of the outward and visible creation at all, but rather as a description of the inner processes of all creation-God's thinking the Universe into being in his own mind.

It is not alone in the systems of highly-cultured peoples that this philosophy emerges. The late lamented Dr. Brinton, the highest authority upon the red Indians of America, has made it clear that these simple peoples evolved the same philosophy, in child-forms.

Christianity gathered all these scattered strains of philosophy, running down through different peoples, under different religions, and wove them into the sublime conception of The Logos, or Thought-Word of the Father, which it identifies with Jesus of Nazareth. We are familiar enough with the outward form of our Logos doctrine, as embodied in the Nicene creed; but how many of us realize that it is the noblest statement of this ancient and world-wide philosophy, which reads the Universe in terms of mind rather than of matter, and finds the underlying substance, the reality of all being, in thought? Yet nothing else than this is our sacred doctrine of the divine Word incarnate in Jesus Christ. God creates the Universe first of all by thinking it; as every man creates his world around him-his deeds, whatever they may be, his works of poetry, painting, or architecture, by first of all thinking them into being in his own mind.

God creates the Universe in his own mind completely, organically, as a living whole. He is no bungling workman, who builds up his structure by patching on here a bit and there a bit, adding idea to idea, correcting and erasing until at last, in some stumbling way, the whole work stands perfect and complete. He is the type of the nobler work of genius which, in our finest human beings, creates at a stroke; sees the statue complete in the beginning, the picture perfected in its first vision; and then proceeds to construct out of the stone or on the canvas a faint copy of the original thought. So the whole creation stood together in the mind of God as a complete and

perfect thought. Then, as God began to create, as we ordinarily think of it--that is, to realize in matter his original divine thought-everything that came into being came thus as a projection of that thought, a bit of that perfect and complete idea, a fragment of the divine conception. It lives in virtue. of this divine thought that is in it. It is an effort to embody that thought. So the inner secret of every knowledge is found in this thought, embedded or embodied in the outer realm of fact.

The true knowledge of every bit of Nature is a knowledge not of the thing, but of the thought in the thing—of the Logos, or Thought-Word, which is the substance and stuff of all things. Thus we have a knowledge of the earth—geo-logy; a knowledge of the stars, which was at first astro-logy; a knowledge of the winds, or meteoro-logy; a knowledge of life -bio-logy; a Logos of every province of the Universe. A complete knowledge of the complete Universe would be a grasp of the complete thought of God; the infinite and eternal Logos-the thought of the Universe as it always has been in the mind of God, perfect and whole. Christianity identifies the Logos or Thought-Word of the Father, which is the substance of the Universe, with Jesus of Nazareth, the perfectly good man, and affirms that he is the "Word made flesh." It means by this that the inner secret of the Universe is read in the Good Man, and that it is, therefore, a moral secret; that all things in the Universe are working toward a moral end; that the thought of God looks on to a perfected cosmos, in which there shall be no evil and no sin; that thought is energizing through the cosmos toward that "one far-off divine event;" that the moral law is regnant over the whole Universe, and that, as the Jews of old expressed this truth in the form of a symbol-in the divine ark stand the two tables of the moral law. The good man is the crown and consummation of the organic processes of life. The perfect good man, Jesus of Nazareth, interprets the whole Universe in terms of char

acter. He opens the very heart of God and discloses the inner significance of all the cosmic processes.

When the New Testament speaks of Christ, The Logos, as the creator, what is meant is, first, that the true creative force of the Universe is the divine thought, that idea which is evolving creation toward the ideal of the perfectly good man-the crown and consummation of the cosmic processes. Identifying that divine thought of man with Jesus, we speak of him as the creator. It is in this sense, and this sense alone, that such language can be used. So in that wonderful opening of the Gospel according to St. John we have the true philosophy of creation, the creative energy of thought: "In the beginning was the Thought-Word, and the Thought-Word was with God, and the Thought-Word was God. . . All things were generated through it, and apart from it was not anything generated that was generated."

Mind, which is the creative force in the Universe, is, therefore, the creative force in man. The cosmos, which is, in its inner essence, thought evolved, has its earthly consummation in man, who is also, in his inner essence and substance, thought. Man is part of the Universe, though the highest part. The force that evolves it evolves him. He is that force. manifested in its highest form. All human forces are, therefore, as are all cosmic forces, in the last analysis, forms of thought. Man himself is a body woven around a soul-mind materializing itself. Each man is a distinct thought of God, carrying in him the divine potencies of the divine thought. As George MacDonald sings, in his exquisite little poem, in which the baby interprets the mystery of his own being-"God thought of me, and so I grew.'

All that man does upon the earth is done in and through the power of his thinking. Every deed is a projected thought. All his creative work is the manifestation of the one creative force thought. Emerson called an institution "the lengthened shadow of a man." But man is himself the shadow of his

own mind. Every institution is then the shadow of a thought. Human laws, before they are written on the statute-book, are written in man's mind. They are the forth-puttings of his thought concerning the social and political relationships of human beings. Every work of art is first a work in mind. The vision is seen inwardly before it is seen outwardly. The painter paints on the walls of the inner chamber of his mind before he puts brush upon the canvas. Before the great temple rises in marble, it has risen in the mind of the architect; and, if he be a genius in architecture, it has stood perfect and complete, an organic whole, in his thought, before it begins to materialize itself upon the earth. The Alexandrian Jew, Philo, who in the beginning of our era first evolved clearly the doctrine of the Logos or Divine Thought-Word, which Christianity took up into its philosophy of The Christ, found in this conception of the architect's work the germ of his whole philosophy. He is constantly recurring to this simile. God is the divine architect, who constructs the Universe after the same fashion that the human architect constructs the palace or temple. Milton writes that the idea of "Paradise Lost" flashed upon him as a complete whole, before he put pen to paper. Wagner remarks the fact that his greatest inspirations were of the same sort. Before he scored a music drama, the conception of the whole work rose, fully formed, in his mind.

The real dynamics, then, of civilization are the potencies of thought. The forces working to evolve a higher social order are stored in ideas. The real energy in society is mind. It is man's thinking that makes every form of society. It is his change of thinking that destroys each form and rebuilds it again after a higher pattern. The fiercely contested national election above referred to was, after all, not what it seemed. to be on the surface. It was not a contest merely of recognized parties, with all the pomp and pageantry of mimic war. It was not an affair of mass-meetings and processions and what

not. It was, in reality, a conflict of minds. Thought was grappling with thought on this broad continent, and wrestling for a fall. Back of the parties contending with each other there were living ideas, struggling one with another. All this is obvious enough the moment we think of it. I am not dealing in figures and metaphors-I am dealing with hard, prosaic facts. The real creative force in the world is the force of thought.

Have we any clue to this mysterious fact? Have we any glimpse of thought as actually creating-doing over again, in humbler forms, the work of the Divine Mind in creation? Before our generation no answer could have been given to this question. A scientific answer is now looming above the horizon. It is not yet clearly shaping itself into distinct form, but its nebulous outlines are becoming visible. The crowning work of the Society for Psychical Research, up to the present moment, is found in the two bulky volumes entitled "Phantasms of the Living." In this great work is embodied the result of a prolonged, systematic, and thoroughly scientific investigation of certain phenomena which have always arrested the attention of thoughtful men, but which, thus far, have eluded any rational interpretation. From the earliest historic records down to our own day, there has been a continuous line of testimony to such experiences as are known popularly as ghosts, wraiths, etc. Coincident with critical experiences, on the part of friends or relatives,-in the time. of great illness, in the moment of some sudden shock, at the hour of death,-men have seen, or believed that they have seen, the forms of those dear to them, who, at the moment, though unknown to these percipients, were passing through these critical experiences.

The testimony to so deep-seated a belief on man's part is too ample and too serious to be dismissed with a sneer. Accordingly, the best minds in the Psychical Research Society took up, a number of years ago, the study of this subject.