not even the Son, but the Father; but one thing is certain, that sin, sickness, and death will continue their delusions until we reach that Utopian goal.
The footsteps of thought, as they pass higher from material standpoints, are slow, and portend a long night to the traveller; but the guardians of the gloom are the angels of His presence, the spiritual intuitions that tell us when the night is far spent and the dawn approacheth. Whoso opens the way in Science is a pilgrim and stranger, marking out the path for generations yet unborn.
The history of our country, like many other histories, illustrates the might of Mind, and shows human power to be proportionate to the embodiment of right motives. A few immortal sentences, stimulated by justice, have broken fetters, and abolished whipping-posts and slave-markets. Tyranny will go down in blood, and the breath of freedom come from the cannon's mouth.
To legally abolish slavery in the United States was good, but its abolition in the human mind is a more difficult task. The question of right, the Divine Mind must decide. He must destroy the human motive of slavery, lest it germinate in new forms of tyranny. We still have men and women of all races in bondage, ignorant how to obtain their freedom. The rights of man were vindicated in a single instance, when African slavery was abolished over a small portion of our globe; but that instance was only prophetic of further steps toward the banishment of slavery, in all forms and under all circumstances.
This book was written years before I read Dr. Channing on Spiritual Freedom: —
I call that mind free which masters the senses, which protects itself against animal appetites, which contemns pleasure and pain in comparison with its own energy, which penetrates beneath the body and recognizes its own reality and greatness, which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.
I call that mind free which escapes the bondage of matter, which, instead of stopping at the material universe and making it a prison wall, parses beyond it to its Author, and finds in the radiant signatures which it everywhere bears of the Infinite Spirit, helps to its own spiritual enlargement.
I call that mind free . . . which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad not to supersede but to quicken and exalt its own energies.
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I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles which it has deliberately espoused.
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I call that mind free which, through confidence in God and in the power of virtue, has cast off all fear but that of wrong-doing, which no menace or peril can enthrall, which is calm in the midst of tumults, and possesses itself though all else be lost.
I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat itself and copy the past, . . . which does not enslave itself to precise rules, but which forgets what is behind, listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.
I call that mind free which is jealous of its own freedom, which guards itself from being merged in others, which guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.
In fine, I call that mind free which, conscious of its affinity with God, and confiding in his promises by Jesus Christ, devotes itself faithfully to the unfolding of all its powers, which passes the bounds of time and. death, which hopes to advance forever, and which finds inexhaustible power . . . in the prospect of immortality.
How grand his conclusion, “Such is the spiritual freedom Christ came to give.”
The voice of God in behalf of the African slave still echoed in our land, when a new abolitionist swelled the keynote of universal freedom, asking a fuller acknowledgment of the rights of man as a son of God, — that the fetters, of matter be stricken from the human mind, and its freedom won, not with bayonet and blood, not through human warfare, but through Divine Science.
In 1866, higher than the platform of human rights, I built the next staging; and built it for diviner claims, made not through code or creed, but in demonstration of “peace on earth and good-will to man.” The yoke of human codes cramps the human faculties which need freedom. I would rend asunder the cankering fetters, and give man his birthright of allegiance to his Maker.
The lame, the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the sick, the sensual, I would save from the slavery of their own beliefs, and from the educational systems of the Pharaohs who hold the children of Israel in bondage.
I saw before me the Red Sea and the wilderness, but I pressed on, through faith in Truth, trusting this strong deliverer to guide into the land of Christian Science, where fetters fall, and the rights of the Spirit-man's freedom are known and acknowledged. I saw the sick wearing out years of servitude to an unreal master, even the belief that the body governs, rather than Mind.
By universal consent mortal belief has constituted itself a law to bind mortals to sickness, sin, and death; but this custom of belief is misnamed material law, and the physician who upholds it is mistaken in his methods. The law of mortal mind, conjectural and speculative, should be void, should be trampled under foot by the higher law of immortal Mind, that created man for dominion instead of enslavement.
I saw that the law of mortal belief included all error, and must be exposed, denied, superseded; that the claims of illusion's slaves must be explained away, even as the oppressive State laws were disputed, and the slave taught his freedom.
The higher law of the Divine Mind must end human bondage, or mortals will go on as did the colored race, ignorant of their inalienable rights, and submitting to the most hopeless slavery; because their masters enforced ignorance as the accompaniment of servitude.
Let history record it, that Massachusetts succored a fugitive slave in 1853, and put her foot on a tyrannical prohibitory law, regulating the practice of medicine, in 1880. Had her sister States followed this example, and sustained our Constitution and Bill of Rights, it would have saved them from a departure from that immortal sentiment of the Declaration, “Man is endowed by his Maker with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The oppressive State statutes touching medicine remind one of those words of Madame Roland, as she knelt to a Goddess of Liberty erected upon a guillotine, “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”
Discerning the rights of man, we cannot fail to foresee the doom of all oppression. Slavery is not the legitimate state of man. God made him free. Paul said, “I was free born.” So should all men be. Justice and Truth make free; injustice and error lead into captivity.
Divine Science grasps the standard of liberty, and cries “Follow me; escape from the bondage of sickness, sin, and death.” Jesus marked out the way. Citizens of the world, accept the glorious import of “the liberty of the sons of God,” and be free! This is your divine right. Illusion, not law, has bound you, entangled your free limbs, crippled your capacities, defaced the tablet of your mind with error, enfeebled your body.
Causation is Mind, not matter. The body but expresses mortal mind. You possess this body and you make it harmonious or discordant, according to the images of thought impressed upon it. You embrace the body in thought, and should delineate your thoughts in health, not in sickness. You should banish the thought of disease, the belief that matter holds you in mystery and slavery. As immortal, you have a perfect, indestructible form. It is belief in mortality that makes your body discordant, according to the ignorance, fear, and belief that govern it.
If God had constituted material laws to govern man, which, disobeyed, make him ill, Christ could not have disregarded those laws by healing in direct opposition to them, and in defiance of the material condition, instead of through consultation with it.
The enslavement of