< More Elucidations to "The Adeptship of Jesus Christ" (continued from page 11-279) >
While I am disappointed that no one has as yet competently taken to defend the cause of Official Christianity—which is to be attributed chiefly to the fact that the cause is such a bad one, so that no one will undertake to defend it, unless a bishopric is to be gained thereby—I am on the other hand highly gratified that my articles have been thoroughly appreciated by advanced Spiritualists; which could not have been the case had not other honest toilers conscientiously tilled the ground before me, and if Spiritualists had not themselves ascended to the plane whereon they could accept those views. Had I not written, true Spiritualists would gradually have arrived at the same conclusions. There is nothing more due to me, but, that I have put the ideas together. I have invented nothing, but given only what I have found, and what was given to me. I demand neither praise nor blame, but only your attention.
The difference between the exoteric and the esoteric views concentrates itself in the following: The former asserts that Jesus was the highest, the latter affirms that he was one of the highest.
Life, and not Death, is the Divine object of existence. God is not a God of the dead, but a God of the living. Life is God’s work, Death is man's, even the more so when it is unnatural, then it is altogether contrary to the divine design, and is only perversity. Although one man by his death may save a thousand, such contrivance shows human impotency, but not Divine Omnipotence. No man was born for the object of a tragic death, and is no death however theatrical or romantic to be regarded as anything else but a failure.
Every child that is born is intended by God that it should live to a patriarchal age, and attain to the Divine Life. If children prematurely die, if men and women unnaturally die, if death and misery prevail on earth, man’s wilful ignorance of the Divine Laws that rule the All is the cause.
God is not the author of evil, nor docs God require the Jesuitical device of doing evil that eventual good may result therefrom. God’s ways are all good, tut man, turning away from his original state of purity, science and power, has continued in suicide ever since bis fall.
Should it be demanded whether the death of Jesus had an object, I maintain that it had none, and certainly not a Divine object. The Life and not the manifest Death of Jesus Christ is our Salvation. We pertain to the Sphere of Life, and the sophistries from the Spheres of Death are not to be regarded. Certainly it was heroic of Jesus to die for his principles, and he may have forseen such death would threaten him, but the death (if it was absolute, which we deny) is only to be regarded as a failure, and has none of the virtues that the cowardly Plan of Salvation would attribute to it.
Had Jesus lived to teach his system completely, instead of being prematurely cut off, he might have saved the world two thousand years of ignorance and consequent misery Plant an acorn in fertile ground, and one on a stony soil, and while the one will be a fine tree lasting several hundreds of years, the other will be a stunted sapling. So it is with Christianity; the seed that was thrown was good, but the growth was a crop of crab-trees. Christianity has endured for nineteen centuries? But how has it endured? By force and fraud, by ignorance and sophistry. To compel men to accept the Paradise of the Church, priestcraft has established Hell upon Earth.
Is there an object in death? Certainly the physical body becomes manure and fertilises the ground, and foolish people who did not regard the Christ while he was living among them, had by his death their attention attracted, and began to have a superstitious regard for him, and finally said he was the Son of God.
If death has accomplished anything, it is an insignificant result to what the life would have done had it been continued. What, for instance does the death of Garfield teach us? Simply that the President’s intuitions were not in good working order. For no man is intended by God to die when he has still work to perform, as Garfield had. The sympathy which was afterwards elicited falls under the same category, as the fertilizing of the ground by the dead body. It is not the object that the body of man should form good manure, yet nevertheless it does. It is not the object of a man’s mission, that only by a theatrical end he should draw attention upon himself and his ideas, nevertheless when it happens he does. Such is the “Divine Economy” as Platt calls it. As no atom of matter is lost, so it is with atoms of thought. Everything is conserved, but to regard the present arrangement as Divine Design, and the present conglomerated appearances as intended by Deity from all eternity, is a grevious error.
The Divine Economy no doubt utilises death, but it forms no part in the Divine Design that we should unnaturally die, but that we should live. The blood of the Martyrs may be regarded by some as the Seed of the Church, but of such seed also sprang a bloody Church. As you sow, so you must reap. Blood Was the seed, and blood was the crop.
In the same wise as our nature utilises animal food, (the food of death) must the Divine Economy utilise the death of the individual, when there is not the life. When there is not right food, (the food of life) then the wrong food serves to build up the organism, but it will accordingly be unhealthy and depraved, and as there was not the life of the man to continue the work, the dead Jesus has taken the place of the living Christ, and the result was a corrupted, bigoted, depraved and diabolically perverted Church, for dead Christs are of no value compared to living ones, and instead of the universal, Divine Occult Church being promulgated by the life of Jesus, his death has but served to add another idol to the overcrowded Pantheon of the Devil’s Official Church.
In the same wise as the Snob in Society boasts of his suppositious acquaintance with persons of exalted social position, does the Snob in Spiritualism talk inflatedly of high spheres, esoteric truths* “which cannot be rendered exoteric,” angels and advanced spirits, and, last but not least, “my Guides!”
This insufferable conceit is so mixed up with that class of Spiritualists who assume themselves to be the crème of the Movement, although they have never done anything for the Cause, but to damage it by there connection, that however shallow and absurd their ideas are, they are not ashamed to puff them off as superior, even to anything that has as yet appeared. Of this category “I. A. Μ.” (not the great “I am’ but a very little “I am,” and great in nothing but conceit) evidently stamps himself. Inflated with the supposed superiority of “his plane of spiritual development” which he assumes for himself, he comes out with the most shallow of shallow ideas, and calls it conceitedly “a truth so purely esoteric, that it cannot be truly expressed or rendered exoteric.”. Beyond his bare assertion what proof can he produce of his superlatively advanced spiritual state? In the words of an old philosopher —“Speak that I may see thee I would only desire him to expose his ignorance to his heart’e content.
Like the Pharisees of Religion boast of their merit, do the Pharisees when they call themselves Spiritualists, rehearse continually their exalted sphere, their advanced “guides,” their esoteric ideas, which no one can possibly understand but themselves, and a host of similar vanities which serve but to fix ridicule upon Spiritualism, as the folly of a few' individuals is by ignorant outsiders supposed to be a fundamental condition of all spiritualistic minds.
We can only say that one individual is only one individual, and represents no one but himself, and though one fool may be taken as a sample of all the inhabitants in Colney Hatch, one animal cannot be taken as a sample of the Zoo, and in the present stage of mental transition our Movement is more like Noah’s Ark than Colney Hatch University, and although invidious critics would find striking traits of similiarity in both institutions that would serve as illustrations, but comparisons being odious, we beg to differ.
Jesting apart, had we not better look with suspicion upon teachings which are announced as coining from “planes of high spiritual development” but when inquired into, are nothing but a hash of inanities that are not, worthy of attention?
Woe upon you ye Pharisees and Hypocrites ye deluded and deluding self-styled “Spiritual Sciolists” ye blind leading the blind. Not only do you yourself not teach, for your truths! (heaven save the mark) “are so esoteric that they cannot be made exoteric” but you will throw back stones for bread, and carp at teachings which are beyond your narrow minds. How long will folly and vanity please you? How long will yon toil yourself into the conceited dream of your superiority over your neighbours, while when demanded wherein your superiority consists you only give inane ideas, which are as fallacious as they are ridiculous. We can only say that these inflated beings are in the outer most darkness, even like the talking Theosophists.
The furious competition for “high spheres” that is going on among us, is as thoroughly unreal as it is ridiculous. For people do not think of bettering their ways, and becoming good men and true, but content themselves with talking inflatedly of their super-advanced state, but when we ask of them to be what they pretend, they become abusive and would torn upon and rend us. It is, however, not only for them that we have written.
Although great care has been taken to bring the matter home to the people, nevertheless some of them insist upon being “not at home” when Truth knocks, being either engaged with Bigotry, or with Spiritual Sciolism (I thank thee. “I. A. Μ.” for teaching me that word), two designations for two different phases of conceited ignorance.
The following extract from a classical book of Christian Kabbalism,† being very much to the point, may be of interest to the reader. “It is God’s greatest bounty to give light and eyes to see, not only the corporal and temporal, but the Spiritual and Eter- <... continues on page 11-283 >
* Give certain individuals a word, and they will misuse it. The esoteric cant that will crop up, is no, to be attributed to our articles.
† “The Jehior or the Day Dawning or Morning Light of Wisdom,” not easily obtainable. The quotation is from the “Epistle to the Beader.”