CHAPTER IV

THE SUPREMACY OF MIND

Officers and friends urged Philip to reconsider his determination of
resigning, but once decided, he could not be swerved from his purpose.
Gloria persuaded him to go to New York with her in order to consult one
of the leading oculists, and arrangements were made immediately. On the
last day but one, as they sat under their favorite fig tree, they talked
much of Philip's future. Gloria had also been reading aloud Sir Oliver
Lodge's "Science and Immortality," and closing the book upon the final
chapter, asked Philip what he thought of it.

"Although the book was written many years ago, even then the truth had
begun to dawn upon the poets, seers and scientific dreamers. The
dominion of mind, but faintly seen at that time, but more clearly now,
will finally come into full vision. The materialists under the
leadership of Darwin, Huxley and Wallace, went far in the right
direction, but in trying to go to the very fountainhead of life, they
came to a door which they could not open and which no materialistic key
will ever open."

"So, Mr. Preacher, you're at it again," laughed Gloria. "You belong to
the pulpit of real life, not the Army. Go on, I am interested."

"Well," went on Dru, "then came a reaction, and the best thought of the
scientific world swung back to the theory of mind or spirit, and the
truth began to unfold itself. Now, man is at last about to enter into
that splendid kingdom, the promise of which Christ gave us when he said,
'My Father and I are one,' and again, 'When you have seen me you have
seen the Father.' He was but telling them that all life was a part of
the One Life--individualized, but yet of and a part of the whole.

"We are just learning our power and dominion over ourselves. When in the
future children are trained from infancy that they can measurably
conquer their troubles by the force of mind, a new era will have come
to man."

"There," said Gloria, with an earnestness that Philip had rarely heard
in her, "is perhaps the source of the true redemption of the world."

She checked herself quickly, "But you were preaching to me, not I to
you. Go on."

"No, but I want to hear what you were going to say."

"You see I am greatly interested in this movement which is seeking to
find how far mind controls matter, and to what extent our lives are
spiritual rather than material," she answered, "but it's hard to talk
about it to most people, so I have kept it to myself. Go on, Philip, I
will not interrupt again."

"When fear, hate, greed and the purely material conception of Life
passes out," said Philip, "as it some day may, and only wholesome
thoughts will have a place in human minds, mental ills will take flight
along with most of our bodily ills, and the miracle of the world's
redemption will have been largely wrought."

"Mental ills will take flight along with bodily ills. We should be
trained, too, not to dwell upon anticipated troubles, but to use our
minds and bodies in an earnest, honest endeavor to avert threatened
disaster. We should not brood over possible failure, for in the great
realm of the supremacy of mind or spirit the thought of failure should
not enter."

"Yes, I know, Philip."

"Fear, causes perhaps more unhappiness than any one thing that we have
let take possession of us. Some are never free from it. They awake in
the morning with a vague, indefinite sense of it, and at night a
foreboding of disaster hands over the to-morrow. Life would have for us
a different meaning if we would resolve, and keep the resolution, to do
the best we could under all conditions, and never fear the result. Then,
too, we should be trained not to have such an unreasonable fear of
death. The Eastern peoples are far wiser in this respect than we. They
have learned to look upon death as a happy transition to something
better. And they are right, for that is the true philosophy of it. At
the very worst, can it mean more than a long and dreamless sleep? Does
not the soul either go back to the one source from which it sprung, and
become a part of the whole, or does it not throw off its material
environment and continue with individual consciousness to work out its
final destiny?

"If that be true, there is no death as we have conceived it. It would
mean to us merely the beginning of a more splendid day, and we should be
taught that every emotion, every effort here that is unselfish and soul
uplifting, will better fit us for that spiritual existence that is to
come."

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