Basil Wilberforce

“ As an Infinite Motherliness is the sole producing agent of all that is, and as all that is must have been in the thought-womb of Infinite Motherliness before coming into existence, the whole mystery of the dark side of life must be within the purpose of the eternal order, and there can be no independent rival to the Author of the Universe. Again, this amazing revelation of the Creative Motherliness should help us in realizing the oneness of humanity. It should stimulate us to generous strivings for better social conditions and more brotherly relations between man and man. ”

“ No one needs the pulpit to tell them what is the life "not after the flesh." Every purposeful encouragement of the Divine nature within, every clinging to principle in time of temptation, every masterful conquest over bodily desires by forcing the mind away from sense impressions into recollection of the Divinity within, every quenching of anger by a kind and gentle word, ministers to the fruit-bearing life and withers the thorn. ”

“ Thus is Jesus the Mediator, or Uniting Medium, between God and man. Thus does "God in Christ reconcile the world to Himself," for in the perfectly God-inhabited man is revealed the transcendent truth that God and man, in inherent eternal unity, are one. When we think into this self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, when we recognize what it implies—namely, that the personality of Infinite Spirit is manifested in the objective Christ, and that the mystic Christ is in all, and that every human being is a potential Jesus—we have realized what it is to be "in the Lord." ”

“ Who is the engraver who has stamped the reverse of every human coin with the mythical designs of our human imagination, the pleasing illusions of our natural self-life, the device of our outer and common humanity, the conditions of our flesh-and-blood existence? ”

“ When once you perceive that man in his inmost nature is the product of the Divine Mind, imaging forth an image of Itself, you are certain that no negation can finally frustrate the evolution of the Divine principle which is the inmost centre in us all. It must ultimately blend with the ocean of uncreated life whence it came, and whither from all Eternity it is predestined to return, for Infinite Mind has declared of His human children, "Ye shall be perfect." ”

“ The universality of the Divine impress, the certainty that every individual life-centre is a manifestation of God, should convince us that "one is our Father and all we are brethren." To know that humanity is God's child, though it has a side weighted with crime, brutality, and degradation, should stimulate us, first, always to see the best side in people we dislike, and, secondly, to associate ourselves with all ameliorating work for humanity in a vast Empire city like London. The human coins are sometimes for a while lost, and it is our duty to find them. ”

“ The people we admire are not deserving of all the worship we give them; the people we dislike are not as black as we paint them. Some people live with only the reverse side visible, but always there is the other side of the coin. I have never honestly tried mentally to turn over a human coin of this description without finding the King's image often defaced and covered with accretions, but always there. If asked of the most degraded, "Whose is this image?" I should not hesitate in my reply: "The qualities, potentialities, of Spirit are here though hidden." ”

“ Each one of us is a responsible life-centre in which God has expressed Himself, and we have to become moral beings, and a moral being is not machine-made—he must be grown; he is the product of evolution, and for the purpose of evolution he must emerge triumphant from resistance, as every flower, every grape, every grain of corn in this church has emerged triumphant. In other words, he must be exposed to what, with our present imperfect knowledge, we call evil. It is just here that the analogy of the coin comes in. ”

“ What an intense, ever-present reality is the Infinite Mind! What a glorious thought it is that the Eternal Purpose is everywhere! When the heart grows faint and the hands weary, how sustaining it is to know that there is no chance, no mere machinery—everywhere purpose, intelligence, evolution, love! ”

“ It proves that the irrevocability of Divine Immanence in man is not the product of human speculation, but an authoritative revelation. As the child in the womb receives the nature of the mother, and is born into the world bearing that nature, part of the mother, a repetition of the mother, so have we come into this world with a Divine nature within us, which is our real self, our eternal humanity. It is true for us, when it is not yet true to us, that we are the offspring of the Infinite Parent-Spirit by a process more intimate than anything implied by the word "creation." ”

“ The Christian revelation is a complete and intelligible philosophy, and it secures your position. Infinite Mind, brooding Creative Motherliness, has expressed itself by materializing its thoughts in the phenomena of the universe, and body-forming its highest thought in human beings. That man is the highest expression and self-realization of the Creative Mother-mind, is the guarantee that man's consciousness mirrors the infinite Mother-mind as the dewdrops mirror the sun. ”

“ Remember, you cannot see both sides of the coin of yourself at once. When you are discouraged by the prominence of the animal nature; when you are prone to give way to appetite or temper, or despondency, or self-detestation, instantly force yourself to turn over, as it were, the coin of yourself; "reckon yourself," as Paul says, "alive to God"; forcibly detach your attention from the reverse side; think intensely into the other side. Say, "I am spirit, I am the Lord's; His image is stamped on me, His life is in me. ”

“ Spirit, the innermost being, the immortal ego, Infinite Mind differentiated into an individual life-centre, when not grieved, controls soul, and of this control soul is sometimes conscious, but more often not conscious. Body, the external part of man's being, the association of organs whereby the spirit comes into contact with the physical universe, ought to obey soul, controlled by spirit, and then all is well. That is the ideal relation between the three functioning centres in individual man. Spirit is the seat of our God-consciousness. Soul is the seat of our self-consciousness. ”

“ Our minds can focus the Divine Presence, and we may speak to the world's Creator as intimately as a child would prattle to its mother. Then consider what ought our moral life to be? Not obedience to a conventional category of social maxims, but an expression of the Infinite Mind, and our daily prayer should be, "May my conscious mind perceive that Thy life, Thy thoughts, Thy spirit are within me, and that Thou art seeking to realize Thyself and manifest Thy love through me." ”

“ Use your will to keep your mental faculties in conscious realization of your true relation to Infinite Mind, as one of His vehicles, and you will not grieve the Spirit. Know that God is the Spirit within you, and never forget that He is also Abba, Father, outside you. Abba, Father, longs for us far more than we long for Him. Around us always are the everlasting arms. ”

“ He came to teach that the "inborn Word" is universal; it is the Mother-God repeating Itself in all Souls; and if this truth were to be realized and appreciated, it was expedient that the visible Personality in which it was specialized should be removed, in order that men might mentally universalize the manifestation, and learn that this spirit of Sonship, this Divine nature, this distribution of the Creative Being, belongs to all men, as the hope of their existence, the ideal of their life, the leaven of their humanity, the assurance of their perfection. ”

“ As it awakens the nature of the Infinite Mother-Soul within you it will teach you what is God's ideal of humanity—namely, that God's true son is not one perfect man, though one perfect Man alone realized the ideal, but the whole multitudinous race of men, of which race God is the Father, the Mother, the Soul, the Glory, and the Eternity. ”

“ The one ever-lasting impossibility to man is to sever himself from immanent spirit. A man's soul may have so wrongly "devised his way" as to be derelict; the nightmare of life may have been so heavy that a man has not recognized that the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven within him are committed to him. ”

“ That Creative Intelligence exercising volition, that Parent Mind, has impressed His image and superscription upon all that is—upon the life and beauty of the animal world, upon the marvels of the vegetable world, the prolific fruits of the earth, the gorgeous flowers with which church and altar are decorated to-day. ”

“ God is All, God is Love, God is Omnipotent, and God is Immanent. Therefore it is certain that a hidden purpose of benevolence and love, incomparably higher than would be accomplished by the abolition of what we call evil, must have actuated the Infinite Mind when He "thought-created" phenomena. Clearly it is an impossibility, even to Omnipotence, to make moral beings, in whom He could realize His highest quality of love, without giving them a measure of volition, which volition had to pass the test of the complex education and temptations of earth-life, with all that it entails ”

“ The moral evolution of humanity is not automatic, it is not generic, it is not impersonal. It is individual, in accord with the personal equation of each one. Though it is a necessary philosophic truth that our true ego, our imperishable centre, is in the universal, and not in the imprisonment of what we now call personality, still we shall never lose our individuality, we shall always know that "I am I and no one else." ”

“ Obviously, if we concentrate all our attention on the reverse side of the coin, if we persist in imagining that our animal nature is our real self, we forget that the King's image is on the other side. We can only see one side at a time, and while we gaze at the reverse side, and the other side is hidden, doubt, depression, pessimism, sense of separateness from God, are the inevitable result. ”

“ Then, again, without being free to disobey, we could never become moral beings. The antagonistic pressure of non-moral inclinations challenges our highest self, and as we make, within our limited sphere, correct choice between alternatives presented, we are built up Godward or the reverse. But inasmuch as Infinite Spirit and His vehicles are elementally inseverable, and "Abba, Father, ordereth all things," though wrong choice, and the selection of lower standards, will occasion pain and unrest, and delay the evolution of the Eternal purpose, and grieve the Spirit within us. ”

“ Infinite Mind expresses Himself in individual human life-centres that He may realize His own qualities and have millions of separate entities to love and, after education, to love Him. Is it conceivable that He would so overdo His creative work as to produce beings with a superior will to Himself capable of resisting Him through the endless ages, and putting His purpose to complete confusion? ”

“ Man is therefore the special sphere of the self-manifestation of the Originating Mind. We humans are personal spirits who have proceeded from God into matter, and "the image and superscription" of the Creative Sovereign Power, whence we came, remains for ever indelibly impressed upon our inmost ego, and must work in us, and will work in us, until at last it unites our conscious mind fully with God. ”

“ Keep the tongue from evil and the lips that they speak no guile. Never allow yourself to repeat that which will prejudice your hearer against another. Don't repeat a scandal. It causes an evil thought-atmosphere to prevail; it thwarts the God within; it grieves the Spirit more fatally than breaches of the moral law. ”

“ It ought to make impossible the international jealousies which provoke taunts and defiances between European nations which ultimately issue in the misery and wickedness of war. Above all, it should impress upon us the dignity, the priceless dignity, of every individual human life, as drawn directly from the Originating Spirit. ”

“ Does it not suggest the words: "Can a woman forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion upon the son of her womb?" Can Infinite Mind forget the individual life-centre which has come forth from its creative thought-womb? ”

“ Disharmony, or, as we call it, sin, when it is mental, is the assertion of self, seeking its life and its happiness through human intelligence only. Sin, when it is bodily, is the assertion of animal appetite, seeking its life and its happiness through the senses only. ”

“ In other words, a man's conscious mind may wrongly "devise his way," but "the Lord will direct his steps." Saturate your mind with that thought. Speak to the universal Spirit outside you and individualize Him. Say, "Abba, Father, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in Heaven and on earth, though my heart may be 'devising my way' wrongly and tortuously, I know Thou wilt 'direct my steps' into Thy purpose." In that attitude of mind you know that God will be in whatever happens to you. This gives you a great freedom in worshipping Infinite Spirit. ”

“ The imperfection that seems to mar the perfection of the economy of the world is recognized as a necessary condition for the production of the highest good, one of its objects being to make you hate it. The proposition which I constantly reiterate is clear, logical, conclusive. God is All, All is God; God is the only ousia (substance) in the universe. This negation of good which we hate, this contrast, either is or is not part of universal order. If it is part of universal order, then, in spite of all seeming paradox, it is of the "all things that work together for good." ”

“ That is, the universal principle of the Divinity of humanity, as the outbirth of the Mother God, was manifested in Jesus of Nazareth in such full-orbed completeness that the qualities and perfections of the Parent God were displayed in Him, and the full result upon human character of this Divine Immanence, the realization of which had before been vague and without outline, was shown forth in Him, that men might know what power was in them, and what the indwelling Spirit of God was making of them. ”

“ Each man is the soil in which the "soul-man" and the "body-man" produce thorn and thistle, and the "spirit-man" produces grape and fig. The opposing functioning centres in the same individual strive for the mastery, and from this very striving emerges the perfected life of the Child of God, and that is where the possibility of what we call evil comes in. Our own limited minds teach us that God's thought-forms, imaged forth from the womb of Infinite Mind, could never attain Self-consciousness unless associated with matter in some definite form. ”

“ It alters the whole outlook on life to know you personally are an idea in the mind of God, and that you have the power within you to identify yourself with God's purpose. Your entire theology is expanded; for to begin to know God as He is in Himself is to become a convinced Universalist and a denier of the essentiality of evil, though you hate evil as you never hated it before. ”

“ Grant the axiom that the power of Infinite Mind to realize in us, and express through us, and externalize love in the circumstances of our life, is strictly conditioned by our appreciation of what Infinite Mind is in Itself, then the more familiar, the more reverently tender, our estimate of Originating Spirit, the more will It be able to manifest in our lives. ”