Then, again, standing fast in the Lord gives you a new power of expressing, manifesting, the Immanent God by your life, your example. The highest duty in life is manifesting God. You will find that the words in my prayer, "May my highest aim this day be to manifest God and to make others happy," become your normal attitude. It will be as natural to you now to give a gentle answer to a deliberate provocation as formerly it was natural to give an irritable reply. You will take your own line on principles of moral rectitude, heedless of the strife of tongues, but with perfect respect for the expressed opinions of others who wholly differ from you. Then it is hardly necessary to point out that "Standing fast in the Lord" is to be a power in intercession. God has taught us that there is no sphere in which the soul, that really recognizes its relation to Infinite Spirit, can more effectually help and bless others. I cannot define these "thoughtographs" of mental causation on the spiritual plane, but it is impossible to measure the cumulative force of united intercession.

Intercession does not mean that you have importuned an objective Omnipotent Being to do a kindness to one of His subjects, though in human language we seem thus to express it. It is, that having found your true relation as an individual to the Universal Originating Spirit, and your sympathy and pity being drawn to some case of need, you specialize, by the power of your thought, the All-surrounding Infinite Love, and focus it, direct it, to the particular case of need, and Infinite Love thinks, wills, and expresses Himself through you. When Paul said, "Brethren, pray for us," he knew that loving, sympathizing, healing thoughts, projected like wireless-telegraphy vibrations from united God-inhabited hearts, were the life of God in man reaching forth to quicken, stimulate, and support a brother man. I have been upheld in physical and mental weakness by a stream of kindly sympathy, radiating Divine creative energy. I once before expressed my gratitude in the words of an American divine:

"Beneath the shelter which your prayers have reared,

Quiet and blest,

The storm which struck me down no longer feared,

Secure I rest."

That is what this wireless spiritual telegraphy does—it frees the mind from fear. To free the mind from fear is to strike at the root of many a physical and mental trouble.

I have been withheld recently from taking an active part in this Divine work, but I have a sheaf of letters of thanksgiving. I give extracts from two:

You prayed for a young girl who was about to face an examination for a post and who was tormented with nervous headache. The letter says: "It was a positive miracle; there was not a headache after that night, and the examination was passed most successfully."

Again, you prayed two Sundays in succession for a youth in the North of England. The letter says: "He was dying; the doctors had given him up, and he himself had no thought of recovery. He is well and a new man; people are expressing the greatest astonishment, declaring that no one understands it. They do not know the explanation." These cases are not that an Objective external God did something kind because we asked Him, but that the Immanent Universal Mind used our sympathy, and our yearning to help, in bringing about that which He also desired, but for the fulfilment of which He needed the focussed love and desire of the individual life-centres in which He is Immanent. That is one way of "coming to the help of the Lord against the Mighty."

Now these recapitulations imperfectly express my meaning when I ask you to "Stand fast in the Lord." The end of a year is a time when a register of results is justifiable, and an occasion for a fresh start is recognized. I ask you to make a resolution that you will be spiritually self-supporting, and independent of external aid, and that, whether the pupil-teacher to whom you have become accustomed is in the flesh or out of it, you will "Stand fast in the Lord," for his sake as well as your own. "We live, if ye stand fast." It is so, it must be so, for the test of a teacher is the perseverance of the taught. To fall away from a great principle because the temporary enunciator of that principle is removed, is to condemn that enunciator as a failure, and perhaps to send him to his account without his golden sheaves.

"Ah, who shall then the Master meet

And bring but withered leaves?

Ah, who shall at the Saviour's feet,

Before the awful judgment seat,

Lay down for golden sheaves

Nothing but leaves, nothing but leaves?"

In the words of Shakespeare I say, "Hereafter in a better world than this I shall desire more love and knowledge of you"; meanwhile remember, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," all the power you can possibly need is at your disposal, you need no helper to give it you, it is yours now.