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             (3) To C––– On Enquiring why the Term “Father” Only Is Applied to God, when, as Being both the Force and the Substance of Existence, God Is Necessarily Mother as well as Father

 

            Spirit loq. You ask of our constant use of the term “Father” in expressing God. The purpose of these writings is to attract men and women to the consideration of truth in the innermost recesses of their own consciousness. Hence we use the term “Father,” because to the majority of minds it expresses (what you call) God, in terms of His closest and most intimate relations to mankind. It soothes that fear which is the greatest obstacle to your love. Not yet do you appreciate

(p. 85)

the full significance to man of that deep assimilative love to be felt by him for the “Father in Heaven”; love unfettered by sense of fear or self-interest, love independent of all professions, manifested solely in action reaching up to the Object beloved. For love as we conceive it means the spontaneous uplifting of the whole being to that which is loved. It is that clinging, absorbing attitude of man to God which alone shall bring to him direct vision of God.

            Man is ever ready to define that which is difficult of definition, rather than to accomplish that which demands his whole effort of will and faith. Only when man shall have absorbed into his being the true nature and scope of this love proceeding from God’s Fatherhood, whence he derives his tenderest conceptions of Earth’s fatherhood and motherhood combined, shall he grasp such nearer vision of the infinite fullness of redeeming love in God as will remold into forms of highest altruism his every relationship to man and beast, only then, too, shall we deem it unnecessary to speak further to men of God as their “Father in Heaven.”

            But while we accentuate thus the Fatherhood of God we have ever in our thoughts the Divine Motherhood it implies. The world of men and women is as yet not ripe, because not sufficiently spiritualized, to comprehend this further and fuller aspect of the Divine whose force rather than whose love it has hitherto idolized and feared.

            This is so because Force in the Divine is more self-evident to man than that which underlies and inspires force, namely, Love. Until man’s consciousness of duality in being shall have been lifted from the gross companionship into which he has cast it; until woman shall have asserted the essential feature of her being – love – on a plane so high as to draw mankind up from the present material sense of its meaning, until then, this mystery – which men know only in terms of “masculine”

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and “feminine” and which they have debased to its lowest elements shall we guard, awaiting in full assurance Earth’s fitness for its interpretation. Yet to all who, untainted by the gross materialism which makes it impossible even of conception to the majority of mankind, seek explanation of it, we would say, “God wills that we minister in silence to the needs of your souls.”

            Meanwhile the very mention of the Deity in connexion with man’s present conception of duality as he beholds it in its manifestation of sex in animal life, or still more so as he conceives of it in its grosser manifestation of human sex-relations on Earth, would justly strike horror and terror into the minds of many truth-seekers and turn them absolutely from the consideration of our approach to Earth. Until, therefore, man reaches forth further efforts to the attainment of Divine Wisdom, and sees the highest in all manifestations of the Divine, we would withhold from Earth that which it is unable yet to assimilate, our supreme object being the spiritual rather than the intellectual assimilation of truth. For while man is steeped in the sensuality we behold around him, there is no doctrine so prone to travesty, yea to deadly blasphemy, among men, as this of the Duality of all Being.

To this everlasting fact which underlies the corruption by man of Divine Truth, and which is bound up in the very nature of the Deity from whom all things proceed and in whom all things have their being, we dare only point at present, conscious that the near awakening of man’s intuition shall bring release from his own lower nature which hitherto forbids him even to gaze on the highest in God lest he cause it to minister to his own lowest.

 

FINIS

 

 

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