THE “NEW GOSPEL OF INTERPRETATION”

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XI.

The Esoteric and True Doctrine of Divine Incarnation

As God is pure spirit, so is pure spirit God: and they are none the less so because individuated in a human soul, or because, when thus individuated, such soul is invested with a human body.

Such is the true doctrine, simple, obvious, inexpugnable, of divine incarnation. And the Gospel which Jesus came to teach and to demonstrate by his example, is that of the equal possession by all men of Divine potentialities, belonging to them in virtue of the nature of their constituent principles. He was a man who had been perfected through the suffering of the experiences of many lives, and had attained to the fullness of Christ, and who had therefore no need to return to the body

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for his own sake. (1) But coming back, out of pure love, to redeem, by showing others what they also have it in them to become, he was a Christ, and as chief of the order the Christ. And that he was a redeemer was not by suffering instead of others – “for” does not in this relation mean “instead of” – but by suffering in and with others, trough the fulness of his sympathy, that by the exhibition of the perfection of his love he might win them also to love. For the love that immediately saves man is not the love for him, but the love in him. This love in him is God in him. For “God is love.” And God in man is Christ. Christ is the new man in him; his own regenerate selfhood, who “bears the sins” of his past evil selfhood, now no more, and who is therefore his “propitiation” and “atonement” making him one with his own indwelling divinity, and through this with universal Deity. So is man “saved by Christ.”

Our language has of late become enriched by appropriation from the East of the term “Karma,” which denotes succinctly that which is implied in the utterance, “Thou comest not out thence until thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” Rightly comprehended, this doctrine is not inconsistent with that of redemption by regeneration and forgiveness of sins. Love covers and wipes out a multitude of sins in him in whom love is enkindled. And to him who comes to love much, much is forgiven. Its operation is retrospective. The injustice would be were it not so. For the man is no longer the same as he who sinned, and to protract the punishment would be to punish the wrong person. Wherefore, there is no hard and fast debtor and creditor

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account between man and God. And the doctrine that withholds from redemptive effort “lest Karma be interfered with,” is a doctrine of the pit, devised expressly to withhold from the exercise of love, to the loss of both giver and receiver. Ignoring love and its regenerating power, it ignores Christ. There neither is nor can be any real conflict between the divine love and the divine justice.

Man requires but to be convinced of his own divine possibilities to make every effort to realise them. Knowing this, Jesus restricted his message for the most part to the assertion of this supreme truth. Let men once be certain that their birthright is divinity, is God, and all else, every detail in life and practice, will order itself accordingly. The aspiration towards such ideal will prove its own fulfilment. Any teaching other than this; any insistence on particular modes of life, such as concern diet, or man’s relation to the animals, essential though they be, would have failed to find response in a world so hard and unsympathetic as the Roman world of that day. Moreover, whatever Jesus may have said on these and kindred points, that only is recorded which his biographers thought fit to record, and that only survives which Ecclesiasticism has permitted to survive. The gospels, moreover, declare that the world would not hold the books that might be written about him, his sayings and doings; and it is positively affirmed in the New Interpretation that the second destruction of the Alexandrian Library was effected at ecclesiastical instigation, expressly in order to suppress the evidences it contained of the falsehood of the ecclesiastical presentation of Christianity. (1) And, besides all this, Jesus himself declared that he withheld many things from his disciples because they could not bear them then, not being sufficiently advanced in their perception of things spiritual, and foretold the advent of a Spirit of Truth

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which should guide them into all truth – a prediction and a promise for the fulfilment of which the Church has hitherto waited.

The farther the recession from the infernal, the nearer is the approach to the celestial in respect of condition. Similarly, the farther the recession from the ecclesiastical, the nearer is the approach to the divine in respect of truth. The keynotes of the doctrine which is that at once of the Bible and of Christ are precisely the tenets most fiercely anathematised of Ecclesiasticism, namely Pantheism and Evolution, its condemnation of the latter being comprised in its condemnation of the doctrine of the divinity of Substance as a deadly heresy.

Like Christianity itself, these tenets have been put before the world only in travesty. All things are God as to constituent principles, but not as to condition, because of creation. God, the God that man has it in him to become, is the product of Evolution. Proceeding from God by emanation, man returns to God by evolution. Thus his end is in his beginning. This is the true Pantheism.

The true evolution is in this wise. In virtue of the divinity of the constituent principles of existence, its force and its substance, the inherency of existence is divine. Evolution is the manifestation of inherency, the impulse to evolution being the tendency to revert to a lost divine condition. Wherefore Divinity is the goal of evolution. Evolution is the method of the individuation of divinity; and its process is not accomplished until divinity is attained. God is the birthright of every creature; and there is no barrier to the realisation of God save the will of the individual. “Even of these stones God is able to raise up children unto Abraham.” All that is necessary is that the spirit locked up in matter be set free to operate. For “Every monad of the divine substance possesses the potentiality of twain.” And the soul – which is the individual – when once generated,

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is indestructible, save through its own perverse will. “Spirit of itself is diffuse, and the naked flame is liable to fuse with other flames. But the flame which is enclosed in substance has become an indiffusible personality,” capable of surviving all changes of form and condition, and ever putting on higher ones through the unfoldment of its capacities; to which unfoldment, whether in the individual or in the universal, there is no limit. And be the product sublime as it may, it always is “Christ.” For Christ is God under manifestation by means of individuation. And the manifest never exhausts the unmanifest: but always, in manifestation, the “Father is greater than the Son.”

In making Christ the incarnation of the “Son” in the Trinity of the Godhead, instead of his counterpart in man, Ecclesiasticism has confounded the Manifest with the Unmanifest, and made the Holy Ghost the Father of the “Person” through whom he has his procession. This is a subtle device for depriving man of his divine potentialities, and for exalting the Order which claims the power of converting the eucharistic elements into actual Divinity.

NOTES

(39:1) Perfected, this is to say, in respect of his spiritual selfhood, which, as the true and permanent individual, alone re-incarnates; and, in virtue of such perfection of soul, able to accomplish the full regeneration of his bodily nature, which, as derived from human parents, themselves only partially regenerated, necessarily lacked certain degrees of regeneration. Hence the “weakness” through which, as St. Paul says, he was crucified. See Clothed with the Sun, I, xxiv.

(40:1) Clothed with the Sun, I, xxxii.