The Canon / Pillars / New Thought
Pillars · 1903
Lessons in Truth
New Thought / UnityLessons in Truth is a course in what its author called practical Christianity, holding that God is omnipresent Spirit, that the human being is the living expression of that Spirit, and that right thought is the instrument through which health and good are realized. Its central claim is that the divine is not distant but indwelling, and that recognizing this indwelling presence is the ground of all healing and demonstration.
The book proceeds as a sequence of lessons rather than argument, teaching a disciplined mental method built on denial of error and affirmation of truth. Written with devotional warmth and unusual clarity, it renders abstract metaphysics into teachable steps a student can practise daily.
Adopted by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore as a primary text of the Unity movement, it became the doctrinal anchor of that tradition and one of the most widely circulated New Thought works. Its affirmation-based method runs forward through the entire prosperity-and-healing lineage.
In its words
The appearances are that our bodies and our circumstances control our thoughts, but the opposite is true. Our thoughts control our bodies and our circumstances.
God as infinite wisdom lies within every human being, only waiting to be led forth into manifestation.
To affirm anything is to assert positively that it is so, even in the face of all contrary evidence.
All joy and strength and good spring up from a fountain within one's own being; and if we only knew this truth we should know that, because God in us is the fountain out of which springs all our good, nothing that anyone does or says, or fails to do or say, can take away our joy and good.
Victory must be won in the silence of your own being first, and then you need take no part in the outer demonstration of relief from conditions.
It does make a great difference in our daily lives what we think about God, about ourselves, about our neighbors.
If you turn your thoughts away from the external toward the spiritual, and let them dwell on the good in yourself and in others, all the apparent evil will first drop out of your thoughts and then out of your life.
Understanding is a spiritual birth, a revelation of God within the heart of man.
But until, down in the depths of your being, you are conscious of your oneness with the Father, until you know within yourself that the spring of all wisdom and health and joy is within your own being, ready at any moment to leap forth at the call of your need, you will not have spiritual understanding.
When you have learned how to abandon yourself to infinite Spirit, and have seasons of doing this daily, you will be surprised at the marvelous change that will be wrought in you without any conscious effort of your own.
That which God would say to you and do through you is a great secret that no man on the face of the earth knows, or ever will know except yourself as it is revealed to you by the Spirit that is in you.
Practices it teaches
Lessons in Truth Denials & Affirmations — Cady's daily practice
H. Emilie Cady — a New York homeopathic physician and student of Emma Curtis Hopkins whose Lessons in Truth became Unity's foundational course — taught a gentle, portable practice of denials and affirmations.
Going into the Silence — Cady's 'Finding the Secret Place
H. Emilie Cady — a New York homeopathic physician, student of Emma Curtis Hopkins, and author of Unity's foundational course Lessons in Truth — taught a distinct contemplative practice she called "sitting in the…
Lineage
The author
H. Emilie CadyLessons in Truth — practical Christianity Full voice →Key terms
Kindred books