< Primitive Man (continued from page 11-140) >
(A large note of interrogation stands over that last expression in my mind; What was that element? And in ver. 7, “Jhoah, l’Etre des etres ayant formd la substance d’Adam de la sublimation des parties les plus subtiles de l’element Adamique, inspire dans son entendement une essence exhalee des Vies, et des lors Adam, l’homme universel, devint une similitude de l’Ame vivante universelle.” On verse 5 D’Olivet remarks “l’Etre des etres avait dit seulement nous ferons Adam, et Adam, l’homme universel, avait ete fait en puissance, Bientot il on paraitre en acte.”*
In my groping fashion, where I am quite out of my depth, I have thought that possibly the Universal Adam that God said he would make was not only potentially Adam from the first germ cell of sentient life, but still is only potentially the Adam designed by Deity for sovereign rule on earth, his evolution being by no means complete; and “the man Christ Jesus” hitherto the only being fully corresponding to the word. That expression, “puissance collective” is very suggestive of the powers won from successive developments of creaturely life. Students of Boehme will remember the many beasts in human nature, which he again and again speaks of as being comprised in the first born nature over which regenerate man has to rule.†
It is somewhat provoking when the word created is used, by those who still believe in a Creator, people who do not assume that it is used in the sense of a moulding from without —forming by the direct action of omnipotence, rather than by the several individualised centres of power derived from God: even the words of the Bible might put them upon a less childish tack, where we find it expressly stated Genesis ii, ver. 3, that God made “every plant of the field before it was on the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew.” Taken in connection with the previous expression fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself,” could any words better indicate the process of self-evolution? J. Boehme is here explicit enough. “Moses says further, God made man of the dust of the earth, and breathed into him the living breath, and then man became a living soul. But we are here to understand that God did not, in a personal and creaturely manner, stand by like a man and take a lump or clod of earth, and make a body of it. No, it was not so. But the word of God, viz., the speaking word, was in. all properties in 8piritus Mundi, in the spirit of the world, and in the ens or being of the earth, stirring up from the spirit of the world, and spoke or breathed forth a life into every essence. This was the Fiat or creating power, which is the desire of the word in the root that was in the model or idea of man, and attracted the ens of all the properties of the earth, and whatever could possibly be therein into a mass or concretion....“In brief, the human body is a limus out of the substance of all substances, else it could not be called a similitude of God, or an image of God. The invisible God, who has from eternity introduced himself into substance and also by this world into time, has by man’s image modelled himself, out of all substances into a creaturely image, viz: into a figure of the invisible substance.”
Treatise on Election: Chap, v, pars. 89, 98, 99. (The whole chapter “on the origin of man” will repay attentive study.) Now just as long hundreds of ages slowly prepared the animal man by self evolution for being what we now call man, though “man’s self is not yet man” yet so far advanced in godlike faculty as to be‡ at once a receptacle of and medium for divine influx, so, according to Mr. T. Lake Harris, have more modem periods of time gradually developed a structural possibility, and therefore a most pressing need for more celestial developments. And I think there is much in our present phase of humanity that looks like very great modification in it. The nervous system has of late years become far more prominent in prevailing disease, as well as in the pleasures we seek and the excitements we shun. In some respects the constitution of the race has changed and is changing, for the worse if not for the better; for there can be no vacuum in the world our spirits occupy any more than in the material world, and with enlarged powers and quickened susceptibility, a more subtle and demoniacal order of evil threatens us. But this is not a necessary result of evolution. Let Dr. J. Garth Wilkinson tell us what its right direction should be—I was about to say—its goal, but remembered that in going “from glory to glory” none is ever proposed to man as final. After dwelling on the universal law of assimilation in mineral, vegetable and animal life, he says “somewhat of a luminous hope seems to overshadow and tremble around us, while we follow the analogies that proclaim the oneness of God’s laws in nature and in man.”... “Let us lean on nature’s arm, and follow the analogy till we have better lights; the rather because analogy is itself assimilation. The possibility of assimilation lies in the fact that the universe runs manward from its source.”... “and in the individual and the race, as the part and the whole of existence, it is that supernal fire which burns to make us more and more from the dust of the earth in the image and likeness of Divinity.”—The Human Body and its connection with Man, page 143.
Mr. Podmore’s last sentence in the paper to which I have referred, regarding Will, leaves me, as the doctrines of those who question its freedom always do, in astonishment which it would be rude to express: yet if I did, I am persuaded he would not blame the puppet of necessity. It would be inconsistent to do so. I do “not want a will to guide the rise and fall of the mercury,” its own law of being will suffice; but I want a strong one, and what ought to be the law of my being—the law of kindness—to suppress my emotions when man “a sparkle out of the great omnipotency of God” is submitted, even in theory, to the bondage of irresponsible matter.
The Cottage, Cullompton.
* “The Being of Beings had only said, we will make Adam; and Adam, the universal man was made potential. Soon he will appear in act.”—Cosmogony of Moses, page 72.
† “Also there will be found a great multitude and variety of earthly beasts living in him, which he loveth and fostereth, for he loveth everything that is in the world, and hath set it in the place of Christ.”—J. Boehme, Kay to Divine Mysteries.'' Par. 8. “In the human body, which was compacted out of the limus of the earth in the divine Fiat, there existed a Bestial Seperatour which hath manifested or revealed the property of all beasts, whence so many lusts, desires and wills are existing in man.” J. Boehme “On the True and False Light”—Par. 46.
‡ Robert Browning's Paracelsus.