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CHAPTER XV

 

“Unto a Perfect Man”

 

            WHITHER then shall man, who is man and not infant, turn for the enlightenment and salvation of his soul? To upstart Ecclesiasticism which gives him a book, a person, an event, and authoritatively bids him worship these? Or to restored Christianity, which exhibits before him an Ideal, far-off, divine, yet attainable; and a system of life and conduct independent of accident or favour, leading to the sure welfare of himself and all his kind here and now, verifiable by self-realisation, and founded in the very nature of existence?

 

            Man has long listened doubtfully to the priest as that enemy of the intuition declared his wholly base nature and constitution, his generation from actual dust, his inherited vileness and fundamental wickedness ineradicable save by arbitrary decree or cowardly purchase of favour by another’s blood, his eternal happiness or misery dependent upon a choice itself conditioned by the accidents and environment of one fragment of earth-life – in a word, the designedly radical difference and naturally impassable gulf that is forever fixed between the human and the divine natures.

 

            It is time that man hearkened once again to the voice of the prophet, which is the voice of God within him. And what that voice tells him today, as it has always been ready to tell him down the ages when he would open the ear of understanding to it, is simply that he and all his brothers, even to the least of these his brethren, are equally possessed of divine potentialities which they may realise to the utmost if only

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they so will; that the inalienable birthright of all mankind is divinity, is God.

 

“Be Ye Therefore Perfect”

 

            “Within thee, O man is the universe; the thrones of all the Gods are in thy temple.

 

            I have said unto men, Ye are Gods; ye are all in the image of the Most High.

 

            No man can know God unless he first understand himself.

 

            God is nothing that man is not.

 

            What man is, that God is likewise.

 

            As God is at the heart of the outer world, so also is God at the heart of the world within thee.

 

            When the God within thee shall be wholly united to the God without, then shalt thou be one with the Most High.

 

            Thy will shall be God’s will, and the Son shall be as the Father.” (1)

 

NOTES

 

(43:1) Clothed With the Sun, Part II, Nº 13 (2).

 

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