"One Lord, one faith, one baptism." Eph. 4:5.
Every step of progress is a step more spiritual. The great element of reform is not born of human wisdom; it draws not its life from human organizations; rather is it the crumbling away of material elements from thoughts and things,—the translation of matter back to its original language,—mind, and the final unity between man and God. The footsteps of thought, as they pass from the sensual side of existence to the reality and Soul of all things, are slow, portending a long night to the traveller; but the guardians of this night are the angels of His presence, that impart grandeur to the intellectual wrestling and collisions with mortal beliefs, as we drift into more spiritual latitudes. The beatings of our heart can be heard; but the ceaseless throbbings and throes of thought are unheard as it changes from material to spiritual standpoints. Even the pangs of death disappear accordingly as the understanding that we are spiritual beings here reappears, and we learn our capabilities for good, which insures man's continuance and is the true glory of immortality.
The improved theory and practice of religion and of medicine are mainly due to the people's improved views of the Supreme Being. As the finite and personal sense of Deity, based on material conceptions of spiritual being, yield their grosser elements, we shall learn what God is, and what God does for man. I like the Hebrew term that gives another letter to the word God and makes it good, for this unites science and Christianity, whereby we learn that God, good, is the divine Principle,—more than a person—and this Principle is learned through mind instead of matter, in and of purity and holiness, of Soul instead of sense, and by revelation supporting reason. It is the false conceptions of Spirit, based on the evidences gained from the so-called material senses that makes a Christian only in theory, shockingly material in practice, and forms its Deity out of the worst human qualities, else, of wood or stone.
