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| style="text-align:center; width:50%;" | LIGHT. | |||
| style="text-align:right; width:25%;" | [November 11, 188{{Style S-Lost|…}} | |||
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| continues = 65, 66 | | continues = 65, 66 | ||
| title = “The Perfect Way” and its Critics. | | title = “The Perfect Way” and its Critics. | ||
| hide = yes | |||
| subtitle = No. II. | | subtitle = No. II. | ||
| untitled = | | untitled = | ||
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| author signed = The Writers—not the “Authors”—of “The Perfect Way, or the Finding of Christ” | | author signed = The Writers—not the “Authors”—of “The Perfect Way, or the Finding of Christ” | ||
| source title = Light | | source title = Light | ||
| source details = November 11, 1882 | | source details = v. 2, No. 97, November 11, 1882 | ||
| publication date = 1882-11-11 | | publication date = 1882-11-11 | ||
| original date = | | original date = | ||
| notes = Printed source pages: 508-510. | |||
}} | }} | ||
... | {{Style P-Title|“THE PERFECT WAY” AND ITS CRITICS.}} | ||
<center>No. II</center> | |||
<center>''To the Editor of'' “Light.”</center> | |||
{{Style S-Small capitals|Sir}},—In the number of “Light” following that which contained Dr. Wyld’s last letter on the above subject,—viz., on page 466, October 21st, there is a passage which strikingly exhibits the unsoundness of the position assumed by some of our critics in regard to the historical Jesus and the design of the Gospels. The passage in question consists in a list of parallelisms between the lives ascribed to Buddha, Christna, and Jesus, and might have been enlarged, as is pointed out in the opening pages of “The Perfect Way” by the addition of the names of Osiris, Mithras, Heracles, Bacchus, Zoroaster, and other portraitures of the Man Regenerate. And it needs, surely, but an intelligent and unprejudiced examination of these manifold parallelisms to convince the student that the various expressions implying a Divine nature and mission, on which the conventional theology of the Christian Church bases its estimate of Jesus, are simply the stock formulæ whereby the mystical writers of all times and places have been wont to depict that which they regarded as the supreme object of culture and end of experience, namely, the perfectionment, through suffering, of the typical Man Regenerate; the entire process of the building up of the Christ within the human kingdom. And the very name by which the spiritual and solar hero of the Four Evangels is designated,—Christ Jesus—is in itself an indication that it is a universal name. Not the name of any ''one'' individual, or even of any fleshly personage, but the name by which in the language of Heaven all pure and perfected Spirits are called—the Anointed of God, the everlasting “Yes” or “''Jesous'',” who alone have eternal life. | |||
For us the Four Gospels depict the ever-recurring acts of the soul in all ages, her flight from Matter and Illusion, her recognition of the Divine, her reception of illumination, her painful sufferings and passion on the earth-plane, her final triumph and ascension into purer spheres. They are thus, not the record of any one man’s actual life, the facts of which, as they stand, are necessarily open to serious dispute and contradiction, but they are a spiritual drama or mystery, setting forth the manifestation of the Son of God ''in man''; the Immanuel, or God within us. And we declare that this mystic and wholly spiritual “God’s spell” has been wrested from its true and original meaning by an ignorant or designing priesthood, which ''in its inveterate desire to provide the people with a material and human god, palpable to sense, and extraneous to themselves'', has persistently misapplied to the fleshly personage, titles, acts and achievements belonging only to the kingdom of the Invisible and Spiritual. And thus the corrupted Church has committed idolatry as gross as that of falling down and worshipping an image in place of the Lord God. | |||
But we are willing to go so far with Dr. Wyld as to admit that, inasmuch as it is probable all the mystical histories of various times and countries may each have centred round some special representative, it is likely that the Christian Gospels may, in great measure, have taken shape and spirit from the life and teachings of some fitting model, chosen to exemplify the spiritual possibilities of the human race. We affirm only that what immediately and vitally concerns us and our salvation are not the acts or the sufferings of this individual, or of any individual soever, ''but the living of that life ourselves'', the suffering of that Cross and Passion in ourselves, the “rising again from the dead and ascending into Heaven” of our own interior regenerate Ego. | |||
So that if it should at any time be proved—what we nowise assert or wish to believe—that the historical Jesus never existed at all, and that everything related about Him is a pure, absolute myth, we should sustain no shock, lose no hold on our faith, and retain our position inviolate. And, far from lacking in reverence or gratitude to any one of the many “Captains of Salvation” who have been “made perfect through suffering,” we indeed shew our regard for these by rescuing the foremost of their number from the category of impossible monstrosities, and reinstating him in that proper humanity which he must have loved so dearly and laboured so painfully and successfully to exalt by shewing what it has in it to be. | |||
Religion can never depend for its facts and its hopes on historical data. These, in the very nature of things, are always questionable, and become more and more difficult to verify as the transit of centuries removes us from the epoch to which alone they are related. The real events of religion are not of this world; its kingdom is interior; its acts are all spiritual an essential. We “must be born again” into another sphere, upon another plane, converted from the material to the immaterial, before we can apprehend heavenly things. No one knows this better than Dr. Wyld himself; yet at times he chooses to write as though, with the mass of uneducated and superstitious Churchmen of the day, he accepted on the ''material'' plane the miraculous history of the Gospels, and trusted to the “mystery of the holy Incarnation,” “agony and bloody sweat,” of the man, Jesus of Nazareth, to save his soul and to endow him with life eternal! | |||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|14-65}} | It is against this idolatry that we uncompromisingly contend. The Gospels—and all similar books in all religions—present us, we maintain, with a ''picture'', a guide, a demonstration of eternal and universal processes, illustrated by the history—partially true, but in great part gathered from other previous histories—of one, who, by successive re-births, had attained so high a grade as to constitute him our Elder Brother in a special sense, and to make him worthy of our deepest homage and tender affection. All this—but no more. Even he was not perfect, as the Gospels themselves witness. For one who could pray, “''Not My will, but'' Thine be done!” was plainly not yet in entire union with God. And so it needs must be, for when that perfect union is accomplished, there remains no passion, no cross, no burial to be endured. All re-births are ended, and the spirit is for ever freed from matter. There could not, therefore, by the very nature of things, be any ''perfect'' man upon the earth-plane; because, so soon as perfection is attained, this plane is necessarily incapable of retaining the purified spirit. Wherefore to adore a human being with the adoration due to God, or to look to any human being, whether in the past or in the present, for our own redemption by means of any sacrifice he could make of his own body—this is at once idolatry and blasphemy; the first because it places an earthly creature in the place of God; the second, because it directly militates against that immutable principle of justice which is the essential centre-point of Divinity. | ||
Apart from this question of ''historical'' religion, there is not a word in Dr. Wyld’s last letter which we cannot thoroughly endorse. It is so strange to us that he should think otherwise that we cannot avoid giving expression to a lingering suspicion that he ''has not read our book'',—especially the chapters on the “Atonement” and the “Redemption,” and Appendix V. For surely, in such case, he could not have accused us—as by implication, at least, he has more than once done—of an attempt to create a “new Gospel,” differing from that of “Jesus Christ.” | |||
To pass to a letter headed, “The Teachings of the Perfect Way,” contained in your issue of October 28th, we can but say that the allegation of your Bristol correspondent, that we affirm “the annihilation of the greater portion of the human race,” fills us with amazement. “Few shall be saved from that fate,” he says, as if citing from our writing. No such passage can we find in the book, unless he refers to the quotation given on one of its pages from the Gospel; to wit, “The way is straight, and the gate narrow that lead unto life, and few they are who find it.” (p. 165.) Your correspondent must know well whose words are these; but, if their meaning perplex him, it is only because he does not understand them aright. They indeed are few who in any single generation attain to Nirvana. Only a small number of our race, in any given epoch, achieves the perfection necessary to final beatitude. But the fate of no human soul is pronounced after a single life-time. They who fail—and who fail again and again, even as the Scripture tells us, until seventy times seven—may be purified by successive re-births, and may thus surely fulfil at last the conditions of salvation, however {{Style S-HPB SB. Restored|l}}ong<ref name="editor-restoration-64">The obscured initial letter is restored from Light, v. 2, No. 97, November 11, 1882, p. 508, PDF page 8.</ref> and painful may be the schooling required. So far, indeed, from teaching any such doctrine as that ascribed to us in your correspondent’s letter, we have distinctly and repeatedly insisted that only the ''persistently evil'', those who all their “seventy times seven” of existences, habitually rebel against the Divine Will, and so lose the human spirit within them, sink at last into “outer darkness” and extinction. | |||
As for our divergency from Swedenborg in respect to the relations of Matter and Spirit, we are not concerned to rebut this statement. And if, indeed, Swedenborg has maintained the proposition cited, we are only too glad to differ, so monstrous to us appears the notion of ''two'' original self-subsisting entities, and no single universal elemental essence, of and from which all things are, and to which all can revert. But, may it not be that your correspondent has failed correctly to apprehend Sweden-{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|14-65}} | |||
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<gallery widths=300px heights=300px> | |||
Light v.02 n.97 1882-11-11.pdf|page=8|Light, v. 2, No. 97, November 11, 1882, pp. 508-510 | |||
</gallery> | |||