ELLIOT STOCK, 7, PATERNOSTER Row, E.C.

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FOREWORD

[Transcriber's Note: Foreword missing from source book]

CONTENTS

[FOREWORD] (missing from source book)
[INFINITE IMMANENT MIND]
[SPIRIT, SOUL, BODY]
["OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO HERE"]
[LAST WORDS]

MYSTIC IMMANENCE

Infinite Immanent Mind

"Whose is this image and superscription?"—ST. MATT. xxii. 20.

The question, "Whose is this image and superscription?" is suggestive, first, of the deeper meaning of a harvest festival, and that is the recognition in public worship that the material universe is the visible thought of God. What is the principle by which everything came into being? Physical science has now reduced all material things to a primary ether, universally distributed, whose innumerable particles are in absolute equilibrium.[#] The initial movement, then, which began to concentrate material substances out of the ether could not have originated with the particles themselves, and we are logically compelled to acknowledge the presence of a Creative Intelligence exercising volition. That Creative Intelligence exercising volition, that Parent Mind, has impressed His image and superscription upon all that is—upon the life and beauty of the animal world, upon the marvels of the vegetable world, the prolific fruits of the earth, the gorgeous flowers with which church and altar are decorated to-day. Whose is their image and superscription? Whom do they manifest? Whence come their life and their beauty? To understand the deeper meaning of a church decorated with fruits and flowers we must have risen to some conception of the Invisible Intelligence that is realizing itself in concrete phenomena. Everything in the physical world is what it is by reason of a spirit-organism or mind-form which relates it to the Universal Mind, and the Universal Mind is that Divine activity which St. John calls the Word, the Logos, the Originator in creative activity. "Through every grass-blade," says Carlyle, "the glory of the present God still beams." It does, and therefore a harvest festival suggests, not only the obvious duty of profound thanksgiving to a bounteous Father—that goes without saying—but also a reverent mental recognition of the intense nearness of God, that "Earth's crammed with Heaven and every common bush afire with God."