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Jesus says: “Repent and believe the ''Gospel;''”'' ''that is, believe in the ''good news ''of the coming of the kingdom of heaven, and let your prayer to the Father be, “Thy kingdom come on earth even as in heaven.”
 
The evangelical sect teach that the Gospel is the belief that “the blood of Christ has been shed for the sins of the world.” So indeed it is; but the blood of Christ is the life of Christ, for “the blood is the life,” and thus it is that Christ, by his life, and teachings, and self-sacrifice, and transfiguration and death, and resurrection, if adopted by us, becomes “the way, the truth, and the life” whereby we are saved.
 
By this faith sin and disease disappeared before Him, and He thus became the Saviour of the body, and by this faith the soul is cleansed and then glorified. The Gospel, or good news, is thus no mere form of words, or sounding phrase, but the actual fact that the kingdom of heaven has come to all who believe, repent, and live the complete life of Christ.
 
The fruits of this salvation are “long-suffering, patience, love unfeigned, joy, peace,” and its gifts are the powers of the Holy Spirit, the spiritual man, with his Christ-like power to “heal all manner of diseases, and cast out all devils.”
 
These are not words, but facts. The spiritual man has not only “the life which now is, but that which is to come;” I the original form in which he was created is rediscovered; and being in the form of God, a divine man on ''earth, ''he is supreme master of himself, and therefore of the external phenomenal world, because to the Divine Man is given the power to create, re-dissolve, and re-create externals by the force of his spiritual alchemy.
 
“Where two of ye shall agree as concerning anything ye shall ask it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven,” and “Lo I am with you al way, even to the end of the world.”
 
If this promise of Christ is true, and if we have not the promised proof that Christ is with us, then we may be good moral followers of Jesus; but we are not saved ''here, ''soul and body, by the blood and life of Christ’s mystical power over all secondary laws, and therefore over matter.
 
It may be replied that this cannot be the true meaning of Christ’s words, because since the days of the apostles no such powers have been possessed by mortal man.
 
But it is replied not so, for in no age of the world has “God left Himself without a witness,” and to those who have been initiated this statement is known to be true.
 
Pre-eminently to re-create his vile body into a new and glorious body, and thus to “glorify God with our souls and ''bodies ''which are His,” has been practically accomplished in all ages of the world, and divine and miraculous men and women have never ceased from the face of the earth.
 
Moses was an illustration of this when descending from Mount Sinai, where lie for forty days communed with God, and his face shone so that the people dared not approach him; and thus also Stephen, the first Christian martyr, whose face the people saw “as it had been the face of an angel;” and like events have happened in modern times, and in all times. The lives of the saints, as in the instances of St. Ignatius, St. Teresa, and Savonarola, are an unanswerable evidence of this assertion, and the history of the Church of Christ affords a continuous succession of examples of holy men and women while in ecstatic prayer becoming, as St. Teresa expresses it, married mystically to the Divine Son, and thus ''actually ''becoming ''one with God, ''as Christ said He was one with God.
 
Those who ascended to this spiritual eminence became elevated from the ground, while their faces shone with an effulgence, and their chambers became filled with light— exact counterparts of the transfigured Christ.
 
This statement will not be received by the uninitiated, but it is not the less true, as those who have been initiated know.
 
Those who have watched the beauty of the Sleeping Child whose angel is beholding the face of God, or who have hung over the “rapture of repose” in the face of the dead, whose spirit has just taken its last embrace on departing, may conceive of the beauty of those “born of the spirit,” and with such it will not “seem a thing impossible” that God should raise the “dead soul” to the manifestation of the effulgent Spirit.
 
If it be now asked, as in the days of Christ, “Are there few that be thus saved?” it may be replied, as by Christ, “Strive ye to enter in at the strait gate, for many will seek to enter in and shall not be able,” “for many be called, but few chosen,” and “strait is the gate that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”
 
If matter be merely a form assumed by certain forces, then each man’s form is the form of his soul force; and if so, it can readily be understood that when the soul is purified by a life of holiness, and when forsaking the husks which the swine do eat,” it says, “I will arise and go to my father,” that the Christ or spirit “coming suddenly to its temple,” the entire man becomes transformed into a resemblance of the transfigured Jesus.
 
And as the spiritual man is “in the form of God,” he becomes God-like in aet, as well as thought. He becomes a worker of miracles; and being a forgiver of sin, or a healer of the diseased, he can transform into his own likeness the bodies of those who believe.
 
The souls of these men and women have found their Christ or Spiritual Light, and are at one with the Father.
 
As the humble chrysalis is by the transforming power of the sun’s heat converted into the glorious butterfly, so the careworn and travel-toiled Jesus by the force of his spiritual prayer was transfigured, “when His face shone as the sun and his raiment became as light,” and Peter, and James, and John fell on their faces to the earth before Him.
 
Thus it is that the spiritual mannot only commands his own body, but can transform all lower forms, and the miraculous becomes his normal condition.
 
As “God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third generation,” we can thus easily see why the spiritual regeneration of soul and body is a rare and exceptional event, and all but unattainable, except among the “few who are chosen.”
 
But if the sins are visited to the third generation, so also are the virtues; and we can see how it may come to pass, that if the children were only begotten and reared in perfect love, those of the third generation might become actually’ sons of God.
 
To attain this end we might well afford to “sell all which we have and follow Christ;” and we can appreciate the wisdom of that man who “bartered all that he had, and purchased the one field in which was hidden the sacred treasure.”
 
For thousands of years in the East, and by fits and starts in the West, this hidden light has been from time to time found and acted upon, and men and women who, having “crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts, which war against the soul,” have lived the Christ-like life, and been gifted with the miraculous power of healing and prophecy.
 
The moral teachings and beneficent life of Jesus are sufficient for the great majority of human beings; but the esoteric teachings of Christ are revealed only to the few, and it is with the esoteric only that “the spirit maketh intercessions withour spirits with groanings which cannot be uttered. The simple good ones of the earth have “the promise of the life to come,” but those esoterically saved by the Christ within them coming to his temple are, while on earth, also in heaven, and are already “children of the resurrection.”
 
Jesus taught the law of love, which, if followed, ''leads'' to the kingdom of heaven, and thus the young man who had kept this law from his youth was told that he was ''not far ''from the kingdom of heaven, but although not far from it, he was not within that kingdom.
 
The water, in his ease, had not been converted into wine; the ''moral'' man was not the ''divine'' man; he was a lover, but not the bridegroom: he was not, in the miraculous sense, one with God as Christ and his chosen are.
 
To be “Christ-like,” then, is the sum of the idea herein propounded.
 
This is a commonplace phrase, but those who use it generally only realise half its signification. The meaning usually attached to it is that of one who lives a loving, peaceful, true, and religious life; who daily is a peacemaker, easily forgives his enemies, and doing daily all the good he can, makes continual self-sacrifices.


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