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 Copyright tntry 
 
 SECOND COPY. 
 
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 Copyright A* D, \ 900, by W. E. Simonds. 
 
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 PRINTED BY CLARK & SMITH, 
 HARTFORD, CONN. 
 
WHITHER? 
 
 "HHE boon most earnestly desired by the 
 average human heart is immortality — 
 the assurance of it* More thousands of books 
 have been written about it than about any 
 other thing* If a man finds that he does 
 not desire immortality he may know that 
 therein he differs from the average and nor- 
 mal man* A threatened future of long con- 
 tinued punishment is less unwelcome than 
 the prospect of annihilation* Hope whispers 
 the possibility of relief from suffering in 
 some remote age* Hope dies when it faces 
 oblivion* Whenever we turn to that which 
 comes after the change which men call 
 death* the aspiration rises* even though 
 silently* for one sure word from the silence 
 whence we come and to which we return* 
 
 These pages discuss this question of im- 
 mortality* They do not deal with any 
 theological doctrine as such* They do not 
 seek to differ with the tenets of any relig- 
 ious belief* The propositions of these pages 
 proceed on the basis of facts which are open 
 
Whither 
 
 to perception by all men, other facts which 
 may, if men will, be held by them as matters 
 of positive knowledge and conclusions which 
 are intended to be the results of reasoning 
 which rejects that which is odd or fantastic 
 and which progresses from one step to another 
 in plain and direct fashion* This reasoning 
 has occasion at times to make use of certain 
 truths which agree with the intuitions of all 
 men and with universal experience, such as : 
 there can be no effect without an adequate and 
 equal cause; sometihng cannot proceed from 
 nothing; something cannot be rescrvled into 
 nothing ; no part of force or substance can be 
 destroyed* Simple and axiomatic as these 
 truths seem, they are nevertheless at times 
 anchors taking hold of the deeps of sure 
 steadfastness amid shifting sands and cur- 
 rents that seemingly move one knows not 
 whither* 
 
 The generally recognized facts which bear 
 upon the problem of existence — where we 
 came from, what we are, and whither we 
 go — are not many when one first begins to 
 look for them* Beginning with himself, and 
 that naturally, man feels sufficiently sure 
 that, for the present at least, he is a fact* 
 That he is himself, distinct and apart from 
 all other things, living or dead, he needs no 
 proof aside from his own consciousness, a 
 thing that includes surety both in thought 
 
Whither 
 
 and feeling of individual, intelligent exist- 
 ence* Looking around him, man finds himself 
 living with hundreds of millions of fellow 
 facts of individual consciousness on a globe 
 seemingly designed in some fair measure for 
 just that purpose* He finds that the solar 
 system, which includes the earth on which 
 he lives, is only one — a very small one in 
 comparison — of an innumerable company 
 distributed throughout regions of space so 
 vast that he cannot comprehend the first 
 thing of its immensity* And there he is, all 
 at once, face to face with the mystery of it* 
 And he cannot help wondering u What is it 
 all for?" He knows well enough that this 
 latter question runs on all fours with the 
 question of his own immortality* 
 
 The aids which man has in working, by 
 himself, at the solution of these questions 
 are his capacity to observe and remember, 
 his capacity for reason — including certain 
 axiomatic truths but lately stated — and his 
 grasp of certain facts of high importance by 
 means of positive knowledge* He needs 
 no commentary on his capacity to observe 
 and remember ; he understands well enough 
 about that ; he uses it every day* He knows, 
 in a practical way, very well what his reason 
 is — that co-operating union of his mental 
 faculties by the aid of which he examines, 
 combines, compares and draws principles of 
 
Whither 
 
 general application from the impressions 
 which his senses bring and the imagined 
 things which spring within him* The facts 
 of positive knowledge are those of which a 
 man is sure independently of having learned 
 or having reasoned about them* A man's 
 consciousness* his surety of his identity* his 
 individual existence* is one of these facts of 
 positive knowledge* 
 
 Observation and reason are not our only 
 sources of knowledge* Man holds some facts 
 as matters of positive knowledge* The 
 human mind is capable of knowing and 
 does know facts which are beyond the grasp 
 of the senses* which the mind cannot prove 
 and which it cannot even comprehend* For 
 instance infinite space — space without limit 
 in any direction — is something incapable of 
 proof (as one may prove that two and two 
 make four or that water and salt will coal- 
 esce in solution) but a slight degree of 
 attention rightly directed will show anyone 
 that he knows that space exists forever in 
 all directions* Stand out under the sky* 
 Point your finger toward the blue vault in 
 any direction* Imagine a line projected in 
 that direction so far that a ray of light* 
 moving nearly two hundred thousand miles 
 a second* must travel a million years to 
 reach the end of the imaginary line; you 
 know* absolutely know* that unmeasured 
 
 4 
 
Whither 
 
 space goes beyond that point. Multiply the 
 length of the line a million times; again 
 you know as before that unmeasured space 
 goes beyond this point* Multiply the length 
 of the line until the mind wearies with the 
 effort — the weariness only demonstrating 
 the mind's incapacity to comprehend infinity 
 — and still you know that unmeasured space 
 goes on beyond the farthest point to which 
 the mind can project its imaginary line ; and 
 you know, absolutely know, that in your 
 effort to imagine distance, you have not 
 progressed in the slightest degree in ap- 
 proaching the point where space stops* The 
 tremendous fact is outside of all your physi- 
 cal senses* You cannot prove it* You can- 
 not comprehend it* You simply know it* 
 That is positive knowledge* 
 
 So it is with time past, although that is 
 for some persons a little more difficult to 
 deal with at first because many have always 
 unconsciously dated time as beginning with 
 the creation of the world* But imagine a 
 date when the world was created, no matter 
 whether you place it six thousand years ago 
 or six thousand million* Dwell on that 
 point of time for a little; the knowledge 
 comes home to you insistently that time had 
 been going on before that event just as it 
 has since* Put back your imaginary date 
 as far as you will, and the knowledge comes 
 
Whither 
 
 home to you, again and again, and with 
 each repeated effort, that you ate never any 
 neater the beginning of time* In other words 
 it is impossible for time to have ever had a 
 beginning* It has been running forever* 
 Physical perception, proof and comprehen- 
 sion of this fact are all out of the question* 
 But you know that it is so. 
 
 It is easier to deal with time to come* 
 One knows and feels without effort that 
 time can never cease to run* Time and 
 eternity are one and the same thing ; they 
 possibly differ that in this world we have 
 definite natural time-units, the period of 
 light and darkness which make up a day, 
 and the round of seasons which constitute 
 a year, while there is little reason to think 
 that the next world, if any there be, has 
 any time-unit* Its inhabitants, if any there 
 be, apparently can have no concern with the 
 flight of time, no occasion to note its pass- 
 age* It may well be that u there is no night 
 there*" 
 
 The eternal duration of substance — that 
 which has objective existence and extension 
 — in the past is another fact of which you 
 are sure; for no one needs to be told that 
 something cannot be produced from nothing* 
 And yet, if you really try to form a mental 
 image of this eternal duration of substance 
 
Whither 
 
 in the past you can no more do it than you 
 can form a like image of the endless time 
 behind you* 
 
 The endless existence of force — that 
 which has potency of change — in the past 
 is another fact of which you are sure* You 
 would not give a sober second's heed to him 
 who should assert to you that at one time 
 in the past the universe was dead and force- 
 less and that at some subsequent instant, 
 force sprang into being with absolutely no 
 cause whatever* And this eternity of the 
 past duration of force necessarily applies to 
 each and every kind of force which exists to- 
 day* that is* there was necessarily always 
 in the past a force either identical with or 
 adequate to produce each and every possible 
 force of the present and of the future* But 
 you will fail in any attempt to form a men- 
 tal image of this eternal existence of force 
 of any kind in the past* 
 
 The continuity of life through a past 
 eternity is another incomprehensible fact* 
 the surety of which comes to you partly 
 through absolute knowledge and partly 
 through right reason* Imagine a time when 
 life nowhere existed and you at once know 
 that neither out of dead space nor out of a 
 dead universe could life have ever risen* 
 There never could have been a time when 
 
Whither 
 
 life was not* To produce life from death is 
 to produce an effect without a cause* It is 
 to produce something from nothing and you 
 know that something cannot be produced 
 from nothing* Reason applies this surety 
 to life as a present fact and thereby demon- 
 strates its eternal existence in the past* 
 
 Here then we have certain infinities that 
 we are sure of* space* time* substance* force 
 and life* We cannot comprehend them, we 
 cannot form a mental image of one of them* 
 But our lack of comprehension does not dis- 
 turb our surety of their existence* One les- 
 son of it is that we are not to be troubled 
 about the existence of other things to which 
 facts or right reason point simply because 
 we cannot comprehend them. 
 
 In studying the problem of existence one 
 needs to effectually subdue and overcome 
 the doubts and questionings which are apt 
 to arise in the mind as to the reality and 
 actual existence of forces which are beyond 
 the grasp of senses* forces which cannot be 
 seen* heard* touched* tasted or smelled* In 
 considering that matter those very senses 
 may properly have attention to begin with* 
 If anyone knows will he tell ho<zv — by what 
 force and by what action of that force — it is 
 that certain nerves receive sense impressions* 
 that certain nerves transmit those impressions 
 
Whither 
 
 to the bt ain, and that the brain translates 
 such impressions into terms understood by 
 something* within us* The nerves and the 
 brain we can find if we take the man apart 
 but we cannot find the forces which operate 
 through them and we certainly cannot find 
 the consciousness* Some force, with mind 
 behind it, attends upon your heart-beats and 
 your respiration without your attention or 
 supervision and sleeps not when you sleep ; 
 you will look in vain to find it* "When you 
 eat substance which through heat has been 
 deprived of all semblance and potency of 
 life, in the ordinary sense of that word, 
 some subtle alchemic force distills from it 
 the different sorts of nutrition for the whole 
 multitude of the organs, tissues and fluids 
 of the body; and, more wonderful still, 
 feeds from it the very force that works all 
 these wonders ; you will look for that al- 
 chemic force in vain* Four hundred thou- 
 sand million of waves of the light-ether 
 enter your eye each second when you see 
 the color red; and an average atom vi- 
 brates five hundred millions of millions a 
 second; the imagination cannot picture 
 these things, much less the senses grasp 
 them* The entire vegetable world from the 
 blade of grass to the mighty Mariposa red- 
 woods, trillions upon trillions in number, 
 all with wonderful and wonder-working 
 mechanisms within them, are maintained 
 
Whither 
 
 and nourished by forces elusive of all our 
 senses; their aggregate effect is so great 
 that if their activity could be heard it would 
 drown the roar of Niagara; the energy 
 their green leaves noiselessly exert in tear- 
 ing apart the carbonic acid of the air, ap- 
 propriating its carbon and freeing its oxygen, 
 easily puts to shame all the steam engines 
 in the world* A force from the sun leaps 
 to us a hundred and eighty-six thousand 
 miles a second along almost a hundred 
 millions of miles of darkest night, giving no 
 human sign of its flight till it strikes our 
 atmosphere when it bursts into a radiance 
 which is at once light and heat for the 
 whole world; and one thing it does is to 
 noiselessly and invisibly lift millions of tons 
 of water each day from the earth to the 
 clouds; without that force there would be 
 neither brook nor river to run to the sea* 
 Another mighty but elusive force spins the 
 earth like a top a thousand miles an hour 
 at the surface; some fellow force, similarly 
 elusive, hurls the earth along its orbital path 
 eighteen miles and a half every second ; and 
 still a third moves the whole solar system 
 twelve or more miles a second toward the 
 bright star Lyra* These are but a few, the 
 merest beginning of the unseen forces which 
 are the real masters of the universe* The 
 senses grasp nothing but effects* The causes* 
 every one of them, are non-existent to all 
 
 10 
 
Whithet 
 
 our senses* The existence of a force is not 
 to be doubted simply because we cannot 
 sense it* There may be reasons for doubt- 
 ing the existence of a suggested force but 
 its non-existence to the senses is not one of 
 them* 
 
 In dealing with the problem of existence, 
 one also needs to effectually overcome all 
 doubt as to the possibility of the existence 
 of substances which no sense of man can 
 grasp* And it will help greatly in dealing 
 with that problem to realize that such sub- 
 stances are vastly more enduring than the 
 forms of matter which are subject to appre- 
 hension by the senses* We can no more 
 form a mental image of the possible rarity 
 of substance than we can form a mental 
 image of the distance of far away stars* 
 The etheric substance in and by which light 
 is propagated and transmitted is so rare that 
 it passes through a pane of glass — a sub- 
 stance as dense as steel — as though it were 
 an open door* With a microscope of high 
 power one may see objects i - 100*000 of an 
 inch in diameter but that does not come 
 within a long distance of the possibility of 
 seeing an atom* Different men have at- 
 tempted to calculate* in different ways* the 
 number of atoms in a permanent gas at 
 zero temperature and ordinary atmospheric 
 pressure* Thompson makes it 98,320,000.- 
 
 11 
 
Whither 
 
 000,000 in I - 1,000,000,000 of a cubic inch; 
 Clerk Maxwell makes it 311,000,000,000; 
 Stoney 1,901,000,000,000; and Sorby 6,000, 
 000,000,000* Sorby suggests that even if 
 we could improve the microscope so that 
 atoms would come within its capacity, light 
 is too coarse a medium to enable us to see 
 them* A well known physicist says it 
 would take a group of a hundred and 
 twenty-five million atoms to come within 
 the grasp of a microscope of the highest 
 power* Such figures convey no real mean- 
 ing whatever to our minds; we can form 
 no mental image of such minuteness* Mean- 
 while, however, the atom must be far more 
 of an unchanging reality than is the Wash- 
 ington monument* The light-ether is rarity 
 itself as compared with the atom* But it is 
 easily conceivable that substance may exist 
 which compares with the light-ether in 
 rarity as that compares with lead* And 
 probably matter is only substance in a cer- 
 tain degree of density and in atomic form* 
 
 Notwithstanding the fact that, in some 
 sense, force is the master and substance is the 
 servant, it is plainly evident that force can- 
 not act or exist apart from substance* As 
 well might a lever lift in the absence of a 
 fulcrum or a sword cut without an arm to 
 wield it* Everything which exists, create 
 or uncreate, is and must be either substance 
 
 12 
 
Whither 
 
 or an attribute inseparable from substance* 
 The old theologians saw that truth when 
 they made the Nicene creed state that Christ 
 44 is of one substance with the Father/' 
 Isaac Newton arrived at the inseparable- 
 ness of force from substance through reason, 
 and since his time men have demonstrated 
 it by investigation and experiment* Heat, 
 light, sound, gravitation, electricity, mag- 
 netism, life and all other forces whatsoever, 
 can only act in and through substance* 
 Observation and reason teach that in the 
 last analysis, substance and force are insep- 
 arable and indivisible; whether at that 
 point they be one thing or two inseparable 
 things need not now be discussed* A subtle 
 substance named the "ether," a substance 
 of greater rarity than matter, is the medium 
 through and in which many of the invisi- 
 ble forces act, the force being propagated by 
 wave-motions of the ether* One of the 
 simplest of all happenings involves an ex- 
 traordinary instance of this action* When 
 an apple falls it is moved by the force called 
 gravitation ; that is a force that involves a 
 velocity in the ether more than a million 
 times in excess that of light, which moves 
 one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles 
 a second* A knowledge of an ether and of 
 the inability of all force to act except through 
 substance, offers a reasonable explanation 
 of different sorts of communication, out of 
 
 13 
 
Whither 
 
 the ordinary, from one person to another* 
 Mind reading, the transmission of thought 
 from one person to another with no sensible 
 intermediary, is one of these, the reasonable 
 explanation being* that thought sets up 
 mind-waves in an ether which flows in all 
 directions and which, in the case of some 
 recipients, are felt by some inward faculty 
 and translated into terms understood by the 
 recipient* In hypnotism, the governing of 
 the actions, thoughts and feelings of one 
 person by the will of another, the control- 
 ling impulse from the directing will must 
 be communicated through the medium of 
 an ether* In mind-cure, so called, an ether 
 is the only medium through which the 
 healing impulse can proceed from the healer 
 to the patient* In wireless telegraphy the 
 communicating impulse consists of motions 
 in an ether* It is probably one ether sub- 
 ject to different sorts of wave motion for 
 these different purposes* Ether is not ma- 
 terial ; it is not matter ; comets millions of 
 miles in extent but so tenuous in substance 
 that the smallest stars shine through them, 
 dash about the sun at a tremendous pace, 
 almost four hundred miles a second, and 
 suffer no perceptible retardation by ether, 
 showing it to be a frictionless medium or at 
 any rate so nearly such that it is necessarily 
 below matter in rarity* 
 
 14 
 
Whither 
 
 Substance pervades every spot and point 
 in the universe* The light of a hundred 
 million suns comes to us from depths of 
 space so remote that any combination of 
 figures which we put together to represent 
 their distances conveys no more real mean- 
 ing to our minds than does a page of San- 
 scrit to an Australian Bushman, but if you 
 were able to put in the path of that light a 
 zone of pure emptiness the millionth part 
 of an inch across it, that messenger of in- 
 conceivably swift wing would die at that 
 bar on the instant* The wave motion which 
 propagates light could not cross the bar* 
 Force can be transmitted only through 
 substance and only by continuously com- 
 municated vibrations or wave-motions of 
 substance* Substance is necessarily every- 
 where* While we can in no wise compre- 
 hend the infinity of the space that surrounds 
 us on all sides and in every direction, we 
 can form some image of things contained 
 therein which are large to the contemplation 
 of a human being* On a clear night if one 
 has good eyes he can see about two thou- 
 sand stars; with the possible exception of 
 two or three planets of our own solar system, 
 they are all suns* Our sun is ninety-three 
 millions of miles away from us and the 
 nearest of these star -suns multiplies that 
 distance two hundred and seventy-five thou- 
 sand times* With a good field glass one 
 
 15 
 
Whither 
 
 may see about two hundred thousand of 
 these star-suns and with the Lick or Yerkes 
 telescopes a hundred millions come into sight* 
 If all these star-suns — fifty thousand for 
 each one we now see — were visible to the 
 eye, the sky, upon a clear night, would be 
 an unbroken fret work of golden star-fire* 
 And who shall say how many there are of 
 dead suns with their systems of dead planets, 
 invisible in the black night of interstellar 
 space, waiting for the morning of creation 
 to break again for them ? Some of these 
 star-suns are so far away that their light, 
 traveling a hundred and eighty-six thou- 
 sand miles a second, must be a hundred 
 thousand years in reaching us* Substance 
 exists all the way without a rift or the star 
 light would never reach us* This is only 
 the beginning of infinity* Substance per- 
 vades it all* Substance is of infinite extent* 
 However, one need not jump to the con- 
 clusion that the entirety of the system which 
 includes the visible universe is the only 
 system of that general kind in existence, 
 for there is a star in the sky sometimes 
 called u The Runaway," moving some two 
 hundred miles and more a second, whose 
 motions are not given or controlled by any 
 or all the heavenly bodies known to us* 
 This curious stranger evidently invites us 
 to contemplate the possibility of the exist- 
 ence of other systems more or less like that 
 system of which the visible universe is a part* 
 
 16 
 
Whither 
 
 What do we really know about the atomic 
 constitution of matter and about the exist- 
 ence and properties of ether? An atom is 
 the unit of matter* It is both the physical 
 and chemical unit* There are some eighty 
 known sorts of matter* as gold* silver* iron* 
 carbon, oxygen* hydrogen* ete* Each sort 
 is called an "element" That matter has 
 units* indivisible units* is clear from the fact 
 that these different elements* when they 
 combine at all (and they do combine in 
 variety) ♦ always combine in definite and 
 unchangeable proportions by weight* If 
 matter were not composed of units, if it were 
 infinitely divisible* there could be no such 
 law of combination in definite proportions 
 and the elements would combine in any 
 proportions as — to illustrate roughly — we 
 may mix together any proportions of two 
 liquids* It is a law which enabled a Russian 
 chemist. Mendeleef* to construct a table 
 of elements disposed according to atomic 
 weights and properties* with certain unfilled 
 gaps* from which he predicted the future 
 discovery of then unknown elements* hav- 
 ing properties which he described ; and since 
 then the discovery of new elements has 
 accurately fulfilled the prediction as to some 
 of the gaps* How large are these units of 
 matter* these atoms? A microscope of the 
 highest power enables us to see things which 
 are only I -100.000 of an inch in diameter 
 
 17 
 
Whither 
 
 but it gives no sign of capacity to discern 
 an atom* An eighth of a grain of indigo, 
 dissolved in sulphuric acid, will give a dis- 
 tinctly blue color to ten quarts of water, the 
 millionth part of a grain to a drop, but that 
 does not get near to the minuteness of an 
 atom. We get nearer when we separate 
 water, as we readily can, into oxygen and 
 hydrogen, the latter being the gas which is 
 used to fill balloons, and having atoms so 
 small and light that in common air it rushes 
 upward like a cork in water* Physicists 
 agree that they have measured the magni- 
 tude of atoms in several different ways but 
 no explanation of these ways is likely to be 
 understood, they tell us, without "a pretty 
 thorough knowledge of molecular physics." 
 One method involves a study of the colors 
 displayed by a soap-bubble, which are due 
 to the interference with each other of the 
 light-waves that fall on the film, the length 
 of which the physicists readily measure; it 
 results that the thickness of that part of the 
 film which is black for a second or two 
 before it breaks is shown to be 1-10,000,000 
 (J -9,600,000) of an inch. This is not a 
 thickness made up of a single stratum of 
 atoms; it is a thickness of water, the ulti- 
 mate particles of which, as water, are mole- 
 cules, each composed of two atoms of hydro- 
 gen and one atom of oxygen chemically 
 combined; and there must be more than 
 
 18 
 
Whither 
 
 one stratum of molecules (each containing 
 its three atoms) in this thickness of water- 
 film for a single stratum could not maintain 
 itself in the air, as a film, for an instant, 
 wherefore a single atom can only have a 
 fractional part of the 1-10,000,000 of an inch 
 for its individual magnitude* One well 
 known physicist speaks of that magnitude 
 of the individual atom as being 1-50,000- 
 000 of an inch, in which case it would re- 
 quire a group of 125,000,000 (the cube of 
 500 atoms in a line) to be visible as a mere 
 point in a microscope of the highest power, 
 one that discerns a thing that is 1-100,000 
 of an inch in diameter. But it is not read- 
 ily to be seen why the single atom must not 
 be much smaller than 1-50,000,000 of an 
 inch; when we allow for plural strata of 
 molecules and room for the vibration of the 
 three atoms of each — all within the thick- 
 ness of the water-film — the magnitude of 
 the single atom would seem to be less than 
 1-100,000,000 of an inch* It is not a neces- 
 sity of the discussion of these pages that we 
 should know just how large an atom is* It 
 is sufficient on that point that it is a reality 
 and minute beyond our comprehension ; and 
 that much we know* How do we know 
 that the atom vibrates at a tremendous rate? 
 It is known that the ether has various sorts 
 of wave motions, for instance those associ- 
 ated with light, electricity and gravitation, 
 
 19 
 
Whither 
 
 the last named necessarily constant and 
 never ceasing* It is known that these wave- 
 motions do not originate in the ether but 
 are imparted to it by the vibration of atoms 
 of matter* Speaking of atomic vibration of 
 a thousand million of millions per second* a 
 well known physicist says* u there is indub- 
 itable evidence that the atoms of matter do 
 actually make such a number of vibrations 
 per second*" Consider the wave-motions of 
 light for a little: the velocity of light is 
 186*000 miles a second; " the wave-lengths 
 of light in the ether are known with great 
 precision/' they being 1-40*000 or 1-50*000 
 of an inch; the velocity divided by the 
 wave-length gives the number of vibrations 
 of the atom, imparting the wave-motion to 
 the ether, nearly six hundred millions of 
 millions per second* The atomic vibration 
 involved in the stress called gravity* which 
 is necessarily constant and unceasing* is at 
 a much higher rate than that involved in 
 light ; it is at least one hundred and eighty- 
 six thousand millions per second* How do 
 we know the ether exists as a thing apart 
 from matter? The working of wireless 
 telegraphy depends on the existence of such 
 ether* The transmission of electric energy 
 depends on the existence of such ether* The 
 working of gravitation depends on the ex- 
 istence of such an ether* The transmission 
 of the Roentgen ray depends on the exist- 
 
 20 
 
Whither 
 
 ence of such an ether ♦ Let us again con- 
 sider light for a little* That light is not 
 substance but a mode of motion in substance 
 is shown by dividing a beam of light and 
 letting the two parts travel by different 
 paths to a screen ; either part, alone, illum- 
 inates the screen but wherever the two parts 
 of the beam interfere at the point of union, 
 there the screen is darkened, the two parts 
 mutually destroying each other; if light 
 were substance the reunion of the two parts 
 would but add to the illumination; their 
 destruction of each other proves that light 
 is not substance but a mode of motion in 
 substance* That substance is the ether* It 
 is substance beyond matter in rarity* Glass 
 is matter, matter as dense as steel but it 
 offers little hindrance to the passage of light; 
 when we see the light pass through the 
 glass we know that the ether in which the 
 light is propagated necessarily flows through 
 the glass with what is practically perfect 
 freedom* The Roentgen ray tells the same 
 sort of tale about many sorts of matter that 
 are opaque to light* As ether is substance 
 why is it not also matter — a finer sort of 
 matter? We have just seen that matter 
 has indivisible units, atoms ; and ether has 
 no atoms ; the ether is continuous and mat- 
 ter is discontinuous ; atoms have vibrations 
 but the motions in ether are wave-motions* 
 Matter has gravity ; every particle of mat- 
 
 21 
 
Whither 
 
 ter in the universe attracts every other par- 
 ticle; this is true of atoms and is equally 
 true of the huge, far-away suns in the vast 
 night of space* Ether is gravitationless ; if it 
 were not it would accumulate around the 
 suns and planets, refracting and retarding 
 light and leaving inter-spaces which the 
 light could not cross* Matter has friction 
 while the ether is f rictionless ; if it were not 
 frictionless it would retard the movements 
 of all the heavenly bodies without exception 
 especially the comets of extremely tenuous 
 body ; but it does not retard them* There 
 are many differences between matter and 
 ether but these suffice* Why ether ? Why 
 not ethers — in the plural? Perhaps there 
 are ; there may be a special ether for word- 
 less communication between God and man, 
 between spiritual beings and mortals, and 
 between man and man* And then again 
 one ether may suffice* The work of Far- 
 aday and Maxwell made it reasonably 
 certain "that the waves which constitute 
 light and waves produced by changing mag- 
 netism were identical in their nature, were 
 in the same medium, traveled with the same 
 velocity, were capable of refraction, and so 
 on*" Atoms are probably vortex rings of 
 ether in ether ; we do not know how they 
 could be produced but their production being 
 granted the actions and properties of the 
 atoms stand accounted for* Even so, matter 
 
 22 
 
Whither 
 
 and ether differ widely* If one ventures a 
 glance into a pot of melted steel he is driven 
 back by a blinding glare of light and heat* 
 Nevertheless the ether intimately pervades 
 the white-hot metal at a temperature of 
 absolute zero, a degree of cold which the 
 imagination cannot compass* 
 
 Human consciousness and mentality gen- 
 erally are not attributes of matter — by which 
 is meant substance in atomic form, sub- 
 stance that has gravity* Quite the contrary* 
 Neither is ever associated with matter ex- 
 cept in company with life-force which will 
 only occupy organized matter* To be sure 
 structureless protoplasm is life-stuff but it 
 cannot build blood, bone, fibre or tissue 
 except in the presence of an organism pos- 
 sessing the full life principle* When the 
 human life-force quits matter, consciousness 
 and mentality in its entirety both go with 
 it* The query not rarely put forth as to 
 whether thought is not really a product of 
 the action of the gray matter of the brain, 
 might busy itself profitably awhile with the 
 question whether the power afforded by a 
 steam engine in action is essentially a pro- 
 duct of the steel and iron or of the steam* 
 And the kindred query as to how it is that 
 an injury to the brain interferes with mental 
 action might with equal profit, ask how it 
 is that the steam is powerless for the pur- 
 
 23 
 
Whither 
 
 pose in hand, when the engine is broken or 
 disordered. Force cannot act except through 
 substance. Conscious mentality cannot ex- 
 press itself — at least under human conditions 
 — except through organized substance and 
 when the organism is out of tune, in those 
 respects which concern its relation to mental 
 action, the expression of mental action suf- 
 fers like discord. We do not know and 
 cannot conceive of human consciousness or 
 of any feature of conscious mentality except 
 in connection and company with life-force. 
 This fixity of association points to the con- 
 clusion that consciousness and mentality in 
 general have necessary eternity and existence 
 along with life. If the fact be so, that is 
 immortality — conscious immortality. 
 
 Brain action is an accompaniment of all 
 thinking but it is an instrument of the 
 mental process and not its source or cause. 
 The memory is a mental faculty that effec- 
 tively mocks all effort to establish mentality 
 as a product of brain action. The entire 
 human body is constantly perishing and as 
 constantly renewed; the old physiologies 
 gave us a new body in each term of seven 
 years' the probabilities point to entire re- 
 newa in a shorter time than that. More- 
 over the destruction of brain cells takes place 
 in all thinking and feeling; in deep thought 
 and strong feeling the destruction goes on 
 
 24 
 
Whither 
 
 rapidly. The renewal of the brain takes 
 place in a much shorter time than that of 
 the body as a whole* Remembering: the 
 past is a mental act of the highest import- 
 ance* Mental growth and improvement 
 would be impossible if the mind could retain 
 nothing of its experience* The brain cells 
 which act in all such experience perish in 
 the acting ; if memory depended upon them 
 it would perish too* But memory does not 
 perish; it persists; and it is not rare that in 
 years past middle life the happenings of 
 childhood and youth are recalled more clear- 
 ly than events of intervening years. The 
 brain perishes but the memory persists* This 
 is a fact that establishes mentality as regnant 
 over brain action and not at all its product. 
 
 Will the life principle of human beings of 
 necessity persist to all eternity? That is a 
 question of mighty import* On the one 
 hand we have an eternity of life in the 
 past* pointing by analogy to an eternity of 
 life in the future* On the other hand we 
 have the torment of knowing that we see 
 every living thing die first or last* Wait a 
 moment. What is it we do see ? We see 
 at one moment organized matter presenting 
 appearances that tell us that life is in it and 
 we see that same organization at another 
 moment presenting appearances which tell 
 us that life is not in it* We have never yet 
 
 25 
 
Whither 
 
 seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled any 
 force of any kind whatsoever* We have 
 seen an apple fall but no sense ever yet 
 perceived the force — we call it gravity for 
 the sake of giving it a name— which moved 
 it. We have seen the armature fly to the 
 magnet but no sense ever yet apprehended 
 magnetism* We have seen a million things 
 but we never yet saw light* And so on 
 through the whole category. Substance 
 when sufficiently dense we can touch, taste, 
 see, hear and smell* Matter, the servant 
 and slave, is in evidence to all our senses, 
 but the forces which, by lawful process, do 
 what they will with matter are always 
 out of the grasp and contact of every sense* 
 Life— whatever else of high degree it may 
 be— is a force- No part of force or substance 
 can possibly be destroyed; that is axiomatic* 
 Some, perhaps all, of the physical forces are 
 convertible each into the other* Power, 
 through a dynamo, readily changes into 
 electric energy and that again, through 
 proper media, into heat or light or back into 
 power again. Not so the life-force* Man 
 struggles in vain to get life except from life* 
 If life were convertible into the other forces 
 it would be because of its subjection to their 
 law as to convertibility; and other forces 
 would be convertible into life* But they are 
 not* So far as human knowledge goes, life 
 is not convertible into or from any other 
 
 26 
 
Whither 
 
 force. So far as human knowledge goes, life 
 is inconvertible and changeless* An eternity 
 of life behind us warrants an expectation of 
 eternity of life in the future. All this comes 
 so near to being proof of the necessary 
 eternity of future life, that if there were as 
 much evidence for the opposite we might 
 well be and should be hopeless. 
 
 It would argue nothing pro or con, on 
 the question of immortality, if man should 
 succeed in coaxing a manifestation of life 
 from matter for it is instinct with incon- 
 ceivable activity — as a mere reference to its 
 atoms vibrating millions of times a second 
 sufficiently indicates — and is also instinct 
 with wonderful energy — as a mere reference 
 to the mixing of the harmless elements 
 which produce nitro-glycerine again suf- 
 ficiently indicates. The same life-fount 
 which is at the root of the human life-force 
 must be at the root of the activity and 
 energy of matter, wherefore, possibly, we 
 might produce life from matter if we only 
 knew how. But it would not in the slightest 
 degree tend to the conclusion that life is 
 inherent in matter apart from a power and 
 source behind it. However, so far as we 
 can see, it is ordered that we shall not pro- 
 duce vegetable or animal life from matter 
 not already containing it. Artificial pro- 
 duction of protoplasm would be something 
 far short of that* 
 
 27 
 
Whither 
 
 It is natural to query where the life- 
 principle of the human being* goes when it 
 quits the organized matter of the human 
 body which it has energized* That life is a 
 force is certain* Force cannot exist apart 
 from substance — not for an instant* Life 
 cannot be destroyed* It is not an entity. 
 It cannot fly off into space in company with 
 nothing* When life quits matter it must 
 quit in company with substance* That is 
 necessarily live substance; and live substance 
 is necessarily an organization* This con- 
 clusively calls for the existence* in intimate 
 relations with the human body of matter* of 
 another organic body of subtle substance 
 which may well be called the "spiritual 
 body," which is energized by the same life- 
 force that energizes the body of matter* and 
 which* with the life-force* quits the body of 
 matter when it is no longer tenantable by 
 the life-force* 
 
 The realization of the possibility of a 
 thing one has never seen* as well as the 
 formation of a mental picture of it* are 
 naturally helped by knowledge of an anal- 
 ogous thing* Many have seen and all may 
 see a human skeleton* That which the eye 
 rests on* bone material* is inorganic matter 
 and was essentially such when the skeleton 
 was the supporting framev/ork of a living 
 human body* It nevertheless contained with- 
 
 28 
 
Whither 
 
 in it another skeleton of organic matter, of 
 the same size and form which can readily be 
 brought to light and view* Lay the skele- 
 ton in a bath of hydrochloric acid, renewed 
 from time to time, and the calcic material of 
 the bones will all be removed leaving behind 
 it a skeleton of the same size and shape, of 
 organic translucent gelatinous matter, which 
 was the real living thing of the whole bony 
 structure when it was in the living human 
 body* A complete body of subtle substance 
 contained within and bounded by the living 
 human body of matter is of itself no more 
 marvelous than this secondary skeleton of 
 matter contained within the bony structure 
 of the skeleton* 
 
 It may be asked u If there be this body of 
 subtle substance in intimate relation with 
 the human body of matter, does it conform 
 in any way to the shape of the body of 
 matter ? " No necessity of that sort is readily 
 apparent* But it is just as reasonable to ask 
 44 Why not ? " It is a common infirmity of 
 the minds of men who form the mass of the 
 civilized peoples of the world — and this in 
 distinction from the savage mind which 
 readily pictures the u happy hunting 
 ground " — that they have the habit of 
 comprehending, after a fashion, that which 
 they can see or hear or touch or taste or 
 smell, but when their imaginations turn to 
 
 29 
 
Whither 
 
 that which is beyond the senses, they will 
 have nothing: but the far away and the 
 impossible* To them Heaven must be some 
 vast distance afar and its inhabitants must 
 be shadows, absolutely without substance* 
 They will have no middle ground between 
 matter and that which is absolutely unsub- 
 stantial* Heaven might be far away easily 
 enough but a being without substance, even 
 God, is impossible* That nothing is never 
 something must be accepted once for all* 
 This "spiritual body " is a body of substance 
 — substance that is necessarily superior to 
 that of the body of matter* That substance 
 is a necessarily live substance which must 
 be sustained and nourished, not indeed after 
 the earthly fashion, but after a fashion of 
 its own, just as real and just as necessary* 
 This necessity calls for a spiritual body with 
 the capacity for assimilating nourishment 
 after a fashion just as orderly and natural 
 as that of the human body, however differ- 
 ent and ethereal in kind or degree it may be* 
 The spiritual body may or may not be in 
 form like the mortal but that it is an organic 
 structure is reasonably certain* 
 
 The following are fair questions : u What 
 necessity is there that man's spiritual body 
 should have existence in this world ? ff 
 "Why may it not be that the central 
 spiritual spark at the core of the human 
 
 30 
 
Whither 
 
 entity quits the organism of matter at the 
 death-change, enters the spiritual world with 
 such endowment of character as it has ac- 
 quired in this world, and there takes on by- 
 growth its spiritual body as the kernel of 
 corn planted in the ground first rots and 
 then grows a new plant ?" The splendor 
 of the diction of St* Paul's illustration occurs 
 at once : u But some man will say, How are 
 the dead raised up? and with what body do 
 they come? Thou fool, that which thou 
 sowest is not quickened except it die : And 
 that which thou sowest, thou sowest not 
 that body that shall be, but bare grain ; it 
 may chance of wheat, or of some other 
 grain : But God giveth it a body as it hath 
 pleased him, and to every seed his own 
 body*" As a matter of fact this illustration 
 deals with nature's methods for the multipli- 
 cation of living organisms, not with the 
 continuity of the life of a single entity* 
 There is no fact or reason which points to 
 anything in the next world of that kind — 
 either the germination of seed or animal 
 conception, gestation and birth* The spirit- 
 ual entity of the human ego in that world 
 must necessarily have the experience of this 
 world behind it for disciplinary reasons* 
 Seed germination and animal-birth cannot 
 be actualities of the next world* Force can- 
 not exist apart from substance* Man's life- 
 force can only exist in company with live- 
 substance* Live substance is necessarily an 
 
 31 
 
Whither 
 
 organism* When the life-force of man quits 
 the body of matter it can only quit in 
 company with a living organism* That 
 living organism is the spiritual body with 
 which the human ego enters the next world* 
 
 We are quick to assume that the body 
 which we have after we are done with this 
 body of organized matter is a finality* The 
 evolution of Darwin does not point that 
 way* Neither does the long evolution of 
 the Buddhist* Neither does the quittance 
 of the body of matter by the body of subtle 
 substance* So far as analogies go they 
 point to the possibility of further changes 
 in that direction* The question is not of 
 special importance to this discussion* The 
 all important question is. u Do we have an 
 existence consciously continuous with this 
 present one after we quit this earthly ten- 
 ement ? " 
 
 The Buddhist belief in re-incarnation, as 
 a normal and necessary experience, is a thing 
 well known to many ; and it is taking 
 hold of the western world under the name 
 of theosophy* It is an idea that crops out 
 in divers places* For instance, in the New 
 Testament, thus x " And his disciples asked 
 him. saying. Master, who did sin. this 
 man or his parents* that he was born 
 
 32 
 
Whither 
 
 blind ? " And, again, with approval, in 
 Charles Kingsley's " Water Babies " : 
 
 "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 And cometh from afar*" 
 
 The thing in itself has nothing in it to 
 stagger the imagination* It is easily con- 
 ceivable that after a long period of more or 
 less happy dream life in the next world (the 
 Buddhist's u Devachan ff ) f the spiritual body 
 may fail, as the body of matter failed and 
 the entity at the core of it, a spark from God, 
 go back to re-embodiment in mortal form, 
 taking possession of matter at the moment 
 of physical conception in the womb; and 
 that this may be repeated many times — all 
 under the dominion of immutable law. But 
 to what end ? The Buddhist says that in 
 each embodiment the ego is incarnated in a 
 body and provided with an environment 
 such as the conduct in the last embodiment 
 deserved — good or bad, according to the 
 behavior in the last earth-life. But the gate 
 of oblivion shuts down at the beginning of 
 each embodiment so that the re-incarnated 
 entity has no continuity of consciousness or 
 memory connecting with its earlier embodi- 
 ments. The whole continuity is open to 
 the entity later on but not then. To punish 
 a horse to-day for misconduct of yesterday, 
 when he can by no possibility connect the 
 
 33 
 
Whither 
 
 misconduct with the punishment, is the 
 height of unreason* The re-incarnation 
 theory seems to apply the same unreason 
 to man's career* This is a cardinal objection 
 that is generally urged against the theory 
 of re-incarnation* 
 
 The Buddhist would say that the last 
 paragraph by no means utters the last word 
 about the reason or unreason of the theory 
 of re-incarnation* Turn back in imagina- 
 tion to the days when our fore-fathers were 
 cave-dwellers, naked, hairy, eaters of food 
 uncooked, swift and fierce to fight, below 
 the Australian Bushman in intelligence and 
 not possessed of the most shadowy and 
 rudimentary element of civilization* If we 
 have souls to save they had souls to save* 
 What sort of entities must they have been 
 on their entrance into the next world? 
 What could conscience or repentance do for 
 them ? These questions make for the prob- 
 ability of re-incarnaticn* Nor does the 
 shutting down of the gate of oblivion at 
 each new incarnation — with karma select- 
 ing for the re-incarnated entity such a mortal 
 body and such a mortal environment as the 
 conduct in the last deserved — work such 
 iniustice as seems at first blush* The forces 
 which make for the development of man 
 are constant and eternal* The human en- 
 tity reaches a certain pitch cf development 
 
 34 
 
Whither 
 
 at the end of each incarnation. It begins 
 right there when it begins again* The 
 forces of development envelope it sleeplessly* 
 It can hardly be said that the elements of 
 eternal justice are absent from the situation* 
 These are things which the Buddhist, from 
 his point of view, would say* 
 
 Buddhists and occidental believers in im- 
 mortality both agree that the object of earth- 
 life is development of the human ego through 
 discipline but they do not exactly agree as 
 to the nature of that development* To the 
 occidental idea, development is improvement 
 first of all in goodness and next in wisdom, 
 with increasing power and happiness as a 
 concomitant and result. To the Buddhistic 
 idea, development is improvement first of 
 all in what the Buddhist terms spirituality, 
 meaning thereby the power and capacity 
 of having absolute, positive and intuitive 
 knowledge independently of study and rea- 
 son; along with this acquirement of capacity 
 for positive knowledge must go enough of 
 goodness to prevent the spirituality from 
 being one of evil eminence ; and the final 
 goal is Nirvana, a condition of happiness 
 soon to be considered. In the Buddhistic 
 theory the power of knowing things posi- 
 tively and intuitively is one of antagonism 
 to intellectuality and reasoning. Whether 
 the Buddhists deceive themselves as to the 
 
 35 
 
Whither 
 
 real nature of their spirituality is to fee seen, 
 for instance, in the following; quotation from 
 a lecture delivered in 1899, at the Jagannath 
 College, Dacca, by Swami Abheyanada, it 
 being a fair sample of advanced Buddhistic 
 teachings* "Brahman, the One, the abso- 
 lute Infinite, is the essence from which all 
 things manifested proceed* I deny that 
 Brahman is conscious for this would imply 
 something outside of Itself of which It is 
 conscious* I deny that Brahman is think- 
 ing for this would imply something exter- 
 nal to Itself of which It is thinking* I deny 
 that Brahman has knowledge for this 
 would affirm that there is outside of It 
 something to be known* Brahman is not 
 conscious but It is the essence of conscious- 
 ness, Brahman is not thinking, but It is 
 the essence of thought; Brahman has no 
 knowledge, but It is the essence of knowl- 
 edge* Brahman does not do any action* 
 It simply is* ♦ ♦ ♦ Brahman, the Im- 
 personal, cannot be worshipped because It 
 is infinite*" This picture of a supreme 
 being, the necessary source of consciousness, 
 thought and knowledge throughout the 
 universe, while not Himself possessing them 
 needs no comment* This is simply reason- 
 ing over-refined and inverted till it becomes 
 artificial, fantastic and unreal* 
 
 36 
 
Whither 
 
 Under the Buddhistic plan, man is incar- 
 nated on an average about eight hundred 
 times on this planet in this "round," with 
 Devachanic or heavenly dream-life intervals 
 between each two incarnations, varying in 
 duration from fifteen hundred to several 
 thousand years each* These incarnations 
 in order to be useful need to be a practically 
 continuous course of development so far as 
 the chain of earth-lives is concerned* A mil- 
 lion bricks side by side give only the eleva- 
 tion of a single brick* To re-learn the 
 multiplication table a hundred times is not 
 the equivalent of a progressive study in 
 mathematics which finally masters the in- 
 tegral calculus* It is not readily to be seen 
 how the spiritual entity at the core of the 
 human ego, can, at the beginning of an 
 incarnation in the flesh, resume its develop- 
 ment at the point of progress where it 
 stopped at the close of its last incarnation* 
 Each incarnation must, as a rule, give some- 
 thing of development* Many incarnations 
 should give a considerable aggregate of de- 
 velopment* It would seem that the spiritual 
 entity of the human ego does and must 
 begin each incarnation as a babe, not only 
 in things physical but also in things mental 
 and spiritual* The babe that came into the 
 world with a mental, moral and spiritual 
 endowment which was the ripened fruit of 
 many past incarnations could profit prac- 
 
 37 
 
Whither 
 
 tically nothing by an added earthly experi- 
 ence unless, in the intervals of re-incarnation 
 the whole world made progress in ratio equal 
 to its own ; and the history of the world, 
 with its waxing and waning civilizations, 
 points to nothing like that* The submerged 
 continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, which 
 are a part of Buddhistic lore, forbid the 
 entertaining of such an idea* If each in- 
 carnation carried with it the fruit of all past 
 experience this would be a most surprising 
 world because of the semi-angelic nature of 
 some of its inhabitants as compared with 
 their fellows whose round of incarnations 
 was of later beginning or varied through 
 other causes* The world exhibits no such 
 phenomena* 
 
 The strongest of all arguments advanced 
 by the Buddhists in support of the doctrine 
 of re-incarnation governed by karma is that 
 it accounts for the inequalities of human 
 birth and environment of which the world 
 is full, one child being born of healthy and 
 moral parents into a home of wealth and 
 education, from which he naturally proceeds 
 to a life oj honor and success, while another 
 child is born of parents diseased and vicious 
 into a home of ignorance and poveity from 
 which he naturally proceeds to a life of 
 hardness, dishonor and crime* The Buddhist 
 says that each gets the birth and environ- 
 
 38 
 
Whither 
 
 ment that his conduct in the last incarnation 
 fairly earned; and that on no other basis is 
 there justice in these inequalities of birth 
 and environment* The explanation does 
 not explain* Creature comforts are not the 
 proper reward and outcome of spiritual well- 
 doing'* and* on the other hand* punishment 
 that is not remedial and reformatory, but is 
 simply stern and relentless justice* lacks little 
 of being ugliness* The reasonable success 
 of any scheme of human development* if 
 not simple justice at the hands of its author, 
 demands that a human entity coming back 
 for re-incarnation after an earth-life of bad 
 conduct, shall be subjected to reforming influ- 
 ences and not simply to punishment which. 
 so far as he knows* is undeserved* And the 
 influences surrounding a child born into dis- 
 ease* ignorance, vice* and poverty, instead 
 of being reformatory* directly tend to deeper 
 degradation* At just this point of high 
 importance the Buddhistic scheme signally 
 fails* And while the Buddhistic scheme 
 finds little difficulty in dealing with hered- 
 ity, under present human conditions, it yet 
 remains true that if the human race in gen- 
 eral were bred with the same care as to 
 hygiene and morals that a careful breeder 
 of the lower animals applies as to desired 
 characteristics, it would leave little place and 
 opportunity for the working of the karmic 
 scheme ; and meanwhile the past history of 
 
 39 
 
Whither 
 
 the race points to a time in the not distant 
 future, as centuries go, when mankind in 
 general will be thus bred* The question 
 why the birth and environment of some 
 men have so much more of misery in them 
 than falls to the lot of others, is a part of the 
 question why there are pain and evil in the 
 world at all, a question discussed hereinafter* 
 But this is surely an orderly universe predi- 
 cating similar order in the immaterial realm 
 with which it is interfused — order that must 
 give ample compensation at some time and 
 place for all unmerited suffering and hard- 
 ship* 
 
 It is both common sense and good judg- 
 ment in their last analysis that "by their 
 fruits ye shall know them," The Buddhists 
 claim that the high priests of their religion, 
 the Mahatmas, are wise far and away be- 
 yond the rest of the world, having absolute 
 knowledge and actual vision of the interior 
 secrets of the universe and of the whole 
 stupendous problem of existence in all possi- 
 ble elaboration of detail* These masters of 
 wisdom have never made a contribution to 
 the useful arts or, outside of their philoso- 
 phy, — which in an intellectual sense is a 
 wonderful and fascinating thing — to the 
 world's stock of knowledge* They have 
 never permitted the great body of their co- 
 religionists to comprehend their plan of 
 
 40 
 
Whither 
 
 salvation* Any excuse for such action, 
 made alongside of this claim to the possession 
 of vast wisdom, is hopelessly vitiated by the 
 fact that any scheme which permits a few 
 men to be the recipients of wisdom, to the 
 exclusion of the many, violates that clear 
 principle of natural righteousness which de- 
 mands equality of treatment for all men* 
 And with all this vast store of wisdom in 
 their possession, the Mahatmas have per- 
 mitted India with its hundreds of millions of 
 people to be decimated and devastated by 
 pestilence and famines, frequent and terrible, 
 with no effort on their part to teach the 
 people agriculture or hygiene. If it be 
 answered that the life of the Devachanic 
 intervals between incarnations is so much 
 to be preferred to earth-life that it is not 
 kindness to avert the passage to it at the 
 hands of nature, the true and final reply is 
 that the object of earth-life is development 
 through discipline and that such premature 
 shortening of earth-life aborts the very ob- 
 ject and end for which men are born into 
 this world* 
 
 The Buddhist makes Nirvana the end, 
 absorption into the God-head, a condition 
 of "absolute consciousness which is non- 
 consciousness/' Doubtless our present con- 
 sciousness is a relative matter in that it 
 distinguishes us from other things* God 
 
 41 
 
Whither 
 
 may have a consciousness not dependent on 
 such relativity* And man may develope to 
 a point where he has such absolute con- 
 sciousness; that need not be discussed here* 
 Nirvana means* for one thing, eternal rest 
 and that is a conception which violates the 
 fundamental law of our being which is con- 
 scious activity — growth and progress which 
 know no finality* A possible heaven of 
 contemplation/' in the very presence of God* 
 reached by a purified soul after myriads of 
 ages of spiritual effort* will not be "rest" — 
 stagnation* 
 
 These pages use the word "He n in speak- 
 ing of God. as is usual elsewhere* Were it 
 not that it might savor of irreverence the 
 word "It" would be used instead* The 
 Buddhists are right in saying " It*" For if 
 the universe has a God* such a being cannot 
 possibly have the (psychical) attributes of 
 sex — at least not of one sex alone* The 
 word "He" is used out of deference to 
 custom* 
 
 A conception of a God of the universe 
 more common than any other in the past 
 and perhaps also in the present* makes Him 
 a being of definite dimensional personality, 
 of unimaginable splendor and dignity* local- 
 ized in Heaven* at the center of the universe* 
 seated on a radiant throne and receiving the 
 
 42 
 
Whither 
 
 adoration of shining hosts of saints and 
 angels r endered in musical number of ravish- 
 ing and unspeakable harmony* One writer 
 puts it, in part, thus : " And immediately I 
 was in the spirit ; and behold, a throne was 
 set in heaven, and one sat on the throne* 
 And he that sat was to look upon like a 
 jasper and a sardine stone ; and there was a 
 rainbow round about the throne in sight 
 like unto an emerald* And round about the 
 throne were four and twenty seats x and upon 
 the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, 
 clothed in white raiment ; and they had on 
 their heads crowns of gold* And out of the 
 throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings 
 and voices*" It is a conception which gives 
 God as a localized and dimensional being, as 
 seeing all things in the universe from His 
 throne in heaven and governing all things 
 throughout the universe by His fiat, the 
 exertion of His will projected from that 
 center* It is a conception which makes all 
 natural laws the creation of God and subject 
 to change, suspension and interruption by 
 Him* 
 
 Nevertheless men have had before them 
 a nobler conception of God* Thus Paul 
 speaking to the Athenians on Mars Hill : 
 
 44 God that made the world and all things 
 therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven 
 and earth, dwelleth not in temples made 
 with hands; Neither is worshipped with 
 
 43 
 
Whither 
 
 men's hands, as though he needed any thing, 
 seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and 
 all things; And hath made of one blood all 
 nations of men for to dwell on all the face 
 of the earth, and hath determined the times 
 before appointed, and the bounds of their 
 habitation; That they should seek the Lord, 
 if haply they might feel after him, and find 
 him, though he be not far from every one 
 of us ; For in him we live, and move, and 
 have our being/' 
 
 Various causes have contributed to the 
 wide acceptation by men of the conception 
 of God as a being of definite dimensional 
 personality having a local habitation* The 
 foremost of these causes is that men's minds 
 dealt with ideas of God and heaven at a 
 time when all men believed that there was 
 but one world, that the one world was essen- 
 tially flat, and that it was stationary ; Gior- 
 diano Bruno was burned at the stake in 
 Rome as late as the year J 600 for maintain- 
 ing that there are more worlds than one, 
 and Galileo died in prison in i 642 where he 
 had been many years, for denying that the 
 earth is the center of the universe ; to the 
 old beliefs heaven was naturally in the sky 
 and that heaven was naturally God's home; 
 we inherited those beliefs* Another of these 
 causes is the inability of some minds to im- 
 agine a personality (intelligent individual- 
 
 44 
 
Whither 
 
 ity) that is not dimensional, a personality 
 pervasive of all things material and imma- 
 terial in the universe. Another of these 
 causes is the statement in Genesis that u God 
 created man in his own image " ; and man 
 has definite dimensional personality as well 
 as local habitation* Another cause is that 
 man is always a thing separate and apart 
 from his creations* We have some faint 
 appreciation of the marvelous mechanisms 
 of nature, ranging from the bodily structure 
 of insects in the summer air that only become 
 visible to the eye in a sunbeam, up to the 
 whirling worlds of our solar system* When 
 man invents and constructs a Jacquard loom 
 or a web-perfecting printing press the man 
 forever remains apart from his creation ; an 
 analogy seemingly perfect leads to the idea 
 of a similar separateness of God from His 
 works* 
 
 There is no one place in the universe 
 specially suitable for God or heaven* The 
 importance of this truth cannot be over- 
 estimated* The universe has no circumfer- 
 ence and consequently no center* God can- 
 not be localized in a universe which has 
 neither center nor circumference* God is 
 necessarily everywhere* On a revolving 
 globe like ours, man cannot look u up " to 
 heaven nor "down" to hell* That "God 
 created man in His own image" is sure; 
 
 45 
 
Whither 
 
 man's intelligent consciousness could have 
 come from no other source ; this is likewise 
 a truth of supremest importance ; but it is a 
 spiritual u image " not a bodily* Man's 
 apartness from his creations has no possible 
 analogue in God and His works; man util- 
 izes a stream of water to turn a wheel and 
 goes away, whither he will, leaving the 
 wheel to turn ; he is able to do this because 
 nature — God in physical manifestation — 
 constantly lifts the spent water to the foun- 
 tain-head ; there is no one but God to ren- 
 der like service to God's creations* 
 
 There is a conception of a God of the 
 universe which consists with all known 
 facts and with all reason that is not odd or 
 fantastic. This is a conception that gives 
 God as a being who has a mode of existence 
 transcendent and external of all created 
 things but who is also the primal* imma- 
 terial substance from which all substance is 
 formed and the primal force whence all forces 
 proceed; a single, conscious, personal, in- 
 telligent being existent from everlasting to 
 everlasting; a being who suffuses, pervades 
 and permeates by His substance, force, per- 
 sonal presence and conscious intelligence 
 every part of everything in the universe; 
 a being who has, as uncreated and eternal 
 parts of Himself, all natural laws, physical, 
 mental, spiritual and whatsoever other laws 
 
 46 
 
Whither 
 
 there may be in the universe; a being* to 
 whom all things are possible, and none other, 
 that are consistent with such laws; the 
 creator, by lawful and orderly process, of 
 all things except Himself, whose motive of 
 existence is love as infinite as the infinities 
 of time and space ; and who through that 
 love serves each one of us with infinite 
 humility. There is no other conception of 
 a God of the universe that does consist with 
 all known facts* 
 
 The not unknown conception which re- 
 places Him by an unconscious intelligence 
 is not only more odd and fantastic than the 
 idea of a headless yet forceful man, but it 
 forgets that we ourselves have consciousness 
 which can only come from a fountain-head 
 of consciousness* Something cannot be de- 
 rived from nothing and consciousness cannot 
 be derived from unconsciousness* Another 
 conception of first cause which dispenses with 
 a single overruling intelligence, conscious or 
 unconscious, and gfives in place thereof a 
 great number of different impersonal un- 
 conscious forces — generally called collec- 
 tively "Nature" — all self-existent, and all 
 acting as if they were co-operating intel- 
 ligently, flatly contradicts the fundamental 
 fact of intuitive knowledge that intelligent 
 action can only proceed from personal in- 
 telligence* It multiplies enormously what- 
 
 47 
 
Whither 
 
 ever difficulty there may be in the conception 
 of a single first cause by necessitating the 
 conception of a multitude of first causes; and 
 — like the conception of a single unconscious 
 intelligence — leaves our personal conscious- 
 ness derivable from nothing and nowhere* 
 
 The conception of God already stated as 
 reasonable and consistent gives Him as the 
 immaterial primal substance of which all 
 substance material and immaterial is formed* 
 Any other conception gives matter as un- 
 created and self-existent, along with God, 
 from all eternity in the past to all eternity 
 in the future* Matter uncreated and self- 
 existent is a tremendous effect, without a 
 cause. The strenuous student of truth has 
 the right to object u So, in the same sense, 
 is Goo an effect without a cause*" And it 
 is true* But the existence of a higher power 
 than man, the giver of man's planetary 
 home, his life, intelligence, mentality, and 
 consciousness is a surety* All of these, the 
 planetary home, the life, the intelligence, 
 the mentality and the consciousness are 
 effects which each must have had a cause* 
 None of these has, in and of itself, eternity 
 behind it, for plainly there was a time when 
 this world and all it contains were not ; each 
 and all had a definite beginning* Man's 
 consciousness, for instance, was necessarily 
 imparted to him from without ; it is not a 
 
 48 
 
Whither 
 
 continuous inheritance, from man to man, 
 through all eternity in the past ; the begin- 
 nings of the world itself bar that* Such 
 consciousness in man from age to age, thou- 
 sands of millions of him, could only have 
 been imparted to him by a higher power 
 which necessarily had consciousness through 
 all eternity in the past, for consciousness 
 could never have existed at all as an ab- 
 straction and apart from a living being and 
 it never could have sprung into being from 
 unconsciousness* The same considerations 
 apply, in substance, to man's planetary 
 home, his life, his mentality, his intelligence 
 and to every possible substance and force in 
 this world* Each of them had a beginning, 
 so far as this world is concerned, and yet 
 each necessarily had a source and cause 
 eternally existent in the past* The perfectly 
 evident co-operation and harmony of action 
 of man f s planetary home, his life, his intel- 
 ligence, his mentality and his consciousness 
 conclusively point to a unity of cause, a 
 single being* The name universally given 
 to such a being is God* It is true that He 
 never had a cause, but He is the only ex- 
 ception* The impossibility of a localized 
 God makes it impossible that any substance 
 or any force can exist as a thing separate 
 and apart from God* It cannot be too 
 firmly realized that a universe without cen- 
 ter or circumference cannot have a God in 
 
 49 
 
Whither? 
 
 any one place as distinguished from other 
 places and that the God of such a universe, 
 which our universe clearly is, must neces- 
 sarily be in all places* A God that fills all 
 space and all places leaves no room for any- 
 thing anywhere except Himself. The sub- 
 stances and forces of and in this world each 
 and all had a beginning, thus conclusively 
 establishing an eternally existent higher 
 power which gave them to this world* A 
 universe without center or circumference 
 conclusively establishes that higher power 
 as existing in all places, thereby, in the last 
 analysis, excluding all other substances and 
 forces from all places. Wherefore all sub- 
 stances and all forces are of and from God. 
 
 If matter is not self-existent, then the 
 only thing of which it, or substance of any 
 kind, can be composed is the substance of 
 God, for something can never proceed from 
 nothing; and in the last analysis everything 
 that is substance must be God-substance. 
 This applies to the frozen wastes at the 
 poles and to those ethereal depths of space 
 where the cold outruns the possibilities of 
 the imagination. It applies to the tremen- 
 dous but unmelting heat under the crust of 
 the earth on which we live, and to the un- 
 imaginable heat source at the sun. It ap- 
 plies to the lily and the rose, and to the 
 putridity which we loathe. Heat and cold 
 
 50 
 
Whither 
 
 light and darkness, growth and decay, in 
 their relation to the human senses are one 
 thing* In their relation to God whose senses 
 are not human, they are necessarily quite a 
 different thing* Decay is as natural and as 
 necessary as growth ; it is the lawful and 
 orderly process for the disintegration of mat- 
 ter in one form preparatory to its reintegra- 
 tion into another form. And this substance 
 of God pervades all space and every point of 
 it forever and forever. Each night the 
 astronomer's eye or his photographic plate, 
 may catch the light of a star which started 
 from its source long ages before Christ was 
 born. A rift of space of pure emptiness at 
 any point would have hopelessly barred its 
 way. No such empty rift of space exists. 
 God's substance is everywhere* 
 
 The consistent and reasonable conception 
 of God already stated gives Him as the 
 prir»al force from which all other forces 
 proceed. And that means forces physical, 
 mental, moral, spiritual and in all prob- 
 ability, other forces of which we have no 
 knowledge. God's substance is necessarily 
 everywhere. All substance exists in com- 
 pany with force. There is no such thing 
 as inert matter. Matter is resolvable into 
 atoms, a group of which more numerous 
 than the combined armies of the world, 
 might ride on the point of a needle and yet 
 
 51 
 
Whither 
 
 not be visible to the human eye aided by a 
 microscope of the highest power* Each one 
 of these atoms vibrates sleeplessly with an 
 inconceivably rapid motion, millions upon 
 millions of times a second* This is true of 
 each brick in a building of to-day and of 
 each stone in the hoary pyramids* It is true 
 of the deserts and the iceberg's* It is true of 
 the brazen statue and of the air we breathe* 
 The rapidity of a cognate sort of movement 
 in a rarer sort of substance than that made 
 up of atoms has been studied with the result 
 of finding that in order that a thing may be 
 perceived to be red more than four hundred 
 trillions (400*000*000.000,000) of the waves 
 of light-ether must enter the eye in a second, 
 and that there are other colors which call 
 for seven hundred trillions* That force 
 which accomplishes this universal vibration 
 of atoms and the wave motion of the ether 
 is, in the ultimate, necessarily God-force 
 permeating all substance* God-force, the 
 ultimate primal force, suffuses, permeates 
 and possesses God substance at every point 
 and place in the universe* 
 
 God's primal substance and God's primal 
 force are necessarily present everywhere and 
 in everything* That primal substance and 
 that primal force are necessarily part and 
 parcel of God's being, not possibly to be 
 separated therefrom* Their presence every- 
 
 52 
 
Whither 
 
 where necessitates His presence everywhere* 
 His being includes consciousness or we never 
 could have had consciousness* God is pres- 
 ent in primal substance, primal force and 
 conscious intelligence everywhere and in 
 everything* Your body is made of His 
 substance* Every force within or pertaining 
 to you proceeds from His primal force* " In 
 Him we live and move and have our being," 
 is literally true, apart from mere sentiment* 
 It is as true in a practical and homely sense as 
 that two and two make four* 
 
 We can trace the life-force back for some 
 distance toward the primal force of God* 
 We find our present ultimate in that direc- 
 tion in the protoplasmic cell, the active thing 
 in all that accretion of living organisms 
 which we call growth* We find protoplasm 
 dominated by a force which animates it, 
 impels it along the avenues of living organ- 
 isms and causes it to assimilate into the 
 substance of those organisms* God's pres- 
 ence, force, consciousness and intelligence in 
 company with that protoplasm fully explain 
 its life action* Nothing else does* 
 
 God's presence in the lower animals can 
 alone explain the marvelous thing we call 
 instinct — a thing that man himself relies 
 upon till reasoning intelligence comes to its 
 kingship, for it is that which makes the 
 
 53 
 
Whither 
 
 human babe turn to its mother's breast 
 We see the birds weave their nests in vast 
 variety of architecture ; we see the bee con- 
 struct its mechanically perfect comb-cell ; we 
 see the spider spin its web with more than 
 the skill and delicacy of any human mech- 
 anician; we see the squirrel in fall lay by 
 its store of nuts for winter; we see the 
 musfcrat raise and thatch its reedy home in 
 the fall for the young which will come in 
 the cold and early spring; we see that musfc- 
 rat re-oxygenate the bubble of his carbon 
 laden breath against the ice under which 
 he is swimming in winter and, re-breathing 
 it, pursue its way, a past master in this par- 
 ticular item of chemistry; we see the beaver 
 locate his dam with what would be good 
 judgment in man and build it with equal 
 skill; we see certain ants (Lasius Ameri- 
 canus) guarding and herding the little 
 aphides with more care and skill than the 
 human herdsman expends upon his cows, 
 for the honey dew they produce; every one 
 of these creatures wholly untaught* We 
 see a thousand things of like nature* Noth- 
 ing but the personal presence and direction 
 of God can explain them, and that explains 
 fully* 
 
 Instinct can hardly be other than uncon- 
 scious mind acting under the limitations 
 imposed by the absence of consciousness 
 
 54 
 
Whither 
 
 and under other limitations imposed by 
 the field of its exercise — for instance the 
 absence of the senses in minerals — for in- 
 stinct pervades the mineral and vegetable 
 kingdoms as well as animal* Crystalization 
 is a product of design* Design is not possible 
 without mind* Instinct is unconscious mind 
 moved by divine suggestion and working 
 under the necessary limitations of evolu- 
 tionary creation* The mineral* the vege- 
 table and the brute kingdoms lead up to 
 man* He is their evolutionary product* 
 When consciousness is added to mind* when 
 the babe first says u this is I/' reason and 
 moral responsibility begin and the reign of 
 instinct* as it has so far manifested itself* is 
 near its end* Consciousness* reason and 
 moral responsibility are God-like attributes* 
 They are an awful as well as a sublime 
 gift; by his use of them man must stand 
 or fall* 
 
 God's presence in the plants alone explains 
 the qualities they have and the things they 
 do* Sex prevails in plant life and plays the 
 same part in reproduction as in animal life* 
 Plants sleep in the absence of light and are 
 more sensitive in that regard when young 
 than later* Tree leaves have a plurality of 
 buds and when frost kills the first growth 
 a second bud promptly unfolds* The nip- 
 plewort* the water lily* the marigold and 
 
 55 
 
Whither 
 
 their congeners open and close with the 
 travel of the sun ; the water lily sinks below 
 the surface of the water with the night and 
 rises above it with the day. If the African 
 marigold closes unduly it is a warning of 
 rain; the Siberian thistle gives the same 
 signal if it closes in the night* The water 
 calthorp grows an air filled bulb in its leaf 
 stalk to float the plant in the water* Plants 
 have divers ways of vast ingenuity for dis- 
 semination of their seeds; some have wings 
 to ride upon the winds; some hooks and 
 spines by which to attach themselves to 
 roving animals; some aquatics equip their 
 seeds with a bouyant net-work which takes 
 them abroad upon the water and then de- 
 caying* lets them sink; the blue violet has 
 inconspicuous flowers which perfect the best 
 seed close to the ground but when nearly 
 ripe the stem grows quickly* thrusts the 
 seed pod above the foliage and then* by a 
 contraction of the edges of the opened pod* 
 shoots its seed one by one into the air ; the 
 false indigo (Baptisia). with its foliage* 
 makes a globular shaped plant the stem of 
 which breaks off just at the surface when 
 the seed is ripe and rolls in the wind like a 
 ball across the fields* sowing its seed by the 
 way; the clover gives a special few of its 
 seeds a durable overcoat that those few may 
 persist even if the great uncoated majority 
 perish* Plant fertilization has its wonders* 
 
 56 
 
Whither 
 
 the English arum attracts insects into its 
 flower by nectar, then, by an arrangement 
 of hairs in the constricted throat of the blos- 
 som, imprisons them till its anthers are ripe 
 and shed their pollen on the prisoners, next 
 by the withering of the hairs, lets the insects 
 escape, laden with pollen to fertilize other 
 blossoms of the same species* " The female 
 valisneria lies rolled up under the water, out 
 of which it lifts its bud to bloom in the open 
 air; the male then loosens itself from the 
 too short stalk and swims to her with his 
 dry blossom dust*" Only mind can do these 
 things* And the only mind available for 
 doing it is the divine mind* 
 
 The mineral kingdom, the so-called in- 
 animate world, is equally the arena of God's 
 presence and power* All matter, dead and 
 inert though it may be to every human 
 sense, has in it motion and energy outrun- 
 ning our comprehension* Matter is made 
 up of atoms each one of which vibrates five 
 hundred millions of millions of times a sec- 
 ond* There are varied manifestations of 
 vast energy (that which is or may become 
 force) in matter; chemistry treats of little 
 else* There are elements seemingly force- 
 less in themselves which brought together 
 give the high explosives* Crystalization is 
 one of the wonders of the mineral kingdom* 
 There are acids which dissolve the metals 
 
 57 
 
Whither 
 
 and alkalies which corrode them* Fire and 
 flame, common though they be, are un- 
 solved mysteries* There are drugs which 
 excite the animal system to intoxication 
 and those which deaden it to insensibility* 
 All the pages of this book would not suffice 
 to catalogue the manifestations of energy 
 known to man proceeding from so-called 
 inanimate matter* There is no final ex- 
 planation of all this except that which 
 locates it in the primal, conscious, intelli- 
 gent force of God* 
 
 In the processes of animal and vegetable 
 life, abnormal manifestations occasionally 
 appear. Children are sometimes born blind, 
 idiotic or otherwise defective, and things of 
 like sort happen to animals of lower degree* 
 And instinct sometimes seems to work as 
 blindly as when a hen is kept to her nest 
 by an artificial egg. Such facts seem to be 
 inconsistent with the immediate presence of 
 God as the energizing and directing force 
 in processes where such happenings occur* 
 The seeming incongruity disappears in the 
 light of the truth that God is law as well as 
 love, and that necessarily — law that is a 
 part of His being, an uncreated part of His 
 being* His omnipresence energizes all pro- 
 cesses but His law directs; it is law of 
 universal application that knows no sus- 
 pension or interference by Him* In the case 
 
 58 
 
Whither 
 
 of abnormal manifestations in life-processes, 
 even human perceptions so often see the 
 cause to be disobedience of natural law as to 
 warrant the conclusion that it is always the 
 cause even though the disobedience be some- 
 times unwitting or committed by another 
 than the sufferer* And when instinct works 
 blindly it is unconscious mind working by 
 exterior (divine) suggestion, after a fashion 
 akin to that in which the human mind 
 works in hypnotism — mind to which con- 
 sciousness and reason have not been — and 
 under the necessary limitations of evolution- 
 ary creation cannot be — added* 
 
 One of the chiefest gifts to man is that of 
 consciousness* Without it immortality itself 
 would be valueless* One might as well be 
 dead as not to feel and know that he lives* 
 Unconscious human existence is exemplified 
 in sleep that has no remembered dreams* 
 The gift of consciousness could only have 
 come to us from a conscious being* A 
 conscious God is the only thing that can 
 impart consciousness to all men in long 
 succession of generations, age after age* 
 Consciousness never wakes in the course 
 of evolution, Darwinian or Buddhistic, till 
 the animal kingdom is reached* The ani- 
 mals below man feel consciousness and 
 individual identity blindly and dumbly* It 
 is reserved for man to feel and think it* 
 
 59 
 
Whither 
 
 Observation and intuition both teach that 
 fact* It can never leave man, the teal man, 
 in any further development* When the 
 spiritual body quits the body of matter, life 
 and consciousness necessarily go with it* 
 
 The only conception of the origin of that 
 part of man which thinks, which reasons, 
 which recognizes right and wrong and 
 which is sensible of individual identity, that 
 will consist with all known facts and with 
 all sane and healthy reasoning, is that it is 
 a spark of God's own self, detached from 
 His infinite being in the sense that man has 
 his own individual consciousness* The most 
 reasonable conception of its history is that 
 this spark is first launched into matter in 
 the mineral kingdom, at the gathering of 
 the world-mist in the sky, with all its po- 
 tencies dormant except such as are necessary 
 to its existence there ; that it passes on into 
 the vegetable kingdom and makes the 
 gamut of that kingdom with other poten- 
 cies , wakened* That it emerges into the 
 lower regions of the animal kingdom and 
 works its way upward through successive 
 grades, with new powers waking into life 
 at each step of the ascent; and that the 
 divine spark — now become man — eventually 
 quits matter by the process we call death 
 and passes to higher phases of life and de- 
 velopment in a body of subtle substance 
 
 60 
 
Whither 
 
 which may well be called a "spiritual body*" 
 Mind inheres in the immortal spark from 
 the first but it is unconscious, unreasoning 
 mind, working: wholly by divine suggestion 
 until humanity is reached* As man's spirit- 
 ual body must begin its growth with that 
 of the physical body, at the instant of phys- 
 ical conception, it is not conceivable or pos- 
 sible that the spark of and from God takes 
 up its dwelling in man at any later period* 
 The spiritual entity at the core of the human 
 ego has had eternal existence in the past as 
 a part of God's being* It has an immortal 
 future in store ; as a part of God's being it 
 can never die* 
 
 A human being evidently consists, in the 
 main, of three parts* First, a conscious and 
 individual something — substance not shad- 
 ow — of and from God which has the potency 
 of eternal growth in goodness, wisdom, hap- 
 piness and power* The word "spirit" or 
 the word "soul" serves as a name for this 
 something* In it, life, mentality, character 
 and all feeling except sense-perceptions and 
 fleshly desires inhere both in this world and 
 the next* Second, a body of organized 
 subtle substance which may well enough 
 be called the " spiritual body*" Third, the 
 body of organized matter which serves to 
 receive and transmit sense-perceptions and 
 which is the seat of all fleshly desires* The 
 
 61 
 
Whither 
 
 connection of the spirit is evidently in the 
 first instance with the spiritual body, and 
 through that with the mortal* The mind, 
 an attribute of spirit, acting through the 
 spiritual organization, is in connection with 
 the physical brain under all ordinary condi- 
 tions; what further connection, if any, there 
 is between the spiritual and mortal bodies can 
 only be conjectured* When the body of 
 matter fails to a certain degree that failure 
 severs the connection with the spiritual body 
 which then, in freedom, quits the body of 
 matter forever and, by the mere act of quit- 
 ting, finds itself in the spiritual world, a world 
 which surrounds us here in the mortal for it 
 is by no means rare that spiritual vision 
 breaks upon the consciousness of the dying 
 while yet in the flesh, like sunlight through 
 a cloud-rift, and that he who is passing sees 
 and essays to speak to friends who have 
 gone before* 
 
 It is not uncommon to hear good men 
 express scorn of the idea that they are 
 ascended, in the evolutionary sense, from 
 what we are accustomed to call the lower 
 animals* It is to be remembered that all 
 things in creation are just as much the work 
 of God as is man himself* And what He 
 has found necessary to make, especially of 
 His own substance and pervaded by His 
 conscious intelligent presence, is not to be 
 
 62 
 
Whither 
 
 scorned or to be considered "common or 
 unclean "; certainly not by the clear-eyed, 
 reverent soul* This truth of God imma- 
 nent by substance, force and consciousness 
 in all things that have substance is to be 
 faced even though our human senses forbid 
 us to dwell on it, as to some things, with 
 pleasure* We loathe putridity; we have 
 good human reasons for it; and we can 
 readily suspect deeper disciplinary reasons 
 for it in God's providence* But there is 
 easily an eminence of vision which regards 
 it very differently and to which its forma- 
 tion of God's substance and pervaded by His 
 presence is not abhorrent* There is but one 
 creator in the universe* He created all 
 things* A conception of God immanent in 
 only the things which to our senses seem 
 good and absent from those which to our 
 senses seem bad is barbaric and childish* 
 
 Verse twenty-six of the first chapter of 
 Genesis says "And God said, Let us make 
 man in our image, after our likeness ; and 
 let them have dominion over the fish of the 
 sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over 
 the cattle, and over all the earth, and over 
 every creeping thing that creepeth upon the 
 earth/' This statement clearly relates to 
 the psychical and not the physical nature of 
 man — it relates to man's spirit; the refer- 
 ence to the "dominion" man is to have 
 
 63 
 
Whither 
 
 shows that ; there are many animals that 
 have greater physical strength than man. 
 The next verse says, " So God created man 
 in his own image, in the image of God 
 created he him ; male and female created he 
 them/' Verse seven of the next chapter 
 says, " And the Lord God formed man of 
 the dust of the ground, and breathed into 
 his nostrils the breath of life ; and man be- 
 came a living soul*" These are plain, clear 
 and intelligent statements that man's body 
 is formed of u the dust of the ground " and 
 that his indwelling self proceeds from God 
 and is a thing in the " image " and u like- 
 ness " of God* And these are statements in 
 perfect accord with all known facts, with 
 right reason and with common sense* There 
 is no other possible source of the intelligent 
 consciousness of man than God. 
 
 Verse thirty of chapter ten of the Gospel 
 of John makes Christ say, u I and my Father 
 are one/' As God is immanent in the entire 
 substance of the human body and as man's 
 indwelling self proceeds directly from God 
 and is in His "image" and "likeness," 
 that was true not only of Christ but is also 
 true of all men* These pages make no issue 
 with anyone who holds that Christ was one 
 with God in some other sense* It is enough 
 for the purpose of these pages to point out 
 the oneness of all men with God* The im- 
 
 64 
 
Whither 
 
 measurable dignity of the fact that every 
 human body is the temple of the ever living 
 God outruns the possibilities of the imagina- 
 tion* 
 
 The oneness of man with God throws an 
 illuminating light upon some of the most 
 important of Christ's sayings as reported to 
 us* That the person called Christ in the 
 New Testament did live on this earth is an 
 allegation of historical fact that does not 
 admit of reasonable doubt* That the central 
 motive of His being was love of the same 
 kind that is the central motive of God's 
 being is clear* That he had an insight into 
 the deep truths of existence needs no proof* 
 That his life was devoted to the service of 
 God and the enlightenment of man is readily 
 seen* That through his clear insight into 
 the deep truths of existence* he may have 
 acquired a mastery over the laws of nature 
 which enabled him to do things which were 
 " miracles n to our lesser insight* is probable* 
 Corollating the indisputable facts of Christ's 
 life and character with the fact of the one- 
 ness of man with God* the man who is 
 both reasonable and unprejudiced can have 
 no cause for ignoring or totally rejecting the 
 founder of the Christian religion, however 
 much such a man may differ with theolo- 
 gians as to doctrine and dogmas* 
 
 65 
 
Whither 
 
 The conception of God already stated 
 gives Him as not only creating us but also 
 serving us with a humility which can only 
 be adequately described as infinite* Christ 
 washing the feet of the disciples but faintly 
 symbolizes it. The propositions that a thou- 
 sand years in His sight are but as a watch in 
 the night, that not a sparrow falls to the 
 ground but that He notes it and that the 
 very hairs of our heads are all numbered, 
 fall immeasurably short of stating the actual 
 fact as to the sleeplessness of His care for us, 
 each one of us — there is more than enough 
 of Him for that — and the infinite detail 
 of it. 
 
 Why should God do this ? There is one 
 explanation which is ample, and only one* 
 The central motive of His being is love, the 
 infinitude of which is no more to be com- 
 prehended by our minds in their present 
 development than are the infinities of time 
 and space — indeed far less so. He spends 
 His time from all eternity in the past to all 
 eternity in the future in creating individually 
 conscious beings, with suitable environment, 
 and leading them, by lawful and orderly 
 processes of development, to higher and 
 higher phases of existence, with resulting 
 and consequent advance in happiness ana 
 enjoyment. This is the only occupation 
 possible to a being who already hath all 
 knowledge. 
 
 66 
 
Whither 
 
 If it be so that conscious life goes on after 
 we quit the organism of matter, then in 
 what place do we dwell? Where should 
 that place naturally be — at least for the 
 next phase of existence — except in connec- 
 tion with this globe ? Evidently there are 
 other worlds of matter more or less like our 
 own and that without number. It is reason- 
 able and natural to think that they are occu- 
 pied by beings more or less like ourselves — 
 for immaterial beings cannot use a material 
 world — who, like us, are subject to a quit- 
 tance of the organism of matter after the 
 fashion which we call death. In such case 
 the natural place for the next phase of ex- 
 istence is in an immaterial world interfused 
 with the material world. Fact and reason 
 strongly indicate that we are separated from 
 the next world only by the veil that divides 
 the material from the immaterial. It is not 
 a thing exceedingly rare that the dying see 
 their spiritual kin before they have com- 
 pletely quit the mortal. In any attempt to 
 locate the next world in the far-away, the 
 imagination is afloat on a shoreless sea. 
 The universe is infinite in extent. An in- 
 finite universe can have neither center nor 
 circumference. You cannot look "up" to 
 Heaven nor "down" to Hell. Those lines 
 of direction change every instant, exactly as 
 do the spokes of a revolving wheel. The 
 direction which is "up" at ten o f clock in 
 
 67 
 
Whither 
 
 the forenoon is directly "down" at ten 
 o'clock at night* In first regarding the 
 idea of an immaterial habitation on or 
 around this globe the objection naturally 
 arises that the material occupants, mineral, 
 vegetable and animal must be fatally in 
 the way of the immaterial. To that it 
 may be said that the substance of the 
 immaterial world is necessarily so subtle 
 that it is practically nothing to matter and 
 matter is practically nothing to it* And it 
 is to be remembered that the heat and 
 cold and probably the light and darkness 
 apprehended by our human senses are not 
 apprehended in the slightest degree by the 
 immaterial, the spiritual world* There may 
 well be a " light that shineth in the dark- 
 ness and the darkness comprehendeth it not/' 
 One form of it is exemplified even for mor- 
 tals in the Roentgen ray* 
 
 Most, if not all of us, feel a reluctance to 
 take up our abode in the so-called u world 
 of shadows*" It is a reluctance which should 
 vanish on reflection* The spirit of man 
 dwelling in the subtle substance of the spirit- 
 ual body, freed from matter, must have the 
 capacity and potency of being instinct with 
 life, force and mentality immeasurably be- 
 yond its capacity when immanent in and 
 fettered by the body of matter* All forces 
 of every sort completely elude the senses* 
 
 68 
 
Whither 
 
 We see and comprehend only the effects 
 which they produce in matter* When our- 
 selves freed from matter and living* in the 
 immaterial, spiritual world we must be vast- 
 ly nearer to those forces and to a compre- 
 hension of them* The capacity for knowl- 
 edge and its acquirement, the capacity for 
 wielding the forces which control matter, 
 the capacity for enjoyment and the capacity 
 for everything that makes existence worth 
 the having must be vastly and perhaps in- 
 conceivably increased in the spiritual world* 
 This subject will have further attention 
 hereinafter when reached from another di- 
 rection* 
 
 While the spiritual entity of man freed 
 from the organism of matter has the potency 
 of and capacity for vast increase of powers 
 and enjoyment, it does not follow that it 
 possesses and enjoys such increase imme- 
 diately upon quitting organized matter* It 
 is not possible that the man who has to his 
 credit a long record of love, good will and 
 service to his fellow men goes, after the 
 change which we call death, to the same 
 kind and degree of experience as does the 
 persistent and wanton wrong doer* And a 
 theory of endless punishment — not endless 
 torture — is wholly tenable; for the spiritual 
 man may have endless regret for opportu- 
 nities wasted or evil acts committed ; or he 
 
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Whither 
 
 may always lag, in the race of development, 
 by an interval, behind those who outstripped 
 him in that race on earth. Cause and effect 
 must be eternal verities quite as surely in the 
 moral and spiritual world as in the physical* 
 No power exists which can in the twinkling 
 of an eye transform an ignorant man into 
 a being of wisdom or a beastly criminal into 
 an angel of sweetness and light* What the 
 man was mentally, morally and in character 
 at the moment before death, that he must 
 be the moment after death and that he must 
 remain until change in the nature of devel- 
 opment takes place* And every step of the 
 upward ascent in goodness and knowledge 
 he must make for himself* That must be 
 true of all worlds* 
 
 Heaven, so far as it exists, cannot be es- 
 sentially a place, but a condition* And Hell* 
 so far as it exists, cannot be essentially a 
 place but a condition* When man first 
 makes his appearance in the spiritual world 
 he is and must be the same person he was 
 in this world, minus the mortal body, its 
 pains and its impediments to the free work- 
 ing of the spiritual body and the indwelling 
 self* Now he no longer has speech but 
 communicates much more readily and ac- 
 curately with his fellows by the direct trans- 
 mission of thought and feeling* Morally, 
 mentally and in character he is naked* 
 
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WhUher 
 
 What he knows, what he thinks, and what 
 he feels ate known to all around him with 
 absolute clearness* Worst of all, for the 
 persistent and willful wrong doer, he now 
 knows and recognizes himself for just what 
 he is* Under such conditions the last thing" 
 the thoroughly bad spiritual entity desires 
 is the neighborly presence of the thoroughly 
 good one* The latter would willingly be 
 that neighbor for the purpose of extending 
 a helping hand, but the former naturally 
 flees the presence of the latter* Like con- 
 sorts with like through all the grades from 
 the lowest to the highest* 
 
 A force that can sooner or later irresistibly 
 impel even the thoroughly bad spiritual en- 
 tity — with possible rare exceptions — to begin 
 the upward climb is plain enough* It is 
 the nakedness of his whole past, his present 
 thoughts, his present feelings and his real 
 character to himself and all around him* 
 Memory now unrolls her scroll and every 
 thought, act, feeling and perception of his 
 human life is always before his gaze and 
 the gaze of all around him. All our human 
 experience in its slightest detail is photo- 
 graphed upon the instant on an everlasting 
 tablet* Very little of it can we recall in 
 this world for the memory is a subconscious 
 faculty evidently belonging peculiarly to the 
 spiritual self and working by a law of as- 
 
 71 
 
Whither 
 
 sociation by no means wholly subject to the 
 control of the will under its human limita- 
 tions, but the record is all there* The de- 
 lirium of fever not rarely makes the sufferer 
 babble of things of which in his sane mo- 
 ments he has no conscious knowledge or 
 memory; hypnotism can stir the deeps of 
 the memory in the same way* A sleepless, 
 accusing conscience which cannot be dulled 
 by any device whatsoever and which be- 
 comes but the more strenuous the more it is 
 resisted, working with all its reasons for 
 accusing, in full sight and recognition, can- 
 not — with possible rare exceptions — be for- 
 ever resisted by the dullest, vilest and most 
 beastly man that ever went from this world 
 to the next. There, escape by suicide is 
 impossible* This condition is Hell with all 
 sufficient literalness. At some time, sooner 
 or later, presently or after ages of suffering, 
 the miserable spiritual entity is forced to 
 begin the upward climb and then the longest 
 of all single steps toward victory is taken, 
 for thereafter the upward ascent must con- 
 tinue forever. 
 
 By what means shall the spiritual man 
 accomplish his upward climb? , Repentance, 
 genuine repentance, which would do all 
 possible things to undo the wrongs of the 
 past, with change of intent and desire that 
 makes all further wrong doing hateful and 
 
 72 
 
Whither 
 
 impossible and fills the spiritual man with 
 universal love is the large* part of the vic- 
 tory* Beyond that there must be exhaust- 
 less opportunities for work by the repentant 
 wrong-doer in efforts to induce and assist 
 other souls, infantile, ignorant, idiotic, in- 
 sane, degraded and benighted entities, to 
 enter upon the work of development and 
 regeneration* Growth in knowledge and 
 wisdom when one is more nearly face to 
 face with the interior secrets of the universe 
 needs no comment* 
 
 Those who have taken it for granted that 
 the New Testament does not permit one to 
 entertain the idea of repentance and reform- 
 ation in the next world may well consider 
 certain sayings of Paul and Peter* Paul 
 wrote in one place, "Why are they then 
 baptised for the dead?" and it was of his 
 dead friend Onesiphorus that he wrote in 
 another place u The Lord grant unto him 
 that he may find mercy of the Lord in that 
 day*" And thus Peter, u For Christ ♦ ♦ * 
 being put to death in the flesh, but quick- 
 ened by the spirit ; by which also he went 
 and preached unto the spirits in prison; 
 which sometime were disobedient ♦ ♦ ♦ n 
 And again, "For this cause also was the 
 gospel preached to them that are dead*" 
 
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 But why should all this hard experience 
 be necessary for any man spiritual or hu- 
 man? Why is evil in the world at all? 
 Why did God not make the creatures of our 
 sort incapable of sin and endowed with hap- 
 piness, pure and undefiled forever and for- 
 ever ? It is a common conception of God 
 that he can do any act that can possibly be 
 imagined in any imaginable way, time and 
 manner ; that is usually what is meant by 
 the words u all powerf uL" There is nothing 
 in all the vast range of the phenomena of 
 nature and nothing in right reason which 
 teaches such a thing as that* It is a purely 
 gratuitous assumption* No power can make 
 that right which is wrong, can make that 
 white which is black or can make two and 
 two to be either three or five and there are 
 different sorts of acts which are not possible 
 of accomplishment by any power* The 
 central actuating motive of the God who 
 created and maintains us can only be love 
 that passeth understanding; a passion of 
 altruism which expends itself in creating 
 individually conscious beings and leading 
 them on to happiness* It is not conceivable 
 or possible that a God possessed by such a 
 central actuating motive would lead us along 
 the hard path we tread if there were any 
 other possible, easier way to happiness, in- 
 telligent happiness, the happiness of a happy 
 human being as distinguished, for instance, 
 
 74 
 
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 from the happiness of the ox that has eaten 
 his fill of rich grass and is digesting it as he 
 lies at ease in the grateful shade of a tree in 
 his meadow* Is the human happiness better 
 worth the having than that of the ox? 
 How much would you give for the happi- 
 ness of the ox even if made eternal ? How- 
 ever much you fear that future which lies 
 beyond the grave would you exchange its 
 uncertainty iot a happy future like that of 
 the ox ? 
 
 This difference between the ox and the 
 human received attention long ago* Let us 
 turn to the book of Genesis again for an 
 illustration which it affords* In chapter 
 three it is said with reference to a tree in the 
 Garden of Eden, u And the serpent said unto 
 the woman ♦ ♦; For God doth know that 
 in the day ye eat thereof your eyes shall be 
 opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing 
 good and evil*" Whereupon they ate "And 
 the eyes oi them both were opened and they 
 knew that they were naked/' Here we have 
 a picture of a human, first, unable to distin- 
 guish gravity from a grave-yard, naked and 
 unashamed, and taking the same view of 
 right and wrong that the ox does ; and after- 
 ward we have the same human gifted with 
 intelligence; and consequent knowledge of 
 good and evil* The ox may gore his fellow 
 in getting a better place in the meadow, but 
 
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Whither 
 
 his act is not evil because he does not know 
 that it is wrong to gratify his natural desire 
 at the expense of his fellow ox* There can 
 be no such thing as evil in the absence of 
 that kind of knowledge* The knowledge of 
 good and evil is a necessarily integral part 
 of intelligence* And intelligent happiness 
 toward which God is leading you and which 
 transcends the happiness of the ox as Heaven 
 transcends the earth, is only possible to an 
 intelligent creature having knowledge of 
 good and evil* 
 
 But why should a knowledge of what is 
 evil be necessarily associated in the human 
 being with the power to do evil ? Let us see 
 what evil is* It is not substance, having 
 objective existence and dimension* It is al- 
 ways an act either of commission or omission* 
 The great body of all evil is an act done by 
 a man in the gratification of a natural desire 
 at the expense of the rights of a fellow man* 
 More rarely the evil act, as in drunkenness, 
 is an injury to one's self* In any case the 
 evil act is the wrongful gratification of a 
 natural desire* Such natural desires of men 
 as are rooted in the fleshly appetites are 
 necessary to the maintenance of life and the 
 procreation of the human species* The phys- 
 ical world of man could not go without them* 
 All other natural desires of man are rooted 
 in and are the necessary outcome of that 
 
 76 
 
Whither 
 
 neve* dying: impulse in man to better his 
 condition which has resulted in the develop- 
 ment of a Lincoln and an Agassis from the 
 cave dwellers of the dim and distant past* 
 These desires are a part of the working" of 
 that evolutionary force which has brought 
 man to what he is from conditions so low 
 that we can hardly imagine them and 
 which, now eradicated from the nature of 
 man, would leave him to return to the same 
 low conditions* 
 
 44 The forces of nature are the fingers of 
 God/' And this evolutionary force is the 
 most* potent of them all* The power to 
 know evil is a necessary part of intelligence* 
 The power to do evil is a necessary part of 
 that law of evolution which can be no other 
 than one of God's laws — Jaws which are 
 uncreated attributes and parts of God* If 
 man is to climb to higher things, this and 
 this alone is the path possible in the eternal 
 fitness of things* Man's capacity to do evil 
 exists in order that man may he a morally 
 improvable creature; that statement covers 
 the whole ground* Growth in love and wis- 
 dom are all that can keep man from doing 
 evil* And that growth will prove quite 
 sufficient in the long result* 
 
 Moreover cause and effect stand in eternal 
 relation to each other, and this quite as 
 
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 much in the in the moral and spiritual 
 world as in the physical* Intelligent hap- 
 piness is the natural effect and reward of 
 virtue* "We find in this world that all things 
 worth the having are ever and always the 
 product of struggle and of victory over ob- 
 stacles encountered* It is inconceivable that 
 a conscious being, endowed with a knowl- 
 edge of a distinction between right and 
 wrong and necessarily the power to do 
 either* can reach the heights of wisdom or 
 of happiness except by deserving it. except 
 by struggling with evil and overcoming 
 it. except by struggling with ignorance 
 and overcoming it* Nothing for nothing* 
 The clear equivalent of happiness is that 
 virtue which is the effect of overcoming 
 evil* So much consists in the nature of 
 things, no more to be trifled with than a 
 law of mathematics* 
 
 Why is there pain in the world ? Why 
 did God not make man incapable of suffer- 
 ing? Especially why must the lower ani- 
 mals — dumb to make protest and helpless to 
 escape as they are — suffer as they do?" 
 The use of bodily pain as a danger signal 
 of the physical system of animals of all 
 degrees needs no discussion beyond its mere 
 mention* Pain is not rarely a protection 
 against the abuse of self, wilful or neglectful 
 and a proper punishment therefor* The pain 
 
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 that comes from sinning against health and 
 hygiene, physical or moral, tends to prevent 
 a repetition of the of fense* When pain is the 
 result of an evil act its reason for existence 
 harks back to the reason for the existence 
 of evil, a question already considered* But all 
 that has been said and all of like nature that 
 can be said fails to explain the whole matter* 
 It especially fails to explain a substantial 
 part of the sufferings of the animals lower 
 than man* The only thing which does 
 completely explain it is that it is inevitable 
 in that evolutionary plan of man's devel- 
 opment which is the only possible plan* 
 That this law applies alike to man and 
 beast makes for the correctness of the Dar- 
 winian and Buddhistic theories of evolution 
 but that is a matter of no consequence to a 
 seeker after truth* 
 
 In the aggregate there is a great amount 
 of suffering in the world which to human 
 eyes is unmerited, as where nature smites 
 man in a catastrophe, where animals prey 
 one upon another, where children take the 
 ills of heredity or other hardships from 
 parents, where man is unjust to his fellow 
 man, and where the lower animals have 
 disease or are abused* A man of excellent 
 personal character wrote, u If the maker of 
 the world can (do) all that he will, he wills 
 misery, and there is no escape from the con- 
 
 79 
 
Whither 
 
 elusion/' Another man of like excellence 
 of character wrote, u In our planet waste, 
 wreck and abortion hold divided empire 
 with economy, perfection and fruitfulness*" 
 And a third, " There is no absolute co- 
 incidence between virtue and happiness*" 
 The spectacle which this world affords of 
 apparently wanton waste and unmerited 
 misery, vast in amount, distresses some men 
 who desire to believe in God, makes others 
 honestly doubt His existence, and impels 
 still others to affirm that there is no God, 
 or at most a cruel one* The key to the 
 mystery is this, "Man must work out his 
 own salvation in all things/* In matters 
 physical, mental, moral and spiritual man 
 must find out for himself that which is right ; 
 he must pursue it, follow it, master it and 
 attain to it* God makes the original gift of a 
 spark from His own being instinct with in- 
 dividual consciousness and with the potency 
 of gain and improvement without end* With 
 that man must earn all that he ever possesses* 
 
 This is not a matter of the will of God 
 alone* It is a part of the eternal fitness of 
 things* There is no other possible way in 
 which our unending race of improvement in 
 goodness, wisdom, power and happiness can 
 be run* It is in accord with that divine law 
 which has no law giver, which is an un- 
 created attribute of God, existent from ever- 
 
 so 
 
Whither 
 
 lasting to everlasting, but in harmony and 
 at one with the eternal fitness of things, 
 that right and best way of which there can 
 only be one way* All the physical laws of 
 the universe are equally a part of that divine 
 law which is at one with the eternal fitness 
 of things and man must work out his sal- 
 vation in all things, so far as this world is 
 concerned, in the environment which they 
 furnish and provide* And so it is that the 
 lightning strikes the temples where God is 
 worshipped; the hurricane destroys the 
 home and goods of the man who is trying 
 to serve God in singleness of heart* Since 
 the trend of things physical must necessarily 
 be upward unless the plan of creation is to 
 end in final degradation, the stronger of the 
 lower animals prey upon the weaker and 
 the fittest survive; and since man must 
 know evil and have the power to do evil 
 in order to be a morally improvable creature, 
 he is, in the aggregate, the cause of much 
 unjust and unmerited suffering to his chil- 
 dren and to his fellow men* 
 
 We do not know whether it would have 
 been right for God to have refrained from 
 creating beings of our sort* It is not con- 
 ceivable that He should so refrain, for that 
 love which is the central motive of His 
 being must overpoweringly constrain Him 
 and occupation of that sort is the only 
 
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Whither 
 
 occupation possible to a being; who already 
 hath all knowledge* But let us suppose it 
 conceivable* Nevertheless since He did enter 
 upon our creation, the way in which it is 
 done and is being done is the only way 
 possible* 
 
 And if all that which seems to us to be 
 wanton waste and all that suffering which 
 seems to us to be unmerited actually is such, 
 and all that suffering is without specific 
 compensation to the individual sufferer, how 
 much ought it to count toward barring the 
 working of a plan which, in the long result, 
 gives individual consciousness and an eterni- 
 ty of high degree to countless myriads ? Not 
 the weight of a feather* As well balance a 
 grain of sand against the material universe* 
 
 So far as concerns the reign of tooth and 
 claw among sections of the lower animals, 
 we are much in the dark as to the amount 
 of suffering it causes* It is certain that none 
 of the lower animals suffers to a like degree 
 with man in similar circumstances and some 
 of them suffer little if at all under great 
 physical injury* How much of their cries 
 and contortions, under injury, is due to the 
 instinct of self preservation and how much 
 to pain we do not know* The lower ani- 
 mals suffer not at all from fear of death ; 
 they have no concept that death can come 
 
 82 
 
Whither 
 
 to them; and die once they all must. As 
 they are not morally improvable creatures, 
 untimely death does not abort the object of 
 their earth lives in that regard* If, as seems 
 inevitable, they are the vehicles of the divine 
 spark, on its upward travel toward incarna- 
 tion in humanity, then the quick coming of 
 death is gain for the monad and the charge 
 of reckless waste in nature's evolutionary 
 methods falls to the ground. That suffer- 
 ing of the lower animals which weighs most 
 heavily on our attention and feelings, as it 
 was doubtless meant to, is that which is 
 wantonly, ignorantly or carelessly inflicted 
 by man; it is chargeable against man in his 
 final reckoning* 
 
 We do not know how much of the appar- 
 ently unmerited suffering of human beings 
 is deserved. A man is not generally a com- 
 petent witness in his own case about that. 
 Some unmerited suffering has to be because 
 of the necessary reign of physical law; 
 other unmerited suffering has to be in order 
 that man may be a morally improvable 
 creature with liberty to do evil ; so much we 
 know. It is conceivable that one of the 
 spiritual laws of creation may be that all 
 unmerited suffering, deprivation, and hard- 
 ship shall receive ample compensation. It 
 is inconceivable that there should not be 
 such a law if it be possible. Cause and effect 
 
 83 
 
Whither 
 
 must be verity quite as much in the spiritual 
 world as in the physical* Compensation is 
 the natural sequence of undeserved injury; 
 nature has implanted that intuition in even 
 the rudest and most savage breast* Without 
 it there is a break in a stupendous system 
 every part of which excites our wonder and 
 outruns our understanding* With it there 
 is a chain of infinite perfection* Right 
 reason establishes it* The compensation 
 may not come in this world* but that does 
 not highly matter* Important as earth-life 
 may be in some regards it is after all only 
 an incident of existence* 
 
 This is an orderly universe* one in which 
 law and order reign at every point and part 
 of space* The protoplasmic cell and the 
 vibrating atom teach it* The planetary 
 systems far and near* some with their two 
 suns or three or four, some with suns of 
 crimson or blue or brown teach it* The 
 comets in their mighty and seemingly erratic 
 sweep* teach it* There is nothing in all the 
 vast and multitudinous phenomena of the 
 universe that does not teach it; and evi- 
 dently God* even God* when he would create 
 a system of worlds must take vast aeons of 
 time for each part of the work* from the 
 gathering of the world-mist into a whirling 
 mass to the final production of living intel- 
 lectual beings with an environment suited 
 
 84 
 
Whither 
 
 to their maintenance* In hundreds of direc- 
 tions and thousands of instances, the telescope 
 discloses in the sky the same process of sun 
 and world making by which our own solar 
 system came into being, gaseous masses in 
 various stages of development from masses 
 of pure gas with but a single element to 
 those having several elements in differing 
 degrees of condensation and density ; it has 
 never entered into the mind of man tocon- 
 ceive of the vast reaches of the timcwhich 
 must elapse before these processes of creation 
 eventuate in planetary systems* And the 
 whole process does and must go forward 
 under relentless law* The lesson of it is 
 that God can only produce His mighty 
 effects by processes which are governed by 
 law* Instantaneous creation by fiat in the 
 material world is not a possible thing* In 
 all the eternities of the past no event ever 
 happened that was not the product of law* 
 And in all the eternities of the future no event 
 will ever happen that is not the product of 
 law* There is no realm of existence, ac- 
 tivity, substance or force — physical, mental, 
 moral or spiritual — that is not under the 
 reign of immutable law* 
 
 A writer who made a name in the world 
 wrote this: "If the maker of the world 
 can (do) all that He will, He wills misery, 
 and there is no escape from the conclusion*" 
 
 85 
 
Whither 
 
 It is not true. The utmost that can war- 
 rantably be said tending even apparently in 
 that direction, is that God may not be able 
 to prevent such misery in the world as is the 
 result of the plan of which the world and 
 its workings are a part* Lack of power to 
 prevent misery differs by a world from 
 affirmatively willing and causing it* One 
 may truthfully answer to the proposition of 
 the last sentence that the plan is essentially 
 God's plan* And to that the true and final 
 reply is that it is the only plan by which 
 beings of our kind and nature can be created 
 and developed into higher conditions* These 
 considerations cover the whole matter and it 
 still remains true that the proposition last 
 above quoted is not, either in letter or spirit* 
 Under no conditions does God wilt misery 
 to men* 
 
 The real, though possibly unconscious, 
 bent of the mind of the writer just referred 
 to is disclosed in his proposition just quoted 
 and it is also disclosed two pages earlier in 
 the same essay where he wrote : " It is one 
 of Nature's rules and part of her habitual 
 injustice that 'to him that hath shall be 
 given, but from him that hath not shall be 
 taken away even that which he hath*'" 
 This writer's manner of using the last quota- 
 tion is intended to discredit it* If he had 
 kept the saying last quoted and the parable 
 
 86 
 
Whither 
 
 of which it is the outcome together, and had 
 understood both, he might have seen that 
 the teal and reasonable meaning of that 
 saying is: "To him that hath improved 
 that he hath shall be given, but from him 
 that hath not improved that he hath shall be 
 taken away even that which he hath/' In 
 the minds of those to whom the logic of this 
 writer is convincing, he wrought easy havoc 
 with current religious beliefs, but the fact is 
 that he failed to make much impression on 
 the world at large because his logic is one of 
 half-truths that is more in love with itself 
 than with sweet reasonableness* 
 
 This writer trampled upon men of straw, 
 which were nevertheless very real men to 
 those around them because of two widely 
 held fundamental misconceptions* One of 
 these fundamental misconceptions is practi- 
 cally held by the major part of the whole 
 world to-day and the other is held by nearly 
 all men who believe in God* The first men- 
 tioned of these misconceptions is that death 
 is a calamity and disaster, the fact being 
 that death, coming in its natural order, must, 
 to the normal man, be just as natural and 
 quite as much to be desired as birth* Hardly 
 any of us can feel this truth, however 
 much we may be convinced of it, because of 
 the impressions branded into our very beings 
 by the teachings of our early and tender 
 
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Whither 
 
 years and because of the saturation of all 
 our literature with distillations from the im- 
 aginary darkness of the tomb* 
 
 To begin with, it is the rarest of all things 
 in the world that death is accompanied by 
 fear or pain. Nature, God in physical 
 manifestation, is a beneficent mother in that 
 hour. The fear of death at all other hours 
 in life is a matter of high necessity* Were 
 it not for that powerful deterrent against 
 suicide, the plan and object of our existence, 
 here, which is development in goodness and 
 wisdom through discipline, would utterly 
 fail, for men would take refuge in death 
 from trivial trials physical and mental* 
 Physicians and others accustomed to attend 
 on the departure of the human ego from 
 this world know well that, as a rule, fear 
 and pain are absent in the hour of transition 
 and that when the passage is not veiled by 
 unconsciousness the departing one is the 
 least concerned of all present and not rarely 
 gives evidence of pleasurable experience and 
 anticipation* 
 
 Silence, loneliness, shadowy existence and 
 lack of avocations of human interest are 
 the ordinary conceptions of life beyond the 
 grave* They are false conceptions* That 
 world beyond has been fed from this world 
 for at least hundreds upon hundreds of cen- 
 
 88 
 
Whither 
 
 turies, thirty-six hundreds of millions to a 
 century, and must be so populous that all 
 the people on the globe are but a handful 
 in comparison* Kind hands and hearts 
 received us into this world and such must 
 receive us into that, in such greater abun- 
 dance and kindliness as, in larger numbers 
 and high development, that world exceeds 
 this* The "shadowy existence " must be 
 really in a body of subtle substance freed 
 from all physical pains and penalties and 
 endowed with powers of perception, reason- 
 ing, expression and enjoyment transcend- 
 antly beyond those of the present* Do you, 
 with regret, look forward to leaving the 
 44 lusts of the flesh and the lust of the eyes 
 and the pride of life ? " So you would have 
 looked forward to manhood if the prospect 
 had been presented to you in like fashion, 
 when, as a child, you were coasting down 
 hill in January or building mud-dams in 
 April* Do you feel any desire for childhood's 
 joys in the strength of your manhood ? Not 
 but that in some cases certain of the lusts of 
 the flesh may survive the death-change for 
 a time* But it need be only for a time* 
 
 And as for avocations of human interest, 
 it is sure and certain that activity is the 
 fundamental law of the human ego and 
 that a future of endless rest woulo even- 
 tually be one from which we should gladly 
 
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Whither 
 
 flee into oblivion and annihilation* Some- 
 one asked an ex -president of Harvard 
 "What are you going to do when you 
 enter the other life ? " And his answer was 
 "There are enough problems, mathematical 
 problems, connected with the arc of a circle 
 to keep me busy and happy for at least a 
 hundred years/' A chemist of the old days, 
 John Beecher, said of himself and his re- 
 searches "I seem to myself to live so sweetly 
 that may I die if I would change places with 
 the Persian king/' John Beecher is hardly 
 unhappy in his larger opportunities of the 
 next world* A student in any part of 
 knowledge must there revel in his enlarged 
 capacity and wider range of research* The 
 causal forces which lie back of the external- 
 ized phenomena of this world, the causal 
 forces of the phenomena of the next world 
 and perhaps eventually of all worlds must 
 present fields for infinite and exhaustless 
 study and investigation* Exchanging the 
 slow and inaccurate speech of this world for 
 instantaneous and accurate transmission of 
 thought and feeling must be a part of the 
 pleasure and profit of the next world* The 
 art, the invention and the music of that 
 world must be something unimaginable in 
 this* Towering above all else to the vision 
 of the soul that yearns to climb the heights 
 Godward must be the opportunities for doing 
 good, teaching, helping, succoring and ed- 
 
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 ucating the infantile, the ignorant, the in- 
 sane, the idiotic, the degraded and vicious 
 entities entering that world from this* The 
 avocations of human interest in that world 
 must be of far more surpassing value than 
 in this* 
 
 All men have experience which suggests 
 the joys of the spirit triumphant over mere 
 desire* To the inventor it comes when, from 
 his brain, long in travail, a new idea is born 
 into the world* To one it comes at break of 
 day when from a favoring height he watches 
 the sun detach itself from the far away hills 
 — realizing that he is looking upon the 
 turning of the very wheels of the universe* 
 To another it comes on the ocean at night, 
 when the moon throws a trail of silver 
 splendor to his feet across a summer sea* 
 To another it comes when a compelling 
 orchestral harmony takes his soul skyward 
 in flight more exulting than an eagle's 
 wing* For another it is when he looks from 
 a mountain's crest on an endless forest sea, 
 which at the far horizon melts into the 
 infinite blue* To all it comes when, by self 
 sacrifice, we lighten the burden of a brother* 
 Of such are the joys of the spirit fettered in 
 the flesh* What must they be when we no 
 longer see as through a glass darkly ? 
 
 91 
 
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 The death-change instead of being the 
 climax of calamity and disaster can be only 
 an incident in the existence of the human 
 ego and to most, in its normal coming, a 
 desirable incidents Its desirability for him 
 whose good acts and intentions outweigh 
 his bad ones needs no further comment* It 
 must be desirable for the man whose evil 
 acts and intentions largely outweigh his 
 good ones, unless he be hopelessly and irre- 
 deemably bad, an eminence in evil reserved 
 for very few* 
 
 The life of the human ego in this world 
 is a necessity of existence but not the whole 
 of existence* The death-change, vastly 
 important though it be, is only an incident* 
 The misconception of it as the climax of 
 calamity and disaster has worked great 
 mischief* But it is an idea that must lessen 
 and eventually disappear* Graves simply 
 hold empty shells of human lives and are 
 instruments for turning back the mortal 
 part into sweet and wholesome earth* Men 
 will yet look forward to them with serenity 
 and composure* We may not be able to do 
 it because ol the mistakes of our forbears* 
 Our children will be more fortunate in that 
 regard* 
 
 The other of the fundamental miscon- 
 ceptions hereinbefore referred to relates to 
 
 92 
 
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 the question whether God is u all powerful ff 
 in the sense ordinarily given to those words* 
 Nearly all men who believe in God at all 
 believe in Him rather thoughtlessly, as all 
 powerful, in the sense that He can do any- 
 thing imaginable or unimaginable, at any 
 point of time imaginable or unimaginable, 
 in any way imaginable or unimaginable, 
 and in any period of time imaginable or 
 unimaginable* When confronted with the 
 question whether He can make white and 
 black to be one and the same color, whether 
 He can make right and wrong to be one 
 and the same, whether He can make two 
 and two to be either three or five, whether 
 he can make something from nothing or 
 something into nothing, it is at once seen 
 that there are acts which are impossible of 
 accomplishment by any power whatever, 
 and that God's power is, in the eternal 
 nature of things, limited to doing things 
 that are possible, that is, consistent with the 
 laws which are a part of His nature and 
 being* 
 
 We have a way of knowing what is 
 possible with God by studying Him as He 
 exhibits Himself in His works which are 
 open to our observation and study in mul- 
 titudinous array* It is interesting to note 
 what Paul says about this u For the invisible 
 things of him from the creation of the world 
 
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 ate clearly seen, being understood from the 
 things that are made, even his eternal power 
 and Godhead*" In all of them, from the 
 vibrating atom tip through the marvelous 
 mechanism of a blade of grass to our world 
 swinging on its annual way eighteen and 
 a half miles a second, and still on to the 
 millions of starry suns so deep in space that 
 man knows no way of making their distance 
 comprehensible, we find that everything is 
 subject to law which is relentless and that 
 changes not* We find that in the creation 
 of the blade of grass there must be the 
 necessary time and the necessary conditions 
 and that all must go forward under the 
 control and dominion of immutable law* 
 We find that in the creation of a habitation 
 for men God must take periods of time, the 
 fractional part of which staggers our im- 
 agination; that the matter utilized must go 
 through a vast number of changes, each of 
 long duration, subject now to heat and then 
 to cold, now to volcanic action and then to 
 grinding glaciers; and that even after the 
 stage of animal and vegetable life is reached 
 both must come down through forms gi- 
 gantic and seemingly grotesque to the de- 
 velopment suited for man's surroundings* 
 All creation teaches with a voice that is 
 clear and unmistakable that all of God's 
 acts are in pursuance of law that is immut- 
 able* relentless and changeless* There is 
 
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 nothing; in creation that has in it the re- 
 motest suggestion of any act being possible 
 to God that does not proceed in a certain, 
 orderly and changeless way* 
 
 Whenever these pages discuss what is 
 possible with God, they do not undertake 
 to say what might be possible with Him as 
 a matter of absolute power* For instance, 
 if He were subject to fits of anger like a man, 
 with moral sense for the time being prac- 
 tically non-existent, it is conceivable that 
 He might, so far as the absolute power to 
 do it is concerned, destroy our solar system 
 in an instant* It is idle to speculate as to 
 what God's power is irrespective of moral 
 law — or of law of any kind* He has never 
 exhibited Himself to us in any way that 
 justifies any conception of Him as not being 
 or at least holding Himself subject to law — 
 moral or physical, mental or spiritual* These 
 pages deal with God as He is, not as He 
 might be if He were not what He is* 
 
 The idea that anything is possible for 
 God except that which proceeds in a certain, 
 orderly and changeless way is essentially a 
 disorderly, lawless and riotous conception of 
 Him* The only consistent view of natural 
 laws, physical, mental, moral and spiritual, 
 makes them uncreated and uncreatable, 
 eternal and changeless parts of God's being, 
 
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 the best that is possible in each case con- 
 sistently with the eternal fitness of things* 
 This conception of God's power is consistent 
 with the existence of pain and evil in the 
 world alongf with God's infinite love* It is 
 not a reasonable conception that God can 
 will a universe into being" to-day and into 
 nothingness to-morrow* And it is evident 
 from what he does that he cannot create an 
 intelligent being of our high degree except 
 by the evolutionary plan which involves 
 development through discipline* Any other 
 conception of God's power than this rejects 
 the teachings of His works exemplified 
 throughout the universe* 
 
 The necessity of the evolutionary plan — 
 which for the purpose in hand is practically 
 experience of pain and evil and victory over 
 them — for man's development — which is 
 practically improvement in goodness, wis- 
 dom, power and enjoyment — throws light 
 upon some otherwise dark things. "Whom 
 the Lord loveth he chasteneth " seems on its 
 face a hard and unkind saying. Its real 
 meaning is quite the reverse of unkind and 
 that meaning is not far to seek. That wise 
 father whose son. athletic of mind and body* 
 is destined for a profession which needs great 
 and difficult attainments for high success 
 therein, does not rest content when the son 
 simply acquits himself fairly well in his 
 
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 studies* The son's strength of mind and 
 body justifies more than that* And the wise 
 father requires more than that* The son 
 may not like the enforcement of the re- 
 quirement in the days of hardness, but when, 
 in the later result, he stands forth a prince 
 among: his fellows, he looks back and blesses 
 the wisdom and firmness of the father. The 
 prizes that man may attain through devel- 
 opment are of a value that cannot be ex- 
 pressed in any terms our language knows* 
 The laws of the universe, God's laws of 
 universal application, not "special provi- 
 dence," fit a man's spiritual burden to his 
 capacity for burden-bearing. He that has 
 the larger capacity and therefore the more 
 to endure may be pitied by his fellows, but 
 a larger wisdom knows that he is speeding 
 toward a kingdom which his fellows are 
 approaching with slower foot. His fellows 
 might stand unpleasantly surprised if they 
 realized the full significance of the difference* 
 
 Men who devote themselves exclusively 
 to the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, fame, 
 knowledge, power or distinction of any sort 
 are, with their present vision, quite likely to 
 stand appalled at the idea of courting an 
 athletic spirituality involving development 
 through severe trial* They might be sur- 
 prised to know that there are men of ath- 
 letic spirituality, under development through 
 
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 trial, who would assuredly and truthfully tell 
 them that while appreciating the good things 
 of this world in right and reasonable fashion, 
 they would by no means change places with 
 their seemingly more fortunate fellows and 
 that there are compensations of immeasur- 
 able value even by the way* No man ever 
 yet surmounted a trial completely without 
 feeling thankful for it and realizing lasting 
 blessing therefrom* However, a man will 
 not go to Heaven because he is poor or to 
 Hell because he is rich* Clearly a rich man 
 can serve his fellow man, which is serving 
 God, quite as acceptably as a poor man, but 
 he may not accomplish it by endowing a 
 hospital or founding an institution of learn- 
 ing* Heaven is not purchasable* The way 
 in which a man gets his money must be of 
 quite as much consequence, in the spiritual 
 reckoning, as the way in which he spends 
 it* When you discover the Kingdom of 
 God, you will find it within you. 
 
 To an eye which sees all things there is 
 no such thing as an accident* In the human 
 sense there is abundance of luck and abun- 
 dance of accident, but not to the knowledge 
 and vision which comprehends all things* 
 To that vision and knowledge the cause is 
 clear which leads one man to stumble over 
 a stone which discloses a gold mine and 
 another man to death by drowning through 
 
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 the sinking of a bridge into a rushing* tor- 
 rent* We see only one side of the tapestry 
 which the looms of eternity are weaving; 
 if we could see all the strands as they are 
 laid, in front and rear, we could understand 
 the significance of otherwise mysterious phe- 
 nomena which appear on the surface open 
 to our gaze* We speak of the appearance 
 of a Washington, a Bolivar or a Lincoln, at 
 a critical period of the affairs of a people, 
 as providential, meaning a special interpo- 
 sition of Divine Providence* It is provi- 
 dential but not special* The universe needs 
 to work by and through immutable laws* 
 The universe which had its laws suspended 
 or wrenched out of their orderly working 
 could not work at all* But God's wisdom 
 and plans are large enough and far seeing 
 enough to provide in their orderly working 
 for a Washington, a Bolivar and a Lincoln 
 at the time of their critical need* And they 
 are large enough and far seeing enough to 
 provide for all contingencies to the minutest 
 detail* 
 
 Are there then no such things as miracles? 
 Not if it is to be understood that a miracle is 
 something not wrought in accordance with 
 eternal and immutable law* If a miracle is 
 simply some happening that is far and away 
 out of the ordinary, transcending all we 
 know of law, then there may well be mira- 
 
 L«rc. 
 
 99 
 
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 cles* A man who should freeze water in 
 the presence of some tribes of men in the 
 heart of Africa would perform that which 
 would be for them a miracle, something far 
 outrunning all their knowledge and all their 
 powers of imagination, for nothing ever 
 happened to their knowledge which would 
 indicate the possibility of such a thing* If 
 a hundred years ago a man, being in New 
 York, had said u Yesterday I dined with a 
 friend of mine on the shore of Lake Michi- 
 gan, and he has told me in the last few 
 minutes that he will be here to-morrow," 
 and they to whom he said it had believed 
 it, they could only have believed him on 
 the assumption that a miracle had been 
 performed* But the thing may be said and 
 done to-day and evoke no surprise or com- 
 ment* Shakespeare makes Puck say m I'll 
 put a girdle about the earth in forty min- 
 utes n and for some hundreds of years this 
 stood as the extremest flight of fancy ; now 
 we can girdle the earth a number of times 
 in that same forty minutes* So much of 
 undiscovered law remains that we are in no 
 position to say what things are possible, but 
 that nothing ever did happen or ever will 
 happen except in accordance with law, we 
 may be very sure* 
 
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 Whence come the laws which govern ihe 
 universe in all its parts and aspects? It is 
 not uncommon to hear it said " The exist- 
 ence of law necessarily implies the existence 
 of a law-maker." That idea carries the 
 implication and consequence that the law- 
 giver might, if he would, change the laws* 
 Now in the forum of absolute and eternal 
 right there can be but one right, best and 
 lawful way of doing a thing* Clearly God 
 is not capable of doing a thing except in the 
 right, best and lawful way* Some one has 
 said in poetic strain u The forces of nature 
 are the fingers of God," and that is literally 
 true* He did not make the laws* They 
 are changeless parts and attributes of Him- 
 self, from everlasting to everlasting* He is 
 a God u in whom is neither variableness nor 
 shadow of turning*" The only conception 
 of the laws which govern the universe which 
 consists with all known facts and with all 
 sane and healthy reasoning, makes them 
 eternal, changeless and uncreated attributes 
 of God. Perfectly true it is that we cannot, 
 with our present development of mind, com- 
 prehend the first thing of such a being* But 
 it is equally true that we cannot comprehend 
 Infinity of time or space or substance or force 
 or the sure eternity of life in the past and 
 yet we know, and know beyond all question, 
 that they are facts* 
 
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 It may be objected that the last paragraph 
 makes toward fatalism* And good souls 
 may ask "Is all prayer to God in vain?" 
 And "Ate the heavens brass to the heart- 
 rending petitions which constantly rise from 
 crushed and bleeding human hearts?" It 
 cannot be so* The thought and feeling of 
 a human being can be imparted to another 
 human being by direct transmission and 
 without the intermediation of words or 
 signs* The fact points to the conclusion 
 that thought, at its source or origin, creates 
 mind-waves in the ether which are received* 
 felt and understood by some faculty in the 
 recipient. When one cries to God, either by 
 spoken word or unspoken thought* the cry 
 goes not to one who is far away* He is 
 closer to the petitioner than we can possibly 
 conceive* His love and sympathy go out to 
 each one. not generally but in particular* to 
 the Digger Indian and the Empress of the 
 Indies alike, in measure far outrunning hu- 
 man capacity for love and sympathy* , No 
 reason exists why He may not and does not 
 make quick return* in spiritual strength, to 
 the spiritual ego that seeks His aid aright 
 in the manner that human beings transmit 
 wordless thought and feeling. In such case 
 the benefit conferred is doubtless measured 
 by the petitioner's capacity to comprehend 
 and receive* The human ego that can bring 
 its mind and feelings into right relation with 
 
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 this fountain of spiritual strength, should be 
 able to get from prayer strength to give 
 mastery over all earthly conditions* The 
 spiritual ego has the potency and capacity 
 of dominating, even in a physical sense, the 
 body of matter in which it is enshrined as 
 well as adverse circumstances of environ- 
 ments Prayer, heartfelt and sincere, ac- 
 companied by belief in God's power and 
 willingness to help and directed to proper 
 ends, is a resort to a higher law capable, in its 
 own way, of making the petitioner superior 
 to all trials and conditions* 
 
 We are told occasionally that matter, 
 space, time and disease are not realities but 
 illusions, in fact that the whole material 
 universe, or that which we take to be such, 
 is but a vast play of illusion, though why 
 God should thus befool us has never been 
 made clearly to appear* If this be true it 
 makes no practical difference, for, in such 
 case, the play is so perfect that illusory 
 causes produce illusory effects with all the 
 certainty, sequence and perfection of realities, 
 wherefore we can only profitably discuss 
 such causes and effects in terms of reality* 
 The healing effects of mind-cure, faith-cure 
 and Christian science do not depend on the 
 unreality of matter, space, time or disease* 
 Nor do their curative effects negative the 
 curative effects of drugs* Our physical 
 
 103 
 
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 bodies respond to the physical and chemical 
 effects of drugs* They also respond to men- 
 tal impulses and that is the central truth of 
 mental healing, faith-cure, Christian science 
 and of that treatment by suggestion prac- 
 ticed by the aid of hypnotism* There are 
 diseases, tissue changes, mutilations and 
 fractures which, with our present knowl- 
 edge do not yield to surgery, drugs, or the 
 other methods of cure but they are all re- 
 medial in some cases* Treatment by sug- 
 gestion is the truth that underlies mental 
 healing, faith cure and Christian science ; it 
 finds its most certain working in hypnosis* 
 One thing that the consciousnes does is to re- 
 late the mind to other — perhaps all — things 
 external to itself; in doing this the con- 
 sciousness also, in a manner, stands between 
 the mind and other things somewhat like 
 an interference* For lack of a better name, 
 the consciousness, in the performance of this 
 interf erin g function, may be termed the mind- 
 sentinel* In hypnosis — whether induced by 
 man or by a spiritual being — that mind- 
 sentinel is practically wrapped in slumber, 
 leaving a condition of mind which may be 
 called dominant mind* It is a condition 
 higher in degree but somewhat like in kind 
 to the unconscious mind of the animals 
 lower than man* This condition of domi- 
 nant mind accounts for the happenings 
 sometimes attributed to a subliminal self or 
 
 104 
 
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 a subliminal consciousness* The relating 
 faculty of the consciousness accounts for 
 the chaotic sequences of ordinary dreams; 
 the sleeper, through disturbing: physical 
 causes, wavers toward and from the waking 
 state and the mind relatingf faculty of the 
 consciousness works in exact sympathy of 
 activity* The relatingf and interfering- fac- 
 ulties of the consciousness, together, account 
 for a great many important things, the dis- 
 cussion of which here would take us afield* 
 This dominant mind can and does act on 
 the higher nerve centers with mighty force ; 
 these in turn act with like force on the 
 lower nerve centers; and these in turn act 
 with like force on the organs and functions 
 of the body* In hypnotism this dominant 
 mind, prompted by external suggestion, 
 readily rendered the body insensible to pain; 
 it accelerates or retards the heart-beats and 
 the circulation of the blood ; it makes the 
 body strong or weak, rigid or flaccid; it 
 simulates disease or heals it; in short it 
 shows itself for what it is, the mighty mental 
 monarch of the physical body* It does more 
 than this ; under exterior suggestion it some- 
 times alters the moral nature and improves 
 mental capacity* A man can generally ap- 
 peal effectively to this dominant mind, by 
 and of himself, if he gently but firmly and 
 persistently wills as he drops to sleep at night* 
 when the activity of the consciousness is 
 
 105 
 
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 waning — and night after night — that his 
 physical or mental state shall be bettered for 
 the next day in a direction indicated in the 
 willing, beginning this auto-suggestion with 
 some simple requirement* Hypnotism, men- 
 tal healing, faith-cure, Christian science, and 
 cures like those at the shrine of Lourdes are 
 all suggestions to this dominant mind and 
 are effective in just the degree that they 
 succeed in eluding or suppressing the mind- 
 sentinel referred to* The dominant mind is 
 subject to directions reaching it through mind 
 waves in the ether from a mind concerned in 
 putting the mind-sentinel to sleep* And per- 
 fect conviction of almost any kind efficiently 
 suppresses this mind-sentinel without notice- 
 ably affecting the consciousness otherwise* 
 The ether and the dominant mind are tools 
 of God's own making* Where we know a 
 little about them, He knows all about them* 
 He can use them far more effectively than 
 we can* The efficacy of prayer in results 
 personal to the petitioner may find one ex- 
 planation here* But that form of convic- 
 tion, another name of which is faith, may 
 be an element of supreme importance in 
 prayer — to open the gate for God to enter* 
 No man prays without some degree of faith; 
 no man prays with the firm conviction of 
 its hopelessness and uselessness* The greater 
 the faith, the wider open is the door for God 
 to enter* 
 
 106 
 
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 Mistaken beliefs on the part of those who 
 are nearing the sunset of life on ear th, as to 
 what they themselves really are, as to the 
 nature of the death-change and as to the 
 life beyond the grave have caused and are 
 causing millions upon millions of men to 
 walk all their later years in something 
 worse than a vale of tears* Most men find- 
 ing themselves then treated by the young 
 as mere cumberers of the ground, realize for 
 the first time the real meaning of the ad- 
 monition " Honor thy father and thy mother 
 that thy days may be long upon the land 
 which the Lord thy God giveth thee/' Joined 
 to this neglect, to have sight and hearing 
 fail, the joys and appetites and illusions of 
 youth disappear and comliness and strength 
 merge into wrinkles and decrepitude is bad 
 enough* If there be added thereto a gloom 
 which at the tomb just ahead deepens into 
 eternal night or hopeless doubt, the misery 
 of it is insupportable, and the only grain of 
 relief consists in ignoring with all one's might 
 all thought of death and nursing every little 
 possibility of entertainment and physical 
 enjoyment* This is not what should be and 
 not what would be if we were not weighted 
 down by the awful inheritance of the wrong 
 beliefs of the ages gone before* The com- 
 pensations of age ought to outweigh its 
 losses* In the vast majority of men the 
 spiritual body necessarily grows in grace 
 
 107 
 
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 and beauty with the aging of the earthly 
 tenement, a body of fat more enduring and 
 important substance than all that goes to 
 make up this solid earth or even the sun 
 that gives it light and life ; long after this 
 whole solar system shall have been resolved 
 back to world-mist for purposes of new 
 creation, that spiritual body or its superior 
 successor must be in the fresh glow of im- 
 mortal youth* It is stated that rays eman- 
 ate from human beings which can be caught 
 and fixed on a photographic plate in a room 
 of absolute darkness ; if that be true the rays 
 cannot be material and it is more than pos- 
 sible that they radiate from the spiritual 
 body* If we had eyes to see that spiritual 
 body all material beauty of the human body 
 must seem a poor thing ever after* It is no 
 wonder that a great mass of negroes in 
 America look forward with passionate de- 
 light to escape from the universal contempt 
 which we visit on their black bodies and 
 revel in the anticipation of the spiritual 
 body, one of whose highest attributes to their 
 imagination is its whiteness* A knowledge 
 of the growing grace and beauty of the 
 spiritual body is entitled to be one of the 
 overmastering compensations of age* One 
 can live in the spiritual body, if he but will, 
 while on earth* You will search the faces 
 of Gladstone and Bismark, as they looked 
 in their later years, in vain, for any traces 
 
 108 
 
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 of the realities of age* Though their locks 
 were gray and their faces wrinkled, the 
 immortal youth of the spiritual body dom- 
 inated the physical tenement and shone 
 from it clearly* So might it be with all of 
 of us* But in order to have it so a man 
 needs to realize and feel the imperial majesty 
 of the immortality which God has given 
 him* He needs to train his heart to love 
 toward all his fellow men and to be glad in 
 whatever right thing brings gladness to 
 them* While giving charity* not merely 
 toleration, to all men he needs to rely upon 
 his own independent judgment in all ques- 
 tions of right and wrong or which concern 
 his spiritual welfare* So with aging years 
 will he come nearer and nearer to an under- 
 standing of the reason of his being, to an 
 unshaken confidence in his future and to a 
 realization of that peace which passeth un- 
 derstanding* Clouds of doubt and fear may 
 sometimes creep over him but they will pass 
 and leave the sunset sky serene* Such vision 
 the aging years ought to bring to all* 
 
 The universe could not exist if it were 
 not equipped with immutable laws and 
 forces which govern every action of every- 
 thing in it down to the minutest detail* 
 Unless the final degradation of the human 
 race and the ultimate failure of the scheme 
 of the universe has been ordered from the 
 
 109 
 
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 beginning, an inconceivable and impossible 
 thing, the end and ultimate must be the 
 success of the plan and the constant devel- 
 opment of the human ego into higher and 
 higher things* It must be a plan which 
 allows for many a stop and many a jolt 
 and many a period of apparent retrogression 
 for civilization after civilization has waxed 
 and waned upon this planet, the waning 
 doubtless being because at some point in the 
 progress of nations intellect parted company 
 with goodness and the two grew wider and 
 wider apart, for plainly growth in intellect 
 toward an evil eminence is not permissible 
 beyond the point where reform is possible, 
 under the dominion of a creator whose mo- 
 tive of existence is love* 
 
 But the finality is never in doubt* A 
 writer of history who had a rare insight 
 into its real meaning said at the end of a 
 work upon which ne had wrought many 
 years, " These pages will not have been 
 written in vain if the facts they present 
 impress the reader as they have impressed 
 the author, with a conviction that the civ- 
 ilization of Europe has not taken place 
 fortuitously, but in a definite manner and 
 under the control of natural law ; that the 
 procession of nations does not move forward 
 like a dream, without reason or order, but 
 that there is a predetermined, solemn march 
 
 no 
 
Whither 
 
 in which all must join, ever moving, ever 
 resistently advancing:, encountering and 
 enduring an inevitable succession of events* 
 ♦ ♦ I have asserted the control of natural 
 law in the shaping of human affairs — a 
 control not inconsistent with free will ♦ ♦ ; 
 that higher law limits our movements to a 
 certain direction and guides them in a cer- 
 tain way*" This is true* Men and nations 
 have an ample margin of free will within 
 the leash of which they can do works of 
 good or evil, with sure recompense in kind, 
 but beyond that their courses are as fixed 
 as those of the stars* Although God is im- 
 manent in the dust that you tread under 
 foot and in the decaying leaves which carpet 
 the dusky silences of trackless forests, He is 
 first of all the transcendent Creator, King 
 and Master of the universe* Princes and 
 potentates, armies and empires are, in them- 
 selves, nothing to Him* The wealth of the 
 Indies He balances by a pebble on the strand ; 
 He can make either with equal ease* Human 
 pomp and power count for less than the 
 breath of the sweet-toned winds* Every 
 man who seeks to live by the Golden Rule 
 and every man who tramples it under foot 
 in the race for wealth or pleasure or power 
 or fame, no matter under what forms he 
 seeks to conceal from himself or others the 
 real nature oi his acts, will reap exactly as 
 
 ill 
 
Whither 
 
 he sows and that to the uttermost atom of 
 recompense* It is not, alone, a matter of the 
 <wiU of God* It is a matter of eternal law* 
 
 This is truth that would be terrible even 
 unto despair were it not that the creation of 
 man has its source in a fountain of infinite 
 love* For each man love and law start 
 their course together and run in a blended 
 stream through all the eternities* God's 
 love sleeplessly envelopes the worst and 
 vilest of wrong doers for within him shines 
 the jewel of immortal consciousness, with 
 all its wonderful potencies, that he took 
 from God* It is the divine will, to which all 
 created things must sooner or later render 
 perfect obedience, that he shall love that 
 which is good, triumph over that which is 
 evil, come to a knowledge of the majesty of 
 the nature which God has given him and 
 course through eternity on ever rising wing* 
 The law demands atonement for all wrong- 
 doing to the uttermost, but not all atone- 
 ment is unwelcome; if a man takes a great 
 burden of wilful and enlightened wrong- 
 doing to the next world, there it is for him 
 a midnight of misery, with every wrong 
 act stripped of all disguises, known to him- 
 self and to all others for just what it is, 
 and burning with sharp distinctness into his 
 consciousness so long as he rebels against 
 punishment and atonement; but once re- 
 
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 pentancc comes in such full and sincere 
 measure that he hastens to submit and 
 atone, no matter at what cost, and to do 
 works meet for repentance, then the stars 
 creep out one by one, suffusing* the darkness 
 with the morning: starligfht which finally, 
 as repentance and atonement do their perfect 
 work, breaks into the white light of the 
 eternal day* 
 
 Are there then no lost souls ? Only God 
 can answer* We can try to imagine how 
 Infinite Love would deal with the irre- 
 deemably bad* Eternal torture is out of the 
 question. Eternal persistence in evil is equal- 
 ly out of the question* It only remainsrthat 
 irredeemable badness must finally work ex- 
 tinction of consciousness* But that cannot 
 quench the immortal spark from God which 
 was clothed upon with the consciousness* 
 What more reasonable than that in due time, 
 perhaps after a night of ages* when the 
 morning of creation is breaking: upon a 
 gathering: mass of world-mist, the quench- 
 less immortal spark shall be ag*ain launched 
 into matter, unhampered and untainted by 
 its awful past ? Who of us knows that he 
 has not just that past behind him? But 
 eternity is a long: time — long: enough to pro- 
 vide incarnations to lead all souls to ligfht* 
 
 113 
 

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