hich were
to me like stepping-stones. I will note a few of them, they came about
two weeks apart.

"1st. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me.

"2d. I am Soul, therefore I am well.

"3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four-footed beast with a
protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering, with my
own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I resolutely fixed
my attention on being well, and refused to even look at my old self in
this form.

"4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with faint
voice. Again refusal to acknowledge.

"5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing look;
and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the inner
consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for I was
Soul, an expression of God's Perfect Thought. That was to me the
perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I appeared
to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my real being,
by constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees (though it took me
two years of hard work to get there) I expressed health continuously
throughout my whole body.

"In my subsequent nineteen years' experience I have never known this
Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I have often
failed to apply it, but through my failures I have learned the
simplicity and trustfulness of the little child."

But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead
you back to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such
records of experience how impossible it is not to class mind-cure as
primarily a religious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our
life with God's life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an
interpretation of Christ's message which in these very Gifford lectures
has been defended by some of your very ablest Scottish religious
philosophers.[52]

[52] The Cairds, for example. In Edward Caird's Glasgow Lectures of
1890-92 passages like this abound:--

"The declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus that
'the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand,' passes
with scarce a break into the announcement that 'the kingdom of God is
among you'; and the importance of this announcement is asserted to be
such that it makes, so to speak, a difference IN KIND between the
greatest saints and prophets who lived under the previous reign of
division, and