becomes a scribe under orders. He exemplifies the greatest of producers, who confessed: “Of mine own self I can do nothing; the Father that dwelleth in me he doeth the works.”

There are many people in many parts of the world today whose health has been improved, longevity promoted, hope renewed, business expanded by reading one or more of the letters which make up this volume. If this were not the case the writer would scarcely dare send them abroad in book form for the encouragement of weary wayfarers in this rigorous age. Now to the letters.

Peter V. Ross




Radiant Realities




Reasons for the Hope Within

In our brief conversation yesterday you described a shakiness or weakness which was getting you down. When I reminded you that there was a spiritual remedy for putting you on your feet, you asked, “What is it?” quite confident, all the while, that I could not tell you. Well, I can at least offer some useful hints, and the purpose of this letter is to do so.

You feel within yourself a certain energy at work. Life is its name. You are acquainted with it not only in your inner self but in the outward world, because Life is everywhere on display. It always was, it always will be. This means that Life is beginningless, endless, diseaseless, ageless. It does not exist as an abstraction; it exists in expression, and man is the highest expression. It bodies forth in you and becomes you. In so doing it retains its inherent qualities of health, radiance, and eternality. Thus do these properties become your properties. And thus does sickness become a stranger to your habitation.

The shakiness you complain of, therefore, lacks genuineness. All disease and all distress and all limitation lack genuineness, which explains why they can be overcome. Each and all of them are misinterpretations of reality, because reality is cast in the mould of health and perfection. The lever by which you overthrow them is the truth briefly stated above. Truth, though, is not so much a lever as it is the solvent which dissipates mortality and sets men and women free.

You are already beginning to suspect that the shakiness you mention is mesmeric, a misunderstanding of your actual condition, for whatever you may suppose or argue yourself in to, the unchanging fact is that yours is a Life that neither sickens nor weakens, since it is selfexistent and self-sufficient, never made and never expendable. It is none other than the Almighty dwelling in you. You and He are one, and fortunately He is the One.

Maybe you do not get all of the foregoing at the first glance. Well, read it again — and again. This is the way you did when you went to school, is it not? You took on faith those parts you could not understand — faith in what the book or the teacher said. Most education begins this way.

Then amplify these statements; reason them out to yourself. Since you are nearly always talking something, silently for the most part, why not elect to voice that which is stimulating and strength producing? That shakiness has been very largely produced because you have been arguing for it, quite unconsciously most of the time, it is true. You have gone into reverse instead of talking sensibly and healthfully. Now is the time to change your conversation and talk at least as discreetly to yourself as you do to others. Try it a few days and let me have the results in your next letter.




Annihilation of Infirmity

People the globe over are recognizing what the wise men of all times have said, that Life, the Life that abounds in the outside world, the Life that thrills throughout individual premises, is nothing less than the

Almighty. This unequivocal fact, once you acknowledge it, begins to work the annihilation of your infirmity, whatever its nature.

Your Life, so defined, brooks no interference, no opposition, no disorder. Charged with intelligent purpose and resolution, forever radiant and buoyant, it feels the urge of omnipotence and the guidance of omniscience.

Do not become reconciled to your present disorder. Challenge it right now. Begin this moment to cultivate the habit of thought which rejects, automatically and instantly, arguments of apprehension, despondency, limitation, and sickness. You can establish within you a sense of the nullity of age and distress; you can gain a settled conviction of the power and presence, in you, of harmony and dominion.

You ask why everyone rebels against restriction. Well, I would say in reply that restriction just does not make sense. You and I cannot see any justification in it. No normal person can. This spirit of protest is conquering the air and exterminating distance. It is challenging disease and wretchedness, and with increasing success.

When we make war on obstructions to legitimate freedom we question their genuineness, since no one rebels against realities. He submits to them, recognizing that realities cannot be brushed aside. But sickness can be put aside. So can other interferences with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We are proving this every day, in some measure.

Every healing and every regenerative system proceeds, unconsciously perhaps, from the standpoint that pain and wretchedness are not genuine. Why, the worst man you ever heard of would not put them in the world if he could. Enlightenment accords them no standing ground except in appearance, in belief, in ignorance. Believe it or not, the fact is that we live under the law of perfect God and perfect man. Otherwise how could this old world carry on for a single hour?

Most men are strangely shy when it comes to talking about God. We need not take time here to analyze why. Naturally every individual has his idea of what Deity is. There are as many ideas as there are men and women. Probably people are in agreement this far, that Deity is all-knowing, allpowerful, everywhere present. Now who or what is everywhere present, and everywhere compelling so far as that goes? Life is, Mind is, Principle is. You cannot help but see them in operation on all hands, gloriously in operation. Eminent teachers in all ages have used them as names for the Almighty or Supreme Being. Why not form this habit yourself? You will be surprised to see what it will do for you.

And whenever you feel mystified as to precisely what you are, remember that the properties of Life, Mind, and Principle converge on your premises and make you what you are, and that not a material mortal but a spiritual immortal. Because Life, Mind, and Principle have no beginning and no ending. Neither are they acquainted with sickness or defeat. Some day you will take resolute steps to repudiate your supposed association with those enemies.




Bodily Replacements

The biological experts say that many ailments come to pass because the eliminatory processes get lazy. Then they fail to throw off the dross, debris, and vapors which follow in the wake of rebuilding, for the body is in a constant state of reconstruction. Replacements are rushed in here and there while ashes and refuse are carted out. If the waste is not expelled promptly it settles down here or there to make points or places of disorder and distress.

Glands, like dispositions, so it is said, get uppish at times, either too slow or too swift in their operations. Then distribution and transportation are interrupted and freight piles up in this place or that with resulting poundage or enlargement.

But the everlasting fact is that all the functions of being — call them digestion, circulation, assimilation, elimination, or what have you — are under the command of the Almighty. They are propelled by Him, without a chance either to lag or to gallop. In other words irrepressible Life streams throughout your constitution without a single falter or flurry.

When you think these statements over every hour of the day, reason them out, and apply them to your premises, you resort to that truth which makes for freedom, and find yourself reconditioned.

Take hold industriously and expectantly. You must do something about the troublesome situation if you would have protection or relief. The reason people do not reap the full benefits of spiritual effort often lies in their failure to make getting well their chief business. Good health is worth working for if anything is.

Yes, the word of Truth is “quick and powerful, sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” When you talk as above you set the word in motion.

Of course you keep in thought all the time that perfection is your present and constant status. Abnormal action of any sort, whether too spiritless or too accelerated, has no more actuality than the cinema picture. Hence the non-existence of disease and mortality. They are illusions to disappear with enlightenment. The whole healing process lies in a reformation of thinking.




Turning from Body to Being

Yes, the body is, as you say, a mental concept, the product, largely, of one's thinking. Essentially a thing of thought, it necessarily rises or falls with the individual's mood. The more vivid, the more buoyant one's thinking, the lighter and freer the body. And one's thought, as you know, is pretty constantly running up and down the gamut as the angels chased up and down Jacob's ladder, with the result that one moment mentality may reach the heights of Christ and the next moment fall to the depths of Adam. The body, actually the lower stratum of mentality, is carried along in one direction or another as the case may be.

Some people say that electricity is generated. It is not. Electricity is and was and will be. So some people think Life is given and can be taken away, that it can be acquired or built up or even impaired. This is not true. Life is. It is all that is. It was and is and will be.

You are not all of that Life, but you are a good specimen of it, which is quite enough for one girl, is it not? And there is not anything wrong with that Life. It cannot be put in pain or in helplessness or brought to an end. It flows on in peaceful permanency.

You have a satisfactorily equipped body the moment you fall asleep, generally. There is no reason why you should not have a satisfactory body the next time you put your feet on the floor or walk into the adjoining room. Remember the body is a mental concept. And you can have a definitely better concept as soon as you read this letter.

Now continue being a good soldier, a smart and active youngster, as you always have been. Before long you will find that this dream of incapacity which has been hovering around is not yours at all.

Your friend, Em, says that you are a wonder, that you always were. She is a keen woman, I would say, to size you up so accurately. She says too that this ailment of yours is on its last legs, and that pretty soon you will be your former vigorous self.

By the way, there was a chap here the other day who said that we used to think of God as the Supreme Being; but that now we think of Him as Being itself, the only Being there is, your Being, everybody's Being. Used to think of Him as the source of life, but that now we think of Him as Life itself, your life and mine and everyone's.

Nothing wrong with you then, is there? Only a little nightmare, and that not yours.

Now pick up your pencil and write another letter, because I must start out on the road in a few days. Am going to Europe. Have to proceed by way of Quebec instead of New York this time. Terribly sorry to miss you, but I will be coming back through New York later in the autumn. Then will be a better time to see you, anyhow, because you will be in better trim.




Life a Peaceful Permanency

Albert Einstein is reported to have said, not so long ago, that there is enough power hidden in a handful of snow to heat a Minneapolis apartment house for a year, and that sufficient power lurks in a single lump of coal to take a ship across the Atlantic and back. No wonder Archimedes boasted that if he could get a patch of external terra firma to operate from, he could lift the earth, since the potentialities of man must be limitless compared with those of a snowball or a dusky chunk of carbon.

Two centuries after Archimedes took his lofty mathematical flights in Sicily, another prophet, on the opposite side of the Mediterranean, wrote a justly famous letter known as “The Epistle to the Hebrews.” In it he referred to the ideal man as made after the power of endless life.

How is it that men can dream such dreams? Simply because, as Job observed, there is a spirit in man; and the inspiration of the Almighty gives him understanding.

How much understanding can a man have? All that he will accept, since the Mind which governs the universe is both within and without him, marking up all the hidden answers. Too bad he does not take time now and then to stop, look, and listen. That habit makes prophets.

Remembering now that you are a man, how will you utilize your powers? The foregoing distinguished characters were not dreamers, they were wide awake to realities. Their keen vision penetrated the mists of materiality and mortality with their restrictions and sufferings. They looked abroad into the land of green pastures beside still waters. You can do likewise since you have at your command the same Mind that they invoked. In fact you are beginning to do it already.

So, while others may believe that the channels of supply are choked with obstructions — droughts, strikes, inflations — you can see them brimming over and bringing swiftly to your door whatever is necessary to make business enterprises productive and daily existence adequate. And when pain and infirmity try the soul, you can dwell in the fact that Life, the Life that animates you, is a peaceful permanency, neither coming nor going, that it experiences neither age nor disease, and that it is charged with the glories and energies of the Eternal. Then will you begin to become aware of faultless form and function.




Getting Out of Trouble

Most people need encouragement. I wonder if you would not like a few words of it. Maybe you will not care if I remind you of some of those things which you know as well as anybody, but which need to be spoken out loud so you can, as it were, put your hands on them, and thereby lift yourself out of the muddling dream that once in a while settles down at your house.

Now the devil just cannot get in to disturb you or the household in any way, for the very good reason that there is no devil; and if there were, he could find no listening ear or open door whereby to reach you. Hence he is pretty much out of luck.

A lecturer said something to the effect, last night in San Francisco, that man is Life expressed, which is incontestably true, is it not? It is true of you, which means that you have all the strength and energy you can use, and that you will use them by getting on your feet and doing the work at hand.

You cannot be confused or held down any longer, because you feel more and more the energy of that irrepressible Life whose temple you are. Have you said it today? “The Lord is in His holy temple, let all this miserable clamor of weakness and distress be still.” Because, as you and I know, temple is just a picturesque name for spiritual consciousness, and spiritual consciousness, not a material body, is you. Shakespeare says of it, in The Tempest, “There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple.”

Not only have you the ability to snuff out that suggestion of illness, but you have the ability to face that variance in the family circle, and instead of arguing over it as one girl argues with another, you will dignifiedly put it out of thought and conversation as a thing unworthy of consideration. You will not permit it to assume formidable dimensions or grow to the point of irritation.

Getting out of trouble, you know, is largely a matter of waking up. Somehow or another you have strayed into the realm of dreamland where you feel heavy, distressed, discouraged. You are not there, you only seem to be. This seeming can be dissipated by recapturing the normal sense of yourself, which temporarily you have lost sight of.

And yet really you have not abandoned your genuine self. You could not. It is here and now and always has been, all hunky-dory. It has been momentarily forgotten, perhaps, but you have the power to bring it to recollection. How? By reminding yourself frequently of this stirring fact:

I am a perfect blend with vital Principle, and Principle is a compound of limitless intelligence, animation, power. This explains why I think and walk and live, and can do so with freedom and assurance. All restrictions on my activity are part of the dream. But I am not a dreamer; I am a doer. The Almighty propels me, and I like it. I will be up and about His business.




Unreality of the Abnormal

Whatever is abnormal in health, physique, business, human relations, or morale does not make sense. Its presence in a well ordered universe is unthinkable, impossible. And this universe has now endured so long that we have a right to assume that it is well ordered.

Abnormalities exist, if at all, only in obsession, fancy, ignorance, misunderstanding. This is why they can be atomized, leaving the normal standing forth in bold and unmistakable relief.

All hope and faith and progress depend upon the unreality of the abnormal. Why things and conditions should even seem to assume anomalous form nobody can say. But everyone can doubt their reality, he can even challenge their existence and insist upon the presence, here and now, of the perfect and permanent.

In this mood the perfect and the permanent will, even if slowly, come into view, and the abnormal, whether it be sickness, deformity, want, depression, or whatnot, will begin to depart from experience.

We talk so much about proving and demonstrating propositions, but how much, after all, have you and I ever proved? How much have we actually demonstrated? Not enough to brag about. But we have entertained convictions that what is just or delightful has enduring qualities, and that what is otherwise must be of few days and even those full of trouble.

Faith tells us that certain things cannot be, and that their opposites must be. There is no question of proof or demonstration, in the technical sense of those words, involved. This is why proficiency in mathematics will not help a man recover his health or save his business or get him on speaking terms with his wife. Whereas simple faith and hope, fortified with such understanding as can be marshaled, will accomplish wonders. To feel that “the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind” has saved more souls than all the exact knowledge in the world.

As a matter of fact there is no such animal as exact knowledge, and those who know the most are the fullest aware of that fact. It is only yesterday that Einstein's relativity brushed aside Newton's sure-as-fate gravity. Nobody has reached finality, nor will he in a universe that is infinite. But he can be convinced that certain things and certain courses are better and wiser than other courses and things. And when he throws the weight of his conviction with the former, his lines fall in pleasant places.




Value of Serenity and Flexibility

Thanks a lot for the encouraging report. You are wise in taking things a little easy. Just be as relaxed and confident as you can. Tensity of temperament in the upper stratum of mind becomes tensity of tissue in the lower stratum of body. Rigidity of thought reacts at once in rigidity of bodily function. Whereas flexibility of mentality, poise, and ease build a sure foundation for soundness of body and attractiveness of person.

The old-time American Indian, astride his pony, symbolizes a life of composure and grace. Not a thought is tense, not a sinew drawn. Nothing interferes with free and unobstructed action.

The simple rule that exuberant Life is all leaves no room for a troubled or confused man. There is no such man in your establishment. On the contrary right there is a giant in full swing, and you are the giant.

Do not listen to the ailment when it tries to nag you. Talk back to it. Say, “You cannot speak to me. You have no voice, no intelligence, no existence. The presence in me of the Almighty as Life abundant makes your presence and existence impossible.”

I will stay on the job. We are on the road to victory. In fact the victory is ours right now.

You are quite right in taking hold of your problem energetically and confidently. The condition must not be permitted to grow beyond belief into conviction. Now is the easiest time to put it to rout. And you are going to do it.

True enough, all these symptoms are quite apart from you. They can not appear in your realm, for really you are a spiritual man in the unobstructed realm of Spirit where nothing antagonistic to unruffled Life can come. See the difficulty as something outside of you, indeed as something quite remote; and then talk to it and denounce it as having no intelligence or energy back of it. In this way you can undermine it and cause it to topple over.

And then take that other ground that not only is Life everlastingly and uninterruptedly serene in the world at large, but that that Life is yours and is coursing throughout your being without interference or heaviness. You are nothing less than the functioning center of that Life.

Then take the further position that you are in the grasp of Principle and therefore that those forces which are trying to disturb you and occasion anything abnormal are powerless to accomplish their purpose. Look at them in that penetrating, masterful, understanding way which spells their extinction.

Nothing can interfere with the important work you are carrying on. Nothing can in any way frustrate the divine purpose which is operating through you. You are chock full of animation and chock just as full of the intelligence which enables you to recognize the imperturbability of your existence.




What Does God Mean To You

You say you miss the word God in my letters. Well, you may miss the word but you do not miss Him, do you? He turns up in almost every paragraph under the name of creative Mind, Life, Love, Principle. Indeed He turns up every instant in every nook and corner of you as you think or live. There is no other Mind or Life than the Creator and Governor of the universe. You have that Mind and Life; hence your permanence, your immunity from disease and decrepitude. You are using that Mind and Life right now in following this argument.

You see, many of the most valuable words in the English language have, in the long course of years, been so distorted or cluttered with unwarranted interpretations and usages, that they have lost their power to express the thought originally intended to be conveyed.

This is particularly true in the field of theology. Take such words as sacrifice, salvation, atonement. What do they mean to you? Is that meaning clear-cut and exact? Do the words have the same signification for you that they have for others? Can you be sure when you use the word Christ, for example, that it has precise meaning for you and the same precise meaning for your listener?

People long experienced in writing or in public speaking discover that they fail to make their meaning as clear to their audience as they would like. This is largely due to the indefiniteness of the language they employ and the lack of agreement between people as to what certain words mean.

It is safe to say that there are as many conceptions of God as there are human beings. Each has his own picture, and, if I dare say it, that picture is all too often rather obscure.

But when we call the Supreme Being Mind, Life, Love, Principle we begin to get somewhere, because everyone knows and even feels something of what each of these momentous words means. Moreover, all people are pretty much in agreement as to that meaning. So that to refer to the Supreme Being as Mind, Life, Love or Principle immediately charges the language of the speaker or writer with dynamics. People get his thought, his mental picture. In ordinary parlance they know what he is talking about and are correspondingly touched or moved by what he says. Their attention is arrested. Their thinking is stimulated.




Names for Supreme Being

Now and then, as you turn the leaves of serious books of different races and different periods, you find the sages referring to the Supreme Being as Mind, Life, Love, Principle, if not expressly then by necessary implication. So you and I are in good company when we use these words, and we make Supreme Being more vivid to ourselves and more appreciable to those we hold converse with.

And the appreciation of Supreme Being is of first importance, because there is but one Being in this universe; and since you and I be, we must be that Being. In this recognition we identify ourselves with limitless Mind, Life, Love, Principle. Their properties become our properties. We become men and women of Principle, with existence so exalted that the claims of mortality, from sickness all the way down to ordinary meanness, cannot rise to our heights.

You do not object, do you, to the word Mind as a synonym for Deity, because Mind obviously is everpresent, allknowing, and everywhere directing the affairs of the universe. Nor do you object for a moment to Life as another synonym, because Life is everywhere present, everywhere in operation, everywhere undefeatable and unexpendable. When it comes to power, the outstanding quality of God, what has more power than Love? Ultimately it is the only power.




Love is the Heart of Healing

At this point my lead pencil demands a hearing. It reminds me that it is built of particles so far apart that were my vision keen enough the pencil would look more porous than a sieve. Not one atom touches its neighbors. The law of attraction holds them in their respective orbits. No man on earth is strong enough to pull the pencil in two — strong enough to separate the atoms from one another. Why are they so clannish? Because they like one another. Here shines forth, not the strength of materials, for matter is a phantom, but the power of adoration.

How silent is the atom in its ceaseless activity. The patriot is silent. Never does he boast of his patriotism. It is so much a part of him that he scarcely knows he has it. So of one who is strong in love. The emotion is his very self. It seldom occurs to him to announce it.

Here we have a hint of the heart of spiritual or metaphysical healing. It is more than a purely intellectual process. It has, at its highest, the warmth and ardor of devotion. It is the mood wherein evil is unthinkable and unrecognizable, wherein good is the natural and exclusive order, the all and the only.




Duality Disposed Of

Now is the time, you will agree, to expose that wretched duality which confuses thought quite as much today as it has ever done. For do we not hear on all hands of mortal mind and immortal Mind, of material life and spiritual Life, of human love and divine Love? as though there were two kinds of intelligence, two kinds of life, two kinds of love, when there cannot be in the very nature of things. All accurate thinking proceeds from eternal Oneness.

There is one Mind, one Life, one Love, one Principle. They manifest themselves in men and women in various degrees, but so far as anyone thinks, lives, loves, or behaves, he shows forth the one and only Mind, Life, Love, Principle. His neighbor may show forth more than he does. He himself may show forth more tomorrow. But whatever he manifests today, of love for example, is at least a spark of the genuine, which as time rolls by expands into a consuming flame to work the annihilation of everything opposed to good.




Man is Endless Life on Exhibition

And last what shall we say of Principle? Why, Principle holds in its fist the beginnings, the foundations, the substances, the controlling influences of the universe and all that therein is. Does it lack animation, intelligence, magnanimity, graciousness? Certainly not. Principle is a compound of Mind, Life, Love. It permeates them all just as they all permeate it. They are a perfect blend, which puts on its foremost exhibition in man.

Hence it is that man has the fortitude, the intelligence, the will to face problems, suffering, despair itself. He cannot help believing that, regardless of appearances, all must be well with him and with the world when Principle is at the helm. For him the everlasting arms are underneath.

The names we have just accorded Deity are abstractions in a way. They become cognizable and feelable only as they find manifestation in the things and the creatures of the universe, among which man is the highest, so far as we know. Unseen in themselves they spring into visibility in him. Thereby does he become a witness to their presence. Life and Mind issue forth in man. In doing so they necessarily retain their inherent qualities of sufficiency and permanence. Hence it is that man is a living, intelligent, enduring entity.

The same is true of Love and Principle, with the result that man, in his true status, is the very embodiment of graciousness, devotion, kindliness, rectitude, and integrity. Hence it is written, “God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”

Here you have the oneness of God and man. The fear has been that in emphasizing the oneness of man and Life, people will identify Life with materiality. What they will do is this, they will identify Life with the best they are at the moment. This is all any one can do, whatever he may say or dream. And this is quite enough, for if we identify ourselves with the highest reaches of present attainment, we shall be ready for the next higher rungs of the ladder.

No one can picture the ultimate. Progress comes by steps, slow and short maybe, but they come by the individual acknowledging, and acting upon the acknowledgment, that he is an epitome of the energies and intelligences of the universe, a reflection thereof if you like. Therefore he is in the possession and enjoyment of incontestable dominion.

From these fundamentals we are ready to agree that Life, the Life of man, is irrevocably continuous; that intelligence, individualized in man, is sufficient for all legitimate demands on him; and that Principle, abroad in his domain, makes him unaware of unprincipled invitations; while Love builds him immune to littleness.




Does God Know Your Problems

Once in a while everybody, I suppose, raises the questions you have raised, “Is God in this human experience? Does He know about my problems?”

Everybody makes his own God somewhat as everyone makes his own world. My God does not get involved in difficulties of any sort, not even in mine; but He knows that I get involved and He can be depended upon to help me out.

If I had a less considerate God, it seems to me, I would drop Him for a God more sympathetic.

We know some things intellectually, we know other things by actual contact or experience. Hence it is that I know quite a bit about the war from what I have gained from headlines and broadcasts. This is intellectual knowing.

But I have not seen, for half a century, so much, in the way of warfare, as a shotgun in action. More than that, I never have felt the sting of a bullet; never have faced a man armed with anything more formidable than a glaring eye.

So I know nothing about the feel of war, though on the other hand I know it exists once in a while from what others tell me.

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot! Rose plot,

Fringed pool, Ferned grot — The veriest school

Of peace: and yet the fool Contends that God is not —

Not God! In gardens! When the eve is cool. Nay, but I have a sign:

'Tis very sure God walks in mine.

Thomas Edward Brown




The Inner Man of Spirit

When you close your eyes and silence the noises brought in by the five senses, you observe that you are a consciousness rather than a corporeality. Expansion takes place immediately. If you follow up this clue and reflect for a time on the inner wonders of being rather than on the outer attractions of the world, you reach the astonishing conclusion, maybe, that you are an out and out intelligence, traversing this earth in quest of improvement and achievement.

Not a material mortal, certainly you are not. How have we ever descended into that gross concept of man? Why do we insist that we are mortals? A strange perversity, is it not, and so far as you and I know, an unaccountable one. And yet, day by day, we drop from our native level of spirituality to the unnatural level of materiality, even from manliness to unmanliness now and then.

We do it voluntarily apparently, and by the simple yet devastating process of appraising ourselves as mortals, doomed to walk this troubled world for a period and soon to be arraigned before an unknown court for reward or punishment. When all the time we are immortals, with structures spiritual and enduring, inhabiting a realm where security and satisfaction are guaranteed. Now figure out the implications, and you will begin to get acquainted with yourself and find how wonderfully and fearfully you are made.

This lowering of one's appraisal of man to the level of a mortal, constitutes the traditional fall. It is the original sin, which is nothing more or less than a departure from reality, a deviation from truth, a renunciation of one's birthright. Of course it bears consequences so long as indulged in. But the way back to a peaceful status is open. One can this moment orient himself, that is, he can change his mind and become sensible, insisting hour by hour that he is a man, and acting the part, which should not be difficult when he remembers that man, as already stated, is an intelligence, not a lump of clay. Maybe in letters to follow I will set up a few signposts.

You want to know how spiritual man looks. It is my guess that he looks easily four times better than the average man you and I see today. I suspect that a caterpillar sees this man of today about four times worse than you and I see him.

It is all a question of vision here as elsewhere. A dull vision sees a dauby man. A keen vision sees a man of splendor. Just how splendiferous spiritual man is no one can say, for no one, so I fancy, has developed an eyesight that will take him in. But he is here. There is no other. We look right at him with eyes that blur his stateliness.

If you get away from the obsession that there are two men, one spiritual, the other material, and drop those two words “material” and “spiritual,” maybe you will arrive at something definite.

I do not remember meeting you, but you must be a great girl to be able to get a laugh out of that savage rebuff you received over my telephone a month ago. By the way, believe it or not, the phone has interrupted this short epistle two or three times, which explains its brevity and disconnectedness.




Which Man Are You

Do not say to yourself, “My true selfhood is incorporeal.” Say, “I am incorporeal.” You do not have two selves, you know, one corporeal and the other incorporeal; one perfect, the other imperfect. You are only one and that one is fashioned after the pattern shown in the mount.

You should stop speaking of your “true” self or your “real” self. To use such expressions is to imply that you have an unreal or an untrue or an imperfect self. And you have not. You have only one self, which is the temple of the living God, that is, the place where boundless animation and intelligence are in play.

This intelligence is yours. It is the only intelligence there is. It does your hearing and your seeing and your knowing. Hence they cannot be otherwise than keen and normal. We will keep up our work along this line, confidently expecting that the mesmerism, for such your impaired sight is, will dissipate.

I notice when you speak, in your last letter, of being nearly asphyxiated, you use the expression “my real self' when you wish to say that you are okay, untouched by any unfriendly agency. Have we not talked about the real and unreal man enough to have reached the conclusion that you are not two?

Better say, “I have never been touched by gas fumes.” Better say, “I am a giant — the gathering place of all the vigor and vitality and vim I can hold.”

I doubt if you have any great interest in that “real man” you talk about. Certainly he will get along all right without your help. Your interest should center on yourself — on “me or I,” as you put it.

Just grab your lead pencil and write your name in on the card. I will be looking for you at the Meeting. Meanwhile have the courage to say “I” four hundred times a day and forget all about the “real man.” Let him take care of himself. You do not owe him anything.

Say to your husband not “God's man is all right,” but “You are all right.” When you talk about God's man you are talking about somebody that you and your husband are not interested in. He may be up in the clouds somewhere.

Now please see the point. It is Charley who is all right and it is you who are all right. If you do not say this of him and for him and to him, but waste your breath on the desert air by saying somebody else is all right, how do you expect Charley to get any good out of your treatment.

Talk these truths to him. He is the perfect man, he is the image and likeness, he is the temple of the living God. And he must say these things convincingly to himself. He must say: “I am a perfect man, the temple of the living God, the image and likeness. There is not a thing wrong in my entire make-up. I am whole.”

Charley is coming out of this a fine, stalwart chap, better than he has ever been before, with the courage of a lion.




Soul and Body

Your letters came, and very good ones they are. Wish I had time to write more fully but am now putting on my hat to hit the road.

Those expressions “embodied” and “personified” might be regarded objectionable, possibly, on the ground that they suggest corporeality. But everyone to his own way of thinking and talking.

It is going a long way toward placing a supposedly troubled man on his feet to acknowledge that he is an expression of boundless Life, or to put it the other way, that he is irrepressible Life expressed.

The precise form of the expression is difficult to figure out, but spiritual things are difficult to define or describe. It seems almost impossible to put them in our limited forms of phraseology.

Anyhow I was glad to hear from you and to see that you are taking hold of life so normally and vigorously. You have the best years before you. So dig in like the industrious chap you are.

You want to know how Mind can rectify bodily conditions. This is easy enough to understand when you recognize that you are mental throughout. You may try to separate yourself into soul and body, ascribing all intelligence to soul and none to body. But the fact is soul and body are one. They are both mental. Body is the part of soul, or to use the new word, consciousness, which is cognizable to material sense. But it is mental. This is why it talks to you so much.

Stop regarding yourself as both soul and body. Stop using the expression body at all, if you like, and regard yourself as consciousness. Then it is plain why a change in your thinking will result in a change in what you have been calling body, for body is part of consciousness. Get the fear out of mentality, therefore, and you get the wobbles out of body.




Your Oneness with Life Abundant

The compound idea sometimes referred to as man is you.

It is an ensemble of all the qualities of Life and Mind and Soul. Worry not about generic man. You are the man, or rather the woman, you are concerned with, and she is the temple of the living God. She is the scene and center of His activities. His intelligence and glory and graciousness are in full play right on her premises. They constitute her identity. They are that woman — that you.

You see, you are so close to, so interwoven with, Life triumphant that it is all there is to you. You are as perfectly blended with it as the white and yolk of an egg are blended by a thorough culinary beating — all one. So are you one with glorious Life.

I doubt if any precise rule of healing has ever been formulated. I doubt if such a rule can be put into words. The curative process can be hinted but it cannot be stated with the definiteness of the rule of three. One can find the whole thing presented in the Fourth Gospel. Yet there is nothing there which approaches the formality of a rule. This is one reason why the book endures.

Healing comes when one gets the slightest sense of his identity with exuberant Life, but how to attain that realization is not easy to specify. It comes when least expected and when least striven for. It just comes. Life, the very Life which is individualized in you, is self-existent and self-sustained, which means that it knows no weaknesses or impedimenta.

For this Life, which by the way we call God, retains its inherent vitality when expressed in you. It loses no energy or other quality when it becomes you. It is the same original irrepressible, ageless, diseaseless, endless Life it always has been.

I would like to write this subject up in my own way. I would do so if there were any hope of getting it published. Maybe I will do it anyway one of these days. It should be done and can be. Wish I could see you but I will not be in New York before March, probably.




Man and Life Inseparable

Congratulations to Charley on his will and ability to stick to his job. Soon he will thoroughly like the work and glory in doing it, because Charley is one of those fellows who faces situations courageously and overcomes difficulties. He is not inclined to take a back seat.

The luckiest thing Charley ever did was to unite his battle plan with yours. Together you can face the traffic any time and all the time.

Now just drop that word “body.” Call yourself “me” or “I” or “Mary Ann.” Mary Ann is unlimited animation and intelligence. Body is only another word for identity, and your identity will appear all right if you keep talking to yourself as we have been talking during our correspondence.

Forget this notion about there being two men, one material and one spiritual. There is only one kind of man or woman, and he or she is spiritual and perfect. This means you are spiritual and perfect, and it means that Charley is spiritual and perfect. If you will hold to this bold fact, you will find yourselves getting freer and stronger and better and finer, because when Spirit catches one in this pliable mood it molds and fashions him anew.

You do not know what to do about your body? Well, take good care of it. Think and talk as you and I are thinking and talking, and this thing you call body will improve and improve because consciousness keeps building it in finer and finer form. It will get so unobtrusive after a while that you will hardly know it is around.

What you need is a recognition of the searching fact that you and Life are inseparable. You have been too shy to admit your true I-ness. You are pretty frequently saying, I am this, that, and the other, but it is rather the exception for you to acknowledge the sublime fact, “I am that Life revealed which began not and ends not, a Life crowded with the potencies and glories of the universe.” And this Life, right in your midst and constituting your only identity, carries on with laborless energy, functioning and building and strengthening and inspiring without let or hindrance. It is all there is to you. This energizing truth will lift you off your feet if you will grab hold of it. Or, if it does not, it will electrify and brighten every corner of your premises.

To think of Him as by our side Is almost as untrue,

As to remove His throne beyond Those skies of starry blue.

So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn, and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth, Myself God's sanctuary

Frederick W. Faber




Temple of the Living God

You are quite right, people are amazingly slow to accept the glorious promises made by the seers and prophets of all ages and races, and confirmed by the experience of those who have had the good sense to believe.

These promises are more than promises, they are facts to be accepted by everybody in quest of self-improvement.

Thus it is written, “Ye are the temple of the living God.” Scores of people have told me of gaining relief from one malady or another by taking this assurance seriously. And yet so many people, instead of accepting the affirmation unreservedly, are inclined to inquire, “Who is this I or me who is the temple? Is it the body or consciousness or soul?”

Thereby does one depart from the guarantee and wander out into the fields of speculation and disputation. The promise is that you are the temple of the living God. Simple enough, is it not? Accept it. A temple is a place where people gather together. You are the place where all the properties of the Eternal assemble to make you a woman of unquestionable quality.

Energy, strength, and buoyancy are therefore unavoidably yours. The obsession of weakness and incapacity may try to frame or mesmerize you, but you cannot be deceived, for not only are you the temple of animation but of intelligence. Therefore you are equipped with the vision that enables you to see through this trickery and to recognize your genuine self right where the troubled self seems to be. Speak the truth to this imposition and speak it searchingly and confidently.

Instead of looking around and trying to uncover error in yourself or elsewhere, look about and uncover the goodness and verve which constitute you. There is altogether too much keenness displayed in uncovering evil; it is good that needs to be brought to light. And if you will look yourself over thoroughly you will find what deep thinkers always find on their premises — a full-fledged man or woman, as the case may be, faultless and sufficient in all parts. Your work now is to make that discovery. It can be done.




Mood Molds the Body

You are quite right. There is a lot of nonsense being said about the body. Since it is the only body you and I know anything about, our sensible course is to be good to it, not neglect or despise it. Thereby we expect to gain a better body.

You are not far from the fact when you say that your thought and your mood construct the body. This is why Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes used to pray, “Build me more stately mansions, O my soul, as the swift seasons roll.” And since we build a new body every twelve months or so, we should, with the passing of the years, learn to build more robust and prepossessing structures rather than shabbier ones.

This is precisely what smart people are doing. Now and then you observe some friend who is making a pretty successful attempt. You exclaim, “Why Charley looks ten years younger than he did the last time I saw him.” How important it is that we fill mentality with sound thought, for one does not live by bread only.

In charming verse Samuel Longfellow speaks of “Life which maketh all things new.” It makes you, in every part and faculty and function, new each day; it starts you out each morning in a new program with freer step and fuller breath. How apropos are these lines from Ethel Colwell Smith:

Have you not noticed today is brand new?

No second-hand ever is offered to you. (Unless carelessly, you mull the used old one,

And sully the new with yesterday's cold one.)

Today is untouched as a smooth square of stone.

You carve what you want with thoughts of your own.

You better take care and trim as you should,

For tomorrow retains today's quota of good.

Sing a small prayer, then work with a will.

God is right there, so why not be still And glorify Him, as He glorifies you,

With thanks for today?

It's always brand new.




Hints of the Spiritual

You speak rather doubtingly about consciousness as a name for man; and when I suggest intelligence as another good name, you are not quite sure about it. Well, you would hardly care to be referred to as nonintelligence or even as unconsciousness. Really, if you reflect a moment, you satisfy yourself that those two words, intelligence and consciousness, are tremendous in their signification.

When one thinks of himself in terms of thought rather than of physicality, he walks the broad highway of the animate, the enduring, the substantial. It is when one thinks on materiality and mortality, with their limitation and impermanence, that one is likely to lose hope and wonder what is going to become of him.

We all think; we are all conscious. In fact thinking is perpetual motion. Who can stop either his own or others' thinking? To think is to live; and to be conscious is to be aware of life. The sum total of your thoughts constitutes your entity, and the sum total of your thoughts comes pretty close to being consciousness, does it not? It is you.

Intelligence and consciousness enjoy a security that promotes confidence. Theirs is that place of refuge known as “under the shadow of the Almighty.” Dangers and enemies, whether in the form of disease or of violence, cannot touch intelligence. It is invulnerable and unassailable. It represents spiritual man, that is, it represents you in genuine form, color, structure, and function.




Your Servants, the Body and Intellect

But man, as we appraise him in everyday affairs, is in need of some means or instrument of contact with the world about. Hence it is, we may say, that consciousness evolves a body; and an intellect too, for that matter. Consciousness commands both body and intellect and depends upon them to get its work done. The heavier work is assigned to the body. It becomes one's chore boy so to speak. While to the intellect, of finer mold than the body, is assigned the lighter jobs, and it becomes the secretary.

Through the intellect and through the body, then, consciousness carries on. Intellect and body do not remain the same from year to year, or even from hour to hour. They are in a state of flux, since consciousness is reconstructing and reconditioning them pretty constantly, shaping them for better or for worse according to the mood.

You may recall that I have, on occasion, compared the body to a lead pencil. The pencil is not you, but it is yours. You keep on the outside and grip it in your hand. You do not crawl into it. If you did you would lose control of the implement. So it is with the body. If you are wise you do not crawl into it. Rather you maintain the vantage point of aloofness. Then you can direct it and enjoin good behavior; you master it instead of permitting it to master you.

You can carry this simile to the intellect, as well, and keep it under control, instead of permitting its smartness to confound you. Consciousness, you have already suspected, is pretty much the same as soul. It is the modern substitute for that significant word. It ranks above intellect and body and can make them its servants.

Now, as we have so many times agreed, there is no definite line of demarcation between what we call body and what we call consciousness. They are one, and consciousness is the one, body being the part thereof which is cognizable to the five senses. It is the part we can put our hands on. The interior niceties of morale are not sensible to physical touch.

The body necessarily improves or declines as consciousness rises or falls. When mood soars, as in the case of a baseball player who steps to the plate to hit a home run at a critical stage of the game, consciousness lifts the body to such heights of precision and speed that a close observer would gain a glimpse of spiritual man. He is always present.




The Everpresent Reality

One who heals disease, or lifts people over other hurdles, is one who can see the spiritual and only man where the supposed suffering or troubled man appears. When he views this perfection, suffering people, by absorption or reflection, get to see themselves as he sees them, to find that they are poised and well.

What we call matter is at most an understatement of Mind, do you not suspect? So the man we call a material mortal is not a man at all; he is an understatement of man, which passes from thought as mood rises in its outlook. Jesus, whose life affords so many of the answers, used to refer to himself as the son of God or the son of man, according to his mood.

If the camera could adequately picture a pilot bailing out, we would understand how it is that he lands safely and escapes the flying missiles on his way down. Why his immunity to danger? In those critical moments he has put from thought the vulnerabilities known as mortality and materiality and put on the whole armor of Mind or Spirit.

Maybe you have had the experience of going through a highway collision, and immediately thereafter finding yourself unscathed. “Miraculous!” you exclaimed. The fact is that in that awful moment you attained the stature of spiritual man, against whom there is no law of accident or destruction.

Few people seem to recognize that we look right at the spiritual and perfect man, and, comprehending him not, reckon him a plain ordinary mortal.

I have in mind an incident related by an army Colonel. A boy in his regiment seemed of little account. He had been brought up by his parents to believe that he was a weakling. The Colonel, accosting the boy each morning, “How are you today, young man?” each time received the unvarying reply, “Very well, sir, but you know I never was very strong.”

One day the regiment was crouching in a trench facing a field of high grain wherein lurked the enemy. The Colonel saw that boy (no one had told him to do it) crawl up over the top, disappear into the waving grain, and presently return with three or four prisoners. After taking them to the rear, he returned and duplicated the adventure.

What happened? The boy found himself, for an hour at least. No longer was anything impossible. Fear was gone. Danger banished. Whenever you see a man in the apparent form of infirmity of body or of character, you may be assured that back of that appearance towers a man in the full power and permanence of Spirit. There is no remoteness to reality. It stares us in the face at every turn. We see it, in part — see it in the tiniest as well as in the mightiest phenomenon, because to the eye that is single the small and the great are one.

When you look at yourself from within you see mentality. A bystander, looking at you from without, sees body. What we call soul and body then are different aspects of the same entity. Both are mental; both are carved out, by different techniques, from the same indivisible whole.

Says Alexis Carrel: “We do not apprehend man as a whole. We know him as composed of distinct parts. And even these parts are created by our methods (of observation) . Each of us is made up of a procession of phantoms, in the midst of which strides an unknown reality.”




The Exuberance of Life




The One and Only Existence

The biologists have wondered how Life is initiated. Why, Life is not initiated, it is, it always was. It is selfexistent and selfsufficient and self-sustained. It was never made or created. It never started nor will it ever end.

Life is the only power and presence in the universe. It has no enemies in the form of disease or disaster or years. And this Life retains its energy, vitality, health, and endlessness when individualized as you. It is in unlabored and peaceful operation in every area of your geography. It manifests itself as you.

Pronounce the above facts, and as many other facts of existence as come to you. Go through the rehearsal many times a day, not glibly but intelligently. Abandon the bromides you have been talking. In interviews with yourself develop a new conversation, a conversation meaningful and dynamic.

Let me hear from you pretty soon. You can be the master of your ailment by giving your soliloquy an upward direction. By a simple turn of thought and word you can change the foregoing phraseology to fit your business or personal or other problems.

Of course you will not become resigned to that cane or to any form of infirmity. On the contrary you will insist that you are in the full possession of your strength and liveliness. They cannot give way or get out of order, because they are the outpourings of that omnipresent Life which will never fade or fail in any detail.

Life, which is but another name for the Almighty, is incessantly and irrepressibly in action. It can know no opposition or derangement. And Life is everywhere and allpervasive. These facts are open to observation. Nothing can be clearer.

Hence it is that Life is unlaboredly in operation throughout your domain, even where pain or weakness or interference may try to lift its voice. Your difficulty then is not there, after all. Indeed it is not existent. Never can it rise above illusion or obsession. Peace and perfection characterize His world and His world is your world.

You ask about walking. Be moderate, I should say. Walk a little, do not walk all you can. After a while you will walk a bit more. But do not walk until you are tired. Stop while you still feel fresh. And do not walk at all if by any chance it should be excruciating. In other words practice your usual good sense.

A prudent person makes her health the first consideration. So you are making recovery your first objective. And if a practitioner can help, by all means enlist his services even if it does strain your budget.

This answers your two major questions. I will try to answer any further queries whenever you give me a buzz. Why not do so once in a while? You can get a good treatment right over the telephone, you know.

Here is a dynamic treatment, and yet how simple and easy. “I am the temple of the living God.” Say it slowly and solemnly. Then do not rush off on some tangent. Hold thought in line with this stimulating sentiment. Presently say it again, “I am the temple of the living God.” And say it at frequent intervals all day long, refusing to be distracted by conflicting thoughts or arguments. Certainly you will not recite it parrot-like, although that would be better than contrary recitations; you will declare it with a pretty clear realization of its meaning.

What will happen the while? Consciousness will form you anew. You will find that your legs behave as well as your arms, and vice versa, and you will find that they all behave so well you scarcely know they are present. You did not know you had them when you were a girl, and how free and joyous life was. That same freedom is asking you to accept it today.




Get on the Beam

“Hitch your wagon to a star,” recommends Emerson. Lay hold of the immensities and potentialities of Life, which is not difficult when Life is as close as hand or breath. Then will you gather might from omnipotence, wisdom from omniscience, protection from omnipresence.

Is it not plain that the benign power which sustains and directs the earth in the vast open spaces of heaven upholds and propels you in your daily orbit? Is it not obvious that the divine animation and intelligence, which vitalizes and oversees the universe, enlivens, instructs, and cares for you?

Admit these undeniable facts every hour of the day. Amplify them in your own way and words. Thereby will you protest the truth which removes obstructions. Your wagon speeds up. Vigor, vision, and hearing, with which to enjoy the journey, spring into normal action. You are a synthesis of the properties and powers of supreme Being. Acknowledge it and be free.

It is astonishing that most people add to their difficulties by insisting that they must prove the facts of metaphysics before they can gain relief. This is the hard way, unnecessarily hard. What one has to do is to admit or acknowledge the facts.

We will see what we can do about the predicament. I am confident that we can do a great deal and therefore am taking hold of the case.

Life is untouchable by disease, discouragement, disaster or restriction, because Life, the very Life you live, is God, continuously and peacefully operating in you at every point. No possibility then of your separation from it, is there? Hence your vitality and endurance and freedom of movement.

Your note arrived. I have taken up the three cases and expect to hear from you again soon.

We attach remoteness to Deity by referring to Him as the Supreme Being, when in fact God is Being itself, your being. Suffering must abate when you come into this realization of your identity with harmonious Life. Life must be expressed. Where? At its highest in you.

God must be expressed. But where? Greek poetry answers, and Scripture reiterates, “There is . . . one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all.” Few exercises are more exhilarating than for one to realize, as understandingly and reverently as possible, the indwelling presence of exuberant and irrepressible Life.

Here is the fervent prayer of the righteous man which availeth much. For prayer does not consist solely in petition or desire. It consists, and to a very considerable degree, in intelligent affirmation of the truth of being, the outstanding feature of which is one's thorough blend with the Eternal, He in you and you in Him.

You can say, and say intelligently, “The Eternal is All-in-all; Mind, Life and Principle, and they alone, are in the midst of me in all their mightiness.” This kind of thinking builds giants.




Words, Words, Words

This morning, when I peeked out into the reception room, I saw a man who, for some time, had been coming for treatment. He had been having a tough time. He was still in its throes. Nevertheless there was a broad, genuine smile on his face. “Charley,” I asked, “What are you grinning about?” Instantly came his reply, “I am happy because I am a giant today.”

Many people are so disposed to use labored language in describing their symptoms. Not a few would have resorted to the mushy meaningless phrases that too often get a foothold on the printed page — words that do not register, that would have meant little or nothing either to him or to me. But everyone knows what “giant” signifies. It pictures a man of strength, virility and courage, with the determination to be up and about his business. Charley was in that mood and he used words that said it.

It is refreshing to find a man so at home in his subject, or in his mood or condition, that he can use just ordinary words. He can put across what he has in mind to say. When you consult a learned lawyer he will talk with you in language you cannot fail to understand, whereas an indifferent lawyer may employ legal jargon, with the result that you may go from his office more confused as to your rights than ever.

Charley knew precisely what he was talking about. He was beginning to feel the dynamics he had imbibed from my letters, talks, and silent work. Consequently he felt better, his hope was revived, he had faith that, judging from progress already made, he would inevitably get out of the woods.

Suppose some day you check your thinking and talking, examine the words you use, and see how much resemblance they have to the phraseology which will make you understood. Try to put a little naturalness, newness, freshness and color in your thought and talk, especially in denouncing your difficulties. The devil has become so accustomed to the doctrinal way of talking, maybe, that he just yawns when he hears it.

Whenever a speech, a letter, or a book arrests attention, this is a sure sign that it is not plain words, words, words, but rather thoughts, thoughts, thoughts; and everybody delights in thoughts. They have a feeling and a taste. Mere words do not. They are like cotton in the mouth and chalk to the taste.

Now you will see why some speakers and some writers fail to interest you. Their product has no flavor. Their effort does not create pictures; and if one in his writing and talking does not create pictures, he is accomplishing mighty little. Because we think in pictures, at least we ordinary people do. Only the mathematicians think in abstractions. Some speakers see their sentences, even to the punctuation marks, passing in space right out before them.




Expanding Your Horizon

So you have been doing a little quiet reflection and have been surprised with what has come to thought. Well try it again. Lie down and look out into the world. Look over the housetops, even over the treetops.

Contemplate the marvelous peace and order. Not a single jar anywhere. Picture Life, unfettered and infinitely varied; consider Mind adequate to direct the world in all its detail; recognize underlying Principle, animate and pervading, which sustains and governs all.

Think of the power and magnitude of Life and of Mind, their fullness and their everywhereness. Yes, be absent from the body and present with the Lord. And in this contemplation come back to yourself and recognize that you are part of the sum total of all this grandeur.

You are nothing less than an aggregation of the qualities of the Eternal, which make you His image and likeness. You are the I am that.

What of the grief and disappointments, the symptoms of disease or of age? They are lying impositions. There is no Principle to support them. There is no Life or substance, not a particle, in them all. There is no Mind to think or conceive them; no mentality of yours to feel or experience them.

No, you say, I am not that sick I am. I am that I am which I feel when I look over the mountaintops. I am of that Life which never began, will never fail, will never end.

I am intelligence adequate to my everyday needs, adequate to carve out the career the Almighty has planned. There are no impedimenta in my way to a satisfying and continuing existence.

I can do all things through that spirited energy which surges through me, that vital Principle at work in my economy. I am interknit with Principle. I share its power, its wisdom, its achievement. I and Principle are one. Nothing is impossible to a man of Principle.

I say all this, not out of my own will and discernment, but out of the understanding of that Mind which is everywhere, even to my innermost parts. I acknowledge all these advantages, not through any sense of braggadocio, but through the grace of an all-sympathetic Governor of the Universe who withholds no good thing from His people.

It was worth a million to hear your voice clear and ringing over the phone last night. Made me wonder why I had not called you up months ago.

Nothing like our favorite prescription, after all, which runs something like this: “Exuberant and joyous Life, and this Life only, is in the midst of me. It is all there is to me. It is my Life, my very existence. I and this Life are as closely interwoven as the figures of a tapestry are blended in the cloth. “This explains my strength, my intelligence, my courage, my resolution to be up and doing. Hence it is that I have the assurance and understanding to say a hundred times a day, and say it as though I meant it, „I am His beloved daughter in whom He is well pleased.' I can see and experience myself as He sees me. There is no other self but the robust and permanent self. I will recognize no other. I will be what I am; and I am Life vigorous and continuous expressed.”

The good Lord sees that you get by from day to day. He will see that you do more than this. He will rouse you to the point where you can do the fine things you dream about, emerging from the world of three dimensions and moving toward the limitless realm of four dimensions where you are light, free and unobstructed, and where pain, restriction and fear cannot intrude.

An old-fashioned hymn runs, “What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.” What a privilege, you and I might say, to talk sensibly in the interviews with ourselves, saying:

“Life is continuously vigorous and glorious, and this Life is individualized in me. In this process of individualization Life loses none of its youthfulness, its energy, its intelligence, its hope.

“I will not repeat to myself the suggestions of an existence that lags and weakens and discourages. There is no such life and there is no such existence, because Life and existence are everlastingly active and joyous and inspiring, imbued with a faith and confidence that will never permit me to falter.

“I will not let down. I will gather myself together and face situations. This world needs me. It is a glorious old world, getting better every day. And how I like it. And how I almost ache to do its chores and jobs. What fun it is to be alive and fired with such ambition.”

Your note arrived yesterday. The “chainless soul” you refer to finds a parallel in Emerson's “uncaged spirit.” And Shelley gives hints along the same line in his To a Skylark:

In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun

O'er which clouds are bright'ning, Thou dost float and run,

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

And by the way, To a Skylark would not be a bad lesson for you to study. It gives a superb picture of that freedom you are looking for.




Gladness of the Prospect

You are well named Joy, because Life fairly warbles with joy, and you are Life on exhibition walking to and fro in the earth. In the movies you see glorious girls on parade displaying gorgeous clothes. Mannequins they are called, are they not? They just dazzle a fellow and are intended to do so.

Well, you are on parade in this world, showing forth the glories of one endless Life, for Life insists on living and on being made visible.

There is a quietness and a calmness about Life, a certain indifference to any opposition or interference; because Life has all the power there is, and all the presence, and well does Life know this. But while Life is poised and serene, it is also charged with a tremendous energy which speeds abroad in your land making every speck thereof glow with comfort and confidence.

And Life never thinks of coming or going. Life is content to be, and of course to be all there is. Life has no rivals, no impediments, no fears. Whose Life are we talking about? Joy's. Is she saying this and knowing it? She certainly is. She has little sense of anything but the abundance, the boundlessness, the exuberance of Life.

Every time any contrary suggestion comes along, she rebukes it, saying “Not wanted.” Well do you know that there is nothing back of such suggestions — no mind, no urge, no will. Nor is there any mentality to accept those suggestions, feel them, or experience them.

The goodness of the Governor of the Universe is such that He could not dream of permitting one of His people to entertain a single alarm or distress. You know that right now He holds you in His ample palm and will not let anything or anybody except Santa Claus get within miles of you.

Reach right down now and take hold of your boot straps and pull yourself together. Then strut and purr and delight yourself in the everlastingness of Life.

I think you love God and serve Him, at the very height, when you have a good time and fill yourself with joy. I am sure that He has purposes for you, and that an outstanding purpose is that you shall have those things your heart desires and has desired all these years.

Do not let the reformers torment you. Your name has not been entered in any black book. Hard roads and tough experiences cannot be classed among the necessities or inevitables of life. The Almighty forces you to do nothing except to have a glorious existence. Rather pleasant to be forced in this direction, is it not?

Peace, home, and work — all these glories — are yours as a matter of right. Nobody ever was punished or denied anything for having a good time. Do you not feel better?

Life lives. Actioning and functioning inhere in it. It searches every part of your economy sustenancing, vitalizing, and strengthening every fiber. There cannot be any torpidity in Life or any hindrance to its free operation in any area of your system.

You were well-made in the beginning and that wellmadeness can never be interfered with. You are whole, sound, intact this very moment, and you feel the thrill and vigor of Life to every extremity.

The disorder you mention is no more than an obsession.

Happily, it is not your obsession but the obsession's obsession. Disown it, then. Have confidence, have expectancy, walk around saying to yourself, “Life, the Life I am living, is self-existent and uninterruptedly energetic and tranquil.”

You should come out of this difficulty before long, and I am confident that you will if you take the above prescription.

You are bound to increase in strength and confidence, because you are recognizing, hour by hour, that the Almighty is in the midst of you, which means that you are admitting the almightiness of health and Life itself.

Mind too is in the midst of you, and out of Mind you can gather the feel of exuberant Life. This Mind is of deeper perception than to cognize such impossibilities as distress and danger. It knows nothing about them. But this Mind is your Mind, there is no other. Stop right here and gather up the implications, if you would be free.

The distress you describe is a misstatement of your condition, because abounding Life permeates you in all its peace and invincibility. Have faith, keep up your efforts, and remember Derzhavin's lines:

O Thou eternal One! whose presence bright All space doth occupy, all motion guide.

In doing so you will realize that the Russian has something in his system besides Communism.

This difficulty you describe should leave you very soon and should never come around again. Relapse! How can it find you? It has no intelligence, no locomotion, no legs or wings.

No, the ailment is an out and out nonentity. It is without intelligence, without power to move about, without presence, without existence. An out and out lie is what you should denounce it.

And what are you? You are an exhibition of that Life which knows nothing about restriction or distress. You are a manifestation of that Life which is invulnerable and invincible.

Right where those symptoms try to talk or assert themselves is a peace that cannot be disturbed.

After a while let me hear from you again. Do your best to declare these truths and thereby give yourself a good boost. Do so many times a day. It requires only a moment.




Unconquerable Vigor

I have been working on your case each day, confident all the time that you are laying firmer hold of the exhaustless energy always at hand.

You are saying to the difficulties in your way, “Out with you. Animating me is the unconquerable vigor of the Eternal. He has appointed me to do His will. He has endued me with the capacity and endurance to establish the work of His hands. The untiring forces of His universe are with me.”

You have, in the case of the patient you mention, what you have been looking for — an opportunity to do something worthwhile — and you will measure up to the occasion.

Of course he is scared. It is your business to wipe out the fear. This accomplished, bodily functions will go on as they should.

You and I do not make the mistake of accusing the patient of temperamental aberrations and using them as an alibi for our lack of success. Rather do we extinguish them if we detect their presence. This is what patients hire us to do.

But the fact is that when you look at your patient you look at a man, an immortal. If you think you see a mortal, you will naturally try to correct your vision and see the man. This is metaphysical treatment. Make no mistake about it, there is a man there, and if you even glimpse him, you will have effected a cure. Certainly you can glimpse him.

Pathologically, it is safe to say, some of his functions have slackened, circulation in particular. But Life, and Life is all there is to him, does not lag. It is perpetually and irrepressibly in operation, for Life is the Almighty.

The patient is experiencing, right now and always, at every point of his being, the laborless movement of resistless energy. He is well and he knows it, for reasons with which you are familiar.

You are still here and hunky-dory notwithstanding all the misfortunes of youth and of adult years. Your integrity has never been invaded. In plain language you are as good as ever, because the great Architect used such enduring substances and so fitly joined them together when He built you — built you the veritable temple of God.

Hence today you can go forth with as much courage and strength as the most favored individual in the community, if you will cultivate the habit of identifying yourself every hour with omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. Now study out what this means and recognize how easy it is to follow the system. It is just as easy as it is for you to identify yourself with misfortune and weakness and other impositions. Put the latter out, sternly, and welcome the presence of the others expectantly.

So doing, you will feel something of the power of endless Life — its freedoms and satisfactions and even joys.

Insist upon the fact that Life is in indisputable movement right where the inaction or weakness tries to clamor. Stick to this truth, maybe not all day, but for a few minutes several times a day. You will find that something happens, because in so doing you have joined forces with the Eternal.

You want Class? Well, you have a pretty good piece of it right in this letter, and some other pieces in previous letters. Pick them up and put them to work, and you will be a new creature.

How can Life know anything about sluggishness when Life is the Almighty? It cannot. Neither can you because Life is all there is to you.

Life in its very nature is animation. It is constantly active at every point, and that action and movement are undisputed and unfrustrated, for the Almighty, and Life is His name, has no competitors or opponents.

As you declare these truths understandingly and expectantly, you will be translated into that consciousness which is aware of buoyancy and freedom.




You Were Made Well

By this time, probably, you are feeling better. Keep in thought some of those propositions you heard in the lecture about your being the temple of the living God, that irrepressible Life is in operation in you and through you, and that you cannot be deceived into believing or fearing there is anything wrong with you.

Over a hundred years ago a famous physician remarked, “Man is made to be well.” You were made to be well. In other words you were well-made. What purpose could be promoted by making you ill?

You are all right from head to foot. This mesmerism that you are otherwise will dissipate and you will step out stronger and freer than you have been for a long time. Let me hear from you again pretty soon.

Yes, there is nothing like turning thought from the limitations and distresses of worldly experience to the magnitudes and infinitudes of Life as Life genuinely is. This attitude helps one to come into a realization of the freedom and the glory of existence right here and now.

Because, after all, the perfection we long for and talk about is an everpresent condition. It belongs to the past, the present, and the future. It is a feature of that self-existent Life which always was and always will be. And this Life is yours. There need be no postponement of the blessed condition of health.

I often think of you. No doubt you will discover your well-madeness. The discovery is likely to come about any day.

You are getting along very well, according to your letter. The occasional normal days will gradually lengthen into a week and the week into a month. Well, a month of normality would be a pretty good record for almost anyone these days.

You know I do not believe those strange things you tell about bodily misbehavior. Better than that you do not believe them. You know that Mind cares for the body more certainly than it cares for the sunflower. This means a nice scrumptious body with infallibly functioning parts.

Put in more time talking the truth about yourself. It is terribly stultifying, you know, to be telling stories derogatory of one's self.

Yes, you have always been peculiar, peculiarly free, normal, joyous, spic and span in every respect. You see, you were made this way. Hence you cannot well help discover, as you are discovering, that your existence is fluid rather than static. You have all the agility and freedom of movement you need.

Besides you are seeing how bright this world is, how open are its spaces, how many are your opportunities for expression.

Keep on talking these truths to yourself. Your hand will find its cunning, of course it will, and so will your entire economy, because such is the will of the Almighty.

Once in Yosemite, where I have spoken several times, someone commented on the magnificence of the mountains. Whereupon his companion said, “Well, why should they not be magnificent? Did He not make them up right?”

That is what He has done for you. He made you up right. He keeps you up right, and He makes things up right all about you.

You have been receiving so many letters lately that I wonder how you get them all read. But it is not hard to read what people write when they tell you the truth about yourself. And the truth is that you are a valiant soldier, undisturbed and unafraid. You still meet the situation, as you have for months, with your chin well elevated. After all, you realize you are under the shadow of His wing, which means that no harm can approach.

The only dangers that try to creep up are the same kind of dangers you experience in dreams. They do not hurt anybody, because they are not. All error, as you remember, is made of the stuff dreams are made of.

You are an unobstructed man in an unobstructed universe. The confusion or fear that has made you believe otherwise will soon be dissipated.

Life is so fluid and so overwhelmingly powerful and insistent upon its unfailing functioning that it is appropriately called the jealous God who will tolerate no fear or confusion or obstruction. No dam can be built across its channel.

The man we are discussing is nothing less than the place in which this Life we are talking about is effused. Grab up your dictionary and see what the word means. And then try to realize what it is for a man to experience, throughout his being, the effusion of incontestable Life.

In fact nothing can be added to your perfect economy, nor can anything be removed. When you were well-made, as definitely you were, the well-madeness was guaranteed for all time.




The Law of Self-preservation

The Greeks, who were the keenest of the keen, used to insist that the road to freedom lay in knowing one's self. Even a slight acquaintance with your constitution would reveal that you are filled to overflowing with rhythmic movement. Every item in your make-up thrills with energy and activity and combines its effort with the efforts of its innumerable neighbors, so that together there operates within you those forces of being which make you the temple of the living God.

Yes, every detail of your structure functions constantly in the most perfect of orchestrations. Mind is the director or conductor.

And Mind is so close to you that it is in you and through you. So intimate indeed is the relationship that this Mind is yours. Now certainly you have enough selfinterest to look after yourself and keep yourself in good condition. This is the law of self-preservation.

Yes, your constitution is about the busiest place in the world. Spirit is at work every instant reforming you. The work never ceases. It is perfectly coordinated and results in a better structure for you day by day and year by year — a structure full of energy and mobility and freedom.

You have nothing more serious than a little unrest and dissatisfaction, which come to every person once in a while. They are devices the devil puts out. The prudent person does not long listen to them. But the person who allows himself to be fretted and tossed about by these suggestions may get in a bad way. All one has to do is to be sensible and go ahead and make good in his job or profession.

Now your success will be promoted if you keep in mind that you have something vital and important to give people in trouble; in other words, that your services are needed and valuable. Then keep in thought that people appreciate your efforts, that is, they desire your services and value them and want to compensate you. How can it be otherwise when people are motivated by Principle?

More than this keep in mind that the good Lord supplies them with the willingness and the means to obtain what they require; in other words they are not povertystricken but fully equipped to procure whatever is essential to their well being.

Be careful not to shut out work, or compensation therefor, by believing that clients lack discernment and appreciation and gratitude. As a matter of fact they are full of these and other fine qualities.

When you say you want to blot out “matter,” you mean that you want to rise out of the heavy limited sense of existence. I say this because I am convinced that many fervent idealists emphasize too much the proposition that the body is matter and that therefore the body is nothing. This line of argument can be carried to the point of extinguishing the body, possibly, when what we want to do is to improve it.

The facts are that Mind cannot be dizzied and Life cannot be heavied. Whose mind and whose life are we talking about? Yours.

These are the ideas to think out and to say and to realize in as many ways as you can. Thereby you unleash the divine energies within.




The Caravan of Progress

Life is perpetually hale and hearty because it is God. This Life is in you and through you. It is yours. Indeed it is you and you are it because you and Life are one. You and Life are interwoven as certainly as the figure is interwoven with the rug.

No room in your system, therefore, for any disarrangement. Life knows no such abnormal condition as you describe, since Life is God, the jealous God who endures no interference.

Yes, God is the all and the only of your being. You cannot be otherwise than well built and well maintained in every part and detail. This is why you can say, “Perfect God and perfect woman, and I am the woman.”

Talk these truths to yourself understandingly from day to day. Thereby you will receive a good treatment. I will stand by you, but through your own efforts, as indicated above, you can accomplish a great deal.

Your letter of July sixth has arrived. Now the indisputable fact is that Life, in all its radiance, is coursing through you. There is no inaction or overaction at any point to cause buzzing or heaviness or kinks or aches and pains.

Just silently realize, many times a day, the ceaseless motion of illimitable energy. The kingdom of God is within you, that is, the reign of peace and health is established in your domain. There cannot be any heaviness for you when you recognize that your structure is spiritual.

Stand still long enough once in a while to consider that Life, in all its vigor and glory, insists upon springing into visibility through you; and that in this process of visibilizing itself, Life, now yours, loses none of its potency or determination to live.

It is grand to hear of your improvement. Of course those legs and knees and all other items in your makeup are in perfectly good order and full of strength and locomotion. Anyhow your structure is spiritual, so you cannot be otherwise than light and feathery in your movements.

Life is ceaselessly flowing through you to the remotest corners every moment of your existence. It is the very nature of Life to live, that is, function and move. It is fluid. No possibility then of sluggishness. Perpetual motion is its rule.

It is clear from your last letter that you are developing a courage and resourcefulness that will lead out into a larger way of living than you have experienced in the past. You have all the capacity needed to round out your career. Just set your thought to the enterprise every morning and keep on the move till the next day. You cannot help but take your place in the caravan of progress.

As you follow this procedure Spirit forms you anew and even builds your affairs into a satisfying structure.

Mind is looking after you at all times and in all ways. You are not forgotten for an instant. Mind works as ceaselessly as gravity does. And you know gravity does not overlook you or the tiniest particle of dust; it operates on everything everywhere and always. Mind operates constantly and beneficiently on you and in your behalf. It directs all the functions of your economy. It directs all your business affairs. Have confidence. All is well as presently you will find.

You are doing nobly when you refuse to think and talk of feet and legs and knees but rather cling to the indisputable fact of “perfect God and perfect me.” This me or you is just filled with the energy of uprightness and stalwartness and the ability to be about the affairs of every day existence.

Life is uninterruptedly swift and supple. It knows nothing about stiffening or settling down. You have all the freedom and harmony of action that you had when a girl. These qualities have never departed. They cannot because they inhere in the Life you live day by day. This Life is more than in you and through you, it is you. You are identical with it.

The Prophet of Galilee so admitted when he said, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Make the same admission yourself every hour. You will be surprised to see how much it will do toward breaking up the infirmity.

Mighty glad to hear of your deliverance. Better keep up your work along the line we have been pursuing for a while. Sometimes people retire from their curative thinking and effort too soon.

So far as that goes, it will be a good practice for you to remain mentally alert, thinking out different aspects of truth, and applying them to yourself, for years to come.

Life always was and always will be. This is why Shakespeare observes that “we are made of the stuff eternity is made of.”

Life then is God and He is all there is to you. He makes Himself manifest through you, establishing Life throughout your whole structure. And this Life, so in dividualized, retains all its glorious qualities, the quality of eternality among them. Hence you have no choice but to live on and on, nor has anyone else.

Now proceed with more courage, and act as having dominion over all contingencies. You have it. Use it. You will enjoy the adventure.

Remember that those pains and symptoms are not in your world. They are in a world of dreams and mesmerisms. They are in a world of wild unreality.

You live in the world of reality — of strength, of peace, of beauty, of security. Those things of distress and danger cannot come into your experience.

Life is coursing through you now in that invariable fashion which compels every function to be up and doing its work without protest.

This means that there cannot be anything out of order in you — no inaction, overaction, or any sort of action except the invincible action of a Life which does not begin or lag or fear or sicken or ever think of coming to an end.

Talk to these impostors called symptoms which are trying to distress you, and tell them what you think about them. You think plenty, do you not? Use strong language. The occasion more than warrants it. It demands it.




Integration of Man and the Eternal

You do well when you remember Jesus' saying: “No man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.” This means that true selfhood never descends from its state of security and perfection into what seems to be the mire of mortal existence.

That is why you are all right this moment and are insisting that you are all right and realizing that you are so.

Anyway, your spiritual self, and there is none other, cannot have any such adverse conditions as you describe. Therefore speak to the symptoms and distresses and tell them they have no impulse, no place, no possibility.

You are nothing less, after all, than the exhibition of that Life which knows no corruption or frailty, that Life which always was and always will be, that Life whose inevitable urge you feel in every fiber.

I have just been thinking how out of place unsteadiness and wobbling are in your domain, when the Almighty is always there. You see He is carrying on constantly in your realm with that jealousy which excludes every worry or waver. He has signs up everywhere, “Trespassers, keep out!”

A modern prophet, Emerson is his name, states the proposition like this: “In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life — no disgrace, no calamity — which nature cannot repair. As I stand on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. The currents of the universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”

Of course you are calm and possessed of dominion over every disturbing suggestion. Yours is the kingdom, the glory, the victory.

Continue to talk to yourself, expanding the above thoughts, and talk frequently and expectantly. Make this conversation your chief business. Then you will find yourself walking this good earth with freer step and fuller breath.

Keep talking to yourself those facts we have been alluding to in past letters. Then you will more consistently feel the divine energy at work to your very extremities.

All this because you and the Almighty are one. He pervades every fiber and function of your economy somewhat as moisture pervades the fog it makes. He it is who makes you strong and well and confident. His will it is that inspires you to hitch your wagon to a star and move out toward fetterless reality.

The Almighty is all over your citadel, manning every outpost, strengthening every defense, and arming you with the requisite courage and ability to proceed in the adventure of life in which He has started you out. And however far it may lead, He will never depart your side. For Him to abandon you would be for Him to abandon Himself in some measure, for are you not part and parcel of Him?

When the Almighty steps out in you, He remains Himself. This is why you and He are so closely related. It is a perfect case of togetherness.

Blending is a tremendously significant and pungent word. Your blending with exuberant Life spells vigor, buoyancy, youthfulness, and that right now. Do organs or glands seem erratic? They must normalize their conduct under the influence of this compelling truth.

Your blending with Mind guarantees all the wisdom and courage you need. Your blending with Principle keeps you calm, composed and unafraid, quite impervious to suggestions of anger or irritation.

The word blending, used in these ways, stirs the user to increased strength and hope. Therefore think these propositions out in your own way. Apply them to yourself hour after hour and day after day in those interviews with yourself. You do not have to submit to unjust distresses and restrictions. On the other hand, you have no excuse for rebelliousness if you do not immediately acquire what you think yourself entitled to. Work on patiently and expectantly.

I have been trying to open my thought to something that could be put in a letter. Strange, is it not, that we cannot force our mentality to work, at least not to any great advantage, but we can open its doors and allow worthwhile thoughts to come in. There is an everpresent Mind pouring in vastly more than even the wisest of men accept, and doing this constantly.

Yes, we have this universal understanding and consciousness, or we can have it, by the simple process of acknowledging its availability and permitting it to take charge of us. The process should be as natural and easy as for the fish to feel the presence of the ocean.

It must be that inventors, artists, and creative writers learn this knack of yielding to the instruction of Mind, which is so close and so intimately related to us that it constitutes the very warp and woof of our structure. You are in it and it is in you. Is not this why the Galilean Prophet used to say, in effect: I and my Father are one; I dwell in Him and He dwells in me?

From this we are immediately convinced, if we have not been convinced before, that man is an intelligence, not a nonintelligence or physicality. No room for argument, is there? How unlimited then are his possibilities. Life is so stupendous, so omnipotent, so all-in-all that it cannot suffer the tiniest bit from such a hostile incident as you mention. And this invulnerable Life is your life. You are living it now. It takes tangible form in you. You are this impregnable Life on exhibition in the world.

The question naturally arises, of what substance must man be that he may integrate or blend with Life, Mind, Love, Principle? Obviously he must be, as already intimated, intelligence rather than unintelligence, consciousness rather than corporeality. We are persuaded that the material mortal who commonly passes for man is no more than a misstatement, a misappraisal, a misinterpretation of man. Manifestly perfection, immortality, and oneness with supreme Being are not claimed for him.

The point is that as one insists from day to day that he is a spiritual immortal and therefore immune to disease and all phases of mortality, he abandons the mortal sense of himself as limited and sickly and gains the true sense of himself as sound and enduring. Thus are healing and longevity promoted.




The Obsession Called Disease




Things Are Not What They Seem

Investigators say that our ups and downs are due to the varying moods of the thyroid gland. Then do they, and even you and I, look about for some method of balancing this all important dignitary.

The only rule to insure balance to any gland, organ or what have you, is to recognize that the Almighty has it under control; and this is not a remote but a close, constant, exclusive control.

Who is the Almighty? He is the dramatic name for the universal intelligence, animation, and power we call God. Sometimes we refer to Him as Mind, Life, and Principle united.

But regardless of name, the Almighty exists watchfully determined not only to establish but maintain order in the lives and in the affairs of His people. So irrevocably set is He to have His way, that He silences all opposing wills and forces. His presence extends to all the parts and doings of men and women. Nothing is too tiny, nor is anything too immense, for Him to bring into line with perfection.

So intimately related is He to you that He and you are one. Happily He is the one, His the only Ego. You seek safety by insisting that His presence envelops you. You could gain more than safety, you could take on animation and intelligence without limit, if you would admit that His presence is your very being.

Why not make the admission? It will work the overthrow of your limitations and frustrations. It will work the overthrow of your ills and sorrows. It will go so far as to mitigate the appearance of years, if you have reached that period called age.

It does not make any difference what you name the things about you or what you name the things within you. Even when you do your best, groping about in the mistiness of this world, you fall short of according them their deserved dignity. Hence whether you call a thing thyroid or pituitary or wheelbarrow matters little. There is nothing in a name. But there is everything in the fact that the Almighty controls and directs the thing and its function peacefully and undeviatingly.

By the way, have you ever tried to push a loaded wheelbarrow? Probably not, but if you have, you have discovered that it is a wilful conveyance. It never overlooks an opportunity to tip one way or the other and spill its contents as though bent on escaping responsibility. But the strong steady arms of the man in charge hold the wheelbarrow in balance and drive it to its destination. This is what the Almighty does to those members and those functions of ours we so inadequately understand and so sadly misname material. He propels them without waver or hesitation. Thus do they operate unlaboredly and mightily.

Misname or misinterpret form and function, if in your immaturity of judgment you must, call them material or nothing if you will, they still remain something, something sublime and undefiled. The recognition of this fact brings healing, for healing consists in finding that in place of the supposed stress or pain or disorder is the uninterrupted harmony of being.

During the past few days or weeks we have been talking more or less about the belief of disease as opposed to the fact of health. Maybe it will be well to write down some of the statements made in that connection so that you may have them at hand to read over from time to time.

Why is it that everyone instinctively resists sickness and infirmity? Simply because no one can believe that they are genuine. No one can figure out how there can be mortality or infirmity, when God is Life and therefore Life triumphant is All-in-all.

Resistance to disease is made successfully only when the resister begins to see that they are not true; that at most they are mesmeric states which can be broken by the realization that Life is sound and eternal. Life is sound and eternal, you know, because it is self-existent, never created and never expendable.

Every individual takes on this inviolable Life. It is in him and through him. It is his. Therefore there is no denying that the life, the entity, of every man and woman is established for all time.

Indeed every individual is a manifestation or expression of this abiding Life. Life cannot be seen or appreciated apart from living creatures. Animate beings, of which man is the highest, are visible exhibitions of otherwise invisible Life. Hence it is that man is the temple of Life, speaking figuratively; or the expression or manifestation of Life, to use the direct form of conversation.

For any one to contemplate and reason out these truths is at least to begin to dissipate the supposition that he is sick. Life cannot be slackened or unduly quickened. It knows no haste, no lethargy, no corruption. And you are this Life expressed or in action.

To realize these facts is not only to lift the mesmerism which is interfering with one's good health, but to radiate an influence which will benefit others on whom his thought rests. And one can quite easily cultivate the habit of thinking and talking along such healthful lines pretty constantly, and at the same time refuse to accept the suggestions of distress and suffering.

Disease may keep putting forth its insinuations of pain and weakness. You and I have to be still more industrious in talking the above truths to them.




The Quiet Sway of Energy

It is encouraging to learn of your improvement. Remember you are the locale of boundless energy, joy, and capacity for achievement. Invisible Mind, Life, Love, Principle must have opportunity for expressing themselves, for making themselves operative and palpable, and you are that opportunity. No error or distress can enter that temple, that you. Only the mightiness of vitality finds entrance there.

Can you not feel its thrill and tingle coursing through you? Of course you can. There cannot be anything slow or sluggish in your system when you recognize that Life is uncontestably operating in you and through you. There cannot be any lack of ability when you realize that Mind is directing you. Let me hear from you again in a week or ten days.

It will be quite all right for you to manage your case alone from this time on. You have made a good start and are well equipped for finishing the job. Of course we would like to have a talk. Maybe the opportunity will be provided after all.

Yours is a spiritual structure. Therefore it must be very flexible and supple and spacious. No way of its get ting stuffy or bogged down. Its very nature is to be constantly free and fluid as thought.

There is a pretty close connection between inextinguishable Life and man. Indeed it is so close that man is, if not Life, then Life expressed, made concrete, made tangible. Therefore you normally feel the quiet sway of energy removing every obstacle to ease and strength.

When you are reading or declaring the truths of being do not put them off on Mt. Wilson but put them on yourself. Really, though, you do not have to put them there, for they have already arrived. What you should do is to acknowledge the fact.

Can you not get a hint from gravity? How unobtrusively it works; no straining, no effort, no opposition. It simply is and does. We can, with one device or another, interfere with gravity. But we cannot interfere with the performance of Life; and it is your life we are talking about.

Life simply cannot be withstood or weakened; it is Omnipotence Itself and does not know anything about age or inactivity.

This bondage business, you talk about, is largely selfimposed. You cannot afford to play any such trick on yourself. Talk the truth instead. You are altogether too valuable a man to be incapacitated. The Mrs. will get tired of waiting on you after a while. Better not tax her patience too far.

And why be afraid? Are you not a spiritual man in a spiritual realm — a man who cannot be touched by dangers, a realm where dangers cannot enter? Socrates was right when he exclaimed: “They cannot catch me” — they cannot and do not catch you. They are the dream, and the dream is not you or yours. You know your freedom and you can exercise it and will.




Sick Thinking Is No Thinking

You speak of the mental nature of disease rather skeptically. Well, there was a time when characterizing disease as mental gave people a leverage for overthrowing the arch enemy, because up till then disease had been regarded almost altogether as physical and unquestionably a stubborn reality. To style disease as mental was to reduce its formidability.

Now we are beginning to see that it will not do to admit that disease is mental, even that it is an obsession, because this would imply that there is a mind back of the thing, when there is not.

Why can we be so bold as to talk this way? Because there is only one Mind in all the universe, the Mind we call God. Mind then cannot conceive disease, cannot construct it, cannot project it into your experience. Nor is there any mind to feel or experience disease. You have none, for the one and only Mind, the Mind you have, is of clearer vision than to behold corruption.

Right here it is well to note that there is only one kind of thinking, and that kind is good. Any supposed thinking to the contrary is equivalent to no thinking. Do not then be so afraid of the consequences of fear or of anger or of other unseemly emotions. Of course it is not well to indulge these tremors. Yet everybody does indulge them on occasion. The point is that not one of them, or all combined, has the power to cause disease or to end existence. Hold thought unwaveringly to these truths as you suppress agitation. They will endue you with power from on high to overcome that fear of fear. You can, bit by bit. Its consequences have been tremendously overstated.

One might be in better business than getting scared, as you say. Nevertheless the scare cannot put Charley out of existence or even make him ill. Fears and alarms are specters. This is why they cannot do anything to you or me. Remember the Psalmist's assurance: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.”

Mistaken beliefs are as futile as fears. They cannot change the fact that you are perpetually well and at peace.

Belief in heredity, as you know, is nonsense. You came directly from the Almighty, the exhaustless reservoir of Life perennial, not through any human parentage. In fact you have not even come from Him. You are still with Him. And better yet, He is still with you. Hence your complete safety and your assurance of years of tranquil and useful existence.

I would write more along these lines were it not for the fact that you are fully convinced already that all is well.




Simplicity of Spiritual Treatment

You are the second person today to ask what a metaphysical treatment is. Do you not think it asking a good deal to have one give away the secrets of his trade? I will tell you a story instead, one of the first incidents I heard when starting to investigate this subject.

An important business man had a full crop of troubles. Deciding to call on a metaphysical healer, he was surprised and disappointed on entering her office, for there was a striking dearth of intelligence and dignity in the place, so he thought. But he was a good sport and quickly concluded: “I have come here to be put on my feet. I will see the thing through. Maybe Providence has had a hand in the matter.”

He began to unravel his troubles. At the end of the first one, the practitioner promptly exclaimed, “Yes, honey, but it ain't so.” He unraveled another and another, only to hear the same ejaculation, “Yes, honey, but it ain't so.” He terminated the interview. He could not take any more. He went out supposing that the experience was over. But it was not. A week or so afterward he discovered that one of the troubles had disappeared.

After a while another went the same unannounced way. He then admitted that this good woman, simple and unlettered as she was, knew what she was talking about, and possessed the ability to put that something across to him; and that in him the something had born fruit after its kind.

There are people in distress who have like experiences in reading from a printed page or from hearing a talk from the platform or from receiving a silent pronouncement of truth, from one who understands what he is saying or thinking. The healing comes about because the sufferer is receptive to the truth thus liberated. Accepting it, he necessarily sees the situation as the speaker or writer or practitioner sees it, with the result that the deception or illusion departs and he is recovered of his difficulty.

You feel courageous in the presence of a redoubtable man, you feel vigorous in the presence of a stalwart man. This is why everyone should go through the daily round radiating such courage and faith and heartiness as he can muster. Others are stirred and uplifted by his mood, his example. They feel as though they had reached out and tapped the brimming wellspring of Life. Health and heaven itself are just that close.

Naturally you want to know what causes disease. Everybody does, but no one has the answer. Here is a spacious realm wherein the greatest can do no better than guess. We will concede that some guesses may be better than others, but no guess possesses finality and the most learned of the guessers are free to so confess.

But you and I have something better, and I believe everyone else has something better, than a knowledge of the cause of disease. We have a conviction that when we get smart enough we shall find a world and find a self that know nothing about the infernal thing. Reason tells us that it can have no genuine existence, for if it had, this earth would long since have become a barren waste with no living thing as big as a blade of grass.

Here is the starting place of recovery or immunity. Disease has no genuineness. And there inheres in everyone of us the potential ability, not only to denounce the thing as unreal and iniquitous, but to see through its deceptive devices. This is the meaning of the promise that man has dominion.

As one acknowledges that the Almighty is his intelligence, individual ability expands and improves; as one acknowledges that the Almighty is his Life, individual existence harmonizes and lengthens; as one acknowledges that the Almighty is his supply, the reputedly meager earth responds with such things as are necessary day by day; as one realizes that the Almighty is Principle, he brings to his support the benign forces that hold the stars in place.

Thus is the Word made flesh. Thus is divine law made to operate in human affairs, making the requisite adjustments. Thus are the limitless potentialities of men and women set loose.

Everyone has the Mind that knows; the Soul that feels the finer impulses; Spirit, continuous and everpresent; Principle, which sustains and governs all; Truth, manifested in trueness and perfection; Life, expressed in beauty, vitality, permanence; Love, which shows forth in sympathy and compassion.

Each of the seven terms capitalized above embraces the nature of all; in other words, each includes the others. They combine as one, for Deity, in a certain sense, is compound. That one, expressed or manifested, is man. Hence the properties of the Eternal are focused in man, or, if you have the courage to confess it, are focused in you.

This is why you are called a man, next to God the loftiest of words. You cannot use any adjective that will add anything to Him; you cannot use any adjective that will embellish man. How about woman? Man, you know, is the generic term for both him and her, but, of the two species, she concededly occupies the higher bracket.




Arthritis on the Way Out

Arthritis, you complain? Why, the experts would say that some of the debris, which should have been hustled out of the body in the ordinary courses of elimination, have, in their desire to escape expulsion, sought out hiding places here and there in the interiors and set themselves to work gumming up the machinery.

Well, there cannot anything escape the relentless sweep of the forces bent on cleaning up your habitation. The refuse has no choice but to be expelled. Life cannot be swerved or polluted at any point of your economy. It is the very nature of Life to function incessantly and uninterruptedly. Indeed Life is so exclusive that it will not tolerate any distress or corruption on its premises, and its premises are your premises.

We will both pitch in and work along these lines, and who or what can prevent results? Your entire constitution will be cleansed and burnished anew.

Notwithstanding the difficulty you experience in getting about and enjoying the free use of arms and legs, the unalterable fact is that there can be no longcontinued interference with your freedom of locomotion. There can be no impediment anywhere; just the unobstructed, peaceful flow of Life.

Giantly easy and strong, you have all the flexibility of movement that belongs to man.

Talk these facts over to yourself, hour by hour, working out the reasons for them. Thereby will you come into the freer step and fuller breath. I say work out the reasons, for it is a legal maxim that he who knoweth not the reason of a law knoweth not the law.

All sight, perception, and understanding have their place in Mind. It is Mind that sees and hears and knows and remembers. Where is this all-wise Mind? It is in you, it is your mentality, it does your seeing. This is why your sight must be clear, unerring, even tireless.

I am still on the job. Write again at your convenience.

As I read your letter, stating that the arthritis or rheumatism still holds on, I silently talked back the plain fact that Life in all its stamina bodies forth in you. It continues to be Life triumphant after taking on the form you call me or I. Hence you lack nothing requisite to a perfectly vigorous and mobile figure.

It is clear as day that you are thoroughly well made, vastly better made than was the wonderful one-horse chaise. There is not a thing out of order in your entire setup. How could there be when the Almighty and He alone is in charge? His very presence, spelling unbounded health and strength and functioning, makes the presence of any opposition quite out of the question.

No doubt you will take on more of the lightness and freedom and comeliness of spiritual being as time glides by, because you will continue to work in the faithful, efficient way you have been working. Made after the pattern of permanence, there cannot be anything unseemly in your system. There is not too little action in this place nor too much action in the other. You are a perfect equilibrium of the vitalities of the Eternal.

Since you are under the control of Mind, all the movements of being operate peacefully and adequately, delusions to the contrary notwithstanding. We will expect the improvement, already well under way, to continue. Keep up your work to that end day by day.

Hold right on. Things are tough, yes, but suddenly the worst becomes best to him who perseveres. And you are of a breed, you know, that perseveres. You are not a quitter. So study the letters I have written. Have faith, stick to the truth expectantly. We will win, of course we will.

Time to study is much to be desired, but many people do not have it and yet get along very well. You can. Just content yourself with thinking sensibly and searchingly as you go about your work. A single statement of truth, such as the following, will last all day long: “I am the expression of Life triumphant.”

Relying on all-knowing Mind, you cannot be aware of anything opposed to quietude and freedom. Indeed you are now aware, in the depths of thought, of the beauty of wholeness, for it is still true that the kingdom of God is within you.

Remember now that you are His beloved daughter in whom He is well pleased.

No doubt you will take on more of the lightness and freedom of being as time glides by, because you will continue to work in the faithful, intelligent way in which you have started out. There can be neither too much nor too little action in any part of your system, since you are under the control of the Almighty.

A Bible verse says that the Almighty has put His law in your inward parts. This law will regulate you perfectly in every detail. Not a single item in your make-up can get out of condition.

You see the Almighty is very jealous about you. He will not let anything or anybody interfere with your comfort or prospects. He is keeping a very close watch over you every moment and promptly silencing every hint of discouragement and disquietude.

Now say, “Perfect God and perfect woman, and I am the woman.” We are so inclined to think that back of so-called mortal man is the immortal man of God's creating. But there is no mortal man to get in front of immortal man. The immortal is the only man or woman there is. So you have no mortal self to dispose of. This perfect woman we are talking about is the only you there is. There is no imperfect self anywhere.

You are filled with the peace and power which will enable you to rest at night and perform at the desk and elsewhere daytimes.

Try to recognize your identity with the power of endless Life. You are identical with it. It is in you and you are in it. Say so and feel the significance of the fact.

Almost immediately your circulation should become normal. You know Mind controls the body with the same certainty that it controls the movements of the planets. Just be persuaded that there is only one Mind. Herein lies salvation. Stop talking this mortal mind business. It is nonexistent.

The only Life and the only Mind are the Eternal, and you have them — you have them constantly. They are the basis of every act and movement. That is why your actions and movements and thinking can be in the realm of perfection, the fourth dimensional world, where serenity and freedom reign uncontested.

The symptoms you mention would indicate that your bodily functions are retarded. You can correct this supposition by realizing how irrepressible Life is, because Life is God and knows no opposition or interference. And this incessantly active and exuberant Life is yours. It is the life you are living.

This means that you are chock full of actioning and functioning. Circulation, respiration, assimilation, and elimination go on as positively as gravity works. You will find the dizziness departing as you hold to these indisputable. Let me hear from you in a week or so.

Of course you cannot tumble over. The Almighty, who is so close that He is in you and through you, holds you erect and upright.

It is not surprising that your heart action quickens when you climb stairs. This is the experience of everyone, at least everyone who gets past twenty-one. What is your remedy? Well, be temperate and do not be running and tearing around as you did when you were a child. We change our ways, do we not, as our good sense develops with the passing of time.

People are different in their mature years, and this without being any weaker or sicklier. They are simply different, and must direct their lives more quietly and sedately. There is nothing out of order with your circulatory system. Here again you must remind yourself many times a day that the Almighty is in the midst of you, regulating and steadying every function. He is opposed to both overaction and inaction. He insists on a balanced regime.

You and I need spiritual understanding, no doubt, but first we need its approximation, just ordinary common sense and to live in accordance with it, do we not! And common sense means that you should tell yourself every hour that the almightiness of health and the determination to persevere are inherently yours as the expression of consummate Life.




Fading Phantoms — Growths and Their Ilk

There is so much work to be dispatched this morning that instead of writing you directly I will quote from a long letter that just came in from a student in Los Angeles. Here it is:

“Would you like to hear the latest thing that your brand of teaching has accomplished? Several weeks ago a woman was brought to my home, half carried by her husband and daughter, suffering from cancer of the uterus.

“She had been passing blood steadily for over three months and was in an emaciated condition. She walked out of the house unsupported without realizing it. She also stopped flowing on that day.

“The next day she had quite a bit of pain. The fifth day she came back and said, „I have something to tell you,' and then she began to cry. It was a little while before I could pry from her that she had been healed and that the growth had disappeared.

“In two weeks time she has gained twelve pounds and says she feels so strong she can hardly believe it. All of her family have been over to thank me with tears of gratitude. I know this will make you happy.”

We are all expecting to see you back and busy again before long. Do not forget that you are important and needed. And above all do not ever suppose that you can come to an end. You cannot. No one can. All you can do, and you are going to do it, is to find your genuine self — that self of boundless and continuous Life.

I know of a man who was sure he could not be mentally manipulated. So one evening he turned himself over to a professional hypnotist. In a moment he, with other victims, was picking strawberries, wading streams, and doing other fanciful things, right up on the stage, with two hundred people looking on.

Finally he imagined that he had grown twice his normal size and got stuck trying to get through a door. Wriggling to detach himself, he scratched his shoulder on a nail and woke out of the trance. Then he beat it, not stopping to take his hat. What we call disease, whether it assumes the form of a headache or growth, is mesmeric. The individual accepts morbid suggestions, quite unconscious of what is going on, perhaps. Pretty soon he talks them himself. In due course he begins to feel the conditions that have been mentally pictured.

In other words, he yields to the spell and apparently is in a bad way.

Now in your case we must look searchingly and courageously at this morbid mess and reverse the argument.

How shall we do it? By seeing how impossible danger and distress are in a world made and governed by

God, who is best described as Love. He has not made such maladies as you describe. He has not brought them into existence. How then can you experience them?

If you look at a diamond closely you may find a great many tiny flat surfaces. They are called facets. They reflect light. That is very much what you are doing. You are reflecting Life, the irrepressible, diseaseless Life we call God. And you yourself cannot know anything about distress or danger. No possibility here for a growth. Such a thing is mesmeric. It is the case of the man who thought he had grown so immense that he could not get through the door.

Now face this thing, and remember you are dealing with a mental situation. You are dealing with belief, not with growths and headaches. They are not there and they are not yours.

The mesmerize is morbidity. Just talk to it, and talk vigorously and vehemently, and tell it how impotent and how nothing it is. And talk to the symptoms you mention, if you will, and make them depart. You can do it and you have to do it and you will do it.

Since Life is irrepressible there cannot be any of that congested or otherwise restricted condition which you describe. Life can do no less than express itself in you and through you peacefully and uninterruptedly. It is doing so this moment. It will never do otherwise.

Since you are spiritual and incorporeal, there is no material in you out of which to build a growth or tumor. Indeed if such a thing were built, there is no place in you to put it.

There is no creative power to cause or construct such a mirage. Vital Principle is operating in you and through you in that omnipotent way which makes abnormal conditions impossible.

You cannot be held down or made helpless. God is working through you to will and to accomplish His purpose. His will and purpose for you is a free and active and useful life. Nothing can frustrate that purpose.

Whatever is possible to God, is, in sufficient measure, possible to you. You have His strength, His understanding, His power. They are yours. Can you not feel them at work in you this moment?

You can take that ailment and detach it from yourself and put it in dreamland. You can then repudiate and disown the dream. It is not yours. Isolate it.

You are quite right in your expectations that the hospital experts will send their cleverest detectives, in the form of tests, and find nothing wrong in your establishment. Better than this you will discover that these good men are under the control of the Almighty and that He will use them to speed your recovery.

In the meantime keep reminding yourself that Principle is at work in you, building up strength and energizing functions to the extent that you will be able to realize what you have been so often saying, “Perfect God and perfect me.”

There is only one Mind, which builds all things. This Mind does not build abnormalities. It cannot conceive such things. They are therefore unthinkable and inexperienceable. No, they are downright impostors. They can do nothing but slip away.

The universal peace which comes from the Father above extends to you. This peace, as well as unlimited vigor and confidence, reigns supreme in your habitation.

The news in your letter does me an enormous amount of good. Now you and I will not say anything about the victory. We will just be everlastingly grateful for it. And we will keep on working for a week or two, quite as industriously and faithfully as in the past. This guarantees a permanent cure. Sometimes people, in their enthusiasm, let up on their efforts too soon.

You are well made. The Architect who built you knew precisely what He was about. He selected the best of substances. Every one of them has enduring quality. They are bound together and held in place by Principle.

All of which means that you are invulnerable to everything in the nature of disease. You have been established for all time. There is no power that can move you or draw you into danger or distress.

Let me repeat that you are made of enduring substances. They cannot be enlarged or corrupted or changed in any respect from their native state of health and soundness.

Are you sure your mother passed on? The conviction is very strong with me that she has not. Certainly she is alive and well today and carrying on in that undiscovered country in a big and fine way.

Are you sure that she had the malady you suspect you have inherited? Better make sure, I should say, that she did not have it. Perfect God and perfect woman fits her case exactly, and you should know this definitely.

Have you not heard that you are made of intelligence and animation? That they are your substances? That you are spiritual? How in the world can a spiritual woman have anything of the sort you mention?

You must begin right away to talk a different language.

You must stop telling these untrue stories about yourself. Is not woman the noblest work of God? Are you going to say or admit anything to the contrary?

There is no power in this world to make the condition you are fearing. It never has been made. It will not be made for you.

There is nothing to tell your husband about. There is nothing that he will ever discover. The whole thing is an out and out delusion. In other words it is not there. Hence there is nothing for him to see and there is nothing for you to fear.

Now brace up and assert yourself in that fine courageous way that you know so well how to do. Let me hear from you again, of course, and before long.

You will be in good shape for the opening of 1941. Error's jitterings will not disturb you in the least. Are you not a Gibraltar, a veritable giantess, who has no alarm in her make-up?

You will face these difficulties as you have always faced difficulties, in the realization that there is nothing in them but impotence. Life is so all-compelling and allpervading (I mean the life you are living) that you will move along with the courage you need for a swift and permanent freedom.

When people say you are sweet and attractive they are paying you a superlative compliment. Girls are not supposed to be philosophers or even poets. They are expected to be just easy to look at so boys feel strutty when seen in their company.

But you are more than merely attractive. A girl who has had the experience you have had, particularly in country life, cannot help but be interesting to worthwhile people. She is different.

Now to those phantoms called goiters. They are losing their terror these days because, their trickery exposed, they have been taken out of the class of incurables.

There was a time, years ago, when every victim of yellow fever succumbed. But one day an unusually resolute fellow refused to go. Other victims, encouraged by this man's heroism, began to put up a stout fight, until today yellow fever is almost unknown. Goiters will be unknown one of these days. Already are they on the way out. Yours can be disposed of.

Sorry you did not show up at Hunter's Haven. Probably the weather and roads were too much. Maybe you can run down to San Francisco some day soon as originally planned. By all means let me hear from you again.

The Eternal is All, all there is to you. His qualities and properties, and none other, are yours. Among them is unchanging symmetry. How sure is your immunity from such disfigurements as goiter.

There is no creative power back of it. Indeed it is an offense to His creation. It has no power to maintain itself nor is there any external source of nourishment. The thing cannot grow, extend, or do otherwise than fade out, because it has no enduring substance, no crafty stratagem, and no ability to hold on. There is no occasion or excuse for the abnormality in the way of irregular glandular action, because every function of your being is propelled by the Almighty. No gland can resist this undeviating propulsion. It can do no less than perform its work faithfully.

Denounce the imposition as lifeless, inert, nonintelligent, and non-existent, since, as we started out to say, God, who is unassailable Life, is All. Your oneness with Him gives you His strength, His insight, His prerogative to be shapely. You have, in adequate measure, the same dominion over this affront that He enjoys and you can exercise it.

Without doubt you are putting up a valiant defense.

Nobody could do better. Your reward is certain.

The same Principle which put aside those other ailments will presently put that spot where it belongs — out in the airy field of nothingness.

The unsightliness has no cause, no permanence, no mobility. It is senseless, lifeless, and doomed to extinction. It is not anything worth mentioning, for the simple reason that God is All. And God is resplendent Life. There is nothing in you or to you but unblemishable being.

That supposed condition cannot talk to you. Tell it that it cannot. It is inarticulate. Right where it tries to boast is the beauty of being in full sway.

Keep in thought that consciousness is rebuilding you and will produce a structure without fault or defect. We are assured in Scripture, “For then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot.”

Talk these facts to yourself and apply them to the situation. Thereby you set the dynamics of truth in operation. They can be depended upon to bring to light everpresent perfection.

That lump has no substance. It has no staying qualities. It can do nothing but disappear for lack of sustenance. Have no fear or respect for it. Denounce it as a lying deception.

The house built without hands eternal in the heavens is your spiritual structure, constantly and continuously in order. You have no other structure, because you are not two, one material and one spiritual. You are only one and that one is His beloved daughter in whose comeliness He is well pleased.

Mind, the only Mind there is, has never conceived such a fault. Truly it has not been brought forth, for there is no mentality to do such a wicked thing. And best of all there is no mentality of yours to feel or experience it.

Peace and invulnerability pervade your entire system, and there is no power on earth to interfere therewith. Have faith. Presently you will discover that all is well.




Blueprint of Perfection

So you have had less pain. Well, this is what we should expect because that thing called pain is inarticulate. It cannot speak up. It is senseless. When you talk to it in these terms it naturally quiets down and backs out.

Your premises, you know, are in normal condition. Nothing disorderly can be staged or foisted upon them. There is no mind to devise such an abnormality as you describe and no architect to build it. It is a good deal to say, but no exaggeration, that perfection bodies forth in you and can never be converted into imperfection.

So there is no escape from the conclusion that you are stanch and shapely in every detail, a formation of beauteous Life.

I am much pleased with your letter. Since you are “feeling wonderful” you will soon find your figure in better form and color, because with mentality quickened and toned it constructs a prepossessing appearance.

Keep talking the truths we have been talking. Talk them to yourself. The result will be a still more uplifted sense of things and of yourself. You will build another world. This is about what every individual does for himself, builds a world of his own; and he can make it of such dimensions and of such quality as he desires if he is industrious.

Very likely you have forgotten all about that throat ailment you mentioned. Really, you know, Mind directs all the functions of being and therefore nothing in your system can become disturbed or disarranged. There cannot be any additions at any point, nor can there be any subtractions from other places.

All of which adds up to the fact that you are made and maintained in the beauty of wholeness. Just step around and say that you are. Face those difficulties that try to speak to you, and say to them, “You cannot talk these things, they cannot be talked, no one could hear them if they were talked. Principle is established in me and in all my affairs, which spells health and security.”

I hope all the disturbances of the Orient will abate before you reach Hong Kong. They are bad enough at present but suddenly the worst of storms quiet down, you know.

Your cheerful note received; also notes of similar character from your friend.

Of course you are taking things rather easy, content to admit that you have a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens; that you are a synthesis of the vitalities and glories of unquenchable Life; that you have that Mind which sees through the phantoms of disease and recognizes the pattern of perfection.

Do not strain or labor, do not try to prove anything, simply say and admit what Jesus said and admitted, “As the Father hath self-existence so hath He given selfexistence to me.” Here is the existence that never began and can never fail, an existence full of hope and joy, an existence that will endure on and on without fear or interruption.

Everybody asks “why.” Hence you are justified in doing so. But nobody can give the answer. So you and I, along with the rest of humanity, plod along with a little understanding, an immense amount of faith, and with now and then a definite achievement to our credit.

The Almighty is your builder and maker. Certainly He did a good job and guaranteed it would stand the wear and tear. He constructed you in strength and shapeliness. He said: “This girl can have nothing added to her and nothing subtracted from her. She is well-built and I am well-pleased with her.”

Now when any obsession to the contrary hovers about, do the best you can to put it out of thought by contemplating the above truths. You will state them in various ways. As you do so, and hold to them, they will crowd the obsession out of your household, and you will find yourself in good trim.

The physiologists know that you have a new body every year or so. Consciousness does the rebuilding. Keep consciousness as hopeful and balanced as you can. It is building you a new body, some small area every day. By the end of three hundred and sixty-five days you will have an entirely new structure. It can be, and we will expect it, better than the one you had thirty years ago. Meanwhile, bear in mind Edmund Spenser's recipe for beauty:

So every spirit, as it is more pure,

And hath in it the more of heavenly light,

So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairly dight With cheerful grace and amiable sight;

For of the soul the body form doth take; For soul is form, and doth the body make.




Functions Feel Urge of Principle

Principle has everything in your economy perfectly under control, which means that the vomiting and other violences will have to subside.

When you look out in the heavens you observe that moon and stars are perfectly regulated — no disturbances anywhere. The universe enjoys this orderly state because gravity controls.

So everything in you enjoys stability for the reason that Principle holds every part and function of your economy in line. In ordinary parlance, everything in and about you is under control.

Hence it is that whatever you put down your throat will peacefully continue on its way, because Principle is constantly and exclusively operative in your habitation. You see God has a way of exerting His influence at every point.

It is literally true that underneath are the everlasting arms. Thus there can be no shakiness or tottering or stumbling. Just a perfect balance and rectitude. Well do you know it. Repeatedly and intelligently and expectantly do you say it.

Your letter just arrived. It is fortunate you told me the whole story, because the bigger the yarn, the easier to disbelieve it.

Now that power which runs the universe, and it is some power, you know, runs you, and runs everything in and about you. It is a living, an understanding power, and it searches every avenue of your being and propels every function regularly and constantly. Can you not feel it at work right now? Sit quiet a moment and you will.

There is no law against being a little discreet as to what you eat or drink. There are some foods that make tough grinding, you know. You are careful what you pour into your car, and what you throw to the chickens. Well, have a care about yourself. You are easily the best pastry cook in the world, but that does not mean that you have to eat your pies and cakes.

Vegetables and fruits are always easy to get away with, and horses and elephants, even some whole races of men, grow fat and strong and sassy on the diet.

Now this is scolding enough for once. Your chief business is to get well, and you can do it. Every part and parcel of you is still present, as full of vigor and vim as it was the first time I saw you a quarter of a century ago. Give Spirit a chance to polish you up a bit.

Your two letters arrived. The news in them is sparkling. The symptoms described arouse no alarm. How in the world can spiritual man, as such you are, have those symptoms? He cannot be touched by infirmity. He is not, and you are not.

A state of calm confidence, which can look at a distressful situation and view it a presumptuous and fantastic thing apart from the supposed sufferer, is one of the best treatments there is. It beats arguments and pretty phrases.

So sit back once in a while and feel that courage and invoke that vision wherein there is naught but stability and soundness as distinguished from trepidation and corruption.

There is no corruption in your sphere, nothing out of proportion, nothing foreign to perfection. This must be the case, because right there is Life immutable in substance, in form, in functioning. Right there does Principle reign, commanding, “Peace, be still.”

Yes, health and hope prevail in the temple, and you, unafraid and unconfused, know it and sense it.

You are a brick all right, and bricks always win. You have the advantage over other bricks in this that you have keen discernment, a discernment that enables you to appraise yourself as you are, immune to everything hampering or distressful.

Those aches and pains that try to flare up have no initiative. That is why they never can start out and find you. They have not found you yet or attached themselves to you.

You know how dirt apparently attaches itself to a garment. But a little warm water, reinforced by soap, puts the dirt to flight. Then stands forth the miracle, a cleansed garment. The soil never merged with the garment after all.

After the washing or rinsing, the dirt appears to be in the water. Turn the water through a foot of gravel, and the second miracle appears: the water refuses to receive it and the soil goes back to its mother earth where it belongs.

Do not these illustrations show how thoroughly you are insulated against disease?

These errors that are trying to harass you have gained no foothold. They will be duly detached and isolated one of these days. Unharmed and unscathed you will come out of this experience better than ever.




Skin and Complexion Freshness

You are in the period of life, obviously, when wisdom hints that you hit a slower pace than formerly. The skin difficulty and the despondency may come about through overexertion and over-anxiety, do you not suspect? Try to find a way of being reasonable with yourself. Do not drive her so hard.

A change in your mood will result in a change in that skin difficulty. The specialists agree that such disorders are often due to strain and nervousness, overwork and suchlike. They are a sort of protest that the inner man or woman puts up when he is crowded too hard and perhaps even misused. So be good to yourself. It is the great secret, I believe.

But above and beyond all is the simple fact that universal Mind is the only Ego, the only thinker, the only knower, the only feeler. Mind has not produced this condition and does not know anything about it. You have that Mind, and no other. That Mind is your ego. You cannot feel or experience anything that that Mind does not cognize or experience. Get very busy about seeing this point and gaining its signification.

Says Samuel Longfellow:

Thy calmness bends serene above My restlessness to still;

Around me flows Thy quickening Life To nerve my faltering will:

Thy presence fills my solitude; Thy providence turns all to good.

Again, may I remind, you are equal to the situation. You can overcome all the impedimenta, spots, lumps, and what have you, as you bind that strong man of deception whom Scripture warns against.

And you bind him by knowing that the Almighty is in the midst of you, alert to every emergency. He is the master engineer who operates all the machinery of your life.

He knows just how to put His hand on each trespasser, tie him hand and foot, and eject him from the house — and He just delights in doing so. Fortunate are you to have such a defender.

Probably the cause of your husband's skin irritation is the fussing that has been going on for months in the household and at the shop. Now that it has subsided, his inner self should quiet down. With calm inners he should soon have complacent outers. Makes sense, does it not? This is about what any specialist would say, I suspect.

And since the Almighty is in undisputed control of you and of your affairs and of your household, you will rapidly take on that peace and confidence which will promote all the health and strength and joy you can use.

The truth is, you are made every whit whole and there is no power on earth to question that wholeness, but there is a certain power that will remove illusions. It is that Light which shines in darkness, that Light which symbolizes Life. And that Light is in you.

Your complexion cannot cut up. Such a performance would interfere with the peaceful reign that the Almighty has established. Spots and suchlike are the things which have no place or substance. In plain language, they are not. They cannot be because the enginery of your being is in perfect working order. It works so peacefully and efficiently that irregularities and blemishes cannot get a look-in. Now remember, there is no cause or momentum back of them. They are no more than phantoms, anyhow.

The freshness and color inherent in Life shine forth flawlessly in you as certainly as you live.

Yes, as we agreed over the telephone, that epidermic condition is senseless and lifeless. Hence it has no power to expand or develop. Its only choice is to fade out, and fade out it will as you energetically dispute its presence as having no animation, substance or locale.

A man of spiritual structure, and you are precisely that, affords no lodging place for such brazenness.

Of course spiritual being, and there is no other, has no surfaces subject to irritation. The Almighty occupies every inch of your habitation. So jealous is He that He will permit no intruders. This is why you can abide in ease and quietude.




The Focus of Divine Energies

Indeed nice of you to write. I appreciate hearing from you. Write again whenever you feel like it.

You are quite correct in insisting that you are the temple of the living God — the place where the vitalities and energies and intelligences of Life focus. When they come together, they make you. What do they make you? They make you a woman. What sort of a woman? A woman upright and God-like.

As you talk these propositions to yourself, and think them over, you see how true they are. Then it is that you feel more hopeful and more vigorous. In this mood you become acquainted with yourself, to find that you are well-made.

You are a compound of the properties of the Eternal. Among them is not one alien quality, not one weakness or discouragement or pain. You are whole, sound, and intact — full of strength, yes, and just as full of confidence and faith. Get up and walk around and talk these things you know so well.

You say you will try harder, which means, in one aspect, that you will take things easier. Give the good Lord a chance to set your affairs in order. He will do it if you remain quiet once in a while. He will even tell you what to do. He will make your household and family affairs more ideal, of course He will.

The improvement you have been experiencing is indicative of what is ahead for you. We will keep working in the way pointed out in past letters. Then you will get in a mood where consciousness can form you anew.

It was delightful to see you yesterday. Now do not forget that we agreed that you are a composite of every quality that can be found in the Almighty, just as a ray of light is a composite of every quality that can be found in the sun. You do not have to struggle and grab for those qualities. You have them. Together they make you the perfect woman we are talking about.

And every gadget in the machinery of your being is in perfect order and running so smoothly that you hardly realize that it is running.

What about all those troublesome symptoms you told me about? They are the deceptions, the spectrals, the shadows — here today, apparently, gone tomorrow.

Keep in thought that you are filled with the peace and power, which will enable you to rest at night and enable you to get about normally in the daytime.

Try to recognize your identity with the sublimity of endless Life. You are identical with it. Say so and gather the significance of the fact. There is nothing to you but this endless Life with all its vigors and glories.

The only Life and the only Mind are the Eternal, and you have them — you have them constantly. They are the basis of every act and movement. That is why your actions, movements, and thinking can be in the realm of perfection, the four-dimensional world, where peace and freedom reign uncontested.




Open Spaces of Voice and Song

From what you report, progress certainly is under way. The Architect of the universe built you so faultlessly that there cannot be any obstruction or stuffiness in any part of your structure. Rather, wide open spaces are the rule.

Hence your breathing and singing apparatus is in prime order, and you feel that it is, because you have that

Mind which cognizes things as they are, and they are wellconstructed and well-conditioned.

Mind does the singing and the breathing — that allknowing and all-living Mind we call God. There is no other mentality or power, and you have it, so that when this Mind sings and breathes you have your participation in the program. Singing, when all is said and done, is a divine process, and there is no evil that can thwart or interfere with it. Free and untrammeled it swells and soars through the boundless areas of the empyrean.

Let me hear from you again soon. But be sure to keep up the expansive talking with yourself. It means everything.

Probably you are right in your conclusion that you had better trudge along alone for a while. I am confident you will discover ere long that everything is hunky-dory. Complete recovery is assured, because every part and portion of you, including your faculties of sight and hearing, are built of such enduring substance and in such matchless quality. They will not fear or falter.

The Eternal has opened up a channel in the form of song through which you can make this a more tolerable world for multitudes, and the Eternal is not in the habit of having His projects defeated. He will keep that channel expanded and productive.

The plain fact is that you feel the full power and urge and ease of being. This sensation leaves no room for throatiness or chokiness. Your structure is as open as open can be. Not a thing in the way anywhere. And your being is so thoroughly fluid that your efforts know no restraint or hindrance.

Neither disease, surgery, nor age has ever touched you. Wholeness, soundness, and action abound in your habitation whether you call the particular spot throat, chest, or whatnot. Right there Life in all its glory and irrepressibility is carrying on.

I will be happy to hear from you or to see you any time that you feel the inclination. Meanwhile I am confident that you will keep going with increasing vigor and satisfaction.

You are a courageous soldier to persevere in your case alone, but you are not alone when you remember that the Almighty is All. Reason out this tremendous statement, God is All, several times a day. The result will be certain and pronounced.

This kind of reasoning is so much better than the commonplace chatter and the repetition of purloined phrases. It brings out that sense of your oneness with supreme Being, which you mention in your letter; and oneness is the whole story. It spells the glory and the dominion. Says the poet:

O, child, this moment thy breath is Mine — Hush, listen! thy pulse beats now with Mine. Dawn, and a star, and the sea unfurled,

And a miracle hush hanging over the world!

It is quite all right for you to share my letters with anyone who will be helped thereby. I have just read from a book on voice placement: “The power to realize ideas quickly and intensely is at the basis of all eloquence and all true vocal expression.”

So it is that a vivid realization that Life, the very Life that animates us, is the sole power of the universe, immediately lends steadiness and strength to every fiber and function.

It is obvious from what you write that your thought is expanding. Well-conditioned and unconfused, you stand in true giantry, the master of situation after situation in the daily round of experience.




Asthma, Hay Fever, Sinus Eradicated

That stuffiness called catarrh or sinus trouble cannot keep up. Certainly it cannot extend its area. It has no mobility or existence even. Tell yourself every hour that Life is perpetually and peacefully in operation throughout your system without interference at any point. As you talk along this line consciousness will form you anew.

You can say all you like about being discouraged and hopeless, but I do not believe a word of it. What is more, I do not believe there is anything out of commission in your constitution. Is not plenteous Life, and copious Mind all — all there is to you? There is not a stuffiness in a carload of girls of your caliber.

Nothing in your make-up except penetrative Mind, or, maybe you would say, Life incontestable and searching. That is what you are — Mind and Life in action. You are in them and they are in you. You are not a little Topsy waif. You and the Almighty are one. You have what He has and you have nothing else.

Talk a great deal to yourself along these lines — talk every hour. And end up your interview by admitting, “Mine is the kingdom, the power, the dominion, the glory, the victory.”

Now dig in. We both will. There is nothing in the hindrance to confuse or alarm or continue. You are master of the situation. Say to the annoyance, “Get out and stay out.” You can.

You are due for another study sheet in the form of a letter. You see, as you try to lay hold of the truths which gather around perfect God and perfect boy, those truths gather around him and lift him out of his sinus maze, if he thinks he has any. Immediately he feels movement and openness and freedom. The stuffiness and heaviness vaporize.

There is nothing to you but Life — absolutely nothing. How in the world can boundless Life know anything about congestion and other sinus aggravations? It cannot and it does not. Neither need you.

Yes, you are all Life. There is nothing else to you. Life, when it cropped out as you, did not lose its original status of healthfulness and spaciousness.

I do not believe the good Lord knows anything about your impatience or undue sense of responsibility or any other idiosyncracy; and of course those traits do not have the remotest relation to hay fever. They are no impediment to your recovery. Nevertheless they are bothersome businesses, so why not develop that poise and tranquillity which snuff them out.

But since the kingdom of God is within you, that is, the kingdom of radiant Life, the symptoms of hay fever cannot invade your economy. Turn on them as General Patton turned on the Nazis.

You are master of the situation because you have the allknowing Mind, that Mind which understands how to cope with difficulties and how to see yourself as you are. And you are within the scope of perfect God and perfect man.

Someday, and that pretty soon, Principle is going to seize that sneezing and pitch it out of the window. Then the place thereof will know it no more.

When it comes to difficult breathing, recall these lines from Emily Bronte:

Though Thou were left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee. Thou — art Being and Breath,

And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

The experts agree that asthma and bronchial difficulties are many times due to a nervousness, which tends to close the air cells and passages. With a restoration of confidence the avenues of breath reopen.

How free and omnipotent breath is, after all. It shows forth the power of endless being. Exuberant Life cannot be congested or compressed. Life is boundless and unconfined. No obstruction can be raised to its perpetual and peaceful flow to the remotest parts. Certainly worry, apprehension, and atmosphere cannot stay its course.

Expansiveness in your structure, rather than congestion or inflammation, is the undeviating rule. The sniffle and throatiness that loom so large to your sense are quite unobserved by others. It is often your ear that deceives you into supposing your voice inadequate.

The spiritual structure of man, and hence the unstoppable quality of his economy, are hinted in Jesus' statement to Nicodemus: “The wind bloweth where it pleaseth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.”

Everyone is born of the Spirit. You are. Hence your security and permanence in every detail.

The kingdom of God is within you, and in that kingdom there is no possibility of colds, asthma, or hay fever finding lodgment. As we were just saying over the telephone, you are filled with the vitality and the ability to be up and about your work.

Always come back to the fundamental fact that you are spiritual not material. This explains why you cannot have inflammation, congestion, or bronchial irritation. Your vocal apparatus is as clear as a bell.

Have no worry. Colds and their like cannot develop. Their only choice is to depart. They cannot endure the warmth of the very truth you and I are now talking.

These bronchial disorders are not structural. They are largely nervous tension. An uplift in mood removes their supports. Life cannot tighten. In its very nature it is expansive, constantly in action and on the move. And that action and movement are nothing less than omnipotent. Relax a moment and get the significance of all this.

The Eternal is directing the functions of your being, vocals included. Try to take it easy. Coughing has no energy back of it. It is senseless and lifeless, inarticulate and voiceless to the extent that it cannot utter a sound or protest.

You are going to discover pretty soon that everything in your economy is going on under the peaceful propulsion of the omnipotent One. We will keep working and looking toward that end.




Recourse to Medicine and Surgery

From the tone of your letter I suspect that you are halting between medical and metaphysical treatment.

There is nothing unusual or serious about this hesitancy. Take your time in reaching a decision.

In the first two weeks of the idealist's enthusiasm he may fancy that the physician and apothecary will soon be out of business. But as time goes on he becomes more tolerant of a curative system that has prevailed for centuries. Society is not transformed overnight. He discovers that some miscalled materialists possess as much spirituality as the avowed spiritual healer, and more experience and resourcefulness. From that time on he concedes that medicine and surgery still have their place in the world, if not for him then for others. His prejudice and aloofness vanish.

As a rule it is not well to mix different systems of healing. Yet, like most rules, this one is subject to modification. There may be times of acute distress or prolonged suffering where the seasoned idealist will think it better to resort, temporarily, to material remedies. Here is a field where people will naturally follow the dictates of their own judgment. They will not be influenced by those who have never felt the touch of severe sickness. No one can be sure what he may do under the pressure of distress.

Experience gives a certain balance and soberness to idealism which keeps the over-zealous from walking out on the water. Primarily the sick desire relief. They want to be put on their feet without undue delay so that they may go comfortably about their work or business. Getting well justly takes on huge proportions in their thought.

So think the matter over. Keep up your reading and expectations. Write again one of these days.

In extremis it is often advisable, for reasons not necessary here to set forth, to call a physician. Metaphysical treatment can of course be kept up.

Life is not necessarily extinct because the patient ceases to breathe. He still thinks, he still lives. He has not yet left the body, perhaps. He hears what those around him are saying. He gets their thoughts and is influenced by them. Be careful therefore what you say or think. People, seemingly gone, have been brought back by positive, vehement reminders that life is continuous. Audible appeals to them are particularly effective. They hear and, responding, reject the mesmeric call to leave. They are in the valley of indecision. Do not abandon them the moment of apparent departure and allow them to drift away when prompt, incisive encouragement may induce them to remain and carry on their responsibilities here.

Children present plenty of problems these days, as you say. Well, they always have and particularly in the realm of health and sanitation. Do your best to extinguish the supposed power and inevitability of what are known as children's diseases. The home atmosphere reacts on youngsters. They thrive when harmony prevails. Discord has its consequences.

Contagion and infection must be intelligently faced. Everyone has the ability to detect the ordinary types of communicable diseases. He has respect for laws and regulations which have been prescribed to prevent their spread. The adult will isolate himself. He does not need to feel the arm of compulsion. Children will obey parents or guardians and stay in. They will not go to school or otherwise mingle with outsiders.

It is the duty of parents and householders, as everyone knows, to report communicable diseases to the health officer, in order that he may take such means as he thinks best for isolating the contagion. The regulations he prescribes will be observed without argument. Nobody likes to be quarantined, but here is a case where individual convenience must yield to the public welfare.

You did right last evening, following the crash, to immediately call a surgeon to look you over. In cases of accident experience has shown the wisdom of enlisting the services of an M.D. This of course does not prevent supplementing his efforts with metaphysical treatment.

It should be easy, should it not, for the Almighty to make a man, skilled in medicine and surgery, an instrument for hastening recovery. Anyhow no one need be afraid of practitioners of this system. The world is far from having outgrown the need of them. Here and there an individual may have done so, and yet no one knows what he may do in the stress of circumstances.

Better not shout from the housetops that you are through with doctors. Nice people and prudent do not indulge in such unseemly boasts. It sometimes looks as though the devil accepts the challenge and tests the unwary braggart.

So you are on the road to motherhood. You will not mind then if I offer a few recommendations. Fear is one of the major difficulties, if difficulties there are. This is why physicians like to have metaphysical assistance. They have found that it definitely relaxes tension and establishes that confidence which makes the situation easier for them as well as for the patient.

In obstetrics we do not avoid the best means experience has brought forth. A competent surgeon is consulted of course. A hospital has the advantage that professional experts and suitable appliances are always at hand. It is perfectly obvious why doctors like to have their patients there, and doubtless the patient is better off there than she would be in many situations you can think of.

Naturally the prospective mother will consult a physician from time to time during the period of gestation. She should also consult with a metaphysical practitioner regularly, who will hold to the fact that Mind is directing the entire enterprise and that Life exuberant is developing and taking form in accordance with the law of perfection.

Everything in the patient's economy is unobstructed. She lives in an unobstructed realm. She is unrestricted herself. The functions of her economy will perform without fear or distress. Nothing can interfere with the unfoldment of the joyous event.

It is easy to bring forth an idea, is it not? No obstructions or interferences of any sort. Well man, even if he is not yet a day old, is an idea. No impedimenta to his coming into the world. On the contrary everybody welcomes his debut. The neighbors bring in toys and garments. Even the stars in their courses pause to lend a hand.

Think and work along these lines and a fine youngster will be added to a population which needs fine youngsters.




Diagnoses and Examinations

So you have been advised to have a diagnosis. Would it not be grand if life were so transparent that the experts could tell precisely what ails us, and, having told us, could put us on our feet quickly and definitely? But nobody who has lived in this world long has found life so simple at any crucial point.

Hence when you ask for advice about submitting to diagnosis, I naturally hesitate to offer an opinion, because I have known of good results following diagnosis, but on the other hand I have known of alarm and confusion — a loss of morale.

Certainly I will not abandon your case if you have a check-up. I will not abandon it even if you go to a hospital. You see the topmost tenet of metaphysical practice is to do the kindly thing. And it is not the kindly thing to abandon a frightened soul groping about for salvation.

You write that you feel like having a diagnosis or checkup. Have you not noticed how everyone desires certainty? People demand that ideas and situations be set forth in black and white, not in grey. They want to know even the worst. If sick they want to know what the disease is, what its name is, so that it can be seized and pitched out. But as we have just observed there is no way of finding out, and there is no way of pitching out, with any degree of certainty. Anybody, qualified to speak, will tell you just this.

The weakness with hospital observation, X-rays, and other tests is that they go no farther than material appearances. They seldom consider the emotional and psychological. They never reach reality. If they should reach reality, they would find perfection, would they not? I have known of sick folk taking a metaphysical treatment, or even doing a little clear thinking on their own account, before they submitted to a check-up, and joyously receiving a report from the subsequent diagnosis that all is well.

One time long years ago I casually put in print a statement something like this:

“Life in its fullness and exclusiveness functions adequately at all times and in all places. Not the tiniest area in your economy is overlooked by Life in its work of construction and maintenance. Originally built of that stuff eternity is made of, your structure is safe against impairment or encroachment. The suppositional forces of decay and disintegration are powerless to invade what are designated teeth and gums. Soundness and stability are the rule of every particle of your make-up.

“Hold thought faithfully to these simple yet constructive facts, even before dental difficulties actually intrude themselves upon your attention. But if they already seem to have arrived, hold to these same truths, consistently and steadfastly, and consciousness will reconstruct your mouth on normal lines.

“Someday, in the higher reaches of thought, you will realize that your integrity has never been invaded; that your perfection is now as it was when the morning stars sang together, and that really there has been no occasion for repair or rebuilding.”

I have since been happified to have people report, from time to time, substantially as follows: “I had consulted a dentist. He gave me a date for filling my tooth. Meanwhile I read your statement. When I seated myself to have the cavity filled, the dentist found a sound tooth.”

What wrought the change? The patient got some hint of reality. Reality, you know, is undecayed and undecayable. If you will believe that you are a specimen of reality, and hold to the fact with its implications, you may discover that yours is an enduring, a permanent structure, perfectly built and perfectly maintained.

So before resorting to material tests, why not know your perfection with such clarity and faithfulness that neither the X-ray nor any other process will condemn you. The errors, if such there be, that harass you, are not of the tangible sort, fundamentally. They cannot be touched or handled or seen. But they can be seen through, and the discerning, courageous man looks right through and past them into reality. There is no mystery about the process. You resort to it every day when you refuse to be mesmerized or confused by assertions or symptoms of sickness.

Have no anxiety about that approaching physical examination. Since you are well made of that enduring substance called Spirit, the examiners may apply their most rigorous tests, X-ray and so on, only to find that you embody soundness and wholeness.

Have no fear. Rather have every confidence that you are without fault or blemish. Nothing to the contrary can be detected for it is not there.

Keep in mind that the examiners are kindly and just and principled men. This means they will report truly on your case and give you the bill of health you are entitled to. Principle governs the whole situation.

Since you are whole and sound throughout, all the tests, blood or otherwise, known to the physicians, will not bring out anything other than a favorable report. You will not have to go through any anxious period or tedious treatment. You will only have to be the nice, sensible woman you always have been.

I just turned over the leaves of a document on my desk to find the following: “Life is self-existent. It is not caused; it is not created. God does not make life; God is Life. Hence it is that Life must be impregnable.

“Spiritual man, and truly there is no other type, is the expression of this Life. He is the highest witness to its presence. Really therefore sickness and infirmity cannot molest him — cannot molest you. Disease is seeming or mesmeric rather than actual. Hence its curability by healthful thinking.”




Personal Sense a Perjurer

Symptoms of disease are well defined as perjurers. Now a perjurer is not an ordinary liar. He is a crafty, calculating liar. Some call him personal sense or mortal mind or what have you.

He is a liar and the father of lies. Liars and lies and obsessions all belong in that supposititious world — the wild world of unreality. So those things and conditions which we regard as existent in the unreal or supposititious realm are nowhere. No one knows anything about them. No one experiences them.

Disease does not have to be destroyed or eradicated. The whole curative process is a process of enlightenment — a mode of thinking, a clarity of consciousness, which knows nothing about sickness and mortality.

There are not two worlds; there are not two minds; there are not two lives; there are not two kinds of men; but one God, one Mind, one Life, one kind of man. And that man knows nothing of disease and never has known anything of it, because he is the expression or outcropping of that selfexistent Life which is whole and sound.

Man can know nothing of mortality, for the simple reason that he is a man. He does not know anything about stripes because he is not a zebra.

There is only one world and it is a glorious place of plenty and security and joyousness. And there is only one Mind and it knows only those things of Life abundant. There is only one Life and that a jealous Life, which covers the whole ground and insists upon its rights, its privileges, its immunities.

Error is not even a perjurer. It is non-existent. We must take a radical stand and persist in it expectantly. This takes courage of course. But you have courage. Courage is one of man's outstanding qualities.

Here alertness comes into play. But you have alertness. Remember the zebra and the gnu. The gnu has a keen scent for lions. He does not permit the king of beasts to sneak up and crouch for a spring. He charges him while yet afar off and bowls him over. Whereas the fat, sleepy zebra falls an easy prey. Hence he wisely fraternizes with the homely gnu and enjoys the protection of the gnu's superior vigilance.

Lurking dangers, whether disease or whatnot, are inherently cowards. All you and I need to do, and it is considerable, is to detect their approach and to assume a determined aggressiveness, never letting up until they are driven back into their native jungle of nothingness.

In the realm of reality there is no such thing as disease. No such thing as age. No such thing as mortality. Mind unconfused cannot conceive such things; cannot feel or experience them. We have only to let God's thoughts be in us. Then instead of seeing things in a limited, distorted, or sickly condition, we shall see them as they are in their fullness and resplendency.

We are looking right at them this moment. You are contemplating yourself right now in all the beauty of being. You are not becoming. You have arrived.

This letter is dashed off in a few hurried moments just before my return to Boston. It was a great meeting we had and tremendous will be the consequences. Do plenty of reading during the year to come, by all means, but also do plenty of thinking. Reason is man's distinguishing mark. There are creatures who do not reason, it is said. If you surrender your reason to the printed page or to the voluble talker, you may forfeit your distinctiveness as a man. Do not do it. Use your reason to the limit. You have the same access to allknowing Mind that the prophets have.




Dreams Leave No Scars

Keep in mind every hour that you are not a soul and a body, but that you are a mentality, an intelligence, a consciousness, a soul. This means that you cannot be hurt or touched or endangered by any material means or device. You are absolutely invulnerable to danger — safe under the shadow of the Almighty.

Your identity is Spirit, is Life, not matter or corporeality. This Life knows no malady, no beginning, no end. It is God Himself, finding expression in you. You are as safe and eternal as He is.

Knowing these things, you will approach any situation with calm confidence. You will realize that He holds you safe within His ample palm. His care and solicitude will not depart from you one single second.

He is Principle — animate, intelligent, benevolent Principle. Principle sustains and directs you. Principle directs every individual that contacts you, whether practitioner, nurse, or doctor. Which means that whatever is done around your environs is unerringly and rightly done.

Have your local practitioner keep up the work. Have her put in plenty of time. I will stand by. There is no doubt about winning.

Long ago I should have reminded you, by letter, that yours is a spiritual structure, which has not been handled or even touched by any mortalities, or by any material remedies or instruments. This means that your integrity holds fast. Lowell paints the picture:

'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,

'Tis the natural way of living:

Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake.

I have just returned to the office. Wanted to phone you from Lansing but your whereabouts were so indefinite. Saw your Papa and Mama. They were in the pink of condition, it seems to me, having an unusually happy time. Sorry, awfully, to have missed you.

Somehow I would not rush into the doctor's hands. Cases like yours are straightened out by metaphysical treatment. In fact I have some on hand right now that are doing very well indeed.

A little irritation in those inner parts which are sensitive and out of sight makes one think the world is coming to an end. The same irritation on the back of your hand would give you no concern at all.

So try to minimize the thing. Try even to exterminate it. There is nothing to you but Life in all its glory. And this glory has a permanence that cannot be disturbed even temporarily.

Suppose you write me again, rather more in detail, and we will see what can be done about it all. Perhaps you should consult the doctor further, but I cannot help thinking you should hesitate a bit and try milder methods.

So the operation is over and you feel relieved. Well, it will be a comfort and a defense for you to say once in a while: “The malady was not and the surgery was not.

Neither of them has touched or moved me. How could they when my structure is spiritual? Hence it is that I am still intact and sound. Nothing out of condition or out of place in my entire economy. Perfect peace and soundness prevail. It cannot be otherwise, because the Almighty stands guard and forbids the entrance of any alien.”

Then as you begin to think about the Almighty, you gather courage to admit that He is so close as to be one with you — and you say, “I am in Him and He is in me. Since He is mighty I must be mighty; since He is eternal, I am also.”

Have you ever tried to say to yourself, “Perpetually exuberant Life issues forth as me?” If you try real hard you can say it. The second time will be easier. You can say it forty times a day. The mere saying will do something for you.

That surgery you mention never happened, because you are spiritual in structure, intelligence rather than corporeality. And intelligence cannot be touched by material instruments or ailments. Every part of you therefore is in perfectly good trim today. This is why we say you are whole, sound, intact, and at peace at every point and in every respect.

We will keep working, which means you will keep talking to yourself constructively. Now be careful to repudiate that surgery, with the conditions it was aimed at. They never have entered your habitation. You can still say, “Perfect God and perfect me.”




Immunity from Hurt or Flaw

We must put those X-ray pictures, which the experts have been taking of you, out of thought. With them eradicated you will calm down and soon be as tough as a bear.

In fact you are already. There is not a thing out of commission. You are not scared. You have not even been misrepresented by those technicians. The whole affair is a dream. And the dream is not yours. You are now, and have been all the time, safe and sound; and what is more, you know it.

Now banish those pictures, stop thinking about the whole incident, and be yourself.

Congratulations on your victory. Do not be shouting from the housetops, though. Why tell other people? You will even hesitate to tell yourself, but you will be continuously grateful and active to the end that the whole business be forgotten. Now is the time for your best work. No excuse for the reappearance of the malady even in a mild form. Nothing to reappear since the thing never was.

And the good Lord knows full well that you can fill that job. He will place you in it unless He has a position where you are more needed.

Physical examination? They may resort to the most searching tests but will find no fault because the Almighty set up your establishment in His usually grand way long ago, and continues to so maintain it.

Remember that the Eternal is in the midst of you, and He alone. Nothing of yours therefore can be out of place or out of order. Quiet and harmony prevail. Denounce everything to the contrary as a lying imposition.

Remember too that the Eternal is in your home and will not permit it to be invaded by foreigners, whether people or problems. Of course you have a right to peace and the good Lord will see that you have it. Now expect this. Things will calm down and the number of household invaders decline.

Yes, the Eternal is such a jealous God that He is going to clear up your entire establishment. He will not tolerate anything about the place, whether you call the place body or house or whatnot, that disputes His glorious reign.

You do not have to put up with the mess you mention. Now stride around and say: Mine is the kingdom, the power, the dominion, the victory. You are not strutting when you talk this way. You are asserting the truth, that truth which will bring relief. You are actually praying.

Remind yourself every day: “Eternal Life bodies forth in me and becomes me. It constitutes my sole existence. It remains eternal Life, unchanged and unimpaired. I and eternal Life, then, are one and Eternal Life is the One.”

After all you never really fell. How could you when underneath are the everlasting arms? And even if you fell, how could you be hurt when your structure is spiritual? You can no more be injured than a thought or an idea. Yes, you have always lived in security and you live there now. And you have always lived in peace and painlessness, and you do so now. Remind yourself of these facts very frequently.

Those gums and teeth, like the rest of you, are in good trim. Mind does not overlook a single area in your economy. And it does not overlook that area called the mouth. It is cleansing, nourishing, and rebuilding there as occasion demands, thereby keeping the place in sanitary condition.

I was pleased indeed to receive your letter and to learn that you are getting about more and coming definitely into your freedom. About ninety per cent of our troubles, at least, come from fear. And fear has its foundation in the belief that we live in a material body.

Such belief results at once in a sense of danger, because a material body can be hurt by accident, overcome by disease, and finally put entirely out of commission. Just so long as we believe that we live in a mortal frame, we shall be haunted by a sense of peril.

But when we abandon this mistaken concept of ourselves as limited and compressed within a physical form and begin to lay hold of the fact that we are incorporeal and spiritual, buoyant and free — begin to see that we are outside the body rather than in it — we shall overcome fear, and with fear overcome, mentality will give more harmonious direction to the body and its functions.

Your note of the fifteenth received. By all means run in if you visit San Francisco. It will be a pleasure to see you again and talk matters over.

The merriment of V-J day is mighty stimulating medicine for you, and for everyone else, because, according to Scripture, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”

Vital Principle is perpetually merry, and this Principle is carrying on all over your place. So exclusively is He carrying on that He rules out and expels every intruding ailment and establishes strength and the joy of being.

Now keep reminding yourself frequently of this fact, and the other facts we have been bringing to light recently, because your full recovery is the important business of the day, and that recovery can be accomplished. We are well on the way to it. Both of us, working together, should and will do a good job. “Are not two prayers a perfect strength?” asks Dante Gabriel Rossetti.




The Circulatory System

Everything in your constitution is governed by active Principle. It is the balance wheel which sees to it that no function gets too rapid or too slow. That blood pressure which you mention cannot go on. In other words, your circulatory system, in its every part and aspect, operates with the persistent movement of divine energy. It will neither be feeble nor boisterous, but sustained and rhythmic.

Now remember there is nothing for you to get fearful or nervous about. You are perfectly well-made. Nothing can interfere with the quiet of your being, because your being after all is supreme Being.

I will give your case thorough attention. You will find yourself improving.

Your letter came two or three days ago. Of course you are making progress. You cannot help it when you keep in thought that untrammeled Life does your living. Hence it is that you have the strength, health, and confidence of the normal woman. Hence it is that your faculties are keen and alert.

Irrepressible Life functions at every point, which means that all the machinery of your being is operating peacefully and energetically. Action, and that full and free, is inevitable. You feel its glowing and constant stir.

Why not say once in a while, “Mine is the kingdom and the power and the glory and the victory?” This is no exaggeration, for does not Scripture say that the kingdom of God is within you? What more can you ask? Do not ask it. Say it, admit it. Are you not feeling better already?

Life is the Almighty who is in the midst of you, and who promises: “I will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on me.”

Your last letter states in effect that you do not see any particular change for the better, although your previous letter described how successful you were one day in walking to church. Your experience that day shows the possibilities. Doubtless it would have been better if you had not overtaxed yourself on that occasion. Nevertheless you cannot help admitting that what you did that Sunday you can do again and again.

It is clear enough to me, and probably it is to you, that the difficulty is mental rather than physical. It is fear and its allies that have in a measure frozen you up. With a little more boldness you will thaw out and walk around like other people. Life should not be cramped up in the way you describe.

It cannot be and really is not. If an occasion for quick and radical action on your part should arise, like a sudden cry of fire, you would be on your feet and out of the house in a jiffy. And you will be up and about, enjoying your usual freedom, as fast as you attain a normal mental attitude.

What is there to fear? Is Life in any danger? Who or what can threaten Life or put it in jeopardy? Nothing can. Because Life is not only harmonious and eternal, but it is untouchable by anything in the nature of disease or age or accident. Life is God.

And this Life we are talking about is your life, unfettered and uncontaminated, without any beginning, without any end, without any perturbance.

Hemorrhage is an old-time bugbear. Its only hope for continued mischief lies in the belief that man is material. There is no such man, truly, and therefore there cannot be a hemorrhage disquieting or endangering existence.

The truth that cures hemorrhage is the plain, yet revolutionary, fact that man is spiritual. He is intelligence, not corporeality. There can be no blood in intelligence or incorporeality. How then can any ooze out? It cannot. A recognition of this verity, held to persistently and expectantly, has stopped many a bleeding. It will stop yours.




Relapse and Reassurance

When an ailment is cured it comes to an end. It cannot return. If there seems to be a relapse it is not a recurrence but a new manifestation of disorder, perhaps stimulated by fear or expectation.

Now the next time you extinguish the malady by realizing its nothingness, remember that it is extinguished, which means that there is nothing to recur or to return. Euripides makes a woman in one of his plays observe: “When once I saw the truth, there was no drug that I could take to unsee it and lose again what once I had seen.”

It was mighty pleasant to hear of your definite improvement. Now is the time, while you feel better, to put in your best recuperative work. Do not talk to people about your recovery. “See thou tell no man,” is the Biblical injunction. Certainly do not exult. Your friends will note quickly enough that you are getting better. You have only to go quietly about your business, every hour expressing your gratitude silently.

The good Lord has been with you thus far. Surely He will continue to strengthen and carry you on.

Of course the shortness of breath cannot come back. It is gone for good. As a matter of fact it never was. There is nothing to come back. So we will have no fear in that direction.

Eternal Mind, the only mentality there is, never heard of such a thing as shortness of breath. How then can you hear of such a thing or experience it? You are not going to from now on. You are a veritable giant, who can face this deception and walk about in comfort.

A prodigious worker you are to respond so quickly and definitely. Now may I play the role of a doctor by urging you to take things easy, very easy, for a spell. Many people, after being lifted out of a difficulty, plunge right into full activity, socially or workingly. The experience of all practitioners, medical or metaphysical, shows that this is not wise.

So, may I say again, do not unduly draw on your energies in having a good time or in housekeeping or in any way whatever. First get thoroughly on your feet. You will accomplish more in the long run.

When you write next time do not forget to tell me that you are doing this very thing. You have discovered that you are an important person, whose existence in this world as a going concern is essential to the well-being of your family, not to mention a much wider circle.

Now that you are pretty much at peace is the time for you to work on this problem — work to undermine and annihilate it so that there will be no recurrence. Do not wait till illness pops up again, but put in your best licks right now. That is what I am doing and it is what you must do.

There is no cause or urge back of the thing. Hence it cannot spring into action. There is nothing to spring. The whole bugaboo is nil and null, silence implying harmony.

Now do not let down on the job. Be active and bring this unhappy business to an end.

Moving that heavy furniture had more to do with your difficulty than anything else. There comes a time in life when one should be prudent and not run out in storms or lift cook stoves or even shout about his victories.

Many a time did Jesus warn his people, after putting them on their feet, to say nothing about their healing. There is a reason for this, you know. To boast over one's recovery amounts to daring the malady to reappear. It will even provoke your friends, in commenting on the situation, to remark: “Well, we will see; she is not over this yet.” Such adverse thinking is not good for one.

You are doing an excellent job with those patients. They represent types that you will encounter occasionally as you surge ahead in practice.

It is not difficult to see, is it, that mood or temperament has much to do with the patient's recovery or nonrecovery. If he would only half try, instead of wonder and complain, the victory would be won more quickly.

Hence feel no discouragement. Go ahead. Your efforts are never wasted. Indeed I will be surprised if Charley does not step out as good as new one of these days. Tell him I give him a boost occasionally as time permits.

And Mary, in sending a dollar, does not show any great appreciation or expectation. She would not think anything of paying several times as much for a hat. How little some people value their lives, after all. What are you and I going to do about it? Just take it easy. Do not let them aggravate you. Plug along and do your best.

I have been wondering how you are getting along. Somehow I feel as though you were making substantial progress. If you have not come out of that difficulty as yet, you will ere long.

The distress does not follow you into your sleep. This means that there are worlds where such troubles cannot enter. Really you are in that sort of world all the time. One of these days you will so discover.

Ailments like yours do not have any world of their own or locality or even existence. They cannot talk. And there is not any person or intelligence to talk for them or to project them into your life.

Your oneness with God gives you His strength, His insight, His ability to be free. You have the same dominion over distress that He enjoys, and you can exercise it.

Keep up your courage and patience as best you can. Probably you are quite all right by this time. Let me have a word or two from you.

Tired of you, you say? Why, it is this tiredness of folk that gives me employment. If everybody were okay, what would I have to do? And yet that is precisely what you are, okay all the time. And whenever I think of you, which is not infrequently, I always see a full-fledged giant. This is one way of giving you a treatment.

Since you are Life expressed, you cannot let go of Life. You and it are interwoven. Rather heartening, is it not? So seize the broom now and tear into the housework. I will boost and we will win.

Lift up the heavy gates and allow the king of light, hope, and energy to come in.

I heard the other day — maybe the news has reached you — that the god of bonds and bounds has been dethroned. My, is it not grand to be free, full of courage and the will to live?




Heredity and Succession

I would not worry too much about the past. Dispose of its adverse happenings; they never were. Your line of ancestry does not trace back to mortality. You came direct from eternal Life. In fact you are that Life on exhibition in the world.

Only this morning a woman stepped into the office who had recently sustained injuries interfering with her ability to navigate. This morning she walked naturally. Her face was bright and beaming. Her eye was clear and glad. She asked me, “Do you know how I did it? I kept saying, „Thank God I am able to walk.' ”

Here is the key to the situation. Do not think you have to prove anything. You do not. You have to gratefully acknowledge what already is. And the fact is you are fashioned in perfection. Nothing has been added or subtracted which would mar your symmetry. You never inherited anything less than the best.

Evidently you are rising to the occasion, with the result that the boy is improving. The improvement will go on. This is inevitable in the presence of your intelligent and conscientious effort.

Whatever the mother may have done has had no effect on the boy. His heredity is in eternal Life. He has inherited its qualities and none other. Among them is the poise and confidence to stand unshaken when error would try to disquiet him.

The diseases you mention are very common in the world, and without any fault, in most cases, on the part of the individual. Heredity does the trick, in belief.

Therefore annihilate the law of heredity with your patient by realizing that he did not come by the supposed route of human parentage. No one, in fact, comes that way. He started out from and with irrepressible Life and has not departed therefrom. How can his life be corrupted or fettered? It cannot and is not.

Any excursions he may have taken, involving contagious contacts, are parts of that dream in which, after all, he has not indulged. In other words he has not been exposed. He is a spiritual man in the pure realm of Spirit, where no contagions enter.

Declare these truths and others you are familiar with, and apply them very definitely to this man; do not dreamily put them out on the Statue of Liberty.

Of course I am expecting you to make good, not only in this case, but all along the line. The great purpose the Lord has for you cannot be thwarted.

The rule of perfect God and perfect woman applies to the girl you are helping. Amplify this rule as you think about her and talk to her. You can handle the case yourself. The harmony of her being cannot be interfered with in the way you have described.

Her heredity is from God. “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world; again I leave the world and go unto the Father,” said Jesus. While Wordsworth paints this glorious picture: “Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.”

We are missing you tremendously but knowing that you will soon be back bigger and finer than ever. Keep in thought how important you are and how desperately you are needed these days. This will speed recovery.

You are full, this very moment, of an energy that cannot be depleted. It has never departed. The obsession of weakness which tries to depress you is temporary only. It will soon recede before the truth you so understandingly and faithfully voice.

Perfect God and perfect woman is the rule of your existence, which means that God is the All and the Only of your being. Thereby supreme Being becomes your being and the power of endless Life pervades your whole economy.

Presently you will feel the impulse to put your feet on the floor and move about, and we will all be happy to see you back at your post before long.

It may be that the ailment that annoys you is classified as hereditary. Anyhow it is well to remember that one person can inherit nothing defective from another, because each individual comes from the perfect One, not from a mortal, and therefore succeeds to nothing evil or morbid; he succeeds to Life satisfying, harmonious, and exhaustless. Writes Lydia Avery Ward:

Why bowest thou, O soul of mine, Crushed by ancestral sin?

Thou hast a noble heritage That bids thee victory win.

The tainted past may bring forth flowers As blossomed Aaron's rod;

No legacy of sin annuls Heredity from God.




Plain Talk About Treatment

You keep asking, in your letters, how to treat yourself. Well, from time to time I have given you some definite hints, because the greatest service a practitioner can render, perhaps, is to help equip the patient for handling his difficulties himself.

Any denunciation of disease or restriction or evil of any sort, as an unreality, with an exaltation of health and plenitude as unalterable realities, your very own, is a legitimate treatment. It will produce results however crude may be your effort, providing it is genuine and faithful.

Treatment, you see, is a mental attitude. It cannot always be put into words. Indeed it never can be adequately so put when at its height. But usually we work in the lower level of argument, hoping thereby to be lifted to the loftier altitude where we can see and know without necessity for debate. Certainly argument is not to be despised. Whether silent or audible it will bear fruit. As a man thinks so he is.

You are not expected to give a perfect or ideal treatment. Simply do the best you can. This the Almighty accepts. This puts you in a mood where you listen to what He has to say, and perpetually He reminds you if you will tune your ear to His voice, that you are His beloved daughter in whom He is well pleased, which means, among other things, that He has fashioned you in perfection and put you forth in the world invulnerable to every casualty whether in business or home affairs, whether in health or in personal security. Perfect God, perfect world, perfect man is the unalterable law to which the poet refers when he assures, “Underneath are the everlasting arms.”

Any treatment, therefore, that you may give yourself, or another on request, will be effective if you do your best, as already stated, to exalt the desirable and to dethrone the undesirable. Sometimes your appeals will be of a higher order than at other times; and yet you will be surprised, now and then, to find that your spontaneous and apparently feeble efforts have been more productive than your studied or finished ones.

Always affirm present and absolute perfection. Do not begin with partial perfection and try to work up to the absolute. Begin with the absolute. Insist that you are there now, that you always have been there and cannot be removed. You cannot talk this language to the world at large, of course, but you can talk it to yourself, or to anyone who asks for help, silently generally, but audibly as occasion permits. Yes, perfect God and perfect man is the rule of your existence.

You must recognize it, thankfully and understandingly, and reject anything less.

Speak invariably out of a generous heart. Littleness, meanness, hardness are obviously at variance with any effective spiritual endeavor. Sympathy and consideration for the troubled open the way for reaching and dissolving their afflictions. The hard-as-nails quality of thought, the condemnatory attitude, and their like are foreign to metaphysical treatment.

The prying into people's affairs, the uncovering of latent faults, are unnecessary and inexcusable. Enough of evil has already been uncovered. In fact evil does not need to be exposed. It can be eradicated without being even mentioned, thought, or known, through a searching realization of the allness of good.

Then you should speak out of such understanding as you can summon, the understanding that God is Life, Mind, Love, Principle, and that you are built of His properties. In thus becoming you, they part with none of their inherent virtue. Hence it is that man and God are one — one in quality, one in inseparability, one in that the two constitute completeness.

The very animation you feel, the intelligence you exercise, the influence you wield are none other than the Almighty working through you both to will and to do His good pleasure.

In this understanding of reality you will be able to see something of the nothingness of disease, of frustration, of despair, of every other hindrance to normal existence. Be very definite and very searching in denouncing the abnormals as illusions — not yours at that.

Then there is the necessity for faith. Expect results, promptly and abundantly, since they are always at hand, always on the supposedly troubled premises, awaiting recognition.

Speak with confidence, not in braggadocio of course, but in that assurance which you gather as you recognize the allness of Life imperishable and the nothingness of every condition opposed thereto, remembering all the time that this Life is yours, or the Life of the individual you are helping.

Be not afraid. God is with you in the enterprise. In other words, active Principle which dwells in you does the work. Hence the promise, “My presence shall go with thee.”

You speak with authority because you are calling God into action. By Him we mean the tireless Spirit which knows no resistance, the ineradicable Life which knows no disease, the munificent Mind which understands all things, the dynamic Truth which corrects all imperfections, the vital Principle which overcomes all evil.

Patience is always in order. If we do not succeed promptly or definitely, we continue the treatment. We do not waste time wondering why. Rather do we continue to bend our efforts to the realization of present perfection, regardless of appearances.

The word of truth needs to be spoken positively not halfheartedly, searchingly not sleepily. Be clear, incisive, vigorous, and absolute, never hesitating or doubtful. The Word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. It is dynamic, scattering before it all disease, evil, limitation. Be on the alert, feel sure of your ground, believe that you are entitled to results and that your patient is entitled to relief.

Finally there must be that abiding in the truth, that repetition of effort, that willingness to continue until victory is won. Be constant in right thinking rather than spasmodic. Do not ease up when the case improves; rather redouble your efforts.

A woman householder in India, so the story runs, called in a native electrician to fix up her lighting system. He gave the erring apparatus attention but still it would not work. She called him in again, with a like lack of results. The third day, when he appeared, she said reprovingly, “Boy, why don't you use common sense?” Instantly he retorted, “Madam, common sense is a gift from the gods. I have only a technical education.” After all is said and done, there is no substitute for ordinary sense. It will save almost any situation, while a lack of it may sink the best of ventures.

In all this adventure nothing is destroyed, since to change from a material to a spiritual conception of the universe does not destroy the universe or anything in it, but it reveals the universe and all therein contained as real, permanent, and beautiful. To exchange the physical concept of man for the spiritual does not put man out of existence but brings into view his real selfhood as perfect and immortal. In this transformation nothing is changed except the erroneous concept of things.

This is not all that can be said about metaphysical treatment, certainly not. But it is enough to show that there is no mystery in the process. The most ordinary person can wield its power by emphasizing the things of good report and repudiating the things of ill report.




Prayer's Effect on Body

Prayer is, as you say, receiving a lot of attention in these times of war and casualties. The other day as I seated myself in the lounge of a Southern Pacific train, a passenger next to me introduced himself as an army physician who had just returned after two years practice at the front. In the course of our conversation he casually remarked: “If people would say their prayers and have faith and do nothing else (and I emphasize this latter) they would get along all right.”

Quite naturally he did not mean to intimate that the time had arrived when doctors and apothecaries could be dispensed with. He was putting forth his conviction that prayer is a definite (and you and I might add a sufficient) power in the field of therapeutics.

Prayer necessarily has a different meaning for different individuals. It will be more intelligent in some than in others. Probably nobody questions the efficacy of the sincere outpourings of the soul, though he may know little of the processes involved. With some, prayer may tend toward the emotional, while with others it will have a slant toward the intellectual.

It is safe to say that prayer is generally composite. It involves desire, petition, faith, and finally affirmation of what already is rather than of what is hoped for. “Prayer,” says Emerson in his essay on Self-Reliance, “is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing His works good. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will see prayer in all action.”

Certainly the metaphysical treatment of the sick is not purely an intellectual process. It involves warmth and fervor. It is permeated with sympathy, comfort, tenderness, compassion, cheer. The metallic thought has little capacity for the alleviation of distress.

It is hardly less than astonishing what full confidence in the goodness and readiness of God, on the part of the most untutored mentality, will do in dissipating pain and affliction. All this is in accord with Isaiah's promise, “Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save, neither His ear heavy that it cannot hear.”

“Why is it,” you ask, “that a normal mental attitude, a healthful line of thinking and talking, will heal disease?” Obviously because disease is a mental condition; and mental conditions, manifestly, can be changed by mental processes. Every school of medicine recognizes that many ills are mental. Metaphysics insists they all are. Indeed it ventures that they are less than mental, they are illusory having no mentality back of them.

But you may argue: “My ailment is in the body; and how can the body be influenced by prayer or by spiritual means?” Well, it can be because the body itself is mental. Does it not talk to you, saying, perhaps, that it hurts, that it is weary, or that it is at ease?

But you may contend that the human mind does the talking. Well, what is known as the human mind and the human body are all one and together, are they not? They combine to form that intelligence called a human being.

We speak of man as both mind and body, mind being the upper, the more ethereal layer, and body the lower or grosser. But they are both mental, both parts of the same mentality. Change your mentality, your thinking, and necessarily you change your body.

Since the body is mental and disease is mental, all types of disease respond to metaphysical or spiritual treatment.

Not only is disease mental, it is mesmeric. It seems to be true yet it is not. Hence its curability.

This mesmerism is induced, very largely, by the mistaken assumption that man is a material creature in a material world of danger. But when we keep in thought that God is Spirit, we must conclude that, whatever the appearances may be, man is a spiritual creature in the unobstructed realm of Spirit where disasters and diseases cannot lurk. Well, man and the world in which he lives cannot differ in quality from their Creator.

You are consciousness not corporeality. Of what are you aware? Aware of Life, of Life abundant. And this moment, so far as you feel heavy, weary, sick or in despair, you are mesmerized.

How shall we break the mesmerism? Workable recipes may be found in previous letters. Unerring Mind controls man, controls you. How then can there be anything in you out of place or out of order? You are the temple of the living God. Not the temple of weakness, decrepitude, sickness; but the temple of strength, health, beauty.

In other words you are an epitome of irrepressible Life. Indeed you are irrepressible Life exhibited. This spells exemption for you from disability and dissolution.

You are the locale of all-knowing Mind diffusing in you the intelligence you need for success and usefulness — the ability to find employment, to make good in your business or profession, to overcome the problems of everyday experience.

Have you ever said, silently, “I am the temple of the living God, the place where limitless Life and Mind are in operation, the place where dullness and distress cannot enter?” To talk thus to yourself instead of rehearsing the trifling or depressing thoughts which try to command attention, is to speak the truth which shatters the mesmerism of suffering or discouragement. And you can, if you will, carry on this rational conversation all day long while about your ordinary work. This is having your conversation in heaven. It is prayer.

At this point you may ask, “Is the body the temple of the living God?” Well, you might better so regard it than to picture it the resort of sickness. However, we have not been talking or thinking about the body but about you. And you are immeasurably more than the body. Have we not agreed that you are consciousness, not corporeality?

Consciousness is out of the body rather than in it. It inhabits an area so wide that it is anywhere or everywhere at will. If it would contact the crude material world, it must have an instrument. Therefore it evolves the body, holds it, wields it.

When consciousness is normal, unalarmed and unconfused, it constructs a normal body; but when consciousness is confused or mesmerized it may construct a faulty even sickly body. “When the mind's free,” assures Shakespeare in King Lear, “the body's delicate; the tempest in my mind doth from my senses take all feeling else save what beats there.” How may one normalize consciousness so that it will build better? By thinking out these constructive truths now under consideration.

Thereby will consciousness be lifted to the point where it will build a better body — yes, and a better intellect, for intellect also is a product of consciousness.

You are more than a body, more than body and intellect combined. You are an individual consciousness standing back of body and intellect and telling them what to do. It is clear that you order your body to do this, that, and the other task.

But it is equally clear that you also direct your intellect to carry on first this and then the other enterprise. Did you not, a moment ago, command intellect to declare, “I am the temple of the living God”? And right now, maybe, you are asking intellect to recall this line from Morte D'Arthur: “Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.”

Body and intellect are yours — your instruments, your servants — yet they are not you. You are that individual consciousness which rules them.

Bodies come and go. This human frame is not the permanent affair it appears. Observe from week to week that mark on your fingernail. Nearer and nearer it approaches the end until presently mark, nail, and all are gone. A new nail has taken the place.

The same process of growth and change, in response to the ceaseless urge of Life, is taking place throughout the body, so that at the end of the year, if we may believe the physiologists, one has an entirely new equipment.

Intellect rises and falls. Possibly you have detected this in yourself. Certainly you have observed it in others. You have seen intellect attain such heights in some man that you have stood in awe of him. Ere long you may have seen that proud intellect decline and disintegrate. Human experience knows no tragedy more touching.

Intellect rises and wanes, bodies come and go, but you, the individual consciousness which holds and commands them, go on and on indefinitely, made after the power of endless Life. Here is the temple of the living God. And if you even glimpse this sublime picture of yourself, your body will make little trouble.

It will behave as well as it did when you were a youngster. Then its behavior was so faultless that you scarcely knew you had a body. Some day, under the influence of these truths we are now working out, you may hope to possess as good a body as Jesus possessed the day he strode through threatening crowds unseen, or the evening when he stepped into the room where his disciples were gathered behind bolted doors.

An individual who can perform such feats is fast growing unto the stature of perfect manhood. He is putting resistances behind. He is emerging into spiritual or genuine consciousness. And spiritual consciousness cannot become unconscious. Hence the permanence of individual man.




The Alibi Styled Age




A Word About the Inevitables

As I was going over your case this morning, it occurred to me how numerous are the inevitables. One of them is the inevitability of health not only in the matter of bodily conditions but in one's personal and business and family relations. Yes, normality has been established from the very beginning, and continues to this moment.

And while health and normality appear to be invaded on occasion, they never genuinely are. For men and women have an impervious integrity. They are clad in an armor which relentlessly resists all intrusions of the various enemies that seem to infest human existence.

Hence the difficulty trying to raise itself against your peace of mind is at most fanciful. It belongs under the classification of phantasmagoria. Just turn to your dictionary, right now, and see what a significant word this is. It offers a handy repository wherein to cast all the litter of distress and discouragement.

Yes, this world is full of inevitables — undisputed health, confidence, success, and longevity.

Hold steadfastly to these felicitous facts and you will put the undesirables out of experience to make room for the desirables.

I came near overlooking the point you raise about age. Certainly it is not one of the inevitables. Why not talk to it like this: “Age, I say there is no such thing. Life does not know anything about you. I cannot know anything that Life does not know. Age cannot be thought, it cannot be conceived. It is an outlaw, unknown in the reality of being.

“Life can never slow down. Inertia can never utter its voice. It can never retard me. There is no such thing. I know nothing about inertia. My vision and my understanding are assured. I can work year after year like a beaver. I know the processes, the faculties, the resources of Mind and Life. Why stand I here idle? Why not arise out of this obsession? Why not awake and be myself? I will.

“I am under the compelling necessity of disputing the inertias. Man is a creature of action and resolution. He is jealous of his rights and of his immunities. I know my rights; I will stand on them. I know my privileges; I will insist on them. Man never declines, weakens, ages; and I am a man. Why was it I ever suspected I was a mortal? A terrible thing it is to try to lower the noblest work of God to that level.”

Many thanks for your letter. It is clear, from what you say, that you are working intelligently and industriously on the case. Doubtless your mother is doing the same. Encourage her to pursue the salubrious conversation with herself.

The outstanding fact is that she is made of enduring substances on which years have had no deleterious effect. Made of the stuff eternity is made of, she cannot do otherwise than maintain from day to day her native vigor and keenness.

Of course she can see and hear and know and understand. She has that Mind whose sight and hearing are infallible. Write again when convenient.

You and I see pretty clearly that the Life which constitutes your being is self-existent and continuous. It knows nothing about years or lapse of time. Therefore it knows no diminution either in courage or in vitality.

We must face this question of age and mortality and unsee them fearlessly and effectually. You are as full of unassailable vigor and well-madeness as you ever have been.

You know all these things. You can speak them, you can realize them. You can do all things through vital Principle which empowers you.




The Siren Call of Ease

We have all observed a certain reluctance in people to face realities. The most powerful of nations draw back on the brink of vital issues. The wisest of individuals do likewise. But Patriarchs look straight ahead challengingly. They have to face situations. Indeed they have developed a courage which makes them ready for adventure.

Having seen this world pretty thoroughly, almost as thoroughly as Alexander surveyed it, we of the class of '95 cannot help but dream of other lands, particularly that undiscovered country.

So I am making bold, this first day of the year, to ask the publisher to send each of you a complimentary copy of my book, If a Man Die He Shall Live Again. Of course you will not hesitate to dip into it. It carries no religious or philosophical slant.

Incidentally, I rather resented passing into the Patriarch Class. But now that the experience has brought a resumption of that fine fellowship we learned half a century ago on the Campus, I feel more than reconciled. So do you.

May 1946 be your best year yet. It can be, you know, for who makes our year if we do not? Concededly the Almighty has something to do with the enterprise, but so cleverly does He operate that we take ourselves to be the operators. Thus is personal vanity satisfied. And yet we know full well that so far as we have done anything worthwhile, it is He that put us up to it and imparted the necessary will and strength.

Once have I heard, indeed twice, someone say something about getting old. And it just makes me indignant. It is the most stupendous lie anybody can utter, the most ruinous, and the lie the devil best likes one to tell.

If you said it to anybody else you would be in immediate danger of the judgment. Well, you are in the same danger when you say it to yourself. So stop it. Refuse to accept its symptoms, and above all refuse to believe that anyone else can see or accept them. How in the world could he see them when looking at an exhibition of imperishable Life?

Life is imperishable. It is your life we are talking about now. This means that Life has no beginning, no ending, no danger, no disease, no age. Say this once in a while, having your own life in mind. You know you do not have much to do except to say things. Choose to say wise things and true.

If Life knew any diseases it could not be everlasting. If Life could slacken or experience any obstruction in its functions, it would eventually come to an end. But it cannot end. It is perpetually and irresistibly in operation in you.

Close your eyes and ears once in a while and try to realize what this means. It means that the flubdub which is trying to bewitch you into age is inarticulate. It is the silence which implies perpetual activity.

Can there be anything wrong anywhere in you? Can any glands get balky or stubborn or scared? You know they cannot. Well, why not say it and say it as though you meant it, and then act upon the pronouncement?

You know that there is something for you to do in the community, that there are people who cannot get along without you. And do you not believe the good Lord expects you to discharge your obligations? You well know that you are indispensable, that He has important work for you, and that He fills you with energy for doing it.

You can do all things, it is written, through Christ which strengthens you. And what is Christ? Speaking in a general way, Christ is the truth about all things. Speaking specifically, Christ is the true or ideal man.

Christ has been associated with Jesus because he found his true self. Christ becomes associated with you just so far as you discover yourself. You are well on the way. To continue to bend your efforts in that direction will help you to forget the restrictions with which years are trying to burden you. There is no substitute for work, after all, in outwitting mischief makers.

This letter is not intended to scold you, or to tell you anything, but simply to remind you in a good-natured way of what you have been telling your people for the last forty years. Now tell it to yourself and take some of your own medicine. Then pass it on to Mary. Some of it will fit her case as well as yours — and the typewriter is so tired it will not write any more.




Challenge Obstacles and Live

You are right. It is the desire to live that keeps one active and even young, and it is having something to live for that stimulates the desire. Yes, it is the will to carry on that keeps one carrying on, but back of it all there must be something to carry on for. There must be an objective. Having chosen it, do not retire from the fray. Are there pressures? Are there resistances? Are there betrayals? Of course there are. To challenge them is to live. To yield is to fade out.

It is the determination to take hold and save one's self, the determination to continue to face the traffic, the constant alertness to the mesmeric forces that try to lull one into acquiescence, that keep one youthful. There is a tendency to do everything else except get right down and work for health and for life itself.

Age is not a necessity, an inevitable, an honorable thing. It is a surrender to the siren call of ease when there is no ease. Keep in thought the obvious truth that universal Life, which has no beginning or ending, is individualized in you and makes you a woman who is ageless and indestructible. If you will hold to this fundamental and lucid statement of truth, and talk it to yourself, it will put you on your feet.

Certainly a youngster like you should not get discouraged. The world is altogether too inviting. It still is full of wonder and promise. You say you are no longer a youngster? I say you are. Not a person in this world has taken more than the first few steps.

It is well that you have a job. Nothing like activity to keep one in a normal mood.

What in the world do you mean when you say you must learn more of God and less of man? "Know thyself" is still sound doctrine. But why separate yourself from God? This is the error of the ages. It is known as duality. You and God are one as certainly as is the moisture and the cloud. Now be careful to have a better opinion of yourself.




Every Day a New Day

Every morning brings a new day to every individual, and a new life. These new mornings, fresh from the highlands of eternity, never cease to arrive. Hence it is that individual life is continuous. It cannot hesitate or grow old.

We see or experience only the present moment; then it is gone like a flash. Another moment takes its place. Doubtless there is an inexhaustible supply. We shall never run out of moments. In other words we shall always keep experiencing things. We shall always keep on living. Do not permit yourself to weary of the wondrous adventure so early in the day.

Charley is as full of giantry now as he ever was. Age is a thing that Mind cannot think or conceive. It is a condition therefore which no one need feel. In short age should be appraised as inexperienceable.

Charley can be striding around every day supple, agile, and bent on doing things.

Glad to hear of your improvement. It occurs to me this morning that you might like to be reminded of the fact that the Eternal is in the midst of you, releasing all the strength and health and courage you need for getting around in the world and doing your part.

It is written, as you know, that the kingdom of God is within you, which implies that yours is the kingdom and the power and the dominion and the victory.

Just face those symptoms of decline every time they assert themselves, and talk them down. You can because they are lying and deceptive. They vanish when you remind them that Life is All. They are no more formidable than other obsessions or mesmerisms. They cannot inhabit your establishment because you are a temple whose sole tenant is the living God.

Expand these statements as you talk to yourself. Thereby you give yourself a treatment, a treatment which will work, for these declarations are true, and the truth is still mighty and will prevail.




Identify Yourself with Omnipotence

Received your note a while back and have resolved many times to write you further, but other matters have kept getting in the way. Well, you are all hunky-dory notwithstanding past misfortunes. Your integrity has never been assailed. In plain language you are as good as ever.

So today you can go forth with as much resolution and vitality as the most favored individual in the land, if you will cultivate the habit of identifying yourself every hour with omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence.

Now study out what this means and recognize how easy it is to follow the system. It is just as easy as it is for you to identify yourself with misfortune and weakness and other impositions. Put the latter out sternly, and lay hold of the others positively and expectantly.

So doing you will learn something of the power of everlasting Life — its freedoms and satisfactions and even joys.

There is a universal belief that mortals are not wellbuilt. They do not even measure up to the wonderful onehorse chaise. The result of the belief is that after a time they begin to play out at this point or the other. Those supposedly troubled areas you mention actually are part of a structure still a going concern. Years do not count. Silly mortals do the counting.

Now the fact is that there is no such thing as a mortal. In other words you and I have never departed from reality and regarded ourselves as less than members of the family of Melchisedec.

Here is something for you to work on for days and weeks. The last two Association letters have supplementary ammunition. I will pitch in too.

And remind yourself to take it easy and not try to do all the work in the world. Quiet hours of meditation often prove more productive than just tearing around.

Your letter deals in the words of eternal Life, that Life which is annihilation to age and mortality.

Life, you see, is all. This whole truth and nothing but the truth is impaired the moment we say Life and man, because man and Life are one and the same. Our difficulty begins when we try to separate them.

God is all there is in the household you inhabit. It is not a case of God plus a troubled woman, or God plus age. It is a case where God is All, all there is to you.

One of these days we shall become wise enough to see that age is an impostor. To eternal Life there can be no ageing process but only growth and expansion and continued youthfulness.

The Mind of the universe goes with you. Let it take form in your thinking as wisdom, cheerfulness, courage, and the determination to carry on.

The Life of the universe, likewise, goes with you. Let it take form in you as the exuberance of health, strength, perennial youthfulness, and majesty of being.

These two radiant omnipotences, called Life and Mind, do take form in you regardless of effort on your part. It is up to you to acknowledge the fact and enjoy the effect. This will keep you busy during your spare time and will bear abundant fruit.




Deeds Not Years Count

Just awfully fine of you to write. Yours is the first eastern news I have received for months. Of course you keep boosting yourself along by remembering that you are well-made; that you are the temple of the living God.

Animation and intelligence abound. Where? In you. They walk about in you. You are a perfect arsenal of them. You can feel inexhaustible energy coursing through you constantly and uniformly. What is all this? Simply the presence of God.

And best of all you are a thoroughly fine specimen of Life and always were. You always will be, because goodness and existence are everlasting. They do not begin. They do not end. They just are. And you are. Is not this enough?

These conditions we call illness and age and discouragement are hallucinations. They are not facts. Therefore you really know nothing about them.

This signifies that you should be walking about, every day, a happy warrior, full of vitality and of wisdom, planning busy years for the future.

Sometimes, you will notice, people lie down and take refuge in age. Tiring of work and responsibility, they step aside to make way for the children or younger members of the firm. They used to do it at the end of two score years. But no more. Today they are on their tiptoes at four score. Will the advancing race stop there? Certainly not! Age is doomed.

You and I agree that there is only one Mind and that everyone has it. It is a Mind which sees and hears and knows adequately. This guarantees that your sight is clear and searching and tireless. Here is the truth which will liberate you if you will industriously apply it to yourself.

The eye condition you describe is common to people of mature years. But years are unknown in reality and you are in reality. Age is not creeping up. Dispute the phantom. “The Lord's mercies are new every morning.”

Do not dwell too much on the good times gone by. Better ones are ahead. You are equal to the changed order which has gone forth in the earth these days. Let me hear from you in a week or two.




What Say the Celebrities

Many happy returns of the day! Looks as though I should be unable to do myself the pleasure of seeing you this trip, but I will show up next year.

Every time you and I identify ourselves with that unwavering Life which never began and will never fail, we take on an added sense of strength and agility.

And every time we identify ourselves with the allknowing Mind, our intellect becomes keener and our hope stronger, and we begin to see more definitely than before that man is an ensemble of the divine qualities.

The tirade carried on by the unimaginative against the commemoration of birthdays receives a fitting rebuke from Allan Junior:

“Whoever sent the first birthday greeting put us all in debt, for it is an annual opportunity of enabling us to let our friends know that they are held in loving remembrance and continued friendship. It is a delightful custom this. . . It is the greatest of personal compliments, and to have it paid to you year after year is a symbol of continued friendship; a proof that your presence is appreciated and your worth recognized.”

Your telegram came. I took up the work right off and sent you this wire: Individual life never ages or weakens. It continues robust and hopeful.

Your good mother is a witness to the presence of that Life which never started and will never stop. She has all its properties, each one inextinguishable.

Age is no more than an obsession, and she will not be confused by obsessions. She wants to live. There is every reason why she should continue in this world. She is needed here. She knows she is. She will courageously face the issue and come out of the difficulty freer and better than she was before.

You ask for the views of celebrities on the subject of age. Well, here is something mighty encouraging from Dr. Frank Crane:

“Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips, and supple knees; it is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions. It is the freshness of the deep springs of Life.

“Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of fifty more than in a boy of twenty.

“Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years.

People grow old by deserting their ideals.

“Years wrinkle the skin; but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

“ W o r r y , d o u b t , s e l f d i s t r u s t , f e a r , a n d despair — these are the long, long years that bow the heart and turn the greening spirit back to dust.

“Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the sweet amazement of the stars and the starlike things and thoughts, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what is next, and the joy of the game of living. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your selfconfidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.”

And right here is something good from Philip James Bailey:

Life's more than breath and the quick round of blood; It is a great spirit and a busy heart.

The coward and the small in soul scarce do live.

One generous feeling — one great thought — one deed Of good, ere night, would make life longer seem Than if each year might number a thousand days, Spent as is this by nations of mankind.

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

Robert Bridges published his famous Testament of Beauty on the day he started his eighty-sixth year. Good critics have pronounced it not only his greatest poem but his youngest.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writes:

It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late — Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Aedipus, and Simonides

Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers

When each had numbered more than fourscore years; And Theophratus at fourscore and ten

Had begun his Characters of Men.

Chaucer at Woodstock, with the nightingales, At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales.

Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past. What then, shall we sit idly down and say:

The night hath come, it is no longer day? For age is opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress. And as the evening twilight fades away, The sky is filled with stars invisible by day.




Change of Life Stripped of Terror

Answering your letters of the fifteenth and sixteenth, I am of course pleased to see you are getting along. Now that “change” is simply a change for the better. It means you are going up higher. And progress, everyone concedes, is painless. It can be so pleasant that you scarcely know it is taking place. Presently you will be forgetting all about the thing.

Since you are made of intelligence, you are so weightless that your legs should not balk when you move about. If you could heap all the intelligence in the world on the scales, it would not weigh a fraction of an ounce, would it? So keep in thought how light, boundless, and free you are.

Keep in thought also that the Almighty is directing your circulation and propelling it, faultlessly and adequately. You see you are completely under His control, which makes for harmonious functioning to the remotest recesses.

---------------------------

Thanks a lot for the book order. The volume is already on its way. I hope you will get a great deal of satisfaction from it.

Some people insist that there is no “change of life.” How much better it is to consider that the change is escape from a shackling belief. All progressive steps should bring glimpses of wider freedom. There should be no discomfort, either physical or mental, at this period of life, and there will be none to the individual who overcomes her fear of the experience and who entertains a right sense of its significance. It is progress and development, leading to an improved status.

I have just been thinking how full of pep and strength you are — how full of confidence and the determination to be about your work.

That worry and tension you have been under are letting go. Just keep on in the industrious and expectant manner which becomes you so well. You will emerge into that path of progress which the Lord has prepared.

Life changes only as it improves and advances. And this beneficent change should be without distress. It would be so except that the world has come to expect a dickens of a time at that period.

Now keep in thought how certain it is that imperturbable Life is functioning throughout your economy. Nothing can interfere with the peacefulness of its workings.

Who in this wicked world invented the expression “change of life?” Why did they not call it “change of divine Love or change of eternal Principle?” It would be just as impossible and just as foolish, would it not?

Spiritual woman, yourself, is made of intelligence, and intelligence cannot experience hemorrhages. Now be sensible. Do not get worked up over this affair. Be calm and expectant.

Woman is made of intelligence, so it is written. You are nothing less than an intelligence yourself. This is why you cannot have hemorrhages and blood pressures and other nonsenses.

Just the other day a man in my lecture audience reported that he was cured during the hour of a hemorrhage that had been bothering him a long while. A woman who attended the lecture had a remarkable healing of “change.” She could hardly get around when she came to the meeting but went away walking comfortably.

Someday you will come out of this mesmerism of mortality to find that you are made of first class substances fitly joined together — not a leak anywhere. So walk about saying truthfully and understandingly, “Perfect God and perfect woman — and here she is.”

You are right in asking, “What hinders me from getting around and doing my work?” Nothing hinders or can hinder you. You are invested with the very powers of the Almighty and yours is the freedom which He guarantees.

The only change life knows is advancement. When people go through what they call the change, they are simply moving forward. This advance should be and, if unwarranted fear is removed, will be perfectly peaceful. There is no excuse for the confusion and distress which are supposed to accompany the occasion. I would not say, no change; rather would I say, a change for the better.

Arise, shine, for thy freedom is come.




The Power of Encouragement

How perfectly silly, as you say, for one to appraise himself a year older just because the earth has finished another trip around the sun. What does that have to do with you and me? It may change the seasons and the weather, but it adds nothing to our strength, neither does it subtract anything from our accustomed vigor. Life is obviously a continuous affair, without beginning of days or end of years. It knows nothing about youth on the one hand or about age on the other. It is constantly and gloriously yours in full measure. There is no other.

If you and I received a little more encouragement and less censure, we should find it easier to maintain our inherent newness and freshness. This is why we are learning to extend appreciation and sympathy and to withhold condemnation and to silence plain speaking. Few people appreciate what even a pleasant look will do toward strengthening some struggling soul to face his problems and live on.

And we have to live. There is no escape. The alchemy of Soul has breathed into each one of us the irrevocable breath of Life. Just why and just how this miracle has been performed, no one can say. But something in each one of us whispers the reminder that there is a divine purpose back of it all, that we are essential parts of the divine plan, and that somehow victory will come if we faint not. There is something in you unalterably at enmity with decline and dissolution.

So you and I will keep trudging along on your case. We are not of the sort that gives up. Not a bit of it. Especially in the matter of bodily aches and pains, for doctors of medicine are finding that those things are frail and fragile. They are curing them by ridiculously easy methods these days. A little messy mold, scraped up almost anywhere and transformed into penicillin, is sufficient to do the trick.

So surely you and I are going to wield faithfully that spiritual weapon, intelligent prayer, which the Lord has provided. It will deliver you from the enemy.

The plain facts are that you are the embodiment of vitality; you feel exhaustless energy at work; you enjoy that confidence which promises relief.

All of which is perfectly natural when you recall that you are made after the power of endless Life. There is nothing to you but that Life. It is not simply in you, but it is you, according to the rule that you and the Eternal are one.

We will work along patiently and expectantly. Results will come as radiantly as does the color to Wenatchee apples.

Your several notes have arrived. They scare me not. I cannot visualize a mental giantess, even if she is only five feet three, ever becoming confused.

Here is a new metaphysical proverb: Matter is nothing; all is Mind manifested. Mortality is nothing; all is Life exhibited.

Where and who is the manifestation? If age cannot find Mind or Life, how in the world can it find Mind or Life manifested or exhibited. And are you not the manifestor, the exhibitor?

It is time you put in a little effort trying to recall that perfect self that somehow or another you have temporarily forgotten.

Principle does not age. Kindly but firmly it holds every speck of you in place and in order. Not a fiber in your economy has a chance to wriggle or speak out of turn. Soon you will feel a calmness and confidence settling down all over, for Principle permeates you with its own perpetual endurance.

It cannot be otherwise because the Almighty, which is only another name for Principle, is in the midst of you, straightening out or expelling anything and everything that tries to be obstreperous, and establishing peace and power and permanence at every point.




The Dispersion of Gloom

I have been reading from inspiring books the last two weeks. The enclosed references therefrom will do you good.

It will help you more, however, to recognize what perfectly good trim you are in and what nonsense all this turmoil is. It is too bad there is not some famous prophet to whom you can go to be told that you are perfectly well. That pronouncement is the truth which would make you free.

No, there is not a thing wrong with you. Life in all its strength and harmony and glory is pouring through you. And best of all you know it.

Of course you are talking this way to yourself every day and living up to what you say as best you can.

Grab the broom once in a while. Whip up a cake. See how much you can do to make Charley happy. You know he is a prince and deserves all the goodness you can shower on him.

I have been trying to get out to see you. It is not so easy to make the trip as it once was. Now I have to start on the road in a few hours. But one of these days I will show up and we will have a good chat.

Meanwhile keep your thought and your interview with yourself on a high level. Because this thing called the body is a mental concept. Therefore when mentality reaches a sufficient clarity and buoyancy, you will feel quick of step and agile of movement. It will be impossible to hold you down.

This day of freedom is coming. Talk it. Expect it. In this talk and in this expectancy lie the full power of being.

Your letter just came, and was it vivid and gripping and comforting!

You know the boy without a classical education who struggled to fill in the army questionnaire. He could not make head or tail. So he turned the paper over and wrote, “I'se ready, Uncle Sam, when you is.” You are always ready for big, fine jobs.

You are full of peace and calm, and the determination to do. You refuse to be disturbed by the nuisances set up by others. You do not burn up your reserves by thinking of the mean things outsiders say or do. But serenely do you move on like the great plane in the air.

For what are you, anyhow? Nothing less than Life triumphant on exhibition. The show or exhibition must go on, which means that you never falter. Yes, we will knock these shadowy discouragements galley-west and you will go on about your glorious business.

You remember what the lecturer said about people talking to themselves and others gloomily. Nobody has any right to put out such damaging conversation. It makes things harder for other people. It works disastrously for him.

There is no excuse for such kind of business. The fellow who indulges it oftentimes is only acting, anyhow. He does not mean what he says when he complains about bad health, an approaching end, and nothing in the world to hope for.

Everyone took an oath, as the lecturer said, to acquit himself like a man when handed a permit to come into this world. And a man does not talk such devastating stuff. Rather he tries to make the world a little brighter. He tries to disperse some of the mesmerism that is confounding humanity. That is what he came here for.

Do not take things too seriously when people talk gloomily to you. Be compassionate, of course, but in the same instant silently erase the pictures.

Troubles, whether in the nature of sickness, confusion, discouragement, or whatnot, come from our misinterpretation, not only of the world about us but of our own selves. We fail to see situations as they are. Disease of all types, and interferences with our careers, are not what they seem. Right where they appear, the full perfection of being, which we misinterpret, is in operation.

You have seen the surf riders of the South Sea, at least you have seen pictures of them. They appear to lean back on an unseen power and receive its support and propulsion. Thus reinforced they glide over the waves with as much assurance as others walk the city streets.

You can lean back on all-knowing Mind and enjoy its intelligence and direction. Or rather you can allow that Mind to be in you and propel every process of your economy. Indeed this is precisely what is going on, anyhow. It is up to you to admit the fact and be young and well.

This same Mind shapes all your affairs, whether personal or business. It is a case of the Almighty being at the helm. Acknowledge this and permit Him to direct your course.




Lend an Ear to the Almighty

Well, do not wrestle too hard. Take time off occasionally to be just lazy and ordinary. Then it is that you are most likely to hear what the Lord is saying, and never doubt it, He is talking to you pretty constantly. All of which is perfectly natural, because He is your Mind.

This is why you are keen to see through those obsessions of distress that try to parade before you. They show forth no more reality than do the moving pictures. The latter do not scare you, neither should these distress pictures scare you. They do not report your errors for you have none.

The great Builder did such a good job in constructing you that He was particularly well pleased, you will recall. So well indeed that He guaranteed you to run on and on.

All right, we will keep trudging along very hopefully, but not too industriously, as already noted. We must not get intense in our work of overthrowing things that are not.

Your cables have arrived from time to time and I have given the situation attention. I will keep doing so until the matter clears up.

The divine consciousness reigns. It is yours to call into action, since you are in rapport with all-knowing Mind. You cannot then be aware of anything opposed to the harmony and freedom of being. On the contrary you are constantly aware, in the depths of thought, of the strength, health, and confidence you have enjoyed in your best moments throughout your years. It is still true that the kingdom of God is within you.

Life, in all its exuberance, functions throughout your economy. It operates at every point, allowing no place for distress. This Life is the all and the only of your being. As you talk to yourself along these lines you cannot help but expand.

And here is a convenient place to remind ourselves that prayer, which in its major aspect is the placing of emphasis on the good, the beautiful, and the true, is subjective. It changes him who prays, little by little raising him to recognition of his divine sonship.

This morning it is raining in San Francisco as it rains in the Tropics — great, wide, splashy drops. Mighty glad does this make the good earth, because there is need of the moisture to quicken the season's vegetation.

The other day a keen sort of woman, having all kinds of distresses in mind, said to me: “I should know that I am not talking them and not feeling them, although they seem to be my thoughts and my sensations.

“How true this all is, yet how seldom we recognize and hold to it. The indisputable fact is that the Almighty and I are one. How brief, how plain, how tremendous. I can know only what He knows, think only what He thinks, experience only what He experiences.

“So I ask myself once in a while, „Who is doing your thinking and your talking anyhow, that impostor called the devil or the Almighty?' Then I quiet down, and does not everybody need quieting these days? What would happen if the whole human race would be still, even a few hours? At least this much, some of the wars would cease.”

This lady showed quite a bit of sense, did she not?

Surpasses some things that the prophets of old voiced.

Maybe you are studying too hard and too frantically. Put aside your books for a while. Look about in the world. Mix with people. The kingdom of God is within you. Take a little time off in which to get acquainted with yourself.

Get busy with the work and affairs at hand. There is plenty for you to do. Pray for the protection of our boys at the front. You cannot afford to be idle a moment. Know that His presence goes with them, imparting strength and courage and security. You are very much needed. Now get to work with all your might and main. Presently you will forget your troubles.

Your departed menfolk have escaped into a freer and finer world. Of course you miss them, but if they could talk to you they would tell you to have no worries about them. They have taken on forms too resplendent for our dull vision to comprehend.

A famous writer names his latest book The Stars Are Still There. What a strangely significant title, picturing, as it does, the stability of the heavens, the stability of the world, the stability of your world of business, of health, of personal affairs, or what have you.

We all feel this stability, unconsciously for the most part perhaps. Hence our ability to dismiss peremptorily suggestions of ill health, bad business, restless personal relations. We are discovering that there is no mind to set them afloat in the world. They are just baseless insinuations, perfectly parentless, lies and the father of lies.

Yes, the stars are still there and you are still there where dwell universal Mind, exuberant Life, and vital Principle. Together they sally forth and become you. Tremendous, is it not? It spells your dominion over those fancied oppressions. Speak that dominion to them. They will fade away.

You are a realization of the ease and mightiness of Life ready to take your place in the cavalcade of God's anointed. You are becoming faintly conscious of your prerogative. Be quiet and thoughtful once in a while and feel that consciousness steal over you.




We Have to Live

It was a distinct satisfaction to see you stride in this morning in the full strength of being. It was a joy to listen to you across the desk and note your clarity of thought and firmness of conviction. The good Lord gave you these qualities in order that you may carry on His work, and He will continue to reinforce them to the end that you may fulfill His purpose.

Men are different at eighty from what they were at eighteen, but that difference does not lessen their importance in the world or diminish their capacity. They cannot play baseball or even pitch quoits, but they can speak out of an experience and wisdom that come only with mature years. This explains why they are so essential in society and why some strange instinct moves them to live on.

Earth's oldest inhabitants, the majestic redwoods of the Pacific Coast, after fifty centuries and more of battling against the elements, still stand and endure in awesome beauty, an inspiration and a protection to the straggling saplings about.

Yes, you are still drawing from the overflowing reservoir of energy, but you do not need to draw so lavishly as you once did. Be content to take those briefer draughts that become the dignity of mature years. Then there will be no sense of inadequacy when you approach your daily work, but on the contrary a confidence that you have all that is necessary to put things across.

We all have observed that what a person really wants he pretty generally gets. This is true in as simple a case as dropping cigarettes. Whenever the victim really wants to stop, the victory is about won. But usually, when he closely inspects his inners, he finds a desire to hold on a while, under the delusion that there is profit therein.

Maybe I should not say this, but I suspect it is often true, people wearying of this world do not detect the subtle desire to let go. Nobody can be blamed, of course, because human existence is not always so easy to take. But one had better be on the lookout to see that this suggestion to depart, cropping out in the symptoms of age, receives a definite rebuke.

Because after all we have to live. There is no getting around it. Joseph Addison exclaims, you may remember, “Eternity, thou pleasing, dreadful thought,” because there are responsibilities as well as joys in living. Sometimes the former seem to out-number or out-weigh the latter.

But having no choice, we face the traffic every day, give as good account of ourselves as we can, and when we finish the course, we will finish it with satisfaction. We shall not be left helpless at any point. The Almighty will see to that.

And yet there is no finishing the course. There is only one Life. The past, the present, the future all run together, making the everlasting now.

There is only one world, and yet in that world you and I have already experienced several worlds, have we not? We are going to experience several more, and they will grow in quality, because we have taken up arms against mortality and will keep the faith.

“It is only the finite that suffers,” assures Emerson. “The infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.”

The wise and prudent dispute age early in their career before the years come in which they have no pleasure. They continue to dispute the enemy after his suggestions make their appearance. They dispute them with the conviction that Life is self-existent.

Life is like beauty in that it is not made. It is. The Creator did not cause or put forth Life. The Creator is Life. Bodying forth in you, Life retains its native quality of permanence.

You cannot remind yourself of these facts too often, for thereby do you furnish substances for consciousness to use in repairing and rebuilding you from year to year. Consciousness, amazingly enough, is both the builder and the building material. Make that material of sound quality, and even sounder next year, by rational thinking. Thereby will consciousness be equipped to build a body in better form and style as time rolls on.

It goes without saying that you will sedulously bar from thought the meanness and hardness and even proneness to judge others which so easily beset us. That sorry triad, no one needs to be reminded, makes wrinkles more than skin deep. When you feel like retaliation, find consolation, if you must have it, in the uncompromising fact that they who judge you are themselves daily arraigned, whether they know it or not, at that tribunal where they cannot plead some printed page or by-law in justification of their cruel pronouncements.




The Incredible Depths of Mind




Think Imperially

You wonder whence has come the idea that God is Mind. Well, it hardly seems to have come at all. It is as old as reflective thinking. You find it here and there in philosophic books as far back as literature extends. Better than this you find it whenever you take a walk in the woods or cast a glance into the heavens or study your own inner workings for a moment. Then it is that you are amazed at the order and beauty that are unexplainable except as the product of supreme intelligence.

The idea that God is Mind is as old as the hills. It is the taking of the idea to heart and the putting of it into practice which is new. That adventure was launched scarcely a hundred years ago in the Western world, with the result that today people everywhere are beginning to recognize that there is one Mind in the world governing and directing all things and all persons. This pronouncement startles no one these times, it is so reasonable and withal so obvious.

How many times have you seen a flock of birds suddenly rise from the ground, perhaps in alarm? The air is full of them. Yet there is not the slightest confusion and never a collision. Why this amazing order? They simply lend themselves to the one Mind. Each does not try to assert an intelligence of his own. Right here is an explanation for whatever disorder there is in the world — the willfulness of individuals and of nations, their determination to have their own way rather than yield to the mandate of all-comprehending Mind.

Because Mind is more than pure intellect. It possesses the higher qualities of Soul, such as sympathy, kindliness, and graciousness. There is no hardness or meanness there, no indifference to the human call. “Your heavenly Father knoweth ye have need of these things” in daily demand, and supplies them.

And so it is that Joubert observes, “We measure minds by their stature; it would be better to esteem them by their beauty.”

Now how is the divine idea that Mind is God put to work to ameliorate human conditions? Immediately is it put in action by the individual acknowledging that he has that Mind. There is no other. His faculties and his abilities are in this Mind and of it. In other words this Mind is his mind. He and it are one, with this tremendous advantage that Mind is the One.

This acknowledgment is the intelligent prayer which results in an expansion of the individual's capacity for doing things. Lack of courage gives way to confidence and assurance. Dimness of sight or dullness of hearing clarify, because hearing, after all, is understanding, while sight is perception. Perception and understanding are properties of the all-wise and ever-benign Mind, and that Mind is his. What can he lack?

Turning for guidance to this Mind, which is so close that it is within as well as without us, is a surer venture than turning to the printed page or to the well-meant advice of friends. Indeed there comes a time when one has no other resort. He gets beyond the teachers and their rules.

What does an Edison have to do with them? They have their place but they also have their day. You and I should be developing that confidence and insight which encourage us to look into the incredible depths of Mind for instruction, having due regard all the time to what the prophets and teachers have said and to what experience has taught.

So it is that each of us journeys with a veritable encyclopedia at his elbow. We are learning how to utilize it. Thereby is independent thinking developed. And independent thinking, after all, is not the thinking of the individual; it is the thinking of that Mind with which he is identified.

All this is not to promote ordinary egotism, but rather to banish it. For one begins to learn true humility the day he recognizes that there is one Mind, the Mind of the Almighty, and that this Mind is his only by the grace of God.

Says Sir Francis Bacon, “I had rather believe all the fables in the Legends and the Talmud and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.”

Sorry I missed you yesterday. Did not mean to but somehow or another it happened.

Anyhow, maybe I can tell things better in a letter. You know that “thinking imperially” is a colorful adventure. Because thinking is living. And to think imperially is to live royally, that is, to live in the royal, kingly way which is round with the richness of existence.

There is no such thing as stopping or restricting Life. Might as well try to stop the sun from rising or setting. Might as well undertake to put summer in the place of winter.

And so it is that Life courses through you. It cannot be interfered with in the slightest. It just will act and function, and you are a thrill with its warmth and vigor and glory.

Everything to the contrary is an out and out illusion. It is not even mental. It is not there. And of course it is not yours. You can stride around now in all the freedom and perfection that anyone can enjoy.




Thought as Related to Health

You are right, healing is taking place. In other words your existence is moving on, fuller and richer than you have known before.

It all adds up to this, you are accepting that Mind which knows nothing about human ailments. You know the Almighty has that kind of mentality. His understanding is so profound (Scripture has it that He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity) that He looks through difficulties such as yours and sees reality. Well, this same understanding is yours, because His mentality is your mentality. There are not two mentalities in the world.

Of course you like to work and accomplish things, and of course you have the ability to persevere. The world needs your fertile effort and will have it. We will keep a-going. The whole obstruction will be wiped out as you predict.

No, it is not ignorance that is making your troubles. You are not ignorant or anything like it. On the contrary you are competently enlightened because you have at your beck the omniscient Mind. It is the only mentality there is. The things it knows are the only things you know. And it knows nothing about these distressing symptoms you mention. How then can you experience them? Well, really you do not. Is not this grand?

This very day you walk the high altitudes of peace and freedom. Presently you will be feeling the freer step and fuller breath. You are already there in that spacious realm of strength and assurance.

The entire machinery of your being is operating faultlessly and uninterruptedly. There is no letting down in your system. You are well-conditioned throughout.

You can say, and every hour you are saying it understandingly, “I am well and I know it.” No inaction or overaction anywhere. Your entire territory feels the steadying power of Mind.

Do not study and try too hard. Be silent and even idle now and then. This gives the Lord a chance to speak to you and even to strengthen you.

Your last letter just arrived. Doubtless with your clear insight and comprehension, which amounts to prayer, you will get along alone for the most part.

Anyone who argues that spiritual or right thinking is difficult should remember that there is only one kind of thinking going on after all, and that is the sound and accurate thinking we are talking about. This must be the case for there is only one Mind, the divine Mind; and there is only one kind of woman, and she is spiritual and therefore rightly-minded. Meditation upon things of good report is for her the natural order of being.

Much is said, you know, about mortal mind, mortal man, and material thinking. They are falsities, every one of them; and it is time we put them aside as sickly, enervating, and unworthy of consideration or credence. Then will they fade out. They come, if they do come, only because we condone them.

One who exercises his prerogative to think philosophically becomes the master of adversity. And truly man in the likeness of his Maker is incapable of material thinking or feeling, in which are included fatigue and depression.

The invitation, “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest” is still open.

I am confident that the treatment you are getting will penetrate the mists and let in the light to the extent that you will see a better world and a better self. That better self is at hand, so is that better world.

I would not worry too much about that subconscious mind or that mortal mind. There is one mentality, and it is so keen and balanced that it does not know anything about the difficulties you mention. And you have that Mind. Therefore you have the clarity of vision that can see through the troublesome illusions and fix its gaze on the grandeurs of reality. So be confident. You can walk this earth in peace and in dignity.

You have no involuntary non-receptivity. You are open to the truth, you desire it. It will enter and take possession of you and set you free.

What if you are now and then assailed by troublesome symptoms? Happily you can always say to them: “You have no intelligence, no animation, no occasion, no presence. The divine Mind knows nothing about you. The divine Mind is my mind and my only mentality. Therefore I know nothing about you. Depart, you workers of iniquity.”

Put on a command performance. Do not be a sluggard. Be a hero in the strife. You have the authority to speak in this way for the kingdom of God is within you.

Hence it is that yours is the kingdom, the power, the authority, and the victory. Do not hesitate to make demands on the Almighty. Literally He is in the midst of you. He enters every fiber of your being. No tempest can move or disturb you.




Presence of Mind

Maybe if instead of reading so incessantly you would be content with thinking or talking simple and dynamic truths to yourself, you could take things easier and get more done. There is no particular virtue in reading pages you are perfectly familiar with, is there? Why not be quiet, some of the time, and allow all-knowing Mind to flood your mentality and literally take possession of you?

That mentality knows nothing about weakness or sickness. It is of wider wisdom than to believe such enormities; and you can have that Mind without making any labored effort. Be still. Do not struggle for better thoughts and higher understanding, but allow that Mind to hold sway.

This is praying. This is a sure method for breaking the mesmerism that is binding you.

Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight Awhile on boughs too light,

Feels them give way beneath her and yet sings — Knowing that she hath wings.

Victor Hugo

Replying to your note of the twenty-ninth, it comes to me that He has set before you an open door and no man can shut it. Indeed He has swung that door wide back on its hinges and holds it there, while He leads you through into that spacious realm of light and vision, not to mention strength and poise, which He has prepared for those He loves.

As you get something of the significance of this declaration of truth you will feel sturdier and surer. You will see that those symptoms are the voice of imposition. This in itself puts them miles away. You do not talk them, you do not think them, and you do not feel them. They are alien to your experience.

All because the kingdom of God is within you — the reign of peace and health and life unfettered and unhurting. This must appear clear to you when you say: “I am the temple of the living God; the Lord is in His Holy temple, let all these symptoms of pain and danger be still.”

Your letter reveals that you are developing a courage and resourcefulness that will lead out into a larger way of living. You have all that is needed, right on your premises, to round out your career. Just set your thought to the enterprise every morning and keep on the move till the next day. Then will you secure a place in the caravan of progress.

Mind is looking after you constantly. You are not forgotten for a single instant. Mind works as ceaselessly as gravity does, and you know it does not overlook you or the tiniest particle of dust. It operates everywhere and on all things. Mind acts always and beneficently on you and in your behalf. It directs all the functions of your being. It directs all your business affairs. Have trust. All is well as you will presently find.

Do not worry about what you style “reflecting the necessary intelligence to drive your car.” There is only one Mind, and the fact that you manifest any intelligence at all proves that you have that Mind. Lean on it as you practice. This will help you to become a good driver. And you lean on it in a practical way when you confidently utilize your present ability and experience. They are part of God's presence, you know.

There is only one presence — the presence of animation and intelligence without limit. This indwelling presence of the Almighty means that you possess His qualities — His courage, resourcefulness, sagacity. Well, say so occasionally and reverently try to realize it.

You provide the opportunity for Life triumphant to be expressed or made individual. Instead of being apart from Him, you are a part of His Being.

You necessarily draw from His presence the integrity and robustness which make up health and longevity; the graciousness and generosity which are the foundation stones of character; the brightness which illumines existence; the protection which keeps up your defenses.

His presence is never idle, never irresolute, never frightened, never thwarted, never a dawdler. Invariably does His presence, and after all it and you are pretty much the same, spell genuine manliness or womanliness.

His presence makes it unnecessary for you to scan the heavens for a sign or to strain your ears to hear His voice.

Robert Browning assures:

There is an inmost center in ourselves

Where truth abides in fullness . . . and to know Rather consists in opening out a way

Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, Than in effecting entrance for a light Supposed to be without.

Turn to that intelligence within. It is the Almighty, is it not? When your best intelligence tells you what to do, God is giving you direction so far as you are willing to receive it. In emergencies this is precisely what we do. We do it instantly. We do it without reserve. We do it because we cannot do otherwise. We call the phenomenon “Presence of Mind.”




The Reservoir of Productive Ideas

We shall have to be a little more aggressive, maybe, sensibly aggressive. It will not do to permit circumstances to keep popping up and deferring that plan God has for you, so we will expect that He will keep the way of action open and clear for you. He will not permit anyone, not even friends, to roll boulders in the way. We must mentally take hold of impedimenta and chuck them out — all in demonstration of our dominion.

You do not need to go far away to get material for the stories you have contracted to write. You can draw it right out of the exhaustless mental reservoir which is so close that you resort to it, at least momentarily, every day. It is one of those upper strata of thought, which, when tapped, puts your pen to work at an incredible speed.

Emerson counsels: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.”

Certainly editors can depend on you. Nothing can interfere with that divine procedure of writing. It will flow as irresistibly as the tide flows out of Golden Gate.

I like what you say about my books. Awfully fine of a keen critic to speak so generously.

Your movie prospects and writing prospects feel the propulsion of Principle. Hence your product has marketable quality. It cannot hang fire. Mind is in the midst of it and unalterably determined to put it through to consummation.

All arguments to the contrary are vain. All obstructions are impotent. The Almighty is in the midst of those movie people, imparting almighty good sense and irresistible activity.

And He is in the midst of you, driving off interruptions and intruders and filling you so full of mental pictures that you can scarcely get them down on paper.

Congratulations to you and Charley. You make a great team. No doubt you will give a good account of your respective positions.

You are quite right. It does not do to become inactive. One must use the strength and ability that he finds each day. The vacuum thus created is soon filled with more strength and more ability than one had before. He must not hide his revelations under a bushel.

Yes, go ahead and be as active as opportunity provides. In this way you will more and more forget your personal problems. Ere long you will find that you do not have any. Best to you both.




Flow of Thought

Yes sir, you will more and more feel the tireless energy of Life and get more and more firmly on your feet every day now. You know that assembled in you are all the attributes of Mind. Among them are intelligence, strength, courage, productiveness, and ability to get on with the job. And is that work important?

It certainly is. The Lord has so much for you to do, work no one else can do, that He will see to it that you are able to do it and have a good time withal.

When reading we find it wise to emphasize the hopeful and wholesome assertions, and to minimize or even omit the weird and fear-inspiring. One of the first things I learned in writing was to paint cheerful pictures only. A writer should not dare paint a picture that concedes power to error.

I have just read from a book on expression: “The power to realize ideas quickly and intensely is at the basis of all eloquence and all true vocal expression.”

So it is that a vivid realization that Life, the very Life that animates us, is the sole power of the universe, immediately lends peace and strength to every fiber and function.

Yes, we have to learn to grab things on the run in these days which are only twenty-four hours long. But that is when we pray our best, do we not? It is a mighty good thing to have a multitude of chores, day by day. Perhaps we would not profit by having hours and hours for study and meditation.

Do you not do your best thinking while you are adjusting your hat or tying your shoes? The good Lord seems to seize those moments when we are off guard to slip over a few bright ideas.

Your note of the thirteenth has arrived. The alldiscerning Mind will make you a success in the contests, of course it will, because that Mind is your mind and therefore it constantly directs you in every legitimate undertaking.

So lean on Mind, admit that you have it, and all will be well. Certainly it has the intelligence and creativeness and resourcefulness necessary for the occasion. And above all have faith and assurance. Mind will make you a winner.

You know the outstanding faculty of the Almighty is creativeness and productiveness. This is why those properties are uppermost in your make-up, since you and He are one, are you not?

Do not think a single thought of failure or say one word against yourself. The Almighty does not like to have His youngsters discredited. And you must not indulge in that practice.

You can do all that is required to bring about success in your venture. Your sufficiency springs from the Almighty within. Now rise in the full power and ease and majesty of being and produce, create. You have it in you.




Soundness of Mentality

It is proverbial that people who doubt their sanity, as you say you do, are invariably well-balanced. So have no fear. Your mentality is safe. How can you believe otherwise when you recall that there is only one Mind, the divine, and that that Mind is yours?

If there is anything that can be depended upon in this world it is the perpetual soundness of universal

Mind. That Mind is popularly referred to as the Almighty. Who can dethrone Him? History recounts only one attempt. It was headed, you remember, by Satan, and ended in disaster to him and his entourage. John in his Revelation pictures the event briefly but vividly. Milton amplifies the story in his Paradise Lost. More recently Anatole France has given a philosophic account of that war in his Revolt of the Angels.

No, it is unthinkable that the universal Mind should be dethroned. Hence it is unthinkable that man, whose mentality this Mind is, should lose his reason. No act of his own, no act of an enemy, could bring about such a calamity. Man is unchangeably sane and balanced, because he is crowned with unwavering Mind.

Now if every individual would acknowledge this sublime truth, the kingdom of heaven would come to earth. The present submergence is due to the stupidity of appraising people as material mortals and to the fear that they will not only lose their bodies but their souls.

This constitutes the fall of man. We can bring about the restoration by translating ourselves from material mortals back to our native status of spiritual immortals. This we can do by consistent right thinking. Our salvation rests in our own hands, for everyone can think accurately. Indeed, in his better moments, he cannot do otherwise, endued, as he is, with divine intelligence.

And if someone should come under the unfortunate belief that he is deranged, and therefore unable to think rationally of himself, others can supply that deficiency and insist upon his sanity. Thereby can his balance be restored.

Your brother, far from being on the decline, is clearly on the way to a higher level of thinking. This means he is rising into that altitude where he will be amply occupied.

Not only is there a place for him but there is work for him. No doubt of this, and no doubt he will awaken to the fact, for are we not realizing every day that he is the temple of the living God, wherein are the strength and health and intelligence necessary to normal activity.

We will not for a moment think of him as mentally impaired or incapacitated. He is full of energy and has a mind to work.

And not only is he endued with a balanced and gracious mentality, but he is in the grasp of Principle, and Principle holds him in line with right conduct. He cannot get out of the realm of rational thinking and acting.

In everyday language, he is sober, balanced, and serene. He knows what he should do and he does it. On the other hand he knows what he should not do and refrains therefrom. Yes, he is under divine restraint and government. He cannot deviate from the norm.

The one and all-knowing Mind is no respecter of persons. He is quite as mindful of your boy as He is of the celebrities. And remember the boy has never done anything, nor has anything ever happened to him, that would interfere with the justice and generosity of Mind. All that Mind has is his, in line with the promise of the father in the story of the prodigal, “Son, thou art ever with me and all that I have is thine!”

Which means that the boy has the intelligence he needs for making good. His mentality is clear, because his mentality is none other than the Mind we call God who certainly is never confused or clouded. We will keep working, and working expectantly. Write again.

You are quite right in your conclusion that there is one Mind in the world, directing all things and all people. I remember reading this in a local paper, not over forty miles from your city of Ypsilanti, when I was a boy on a Michigan farm. This Mind, governing the universe and governing you, cannot be dimmed or lost. It always was, it always will be, lucid and searching. It is what is known as “His presence.”

Hold to the fact that reason cannot be dethroned or thinking blurred or perception clouded. While there may be moments or days when we do not see or think too clearly, yet the unchanging fact is that Mind, yours and mine, functions efficiently and is adequate to our needs.

More than this, the Almighty is in the midst of you and me and of our affairs. If anything seems out of order with us today, we may be sure that the Almighty will rectify matters. This indwelling presence of the Almighty means, in plain language, that you are almighty well, serene, and qualified to make the grade.

Talk the above statements to yourself and amplify them in your own language. Whenever you do this you pray, and, make no mistake, prayer is answered. When you pray in this way you identify yourself with an intelligence which will never prove inadequate.

I am confident that Charley will come to himself. He never has done anything or thought anything or encountered anything that could shake his mentality, for his mentality is that Mind which stands like Gibraltar against any shock.

Your note of the ninth shows that he is picking up. Of course he will come to. Only this morning I had word from a man who was mentally clouded. During the night he had a dream so dramatic that he fell out of bed.

Scrambling to his feet he found that he was all right. This shows how close normal mentality is. It is so close that Charley has it already. No wonder he wants to write. I expect he will produce a coherent letter pretty soon, and you do also.




Stability of Reason

The reports of Charley's condition arrived yesterday. Of course his letters show improvement. We will not believe the superintendent's statement that his behavior is not keeping pace. The fact is that Charley is a regular boy this moment, capable of thinking and acting and being what a boy of his age should be. In other words he is all there.

This must be the case when Mind is diffusing its intelligence to every recess of his being, and Soul is beaming forth in every nook and corner, while Life exuberant is animating every inch of his territory. Perfect God and perfect man is the rule of his existence.

We will keep working faithfully and expectantly, for Charley has more than a spark of the divine in his make-up. He has nothing less than a full complement of divine endowments. They will spring into visibility in response to our effort.

People have not, so far as my experience goes, found insanity any too easy to cure. On the contrary they have found it quite as baffling as some other disorders. The extreme type of it goes out, to use Jesus' words, only by prayer and fasting, which means more than average spiritual discernment. This affliction may have been the seven devils which were ejected from Mary Magdalene.

It has been the habit of reformers to use this good woman's name to point a moral or to adorn a tale here and there all down the centuries. They are still at it. The Bible utters not one syllable against her.

Do not be discouraged, but keep plugging along on the case. You will win. Eternal Mind, and your patient has it, cannot be deranged. Reason, one of the leading attributes of Mind, cannot be dethroned. So you will keep insisting that your patient's mentality is clear as a bell.

Your boy has the immutable Mind we call God. Indeed there is no other mentality. This Mind, and therefore this boy, cannot be confused or less than adequately equipped. Reason cannot be clouded or dethroned.

Now keep in thought that the boy's mentality is of omniscient Mind and therefore is sound and unshakably established. Refuse to believe that his thought is otherwise than clear and balanced. I will take hold of the case. Let me hear from you in a week or ten days.

Of course your prayers count in bringing recovery to the lad. In fact you can be the best practitioner on the case, it seems to me, and you are already measuring up to that high standard. Have conviction. Your efforts will be rewarded.

Since the Almighty is in the midst of him, the almightiness of intelligence is there in operation. No room in him for hallucinations. He can spring into normality any day, ready for his part in life's program.

Your note of July thirtieth interests me, showing, as it does, that you are thinking.

No doubt man has a spiritual identity, call it body or what you will. Exactly what its appearance may be is impossible for us to say right now, perhaps. It is enough to know that it is well-conditioned and well-minded.

Wish I could write you more at length but work is so piled up before me. I am confident the brother is coming out of the mesmerism. What the good people around him may think or say theologically will not hinder. Have no concern.

The Almighty does not know anything of these supposed deterrents or adverse conditions. We had better admit that you do not and that Charley does not. Meanwhile we will keep working and trusting as intelligently and faithfully as we can.

Your letter just arrived. Every individual has the one and only Mind. Your boy is endued with it. Think of him in this way. Silently talk to him, reminding him of his full and adequate mentality. Do not try to prove the proposition. Simply admit it. He likes what you think and say and will respond to your efforts.

Since the unswerving Mind is his mentality, his thinking cannot be erratic. He must, regardless of appearances, be sane and sound. His present apparent unfortunate condition is at the worst only a passing aberration. As you hold to the truths we have elaborated, the situation will clear.




The Faculty of Sight

All-seeing Mind is in your midst, and out of it you see fully and adequately. You are made every whit whole and there is no power on earth to mar that wholeness, but there is a power that will remove the seeming dimness of vision. It is that light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

The unpleasant eye situation might, in the course of time, pass away without effort on our part. But we will not wait on nature. We will at once call into action the dynamic truth that you are built in such perfection and permanence, in all your parts, that nothing of the sort you seem to suffer has happened or can continue.

I intended to talk with you while in Los Angeles but somehow could not get around to it. So I will write.

You know you came into this world with a full complement of powers, correct vision among them. It is the sort of vision that cannot be obscured because it is a faculty of Mind. Impress upon yourself occasionally that you have that Mind.

You came into being well-made. That wellmadeness can never be interfered with. It cannot be damaged by the addition of anything alien or by the subtraction of anything that is vital. Your integrity, in other words, cannot be touched and has not been touched.

The eye trouble comes, from the standpoint of anatomy, because drainage gets a bit clogged, but the unchangeable fact is that the open channels of Life remain forever open. They can never be deflated or inflated.

I have been thinking, and maybe have so written, that right where that distressful eye situation seems, Mind is seeing and performing with ease and adequacy. Remind yourself of this fact frequently.

Your letter of the twenty-sixth pleases me immensely. It shows steady forward strides on your part.

And yet whenever one finds it too difficult to make the grade without glasses, the sensible thing is to put them on. It will not do to go struggling along half out of commission. Looking through two lenses is not so much wickeder than looking through one.




Let There Be Light

I am wondering how you are getting along, confident of course that you are doing pretty well. Suppose you give me a buzz or write a note.

Let there be light is the perpetual command of the Almighty, and His commands are obeyed. This denotes that there can be no dimness on your premises. They are thoroughly lighted. Indeed all the earth is visible to you, adequately visible, because the seeing apparatus, which is part of that perfect man God made you, is constantly in operation. Nothing which you need to see can be hidden.

Have faith; and if at any time your faith seems a bit weak, ask, “Lord, help thou mine unbelief.”

Your faith should make you whole and I believe it will. The continuous fact is that Mind, with all its attributes, bodies forth in you; and among its attributes are the fadeless faculties of sight and hearing. They are better named as you know, perception and understanding. You have them both beyond peradventure.

That “straining anxious eyes toward an uncertain future” as a cause for blurred vision is nonsense, is it not?

Such human cause as may be, you will, if necessary, find in some other direction.

The glorious fact, as we have pointed out before, is this: Sight, your sight, the only sight there is, is a faculty of omniscient Mind. Therefore sight is unfailing — your sight is unfailing. It is keen and tireless and enduring. Admit it a hundred times a day.

And while you are admitting, admit, boldly and audaciously, that this world needs you, that there is some position for you to fill, and that a way thereto will be found. You do not have to be idle twenty-four hours, and you do not have to submit to the lying imposition known as impaired vision.

Sight is a faculty of Mind, hence is faultless. You have this Mind. Indeed, in technical language, you are its compound idea. Which means, if it means anything, that you are a composite of its faculties — its faculties of sight, hearing, knowing.

The impairment you mention has never touched you. It presently will dissipate if you think and talk along the lines here indicated.

It isthe very nature of Mind to see and hear and understand. Mind cannot do otherwise.Whose mind are we talking about? Well, there is only one, the allcomprehending Mind we call God. That Mind is yours in the measure you need it. You are using it in reading this letter.

This very Mind does your seeing. Hence it is that your sight is adequate. Talk to yourself along these lines, insisting that such is the case.

Circulation and all your functions must conform to the divine rule of unlabored movement. There can be no interruption of peace and harmony at any point of your economy, because the Almighty is there, directing and propelling all action and establishing unimpeachable wholeness and soundness.




The Faculty of Hearing

Yes, all-knowing Mind is with you always. Now go a little further and confess that that Mind is yours. Is this not tremendous? Do not tell others about it, just tell yourself and believe what you tell her.

This is why you hear and understand so well. Mind in its very inherences must see and know and understand. Healing does not need to be slow. It can come any day. Even now you pick up the remarks people do not want you to hear. Does this not prove that your hearing apparatus is in working order?

Though it were a bit out of condition, the Almighty who goes over your habitation many times a day, more faithfully than the night watchman goes his rounds, tightens up every gadget that needs tightening and loosens every gadget that needs loosening. You are well looked after, are you not?

The faculties of sight and hearing, you know, are part of your perfect structure. They can no more fail than can Life itself. In former days they behaved so well you scarcely knew you possessed them. They have their perpetual and peaceful existence under the law of perfect God and perfect man, a law of annihilation to every suppositional fault or failure.

Sight, hearing, all your faculties are faculties of divine Mind. Hence their perfection and permanence. But the divine Mind is your mind. You have no other mentality. So when you say that divine Mind's seeing and hearing are infallible, you in effect say that your sight and hearing are infallible.

You can talk these truths to yourself, even if you cannot quite realize them. As a result consciousness will form you anew.

Hope you have a pleasant trip. Remind your sister that the boy has entered the other world with freer step and fuller breath, ready for new assignments and further developments. His life is not extinguished because he has become inaudible and invisible to us. He has taken on a form so resplendent that our dull vision is not able to cognize him.

A Quickened Understanding Assured

An adequate hearing apparatus is part of that perfect spiritual structure in which the Maker built you. It cannot fail, of course it cannot.

Then, too, hearing is a faculty of the all-knowing and the only Mind, and that Mind is yours. This is why your understanding and hearing and sight are assured.

Your consciousness is you. Naturally it is where you are. Talking the foregoing truths over to yourself quickens, clarifies, expands that consciousness. The result is that you improve and grow.

Last week I had a letter from a man who had consulted me about impaired hearing. Today came his answer to my reply, saying that he studied the letter thoroughly — in fact he about committed it to memory and found that he could hear his watch tick.

I do not know how good the letter was, but evidently it had considerable virtue. Therefore I am here setting it forth verbatim for your benefit:

“Hearing is permanently established in Mind as one of its outstanding faculties, and you have that Mind.

“Hence when you say that Mind hears, you in effect say that you hear, clearly and searchingly. You and the Father are one, are you not? So you should remind yourself every hour that you and Mind are one and therefore that you hear and understand and know fully and adequately.

“Just talk these truths to yourself, think them out, amplify them. Make this your chief business, confidently expecting results. You will not be disappointed.”

Hearing is a faculty of divine Mind. Hence its perfection and permanence. You will appreciate the practicality of this fact when you recognize that the divine Mind is the only mentality there is. It must then be yours. Hence the impossibility of impaired hearing.

Talk this truth over to yourself, elaborate it. Have faith that it will expel that stupid belief of imperfect understanding. You overcame the head cold the other day. Now for the ear difficulty. It can be adjusted as certainly as was the cold.

The experts say that dull hearing is often due to stuffiness in the ear passages, the Eustacian tube among them. So remember how free and unobstructed Mind is, Mind being the hearing or understanding agency. Boundless and unconfined, it cannot be clogged or congested.

This moment I opened a letter from a woman who is solving her problem of hearing. It contains this highly significant statement: “Hearing was perfect in preexistence. I brought it with me. It must be substance incapable of loss or impairment.”

Since Life cannot be stilled or silenced, hearing cannot be for it is an essential part of Being. You hear and see out of the marvelous depths of Mind and Life. Any day the mesmerism to the contrary should yield up the ghost.

Remind yourself frequently that right where that inadequacy seems, Mind is hearing and performing with the utmost ease and efficiency.




No Eccentricities of Voice or Vision

Impediment in speech is a perfectly senseless eccentricity. More confidence on the part of the individual is usually all that is necessary to insure a free flow of words. Mind is back of and directing the function. “He uttered His voice, the earth melted” is the Scriptural picture of the power and assurance of vocal expression.

Stuttering is a nervous habit brought on by imitation sometimes, it is said, and in other cases it comes through the channel of heredity. But whatever its supposed origin it has no permanency. Part of man's dominion consists in full and untrammeled freedom of utterance.

There is nothing in heredity, once that specter is intelligently faced and analyzed. Your boy came direct from the Almighty, carrying with him only the purposes and the properties of the Almighty. He brought nothing foreign to perfection. He came fully equipped with every attribute of a full-fledged man. No, he gathered nothing from human relatives by that curious law, which is not a law, called heredity. He has gathered nothing from association or environment or through imitation.

He is his own perfect self, I had almost said he is the Almighty's perfect self, for such he is in a way, because the Almighty was not content in sending him forth into existence, the Almighty came right along with him and stayed on the job.

The Almighty is right there now and tolerates no nervousness or hesitation for an instant. He enforces the law of perfect God and perfect boy. Peace and dominion reign supreme.

Now get very serious and constant in your work along these lines. Be assured of results but do not watchfully look for them. I will lend a hand to correct this habit. We will win.

Do not be alarmed about the eyes of your youngster being out of line. They can be brought into true focus, and they will be as you gain a more accurate appraisal of the situation.

Many children have unaccountable variations from the norm. But experienced mothers rise to the occasion. You will be one of them and mightily pleased with the achievement.

If you do no more than insist, day by day, on the law of perfect God and perfect child, consciousness will construct a normal body. So think less of the blemish. It is bound to go. It cannot continue unless you dwell too much on it, which is precisely what you will not do. You will put it out of thought for the right idea (the idea of undeviating straightness and trueness) and thereby put it out of commission.

In place of your frightened or confused thinking substitute the confidence which comes as you admit that his vision and perception are as true as Truth itself. No departure there from perfection. Principle holds them straight in line and will not permit them to deviate this way or that. Do not observe him too often. Bring him up more as the barbarians brought up their young. The Almighty in his midst has him under control and will bring every item of his structure into perfect alinement.

The great Architect built for you a seeing apparatus which is entirely adequate to your needs. He used such transcendent skill and such priceless substance that He guaranteed His work for all time.

Looked at in another aspect, sight is a faculty of omniscient Mind. Hence its continuous perfection. You have that Mind, there is no other. This is the truth which will liberate you if you will do your best to lay hold of it. And you will lay hold of it by talking and explaining the proposition to yourself day by day.

Awfully fine of you to send the newspaper clipping in re family history. I prize it tremendously.

You know when the great Architect turned you out He guaranteed that you would run for a good long while. He was perfectly safe in issuing this guarantee, because He used the best substances and fitly joined them together in the course of the construction work.

This means that there are no weak spots in you, call them vision or whatnot. Each part and function is as perfect as the others.

So it is that out of divine Mind you see and hear and understand in quiet assurance. Nothing can shut off or interfere with your view. Take it a bit easy and you will find your eyes quite equal to the situation.

You will find plenty to do in your profession. You know that your world of music is largely what you make it, is it not, and you are equipped to make it a very inviting and profitable world. The Almighty provides for all this and He will impart the resolution and the strength to carry on in a better way than you have done before.

Following our talk over the telephone, may I remind you that the Creator, when He constructed you, used the best of substances and fitly joined them together in true workmanlike fashion. Then as He turned you out to participate in the adventure called the world, He guaranteed that His creation would work and last indefinitely.

Your seeing and hearing equipment is part of that spiritual structure. It does not know anything about dimness or dullness. It works with perfect precision and will continue so to work.

Cataracts are sly suggestions that would shut out that light which lights everyone who comes into the world. But light cannot be excluded for light is synonymous with Life, and Life absolutely refuses to be banned. Its interdiction is preposterous. It triumphs over every enemy.

Sight is unfailing and unalterable because sight is a faculty of self-existent Mind. This Mind is the mind of every individual and assures him unfading and perpetual vision. You live under this divine guarantee.

The promise is that the veil shall be lifted, the veil that would obstruct our view of reality, and that veil is being lifted every day by the progress of enlightenment. More light, not less, is the eternal mandate of Mind.

Presumptuous cataracts are a denial of what we know of the good and true. There is no mentality to produce or foster or project them into your experience. On the contrary every impetus of Mind is leveled at the extinction of such arrogance.




The Substantiality of Spirit




Exit Matter

So you weary of the endless and for the most part meaningless argument about the unreality of matter. Well, the issue has been wrestled with and disposed of by the keen thinkers of every age. They tell us that matter is a misunderstanding of substance. With keener vision, they promise, we will discover that Spirit and matter are but different aspects of reality, the one true, the other false. Enlightenment therefore will terminate the debate and bring into view the exclusiveness, the substantiality, the permanence of Spirit.

Everyone concedes that matter is not the hard, heavy, static stuff it appears. Some speak of it as energy and others as mortal mind. In either case it is motion so slowed down as to become visible. It is the way realities appear to inadequate physical sense.

What we call matter then is mental. It is a limited sense of things — a sense of things as crude, dense, expendable. In this misunderstanding lie all restriction and suffering. Whereas Spirit is unrestricted, imponderable, impalpable, and permanent. In this actuality lies the truth which makes men free.

Faith, hope, charity, and with them the innumerable other spirituals, abide, do they not? While doubt, turmoil, infirmity, and with them the other hosts of clay, disintegrate and disappear with the march of time.

Some people think of the Creator as a person, everpresent and unlimited of course. Others think of Him as Spirit. But there is no essential difference, perhaps, between Spirit and infinite Person. Both are omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient — the commonly accepted measure of Deity.

You will be interested here in the reasoning of Abraham Rihbany: “Whether God is personal or not depends upon our knowledge of what personality is. If we mean by a person an individual of bounded dimensions (an erroneous conception of personality), then God is not personal. But if personality is self-conscious being, with all its attributes of intelligence, will, emotions, and purpose — finite in man, infinite in God — then God is personal ... To me God is personal in the truest sense of the word.”

Venturesome William Blake puts forth the assurance: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

While Walt Whitman, with his usual optimism, boldly affirms: “I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the universes are limitless, in vain I try to think how limitless.”

When we concede that the Creator is Spirit, logic immediately insists that creation must be spiritual. If human sense, on the contrary, sees a material universe, we have a right to suspect that human sense entertains a wrong concept of things. This mistaken concept is all there is to matter, and it is the purpose of idealism to change and correct that concept in order, not that things shall be destroyed, but that they shall be discerned in their true light.

To change from a material to a spiritual concept of the universe does not destroy the universe, nor anything in it, but it makes the universe, and all contained therein, more real, permanent, and beautiful. To exchange the physical idea of man for the spiritual does not put man out of existence, but brings into view his real selfhood as perfect and immortal.

It is this man, and really there is no other, that we affirm is immune to disease and the other ravages of materiality and mortality. When you insist, from year to year, that you are this sort of man, the heaviness and afflictions of so-called mortal existence will recede. Eventually they will fade out under the blaze of intelligent thinking.

At first thought the unreality of matter may have little point to the man in pain. Someone may smartly say to him: “The body, you know, is made of the same elements that a wagon wheel is made of. How then can it tire or hurt? Indeed the body is matter and matter is not, so you have no body anyway.”

Now no one, whether at ease or in distress, wants to be rid of his body. What he wants is a better body than the one he appears to have, a body in rapport with good health and all that that implies. He would like to know how to obtain it.

The body is a human concept. It is therefore mental. This is why it rises or falls with the individual's thought. Accurate and generous thinking therefore is the source of the ideal body which neither hurts, hampers, nor boasts. Improve your thinking and you improve your body, indeed your whole being. Put emphasis steadfastly on the salubrious, the imperishable, the beautiful, the magnanimous; in the same instant rejecting the sickly, the fearsome, the oppressive, the mean. In this mood you live in Spirit and Spirit lives in you. This looks toward the millennium.

When it is recognized that the human body is essentially mental, it becomes at once apparent that a change in thought effects a change in the body, and this even to the extent of what we call a physical or structural change in some organ or member.

This is precisely what metaphysics is accomplishing in its healing ministry. By substituting in consciousness an understanding of health in place of a belief in sickness, a knowledge of soundness instead of an illusion of decomposition, a realization of symmetry in lieu of a supposition of deformity, metaphysics is bringing about an improvement in health, not to mention morale. Hence it is that metaphysics takes the radical position that matter is unreal, and if it did less, metaphysics would have little to offer beyond what already has been offered in the way of relief for suffering humanity.




Grace and Symmetry

Your letter telling of the plight of your little girl was on my desk when I returned from the Orient. The rule of perfect God and perfect child governs her, regardless of the pretensions of polio. It contemplates a child who is changelessly upright and God-like. She conforms to the old saying, “straight as a string.” Rectitude and integrity is her middle name.

There is no power in this world to put her out of shape or out of condition. Principle holds her perfectly in line, holds every bit of her in place.

She has that Mind which knows and feels grace and symmetry. Neither her thought nor her experience can depart from this perfect pattern.

Hold to these statements; amplify them. Direct your thought and your conversation to the girl. Teach her to talk and work accordingly. Thereby will consciousness be given the opportunity to form her anew. I will take hold. Let me hear from you in a week or so.

So your back seems out of line. Well, no spine is absolutely straight. Therefore you are part of a large company of respectable people. The mathematicians say no circle is round. And the scientific world opines that there is no perfect human being. But you and I are interested in the perfect men and women of God's creating, and it is high time you joined their company in thought. This done you cannot be balked by lawn mowers or creaking backs or any other jarring business.

In other words you are well-made, well-balanced, and well-proportioned if you care to be your true self. These distresses that would argue to you cannot talk. They have no voice, no intelligence. They are inarticulate and silent as the dawn.

Now go on with your sensible soliloquy and bid those lying insinuations to leave. You have the power. I will help. The good Lord will see that you have a graceful posture and carriage. Write again in a week or ten days.

It will help your grandson if members of the family will keep in thought that he is well-made, his proportions perfect. How could there be any faulty architecture in the noblest work of God?

Why, the boy is intact and symmetrical, right now and always. He has nothing before him but a glorious career. No threat of deformity can be held over him.

Your letter is filled with usable wisdom. Every page proves my statement made at the Biltmore, “You are important, even indispensable.” And since you now admit the fact, and are acting up to the admission, we shall not have to argue the proposition further.

Rather I will ask you to admit that the supreme Builder has shaped you in unalterable symmetry. You know full well that He could not do less. And where is the person or the power who can mar His handiwork? So you will have to acknowledge, and you do, that today you enjoy the unchangeable grace and bearing you enjoyed when the morning stars were cast abroad in the heavens.

I am terribly busy. No end of things that have to be done, but I will keep your case in mind. Of course you will improve and improve.

Remind yourself that Life is untouchable by disease or imperfection, because Life, the very Life you live, is God. It is the everlasting I Am, continuously and harmoniously operating in you at every point. Say to yourself, then, “That is what I am.” No possibility of your separation from it. Hence your vitality and freedom of movement.

Read my editorials and talk their truths to yourself. In this way you will get a good treatment from me, coming in none too round about way.

The fact is that you are in perfect alinement. Principle has put you together in this way and holds you there without a kink or crook.

In other words the Almighty, and the Almighty alone, is in the midst of you; you cannot get out of plumb or out of shape.

Do not examine yourself too much for defects in thought or elsewhere. Be content to know that you are quite all right in every detail. The Creator so built you and so maintains you.

Vital Principle permeates every recess of your being, strengthening every fiber and regulating every function. He is the jealous God who will not permit the slightest deviation from perfection. So whatever you may name any particular area — heart, hand, or what have you — be confident that all is well there.

The fact that you may have been calling yourself a material mortal does not confuse the Almighty in the slightest. He knows that you are a spiritual immortal. He is proud of His handiwork. More than once a day He observes, “Just see my beloved daughter in whom I am well pleased.”

You are spiritual. You live in the realm of Spirit. Your substance is intelligence. Hence you are sound and enduring throughout. No decay or corruption can find or touch you. You are built for eternity and for a glorious purpose and career.




The Liquidation of Poundage

Keep in thought that active Principle operates throughout your being. This compels all the functions of your economy to behave. Hence they can neither unduly deplete nor unduly augment your stature.

Do not forget that the lines are fallen to you in undeviating comeliness. In other words you are duly proportioned — and that right now.

It is grand to learn that you are so full of activity. Without doubt you are doing a lot of good in the community as well as gathering a great deal of satisfaction to yourself.

Certainly the excess avoirdupois will fall away. It is mental, is it not? Therefore keep reminding yourself how queenly you are. This is a dynamic truth, and the truth, when declared, is like the atomic bomb, it vaporizes the error.

Just the other day a woman wrote me of having a short lip elongated while listening to my lecture. Encouraged by this experience, she reasoned with herself about overweight, and was delighted to find her figure reduced. The fact is that woman is shapely and comely. She weighs neither too much nor too little. She is neither too tall nor too short. Well, the temple of the living God cannot be less than perfect in outline, can it?

Never doubt that when one talks along these lines to herself, seriously and expectantly, she will find her form improving because her thought is uplifted and clarified by this sort of conversation. Then consciousness constructs a better body, or, better stated, clarified thought sees the individual more nearly as she is. And every individual is the image and likeness of God and in a degree is as perfect as God Himself.

Well, if you cannot resist over-eating, try resisting the belief that eating will increase your weight. You see it is your belief in the matter that works the mischief. Anyhow the unusual appetite will subside when you recognize that the Almighty is in the midst, controlling all your desires, emotions, thoughts, and functions.

You know He is so very close to you that He and you are one, which insures that you can be as sensible and welldisciplined as He is, and that you can no more lose your form divinely fair than can He. Yes, you two are one. He is in you and you are in Him, all of which spells annihilation to everything opposed to your good looks.

Many thanks for the hopeful letter. Certainly you are progressing. Your higher and freer thinking, your expanded confidence and expectancy, have encouraged consciousness to reconstruct you.

Surely you feel more bodily strength and agility. You are perking up with the will to throw off needless surplusages. Who or what can load you down with them? The great Architect guaranteed you a suitable contour and carriage for easily four score years and ten.

Sometimes people cultivate the sitting habit too assiduously. There is no law, you know, against one striding around and even doing a few calisthenics, once in a while. It is fun. Some of those glands, notably the thyroid and pituitary, by becoming too energetic or too poky, are credited with giving the body an unwanted build-up.

Well, this sort of nonsense can be stopped by realizing that the Almighty is in charge and giving direction to every function, permitting no undue haste on the one hand or any undue procrastination on the other.

Now, without any doubt, when Mind and Life sally forth in you they do a very good job, that is, they build you neither too large nor too small, but just about right — comely and easy to look at, most certainly. They give you all the courage and ability you need for making a good impression in the community and for carving out a suitable career.

You lack nothing that is essential to an attractive mien, a pleasing address, and an everyday existence useful and satisfying. Have a better opinion of yourself. Strike out and do things. Be yourself, and do not think you have to completely sink your existence in serving others. Be good to yourself. Take good care of her. You are important, are you not?

Certainly the Lord would not have you neglect yourself.

Let me hear from you again pretty soon. Meanwhile trudge along in the sensible way indicated in the above paragraphs. You will find yourself improving.




Shaping a Comely Form

The master Architect who built you insured His work — guaranteed that it would not swell or warp or in any way get out of line. So the undeniable fact is that you are in perfect trim now, uniform and balanced, not too heavy and yet not too thin.

Inordinate heaviness is supposed to be due to abnormal action of some of the glands, particularly the thyroid. But the fact is that omnipotent Spirit directs every gland and every function in your constitution and compels them to do their work efficiently, never slowing down on one hand or speeding up on the other.

A short way of saying all this is to remind yourself that Spirit is in your midst, taking care of and giving direction to every gadget however large or small it may be.

The same Spirit is in operation in family affairs and will give to them a satisfactory adjustment. Sit tight, do not talk much, and give Spirit a chance to reign. Spirit likes to run things, you know, and run them smoothly.

P.S. Of course you realize that what we are saying and doing has reference to spiritual man and his makeup and functions. We are not claiming any perfection for material mortals. But strange to say when they hear this conversation about perfect man, these mortals reform their ways and become more comely and better behaved themselves. And some day you and I will find that there is no such race, because are we not all made in spiritual form and texture after the blueprint shown in the mount?

You are a spiritual man. There is no other type. Omniactive Spirit takes care of your outline. Therefore undesirable poundage cannot accumulate; and if any has already seemed to accumulate, it will vanish when you understandingly and persistently say scram.

You know the Father is well pleased with His workmanship as wrought in you. Of course you have the frame, the size, the carriage that are pleasing to Him.

Remind yourself that all the movements and the functionings of your being are nothing less than allcompelling Spirit working out its purpose in you; hence there can be no inadequacy of action.

Keep in thought that whatever building is going on in you, and there is plenty of it, is under the direction of Spirit. Therefore your profile cannot lack character and attractiveness. Spirit forms you in due proportions as your moods and attitudes permit. Both in form and hue it bestows on you its choicest workmanship.

I will work on the case. Let me hear from you in a week or so.

The Maker constructed you in perfection and insured His work for an indefinite period. This goes for your faculties of sight and hearing. It goes also for what you call figure. He made you unalterably symmetrical and unalterably unimpairable.

Spirit does your seeing and controls your contour. You are directly under its omnipotent command and enlightenment.

Spirit is so close that it is in you and through you — so close indeed that it is you. So that when I say Spirit sees adequately, I, in effect, say your sight is adequate.

Now get busy in your own behalf. Think out the above truths and elaborate them. Talk them to yourself hour by hour and day by day. Expect results. I will help. Let me hear from you in a week or so.

That heaviness will be liquidated one of these days, and without too much struggle. As your thought becomes clarified, consciousness will form a prepossessing body. It is a case of, “O Life that maketh all things new.”

You ask where Principle is. It is in you. You are a perfect blend with it. You and Principle are one. Hence your power to control situations.

Many thanks for your note. Maybe it will be just as well for you to journey along alone for the time being. I am confident that the truth we have been announcing, and the further truths that you will continue to announce, will promote the stateliness desired.

The same process will fill you with hope and strength also. Even your vision will normalize. Why Mind, in its very nature, cannot do less than see adequately. Where is this Mind? It is so close that you call it me. So how can me do less than see well?

Yesterday I had a letter from a jubilant woman. She never has had much of a figure. Now she says: “Did I tell you that the reason I have been shopping this spring is that nothing bought before you started treatment fits any longer? One of my prized possessions at the moment is a tailored suit — the first. There just never has been enough of me before to provide the wherewithal for such an outfit.”

So do not be surprised if you have to restock your wardrobe. These days of course you will not mind, because there is such a demand from Europe for used garments.

Sorry your letter went unanswered. I do not know why. Maybe it was lost in the deluge of mail that comes in day by day.

You may be sure that the Creator not only gave you a comely form but protected it against any subsequent encroachment. You see there is an undeviating law, indeed He is the law itself, which not only fashions you in just measure but forever after holds you there. So keep in mind that you are well-made, well-conditioned, wellproportioned.

There is no power anywhere to interfere with that fine structure of yours by adding a single unnecessary pound.




Outlawing Accidents

I like that part of your letter in which you argue that law and order must pervade the universe, regardless of the apparent confusion and even danger that lurk here and there. I suspect you have been reading my editorial, SecurityConscious.

It is proverbial that we see and know in part only. Our everyday perception and understanding are insufficient to take in the perfection and security that surround us. But reason tells us that they exist to the exclusion of chaos and destruction, because we live in a realm where Principle reigns, a realm of Spirit where all things and all creatures are spiritual.

Thereby are accidents and casualties outlawed. They have their supposed existence in that spectral world of matter, outside of which all is serene and peaceful. Intelligent thinking, which is the major ingredient of prayer, puts us in that ideal environment.

“Watch your step” is sound, practical advice. But watch your thinking comes first, does it not? Enlightened and balanced thought refuses to dwell on the specter of disorder and danger, insisting that undeviating Principle governs all things from the minutest to the mightiest — the hammer I wield and the car I drive? you ask. Well, if not, who or what does direct them? You had better not turn them over to chance. Too much of that nonsense has already been indulged. It accounts for every mishap that has darkened human experience.

Do you not wonder how people dare speak of luck in the face of the sublime fact that the Lord God omnipotent reigneth? We must not relegate God to the region beyond the clouds. He glorifies the commonest tasks and the thoroughfares of everyday existence; He sanctifies every spot you and I will ever tread. Exodus has it, “The place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

People are prompt to admit that there are no accidents in Spirit or Mind. Certainly there are not. What you and I are interested in is that there shall be no accidents in the highways we travel or in the shops or kitchens where we work. We are slow to acknowledge that law and order is established in those supposedly mundane quarters. But they are. And for one to recognize understanding that Principle is always and everywhere in control, wheresoever he may be or whatsoever he may be doing, will introduce safety into his experience.

Principle governs not only him and his movements but it governs the implements he employs and the people in propinquity with him. Be alert to realize these momentous truths as you go about your daily routine. Thereby is raised a wall of defense against accident. Thereby is divine law made to operate in human affairs.

Write again and we will continue the discussion.




Unbreakable Structure of Man

Your highway mishap is not half so bad, even from the human standpoint, as has been pictured. From the divine standpoint, and really there is no other, it has not happened. It could not in that realm of law and order in which we live, move, and have our being.

Its whole existence rests in belief. And we will not believe, we will know the eternal safety and unshakableness of things.

It did not catch you. You cannot be caught for you are as impalpable as the “wind that bloweth where it pleaseth.” And you are as unbreakable as Principle, of which you are the expression.

Life (yours) is unlaboredly continuous — omnipotently irrepressible. And you are altogether too important and too indispensable even to be “laid up.”

Declare and act upon those animative truths you so well understand. It was quite the thing for you to have the surgeon patch you up. There still remains enough for you and me to do. So put your conscience to rest.

The accident which preceded your present condition is one of those things which happen not in the world of reality but in the world of dreams. And we do not have to suffer from the disasters of dreamland.

There is no reason why dreams of incapacity may not break any hour leaving you to walk forth in freedom and dignity. So you will naturally continue to work and pray with this glorious end in view.

You and the members of the household should stop looking back at the accident and talking about it and holding to it as an actuality. You must all do your best to eradicate it from thought as nothing more than a nightmare which never has touched you. You have been in the realm of safety throughout this supposed tragedy.

Insist, as you soliloquize, on your present perfection, the present ability to move and get about. The wellmadeness you started out with is still with you. Admit it. Any day you may prove it.

Charley's structure is spiritual. This means that truly it has never suffered any injury. The description you set forth is like one of the pictures on the screen. People look at them so fixedly that they sometimes howl with grief or with laughter as the case may be. Charley and you are evidently mesmerized with the picture of a damaged portion of his economy which has no more reality than the movie or cinema.

Now stop analyzing what the experts have said, and what mesmerism continues to say, is the condition. The omnipresence of God means that perfection exists at every point in the universe. This does not leave any room for imperfection anywhere in Charley's make-up. Perfect God and perfect man is the recipe. And Charley is the man.

Rather fortunate, is it not, that his structure is spiritual and hence as free as the multiplication table from the attacks of mortality. And so we look out at the universal Life about us, and then peek in on that same Life on our own premises, and remark, “Why, I am that; therefore I am in for a good long period of effort and usefulness.”

You must keep in thought that the accident did not happen and that the flame did not touch you. This for the simple reason that you are spiritual and therefore untouchable by fire or any other menace; and that not only are you spiritual, but that you live in the universe of Spirit where dangers and accidents do not roam.

This is what the Scripture means when it speaks of man as dwelling under the shadow of the Almighty, whence he can look out upon disease and disaster and extinguish them as threatenings quite apart from himself.

No, there is nothing wrong with you, with your face or eyes or anything else. You are a portion of the universal perfection. Nothing in the way of blemish can be attached to you. Spiritual man, your true self, cannot have the marks you describe. No cause for them, nothing to make them of, no place to put them. They just are not.

Suggestion has been lying about you, saying in effect that you fell down and messed things up a bit.

No one knows more clearly than you that your structure is spiritual. This means that you cannot fall — gravity does not pull on you. The indisputable fact is that you have not fallen and you have not been injured.

There is nothing to you, and you well know it, but Spirit. How then can you be bruised? You cannot be and you have not been. Hold to these verities and be free.

There is nothing to you but unassailable Spirit. You have said it often enough. Now you are going to rise to the zenith of demonstration. Yes you are, young fellow. You are going to prove what man is.

Spirit inviolable is the all and only of man's being. Speaking along this line Moses says, “I am That.” The Upanishads say, “Thou art That.” Now put it your way and say, “That is I.”

You know full well that you were made upright and Godlike and that you never stumbled and fell down. Now be thankful that you are still perfectly intact. In this mood you will give yourself the best treatment you have ever had.

There must be a mistake about your being hurt while lifting the chesterfield, because spiritual woman (you are one) cannot be strained in any way. You are whole and intact in every respect. Spirit so made and maintains you.

Spirit gives you the strength to carry on your work. Do not believe that you are incapacitated in any way. You are not. You are charged with the divine energy, for is not irrepressible Spirit in you and through you, so close that it is your very own?

Your note telling of your brother's catastrophe at the front just came. Well, an outsider cannot say much on such occasions. But certainly all of you are right in hoping that things will turn out better for him than now appears.

There is a tremendous power in the world, intelligent and much alive, which is called Spirit. No one has ever seen it but everybody has it and feels it, because Spirit burgeons forth and, in its course here and there, makes men and women. Spirit establishes in them its own faculties, indeed its own life and being and substance.

This is why no man can lose his sight and hearing, or his cheek or jaw. All this is true of the brother. He cannot be deprived of his faculties or his parts. They are all permanent and indestructible, because they are of this benign power and substance we call Spirit, which has chosen to take up its residence with him, making him, to use the language of a great philosopher, “the temple of the living God.”

Now if you will all think on these things, with a hundredth part of that faith which removes mountains, you will invoke a law which will put that boy back in condition.




Process of Rebuilding

Doubtless you took the right course in having an X-ray after the fall. Now we will keep in thought what wonderfully enduring substances you are made of. You are as unbreakable as thought or spirit, as sunshine or atmosphere.

This is the reason why you are confidently holding to the fact of present intactness and insisting: “I am whole and sound. Principle is in charge, holding every speck of me in place, in order, and in shape. Nothing can interfere with the perfection of my make-up. Besides, abounding Life, the very Life that vitalizes the universe, is in me. It is all there is to me. Whatever improvement or reformation is necessary will proceed swiftly.”

Think on these and other curative truths. As you do so consciousness builds you afresh — builds you a better body than any of your preceding bodies have been.

I can imagine how hard it is to be still and patient in this emergency, but you can turn the setback to good account and prove it a blessing by hitching yourself so securely to Spirit that you will never again be detached.

Your last note just arrived. Consciousness, you know, turns out a new body every year or two. A confident and enlightened consciousness can do a better job of reconstruction than can the surgeons.

So hold to the fact that consciousness is building you another body right now. We cannot say just when the work will be finished, maybe next week, maybe next June. But keep the blueprint of perfection before you. With this pattern to follow, consciousness will make that hip as perfect as the rest of you in His good time.

Wise Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, as I have so often reminded you, called on consciousness to do a better job next time when he ordered: “Build me more stately mansions, O my soul, as the swift seasons roll.”

Now remember consciousness is getting ready to build you a new body, and intellect, too. So the situation is very hopeful when you say your mental state is much improved. Continue to fill mentality with sound, wholesome, colorful thoughts. Consciousness is just looking for such timber to build with.

Man does not live by bread only. In other words consciousness, in carrying on its building operations, uses other substances than the bread and potatoes and caviar you eat. It draws on your thoughts, on your moods. In fact it gets most of its timber out of mood rather than out of ordinary food.

So do the best you can to keep your thought buoyant and young and expectant and animate. Be very much in earnest. Ask for a great deal, and ask expectantly. Make urgent appeals to consciousness, to the Almighty, to that unseen, always adequate power we call God.

It will set you free to admit that your intactness has not been shaken by the fall; and therefore that you still have all the strength and resourcefulness and confidence you need for doing everything legitimate that may be required of you.

You may not be able to do much of yourself. But the Father that dwelleth in you, with whom you are at-one, can do all that is necessary to put you on your feet and endue you with the resolution and ability to make the grade.

Spiritual woman, and that is what you are, cannot slip or stumble or get bumped. You did not fall. Blot out the whole picture. You are quite yourself this moment.

The laws of prolonged convalescence are not laws at all, as you well know. Your integrity has never been invaded. You will be stepping out any day finer than ever. Meanwhile be half as patient as Job was. You will be so much bigger because of this experience that you will find that it has not been a reversal after all.

A Reappraisal of Dentistry

Of course you do not want to turn to dentistry if you can help it. And yet the popular prejudice against the dentist's office, as though it were a chamber of terrors, is rapidly giving place to an appreciation of a service which the world has not outgrown.

The dentist and his equipment are not to be feared. Rather should we say with Jacob, “The Lord is in this place and I knew it not.” Intelligence can direct the dentist's diagnosis, his hand, his instruments. It will do so if you acknowledge the fact. How then can any hurt or harm result? They will not if you face the situation understandingly and confidently.

We will not forget however that the realization that man is spiritual, therefore not subject to decay and disintegration, is a preventive of tooth and gum maladies, and a cure for them in the event that they get by. The demonstration of this truth will abolish material dentistry.

Teeth and gums come to grief, say physiology and pathology, because the blood which is supposed to build and keep them in repair does not circulate fully on their premises, or, if it does, is not charged with the proper nutritive and building substances. All this is no more than a belief or obsession.

The fact is that Life, in all its efficiency and richness, functions at every point of man's being. It overlooks not one single spot and fails not to sustain one single area of his economy.

Now reason these statements out, amplify them in words of your own, expect results, and you will enjoy them, for you are a man, are you not? Claim then your rights, immunities, and privileges. People have brought gums and teeth into healthful condition by giving themselves this simple yet searching treatment.

Let me hear from you again in a week or so. Keep admitting these facts. You do not have to prove them. Acknowledge them.

Perfectly respectable people, as you know, resort to dentistry, which in these days is not so unpleasant as in former times. You see the good Lord teaches dentists to do their work more humanely and scientifically than formerly. Well, if He does not, where then do they learn?

And yet the indisputable fact is that man, or woman either for that matter, is made of a substance, Spirit, which never decays or gets out of order. In other words the structure of every individual is spiritual, hence enduring. The highest dentistry lies in realizing this fact.

Spirit and Mind cannot be touched by decay or disorder. Each individual, after all, is an intelligence, not a corporeality. Hence his exemption from troubles — dental or otherwise. Talk these truths over, apply them to the situation. You may be surprised at the results.

Of course prayer can cure toothache, and has done so many a time. Where is toothache, anyhow? You might as well ask, where is color? The experts agree that color is in mentality not in the exterior object. Metaphysics specializes, does it not, in lifting and clarifying mentality until it is too clever to believe in or experience such imposition.

So you are on the lookout for something more congenial than single blessedness. How glorious! This is precisely what everybody should do regardless of age, color, or previous condition of servitude. And in that adventure you have what it takes to win, that is, you have attractiveness and everything implied thereby.

The human mouth is not the choicest spot in this universe; and yet it is one of the most conspicuous. This is why everyone should do his utmost to keep the mouth and its accessories in as sanitary a condition as possible. Modern dentistry is indispensable to most people. Doubtless there are those who can keep teeth and gums in good order through prayer or metaphysical methods.

There are others whom nature has so favored that they can be indifferent and still have attractive smiles.

But most of us, and evidently you are one of them, must, as they say, do something about it. So see the best dentist you can think of, because there is a vast difference in dentists. Some of them, like other perfectly fine people, lack plain ordinary sense or experience. Without those qualities a dentist can irretrievably ruin a perfectly good mouth in short order.

Along with this, keep rehearsing the constructive fact that you are made of the lasting substances of Spirit. Hence infection and decay cannot get in their work on you. Tell yourself frequently, “I am made of the stuff eternity is made of.” This is a guarantee not only against decay but against wrinkles and other marks of age.

And as you rehearse these facts to yourself, go out in the world in a mood of friendliness and put yourself in the way of opportunity, if you would have that loneliness assuaged. Do so confidently and expectantly. You know how. You will have to put forth some effort but the reward is worthwhile.

Life in all its richness is continuously and irrepressibly active. There is no power to impede its movement or defeat its purpose. It flows on and on in its laborless way, always and everywhere, somewhat as gravity behaves.

All of which speaks of a perfect circulatory system in man and assures sufficient maintenance for every item of his economy, call it mouth or what have you.

You have had a hint of how this works in the case of your toe. You will have a further hint with those gums. Consciousness will replenish them as you think and talk these remedial truths to yourself.

And make this monologue your chief business. Do not be content with an occasional chat, but every hour give yourself a good going over.

I will keep working. Our combined efforts will bring results.

Probably it will be well to make an appointment with the dentist. Before the day arrives you will have had time to correct the situation metaphysically. I will help. There is no reason why you should not have the experience that other people have had. They have gone to the dentist one day and he has found cavities. A week after, with all set for doing a fat filling, he has been astonished to find sound teeth.

The remedy is simply this: know that your substance is Spirit. It cannot shrink or decay. It has not done so. Every part of your economy is richly and constantly nourished by exuberant Life. It overlooks not a single spot. Health and wholeness are the inevitables. Let us work along this line and expect results.

Every individual should insist, in his silent interview with himself, that he is formed of enduring spiritual substances, that in him are no defects or deficiencies, that, regardless of appearances, he is sound and entire. In the same instant should he reject infirmity and other suggestions of mortality as lying impositions.

Abiding in this balanced mood and argument, he will at least begin to experience the health, the fortitude, the resourcefulness he has desired. They are present, with all other stalwart qualities; they are his. They are yours. Indeed, they inhere in everyone's true nature and need only to be acknowledged and acted upon in order to be felt and enjoyed.

For a further discussion of dentistry see pages 108-109.




Tension and Nervousness Exposed

Something can be done about that nervousness you complain of. Why do you not remind yourself now and then of that Mind within which enjoys absolute dominion? It is absurd to suppose that it can be upset by alarm or worry. What impostors they are. How groundless is their argument. How impossible it is that they should for an instant ruffle that calm ocean of Life in which you live and move and have your being.

There can be no such thing as nervous breakdown for a person of your giantly stature. You are teeming with the divine energy that makes not only for strength but for confidence. Rectitude, integrity, uprightness permeate your premises. Every area of your being is in peaceful and yet exuberant animation. Is not abounding Life in your midst? Who or what can disturb its rhythm?

Your note of the twenty-sixth received. You know how straightly and stoutly a telephone pole stands which is held in place with proper guy wires. Does not this picture portray how firmly and uprightly you stand in rectitude and confidence when your mind is stayed on the Almighty?

In this very attitude you invite Him to take up His abode within. Or more accurately stated, you find that He is already not only without but within you, affording you strength, composure, and assurance for every occasion.

There is no reason for distressful symptoms. But there is necessity to realize their absence, and the presence in you of that Mind, which, unconfused and unconcerned, can see the world and see yourself well conditioned and firmly established. This Mind is the only mentality there is. It must then be yours.

Every hour of the day, therefore, you can truthfully declare: “I am serene and at peace. Nothing can interfere with the harmony of my existence. My being is supreme Being, into which no alarm and no unsteadiness can come.”

Try to take things easy. Make some of your famous spaghetti once in a while. Fill up on it. Then take a look over your backyard onto the rippling Lake.

If this is not enough, read some of your own poems. You are not likely to find any better ones. Walk around saying, “I am a woman.” Say it every step you take. That is a stupendous thing to say. It means there is no worry or nervousness or concern within miles. It means you are as stanch and confident as the rock of ages.

Challenge pretentious annoyances. They cannot do a thing. You do not have to see or hear them. They are not in you or in your house or in your garden. They are in another world which radiant girls like you do not frequent.

Yes, you are just as placid as the Lake at its best. You have no more to worry about than those birds flitting around in the trees. Because the good Lord has you in hand all the time. He will not let anything or anybody bother you.

If all the world is a stage, then all your house and associations and doings are the background for tranquillity. Nothing can creep in to disturb. The still resistless power of Principle governs. Do not struggle for peace. Be quiet a moment. You will find it right on your doorstep.

Now do a lot of this sensible talking with yourself, and plenty of that strutting around. It will not be long before your mastery of the situation is a certainty.

You are brimming over with that kind of potency which is poised and calm and sufficient to every demand. There is no anxiety or hurriedness; there is that quiet command of every situation.

This is why Scripture says you are the temple of the living God. By virtue of all the powers which gather there, you are able to circulate in that normal life which you formerly enjoyed. Of course you are on the mend.




Reality Lies in Peaceful Repose

I am feeling very confident about you, never wondering how you are. I just know how full of composure and vigor you are.

And that mind of yours? Why it is the Mind we call God. That is why your mentality cannot be confused or frightened for a moment. This is why your thought is continuously calm and keen.

Yes, there is no one with more courage and better balance and fuller understanding of herself than you. Your thought is steady and penetrative. There is not a ruffle throughout your being. You are a princess mentally and soulfully as well as bodily.

How silly are those insinuations of confused or lost mentality. Why, Mind is God — yours is. Hence it is that you have such faith and dominion — and you have them right now and cannot lose them.

I am negligent enough in writing you though every day I silently tell you what a wonder you are and how graciously and gallantly you are swinging along.

High-strung folk like you and me must be careful to keep our temperament serene and mellow. If we allow it to go on rampage when we see the favoritism, injustice, rivalry, and the like going on about us, our emotions burn us up. If they only scorched the fellow who is to blame we should not worry, but the conflagration is confined to our establishment.

Sometimes relief does not come immediately. Then people ask why and even get restless. But the Almighty cannot be hurried. Time enters into His plan for building a tree and even for bringing out lasting health and success in His people. So we patiently work and wait, knowing that no effort is wasted.

Keep reminding yourself that the Eternal springs into visibility as you. In so doing He retains His perpetual qualities of health, confidence and resourcefulness. Hold to this truth steadfastly, amplify it. Thereby you pronounce the healing Word of God.

This same Eternal springs into visibility in your business and family and personal affairs, giving them a right direction and movement. Thereby are success and peace of mind insured.

This is prayer, for as Emerson says: “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.”

Who said there was a loose screw in your thinking or anywhere else in your make-up? You are perfectly put together. The great Architect saw to that.

And that benign power, animate and intelligent, which upholds the earth and spins it about in the heavens, holds you up in full vitality and composure. No doubts, no wavering, but complete confidence and conviction.

No wonder you feel like getting about and taking hold of projects that need to be put over, and this in your good oldfashioned way.

A person with your stability and equipment can certainly walk up to that speaker's desk on every occasion and give a good account of herself. Fear and nervousness are nonsense. You have the confidence and the capacity you need for the assignment.

Take hold of yourself and proceed, knowing that you can do all things through vital Principle that sustains and directs you. I will give you a boost or two. You will not need much help.

Do not believe for an instant that there is any hostility in the audience or elsewhere that can confuse omniscient Mind, that Mind within. It does the talking and the reading. Rejoice that because of that support no adverse circumstance can interfere with your performance.




He Giveth His Beloved Sleep

You are not the only one who has restless, sleepless hours. The world is full of people who nightly turn to the Psalmist's promise, “He giveth His beloved sleep.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning, you may remember, has expanded the comforting theme into a poem of nine stanzas.

A man may have the ability to measure and weigh the moon and yet have to bow down to an ordinary cold or to a night of worry, which proves that something more than intellectuality may be necessary to invoke the healing power of the Almighty. Nevertheless clear and intelligent thinking is an outstanding feature in metaphysical therapeutics, whether the desire is to overcome sickness and poverty or to gain rest and repose.

But why, you ask, cannot one quiet down and go to sleep when the hour arrives? No doubt there are many reasons. One of them will hold good for one person and another for someone else. I find that I lie awake when I should be asleep because I like to keep up my thinking, and thinking is a good part of living. Not that one stops thinking when he falls asleep. On the contrary his thought takes on incredible speed the moment he steps out into the next-door realm of slumber.

Now some people try to minimize the need of sleep. They despise it, you would think from their conversation, and regard it as a black-out. To me sleep possesses more dignity. It is a realm from which weariness and fatigue have been banished. After we have basked in its balmy atmosphere for a few hours, we return to this hardworking world refreshed and ready to take up our labors where we laid them down the night before.

“We sleep, but the loom of life never stops,” says Beecher, “and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up tomorrow.”

Hence you and I are perfectly in accord with Shakespeare's laudation, “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” No doubt people in these hectic days indulge in too little repose rather than in too much. You see indications in their drawn and anxious countenances. There is plenty of time in eternity. There is no compelling necessity that you and I should deprive ourselves of reasonable quiet and rest. It does not do to burn the candle at both ends. Sensible people do not except in emergencies.

Do not be so intense on this issue of sleep. Do not contemplate how strong and refreshed you will be in the morning if you enjoy a night's rest, or on the other hand picture how run down you will be when the sun rises if you have not had a full quota of slumber.

In this carefree attitude you will presently fall asleep. And if you should not do so promptly, there is nothing to be concerned about. One remedy for sleeplessness is to think about it as little as you can.

“When thou liest down,” assures the Proverb, “thou shalt not be afraid; yea, thou shalt lie down and thy sleep shall be sweet.”

“Now let God take over the night shift,” says the sensible business man when the hour comes to turn in.

I suspect, as you intimate, that sleeplessness can be due to our reluctance to surrender. We like to keep active, quite unwilling to drop our soliloquy. But we do not drop anything except our burdens. Existence goes on, generally in freer and swifter measure. The child who has not taken on the anxieties of life falls asleep as naturally as he awakes.

Falling asleep, after all, is waking up in another world, pleasant and restful. Certainly there is no reason to hesitate about letting go and embarking on the journey. Says Byron:

Strange state of being! (for 'tis still to be) Senseless to feel, and with sealed eyes to see.

Put the brake on those fretful night thoughts. They are not yours. They are set in motion by mischievous suggestion which perches on your shoulder. Shoo him off. You know how.

You say blood pressure is no part of God or of God's man. Why not say, “It is no part of me. There is nothing to me but Spirit in all its plenitude and quietude. Now I can lay me down to rest and sleep, because it is His will that I shall forget weariness and tension and take on that relaxation and serenity that passes understanding.”

Avail yourself of the pledge, “He giveth His beloved sleep.” You can depend on Him each night to lead you into that land of slumber where the wicked cease to trouble and the weary are at rest. You do not have to work or struggle. Let Him take possession.

Try to recognize your unity with Spirit and thereby feel its support and rhythm. Spirit is the basis of every movement and act. Hence it is that your thought and action can be in the realm of equanimity, the fourth dimensional world, where peace reigns uncontested.

Say to yourself, as did the Psalmist, “I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep; for thou, Lord, only makest me to dwell in safety.”




Companionship Versus Loneliness

From your letter, just arrived, it is clear that its writer is of the shy and retiring type. Now there is nothing more productive in this world than confidence accompanied by a reasonable amount of tactful aggressiveness. Everybody needs this quality if he is to make his way in life.

Expectancy should run high in the campaign for companionship you have entered upon, because you have all it takes for success.

Too often idealists are disposed to live a hermit life content with reading and pondering. Now a certain amount of solitude and prayer is highly important, but it is only half of the enterprise after all. You must get out and make contacts. Put yourself in the way of opportunities. This stratagem you understand much better than I can describe. Its finesse is not to be neglected. Certainly it is perfectly legitimate.

Then comes that faith which removes mountains. Practice all of it you can muster, and you can muster a great deal. Expectancy means very much the same thing.

The foregoing rules, to which you can add others, are a law of annihilation to disappointment; and you put this law into operation every time you think and expect and act along these lines of promotion.

You do not have to submit to loneliness. You can capture that companionship which will round out and enrich your life. The Almighty is with you.

No individual is sufficient unto himself. The Biblical apothegm, “It is not good that the man should be alone,” epitomizes the wisdom of the ages. Says Luther, “God has set the type of marriage everywhere throughout the creation. Each creature seeks its perfection in another. The very heavens and earth picture it to us.” No, the law is not confined to the animate. Toss a couple of chips aimlessly into a tub of water. Presently the two will be jauntily bumping along together. Nature will not tolerate isolation.

Attractiveness? You have it. Everybody has, though perhaps only potentially on the surface. Development and expansion of the quality is always in order. Not a few could profit by checking themselves occasionally to see what they can further acquire in the way of accomplishments and versatility. A single interest in life, even a hobby, glorified, lifts one out of the commonplace and attracts its affinity or counterpart.

Recognizing that life is less than nothing without love, the Good Book promises, “God setteth the solitary in families.” Get busy now, I will help. Two prayers are said to be a perfect strength.

Walt Whitman used to say, and he was not strutting but speaking grandly, “I do not doubt that I am limitless; in vain I try to think how limitless.” You have the right, indeed the duty, as has any normal person, to talk this way to yourself.

It is so natural with many people to heap up limitations and thereby keep out opportunities and achievements, instead of leaving the way open.

Whatever successes or whatever disappointments you may have had in the past, whatever drawbacks or obstructions may appear today, the undeniable fact is that you have what is necessary to woo to your door whatever is needed to happify existence.

A condition precedent to success is the energy, comeliness, and confidence that go along with good health. You promote health when you remind yourself, hour by hour, that all the functions of being — call them digestion, circulation, assimilation, elimination, and whatnot — are under the command of divine Mind. They are propelled by it. They have no chance either to lag or to gallop.

Be industrious and expectant. The prize is worth working for. Mind gives you the necessary will and skill.

Doubtless you are familiar with my editorials Normal Living and Persuasiveness of Love. They will be worth reading again maybe.

Have no fears. Refuse to be panicky for an instant. Mind has prepared all you will be able to enjoy or at least all that will be good for you to receive for the time being.

Try not to entertain doubt or suspicion. Treat these two enemies rigorously. Rule them out. If you could visualize the entire program, as you will see it one of these days, you would see it full of promise and realization.

Since you are His beloved daughter in whom He is well pleased, He certainly will provide to an extent that may today appear unlikely or even impossible. He withholds nothing from those who do their best, because in their faithful effort they come into possession of all that He has.

Put on the armor of confidence and expectancy. You will be surprised to see how much better you get along. He has built in you an attractiveness which will win the day. I will take hold of the case. Let me hear from you in a week or so.

Your letters of June 4 and 8 arrived this morning. The news they bring is tremendous.

Of course it is right for you to think the truth about Charley. You cannot help thinking about him. Therefore you should “cast your net on the right side.” He will feel that awful urge of Principle, that urge that will compel him to face the issue and act. He is not a dawdler in the valley of indecision. There is no such man. On the contrary he is a man of action, that is, he is receptive to the divine impulse and promptly responsive. He has the courage and the will to go ahead.

And what is quite as important, you have the wherewithal to lead him on.

And what is most important of all is that the Almighty has the enterprise in charge. There will be no halting or backsliding, but there will be that forward movement which will lead to consummation. What have you to fear from the other girls? The foregoing truths provide you a weapon they know not of.

As for the skin condition, you are made every whit whole and there is no power on earth to impair that wholeness, but there is a certain power that will remove illusions. It is that Light which shineth in darkness, that Light which symbolizes Life. That Life is in you and through you and is all there is to you. There is nothing besides God; no, nothing in you besides His Mind and Life.

Yes, I can still help on that marriage problem and you can help yourself very substantially by applying the principle involved in that “Admissions” letter to the situation.

Admit that you are awake to the fullness of Life and in the active enjoyment of every advantage essential to round out existence in a satisfying way. Admit that allwatchful Mind knows of your need and satisfies that need.

You see, whatever the shortcoming may seem to be, the acknowledgment that the prayer is heard and answered speeds the day of victory.

And once in a while take things awfully easy. Do not care whether school keeps or not. Stop trying to think and demonstrate so absolutely. Then you give the good Lord an opportunity to bring to pass just what you hope for. Or rather, you give Him a chance to open your eyes to what He has already provided.

Of course we will win. It is the Father's will and good pleasure that you should lack nothing.

That fine faith of yours, accompanied by the efforts we are putting forth, will surely bring you into a wider field of living. Be careful, I should say, not to argue in any way against your success, particularly along the line that opportunities are not abundant. You need only one, you know, and if it has not already occurred, it may show up any hour and in a most unexpected fashion.

It is an old saying that the Lord is most on the premises when He seems most certainly absent. The plain fact is He is never absent. And better than all He has His purpose fixed on doing something extraordinarily fine for you.

Let me hear from you again in a week or so.




Family Affairs

It is natural that you should like to stay in this part of the world, and with your husband. Few marriage alliances are perfect, as everyone knows, but yours without doubt is much above the average. Of course you will stay with it. The little flare-up you mention will be forgotten in a few days.

One relative, as you know, is generally given to ordering other relatives around, whereas each one should make his own decisions. Naturally this is precisely what you will do.

You are now in one of the pleasantest spots on earth. By all means remain. You cannot go back East and pick up the thread of life there as you left it. Oak trees do not go back to acorns.

Now take it easy. Talk little. Go along day by day in your usual circumspect manner. The good Lord is looking after you. Soon everything will quiet down. I will help.

People frequently change their mood in response to the urge of Principle. This will happen with your good wife. Expect it. Look for her to act in a perfectly womanly way. She cannot do otherwise when the good Lord holds her in His ample palm. He will not let her think or act unreasonably.

It is God which worketh in both of you not only to will but to do His good pleasure. Hold on hopefully and intelligently for a while. The situation will clear up.

Religion does not separate people. Rather it draws them closer together. Just continue to be nice, tactful, and loving. Little more will be necessary in order to reestablish peace and confidence.

Now you must blot out those unpleasant pictures of the past. You know very well that your husband is a thoroughly good scout. He has done all that he can do to straighten things out, and straightened out they are.

This means you are going to be a good scout yourself. Differences rise up in the best regulated families, it is said. They have to be put out of thought. Then they expire for lack of sustenance.

Why stand aghast at a family fuss or two? You cannot demolish evil by dwelling on it. Undermine it and see it vanish by realizing that there is nothing to it.

Respond to your husband's attentions in the way you used to. This will keep his devotion fresh and alive. But if you continue disgruntled or mopish you will make it difficult for him to manifest the affection he feels. He wants to do right. Encourage him. You are master of the situation. Do not let a good man slip through your fingers. You know there is a shortage of man power these days; and this can be an awfully chilly world for a woman out on her own.

Peace, peace, wonderful peace, pervades your household and your very being. This must be the case because the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. His reign, His presence, exclude every disturbance from your daily existence., They even make mama the agreeable person she should be. Have faith.

Have just read your letter. It reveals what a lot of damage this dern nonsense talked and practiced by certain zealous religionists does in the world. If they would live as other human beings do, in the matters you mention, they would be infinitely better off.

This smartness is not promoting spirituality. Its results are more likely to be disastrous than otherwise. The observance of the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and the conventions society has established will keep the people of this generation busy enough. What we may be doing a million years from now nobody need try to figure out.

There is nothing wrong about your impulses. They are perfectly normal and perfectly in line with a philosophy of life that will promote your growth. Nobody ever got very far choking himself or even half choking himself.

There are two great laws of biology — the first, selfpreservation, the second, race-preservation. One is about as insistent as the other.

Naturally you and Charley will have to make a proper and sensible adjustment for the sake of the business if for nothing else; because, when people are in a muddle, business has a way of going to the dogs. And you must not let the fine enterprise you two have built up be jeopardized.

Charley understands this. He has seen many a man go on the rocks because he went careless. It does not pay. It must not go on, and it will not. Good sense and everything else is against it.

So keep in mind that the Almighty is in the midst of your affairs, both home and business. He will establish right conditions and maintain them.

You do not have to argue so much, either silently or vocally. You know how one puts in hours and whole nights going around in profitless circles of thought. The situation is not half serious. The world is pretty full of this kind of discord, as you know, but sensible people do not permit themselves to be carried away by it.




Business and Employment

Your ability will make a suitable place or position for you. Have no doubt. Principle will put you where you belong, will strengthen you there, will keep you there. That is what gravity does with the earth. It does not permit it to drift from its orbit. Principle will not permit you to be idle or out of your place.

Certainly the way to a career is open to you, perhaps in a direction not yet suspected. It is inevitable that one should find an outlet for his abilities. This fact is crystallized in the Proverb: “A man's gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men.”

Hold thought to these truths. They will promote you.

Your telegram received. You remember what that San Francisco chap recently said to the effect that no individual has any duplicates in the wide universe. This means that both of you are important. Each has something indispensable to the world. The world knows this and knows where to obtain it; and you know it and how to proceed.

Why all this wisdom on the part of the world and of yourselves? Because all-discerning Mind is functioning everywhere, in you and in everyone else, even dipping down into worldly and material affairs to set them right.

Hold on to this truth and thereby bring it out in your experience. And above all be willing to do the thing that comes to hand to be done. Better things are sure to appear when we gladly and industriously do the supposedly smaller jobs.

Meanwhile I will give you a boost or two or three. The first thing you know you will see that opportunity which even today is looking you in the face and saying, “I am yours, grab me quickly.”

Take hold of yourself in the good old-fashioned way and be master of the situation. This should be the easiest thing in the world for a man of your outstanding ability. Do not let worry and inferiority complex confuse you. And certainly do not let them get you down.

You are thoroughly equipped for running that plant, intelligently handling its labor problems along with other matters. This is why the company has put you in charge. They have full confidence in you. So has everyone else. You know very well that you measure up to the situation. Now stop dawdling and be a man.

The all-wise Mind is yours. It is what you mean when you say I. Just recognize this simple fact and proceed fully equipped with divine intelligence. Running that business should be a joy not a burden. And it will be.

The business will succeed. Is it not a helpful enterprise in the community affording worthy people employment and providing the world with a necessary commodity? It is not too much to affirm that the Almighty is in the midst of the adventure, giving it direction, indeed giving direction to every man and woman connected with it.

There is a senseless theory abroad that the individual should put himself out of the way and let God do it all. This is a dangerous half truth. You have heard it said that Jesus put himself out of the way. The fact is that wherever he went he stole the show. This was the chief objection the Pharisees had to him when they complained, “The whole world is gone after him I What do we count for?”

When the Almighty works in starting, upholding, expanding a business, and making it a profitable and commendable venture, the Almighty works through the management and the employees, does He not? Certainly He does not dispense with them. On the other hand they do not dispense with Him. It is a joint undertaking with perfect cooperation and synchronization of effort.

That business transaction has no choice but to move in the right direction. The Almighty has no patience with static conditions. His whole universe is in motion, effortless and triumphant. There is not a single motionless area under the sun.

Yes, everything feels the urge of Principle, whether we call the thing a city lot, a noodle factory, or a human body.

Nothing static certainly in the thought of people these days, whether it has to do with buying or selling or what have you. Thought is courageous and venturesome. It acts in response to that old axiom, “Nothing ventured, nothing have.”

This same Principle is making an adjustment of all the affairs and the conditions of your children and household. Have faith. Everything is under control.




Dominion Over Habits

Your letter of the twenty-fourth is at hand. Mind knows your need of a place and knows where and what the place is and is determined to bring you and the place together. Keeping these simple but indisputable facts in thought will do the trick.

You can master the liquor situation by facing it fearlessly and extinguishing its supposedly dreadful influence. Liquor is a strangely powerless and unattractive thing when looked at squarely and sensibly. This is why Charley will forget all about it one of these days. He is well on the way already.

Liquor is no more attractive and no more potent than ordinary drinking water. It is our stupid thought about it that raises the mischief. So we will keep seeing and understanding how certain it is that a person of intelligence cannot be moved by such nonsense. You both stand like two Gibraltars immovably fixed in Principle and quite oblivious of all apprehension.

I will continue to steady the situation. Write again whenever you feel like it.

Your note just arrived. Perhaps you make too much of the smoking business. Most people do. They exaggerate its pleasure on the one hand and its wickedness on the other. Now smoking is not entitled to so much consideration. About the most you can say of it is that it is an expensive, mussy habit. Millions of perfectly respectable people indulge. But they would be better off if they maintained their dignity.

And you will have no difficulty in maintaining your dignity, I am sure, because the Almighty is on your premises and He sees that everything is kept in apple-pie order. He is on the alert for intruders, since those premises are His premises. He can land on any wrong impulse, smoking or whatnot, bind it and cast it out. He will be doing that very thing for you pretty soon. You may say, “I did it,” and you will not be far wrong because the Almighty and you are one.

Is this not why you feel so mighty, formidable, and even exhilarated at times? It is the Almighty carrying on in you. This is why you have the confidence and the prowess to go ahead and be yourself. You have no illusions about tobacco. There is nothing to it worth mentioning.

There has been a lot said in these days, as you know, in derogation of will power. It has been pictured by many wellmeaning people as a monster of frightful mien. Now the will to do right, and everybody recognizes the thing at sight, as a divine impulse. There is nothing human about it. No one can go anywhere unless he lends himself to it. The next step you take will be in response to its urge. I resorted to it, I am convinced, in starting this letter.

So have no fear about exercising will power when it calls you in the right direction. It is the voice of the Almighty. Respond. Do not be a dawdler.

Hamlet is the outstanding dawdler in literature. Shakespeare must have been deep in the valley of indecision himself when he framed Hamlet's speeches, for renowned writers have a casual way of making their characters confess what is in their own thought.

So the Bard of Avon, in one of his dallying moods, inspires Hamlet to temporize, “To be or not to be,” that is, “Shall I take it lying down or standing up?” Everybody faces this issue many times in the course of a year and generally makes the manly decision. The Mind within will not let him rest until he does so. You will take this course pretty soon and the Almighty will be with you. You will be surprised to see how easy it is to carry out the resolution, for after all is said and done His is the resolve and His the sufficiency. Proceed.

On another occasion Shakespeare is himself. No longer is there a doubt or waver. You may think at first that he is boasting. Nothing of the sort. He is asserting the inner and only man when he confesses through Julius Caesar:

I am constant as the Northern Star,

Of whose true fixed and resting quality, There is no fellow in the firmament.

The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks; They are all fire, and every one doth shine;

But there's but one in all doth hold his place. So in the world: 'Tis furnished well with men,

And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive; Yet, in the number, I do know but one

That unassailable holds on his rank, Unshaked of motion ... I am he.

But clearly here declaims a greater than Shakespeare, and a much greater than Caesar, as these Colossi are known to history and tradition. He is none other than the Self who is the only real, the Christ, the constant and forever I am. Have the will to be him. You can. You will not carry out the entire program in one day perhaps, but you will make a beginning, and he who begins well can end well, because he has confirmed his unity with the Almighty.




An Increasing Purpose Runs

This morning I stepped into the barber shop of Hotel St. Francis to get fixed up. As usual the personnel was busy. Sometimes I go there in the morning, sometimes at midday, and sometimes in the evening. But the place is always well filled.

I asked the barber who waited on me, then, in turn, the manicurist, the shoe shiner, the cashier, “Why is it that your customers do not all come to the shop at the same hour?” Not one of them could give a satisfactory answer. Very likely the problem had never occurred to them.

But you and I suspect that the universal Mind governs people in as simple an adventure as getting their hair cut or their shoes shined. Which leads us further to suspect that this Mind may be directing us in all the affairs of the day and of the year, however tiny those affairs may be on the one hand or however momentous they may be on the other.

Sometimes we wonder what would happen if we yielded to that Mind with less resistance than we usually put up. Most people like to assert what they call their own mind. But they do not have any mind of their own. True there are baseless suggestions which whisper to them to do this or to do that, but there is no other Mind than the universal One, and sooner or later the most obstinate come under its direction.

This explains why it is that not all the people on earth try to crowd into one community. It explains why some of them busy themselves doing one sort of work and others doing a different sort. They do not all try to do the same thing and in the same place and at the same time, because they yield to the command of versatile Mind.

The advantage of acknowledging this Mind as our director is that it is all-knowing. It makes no mistakes. It leads no one into failures or accidents. It does not lead them into sickness or old age. On the contrary it keeps people perpetually safe, perpetually young, and perpetually pretty well satisfied.

Occasionally someone who listens to universal Mind feels the urge to do some extraordinary thing like building a supposedly impossible bridge or effecting a union of nations that will keep them at peace with one another or challenging by metaphysical methods the actuality of sickness and suffering. And right now there is a Russian physician who says there is no use of growing old; and better than that he believes he has a recipe for preventing it.

What we need then is a willingness to acknowledge the presence of this resourceful Mind and develop a willingness to listen for its instruction, rather than accept the foolish or devastating suggestions that try to engage our attention. Nobody can explain whence they come, or why they should be permitted to operate, but many are finding that they can silence the mischief makers. Once they are silenced no explanation is necessary. Then shall we walk this earth with confidence, with better health, with longer years.

There is another universality called Life. It is a near neighbor to Mind. In fact the two beneficent powers are equally yoked together. They operate in unison. Mind supplies the intelligence for the enterprise and Life supplies the animation. You see them at work everywhere. Observe the sap climb the tallest pine to build a twig. Mind directs it; Life enriches it.

Mind and Life have other partners, chief among them being Soul, Love, Principle. Some people are able to see in Principle a synthesis of them all, which gives us a picture of God as plural or composite. He is One in one sense but multiple in another.

And when you and I speculate what we are, we become convinced, if we permit the speculation to proceed long enough and deep enough, that Principle crops out in us and makes us what Principle is, that is, a compound of perpetual animation, intelligence, devotion, morale, and the multitude of other spiritual qualities which go to make up the perfect man.

Here is a hint of the truth which sets people free. Everybody is familiar with the Galilean's promise, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Today people, in larger number than ever before, are grasping the enormous significance of those twelve words and trying to put them to work.

This world is so full of marvels, apparent to anyone who walks out in it a few moments, either in the city or in the country, and forgets himself and his problems long enough to look, even casually, here and there!

So much of the turmoil that boils and bubbles today springs from that wide-spread hunger expressed in the new word “Gimme.” In plain language everybody wants money. Having acquired it he wants more. The thirst is never satisfied. He thinks he has not very much faith or trust in anything else. It will give him power and security.

Leaving the barber shop, I observed the reconstruction of an important building in full blast — a rare sight these days. An enormous amount of money is being spent, and at a critical period. Where does the money come from? Why people, even you and I, are contributing to some courageous and resourceful man such funds as we can scrape together. We marvel at his fortitude in striking out on the venture. We might better marvel at our own fortitude in turning our money over to him to play with.

Why do we do so? Because, after all is said and done, we trust that man, who perhaps we have never seen, more than we trust our money.

This brings out a finer side of the individual. His faith and trust are not altogether in the Almighty but in the Almighty's men and women. You and I are trusting them all, with a few exceptions, and we would trust them in any real emergency. We put our property and even our lives in the hands of strangers. You do it right along.

Which makes us consider how important are the things that abide. What are they? Chiefest among them, it is written, are faith, hope, charity — and the greatest of them is charity. These three eminences, stabilized by the common sense of the multitudes, guard civilization and insure its endless unfoldment.