Carmen Ariza

by Charles Francis Stocking

“The solution of the problems of mankind? Ah, yes, there is a cure-all; there is a final answer to every ethical question, every social, industrial, economic problem, the problems of liquor, poverty, disease, war. And the remedy is so universal that it dissolves even the tangles of tariff and theology. What is it? Ah, my friends, the girl who came among us to ‘show the world what love will do’ has taught us by her own rich life––it is love. But not the sex-mesmerism, the covetousness, the self-love, which mask behind that heavenly name. For God is Love. And to know Him is to receive that marvelous Christ-principle which unlocks for mankind the door of harmony.

“No, the world’s troubles are not the fault of one man, nor of many, but of all who seek happiness in things material, and forget that the real man is the likeness of spirit, and that joy is spiritual. The trusts, and the men of wealth, are not all malefactors; the churches are not wholly filled with evil men. But all, yes all, have ‘missed the mark’ through the belief that matter and evil are real, and must grope amid sickness, poverty, crime, and death, until they are willing to turn from such false beliefs, and from self, and seek their own in the reflection of Him, who is Love, to their fellow-men. It is only as men join to search for and apply the Christ-principle that they truly unite to solve the world’s sore problems and reveal the waiting kingdom of harmony, which is always just at hand. And it can be done. It must be, sometime.

“In that day all shall know that cause and effect are mental. The man who hears the tempter, the carnal mind’s suggestion to enrich himself materially at the cost of his brother, will know that it is but the voice of mesmerism, that ‘man-killer from the beginning’, which bids him sever himself from his God, who alone is infinite abundance. The society woman who flits like a gorgeous butterfly about the courts of fashion, her precious days wasted in motoring, her nights at cards, and whose vitality goes into dress, and into the watery schemes for ‘who shall be greatest’ in the dismal realm of the human mind, must learn, willingly or through suffering, that her activities are but mesmeric shams that counterfeit the divine activity which manifests in joy and fullness for all.

“Christianity? What is it but the Christ-knowledge, the knowledge of good, and its correlated knowledge, that evil is 263 only the mesmeric lie which has engulfed the world? But, oh, the depths of that divine knowledge! The knowledge which heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, and opens the prisons to them that are captive! We who are gathered here to-night, feeling in our midst that great, unseen Presence which makes for righteousness, know now that ‘in my flesh shall I see God,’ for we have indeed already seen and known Him.”

With them sat the man who, swept by the storms of error and the carnal winds of destruction, had solved his problem, even as the girl by his side told him he should, and had been found, when his foul prison opened, sitting “clothed and in his right mind” at the feet of the Christ. Jesus “saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit––God––like a dove descending upon him––immediately the Spirit––carnal belief, error, the lie––driveth him into the wilderness.” And there he was made to prove God. So Josè de Rincón, when the light had come, years gone, in desolate Simití, had been bidden to know the one God, and none else. But he wavered when the floods of evil rolled over him; he had looked longingly back; he had clung too tightly to the human concept that walked with him like a shining light in those dark days. And so she had been taken from him, and he had been hurled into the wilderness––alone with Him whom he must learn to know if he would see Life.

Then self-consciousness went out, in those four years of his captivity, and he passed from thence into consciousness of God.

Then his great world-knowledge he saw to have been wholly untrue. His store of truth he saw to have been but relative at best. His knowledge had rested, he then knew, upon viewpoints which had been utterly false. And so, like Paul, he died that he might live. He crucified Self, that he might resurrect the image of God.

“The world,” resumed Hitt, “still worships false gods, though it reaches out for Truth. And yet, what are we all seeking? Only a state of consciousness, a consciousness of good, of joy and harmony. And we are seeking to rid ourselves of the consciousness of evil, with its sin, its disease and death. But, knowing now that consciousness is mental activity, the activity of thought, can we not see that harmony and immortality are within our grasp? for they are functions of right thought. Salvation is not from evil realities, but from the false sense of evil, even as Jesus taught and proved. The only salvation possible to mankind is in learning to think as Jesus did––not yielding our mentalities daily to a hodge-podge of mixed thoughts of good and evil, and then running to doctors and preachers when such yielding brings its inevitable result in sickness and death. Jesus insisted that the kingdom of heaven 264 was within men, a tremendous potentiality within each one of us. How may it be reached? By removing hampering false belief, by removing the limitations of superstition and human opinion which hold its portals closed. True progress is the release of mankind from materialism, with its enslaving drudgery, its woes, and its inevitable death. Mankind’s chief difficulty is ignorance of what God is. Jesus proved Him to be mind, spirit. He proved Him to be the creator of the spiritual universe, but not the originator of the lie of materiality. He showed matter to be but the manifestation of the false belief that creation is material. He showed it to be but a sense-impression, without life, without stability, without existence, except the pseudo-existence which it has in the false thought of which the human or carnal consciousness is formed. But the lack of understanding of the real nature of matter, and the persistent belief in the stability of its so-called laws, has resulted in centuries of attempts to discredit the Bible records of his spiritual demonstrations of God’s omnipotence and immanence, and so has prevented the human mind from accepting the proofs which it so eagerly sought. And now, after nineteen centuries of so-called Christian teaching, the human mind remains still deeply embedded in matter, and subject to the consentaneous human beliefs which it calls material laws. Jesus showed that it was the communal mortal mind, with its false beliefs in matter, sin, disease, and death, that constituted ‘the flesh’; he showed that mortals are begotten of such false beliefs; he showed that the material universe is but manifested human belief. And we know from our own reasoning that we see not things, but our thoughts of things; that we deal not with matter, but with material mental concepts only. We know that the preachers have woefully missed the mark, and that the medicines of the doctors have destroyed more lives than wars and famine, and yet will we not learn of the Master? To reach God through material thinking is utterly impossible, for He is spirit, and He can be cognized only by a spiritual consciousness. Yet such a consciousness is ours, if we will but have it.

“Ah, friends, God said: Let US make man in OUR image and likeness––let Life, Love, Spirit make its spiritual reflection. But where is that man to-day? Buried deep beneath the dogma and the crystallized human beliefs of mortals––buried beneath ‘the lie’ which mankind accept about truth. Nothing but scientific religion will meet humanity’s dire needs and reveal that man. And scientific religion admits of actual, practical proof. Christianity is as scientific as mathematics, and quite as capable of demonstration. Its proofs lie in doing the works of the 265 Master. He is a Christian who does these works; he who does not is none. Christianity is not a failure, but organized ecclesiasticism, which always collapses before a world crisis, has failed utterly. The hideous chicane of imperial government and imperial religion against mankind has resulted in a Christian veneer, which cracks at the first test and reveals the unchanged human brute beneath. The nations which writhe in deadly embrace to-day have never sought to prove God. They but emphasize the awful fact that the human mind has no grasp upon the Principle which is God, and at a time of crisis reverts almost instantly to the primitive, despite so-called culture and civilization. Yes, religion as a perpetuation of ancient human conceptions, of materialistic traditions and opinions of ‘the Fathers,’ is a flat failure. By it the people of great nations have been molded into servile submission to church and ruler––have been persuaded that wretchedness and poverty are eternal––that heaven is a realm beyond the grave, to which admission is a function of outward oblation––and that surcease from ills here, or in the life to come, is a gift of the Church. Can we wonder that commercialism is mistaken by nations for progress? That king and emperor still call upon God to bless their barbaric attempts at conquest? And that human existence remains, what it has always been, a ghastly mockery of Life?

“Healing the sick by applied Christianity is not the attempt to alter a mental concept; it is the bringing out of harmony where before was discord. Evil can not be ‘thought away.’ He who indulges evil only proves his belief in its reality and power. Christian healing is not ‘mental suggestion,’ wherein all thought is material. When evil thinking is overcome, then the discords which result from it will disappear from consciousness. That is the Christ-method. Behind all that the physical senses seem to see, know, and feel, is the spiritual fact, perfect and eternal. Jesus healed the sick by establishing this fact in the human consciousness. And we must learn to do likewise. The orthodox churches must learn it. They must cease from the dust-man, whose breath is in his nostrils; they must cease from preaching evil as an awful reality, permitted by God, or existing despite Him; they must know it as Jesus bade all men know it, as the lie about Truth. Then, by holding the divine ideal before the human mind, they will cause that mentality gradually to relinquish its false beliefs and copy the real. And thus, step by step, changing from better to better beliefs, at length the human mind will have completely substituted reality for unreality, and will be no more, even in thought. The ‘old man’ will have given place to the ‘new.’ This is the method of 266 Jesus. There is no other. Yes, for the present we reckon with material symbols; we have not yet fully learned their unreality. But at length, if we are faithful, we shall lay them aside, and know only Truth and its pure manifestations.