ration.

Another word that must be cleared up is the word _reckon_. This does not
mean to visualize or imagine. Imagination is not faith. The two are not
only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other.
Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach
reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that
which is already _there_.

God and the spiritual world are real. We can reckon upon them with as
much assurance as we reckon upon the familiar world around us.
Spiritual things are there (or rather we should say _here_) inviting
our attention and challenging our trust.

Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits. We
habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of
any other. We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world but we
doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word.

The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the
whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and
self-demonstrating. It does not appeal to our faith; it is here,
assaulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final.
But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that
other reality, the City of God, shining around us. The world of sense
triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal,
of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam's
tragic race.

At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The
object of the Christian's faith is unseen reality.

Our uncorrected thinking, influenced by the blindness of our natural
hearts and the intrusive ubiquity of visible things, tends to draw a
contrast between the spiritual and the real; but actually no such
contrast exists. The antithesis lies elsewhere: between the real and the
imaginary, between the spiritual and the material, between the temporal
and the eternal; but between the spiritual and the real, never. The
spiritual _is_ real.

If we would rise into that region of light and power plainly beckoning
us through the Scriptures of truth we must break the evil habit of
ignoring the spiritual. We must shift our interest from the seen to the
unseen. For the great unseen Reality is God. "He that cometh to God must
believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently
seek him." This is basic in the life of faith. From there we can rise to
unlimited height