Philip Dru: Administrator | Page 9

resigning, but once
decided, he could not be swerved from his purpose. Gloria persuaded him to go to New
York with her in order to consult one of the leading oculists, and arrangements were
made immediately. On the last day but one, as they sat under their favorite fig tree, they
talked much of Philip's future. Gloria had also been reading aloud Sir Oliver Lodge's
"Science and Immortality," and closing the book upon the final chapter, asked Philip
what he thought of it.
"Although the book was written many years ago, even then the truth had begun to dawn
upon the poets, seers and scientific dreamers. The dominion of mind, but faintly seen at
that time, but more clearly now, will finally come into full vision. The materialists under
the leadership of Darwin, Huxley and Wallace, went far in the right direction, but in
trying to go to the very fountainhead of life, they came to a door which they could not
open and which no materialistic key will ever open."
"So, Mr. Preacher, you're at it again," laughed Gloria. "You belong to the pulpit of real
life, not the Army. Go on, I am interested."
"Well," went on Dru, "then came a reaction, and the best thought of the scientific world
swung back to the theory of mind or spirit, and the truth began to unfold itself. Now, man
is at last about to enter into that splendid kingdom, the promise of which Christ gave us
when he said, 'My Father and I are one,' and again, 'When you have seen me you have
seen the Father.' He was but telling them that all life was a part of the One
Life--individualized, but yet of and a part of the whole.
"We are just learning our power and dominion over ourselves. When in the future
children are trained from infancy that they can measurably conquer their troubles by the

force of mind, a new era will have come to man."
"There," said Gloria, with an earnestness that Philip had rarely heard in her, "is perhaps
the source of the true redemption of the world."
She checked herself quickly, "But you were preaching to me, not I to you. Go on."
"No, but I want to hear what you were going to say."
"You see I am greatly interested in this movement which is seeking to find how far mind
controls matter, and to what extent our lives are spiritual rather than material," she
answered, "but it's hard to talk about it to most people, so I have kept it to myself. Go on,
Philip, I will not interrupt again."
"When fear, hate, greed and the purely material conception of Life passes out," said
Philip, "as it some day may, and only wholesome thoughts will have a place in human
minds, mental ills will take flight along with most of our bodily ills, and the miracle of
the world's redemption will have been largely wrought."
"Mental ills will take flight along with bodily ills. We should be trained, too, not to dwell
upon anticipated troubles, but to use our minds and bodies in an earnest, honest endeavor
to avert threatened disaster. We should not brood over possible failure, for in the great
realm of the supremacy of mind or spirit the thought of failure should not enter."
"Yes, I know, Philip."
"Fear, causes perhaps more unhappiness than any one thing that we have let take
possession of us. Some are never free from it. They awake in the morning with a vague,
indefinite sense of it, and at night a foreboding of disaster hands over the to-morrow. Life
would have for us a different meaning if we would resolve, and keep the resolution, to do
the best we could under all conditions, and never fear the result. Then, too, we should be
trained not to have such an unreasonable fear of death. The Eastern peoples are far wiser
in this respect than we. They have learned to look upon death as a happy transition to
something better. And they are right, for that is the true philosophy of it. At the very
worst, can it mean more than a long and dreamless sleep? Does not the soul either go
back to the one source from which it sprung, and become a part of the whole, or does it
not throw off its material environment and continue with individual consciousness to
work out its final destiny?
"If that be true, there is no death as we have conceived it. It would mean to us merely the
beginning of a more splendid day, and we should be taught that every emotion, every
effort here that is unselfish and soul uplifting, will better fit us for that spiritual existence
that is to come."
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