Page 2 Advertisements Column 2

Press, Volume LII, Issue 9125, 8 June 1895, Page 2

SERMON. and blotted out; carnal mau has been substituted, and tho spiritual man has gone out of tho purpose of God. When human mind began to personify God, to place Infinite Principle upon a pedestal of personality and bad cemented it to finite apprehension, this was the weaving of the web ot aenae that deceives aad betrays. Man has listened to the Serpent which tells him that evil is more powerful than good, that evil is the positive, and good the negative. It is a denial of the God-Father-hood, a betrayal of the man-brotherhood, an acceptance of the appearance for tho real. There is no statement that debases man so much as tbat statement of the fail, no statement so hopelessly untrue, so disastrous in its effects, so absolutely wrong iv all its conclusions and deductions. The doctrine of Salvation contradicts that whole statement ; tbey say that man can be restored by faith, by taking on that condition which realises and interprets the first principle. Faith is that understanding of the statement of Being, and ihe law that governs it, which for ever robs Infinite Economy of the possibility of accident. It plants man in the centre of that Infinite purpose that never changes or varies in any condition, and shows that whatever man's condition may be, he is cradled in the arms of Omnipotent purpose, from which he cannot escape. This is what the re-ligo, the binding back means ; it is justification by faith. Eedemption waits our recognition ; it is the eternal principle of Truth itself in manifestation, and the only thing that tarries aud delays is our consciousness of the redemption, the realisation that it is ours to appropriate and use. When we have made the redemption our own it puts out the false human belief that we ever lost our source and parentage ; it destroys the entire dream that has placed us in the wilderness of beliefs. As long as »ye believe that we are the children of evil, we breathe that atmosphere and seem to ourselves to be evil, as long as we accept tho statement that evil is more potent than good, so long the world seems to be one vast caldron of vice and sin. When we realise that God is our Father, and will leave the ninety and nine to seek us if need be, when we put out of our consciousness the false statement of being, that Infinite Love could ever change, or an accident stop the purpose of Omnipotence, then we rise to the height of God's revelation. We are only held down ub long as human beliefs can deceive us, when we cease to believe that we are lost, we shall find ourselves cradled in the arms of Infinite Love. The Bible gives us two portraits of man, the tirat the man who believed himself to bo lost, who had looked upon tho serpent of appearances and been deceived; the other, the man who had evolved through those conditions to the consciousness of the man who knows. The first is as necessary as the last, everyone mast have the consciousness of the Adam dream before he can manifest the Jesus consciousness, it is a necessary part of Infinite economy. The fleshly man, is as the world believes and accepts, the last is as God knows : the first carries the identity of the dpiritual man through all his wanderings. " Both these men are tho sons of God" they say, and yet they also say God has but one son ; they cannot look through this mortal fleshly representative and see the Jesus waiting for ovolution, they cannot see, behind the mortal representation, the God principle working the manifestation tbat shall end in the Christ. The Jehovah of the Old Testament; is associated all through with the carnal man ; the revelation of the New Testament shows God as the principle of love ; tho Jehovah God was the creation of human beliefs. The representative man had to be tempted by appearances, for he was in the innocence of ignorance that saw without understanding or realisation; the spiritual man, tha product of the God-mind io action through the function of thought, untutored and unevolved, was standing upon the threshold of that evolution that should carry the expression into manifestation. The fall was but as the dropping of a seed on to the ground, to come back and kiss th eye and sense with the manifestatiou of ita expression. Why do men claim relationship only to Adam and not to Jesus Christ ** they have not understood that the mortal man was the representation through which the spiritual man was passing to the manifestation of the Christ. Just as tenderly aa a mother gives her infant those first lessons necessary to its development, does the grand abstract principle of Life, Love, and Truth, move men through the stages that shall produce the manifestation of perfection. Infinite Love and tenderness bends the heaven with ita freightage of solicitude, that yoa shall rise to the place of your belonging ; it cries to you—o child, come out of the wilderness of beliefs, give mc thy heart, enter the palace of Truth and breath the air of freedom that tells you you are the child of the King, understand the sublime truth that when you fall, yoa fall into your Father's arms, who seeks to waken you from this dream with the kiss of peace. 7569