"My friend," said Hitt calmly, "he fell away from the Church because he could not stagnate longer with her and be happy. Orthodox theology has largely become mere sentimentalism. The average man has a horror of being considered a namby-pamby, religiously weak, wishy-washy, so-called Christian. It makes him ashamed of himself to stand up in a congregation and sing 'My Jesus, I love Thee,' and 'In mansions of glory and endless delight.' What does he know about Jesus? And he is far more concerned about his little brick bungalow and next month's rent than he is about celestial mansions. And I don't blame him. No; he leaves religion to women, whom he regards as the weaker s.e.x. He turns to the ephemeral wisdom of human science--and, poor fool! remains no wiser than before. And the women? Well, how often nowadays do you hear the name of G.o.d on their lips? Is He discussed in society? Is He ever the topic of conversation at receptions and b.a.l.l.s? No; that person was right who said that religion 'does not rise to the height of successful gossip.' It stands no show with the latest cabaret dance, the slashed skirt, and the daringly salacious drama as a theme of discourse. Oh, yes, we still maintain our innumerable churches. And, though religion is the most vital thing in the world to us, we hire a preacher to talk to us once a week about it! Would we hire men to talk once a week to us about business? Hardly! But religion is far, far less important to human thought than business--for the latter means automobiles and increased opportunities for physical sensation."

"Well, Mr. Hitt," objected Doctor Siler, "I am sure this is not such a G.o.dless era as you would make out."

"No," returned Hitt. "We have many G.o.ds, chief of whom is matter. The world's acknowledged G.o.d is not spirit, despite the inescapable fact that the motive-power of the universe is spiritual, and the only action is the expression of thought.

"But now," he continued, "we have in our previous discussions made some startling deductions, and we came to the conclusion that there is a First Cause, and that it is infinite mind. But, having agreed upon that, are we now ready to admit the logical corollary, namely, that there can be but _one_ real mind? For that follows from the premise that there is but one G.o.d who is infinite."

"Then we do not have individual minds?" queried Miss Wall.

"We have but the one mind, G.o.d," he replied. "There are not minds many. The real man reflects G.o.d. Human men reflect the communal mortal mind, which is the suppositional opposite of the divine mind that is G.o.d. I repeat, the so-called human mind knows not G.o.d. It never sees even His manifestations. It sees only its own interpretations of Him and His manifestations. And these it sees as mental concepts. For all things are mental. Could anything be plainer?"

"Well, they might be," suggested Doctor Siler.

Hitt laughed. "Well then," he said, "if you will not admit that all things are mental--including the entire universe--you certainly are forced to admit that your comprehension of things is mental."

"Agreed," returned the doctor.

"Then you will likewise have to admit that you are not concerned with _things_, but with your comprehension of things."

"H'm, well--yes."

"And so, after all, you deal only with mental things--and everything is mental to you."

"But--whence the human mind? Did G.o.d create it?" continued Doctor Siler. "Did He, Mr. Moore?"

"The Bible states clearly that He created _all_ things," returned that gentleman a little stiffly.

"My friends," resumed Hitt very earnestly, "we are on the eve of a tremendous enlightenment, I believe. And for that we owe much to the so-called 'theory of suppositional opposites.' We have settled to our satisfaction that, although mankind believe themselves to be dependent upon air, food, and water for existence, nevertheless they are really dependent upon something vastly finer, which is back of those things.

That 'something' we call G.o.d, for it is good. Matthew Arnold said that the only thing that can be verified about G.o.d is that He is 'the eternal power that makes for righteousness.' Very well, we are almost willing to accept that alone--for that carries infinite implications.

It makes G.o.d an eternal, spiritual power, omnipotent as an influence for good. It makes Him the infinite patron, so to speak, of right-thinking. And we know that thought is creative. So it makes Him the sole creative force.

"But," he continued, "force, or power, is not material. G.o.d by very necessity is mind, including all intelligence. And His operations are conducted according to the spiritual law of evolution. Oh, yes, evolution is not a theory, it is a fact. G.o.d, infinite mind, evolves, uncovers, reveals, unfolds, His numberless eternal ideas. These reflect and manifest Him. The greatest of these is the one that includes all others and expresses and reflects Him perfectly. That we call man. That is the man who was 'made'--revealed, manifested--in His image and likeness. There is no other image and likeness of G.o.d.

Moreover, G.o.d has always existed, and always will. So His ideas, including real man, have had no beginning. They were not created, as we regard creation, but have been unfolded.

"All well and good, so far. But now we come to the peculiar part, namely, the fact that _reality seems always to have its shadow in unreality_. Every positive seems to have a negative. The magnet has its opposite poles, one positive, the other negative. Jesus had his Nero. Truth has its opposing falsities. At the lowest ebb of the world's morals appeared the Christ. The Christian religion springs from the soil of a Roman Emperor's blood-soaked gardens. And so it goes. Harmony opposed by discord. Errors hampering the solving of mathematical problems. Spirit opposed by matter. Which is real? That which stands the test of demonstration as to permanence, I say with Spencer.

"And now we learn that it is the _communal mortal mind_ that stands as the opposite and negative of the infinite mind that is G.o.d, and that it is but a supposition, without basis of real principle or fact. It has its law of evolution, too, and evolves its types in human beings and animals, in mountain, tree, and stream. All material nature, in fact, is but the manifestation, or reflection, of this communal mortal mind.

"But, though G.o.d had no beginning, and will have no ending, this communal mortal mind, on the contrary, did have a seeming beginning, and will end its pseudo-existence. It seemingly began as a mental mist. It seemingly evolved form and became active. It seemingly evolved its universe, and its earth as its lower stratum. It made its firmament, and it gradually filled its seas with moving things that manifested its idea of life. Slowly, throughout inconceivable eons of time, it unrolled and evolved, until at last, through untold generations of stupid, sluggish, often revolting animal forms, it began to evolve a type of mind, a crude representation of the mind that is G.o.d, and manifesting its own concept of intelligence. That type was primitive man.

"Now what was this communal mortal mind doing? Counterfeiting divine mind, if I may so express it. Evolving crude imitative types. But types that were without basis of principle, and so they pa.s.sed away--the higher forms died, the lower disintegrated. Aye, death came into the world because of sin, for the definition of sin is the Aramaic word which Jesus used, translated '_hamartio_,' which means 'missing the mark.' The mortal mind missed the mark. And so its types died. And so they still die to-day. Yes, sin came through Adam, for Adam is the name of the communal mortal mind.

"Well, ages and ages pa.s.sed, reckoned in the human mind concept of time. The evolution was continually toward a higher and ever higher type. Why? The influence of divine mind was penetrating it.

Paleolithic man still died, because he did not have enough real knowledge in his mortal mind to keep him from missing the mark. He probably had no belief in a future life, for he did not bury his dead after the manner of those who later manifested this belief. But, after the lapse of centuries, Neolithic man was found manifesting such a belief. What has happened? This: the mortal mind was translating the divine idea of immortality into its own terms and thus expressing it.

"Ages rolled on. The curtain began to rise upon what we call human history. The idea of a power not itself began to filter through the mist of mortal mind, and human beings felt its influence, the influence that makes for righteousness. And then, at last, through the mortal mind there began to filter the idea of the one G.o.d. The people who best reflected this idea were the ancient Israelites. They called themselves the 'chosen' people. Their so-called minds were, as Carmen has expressed it, like window-panes that were a little cleaner than the others. They let a bit more of the light through. G.o.d is light, you know, according to the Scriptures. And little by little they began to record their thoughts regarding their concept of the one G.o.d. These writings became sacred to them. And soon they were seeing their G.o.d manifested everywhere, and hearing His voice in every sound of Nature.

And as they saw, they wrote. And thus began that strange and mighty book, the Bible, _the record of the evolution of the concept of G.o.d in the human mind_."

"Do you mean to say that the Bible was not given by inspiration?"

demanded Reverend Moore.

"No," replied Hitt. "This filtering process that I have been speaking about _is_ inspiration. Every bit of truth that comes to you or me to-day comes by inspiration--the breathing in--of the infinite mind that is truth.

"And so," he went on, "we have those reflections of the communal mortal mind which we call the Israelites recording their thoughts and ideas. Sometimes they recorded plain fact; sometimes they wrapped their moral teachings in allegories and fables. Josephus says of Moses that he wrote some things enigmatically, some allegorically, and the rest in plain words, since in his account of the first chapter of Genesis and the first three verses of the second he gives no hint of any mystery at all. But when he comes to the fourth verse of the second chapter he says Moses, after the seventh day was over, began to talk philosophically, and so he understood the rest of the second and third chapters in some enigmatical and allegorical sense. Quite so, it appears to me, for the writer, whoever he was, was then attempting the impossible task of explaining the enigma of evil, the origin of which is a.s.sociated always with the dust-man."

"You deny the truth of the account of the creation as given in the second chapter of Genesis, do you?" asked Reverend Moore. "You deny that man was tempted and fell?"

"Well," said Hitt, smiling, "of course there is no special reason for denying that serpents may have talked, millions and millions of years ago. In fact, they still have rudimentary organs of speech--as do most animals. Perhaps they all talked at one time. Snakes developed in the Silurian Era, some twenty million years ago. In the vast intervening stretch of time they may have lost their power to talk. But, as for the second chapter of Genesis, Moses may or may not have written it.

Indeed, he may not have written the first. We do not know. The book of Genesis shows plainly that it is a composite of several books by various authors. I incline to the belief that some more materialistic hand and mind than Moses's composed that second chapter. However that may be, it is a splendid example of the human mind's crude attempt to interpret the spiritual creation in its own material terms. It in a way represents the dawning upon the human mind of the idea of the spiritual creation. For when finite sense approaches the infinite it must inevitably run into difficulties with which it can not cope; it must meet problems which it can not solve, owing to its lack of a knowledge of the infinite principle involved. That's why the world rejected the first account of the creation and accepted the second, snake-story, dust-man, apple tree, and all."

"Hitt!" exclaimed Haynerd, his eyes wide agape. "You're like a story-book! Go on!"

"Wait!" interrupted Miss Wall. "We know that man appeared on this earth in comparatively recent times. For millions and millions of years before he was evolved animals and vegetables had been dying. Now was their death due to sin? If so, whose?"

"a.s.suredly," returned Hitt. "Your difficulty arises from the fact that we are accustomed to a.s.sociate sin with human personality. But remember, the physical universe has been evolved from the communal mortal mind. It represents 'negative truth.' It has been dying from the very beginning of its seeming existence, for its seeming existence alone is sin. The vegetables, the animals, and now the men, that have been evolved from it, and that express it and reflect and manifest it, must die, necessarily, because the so-called mind from which they evolve is not based upon the eternal, immortal principle, G.o.d. And so it and they miss the mark, and always have done so. You must cease to say, Whose sin? Remember that the sin is inherent in the so-called mind that is expressed by things material. The absence of the principle which is G.o.d is sin, according to the Aramaic word, translated '_hamartio_,' which Jesus used. The most lowly cell that swam in the primeval seas manifested the communal mortal mind's sin, and died as a consequence."

"In other words, it manifested a supposition, as opposed to truth?"

"Its existence was quite suppositional," replied Hitt. "It did not manifest life, but a material sense of existence. The subjective always determines the objective. And so the communal mortal mind, so-called, determined these first lowly material and objective forms of existence. They were its phenomena, and they manifested it.

Different types now manifest it, after long ages. But all are equally without basis of principle, all are subject to the mortal law that everything material contains within itself the elements for its own destruction, and all must pa.s.s away. In our day we are dealing with the highest type of mortal mind so far evolved, the human man. He, too, knows but one life, human life, the mortal-mind sense of existence. His human life is demonstrably only a series of states of material consciousness, states of thought-activity. The cla.s.sification and placing of these states of consciousness give him his sense of time. The positing of his mental concepts give him his sense of s.p.a.ce.

His consciousness is a thought-activity, externalizing human opinions, ideas, and beliefs, not based on truth. This consciousness--or supposit.i.tious human mind--is very finite in nature, and so is essentially self-centered. It attributes its fleshly existence to material things. It believes that its life depends upon its fleshly body; and so it thinks itself in constant peril of losing it. It goes further, and believes that there are mult.i.tudes of other human minds, each having its own human, fleshly existence, or life, and each capable of doing it and one another mortal injury. It believes that it can be deprived by its neighboring mortal minds of all that it needs for its sustenance, and that it can improve its own status at their expense, and vice versa. It is filled with fears--not knowing that G.o.d is infinite good--and its fears become externalized as disaster, loss, calamity, disease, and death at last. Perhaps its chief characteristic is mutability. It has no basis of principle to rest upon, and so it constantly shifts and changes to accord with its own shifting thought.

There is nothing certain about it. It is here to-day, and gone to-morrow."

"Pretty dismal state of affairs!" Haynerd was heard to mutter.

"Well, Ned," said Hitt, "there is this hope: human consciousness always refers its states to something. And that 'something' is real.

It is infinite mind, G.o.d, and its infinite manifestation. The human mind still translates or interprets G.o.d's greatest idea, Man, as 'a suffering, sinning, troubled creature,' forgetting that this creature is only a mental concept, and that the human mind is looking only at its own thoughts, and that these thoughts are counterfeits of G.o.d's real thoughts.

"Moreover, though the human mind is finite, and can not even begin to grasp the infinite, the divine mind has penetrated the mist of error.

There is a spark of real reflection in every mortal. That spark can be made to grow into a flame that will consume all error and leave the real man revealed, a consciousness that knows no evil. There is now enough of a spark of intelligence in the human, so-called mind to enable it to lay hold on truth and grow out of itself. And there is no excuse for not doing so, as Jesus said. If he had not come we wouldn't have known that we were missing the mark so terribly."

"Well," observed Haynerd, "after that cla.s.sification I don't see that we mortals have much to be puffed up about!"

"All human beings, or mortals, Ned," said Hitt, "are interpretations by the mortal mind of infinite mind's idea of itself, Man. These interpretations are made in the human mind, and they remain posited there. They differ from one another only in degree. All are false, and doomed to decay. How, then, can one mortal look down with superciliousness upon another, when all are in the same identical cla.s.s?"

Carmen's thoughts rested for a moment upon the meaningless existence of Mrs. Hawley-Crowles, who had anch.o.r.ed her life in the shifting sands of the flesh and its ephemeral joys.

"Now," resumed Hitt, "we will come back to the question of progress.

What is progress but the growing of the human mind out of itself under the influence of the divine stimulus of demonstrable truth? And that is made possible when we grasp the stupendous fact that the human, mortal mind, including its man, is absolutely unreal and non-existent!

The human man changes rapidly in mind, and, consequently, in its lower stratum, or expression, the body. For that reason he need not carry over into to-day the old, false beliefs which were manifested by him yesterday. If he leaves them in the past, they cease to be manifested in his present or future. Thus he outgrows himself. Then, opening himself to truth, he lays off the 'old man' and puts on the 'new.' He denies himself--denies that there is any truth in the seeming reality of the mortal, material self--as Jesus bade us do."

"He must make new thoughts, then?" said Miss Wall.

"No," replied Hitt. "Thought is not manufactured. G.o.d is eternal mind.

His ideas and the thoughts regarding them must always have existed.

His thoughts are infinite in number. He, as mind, is an inexhaustible reservoir of thought. Now the human, mortal mind interprets His thoughts, and so _seems_ to manufacture new thought. It makes new interpretations, but not new thoughts. When you hear people chatting, do you think they are manufacturing new thought? Not a bit of it! They are but reflecting, or voicing, the communal so-called mortal mind's interpretations of G.o.d's innumerable and real thoughts."

"And so," suggested Father Waite, "the more nearly correct our interpretations of His thoughts are, the nearer we approach to righteousness."