"Garfield said, 'The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian, the philosopher, the historian and the humble listener, there has been a divine melody running through the song, which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come.'
"What has made possible this divine melody but the spirit of love and truth that ever animates the children of God? Were it not for this vein, nay this wholeness of the invisible spirit, what could we have on which to found hopes of 'halcyon days?'
"Not from the visible man of flesh and blood do all things beautiful and true emanate, nor from the material and unstable, but from the one source that is God, as apprehended and realized by His idea, the real, invisible, spiritual man. Beauty, worth, can only be in idea or understanding.
"What made Milton, Shakespeare, Emerson, truly great was their appropriation and manifestation of the invisible inheritance of spirit, mind.
"What is man without intelligence, without love, without life, without truth? The real man is spiritual because he is the idea of Spirit, Mind, God, the only Creator. All that is grand, noble, true in an individual is a manifestation of the God-power and presence. There is but one real Mind, and all real or positive thought or intelligence is the manifestation of Mind, which is God. There is but one real Intelligence, and the intelligence manifested by the individual is the Intelligence which is God.
"God is absolutely one Verity, the primordial Essence. But how shall we know this as a fact? How shall we prove it as an incontrovertible truth? you ask.
"By persistent acknowledgement of God and His creation, we become one with Him, and to be one with God is to know absolute Truth. We are conditioned by the thoughts we think and by the words we speak. By thinking and speaking right words we manifest true conditions; by thinking and speaking wrong words we manifest false conditions. 'As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.' If we desire to manifest strength, justice or wisdom of God, we must 'acknowledge God in all our ways.'
"'The only salvation,' says George MacDonald, 'is being filled with the spirit of God, having the same mind as Christ.'
"In order to realize the essence of these words, in order to realize the essence of any truth, we must enter into its meaning by becoming one with it, by making ourselves the expression of its harmony, the picture of its idea.
"Knowing the potency of the word, we say the true words over and over again, silently or audibly, we think of them in every possible way, with varied expression if we will, as it is the thought, the prime idea that we are seeking to manifest.