|
The Nazarene
Way of Essenic Studies |
The Perfect Way represents a discovery to ascertain the nature and method of existence. It also represents a recovery because the system propounded has proved to be that which constituted the basic and secret doctrines of all the great religions of antiquity, including Christianity, – the doctrine commonly called the Gnosis, and variously entitled Hermetic and Kabbalistic.
THE PERFECT WAY PART 1
Abstract
Preface
Lecture the First - Introductory
Lecture the Second The Soul - and the substance of existence
Lecture the Third - The various orders of Spirits; and to discern them
Lecture the Fourth - The Atonement
Lecture the Fifth - The nature and constitution of the ego
Lecture the Sixth - The Fall (1)
Lecture the Seventh - The Fall (2)THE PERFECT WAY PART 2
Lecture the Eight - The Redemption
Lecture the Ninth - God as the Lord; or, the Divine ImageAPPENDICES
Concerning the interpretation of scripture
Concerning the hereafter
On prophesying; and prophecy
Concerning the nature of Sin
Concerning the "Great Work" and the share of Christ Jesus therein
The time of the End
The Higher Alchemy
Concerning Revelation
Concerning the Poet
Concerning the One Life
Concerning the Mysteries
Hymn to the Planet God
Fragments of the "Golden Book of Venus"
Part -1-
Hymn of Aphrodite
Part -2-
A discourse of communion of souls, and of the uses of love between creature and creature.
Hymn to Hermes
The Secret of Satan
Plates
Figure - 1 - The Cherubim of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse
Figure - 2 - The tabernacle in the wilderness
Figure - 3 - Section of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh(Revised and Enlarged Edition.)
Boston, Mass.:
ESOTERIC PUBLISHING COMPANY,
478 Shawmut Avenue.
1888.
AUTHORS’ EXPLANATION.
These lectures were delivered in London, before a private audience, in the months of May, June, and July, 1881.
The changes made in this edition calling for indication, are, – the substitution of another Lecture for No. V., and consequent omission of most of the plates; the rewriting, in the whole or part, of paragraphs 6 - 8 and 28 in No. I.; 34 - 36 in No. II.; 5 - 8, 12, 13, 22, 23, 42, 43, 54, and 55, in No. IX. (the latter paragraphs being replaced by a new one); the lengthening of Appendices II, and VI; the addition of a new Part to Appendix XIII. (formerly No. IX); and the substitution of eight new Appendices for Nos:. VII., and VIII.
The alterations involve no change or withdrawal of doctrine, but only extension of scope, amplification of statement, or modification of expression.
A certain amount of repetition being inseparable from the form adopted, – that of a series of expository lectures, each requiring to be complete in itself, – and the retention of that form being unavoidable, – no attempt has been made to deal with the instances in which repetition occurs.
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
In presenting an American edition of THE PERFECT WAY, or, The Finding of Christ, to the reading and inquiring public, we have been actuated by the conviction that a comprehensive textbook of the “new views,” or the restored wisdom and knowledge of the ages regarding religion or the perfect life, was imperatively required, wherein the subject was treated in a manner luminous, instructive, and entertaining, and which, without abridgement, or inferiority of material or workmanship, could yet be sold at a price that would bring the work within the means of the general public.
THE PERFECT WAY will be found to be an occult library in itself, and those desirous of coming into the esoteric knowledge and significance of life, will be richly repaid by its study or perusal; and especially will those who feel that they cannot afford the means or time to purchase and read many books, do well to make this one of their first choice. To such, and all who are seeking new light, life, and higher inspiration, we respectfully dedicate the American edition.
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION.
As the writers rather than the authors of this book, we propose on behalf of a more ready apprehension of it, and the satisfaction of much questioning concerning it to take occasion of the issue of this Edition to give a succinct account of its nature and import.That which The Perfect Way represents is neither an invention nor a compilation, but first, a discovery, and next, a recovery. It represents a discovery because it is the result of an attempt – proved successful by the issue – to ascertain at first hand the nature and method of existence. And it represents a recovery because the system propounded in it has proved to be that which constituted the basic and secret doctrine of all the great religions of antiquity, including Christianity, – the doctrine commonly called the Gnosis, and variously entitled Hermetic and Kabbalistic.
In yet another sense does The Perfect Way represent a recovery, and also – for ourselves – a discovery, seeing that it was independent of any prior knowledge on our part. This is as regards Faculty. For the knowledges concerned, although verified by subsequent research in the ordinary manner, were obtained solely by means of the faculty which consists in perception and recollection of the kind called intuitional and psychic, and therefore by the method which in all ages has been recognized as the means of access to knowledges transcendental and divine. Being fully described in the book (e.g. Lect. i. pars. 4-18; App. iii., Part 1, etc.), this faculty needs no further definition here. It is necessary, however, to state this in relation to it: That the value of the recovery of the knowledges concerned, great as it is for the intrinsic interest and importance of subject, is indefinitely enhanced by the manner of its accomplishment. For, much as it is to know the conclusions of ancient wisdom concerning the most momentous of topics, and to recognize their logical excellence, it is far more to know their truth, seeing that they involve the nature and destiny of man in all time. It is this supreme question which finds satisfactory solution in the present case. Had the recovery been made in the ordinary manner, namely, through the examination of neglected writings or the discovery of lost ones, methods which, however successful would have been altogether inadequate for the results actually attained, – no step would have been gained towards the verification of the doctrines involved. Whereas, as it is, for ourselves, and for all those who with us are cognizant of the genesis of this book, and who are at the same time sufficiently matured in respect of the spiritual consciousness to be able to accept the facts, – that is, for all who know to be able to believe, – the book constitutes of itself an absolute confirmation of its own teaching, and, therein, of the recovered Gnosis. For, being due to intuitional recollection and perception, – faculties exercised in complete independence of the physical organism, – it demonstrate the essentially spiritual nature of existence; the reality of the soul as the true ego; the multiple rebirths of this ego into material conditions; its persistence through all changes of form and state; and its ability, while yet in the body, to recover and communicate of the knowleges which, in the long ages of its past as an individualized entity, it has acquired concerning God, the universe, and itself. In respect of all these, the experiences of which this book is the result, – although themselves rarely referred to in it, – have been such, both in kind and quantity, that to regard them and the world to which they relate as delusory, would be to leave ourselves without ground for belief in the genuineness of any experiences, or of any world whatsoever. It is not, however, upon testimony merely personal or extrinsic that the appeal on behalf of this book is rested, but upon that which is intrinsic, and capable of appreciation by all who have intelligent cognition of the subjects concerned.
Especially is this book designed to meet the peculiar circumstances of the times, – so aptly described by Mr. Matthew Arnold when he says that “at the present moment there are two things about the Christian religion which must be obvious to every percipient person; one, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.” In an age distinguished, as is the present, by all-embracing research, exhaustive analysis, and unsparing criticism, no religious system can endure unless it appeals to the intellectual as well as to the devotional side of man’s nature. At present the faith of Christendom is languishing on account of a radical defect in the method of its presentation, through which it is brought into perpetual conflict with science; and the harassing and undignified task is imposed on its supporters of an incessant endeavour to keep pace with the advances of scientific discovery, or the fluctuations of scientific speculation. The method whereby it is herein endeavoured to obviate the suspense and insecurity thus engendered, consists in the establishment of these two positions:
(1) That the dogmas and symbols of Christianity are substantially identical with those of other and earlier religious systems; and
(2) That the true plane of religious belief lies, not where hitherto the Church has placed it, – in the sepulchre of historical tradition, among the dry bones of the past; but in the living and immutable Heaven, to which those who truly desire to find the Lord must in heart and mind ascend. “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here; He is risen.” This is to say, the true plane of religious belief is not the objective and physical, but the subjective and spiritual.
It is true that many men renowned for piety and learning, pillars – accounted – of the faith, have denounced as in the highest degree impious the practice of what they call, “wresting Scripture from its obvious meaning.” But their denunciation of impiety includes not only the chief of those “lesser lights,” the Christian Fathers and Jewish Commentators, but also those “two great lights,” Jesus and Paul, seeing that each of these affirmed the mystic sense of Scripture, and the duty of subordinating the Letter to the Spirit and seeking within the veil for the meaning. The fact is, that in their use of the term “obvious,” the literalists beg the questions involved. Those questions are, – To what faculty is the sense of Scripture obvious, – to the outer or the inner perception? and, – To which of these two orders of perception does the apprehension of spiritual things belong? Nothing, assuredly, can be more obvious than the “impiety” of setting aside the account which Holy Writ gives of itself, and ascribing to it falsehood, folly, or immorality, on the strength of outward appearance, such as is the letter. To those whom this volume represents, it is absolutely obvious that the literal sense is not the sense intended; and that they who insist upon that sense incur the reproach cast by Paul when, referring to the veil which Moses put over his face, he says: “For their minds were blinded; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remaineth unlifted. Even unto this day the veil is upon their hearts.”
We will endeavour briefly to exhibit the principles of this conclusion. The first lesson to be learnt in the school of philosophy is the truth that the mind can apprehend and assimilate that only which presents itself mentally. In other words, the objective must be translated into the subjective before it can become pabulum for the spiritual part of man. Truth is never phenomenal, but always metaphysical. The senses apprehend and are concerned with phenomena. But the senses represent the physical part only of man, and not that selfhood which the philosopher intends when he speaks of Man. This, the true ego cannot come into relation with, or take account of, events and persons which present themselves phenomenally and objectively only. Thus, they are but vehicles and symbols by which truths, principles, and processes are conveyed to the subjective apprehension, – the hieroglyphs, so to speak, in which these are portrayed. Belonging to time and to matter, persons and events are, – in their phenomenal aspect, – related only to the exterior and perishable man; while principles and truths, being noumenal and eternal, are cognizable only by that in man which, being also noumenal and eternal, is of like nature with them, namely, his subjective and spiritual part. For the apprehender and that which is apprehended must belong to the same category. And as the former is, necessarily, the purely rational principle in man, the latter also must be purely rational. For this reason, therefore, in order to maintain its proper spirituality, religion must always – as Schelling points out, – present itself esoterically in universals and in mysteries. Otherwise, being dependent for its existence upon the continuance of an environment merely physical and sensible, it becomes as evanescent as is this. From which it follows that so long as we regard religious truth as essentially constituted of and dependent upon causes and effects appertaining to the physical plane, we have not yet grasped its real nature, and are spiritually unconscious and unilluminate. That which is true in religion is for spirit alone.
The necessary subjectivity of truth was affirmed also by Kant, who regarded the historical element in Scripture as indifferent, and declared that the transition of the Creed into a purely spiritual faith would be the coming of the kingdom of God. Similarly the mystic Weigelius (A.D. 1650) says that in order to be efficacious for salvation, that which is divinely written concerning the Christ on the objective plane must be transferred to the subjective plane and substantialized in the individual, being interiorly enacted by him. And the pious and learned translator of the Hermetic books, Doctor Everard, writes: – “I say there is not one word (of Scripture) true according to the letter. Yet I say that every word, every syllable, every letter is true. But they are true as He intended them that spake them; they are true as God meant them, not as men will have them.” (Gospel Treasury Opened, A.D. 1659).
The reason is that matter and its attributes constitute but the middle term in a series, the Alpha and Omega of which are spirit. The world of ultimate effects, like that of ultimate causes, is spiritual; and no finality can belong to the plane of their middle term, this being a plane only of transition. The absolute is, first, pure, abstract thought. It is, next, a heterization of that thought by disruption into the atomism of time and space, or projection into nature, a process whereby, from being non-molecular, it becomes molecular. Thirdly, it returns from this condition of self-externalization and self-alienation back into itself, resolving the heterization of nature, and becoming again subjective and – as only thus it can become – self-cognizant. Such – as formulated by Hegel – is, under manifestation, the process of universals; and such is, necessarily, the process also of particulars, which are the product of universals. Wherefore man, as the microcosm, must imitate, and identify himself with, the macrocosm, and subjectivize, or spiritualize, his experience before he can relate it to that ultimate principle of himself which constitutes the ego, or selfhood.
Such a view of religion as this, however, is obviously incomprehensible save by the educated and developed: its terms and its ideas alike being beyond the capacity of the generality. This book, therefore, and the work which it inaugurates, are addressed to the former class; – to persons of culture and thought, who, recognizing the defects of the popular belief, have abandoned, as hopeless, the attempt to systematize it and to relate it to their mental needs. There never can be one presentation of religion suited equally to all classes and castes of men; and the attempt of the Church to compass this impossibility has, of necessity, resulted in the alienation of those who are unable to accept the crude, coarse fare dealt out to the multitude. Enacting the part of a Procrustes in respect of things spiritual, she has tried to fit to one measure minds of all kinds and dimensions, in total disregard of the apostolic dictum: – “We speak wisdom among the full-grown. . But not unto you as unto the spiritual, but as unto the carnal, unto babes in Christ, feeding you with milk, not with meat, being not yet able to receive it.”
For these, then, – the uninstructed and undeveloped, – the Church must continue to speak with veiled face, in parable and symbol. Our appeal is to those who, having attained their intellectual and spiritual majority have put away childish things, and who, accordingly, – instead of being content with the husk of the letter, and ignoring the spirit for the form, or limiting it by the form, – are impelled by the very necessity of their nature to seek behind the veil and to read the spirit through the form, that “with unveiled face they may behold the glory of the Lord, and be transformed into the same image.” They who are thus ripe will in these pages learn what is the Reality which only Mind can apprehend; and will understand that it belongs not to the objective and phenomenal plane of mundane history, but to the subjective and noumenal plane of their own souls, where seeking they will find enacted the process of Fall, Exile, Incarnation, Redemption, Resurrection, Ascension, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and – as the sequel – the attainment of Nirvana, the “peace that passeth understanding.” For those thus initiated the mind is no longer concerned with history; the phenomenal becomes recognized as the illusory, – a shadow projected by the Real, having no substance in itself, and an accident only of the real. One thing is and abides, – the Soul in man, – Mother of God, immaculate; descending – as Eve – into matter and generation; assumed – as Mary – beyond matter into life eternal. One state, supreme and perfect, epitomizes and resolves all others; – the state of Christ, promised in the dawn of evolution; displayed in its process; glorified at its consummation. To realize the assumption of Mary, to attain to the stature of her Son, – these ends and aspirations constitute the desire of the illuminate. And it is in order to indicate them anew and the method of seeking them intelligently, that this book is written.
This preface may – it seems to us – fittingly conclude with a token of the estimation The Perfect Way has won from persons specially qualified to judge it. The following is selected from numerous communications to the like effect, coming, not only from various parts of the world, but from members of various nationalities, races and faiths, and showing that our book is already accomplishing far and wide its mission as an Eirenicon.
The veteran student of the “divine science,” a reference to whom, as the friend, disciple, and literary heir of the renowned magian, the late Abbe Constant (“Eliphas Levi”), will be for all initiates a sufficient indication of his personality, thus writes to us: –
“As with the corresponding Scriptures of the past, the appeal on behalf of your book is, really, to miracles: but with the difference that in your case the miracles are intellectual ones and incapable of simulation, being miracles of interpretation. And they have the further distinction of doing no violence to common sense by infringing the possibilities of Nature; while they are in complete accord with all mystical traditions, and especially with the great Mother of these, – the Kabbala. That miracles, such as I am describing, are to be found in The Perfect Way, in kind and number unexampled, they who are the best qualified to judge will be the most ready to affirm.
“And here, apropos of these renowned Scriptures, permit me to offer you some remarks on the Kabbala as we have it. It Is my opinion, –
“(1) That this tradition is far from being genuine, and such as it was on its original emergence from the sanctuaries.
“(2) That when Guillaume Postel – of excellent memory – and his brother Hermetists of the later middle age – the Abbot Trithemius and others – predicted that these sacred books of the Hebrews should become known and understood at the end of the era, and specified the present time for that event, they did not mean that such knowledge should be limited to the mere divulgement of these particular Scriptures, but that it would have for its base a new illumination, which should eliminate from them all that has been ignorantly or wilfully introduced, and should reunite that great tradition with its source by restoring it in all its purity.
“(3) That this illumination has just been accomplished, and has been manifested in The Perfect Way. For in this book we find all that there is of truth in the Kabbala, supplemented by new intuitions, such as present in a body of doctrine at once complete, homogeneous, logical and inexpugnable.
“Since the whole tradition thus finds itself recovered or restored to its original purity, the prophecies of Postel, etc., are accomplished; and I consider that from henceforth the study of the Kabbala will be but an object of curiosity and erudition like that of Hebrew antiquities.
“Humanity has always and everywhere asked itself these three supreme questions: – Whence come we? what are we? whither go we?
Now, these questions at length find an answer, complete, satisfactory, and consolatory, in The Perfect Way. (This judgment is irrespective of the mode of presentation, for any defect in which the responsibility rests with ourselves.)
As the secrecy originally observed is, even were it still desirable, no longer practicable, we have added our names to the title-page.
CHRISTMAS, 1886.
PREFACE
According to classical legend, the Goddess Athena had once for votary a fair virgin named Medusa, who, becoming vain of her beauty and weary of the pure service of the maiden Goddess, introduced folly and defilement into the very sanctuary of the Temple in which she was wont to worship. Thereupon a terrible fate overtook her. The beautiful face, which had been the cause of her fall, assumed an aspect so terrible as to blight and petrify all who looked upon it; her tresses, once the chief object of her pride: were changed into vipers: and the hands which had ministered to heaven became as the talons of a bird of prey. Thus transformed into a Gorgon, she brought forth monsters, and for a time devastated the earth. At length the hero Perseus, “Son of God,” commissioned by Athena and Hermes, and armed by them with wings and sword and shield, slew the terrible creature, and smote off her venomous head. This exploit, – itself fraught with great perils, – was followed by the achievement of another not less difficult. Andromeda, daughter of the Aethiopian king, being doomed to become the prey of a dragon which long had ravaged her father’s coasts, was already chained to a rock on the seashore and on the point of being devoured, when Perseus, – divinely guided to the scene of the intended sacrifice – vanquished the Dragon and delivered the princess. And, having won her love and espoused her, the son of Zeus bore her away from her father’s kingdom into heaven, to shine forever beside him, redeemed, immortal, and glorious.Now the names Medusa and Andromeda have a common root, and signify respectively “guardian” or “house” of Wisdom, and “the ruler” or “helpmeet” of Man. They are thus typical names, the first of the Church, the second, of the Soul. And the two myths of which their bearers are the heroines, together constitute a prophecy, – or perpetual verity, – having special application to the present epoch. Medusa is that system which, – originally pure and beautiful, the Church of God and the guardian of the Mysteries, – has, through corruption and idolatry, become “the hold of every unclean thing,” and the mother of a monstrous brood. And, moreover, like the once lovely face of Medusa, the Doctrine which bore originally the divine impress and reflected the Celestial Wisdom Herself, has become through the fall of the Church converted into Dogma so pernicious and so deadly as to blight and destroy the reason of all who come under its control. And the Perseus of the myth is the true Humanity, – earth born indeed, but heaven begotten, – which endowed by Wisdom and Understanding, with the wings of Courage, the shield of Intuition, and the sword of Science, is gone forth to smite and destroy the corrupt Church and to deliver the world from its blighting influence. But it is not enough that the Gorgon be slain. A task yet greater and more glorious awaits achievement. Andromeda, the Soul, the better part of Man, is on the point of being devoured outright by the baleful dragon of Negation, the agent of the lower nature, and the ravager of all the hopes of mankind. Her name, – identical with the terms in which is described the first Woman of Hebrew story, – indicates her as the helpmeet and ruler of man; her parentage denotes the origin of the Soul from the astral Fire or Aether, signified by the land of Aethiopis; the brazen fetters with which she is bound to the rock, typify the present bondage of the Divine in man to his material part; and her redemption, espousal, and exaltation by the hero Perseus, prefigure the final and crowning achievement of the Son of God, who is no other than the Spiritual Manhood, fortified and sustained by Wisdom and Thought. Of no avail against the monster which threatens to annihilate the Soul, are the old devices of terrorism, persecution, and thraldom by which the corrupt Church sought to subjugate mankind to her creed. The Deliverer of the Soul must be free as air, borne on the wings of a Thought that knows no fear and no restraint, and armed with the blade, two-edged and facing every way, of a knowledge potent alike for attack and defence. And he must be wise and free in every sense, bent, not on destruction merely, but on salvation likewise, and his sword must be as apt to smite the fetters from the limbs of Andromeda, as to deal the stroke of death to the Gorgon. It is not enough that he carry to Olympus the dead Medusa’s head; he must bear thither also a living Bride. His mission is not only to satisfy the Mind but to content the Heart. The Intellect, –the “Man,” – it is, who handles the sword of the liberator; and the Intuition, –the “Woman,” – it is, who weaves and constructs. But for her labour his prowess would be vain, and his deeds without goal or reward. The hero brings home spoils to the tent, and hangs up his shield and spear by the hearth-fire. All honour to the warrior, alike as iconoclast, as scientist, as purifier of the earth. His work, however, is but initiatory, preparing the way and making the path straight for Her who carries neither torch nor weapon of war. By her is the intellect crowned; by her is humanity completed; in her the Son of Zeus finds his eternal and supreme reward; for she is the shrine at once of divinest Wisdom and of perfect Love.
It is thus evident that classical story, identical in substance with the allegorical prophecies of Hebrew and Christian scripture, exhibits the work of the Saviour or Liberator, as having a twofold character. Like Zeus, the Father of Spirits, whose son he is, the Reason is at once Purifier and Redeemer. The task of Destruction accomplished, that of Reconstruction must begin. Already the first is well-nigh complete, but as yet no one seems to have dreamed of the last as possible. The present age has witnessed the decline and fall of a system which, after having successfully maintained itself for some eighteen centuries against innumerable perils of assault from without, and of faction from within, has at length succumbed to the combined arms of scientific and moral criticism. But this very overthrow, this very demolition, creates a new void, to the existence of which the present condition of the world and the apprehensions and cravings everywhere expressed, bear ample testimony. On all sides men are asking themselves, “Who will show us any good?” To whom or to what, if the old system be fallen, shall we turn for counsel and salvation from Doom? Under what roof shall we shelter ourselves if the whole Temple be demolished, and “not one stone be left upon another that shall not be thrown down”? What way shall we take to Zion, if the old road be buried beneath the avalanche? Agnosticism and Pessimism have seized upon the best intellects of the age. Conscience has become eclipsed by self-interest, mind obscured by matter, and man’s percipience of his higher nature and needs suppressed in favour of his lower. The rule of conduct among men is fast becoming that of the beast of prey: – self before all, and that the earthly, brutish, and ignoble self. Everywhere are the meaning and uses even of life seriously called in question; everywhere is it sought to sustain humanity by means which are in themselves subversive of humanity; everywhere are the fountains of the great deep of human society breaking up, and a deluge is seen to be impending, the height, extent, and duration of which no one can forecast. And nowhere yet is discernible the Ark, by taking refuge in which mankind may surmount and survive the flood.
Nevertheless this Ark so anxiously looked for, this Way so painfully sought, this work of Reconstruction so sorely needed, are all attainable by man. The certainty of their attainment is involved in the nature itself of existence, and ratified in every expression given to the mysteries of that nature from the beginning of the world.
The prime object of the present work is, then, not to demolish, but to reconstruct. Already the needful service of destruction has been widely and amply rendered. The old Temple has been thrown down and despoiled, and the “children of Israel” have been carried away captive to “Babylon,” – the mystic name of the stronghold of Materialism. As it is written; “The vessels of the House of the Lord” – that is, the doctrines of the Church – “great and small, and the treasures of the Temple, and of the King, and of the princess, were carried away to Babylon. And the enemies set fire to the House of God; and broke down the wall of Jerusalem,” – that is, the Soul, – “and burnt all her towers, and whatsoever was precious they destroyed.”
It is now time for the fulfilment of the second and last act of the prophetical drama; – “Thus saith Cyrus,” – that is KurioV the Lord, the Christ; – “All the kingdoms of the earth hath the God of heaven given me, and He hath charged me to build Him again a House in Jerusalem.” “Who is there of you, who will go up and build again the Temple of the Lord God of Israel?”
In these words is expressed the intention of the writers of this book. And if they have preferred to withhold their names, it is neither because they distrust the genuineness of their commission or the soundness of their work, nor because they shrink from the responsibility incurred; but in order that their work may rest upon its own merits and not upon theirs, – real or supposed; – in order, that is, that it may be judged and not prejudged one way or the other. Such reservation is in accordance with its whole tenor. For the criterion alone to which appeal is made on its behalf is the Understanding, and this on the ground that it is contrary to the nature of Truth to prevail by force of authority, or of aught other than the understanding; since Truth – how transcendent so ever it be – has its witness in the Mind, and no other testimony can avail it. If truth be not demonstrable to mind, it is obvious that man, who is essentially mind, and the product of mind, cannot recognize or appropriate it. What is indispensable is, that appeal be made to the whole mind, and not to one department of it only.
In this book no new thing is told; but that which is ancient – so ancient that either it or its meaning has been lost – is restored and explained. But, while accepting neither the presentations of a conservative orthodoxy, nor the conclusions of a destructive criticism, its writers acknowledge the services rendered by both to the cause of Truth. For, like the Puritans, who coated with plaster and otherwise covered and hid from view the sacred images and decorations which were obnoxious to them, orthodoxy has at least preserved through the ages the symbols which contain the Truth, beneath the errors with which it has overlaid them. And criticism, however fiercely infidel, has, by the very act of destruction, cleared the way for rebuilding. It has fulfilled the man’s function, – that of analysis, and made possible the woman’s, – that of synthesis. And this is according to the Divine order.
In both nature and method, therefore, this book is mainly, interpretative, and, consequently, reconciliatory. And it is this, not only in respect of the Hebrew, Christian, Oriental, and Classic systems in particular, but in respect also of modern thought and human experience in general. It aims at making at-one-ment between Mind and Heart by bringing together Mercy – that is, Religion – and Truth – that is, Science. It seeks to assure man that his best and most powerful friends on every plane are Liberty and Reason, as his worst enemies are Ignorance and Fear; and that until his thought is free enough and strong enough to bear him aloft to “heaven,” as well as to “the lowermost parts of the earth,” he is no true Son of Hermes, whose- typical name is Thought, and who yet is, in his supremest vocation, the Messenger and Minister of God “the Father.”
ADVENT 1881.
ABSTRACT OF
ARGUMENT AND CONTENTS.
_____________________
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION PREFACE
LECTURE THE FIRST
INTRODUCTORY
PART 1 Purpose of this book; to supply the existing need of a perfect system of thought and life by one founded in the nature of existence. This not a new invention, but a recovery of the original system which was the basis of all religions. Its recovery due to the same means by which it was originally received, namely, the Intuition, which represents the knowledges acquired by the Soul in its past existences, and complements the intellect, being itself quickened and enhanced by illumination of the Spirit. Revelation a proper prerogative of man, belonging to him in virtue of his nature and constitution, and crowning the reason. God, the supreme Reason. The Understanding, the “Rock” of the true Church. Illustrations of Method, classic and rabbinical. Sketch of Doctrine. Spirit and Matter: their nature, relations, and essential identity. Existence and Being. The Kalpa, Sabbath, and Nirvana, Divinity of Substance: its unity and trinity, and mode of individualization and development. The true doctrine of creation by evolution; found in all religions, as also that of the progression and migration of Souls; personal and historical testimony to its truth; recognized in Old and New Testaments. Rudimentary man. The Sphinx.PART II. Relation of the system recovered to that in possession. The true heir. Religion, being founded in the nature of existence, is necessarily non-historical, independent of times, places, and persons, and appeals perpetually to the mind and conscience. Objections anticipated. Persistency of religious ideas due to their reality. The apparently new not necessarily really new. Christianity not exempt from the influences which caused the deterioration of Judaism. Its future development by means of new revelation foretold by its Founder. Need of such new revelation to preserve, not only religion, but humanity from extinction. The “man of sin” and “abomination that maketh desolate.” Substitution of Gospel of Force by Gospel of Love. One name whereby is salvation, but many bearers. The Christs.
LECTURE THE SECOND.
THE SOUL; AND THE SUBSTANCE OF EXISTENCE.
PART I. The Soul, universal or individual, the supreme subject and object of culture; the essential self, to know which is the only wisdom, involving the knowledge of God. Mysticism or Spiritualism, and Materialism, the doctrines respectively of Substance or Spirit, and of phenomenon. Matter a mode or condition of Spirit, and indispensable to its manifestation. The object of all religion and subject of all revelation the redemption of Spirit from Matter. Necessity to creation of the idea of a No-God. The ascent from Nature’s Seeming to God’s Being. The recovered system and Materialism respectively as Phoebus and Python.
PART II. The Soul as individual, its genesis and nature: the divine idea, eternal in its nature, but perishable if uninformed of the Spirit. The “Fire of the hearth:” the Divine breath. Convergence and divergence: the celestial Nirvana, and that of annihilation. The end of the persistently evil. The planet and its offspring. The fourfold nature of existence, alike in macrocosm and microcosm, due to differentialities of polarization of original substance.
PART III. The Soul as individual, its history and progress: commencing in the simplest organisms, it works upwards, moulding itself according to the tendencies encouraged by it; its final object to escape the need of a body and return to the condition of pure Spirit. Souls various in quality. The parable of the Talents.
PART IV. Of the nature of God; as Living Substance, One; as Life and Substance, Twain; the Potentiality of all things; the absolute Good, through the limitation of whom by Matter comes evil. Subsists prior to creation as Invisible Light. As Life, God is He; as Substance, She; respectively the Spirit and Soul universal and individual; the Soul the feminine element in man, having its representative in woman. God the original, abstract Humanity. The seven Spirits of God. “Nature.” The heavenly Maria, her characteristics and symbols. As Soul or Intuition, she is the “woman” by whom man attains his true manhood; The defect of the age in this respect. No intuition, no organon of knowledge. The Soul alone such organon.
PART V. Divine Names, denotative of characteristics. Function of religion to enable man to manifest the divine Spirit within him. Man as an expression of God. The Christs, why called Sun gods. The Zodiacal planisphere a Bible or hieroglyph of the Soul’s history. Bibles, by whom written. The “Gift of God”.
LECTURE THE THIRD.
THE VARIOUS ORDERS OF SPIRITS; AND HOW TO DISCERN THEM.
PART I. The sphere of the astral, its four circuli and their respective occupants. The Shades; purgatory; “hell;” “devils;” “the Devil;” possession by devils; “souls in prison;” “under the elements;” spirits of the elements, subject to the human will; souls of the dead; the anima bruta and anima divina. Metempsychosis and reincarnation; conditions of the latter; descent to lower grades; cause of the Soul’s loss.
PART II. The astral or magnetic spirits by which, ordinarily, “mediums” are “controlled;” reflects rather than spirits; difficulty of distinguishing them from Souls; elements of error and deception; delusive character of astral influences; their characteristics; danger of a negative attitude of mind; necessity of a positive attitude for Divine communication; spirits elemental and elementary; genii loci; cherubim.
PART III. The sphere of the celestial; the procession of Spirit; the triangle of life; the Genius or guardian angel, his genesis, nature, and functions; the Gods, or Archangels.
LECTURE THE FOURTH.
THE ATONEMENT
PART I. This the central doctrine of religion, and, like the Cosmos, fourfold in its nature. What the doctrine is not; its corruption by materialism; priestly degradation of the character of Deity. The Bible represents the conflict between prophet and priest, the former as the minister of the intuition, and the latter as the minister of sense.
PART II. The occult side of the sacrificial system. Effusion of blood efficacious in the evocation of subhuman spirits, as shown by various examples. These spirits visible in the fume of the sacrifices. Astral spirits personate the celestials. Abhorrence of the true prophet for bloodshed, illustrated in Buddha’s rebuke to the priests. The orthodox doctrine of vicarious atonement, a travesty due to astral spirits, of the true doctrine. Pernicious effects of the use of blood (or flesh) for food; impossibility, on such diet, of attaining full perception of divine truth.
PART III. Antiquity and universality of the Cross as the symbol of Life physical and spiritual. Its application to the doctrine of the Atonement fourfold, having a separate meaning for each sphere of man’s nature. Of these meanings the first is of the physical and outer, denoting the crucifixion or rejection of the Man of God by the world. The second is intellectual, and denotes the crucifixion or conquest by man of his lower nature. The third, which refers to the Soul, implies the passion and oblation of himself, whereby the man regenerate obtains the power – by the demonstration of the supremacy of spirit over Matter – to become a Redeemer to others. The fourth appertains to the Celestial and innermost, and denotes the perpetual sacrifice of God’s Life and Substance for the creation and salvation of His creatures. The pantheistic nature of the true doctrine.
LECTURE THE FIFTH.
THE NATURE AND CONSTITUTION OF THE EGO.
PART I. Psyche as the Soul and true Ego the result of Evolution, being individualized through Matter.
PART II. Man’s two personalities. Karma or the results of past conduct and consequent destiny. The soul essentially immaculate.
PART III. The Ego more than the sum total of the consciousnesses composing the system, as representing these combined and polarized to a higher plane. The Psyche alone subjective and capable of knowledge.
PART IV. The Shade, the Ghost, and the Soul; their respective natures and destinies.
PART V. The anima Mundi, or Picture-World. The soul of the planet, like that of the individual, transmigrates and passes on.
PART VI. The Evolution of the Ego, and therein of the Church of Christ, implied in the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the B. V. M.
LECTURE THE SIXTH.
THE FALL ( 1 )
PART I. The first Church; its type the Kaabeh, or cube, denoting sixfoldness; dates from “Paradise.” The Merkaba, or vehicle of God, drawn by the four elements. The four rivers of Eden. Allegorical character of the Mystic Scriptures; how recovered by Esdras; their origin and corruption.
PART II. The parable of the Fall: its signification fourfold, being one for each sphere of existence; the first, physical and social.
PART III. The second signification rational and philosophical; the third, psychical and personal.
PART IV. The fourth signification spiritual and cosmical. The Restoration implied in the Sabbath, and prophesied in the Zodiac, and in the arms of Pope Leo XIII
PART V. A new Annunciation.
LECTURE THE SEVENTH.
THE FALL ( 2 )
PART I. Interpretation of Scripture dual, intellectual and intuitional, or exterior and interior; the Soul as the woman, through whose aspiration to God man becomes Man in the mystic sense, and made in the image of God; and through whose inclination to Matter he falls from that image. As the fall is through loss of purity, so the Redemption is through restoration of purity.
PART II. The Soul’s history as allegorized in the books of Genesis and Revelation.
PART III. Source of errors of Biblical interpretation. The historical basis of the Fall. The Church as the Woman. Rise and Fall of original Church. A primitive mystic community. The source of doctrine, interior and superior to priesthoods.
PART IV. Nature and method of historical Fall. The three steps by retracing which the Restoration will come. Tokens of its approach.
LECTURE THE EIGHTH
THE REDEMPTION
PART I. The “great work” the Redemption of Spirit from Matter: first in the individual, next in the universal. Definition of mystic terms used to denote the process: “Passion,” “Crucifixion,” “Death,” “Burial,” “Resurrection,” “Ascension”.
PART II. The Man perfected and having power: the “philosopher’s stone,” and kindred terms; the Adept and the Christ: sense in which the latter may be called a medium for the Highest; not as ordinarily understood: the Hierarch or Magian, his qualifications and conditions.
PART III: Design of the Gospels to present perfect character of Man Regenerate; selection of Jesus as subject; Church’s failure of comprehension through loss of spiritual vision, due to materialism. Answer to objection; doctrine of Incarnation; perversion and explanation: method of Gospel symbolism; the miracles; cosmic order of Gospels.
PART IV. The Sacred Mysteries of Regeneration, celebrated in caves, labyrinths, and pyramids. The great pyramid a symbol of the Soul’s history; the six Crowns, or Acts of initiation: “Betrothal,” “Trial," “Passion,” “Burial,” “Resurrection,” and “Ascension.” The Cup of consummation; the divine Marriage: its three stages, how represented in the Gospels.
PART V. The Twelve Gates of the Heavenly Salem; the Tabernacle; the Round Table and its “bright Lord;” the Number of Perfection; the genealogy of the Man Regenerate; “Christ” no incarnate God or angel, but the highest human. The world’s present condition due to sacerdotal degradation of truth. Christian gospels represent later stages only of regeneration, the earlier ones having been exemplified in the systems of Pythagoras and Buddha. Christianity framed with direct reference to these, not to supersede but to complete them; Buddha and Jesus being necessary to each other, as head and heart of same system. Of these combined will be produced the Religion and Humanity of the future; hence the import of the connection between England and the East. “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” The “Kings of the East,” and the “drying-up of the Euphrates.” The Transfiguration, a prophecy. The “Eastern Question;” its interior significance; the destiny of Islamism.
LECTURE THE NINTH.
GOD AS THE LORD; OR, THE DIVINE IMAGE.
PART I. The two modes of Deity; God as the Lord, in the Bible, the Kabbala, and the Bhagavad-gîtâ. Swedenborg and his doctrine: his limitations and their cause. The Hermetic doctrine. The “Mount of the Lord.” True meanings of “Mystery;” sacerdotal degradation of the term, and its evil results.
PART II. Function of the Understanding in regard to things spiritual. Its place in the systems human and divine. The “Spirit of Understanding,” his various names and symbols, and relation to the Christ. Cognate myths in illustration. Hermes as regarded by the Neo-Platonists and by modern Materialists. Mystic and Materialist, the feud between them. The School of Torturers. The “Mystery of Godliness,” according to Kabbala and Paul. The Pauline doctrine concerning Woman; its contrast with the doctrine of Jesus. Woman according to Plato, Aristotle, Philo, the Fathers, the Church, the Reformation, Milton, Islamism, and Mormonism.
PART III. Charges whereby it is sought to discredit the system of the Mystics; Plagiarism and Enthusiasm: the signification and value of the latter. Ecstasy: its nature and function. Mystics and Materialists, their respective standpoints. Conspiracy of modern science against the Soul. Materialists, ancient and modern, contrasted.
PART IV. Man’s perception of God sensible as well as mental. The Divine Unity, Duality, Trinity, and Plurality. The Logos, or Manifestor. The mystery of the human Facepp.
PART V. The Vision of Adonai.
PART VI. “Christ” as the culmination of Humanity and point of junction with Deity. The Credo of the Elect.
APPENDICES.
I. CONCERNING THE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE.
III. ON PROPHESYING; AND A PROPHECY.
IV. CONCERNING THE NATURE OF SIN
V. CONCERNING THE “GREAT WORK,” AND THE SHARE OF CHRIST JESUS THEREIN.
XIII. FRAGMENTS FROM THE “GOLDEN BOOK OF VENUS.”
PART II. A DISCOURSE OF THE COMMUNION OF SOULS, AND OF THE USES OF LOVE BETWEEN CREATURE AND CREATURE.
PLATES.
Fig. 1. THE CHERUBIM OF EZEKIEL AND THE APOCALYPSE.
Fig. 2. THE TABERNACLE IN THE WILDERNESS.
Fig. 3. SECTION OF THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZEH..
“And the Lord God said unto the serpent I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” – Gen. iii. 14, 15.
“And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” – Apoc. xii. I.
LECTURE THE FIRST.
INTRODUCTORY.
PART I.
THE purpose of the Lectures, of which this is the first, is the exposition of a system of Doctrine and Life, at once scientific, philosophic, and religious, and adapted to all the needs and aspirations of mankind. This system is offered in substitution, on the one hand, for that traditional and dogmatic Conventionalism which, by its failure to meet the tests of science and to respond to the moral instincts, is now by thoughtful persons nearly or wholly discarded; and, on the other hand, for that agnostic Materialism which is rapidly overspreading the world to the destruction of all that is excellent in the nature of man.
2. But although offered in substitution both for that which experience has shown to be defective, and that which is so recent as to be only now in course of reception, the system to be proposed is not itself new; and its present exposition represents, not an Invention as ordinarily understood, but a Restoration. For, as will be shown indubitably, there has been in the world from the earliest ages a system which fulfils all the conditions requisite for endurance; a system which, being founded in the nature of Existence itself, is eternal in its truth and application, and needs but due understanding and observance to enable man by means of it to attain to the highest perfection and satisfaction he can by any possibility imagine or desire. And, as also will be shown, this system is no other than that which all the great religions of the world have, under various guises and with varying degrees of success, striven to express.
3. Our object, therefore, is to restore and to rehabilitate the Truth, by divesting it of all the many limitations, degenerations, perversions, and distortions to which throughout the ages it has been subjected; and by explaining the real meaning of the formulas and symbols which thus far have served rather to conceal than to reveal it. That which we shall propound, therefore, will be no new doctrine or practice; but that only which is either so old as to have become forgotten, or so profound as to have escaped the superficial gaze of modern eyes.
4. Now, in order to be entitled to a hearing in respect of a subject thus momentous and recondite, it is obviously necessary that the claimant should be able to plead some special qualification in the shape of de possession either of an exclusive source of information, or of an unusual faculty. Hence it becomes necessary to include in these introductory remarks an account of the qualification relied on in the present instance.
5. That which is thus claimed is at once a faculty and a source of information, and is, in these days, of rare though not novel occurrence. It is that mode of the mind whereby, after exercising itself in an outward direction as Intellect, in order to obtain cognition of phenomena, it returns towards its centre, as Intuition, and be ascertaining the essential idea of the fact apprehended through the senses, completes the process of its thought. And just as only by the combined and equal operation of the modes termed centrifugal and centripetal, of force, the solar system is sustained; so only by the equilibrium of the modes, intellectual and intuitional, of the mind, can man complete the system of his thought, and attain to certitude of truth. And as well might we attempt to construct the solar system by means of an exercise of force in one direction, the human system by means of one sex, or the nervous system by means of the motor roots only, as to attain to knowledge by means of one mode only of mind. It is, however, precisely in this manner that the materialistic hypothesis errs; and by its error it has forfeited all claim to be accounted a system.
6. The Intuition, then, is that operation of the mind whereby we are enabled to gain access to the interior and permanent region of our nature, and there to possess ourselves of the knowledge which, in the long ages of her past existences, the Soul has made her own. For that in us which perceives and permanently remembers is the Soul. And inasmuch as, in order to obtain her full development, she remains for thousands of years in connection, more or less close, with Matter, until, perfected by experience of all the lessons afforded by the body, she passes on the higher conditions of being; it follows that no knowledge which the race has once acquired in the past can be regarded as hopelessly lost to the present.
7. But the memory of the soul is not the only factor in spiritual evolution. The faculty which we have named the Intuition, is completed and crowned by the operation of Divine Illumination. Theologically, this illumination is spoken of as the Descent of the Holy Spirit, or outpouring of the heavenly efflux, which kindles into a flame in the soul, as the sun’s rays in a lens. Thus, to the fruits of the soul’s experience in the past, is added the “grace” or luminance of the Spirit; the baptism of Fire which, falling from on high, sanctifies and consummates the results of the baptism of Water springing from the earth. To be illumined by this inward Light, to be united with this abiding divinity, was ever the ardent aspiration of the seeker after God in all times and of all lands, whether Egyptian Epopt, Hindu Yogi, Greek Neoplatonist, Arab Sufi, or Christian Gnostic. By the last named it was styled the Paraclete and Revealer, by whom man is led into all truth. With the Hindu it was Atman, the All-seeing, not subject to rebirths like the soul, and redeeming from the vicissitudes of destiny. By the combined operation of this Light, and the enhancement it effects in the intuitions of the soul, – enabling her to convert her knowledge into wisdom, – the human race has been from age to age perpetually carried up to higher levels of its evolution, and will, in due course, be enabled to substantialize in itself and to be all that in the past it has known and desired of perfection.
8. These Lectures, then, represent the result of intuitional memory, quickened and enhanced, we believe, by some measure of the divine influx, and developed by the only mode of life ever found compatible with sound philosophic aspirations. And of the doctrine we seek to restore, the basis is the Pre-existence and Perfectibility of the Soul. The former, because, but for her persistence, progressive genesis, or gradual becoming, would be impossible. For development depends upon memory, and is the result of the intelligent application of knowledge gained by experience, in satisfaction of the needs of the individual; the sense of need being complemented by a sense of power.
And the Perfectibility; because, as a portion of the Divine Being – which is God – constituted of the Divine Substance and illumined by the Divine Spirit, she, the Soul, is necessarily capable of all that her nature implies; and competent to realize for the individuality animated by her, the injunction of the great Master of mystical science; “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
9. It is necessary for the elucidation of our system to speak yet further of the constitution of man. Concerning this, our doctrine is that which has prevailed from the earliest times, and in all philosophical religions. According to this doctrine, man is possessed of a fourfold nature, a speciality which differentiates him from all other creatures. The four elements which constitute him are, counting from without inwards, the material body, the fluidic perisoul or astral body, the soul or individual, and the spirit, or divine Father, and life of his system. This last it is whose kingdom is described as the leaven taken by the woman, – the divine Sophia or Wisdom, – and hidden in three measures of meal, namely, the soul, the perisoul, and the body, until the whole is leavened; until, that is, the whole man is so permeated and lightened by it that he is finally transmuted into Spirit, and becomes “one with God.”
10. This doctrine of the fourfold nature of man, finds expression also in the Hebrew Scriptures, being symbolized by the four rivers of Eden – or human nature – flowing from one source, which is God; and by the four elemental living beings of Ezekiel, and their four wheels or circles, each of which denotes a region and principality or power. It has its correspondence also in the four interpretations of all mystical Scriptures, which are the natural, the intellectual, the ethical, and the spiritual; and also in the unit of all physical existence, the physiologic cell. For this, as the student of Histology knows, is composed, from without inwards, first of cell-membrane or capsule, which is not a separable envelope, but a mere coagulative sheathing of its fluidic part; secondly, of the protoplasmic medium; thirdly, of the nucleus, itself a mode of protoplasmic substance; and, lastly, of an element not present in all cells, and often when present difficult to perceive, namely, the nucleolus, or inmost and perfectly transparent element. Thus does man, as the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, exemplify in very detail of his system the fundamental doctrine of the famous Hermetic philosophy by which the expression of every true Bible is controlled, the doctrine, namely, of Correspondence. “As is the outer, so is the inner; as is the small, so is the great: there is but one law; and He that worketh is One. Nothing is small, nothing is great in the Divine Economy.”
11. In these words are contained at once the principle of the universe and the secret of the Intuition. She it is, the Divine woman of man’s mental system, that opens to him the “perfect way,” the “way of the Lord,” that “path of the just which, as a shining light, shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” And her complete restoration, crowning, and exaltation, is the one condition essential to that realization of the ideal perfection of man’s nature, which, mystically, is called “the Finding of Christ.”
12. Now, the modes whereby the intuition operates are two, namely, Perception and Memory. By the former, man understands and interprets; by the latter, he retains and utilizes. Perceiving, recollecting, and applying, the mind enacts for itself a process analogous to that which occurs in the physical organism. For its operations correspond to the three physiological processes of Nutrition, – prehension, digestion, and absorption.
13. When the uninitiated person, or materialist, denies positively, as, with curious inconsistency, such persons do deny, the possibility of positive knowledge, and declares that “all that we know is, nothing can be known,” he speaks truly so far as concerns himself and his fellows. “The natural man” as the apostle declares, “perceiveth not the things that are of the Spirit, for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them because they are spiritually discerned. But the spiritual man judgeth all things, and he himself is judged of no man.” While the two orders here indicated refer to the inner and outer, or soul and body, of each individual, they refer also to the two great divisions of mankind, – they who as yet recognize the body only, and they who are so far unfolded in their interior nature as to recognize the soul also. Of these last is the initiate of sacred mysteries. Following his intuition, such an one directs the force of his mind inwards, and, – provided his will is subordinated to and made one with the Divine will, – passes within the veil, and knows even as he is known. For, as the apostle says again, “What man knoweth the things of a man save the man himself? So, likewise, the things of God no man knoweth, save the Spirit of God within the man. And the Spirit knoweth all things and revealeth them unto the man.” As thus by means of our Divine part we apprehend the Divine, no such apprehension is possible to him who does not, in some degree, reflect the Divine image. “For if thine eye be evil, thy whole body is full of darkness. If, then, the very means of light in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”
14. Matter is the antithetical ultimate of Spirit. Wherefore the enemy of spiritual vision is always Materialism. It is therefore by the dematerialization of himself that man obtains the seeing eye and hearing ear in respect of Divine things. Dematerialism consists, not in the separation of the soul from the body, but in the purification of both soul and body from the engrossment by the things of sense. It is but another example of the doctrine of correspondence. As with the vision of things physical, so with that of things spiritual. Purity alike of instrument and medium is indispensable to perception.
15. This, then, is the nature and function of the Intuition. By living so purely in thought and deed as to prevent the interposition of any barrier between his exterior and his interior, his phenomenal and his substantial self; and by steadfastly cultivating harmonious relations between these two, – by subordinating the whole of his system to the Divine central Will, whose seat is in the soul, – the man gains full access to the stores of knowledge laid up in his soul, and attains to the cognition alike of God and of the universe. And for him, as is said, “ There is nothing hid which shall not be revealed.”
16. And it is not his own memory alone that, thus endowed, he reads. The very planet of which he is the offspring, is, like himself, a Person, and is possessed of a medium of memory. And he to whom the soul lends her ears and eyes, may have knowledge not only of his own past history, but of the past history of the planet, as beheld in the pictures imprinted in the magnetic light whereof the planet’s memory consists. For there are actually ghosts of events, manes of past circumstances, shadows on the protoplasmic mirror, which can be evoked.
17. But beyond and above the power to read the memory of himself or of the planet, is the power to penetrate to that innermost sphere wherein the soul obtains and treasures up her knowledge of God. This is the faculty whereby true revelation occurs. And revelation, even in this its highest sense, is, no less than reason, a proper prerogative of man, and belongs of right to him in his highest and completest measure of development.
18. For placed as is the soul between the outer and the inner, mediator between the material and the spiritual, she looks inwards as well as outwards, and by experience learns the nature and method of God; and according to the degree of her elevation, purity, and desire, sees, reflects, and transmits God. It is in virtue of the soul’s position between the worlds of substance and of phenomenon, and her consequent ability to refer things to their essential ideas, that in her, and her alone, resides an instrument of knowledge competent for the comprehension of Truth even the highest, which she only is able to behold face to face. It is no hyperbole that is involved in the saying, “The pure in heart see God.” True, the man cannot see God. But the Divine in man sees God. And this occurs when, by means of his soul’s union with God, the man becomes “one with the Father,” and beholds God with the eyes of God.
19. That is not really knowledge which is without understanding. And the knowledge acquired by man through the soul, involves the understanding of all things apprehended. Now, to understand a thing, is to get intellectually into, beyond, and around it; to know the reasons of and for it; and to perceive clearly that it, and it only under the circumstances, is and could by any possibility be true. Apart from such knowledge and understanding, belief is impossible. For that is not belief, in any sense worthy of the term, which is not of knowledge. And only that belief saves which is conjoined with understanding. For the Rock on which the true Church is built, is the Understanding.
20. Such is the meaning of the words of Jesus on the memorable occasion of Peter’s confession of him. It was not to the man Simon that was applied the apostrophe, – “Thou art Peter, the rock, and upon this will I build my Church;” but to the eternal and immutable Spirit of Understanding, by means of which the disciple had “Found Christ.” Thus the utterance of Jesus had reference, not to the man, but to the Spirit who informed the man, and whom with his spiritual eyes the Master discerned.
21. We have said that the soul, with the eyes of understanding, looks two ways, inwards as well as outwards. It is interesting to remember that this characteristic of the soul was typified under the image of the two-faced divinity, Janus Bifron, or, as called by Plutarch, Iannos. Now Janus is the same as Jonas. Wherefore it is said that Simon, the expositor of the true doctrine, is the son of Jonas, meaning the Understanding. Janus is also the doorkeeper, as is Peter in Catholic tradition. And for this reason a door is called janua , and the first month or entrance of the year, January. Janus thus came to be regarded, like Peter, as the elder, the renewer of time, and the guardian of the outermost circle of the system, and one therefore with Saturn. And as the former was called Pater Janus, so the latter was called Peter Jonas, the Rock of Understanding. And he is represented, as also is Peter, standing in a ship, and holding in one hand a staff and in the other a key. By this is signified, that to the Understanding, born of the experiences of Time, belong the Rod of the Diviner, – or the power of the Will, – and the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Wherefore, the real chief of the apostles in the true Church, – that which by its knowledge of the mysteries of existence, alone can open the gates of eternal life, – is the Understanding.
22. The priesthoods, materializing, as is their wont, divine things, have applied the utterance of Jesus to the man Simon and his successors in office; but with the most disastrous consequences. For, ignoring the understanding, and putting asunder that which God has joined together, – Faith and Reason, – they have made something other than Mind the criterion of truth.
To this divorce between the elements masculine and feminine of man’s intellectual system, is due the prevailing unbelief. For, converted thereby into superstition, religion has been rendered ridiculous; and instead of being exhibited as the Supreme Reason, – God has been depicted as the Supreme Unreason. Against religion, as thus presented, mankind has done well to revolt. To have remained subject, had been intellectual suicide. Wherefore the last person entitled to reproach the world for its want of faith is the Priest; since it is his degradation of the character of God, that has ministered to unbelief. Suppressing the “woman,” who is the intuition, by putting themselves in her place, the priests have suppressed also the man, who is the intellect. And so the whole of humanity is extinguished. Of the influences under which Sacerdotalism has acquired its evil repute, a full account will appear as we proceed.
23. In these lectures, then, the practice denounced will be exchanged for the original method of all true Churches. And appeal will be made to that consensus of all the faculties, sensible, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, comprised in the constitution of man, wherein consists Common Sense. It is not upon any authority of book, person, tradition, or order, that we ourselves rely, or that we invite the attention of others. Reference will indeed be made, as already, to various sacred and other sources, but only for illustration, interpretation, or confirmation. For, confident in the knowledge that all things have their procession from Mind, and that consequently Mind is competent for the comprehension of all things; and also that Mind is eternally one and the same; – we have no fear of antagonism between the perceptions of the present and those of the past, however remote that past be. Only let it be remembered, the appeal is, in all cases, to perception, and in no case, to prejudice or convention. In proceeding from God, all things proceed from pure Reason; and only by Reason which, in being unwarped by prejudice and unobscured by Matter, is pure, can anything be rightly apprehended.
24. Hence it is that the disposition which refers everything, for instance, to a book, and this, perhaps, one arbitrarily selected from among many similar books; or that refuses to accept truth save on the authority of miracle, is a superstitious disposition, and one that opposes as insuperable a barrier to knowledge as does the materialism, – no less superstitious, – which, constructing an hypothesis independently of facts, rejects all evidence which conflicts with its hypothesis. It is precisely a materialism such as this which, in the recoil from superstition of one kind, has plunged the age headlong into superstition of another kind. For the cultus of the present day, – that of Matter, – is the most stupendous example of Fetish-worship the world has ever seen. But of this we shall have more to say further on. It is necessary here but to remind those who worship a book, that things are not true because they are in a Bible; but that they are in a Bible because previously recognized as true. And miracles, – which are natural effects of exceptional causes, – may indeed be proofs of occult power and skill, but are no evidence of the truth of any doctrine.
25. The following story from the Talmud will serve both to lighten our lecture and to illustrate our position in this respect:
“On a certain day, Rabbi Eliezer ben Orcanaz replied to the questions proposed to him concerning his teaching; but his arguments being found to be inferior to his pretensions, the doctors present refused to admit his conclusions. The Rabbi Eliezer said, ‘My doctrine is true, and this karoub tree, which is near us shall demonstrate the infallibility of my teaching.’ Immediately the karoub tree, obeying the voice of Eliezer, arose out of the ground and planted itself a hundred cubits farther off. But the Rabbis shook their heads and answered, ‘The karoub tree proves nothing.’ ‘What,’ cried Eliezer, ‘you resist so great a miracle? Then let this rivulet flow backwards, and attest the truth of my doctrine.’ Immediately the rivulet obeying the command of Eliezer, flowed backwards towards its source. But again the Rabbis shook their heads and said, ‘The rivulet proves nothing. We must understand before we can believe.’ ‘Will you believe me,’ said Rabbi Eliezer, ‘if the walls of this house wherein we sit should fall down?’ And the walls, obeying him, began to fall, until Rabbi Joshua exclaimed, ‘By what right do the walls interfere in our debates?’ Then the walls stopped in their fall out of respect to Rabbi Joshua, but remained leaning out of respect for Rabbi Eliezer, and remain leaning until this day. But Eliezer, mad with rage, cried out: ‘Then in order to confound you, and since you compel me to it, let a voice from heaven be heard!’ And immediately the Bath-Kol, or Voice from heaven, was heard at a great height in the air, and it said, ‘What are all the opinions of the Rabbis compared to the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer? When he has spoken, his opinion ought to prevail.’ Hereupon Rabbi Joshua rose and said, ‘It is written, “The law is not in heaven; it is in your mouth and in your heart.” It is in your reason; for again it is written, “I have left you free to choose between life and death and good and evil.” And it is in your conscience; for “if ye love the Lord and obey His voice within you, you will find happiness and truth.” Wherefore then does Rabbi Eliezer bring in a karoub tree, a rivulet, a wall, and a voice to settle questions of doctrine? And what is the only conclusion that can be drawn from such miracles, but that they who have expounded the laws of nature have not wholly understood them, and that we must now admit that in certain cases a tree can unroot itself, a rivulet flow backwards, walls obey instructions, and voices sound in the air? But what connection is there between these observations and the teaching of Rabbi Eliezer? No doubt these miracles were very extraordinary, and they have filled us with astonishment; but to amaze is not to argue, and it is argument, not phenomena, that we require. When, therefore, Rabbi Eliezer shall have proved to us that karoub trees, rivulets, walls, and unknown voices afford us, by unusual manifestations, reasonings equal in value and weight to that reason which God has placed within us to guide our judgment, then alone will we make use of such testimonies and estimate them as Eliezer requires.’”
To the same purport the famous commentator, Maimonides, says, “When thy senses affirm that which thy reason denies, reject the testimony of thy senses, and listen only to thy reason.”
26. Having spoken of the Soul’s functions, and of her relation to man, we come now to speak of her nature and history. Whether of the individual or of the universal, Soul is Substance, that which sub-stands all phenomena. This substance is original protoplasm; at once that which makes and that which becomes. The first manifestation of substance is in the interplanetary ether, called by Homer the “Middle Air,” and known in the terminology of Occultism as the Astral Fluid. This, be it observed, is not soul, but that whereby soul is manifest, and in which it potentially subsists. Matter is the ultimate expression of substance, and represents that condition in which it is furthest removed from its original state, as the membranous capsule which forms the circumference of the physiologic cell represents the ultimate expression of the fluidic contents.
27. The soul may be likened to the nucleus of the cell. The protoplasmic medium which is found within the capsular envelope and in which the nucleus floats, may be likened to the astral fluid, whether interplanetary or intercellular. But the nucleus, the fluidic body surrounding it, and the exterior membrane, are all equally protoplasmic in nature, and the potentiality of one is in all; the difference actually observable among them being due only to difference of condition.
28. All the elements of the cell, however, – the nucleus included, – are material; whereas Matter itself is, whatever its kind, a mode of Substance, of which the nature is spiritual. But though Substance is, by its nature, Spirit, there is a sense in which Spirit is not Substance. This is the sense in which Spirit denotes will or energy, as distinguished from the Substance in which this inheres. Under impulsion of the Spirit as thus defined, Substance exchanges its static for a dynamic condition, repose for activity, becoming molecularized, and therefore materialized, in the process. It does not, however, cease to be Substance by becoming Matter; but Matter ceases to be Matter by cessation of motion. Matter may thus be defined as Substance in a state of incessant, intense activity, which is the condition of every particle in the universe. From the microscopic molecule to the planet everything revolves impelled by one force, and obeying one law.
29. The truth that Matter is Substance in its dynamic condition was well-known to the hierophants of ancient India and Egypt, and finds expression in the Hebrew sacred books, –which are Egyptian in origin, – in the phrase, – “And on the seventh day, God ended his work, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.”
This “resting” – which is not annihilation but repose, – involves the return of Matter to its static condition of Substance. The idea presented is that of cessation of active creative force, and the consequent return of phenomenal existence into essential being. This stage it is which constitutes the termination of the creative period, and the perfection of every creative work. It is at once the “rest which remains for the people of God;” the attainment of perfection by the individual, system, or race; and the return of the universe into the bosom of God, by re-absorption into the original substance. The Buddhist terms it Nirvana; and the period of which it is the termination is called by the Hindus, Kalpa, a word signifying Form. And they hold that the universe undergoes a succession of Kalpas, being at the end of each reabsorbed into Deity, Who then rests awhile prior to the next manifestation, reposing upon Sesha, the celestial “serpent,” or living circle of Eternity, the symbol of essential Being, as opposed to existence in its strict sense of manifested Being.
30. For, as will by-and-by be more fully shown, the substance of the soul, and therein of all things, and the substance of Deity, are one and the same; since there is but one Substance. And of this substance, the life is also called God, Who, as living Substance, is at once Life and Substance, one and yet twain, or two in one. And that which is begotten of these two, and is, theologically, called the Son, and the Word, is necessarily the expression of both, and is, potentially, the Universe, for He creates it after His own Divine image by means of the Spirit He has received. Now the Divine Substance is, in its original condition, homogeneous. Every monad of it, therefore, possesses the potentialities of the whole. Of such a monad, in its original condition, every individual soul consists. And of the same substance, projected into lower conditions, the material universe consists. It undergoes, however, no radical change of nature through such projection; but its manifestation – on whatever plane occurring – is always as is the evolution of its Trinity. Thus – to reckon from without inwards, and below upwards – on the plane physical it is Force, universal Ether, and their offspring the material World. On the plane intellectual it is Life, Substance, and Formulation. On the plane spiritual – its original point of radiation – it is Will, Wisdom, and the Word. And on all planes whatsoever, it is, in some mode, Father, Mother, and Child. For “there are Three which bear record in ‘heaven,’ or the invisible, and these Three are One. And there are three which bear record on ‘earth,’ or the visible, and these three agree in one, being Spirit, Soul, and Body.”
31. The soul’s entrance into Matter, and primal manifestation as an individual, occurs in the lowest modes of organic life, and is due to the convergence of the magnetic poles of the constituent molecules of some protoplasmic entity, an action due to the working of the Spirit in the Matter concerned. For all Matter, it must be remembered, has, and is, Spirit. The focusing of these poles gives rise to a circular magnetic current, of which the result is an electric combustion, which is the vital spark, organic life, Soul. It is, however, no new creation in the ordinary sense of the term. For nothing can be either added to or withdrawn from the universe. It is but a new condition of the one substance already existing, a condition which constitutes a fresh act of individualization on the part of that substance. It has become by self-generation, a soul or nucleus to the cell in which it has manifested itself. Such is the mode of operation of Substance, whether as manifested in the human soul or in the physiologic cell.
32. The doctrine of creation by development or evolution is a true doctrine, and is in no way inconsistent with the idea of divine operation; but the development is not of the original substance. Being infinite and eternal, that is perfect always. Development is of the manifestation of the qualities of that substance in the individual.
Development is intelligible only by the recognition of the inherent consciousness of the substance of existence. Of the qualities of that substance as manifested in the individual, Form is the expression. And it is because development is directed by conscious, experienced, and continually experiencing intelligence, which is ever seeking to eliminate the rudimentary and imperfect, that progression occurs in respect of Form. The highest product, man, is the result of the Spirit working intelligently within. But man attains his highest, and becomes perfect only through his own voluntary co-operation with the Spirit.
There is no mode of Matter in which the potentiality of personality, and therein of man, does not subsist. For every molecule is a mode of the universal consciousness. Without consciousness is no being. For consciousness is being.
33. The earliest manifestation of consciousness appears in the obedience paid to the laws of gravitation and chemical affinity, which constitute the basis of the later, evolved organic laws of nutritive assimilation. And the perception, memory, and experience represented in man, are the accumulations of long ages of toil and thought gradually advancing, through the development of the consciousness, from inorganic combinations upward to God. Such is the secret meaning of the old mystery story which relates how Deucalion and Pyrrha, under the direction of Themis (Wisdom) produced men and women from stones, and so peopled the renewed earth. These words of John the Baptist bear a similar signification: – “Verily I say unto you, that even of these stones God is able to raise up children unto Abraham.” And by children of Abraham, are denoted that “spiritual Israel,” the pure seekers after God, who finally attain and become one with the object of their quest.
34. As between Spirit and Matter, so between the organic and the inorganic, there is no real barrier. Nature works in spirals, and works intelligently. In all that modern science has of truth, in respect of the doctrine of Evolution, it was anticipated thousands of years ago. But the scientists of old, using a faculty of the very existence of which those of the present day hear but to jeer at it, discerned in Soul the agent, and in Mind, the efficient cause of all progress. They perceived, as all now perceive who only allow themselves to think, that were Matter, as ordinarily regarded, all that is, and blind force its impelling agent, no explanation would be possible of the obviously intelligent adaptation everywhere apparent of means to ends; the strong set of the current life in the direction of beauty and goodness; and the differentiation of uses, functions, and kinds, not only in cellular tissues, but even in crystalline inorganic elements. Why should Matter, if only what ordinarily it is supposed, – unconscious, aimless, purposeless, – differentiate, diversify, develop? This is the question the ancients asked themselves; and they were keen enough to see that in their very ability to ask it, lay the solution of the problem. For the question was prompted by Mind, and the presence of Mind in the product man, involves its presence in the substance whereof man consists, seeing that an extract cannot contain that which is not in its original abstract.
35. The reasonableness of this proposition is, however, at length beginning once again to be recognized even in the prevailing school, by some of the more intelligent of its members; one of these having recently declared it necessary, in order to account for the facts of existence, to credit Matter with a “little feeling.” (The late Professor Clifford.) This is an admission, which, carried to its legitimate issue, involves the recognition of the system now under exposition. For it involves the recognition of God and the Soul. Thus is modern science, painfully and against its will, working back towards the great doctrine taught long ages ago in the lodges of the Indian and Egyptian Mysteries, and verified by the spiritual experience of every epopt who lived the life prescribed as the condition of illumination.
36. This is the doctrine known as that of the Transmigration of Souls. Of this doctrine the following concise description is taken from a translation dated 1650 of one of the so-called Hermetic books, which emanating from Alexandria, and dating from pre-Christian or early Christian times, represent – at least in a measure – the esoteric doctrine of the Egyptian and other ancient religious systems. Of this body of writings only a few fragments survive. The passage cited is from book iv of the work called The Divine Pymander, or Shepherd, of Hermes Trismegistus.
“From one Soul of the Universe are all those Souls which in all the World are tossed up and down as it were, and severally divided. Of these Souls there are many Changes, some into a more fortunate Estate, and some quite contrary. And they which are of Creeping Things are changed into those of Watery Things, and those of Things Living in the Water to those of Things living on the Land; and Airy ones into Men; and Human Souls that lay hold of Immortality are changed into (holy) Daemons. And so they go on into the Sphere of the Gods. . . . And this is the most perfect glory of the Soul. But the Soul entering into the Body of a Man, if it continue evil, shall neither taste of Immortality nor be Partaker of the Good; but being drawn back the same Way, it returneth into Creeping Things. And this is the Condemnation of an evil Soul.”
37. The doctrine of the Progression and Migration of Souls, and of the power of man, while still in the body, to recover the recollections of his soul, constituted the foundation of all those ancient religions out of which Christianity had its birth; and was therefore universally communicated to all initiates of the sacred mysteries. And, indeed, one of the special objects of the curriculum of these institutions, was to enable the candidate to recover the memory of his previous incarnations, with a view to his total emancipation from the body. For the attainment of this power was regarded as a token that the final regeneration of the individual – when he would no longer have need of the body and its lessons – was well-nigh accomplished. Thus the prime object of the ancient lodges which constituted the pre-Christian Churches, was the culture of the soul as the divine and permanent element of the individual.
38. Various eminent sages are said to have remembered some at least of their previous incarnations; and notably Krishna, Pythagoras, Plato, Apollonius, and the Budha Gautama. This last – the “Messenger,” who fulfilled for the mystics of the East the part which six hundred years later was, for the mystics of the West, fulfilled by Jesus, – is stated to have recovered the recollection of five hundred and fifty of his own incarnations. And the chief end of his doctrine is to induce men so to live as to shorten the number and duration of their earth-lives. “He,” say the Hindu Scriptures, “who in his lifetime recovers the memory of all that his soul has learnt, is already a god.”
Socrates also is represented as distinctly asserting the doctrine of reincarnation; and it was implied, if not expressed in the system formulated by the superb modern thinker and scientist, Leibnitz.
39. Following the Rabbins and especially the Pharisees, Josephus asserted the return of Souls into new bodies. Nor are recognitions of the doctrine wanting in the Old and New Testaments. Thus the writer of the Book of Wisdom says of himself: “Being good, I came into a body undefiled.” The prophets Daniel and John are told by their inspiring angel that they shall stand again on the earth in the last days of the Dispensation. And of John it was also intimated by Jesus that he should tarry within reach of the earth-life, either for reincarnation or metempsychosis, when the appointed time should come. And of that great school which, apparently because it approached too near the truth to be safely tolerated by a materializing sacerdotalism, was denounced as the most dangerously heretical, – the school of the Gnostics, – the leader Carpocrates, taught that the Founder of Christianity also was simply a person who, having a soul of great age and high degree of purity, had been enabled, through his mode of life, to recover the memory of its past. And Paul’s description of him as a “Captain of Salvation made perfect through suffering,” obviously implies a course of experience far in excess of any that is predicable of a single brief career.
To these instances must be added that of the question put to Jesus by his disciples respecting the blind man whom he had cured: “Did this man sin, or his parents, that he was born blind?” For it shows either that the belief in transmigration was a popular one among the Jews, or that Jesus had inculcated it in his disciples. His refusal to satisfy their curiosity is readily intelligible on the supposition that he was unwilling to disclose the affairs of other souls.
40. The opening chapters of the Book of Genesis imply the like doctrine. For they present creation as occurring through a gradual evolution from the lowest types upwards, –from gaseous elemental combinations to the crowning manifestation of humanity in woman, –and thus indicate the animal as ministering to the human in a sense widely differing from that ordinarily supposed; for they represent the animal as the younger self of the man, namely, as man rudimentary. All this is involved in the fact that the term applied to the genesis of living things below man, signifies soul, (Heb., “NEPHESH”; i.e., the lowest mode of soul.) and is so translated when applied to man: whereas applied to beasts it is rendered “living creature.” Thus, had the Bible been accurately translated, the doctrine that all creatures whatsoever represent incarnations, though in different conditions, of one and the same universal soul, would not now need to be re-declared, or, when re-declared would not be received with repugnance. That it does produce such a feeling, is a sign how far man has receded from a level once attained, at least in respect of his affectional nature. For the doctrine of a universal soul is the doctrine of love, in that it implies the recognition of the larger self. It represents, moreover, Humanity as the one universal creation of which all living things are but different steps either of development or of degradation, progression or retrogression, ascent or descent; that which determines the present condition and ultimate destiny of each individual entity, being its own will and affections. Animals appeared first on earth, not, as is vainly supposed, to minister to man’s physical wants, but as an essential preliminary to humanity itself. On no other hypothesis is their existence intelligible for the long ages which elapsed before the appearance of man.
41. Thus, not only is the doctrine respectable for its antiquity, universality, and the quality and character of those who, on the strength of their own experience, have borne testimony to it; it is indispensable to any system of thought which postulates Justice as an essential element of Being. For it, and it alone of all methods ever suggested, solves the problem of the universe by resolving the otherwise insuperable difficulties which confront us in regard to the inequalities of earthly circumstance and relation.
The importance attached to it by the Egyptians is shown by the fact that they chose for their chief religious symbol an embodiment of it. For in representing the lowest as linked to the highest, – the loins of the creature of prey to the head and breast of the Woman, – the Sphinx denoted at once the unity, and the method of development, under individualization, of the soul of the universal humanity.
PART II
42. WE will now define more precisely the nature of the system we seek to restore, and its relation towards that so long in possession in the West. Although neither Christian nor Catholic in the accepted sense of these terms, it claims to be both Christian and Catholic in their original and true sense, and to be itself the lawful heir, whose inheritance has been usurped by a presentment altogether corrupt, false, superstitious, idolatrous.
According to the system recovered, the Christ Jesus, Redeemer, and Saviour, while equally its beginning, middle, and end, is not a mere historical personage, but, above and beyond this, a Spiritual Ideal and an Eternal Verity. Recognizing fully that which Jesus was and did, it sets forth salvation as depending, not on what any man has said or done, but on what God perpetually reveals. For, according to it, Religion is not a thing of the past, or of any one age, but is an ever-present, ever-occurring actuality; for every man one and the same; a process complete in itself for each man; and for him subsisting irrespective of any other man whatsoever. It thus recognizes as the actors in the momentous drama of the soul two persons only, the individual himself and God. And whereas in it alone is to be found a complete and reasonable exposition of the parts assigned to both in the work of salvation, all competing systems must be regarded as but an aspiration towards or a degeneration from it, and as true only in so far as they accord with it.
43. And here it may be remarked, that the doctrine of religion as a present reality, needing no historic basis, is one which in this age ought to find especial welcome. For, what now is the condition of men’s minds in respect to the historical element of the existing religion? None but those who through lack of education stand necessarily upon the old ways, have any reliance upon it. Critical analysis – that function of the mind which, in its nature destructive, is, nevertheless, really harmful only to that which, in being untrue, has not in itself the element of perpetuity – has laid an unsparing axe to the forest of ancient tradition. The science of Biblical exegesis has made it obvious to every percipient mind that sacred books, so far from being infallible records of actual events, abound with inaccuracies, contradictions, and interpolations; that sacred persons, if they existed at all, had histories differing widely from those narrated of them; that sacred events could not have occurred in the manner stated; and that sacred doctrines are, for the most part, either intrinsically absurd, or common to systems yet more ancient, whose claims to sanctity are denied.
44. Thus, to take the leading items of Christian belief, – the whole story of the Incarnation, the expectation of the Messiah, the announcement by the angel, the conception by the Virgin, the birth at midnight in a cave, the name of the immaculate mother, the appearance to shepherds of the celestial host, the visit of the Magi, the flight from the persecuting Herod, the slaughter of the innocents, the finding of the divine boy in the temple, the baptism, the fasting and trial in the wilderness, the conversion of the water into wine, and other like marvels, the triumphal entry into the holy city, the passion, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension, and much of the teaching ascribed to the Saviour, – all these are variously attributed also to Osiris, Mithras, Iacchos, Zoroaster, Krishna, Buddha, and others, at dates long antecedent to the Christian era. And monuments and sculptures still exist, showing that the entire story of the Divine Man of the gospels was, long before Moses, taught to communicants and celebrated in sacraments in numberless colleges of sacred mysteries.
45. The Fathers of the Church, – who were well aware of these facts, – dealt with them variously according to the tone and resources of their individual minds. Many of the most notable, including St. Augustine, saw the truth in its proper light; but the explanation accepted was, that the Devil, foreknowing the counsel and intention of God, had maliciously forestalled the career of the true Messiah by false semblances, causing it to be enacted in anticipation by a number of spurious messiahs, so that when the world’s true redeemer should appear, he might be lost, as it were, in the crowd of his predecessors, and shorn of all particular glory.
46. And what, it may be asked, of the personage just mentioned, who plays so enormous part in the orthodox presentment? He, too, is a perversion of a truth, the real meaning of which will by-and-by be exhibited. It is sufficient to remark here, that, in being founded, – as by the current corrupt orthodoxy, – on the conception of a personal and, virtually, a divine principle of evil, Christianity is made to rest upon an hypothesis altogether monstrous and impossible.
47. There is neither space nor need to particularize the strictures to which the Bible throughout is fairly open, alike on grounds historical, moral, and scientific; or to speak of the many ecclesiastical Councils which, from century to century, have dealt with its component books, variously affirming or denying their canonicity; or to point out the innumerable contradictions and inconsistencies, of doctrine and of narrative with which it abounds. These things, already familiar to many, are readily verifiable by all. This only must be insisted on: to be a student of religion, to be a theologian in the true sense, it is necessary to have knowledge, not of one religion only, but of all religions, not of one sacred book only, but of all sacred books; and to deal with all as with the one, and with the one as with all; to handle the Vedas, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Lalita-Vistara, the Zend-Avesta, and the Kabbala with the same reverence as the Old and New Testaments; and to apply to these the same critical touchstone as to those. It is truth alone which is valuable, and this fears nothing. The crucible does not hurt the gold. The dross alone falls away under the test; and of the dross we are surely well rid.
48. And when all this has been done; when the mind, purified from prejudice and disciplined by experience, has become an instrument of knowledge competent for the discernment of truth, what, it will be asked, remains to man of his faith and hope, his God and his soul? We know the reply of the Materialist. He, as has been wittily said, throws away the child with the water in which it has been washed. Because he finds impurity obstructing the truth, he rejects the truth together with the impurity. That which remains is the real, ever-living religion; a Divine and operating Word, and not a testament of the dead; a God and a Soul who, as Parent and Offspring, are able to come into direct and palpable relations with each other. And the Creation, the Fall, the Redemption, and the Ascension – rescued from the tomb of the past – become living and eternal verities, enacted by every child of God in his own soul; and Inspiration once more lifts its voice and is heard among us as truly as of old.
49. For those, then, who, being indeed of Christ, as well as called by his name, know by personal experience that “the kingdom of heaven is within,” there is no cause for anxiety as to the issue of any investigation, critical, scientific, or historical, how keen and unsparing so ever For they know that Religion – which is the Science of Life Eternal, – appeals, not to the bodily senses, but to the soul, since no mere physical phenomena can have any relation to spiritual needs. They know, too, that in representing absolute, eternal verities, religious ideas are beyond the reach of any power of earth to erase or destroy them. But they who, on the contrary, have staked their all of faith in God and hope in heaven upon the special events of a particular period and place, have indeed ground for dismay and despair when they behold in the sculptured remains of other places and remoter times, the effigies of the like events, – the crucifixion of Mithras, the infant Horus or Krishna in the arms of an immaculate mother, the resurrection of Osiris, and the ascension of Heracles. For they see in these, the invalidation, or at least the perplexing multiplication, of events which, on their hypothesis, ought to have happened but once in the world’s – nay in the universe’s – whole history, and on the correct reporting of which their eternal welfare depends. The actual value of these facts will appear as we proceed. They are cited here in demonstration of the fallacy involved in the conception of religion as a thing dependent on history. Rightly interpreted, they will show that the Soul has no relation to phenomena, and that “the kingdom of Christ is not of this world.”
50. The Gospels bear evidence of being compiled or adapted in great measure from older Oriental Scriptures. But whether or not the events related happened only in part or not at all; whether they were put into their present form by Alexandrian Epopts some hundred years after the date assigned in them to the events they record; or whether their central figure, being himself an Initiate and Adept in the religious science of Egypt and India, actually rehearsed in his own person the greater part of the sacred mysteries, – is, happily, but of secondary importance. And even were it otherwise, it is obvious that the further we get away from the period of the events relied on, and the more years multiply upon us, thrusting that past into still remoter times and ever deepening shades of antiquity, the more difficult must the task of verification become, and the weaker the influences exerted upon man’s moral and intellectual nature. Alas for the hopes of the generations yet to be born, if an historical Christianity be indeed essential to salvation? Nor can we be blind to the injustice and cruelty of making salvation dependent upon belief in occurrences concerning which only a learned few can at any time be in a position to judge whether or not they ever took place; and these, moreover, occurrences of a nature to be a priori incredible save to an elect few. Assuredly, if any demonstration be needed of the necessary unsoundness of a system which rests upon history, it is to be found in the present condition of Christianity. Declining to entrust its doctrine to Reason, the Church has taken its stand upon historical evidence, only to find this give way under it; and it is now without any basis save that of Custom. The time has come in which Christians are Christians, only because they are accustomed to be Christians. Habit has superseded conviction.
51. Very different is the relation between the human mind and the system under exposition. Appealing to the understanding, and condemning as superstition the faith which is not also knowledge, this system meets unshaken the tests alike of time and of reason; and, so far from looking coldly on science, hails it as an indispensable ally, stipulating only that it be science, and not that which is “falsely so called.” Hoping everything and fearing nothing from the light of reason, it welcomes the searching ray into every recess, and greets with eager hands the philosopher, the historian, the critic, the philologist, the mathematician, the classic, the physicist, and the occultist. For its appeal is to intelligence as developed by knowledge, in the absolute assurance that where these exist in the greatest plenitude, there it will gain the fullest recognition.
52. And the intelligence appealed to is not the head only, but is also of the heart; of the moral conscience as well as of the intellect. Insisting upon the essential unity of all being, it admits of no antagonism between the human and the Divine. But holding that the human is the Divine, and that that which is not Divine is subhuman, it seeks, by the demonstration of the perfection of God, to enable man to perfect himself after the image of God. And it claims, moreover, to be the one phi