which shows us all men working, whether willingly or unwillingly, for the common good, and each receiving what he needs or has power to use. It is a recognition that all men are comprehended in the Spirit's plan, that nothing can be for the common harm; that even mistakes work out for good, and that life gives to each the experience from which he will get most development and the power which he can best use and relate to his whole life. From the spiritual standpoint the subjective mind is the indwelling life of the soul; and its growth a matter of gradual self-attainment. At its highest stage it is the realization of that which we have in common with everyone that understanding and that consciousness of the law of harmony which makes us love all mankind, and live in communion with the love that is the substance of all things. The separate self does not appear at all on the horizon of such thought and purpose.

We have all had a consciousness of this love at some time in our lives, no matter how the cares of the world may have choked it out. It was this consciousness that made a little boy say, in a burst of happiness, "I love everything, and everything loves me." When we "become like a little child" in this sense, we, too, recognize the love that binds all life in

one.

When we can harmonize these two-the sub

conscious, that knows no separate self, with the objective, that can see all men as one because it sees all men as working for the same endwe shall have rest and harmony instead of worry, the insanity of the spiritual mind.

The objective mind which is active during waking hours, apparently rests during sleep; the subconscious mind is ever busy. Like the heart or the digestive organs, the subconscious mind carries on its work during that break in our usual consciousness which we call sleep. How this is done we do not know, any more than we know how the physical organs carry on their work while we are wrapped in slumber and unconscious of all about us. There are very few, though, who have not had some proof of the activity of the latent mind during sleep. That somehow this under-mind does work in an 66 uncanny way that is to say, in an unknown way-is shown by the fact that most persons can wake up at any hour that they fix in their minds without being called and without the abominable alarm clock.

It is a common enough thing to hear people say, "I do not know how I knew that; I never remember hearing it; it just came to me." Or, "I tried and tried to think of that yesterday, and could not, but, when I woke this morning, it was the first thing that came to my mind.” Such incidents show that some process of which we are not objectively conscious is going on all

the time; that no mental experience is destroyed or wholly dissipated. The common wish is "to sleep over any perplexing matter. After a good sleep our ideas are often better arranged than when we fell asleep.

I have a friend who drops all her problems into her subconscious thought, refuses to be "exercised in her mind" about them, and leaves them for the latent mind to answer. So long as she views them from the objective, conscious point of view only, she finds herself worrying and losing sleep. The sleep-won mind, the "all-knowing Self," as it were, is not touched by worry, perhaps because, in communion with the substance of all experience, it perceives that there are few "problems" in life, when she does not persist in regarding as a "problem" each separate experience.

We must learn to connect each experience with what we know of our life up to that point and with what we think it is meant to be. This effort will often show us, or itself prove to be, the key to the "problem."

But it is only the scientific expert, one who has a perfect conception of the workings of all the parts of the frame, who can take one bone and reconstruct from it the entire structure of the extinct animal. That would be impossible for the tyro, and most of us are tyros in the science of living.

CHAPTER VIII

WAKEFULNESS

'And Sleep will not lie down but walks
'And wild-eyed cries to time.

THE

"Ballad of Reading Gaol."

OSCAR WILDE.

HE fact that we confound rest and sleep makes us regard wakefulness as an evil. We go to bed to sleep, and, if sleep does not come at once, we begin to fret and to toss and we try by every means that we know to force ourselves to sleep. We never accomplish anything that way, because it is essentially opposed to the nature of sleep. Sleep, to be refreshing, must be complete relaxation of mind and body, and that is not gained by striving. Natural sleep is merely " letting go," which is just what so many find hard to do. The course is so simple and plain that "the wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein," but he often does err in spite of its simplicity; and sometimes, perhaps, even because of its simplicity.

Naaman, captain of the host of Syria, went to the Israelitish prophet, Elisha, to be cured of his leprosy. As he was a great man with his

master, he expected some special ceremony done for him. Imagine his surprise and wrath when bidden to wash in the River Jordan.

At first Naaman went away in a rage; such advice ill-befitted his ideas of his needs. If it were enough that he should bathe in a river, why in Jordan? "Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?" Why not wash in them and be clean? And Naaman turned and went away.

But his servants questioned him and said: "Had the prophet bid thee do some great thing, wouldst thou not have done it? How much rather then when he saith to thee wash and be clean "?" Then Naaman yielded and was made whole.

This story is a picture of our own ways. We despise the remedy that is simple, and we feel sure that, had it been some great thing, we should have found it easier to do. We are unwilling to accept simple, natural explanations of our difficulties. We feel so because we think so highly of ourselves. We forget that the greatest things are often the simplest, and, if the natural things are too hard for us to do, it is because we lack that true greatness which sees and welcomes directness.

If man understood his life better, he would cease to think of anything as an "accident" without a cause. He would know that nothing can occur to him that does not signify some