Section XVIII
[On Aug. 26th, 1873, I had been reading over previous
communications, and had thought much about the symbolic nature of spirit
utterances. I had wondered whether we erred in being too literal in their
interpretation. I put the question, and was told that I was in no fit state for
communing. This is one instance out of many where the difficulty of
communication was apparent. I was told to refresh myself. The day was rainy,
dreary, and comfortless. I was below par, and in a strange place, being from
home on a visit. I did as I was bid, and then it was written, at first with pain
and slowly, then more easily:--]
The conditions, though still unfavourable, are better. You would be well
advised to prepare yourself always, both mentally and bodily, for communion. As
we have before said that we cannot operate when the body is overloaded with
food, so now we say, that a system depressed and weak is not favourable for our
purposes. We do not advocate the depression of the vital powers by neglect of
due food any more than we countenance gluttony and drunkenness. We preach the
mean in all things where it is knowable. Asceticism and self-indulgence are the
extremes which are evil in their results. That is the mean for each which leaves
the bodily powers in perfect play whilst it leaves the mental faculties
unclouded and unexcited. A clear, active, undepressed yet unexcited mind we ask
for, and a body whose powers are vigorous and neither in excess nor defect of
their capacity. Each man might do much, by the exercise of a judicious
self-control, to render himself better fitted both for his work on earth, and
also for receiving instruction from those who are sent to minister to him. The
habits of daily life are frequently unwise, and lead to a diseased state of body
and mind. We lay down no rule beyond the general one of care and moderation. We
can only tell what suits individual wants by being brought into personal
contact. Each must learn to settle for himself what is best for him.
It is part of our mission to teach the religion of the body as well as of the
soul. We proclaim to you, and to all, that the due care of the body is an
essential prerequisite to the progress of the soul. So long as spirit is
prisoned in the earth body through the avenues of which it finds its expression
on the plane of matter, it is essential that you care intelligently for that
body, lest it react on the spirit and affect it injuriously. Yet it is only in
rare cases that intelligent discrimination is exercised with regard to food and
clothing, and the habits of life which have so great an effect on spirit. The
artificial state of existence which prevails, the ignorance with respect to all
or nearly all that influences health, the vicious habits of excess that are so
nearly universal, these are all bars and hindrances to true spiritual life.
Touching the matters on which you question, we remind you that we have many
times said that we take the knowledge already existing in the mind, refine and
spiritualise it, and build upon it as a foundation, only rejecting that which is
noxious and untrue. We deal with old opinions as Jesus dealt with the Jewish
law. He apparently abrogated the letter while He gave to the spirit a newer and
nobler meaning. We do the same with the opinions and dogmas of modern
Christianity as He did with the dicta of the Mosaic law, and the glosses of
Pharisaical and Rabbinical orthodoxy. Even as He proclaimed the truth, true for
all ages, that the letter might well be dispensed with, so that the spirit were
retained; so do we, in words drawn from your own teachings, say to you that the
letter kills, but the spirit gives life. Rigid adherence to the strict letter of
the law is quite compatible with--nay, usually leads to--neglect of the true
spirit. The man who begins by observing scrupulously the minutiae of the ritual
law ends by becoming the proud, arrogant, unlovely Pharisee, whose religion is
swallowed up by his theology, and who yet can thank God that he is not like
other men.
It is against this insidious form of religion that we wage determined war.
Better for each struggling spirit that it should grope unaided after its God,
trusting in the end to find Him, though after many wanderings, than that it
should be cramped and confined by the trammels of an earth-born orthodoxy, which
prescribes the God, as well as the way to reach Him--that way being through a
wicket of which it holds the only key--which cramps all natural aspirations,
drowns all soaring thoughts, and condemns the free spirit to mere mechanical
action without a particle of true spiritual religion in it. Better, we say,
anything than this parody on spiritual religion.
Some there are, and they not the noblest of your race, for whom it is
essential that deep subjects of religion should be thought out ready to their
hand. For them free spiritual thought would mean doubt, indecision, despair,
death. They cannot climb the giddy heights where man must gaze into hidden
mysteries, and face the unclouded radiance of the Sun of Truth. Not for them the
pinnacles which overhang precipices deep down in which lie hid the Eternal
Verities. They cannot gaze lest they fall: they cannot endure the ordeal: they
must fall back on safer and more beaten paths, where others have walked before,
even though the way be tortuous and uncertain. They must be hemmed in between
high walls over which they dare not look. They must walk warily, picking their
way step by step, and avoiding all inequalities, lest they stumble and fall. And
so they fall back on the prescribed dogmas of unyielding orthodoxy. So it has
been decided by the wisdom of the Church is the answer of their priests. Doubt
is ruin; thought only ends in bewilderment; faith is the only safety. Believe
and be saved. Believe not, and be damned. They are not able to receive these
things. How should they? They have not yet grasped the fragments of truth that
lie on the very threshold of knowledge. How, then, should they enter in and
dwell in the penetralia where truth is enshrined in fulness?
Some there are who are not merely unable, but unwilling, to receive or
entertain anything which militates against that ancient and received theology
which they have learned to consider as the embodiment of Divine truth.
It has sufficed the needs of the saints of Christendom. It has cheered the
martyr at the stake, and consoled the dying saint in ages long gone by even as
now. It was their fathers' creed. It was the gospel of salvation which they
learned from a mother's lips. It is that which they have received as the deposit
of the truth, and which they are determined to teach their children, that they
in turn may hand on the truth whole and undefiled. And so a feeling of heroic
determination comes over them that they will not even touch that which seems to
contravene this faith of theirs, consecrated to them by so many associations,
and endeared by so many memories. They are, as they fancy, defenders of the
faith: and all a martyr's zeal burns within them. They cannot be reached by any
influence that we can bring to bear. Nor would we willingly interfere with so
comfortable a faith. Were we to make the attempt, we should need to upset from
the very foundations the edifice they have reared. We should need to make war on
this faith which they love so well, and hew it down with merciless axe. Their
Immutable God and their stereotyped religion, changeless and unchangeable, we
should need to attack, and show that though God changes not, yet the mind of man
does, and that what was sufficient for the past may be, and often is, quite
inadequate for the future. We must show them--what they could never see--the
progressive march of revelation, the gradual enlightenment of man in proportion
to the freedom of his thought and the enormous mass of purely human fiction
which they have dignified by the title of Divine Revelation. The task would be
vain: and we are not so foolish as to attempt it. They must gain their knowledge
in another sphere of being.
Some, again, have never thought about the matter at all. They have a sort of
conventional idea about the external profession of religion, because they cannot
get on well socially without it. But it is of the slenderest make, and will go
into very small compass when not in use. It is indeed but the outside covering,
which is not intended for anything but show. So long as it looks well from a
distance, it serves the purpose for which they use it. These and such as these
are our bitterest opponents. To force them to think about religion is most
irksome and annoying to them. The subject is distasteful, tolerated only in its
lightest form from sheer necessity. It is the business of priests to settle what
is right, they take as much as is necessary on trust. To force them not only to
see the flaws in the old faith, but to admire the excellences in the new, is a
double aggravation, involving double trouble. They will have none of it. They
cling to the past, and live in it. They are well as they are. Progress they
hate. Freedom they know nothing of save in that conventional sense in which it
approaches very near to slavery. Free thought to them means scepticism, doubt,
atheism, and these all are not respectable. They are social blunders. Progress
means something which politically and religiously is horrible to them. They not
only shrink from it, but they view it with loathing and contempt. The good old
times enshrine their ideal; and in the good old times such things were never
heard of. Hence they are manifestly wicked, and to be avoided.
It is, no doubt plain to you that we have no dealings with these three
classes, and with the myriads who lie in between them, enclosed within the poles
of inability and unwillingness, or positive aversion. Hereafter you will learn
that it does not rest with us to choose in the matter. We cannot reach them even
if we would.
We strive to inculcate on all that the way to know God is open and free, and
that the man who prefers stagnation to progress is violating one of the first
conditions of his being. We say that man has no right to close the road to God,
and to lock up the wicket, compelling all to pass through his door. We say again
that rigid orthodoxy, dogmatic faith prescribed in human words, inflexible lines
within which he who walks not is therefore lost--these are human figments, bonds
of man's making to tie down aspiring souls, and pin them to earth. Better, we
reiterate, for each struggling spirit to wander forth with no guide but its
appointed angel, to pray for itself, to think for itself, to work for itself
till the day-dawn of truth rise upon it, than that it should surrender its
freedom and accept its religion at the dictation of any. Far, far better that
the wanderings should be tortuous and long drawn out, and the creed scant and
little satisfying; better that the cold winds should brace it, and the storms of
heaven beat upon it, than that it should be cramped within the narrow, choking,
airless avenue of human dogmatism, gasping for breath, crying for bread, and fed
only with the stones of an ancient creed, the fossilised imaginings of human
ignorance. Better, far better, that the shallowest and crudest notions of the
Great Father should come to His child direct from spirit to spirit, the Divine
inbreathing of Divine truth, than that he should consent to receive the most
elaborate theology which fits and suits him not, and dream on in drowsy
carelessness through the probation life, only to awake to a bitter consciousness
of the falsity of that which he has so heedlessly accepted. Honesty and
fearlessness in the search after truth are the first prerequisites for finding
it. Without these no spirit soars. With these none fail of progress.
We have yet to show you more of this as exemplified in the Life and Example
of the Lord Jesus.
We have shown you what to the enlightened mind is the true attitude of the
spirit. This fearless thinking out of the way to God by those who are enabled to
attempt it, will infallibly lead to what we unceasingly proclaim, a spiritual,
refined, and elevated religion, in place of a literal, dogmatic interpretation
of the words of your sacred records. For all utterances of spirits through man
have a spiritual interpretation as well as a material one which meets the eye.
And it is this spiritual interpretation which is entirely missed by a
materialistic age. Man has gradually built around the teachings of Jesus a wall
of deduction, and speculation, and material comment, similar to that with which
the Pharisee had surrounded the Mosaic law. The tendency has increasingly been
to do this in proportion as man has lost sight of the spiritual world. And so it
has come to pass that we find hard, cold materialism deduced from teachings
which were intended to breathe spirituality, and to do away with sensuous
ritual.
It is our task to do for Christianity what Jesus did for Judaism. We would
take the old forms and spiritualise their meaning, and infuse into them new
life. Resurrection rather than abolition is what we desire. We say again that we
do not abolish one jot or one title of the teaching which the Christ gave to the
world. We do but wipe away man's material glosses, and show you the hidden
spiritual meaning which he has missed. We strive to raise you in your daily life
more and more from the dominion of the body, and to show you more and more of
the mystic symbolism with which spirit life is permeated. They take but a
shallow view of our teaching who pin themselves to the letter. We would raise
you from the life of the body to that which shall be to you the fit approach to
the state disembodied. There is but a glimpse possible as yet; but the time will
come when you will be able to see, as we cannot explain to you in your present
state, the true dignity of man's higher life even on the earth sphere, and the
hidden mysteries with which that life is teeming.
Before you can reach so far you must be content to learn that there is a
spiritual meaning underlying everything; that your Bible is full of it; man's
interpretations, and definitions, and glosses being but the material husk which
enshrines the kernel of divine truth. Were we to throw away this husk the tender
kernel would wither and die. So we content ourselves with pointing out, as you
can bear and understand, the living verity which underlies the external fact
with which you are familiar.
This was the mission of the Christ. He claimed for Himself that fulfillment
of the law, not its abolition or abrogation, was His intent. He pointed out the
truth which was at the root of the Mosaic commandment. He stripped off the rags
of Pharisaical ritual, the glosses of Rabbinical speculation, and laid bare the
divine truth that was beneath all, the grand principles divinely inspired which
man had well-nigh buried. He was not only a religious but a social reformer; and
the grand business of His life was to elevate the people, spirit and body, to
expose pretenders, and to strip off the mask of hypocrisy; to take the foot of
the despot from the neck of the struggling slave, and to make man free by virtue
of that truth which He came from God to declare. "Ye shall know the truth," He
told His followers, "and the truth shall make you free: and ye shall be free
indeed."
He reasoned of life and death and eternity; of the true nobility and dignity
of man's nature; of the way to progressive knowledge of God. He came as the
Great Fulfiller of the law; the man who showed, as never man showed before, the
end for which the law was given--the amelioration of humanity. He taught men to
look into the depths of their hearts, to test their lives, to try their motives,
and to weigh all they did by the one ascertained balance--the fruits of life as
the test of religion. He told men to be humble, merciful, truthful, pure,
self-denying, honest in heart and intent; and He set before them a living
example of the life which He preached.
He was the great social reformer, whose object was at least as much to
benefit man corporeally, and to reveal to him a salvation from bigotry and
selfishness, and narrow-mindedness in this life, as it was to reveal glimpses of
a better life in the hereafter. He preached the religion of daily life, the
moral progress of the spirit in the path of daily duty forward to a higher
knowledge. Repentance for the past, amendment and progress in the future, summed
up most of His teaching. He found a world buried in ignorance, at the mercy of
an unscrupulous priesthood in matters religious; under the absolute sway of a
tyrant in matters political. He taught liberty of both; but liberty without
license; the liberty of a responsible spirit with duties to God and to itself;
of a spirit corporeally enshrined with a corresponding duty to its brethen in
the flesh. He laboured to show the true dignity of man. He would elevate him to
the dignity of the truth, the truth which should make him free. He was no
respecter of persons. He chose His associates and His apostles from the mean and
poor. He lived amongst the common people; of them, with them, in their homes;
teaching them simple lessons of truth which they needed and which they could
receive. He went but little among those whose eyes were blinded by the mists of
orthodoxy, respectability, or so-called human wisdom. He fired the hearts of His
listeners with a yearning for something nobler, better, higher than they yet
possessed; and He told them how to get it.
The gospel of humanity is the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the only gospel
that man needs; the only one that can reach his wants and minister of his
necessities.
We continue to preach that same evangel. By commission from the same God, by
authority and inspiration from the same source, do we come now as apostles of
this heaven-sent gospel. We declare truths the same as Jesus taught. We preach
His gospel, purified from the glosses and misinterpretations which man has
gathered around it. We would spiritualise that which man has hidden under the
heap of materialism.
We would bring forth the spirit-truth from the grave in which man has buried
it, and would tell to the listening souls of men that it lives still; the
simple, yet grand truth of man's progressive destiny, of God's unceasing care,
of Spirit's unslumbering watch over incarnated souls.
The burdens that a dogmatic priesthood has bound upon men's backs, we fling
them to the winds; the dogmas which have hampered the soul, and dragged down its
aspirations, we tear them asunder, and bid the soul go free. Our mission is the
continuation of that old teaching which man has so strangely altered; its source
identical; its course parallel; its end the same.
[ I inquired whether I rightly understood that the work
of teaching, a section of which is under the direction of Imperator, derived its
mission from Christ.]
You understand aright. I have before said that I derive my mission, and am
influenced in my work, by a spirit who has passed beyond the spheres of work
into the higher heaven of contemplation. . . .Jesus Christ is now arranging His
plans for the gathering in of His people, for the further revelation of the
truth, as well as for the purging away of the erroneous beliefs which have
accumulated in the past.
I have heard something of this from other sources.
Is this then the return of Christ?
It is the spiritual return. There will be no such physical return as man has
dreamed of. This will be the return to His people, by the voice of His
Messengers speaking to those whose ears are open; even as He Himself said, "He
that hath ears to hear, let him hear; he that is able to receive it, let him
receive it."
Is this message coming to many?
Yes, to many it is being made known that God is now specially influencing
man at this epoch. We may not say more. May the blessing of the Supreme rest on
you.
+IMPERATOR.
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