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XXIV.

Event Herein Declared Means Man’s Completion in His

Proper Divine Image, by His Promotion to Spiritual Manhood

            SO FAR from there being any real antecedent improbability against the occurrence of an event such as is herein affirmed, supremely transcendental though its nature be, there are for it historical parallels showing antecedent probability in such kind and degree as to constitute it a moral certainty. So that for those who have with candour and percipience due made intellectual study of the spiritual history of our planet, or who by

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recovery of their own intuitional perceptions and recollections have become cognisant of the world’s remote past and of the true nature of existence, the marvel would be, not the occurrence, but the non-occurrence of an event such as that in question, and this at the very time, in the very manner, and under the very conditions claimed for it. Its failure to occur, and to occur then and thus, would have constituted for them an irregularity as perplexing, as well as disastrous, as the failure of the day to follow the night, of the summer the winter.

            That, therefore, which this Society claims to represent is no crude, superficial, narrow scheme, or vain addition to the multitude of organisations, religious and others, already existent; nor any ephemeral extravagance devised in celebration of a century’s obsequies. It is the recognition, inauguration, and promotion of the crowning stage of a process of evolution which for thousands of years has been in progress, and involves the supreme interests of an entire planet: of a stage, moreover, the entry upon which at the period and under the conditions of Church and world which now are, has been the theme of inspired prophecy, divine revelation and sacred Scripture from the world’s spiritual beginning. For it is the promotion of man to his true, because his spiritual, manhood, by means of his promotion to his true because his spiritual, womanhood, making him in condition that which – as the Bible insists – he is by constitution, an organon of knowledge competent for the comprehension of all truth, and therein to his complete elaboration in his proper divine image. “For Adam is first formed, then Eve.” Because that which is first in the divine intention, is last in the divine manifestation. To say which is to say that it is the establishment of the real and substantial, in place of the nominal and apparent, Church of Christ. For, as only when the individual is twice-born is he really

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born, so only when the Church is twice-born is she really born. And the second coming of Christ, that wherein He “comes in the clouds of heaven” of the Church’s understanding, is the second birth or regeneration of the Church, that which qualifies her to be mother of the new Humanity. Wherefore a regenerated Church means a regenerated World.

            Such is the end to the accomplishment of which the Esoteric Christian Union is dedicated.

            LONDON, Michaelmas, 1892.

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