Page:Retrospection and Introspection.djvu/93

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ADMONITION
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envy, ingratitude, and enmity, which smite the heart and threaten to paralyze its beneficence. The unavailing tear is shed both for the living and the dead.

Nothing except sin, in the students themselves, can separate them from me. Therefore we should guard thought and action, keeping them in accord with Christ, and our friendship will surely continue.

The letter of the law of God, separated from its spirit, tends to demoralize mortals, and must be corrected by a diviner sense of liberty and light. The spirit of Truth extinguishes false thinking, feeling, and acting; and falsity must thus decay, ere spiritual sense, affectional consciousness, and genuine goodness become so apparent as to be well understood.

After the supreme advent of Truth in the heart, there comes an overwhelming sense of error's vacuity, of the blunders which arise from wrong apprehension. The enlightened heart loathes error, and casts it aside; or else that heart is consciously untrue to the light, faithless to itself and to others, and so sinks into deeper darkness. Said Jesus: “If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” and Shakespeare puts this pious counsel into a father's mouth:—

This above all: To thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

A realization of the shifting scenes of human happiness, and of the frailty of mortal anticipations, — such as first led me to the feet of Christian Science, — seems to be requisite at every stage of advancement. Though our first les-

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