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CAPÍTULO IX

RECAPITULAÇÃO, DEDICATÓRIA, E CONCLUSÃO

            TO the “New Revelation” has now been added the record of the “miracles” by which revelations are wont to be accompanied and attested. But though a New Revelation, it contains no new gospel, but is a confirmation, reinforcement, continuation, simplification, combination, and development of that which was the substance of all former gospels, even the doctrine of salvation by the culture of the soul and worship of perfection, relieved of all accretions, perversions, and degradations, and restated in its original proper simplicity.

            Alike in substance, in method, and in occasion, the New Revelation lacks nothing to make its correspondence with the old complete.

            For, with all others, it teaches that the soul is the one indestructible entity, and point of identity between the individualised part and the Universal Whole; that it is by the infusion into it of the soul that the world is redeemed from its lower planes; that the full manifestation of the

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soul is at once the method and token of redemption; and that such manifestation is wont to be made whenever, through neglect of the soul and immersement in sense, the world’s misery has culminated in despair.

            Exhibiting the world’s religious history in a light wholly new to the modern age, the New Revelation further shows that the course of development of the consciousness has ever been the same for races and for individuals; and that a complete correspondence subsists between the spiritual and physical planes of existence. It thus exhibits the essential identity subsisting interiorly between the religions of India, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Judea, and Christendom, and also between the experiences of all individuals who, by virtue of their sedulous endeavour to rise from the outer and phenomenal spheres of the consciousness to the inner and real, have succeeded in reaching the central sun and true Self, at once of the individual and universal, thereby attaining demonstration of the substantial identity of creation with God, and thence of various parts of the creation with each other as parts and whole of the same universal Self.

            As regards the method of redemption, also, the New Revelation is in precise correspondence with the old. Setting forth, even as do they, the evils suffered by the world during the cycle

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known as the historical period, as due to no inherent defect, either of constitution or of circumstance, but to a temporary and remediable lapse from normal health through the misconduct of life, and, primarily, through disobedience to the laws of Purity, – the New Revelation, like its predecessors, insists on a return to purity as the condition and means of recovery; and, combining herein the teaching of them all, it declares that man must be made clean outwardly in respect of his flesh by the washing of water, as specially insisted on by Moses; that he must be made clean inwardly in respect of his organism, as insisted on by Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Mohammed, as likewise by Moses, by the abjuration of a diet of blood and of all poisonous infusions whatsoever, and by the return to his natural sustenance – at once food and medicine – the grains and herbs, the juices of fruits, and vegetable oils; for so only will he deposit tissues possessed of perfect soundness, and have an organism capable of attaining its full development in respect of all the faculties of humanity, and build up his body to be a pure temple and abode of the soul.

            And he must be made clean also, as insisted on, not alone, but above all others, by Jesus, by the washing of regeneration, or new birth of the spirit, through the purification of the mind and

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affections from whatever may hinder the full development in him of the soul, and his restoration to perfect spiritual health. Thus repudiating as a blasphemy against the character of the Divine Existence, the doctrines, at once sacerdotal and scientific, of the inherent depravity of Nature and of salvation by vicarious sacrifice, the New Revelation accords with the old in setting forth, not the repudiation or renunciation of the lower and lesser Self; but its subordination to the higher and larger, by its suffusion with the soul under an impulse of sympathy at once towards God and the world, as the true method of restoration. It thus re-establishes the parental character of the Deity in accordance with his manifestation of himself in the creation of which Humanity is the climax and crown.

            In thus once more exhibiting to the world the divine character of all Existence, the New Revelation can hardly fail to excite the bitter animosity ever evinced by Sacerdotalism towards Pantheism. Recognising at length God as its Parent, Earth finds no place for sacrificing priest or atoning victim, and no need of mediatorial intervention. Hence the fate of all those, of whom Socrates was not the first nor Jesus the last, who, by clearing the road to the intuition of God, and demonstrating the doctrine of universal

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identity, tore away the veil of blood which, by priesthoods as representative of man’s lower nature, had been interposed between the world and its soul. The annals of ecclesiasticism show that, under the regime miscalled Catholic and Christian, the greatest and best of thinkers and doers – that band of pure Pantheists of which, in the world’s dark ages, the chief exponents were an “Angelic Doctor,” a Galileo, a Vanini, a Bruno – were compelled to prevarication or suppression, or consigned to dungeon or stake. It will be much that has been gained if, by the larger logic of the dawning era, religious orthodoxy find itself deprived of its favourite weapon, the denunciation of Atheism, against those who, recognising God as the All, venture in plain terms on the assertion. It is through the pretext that, by depriving Deity of Personality, Pantheism virtually abolishes him, that Sacerdotalism has been enabled so long to maintain its disastrous sway. Henceforth, by the application of the doctrines of Correspondence and Heredity to all planes alike of Existence, the doctrine of the Divine Personality will be accepted as the inevitable corollary to that of human personality. Discerned in the first instance by the restored intuition as a necessary truth, it is now made known by actual revelation, that the characteristics of the Spirit in Matter are but

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limitations of those of the Spirit in itself; and hence that the personality of man, and of his fellows the animals, is but a mode and degree of the personality of God. In this restored recognition of the Parenthood of Deity – that is, of the truth of Pantheism – the world’s sacrificial system, whether under the guise of sacerdotal Christianity or materialistic philosophy, or of any of those orthodoxies, political or social, in which the sacrifice of the inner nature to the outer, of the higher nature to the lower, of the right to the expedient, is made the condition of success and honour, has received the wound which, however long it may linger, will prove its deathblow.

            From repeating and reinforcing the ancient teaching respecting the existence and culture of the soul as the essential constituent of the world and agent of its redemption, the New Revelation proceeds to set forth the nature of the soul, and the identity of the universal and individual in respect of all qualities, properties and attributes, saving only that of actual infinity; together with the necessity of according equal recognition to each aspect and relation of the Divine Existence shared by the individual – namely, to its unity, its duality, its trinity, and so forth to its infinite multiplicity. And it shows that to omit from recognition in the conduct of life aught that appertains to it as a portion of the Divine Existence,

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is to distort and dwarf ourselves, and render us a defective expression of the divine perfection. Especially does it claim recognition for the doctrine of the duality, on the ground that, by the undue prominence accorded to that of the trinity, it has been fatally obscured, to the hindering of the full manifestation in the flesh of that perfected soul, the fullest expressions of which have ever been recognised by the world as its Saviours and Christs.

            To such a manifestation afresh the New Revelation points as that of a new Sungod about to rise on the world to redeem it from the present winter solstice of the soul. For in point of occasion and timeliness, no less than in method and substance, does the New Revelation correspond with the old. Like them also, it has a purpose at once immediate and remote, and exhibits the physical order of existence as ever in correspondence with the spiritual.

            Now as ever is the world’s extremity the soul’s opportunity. Never more truly than of the present could it be said that now is the hour and power of darkness, when, openly denying the soul as non-existent, and renouncing the authority of the conscience or any sense of perfection, the world’s sense-worshipping orthodoxies are more than ever exalting the lower nature, and more than ever insisting on a regime of blood as the

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way of salvation, on all planes of being alike. For now has man relegated himself entirely to the abyss, and seeking to build up civilisation on the sole basis of the body and sense, has suffered “Antichrist” and the “Beast” to reign supreme. They who hitherto have borne rule are spirits projected so far into matter as to have lost the consciousness that they are spirits, and become wholly incapable of ministering to the needs of both sides of man’s nature. Hence it is that the world is becoming more and more one vast scene of selfishness, hypocrisy, violence, and fraud; that the rule of love has yielded wholly to that of the struggle for existence; and that – his higher nature renounced – man has voluntarily, even eagerly, ranged himself on the side of the carnivora, and, like them, rends and devours his prey. Right has given place to might, and sacrifice is accounted better than mercy, provided the victim be another. Even Secularism itself can no longer suppress the apprehension that the world’s heart must have become more wicked than ever to harmonise with the prevailing regime of bloodshed and torture.

            In this headlong descent to Avernus our own land is no laggard. Though spiritual heir to Israel, and so long witness for the soul to the nations, England, as represented by her national legislature, now makes each step a downward

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one. By sanctioning for the first time in her history, at the bidding of a conscienceless science, the deliberate infliction of torture, and this on the most innocent and helpless of her children, for the benefit of the strong, she proves that she has at length touched bottom, – for hell itself has no lower depth. While the foremost and most capable of her sons, representative at once of her Church and her State, manifests his utter deprivation of spiritual vision by allying himself on the one hand with the chief priests and Pharisees of a sacrificial orthodoxy, and on the other hand with the would-be destroyers of her national Church, and vehemently propounding anew the blasphemy of Caiaphas and the mob, proclaims it expedient that one nation be put to death for the rest. The signs may be small, but the signification is vast. I have shown that possession is not a thing of the past.

            While the soul, thus ignored or betrayed at home, is hounded to crucifixion as on a new Calvary, abroad is the Empire of the North, under possession by the demon of darkness, bent upon hewing asunder the bands which link the earth’s dark races to their spiritual lords and redeemers, the “Kings of the East;” and thrusting itself between them as a wall of ice, seeks to bring back a new glacial period. Meanwhile, those who are skilled in the lore of the East,

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know that the world’s soul and sun has really been born anew, though still in its cradle; and for these, the prevalence of the influences which impel Russia, and the acquiescence of England in the world’s threatened materialisation, mean the massacre of the divine child together with the host of other innocents, as of old, by the kings and priests of the world’s orthodoxies.

            Seeing, then, that upon the issue of the cataclysm already initiated, hangs the spiritual life or death of the world for a “thousand years” to come; seeing, also, that by virtue of the correspondence by divine ordination subsisting between the spiritual and the material planes of existence, every winter solstice, spiritual as well physical, has hitherto been made the season for a new birth and manifestation of the redeeming sungod, it becomes for those who, having their spiritual as well as their intellectual eyes open, are able to comprehend as well as to catalogue the facts of the world, more than possible, more than probable, even certain, that unless the universe has suffered subversion of its ancient constitution, there will be in some kind essentially the same in substance, however differing in form, precisely such an outpouring of the spirit and manifestation of the soul as have ever, under like conditions, been the herald and agent of the

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world’s salvation. That they by whom the depth of the world’s degradation and despair is discernible should be so few, is a proof, not that the flood of evil is not at its height, but that the period of spiritual darkness is at its densest. Losing the sense of perfection, men have come to accept that which is for that which ought to be, and which, but for their own folly, might be; and having thus no standard of perfection towards which to aspire, have become incapable of amendment in the one direction in which amendment is to be found. For that which is now termed civilisation consists but in the exaltation of the seeming, the external, the evanescent, the finite, to the contempt and negation of the real, the internal, the permanent, and the infinite. It is a whitening, not a cleansing, of the sepulchre; a decorating, not a vitalising, of the corpse.

            Not for the extension and perpetuation of any system such as now prevails, has the Empire of the East been committed to Britain; and not for any interests merely material will the approaching warfare be waged. Neither will England achieve the high destiny which awaits her until she has passed through a tribulation such as she has never yet known, a tribulation of which the physical manifestation will be but a reflection of the spiritual reality. Only after she has passed through the flood of a bloody

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baptism of soul as well as of body, and rising instead of descending by the ladder of her many errors, has become wholly regenerate, will she attain the full measure of the spirit wherewith, when vitalised herself, she will re-vitalise her children, nay, her progenitors, of the Orient. For them as well as for herself will the accomplishment of this be the consummation of the long anticipated KALKI of all the world’s Apocalypses. Poor indeed were the outlook for the world were that which it now has and is, all for which the conflict is waged. In drawing the sword against Russia, England, even though she know it not, will be drawing the sword on behalf of the world’s Sun and Soul, against the “dragon” and “beast” of the “pit” of Materialism. Thus contending, suffering, triumphing, will she herself become to the world the manifestation of the Christ about to be.

            That a period of gestation was in process, pointing to precisely such a new birth as has been indicated of the world’s spiritual sun, has now for a whole generation been more than suspected by those who with enlightened vision have watched the rise and progress of the faith and practice misknown as “Spiritualism.” In all parts of Christendom, upon tens of thousands of those who, faithful to their first love, the ideal of the soul’s intuitions, and sedulously cultivating

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the largest and highest self, have kept themselves unspotted from the world’s cruel orthodoxies, have, unsought and unexpected, descended in advance the influences charged with the preparation of the “way of the Lord” for that coming which, however watched for, however called – whether Advent or Avatâra – will as of old, when it comes, be “as a thief in the night.” The “signs and wonders” recorded in this book, manifold and marvellous though they be, differ nothing in kind from those familiar to multitudes, who making no outward demonstration, but nursing their souls in silence and confidence, know by actual and repeated experience the utter falsehood and rottenness of the prevailing creeds and systems, social, scientific, political, and religious alike; and confidently anticipate the early dawning of a new Christian Year on a loftier plane of its consciousness than earth has yet attained. As by these the Coming will not be unexpected, so to these will the arrival of its herald in the shape of a New Revelation be an occasion, not of scoffing but of supreme gratulation. To these, therefore, is this Introduction, Supplement, and Complement to England and Islam especially dedicated.

FIM

Índice Geral das Seções Índice da Seção Atual Índice da Obra Atual Anterior: VllI - Extensão