There must have been some intimate connection between the forgiveness and the healing, and though the exact nature of this connection may be beyond our present perception, involving relations of cause and effect too deep for our imperfect powers of analysis, still we can see in a general way that it is in accordance with the teaching of the Bible on the subject.
The Bible is a book about man in his relation to God, and it therefore starts with certain fundamental statements regarding this relation. These are to the effect that death, and consequently disease and decrepitude, are not laws of man's innermost being. How could they be? How could the negative be the law of the positive? How could death be the law of Life? Therefore we are told that in the true order of things this is not the case.
We become like what we contemplate. We cannot avoid it, for we are made that way, and therefore everything depends on what we are in the habit of contemplating. Then if we realise that growth, or the manifestation of the spiritual principle, always proceeds from the innermost to the outermost, by a creative process from within as distinguished from a constructive process from without, we shall see that the working of the mind upon the body, and the effect it will produce upon it, depends entirely on what form the mind itself is taking; and what form it will take depends on what it is reflecting.
This is the key to the great enigma. In proportion as we reflect the Pure Spirit of Life, we live; and in proportion as we reflect the Material, contemplating it as a power in itself instead of as the plastic vehicle of the Spirit, we bring ourselves under a law of limitation which culminates in death. It is the same law of Mind in both cases, only in the one case it is employed positively and in the other negatively.
Something like this seems to be St Paul's idea when he says that the Law of the Spirit of Life makes him free from the law of sin and death (Rom. 8:2). It is always this law of mental reflection that is at work within us, producing its logical effects, positively or negatively, according to the image which it mirrors forth.
If the Universal Spirit is to realise in itself the consciousness of Will, the perception of Beauty, and the reciprocity of Love — all, in fact, that makes life intelligently living — it can do so only by projecting a mental image which will give rise to the corresponding consciousness; and so we may read the text as meaning that man thus subsists in the Divine image, or creating thought, of him. If the reader grasps this idea, he will find it throws light upon many otherwise perplexing problems.
This, then, is the real nature of sin. Whatever shape it may take, its essence is always the same: it is turning our mental mirror the wrong way and so reflecting the limited and negative, that which is not Life-in-itself, and correspondingly forming ourselves into a corresponding image and likeness. The story of the Fall typifies the essential qualities of all sin. It is seeking the Living among the dead — trying to build up the skill and power of the worker out of the atoms of the material in which he works; just as though, when you wanted a carpenter, you went into his workshop and tried to make him out of sawdust.
By sin, in the sense we have now seen, death and all lesser evils enter into the world. Sin is the cause and they are the effect. Then if the cause is removed, the effect must cease — the root of the plant has been cut away, and so the fruit must wither. It is a simple working of cause and effect.
I cannot pretend to analyse those reasons, for that would imply a knowledge on my part equal to his own; but from what we do know of psychological laws and of the power of mind over body, I might hazard the conjecture that in those cases where he pronounced forgiveness, the sufferer apprehended that his sickness was in some way the consequence of his sins, and therefore it was necessary to his bodily healing that he should be assured of their pardon.
In other cases there may not have been such a conviction, and to speak of forgiveness would only withdraw the mind of the sufferer from that immediately receptive attitude which was necessary for the working of the spiritual power.
But who shall say that the principle of the removal of the root of suffering by the forgiveness of sin was not always present in the mind of the august healer? Rather we may suppose that it always was. On one occasion he very pointedly put this forward. The proof, he said, that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins is this: I can say to the palsied man, "Arise and walk", and it is accomplished (Luke 5:24). This was what was in the mind of the Great Healer, and comparing it with the general teaching of Scripture on the subject, we may reasonably suppose that he always worked from this basic principle, whether the exigencies of the particular case made it, or not, desirable to impress the fact of forgiveness upon the person to be healed.
If we start with the assumption that sickness and death of the body result from imperfect realisation of life by the soul, and that the extent and mode of the soul's realisation of life is the result and mode its realisation of union with its Divine Source, then it follows that the logical root of healing must be in the removal of the sense of separation — the removal, that is, of that inverted conception of our relation to the Spirit of Life which is "sin" — and the replacing of it by the right conception in accordance with which we shall more and more fully reflect the true image of "the Father" or Parent Spirit.
When we see this, we begin to apprehend more clearly the meaning of St Paul's words, "There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus, which walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit" (Rom. 8:1).
Now if, as I apprehend, the condition of consciousness when we pass out of the body is in the majority of cases purely subjective, then from what we know of the laws of subjective mind we may infer that we live there in the consciousness of whatever was our dominant mode of thought during Earth life. We have brought this over with us on parting with our objective mentality as it operates through its physical instrument, the brain; and if this is the case, then the nature of our experiences in the other world will depend on the nature of the dominant thought with which we have left this one, the idea which was most deeply impressed upon our subjective mind.
If this be so, what a stupendous importance it gives to the question whether we do or do not believe in the forgiveness of sin. If we pass into the unseen with the fixed idea that no such thing is possible, then what can our subjective experience be but the bearing of a burden of which we can find no way to rid ourselves; for by the conditions of the case, all these objective things with which we can now distract our attention will be beyond our reach.
When the loss of our objective mentality deprives us of the power of inaugurating fresh trains of ideas, which practically means new outlooks on life, we shall find ourselves bound within the memories of our past life on earth, and since the outward conditions which then coloured our view of things will no longer exist, we shall see the motives and feelings which led to our actions in their true light, making us see what it was in ourselves rather than in our circumstances which led us to do as we did.
The mode of thought which gave the key to our past life will still be there, and no doubt the memory of particular facts also, for this is what has been most deeply impressed upon our subjective mind; and since by the conditions of the case the consciousness is entirely subjective, these memories will appear to be the re-enacting of past things, only now seen in their true nature, stripped of all the accessories which gave a false colouring to them.
Of course what the pain of such a compulsory re-enacting of the past life may amount to must depend on what the past life has been; but even in the most blameless life we can well suppose that there have been passages which we would rather not repeat when we saw the mental conditions in ourselves which gave rise to them — not necessarily crimes or grave moral delinquencies, but the shortcomings of the everyday respectable life, the unkind words we thought so little of but which cut so deep, the selfishness which perhaps ran on for years and which, because of that very self-centredness, we did not see dimming the happiness of those around us. These and the like things of even the most blameless life we should not like to be compelled to repeat when seen in their true light, and how much less the episodes of a life which has not been blameless.
That there should be a re-enacting of past memories is what we might infer from our knowledge of the law of subjective mind, but there are not wanting certain facts of experience which go to support the a priori argument [argument from self-evident propositions — Ed.].
I used to laugh at ghosts when I was a young man and thought it all bunkum, but an experience which I went through many years ago entirely changed my ideas on the subject and indeed was the starting-point of my giving consideration to the laws of the unseen side of things. If it had not been for that ghost, you would not be reading this book. However, I will not go into details here, for the story has already been published both in French and English magazines. [See Cahapter 2 in The Law and the Word — Ed.]
Of course, I don't believe everything I hear, nor do I think that because a thing is in print it is necessarily true — heaven forbid, for then how could I read the daily newspapers? — but applying to each case the rules of evidence as strictly as though I were trying a man for his life, I find a residuum of instances in which it is impossible to come to any other conclusion than that a haunting spirit has actually been seen.
We are often told that you never meet persons who have themselves seen a ghost but only those who know somebody else who has; in other words, you can never get at the actual witness to cross-examine him, but only at hearsay evidence. But I can contradict this entirely. Since I began to investigate the subject seriously, I am surprised at the number of persons of both sexes who have circumstantially related to me their personal experiences of this sort and have stood the test of careful cross-examination in which I held a brief for the standpoint of "scientific doubt". Therefore when I say a few words about ghosts, I am talking on a subject that I have investigated.
In a large majority of cases it will be found that the spirit appears to be bound to a particular spot and to go on repeating certain actions, and the inference is that the subjective dreaming, so to say, of the departed is in these cases so intense as to create a thought-form of their conception to themselves sufficiently vivid to impress itself upon the etheric atmosphere of the locality and so become visible to those who are sufficiently sensitive.
Now, that this is not always the consequence of some great crime or other terrible happening is shown by a case in which the former owners of a house, husband and wife, after having long been habitually seen about the premises, were at last questioned by a lady who was sufficiently sensitive to communicate with them. They stated that the only thing that bound them to the house was their inordinate love of it during life. They had so centred their minds upon it that now they could not get away though they longed to do so; and, judging by their appearance and the confirmation of their identity subsequently obtained from some old documents, it would seem that they had been tied up like this for several generations.
This is an instance of having too much of a "pied a terre" [a temporary or second lodging, literally 'a foot to the ground' — Ed.], and I don't think any of us would like it to become our own cases; and a fortiori [with greater reason or more convincing force — Ed.] the same must hold good where the recollections of the departed are of a darker kind.
Then the only mental attitude which can produce this effect is belief in forgiveness, the assurance that all the transgressions and shortcomings of the past have been blotted out forever. If we attain this realisation in this present life, if this assurance is our dominant idea — the idea upon which all our other ideas are based — then by all the laws of mind we are bound to carry this consciousness with us into the other world and thus find ourselves free from all that would make our existence there unhappy.
Or even if we have not yet attained such a vivid assurance as to be able to say "I know", and can as yet only say "I hope", still the fact that we recognise that the principle of forgiveness exists will cause us to lay hold of it as our dominant idea in the subjective state and so place us in a position to gain clearer and clearer perception of the truth that there is forgiveness, and that it is for us.
Perhaps the critical reader may here remark that I am attributing to the subjective mind the power of starting a new train of ideas, and so contradicting what I have just said about the departed being shut up within the circle of those ideas which they have brought over with them from this world. It looks as if I had made a slip, but I haven't; for if we have carried over with us — not, perhaps, the full assurance of actual pardon but even the belief that forgiveness is possible — we have brought along with us a root idea whose very essence is that of making a new start.
It is the fundamental conception of a new order and as such carries with it the conception of ourselves as entering upon new trains of thought and new fields of action — in a word, the dominant idea of the subjective mind is that of having brought the objective mental faculties along with it. If this the mode of self-consciousness then it becomes an actual fact, and the whole mentality is brought over in its entirety; so that those who are thus in the light are liberated from imprisonment in the circulus of past memories by the very same law which binds those fast who refuse to admit the liberating principle of forgiveness. It is the same law of our mental constitution in both cases, only acting affirmatively in the one and negatively in the other, just as an iron ship floats by the identical law by which a solid lump or iron sinks.
Of course we may conceive of degrees in these things. We may well suppose that some may recognise the actual working of forgiveness in their own case less clearly than others; but whatever may be the degree of recognition of the personal fact, the realisation of the principle is the same for all; and this principle must assuredly bear fruit in due time in the complete deliverance of the soul from all that would otherwise hold it in bondage.
And perhaps we may even go so far as to suppose that the power of those who are thus in wholeness of mind to aid those who are not is not confined to such as have passed over; it may be the privilege also of those who are still in the body, for the action of mind upon mind is not a thing of physical substances. If so, then we can see a reason for prayers for the departed, to say nothing of the many instances in which ghosts are reported to have besought the intercession of the living for their liberation. There is, however, in certain quarters, a lamentable inversion of this principle where prayers for the departed are turned into an article of traffic and a means for making money. I may have something to say about this in another book, and meanwhile I would only say, Beware of spurious imitations.
Of course this picture of the condition of souls in the other world does not profess to be drawn from actual knowledge, but it appears to me to be a reasonable deduction from all that we know of the laws of our mental constitution; and if the experiences of the departed logically result from the working of those laws, then what greater action of the Divine Love and Wisdom can we conceive than such an expression of itself as must utilise these laws affirmatively for our liberation instead of negatively for our bondage? The Law of Cause and Effect cannot be broken, but it can be applied with intelligence and love instead of being left to work itself out negatively for want of guidance.
So it is, then, that the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins is the mainspring of the Bible — the promise of a Messiah in the Old Testament and the fulfilment of that promise in the New — and the realisation, whether in or out of the body, that God is both able and desiring to forgive, freely and without any offering save that of His own providing, and requiring nothing in return except this: that "to whom much hath been forgiven, the same loveth much".