In scientific investigations lying in the realm of the physical there are countless objects to engage our thoughts, but here we have but one, and we always carry it about with us and are continually using it. Our _consciousness_ is to all the operations of our spirits what seeing, touching, hearing, tasting and smelling is to surrounding bodies. It enables us to examine all the minds in the universe. Would you like to have an organ which would enable you to see spirits? In your _consciousness_ you have a faculty superior to all the five senses put together. In our consciousness we see and feel ourselves, and in so doing we see not only the minds of others, but our great Father himself. We can not tell what instincts are in the bee, or what sagacity is in a spaniel, because we are neither spaniels nor bees, but we are of a more noble race. We are in possession of minds or spirits, and consequently identified with all minds or spirits, so the science of mind, or psychology, is the knowledge of ourselves.
Christianity, as a spiritual system, takes us and all its votaries into this intellectual temple, where we may certainly know God through a correct knowledge of self. In this temple we have a sample of the spirits of men, angels and demons, and over all, an example of the spirit we worship. These invisible intelligences are the wonderful agencies through which good and evil are effected. Natural laws are only the rules by which the great Father Spirit acts. Laws are rules by which agents act, and they always imply agents. Men of olden times are often spoken of as great metaphysicians. Who has not heard of Homer, Herodotus, Pindar, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Plato and many others. But those ancient men, here as in physics, dealt so much in fancy that they were not disposed to enter into the simple examination of their own minds or spirits. Entangled in the doctrines of chance, fate and destiny they robbed the Creator of the sceptre of the universe. They placed Jove, their supreme deity, under a decree that he could not change; confessed that he could not, in many instances, help them when he desired to do so. The greatest hindrances to progress among them were their failures to know the true character of Jove, or their want of a correct knowledge of God, and the distinction between mind and matter. They failed to separate between the two. Their gods were continually in an abominable quarrel about some interest that involved human welfare, and for that very reason their theory of mind was nothing but a confused mass of childish stories. They had no starting point from which to reason. They, failing to separate between mind and matter, were led into endless theories about what they denominated the animal and intellectual soul. The idea of one of their own poets that we are God's offspring was of no avail, in science, to them, because they neither knew themselves nor their gods. We are, therefore, indebted to the Bible for our superior knowledge in the science of mind. If the Gospel had never reached us we would have been as great dreamers in mental science as the mystics of India.