Ernest Holmes' "Sermon by the Sea"

In his final "Sermon by the Sea" given in 1959 at Asilomar, California, Ernest Holmes shared with us his vision of the outcome of global well-being, the human species and Earth transformed by the consciousness that he had articulated as Science of Mind. His sermon is a prescription for planetary resurrection, a prophetic, millennial assertion of the role of Religious Science in bringing about the world's rebirth. The text follows:

"[Science of Mind] is the most direct impartation of Divine Wisdom that has ever come to the world, because it incorporates the precepts of Jesus, and Emerson, and Buddha, and all the rest of the wise. And I would that in our teaching there would never be any arrogance, for it always indicates spiritual immaturity to me. Others will arise who will know more than we do; they won't be better or worse, they will be different and know more than we do. Evolution is forward. . . .

We have discovered a pearl of great price, we have discovered the rarest gem that has ever found setting in the intellect of the human race - complete simplicity, complete directness, a freedom from fear and superstition about the unknown and about God.

And we have rediscovered that which the great, the good, and the wise have sung about and thought about - the imprisoned splendor within ourselves and within each other -and have direct contact with it. Whether we call it the Christ in us, or the Buddha, or Atman, or just the Son of God the living Spirit, makes no difference. You and I are witness to the Divine fact and we have discovered an authority beyond our minds, even though our minds utilize it.

We are a part of the evolution of human destiny, we are a part of the unfoldment of the Divine Intelligence in human affairs. [This unfoldment] has reached the point of conscious and deliberate cooperation with that principle of evolution and out-push of the creative urge of the Spirit, on this planet at least, to bring about innumerable centers which It may enjoy.

Man as we now know him is incomplete, and those vague feelings and subtle senses of interior awareness which arise within him are gentle but persistent prophecies of still greater achievements.

It would be wonderful indeed if a group of persons should arrive on earth who were for something and against nothing. This would be the summum bonum (a Latin expression meaning "the highest good")of human organization, wouldn't it?

Find me one person who is for something and against nothing, who is redeemed enough not to condemn others out of the burden of his soul, and I will find another savior, another Jesus, and an exalted human being.

Find me one person who no longer has any fear of the universe, or of God, or of man, or of anything else, and you will have brought to me someone in whose presence we may sit, and fear shall vanish as clouds before the sunlight.

Find me someone who has given all that he has to love, without morbidity, and I will have found the lover of my soul . . . . Why? Because he will have revealed to me the nature of God and proved to me the possibility of all human souls.

Find me one person who can get his own littleness out of the way and he shall reveal to me the immeasurable magnitude of the Universe in which I live.

Find me one person who knows how to talk to God, really, and I shall walk with him through the woods and everything that seems inanimate will respond - the leaves of the trees will clap their hands, the grass will grow soft under him.

Find me one person who communes with cause and effect, and in the evening, the evening star will sing to him and the darkness will turn to light. Through him, as the woman who touched the hem of the garment of Christ was healed, shall I be healed of all loneliness forever.

Find me someone who is no longer sad, whose memory has been redeemed from morbidity, and I shall hear laughter.

Find me someone whose song is really celestial, because it is the outburst of the cosmic urge to sing, and I shall hear the music of the spheres.

Find me one person who has so completely divorced from himself all arrogance, and you will have discovered for me an open pathway to the kingdom of God here and now.

Find me somebody who has detached his emotional and psychological ego from the real self, without having to deny the place it plays in the scheme of things and without slaying any part of himself because the transcendence is there also, and I will have discovered the Ineffable in this individual and a direct pathway for the communion of my own soul.

I am talking about you and myself. When I say "find a person" I don't mean to go over to Rome, or London, or back to your own church. The search is not external . . . . [These] people all exist in us. They are different attributes, qualities of our own soul. They are different visions; not that we have multiple or dual personalities, but that every one of us on that inner side of life is, has been, and shall remain in eternal communion with the Ineffable where he may know that he is no longer with God, but one of God. If it were not for that which echoes eternally down the corridors of our own minds, some voice that ever sings in our own souls, some urge that continuously presses us forward, there would be no advance in our science or religion or in the humanities or anything else.

One cannot but feel from the human point in such meetings as these that it is entirely possible one might not be here next year. This is of complete indifference to me because I believe in life and I feel fine. Such an event is merely the climax of human events in anybody's life, and it is to be looked forward to, not with dread or fear or apprehension, but as the next great adventure and one that we should all be very happy and glad to experience.

You are Religious Science. I am not. I am only the one who put something together. I do not even take myself seriously, but I take what I am doing seriously. You are Religious Science-our ministers, our teachers, our practitioners, our laymen. You find me one thousand people in the world who know what Religious Science is and use it, and live it as it is, and I'll myself live to see a new world, a new heaven and a new earth here.

What I am saying is this: There is a Law that backs up the vision, and the Law is immutable. "Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away." There is a Power transcendent beyond our needs, our little wants. Demonstrating a dime is good if one needs it, or healing oneself of a pain is certainly good if one has it, but beyond that, at the real feast at the tabernacle of the Almighty, in the temple of the living God, in the banquet hall of heaven, there is something beyond anything that you and I have touched.

Find one thousand people who know that, and use it, and the world will no longer be famished. How important it is that each one of us in his simple way shall live from God to God, with God, in God, and to each other. That is why we are here, and we are taking back with us, I trust, a vision and an inspiration, something beyond a hope and a longing, that the living Spirit shall through us walk anew into Its own creation and a new glory come with a new dawn.

Your human incarnation is the invitation to your spirituality. We are coming into Divine consciousness. Community: where individuals commune into unity and where Unity touches individuality and individuality touches Unity.