80/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE

In music, every major scale has its corresponding minor, and every scale its minor intervals. Minor intervals give it depth and richness. Without the minor quality, it would be tame and monotonous. Many of the deepest expressions are tinged with the somber, subdued undertone of the minor.

Yet how different is the hopeless melancholy, represented by a doleful, unrelieved minor strain, from the spirit of joy and triumph revealed when the minor strain leads up to a full major chord! Should the music end in the midst of the minor passage, we might indeed pronounce it unconsoling and morbidly suggestive.

But we wait expectantly for the coming of the major chord; for the light it sheds over the otherwise gloomy minor passage, alters its complexion. The weakness of the minor is supplemented by the strength of the major, and the whole effect is glorious.

We live to overcome, and rejoice in triumphing. We glory in the consciousness of power to transcend each finite plane, and make it a stepping-stone to others above. Life is both high and deep. Only by coming up from its depths can we appreciate its heights. The glory of the view from the mountain-top, is due to the presence of valleys below.

In the comprehensive view from above, they appear totally different from the conception we entertain of them while groping our way through the dark, gloomy forests that line their recesses; but the change is in our view-point, not in the valleys themselves. Neither mountains nor valleys could exist alone. The one kind of formation implies the other.

Knowledge of good implies knowledge of evil also. The timid, apprehensive Israelites saw only forebodings of disaster in the Red Sea and the wilderness. But, to the larger vision of Moses, such obstacles vanished in anticipation of possessing the promised land. So, as our thought lingers on the lower planes of consciousness, on its journey to the realm of spiritual Reality, which it seeks to possess, we seem beset on every hand by evil forces.

Ideas seen in perspective, as they are projected in a world of time and space, often appear distorted. As time and space have no absolute values, the angle and extent of the perspective in which things appear, must depend on the attitude of the observer.

If our world seems essentially base, evil, unsatisfactory, it is an indication that we see life at too close range too narrowly. Were we to adjust our view-point, after the manner of the greatest seers, the real value of our world would be more readily appreciable.