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 Series VII. NOVB&BfEIR IStll...... Nos. 1 and 2. 
 
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 BULLETIN OF 
 
 CENTRAL COLLEGE 
 
 FAYETTE, MISSOURI 
 
 BENEFACTORS’ DAY ADDRESS 
 
 The Discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone 
 
 By REV. JAMES W. LEE, D. D., 
 
 Pantor of St. John's Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 
 
 St. Louis. 
 
 The Bulletin of Central College is published quarterly 
 by the College. Entered at Fayette, Missouri, as second- 
 class mail matter. 
 
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 Bulletin of Central College 
 
 SERIES VII. FAYETTE, MO., NOVEMBER, 1911 Nos. I and 2. 
 
 The Discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone. 
 
 By Rev. James W. Lee, D. D. 
 
 President Webb, in connection with the invitation 
 he sent me to deliver the Benefactors’ Day address, 
 intimated that I could select my own subject. 
 
 I can hardly think of any subject having to do 
 with literary, philosophical, scientific, or political ques¬ 
 tions but would furnish ample material for an address 
 appropriate to the spirit which led to the establishment 
 of Benefactors’ Day in Central College. Those noble 
 men, who, by their gifts, have made Central College 
 possible, had in view the training of students in all 
 lines of study, so that if I were to give an address on 
 architecture, or painting, or music, or agriculture, or 
 - theology, or literature, it would be perfectly in keeping 
 with the occasion, which calls us together tonight. I 
 have chosen as the subject of my address, “The Dis¬ 
 covery of the Philosopher’s Stone.” 
 
 ^ The most remarkable achievement in the history 
 of human research was the discovery of the Philoso¬ 
 pher’s Stone in 1898. This event is brilliant enough 
 to make luminous forever the period in which we live. 
 When the French soldiers in 1798 dug the Rosetta 
 Stone from the mud of the Nile, they put the key to 
 Egyptian learning in the hands of scholars and uncon¬ 
 sciously did the only thing that justified the invasion 
 of the country by Napoleon. But the history of an an- 
 
 — 3 — 
 
cient people learned men are able to read out of the 
 hieroglyphics by means of the Rosetta Stone is as a 
 spark to the sun in comparison to the history of Crea¬ 
 tion students of science are able to read out of the uni¬ 
 verse by means of the discovery of the Philosopher’s 
 Stone. 
 
 I. 
 
 Ever since man began to think he has had a con¬ 
 viction that all things were made by some one thing. 
 
 Nights have never been still enough and sleep has 
 never been profound enough to shut the human mind 
 from the dream that the strands from which the uni¬ 
 versal order are braided were drawn from the same 
 kind of yarn. Thales thought the worlds were spun 
 out of water. Diogenes, of Apollonia, believed they 
 were twisted out of air. Heraclitus said the raw ma¬ 
 terial of immensity was fire. Plato held that the em- \ 
 
 broidery of Creation was crocheted out of ideas. The 
 quest of the Greeks was for some single principle by 
 which they could account for the reality of being. 
 
 They sought the “by word” that would open the door 
 to them into the free-masonry of existence. They 
 looked for the substance out of which all things came 
 and back into which they could all be turned again. 
 
 Had they defined to themselves the Philosopher’s 
 Stone, they would have represented it as standing for 
 the answer to the riddle of reality. 
 
 The Egyptians, unlike the Greeks, were a practical 
 and not a speculative people. They preferred corn to 
 feed their bodies on to first principles to feed their 
 minds on. In their esteem the earth was a granary 
 and not a library, a packing house and not a college, a 
 dining room to eat in and not a study to think in. 
 
 They preferred luxury to logic, as the savage in Africa 
 today longs for fresh meat to match his hunger far 
 more than for the reticulations of mental wheelwork to 
 match his wonder. It was their custom to suck the 
 juice direct from the orange of existence instead of 
 finding reasons for its shape and color and content. It 
 
 —4— 
 
was in accordance with their ideas to drinx down 
 straight the sugar from the watermelon of life rather 
 than "to try to find out how it grew green and round on 
 the vine. * Hence, they narrowed the meaning of the 
 Philosopher’s Stone to the dimensions of a fact that 
 could be cashed in the coin of the realm. They saw no 
 use for a theory that could not, as a servant, he made to 
 accomplish practical results. They believed certain 
 elements were lving around loose in Nature, from 
 which, if found, they could distill a concoction 
 that would turn base metals into noble ones. They 
 never succeeded in transmuting one metal into another, 
 but the contagion of their efforts to find the secret of 
 doing it spread to the different nations of Europe. 
 From the fourth Century A. D. down to the death of 
 Balsamo in 1795 many of the most distinguished men 
 in history spent their time and thought and money in 
 the effort to find the Philosopher’s Stone. Belief in 
 the Philosopher’s Stone constituted the creed of great 
 church fathers, like Thomas Aquinas; philosophers, 
 like Albertus Magnus; students of Nature, like Roger 
 Bacon; and pantheistic mystics, like Jacob Bohmen. 
 Accomplished fakers, like Nicholas Flamel, Mareclial 
 de Rays, Count St. Germain and Count Cagliostro, tak¬ 
 ing advantage of the credulity of the people, made vast 
 fortunes by the sale of complicated mixtures they de¬ 
 clared would turn lead into gold. 
 
 Faith in the Philosopher’s Stone declined with the 
 gradual development of the Science of Chemistry. 
 After the publication of John Dalton’s New System of 
 Chemical Philosophy in 1808, the last foot of ground 
 left for the alchemists to stand on seemed to be de¬ 
 stroyed. According to the doctrine of Democritus and 
 Lucretius atoms were the foundation stones of the 
 heavens and the earth. Earth and air and fire and 
 water could all be divided and subdivided on and on 
 and down and down to finer and finer points, 
 but at length the limit was reached, and the 
 final, ultimate end of every material thing 
 was the atom. Beyond the atom there was 
 
 — 5 — 
 
nothing. Having the accnmulated results of pa¬ 
 tient study for more than two thousand years to assist 
 him, Dalton was able to lay for the atom a firmer and 
 broader foundation than ever Democritus and Lucre¬ 
 tius were able to do. After Dalton’s genius had dis¬ 
 closed the place and importance of the atom, the world 
 of the alchemists was thought to be an unchartered wil¬ 
 derness lying outside the track of progress. From 
 1808 down to the beginning of the last quarter of the 
 nineteenth century, more and more was made of the 
 atom. Meteors, moons and vast planets, whirling in 
 space, were all made up of tiny, little, impenetrable, 
 unbreakable bits, called atoms. Blazing suns and pon¬ 
 derous worlds hurtling through space on billion-mile 
 journeys were all made of atoms. A million-billion of 
 these dumb infinitesimal balls are contained in a 
 speck of matter big enough to see with the naked eye. 
 If one’s power of vision were increased a million billion 
 times, he would be able to see the atoms rebounding, 
 Hying and colliding around him like so many bullets. 
 The trillions of quadrillions of quintillions of atoms 
 contained in the water sufficient to fill the boiler of a 
 steam engine can be inflamed and scourged by heat 
 until they become mad enough to draw a freight train 
 over the Rocky Mountains. 
 
 II. 
 
 Thinking of atoms as impenetrable and final and 
 as endowed with such wonderful gifts of doing things, 
 the opinion became fixed among many of the leading 
 scientific men in the seventies of the last century that 
 there was no place for intelligent will in the universe. 
 The atoms themselves were regarded by many as hav¬ 
 ing sense. Haeckel said they had sensation and will. 
 Clifford declared them to be mind-stuff. Tyndall said 
 they manifested desire for union. Thus the conclusion 
 was reached that the universe was a machine with ca¬ 
 pacity inhering in its wheels to turn itself. The mater¬ 
 ialistic tide, beginning in Greece with Empedocles, 
 Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, and flowing 
 
 — 6 — 
 
steadily over Rome from the time of Lucretius, had at 
 length reached its tide with Dalton and Tyndall and 
 now threatened to flood all the shores of the modern 
 mind. 
 
 Thinking of the atoms as having free-will as 
 Lucretius did, or as having sensation and will as 
 Haeckel did, or as being so much mind-stuff as Clifford 
 did, the materialists were able to see how all worlds 
 were spun by them as if they were so many little 
 spiders, out of their entrails, and then left round, 
 opaque, wheeling webs in the heavens. 
 
 III. 
 
 It is not difficult to understand why those who be¬ 
 lieved the universe to be a machine, the wheels of 
 which were self-whirling atoms, had no place for cre¬ 
 ative mind. If the atoms, of which all things were 
 built, were little bricks of matter self-fashioned to 
 points so fine that they could be cut no further, and had 
 the necessary self-activity for laying themselves up 
 in the walls of the heavens, and for wheeling them¬ 
 selves into the gable ends and rafters and roofs of the 
 constellations, what was the use of a God sitting idly 
 by to watch them work? What use was there for an 
 overseer on the plantation, if the hands worked as well 
 and accomplished as much without his presence as with 
 it? There seemed to be no reason for bringing the 
 Eternal Mind from some transcendental whither to do 
 work in a system equipped for doing everything that 
 could be done without it. They saw no way to bridge 
 the chasm between things and thought, between mind 
 and matter. Even if the universe of the tangible 
 needed any outside assistance, there was no nook nor 
 cranny through which a God could get into the 
 mechanical order. Every crevice and roadway was 
 closed against him. All the gates were shut tight 
 against any divine invasion of the territory bounded by 
 time and space. 
 
 IV. 
 
 This was the situation as looked at from the stand¬ 
 point of the scientists forty years ago. 
 
A few years later Sir William Crookes, while ex¬ 
 amining the actions of particles of matter in a bulb 
 from which the air had been taken, saw that they had 
 properties not possessed by ordinary matter. He con¬ 
 cluded that he had actually touched the borderland 
 where matter and force merged into one another, the 
 shadowy realm between the known and the unknown. 
 In 1895 Roentgen discovered the X-rays, while experi¬ 
 menting further with vacuum tubes. In 1896 Henri 
 Becquerel discovered that the salts of uranium had the 
 power of spontaneously emitting invisible radiations, 
 which affect photographic paper, and pass through 
 metals and discharge electrified bodies. Thus strange 
 discoveries were being made by looking into regions 
 never penetrated before. The frontiers of new lands 
 were being entered and marvelous were the tales 
 brought back by the daring explorers. 
 
 V. 
 
 In 1898 Madame Curie and her husband, after in¬ 
 finite pains, succeeded in discovering radium. This 
 event stirred the world of science far more deeply than 
 the declaration of Professor Tyndall in his Belfast ad- 
 dress in 1874 moved the world of faith. Democritus 
 and Lucretius and Dalton and Tyndall and all the 
 other believers in the hard, impenetrable, unbreakable 
 atom were put out of business in a single day. Theo¬ 
 ries of philosophy hoary with age, as well as newest 
 systems built on them toppled with sudden and world¬ 
 resounding crash into ruins. The very foundations of 
 Creation itself seemed to be upset. The discovery of 
 radium meant so much that it will take the slow, poky 
 minds of the rank and file of men a hundred years to 
 understand all that was involved in it. One of the most 
 amazing things about it was that the dreams of the 
 alchemists were found to be true, more than a century 
 after the last one of them was dead. The Philosopher’s 
 Stone was a vast, revolutionizing fact after all, and had 
 at last been brought out of darkness into light, had 
 been brought from the realm of fancy into fact. The 
 
 — 8 — 
 
quest of tlie ages since the days of old Thales had been 
 found. Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus and 
 Boger Bacon, who had died believing in the transmuta¬ 
 bility of the metals, were vindicated. When radium 
 was discovered, a form of matter was found the atoms 
 of which were in the act of breaking down. Never be¬ 
 fore had the inside of atoms been seen. They had kept 
 their little souls locked out of sight since the founda¬ 
 tions of the world were laid. It was seen that the 
 atoms in a small speck of radium had force enough 
 packed away in their little insides to keep a bell ring¬ 
 ing for hundreds of years, or to keep a globe of light 
 blazing for hundreds of years. It was found that the 
 vastest stores of energy were not in the coal beds, but 
 inside the atoms of which the coal beds were formed. 
 And while a million billion of atoms are necessary to 
 make up a speck of matter large enough to be seen with 
 the naked eve, vet each atom of this million billion of 
 them has inside itself from one thousand to more than 
 two hundred thousand electrons, or corpuscles, or bits 
 of electricity, making revolutions at a high rate of 
 speed as the planets are turning round the sun in the 
 heavens. It was learned not only that the electrical 
 corpuscles are wheeling on circles inside each atom, 
 but the key was also found for determining precisely 
 how many corpuscles each atom contained. Hydrogen 
 being the lightest of all the elements, its atom contains 
 just one thousand more electrons than its atomic 
 weight. Its weight being one, its interior self houses 
 one thousand electrons. The atomic weight of gold is 
 197, therefore, each gold atom contains within itself 
 197,000 electrons. Lead with 206 for its atomic weight 
 contains atoms filled with 206,000 corpuscles each. 
 Find the atomic weight of any of the eighty chemical 
 elements, and multiply that number by 1000 and you 
 have the number of corpuscles contained in each one 
 of its atoms. 
 
 VI. 
 
 It was learned that though the number of cor¬ 
 puscles in each atom was different, yet the corpuscles 
 
 —9— 
 
themselves were all precisely alike. For instance, 
 there are 206,000 corpuscles in each atom of lead, and 
 there are 197,000 corpuscles in each atom of gold, but 
 the corpuscles in an atom of lead are exactly like those 
 in an atom of gold. Thus, in order to turn lead into 
 gold, it would only be necessary to take 9,000 corpus¬ 
 cles out of one of its atoms and a gold atom would be 
 the result. Iron has 55,000 corpuscles in each one of its 
 atoms, and silver has 107,000 corpuscles in each one of 
 its atoms. If you will take out of an atom of silver 
 52,000 electrons, you will have left an atom of iron, or 
 if you will add 52,000 electrons taken from some other 
 element to the corpuscles of your iron atom, you will 
 get silver. Sir J. J. Thompson says that man will know 
 some day doubtless as well how to get hold of the elec¬ 
 trons and mix them to make what he wants, as he 
 knows today how to combine hydrogen and oxygen to 
 get water. 
 
 VII. 
 
 All this is amazing enough to take people’s breath 
 away, but something more astounding still has been 
 found out about corpuscles, and that is their vast en¬ 
 ergy. Sir Oliver Lodge says it has been calculated that 
 the collapsing of the corpuscles, or electrical constit¬ 
 uents of a radium atom, by so little as one per cent of 
 their distance apart can supply the whole of the energy 
 of its observed radiation for something like thirty 
 thousand years. The corpuscle is so small that in 
 comparison with the size of the atom in which it re¬ 
 volves it is as a grain of sand to a cathedral. And yet 
 these little corpuscles, when by any means they get out¬ 
 side the atom of which they form a part, shoot forth 
 with a velocity that, according to LeBon, could be 
 equalled by a bullet only if it had one million three hun¬ 
 dred and forty thousand barrels of gunpowder behind 
 it. Corpuscles travel so fast in their small orbits inside 
 the atom, that the same rate of speed in a straight line 
 would take them from the earth to the moon in four 
 seconds. There is force enough inside an old-fashioned 
 
 — 10 — 
 
/ 
 
 copper cent piece, if it could be released, to pull a 
 large freight train four times and a quarter the cir¬ 
 cumference of the earth. Sir Oliver Lodge says that 
 the electrons are as much faster than a cannon ball as 
 a cannon ball is faster than a snail. Sir J. J. Thomp¬ 
 son says that a few grains weight of hydrogen has 
 within its corpuscles enough force to raise a million 
 tons to a height of more than three hundred feet. Max 
 Abraham calculates that one gramme’s weight of 
 corpuscles contains energy equal to eighty billion 
 horse power per second. 
 
 Sir J. J. Thompson said in his presidential address 
 before the British Association held in Winnipeg, Can¬ 
 ada, in 1909, that in one gramme of hydrogen, that is. 
 in one-thirtieth of an ounce of hydrogen there are about 
 6 x 10 (raised to the 23rd degree) atoms, and that the 
 energy due to the corpuscles in a gramme of hydrogen 
 is equal to 11 x 10 (raised to the 9th degree) calories, 
 or heat measures. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 I have pointed out before that the atoms of hy¬ 
 drogen and oxygen combined in water sufficient to fill 
 the boiler of an engine could be scourged by heat into 
 anger sufficient to impel them to draw a freight train 
 over the Rocky Mountains. But the force developed 
 by scourging the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen from 
 the outside of themselves is not a millionth part of the 
 force that could be secured from the inside of them. 
 There is, perhaps, enough force inside the atoms of an 
 engine boiler full of water to take a train from here 
 to San Francisco and back one hundred thousand 
 times. This can be understood when we remember 
 that the corpuscles inside the atoms are revolving in 
 their orbits at an unthinkable rate of speed per sec¬ 
 ond. Their great energy is due to the fact that they 
 are moving so fast. 
 
 IX. 
 
 The conclusion students have reached, then, is that 
 matter is constituted of electricity, and that electricity 
 
 —ll— 
 
is nothing bnt brilliant mist rising up from the ether 
 sea. Ether has been defined as the nominative case of 
 the verb to undulate. Sir Oliver Lodge says that the 
 intrinsic energy of the constitution of the ether is so in¬ 
 credibly, so portentously great that every cubic milli¬ 
 meter of space possesses what, if it were matter, would 
 be a mass of a thousand tons and would contain energy 
 equivalent to the output of a million horse power sta¬ 
 tion for forty million years. We can understand there¬ 
 fore, why the corpuscles, which are flying around with 
 such velocity inside the atoms, have such tremendous 
 power. The pressure of the ether is so great that it 
 equals 10,000 tons per square millimeter. Matter, 
 therefore, is nothing but areas of the diminished den¬ 
 sity of ether. When the ether moves out into gossamer, 
 filmy, imperceptible mist, we call it matter. Matter 
 then is made of atoms, and atoms are made of corpus¬ 
 cles, or points of electricity, and electricity is made of 
 ether, and ether is coterminous with the whole sum of 
 things. Ether is force, but imponderable and immate¬ 
 rial. It is as subtle and as distant from what we know" 
 as ordinary matter as thought is. Ether is the ever¬ 
 lasting dwelling place of eternal intelligence. It con¬ 
 stitutes the vehicle through which the Creator works. 
 God is not imprisoned in it. He transcends it. But He 
 uses it as the raw material out of which to make 
 worlds. 
 
 Thus, when we resolve matter into ether, we are 
 compelled to admit that not a wave of it can ever move 
 out into any created thing without the thought and will 
 of the Almighty. 
 
 Evervone can see that the action of a force can 
 not be determined by a force, and that motion can not 
 be determined by motion. That the action of a force 
 can not be determined by a force is demonstrable. 
 For, if the action of a force is determined by an act, 
 then the act itself must have been determined by a pre¬ 
 ceding act, and this preceding act by another, and so 
 
 on in like manner to infinitv. If the front one of a 
 
 •/ 
 
 thousand billiard balls in a row is seen to move, we are 
 
 — 12 
 
compelled to infer that it was propelled by some power 
 other than and outside itself. When we are taught by 
 science, therefore, that all matter is made of force, we 
 are driven to the conclusion that the force taking the 
 various forms of matter is the expression of the eternal 
 will of the Creator. So at last we see that Plato was 
 right when he taught that all things we see are but 
 ideas clothing themselves in the forms of matter. 
 
 X. 
 
 The Philosopher’s Stone with Thales was water; 
 the Philosopher’s Stone with Democritus and Dalton 
 was atoms; the Philosopher’s Stone with the modern 
 scientists is electricity, and then, when further an¬ 
 alyzed, is ether, and ether has now been shown to be 
 force, and finally, back of force is thought, and thought 
 is the expression of the eternal mind of God. The 
 Philosopher’s Stone, then, as far as so-called material 
 things go, is thought. All things are the expression of 
 thought. Thought is the foundation principle of the 
 created universe. Thought is the Philosopher’s Stone 
 in the universe of things. It is amazing that science 
 brings us back to idealism as the working principle of 
 the sum of things. What we call matter, then, is not 
 matter in the ordinary acceptation of the term; it is 
 thought in the form of whirling, seething bits from the 
 sea of ether. It is thought in the form of ether. We 
 call things hard. There is nothing hard. Pocks are 
 soft, and seem to be rigid because made up of particles 
 going fast. A hard thing is a soft thing going fast. 
 The hard, fixed appearance of the mountains and the 
 earth are simply a case of cinematographic continuity 
 like the scenery in a five cent picture show. The car¬ 
 riage seems to be coming down the road and the 
 robbers seem to be holding the parties in it up, but in¬ 
 stead of there being one scene, there are thousands of 
 them thrown together in a single picture. So, instead 
 of seeing the Shasta Mountains as you pass from Port¬ 
 land to San Francisco as solid, stolid, hard piles rising 
 into the sky, you see a cinematographic aggregation of 
 billions of quadrillions of sextillions of atoms, multi- 
 
 —13— 
 
plied over and over again and again by as many tril¬ 
 lions of atoms each filled with thousands of corpuscles 
 and all together going so fast that they make a huge 
 heap that seems to he hard and single. 
 
 Halley’s Comet is nothing but a cinematographic 
 picture show, making a seven billion mile tour every 
 seventy-five years, giving free exhibitions to planets 
 like the Earth and Mars and Uranus and Neptune. 
 
 XL 
 
 We hear a great deal today about what is called 
 New Thought and it is remarkable what great things 
 can be accomplished by exercising the intelligence in 
 the direction of God’s thought. Many diseases can be 
 cured simply by getting in line with the ideas ex¬ 
 pressed in the Universe by the Infinite Mind. But we 
 can not, by thinking, arrest the habits of the universe. 
 Many ailments can be healed by thinking in the direc¬ 
 tion of the laws of God. We hear it often said today 
 that there is no such thing as matter,and it is correct 
 that there is no such thing as matter as the ordinary 
 mortal thinks about it. But there is such a thing as 
 the definite combination of atoms into bodies, which, 
 in the last analysis, are corpuscles, and finally, and ulti¬ 
 mately, ether. Now the thoughts of the Eternal Mind, 
 which express themselves in oxygen, gold, platinum, 
 arsenic, etc., are filled with dynamite. They can not 
 be trifled with. They were expressed along definite 
 lines and intended to accomplish definite results. 
 
 XII. 
 
 The human body, for instance, is made up of oxy¬ 
 gen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, with a little mixture 
 of iron, lime, soda and phosphorus, besides traces of 
 compounds known as chondrin, osmazome, cholesterin 
 and resin. In each oxygen atom in the human body 
 there are 16,000 corpuscles, in each hydrogen atom 
 there are 1,000 corpuscles, in the carbon atom 12,000 
 corpuscles, in the nitrogen atom 14,000 corpuscles, in 
 the iron 55,000 corpuscles, in the phosphorus atom 31,- 
 000 corpuscles, etc. All these corpuscles are points of 
 electricity. 
 
 — 14 — 
 
XIII. 
 
 Man’s body is so much palpitating lightning. In 
 man we have so much of the Aurora Borealis breathing. 
 Now, to get health and peace and strength out of light¬ 
 ning and Aurora Borealis, there must be the most exact 
 conformity to the laws of the marvelous mixture of 
 molecules out of which man’s body is built. There is 
 not such a combination of forces under the sun as is 
 found in the body of man. Now, it is an absolute law 
 that nothing can be taken into the body without danger 
 except something that has its duplicate already in the 
 body. You can get strength from milk and eggs and 
 meat and bread and fruit and vegetables, because the 
 oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, iron, lime, soda, 
 phosphorus, ehondrin, osmazome, cholesterin and 
 resin which constitute the body of man are found in 
 milk and eggs and meat and bread and vegetables. 
 The corpuscles in these forms of food match the cor¬ 
 puscles of which man’s body is made. But arsenic is 
 an element with 75,000 corpuscles in each one of its 
 atoms. If one should undertake to put a bottle of 
 arsenic into his body, he would find that there being 
 nothing in the body to match the arsenic, the attempt 
 of the body to arrest the effect of the arsenic would re¬ 
 sult in his death. Man can not, by thinking, arrest the 
 effect of an element taken into his system for which his 
 body has no affinity and no need. God made arsenic by 
 taking 75,000 corpuscles and putting them together. 
 So arsenic is His thought, and if man could arrest its 
 effect in the system by a thought of his, then it would 
 follow that a thought of the Infinite could be held up 
 by a thought of the finite. Every form of matter, as a 
 thought of God, acts in accordance with the most exact 
 law. The laws of God really constitute the love of God. 
 and love is as deadly as dynamite when you get into 
 wrong relations with it. All the quadrillions of atoms 
 have each their own role and play it in exactly the 
 same fashion. The laws of the Universe may be re¬ 
 garded as the summing up of the promises of God. It 
 is the promise of God in the law of gravitation that if 
 
 —15— 
 
you keep your feet on the ground, you will be main¬ 
 tained in peace, but it is also the promise of God in the 
 law of gravitation that if you climb to the top of a 
 church steeple with the vain hope that God being good 
 will take care of you and thus presuming on His love, 
 jump to the ground, it will follow that you will be 
 killed, nevertheless. It is a promise of God in combus¬ 
 tion that, if you jump into a furnace, you will be burnt. 
 When an illiterate, hysterical champion of New 
 Thought, with no knowledge of the promises of God in 
 the laws of the Universe, with no mental training as to 
 the meaning of God’s thought expressed in Nature, 
 rises up to tell us that evil and disease can be blotted 
 from the life of humanitv in anv other manner than by 
 conforming to God’s law, he should not be taken seri¬ 
 ously. Such a man would not do the slightest harm to 
 people trained to think, but there are many poor, 
 ignorant, mentally-belated specimens of humanity in 
 the world and these would be in danger of ruin if 
 they should undertake to put into practice such crude 
 thinking. Things have certain properties in them¬ 
 selves and our thoughts can not take them away. Pain 
 and disease are realities just as fire is a reality. The 
 conception of life that leads one to think that fire will 
 not burn is really a lapse into the incoherent, inconse¬ 
 quent and capricious idea of Nature held by the primi¬ 
 tive mind of the savage. To say that microbes, when 
 they begin to bite and eat away the health of a mao, 
 are not real things, is like saying that the tiger, ready 
 to devour the hunter is not a real, striped thing. A 
 tubercle bacillus inside one’s lungs is as real as a rattle 
 snake outside one’s leg. The negroes down South 
 bought comet pills from fakers in 1910 to insure them¬ 
 selves against the perils they feared were ablaze in the 
 streamers of Halley’s Comet. But no one trained to 
 think could ever believe that pills of any sort would 
 have the slightest effect in saving people from what¬ 
 ever perils there might be in Halley’s Comet, or in the 
 San Francisco earthquake, or in the Johnstown flood. 
 
 — 16 — 
 
XIV. 
 
 The Philosopher’s Stone, then, in the realm of 
 things is the thought of God. The Philosopher’s Stone 
 in the realm of spirit is the love of God. God is Infinite 
 Spirit, man is finite spirit. God, as Spirit, is defined in 
 the Scripture as love, and man, as spirit, when he lives 
 up to what he essentially and potentially is, is love. 
 When man loves God with all his heart and mind and 
 soul and strength, he conforms to the laws of his own 
 being and to the divinely-implanted potential power to 
 lead a holy life. When man by the grace of God in 
 Jesus Christ loves, he is himself, really, essentially and 
 fundamentally. Love is the raw material of man’s be¬ 
 ing. In loving, he becomes himself as a child of God, 
 himself as an expression in human form of the love of 
 God. All material things are expressions of thought, 
 clothing itself in the forms of ether. All self-conscions 
 beings are expressions of love, clothed in forms of hu¬ 
 manity. In coming back to ether, planets, rocks, moun¬ 
 tains, seas and forests come back home, come back to 
 the origin of themselves, come back to that out of 
 which they were made. So man, in coming back to 
 love, comes to the home of himself, the origin of him¬ 
 self, the reality of himself, the raw material of himself. 
 Take the ether in a cubic inch of space and it can be 
 used for making any material thing in the Universe. 
 It can be used to make diamonds, or rocks, or water, or 
 soup, or cloth, or rice, or mountains, or stars, or trace- 
 chains, or anything whatsoever that has length and 
 breadth and height. And so love, real, disinterested, 
 pure and true in any human heart can be cashed in 
 any form of human value. In loving, one possesses all 
 things. The fountain and reality of love was Jesus 
 Christ. Re declared, if a man find himself, he shall 
 lose himself, that is, if he find himself in things, he 
 shall lose himself in spirit. But if he lose himself in 
 love, he finds himself in spirit. 
 
 In society we have the divinely-implanted rela¬ 
 tions of men served up in terms of life. As the mineral 
 climbs upward to bloom in the flower, and as earth and 
 
 — 17 — 
 
sunbeams get together to grow in the oak, so at last 
 electricity and life conjoin to smile in the face of man. 
 In partnership with him the electrons stand np, cor¬ 
 puscles walk about, atoms sit at the table, molecules 
 breathe and the whole marvelous mixture is agitated 
 by the beating pulse. Man is a representative and 
 trustee of all below him and succeeds in compressing 
 the wonders of the whole universe into the small com¬ 
 pass of one hundred and fifty exquisite pounds of ani¬ 
 mated electricity. In man the raw material of life 
 finds a head and a heart, a tongue of utterance and a 
 face of beauty. In the blood which flows through his 
 heart he carries in solution hills and streams, winds 
 and clouds, flowers and birds and continents and seas, 
 and something of the content of the whole ether sea. 
 
 But until through love man comes into relation 
 with others of his kind, he has no significance. In the 
 race to which he belongs he finds his other and better 
 self. When through love he comes into reciprocal rela¬ 
 tions with the larger and kindred life of which he forms 
 a part, his arms become long enough to encircle the 
 globe. In correspondence through love with the social 
 whole in which his life is planted, he finds it possible to 
 multiply the significance of his own individuality by 
 the social whole of the race. Through relation, in 
 terms of love, to all the sons and daughters of God, he 
 becomes significant and great, for upon the supposition 
 that there are one billion five hundred millions of per¬ 
 sons like himself on earth, he finds his individuality 
 augmented by the possession of three billion hands to 
 help him work, and of three billion eyes to help him see, 
 and one billion five hundred millions of hearts to aid 
 him in solving the problems and bearing the burdens of 
 life. When he comes into relations with men and God 
 through terms of love, his existence is not then eked 
 out in lone Bedouin isolation. He becomes a partner of 
 a life as wide as humanity and as illimitable as God, the 
 throbbing currents of which come up around his beat¬ 
 ing heart to refresh it and to float its outgoing pulsa¬ 
 tions throughout the universe. 
 
 — 18 — 
 
The race from the beginning of its career has been 
 painfully and slowly, bnt snrely, by means of love, pull¬ 
 ing itself together into one great, harmonious, sympa¬ 
 thetic, human whole. It is the unspeakable privilege 
 of those of us, who live at the beginning of the twenti¬ 
 eth century, to see this work more advanced than ever 
 before. Humanity is united today as it never was be¬ 
 fore, because human beings have learned the secret and 
 the wisdom and the practical results of loving one an¬ 
 other as they never did before. The elbows of the na¬ 
 tions now touch and they are supported by a common 
 commerce, and more or less inspired by a common 
 hope, and feel themselves moved to a common destiny 
 as not in any previous period of the world’s history. 
 By loving, man finds the secret of living a universal 
 life, and sees himself as an open port, where, for a 
 small contribution to the multiplex flow of exchanges 
 passing through it, he can take toll of the merchandise 
 of the world. 
 
 It is because society is being organized in accord¬ 
 ance with the principles of love that man finds it pos¬ 
 sible to use the millions invested in street car systems 
 for 5 cents a ride. And because society has learned to 
 substitute the law of love for the law of the jungle, man 
 finds it possible to avail himself of the vast outlay of 
 money and thought which unite to produce the morn¬ 
 ing paper for 1 cent a copy. And because of this, he 
 can use all the billions which have been spent in the 
 establishment of railroads, steamship lines, electric 
 light plants, shoe factories, iron foundries and othei 
 forms of modern industry to serve every side and rela¬ 
 tion of his life at such compensation as comes within 
 the range of every earnest toiler’s income. No king or 
 queen of ancient times ever had the comforts and con¬ 
 veniences enjoyed by every industrious laboring man 
 of today. No Lucullus or Heliogabalus ever fared as 
 he does, and all because we have come to the time 
 when man, by learning the secret of love, is able to 
 recognized himself as one factor of an equation of 
 which the human race is the other, and to the time 
 
 — 19 — 
 
when the small factor, which spells individuality, lias 
 learned how to increase its power and multiply its 
 efficiency by the multitudinous immensity of the larger 
 factor, which spells humanity. 
 
 In his recent address before the British Associa¬ 
 tion, held in Portsmouth in August, 1911, Sir William 
 Eamsey, the president, declared that the common¬ 
 wealth of Athens attained a high-water mark in liter¬ 
 ature and thought, which has never quite been passed. 
 
 The reason he gave for this was that a large propor¬ 
 tion of its people had ample leisure due to ample 
 means. They had time to think and time to discuss 
 what they thought, and they achieved this because 
 each Greek freeman had, on an average, at least five 
 slaves, who did his bidding, who worked his mines, 
 looked after his farms, and, in short, saved him from 
 manual labor. 
 
 Now, we in the United States are much better off f 
 
 The population of the country is, say, in round num¬ 
 bers, ninety millions. There are consumed in our fac¬ 
 tories one hundred million tons of coal annually, and ^ 
 
 Sir William Eamsey said it is generally agreed that 
 the consumption of coal per indicated horse-power per 
 hour is, on an average, about five pounds. This 
 would give us, as a nation, fourteen million horse¬ 
 power per year. A single horse-power is twenty-firo 
 times as much as a single man-power. Fourteen mil¬ 
 lion horse-power are, therefore, three hundred and fif¬ 
 ty million man-power. Taking a family as consisting, 
 on the average, of five persons, our ninety millions 
 would represent eighteen million families, and divid¬ 
 ing the total man-power by the number of families, we 
 can see that each American family has, on the average, 
 nearly twenty slaves doing its bidding, instead of the 
 five slaves owned by the Athenian family. 
 
 It is this that makes it possible for America to 
 support its own population, while contributing a 
 large amount to the support of the populations of the 
 rest of the globe. When I was a boy down South, a 
 man was thought to be of importance if he owned 
 
 — 20 — 
 
twenty negroes. We have lived to see the time in our 
 country when every American family has twenty 
 slaves, not in the form of human flesh, but in the form 
 of physical force to work for it. 
 
 It has taken man thousands of years to find the 
 Philosopher’s Stone in things. For the future his en¬ 
 ergy will be directed to the recognition of and the 
 practice of love, which is the Philosopher’s Stone in 
 the realm of humanity. The discovery of this is not 
 new, but the attempt to practically apply it to human 
 affairs in this world is new. Up to within recent years 
 the general working theory has been that love is a 
 good thing for heaven, but an impractical thing in the 
 hard, work-a-day world this side the grave. But v;e 
 have arrived at such a crisis in our relations and strug¬ 
 gles that human beings of insight and leading are be¬ 
 ginning to feel that the only way out of our entangle¬ 
 ments, national, international, political, social, and 
 commercial, is by the divinely-ordained highway of 
 love. Preachers from Job to Phillips Brooks have 
 been saying this all along, but the heedless world 
 rushed headlong, practicing the principles of the jun¬ 
 gle in the domain of human affairs. They felt the 
 preachers were right in a transcendental sense. Just 
 now they are beginning to see that the preachers are 
 right in every sense for this world and all worlds. 
 
 — 21 — 
 
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