ded, "To be spiritually
minded is life." As if he would say, True life is the _consciousness_
of spiritual things only.

Is human life aught but a series of states of consciousness? And is
consciousness aught but mental activity?--for when the mind's activity
ceases, the man dies. But mental activity is the activity of thought.

"It is the activity of thought," said Jose aloud, "that makes us
believe that fleshly eyes see and ears hear. We see only our thoughts;
and in some way they become externalized as our environment."

His reasoning faculty went busily on. Thought builds images, or mental
concepts, within the mind. These are the thought-objects which mankind
believe they see as material things in an outer world. And so the
world is within, not without. Jesus must have known this when he said,
"The kingdom of heaven is within you." Did he not know the tremendous
effects of thought when he said, "For as a man thinketh, so is he"? In
other words, a man builds his own mental image of himself, and conveys
it to the fellow-minds about him.

Jose again opened his Bible at random. His eye fell upon the
warning of Jeremiah, "Hear, O earth, behold I will bring evil
upon this people, _even the fruit of their thoughts_!" Alas! he
needed no warning to show him now the dire results of his own past
wrong thinking. Evil is but wrong thinking wrought out in life
experience. And so the chief of sins is the breaking of the very
first Commandment, the belief in other powers than God, the
infinite mind that framed the spiritual universe.

"But we simply can't help breaking the Commandment," cried Jose, "when
we see nothing but evil about us! And yet--we are seeing only the
thoughts in our own minds. True--but how came they there? And whence?
From God?"

Jose was quite ready to concede a mental basis for everything; to
believe that even sin is but the thought of sin, false thought
regarding God and His Creation. But, if God is all-inclusive mind, He
must be _the only thinker_. And so all thought must proceed from Him.
All thought, both good and evil? No, for then were God maintaining a
house divided against itself. And that would mean His ultimate
dissolution.

Infinite, omnipotent mind is by very logic _compelled_ to be perfect.
Then the thoughts issuing from that mind must be good. So it must
follow that evil thoughts come from another source. But if God is
infinite, there is no other source, no other cause. Then there is but