a physician, or a professor of natural philosophy,—­according to the ruder sort then prevalent,—­he never thanked Jesus for restoring his senseless hand; but neither red tape nor indignity hindered the divine process.  Jesus required neither cycles of time nor thought in order to mature fitness for perfection and its possibilities.  He said that the kingdom of heaven is here, and is included in Mind; that while ye say, There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest, I say, Look up, not down, for your fields are already white for the harvest; and gather the harvest by mental, not material processes.  The laborers are few in this vineyard of Mind-sowing and reaping; but let them apply to the waiting grain the curving sickle of Mind’s eternal circle, and bind it with bands of Soul.

The Deep Things of God

Science reverses the evidence of the senses in theology, on the same principle that it does in astronomy.  Popular theology makes God tributary to man, coming at human call; whereas the reverse is true in Science.  Men must approach God reverently, doing their own work in obedience to divine law, if they would fulfil the intended harmony of being.

The principle of music knows nothing of discord.  God is harmony’s selfhood.  His universal laws, His unchangeableness, are not infringed in ethics any more than in music.  To Him there is no moral inharmony; as we shall learn, proportionately as we gain the true understanding of Deity.  If God could be conscious of sin, His infinite power would straightway reduce the universe to chaos.

If God has any real knowledge of sin, sickness, and death, they must be eternal; since He is, in the very fibre of His being, “without beginning of years or end of days.”  If God knows that which is not permanent, it follows that He knows something which He must learn to unknow, for the benefit of our race.

Such a view would bring us upon an outworn theological platform, which contains such planks as the divine repentance, and the belief that God must one day do His work over again, because it was not at first done aright.

Can it be seriously held, by any thinker, that long after God made the universe,—­earth, man, animals, plants, the sun, the moon, and “the stars also,”—­He should so gain wisdom and power from past experience that He could vastly improve upon His own previous work,—­as Burgess, the boatbuilder, remedies in the Volunteer the shortcomings of the Puritan’s model?

Christians are commanded to grow in grace.  Was it necessary for God to grow in grace, that He might rectify His spiritual universe?

The Jehovah of limited Hebrew faith might need repentance, because His created children proved sinful; but the New Testament tells us of “the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”  God is not the shifting vane on the spire, but the corner-stone of living rock, firmer than everlasting hills.