Mysticism
By
Annie Besant
LONDON THE
THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY
161 NEW BOND
STREET, W.
1914
|
CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|
I. |
THE MEANING
AND METHOD OF MYSTICISM |
1 |
II. |
THE GOD-IDEA |
30 |
III. |
THE
CHRIST-IDEA |
59 |
IV. |
THE MAN-IDEA |
85 |
V. |
INTERPRETATIONS |
113 |
.
I
THE MEANING AND METHOD OF
MYSTICISM
FRIENDS:
There is no doubt, for any observant person, that what is
sometimes called a ‘wave’ of mysticism is passing over the world at the present
time. It matters not whether you travel in the East or in the West; it matters
not whether you look at the churches or at the many bodies outside the
recognised churches in Christendom; wherever you look you see the same fact
emerging - that men and women are turning away from external proof towards inner
realisation; that they are beginning to feel that not the authority from outside
but the authority from within ought to be the guiding force of life; that they
are beginning to feel that scriptures, however sacred, authority, however
venerable, is not [1] the final word of religion for man. And so on all
sides you see a searching, a desire, a longing, to replace faith by knowledge,
speculation by certainty.
You may remember, looking over the last year or two, that
that which is called Mysticism has met with expositions in this country, and you
may remember, perhaps with some feeling of slight amusement, that it was the
pronouncement of the Dean of S. Paul’s which induced the Times newspaper
to change its attitude to Mysticism. “We had thought,” said the Times,
“that Mysticism was an exploded superstition”. It is true that Lord Rosebery had
spoken of Cromwell as a practical mystic, and had stated in various ways that
the practical mystic was a very terrible person, that he was a man apt to carry
everything before him, a man to be reckoned with in the outer world as well as
in the inner; but then you would agree with me that a man like Cromwell is not
exactly the kind of man that the Times would approve of, unless he lived
some centuries ago, and did not cause unrest and disturbance in the eminently
respectable society in which the Times desires to live and move. But when
a Dean, and not only a Dean, but a Dean of the Metropolis of the Empire, a Dean
of S. Paul’s - surely the most respectable of all ecclesiastical dignitaries -
when a man like that came out with the statement that “Mysticism is the [2]
most scientific form of religion”, you cannot wonder that under those
conditions the Times began to reconsider its view, and perhaps began to
think, with some inner disturbance, that Mysticism was rather an explosive
superstition than the exploded superstition, the burst and dead shell, which it
had hitherto hoped that it was. It had belonged to cranks like Theosophists, to
foolish people; but when a Dean pronounced it scientific, then, like mesmerism
rebaptised as hypnotism, it could be accepted in respectable society and brought
within the purview of the ordinary respectable man.
And so now we can deal with Mysticism without fear of being
called superstitious for the dealing, and we may perhaps begin by asking: Why
did the Dean of S. Paul’s declare that Mysticism was the most scientific form of
religion, why did he remove it from the world of dreams and place it in the
broad light of intellect, in the scientific world of fact? For a very clear and
definite reason; because Mysticism, like all science, depends on the testimony
of consciousness, the only sure testimony that we possess as to the existence of
facts without us, as to the existence of an external world at all. It is only
from the testimony of consciousness that we can argue that anything exists
outside ourselves. Because, when certain impacts are made upon us,
consciousness answers to those in various ways, therefore we conclude that
[3] there is an external
world. We do not know that world; we only know the response of consciousness to
impressions made upon us from what we presume to be an external world. Many
people, because they do not think closely, do not realise that all that they
know is the impressions made upon their consciousness, they presume by something
outside it; they know the impressions; they are conscious of them. That which we
call ourselves makes answer to something from without, and according to the
nature of the answer, the part of our consciousness which responds to the
impression, we classify the various external objects, label them and place them
in a certain division corresponding to a division in our own consciousness. We
find, for instance, that external objects, producing a certain effect upon the
consciousness through the senses, are classified as the phenomena which give the
basis for science, and the observations are put aside as dealing with the facts
with which science is concerned. We find that another class of impressions from
without arouses in us what we call feeling, a feeling of pleasure or of pain and
so of attraction or repulsion, and that these gradually develop into what we
know as emotions; we place them in their own category in turn and realise the
emotional nature that responds in us to the impacts giving rise to those
feelings and emotions. Then we find that [4] another set of impressions
appeals to a different part of our consciousness and we have what we call
thoughts, ideas. Percepts derived through the senses become gradually
manipulated by our consciousness into thoughts, ideas, concepts, and we put them
into a class by themselves. So we have three classes of impressions - the
sensuous, the emotional, the mental, - and these we realise as the answers of
our consciousness to certain classes of impressions made upon us by the external
world.
Then we begin to ask: is this all? do these three classes
include everything to which consciousness responds? is there any other part of
our consciousness which does not belong to the body, or the emotions, or the
mind, which will respond to certain impressions from without, a class of
impressions that cannot be included in one of the three that I have named, and
yet impressions that we recognise, and to which we find our consciousness
respond? Hence, when the question is asked: have we exhausted all impressions in
the sensuous, the emotional, the mental? The normal consciousness of humanity in
all times, in all countries, in all stages of civilisation answers distinctly:
No; there is something more.
And when we begin to ask what the something more is, we find
a certain difficulty in making this class as precise as the others, for
experience, although universal, has not [5] been carried on definitely
and carefully as have the other impressions received by the body, the emotions
and the mind. A sense of something greater than ourselves; a presence which in
our quietest, our noblest, our purest moments is more perceptible than in the
rush and in the turmoil of the world; a presence which, while it is
overwhelmingly great, gives to the littleness that we experience before it a
sense of joy and comfort and not of terror or of pain; something so great that
it enfolds our whole nature; something so profound that we know that nothing in
our own nature is alien from it; and dimly, gropingly, as might be when an eye
was developing m the body and the sense of light and dark was the only response
made by it, thus dimly and thus gropingly does what we call the Spirit in man
stretch out to something universal and supreme to which it feels its kinship, to
which it recognises its relationship; and as the babe gropes after the mother’s
breast so does the child-Spirit in man grope after the bosom of the Eternal, the
Universal.
At first we may not quite realise intellectually what this
means. The groping of man and the answer to the groping is what we call
religion. And all the religions of the world are nothing more than man’s search
for God and God’s answers to the searching. And gradually as we look back over
the long history of the past and find religion everywhere, from [6] the
dim ignorance of the savage to the loftiest heights of the illuminated Spirit,
we come to realise that this testimony of consciousness is as reliable as the
testimony of consciousness in the lower worlds of emotion and of thought. We
begin to trace it as we trace the others; we begin to realise that the
impressions that come to the Spirit must come from something as real, if not
more real, than those that come through the senses and the emotions and the
mind, and we declare that this consciousness of man answers to another class of
impressions that is as distinct from the other three as each is distinct from
the others, and that it is on the basis of these that the religions of the world
have grown up and have developed.
And we begin to see that in the constitution of man there is
this fourfold answer of consciousness, his response in these four different
ways to the impacts of some forces outside himself; we realise that by the use
of the senses science has gradually been developed; we recognise that by the
gradual purification of the emotions and their development ethics has taken its
rise, and that the discipline of the emotions is moral culture; we realise that
the intellect has for its product philosophy, the rational explanation of the
world around us; and that the spirit has no less than the others its own domain,
its own powers, its own experiences, and that these are embodied in the
religions of the world, in the experiences [7] of the most highly
developed of the human race.
And then we realise why the Dean of S. Paul’s said that
Mysticism is the most scientific form of religion, because it is based on a part
of human consciousness, because it is answered to by part of the human
constitution. And if we accept the testimony of consciousness as final after
long experience in every other department of life, we cannot deny it in the one
in which it has spoken universally and with certainty, in that spiritual world,
more real than any other, in the testimony of consciousness strongest in the
most highly developed of our race.
And so we come to the “meaning of mysticism”, and we divide
it from two other forms of thought with which it is sometimes confused.
Mysticism is not Psychism. Now Psychism is rather a clumsy word, but I am using
it in the ordinary sense, in which it means the development of certain powers by
which observations are carried on in the world of matter subtler than the
physical, so that you may see and hear and feel impacts of matter to which the
ordinary physical body is insensitive. That belongs to the domain of the senses,
not to the domain of the Spirit.
Psychism is a development of the senses; subtler than the
physical certainly, but still of the nature of senses: you see, in the higher
world; you hear, in the higher world; you
[8] touch, in the higher
world; taste and smell have there the objects which they perceive; you are still
in the world of phenomena, tangible, cognisable by the senses, and there is
nothing more spiritual, if you are walking across a meadow in the country, in
seeing by psychic vision the nature spirits or the fairies around you, than
there is in seeing the cows and horses that are sharing the same field. In both
cases you are dealing with the visible, and a sense that is finer is no more in
the domain of the spiritual world than a sense which is duller. No confusion
then should arise between Mysticism which belongs to the spiritual world, and
psychic research which belongs to the sphere of the senses quite as much as the
observation by the senses of the physical world.
Nor is Mysticism allegory or symbol. Both of these are
intellectual, not spiritual. When S. Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians
gave an interpretation of the story of Genesis, calling it allegory and
explaining the story of Abraham and the rest from the allegorical side, saying
that they are symbolic of other truths not of the physical plane; in that
explanation of the allegory and the symbol you are dealing with an intellectual
conception, not a spiritual. You are giving instead of the words as applied to
the physical plane the symbols as applied in the world of thought. And so you
may remember how Origen - a man of very [9] analytical mind whose
writings deserve careful study from every student of religion - dealing with the
Bible and speaking first of its historical meaning, says it is meant for the
carnal-minded, the ignorant; then, for the intellectual there is the allegorical
meaning, into which a man is forced when he finds absurdities in the historical
narrative, such he says as the Tower of Babel, or God walking in the cool of the
evening in the Garden of Eden; those things, he says, while they pass unobserved
by the ignorant, strike the vision of the educated man, because they are
intrinsically absurd and impossible the moment they are thought of, the
intellectual man is obliged to try to find out a meaning under the veil of
incredible assertions, and so he takes the allegorical meaning and he learns
many great intellectual truths by applying the key of allegory to unlock the
meaning of the Bible.
And he goes on to say that there is another meaning in the
Bible, neither that which is historical for the ignorant, nor that which is
allegorical for the instructed; there is a spiritual meaning below the other
two, and that, he says, can only be known by the spiritual man; and he quotes on
that the words of S. Paul, that the things of a man can only be known by the
Spirit of man that is in him, and the things of God can only be known by the
Spirit of God; and then he goes on to say: “Know ye not that your bodies are the
[10] temple of God and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” Only as that
Spirit illuminates the scriptures of the world can their inner truth and
spiritual meaning be discerned.
So you come into the realm of Mysticism, the realm of the
Spirit. It is the mystic interpretations of the great spiritual facts of the
spiritual world which lie at the basis of all that is worthy to be called
knowledge. Faith you may have, speculation you may have, but knowledge comes
only by the Spirit, which alone, because of his identity with Deity, can know
the universal Spirit whence he has come forth. And Mysticism is in its meaning,
the direct knowledge of God and of the facts of the spiritual world which are
partly embodied in what are called religious truths. That is really what
Mysticism means - direct knowledge, as direct as the knowledge on which science
is based by observation, but now not the outward-turned investigation by
observation, but the inner realisation. Knowledge is the reproduction within us
of something outside us, so far as the knowledge is found by the senses and the
emotions and the intellect; but the knowledge of the spiritual world is an inner
reproduction in the Spirit of man, a realisation of what before had been
external truth. There are facts in the spiritual world as well as in the other
worlds cognised by consciousness; facts, truths given out in the many religions
from time [11] to time, partially given out in forms suited to the time
and the nation and the type of the people to whom they were given. The facts of
which those religious truths are partial explanations, the facts that you find
embodied as partial truths in every religion, universal, found in every age;
those spiritual verities which are the common heritage of our race, which are
found in every great religion, living and dead; the truths of the nature of
God, of Man, of spirit; all the great ideas which you find embodied in
world-religions: those are the facts of the spiritual world: and when a man
knows them directly, when the Spirit within him, the spiritual consciousness,
is so unfolded, that he is able to realise them in himself and transform
hearsay knowledge on the testimony of others into direct knowledge by his own
observation an experience, - then and then only is that man a Mystic, a knower
of the realities of the spiritual world.
Now all religions have testified to the possibility of such
knowledge of God and of spiritual truths. Recall for a moment a familiar
quotation from one of the great Upanishats of Hinduism, where the disciple was
seeking after knowledge and went to a teacher to ask “What is knowledge?” The
answer came by dividing all knowledge into two classes; one all the knowledge
that can be taught to a man, including all scriptures [12] however
sacred, all science, all literature, comprising the whole of that knowledge
available through the sense and the feelings and the mind as the lower
knowledge of God. Of God? Yes, because Hinduism excludes God from nothing, He is
immanent in all, and therefore all knowledge is God-knowledge, along whatever
channel it may reach the man. All that was classed together as the lower
knowledge. The higher knowledge, the supreme knowledge, the Teacher went on to
say, is the knowledge of Him by whom all else is known, for all the lower
knowledge flows down from the higher. Once you know God, all knowledge is
within your reach; for to know Him, to know Himself, is to hold the key to every
riddle, and there is nothing in a universe of which God is the Life which may
not be known when that supreme knowledge is mastered. And so you find the Christ
declaring: “The knowledge of God is eternal life”. Very little stress is laid on
that in modern Christianity. We are told to believe; are given creeds to accept,
hearsay knowledge is offered to us, - part of the lower knowledge not the
higher. The higher knowledge is eternal life, a present possession not a future
experience, for eternal life is not life in heaven, eternal life is not life on
the other side of death; eternal life is nothing that depends even on
everlasting time. Eternal life is and is only the knowledge of God, they
Eternal, [13] the Self of the Universe. That knowledge in itself is
eternal life. Exactly the same teaching you see as the ancient teaching of the
Upanishats. And so in other religions you will find the same constantly
repeated.
Mysticism does more than declare that that direct knowledge
is possible; it proclaims the method whereby that knowledge may be obtained; and
here again, if it helps you at all, you may take quotations from the great
sayings of the two religions I have already mentioned, for you find in another
Upanishat where knowledge is spoken of: “Awake, arise, seek the great Teachers
and attend, for verily they say the path is narrow, narrow as the edge of a
razor”. And when you listen to the words of the Christ you hear Him saying:
“Strait is the gate, narrow is the way that leadeth unto life (not to heaven)
and few there be that find it”. I know that by a modern twist life has been
changed to heaven and destruction changed to hell, but in the great spiritual
world heaven and hell have no place; knowledge of God and ignorance of God:
those are the pair of opposites which there you find, for knowledge of God is
life and ignorance of God is destruction - not everlasting, for that cannot be
where God resides in every human heart, but while He is unknown destructive
agencies can touch us, where He is known eternity is ours.
You see you find the testimony to a method [14] as
well as to a fact. Again the religions teach that method. You must not limit
your thought on religion to the few hundred years since the Reformation, to the
minority of Christians that you find in the so-called Protestant communities.
You must take a larger view than that: go back over the whole of Christian
antiquity and further back still over the ancient religions of the East, and
then you will find that identity of knowledge which is the mark of reality,
which is the keynote of Mysticism. And so you find the existence of a Path and a
method declared by which the supreme knowledge may be gained. The Roman Catholic
has always kept a knowledge of that Path and he calls the end of it by a
startling name. Generally the word Union is used, but take up some great book of
Catholic theology and you will find the startling word which I have in mind;
they call it Deification, the deification of man, man become God, for nothing
less than that is meant by Deification. And the Hindu and the Buddhist call it
Liberation, the setting free of the human Spirit from the bonds which have tied
him down, from the matter which has blinded him. The meaning is the same, the
method the same, the thing the same. And so we begin to realise that in the
realm of the Spirit there are none of those divisions that mark off one religion
from another in the reparative plane of earth, and [15] we realise that
the Spirit is united where earth holds diversity, and that where knowledge
takes the place of faith, there controversies sink into silence and the
certainty of truth is known.
Now the Mystic of the modern phrase is the Gnostic, the
Knower of the Early Church. I said Mysticism meant the direct knowledge of God
and of the facts of the spiritual world. That is exactly what is meant by the
Gnostic, as he is described in those splendid pages of Origen to which I have
before alluded. He points out, with a plainness of speech which I fear might
make him unpopular in some evangelical circles today, that while the Church has
medicine for the sick - and he says the sick are the sinners - it has also
knowledge for the Gnostic, and he goes on to say quite clearly and plainly that
you cannot make a Church out of sinners, that they are to come there and be made
welcome for their healing, but the Church needs Gnostics for its builders and
its maintenance. Too much has that thought passed out of modern Christianity.
The feeling - a right and noble feeling - that the very lowest of mankind should
have some message brought to him to brighten his life and to lift him out of the
mire of ignorance; that righteous and charitable feeling has been exaggerated
in modern Christianity, so that it would seem that which the lowest of men is
able to accept is all that
[16] Christianity has for
the learned and the thoughtful. But it is not so; it was not so in the days of
the Church’s strength. And the return of Mysticism to Christianity is the sign
that strength and vitality are coming back into the Church, that the days of
Erastianism are over, that the eclipse through which Christianity passed when
faith replaced knowledge and when credulity was the mark of the believer, that
these dark days now lie behind you, and you are going forward into the dawn of a
brighter and a better day. Again the Gnostic will reappear, the knower of the
truth, for the Gnostic is the very backbone of religion, and where the Gnostics
disappear there religion fails in vitality and in adaptation to life.
But some people say: How can you be sure that all these ideas
of the Mystic as to God and the great truths of the spiritual world are not mere
fancy, mere imagination; are you sure that they are not a subtle, although
perhaps fine, form of hysteria, and is there not a danger that sanity,
controlled intelligence, may vanish and superstition may take the place of true
religion if the Mystic is listened to, if the knower is consulted? The answer to
that is the answer which science gives, that these are facts, and the facts are
proved by the identity of impression made upon the normal human consciousness by
their impact. Why do you call a tree green? [17] Because the normal human
sight recognises the same colour in the tree in springtime, and the word green
has been taken to signify that impression. All normal eyes respond to that in a
similar way, and the similarity, nay the identity, of response is taken as proof
of the existence of a fact of which the impression on the human consciousness
is the only thing that we can know; identity of response is practically the
measure of truth for science. That is also the measure of truth in Mysticism.
Where you find an identity of response in Mystics of all ages, of all religions,
of all countries, there you have the only proof that science can offer us,
identity of response in the normal human consciousness. You can repeat,
re-verify under similar conditions, for the same impression is always found.
That one test we have of objective reality is answered in the spiritual world by
the Mystics of our race. They all respond in the same way to the impact of a
spiritual fact. And it is in that identity of mystic response that we see as
everywhere else the mark of objective truth; the Mystic’s experience of God is
everywhere the same, no matter by what name God may be called. The mystic
response to the Christ idea is everywhere the same, no matter what the name by
which that mighty truth may he labelled in a special faith. The truth of the
spiritual nature of man and its realisation is [18] everywhere the same;
the contact of the human Spirit with the divine is everywhere experienced; and
wherever man has the direct experience of God, whether it be in the spiritual
experience of the Methodist or the experience, also spiritual, of the Saint,
there you have the germ of the Mystic who gains for himself direct knowledge,
not hearsay knowledge but knowledge that to the man who experiences it
transcends all other certainty, which no argument is able to shake which no
argument is able to strengthen.
There is a curious verse, once more in a Hindu scripture,
which the Dean of S. Paul’s practically repeated in another form - I do not know
whether he is a reader of the Bhagavad-Gita. It is written there, rather
to the distress of the very orthodox Hindu, that the Vedas, the most sacred of
books remember, are as useful to the enlightened Brahmana as a tank in a country
which is all covered over with water - an admirable simile. If there is water
all around you, you have no need of a tank; the tank is valuable in the dry
country where water is not available, but of what use is a tank to a man who
sees water everywhere around him? And of what use the written word, however
sacred, to a man into whom is flowing the knowledge of God, the origin of all
scriptures? And so we find the Dean of S. Paul’s declaring that the mystic does
not care very much about scripture, [19] he is like a man with a
reservoir; the simile the same and equally true. Direct knowledge transcends all
knowledge transmitted through another.
We find there has been conflict in the past between Mysticism
and dogma, and the Mystics have very often, in the Western Church at least, been
persecuted during their lifetime although canonised, wisely, after their death.
The Roman Catholic Church in that is very wise. It tries to keep its heretics
within bounds while they are alive by threat of persecution or actual
persecution, and then when it finds that danger has past, by perhaps a few
centuries having gone by, it holds up the Mystic as the Saint and canonises the
man or woman whom before it imprisoned. And it is wise; for your Mystic when he
is of the past is always a useful buttress to the Church, although when he is
living among the orthodox he is apt to be rather a cause of unrest. And the
Priest and the Mystic have constantly been in opposition, for the priest has as
his duty to teach the ignorant by dogma, whereas the Mystic has as his function
to illuminate the profoundest truths of religion.
Now dogma is necessary at a certain stage, exactly in the
same way as chemical and physical formulae are necessary when a boy is studying
chemistry or physics. It would be very foolish of the boy to reject the chemical
dogma because it comes to him on the authority [20] of his teacher, and
guides him in his early experiments. That is the use of the formula, the use of
the dogma, for a dogma, as I have often said to you, is only the intellectual
presentment of one side of a spiritual truth, imposed by authority from outside.
The authority may be a very good one of experts along the particular line. The
chemist wisely imposes his chemical dogmas on the student in the laboratory;
they are safeguards in experiments; they are the guide to knowledge. But what
would you think of the chemist who, after a student had mastered his subject,
said to him: “You must not verify, you must not prove, you must not make
original research, you must always go on repeating the chemical formulae you
learned as a boy, you must never go out into the untrodden realm of the unknown
and bring back fresh knowledge?” But that is what the theologian so often does;
that is what the priest so often insists upon. He takes the dogma not as a guide
but as a limitation, not as a way to knowledge but as the end of knowledge,
beyond which no one must venture to tread the unknown path.
Hence it is that dogmas have to be broken into pieces,
because they are obstacles in the ever immortal search for truth. They must be
broken when they are outgrown, and they are outgrown when the unfolding Spirit
of man begins to know for himself, and no longer to need testimony from outside.
And the end [21] of religious instruction ought to be to transfer the
authority from outside to inside, from the book or the church or the teacher to
the inner awakened Spirit of the man, to that inner Ruler Immortal who is the
only true King, the human Spirit himself. For religion should be self-determined
and not determined by others; religion must be self-builded, after the
conditions of building have been mastered; and one religious truth realised by
your own Spirit is worth a thousand testimonies from others, for it is your own
for ever and none can take it from you.
Until you know God directly you are at the mercy of every
clever argument around you; you cannot know Him by the senses, you cannot know
Him by the emotions, you cannot know Him by the mind; you can only know Him by
the Spirit that is Himself within you, and when once you know Him in yourself He
will shine upon you from everything around you, and that is the only knowledge
which makes your life secure.
But there is a Method of Mysticism. It is that Path, on which
some two years ago in this hall I lectured, giving it step by step, as it were,
so that any of you might study and tread the way, I can only now just put it in
a brief form as the Method of the Mystic, which, as I just now said, is alike
everywhere, for all great religions recognise the Path.
The first part of it depends on the conquest [22] of
the senses, the conquest of the emotions, the conquest of the mind, the lower
nature; and in order that you may understand it you have to realise that the
Spirit is your eternal Self, which has come into this outer world of matter in
order to subdue matter for his own purposes, that he may be its master, not its
slave. People say sometimes: why did the Spirit as it is said descend into
matter? Now the words descend and ascend are not good when you are speaking of
the unfolding and the realisation by the Spirit of himself. I use them because
they are commonly used.
The descent of the Spirit means that your eternal Self, a
portion of God Himself, “a part of Myself, a living Spirit”, as he has been
described, comes down into the world of matter to draw around him the matter by
which he may conquer and rule in the lower worlds. That descent, at first into
matter too gross to answer to his changes in consciousness, means that matter
blinds him and fetters him; he gathers it around himself and it blinds him more
and more as he feels the matter grow denser and denser. And yet unless he
gathers it around him, how shall he come into contact with the unknown worlds of
which he is to be hereafter builder and maker and ruler, transforming them into
higher possibilities, permeating them with his own nature, so that they shall
become expressions of the spiritual life. He begins to live wrapt round with
[23] these veils of matter and by each veil he contacts a material world,
comes into touch with it, has impressions made upon him by it, and the matter
that he draws around him changes as his moods of consciousness change, vibrates
in answer to every change, until at last he establishes around him what we call
bodies, every vibration in which gradually answers to one of his changing moods
and becomes an expression of himself to the outer world into which he has
entered. The building up of these bodies, the making of them more and more
responsive, that is the work by which, as he gradually unfolds from within, he
manifests outside his own spiritual essence.
He builds a physical body because he wants to see a physical
world, to hear physical sounds; he builds an emotional body because he wants to
experience what is called pleasure and pain and gradually to use emotions in
order that he may serve the world to which they belong; and he builds a mind, in
order that his illimitable power of perception, cabined within what we call the
human mind, may grow more defined, may be sharpened, may be gradually made keen
to answer to all the wonderful universe of mind outside himself, and that he may
know that world and turn it to the highest uses. And these senses and emotions
and mind are the vehicles which he makes for his own purposes, not to be
mastered by them but to use [24] them, not to be their slave but their
lord. And when he has developed them, then comes the time that he can prepare
himself for treading the Path; then comes the time when, as I said, he conquers
the senses. What does that mean? It does not mean that he destroys them; it does
not mean that he kills them, but it does mean that no sensation reaching him
through the senses has any power to make him swerve from the path chosen by his
will, from following out the path of evolution by which he will realise his own
divinity.
He keeps the senses, nay he improves them, makes them finer
and finer in subtler and subtler matter; they are his tools not his masters;
they are no longer wild horses carrying him over the fields of desire, but
well-broken steeds carrying him wherever he wills to go. And so with his
emotions: the true Mystic does not destroy emotion but he makes it the obedient
servant of the higher compassion and the higher wisdom. He gradually takes away
from it the tendency to answer to the external pains and pleasures of the world,
in order that he may use it for the helping of the world, for only when the
world has ceased to have power to move you, are you able to help that world to
tread the higher path. He uses his mind as an instrument to that end, in order
to help in expressing himself. These things which in the ordinary [25]
untrained man of the world are masters, senses that oftentimes degrade him,
emotions that often torture him, thoughts that often harass him - these for the
Mystic are the obedient servants of an illuminated intellect and a will
harmonised with the Divine. And when that point is reached, then he can tread
the higher stages of the Path; then he can tread it onwards to that deification
of which the Roman Catholic speaks, to that liberation of which the Hindu and
the Buddhist speak, and then he becomes what Lord Rosebery spoke of, the
practical Mystic, the strongest type of man.
Now why is it that the practical Mystic is so strong? can
overcome all obstacles? It is because he has realised the inner God, for to the
deity within him no obstacle really exists, no difficulty is anything more than
an empty form. Realise the God within you and what is there of outer things that
can stop you, hinder you, or turn you from your Path? There is nothing in this
world which is not the life of God, and when that God is realised within you all
outer things become your servants; they have no power to hinder nor to control.
The Mystic not only realises that Omnipotence living within himself which makes
all difficulties easy and all burdens light, but he also has that perfect
serenity and content which makes it impossible to crush him with sorrow or to
harass him with [26] anxiety; he is content because he is seeing God in
everything, and God is the Mystic’s hope and joy; in whatever He comes, in form
of joy or sorrow, in form of triumph or defeat, of failure or success, it is
always the life of God the Mystic sees and the form is nothing, the God within
the form is always welcome and beloved. He is strong, our practical Mystic, and
he not only feels the strength of deity in him and the content with all outer
circumstances, but he is full of that tolerance and that sympathy which grow
out of his seeing God in every one around him, and therefore not wanting to
compel not wanting to control, but, respecting the divine spark in all, he
leaves it to flame out in its own way without any attempt at compulsion from
himself. He is equal under all conditions, because to him they are all
manifestations, pure and beautiful, of their indwelling life. And he is calm
because he lives in the Eternal and to him who lives in the Eternal how can
there be shaking from the changes of time? It is the realisation of God within
that makes the Mystic strong. And his judgment is far better than the judgment
of the ordinary man of the world; for what are the things that distort your
judgment? Your own prejudices, your bias - national or individual - your own
desires and longings, your own personal wishes to have this or to avoid that.
All these are weights in the scales of your judgment and [27] therefore
the balance does not weigh truly. But the man who wants nothing because he
possesses all, the man who realising God asks nothing more from earth, that
man’s judgment is clear and direct because undistorted by personal desire or
personal longings. He wants nothing, and all things come to him; he asks for
nothing, and all is there for him to use; he desires nothing, for all the riches
of the world are his. He is a steward not an owner, and all the Gods pour into
his hands their wealth, because his hands are always emptied out for the helping
of his fellow-men.
That is the splendour of the mystic life, this power of
service which only this inner form of realisation can possibly give to any one
of us. We are climbing towards it as we begin to understand something of its
possibilities, as we live a little of the truth we know. But remember, if you
do not live the truth you know, truth’s treasures will be locked against you,
because that which you do not utilise is of no value to yourself. You must
utilise what you know. Do not be like the men of whom a judge in India lately
said: “Oh yes, they believe all these things, but they do not want them in their
own families”. That I fear is a very common condition of mind among people who
profess religion but do not live it. And so my last word of counsel, if you
would become a Mystic, is this: never [28] pretend to believe a truth
which you are not willing to act out in the world; never say “I believe” where
you cannot also say “I act”; let your religion be small in beliefs unless it is
pregnant with action, for truth is only truth for you when you have learned to
live it. And the man who has learned to live one fragment of truth will find
Truth herself come to him with open arms; for she only gives herself to those
who are willing to surrender themselves to her, and to live every truth that she
imparts. [29]
II.
THE GOD-IDEA.
FRIENDS:
I have as subject this evening ‘The God-Idea’, and I mean by
that title to indicate the many ideas of God which have been held during the
evolution of mankind; and to try, if I can, to show you how in all the great
religions there has existed at one time or another a lofty conception of God;
that out of the past of all the great religions an idea of God may be
distinguished, grasped and understood, which becomes the Mystical Idea as man
seeks to know God directly in the fashion of which I spoke on Sunday last; that
in all the great religions we shall find indications of a magnificent idea of
God as the Life of the Universe; that we may see that emerging from time to time
with other lower ideas found in the same religion, because the minds of men are
many and each man’s idea of God can only be that which his own mind is able to
fabricate, which satisfies the yearnings of his own heart; that wherever we go
we shall find traces of the higher idea, though often [30] encumbered
with lower notions and ignorant conceptions, and that we may, if we will, find
that there really does exist a universal testimony to the highest that we can
conceive of God, bodied out in the thoughts of the most highly developed
spiritual men, and left on record for the teaching and the inspiration of the
world from the earliest dawn of history down to our own day.
Now during the last century, when the science of what was
called Comparative Mythology had its birth and its development, the western
world of thought was startled as the many great religions of the elder world,
and the younger world which was not western, came gradually within its purview.
Everywhere men found that the varied religions of the world, living and dead,
taught many of the same ideas, proclaimed many of the same doctrines, bore
testimony to the same universal truths. By the labours of the antiquarian and
the archaeologist; by the researches of the students of philology and of
ancient civilisations, there was gradually unrolled before the minds of the
educated and the thoughtful a mass of information, stretching back for thousands
upon thousands of years, recorded in fragments of ancient cities, unburied from
long-covered temples and, monuments, emerging from civilisations that long ago
had vanished from the stage of history; and all of them bore testimony to
religious truths which [31] in their main outlines were identical.
Looking at the whole of these and comparing these records of the past, there was
gradually built up a science, built out of the discovered facts which, as far as
the facts went, none could challenge. Startled at this wide identity of
thinking, marvelling at the enormous wealth of the religious past that thus had
been unrolled, men naturally began to speculate as to the reason for the
identity, and sought for the explanation of these countless likenesses emerging
from every faith, as I said, living and dead.
Not unnaturally, I think, for the conclusion was drawn at a
time when the educated world was far more sceptical than it is today; not
unnaturally, in view of the great triumphs in unveiling the history of organisms
which grew out of the studies of Darwin, Wallace and others; not unnaturally,
the students of Comparative Mythology imagined that in the past men must have
been much less evolved than they are today and that the child nations of
antiquity could not have formulated for themselves the conceptions that were
found in the literature of some of the most ancient peoples. They concluded that
before those spiritual and philosophic religions there must have been a long
period of unrecorded history in which, from the ignorance of the savage, from
the ignorance of the barbarian personifying the powers of nature, terrified by
the [32] destructive agencies he was unable to control, there gradually
grew up out of the sense of helplessness and terror the primary ideas of God.
They found that this view was, to some extent, from their standpoint,
strengthened by the fact that among the savages of our own time there are found
various forms of religion - those called animistic and the like - where the
ideas, if they can be called ideas, of God are of the lowest and least
developed character. Many researches into what those savage peoples really
thought were not at first available. There were the records of travellers, the
statements of explorers, who told us roughly the superficial views that they
gathered from the savages whom they found in the countries to which they went.
It was not then, I think, unnatural that they should see in the beliefs of those
savage peoples, in their low and barbarous ideas of divine agencies, the origin
of religion. It was not unnatural that they should imagine that the great
philosophic and spiritual ideas of God had, by some process which they did not
stop to work out or to prove, evolved from the primary ignorance of the savage.
And so they traced back the identities in religion, the likenesses in religion,
to this dark time of savage ignorance, to this personification of the powers of
Nature, and, putting forward the science of Comparative Mythology based on
irrefutable facts but bound together [33] by an assumption which was not
proved, they came to the idea that all thought of God, as all other religious
truth, was but an evolution from the past, and that we must regard that childish
ideal as the origin of the later and loftier views of God.
A little later, more careful researches into savage beliefs
revealed one startling and puzzling fact. You will find, I think in a book by
Dr. Andrew Lang a most interesting account of the knowledge which was gradually
gathered by sympathetic travellers who were trying to understand something of
the thought of savage peoples. And the records that came from these later
investigations all bore testimony to the fact to which I alluded, which were
startling when it came out, in view of the deductions of Comparative Mythology.
It was that in the background of every savage faith, kept as a sacred thing, to
be spoken of only with reverence and with awe, behind all those superficial
beliefs in gods and devils, behind all those thoughts of sacrifices to
propitiate hostile powers, there was one Being ever believed in whose only
symbol was the over-arching sky, who had no image, who had no likeness, to whom
no prayers ever went up, to whom no sacrifice were ever made, a mighty
all-embracing Life, spoken of sometimes as the Great Spirit, spoken of sometimes
by no special name but only by symbol; indications of an idea so [34]
foreign from the savage of modern thought that man began to ask how could this
idea have arisen, how could it have come into the mind of the savage, how could
a conception so great and all-embracing come from these undeveloped brains,
these crude unevolved barbarians?
And about this time another view was put forward to account
for the identities found in religions, the idea that they did not grow out of
savage ignorance, but that they came from an identity of origin, from Teachers,
highly developed spiritual men, who came forth into the world from time to time
to give out the ever-same ideas in a form suited to the needs of the time. The
idea was put forward that the child-nations of the past, the undeveloped and the
unevolved, were taught by those who knew, by those who by their own evolution
had reached the point where the loftier vision of the Supreme was seen; that
there were traces through history that the highest ideas given to the world were
always given as the basis of a new religion, and not as an evolution out of the
past from the days of savagery and of ignorance; that these ideas came from the
mouths of men who spoke with authority of that which they knew, and were not the
dreams of savages, awe-stricken before a Nature too mighty to oppose, in which
destructive agencies were rife.
And they who put forward the idea claimed [35] for
evidence the scriptures of the oldest religions of the world as well as those of
the more modern: they pointed to books that went back into the night of time,
the Vedas of the Hindus, the sacred books of the, Zoroastrians and of the
Egyptians, and of the peoples who bordered the Mediterranean Sea; they pointed
to these as containing the loftiest conceptions possible to men so far of the
Nature and the Being of God. And they showed that, as the religions went on,
these conceptions tended to materialise instead of, keeping their original and
lofty spirituality. And they based all that on evidence that could not be
denied, the most ancient scriptures as yet known to the world of men.
They pointed to these, then, as evidence that the teaching
about the Divine Nature was a teaching always the same, and that the traces of
that still found among savage peoples, these ideas of a Great Spirit symbolised
by the arching sky, were the faint remnants in degenerate nations, the dying out
fragments in the remains of mighty; civilisations of the past, of the original
teachings which they had received in the days when they were civilised, when
they were strong.
And gradually people are beginning, I think, to realise that
the savages of today are remnants of dead civilisations, and not the crude forms
from which men have evolved; [36] that the ancient savages, the primeval
savages, if I may say so, were really childlike people, infant nations, willing
to learn and glad to be taught, and that to them came the great Instructors, to
them the mighty Teachers; and that we can point first to the scriptures that
remain, admittedly ancient, going back thousands upon thousands of years, and
then to these surviving beliefs in the remnants of the gradually dying out
barbarian nations, ideas that they most certainly could not give birth to, but
that still stand as landmarks of a God Idea mightier than they now could
conceive, and practically with no influence on their religion or their lives.
Two chief types of religion come down from the great race
that preceded the fifth, or the Aryan, those that are called Solar Worship and
Nature Worship; and we realise that in those elder days the teaching to the
more ignorant, the more childish peoples was given in the form of symbol,
largely drawn from Nature around them, not teaching that the natural object was
God, but rather that through the outer object God was revealed, and that all
Nature was but a veil of Divinity; that the power, the might, the splendour of
God spoke out through the objects of His world, and that they were symbols of
the Divine.
The mightiest of these symbols was, as was natural, the Sun,
the source of light and heat and life on our globe. And so you find the [37]
Sun as symbol, constantly shown as image, constantly appearing in legend and in
myth, as the symbol of the Supreme, the Universal God. You find the Sun as a
great golden disc still to be found in the temples that have been unburied,
still to be found in the legends of the nations that have well-nigh passed away.
Take ancient Peru as an example before the Spaniards had trampled out that
splendid civilisation by fire and sword. You find the Incas called the Children
of the Sun; you find that royal family regarded as the offspring of the Sun; and
all through their worship, a worship of joy and of happiness, in which the
sacrifices were flowers and the hymns were songs, you find the Sun as the symbol
of the God they worshipped, and to whom went up the hearts of grateful men, the
symbol in the lower world of the all-nourishing, all-irradiating life of God.
And so you find in the Hindu religion, where I shall have to
draw your attention presently to some of the most sublime conceptions of the
God-Idea that have ever been made known to our humanity, that the Sun stands as
the physical symbol of God; you find how “the God in the Sun”, as He is called,
is the object of daily greeting by the millions of Hindus who bathe on the banks
of their rivers before sunrise, and then, as the Sun is rising, turn to it with
the famous prayer: “Thee, O Sun, we worship, the glory of God resplendent;
[38] may thy light illumine our intelligence”. No physical light of the Sun
can illumine the intelligence of men, and that famous prayer, most sacred to all
Hindus, uses the Sun as symbol of the God-Idea, the Light and Life of the world
as God is the Life and Light of the Spirits that come forth from Him.
And so you find right through the history of religions traces
of this symbolism of God under the form of the Sun.
And you find wherever the human element comes into the
God-Idea, as it does in every great religion, that humanity is taken up as it
were to deity; you find that the story of the God made man follows the course of
the Sun throughout the solar year; you find the festivals of every religion,
including your own, are marked by solar positions, and that one side of the
story of the Christ is a repetition of the story of all the God-men of the past,
born amid danger, passing through childhood in danger, coming on to manhood at a
period marked by the relation of the Sun and the Moon, dying on a date which
every year is fixed by the astronomical observation, rising again after that to
a renewed life, and ascending into the heavens, whence His beams pour down for
the ripening of the corn and of the grape, the bread and wine of human life. And
as you recognise it, it does not make you disbelieve in the historical existence
of the Christ, but it tells you that every mighty man [39] that human
life has deified goes through a marked succession of events, alike in every
great faith, drawn from what are called the myths of the past, the myths which
are the great spiritual truths thrown into a story-form for the helping and the
teaching of men.
And you find, again, Nature Worship permeating all great
faiths without exception, in which the creative power of Deity is seen
reproduced in the creative power of humanity, and God as the Universal Father,
the Giver of Life, the Sustainer of Life, is shown out in symbols - innocent and
beautiful in the minds of a people not yet corrupted into evil - and still
persisting, as you have them, in the symbol of the Cross, known to every great
religion of the past and most sacred of symbols in the Christendom of today.
That hasty but broad outline of religions that are well-nigh
lost in antiquity and are only seen in their later forms in the most ancient
living faiths, brings us to the next great stage of the God-Idea, in which
religions were national, and the God of the religion was worshipped specially by
the nation in which the religion was proclaimed. In that stage of religious
proclamation, you find three great religions of the far-off historical past; I
might say before history, but I take it as historical because a literature
remains; and while you are unable to fix the furthest off limit for the date of
that literature you are [40] able to say that it cannot be more modern
than such and such a date. In the ancient world, then, looking backward to this
stage, you find religion, as I said, national. The oldest of those is, of
course, Hinduism, where you have a faith that still is living, fundamentally a
religion but also a social polity; a social organisation, just as you find also
in the Hebrew religion that the social organisation and the religious are
closely intertwined, and that many a law which is purely a sanitary or hygienic
law is made part of the religion, so that it might have the binding force that
comes from the fulfilment of a religious obligation. Hinduism fundamentally, of
course, as were the other two great religions of Egypt and the Mediterranean
borders, and the ancient Persian or the faith of Zarathustra, the Zoroastrian
as we generally call it, is Pantheistic. Now religious Pantheism and philosophic
Pantheism are constantly confused; but their effects upon the mind of the
devotee and the mind of the philosopher are quite different. Philosophic
Pantheism only postulates one existence whereof all beings are modes; one
infinite eternal existence, and all universes, all worlds, all separate
existences of mineral, of plant, of animal, of man, modes of that one existence.
Outside of such manifestations, in philosophic Pantheism, God is not; He is
expressed in a universe but not outside it. He is conterminous with whatever
universes [41] or worlds are existing, their fundamental life, but
entirely what would now be called impersonal. This is appealing only to the
intellect and not to the heart, the self-existence whereof all else is but
mode, inaccessible to form of prayer or entreaty, a unfit for any emotion, save
the purely Intellectual delight of a splendid theory, but in no sense
religious, if you take religion as the searching of man for God and God’s answer
to the searching. But when you come to pantheistic religion, then all is
changed. That which is behind all forms of life is Himself the Life, the
Consciousness, the Power. All forms are but an expression of part of His
existence, and beyond and above all forms He Himself, in His infinite being,
remains.
And where religion is pantheistic, there you always find
accompanying it what the West has called Polytheism, the expression of God in
many forms. Now there is a profound difference between this as seen by the
Eastern, and the view which you often call Polytheism in the West, founded
chiefly I think on your knowledge of the Greek and of the Roman faiths, and on
your very superficial knowledge of the great religions of the East, in which you
imagine that the word God implies to the Eastern the same as it implies to you.
Now that it is not so: The word that the Eastern uses for God is a word
equivalent to your [42] “angel” or “archangel”, not the One Supreme Being
whom you alone speak of under that name. When the Hindu speaks of the Deva so
and so, it only means Shining One, the very word that John Bunyan applied to the
angels in the Pilgrim's Progress. And if you want to be sure of that, let
me - although later I shall be giving you some quotations that prove it to
demonstration - quote but one single verse regarding this with a couple of
verses before it that show the scope of the whole. A great Hindu philosopher in
one of the Upanishads is said to have been asked by his wife to explain to her
the Wisdom of the Self. “The Self” is the word used for the all-pervading,
all-irradiating, all-vivifying, all-sustaining Life of God. He went on to
explain it to her as the one Life of the Universe, and to tell her that all that
there was of love and of beauty were but the scattered reflections of the one
Self. And then he went on, in the words I want you to note:
Not for the sake of the husband is the husband dear, but for
the sake of the Self is the husband dear;
Not for the sake of the wife is the wife dear, but for the
sake of the Self is the wife dear;
Not for the sake of the son is the son dear, but for the sake
of the Self is the son dear;
Not for the sake of the Gods are the Gods dear, but for the
sake of the Self are the Gods dear.
I am using there the word “Gods” because that is the usual
translation, but if you put the word “angels” you will have the idea of [43]
the speaker. In all the manifestations of the one Life, husband, wife, son - and
he gives many others that I did not quote - including those spiritual
intelligences, the Shining Ones of higher worlds; those are only dear, only
beautiful, only loving, because of the One all-pervading Life in whom alone
they live.
That is the religious Pantheism, with which, as you see, what
is called Polytheism goes. It is not the idea of a number of Gods, as you mostly
think of it; it is the idea that in a world in which everything embodies the
life of God, there is nothing existing that does not share in His beauty, in His
strength, and in His life. When the Hindu wants to put his view of the place of
the woman in the home, he says: “Thou art Lakshmi - the Goddess of prosperity -
the Light and Goddess of the home”. He uses the word in order to point out that
every form - human, animal, vegetable mineral, - is God-vivified, is an
embodiment of the life of God. And so, as that Life is embodied in myriads of
forms some of which as I said, you would speak of as ‘angel’ or ‘archangel’, God
comes forth into His world so that He can appeal to the hearts of men, however
ignorant, however degraded, however evil. And to the polytheist it is the life
of God in the form, which to him is beautiful and fit to be worshipped. It is
the idea that everything in the world has the life of God within it, and that we
should recognise that [44] Life wherever it manifests itself in form. And
so that Polytheism, which is Pantheism in action, irradiates the whole world
with the splendour of a divine life, and there is no human activity, no human
occupation, nothing that men can do of useful and of good, that has not the
benediction of God behind it, in which man is not exercising a divine function,
and bringing the life of God into the life of men.
And that is also true of the old Egyptian faith and the old
Zoroastrian faith. They all see the world as much larger than the physical,
inhabited by many grades of beings, some higher and some lower than man.
And as a child would ask his father to reach him down from
the mantelshelf something that he is not yet tall enough to grasp for himself,
and that prayer of the child to the father is not thought to touch the unity of
God, and the help of the father to the child is not regarded as being against
the laws of Nature; so the prayers of men to those above themselves in power
and in helpfulness go up as the prayers of children to their fathers, asking
for a help they themselves are unable to compass, and, as Sir Oliver Lodge has
pointed out, there is nothing in that against the laws of Nature, but only a
dependence and interdependence that spread throughout the whole of Nature which
is animated by one divine life, in which the elders help the youngers and answer
their requests. And [45] you can have your prayers answered either by
knowledge, which subdues the laws of Nature to your purpose, or by an appeal to
those Beings who are behind every natural force and every natural law, and who,
for love’s sake, will help, and do constantly help, in the daily lives of men.
Leave for a moment those religions of which I have spoken,
which I have glanced over in their national view and their general teaching, and
come to the Hebrew faith, passing as it did through two remarkable and distinct
phases. There again it is a national religion as all the religions of the past
were national, very much in many ways to the benefit of the people; for where
every nation had its own religion there was no need to go about making
proselytes, and trying to convert a man of one nationality and of one faith to
your faith; because they could then no more change faith than you could
nationality without losing all that made them what they were, and so the world
had much more religious peace than it has had in later days. Now in the Hebrew
faith at first we find the God Idea was that of a national or tribal God,
limited as you can see in the older books of the Hebrew Old Testament. Read
Genesis, read any of the five books called Books of Moses, read the book of
Joshua or read the book of Judges, and you will find quite clearly
in these older remnants of the Hebrew scriptures that you are face to [46]
face with a God who has many other Gods around him, and that superiority is
claimed for him by his own nation and his own people. When you read in the third
chapter of Genesis of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,
or when you read of the Tower of Babel, when the people were going to build up a
tower that was to reach unto Heaven, and God said if they did that there was
nothing they would not be able to do; so he went down among them and confounded
their speech, so that they should not be able to understand each other; when
you read in the Book of Judges that the Lord was with Judah, and he
drove out the inhabitants of the valley but could not drive out those of the
mountain because they had chariots of iron - when you read things like that,
you realise at once that you are in the presence of a conception of God which
is local and national, and you realise that many of the commands that were
given to inflict the most cruel and brutal punishments upon the Jew who turned
renegade to his faith were chiefly intended to preserve the Jews as a nation,
for it was treason that was punished; for to dally with any other form of
religion was really treason, as the Gods of the nations around them were enemies
of their own God, and therefore to turn to them was treason to the State
belonging to the tribal or national God. And that view continued till the
Captivity: then the [47] Jews were carried out into the ancient
civilisations, Assyrians, Babylonians, etc. And when they come back again to
Judea you find that in the remnant that returns the God Idea has assumed a
wider, greater, and far more splendid form. They bring back with them the idea
of immortality; they bring back with them the idea of one God, the universal,
the all-pervading. You have such a splendid; phrase as that spoken in the
Psalms, in a post-Babylonian Psalm: “Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, or
whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art
there: if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of
the morning and dwell in the utter most parts of the sea, even there shall thy
hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me”. There is nothing like that in
the older books, no conception of that thought until the post-Babylonian days;
and then instead of the God who walked m the garden in the cool of the day you
have “the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, whose Name is Holy”. The
splendour of that phrase ‘who inhabiteth eternity’ is separated by an age of
thinking from the conception of the God who walked in a little garden - utterly
different; a sublimely spiritual idea instead of a local and a material one.
And then you pass on to the God-Ideas that are found in what
we may call the [48] universal religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam,
the three comparatively modern religions of the world. They are not national;
there are no limitations in them to a special form of social order intended for
the development of a particular nation; they can pass from one nation to
another and be adapted to any civilisation into which they come. Now in southern
Buddhism there cannot be said to be any Idea of God. In northern Buddhism you
find the Idea of God again appearing as the celestial Buddha, the boundless
Buddha, but in the southern church it is the Lord Buddha Himself who is the
object of worship, to whom flowers are brought, to whom love goes out, the Man
who has risen into God.
When you take Christianity, there you have as the central
God-Idea the Idea of the Father of Spirits. That is one of the great
contributions of Christianity to the religious thought of the world, a
universal Father, who is really the Father of men. But in Christianity itself
you have a trace of Pantheism more than once, as you must have in all religion
that seeks to be reasonable, philosophic, intelligible. You read in one of the
Epistles of S. Paul the statement, after saying that all things are to be
subdued to the Son: “Then shall the Son Himself be subject to Him who put all
things under Him, that God may be all in all”. You find the same thought [49]
coming out when it is declared: “In Him we live and move and have our being”.
And while it is true that, owing to many historical conditions and the gradual
growth of civilisation out of the darkness which followed the destruction of the
Roman Empire up to our own time, that deeper doctrine of Pantheism has been
overlaid and you only find it now and again in some lecture delivered
philosophically to philosophers, as by Mansell, where he finds himself landed,
as he says, in the pathless desert of Pantheism, led there by his reason which
finds it impossible to deny; that side is left out entirely in popular
Christianity, and the conception of the Father is the one most dwelt upon, with
those other aspects of deity in the Son and the creative intelligent Spirit.
When you come to Islam, there the God-Idea is more the
Monarch than the Father, rather the Ruler of nations than the Lover of men. I am
not forgetting that there are some most exquisite statements as to the love of
God in Islam from the mouth of the great Prophet himself, as well as from the
mouths of some of his followers; but the main conception, the conception that
dominates popular Islam, is rather the idea of the mighty Ruler, the one supreme
authority, than the nearer and tenderer conception you find in Christianity as
coming from the mouth of the Christ. And never forget, when you think of Him as
God, that He recalled to the men of His day according [50] to the account
which is left of Him, that older conception of the Hebrew faith, calling all the
sons of God. “I said: Ye are Gods and ye are all the children of the Highest”.
Passing again from that brief sketch of these three universal
religions, separating them for the sake of clearness from the older national
religions of the past, and reminding you that there were of course many other
national religions, although I only spoke specifically of the three fundamental
faiths that branch out into others, let me ask you now to turn for a moment to
the highest conception of God, the God-Idea at its noblest and its greatest, as
it comes out in the great religions of the world belonging to the Aryan race and
its branches as far as they have spread. I am using here for convenience sake a
little book compiled by myself and issued by the Theosophical Society, the first
part of the Universal Text-Book of Religion, and although I am using this
for quotations, I may say that all the quotations were taken by me and others
from the originals or translations, and have very carefully been left in their
own complete sense, so that you should be able to judge of the teachings of the
religions of the world, arranged as they are here under the heads of the great
doctrines. I am taking here those which are put under The Unity of God, in order
to put to you those great central Ideas of God, so [51] marvellously
alike, so sublimely spiritual, as we find them in the greatest of our race. I
take first only the oldest, drawn from the Hindu scriptures:
“I will declare that which is to be known, that which being
known immortality is gained, the beginningles supreme Brahman.”
That, remember, is the Hindu name for the supreme God, “the
One only without a second”, and then a description comes from a Upanishat:
“Unseen He sees, unheard He hears, unthought of He thinks,
unknown He knows; none other than He is the Seer, none other than He is the
Hearer, none other than He is the Thinker, none other than He is the Knower; He
is the Self, the Inner Ruler, immortal, that which is other perishes.”
And again:
“I am the Self, seated in the heart of all beings; I am the
beginning, the middle and also the end of all beings … nor is there ought moving
or unmoving that may exist bereft of Me. … Whatsoever is glorious good,
beautiful and mighty, understand thou that to come forth from a fragment of my
splendour. … Having pervaded this whole universe with one fragment of myself, I
remain.”
And again:
“When darkness was not, when there was neither day nor night,
neither being nor non-being, then there the All-Blessed even alone. None is able
to comprehend Him in the space above, in the space below, in the space between.
For Him whose name is infinite glory there is no likeness. Not in the sight
[52] abides His form;
none beholds Him with the eye; those who by love and wisdom know Him as dwelling
in the heart, they become immortal.”
There you have the Hindu Idea of God, not, I think,
surpassable in magnificence in any scripture or in any thought. And that has
permeated the Indian people, is familiar to the peasant even as it is thought of
by the philosopher.
“Manifest, near, dwelling verily in the heart, is the great
goal; on Him is founded all that moves, breathes and closes the eyes. Him you
know as what exists and exists not, who is to be adored, who is beyond the
knowledge of creatures, who is greatest. Luminous, more subtle than the subtle,
on whom the worlds are founded and their inhabitants.”
“He is great, divine, of a nature not to be conceived by
thinking, more subtle than the subtle; He shines in many ways; He is more
distant than the distant, and also near in this body; for the open eyed He
dwelleth here, even in the heart. He is not apprehended by the eye, nor by
speech, nor by the other senses, nor by devotion nor rites, but he whose reason
is purified by the light of wisdom, he by meditation beholds Him who is
partless.”
Now there is no reasonable challenge as to the most modern
date that can be given to these. The Zoroastrians that followed them are said by
a great Orientalist of the West to go back to some five thousand years before
the Christian era; and how much beyond these writings go no historian may dare
definitely to say. Two only of these quotations were taken from a comparatively
modern scripture, though still one which is thousands [53] of years old,
the Bhagavad-Gita. The rest were taken from the Upanishats, which are of
unknown antiquity.
Now if you take the Zoroastrian faith, you find there an idea
that later appears in the Hebrew:
“My first name is Ahmi - I am. Thou, first great Thinker,
whose splendour pervades all light, who through His intellect is the Creator of
all, who supports righteousness and the good mind. Thou Spirit Mazda, Thou who
art ever the same. His origin, none can know, except Himself, who can comprehend
him? He is living and wise and powerful and independent and just; His knowledge
extends over all that is heard or seen or that exists. All existence is visible
to His knowledge at once, without time, and from Him nothing is hid.”
In the earlier Hebrew period there is only one passage that
touches this loftier view; in Exodus: “I am that I am”, the statement of
pure existence. The fundamental truth, the unity, is loudly proclaimed: “Hear, O
Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord”. But later on you find the lofty idea: “I
am the Lord and there is none else. There is no God beside me”. “The Lord is the
true God, He is the living God and a King of Eternity.” “He is the living God
and steadfast for ever; and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed and
His dominion shall be even unto the end.” There the wider, nobler idea appears.
Then when you come to the Christian religion, you have the
phrase in the Acts: [54] “He is not far from any one of us, for in Him we
live and move and have our being. As certain also of your own poets have said,
We are also his offspring, . . . We are the offspring of God”. And you get also
there a splendid ascription: “Now unto the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible,
the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever”.
And when you come to Islam, here we are suffering somewhat
from the badness of translation, for the great book of Islam has never been
translated by a believer in Islam, as it should be, and therefore you have
difficulty. But still even through the wooden translation you can catch the
splendour of one of the passages from the Quran: “God, there is no God but He,
the ever-living, the ever-subsisting. Slumber seizeth Him not nor sleep. To Him
belongeth whatsoever is in heaven and on earth. Who is he that should intercede
with Him unless by His permission? He knows what has been before them, and what
shall be after them, and they shall not compass aught of His knowledge save what
He willeth. His throne is extended over the heavens and the earth, and the care
of them burdeneth Him not, for He is the High, the Mighty”.
And when you come to the teachings of the Prophet, as
preserved in his sayings translated by one of his own people, you have some
beautiful conceptions of the Nature of God:
“Whoso seeketh to approach me one span I seek to
[55] approach one cubit; whoso
seeketh to approach him two fathoms, and whoso walketh towards Me, I run towards
him.”
“God saith: O man, only follow thou my laws and thou shalt
become like unto Me, and then thou shalt say ‘Be’, and behold it is.”
“The person I hold as a beloved, I am his hearing by which he
heareth; I am his sight by which he seeth; I am his hands by which he holdeth; I
am his feet by which he walketh.”
“There was God when there was nothing. He knoweth all things
before and after their existence. He is light without darkness, life without
death, knowledge without ignorance. As He is today so He will remain for ever.”
Now those are but a few of the God Ideas, as you find them in
the scriptures of the world, the higher of course - deliberately taken out of
the highest and the noblest, for the highest is the test of all religions and
not their lowest, as they are lived out by ignorant and foolish men.
And I submit to you that brief testimony, and you can
multiply it a hundredfold if you will. Read your own scriptures at length, and
not only these little jewels that I have picked out in order to show you
specimens of the wealth that those religions contain; and you will realise that
you only want one thing, which comes out so strongly in the Hindu quotations, in
order to turn those loftiest ideas into the Mystical Idea of God. You notice how
over and over again, when speaking of God as distant, He is also spoken of as
near, and then it is ever said he dwelleth in [56] the heart. It is in
the heart that the Mystic sees Him. For if there is One life and only One life
without a second, then your lives and mine, however poor and weak and childish
and undeveloped they may be, are the Life of God Himself, and all that He is we
can from within ourselves unfold. “The kingdom of God is within you” quoth the
Christ, the great revealer of God to the western world. It is in your own
hearts, in the depths of your own being, in the profoundest depths of your own
existence, that you must seek if you would find and know the God whose
knowledge is Eternal Life. If you cannot find Him there, you will never be sure
of Him anywhere. But if once you catch a glimpse of the Eternal within you, then
the Eternal around you will shine out clearly before your eyes. And think what
that means of strength and of splendour to every one of you who has found out by
direct knowledge that God is hiding within you, as He is manifest in the
wondrous life of the wondrous universe around you. Nature is but a veil behind
which is shining the eternal smile of God.
And think what it means if Nature is to you not a soulless
mechanism but a living organism; if God is no longer an abstraction of theology
but a Living Spirit, the Friend and the Lover of Men; if He is no longer to you
a Name but is a Life. That is the glory of the Mystic; that is the joy of the
one who [57] knows. Wherever you go you see Him shining; wherever you
look you recognise the traces of His being. You look at the wonder of Nature
spreading out before you and in the whole of that manifested beauty, as in the
tiniest fragment that you can take in your hand, you see it all irradiated by
the Perfect Beauty that is God. You see Him in the blue of the sky or the ocean;
you see him in the radiant snow on the mountain peak; you hear Him singing in
every bird; you see Him smiling in every flower; and most of all you see Him in
the heart and in the intellect and in the love of men. You see Him in the love
of the mother for the babe; you see Him in the love of the youth for the maiden;
you see Him in the strength of the athlete; you see Him in the patience of the
saint; you see Him in the righteousness of the most holy, and you see Him hiding
in the heart of the basest, illuminating it now and then with some touch of
human love, which is the nearest of all things to God, whose very Nature is Love
and Bliss.
Do you wonder then that anyone of us who has caught but one
glimpse of that infinite and splendid beauty that enwraps the worlds, longs that
all others should likewise catch if it be but a passing glimpse of that supernal
beauty? for what can there be of fear and grief to those who know, of their own
knowledge, that God is, and that the Self of All is One? [58]
III.
THE CHRIST-IDEA.
FRIENDS:
Perhaps the most attractive idea in almost all the religions
of the world is the idea of the Divine Man, whether that Divine Man be brought
into existence by the ascent of man into God, or by the descent of God into man.
Last Sunday, after reviewing the idea of God as it appeared
in many nations, as it was taught in many religions, we found that the essence
of those ideas, the substance which underlay them, was gathered up and rendered
yet more splendid, summed up in the Mystical Idea.
So with what I have called the Christ Idea, using the phrase
most familiar in the West, the idea of the God Man, the Divine Man, as
practically the central object of worship. That also I want to trace for you
through various faiths, catching the light which is thrown upon it in the
different conceptions [59] which have been held from time to time in many
nations in many ages of the world. And there again we shall find that this same
idea, put in varied forms, is summed up and rendered still more beautiful, still
more practical, when we take it in the light of Mysticism, and realise that the
story of one God Man, of one Christ, is in its deepest, truest meaning the
evolution of Divinity in every child of man. And it is really to that thought we
are finally led when we are studying the main religious conceptions, as we find
them in the history of the great faiths of the world, as we see them
reappearing millenium after millenium in the story of the experiences of the
human soul.
And so there gradually grows upon us, as we follow the study,
the idea of a wonderful unity, the thought of world conceptions embodied in a
particular form in each religious faith; and the outcome of it is, I think, a
profounder faith which grows out of the wider knowledge, a realisation that that
which in all times and in all countries has satisfied the yearning Spirit in man
must exemplify a profound spiritual reality, must be found in Nature itself when
studied by the spiritual vision.
Now, so far as I know, in the great faiths of the world, two
alone are without the conception of the God Man as a central object of worship.
We do not find it in the popular
[60] Hebrew faith. I am
obliged to put in the word ‘popular’ because, in the more mystical writings of
the Hebrews, there are naturally traces of this same spiritual fact; but owing
very largely, I think, to the sense among the Hebrew teachers that the people
were in danger of falling away from their national God into various forms of
idolatry, it seems that all image or likeness, even the human itself, was
excluded from their larger conception of Deity. In their mystical writings, as I
say, you find traces of that, traces which are drawn partly from the verse in
Genesis when it is said that ‘in the image of God made He man’.
The other faith which is without the notion of the God Man
is, of course, the faith of Islam. And there it is very easy to see why the
great Prophet of Arabia left entirely on one side all conception of humanity
when he was founding and building his religion. You cannot study the history of
the time in which Islam was founded without seeing how the popular ideas of God
and of Christ had become debased and repellent. And founded also, as that faith
was, in the midst of peculiarly brutal forms of idolatry, it was probably
thought necessary by the insight of the Prophet to put forth a faith entirely
free from all conception of humankind as entering into the Godhead.
In both those cases it would seem that surrounding
necessities veiled what in other faiths [61] was one of the central
religious conceptions. And putting those two aside and turning to the other
great faiths, whether national or world-wide, we shall find that in the centre
of each of them this idea of the God Man shines out luminous and supreme. We see
that the human heart turns to that conception of deity, finding God in the
familiar and beloved form of man; that man, in his longing for sympathy, asks
for a manhood which would be able to feel with human feelings, in which the
human heart shall ever throb; and we shall find that all the tenderest love and
the most reverential homage is offered up to that manhood taken into God. We
shall see that, in times of sorrow and distress as well as in times of
rejoicing, the human sought the human in Deity, m order that the sense of
sympathy and of kinship might arise. And that is justified when we realise that
in every child of man God is incarnate, and that man was really following the
deepest promptings of the Spirit when, not yet perchance recognising his own
divinity, he yet sought in human symbol and in human likeness to find the
thought of God that must sustain and console.
Now everywhere, of course, there is one form of this, less
exalted than the one that I have called the Christ Idea, which you find in Greek
and Roman and Hindu story, - the idea of the demigod. That is mostly
interesting, from the standpoint of comparative [62] religion, in that,
when you come to the God Men themselves, you see that this same thought of the
absence of a human father is prominent in every one of them. The demigods of
Greece and Rome, the demigods of the more ancient Hindus, were men living
amongst men and taking active part in human affairs; they were kings, they were
warriors, they were statesmen, sometimes they were teachers. And you cannot read
a great epic poem of Greece or of India without finding very many cases in which
a God overshadowed an earthly maiden, and became the father of a hero, the
ruler, the warrior, who was to play a great part in the history of his country.
That idea of the demigod is allied to some thoughts of the great Incarnation
which, under many names in other religions, is signified in Christianity by the
name of Christ, and it has, it is true, in common with these legends, the
thought that no earthly father is the parent of the Divine Child. But that is
rather a side issue.
The real interest in the two conceptions is that, wherever
you get the thought of the demigod, you are there concerned with a religion
which has adopted that religious polytheism of which I spoke in the second
lecture, in which the pantheism of the religion has, for the sake of worship,
for the sake of attracting and helping men and women, veiled itself in the form
of mighty spiritual intelligences called ‘gods’ among the Greeks and [63]
the Romans, called ‘Shining Ones’ among the Hinds, the phrase analogous to the
thought of the ‘angel’ or ‘archangel’ in the Christian scriptures. And it is not
without interest in this connection to remember that verse over which so much
dispute and so much controversy have arisen, that you find in Genesis, when it
is said that “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair and
took them wives of all whom they chose”. Some commentators tell us that those
are the angels who came down and wedded with mortal women, but, however that be,
whatever was in the mind of the Hebrew writer, it is a thought that we find over
and over again in the literature of the ancient world, and always in connection
with the faiths where the Supreme Deity is regarded as incarnating in all the
forms in his universe, so that what the Christian calls the angel, the spiritual
intelligence, is one that occupies a large part in the life of the people. And
there is an intimacy, as it were, of connection between the two; taking interest
in human affairs on the divine side, looking up to the Divine Helper on the
human side; so that life becomes permeated with the idea of super-physical
existences and all Nature becomes irradiated with God in many forms. But, apart
from that, these demigods are not interesting to us in our search after the
larger idea of the God Man, which is signified, for [64] the sake of
intelligibility here, by the great name of the Christ.
In taking that larger thought, turn for a moment first to
Buddhism, not because Buddhism is first in time, of course, for the religions of
the Hindus and of the Persians - the Zoroastrians, - are much older in time
than the Buddhist; but because in that we find put forward so clearly and so
beautifully the thought of the way in which man evolves into Divinity, in which
the perfect Divine life is reached m human form. Of course in Buddhism you have
as a fundamental idea the thought of Reincarnation, and so when the Buddha has
reached Illumination, has in fact become the Buddha, we find in the stories of
which Easterns are so fond - the Jatakas or birth stories, as they are called -
sayings of the Lord reported which speak of former lives, lives traced even from
the animal kingdom, in which the far-reaching vision of the perfectly
illuminated Man looked backward over the uncounted aeons of the past, and saw
the Spirit within Him climbing up the many steps of the great ladder that leads
from the mineral up to God. You find Him speaking of Himself as a tiger,
speaking of Himself under other animal forms, and then speaking of His human
births, of life after life, birth and death after birth and death, until the
time comes - ages, uncounted ages before the era of Buddhahood - when it [65]
is said that He took the vow to be a Saviour of the world. And then it is
written that He perfected His vow age after age, until He came at length to His
last mortal birth.
Now the idea of the evolution of a Buddha has, as its
starting point, a man who, moved by sympathy for the sorrow of the world and
desiring, under an impulse of perfect compassion, to lessen the world’s
miseries, comes into touch with the Buddha of the time, to whom he offers his
vow that he also will give himself to become saviour of the world as He is. That
is a necessary step in the long evolution, the starting point, we may say, of
the life of a Buddha. And then there is necessary the acceptance of the offer,
the confirmation by the One who has trodden the Path, who has attained
Illumination, who is living His last life as man, and who, on death, will pass
onwards into Nirvana. That mighty Being accepts the vow that a successor in the
future offers to Him, moved by the impulse which long ages before He also had
felt, the vow He also had offered. And then, in the acceptance of the vow, it is
held that the first step towards Buddhahood is taken. Life after life he passes
onwards, marked by an ever-growing width of sympathy, an ever-growing depth of
compassion; and then there is some division between the views held by the two
great branches of the Buddhist Church. Some say He enters on the Path, [66]
and that is also the Occult view; others say that He stands aside through many
lives, gradually perfecting the human nature, but does not pass through the
definite Initiations intended for other lines of work. It matters not much which
view is held. The Occult view, as I say, is that He passes through Initiation
after Initiation, until He has reached the stage of Liberation that we call the
Master; then onwards and onwards still, until He becomes the holder of that
great office, the name of which will be familiar to you, the office of the
Bodhisattva, He “whose essence is Wisdom”; and finally, He leaves the body, for
the last time, and passes away from earth. The One who is next to Him in the
order of evolution along these lines takes then the place of the Bodhisattva
which the first, in becoming the Buddha, has left vacant. This is the name by
which, in Buddhist countries, the Supreme Teacher of the world is indicated, the
One who, at each new stage of civilisation, enters into a human body in order to
give the new spiritual impulse, in order to give the principle on which that
civilisation will be founded, and by which it will be developed. He comes time
after time to found a new religion, embodying in the religion the central idea
which is to dominate the civilisation; coming thus out into the world; time
after time, when the new impulse is needed, when a new division of the great
[67] race - a sub-race - is to be born; then taking a human body - generally
the body of a disciple - He lives on earth, teaching and proclaiming the
ancient truths in the new garb which is suited for the time, to give the
necessary impulse for the new spiritual life; and then, passing back to where He
was before, leaves another to look after the religion He has founded, Himself
the Guide of every faith on earth, the Supreme Teacher. He loves all the
religions he has founded, and ever pours down into them the floods of His
spiritual life. When His work is over, when a great race has reached the point
at which another new departure is to be taken, then, for the last time this
Bodhisattva also comes into the World as mortal man. Then He passes through the
hard stages that you may read in the story of the life of the Lord Gautama, the
last Buddha, and finally he reaches that perfect illumination which enables Him
to open before the men of the coming ages the ancient Path, with new
instructions to make the treading of the Path clearer in the eyes of the people
of His day. And you find Him then proclaiming the ancient law, you find Him then
establishing the ancient order, and giving to the world that law, pointing that
noble Path to the people of His time. Then He passes away from earth for the
last time through the gateway of death, and becomes the spiritual Buddha,
[68] parted from the earth He has served, so far as further physical
manifestation is concerned.
And along that line, as you know, the great Buddhist religion
has been built up. They tell us that when the Lord Buddha passed away, it was a
brother of His - not a physical Brother, but a Brother who had trodden with Him
the great Path through many ages - the Lord Maitreya, the Lord of Compassion,
who took His place m the seat of the Supreme Teacher. The Bodhisattva of our own
time, then, is this Supreme Teacher, known in the East under that name of the
Compassionate One, far Gautama the Buddha is ever called the Buddha of Wisdom,
while Maitreya, the Buddha-to-be, is called the Buddha of Compassion.
And so you find in that ancient faith this climbing up of man
into perfection, as the idea of the World Teacher that rules the minds of
myriads of men who call themselves by the name of the Lord Buddha.
In the Hindu religion, on the other hand, you find the
supreme manifestation of God more closely allied to your Christian idea, for
there the Avatara is representative of the same Christ thought. He is one who
descends from Deity into manhood, he does not climb from manhood into God. The
normal orthodox idea is that from time to time, from the second Person of the
Hindu [69] Trinity, there comes forth a fragment, as it were, of God
Himself, who descends into the world of men and becomes in that world a Saviour
and a Teacher. Ten of those great descents (the words Avatara only means
descent) are spoken of in the Hindu scriptures. Nine are of the past; one more
is to come in some hundreds of thousands of years from the present time. Nothing
short of that is spoken of as a great Avatara. The word would be utterly out of
place, and would only show ignorance, were it used to indicate a teacher of the
world who was not God Himself descending into humanity.
But there is one peculiarity of the Hindu faith that I ought
to mention to you in regard to these Avataras; they mark out the great epochs
of evolution in a very, very remarkable way; for when you remember that these
are found in some of the most ancient Hindu writers, it may strike you as
strange, if you have not reached the idea that universal religion is of unknown
antiquity, and that the Hindu faith is the oldest of living faiths; it may
strike you as strange that in these Avataras you have the order of evolution as
recognised by science, marked out by symbol and by word. You have to remember
that to the mind of the Hindu God is everywhere and in everything, otherwise it
may seem to you perchance grotesque as symbol, but not so to the Hindu. The
first Avatara is in the form [70] of a fish, the second of a tortoise,
the third of a boar, then of a half-human half-animal figure, then of man
himself. Put those side by side with evolution as seen by science and you will
see how the first is the symbol of the time when water covered the earth and
nought but the great fish kingdom could exist; you come on to the reptiles, the
amphibious creatures, typified in the tortoise; then to the mammals, typified in
the boar; then to the semi-human, typified in the man-lion; then to the human,
typified first in the dwarf and then in a full-grown man. And not until all
those stages have been traced, everyone of which is due to a new impulse of the
ever evolving life of God, do you come to the two great Ones who dominate Hindu
India - Rama, the perfect King, and Krishna, the perfect object of devotion.
Those two Avataras are the examples of the Hindu, just as among you the Christ
is taken for an example, “having left you an example that you should follow in
His steps”. In those two marvellous Divine-human figures, all that you can think
of most splendid in power, most magnificent in justice, greatest in rule; the
idea of the perfect King is embodied in Rama; in Krishna all that you can think
of that is tenderest in love, all that you can imagine is fairest in childhood,
joyous and glad, with the flute ever playing divine music to which the very
beasts of the field came, [71] attracted by the marvellous notes, the God
enshrined in the heart of every woman in India who follows the Hindu faith, the
God of the home, the God of the child - that is Shri Krishna to the myriads who
bow down to Him, all in men most gracious and most tender, all that most
divinely images, embodies a perfect childhood and a perfect youth, the ideal and
the loved of the Hindu heart.
Then you come, as ninth, to the Lord Buddha, accepted as
Avatara by the Hindu as by the Buddhist, only now as a descent from God, not as
an ascent from man; but He, they say, was the Avatara for the non Hindu
nations, not intended for the Hindu but for nations outside India.
The tenth, as I said, is yet to come, hundred of thousands of
years from the present time. Now that idea of Shri Rama and Shri Krishna is the
one most closely related, I think, to the Christ Incarnation, and it is
remarkable that in one form of the narrative, the stories of them come very
nearly side by side.
But if you look in other faiths as well, in Egypt you have
Osiris; you have among the Persians Mithra, and in many other nations similar
Divine men, joined together by the stories of their lives which, as we shall see
in a moment, are closely connected with the story of the sun’s course through
the year.
Then, thus descending to the later faith, we find the idea of
the Christ the central thought [72] in Christianity; for after all it is
not too much to say that the heart of the Christian goes out to Christ as it
does not go out to the others who are called the first and the third Persons in
the Christian Trinity. Now that is the same in Hinduism; the Hindu Vishnu is the
second Person in the Hindu Trinity, as the Son is the second in the Christian.
The first in that Trinity, while He attracts the Yogi, the philosopher, does not
attract similarly the love of the ordinary devotee, while the third Person of
the Trinity in Hinduism, like the third Person in the Christian Trinity, can
scarcely be said to be an object of worship at all. Both recognise the Creative
Spirit as an aspect in the Trinity, but you find no temples to Brahma in India -
save one I think that has been discovered - and you find but little worship of
the Holy Spirit in the Christian churches, although one day is specially set
apart to reverence Him.
Coming then to this Christ idea in Christianity, I want you,
if you will and if you can, to realise that what that idea in experience and in
beauty is to you, so is the idea of the Buddha to the Buddhist, so is the idea
of Shri Rama and Shri Krishna to the Hindu; and that from the traces of faiths
now dead we can see that to the Egyptians Osiris represented the same beloved
idea of God and man united. And it is not to be forgotten that the Egyptian dead
was said to “become [73] Osiris” just as the Christian thinks of his
beloved dead being united to Christ. These great ideas are one; they are not an
appanage of any one special faith; they reappear in every religion, and so prove
the reality of the truth of the idea that underlies them. If you can cease to be
exclusive with your treasures, you will find that they only become the more
precious and the more your own, when you realise that other religions also have
had the same delight in their conceptions, and that which is universally found
may be expected to be true.
Thinking now for a moment of that one great Being who in the
West is spoken of as the Christ, He is regarded by all who have gone deeply into
these matters as the Supreme Teacher of all the religions of the world. Put in
another phrase, that Mighty One whom you speak of as the Christ is the same
individual as the Buddhist speaks of as the Bodhisattva. You are worshipping
the same individual, although perhaps most in both the religions would feel
offended at the idea. When talking not very long ago with a Buddhist monk, I
told him that the Bodhisattva - the Lord Maitreya - was the same as the
Christian Lord Christ, and he was shocked at the idea; to him it was a
blasphemy; just as it may be to some of you but a blasphemy to think that the
One whom you reverence as the Christ is worshipped under another name in eastern
[74] lands. But to me, it is one of the most beautiful of things to think
that the millions of the Buddhist world who bow the knee to the Bodhisattva send
up their love and their prayers to the same mighty Being as the One to whom the
millions of Christendom bow down in homage. To realise that both are worshipping
the same mighty One seems to me so fair a thing; religions are nearer than they
dream, and worshippers are joined in prayers although distinct in the names to
which those prayers are addressed. Surely it is a greater thing, a gladder
thing, to know that your Christ is worshipped by myriads who have never heard
His Name; for to Him all prayers to the God-Man go up, and it matters not
whether they name the Lord Maitreya, the Lord Krishna, the Lord Christ; they are
but three names of One who presides over all, and who leads His children, to
whatever faith they belong. Was it not the Christ Himself who said: “Other
sheep I have that are not of this fold; them also I must bring and they shall
hear My voice; and there shall be one fold and one shepherd?” There is one
Shepherd in the higher world, though there are many folds in the one of division
which is our earth; but the one Shepherd shall draw them all together, for they
know His voice and shall surely learn to know each other.
And now think for a moment of him in [75] His
historical aspect. The Christ in all times and in all ages has stood out as man
in two characters - one as Teacher, the other as what is called Miracle-Worker -
that is as One who knows the laws of Nature far more fully than the people of
His time know them and so utilising those laws, and utilising them far the
benefit of human kind, He performs many a mighty work, but still ever a work
which is done by law, a work which comes within the mighty scheme of Nature; for
there are many powers that as yet you know not of; and these, as the Spirit
shines out more strongly will come within your grasp. There are glimpses of it
from time to time when, by the exercise of faith by a believer, some wondrous
cure is performed; there are traces of it when from time to time, not by faith
but by knowledge of these at present hidden powers, some great work of healing
is wrought to bring relief to a sufferer and joy to those around. But there are
many powers hidden in the scheme of Nature that as yet you know not, every one
of which shall come within reach of humanity as humanity climbs nearer to
Divinity. And if the Divine Man shows out the powers sometimes, it is as an
encouragement and an inspiration to men so blinded by flesh that they know not
their own divinity; and because they know not the splendour of their
birthright, they have contempt for their own nature, not realising what is
hidden within it. [76] But every Christ of the past is only a prophecy
and a promise of the man of the future, the man who, unfolding the Divine powers
of the Spirit, shall be master over physical nature as well as over
super-physical, and, by gradually spiritualising with his own life the matter
around him, shall render it obedient to his will and ductile to his power. It is
the evolution which lies in front of which the world’s Christs are the promise
and the realisation.
I do not think that those who have studied carefully are
likely themselves to be led astray along the lines of the so-called Higher
Criticism, some of which would lead them to deny the existence of the physical
Christ. He was a Man among men, around whom legends gathered, around whom
stories were collected. He enters the list like His great forerunners, a man
treading the familiar paths of earth, and living among the family and the people
to whom by birth He belonged.
But that aspect of the Christ is the least important, the
least interesting. Far more important, it seems to me, is the aspect of the
Christ in which you see His kinship in story and in legend with all the Christs
that have trodden the human way before Him. And that is ever in connection with
what is called the legend of the Sun - the Sun, because all things in lower
Nature symbolise the higher - in which the progress of the sun [77]
through the year symbolises the great Life of God made Man lived for human
helping. Do you realise that all the things in lower nature are but symbols and
shadows, reflections, if you like, of the profound truths of the spiritual
world, objectified in matter for the helping of men. Men have studied, beginning
at the wrong end, when they think the objects in Nature were originally
worshipped; the objects in Nature are the shadows here of the great spiritual
verities which lie at the base of every great religion of the world. The truths
are m the spiritual world, the shadows in this material world in which we live.
God is not the sun, but God is the life of the sun, and the sun is the
reflection of a fragment of the Life of God; and so the sun, as he goes his
annual course, is figuring out and showing forth the real Life of God in the
story of the World-Teachers who come to earth over and over again. And what men
call the Solar Myth is really the expression of a spiritual truth, re-lived
among men by every great Teacher who comes to illuminate the world. And so you
ever have the story of the birth encircled with difficulty, with danger, with
menace and with threat; for it is the sun at the shortest day of his life,
encircled with the winter dangers, and menaced in those days by storm and mist
and fog. And you see him climbing slowly through the spring months; born at the
winter solstice, [78] born ever of a virgin and His symbol in any
religion the sign of the Zodiac which was in the ascendant when he was born into
the world. And so sometimes the sacred animal, that ever symbolises the Man-God
in a religion, is the bull as it was in Egypt, is the lamb as it became in
Christendom. The fishes also you find as symbol, and according to the date of
your religion is the sign of the Zodiac that is the symbol of the God Man for
that special faith. And so by such calculations you may be helped to the date of
the religion, to alternative dates going back by thousands and thousands of
years; for you can only say the religion may have been born at such and such a
date, or at the equivalent point tens of thousands of years before. And so you
find among the Hindus that you can calculate to find out these dates, because in
the Hindu ancient stories they give the chart of the heaven as it was when the
hero of the tale was born.
And so you find this idea in the myth, that man is to become
united with the God who embodies the myth, as I spoke of Osiris, and the dead
men becoming Osiris, and of the Christian united to his Christ on the other side
of death.
And that leads us gently onwards to the still deeper view in
which, leaving the symbols of the sun’s course in the heavens, we come on to the
evolution of the Divine Man in every evolving human being, whose human evolution
[79] will not be over until he has trodden the road which is trodden
before him by the Christs of great religions. There is the profoundest interest
for all of us, the birth of the Christ in the Spirit of man, the unfolding of
the Christ in the human life. And we find that exquisitely embodied in the
story of the Christ of Christendom, as you have it in the gospels, where the
great events of the life typify the great Initiations on the Path, every one of
which means a new expansion of consciousness to the unfolding consciousness of
man, and each of which marks a stage lived out in the life of the Christ, lived
out in the life of the man who is climbing towards Divinity. You have the first
great Initiation typified in the birth of the Christ, the birth from a virgin -
for that is ever regarded as the pure birth, untouched by earthly father - into
that kingdom of heaven in which the Christ life begins. And then you come to the
Baptism, when the Spirit of God descends upon the Beloved Son and abides on Him,
and there you have the second of the great Initiations in which the work of the
Initiate is to bring down into his human consciousness the Divine consciousness
which broods ever above him, so that he may know himself in this and in the
other subtler and higher worlds. And then onward to the next stage, the
Transfiguration on the Mount, on which the disciple, ever extending in his
[80] consciousness, reaches the point at which it stretches upwards and
around him and he knows himself irradiated with the majesty of God. And then
onwards from the Mount of Transfiguration, where he realises his own Divinity,
down into the valley of suffering, onwards to Jerusalem, onwards to the Garden
of Gethsemane, to the mockery of the High Priest and of the Ruler, bearing the
cross as He faints beneath its weight, nailed to the Cross with all His
possessions stripped from Him, going from stage to stage until the last darkness
descends upon Him in which the human nature cried out in its agony: “My God, my
God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” And in the very moment of that final darkness
He finds the Divine Arms nearer than they ever were before, finds that the loss
of the outer God is the discovery of the inner, and in that discovery the words
go forth: “It is finished!” and the man has completed his pilgrimage. The time
comes when He is entering into God, and then comes the fifth, the great
Initiation, the Liberation of the human Spirit, typified in the resurrection and
the ascension of the Christ, when the God who found Himself upon the Cross,
takes to Himself His own Divine power and becomes the Master of life and death,
He who has in His hands the keys of heaven and hell; for there is no height of
glory into which He cannot rise into communion with deity, there is no depth
[81] of hell of human misery, into which He cannot descend in the helping of
His fettered brethren upon earth.
And so that story of the Christ as told in your own gospels,
means to the Occultist the mystical story of the unfolding of God in every man.
And so it was that S. Paul saw it, and gave you many a hint, many a suggestion;
which might show you that the Christ was not only one splendid Figure, but
typified the unfolding God, the divine Spirit, in every one of us, for do you
not read m the teaching of S. Paul: “My little children, in whom I travail
again, until Christ be formed in you”. Do you not read him saying over and over
again that you must be crucified with Christ did he not declare that he himself
had passed through that mystical crucifixion? Did he not go on to say that “the
life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God”, and
did he not say: “Not I live, but Christ liveth in me?” To live the Christ-life
while still in the bondage of the flesh, to pass through all those stages of
unfolding divine humanity and to know that the Christs of the race have trodden
that Path before you, have reached that goal which you in time shall reach -
that is the true salvation; that is the inner reality of mystical Christianity;
not to be saved by a Christ outside you, but to be uplifted by the Christ
within you; to become the very Christ Himself in your own life for
[82] the outcast, the
helpless and the despairing; to gain that divinest of all powers, to pour into
them your help, and into them your life, and to know that the reward for every
pain that you have suffered in your human pilgrimage is the power to help the
fainting children of men, to raise them a little nearer to the life which is
Divine. That is the true meaning of the Ascension; that ascending into God
yourself you are present to give help to every child of man, for is it not said
the Christ is but the firstborn among many brethren? And you ought to be His
brethren as you name His Name; you think too ill of yourselves to claim your
birthright, and you deem it blasphemy to try to realise that which your own
scriptures proclaim. But will you not learn to live your religion, as you say
you believe it. Will you not cease to call others heretics, for the worst heresy
is the heresy of the life, and not the heresy of the brain, the heresy that
denies that the Christ-life is possible for man, and calls itself a miserable
sinner when it ought to be climbing into a saint of Divinity. You think too ill
of yourselves, you think too humbly of yourselves, you who name the Name of
Christ, the Supreme Teacher of the world: rise then, I, who am not Christian,
would pray you, to the height of your great calling; recognise in yourselves
the Christ as some of us recognise Those who are one with Him but are [83]
known by other names; for names make no difference where the realities veiled by
the names are one; it matters not whether you call yourself Hindu, Buddhist,
Christian, Mussulman; all men are sons of God, and are unfolding the Deity
within them. Take whatever name helps you most. The mother does not murmur when
the lips of her babe pronounce her name in childish fashion; it is the love
which appeals to her; and be sure that the Christ, and all Christs, recognise
those as brethren in whom Their own likeness shines out most perfectly, and
that, as you become a Christ m reality to the helpless amongst you, so shall the
great Christ recognise you as brethren, and not be ashamed that you wear His
Name when you try to live His life. [84]
IV.
THE MAN-IDEA.
FRIENDS:
Once more in beginning with the Man-Idea, as I did with the
God-Idea and the Christ-Idea, I propose to consider what have been the
conceptions of man which we can find through a study of the history of the past
- how the thought of man has presented itself in science, in religion; how far
we can trace coherent conceptions of the human being, whether we turn to
observation as recorded in science or whether we turn to the scriptures of the
world containing that which is put forward by highly evolved men as to the
origin of man, as to his nature and the possibilities of his future becoming.
Let us first turn to science, for that is the furthest
removed from what may be called the Mystical Idea of man, and I am thinking
chiefly of the science of the last century, for the conception of man in the
science of the [85] immediate present has not been very distinctly
formulated and seems to be somewhat in a condition of flux, Science is certainly
going away from the materialistic position in which the conception of man was
naturally that of an evolving body rather than that of an unfolding Spirit. That
thought is falling behind in the scientific world, and one feels, in describing
the conception - a perfectly coherent and logical conception - which
materialistic science put forward, that one is to a very large extent doing
present-day science an injustice. It is not that I am really ignoring the
progress which science is making, but only that I am in the position that that
wider and larger thought of man which is beginning to express itself through
some of the leading scientists of the day is hardly yet sufficiently formulated
and developed to be very clearly perceptible, to be presented in a very
intelligible way.
It is perhaps even more in philosophy than in science that
the idea of man, among the great thinkers of our time, is showing a change from
the materialistic thought to the idealistic or religious. If you take, for
instance, the philosophy of Bergson, as presented by himself, you see at once
that there we are going back to the thought that man is a spiritual
intelligence and not only an intellectual being; and we shall see, in glancing
at that later in connection with the theosophical thought, [86] that he
is there putting forward in philosophic garb what Theosophy has been teaching
more along scientific and psychological lines.
Leaving that, however, for the moment, for it is one of the
later conceptions, let us ask how science thought of man in those days well in
the mind of the elder amongst us, that which was the foremost thought of the
time when people of my own age were almost reaching middle age, and when many
who now are elderly were young, progressive, as it was said, in their thought.
The evolution hypothesis, of course, dominated the
conception of man, and so we had society figured for us as evolving from man in
the savage state, that savage man having himself evolved from those that are
spoken of as the social animals. You will be familiar, at least, from your study
with the thought of the evolution from the social type of animal into primitive
man, and you will be familiar with the thought of the gradual evolution of
society first, of course, from the mating of the semi-animal men; then the
formation of the family as the first unit of the society which was yet to be;
then that is traced onwards for us as families aggregate into tribes, later as
tribes aggregate into nations. And so we find ourselves face to face with an
idea which is not without its beauty, which is not without its splendour even,
in which we trace stage by stage this growth of the animal into the man, [87]
of the men into the tribe, and of the tribes into the nation.
And side by side with that we are asked to realise the
evolution of morality: first, the recognition of the family bond, in which,
clearly for the defence of the family itself, any sort of rejection of
obligation and of duty would have led very rapidly to the extinction of the
family. Then we see morality extending to the tribal limit; within the tribe
violence is forbidden, within the tribe murder and theft are looked upon with
disapproval; and so gradually there grows up a rough tribal morality, binding
within the limits of the tribe, but recognising no duty and no obligation to
those who belong to other tribes, who are outside this limit of the recognised
tribe. Then we are asked to see how that gradually extends, as the tribes gather
together into the nation, and you have a national morality in which violence is
forbidden within the nation, in which theft and murder are not permitted within
the boundaries of the State, but where, as regards other nations, morality has
very little to say as regards the dealings of one with another.
And even up to the present time international morality is
only, as it were, in the throes of birth. While we recognise that it is wrong,
that it cannot be allowed, that one man shall murder one man, if you multiply
the man by some hundreds of thousands, then murder [88] becomes war, and
the assassin is changed by the very largeness of his action, he is a general, a
hero, a great warrior. And yet fundamentally, if you look at it, the crime of
murder cannot become righteous by multiplication, nor can the killing of men
turn into a virtue because performed on an international scale.
And so again, when you are dealing with theft. You must not
steal a man’s purse, he would at once call upon the police; but if you steal his
land and call it annexation instead of theft then it becomes the recognised
attitude of the strong nation towards the weak, of the civilised nation towards
the savage. Looking at it again, you realise at once that an act does not change
its nature simply by transferring it to the international platform. And,
although we may fairly recognise the fact that, in the case of the private
murder, the root is anger or desire for individual gain, while, in the case of
war, many other motives and thoughts may mingle with it, none the less it is
well, I think, to realise that we have not yet reached a truly international
stage of morality. We see a glimpse of it here and there, as where arbitration
is preferred to war, and justice is appealed to instead of guns and battalions;
but that even now is only attempted where a nation thinks the matter under
dispute to be comparatively unimportant, and no great nation as yet has taken
the step of daring to trust some grave [89] matter of national importance
to the arbitrament of justice. Rather would it fly to arms and make the
strength of its armies and its navies the measure of right and wrong.
But, while we may realise there is much that is logical in
that evolution, the difficulty in it is that it is not supported by fact, and
that history, as far as it exists, does not show us these traces of the savage
unfolding into civilisation, of the barbarian growing into a high state of
education and culture. It seems so natural, that perhaps you hardly realise that
there is no such case known in history. The savages that we know are all tending
to disappear, not to grow into a higher state of civilisation. We find them
dying out where civilisation approaches them. On every occasion that we know of
where a nation called more highly civilised has invaded the territories of a
comparatively barbarous people, the result to the savages has not been growth in
civilisation but either extermination or gradual decay. Nowhere, so far as I
have read history, have I found or heard of a single case in which savages, left
to themselves, evolved into civilisation. And that is somewhat remarkable if
the scientific theory be a true history of the past.
Many other difficulties arise as well as the absence of
proof, for history goes the other way. Civilisations, as we know them in the
past, have the same strange mark and [90] characteristic that, as Bunsen
said of Egypt, they seem to spring “full formed upon the stage of history”. We
cannot trace them in their infancy, their youth, their growth; we only come
across them in their maturity, and dig down as you will through ancient
civilisations you do not dig down into a savage state. You find cave men; you
find men of the Stone Age, but you never find traces of evolving from the Stone
Age into civilisation. That bridge is never crossed; that gulf always exists.
And we begin to wonder, looking at this, whether the later
science - which has really struck away the foundations from this theory of the
evolution of man - is not right when it tells us that qualities are not
transmissible. We wonder whether, after all, Huxley was not right in his latest
view, when he pointed out that the evolution of human qualities was destructive
to their possessors, so that they had no opportunity of handing them on to their
offspring. It is fairly clear that the theory of the evolution of social
qualities in man, the moment you look closely into it, breaks into pieces in
your hands, for where the social quality shows itself, such as the love of the
mother to the child, the love of the parent to the offspring, you see it far
more in the social animals than you see it in savage man. The animal risks its
own life for the saving of its young; the savage takes his babe and dashes out
its brains, if the food supply [91] is likely to run short and he wants
to get rid of a mouth of no immediate use to the tribe.
Not only is that an observed fact, but you find also, if you
think of it for a moment, that, the animal that sacrifices its own life for its
young dies in the sacrifice and so cannot hand on that quality, that tendency to
love, because it perishes in the very moment of its expression. So, even were
acquired qualities transmitted - as science tells us now that they are not - you
would not be helped as to the evolution of the social qualities, which are a
disadvantage in the struggle for existence, and, practically eliminate their
possessors in the frantic struggle for life.
And so again, when we are studying human kind, we do not find
that the most highly evolved men - the geniuses of the race - are those whose
families after them manifest the high mental or moral qualities which the father
may have shown. When you have thought over this idea of how man evolved, you
must have been struck with the difficulty placed in the way of evolution by the
fact of the genius. “Genius is sterile” is one of the phrases of science, and it
is true. The genius does not have a higher genius for child; his genius is not
handed on to those who come after him. On the contrary, where, as in the case of
artistic genius, you sometimes find one or two generations of talent preceding
the birth of the genius, you find, after he has [92] flowered into his
great and splendid manifestation, that the family then disappears. It seems to
have done its work. It is true that, especially in music, you will find one or
two generations of talent proceeding a Mozart, a Bach, a Mendelssohn; but they
are leading up to the production of a body sufficiently sensitive and
sufficiently delicately organised to make it a fit temple for the incoming
genius. The family is a preparation for the genius which is to flower into
splendour, and when it has done its work, when it has built up the sensitive
body, when the nervous system has been made delicate and responsive so that the
incoming soul of genius may find therein a fit instrument and a fit expression -
then, with the death of the genius, that exquisite delicacy of body disappears.
There is no posterity to genius; there is only seldom anything that you can call
an ancestry.
And there again the view of man taken by science in its more
materialistic days gave us no proof, gave us no hope even, that our race would
really rise generation after generation into some future splendour of
achievement that would dwarf all the achievements of the present. On the
contrary, that terrible phrase: “Genius is sterile” was, as it were, the death
knell of the progress of the human race.
Looking at it from that standpoint and asking what genius is,
we have been given [93] various definitions of it, of which I think the
most materialistic and the most untrue is that remarkable definition that
“genius is the capacity for taking pains”. I cannot think of anything more
absolutely divorced from the reality, for surely genius is the ability to do
well without practice that which other people do only to an average extent with
infinite pains. And that seems to me the characteristic of genius - an inborn
faculty, an untrained manifestation. And so it well may be if genius be the
power of the descending Spirit manifesting itself in a form prepared for the
manifestation. Then we can realise why the child will show it forth, why a
Mozart will show his musical genius while still his baby fingers are unable to
compass the notes which would express his thought; and we begin to realise also
how that marvellous child who is conducting an orchestra at the age of seven is
able to show out such power and yet be a mere child when he is off the platform
and when no longer he is putting forth the wonderful power that he has.
And so, looking at the idea of man as science gave it, it
strikes us as incomplete, unsatisfactory, unproved, not answering to the facts,
and undermined by the later conception of the very science that gave it forth.
Suppose we turn from that to the religious ideas. Those we
find fall into two great [94] divisions. One is the idea that man is
created by God, the idea put forward chiefly by the Jewish and the Christian
religions, Islam following those along the same line of thought; the idea of a
special creation, so that man is unique, unrelated to the animals that went
before him, with no past to explain the nature of the individual, but supposed
to have an unending future, although he begins with birth. The religions that we
may call those tending to anthropomorphism show out this idea of man as God’s
creation. The pantheistic religions, on the other hand, give us, as we shall see
in a moment, rather the idea of man as an emanation from the Divine nature,
sharing that nature and containing within himself all divinest possibilities.
But let us pause for a moment on the Hebrew and Christian
conception of man. And here, as regards the Hebrew thought, in order that one
may not be in any sense unfair, let me remind you that in the books called the
Apocrypha of the Hebrew scriptures you find suggestions and hints of deeper and
sublimer views than you find in the Canonical scriptures. There the inner
teaching of the Hebrew faith was beginning to show itself, whereas in the
Canonical scriptures, especially the earlier ones, you have rather the popular
view, the view preached to the people.
And I am not forgetting in this that you have in the time of
Josephus at least a full [95] recognition amongst the Jews of the great
truth of Reincarnation, although in the earlier scriptures you find no trace of
it, but, on the contrary, the idea that man, specially created at birth,
perished at death. You may remember how it is written in one of these “who
knoweth [the difference between] the spirit of man that goeth upward and the
spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?” You may remember also
that it is said that “In the grave there is no remembrance”. The idea that
dominates the older Judaism is the idea of death as an end, a real end to the
life of man. You do not find that reasserted in the prophetic books after the
Captivity; you do not find it in the Apocrypha, where you have a verse that
stands out, and stands out in startling contrast with a somewhat similar verse
occurring in the book of Genesis. You remember how it is said in
Genesis: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God create He
him; male and female created He them”. You may remember also that it is written
in the Apocrypha: “God made man in the image of His own eternity”. How different
the atmosphere! How changed the thought! In one case the image of God is the
outer form; in the other it is a likeness of nature, an identity of existence.
And in that view that God made man in the image of his own
eternity, the Hebrew [96] faith joins hands with all the religions of the
East in which man is, as I said, not a creation but an emanation of the life
God.
Now the Jewish and the Christian idea of man as a special
creation carried with it the idea that man fell from original righteousness; man
is a fallen creature. You find that in such verses as: “The heart of man is
corrupt and desperately wicked” - a terrible idea of man’s nature. And yet more
than once that phrase is used in the scriptures - a fallen being. And that is
the idea of man which is quite definitely put forward, you must remember, in
the Church of England. I do not mean that Anglicans believe it now; they have
outgrown it; but it is not right, it is not quite straightforward, to put one
view in the documents of a church and another view as represented in the minds
of the believers in that church. Take for a moment the idea of man as put
forward in the Articles of the Church of England - and remember that every
clergyman who is inducted into a cure is obliged to read these articles out in
open church, and to declare that he accepts them too in their literal and
grammatical meaning. You read there in the Ninth Article on Original Sin an
explanation of what Original Sin means and it depends of course on the fall of
man. “Original Sin,” it is said, “standeth not in the following of Adam (as the
Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the fault and corruption [97] of the
Nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam;
whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own
nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the
spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s
wrath and damnation”. Now that is the Article still obligatory upon every
clergyman, and surely it is not well for a Christian church to allow itself to
be bound by an idea of man so blasphemous as regards God, so insulting as
regards man, for it stands there for the mockery of every unbeliever; and you
cannot blame the unbeliever for mocking, when he has the right to point to that
as the religion established by law in this country. Original sin a defect with
which every one of you was born because you are descended from Adam; no fault of
yours, but you are specially created with this original sin in your nature! If
there be an imperfection in a work, you blame the maker of the work and not the
deficiency of the work itself; and so, if man be inclined to evil by the mere
fact that his nature has the taint in it of original sin, so that he is
naturally evil, then how can he come from a perfect workman? Does not the
blemish in the creation point to the inefficiency of the creator? That is why I
called it blasphemous; it is an insult to God.
And after all, what was the original [98]
righteousness from which man fell? He fell at the first temptation, so that
certainly original righteousness did not carry him very far. But there is a
worse thing to remember than that, if we are to take the words of scripture, and
we have nothing else on which to base this doctrine. It is said there that man
knew neither good nor evil. But if he did not know right from wrong, good from
evil, then he did not know that it was wrong to disobey the command that was
given to him, and he ought not to have been blamed that, in his ignorance of
right and wrong, he broke the command which his Maker gave him.
It is these things that point the arrows of the unbeliever,
and it would be well if Christianity, which is developing so much towards
Mysticism, towards higher and nobler views of God and man, should change these
printed documents, and no longer leave them as a bond and fetter on every
thoughtful priest of the church, as well as meaningless as regards the laity who
have grown far out of these conceptions of long past ignorance.
If you revolt against that conception of man as tainted with
original sin, as needing Baptism in order that it may be removed from him; if
you are unwilling to believe that man cannot turn and direct himself by his own
natural strength and that we have no power to do good works acceptable to God
unless God enables us to do them; if you feel that [99] that idea is
absolutely impossible of acceptance - then what remains from the standpoint of
religion? You have then the ancient view of man that comes out from the older
eastern faiths as embodied in their scriptures, and is the very opposite of the
idea to which I have been drawing your attention. It is the thought that every
Spirit of man is a direct emanation from God and a partaker in the Divine nature
- a phrase of S. Paul’s, remember, but utterly at issue with what I have just
been reading to you. That thought of man is expressed in the well-known words
put into the mouth of Shri Krishna: “A fragment of Myself, a living Spirit,
comes forth into the world of matter, and draws around itself the senses, with
mind as the sixth”. That is the fundamental idea of man, as we find it in the
East. Man is not corrupt and wicked naturally; his nature is divine and is
unfolding its divine possibilities. Man, being divine in his essence, must
inevitably flower into deity, and the story of man’s evolution is not a story
beginning with a fall but beginning with an ascent, and the only original sin
which has any existence is the ignorance in which he begins his upward climbing
and out of which he gradually and slowly emerges.
Now what is that conception as we find it traced in these
ancient religions, as you find it now put forward on exactly the same lines in
our Theosophical literature? The Spirit [100] which is to be man
emanated, as I said, from God Himself, is Divine in his nature. Another phrase
is once used: “Brahma [the Creator] meditated, and man came forth”. Man is a
thought-form of God, and that is the real essence of the image of God which is
of the deepest nature of man. That phrase I quoted from the Apocrypha that “God
made man in the image of his own Eternity” is true concerning the human Spirit.
You are far more than immortal, far more than everlasting; you are eternal as
God is eternal, and while God lives man cannot perish. That is the essential
truth. You share the Divine nature, eternal as He is eternal. And so you find it
written that this Spirit in man is “unborn, undying, ancient, constant,
perpetual”.
And then you find it pointed out that all men coming forth
thus from God were like each other in their origin. If you ever care to turn to
the Puranas - those ancient scriptures of the Hindus - you may read of a far off
age when all men were alike, when they had not yet developed qualities which
differentiated them the one from the other, but were all simple childlike
creatures, undeveloped, unevolved, the mere beginning, as it were, of a sketch,
an outline, of a human being.
Then we find how this Spirit, the divine fragment, drew
around itself portions of matter. You may say: why? Because when a world is
coming into manifestation, God - [101] who is One -becomes many in order
that that universe may be; and every fragment of God is embodied in matter, and
the object of the embodiment is that that embodied fragment may develop within
those material appropriations, or coverings, the power of knowing, of
perceiving, and of ruling, throughout the whole of this universe of manifested
life. Enclothed in matter, plunged into matter in order to unfold the
possibilities that lie hidden within this fragment of God, he is at first
blinded by the matter that veils him; his powers of perception, that can only
act in the divine world with matter so subtle that it can hardly be thought of
by us as matter, thrown into grosser matter, are cut off one after another as he
gradually draws around himself denser and denser veils of matter, each veil
limiting him further, each veil shutting him in more closely. And so when our
physical matter, as we call it, is reached, and that surrounds this divine
fragment, at first every power of perception is covered over with the matter,
and it is said in an old Islamic saying that “God sleeps in the mineral”. If He
were not there, there would be no possibility of growth, no possibility of
evolution. If life were not hidden there, how should life appear in a world
where, at one time, only the mineral existences were found? The possibility of
the dawning life of God was embodied in the mineral world, and in that
embodiment the [102] essence of life was sleeping. And then you may trace
onwards from that mineral life.
But let me for a moment break off to remind you that it is an
Eastern of the Easterns, a Brahmana of Bengal in India, who proved for the first
time in the Western world that the life that was dwelling in the mineral is like
the life which is dwelling in the vegetable, in the animal and in the man. He
has proved by scientific demonstration, that that life can be shown in its
manifestation, that it can be poisoned, that it can be checked, that it can be
driven out of a particular form, so that the form becomes dead. And, after many
an experiment and many an exposition, at last your Universities of Oxford and of
Cambridge have waked up to the recognition of a mighty genius in that Indian
electrician, and have invited him to come and lecture in their halls of
learning, and demonstrate scientifically what he has said his ancestors
proclaimed on the banks of Ganga - that “there is One Life without a second” and
that all that is, is an embodiment of that life.
And gradually that life working within the mineral begins to
organise, begins to move onwards towards the crystalline forms, and then
onwards into the vegetable crystal, and so onwards to the plant, when we may
quote again that saying of which I have already quoted the first words, and say:
“God dreams in the vegetable”. And then we find it [103] going still
further onwards in its inward evolution, unfolding a little more power,
out-folding a little more of its inward-turned consciousness. And so in the
animal you have additional proof of the unfolding life, and the sentient animal
is found. Are you aware that in a very ancient commentary on a Hindu Upanishat
it was explained that the life of God entering into the mineral was different
only in the quality of the existence from that which entered into the vegetable.
In the vegetable it began to show out the quality of feeling; afterwards, when
it went on into the animal, then it showed out desire and sensation. And then,
after at last unfolding into man, you had the consciousness that looked before
and after, that remembered and imagined. And that old commentator wrote hundreds
of years before Darwin, and showed that evolving life definitely, distinctly,
clearly.
And man, the life that was to be man, evolving in the animal,
evolved the senses and so began to prepare a physical embodiment in which a
higher form of intelligence could work.
And through all these long aeons of evolution, the life
evolving through the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, up to the animal man,
the Spirit that was to become the Spirit of man was brooding over these
evolving forms and trying to send into them, through their very atoms aggregated
together, new streams [104] of his ever unfolding life until, when a
point was reached in which a further evolution was possible, then the Spirit
came closer into touch with the vehicle prepared for it through this long course
of evolution in the lower kingdoms, and the indwelling of the Spirit in the body
was the beginning of man as man.
And then you have a slow building up, a gradual change and
unfolding, the evolution by way of Reincarnation, which is the universal
teaching of the ancient world, how the Spirit in the human body, the body only
of the child-man, gathered there a little experience; how then it passed on into
the second world, and there worked off the part of experience in which having
broken itself against the laws of nature - pain was the inevitable reaction; and
how then, passing on into the third world of human pilgrimage, all the good
experience that had been gathered was evolved into faculty, mental and moral;
how with that little beginning of faculties, the child-Spirit came back again to
human birth, gathered a little more, went again through similar experiences of
pain following on law disregarded, of increased faculty following on law obeyed;
and so backwards and backwards again to earth through the gate-way of birth,
onwards and onwards over and over again through the gateway of death, ever
growing, ever expanding, ever unfolding more and more of the divine
consciousness
[105] latent within him,
growing upwards from the child state of man at first into a partial
civilisation, then upwards still in unfolding power to higher and higher stages
of evolution, going on still ascending the heights of human knowledge and human
greatness, till he reaches the summit of human civilisation as far as that
special type of form can go.
Child nations at first, we see, not savages in the brutal
sense, but ignorant and childish, never left to themselves, never left
unguarded; ever in the care of divine Instructors who taught them their earliest
lessons in knowledge, in art, in the laws that must govern anything worthy to be
called society. I used the phrase that Bunsen used of the Egyptian civilisation
that it “sprung full formed upon the stage of history”, but that is equally true
of every civilisation; for the civilisation in its founding has the divine
Instructors, the divine Kings, guiding the infant peoples, training their young
intelligence, teaching them as tender fathers might teach them. Child nations,
obedient, ready to be taught, ready to be helped, and rearing under the
guidance of those great Instructors the mighty monuments that still exist,
testimonies to the civilisation of the most ancient world. You must often have
marvelled how it was such buildings were made, such extraordinary stones were
lifted, such exquisite sculptures and paintings were created; and you will never
understand it till [106] you realise that the child nations were the
hands while the mighty Teachers were the brains, gradually evolving their child
pupils to higher and higher possibilities.
And then came the time - as the child goes out of the
nursery, as the child goes on to be the boy in the school - when the Instructors
drew a little backward and left the child nations to grow into youth and into
manhood, gaining their own experiences, no longer ruled autocratically, no
longer with rulers that were absolute, but taught to guide themselves, left
thus to guide themselves, to make many a blunder, many an error; and yet the
errors of youth, of humanity are greater than the child - perfections of its
early stages; for they mean that the God in the man is unfolding his own powers,
and that he is no longer in leading strings to those more highly evolved than
himself.
It is true that in such a civilisation as that of ancient
Peru you have an enormous amount more of happiness than you have in your modern
civilisation. It is true that human life then, guarded and caressed, was a happy
childlike life, fair and beautiful in its expression, as children in the
nursery are beautiful and gay. But it is also true that it was a child life, and
that man was not always to remain a child; that the experiences passed through
in later times, the struggles and the conflicts, the difficulties and pains,
were all [107] making him man instead of child, and bringing him on to
the maturity into which the nations are beginning to grow today. It is true that
every fragment of liberty that ignorant nations have grasped has been paid for
in happiness for the time; but it is also true that very gradually and slowly a
higher, nobler, liberty will come to the front and that man - learning
self-control as he could never learn it while controlled from outside - will
grow into a nobler liberty, a more splendid freedom, his will becoming one with
the will of the whole, and an ordered harmony shall replace the ancient monotone
of childish obedience.
And so you begin to realise how man grows, unfolding ever
from within, developing ever greater and greater possibilities.
But now there is one other point you ought to notice in that
growth. It is not entirely what you would call continuous. I will show you in a
moment what I mean by that. A civilisation grows, it reaches its highest point,
it decays; another civilisation is growing up, as it were, while this is
decaying, and it rises again to a high point and in its turn decays. How often
in the history of the world has civilisation been carried to a splendid height
of achievement. How often has it broken down and men have begun to build again
from a comparatively barbarous condition, rising higher than the older, but
beginning again so low down as though past experience were [108] useless,
as though man could never learn. It may not have struck you that the impulses
which brought into manifestation one set of Spirits after another were
successive and not simultaneous; that new waves of life came ever pouring out
from the divine source of life and that it was necessary to have the lowering of
a civilisation as the fresh Spirits came into it in order that they might learn
the lessons for which their infantile condition fitted them; and that again and
again the upward path had to be climbed, again and again experience had to be
won by these ever successive waves of life - and every wave of life myriads of
human Spirits. It may be that a time is coming - and that is the hope which
some of us are trying to realise - when the human Spirits will have so far
unfolded that this civilisation need not break into shivers as other
civilisations have done under the incoming rush of rougher and less developed
people, so that the treasures of civilisation for the time were apparently lost.
It is the hope of some of us that such a stage has been reached in the evolution
of man that the misery on which our civilisation is builded will not grow so
terrible, will not grow so bitter, and life become so overwhelmingly
intolerable, that once again civilisation shall be overthrown and the weary
rebuilding be again begun by some people less civilised but also less corrupt.
It may be - we hope it is - that we have reached a stage
where the elder Spirits [109] amongst us will realise that they are here
to help and not to dominate, that they are here to use their power for service
and not for oppression; and if enough of them come among us, if enough of them
are born into our people, then we may save what civilisation has accumulated and
carry it on into the next civilisation, which will then begin at a higher level
and not from the lower stage at which previous civilisations have begun.
And there is some possibility of that, and I must now remind
you of that new philosophy now spreading among us, the latest word of
philosophy, which represents our Theosophical idea, that in the gradual
evolution of man, in the evolution of the bodies and the unfolding
consciousnesses, you have stages: first a stage of Instinct, of strong
sensation, of violent desires, of the instincts that belong to the life working
through undeveloped forms; that then those are gradually thrown into the
background as the Intellect of man develops and in the early evolution of that
there grows up, dominating those instincts, an intelligence that, learning to
cognise the world outside it, turns outwards and works upon matter and creates
apparatus for the understanding and the mastery of matter, but knows nothing of
the mastery of life, for its look is outwards and not inwards; and that then a
stage comes where this feeling, this knowledge, presses [110] against the
boundaries it cannot overleap, when the inner life takes a new impulse upon it,
when there is a new unfolding, and in that stage of evolution mind is
transcended; and then that which was instinct, which lay half dormant, dominated
by the intellect which was higher, that rises into still loftier development and
begins to show itself as Intuition, higher than the intellect, a fragment of
life itself realising its own possibilities. And hidden in that intuition which
is now but as a dream, hidden in that intuition that gradually shall evolve, you
have the divine self-conscious life unfolding which shall make man at last know
himself divine.
That is the realisation of man as man that exists in the
ideal world, when the Spirit that came forth from God, that was blinded and
cabined and controlled by matter, gradually spiritualised the very matter that
blinded him and began to shape and mould it to his own purposes; then came the
unfolding of the intellect for the mastering of matter and the understanding of
its forces and its powers; and then, deep within the God within the man, there
arises the self-consciousness that will make him consciously divine, above and
beyond the intellect, rising into the region of the spirit; becoming divine with
that divinity that last week I spoke of as the Christ Idea, realising himself as
divine, knowing in his own consciousness that he is more than instinct, [111]
more than intellect, that he is God himself unfolding into his own
self-knowledge. Then and then only shall the idea of man become perfect, then
and then only shall he reach his crown as man. Before him still will stretch
avenues of infinite progress, in which greater possibilities of divinity within
him will unfold into the actualities of a divine existence, when he shall
utilise all the experiences he has gathered, when he shall become the maker of
new worlds, the builder of new universes, working into them the knowledge that
now he is acquiring and expanding it with that expanding consciousness whose
very centre is God. To that consciousness there is ever a centre but it knows no
circumference - progress unending, ever continuing, new bodies and new universes
revealing themselves, man unfolding into God and using his divine powers. That
is the Mystical Idea of Man; that is the union with God which every Mystic
proclaims. [112]
V.
INTERPRETATIONS.
FRIENDS:
Tonight I am to try to put before you some interpretations of
religious teachings that may be applied to what are generally called theological
dogmas, in order to show you how you may apply the method of interpretation to
any of the specific teachings of great religions, which may strike you as
difficult or obscure in the form in which they are presented to you. For, as
you know, much of the unbelief of our own day has grown out of the feeling that,
in the face of science and of its advance, many of the doctrines which satisfied
our predecessors appear to us incompatible with many facts of which we are
reasonably sure.
Now in the past, as some of you may remember who have read
Origen, it was quite definitely recognised that the teachings of scripture might
be interpreted along three different lines. One was the historical, which
implied a considerable number of incredible statements of supposed events. Then
the [113] allegorical, which gave an intellectual meaning to the stories
which were supposed previously to have been taken as history. And lastly there
was the spiritual meaning, that Origen said was to be discerned by the spiritual
man, the man in whom the divine life was unfolding, who did not need the crude
teachings of the supposed history, nor the allegorical interpretation, for the
satisfaction of the intellect, but desired to find help in the unfolding of the
spiritual life and insight in the illumination of the Spirit, a clearer
understanding of the profoundest truths of his own existence, of Nature and of
God.
Allegory clearly does not come within the definition of
Mysticism. You may remember how St. Paul used allegory in the Epistle to the
Galatians, and how he took the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar - a story
which is not particularly edifying if you regard it as historical - and gave to
that an allegorical interpretation, applying it to the condition of man in
relation to God and treating the woman of the story as a symbol of the heavenly
life.
Or you may take another way of interpreting in which not
exactly the allegory but the allied symbol is used. Symbol, as you know, is a
representation, a pictorial representation of some truth which it is desired to
make intelligible to those who learn more easily by the presentation of a
picture than they do [114] either by verbal explanation or by spiritual
insight. And one very good example of that might be taken from the book of the
Revelation of St. John, where you read of the “woman clothed with the
sun”. There you cannot be said to have an allegory, which is really a prolonged
story carried out into detail, but only a single striking symbol in order to
indicate an easily defined area of thought, one thought even, which can be
expressed in this graphic form.
You come away entirely from all those methods of dealing with
truth when you come into the region of Mysticism. Then you are seeking to find
by an internal illumination the many-sided truth, glimpses of which have been
caught by many people at different stages of evolution; and you are endeavouring
to see that truth, in its fulness, so that all the scattered truths or glimpses
of truth may be found to form a coherent and intelligible whole. In the mystical
interpretation, you find all the truths that were put forward in the groping
after truth by the earnest but often unintelligent seeker, and in this way -
gradually realising that truth is a many-sided thing, that it appears in
different lights from different standpoints, but that all of them are consistent
with each other when the many sides are beheld - you are led on to a most
valuable fact that it would be well for each one of us ever to remember: that
there is no such thing as [115] an error that endures. An error can only
last by virtue of a truth which is enshrined within it, and the principle of
life is not in the outer clothing of the error, it is in the inner reality of
the truth which that error enfolds. You never get rid of a superstition, a false
view, until you realise the truth, veiled by the superstition. It has been
said, and nobly said, in an old Hindu book: “Truth alone conquers, not
falsehood”. Falsehood has in it the certainty of death; falsehood is against the
nature of the universe and cannot withstand the friction that it finds by
dashing itself against the eternal law; falsehood breaks itself into pieces, for
law is invariably law, is inviolable, and nothing that is against the law can
possibly endure. You may have patience with error, and sometimes even leave it
for a while, for, at some stages of human growth, the truth as seen through the
coloured glass of an error can be seen by eyes too weak to face the whole bright
light of the unveiled truth.
And so in early stages in the teaching of the child humanity
by its elders, you will find many a presentation of the truth very imperfect,
many a ceremony perchance which indicates it feebly. And yet the indication and
the partial truth was all that the then child mind was able to grasp and to live
by. And if, in looking over great religions, you find many crude presentations
of a truth which appears to you in fuller and richer beauty, remember [116]
that in days gone by you also were as children, unable to grasp the larger views
of truth, and do not look down on youngers with contempt, do not ridicule their
crude apprehension of things divine. When some climbing plant is putting out
little tendrils which grasp some twig, some tiny branchlet, which is all those
baby tendrils are able to grasp and enfold, if you drag away suddenly the
branchlet to which they cling you will tear away the tendrils, and the plant,
not strong enough to climb alone, will fall and perish perchance on the soil. So
it is with the climbing human soul: it does try to grow up towards the light
that is truth, towards the sun that is truth, as does the little plant, and it
puts out little tendrils to grasp here and there something that it is able to
contact and cling to; some idol as you call it, it may be, an image, a picture,
an anthropomorphic idea of God. Never mind if it be limited, if it is great
enough to help a human soul to climb; and be you careful that, in your fuller
knowledge and larger insight, you do not blind the little ones who are seeking
after truth, and, refusing them the thought that they can grasp because it is
limited, make it impossible for them to grope after the divine at all.
And so, thus looking at man’s unfolding powers, we may take
tonight some of the doctrines which have been found in many religions. Here I
take those chiefly in their [117] Christian presentment, because there
will be no particular value in my pointing out here, as I should point out were
I in India, the cruder and narrower views which you find in Buddhism, in
Hinduism, as you find them in every great faith by which men have lived and
grown. I take specially the Christian because they are the truths which here you
want to understand. And I will begin with one which is likely to revolt you more
than any other, perchance. You have outgrown it and see all the error in it and
you may perchance miss a tiny kernel of truth in it, by the recognition of which
you may help those who still hold it to reach the larger view, a greater hope. I
mean the doctrine of Everlasting Torment, or Hell.
Now you have there a doctrine which you may fairly say is not
believed in by the more educated religious people of the day. But on the other
hand you must remember that the educated religious minority - in comparison with
the enormous crowds of uneducated religious people - is extremely small, and
there is a certain danger lest you should go too far ahead of the people around
you, and so lose sympathy with them where your sympathy might help. Moreover
there is a danger in the view of everlasting torment, which still is spread so
widely if you come to think over it, for it has a very terrible effect on the
minds of those who believe in it, and even of the minds of those who disbelieve
in it in their saner [118] moments, but are apt to fall back into the
cruder belief in times of danger, of illness, and of death.
Probably hardly any of you realise the amount of misery which
is caused on the other side of death by this terrible belief in everlasting
torture on that other side, the people who hardly believe it, but are afraid;
and who sometimes for months and years after the physical body has been struck
away are still living in a state of dread as to what may hereafter happen.
Now think for a moment how much this doctrine is believed in
its crude form by the churches around you. Take the Roman Catholic Church. There
it is an Article of faith, one of the things that the Roman Catholic is bound to
believe. And I noticed not very long ago in the Christian Commonwealth
that there was a rather warm discussion on a little book which had been issued
with the sanction of the Roman Catholic authorities. The late Archbishop of
Dublin had approved it, and it aroused over here much surprise, and almost
disbelief that such a book could be. It was a little book written chiefly for
the children in Roman Catholic schools in Dublin and other parts of Ireland, and
it is true that it was as abominable a little book to put into the hands of a
child as it is possible to conceive. It was illustrated too, which made it still
more offensive, but the letter-press was [119] terrible. It is many, many
years now since I looked at it; I have hardly looked at it, I think since my
Free-thought days more than twenty-five years ago; but I remember still the
horror that I felt when I read there of a babe, a span long, writhing on the
red-hot floor of an oven in hell; and another description of a girl of whom it
was said: she is clothed in fire, her bonnet is of fire, her clothes are on
fire, everything around her is fire; she was vain of her dress when she was in
the body, and so now she has to wear clothes of fire in hell for ever and ever.
And so it went on, one horrible description after another, and when one thought
of the children who were told these things, and know how imaginative is a little
child, one felt almost as though really it ought to be on an Index of bad books
such as the Pope is supposed to have. I am not in favour of that really, but if
it were ever legitimate to burn books as mischievous I think those horrible
little books called A Sight of Hell and Hell open to Christians
ought really almost to be destroyed.
I am not sure you ought to applaud that because it is not a
thing we ought to do. It is never right to use force instead of argument and
reason, and, although it is true the books are abominable, I would let them have
their turn until mankind reaches the point where they cannot possibly do any
harm, and I think practically it is almost reached now. [120] Still the
Roman Catholic Church, one is bound to admit, great as is its presentment of
Christianity does on this point side with the mass of the ignorant and declare
as a matter of faith the everlastingness of Hell.
Now go to the opposite pole, the Evangelical Alliance. That
was a very strong body when I myself was a child, and one of the Articles that
had to be accepted before you could be admitted into the Evangelical Alliance
was that everlasting torment must be taken as a matter of faith. The two
extremes of Rome and of the Nonconformist!
Take side by side with that the body which is now having a
Congress in our city, the Salvation Army. Now the Salvation Army is a body that
does an enormous amount of good, not only here but in other countries in the
world. Certainly I cannot speak of them without remembering and mentioning that
the work they are doing in India is an admirable work, not only in bringing back
tribes of habitual criminals to decency of civic life, but also because, alone
among all Christian white men in India, they make no difference of colour but
welcome the coloured man; they wear Indian dress, eat Indian food; they avoid
taking meat because it strikes against Indian principle, and they are thoroughly
good self-devoted, self-denying people. But having said that, I am obliged also
to say that their doctrine of hell is entirely abominable. They [121]
preach the doctrine, these good and charitable men and women, that God will
torture some of his creatures in Hell for ever and ever. They would not do it
themselves; they are loving and self-sacrificing; and yet by some curious act of
mental topsy-turveydom, they are able to think that the God whom they call a God
of love will torture these miserable souls for ever and ever, and they preach
it. I daresay they frighten some people out of drunkenness, and perhaps it is
worth while for people who believe in it to use it in that way. I am not
prepared to lay down a moral principle on that; you and I of course could not do
it. None the less you must remember that they influence thousands and tens of
thousands of people. They had a hard time when I was a child; they were stoned
in the streets; brickbats were thrown at them; decayed vegetables were thrown
at them. You might compare them to the militants of the day in the way that the
hooligans treated them. But they won through, and they are now respected,
honoured, looked up to, praised by the King himself. They do wield great
influence, and they all believe in Hell; they are pledged to, otherwise they
would be turned out of the Army. When you see that, you cannot say that this
doctrine of everlasting torment is one that ought to be simply ignored. It ought
to be actively opposed, and the truth underlying it ought to be seen. And if
you want to [122] realise how good and gentle a man may be and yet be
able to accept the doctrine, think of Keble, the saintly author of The
Christian Year. Remember those words of his when he is dealing with the
very question of Heaven and Hell being equally everlasting, and of some people
no longer believing in Hell, and he puts in a startling way what he himself
feels:
But where is then the stay of contrite hearts?
Of old they leaned on Thine eternal word,
But with the sinner’s fear their hope departs,
Fast linked as Thy great Name to Thee, O Lord,
That we should endless be, for joy or woe,
And if the treasures of Thy wrath could waste,
Thy lovers must their promised heaven forego.
A striking verse. And yet one can hardly believe that Keble,
if he had thought of it, would not gladly have given up his joy in heaven in
order to quench the fires of an ever-lasting hell in which others were to burn
in torture for everlasting ages. And yet he says this. If that be so, it is
worth while to see the truth that underlies this ghastly error.
You find the doctrine of Hell, of course, in every religion.
You find it in Hinduism, you find it in Buddhism, you find it in the forms that
are current in China and in Japan. But the hells are all temporary. There is
where those great eastern faiths have the advantage; they only last for a time,
and then the man goes on to heaven, and finally comes back again to earth,
improved by his experiences, it is [123] said. It is only in Christianity
that you have the everlasting hell, and that because it has lost the splendid
doctrine of Reincarnation. And, losing the thought of coming back to earth for
further evolution, the suffering on the other side of death was inevitably
looked upon as permanent instead of transitory.
Now what is the truth in this? It is that wherever you go
against a law in Nature there suffering inevitably follows. That is true, for
the laws in Nature - which express the nature of God - all make for happiness,
for welfare, for universal peace and bliss, and the laws of Nature understood
and lived by bring happiness as a result. And that is inevitable; for it is
written: “God is bliss” and so harmony with His nature must needs bring bliss to
everything that lives. Happiness is the inevitable end of man, the inevitable
goal towards which he is ever advancing; happiness is the satisfaction of the
divine nature in every man, and, although we often blunder in our seeking,
although we often mistake the mirage for the stream, and the will o’ the wisp
for a guiding light, none the less is it true that, as God is bliss, so man’s
ultimate destiny inevitably is also bliss, and pain is the sign of a law against
which man has dashed himself, the voice of Nature telling him of the blunder he
is making, and turning him away from the error into which by ignorance of the
law he is falling. That is true. And that law does not only [124] apply
to the physical world. It is literally true that if you give way to certain
forms of vice, which can only find a temporary pleasure by the mechanism of your
physical body, then, when that physical body is struck away by death and you are
living in the higher subtler bodies expressing higher parts of your
consciousness, under those conditions the cravings which in this life you
nourished and over-nourished, failing their natural satisfaction, will become a
torment to you until they are starved out by non-gratification. That is true.
Take a very simple illustration, the illustration of drunkenness. You have
probably heard from men who fall under the curse of drink that they know the
misery of it, they know the degradation of it, they know the poverty and the
wretchedness of the drunkard’s home; but they will tell you that when the
craving for drink comes upon them, it comes with a force so overwhelming that,
like the current of a strong river, it sweeps them off their feet, and they are
unable to resist the temptations of the drink which they know means pain on the
morrow and ill-health in the long run. Take for a moment then that craving and
note the suffering of the man who is in its grasp, and how it drives him to the
gratification that he knows is injurious. Take that man after death; he has only
lost his physical body; the craving, which is part of the passional nature,
remains in a subtler body so [125] that the vibrations in the matter that
he has given rise to are a hundredfold more powerful than the vibrations in the
denser matter that makes up the physical body. The result is that the effective
part of the craving, that which the man feels, is enormously stronger than it is
while still he is living in the body, and that is what he finds on the other
side of death - not an arbitrary penalty inflicted by an angry God, not an
artificial suffering made as a matter of revenge or even as a matter of
education, but the inevitable outcome of what the man himself has fostered, the
answer of his own nature to that poison drink in which he has found temporary
pleasure and, even in the physical body, lasting injury. And that is what he
finds on the other side of death, not fire, not worm, save allegorically, but a
craving which he has made asking for satisfaction that he can no longer give.
And if you had seen, as I have seen, those who are suffering in the intermediate
world under this craving which they cannot gratify, you would be inclined to
think that after all people were not so far wrong when they talked of the
suffering on the other side of death that comes to the man who has lived evilly,
has not lived as a human being should.
That is the kernel of truth in all the exaggeration; that
the little bit of truth, that you cannot disregard a natural law without having
the inevitable reaction of pain. And out of that [126] all the idea of
Hell has arisen; true, for man is in a realm of law; but false, in the
artificiality which has been imposed upon it, false in the idea that it is
punishment, false in the notion that it will endure for evermore.
Now I have known many a drunkard who, when he has realised
this simple fact in Nature, has broken the habit here, feeling that he must
break it off some time and that it is wiser to break it off where the breaking
will cause least suffering than otherwise he would have to endure. It is the
commonsense view which approves itself to the man’s mind. He knows the habit
lasts; he knows that that which he practises goes on enduring, and so he very
readily realises that he can sow on this side of death a seed of passion which
will grow strong and flower on the other side of death. That is the experience
that the Mystics have had when they have passed into the world on the other
side of death; for remember, the Mystic learns gradually to see with subtler
sight than the sight of the body, and that all the great Saints that you have
read of have had visions, as they call them, of these post-mortem conditions;
not really visions, save as we all see is a vision, for they have passed into
those worlds without going through the gateway of death, as men and women are
passing now every day, seeing what goes on, understanding what they see.
We may leave then this idea of Hell as [127] taught in
the churches, with the realisation that a kernel of it is true; that disregard
of law brings about inevitable suffering. Then Hell falls into due proportion
and takes its place as inevitable in a realm of law, in the modified form of the
working out of law on the passional nature of man.
Turn from that to another teaching which has been very much
rejected of modern days - the existence of the being called Satan. Now it is
perfectly true that there is no summing up of the world’s evil in what is called
a fallen angel, but it is also true that by our own evil thinkings we are
surrounding ourselves with forces that tempt, forces that lead us astray, and
that every time we think along wrong lines, every time that we deliberately
think and do a wrong thing, we are creating in our own mental atmosphere a
power that tempts, a power that influences, a power that is continually pushing
us into evil ways. And that comes out very strangely sometimes in relation to
what are called epidemics of crime, epidemics of suicide. If you have taken the
trouble, or if it has come in your way, to examine at all into the condition of
people in whose family a suicide has taken place, you will very often find that
someone in that family is conscious continually of a prompting to self-murder. I
have come across such cases over and over again, where a man or a woman has come
to me and said: [128] “I feel that I must kill myself, what can I do?” “I
hear a voice telling me to kill myself”, and so on. Part of that is due to a
fact that when a person has committed a crime followed by death, or has
committed self-murder, that person on the other side of death has the
inclination to prompt others to a similar crime. That is one of the very many
reasons against capital punishment, and an explanation of the fact that where
capital punishment is largely used crimes accompany it, which do not show
themselves as much in a nation when the death penalty for a particular kind of
crime has been swept away. There was a time when you hanged people in England
for theft of anything worth more than five shillings, and not so very long ago a
person who stole a sheep was hanged. In addition to the crime of murder, lots of
thefts carried the death penalty with them; and as the death penalty has been
abolished for those forms of crime the crimes have diminished in frequency, they
have not increased, for England has got rid of the continual promptings that
went on from all those miserable people whom she flung into another world,
careless of what fate might there await them; and you have found those crimes
that were punished by death grow fewer and fewer in your population partly
because the promptings and the temptation have vanished, as the crimes are no
longer [129] followed by the brutal punishment of death. And so it is
even in the case of murder. In most cases - I am obliged to use that word “most”
because I believe in France, if I remember rightly, murders increased when the
death penalty was for a time abolished, and there are certain reasons for these
crimes in France and especially among the Parisian population, a heritage of
the ghastly days of the Terror of the Revolution, which seems to have left
behind it, in some quarters of Paris, men who are rather of the type of savages
than of the type of civilised human beings, but with that exception - so far as
I have seen the statistics of murder and capital punishment, you will find that
murder tends to decrease and not increase with the abolition of capital
punishment; and again for the same reason, that the pressure from the other side
becomes less with the diminution of the numbers of those who are so hurriedly
thrown into the world on the other side of death.
That is the kernel of truth again in the idea of external
tempting, of a devil who tempts. Your own thought forms tempt and they are
external to you in the subtler worlds; evil people on the other side of death
tempt, and they also are external to you; but you may throw out of your mind the
nightmare of an embodied evil, who stands up, as it were, against the embodied
good that men call God. That is one of the nightmare dreams of [130]
ignorance and uncultivated humanity. It is better to know the truth that
underlies it, for then you can guard yourselves and guard others; for every time
you check an evil thought, every time you substitute a good thought for an evil,
you are creating in the thought atmosphere an angel that guards instead of a
devil that tempts, and you are becoming a helper and not an injurer of your
fellow-men, susceptible to the influence of thought.
And that is a thing well for us all to remember for too many
of us do not realise that our thoughts are not our own, that they go out as
messengers from us, and create the thought atmosphere in which we and others
live.
Pass again from that Interpretation, and take up now another
thought, that which is called Salvation. Now Salvation has changed its meaning
strangely in the course of Christian history. At one time it was realised that
salvation meant salvation from evil, not salvation from what is called the
wrath of God; and in a moment, in dealing with the great teaching of the
Atonement, I will trace hurriedly for you the phases through which that doctrine
has passed since the time of the Christ.
Before I do so, let me pause on this word salvation, which
has a very beautiful meaning from the mystical standpoint, not meaning salvation
from Hell, not meaning salvation from the wrath of God, but meaning salvation
[131] from the limitations and the weaknesses of the flesh and of the lower
world, the liberation of the Spirit from enslavement to matter, the triumph of
the divine Spirit within us over the material bonds which bind and limit us
today. For the mystic thought of this Liberation, as they call it in the East,
this Liberation of the human Spirit, lies in the recognition that that spirit
has been unfolding age after age into higher and higher powers, that he has gone
through death and birth hundreds of times, and at last has so developed the
powers of the Spirit within him that matter has no longer the power to bind him.
The time comes when, to use the eastern phrase, “the bonds of the heart are
broken and man becomes immortal”. That is the redemption of the flesh, that the
final resurrection of the body, when matter, spiritualised by indwelling Spirit,
made ductile and plastic under the spiritual impulse, becomes the servant and
the expresser of the true master, the spiritual man, giving out in all worlds,
in all densities of matter, the power and the influences which belong to the
spirit that is man.
And we find in that long course of evolution that man slowly
and gradually acquires mastery over his physical body, his emotional body, his
mental body, until they are no longer his masters but his servants, obedient to
his will and carrying out that which he orders them to do. Think for a moment
[132] what it means. It means that your body has no power to impede you in
anything, no power to turn you aside from the path you will to follow. It is
like a well-broken horse, whereas most men’s bodies are rather like the unbroken
steed, not obedient to the rein of the mind, not obedient to the will of the
rider, but plunging about in their own way, showing their strength and their
vigour by rebellion and not by obedience.
And that carries with it a very useful lesson, which applies
to the emotional nature as well as to the physical. You must not be sorry if you
find your emotional nature strong, full of powerful impulses, and sometimes
conquering your saner and more settled will. A man says: “Oh I have strong
passions that carry me away; I have strong emotions that whirl me off at their
will”. You do not, when you are choosing a horse, choose a feeble
half-broken-down animal, without vigour, without energy, without life, without
spirit. You would not accept such a steed as a gift. You choose the unbroken
colt, full of energy, full of life, full of vigour, who resents the touch, who
fights against the rein, who tries to throw his rider in order that he may
plunge along his own chosen way without curb, without aught to restrain him.
That is the horse the good rider will take, knowing that presently he will be
obedient to his will. And if he is a wise rider, he will not try to break the
spirit of [133] the horse; he will not try to break him at all in the way
in which some foolish men try to break the will of the animal. By gentleness and
kindness, by affection, by helping the horse to love him, by teaching the horse
to trust him, he will gradually calm that horse to obedience without breaking
his will and his spirit, until the creature is obedient to the lightest touch of
the rider’s hand or knee, and will carry his rider anywhere through danger and
through death. Why! look at the way the Arabs train their horses. Look at the
way that the horse will stop in the middle of the danger of the battlefield and
catch his fallen master’s cloak with his teeth, lift him up and carry him away
out of danger and so save the life that he loves. The Arab does not want a
broken-down creature; he wants one full of life, spirit, energy. And so you,
with your passions and your emotions. They mean strength, power, the moment you
conquer them. Dangerous, I grant, while they are your masters, but of the
greatest service when they are obedient to your will, for they are like the
steam in the boiler, which will enable the engine to work; they are like the
horse to which I compared them, which will carry its rider anywhere once it
recognises the master. And when your emotions and your passions and your
physical body know that you are their master and not their slave, then that
strong nature of yours becomes of infinite service. You cannot [134] make
a great man out of a weakling; you cannot make a great warrior for truth and
righteousness out of a will-less and mediocre man or woman. You want material,
you want strength, you want vigour, you want life; and be willing to take the
trouble to guide and master them, for in the end your trouble will be rewarded
by a power that you can turn to all noble purposes, which will enable you to
become one of the Helpers of the world.
You will not translate that into the idea that you are to
allow your passions to master you; otherwise you will have to come back life
after life until you have learned the lesson that the lower must obey the
higher, that the will of the Spirit must subdue the desires of the flesh.
And salvation in the old meaning of the word meant that all
the struggle was over, that the man had gained the victory, that the flesh and
the emotions had no longer power to disturb him, that he had turned them into
instruments whereby he might carry on his work for the helping of mankind. And
they said the man was liberated, or the Christian in the old days said the man
was saved, when the wheel of births and deaths for him had ceased to turn, when
he had entered birth by compulsion for the last time, when he had passed through
the gateway of death by compulsion for the last time, when he had become the
master of life and death, and held in his [135] own hands the keys of the
embodied and disembodied states. That was the salvation of the man, that the
liberation of the human spirit, when the man becomes “a pillar in the temple of
my God and he shall go forth no more”. Compulsion past, the voluntary will of
the man himself one with the will of God, ready to go anywhere to help,
compelled to go nowhere by power external to himself. That is the Eternal Life
of which the Christ said: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, and few
there be that find it”; few in the past, more in the present, crowds to tread
that narrow way in the long ages to come, for the work of the world will not be
over, this globe shall not pass into the chill of death, until those whom it has
born from its womb have passed onwards into power, and the children of men, a
mighty crowd saved and liberated, shall be ready to pass on to other and more
splendid worlds, masters of the matter they have redeemed, lords of the worlds
they have conquered.
And that brings me to the last doctrine that I have time to
deal with tonight, the doctrine of the Atonement. Very many strange phases that
doctrine has passed through during the centuries of church history. First of
all, as you find it in the New Testament, it is a doctrine put forward somewhat
vaguely, with no exactitude of phraseology such as the churchmen later gave to
it; that Christ had [136] led men to the Father, that he had sacrificed
Himself for man, laid down His life for them, given Himself for them, such
phrases you find from time to time scattered through the New Testament. Then you
come to the writings of the Early Church where those phrases are explained, and
there you find it stated that Christ had become the ransom for men as the
Apostle taught, but that the person to whom the ransom was paid was the devil
who held man enthralled. Man, they said, had fallen in the first Adam; the
second Adam had given Himself for the life of men; He had paid for their
redemption with His own suffering and His own death. They never dreamed, those
early Christians, that men needed to be ransomed from the Father, nor to be
saved from the wrath of a God of Love. That was to come in later days, when the
memory of the wondrous passion of the Christ had faded away from the hearts of
men.
And so first it was the ransom paid to the devil. Christ went
down into Hell, to come back from it, not alone, but bringing with him those
whom he had redeemed, breaking the power of Death which could hold neither
Himself, nor the mankind whom He had saved from death. Then, as you know, you
find a change come over the idea, and slowly and gradually the devil falls into
the background, and Christ is seen as meeting the wrath of God. That view of the
doctrine crystallised itself in the [137] great work of Anselm, entitled
with the terrible words: “The wrath of God to Man”, and that gave the doctrine
of the Atonement for all the Middle Ages, fixed it, petrified it, as it were,
and so it lasted down, through what is called the Reformation, was taken up by
Calvin, by Luther, and by Knox, by all of those who then left the Roman Catholic
Church and carried it on into the Reformed Church. And it took an even more
terrible and harsher aspect, for you find in the doctrine of Calvin that as
Christ died to redeem men, it was clear He could not have died for all men. You
will find this most clearly put out in the writings of the great Calvinist,
Jonathan Edwards, who said that as all men are not saved, it is clear that
Christ did not die for all, but only for those who were predestined to
salvation. You find a trace of that in your own XVII th Article, by the “eternal
purpose” of God some are chosen for heaven, others to pass away unsaved.
Then you come on to the writings of men who were living when
the elder amongst you were young, the writings of some of the Bishops of our
Church like Wordsworth, the Bishop of Lincoln, like many others who wrote and
preached, like Canon Liddon, one of the greatest men of the Church in modern
days, like Pusey, one of the greatest of teachers; like the Keble whom I quoted
just now, all of whom held the doctrine, not in the Calvanistic form of a
limited ransom, but that all men [138] might be saved if they would
accept the offering which was given them. And you come across some phrases
startling to us in these modern days by the deliberateness with which men
represented God the Father as exacting suffering and God the Son as willingly
submitting to his Father’s will. One phrase comes into my mind, spoken by a
Bishop of the Church: “The cloud’s of God’s wrath gathered thickly around the
whole human race; they discharged themselves on Jesus only; He became accursed
for us and a vessel of wrath”. One might quote dozens of phrases like that from
men who have taught within our own lifetime. Then there came a revolt in the
English Church against the teaching of this legal contract between God and
Christ, in which Christ was made the substitute and bore the punishment. Men
began to revolt against it, their conscience awakening and protesting against
this interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement. And they began to try and
find a way out of it, and one of those ways, and a very beautiful one, you find
in the book of McLeod Campbell on The Doctrine of the Atonement, a Scotch
clergyman who wrote a book that is well worth your reading if you have not read
it, in which he put forward the view that the real meaning of the Doctrine of
the Atonement was that God and man were joined together and united by a mutual
understanding that took place between [139] them, Christ, he said,
revealed to God that which man could be in his perfection, and Christ revealed
to man the heart of God, the love of the Father shining out through the Son - a
wonderful advance if you think of it. And Robertson of Brighton, and Murice, and
many another, took this more beautiful and spiritual view of the Atonement
wrought by Christ, in which the wrath of God was cast aside, in which any real
breach between God and man was seen to be man’s only, in which the heart of God,
if one may use the phrase, was shown in all the infinity of its love and
tenderness and compassion, the compassion of the Father for the Children to whom
he had given life. And so the fairer doctrine spread over the Anglican Church
and the harsher views of the Atonement disappeared.
But they did not reach the mystic view, the view which, while
it takes up every fragment of truth in the older teachings, gives us the real
fact of the meaning of the Christ and how the union between God and man is
reached; which bids us see in Christ One who has risen to such a height of
perfect unity with God that, looking down upon all His brethren on the earth,
He sees them all wearing His own body and identifies Himself with them in the
veriest depths of His nature; how, as you might have a number of vessels closed
towards each other by their sides but open everyone of them to the sun, and
even as the sun’s rays of
[140] light shine down into
every vessel, no vessel being closed to him, so does the Mystic see Christ, the
Supreme Teacher of the world, send down His strength, His love, His purity, into
the souls of men, that are ever open to Him although closed to each other. He is
ever imparting the strength of His own nature to their feebleness, the purity of
His own nature to their foulness, the love of His own nature to their hatreds,
so to transform them into His own likeness, the perfect image of the Universal
Father.
And then we begin to understand that Atonement means that
there is a height of spiritual strength and beauty to which the human Spirit can
climb as it unfolds its divine powers within it, and that you and I as we climb
upwards can begin even at a lower stage to practise this wondrous power of
atonement which is in the hands of all who begin to realise the deepest sense of
the brotherhood of man. You begin to realise that if you know more than others
it is in order that your knowledge may illumine their ignorance, that you may
share with them the knowledge that you have gained. You begin to realise that if
you are pure and clean and sweet in emotion and in mind, you are not to isolate
yourself in the heaven of your own perfection but to try to pour it down into
the outcast, into the miserable, into the sinner, in order that they may share
your purity and be uplifted by [141] that nearer to the perfection of
their own divine nature. You begin to realise that if within your heart the
spirit of love has unfolded, that then you should go among the turbulent, the
haters, the embittered, and the sour, and pour down the nectar of your love into
their angry souls that they may know the sweetness and the peace of love and
harmony. For every man and woman can act to a certain limited extent as Christ,
while he is growing to that higher perfection with which future lives shall
crown his work.
But you must not shut yourselves away keeping happiness,
keeping purity, keeping knowledge, to yourselves; you must be willing to share
them with every child of man, and you must realise in the lowest, the foulest,
the most brutal, your brother man, your sister woman. Only thus can true
brotherhood be reached. You and I are so glad to claim our brotherhood with the
great ones of humanity, so proud to think that we are men as they; we are eager
to claim common humanity with the saint, with the hero, with the martyr, with
the genius, nay, with Christ Himself, the firstborn among many brethren. But, O
friends, there is no brotherhood for us with those above us unless we will stoop
down as brothers to those below us; there is no separation in this brotherhood;
the higher is ours only as the lower is ours. But if you fear the weakness of
others, if you fear the foulness of their [142] sin and the cruelty of
their hatred, then you must wait before you can claim to be at one with the
highest purity and the most perfect love, for that love knows no differences,
that love knows no barriers. If we join ourselves to that, it is that we may be
poured out as it is poured out for the helping and the saving of the world. The
world is poor and ignorant, the world is sorrowful and lacking in so much that
you and I possess let us give it all we have, our knowledge, our refinement, our
purity, our love, the tenderer and fuller the lower the others are sunk in
hatred and in vice, for we can only redeem our brethren as we stand beside them,
sharing our best and sharing their worst. So alone shall appear in us the
likeness of the Son, and so alone shall we compass Atonement with the Father,
the Life of all that lives. [143]
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