nsecrated in any final system of truth. It is a pure
abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, to be
sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped
out and forgotten. The ideal, so far from being co-extensive with the
whole actual, is a mere EXTRACT from the actual, marked by its
deliverance from all contact with this diseased, inferior, and
excrementitious stuff.

[69] I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure
writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their
attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically
involved in the experiences of union with a higher Presence with which
they connect themselves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the
absolute whole of things, it is quite sufficient for the life of
religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most
ideal part.

Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to
us, of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational
whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point
of view of any system which those other elements make up, can only be
considered so much irrelevance and accident--so much "dirt," as it
were, and matter out of place. I ask you now not to forget this
notion; for although most philosophers seem either to forget it or to
disdain it too much ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have to
admit it ourselves in the end as containing an element of truth. The
mind-cure gospel thus once more appears to us as having dignity and
importance. We have seen it to be a genuine religion, and no mere
silly appeal to imagination to cure disease; we have seen its method of
experimental verification to be not unlike the method of all science;
and now here we find mind- cure as the champion of a perfectly definite
conception of the metaphysical structure of the world. I hope that, in
view of all this, you will not regret my having pressed it upon your
attention at such length.

Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way of thinking, and
turn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden
of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from
its presence. Just as we saw that in healthy-mindedness there are
shallower and profounder levels, happiness like that of the mere
animal, and more regenerate sorts of happiness, so also are the