The last Sunday of a year suggests a moral balancing of accounts. I will not burden you with retrospect; what is the good? Nor will I waste your time with anticipations—always a futile speculation. The only thing that matters is the present. How do we stand—now, to-day? That is important both to pupil and to pupil-teacher. There is something intensely pathetic, something that arouses an echo in my own heart, in the way Paul interweaves the "we" and the "ye" in that sentence. This great prototype, "We live if ye stand fast," of all subsequent ministrants to souls recognizes the close interdependence of spiritual welfare between himself and those he had been commissioned to teach. The truth of human solidarity, and the responsibility of each soul to minister to its neighbour, reaches its climax in such a relationship as that existing between Paul and the Church in Thessalonica. He had laboured to kindle the dormant capacities of their souls, while training his own. His life had not been easy. Festus said he was mad. The magistrates at Philippi scourged and imprisoned him. Demas forsook him, and his colleague Peter withstood him. Moreover, he had constant weakness of health, his thorn in the flesh tormented him, but the one only thing he cared for was that souls awakened under his ministry should not fall back. He speaks as if his very life hung upon their continued perseverance in the truth he had taught. "We live," he says—"we live, if ye stand fast in the Lord." It is as if he had said, "Ye are the very travail of my soul; life will not be worth living to me; it will be darkened by shadow, if ye, the souls whom I have influenced, fall away when I am no longer with you." More than that he felt that he would be measured by the result of his work. I imagine that all ministers must feel the same, and, without presumption, may in the same way suggest to their people, as one additional motive for striving for the grace of perseverance, the motive of contributing to the life-joy of the human instrument through whom they have gained some light. The thought obtrudes itself aggressively at one of these way-marks, these sign-posts in the passage of time, which remind one of the uncertainty as to the continuance of existing conditions. Not that "uncertainty" matters in the least. I dislike the word "uncertainty"; the one certainty is that all is well, as God is All and God is Love; when you know that, you don't talk about "uncertainty":
"All unknown the future lies—Let it rest.
God who veils it from our eyes—Knows best.
Ask not what shall be to-morrow—Be content,
Take the cup of joy or sorrow—God has sent."
Of course, every pupil-teacher in God's school knows that he, personally, is nothing—nothing but a voice crying in the Wilderness. Nevertheless, he has one desire in the fulfilment of which his happiness here, and perhaps in the other dimension, is closely concerned; it is that his fellow-pupils should "stand fast in the Lord." "In the Lord," mark you—"in the Lord." Not in fidelity to some ethical standard—not in the shibboleths of some acceptable so-called school of thought, not in the excluding externalisms of some particular denomination—those are all incidents which have their place—but "in the Lord." To define exhaustively the meaning of "in the Lord" would be to recapitulate the whole curriculum; but to be "in the Lord" is a spiritual acquisition attained by systematic thinking into God, and "standing fast in the Lord" is using the will to compel the conscious mind to hold the thought till it becomes a normal attitude. To be "in the Lord" is to have discovered your true relation as an individual to the Infinite Originating Spirit. It is to have recognized that God is known only by the mind, and that mental force is "that you have the likest God within your soul"; and with the aid of that mental force to have thought yourself out of objective Deism into the truth of the universally diffused Creative Mind, Immanent, Transcendent, and Paternal. It is to have realized what Wordsworth calls the Sense Sublime of—
"Something far more deeply interfused,
A Motion and a Spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
This "sense sublime," which is spiritual consciousness, is a sense which, once awakened, Materialism can never stamp out, though it is very possible to be unfaithful to it. It is a thrilling consciousness of penetrating Divine Mind everywhere. This "sense sublime" is an hereditary instinct in our nature which makes "feeling after God" automatic. This "sense sublime," added to the natural demand for a conception of God under some conditions of personality, has been the foundation of all religions. It was the foundation of the higher Deism of the Jewish theology, which possessed beautiful characteristics in spite of its anthropomorphism. Isaiah was full of the "sense sublime," and he bids us create "thought-forms" and think of Infinite Spirit as men would think of their mothers—"As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you." "Use your imagination," he would say, "to conceive that the tenderness of a mother feebly represents the watchful love, the protecting care, of Jehovah towards the human race; for a human mother may forget her child, 'Yet will I not forget thee,' saith the Lord."
Beautiful and consoling as is Isaiah's conception of God as Universal Mother, it is still Deistic, it still leaves the Infinite Intelligence as a Person, which He is not. It does not answer the philosophic problem of how mentally to specialize the Infinite Mind while at the same time preserving mentally the conception of its universality. The Gospel of the "Word made Flesh," the revelation of the Incarnation, solves that problem.
In the Christian revelation the words "Absolute," "Infinite Mind," and the rest, are relieved of impersonality and vagueness. We see that earth's teeming millions are not created, designed, or fashioned, or even generated in the physical sense. They are to God what words are to thoughts—expressions, utterances of the Infinite Mind of God. Each human being is an individual vehicle or life-centre in which the Infinite Mind expresses, manifests itself. Each human life is the reproduction in an individuality of qualities which the Infinite Creative Mind perceives within itself and desires to realize. Now, if the sum-total of these universally diffused qualities of the Infinite Mind could be specialized in one absolutely perfect individual life-centre, we should be able to recognize the personalness of the Infinite Mind and estimate the qualities and principles of the Originating Spirit. And in Jesus we have this unique specimen, this concentration in one individual life-centre, and we know what God is because in Jesus dwelt "all the fulness of the God-head bodily." More than this. The Universal, specialized in Jesus, enables us to understand how God is immanent in us; for the Lord Jesus declared that our relationship to the Infinite Mind was essentially and potentially of the same nature as His, that we too have "the Father in us." He emphatically declares: "I go to My Father and to your Father." Thus is Jesus the Mediator, or Uniting Medium, between God and man. Thus does "God in Christ reconcile the world to Himself," for in the perfectly God-inhabited man is revealed the transcendent truth that God and man, in inherent eternal unity, are one. When we think into this self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, when we recognize what it implies—namely, that the personality of Infinite Spirit is manifested in the objective Christ, and that the mystic Christ is in all, and that every human being is a potential Jesus—we have realized what it is to be "in the Lord." If only we could stand fast in this truth! If we restless, capricious human beings could but exercise our wills, our power of self-compulsion, in holding our conscious minds fast to this thought, it would reconstitute the whole of our character and being, because it would readjust our mental relations with the material environment and sense-impressions in which we live.
It alters the whole outlook on life to know you personally are an idea in the mind of God, and that you have the power within you to identify yourself with God's purpose. Your entire theology is expanded; for to begin to know God as He is in Himself is to become a convinced Universalist and a denier of the essentiality of evil, though you hate evil as you never hated it before. So to be "in the Lord" is not to be staggered by the existence of evil. The imperfection that seems to mar the perfection of the economy of the world is recognized as a necessary condition for the production of the highest good, one of its objects being to make you hate it. The proposition which I constantly reiterate is clear, logical, conclusive. God is All, All is God; God is the only ousia (substance) in the universe. This negation of good which we hate, this contrast, either is or is not part of universal order. If it is part of universal order, then, in spite of all seeming paradox, it is of the "all things that work together for good." If it is not part of His universal order, then the philosophy of Infinity is shattered, and we are confronted with another creative originator in the universe, in everlasting antagonism to the good God—a paralyzing Dualism, which is only another name for Atheism. God is All, God is Love, God is Omnipotent, and God is Immanent. Therefore it is certain that a hidden purpose of benevolence and love, incomparably higher than would be accomplished by the abolition of what we call evil, must have actuated the Infinite Mind when He "thought-created" phenomena. Clearly it is an impossibility, even to Omnipotence, to make moral beings, in whom He could realize His highest quality of love, without giving them a measure of volition, which volition had to pass the test of the complex education and temptations of earth-life, with all that it entails; and His purpose is so high and glorious that its ultimate consummation will justify and vindicate all the apparently inexplicable means He adopts in bringing it about.
Once more—though I fear I cause that string to vibrate too often, but out of the heart the mouth speaketh—to "stand fast in the Lord" is to be unspeakably uplifted and supported when crushed under the sorrow of bereavement. "Standing fast in the Lord"—you know that every separate individual human being is a product of the Divine Mind, imaging forth an image of Itself on the plane of the material. Consequently, each Individual and the Originating Spirit are essentially inseverable. Therefore human souls strongly linked by love are inseverable, and, though visibly separated, are merged in one another, and spirit with spirit does meet. "The Communion of Saints" is to you who are "standing in the Lord" not a theological dogma, but a fact of being. You do not believe, you know, that the casting off of the body, the passing out of sight of the temporary corporeal enslavement, causes no separation between you and those who are living now in a world of duller life, where the limitations of the physical do not exist. We may be unconscious of the intensity and reality of this communion, because our spiritual self, our real man, is still in the educative isolation of the flesh; but the beloved departed know that the only real home of the spirit is the Universal, and that there is no limitation of time or space where they are, and that as thought-transference on the physical plane is acknowledged as a scientific fact, nothing can hinder the transmission of mind-impulse on the spiritual plane, especially when we remember that there is a force greater, according to St. Paul, than Faith, and greater than Hope, and that is Love. If Faith can penetrate into the spirit-world, cannot Love? God is Love, and "Love never faileth."
If you are "standing fast in the Lord" the vibration of your love penetrates into God's hidden world. The method is the mental process of thinking yourself into conscious realization of the Presence of Universal Spirit, and then, with that thought sustained, thinking strongly of the loved one you want in the spirit world. They catch the impulse of your telepathic, God-inspired, love-thought, and respond to your spirit, and sometimes you will be definitely conscious of the response through the percipient mind. Another test of standing fast in the Lord is the increase of your usefulness in the world. The service for others, of one who is standing fast in the Lord, will manifest itself mainly in three spheres: the sphere of action, of example, of intercession. First you will have a new enthusiasm and desire to work in the sphere of definite remedial activity on this temporal, this material plane. You know that there is nothing but God, therefore you recognize that the material plane is one of God's spheres of love and sacrifice. Being "in the Lord" does not imply a life of indolent contemplation. It implies "coming to the help of the Lord against the mighty," like that consecrated sister of humanity, Sister Dora. You remember, I have often repeated it, how, after a laborious day in her hospital, her rest was constantly broken by the sound of the bell placed at the head of her bed to be rung whenever any sufferer wanted her, and on that bell was engraved the motto, "The Master is come and calleth for thee." I often try to remind myself of that. As every member of the race is God-inhabited, every claim made upon us—though of course we must consider each claim with due discretion—is the Master's voice saying, "Remember, I in them, and thou in Me, that they may be perfect in us."