Índice Geral das Seções Índice da Seção Atual Índice da Obra Atual Anterior: Seção lX
Passing to the final signification
of the scheme, that with which we are now especially concerned, we find the
Zodiac setting forth both the character and the periods of the great cycles of
man’s religious creation or development, precisely after the manner of the
previous creations. For the constellation Virgo, which contains the figures of
Isis and Ceres, and the tree of generation, indicates man’s earliest worship, –
namely, that of Nature as an all-sufficient mother. In the next, Leo, which
contains a serpent, are represented light and darkness, or good and evil, of the
(p. 573)
difference between which humanity (as individual or as race) becomes cognisant
through the agency of “the woman” in the previous stage. It is only after
passing through several stages, of which each grows necessarily out of its
predecessor, that man attains the full conception of the meaning of existence.
The exaltation of the woman, both within and without him, equally with the man,
as representing two essential constituents of the Divine Existence, constitutes
the final perfection by virtue of which he ascends into the highest heaven of
spiritual bliss. In the constellation Aries, which corresponds to the fourth day
of creation, man learns to recognise the sun, or the “Lamb slain from the
foundation of the world,” and its mate the moon, as at once the instruments of
the light and heat, the energy and love, from which he derives his own
existence. These, on the physical plane of humanity, have their counterparts or
impersonations in Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Deucalion and Pyrrha, Tae-Keih
and Yang (for the Chinese), Protogonos and Æon (for the Phœnicians), and their
children Genos and Genea, all of whom are but types of man and woman on the
physical plane of the consciousness. The spiritual signification of this sign
finds its fulfilment in
(p. 574)
humanity taken up into Deity, as in Osiris
and Isis, Christ and Mary, and finally in the taking up of all humanity, by
means of “the same spirit,” which is ever, as the history of the world shows,
seeking to incarnate itself in Nature at large, in order to make of it a fitting
body for itself. And this is no other than the perfect human because perfect
Divine soul we know, or rather do not know, as “Christ,” the soul of which every
people in the world, “from China to Peru,” has had an intuition; and which found
its most perfect expression in Israel only to be rejected and judicially
murdered, and which is now seeking to find its full expression in and be found
of England, in order that it may at length be manifested to the world for its
final redemption from the dominion of “the Beast.”
Of that “Beast”
(p. 575)
Reformation has been tried and found wanting.
Hence the sentence bas gone forth, – “Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?”
“Sith thou hast not hated blood, even blood shall pursue thee,” unless it repent
in time and recognise the whole Christ.
Aries is the constellation which,
by being in the ascendant during. The later period of Egyptian history, gave its
name to the period, and dictated the nature of the sacrifices of the various
religions. It was in honour of the sun in Aries that the Egyptian sun-god Horus,
and the Hebrew deliverer Moses, were represented as having horns; as Michael
Angelo seems to have comprehended when he represented Moses thus decorated. When
the sun was in the previous sign, Taurus, the Bull was every-where the principal
object of worship. The selection of certain animals to be held sacred arose from
the fact that they represented the signs of the Zodiac through which the sun
passed on his daily, yearly, and periodical tour of beneficence. Taurus
represents an earlier stage in both the physical and the spiritual development
of creation. It is the sign of the third day of Genesis, that of the earth’s
fertilisation and cultivation, by the procreative powers of Nature, as
represented by the Bull or Ox.
(p. 576)
We in
(p. 577)
humanity, which we have so long worshipped in
the Bible and in Christ without having the least notion of what we were doing;
but doing it by compulsion of the same divine instinct which has governed the
whole course of creation from the moment that it first issued from the Divine
Mind. It is the religious consciousness of
The termination of the fourth day
of Genesis,
(p. 578)
in the appearance of the sun and moon, which
were thenceforth to play the chief part in the work of existence, corresponds on
the spiritual plane with man’s recognition of the existence of the soul as the
sun, centre, and true self of himself and of all things, – the soul and
universal Ego. The revelation of the sun was the revelation
of the moon also. In them the skies presented man with “two witnesses” to the
duality of the Divine Existence ever in correspondence with those that he had in
his own nature. With the great doctrine thus attested, it could only have been
by the most strenuous exertions that the “serpent” succeeded in closing man’s
eyes to the truth. Thick indeed must have been the pall of blood drawn across
the heavens to shut out the sight of the sun of the true life! Yet so
effectually has the serpent done its work that it is not the “babes and
sucklings,” but the learned and mighty, the powers of this lower world, its
priests of religion and science, philosophy and art, who have been the foremost
to declare that
earth and flesh are all, and that there is no
sun, no God, within or above us; and it is only because they have found that man
would and must have a God, simply because he was made by God in his own image,
that they have given him
(p. 579)
substitutes of their own fabrication, and
said to him, – “If you are such a fool as to have a religious sense, and to
insist on worshipping something, worship us and the things we put before you;
not an imaginary sun or soul, but something tangible, something that you can see
and feel, and touch and taste, and hear and smell. Sense is all. Its only
antithesis is nonsense. There is no Life, or we should have found it out long
ago with our chemical and mechanical tests. Worship death, and its symbol,
blood.”
The fifth day, Pisces, has a
correspondence to the season of the flooding of the
This day also has a spiritual
significance for us. It witnessed the full manifestation of Him who, as a second
Noah, was the son of a carpenter, and built himself an ark of refuge for the
soul of man when threatened, as it now is once
(p. 580)
more after another cycle of two thousand
years, again to be overwhelmed by the deluge of unbelief and unreason. We, like
Noah, like
The period we are entering will
see the completion and fulfilment of the work of the fourth and fifth days. We
have had with us the revelation of the two divine witnesses, the sun and moon,
the man and woman, the light and dark races of humanity. But, owing to our
absorption in the things of sense, we have not recognised their spiritual
significance. The very anxiety shown about their souls by those not dead, has
been a sin. For it has been such as to show that they had no real faith in the
goodness of the Divine Existence. What would a father think of his children if
they manifested so little trust in his goodness as to be always besieging him
with entreaties for the necessaries of life, and seeking to win his favour by
all sorts of petty bribes and self-mortifications? Would he not rightly be
disgusted, and bid them to set about their proper tasks, and leave him to do
what was best for their sustenance, and assure them that he only wanted their
love and obedience, and that all the rest was a proof of unbelief in him? And
supposing one of
(p. 581)
them had offended him, and was longing to be
forgiven and received back into favour, what would the father think of an
estimate of his goodness that could prompt his child to go and kill one of its
animal pets, – to say nothing of one of its brethren, – and then come and offer
its blood as an atonement for its own fault? Would not the father be rightly
indignant at such utter failure to recognise his justice and tenderness?
The fifth day has passed. The
religion of the Fisherman has conquered; and sailing in the “ship of
Grace” we have peopled the waters. We have endured also the reign of “the
man-child,” with his “rod of iron;” and have witnessed the elevation of the
dragon to a height it has never before attained. Once more the only hope for man
is by a new outpouring of the Spirit and a new incarnation in the flesh. This
time humanity must fight under the banner of a whole soul. Man has learnt by his
past failures that it is not good for man to be alone. The sun must summon the
moon to his aid against the spirits of night. The true marriage must be
consummated. The serpent has already shown its enmity to the woman when under
its influence in the sign of Virgo. It has bruised more than her
heel. It is as bad for woman to be alone as for man; and the
(p. 582)
head is apt to be filled with morbid fancies.
Celibacy is the parent of all diseases. Nature will not be cheated. Repressed in
a healthy direction, it will find vent in an unhealthy one. The serpent knew
well what he was about when by the device of the “immaculate conception” he
degraded love as impure, and exalted asceticism.
But the serpent knows that the
woman is in her turn destined to “bruise his head.” Woman must yet find her mate
in man, as her prototype Nature finds her mate in God. The first five days of
creation may see her under the harrow of man as priest and master; but man
himself has, if possible, been the greater sufferer through the suppression of
the feminine attributes of existence. The sixth day will see woman also taken
up, and humanity at length comprehending what is the full meaning of being “made
in the image of God, male and female.”
The serpent sees that that time
must come, and sets himself to avert the calamity. Looking round for allies, he
is dismayed to find that his ancient and trusty ministers, the priests, have
failed him. True, they are zealous as ever, as is shown by the frantic efforts
with which they respond to his call. All the old arms are taken out and
refurbished. Every device whereby
(p. 583)
woman has been kept in the toils of
sacerdotalism is reset. Pilgrimages, ritualistic observances, sacraments
innumerable, all are exhibited with fresh and brilliant adornments; but for the
most part in vain. Woman, following the man, has ceased to believe. The
serpentin despair throws his old allies overboard, and turns h is attention to
new ones; even those raw recruits of science whom he has in anticipation been of
late drilling for his service. An idea strikes him. Yes, the woman shall indeed
join the man. He cannot prevent that. But not as woman. “Her desire shall” as
ever “be to the man,” but the man when he has got her shall find that she is no
woman, but only a harder and inferior sort of man.
The rod of iron that under the
rule of the man-child entered into man’s soul, has entered into woman’s also.
She too has ceased to believe. She has abandoned her intuition. No longer of or
at man’s side to infuse into him her own loving spirit, she is beside him to
encourage, if not to take part in, all the devices whereby he manifests the
brutal side of his nature. She looks on approvingly at, sometimes even shares,
his bloody sports; and eagerly partakes his mangled spoils. She shrinks not from
defiling herself by contact with the revolting barbarities of the
(p. 584)
shambles. And though withdrawing the devotion
which in her age of faith she bestowed on the priest and his sanguinary
doctrine, she but transfers the observance to the home, where she constitutes
herself the chief patron of the doctor whose hands are reeking with the blood of
innocents whom he has just been torturing for the pretended benefit of herself
and her children. Fortunate serpent, to have lighted upon such a de vice for
compassing bitterest disappointment for the sweet soul of humanity! After all
that the “Lamb” has done to make his bride ready for the marriage supper, in no
array of “fine linen white and clean,” the linen of “the righteousness of the
saints,” does she come to him; but in a “vesture dipped in blood;” no “king’s
daughter all glorious within,” but a carnivorous beast!
That the” Woman’s Movement” has
not suffered utter shipwreck, is not for lack of the serpent’s wiles. Once more
has Eve been sorely tempted to claim the initiative. Womanhood has narrowly
escaped being misrepresented by women, who by renouncing womanhood have
well-nigh turned themselves into men. But as at every other turn the serpent has
been foiled, so here also woman has in some measure been true to herself. The
work of the sixth day shall be completed, and
(p. 585)
with its predecessors shall by the soul, or Eloim, of the planet, be pronounced “very good.”
That there ‘may be no error
respecting the nature of the “serpent,” it must be here said that evil is not an
entity in the sense in which good is an entity. We have seen that opposites or
contrasts are necessary to perception. There must be darkness, or we cannot
recognise light. Similarly there must be evil, or we should not be conscious of
good. There must be a “devil,” or the soul could have no conception of God. But
the “devil” represents in himself no absolute existence. There is but one
Absolute Existence in the universe, and that is God. God is, as declared alike
in the Hindoo, Persian, Egyptian, and Hebrew “revelations,” the Ego, sole and universal: the one
Positive Existence; the great “I Am” that includes all Egos whatsoever. But it is necessary
for the purpose of his self-manifestation to differentiate himself into
opposites. Essentially all is God, and cannot by any possibility be otherwise.
It was therefore necessary for God to fabricate as it were a no-god, to act the part of an opposite to
and contrast with himself. Evil then is, so far as God is concerned, but as’
darkness is to light. It represents its negation. That the negative has in
respect to evil become
(p. 586)
a positive, is due to the fact that in a
universe in which a living God is all and in all, it is impossible for death to
subsist. What we call death is change from one sphere or mode of being to
another. That anything should die and become unconscious in the ordinary sense
of the terms, a sense invented by orthodoxy, is absolutely impossible and
inconceivable. We cannot conceive of existence as a whole ceasing to be. The
perpetuity of the whole involves that of the parts. Life, then, being inherent
in existence, and God being the source of healthy existence, it follows that the
transference of life from the light to the shadow of God, from the place where
He manifests himself as God to that where He manifests himself as no-god, signifies the manifestation of
that life as individual consciousnesses bearing the same relation to good that
darkness bears to light. All spiritual beings are free to choose between the
contrasted opposites of the Divine Existence. If, following their natural
intuition, they make the light of the Divine Presence their abode, they grow up
children of light; and let what may occur to them outwardly, they have “no
darkness ‘in their dwellings,” but “their whole body is full of light.”
Recognising the substantial identity of their own
Ego with the universal Ego, they are
(p. 587)
one with God, and know no will but his will.
If, on the contrary, they abandon the natural and primary intuition of the
essential soul for the artificial and secondary reason of the outer senses, they
move from the light of God’s presence as God, into the shade of his presence as
no-god; where, by virtue of their indestructibility, they still continue to
subsist and to develop, building themselves up into a structure corresponding to
the medium they have chosen to be their habitat. That is, they create a world of
darkness corresponding exactly to the world of light, in that it represents the
conversion of positive good into positive evil, of the spiritual sun into a
material sun, of intuition into reason, of God into the devil. For by reason
that existence is personal it is inherently monarchical. And the same
consciousness of a higher being that constitutes for the healthy soul the
aspiration towards God, constitutes for the morbid soul an aspiration towards
God’s opposite. The “devil” is thus a necessary result of the conditions. The
children of the darkness of mere reason, will have a leader, just as men will
have a leader, even though it be only the impulse of their own lower nature. To
lead and be followed makes existence more. No place, thus waiting to be filled,
can
(p. 588)
long remain empty; and so the “devil” appears
as the product of reason, precisely as the recognition of God is the product of
intuition. The very demons of the pit of darkness thus bear witness to the
necessary existence of God. Abandoning the true God, they find themselves
compelled to make a false one. Turning their backs upon the sun, they have to
use an artificial light. The poet expressed the truth as nearly as words could
when he made the fiend say to “Festus,”
“I am the shadow which Creation casts
From God’s own throne.”
The shadow is no bad thing in
itself. Only those things which persist in growing up under it are noxious and
deadly. The fact that this is so in the spiritual world suggests a useful
thought for the benefit of the physical world. Just as the diet healthy for the
soul is that which is permeated by the intuition of God, so is the diet most
suitable for the body of the perfect humanity that which grows and ripens in the
sunshine. Roots and herbs may sustain the lower nature. Man’s mouth is not
placed close to the ground that he may subsist wholly on them. He walks erect,
with a face turned upwards to behold the skies whence he has origin, even the
sun.
(p. 589)
above him, at once physical and spiritual.
And his healthy, because natural, diet consists of the seeds and fruits which
grow above the ground, within his reach as he walks along, and to be gathered without stooping.
These the bounteous Mother prepares and sheds for us when fitted for our use by
the elimination from them of every particle of fibrous and innutritious
substance, shed too in such abundance that, if not used by us, they he on the
ground to rot. Ah, there is no discord in Nature, if only we seek aright for her
harmonies. No single pang does she willingly inflict on her children. All that
they suffer, no matter of what kind, even earthquake, famine, tempest, and
death, would either have no place or would be converted into sources of positive
happiness, if only we would return into harmony with her. She is the body that
He hath prepared for the soul, which, when Nature was ready, said, – “Lo, I come
to do thy will, O God, “ by animating that body with a life higher than its own
original life. Of this body of God the
blood corpuscles are free and conscious beings. Life is of many grades; but to assume of the
warm-blooded animals that they and we are not brethren, is to expose ourselves
to the liability of eating our own kith and kin, The
(p. 590)
earth affords of her own lower consciousness
ample sustenance wholly beyond doubt, in the vegetable, perhaps also in many of
the fishy tribes. If, as seems probable, the blood is not only the life, but
also is the higher life, the warm-blooded animal has capacity for spiritual
development, however low it may be now, which unfits it to be food. The soul
once infused, though rudimentary now, is eternal. The difference between animals
and men is but one of degree. In many men the soul is absolutely inert. This,
however, seems to be necessarily true. As is the stage of development of the
individual soul, so is the bodily form in which it is incarnated. Soul and body
are co-products of the sun and the earth, of God and Nature. They are mediums
chosen and anointed for the full revelation in process of time of God in the
flesh. Everything that partakes the higher life shall in the flesh at length
“see God.” “A body hast thou prepared.” But the living blood corpuscles of the
same divine circulation must not eat and devour one another. To do that is
suicidal to their own souls. True, they cannot die. But they can convert
positive good into positive evil. From being “saints” in the Divine economy,
they can make themselves “devils.” No; the Mother that produces, she can sustain
us. Her own creatures
(p. 591)
of the vegetable kingdom, stationary and
locomotive,
which indicate their nature by their temperature and nervous organisation,
constitute the diet on which alone man can be fully man, on which alone humanity
can so build itself up that it can become “a temple of the living God,” having
the spirit dwelling in it. In speaking thus, I speak that which my own
intuition, reason, and experience have combined to teach me, in addition to that
which I have found in the Gospels of Moses, Pythagoras, Buddha, and Christ. It
is because Nature is perfect that she requires no pang for the support of the
healthy life. She has domains of being in which existence can be enjoyed without
its cessation involving what we call pain. And it is from these that she gives
us for food. The carnivora are a degeneration due to the same spiritual
influences whereby man is induced to yield to his lower nature against the
promptings of his higher. It is through man that those influences have passed
downward into man’s earlier stages, the animals. When man suffers himself to be
redeemed, all Nature will be redeemed in him. “The lion shall eat straw like the
bullock,” and with the reign of perfect purity in man will all noxious forms of
life disappear.
It is but another of the
devices of “the Beast”
(p. 592)
to represent perfection as appertaining only
to an existence which, in being spiritual, is regarded by most men as unreal. As
if the flesh could be necessarily evil and the spirit necessarily good, when we
find that there are beings wholly spirit who are evil, and men not wholly spirit
who are good! The whole aim of the Gospels of the world’s Saviour was to
commence the work of redemption with man. He was seen to be the pivot on which
the character of existence turned. His perfection secured, that of all the rest
would follow. Moses, Pythagoras, and Buddha sought to effect by means mostly
physical that which Christ sought to effect by means mostly spiritual. They
worked from below upwards; He worked from above downwards. To the same end
worked Spinoza, Berkeley, and Hegel, in the sphere of pure intellect. But the
end of them all was the same, – namely, the building up of humanity into a
perfect temple for the abode of the Divine spirit, the making of Nature a pure
body for its proper soul, first of the system, then of the Universe. The
conflict between the saviour and serpent may thus be summed up: – while the
former seeks to turn all creatures into frugivora, the latter seeks to turn all
into carnivora. How hard the orthodoxies work on this latter behalf!
(p. 593)
Students have wearied themselves
in conjectures respecting the meaning of the chief symbols of Buddhism. Of these
is one which is called the Chakra, or wheel of the Divine law. Respecting this,
and the tree and the serpent, which in Buddhism play as conspicuous a part as do
the tree, the serpent, and the cross in Christianity, the most successful and
intelligent of all explorers in this direction is M. Senart. “While he has
obtained a key to the outward interpretation of some of his numerous facts, he
has failed wholly to discern their inner and true meaning, and has moreover
repeated the mistake of Dupuis, in regarding the history of the Typical Man as a
mere solar myth. The serpent was for Buddha what it is for all other religions,
– at once the beneficent serpent of eternal generation, and the malignant
serpent of darkness and sense. The tree was what it was in
(p. 594)
because the Oriental orthodoxies, flesh-fed
and gross, were, like all others, unable to conceive of spirit apart from
matter, of the ideal apart from the phenomenal, that they represented the
spiritual perfection of Buddha as annihilation, interpreting no thing to signify nothing, even as certain other orthodox
bunglers have done. His final absorption into God was no other than was
signified by the Christian “heaven,” when, the phenomenal done with, the
perfected individual soul should return and become reincorporated with the
universal Parent Soul, even as a son returns from his world-experiences to his
father’s house, with his consciousness heightened and his character perfected by
the things which he has suffered, not to lose his individuality, but by
retaining it to contribute to the higher satisfaction of that of the whole.
Buddha was for
(p. 595)
has always been an axiom that only God can
see and know God. Hence the satisfaction of the human consciousness on finding
that it has attained proof in one of its sons. The identity of the religious
idea in
The earth, properly, knows no soul
save that which it has received from the sun; and the sun must be justified of
all his children. Buddha represented a special vitalisation to that end.
Assuredly we do not regard the sun as he deserves of us. Substituting the
mechanical mode for the spiritual essence, we lose the beauty and significance
of existence. To the sun we owe colour. Who now regards colour with any but a
mechanical eye? Let us try to make existence larger and richer, by looking at it
with the spiritual eye. Since the world is a living and not a dead world, they
must mean something, these various glories of colour. Our Eastern question is,
in a measure, a question of colour. In white we have the presence of all colour,
Light purity, and innocence. In black we have the absence of all colour, and the
spiritual counterpart. In the green of earth
(p. 596)
and spring we have hope, fortitude,
endurance, resurrection. In the blue, of heaven, fidelity, purity, constancy,
faith, and trust. In the red, of blood, heart, heat, love, intensity of life. In
the violet, colour in which the painters who knew because they were Pantheists
and believed in existence, loved to clothe the Madonna, we have red combined
with blue, to signify earnest longing and aspiration, mingled with tenderness
and purity; a world exalted through humility, saved by forgiveness. Thus does
the trinity of the divine graces – Hope, Faith, and Charity – find its
corresponding expression in the familiar green, blue, and red, which we so often
gaze upon without in the least perceiving it.
What shall we say of yellow?
Yellow signifies, as some say, insincerity, falsehood. Yes; there is a yellow
that signifies those odious things. But not the true yellow: not the yellow that
is allied to the warm colouring of the heart’s blood. It is the pale, washed-out
yellow that suggests evil; self-will without heart. The warm, rich golden
yellow, colour ever given to the hair of the impulsive Magdalen, is also the
colour of the Sun when, as if in love, he nears the earth to woo it for his
bride; and pillowing his chin upon the wave, looks like God’s own head, rising
or sinking in love to rest from his work of
(p. 597)
creation or redemption. Yes; yellow is the
warm and shining one of the skies, arbiter of life and death, or “judge of quick
and dead;” at once giver of life and avenger of wrong, even as the name of the
first prophet signified, who in his noble but impetuous indignation slew the
first murderer. For Cain, name so long and so
characteristically banned by sacerdotalism, signifies the shining one. In Cain the sun-god slew his
libeller, the false priest. Yellow is the colour of the royal metal, the symbol
of the sun and token of perfection attained in the kingdom of the metals, even
gold. Among fruits and flowers also has the divine orb stamped the image of
himself, as in the orange, whose periods of ripening are his own solstices of
winter and summer; and in the gorgeous sunflower, whose very lack of shade of
leaves makes it but the more fitting symbol of its great prototype.
Need I say that the whole
significance of the search for the philosopher’s stone, that Sangrail of the
alchemists, was but the search for the secret of perfection whereby all baser
metals might be converted into gold, even as by the influences of the spiritual
sun all men might be converted to the perfection of God? Chemistry in its first
inception was not the dead mechanical thing it is now; it was a confession of
Pantheism.
(p. 598)
For it represented the conviction that the
same Divine incorruptible spirit is in all things; and that could the process of
conversion be discovered, all metals could be converted into gold, and into the
image of the sun and of God thereby. It was for this end that the alchemists
devoted themselves to the search for the magic stone, as rarely have Christians
devoted themselves to the search for God and for salvation. Science for them was
but a branch of theology. They knew that to work the miracle at which they
aimed, the worker must himself be unblemished as the true priest. Hence the
first condition of success for the alchemists was perfect purity of life. Theirs
were all the old sacraments of perfection, just as they had been among the
initiated of the ancient religious mysteries, and just as they have been for the
same class in the Christian mysteries. The idea of the alchemists was that of
the regeneration of the baser metals by their conversion through the new birth
of a higher life into gold. And the first fortress of the enemy that required to
be razed, was the fortress of their own self-will. The first essential of the
true scientist was sympathetic self-sacrifice.
What gold is to the metals, the
diamond is to stones, – the perfect Adam, as the name and
(p. 599)
nature import; diamond, adamant, or Adam;
perfect in purity and temper.
The golden yellow has a yet higher
destiny in the scheme of the Divine Existence. Colour of the sun, it is the
colour also of “the sons of God.” Here we come upon the problem of the “Black
Madonna.” The idea was that the “daughters of men,” the dark races, were also
the first races of humanity. And the Black Madonna represents Mother Nature and
her offspring, ere by the appearance of the sun at the close of the fourth day,
she was wooed and won to fairer and higher destiny. Thenceforth she bore sons of
God as well as daughters of men: – even those two halves of humanity whom,
rarely very happily wedded, the envious serpent is determined now to mate a
final effort to sunder wholly in the persons of Aryan England and Semitic
Moslem. He has known that the solar races, the yellow-haired and light-skinned,
hare from the foundation of the world, as children of the sun, been destined to
redeem to the spirit of the sun the children of this world; and that the period
that should see humanity at length recognise its true character as made in the
image of God, is now at hand, and that his time is becoming short.
(p. 600)
Anciently the seasons of the year
were counted as two, summer and winter. The world itself of humanity has two
divisions to correspond, the rule of the dark and the rule of the light races of
men. The former represents the rule of Nature with merely an instinct of God; of
the “daughters of men” prior to the advent of reason by contact with the “sons
of God.” Thus the full summer of humanity is still to be realised. It will be
the mission of the white or solar races to redeem the earth by the infusion of
the spirit they have derived from their Divine Parent. Not that either race will
rule exclusively. Henceforth they are, like the two sexes of humanity, as
masculine and feminine to each other. It is against the realisation of the
world’s spiritual summer, that the serpent of winter is now arraying himself in
the person of
Everywhere apparent is the
consistency of existence with regard to the manifestation of the Divine
attributes. An illustration is afforded by the flame. Holding a match above it,
the fire is seen to descend to the match, instead of lighting
(p. 601)
it from below. The fire descends from heaven
towards the object, and that which arises to meet the yellow divinity is the
violet hue of sympathetic Nature. Even in the flames of the fire do we see
typified the necessary union between the sons of God and daughters of men.
Thus does it appear that from the
beginning there has been one God and one Christ; one religion and one humanity;
one enemy to the soul of man, and one mode of salvation. And while it is at
length made manifest that there is one existence to be worshipped, and one mode
of worshipping it, it is also at length made manifest that there is no
invincible obstacle between the union of the soul of humanity with the whole
body of humanity, so that all may be one in the same faith, and worship of the
same existence; inasmuch as the souls of the nations are not many souls but one
soul, and the bodies of the peoples are not many bodies, but one body; seeing
that He hath both “made of one blood” and saved by one blood, even the blood of
the self-sacrifice of the perfect, “all nations of men.” It is the vision of a
humanity thus united and thus perfected, and not of a humanity the product of
anger, bate, selfishness, and the blood of others, that has filled with ecstasy
every prophet and redeemer in whom the common consciousness of
(p. 602)
our planet and race has found full utterance.
The Sangrail is indeed the blood of the atonement, not as propounded by
Caiaphas, but as made by humanity itself in its redeeming “sun-gods.” Their
deaths have proved that man had it in him to be faithful to his intuition of God
and the soul unto death. And they who have accepted the doctrine in this sense,
have for their ‘faith in the perfection of the Divine Existence been allowed to
see the full vision of that ideal which humanity is some day to realise in the
flesh.
Let us illustrate this by a recent
example. To say that the seers and redeemers have one and all beheld the same
vision of perfection, is not to say that they have seen it in the same degree of
perfection. Some have seen it as through a glass darkly; some as it were in
patches of blue through gaps in the clouds of sense; and for some the
intervening mists and clouds have been rolled back like a scroll, disclosing to
their view the whole fair face of the true heaven of the ideal. They have seen
and not been blinded. The very loss of outward sight, as in Homer and Milton,
has but ministered to the fulness of their spiritual vision; showing that man
needs but to have the eyes brought to a focus on his inner self, in order to
(p. 603)
see that which is real without him. AU souls
have the same nature and the same history, and every individual soul is to the
universal soul, as the sun seeming is to the sun being. Reading the soul, even his own,
man knows all souls, even God and the world. The soul is spirit individualised.
Spirit is the basis of existence. Existence is homogeneous. To know a portion of
the spirit is to know all spirit, to know all existence. To know one self is to
know God, and man and the world also. Such knowledge comes only of the full
vision of every pair of eyes in our nature. Humanity can see only by means of
both the man’s and the woman’s eyes, with the reason and the imagination, with
the head and the heart. This is the meaning of intuition. Looking within, man
sees the spirit of which the world is the manifestation to sense. The orthodox,
because merely materialist, scientist denying the life, fancies that its
mysteries can be found through the gates of death, a death not of his own lower
self! Hence the ministers of science have become priests of blood. As if they
who, having no spiritual life of their own, start with the negation of that of
which they are in search, could rationally expect to discern the life of the
universe! When physiology renounces the
(p. 604)
practice of torture, it may discover that man
has a heart as well as a brain, and is a dual being. I commend the suggestion to
Professor Ferrier and his kind; also to those students who are trying to
learn even the rudiments of anatomy on
living subjects; especially to those of them who – for there are
such – are,
if only anatomically, women.
But to our illustration. Again it
is a man and a book. The true man, be whose every work represents the actual
stage of his own spiritual history, cannot write that which he does not see and
feel in himself. Whatever he finds to be essentially true of himself, is true of
all existence. The individual is the microcosm in which the macrocosm is
repeated. The macrocosm repeats itself by generating its own kind. The history
of a soul is the history at once of the system of sun and stars, and of the
foetus in the womb. For all life is one, though on different planes. The day and
the year repeat themselves in the individual. The true man’s work, if an actual
expression of his own interior history, will show the spring and morning of
birth initiation and promise; the summer and noon of conflict, achievement, and
triumph; the autumn and evening of reflection and content; and the winter and
night of declining regard for the past, and
(p. 605)
increasing solicitude and preparation for the
future. Declining, failing, and failing, such an one will ever arise again; and
his rising shall be on a higher plane, with fuller powers to a more abundant
existence.
All planes of existence find their
symbol in the Zodiacal planisphere. At once a sphere, a vortex-ring, and a
spiral, it is the history of the soul in all stages of its manifestation in the
individual, from its first projection outwards to its final return. Hence it is
that the first stage in which the divine idea takes visible form is that of a
fluid mass, nebulous, opaque, and apparently unorganised. The various religions,
whether of the individual or of the race, represent different “days” in the
creation of the consciousness. In the first stage the “spirit of God moves” by
reason of its divine energy and love, its male and its female qualities, “upon
the face of the waters.” In the last, the system has attained its full
perfection. Sun and moon, head and heart, God’s two witnesses, have appeared in
the full harmony of a perfect marriage; and earth is rich with an abundant life,
product of the union. Such a “divine child” is the “Christ.” At first worshipped
as a man and a person, he is found later to be a spiritual influence, at once
(p. 606)
single, dual, and triune, of which the two
halves of humanity represent the two modes of operation. He, the perfect idea
After which man has been constructed, finally becomes fully realised, first in
the individual, then in the race.
The development of the
consciousness, whether it be that of an individual or of a race, of a religion
or of a system, is accompanied by, nay consists in, its accomplishment of the
passage from the outer to the inner of the concentric circles of which its
substance consists, and thence to the centre, or God. That is
self-consciousness. From the stand-point of any circle can be discerned only
that which lies without. Those within are still opaque. Reaching the centre, all
becomes lucid and translucent, “full of light.” The system is then seen from the
central sun, and its order and harmony fully discerned. It is no matter at what
stage or on which circle one stands at any given time of one’s development. All
that matters is, whether one is alive. If alive, one moves. Motion involves
life. No matter about the direction at first, more than about an infants
direction. The thing is to be able to stand erect and walk. Patience and
perseverance, and a healthy regimen, will do the rest. No matter how awkward and
devious the early attempts. Every effort
(p. 607)
develops power. The larger the capacity of
the individual system, the greater its possibilities of perfection. The longer
also the process, and the more catastrophic the cataclysms by which its journey
towards its final perfection will be marked. A happy prospect for
The book to which I refer is
illustrative of such a process. It represents the determined effort of a highly
vitalised soul to “work out its own salvation,” in the way appointed to all
souls, by penetrating its outer crusts of sense and intellect, and so getting to
its true inner and central self and sun. The writer followed the ordinary
scientific method. He went round and round the circle on which he found himself,
seeking for an opening by which he could get to one yet nearer what he felt to
be his true centre. That he failed to find such an opening was due to the very
causes that make science itself thus far a failure. It involved that also which
lies at the root of all evil, illhealth proceeding from dyspepsia, – in this
case a mental dyspepsia. He gathered a larger number of facts than he had power
to vitalise. Lord Amberley’s bequest to the world of the planisphere of his
soul’s creation and redemption, represented the mistake which every true man is
(p. 608)
bound to make over and over again until he
finds out that it is a mistake, that of thinking that the fuel vitalises the
fire, regardless of the liability of the fire to be choked by it. Had he made a
light meal, as it were, of a single dish of fact, and digested and assimilated
that perfectly ere taking another, he would have got from it the nourishment
which it contained. His mind would have appropriated the idea. Doing this, and
giving the idea time to assimilate itself to his own mind, and so to feed the
flame of his soul, he would have found that in the strength of that meat he
could perform the whole journey of existence, until he found himself landed safe
and sound at the very portal of one of the many mansions of the Father’s house.
Every idea is a fruit dropped from the tree of the eternal existence. It
contains at once the soul’s best food, and the germ of a new life. It is the
tree in small, the microcosm of the infinite whole. Lamenting with varied
feelings his early departure, people say, “Poor Lord Amberley!” Few are there
now in those “mansions” who enjoy more intensely than he and his the vision of
the ideal now at length fully revealed to their longing gaze. Faithful to their
intuitions unto death, theirs is now the crown of life. Yet while h ere they had
reached only the stage in
(p. 609)
which, while they could plainly discern the
discords of the great music, its harmonies were so little suspected that they
were inclined to disbelieve in their existence. Theirs, however, were the only
ears that can hear the harmonies. For they were the ears, so rare nowadays, that
could detect the discords. The power to hear the harmonies comes at length to
one and to all, if only we labour and do not faint, if only we trust the
intuition that tells us there is a truth and a perfection; that the truth and
perfection are worth the attainment, and that their attainment is possible; and
if only moreover we adopt the means implied in the injunction, “Pray without
ceasing;” not merely as priests interpret prayer, – namely, as something they
may be paid to do for us; nor as morbid ascetics interpret it, – namely, as
begging in place of working; but by regarding as prayer whatever, being
legitimate, tends to the end in question, believing that laborare est
orare.
There is a doctrine which, one of
the most catholic though it be, is both damnable and damning. It is the
doctrine, never so prevalent as now, that the “evils” of this life are due to
defect in the nature either of the Creator or of the creature. Wholly incapable
of reduction to
(p. 610)
intelligent comprehension by any analysis
whatever, this proposition constitutes for the “devil’s” creed a leading dogma. That is, it must be received or
rejected at sight by the consciousness apart from the reason. A dogma when true,
requires for its reception only that the consciousness be a healthy and fairly
developed one. When false, its reception constitutes an infallible indication
that the consciousness that receives it is a morbid one. Seeing that this dogma
is received, and never so widely as now, it follows either that men are widely
diseased; or that God, or existence, is evil. What I wish to suggest is that,
finding ourselves placed between two propositions of which, while one is known
to contain at least a very considerable proportion of truth, the other is wholly
inconceivable, the plainly rational method would consist in submitting first to
an exhaustive analysis the more manageable and probable of the two propositions.
Doing this we should find ourselves considering, not only the question of the
respective natures of the Creator and the creature; but also of the probable
intention of the Creator in making the creature, and the degree moreover in
which the creature had, so far as in him lay, done his best to fulfil that
intention by pursuing a mode of
(p. 611)
life calculated to enable him to fulfil it.
Doing this we should, it seems to me, find that this would happen. So far from
concluding that we fulfil in any degree the intention of the Creator, as plainly
expressed in the laws or conditions of our well-being, we should find that we
had not only not discerned the nature either of the Creator or of ourselves, or
of his intentions with regard to us; but we should find that we had, without any
call or necessity whatever, adopted a mode of living which absolutely
incapacitates us physically, intellectually, morally, and spiritually from
obtaining the smallest insight concerning the nature either of the Creator or of
the creature, or of the end for which we were created.
The fact is, we have allowed the
scientists to do for us in regard to our view of the physical world exactly what
the sacerdotalists have done with regard to the spiritual. Both classes alike
have formed their diagnosis of the healthy from the morbid subject. And as no
healthy subject submits to the inspection either of doctor or of priest, they
have had but diseased subjects upon which to experiment. The consequence is that
they have hastily assumed that there is nowhere such a thing as a healthy
subject, not even in the
(p. 612)
Divine idea. And with all that positiveness
of assertion which ordinarily characterises a total absence of thought, they
infer that man being bad, God likewise must be bad. Enough has been said in this
book to indicate that which, in common with every real and practical student of
the question from the beginning of time, I hold to be the cause of the world’s
evils, no matter of what kind, or on what plane of his consciousness. And I say,
that so far as all reason, intuition, and that third person of the holy trinity
of existence, experience, go, it is absolutely certain that not only is the
nature of the Creator not in fault, but that neither is the nature of the
creature in fault. But that we simply spoil the world and existence for
ourselves and each other by our ignorant and brutal mode of sustaining our
lives. And I say with the most absolute confidence, that no man has a right to
pretend to know anything whatever about the nature either of the Creator or of
the creature, until he has by a long, persistent, and rigidly conscientious
experience of the pure and innocent regime natural to man, qualified himself for
forming an opinion in the matter. As men live now, they have not in any degree
approaching its natural perfection, any one faculty that they would have if
(p. 613)
they lived in the way I am indicating.
Physique, mind, and character alike are removed by an absolute interval below
the perfection of which they are capable. And not only would a complete
reformation in’ this respect constitute an absolute remedy for all our evils,
individual and religious, but it would do so for our evils political and social,
at home and abroad, in all questions, from those of population and food-supply,
to questions of foreign policy. The great, primary, and absolutely certain fact
to be borne in mind, is the fact that man cannot by any possibility subject any
region of his nature to the unnatural diet of blood, without depraving every
region of his nature, and that in respect to its every function. Sacerdotalism,
or the exaltation of a sanguinary doctrine and ritual, has sustained itself in
the world solely by means of its suppression of this cardinal truth.
As members of the great Aryan
race, we attained our preeminence by means of the superiority of our diet. We
carne from countries where, by reason of the severity of the climate, life was
harder than in the tropic; and where Nature, with the infinite wisdom and
kindness manifested in her every act, adapted her vegetable products to the
requirements of her
(p. 614)
children; giving in place of the cooling
fruits of the torrid, the beat-producing cereals of the temperate zone. Changing
its diet under seductions at once sacerdotal and devilish, the Aryan race has
gradually and steadily sunk from its ancient perfection of mind and body, until
it has come that, so far from aspiring to fulfil its original destiny by being
the earth’s redeemer from evil and wrong of every kind, and the restorer to man
of the paradise he has forfeited, it is setting down into the lowest forms of
selfishness and sensuality, and even erecting into a religion and a worship,
principles and practices which are absolutely incompatible, not only with
happiness but with existence itself.
There is one of the senses to
which, thus far, sufficient justice has not been done in this book. We have gone
mainly by sight, intellectual or intuitional. Let us rest our eyes, and
endeavour to go a little way by sound.
It has been ascertained that the
force of the sun’s attraction is inversely as the square of the distance. From
this it follows that a planet at half the distance of another planet from the
sun is acted on by quadruple its gravity. A musical chord, double the length of
another, must be
(p. 615)
stretched with quadruple force to make it
sound the same note. It follows from this that, if such chords were extended
from the sun to each of the planets, and stretched with forces equal to the
gravities of the planets, they would all sound the same note.
“Tis we musicians know.”
It is the musician who alone for the modern
age has been the seer and the revealer. In music, and in music alone, has the
school of the prophets survived. There only has God not left himself without a
witness in the world. Melody and harmony have, as male and female, been the two
witnesses to the duality of the Divine Existence, when all others have failed.
It is in the
fugue
that the
musician finds his scope for the loftiest flights of his genius. This is because
the fugue is the zodiac of the universe of sound; the vortex-ring of the
auricular creation.
Mendelssohn’s Scotch Symphony
occurs to me in illustration. It begins on a low plane by a subdued mass of
sound in which neither melody nor harmony is distinctly discernible. It is a
nebula, opaque to the ear. Nevertheless it dimly suggests to the mind an idea of
power, and of a possibility of order. As the music proceeds it
(p. 616)
seems as if through some scarcely perceptible
process of evolution, the chaos is not quite so much a chaos as it has been.
Threads of melody keep passing across the woof, growing ever brighter and
broader. The whole stage and level too have changed. What was gaseous and fluid
becomes fixed and solid; what was merely mineral shows signs of vegetation.
Gathering strength to express itself more fully, life moves about, vegetation
acquires the faculty of locomotion, grass becomes flesh. The atmosphere clears.
The waters separate from the land. Another plane or “day” has succeeded, higher
than, yet corresponding to, the previous ones. The days follow each other, each
raising the world to a higher level. The time comes when the mystery is cleared
up. The piece is a fugue, in which the same theme continually repeats itself, on
a succession of planes rising ever higher and higher, all singing parts of the
same chorus, and all uttering the same melody. For all at length reveals itself
as a paean and hymn of praise and rejoicing uttered by the voice of Nature in
recognition of its great soul, the Creator, who by virtue of his dwelling at
once within, above, and below it, and being both it and more than it, is able to
do for it all that its own consciousness can conceive of perfection.
(p. 617)
Such is the vision of the world
for all who have succeeded in sinking the individual in the universal, and have
thereby been permitted to see the world both as it is in the Divine idea and as
it will be in fact, if only England in this present ordeal by fire remain true
to her intuition of the soul, and do battle right manfully with the “dragon” on
behalf of the duality of the Divine Existence, as enacted on the plane of the
universal humanity.
While faithful to the death,
(p. 618)
without Paul knowing the full meaning of what
he was saying – then will the two halves of the dual soul of humanity be
incarnate in humanity, having their counterparts in the man and woman, the light
and dark races, the reason and the intuition; and, completing the holy trinity
of the Divine Existence by their offspring, Conduct, or the only true morality,
the morality not of seeming, but of being. And so shall “we all come in the
unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect humanity, unto the measure of the stature of the
fulness of Christ.” The realisation of this vision of a world’s perfection was
that to realise which, next to Buddhism, Catholicism has represented the chief
attempt. The failure of Catholicism has been due to precisely the same causes
that have led to the failure of every attempt to redeem the world made before
and since. Man could not extricate himself from the meshes of sense whereby he
gave the powers of evil their control over him. Repeating the very same devices
whereby he had quenched the spirit in every one of the previous religions of the
world, the devil of blood and selfishness suffered indeed the light of the true
Pantheism to shine for the knot of highly vitalised worshippers in the inner
(p. 619)
sanctuary, the initiated or communicants. But
in draping the Church in red, he effectually prevented its light from reaching
those without. Like the ark of Noah, it rode the troubled waters of the world
with the Divine life shut up in it, scarce caring to throw a rope to a single
one of the wretches who were drowning around it, save only in so far as it
thought they might be serviceable to itself. Like the ark of Israel, it had
within it the testimony of the two witnesses to the Holy Duality, the cherubim
who “covered the mercy-seat with their wings, while their faces looked toward
each other;” even as they had ages before done for the Church in Egypt, whence
by a true Apostolic succession Israel inherited the spirit. But the Church that
should have been Catholic, and that by virtue of the ark and the two witnesses,
the man and the woman, the Christ and the Mary, the power and the sympathy, the
wisdom and the love, of the Divine Existence, should have built up humanity into
a body for its true soul, – suffered the wings of the cherubim that covered the
mercy-seat to hide that seat from its own view; and instead of leading a fallen
world back into the perfected paradise of a pure and happy life, it
(p. 620)
“shut the gates of mercy on mankind,” and
“set at the east of the Garden of Eden” the very cherubim of its own ark, and
the “flaming sword” of the fires of its persecutions, “which turned every way,
to keep the way of the tree of life,” not for, but from man. Essentially Pantheist in its
holy of holies, the Catholic Church became the Church of Rome, a rule of force
and blood; and from being for the world polytheist, in the true and right sense,
sank into a mere fetish worship. Hence it has come that its present “infallible”
head, seeing the glory departing, but not seeing why, not seeing that it was for
its own good being deprived of that on which it had set its heart – its outward
power and adornments – has clung to the “unclean thing,” and made Christendom
resound with his lamentations and maledictions. The Pope sees now; and there is
hope for Home. The devils cast out of her Church, Italy may learn a new and even
more perfect worship of the beauty of the Divine Existence, than ever was
attained by her great, great because Pantheist, Art-priests of old.
Now that we know the spiritual
significance of the tale of
(p. 621)
For several years past has a
little propaganda been at work in
(p. 622)
the Hour and the Man shall come, and the
voice of the living Word shall utter itself. What if some of those engaged in
the work did enjoy the sight of the falling walls and flying inmates, and worked
with a will at their task of demolition? The Lord must have his “besom of
destruction,” – “yea, carnage is God’s daughter.”
They knew that they were pulling
down the Bastille of Britain, that prison in which so many consciences had been
immured and strangled, so many minds racked, so many hearts torn, by the regime
of shams; and that, follow what might, it could not be worse than that which
they were demolishing.
Now word comes that the work is
over. That age and infirmity have stayed the hand of the captain. That he and
his band agree that there is nothing left to be pulled down, and that the
materials are lying about ready, if fit, to be built into the new structure
whenever the Architect and the Plan shall be forthcoming. May we not accept the
fact as a sign that the end is at hand? that
(p. 623)
doing what he has done, Thomas Scott has written his name upon the
Bible of the future far more indelibly than his noted blood-exalting namesake
wrote his on the Bible of the past? None more effectually than he has striven to
roll back the stone from the door of the sepulchre. Even if be was in a measure
disposed to suspect that the Lord had not risen but was still there; better
God’s own truth, however unwelcome, than the treacherous solace of a lie. The
world has not now for the first time to learn that the blasphemer of one age is
the prophet of another, cry how may the chief priests and pharisees, “he hath a
devil and is mad.” His work has alone made mine possible.
We come to the signs of the times
and seasons as indicated by those symbols of antiquity upon which we have so
long been dwelling. Self-seeking Sapience, essaying to be historian, declares
that “
(p. 624)
man can by no means withstand; and that if
Europe created
How far it is true that Turkey is
but the creature of the convenience of sacerdotal Europe, and how far it is the
predestined link between the two halves of the perfected human body of Christ,
to snap which would be to put asunder that which God has irrevocably joined
together, even the halves of his own Divine Existence on the earthly plane of
its manifestation; and how far, moreover, not only has the event been
anticipated, but the very time of its occurrence fixed and indicated, we will
now endeavour to gather from the planisphere of the Zodiac.
The great cycles of the
development of the religious consciousness of our planet, through its highest
product and function, man, coincide with
(p. 625)
the periods of the phenomena known to
astronomers as the precession of the equinoxes. The sun does not return at the end
of each year quite to the same point in the circle of the stars from which it
started at the commencement of the year; but recedes each year just so small a
portion of the whole circumference of its orbit as to lose one whole
circumference in about 26,000 years. The phenomena corresponds to that of the
loss of a day, which is made in travelling round the earth from east to west.
This number was anciently regarded as constituting a great solar year; and it
was the basis of the calculations whereby the Hindoos sought to fix the duration
of the earth’s existence. Dividing this number by twelve, which is the number of
the signs in the Zodiac, the sun is found to recede by the space of one sign in
about 2150 years. This number, together with certain subdivisions of it,
constitutes the basis upon which, by means of the spiritual observation of the
work’s actual history, extending over vast periods, the fabric of prophecy has
been reared.
The ancient religions appear to
have been governed, not only in form but in character, by the signs of the
Zodiac; for their ritual consisted chiefly in the worship of the spirit of the
sun.
(p. 626)
under the form suggested by the sign which
ruled the spring equinox. As the sun changes its place in the Zodiac once in a
little over 2000 years, that was about the duration of any particular form of a
religion.
The earliest indication we have of
the religious state of
(p. 627)
turn are about to compose it, by the
recognition of the perfect equality of the two halves of the Divine Existence,
whether as subsisting originally in the Divine nature, or as subsisting in the
sensible manifestation of that nature in humanity. Of this reconciliation the
Lingha-yoni-poojah, still so popular in Hindoo
cities, is a memorial.
The passage of the sun into the
constellation Taurus – from dualism to fecundity – led to the
substitution of the Bull for the Gemini, as the chief object of worship,
for the next 2000 years. Of this worship
The next period saw the “Bull”
give place to the “Lamb,” as the constellation in which the sun underwent his
annual “crucifixion” at the spring equinox. The Persians, who as Zoroastrians,
or worshippers of the “sun-star,” were, esoterically, the purest of Pantheists,
anticipated Christianity by worshipping
God-the-Soul under the symbol of “the Lamb
slain from the foundation of the world” for the world’s redemption from the
dominion of darkness and evil. Their crucified, rising, and ascending sun-god,
was called Mithras.
(p. 628)
For nearly 2000 years we have been
in Pisces, under the dominion of the Fish. This sign finds its antitype in the
supremacy of Peter the fisherman. The-coming sign always begins to exercise its
influence some time in advance of its actual arrival. Hence it is that our
present condition exhibits symptoms of the approach of the sign known as Aquarius, who is represented as humanity
rising from the affluent Mother Earth, who has just been fertilised by the
There are yet other indications
prophetic of the nature of the period at which the earth has arrived in the
development of its consciousness. The would be contraveners of the duality of
the Divine Existence have something commonly deemed more sacred than the Zodiac
with which to reckon. There are no less than nine great periods of Hebrew prophecy
that now have their termination; while several others already terminated, bear
their testimony to the anticipated character of the coming epoch. Among these it
is sufficient to name the expiration of the 6000 years from the date of the
“Creation” in Genesis; of the 2520 years, or “seven times” of Daniel, from 647
B.C.; the 2500, or fifty jubilees, from 627 B.C., the
(p. 629)
18th year of Josiah’s reign; the 1335 years
apparently referred to by Daniel as constituting the interval between the
promulgation of the Code of Justinian, and the end of the religious divisions of
the world. The last named event has been confounded by students of prophecy with
the final “millennium” of sabbatical rest. There are also the secondary
fulfilment of the 2300 years from the complete renewal of the sacrifices in the
time of Nehemiah, namely, B.C. 437, to the complete purification of the Holy
Land; the secondary fulfilment of the 1260 years, or forty-two months, of Rev.
XI And XIII, from the decree of the Emperor Phocas acknowledging Pope Boniface
III. Head of all the Churches of Christendom; and lastly the declaration in Rev.
X. 6, that “there shall be time” or a prophetic period of 360 years, “no
longer,” from A.D. 1517, the beginning of the Reformation, to the end of the
present dispensation.
All these calculations were made
long since, and in the expectation of events differing considerably from those
which may now be anticipated. They represent the endeavours of devout and
learned men to ascertain, by means of a process purely rational, the
correspondence of the prophecies with actual history. Their failure was due to
the fact that they were rational in the sense that
(p. 630)
they possessed no sympathetic insight into
the nature either of the religion of the Bible or of any other. They committed
the further error of mistaking for individual persons what really are movements
indicative of the prevalence of the spiritual influences which have always been
at work in the world. And in conflict for the possession of the consciousness of
the earth, with a view respectively to its obscuration or enlightenment.
Of the circumstance which has led
to the substitute which appears at the end of this book for the intimation
ordinarily rendered by the word FINIS, it will be time to speak when its
contents have received the confirmation which time alone can supply. It is
enough for the present that the circumstance in question constitutes for me an
absolute demonstration of the reality of the spiritual world, as well as of the
soundness of the intuition which has controlled my whole work. I have now only
to hope that the execution of the idea by its translation into sensible fact, is
so far commensurate with the importance of its nature that it may not fail of
its due use through defect of the instrument employed.
In the book which constituted the
spring and morning of the ten year cycle just passed of my own spiritual history
– as not impossibly may
(p. 631)
this of a new cycle just begun on another
plane, I mean The Pilgrim and the Shrine – I said that it requires a
revelation to interpret a revelation. It seems to me now that the sole
difference between the prophet and his merely rational fellows is but one of
sympathy. Loving more, the prophet feels and sees more. Feeling and seeing more,
he
knows more. For others life may be a
cold and torpid formality, to be got through with as little expenditure of
feeling as possible. For him Existence is alive with a vivid passionate life, to
be made the very most of, and finished perfectly in its every minutest part,
even as our own English youth so strive to do in respect of their games. If only
they and we all had so high a standard of excellence in things real, and strove
equally to accomplish it! No lowering shade of Pessimism then would chill and darken life!
*
*
*
*
*
One glance across the troubled
waters of the Red Sea and Jordan both of our anticipated tribulation, towards
those who seem from thence to beckon us on; and silence for a moment that we may
catch the echoes of their utterings respecting the things which for them, as for
their prototypes of so long ago, will hereafter be cherished as things which
belong to their peace. For if
(p. 632)
whose history is a repetition of that which,
already more than once commenced, only now is to be completed, we must expect to
discern yet other correspondences than those already indicated. There is no need
yet to suspect that the Parent Spirit of the Sun has failed of its ancient
health or vigour, that its Earth-children of today should lack any of the family
traits whereby their predecessors have been distinguished.
These, then, are the future things
of which I seem to see and to hear somewhat respecting the Church of the coming
Regeneration. Peter, who has denied his Lord but once, has in his never dying
zeal again wielded his sword, not this time to cut off the ear of the faithful
servitor who did but his master’s bidding, but the master himself. His weapon
and his skill are now turned to uses beneficent and by no means vindictive.
Nowhere within the sweep of Peter’s sword is the ear that desires to hear the
free Word cut off, but only is opened the better to hear. And if so be any
cutting off prove needful, it is done to the false priest who closes up in the
rock the living waters of salvation, and gives of blood to the thirsty people to
drink in its stead. As for Peter himself, while still as fond as ever of
tabernacle building, he is careful in his worship therein, not to stop short of
that of the supremest.
(p. 633)
Decreasing, as befits the genius
of the summer pole, when his lord of the winter pole increases, the Baptist was
under eclipse and “in prison,” where also he lost his head. This, with the new
solstice, he has regained. And with his head he has found also his heart. No
longer a “Voice” merely, and “the least in the kingdom of heaven,” he has
become, like his Lord, a perfected dual soul. And in that while by his
possession of full knowledge he is at once prophet, evangelist, and seer, by his
exaltation of love the most he has become mightiest of the company of the
preachers.
Judas, long so careful of the bag,
on behalf of which he sought to quench the light of the Ideal, has taken back
his – nay, her? – kiss and having given the pieces of money
to the poor, has concluded that there is a better way to manifest repentance
than by hanging himself. So may he yet reclaim the forfeited place among the
faithful thirteen.
Dwelling in the home of “John the
Beloved,” the Madonna mother, in peace and joy, is tended in her age of her
children in the flesh.
The tears of the Magdalen, who
also in no small degree has been a “mother of God,” are all of joy. For, the
passage of the grave escaped, the touch of an earthly affection is not
(p. 634)
declined. She in her turn now casts devils
out of others.
The Christ himself has not been
crucified; for
*
*
*
*
*
But first to the field of
Armageddon, where, backed by all the orthodoxies, the Devil shall do battle for
his kingdom. There, O
(p. 635)
when thou fallest thou shalt arise again, and
the victory will be thine, for thy soul will be on thy side.
Arm, then, O
(p. 636)
peoples recognising shall cry, – “Habet testes!
Habemus Papam!”
While thus it shall be at home,
“India” shall not “perish,” but Israel and Ishmael shall together prepare and
guard for England “the way of the kings of the East,” by the way of the “great
river Euphrates.” Thus united in one dominion, the Man and Wife of Humanity
shall, as God’s Two Witnesses, bear equal and loving testimony at once to the
Unity, Duality, Trinity, and Plurality of the Divine Existence. Now can we, with
such prospect to follow the Tribulation, dauntlessly cry: –
“Hail once more to the banner of battle unrolled.
Tho’ many a light shall darken, and many shall weep.
For God’s just wrath shall be wreak’d on a giant
liar;
And many a darkness into the light shall leap,
And shine in the sudden. Making of splendid names,
And the heart of a people beat with one desire;
For the peace that we know no peace is over and
done.
And now by the side of the Black and Baltic deep,
And deathful grinning mouths of the fortress,
flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.”
“CONSUMMATUM EST.”
Jan. 27, 1877.
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