Índice Geral das Seções Índice da Seção Atual Índice da Obra Atual Anterior: Seção lV Seguinte: Seção VI
XIII.
And now, in conclusion, to resume,
combine, and point what I have said.
It was with some distress that I
found myself passing my twelfth section and writing thirteen at the head of this
one. For, wishing to make this little book a Christmas and New Year’s present,
as it were, to my countrymen, I thought that there was a peculiar fitness in the
correspondence between the number of its sections and the number of the months
in the year. Designed, as it was, to minister to the passage of England from the
spiritual gloom and chill of the expiring year to a new year on a higher plane
of her consciousness, I thought to make it like the universal sun of the
complete system of man, and like the sun’s representatives on earth, – the true
people and the true man wheresoever
(p. 268)
found; like him, too, of old of whom the
years were as the days of the year, even three hundred and sixty and five, and
of whom it is said that he “walked with God, and was not, for God took him.” For
Enoch was a solar hero who, in virtue of his being a man of strong soul and
perfected intuition, was regarded as not dying, but as translated, like the sun,
to reappear and shine on a new and a higher plane of spiritual existence. Twelve
was, moreover, the typical number of the people who, regarding themselves as a
typical people, divided themselves, like the year, into twelve parts; and of the
perfected soul of that people, who surrounded himself in like manner with twelve
Apostles, as all his predecessors in the office of redeeming Sun-god in the
Gentile world had done. But another section was un-avoidable, and so, as my wont
is, I set myself to consider what might be said for the number thirteen. The result was not a little remarkable, and
I give it as it will supply yet another illustration of the doctrine of
spiritual correspondences on which I have so much insisted, and thereby of the
doctrine that the world is all v e and conscious in every fibre of its being,
and that it and all upon it are so inextricably knit together that if one
suffers, all suffer; and if one rejoices, all rejoice, if so be only they are
spiritually
(p. 269)
alive. Well, the thought that carne to me
respecting the number thirteen was in this wise.
First, of course, as in duty
bound, I thought of it as the typical number of Judas, in memory o f whom we
decline to sit thirteen at table, feeling sure that some one of the party will
“fall away” before the end of the year. My thoughts had been busied with the
subject of falling away. I did not believe that it was possible for any one to
pass beyond the range of the universal sun, and so to fail wholly away and be
finally lost; and I felt a sudden warm impulse towards Judas as one who, having
been the greatest of sinners, would some day be the greatest of saints, for who
would be able to tell as he could tell, of the boundlessness of the redeeming
love, unless it be perchance him who is called Satan himself? What prodigal of
earth had strayed so far from the divine home as Judas? Yes, Judas and Satan,
the human and the spiritual representatives of the sin of unfaithfulness to the
intuition of the ideal – the “sin against the Holy Ghost” – might yet return and
be accepted.
Reflecting that every individual
is but as a concrete of some race which is to him as an abstract, I sought for a
race of which it could be said that it had its antitype in Judas; and this was
the road my thought took.
(p. 270)
Following the order of creation
pursued in the formation of the solar system, the ancients made the sun, and the
six planets which are visible to the naked eye, the representatives of the days
of the week, not omitting in the arrangement to avail themselves of the sanction
manifested in the moon’s quarters. For the sun and moon were to them no
mechanical accident, but a divine couple, representing to the earth the m ale
and female elements of all existence; the one beneficent, penetrative, and
vitalising, yet withal capable of being angry and fierce; and the other,
notwithstanding her variability and apparent waywardness, ever faithful to him,
content to shine by his light, to reflect his beams, and to shed the subdued
light of her softer love over the rough things of the world, so as to mellow and
harmonise into beauty all that is seen by her light. So the ancients made their
week after the idea suggested by the sun and moon and the planets; and as Homer,
and Hesiod, and the most ancient records of India and Egypt and many other
countries tell us, appointed each seventh day to be “the sacred day of the sun,”
or “the Lord’s” day and the chief day of the week, in honour of the sun as the
representative of the divine creative energy
(p. 271)
by whose agency the universe was made. They
also arranged the days in the order of the distance of the planets from their
common centre and true self, the creative sun. From this we see that those poor
people of antiquity who, having no modern science to teach them better, were so
benighted as to believe in God and the soul and the universal life, were, after
all, not so very far behind us in some things. They may not have had our wealth
of “facts;” but they did not make a bad use, for them, poor heathen that they
were, of the few typical facts they had.
There was a people, in no very
ancient times, whose leaders – perceiving that there was good stuff in them
notwithstanding that they were very deeply sunk in the superstitious
Nature-worship of the people in whose land they dwelt, and that, in fact, under
the blighting influences of the association, they had lost, whatever knowledge
they might once have had of the true God, and become as bad as, if not worse
than, those among whom they dwelt, – sought to lead them away from that land to
one which, by virtue of its ability to afford discipline and scope for
development, might prove to them the means of a national regeneration.
Prior to this migration,
this people, who were
(p. 272)
Semites, were called
As the most distant from the sun
of all the planets then known, Saturn was regarded as the eldest; and,
consequently, his chosen people claimed all the advantages of primogeniture. But
there was a correspondence of another kind between Saturn and
(p. 273)
the least luminous of the planets and the
longest to come round; while
The worship of Saturn, however,
possessed y et another signification, and one bearing directly upon the people
who produced Judas, the culmination of unfaithfulness. For in the ancient system
of astrology, of which Chaldaea, the country of Abraham, was the seat, Saturn
was regarded as the type of faithfulness, owing to the punctuality with which,
notwithstanding the length of his circuit, he always came round to his proper
time. Saturn, in the language of astrology, was called the High Father, or
Father of Elevation. And this was precisely the signification of the name of
Abram, who, for his faithfulness to his intuitions of God, was especially called
“the friend of God.” The supreme virtue, which the Bible more than all others
exalts, is
(p. 274)
precisely this quality of faithfulness. It is
by their employment of the first syllable only of the word, and their conversion
of it into belief – thereby substituting an intellectual
conclusion for a moral quality – that the orthodox emissaries of the
arch-exemplar of unfaithfulness, have done all the evil they have done in the
world. For the purpose and effect of the device have been to substitute Satan
and seeming for God and being as the object of man’s worship.
The far-seeing leaders of
(p. 275)
this is a universal truth, the leaders of
Israel suffered Israel to go on worshipping what it fancied to be its true self,
namely, Saturn and the flesh, confident that if only they were true to the
Jehovah whom they regarded as the parent of the national self or soul, and lived
purely, they would, in time, attain the intuition of their true self, and mark
their progress in spiritual development by keeping the Sabbath on the sun’s and
the Lord’s day, instead of on Saturn’s and their own day. Meanwhile they
carefully recorded all the typical facts of the national history, physical and
spiritual, no matter how unflattering to the national vanity they might appear;
and as Israel was a typical people, and lived its life out without stint or
make-believe, its history, when completed, proved to be modelled in precise
conformity with the phenomena of the sun’s annual revolution.
Who is not familiar with all that
the Israelites suffered on their long and painful quest for the Sangreal of
spiritual perfection during the third cycle of their history, that which
extended from the rising from the Red Sea, to the setting in the waters of
Babylon; their sojournings in the “Wilderness of Sin;” their progresses, their
backslidings, and repentances; their frequent treacheries against
(p. 276)
their national Jehovah – the parent of the
soul of Israel – by going after strange gods; treacheries, too, in which they
were always accompanied and encouraged by their priests and pharisees and other
representatives of their various orthodoxies who refused to be guided by the
intuitions of the prophets? Who does not know how, under ecclesiastical rule,
the poor people, having little time to spare from the exigences of their
physical wants, trusted to those who had leisure and ability to study and think
to teach them the truth; and how, trusting to these false guides, they found
themselves making their national God in the image, not of their own true, noble
souls, but of their lower and outer animal body, until it had come that instead
of the pure, water-loving Jehovah of the intuitions of their
great leader, they were worshipping a god who delighted in blood and carnage?
And who does not know how prophet after prophet was persecuted and slain, who
rose to denounce such a delineation of Deity and the shedding of blood to
propitiate him? And how infuriated the sacerdotalists always were at the
doctrine that it was only their own lower nature that men had the right to
sacrifice, and not others to themselves; and how they denied that the
(p. 277)
perpetual sacrifice of the lower to the
higher, of the outer to the inner, of the body to the soul, of the flesh to the
spirit, is the divine law of all existence, or that all sacrifice is holy which
does this, and all sacrifice wicked which, by reversing this process, exalts the
lower at the expense of the higher nature?
What
(p. 278)
God Jehovah, still as ever differentiating
him-self into the dualism spirit and flesh, was hence-forth to be worshipped
under the new modes known respectively as “Christ” and “Cash.” Thus, hopelessly
divided, the soul and body of Israel could no longer associate together in the
same organism; for while the former had become purified, redeemed, and
glorified, the latter had sunk deeper and deeper into the mire of the flesh,
without even a common self or national soul by the cultivation of which they
might expand their ideas of existence beyond the individual in the direction of
the universal.
It is thus I reached the
conclusion that the number thirteen is not only the number of Judas, but the
number of Israel, who, in betraying and slaying its own representative soul,
Christ, had relegated itself back far beyond its original outer sphere of its
planet Saturn, even to that of the representative of unfaithfulness and
negation, known as Satan.
Truly an unfortunate number did
the tale end. But I was not satisfied that it should end there; and so I thought
on, and this is what I at length carne to. The interval between Christ and Judas
represents the extremes of existence. It is the interval between the perfected
soul, or the sun,
(p. 279)
and the outer darkness of space, that is,
between the All-god and the No-god. But as everything that exists must have two
sides to it, the same number that on one side represents absolute negation, must
on its other side represent absolute perfection. It might be, then, that my book
would be more perfect than if it contained but twelve sections. The year of
twelve months, I reflected, is the typical year of man. “Woman has no part in
it. It is the solar, not the lunar year. The lunar year – the year of thirteen
months of four weeks – is the true year of the feminine half of humanity. In our
present year the only month that consists of four weeks, the only true woman’s
month, is the month dedicated to the apostle who succeeded Judas, and is the
month which, like Judas, “by transgression,” or skipping over a day, “falls into
its own proper place.” The “Christian year,” which was the year of the worship
of humanity as a man only, was the year of twelve months. This has come to its
end – since, as Dr. Strauss has truly told us, we are no longer Christians –
without having accomplished, save doctrinally, its end, the redemption of the
world. Not that the fault was due to Christianity, as originally conceived. The
fault was that of the pagan sacerdotalists. These had
(p. 280)
found that their own religions were dying
put, displaced partly through their own decay, and partly through the growing
popularity of the new Christian presentment of character, – a popularity due to
the retention by the peoples of their own healthy intuitions, which enabled them
to see in Christ precisely what they wanted. Finding this to be so,
Sacerdotalism migrated wholesale over to Christianity, bringing with it its
whole paraphernalia of doctrine, observance, and rite; and having re-established
its sway, proceeded once again to drown in blood the new-found soul of humanity,
its arch-tool for the purpose being the emperor Constantine. And hence it carne
that under the new regime, while woman and the newly recognised redeeming
influence of her true intuitions were not repudiated in name, they were
repudiated in reality; and so the new year of humanity remained as before, a
solar and exclusively male year of twelve months.
But the spirit was not quenched.
The time was not ripe. Another cycle of a thousand or two thousand years,
culminating in a second deluge, not of water but of blood, agony, and despair,
must pass ere the world learn that muscular might is not moral right; that not
force but love is the law of its well-being; and that woe ever comes of the
divorce between the
(p. 281)
two halves of the divine existence. Learning
this, it would awake to the error it had committed, and by ushering in the true
year at once of Humanity and of Deity, would demonstrate the relation between
the number
thirteen and the absolutely perfect
existence.
If the correspondence I am about
to indicate be substantiated, we shall have obtained a very powerful aid in
support of the hypothesis of a universe at once living and conscious, and
consisting of correlated systems which represent the translation into fact on
successive planes of ideas subsisting in the divine mind; and also of the
ability of the human soul as allied to that mind to discern those ideas by its
own intuition.
No one can dispute either the
antiquity or the general accuracy of the account given in the Book of Genesis
respecting the stages of the earth’s physical development. It represented an
adaptation to the history of the typical people,
For
(p. 282)
spiritual consciousness was to correspond
with the earth’s physical development, as described in Genesis, Christ
represented the close of the fourth cycle, precisely as the manifestation of the
sun had marked the close of the fourth day of the physical creation. The idea of
Christ had been discerned and desired, and its realisation attempted, in many
religions long before it was manifested in its fulness in Jesus; precisely as
the sun itself, we must conceive, had been discerned and desired, and the full
view of it sought by the dwellers on the earth long before either the sun itself
had attained its full distinctness and intensity, or before the earth’s
atmosphere had become sufficiently translucent to enable it to be clearly seen.
For, just as only when our own eyesight is perfect and the atmosphere clear, is
it possible to see the sun in all the fulness of its brightness, so only when
the spiritual consciousness of man is sound and his external surroundings
subordinated to his true spirit, is it possible for him to behold the vision of
the Absolute Ideal, – the central spiritual Sun of the Universe.
The process whereby the national
soul of
(p. 283)
the processes just described. Under a regime
of sense and force, the world’s miseries had reached their culminating point. It
was seen that man must return to his intuitions or perish. Of this perception
Christ was the product. The need of the age expressed itself in one of its
children. Such has ever been the genesis of the true solar hero, as Mr. Carlyle
himself long since told us. The clearing of the world’s spiritual eyesight from
the obstruction of the clouds and fogs of sense enabled humanity to attain that
full intuition of God of which Christ was the expression.
It is true that mankind soon
receded from the exaltation under the influence of which it had been enabled to
attain in Christ a full intuition of God “Antichrist” must come again to
over-power man’s new-born intuition by a regime of sense. Antichrist did come,
“transformed into an angel of light,” for the form in which it carne was no
other than that, first, of Church Orthodoxy, and next, when it had sickened men
of religion, that of Scientific Orthodoxy. Under these two guises it has brought
upon the world such a deluge of blood and tears of men, women, and animals, as
once more to arouse humanity to the conviction that it must return to its “first
(p. 284)
love,” the true intuitions of its soul, or
perish outright.
The fifth cycle of the world’s
physical development – that which had been ushered in by the full manifestation
of the sun – was occupied chiefly by the peopling of the earth’s waters. The
corresponding cycle of the world’s spiritual development has been in like manner
mainly occupied by the circumnavigation of the earth, the discovery of its many
lands in the world of waters, and the peopling of those lands by the race which
of all races has shown itself possessed of the highest spiritual vitality,
namely, our own. The time has come when that vitality is at its lowest ebb. Our
spiritual Sun has passed its zenith. The influences of its spirit are no longer
sufficient to mellow our hearts and ripen into maturity the fruits of our hands.
Full winter in all its darkness and cold is upon our souls. And so far from
fortifying ourselves against it, and crowding round the genial hearths of the
national home, where the sun of the ages past still supplies us with vitalising
heat and light from the stores of its providential bounteousness; so far from
watching eagerly for the appearance of the divine child of divine sympathy that
is so soon to be born unto us, – the “Son that unto us is given”to open to
(p. 285)
us anew the kingdom of the summer heavens; –
we are not ashamed to declare that we “hate Christmas;” and actually seek to
bring about a new glacial period for soul and body by encouraging the
treacherous advances of the arch-spirit of Winter – winter physical,
intellectual, moral, and spiritual – which has its latest and chief incarnation
in the Russian Empire.
Is it not becoming evident that a
new sunrise, on a higher plane of our spiritual consciousness, and with intenser
rays, is needed to rekindle the national life of
(p. 286)
the divine life may burn low in us, may even
go out. But while there is life there is hope; and the smallest spark may be
kindled into a blaze, if only we consent to take off some of the dense black
coals of sense wherewith, like unskillful servants, we have choked it, and
stimulate aright the flame that still lives and burns at its heart.
No life, no meaning, no harmony in
the universal existence! Take, O Votary of Scientific Orthodoxy, the earliest
opportunity of comparing the intervals between the notes of the musical octave
with those which separate the planets from the sun. Seek well the meaning of the
correspondence you will there find; and then, if you will, reassert that there
is no meaning, no harmony in the universe. Perchance the discovery you will make
there will enable you yet to “beat your music out” in a way little anticipated
by you; inasmuch as it will be, not the discordant shrieks that you call music,
but the everlasting “music of the spheres,” even the voice of the living God,
that utters itself therein.
O fellow-countrymen mine! What
“thrice sodden asses have we been to take this drunkard” – orthodox science “for
a god, and worship this dull fool!” At such bidding to yield up our
(p. 287)
own souls and the soul of our dear old
England; and to consent to let our poor and our animals be experimented upon and
tortured, and our mothers and wives and sisters and daughters stigmatised as
“screaming women” whenever a cry of sympathy is wrung from them! As if when men
are bloody and cruel, women could do other or better than “scream!”
The termination of the Christian
cycle, or fifth period of the world’s spiritual creation, involves the virtual
abrogation of the solar and male year of twelve months, and its supercession by
the lunar and female year. For it involves the recognition by mankind of the
crowning work of the sixth day, the making by God of man “in his own image, male
and female,” and the admission of woman and her sympathies of heart and soul to
an equal place beside man and his force of intellect and will.
It was the cry chiefly of the
masculine element in humanity that summoned the Soul of Israel to the rescue. It
is now the cry mainly of the feminine half of humanity that is summoning the
Soul of England on the like mission. For just as the cry of the souls of male
humanity two thousand years ago went up before God in appeal for aid against
their sacerdotal and imperial tormentors, so now
(p. 288)
has the cry of the souls of the women and of
the animals gone up to God in appeal against their oppressors and tormentors,
sacerdotal, scientific, and in whatever way orthodox, who insist on keeping down
woman and her divine insight, who make bloodshed and carnage their delight, and
who, utterly denying the doctrine of one blood, one life, one consciousness, one
God, one incorruptible spirit, exalt male force to the place of deity and duty,
and selfishness and cruelty to that of sympathy and love.
This, then, I judged to be the
significance of the number thirteen as applied to my book. Our new-born sun was
rising upon a period which will be marked as no other period in the world’s
history has been marked, by the dominance of the moral and spiritual influences
of woman. This period will see her taken up bodily into the godhead of a
perfected humanity, as she was spiritually under the expiring dispensation. In
her shall a new plane of the earth’s consciousness be redeemed. For in her
abounding sympathies she will include the whole sensitive creation, to the dear
mother earth herself of which woman in her physical aspect has ever been the
type and correspondence. In the new church of the Regeneration woman will be
both a prophet and
(p. 289)
a priest, by the pure light of her intuitions
and the pure service of her hands ministering effectively to the redemption of
the coarser animal, man. Does the true inner significance of the woman’s
movement at length begin to dawn upon us? Do we now begin to see why “the
heathen” of our orthodoxies “rage, and the people imagine vain things,” whenever
an attempt is made by a woman to invade a temple of orthodoxy, be it in church,
parliament, or medical consulting-room, in order to claim the fulfilment of the
decree, “whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder;” and to demand
her due share of the responsibilities, duties, and rights of the common
existence, and insist on pervading and suffusing the whole conduct of life with
those softening influences of the spirit of which she has been divinely ordained
to be the special depositary, – those influences by his repudiation of which man
has precipitated himself from bad to worse until he has converted the fair earth
into a slaughter-house, a torture-chamber, and a den of murderers, making
existence hideous and intolerable for every partaker of it who is not as
absolutely dead, insensate, and selfish as themselves?
Is the idea of a regeneration in
Church and State and Society, in which Religion and Science
(p. 290)
and Conduct shall go hand in hand, wholly
absurd? – a regeneration in which women shall minister, not as “doorkeepers” and
charwomen merely, but as prophets and priests? Let me show that such a
phenomenon is not so novel and strange as y ou may think it. Years ago – the
sacred number of seven – the tender heart of a woman was stirred within her by
the tales which reached her of foul and unspeakable deeds done in secret
chambers to innocent creatures whom from earliest childhood she had been wont to
regard as her dear brothers and sisters. A little note inserted in a magazine
elicited a response from one of her own sex. The two worked together, collecting
information, and considering what should be done to put an end to an evil which
proved to be more and more foul and detestable the more the light let into it.
Under the compulsion of an influence of which neither she nor any one about her
could clearly discern the real nature or source, the former of these two women –
she whom I shall call the Prophetess of the Regeneration and Herald of the
woman’s year – found herself enrolled, abroad, as a medical student, and placed
in circumstances in which the whole interior of the foul temple of iniquity,
with all its ghastly secrets, was thrown open to her gaze.
(p. 291)
Well might a woman have quailed with horror,
and turning her back have fled from a spectacle so hideous. But she was under an
influence which made retreat impossible. The deeper and blacker the bell into
which her soul bad descended, the greater the compulsion that was on her to
accomplish her work, and redeem the souls imprisoned therein. Wherefore, to her
dear animals who were crying to her as if in her they recognised a fellow soul
that bad attained its incarnation in humanity for the express purpose of
delivering all Animality from its thrall, she could but cry, “Though I myself
perish, I will save-you!” One conviction mainly sustained her. This was not a
conviction that man would be induced to forego his chances of obtaining
alleviation for his own pains on receiving the revelation of the torments he was
inflicting on others. That would have been to give him a credit for
unselfishness to which by his conduct to women and animals he had not shown
himself entitled. No, the hope was that she would be enabled by actual
investigation to demonstrate to herself first, and then to the world, that
Existence is not so evilly constituted as to make that necessary to man’s
welfare on the physical plane which is fatal to his welfare
(p. 292)
on the moral and spiritual planes, and fatal
also to the happiness of the whole lower sensitive creation. Mingled with these
feelings, more-over, was an ambition of a more personal kind. This was to
demonstrate the ability of her sex to achieve the highest medical honours
without having consented to a single medical sin. Thus sustained, she studied
on, hearing, seeing, and learning everything – but never sanctioning by her
presence the actual commission of the barbarities at which her soul so revolted
– until her conviction had become knowledge, and her faith was justified.
Meanwhile, her fellow-worker was
not idle. She was to be the priestess of the regeneration who was to introduce
the acceptable year of woman’s moral and spiritual supremacy, by scourging from
the temple of science all who traded in innocent blood. Unweariedly did the
large-hearted priestess work at her self-imposed labour of love. Leaves from the
tree of knowledge – a tree destined to prove at last so fatal to those who have
hitherto so jealously guarded it – were strewn all over the land. Hearts began
to stir, eyes began to open, and at length the great soul of
(p. 293)
consciousness, its movements were scarcely
less harmful to the friends than to the foes of the Regeneration. Something was
done, but done exceedingly ill. It was, however, a beginning, a beginning soon
to be followed by the terrible awakening of the present crisis. For
Do my readers care to know what is
the kind of teaching and work which may be anticipated from the true
prophetesses and priestesses of the Regeneration? Of the former they will find
an example in the opening tale of the magazine with which the publisher of this
volume commences the new year. The utterance there is that of one whose system,
physical and spiritual,
(p. 294)
is wholly untainted by the consciousness of
bloodguiltiness, and whose sympathies therefore are unblunted by the consent to
stifle a healthy intuition by assenting to accept salvation for soul or body at
the cost of suffering to another, be it a god or an animal. Only they whose
consciences are thus unsoiled can plead with full and true heart the cause of
mercy, truth, and justice.
Would any one know the kind of
work that is to be expected from the true priestess of the Regeneration? The
only example to which I can direct them is an imperfect one. But being the only
one, it must serve to indicate what may and will be the character of the temple
and the ritual of the future, when the ministers thereof shall be wholly free
from the taint of orthodoxy. The example in question is the original society
formed for the purpose of obtaining from the Legislature an enactment for the
protection of animals from scientific torture. That this society has fallen
short of its original intention, and, instead of the prohibition, has procured
the legalisation of the foul practices in question, has been due to a defective
intuition on the part of its promoter and her coadjutors. The former, by her
rejection of this orthodox doctrine of vicarious atonement, had proved that she
possessed an exalted conception of the divine perfection, and thus had exempted
(p. 295)
her soul from the stain of bloodguiltiness
and its share of the responsibility for the sacrifice of Jesus. But while
remaining theist, she failed to become pantheist, and declined to exalt her
ideas of the perfect humanity until, like that of deity, it also should be
exempt from the taint o f innocent blood. The priest impure, the temple was
befouled, and the rite vitiated. The Soul of England declined to accept
salvation for its animal children at the hands of a flesh-eater and an upholder
of “sport;” and so Moses must die on Pisgah. The little temple which had been
reared expressly for the culture of the great gods Sympathy and Justice – the
gods in whose worship the Soul of England was once wont to take its supremest
delight – being ministered in by half-hearted priests, who, saturated more or
less with its orthodoxies, endeavoured at once to serve Sense and Soul – from
being a temple of the English Jehovah, became little better than “a synagogue of
Satan.” Flesh-eaters and “sportsmen” themselves, its priests could not include
in their reprobation the degrading brutalities of the shambles and the field.
Hence it came that, in place of pleading for a stern prohibition against the
infliction of suffering on aught that breathes, except, perhaps, ou the direst
emergency, the foul deeds in question were made
(p. 296)
legal, on the condition that only skilled
tormentors should have the privilege of perpetrating them. Thus once more did
orthodoxy triumph over the soul, and once more the rabble shout, in accord with
the chief priests and pharisees, “Not this man, but Barabbas!”
The sequel is noteworthy. Instead
of remaining at her post and endeavouring by all means in her power by
self-purification to become consecrated anew for the better fulfilment of her
sacred function, the priestess withdrew, handing her still smoking censer,
sorely against my own desire, to myself. I had already sounded a note in the
cause, which had gone straight to the heart of England; and I was desirous of
restricting myself entirely to the work referred to in the preface to this book,
But the compulsion was irresistible; and so, stepping into the little temple,
having but one thought, that of infusing a higher degree of vitality into its
ministrations, I found that the founder-priestess through whose instrumentality
I had been brought there, had at the self-same instant, to the surprise of all,
withdrawn, leaving me to recognise in the act the outcome of her
self-condemnation for unfaithfulness to her intuitions; leaving me, too, alone
with the for the most part still less
(p. 297)
highly vitalised secular priests, her coadjutors. What
followed was more noteworthy still. .By means of a combination of a little
serpentine wisdom with dove-like innocence, the society was saved from
dissolution, and put in train for translation to a higher level of spiritual
vitality than it had yet been able to live up to. Though not the highest
possible, this proved too high for many of those who had remained. Of these the
reaches were various, and especially curious as illustrating the truth that
different errors represent but different degrees of spiritual perception, all
error itself being but the limitation of truth. Some, for instance, thought the
society had done its work, and done it well, in procuring the legalisation
instead of the prohibition of torture, and that all that remained was to “watch
the working of the Act”! Another, again, manifested his incapacity for sharing
the society’s translation to a higher plane, by propounding as the sole logical
finality the doctrine that only very painful experiments should be
prohibited, while those that are painful merely should be permitted! Of course he was
an enthusiastic “Russian.”
Well, things nowadays are, after
all, not so very different from what they were a thousand
(p. 298)
years or two ago. Those who were “convicted
by their own conscience” of being “not without sin,” in that they had themselves
committed adultery with the orthodoxies, “went out one by one;” while “the
money-changers and they that sold doves” for the sacrifices, also quietly and of
their own accord, quitted the temple, leaving it free for the reviving soul of
England to manifest its fuller presence therein.
This little piece of recent
history is but one of the innumerable instances in which the best intentions
have been frustrated through a lack of spiritual perception due to the orthodox
regime of blood. It was not that the defaulters were renegade or lukewarm to
their intuitions. It was simply that their intuitional powers were debilitated
through their mode of sustaining their organisms. Where the lamp-glass of the
body is foul with blood, the light of the soul cannot shine through it. Not at
such as these, then, may be directed the malediction for lukewarmness hurled at
the Church of the Laodiceans. Rather should be commended for their meditation
those words of Wisdom from the book of that name – ”Thou hast mercy upon all,
for thou lovest all things that are, and abhorrest nothing which thou hast made;
for never wouldest thou have made anything if thou hadst hated it. And
(p. 299)
how could anything have endured, if it had
not been thy will? or been preserved, if not called by thee? But thou sparest
all: for they are thine, O Lord, thou Iover of souls. For thine incorruptible
spirit is in all things.” And this also: – “They shall not hurt nor destroy in
all my holy mountain. . . . He that killeth an ox is as i f he slew a man.”
Those of us who, being men, refuse
to accord to women the same freedom of evolution for their consciousness which
we claim for ourselves, do so in consequence of a total misconception of the
nature and functions both of humanity and of existence at large. The notion that
man and woman can by any possibility do each other’s work is utterly absurd.
Whom God hath distinguished, none can confound. To do the same thing is not to
do the same work, inasmuch as the spirit is more than the fact, and the spirit
of man and of woman is different. While, for the production of perfect results
it is necessary that they work harmoniously together, it is necessary also that
they fulfil separate functions in regard to that work.
Thus, in the broad scheme of life,
the true woman is ever the inspirer and consoler, the true man the planner and
executer. The recognition of this fundamental fact of existence will be the
(p. 300)
corner-stone of the temple of the
Regeneration, to the rapid approach of which all signs point. For the mission of
man’s redemption is ever the same; and as “no man shall save his own brother nor
make atonement unto God for him,” so must all who are to be redeemed co-operate
in the mission of redemption. True it is that in the proclamation of a gospel to
save, it is the man who must preach, who must go forth among the people; the man
who, if need be, must die. But in none of this is he alone. If his be the glory
of full noon-tide, his day has been ushered in by a goddess. Before Phoebus
Apollo is
(p. 301)
lags, the joy slackens for the need. The
Christ is in their midst, but he opens not his lips. His thoughts are elsewhere.
The woman by his side, she who is to be the mother of God in him, is the first
to inspire him. She saith unto him, “They have no wine.” Still is he absent –
perchance diffident, perchance reluctant to attract observation. So he saith,
“Mine hour is not yet come.” He knows, too, that the work performed at the
prompting of feminine eagerness for his distinction, ere the man’s perceptions
be matured, must be an imperfect work. Knowledge must dominate sympathy. But she
has spoken, and soon the impulse of her divine compassion communicates itself to
his divine power; and the word, at once creative and redeeming, is uttered. From
the womb of space proceeds the Logos; from the bitter sea rises the sun of life;
from the ark upon the waters proceeds the living humanity that is to redeem the
waste earth. From the true woman issues the true man, Hail, Mary, full of grace,
the Christ is thy gift to the world! Without thee he could not have been; but
for thine impulse he could not have worked his mighty works! Such is the history
of all time; such is ever the sign of the Christ. The woman feels, the man acts;
hers the glory of firing his
(p. 302)
breast; hers the first emotion to which he
responds. But for her he is powerless; but for her, dumb to aught of good.
Knowledge severed from Iover, man divorced from woman, and he strikes only in
the cause of the base and the wrong. It is the seed of the woman that must
bruise the serpent’s head. Offspring of her pure intuitions, the true Christ is
her gift to the world. To her the divine Existence exclaims, “Woman, behold thy
son!” Nature, behold thy god! The Baptist, who knows not woman’s love, can but
denounce and terrify. The Christ who redeems must first have learnt from woman
to feel and to love. Now as ever, it requires the love that first fills the
heart of the Virgin and Mother to kindle the holy spirit in him who by virtue of
his full, rich, absolute humanity, is to realise for his fellows their ideal of
deity.
The function of the Church is the
culture of the ideal. More than ever will such an institution be required in the
Regeneration, when the ideal and the soul will be recognised as the true and
only real, the only solid and permanent entity. In that culture man and woman
must be free to cooperate, in every department of life. The abrogation of the
regime of blood and force will at once be due to woman, and will make her
(p. 303)
presence acceptable. Associated with her, man
will learn tenderness and reverence; associated with him she will acquire
knowledge and courage. Each will learn, each will work, and each will teach,
without rivalry or collision. There will be no need of test or dogma. For as
truth is one, and mind is one, so under a healthy regime of life will the
perception of truth be one and the same.
Whom of those now among us shall
we hail as our teachers in the coming Regeneration? We shall want knowledge as
well as love, facts as well as sympathies. Thus only will the true marriage be
accomplished, thus only will be accomplished the perfect year, that consists at
once of twelve and of thirteen months. Methinks I see some who, though to
outward eyes far off now, are yet not wholly beyond recall; some who, while
apparently fast bound in the bonds of orthodoxy, yet are not wholly dead to
their first love, the mother’s intuitions. There is one who, preeminent as a man
of” facts,” yet has ventured to show that he is not incapable of discerning
their significance. Much is forgiven. to him who, from the depths of scientific
orthodoxy, dares to accord the preference to Mind over Matter. This, then, do I
say to Professor Huxley: – Live on the diet to which Nature has
(p. 304)
adapted your structure, in full faith that
she knows best what is best; give yourself leisure to think and liberty to feel;
and so, provided that y ou quench no. impulse of the spirit you will become
qualified to be one of the chief apostles of the Regeneration. For then, in
place of being a Reasoner only, you will become a Seer, and so will beyond most
be able to make others see also.
Another in the apostolic group of
the new thirteen may be the author of a recent book on the “Physiology of Mind.”
True, Dr. Maudsley is, intellectually, still in his teens, – for has he not
lately said that all things are matter in process of development, and that the
brain of man is the measure of God! Nevertheless he has an intuition of God.
Hence, provided that he lives aright, his present meagre Pantheism shall be
developed into that higher kind which alone is the religion of those who, true
to their intuitions, are faithful to the end, and receive accordingly the crown
of life. One other only will I indicate here, as possessing the mark of the
coming age.
(p. 305)
intuitions, has been the one statesman of all
Englishmen to appeal to” flesh and blood” as the basis of right; to him who, in
making “the good of the community” his standard of right and wrong, has meant
thereby the whole community, and no clique – barring his
sacerdotal proclivities – may be safely accorded the leadership of England,
when, by having found her true self and centre, England shall know her own mind.
For the present Mr. Gladstone is qualified to be the representative man of
(p. 306)
the priest has been the shedder. Through this
blindness has come the failure to see that the lesson of the Bible is the lesson
of all existence, – the lesson that by the perpetual sacrifice of her own lower
to her own higher, and not by the sacrifice of another, does all Nature “arise
and go to the Father” from whom it first proceeded; and that in the eternal
conflict between the soul that seeks to rise and the flesh that seeks to hinder,
the prophet has, as a rule, been he who is on the side of the soul and its
intuitions of God, and the priest has, as a rule, been he who is on the side of
sense and of the flesh, and of the negation of God and of the soul’s intuitions.
Well, precisely as
(p. 307)
people and of every true man. For it is no
other than the tale of the eternal conflict of good and evil, of soul and sense,
of the intuitions and of orthodoxy, of the ideal and the phenomenal, of the
higher and the lower love. So far from having for its moral – “All for love and
the world well lost,” the tale of
(p. 308)
connexion with what I have said concerning
national souls.
But when England and Mr. Gladstone
come to know each their true centres and selves, and find too that those centres
and selves coincide, arid that both are one in the true centre and self of the
Universal Existence, – then will the hour and the man have come, and the new
Church and State of the Regeneration will not lack their builder, their prophet,
or their priest; or England lack a leader able for every great and good
enterprise, even for that of this present trouble, when legitimately summoned to
act.
A sign or two whereby we may know
that the Regeneration is upon us. The cynicism previously so prevalent will have
wholly vanished. For we shall then, as a people, be in the enjoyment of good
health; and cynicism is a morbid product, springing from the belief that nothing
is real, and that every one – scarcely excepting oneself – is contemptible. Our
cynicism gone, we shall not shrink from being real and genuine, and putting our
hearts into what we say and do. It may even be imagined that we shall not be
ashamed to pray, – not to say prayers merely, but as if praying were
something more than a ceremonial.
(p. 309)
For, under a dispensation that signifies the
attainment of a high degree of spiritual vitality, we shall not degrade prayer
into mere petitions of the sort now offered.
We shall not, for instance, put
material prosperity in the first place, and think that we have done our best for
the dear queen-mother when we have asked for her “in health and wealth long to
live.” Rather, – if it be that she is then like-minded as now, and still
overburdened with the shadow of her great sorrow, – shall we ask that she also
may be a partaker of the new vitalisation, that so she may recognise in the
change that will have passed over England a token of the real presence, living
and energising, of him whose bodily absence her soul mourns. And recognising
this she will be comforted; and after the manner of that other famous typical
sovereign, the sweet singer of
(p. 310)
lofty an ideal of faithfulness to his
intuition of duty.
In such a day ruler and people
will be one, and none shall come between them to make them strangers and foes.
The typical man o f the people, even he whom we now style Demagogue, will not
refuse to grasp in amity the hand of the Prince, even his whom we now style Heir
Apparent, and to say to him “Hail,
Prince and Brother! well is it with us now that at length we understand
ourselves and each other. Long time and sore we contended. For I had vowed that
never should throne of
(p. 311)
themselves, and us with them, to such height
that in thee I can at length recognise the spirit of Him who was “the Father of
our Kings to be” in the Regeneration: and in me thou canst recognise a true
representative of the true Soul of our common England, that Soul now at length
found, never more to be put to shame and flight. For henceforth Prince and
People are one, as head and heart of the healthiest and most highly vitalised of
National Organisms the world has ever seen; in that it is, even like the Divine
Existence itself, alive in all its being, in body, mind, soul and spirit, with
the passionate life of the Infinite. For we are all, high and low, rich and
poor, animated and redeemed by the love given to man to that end, even the true
love of the womanly half of the National Soul which for prince and peasant alike
has taken form in those dear partners of our loves, whose delight it is to win
us men to empty ourselves into their compassionate laps of the grosser elements
of our nature, in order that they may build us up again softened, purified,
perfected, and redeemed. Only rule by loving, O Prince, and we thy people will
follow thee as the moon the earth, the earth the sun, and the sun God. Such will
one of the signs of the blossoming and
(p. 312)
budding of the era that shall have for its
symbol the number, then rehabilitated to know no relapse, the woman’s sacred
number, thirteen.
And what a
literature and drama shall we have under a Regeneration when each living soul
shall be free to live a true life, and to set forth that which it truly knows,
and not that merely which it supposes others may like to be told; and when
thought without feeling, or feeling without thought, or both without vision, or
a literature without either, shall be accounted a monstrosity; and when reality
and not “form” will be the basis of morals! Truly in such time will that be
regarded as a season of low national vitality, when our representative books
were a
Nemesis of Faith,
with no faith worthy to be vindicated; a Vestiges of Creation, with no Creator to make the
footprints; an Eclipse of Faith, with the faith that was eclipsed no brighter
or more joyous than the gloom of the adumbration. Small chance then will there
be for books which, inasmuch as their sweetness and their light will be all in
the letter and none in the spirit, will be held to represent but reason
unillumined by loving intuition, and to constitute lanterns fairly painted
indeed on their glasses, but having no spark of light within, – no humanity,
(p. 313)
and therefore no deity. Neither in that day
will store be set by delineations of the Ecce Homo with the Homo omitted, or “Lives of Christ”
wholly factitious, by men who know not what it is themselves to have lived or
died, and still less to have risen again, and which are therefore but made to
sell, and which do sell, – but most of all him who buys.
What will not literature be when
men who have themselves learnt will be free to write, and publishers free to
publish, and the public free to read that for which their souls crave:
undictated to by “pious” tradesmen whose notion of putting what they call their
conscience into their business consists in setting up a little Index
Expurgatorius
of their own devising, and even while disseminating the foulest garbage of
immorality, withholding from the public aught that might minister to the
development of the intuitions.
One or two even now are among us
from whom good work may be expected. The healthy intuition that dictated Joshua Davidson will be at no loss to turn the
whole strong current of its force into channels of life; and the true sympathy
with Nature which prompted the severe but deserved irony of Madcap Violet will, if true to itself, do still
greater things.
(p. 314)
Here is a thought which may yet
further tend to draw Mr. Gladstone’s mind in the right direction, the direction
in which alone he can minister to the realisation of
This “Eastern Question” is for us
the reproduction of the epic of the Bible and of the Iliad. It is our
representation of the great drama of God and the soul versus the devil and the flesh. It is a
solar epic in that the contest is between the central spiritual sun, on behalf
of the soul o f man, its offspring, and the outermost void of absolute negation
of existence. It is the conflict, of which the prize is the soul of
(p. 315)
sun shine, and of its kingdom there shall
scarcely be an end. The powers of darkness will be driven back, and, confined
within their own proper place, will fulfil their proper function by developing
harmlessly to others and beneficially to themselves.
But should England renounce her
duty and her soul, and, going over to the enemy, make friends with the powers of
darkness, leaving the Moslem and the whole East to be absorbed by Russia, then,
in ages long hereafter, will the story be told in the form of a new solar myth,
how that the sun-god and the winter-dragon strove together for the soul of the
kingdom of the isles of the sea, and how that the dragon conquered; and “drawing
with his tail a third part of the stars of heaven,” overwhelmed the earth in
darkness, and brought back the glacial epoch j while the sun-god returned to his
place whence he had come, for the first time in the world’s history, conquered
and slain without resurrection, and all because England’s own children knew not
that she and they had a soul.
A word of acknowledgment
respecting the soul to two o f our scientific students to whom it may be a
matter of interest to know that their researches have greatly aided and
(p. 316)
confirmed my conclusions in respect to the
part fulfilled by the soul in the development of the world’s religions. These
are Mr. Herbert Spencer, already mentioned, and Mr. Edward Tylor. It is true
that the conclusions I have drawn from their facts are the exact opposite of
their own. It is for their establishment of the fact that soul worship is
absolutely universal, even among people so rudimentary as to have failed to
reach the conception of any being superior to the souls of their deceased
ancestors, – that I am indebted to them. For the fact that the consciousness of
the existence of a spiritual self other than one’s own apparent self, as
constituting the source of our existence, is shared by the lowest types of
humanity, seems to me no more to constitute a proof that such consciousness is
delusive, than does the fact that the most rudimentary savages are conscious of
the existence of a relation between cause and effect constitute a proof that all
science which is based upon that relation, is delusive also. Religion has ever
been based upon the conception of the existence as entities functionally
distinct but substantially identical, of the individual, the national, and the
universal soul. The recognition of that fact constitutes the key to all
religions.
(p. 317)
For it is by direct intuition that the soul
discerns and is discerned.
And thus it appears that all the
achievements of modern science in respect to the solution of the problem of
existence do not together equal in worth the truth which so many thousands of
years ago the Egyptians were able to symbolise in their mysterious effigy of the
sphinx. For the sphinx was at once a concealment and a revelation of the problem
of mortal existence; and this is precisely the problem upon the solution of
which modern science has fairly turned its back in denying that existence does
exist! The sphinx was at once a revelation of what existence means, and of what
man must do to reap the full perfection of which it is capable. Not raised aloft
in air, but resting low on the ground, having its hinder extremities those of an
animal, its head that of a man, and its eyes those of a god, the sphinx
represents existence as it is for every individual unit of consciousness into
which the Universal Consciousness has distributed itself. For it represents
mortal existence as rising from the earth into the animal, from the animal into
the human, and finally from the human into the divine, simply by dint of fixing
the eager, hopeful, y et withal calm and patient eyes of perfect faith on
(p. 318)
the vision of the ideal revealed to the
intuitions of its soul. The world well knew then that the soul that ever tends
upwards, subduing the animal to which it is attached, redeems itself and its
animal along with it, so that its whole being at length returns towards the
source from whence it proceeded, taking with it into the Godhead the outermost
spheres of the physical creation.
What, on the other hand, is the
doctrine and method of orthodox science? It is to ignore the divine vision and
the divine eyes of the sphinx: to hack and hew away every feature of it that
does not correspond with its animal extremity; and having destroyed every
vestige of the god and the man, to devote itself to the exclusive cultivation of
the tail end of the beast. Surely when we consider the lengths to which the
animal within us is adventuring, it scarcely seems too much to predicate that
there has of late been a vast invasion of the bodies of humanity by the soul s
of carnivorous beasts. On no other hypothesis can I, for my part, account for
the spirit that is abroad. It is like a possession on a whole-sale scale by
demons, such as those which even the swine could not tolerate, but drowned
themselves to be quit of. And yet we rest quietly in
(p. 319)
our beds, and eat and sleep and play, and do
all things just as they are said to have done in the days of Noah, never
dreaming of the deluge of blood that we are summoning to overwhelm us.
And if, O orthodox tail-enders, who deny the soul and its power
to redeem, y e seek a riddle anent the sphinx, here is one to your measure: This book has
been written in a chamber in
A word on the things that might
be, could
I have more than once spoken of
the Moslem in terms implying that we are perhaps more nearly related to him.
than we are to our own co-religionists and co-complexionists. This shall have
the explanation which it requires. And I hope that the explanation will, by
further stimulating our sympathies in his direction, serve to crown and complete
the edifice I have striven to erect. It is a further elucidation of the mystery
of the number thirteen, beyond which there is no revelation, because
perfection is then reached.
All history indicates it as an
essential part of the divine programme in respect to humanity,
(p. 320)
that it should represent on every plane and
in every sphere of its existence the same principle of dualism which we Lave
beheld pervading the entire universe of existence. Inasmuch as such dualism
constitutes an essential condition of existence, it is manifest that success
must be impossible in any enterprise in which it is sought to countervail the
divine decrees in respect to the mutual relations of its elements. The mode
wherein the dualism has operated in the sphere of humanity has been by
differentiating the human race into two great divisions.
Without troubling ourselves
respecting the origin, reason, or ultimate aspects of the distinction of race
and colour, it is sufficient to consider the duties which arise out of the fact.
Of the two races, the chief representatives in the world have, for all time, so
far as our information goes, been the pale Aryan and the dark Semite. It is in
these that all other varieties of the earth’s races culminate. Of these two
large divisions of the population of the earth, the Turkish Empire constitutes
for the Semite and dark the representative and chief; while the
(p. 321)
amity between the two great halves of
mankind; and that enmity between
This is not all. The fair Aryan
and dark Semite (highest of the coloured races) are to each other as male and
female in the economy of the human family. The characteristics which distinguish
them are precisely those which bear out such a comparison. One represents the
light, and the other the heat, of the world’s system; one the head, and the
other the heart; one the reason, the other the intuitions. The Semite, as is
natural to its feminine characteristics, has always been inclined to the
masculine presentation of Deity, and the Aryan to the feminine. One of the modes
in which the spiritual influence of sex is wont to exhibit itself is that the
feminine side should be found not unwilling to submit to be controlled by the
masculine; and it is upon this characteristic that our hold of
(p. 322)
arrangements. And it is the same in the
religious history of all the dark races. The moment they advance sufficiently
far in the development of their spiritual consciousness to recognise the
insufficiency of Nature of herself to produce and sustain them, they at once
exalt existence under its male aspect as the exclusive Deity.
The Semitic religions, too, have
differed from the Aryan, in that they have accorded a larger share of their heed
to the prophetic than to the sacerdotal spirit. The devotion of which the Semite
is capable when his enthusiasm is stirred by a direct appeal to his intuitions,
surpasses anything of which the light races have any experience among
themselves. At the same time, the very consciousness of the Semite of his own
emotional susceptibilities serves to reconcile him to the control of the cooler
Aryan. The “daughters of men” have never been able to thrive without the aid of
the “sons of God.”
Seeing that the relations at
present subsisting between ourselves and the Semitic races are not so much the
result of accident as of an affinity of opposites deeply seated in the
constitution of humanity, and that it is by virtue of that affinity that we
maintain in the East the only available
(p. 323)
outlet for our energies likely to be long
open to us, the direction of our interests cannot be more doubtful than that of
our duty. One thing is certain. We are far more likely to remain fast friends
with a race between whom and ourselves the relationship is that which I have
described, and with whom, owing to the distance which separates us, we are not
likely to become so familiar as to endanger friendship, than with peoples who
are our natural rivals in every department of activity, and who are, moreover,
our near neighbours, as well as near akin in race.
But it is not only with her own
interests that the
There is a contingency in the
future history of
(p. 324)
in
Always liable to an access of
religious enthusiasm, the Moslem populations were never more deeply stirred than
at the present time. The statement has been industriously circulated among them
that Christendom is preparing a new crusade against their Holy Places. Anything
on our part to confirm these apprehensions, would have the most disastrous
results for the
(p. 325)
whole East. On the other hand, a league of
true amity with
(p. 326)
bring upon itself a second edition of the
plagues of
(p. 327)
who, when these come, are not found wanting
And foolish are they who think that, because the spirit has died out of
themselves, it has died out of all existence. As well doubt whether the present
solstice will produce its sun as usual. The famous cycle, the time, times,
and half a time, or 1260 years, of the Hebrew prophets, may have for Islam a significance
little suspected. And not this one only.
Índice Geral das Seções Índice da Seção Atual Índice da Obra Atual Anterior: Seção lV Seguinte: Seção VI