“OH, LORNA, I can hardly wait to see the moving-picture machine that your big brother got for Christmas,” said Colombe to her chum as they both awaited Jim’s return from school. “Oh, goody, here he comes now! . . . Jim! Will you run your moving-picture machine for us? I never saw a movie machine!”

“Sure!” grinned Jim, good naturedly, as he hung up his coat and hat and kicked off his boots. “I suppose you want to see a Mickey Mouse picture. Well, here is the machine. Now Lorna, you and Colombe hang a sheet over that line which I put up in my room, and pull down the shades to make it dark, while I plug the cord into the light socket and focus the machine.”

“Why do you have to attach it to the light plug?” asked Colombe.

“Well, we need a bright light back of the film to throw it on the screen, don’t we?” replied Jim.

“What’s a film?” again questioned Colombe.

“Well, gracious, Colombe, you certainly don’t know much about movie machines,” grunted Jim. “Here, look at one and see for yourself.”

Colombe picked up what seemed to be a large roll of shiny ribbon and examined it. “Oh!” she cried, “It’s a lot of tiny pictures of Mickey Mouse! But they’re so little that we can’t be able to see them on the screen this far away!”

At this Jim laughed and said, “Just you wait and see! But if you don’t hurry and darken this room, supper will be ready before we have time for anything.”

This reminder sent the girls scurrying to obey Jim’s instructions, and when they returned to the machine the film was in place and the electric light bulb was already shining brightly through it. “Oh!” gasped Colombe, “Look on the screen! Mickey Mouse! A big Mickey Mouse—as big as we are!”

“Now watch him move around when I crank the machine,” said Jim as he started to turn the handle.

And how that mouse did jump, run, and caper about with his friend, Donald Duck! Colombe and Lorna sat entranced until the end of the picture, and Colombe went home full of excitement at what she had seen.

“Oh, Aunt Amy!” she cried to her visiting aunt. “I wish you could have seen Jim’s movie machine! It made a ‘mouse on the wall so real that if you hadn’t known better you would have thought it alive! It did everything a person could do except talk!”

“Yes,” answered her aunt, “and if you would go to a theatre where they have big talking-movie machines you would hear him talk, too. Now doesn’t all this make you think of what I heard your mother saying about how our thoughts actually make for us the world in which we live and which we see all about us—even spiders, wasps, snakes, and the like?”

“Why no,” said the puzzled Colombe. “I don’t understand what you mean at all. What has a movie machine to do with our thoughts? Do you mean that our mind is like Jim’s movie machine?”

“Exactly,” agreed Aunt Amy, “and your thoughts are like the film. God’s bright Light of Love is always shining within your picture-machine-mind, and when you put into it a good clear thought-film, His Light shines through it causing you to see the talking-moving picture right in your world, just as you saw it on the screen in Jim’s room. So you see that when people put spider thoughts into their mindmachines they are going to see spiders crawling about in the world. And they can never get rid of spiders, wasps, mosquitoes, and other pests in the world, until they all first take out of their minds the films that are making such nuisances.”

“But Aunt Amy,” protested Colombe, “If everything I see is just a thought-picture, then why can spiders and wasps hurt me? Pictures can’t hurt!”

“No indeed, Colombe,” answered her aunt, “and nothing really can hurt you. You see, you forget that your body, too, is a picture in your mind, and it cannot be hurt unless your mind contains a belief that it can be hurt. When you saw Jim’s Mickey Mouse picture, Mickey seemed to get hurt once or twice, didn’t he? And no doubt he cried, too!”

“Why, yes, he did!” exclaimed Colombe. “And I felt so sorry for him that I almost forgot he wasn’t real.”

“Exactly!” said Aunt Amy: “And so it is with your body. You make for yourself a picture of your body becoming hurt or sick, and then put it into your mind-machine—and then the result is naturally a ‘hurt’ body, which makes you feel so sorry that you forget it is not real.”

“But, Aunt Amy, I was in bed with a bad cold last week and I didn’t make any sick pictures first.”

“Are you sure, Colombe?” questioned her aunt. “Remember the Thought-Balloon-People story, which your mother recently told you. You must have put your interest into some sort of a sick thought, or else your body couldn’t have seemed sick. And you know that any thought that is not good and like God would think is ‘sick.’ ”

“I see,” said Colombe, thoughtfully. “I know that all of my thoughts are not always like God’s. But when mother told me about the Thought-Balloon-People I never thought about them being so important as all that. But I still don’t quite understand. You say that God’s Light shines in my mind and through all of my Thought-Balloon-People, making everything that my eyes see?”

“Yes,” answered her aunt. “That is true. Your Thought-Balloon-People are like the film in the movie-machine, and the world, including your body, is like the screen upon which the picture is thrown.”

“Then,” persisted Colombe, “why doesn’t every silly little thought I think bob up in front of me?”

“Again you have forgotten the Thought-Balloon-People story, Colombe. Don’t you remember that a new little thought was just a limp useless little thing, until you put your interest into it? Well, the bigger and stronger your ‘Thought-balloons’ become, the quicker and the better will they appear before you in your world.

You noticed Jim’s Mickey Mouse film was very carefully made. It took a lot of time and work to make that film, and it takes a lot of time and effort to make a powerful ‘thought balloon’ or ‘thought-film.’ A thought doesn’t amount to much until your interest in it and your feeling about it puts it on your mind-film, and even then it cannot ‘bob up’ before you until you put it into your mind-machine by really believing it is true.

“But why not start trying to make the pictures you want to see happen in your life? Then when you actually see them before you, you will KNOW for yourself that your mind is a movie-machine, and that if you will put into it the right sort of pictures, you can make your world any way you want it to be. So learn this very important rule:

“The beliefs which you hold in your mind are making your body and the outer world what you see with your eyes.”

Questions.

1. Have you ever seen a movie? If so, have you seen the machine and film which make the picture on the screen?

2. Is the picture on the screen exactly the same as the picture on the film except for size?

3. How is your mind like a moving-picture machine? What shines in our mind-machine?

4. Is every little trivial thought on our mind-film? Why not?

5. Would a blurry film make a blurry picture? Would a dark film make a dark picture? Then what must we do to make nice clear, bright, happy pictures in our world?

6. When we are unhappy our world sometimes looks dark and gloomy. Is that because of a dark film in our mind?

7. If you have read “The Love Fairy’s Magic Fingers,” tell how their thought-films were made, and what happened because of them.

8. If you want a strong husky body, what should you do?

9. What sort of thoughts do you suppose God must think?

10. Since everything we see is the result of our thought-pictures, how, then, do you suppose God sees us since His Thought Pictures are perfect?

11. Will we ever see like He does?

12. How will things look to us then?

—o—

EVERY person who has symptoms of disease is living in the shadow of delusion. All disease exists only in the mind in the form of an idea. Symptoms of disease are merely the various forms of the disease idea made tangible in the human consciousness.

That which appears to be disease is nothing more than a false belief about your True Self, which is perfect, eternal, Spiritual Being, created in the exact image and likeness of God, the Father.

The soul, mind and body of you which seem capable of being diseased are only thought-pictures of what you think of your True Self. When you have learned to see yourself as God, “whose eyes are too pure to behold iniquity,” sees you, your thought pictures of yourself will change and you will awaken “in His likeness.” You will have been renewed by the renewing of your mind.

By letting “that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,” you will get a perfect vision of your True Self, the living son of the living God. “As a man thinketh in his heart”—so does he appear. Think of yourself as God thinks of you and you will be lifted up, transfigured, glorified. “Thy faith hath made thee whole.” Faith is the power which brings Reality into manifes- tation.

“I BELIEVE IN MYSELF: GOD IN ME.”

—Earl Sumner.

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