THE “NEW GOSPEL OF INTERPRETATION”

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XXIII.

Present Disintegration of Society Preparatory to

Re-integration on the Basis of the New Interpretation

OF THAT time it is said, “The stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be shaken.” By this is implied the discomfiture of the representative intellects of the age through the exposure of the falseness of their philosophy and science, and the downfall of the reigning orthodoxies. Hence it is not alone to

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the Ecclesiasticism of Religion that the New Interpretation has a message at once incisive and peremptory, but to all modes of it, in Church, State, and Society, where in custom, convention, and tradition bear rule to the exclusion of principle, truth, and right, and “the Lord” – the divinity in each individuality – is systematically “crucified” by being repressed instead of unfolded. It will suffice to speak here of its message to but one of these Ecclesiasticisms, that which, as the open and avowed enemy and rival of religion, claims the supremacy for the priesthood of science.

Granted that Science has done good and necessary service by rescuing the intellect from suppression at the hands of its fellow of religion, none the less has it done a correspondingly evil service by suppressing in its turn the intellect’s supplement and complement and indispensable mate, the intuition. For in thus doing it has worked with a mutilate organon, by methods illegitimate because inhuman, and misleading because unscientific, to conclusions false and disastrous in respect of all that is essential to man. And this even to the making of the conditions of existence such that the “survival of the fittest” for them means the survival of the unfittest to exist at all.

The besetting sin of Science has been Assumption. It has assumed the non-existence of all that transcends the faculty employed by it – the superficial sense and reason – and therein the truth of the materialistic hypothesis, scornfully rejecting without examination, all evidence proffered to the contrary. Doing which it has made, not experience, but non-experience its basis of conclusion, and not the discovery of truth, but the establishment of its own pre-conceived hypothesis, its object. And so it has come that, instead of leading the van of the army of truth-seekers bent on the conquest of the mystery of existence, it has fallen far behind, hugging its ignorance, boasting itself “agnostic,” and, in respect

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of the most important of all knowledges, has demonstrated itself to be not science but nescience. This is the knowledge of man’s real nature and destiny. For while under the spiritual outpouring of the latter half of this century, there have been millions upon millions of persons, sober of judgment and unimpeachable as witnesses, many of them highly trained in scientific methods, who by keeping an open mind have obtained concerning the reality and accessibility of the spiritual world and, therein, man’s survival of the material body, proofs to reject which would be to leave themselves without grounds whereon to believe in the existence of the physical world; – Science continues wilfully ignorant of the fact, and in its ignorance presumes positively to deny the fact, basing its denial upon a non-experience due to its refusal of experience, whether its own or that of others.

The future history of Superstition will contain no chapter more humiliating to the human mind than that which has for its subject the attitude of science towards the spiritual movement of this age. The cause is not far to seek. Having made matter its fetish, its priests would tolerate nothing that might imperil the supremacy of their idol. Modern scientist is but old priest writ differently. The spirit is the same.

For superstition does not consist in the belief in a spiritual world. It consists in the ascription to any entity, real or supposed, of properties and attributes which it does not possess, and the accordance to it of veneration on their account. And science has done this with matter. Wherefore, as the most materialistic of all ages, this has been the most superstitious of all ages.

Through the like defects of temper, faculty, and method it has come that science has recovered the ancient and Biblical doctrine of Unfoldment, only to stultify it, calling it evolution. For the result of positing matter as the basis of the process is to deny to the entity which is

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the true subject and object of the process, the permanence indispensable to the process. And instead of getting rid, as it fondly thought to do, of the idea of God, it has, by its practical endowment of matter with even more than divine potentialities – for even Divinity is not conceived of as transcending Itself – exalted matter to the place of God, with the result of deifying the lowest instead of the highest. Meanwhile, though admitting its absolute ignorance of the nature both of the force by which and of the substance in which, as well also as of the impulsion through which, evolution occurs, it assigns by its denial of all transcendental experiences, limits to evolution. And while, moreover, it makes evolution the method of all progression and development, it has systematic recourse to methods which, by their very nature, tend inevitably to arrest and reverse the process of evolution, by converting it into retrogression and degradation, fatally deteriorating men themselves, and this on the pretext of benefiting humanity.

Whereas when, heeding the message of the New Interpretation, and adding to Intellect, Intuition, Science shall work with a whole organon, she will recognise as the real material of things not matter but substance and this divine substance, even divinity itself, and the divinity therefore of the inherency of which evolution is at once the demonstration and the manifestation. During which she will recognise man’s moral and spiritual nature, as equally with his physical nature the subject of evolution, and as far more than this the object of evolution, seeing that they, and they alone, appertain to him as, and constitute him, a permanent and a perfectible being.

Science must learn that the power of knowledge to bless or to curse depends upon the method of its acquisition no less than upon that of its application. There is no forbidden knowledge; but there are forbidden methods. They who insist upon such methods

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as necessary thereby convict themselves of being constitutionally disqualified for the pursuit of knowledge. They have mistaken their vocation.

Hitherto, assured by his priests of religion that he is made out of nothing, and by his priests of science that he is made out of matter, man has had the reverse of encouragement to avail himself of his power of self-unfoldment. And so it has come that, seeing no goal worthy the effort necessary for its attainment, he has despaired of life as at all worth living and has become pessimist. But now, through the advent of the New Gospel of Interpretation, affording him proof inexpugnable of the divinity of his substance and thereby of the illimitability of his potentialities, his way is cleared, and he has before him a track and a quest which only the sheerest imbecility would set bounds to, or refuse to follow.

Herein consists the reconciliation of Religion and Science. Not indeed of those falsely so-called hitherto in vogue. The sooner they perish and disappear from the scene the better. But of those truly so-called which will be engendered of the New Interpretation. For then, working each with a perfected organon and a purified intent, on diverse planes but in the same direction, they will alike minister to man’s realisation of that which, in virtue of his derivation, constitution, and nature, is his indefeasible birthright, – the divinity which Christ claimed for him but to die in the assertion thereof; and the very attempt to realise which will prove the accomplishment of Christ’s mission, the establishment of the “kingdom of God” “on earth as it is in heaven.”

And of the time that is at hand, when the divine outpouring – patent to every spiritually percipient eye as now in actual widespread process – of which the New Gospel of Interpretation, while the crowning token, is but one of the many tokens – shall have established its

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sway, it may confidently be affirmed that only in so far as any priesthood of any cult whatever, religious or other, shall thus work, will it obtain recognition as having any valid reason for being. For then man sane will be the rule and not, as hitherto, the exception. And, being sane, he will so order his household in every detail of life as to make of society the “holy city” which ever comes down from the heaven of man’s purified understanding, even that perfect ideal of which Christ is the individuated expression. For the “Finding of Christ” is the realisation of that ideal which, in such measure as his intuition is complete, man ever discerns. The religion of Christ is enthusiasm for the ideal; and the only true Christianity is the imitation of Christ. Wherefore in the city of which it is said “without are dogs,” there is no place for those who, being condemners of enthusiasm and haters of the ideal, are fitly termed “cynics.”

“Behold I make all things new.” Signs manifold indicate as imminent the dissolution of the existing order. Class is divided against class. Law is systematically defied. Marriage has become a failure through the inability of people to live up to it. Murder stalks abroad unabashed and boasting, claiming to be a legitimate method of redressing social inequalities. Madness, despair, and suicide are rife beyond all precedent, showing that men are fast coming to dread life even more than death. And armed men in millions stand ready waiting for the signal to fly at each others’ throats. To such pass have the Ecclesiasticisms, religious, political, scientific, and social, between them reduced the world, by their systematic blasphemy against the laws of Being, and therein against the Holy Ghost, under instigation from the pit.

Such being the world’s wickedness, the world’s misery is proof positive of God’s goodness. It is according to the divine order that evil should work its

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own destruction as the prelude to reconstruction. Let the heathen of the dominant orthodoxies rage as they may, and the people their creatures imagine what vain things they will, there is always One who, sitting in the heavens, “rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm” which man has raised for himself, out of evil bringing good: – “Adonai, the Word, the Voice invisible,” He whose symbols are, “Solve, Coagula, Fige;” dissolve, resume, fix; disintegrate, re-integrate, consolidate. He is the “Word for ever written in the heavens;” and “in his two hands are the dual powers of all things, having the potency of both in himself.” And always is the “Bow” of His “Seven Spirits” “set in the clouds” for those who, dwelling on the heights of His holy mount, as spiritual shepherds faithfully watch the flocks of their own pure intuitions. And for them the earth is never really drowned – hopeless as its case may appear, and tremendous as may be the process of its purgation – but only washed and cleansed. For as these know, God is immanent in it. And never was the issue of such deluge more palpable and sure in prospect than now. This is because in the New Interpretation has been given in advance of the catastrophe that which is to control and shape the reconstruction to follow the catastrophe. And “of it will the whole earth be overspread.”