THOSE who worship the immanent God, the indwelling God, cannot accept the theological     opinions of the orthodox churches for the further reason that they are all based on the dogmas of the fall of man and his separation from God, and on miracles and other medieval conceptions. From a careful analysis of the propositions embraced in the orthodox theology, it follows as a necessary and logical conclusion that each one hinges upon the other and they must all stand or fall together.

If man never incurred the displeasure of God and never was estranged from Him, or, in other words, never fell, then it follows that there was no necessity, occasion, or reason for a vicarious atonement to establish his relationship with God. In other words, if man never was separated from God, no vicarious atonement was necessary to restore peace and harmony between him and God.

It is also apparent that if man was never in a lost or fallen state or condition, was never separated from God, the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus, the Gentle Seer of Galilee, was a useless and needless requirement,--nay, a cruel tragedy. It follows also that if man was never separated from God, the necessity for a belief in the vicarious atonement cannot possibly exist.

These conclusions seem to follow logically from a fair, candid, and careful consideration of the various propositions embraced in the orthodox scheme of man's redemption. It will be observed that the whole orthodox plan is based on a dualistic conception of man's relation with God; in other words, that God dwells apart from man, separated by a gulf, and that Jesus is the only intermediary to bridge that chasm.

The moral effect of the doctrine that man was estranged from God and is by nature weak and sinful, when viewed from the standpoint of modern psychology, as well as some of the tendencies that flow from the belief in a vicarious atonement, blotting out of man's iniquities, and the unethical influences flowing from such teaching, will be considered in subsequent chapters.

Perhaps no other thought of God has produced so much discord in the human race as the dualistic conception of God and man--the dogma that separated man from God. The Church, instead of uniting men, has separated them. If its teachings are true, why is this so? Truth leads to harmony. Truth is harmony. Falsehood leads to strife. Falsehood is strife.

When man was told of his total depravity, God's displeasure with him on account of the act of his first ancestor, and his entire separation from God, he instinctively looked for a mediator to plead with God for a restoration of that lost relationship. This gave rise to the idea of priestly mediation and furnished the priesthood an opportunity to inject and wedge itself in between man and God--interpret God's will to man--and it has held that vantage point over man for fifteen centuries.

No great teacher ever separated God from man. Man was never separated from God except in consciousness,--only as he believed it. His theological teaching caused him to believe it. He felt his degrading position in the great scheme of Nature. When the idea of total depravity once took possession of his mind, he became the easy prey of those who desired to control him. Is it strange that man has at times been weak and vacillating, when his theology made him an outcast?

As Emerson wisely observes: "That which shows God within me fortifies me. That which shows him without me makes me a wart and a wen." Never was a more ingenious idea invented for the control of man than his separation from God--that he had lost the divine image and was a spiritual mendicant, a wanderer over the face of the earth, without compass and without chart.

Out of the theological mists and miasma of the past has come duality. Under the glare of a spiritual sunlight will come unity--unity of life, unity of intelligence, unity of man and God. The adherents of New Thought entertain different ideas and conceptions of man's relation to God. Their views are widely divergent from those of the orthodox theologian, and these differences are fundamental. By no process of reasoning or logic can they be made to harmonize or blend. They represent the extreme opposite poles of thought, the one holding to the dual conception of God and man, the other, the unity of God and man.

Those who accept progressive ideas, as taught by New Thought, accept evolution as Nature's method of creation; that, so far as they can observe, the laws of evolution are operating throughout the universe, and that all animate life on this planet is under the dominion and control of these laws. Evolution may now be regarded as universally acknowledged among scientists, and by all educated men, in every part of the world. Evolution, like every new idea and discovery, was compelled to fight its way to recognition, because it was thought it would disturb the then existing idea of creation, as taught in Genesis. But a few years' time has wrought a great change in thought, regarding the truth of evolution.

When the writer was a student at the Ohio Wealeyan University, evolution was universally frowned upon and stigmatized as an atheistic doctrine tending to undermine the foundation of the Christian religion. On one occasion a distinguished bishop was brought to the institution to preach a sermon to the students against it, who warned them not to be deceived by its false teachings. Darwin and Huxley were then regarded as the arch enemies of religion. But it is a happy circumstance that this is all changed, and that all thoughtful men now accept evolution as a recognized truth and Nature's method of creation.

The adherents of New Thought conceive of man as the result and product of evolution: that he was evolved from the lowest form of animal life; that he is now the acme of all her operations, representing the highest and most perfect type of all intelligent and sentient beings. They conceive that in the long travail through the countless ages, from man's beginning, there may have been periods when his progress was slow, when his advance was halted, even intervals when his steps were backward, but on the whole, and as one grand triumphal progression, man's growth has been steadily, persistently, and eternally onward and upward, to his present mental and spiritual stature. Whittier said:

They do not regard man as sinful or weak by nature, or that he was ever a fallen being, or that he was ever separated or estranged from God, or that he ever lost the divine ideal. They conceive of man as created, not in the physical image, but in the moral, intellectual, and spiritual image, of God.

They cannot agree with the orthodox conception that God ever demanded a vicarious atonement for the redemption of man, or that an infinitely tender and just God would exact such a requirement, much less of so pure and noble a soul as Jesus of Nazareth.

They cannot think that God condemned the entire race forever for one act of their common ancestor, when that one act was an effort to step forward and move upward in the evolution and progress of man, an effort to rise above the animal and become a man. Such a conception debases God and gives Him lower moral qualities than man.

They look upon the account of man's disobedience and expulsion from the Garden of Eden, related in Genesis, as a bit of Oriental imagery--an allegory, the Oriental method of teaching,-- designed to teach another lesson, rather than the forced interpretation given by the theologian. The Western theologian has employed Western ideas to interpret an Oriental document, hence he has not caught its meaning or truth. Alas, how much error and wrong have crept into the world to harass and bewilder man, from an interpretation of allegories as facts and offering them to the world as truths.

But someone asks if the advocates of New Thought believe in and accept the divinity of Jesus? Yes. They go even farther than their orthodox friends in accepting that divinity· They do not require the performance of miracles as a necessary step, to prove the divinity of that gentle soul. They see divinity in every act of his life. Whoever in the sincerity of his soul could utter the Sermon on the Mount requires no other proof of his divinity. They see divinity also in every man, --slumbering, perhaps, and only waiting to be called forth into development and expression.

With most of us the Christ within is asleep in the ship, and only as the winds and waves of life beat therein, threatening us with shipwreck and destruction, do we find courage to wake the Gentle Master to still the raging tempests. If the sole divinity of Jesus is denied, the divinity of all men is affirmed.

Jesus taught the unity of life, the unity of God and man. He understood the great secret of life and developed the divine principle in himself, so that in the consciousness of truth he could say, I and the Father are one. He is the one great masterful ideal, toward whose perfection man should continually and forever strive.

The advocates of New Thought conceive of the vicarious atonement as a plan which permits the individual to shift his responsibility to another, and therefore as an evasion of the law of cause and effect, that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. Let this thought sink deep into your soul.

Neither do they agree that a belief in a particular creed is a prerequisite to man's eternal welfare. The thinking man cannot set aside the results of reason and the voice of intuition, to adopt a particular belief because he is so bidden, when the voice of his own soul conveys a different meaning. Jesus had little or nothing to say about belief, but he had much to say of life and methods of living.

They regard man as possessing the potential attributes of divinity within himself and that he is conscious of these divine qualities which make him man; that it is man's privilege, duty, and function to develop those qualities, attributes, and possibilities, in the great school and discipline of life.

They concede that as God by His creative processes brought man to his conscious state, so it is man's business and duty to perfect himself. This is the true meaning and purpose of life. Character is the true vision of the soul, the ideal set before man, the goal of all his endeavors. They do not recognize or accept miracles according to the orthodox conception and belief as possible in a universe governed, controlled, and operated under universal law. They look upon what many people regard as miracles, coming as special interpretations of God or otherwise than as the result of law, as having no existence, except as creations of the imagination of man.

They cannot conceive of any reason for bringing any person into the world by immaculate conception, but regard Nature's method of producing man as entirely holy, for Nature herself is holy. They regard the accounts of the various immaculate conceptions of the several saviours of the world, recorded in history, as traditions and nothing more, probably having their origin in the ancient myth that the sun was born of the dawn, and the dawn was a virgin. It has been said that any distrust of the permanence of law would paralyze the faculties of man.

In one sense everything in Nature, from leaf to planet, is a miracle,--not in the sense that they are not controlled by universal law, but only in the sense that we do not understand them. Man himself is the standing miracle of creation. Walt Whitman said: "Seeing, hearing, feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle; and a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels." Nevertheless, they are all under the control and operation of universal law.

It is a fundamental idea of New Thought that the universe in all its parts is governed by universal law; that from the smallest atom up through the infinite planetary systems law reigns supreme; that the law of compensation prevails and holds its sway over every thought and act of man; that whatsoever he sows, that shall he also reap. This law is written in luminous letters on the very dome of the universe. It stands before man's face, so that none can escape it and none can deny it. This law is as inexorable in the mental, moral, and spiritual world as in the physical universe. Modern science, reaching out toward a solution of ultimate questions, is now pro- claiming the universal reign of law, the unity of all substance, and the existence of universal intelligence in Nature.

The adherents of New Thought conceive of a universal mind or divine intelligence pervading and permeating the universe, manifesting in all forms of creation; that there is  also a unity of life and that each individual is a part of that intelligence and that universal life and spirit. The visible forms of nature are the expressions of that divine life and intelligence, and the same life and intelligence that seek expression in the bud, the grass blade, the flower, the bird and animal, are also seeking expression in man. This awakens in man  a kinship with all created things. In man this life and intelligence find their highest manifestation and expression. He stands at the summit of all created beings, the most finished product in the great evolutionary struggle. A conscious being, aware of his own kinship with God, he walks the earth erect and can say, I am divine.

Some one has said, "God sleeps in the rock, smiles in the flower, and comes to consciousness in man." This unity of life, this divine intelligence, pervading all nature and rising to its highest expression in man, is the basic fact in the philosophy of New Thought. The ultimate purpose of all true religious teaching is to produce a realizing sense of this consciousness in man. This consciousness enlarges the vision of man's soul and awakens in him a knowledge and true estimate of the boundless possibilities within himself. Pope caught a vision of this great truth:

Someone says, all that has been said about New Thought is but a restatement of the old      pantheistic philosophy. For the sake of argument, suppose we concede it. What then? If      pantheism means that God is omnipresent in the universe, in nature, both spirit and substance, subject and object, being all in all, the visible and invisible, that the universe is a living whole, expressing itself in infinite variety, are you still opposed to pantheism?

When you see in Nature the manifestation of an intelligence, in every cell and bud the      interplay of forces producing movement and repose, unity and variety, the recurring seasons, the planets obeying a hidden law, growth and decay, the conservation of energy, actions and reactions, all producing a perfect equilibrium, does it not suggest to you an infinite life, a supreme intelligence, and that all is God, and God is all?

Is not a spiritual pantheism more desirable than an absentee God--a God of finite proportions dwelling in some distant part of the universe? We must have one or the other. Which shall it be?

The highest conception of religion as taught by New Thought is to unfold and develop the soul into harmonious relations with divine intelligence, and thus come into spiritual unity with God. As the effect of the orthodox religions is to separate God from man, and New Thought conceives of God as within man, their ideals of prayer are not the same. The one prays to an absentee God, the other to the God within. True prayer is not debasing the soul in the presence of divinity. It is lifting the soul up. The divine intelligence is conscious of man's innermost thoughts before they are uttered. Real prayer is not asking selfish favors. It is bringing the conscious mind into touch with the universal or divine mind. It is going into the closet and closing the door; that is, shutting out consciousness of external things, as Jesus taught, and there communing with infinite intelligence in secret.

I like the prayer of Socrates, "Give me inward beauty of soul, and let the inward and outward man be at one."

Emerson says, "Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious." "Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing His works good."

"Be still and know that I am God" is the voice of the soul in the true attitude of prayer. Goethe speaks of prayer as God seeking for Himself and meeting Himself in man. Someone has defined prayer as the intercourse between oneself and our ideal companion.

Prayer is lifting up the soul to him who "has no eyes and yet He is looking at us; no ears and yet He hears us; no face and yet His smile greets us." True prayer is lifting the soul into an atmosphere where one feels the glow, the beauty and harmony of the infinite presence and over his soul play vibrations from the source of eternal truth and love. God does not come at the sound of a bell or the blare of trumpets, but silently, as the dew is distilled upon the grass-blade bringing life, growth, and beauty to the plant, so unheard and unannounced God comes to refresh the soul with His unseen presence and power.

The votaries of New Thought do not depend upon one book or all books for their ideas, conceptions, and knowledge of God. To them that book only is inspired which inspires man and awakens in him higher purposes in life and a closer unity with God. The author of every book that speaks the truth was first inspired. If God at any age of the world inspired the author of a book, no reason can be conceived why he should not inspire others in every age, even this. Why should not God speak to Emerson as well as to Moses, or to Walt Whitman as well as to St. Paul?

To attribute the authorship of a book to God or to divine inspiration is not an act of wisdom, unless in every line and precept it breathes a pure morality and sets the highest ideals before man. The mistakes, low standards of morality, unethical teachings, and unworthy examples are thereby unduly emphasized. It is the consensus of opinion among profound thinkers that many things contained in the Bible might have been omitted with resulting profit to the race. It records that some of God's chosen people, those held up to the world as the highest exponents of wisdom, freely indulged in the custom of taking many wives and concubines. In the same volume are accounts of trickery and deceptions in business matters, cruelties and conduct in wars, that would not be tolerated in this or any other civilized age, and the God of the Jews apparently gave it all his approving smile.

Every man pictures God according to the qualities of his own thought. If he is material and gross, he worships a gross God. If he is spiritual, he worships a spiritual God. Every man's God is a reflex of himself. We read much in the Bible of an anthropomorphic God. Much there is written of an angry, revengeful, and jealous God. These are not commendable traits in man; how much less must they be in a God? Such examples set low ideals for man.

It has been said that he that knows but one Bible, knows none. There is perhaps much truth in the statement. The Vedas and Zend Avesta contain many truths later found in the Hebrew Bible. How many who accept the Bible literally and as the inspired word of God, ever read those ancient Bibles?

We can find much wisdom outside of written books. The book of Nature is always an open volume, and we may read God's thoughts and secrets from its pages and thereby get wisdom and understanding. The rocks and trees and running brooks preach sermons more eloquently than the human voice and teach profounder lessons than were ever read in books or taught by man to man. In the book of Nature we catch glimpses of eternal beauty, of an ever-pervading harmony, of infinite power, of universal order, of an abiding and constant love. In that book man's kinship with divinity is revealed.
 

"The spiritual principle within men can know and interpret Nature, because the link that binds together all parts of Nature into one organic, correlated whole is itself a spiritual principle. My mind can understand Nature, because Nature herself is the revelation of mind, the manifestation of a principle, the expression of one root idea."

To him whose soul is attuned to Nature's laws, God appears in the starry vault of night, in the mellow glow of the sunset, in the flower by the wayside, in the music of the child's voice, and in the majestic qualities of man. We do not all read these meanings and discover these beauties and harmonies in Nature's symbols. Nature gives us back only what we lay at her feet. If we come to Nature with an unseeing eye, we see not; if we listen to her message with a dull ear, we hear not; if we call to her with listless purpose, she answers not.

Nature is God's true revelation. All supposed revelations given direct to man, translated into language and handed down through the centuries, convey at best only an imperfect and indistinct substitute for the original message. Language is imperfect. Thought is changed in its transmission. The message is not the same to the recipient as the giver, nor does it convey the same meaning to two individuals.

If we turn to the Hebrew Bible for a guide in our quest for an ideal of God, we find language rich in metaphor, expressing different conceptions of deity, reflecting the varied and diverse views of those who thus conveyed their thoughts to the world. We can read therein of an anthropo- morphic God, a God of revenge, a jealous God, a God who disliked a part of his children and made others his chosen people, a God of limited powers, an omnipotent God, a provincial God, a distant God, and an indwelling God. The ideals are but the expression of finite minds; the blind struggle of men attempting to write down and transmit to man their impressions and conceptions of an infinite God.

But Nature ever speaks with the same symbols. As often as we wander from the narrow path, under the spell of phantasms and illusions, so often does she recall us from our somnam- bulisms and bring us back to truth and reality. We do not plant in autumn, because Nature has taught us the winter is at hand; every recurring season and every phenomenon of Nature has its message of truth.  Man caught his first ideas of law, of order, of beauty, of movement and repose from an observation of the symbols and operations of Nature.

Nature first furnished and displayed the symbols of geometry. Man first saw the squares, the right-angled and equilateral triangles in the starry heavens above. Nature is the fountain and prototype of all law. She furnished the law of cause and effect, the most valuable law ever vouchsafed to man. Nature has her own methods of imparting knowledge, and the nearer we follow them the more wisdom we display. She does not reveal all her meanings and mysteries. She conceals as well as reveals. She spreads her symbols before man, and leaves a work for him to perform. She supplies an innuendo, and bids him interpret and translate its meaning.

Nature is the manifestation of the divine, the expression of the infinite God. We may learn of nature, but we cannot master her meaning. Forever the infinite stretches away before us. Eternity alone will suffice to encompass and master her secrets.

Here man can observe the wisdom of divinity. Man is ever the learner, but never the master. If man were master of all Nature's meanings, her mysteries and secrets, his ideals would be destroyed, his vision would be lost. If man understood God, and could fathom the mysteries of the universe, he would become tired of God and weary of the universe, he would weave his dreams about a greater and more mysterious God. He would reach out toward the infinite, for new mysteries, a new universe that he might learn their hidden secrets.

Stagnation is decay and death; advancement is life, is growth. There is no joy like that of eternal progression. It is the flowering pathway that stretches before man and lures him toward a haven of eternal peace. That alone satisfies the soul; it is the divine wanderlust of man.

The adherents of New Thought entertain not the least glimmer of doubt of the conscious identity of the soul after the change we call death. This conclusion does not rest on written revelation so much as on the inner revelation of man. It is written in man's nature; the soul feels it and speaks its own divine message. The soul is divine, and that which is divine is eternal. This life is but a threshold of a larger and fuller life. This conclusion is borne out by many facts, experiences, reasons, and in the whisperings of intuition. Profound thinkers in these days agree on the unity of life; that we are part of the great life current of the universe, that the soul has divine attributes and is a part of the great divine soul.

These ideas found expression in many ancient religions and philosophies, and find a receptive chord in the human understanding. The kingdom of God is within you, so spoke the Gentle Seer of Galilee. Science is now voicing the same great truth. That which is divine cannot cease to live.
 
There are times when we feel a conscious harmony with God and Nature, and the soul's vision brings us unmistakable glimpses and presages of a future life. It is the utterance of the divine to the divine in man.

Science teaches that nothing in the physical universe is lost. "Atoms are indestructible, force is indestructible, the soul is indestructible," says Flammarion. Sir Oliver Lodge, in commenting on this ever-recurring question, observes that there is a unity running through the universe, and a kinship between the human and the divine. Here are some of his further conclusions:

"Meanwhile what has our experience been here? We have not been left solitary. Every newcomer to the planet, however helpless and strange he be, finds friends awaiting him, devoted and self-sacrificing friends eager to care for and protect his infancy and to train him in the ways of this curious world. It is typical of what goes on throughout conscious existence; the guidance, which we exert, and to which we are subject, now, is but a phase of something running through the universe. When the time comes for us to quit this sphere and enter some larger field of action, I doubt not that we shall find there also that kindness and help, and patience and love, without which no existence would be tolerable or even at some stages possible."

Let us listen to Addison speak across the years: "Among other excellent arguments for the immortality of the soul, there is the one drawn from the perpetual progress of the soul to its perfection, without a possibility of ever arriving at it. How can it enter into the thoughts of man, that the soul which is capable of such immense perfection and of receiving new improvements to all eternity, shall fall away into nothing almost as soon as it is created?"

Carlyle says: "Pierce through the time element, glance into the eternal, believe what thou findest written in the sanctuaries of man's soul, even as thinkers in all ages have devoutly read it there; that time and space are not God, but creatures of God, as it is a universal here, so it is an everlasting now. Know of a truth that only the time shadows have perished or are perishable; that the real being of whatever was and whatever is and whatever will be, is even now and forever."

The soul is divine, the real in man. It is the revealer of its own truth, it speaks its own language, the fact of its own eternal existence. "It cannot wander from the present which is infinite to a future which is finite."

A confident reliance on the soul's continued existence is innate in man. It is a universal belief. It is not there to mock man in this universal hope. Nature is not so unjust or cruel. Our vision may not span the gulf that separates us from the unknown, but an unseen power brought us safely to the earth and an abiding trust tells us that it will safely bear us away and care for our every need. He who unerringly guides the bird along the pathless coasts and trackless wastes, "In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright.''

This faith was planted in man for a high moral purpose. It is necessary for man's spiritual growth, for the development of character. It is the potent influence that makes man more than the animal, that leads him along the upward path to the highest moral and spiritual endeavor.
Let us listen to the message of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: "Whatever this globe was put here for, it was not for failure. Whatever the unit was made for, the race was not made for hopelessness. However black the past, however blind the present, a bright future is a philosophical necessity. What has the king, the priest, or the prophet of your dreary creed to look to, compared with the promise open to the obscurest human soul, that knows itself a deathless thing?"

Let us turn to Addison once more: "If man considers his being as circumscribed by the uncertain term of a few years, his designs will be contracted into the same narrow span he imagines is to bound his existence. How can he exalt his thoughts to anything great and noble, who only believes that after a short term on the stage of this world he is to sink into oblivion and to lose his consciousness forever?"

The late Senator Ingalls, in pronouncing a eulogy on the memory of his departed friend, spoke these memorable words:

"If the existence of Burns was but a troubled dream, if his death oblivion, what avails it that the Senate should pause to recount his virtues? Neither veneration nor reverence are due the dead. They are but dust.

"No cenotaph should be reared to preserve for posterity the memory of their achievements. Those who come after them are only to be their successors in annihilation and extinction. If in this world we have only hope and consciousness, duty must be chimera. Our pleasures and passions should be the  guides of conduct, and virtue is indeed a superstition if life ends at the grave.

"Such is the conclusion which the philosophy of negation must accept at last. Such is the felicity of those degrading precepts which make the epitaph the end. If the life of Burns is a taper that is burned out, then we treasure his memory and his example in vain, and the latest prayer of his departing spirit has no more sanctity to us who sooner or later must follow him, than the whisper of winds that stir the leaves of the protesting forest, or the murmur of waves that break upon the complaining shore."

New Thought is in harmony with the latest utterances of science and philosophy, regarding the unity of life, that it pervades and animates all nature and all created beings. Only as we recognize this fact can we find a rational and substantial basis for the brotherhood of man.

To the extent that we realize and understand that the same life, the same divine current, that flows through our being is the life current in all men; that we have the same divine source and are governed by the same universal law, shall we be able to grasp the true meaning and significance of the brotherhood of man.

When we look beyond the outer form and see a divine soul in every man, and can say with Walt Whitman, "I shall meet the real landlord, and know that the great cosmic soul is in and over all, seeking expression," can we truthfully and sincerely address our fellowman as Brother.

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