l and will from
thought. All minds are free agents, being vicious or virtuous from their
own choice. There is as much piety, morality or immorality in the
flowing of the Wabash river as there is in involuntary action. So
ability to choose is the great factor of morality, virtue, immorality,
and vice.

In scientific investigations lying in the realm of the physical there
are countless objects to engage our thoughts, but here we have but one,
and we always carry it about with us and are continually using it. Our
_consciousness_ is to all the operations of our spirits what seeing,
touching, hearing, tasting and smelling is to surrounding bodies. It
enables us to examine all the minds in the universe. Would you like to
have an organ which would enable you to see spirits? In your
_consciousness_ you have a faculty superior to all the five senses put
together. In our consciousness we see and feel ourselves, and in so
doing we see not only the minds of others, but our great Father himself.
We can not tell what instincts are in the bee, or what sagacity is in a
spaniel, because we are neither spaniels nor bees, but we are of a more
noble race. We are in possession of minds or spirits, and consequently
identified with all minds or spirits, so the science of mind, or
psychology, is the knowledge of ourselves.

Christianity, as a spiritual system, takes us and all its votaries into
this intellectual temple, where we may certainly know God through a
correct knowledge of self. In this temple we have a sample of the
spirits of men, angels and demons, and over all, an example of the
spirit we worship. These invisible intelligences are the wonderful
agencies through which good and evil are effected. Natural laws are
only the rules by which the great Father Spirit acts. Laws are rules by
which agents act, and they always imply agents. Men of olden times are
often spoken of as great metaphysicians. Who has not heard of Homer,
Herodotus, Pindar, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Plato and many others. But
those ancient men, here as in physics, dealt so much in fancy that they
were not disposed to enter into the simple examination of their own
minds or spirits. Entangled in the doctrines of chance, fate and destiny
they robbed the Creator of the sceptre of the universe. They placed
Jove, their supreme deity, under a decree that he could not change;
confessed that he could not, in many instances, help them when he
desired to do so. The greatest hin