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yourself to be learned." A man must possess sight before he can consider himself able to see, and he must have the use of his limbs in order to count on being able to move, and he must have wealth or knowledge if he is to reckon on using either. It would be not only ineffectual and senseless, but a cruel mockery to call upon any one to exercise gifts or powers which they did not possess, or were incapable of exercising.
TJ Why am I authorized to reckon on these glorious facts ? Simply because God does it. God reckons me to have died with Christ, and I am going to reckon myself to be where God reckons me. God reckons me to be living in Christ, and I am going to reckon myself to be living in Christ. The word in the Book of Genesis about Abraham is this — not "Abraham believed God," but "Abraham amened God." He staggered not at the promise, through unbelief, but said " Amen " to it. It seems akin to mad- ness for you to reckon yourself dead to the foul things in your life that have mastered you a hundred times, so that you continue under an overwhelming sense of defeat. Say " Amen " to God. Then God will honour your faith and make victory real in your life, and your Amen to God will please Him as Abraham's did, for God was so pleased with Abraham's Amen that He counted it to him for righteousness.1
1. It is an exercise of the Imagination. The imagination is the faculty by means of which we perceive the facts of life and apply them to our lives. "Beckon yourselves dead," "reckon yourselves alive"; in other words, be convinced of it, and you will be it. It is a significant anticipation of the method adopted by those who call themselves Christian Scientists in their attempts to heal the body. It is what is called " Auto-suggestion," namely, a strong, purposeful denial of one set of experiences and pheno- mena, and an equally strong affirmation of others, and the antici- pation that the series thus denied will wither, as a plant withers when deprived of water.
"H There is little doubt that the principle of auto-suggestion is rapidly being recognized on the physical plane in the sphere of the influence of mind over body. On this plane the principle works both ways — both for disease and for health; the mind, dwelling constantly on particular symptoms of disease, renders the body liable to be affected by that disease. In an obituary notice in the Lancet of a great nerve doctor, who died from paralysis, this is practically acknowledged, for we read : " It is re-
1 J. Gregory Mantle.
340 A GOOD RECKONING
markable that he wrote much about diseases of the nervous system, thus giving another example of the curious coincidence that not infrequently medical men die of the diseases to which they have given special attention." It certainly tells for health. In spite of many failures, and premises that, in my opinion, are erroneous, and an exaggeration of the matter-denying philosophy of Berkeley, the so-called Christian Scientists may fairly claim to have established the principle that the sphere of causes is the mind. Their council to their disciples is : " Ally yourself in thought with the resistless Divine life within you as the one true fact of your being. Obliterate the obstructions of doubt and fear, that the Divine force within may have scope to work ; ' reckon yourself dead ' to all the illusions of the false self ; ' reckon your- self alive ' to all the elements of health and power, and strength, and perfection, and this mental process will result in change throughout the whole physical frame." And it certainly does, and in numerous instances, to some of which I am able to testify from personal observation, the result is the cure of disease. It is almost a matter of surprise, considering the training of the man in the strictest sect of the Pharisees, to note the strong grasp of spiritual intuition with which this truth — known to the Easterns 2000 years B.C. — is adopted by St. Paul, and applied to the Divinely ordered method of spiritual growth. "Eeckon your- self dead to sin — reckon yourself alive to God." The road to a true and noble life, he would say, is the intense, purposeful focus- ing of your mental faculties upon all that is high, noble, pure, Divine, and the deliberate, persistent ignoring, denying, all that contradicts it. The seed of action is impulse. Meet the impulses within you on their own ground — where you find them. They are all in the mental region — think yourself into God — reckon yourself alive to God.1
T[ There is a pathetic story of a slave who was put up for auction at a slave-mart. A kind-hearted man in the crowd paid the price and gave him his freedom ; but the iron of slavery had entered his soul, and he could not divest himself of the mental habit of a slave. He failed to imagine the change in his position, and so he went back to his squalid hut, took up the hoe, and resumed his old place in the slave-gang. He could not imagine anything so good, and until he could, he was not free. There are thousands like him, slaves because the imagination is enslaved, in bondage to habit, to vice; and they might be free if only it could be brought home to the imagination. It is not money that delivers : it is the imagination.2