sufficiently plain rules for our guidance. With a knowledge of the subject
whose depth can be appreciated only by those who have themselves some
practical acquaintance with it, He bids His unlearned audiences, those
common people who heard Him gladly, picture to themselves the Universal
Mind as a benign Father, tenderly compassionate of all and sending the
common bounties of Nature alike on the evil and the good; but He also
pictured It as exercising a special and peculiar care over those who
recognize Its willingness to do so:--"the very hairs of your head are all
numbered," and "ye are of more value than many sparrows." Prayer was to be
made to the unseen Being, not with doubt or fear, but with the absolute
assurance of a certain answer, and no limit was to be set to its power or
willingness to work for us. But to those who did not thus realize it, the
Great Mind is necessarily the adversary who casts them into prison until
they have paid the uttermost farthing; and thus in all cases the Master
impressed upon his hearers the exact correspondence of the attitude of this
unseen Power towards _them_ with their own attitude towards _it_. Such
teaching was not a narrow anthropomorphism but the adaptation to the
intellectual capacity of the unlettered multitude of the very deepest
truths of what we now call Mental Science. And the basis of it all is the
cryptic personality of spirit hidden throughout the infinite of Nature
under every form of manifestation. As unalloyed Life and Intelligence it
_can_ be no other than good, it can entertain no intention of evil, and
thus all intentional evil must put us in opposition to it, and so deprive
us of the consciousness of its guidance and strengthening and thus leave us
to grope our own way and fight our own battle single-handed against the
universe, odds which at last will surely prove too great for us. But
remember that the opposition can never be on the part of the Universal
Mind, for in itself it is sub-conscious mind; and to suppose any active
opposition taken on its own initiative would be contrary to all we have
learnt as to the nature of sub-conscious mind whether in the individual or