THE “NEW GOSPEL OF INTERPRETATION”

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XXI.

Present Restoration of Faculty and

Knowledge Predicted in the Bible

IT IS the actual occurrence in the present age of a restoration of faculty and knowledge of the nature herein described, that constitutes the reason for being of the Society represented by this exposition. The Esoteric Christian Union is the outcome of the desire of numerous devoted students and followers at once, of spiritual religion and spiritual science – dwellers in various lands, inheritors of various tongues, and members of various communions – to render universally accessible and known that which they themselves have recognised as being, beyond all question, the New Gospel of Interpretation so long and so positively promised and so sorely needed.

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No new gospel in itself is that which it is thus sought to promulgate. It neither adds to nor detracts from the old gospel familiar to Christendom. It is a new gospel only of Interpretation. And being this, it is a gospel in which – while nothing new is told – that is interpreted which is so ancient as to have become forgotten and lost; so fresh, nevertheless, with eternal youth as never to be obsolete; so pure and, withal, so profound as to have transcended comprehension and appreciation by that “generation” – so long in possession but now about to pass away – which, for its gross materialisation of spiritual things, was styled by Jesus “adulterous;” and yet so simple and plain that he who runs may read it, and all can understand and observe it; and, so single, exclusive, and potent in respect of man’s highest interests, that its suppression has ever been the first object of those who have sought in his degradation and perdition their own promotion and gain.

And its appeal is to the all-comprehensive criterion of Experience, Reason, and Revelation, and these in their fullest and highest modes. For, claiming – as it does claim – to represent the Whole Humanity of Intellect and Intuition purified, unfolded, equilibrated, fused into a unity, polarised to the Highest, resolved to be content with nothing but the Highest, and – so – actually attaining to the Highest, it appeals confidently to the Highest, anticipating the fullest recognition from those who have themselves the most fully attained. And this without restricting the number to the members of the Church visible, militant here on earth; but including also those who, whether in the body or out of the body, have transcended alike the terrestrial and the astral and become members of the Church celestial. For that it is in very truth from this latter, that the New Gospel of Interpretation is directly derived, the proofs both intrinsic and extrinsic are such as to admit of no possibility of question for those who, being cognisant of

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them, are qualified to appreciate them. For that which its doctrine represents is not surmise or opinion, but positive knowledge obtained by experience and at first hand, “established, every word, at the mouth of two witnesses” – its immediate recipients and formulators – commissioned, trained, and initiated at no mere earthly hands, and by them put forth as that which they themselves have actually “heard and seen, and their hands have handled, of the Word of life,” – no experience being withheld requisite to qualify them for their task – but making, nevertheless, appeal on its behalf, not to any authority or person, institution or book, but to the Understanding.

And if it be asked how, or under what circumstances precisely, an event so momentous came about, and what token, if any, there is to show that the Saviour it claims to restore is in very truth the same with Him of whom, it is alleged, man has been so cruelly defrauded, and that the Christ of the proffered Gospel of Interpretation, is identical with Him of the accepted Gospel of Manifestation – this ought surely to suffice, He had his birth among the animals.

For their terrible wrongs, culminating at the hands of their scientific tormentors, were the last drops which filled to overflowing with anguish, indignation and wrath, hearts already brimming with the sense of the world’s priest-caused degradation and misery, wringing from them the cry which rent the heavens for His descent, and in direct and immediate response to which He came.

For the New Gospel of Interpretation was vouchsafed in express recognition of the determined endeavour, by means of a thought absolutely fearless and free, to scale the topmost heights, fathom the lowest depths, and penetrate to the inmost recesses of Consciousness, in search of the solution of the problem of Existence, in the assured conviction that, when found, it would prove

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to be one that would make, above all things, Vivisection impossible, if only by demonstrating the constitution of things to be such that terrible as is the lot of its victims here, the lot of their tormentors hereafter is unspeakably worse; as has proved, with absolute certainty to be the truth, to the full vindication at the same time of the Divine Justice and the Divine Love.

Such is the spirit in which the work of the New Interpretation was conceived and executed; and such has been the manner of the Coming – the Second Coming – of Him the Typical Exemplar of the divine, because the Whole and Equilibrated, Humanity, of whom it is said that “when He is come, He shall restore all things, and shall save both man and beast;” forasmuch as He is Himself the personal demonstration of the presence of “the same incorruptible spirit in all things.” For, that the Christ has His birth in a cave, and a stable, and among the animals, is not only because there is “no room in the inn” of a world crowded with falsities and inanities and positive insanities, for the humanity of which He is the representative; it is also because the divinity of which He is the realisation is the common heritage of all individuations of the Universal Consciousness, how low soever may be the degree of their unfoldment. Wherefore the meanest are His brethren, no less than the most advanced. And to their befrienders and their tormentors alike – but with how awful distinction of significance! – He addresses now, as before, the burning words, “Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto the least of these My brethren, ye have done them unto ME!” For, “so He cometh, bringing his reward with Him, to give to every man according as his work shall be, and judge both quick and dead;” – the quick, who are alive with a living, because a loving spirit; the dead, who are “dead in trespasses and sins” through their determined suppression in themselves of all that is implied by Her, the “Woman,”

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Intuition, whose Son He is, and their consequent utter insensibility to all but the “earthly, the sensual, the devilish.”

It is the declared function of the Christ to redeem to the uttermost. And hence it is that the New Gospel of Interpretation sounds clear and high its keynote – “The earth cannot be redeemed in man alone; but all creatures must share in the benefits of his redemption.” For all are One: and “Love is the recognition of the Omnipresent Self; the knowledge of God in others.” Even the pit itself is not shut out from the benefits flowing from a redeemed earth. For “He descendeth into hell”: – not as Ecclesiasticism has impiously pretended, to exemplify the implacability of the Divine Nature by undergoing in His own person the torments due to the sins of the world, but to demonstrate the boundlessness of the divine love that, so, haply He might save such as will to be saved.