Is there any advantage in using this other term for God or our Father? Only that it may bring home to us a new meaning and confidence. Whatever our earlier experience may have found in God, whatever peace, poise, faith, hope, and companionship there has been for us in the God of our earlier faith, can only be beautified and intensified by a deeper knowledge of His nature. And we can say with a greater intimacy of knowledge, ' ' I know him in whom I have believed/ ' The Cosmic Consciousness is the Infinite Spirit of Intelligence that "made and rules the summer flowers and all the worlds that people starry space/ ' A mystery of being? Yes, but no more a mystery than we find on every hand. We explain physical action and reactions as due to chemical affinity, capillary action, attraction of gravity, and so on, and think we have explained; but have we? What are these forces? What is force? Can any materialist among the scientists tell us? Only a true recognition of the mental nature of the universe can answer this question. This, at least, the mental scientist can say: If we are to judge by the way they act, force and thought are the same thing. There is no distinction between what we call force and what we call thought, for force is Mind at work; and Mind at work is thought.n5563 ¶1
It is plain then that the Cosmic Consciousness is Intelligence : for it acts by thought : it is Life, for all life is derived from it: it is Wisdom, for wisdom is harmonious action ; and Spirit, as One, cannot know friction from another Will : it is therefore Harmony : It is Beauty, for beauty is merely the orderly arrangement of parts: It is Love, for love is the unity of kindred things: It is all that man calls "good." And yet we must not confound this good with any idea of contrast as over against anything that we call bad, for that introduces two forces into the universe, God and a Devil, and to admit a Devil is to admit not a unitary universe, but a dualistic; and we have just seen that the universe is one. Jesus himself called attention to this as of the first importance. The greatest and first saying of the Mosaic law, said he, is this, "Hear 0 Israel, the Lord, thy God, the Lord is one, and beside Me there is no other/ 'n5563 ¶2
Accordingly by Good, we mean that which is real or true and that God as the Real and the True is the author of all that makes life beautiful, happy, and satisfying. And by the same token, we must perceive that what we call "bad" is merely failure to work in harmony with the law of the Good. Evil, then, is wrong thinking, the thing of a day. Truth is harmonious action, the thing of eternity. The one passes away, the other endures.n5563 ¶3
The Cosmic Consciousness is therefore everything that is true, eternal, enduring. And thinking of God in these terms of intelligence and bigness, ready to become to us just what we ask or think, we dare to launch our desire into the infinite, knowing that our vessel will return laden with the cargo which our faith has collected.n5563 ¶4