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CHRISTIANIZING “PAGAN” IDEAS
[Fragment in H.P.B.’s handwriting in the Adyar Archives.—Compiler.]
To whom then, are we indebted for the modern notions of Spirit communion, and Spirit return? Whence have they developed? It can be still less from Protestantism. For if we mistake not, though the many Protestant sects differ on more than one point, nearly all agree in believing that the departed Soul whether that of a Saint or a Sinner is already judged and doomed before it separates from its body. Hence no need of prayers for it. It will awake on the last day of Judgment when “Christ will judge the quick and the dead,” to regain its body, together with its consciousness i.e. its conscious individuality; which will be either rewarded with eternal beatitude or be cast unto eternal damnation. And, as they recognize no intermediate purgatory like the Roman Catholics, some of them seem to be very confused in their notions as to this particular question. With whomsoever we may have conversed upon this topic, whether a theologian or a layman, none ever could enlighten us upon the subject. No member of a Protestant Church could explain whether the Soul, during this period . . . . . between bodily death and Resurrection Day was conscious or 341unconscious which precluded the possibility of an independent action such as is necessary to a Spirit desiring to preserve its earthly relations and communications with men.
Thus we have the Roman Catholics and the Oriental Church alone, who after adopting these old pagan ideas, have Christianized them, and believe in them with anything approaching logic. And as the former teaches a state of purgatory, and the latter, though rejecting such a state, yet allows to every sinner and every blessed Soul a proportionate amount of either damnation or beatitude, before the hour of final reckoning or the Great Day of Judgment settles their account, it also accounts for the fact that, . . . .