Death comes when work in the objective is finished for the time, through lack of knowledge to prolong the process.

The coarser body is laid off, and it steps out of its encasement into the finer vibrations of the spiritual planes. In this work which it has done the Earth environment made it as necessary to materialize spirit as to spiritualize matter.

In the last analysis we shall doubtless find that spirit and matter are identical.

How, then, can we call this a "dream life" and assert that we live in the unreal? Does not this very attitude result in an unbalanced mind?

"Life is real"— death is the illusion. Our lessons in matter are not to be evaded with "denials." As well might the schoolboy "deny" his alphabet and his tables in arithmetic because he had not yet discovered their relation to philosophy and the propositions of Euclid. Let us learn the fundamental principles of life, and we shall understand at last the macrocosm.

The different experiences of our lives are like chapters in a book.

Taken separately they seem to have but little meaning to us.

Their real significance comes from the chapters that went before and those that follow.

When bound together in a completed volume, we can see the relation of one experience to another. We will then perceive the harmony and understand the narrative.

Do not lament that your friend is on the "animal plane." It is a great thing to be a good animal. Many who think themselves beyond that point of evolution have not reached it yet. There is no phase of growth that should be despised. All are alike good; all men pass over the same road, and sight its milestones at the same points of the journey, though in different hours. Some loiter and others press on more earnestly. We should not quarrel with the wayfarer who lingers by the roadside. It is his privilege; and at some other point beyond, his pace may take him far ahead of us. There is no reason for haste. Every soul knows its appointed times and places.

We need not regret that those of others do not always coincide with ours.

VIII.

A PIVOTAL PHILOSOPHY.

"The light that is within thee."

THE scientific world is just beginning to conjecture that light is an interior condition. The cat sees in an atmosphere that to the human eye is darkness. Among men there is an infinite variety of vision. An environment may be opaque to one and transparent to another.

The discovery of the X-rays has demonstrated the existence of a radiant energy that infolds us, a light within the light, and of a vibration so rapid that it is invisible until we have provided special conditions for its manifestation. Spectrum analysis has revealed more of the nature of light and color than we had ever dreamed possible to discover. The man with the seeing eye lives in a different world from that of the blind man. Let us study the correspondence of this truth in philosophy.

We hear much of the New Thought. What is "new" as distinguished from the "old"? In the old thought we sought cause and consequence outside ourselves. We had an absent God in a far-off heaven. We had a Devil, who "went about as a roaring lion." We had a Mediator, who "came down" from heaven as a sacrifice for sin and re

turned to make intercession for us. We had a Holy Spirit that must be implored to "descend" upon us. We dwelt upon Providence, fate and destiny as governing powers. Heredity and environment were influences which relieved us to a large degree of personal responsibility. Disease, poverty, and sin were from without, and were contagious, infectious, and epidemic. Our motives were almost wholly in the external. "What will people think?” was constantly in our minds-implanted in the nursery and developed in society. "Henceforth remember that the eyes of the world are upon you" was solemnly enjoined upon the convert at the altar rail. We lived in fear of God, of the Devil, and of one another; as the old hymn so aptly expressed it, "Fightings without and fears within." This was considered the divinely appointed order of things, and we were taught that our salvation must be worked out "with fear and trembling." Man's hope of salvation was mostly from without, and his only dream of a real happiness lay in the misty realms of a remote paradise. So much for the old thought.

The new thought may be truly called a pivotal philosophy. It changes all the old bearings of life and brings everything to a centre within the individual himself. It teaches him to think. It brings him to a poise-a pivot in himself. It withdraws his scattered thought-forces from the externals of

life and shows him limitless results to be accomplished through concentration. It teaches absolute freedom, with absolute responsibility for all the past, present, and future.

God exists within; and, as a fountain cannot rise higher than its source, the only conception of God possible to each life is limited by its own experience of divine impulses. Every human life is a magnet which, through the law of vibratory affinity, must draw to each man precisely what he elects — no more and no less. We owe neither our good fortune nor our so-called misfortune to one another. The supreme motive of life is the realization of being.

The New Thought teaches that all heredity, environment, and interior conditions are controlled by the soul, and that man's life is not governed to the least degree by any outside circumstances. He simply responds to these as they touch the chords of sympathetic vibration within himself. The New Thought reveals to him the absolute equities of existence. It shows the objective life as plastic clay moulded at will through the intelligent use of subjective consciousness. It increases activities by revealing powers and showing man how to keep his hand upon the lever. It places under control the marvellous forces of a universal energy. It radi

cally alters all man's

relations to God, to himself,

and to his fellows. It teaches him to live at the