Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1180

Carbon of a letter from 310 Riverside Drive, New York City, to Charles G. Baldwin, 520 Munsey Bldg., Baltimore, Maryland

May 28, 1936

My dear Charles:

It was kind of you to regard my communication as a personal favor and a basis for your interesting reply. You probably haven’t found out that I am the world^’s worst correspondent but you are in a fair way to do so. I don’t know much about Yoga Philosophy but you make me think a good deal of it by identifying it as you do with my own ideas. As it seems to me, it must be pretty good and I am not sure that I want to be cured of it. However, I do intend to read the article you cite under the title, “Ways That Are Vain.” The Psalmists said all is vanity, but then there are special brands of vanity and it may profit me to look up the ones you refer to.

Your fourth paragraph puzzles me a little, especially, your reference to “existence against evil.” From where do you quote it? I like to think of the universality of creative power and that its creativeness is just the manner in which it is directed. Inspiration directs it in ways that are constructive, organic and therefore creative. Our reactions against evil make us moral and corrective, therefore disintegrative and destructive. It is only necessary for us to decide that something is evil for our moral nature to prompt us to make war against it, even putting God in uniform and hiring Him out in the service of Mars. This is a grand tribute to evil setting it upon a high throne and engaging God with us to storm its battlements.

I am gratified to note your excellent powers of recognition which became so active when you reached the latter part of my letter to Dr. Limbert, even though your recognition seems to carry but little if any endorsement.

For my part I think I have become, as time goes on, rather less enamored of argument which is most often used by way of dispute and rather to destroy and put down than to build up. At best it is of very narrow application for it depends upon limited premises and it can develop nothing but what is contained in those narrow premises. Interpretation of phenomena yields results more nearly in the character of universals. Possibly this is something like your fourth dimension. In any case it is a field in which argument has but little if any significance.

When are you going to start that new church? I think you have selected a very good title for it. According to Emerson, “If only men be well employed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly enough advance beyond all hearing of other men^’s censures, out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded.” I am sure we can be well employed in such conspiring and in so doing we may find the key of the economic, as of other things wrought directly into the “designs of the Spirit.” I am not sure that it is necessary to go into the fourth or any higher dimensions than we are already familiar with in order to avail ourselves of the beauty of those designs. There is much inspiration to be found even in the mere inventory and taking stock of the Beauty, essential Beauty, with which we are endowed, and particularly, that beauty which manifests itself in the essentials of our social organization which most of us are so little inclined to interpret and to try to understand.

I, too, am going to see you. I am sure it will be a great pleasure. I will probably have the opportunity before very long and will surely avail myself. Meantime, if you should happen to come to New York without looking me up, I will commence to believe in the reality of evil.

Sincerely,