Legend
< Christian Occultism or Esoteric Christianity (continued from page 8-161) >
forty nights, and overcome the devil, He from the mountain preached the Sermon on the Mount, an epitome of moral and spiritual perfection, and then immediately began to put His moral and spiritual precepts into action, transmuting spiritual truths into moral and physical facts by going about continually doing good, and curing all manner of diseases, and teaching that love to God and love to man were the sum and substance of all religion and all morality. He hated intensely all cruelty and all lying, but especially all hypocrisy and formalism and priestcraft. He opened the eyes of the blind; He caused the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, the leper to be cleansed, and the demoniac to be purified and in his right mind. lie raised the dead to life, and was Himself, as an evidence of His spiritual nature, transfigured so that “His face shone as the sun and His raiment became as light.” He taught the law of self-sacrifice, or the crucifixion of the flesh, as a pre-requisite to that spiritual regeneration which is eternal life. Himself “despised and rejected of men,” abhorred by formalists, hated by the priests; He was persecuted, scourged, spit upon, and crucified as the result of His perfectly true, holy, and loving life.
To be fully possessed by the Divine power, beauty, majesty, and significance of this miraculous man, we must devour, as it were, the story of His life, His words and acts, His afflictions and crucifixion with the intense earnestness as of a new revelation, and in one unbroken effort.
If read thus the story comes out with a power, truth, beauty, majesty, and love which are overwhelming; and he who, whilst thus surveying the complete Christ—the manifestation of such love and holiness on one side, and such hideous wickedness on the other—is not torn with a tempest of grief and admiration, has not yet entered into the depths of a true emotion.
This Jesus Christ declares himself, and is declared by others, to be the only begotten and well-beloved Son of God, and the only way, and truth, and life by which we can go to our Father.
In order, if possible, to see how such claims can be true, how Christ, as the spirit, can be the Saviour of man, body and soul, let us attempt to discover the nature and capabilities of man, and his destination. No more profoundly interesting questions can be asked, and nowhere can we find so profound a solution as in the teachings and life of Jesus Christ, Himself the all-wise and divine man.
Man, according to St. Paul, and a true psychology, is a trinity of body, soul, and spirit.
The visible earthly body is not the man, but only the mechanism used by the soul, which is the man. The visible body is said to be composed of certain atoms called matter; which matter is only a series of forms assumed by certain forces.
Force being the substance of matter, there is no such thing as “solid” matter, and no two “atoms of matter” are actually in contact.
Matter being only certain forms assumed by certain forces I can be dissolved and become invisible by the action of heat and other forces including spiritual force; and can be reformed I by man, as a spiritual force, into its original, or any likeness desired by the spiritual force controlling the secondary forces.
Matter can thus be rendered as invisible as the soul and spirit of man now are.
Inhabiting the visible body is the soul or mental force of the man, and this is the man on this earth and in this world.
This soul wills, reasons, loves, hates, and moves its bodily machine according to its affections. It lives in a physical world, and accommodates itself to physical conditions, It marries and begets children; it digs the ground, and grows corn, and wine, and oil, and sheep, and oxen out of the ground. It moves the body to eat these and other forms of matter, in order that it may appropriate their forms and forces, and thus rebuild its ever decomposing body.
The soul does all this and many other things for about seventy years.
It clothes its body in garments of skin, or cotton, or wool, or silk, and lives in a hovel, a cottage, a mansion, or a palace, according to its powers of appropriation.
The man who is clothed in cotton and lives in a cottage, and “eats his bread by the sweat of his brow,” is generally despised by the man who has a gorgeous house and furniture, and who is “clothed in purple and fine linen, and fares sumptuously every day;” and yet our earthly life is but as a grain of sand on the sea-shore.
In about seventy years at the furthest all this formalism comes to an end. The body first gets stiff, the eyes dim, the hearing dull, and the limbs unsteady; and ultimately the man is said to die!
But it is not so; the reality is not as the appearance; for even as no so-called matter can be annihilated neither can any force.
Matter is changed in form and position, according to the direction of the internal force; but the internal force of man, being his reasoning soul, remains a reasoning soul after the decay of his body, just as an electric force remains an electric force, although the jars, and tin-foil, and wire by which the electric force is held captive are broken and strewn on the ground.
The soul, thus being at the death of the body free to act on its own account, remains the living and reasoning soul of man, useful or mischievous, happy or miserable, according to the thoughts, words, and deeds done while in the flesh.
This is the doctrine of Christ and of all religious teachers, and it is in conformity with the wholesome instincts of the vast majority of human beings. It is also in harmony with man’s highest happiness, and therefore we pronounce it true.
Those who will not or cannot believe this doctrine are abnormal human beings, the victims, it may be, of their own conceits; or, it may be, so organically constituted as to be incapable of apprehending the true nature of man—just as from an organic defect some are colour-blind, and cannot distinguish red from green.
But man is a trinity; and just as his bodily form is inhabited and animated by his soul-force, so his soul-force, being itself after the death of the body still in form as a man or woman, is on its departure from the body either a wandering, and, it may be, a visible soul or ghost, or it may be confined as a purgatorial creature, doomed for a certain time to purgation as by fire. Or it may be that the soul, while on earth, having lived a life of purity, love, and holiness, passes into paradise, and lives with the angels and “the spirits of the just made perfect.”
If this result is gained, then that soul has found its spiritual head, or centre, or essence, the Christ within it, and has become truly a son of God.
Thus the man becomes a saved and angelic creature in heaven. But just as man, as Adam—who was made in the form of God, and was a true child of God—lost his immortal life here, so man, when he finds and regains the lost and hidden Christ within him, becomes an immortal and angelic being; the divine and miraculous man even while on this earth.
Even if the story of Adam be regarded as mythical, it none the less expresses the mystical truth that the true man is a son of God, a Christ-like, miracle-working man, “having dominion over the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field,” and all subordinate creation.
Thus we can find an explanation of the words of the apostle: “If any man be in Christ (or in spirit), he is a new creature; old things are passed away, and all things have become new.” Thus also are explained the words of Jesus when He says: “No man hath ascended up into heaven but He who came down from heaven, even the Son of Man who is in heaven.” Thus also can be understood Paul’s words when he said: “I knew a man in Christ, how he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.’
This is the hidden and esoteric doctrine taught by Jesus, “the secret of the Logos,” as especially revealed by John, namely, The Gospel, the Good News, or the coming of the kingdom of heaven on this earth as demonstrated by the abolition of sin, disease, devils, and mortality, before the face of Christ, the Divine and Miraculous Man.
It may be asked, as by Nicodemus, “How can these things be?” and it may be replied, “Art thou a teacher in Israel, and knowest not these things?”
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