Índice Geral das Seções Índice da Seção Atual Índice da Obra Anterior: – Prefácio para a Terceira Edição Seguinte: I – Início de Nossas Vidas
(p. xviii)
PREFACE
TO THE FIRST EDITION
OF all records which might have reached
us across the gulfs of time, but have failed to do so, unquestionably the most
precious would be those which contained in detail the history of the
world’s foremost Revelators and Saviours, showing the particulars of
their characters, training, and careers in such wise as would render
intelligible the manner in which, by heeding the divine call and living the
divine life, they came to know the divine doctrine, and were able to minister
to the world’s redemption by supplying its supreme need – the need
for a perfect system of thought and rule of life. In the presence of such
records it would have been impossible to doubt the reality and accessibility of
the world spiritual and celestial, of inspiration and revelation, or to have
fallen into the disastrous misconceptions which in manifold cases have usurped
the place of history, and, by ascribing to the Revelators the divinity which
inspired them and their work, have ministered to the falsification and
degradation of religion. It has been made the essential condition of the
present record of a work which, whether by its derivation, its nature, or its
destined results, is second to none of the kind in view, that it be so ordered
as to preclude the possibility of the like or any other misconceptions.
The
doctrine of the restoration of which this book is the record has already been
for some time before the world, and found wide promulgation and high
acceptance. But the work of the Revelator is of two kinds, being both doctrinal
and experiential or evidential. And the world needs for its full conviction
both classes of knowledge. It must have actual facts as well as abstract truth.
This record of the former is, therefore, the necessary supplement and
complement to the account already made public of the latter.
The
fullness and frankness of this narrative necessarily exceed
(p. xix)
those by which biographies are ordinarily
characterised. As the history, not of a person only, but of a soul, and that a
soul the work of whose latest earth-life was so ordered as to constitute it a
demonstration such as has never before been vouchsafed to our planet, of the
soul’s nature, history, and powers, the rules whereby biographies are
commonly regulated were wholly inapplicable and inadequate. To have observed
them, as by having recourse to suppression or modification in respect of
matters ordinarily deemed too intimate and delicate to be openly disclosed,
would have been fatal to the purpose in view, and caused the chief life related
to have been to such extent lived in vain, both as regards the liver of it and
the world for whose sake it was lived.
The
same justification is pleaded for the outspokenness of the narrative generally
in regard to certain contemporaneous tendencies, schools, institutions,
writings, and persons. Nothing would have been more pleasing to the writer than
to exclude whatever might jar on individual susceptibilities. But the direction
under which he has written allowed of no indulgence of his own preference in
this respect. The judgments pronounced represent no merely human opinion. They
were imparted from the spheres where all things mundane are fully known and
infallibly estimated. And having been imparted for the general good, and not
for the private information of their immediate recipients, the suppression of
them, no matter how praiseworthy the motive, would have constituted an act of
unfaithfulness both to the illuminating influences to whom they were due, and
to the world for whose instruction and correction they were designed.
Conspicuous
among the objects of these remarks is the well-known institution called the
Theosophical Society and its promoters. The time will assuredly come when that
movement will be accounted an important factor in the religious history of our
age, and any light that can be thrown on its origines will be of no
less value than would be such light on the origines of Christianity itself.
E.M.
Índice Geral das Seções Índice da Seção Atual Índice da Obra Anterior: – Prefácio para a Terceira Edição Seguinte: I – Início de Nossas Vidas