Chapter IV - Creation
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Personal love is little better than personal hate; both
Personal love is little better than personal hate; both
bringeth a snare, for their foundations are error, viz.,
Intelligence in matter, and we cling to them, only be-
cause we have not reached higher; not that God is
found in them, but that we are groping darkly for
Him where He is not, when there is no place where
His voice is not to be heard. Is there one individual
putting off the "old man" and "putting on the new,"
who has not felt the loss of personal pleasures and
pains? yea, and of personal friends, before he found
what belongs not to person, namely, the enlargement
of his being in Love and Wisdom that reaches beyond
personal pain or pleasure. The loss of a friend has,
perhaps, given you the explanation of this. Pain
quickly informs us that personal pleasure is mortal,
and that both are error.
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A sinner believes, momentarily, he is happier for
A sinner believes, momentarily, he is happier for
wrong-doing, and another man that he suffers for doing
right; the one is a belief of personal pleasure, and the
other of pain, but both are false. God is not the
author of personal sense, or discord. Would existence
seem blank without a personal friend? then the time
cometh when you will feel this solitariness, and when
this vacuum must be filled with Principle, instead of
person, and with the Love that is God. When this
hour for development arrives, you will suffer from per-
sonal enemies so severely it will cause you to approach
more readily the science that destroys all personal trust
and gives you higher joys, even as pain is salutary in
taking away a belief of pleasure in sense. These are
the footsteps of science, by which Truth amputates
error. Our individuality is never lost; but the belief
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of Life, Intelligence and Substance in person is lost.
of Life, Intelligence and Substance in person is lost.
Universal Love is individual also, embracing every
idea from infinitesimal to infinity. And so of joy that
issues from Spirit, it is both individual and collective;
you cannot be alone, for God and man are inseparable,
and eternal, and the rich blessing of understanding
your individuality in Spirit and not matter, as Soul,
and not sense, is that you may learn how to follow
Jesus in this saying, "I and the Father are one." This
spiritual understanding of man tends not in the least to
humanize Jehovah, but to turn man from the human
to the divine, from the belief of Life in matter, to the
Life that is truth; to raise the understanding above
frailty, and to pass the barriers of sense into the imper-
sonal evermore of being. That man epitomizes the uni-
verse, and is the body of God, is apparent to me not
only from the logic of Truth, but in the phenomenon,
that is sometimes before my spiritual senses, and which
the late celebrated naturalist, Agassiz, saw in his micro-
scopic examinations of a vulture's egg. We had made
the discovery through spiritual sense, that the body of
Soul embraces the universe, and that man is the full idea
of Life, Substance and Intelligence, before seeing this
corroborative evidence of Professor Agassiz's discov-
eries, in which he saw the atmosphere, sun, moon and
stars, represented in the ovum of a bird; the point
where the so-called embryotic life is formed appearing
as the sun. Intelligence outside of matter, embraces
every idea of man and of the universe; this Intelligence
is Soul, and man borrows all Life and intelligence from
this, his Principle, even as the earth borrows light and
heat from the sun. Water corresponds in figurative