The Hidden Power, and Other Papers upon Mental ScienceTroward, T. (Thomas)
Religion
The Hidden Power, and Other Papers upon Mental Science
Troward, T. (Thomas)
New Thought
"We worship that which we know," and it is this knowledge that gives the
worship a healthful and life-giving quality. It is not the ignorant
worship of wonderment and fear, a mere abasement of ourselves before
some vast, vague, unknown power, which may injure us if we do not find
out how to propitiate it; but it is a definite act performed with a
definite purpose, which means that it is the employment of one of our
natural faculties upon its proper object in an intelligent manner. The
ignorant Samaritan worship is better than no worship at all, for at
least it realises the existence of some centre around which a man's life
should revolve, something to prevent the aimless dispersion of His
powers for want of a centripetal force to bind them together; and even
the crudest notion of prayer, as a mere attempt to induce God to change
his mind, is at least a first step towards the truth that full supply
for all our needs may be drawn from the Infinite. Still, such worship as
this is hampered with perplexities, and can give only a feeble answer to
the atheistical sneer which asks, "What is man, that God should be
mindful of him, a momentary atom among unnumbered worlds?"
Now the teaching of Jesus throws all these perplexities aside with the
single word "knowledge." There is only one true way of doing anything,
and that is knowing exactly what it is we want to do, and knowing
exactly why we want to do it. All other doing is blundering. We may
blunder into the right thing sometimes, but we cannot make this our
principle of life to all eternity; and if we have to give up the blunder
method eventually, why not give it up now, and begin at once to profit
by acting according to intelligible principle? The knowledge that "the
Son," as individualised Spirit, has his correlative in "the Father," as
Universal Spirit, affords the clue we need.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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