50/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE
One finds in his orchard a wild, gnarly apple tree producing sour, unpalatable fruit. He cuts off the top, and grafts shoots of some choice variety on to the old trunk. The whole appearance of the tree is thereby altered. Henceforth it yields foliage and fruit of a new order.
The wild variety does not develop into the cultivated, neither does the material consciousness grow into the spiritual; they are quite independent of each other. Not until one assumes the spiritual view-point, and begins life anew from its level, will his outward conditions be completely and permanently changed.
“That which is born of the flesh [the wild apple tree, “the natural man,” according to Paul] is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” “The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is of heaven.”
The higher consciousness in man is grafted on to the lower, the material, which has developed gradually by the slow process of evolution; but it is of a totally different order, and is not to be confounded with its inferior counterfeit.
If one waits to reason his way out of intellectual difficulties, he will never see the spiritual light. “Let the dead bury their dead.” Assume the spiritual consciousness, and hold to it constantly and exclusively, until it becomes permanently established.
No ideal is in itself extravagant. In most instances where men fail to realize high ideals, it is not because their ideals are preposterous, but because they have entertained them without a sense of consciousness sufficiently profound and unwavering to effect their realization.
They have failed to rightly interpret New Testament history, because, not having become acquainted in their own consciousness with the deeper life of the spiritual plane, the accounts narrated in the gospels have seemed to them either mythological stories, dealing not with actual events, but with purely imaginary experiences outside the realm of fact, or else descriptions of events of a supernatural origin.
But science is fast abolishing the supernatural, and bringing all facts within the domain of universal law; and it only remains for innumerable well-authenticated accounts of occurrences at the present day,
similar to many of those recorded in New Testament history, to be verified by thoroughly scientific tests, in order that they may be accorded such unreserved acceptance by the thinking world in general as they have already received at the hands of a considerable number of trustworthy, independent investigators.