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By Root 597 0

thoughts are hypocrisy, dictated by fear, or desire for self-glory, or some such motive. They are counterfeits and they bless neither the giver nor the recipient. On the other hand, the true thought about fellowman blesses him spiritually, mentally, and materially; and blesses you too. Let us be merciful in our mental judgments of our brother, for, in truth, we are all one, and the more deeply he seems to err, the more urgent is the need for us to help him with the right thought, and so make it easier for him to get free. You—because you understand the power of the Spiritual Idea, the Christ Truth—have a responsibility that others have not; see that you do not evade it. When his delinquency comes to your notice, remember that the Christ in him is calling out for help to you who are enlightened—so be merciful.

Because in deed and in truth we are all one, component parts of the living garment of God, you yourself will ultimately receive the same treatment that you mete out to others; you will receive the same merciful help in your own hour of need from those who are farther along the path than you are. Above all is it true that, in freeing others from the weight of your condemnation, you make it possible to absolve yourself from self-condemnation.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

This is one of those wonderful gnomic sayings in which the Bible is so rich. It is nothing less than a summing up in a few words of the whole philosophy of religion. As usual, in the Scriptures, the words are used in a technical sense and cover a far wider meaning than we attach to them in everyday life.

Let us begin by considering what the promise in this Beatitude is. It is nothing less than to see God. Now, we know, of course, that God has no corporeal form, and therefore, there is no question of “seeing” Him in the ordinary physical sense in which one might see a human being or an object. If one could see God in this way, He would have to be limited, and therefore, not God. To “see” in the sense referred to here, signifies spiritual perception, and spiritual perception means just that capacity to apprehend the true nature of being which we all so sadly lack.

We live in God’s world, but we do not in the least know it as it is. Heaven lies all about us—it is not a distant locality afar off in the skies, but all around us now—but because we are lacking in spiritual perception, we are unable to recognize it; that is to say, we are unable to experience it; and, therefore, so far as we are concerned, we may be said to be shut out of Heaven. We do contact a very tiny fragment of it, and that tiny fragment we call the universe; but even that little bit, we see, for the most part, all awry. Heaven is the religious name for the Presence of God, and Heaven is infinite; but our mental habit leads us to mould our experience into three dimensions only. Heaven is Eternity, but what we know here, we know only serially, in a sequence called “time,” which never permits of our comprehending an experience in its entirety. God is Divine Mind, and in that Mind there are no limitations or restrictions at all; yet we see everything distributed in what is called “space,” or spaced out—an artificial restriction which continuously inhibits the constant regrouping of our experience that is required by our creative thought.

Heaven is the realm of Spirit, Substance; without age, or discord, or decay; a realm of eternal good; and yet, to our distorted vision, everything is ageing, decaying, wearing out; getting born only to die, blossoming only to fade.

We are very much in the position of a color-blind man in a beautiful flower garden. All around him are glorious colors; but he is quite unaware of them and sees only blacks, whites, and grays. If we suppose him to be also devoid of the sense of smell, we shall see what a very small part of the glory of the garden exists for him. Yet it is all there, if he could but sense it.

This limitation in us is known in theology as the “Fall of Man,” and it arises from our using our free will in opposition