If you desire panic and distress, let imagination fill your soul with fears. But if peace, happiness, health and power be your desires, live the WHITE LIFE and hold fast only to reason.
By the reality called reason I do not mean mere cold calculation and hard logic. Such phases of reason are legitimate in their place, if freed from cunning and deceit, but the higher reason is to these as a woman's love—look is to the glitter of ice. The higher reason is not alone intellection, it is also intuition and harmonic assurance—what religious thought calls faith. The higher reason declares self-preservation to be the first law of life, and then, just because this is true, it cares for self and trusts the White Universe to assist. I really do not see what a human soul need actually fear when that soul and the White Universe are bent on the same goal, the soul's welfare.
The Universe is a growing organism. It is forever striving to realize its own best estate. This is the true goal for all individuals. It is saying the same thing if we affirm the goal to be Health—for worlds or man: Body-Health, Mind-Health, Self- Health.
When any form of health is threatened, you say, perhaps, it is FEAR that warns you to self-preservation. But I say it is REASON, and your fear-feeling is unnecessary and hurtful. If you can remember that the White Life or Universe and you have the same desire, your highest welfare, you can banish the fear-element, reserving only the reason-assurance element. All the fears in the world cannot benefit you. Harmony and courage will sublime your whole life.
I have never known a person whose reason has induced self- suffering. Suffer-fear is always a product of diseased imagination. What some may call reason-fear, when they think they are extremely sensible, is simply fear, and nothing but fear, and it is due to imagination, not to reason.
"But," you say, "are there not all sorts of evils in the world, and do they not threaten us, and should we not forefend against them? In this forefending, how can we escape fear?"
These questions show how thoroughly fear is knit into our very lives.
Now this is precisely the point. Fear has no rightful place with any rightful living, because the WHITE LIFE alone is rightful, and in that life reason-assurance only is possible, and, therefore, rightful.
The best way in which to forefend against evil is to deny it and cast out the fiction.
This entire question of evil is at your command. Evil exists because other people admit its existence. If all were to live the WHITE LIFE, each person might rightly declare, "There is no evil." The only real evil is that which can hurt your best self. When anything hurts your best self, it is your self that hurts your self. The only evil in the Universe is some one's act hurting others, but more, hurting self. If to you evil is, then, it is yourself. You can so live the sublime WHITE LIFE of harmony as to be able to say: "So far as I am concerned, evil has gone out of the world. There is no evil to me."