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Evolution of the Soul, by Anna Bishop Scofield
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Title: Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul
Author: Anna Bishop Scofield
Release Date: May 8, 2006 [eBook #18355]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INSIGHTS AND HERESIES PERTAINING
TO THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL***
E-text prepared by Al Haines
INSIGHTS AND HERESIES PERTAINING TO THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL
by
AMMYEETIS (Persian)
Second Edition 1916
Christopher Publishing House
Boston
Copyright 1913
by the Christopher Press
Copyright 1916
by the Christopher Publishing House
DEDICATION.
To those heroic minds who can truly say: "My soul is my own," and
bravely maintain it through everything--in spite of Church or State--I
do offer with earnest congratulations and my loving greetings, these
fragmentary thoughts of
AMMYEETIS.
Our revered Emerson loaned his Plato to a neighbor. Meeting him some
time afterward he said to him: "How did you like Plato?" "Very much,"
the farmer answered, "very much indeed. I see he has a great many of
my idees." And so, my readers--if there be such--there may be herein
set forth some of your own familiar thoughts which you may not have
found opportunity to express in such guise as appears in this small
book.
CONTENTS.
No New Thing
Evolution
Slowness of Evolution
The Work of Nature
A New Science
World Making
Imperfections Revealed
World Origin
Spirit Individualized through Matter
World Signs
World Growth
Death a Benefactor
World Progress
The Origin of Evil
Vibration
Life
Churches Money Makers
Life in Nature
Heaven
Nature Spirits
Experience
Spiritualism
Phenomena
Mediumship
The Migrations of our Race
The Discipline of Life
Homogeneity of the Race
Of God
Of Jesus
The Gods
Knowledge of Occult Law
Evanescence of Mere Beliefs
The Fount of Inspiration for All
Man versus Death
Fear of Death
Test of Character
Character Forming
Man the Final Earth Product
Superstitions
Self-Justice
Symbolism
Love
Ideals of Love
The Needs of Woman
Man versus Woman
Natural Cruelty of the Undeveloped
The Worst Sin
Reincarnation
Processes of Reincarnation
Education of Children
Egotism
Responsiveness
Hell
The Commonplace
Petroleum
Law
Communism
Happiness
Pain
Foes in the Household
The Inner Life
Root of Evils
Rest in Change
Miserliness
Special Providence
Human Destiny
Ethical Law
Human Life
Animal Likeness
Natural Superstition
Adaptiveness of Man
Devil Worship
Fanaticism
Truth
Christs
Hero Worship
Reason
Sympathy
New Religions
The Growth Processes of the Human Soul
Necessity for Phenomena
Will
Change of Atoms
Our Limitations
Final Race Experience
Religious Performances
Of Teachers
Wise Use of Money
Genius
Thoughts Are Things
Unfoldment
Inventions
Divine Healing
Surplus
Analysis of the Lord's Prayer
Absurd Beliefs
The Resurrection
The Creator
Retributive Justice
The Soul
Woman
Insights and Heresies
Pertaining to
The Evolution of The Soul
NO NEW THING.
There is no new revelation to be given to man; there is no need of it.
Those who have labored most strenuously to evolve from their inner
consciousness a new, a better religion, have found themselves bogged in
the mire of their egotism which has landed them in a police court, or
they have been confronted by exactly the same problems as those from
which they have sought to escape. Few, indeed, have survived the test
of time. There is an ancient promise that stands yet for man's use:
"To him that hath (improved) shall more be given, and from him that
hath not (improved) shall be taken away that which he already has."
This was never meant to apply to material things--it could not--it was
spoken in reference to the gift of understanding, and of using the
occult, the psychic law. Many psychics have lost their spiritual gifts
through failing to understand that endless progress is the law that
forces souls along the way of life. No stopping by the way to gather
shells upon the shore, no aimless looking back; but work with stout
heart and resolute will. It all means work, overmastering habits of
thought and action, lifting the soul from the grooves of heredity, and
in all ways making aspiration attract the inspiration that sustains the
soul.
EVOLUTION.
All subjects pertaining to our knowledge of the soul are too subtle to
be weighed and proved by external intellect alone. Our lives are ruled
by such a hotch-potch of inherited beliefs and tendencies, that it is
almost impossible for us to use any discrimination concerning them; or
to arraign ourselves before the tribunal of our own better judgment in
such manner as to enable us to separate the false and effete ethical
and religious influences, from the wise and true, which alone are
abiding and permanent.
Thus we grope and stumble along through our earthly lives, burdened
with ideas which were set in motion far back in a crude age, and which
were so well adapted to their time that they still vibrate to the
tendencies of our own day. This applies to every department of human
experience, and were it not that we are, as a huge family, better than
our cherished beliefs, higher in the scale of development than these
would seem to indicate, we should still be under the dominion of the
so-called "Dark Ages." The most important and the dearest phase of
human experience must come, of course, through its religious beliefs,
and as they are narrow and superstitious, on the one hand, or grand
with faith and understanding of law, on the other, do we judge of the
status of the individual, the community, and the race; and the advances
made upon this line mark the progress of what we term civilization on
this planet.
There is no time so trying, so full of agony to the soul, as is that
hour when it first begins to doubt the absolute, unquestionable truth
of the creeds it has hitherto blindly accepted, and in which it has
fully believed. Creeds are the swaddling clothes of the soul, and must
inevitably be outgrown and laid aside as the mind of man grows more and
more capable of comprehending the truth which is to set it free from
the trammels of mere blind belief.
It is so comfortable to have our spiritual faith ready made for us, our
paths all mapped out, and our final destiny made plain and sure,
provided only that we remain faithful in our adherence to them as they
are set forth by our parents and spiritual guardians, that when the
great, ever-surging, resistless tidal wave of progress first reaches
the soul, it can only stand in dumb agony, like one upon the seashore
watching its last hope go down beneath the waste of mighty waters.
Torn from its anchorage of inherited beliefs, it is sure to be
tempest-tossed, rent and torn, buffeted by conflicting tendencies, cast
upon many a desert island of unfaith, and haunted by miserable doubts
and black despair, ere it hears and heeds the pilot of truth, the only
guide to the peaceful haven of eternal life. Happy, indeed, are they
who tarry not upon the weary way; but who have within them that
aspiration, that endless cry for light, which shall always, in God's
providence, compel the needed response and guidance; for many honest,
earnest men and women, lacking this attribute of the soul, fail all
through life to reach this only true solution of the riddle of human
existence. Kind and sincere friends say of them: "Oh! if they had only
remained faithful to the religion of their fathers, they would have
found happiness and peace." But the law of evolution brings each and
every soul to the point where it must stand alone with God, there to
discover and establish its relationship to the Divine, irrespective of
all preconceived ideas and notions, superstitions, and ignorance. This
is exactly what every soul must come to--the aggregation of powers and
forces of body and soul resulting in the fully developed and
rounded-out individuality of any given personality. These are the rare
and unusual men and women, the fully flowered out, the richest fruitage
of any and all races, and it is to these that we must look for that
union of sympathy with and comprehension of the needs and requirements
of all which is to usher in the reign of peace, and universal good will
on earth.
Jesus of Nazareth went before us on the path, the only way cast up for
earnest souls to walk in. There has never been given to the world any
system of ethics superior to his. He recognized the homogeneity of the
race--"Each for all, all for each," was the whole import of his
teachings. In him was epitomized the experience of the race. Each and
every soul must wear its crown of thorns, and bear its cross and suffer
crucifixion, ere the soul astray from God, immersed in, and overwhelmed
by matter, can be forced to relinquish its hold on, its love for the
external, material things pertaining to this world. But it has to be,
it certainly must be, the experience of every creature born of woman.
Be sure, O soul! if none of these experiences have ever been realized
by you, that you are but just now entering upon the inevitable rounds
which must attend your connection with, and relationship to this
earthly sphere of being. Such are as the insensate clod, having as yet
neither spiritual sense, nor moral responsibility. Nature's processes
are slow; but be sure that the goal is appointed, and that God will be
there and will wait till we come.
When Jesus said: "The poor ye have always with you," he did not refer
to dollars and cents only, but to that poverty of intellect, that
barrenness of the moral nature which makes a human being a reproach and
a terror to his kind. These we shall always have to deal with, to
educate if we can, to constrain from overt acts of evil, and to protect
ourselves from in all the works and ways of life.
So painful and slow is the process of character-forming that millions
of souls pass on from this sphere of life to the spirit world so
lacking in individuality that they have no more power for any
expression of themselves upon that plane of being than they had when
they were living here. Not as much, in fact, for the physical body and
brain have always some possible function and use while they hold their
relationship to the world of material life, which function and use are
laid aside when they are put through the sifting process of physical
death, and in all cases, unless the powers of the ego as exercised here
are supplanted by a sufficient growth of the spiritual nature to
sustain the ego in its new relationship, and give to it the impetus
needed to start it forward upon lines of usefulness and growth, it
naturally fails to waken to any sort of realization of itself and its
possible career in its new life. This is specially true of those
persons who have been psychologized by those teachings which relegate
the souls of human beings to the cold clasp of the ground, until the
expected day of judgment; or of those poor, overworked men and women to
whom heaven seems only a place to sleep and rest in; or again, of still
another class of minds that has brought itself to a belief in utter
extinction after the close of this external life. These are the
"shades," the "shells" we hear of, for there are times when the subtle
inner sense of these sleeping ones is stirred to action by the wails of
the loving, longing ones left on earth to mourn; and, as is the case
with one in somnambulic sleep, the spirit walks and talks, in response
to the demands of friends, through those persons who are gifted with
the aura necessary for the medial agency. These excursions of the soul
into the realm of matter, thus made by and through the offices of
clairvoyants and seers, the repeated arousings of the ego from its
contented sleep are finally highly educational, and result in
resurrecting the forces of the enfranchised being, and setting them in
motion on the lines of useful work for humanity. For this medial
service which is thus being rendered to the spirit world by such gifted
persons still living here in the body, multitudes are daily and hourly
expressing their gratitude and appreciation.
We have somewhat abolished our old, long-established Hell, and now, to
be consistent, we must also do away with our preconceived ideas of a
Heaven of eternal rest; for why should the souls of men be wrapped in
useless slumbers, until the strong overwhelming influence of the law of
progress sweeps them up like dry leaves before a whirlwind, and rushes
them along to the gates of a conscious life, through a new relationship
upon the physical plane? The spirit does not weary, and when the
exhausted body is laid aside, why not enlist the services of all to
whom any appeal can be made? Thus shall we all be growing together,
and Death shall be forced to cast aside its grim and dreadful seeming
and show for the angel it is. Ah! how could we go on and on in the
narrow limitations of this small beginning of a life, if Nature did not
kindly call a halt somewhere on the road, while we, taking fresh
courage, start out in our new career with our entire being adjusted to
laws which are working in harmony with the divine will.
SLOWNESS OF EVOLUTION
There have been times in the lives of all soul-grown people when the
inner consciousness has clearly perceived that some given experience
may mean an important crisis in the expression of their individual
character. But not frequently, in the ordinary lives of human beings,
do they meet up with really great events, or personal experiences that
create for them special overturnings of their ideas, or any change of
personal habits. To the mind of youth, life seems a plainly simple,
straight-forward way; but when overtaken by results of unconsidered
actions, for which there has been no preparation, there dawns upon it
the consciousness of appalling vistas, and visions of future
possibilities that are overpowering.
As we journey forward on the path of existence, life becomes ever more
and more complicated, and the need, the overwhelming demand for an
understanding of the ever-varying problems presented to the mind for
consideration, and the constantly urgent necessity for wise decisions
must call into action all our highest powers of the intellect and
reason, in order to secure to us the best results from the
opportunities given us to acquire knowledge. Every one of our
experiences are bits in the mosaic of our lives, and without them the
picture would be incomplete.
But with all, we are forced to realize how unfinished and
unsatisfactory are nearly all of our experiences of earthly existence.
It is, indeed, "a thing of shreds and patches." But we are caught in
the web of material existence from which there can be no lawful escape,
save by unpremeditated physical death. We are thrust into the seething
cauldron of formative life. The entire race of man, forced forward by
the resistless power of the law of progress, is on the everlasting
journey to the heights of perfected being. To us, enmeshed in the ties
of interest and affection, the various heredities and the worldly
Karmas which hold us fast, the slow, unnumbered processes of evolution
on this, our home world, as recorded in history seem unendurably long.
But time is naught--eternity is unending--and "ten thousand years are
but as a day with God," the great Maker and Moulder of our immortal
souls.
THE WORK OF NATURE.
The planet itself is stirred to its very centre. On one side, the
earth opens its horrible maw and swallows up uncounted numbers of her
children, or spews out her molten interior in vast lava tides,
overwhelming and destroying all within their reach. At the opposite
side, great floods of gas and rock oil, set free by the operation of
the drill, shoot up in the air and fall back upon the soil in a
luminous spray, as like to liquid gold as aught not filled with the
beloved auriferous metal could be. The waters loosed from their
fastnesses over-reach their accustomed bounds, and great tidal waves
are encountered in unexpected latitudes. Nature is rounding up her
great circle, and making conditions for a new era.
A NEW SCIENCE.
A science of Spiritual evolution could be erected, based upon the
teachings and ethics of Jesus Christ, that would put souls consciously
in their true rank and grade, and make them known just as people are
recognized by the college curriculums from which they have graduated.
WORLD MAKING.
The "fire-mist" and the mephitic vapors were finally swept away;
another era was preparing. Incorporate in the world substance of which
the planet was made were the seeds and germs of all life. Its crude
material was made manifest in the prodigious vegetable growths, and the
awful corresponding animal life. Birds and beasts and reptiles, each
one more hideously terrible than the others, filled the air, the earth
and the waters of the earth with the abounding life of these horrible
creatures. Into this unaccountable menagerie came also the
foreshadowing of man--a huge hairy creature possessing size and power
to do battle with his animal compeers for supremacy in the seething,
upgrowing land.
This was only the differentiation of the animal-man from the animal per
se--the beginning of the form which stood upon its hind legs. From
such rudimentary forms was evolved intelligence which finally begot the
human soul. This, after vast ages, grew into a state and condition
through which spirit could manifest, and the human race was finally
started on its endless earthly career.
With the birth of the soul came what we call the religious instinct,
and man began to worship natural objects; animals and reptiles, the sun
and finally, superior personalities were thought to be gods. The
"phallic worship," worship of the human organs of creative power, gave
the males great prominence. The female, woman, the mere matrix was
considered, from the first, of far less importance. No one stopped to
think, what is one without the other in the great world processes.
Nature, ever on the alert so as not to lose any and every possible
representation of her power, buried here and there specimens of her
handiwork, and the exhumed remains of prehistoric monsters are even now
being restored and labelled with such titles as our modern scientists
have been able to invent to somewhat describe the size, the form, and
the habits of these long extinct manifestations of the beginnings of
life on this earth.
Among these, too, have also been found the bones of huge human-like
beings whose decadent progeny are still alive in limited number.
The gorilla is still the terror of some of the wild places of the
earth; as he booms his way through the impenetrable forests, he sends
forth his note of warning, beating his great hairy breast, and all
living things flee before him. Fancy what the awful first man--his
progenitor--must have been! Science has never yet been able to
discover the probable length of time it required for this crude age to
endure in order to lay the foundation of the world; for time was not,
and existence was recorded only by ages and aeons. But seven times
their infernal progeny were nearly all swept off the planet by awful
cataclysms and the whole affair had to be begun over again.
IMPERFECTIONS REVEALED.
The soul digs deep into the age-long deposits of knowledge, the results
of countless experiences, and brings up the Real.
This has to be, the most successful egotist, the most deluded hypocrite
must inevitably meet up with himself some day and begin to know the
truth versus make-believe.
All souls are so veiled in the flesh, and held by the crowding
necessities of their lives, that it is only on rare, unexpected
occasions that the individual soul can throw down the barriers and show
of what it is capable.
WORLD ORIGIN.
To be able to understand, even to our limited degree, something of our
origin, and the purpose of our existence is most comforting and
sustaining. In the beginning, the Creator sent to this planet a given
number of beings intended for the exemplification of the law of
evolution and soul growth. In the everlasting rounds of human life, no
new souls are being created and sent here to work out their salvation
through their experiences incident to the life of this young planet,
earth. What appears to our limited perception to be the beginning of
new lives is so only in relation to their present embodiment. All new
souls now being born here are but returning from some other phase of
existence. The whole human race is one family. Bound to the wheel of
life, every individual soul must pass through all of the varied
experiences that are set for its evolution. What they are not today,
they have been, or must become. But not all people march over just the
same highway to reach the soul's status. Details of experience do not
count. It is the lesson learned, and practically applied that forwards
the unfoldment of the individual in a comprehension and understanding
of God's eternal truth. Only results in all things, temporal and
spiritual, attest the unfoldment and growth of each and every soul.
It is only when man has evolved to the point of being more than a man,
"a little lower than the angels," that the higher spheres of activity
are necessary for his further progress. To expect to develop in the
worlds of finer substance than that of earth before he has learned all
that earthly experiences can teach him, is like "placing a child in the
higher classes of a school before he has mastered the lessons of the
lower."
SPIRIT INDIVIDUALIZED THROUGH MATTER.
As spirit _per se_ has no entity, and only evolves individuality
through its relationship with matter; and has no other conscious
expression; the so long-talked-of "Fall of man" was not a fall
downward, but it was a process upward, necessary to his being, to his
existence as man.
WORLD SIGNS.
Our planet, true to her everlasting record, has put forth her potent
reorganizing power to celebrate the ushering in of the new era.
Not less marvelous are the signs and indications of great changes
taking place upon the visible planes of the lives of men. Hand in hand
march the visible and the imponderable forces of this earthly life.
Ignorance and vapid superstitions can no longer block the doorway of
the living Christ.
God wills to know, and be known of his own, and to hold his love a free
gift to all races of men.
The trump of recollection and of recognition has sounded. The dead
have already risen, all along the lines, and no power can hale them
back to their dreams.
Onward, ever upward points the finger of progress. Long hoarded wisdom
and knowledge of the forces of nature are pouring into the minds of
seers, and of wizards of science; and these long separated and divorced
streams are evoluting to the unison of material and occult sciences,
which is destined to bring in the reign of peace and prosperity to all
the peoples of the earth, and to bring to light the relics of past
ages, cunningly hidden away in the vast womb of nature that they might
be preserved and brought forth to our knowledge in these later days.
By the undeniable record yielded up from buried cities and storied
crypts, and in the skeletons of mummies of both animals and men of
those most ancient times, she is showing us where she began the present
cycle, now closing in about the race, with great clattering of forces
and profound portents in earth and sky.
The equilibrium of the universe is maintained by the transition of its
forces. Atlantis, matured and ripened, sinks beneath the sea, and her
accumulated wealth of wisdom and knowledge is transferred to other
continents to arise at the appointed time to enrich and bless the land
of their adoption; and all art and science is but shining today in the
reflected, reawakened light of past ages.
In view of the revelations being made on all sides, we may well
reiterate Solomon's wise saying: "There is nothing new under the sun."
There can be nothing absolutely new. There is only endless iteration
and readjustment of powers and forces to fit the need of the day and
generation.
Nature buffets her children bitterly and wipes out her surplus of human
life as she destroys the overproduction of beast and bird, of insect
and reptilian life. She inspires the minds of men with an
overmastering desire for possessions. She hides her wealth in
inaccessible places and sets her jealous, invisible forces to guard and
determinedly hold all possible avenues of approach to them. But this
world was given to man to conquer and own and make much of; and the
glitter of a speck of useful metal in a stray boulder in the lonely
cañon; or the chance outcropping of rock which to the practised eye
denotes the nearness of the deposit of oil--these, or any of the
thousand and one signs, she hangs out along the path in which man is
destined to march on his way to absolute sovereignty, set his forces of
intellect and will in motion, and he will never rest from his labors
until he stands upon the pinnacles of the gods, the crowned monarch of
all nature's forces on this planet.
All phenomena are negative, and are only the external garniture of the
world of man, the spirit, the child of the Eternal, of the father and
mother Creators of him. Thus man is, by absolute inheritance, the
king, and the ruler over all nature. But not without effort can he
enter and possess and maintain his power over his own. Ice and frosts,
and searing sun, and lonely wilds, and trackless wastes, and countless
waters, and evil beasts, and horrible reptiles--all, all he must
encounter and set at naught in his trackless journey. Carefully must
he force the wilderness to bloom, and by his wise efforts "make glad
the waste places" of the earth. Wherever the foot of man has been set,
there is it "hallowed ground." Whatever may have been his intent or
whatever his fate, in his wake shall surely follow the manifest purpose
of that ever-ruling Power which led him. Everywhere along the way,
Nature trails her loose ends, well baited, with which to catch the
unwary, and the whitening bones of the lonely emigrant family lost on
the plains, and the snowy hair of the dead mountaineer bleaching on
high summits or woven in the nests of birds, or the bodies of dead
mariners, or the lonely corpse of the treacherously slain, pulsing with
the tide on foreign shores, or the miners in their pits, forced by the
deadly "damps" from all visible connection with human life, or the
child of a superior race held captive by savages, or the beautiful
white girl sold into the harem of a barbarous sultan, or any or all
other of such expressions of destiny in the isolated lives of men are
but pioneering the way of the race to complete homogeneousness and
unquestioned ownership of the whole wide earth.
WORLD GROWTH.
All of nature's processes are slow and always evolutionary. The
controlling laws are subtle and secret and can never be comprehended or
understood save as they work out in visible results. There is every
indication that it has required an illimitable series of ages to evolve
even the physical form of man in the unnumbered races of the human
family from the first semi-human life to man as we see him now--clever
and strong of brain and will, daring and equal to great emergencies,
and in inventive, creative and executive gifts a very god of power and
might. The laws of evolution refer primarily to the individual planet,
Earth, and include all that it contains--in a word, all things in any
way related to it. Mineral deposits and crumbling rocks nourish the
vegetable world; the vegetable world provides sustenance to the animal
kingdom, and it, in turn, with all the others combined, sustains all
human life; but its real root, its permanent existence, is in the
planet itself. Each and all of these diverse manifestations of law
coordinated, constitute the mysterious modes and methods of the
evolution of life from the lower to the higher status of being, and it
works on, and ever on eternally, till human life finds its completion
and satisfaction in the fulfillment of the law which merges the
advanced and prepared soul in the Universal Spirit and crowns its final
evolution with its at-one-ment with its Creator.
Nature does not duplicate her handiwork, but cunningly sets her sign on
every leaf and branch to insure individuality. She throws protecting
arms around all her growing life of fruit and vegetable in order that
each shall reproduce of its own kind, and thus keep intact the orderly
succession, and that there shall be no lack of nourishment for the
children of men.
She gives without stint to all the peoples of the earth her world-stuff
to be worked over into human flesh, and animal fibre. But no tiniest
grain of her possessions has ever, or will ever escape from her hand,
and the daily debris from all earth-made bodies is her constant toll.
When the forms are set free from the life principle which has pervaded
them in their earthly career, the circle is rounded, and when the
grave-rite, dust to native dust we here restore to our great mother is
uttered, she is the gainer; for the operation of thus passing the
material of which the planet is made through the highest created forms
of life, brings it into a certain relationship to spirit, and thus the
evolution, the spiritualization of the world-stuff of the planet itself
is going forward.
DEATH A BENEFACTOR.
Death is a benefactor to the human race. How could we bear the burden
of existence if Nature did not somewhere on the march "call a halt"
while the angels of dissolution tenderly unloose our burdens of pain
and sorrow, and disappointment, and stultifying regrets, and remorses
for past ill doings and shortcomings?
WORLD PROGRESS.
It is known only to the lesser gods, who keep the celestial "accounts,"
how many times the swaggering, bully-ragging, brawling, piratical, and
murderous human family has swept around this globe. Here and there
relics of their status, their growth in the external, material
conditions of life are being exhumed, wrung from the faithful clasp of
Mother Earth, to excite the wonder of the day and time. Many of the
attributes of these lost races, their arts and their religions, have
come to light; but whence they came, and how they perished, is an
unsolved mystery. From the processes of disintegration--earthquakes,
and widespread volcanic action--now going on, we can readily conceive
of the manner in which vast multitudes of humanity have been removed
from this planet to make room for still other races and peoples. The
great pilgrimage still goes on. Unnumbered hordes following the secret
instinct of evolution, unceasingly press forward from the East toward
the setting sun. This same army, in a former incarnation, went forth
over the land where they lived to slay and exterminate; in this
embodiment, here in America, they hew out the rocks, and toil in the
mines. They harvest the grain that is to feed the hungry multitude
that is speeding on toward this new land as fast as the modern
conveniences can fetch them. Thus they serve instead of destroying
humanity--a great advance toward civilization.
There has been, there will always be an unvarying round of tearing down
and upbuilding in the whole wide realm of nature. Nothing, not the
tiniest grain or the most ponderous production of skilled hands, ever
stands still. All things are in vibration, and their permanency
depends wholly upon the rate of vibratory motion. Here and there all
the way along, from the earliest times of which there has been any
record, great souls have blossomed out, and have carried aloft the
God-given light of intelligence and culture. These inspired minds,
great souls, have persisted in announcing their message to a darkened
world, often in the face of direct want and persecutions; misunderstood
and maligned, they were and are the saviors of the people of this
undeveloped planet. Even yet, they are known and valued by but a
limited number of supposedly intelligent people. While these inspired
light-bringers were seeking to shed abroad in the minds of men the
truths that shall make men free, the Church was devoted to closing, and
holding fast shut every avenue of the human mind that might have a
tendency to teach the people anything outside of their tenets which
were the outcome of their weird imaginations. If anything could cause
a doubt to arise in the Creative Mind as to the wisdom of letting loose
on this small planet the pestiferous peoples that have swarmed over and
possessed it, it must have been aroused by their demoniacal
performances in the name of religion, that have disgraced the nature of
man from the beginning of our knowledge of the world. While a
perception of beauty and harmony is latent in the minds of men, it is
the last of the attributes of the soul to develop. The figured
semblances of God, hewn out of stone or wood by the primitive races,
are mostly hideous inventions of the evil thoughts of evil minds. From
the terrifying African God, "Mumbo-Jumbo," to the artistic bronze
representations of the Deity of the nations of the East all are marked
with awe-enforcing ferocity and ugliness, instead of by the
soul-inspiring lineaments of love and beauty. Tremblingly the minds of
men have groped their way along through the mazes of ignorance and
enforced darkness to a degree of personal liberty; and every picture
painted, every bit of sculpture achieved in the interest of harmony and
beauty is testimony to the persistency of the inspiration vouchsafed to
man of the Creator's love of beauty, and of the final state of harmony
to be reached by humanity.
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL.
"All evil is only undeveloped good" has come to be the "shibboleth" of
not only the Spiritualists, but of many other of the latter-day cults.
It sounds fine, beautiful, and is--Praise God!--in a large sense, true.
It is a beautiful reaction from the ancient blasphemy taught by the
priests and pastors anent hell and the devil. The comforting belief
that the above quoted statement settles the whole matter is accepted
and believed in. Since the supposed dethronement of "Auld Hornie," as
the Scotch named him, as head devil, it has not been thought necessary
to give the matter much if any consideration.
Mediums, especially, have gladly ignored the fact of the possibility of
there often being in their séances the very presence of potent and
powerful evil influences.
Spiritualism has flung wide the doors and given ignorant, and
undeveloped humanity an equal opportunity with the refined, and good to
express themselves. It is thus the only truly democratic religion ever
made known on this planet! It recognizes all human beings, good and
bad, as the children of one and the same Father, and that not one can
be lost from the hand of God!
The peculiar people who have developed the strange power of
mediatorship between this material world and the plane of existence
known as the spiritual world have always been helped and sustained in
their great work by their invisible friends and appointed spirit
guardians, or they could never have carried forward their important
mission to the people of this earth.
Regardless of all the efforts of the enemies and traducers of
Spiritualism, the spread of the knowledge of the unfolding spiritual
philosophy has been and is marvelous; and the establishment of the fact
of man's existence, continued after physical death, through varied
phenomena, is in itself the proof of its being the work, not of Satan,
but of a beneficent God. And why not? The Creator of us all must know
his earth-children's needs for their further evolution and growth!
There have been great searchings, at various times, trying to discover
the "origin of evil." Vast stores of uncanny legends, and tales of
wonders have been handed down to us in explanation of this most
baffling mystery.
The destructive force in nature had no "origin." Just as God, the
Constructive Force, had none. It was, as God was. It is and always
will be, while God and nature are.
It rides the whirlwind and the flood, and differentiates itself through
the smallest minutia of the affairs of human life. It is the primeval
element, the "pure cussedness" which has to be conquered, or adjusted
in every human being. It essays to bar all progress; Ignorance and
Superstition are its blinded handmaids. It exacts the fearful
penalties of scornfully misunderstood efforts, if not ostracism and
persecution, for the use of the diviner faculties. It is the spirit of
unconquered ill. It is the genius of the utterly selfish will of man.
But it is when it allies itself with the intellect and will of man, and
becomes the motive power, and thus expresses itself in concrete form,
as is often the case, that our sympathies are touched and our sense of
justice aroused, and we feel our lack of protection from the "powers
and principalities of the air." Our only refuge is in growing to and
experiencing a perfect at-one-ment with the eternal law of the
opposing, the Constructive Force--God. There is no protection, no
safety, but in the Divine Love and Wisdom.
VIBRATION.
There was no beginning; there can be no ending. There is a constant,
undeviating process of changing and readjustment of all the forces of
the universe. All is vibration. None of nature's forces are at rest,
at equilibrium. Build you a fine dwelling, and ere it is finished for
your occupancy, the disintegrating forces will have made a raid upon
the material of which it is constructed. Take notice of the signs of
decomposition going on in everything around you--the accumulation of
fluff in your rooms, in the innermost of your garments, along the
seams. So also do the rocks and mountains yield themselves to dust,
and so does all the planet reverberate with the resistless onward march
of the law of progress, unfoldment, evolution from the lower to a
higher form of expression.
Lands edging the seas and the inland waters, from their constant
erosion, slip away and are lost. Continents disappear, undermined by
earthquakes and similar convulsions of nature, and new lands arise from
the bowels of some faraway ocean to keep the balance even.
LIFE.
From time immemorial the researches of men in the vain effort to
discover and make known to the world the origin of life, of all life,
on the planet earth and elsewhere, have been most anxiously considered.
These efforts of the inquiring minds of men have not been altogether
fruitless of results; because through them has been made manifest the
most marvelous of all the facts in nature, that "there is no death,"
that "what seems so is transition." It has also become known and
understood of late years, that from the ephemera of life, of an hour or
of a day up to the highest archangel, through all the intermediate
grades of being, visible and invisible, there are no vacant spaces.
Everywhere there is an overwhelming volume of life, actual though not
conscious or individualized, until the higher ranges of human life
become known and correlated. Comes the man with the scalpel. He
dissects the human brain, and is disgusted at finding no clew to the
secret cause and source of life. He never suspects, he does not
conceive of the fact that there is in everyone, an immutable, invisible
power--a spirit germ--nor would he believe in its potency if he knew it
were true. Then there is the man with the retorts and the scales, and
the "residues." He announces to the world that he can create life
without any help from the "Great Spirit" people talk so much about.
There is also the man with the bottle full of water, with a handful of
mud at the bottom. He is sure he can produce living organisms; might
even set agoing a new race of beings, if he only had time, and a larger
bottle! Back of every expression of life we know abides the source,
the cause of all existence, so hid, so truly an integral part of life
as never to yield a knowledge of itself either to the scalpel of the
physicians or to the electrical battery of the explorer of mysteries.
Into this sphere can no man come. Herein can be no meddling of the
human intellect.
Through this searching for the source, the cause of life, man has been
brought face to face with law, with a force he can never understand or
conquer, or adjust to the demands or suggestions of his will. From
ancient expressions of intelligence have been handed down to us the
name, the title, God, as a concrete expression of this power that holds
dominance over all created beings.
Another important revelation made to man is the fact that there is but
one law, _per se_.
It is an established, consecutive, endless chain from the beginnings of
human life here up to the absolute ultimate of the immortal soul. It
proves the homogeneity of the whole human race; it declares the value
of existence here, and explains the logical sequence of its continuance
beyond this fragment of life into nature's invisible realms.
What we shall do, each one of us, with our individual portion of life;
how we shall work out our personal experiences, and to what end is
another matter. There is our heredity which is, in every case, so
mixed as to yield but little of the primal strain, and which gives to
each one of us unknown possibilities, or undesired idiosyncracies to
fight out and eradicate from the nature. The many failures to discover
the mystery of life surely ought to prove to all experimenters the
truth that spirit holds the only key to its endless mystery.
CHURCHES MONEY MAKERS.
There is no detail of the ordinary human life of all who are in any way
connected with the church, which has not been exploited for money.
There is no end to the myths and fables that have been put before the
superstitious and ignorant, and each and every one has its price; and
every celebration draws its pay; and all for the glory of God, not at
all for the help of man. The peasants and other laborers starve, and
are overwhelmed by the riot of fatal disease.
As a money-making concern, it leaves nothing to be wished for--it is a
great success.
There was no "beginning," there can be no "ending." Whatever appears
ended in our experience is only in seeming, and in other shapes and in
transformed relationships will appear again and again, asserting "There
is no death, what seems so is transition," change of elements and
forces. There is but one law; one creative centre. One model for
advanced individualized life in any world; in all worlds. The whole
purpose and intent of all creation is simply to render all inert,
unused matter into life. The universal Spirit pervades all things.
Mineral; vegetable; animal; human; angel; one unbroken chain, from the
sod up to divine perfection, from the pigmy races we see here, on this
small globe, up, forever upward and onward to the courts of the "sons
of God"; to the spheres of the eternally immortal. Ignorant mortals
assert from time to time, the day and the hour of the "End of the
World," and foolishly prepare for the final destruction of this planet.
It is true, this earth is always coming to an end, and always
rehabilitating itself with its own unused materials. Mountains slide
down and fill up the valleys. The waters of the sea undermine and gnaw
off big slices from the land; all, all is motion, vibration; nothing
stands still. If it were possible for anything in the universe to
stop, to break the everlasting chain, there would be no universe; there
would be only chaos come again, and all the work of setting the planets
a-spinning round and round their centres and apportioning the orbits of
the stately suns, and their places in the precessions of their
accompanying worlds; all would go for nothing, all would have to be
begun again, and on the same lines exactly. There are no other; there
is no other law, and the name of the law that holds all in imperishable
harmony, is Love, just Love.
LIFE IN NATURE.
The microscope has revealed to us the life and habits of myriads of
creatures of whose existence we had previously no knowledge. We had
not even a suspicion that what to our unaided vision appeared inert
elements held a rampant, multitudinous life, nowhere dead, but always
surging and changing, ever replacing death and decay with a new life
all its own. Nature's luxuriance everywhere fills us with wonder and
delight. The fragrant ferny depths of the forest, and the lush growth
of the rank marsh-land, the immeasurable sands of the ocean-edge hiding
in their mysterious sameness innumerable and beautiful shells and
corals, and the mountain top heaped up with boulders, or crumbling by
nature's processes into pebbly imponderance.
Life, swarming everywhere. Tiny leaflets giving succor and shelter to
tinier animal life--its special fairy. Huge beasts couchant in
majestic trees, guarding against invasions, with a fierce, jealous rage
inherited from the gnomes and satyrs.
Deep sea depths untouched by lightnings, where the kraken makes his
home; jolly dolphins disporting in the sunlight, responding to the cry
of the hovering wild duck and gull. Human beings overcrowding in the
oldest settled portions of the globe, until nature's resources for
their sustenance are wellnigh exhausted.
All these, and many more, might justly be enumerated to illustrate the
bountiful and inexhaustible resources of the great creative,
reconstructive Power in the universe of matter.
Life, everywhere life, forcing out death and decay. Ever changing its
form of expression. Reforming itself upon steadily advancing models.
All nature swinging in circles so wide and vast as to require centuries
for their completion.
One of the most fascinating doctrines of the Swedish Seer is contained
in the "law of correspondences." By it many things, seemingly
irregular, "fall into line," and become parts of a great process of
development. Following this method, the earnest, searching mind,
looking through nature up to "Nature's God," seeks to go beyond the
confines of the mere animal, material existence, and come into sympathy
with and get a knowledge of the world unseen, but often felt and
recognized, spiritual life, filling all the spaces which seem to the
earth-dimmed senses dull and void. There is no death, no vacancy in
this realm of nature, any more than in that other, more tangible one,
the outgrowth and the necessity of this great storm-tossed planet. But
all the expressions of life in this sphere are different from those to
which our material senses are accustomed, and require the action of
another, a finer, more spiritual set of faculties in order to
comprehend them even partially which, at the best, is all we can hope
to do while we remain denizens of and subject to the laws which control
this world of material substance.
"Jacob's dream" was not a dream only. It was a reality. From supernal
heights "Ladders" are ever being dropped down to our earth, into our
midst, upon which forms immortal and real "ascend and descend"
according to our need and our demand upon them for love and help.
We are continually overshadowed by this supermundane existence. Its
influences are both positive and negative, good and evil. It has
powers adapted to every issue of human experience; because it is the
outgrowth, the fruitage of human life. Its roots are planted in this
earth. Its topmost branches wave in the sunlight which flows from the
"Throne of God." It is God. Not a separate and distinct being; but an
intelligent principle of love abounding in everything; expressing
itself through everything. Knowing no "high" or "low." Seeing no
difference between the "just and the unjust"; showering down upon all
alike, benisons of wisdom, and peace and good will.
Gathering all together in one embrace; the whole race of man, one
undivided family. Its divine "Trinity" is Evolution, Progress,
Liberty. Many minds reject this assumption of facts, because of the
necessity which a recognition of them would involve for a readjustment
of mental processes, and religious beliefs affecting their daily
experience.
HEAVEN.
Millions of enfranchised souls pass from earth life and find the spirit
world--the "Summerland"--a Heaven, and stay therein for vast lengths of
time. The change from this life of toil, and misery to an existence of
rest from all pain and sorrow of earthly existence is really Heaven
enough for the average human mind. A place of beautiful surroundings,
where everything necessary for their comfort is furnished them, without
money and without price and, best of all, where they no longer fear
being grabbed up and punished by the devil for their sins of ignorance
committed when in the body. It is not possible for us, plunged, as we
all are, into the vortex of this difficult existence, to realize what
all this means to the world-weary. If one shall halt by the way, or
fall aside from the great unending procession nothing stops. The
terrible, tumultuous waves of humanity roll on, and the lost are not
missed or mourned for, save by the few that were responsible for their
coming, or for the awful lack of help and tendance that made them
failures in the battle of life.
The great army of the commonplace, the neither positively good nor the
very bad, is the largest class of all humanity. The most pestiferous
and difficult to adjust to the law of progress and advancement. Hold
one of them out of hell by the hair of the head, and when he is let go
he only drops further in, and nothing teaches him but the "slings and
arrows" of misfortune, and every dreadful experience that can be handed
out to him. Much of this almost universally deplorable condition--it
may be the whole of it--has been induced by false, unreasonable
religious teachings. The human mind needs every inducement to effort
to overcome its natural inertia instead of being put to sleep by
promises of being exempt from all responsibility connected with its
final redemption.
NATURE SPIRITS.
The "dwellers at the threshold" are the individualized entities of the
elements of nature. Air, fire, earth depths, and seas. These belong
to the domain of nature, pure and simple, and are met and controlled by
the affinities of the chemicals of the material, physical organization
of the individual. The most potent of these leading in the degree of
material success to be achieved in dealing with material life.
Money getting in the mines, earth depths. All manufactories that
require raging and continuous flame; ships to sail, and conquer water
spirits; electrical and etherial forces that move in the air currents.
These are the soulless, irresponsible "goblins" and "gnomes," "Fire
spirits" and "_ignes fatui_" of the nether world. All human beings who
progress at all have to deal with one or more of these forces.
Beginning in blind ignorance, through struggle, the mortal will is
developed and the mere animal man has set his foot upon a low rung of
the ladder of the ascending series. Next, man has to deal with the
primal races. The "Missing link" which will never be found save at the
"threshold" where it combines its forces with those of man's other
natural enemies, and keeps jealous watch and ward at every point of
egress of the soul which seeks to enlarge its domain. Finally the will
of man, with its long heredity of war with these potentialities, "at
enmity with God," resisting the divine; even as these have striven to
hold him in a perpetual slavery, is in its last struggle. The vast
aggregation of human will, set free from the clog of the flesh, knowing
nothing of the divine, seeing no guiding light, combines its forces,
and commingles its powers with whatever its endless tentacles can
reach. These are the powers and principalities of the air. These are
the demons, "bad spirits," "devils" and "familiars" of the literature
of the ages, and the presiding geniuses of many a phenomenon resulting
from modern research into the mysteries of nature. As their
intelligence exceeds that of the underlying grades, so just in that
degree is their power increased, and used, to block the gateway that
opens upon the path. Their abodes lie in outer darkness, or are
illumined only by flashes of fictitious, and evanescent light from the
expiring embers of earthly exhalations, and the phosphorescent gleams
of decaying forms. The soul that has received an illumination from the
Divine has in its keeping a talisman of power, yet none can escape
these watchful ones.
"Here eyes do regard you in eternity's stillness." "Choose well; your
choice is brief, but yet endless." The winged fiend, the "Appolyon,"
must be met and settled with at every turn of the way that leads to the
kingdom which the Christ came to establish, and whose best name is
"peace." In this grade, love finds no home, but its great prototype,
the lust of the flesh, stealing ever the livery of heaven, lures on
tender souls to their sad undoing.
By help of divine love alone can the soul journey safely onward and
upward through this great concentrated, immediately-environing earth
grade. It is solidly compact, sleepless and untiring, seeking
ceaselessly whom it may win to its realm. It is the unrecognized
longing of the soul for restoration to its divine heritage of love.
EXPERIENCE.
Experience is at the same time the surest and the slowest teacher of
men. Wisdom, the crowning glory of humanity, is but an enlarged
perception of man's needs, and how to meet them, based upon individual
experience and observation of the effects of natural law upon all. An
individual is an epitome of the world--society. Discipline is
everywhere considered indispensable to the individual. Far more is it
so to the world of society. Anarchy and revolution are no more
efficient for the body politic than for the individual. Growth, slow
and gradual, aggregation of power and wisdom through the education and
enlightenment of its individual members, is the only safe and sure way
to permanency and enduring life.
SPIRITUALISM.
In Spiritualism alone is to be found an expression of the religion of
Jesus of Nazereth. It is truly democratic, giving to saint and sinner
alike both here, in this life, and after death, an opportunity for
redemption. Its first mission to the world is the proof it gives of a
continued existence in which is still experienced all the
idiosyncracies which marked the individual in earth life. This fact
has either been ignored by certain classes of minds, or has been taken
by them as proof positive of the hellish origin of its phenomena,
whereas in this very expression of characteristic life lies its
wonderful power and potency. From long-continued educational influence
people out of churches, as well as inside of the influence of their
superstitions, have come to idealize death, its awe-inspiring mystery
and its strange variety. It is thought, by them, to be a sudden
translation from a lower condition to a higher, wherein, through some
divine hocus-pocus, the members of certain so-called "Evangelical"
churches, no matter how worldly-minded, and selfish, or however false
to their teachings they have been, or how false their lives to the
divine ethics taught by the Lord, whose name they assume as their
prerogative, that their through tickets to the supernal spheres are
assured. It is believed that death purges them of all their sympathy
with and attraction to mortal life, and that they are forever absolved
from all their responsibilities, and freed from dependence upon the
inter-relationships between the two conditions. Exactly the reverse is
true. Multitudes of souls only begin their true living, their
comprehension of life's meanings, after death has sifted them out of
the ashes and lifeless embers of their mistaken ideas, or vicious
indulgences. Shall these, then, be brought beneath the ban of
limitless darkness, and exiled from the "many mansions" of our Heavenly
Father's and Mother's house? A tiny rap, untraceable to any material
source, a table moved by invisible force, a closed and locked piano
skillfully played upon by unseen hands; these were the first links in
an endless chain of eternal benefits pouring down from the smiling
heavens upon the benighted children of earth. Again was heard "the
voice as of one crying in the wilderness" of this world's marts for
barter, and selfish gain; "Let him who hath ears to hear, let him
hear." "The grave has lost its victory" and death is but a halt called
in mercy and loving tenderness, that your weary souls may be refreshed
by a draught from nature's founts and bountiful resources that you may
mount upward as on the mighty wings of eagles; or discover for your
wandering feet the path of rectitude and safety.
PHENOMENA.
All expressions of nature are phenomenal. Man is of all the most
wonderful. A tiny spark of spirit encased in matter, by the
irresistible law of progress evolving powers of brain, thought,
consciousness, reason, intuition; unfolding, expanding; realizing
finally his at-one-ment with his source, the cause of him--God--man
immortal, illimitable. At certain points of unfoldment seemingly lost,
great hue and cry from many--pin heads--who think they have discovered
God, a failure. Watch out and see. Give the Lord a chance. Nothing
is done with yet. In a very old hook of Hebrew history, there are
recorded well-attested accounts of phenomena, which are so distinctly
outside of the ordinary happenings of this material existence, that
they were always recognized as being of a purely spiritual origin,
method and purpose. Within the last century the same experiences have
been vouchsafed to present humanity. Millions of people have attested
the truth of a continuance of these same phenomena; they having taken
place within the range of their own personal experience. And why not?
The Creator knows what his children need in this, as well as in other
ages. That human souls, the lives of human beings, persist after
physical death, does not prove their eternal existence along the lines
of highest soul evolution. The greatest possible unfoldment is not a
gift of God. It is held only by the individual soul as the result of
age-long study, and toil, through manifold embodiments, long-continued
self renunciation, and sacrifices not yet known or understood. Its
initiations are endless; its revelations of the infinite law are, at
times, too seemingly trifling for recognition; but as the lapidary
leaves no facet of the jewel uncut and unpolished, so the
guardians--the guides and teachers of the candidates for spiritual
unfoldment--omit no least lesson or discipline that can aid in
perfecting the individual soul.
It is the meanest kind of bosh teaching people that there will be
eternal punishment for ignorant wrong-doings in this short kindergarten
experience of life, making them believe their last chance for anything
better is gone forever. Half the sins that are committed here anyway
are either sins against the conventionalities, or they have been
hatched up by some unsext priests and have nothing to do with the case.
Besides, the sins of the body in many a poor mortal are left with the
body in the grave.
The ages, the aeons required for the perfecting of any given soul, are
known only to its Creator, or how great must be the accumulation of
ages ere the whole human family--the children of God--will respond to
the eternal roll-call that shall usher in the redeemed of every land
and clime, not one "Lost," or gone astray. Those who have stepped
forth into the arena of this present manifestation of life on this
planet, have, each in their place, their responsibility and task, to
keep alight the beacons of reason, and intelligence, as guides to
truth, and to pander never to the powers of ignorance and superstition,
however manifested by Church or State.
MEDIUMSHIP.
Mediumship today is clearly an abnormalism. But the history of the
world has been that the so-called abnormalisms of one generation are
the accepted, commonplace realisms of the succeeding types. Sight, the
desire to see, existed first in the mind of the unfolding human brain;
the will joined its forces to aid the work of liberation and the visual
nerves began to form and grow. The imprisoned soul within kept pushing
on, until gradually the beautiful, complex organ of sight was evoluted
and the soul possessed a window through which it could see things for
itself. The evolutionary processes attending mediumship quite
correspond to this physical process. Man demands to know concerning
those things that have long been hid, and to understand the "deep
things of God," and so the soul of him is saying, "I, too, have visions
unspeakable," and closing up the avenues of his external sight, he sees
and apprehends truth, a light upon his path, of which in his previous,
darkened state he had never conceived. The intuitional faculties being
the true interpreters of the immortal soul, are capable of unlimited
cultivation, unlike those of the intellect which have always the
limitations of cerebral organization. These powers are as limitless as
God, and only through the expansion and recognized rational, practical
use and application of these faculties--now sometimes falsely named
supernatural--can the human race pass out from its present environment
of darkness, and crime, and reaching upward expand into a saving
knowledge of the truth, as made known by the Christs.
THE MIGRATIONS OF OUR RACE.
Vast numbers of times has the human race marched around this world on
which we live. Each journey of the whole family has embraced a cycle
of time. Each cycle has been rounded up by some great cataclysm of
nature, which has left the earth desolated, in ruins, to rest from the
invasions of its nomadic children.
Of the truth of these great convulsive throes of the planet we have
many ancient legendary accounts. The Biblical accounts, and the
irrefutable testimony of the globe itself, as recorded in the veined
strata which have held their record for ages inviolably concealed,
until man should finally bring to the unmasking of her secrets an
intelligence clarified from the mists of superstition, and illuminated
by the intuition not only of the soul, but of the intellect and reason.
THE DISCIPLINE OF LIFE.
"The mills of the gods grind always,
They grind exceeding small,
And with great exactness grind they all."
Their "hoppers" are too numerous to be counted. Physical pain, sorrow
of many sorts and kinds, losses and crosses innumerable, unending
disappointments, holding back the ambitions from all satisfactory
realization of pet schemes, and finally, physical death. Not one human
creature escapes. Into the hoppers they go, again and again, time
after time, till the refining process is completed and the soul is fit
to stand in holy and exalted presence, and to be set to do the work of
the Master. Here and there some gifted soul realizes that its anguish
means "growing pains." A was described as a "good man who let the Lord
do anything He wanted to, to him."
The discipline of this life is hard to bear; but if people will not
learn the lesson intended, here and now, they will be forced back
through reembodiments until this life can teach them nothing more, and
they have finally earned a right to a place in the heavens--the home of
the gods--where perfect peace abides.
Men are naturally gregarious. In all phases of life they seek
sympathetic comrades, or followers that they can hypnotize to do their
will. They instinctively set themselves off into classes, and while
this is useful as a protection from invasion, conditions in India show
the evils of class-caste distinctions carried to a ridiculous extreme.
The vast, surging, unyielding predatory classes on this earth consist
of those who have but lately--comparatively--emerged from the animal
kingdom, and have not yet been put through the mill of reincarnation
times enough to rid them of their wild beast "tricks and manners," and
make of them men and women fit to have around. The dreadful thing is,
having to live on the same planet with them, and endure their terrible
onslaughts upon the peace, and happiness of the unfolded, the civilized
portions of the race. But all are of common origin. Such as they are,
all have been, and such as the highly developed, educated and useful
class are now, they will surely become.
HOMOGENEITY OF THE RACE.
The "dreamer" who passes through this life, satisfied with the
creations of his own fancy, adds nothing to the practical needs or
demands of his day and time. In all the years and ages of the
intellective life of the planet, such men and women have lived and
walked their little round atween the two oceans which bound the shores
of birth and death.
But a truer concept of the meanings of an earthly existence has arisen
in the minds of gifted humanity. The cloister gives way to the open
court; the inspired ones are seeking the roads which may lead out from
hazy, unproven cloud-land into the brightness of the everyday,
practical life which the world must have experience of, along all
lines, among all classes, high and low, ignorant and learned, ere it
can dislodge the incubus of superstition, and undevelopment under which
it has staggered along, through devious ways of despair and unbelief,
to awaken at last to a realization of the final destiny of humanity.
To the average mind the far-off, unascertained and dim, is what is most
attractive. Sending missionaries to the so-called "heathen," or
speculating upon the social conditions of people supposed to be living
on other planets, is of vital interest to their soaring minds. Any
amount of money and good red blood of humanity, if need be, are not too
large a price to pay for the gratification of these projects of
unsatisfied mentality. The vast body politic, the struggling, seething
masses of humanity grope and dig along their appointed ways, and the
progress of the entire race of man toward an enlightened homogeneity is
at a seeming stand-still. The homogeneity of the whole race in its
absolute entirety, is the key-note of the life which is to be here, on
this mortal earth, and thus every experience of individuals or of
nations becomes of vast importance.
Every event, small or great, that serves to illustrate the possibility
of fellowship, and brotherhood among the children of men, is a
milestone on the way to this recognition of the homogeneity of the
human race. In obedience to this law, this demand of the evolutionary
forces our brave sons, and lovely daughters, are, all unconsciously to
themselves, following the beckoning hand of noblest progress toward
peace, and mutuality, and are allying themselves with the
representatives of races and peoples hitherto considered foreign and
unrelated to us, in all ways save the commercial. What bonds shall
ever be forged between the nations of the earth that can supersede such
ties of love and fealty to family and home?
The external aspects of these alliances, though yielding honors, and
coveted opportunities, are of the smaller importance compared with the
amazing factors of peace and amity between the nations that are
silently and certainly working themselves out toward the beautiful
exemplification of the universal Fatherhood of God, the
inextinguishable sentiment of the final unity of his earthly children.
* * * * * *
One of the strangest phases of human life here is the almost universal
resistance to improvement. But this conservative attitude is also a
balance, prevents running off on tangents.
OF GOD.
It has been popularly reported that science has driven God out of the
world. Science has refuted ignorant beliefs, driven superstition out
of the minds of people, and opened many minds to the great facts of
life as against the silly beliefs of primitive peoples. It is thought
by many that the history of all God's doings is writ in the Holy (?)
Book--the Bible. From the study of his character, one might fancy that
"Great Jove of Mount High Olympus" was come again with only his name
changed from Jove to Jehovah, for He brought with him all the "high
days," and ceremonies, and every vice and delinquency, and outrage that
had marked pagan rule. He gave special directions as to the
killings-off of the Hitites, and the Jebusites and all the other ites.
There weren't to be any Ites or any other "furriners" left alive to
pester his chosen people. He went right on giving directions as to how
these people were to be disposed of, making such awful suggestions,
specially as to the women, that if He had not been known to be God, He
might have been recognized as the Head-up Devil. It has been written:
"By their fruits ye shall know them." What are the results, the
"fruits," of the Jehovian dispensation? They are just exactly such as
must naturally follow the teachings and influences of the spirit of
hate and vengeance; the suppression of reason, holding back the
progress of the race, fettering the brains of men with bonds of
ignorance and superstition, a network of lies and myths. Through the
dominance of selfishness and greed, the boasted freedom of men has been
lost--they are slaves to a man-made religion. So science has served
the highest interest of humanity in doing all it can to drive out this
sort of a God, with his hell and eternal punishment, from the world.
The reasoning, thinking world has outgrown such a wicked, despotic God,
and is demanding quite another sort of Deity. Humanity has to be
taught what it must have to equip it for its higher, nobler destiny.
Justice to all in equal measure; Reason and Love must abide and work
out their results, their "fruits," in human lives. The unanimous
refusal of the framers of the "Constitution" of the United States to
set forth therein the will of God, and his commands was wise and
farseeing. It has raised up a barrier against the encroachments of
every form of popular religion and has given a semblance to freedom of
thought and speech.
All along the way, seers and prophets--inspired mediums--have wrought
and sung of the days to come when all the earth should rejoice in peace
and good will. The magnificence of their inspired and inspiring words,
their immortal melodies of praise of the Creator will stand while this
world lasts. The fact that his people had diviner instincts than had
He whom they worshipped as God, showed that "Yahweh" was only the
guardian spirit of the great and wonderful Hebrew race.
The greatest discovery of the past century, far greater than any
revelation of science or knowledge of past ages, revealed by modern
research is the discovery of a God of Love. Not of that sentimental
expression of maudlin emotion that soon evaporates in hypocritical
make-believe; but the profound recognition of the rightful
consideration of every human being, regardless of race, color or
belongings.
OF JESUS.
The knowledge we have gained through the study and research of earnest,
truth-seeking souls who have found that all known religions have a
common root--have the same basis of truth--is a proof of the value of
the revelations given to the world through the teachings of our Christ.
From no other have we been given, in an externalized, practical form,
those great, eternal religious principles which must forever stand as
the rule and guide of human souls. No ancient philosopher had evolved
to a God-likeness that enabled him to go beyond a high stand-point of
moral perfection, or to give to his disciples what was most needed by
the world for its comforting in the accumulating, expanding experiences
incident to earthly life.
Jesus, our Christ, the Christ of the religion named for him was the
transmitter of heavenly truths. To him the world owes forever a debt
for making known a knowledge of the fact of the continued existence of
the individual being after physical death, and it was given to him to
point out the way of life that can alone lead to eternal happiness and
peace. He is our Teacher, our Leader above all others. We have
nothing to do with the impossible, faked-up personality that the
priests have so long exploited as the "blood Redeemer" of the world; it
is to the inspired philanthropist, the greatly-loving man that we owe
our allegiance. This will appear more and more as time goes on, and a
lot of untruths will fade out and give place to great realities.
THE GODS.
The pagan gods were innumerable and their distinctive attributes were
understood. They well might be, as they were only deified men and
women. The next unfoldment caused them to raise altars to "the unknown
God." Then came Jesus, the Nazarene, who told them that the "unknown
God" was their Heavenly Father, not of a chosen people only, but of all
the human race. The new religion, inspired by Jesus--our Christ--and
which was to bear his name, naturally brought with it all the
superstitions of the pagans, and these have been handed down through
the ages, and accepted and believed as true.
The primitive conception of a god was of a being with qualities like
their own, and as men delighted in rapine and every possible
accompanying vice and crime, so they endowed their gods in like manner,
fashioning beings to be feared and to whom must be given big offerings
and sacrifices. So long as these were limited to beasts it was a good
thing, because the priests who ate the flesh thus consecrated were sure
of cheap meat for a long time thereafter. But when the "firstlings of
the flock" failed to bring satisfactory responses to the demands of the
suppliants, they began sacrificing human lives in the vain hope of
allaying the anger and vengeance of the dissatisfied all-powerful gods,
and beautiful young maidens were thrust into the fiery jaws of Moloch,
or crushed in the coils of sacred serpents, or slain upon altars
according to the special god whose propitiation was sought.
From all these inhuman practices to a recognition of a God of love and
mercy was a step so long that even yet there remain in the teachings of
religionists indications of similar ideas, wherein not only nature's
culminating efforts, but all the painful experiences of human beings
are accepted and feared as expressions of the "wrath of God."
KNOWLEDGE OF OCCULT LAW.
The invitation of one of old to his followers, and fellow believers:
"Come let us reason together," marks the dividing line between
knowledge and superstition. The daring of the mind of man proves him
to be, in very truth, "a child of God." No arcana of knowledge are too
deeply hid in mystery to escape the prying of his curiosity, his
longing for enlightenment, his long-sustained and vigorous efforts to
surprise the hidden things of God and Nature. Livingston and Stanley
wrought in the jungles of Africa, Audubon and Agassiz in the fastnesses
of tropical America. These in the material world, the world of
effects. Gessner and Varley, Darwin and Spencer, together with a long
list of other inspired minds, have given their best thoughts, devoted
their noblest energies to the explorations of the world of causes, the
occult and invisible realms of pure principles in God and Nature. Back
of all these there lies the richest bequest ever made to humanity in
the discoveries and revelations of the most ancient "adepts," the
fathers of mystical lore, in the light of modern discoveries and
inventions, mystical no longer; but practical and full of earnest
meaning in their adaptation and adjustment to the needs and wants of
the citizens of the world today.
EVANESCENCE OF MERE BELIEFS.
Proclaim not mere beliefs today, and be not labelled and pigeon-holed
and held to account on any special line of thought or action lest the
individual soul be barred out from a conception and knowledge of some
far grander truth. At best our view is narrow and contracted, else
were we gods, and as we grow we discover our little, vaunted beliefs to
be but as tiny shreds of color in God's great mosaic, our song of
triumph and discovery but as the buzzing of the insect to the chorals
of the chanting hosts of heaven. So, then, an eternal negation is the
safest attitude of the unfolding soul. Mere beliefs, unproven by
facts, are so many barriers set up for the soul to overleap and leave
behind on its onward march.
THE FOUNT OF INSPIRATION FOR ALL.
"The righteous shall inherit the earth." Just so far as we are able to
prove our rightness, the world--nay the whole universe of God--is ours.
Our Heavenly Father has never said: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no
farther, upon the road to knowledge." Everything invites us; get
wisdom, get understanding, and to thy knowledge add virtue are the
recommendations from inspired sources, and to the soul that fears not,
revelations upon every line stand invitingly open.
MAN VERSUS DEATH.
In all the domain of organized being, it is only man, who, in his crude
egotisms, and defiant resistance to nature's laws, makes ado with
death. The dainty denizen of the air, and the things that creep over
the earth, the leviathan in his nature element, and his warmer-blooded
brother whose passage causes the earth to tremble beneath his tread,
all the multitudinous expressions of the animal kingdom, that disport
themselves in fur, or feather, in filament of scales, or covering of
hair, each and all recognize the approach of their final experience on
earth, and hie themselves to their appointed coverts, to keep their
tryst with their old mother in utter privacy. How well she loves her
children! She sheds over them her varied mantle of leaf, and piney
bloom, or scented brake, and soothes them with softly falling rain, or
tender dew, and woos their elements back into her bosom from which they
sprang. All this is in consonance with nature's arrangement for caring
for her own. There is no such thing known among these as a vulgar
display, or a flaunting of the deposed forces in the faces of the
creatures left behind.
In man's treatment of his kind, there is everywhere betokened his
unfaith and fear. His undeveloped spirituality leaves him without even
so much power to adjust himself to the divine order of progress, by way
of the gates of death--rebirth--as have his humble progenitors, his
representatives in the animal kingdom; and so he plants himself upon
his fancied prerogatives, and turns his dulled senses away from the
God-call: "Come up higher," and moans and raves, and howls his despair
in sounds and terms indicative of his tribal, or racial environment and
relationship.
A voice of love has sounded down throughout the ages in unmistakable
terms to the children of men. "My father has many mansions, invisible
to your seared, earthly vision, but beautifully furnished forth for all
your needs; nor hath eye seen or ear of yours heard the wonderfulness
of the great preparation He hath made to receive you into his kingdom."
And seer and sage have reiterated this in unmistakable language, and
the enlightened of the older races have caught the straying tones of
the vibrant air of the beyond, and have beheld the mirage of the homes
of the blest, and have sought to impress the truth of the living
reality of the beyond upon the inchoate brains of their fellows. But
superstition rears its grizzled front alike in seats of learning, in
the homes of the cultured, and in the hovels of the outcasts; in this
sense, all the human family are of hellish kin, and in a large
percentage of them their whole lives are given over to their effort of
resistance to the divine ordering which speaks ever to the soul of man
in unmistakable terms of tender consideration, saying: "Thy poor days
here are full of pain and sorrow, because of necessary crudities. So
live that when thy summons comes to join the everlasting cavalcade
which sweeps across the world, thou shalt apprehend thy high emprise,
and go forth exultingly to claim thine own meed of further existence in
spheres yet undiscovered to thy longing ken."
"Earth loses thy pattern forever and aye" that thou mayst be renewed
and set up in the finer mould of thy most excellent Karma, which is thy
hidden reality of character. Rejoice then, O mortal! in the
beneficence of nature and of thy Parents, God, for surely it is well
that they call a halt for thee and thine beside the river of death, and
loosen thy burthens of pain and heart-breaking sorrow, and let loose
from thy soul that raven, "Never more," which has preyed long upon thy
soul and held thee in the grip of unspoken despair and anguish. This
is of all demons the blackest and most subtle. In tones of love it has
been proclaimed by the divine mind that nought is ever taken away that
shall not be restored to thee. Not as thou, in thy small, limited way,
wouldst hold it back from its own high place, and mission in the
universe and bend it to thy purpose; but according to the wisdom of its
Creator and thine, shalt thou see and know and claim all that belongs
to thee, be it the inspiration of thy nature, unexpressed here amid the
din and rush of this chaotic existence; or power to carry forth thy
grandly bold designs in conjunction with nature's illimitable
chemistry; or to perfect within thy mind a knowledge of her laws; or to
fold to thy bereaved heart thy lover, friend, or child, so lost to thee
now in the great unexplored silences, that thou wilt not even try to
see their way of life, but art ever persistent in saying they are dead.
Whatever thy soul shalt cherish as highest and best good to be longed
for, that shall be given to thee, in its new and resurrected form, over
which has passed the chrism of the immortal and everlasting life. We
need a new perception of that great law of the "survival of the
fittest." Who are the "fit"? The nomadic tramp who yields no meed of
use to his fellows? The willfully sin-sodden who poisons all his
surrounding atmosphere with the noxious exhalations from his decaying
organism? He who hoards and locks away from his fellows his treasures
of gold or precious knowledge, and he, who having in his hands the
powers of wealth and influence, never deigns to stretch forth his hand
to relieve the cruel stress of the needy or to protect the helpless, or
to sustain and strengthen the weaker ones of earth?
Nay! The true "survival" is not here on this underdone sphere, but
outside, beyond, above, in the realms of the spiritual where our
burdens are loosed and the souls of men are set free, and true liberty
is accorded to each and everyone to be, and to do, all that in him lies
toward the upbuilding of the great sum of the soul life we call God.
Once this perception of the soul and even some slight degree of
knowledge concerning the laws which hold over the destiny of each
individual being becomes, through a familiarity with phenomena now
everywhere common, understood and accepted, the entire life on this
planet will be changed, elevated and happified. Fancy living day after
day under the bondage of the fear and dread of what everyone knows to
be as inevitable as is the experience of each, of physical dissolution;
and yet multitudes of people do so live. It is debasing, and
disennobling in every way. It robs the soul of all its natural dignity
and sends it through the world orphaned, and mourning, where it might
and should recognize its divine relationship, and rejoice in its
unfolding powers; and so you who may be giving a moment to the reading
of this brief testimony to the great truth of immortality, consider,
and realize thy divine paternity and demand what is, and has always
been thine own by right of interblending of thy own inner nature with
that of thy soul's origin, the heart of Him who hath made us.
The bond is eternal and indestructible. God in all humanity and we in
Him, and the sooner we see this and yield ourselves in obedience, not
like "dumb driven cattle" but as self-respecting, self-asserting
mortals--within the law of accord with the highest--the sooner shall we
enter into that "Nirvana" which is "peace."
FEAR OF DEATH.
In the childhood of the race, the time of its exclusively animal life,
it was necessary for its protection that there should exist in the
slowly unfolding human mind a great, overwhelming terror of death. In
fact at that time indifference to death would have involved the entire
race of man in utter extinction. From that time have come down to us
superstitions and fears which, while acting still in the minds of the
ignorant as a preservative of human life even under most terrible
conditions, have at the same time shrouded countless numbers of good
and useful lives with gloom, overshadowing them with a horror from
which they could not escape. It has been less the actual fear of
death, but of what might be in store for them after they should have
passed through this experience which is so inevitable to us all. Jesus
prophesied of a time to come wherein death should lose its sting, and
thus be swallowed up in the victory of the spirit over matter.
The enjoyment of this life demands that, right here and now, we should
begin to know and understand how we are to establish our individual
relationship to the invisible, the real world--the world of causes, the
world of law--so as to bring to us a sufficient knowledge of the hidden
mysteries of the future life to give us some certain grounds for faith
in the unseen. This can only be accomplished by the development of our
own occult powers, or by learning of the psychic experiences of others
which serve to point the way to what we may come to know for ourselves.
It is all one, here, hereafter, anywhere. Caught in the web of life,
there is no escape from its demands upon the individual soul.
Somewhere along the way it has to decide its own fate. Upward and
onward, or down into the purlieus of the crude beginnings of things.
It is free to make its choice. It can pursue the hard and toilsome
path of earning its right to eternal happiness, or it can flop around
through all the hells of life unrelated to God, and resistant to the
Christ.
It is the fear of death, of physical dissolution, that is to be
individually conquered. This can only come as a result of a perception
of spiritual law, and the unfoldment of the spiritual nature.
The fear of death, of what may lie beyond, has been nature's safeguard
against a universal stampede out of this life when the miseries of
existence on this earthly plane become too dreadful to be borne; when
the tortures of the soul in the tortured body drives out all reason and
all philosophy, and the consciousness senses only the demand for
surcease of agony. But when the "golden bowl" is broken--the silver
cord of human life is severed--by suicide--nothing has been gained by a
changed environment. There are the same responsibilities and soul
needs, and the miseries and unsatisfied desires of their minds are
exactly the same. Nothing has been gained, but much has been lost.
Brave, staunch souls one by one obey the call to march over the "border
land" into nature's invisible realms; they cannot help themselves, no
one can. On they go, an endless caravan into the land of revelations,
the place of reviews, where the utterly selfish are fetched up with a
"round turn," and made to realize that a real godliness is the only
thing that can "pass muster," that mere beliefs do not count, and only
character tells. How swiftly, how inevitably their places are filled;
nothing stops; prince or peasant, it is all one; the will of the
gods--the guardians of this planet, is being fulfilled. Life here is
just one link in the endless, unbreakable chain of individual existence.
* * * * * *
Most fortunate is the soul that is started out to make the journey of
life without being handicapped by some narrowing religious superstition
or an intellectual bias that limits the mind, preventing all unfoldment
of originality.
TEST OF CHARACTER.
Sooner or later everyone who has character enough to make any sort of a
test worth while, has to have a regular bout with his "evil genius."
Christ said: "The devil hath desired thee that he may sift thee as
wheat." The form which the test takes depends entirely upon the
organization of the individual. But it is in every case the same
thing. The thorough arousal of the latent powers of the nature, and
the suffering which ensues from the results of its unbalanced actions,
constitute the discipline of this life. We can no more escape it, or
subvert the action of this law of evolution than we can put a stop to
any of the upheavals of nature. The volcano and the earthquake are but
the expressions of power in the globe which we inhabit to throw off her
old, and ascend through violent agitation to higher conditions. There
is a natural correspondence in the experience of her inhabitants and
that of our old, old mother!
* * * * * *
Back of protoplasm, back of organic human form is the soul--a thought
of God, a spark of divine, eternal life; imperishable, immutable as God
himself.
CHARACTER FORMING.
All animals, the human creature included, are born blind and this
physical condition of man absolutely typifies his life-long state,
owing either to his environment, his heredity, or his false education.
The great mass of humanity come into the world unmarked by any
specially-developed individuality. These are the legitimate prey of
priests and teachers who have their place, or use in the evolution of
the lower grades of life on this planet.
The smaller number of advanced souls that are "cast upon the shoals of
time," the evolved thinkers, the philosophers have by far the more
trying, and difficult life; for the highly individualized man or woman
cannot belong to any set school of ethics; there are no fixed
landmarks, religious or otherwise. Blinded by inherited prejudices, if
not by destructive tendencies, with ideals for which there is no
seeming avenue in this commonplace, workaday world; the life of such an
one is ever a grope toward the light of truth.
Lacking the sagacity, the primal instinct of self-protection in common
with the nature children of the wilds, he plunges forward on his unlit
way, and has many a fall into the bogs and morasses of life until he
finally sees that only from the higher, the spiritual side of existence
can come to humanity redemption from the errors, wrong thinking and
action that is the cause of all sin and sorrow of the world. Blessed,
indeed, are those to whom this understanding comes in time to harmonize
conflicting beliefs and tendencies, and to be the means of rounding out
the life, and perfecting that most potent and powerful of all things, a
noble human character.
MAN THE FINAL EARTH PRODUCT.
In man Nature has reached her highest evolution. His life and being
are the topmost rung of the ladder, but she has not finished with him.
It is universally believed that physical death severs everlastingly her
dominion over him, and thus ends all her service to him. This is by no
means true. Man is her offspring, her child, and to her he returns
again and again, drawing from her complex, multitudinous,
many-chambered heart such forces as shall bring to him the experiences
he requires to further unfold his nature and bring forth all his
possibilities.
Not man alone but the planet itself is in the mills of the gods. The
seeds, the germs of life that were expressed in such ways in the
beginnings of life on this world, still exist in a greatly modified
degree and the misunderstood phases of nature's ministry are the
results of the out-working of these primitive elements still inhering
in the world-stuff of which human bodies are made.
Nature wields her powers of fire and flood and devastating epidemics
mercilessly; she constantly rids herself of her superfluous offspring,
and forces them to a new environment in her invisible realms, through
which they pass, gaining more or less by the experience and from which
each must emerge, and continue to evolve and grow according to the law
of his own being.
SUPERSTITIONS.
Fear of the unknown has given birth to all the superstitions that have
afflicted the minds of ignorant and unthinking people. Few people
escape some form of superstition. For instance, the silly sayings,
anent the moon, "Fair Priestess of the Night." It is unlucky to see it
in its newness--so and so--when the real fact is, it is a merciful
Providence that permits us to see it in any of its phases, over the
left shoulder or over the right, or through the glass, or in any way at
all. There is nothing more "lucky" or glorious than to have good
eyesight of one's own, with which to behold this and all the other
beauties of nature. The man who chanced to be passing under a ladder
just at the moment when a workman half-way up let fall a bucket of
paint which struck and deluged him, had some reason for thinking it
"unlucky" to go under instead of around such an impediment to travel.
But not once in a lifetime would such a thing happen to any one, and it
is impossible to imagine what going under ladders or meeting loads of
barrels, or funerals, or opening umbrellas in the house, instead of
outside of it, or any of the hundreds of silly, puerile, fool
superstitions that have sprung from no one knows where, and that have
no scientific meaning, and no earthly bearing upon the realities of any
life have "to do with the case." These are all the offsprings of minds
tinctured by fear of they know not what, and which are peddled around
and handed down religiously from one generation to another, to keep
alive a sensationalism whose tendency is to blind those who accept them
to the great living fact of God's providence which is and has ever been
ruling the lives of his earthly children.
SELF-JUSTICE.
While self-abnegation is a valued experience in the spiritual
discipline which goes to the formation of a perfect character, the
reaction where the ego posits itself upon the law of justice to self,
is in reality the beginning of salvation to the individual. But
preachment from any source cannot avail with any soul deeply immersed
in work for others. There is too much in array against it. The
established heredity concerning the first duty of woman is of itself
alone a formidable influence to be overcome; then either the real
needs, or the selfishness of others, present obstacles beyond the power
of loving, sensitive souls to resist. The change must come from the
consciousness of the individual of her own needs along these lines,
which alone can arouse one to sufficient will, and purpose to be true
to one's self if the heavens fall. This is first, and above all other
considerations.
SYMBOLISM.
A crude and inartistic symbolism is revolting to a spiritually-unfolded
consciousness. True mystic symbolisms must observe accurately the
finer law of correspondences or they fail to appeal to such as these,
and become to the occult a mild form of blasphemy.
LOVE.
No phase of human character--of mental or spiritual philosophy--has
engrossed so much attention or received such a variety of treatment as
has human love. Nearly everyone who thinks at all, has been brought,
at some stage of experience, to an attempt at analyzing the emotional,
sentimental nature, asking: "What is Love?"
In contradistinction to that which repels, and disintegrates, it is
attraction. Love is God, it draws elements together, and holds them in
proper spheres. It centralizes and builds up. It is controlled by
fixed laws; it is only "blind" to those who have not investigated its
nature, and office unshrinkingly, with an eye to a complete
understanding of its true function. Devoted humanitarians have shown
us how to feed, exercise, and rest the physical system, in order to
produce health. Ministers of the Gospel have taught souls the way of
life ever-lasting. Professors of the various sciences and arts, useful
and ornamental, have instructed the intellects of men, and now and then
a woman; but with all these, the affections--the crowning--rather the
integral element of all life and being, have had few, or no exponents
who have ever attempted to treat them from any basis which can be
called philosophical, or which could ever serve as a guide to one
uninitiated in their occult phases.
The ordinary expression of this part of the nature, is a vampyrism
which is constantly on the alert to see what, and how much it can
gobble up for its own delectation. This is the lowest grade. It
begins with the selfism of the individual, its manifestations are named
lust. It seeks expression through the sensuous nature, but extends to
the spirit and will.
O Love! What crimes are committed in thy name! What laying waste of
true and tender hearts, what defacing of sweet bodies, fashioned and
set up as temples of the spirit!
This vampyrism extends through every department of the affectional
nature. It exists not only among men and women recognized as lovers,
married or otherwise, but parents are ghouls to their children, and
friends devour each other without stint. Attraction is that law which
draws together two opposite elements or forces, positive and negative,
or male and female. As the nature and attributes of a human being are
multiform, so are the attractions, or loves, numerous. Ignorance of
the laws which ought to control and adjust these loves, is the prime
cause of all the misery and crime with which the earth is flooded. Two
people of the opposite sex are attracted through the intellect on this
plane, and realizing the limit of the law which draws them together,
they could be admiring friends forever; but ignorant of their needs
outside of this, they attempt to force a conjugal relationship which
too often ends in dislike. Every grade of lust and love finds
representation in the so-called marriage relation, as it stands today.
Intellects and spirits without any bodies--worth mentioning--and gross
mortal remains unvitalized by souls. The former class ignore the
claims of the physical, and gather their robes together sanctimoniously
indicating: "Avaunt, lest my purity be contaminated"; while the latter
laugh their spiritual pride and fastidiousness to scorn. The war goes
on between good and evil, whereas there is really no just ground for
difference. All that is needed for the attainment of harmony and peace
is a wise adjustment of these forces in individuals and in society.
* * * * * *
The growth of all true character must be slow and gradual. It is not
enough that the soul perceives the beauty of a grand, moral life, it
must also learn to live it humbly, earnestly and truly.
"IDEALS OF LOVE."
"Greater love hath no man than that he shall give his life for
another," whether the scene be set upon the mimic stage, or on the
broad theatre of the world. Heroic rescues, desperate efforts to save
endangered lives, care of the battle-wounded or fatally diseased meet,
from great and small, brutal and cultivated, deserved recognition, even
to the extent of making the individual actors--so favored by the
gods--famous, throughout the world.
The patient service of men and women to their families, of children to
their parents, or of friends who rejoice in serving, that goes on all
around us conforms so entirely with our established ideals of what is
right and becoming, that it is unnoticed and wins no applause, but
oftener only calls out from the recipient demands for further sacrifice.
In all such related service the real blessing comes to those who give
far more than to those who receive. The operation of this law hallows
all the relationships of this life, and must finally yield to the
unselfish giver undreamed of compensations. Not here, perhaps, but in
that sphere of being where love is indeed the fulfilling of the law,
shall the patient givers, those who have served at love's altars, find
themselves closely allied to the immortal ones, "who do his pleasure."
Love, garlanded, and adorned with all that wealth can bestow, enthroned
in seats of honor, and social recognition is accepted as our ideal of
what love should claim, and win from life; but I have looked into the
faces of humble, patient toilers, and there I have seen that the
sustaining influence with them was love, and have marvelled greatly
over the compelling power of their ideals of love.
Remembering that foundations of love upon this earthly planet were, of
necessity, laid in the selfish instincts of the race--a race as yet so
undeveloped in all that "makes for righteousness"--we need not despair
of the final outcome, and realization of its high behest to the
children of men; for no expression of love, however mean in view of our
own exalted ideals, but is, in reality, an effort towards something
higher and better. The obdurate and selfish are unfolded, and taught
by its painful misunderstandings, and awful tragedies.
Those poor souls who expect everything from this life, whose ideals are
bounded by their own selfishness, who have never discovered that God is
Love, and that only through love, purified, exalted and idealized can
any of his earthly children ever reach to any conscious relationship
with our Father in Heaven, and who, failing to realize even their low
ideals, pass on from one experience to another vainly searching for the
realization of what their dimly perceived intuitions of love constantly
assure them should be theirs--for even such as these there must be a
final redemption; for, like one of old, they have "loved much," and the
sins of a vast ignorance are at last condoned by God's all pervading,
untiring, illimitable law of love.
O ye! who labor for humanity's uplifting; O weary workers in the homely
ways of the unskilled in every relationship of life, unrecognized by
your fellows be ye of good cheer! As the circling waves of a calm lake
spread wider, and more widely from a center disturbed by some heavy
substance, so shall your least word, or thought of pure, unselfish
love, from your overburdened lives, reach out and diffuse an influence
throughout the universe of God, and become a part of the life immortal!
Love, and love alone creates the desire for immortality, lifts up and
renews the oft fainting faith, the faltering, changeful hope, and
perpetuates the expectations of the restoration of beloved companions,
the reunion of families, and friends. It inspires the spirit, and
seals the brokenhearted to the service of "ideal love." It leads the
human soul onward, and upward, until it triumphs, at last, over this
life's defeats and losses, and its manifold despairs.
Undeterred by the alarms of war, the wails of the diseased and
famine-cursed, and the violent protests of the oppressed, and
misery-steeped unfortunates of this plane of being, the "Prince of
Peace" is calling together his scattered forces. The beacon lights
shine along the high places where dwell the exalted, and powerful ones
of earth, and glimmer faintly from the lowlands, where the dire enemies
of mankind--ignorance and superstition--are, at last, learning that
God, the true God, loves, and cannot hate.
The "ground-swell" of the "ideal love" cannot be resisted, nor
overborne by any competing power in the universe, and with
ever-increasing force and power to conquer all of earth's conditions of
unrest, and dissatisfaction, born of false ideals, it will sweep
resistlessly on, until it is merged in God. The recognition of the
homogeneity of the race, and the "Fatherhood of God," shall bring the
longed for fulfillment of the ancient prophecy of "Peace on Earth, and
good will to Man."
* * * * * *
The priests endowed the gods with vices which they knew to be popular
among their rich and powerful patrons.
THE NEEDS OF WOMAN.
Women need any and all disciplines which teach them self-justice.
There are many noble and good women who allow their whole lives to be
picked away from them by demands upon their time and strength which
come to them under the guise of duties. Viewed from a higher
standpoint, they are not duties, in that they conflict with the great
underlying principle of self-justice. This is the pivotal idea of a
true religion; for it is impossible to be true, to be just to others
save as we are so to ourselves, and while no character can be
perfected, except through the fiery ordeal of an entire
self-abnegation, there is a higher, and a holier life in store for
those who have the strength, and the courage to plant their feet upon
this God-given and eternal law of justice to self.
It is comparatively easy to gird one's self for the conflict which is
apparent, nearly all women souls are equal to that heroism; but it is
in the daily round of the household, in relation to the church, and to
society, or to the professions where women need to watch most jealously
the weakness of self-sacrifice. Women have had the beauty of
"unselfishness," and "amiability" dinned into their ears for so long
that there is no depth of degradation, or of abnegation of true
womanhood to which they will not descend for the sake of being so
considered by those whose interest it is to keep them where they
virtually endorse the vices of others by their own lack of
self-justice. While we must grope along until we understand the
wickedness of this, and until we outgrow that weakness, let us be ready
for, and equal to the hour which shall give us the laurels of the
victor. And why not laurels? Has it not been uttered by the mouth of
inspired prophecy that the "last shall be first," and that "the stone
rejected by the builders shall yet be the head of the corner?" It
rests with us, individually, to represent that truthfulness, and
faithful adherence to the justice due to womanhood which shall yet
crown her with rejoicing.
To this end women must begin to gather in those pearls of unselfish
devotion and self-abnegation which they have been so recklessly casting
under the feet of ignorance and beastliness.
It is blessed for lovely and loving woman to bestow bountifully from
the richness of her nature. But every grace has its complement, and
the complement of this, for the present, is the greater blessing of
conserving herself until she knows her power as an individual, and
thoroughly comprehends what is due to her dignity and worth.
MAN VERSUS WOMAN.
Man, living entirely in his physical nature, goes on and on in the
gratification of the senses until he becomes satiated, and "blasé," and
there is nothing satisfactory left for him upon the sensuous plane.
Then he either crystallizes into a hard, selfish being, or plunges
still deeper into the slough of sensuality from which Divine Love alone
can rescue him. This power is most often manifested by woman, the
natural law-giver and redeemer. For ages man has projected his selfish
human will into all the affairs of life, thus setting aside the higher
law. In the love relations he has specially dominated woman, reversing
the divine order of nature, and thus killing out all possible
inspiration, and consequent happiness. Everywhere he has set up his
own lustful desires as the rule and right of life in his relationship
to woman, destroying the spiritual sacrament of marriage; and by his
selfishness and greed of power, he has reduced her to a condition of
prostitution. He outrages the helpless ones who have confided their
honor, and their lives to his keeping, and the law--the vile, cursed,
man-made law--upholds him in this slaughter of all that should make his
heaven of trusting love. The wails of the wronged ones--specially
those who suffer in the marriage relation--go up incessantly to God,
and the woe of the children who, through these conditions, have
inherited only animal love and instinct is enough to drown the "music
of the spheres."
Parenthood being one phase of unfoldment, each individual must at some
period of incarnation exercise this important function. To the uses of
reproduction, the animal love with its blustering activities of
expression, is, rightly understood, adjusted. But above and beyond
this is the spiritual union which brings forth children of the mind,
the fruitage of the soul, manifest in noble thoughts and brave deeds.
Every expression of love, however crude and animal, is an impulsion of
the flesh-enveloped soul toward the source of all love, and however
distasteful one may seem, to such as have evolved a spiritual
consciousness, and the demand for soul satisfaction, it cannot be
ignored.
Through the pain of satiety, of disease, or suspended activity of the
love nature, the ego at last senses its need of God. It comes to know
that nothing less than divine love can ever satisfy this demand of the
heart. The constant tendency of the inspired human being is to
extremes. The "golden mean" is the "high water mark" of real
cultivation. We have on one side the suppression of the ascetic, and
at the other end of the line the abandonment of the debauchee--both
sinful and false because extreme, both casting a reproach upon the laws
of God as outworked in, and through nature. The ascetic, seeing the
harmful results to the soul attending the usual unlimited, and
undisciplined expression of nature which man accords to his supposed
necessities, draws the line by cutting off all surplus of physical
supplies and, stifling the cries of passion, retires into a cave or
cell, and into himself, thus totally ignoring all the necessary
activities attending the development of this planet and of the human
race. He may thus reach a high altitude of purely spiritual
perception; but it is, after all, a sublimated selfishness. His
example is of no benefit to the world's workers. He is not of those
who think and feel, and who are in the way of divulging esoteric
knowledges to the quest of the vast army of earnest seekers after light
upon these underlying laws of human life.
For the control by man of the love, and the life of woman there is a
cut-and-dried sentiment and an enforced law concerning the segregated
exercise of a natural function. By her acceptance, or rejection of
this onesided "morale," is woman judged pure or impure, blessed or
cursed, as the case may be. If this rule could be enforced equally
upon both sexes, if there were not two distinct sets of moral laws, one
for man, and quite another for woman, there would be no such injustice.
As it is, there is but one way left open for woman. She must develop
the power and will to be a law unto herself, regardless of the
suspicion, and brutality of man, and with this also indifference to the
foolness and the weak protest of her fellow slaves--women. These are
"long, long thoughts." Ages must elapse ere the males of our kind will
have evoluted up to a status where they will see that through justice
to woman alone can they secure to themselves any degree of worthy, or
lasting happiness, or satisfaction.
NATURAL CRUELTY OF THE UNDEVELOPED.
The most unaccountable phase of the minds of the leaders of religions
has been their persistent effort to make their fellow beings wretched
and miserable instead of glad and happy. We expect savagery from the
Comanchee Indians and other primitive tribes and races; but from
self-styled Christians the history of their cruelties is astounding.
It is pure devil worship--that is what it is--if they but knew it.
One of the beautiful plans of theologians and priests for scaring
half-witted people into their individual folds has been telling them
that they were in danger of committing the most dreadful of all sins,
the "sin against the Holy Ghost." The utterly "unpardonable sin" of
all sins. This blasphemous, fiendish proposition has frightened
numbers of half-baked folks, and they have pestered their small modicum
of brains over this mysterious say-so of priests and parsons even to
the point of committing suicide, or of landing themselves in lunatic
asylums.
THE WORST SIN.
The much speculated over "sin against the Holy Ghost," the so-called
"unpardonable sin" is the sin that men and women commit against
_themselves_; for the most holy of all ghosts, or spirits, is that
portion of God--the universal Spirit--embodied in their own separate
personalities, and it is only "unpardonable" in that it sets the soul
back from its possible and intended progress toward its ultimate
perfection.
REINCARNATION.
The objections to the acceptance of a belief in the law of
reincarnation are based upon the imperfect teaching, and the consequent
inadequate understanding of the laws controlling such experiences.
Some of the reasons for disbelief are utterly illogical. For instance,
one view is this: "I never want to come back to this earth after I once
leave it." The fact is, that there could be no return to today's
recognized conditions of life. If one were to return to this planet
and become reembodied, he would find himself in some other country, and
under such entirely changed conditions that he would be totally
unconscious of being on the same world where he had formerly lived.
Then, again, the law of vibration is so immanent in material things,
the changes are so constantly undermining conditions and setting up
quite others that if one were to return in one hundred or even in fifty
years, it could not be the same, and that person could not be in any
way subject to the same conditions, or to the same experiences.
Furthermore, it is nature's wise and provident law that there is hardly
ever any memory of any previous life here. Still, after the soul has
passed through many lives and has accumulated great knowledge, a vast
consciousness which can not be laid aside, there come to individual
souls faint gleams of memories of past experiences which, if heeded or
understood, might become helpful and instructive, if not altogether
consoling.
There has never been a time when the needs of humanity have so reached
the great spiritual overlords of this planet as at present. Or, that
those needs have been so responded to by the return to earth of wise,
and godlike spirits as now. Many of these have sought to approach
humanity through personal reembodiment in the flesh. It would be well
for the world if, instead of cramming the brains of children with
effete ideas and superstitions, the messages of these wise ones could
be listened to and heeded.
A thorough understanding of the laws of reembodiment, so far as we can
know them, entirely refutes the belief and the feeling of the injustice
of the Creator towards any human being. The law of evolution carries
the soul along from one expression of life to another giving to each
individual the opportunity to accumulate such knowledge, and to grow
such character as shall finally bring it to a state of perfection. The
discrepancies in human life are largely external. The millionaire,
envied by less fortunate beings, may be far below the poor, struggling
laborer in point of real unfoldment of soul. And again, people so
favored in this material experience of life may be forced by the very
nature of existence to return into humble conditions to learn the real
lessons of life here.
We are not the arbiters of our own destiny, and the sooner we conceive
the idea of non-resistence to fate, realize that our lives are guided
by unerring law, and simply set ourselves to trying to understand the
meanings of our experiences, and to trying to wring from each one all
that it is intended to teach us, seeking to learn from it all that we
possibly can in order that we may not be forced to be taught the
lessons over again, the better for our growth and happiness.
This earth, our birth place, our kindergarten school, and the
university from which we must each graduate, having once received us,
can never let go its hold upon one of its children until this final
result is attained. Over and over again, the lives of all who belong
to this planet pass into the invisible realms of Nature to rest from
the sordid and wearisome experiences of material life, and again return
to seek out further growth and understanding, until the final
culmination is reached. The soul is hurried on through its experiences
of departing and returning, until earth has no further lesson, no
further service to perform. Then, indeed, it may graduate and ascend
to its place among the gods.
* * * * * *
Newly-embodied souls might be considered as raw material flung out upon
the sea of life to be ground and polished by experience, and grown into
a semblance of perfection befitting the "children of God."
PROCESSES OF REINCARNATION.
Spirit has no consciousness on the material plane, except through the
vibratory action of the human brain, the mortal mind. The individual
ego gathers up from each incarnation--if it is true to itself--some
knowledge, some wisdom, and stores it away in the spirit brain. Its
experiences cover every opportunity to understand, from lowest to
highest, all that any single one in the whole human family has ever
known. This is the justice of the great Creator. The king today has
been in some previous life an oppressed laborer, and if he could for a
moment lay aside his egotistical pride of power and place, he might
remember and know how 'tis himself. Men and women of thought, of great
character have returned from each separate incarnation, for rest from
the destroyed physical, loaded like the honey bee with the results of
labor and effort.
When the practised soul familiarizes itself with the newly-born,
fleshly tabernacle it is to inhabit and use for a long or a short time,
it broods over the unconscious being, and at the first indication of
intelligence, pours into the human brain-cells its own spiritual life,
and what thus comes in is there to stay. The growth of the child, the
development of the individual, depends mostly upon the capacity of the
brain to receive and adjust this knowledge and inspiration to its use
upon the earth plane upon which it is to live, the place, the
environment in which it is to learn its next needed lessons.
The soul, the ego, thus placed, is bound and shackled by its human
heredity. This is inevitable, it has no choice as to its lineaments or
figure. It in a sense bears the "sins of the world"; it can in no way
separate itself, really, from the whole human family.
When the experiences of the dual nature, the body and soul, from any
cause, bring the body, or the brain into conditions where it can no
longer respond to the uses of the spirit, then occurs what is called
death--physical dissolution. But this change is simply the unclothing
of the spirit from its earthly conditions, setting it free to return
again to its home, there to review what it has gained, and added to its
previous stock of knowledge. The individual soul in each incarnation
forms for itself ties more or less real and lasting--with the mother,
the fleshly vehicle, through whose mysterious service it enters upon
its earthly life; with the male parent whose service to humanity may,
or may not be godly or godlike, though natural and necessary; with
family relations; and with friends, public and private. Nearly every
person who passes through this unveiling comes to the grave-side with
trains of friends to whom he is attached, and whom he will not forget,
and he will stay on and on in his heaven till every claim upon his
love, or service is fully satisfied. No more severing of ties; no more
broken hearts, or disappointed hopes. No injustice, full fruition in
heaven.
This adjustment measured by earthly reckoning may take long reaches of
time, but finally, the soul, stirred by the eternal law of progress, of
unfoldment, repeats its former experience, drinks of the cup of
forgetfulness, and returns again to learn in the great university of
unfolding life on this planet. A vast multitude, it is coming and
going, unceasingly moving on. No two alike; each in its place pressing
forward to the station which the totality of its experiences through
many lives entitles it. There is but one law, but one method that
abides. It is the spiritual law of evolution; everyone is held by it;
all who seem exempt today from its influence upon their lives, have
already passed the crucial tests, or are traveling forward to meet them.
Sooner or later every human soul must inevitably take its turn, until
it passes up through the whole gamut of earthly experience. Whatever
character anyone achieves belongs to the individual eternally. It is
the reward of patient service, of consecrated effort for the truth.
Great souls are what they are, in the places they now occupy by virtue
of their many incarnations. Through the great variety of experiences
gained, they have come to know. They have earned the right to be what
they are. There are usurpers in all the ways of life, ignorance and
hypocracy masquerading as the real thing, but they do not last.
Pretenders are soon unmasked and taken at their true value.
Sometimes the spirit is strong enough to ignore its present
surroundings and rise above all the obstacles connected with its
material heredity. It depends upon the unfoldment of the spirit
whether it shall espouse the cause of progress and truth, or yield to
the pressure of its environment and shrink back into a lower grade, and
lose the opportunity for further growth.
EDUCATION OF CHILDREN.
Nearly all so-called civilized people set to work to cram the minds of
their children, at the first indication of any degree of intelligence,
with a religious bias such as they themselves have inherited or have
been taught. Then the intellect must be shaped, forced and driven into
accepted moulds, and the human being is considered ready to be turned
out into the world to fight the battle which everyone, in one way or
another, must fight all along the way of human life--to begin to test
the value of the ideas and principles with which the soul has been
furnished to meet all the exigencies incident to the pilgrimage from
birth to the final exit from this state of being. It has taken
uncounted ages to produce the perfected types of physical humanity we
see on earth today. Here Nature calls a halt, saying: "As the
handmaid, the co-worker with your Creator, I have brought you along to
the point where you look and seem almost as gods. There is in each of
you a divine ego--a thought of your Creator--a sure guide to
perfection. To reach this goal must be now your constant endeavor.
There is a spiritual body, the outgrowth of the physical."
Thousands of children, too young to choose for themselves, are being
fettered in spirit by the chains of old, effete superstitions; their
intellects are being stultified by the absorption of narrowing creeds
and vulgarizing ideas of God and his universe. There are numbers of
Spiritualists and "liberal" men and women who expose the tender minds
of their children to these same influences for society's sake, knowing
though they do, from hard experience, what an effort it costs to free
the mind of such serious bias, and re-educate it aright.
* * * * * *
The noblest teaching is that which puts us _en rapport_ with our own
inner, unspoken and unrecognized perceptions. No truth, however
manifested, can adjust itself to our soul's needs, save as it finds in
us a response through that preparation which comes from a certain
degree of previous knowledge.
EGOTISM.
Egotism is the perception, and recognition by individuals of the rights
and the possibilities of their real selves, their ego. Without it
human beings would not stand up on their hind legs, they would crawl.
It is at the same time a necessity and a danger. It has never been
settled which is cause and which effect, whether insanity creates the
awful manifestations of egotism or the unbalanced egotism induces
insanity. "Keep us sane" is the wisest of all prayers, the greatest
demand one can make upon his consciousness.
People pass into the spirit world in the full bloom of their egotism;
hordes of them return to tell their friends things they know absolutely
nothing about, and the folks on this side believe all they say, and so
fool ignorance is passed along and stays in the minds of those who
listen to the "messages" of egotism and ignorance. There are "dead
loads" of people who think this is all there is of Spiritualism. While
it _is_ blessed that friends can return, and comfort the mourning ones
by their assurances of remembrance and love, this should never be the
final result sought for. Those who have lived but a limited time in
the spirit world--the world of causes, of law--cannot teach people here
the knowledge that can satisfy their souls. But there are educated
souls, who have once lived honored and useful lives here, who are only
too glad to respond to the needs of inquiring humanity, teaching them
the ways of wisdom, and lifting them out of ignorance and darkness into
the light.
RESPONSIVENESS.
Surely we are trying to solve the biggest problems before the class.
The people who are our profoundest teachers, through whom come our
largest experiences and knowledge are often most unconscious of their
influence on other minds; and this is lawful, for the moment a human
soul begins to wriggle either from anxiety or egotism, the divine
"chemical affinities" are disturbed.
Long before we get up to God, our nearer relative, "Mother Nature," is
most gracious in her methods of unfoldment, standing ever ready to
whisper in the devoted, or willing ear, her "open sesame" to the
manifold workings of her secret laws. It is ever the same old
exhortation: "Seek and ye shall find," "Knock and it shall be opened to
you," and the most wonderful of all is, the amount of unexpected
testimony, and endorsement which she will contrive to bring to bear to
prove to you the truth of what she asserts through your own individual
experience.
"Elective affinities" hold their own royally. You shall think and feel
deeply, and the first friend you meet shall tell you--quite
spontaneously--of his ponderings which tally with your own, never
suspecting that they are held to you by a subtle, and beautiful
chemistry, the response of soul to soul.
There is but one integral law. All others are but its radiations. The
natural tendency of the human mind is ever toward being satisfied with
its present limitations, instead of which we ought to constantly
exercise our will and aspiration to fling off the mists of prejudice
which so easily envelop the soul, and strive ever to enlarge our
horizon, and push on to higher and better things.
HELL.
Such men as J. Knox in Scotland and J. Edwards in this country must
have had chronic indigestion or cancers in their insides, or they could
not have revelled so in hell, and "eternal damnation" as they did.
What unreckoned miseries would surely have been spared their listeners
if they, and thousands of their sort, could have developed a modicum of
Christian feeling and a little kindness toward their hypnotized hearers!
Not only from their immediate, personal teachings came awful fears of
what must be the fate of all who were under the judgment as set forth
by the unbalanced minds of such as these; but the long ineradicable
chain of influences that haunt, and torture the minds of good folks,
even to this day. The utter lack of wisdom and knowledge of God's laws
and providence, in the realm of theological teachings, is undoubtedly
the cause of much of the diablerie of the world today.
If all the priests and parsons who have ever infested this earth with
their blasphemous theology were to unite their fiendish forces in a
concentrated effort to doom one human soul--one spirit--to be burned
forever in the endless hell fires which they have so long exulted in
holding up over poor, wretched, ignorant peoples, they could not do it!
They have had a glorious time persecuting, torturing, burning and
slaying human bodies, driving millions of innocent inhabitants off the
planet, who had just as much right to this--their home--as had, or can
ever have any set of bloodthirsty ruffians, claiming their commissions
from God Almighty! How thoughtless, expecting the religionists to put
aside this, their most cherished dogma, of "eternal punishment in hell
fires!" What would they have left to scare folks with, and make them
hand over their dollars, and what, O what! vent could they have for
their own natural, pure cussedness?
THE COMMONPLACE.
Great is the god Commonplace, and his prophets of the accredited order
of the "Common, ornary Kusses" are legion. They are of both sexes and
of every race, age and condition. Consent to render homage to their
Deity by confessing by word and deed that every man is as good as
another and better too, and they will continue to smile openly; but, in
secret, they will prey upon you. Their capable emissaries go around
with measuring line and shears, alert to discover, and ready to reduce
to the proper dimensions anyone who shall dare to outgrow their
prescribed proportions. You can never know when you are safe from
their incursions.
The dignified old man who sits next you at your hotel table seeming to
be entirely preoccupied by the discussion of his dinner, may only be
biding his time, waiting an excuse to deliver you over to their
insatiable maw, to be dealt with according to the rules of their
society. Or, perhaps the lady who in the first flush of your
acquaintance quite dazzles you with her fluent chat upon multitudinous
topics, suddenly, upon finding you unguardedly expressing opinions not
approved by the high priests of mediocrity, lets fall her mask, and
shows herself to your astonished gaze a secret emissary, a determined
servant of their most ancient and established order. "Thus far," so
far as we can accompany you, "shalt thou go and no farther" at your
peril. Woe to the soul that yields a ready obedience to the master's
voice, that is ever calling to all who can hear: "Come up higher." The
sash with which he would gird up his loins, "the latchet" with which he
tightens his sandals that he may run more swiftly the race set before
him, the staff upon which he would lean shall all be turned by these
demon worshippers into scourges. He shall be "beaten with many
stripes," for so it hath been ordained from long time, until the pain
of his wounded heart and hurt brain shall deaden his sensibilities so
that he can no more hear the voice nor see the helping hand.
Defy, resist, and the limp, sprawling, accommodating God becomes a
sinuous, hydracrested, overpowering dragon, stopping at nothing to "put
you where you belong"--his favorite battle cry--himself judge, jury and
executioner. This he has not the power to do unless he can prove to
you that you "belong" where he seeks to place you, for his veins are
full of mud. He is of the "earth earthy," and in the rarified
atmosphere of noble ambition and great achievements, he is utterly
blind and of no account. Take heart, then, O aspiring soul! "Prove
all things; hold fast that which is good." Render unto every true
principle that which is its due; but beware how you worship or lean
upon teachers, leaders who, beneath their proudly-worn garb, and
insignia of leadership, may be all the time wearing the robes of the
high priests of the god Commonplace.
PETROLEUM.
"'Pears like" the affairs of life on this planet are dreadfully
"higgledy-piggledy"; but in reality, there is a divine purpose, a use
in it all. It is the soul's kindergarten. It is interesting to
observe the curious and round-about ways Nature takes to insure the
greatest good to the greatest number of her needy children. Long
before the first nitro-glycerine "go-devil" was sent down, down, to the
uttermost depths, to shatter the oil-bearing rock, and set free the
wonderful deposit that was destined to mark a new era in the affairs of
men, rang out the Biblical mandate: "Let there be light," and in due
time the whole world was illuminated.
The sorcerers, who have abstracted vast wealth from this earth product
have fancied it was for their special benefit and use, that nature had
garnered up her stores to be thus liberated, and chemicalized into a
thousand forms, by their sagacious work. Not so! Quite indeed, not so!
Came--at last--the kerosene lamp. How marvelous the light of its clear
flame, after "tallow dips" and "pine knots"! How the little lamp of
the first experiment grew, and grew into gorgeous centers of sun-like
radiance, shining everywhere, illuminating hitherto darkened,
impenetrable places, carrying the torch of civilization round the
entire world. Alike in slum and palace, in homes of poverty, and set
to shine in the gilded resorts of the noble and wealthy; blessing the
student, and the vast army of enforced workers; lighting the paths of
men, and the ways of the multitude; making vice and crime more
difficult, by dispersing the darkness from hidden purlieus. Through
primeval depths and mountain fastnesses, wherever the footsteps of men
have wandered, the magic lamp has pioneered the way.
All war is horrible. Through what agonies of loss, and orgies of
death, and tortures of the weak driven to the wall by unscrupulous men
the war against material darkness on this planet has been carried on is
utterly unimaginable and impossible ever to be known. The end has been
reached, the great needs of humanity at large have been and are being
served, and while superior sources of light have largely taken the
place of the oil lamp, it still shines calmly on in the homes of the
poor, and will, for ages yet to come.
* * * * * *
"As a man thinketh, so is he." This may be only measurably true, in
consequence of the stress of circumstances; but sooner or later, the
thought moulds the individual beyond the power of disguising the real
character.
LAW.
It was all in order for Yahweh, the guardian spirit of the Hebrew race,
to "hetchel" the Jews--and from all accounts they needed it--but the
most anomalous phase of this whole affair consists in the fact that
after having set forth to the world that the church, and all were to
come under the rule of the "new dispensation," and represent the
teachings of the Master, they should turn back to the old, old history
of the Jews, and incorporate bodily into the so-called Christian
religion, and into the political life and jurisprudence of nations, the
restrictions, the penalties, and, in a word, the Hebraic law in its
entirety. Law, as it is applied in America, is a process lacking in
equity and justice. It is circumvented by $-s for the benefit of the
rich, a menace to the poor man, binding on the needy burdens that kill,
or lead to despair. Jesus Christ did not make law; he only indicated
the presence of the higher law--the scientific law--that must rule all
life on this planet ere justice to all can ever prevail.
The gospel of Jesus--the Nazarene--was the first that ever brought hope
or promise of any possible good to the outcast, and the children of
poverty.
COMMUNISM.
Communism is the beginning, and not the culminating state of societies
and peoples. All efforts on this line fail, because they are based
upon the false and impossible premise of the absolute equality of all
men. There never has been, there never can be any such adjustment of
the forces of nature on this planet; because no two souls are alike and
there can only be equality in alikeness. Spirits come here in groups.
They start simultaneously on their pilgrimage across the "sands of
time"; but at the very outset there are obstacles and handicaps
innumerable. At once there is heredity. There is no equality in
heredity. It is good, bad or indifferent as the case may be. But the
great divergence is in the soul itself; it grovels or aspires, and
unfolds its powers according to the laws of its own individual being,
and all men, and women should not be held accountable or judged alike.
It is not just. Communism would seek to suppress all individuality and
reduce everyone to the "dead level" of the commonplace, under the
mistaken idea of universal equality. Gifted persons daring to lift up
their heads above the common ruck of mankind, are at once shoved back
into the narrow groove the heads of the cult have decided to be the
proper rut for human beings to run in.
In this view, persons of ignoble and narrow natures may sit in judgment
upon people of genius and refinement, and may force back the most
aspiring seer into expressionless life by the utter lack of any
comprehension by their dull, selfish fancy. Ye gods! How they exult
in doing it! This trick is played upon sensitive, modest, gifted
people everywhere. Fools set the pace and rule, and those who know the
least of the responsibilities of living are the first to rush forward
and grab them up. Envy and jealousy have it all their own way, and so
it is the world around; everyone is forced to pay a fearful price for
his superiority.
At different times poets and writers, good people of distinction and
philanthropy, weary of the "storm and stress" of life and of invasions
and intolerable "bumptiousness" of the vulgar and indiscriminating,
have tried to secure a place and surroundings where high thinking and
simple living might order their days and secure to them companionship
fit for the gods; but the noblest and best of humanity are not
permitted to go off by themselves in such ways and have a little heaven
on earth all to themselves. This cannot be. They must stand apart
each in their place, out in the world--"in the open"--that they may
each one stand as a beacon light, object lesson, leader, and thus
assist in "leavening the whole lump" of ignorant and unregenerate
humanity.
HAPPINESS.
Happiness is the final achievement of the human soul. Perfect
happiness can only come as the result of absolute at-one-ment with God,
the divine will, and in this conforming there is no loss of
personality, or of individuality; it only rounds out the soul into its
godlike completeness. It is unimaginable that there should come loss
of any attribute of the soul on its way up to the rendez-vous with its
Parent, God. Rather, that its powers should increase in every possible
direction with use, in conformity with divine law. This is the only
true happiness.
The ideals of happiness cherished by men take in an immensely wide
range, and bring into action all the peculiar attributes of the
composite natures of man. The brutal instinct cries out: "Kill! kill!"
Bloodsheding is its ravishing delight. When it arrives at a point
where it may not destroy its fellows, the whole created animal
kingdom--including woman--is its prey. Wars and rumors of wars will
never cease on this planet until humanity at large develops out of this
grade which expects to find happiness in the exercise of its very
lowest, primitive instincts.
Further along in the line of the evolution of the soul, ideals of
happiness pursued by man are simply futile and childish; the awakening
to a realization of this is a commonplace, world-wide experience, and
only repeated embodiments can purge the soul, educate the minds of men,
and turn their attention to the only true and lasting ideals of
happiness.
PAIN.
Physical pain beyond a certain point ceases to be pain and becomes an
ecstasy. The same beneficent law controls mental and spiritual
agonies. They each have their limit. To the keenest of sorrows, the
deepest of griefs our Maker has spoken: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no
farther." Nurse them as we may, draw them as deeply as we can into our
soul's recesses, and make them, in our morbid states, idols to cherish,
they yet lose their power to hold our souls in subjection.
Both physically and mentally, the nerves of feeling refuse to respond.
They have their limitation, and time holds for every heart-breaking
experience a consolation. If it were not so, this world would be
turned into a vast, howling lunatic asylum. Unseen and unrecognized by
stricken hearts, "The Angels of His, who do His pleasure" stand ever
ready to pour healing balm upon all our wounds, and to teach the great,
eternal truth that afflictions are the real educators of the soul.
FOES IN THE HOUSEHOLD.
"A man's foes shall be they of his own household." This saying
referred to the religious differences which the great prophet saw would
arise in consequence of his peculiar teachings. There are no ill
feelings between people so rancorous and lasting as those which spring
from such causes, and as hate is but love inverted, the nearer and
dearer the relationships, the more bitter is the feeling likely to be
engendered. Proverbially, family feuds are the most deadly and
difficult to eradicate.
The friend, the relative who knows you best, who has seen you in your
hours of weakness when you have been entirely "off guard," is the one
who can most injure you should anything occur to sever your hearts.
There is no help for this save in that growth of charity and
forbearance one toward another which teaches us to seek not our own,
but to try to help each other in the great struggle of life.
* * * * * *
Who are the "pure in heart?" Those who aspire to the good, and
sacrifice self to attain it. What is virtue? That which is best for
the individual; not on either the animal or the spiritual plane alone;
but in every lawful expression of the nature; the epitomization, and
spiritualization of all past "karma" from the sod up to God.
THE INNER LIFE.
How unreal seems the existence of the inner life! How vain our intent
to catch its meaning, and portray its deepest lessons, and yet, it is
the reality. It forms the center around which all external life
revolves, from which all outward being receives its vitality and
assurance of existence. The passive soul heeds not the ever-recurring
changes which its very continued life indicates, and will, when
unveiled by the transforming hand of death, wonder at its wealth of
life. The conscious being, ever alert, notes the changes and the
indications of ever-progressing life with delight, and awe, and a
profound recognition of the law of its being which sets the star of its
existence higher and higher in the heavens, and lures it on for its own
perfection even unto the perfect day. To such a soul there is little
peace, or rest by the way; but it may finally learn a godlike heroism
and patience which will enable it to trace its steps, and see in all
its life's experiences a sequence which is divine and beneficent.
* * * * * *
Power is silent; power does not fume and bluster. It holds firmly and
steadily on its way, and wins by force of its resistless and relentless
sway.
ROOT OF EVILS.
The most unaccountable phase of philanthropic effort put forth by good
people for the help of humanity is their utter failure to apply their
remedial suggestions, or helpful agencies to the real roots, or causes,
of great matters needing attention. Everything is approached and dealt
with entirely from the external. Either from ignorance or fear of the
probable results to be met with upon close inspection, the beginnings,
the real causes of evil doings are let alone to grow until they become
unbearable. Then comes the "hue and cry" joined in by all who seek to
have wrongs righted.
Such has been, and is the "white slave evil." Ignorance is the cause
of all evil; but the special cause of this great, terrible, devastating
wrong starts with the utter lack of the education of children by their
parents, especially of the necessary instruction of girls regarding
their own natural functions, and their relationship to men. The most
vitally important knowledge that can ever be theirs is left entirely
out of their home education, and the natural curiosity of the young
left to the foolish ignorance of their young mates, or of designing
underlings.
* * * * * *
Woman is the magnet that draws souls to this life.
BEST IN CHANCE.
There is no method so surely successful in barring the progress of the
soul as that of permitting a prejudice for one phase, or presentation
of occult law to so blind the perceptions of the mind as to cause it to
entirely disregard all such views as are not already set forth, and
accepted.
It is as the old story of the two who fought over the shield with a
gold side and a silver side; because, as neither could see both sides
at once, each considered the statement of the other a willful
falsehood. Let us try, at least, to bear in mind that our relationship
to this universe has been of long enough duration to permit of the
evolution, and establishment of many series of laws which do not, as
would seem at the first glance, conflict, or force us to a disbelief in
our own well-accredited experiences. The whole united universe is
moving forward upon evolutionary lines, and what was, and is true in
the beliefs of the East, must be today supplemented by the further
knowledge revealed by the seers of the West. The extreme likeness
which exists between the different religions of the world is everywhere
apparent, and the devachan of the Theosophists corresponds to the
expected rest in the tomb, until Gabriel sounds his horn on
resurrection day of the orthodox Christian.
The only way the priests knew to prevent the knowledge of their
ignorance coming to their followers was to draw a veil over the future
of the invisible soul, and promise a long, long rest to the weary and
heavy-laden ones, to whom this, alone, seemed compensation for their
earthly cares.
People are just as tired today as they have ever been in the history of
the world, but they are growing, through their superior knowledge of
occult things, to see how to separate spirit and soul from matter, and
to render unto each its just due in its proper sphere. In laying aside
the physical body, and perceiving that the new life opening up before
the spirit offers the truest possible rest to the enfranchised soul,
through congenial activities, and obeying its behest finding a real
heavenly experience through their recognition, and obedience to the
undeviating law of uses.
* * * * * *
We do want God in the Constitution; but not the God of any creed or
ism, but of the great moral principles, the ethical philosophy taught
by Jesus, the Christ.
MISERLINESS.
There is such a thing as being miserly of thoughts and ideas as well as
of lucre. One is as foolish as the other. Circulation is necessary to
health and comfortable living. Cast off the leading strings of other
minds. Out of the abundance of thine own heart speak thine own truest,
highest thoughts. Think not thy supply will fail, or that by
withholding thou shalt increase thy store. It is not possible to make
a corner in this realm, or to take out a mortgage on God's gifts.
Freely ye have received, freely give and thy "measure shall be pressed
down and running over."
SPECIAL PROVIDENCE.
If the absolute homogeneity of the race were once understood and
established in the minds of men, it would put an end to the varying
modes and methods of thought which now only tend to separate their
minds and hearts. To know, to feel the unity of soul with souls, and
of the minds of men with the Infinite would forever wipe out the
discord and inharmony which now prevail everywhere. Not my erring, and
human will, but thy Will of Wisdom and Love be done on earth as it is
in heaven, must be, finally, the attitude of every aspiring soul.
Too long the Christian world has accepted the legendary Hebraic God, in
the place of our real "Father who art in heaven." The teachings of
Jesus--the testimony he gave of the love of God, if taken to the
heart--must dispose forever of the perception of God as a Being of
cruelty and revenge, and given over to low attributes. The Creator of
the universe--"without whom was nothing made"--manifests to us through
the action of eternal and unchangeable law. This is demonstrated to us
by and through his vice-gerents, the angels of his who do his pleasure.
Down, down from the supernal regions, from the supernal plane of being,
comes the Divine Mandate which is made known to the human soul through
the instrumentality that can penetrate the surroundings, and best make
manifest the inspiration, the warning, or the perception of the
undeviating law which holds all human experience and its sure results
in its care and keeping. And those who dwell upon the threshold of the
door which opens upon the life eternal are those who have loved and who
still do love the children of earth--fathers, mothers, children,
friends who have walked the earth by our sides, and whom no starry
crowns, and no glorious heaven could tempt away from the work of
blessing and comforting the sorrowing souls still left on earth to
mourn the loss of their loving companionship, and sympathy. And this
is God's "Special Providence" made manifest in our lives whenever and
wherever we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
* * * * * *
Once the soul really looks forth and sees, there can be, after that, no
more sleeping. All is effort, weighing, balancing, deciding, groping
painfully along, or running swiftly the race, bracing against fearful
odds, or bravely out-riding the storm. Taking it all as it comes, it
is increasing action, motion, change.
HUMAN DESTINY.
Confucius, long considered the oldest and wisest of all the ancient
teachers, when he was consulted upon an abtruse point of ethics, said
in effect: "Ask the ancients. I do not know." The results of modern
research are constantly undermining the first-recorded ideas concerning
the age, and the degree of scientific and religious culture of the
race, and we may well feel like turning from the authenticated
historical records with which we are familiar to ask of the old, old
world the occult meanings of the messages graven on pillar and on
chiselled stone. The records which have survived the storm and stress
of the ages bringing down to us unexpected knowledge of the lives, the
achievements, and the histories of far-off, long-buried, hidden and
lost peoples, communities, and even distinct personalities, were
carefully planned and exactly executed by those who, already perceiving
the mutability of all human life, and all its affairs, who--in a
word--realizing that "the fashion of this world passeth away," sought
to immortalize and perpetuate forever an absolute history of their own,
and kindred races, by the uprearing of vast, imperishable monuments and
temples, and abodes of men. The pyramids, majestic rock-hewn places of
worship, and subterranean crypts are but the fingerposts of destiny.
The voice of the weird spirit of "Memnon" who sits enthroned within the
awful wastes of the desert sands, moans on and on, ever the same
awe-inspiring warning. "Listen, listen, vain, evanescent, puerile
chrysalis, man! Such as thou art, so were these most ancient of days
over the history of whose toilsome, groping lives we keep forever
jealous watch and ward. As they are today, so shall ye become. A
little space, a few cycles of time, and all that lives and stalks
abroad in the full plentitude of energy and ambition shall become
resolved into the unfathomable the unreadable mysteries of the ages."
Not after such fashion shall we of this age of widespread enlightenment
write our history on the annals of the planet's life, and evolution.
All that has gone before this time--the closing in of the vast
cycle--has been, in a way, fragmentary, comet-like; the whole race of
mankind has marched around the globe again and again. The leaders--the
head--were the favored few, priests and kings, warriors and nobles; the
vast tail, the untaught, the unawakened, the ignorant, servile masses,
the grovelling slaves, but a remove from the beasts of burden.
The spur of necessity, the development of ambition, and avarice, and
the unfolding of the ego in man forced him along upon unknown paths,
kept him separate from his kind, and built up the distinct races, in
order that the individuality of each might become distinctly marked and
recognized, that each, in his own special environment, might become the
highest possible expression of what climate, soil and other influences,
incident to the natural heredity could evolve in the lives and beings
of given races of men. It is as though Nature had disported herself in
bringing to life an infinite variety and diversity among her perfected
children. But men, here and there, have always shown the golden cord
of kinship to astonish and bewilder the unwary and unthinking.
The virtue and honor of a race are considered mere superstition and a
perpetuation of injustice and wrong, or are accepted as a lesson in
charity and brotherhood. Thus is ever growing and becoming established
the entire homogeneity of the race. We have girded the earth, and
established our fiery rule in the depths of the seas; the time for the
fulfilling of a prophecy far reaching in its results is even now at
hand. "That which is spoken in the closets, shall be shouted from the
housetops." Far and wide it is whispered in secret places, lest it be
known of selfish greed or ambitious tyranny, and this it is that the
human heart conceives, and human lips proclaim: "Liberty! liberty!!
liberty!!!" Room for noble thought, freedom for grand and acceptable
work in the cause of human enlightenment, and the soul's redemption.
The whole vast aura of the earth, the illimitable ether trembles and
thrills with the majesty of the word. High above the thunder-roll of
human discontent and awful pain, blazes the lightning of thought, and
the undying aspiration of the soul. And thus shall we tell our
story--thus record the history of the now oncoming race. Not in
material emblems only, consecrated to the forces of nature; but in the
spiritual records which tell of the freeing of humanity from the
tyranny of effete religions, and the upbuilding of a new composite
race, fear free, and worshipful only of recognized universal truth.
ETHICAL LAW.
Setting aside all our hereditary beliefs, all our theological teachings
let us try to consider the true teachings of Jesus as differentiated
from the instructions given by Moses for the guidance of the Jews.
Moses never told his people to love and forgive their enemies. Jesus
made a strong point of this, even bidding his disciples to forgive
injuries to the seventieth time. Moses impressed upon his people the
excellence of revenge, always demanding "an eye for an eye," a life for
a life. Jesus said all that sort of compensation rested forever with
God, that He alone, who saw and knew the hearts of men, could deal
justly with them. The old Jewish law stoned to death the immoral
woman--not the man--O no! certainly not! Jesus said to a flagrant
woman brought before him by a rabble of men: "Let him that is without
sin cast the first stone." What divine sarcasm, and how they are said
to have slunk away under his perception of them!
How is it now with the Christian religion in the so-called Christian
nations? Where on the face of the earth is there a community or a
people that is governed and controlled by the real teachings of the
Christ?
All our jurisprudence is based upon the laws given to the Jews by their
leader and lawgiver. We take the lives of those people who are guilty
of breaking certain laws of ours based upon the laws of Moses, and
while we do not stone the life out of those women--not men--whom we
prove guilty of breaking the seventh commandment, we do build up
against them walls of conventionality, and of uncharity harder than the
rocks once used for the killing of their bodies.
Consider this beautiful law now in operation in the state of New York.
If a poor, starving, homeless, hopeless human being, maddened by the
bitter woes of life, seeks surcease of pain by throwing off his own
individual life, by committing suicide, the law insists that such a one
shall be not only forced back to a continuance of a horrible existence
here, but that each and every one of such sinners shall be punished by
imprisonment and fine. If that isn't serving the devil, what in the
name of common sense is it? Where are the good Samaritans among the
pretended followers of the loving Christ? What sort of a reckoning
will such lawmakers have to meet, and what penalties undergo under the
applied judgment of the Great Teacher and exemplars? "Woe to him
through whom offences come," he said, and again: "Because ye did not
give aid and comfort to the least of these, I will not call you of my
flock." Could anything be more brutally unmerciful than such a law as
this in its dealings with the most helpless, forlorn, and seemingly
Godforsaken of all earth's children--the voluntary suicide?
How the demons must gloat over the lost souls who formed and enforced
such a fiendish law! Why this everlasting "harking back" to Moses,
while posing as followers of teachings utterly at variance with his?
Let us admit that we are Jews and stop persecuting them because they
are not Christians, or let us try to know what Christ Jesus really
meant us to understand by his ethics of love and good will to men.
Many people have lost all their faith in the immortality of the soul,
because Moses did not preach it. It is quite possible that even the
worshipped Moses did not know everything that men may yet come to know
about this, and anent a world of other things. Neither did the
troglodytes, nor the cliff dwellers know of electricity or the X-ray!
But Jesus knew of the life--the eternal, unquenchable life--of the soul
beyond this mortal existence, and he knew and taught the way and the
life that leads to that higher life. All through his teachings run
this under-current of belief in the value of the individual soul, and
instructions as to the highest and best way to evolve it from its
lowest estate up to the Infinite.
Fancy what a revolution would come to the whole so-called Christian
world if the ethics of Jesus, so plainly set down in his legacy to the
children of men, were understood and lived! What wrong and injustice
would be done away with, what works of mercy would be wrought!
HUMAN LIFE.
From the earliest soul consciousness to this very hour the mystery of
human life has been, and is the subject of greatest interest. What is
the origin of man? What is he here for? What is the everlasting
purpose of him? And what, O what is his destiny, here or hereafter?
The woeful story told in the Bible of the origin and the "Fall of man,"
entailing untold miseries and uncomprehended anguish upon the whole
human race, has never been believed in by thinking minds. Especially
all that "rot" about God's repenting Himself of having made man in his
own image, and then setting Himself up in his only Son--a sacrifice to
Himself--for the sins of the folks He had just made and set agoing, and
told to subdue and master the planet He had made for them to live on;
but this yarn caught the fancy of infantile and puerile minds, and also
of the designing priests and theologians who have never, to this day,
tired of "baring the backs" of humanity to this "devil's rod,"
increasing, and multiplying the tortures of the minds of such as could
be made to accept such stuff by fears which could never be comprehended
or justified even in the minds of such children.
Our Heavenly Father has never set "metes and bounds" to the souls of
his earth children; there is no hidden mystery that cannot be fathomed
by them; there is no knowledge withheld from the earnest seeker after
truth. But first of all, the mind must be clarified and set free from
the blasphemous superstitions engendered by the crude beliefs taught by
theologians. The developed mind, and reason must arouse to rage and
resistance in view of the wreck and ruin of untold millions of lives,
the result of false teachings.
ANIMAL LIKENESS.
People have a way of saying of those they admire greatly: "She has the
face of an angel," or "She is a perfect beauty," "Beauty beyond
compare," et al, according to their ideas of what constitutes absolute
beauty; but the human countenances that have in them no faintest
suggestion of the kingdom below us are very rare. If one looks
attentively at the faces of the crowd as it surges along the most
attractive street, there may be seen on review surprising resemblances.
A man looking like an elephant, another like a toad, bull dogs and
wolves galore, beneficent faces of old people, calm and patient,
resembling work-worn horses, always folk of both sexes who suggest
sheep,--now and again a cantankerous billy goat. You may be sure that
the vast numbers of reptiles are not left out of the human
representation, and the birds, too. The "eagle eye," and the
carnivorous beak require no introduction to the menagerie, they belong
there. But the felines have it, the cats, little and big, monopolize
the show. Men regard a recognized resemblance to the king of
beasts--the lion--a compliment to their natural powers and rightful
rulership, while women have to put up with being considered cats, and
many of them prove by their cattish doings their resemblance to their
animal ancestry. There are babies everywhere about. It is
disheartening to peer into their tiny faces and see in so many of their
eyes no "speculation," no suggestion of intelligence. They remind you
of the eyes of a fish.
Human beings have through them strains suggestive of the animal
kingdom. It seems quite right to expect each one to act like the
creature he resembles, when under the stress of violent emotion.
NATURAL SUPERSTITION.
At the creation of the race there was thrown around it such safeguards
as should tend to its continuance. These were, of course, implanted in
the crude mentality of undeveloped man. Underlying all the rest and
the most important to its perpetuation was fear. The ignorant child
has no fear of consequences attendant upon any action; experience
teaches him to know what they are, and how to protect himself from
them. This was the first lesson of primitive man, and when, through
the exercise of his inventive faculties, he had mastered his visible
foes, the animal monsters surrounding him and threatening his life, and
he found himself confronted by the action of terrible forces which he
could not grasp or see, he, by analogy, endowed them with personality,
and such attributes as he knew himself to be possessed of, adding
thereto powers and possibilities which were limited only by his own
imagination. This was the very beginning of the working of the mental
in him, and while it was most grotesque and unreasoning, it yet drew a
sharp line between the mere animal and the animal man, and his whole
life being spent in conflict with his foes, he naturally carried
forward his growing perceptions of the existence of supernatural powers
which were influencing his life upon the same basis, i. e., of an
unending warfare, wherein he must always be the one attacked and
vanquished. Fear of the animal world developed into a shivering terror
of the invisible, and so deep and lasting was this first impression of
the spiritual world upon his crude faculties, that it was made an
universal heredity among all races and peoples. It exists everywhere
today, even among those who profess to be living in the light of a
higher revelation of God's purpose in the life of man.
ADAPTIVENESS OF MAN.
The most surprising and extraordinary quality of mind manifested by man
is his ready power of adaptation to whatever may become a part of his
earthly experiences. It, alone, assures his continual progress upon
all lines of growth connected not only with his earthly but also his
immortal career. Great inventions, unexpected discoveries, and
astounding revelations may stagger him for a moment; but the facility
with which he finally absorbs all the hitherto unknown outworkings of
science and natural law, and assimilates them to his inner sense of the
fitness of things, changing all his relationship to his material life,
and forcing himself to a readjustment not only of his mental
perceptions, but also of his external existence gives proof sufficient
of his being not only favored of the gods, but also of his near kinship
with them. The marvels of mechanics, the divinely beautiful
representations of art, and the exalted inspirations of literature were
never so sought after, or so appreciated by large portions of the race
as at the present time. The peasant's cot today is made comfortable
and beautified by accessories which within our historical knowledge
could not be commanded by kings and princes possessed of great riches.
The spiritual origin of the splendid architecture of the great "white
city" and later of the southern expositions is perfectly apparent to
the eye of the mystic and the seer, and these vast, concentrated
exhibits of the world's work are object lessons of which the influence
can never be outlived even by the careless and unobserving. Today the
great leaders of men, led by inspiring thoughts which would have
appalled their forefathers, perfect schemes for overcoming the
obstacles inhering in the vast forces of nature, and harness them into
subservience to the growing needs of the race.
What devil-worshippers those old chaps were! To him they ascribed all
power over things animate and inanimate, and the effrontery of the man
who should have even mentioned the possibility of talking over a wire,
thousands of miles, or of utilizing the forces of Niagara, or of
hundreds of inventions now in use in the most commonplace surroundings
would have been met with condign punishment. Our inventors would be in
dungeons instead of their comfortable laboratories, and our great
engineers would long ago have lost their heads. What a time we have
had getting the devil out of our mechanical life! Now he can only rule
in the immaterial world, in the crude imaginations of the ignorant and
superstitious.
DEVIL WORSHIP.
The Infinite Mind is in all things, everywhere what we are not. Where
we are full of impatience, He is calm and unmoved; wherein we grope
blindly, He, seeing the end from the beginning, is well content with
his own handiwork, and with the final outcome of the souls of his
earthly children. Many of the imperfections and individual
shortcomings of people are laid aside in the dark crucible of physical
death and the grave. Such of these tendencies as are carried over into
the next plane of being, persisting in the spirit, are there dealt with
as disease or ignorance, the results of malformation or bad
environment. God is love, not hate, and "rejoiceth not in the death of
the wicked," nor in the punishment of the wrongly educated; for a large
portion of the sin and seeming iniquity of humanity is the result of
heredity and of a misunderstanding of the laws of God expressed through
nature. Undoubtedly there have been good men and true among those who
sought to interpret God's law aright and formulate a code for the
guidance and discipline of humanity in accordance with justice and
equity. But their premises were all wrong. They took for their
foundation the old Jewish history wherein the God of the Hebrews was
always represented as a jealous being, rejoicing in revenge and rapine,
and in all that the enlightened world can conceive of as characterizing
a devil. So the modern world has been committed to a devil worship.
Nowhere is the ethical teaching of Jesus recognized in our laws. It is
the old Hebraic attitude toward life and God.
FANATICISM.
Physical death is the fulfilling of a natural law everywhere
prevailing; a change, which the mutability of all material creations
renders necessary, and salutary, and, when received without the
prejudices engendered by education, pleasing. Religion has nothing to
do with it, and more than that it ought to influence every act of life.
No more has religion anything to do with the intercourse of disembodied
spirits with those in the form. That also is wholly controlled by laws
inherent in the nature of things, and will, when the ridiculous hue and
cry raised by sensualistic minds has somewhat abated, resolve itself
into a fixed fact having no more direct bearing upon human affairs than
any other form of social intercourse. It has taught no new code of
morals; it has not overthrown, so much as it has revealed the true
state of things. It has revived the spiritual teachings of him by whom
the world--called from him Christian--professes to be guided and
controlled.
Fanaticism is the law of some minds, and it will display itself in
whatever arena they are engaged. In politics the man they vote for is
almost a god. In mechanics, they have invented a machine which shall
ensure "perpetual motion;" in chemistry, the elixir of life, or a cure
for all the ills of human life; in morals, the kingdom of heaven is
speedily coming through the intervention of their dead friends.
The truest religion is that which adheres most faithfully to nature's
laws; for strive we ever so hard, we must return to them. They are
God's will made manifest, and the mind most free from prejudice
engendered by false education is the one which secures to itself the
most harmony, making possible that removal of "mountains" so often
quoted--meaning the inevitable obstacles of spiritual life.
Christ said: "The kingdom of heaven is within you" and he might have
added that of hell also. Here is the beginning, if not the ending of
all growth and reform. There seems to be a universal tendency or wish
to escape from one's self, and most so-called reforms begin at the
surface--the ultimate--rather than at the centre. This should be an
education to children, teaching them that their temptations are to be
dreaded only as they are responded to by something within, and that
loses all power with them as they gain self-knowledge and self-control.
TRUTH.
The demand for a knowledge of the truth, God's truth, is as old as the
world, the world of intellect and knowledge, the world we know about,
and of which we have a more of [Transcriber's note: or?] less true
history. This cry of earnest and thoughtful men and women for truth,
"nothing but the truth" has rung adown the ages from the pagan, and the
nature worshipper through all the countless phases of belief to our
modern presentations of inspired faith. Everyone who dares to think
must realize how this longing of humanity has been met and exploited in
times past by ignorant and self-seeking people, and suffering humanity
has been imposed upon by superstitions and false teachings which have
left it in sorrowful dissatisfaction, or lost in the mazes of doubt and
unbelief.
The fool hath said in his heart "there is no God." Life is too short
and too full of interest in other directions for us to turn aside to
combat fools of any sort. If we admit into our inner consciousness the
absolute recognition of the existence of a supremely loving and wise
God whose attributes are more marvelously great and grand than it can
ever enter into the heart of man, or the mind of the highest archangel
to conceive, we shall have taken the first step toward so positing
ourselves toward him, as we perceive him embodied in his works, as to
begin to see some faint indications of the divine purpose concerning
the souls of men created in his image. All that we know of his laws
and his intentions toward us, as indicated by our experiences here and
now, embodied as we are in matter, supplies the whole of the data from
which we infer truth, the truth as it is in God.
We find, first of all, that we are set here a homogenous race, for as
the means of communication between widely separated branches of the
family become established and easy, our horizons expand, racial
prejudice and antagonisms vanish, new interests and fresh sympathies
arise, and we are thus brought to recognize the fact of our common
origin.
What a dull and deadly uninteresting place this planet would be without
the differentiation of the races! What if the whole united world were
Irish or German, Russian, or even loudly pervading, assumptive
American! What an awful element of boredom would be added to our
existence; and yet there are people so blind to this most wonderful
expression of God's Providence, that they limit their sympathetic
regards to a chosen few, and virtually cast all other peoples into
outer darkness. This applies especially to religious prejudices and
beliefs. Let's see about this: your antecedents were, so far as you
know, Scotch and English, but by some providential intervention you are
now American. You are expected to scorn and despise all other clans
and races, and to condone all the faults and crimes of these which have
been so honored by you, and this is called patriotism, and makes you
feel virtuous and popular, and it is necessary and right--politically
considered--but not from the standpoint of the occult, the spiritual
side of existence. There is a wise intention and purpose in the
blending of the races in their intermarriages, it is for the breaking
down of prejudices as old as the race itself, that have ever kept the
peoples of the earth apart.
There is but one law of evolution, and that which holds for the
individual epitomizes that of a nation, or a world. So as we see
people at a certain stage of their unfoldment of individuality exhibit
an extreme egotism, amounting almost to an insanity, by isolating them,
by confining them to the radius of their own mentality, so it is with
the different tribes and races and nations of the world. They are set
apart to grow their own peculiar traits of character, possible only to
their prescribed environment, that they may thus push forward their own
special gifts and endowments to their own ultimates. This is but a
phase of their evolutionary process, a class preparation looking toward
a wider experience, wherein it shall come to be seen that all the world
is akin. Referring again to the unit man. The shibboleth of the just
present past time has been individualism which, rightly understood,
means simply that the soul of man has progressed to a point where
occult forces can lay hold on the crude being and shape it into a
worthy likeness of its divine Maker, and it must there stand alone,
until it feels its at-one-ment with the Divine and sees and
acknowledges the higher law and purpose of its being, and furthermore
recognizes why it has been called into existence.
Truth is like certain chemicals. It can only be retained by the mind
wherein it finds an adapted affinity, and then it has in each a
distinctly individual expression according to the mental and moral
status of that mind. But laws and principles are stationary and
unchangeable; it is our own personal knowledge which varies and changes
with our growth. We may ignore and denounce certain phases of
phenomena, but the phenomena work on just the same, unaffected by our
beliefs or disbeliefs. The loss is ours if we willfully close our eyes
and ears against the enlightening message which it would bring to us in
passing our way.
CHRISTS.
Confucius, the moralist, Buddha, the intellectualist, Jesus, the
loving. Why reject the teachings of any one of this trinity of
inspired and inspiring ones? All are of God, light bringers to a
darkened world.
HERO WORSHIP.
All along the individual life, the soul's development through matter,
are strewn experiences which mark the dawning force which is finally to
culminate in its marked individuality, and separation from the mass of
organized, created beings. These experiences are the rare awakenings
of the soul to the realization and use of its own native powers which
flow from its divine paternity and origin, and which constitute its
birthright and ultimate inheritance. At times, the gifts and powers of
certain beings burst into bloom and fruition when least expected, and
cast a radiance and a halo around the personality, which mark and award
it a place among its fellow men, altogether superior to the general
trend and outworkings of the recognized character. Around such
illuminated points of high expression of the soul's possibilities
gather other personalities and, by the action of a natural law,
crystalize about the central magnet of the inspired, and the inspiring
thought or action, and thus is leadership created. Barely does the
entire life outwork itself upon lines which harmoniously express the
inspiration which begot the godlike union of the human with the divine,
and thus through the natural falling away from the ideal, those who
seek the higher life through imitation or emulation of the model so set
up are finally forced to put aside their hero worship and seek their
own individual growth on the lines upon which they can lawfully unfold.
The varying moods, and idiosyncrasies of the hero or the saint turn
away their followers to the contemplation and study of those great
moral principles which rule the world and control the universe.
On the physical plane great strides are being made. The suppleness of
one, the power of balance of another, the feats of the acrobat, the
will of the juggler which commands the action, and the seeming
suspension of natural law; all these expressions are ever increasing
and varying through the industry and the ingenuity of man, and point to
the possibilities of the hitherto undreamed of physical perfection of
development, and grand unfolding of unknown powers. Man must master
the earth by controlling the laws of the material world. This is the
foundation of all things, and upon it shall be built all that the soul
must have for its unfoldment, within the aura and the radius of this
external plane.
* * * * * *
If there can be one thing more pitiful than all others it is to see
little human bugs and reptiles mount their egotistical stilts and
declare the non-existence of the Creator.
If the blatant critics would only give over blowing their individual
horns, and remark for a little the value of quiet introspection, many
mysteries would reveal themselves and much good would be realized.
REASON.
Human reason is the outgrowth of the intuition. In its final analysis,
it is the comprehension by the soul of the reality of truth and of its
just relationships and values. It is the power of discriminating and
deciding between the perception of the intuition and the testimony of
facts gathered by observation and experience. The intuition of man is
of the will, that of woman is of the affections; thus it is more
spiritual than man's. Just as the doctors have prospected and laid out
and defined the functions of the physical body, so are the
psychologists and the mental scientists seeking a way and method by
which the attributes of the real being may be divided off into sections
and labelled accordingly. The fact is, the individual soul is all the
time struggling to reach its own at-one-ment with itself. When it
comes under the tuition and discipline of the gods, and begins to
perceive their methods, it can understand the whys and wherefores of
the intentions of life's experiences. They are to consolidate and make
practical vagrant emotions and tendencies, and lop off and scorch out
the idiosyncrasies of heredity and custom, and rouse the soul to a
knowledge of its need of harmony with divine law. Into the real soul
depths can no divulging line and plummet reach. This domain belongs to
its Creator alone. It is only as the tests of living and doing
manifest hidden motives and meanings that we catch glimpses of the ego
that abides within and through this life, submerged as it is in the
flesh. We can know but little of what is now, or of what yet shall be,
when the wholeness of the individual is established.
SYMPATHY.
Be not beguiled by pity masquerading in the guise of sympathy. Real
sympathy comes only through an understanding of conditions as the
result of the same, or of exactly similar experiences. But though
experiences differ in details, according to the organizations and
idiosyncrasies of individuals, the results in awakening the mind to a
realization of truth, and final evolution and growth of the soul are
enough alike to foster a real sympathy, and mutual understanding.
Souls thus linked together are truly friends and comrades.
NEW RELIGIONS.
There is a great demand among the people of this, and probably of every
past age, for something new in the revelations of religious thought and
knowledge. When it has not been forthcoming according to the desires
of aspiring worshippers, the imaginations of would-be teachers and
leaders have set to work to devise new schemes for the beguiling of
their fellow mortals that should hypnotize them, and hold their
allegiance to some new revelation of religion, or so-called science.
The following that some of the isms, and newly-hatched cults are
getting together is simply amazing. They seem to reach out and pervade
the world, and they are not confined to any particular grade or class
of people. The "Zionists," the "Adventists," the "Perfectionists," the
"Holy Rollers," the "Christian Scientists," the "Spiritualists," and
unnumbered other forms of belief leave a wide margin for all sorts and
kinds of people of peculiar idiosyncrasies. So much has been promised,
and so little realized in the way of comfort and satisfaction that
wails of doubt, and sorrow are undiminished. Every bit of this
"groundswell" of seeking, tortured souls is just the reaction from
slavish, blasphemous, orthodox religion.
From the perceptions of the primitive man to the understandings of the
unfolded brains of the thinking, reasoning people of today is indeed a
"far cry," and the queer vagaries, and the impossible goings on of the
reputed gods, in partnership with Nature, that were once received with
awe and profound belief, have now nearly lost their hold upon the
credulity of modern humanity.
As man has unfolded and his perceptions have enlarged, his fears of the
wrath of God, and of his possible interference with man's schemes and
purposes have given way to man's own will, and to his determination to
succeed in proving himself master of nature's forces, and of the whole
planet. He has created the "New Earth" of material comfort and
satisfaction that has been so long foretold; while from the heavens
countless multitudes of awakened, arisen souls throng all the ways of
life, proclaiming the truth of the absolute present existence of a "New
Heaven" also. This is not a perfect time, by any means, even with all
this manifestation of progressive power. Perfection in anything, in
all things, is a matter of growth, of evolution, and the whole world is
swinging along in the pathway of progress toward that goal, the
knowledge of spiritual law which is God, as fast as time can move. But
we are actually living in the enjoyment of the fulfillment of a
profound prophecy, with but little thought or realization of all it
means or portends.
THE GROWTH PROCESSES OF THE HUMAN SOUL.
It is pitiful to think of all the woe and sorrow that have been shed
abroad in the hearts of men and women, and even of little children, by
the teachings of ignorant and designing beings anent Death.
Fortunately, all our modern cults are emphasizing the fact that it is
the fear of death that is the "last enemy" of humanity that is to be
put down and shorn of its terror. Physical death is only a step in our
evolution. It cannot be otherwise than a progressive motion of the
spirit. It recalls the spirit from the make-believe, and
misunderstandings of its earthly environments, and experiences, and
shows up the real and true status of life. Vast numbers of human
beings, passing out of the chrysalis of the fleshly embodiment leave
with the body sins for which they have been condemned, and
idiosyncrasies for which they are not accountable: there are, too,
packs of people who have been so bamboozled by orthodox teachings, so
set up in their egotism, that they die believing in their superior
claim to recognition by the gods, but who find themselves elected to a
long sit down in purgatory, or devachan--or whatever the place
is--while they get acquainted with themselves as they really are. The
most deplorable state is that of the souls who cannot rise from the
earth conditions with which they are loaded down. They fill the
atmosphere; they walk the earth dismayed and helpless; their whilom
friends and beloved ones will have none of them. Even if one such is
fortunate enough to find a medium through whom he can communicate, he
gets little or no recognition or welcome, unless he can absolutely
conform to the wishes of the purblind folk, who, knowing nothing of
spiritual law, try to insist upon making conditions, and getting tests
which are so outside of the law that even the Creator could not meet
their demands. For those who have no aspiration toward the spiritual
life, the only way is to plunge back into matter through another
incarnation in the flesh. There are no new souls created and relegated
to this planet. Their number is fixed. They pass and pass, and come
again; good, bad and indifferent all come under the same, the only law
of evolution. The gates of life are crowded with such as these who,
weary of prowling to no purpose, seek re-embodiment on this plane of
existence. The process through which they thus pass is of itself one
of refining and of readjusting to changed conditions, which means
growth for the soul; for throughout the universe, the Great Law, the
law which holds all things in equilibrium, is the law of progress,
evolution, unfoldment.
It must be remembered always that back of all the recognized greetings,
and the assurances of the continued, conscious life of our spirit
friends, back of all the lesser gods, who were human beings, like unto
ourselves, back of all the inspired teachings of all the seers and
prophets is God, "our Heavenly Father," in whom we live and have our
being.
Through his appointed teachers is vouchsafed to his earthly children a
knowledge of his love and wisdom. It is boundless and free for all,
and there are no "chosen people." He is the source, the fountain head
from which flows all life, and all sustaining power. The heavens
declare the glory of God--the Creator; and the arisen souls of men
proclaim his wondrous and unfailing interest in all his created beings.
NECESSITY FOR PHENOMENA.
Some people are born so spiritual-minded that the proper adjustment of
the several functions pertaining to the moral or religious nature stand
clearly defined. Their immortality is never doubted, their faith in
the unseen never obscured by clouds of passion, or dimmed by pressure
of material necessities. These are the beacon lights in the world's
progress. These are the mariners to whom has been given a sure guide
and compass. The others are those who have little or no perception
beyond what is seen to befall animal life, and their growth into a
finer possibility must be slow and tedious. It is in fact necessary
that many should "rise from the dead" and jam tables and chairs and
things around their apartments, ere they can fancy the possibility of
any existence separate from this material life.
The most abominable of all egotisms is that which forever studies to
limit the possibilities of the Creator, to announce firmly that there
is no further consciousness, and no need for human faculties after this
life is ended. The most dignified attitude would be to give him the
benefit of the doubt, to admit that He has the power to continue, and
remould, and readjust through all time and all eternity. But this is
not a class of subjects which can be settled by logic. It is based
upon a conviction of the inner soul, and the most that anyone can do is
to place himself as nearly as possible in harmony with some one law,
and this will form a center around which a perception of more shall
come, and revolve around it grandly and in perfect time, thus
completing the rounding out--the fullness--of the character of the
individual man or woman.
WILL.
Will, human will, is the result of concrete perceptions of the
conscious mind. Its development depends upon the experiences of the
individual soul, and its expression upon the environment, the
education, and spiritual discipline of the individual. Having its
foundation in the functions necessary to the sustainment of the mortal
life of man, it naturally overrides all considerations outside of the
objects of its own pursuit. It is the quality _par excellence_, the
power of the gods, but only as it comes to relinquish all its selfish
determinations, and yield obedience to the all-pervading Higher Will,
the will of God, in whom all life has its source and continuance of
being can it march along the royal highway that leads to perfection.
This must be so eternally; for there can be no division of purpose or
of interest in the divine Mind.
* * * * * *
All religions based upon or derived from sorceries obstruct the
progress of the race, and will be, in the fullness of time,
disintegrated and readjusted to meet the growing demands of humanity.
CHANGE OF ATOMS.
There is nothing so great that it cannot be undermined and destroyed.
There is nothing so established and sanctioned by age-long, consecrated
usage that shall not finally be swept along into oblivion and utterly
forgotten.
There is no combination of material atoms--no mechanism, however strong
and useful--that shall not dissolve and be rearranged, and take on ever
higher forms of expression. This is, and has always been the unfailing
law of progression, of the outworking of the ascending series. It
involves all circumstances, and all earthly experiences. Happy are
those who take Paul's advice, who can equip themselves with the armor
of faith, which begets knowledge, and prepare to "fight the battle of
life" with courage and fortitude.
OUR LIMITATIONS.
Much of our successful conduct of life depends upon our recognition of
our limitations, and largely our limitations depend upon the will. The
test lies in the power to discriminate between what one owes to one's
self, and the duties and obligations imposed by responsibilities
inherited or assumed. Temperaments are so variable, no two human
beings alike. Much, too, depends upon the power and habit of
observation.
FINAL RACE EXPERIENCE.
The fear of death--shared in by all created beings--is nature's
safeguard against a universal stampede from this life by physical
death, when the miseries of existence on this earthly plane become too
dreadful to be borne, when the tortures of the soul, in the tortured
body drives out all reason, and all philosophy, and the consciousness
senses only the demand for surcease of agony. Probably most people
have experienced, for a moment, in a time of terrible crisis, a
thought, if not an impulse, to seek thus to end all suffering by
flinging off the bonds of life here, and thus pass out into--what?
Simply life in a changed environment, with exactly the same
responsibilities and soul needs, and the same causes of their miseries,
and unsatisfied desires still existing in their minds.
Life here is just one link in the endless, unbreakable chain of
existence. It is all one, here, hereafter, anywhere. Caught in the
web of life, there is no escape from its demands upon the individual
soul. Somewhere along the way it has to decide its own fate, upward
and onward, or downward into the purlieus of the crude beginnings of
things. It is free to make its choice. It can pursue the hard and
toilsome path of earning its right to eternal happiness, or it can flop
around through all the hells of life unrelated to God, and resistant to
Christ.
One by one all human beings must obey the call to march over into the
border land, into nature's infinite invisible realm; they cannot help
themselves; no one can; on they go, an endless caravan, to the land of
revelations, the place of reviews where the utterly selfish are fetched
up with a "round turn" and made to realize that a real Godliness is the
only thing that can pass muster, that mere beliefs do not count, and
only character tells. How swiftly, how inevitably their places are
filled! Nothing stops; prince or peasant, it is all one; the will of
the gods, the guardians of this planet, is being fulfilled.
RELIGIOUS PERFORMANCES.
"It is to laugh" to "see the heathen rage and devise a vain thing." No
hierarchy of earth, no multitudinous howl of ignorance and stupidity
that "having eyes that see not; and having ears that hear not" can
block the wheels of progress. It has worked in the past, "quite some,"
routing out tortured souls and bodies by the millions, sending them
flying off from this planet which was, and is their real home, turning
rack and screw, and setting baleful fires on tender flesh, threatening
further eternal hell fires; all for what? Why, to prove that "tweedle
dee," is greater than "tweedle dum," and this is the record of religion
at the hands of the theologians and the priests! This is the story of
accepted orthodox religion. Why, then, have a religion? Why not try
the altruism taught by the great Master in a system of ethics that can
never be superseded by one higher and more truth-inspiring, better
adapted to the perfect unfoldment of the human race?
No more of these awful persecutions, and massacres, and killings for
the "glory of God;" for the amusement of devils, really! Practical
common sense, and reason will surely be, in time, the salvation of this
world.
OF TEACHERS.
The wisest teacher is the one who shows the gradual processes of
unfoldment and growth in the mind and body, and in all the outworkings
of the material world. He who breaks down arbitrary distinctions in
every realm of life does the most toward liberating and enlightening
the world. We are from infancy so accustomed to petty distinctions
which have originated in ignorance, and from long use have been
formulated into laws, fixed and binding, that were some person
clear-sighted enough to the truth to show us our invisible bonds, and
how to sever them with the scalpel of common sense, and reason, we
would be amazed at our great freedom, and astonished to see the light
coming through thousands of loopholes and windows of the mind which are
now closed by an accumulation of dust and cobwebs of the petty
superstitions of ages.
* * * * * *
Millions of beings are born so starved that no after nourishing can
make up for it.
WISE USE OF MONEY.
The money that has been spent in building up blasphemous theologies
would have rid the whole world of poverty, and ignorance, if it had
been beneficently employed with the kind intention of doing the peoples
of the earth good, in every way, instead of trying to fix upon them
damnation now, and also arrange for it in their life hereafter.
Here and there, scattered along the way, are souls who have escaped the
"drag-net" of theology, but there are at this present moment great
spirits that, even after having passed through death's dark crucible,
are haunted by damning fears of bad results possible from too much
freedom. The trail of the serpent is felt by them still.
GENIUS.
Genius means simply a high and true sympathy with inanimate and human
nature, and the power to voice their various moods and tenses.
Paradoxes seem to run riot in all occult things. Extremes in all
departments are rare. There are a far greater number of indifferently
good and indifferently bad people than of the superlatively good or
bad. So Nature everywhere keeps the equilibrium, and the eternal
processes of evolution go on, and ever onward toward perfection.
All the pains of this human life come in consequence of the resistance
of the souls of men to the law of progress which is always, and
everywhere, laying hold of them to force them from the sod up to God.
They squirm, and wriggle, and howl, and make no end of fuss, because
the Lord calls upon them to awake from their animalism, and sloth, and
arise, and seek the kingdom.
"He knoweth our frame," no more comforting, or encouraging words than
these have ever been spoken. "He," the great soul-Father, knoweth us
as we are. He knows how to inspire with hope, and courage the most
sorrowing and lost. The felon in his cell, the outcast from all that
men call good, are, with those of superior spiritual attainments,
subjects of this beneficence. Nearly every soul feels, at some period
of existence, its subtle relationship to a something, a power outside
of its material life and surroundings. The experiences of this life
are calculated to strengthen and perfect that relationship. Jesus
Christ is credited with saying, "Be ye lifted up even as I am lifted
up." That is, in spirit, to a perception of the relationship of your
souls to the great "Over soul."
Be ye, then, patient with yourselves, and with each other. Be sure
that you are being taught, "lifted up" to a perception and knowledge of
these things, as fast as it is lawful for you to be.
In God's good time ye shall blossom and bear a goodly fruitage.
"THOUGHTS ARE THINGS."
But thoughts, as potent entities, must pass from the formative,
nebulous condition into a crystallized state by, and through some form
of externalization of language, spoken or written.
Thoughts must be created--born--through the absolute form-creation of
the human brain, in order to secure to them potentiality, and
immortality.
The status of the individual brain, decides its products, the character
of its brain children. Thoughts that are not caught, clung to, and
crystallized, through the action of the external brain can have no
place in the external life of this world, although they do have their
power and influence in the incorporate, silent, ever-working world of
cause.
* * * * * *
The mind digs deep to bring forth the real.
The soul dreads the edicts of its ignorant prototypes. The ego comes
forward with its battle-axe, and the spirit rejoices and exults. Body,
Soul, and Spirit; Nature's trinity.
* * * * * *
As spirit _per se_, has no entity, and only evolves individuality
through its relationship with matter, and has no other conscious
expression, the so-long-talked-of "fall of man" was not a fall
downward, but a process upward, necessary to his being, to his
existence as man.
UNFOLDMENT.
The persistence of the human soul after physical death proves only that
it is a candidate for immortality. The race is just begun. The path
that leads onward to the eternal heights is so long, so beset with
difficulties, with pains and penalties, losses and crosses, and all the
paraphernalia of evolution and growth that the stoutest heart, the
strongest will would fail to respond to the call to "come up higher,"
were one to at once become aware of what inevitably lay before him.
When any individual soul has dwelt long enough in the spirit realm to
begin to feel the unrest of the law of eternal progress, he senses the
law of reincarnation, and his earthly home draws him by attraction. He
is preferred the cup of "renunciation," and forgetfulness, and is shown
the way to his next embodiment.
INVENTIONS.
The inspired thinker sends out a thought to the world, it is taken up
and passed through other brains, it becomes distorted or is recognized
by them in its integrity according to the caliber of mind, or the
idiosyncrasies of the one representing it. A thought or idea, once
given to the world, becomes common property. It is not possible to put
on mortgages or limit the use that may be made of it, or how it may be
made to bring in returns to commercially-inspired minds. A woman
devised a style of dress which she wore for her comfort at her own
convenience. Another woman gave exactly the same pattern and details
to the public, and is now living in elegance on the income derived from
another. A man--a worker--invents an improvement, or a better method
of doing things. The firm adopts and makes money out of it, and its
originator is forgotten. There are, however, clever people who know
how to protect their inspirations, and get the benefit themselves. The
greatest disappointment comes to the originator when the thought is
intended to indicate and outline action. So few people can achieve the
same point of view, so few can be depended upon for united, harmonious
action that the best organizing power is at times fetched up with a
"round turn," and the progress of the good work intended becomes
greatly impeded, or virtually lost.
DIVINE HEALING.
There are today many cults professing to have healing powers; but
whether they are named "Christian," or "Mental," or "Spiritual," or
"Divine Science," or whether the place of healing be in some shrine
sacred to an accredited saint, or only in the presence of the patient
receiving the benediction; they all operate under the same law; there
is no other.
Jesus was the great transmitter to humanity of a knowledge of the power
of divine healing; he never specialized. He never said: "I have cured
your liver complaint, or your lungs are healed," etc., according to the
ailment of the person seeking his aid. He only told them: "Thy [own]
faith hath made thee whole." It was spoken of God long ago: "He
healeth all our infirmities." The quality and the amount of personal
magnetism possessed by the healer--the transmitter of the divine
healing--does make a vast difference in the results of such efforts.
The "Nazarene" was devoid of egotism, and selfishness, and his desire
to heal and bless humanity was with him an overwhelming passion.
That Jesus knew the value of right physical habits is evidenced by the
way he had of admonishing his patients to "go and sin no more," that
is, stop breaking nature's hygienic laws. He had all along told them
that right thinking was necessary to right doing.
* * * * * *
The transcendentalism of one age, shorn of the peculiar shading given
to it by the individuality of the mind through which it first manifests
itself, becomes the hard "common sense" of the next.
* * * * * *
What is Truth? Truth is God. God is Truth. Nothing in the universe
could exist for one instant unless it had in it some faint intuition of
truth, and it is this that we are here to discover.
SURPLUS.
Human beings slaughtered on battle fields, or carried off by pestilence
and famine by thousands, or perishing by accidents by sea or by land by
hundreds, are individually dear and useful, and are mourned; but in the
great aggregate of moving life on this planet, they count as surplus.
ANALYSIS OF THE "LORD'S PRAYER."
How shall we pray? To whom shall we pray? Shall we pray at all?
These are unsettled questions in the minds of many good persons who are
striving to perceive the highest truth and to be guided thereby. The
tests that have been applied to the usefulness of prayer by a large
class of religious people have been, for ages, purely materialistic.
The Lord has been importuned for the bestowal of personal favors, from
the manufacturing of the right kind of weather to the slaying of
enemies, and from the righteous putting down of infidels, to the
spending of dollars with which to build high steeples. Then, too, God
has had the benefit of the very best advice concerning the way He ought
to deal with the heathen, how He should treat sinners of every sort, so
as to show himself equal to managing his fractious subjects, and,
finally, how to carry things along generally after such a fashion as
should win and hold the respect of his earthly advisers.
This utter misunderstanding of the true function of prayer has caused
many earnest souls to sorrow over lost faith in what should have been
to them a source of strength and uplifting. Jesus said: "Ask, and ye
shall receive," and as all his teachings referred to things of the
spirit, he must have meant to indicate to his followers that whatever
was sought for in the line of true spiritual enlightenment would surely
be given. No one prays for houses and lands, for gold and other forms
of material wealth, "for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen."
All through the teachings of Jesus run the mention of his and our
Heavenly Parent, "Our Father," and since much of our knowledge of
spiritual things comes through our perception of the law of
correspondences, we naturally feel and believe that we have not only a
Father but also a Mother in heaven. The recognition of the mother
element--the Divine Mother--has always been a most potent factor in the
power of the Roman Catholic Church to retain the unchanging devotion of
its faithful adherents.
The reaction from a bigoted belief in, and a blind reliance upon a
jealous and tyrannical Overseer sitting in state to judge and condemn
to everlasting torment all but a few of earth's children--a
terror-inspiring God--has naturally turned the minds of many from
recognition of any sort of relationship between humanity and a
superior, divine and beneficent Power. The atheist glories in his
disbelief, and calls exultingly upon those whose faith has become the
stepping-stone to knowledge for proofs that he is not right in assuming
to occupy the superior attitude of mind. Suppose for a moment, that
all the world were brought to coincide with him. How would it benefit
the race to prove it to be wholly orphaned--utterly left out of all
consideration for its future care and happiness?
"Like as an earthly father pitieth his children," Jesus affirmed, is
the love of our Father, God, for the human-race. "I and my Father are
one." "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." These are some of the
references made by Jesus to the relationship that he constantly
asserted was established between his own soul and that of his Father,
in the supernal world, and thus he taught his followers to pray:
"Our Father which art in Heaven." This is the first recorded utterance
of the modern shibboleth: "The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of
Man." In this now universally employed invocation, Jesus claimed for
himself no other mention than that in which he instructed all of
earth's children to join.
"Hallowed be thy name." In a sacred name there is power to hold the
wavering thought; so may thy name be hallowed! _i. e._, held sacred.
It is affirmed that every created thing has a real appellation, a name
given to it by its Creator. We pass through this rudimentary state of
existence known as John or Mary, or by some other of the thousand or
more titles in vogue that are indicative of different personalities;
but it was long ago shown to an inspired teacher that, at a given point
of development, each soul should be given its true name, a new one that
should be "written in the forehead." Our Puritan progenitors had a dim
perception of a higher and inner meaning to names. By calling their
children Grace, Mercy, Patience, Charity, etc., they sought to embody
spiritual principles.
"Thy kingdom come." No heavenly kingdom can ever be "let down" to the
earth. The earthly must become developed and interpenetrated by the
spiritual, and thus be lifted up into an harmonious co-relationship
with the Divine.
"Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." There is but one
will; so make it known to us that we may realize out [Transcriber's
note: our?] at-one-ment with the Divine, even as do the "angels in
heaven."
"Give us this day our daily bread." "The earth is the Lord's and the
fulness thereof." (Make us partakers of thy bounty, that our bodies
may have needed nourishment. Illuminate our spiritual understanding
that we may take to ourselves each day such spiritual food as we are
best fitted to appropriate and use.)
"And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." Up to this
point there is simply suggested the personal relationship between the
petitioner and the Being to whom he prays; but into this phrase quite
another element is introduced--a new factor; forgive us, as we in turn
forgive our enemies. This puts upon one who utters these words the
responsibility of answering his own prayer, or of making the conditions
whereby he shall be forgiven and accepted, that thus may be established
the eternal vibrations that bind the very lowest to the Highest.
"And lead us not into temptation;" _i. e._, graciously protect us from
following the devices of our own ignorance; but if we willfully go our
own way, and are overcome with grief and disappointment because of our
misdoing, "deliver us from [the] evil" consequences thereof, by
inspiring our minds with courage to bear our pains and penalties with
true heroism, and teach us through our experiences wherein lie our
highest growth and wisdom for all our future lives. "For thine is the
kingdom, and the power" to create and destroy, "and the glory." (All
things begin and end in God.) "Forever and ever. Amen."
Jesus had undoubtedly learned the pure ethics of this all-embracing
appeal. Principles are unchanging; but, as the law of evolution
carries each succeeding representation of the underlying facts of
spiritual science ever higher in the ascending series, on the spiral
pathway that leads to the kingdom of God, so in each is embodied a more
advanced phase or externalization of such facts. The revelations
vouchsafed to the world through the teachings of Confucius, Buddha, and
other saviors of men appealed only to the intellect. Jesus was the
first to announce to the heart-hungry that "God so loved the world"
that he sent one of his best beloved sons to bear witness to his own
eternal love, and to show how all may become participators in its
boundlessness.
The potency of prayer corresponds to the power of the thought or to the
exalted aspiration of the soul projecting it. There are some who,
seeking divine aid, are too weak in this respect to realize any special
results, while the prayers of others ascend as on the wings of eagles.
This attitude of the soul is not to be confounded with the "communion
of saints." Communion indicates the existence of a degree of equality
which, in the relation of finite man with his Maker, cannot be.
An occult wave has swept round the world. The seals are being broken,
and the sphinxes are speaking wherever they find ears to hear and minds
to comprehend. The heart of the mystery is this; there is no new thing
to be proclaimed. "Spiritual things are spiritually discerned," and,
with the divine illumination vouchsafed to all, "a wayfaring man,
though a fool," may see and know the deep things of God. But no door
will be opened, no angel or "minister of grace" or "spirit friend" will
descend the ladder of light that leads to the realms supernal, no
inspiration of God will ever come to any soul on earth without
prayer--in response to either conscious supplication or unconscious
aspiration toward the Giver of every good and perfect gift. The
ultimate function and use of prayer is simply to establish our
relationship with the divine and ever-lasting forces that rule and
guide our lives. These are ever operating to help us to live above the
purely personal relationships that limit our growth and advancement
along the lines of spiritual unfoldment, and to open to our souls
vistas of perfectness on the higher planes of wisdom and understanding
of the mysteries of immortal life.
ABSURD BELIEFS.
The supreme egotism of man has been largely corrected through the
influence of education and experience which have made him conscious of
the ridiculousness of his demands for recognition of his supremacy.
Each one of those high, old eastern Emperors had to have his pedestal,
and his title of god, without reference to his real character. Modern
men do not expect to be real head-up gods. They know too much to be so
ridiculous. But there are those who seem to feel that they are at
least "little tin gods on wheels."
When the Nazarene appeared among men possessing godlike qualities, it
was entirely in line with the custom of the time to call him a god.
There was neither logic nor common sense in the role Jesus was to play.
He was God of all gods. He was, at the same time, the Only Begotten
Son of God, and, as the idea of sacrifice to the numerous gods was an
important part of the religious orgies of the time, they could only
bring that into their new scheme for entrapping souls by making the
Son--who was really God--a sacrifice to himself, to propitiate himself,
and keep himself from utterly destroying and damning the folks He
himself had created. So they made it out that this good man should be
a propitiation for the "sins of the race." Silly; improbable;
unlawful; incredible; impossible. The more useless and undeveloped
people were, the more they believed that the sacrifice of a very
God--to their egotistical minds--was not too much for the salvation of
their infinitesimal, pinhead souls.
THE RESURRECTION.
It has been believed that dead folks stayed boxed up under ground
waiting--ages perhaps--for the last trumpet to sound to call up the
sleeping billions to the surface of the earth to the final "day of
judgment," when they should all swarm up out of their graves to be let
to know by the great Judge of all to which class they belong, the
"sheep" or the "goats"--there was to be only those two kinds--sheep to
go straight to heaven, all the others to be cast into hell fire to burn
forever. The air would be full of toes and fingers and legs and heads
coming from all directions to join themselves to the bodies from which
they had been detached in their physical life; it was understood that
in every case there would be no mistakes made, no white person, minus a
member of his body in life, would find himself persistently chased up
by arms or legs--especially by heads--of a different color, and form,
from what he would know were his own; but, by some unaccountable magic,
some divine law of attraction each dissevered member would instantly
recognize its true belonging and fly to its former familiar location.
Where this great final "round up" is to be held has not yet been made
known to the "true believers." "Chautauqua" has been suggested, and
also the lot back of the "White House" in Washington, D. C. There are
objections, however, to these and some other places because of the
limited area, but as "with God all things are possible" either spot
might be made to answer. The great open-air university at Chautauqua
is known everywhere on earth--and possibly beyond--and certainly would
be a good point for the saints to hail from, in their upward journey,
and the "White Lot" in Washington would shorten the journey for those
who are booked for the trip in the other direction.
Out of this belief has grown quite a little sect which takes it upon
itself to decide upon the fate of all the world outside of its very
limited number. It is hard upon the Methodists and Presbyterians and
all the other cults and sects scattered about over the whole earth that
they should all be doomed to everlasting hell fires because of a little
difference of opinion with these self-elected judges! The more insane
of them have ignored all the claims of citizenship, have burned their
fences and their barns, and given away all their earthly belongings,
and refusing to be taught by the repeated failures of the many times
set for the final ending of the planet, have donned their unbleached
cotton "ascension robes," and have sat around on the hill-tops and
waited long for the end of all things earthly, and the fun of seeing
all the people who did not agree with them switched off into hell.
The real beginning of this came from two sayings purported to have been
the words of Christ. While hanging upon the cross a man nailed to
another cross, begged Jesus to save him. Jesus was an adept, highly
clairvoyant. He saw that the man was good--probably better than the
people who had hung him there to die--and that if he was a thief, as
they said, he had stolen things for the benefit of his people for food
and for sandals and things for the family. So he said: "This day you
shall be with me in the spirit world." Some clever person caught on to
this and said to himself: "That settles it, if one man can go straight
through without being laid up in the ground after death, all can."
This view furnished an altogether different outlook and gave people a
new idea of the law. Jesus assured his disciples that the kingdom of
heaven would come on earth very soon, in fact, while they were yet
alive. Well, he knew a lot about the soul, and immortality and all
that, but nothing at all about evolution, or electricity, or what
wonderful unfoldment of brain and magnificent works man should achieve.
The Nazarene, like all seers and prophets, was simply mistaken in point
of time. He did not give the Creator time enough to bring all things
to pass, and if the people who think this world is actually coming to
an end pretty soon would just think once that the Creator does not set
things agoing solely for the purpose of destroying his work, and let
him have his own way and time, they would save themselves much trouble.
THE CREATOR.
God--the all-creative Spirit--is the most positive element, or force in
nature, and nothing is or can have existence in the external world that
is not conceived and formed first in the matrix of the spirit. So it
is in the realm of the invisible that the law of progress, of unending
evolution takes its rise and becomes operative. Still, however clearly
defined may be a truth, a law in the mentality of the higher powers, it
can only be externalized to the degree comprehended by the mind through
which it is given to the world. All that saves this world from being
in a state of utter darkness is the fact that from its very beginning
there have been souls capable of being illuminated by the light from
the higher life, spirits so grounded in a faith in its certainties that
they have shone out upon the stern and awful path trod by the human
race like beacon lights above a stormy sea, or beaming stars shedding a
calm radiance upon a trackless waste.
RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE.
We know so little of the mysteries of occult, divine law, and yet
taking thought of the entire history of the human race, such as we
have, and our own personal experience and observation, we must
recognize that there are certain fixed principles, certain laws,
indicating the undying value of right living. To understand and apply
these laws to the all around conduct of life, to the practical affairs
of human effort, is in its highest, its spiritual sense the real
business of earthly existence. Those religious teachers who have had a
degree of spiritual enlightenment have wrapped up their perceptions of
moral law, and disguised them with creeds and dogmas, and have used
them to further their personal ambitions, and to hold their power over
such people as they have been able to hypnotize into believing in them
as the vice-gerents of the Most High. All this has been going on for
long, and has been handed down through unnumbered generations until it
has crystallized into forms and ceremonies, and unmoral
conventionalities which stultify the race. "Dead loads" of good people
believe they are doing God's service in trying to live up to these,
never knowing how much they are the result of fanaticism and ignorance,
and the concentrated intention of every sort of priests to keep their
power over unthinking minds. Here and there, scattered along
throughout the realms of intelligent being, there have always been
noble and true men and women who have brought a sufficient
comprehension of the out-working of the eternal principles of
unswerving moral law to make their conduct of life here wise and
dependable, and to give to them the assurance of a successful
continuance of individual life in other spheres of being, beyond
earthly limitations. Those untrammelled souls who thus unfold grow up
into an at-one-ment with the divine, all-pervading principle we call
God. They have been, and are light bringers, and saviors of humanity.
The perfection of individual character can only be achieved by
determined effort, by unshrinking, concentrated labor. This simply
means an acceptance of all the inevitable experiences incident to this
life, coupled with a brave determination to wring from each and every
one of them, good, or seemingly bad and unfortunate, all the lessons it
can teach, and all the truth it can possibly reveal. This evolution of
the soul is from the innermost sacred precincts of the personality, and
it is often unrecognized by those who have the most inclusive
development of the attributes and innate resources of their own souls.
Those people who are thus intent upon their souls' growth do not flaunt
themselves in forms and ceremonies. Life is too short. The chief, the
most important moral law is the law of justice, absolute unerring
justice. This law is the very least comprehended of men, because its
majesty, its even-handedness has been so misinterpreted, so travestied
by various kinds of religious teachers, rulers, and self-appointed
judges. Man-made laws which everywhere prevail tend always to
segregate people into classes, producing results devoid of equity,
favoring the materially superior. It is quite common for people who
know nothing whatever of the operations of occult and spiritual law to
ignore all responsibility for their unhappy earthly experiences, and
"blame it all" on God. A child dies, the mother accuses God of making
her the special subject of his unkindness in taking away from her the
object of her love. Everywhere, among all classes of people this is
not at all an unusual experience. The fact is, the prevailing
ignorance of natural law--moral, spiritual law--is alone the cause of
nearly all the misery of humanity. God has nothing whatever to do with
it. There is this about it: there are the "eternal verities," the laws
which speak ever to the consciousness of man, and whether they are
broken in ignorance or willfully set aside, the results are nearly the
same; the penalties exacted by beneficent justice are unalterable; only
in one case, there must finally be regrets for ignorance; in the other,
great remorse for wickedness and ill-doing. But these results are not
eternal, though the dreadfully cruel teachings of religion have made
people believe so. The faintest stirrings of desire to be better, the
least aspiration toward the higher life is sure of a response from
loving, compassionate beings in angelic ministrations.
The priests of different religions who have been most valiant and
positive in preaching hell fire and eternal damnation have entirely
lost sight of this fact. Not the most strenuous of the whole lot has
ever been able to follow one miserable wretch into the spirit world to
find out whether his prognostications anent his hypnotized victims,
have "come true." "_Au contraire_," great numbers of reputed sinners
have come back in their real personality to report to their friends
that there is no such fate for anyone, that it is one great lie. But
it must not be supposed that there are no sure enough hells. There
have to be places for the hellish to stay till they come of a better
mind. Nature provides for them other opportunities for their gradual
redemption through re-embodiments in the flesh on this earth. There is
besides a constant outpouring from the dark abodes of estrayed and
benighted souls, for the all-embracing love of our Father-Mother
reaches even the horribly suffering lunatics, made so by their selfish,
vicious lives here on earth. There is, indeed, the greatest possible
difference between an intended eternal punishment of sin, such as has
been preached for ages for the purpose of scaring people out of their
wits, and a recognized, just retribution for broken law. Punishments
such as have been believed in suggest a punisher, and our Father in
heaven has been blasphemously represented as "angry with the wicked
every day" and glad to have a chance to pour out his "bottles of wrath"
on their elected heads.
The torturing remorse of the slowly awakening consciousness of those
who have lived selfishly and viciously is far beyond the pains of the
burning, material fires. Every human being that has in it a living
germ of spirit shall be liberated and helped toward the light, not by
any so-called personal redeemer--that is not possible--but by the power
of its own aspiring soul, and even moderately decent folk shall come to
enjoy all that they have imagined and longed for, and all great souls
shall find the peace they have dreamed of. All souls everywhere in the
spirit world will have all they have truly earned in their earthly
lives.
While we stay here we are hardly protected from the envious thoughts
and deeds of evilly disposed and vengeful people. Once safely landed
in that superior and satisfactory realm no such invasions can reach us
ever.
THE SOUL.
The soul is the vehicle of the spirit. It passes from the earthly life
along with physical death, its uses ended. Developed by earthly
experiences, it grows and has the power to detach itself and represent
the personality of the individual to which it belongs, but only while
on earth; it is not employed thus after the spirit leaves the body. It
is the "similacrum" of the body, and is often mistaken for the immortal
part, the enfranchised spirit. But the spirit is generally unawakened
and can only grow with the pabulum of spiritual influence, in harmony
with spiritual law. It is this that complicates this life and retards
the at-one-ment of the greatest of all trinities; body, soul and
spirit, the natural three in one. The soul element is the bequest of
the parents--especially of the mother--to their progeny. If the
conditions are at all in harmony with divine law, the mother pours out
all her soul's influence upon the forming body of her child in the
divinest love ever manifested on earth. Its birth and manifestation
are of the immortal spirit, and create in her offspring some
consciousness of, some desire for immortality. Of all earthly
phenomena this of motherhood is the most marvelous, and naturally the
least understood, and the most slightingly regarded. Its universality
reduces it to the commonplace.
* * * * * *
The conventionalities are not intended to keep people apart who really
"belong" together and who ought to meet, but to protect those who wish
to live good lives from the invasions of envious curiosity.
WOMAN.
Woman is the constructive, the upbuilding force. With what patient
endurance she awaits the slow growth of the bodies she shelters beneath
her heart that are to hold souls here and give them human instruments
with which to do their work on the material plane of life. In this
sphere, the destructive jealousy of man of the power of woman does not
avail, her kingdom is everlasting. Crushed and enslaved she is, and
always has been, but only to gather to herself greater power. She is
the natural lawgiver, the supreme ruler. Man, the intimate holder of
the material forces, dreads the power of woman, and fears her invasions
of his long-established rights in his chosen domain.
* * * * * *
Unwilling motherhood has filled the world with vice and crime.
When men, women and children began to return to earth after physical
death and give their recognized testimony to the fact of their
spiritual resurrection, and of their continued real life with all its
personal endowments exactly as they were here, the crude ideas of
ignorant minds were forever set aside by millions who can now testify
to the absolute truth of spirit return, instead of being buried in the
earth waiting for an impossible time of reckoning and judgment. Do you
call all this blasphemous? Open your eyes. Look! Listen!
Discriminate! Know where is the real, high blasphemy. "God bless us
every one."
ADIEU.
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