Editorial February 24, 1945 Issue

Our Without Is Our Within

Paul Stark Seeley

Some of you know of the bear in a city zoo who, though enclosed in an area where he had ample room to move about with considerable freedom, did not do so. Instead, visitors observed him taking a few steps forward and a few steps back, forward and back, hour after hour, indifferent to the freedom afforded him. When asked why the bear did this, his keeper replied: "He has the small cage habit. He became so accustomed, when young and confined in a small cage, to the limitations it imposed on him that he has remained mentally bound by them, even though he is now physically free to move about in a larger space." The range of his activity was determined not by the physical condition around him, but by the mental condition within him.

A woman once complained to the naturalist, John Burroughs, that she could find no birds in her garden. Quickly pointing to a score of birds in the trees and bushes about them, the naturalist observed, "Madam, you must have birds in your heart before you can find them in the bushes."

How slow we are to learn the simple truth that what we think of as being without us is only the mental concept of existence that is within us. Our without is our within. This truth Jesus patiently and persistently endeavored to drive home to his hearers. "The kingdom of God," he repeatedly told them, "is within you." But most of them declined to believe this, preferring to believe that it was matter's kingdom which was seen about them and thought within them. They believed their outlook was determined more by the forces of material education and environment than by the one intelligent, causative Mind, God.

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