Lewis Pyle Mercer

“ This is what we are all the time doing, one for another, or one against the other,—namely, producing "by a species of mental induction a new state of thought," thus calling forth new states of the will and its affections, and an altered flow and endeavor of all the human forces. "The human world is full of powers in a state of balance and indifference; change the posture of anything therein and the whole has to re-adjust itself to a new balance,—a rush of forces takes place, and currents pass to and fro until the equilibrium is recovered." ”

“ To pass over the other senses, we find that the legs are the outward art of locomotion, from passive to active; from the nails of the toes to the wheel of the knee and the globe of the hip; in short, from the walking-stick to the railroad; the real body uses them in nature, whether as the staff of its lowliness, or the means of its swiftness, or the equipage of its pride; they are the columns of movement; the rich soul's carriage, and the poor soul's crutches. But the arms and hands are all the finer machineries or inventions that are wielded directly by the arms and hands of the soul ”

“ It was miracle; but the same old miracle by which the eternal mind produces and dwells in the universe, produces a written Revelation and dwells in it, creates human minds and dwells with them, orders human history and testifies His eternal providence by it. It was only the indwelling mind of God, in its eternal purpose and meaning, coming out into realization and revelation. The humanity of Christ was conceived of the highest; so is every spirit of man through the father of him. ”

“ That which is no substance is nothing. Substance without form is not given. You may talk of virtue, goodness, intellect, and so forth; but they must attach themselves to a living subject, else they fade into nothingness, with a name it may be, but without existence. In the presence of such profitless verbiage, it is not surprising that many strong minds, with keen powers of observation and great respect for things that are open to sense, should define life as "the aggregate of the activities of the physical organism," and thought as a property of the brain. ”

“ Creation itself was the first Bible. There is such correspondence between the visible and invisible worlds, that we all, in our lucid moments, seek to translate outward phenomena into spiritual principles and mental processes; and this they perceived intuitively from the divine Spirit which then, in orderly influx, was communicated from the Lord without the need of a written Word. Thus the Word, the wisdom of God and the light of man, spoke itself in their hearts and pictured itself in the world. ”

“ Heaven and earth were united in man. The earth which the Word had made in the image of its powers and attributes, and the heaven which the Word had begotten in man by regeneration, were in correspondence and harmony, and the whole phenomenal world was a mirror of divine intelligence, wisdom, peace, and love. ”

“ We may think of the emotional and intellectual life, which we call the soul, as inseparable from the physical organism; and then whether you call it with the materialists, a property of this organism in defiance of all logic and in the absence of all proof, or whether you call it, after the old theology, and in defiance of common-sense, a vital spark, waiting nowhere to get its manhood out of the grave in a final resurrection of dead bodies, it comes to the same thing; when the body dies it disintegrates and personal identity and function are forever lost. ”

“ We produce merely a vast tissue of self-deceptions. The first step in this self-deception of the race is the creation of the devil—the father of lies—who abides not in the truth. In this effort after a sense of independence and ownership, we externalize our thoughts and so pervert our affections and falsify our understandings; and thus weave a fantastic, unreal thread into our whole web of being. We are then cast out of the spiritual garden of Eden, and generate by our own thinking a change in our material environment, to which we give false interpretations innumerable."—Page 13. ”

“ As a man in a mob without the guidance of reason may do what the mob wills and impels; so a man may from mental causes bring himself into spiritual associations, which, in a moment of excitement or sudden provocation will prove too strong for his judgment, and carry him away into a fit of so-called "emotional insanity." By harboring hatred and revenge, and brooding over a special grievance, or by habitual indulgence of passion, man associates with himself spirits who may in a moment tear him away from all thought of restraint, and lash him into the act of murder. ”

“ Swedenborg tells us that "supplication, although tacit, with those who supplicate from the heart, is heard as a cry in heaven. This is the case when such only think, much more when they groan from a sincere heart." Think, then, of all the influences of goodwill, enlightenment, power and healing, waiting in heaven to flow down through the world of spirits to man, by every way that opens. ”

“ To deny the reality of evils in the thought without acknowledging their source in hell and from evil spirits, is not to shun or remove them, but to close the eye of the mind to them while cherishing the unacknowledged inward love from which they flow forth. ”

“ The impulse is continually towards us. The flow is measured only by the truth, the sincerity, the spirituality of man's desire. Into that fountain of influences true prayer ascends as a cry. It is heard as such, felt as such, responded to as such. We do not know how many ways of influx it may open, nor how powerfully they may affect all our spiritual associates, including those who are present in our desire and thought. We only know that if offered in acknowledgment and submission to the Divine will it is in harmony with Divine order ”

“ Correspondence as seen in the plane of nature only (and it was only on this plane that Swedenborg up to this time had discovered it,) consists in such a mutual adaptation of inner and outer, higher and lower, grosser and more subtle spheres or bodies, that there may be a reception, communication and transference of motions and affections from one to the other. It is therefore the name we give to that kind of intercourse which is not bodily influx, or to the union that exists, not by continuity or confusion of substance, but by contiguity and modification of state. ”

“ The substances of the spiritual world are living like the mind itself. The desire of the will flows into the thought of the understanding and fashions it to the form of the desire; then the desire in the thought, which is its own form, descending into the imagination, presents itself in a mental picture, which is an object of intellectual sight. All this takes place within the mind whenever we think from affection with desire to create and to possess. ”

“ Corresponding to it, the spiritual world flows into the natural world, and animates and actuates it, as the soul flows into the body,—not as becoming in any way a part of it, but as a distinct actuating form and force within it in all and every part of it. Why is a dead sun and world wanted? ”

“ Can absolute or genuine truth, being known be planted at the center of a human soul "unconsciously to the individual?" Not by any human being; not at all in any other sense than that it is present from the Lord in the inmost—always and to eternity; and in the internal heavenly mind in the form of "remains," waiting to be consciously accepted by the individual acting in freedom according to the truths "of which his understanding is composed." ”

“ There is one unvarying teaching in Swedenborg's writings—"that the idea of God in heaven is the Lord;" that the only true idea possible to man is that of a Divine Man; that the "idea of an invisible God is no idea, and is not separable from the thought of the principles and forces of nature, and cannot communicate with heaven and the Lord, but falls back upon itself and perishes. ”

“ He must become the form of his own love and nothing else. Everything that is not in agreement with it must be cast off. This is the divinely appointed order; and this is the judgment. Thus the evil are separated from the good, and man comes into his own life and remains in it forever. It is the life of hell with those who have loved themselves and the world above all things; and it is the life of heaven with those who have loved the Lord above all, and their neighbor as themselves. ”

“ The idea of God with which Christian Science expects to "renovate the spiritual character as surely as it remodels the physical system," is the thought of a universal Spirit, proceeding from no Divine Person, and omnipresent by virtue of its ideal presence as the central and pervading life of all persons and all things. All its reasonings play hide-and-seek around two notions: God as the spirit in man; and man as the thought and manifestation of God. ”

“ The soul being the man or real body, the natural body represents the appliances and arts of life, whether economic or aesthetic. The eye is its window, telescope, microscope, and answers to the series of means that transparent substance lends to vision, and which are as curious and exquisite for their appearance as they are excellent for use: for the eye receives the finest impressions from things, and gives the finest expressions from the soul. ”

“ He inquires for friends, meets them and talks with them. He learns about the nature and laws of that world; and as he becomes accustomed to his new life his sense of freedom is increased, and where he felt obliged to conceal and dissemble his affections and thoughts he finds himself less inclined, and is less able to do so. The pressure of his interior life to express itself reveals the state of his ruling love and brings the exteriors into conformity with it. ”

“ No system or science can ever be true unless it starts from God as a centre; and a false idea of God will vitiate the whole. There is one God: even Jesus Christ. He is manifested by Life, Love, Goodness, Wisdom and Power. * * * * There is no space, or time, state or condition, spiritual or natural, in the universe, where this life of God with its attributes, Love, Goodness and Wisdom does not exist. This divine life, or essential being, expresses itself by Power, Order, Law, Intelligence, Use, Harmony, Beauty, Peace, Health and Happiness. ”

“ What we need to be instructed in is, not merely that the soul is immortal, but what the soul is; and this not alone as regards a future life, but our present existence. Hitherto, perhaps no term in the language has been so indeterminate as this word soul. In the old faiths it is a name with no answering reality; and now in this day, of positive ideas and strict definitions, we need to define the soul, to exhibit it to thought, or cease to use a name for which we have nothing as a relative. ”

“ They are right, therefore, who assert the supremacy of the spiritual life; for so far as we come into that orderly life of the spirit, which is regeneration, we are protected from the sphere of evil spirits, brought within the sphere of angelic association, and into the stream of that divine influx and operation which worts all things for eternal ends. This spiritual state lifts from the body at once the chief cause of its ills and makes way for happy usefulness day by day in the circumstances which are the best possible preparation for our entrance into the soul's own world in its own body ”

“ Hourly and momentarily, by touch, by sphere, by speech, by simple thought, human beings are thus affecting and moving one another, consciously, or unconsciously, for good or ill. The power of one will and mind over another, by the use of thoughts manifested in words, looks or acts, directed to the judgment and understanding, or to the feelings of fear, ambition or hope, is the common fact of all social contact. Why should it not be exerted then for the useful ends of healing? ”

“ The only way, therefore, in which one can plant genuine truths in a human soul is by instruction and appeal to his affection and the conscious determinations of his own will and life. It is "to teach truth and lead by truth to good," not blindly, but as one leads another through his understanding.
Another fallacy in this principle of "truth-cure" as it is called, is that divine truth "works from center to circumferences." ”