PHILOSOPHY INTEGRATION (QartteU Imoerattg iCibrarg iltl;aca. Htm ^ncb Autlior.. Cornell University Librarv arV13502 The philosophy of integration. 3 1924 031 250 123 olin.anx Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031250123 WILLIAM A. CRAWFORD-FROST, M. A WILLIAM A. CRAWFORD-FROST, M. A The Philosophy of Integration. AN EXPLANATION OF THE UNIVERSE AND OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. By Rev. William A. Crawford-Frost, M. A. Rector of the Memorial Church of the Holy Comforter, Baltimore, Md., 1896*0 1903 ; Instructor of Chemistry in the Baltimore Medical College; Member of the Society of Arts, England, Etc. Edited by James Wilson Bright, Ph.D. Professor of English Philology, John's Hopkins University ; Hon. Secretary for America of Chaucer Society ; President, 1902-3, Modern Language Association of America, Etc., Etc. 1900 MAYHEW PUBLISHING COMPANY BosTos, Mass. No Copyrighted, 1906. W. A. Crawford-Frost, M. A. TABLE OF CONTENTS. I. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Creation, Gov- ernment AND Destiny of the Uni- verse. ... I II. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. 28 III. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Miracles of Christ. 37 IV. The Philosophy of Integration as Set Forth in the Teachings of Christ. 69 \'. The Temporary Triumph of the Dis- integrator IN THE Sufferings and Death of Christ. . . 93 VI. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Place of De- parted Spirits, and of the Spirit- ual Environment of Man. 109 VII. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. 128 VIII. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Phenomena of Pentecost and the Work of the Holy Ghost. . 143 TABLE OF CONTENTS— CONTINUED IX. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Organization AND Aims of the Christian Church. 152 X. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Communion of Saints and the Remission of Sins by THE Universal Integrator. 160 XL The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Final Destiny OF Man. . 170 PR UFA C£. The system of thought to which I have given the name "Philosophy of Integration" resembles, on the one hand, the Idealistic Philosophy of Hegel, and on the other, the Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer; but it differs from either, 'or both, as a child differs from its parents. It was first made public in a paper read before the Brooklyn Clerical League, in 1895, and published^in outline, in 1896, under the title "Old Dogma in a New Light" for the facts in the life of Christ I have gone chiefly to the Bible itself, but have also made use of the works of Pearson, Blunt, Liddon, Westcott, Farrar and others, whose assistance I gratefully acknowledge. William A. Crawford-Frost. Baltimore, 1906. CHAPTER I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF THE CREATION, GOVERNMENT, AND DESTINY OF THE UNIVERSE. Mr. Edward Clodd and his friend, the late Mr. Grant Allen, agreed upon the following definitions of the terms "Power", "Force", and "Energy": "Power. Motion throughout the universe is pro- duced or destroyed, quickened or retarded, increased or lessened by two indestructible powers of opposite nature to each other, (a) Force and (6) Energy. Force is that which produces or quickens motions binding together two or more particles of ponderable matter, and which retards or resists motions tending to separate such particles. Energy is that which produces or quickens motions separating, and which resists or retards motions bind- ing together, two or more particles of matter, or of the ethereal medium." * Taking these terms in the sense here used, we shall proceed upon the hypothesis that force is only a name for the working of God, the Unifier and Preserver, the Integrator, in the universe, and that energy is a name for the working of His opposite, the Evil Spirit, the Destroyer and Disintegrator, the person represented * Edward Clodd, "The Story of Creation", New York, Humbolt Publishing Co., 1888, p. 7. THE PHILOSOl^HY OF INTEGRATION. to us in the Scriptures not as an everlasting being like God but as a fallen angel, one having a temporal and not an eternal existence. By force we mean that which integrates and con- structs. By energy that which disintegrates and de- stroys. To say that force is God is not to say that God is mere force. All force may be God, and only some of God force ; and that in Him which transcends it may contain His personality. This accords with the conflict, observed in nature, between the creating and preserving force of unity on the one hand, showing itself in the three forms of chemical affinity, molecular cohesion and gravitation, and, on the other hand, the disintegrating energy of diversity, showing itself in the threefold formof,(i) light which causes, especially, disintegration of atomic or chemical union; (2) heat, which antagonizes, especially, molecular cohesion, and (3) electrical repulsion, which combats especially the gravitation of bodies. But chemical affinity, molecular cohesion, and gravitation are three forms of the same force; and light, heat, and electricity are not only one but also transmutable. Instead of reducing God to mere force, let us regard this trinity in unity, of chemical affinity, molecular cohesion, and gravitation, as a mode of God's working. As He really is in Heaven, He may be without body, parts, or passions ; but as He manifests Himself to us on the earth, He may appear to have all these. He shows Himself to us as force in the natural world. For man we have the threefold manifestation of God's working as beauty, goodness, and truth, a THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. harmonizing trinity, together with the disintegrating trinity of ugliness, evil and error, which are the work of the Devil. The origin of evil is, therefore, a question inside a wider problem, which embraces also ugliness and error, viz., the problem of the origin and nature of the Devil. Our contention is that the Devil is God's own limitation and relaxation of Himself. He is God's servant, and is allowed for God's own pre- ordained purpose a succession of temporary triumphs. In reality God is Absolute Unity. In Him is no "variableness or shadow of turning." Yet He has chosen to relax Himself into the Becoming by a con- flict with a part of Himself, which is a mere negation of Himself. The Devil is not a real person but only an apparent or actual one. By actuality we mean the universe as we see it. By reality we signify the universe as God sees it to be in its tme nature. The Devil is thus a foil for the attributes of an All-Wise and Beneficent Creator. We are in the era of the gradual, but continuous, triumph of unity. When all the atoms in the universe are brought together into a solid, absolutely cold, homogeneous mass, our era will have ended, and the Destroyer will be annihilated, and there may begin the gradual triumph of separation which will end only when all the elements are distributed again throughout space into an imponderable, invisible, and altogether imperceptible ether, every atom of which, even though it be divided to nothingness, so far as our powers of apprehension are concerned, will be a partial incarna- tion of both God and Satan. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. All the heavenly bodies appear to be governed by fixed laws. Their movements are systematic. Hitherto we have not been able to fathom the secret of their actions. Condensation of nebulous matter into suns, and thence into planets, and thence into frozen satellites, such as our moon, we observe, by scientific methods ; and may we not legitimately infer, by analogy, that just as the motion of the moon is regulated by our earth, and that of the earth by our sun, so our sun with its whole system is governed by a still larger sun, which in turn takes its direction from a greater, and so onward till there is reached a central sphere which regulates all the stars, planets, nebulous matter, and ethereal media in the universe ? Further, what is there incon- sistent, either with science or revelation, in our regarding this central sphere as the Heaven of the theologians and the abode of God's absolute self-consciousness or personality ? Even as my mind exceeds and transcends my body, so God's mind exceeds and transcends the material universe. Just as the motions of my body are worked from the co-ordinating centre in my brain, so the motions of the material universe may be worked from the centre of His personality, which orthodox Christians locate in a place called Heaven. There only may dwell beauty, goodness, and truth in infinite perfection. On our distant httle earth the atoms are partially conscious of their Godhead or devilhood, and beauty, goodness, and truth are slowly working their way Heavenward into recognition. Spectrum analysis shows us that nebulous masses are composed of some of the same elements that make up THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. our earth; and though we have not succeeded in re- ducing our seventy-odd elementary atoms to one universal substance, we have observed in them certain rythmic inner laws from which we not unfairly infer that their differences may be merely quantitative, and that they may in reality be one. The nebulous mass is a condensation of the infinitely rare distribution of these atoms. To us it appears as creation out of nothing by the deliberate design of an all-powerful God who manifests Himself as the great condenser and integrator. It appears as the creation out of nothing because it is beyond the sensuous apprehension or rational conception of man . The Christian believes in the omnipresence of God, nominally, but usually shrinks from admitting that God is in stones and trees. If we are to escape the unsatisfactory hypothesis of blind necessity, we must believe that God and Satan fill every atom of the nebulous mass that condenses into a planet, and that it so condenses by the triumph of God over Satan. Although no atom can contain the whole of God, yet the two, God and Satan, are in each atom of our earth. Life is that which holds atoms together; death is that which disintegrates them. As integration is evolved, life is developed into recognizable forms, and begins to manifest its gradual triumph over death. All that is is alive. There is no such reality as inorganic nature. Rocks hve. Their atoms have enough subconsciousness to enable them to combine with acids, or what not, by that which we call chemical affinity. Dead things are merely those of which the form of life is too minute for our cognizance. Everything in the THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. universe knows enough to do that which it does, and everything does something, if it be only to hold together and be itself. The subconsciousness of the atoms cohering in a piece of chalk is a different kind of con- sciousness from that of man. A difference of degree becomes a difference in kind. When we deny the subconsciousness of the atoms, we do not mean to assert that they do not know enough to cohere. We only mean that they do not know that they know. After the nebulous mass had condensed into a sun and the sun had contracted into our earth, that which we would call Ufe became manifest. In the misty oceans that had been precipitated from the integrat- ing elements of the atmosphere teemed monera, and amoebae, and other little-differentiated organisms. This was not the creation of life from the lifeless, but simply the evolution of a form of life too fine to be recognized by us into a form that comes within our ken. Passing over ages of the continued struggle of God with Satan, of the constructing force with the destroying energy, we find that God has, in spite of Satan, at last made for Himself a machine called the human brain, in which He and Satan, as on a battle ground, contend to make good- ness and wickedness, respectively, prevail. We have no right to assume that our thought is in our brains. When one considers the number of ideas that are recorded in the mind of a man of eighty, recollections extending back to childhood, one is inclined to be- lieve that if there were retained in the brain a separate impression, or material change, corresponding to each thought, it would require a larger organ than THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. our brain to hold these impressions; and it appears far more conceivable that our thoughts are stored in our spiritual environment, which uses our brains to make itself manifest, just as electricity makes itself known in an electric machine. There is a little universe of living beings in the end of my finger. I examine its parts with the microscope, and I see the blood corpuscles and the minute cells. I can control this little world. I can cause violent motion of its inhabitants by warmth, or stagnation and apathy by cold. I can put my finger in the fire and disperse its atoms to apparent nothingness. I can put a ring around it and cause it to decay by defective supply of living organisms. It is a part of my body. So far as freedom is concerned, what it is to me our world is to God. In regard to government, what the personality of the blood corpuscle is to my personality, my personality is to God's. Each atom knows enough to do what I make it do. Each man knows enough to do what God makes him do. Yet each atom in the nerve, bone, blood, or muscle, is free to follow the laws of its own nature. It attracts or repels just what suits its purpose, and it builds or destroys, moves or stops, grows or decays, in accordance with its own free nature. Though I can control it, I cannot make it untrue to itself, because its true self is its Godhead. Its Ufe is the life of God who inspires all things, not only men, but earth and rocks and trees and all that is. The omnipresent God may be a truly personal God as St. Paul understood. Theologians are oftentimes led to deny God's immanence in the material, through their anxiety to assert His transcendence of it. When one THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. denies either, he falls into error. God is both immanent and transcendent. To say that man is part of God, that some of God is man, is not to say that God and man are merged in each other, or even that man is actually merged in God, for, evidently, God wishes that portion of Himself wrhich I call myself to be regarded by me as a free and independent personal agent, and therefore I rightly look upon myself as such, yet, at the same time, as God sees me, I may be but a tiny atom or corpuscle of His Infinite being. Let us express our conclusions categorically: (i) Force is God. The unifying and integrating cause at work moulding nature is part of God, or a mani- festation of His power. (2) Energy is the activity of the Devil. The dis- integrating and destroying cause at work separating atoms, loosening molecules, and repelling bodies from each other, is a manifestation of God's self- relaxation whom we call Satan. (3) Inertia is not a property of matter but merely a deadlock between God and Satan. A clod of earth is inert. If God chose further to triumph over Satan in it, there would be condensation of it. If Satan could get a sufiScient reinforcement in the shape of heat, and so gain a temporary triumph over God, it would expand and disintegrate. The inertia remains in the clod so long as neither God nor Satan triumphs in it. (4) The Devil, though an actual person, is not a reality but only a temporary and voluntary relaxation of unifying force. God, who alone really is in the universe, is positive and absolute unity. Heat and light THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. are not realities but merely relaxations of cold and darkness. (5) Heaven is a sphere, probably central, from which God regulates the motions of all the ethereal media, neb- ulous matter, suns, planets, and moons in the universe. (6) The history of the universe is a succession of windings and unwindings. We are in an age of winding or condensation. Our era began when the whole uni- verse was distributed throughout space in an imponder- able, invisible, inaudible, and altogether imperceptible ether, which nevertheless contained in itself potentially all the elements or atoms we know on the earth. This is for us the nearest conceivable approach to nothingness. It is for man actual nothingness, though for God it is everything in potentiality. At this period God's self-relaxation has reached its climax of triumph over His unifying impulse. He now begins to conquer His self-relaxation. The impulse to relax yet exists in every atom but it is relatively weaker than the impulse to condense. The result is that a nebulous mass forms at the centre. It condenses into a sun, thence into a planet, thence into a moon, thence into a substance which cannot be definitely described by us because we have had no experience of it in nature but which we call the absolutely soHd oneness or universal substance. This is Heaven. But in the meantime, under fixed laws and at regular intervals, God has triumphed over His self- relaxation all through the universe and formed nebulous masses and suns and planets. One by one these con- dense and draw nearer the centre. Yet self- relaxation makes a hard struggle and the process is exceedingly THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. slow. Each expansion is smaller than the last, and, when all the matter in the universe is a perfect solid, our era will have ended. (7) The theory of Evolution can best be understood by supposing that the planets are closely related to each other chronologically and causatively in the order of their condensation, and that we once hved on the moon and have come to this earth, which had hitherto been the moon's sun, then a spherical "lake of fire", and that we, being one spirit, chose to incarnate ourselves in our earth's fiery elements, there to evolve into amoebae, fishes, reptiles, quadrupeds, and men. It was a fall from a state of Umited purity into another world of sin; but we should emerge from that conflict with higher beauty, goodness, and truth; some of us should get from the earth, through Christ, directly to the center, and the rest, united in one spirit, should in turn go to our sun and, though there condemned to an evolutionary process involving perpetual pain, should attain one step nearer Heaven. It was the yearning for higher knowledge that God used in that one spirit to fulfil His judgment upon him, that he (for this spirit is the person who is alle- gorically presented to us in God's Word as Adam) should leave a home of deathless purity in the moon and choose to incarnate Himself in our earth so that out of the continued struggle there he might get nearer God. It was the yearning of a part of God to get back to the centre of His personaUty. The story of Adam and Eve as given in the Bible may have been intended by God to present to the unfolding mind of man the truth that originally his state had been one of purity 10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. and goodness but that through his desire for wider knowledge he had chosen to fall from his high position. Like a great part of the Bible its full meaning was probably beyond the grasp of the person inspired to write it. There is always an underlying element of Divine, unifying, and connected truth, running through- out the books included in the canon, which, notwith- standing its inward infallibility, is overlaid by a mass of human misconceptions. Objectively, the revelation, by virtue of its internal infallibility, is a perfect one. Sub- jectively, there will be a growth of power in the Catholic or Universal Church to separate the eternal underlying truth from the temporal and fallible human channel which conveyed it. It will be only when we have reached Heaven, and read the plan of salvation back- ward, that the Bible will be a perfect subjective revela- tion. Whether written by Moses, or by Ezra, or by some contemporary of the latter after the return from exile; whether suggested directly to the mind of the writer, or discovered in some ancient Hebrew document, or de- rived from a Babylonian myth, this story of Adam stands at the beginning of the book which for many centuries has claimed to be a revelation of the creation, redemp- tion, and destiny of man, and which to-day is more studied and believed than when it was first compiled. To one who is assured that nothing happens by chance this must appear a truth of eternal cosmic significance, pre-established before the foundation of the world, this tradition of a fall from a state of purity, this theory of a gradual elevation and restoration to a higher per- fection. It is in harmonv with observed facts in our THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. human experience. It accounts for the presence of ideals of beauty, goodness, and truth, which never leave men in peace so long as they dwell in ugliness, wickedness, or ignorance. It explains our constant dissatisfaction with the imperfect present, our longings for loveliness, purity, and wisdom. Since the time of Plato men have possessed, more or less clearly, the belief in a former existence of the soul. To assert that our life hereafter is eternal, but that it began with our birth, is to predicate eternity vnth one end. Men ex- perience certain transient flashes, or intuitions of the human mind, which seem to be recollections of our former state. The most familiar of these is the feeling one has of having seen before a landscape, a book, a person, and of noticing that the next two or three thoughts, or incidents, fit into the fleeting recollection of a previous scene. No satisfactory psychological solu- tion of this problem can be given, although it has been sought in such a phenomenon as that of the successive action of the two hemispheres of the brain, the explana- tion being that when the slower half of the brain per- ceives the picture, the mind recollects the impression on the quicker hemisphere and mistakes the brief interval between them for the lapse of an indefinite time. But we have the same feeling sometimes in the case of words that we hear spoken, and even of thoughts that arise from internal suggestion. Therefore we are obliged to fall back upon the reality of our pre-existence. That alone satisfactorily accounts for intuitive ideas, and for the inner motives and underlying realities of which the outward acts of individuals or the histories of nations 12 THE PHILOSOPHY Of INTEGRATION. are but the external and mechanical manifestations. If, from all of these independent trains of thought, we accept the inference, not capable of logical proof, that we have lived somewhere previous to our present life on the earth, have we anything to indicate the probable whereabouts of our former abode? It may, of course, have been in the souls of our ancestors, or a previous incarnation, but water cannot rise above its level, and we find ourselves with ideals that are higher than any our ancestors could have had, inasmuch as the race has been ascending in beauty, goodness, and truth from the beginning and still continues its progress. Our previous life may have been on some of the other planets, but none of these seems to have any direct connection with, or relation to, our earth. There are the far-distant solar systems, but we cannot perceive that we have any immediate connection with them. On the other hand, we perceive a relationship, as it were in a straight line, direct and somewhat intelligible, between our moon and the earth, and our earth and the sun. If we believe that we have once lived on any of the visible heavenly bodies, and that after this life we will go to live on another of them, the great weight of inference will be in favor of^the moon and the sun, between which our earth is a sort of intermediary. It is true we must have lived originally on the central sphere whence everything that is has expanded, but that must have been many stages before our life here, else probably we would have remem- bered more of it, being, upon that hypothesis, only one remove from infinite knowledge. Herein is the great difference between the Christ and other men. The ques- 13 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. tion then arises, Which way are we probably going ? May we not have come from the sun and be on our way to the moon ? We reply that this view is opposed by what we know of the sun and moon and of the nature of things on the earth. On our planet we find that prog- ress means condensation; that integration is the secret of evolution. We know that the earth is growing colder year by year; and though the short period of human history and tradition is not sufficient to give us a very clear idea of the rate of progress, as it is so tiny a fraction of even our planet's life, yet the variations we perceive within our little period of consciousness are enough to establish the gradual triumph of unity. Let us turn now to the moon. The moon is a worn-out world whereas the sun is a new one. The moon represents the victory of darkness over light, of cold over heat, of contraction over expansion, of force over energy, of God over the Devil. We see on her frozen surface mountains and valleys, extinct volcanoes, silent and dark. We have no right to infer that the moon has ceased to grow cold. We know very little of what cold really is. When matter becomes heated beyond a certain point it may pass out of all forms recognizable by man, and when it be- comes frozen below a certain point may its constitution not become such that it would require beings endowed differently from us to perceive it at all ? The moon may get colder and colder until it will not even reflect the rays of the sun, which may have been the fate of all the moon's moons, if there were any. On our moon we see the end of the process that is now taking place on our earth. We know that human beings like ourselves 14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. could not live on such a cold sphere. If we beHeve that at one time it has been warmer and inhabited, should we believe that its inhabitants were entirely annihilated ? Is it not more in harmony with science to believe that as life is an entity, and that as anything that is cannot be destroyed, so life may be changed but cannot be destroyed, and therefore that those who lived on the moon when it was warmer must have gone, or been transferred, from the moon to some other heavenly body? And which of these bodies would be so avail- able as our earth, which even now attracts the moon to itself with all that is in or on it ? What supposition is more natural, a priori, therefore, than that, if our life has come from any Heavenly body, the moon is that body? (8) According to the theory of the triumph of unity or condensation, the next abode of some of the earth's inhabitants should be the sun. We recognize that the moon is kept in its place by the exact adjustment of energy and force, the one tending to throw it off into space and the other to draw it to the earth. We see further that our planet is kept in its orbit by the dead- lock of the same two enemies, one of which would draw it to the sun. But who raises the question as to what keeps the sun in its place ? If it appeared to be the center of the universe, we might understand that it could be kept still by the tension of all parts of the uni- versal sphere towards itself. We know, however, that it is only one amongst myriads of larger suns, and that therefore it appears dependent upon the attraction of some other body or bodies for its fixity of position. The IS THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. s un may not at present be circulating around its regulat- ing sun; but, if this be true, we should expect it to do so at some future time. It is a significant fact that our whole solar system has been declared by astronomers to be moving toward a point in the milky way. By the pro- cess of condensation, when the sun has cooled down into a planet, and our earth and our planets have become shrivelled into Httle moons, and the moons have become frozen and contracted beyond recognition, then the sun will probably have been drawn so near to its immediate regulator as to be obliged to move around it, if it is not doing so already. Let us not lose sight of the fact that it is by the gradual triumph of God over Satan that this will be accompHshed. The centrifugal energy is Satan. The centripetal force is God. The reader may think we have proceeded too quickly. "How do you know", he may ask, "that our sun is condensing into a planet ? " To this we reply : (a) We behold nebulous masses, which, the spectrum shows us, are composed of many of the same elements that now make up our earth. (b) By the laws of chemical affinity, molecular co- hesion, and gravitation, the atoms in these nebulous clouds would be likely to combine into molecules, the molecules to cohere in bodies, or patches, and the bodies to gravitate towards each other. (c) Hence there would be motion towards the centre of the nebulous mass. (d) At the centre where these motions would end, an amount of heat would be generated that would exactly correspond to the amount of motion destroyed there. i6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. (c) By an argument a priori, therefore, we would ex- pect to find a fiery central mass with a cold atmosphere pressing towards its centre, and containing the same atoms with which we are already familiar. (/) Our latest discoveries by photography of the sun and spectrum analysis have plainly verified our a priori conclusions. It is now clear that the rice-grained ap- pearance of the sun is due to the flaming points of burn- ing hydrogen bursting out from the centre of the fiery mass, and that the sun spots are immense funnel-shaped openings leading in towards the centre of the sun^and caused by the rushing down of the Cold atmosphere; and, although we have not yet discovered all of our atoms or elements in the sun, we have found so many that we can fairly infer the presence of the others. {g) As a final proof, we see in our solar system some bodies which are in the transitional period between the sun state and the planet state, and they are those that appear to be surrounded by the largest number of moons or bodies which are half planet and half moon. Jupiter, whose bulk is 1400 times that of the earth, has so small a density that its mass is only 338 times greater than that of the earth, and it exhibits phenom- ena of belts, and has four moons. Saturn, whose bulk is 735 times greater than the earth and only 100 times greater in mass, exhibits the phenomena of belts and also of concentric rings, and has eight moons. Can- not the significance of this be easily seen? Saturn appears more sun than planet; Jupiter half sun and half planet; our earth a planet with one moon left; Mercury, Venus, and Mars planets that have lost all or some of 17 tHE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. their moons. The planetoids or asteroids which have been discovered within the last century may be the lost moons of these planets. (9) According to this centralization theory of creation, Heaven, our final home, must be an absolutely cold, dark, and magnetic sphere which attracts everything that is to itself. The darkness and coldness of Heaven are, of course, opposed to the popular conception thereof, and also to what has hitherto been the opinion of scientists. Scholars, however, must soon learn that cold, darkness, and magnetic attraction are attributes of reality and that light, heat, and electrical repulsion are merely negative motions. It will be hard to convince the many that material light is a principle of evil, because all through the ages it has been held to be a distinctive attribute of the good and creative force. It was so regarded by the specula- tive cosmogonies and theosophies of Oriental nations; and even the language of Holy Writ is tinctured with the conception that light is pre-eminently the attribute of God, and darkness that of the Devil. Reflection may perhaps show us, nevertheless, that the popular con- ception is as false as was the supposed flatness of the earth, and that, as in the latter case so in the former, the language of the Scriptures must be regarded as spoken to men in popular and understandable form rather than in that which is scientific and accurate. With regard to heat there vidll not be so great diflSculty, though scientifically, light and heat are supposed to be the same thing, namely, undulations of greater or less length, tension, or frequency. Yet the pubUc has been so 18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. accustomed to think of Hell as a place of everlasting burning that it will be rather predisposed to predicate heat as an attribute of the Devil's working, though very loath to admit the same thing of light. Yet light is ex- tremely painful under certain circumstances. Some barbarous nations, as a means of torture, cut off the eyelids of victims. Invalids who suffer from insomnia find light distressing and require their windows dark- ened in the daytime. One cannot sleep soundly in a lighted room. There is something in the nature of light that causes unrest, motion, struggle. Darkness alone is fully adapted to rest. It is in keep- ing with this thought that Heaven, being a place of ab- solute and blissful, though not, of course, unconscious, repose, should have in it no such thing as material light. Being a condition necessary to human vision and the perception of external objects and consequently necessary for the acquisition of a great part of our knowl- edge, light has come to be used as synonymous with knowledge. But a condition necessary to the existence of a thing must not be confounded with the thing itself nor always regarded as the cause of it. The light is not knowledge any more than the eye itself is knowledge, nor is it the cause of knowledge. All that the light does is to enable certain disconnected, incoherent, and dis- integrating impressions to fall upon the retina. It is the understanding, or the innate unifying and discrim- inating function supplied by the mind itself, that seizes these isolated sense impressions and unites them into a concept, or intelligible notion, of an object. In other words light is an element necessary to the per- 19 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. ception of a visible object just as a knowledge of evil is necessary to the perception of good, but the knowledge of evil is not therefore the cause of the perception of good, nor, above all, should it be looked upon as itself good. Neither should light be considered a cause of knowledge or confused with knowledge itself. Light is a form of motion necessary to the perception of a visible object, but it gives man only a chaotic assem- blage of unintelligible, isolated impressions that would but serve to make perception impossible, did not the integrating God overrule this anarchy and make orderly conceptions and knowledge out of it. It is easy to imagine higher forms of existence in which our knowl- edge will not be conditioned by sense perceptions at all or, if so, will be not hmited to the perception of ob- jects by these poor eyes of ours, which require physical light to see but which do not at best see things as they are, for when we supplement their power by telescopes and microscopes we see wider and deeper into the con- stitution of things. Can we imagine our state of in- finite knowledge in Heaven limited and hampered by our present weak and imperfect organs of vision ? Shall we have the same false powers of perception, or shall we not have faculties that see things as they are? If then we are not to be hampered with our present limited and untrustworthy vision when we reach Heaven, why should we there need material Hght, which is necessary only for those imperfect powers ? Material light should not be confounded with spiritual illumination. Serious doubts may arise in the minds of many from the numerous and direct references in the Scriptures, 20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. especially in the Gospel of St. John, to Christ as the "Light of the World", and it requires a violent wrench from the ordinary conception to accept our hypothesis. How can we reconcile it, for example, to such a state- ment as "In Him was light and the light was the life of men." To this we reply that at the time these words were written and, indeed, up till the present, light was regarded as a cause of fertility, growth, and vitality in the organic world. It is easy to account for such an idea. Plants will not grow without light. Therefore it is an obvious, but not necessarily a correct, inference that the light causes the plant to grow. Again, since hght is a necessary condition of all visual per- ception, one is inchned to afi&rm that light is a source of knowledge. These ideas have become so associated in our minds that we can hardly express the imparting of knowledge without employing the figure of enlightening or illuminating. Throughout the Bible, and in our Lord's own discourses, words are used in their simple popular sense, to convey ideas which can be understood by the people to whom they were written or spoken. It is in this sense that St. John speaks of Christ as the light of the world. He was the source of truth and the cause of all spiritual vitality. As to the question. Would God in His revelation al- low us to remain under an impression exactly the op- posite of the truth, namely that light was an attribute of His own working in nature while it was really that of the Devil's? We would reply, God has never de- ceivedjman in any way, but for His own good reasons He has allowed the Devil to do so in many ways. All igno- 21 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. ranee is the work of the Devil, and God is only overcoming it by a gradual process of inspiration. He is revealing His truth by degrees. The Devil tries to deceive to the ut- most, that is, wherever he can he endeavors to make us believe the very opposite of the truth. God, for exam- ple, never told man that the earth is flat. It was the Devil who did that, and it was only after many years of struggle with Satan that God was able to let man un- derstand that the earth is round. Here we see the Devil making us believe the exact opposite of the truth, that the sun moves around the earth, whereas the earth moves around the sun. It is in accordance with this that he should, for so long, have made us beheve that light and heat, which are really disintegrating and destroying influences, and which never, under any cir- cumstances, created anything, are in themselves benefi- cent and preserving principles. When Kepler presented his defence of the Copernican theory to the academic senate of Tubingen, the divines were of opinion that it contained a deadly heresy, because it contradicted the teaching of the Bible in that passage where Joshua commands the sun to stand still. To which Kepler repHed that as the Bible addressed itself to mankind in general it spoke of things in the life of men as men in general are accustomed to speak of them. This must be our reply to those who object that light is spoken of as the good principle in the Bible and darkness as the evil. It is so expressed in concession to the popular misconception that light is able to impart life and growth to plant organisms, joined with the practical ob- servation that darkness acts as a cover to hide evil deeds THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. and that daylight makes the evil manifest. This last fact only shows that evil may serve a good purpose; but good remains good and evil remains evil for all that. A man might find it necessary to tear down a small house on a valuable piece of land in a crowded city in order to con- struct thereon a larger and better residence. In that case the work of destruction would be for a good purpose and would result in a higher construction; but the act of tearing down the old house would be, though justified by the end in view, a destructive act, and nothing but a destructive act. What a singular misconception it would be if one should think that, because the end justified the means, the act of tearing down the first building was in reahty an act of construction! Yet this is precisely the mistake under which those persons labor that regard the action of light in plant growth as a vitalizing and constructive influence. All that the light does is to disintegrate the particles of the plant and set them in motion. The result would be utterly de- structive of the organism, did not God, manifesting Him- self as the worker of chemical affinity and molecular co- hesion, overrule the disintegration caused by Ught and heat and therefrom construct a larger plant organism. Throughout, the action of light and heat has been destructive. Of course, the growth could not have taken place without it. So likewise moral growth can- not take place without temptation, or temptation without sin; and the existence of evil is thus necessary to moral advancement; but no one would be justified therefore in mistaking the evil for the good. Evil remains evil even when it is overruled by God for a good end. It 23 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. is the work of the Devil and not of God, except that God in the beginning, for His own wise purposes, al- lowed the Devil to exist and to bring evil upon the uni- verse. The only answer to the question as to why God allowed the Devil to exist must be found in the hope that when the Devil is finally conquered, and the universe completely condensed, and love finally triumphant, the joy wUl be greater than it would have been if there had been no struggle ; and that the excess of happiness then will more than counterbalance the temporary pain we liave now. While we may not say that whatever is now is best, we shall ultimately see that whatever has been has been for the best, though we may not know this till the whole plan is surveyed backward from Heaven. Of course the terms "good" and "evil" as appUed to the moral conduct of man are much fuller of meaning than when used of the operations of the physical world, but the principle is identical in each. It is the same designing, conscious, evil spirit who destroys matter by light, heat, and electrical repulsion, or centrifugal energy, who in men tries to mar all beauty, to seduce all virtue, and to hamper all knowledge. One cannot say, for instance, that it is morally wrong for a man to hght a candle ; but what we say is that when he does so, he calls into existence two destructive and dangerous motions, light and heat; and he is only justi- fied in doing so when he is prepared to hold them in check and to make them serve some good purpose. It would be wrong to light a candle and leave it so near a magazine of powder as to disintegrate the latter and de- stroy hfe and property. Man instinctively acknowledges 24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. that light and heat are dangerous disintegrating motions, when he confines, his fires to stoves and fireplaces to keep their destructive properties in check. When prop- erly guarded they serve many good purposes, but they themselves are essentially evil and destructive. Even the gentle sunbeam, which causes pleasure to the human eye and agreeable sensations in a man's body, will ruin the vegetables in his cellar. At the same time that God holds the light of the sun sufficiently in check to make it serve some good purposes on the earth, in so far as it acts at all it is always a disintegrator. Every house- wife knows that she must keep her storeroom dark and cool in order to preserve her vegetable supplies from fermentation and rottenness. It may be said that great cold is destructive ; that, for instance, it as surely destroys certain things to have them frozen as to expose them to light and heat. But this is not the case. So long as any vegetable or animal substance is frozen it is not destroyed. It will keep indefinitely. But let heat approach it, and disintegration sets in at once. In the process of freezing one's body, the pain is caused by the conflict vnth heat. When heat is conquered and the face is frozen, there is no pain. It is only when heat is applied that the pain begins. Freezing may cause our fife to depart elsewhere, for our souls now need bodies which contain heat; but they may be other- wise constituted some day; and cold is never a disintegrating process, though it may give rise to disintegration, just as evil may follow from the excess of any good. It may seem fanciful to use the terms "good" or "evil" in speaking of merely 25 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. physical actions, nevertheless the principle cannot be gainsayed. The action of gravitation, like darkness and cold, is always beneficent and preservative, though the Devil may bring evil results out of it also, as where people fall from heights and are killed. Yet the same law, which would be so misused by the Devil, is that with- out which we would all be hurled into space. Good springs from evil, and evil from good ; but the two are al- ways antagonistic. The Devil uses every integration as a stepping stone to a wider disintegration; and God uses every act of destruction as material for a higher reconstruction. But no matter how closely good and evil are related as cause and effect, they are always dis- tinct from each other. Evil is nothing but evil though good should spring from it; and we must never confound the evil with the good. Light and heat are always the work of the Devil even though God, by holding them in check, brings good out of their destructive action. The amount of light and heat upon the earth from the sun will depend not only on the amount of each generated in the sun, but also upon the distance of the earth from the sun. Throughout all parts of the struggle between the Integrator and the Disintegrator there must be uniformity in the rate of God's triumph. If, for example, God, as the centripetal or magnetic at- tractive force, were to gain too great an advantage over the centrifugal or electrical repulsive energy, our earth would be drawn much nearer the sun than it is at present. We should therefore be burned, unless the sun had grown correspondingly cool. If the rate at which 26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. the sun cools should correspond to the rate at which the centripetal force conquers the centrifugal energy, the temperature on the earth might remain the same as it is now, even if we were drawn as near to the sun as the moon is now to the earth. If the centripetal force which draws us to the sun conquered too quickly, we should be burned. If the condensation of the sun took place too quickly, we should be frozen; but God, who, by His great love, cares for each atom throughout the whole expanse of the universe, triumphs over Satan gradually in all parts together, and with sympathetic symmetry. 27 CHAPTER II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF THE INCARNATION OF GOD IN JESUS CHRIST. It is to be expected in an age of observation and scientific experiment, when men have discovered the fniitfulness of inductive methods, that natural laws, many of which assuredly throw light on the unexplained phenomena of life, should be regarded with an exaggerated importance that is truly marvellous to those standing far enough away from the scientific turmoil to view the whole position. We should strive after a rational and comprehensive judgment that coolly accords to each incident in the scene its due value and nothing more. The empirical scientists of the present day are down in the midst of natural phenomena. They are sur- rounded on all sides by material and secondary causes. They deal with what they can see and handle. The enormous mass of facts, experiments, technical terms, and limited generalizations prevents their breadth of vision. They cannot view the whole question in its relation to primary and efficient causes. Because a "law of nature", or uniformity in observed processes, may be for them the object of their search, they are apt to think that such a law is a final or ultimate principle and that it explains fully the facts about which they are reasoning. They find it hard to see that these laws are merely the most frequent modes of the working of a de- 28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. signing power. That same power may, on exceptional occasions, work by different laws; but the tendency is to overlook this. Hence men are apt to infer, because the conception of a human being in most known cases oc- curs upon the fertilization of the ovum by the spermato- zoa of a male, that it could not occur otherwise. It is absurd and presumptuous, however, to afi&rm, merely because we have found this to be necessary in those cases which have come under our notice, that no con- ception could occur without male fertihzation. Be- cause the sun has risen every day within the memory of man, we may infer that it will rise tomorrow. There is an extremely strong probability that it will do so; but no one will argue that because it has risen every day it must rise again tomorrow. The reasoning is precisely the same with those who say that spiritual conception is impossible. It is improbable, viewed an- tecedendy, we admit, that a human being could come into the world without the instrumentality of a material father, yet it is just as clearly possible as that the sun may not rise tomorrow. We admit the antecedent improbability of the con- ception of a human being without male co-operation of a material character, yet if we can show that the whole life of Jesus was unique, then the dpriori improbability will be reversed. The historical position of the Naz- arene is, we assert, one without parallel. Mahomet and Gautama were sent by God to found great systems of reUgion. They have fulfilled a great part of God's plan in human growth, but would anyone argue (i) that either of these systems, if universally adopted, would 29 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. produce an ideal state, one worthy of being the dimax of human development; (2) that these religions have shown themselves actually possessed of inherent power sufiicient to lead to the hope of their universaUty and perfection? On the other hand, will any deny that if the Kingdom of God, as described by Jesus in His parables and teachings, were realized upon the earth, it would be an ideal state, one of perfect happiness, suffi- cient justification and explanation of man's origin and development? Or will anyone deny that the Church of Jesus, which has overcome the rehgious bigotry of the Jews, the refined skepticism of the Greeks, the proud selfishness and mighty power of the Romans, the superstition of the Middle Ages, the heresies of inward traitors and outward foes, and holds to-day the civilized and self-governing nations of the world in its rapidly widening grasp, possesses a mysterious power, one diametrically opposed to any human force, namely the power of self-abnegation, love, weakness, — the mightiest principle which the world has ever seen? Do not all the tendencies of the present lead to the hope that this strange power will continue to work like leaven till the whole earth is impregnated thereby, and subdued thereto, and God's will shall b "lone on earth as it is now done in Heaven? Jesus occupies the center of History. He stands alone. No other man ever made such claims and had them substantiated by such a spot- less hfe and sublime death, or by the self-sacrificing labors of His followers, the cheerful death of martyred saints, the unprecedented triumphs of his teachings. If then, apart altogether from the miraculous and supra- 30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. sensuous elements in the life of Christ, one arrives at the perfectly rational conclusion that His place in the plan is different, not only in degree but in kind, from all others, we should naturally expect three things: (i) that the soul of Jesus should come from a different sphere from that of all others; (2) that it should be incarnated by a different process; and (3) that the development of self-consciousness and power, which proceeds slowly in other men, would be exceedingly rapid in Him, and that He would perform acts appearing to men to be super- natural, which they would call miracles and imagine to be contraventions of the laws of nature. Looked at from this point of view, the immaculate conception of Jesus appears to be precisely what we should have ex- pected ci priori, especially when we find that in so many startling particulars He fulfils the prophecies of the Jews regarding their Messiah, and the expectation that their deHverer should be bom of a pure virgin. It may now be observed that pre-established harmony is an explanation quite sufficient to make us view this procedure as natural and orderly. The control of the de- tails of the universe by its Creator may be by the con- tinual adjustment and exercise of His ever-present power, or it may be by a pre-arrangement of forces that contain sufficient strength to carr}- them onwards, under His Divine permission and guidance, of course, to ful- fil their work ages after the creative act first proceeded from the Divine mind. In such a view of things the pre-establishment of a harmonious relationship between co-ordinating physical conditions would ftilly account for the existence in the Virgin of a species of ovum 31 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. which would contain all that was'^necessary forjthe production of a man child. We mean that the Creator in arranging the details of man's life on earth, with Divine foresight and power, might have so planned the physical development of the line of David that a descendant of that house, the Virgin Mary, should be of this nature and possess this exceptional power. Moreover, even this hypothesis is not necessary when we reflect that God not only governs by the pre-estab- Ushed harmony of His own machinery, but that every- where, and in all things, He rules by direct oversight from Heaven, that He makes one substance different from another by altering the aflSnities of its atoms or the polarities of its ions or molecules. Now the difference be- tween an unfertilized ovum and one that is fertilized, or even between the zoa of the male and the female seed, is merely one of atomic and molecular arrangement, as are aU differences in phenomena, all being various ex- pansions of the universal substance. Therefore the simplest and, after all, the most rational, idea of the conception of Jesus in the Virgin by the Holy Ghost, is the old-fashioned belief that the power of the Most High came upon her and changed the constitution of the ovum, perhaps by the alteration of the polarities or affinities of its atoms, so that it became fertilized directly, instead of intermediately by the instrumentality of an earthly father. It may be argued that the ground of this controversy has been shifted by the Higher Criticism to the au- thenticity of the first chapters of St. Luke and other portions of the Gospels, which describe the conception 32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. and birth of Jesus. It was only to be expected that men looking first at the antecedent probability of each detail in the story would assert that the narrative was written to fit in with a theory of Messiahship as it existed in the mind of a not-unbiassed writer, or as it was handed along by oral exaggeration. We have shown, however, that the most reasonable and philosophical atti- tude is that of a spectator who views the whole question in the light of its historical developments, and then, after getting his true bearings as to the general character of the Incarnation, begins an examination of the details of Our Saviour's life. It is asserted by some, who lay especial stress upon the genealogical record in the First chapter of Matthew, tracing the descent of Jesus from Abraham down, that Joseph was the father of our Saviour. In the i6th verse of this chapter we read : "And Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was bom Jesus, Who is called Christ." We should not fail to notice liat this verse is the only one of the series into which the name of a woman is brought. If it were intended to be inferred that Jesus was the son of Joseph, why should not the form of this verse be the same as that of the preceding fifteen verses? We should expect the verse to have been: "And Jacob begat Joseph, and Joseph begat Jesus, Who is called Christ." The exceptional way in which the sentence is worded, and the manner in which the Virgin is introduced, make it plain that while the writer regarded Mary as unmistakably the mother of Jesus, he either did not beheve Joseph to be His father or had at least his doubts regarding it. Matthew might 33 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. not have happened to know much about the manner of our Lord's birth, and might have been merely in doubt as to whether or not Joseph was really thefatherof Jesus. This is supposing (contrary to our admission) that, though the first seventeen verses are authentic, the re- mainder of the chapter is a later interpolation, inserted to make the narrative fit in with the prophecy of Isaiah: "Behold a Virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, which being interpreted is 'God with us'." We have shown that, even if this were the case, the manner of St. Matthew's narrative in the first eighteen verses would indicate that he had his doubts of Joseph's fatherhood. Again even if Joseph had been the father of Jesus (which we do not admit), it would not have proved that the conception was not the work of the Holy Spirit. We cannot tell how the male zoa fecundate the female when the two come together by the co-operation of the sexes. There is required in the conception of every human being the guiding and indwelUng power of the Holy Spirit, who influences the spermatozoa and makes them perform their work by a direct act of the Divine Will. You cannot explain the fertilization of an ovum by any material causes. You say that the two forms of matter possess an affinity for each other that makes them unite and a fertilized ovum is the result. But what is affinity ? Blind attraction ? Certainly not. That is the ultima thule of unreason. There must be a conscious designing power at the back of the motions of the spermatozoa by which they are impelled to unite with other animalculffi in the ovum and to begin the work of 34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. creating little communities of living organisms, which in the aggregate make up what we call a human body. Under any circumstances, therefore, Jesus must have been conceived by the Holy Ghost and bom of the Virgin Mary, even if Joseph had been a human in- strument used by God as an intermediate material agent in the process (which he was not). The same reasoning holds true of any of the other disagreeable theories that may be advanced, whether it be asserted that the possible earthly agent might have been a Roman soldier, or a fanatical priest of the Temple, who, deceiv- ing or mayhap self-deceived, worked upon the credulity or hysteria of the Virgin, rendering her the unconscious co-agent in the work. There is something intensely repugnant and inherently discordant with the whole system in any of these suppositions, especially in the theory that Joseph was the father. Upon this supposi- tion we might search for a long time in the laws of heredity to discover the probable production of such a son by such a father. Canon Liddon has pointed out, in his 'Bampton Lectures', the difficulty of accounting for so strange — so audacious — an ambition in an unlearned and obscure Galilean, upon any other supposition than His divine origin. Whence came the unparalleled claim of a world-wide empire, an undying kingdom, the absolute yielding of the hearts and wills of all men to Him? Surely not from the blood and brain of a commonplace Joseph. We see therefore that the state- ment of the creeds, "He was conceived by the Holy Ghost, bom of the Virgin Mary," stands impregnable, and that the most probable and fitting view, as well as 35 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. the most rational and scientific, is the old-fashioned orthodox belief which we have heretofore held, that the conception was an extraordinary working of the Divine power directly from Heaven. 36 CHAPTER III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST. As Jesus grew into manhood, constant brooding over His plans would develop within Him that inner power which sees below the surface of phenomena and pierces the eternal mystery of the Real. Vistas of the true laws that govern nature would be spread out before Him. The ever-present consciousness of His destiny, that resistless river within each soul, which sweeps men on through life, surged within His breast. Those occasion- al glimpses which all get of their former hfe — those fleeting, indescribable presentiments that lift the veil of the future for the millionth part of a second — came to Him frequently and were recognized by Him to be what they are, — revelations from the Father. In- trospection with Him meant communion with God. All knowledge comes from within. Experience of ex- ternalities furnishes only the material for the mind to work upon. The persistence, power, and vividness of internal suggestion are the most prominent character- istics of all true prophets, poets, or inventors. Their minds assume control of their bodies, their senses, their experiences and all their material environments. So this vitalizing, moulding, classifying, and formative something withm took fvdl possession of the young GaUlean. The world of outward facts about Him was 37 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. subjected before the growing consciousness of inward knowledge and power. He saw that things are false. They appear manifold and variegated, and they really are one, of one substance and governed by one mind. That this one mind is God, and that He was being filled with the Divine mind more than any other man had been, or would be. He must have known beyond ques- tion. Though He felt His knowledge of reaUties widen- ing and deepening every day, He could not have yet become infallible. Long after this He confessed that He was ignorant of certain things which at that time it was not given to any but the Father Himself to know. It was like an infinite ocean pouring itself down into an ever-enlarging well, a receptacle specially constructed to expand and to hold more than any other, yet, for the present, hmited. Though the boundless ocean above still emptied itself into His mind, there was space in Him to receive more. The channel of communication was unimpeded from the Father to the Son, but the passage from the Son to the Father was beset by the hindrances incidental to humanity. He knew that He was being led on by the Spirit and brought into all knowledge, and that He was gradually acquiring all the Father's power; but, for the time, He was content to be led step by step. When He went to St. John the Baptist to be baptized. He received the first remarkable confirmation of His mission. It was probably on its material side a phe- nomenon of an electrical nature. We cannot satisfac- torily explain the origin of an internally suggested idea by any known law of psychology. The irritation of a 38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. peripheral nerve may be the instrument whereby an external object originates an idea; but to find the source of a mental act that springs from within is a difficulty that can be solved only in one way. We must believe that our brains are but the harps upon which the master hand of the Spirit plays the music of our thoughts. Looked at from its material side, the act of the World- Spirit in striking off an idea through a nerve centre of the brain is akin to a slight electric shock. The mani- festation of God to Christ at the River Jordan was probably an enlargement and intensification of the phenomenon that accompanies the suggestion of an ordinary idea to a commonplace man. The brain of Christ, we infer d priori, would hkely be of a highly sensitive and delicate organization. We should expect its convolutions to be more numerous and more highly differentiated than in the case of any other, if only from the introspective and intensely contemplative habit which must have arisen from the peculiar circumstances of His birth and His mother's teaching. Remembering these facts, we can picture the scene at the river. There was the excitement and magnetic influence of a large gather- ing of people. The young and unknown Galilean, at- tracted by the fervid outpourings of the Baptist, ap- proaches with the intensifying consciousness that He is nearing a crisis in His life. He is impelled by that strange feeling which He now knows so well, and which is described in the New Testament as being "led by the Spirit". The fierce denunciations of John are ring- ing in the ears of the multitude: "Oh generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to 39 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. come ? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance, and think not to say within yourselves: We have Abraham to our father; for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up children i^nto Abraham. And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees; therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire: I indeed baptize you with water irnto repentance, but He that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear; He shall baptize you mth the Holy Ghost and with fire."— Matt. Ill: 7 to 10. With what a thrill of verified presentiment must Jesus have heard these words ! As He drew nigh, He must have been raised to the highest pitch of nervous tension. Then, to bring the strain to its climax, St. John, recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, cries: "Behold the lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world! This is He of whom I said: After me cometh a man which is preferred before me, for He was before me!" Might we not anticipate that the World-Spirit, who works upon all brains making ideas knovwi by electric shocks that disintegrate nerve centres, would give now some striking manifestation of His methods of communication? Should we not expect Him to say what we are told He did say: " This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased ? " It may have been merely an idea suggested to the mind of Jesus : " Thou art my beloved Son," as St. Luke records, accompanied by so powerful an electric discharge that there was an actual flame of Ught resembhng a dove upon His head. So great^was the magnetic sympathy in the overwrought 40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. and excited multitude that all were worked upon by the same idea, and to them it was : " This is my beloved Son." When we offer this explanation, however, we do not take the miracle-element out of the scene. Looked at on its material side, it was probably but an extraordinary instance of internal suggestion, manifest- ing itself in a noticeable electric disturbance. Yet back of every internal suggestion is God or Satan. To resolve some miracles into phenomena of clairvoyance, hysteria, nervous prostration, or mania is not finally to explain them, but merely to show that the World- Spirit sometimes works through these conditions. After this we find that Jesus, still under the guidance of His internal prompter, went into an uninhabited place to fast and meditate in order that He should be further initiated into the mysteries of the power of God. The result was most startling. He seems, by His in- trospective reflection and by His communion with God — perhaps also by intercourse with other beings of the Spiritual hierarchy who "ministered unto Him" — to have discovered three secrets of nature that have never been revealed to any other man, even now in our scien- tific age. These are : First. The transmutation of substances. Second. The true nature of gravitation. Third. The secret of destructive power. These facts are presented to us in the three temptations by which He was assailed. First. He was an hungered, and the Devil suggested to Him that He should convert the stones about Him into bread 41 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. The transmutation of substances has always been the golden dream of the scientific explorer. It follows nat- urally from the idea of the unity of things. If the trees and railways and houses and men about us are but different combinations of the atoms of one elementary substance, then we have only to discover what it is that makes these atoms combine with the same regularity of difference, and the ability to transmute or change wood into iron, or iron into flesh, or stones into bread, will at once follow. That Jesus had by this time begun to realize and work upon the unity of all things is more than probable. As He understood His mission to be the drawing together of men on the earth into one man by the unity of theii finite souls in the Infinite God, so He saw that the same uniting force is triumphing in nature as chemical affinity, molecular cohesion, and gravitation. We should expect from the revelation of His mission as moral unity an enlightenment within Him upon the unity of nature, and, as a necessary corol- lary therefrom, the power to reduce our seventy or more elementary substances into fewer and more general ones; and, finally, after He had been raised from the dead and had declared that all power in Heaven and earth had been given unto Him, we should expect Him to be able to reduce all seventy atoms to the one imiversal substance. From the?e considerations it ought not to cause in us surprise that the first great specific secret of nature apparently discovered by Christ should have been the transmutation of substances. Is it not wonder- derful that the dream of the ancient alchemists and the goal of modem synthetic chemists was reached by 4.2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. the Galilean in His solitary meditation before He had begun His active work or had wrought a single miracle ? Is it not also a fact strongly corroborative of this theory that His first wonder was performed by virtue of this discoveiy? The changing of water into wine is just such a manifestation of His power as we should have expected d priori. The second temptation of Jesus shows that He had solved the secret of the true nature of gravitation, and this is precisely what we would expect to follow from His discovery of the transmutation of substances by altering their polarities or their relation to Heaven. Gravita- tion is God manifesting Himself in drawing bodies to- gether, just as in chemical affinity He draws atoms, or in molecular cohesion He draws molecules. We are told that the Devil suggested to Jesus that He should cast Himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple, and God would give His Angels charge over Him so that He should not dash His foot against a stone. In other words, as soon as He had discovered a secret which enabled Him to counteract the law of gravitation. He felt a natural human temptation to test the power for His own satisfaction and perhaps to gratify a pride of power which He knew to be a sin. He was so real a man that as soon as He had the power He wanted to use it and take pleasure in it, but He remembered that the Father had given Him this new potency for the glory of the omnipotent God and the good of His fellow-men. So H3 put the temptation from Him; but the indirect evidence it gives of Christ's true nature, and the light it throws on His works, remain for our benefit. Men have 43 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. always looked forward to a time when they could fly in the air. Flying machines are the first inventions that men picture to themselves when they prophesy of things to come in a few centuries. Yet we are far from dis- covering the great secret that was probably revealed to Jesus in the wilderness, a discovery that explains many of the most remarkable phenomena of His life and es- pecially the great fact of His ascension. The third secret is the counterpart of the second. We are told that the Devil led Christ to the top of a high mountain, and showed Him all the Kingdoms of the earth, and offered Him all things, if He would bow down and worship him. It does not require great ingenuity to offer a somewhat plausible explanation of this episode. He had discovered the secret of destruc- tive power. By the exercise of this energy He could have annihilated all the armies and fortifications in the world, and reigned an earthly king with supreme authority and the highest military glory. Some men regard Christ as a mystical Person, who was neither God nor man. They invest Him with a halo of unreal majesty that obscures His humanity and prevents the outflow of genuine love and gratitude toward Him. He was so truly a man, so natural, and so Hke any other young man under the same circumstances, that some thought like the following occurred to Him: "Why should I not set up an earthly kingdom and conquer these proud Romans, and establish the throne of David as the supreme powerjof the world? These haughty and selfish foreigners^who are trampling upon our J God- selected race, — ibehold their foolish pride in armed 44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. strength ! How easily could I destroy a Roman Legion !" Then, perhaps, there came over His mind the recollec- tion of the mournful cadence of Isaiah: "He was de- spised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from Him!" He saw a nobler kingdom than that of earth; a kingdom that should have no end, wherein should reign love and peace and absolute unity through self-sacrifice. This power of destruction was but an instrument to be subjected to His more glorious work. With meek submission He threw back the momentary impulse that had come over him when the secret of destruction first flashed through His mind, an impulse that was foreign to His true nature, but which shows tlie reahty of His manhood. When we read of His sub- sequent sufferings, and of the mob that came to take Him. headed by the miserable Judas, and reflect upon this secret knowledge whereby He could have blown them literally to atoms, we catch a ghmpse of the sublimity of His sacrifice. The events of the first week after Christ's return from the Wilderness are interesting to the scientific enquirer because of the evidence they bear to His power of mind- reading and the personal, magnetic or mesmeric power by which He attracted His followers about Him. Two disciples of the Baptist, one of whom was Andrew and the other, in all probability, the beloved disciple, had followed Jesus from Jordan and enquired timidly of Him where He made His abode. He told them to "Come and see." The result was that they became immediately attached to Him with a. love that lasted 45 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGEATION. during their lives. Andrew went in search of his brother Peter, and the bold enthusiast at once yielded to the attraction which Jesus exercised over all whom He chose to win to His immediate service. Philip of Bethsaida was overtaken as they were starting on their return to Galilee, and the simple command, "Follow me," was willingly obeyed, as in the case of the others. Phihp had a friend Nathaniel, or Bartholomew, who lived at Cana, and his first thought was to communicate the discovery to him. He sought him out and cried: "We have found Him of whom Moses in the law and the Prophets did write." Bartholomew seems to have been a deeply contemplative and serious man. He was probably studying his daily office of prayer, as it was the custom of pious Jews to do, ntidpt a fig tree, and possibly his thoughts were on the subject of the promised Messiah. When told by Philip who this new claimant was, that it was only Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph, the momentary flush of excitement died away from his face, and he enquired with a half sneer: "Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?" Philip told him to "Come and see." When Jesus saw Nathaniel coming He said, "Behold an Israelite in- deed, in whom is no guile!" Nathaniel said unto Him, " Whence knowest thou me ? " Jesus answered and said, "Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee." There can be Ht'le doubt that it was the look of secret sympathy and inteUigence accompanying these words, revealing to the startled Bartholomew the fact that Jesus had read the train of thought upon which he was occupied when he sat under 46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. the fig tree, that caused liim to cry out immediately: "Rabbi thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel." Jesus said unto him, "Because I said unto thee I saw thee under the fig tree, behevest thou ? Thou shalt see greater things than these." Then as if to open up the highest vista of the universe that had been yet vouchsafed to Him, showing that He had grasped the idea of Heaven as a sphere above us, attracting our eaith, and all on it, to itself, and from which God sends down His spiritual forces to move and direct all earthly objects. He utters the striking words, rather, perhaps, as an expression of His own exalted vision than as an intelhgible promise to His hearers: "Ye shall see Heaven opened, and the Angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man." Jesus seems to have had a motive for hurrying back to Galilee. There was to be a wedding in Cana, and from the prominent part taken therein by Mary, the bride was probably her daughter or niece. The arrival of the five newly-found friends of Jesus appears to have been unexpected, and His mother had evidently thought He would return alone. When she found that the wine was becoming exhausted therefore, she appealed to Him to help them in this strait, having faith in His divine powers. At first, Jesus, apparently, disliked the idea. In His subsequent life He displayed the same shrinking from the exercise of any manifestation of supernatural power. His reply, "Woman what have I to do with thee ? " would be divested of its apparent harshness if we understood the term "woman" to be one of possible tenderness as it was in the original, and the idea seems 47 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. to be rather, " Mother, what has this to do with me, or my mission ? Why should I employ any of my newly- discovered powers, which were given me for the glory of God, in supplying your temporary need? Mine hour is not yet come." A second thought, however, altered His decision. He may have reflected that the shortage was largely due to his having brought five extra guests, so that He was in duty bound to repair the evil, if He could, or He may have come to the conclusion that, after all, His hour for showing control of phenomena had come, and that this was a good opportunity to begin. The act of chang'ng the water into wine was the sim- plest experiment of His new theory of the transmutation of substances. It involved only a mere outflow of electric force whereby the molecules of the water were charged and their polarities shghtly altered. It may have been that as His eyes rested on the sx pots of stone the plan occurred to Him, and He inferred from the fact of God's having brought the means so near to His hand that He intended Him to use them. He seems to have intimated to His mother that He would comply with her request, for she gave the domestics in- structions to place themselves at His disposal. The result was what we might have expected. The phenom- enal water became phenomenal wine. It was real wine in the same sense that water is real water. Water and wine as well as nitric acid and sugar, or ink and milk, are really aU the same substance. They are but differ- ent kinds of expansions of that substance; and to one who understood how through polarization or magnetism these different degrees of expansion are accomplished, THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. a secret which we are clearing up slowly nowadays, it was indeed a simple act to change the water into wine. Jesus could not have been a real man without feehng somewhat elated in consequence of the success of His first miracle. By this name we rightly denominate His extraordinary and wonderful manifestation of control of the external world. There must have been a human deHghtin His awful power, and a thrill of satisfaction because the Father had now corroborated beyond all possibihty of doubt the truth of His mother's story and His own belief in His Messiahship. While the voice that cried, "This it my beloved Son," at His baptism might be mistaken for a purely subjective or imaginary revelation; here was the actual change of an external object that could be tasted and handled and proved by the senses through its permanence. Though He had refused to convert stones into bread to appease His own hunger, or to gratify His own curiosity, or to test His revealed discovery. He had transmuted the water into wine for the sake of others, and had received His assur- ance from the Father. What should be done next ? His hour had come. j^He would proclaim Himself the Messiah, and this in^the most pubUc maimer. The Passover was at hand. He would go to Jerusalem, the center of reHgious activity, the seat of God's covenanted spiritual Presence. Men had corrupted the worship of the God of love. Their rites and ceremonies were but a cloak for hollow selfish- ness and repulsive worldb'ness. His first work must be to purify the fountain head. He therefore took His mother and brethren and disciples and went to 4f THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. Capernaum to await the first caravan starting for the Capital. As they drew near to Jerusalem, dense throngs of pil- grims were discerned coming from all quarters to the Holy City. Proselytes of every nation were uttering cries in their own languages, and the chaos that attends large crowds of strangers was visible on all sides. The streets and avenues leading to the Temple were espec- ially crowded. Here the fakirs that attend show- gatherings were busy crying their wares. Jugglers and mountebanks were endeavoring to attract the attention of the visiting pilgrims. There were other objects of merchandise, however, connected with the Temple service. Sacrifices of sheep and oxen and doves were to be made. Drovers and others that had these creat- ures for sale thronged the Court of the Gentiles, so that within the consecrated enclosure were penned herds of animals that polluted the sacred place with their filth. As the yearly tribute of the Atonement money, half a shekel, which must be given to the Priests by every Israehte, and by the proselytes from all parts, could only be paid in silver, a thriving exchange traffic was carried on by large numbers of vendors that took the coins of different countries, and various metals, in exchange for the required sort. We can imagine the shock of awed surprise which came upon the startled crowds as the figure of the young Galilean appeared among them, erect and stem, full of an indescribable, magnetic power that caused a paralysis to steal over their brains and rendered them powerless to oppose His will. With a scourge of rushes, hastily picked up from the ground, 50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. He drove out the degraded hucksters and overthrew the tables of the money-changers. The droves of cattle and sheep were turned out of the Court of the Gentiles, and He ordered them to remove the cages of doves. When this had been done, the people partially re- covered from the first effects of the shock. The Priests and Scribes and leaders of the people, when they had regained sufficient composure, gathered around Him, and, while not yet daring to accuse or attack Him, de- manded by what authority He took these bold measures, and challenged Him to show some signs in proof that He was rightly assuming this high-handed position. The thought that seems to have flashed through His brain was singularly in keeping with our theory of the development of the Divine knowledge and power within Him. It was what we should expect, a priori, to enter His mind at this instant. Here was a moment of in- tense nervous tension. His brain must have been in a highly sensitive and excited state, and His mind in a condition of great exaltation. Before Him rose the magnificent Temple and, at once, there came upon Him the recollection of His discovery of the secret of de- structive power. "I could destroy this Temple and, in less than three days, I could bring its parts together again by the magnetic union of the particles of the stones and by my power over the gravitation of the materials to each other." But in the minutest fraction of a second this thought was succeeded by another, "It is the Devil who destroys. Your mission is to construct and unify." Therefore He said aloud, " Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up." A third thought was SI THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. possibly sent by the Spirit as quickly as an electric spark flies, "Nay, I have put this into thy mind to teach thee that they shall destroy the temple of thy body, and in three days I shall raise it up again ; and that this ex- clusive system of worship shall be superseded by a church of Jews and Gentiles that thou shalt found, a Temple that shall be ten thousand times more glorious than this of Solomon." The effect on the Jews however was powerful and lasting. They broke up into angry groups discussing loudly this apparently blasphemous assertion, for, like most utterances, it was soon distorted by those who heard it in their relation of it to others that had been out of hearing. It was twisted into a statement that He would destroy the Temple and in three days build it again. Others would probably report that He had spoken derisively of the Temple saying that He could build a better one in three days. Jesus Himself prob- ably explained to His disciples afterwards, or at least to the one whom He loved and who tells us Our Saviour's meaning here, that the real and spiritual reference was to the destruction of His body. The lasting nature of the effect of His words is proved by the fact that three years afterwards they were used in evidence against Him at His trial before the Sanhedrim. The thought of the destruction of His body perhaps recalled the fact that His must be a life of meekness rather than of triumphant manifestations of power. The latter must not usurp the chief place in His work, but should be always subjected to the higher work of teaching love and non-resistance, of showing to the 5a THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. world that the greatest power on earth is gentleness. Some exercises of His extraordinary potency He would allow Himself to work for the relief of suffering and the strengthening of His mission, but these must take a subordinate place. He did not wish to draw men to Him by their love of the marvellous, by pandering to their vulgar admiration of signs and wonders. There- fore, instead of going on with an exciting work in the Holy City, it would be better to return quietly to Naz- areth and, by teaching and doing good, slowly prepare the whole country for the final pubHcation of His Kingdom at Jerusalem. One incident, however, arises from this visit to the Temple that brings out clearly Our Lord's compre- hension of His mission. Amongst the spectators of His attack upon the defilers of the Temple was Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrim and a man of thought. The bearing of Jesus and the attractiveness of His Holy personaHty had made a deep impression upon the aristocrat. He was anxious to hear more of this young provincial enthusiast. These acts and words seemed fraught with divine power. No man could do things like these, imless God were with him. The Hebrew ruler had all the timidity of a conventionalist and a man of position, a shyness which shrinks from emotional vulgarity and dreads above all things the ridicule of one's peers. He may have come to Jesus secretly by night, less from actual fear of the Jews than from a dread of the personal humiliation which he would feel if, after aU, this yoimg prophet should prove to be a quack or a fanatic. The words of our Saviour to him are clear SS THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. and in accordance with the theory we are setting forth, that whereas all other men have come from the moon or some other planet and were cast into Hell, viz., our earth when it was a "lake of fire", Jesus came directly from the central sphere, and was incarnated by a different process of conception, and was the only be- gotten Son of God in this special sense, who was sent by the Father to get us out of our world of everlasting torment back to God by love. " Marvel not that I said unto thee. Ye must be horn from above. * * * "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, we speak that we do know and bear witness of that we have seen, and ye receive not our wit- ness. If I told you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye beheve if I tell you heavenly things ? And no man hath ascended into Heaven hut He that descended out of Heaven even the Son of Man which is in Heaven." After a brief stay in Judea, during which the disciples baptized a few converts, they began their return to Nazareth. On His way Jesus stopped at Jacob's Well, near Sychar, to rest, while His disciples probably went to the city near by to obtain provisions. A woman came to draw water, and the dialogue that ensued forms a complement to the conversation with Nicodemus, in the hght which it throws on Christ's full realization of the spirituality and universaHty of His kingdom. God should henceforth be worshipped in spirit and in truth, without regard to geographical boundaries. For the first time Jesus explicitly and unambiguously de- clares His Messiahship, " I that speak to thee am He." Our Lord also shows His power either of mind- reading or superhuman knowledge in telling the woman of her adulterous life. 54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION When they arrived at Nazareth, Jesus went into the synagogue on the Sabbath and, according to His custom, stood up to read. The book of Isaiah was handed to Him, and He read from the sixty-first chapter the words: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good tidings to the poor. He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." He sat down to ex- pound the passage as was the custom. When He pro- ceeded to show that these words applied to Him, that He was the promised Deliverer, they listened spell- bound by the grace of His demeanor and the force of His arguments. Then the thought arose, "Whence hath He this wisdom ? Is not this the son of Joseph ? Can this be the boy we have seen grow up amongst us ? " Such thoughts as these roused the petty jealousies and provincial prejudices of the Nazarenes. Their wonder grew into anger. "The man pretendeth to be the Messiah! He is mad! This is blasphemy!" These were probably the muttered remarks. Yet above these angry murmurings the calm voice of Jesus continued the argument. His kingdom was to be a universal one and should embrace the Gentiles. To prove that God had regarded the heathen nations with favor. He quoted precedents in the lives of EHjah and Ehsha. There had been many widows in Israel, yet Elijah had been sent only to a foreigner, the vndow at Zarephath. There had been many lepers in Israel, yet Elisha had cured only Naaman who was a Syrian. God thereby showed that His salvation should come to the Gentiles 55 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. as well as His chosen race. This was too much. The grumbUngs grew into open and frequent interruptions, and finally all present rose to their feet, overcome with rage, and seized Him. What should they do with this presumptuous young fanatic whose ambition had crazed Him, who had been brought up amongst them and now aspired to be their ruler, and even claimed to be the promised Messiah? This then was the secret of His quiet ways! He had never mingled with the rest of them but kept much in solitude and meditation. This was the explanation of His sham humility. He thought Himself above them all. He would Uke them to ac- knowledge Him as a prophet, forsooth! He must die. There is the cliff yonder. Let us take Him hence and throw Him over! To the cHff! To the cliff! While they were hurrying Him along, Jesus probably thought of the second form of His temptation. He had been tempted to test His power of contravening the law of gravitation by throwing Himself from the pinnacle of the Temple, which would have been at the same time a startling way of attracting the attention of all Palestine. He had refused to yield to the suggestion which He recognized as coming from the Devil; and now God was going to give Him the opportunity He desired. When they reached the edge of the cliff therefore to cast Him over, instead of seeing Him fall a hfeless corpse on the rocks below, He seemed transformed into some hght and airy substance that could penetrate material ob- jects and go straight through them. In this manner He passed through the midst.^of them as though He were some impalpable and intangible Spirit, and a few 56 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. seconds later they saw Him pursuing His way down the hill and out of their reach. In contravening the law that drew Him to the center of gravity, He had also temporarily suspended the cohesion of the molecules that composed His body. Compelled to fly from His native place, Jesus wenl to the neighboring town of Cana^ where He probably expected to obtain shelter from the friends or relatives for whom He had wrought his first miracle. He may have foreseen His possible ejection from Nazareth and have arranged beforehand that His mother and brethren and disciples should meet Him in Cana to decide where they should go next. When he arrived, there came in great distress an ofiicer of Herod's Court, probably Chusa, the steward. His son was dying at Capernaum, five hours journey from Cana, and he begged that Jesus would come immediately to heal him. Jesus said, "Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no wise believe." Chusa's reply was a natural one. He did not wish to argue about belief. He merely cried, "Sir, come down ere my child die!" This showed the reality of his faith too touchingly to be resisted by the loving Saviour; but ere Jesus began to set forth, a message probably came to Him from the Spirit, a voice which he might now clearly distinguish from the thoughtsof His human nature: " The child lives. He has just undergone a change, and the fever has left him." It may be that the power of mind reading that He had already shown, arising from his abihty to place Himself in electrical affinity with the presiding mind of God in nature so extended itself that He was dimly conscious 57 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. of all things; and when His attention was concentrated upon any one scene of activity, even though it were many miles distant, the dim consciousness became vivid and clear and, in the spirit. He saw the scene in some such way as God sees it from the central sphere. Whether Jesus merely received a rapid message of in- ternal suggestion, or yielded to an impulse that He did not fully understand, or whether he was able to transport His mind to Capernaum and into the sick boy's cham- ber, or to cure Him by a telepathic discharge of nerve force. He was able to say to the nobleman, " Go thy way. Thy son liveth." When the officer set out to return homewards, he met his servants coming to tell him that the crisis had passed; and the time of the change coincided exactly with the moment of our Saviour's utterance. It was probably due to Chusa's gratitude and also, perhaps, to the proximity of Bethsaida and the residence of Peter and Andrew and the majority of Christ's followers, that He now made a stay at Caper- naum. A memorable Sabbath day's work here comes to our notice. He taught in the synagogue during the morning and healed a demoniac or epileptic. Leaving the syn- agogue. He went to Peter's house at Bethsaida and cured Simon's wife's mother of fever; and toward evening a multitude of sick folk were brought to Him, and He healed them of all manner of diseases. In each case we are told that He "rebuked" the evil spirit which caused the disease. Epilepsy in the time of our Lord was rightly ascribed to its true cause, the working of an unseen baneful >8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION spiritual influence, whereas now, in the days of scientific research, the minds of men have been turned from fundamental and primary, unseen forces by the continued observation of the material and the seen.^ Though the result has been fruitful of knowledge in the sphere of practical therapeutics and the adjustment^ of secondary and outward material phenomena, advanced thinkers are drawing nearer the spiritual point of view of the de- spised days of superstition. The mind is, the only permanent portion of man, not only from hfe to life but also from year to year. Since every_ part of our physical frame undergoes complete renewal, not every seven years or even every three years but every year, and since there is not any portion of our bone or muscle or membrane or any tissue whatsoever remaining in our composition now that was part of us two years ago, what in us is continuous? The power of recollection, the consciousness of identity? Yes; but we may not remember many things we have thesecret potentiality of recalhng, were that latent power to be drawn out by suitable circumstances; and our consciousness of identity from year to year is never as full as it might be, were a wider and deeper symphony to be played on the chords of our memory by the invisible musician of In- finity. Remembering always that spiritual forces are the only dynamical springs of action, that material phenomena are mechanical and secondary and obey the commands of the hidden spirit with the accuracy and regularity of automata, we trace all changes of animal tissue to the brain and thence to^^the invisible mover in the central sphere of Heaven. We can now clearly take 59 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. up the sequence of cause and effect at the point where materialistic medical science loses it. Anatomists point out to us the peculiar structure of the brain and spinal chord and show us the ramifications of the nervous system. Physiologists explain the manner in which the organs of the human frame fulfil their functions of digestion and nutrition and secretion when a due measure of vital force is transmitted to them through the nerves from the brain. Pathologists compare the broken parts of the intricate machine with similar ones in a sound state, and lay greater stress year by year upon the nervous system and the adjustment of nerve centres in the brain as the prime cause of irregularity in the subordinate parts of the human structure. If the soul be the only permanent portion of our composition, and the body but a cluster of atoms that it has the power to draw to itself out of its material environments, and hold around itself, is it not reasonable to beUeve that every disorganization of any portion of that cluster can only be permitted by a voluntary relaxation of the soul or mind itself ? Suppose that a piece of steel is driven with force into my arm. There is a relaxation of the coherence of the molecules of carbon, oxygen, nitro- gen, and hydrogen, or other constituents of flesh, suf- ficient to enable the steel to enter the same. As soon as the foreign substance is withdrawn, a process of integra- tion, begins. Leucocytes cling to the sides of the veins, pass through the walls thereof into the disturbed tissues, and begin to build up again and unite the torn parts. We ask the scientists for an explanation of these facts. They can describe the material circumstances; but when 60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. we press them for the uhimate principle that underlies the process they are powerless. They say, "Nature works the cure". It is the healing of a wound by virtue of certain "natural laws" that they are too apt to consider not at all mysterious because they have tabu- lated and labelled them. They are disposed to think that they do not require to seek the primary cause. If we beUeve that there are mthin us two antagonistic beings, God, who unites us and preserves our bodies in their coherence, and Satan, who is endeavoring to destroy our integration, we shall be able to understand why "Nature works the cure". That portion of God which I call my soul, since it began to particularize itself as me, has kept about it a certain number of atoms making up my body. That portion of the Devil which is incarnated in me has always been trying to kill me by separating those atoms. He tries to starve me, but God causes food to be taken into my body and thereby builds up again the parts which Satan has destroyed. He tries to poison, bum, cut, tear, or otherwise injure me through the over-indulgence of my appetites or the disobedience of the voice of God direc^ng all my actions to the preservation of my unity. All life-giving and hfe-sustaining motions are the direct work of my God- assisted soul. All sinful and deadly energies within me that tend to cause my disintegration are the work of God's opposite. Sickness, pain, anger, malice, laziness, and rebellion are caused by the Evil Spirit. When God has accomplished the purpose that He had in particular- izing Himself in my personahty. He will allow Satan a temporary triumph, and old age, illness, or accident 6i THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. will be permitted to bring my material unity to an end. We believe, however, that death, or the temporary triumph of the Disintegrator, is only permitted for the purpose of being overruled to the production of a higher unity. Epilepsy is one of the peculiar nervous affections in which the agency of the external spiritual Energy is most clearly demonstrated. It is, in most cases, hereditary, and is acknowledged by physicians to be frequently the result of consanguine marriages, or other forms of imprudent sexual relationship. It is obviously one of the numerous penalties attached to sin, though the transgression may have been committed by a remote ancestor, or by the person himself during a former existence on this earth or on the moon or some other planet or astral sphere. Viewed from a material- istic standpoint, v^^e discover the aura or premonitory sensations, the sudden fall, the foaming and convulsions and the succeeding coma; and when we look for causes, we find, perhaps, an undue irritation or excitement of the nerve centres of the posterior portions of the brain, nothing beyond this, nothing to account for or explain the origin of the abnormal nerve-storm or disturbance. We must supply the primary cause from the region of the designing and spiritual motive energy that underlies all disintegrating evils and that, with its opposing good force, uses our brains as a mechanical battle-field. Accordingly we may state the question thus ; All illness is the direct or indirect effect of demoniacal possession, but epilepsy is that form of it in which the cause is most apparent to the pubHc mind. We would, d priori, expect 62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. therefore that, if our theory of the growth of the God- power in the man Jesus be correct, we should find Him exercising that unifying and life-presemng force to restore epileptics as setting forth to the common people the mercy and power of God, and we should expect Him to do so by publicly rebuking the Devil-power as we are told He did. If the skeptical ask how Jesus wrought the cure, we reply that it would be presump- tuous in us to speak dogmatically or positively in regard thereto; but we may with reverence point out several diflferent theories arising from this hypothesis of the triumph of unity, or condensation, any one of which is quite possible. (i) Suppose the evil to have been the result of a cerebral lesion. We have seen that Jesus appeared to have the power of transmuting substances by the alteration of the affinities of their atoms. The breaking of tissue is but a relaxation of either chemical affinity or molecular cohesion or both. If Jesus had attained to sufficient knowledge of God's method of governing all things by regulating the affinities of their atoms, it would be an easy matter for Him to alter the polarity of the molecules disintegrated, and to cause thereby an immediate healing of the lesion and the consequent cure of the epilepsy. (2) If the evil were caused by the hypersensitiveness of some portion of the nervous organism, so that the undue excitation of the affected part caused an excessive discharge of nerve- energy, the problem of curing the epilepsy is merely the difficulty of removing the ab- normal sensitiveness of the part. If Jesus knew that 63 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. all nerve-force was but the material manifestation of the spiritual force that unites, He would soon learn all the details of the application of that spiritual force to animal mechanism, and especially to the construction of nerve tissue. It would in fact be as clear to Him as all other himian problems are to us, when they are explained and understood. Diseases are mysterious to us because we know so little about them. Their mystery, and the difiBcul- ties that obscure them, will vanish as God reveals, through scientific or other channels of illumination, the methods by which His primary and spiritual forces work. We be- lieve that those secrets that God will reveal to us gradu- ally by His Holy Spirit woiking through poets, physi- cians, inventors, thinkers, and prophets, He revealed, for his own wise purposes, immediately and directly to His only begotten Son Jesus. To cure the sensitiveness of a certain part of the nervous organism might, perhaps, only require the removal, by an adjustment of polarity, of a few-misplaced molecules in the Uning of a nerve. (3) If the cause of epilepsy be not some morbid con- dition of nerve tissue or brain matter, but an excess of positive over negative electric discharge, or a super- abundance of negative over positive, using these terms in the sense which is at present unsatisfactorily attached to them, how simple would be the cure in the hands of one who could supplement the defective force from His own body ! One can communicate from his fingers an electric spark of sufficient power to fire a gas jet, by brushing his feet upon a hea\'y carpet. With what facility then could He, who understood the inner working of the spirit-force, through its electric material mani- 64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. festation, add to, or detract from tlie amount of force or energy in the debilitated or overcharged brain! We do not presume to set forth any one of these methods as that adopted by the Divine Gahlean. It is only intended to indicate how many simple explanations could be given of His cures upon this theory of the special revelation of Unity or Condensation. To Him as the only begotten Son of God all cures lay within the range of what we call natural law, not by the contra- vention or anniliilation of those imiformities that we see everywhere in God's working, but in harmonious accordance with these laws, and by means of an extra- ordinary knowledge of the conscious vitality that under- lies them. In the instance of Simon's ■wife's mother we can as readily see the possibility of a natural cure, as in the case of epilepsy. Physicians are tracing the prime cause of many fevers to a disturbance of equiUbrium in the heat- regulating centres of the brain. The God-power, who adjusts the centrifugal and centripetal forces of the planets to such perfection of accuracy that their unity in a system is preserved, has arranged that the amount of nerv^e-force sent from the brain to the various parts of my physical organism by the vaso-motor system shall be so exactly measured and distributed that tliere shall be the proper tem- perature throughout me to maintain the various functions in the unity of a s}-stem which I call my body. The Devil-power wishes to disturb the adjustment and thereby to make me too hot. When the Devil tries to kill me with fever, he causes a rapid flow of energy to 65 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. the muscles of my heart. The latter responds by pump- ing blood too rapidly through the lungs, where it ab- sorbs too much oxygen, and I am consequently burned. The inhibitory power which checks the excessive oxy- genation of my system allows itself to be defeated for the time. There may be cases where the fever owes its existence to the introduction of a foreign element or to some form of germ virus, and then the fever symptoms may be looked upon as the effort of the God-power to expel the enemy, and so preserve my unity. In either case it is manifest that the history of the fever is the story of a conflict between two forces outside the individual, and that their contact with him is mediately through the brain. The common notion is that disease germs are living organisms which come into contact with dead tissue, enter it, make it their home, and so cause aU the evil. We regard everything as having Ufe. There is for us no such thing as dead matter or tissue that is not ahve. Minute atoms, which are filled with God and Satan, make all things what they are by their attractive- ness or repulsiveness towards other atoms. All animal tissues are Uving.*?' When the God-power desires that I shall be healthy and strong. He arranges the atoms of my body so that they have no afl&nity for what are called disease germs. If He wishes to give Satan a temporary triumph over my unity for some wise purpose. He allows Himself a relaxation of His inhibitory nerve-force, and there results throughout my system a complete change in the afiOnities of its molecules whereby they form some kind of union with certain particles external to myself that medical men call bacteria. Whether the^ fever 66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. be idiopathic and spontaneously originating from a dis- turbance of cerebral adjustment, or, on the other hand, symptomatic and arising as a secondary effect of some local injury of the body, we must regard its true cause as a change in the chemical or electrical aflanity of atoms, which change is brought about by the will of a personal and immanent God transmitted from the seat of His transcendent personality in Heaven to the remote and unimportant fragment of Himself known to us as the fever patient. If we believe that Jesus possessed, even to a shght extent, this mighty power of entering into God's inner working, will it not be credible that the touch of His hand cooled at once the parched frame, that the soft tones of His voice banished the mutterings of delirium ? So with steady pulse, thrilling with new vitaUty, Peter's wife's mother rose from her bed completely cured. We have presented to us now the' picture of the bright proclamation of His mission on the shores of the GaUlean Lake. We see Him preaching to the multi- tudes who thronged to hear the new prophet, for the fame of His cures had spread even to the remote parts of Syria, and blessings, soon forgotten, were doubtless showered upon Him by the inhabitants of the various towns of Galilee to which He went from time to time, making Capernaum or Bethsaida His headquarters. He obtained shelter at the house of His enthusiastic follower Simon Of the wonders which he wrought in Chorazin and Bethsaida He afterwards Himself spoke using words of stem denunciation upon the inhabitants, who had not repented, whereas the people of Sodom and 67 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. Gomorrah would have done so, had such evidences of God's power been shown to them. There is a^so here the incident of the extraordinary draught of fishes, which requires for its explanation only the superior insight of one that could detect the presence of a school by natural signs unobserved by others or of one that could at least see God's instincts moving these tiny creatures in search of food, and attract them through those insHncts to the neighborhood of the boats of the weary discipJes. It is probable that Matthew was called at or about this time. From its importance £ls a commercia' center we may fair'y infer that there would be in Capernaum one or more places for the col'ec*-ion of taxes. Matthew had probably heard some of the discourses of Our Saviour, or had seen His remarkable cures, or had been won by His great compassion for the poor and suffering. It may be that Jesus had marked the intelli- gence of the tax-gatherer's mien, or the attentiveness with which he listened. Our Lord certainly had the highest powers of character-reading, and the command "follow me" was enough to induce Matthew to leave a lucrative calHng without a moment's hesitation to follow his new Master. 68 CHAPTER IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS SET FORTH IN THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST. After calling His apostles and teaching them from day to day, and healing the multitudes that came to Him from all parts of Galilee and from Decapolis and Judea and from beyond Jordan, He deUvered to them the precepts of His unifying and condensing method on one of the peaks of a neighboring mountain. This unique discourse contained a statement of the blessedness of all things which make for unity. The object of all law is the preservation of the coherence either of the individual or of the race. Humihty or "poorness of spirit", mourning or Godly sorrow, meek- ness, hunger after righteousness, mercy, pureness of heart, peacemaking, endurance of persecution and revihng for the sake of righteousness, all these are qualities which would preserve the individual and the race in perfect unity, were they universal . The opposites of these are disintegrating energies, which destroy the unity of men's bodies and keep man from man and nation from nation. These are pride, revelUng, bold- ness, indifference to right, harshness, impurity, in- stigation of strife, retaliation of injuries. Therefore Our Lord declared blessings upon the poor in spirit, the meek, and those who followed the things that pro- mote and preserve unity. 69 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. Then the question suggested itself, What will be the relationship of these new ideas to the venerable Law that was given on Mount Sinai, not with words of gentle love like these, but with the awful bigns of God's pres- ence in the natural phenomenon of thunder and light- ning ? Anticipating perhaps this thought in the minds of His hearers, Jesus said, " Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, till Heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law, till all be fulfilled." The new "Kingdom of Heaven" that He had come to found should then be a continuation of the old covenant and a fulfilment thereof. Its supreme law should be Love; and in the application of that law, its members should have various degrees of perfection. He that was most loving, and holy, and the greatest in the King- dom of Heaven would naturally keep all the ordinances of the Law. The crowning distinction between the old dispensation and the new lay in the doctrine of non-resistance: "Ye have heard that it hath been said. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth . But I say unto you that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine 70 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. enemy. But I say untoyou, Love your enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefuUy use you and persecute you." There can be no misunderstanding such plain lan- guage, except by the wilful closing of the eyes to un- pleasant truth. Tolstoy and others are right in teach- ing that any religion which encourages war of na- tions or of individuals is not the rehgion of Jesus. We have no right to afl5rm that Christ did not mean us to take these words literally. He Hved up to them Him- self, and His Apostles and early followers did Ukewise. These principles, and these only, will promote unity, the goal to which the universe is being drawn. Everything in this world must be brought into oneness, and every planet or sphere in God's Creation must be united to our Httle earth in Heaven. The law given through Moses to men was external pressure preserving unity. Men were to be compelled by a power without them- selves to act in such a manner that they might co-exist as a social and national unit. The first four command- ments provide for the worship of the Supreme Power. The fifth secures the maintenance of family unity. Murder, adultery, theft, false witness, covetousness, which are forbidden by the remaining clauses of the Decalogue, are the most obvious disintegrating influ- ences that threaten social coherence. Love, the Gospel of the New Kingdom, should preserve unity by internal yearning for coherence. Men should be drawn by some- thing within themselves to act as the external power had before commanded, and should fulfil the Law, not be- 71 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. cause it was commanded but because they now desired and deliberately chose that path of duty which had become dear to them through a renewal of their nature. They thus from internal bias should choose the things which make for unity. The Law, therefore, is the pressure of men into unity from outside; the Gospel is the drawing of men into unity by the living centre. The latter will exceed the former many times over in co- hering power. While the former prohibited murder, the latter will gradually annihilate all anger and hate, which keep men apart and divide them, even though they be not carried to the length of totally disintegrating the unity of the individual by murder. The Law had forbidden adultery, which disintegrated the family, separating husband and wife and scattering their oS- spring. The Gospel forbids the secret thought of evil, the continuous life of mental impurity, which injures the nervous system and impairs the individual's bodily unity. The Law had provided that strict justice should be meted out to the wrongdoer, in order that men could live together in a community and be secure as to their lives and property; but Jesus taught that he that would be perfect as the Father in Heaven is perfect must be wilUng to sacrifice his life or property for the cause of unity; and that to those that would give themselves up to the "perfect law of love", their unity with the centre of the universe through His only begotten Son Jesus, should be a full and abundant reward; and, furthermore, that they should in time have, as an indirect consequence thereof, perfect oneness with their fellow-men and a consequent peace that ^2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. should pass the understanding of those not expe- riencing it. As the one law of the new kingdom should be more searching and effective than the many precepts of the old dispensation, so its followers should be distinguished from the scribes and pharisees by their secret and in- ward adherence to it. Their alms must not be given publicly, and their prayers should be offered in private rather than with the false assumption of outward, pious observances. He then gave them our "Lord's Prayer", which many men assert would have proved His Divinity to their minds, if He had never said or done anything beside. It is an epitome of the Gospel of Unity or Condensation. Addressing God as our Father we incidentally afhrm His personality, creatorship, and love for us. We locate the seat of His consciousness in the central sphere of the universe, when we add "which art in Heaven". In order that men may be united in love to Him they must reverence His name. We pray for the final coming of His completed Kingdom, for the day when all men shall be united in perfect brother- hood, and when all nations shall be federated, and God's will shall be done on the earth as it is now done on the central sphere. " Give us this day our daily bread" is intended to teach man that in the maintenance of his bodily unity by food he is dependent upon his oneness with God, but that he can rely upon that Heavenly unity to supply him with the means of preserving his material integrity, from day to day, and that he should not look beyond that, lest in his an.xiety to care for his earthly unity he might disturb his unity 73 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. with God. We askTthat our trespasses may be forgiven, or, that oun' departures from oneness with God's will may be overlooked, and that we may be admitted back into God's unity, urging at the same time the fact that we are willing to be united in brotherly love with all that may have departed from loving unity with us. We ask in conclusion that God will not leave us in circumstances which threaten our bodily and spiritual integrity, and that He will deliver us from the Disintegrator. Continuing His discourse in language that has never been surpassed in loftiness and beauty, He warned them against ceremonious fasting in public, carefulness for the things of this world, hasty judgment of others, neglect or distrust of prayer, and false prophets, who should come with an exterior of piety, but whose fruits should show them to be inwardly vile and destructive. Lastly, He urged them to carry out the principles of the Gospel of Unity in their lives. If they were doers of His word, they should be Hke a man who builded a house on a solid foundation; and when disintegrating floods came, they could not break the unity of the structure. But if those that heard departed from and ceased to carry out these principles to action, they were hke a man who built on sand; and when the rain came and the winds blew, the building was broken with a great fall. After He descended from the mountain, there met Him a leper crying, "Lord, if thou wUt, thou canst make me clean." Leprosy was a recognized type of sin. It was a visible disintegrator of the skin and bones, a loathsome gradual separation of cohering atoms 74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. of^the body. *;;_ItjWas^transferable'by contagion.§|When we think how minute a germ inoculated into one's sys- tem will produce in time such disastrous results, we can easily imagine that, through the inoculation of the op- posite principle by contact, a unifying and building- up process might be begun that would in time cure the leprosy. We can further beheve that, if Jesus im- derstood Satan's disintegrating principle in all its work- ings and was, to some extent, master of the cohering force of God's working, He could by His touch not only communicate one germ of unifying power that would require time to propagate itself and effect a cure, but also at once impart as many germs or degrees of the uniting force as would be necessary to vitalize and purify every atom of the man's diseased frame instantaneously. Our Lord's touch of the leper was a breach of the Jewish Law, but it was a vindication of the New Gospel of Unity. The object of the law was to preserve the unity of the State and the material unity of the individual. Yet in the case of leprosy the Law was powerless to check disintegration. Its hygienic reg- ulations only aimed at preventing the spread of the dis- ease. Here was a case where contact would not lead to disintegration but to unity. Hence Jesus broke the Law, because He superseded its working by a more effective power. He took pains however to show His regard for the Levitical usage, by ordering the man^to go to the priest and make the accustomed offering^and secure his guarantee of cleanness.: From Capernaum Jesus went to Nain {[.His res- toration of the widow's son was the greats t exercise 75 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. ot His new powers He had yet attempted. Wonder- ful as it seems that a man should have power to bring back breath to the lungs, circulation to the coagulated blood, and vitality to the lifeless body, we have seen that His previous miracles clearly prophesied this, the great- est of them all. We have observed that, upon our hy- pothesis of condensation or unity all hfe is a continuous inhalation towards the centre of the universe; that no other rational explanation of it can be given than the in- dweUing of the World-Spirit throughout His creation; that life is His breath of cohering love, known to us as chemical affinity, molecular cohesion, and gravitation in its lower aspects, and as beauty, goodness, and truth in its higher. By love Jesus rescued the son of the widow of Nain from incipient disintegration, even as by love He is now raising the whole race from death unto Ufe, from diversity into unity, from antagonisms of race, color, sex, creed, and prejudice to the unity of a single man — Himself. It would require but a few germs of the cohering force to repair the injured machinery of the young man's body, and to set to work again the streams of living animals that collec- tively we call blood, thinking its teeming millons are one substance, because our eyes are too clumsy to per- ceive their differences and their tiny operations. The blood is the whole body. Some of the Uttle animals group themselves together, form a society of their own, elect their rulers, arrange the laws and constitution of their active commonwealth, and we call them bone. Other little towns and cities we call nerve and mus- cle, skin and hair. The real cause of all these won- 76 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. derful proceedings, the presence of the Omnipotent God, is ignored. The mystery is explained by one word, "secretion"! The wise men that explain every- thing by science are apparently quite satisfied with themselves when they declare that the various parts of the body secrete their elements from the blood. Why, we ask, do they so secrete ? Why do the atoms unite together in a certain way to form nerve, and in a dif- ferent way to form flesh ? They cannot answer. They say sometliing about the "laws of nature", and dismiss the subject to the realms of metaphysics, or theology, or poetry. As our object is not to give a complete exposition of the life of Jesus, but merely to apply to its main features our hypothesis of the triumph of unity or condensation as an explanatory and corroborative theory, we may here consider the other two instances in which He exer- cised His supreme power of restoring the dead to life. The case of Jairus's daughter resembles that which we have just been considering, inasmuch as the body was in each case probably still in a state of unity. It is not likely that mortification had set in. When death occurs from the loss of respiration, or the stoppage of the heart, either gradually or suddenly, without any breaking of the machinery of the physical system, we would imagine the possibility of resurrection to be the easiest of accompUshment. It would involve the mere stimulation of the respiratory centres or of the centres which control the nerves giving action to the muscles of the heart, and then, to prevent relapse, the removal of the cause of the stoppage of vitality. In a few seconds 77 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. the impoverished blood might be replenished by lively corpuscular inhabitants, and the work of renewing and building up the tissues of the whole body actively begun. Many incline to the opinion, from the description given of the raising of Jairus's daughter, that the damsel was only in a trance, that Jesus referred to this when He told them that the girl was not dead but sleeping. It is not necessary, however, to accept His words literally, especially when we are told that the onlookers knew that she was dead. We are not informed in either case as to the cause of death. The restoration of Lazarus was doubtless a more compUcated process, as mortification had already set in. As soon as the integrity of the system is loosened by what we caU death, the microscopic inhabitants of the little bodily universe begin to look about preparatory to migrating. They separate in different directions, each one following some law of attraction in accordance with its own nature and of its own choice. Most of them go away in such tiny and loose forms that we cannot see them, and, though we give the name of some gas to the collective exodus, we are only veiL'ng our ignorance of their real proceedings, and purposes, and motives, by clumsily giving them a title. Yet to one who has been let into the secret of these litde microbes and germs, and of their motives and afi&nities, how easy would it be to check mortification! The little animals must be made to stay at home. There is a trifling step from repulsion to attraction. It merely involves a change of polarity. To one admitted by the 78 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. Ruler of aU, who governs the universe from Heaven by this one law of polarity, into the consciousness of His identity with that Ruler's own Godhead and methods, how easy would it be to check the disintegration of the body, to bid its inhabitants once more take up their places in the system, and, having the brain and bodily machinery again in running order, to call back the de- parted spirit to take possession in the words, "Lazarus come forth!" There are two important incidents in our Lord's life that we must not pass over without comment. These are the feeding of the multitudes and the transfiguration. In regard to the first of these, we need only point out the connection between it and Christ's temptation to change stones into bread and the subsequent proof of His ability to transmute substances in the changing of water into vnne. The fact that Jesus was able to feed five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes, and that the fragments left over were more than the original amount of food, should, in view of our d priori ex- pectation from what had gone before, satisfy us that Jesus actually transformed the elements about Him directly into food, as, we anticipate, all men will in the distant future be able to do. Of the Transfiguration we wiU speak further in the Chapter on the "Place of Departed Spirits." The time was now drawing nigh for the final proclama- tion of the Kingdom of Peace. Since the first visit to Jerusalem, Jesus had traversed Gahlee, Judaea, Ituraea, and Pcraea, preaching the good news of unity with God, restoring the unity of diseased bodies, and performing other works of mercy. 79 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. He had chosen and trained twelve Apostles, to whom He would entrust the proclamation of His religion and the organization of His Church. He had called together seventy followers and sent them out, by twos, to an- nounce the estabhshment of the new era and to awaken universal interest and arouse expectation. The Pass- over was again drawing nigh; and now the whole atten- tion of Palestine was centred on Him, and awaiting the assumption of His rule. After a journey through Peraea, He arrived at Bethany, on the East side of the Mount of Ohves, and took up his residence at the house of Martha and Mary where He made His home for the few remaining days of His life on earth. His arrival occurred on the evening of Friday, the eighth day of Nisan, March 31st, A. D. 30. It is likely that many of the pilgrims coming through Peraea, on their way to the Passover Feast at Jerusalem, had attached themselves to His train, and some of these would probably erect booths and tents on the West slope of the Mount of Olives to wait for His trium- phant entry into the city. Others would, doubtless, go forward into Jerusalem, where they might have had friends with whom they could lodge during the Passover Week or obtain shelter at the inns and hostelries ; and these would probably carry on the word that Jesus of Nazareth had come down through Peraea, and had made a halt outside the city, at Bethany. The following day, being Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, was spent in quiet retirement with His friends and, in the evening, some of His followers were invited to "^nter the house and partake of supper. Lazarus, 80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. being himself a living attestation of the Divine powers of the Galilean, would be looked upon with great in- terest by the assembling pilgrims, and, no doubt, his presence converted many of the .skeptical, and made them join the train. The fact that Matthew and Mark speak of this feast as having taken place at the house of Simon the Leper may not be difficult to understand. Simon may have been the father of Mary and Martha and Lazarus, a man fairly well known, who had either died of leprosy, or had been removed from home on account of it, so that the house would be known as that of " Simon the Leper", though it was now occupied only by his children. During the feast occurred the singular act of annoint- ing which was so fitting at this juncture. On the mor- row Jesus was to proceed into the city and proclaim Himself the Messiah, a prophet, priest, and king. These three offices were included in His title of "The Christ", the annointed one. It was the annointingof a prophet, who should foretell to men their destiny, and at the same time, provide the way to accomplish it, namely, the unity of all men on the earth by means of their growing communion with the one God and Father of all. It was the annointing of mankind's great High Priest, who should soon offer up Himself as an "at-one- ment", a sacrifice, Holy, and undefiled, and acceptable to God, in full payment for the sins of the whole world, and thereby should fulfil all the symbols and types given to men through the Mosaic dispensation, and who should enter into the veil on Calvary, and sit down on the right hand of God, the Father, evermore to intercede for us. 8i THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. It was the annointing of the King of the Jews, their Deliverer, for whose advent they had been hoping with an expectation which had deepened in its intensity since their return from exile, and which reached its climax precisely at the time of this particular Passover. We see, from the anxiety of the chief priests, the popular- ity that was beginning to surround our Lord. There was present at the feast one whose sordid nature was to be the Devil's instrument in the coming disintegration. Judas, who carried the money bags, cried out at the sight of so generous a gift outpoured upon the Master. Then, to excuse himself, he im- mediately began to assume an excessive regard for the poor. Our Lord, reading the working of his mind, re- buked him, and commended Mary for what she had done: "Why trouble ye the woman? Let her alone. She hath wrought a good work upon me, in that she did it for my burying. For ye have the poor always with you but me ye have not always." These words are of the utmost importance here, because they show that Jesus, while about to make His triumphal entry on the morrow, was perfectly aware of the result. He knew that death awaited Him. Any merely earthly reformer would not have so discouraged his followers, at such a critical moment, even if he foresaw an unfavorable and fatal reception. It is the occurrence of ingenuous re- marks Kke this, when viewed with the whole tenor of His life, which renders it so highly improbable that He could have been merely a reformer that designed to set up an earthly kingdom and, having failed, was crucified for high treason. He had, on several occasions, fore- 82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. told His death, and had, doubtless, known perfectly how He would be treated, ever since He had read the description of His end given by Isaiah in his Fifty- third Chapter. Either through pique at this rebuke, or because it had been in his mind for some time, Judas that night stole out on his base purpose of betrayal. Having made his way to Jerusalem and obtained access to the house of Caiaphas, he found willing purchasers for his treachery. The unholy compact was soon completed. His Lord was sold for thirty pieces of silver, and the wretched incarnation of the Evil Spirit made his way back through the darkness, out over the Mount of Olives, to the loving companions who still trusted him. We can imagine the stir and enthusiasm about Bethany early on the following morning. There would be intense excitement, especially amongst those who most firmly believed Jesus to be the Messiah and who looked for the immediate inauguration of that wonder- ful period about which the wildest fancies existed. Those who had been associated with Our Lord in His triumphant march through the country wherein He proclaimed Himself the Messiah, and attested His claim by the very acts which the people expected to take place in the New Dispensation, such as heahng the lame and bHnd and leprous, would confidently look for the other wonderful proceedings that the prophets had foretold and the Rabbis exaggerated. They would look towards the top of the Mount of Olives and expect to see the peaks of Carmel, Tabor, and Sinai closing in on them with clouds from the North and West. They would be 83 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. all impatient to rush into the city, expecting its houses to rise by some kind of fairy magic to the height of three miles. We can scarcely place ourselves in a frame of mind to understand their feelings. Even the dullest and most skeptical would yield to the mesmeric attrac- tion of accumulated excitement. We would expect that as the procession began towards the city, the people, having become almost mad with frenzy, would strip off their garments and throw them down for Him to walk upon; and others would tear off branches from the trees and strew them in the path of the conqueror, shouting the words of the familiar Messianic psalm, "Hosanna to the Son of David ! Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the Highest!" They were soon joined by others who came out from the city to meet the procession, and "those who went before" joined the songs of those "who followed after". In order to fulfil the prophecies of Zachariah and Isaiah, " Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass and a colt the foal of an ass " Jesus sent forward two of His disciples to Bethphage, with instructions to bring Him such an animal and her foal which He had caused to be placed in waiting, or that, by His Divine power of omniscience, He had discerned to be there. Thus, not only was a peculiar prophecy fulfilled, but the world was given an everlasting picture of an ideal triumph. It was not the proud steed, but the lowly beast of burden, the object, like Himself and His Church, of contempt, ridicule, or pity, which should bear the conqueror. Already we have reached the stage when the noblest minds of all 84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. races honor the humble procession of the Prince of Peace, and despise, as remains of a disappearing bar- barism, the gorgeous pageantry of conquering brute force. It may be asked, however, why Jesus, who knew that He would not inaugurate the earthly Kingdom which His followers expected, did not tell them so. We reply that on many occasions He did, but they could not understand Him. The minds of the Jews were so moulded by their surroundings, and previous history, that they could form no other conception of the Messiah than that of an earthly conqueror whose Kingdom should be one of national majesty, with Palestine as its centre. He had tried to teach them that the Kingdom of God was internal and spiritual. It was something different from what they expected. It would work silently like leaven, until, by contact, it influenced the whole world. Even the most faithful amongst them failed to grasp His meaning. We see this in the fooUsh, but pardonable anxiety of the mother of Zebedee's children, that her boys, who had been granted the most intimate personal association with the Master, should sit, the one on His right hand, the other on His left, when He came into His Kingdom. To us , who look back over the centuries, the skein of History is becoming fairly well unravelled. We can now infer, with a tolerable degree of probability, the future course, in out- hne at least, of mankind's development. We can see the drift of all things towards unity, the gradual con- vergence, under the Holy Spirit, of all nations towards a universal federation, and the reign of absolute brother- hood, through Christ, upon this earth. We can further 85 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. see ahead the inevitable rebuilding of Jerusalem, when the minds of all men develop in the consciousness of their unity with Jesus, which is involved in the conception of the Church as His body, and when the hearts of all men go out in love to Palestine the abode of the individual in- carnation of the World-Spirit and the coming centre of the united Race-Personality. The ParUament of the federated nations of the world, it would appear, must be at Jerusalem. It is claimed by many that the Jewish people are particularly adapted to be interna- tional arbitrators. Looking back over the working of the Holy Spirit, which some men inadequately call a "stream of tendency," we can understand the exact place of the first coming of Christ. We can also imagine that the prophecies, which the people then expected to come to pass immediately, will, in most respects, be ful- filled at the second Advent, which will be the climax of our historical development. The poor Jews, however, in the Saviour's time, could only take the view which they did. Our higher and broader vision was then en- tirely beyond them; and Jesus did not attempt to force men to see what by their nature and circumstances they could not see. Hence He gave them teachings in parables and generahties, so that succeeding generations would understand them in the hght of what followed, and would know that He had held the whole plan clearly in His mind all the while. As the procession reached the point where the road sweeps around the Mountain, and Jerusalem lay before them, the Saviour became overpowered by emotion. He was not only a real man but a real Hebrew. He S6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. loved His race and the city of His people. He doubtless, recalled the visits paid in His childhood to the Temple and the many subsequent journeys to the Feasts in the Holy City. Thoughts of His fond pride, His youthful patriotism, thronged upon Him. The intense yearning of His heart for sympathy, the outflowing of His Divine love for His selfish and ignorant brothers moved Him with mingled longing and compassion. Above all, the proud majesty of the magnificent city, then the wonder of men, soon to be humbled to the very dust by the Romans, — the awful horrors of the siege of Titus rush- ing before His prophetic vision, — scenes frightful enough to make the reader shudder after nineteen centuries — a doomed Jerusalem driven on by the Devil to work out her own destruction, through the hard-hearted stupidity with which the Disintegrator filled her people, — these and many other thoughts rushed through His mind and shook His frame with waves of bitterest emotion. None but a brutal heart can watch this picture unmoved. The infinite pathos of His cry has no parallel in history : " Oh ! Jerusalem ! Jerusalem ! Thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!" Nothing so completely refutes the "disappointed poht- ical reformer" theory as this unexpected outburst. If Jesus had been a scheming pretender, who expected to set up a government at Jerusalem, or even a pure-minded, but self-deceived, enthusiast, who dreamed of establish- ing a reign of spiritual grandeur, this was the moment 87 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. at which it would have been impossible to refrain from a cry of triumph. Surrounded as He was by the "Hosannas" of the acclaiming multitude, amidst the zeal and wild joy of His companions, the sudden sight of Jerusalem with all her embattled towers and ghttering domes, could not have failed to cause a thrill of pride and gratified ambition in any human political idealist. The mournful tenderness of His exclamation accords with the Divine foresight of His next words, in which He unmistakably portrays the horrors of the Roman siege: "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things that belong unto thy peace! — But now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground and thy children within thee, and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another, because thou kiiewest not the time of thy visitation." Some of the scribes and pharisees had now joined the throng that was pouring out from the city to meet the procession. They suffered a pang of jealousy at every "Hosanna" shouted by the crowd. Unable to bear it longer, they said to Jesus, "Master rebuke Thy disciples," but He, with thoughts, which are too deep for us, of the constitution of nature and the subcon- sciousness of those objects which appear to us to be in- animate, and of the spirit-powers that dwell unperceived in rocks and trees and earthly elements, declared that if His followers should be silent the very stones would cry out, 88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. When the cortege reached the city walls and entered through one of the gates into the thronged streets, there appears to have been a slight diminution of enthus- iasm. As they passed along, the bystanders enquiied with curiosity in regard to the cause of the commotion, and who this person was, riding upon an ass. The answer was, "This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth." But where were the wonderful transformations that were to have taken place? Why did not the houses suddenly enlarge till their tops reached the clouds? Why were there no earthquakes, and no mountains flying through the air ? The zeal of the poor provincials became chilled in the presence of the crowds of curious onlookers. They began to feel that they might have been mistaken. As they drew towards the Temple the procession became thinner. No person stained with the dust of travel could approach the sacred Mount Moriah without cleansing and purifying himself. Whether through this cause, or on account of their lack of courage, or distrust, or, it may be, through a sense of awe, the followers of Jesus remained at a distance, or dispersed; and He entered the Temple alone. As upon the occasion of His former visit, none could withstand the strange power of His divine presence. He stood before the pompous priests and dignified Pharisees, unarmed save by a handful of rushes, alone amidst a multitude of worshippers, vendors, and at- tendants. A sudden quiet fell upon the place and the babel of noises became hushed . Again the calm voice of denunciation was heard falling upon them viith a stem power that compelled obedience. The avaricious 89 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. hordes fled from their oxen and their money tables un- willing to face His glance. Then crowds began to flock around Him with approval. Sick persons were brought to Him to be healed. Words of marvellous wisdom and sweetness came from Him. Doctrines of subHme grandeur charmed and awed the attentive Usteners. Once more the floodgates of en- thusiasm were loosed, and loud "Hosannas" were shouted, and taken up even by the children, perhaps by the trained boy choirs of the Temple. This exas- perated the chief priests and pharisees beyond measure, but they could do nothing to check the applause. Jesus added to their rage by quoting against them the second verse of the eighth psalm: "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise." There were present strangers from all parts^of the world. Among these were some Greeks who desired to speak with Jesus. They came to PhiUp'andthrough him sought an interview. Philip consulted with Andrew, and together they approached the Master and informed Him of the wish of the foreigners. The answer of our Saviour agrees with the tradition regarding this mes- sage. According to stories, that have their founda- tion only outside the canon, they were emissaries from King Abgarus of Edessa offering Jesus an asylum in his country, stating that this monarch had heard of our Lord's miracles, and that His Ufe was threatened by the Jews. Whether there is truth in all the details of the story we know not, but that they bore an offer of assistance and escape from His threatened fate we may fairly infer from our Lord's reply: "Verily, verily, I 90 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. say unto you, except a com of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit." Which might be interpreted in the language of our theory of unity or integration as follows: Verily, verily, I say unto you, in order that one grain of wheat may result in the uniting of many scattered particles of nitrogen and carbon, and|^other elements, into a hundred grains of wheat, it is necessary that the smaller unity of the single grain shall break up, through the work of the Disintegrator, into its elemental parts, i. e., shall be cast into the ground and die; so, in order that the individual incarnation of God in My person may bear fruit, and develop into the incarnation of God in the whole race, it is necessary that the Disintegrator should be allowed a temporary triumph over My in- dividual unity, or bodily life, and hence I must die; therefore you may tell Abgarus, or any other person who sees that My life is threatened and desires Me to flee from danger, that I must not say, "Father save Me from this hour," but rather, "Father glorify Thy name." And the sacred narrator tells us there was heard a voice from Heaven saying, "I have both glorified it and will glorify it again." The people who heard could not distinguish the words. Some said that it thundered, and others, having heard more distinctly, said "An angel spake to Him." So noble and winning were the words of the Divine Son of Man that even some of the chief priests beheved in Him, but most of them, calculating Sadduces or stupid Pharisees, bhnded by fear and dislike, only sought the more to compass His ruin. He was obliged to re- 91 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. tire quietly towards Bethany that night, possiblv sleep- ing in the open air, or under the shelter of a friendly grove, on the slopes of the Mount of Olives. 9? CflAPTER V. THE TEitPORARY TRIUMPH OF THE DISINTEGRATOR IN THE SUFFERINGS AND DEATH OF CHRIST. On His way to the Temple the following morning, Jesus, by causing the barren fig tree to wither, gave the world an illustration of the judgment that was to come upon the city before Him. Jerusalem had been barren, and should be cut down by the sword and dried up by the fire of war. Those who criticise this miracle as an ebullition of petty impatience fail to see it in its spiritual bearings. The Gospel narrators themselves, perhaps, did not realize fully our Saviour's meaning. It might have been that He was an hungred physically, but He was starving, inspirit, for recognition by His race and for the love of His fellow-men. He thirsted for their uplifting and righteousness. They had been God's vineyard, as He elsewhere taught them explicitly, and when He came to them looking for fruit. He found noth- ing but leaves. The withering of the tree was not child- ish resentment against an inanimate object, but a majestic act pregnant with historical and spiritual signifi- cance. It further served to teach His followers the mysterious power of faith. In explaining to them the potency by means of which He had been able to destroy the coherence of the tree as an organic unity. He placed on record the bold statement that, if they had even a small portion of that peculiar force, they could say to a 93 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. mountain, "Be thou renaoved and be thou cast into the sea," and it would straightway obey them. These words have given rise to much discussion, especially amongst earnest Christians. It is asked why no man has ever had such faith. Thousands of the followers of Christ possess a deep and strong beUef in God, in Jesus as divine, in the immanence of the Supreme Being throughout nature, and in His providential government of all things ; yet they are not only unable to move moun- tains, but they cannot lift more than a few hundred pounds without mechanical appUances. In order to get glimpses of our Lord's meaning we must understand two things: first, what this faith is; and, secondly, how we may come to have it. With regard to the first point, we must know that this kind of faith is not an attitude of the mind, either of acceptance or of rejection, towards any proposition, nor is it merely a general trust or reliance of the finite soul upon the Infinite God. It is a faculty of perception by which the individual is empowered to look beneath the material into the spiritual, to gaze into the unseen through the seen. It is the faculty of apprehending the real under the actual or phenomenal. It does not see nature in its duaUstic appearances of antagonisms, but dives straight down into the underlying oneness. We would define it as the "faculty of apprehending God as unity." God is the Absolutely One throughout the universe ; and our definition is merely a way of describing the faculty by which we apprehend Him. The modes by which the Divine One manifests Himself in nature are called, in scientific parlance, chemical aflSnity, mole- 94 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. cular cohesion, and gravitation. We do not say that God is gravitation, but that gravitation is always a manifestation of God. Faith may thus be considered as a faculty that enables us properly to perceive and understand gravitation as a spiritual force. Our Lord, accordingly, meant that, if we possessed the smallest fraction of the insight into the unseen which He had, we should know that what we call gravitation is merely a name that we have given to a umVersal law of Divine working. We should be able to see that the force which maintains a mountain in its place is the power of the uniting God. We should recognize, at the same time, our own partial identity with that God, and should be- come aware of our own control of nature, as being parts of Him Who governs it. The first power we should have when this faith had been given us would be the abihty to understand and control the law of gravitation. We could suspend it at wiU. To Uft a mountain may seem an immense task for a man; but it is only necessary to alter the polarities of the atoms that compose it, and the mass will lift itself. At present the molecules of earth are so influenced that they attract each other mutually; and the earth attracts the hill, as a body, to itself, and is, in proportion, attracted by it. Set the invisible currents agoing in the opposite direction, substitute electric energy for electric force, and the particles of the mountain will repel each other. Further, the im- mense mass itself will be repelled by the earth. If you wish it, the mountain will lift itself bodily from the earth and cast itself into the sea, in response to your wDl- power. 95 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. To understand our Lord's meaning we must, secondly, learn how we become possessed of this faith. It is ob- vious that Jesus Himself, and those immediately con- nected with Him, were the only ones that have had enough of it to work these wonders. Yet we are not to cease stri\dng after it, though wc cannot expect to possess it by our own efforts. We cannot hope to attain His degree of holiness and freedom from sin, yet we must set that before us as the ideal at which we aim. It comes to men as God chooses to give it. This kind of faith, i. e., power, is not of man but of God. It pleases our Ruler to work gradually. He gives to one man sufiBcient discernment into reality to enable him to play his part in the plan of development, that and no more. Moses, Mahomet, Luther, Plato, andHegel have had a moiety of this faith given them, but one not so large as a mustard seed. Only Christ and His Apostles had the full measure of faith. As we expand and grow in beauty, goodness, and truth, however, our power of re- ceiving this faculty increases. Through the work of the Holy Ghost in men's hearts, all who have been chosen of God to be saved in this era will be brought up into the full stature of Christ, to know and do as He thought and did. St. Paul had the clearest grasp of this idea because he possessed the most thorough conception of unity. He emphasizes the fact that faith is "of grace," i. e., it comes to man as a gift from God, and is not something which we can attain ourselves, though we must strive after it. It is neces- sary that we should place ourselves in an attitude towards Him that will facilitate our reception of it 96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. when He chooses to make us the honored vessels to con- tain such a treasure. The great mistake of the "faith cure" agitation, of the present day, lies in the ignoring of this important fact. The cure of all diseases by faith was accomplished by Jesus, and will become the property of all the elect some day. but it suits the pur- pose of God now to grant that power gradually. We cannot havf it by our own will, but only as God wills; and He appears to desire us lo walk by medicines and other material means for the present. At the close of the last day of our Lord's teaching in the Temple, He told His followers that after two days would come the Feast of the Passover, and then He should be betrayed to be crucified By a singular coincidence, at the very time when He was foretelling this on the top of the mountain, the Chief Priests and the scribes and elders, having met together at the house af Caiaphas, had decided not to take Him on the Feast Day, lest there should be an up- roar among the people. They did not understand the wonderful pre-establishment of harmony by which the Lamb of God should be slain by them for the sins of the whole world, on the very day when 200,000 lambs should be slain for the sins of the Jews of Palestine, types and their antitj^ie. Before the foundation of the world, when the whole plan of the universe, and of man's part in it, lay in the Divine Mind , it had been arranged that they should die simultaneously. Our Saviour knew His own nature and mission too well, and foresaw the future of the New Covenant in His Blood too clearly to be uncertain about the day of His crucifixion. Hence 97 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. a way opens up that determines the assembled priesrs and elders to take the step on the Feast Day after all. This was the further offer of the traitor Judas to betray Our Lord on the following Thursday evening. Christ spent Wednesday in retirement a1 Bethany, and on Thursday He sent some of His followers into the city to procure a room in which they were to eat their last Passover. That evening they made their way quietly into Jerusalem; and He assembled theTwelve to inaug- urate the mystery of the New Covenant, the Feast of the Body and Blood of the Lamb of God. As they reclined on their mats around the dish of food, He re- buked them for their worldly desire of precedence and the mutual jealousies that He perceived amongst them. He wished to destroy the germs of disintegrating pride that He saw threatening their unity. To show that He who is greatest in the New Kingdom must be the servant of all, He washed their feet, the work of the meanest slave. The philosophy of the sacrament which He thereupon instituted is in strict accordance with our legitimate as priori expectations. Its object was the estabhshment of a unifying process whereby men should be drawn into oneness with each other by their absorption of one body and blood, one spirit becoming gradually incorporated in the whole race, by which all individual souls should be integrated into one. Thew^hole Christian System is a revelation of unity. As the word "Atonement" signifies the unity between man and God accomplished by Christ's death, so the word "Communion" indicates the imity between all men, now being graduallybrought 98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. about by the working of the Holy Spirit, through the per- petuation of Christ's death, symbolically and sacrific- ially, in the consecration and consumption of bread and wine wherein He constantly reincarnates Himself for the purpose. The thought of the unity of all men in Him, and of Himself in them, was uppermost in the mind of Jesus. He had seen that God is the Absolute unity that underlies all diversities, from whom all things have come, and into whom they shall all ultimately become drawn . He had grown up to a reaUzation of His own identity with God, and knew that He and His Father were one. He understood that His mission was to unite all men to God and to each other, so that there should be, on the earth, one spirit in a multitude of united bodies, or, viewed as a federated race, one spirit in one body. He had estabUshed a visible symbol of this in the Sacra- ment of the Body and Blood, the most striking that could be conceived, for it represented that they actually ate His Body and drank His Blood, that He might be- come part of their body and they be part of His. He continued to illustrate the closeness of this connection by describing the relation of the branches to the vine. In order that they may have life, they must abide in the vine, as one organism. If they did not, the sap, which was the principle of unity, would not continue to in- vigorate the branches, and they should disintegrate and perish. Each branch, in other words, can only preserve its unity by remaining in the wider unity of the vine After having told them of the Comforter, Whom He would send to guide them into all truth, He said that in a little while they should not see Him, and again in a 99 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. little while they should see Him, because He was going to the Father. When He found that this mystified ihcm, He declared plainly that He had come forth from the Father and had come into the world, and, that now He would leave the world and go back to the Father. They said that they understood Him, and that they now were sure He knew all things, and believed that He had come forth from God. Jesus sadly reminded them that, though at this time they appeared enthusiastic, in a few hours they would dtscrt Him and leave Him alone; and yet not alone, because the Father was with Him. He told them to be of good cheer. In the world they should have tribulation, but he had overcome the world; and then He lifted up His eyes to Heaven and uttered the wonderful prayer that sets forth unity as the "raison d'etre" of all God's Plan, past, present and future, in the creation, redemption, and sanctifica- tion of humanity. "Father," He said, "the hour is come. Glorify Thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given Him power over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given Him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee. * * * Sanctify them through thy truth : thy word is truth. As thou hast sent Me into the world; even so have I also sent them into the world ; and for their sakes I consecrate Myself to My work that they also may be set apart for their mission, through the truth. Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word; thai they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in Me, and I in thee, that they also may he 100 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. one in us; that the world may believe tlial thou hast sent Me. And the glory which thou gavest Me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one; J in them, and thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent Me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved Me. Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am ; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given Me : for thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world. Oh righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent Me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them." Passing cut over the brook Kedron, they came to the Garden of Gf:thsemane. Of the mysterious agony, the most terrible example of suffering Imown to us, we may say httle. Our Lord, evidently, suffered more in the spir- itual conflict with His human nature, in that fight with the Powers cf Evil, alone in the shade of those trees, than He felt when the cruel nails pierced His hands and feet. Those that see in this the shrinking of weakness are met by the calm endurance of His subsequent tortures. It was not the fear of torment, or of death, that caused those awful throes. It was the struggle of the human element with the Divine. Every fibre of the man resented the cruelty, the sin, the burning injustice, the unparalleled barbarity of His coming fate. Was it easy to bear all this for such ungrateful, selfish men? For a righteous man one might perad venture dare to lOI THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. die, but for this hopelessly mean and barbarous race for those that were thirsting to shed the blood of Him that had endured so much only to save them from sin and its penalties and to elevate them to a higher life? We are apt to think that, because He led a sinless life, it was easy for Him to do so, or that He could not have sinned, if He so desired. This is not true. He could have done so; but He was so good that His will would not choose sin. He was a thorough man, and, as such, the ingratitude and sins of His fellow-men hurt Him as they hurt us. Every human instinct cried out against this self-surrender. He doubtless reflected upon the powers which He could command to destroy His enemies and protect Himself. We prefer to regard the scene of Christ's suffering in Gethsemane as the last struggle of Satan to overcome the Son of God. No wonder the agony was frightful. To have such power, and not only to refrain from using it, but meekly to under- go these scoffs, and scourgings! To die the death of a criminal ! Satan is almost as powerful as God ; and every vile passion of humanity — every ungrateful thought — every ignorant brutality — of mankind, was pressed into the Devil's service, to fight the pure spirit of the Divine One, through the human side of His nature. Never has earth witnessed such a conflict. To obey the Divine virithin Him, and to reject, to spurn, to crush the human, that was the struggle in the soUtude. When the tramp of an approaching mob made itself heard, and torches began to glimmer through the trees, Jesus, thoughtful for the safety of His sleeping foUoweia, stepped forward — that He might be the more quickly 1 02 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. recognized by Judas — and gave Himself up to His cap- tors, lest the beloved disciples should suffer violence. The power of His majestic presence is seen in the fact that He was obliged to declare His identity twice, before they recovered from the shock sufficiently to approach. When He had stipulated that His friends should be allowed to depart, and had healed the wound inflicted by the rashness of Peter, the cowardly horde began to reaUze that He really stood before them in meek sub- mission. As soon as they were sure that they had noth- ing to fear from Him, they seized Him and hurried to the house of Caiaphas, where the plot had been hatched. The disciples had forsaken Him and fled. A youth had followed, partially dressed, as if roused suddenly from sleep; but he was suspected, seized, and only escaped by leaving his garment in the hands of his captors. Peter, as we know, followed afar off and by his little part in the drama gave us a reaHstic corrobora- tion of the truth of the whole story. The naturalness of the scene, the encoimter with the maid who recog- nized him, the startled denial, the reiteration of his deception, the crowing of the cock in the early morning, and his sudden remorse, as the warning of His Master came to his mind, these would have been masterpieces of fiction, if they had not been true. How clearly they bring that far-away night before us! The lapse of nineteen centuries has only intensified our appreciation of every detail in it. We can see him rushing, in an agony of remorse, out into the darkness; with the loving look of pity, cast upon him by our Lord, alternately maddening and soothing his tempestuous soul. We 103 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. can see the Saviour of mankind, dragged from one court- yard of the Palace to another, hailed before Annas and Caiaphas and then before the whole Sanhedrim, left shivering in the guard-room, surrounded by the ignorant menials of the High Priest, and the jeering taunts of the brutal soldiers. We see His sacred face buffetted by cruel hands, and even spat upon. We see His guards inventing a coarse game to amuse themselves. They blindfold Him and strike Him with their hands, each one crying, as he bruises the gentle face, "Prophesy to us, thou Christ, who is he that smote thee?" We see the national crime of a mock trial, before a bitterly prejudiced tribunal, and the condemnation of an inno- cent person upon the false testimony of perjured wit- nesses. The Sanhedrim of the Jews cannot pronounce the death sentence; therefore charges must be brought before Pontius Pilate, the Roman Procurator of Judaea. He represents the empire that has given law to the world, that has settled the principles of just dealing between men and nations; surely we may expect justice at this tribunal! Alas, the position of Roman Governor, like many another office of earthly court favor, is not a bed of roses. What with the continuous rehgious dis- turbances amongst the fanatical Jews, their constant quarrels with the Roman soldiery, their turbulent up- risings from time to time as some insane reformer takes it into his head to pretend that he is their Messiah; what with the sharp reprimands that Pilate receives from Rome occasionally, as news of these riotous pro- ceedings reaches the capital of the Empire, he scarcely X04 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. feels the independence and freedom that are essential to the right administration of justice. He lives in a state of nervous apprehension lest some fresh event may in- crease his unpopularity with the Jews, and cause him to be recalled. It is pitiable to see the inward conflict between inclina- tion and duty. He tries in every way to soften the blood- thirsty priests. He declares that he finds no fault in Jesus. Hearing that the accused is from Galilee, he grasps at the chance of evading responsibility by sending Him to Herod. Failing in this he bethinks liim of the custom of releasing a prisoner at the feast; but they choose Barabbas. As a last resort he causes Christ to be scourged, thinking that this will satisfy them, and that, when they have seen Him suffer, they will be ready to let Him go, but the smell of blood only makes hounds fiercer; and when Pilate, showing Christ crowned with the bloody thorns, and standing weak and pale. His lacerated shoulders pleading for their pity, cries, "Behold the Man!" they only cry the louder, like Devil-possessed maniacs, as they were, " Crucify Him, Crucify Him! " Then, driven to his wit's end, Pilate commits the deed that has made his name the by-word of all men: for, by the symbolical act of washing his hands, he declares himself clear of the whole matter, and yet, at the same moment, delivers Jesus over to them to be crucified. He is a judge that pronounces the prisoner "not guilty" and then proceeds to sentence him for the crime, he has just declared, the prisoner did not commit. los THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. We see the^procession on its way to Calvary, the women who loved Him weeping, the steady march of the Roman soldiers, and the staggering steps of Jesus, bearing His heavy cross. We see Him sinking beneath the load, and the stout country man compelled to take it up ; and now we notice the thread-like stream of human beings wending its way outside the city walls to the Place of the Skull. Three crosses lie on the ground beside the sockets, that have been dug to hold them, ready to be uplifted with their burdens. Our Lord refuses the opiate, that He may suffer all the pain that human flesh and human nerves can cause in their disintegration. He lies upon the pieces of wood; the iron pierces His tender flesh; and we hear the thud of a heavy hammer — yet there is no moan. It is only when the cross is raised aloft with its hving crest, and thrown into the hole, and the entire weight of the tortured body is jerked upon the wounds, and the tendons snap, and the nerves hke liquid streams of fire pour their agonies into the reeling brain, it is only in this moment that a sound comes from the quivering lips, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." And now we see the soldiers casting lots for His raiment, and the chief priests and scribes passing by and raihngatHim: " If He be Christ," say they, "let Him save Himself. Let Him come down from the cross." Once more we see the sacred lips move. Even in this moment of agony He thinks not of Himself. He is comforting the thief on the cross beside Him. io6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. "To-day," said He, " shalt thou be with Me in Paradise." Looking down at His mother, who stood with a breaking heart, which responded to every throb of her Son's agony, and, thinking of her widowed lonehness. He turns His fast-dimming eyes towards John, the beloved disciple and says, "Woman behold thy^son." His agony now draws from Him the despairing words of David, which had been used before as prophetic of the Messiah's passion: "Eloi! Eloil lama sabachthanil" He thinks that even God has forsaken Him. As time goes by, thirst of the most intolerable kind, the burning thirst caused by the fever of His wounds and the tension of His nerves and muscles, becomes the most agonizing of all His sufferings. Whose heart has not melted to see the avidity with which a Uttle child, flushed with fever, clutches the cooling cup from its mother's hand; but what is this beside the pathos of the words " I thirst, " as they are wrenched from Jesus by His three hours' suffering! What gratitude do we not feel toward the one unknown hand that uplifted the sponge upon the sprig of hyssop, and held it to His lips! And about the sixth hour darkness came over all the earth tiU the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the Temple was rent in twain. And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice He said, "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit;" and having said thus, He gave up the Ghost. "And Joseph, a good man and a just, went unto Pilate and begged the body of Jesus. And He took it down and wrapped it in linen and laid it in a sepulchre that was 107 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. hewn in stone, wherein never man was laid. The women also, which came with Jesus from Galilee, fol- lowed after and beheld the sepulchre and how His body was laid, and they returned and prepared spices and ointments and rested the Sabbath Day according to the Commandment." io8 CHAPTER VI. THE PHItOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF THE PLACE OF DEPARTED SPIRITS, AND THE SPIRITUAL ENVIRONMENT OF MAN. We shall attempt here to prove that one who accepts the Scriptures, of the Old and New Testaments, should beUeve in the existence of a spirit-world surrounding this earth, and should hold that this living environment contains conscious beings, and that it is the abode of men and women immediately after they leave this life. Wc shall also try to show that the position of the Church on this interesting matter is the goal to which the most recent experiments and scientific theories are leading advanced thinkers. With regard to the teaching of the Old Testament, we have a clear example in the opening of the young man's eyes by the prayer of Elisha. "And when the servant of the man of God was risen early and gone forth, behold an host compassed the city, both with horses and chariots, and his servant said unto him, 'Alas, my master, how shall we do ?' and he answered, 'Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.' And Elisha prayed and said, ' Lord, I pray Thee open his eyes, that he may see.' And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw; and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha." Thus we observe that there existed large 109 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. numbers of living beings that remained invisible to the natural faculties of an ordinary man. All that was necessary to perceive them was an addition of subjective power. His faculties being too coarse to apprehend objects of so fine a fibre, or essence, he needed only an exaltation of spiritual vision, a sixth sense, as some have called it. We notice this exaltation, to a less degree, in poets, and in persons of an originating disposition; and we can easily understand that God, who in this century is revealing Himself chiefly by scientific discoveries, in other ages may have used the channel of spiritual illumi- nation so freely, with prophets and dreamers of dreams, as to our rational, and somewhat skeptical temper, would seem incredible. Such a theory alone accounts satis- factorily for the appearances of angels, and for coundess instances of what we call supernatural visitations. Of course.if one deny the truth of the Bible,other arguments must be used. Here we are only trying to show that any- one who accepts the Scriptures should beUeve in the existence of a living and conscious environment. It does not follow that these spiritual beings are not also material. They may be composed of matter in so fine a form that it transcends faculties Hke ours, just as the shrill sounds, which become inaudible to our ears, nevertheless exist, and can be plainly heard by a tiny insect; or smells, which are too delicate to be detected by us, are known to exist, because dogs follow them. We can imagine a world of sights too brilliant or too dark; sounds too shrill or too deep ; smells too delicate or too powerful; tastes too sweet or too bitter; touches too hot or too cold, too smooth or too rough, too inomense or too no THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. intense — to come within the range of our faculties; and we can picture to ourselves a never-ending succession of conscious material creatures to whom these sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches, would be, in turn, perceptible and intelligible. Therefore the inhabitants of the so-caUed spirit world that is around us, may be just as decidedly material as ourselves, only finer; nay, it is even possible, and to our mind quite probable, that we go on from the lower to the higher, from the grosser up through these finer stages, as the process of our sane- tification goes on. In the New Testament, the teaching is plainer still. St. Paul's conversion resulted from a manifestation to him of the higher spiritual circles of existence. Writing afterwards of his experiences, he says : " I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, — whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth; — such an one caught up to the third Heaven. And I knew such a man, — whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth; — how that he was caught up into Paradise, and heard un- speakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter."— 2 Cor. XII: 2. When Jesus was transfigured on the Mount, He was seen discoursing with Moses and Elias, who had left this life and were living in the Place of Departed Spirits. It is much easier to understand that the faculties of Peter, James, and John were illuminated to perceive the exist- ence of persons whose abode is always about us, but who are invisible to our senses, than that these were spirits that had come from some distant sphere, merely for the III THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. occasion, and that could have been discerned by us with our ordinary faculties if we had been present. We are not, however, left to draw mere inferences in regard to New Testament teaching about the Place of Departed Spirits. Christ has given us as plain a picture as human beings need, in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and in His statement on the cross to the dying thief. The rich man died and went to Hades. While there he could plainly see Lazarus who was in Paradise. They were separated. A great gulf, which neither could pass, was between them but they were able to talk to each other. The word "Paradise" meant a garden, and would be used to denote that portion of the Place of Departed Spirits where the inhabitants were happy; whereas the other part of the same place contained the abode of some who were in torment. The home of the departed spirits, therefore, we take to be one place in which a gulf, whether moral or physical, separates the blessed from the cursed. To the dying thief upon the cross Jesus said, "To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise." Those who aifirm that the state of the blessed dead is one of rest, or sleep, which will last till the Resurrection, are forced either to iiinore this appeal to Scripture, or are obliged to resort to an extremely far-fetched and unsatisfactory under- standing of it. They say that Jesus meant, "I say to-day, unto thee, that thou shalt be with me in Para- dise." By its meaningless redundancy this expression carries its refutation upon its face. It is an exceedingly weak attempt to escape from the plain teaching of Scripture 112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. It was into this " Place of Departed Spirits " that Christ descended. We know that He would keep His word with the dying thief, and that, if there are two dis- tinct localities in the abode of the spirits, one Paradise and the other a place of torment. He would go to Para- dise, because He had said He would meet the thief there. On the other hand, we are told by St. Peter that He went and preached to the "spirits in prison". These are also described as the persons who were disobedient in the time of Noah. Hence they would be not in Paradise but in the other place. It is possible, since Lazarus and Dives could converse across the gulf, that Jesus may have preached to the imprisoned spirits from Paradise, that is, spoke across the gulf; but we consider it more probable that He would have gone to them, if He wished to speak to them. "Why then," the question arises, "should Jesus have desired to preach to the imprisoned spirits?" The only answer we can give is that the abode of the wicked may be a place where they are not without possibility of elevation, one in which the condition is not devoid of hope, and where the dwellers may pro- gress in sanctification. If it were otherwise, then our Lord's preaching to them would be only to mock them in their helpless condition, and to add to their agony and their remorse This idea is out of the question; and so we must infer that the abode of the unsanctified dead is one of progression, and that their suffering is purifying in its nature. Anyone that accepts the Scrip- tures of the Old and New Testaments, in our opinion at least, must hold the following beliefs: "3 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. (i) That we are surrounded by an environment of conscious beings. (2) That this is what the Church means by the "Place of Departed Spirits". (3) That this "Place" is of a double nature; to one class of persons it is a place of joy, a spiritual pleasure garden, i. e., Paradise; to a different class it is a world of torment. (4) That this suffering is for the purpose of cleansing from sin those who undergo it ; and that the abode of the departed is one of progressive sanctification. Some however will not accept the Scriptures as evi- dence in the question, and will desire scientific proofs. To these we reply that what little we do know about the problem, from observed facts, vvdll go to substantiate the position we have just defined. Obviously the field of experiment has, up to the present, been almost closed to us. No man has returned from the "Place of Departed Spirits" to tell us of his experiences there, or his inferences from them, except the one whose word it is not considered scientific to accept namely, Jesus of Nazareth. The experiment, as an ex- periment for human instruction, was only made once; and it has proved the truth of the experimenter's own statement that, unless men will beHeve Moses and the Prophets, they wiU not believe, even though one actually came back to them from the dead. This has proved to be the case, although the resurrection of Jesus has been declared by competent authority to be the "best au- thenticated fact in history." It is true that thousands have believed it, but they are those that accept Moses 114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. and the Prophets. Those that refuse to believe the latter are the persons that deny the truth of the Resur- rection. An experimental test, however, cannot be a satisfac- tory one unless it can be frequently repeated. The nearest approach to such an experiment consists in the taking of ether, or opium, or chloroform, and endeavor- ing to recall any recollections of thoughts or f eeHngs that we may have had in our unconscious state, this being the closest approach to actual death that we can achieve with the ability to return to life again. It would be interesting, as weU as profitable, to collect from persons immediately upon their coming out of anaes- thesia the impressions of their experiences in the un- conscious state. The writer once, when about to take ether in a dental chair, determined to remember the last thought in his mind previous to unconsciousness, in order to ascertain whether it would throw light upon the subject of the next Ufe. He can remember thinking, just at the last moment, that he was entering another life, and also that he would not be able to remember details of it, but that, when he returned to consciousness again, he would always thereafter be sure, in his own mind, that there was an immediate consciousness after death. His first thought, as earthly self-recognition returned was that of coming back from another conscious exist- ence, and not from a blank. This is the experience of only one person; and, however satisfactory it may be to him, no scientific value, of course, can attach to it. Nevertheless, if attempts of this kind were made, care- fully recorded, and compared, much useful scientific data might be secured. "5 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. Experiment being almost entirely blocked to us we must fall back upon observation. First, let us look in upon our own minds; and after- wards we may examine external objects. When we take an introspective survey, we meet at once the phenomenon of double consciousness. In sleep and waking we live two distinct lives. Sometimes they run into each other, and the experiences of the one infringe upon the other; but, in the main, the trains of conscious- ness are separale, and each is continuous and coherent in its own sphere. In dreams we recognize our own per- sonab'ty, sometimes as identical with our waking self, but, at other times a« oblivious of it, or as disconnected entirely with it. We experience sensations that make a powerful impression upon us in our sleeping state, but these, when awake, we are utterly unable to recall. In vivid dreams the actors appear just as material as they appear to us in our ordinary condition. They can apparently be seen, heard, touched, and apprehended by our senses. They eat, sieej), and act as men ap- pear to do when awake. We notice, nevertheless, that the ideas of time and space, however clear they may seem to be in dreams, are, when we afterwards re- flect upon them, exceedingly confused. Places thou- sancL- of miles apart are brought together, and we seem to be in both at once. So the past and future are in- extricably involved in a perpetual present. Persons are thought to be with us that have long .lincr- died, and cihei-s, not bom at the period represented by the dream, are, by a sort of anticip'dtion of the future, made to ap- pear and take part in it. ii6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. How do wp know that the phantasms of our sleeping consciousness have not some conscious realities behind them ? Of course there is not the same kind of external thing beneath these fancies as there is behind the more tangible experiences of out waking life ; but what is the difference between them ? Wherein, for example, does the dream of a tree differ from the waking perception of one? They bnth appear the same. The sense of sight gives no difference. Also, if we had dreamed that we touched the tree, the feeling would have been the same as that which we have when we handle a tree when awake. Yet we are convinced that the tree we see in the day-time is something outside ourselves, that it is really there; and we believe that the tree of our dreams must have been purely imaginar)', i. e., that it has had no real existence outside of our own minds. If we look carefully into the two cases, we will observe that, in the instance of the waking experience, we can verify the phantasm of the mind by repeating it; and we come to believe that, at a certain spot, there stands something that we call a tree, and wliich has the power of always causing in us the same sensations of greenness, rough- ness, resinous odoi, or what not. It is this expectation of the permanence of the recurrent sensations that leads us to believe that there must be, at that place, something, we do not know what, but something real, which always makes the same impressions upon us; and we express this t xpectation by saying that we consider tliis a real tree. On the other hand, because we cannot expeiiment with the tree of our dreams, and cannot be sure of the recurrence of the same sensations, and repeat 117 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. them at will, we say that it has no reality at the back of it, that nothing exists there outside of our own minds. The man who aflirms that the consciousness of dreams has no reality outside of the perceiving imagination is just as unphilosophiral as the man who asserts that the tree of our waking experience is really, apart from our faculties, precisely as we see it to be. It is ignorant presumption to assert that, because this object appears to us tall and round and green and odorous, it is so in itself apart from us, and would be so to beings differ- ently constituted. It is equally presumptuous to assert that the consciousness of perfect sleep, i. e., the realm of dreams unmixed with any thoughts of our waking state, may not be a world of real existences, either spiritual, or material, or both. We observe also a double consciousness in our waking state. We give the name of "consciousness" to the chain of feelings and thoughts recognized in succes- sion by the ego, or brought under the immediate at- tention of the mind. We are also possessed of num- erous experiences that are, at the same time, unrecog- nized by the mind, but are present in what we call the realm of subconsciousness. We possess many feeUngs arising from the workings of digestion, and other organic functions of the body, but it is only rarely that the mind recognizes them, and it is only when some deiangement occurs that we become aware of their existence. The ticking of a clock may fall upon the drum of the ear, and proceed from that to the brain by the auditory nerve, and yet the mind may not recognize it; so that it does not form part of the present conscious- ii8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION ness of the mind. We see, therefore, that the conscious- ness of a person, at any given moment, is a sort of pro- tuberance of the ego, out of the realm of subconscious- ness, into the world of immediate cognition in which we live. The mind is like a fountain that draws its sup- plies from an unfathomable reservoir of subconscious- ness. When we reflect upon thenumber of our thoughts, it seems incredible that there could be stored in our brains a separate cell, or material impression, or change, for each thought. However minute the impression may be, we cannot consider our brains large enough to contain such a multitude of distinct impressions. Therefore we conclude that we must be surrounded by a world of spirit- force, and that our thoughts are really stored in this; and that this realm of other-consciousness is the place from which all our recollections are drawn. What is more probable than that this is at once the place from which our souls have become incarnated, and the place to which they will go immediately after death, the "Place of Departed Spirits", the world of our dreams, and even of our real waking inner self? This hypothesis gathers up all the apparently irrecon- cilable contradictions of the phenomena of double con- sciousness, and makes them intelligible, and, at the same time, harmonizes all observed facts with the teaching of the Christian Church. While the twenty-second Article declares that the Romish teaching regarding Purgatory and Pardons is without warrant of Scripture, and a "fond thing vainly invented", the Church has always believed in an intermediate state, and does not deny that this condition may be one of progressive 119 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. sanctifiration. According to our hypothesis of the gradual triumph of unity throughout the universe, the general purpose of this intermediate state would be the bringing about of unity throughout the perpetually incarnating portions of the spiritual environment of the earth, or the gradual sanctification of the human race by the influence of the Holy Spirit, making all men one in the likeness of God, the Absolutely One, through organic unity with Christ in the sacraments, teachings, and ordinances of the Christian Church. Making the widest conjecture regarding the plan of the universe, we assert, according to this theory, that the whole creation is being drawn slowly towards Heaven, and that smaller spheres are being drawn towards larger, which in their turn are being drawn towards their centres ; until we reach the conception of Heaven, the Absolutely One Substance which is the centre of attraction and regula- tion for the whole. We observe also the process of condensation and unification in all parts of the plan and in every direction in which we look, mental, moral, and physical; and in every aspect of God, Man, or Nature. According to the same hypothesis, we have most prob- ably lived on the moon when it was a planet like this, have there been condemned to be cast on this earth, and are gradually becoming incarnated in it until the elect portion of the human race will be one spirit, and the rest will be cast upon the sun to undergo a similar process. As to how the process of purification by suffering takes place in the realm of subconsciousness, or the "Place of Departed Spirits, "or whatever we may like to call it, we cannot undertake to say, nor does the Church define it. 120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. It may, however, be by reincarnation. There is one incident given in the Scriptures, which, though usually overlooked, throws light upon this subject, and that is the reincarnation of Elijah in John the Baptist. The Old Testament ends with the promise of Elijah's re- incarnation, and the New Testament begins with its fulfilment in John the Baptist. By reincarnation we mean the same soul coming to earth again with a new body, and in new surroundings. By the reincarnation of Elijah we mean that Elijah came back again to this earth and was reborn and became the person whom we know as John the Baptist. We do not mean that John the Baptist was another man, who had a mind and char- acter like those of Elijah, but that John the Baptist actually was Elijah. This is a subject of the greatest importance, because, if reincarnation occurred once, it could occur again. There is much vague and sup- erficial theorizing on the subject of reincarnation now- adays; but we shall confine ourselves to facts as they are set forth in the Holy Scriptures. Joel and Zach- ariah had both described a great day of Judgment, which was fulfilled when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, after the most horrible siege known to history. It was the punishment of the Jews for their rejection of Christ, the Messiah; but before this day should come, according to the prophecy of Malachi, Elijah must return and restore all things. For hundreds of years before the coming of Christ, the expectation of Elijah's return was always associated with the appearance of the Messiah. He was to be the forerunner of the promised Christ. Let us see how the 121 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. prophecy was fulfilled. When the Angel announced to Zacharias, in the Temple, that he should have a son whose name must be called John, the messenger said: "And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God; and he shall go before Him in the spirit and power of EHas — the Greek form of the Hebrew EUjah — to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord." We see here a direct reference to Malachi's prophecy. John the Baptist should go before the Messiah, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the children to their fathers. While all must admit this much, they may say that it does not prove that John the Baptist actually was Elijah, but merely that he came in the "spirit and power" of EHjah. What is meant by the spirit and power .of a man? It is true the expression is not free from ambiguity. We speak of a man having the spirit of another when he is actuated by similar motives, and has the same disposition; but we should remember that the Angel is speaking here of the spirit of a man^who had left this earth and gone to the Place of Departed Spirits; so that the word "spirit" would appear, on its face to mean the spirit in its literal sense rather than one's disposition, or character. We should also re- member that he was speaking of a departed spirit whose return to earth was as direct a matter of prophecy as the coming of Christ Himself. The words of Malachi are plain. "Behold I will send unto you — ^not a man like Elijah, or a man having the same spiritual power 122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. as Elijah, but, " Elijah, the prophet," the man him- self: "Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet, be- fore the great and dreadful day of the Lord." Now we know that this great day has passed, for the language of prophecy shows plainly that it meant the destruction of Jerusalem. Therefore, if this was fulfilled before the year 70 A. D., Elijah came in the form of some person before that time; and if Elijah was reincarnated, before the year 70, in whom was he reincarnated if not in John the Baptist? Fortunately, however, we have much stronger proof. We have our Lord's own statement that Elijah was reincarnated in John the Baptist. Nor do we depend on one Gospel for our authority, since both St. Matthew and St. Mark record it. St. Mark, IX, II, 12 and 13, says: And they asked him, saying, "Why say the scribes that Elias must first come ? " And he answered and told them: Elias verily cometh first and restoreth all things, and how it is written of the Son of Man, that He must suffer many things and be set at nought; but I say unto you that Elias is indeed come, and they have done unto him whatsoever they listed, as it is written of him." If we had no other authority than this, strong as it is, some might have said that he did not refer to John the Baptist ; but St. Matthew leaves no doubt on that point. He says, XVII: 12 and 13: "But I say unto you that Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him what- soever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of Man suffer of them. Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist". After such a statement from our Lord's own lips, it appears 123 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. decidedly wrong to doubt that John the Baptist actual- ly was Elijah. To most people the strange manner in which the prophet of Gilead left the earth would seem an argument against the possibility of any reincarnation, except in the case of people who were taken up into the Heavens as he was. His departure was so exceptional that it may be regarded as being an argument against reincarnation rather than for it. "If all men left the earth alive," some may say, "it might be probable that they would return again, but it is not probable that they would return after death." This has some weight and it would have more but for one significant fact, namely, that Elijah did not come back to earth with the same body that went up in'the chariot. John was born of his mother Elizabeth, and became a little child like any other. If John the Baptist had suddenly appeared from the wilderness full grown, and we had no account of his birth; if, in short, Elijah had simply come back with the same body which he took with him 866 years before, then we might think that his reincarnation was dependent upon his having left the earth alive. But Elijah left his old body behind him in the Place of Departed Spirits, or wher- ever it went in the fiery chariot; and, when his spirit came back to earth again, it incarnated itself in the same way as any other soul takes possession of a human body. The fact that this is the only case of the kind on record does not detract from its inferential value. The gener- laization that all crows are black seems quite as clear as 124 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. most of our accepted inferences, but if a man could produce one white crow it would overthrow it. You might find 50,000 black crows; but if I could show one white one, it would disprove the statement that all crows are black. So if any one argues, because millions of people leave this earth, and, so far as we know, never come back to it, that therefore reincarnation is impossible, and I produce from Scripture one case of a man who did come back and was reincarnated, it overthrows his generali- zation, provided he agrees to abide by Scripture proof. Further, if we compare the character of John the Baptist with that of Elijah, it will be seen how mar- vellously our Lord's statement is corroborated. John the Baptist was the exact counterpart of EHjah in all his physical, mental, and moral characteristics. Elijah the Tishbite came from the wilds of Gilead. The inhabitants of that region were regarded by the people of Jerusalem much as the natives of the South Sea Islands are regarded by the people of London or New York. John came from the wilderness with the same half-savage appearance and manner of speech as Ehjah. The raiment of camel's hair, the sheepskin mantle, the locusts and wild honey, the iierce gestures, and ringing denunciations of sin are all repetitions of the Tishbite. Compare Elijah's bold rebuking of Ahab and Jezebel with John's reproach of Herod and Herodias. It is the same man, speaking in the same strain, after an ab- sence of over 800 years. You find the similarity of THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION disposition, even in the little details of character. For example, take their fits of despondency. Compare the wail of Elijah in the cave with that of John in the tower of Machaerus. Elijah says: "The children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away." He speaks as if he had not a friend left in the world, and his life had been a failure. How like John the Baptist, broken down by his ill-treatment, utterly despondent, even distrusting the Saviour whom he had only a short time before proclaimed as the Lamb of God, sending to ask of Jesus, "Art thou He that sht)uld come, or do we look for another?" We find also a striking resemblance between Herod and Ahab. Their characters were certainly similar. There was the same fondness for grandeur. Both were restorers of cities and builders of magnificent palaces. Both were guilty of gross licentiousness. Both were superstitious, and cowardly. Ahab feared Elijah, and Herod feared John; but neither was man enough to obey the prophet and do the right. Likewise do we find a strange parallel in the charac- ters of Jezebel and Herodias. There is the same super- stition, debauchery, and vindictiveness in each, so that it is a question which name of the two is the more in- famous to our ears. We do not presume to say that Herod was a reincarna- tion of Ahab, or Herodias an incarnation of Jezebel; but we do say positively, because Our I.,ord Himself says so, that John the Baotist was a reincarnation of Elijah; 126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. and we point out these other facts as a most singular coincidence in connection with it. We express our conclusions in the following proposi- tions : (i) We are surrounded by a world of spirit-life. (2) This is the world which we mean by the realm of subconsciousness. (3) It is the world of our dreams. (4) It is the place where all our thoughts are stored. (5) It is the place from which we came at birth, and to which we go immediately after we leave this life. (6) It is the "Place of Departed Spirits" into which Christ went. (7) It is Paradise to some, and torment to others. (8) It is from this world that many intuitive ideas, fleeting recollections of a previous life, presentiments of the future, and instinctive motives emerge. (9) It is from thence that many internal suggestions come. (10) It is a state of perpetual progress towards unity. (11) This progress may be accomplished by Reincar- nation. (12) It will last till the Day of the General Resurrec- tion. 127 CHAPTER VII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF THE RESURRECTION AISTD ASCENSION OF CHRIST. As to the historical facts that a person named Jesus, of Nazareth, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and that his followers asserted that their master rose again from the dead in accordance with a promise He had made to them some time before, there does not appear to be much questioning. Some of those who doubt the truth of the Scripture narrative take the position that He was not really dead. They may urge several arguments in support of this view. The events happened a long time ago, when people were more credulous and easily de- ceived. The burial was not a covering with earth, which would have ensured suffocation, if the person had been simulating death, but merely the placing in a cave, and that at the hands of friends. It is not impossible that the Centurion, who had charge of the execution, may have been the same whose son Jesus had cured, and that he out of gratitude contrived His escape. By appearing to wound Him in the side, he might prevent the others from breaking His legs, as those of the two thieves were broken. It may also be not unreasonably suggested that Pilate, whose wife, we know, was favor- able to our Lord, may have been a party to the plan, and thereby eased his conscience, and at the same time pleased the Jews. The following considerations 128 TH^> PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. should satisfy us of the improbability of these explanations: (i) We must remember that the vengeful Jews were present, at the foot of the cross, watching every move- ment of the Roman executioners, and gloating over the tortures of their Victim. It is incredible that, having pursued Him thus far, they would leave Him until per- fectly convinced of His death. (2) Our Lord had clearly foreseen and accurately described His crucifixion, as far back as His conversation with Nicodemus, when He compared Himself to the serpent impaled by Moses and raised aloft to heal the bitten Israelites. It is in the highest degree improbable that such a plan for connivance could then have existed. (3) There is to be considered the awful risk to one undertaking a mock crucifixion, even though assured of the connivance of the Centurion, or, perhaps^ of the Roman Governor himself. The cruel scourging, and the crown of thorns are not favorable to this hypothesis. The nail wounds in hands and feet are against it. If the Centurion had really desired to save our Lord's life, he might have bound him to the cross with cords, which, as tradition says, he did in the case of the thieves. (4) This hypothesis imphes that Our Lord foresaw the decision at which the Sanhedrim should arrive. Though it may have been a foregone conclusion from the hate which they bore Him, yet no merely human being could foresee with absolute accuracy the decisions which would be reached by a deliberative body com- posed of the chief men of the nation. Amongst them were some favorable to Him, and their influence might 129 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION/ h