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These addresses were well received. They were carefully prepared. They contain thoughts to which I desire to give a wider circulation. I believe them an important incentive to the unfolding human Consciousness and Conscience.
I have the faith that all the members of the Federation who so kindly elected me its President and New Thought people generally, will be glad to see them in this form.
As an evidence of the Love I bear to, and the appreciation I have for, the Federation and the Principle for which it stands, and because of the importance which I think it has in the development of the race, I dedicate to it this little volume.
Future years will show the great good that this body of men and women, who meet in Love and Truth to inspire, encourage and assist each other, are doing. The New Thought is the one movement for which all past movements have been. It is doing much by the mere Suggestion of its existence, but still greater is the good it is unconsciously doing by the most potent power of the Thought it radiated and the Love which inspires its Thought.
Trusting the All-Good to make these addresses important factors in swelling the "Call" and in hastening the "Emancipation," I add them lovingly to the great trend of public sentiment that is now so increasing that its argosies of Thought fill every sea of literature, bearing treasures richer than the silks of the Orient or the pearls of India.
In Truth and Love I desire this Emancipation for you all.
HENRY HARRISON BROWN.
(As Mr Brown was on a tour when this book was printed, and as he was unable to correct the proof, before going to press, many typographical errors crept in. He has thus tried to correct them as best as he could. – Henry Harrison Brown)
Delivered at New Thought Convention in St. Louis, October 26, 1904
In the Evolution of Life each century has left some distinctive mark upon the race. The student as easily realizes epochs in human history as he does in the geological life of the earth. These epochs begin in twilight and overlap each other. I can now simply note the gift of the nineteenth century to the twentieth. That century was the culmination of an era begun in previous ones. Its great contribution was first the complete verifying and acceptance of "The Law of the Correlation and Conservation of Force." All energy is one. It can neither be created nor destroyed, be neither increased nor diminished. This Energy may change its form but is itself eternal. In the latter half of the century was enunciated the now almost universally accepted Principle of Evolution. The century was pre-eminently a philosophical and scientific one, and all tendencies of these were toward materialism. Herbert Spencer was its highest product in these lines. In him the philosophy of the past culminated. He perceived Unity, but reasoned from duality. It was with him, Energy and something unknowable. He declares that he cannot think of Spirit in terms of matter nor of Consciousness in terms of energy. Life and Intelligence is something added to his Unity. Thus while his philosophy is materialistic to the mass, it is noncommittal to himself. He represents the fruit of the scientific and materialistic tendencies of the nineteenth century. He is the last of a long line, and distinguished line, that through the study of objective phenomena have at last brought the human mind to the understanding of Unity. From this we have given us the Affirmation—All is Mind. Spencer will have no successor, for out of the old the New is born. The last student of Duality has given his volume and closed the discussion. The New Century calls for new men and new themes. The First century of our era began with the recognition of Universal Life, as evolved in the Human Soul to Love. "God is Love." "Love God and Love your Brother." The NEW COMMANDMENT is this: "That ye Love one another." Twenty centuries are a brief period for the race to learn that Force has yielded to Love; that Thor's hammer lies at the foot of the Cross of Christ. But it is learned. Never before was Love the ruling principle as even now when the sounds of tremendous battles reverberate across the Pacific and echoed, along our California coast. They once took the echo—"Revenge;" now they sing—"Arbitration and Peace."
In the Evolution of God's thought, from the Universal, the individual must be from the Absolute, the Special; from the Unconscious, the Self-conscious. Truth is the individualization of God. God is Love, but Truth is Man. Each century has been and will be religious. But Fear that "peoples the dark inane with spectral lies" departs as Love penetrates the systems man makes for his worship. Some of the old terror us, its duality, the diverse, the divided making good and evil remain to plague mankind.
But truth is a unit. False or true, is the decision of Man concerning all propositions. Truth is the Human expression of Unity. The Self-conscious expression of God. Power evolves to Life, Life to Emotion, Love, the out-motion from the Soul center is still homogeneous. Love is the same in all individuals. Love evolves into Self-consciousness and Man says: I AM; IT IS. The Individual, the Personal, are the only possible Human expressions. They come through God's method of evolution. Man comes "as a son of God," to his own. In the past Love and Truth have been divorced; each had its organizations and votaries; the areas of each have constantly been encroaching; each has been swallowing the other.
Religion has been lost in a philosophy called theology, and science has been struggling through philosophy to prove religion non-existent. Love IS; Truth IS; but both are one. Science has dealt with effects and religion with cause, but Cause and Effect are inseparable. On the threshold of the New century these two expressions of Life are wed, no more to separate. It is no longer Science and religion, philosophy and worship, physics and metaphysics, for there is no line dividing God and man, cause and effect, love and Truth. Coming generations will know only Unity, and will name it God Power, Life, Love, Truth; and man will say of these–I AM IT.
The field of theology has pre-empted only its study of the future. Man has studied the Effects of God, and surmised the Cause; now he is to study Cause, and know that all is God–Mind.
New Thought people are but a little ahead of the specialists along the old thought of matter. But the miss on their part is the difference between life and death; between time and eternity. Elmer Gates and Dr. Anderson are pioneers, beckoning to the great College forces to "Come up higher." The president of the scientific Congress, whom I met in this city, said there was but one science greater than all those they were discussing, namely, "mentology." God epitomizes himself in a Human Soul. When we study Him there we know all. "Flower in the crannied wall when I know you root and all, and all in all, I shall know what God and Man is," not because the flower tells me, but because I find in it only that which I am, and which I carry to it. I am ALL! "Know Thyself!" is the command of Unity to the Individual Soul.
I am an Unfolding Soul. In that unfoldment I have begun to know myself and I call that knowledge "New Thought." New Thought is neither a science nor a religion; for Priest of God, the New Century, has wed the two and the One is named Life. I AM, means, I live, I love, I think.
New Thought is the recognition that All that was, is, or shall be, is now, and is in the Human Soul. Unity needs expression through the Conscious just as there has been from all eternity, expression through the Unconscious. The one command of God to man is, LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE. The New Thought is the shining through expression, of "the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world." New Thought is not a discussion, a speculation, a theory an hypothesis, it is demonstration through living Life, of Truth. It is doing, and not thinking; it is being and not seeming. "Doing the will of the Father," and thus demonstrating that we are indeed children of God.
New Thought is neither the science nor the religion of Life. It is the Conscious living above the limitations of sense, and partaking of the eternal life here and now. Man limitless, may live above the so called Laws of Nature, by becoming a Law unto himself, and realize Emerson's wisest expression, "Conscious Law, is King of Kings!"
The last step the school-men have to take, in this welding of science, and religion, is the recognition of the Unity of the Universe. The nineteenth century saw the Unity of Energy. Light, heat and electricity, are one. Spencer says he cannot think of the Ultimate as Life. He cannot think of Life as something imported into the unit of protoplasm, and yet he cannot think of it as coexistent with the atom. His real foundation is The Universe plus something. His dynamic element of life is the one essential of Unity and he leaves that out. The Call of the twentieth century is a Unity that is Unity. Life is to be demonstrated as a form of Universal Energy. Life must be demonstrated to be one in origin, essence, and all its essentials, with electricity, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, and whatever other form of energy Man recognizes. In Him is all as Life He is all.
The remnant of the special creation theory is found in the separation of Life, Love, and Thought, from other forms of energy. Not till these are all one, as God is one, will man find secure foundation for eternal life.
Great as are the discovery of the Law of Conservation of Energy, and the principle of Evolution, a still greater discovery was made at the close of the last century, and was its greatest gift. A discovery that marks the beginning of a new era is not the era of electricity, but the era of Thought. That Greatest discovery is expressed in three words–Thought is Energy; Thought is Power.
Telepathy is a common fact. No longer is there organic, and inorganic no longer matter and spirit no longer is there space and time for Thought is God manifest in Flesh, and to Him all these are naught. Thought was made flesh and dwelt in man. I have no less authority than Prof. Drummond for translating Word in John's Gospel as: "In the beginning was Thought and Thought was with God" Read it thus, and see how it illuminates Life. Man is materialized thought.
The century was born like Minerva, full grown, and for the first time in the history of the human intellect, the dual manifestations of human life find common ground. The Meditation of the Orient and the scientific spirit of the Occident are one in a common Affirmation—Thought is power.
The Twentieth century calls us to complete the work begun by Jesus in the first. "I and my Father are one," is the Realization of Unity. It is the blending of Father and Child in conscious expression, as from all eternity they have been one in unconscious expression. We are called to the fulfillment of the prophecy in an angel's song: "Peace on earth among men of good will." "Come up higher," cries the Universal to the Individual. "Come up and through Conscious Thought be master of disease and death." The call is heard. Millions are responding. This convention is a union of those who have heard. Nineteen centuries ago there was a meeting in a small upper room. The Spirit was outpoured. Realization was there! From that meeting so insignificant whence baptized and illumined ones called Christians, went forth, through the dual forces of Love and Truth, earth has heard the name of Jesus uttered by those who bless through love, and those who bring ultimate blessing through the sword. Twenty centuries God and Man have waited for the present realization. This present meeting holds the promise of fulfillment, and shall be to convey all that that early meeting has been to past generations. "The Savior that was to come," has come and his name is Unity.
The new century looked upon the world of humanity just emerging from the swaddling clothes of duality. Yes, in presence of this wonderful Exposition I dare to proclaim, that Man is all this wonderful manifestation of science and art is, yet in the long clothes of babyhood. Thus far he has only been trying to catch the sunbeams of that which is not himself. He is now just beginning to know himself as power, and to realize that what God has done in the universal, Man, his son, can do through special creation. Man is not a special creation, but he is a special creator.
Man toys today with good and evil, church and school, science and religion, matter and spirit, sacred and secular, God and man, life and death, attraction and repulsion, and a long catalogue of illusions that, like the beliefs of children in fairies and brownies, are soon to be discarded. Then will the manhood of the race come. It will see only good and life and love and truth, and from these it will build its own world on grander, more beautiful scale than God without Man has done. We live in a world God made, Man has been remaking it, and yet it shall be a world that Man altogether controls, for God who gave him at birth, dominion, will leave him to enjoy the world eternally which like his Father has been created out of Thought.
I am—What?—All God is, or I could not be. What he does as absolute creator, I am to do as special creator. What he is in Principle, I am to be in detail. I am Spirit! I am divine! I am unfolding my divinity. As fast as I unfold I become Man, because human. I enfold all the past, I encompass all the future, and all that can be, I am in possibility, and in possession now.
I am all this because God is first of all Power, and is in me as power. He is Omnipotent. Again, I am Life for God is Life, and He is in me. I am wisdom, for God is wisdom and He is in me. God is Love, and I am Love, for I am God manifest. I am Thought and Thought is the Omnipotence, the Life, the Love of God, transformed into Human expression. As thought I am an Individual expression of God and all God is behind my thought, that I, man, express.
I LET Thought express itself, and Lo! ―cities spring and point their spires of faith to heaven.‖ I am thought, and I impose upon external nature my Thought, and call it natural law, and I work under that law.
Because thought controls, I send fine vibrations through the space about me, wireless messages by a messenger I call electricity because I do not know who he is, and I vainly think he is the same I call Lightning, when he is only a relative of his as the C on the piano is a relative of G.
And science grows arrogant and makes the most colossal assumption it was ever in man to make— one that marks the downfall of all the cob houses of speculation. That colossal assumption is: "All is Electricity." Electricity is the last idol of civilized man." All is not electricity. But Electricity is, like Thought, a manifestation of the One. Can Electricity and Thought be correlated—transfused into each other? I will not try to answer. Both are One in the Universal Energy, and since Energy is one, I believe that Man will convert his thought into other forms at will, just as he is now able to transform other modes of motion. We can change a higher into a lower pitch or reduce the potential of any power/ so man may transmute his thought into any form of vibration he may wish. I see no reason, since I am All, why I may not from myself radiate electricity from the dynamo of my Soul, just as is done now from the Universal dynamo of God.
Telepathy grounds us in the consciousness that we are in reality but centers of energy, Intelligence, of Love and of Truth in the One that through us as centers as much as we desire of the current of Infinity may find conscious expression. This fact dissolves in Truth the scientific themes as Cleopatra's pearl was dissolved in ancient wine. There is left only "the One who inhabiteth eternity" expressing Itself, as the Human Soul. I am as Conscious Law that which I think I am, and since Thought is creative, I live in the world I think into existence. The real world of imagination, the sub-conscious world of Mind.
The wireless message of health passes from the Human dynamo in St. Louis to the bed of pain in the distant city, the Soul awakens to its knowledge of self as Life, Power and Health. From this thought Rich Health blooms where before was pain and weakness. Mind is all, and Conscious mind is director of that which is still in the Unconscious. This is the most mighty perception of Truth man has yet received: The Conscious directs the expression of the Unconscious. Conscious directs the God in the Soul in its objective manifestation. From this we know that the present wonders of electricity will yet place before the more glorious materializations of Mind as the candle of our fathers pales in the electric glare.
Ideas are man's possessions. The wonders of yonder Exposition are but materialized Ideas through Human brains and Human hands. Sun and star, flower, bird and Man are but the materialization of ideas in the Mind of God. Without hands God wrought these marvels. As His son I have all the Father possesses. Why should I not from myself project to the objective the ideas which I am?
O suns flying with attendant worlds, ye are but thoughts of God manifest to human consciousness! O rock and tree, singing bird and blooming rose, ye are but God's thought in time and space made manifest. But greater than ye are the thoughts of God in Man, for to him ye are subject, as clay to hand of potter. He molds you to his will, but lo, still greater are the marvels of mind. Thought is power thought is creative thought materializes to my desire in flesh and blood. As God materializes his thoughts, so will his son's ideas take shape and form, as worlds and plants take shape from the One Over-Soul. I have but to LET the God-in-me work as it works outside me, to carry out my will, and a world shall grow about me as under God's direct thought this one grew for me.
The grand dreams of human imagination, "without sound of hammer" or without tool or material save the Omnipotent Substance, shall find objective expression in more glorious cities than that in the vision of John the revelator.
"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." Principles are eternal. As God builds so I, his son, build. I have but to know my power. The twentieth century calls upon Man to Know himself as the bodying forth of God, and to live, act and create as God acts and creates, and thus to leave behind him the animal and to be indeed the God he is. Out of the centaur the Human will be completely born when the next century makes its call. Now it is a call to Man to come forth and no longer as part beast struggle with environment that belongs to brute, but to cast off the swaddling clothes of creative power and as Man rule in the world made for him until he learns his power to build a better for himself.
Ideas are centers in the Absolute Energy. Like all centers, they rotate till they condense Infinite Substance, so as to be visible to objective vision. Ideas control the world. They are the only world in which men live. I am that which I think I am, because I think in ideas, and the ideal controls my expression. Thus ideas take form. Just as the astronomer tells what he sees, and reasons there from, so I tell what I see, and state all my deductions from facts.
One of "NOW" Folk is the most remarkable telepathist of whom I have known. I chose a blank card from a lot of similar ones. A friend made a private mark upon one side. I then held it with the unmarked side before my friend and asked him to see upon it the photograph of a certain person. At last he said. "I see him." He created the picture there through concentration. The card was then shuffled with twenty others, and the pack was placed in his hand, with the request that lie pick out the photograph. He did so. He did many times. This card has been kept by strangers for months and then placed among others so like itself that no one could distinguish it, and picked out because he saw the face upon it. He mentally photographed a picture upon a card, and this card was shuffled with many others and placed in the hands of another sensitive, who found it without difficulty. When asked to draw the outline of the picture upon it pith pencil, he traced exactly the outline the first had photographed.
This demonstrates the permanency of thought-forms, and shows that we have in our thought creative power. This is the Franklin kite of Thought creation, and when the century closes we shall know how to make these forms more distinctly materialized without the basis of so-called matter upon which to build, or we shall so refine our bodies that they will be one with the more ethereal forms of our so-called imagination, but which are indeed the real forms in the real Human life.
I have in these mind-created pictures a prophecy of the coming man, who will see without eyes and hear without ears and communicate without visible means—the Man who has through belief begun to live the Eternal Life here and now.
Already we reflect in body our mental pictures of health or disease. The world is only our larger body mastery of physical body leads to the mastery of the larger body, termed environment. Where shall I, a center in the One, stop? I am limitless. "He that believeth shall be saved." All Affirmations fall off the mind of an unbeliever as hailstones from a battleship. We are either God's children or we are not. If not, then I am limited. If we are, then we are as limitless as God himself, and, no matter what we sincerely desire, it is done by us, and unto us, in the objective life by the life that has Its Being in us.
I am a Thought, an Idea of God, and that Idea is perfect even as my Father is perfect. I am subjectively perfect, and that perfection is unfolding itself into objective expression. All eternity will be required for the expression of that perfection which I am. I am an immortal child of God, and am NOW living the one only life of man, that of Self Consciousness, and I am coming each clay more into the realization of myself as Love and Law.
Life from itself has builded in me an organism, and has thus become aware of its Self-creative power. If I can materialize flesh, the highest possible vibration in so-called matter, I can create any of the lesser forms. I am the ultimate of Evolution for my body allows perfect expression of my thought. As a Human Soul, through incarnation, I am expressing daily my perception of God, and as he creates in the sub-conscious my body and its environment, I am learning, by seeing Him work, how to become myself the creator of environment at will.
Millions are today healed by thought. Assisted by the thought of others, they are building bodies to their ideal of health, and bringing environment into their Ideals of beauty and completeness.
Under the Law of Absolute creation I have unconsciously builded my body. Now, under the Law of Individual special creation, I have rebuilt to my will. The call is still, "Come higher and become conscious creator of environment." Not from wood and stone is one to build, but from Myself, just as I have builded my body from myself. Man has made the wilderness to blossom by imitating the process of his Father. Now, when I learn my powers, I have but to speak the word and my servant is healed, and the desert blooms. The waters flow and the rose blossoms, not because man irrigates, but because Man thinks. No matter, O Man, what your desires, think long enough, think strong enough, think with faith enough, and the tree shall be removed from its place and be planted at thy command, for "the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins" and to straighten out the crooked ways of nature by the same Thought-force that mad nature.
Since I am as I think I am, I have heretofore lived the slave of conditions and subject of environment because God and I were two. But now, no longer separated, the prodigal has arisen and come home to the Father and in Unity found Power, and in this realization has conquered disease and death. and, chanting "I and my Father are one," he has taken heaven by violence and, planting its Love and Truth upon earth, made all the promised heaven here and now.
Thus the new Thought comes as the long sought and promised Savior. He always was here. His name is, I Am! Am what? Whatever I think I am! This savior comes through Affirmation to redeem the world. It comes to a materialized civilization to spiritualize it! It comes to a cold and lifeless church to bring the Living Christ. It comes to an era of frenzied finance, to a money-mad people to bring it sanity! It comes to an industrial life that grinds flesh and blood into bonds and stocks, with the vitalizing power of Brotherhood, and binds employer and employed, capital and labor, into one common bond of Truth and Love.
It comes to selfish social conditions to harmonize them, and to our home relations to purify them through a love that has outgrown sex and left us free from the lusts of the flesh and ushered in the purity of the spirit.
The New Thought is new inasmuch as it is the first time in Human history that Man, as his own and present Savior, has proclaimed: I AM GOD MANIFEST, AND AS GOD I LIVE!
He now Affirms: I am power! I am Truth! I am Love! I am creator! I am the kingdom of Heaven! I am life! I am the immortal life and the Heaven, Hell and Death I created with Matter, and all Evil I now destroy, and I proclaim: I AM SPIRIT! I live the kingdom of heaven here and now!
Address Delivered at the New Thought
Convention, Nevada, Mo.,
Sept. 26, 1905
"The Truth Shall Make You Free"
Liberty is a word of early origin. It was born in that innate consciousness of power which demands constantly a larger expression. That mental attitude in which arise the words Liberty and Freedom is Nature's patent right of Manhood. Till that FEELING was born the animal had not evolved into the human. To the degree that an individual feels the need of larger liberty, to that degree only is he MAN. Manhood and freedom are synonymous. Since ideal freedom is not attained, it is evident that though Man is on the way, he is not here. Man is coming. When he arrives he will have sloughed off the animal and will be free. Human history is but the record of the unfolding of Man from the brute. The centaur, the sphinx, the satyr and the faun are the true symbols of humanity. Humanity has emerged at present as far as the head from the animal. The instinct of freedom is the instinct of Human birth.
The Indwelling Intelligence, the Indwelling Humanity, which is the Indwelling God, is through the travail of conditions, is through this birth, coming into Manhood. Efforts toward Freedom are efforts of Man to free himself from animal conditions. Demand for Liberty is the expression of the germinal God. They only are free who themselves strike the blow. Only the growing of the tree causes the leaves to fall off—pushed off from within. In like manner, freedom comes from the unfolding of the inner life. "I am an unfolding Soul," is the Affirmation of Freedom. Arbitrary attempts to free another result only in another form of enslavement. Norway breaks the link that holds her to Sweden only to enslave herself to some royal family.
Freedom does not consist in outward forms—does not consist in the definitions of yesterday.
How much liberty has each age, each people, each individual? All they can enjoy. As much as is created within the mind. For liberty is an ideal condition.
"Man never is but always to be blessed." What Norway now is doing, all men are doing—moving out from one limitation to their freedom into an easier one, which will ultimately grow equally irksome with the old. We break old links that we may forge new ones, that we may also break them, and so on how long? Is it forever? No!
This necessity of growth through creation and destruction is well illustrated today by the relations of capital and labor. Capital felt an enslavement to labor and created organizations for self-protection, which are a new slavery; and labor also created its organizations, in which the individual is enslaved to the organization. When all of these grow wiser they will create lighter fetters. Why is this condition necessary? Because neither the workman nor his employer can free himself from himself. These fetters lie within their thought; represent the present unfoldment of Infinite Wisdom in them. They are enslaved to their ideals, and also freed from old conditions by these same ideals.
Woman is remonstrating against what she terms marital slavery. Slavery exists for those for whom it is the best and the only condition in which they can in the present live. It is slavery of ideas. When ideals of self are changed the slavery is outgrown. The woman, or man, who growls about his marital slavery will make others growl when lie gets out of his present conditions into a new one. Growling is a habit.
Josh Billings said: "He who growls because lie is poor will make you growl when he becomes rich!" Slavery, like worry, is a mental habit to be outgrown. He who recognizes himself as a slave to another must of necessity enslave some inferior. The woman who is slave to husband enslaves her servant, and the bookkeeper enslaved by his employer enslaves the cash-boy. To recognize slavery is to create it. Like disease, it dies out when no attention is paid to it.
The slave is slave because he does not know his power. He finds himself through slavery. The earliest prophecy of Man in that arboreal something of the primeval world, was completely enslaved that it might find out that it was Man. Through hanger he found use of rock and club, and freed himself but greater needs caused him to break, hammer and polish stone to melt ore and make the bronze, after necessity had sent him to the discovery of fire. Freer then, but still the slave, and he has gone on unfolding, till the elements, from fire and water up to radiant matter are now his slaves and free him to a like degree by making him conscious of himself. Thus liberty is only man in a larger expression of those forces and faculties which lie in that arboreal something-link between Man and brute. Liberty to do what he FEELS he can do. Thus liberty, like all human endeavor, begins in FEELING.
This feeling we term desire. Not desire for any particular thing, but desire for expression. That thing which is desired will be determined by experience. Till desire is awakened, man does not know that he is not free. Desire is the recognition in consciousness, that the soul is sufficiently unfolded to press against present conditions. The limitations must give way, when the soul has pushed long enough as bud pushes into bloom, soul pushes through what we term pain, slavery, sorrow and strife till it awakens to consciousness of power, to will, to be and to do; then all limitations give way and we say "Free!"
Desire through necessity leads to action. Necessity is the mother not only of invention, but also of liberty. When man will not endure he will cure.
But what has thus ever limited the Soul? Nothing. What causes desire? The soul's necessity of expression. Only through expression can it be itself. Not to unfold—not to express—would be to annihilate itself. To be, it must unfold. Desire is the sub consciousness coming into conscious activity.
Freedom is but the expression of a new desire. The cry for more liberty demonstrates the truth of the development theory, of the philosophy of evolution, and is Man's warrant of immortality. This cry finds utterance alone in the Human Soul, and is its demand to be freed from animal limitations.
Only as we think of Man as emerging from the bodies of sphinx, centaur and satyr can we understand this "Cry of the Human," which is not the cry Mrs. Browning so beautifully voiced, "Be Pitiful, 0 God!" but is the cry, "Give me Freedom from conditions!" This cry man has ever made. It comprises all his desires it inspires his every effort. The history of the race is but the history of the foetal Man freeing himself from the animal matrix. From earliest primitive ancestor to the latest mental scientist there has been only a struggle for this second, this spiritual birth, when the Soul shall become aware of itself as the Center stance around which revolves the circumference of circumstance.
When this condition of consciousness of himself as Spirit, is reached, then Man has come the Soul has reached that condition pictured by the ancients as Nirvana, or Heaven. This is the condition of individuality, and is found only when Soul is conscious of its Mastery, because it is free from all animal conditions. Neither death, resurrection nor reincarnation are necessary. Neither can they bring the condition. It comes alone through the unfolding of consciousness into that state where the sense of Being is so complete that all consideration of limitations, or of self, is lost in the enjoyment of expression. Tennyson had glimpses of that state, as have saints and sages of all ages, and also modern psychics and mental scientists. He describes it "as a kind of waking trance. All at once," he says, "out of the intensity of consciousness of individuality the individuality itself seems to dissolve and fade away into boundless Being. This is not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the wisest of the wisest, utterly beyond words, where death were almost a laughable impossibility, and the loss of personality seeming the only true life."
Civilization is the record of the cumulative unfoldment of the race toward this birth from the animal into that condition as permanent which Tennyson described as occasionally his. As the sandstone strata has impression of wave and foot print, so civilization in statute and literature, in temple and statue, keeps the wave marks of the Soul's progress from animal, through intermediate forms, until this new century, when it is to be emancipated through the new birth.
This unfoldment, this pushing Power, has ever been from within. Rock never grows to tree. Matter has never moved up from polyp to Man. The same chemicals are in the lower order that are in the human brain, but brain is not there.
In my old Massachusetts home there is a huge boulder split in twain by a growing beech. A seed fell in a little crevice of the rock. It grew till it needed more room. Tree or rock must yield. Life in the tree kept pushing till at last the rock gave way. Was tree imprisoned? Did rock oppress it? No! The stone had not changed, but the tree in its growth came in contact with conditions that were natural and appropriate to it till it demanded more. The demand from life in tree was the cause of the oppression, and not the limitation of the rock. Life is a manifestation of Omnipotence in higher vibrations, and lower modes of motion yield to higher. While other necessary conditions of life to the tree were present the rock must yield tree still lives. Learn this lesson. Our demand for liberty does not mean that some person, thing or condition is conscious of oppressing us. It means that the individual has grown and demands more room, and as unfoldment must continue, conditions must give way. The moment the cry for liberty arises we know that Liberty IS already born in the Soul, and as sure as Life is God, that liberty will have expression. Canute could better keep back the sea than any parent, teacher or government can keep back the out rushing of the soul. Attempt to repress it in its chosen direction and it breaks out in others. Crimes, evils, diseases, rebellions and persecutions are but the result of impediments placed against the unfolding Soul. Freedom to act, freedom to express in some way, must be. Rock or tree must yield the Soul never does it is outward forever. Consciousness of power begins where animal limitations cease.
Man starts as a savage. Liberty arises from the expression of his desires. Each individual desires from his plane of unfoldment. The desires of the savage are as legitimate, and therefore as holy, to the Father's sight, as are the desires of the Madonna. Each will still cry for more freedom till there is no consciousness of limitation then will the self-consciousness of individuality be lost in its Perfection. "I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfection," says Emerson. This Perfect is the One that cries for Liberty and finds it.
In the history of Human Emancipation, physical slavery was the first to go. This slavery was in its inception merely the protection of the weak by the strong. The law of Self-Preservation created every tyranny. The freedom of West India Slaves, of Russian Serf and the American Slave was only the rifting of the rock of the protection of the individual, from the outside, that the individual might, through self-protection, need less communal protection. It is a step toward individuality. But only in so far as master and slave were emancipated within, through desire for larger liberty, were they really emancipated. They are both unfolding still freeing themselves from those mental conditions that made physical slavery necessary.
Civil liberty, we declare, is won. We have embodied it ideally in constitutional law, through an inspired document which says: "Man is created free and equal, and endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This is ideally perfect. But where is it in the actual?
Look about and see if Man has reached his ideal? Is not this Nation today struggling with a tyranny as bitter and oppressive as ever a nation did? But till recently it was not aware it was enslaved.
Were the Roman Triumvirs ever more tyrannous than the three American powers, Capital, Trust and Monopoly, coining the life of father, mother and child into gold, in factory, mine and field? Did Carthage in height of power have a more tyrannous reign than is now Ours under grafter, briber and blackmailer? Did ever Persian Shah kill with more savagery than does trade with its per cent and its impure foodstuff? Did ever heathen priest show more tyranny than modern priesthood in its denunciation of liberal thought in an Ingersoll and Christian Science and in its opposition to divorce? Was ever the reign of Moloch, the fire god of the Phoenicians, worse than the reign of the Goddess Fashion, with her dress that crushes, entangles and enslaves and late hours that kill? Behold her attendant train of insanity, crime, sorrow and disease, joining that great procession which from all the other earth hells make up a great body of our civilization? Was ever anything worse? No. Was ever anything better? No! Man has always created in every age the biggest hell and the best heaven possible to him. All conditions are relative, and conditions in each age are the best possible; they represent that stage of human development. Man in America has interpreted "Free and Equal" to fit his development. Each succeeding age will do the same, ever writing larger the definition of Liberty. What is tyranny now, was liberty to our fathers; they never dreamed, were not capable of dreaming, to what extent the special privileges they gave away would develop into the present slavery. The Congresses of 1861 to 1868 did not dream that their Acts creating National Banks, for refunding bonds and destroying the greenbacks and State Legislatures in incorporating financial bodies did not, could not, foresee that the emancipation of the black slave was to result in enslaving the whole nation to the money power. It could be no other way. Enlarged perceptions will always find the liberty of yesterday the tyranny of today. Otherwise there were only stagnation and retrogression of the partly unfolded Man to the condition of the animal. The centaur has ever made the best laws and governments he could, but he could never legislate for the coming Man. When that Man comes, then all old conditions will be done away with. Could an old Roman or Scythian, could Briton of Shakespeare's time, or Teuton in the time of Charles V. be placed with us today, he would find the oppression of which we complain, too much freedom, and would begin, like those modern Reverends who would carry us back to the Eighteenth Century Sunday and Marriage Laws, to complain of Twentieth Century License.
Humanity is never to travel crablike, backward. The unfolding Human shell will never retreat into the shell of the past. Liberty is relative, and its demands are always without precedent. "Something Man never had opportunity to do and be," is its cry. Therefore all the various phases of liberty are outward expressions of one desire of the Soul for expression. "I WILL BE MAN!" it cried from the body of the Sphinx, and, pushing himself out still more in his desire from the remnants of ancient conditions, he finds only a still larger demand impelling him on. Such demands presage the coming fullness, when Man shall in Freedom be content. "I shall be satisfied when I awake in thy likeness," "in the liberty of the Son of God."