Marlow, September ——.

"Dear John: I hope you are as anxiously awaiting this letter as I awaited the second lecture. It was splendid, so comprehensive, and above all, so practical. It throws light on many puzzling points, and I am delighted so far with what seems so plain and true.

"Some of the members of the class seemed quite shocked at some of the statements, but it is not strange that they should seem startling to one who has never thought on the subject, for indeed, I should think it would take a good while to get used to reasoning that is directly opposite the world's first conclusions; still we are looking for results that are quite contrary to what the world looks for, so we can afford to collide with its opinions. When Mrs. Pearl came into the class room, all turned to look at her and every ear was ready to listen.

"In yesterday's lesson we made a statement of God as the only Mind of the universe, the Great Reality beside whom there is absolutely nothing in existence; but as we look around at the scenes of suffering and poverty and ignorance, we are mightily tempted to disbelieve such a statement.

"'Talk of omnipotent Light in the midst of midnight darkness!' you exclaim. Ah, but you are to remember we are talking of the real creation; the invisible and unapparent instead of the visible and apparent; the changeless and eternal instead of the evanescent and decaying.

"If God is the only Reality, His creation is the only real creation. The word real is applied to that which actually exists, which forever is, not to that which seems or appears; therefore, in speaking of the real we mean the changeless and invisible.

"If God is the only Mind, His are the only real thoughts, and thoughts are invisible to the eye, but discernible to the mind or consciousness.

"If God is everywhere, there is no possible place or space in the universe where God is not; hence He is all there is. One of our modern prophets wisely wrote: 'Has not a deeper meditation taught certain of every clime and age that the Where and the When so mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern them where they mount up out of the celestial Everywhere and Forever. Have not all nations conceived their God as omnipresent and eternal, as existing in a universal Here, an everlasting Now?

"'Think well, thou too wilt find that space is but a mode of our human sense, so likewise Time. There is no space and no time. We are—we know not what; light sparkles floating in the ether of Deity. So this so solid seeming world, were, after all, but an air-image—our me the only reality.'

"This me is the spiritual self, the individual idea of God, His image and likeness.

"What then, about this body, which is not spiritual, you ask? What about the material universe?

"Wait a moment. Think of the premise. As God the invisible is the changeless, what is the variable, fleeting, visible unreality? The real is everlasting, the unreal is transitory. The real is called Spirit, the unreal matter.

"What is Spirit? The underlying omnipresent substance that we call God.

"What is matter? The counterfeit, shadow, emblem, showing that Spirit exists or is.

"We read in a very ancient Hindoo Scripture: 'Those who have understanding, whose thought is pure, see the entire universe as the picture of Thy wisdom;' and the thoughtful Carlyle said: 'All visible things are emblems.... Matter represents some idea and bodies it forth.'

"These thoughts are in perfect accord with the principles laid down in our premise, hence we find that as we believe matter, believe the body to be the real creation, we are believing a falsity. This is the idol we are worshiping instead of the true and only God. The grand visible universe in which we see so many beauties, so many charms, is but the mighty object lesson before us by which we may learn of the infinite, invisible All. As Theodore Parker said: 'The universe itself is a great autograph of the Almighty.'

"The characters used in mathematics do not constitute the science but merely represent to the senses the invisible ideas of the principle of mathematics. The visible does not constitute the invisible, but may carry its messages as we learn to read its poetic and mystic pages. The visible speaks to the mortal nature, but the invisible beyond and above, speaks to the immortal nature.

"Since we find matter to be so totally opposite the real, there is no other name for it than as the unreal, and the unreal being a counterfeit of the real, must be a lie, as the nature of a lie is to make false claims, pretending they are true.

"Matter is a counterfeit because it is not genuine or of God, because it is changeable and fleeting, because being limited to a visible form, it must have finite limitations and can merely give finite conceptions.

"Taking it as a sign of something infinite, we learn of the infinite. All the students, teachers, learned men and women of the world have added to the world's spiritual ideas revealed by their study of the finite as well as their intuitive knowledge of the infinite. Charles Kingsley gives us a hint of how to learn: 'Do not study matter for its own sake but as the countenance of God. Try to extract every line of beauty, every association, every moral reflection, every inexpressible feeling from it.'

"Our ideas of matter must then be entirely changed, and we must learn to look beyond the seeming, to the true. We have believed in the reality of matter and material environment because of reasoning from the false basis that man is material or that he is a mixture of material and spiritual. To believe that the flesh and blood of our sister or brother is their real self, is to believe God capable of creating something utterly unlike himself (John iii, James i.) which may suffer, sin and die, and if He is all perfection, He can not know imperfection. If He is all spirit, He can not know or be matter. Keep before your mind the perfection, omnipotence, omnipresence of Spirit, God or Principle, and you will see more and more clearly the inconsistency of anything opposite Him emanating from Him.

"Believing in matter as a reality, we have endowed it with all the power of the real, have ascribed to it life, substance and intelligence, when it possesses neither.

"Where is the life when the body dies? If life were inherent in the physical body, could it ever cease to be? God the eternal life principle can not cease to be. The life manifested through the body is the life which is God and can not be affected by the decay or disappearance of the body.

"The invisible essence of life is also the true substance, the reliable and changeless something, upon which we may forever depend. We use the word substance in its etymological sense (from sub, under and stare, to stand), and since Spirit or Mind is the reality that underlies every material or sensible object, there is no substance to the object itself.

"Plato taught that 'ideas, are the only real things.' Ideas are expressions of thoughts, and thoughts are expressions of mind, and this reasoning brings us back to God as Mind and Mind as Cause. Admitting Mind or Spirit to be the life and substance back of or expressing itself through the body, we may easily see that intelligence can not exist apart from Mind, and hence can not belong to matter.

"That the mind or intelligence is seated in the gray convolutions of the brain, is held by the materialists, and yet Dr. Laycock affirms 'that matter is fundamentally nothing more than that which is the seat of motion to ends, of which mind is the source and cause.' Professor Huxley crowns the statement by saying, 'That which perceives or knows is mind or spirit, and therefore, that knowledge which the senses give us, is, after all, a knowledge of spiritual phenomena.' Professor Faraday held to the immateriality of physical objects.

"In the language of Jesus the Christ, we are told, 'Spirit is all, the flesh profiteth nothing;' thus from all classes of conscientious but confessedly diverse thinkers, we find statements of universal truth, and this is what the hungry, starving world is seeking with more earnestness than ever before.

"Since there is no life, substance or intelligence in matter, it will be comparatively easy to prove that there can be no sensation, for where there is no life in the body, there can be no feeling. Even the physiologists tell us mind must know pain before it can be located in the body. We state therefore a theorem which is practically demonstrated; there is no sensation in matter.

"As we visit penitentiaries, reform schools and hospitals, as we read and hear the startling statements of press and pulpit, we grow disconsolate and heavy-hearted over the awful power and reality of evil, forgetting again that He who is perfect goodness can not behold evil or in any way permit its existence, any more than heat can permit cold, or light can permit darkness.

"Granting the omnipotence of Good, where is there any room for its opposite?

"If there is but one Power, and that omnipotent and perfect, there can be no evil in reality; hence we are dealing with another lie when we judge according to appearances, which Jesus said we should not do. It is really disloyalty to God to impute to Him all misery, pain, sickness and suffering caused by the evil and ignorance of man. We are told: 'Let your soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of God.' Because we have not done so, but have believed in every claim power, we suffer from 'evils which our own misdeeds have wrought,' as Milton wrote, or, in the words of Emerson, 'we miscreate our own evils.'

"Jeremiah said: 'It is your sins that have withholden the good things from you.'

"According to Webster, 'sin is a transgression of the law of God.' There is but one law—the perfect and unchangeable Truth. Any deviation from Truth is error, and error is sin. In proportion as we deviate from the strictly true, then, we sin. Because we admit things to be true which are not true, we admit, then commit sin, and hence suffer for sin. 'Know ye not that to whomsoever ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are, whether of sin unto death or obedience unto righteousness,' wrote Paul. We first think wrong. Sin is of the mind, not of the body.

"To acknowledge the reality of sin or evil is a transgression of the law, because, according to our established premise, it cannot be true.

"Through a misconception of our relation to God, and a belief in the power of evil, we are obliged to admit the existence of sin, sickness, and death, neither of which can be true in the presence of God, as the only Reality, in which or in whom are all things that eternally are, not that temporarily appear.

"We have believed in a mind or power of thought opposite and contrary to God, when in reality there can be nothing opposite or contrary to eternal Mind. We have believed ourselves endowed with a mind separate from God, and ourselves subject to temptation from some cause not Good. We have believed in minds, when there is but one Mind.

"This false force, this false mind, is variously called the evil or carnal mind, the mind of the flesh, the old man, the serpent, the devil, the adversary. It is simply the opposite or contradictory of the Good, the god of evil.

"Beside every true or positive statement there is a false or negative claim, and in so far as we are ignorant of the true, we are in bondage to the false. To believe the claims of error is to be bound; to know the reality of truth is to be free. To believe in a mind or power separate or opposite from God, is to be subject to any suppositions or beliefs formulated by that mind or negative thought.

"That we are spiritually perfect is true, but it is necessary for us to prove that fact by 'working out our own salvation,' by manifesting the positive or God quality of thought through our life and actions, and the only way to be filled with good thought is to recognize and acknowledge the Good only as the real.

"This error, tempter or devil, was spoken of by Jesus as having no truth, as being a liar, and the father or cause of lies (John viii: 44). Instead of devil (which is only another name for evil or the slanderer), or 'carnal mind', as Paul called it, we find mortal thought a better term for the expression of this power of thinking.

"'Why have we this power of thinking wrong thoughts when there is but one good and only Mind?' you ask. As God's idea, in the image and likeness of Mind that thinks, we have the power of recognition, the power to be or not to be, the possibility to become sons of God. We have the power to distinguish, to judge, to know; we have the spirit that ever leads us on and on in truth.

"But here is where we fail. In our ignorance or limited state of unfoldment, we have mistaken the symbol for that which is symbolized matter is the symbol, as also the body, we have judged according to appearances instead of righteous or strictly true judgment; we have yielded to a belief in sin, hence are servants of sin.

"The conception of matter as having power, is based on appearances, and because we have delegated to it a power, have acknowledged it as an entity, separate from the eternal mind, it has enslaved us.

"Reasoning in this way we find everywhere two opposites or contradictories to be recognized and judged, as the visible and the invisible, the material and the spiritual, the false and the true, the mortal and the immortal, the unreal and the real, the negative and the positive.

"Judging of the true by that which is changeless and eternal, we can decide at once on those qualities or attributes belonging to or describing what is true, and by knowing what is true, we can readily distinguish it from the erroneous.

"We have considered these great errors or negatives which the world has believed and still believes in, and they must be dealt with according to scientific law.

"Through all the ages of Christianity have been heard the words of the Master: 'If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me;' but who has understood it? The letter of the law has indeed been observed by many earnest followers of Jesus to a degree not considered necessary in this age, but what has it demonstrated? What has come of all the fasting and renunciation, the cruel asceticism and severe discipline?

"Do these conscientious disciples give an unmistakable proof of their discipleship by showing the signs that must follow the true believer? How can they when they talk of sin, sickness and death; of things contradictory to the nature, power and presence of God?

"Then they must not have understood the spiritual import of these words of Jesus to 'deny himself.' Deny means, according to Webster, 'to contradict; to declare not to be true; to disclaim connection with; to refuse to acknowledge; to disown.' Jesus meant deny the mortal thought, the false self; refuse to acknowledge it as having any authority; and it is only as the Christ follower proves this to be the true mode of denying self, that he can speak with authority as to the scientific method of dealing with all the errors to which mortal thought gives birth.

"No other way has brought the desired result; hence we confidently assert that all these mistakes agreed to and participated in by mankind must be emphatically, persistently, scientifically denied.

"Systematically and repeatedly we say:

• "1. There is no life, substance or intelligence in matter.
• "2. There is no sensation or causation in matter.
• "3. There is no reality in matter.
• "4. There is no reality in sin, sickness or death.
• "5. There is no reality in evil.
• "6. There is no reality in mortal thought.

"This is denying the self recognized by the world. This is the life that must be laid down, that must be sacrificed, lost.

"Humanity has proven its subjection to these errors. Now, by its faithful rejection of them, let it prove them lies, for the force of a lie is always annulled by rejection. This proves the law referred to by Jesus when he made a denial of self the first duty of his disciples.

"In denying, it is necessary to say the words over and over again; it may be mechanically at first, but say them over, several hours at a time, if possible.

"More is accomplished by concentration than anybody is aware, and the repetition of the words helps to concentrate the thought. First repeat the whole list of denials, then select one on which to spend most of the time for several days. The denial of matter, for instance, makes us more spiritually minded.

"When denying, try to realize there is no space, but that anywhere you send your thought it will go, and as you think or say the words, you will be denying error for the world as well as for yourself, as every thought is world-wide in its influence, and helps to free or bind humanity, even as it is truth or error.

"To deny is to put out of mind, to erase, as it were, the false beliefs. Be earnest, be faithful, and you will have an abundant reward.

"This, dear John, is the substance of the lecture as nearly as I can give it. After Mrs. Pearl had finished the lesson, she requested the class to sit in silence a few moments and together hold the thought, 'There is no reality in matter;' after which we were dismissed with this benediction: 'May we realize that God is, that spirit is the only reality.'

"The lessons are always opened by silent prayer, which I have forgotten to mention before.

"Please, dear husband, observe these rules and study every assertion as carefully as though you were in the class. You, and Grace, and Kate, can accomplish a great deal together; but by all means don't pass judgment till you have carefully examined all the evidence.

"Tell me all about the children. Such details will greatly comfort me, for I must confess that to-night I am the least bit homesick.

"Good night,
"Your loving Marion."