hideous chicane of imperial government and
imperial religion against mankind has resulted in a Christian veneer,
which cracks at the first test and reveals the unchanged human brute
beneath. The nations which writhe in deadly embrace to-day have never
sought to prove God. They but emphasize the awful fact that the human
mind has no grasp upon the Principle which is God, and at a time of
crisis reverts almost instantly to the primitive, despite so-called
culture and civilization. Yes, religion as a perpetuation of ancient
human conceptions, of materialistic traditions and opinions of 'the
Fathers,' is a flat failure. By it the people of great nations have
been molded into servile submission to church and ruler--have been
persuaded that wretchedness and poverty are eternal--that heaven is a
realm beyond the grave, to which admission is a function of outward
oblation--and that surcease from ills here, or in the life to come, is
a gift of the Church. Can we wonder that commercialism is mistaken by
nations for progress? That king and emperor still call upon God to
bless their barbaric attempts at conquest? And that human existence
remains, what it has always been, a ghastly mockery of Life?

"Healing the sick by applied Christianity is not the attempt to alter
a mental concept; it is the bringing out of harmony where before was
discord. Evil can not be 'thought away.' He who indulges evil only
proves his belief in its reality and power. Christian healing is not
'mental suggestion,' wherein all thought is material. When evil
thinking is overcome, then the discords which result from it will
disappear from consciousness. That is the Christ-method. Behind all
that the physical senses seem to see, know, and feel, is the spiritual
fact, perfect and eternal. Jesus healed the sick by establishing this
fact in the human consciousness. And we must learn to do likewise. The
orthodox churches must learn it. They must cease from the dust-man,
whose breath is in his nostrils; they must cease from preaching evil
as an awful reality, permitted by God, or existing despite Him; they
must know it as Jesus bade all men know it, as the lie about Truth.
Then, by holding the divine ideal before the human mind, they will
cause that mentality gradually to relinquish its false beliefs and
copy the real. And thus, step by step, changing from better to better
beliefs, at length the human mind will have completely substituted
reality for unreality, and