OPENING a book recently, the work of a friend, a passage descriptive of the manner in which cowboy ponies are taught to stand still when the reins are thrown over their heads, was read with interest, for it brought at once to mind the popular belief in limitation, and how powerfully this false belief seems to operate so long as it remains a concept of the mortal mind. In the instance referred to, the horse, having been taught to believe that the reins in that position positively circumscribe his movements, accepts the dictum and makes no effort to shake off the illusion; indeed, were he abandoned in such a predicament he might even starve before he learned the truth about his situation. The writer was forcibly impressed that humanity at large is in much the same regrettable plight as the unthinking animal on whom is imposed the false belief of restriction, and that the limitations of our sense of freedom, without which little or nothing can be accomplished, are solely the result of the training, of educational experience. Perhaps no phase of mortal thought has done so much to hamper the cause of Christianity as this sense of limitation; from the ancient dogmatic beliefs of Hebraic orthodoxy to the present-day restrictions of "regular" theology, the key-note has been a belief in bonds.
With the general mortal belief of restriction goes the individual illusion that the personal problem at hand presents peculiar difficulties incapable of solution by Truth, and these in turn grow into solid convictions unless rooted up and destroyed by demonstration. From that doleful day in the third century when the great Emperor Constantine, besieging Byzantium, espoused the cause of Christianity, and forthwith hedged it about with limitations which beclouded the healing truth, to the present-day matter physicians who condemn the suffering patient with the word "incurable," the sense of limitation has ruled in mortal mind, and it is but now, in the last half century, that the phantom shackles are being struck off.
Had the deluded pony taken three steps in any direction he would have exposed the illusion that bound him; and were mankind to cease bowing down to limitation in the guise of matter, and emerge from that vain shadow but a pace or two, the kingdom of heaven would appear. Belief in limitation is but another phase of fear, but until our Master's words, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," come to mean something more to us than sounding brass, we shall continue to be hedged about on every hand by fear's falsities.
