Various

“ It is therefore certain that, in case there is no such thing as mental science, there is no such thing as science at all, in all the realm of the universe; because the mind, in the act of knowing, knows itself or is conscious of its own operations, otherwise it could know nothing whatever, could not be mind.
Have we not the most certain evidence of the existence of mind? Is light a certain evidence that there is light, or a source of light? Is not reasoning a proof that there is something which reasons? Can there be light without a cause? Can there be invention without an inventive being? ”

“ Does not the law say 'It is the soul that sinneth that shall die?' Did I not hear you say that you had wreaked your vengeance upon the innocent one?" Justice and mercy both draw a veil over their faces and respond through the advocates of this system of things, "Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness." The poor skeptic of common sense retires muttering to himself something like this, "Well, if such is the mystery of godliness, I pray that I may never fall into her hands." ”

“ If I am reflecting, I know it, and this consciousness is science, is certain knowledge, is the very thing from which no man can escape so long as he is a rational being. Here is my individuality, my personality, in that which is the indivisible unit of my nature, from which I can not emigrate, and one attribute of which I can not amputate—the I! The thief may escape from justice, but he can not escape from the dishonest wretch—himself. ”

“ Instinct is sometimes an original endowment.
Now, can we or any others tell how it is that mind depends, just like instinct, wholly upon brain structure, and is, at the same time, unlike instinct in that it is wholly dependent on individual, not ancestral experience? And if mind or intelligence does not depend on ancestral experience, how is its origin to be accounted for on the hypothesis of heredity through evolution of species, starting, without life, instinct or mind, by blind forces operating on dead matter, and the forces themselves simply the forces of dead matter? ”

“ An individual is not absolutely indivisible, but that which can not be divided without losing its name and distinctive qualities. Individuality, like personal identity, belongs properly to intelligences. Consciousness reveals it to us that no being can be put in our place nor confounded with us, nor we with others. I am one and indivisible. You can not amputate any of the faculties of the mind. It is a mind which no one dissects or divides. We are assured that we are the offspring of God. ”

“ Vice, virtue, folly, wisdom, malignity and benevolence are not essential to mind, but like the accidents of matter known as roughness or smoothness, softness, hardness, blackness, etc., are merely qualities or attributes of its conduct. Vice is vicious action and virtue is virtuous action. But action arises from will and will from thought. All minds are free agents, being vicious or virtuous from their own choice. There is as much piety, morality or immorality in the flowing of the Wabash river as there is in involuntary action. ”

“ Suppose a legislative body legislates a man a murderer because his great great grand-father killed a man, should it not also legislate him free from the penalty of murder and never in cruel injustice inflict it upon him or any other innocent one simply as a satisfaction to justice? Law ought to always place us where we are in fact, otherwise it is detestably unjust. Why should any sensible man attribute such dealings to the Father of Spirits? ”

“ In your consciousness you have a faculty superior to all the five senses put together. In our consciousness we see and feel ourselves, and in so doing we see not only the minds of others, but our great Father himself. We can not tell what instincts are in the bee, or what sagacity is in a spaniel, because we are neither spaniels nor bees, but we are of a more noble race. We are in possession of minds or spirits, and consequently identified with all minds or spirits, so the science of mind, or psychology, is the knowledge of ourselves. ”

“ The mind is like a telescope in this respect, that it shows itself in showing that about which it is occupied. The man who is content to believe what he sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels, is only a sensuous believer—an animal, and not a man. Reason's glory is that it perceives the invisible. ”

“ The gospel, that divine book, the only one necessary to a Christian, and the most useful of all to the man who may not be one, only requires reflection upon it to impress the mind with love of its author and resolution to fulfill his precepts. ”

“ Neither can I see how it can be satisfied by punishing an innocent person in the room of the guilty, for the innocent one was not the "soul that sinned." Yet this quality of law is claimed in order to make out the theory of a vicarious punishment endured by the Savior, that is, that He took the sinner's "law place." This idea was necessitated by the theory that we all sinned when Adam transgressed, and lost all ability to do anything for ourselves. So we must be redeemed by satisfaction to justice, rather than by mercy. ”

“ From such considerations the doctrine of universal brotherhood has proceeded along with the equal, civil, political and religious rights of all mankind. The ultimate fruit of all is the abolition of oppression and slavery throughout the world, and the desire to see all men elevated to their proper rank as intellectual and moral beings. Thus our views of God and nature, of mind and matter, are of immense practical value to our race. ”

“ THE SIMPLICITY OF THE SCIENCE OF MIND.
Our sphere of research is simplified by dividing its objects into matter and mind, so as to have but two centers of thought. Many have concluded that the address of matter to our senses has made it easy to pursue knowledge respecting bodies, while the invisibility of mind presents insurmountable difficulties, but this conclusion is scarcely supported by facts. If men have erred with reference to their own intellects, they have also made many and egregious blunders concerning matter and its qualities. ”

“ Virtue never spoke in gentler terms; the profoundest wisdom was never uttered with greater energy or more simplicity. It is impossible to rise from the reading of it without feeling a moral improvement. Look at the books of the philosophers with all their pomp, how little they are compared with this. Shall we say that the history of the gospel is a pure fiction? This is not the style of fiction, and the history of Socrates, which nobody doubts, rests upon less evidence than that of Jesus Christ ”

“ A spirit hath not flesh and bone. We are therefore like Him in spirit. Being the offspring of the divine intelligence declares the nature of that intelligence, just as the stream declares the nature of the water in the fountain which feeds it. As the fountain is the antecedent of the stream, so God is the antecedent of life and intelligence, from whom all spirits came, and to whom all spirits must return.
Our studies in respect of mind are wonderfully simplified when we recollect that in ourselves we see all other men, spirit or mind being in its essence and attributes essentially the same ”

“ So ability to choose is the great factor of morality, virtue, immorality, and vice.
In scientific investigations lying in the realm of the physical there are countless objects to engage our thoughts, but here we have but one, and we always carry it about with us and are continually using it. Our consciousness is to all the operations of our spirits what seeing, touching, hearing, tasting and smelling is to surrounding bodies. It enables us to examine all the minds in the universe. ”

“ Is there no evidence of an intelligent authorship here? He who not only created but also endowed [Pg 378] man with all His noble and God-like attributes, would He not delight in visiting man and talking with him and learning him the art of speech? Did man not have the privilege of learning to talk? Did he not hear and learn from the "ancient of days"—from his great author? Is it not unreasonable to suppose that the author of man's being took no delight in him? ”

“ Women were slaves in Egypt, in Babylon, in Ninevah, in Persia, in Greece and Rome, and all those nations sunk. She is now a slave in China, in India and in Turkey.
Adam said: "She is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman for she was taken from man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh." ”

“ There are conditions under which circumstantial evidence is the best possible testimony. These conditions are found inseparably connected with our present subject. That men now possess the same powers of body and mind that they always manifested is disputed by no intelligent individual. Those powers have been, through all the ages, precisely the same both in number and kind. Has the history of humanity furnished a single case in which a person, perfectly deaf during all his life, had the ability to speak words? ”

“ All Adam's children learn to talk by hearing others talk, and as those deaf ones never heard, so they never learned to talk. Very well. The first man, at the beginning of the series of humanity, had no powers or faculties which his descendants do not possess, and as they all have been under the necessity of learning to talk by hearing others talk, will you unbelievers and skeptics tell us, if you can, how that first man became a talker? Can the life-long deaf talk as well as those whose ears are perfect? ”

“ Every kind of opposition has been manifested which the ingenuity of man could dictate. Indeed, there is little urged against Christianity in our day that is original. Almost every cavil and argument may be traced to Voltaire, Porphyry, Celsus and Julian, the old enemies of the Christ. Infidels, who dislike (will you hear it?) the labor and trouble of investigating the question of the claims of the Christian religion upon their intelligence, seize with avidity upon the labors of others and parade them before the public mind. ”

“ The scoffs and sarcasms and sophistries of infidels are not from a love of truth. Whatever the cause or causes may be, one thing is certain, and that is, that they do not understand Christianity itself, nor the nature and magnitude of its evidences. They condemn that which they never gave themselves the trouble to investigate.
Whoever investigates the religion of Jesus Christ will find that the character of its founder is far superior to any other character, and his apostles far superior to any other fishermen. ”

“ If I was passing around through the little city of Kokomo to-morrow, and was talking upon this theme, I would hear some one accuse some poor soul of being a natural born thief, without the ability to refrain from it. There is neither morality nor immorality, vice nor virtue in an involuntary act. Are the rushings of the [Pg 366] Wild Cat river moral or immoral? If a man could be a natural thief, and therefore could not help but steal, he would be no more a sinner in the sight of God, nor responsible, nor morally corrupt than the horse that breaks into your cornfield and fills himself. ”

“ The preacher responds, "God and His justice—yes, His justice." Justice, you know, had to be satisfied, for God Himself could not forgive a man until the debt was paid. Do you see? Common-sense skeptic turns away disgusted, and as he walks off he is heard to say, "Farewell, to all of you!"
Who can blame men who never heard any thing better for being unbelievers? When Jehovah proclaimed His name, He said "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin." ”

“ Now, since evolutionists have learned the secret of mind-making by training dogs and other animals to certain habits, and giving time for heredity to transmit those habits, they being "immediately petrified in brain structure," why should we not go to work and bring about a millennial glory, at least by the third or fourth generation? If so much has been overcome as lies between man and the tadpole, with the tadpole capital only to work upon, perhaps we might, with our present capital, bring into existence a race of gods. ”

“ O, ye evolutionists! will you tell us where this cell-building instinct came from? You claim that it was, or is, an original endowment. From whom? Again you tell us that instinct depends upon brain structure in every instance; then what is the difference between instinct and intellect or mind? You tell us that mind also depends on brain structure, and you say that intelligence is unlike instinct, because it [Pg 381] works by experience, not ancestral, but, on the contrary, by individual experience. ”

“ By examining the word of God you will find that the Free-thinkers of our country, the Illuminati of Germany, Darwin, Strauss, Huxley, Tyndal, Renan, and the man of our own land who is most noted in our midst for oratorical accomplishments without logic, argument or truthfulness of statements touching the Christian religion, are all present evidences of the divinity of the prophetic words of the New Testament. ”

“ Let woman be, to all intents and purposes, the equal of man, trained for the work of every-day life, for this is what the word education means. Then throw open to her all the employments lying within her strength, which are now monopolized by men, and let this new advantage work a reformation in her education. ”