" "> a'ridi MiiifffiWi CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Ubrary BS534 .T86 1913 liSiiiiiiir 3 1924 029 276 710 oHn Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029276710 WORKS OF T. TROWARD EDINBURGH LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE (ONLY AUTHORIZED AMERICAN EDITION) Bound in dark red cloth .... $1.25; by mail, $1.35 Bound in paper 75 ; by mail, .80 THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE (EDINBURGH LECTURE SERIES. AMERICAN EDITION) Bound in dark red cloth .... $1.00; by mail, $1.10 Bound in paper , . .50; by mail, .55 THE CREATIVE PROCESS IN THE INDIVIDUAL (EDINBURGH LECTURE SERIES. ENGLISH EDITION) Bound in cloth (only) $1.50; by mail, $1.60 BIBLE MYSTERY AND BIBLE MEANING A STUDY OP THE BIBLE ON THE LINES OP "THE EDINBURGH LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE" (AMERICAN EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED) Bound in dark red cloth (only) . . $2.00 ; by mail, $2.15 GOODYEAR BOOK CONCERN 339 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK THE EDINBURGH LECTURE SERmS BIBLE MYSTERY and BIBLE MEANING BY T. TROWARD Author of "The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science/' "The DoRE Lectures," "Creative Process in THE Individual/' Etc. Jf ibetf et %xcm "fTentotf et ISUrtmr New York: GOODYEAR BOOK CONCERN 1913 London : Stead, Danby & Co. 3ofooi£ K Copyright, 1913, by T. Troward. CONTENTS Page I. — ^The Creation ----- i II.— The Fall 25 III. — Israel -------42 IV. — The Mission of Moses - - - 73 V.-^The Mission of Jesus - - - - 99 VL— The Building of the Temple - - 119 VIL— The Sacred Name - - . . 149 VIII.— The Devil 187 IX.— The Law of Liberty - - - - 203 X. — The Teaching of Jesus - - - 221 XI.^ — The Forgiveness of Sin - - - 255 XII. — Forgiveness, Its Relation to Healing and to the State of the Departed in the Other World - - - 269 XIIL— The Divine Giving - - - - 285 XIV. — The Spirit of Antichrist - - - 301 PUBLISHER'S NOTE For several years we have watched carefully the literary trend of the metaphysical movement and with- out disparaging the excellent work of many other writers, we have no hesitation in saying that the tfooks written by Judge Troward are unique in circulating themselves. The explanation for this is simple. There is such a wealth of philosophic thought in each chapter that the reader of one book is not satisfied until all of the series have been read. The author of these books is a profound psychol- ogist. He is a master of English. Through years of scholarly research he has penetrated into the depths of divine truth. Therefore his works are deservedly recognised as classics in the metaphysical field. He combines delicacy of feeling and expression, forceful logic and scholarly simplicity. Moreover ^ he imparts the fundamental principles governing the "finer forces" in such a manner as to inspire certainty in regard to the correctness of the methods advocated, for meet- ing ''life problems" on the objective plane. It is significant to note that societies^ studey clubs and classes are now taking up the study of ix X Publisher's Note TROWARD just as they have for so long studied Browning and Emerson. We would be grateful for information regarding the work of such organisa- tions in any locality. We invite those who are interested, to send us their names, in order that we may advise them of other forth-coming books and to the end that we may co- operate in any constructive work, of common interest, that may present itself. FOREWORD THE favorable reception accorded to my Edin- burgh Lectures on Mental Science has en- couraged me to offer another book to my readers. The present volume is written from the standpoint that we possess latent powers which a bet- ter knowledge of the truth regarding ourselves will enable us to develop, and that the purpose of the Bible is to lead us into this knowledge in a perfectly natural manner, while guarding us against the dangers arising from misuse of it. That we should ever ar- rive at a point when we shall be no longer confronted by the element of mystery which is inherent in the livingness of Life is impossible; but this mystery is the Mystery of Light and not of darkness, and will continually unfold itself into more light in response to our earnest inquiry into its meaning; and I have therefore given this book a title indicative of the ever- presence of an august Mystery together with intel- ligible Law. Although my presentment of the Bible is in many respects very different from the generally accepted one, it will be found in no way really at variance with the doctrines of Christianity; on the contrary, xi xii Forward I hope that by helping, in however small a measure, to elucidate them, it will show the reasonableness of great truths which those who reject them as unreason- able discredit to their own incalculable loss. This book was originally the outcome of a number of lectures given by me in London, Edinburgh, Glas- gow, Birmingham and elsewhere, but the great inter- est shown in it by a continually increasing circle of readers has led me to extend the present volume by four additional chapters touching on certain topics holding a pre-eminent place in Bible study. There is one other subject to which I have only been able to advert casually in the concluding pages, but which is of peculiar importance at the present day, that of chronological prophecy. The march of events and the "apid developments in various fields of knowledge show such a marked correspondence with the prophetic measures of time given in the Bible that the serious student cannot but feel convinced that we are very rapidly approaching that climax which the Bible speaks of as the End of the Age. I would ipost earnestly ask my readers to give this subject their attention, for the time is at hand. Its wide extent makes it impose sible for me to treat of it in this book, but if such be the Lord's will, I may make it the subject of an- other volume. T. Troward. Ruan Minor, August, 1913. Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning \. THE CREATION r!E BIBLE is the Book of the Emancipation of Man. The emancipation of man means his deliverance from sorrow and sickness, from poverty, struggle, and uncertainty, from ignorance and litnitation, and finally from death itself. This may appear to be what the euphuistic colloquialism of the day would call "a tall order," but nevertheless it is impossible to read the Bible with a mind unwarped by antecedent conceptions derived from traditional interpretation without seeing that this is exactly what it promises, and that it professes to contain the secret whereby this happy condition of perfect liberty may be attained. Jesus says that if a man keeps his saying he shall never see death (John viii. 51): in the Book of Job we are told that if a man has with him "a messenger, an interpreter," he shall be deliv- ered from going down to the pit, and shall return to 3 Bible Mysterj and BibU Meaning the days of his youth (Job xxxiii. 24) : the Psalms speak of our renewing our youth (Psalm ciii. 5) : and yet again we are told in Job that by acquainting our- selves with God we shall be at peace, we shall lay up gold as dust and have plenty of silver, we shall decree a thing and it shall be established unto us (Job xxii. 21-23). Now, what I propose is that we shall re-read the Bible on the supposition that Jesus and these other speakers really meant what they said. Of course, from the standpoint of the traditional interpretation this is a startling proposition. The traditional explanation assumes that it is impossible for these things to be literally true, and therefore It seeks some other meaning in the words, and so gives them a "spiritual" interpretation. But in the same manner we may spiritualize away an Act of Parliament, and it hardly seems the best way of getting at the meaning of a book to follow the example of the preacher who commenced his discourse with the words, "Beloved brethren, the text doth not mean what it saith." Let us, however, start with the supposition that these texts do mean what they say, and try to interpret the Bible on these lines : it will at least have the attraction of novelty, and I think if the reader gives his careful attention to the following pages, he will see that this method carries with it the conviction of reason. The Creation 3 If a thing is true at all there is a way in which it is true, and when the way is seen, we find that to be per- fectly reasonable which, before we understood the way, appeared unreasonable: we all go by railroad now, yet they were esteemed level-headed practical men in their day who proposed to confine George Stephenson as a lunatic for saying that it was possible to travel at thirty miles an hour. The first thing to notice is that there is a common element running through the texts I have quoted; they all cotitain the idea of acquiring certain infor- mation, and the promised results are all contingent on our getting this information, and using it. Jesus says it depends on our keeping his saying, that is, receiving the information which he had to give and acting upon it. Job says that it depends on rightly interpreting a certain message, and again that it depends on our making ourselves acquainted with something; and the context of the passage in the Psalms makes it clear that the deliverance from death and the renewal of youth there promised are to be attained through the "ways" which the Lord "made known unto Moses/' In all these passages we find that these wonderful results come from the attainment of certain knowledge, and the Bible there- fore appeals to our Reason. From this point of view we may speak of the Science of the Bible, and as we 4 Bible Mystery and Bible Mefimng advance in our study we shall find that this is not a misuse of terms, for the Bible is eminently scientific, only its science is not primarily physical but mental. The Bible contemplates Man as composed of "Spirit, soul, and body" (I. Thess. v, 23), or in other words as combining into a single unity a threefold nature, spiritual, psychic, and corporeal; and the knowledge which it proposes to give us is the knowledge of the true rebtion between these three factors. The Bible also contemplates the totality of all Being, manifested and unmanifested, as likewise constituting a threefold unity, which may be distributed under the terms "Gk)d," "Man," and "the Universe"; and it occupies itself with telling us of the interaction, both positive and negative, which goes on between these three. Furthermore, it bases this interaction upon two great psychological laws, namely, that of the creative power of Thought and that of the amenability of Thought to control by Suggestion; and it affirms that this Creative Power is as innately inherent in Man's Thought as in the Divine Thought. But it also shows how through ignorance of these truths we unknowingly misuse our creative power, and so produce the evils we deplore; and it also realizes the extreme danger of riecognizing our power before we have attained the moral qualities which will fit us to use it in accordance with those principles The Creation 5 which keep the great totality of things in an abiding harmony, and to avoid this danger the Bible veils its ultimate meaning under symbols, allegories, and par- ables. But these are so framed as to reveal this ultimate meaning to those who will take the trouble to compare the various statements with one another, and who are sufficiently intelligent to draw the deductions which follow from thus putting two and two together ; while those who cannot thus read between the lines are trained into the requisite obedience to the Universal Law by means of suggestions suited to the present extent of their capacity, and are thus gradually pre- pared for the fuller recognition of the Truth as they advance. Seen in this light, the Bible is found not to be a mere collection of old-world fables or unintelligible dogmas, but a statement of great universal laws, all of which proceed simply and naturally from the initial truth that Creation is a process of Evolution. Grant the evolutionary theory, which every advance in modern science renders clearer, and all the rest follows, for the entire Bible is based upon the prin- ciple of Evolution. But the Bible is a statement of universal Law, of that which obtains in the realm of the invisible as well as that which obtains in the realm of the visible, and therefore it deals with facts of a transcendental nature as well as with those of 6 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning the physical plane, and acordingly it contemplates an earlier process anterior to Evolution, the process, namely, of Involution, the passing of Spirit into Form as antecedent to the passing of Form into Conscious- ness. If we bear' this in mind, it will throw light on many passages which must remain wrapped in impen- etrable obscurity until we know something of the psychic principles to which they refer. The fact that the Bible always contemplates Evolution as necessarily preceded by Involution should never be lost sight of, and therefore much of the Bible requires to be read as referring to the involutionary process taking place upon the psychic plane. But Involution and Evolu- tion are not opposed to ojie another, they are only the earlier and later stages of the same process, the perpeldal urging onward of Spirit for Self-expression in infinite varieties of Form ; and therefore the grand foundation on which the whole Bible system is built up is that the Spirit which is thus continually passing into manifestation is always the same Spirit, in other words it is only ONE. These two fundamental truths, that under whatever varieties of Form the Spirit is only ONE, and that the creation of all forms, and consequently of the whole world of conscious relations is the result of Spirit's ONE mode of action, which is Thought, are the basis of all that the Bible has to teach us, and The Creation 7 therefore from its first page to its last, we shall find these two ideas continually recurring in a variety of different connections, the ONE-ness of the Divine Spirit and the Creative Power of Man's Thought, which the Bible expresses in its two grand statements, that "God is ONE," and that Man is made "in the image and likeness of God." These are the two fundamental statements of the Bible, and all its other statements flow logically from them; and since the whole argument of Scripture is built up from these premises, the reader must not be surprised at the frequency with which our analysis of that argument will bring us back to these two initial propositions; so far from being a vain repetition, this continual reduction of the statements of the Bible to the prem- ises with which is originally sets out, is the strongest proof that we have in them a sure and solid founda- tion on which to base our present life and our future expectations. But there is yet another point of view from which the Bible appears to be the very opposite of a logically accurate system built up on the broad foundations of Natural Law. From this point of view it at first looks like the egotistical and arrogant tradition of a petty tribe, the narrow book of a narrow sect, instead of a statement of tmiversal Truth ; and yet this aspect of it is so prominent that it can by no means be 8 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning ignored. It is impossible to read the Bible and shut our eyes to the fact that it tells us of God making a covenant with Abraham, and thenceforward separ- ating his descendants by a divine interposition from the remainder of mankind, for this separation of a certain portion of the race as special objects of the Divine favour, forms an integral part of Scripture from the story of Cain and Abel to the description of "the camp of the saints and the beloved city" in the Book of Revelation, We cannot separate these two aspects of the Bible, for they are so interwoven with one another that if we attempt to do so, we shall end by having no Bible left, and we are therefore compelled to accept the Bible statement as a whole or reject it altogether, so that we are met by the paradox of a combination between an all-inclusive system of Natural Law and an exclusive selection which at first appears to flatly contradict the processes of Nature. Is it possible to reconcile the two? The answer is that it is not only possible, but that this exclusive selection is the necessary consequence of the Universal Law of Evolution when working in the higher phases of individualism. It is not that those who do not come within the pale of this Selec- tion suffer any diminution, but that those who do come within it receive thereby a special augmentation, and, as we shall see by and by, this takes place by The Creation 9 a purely natural process resulting from the more intel- ligent employment of that knowedge which it is the purpose of the Bible to unfold to us. These two principles of the inclusive and the exclusive are inter- twined in a double thread which runs all through Scripture, and this dual nature of its statements must always be borne in mind if we would apprehend its meaning. Asking the reader, therefore, to carefully go over these preliminary remarks as affording the clue to the reason of the Bible statements, I shall now turn to the first chapter of Genesis. The opening announcement that "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" contains the statement of the first of those two propositions which are the fundamental premises from which the whole Bible is evolved. From the Master's instruction to the woman of Samaria we know that "God" means "Spirit" ; not "a Spirit " as in the Authorised Ver- sion, thus narrowing the Divine Being with the limi- tations of individuality, but as it stands in the original Greek, simply "Spirit" — that is, all Spirit, or Spirit in the Universal. Thus the opening words of the Bible may be read, "in the beginning Spirit" — which is a statement of the underlying Universal Unity. Here let me draw attention to the two-fold meaning of the words "in the beginning." They may mean lo Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning first in order of time, or first in order of causation, and the latter meaning is brought out by the Latin version, which commences with the words "in prin- cipio"—thsLt is, "in principle," This distinction should be borne in mind, for in all subsequent stages of evolution the initial principle which gives rise to the individualised entity must still be in operation as the fons et origo of that particular manifestation just as much as in its first concentration; it is the root of the individuality, without which the individuality would cease to exist. It is the "beginning" of the individu- ality in order of causation, and this "beginning" is, therefore, a continuous fact, always present, and not to be conceived of as something which has been left behind and done with. The same principle was, of course, the "beginning" of the entity in point of time also, however far back in the ages we may suppose it to have first evolved into separate existence, so that whether we apply the idea to the cosmos or to the individual, the words "in the beginning" both carry us back to the primordial out-push from non- manifestation into manifestation, and also rivet our attention upon the same power as still at work as the causal pinciple both in ourselves and in everything else around us. In both these senses, then, the open- ing words of the Bible tell us that the "beginning" of everything is "God," or Spirit in the universal. The Creation ii The next statement, that God created the heaven and the earth, brings us to the consideration of the Bible way of using words. The fact that the Bible deals with spiritual and psychic matters, makes it of necessity an esoteric book, and therefore, in common with all other esoteric literature, it makes a symbolic use of words for the purpose of succintly expressing ideas which would otherwise require elaborate explanation, and also for the purpose of concealing its meaning from those who are not yet safely to be entrusted with it. But this need not discourage the earnest student, for by comparing one part of the Bible with another he will find that the Bible itself af5fords the clue to the translation of its own symbolical vocabulary. Here, as in so many other instances, the Master has given us the key to the right interpretation. He says that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us ; in other words, that "Heaven'' is the kingdom of the innermost and spiritual, and if so, then by necessary implication "Earth" must be the symbol of the opposite extreme, and must meta- phorically mean the outermost and material. We are starting the history of the evolution of the world in which we live, that is to say, this Power which the Bible calls "God" is first presented to us in the opening words of Genesis at a stage immediately preceding the commencement of a stupendous work. 12 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Now what are the conditions necessary for the doing of any work? Obviously there must be something that works and something that is worked upon; an active and a passive factor; an energy and a material on or in which that energy operates. This, then, is . what is meant by the creation of Heaven and Earth ; it is that operation of the eternally subsisting ONE upon Itself which produces its dual expression, as Energy and Substance. And Here remark carefully that this does not mean a separatiofi, for Energy Czn only be exhibited by reason of something which is energized, or, in other words, for Life to manifest at all there must be something that lives. This is an all-important truth, for our conception of ourselves as beings separate from the Divine Life is the root of all our troubles. In its first verse, therefore, the Fible starts us with the conception of Energy or Life inherent in substance, and shows us that the two constitute a dual-unity which is the first manifestation of the Infinite Unmanif ested ONE ; and if the reader will think these things out for himself, he will see that these are primary intuitions the contrary of which it is impos- sible to conceive. He may, if he please, introduce a Dsmiurge as part of the machinery for the production of the world, but then he has to account for his Demiurge, which brings hip back to the Undistributed The Creation 13 ONE of which I speak, and its first manifestation as Energy-inherent-in-Substance ; and if he is driven back to this position, then it becomes clear that his Demiurge is a totally unnecessary wheel in the train of evolutionary machinery, and the gratuitous intro- duction of a factor which does no work but what could equally be done without it, is contrary to any- thing we can observe in Nature or can conceive of a Self-evolving Power. But we are particularly cautioned against the mistake of supposing that Substance is the same thing as Form, for we are told that the "earth was without form." This is important because 'it is just here that a very prolific source of error in meta- physical studies creeps in. We see Forms which, simply as masses, are devoid of an, organized life corresponding to the particular form, and therefore we deny the inherency of Energy or Life in ultimate substance itself. As well deny the pungency of pepper because it is not in the particular pepper-pot we are accustomed to. No, that primordial state of Substance with which the opening verse of the Bible is concerned, is something very far removed from any conception we can have of Matter as formed into atoms or electrons. We are here only at the first stage of Involution, and the presence of material 14 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning atoms is a stage, and by no means the earliest, in the process of Evolution. We are next told that the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Here we have two factors, "Spirit" and "Water," and the initial move- ment is attributed to Spirit, This verse introduces us to that particular mode of manifestation of the Universal Substance which we niay denominate the Psychic. This psychic mode of the Universal Sub- stance may best be described as Cosmic Soul-Essence, not, indeed, universal in the strictest sense otherwise than as always included in the original Primorial Essence, but universal to the particular world-system under formation, and as yet undifferentiated into any individual forms. This is what the mediaeval writers spoke of as "the Soul of the Universe," or Anima Mundi, as distinguished from the Divine Spirit or Animus Dei, and it is the universal psychic medium in which the nuclei of the forms hereafter to become consolidated on the plane of the concrete and material, take their inception in obedience to the movement of the Spirit, or Thought. This is the realm of Potential Forms, and is the connecting link between Spirit, or pure Thought, and Matter, or concrete Form, and as such plays a most important part in the constitution of the Cosmos and of Man. In our reading of the Bible as well as in our practical application of Mental The Creation 15 Science, the existence of this intermediary between Spirit and Matter must never be lost sight of. We may call it the Distributive Medium in passing through which the hitherto undistributed Energy of Spirit receives differentiation of direction, and so ultimately produces differentiation of forms and relations on the outermost or visible plane. This is the Cosmic Element which is esoterically called "Water/' and so long ago as the reign of Henry VIII., Dean Collet explains it thus in a letter to his friend Randulph. Dean Collet was very far from being a visionary. He was one of the precursors of the Reformation in England, and among the first to establish the study of Greek at Oxford, and as the founder of St. Paul's School in London, he took a leading part in intro- ducing the system of public school education, which is still in operation in this country. There is no mistaking Dean Collet for any other than a thoroughly level-headed and practical man, and his opinion as to the meaning of the word "Water" in this connection therefore carries great weight. But we have the utterance of a yet higher authority on this subject, for the Master Himself concentrates His whole instruction to Nicodemus on the point that the New Birth results from the interaction of "Spirit" and "Water," especially emphasizing the fact that "the flesh" has no share i6 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning in the operation. This distinction between / "the flesh," or the outermost principle, and "Water" should be carefully noted. The emphasis laid by the Master on the nothingness of "the flesh," and the essential- ness of "Water," must mark a distinction of the most important kind, and we shall fi?id it very helpful in unravelling the meaning of many passages of the Bible to grasp this distinction at the outset. The action of "Spirit" upon "Water" is that of an active upon a passive principle, and the result of any sort of Work is to reconstruct the material worked upon into a form which it did not possess before. Now the new form to be produced, whatever it may be, is a result, and tiierefore is not to be enumerated among the causes of its own production- Hence it is a self-obvious truism that any act of creative power must take place at a more interior level than that of the form to be created, and accorcfingly, whether in the Old or the New Testament, the creative action is always contemplated as taking place between the Spirit and the Water, whether we are thinking of producing a new world or a new man. We must always go back to First Cause operating on Primary Substance. We are told that the first product of the movement of Spirit upon Water was Light, thereby s,uggesting an analogy with the discoveries of modern science The Creation 17 that light and heat are modes of motion; but the statement that the Sun was not created till the fourth day guards us against the mistake of supposing that what is here meant is the light visible to the physical eye. Rather it is that all-pervading Inner Light, of which I shall have more to say by and by, and which only becomes visible as the corresponding sense of inward vision begins to be developed ; it is that psychic condition of the Universal Substance in which the auras of the potentials of all forms may be discov- ered, and where, consciously or unconsciously, the Spirit determines the forms of those things which are to be. Like all other knowledge, the knowledge of the Inner Light is capable of application at higher and at lower levels, and the premature recognition of its power at the lower levels, uncontrolled by the recog- nition of its higher phases, is one of the most danger- ous acquisitions; but duly regulated by the higher knowledge, the lower is both safe and legitimate, for in its due order it also is part of the Universal Har- mony. The initial Light having thus been produced, the introduction of the firmament on the second day indicates the separation of the spiritual principles of the different members of the world-system from one another, and the third day sees the emanation of Earth from "the Water," or the production of the l8 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning actual corporeal system of Nature — the commence- ment of the process of Evolution. Up to this point the action has been entirely upon the inner plane of "Water," that is to say, a process of Involution, and consistently with this it was impossible for the heavenly bodies to begin giving physical light until the fourth day, for until then no physical sun or planets could have existed. With the fourth day, however, the physical universe is diiferentiated into shape ; and on the fifth day the terrestrial waters begin to take their share in the evolutionary process, by spontaneously producing fish and fowl: and here we may remark in passing how Genesis has forestalled modern science in the discovery that birds are anatomically more closely related to fishes than to land animals. The terrestrial earth (I call it so to distinguish it from symbolic "earth"), already on the third day impregnated with the vegetable principle, takes up the evolutionary work on the sixth Hay, producing all those other animal races which had not already originated in the waters, and thus the preparation of the world as an abode for Man is completed. It would be difficult to give a more concise state- ment of Evolution, Originating Spirit subsists at first as simple Unity, then it differentiates itself into the active and passive principles spoken of as The Creation 19 "Heaven" and '^arth," or "Spirit" and "Water." From these proceed Light and the separation into their respective spheres of the spiritual principles of the diiferent planets, each carrying with it the poten- tial of the self-reproducing power. Then we pass into the realm of realization, and the work that has been done on the interior planes is now reproduced in physical manifestation, thus marking a still further unf oldment ; and finally, in the phrases "let the waters bring forth" and "let the earth bring forth," the land and water of our habitable globe are distinctly stated to be the sources from which all vegetable and animal forms have been evolved. Thus creation is described as the self -transforming action of the ONE unanalys- able Spirit passing by successive transitions into all the varieties of manifestations that fill the universe. And here we may notice a point which has puzzled commentators unacquainted with the principles on which the Bible is written ; this is the expression "the evening and the morning were the first, second, etc., day." Why, it is asked, does each day begin with the evening? and various attempts have been made to explain it in accordance with Jewish methods of reck- oning time. But as soon as we see what the Bible statement of creation is, the reason at once becomes clear. The second verse of the Bible tells us that the starting-point was Darkness, and the coming forth of 20 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Light out of Darkness cannot be stated in any other order than the dawning of morning from night. It is the dawning into manifestation out of non- manifestation^ and this happens at each successive stage of the evolutionary process. We should notice, also, that nothing is said as to the remainder of each day. All that we hear of each day is as "the morn- ing," thus indicating the grand truth that when once a Divine day opens it never again descends into the shades of night. It is always "morning." The Spiritual Sun is always climbing higher and higher, but never passes the zenith of commences to decline, a truth which Swedenborg expresses by saying that the Spiritual Sun is always seen in the eastern heavens at an angle of forty-five degrees above the horizon. What a glorious and inspiring truth : when once God begins a work, that work will never c^ase, but will go on for ever expanding into more and more radiant forms of strength and beauty, because it is the expression of the Infinite, which is Itself Love, Wisdom, and Power. These days of creation are still in their prime, and for ever will be so, and the germs of the New Heavens and the New Earth which the Bible promises are already maturing in the heavens and earth that now are, waiting only, as St. Paul tells us, for the manifestation of the Sons of God to follow up the old principle of Evolution to The Creathn 21 still further expansion in the g!<^ that shall be revealed. As himself included in the great Whole, Man is no exception tp the Universal Law of Evolution. It has often been remarked that the account of his creation is two-fold, the two statements being con- tained in the first and second chapters of Genesis respectively. But this is precisely in accordance with the method adopted regarding the rest of creation. First we are told of the creation in the realm of the invisible and psychic, that is to say, the process of Involution, and afterwards we are told of the creation on the plane of the concrete and material, that is to say, the process of Evolution ; and since Involution is the cause and Evolution the effect, the Bible observes this order both in the account of the creation of the world and in that of the creation of Man. In regard to his physical structure, Man's body, we are told, is formed from the "earth," that is, by a combination of the same material elements as all other concrete forms, and thus in the physical Man, the evolutionary process attains its culmination in the production of a material vehicle capable of serving as the starting- point for a further advance, which has now to be made on the plane of the Intellectual and Spiritual. The principal of Evolution is never departed from, but its further action now includes the intelligent 22 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning co-operation of the evolving Individuality itself as a necessary factor in the work. The development of merely animal Man is the spontaneous operation of Nature, but the development of the mental Man can only result from his own recognition of fhe Law of the self-expression of Spirit as operating in him- self. It is, therefore, for the setting forth of Man's power to use this Law that the Bible was written, and, accordingly, the great fact on which it seeks to rivet our attention in its first utterance regarding Man is that he is made in the image and likeness of God. A very little reflection will show us that this likeness cannot be in the outward form, for the Universal Spirit in which all things subsist cannot be limited by a shape. It is a Principle permeating all things as their innermost substance and vivifying energy, and of it the Bible tells us that "in the beginning" there was nothing else. Now the one and only conception we can have of this Universal Life-Principle is that of Creative Power producing infinitely varied expressions of itself by Thought, for we cannot ascribe any other initial mode of movement to Spirit but that of thought, although as taking place in the universal, this mode of Thought must neces- sarily be, relatively to the individual and particular, a sub-conscious activity. The likeness, therefore, between God and Man must be a mental likeness, The Creation 23 and since the only fact which, up to this point, the Bible has told us regarding the Universal Mind is its Creative Power, the resemblance indicated can only consist in the reproduction of the same Creative Power in the Mind of Man. As we progress we shall find that the whole Bible turns on this one funda- mental fact. The Creative Power is inherent in our Thought, and we can by no means divest ourselves of it, but because we are ignorant that we possess this power, or because we misapprehend the conditions for its beneficial employment, we need much instruc- tion in the nature of our own as yet unrecognized possibilities, and it is the purpose of the Bible to give us this teaching. A little consideration of the terms of the evolu- tionary process will show us that since there is no other source from which it can proceed, the Individual Mind, which is the essential entity that we call Man, can be no other than a concentration of the Universal Mind into individual consciousness. Man's Mind is, therefore, a miniature reproduction of the Divine Mind, just as fire has always the same ignepus qualities whether the centre of combustion be large or small ; and so it is on this fact that the Bible would fix our attention from first to last, knowing that if the interior realm of Causation be maintained in a harmonious order the external realm of EflFects is 24 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning certain to exhibit corresponding health, happiness, and beauty. And further, if the human mind is the exact image and likeness of the Divine, then its creative power must be equally unlimited. Its mode is different, being directed to the individual and par- ticular, but its quality is the same; and this becomes evident if we reflect that it is not possible to set any limit to Thought, and that its only limitations are such as are set by the limited conceptions of the individual who thinks. And it is precisely here that the difficulty comes in. Our Thought must necessarily be limited by our conceptions. We cannot think of something which we cannot conceive, and, therefore, the more limited our conceptions the more limited will be our thought, and its creations will accordingly be limited in a corresponding degree. It is for this reason that the ultimate purpose of all true instruc- tion is to lead us into that Divine Light where we shall see things beyond the range of any past experi- ences — things which have not entered into the heart of man to conceive, revealings of the Divine Spirit opening to us untold worlds of splendour, delight, and unending achievement; but in our earlier stages of development, where we are still surrounded by the mists of ignorance, this correspondence between the range of Thought's creations and the range of our conceptions brings a5out the catastrophe of "the Fall" which forms the subject of our next cfiapter. 11. THE FALL IN the last chapter we reached the conclusion that in the nature of things Thought must always be limited by the range of the intelligence which gives rise to it. The power of Thought as the crea- tive agent is perfectly unlimited in itself, but its ac- tion is limited by the particular conception which it is sent forth to embody. If it is a wide conception based upon an enlarged perception of truth, the thought which dwells upon it will produce corresponding con- ditions. This is self-evident: it is simply the state- ment that an instrument will not do work to which the hand of the workman does not apply it; and if the student will only fix this very simple idea in his mind, he will find in it the key to the whole mystery of man's power of self-evolution. Let us make our first use of this key to unlock the mystery of the story of Eden. It is hardly necessary to say that the story of Eden is an allegory: that is clearly shown by the nature of the two trees that grew in the centre of the gar- den, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil 25 ^ Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning and the Tree of Life. This allegory is one repeated in many lands and ages, as in the classical fable of the Garden of the Hesperides and in the mediaeval Ro- mance of the Rose—always the idea is repeated of a garden in whose centre grows some life-giving fruit or flower which is the reward, of him who discovers the secret by which the centre of the garden may be reached. The meaning in all these stories is the same. The garden is the Garden of the Soul, and the Tree of Life is that innermost peijception of Spirit of which the Master said that it would be a well of water springing up to everlasting life to all who realized it. It is the garden which elsewhere in Scripture is called "the garden of the Lord," and in accordance with the nature of the garden the plants which grow in it, and which man has to tend and cultivate, are thoughts and ideas ; and the chief of them are his idea of Life and his idea of Knowledge, and these occupy the centre of the garden because all our other ideas must take their colour from them. We must recollect that human life is a drama whose action takes place in three worlds, and therefore, in reading- the Bible, we must always make sure which world we are at any moment reading about, the spiritual; the intellectual, or the physical. In. the spiritual world, which ia that of the supreme ideal, The Fall ^7 there exists nothing but the potential of the absolutely perfect: and it is on this account that in the open- ing chapter of the Bible we read that God saw that all his work was good, the Divine eye could find no flaw an3rwhere; and we should note carefully that this absolutely good creation included Man also. But as soon' as we descend to the Intellectual world, which is the world of man's conception of things, it is quite different ; and until man comes to realize the truly spiritual, and therefore perfectly good, essential nature of all things, there is room for any amount of wM-conception, resulting in a corresponding mis- direction of man's creative instrument of Thought, which thus produces correspondingly misformed realities. Now the perfect life of Adam and Eve in Eden is the picture of Man as he exists in the spiritual world. It is not the tradition of some bygone age, but a S3rmbolical representation of what we all are in our innermost being, thus recalling the words of the Master recorded in the Gospel of the Egyptians, He was asked when the Kingdom of Heaven should come, and replied, "When that which is without shall be as that which is within ;" in other words, when the per- fection of the innermost spiritual essence shall be re- produced in the external part, tn the story of Man's pristine life of innocence and joy in Paradise, we are 28 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning reading on the level of the highest of the three worlds. The story of "the Fall" brings us to the envelop- ment of this spiritual nature in the lower intellectual and material natures, through which alone it can obtain perfect individualization and Man become a reality instead of remaining only a Divine dream. In the allegory Man is warned by God that Death will be the consequence of eating the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, This is not the threat of a sentence to be passed by God, but a warn- ing as to the nature of the fruit itself ; but this warn- ing is disregarded by Eve, and she shares the forbid- den fruit with Adam, and they are both expelled from Eden and become subject to Death as the consequence. Now, if Eden is the garden of the Soul, it is clear that Adam and Eve cannot be separate personages, but must be two principles in the human individuality which are so closely united as to be represented by a wedded pair. What, then, are these principles ? St, Paul makes a very remarkable statement regarding Adam and Eve. He tells us that "Adam was not de- ceived, but the woman being deceived was in the trans- gression" (I Tim. ii. 14). We have, therefore, Bible warrant for saying that Adam was not deceived ; but at the same time the story of the Fall clearly shows that he was expelled from Eden from partaking of the fruit at Eve's instigation. The Fall 29 To satisfy both statements, therefore, we require to find in Adam and Eve two principles, one of which is capable of being deceived, and is deceived, and falls in consequence of the deception; and the other of which is incapable of being deceived but yet is involved in the fall of the former. This is the problem which has to be worked out, and the names of Adam and Eve supply the solution. Eve, we are told, was so called because she was the mother of all living (Gen. iii. 20). Eve, then, is the Mother of Life, a subject to which I shall have to refer again by and by. Eve, both syllables being pro- nounced, is the same word which in some Oriental languages is written "Hawa," by which name she is called in the Koran, and signifies Breath, the principle which we are told in Genesis ii. 7, constitutes Man a (living Soul, Adam is rendered in the margin of the Bible "earth," or "red earth," and according to another derivation the name may also be rendered as Not- breath; and thus in these two names we have the description of two principles, one of which is "Breath" and Life-conveying, while the other is "Not-breath" and is nothing but earth. It requires no great skill to recognize in these the Soul and the Body. Then St. Paul's meaning becomes clear. Any work on physiology will tell you that the human body is made up of certain chemical mate- 30 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning rials, so much chalk, so much carbon, so much water, etc., etc. Obviously these substances cannot be de- ceived because they have no intelligence, and any de- ception that occurs must be accepted by the soul or intellectual principle, which is Eve, the mother of the individual life. New-Thought readers will have no difficulty in fol- lowing the meaning of the poet Spencer when he says — "For of the soul the body form doth take, For soul is form and doth the body make;" and since the soul is "the builder of the body," tho deception which causes wrong thinking on the part of the intellectual man reproduces itself in physical im* perfection and in adverse external circumstances. What, then, is the deception [which causes the "Fall"? This is figured by the Serpent. The serpent is a very favourite emblem in all ancient esoteric lit- erature and symbolism, and is sometimes used in a positive and sometimes in a negative sense. In either case it means life — not the Originating Life-Principle but the ultimate outcome of that Life-Principle in its most external form of manifestation. This, of course, is not bad in itself. Recognized in full realization of the fact that it comes from God, it is the completion of the Divine work by outward manifestation ; and in this sense it becomes the serpent which Moses lifted up in the wilderness. The Fall 31 But without the recognition of it aS the ultimate mode of the Divine Spirit (which is all that is), it becomes the deadly reptile, not lifted up, but crawling flat upon the ground: it is that ignorant conception of things which cannot see the spiritual element in then\ and therefore attributes all their energy of action and re-action to themselves, not perceiving that they are the creations of a higher power. Ignorant of the Divine Law of Creation^ we do not look beyond secondary causes; and therefore because our own creative thought-power is ever externalizing conditions representative of our conceptions^ we neces- sarily become more and more involved in the meshes of a net-work of circumstances from which we can find no way of escape. How these circumstances come about we cannot tell. We may call it blind chance, or iron destiny, or inscrutable Providence; but because we are ignorant of the true Law of Primary Causa- tion, we never suspect the real fact, which is that the originating power of all this inharmony is ourself. This is the great deception. We believe the serpent, or that conception of life which sees nothing beyond secondary causation, and consequently we accept the Knowledge of Evil as being equally necessary with the Knowledge of Good, and so we eat of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil, It is this dual aspect of knowledge that is deadly, but knowledge itself is 32 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning nowhere condemned in Scripture; on the contrary, it is repeatedly stated to be the foundation of all prog- ress. "Wisdom is a Tree of Life to them that lay hold upon her," says the Book of Proverbs; "Salva- tion is of the Jews because we know what we wor- ship," says Jesus, and so on throughout the Bible. But what is deadly to the soul of Man is the concep- tion that Evil is a subject of Knowledge as well as Good; for this reason, that by thinking of Evil as a subject to be studied, we thereby attribute to it a sub- stantive existence of its own, in other words, we look upon it as something having a self-originating power, which, as we advance in our studies, we shall find more and more clearly is not the case ; and so by the Law of the creative working of Thought, we bring the Evil into existence: we have not yet penetrated the great secret of the difference between causes and con- ditions.* But this knowledge of our thought-action is not reached in the earlier history of the race or of the individual, for the simple reason that all evolution takes place by Growth; and consequently the history of Adam and Eve in realization, that is the external life of humanity as distinguished from our simulta- neous existence on the supreme plane of Spirit, com- *See my Edinburgk Lectures on Mental Science. The Fall 33 mences with their expulsion from Eden and their con- flict with a world, of sorrows and difficulties. If the reader realizes how this expulsion results from the soul accepting Evil as a subject of Knowl- edge, he will now be able to understand certain fur- ther facts. We are told that "the Lord God said, 'Behold the man is become as one of us to know good and evil' ; and now lest he put forth his hand and take of the tree of life and eat and live for ever; the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden" (Gen. iii. 22). Looked at superficially, this seems like jeal- ousy that Man should have attained the same knowl- edge as God, and fear lest he should take the further step that would make him altogether God's equal. But such a reading of the text is babyish, and indicates no conception of God as Universal All-originating Spirit; and we must therefore look for some deeper interpretation. The First Commandment is the recognition of the Divine Unity, a fact on which Jesus laid special em- phasis when he was asked which was the chief com- mandment of the Law; and the purpose is to guard us against the root-error from which all other forms of error spring. If the mathematical statement of Truth is that God is ONE, then the mathematical expression of error is that God is Zero, and as the latter position has sometimes been taken by teachers 34 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning of reputa^n, it may be well to show the student where the fallacy lies. The conclusion that the math^ ematical expression for God is Zero is reached in this way : as soon as you can conceive of anything as being, you can also conceive of it as not-being, in other words, the conception of any positive implies also the conception of its corresponding negative ; consequently the conception of the positive or of the negative by itself is only half the conception, and a whole concep- tion implies the recognition of both. Therefore, since God contains the all. He must con- tain the negative as well as the positive of all poten- tiality, and the equal balance of positive and niegative is Zero. But the radical error of this argument is the assumption that it is possible for two principles to neutralize each other, one of which is, and the other of which is not. We find the principle of neutral- ization by means of equilibriation throughout Nature, but the equilibriation is always between two things each of which actually exists. Thus in chemistry we find an acid exactly equilibriating an alkali and pro- ducing a neutral substance which is neither acid nor alkali ; but this is because the acid and the alkali both really exist, each of them is something that is; but what should we say to a chemical formula which required us to produce a neutral substance by equilib- riating an acid which did exist by an alkali which did The Fall 35 not? Yet this is precisely the sort of cquilibriation we are asked to accept by those who would make Zero the mathematical expression of All-originating Being. They say that a Universal Principle which is is exactly balanced by a Universal Principle which is not; they affirm that Nothing is the equivalent of Somethmg. This is mere juggling with words and figures, and wilfully shutting our eyes to the fact that the only quality of Nothing is Nothingness. Can anything be plainer than the old philosophic dictum, "ex nihUo nihil fit"? (nothing is made out of nothing). Disin- tegrating forces there are in Nature, but they do not proceed out of Nothing. They are the ONE positive power acting at lower levels; not the absence of the One Universal Energy, but that same Energy working with less complex concentration and specific purpose than when directed by those higher modes of itself which constitute individual intelligences. There is no such thing as a Negative Power, in the sense of power which is not the ONE All-originating Power. All energy is some mode of manifestation of the ONE, and it is always making something, though in doing so it may unmake something else; and what we loosely speak of as negative forces are the operation of the cosmical Law of Transition from one Form to another. Above this there is a higher Law, to lead us to the realization of which, is^thc whole 36 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning object of the Bible, and that is the Law of Individual Selection. It does not do away with the Law of Transition, for without transition there could be no Evolution, and the glory of Eternal Life is in con- tinuous Evolution; but it substitutes the Individual Law of conscious Life for the Impersonal Cosmic Law, and effects transition by living processes of as- similation and readjustment which more .perfectly build up the individuality, instead of by a process of unbalanced disintegration w^hich would destroy it. This is the Living Law of Liberty, which at every stage of its progress makes us, not less, but more and yet more ourselves. It is for this reason that the Bible so strongly insists upon the mathematical statement that God is ONE, and in fact makes this the basis of all that it has to say.. God is Life, Expression, Reality; and how can these things comport with Nothingness? All we can know of any invisible power is through the effects we see it produce. Of electricity and chemical attraction it may be truly said that "no man hath seen them or can see them ;" yet we know them by their working, and we rightly argue that if they work they exist. The same argument applies to the Divine Spirit. It is that which is and not that which is not; and there- fore I ask the student who would realize reality and not nothingness once for all to convince himself of The Pan . 37 the fallaciousness of the argument that the Divine Being is Not-being, or that Naught is the same thing as ONE. If he starts his search for Reality by assuming what contradicts mathematics and common-sense, he can never expect to find Reality, for he has denied its ex- istence at the very outset and carries that initial denial all the way along with him. But if he realizes that all relations, whether relatively positive or negative, must necessarily be relations between factors which actually exist, and that there can be no relation with nothing, then, because he has assumed Reality in his premises he will eventually find it in his conclusions, and will learn that the Great Reality is the ONE expressing itself as the MANY, and the MANY recognizing themselves in the ONE. The more advanced student will have no difficulty in recognizing the particular schools of teaching to which these remarks apply; their mathemathics are unassailable, but the assumptions on which they make their selection of terms in the first instance are totally inapplicable to the subject-matter to which they apply them, for that subject is Life-in-itself. Now, the deception into which Eve falls is math- ematically represented by saying that God ^ Zero, and thus attributing to Evil the same self-existence as to Good, There is no such thing as Absolute Evil ; 38 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning and what we recognize as Evil is the ONE Good Power working as Disintegrating Force, because we have not yet learnt to direct it in such a way that it shall perform the functions of transition to higher degrees of Life without any disintegration of our individuality either in person or circumstances. It is this disintegrating action that makes the ONE Power appear evil relatively to ourselves ; and, so long as we conceive ourselves thus related to it, it does look as though it were Zero balancing in itself the two oppo- site forces of Life and Death, Good and Evil, and it is in this sense that "God" is said to know both. But this is a conception very different to that of the all-productive ONE, and arises, not from the true nature of Being, but from our own confused Thought. But because the action of our Thought is always crea- tive, the mere fact of our regarding Evil as an affirma- tive force in itself makes it so relatively to ourselves; and therefore no sooner do we fear evil than we begin to create the evil that we fear. To extinguish evil we must learn not to fear it, and that means to cease recognizing it as having any power of its own, and so our salvation comes from realizing that in truth there is nothing but the good. But this knowledge can only be attained through long experience, which will at last bring Man to the place where he is able to deduce Truth from a priori The Fall 39 principles, and to learn that his past experiences of evil have proceeded from his own inverted concep- tions, and are not founded upon Truth but upon its opposite. If then it were possible for him to attain the knowledge which would enable him to live for ever before gaining this experience, the result would be an immortality of misery, and therefore the Law of Nature renders it impossible for him to reach the knowledge which would place immortality within his grasp, until he has gained that deep insight into the true working of causation which is necessary to make Eternal Life a prize worth having. For these reasons Man is represented as being expelled from Eden lest he should eat of the Tree of Life and live for ever. Before quitting this subject we must glance briefly at the sentences pronounced upon the man, the woman, and the serpent. The serpent in this connection being the principle of error, which results in Death, can never come into any sort of reconciliation with the Divine Spirit, which is Truth and Life, and, therefore, the only possible pronouncement upon the serpent is a curse — that is, a sentence of destruction ; and the Bible goes on to show the stages by which this destruction is ultimately worked out. The penalty to Adam, or the corporeal body, is that of having to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow — that is, by toilsome labor, which would not be necessary if the true law of the 40 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning creative exercise of our Thought were understood. The woman passes under a painful physiological law, but at the same time final deliverance and restoration « from the "Fall" is promised through her instrumen- tality : her seed shall crush the serpent's head, that is, shall utterly destroy that false principle which the serpent represents. Since the Woman is the Soul, or Individual Mind, her progeny must be thoughts and ideas. New ideas are not brought forth easily, they are the result of painful experiences and of long mental labor, and thus the physiological analogy contained in the text exactly illustrates the birth of new ideas into the world. And as the evolution of the Soul proceeds toward hi§;her and higher intelligence, there is a corresponding in- crease in the lifeward tendency of its ideas, and thus there is enmity between the seed of "the Woman" or the enlightened conception of the principles of Life, and the seed of "the Serpent" or the opposite and unenlightened conception. This is the same warfare which we find in Revela- tions between "the Woman" and "the Dragon." But in the end the victory remains with "the Woman" and her "Seed." During the progress of the struggle the Serpent must bruise the heel of the Divine Seed — that is to say, must impede and retard the progress of Truth on the earth; but Truth must conquer at last The Fall 41 and crush the Serpent's head so that it shall never rise up again for ever. The "Seed of the Woman," the Fruit of the spiritually enlightened Mind, which must at last achieve the final victory, is that supreme ideal which is the recognition of Man's Divine Son- ship. It is the realization of the fact that he is, indeed, the image and likeness of God. This is the Truth the knowledge of which Jesus said would set us free, and each one who attains to this knowledge realizes that he is at once the Son of Man and the Son of God. Thus the story of the Fall contains also the state- ment of the principle of the Rising-again. It is the history of the human race, because it is first the his- tory of the individual soul, and to each one of us the ancient wisdom says, "de te fabula narratur," These opening chapters of Genesis are, therefore, an epitome of all that the Bible afterwards unfolds in fuller detail, and the whole may be summed up in the following terms : — The great Truth concerning Man is that he is the image and likeness of God. Man is at first ignorant of this Truth, and this ignorance is his Fall. Man at last comes to the perfect knowledge of this Truth, and this knowledge is his Rising-again, and these principles will expand until they bring us to the full Expression of the Life that is in us in all the glories of the Heavenly Jerusalem. III. ISRAEL THE space at my disposal will allow me only to touch upon a few of the most conspicuous points in that portion of the Bible narrative which takes us from the story of Eden to the Mission of Moses, for the reader will kindly bear in mind that I am not writing a commentary on the whole Bible, but only a brief introduction to its study. The episode of Cain and Abel will be dealt with in the next chapter, and I will, therefore, pass on at once to the Deluge. As most of my- readers probably know, this story is not confined to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, but is met with in one form or another in all the most ancient traditions of the world, and this universal concensus of mankind leaves no doubt of the occurrence of some overwhelming cataclysm which has indelibly stamped itself upon the memory of all nations. Whether science will ever succeed in working out the problem of its extent and of the physical condi- tions that gave rise to it, remains to be seen, but it does not appear unreasonable to associate it with the 42 Israel 43 tradition handed down to us by Plato of the sinking of the great continent of Atlantis, which is said to have once occupied the area now covered by the Atlantic ocean. I am well aware that some geologists dispute the possibility of any radical changes having ever taken place in the distribution of the land and water surfaces of the globe, but there are at least equally good opinions on the other side, and if there is any fact in the world's history regarding which tradition is unanmious, it is the catastrophe of the Deluge. And here I would draw attention to the fact that the Bible specially warns us against the opinion that no such catastrophe ever took place, and points out this opinion as one of the signs of the time of the end ; speaking of it as determined ignorance, and tell- ing us that a similar catastrophe, only by fire instead of water, will at some future period overwhelm the existing world (II. Peter iii.) ; and I would add that the possible conditions for such an event may not unreasonably be inferred from certain facts in the science of astronomy. It is not my present purpose, however, to entpr into the scientific and historical aspects of the Deluge tradition, but to point out its significance in that inner meaning of the Bible which I wish the student to grasp. In the story as handed down by all nations, the 44 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Deluge is attributed to the wickedness of mankind, and according to some very ancient traditions this wickedness took largely the form of sorcery, a word which may perhaps provoke a smile in the uninitiated reader, but which holds a conspicuous place in the list of those causes which in the book of Revelations are enumerated as leading to exclusion from the Heavenly City, and it will become sufficiently clear why it should do so when we learn what it really means. Coupling this tradition with the symbolical significance of "water," a deluge would indicate a total submergence in a psychic environment which had become too powerful to be held under control. The psychic world is an integral part of the uni- verse, and the psychic element is an integral part of man; and it is in this circulus that we find the plastic material which forms the nucleus for those attrac- tions which eventually consolidate as external facts. The psychic realm is therefore the realm of tre- mendous potentialities, and the deeper our knowl- edge of its laws the greater we see to be the need for bringing these potentialities under a higher con- trol. Now the opening verses of Genesis have shown us that "water" without the movement of the Spirit is darkness and the abode of chaos. The movement of the Spirit is the only power that can control the Israel 45 turbulence of "the waters," and bring them into that harmonious action which will result in forms of Life, Beauty, and Peace ; and in the world of Man's Mind this movement of the Spirit upon "the waters" takes place exactly in proportion as the individual recog- nizes the trile nature of the Divine Spirit, and wills to reflect its image and likeness. Where this recog- nition takes place the psychic forces are brought under the control of a harmonizing power which, reflecting itself into them, can only produce that which is Good and Beautiful, on a small scale at first because of our infantine knowledge of the powers with which we are dealing, but continually growing with our growth until the whole psychic world opens out before us as a limitless realm filled with the Glory of God and the Love of Man and the shapes of beauty to which these give rise. But if a man forces his way into that realm on no other basis than his individual strength of will, he does so without reckoning that his will is itself a product of the psychic plane, and only one among untold organized entities and unorganized forces which sooner or later will overpower him and hurry him to age-long destruction — "age-long," for I use the Bible word aionios, which, as the learned Farrar has shown in his Eternal Hope, does not mean abso- lutely endless; yet, if we reflect what may be included 46 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning in this word, infinite periods perhaps of withdrawal and renewal of our whole planetary system, we may well stand aghast at such prodigious ruin. But if such dangers are in it, may we not say that we will have nothing to do with the psychic realm? No, for by our nature we are always immersed in it: it is within us, and we are, and always must be, inhabitants of it, and we are always unconsciously using its forces and being re-acted upon by them. What we need, therefore, is, not to escape from what is an essential part of our nature, but to learn to vivify this otherwise dark realm with the warmth of Divine Lqve and the illumination of Divine Light, But the Bible tells how very far the antediluvian world was from recognizing these Divine principles, for "the earth was filled with violence," and, except in the family of Noah, the true worship of God had ceased among men. And remark this word "vio- lence" as the summing-up of human iniquity. Vio- lence is the clashing of individual wills not harmonized by the recognition of any unifying principle. The ONE-ness of the Spirit from which all individualiza- tion proceeds is entirely lost sight of, and "each for himself" becomes the ruling principle-— a principle which cannot but result in violence under whatever disguise it may be masked for a time. The earth filled with violence was the outward cor- Israel 47 respondence of the inward mental state of the masses of mankind, and we may, therefore, well imagine what the nature of their operations in the symbolic world of "Water" must have been. This state of things had been growing for generations untjl at last the inevitable result arrived, and the moral deluge produced its correspondence in the physical world. The uninstructed reader will doubtless smile at my reference to a psychic environment, but those who ) have obtained at least sortie glimpses beyond the I threshold will see the force of my argument when I j direct their attention to the signs of a recurrence of ! a similar state of things at the present day. Research in various directions is making clearer and clearer the reality of the psychic forces, and increasing num- bers are beginning to get some measure of practical insight into them; and while I rejoice to say, we see that for the most part these opening powers are being employed under the direction of sincere religious feel- ing and with charitable intention, yet there are not wanting reports of opposite uses, and this in connec- tion with specific localities where the inverted em- ployment of these great powers is secretly practised according to methodized system. I cannot too strongly warn the student against any connection with such societies, and their existence is a terrible comment upon the Master's description 48 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning tof the latter days, which, He expressly tells us, will reproduce the character of those which immediately ' preceded the flood. The sole safeguard is in recog- nizing the Divine Spirit as the only Source of Power, and in regarding every action, whether of thought, word, or deed, as being in its form and measure an act of Divine worship. This is what St. Paul means when he says "Pray without ceasing." What needs to be cultivated is the habitual mental attitude that leads us to see God in all things, and it is for this reason that the foundation of conscious spiritual Life is that First Commandment to the consideration of which we are approaching. It was, therefore, in consequence of their entire denial of the Divine Spirit that the antediluvians raised up an adverse power which at last became too strong for them to control. And here let me once for all set the student right with regard to those passages of the Bible in which God is represented as making up His mind to inflict injury, as in the announcement of the impending Deluge. These expressions are figurative. They represent the entrance upon the scene of that Cosmic Law of Disintegration which necessarily comes into play as soon as the highest di- recting power of Intelligence is inhibited, and, there- fore, as soon as a man wilfully thrusts from him the recognition of the Universal Spirit in its higher mani- Israel 49 festations as the Guardian and the Guide, he, ipso facto, calls it into action in its lower manifestations as the Universal Cosmic Force. The reason for this will appear more clearly from a careful study of the relations between the Personal and the Impersonal modes of Spirit, but the explana- tion of these relations would occupy too large a space to be entered upon here, and the reader must be re- ferred to other works on the subject; in the present connection it is sufficient to say that we can never get rid of God, for we ourselves are man festations of His Being, and if we will not have Him as the Good, we shall be compelled to accept It as the Evil. This is what the Master meant when He said in the parable that on the lord's return to his city, he or- dered those who would not accept him to reign over them to be slain before him. Noah and his three sons are rescued from the uni- versal overthrow by means of the Ark. As I am con- cerned in the present book with the inner meaning of the Bible rather than with the historical facts, I must leave the reader to form his own conclusions regarding the literal measurements of that vessel; but I would take this opportunity of observing that where distinct numbers and measurements are given in the Bible, they are not introduced at haphazard. From the standpoint of ordinary arithmetic they may 50 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning seem to be so, and the main argument of Bishop Colenso's great work on the Pentateuch is based on these apparent discrepancies. For instance, speak- ing of the sacrifices to be offered for women after child-birth, he points out that during the march through the desert these could, according to the text, only be offered by Aaron and his two sons, and that calculated on ordinary averages, the offering of these sacrifices would have occupied each of these three priests fourteen hours a day without one moment's rest or intermission (vol. i., 123). From the point of view of simple arithmetic this result is unavoid- able; but I cannot endorse the Bishop's conclusion that the scribes who wrote the Pentateuch under the direction of Ezra introduced any numbers that oc- curred to them without considering how they would work out. On the contrary, such investigation as I have been able to make into the subject, convinces me that the Bible numbers are calculated with the most rigid accuracy, and with the very deepest thought of the results to which they will work out, only this is done according to a certain symbolic system known as Sacred Numeration; and the very impracticability of the figures when tested by ordinary arithmetic is in- tended to put us upon enquiry for some deeper mean- ing below the surface. To explain the principles of Israel 51 Sacred Numeration would be beyond the scope of an elementary book like the present, and probably few readers would care to undertake the requisite amount of study; but we must not suppose that the ntmibers given in the Bible are without significance whenever ordinary methods of calculation fail to elucidate them. The whole meaning of Scripture is not upon the sur- face, and in the present connection we are expressly pointed to a s3rmbolic signification in I. ]Peter, iii. 20-21 ; and the recurrence of the Ark as a sacred em- blem in the great race-religions clearly indicates it as representing some universal principle. The Zoroastrian legend of the flood throws some light upon the subject, for Yima, the Persian Noah, is bidden by Ahura Mazda, the Deity, to bring "the seeds of sheep, oxen, men and women, ddgs and birds^ and of every kind of tree and fruit, two of every kind, into the ark and to seal it up with a golden ring and make in it a door and a window." The significance of the Ark is that of a vehicle for the transmission of the life-principle of beings from an old to a new or- der of life, and all that is not included in the Ark perishes. This is the generalized statement of relations which the Ark sets forth, and, like all other generalizations, it admits of a great many particular applications, ranging from those which are purely physiological 52 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning to those which are in the highest degree spiritual, and the study of comparative religions will show us that the idea has been employed in all its most varied applications; yet, however varied, they all have this common feature that they signify something which conveys individual life safely through a period of transition from one order of manifestation to another. The Ark, as the sacred vessel, plays a conspicuous part throughout Scripture, but in the present con- nection we shall best realize its meaning by consider- ing it as the opposite principle to that from which it affords deliverance. If "Water" signifies the psy- chic principle, then the Ark signifies that which the psychic principle supports, and which has an opposite but correspondent nature, that is to say, the Body, The Ark is not independent of the Water but is con- structed for the purpose of floating upon it and simi- larly the body is expressly adapted to man's psychic nature so as to make with it and the spiritual prin- ciple of Life, a Whole individuality. Now, it is precisely in the recognition of this Whole- ness that refuge from all psychic entanglements is to be found. We must always remember that the body equally with the soul is the instrument of the mani- festation of the Spirit. It is the union of the three into a single Whole that constitutes the full reality of Life and it is this sacredness of the body that is typi- Israel 53 fied by the sacredness of the Ark, The Ark of Noah was a solid construction, built on a pattern all the details of which were laid down to scale by the Divine Architect and thus exemplifies the accurate proportions of the human body; and in passing it may interest the reader to note that the proportions of the human body numerically represent the principal measurements of the solar system, and also form the basis of the proportions observed in such ecclesias- tical architecture as is designed according to canonical rules, of which Westminster Abbey and Milan Ca- thedral are good examples. I cannot, however, stop to digress into this very in- teresting subject, and for our present purpose it will be sufficient to say that the Ark with its living freight is typical of the fact that the full realisation of Life is only attained in the Threefold Unity of body, soul and spirit, and not by their dissociation. It is the assertion of the solid, living, Reality of the work of the Spirit as distinguished from those imperfect manifestations which are the subterranean roots of the true manifestation, but are not the real solid thing itself. It is the protest of healthy reality, which in- cludes the psychic element in its proper order as the intermediary between the purely spiritual and the purely material, as against the rejection of the cor- poreal element and total absorption in the psychic, a 54 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning condition which prevents the Spirit from attaining to self-expression as a synthesis, which alone is the completion of its evolutionary work. For this reason undue absorption in the psychic sphere is contrary to the Spirit ; and however we may apply to it the word "spiritual" in the sense of not being corporeal, if the psychic element is not taken in its proper connection with the two others, it is as far from being "spiritual" in the true sense of the word as the material element itself. The true reality is in the harmonious interaction of the Three-in-ONE. God's world is a world of Truth in which evanescent shapes do not take the place of Reality, and for these reasons the Bible everywhere insists on nothing short of the fulness of perfect realization, and the Ark is one of the figures under which it does so. This realization of the Triple-Unity of Man is the first step towards our final enfranchisement ; but in the very act of escaping from the danger of the Deluge we are exposed to a danger of the opposite kind, that of regarding the corporeal side of life as everything, and this is typified by the building of the Tower of Babel. This tower, note carefully, was built of brick, that is of a substance which is nothing but clay, the same "red earth" out of which Adam is formed, and it is there- fore the very opposite to the Heavenly Jerusalem which is built of gold and precious stones. Now, a building Israel 55 naturally signifies a habitation, and the building of the Tower of Babel to escape the waters of a flood is that reaction against the psychic element which denies spiritual things altogether, and makes of the body and its physical environment the one and only dwelling- place of man. It is the same error as before of trying to erect the edifice of Wholeness on the foundation merely of a part, only now the part selected is the cor- poreal instead of the psychic. Arithmetically it is the attempt to make out that one-third is the same as ONE, The natural consequences soon follow in the confusion of tongues. Language is the expression of Thought, and if our ideas of reality include nothing more than the infinitude of secondary causes which appear in the material world, there is no central Unit around which they can be grouped, and consequently, instead of any certain knowledge, we have only a multitude of conflicting opinions based upon the ever- changing aspects of the world of appearances. Quot homines tot sententiaej and so the builders are dis- persed in confusion, for theirs is not "the city that hath foundations whose builder and maker is God." From this point in the Bible story a stretch of many ages brings us to the times of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We are here in the transition stage from allegory to history, and St. Paul points out this intermingling of the two elements when he tells us that S6 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Hagar and Sarah represent the two covenants, and the earthly and heavenly Jerusalems. And here I would impress upon the student the dual character of scrip- tural personages and events. Because a personage or event is typical it does not follow that it is not also historical; on the contrary, certain personages, sys- tems, and events, become typical, that is, specially em- phasize certain principles, for the very reason that they give them concrete expression. As Johnson says of the Swedish monarch — "He left the name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral or adorii a tale." In other words, historical realities become the very summing-up and visible form of abstract principles, and therefore we are justified by the Bible itself in finding in its personages types of principles as well as historical characters. I will not, however, here open the question whether the three Patriarchs were actual personages, or, as some critics tell us, were merely the legendary an- cestors of certain groups of wandering tribes, the Beni-Ibrahim, the Beni-Ishak, and the Beni-Yakub, which subsequently coalesced into the Hebrew nation. However interesting, the discussion of the historical facts would be remote from 'my present object, which is to throw some light upon the inner meaning of the Bible, and for this purpose we Biay be content to take Israel 57 the simple narrative of the text, for, whether actual or legendary, the only way in which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob can affect us at the present day is as char- acters in a history the significance of which will be- come clear if we read between the lines. • But from this latter point of view the biblical state- ment of the national origin of Israel carries enfolded within it the hidden statement of those great prin- ciples which it is the purpose of the Bible to reveal. And here let me draw attention to the method adopted in Scripture. There are certain great universal prin- ciples which permeate all planes of being from the highest to the lowest. They are not many in number, and the relations between them are not difficult of comprehension when clearly stated, but we find diffi- culty in recognizing the identity of the same principles when we meet with them, so to say, at different levels, as for examfple on the physical and the psychic planes respectively, and consequently we are apt to imagine them much more numerous and complicated than they really are. . Now, the purpose of the Bible is to convey in- stliiction in the nature and use of these principles to those in whose hands this knowledge would be safe and useful, while concealing it from others, and in a manner appropriate to this object it continually re- peats the same few all-eihbracing principles over and 58 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning over and over again. This repetition is firstly un- avoidable because the principles themselves are few in number, next it is necessary as a process of ham- mering-in and fixing it in our minds, and lastly it is not a bare repetition, but there is a progressive ex- pansion of the statement so as to conduct us step by step to a further comprehensiwi of its meaning. Now, this is done in a variety of ways and one of frequent occurrence is through the use of Names. Sacred Nomenclature is as large a study as Sacred Numeration and indeed the two so shade off into one another that they may be regarded as forming a single study, and I will therefore no more attempt in the present book to elucidate the one system than the other, for they require a volume to themselves; but this need not prevent us considering occasional in- stances of both and the names of the Patriarchs are too important to be passed over without notice. The frequency with which God is called in Scripture the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, shows that something more must be referred to than the mere fact that the ancestors of the Jews worshipped Him, and the consideration of some of the prominent points in the history of these allegorical personages will throw a light on the subject which will be very helpful in our further investigations. If we realize the truth of St. Paul's statement that Israel 59 the real object of the Bible is to convey the history of the spiritual Israel under the figure of Israel after the flesh, we shall see that the descent of Israel from the three Patriarchs must be a spiritual descent, and we may therefore expect to find in the Patriarchs themselves an adumbration of the principles which give rise to the spiritual Israel. Now, we should particularly notice that the name "Israel" was be- stowed on Jacob, the third Patriarch, on the occasion when he wrestled with the angel at the ford Jabbok, and he obtained this name as the result of his success- ful wrestling. We are told that Jacob recognized that it was the Divine Being, the Nameless ONE, with whom he wrestled, and this at once gives us the key to the allegory; for we know from the Master's in- struction to the woman of Samaria that God is Uni- versal Spirit, and though the Universal is that which gives rise to all manifestations of the particular, yet it is logically and mathematically impossible for the Universal as such to asstune individual personality. Under the figure, therefore, of wrestling with "a man," we perceive that what Jacob wrestled with was the great problem of his own relation to the Universal Spirit under its two-fold aspect of Universal Energy and Universal Intelligence, allegorically represented as a powerful man; and he held on and wrestled till he gained the blessing, and the New Name in which the 6o Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning nature of that blessing was summed up. The condi- tions are significant. He was alone. Father of a large family as he was, none of his dear ones could help him in the struggle. We must each solve the problem of our relation to the Infinite Mind for ourselves; and not our nearest and dearest can wrestle for us. And the struggle takes place in the darkness. It is when we begin to find that the light we thought we possessed is not the true light, when we find that its illuminating power is gone, that we rise nerved with an energy we never knew before, and commence in earnest the struggle for the Light, determined never to let go until we win the victory. And so we wrestle till the day begins to break, but even then we must not quit our hold; we must not be content until we have received the New Name which marks our possession of that prin- ciple of Light and Life which will for ever expand into brighter day and fuller livingness. "To him that overcometh will I give ... a New Name" (Rev. ii. 17). But Jacob carries with him the mark of the struggle throughout his earthly career. The angel touched the hollow of his thigh, and thenceforward he was lame. The meaning is simple enough to those who have had some experience of the wrestling. They can never again walk in earthly things with the same step Israel 6i as before. They have seen the Truth, and they can never again unsee it ; their whole stpndpoint has been altered and is no longer understood by those around them ; to those who have not wrestled with the angel, they appear to walk lamely. What, then, was the New Name that was thus gained by the resolute wrestler? His original name of Jacob was changed to Israel. The definition given of Israel in the seventy-third Psalm is "such as are of a clean heart," and Jesus expressed the same idea when he said of Nathanael, "Behold an Israelite in- deed in whom is no guile" ; for the emphasis laid upon the word "Israelite" at once suggests some inner meaning, since Nathanael's nationality was no more remarkable under the circumstances than that of an Englishman in Piccadilly. The great fact about the spiritual Israel is there- fore cleanness of heart and absence of guile, in other words, perfect sincerity, which again implies single- ness of purpose in the right direction. It is precisely that quality which our Buddhist friends call "one- pointedness," and on which, under various similitudes, the Master laid so much stress. This, then, is the distinctive characteristic which attaches to the name of Israel, for it is this concentration of effort that is the prime factor in gaining the victory which leads to the acquisition of the name. This is fundamental. 62 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning and without it nothing can be accomplished; it in- dicates the sort of mental character which we must aim at, but it is not the meaning of the Name itself. The name of Israel is composed of three sylables, each of which carries a great meaning. The first syllable "Is" is primarily the sound of the indraw- ing of the breath, and hence acquires the significance pi the Life-principle in general, and more particularly of individual Life. This recognition of the individu- alization of the Life-principle formed the basis of the Assyrian worship. The syllable "Is" was also ren- dered "As," "Ish," and "Ash," and gave rise to the worship of the Life-principle under the plural name "Ashur," which thus represented the male and female elements, the former being worshipped as Ashr, or Asr, and the latter as Ashre, Ashira, Astarte, lastara or Ishtar, and lunar goddess of Babylon, -and the same idea of femininity is found in the Egyptian "Isis." Hence the general conception conveyed by the syllable "Is" is that of a feminine spiritual prin- ciple manifesting itself in individuality, that is to say the "Soul" or formative element, and it is thus in- dicative of all that we mean when we speak of the psychic side of nature. How completely the Assy- rians identified themselves with the cultus of this principle is shown by the name of their country, which is derived from "Ashur." The second syllable, "Ra," is the name of the great Israel 63 , Egyptian sun-god, and is thus the complementary of everything that is signified by "Is." It is primarily indicative of physical life rather than psychic life, and in general represents the Universal Life-giving power as distingiuished from its manifestation in particular individuality. Ra symbolizes the Sun, while Is is symbolized by the Moon, and represents the mascu- line element as emphatically as Is represents the feminine. The third syllable, "El," has the significance of Universal Being. It is "THE," i.e., The nameless Principle which includes in itself both the masculine and feminine elements, both the physical and the psychic, and is greater than them and gives rise to them. It is another form of the word Al, Ale, or Ala, which means "High," and is indicative of the Supreme Principle before it passes into any differen- tiated mode. It is pure Spirit in the universal. Now, if Man is to attain liberty, it can only be by the realization of these Three Modes of Being — the physical, the psychic, and the spiritual, or as the Bible expresses it, Body, Soul, and Spirit, He must know what these three are in himself and must also recognize the Source from which they spring, and he must at least have some moderately definite idea of their genesis into individuality. Therefore the man "instructed unto the kingdom of heaven" com- bines a threefold recognition of himself and of God 64 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning which is accurately represented by the combination of the three syllables Is, Ra and EL Unless these three are joined into a single unity, a single word, the recognition is incomplete and the full knowledge of truth has not been attained. "Ra" by itself im- plies only the knowledge of the physical world, and results in Materialism. "Is" by itself realizes only the psychic world, and results in Sorcery. "El" by itself corresponds only with a vague apprehension of some over-ruling power, capricious and devoid of the element of Law, and thus results in Idolatry. It is only in the combination of all three elements that the true Reality is to be found, whether we study it in its physical, psychic, or spiritual aspect. We may for particular purposes give fecial prominence to one aspect over the two others, but this is for a time only, and even while we do so we realize that the particular mode of Life-power with which we are dealing derives its efficiency only from the fact of its being permeated by the other two. We cannot too firmly impress upon our minds that, though there are three modes, there is only ONE LIFE; and in a.11 our studies, and in their practical application, we must never forget the great truth that the Living power which we use is a Synthesis, and that whenever we make an analysis we theoretically destroy the syn- the$}s. The only purpose of making an analysis is to leam how to build up the S3^thesis; and it is for Israel 6$ this reason that the Bible equally condemns the oppo- site extremes of materialism and sorcery. It tells us that "dogs and sorcerers" are excluded from the heavenly city, and when we understand what is meant by these terms it becomes self-evident that it cannot be otherwise. It is for this reason, also, that we find the Israelites so often warned both against the Babylonian and the Egyptian idolatries; not because there was no great underlying truth in the worship of those nations, but because it was a worship that excluded the idea of WHOLENESS. "Wilt thou be made whole?" is the Divine invitation to us all; and the Egyptian and Assyrian worships were eminently calculated to lead their votaries away from this Wholeness in opposite directions. But that both the Assyrian and the Egyptian wor- ship had a solid basis of truth is a fact to which the Bible itself bears this remarkable testimony: — "In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land; whom the Lord of Hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work pf my hands, and Israel mine inheritance" (Isaiah xix. 24). The Israelite worship was as essentially that of the prinqiple represented by "El" as those of Egypt and Assyria were of the two others, and it needed the balancing of those two extremes by the recognitioii 66 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning of their relation to the central, or spiritual, principle to constitute the realization of the true Divine Son- ship of Man in which no element of his threefold being — ^body, soul or spirit — is alien from unity with "the Father." This, then, was the significance of the New Name given to Jacob. He had wrestled with the Divine until the light had begun to dawn upon him, and he thus acquired the right to a name which should cor- rectly describe what he had now become. Formerly he had been Jacob, Le., Yakub, a name derived from the root "Yak" or "One." This signifies the third stage of apprehension of the Divine problem which immediately precedes the final discovery of the great secret of the Trinity-in-Unity of Being. We realize the ONE-ness of the Universal Divine Principle, though we have not yet realized its Three-fold nature both in ourselves and in the Universal. But there are two other stages before this, the first of which is represented by Abraham and the second by Isaac. It should be noted that the two syllables "Ra" and "Is" reappear in these names, the former indicative, as we have seen, of the masculine element of Spirit, and the latter of the feminine, while Jacob, or simple unity, is indicative of the neuter. If we look through the history of Abraham we find the masculine element especially predominant in it. He is the father of the nations that are to spring Israel 67 from him, he receives the covenant of circumcision, he is a warrior, and goes forth to victorious battle, and the change of his name from Abram to Abraham is the substitution of a masculine for a neuter element. In Isaac's history the feminine element is equally predominant. His name is connected with the laugh- ter of his mother (Genesis xviii.), and his marriage with Rebekah is the pivot round which all the events of his life center; and again, his acquiescence in his own sacrifice marks the predominance of the passive element in his character. To him there comes no change of name; he is neither leader, warrior, nor spiritual wrestler, but the calm, contemplative man who "went out to meditate in the field at eventide"; he is typical of the purely receptive attitude of mind, and therefore the syllable "Is" is as indicative of his nature as the masculine syllable "Ra" is of his father's, or the neutral and purely mathematical con- ception indicated by the syllable "Yak" is of his son's. This affords a good instance of the way in which the deepest truths are often concealed in Bible names, and it should lead us to see that the value of the record does not turn on its literal accuracy at every point, but on its correct representation of the great principles to the knowledge of which it seeks to lead us. It is of little moment to us at the present date how much of the book of Genesis is legendary and 68 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning how much historical, and we can afford to view calmly such little inaccuracies on the face of the document as when we are told, in Exodus vi. 3, that God was not known to Abraham by the name Jeho- vah, and in Genesis xxii. 14, that Abraham called the place where he was delivered from sacrificing Isaac "Jchovah-jireh," There are two typical schools of Biblical interpretation, one of which is historically represented by St. Augustine, and the other by St. Jerome. Augustine, who was not an Orientalist and had not studied the original Hebrew, took his stand upon the textual accuracy of the Bible, and urged that if once any inaccuracy were admitted to exist in it, we could never be certain of anything in the whole book. Jerome, who had made an accurate study of the original Hebrew, admitted the existence of inac- curacies in the text from the operation of the sjime natural causes which affect other ancient literature, Such as errors of copyists, variations of oral tradition, and even possible adaptation to the requirements of something which the transcriber believed to be an essential doctrine. These two representative men were not separated by an interval of centuries, but were contemporaries, atnd actually in communication with each other, and we may therefore see from how early a date Christeit- dbm has been divided into blind reverence for the tetter and intelligent inquky into the history of iCs Israel 69 documents. St. Jerome was the father of the Higher Criticism, and with such a respectable authority to back us, we need not be afraid to attribute any such casual errors as the one now in question to those natural causes which render all ancient documents liable to variation, and the point to which I would draw attention is that merely superficial contradic- tions which can t^e reasonably accounted for on purely natural grounds, in no way aflfect the general inspira- tion of the Bible. And by "inspiration" I mean an inner illumination on the part of the writers leading them to the imme- diate perception of Truth, which illumination is itself a fact in the regular order of Nature, the reason of which I hope to make clear in a subsequent volume. The books of the Pentateuch, as we possess them, were written by Ezra and his scribes after the return from the Babylonian captivity-^those writers whom the Jews call "the men of the Great Synagogue," and whose writings were separated from the time of Moses by exactly the same interval that separates Tennyson's Idylls of the King from the date of the actual King Arthur. This alone leaves a sufficiently wide margin for errors to creep into such earlier documents as these writers may have availed themselves of; and wte must next reflect that another interval of several centuries separated them from the copies conveyed 70 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning to Egypt in the second century before Christ for Ptolomy Soter's Greek translation, commonly known as the Septuagint. The "Temple Standard" Pen- tateuch, preserved at Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, can hardly have been the original document written by Ezra, but even supposing it to have been so, what became of it at the destruction of Jerusalem? Tra- dition says it was sent by Josephus to the Emperor of Rome, and written, as it is said to have been, on bulls' hides, we may well imagine that it perished by damp or other agencies, neglected as a barbarous relic in a city whose energies were concentrated on maintaining its position as arbitress of the world by conquest and diplomacy; at any rate the document was never heard of again, and the oldest Jewish ver- sions of the Pentateuch now extant are not older than the tenth century. Under these circumstances we need not be surprised if variations have found their way into the text, nor need we trouble ourselves much about them if we reflect that the real place where Truth exists is in Nature, and not in books, and that the book is merely a recprd of what others have learnt without book; and, moreover, owing to' the deep reverence with which both Jewish and Christian Scriptures have been preserved, we may say that any errors or contradictions discovered in the text no more affect the body of the Truth contained in the Bible as a whole than the dust on the outside of an Israel 71 orange affects the value of the fruit. It is this inner Truth that we are seeking, and if we at all realize the Master's statement that the Kingdom is within, superficial discrepancies will not present any diffi- culties to us. We see, then, in the typical history of the three Patriarchs the announcement of the three great prin- ciples into which all forms of manifestation may be analyzed — the Masculine, Positive, or generating prin- ciple; the Feminine, Receptive, or formative prin- ciple ; and the Neuter or Mathematical principle, which, by determining the proportional relations between the other two, gives rise to the principle of variety and multiplicity. Their successive statement in the symbolical history indicates the need for the prepara- tory study of each in detail if we would arrive at the True Light ; and it is precisely the discovery that this separate study is by itself insufficient that brings us to the point where we have to wrestle in the darkness with the Divine Angel until the day dawns ; we must unite the three principles into a single Unity, and thus learn to form the name "Israel"; and in so doing we discover that it has now become our own name, for we find that the kingdom of heaven — ^the realm of eternal principles — is within us, and that, therefore, whatever we discover there is that which we our- selves are. Our wrestling ceases : the Divine Wrestler has put his name upon us, and the day is beginning 72 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning to dawn; but as yet it is only the earliest hour of daybreak; it is the true sunlight, but it is still low on the horizon, and we must not make the mistake of supposing that this early morning hour is the same as the mid-day glory — in other words, we must not sup* pose that because we have once and for ever finished wrestling with an unknown antagonist in darkness therefore we have nothing more to do. Life is a perpetual doing, though, thank God, not a perpetual wrestling. Our doing is the measure of our living, although the plane on which our doing is carried on may not be immediately patent to all ob- servers ; and it is exactly in proportion as we expand our doing that we expand our livingness. No one can grow for us, and it all depends upon ourselves how rapidly and how strongly we shall grow. IV. THE MISSION OF MOSES HAVING now gathered up in the briefest pos- sible fashion the general gist of the history of the Patriarchs, we must pass on to the Mis- sion of Moses. And here let me again impress upon the reader that the Bible repeats its few grand prin- ciples over and over again, only with greater detail as it pitdceeds, so that we shall find precisely the same principles involved in the history of the march of Israel into Canaan as in that of the three Patri- archs. It is the same statement as is contained in the story of Eden and in the tradition of the Flood, and we shall find it repeated throughout the Bible under other varieties of form which admit 'of more and more specific application of these principles to individual cases, I mention this to explain why we may sometimes appear to go over old ground: there is only ONE Truth, and more detailed acquaintance with it will not change its fundamentals. We have seen that the Bible teaching regarding Man starts with two great facts: first, that he is the image bf Gdd reproducing in individuality the 73 74 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning same Universal Mind which is the Origin of all things, and thus reproducing also its creative process of Thought; and, secondly, that he is ignorant of this truth, and so brings upon himself all sorts of trouble and limitation; and it is the purpose of the Bible to lead us step by step out of this ignorance into this knowledge — step by step, for it is a process of growth, first in the individual, then in the race, and this growth depends on certain clear and ascertainable Laws in- herent in the constitution of Man. Now the peculi- arity of inherent Law is that it always acts uniformly, making no exception in favor of anyone, and it does this as well positively as negatively. Our ignorance of any Law of Nature will never exempt us from its operation, and this is as true of ignorant obedience as of ignorant disobedience: the natural reward of ignorant obedience is no less cer- tain than the natural punishment of ignorant dis- obedience; and it is on this principle that the great leaders of the race have always worked. They them- selves knew the Law; but to impart the understand- ing of the Law to people in general was not the work of a day, nor of a generation, nor of many generations — ^in fact it is a work which is still only in its infancy — and, therefore, if people were to be saved from the consequences of disobedience to the Law it could only be by some method of training which would lead them into ignorant obedience to it. But this was The Mission of Moses 75 not to be done by making any false statement of the Law, for Truth can never come out of false- hood; it must be done by presenting the Truth under such figures as would indicate the real relations of things, though not explaining how these relations arise, because to undeveloped minds such an explana- tion would be worse than useless. Hence came the whole system of the Mosaic Law. On one occasion'> when the Master Was asked which was the greatest commandment of the Law, He replied by quoting the fourth verse of the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, "Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord," or, as the Revised Version has it in Mark xii. 29, "the Lord is ONE." This, He says, is the first of all the commandments; and we may therefore expect to find in this statement of the Divine Unity the foundation on which every- thing else rests. Nor need we look far to find the reason of it, for we have already seen in the opening words of Genesis that in principio — ^that is, as the originating principle in all things — there can be noth- ing else but God or Spirit. That is a conclusion which becomes unavoidable if we simply follow up the chain of cause and effect until we reach a Universal First Cause. We may call it by what name we choose: that will make no difference so long as we realize what must be its inherent nature and what must be our necessary relation to it. 76 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Whatever name we give it, it is always the ONE self-existent and self-transforming Power of which everything is some mode of manifestation, simply because there is no other source from which any- thing could come. This ultimate deduction of rea- son is the recognition of the Unity of God, and could not be more clearly stated than in the words which Isaiah puts into the mouth of the Divine Being, re- peating the phrase in two consecutive sentences as though to lay additional stress upon it: — "There is none beside Me." "I am God and there is none else" (Isaiah xlv. 21, 22). That is to say, "God," or, as we have learnt from the instructions to the woman of Samaria, Universal Spirit, is all that is. This is the great Truth on which the mission of Moses was founded, and ' therefore that mission starts with the announcement of the Divine Name at the Burning Bush. "Moses said unto God, Behold when I come unto the children of Israel and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they 'shall say unto me, What is His name? ^hat shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM; and He said. Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." So the name after which Moses inquired turned out to be no name, but the first perr son singular of the present tense of the verb TO BE^ in its indicative mood. It is the announcement of The Mission of Moses 77 BEING in the Absolute, in that first origilnating plane of Pure Spirit where, because the Material does not yet exist, there can be no extension in space, and consequently no sequence in time, and where, therefore, the only possible mode of being is the con- sciousness of Self-existence without limitation either of space or time, the realization of the "universal Here and the. everlasting Now," the concentration of the All into the Point and the expansion of the Point into the All.^ But though this may have been a new announce- ment to the masses of the Hebrew people, it could have been no new announcement to Moses, for we are told in the Acts that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Eg)rptians, a circumstance which is fully accounted for by his education at the court of Pharaoh, where he would be as a matter of course initiated into the deepest mysteries of the Egyptian religion. He must therefore have been familiar from boyhood with the words, "I AM that I AM," which as the inscription "Nuk pu Nuk" appeared upon the walls of every temple ; and having received the high- est instruction in the land, brought up as the son of Pharaoh's daughter, he must have been well aware of their significance. But this instruction had hitherto *For further elucidation the reader is referred to my Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science, 73 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning been confined to those who had been initiated into the great mysteries of Osiris. In whatever way we may interpret the story of Moses meeting with the Divine Being at the burning bush, one thing is evident, it indicates the point in his career when it became plain to him that the only possible way for the Liberation of mankind was through the universal recognition of that Truth which till now had been the exclusive secret of the sanc- tuaries. What, then, was the great central Truth which was thus announced in this proclamation of the Divine Name ? It has two sides to it. First, that Pure Spirit is the ultimate essence of all that is, and as a consequence the All-presence, the All-knowledge, the AU-livingness, and the All-lovingness of "God," Then as the corollary of the proposition that "Spirit is all that is," there must be the converse proposition that "all that is is Spirit" ; and since Man is included in the "all" we are again brought back to the original description of him as the image and likeness of God. But in those days people had to be educated up to these two great truths, and they have not advanced very far in this education yet ; so from the time when Moses' eyes were opened to see in these truths, not a secret to be guarded for his private benefit, but the power which was to expand to the renovation of the world, he realized that it was his mission to set men free by educating them gradually into the true knowl- The Mission of Moses 79 edge of the Divine Name. Then he conceived a great scheme. Modern research has shown us that the knowledge of this great fundamental truth was not confined to Egypt, but formed the ultimate centre of all the religions of antiquity; it was that secret in which the supreme initiation of all the highest mys- teries culminated. It could not be otherwise, for it was the only ultimate conclusion to which genera- tions of clear-headed thinkers could come. But these were sages, priests, philosophers, men of education and leisure; and this final deduction was beyond the reach of the toiling multitudes, whose whole energies had to be devoted to the earning of their daily bread. Still it was impossible for these thinkers who had arrived at the great knowledge to pass over the mul- titudes without allowing them at least a few crumbs from their table. The true recognition of the "Self" must always carry with it the purpose of helping others to acquire it also; but it does not necessarily imply the immediate perception of the best means of doing so, and hence throughout antiquity we find an inner religion, the Supreme Mysteries, for the in- itiated few; and an outer religion, for the most part idolatrous, for the people. The people were not to be left without any religion, but they were given a religion which was deemed suited to their gross ap- prehension of things, and in the hands of lower orders of priests, themselves little, if at all, better instructed 8o Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning tbsm. the worshippers, these conceptions often became very ;gross indeed. Nevertheless, in their first inten- tion the "idols" were not without meaning. The cultured Greeks laughed at the Egyptian tem- ples as places where, in the midst of a magnificent edifice^ when the sacred curtain of the innermost sanctuary was withdrawn, there was revealed an onion or a cat. Yet here was surely enough to prompt an intelligent person to enquiry. Why did the innermost sanctuary contain no Apollo Belvedere or other marvel unique and worthy to be enshrined, but only one of those wretched animals which dis- turbed the rest of the Greek traveller newly arrived in Eg3Tt, by nocturnal caterwaulings which must have been a marked feature in cities where pussy held un- disputed sway? Or why was the odoriferous onion that lay by tons fpr sale in the markets here set up upon a pedestal as an object of reverence? Surely there must be some deep significance in elevating such common objects to the central place of mystery. Yes, because in these cpmn^on^st of common things there appeared the Great Central Mystery of LIFE more than in the sculptured marble of Phidias or Praxitiles. Thus the Egyptian religion signified, to all who h^d the "nous" to penetrate it, the All-presence of the Eternal Living Spirit as the ONE true object ^of wor^hipr to ihe, foumd, not only in temples, but in The Mission of Moses 8l streets and fields, in all places alike. It signified this to those who had the intelligence to lift the veil, and this meant, perhaps, one in ten thousand of the population; and as soon as he had penetrated the real meaning his lips were sealed, for he was admitted to the Mysteries, For the rest, the priests had such trivial superficia^l explanations as those which ages later they sought to palm off upon Herodotus ; it was no part of their business to lift the veil of Isis. And so Moses saw the generations toiling on and on in an ignorance which could not but have disas- trous consequences sooner or later. Under the pa- ternal rule of a truly illuminated priesthood, such a relation between the inner and the outer religion might be employed to maintain a condition of peaceful well- being for the masses during their intellectual infancy ; but he saw that this state of things could not go on indefinitely. With a general advance in intelligence must come a general disposition to question the out- ward forms of religion, while yet this general advance fell very far short of that fuller development which in solitary instances led the individual to grasp the meaning of the inner Truth. Then, when to any nation comes the ridicule of all it has hitherto held sacred, because it has never learnt the Eternal Truth itself, but has placed its faith in forms and cere- monies and traditions, which, useful in their day and generation, should have been unf dded to meet grow- 82 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning ing intelligence — when this condition of the national mind supervenes, woe to that nation, for it is left without God and without hope, and by the inevitable Law of Nature on the plane of MIND, it cannot but bring upon itself dire calamity. From the stand- point of the governed, this benign, paternal govern- ment could not go on for ever, and equally so from that of the rulers. What guarantee was there of a perpetual succession of priests illuminated not only in head but also in heart? Egypt was old when Moses was a youth, and the signs of decadence were not wanting; for the cruel oppression of the Irsaelites, whom four centuries of naturalization should have placed on equality with their fellow-subjects, was the very reverse of all that was truest in the inner teaching of the Egyptian temples. It was the index of practical atheism. The Science of the temples continued, but it had reached the bifurcation of the Way, and it had taken the Left-hand Path. And if this was the case in Egypt, which led the van of civilization, what was to be expected from the rest of the world? What was the outlook into the future with an intellectual development expanding only on the material side, without any knowledge of those spiritual truths in which lies the real livingness of Life? Surely nothing but the ultimate destruction of mankind in internecine strife, led up to by long ages of that awful spiritual condition in which the The Mission of Moses 83 outward polish of materialized intellectuality only serves to place additional resources at the disposal of the unmitigated savage within. The system then in vogue had once been a valuable system, perhaps the only one possible, but Egypt was no longer young, and the day of that system had pal- pably gone by. What was to be done? That great central Truth which the old system had handed down from hoary antiquity must be made the common ap- panage of mankind. "Nuk-pu-Nuk" must no longer be the mysterious legend of the temples, but it must become the household word of every family through- out the world. This is the work of generation upon generation, very far from being accomplished yet; and the only way to inaugurate it was by a new departure in which the great announcement that had hitherto been reserved as the last and final teaching must become the first and initial teaching; the supreme secret of the Mysteries must be made the starting- point of the child's education ; and, therefore, the mis- sion to Israel must open with the declaration of the I AM as the all-embracing ONE. A sentence consists of a subject, copula, and predi- cate, but in the announcement of the Divine Name made to Moses, there is no predicate. The reason is that to predicate anything of a subject implies some special aspect of it, and thus by implication limits it, however extensive the predicate may be ; and it is 84 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning impossible to apply this mode of statement to the Universal Living Spirit, There can be nothing out- side it. Itself is the Substance and the Life of all that is of ever can be : that is an ultimate conception from which it is impossible to get away* Therefore, the only predicate corresponding to the Universal Subject must be the enumeration of the innumerable — the statement of all that is contained in infinite possibility — and, consequently, the place of the predicate must be left apparently unfilled, because it is that fulness which includes all. The only possible statement of the Divine is that of Present Subjective Being, the universal "I" and the ever-present "AM." Therefore I AM is the Name of God ; and the First of all the Commandments is the. announcement of the Divine Being as the Infinite ONE. I have discussed the subject of the Unity of Spirit in my Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science, but I may repeat here the truth that, mathematically, the Infinite must be Unity. We cannot think of two Infinites, for as soon as duality appears, each member of it is limited by the other, else there would be no duality: therefore we cannot multiply the Infinite. Similarly, we cannot divide it, for division again im- plies multiplicity or Numbers, and though these may be conceived of as existing relatively to each other within the Infinite, the very relation between them The Mission of Moses 85 establishes limits where one begins and the other ends, and thus we are no longer dealing with the Infinite. Of course all this is self-evident to the mathema- tician, who at once sees the absurdity of attempting to multiply or divide infinity; but the non-mathe- matical reader should endeavor to realize the full meaning of the word "Infinite" as that which, being without limits, necessarily occupies all space, and, therefore, includes all that is. The announcement that God is ONE is, therefore, the mathematical statement of the Universal Presence of Spirit, and the phrase "I AM" is the grammatical statement of the same thing. And because the Universal Spirit is the Universal Life Itself, "over all, through all, and in all," there is yet a third statement of it, which is its Living statement, the reproduction of it in the man himself; and these three statements are one, ^rad -can- not be separated. Each implies the two others, like the three sides of an equilateral triangle, and, there- fore, the First of all the Commandments is that we shall recognize THE ONE. As numerically all other numbers are developed from unity, so all the possi- bilities of ever expanding Life are developed from the all-including UNIT of Being, and, therefore, in this Commandment we find the root of our future growth to all eternity. This is why both Moses and Jesus assign to it the supreme place. And here let me point out the intimate relation 86 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning between the teaching of Jesus and the teaching of Moses. They are the two great figures of the Bible. As the Old Testament centres round the one, so the New Testament centres round the other. Each ap- peals to the other. Moses says, "Qf thy brethren, shall the Lord thy God raise up a prophet like unto me"~tht prophet that was to come should duplicate Moses — and when that prophet came, he said, "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead." Each is the complement of the other. We shall never under- stand Jesus until we understand Moses, and we shall never understand Moses until we understand Jesus. , Yet this is not a paradox, for to grasp the meaning of either we must find the key to their utterances in our own hearts, and on our own lips in the words "I AM" ; that is, we mtiit go back to that Divine Uni- versal Law of Being which is written within us, and of which both Moses and Jesus were the inspired ex- ponents. The mission of Moses, then, was to build up a nationality which should be independent both of time and country, and which should derive its solidarity from its recognition of the principle of THE ONE. Its national being must be based upon its expanding realization of the great central Truth, and to the guarding and developing of that Truth this nation must be consecrated; and in the enslaved but not The Mission of Moses 87 subdued children of the desert — the children of Israel — Moses found ready to hand the material which he needed. For these erewhile wanderers had brought with them a simple monotheistic creed, a belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which, vaguely though it might be, already touched the threshold of the sacred mystery, and four hundred years of resi- dence in Egypt had not extinguished, however it may have obscured, the great tradition. Here, then, Moses found the nucleus for the nationality he designed to found, and so he led forth the people in that great symbolic march through the wilderness whose story is told in the Exodus. To the details of that history we may turn more intelligently after we have gained a clearer idea of what the great work really was which Moses in- augurated on the night of the first Passover. Per- haps some of my readers may be surprised to learn that it is still going on, and that they are called upon to take a personal part in continuing the work of Moses, which has now so expanded as to reach them- selves. But all this is contained in the commission which Moses first announced to those he was to deliver, and grows naturally out of its unfoldment. The people he was to lead into liberty were "the people of God," and since "God" is the I AM, they were "The Peo- ple OF THE I AM." This was the true Name of this 8S Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning nation, which was to be founded upon an Eternal Ideal instead of on the historical conditions of time and the geographical conditions of place; and this essential name of the New Nation has been as accu- rately translated into its equivalent of "Israel" as we shall later see that the essential Name of God has been translated by the word "Jehovah." "The People of God" led forth by Moses were proclaimed by the very terms of his commission to be "The People of the I AM." Now, the history of this people is dignified by a succession of Prophets such as no other nation lays claim to ; yet the great Prophet who first consolidated their scattered tribes into a compact community, in prophesying of the future of the people he had founded, passes over all these and, looking down the long centuries, points only to one other Prophet "like unto me." We constantly miss those little indications of Scripture on which the fuller understanding of it so greatly depends; and just as we miss the point when we are told that Man is created in the likeness of God, so we miss the point when we are told that this other Prophet, Jesus, is a Prophet of the same type as Moses. The whole line of intervening prophets were not of that type. They had their own special work, but it was not a work like that of Moses. Isaiah, Jere- miah, Ezekiel, and the rest sink out of sight, and the The Mission of Moses 89 only Prophet whom Moses sees in the future is brought into his field of vision by His likeness to himself. Any child in a Sunday-school, if asked what it knew about Moses, would answer that he brought the children of Israel out of Egypt. No one would question that this was the distinctive fact re- garding him, and therefore if we are to find a Prophet of the same type as Moses« we should expect to find in Him the founder of a New Nationality of the same order as that founded by Moses: that is to say, a nationality subsisting independently of time and place and cohering by reason of its recognition of an Eternal Ideal. To make Jesus a Prophet like unto Moses, he must in some way repeat the Exodus and re-establish "the people of the I AM." Now, turning to the teaching of Jesus, we find that this is exactly what He did. There was nothing on which he laid greater stress than the I AM. "Except ye believe that I AM ye shall perish in your sins," was the emphatic summary of His whole teaching. And here read carefully. Dis- tinguish between what Jesus said and what the trans- lators of our English Bible say that he said, for it makes all the difference. Our English version runs, "If ye believe not that I am He ye shall die in your sins" (John viii. 24), thus by the introduction of a single word assuming all sorts of theological doctrines having their origin in Persian and Neo-platonic specu- 90 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning lations, the discussion of which would require a volume to itself. Not false doctrines, but great truths are presented in such infantine notions as to convey the most limiting conception of ideals whose vitality consists in their transcending all limitations. Thus both as theologians and grammarians the trans- lators of the Authorized Version felt the want of a predicate to complete the words I AM, and so they added the words "he"; but faithful according. to their light, they were careful to draw attention to the fact that there was no "he" in the original, and therefore that word is printed in italics to show that it was supplied by the translators; and the Revised Version carefully notes this fact in the margin. In the parallel case of the announcement to Moses at the burning bush, the translators did not attempt to introduce any predicate; they felt what I have pointed out, that no predicate could be sufficiently ex- tensive to define Infinite Being; but here, supposing that Jesus was speaking of Himself personally they thought it necessary to introduce a word which should limit His statement accordingly. Now the only com- ment to be made on this passage of the English Bible is to note carefully that it is exactly what Jesus never said. In this connetcion He made no personal applica- tion of the verb "to be." What he said was, "Except ye believe that I AM, ye shall die in your sins" (R. V.)- Now, if the criterion by whidi we are to recog- The Mission of Moses 91 nize Him as the Prophet predicted by Moses, is His reproduction of the doings of Moses, then we cannot be wrong in supposing that His use of the I AM was as complete a generalization as was employed by Moses. On the same principle on which theologians or grammarians would particularize the words to the in- dividuality of Jesus, they might particularize them to Moses also. But going back to that generalized statement of Man which is the very first intimation the Bible gives of him, we find that if I AM is the generalized statement of "God," it must also be the generalized statement of "Man," for man is the image and likeness of God, Whatever is true of one is true of the other, only conversely, and, as it were, by re- flection, so that whatever is universal in God becomes individual in man. If, then, Jesus was to duplicate the work of Moses, it could only be by taking as the foundation of his teaching the same statement of essential Being that Moses took as the foundation of his; and therefore we must look for a generic, and not for specific, ap- plication of the I AM in his teaching also. And as soon as we do this the veil is lifted and a power streams forth from all his instructions which shows us that it was no mere figure of speech when He said that the water which He should give would become in each one who drank of it a well of water springing 92 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning , up into everlasting life. He came, not to proclaim Himself, but Man; not to tell us of His Own Divinity separating Him from the race and making Him the Great Exception, but to tell us of our Divinity and to show in Himself the Great Example of the I AM reaching its full personal expression in Man. This Prophet is raised up "of our brethren," He is one of ourselves, and therefore He said, "The disciple when he is perfected shall be as his Master/' It is the Universal I AM reproducing itself in the indi- viduality of Man that Jesus would have us believe in. He is preaching nothing but the same old Truth with which the Bible begins, that Man is the image and likeness of God. He says in effect, Make this recog- nition the centre of your life, and you have tapped the source of everlasting life; but refuse to believe it, and you will die in your sins. Why? As a Divine vengeance upon you for daring to question a theo- logical formulary to which some narrow-minded ec- clesiastic applies the words of the Vincentian canon, "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus," when his formulary has never even been heard of outside such limits as both historically and geographically give the lie direct to his assertion of "always," "every- where," and "by all men"? Certainly not. Truth has a surer foundation than forms of words; it is deep down in the foundations of Being; and it is the failure to realize this Truth of Being in ourselves The Mission of Moses 93 that is the refusal to believe in the I AM which must necessarily cause us to perish in our sins. It is not a theological vengeance, but the Law of Nature. Let us enquire, then, what this Law is. It is the great Law that, to live at all, we must pri- marily live in ourselves. No one can live for us. We can never get away from being the centre of our own world ; or, in scientific language, our life is essentially subjective. There could be no objective life with- out a subjective entity to receive the perceptions which the objective faculties convey to it; and since the re- ceiving entity is ourself, the only life possible to us is that of living in our own perceptions. Whatever we believe, does, for us, in very fact exist. Our be- liefs may be erroneous from the stanc^oint of a hap- pier belief, but this does not alter the fact that for ourselves our beliefs are our realities, and these realities must continue until some ground is found for a change of belief. And in turn the subjective entity re-acts upon the objective life, for if there is one fact which the ad- vance of modern psychological science is making more clear than another it is that the subjective entity is "the builder of the body." And this is precisely what, on the information we have already gleaned from the Bible, it ought to be ; for we have seen that the state- ment that Man is the image of God can only be inter- preted as a statement of his having in himself the ^ Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning same creative process of Thought to which alone it is possible to attribute the origin of anything. He is the image of God because he is the individualization of the Universal Mind at that stage of self-evolution in which the individual attains the capacity for rea- soning from the seen to the unseen, and thus penetrat- ing behind the veil of outward appearances; so that, because of the reproduction of the Divine creative faculty in himself, the man's mental states or modes of thought are bound to externalize themselves in his body and his circtmistances. This, then, is the Law of Man's Being, I do not stop to discuss it in detail, as, writing for New Thought readers, I assume at least an elementary knowledge of these things on their part; and accord- ingly this being the Law we see that the more closely our conception of ourselves approximates to a broad generalization^ of the factors which go to make human personality, rather than that narrow conception which limits our notion of ourselves to certain particular relations that have gathered around us, the more fully we shall externalize this idea of ourselves; and be- cause this idea is a generalization independent of any particular circumstance, it must necessarily externalize as a corresponding independence of circumstances, in other words, it must result in a control over condi- tions, whether of body or environment, proportioned to the completeness of our generalization. The Mission of Moses 95 The more perfect the generalization the more per- fect the corresponding control over conditions, and therefore to attain the most complete control, which means the most perfect Liberty, we need to conceive of ourselves as embodying the idea of the most perfect generalization. But complete generalization is only another expression for infinitude, and therefore we have again reached the point where it becomes im- possible to attach any predicate to the verb "to Be," and so the only statement which contains the whole Law of Man's Being is identical with the only state- ment which contains the whole Law of God's Being, and consequently I AM is as much the correct for- mula for Man as for God. But if we do not believe this and make it the centre of our life, we must perish in our sins. The Bible defines "sin" as "the transgression of the Law," and Jesus' warning is that by transgressing the Law of our own Being we shall die. It would carry me beyond the general lines of this book to discuss the question of what is here meant by "Death" ; but that it is not the everlasting damnation of the Western creeds is obvious from the single statement of the Bible, that the Master employed the interval between His death and resurrection in teaching those souls who had passed out of physical life in the catastrophe of the Deluge, persons who most assuredly had per- ished on account of their transgression of the Law. 96 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning For further study of this subject I would refer the reader to the works of two orthodox divines, Farrar's Eternal Hope, and Plumptree's Spirits in Prison, The transgression of which Jesus speaks is the transgression of the Law of the I AM in ourselves, the non-recognition of the fact that we are the image and likeness of God. This is the old original sin of Eve, It is the belief in Evil as a substantive self-originating power. We believe ourselves under the control of all sorts of evils having their climax in Death; but whence does the evil get its power? Not from God, for no diminution of Life can come from the Fountain of Life. And if not from God, then from where else? God is the ONLY BEING— that is the teaching of the First Commandment — and therefore whatever is is some mode of God : and if this be so, then however evil may have relative existence, it can have no sub- stantive existence of its own. It is not a Living Orig- inating Power. God, the Good, alone is that; and it is for this reason that in the doctrine of THE ONE and in the statement of the I AM, is the foundation of eternal individual Life and Liberty, So then the transgression is in supposing that there is, or can be, any Living Originating Power outside the I AM, Let us once see that this is impossible, and it follows that evil has no more dominion over us and we are free. But so long as we limit the I^AM in purselves to the narrow boundaries of the relative and The Mission of Moses 97 conditioned, and do not realize that^ personified in ourselves, it must by its very nature still be as unfet- tered as when acting in the first creation of the uni- verse, we shall never pass beyond the Law of Death which we thus impose upon ourselves. In this way, then, Jesus proved himself to be the Prophet of whom Moses had spoken. He made the recognition of the I AM the sole foundation of his work ; in other words. He placed before men the same radical and ultimate conception of Being that Moses had done. But with a difference. Moses elaborated this conception from the standpoint of the Universal : Jesus elaborated it from that of the Individual. The work of Moses must necessarily precede that of Jesus, for if the Universal Mind is not in some measure apprehended first, the individual mind cannot be ap- prehended as its image and reflection. But it takes the teaching both of Moses and Jesus to make the complete teaching, for each is the com- plement to the other, and it is for this reason that Jesus said he came not to destroy the Law but to fulfil. Jesus took up the work where Moses left it off, and expanded Moses' initial conception of a people founded on the recognition of the unity of God into its proper outcome of the conception of a people founded on the recognition of the unity of Man as the expression of the Unity of God. How can we doubt that this latter conception also 98 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning was in the mind of Moses ? Had it not been he would not have spoken of the Prophet like unto himself that should come hereafter. But he saw the ages during which his great idea must germinate within the limits of a single nationality before it could expand to humanity at large; and therefore before Jesus could gather into one the "People of the I AM" from every nation under heaven, it was necessary that one exclu- sive nation should be the official custodians of the great secret, and mature it till the time was ripe for the formation of that great international nationality which is only now beginning to show forth its earliest blossoms. V. THE MISSION OF JESUS HITHERTO, our interpretation of the Bible has worked along the line of great Universal Laws naturally inherent in the constitution of Man and thus applicable to all men alike ; but now we must turn to that other line of an Exclusive Selection to which I referred in the opening chapter. This is not an arbitrary selection, for that would contradict the very conception of unchangeable Universal Law on which the whole Bible is founded, but it is a process of "natural selection" arising out of the Law itself, and results, not from any change in the Law, but from the attainment of an exalted realization of what the Law really is. The first suggestion of this process of separation is contained in the promise that the deliverance of the race should come through "the Seed of the Woman," for in contradistinction to this "Seed" there is the seed of the Serpent; "I will put enmity between thy seed and her seed." Again we see the process of selection coming out in the preference given to the offering of Abel over that of Cain, and again the 99 100 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning selection is repeated in the intimation that Seth took the place of Abel, while it is to be remarked that the New Testament genealogy traces the ancestry of Jesus to Seth; so that the line of Seth is clearly indicated as carrying on the selection originally made in favor of Abel. In this line we find Noah, who, with his family, was alone excepted from the universal over- throw of the Deluge; and many centuries later we find one man, Abraham, selected by means of a special covenant to be the progenitor of a chosen race from which in process of time the Messiah, the Promised Seed of the Woman, was to be born. Now, was there in these things any arbitrary selec- tion? After due consideration, we shall find that there was not, and that they arose out of the perfectly, natural, operation of mental laws working on the higher levels of Individualism, and the indications of this operation are given in the story of Cain and Abel. Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain was a tiller of the earth, and if the reader will bear in mind what I have said regarding the symbolic character of Bible personages and the metaphorical use of words, the meaning of the story will become clear. There is a great difference between animal and vegetable life: the one is cold and devoid of any apparent element of volition, the other is full of warmth and adumbrates the quality of Will; so that as symbols the animal represents the emotional quali- The Mission of Jesus loi ties in Man, while the vegetable, following a mere law of sequence without the exercise of individual choice, more fitly represents the purely logical processes of reasoning. Now, we all know that the first spring of action in any chain of cause and effect which we set going starts with some emotion, some manner of feeling and not with a mere argument. Argument, a reasoning process, may cause us to change the stand- point of our feeling and to conceive that as desirable, which at first we did not consider so, but at the end it is the recognition of a desire which is the one and only spring of action. It is, therefore, the feelings and desires that give the true key to our life, and not mere logical statements; arid so if the feelings and desires are going in the right direction we may be very sure that the logic will not be wrong in its conclusions, even though it may be blundering in its method : take care of the heart, and the head will take care of itself. This, then, is the meaning of the story of Cain and Abel. If we realize that the Universal Mind, as the all-pervading undistributed Creative Power must be subjective mind, we shall see that it can only respond in accordance with the Law of subjective mind; that is to say, its relation to the individual mind must always be in exact correspondence to what the in- dividual mind conceives of it. This is unequivocally stated in a passage which is twice repeated in Scrips ture: "With the pure Thoit wilt show Thyself pure. 102 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning and with the froward Thou wilt show Thyself fro- ward" (Psalm xviii. 26, and II. Sam. xxii. 2^), where the context makes it clear that these words are ad- dressed to the Divine Being. If, therefore, we grasp this Law of Correspondence, we shall see that the only conception of the Divine Mind which will really vivify our souls with living and life-giving power is to realize it, not merely as a tremendous force to be mapped out intellectually according to its successive stages of sequence — ^though it is this also — ^but above all things as the Universal Heart with which our own must beat in sympathetic vibration if we would attain the true development of that power, the possession of which constitutes "the glorious liberty of the sons of God." In all our operations we must always remember that the Creative Power is a process of feeling and not of reasoning. Reasoning analyzes and dissects; feeling evolves and builds up. The relation between them is that reasoning explains how it is that feeling has this power, and the more plainly we see why it should be so the more completely we are delivered from those negative feelings which act destructively by the same law by which affirmative feelings work constructively. The first requisite, therefore, for drawing to our- selves that creative action of the Universal Spirit, which alone can set us free from the bondage of Lim- itation, is to call up its response on the side of feeling; The Mission of Jesus 103 and unless this be done first, no amount of argument, mere intellectuality, can have the desired effect, and this is what is symbolically represented in the state- ment that God accepted Abel's offering and rejected Cain's. It is the veiled statement of the truth that the action of the intellect alone, however powerful, is not sufficient to move the Creative Power. This does not in the least mean that the intellectual process is hurtful in itself or unacceptable before God, but it must come in its proper order as joining with feel- ing instead of taking its place. When a mere cold ratiocination is substituted for hearty warmth of voli- tion, then Abel is symbolically slain by Cain. But the allegory goes further. It tells us that the particular animal which Abel offered in sacrifice was the sheep, and from this point onward we find the metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep recurring throughout Scripture, and the reason is that the rela- tion between the Shepherd and the Sheep is pecu- liarly one of Guidance and Protection, Now, this brings us to the point which we may call the "Sever- ance of the Way." When we realize the Unity of the I AM, the identity, that is, of the Self-recognizing Principle in the Universal and in the Individual, we may form three conceptions of it: one according to which the Universal I AM is reduced to a mere un- conscious force, which the individual mind can mani- pulate without any sort of responsibility ; another, the I04 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning converse of this,*^in which Volition remains entirely on the side of the Universal Mind, and the individual becomes a mere automaton; and the third, in which each phase of Mind is the reciprocal of the other, and consequently the inceptive action may commence on either side. Now, it is this reciprocal action that the Bible all along puts before us as the true Way. From the centre of his own smaller circle of perception the in- dividual is free to make any selection that he will, and if he acts from a clear recognition of the true relations of things, the first use he will make of this power will be to guard himself against any possible misuse of it by recognizing that his own circle re- volves within the greater circle of that Whole of which he is an infinitesimal part; and, therefore, he will always seek to conform his individual action to the movement of the Universal Spirit. His sense of the Wholeness of that Universal Life which finds Individual centre in himself, and his con- sciousness of his identity with it, will lead him to see that there must be, above his own individual view of things derived from a merely partial knowledge, a higher and more far-seeing Wisdom which, because it is the Life-in-itself, cannot be in any way adverse to him ; and he will, therefore, seek to maintain such a mental attitude as will draw towards himself the response of the Universal Mind as a Power of un- The Mission of Jesus 105 failing Guidance, Provision and Protection. But to do this means the curbing of that self-will which is guided only by the narrow perception of expediency derived from past experiences; in other words, it requires us to act from trust in the Universal Mind, thus investing it with a Personal character, rather than from calculations based on our own objective view, which is necessarily limited to secondary causes ; in a word, we must learn to walk by faith and not by sight. Now the institution of Sacrifice is the most effec- tive way for impressing this mental attitude. Viewed merely superficially, it implies the desire of the wor- shipper to submit himself to the Divine Guidance by reconciliation through a propitiatory offering, and thus the required mental attitude is maintained. If we see that the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of an heifer can have no power in themselves to effect reconciliation, and yet cannot see any more intelligible reason, then, if we will to accept the prin- ciple of sacrifice in the light of a mere mystery, we hereby still submit our individual will to the concep- tion of a Higher Guidance, and so in this view also the desired mental attitude is maintained. And at last when we reach the point where we see that the Universal Mind, which is also the Universal LAW, cannot have a retrospective vindictive charac- ter any more than any of the Laws of Nature which io6 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning emanate from it, we see that the true sacrifice is the willingness to give up smaller personal aims for the purpose of bringing into concrete manifestation those great principles of universal harmony which are the foundations of the Kingdom of God; and when we reach this point we see the philosophical reasons why the maintenance of this attitude of the individual to- wards the Universal Mind is the one and only basis on which the individuality can expand, or, indeed, continue to exist at all. It is in correspondence with these three stages that the Bible first puts before us the patriarchal and Le- vitical sacrifices, next explains these as symbols of the Great Sacrifice of the Suffering Messiah, and final- ly tells us that God does not require the death of any victim, and that the true offering is that of the heart and will ; and so the Psalms sum up the whole matter by saying, "Sacrifice and burnt-offering thou wouldest not," and instead of these, "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O my God ; yea. Thy law is within my heart." But the idea of Sacrifice has the idea of Covenant for its correlative. If the acceptance of the prin- ciple of Sacrifice brings the worshipper into a pecu- liarly close relation to the Divine Mind, it equally brings the Divine Mind into a peculiarly close rela- tion to the worshipper ; and since the Divine Mind is the Life-in-itself, the very Essence-of-Being which is the root of all conscious individuality, this identifica- The Mission of Jesus 107 tion of the Divine with the Individual results in his continual expansion, or, to use the Master's words, in his having Life and having it more abundantly; and, consequently, his powers steadily increase, and he is led by the most unlooked-for sequences of cause and effect into continually improving conditions which enable him to do more and more effectual work, so as to make him a centre of power, not only to himself, but to all with whom he comes in contact. This continual progress is the result of the natural Law of the relation between himself and the Uni- versal Mind when he does not -invert its action, and because it works with the same unchangeableness as all other Natural Laws, it constitutes an Everlasting Covenant which can no more be broken than those astronomical laws which keep the planets in their orbits, the smallest infraction of which would destroy the entire cosmic system ; and it is for this reason that we find in the Bible such frequent allusions to the Laws of Nature as typical of the certainty of the re- lation between God and his people, "Gather My saints (separated ones) together unto Me; those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice" (Psalm 1,5) ; the two principles of Sacrifice and Covenant rightly understood will always be found to go hand in hand. The idea of Guidance and Protection which is thus set forth, recurs, throughout the Bible under the em- blem of the Shepherd and the Sheep, and it is in a io8 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning peculiar manner appropriated to "the People of the I AM"; "From thence is the Shepherd the Stone of Israel" (Gen. xlix. 24) ; "Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, Thou that leadest Joseph like a flock" (Psalm Ixxx, i) ; "The Lord is My Shepherd I shall not want" (Psalm xxiii. i) ; "I am the Good Shepherd," and similarly in many other passages. If then this conception of the Shepherd and the Sheep repre- sents the mental attitude of "Israel," we may rea- sonably expect it to be precisely opposite to all that is symbolically meant by "Egypt." If "Israel" takes for its Stone of Foundation the principle of Guid- ance by the Supreme Power, then "Egypt" must base itself on the contrary principle of making its own choice without any guidance, that is to say, deter- mined self-will, and hence we find it written that "every Shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians" (Gen. xlvi. 34), , Now, it is a very remarkable thing that tradition points to the Great Pyramid as having been erected by a "Shepherd" power twhich dominated Eg3rpt, not by force of arms, but by a mysterious influence, which, although they detested it, the Eg3rptians found it impossible to resist. These "Shepherds" built the Great Pyramid, and then, having accomplished their work, returned to th6 land from whence they came. So says the tradition. The Pyramid remains to this ^y, and the researches of modem science show us The Mission of Jesus 109 that it is a monumental statement of all the great measures of the cosmic system wrought out with an accuracy which can only be accounted for by more than htmian knowledge. And where should we find this knowledge except in the Universal Mind, of which the cosmic system is the visible manifestation? If, as it appears to me, that mind is primarily subconscious, then by the gen- eral law of relation between subjective and objective mind it could reproduce its inherent knowledge of all cosmic facts in any individual mind that had sys- tematically trained itself into S3rmpathy with the Uni- versal Mind in that particular direction. But such training is impossible unless the individual mind first recognizes the Universal Mind as an Intelligence capable of giving the highest instruction, and to which, therefore, the individual mind is bound to look for guidance. We must carefully avoid the mistake of supposing that jM&-consciousness means Mnconsciousness. That idea is clearly negatived by the fact of hypnotism. Whatever unconsciousness there may be is on the part of the objective mind, which is unconscious of the ac- tion of the subjective mind, but a careful study of the subject shows that subjective mind, so far from know- ing less than the objective mind, knows infinitely more ; and if this be true of the individual subjective mind, how much more must it be true of the Universal no Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Subjective Mind, of which all individual conscious- ness is a particular mode of manifestation? For these reasons, the only people who could build such a monument as a Great Pyramid must be those who realized the principles of Divine Guidance or the Power which is set forth under the emblem of the Shepherd and the Sheep, and, therefore, we can see how it is that tradition associates the building of the Pyramid with a Shepherd Power, Nor is this all. Having first demonstrated its trust- worthiness by the refined accuracy of its astronomical and geodetic measurements, the Pyramid challenges our attention with a series of time measurements, all of which were prophetic at the date of its erection, and some of which have already become historic, while the period of others is now rapidly running out. The central point of these time-measurements is the date of the birth of Christ, and if we think of Him in His character of "the Good Shepherd" we have' yet another testimony to the supreme importance which '^ Scripture attaches to the relation between the Shep- herd and the Sheep. For the Great Pyramid is a Bible in stone, and there can be no doubt that it is this marvel of the ages which is referred to in the nineteenth chapter of Isaiah, where it says — "In that day there shall be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt." And so we find that the cen- tral fact to which the Great Pyramid leads up is the The Mission of Jesus ill coming of "the Good Shepherd"; and Jesus explains the reason for this title in the fact that "the Good Shepherd giveth His life for the Sheep" ; that is what distinguishes Him from the hireling who is not a true shepherd; so that here we find ourselves back again at the idea of Sacrifice, only now it is not the Sheep that are sacrificed but the Shepherd. Could an)rthing be plainer? The sacrifice is not an offering of blood to a sanguinary Diety, but it is the Chief Shepherd sacrificing Himself to the necessities of the case. And what are the necessities of the case? The student of Mental Science should see here the grandest application of the Law of Suggestion in a supreme act of self-devotion logically proceeding from the knowledge of the fundamental truths regarding Sub- jective and Objective Mind. Jesus stands before us as the Grand Master of Mental Science. It is written that "He knew what was in man," and in His mis- sion we have the practical fruits of that knowledge. The Great Sacrifice is also the Great Suggestion. If we realize that the Creative Power of our Thought is the root from which all our experiences, whether sub- jective or objective, arise, we shall see that every- thing depends on the nature of the suggestions which give color to our Thought. If from our conscious- ness of guilt they are suggestions of retribution, then in accordance with the predominating tone of our Thought we shall externalize the evil that we fear; 112 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning and if we carry this terrible suggestion with us through the gate of death into that other life which is purely subjective, then assuredly it will work itself out in our realizations, and so we must continue to suffer until we believe that we have paid the utter- most farthing. This is not a judicial sentence, but the inexorable working of Natural Law. But if we can find a counter-suggestion of such paramount mag- nitude as to obliterate all sense of liability to punish- ment, then by the same Law our fears are removed, and, whether in the body or out of the body, we rejoice in the sense of pardon and reconciliation to our Father which is in heaven. Now we can well imagine that one who has attained the supreme knowledge of all Laws, and, as a conse- quence, has developed the powers which that knowl- edge must necessarily carry with it, would find in the conveying of such an incalculably valuable suggestion to the race an object worthy of his exalted capacities. For such a one ordinary ambitions would have no meaning, he has already left them far behind; but if he elect to devote himself to this great work he must count the cost, for nothing short of delivering himself to death can accomplish it. The Master said, "Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends," and if the Law of Suggestion was to be employed in such a way as to appeal to the whole race, it could only be by / / The Mission of Jesus 113 so deeply impressing them with the realization of the Divine Love that all fear should be for ever cast out; therefore, the suggestion must be that of a Love which nothing can exceed, and so it must consist in him who undertakes the mission giving himself to Voluntary Death. For herein is the difference between the crucifixion of Jesus and those thousands of other crucifixions which disgraced the annals of Rome; it was entirely voluntary. This also places it above all other acts of heroism. Many have died for the sake of others, but to them death was a necessity, and their devo- tion consisted in accepting it when and how they did. But with Jesus the case was entirely differ- ent. He was beyond the necessity of death, and no man could take His life from Him; He Himself had power to lay it down and to take it up again (John X. 17), but He was under no compulsion to do so; therefore, His yielding Himself to a death of excruciating agony was the master-stroke of Love and the supreme practical application of Mental Science. When He said "It is finished," He had accomplished a work which is aptly represented by The Cubical Stone, which is The Figure of the New Jerusalem, of which it is written that ''the length, and the breadth, and the height thereof are equal;" for turn it which way you will it still alwaj^ serves its great purpose 114 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning of impressing the suggestion of superlative Love which can be trusted to the uttermost. Even the crude conception of the Father's "justice" being satisfied by the sacrifice of "the Son/' however faulty both as Law and as Theology, in no way misses the mark from the metaphysical standpoint of Suggestion; and those who have not yet got beyond this stage in their conception of the Divine Being, receive the assurance of the Divine Love towards themselves as completely as those who are able to grasp most clearly the se- quence of cause and effect really involved; and for these latter it resolves itself into the simple argument a fortiori that if the Universal Spirit could thus in- spire one to die for us who was already beyond the necessity of death, then It cannot be less loving in the bulk than it has shown Itself in the sample. It is an axiom that the Universal cannot act on the plane of the Particular except by becoming individualized upon that plane, and therefore we may argue that so far as it was possible for the Universal Spirit to give Itself to death for us It did so in the person of Jesus Christ; and so we riiay say that to all intents and purposes God died for us upon the Cross to prove to us the Love of God. Let us, then, no longer doubt the fact of this Love, but realizing it to the full let us make the Cross of Christ, not the mysterious end of an unintelligent religion, but the beginning of a bright, practical, and The Mission of Jesus 115 glorious New Life, taking for our starting-point the apostolic words, "there is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." We have now con- sciously left all condemnation behind us, and we set forward on our New Life with the self-ol)vious maxim that "if God be for us, who can be against us?" We may meet with opposition, but there is with us a Power and an Intelligence which no op- position can overcome, and so we become "more than conquerors through Him that loved us" (Rom. viii. 37)' This is the nature of the Great Suggestion wrought out by Jesus ; so that here again we find that the ac- ceptance of the Great Sacrifice gives rise to the con- sciousness of a peculiarly close and endearing relation between the Individual and the Universal Mind, which may well be described as an Everlasting Covenant because it is founded, not on any favoritism on the part of God, neither on any deeds of merit on the part of Man, but on the accurate working of Universal Law when realized in the higher manifestations of In- dividualism ; and so it is truly written, "by His Knowl- edge shall My righteous servant justify many," Thus it is that Jesus completes the work of Moses in build- ing up into a peculiar people, a chosen generation, "the People of the I AM" (I. Peter ii, 9). It was this conception of themselves as a chosen nation, separate from all others, and united to God 1 16 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning by a special covenant based upon sacrifice, that did in eifect operate to produce the reality of this ideal in the people of Israel. Here again we see the Law of Suggestion at work. All their institutions, whether religious or political, were based upon the assumption of a covenant with Abraham for ever ratified to his descendants, , and centering round the proinised Messiah; and so, whether looking at the past, the present, or the future, an Israelite was per- petually met by the most powerful suggestion of his peculiar position in the Divine favor. If we recognize in Abraham one whose deep realiza- tion of the truth concerning the promised "Seed" had specially placed him in touch with the Universal Mind in that particular direction, we may naturally suppose a special illumination on this subject which would lead him to impress this idea upon his son Isaac as the foundation- fact of his life; and so from generation to generation, the supreme realization to all his descendants would be that of their covenant relation to God. And besides the impression con- veyed by personal teaching, the law of heredity would cause each member of this race to be born with a pre-natal subjective consciousness of this great Sug- gestion, which would carry its effect into the build- ing up of his life, quite independently of any ob- jectively conscious knowledge of the subject. This involves intricate pyschological problems which I can- The Mission of Jesus 117 not stop to discuss here, but all New Thought readers are sufficiently acquainted with the potency of "race- beliefs" to realize how powerful a factor this sub- jective transmission of a hereditary suggestion would be in forming "the People of the I AM." And there is yet another aspect of this subject which is of peculiar interest to the British and Ameri- can nations, into which, however, I shall not enter in this book; but it will be sufficient for me to say that when a suggestion has once been implanted by the Divine Mind, as the Bible tells us that God did to Abraham in the most emphatic manner, taking oath by His own Being because He could swear by none greater (Heb. vi. 13), that suggestion is bound to grow to the most magnificent fulfillment: "My word that goeth forth out of My mouth shall not return unto Me void, but shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereunto I sent it" (Isaiah Iv. 11). For the reasons which I have now endeavored to explain, the principle of "the Shepherd" is "the Stone of Israel"; it is that great ideal by which the nationality of the "People of the I AM" coheres, and it is, therefore, at once the Foundation Stone and the Crowning Stone of the whole edifice. To those who cannot realize the great universal truths which are summed up in the two-fold ideal of Sacri- fice and Covenant, it must always be the Stone of 'Ii8 Bible Mystery and Bible lieaning stumbling and the Rock of offence; but to "the Peo- ple of the I AM," whether individually or collectively, it must for ever be "the Stone of Israel," and "the Rock of our Salvation." To lay in Zion this Chief Corner Stone was the mission of Jesus Christ. y VI. THE BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE IN our study of the Bible, we must always remem- ber that what it is seeking to teach us is the knowledge of the grand universal principles which are at the root of all modes of living activity, whether in that world of environment which we com- monly speak of as Nature, or in those human rela- tions which we call the World of Man, or in those innermost springs of .being which we speak of as the Divine World, The Bible is throughout dealing with those three factors, which I have spoken of in the commencement of this book as "God," "Man," and "the Universe," and is explaining the Law of Evolution by which "God" or Universal Undiffer- entiated Spirit continually passes into more and more perfect forms of self-expression culminating in Per- fected Man. However deep the mysteries we may encounter, there is nothing unnatural anywhere. Everything has its place in the due order of the Great Whole. A mistaken conception of this Order may lead us to invert it, and by so doing we provide those negative 119 I20 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning conditions whose presence calls forth the Power of the Negative with all its disastrous consequences; but even this inverted action is perfectly natural, for it is all according to recognizable Law whether on the side of calculation or of feeling. These Laws of the universe whether within or around us, are always the same, and the only question is whether through our ignorance we shall use them in that inverted sense which sums them all up in the Law of Death, or in that true and harmonious order which sums them up in the Law of Life. These are the things which under a variety of figures the Bible pre- sents to us, and it is for us by reverent, yet intelligent, inquiry to penetrate the successive veils which hide them from the eyes of those who will not take the trouble to investigate for themselves. It is this Grand Order of the Universe that is symbolized by Solo- mon's Temple. We have seen that it was the mission of Moses to mould into definite form the material which ages of unnoticed growth had prepared, to consolidate into national being "the People of the I AM," and to lead them out of Egypt. This work, with which the truly national history of Israel commenced, had its com- pletion in the reign of Solomon, when all enemies had been extirpated from the Promised Land, and the state founded by Moses out of wandering tribes had cul- minated in a powerful monarchy, ruled over by a king The Building of the Temple I2i whose name has ever since become both in East and West the synonym for the supreme attainment of wisdom, power, and glory. If the purpose of Moses had been only that of a national law-giver and the founder of a political state, a Lycurgus'or a RoUo, it would have found its perfect attainment in the reign of Solomon ; but Moses had a far grander end in view, and looking down the long vista of the ages he saw, not Solomon, but the Car- penter, who said "a greater than Solomon is here"; and the way for the Carpenter could only be prepared by that long period of decadence which set in with the first days of Solomon's successor. "The People of the I AM" are concealed among all nations, and must be brought forth by the Prophet, who should realize the work of Moses, not only in a national, but also in a universal significance. These are the three typical figures of Hebrew his- tory, the beginning, the middle, and the end — Moses, Solomon, Jesus — and the three are distinguished by one common characteristic; they are all Builders of the Temple. Moses erected the tabernacle, that por- table temple which accompanied the Israelites in their joumeyings. Solomon reproduced it in an edifice of wood and stone fixed firmly upon its rocky founda- tion. Jesus said, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again; but He spake of the temple of. His body." 122 Bible Mystery and Bible Meamng Thus they stand before us the Three Great Builders, each building with a perfect knowledge according to a Divine pattern; and if the Divine is that in which there is no variableness nor shadow of turning, how can we suppose that the pattern was other than one and the same ? We may, therefore, expect to find in the work of the Three Builders the same principles however diflferently expressed; for they each in dif- ferent ways proclaimed the same all-embracing truth that God, Man, and the Universe, however varied may be the multiplicity of outward forms, are ONE. St. Paul gives us an important key to the interpre- tation of Scripture, when he tells us that its leading characters also represent great universal principles, and this is pre-eminently the case with Solomon. His name, in common with the names Salem and Jeru- salem, is derived from a word signifying Wholeness (Salim, the Whole), and therefore means the man who has realized "the Wholeness," or in other words the Universal Unity. This is the secret of his great- ness. He who has found the Unity of the Whole has obtained "the Key of Knowledge," and it is now in his power to enter intelligently upon the study of his own being and of the relations which arise out of it, and to help others as he himself advances inta greater light. This is the man who is able to become a Builder. The Building of the Temple 123 But such a man cannot come of any parentage; he must be the "Son of David" ; and it was to test their knowledge in this respect that the Master posed the carping scribes with the question as to how the Son of David could also be his Lord. As rulers in Israel they should have known these things, and instructed the people in them, but they would not come as Nico- demus to Him who could teach them, and so, like Hiram, the architect of Solomon's Temple, the Master was murdered by those who should have been His scholars and helpers. The Builder of the Temple, then, must be "the Son of David"; and again we find that much of the significance of this saying is concealed in the names. David is the English form of the Oriental "Daud," which means "Beloved," and the Builder is there- fore the Son of the Beloved. David is called in Scripture "the man after God's own heart," a descrip- tion exactly answering to the name; and we, there- fore, find that Solomon the Builder is the son of the man who has entered into that reciprocal relation with "God," or the Universal Spirit, which can only be described as Love. To define what is primarily feeling is to attempt the impossible ; but the essence of the feeling consists in the recognition of such a reciprocity of nature that each supplies what the other wants, and that neither is complete without the other. In the last 124 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning analysis, the reason for this feeling is to be discov- ered in the relation of the Individual to the Universal Mind as each being the necessary correlative of the other, and it is the recognition of this truth that makes David the father of Solomon. When this recognition by the individual mind of its own nature and of its relation to the Universal Mind takes place, it gives birth to a new being in the man; for he now finds, not that he has ceased to be the self he was before, but that that self includes a far greater self, which is none other than the repro- duction of the Universal Self in his individual con- sciousness. Thenceforward he works more and more of set purpose by means of this greater self, the self within th^ self, as he grows into fuller understand- ing of the^Law by which this greater self has become developed within him. He learns that it is this greater self within the self that is the true Builder, because it is none other than the reproduction of the Infinite Creative Power of the Universe. He realizes that the working of this power must always be a continual building up. It is the Universal Life-Principle, and to suppose that to have any other action than cohtinual expansion into more and more perfect forms of self-expression, would be to suppose it acting in contradiction of its own nature, which, whether on the colossal scale of a solar system or on the miniature one of a man, must The Building of the Temple 125 be that of a self-inherent activity which is for ever building up. When any one is thus intellectually enlightened, he has reached that stage of development which is signi- fied by the name David : he is "beloved," that is to say, he is exercising a specific individual attraction towards the Spirit in its universal and undifferentiated mode. We are here dealing with the Principle of Evolution in its highest phases, and if we keep this in mind, it becomes clear that the intellectual man, who perceives this, is himself the evoluting principle manifesting at that stage where it becomes an individuality capable of understanding its own identity with the Spiritual Force which, by self-evolution, produces all things. He thus realizes himself to be the Reciprocal of the Uni- versal Mind, which is the Divine Spirit, and he sees that his reciprocity consists in Evolution having reached in him the point where that factor is devel- oped, which cannot have a place in the Universal Mind as suchj but without which the continuation of Evolution in its higher phases is impossible, the factor, namely, of individual will. We lose the key to the whole teaching of the Bible if we lose sight of the truth that the Universal cannot, as such, initiate a course of action on the plane of the particular. It can do so only by becoming the individ- ual, which is precisely the production of the intellec- tually enlightened man we are speaking about. The 126 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning failure to see this very obvious Law is the root of all the theological discordances that have retarded the work of true religion to the present time, and, there- fore, the sooner we see through the error the better. Any one, who has advanced to the perception of this Law, necessarily becomes a centre of attraction to Undifferentiated Spirit in its highest modes, the modes of Intelligence and Feeling, as well as in its lower modes of Vital Energy. This results from the very nature of the evolutionary hypothesis. All creation commences with the primary movement of the Spirit, and since the Spirit is Life-in-itself, this movement must be for ever going on. To take an analogy from chemistry, it is perpetually in the nascent state, that is, continually pressing for- ward to find the most suitable affinities with which to coalesce into self-expression. This is exactly what Jesus said to the woman of Samaria: "The Father (Universal Spirit) seeketh such to worship Him;" and it is because of this mutual attraction between the individual mind, that has come to the knowledge of its own true nature, and the Universal Mind, that the person who is thus enlightened is called "the Be- loved" ; he is beginning to understand what is meant by man being the image of God, and to grasp the significance of the old-world saying that "Spirit is the power that knows itself." As this intellectual comprehension of the' great The Building of the Temple 127 truth matures, it gives rise to the recognition of an in- terior power which is something beyond the intellect, but yet not independent of it, something regarding which we can make intellectual statements that clear the way for its recognition, but which is itself a Living Power and not a mere statement about such a power. It may seem a truism to say that no statement about a thing is the thing, yet we are apt to miss this in prac- tice. The Master pointed this out very clearly when He said to the Jews, "Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have everlasting life, and they are they which testify of Me." "You make a mistake," He said in effect, "by supposing that the reading of a book can in itself confer Life. What your Scriptures do is to make statements regarding that which I am. Realize what those statements mean, and then you will see in Me the Living Example of the Living Truth ; and seeing this you will seek for the develop- ment of the same thing in yourselves — the disciple when he is perfected shall be as his Master." The Building-Power is that innermost spiritual fac- ulty which is the reproduction in the individual of the same Universal Building-Power by which the whole creation exists, and the purpose of intellectual state- ments regarding it is to remove mental obstacles and to induce the mental state, which will enable this su- preme innermost power to work in accordance with conscious selection on the part of the individual. It 128 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning is the same power which has brought the race up to where it is, and which has evolved the individual as part of the race. All further evolution must result from the conscious employment of the Evolutionary Law by the intelli- gence of the individual himself. Now, it is this recog- nized innermost creative power that is signified by Solomon — it must be preceded by the purified and en- lightened intellect — and therefore it is called the Son of David, and becomes the Builder of the Temple. For the Master's statement shows that, in its true sig- nificance, the Temple is that of Man's individuality; and if this is so with the individual, equally it must be so in the totality of manifested being, and thus it is also true that the whole universe is none other than the Temple of the Living God. This great truth of the Divine Presence is what the instructed builders sought to symbolize in Solo- mon's Temple, whether that Presence be considered on the scale of the universe or of an individual man. If the Universal Divine Presence is a fact, then the Individual Divine Presence is a fact also, because the individual is included in the universal; it is the working of the general Law in a particular instance, and thus we are brought to one of the great statements of the ancient wisdom, that Man is the Microcosm, that IS to say, the reproduction of all the principles which give rise to the manifestation of the universe, The Building of the Temple 129 or the Macrocosm; and therefore, to serve its proper emblematical purpose, the Temple must represent both the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. It would be far too elaborate a work, for the pres- ent volume, to enter in detail into the symbolical state- ments of both physical and supra-physical nature con- tained first in the Tabernacle and afterwards in the Temple : but as the Universal Mind inspired the build- ers of the Pyramid with the correct knowledge of the cosmic measures, so the Bible tells us that Moses was inspired to produce in the Tabernacle the symbolic representation of great universal truths; he was bid- den to make all things accurately according to the pattern showed him in the Mount, and the same truths received a more permanent symbolization in Solomon's Temple. An excellent example of this symbolism is af- forded by the two pillars set up by Solomon at the entrance to the Temple: the one on the right hand called Jachin, and the one on the left called Boaz (I. Kings vii. 21). They seemed to have had no struc- tural connection with the building, but merely to have stood at its entrance for the purpose of bearing these symbolic names. What, then, do they signify? The English J often stands for the Oriental Y, and the name Jachin is therefore Yakhin, .which is an intensi- fied form of the word Yak or ONE, thus signifying first the principle of Unity as the Foundation of all 130 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning things, and then the Mathematical element through- out the universe, since all nimibers are evolved from the ONE, and under certain methods of treatment will always resolve themselves again into it. But the Mathematical element is the element of Measurement, Proportion, and Relation. It is not the Living Life, but only the recognition of the propor- tional adjustments which the Life gives rise to. To balance the Mathematical element we require the Vital element, and this element finds its most perfect expression in that wonderful complex of Thought, Feeling, and Volition which we call Personality. The pillar Jachin is therefore balanced by the pillar Boaz, a name connected with the root of the word "awaz" or Voice. Speech is the distinguishing characteristic of Per- sonality. To clothe a conception in adequate language is to give it definition, and thus make it clear to our- selves and to others. A distinct statement of our idea . is the first step in the operation of consciously build- ing it up into concrete existence, and therefore we find that, in all the great religions of the race, the Divine Creative Power is spoken of as "the Word." Let us get away from all confused mysticism regard- ing this term. The formulated Word is the expression of a definite Purpose, and therefore it stands for the action of Intelligent Volition; and it is as showing the place which this factor holds in the evolutionary The Building of the Temple 131 process that the pillar Boaz stands opposite the pillar Jachin as its necessary complement and equilibriation. The union of the two signifies Intelligent Purpose working by means of Necessary Law, and the only way of entering into "the Temple," whether of the cosmos or of the individual, is by passing between these Two Pillars of the Universe, and realizing the combined action of Law and Volition. This is the Narrow Way that leads us into the building not made with hands, within which all the mysteries shall be unfolded before us in a regular order and succession. He who climbs up some other way is a thief and a robber, and brings punishment upon himself as the natural effect of his own rashness, for knowing nothing of the true Order of the Inner Life, he plunges prematurely into the midst of things of whose real nature he is ignorant, and sooner or later learns to his cost the truth of the Scriptural warning, "whoso breaketh an hedge a serpent shall bite him" (Eccl. x. 7). We may not enter the Temple save by passing be- tween the pillars, and we cannot pass between them till we can tell their meaning. It is the purpose of the Bible to give us the Key to this Knowledge ; it is not the only instruction it has to give, but it is its initial course, and when this has been mastered it will open out deeper things, the inner secrets of the sanctuary. But the fir^ thing is to pass between Jachin and Boaz, 132 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning and then the Divine Interpreter will meet us on the threshold and will unfold the mysteries of the Temple in their due order, so that as each one is opened to us in succession, we are prepared for its reception and thus need fear no danger, because at each step we always know what we are dealing with, and have at- tained the spiritual, intellectual, and physical de- velopment qualifying us to employ each new revelation in the right way. For the opening of the inner mysteries is not for the gratification of mere idle curiosity; it is for the in- creasing of our Livingness, and the highest quality of Livingness is Lif e-givingness ; and every measure of Life-givingness, be it only the giving of a cup of cold water, means use of the powers and knowledge which we possess. The Temple instruction is therefore in- tended to qualify us as workers, and the value to our- selves of what we receive within is seen in the measure of intelligence and love with which we transmute our Temple gold into the current coin of daily life. The building-up process is that of Evolution, whether in the material world or in the human indi- viduality or in the race as a whole, and the Bible presents the analogy to us very forcibly under the metaphor of "the Stone." Speaking of the rejection of His own teaching, the Master said, "What is this, then, that is written, the Stone which the builders rejected the same is become the head of the corner?" The Building of the Temple 133 referring to the ii8th Psalm (Luke xx. 17). A careful perusal of the Master's history as given in the Gospel, will show us very clearly what "the Stone" is; it is the material out of which the Temple of the Spirit is to be built up, which we now see is nothing else than Perfected Humanity, Each individual is a temple himself, as St. Paul tells us, and at the same time a single stone in the construction of the Great Temple which is the re- generated race, that "People of the I AM," which was inaugurated when Moses first pitched the taber- nacle in the wilderness. But the process must always be an individual one, for a nation is nothing but an aggregation of individuals, and therefore in consid- ering the metaphor of "the Stone" as applied to the individual, we shall realize its wider application also. Now the Master was executed on the charge of blasphemy for asserting the identity of His own nature with that of God, The subjection of the Jews to the Roman rule placed the power of life and death in the hands of a tribunal which could not take cog- nizance of such an offence — "Take ye Him and judge Him according to your law," said Pilate,, when the charge of blasphemy was preferred before him — and in order to bring Him to execution it became neces- sary to substitute for the original charge of blas- phemy one of high treason, so as to bring it within the jurisdiction of the court. "Whosoever maketK 134 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning himself a king speaketh against Caesar'*— and so the inscription fastened to the cross was "Jesus of Naza- reth, the King of the Je\irs." But the true reason why He was hunted to death was expressed by the scribes, who mocked the Sufferer with the words, "He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him /now if He will have Him, for He said, 'I am the Son of God'." The teaching of Jesus was the inversion of all that was taught by the official priesthood. Their whole teaching rested on the hjrpothesis that God and Man are absolutely distinct in nature, thus directly contra- dicting the earliest statement of their own Scriptures regarding Man, that he is the image and likeness of God. As a consequence of this false assumption, they supposed that the whole Mosaic Law and Ritual was intended to pacify God and make Him favorable to the worshipper, and so in their minds the entire system tended only to emphasize the gulf that sepa- rated Man from God. What was the nexus of cause and effect by which this system operated to produce the result of reconciliftg God to the worshipper was a question which they never attempted to face, for had they, after the ex- ample of their patriarch, determinedly wrestled with the problem of why their Law was what it was, that Law would have shone forth with a self-illuminating The Building of the Temple 135 light which would have made clear to them that all the teaching of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms was concerning that grand ideal of a Divine Humanity which it was the mission of Jesus to proclaim and exemplify. But they would not face the question of the reason of these things. They had received a certain tradi- tional interpretation of their Scriptures and their Ritual, and^ as Jesus said, made the real commands of God void by their traditions. They were tied by "au- thorities," and this at second-hand. They did not in- quire what Moses meant, but only followed on the lines of what somebody else said he meant; in other words, they would not think for themselves. They were content to say, "Our Law and Ritual are what they are because God has so ordered them" ; but they would not go further and inquire why God ordered them so. With them the whole question of revelation became the question whether Moses had or had not made such an announcement of the Divine will, and so their religion rested ultimately only on historical evidences. But they did not face the ques- tion, "How am I to know that the so-called prophet ever received any communication from the Divine at all?" In the last resort, there can be only one cri- terion by which to judge the truth of any claim to a 136 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Divine communication, which is that the message should present an intelligible sequence of cause and effect. No man can prove that God has spoken to him; the only possible proof is the inherent truth of the message, making it appeal to our feelings arid our rea- son with a power that carries conviction with it. The Spirit of Truth shall convince you, said the Master; and when this inner conviction of Truth is felt, it will invariably be found that, by thinking it out care- fully, the reason of the feeling will manifest itself in an intelligible sequence of cause and effect. Short of realizing such a sequence, we have not realized the Truth. The only other proof is that of practical re- sults, and to this test the Master tells us to bring the teaching that we hear, and the teaching He bid us judge by this standard was His own. It is a principle that no great system can endure for ages, exercising a wide-spread and permanent influ- ence over large masses of mankind without any ele- ment of Truth in it. There have been, and still are, great systems influencing mankind which contain many and serious errors, but what has given them their power is the Truth that is in them and not the error : and careful inquiry into the secret of their vitality will enable us to detect and remove the error. Now, had the leaders of the Jews investigated their national system with intelligence and moral courage, The Building of the Temple i37 they would have argued that its manifest vitality and elevating spiritual tone showed that it contained a great and living Truth. This Truth could not be in the mere external observances prescribed by its Ljiw, for no nexus of cause and effect was traceable between the external observances and the promised results, and therefore the vitalizing Truth must be in some principle which supplied the connection that was apparently wanting. They would have argued that God could not have arbitrarily commanded a set of meaningless observances, and that therefore these observances must be the expression of some LAW inherent in the very nature of Man's being. In a word, they would have realized that, to be true at all, a thing must be within the all-embracing Law of cause and effect, and that religion itself could be no exception to the rule — it must, in short, be natural because, if God be ONE, He cannot intro- duce anywhere an arbitrary and meaningless caprice subversive of the principle of Order throughout the universe. To suppose the introduction of an3rthing by a mere act of Divine Volition, without a founda- tion in the sequence of the Universal Order, would be to deny the Unity of God, and thus to deny the Divine Being altogether. Had the rulers of Israel, therefore, understood the meaning of the first two Commandments, they would have realized that their first duty, as instructors of 138 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning the people, was to probe the whole Mosaic system until they reached the bed-rock of cause-and-effect on which it rested. But this is just what they did not do. Their reverence for names was greater than their reverence for Truth, and, assuming that Moses taught what he never did, they put to death the Teacher of whom Moses had prophesied as the One who should complete his work in building up "the People of the I AM." Thus they rejected "the Stone of Israel," and in so doing they fought against God, that is, against the Law of Spirit in Self-evolution, For it was this Law, and this only, that the Carpenter of Nazareth taught. He came, not to destroy the teachings of Moses and of the Prophets, but to fulfill by showing what it was that, under various veils and coverings, had been handed down through the generations. It was His mission to complete the Building of the Temple by exhibiting Perfected Man as the apex of the Pyramid of Evolution. Broad and strong and deep was laid the foundation of this Pyramid, in that first movement of the ONE which the Bible tells of in its opening words; and thenceforward the building has progressed through countless ages till Man, now sufficiently developed in- tellectually, requires only the final step of recognizing that the Universal Spirit reaches, in him, the repro- duction of itself in individuality to take his proper The Building of the Temple 139 place as the crown and completion of the whole evolu- tionary process. He has to realize that the opening statement of Scripture concerning himself is not a mere figure of speech, but a practical fact, and that he really is the image and likeness of the Universal Spirit. This was the teaching of Jesus. When the Jews sought to stone Him for saying that God was His Father (John x> 34), He replied by quoting the 82d Psalm, "I said ye are gods," and laid stress on this as "Scripture that cannot be broken" ; that is, as writ- ten in the very nature of things, that signatt^a rerum by which each thing has its proper place in the univer- sal order. He replied in effect, "I am only saying of Myself what your own Law says of every one of you. I do not set Myself forth as an exception, but as the example of what the nature of every man truly is." The same mistake has been perpetuated to the present day; but gradually people are beginning to see what the great truth is which Jesus taught, and which Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms had proclaimed before Him. Perfected Man is the apex of the Evolutionary Pyramid, and this by a necessary sequence. First comes the Mineral Kingdom, lying inert and motion- less, without any sort of individual recognition. Then comes the Vegetable Kingdom, capable of assimilat- ing its food, with individual life, but with only th« 140 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning most rudimentary intelligence, and rooted to one spot Next comes the Animal Kingdom, where intelligence is manifestly on the increase, and the individual is no longer rooted to a single spot physically, yet is so intellectually, for its round of ideas is limited only to the supply of its bodily wants. Then comes the fourth or Human Kingdom, where the individual is not rooted to one spot either physical- ly or intellectually, for his thought can penetrate all space. But even he has not yet reached Liberty, for he is still the slave of "circumstances over which he has no control" — his thoughts are unlimited, but they remain mere dreams until he can attain the power of giving them realization. Unlipiited power of conception is his, but to complete his evolution he must acquire a corresponding power of creation — with that he will arrive at Perfect Liberty. Throughout the Four Kiftgdoms which have yet been developed, the progress from the lower to the higher is always towards greater liberty, and, there- fore, in accordance with that principle of Continuity which Science recognizes as nowhere broken in Na- ture, Perfect Liberty must be the goal towards which the evolutionary process is tending. One stage more is necessary to complete the Pyra- mid of Manifested Nature, the addition of a Fifth Kingdom, which shall complete the work for which the four lower Kingdomsi are the preparation — ^the The Building of the Temple 141 Kingdom in which Spirit shall be the ruling factor, and thus the Kingdom of Spirit which is the Kingdom of God. These considerations bring out into a very clear light one meaning of Daniel's prophecy of "the Stone," cut out without hands, which grew until it filled the whole earth. It is the same "Stone" of which Jesus spoke, and is bound by the inevitable sequence of Evo- lution to become the Chief Corner-Stone ; that is, the angular or five-pointed stone in which all four sides of the Pyramid find their completion. It is that head- stone capping the whole, of which it is written that it shall be brought forth with shoutings of "Grace, grace unto it" (Zech. iv. 7). The Fifth Kingdom, the Kingdpm of spiritually developed Man, is that which is now slowly growing, as one individual after another awakes to the recog- nition of his own spiritual nature, seeing in it, not a mere vague religious sentiment, but an actual work- ing principle to be consciously used in everything that concerns himself. This "Kingdom of God," or of Spirit, was compared by the Master to leaven hidden in meal, which spread by a silent process until the whole was leavened. The establishment of this Fifth Kingodm is a nat- ural process of growth, a great silent revolution which will gradually change the face of society by first changing its spirit; and for this reason the Master; 142 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning said, "The Kingdom of God cometh not with observa- tion." Outward forms of government will perhaps always vary in different countries, but the recognition of Man as the true Tempk must produce the same effects of "justice, mercy, and truth" in every land, so that war and crime, ignorance and want, sickness and fear, shall be known no more, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away (Isaiah xxxv. 10). This is the meaning of the Building of the Temple, and in studying it we must remember that the sacred symbols apply, not only to Man, but also to his environment. The Tabernacle of Moses and the Temple of Solomon not only represent the Microcosm but also the Macrocosm. And this leads, us to the threshold of a very deep mystery, the effect of the spiritual condition of the human race upon Nature as a whole, regarding which St. Paul tells us that the entire creation is waiting in anxious expectation for the revealing of the sons of God (Rom. viii.). The Building of the Temple is thus a three-fold process, commencing with the individual man, spread- ing from the individual to the race, and from the race to the whole environment in which we live. This is the return to Eden, where there is nothing hurtful or destructive. The expulsion from the spiritual "Garden of the Land" led man into a world that brought forth thorns and thistles, and the earth was cursed for his The Building of the Temple 143 sake"; that is to say, the mental attitude resulting from "the Fall" induced a corresponding condition in Nature; and by the same Law the mental attitude which is restoration from "the Fall," will produce a corresponding renovation of the material world, a state of things which is described with poetic imagery in the eleventh chapter of Isaiah. This influence of the human race upon their sur- roundings, whether for good or for evil, is only the natural result of carrying out to its final consequences the initial proposition of the Bible that Man is the image of God. This is the affirmation of the inher- ently creative power of his Thought; and if this be true, then the collective Thought of the race must be the subtle power which determines the prevailing conditions of the natural world. The uncertain mixed conditions among which we live very accurately represent our uncertain and mixed modes of Thought. We think from the standpoint of a mixture of good and evil, and have no certainty as to which is really the controlling power. Good, we say, works "within certain limits"; but who or what fixes those limits we cannot guess — in short, if we analyze the average belief of mankind as repre- sented in Oiristian cotmtries at the present day, it resolves itself into belief in a sort of rough-and- tumble between God and the Devil, in which some- times one is uppermost and sometimes the other; 144 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning and so we entirely lose the conception of a definite control by the Power of Good steadily acting in ac- cordance with its own character, and not subject to the dictation of some Evil Power which prescribes "certain limits" for it. This balance between good and evil is undoubtedly the present state of things, but it is the reflection of our own Thought, and the remedy for it is there- fore that knowledge of the inner Law which shows us that we ourselves are producing the evils we de- plore. It is for this reason that the Apostle warns us against emulations, wrath, and strife (Gal. v. 20). They all proceed from a denial of the Creative Power of our Thought; in other words, the denial that Man is the "image of God." They proceed from the hy- pothesis that good can exist only "within certain limits," and that, therefore, our work must not be directed towards the producing of more good, but to scrambling for a larger share of the limited quantity of good that has been doled out to the world by a bankrupt Deity. Whether this scramble be between individuals in the commercial world, or between classes in social life, or between nations in the glorious game of mur- der with the best modern appliances, the underlying principle is always that of competition based on the idea that the gain of one can only accrue by another's loss; and, therefore, what prevents us to-day from The Building of the Temple 145 "altering into rest" is the same cause that produced the same effect in the time of the Psalmist, "they could not enter in because of unbelief," and "they limited the Holy ONE of Israel." So long as we persist in the belief that the truly originating causes of things are to be found anywhere but in our own mental attitude, we condemn our- selves to interminable toil and strife. But if, instead of looking at conditions, we en- deavored to realize First Cause as that which acts independently of all conditions, because the condi- tions flow from it and not vice versa, we should see that the whole teaching of the Bible is to lead us to understand that, because Man is the image of God, he can never divest his Thought of its inherent crea- tive power; and for this reason it sets before us the limitless goodness of the Heavenly Father as the model which in our own use of this power we are to fol- low. "He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth His rain on the just and on the unjust." In other words, the Universal First Cause is not concerned with pre-^isting conditions, but continually radiates forth its creative energy, trans- muting the evil into the good and the good into some- thing still better; and since it is the prerogative of Man to use the same creative power from the stand- point of the individual, he must use it in the same 146 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning manner, if he would produce effects of Life and not of Death. He cannot divest his Thought of its creative power, but it rests with him to choose between Life and Death according to the way in which he employs it. As each one realizes that conditions are created from within and not from without, he begins to see the force of the Master's invitation: "Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will giye you rest" ; he sees that the only thing that has prevented him from entering into rest has been unbelief in the limit- less goodness of God, and in his own limitless power of drawing from that inexhaustible storehouse; and when we thus realize the true nature of the Divine Law of Supply, we see that it depends, not on taking from others without giving a fair equivalent, but rather on giving good measure pressed down and shaken to- gether. The Creative Law is that the quality of the Thought, which starts any particular chain of cause and effect, continues through every link of the chain, and there- fore, if the originating Thought be that of the abso- lute goodness-in-itself of the intended creation, irre- spective of all circumstances, then this quality will be inherent not only in the thing immediately created, but also in the whole incalculable series of results flow- ing from it. Therefore, to make our work good for its own sake The Building of the Temple 147 is the surest way to make it return to us in a rich har- vest, which it will do by a natural Law of Growth if we only allow it time to grow. By degrees, one after another finds this out for himself, and the eventual recognition of these truths by the mass of mankind must make "the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose" (Isaiah xxxv. i). Let each one, there- fore, take part joyfully in the Building of the Temple, in which shall be offered, for ever, the two-fold wor- ship of Glory to God and Goodwill to Man, VII. THE SACRED NAME A POINT that can hardly fail to strike the Bible student is the frequency with which we * are directed to the Name of the Lord, as the source of strength and protection, instead of to God Himself, and the steady uniformity of this practice, both in the Old and New Testaments, clearly indi- cates the intention to put us upon some special line of inquiry with regard to the Sacred Name. Not only is this suggested by the frequency of the expres- sion, but the Bible gives a very remarkable instance which shows that the Sacred Name must be consid- ered as a formula containing a summary of all wis- dom. The Master tells us that the Queen of the South came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and if we turn to L Kings X. i, we find that the fame of Solomon's wisdom, which induced the Queen of Sheba to come to prove him with hard questions, was "concerning the Name of the Lord." This accords with the im- memorial tradition of the Jews, that the knowledge of the secret Name of God enables him who pos- isesses it to perform the most stupendous miracles, 149 ISO Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning This Hidden Name — the "Schem-hammaphoraseh"— was revealed, they say, to Moses and taught by him to Aaron and handed on by him to his successors ; it was the secret enshrined in The Holy of Holies, and was scrupulously guarded by the successive High Priests ; it is the supreme secret, and its knowledge is the supreme object of attainment; thus tradition and Scripture alike point to "The NAME" as the source of Light and Life, and Deliverance from all evil. May we not therefore suppose that this must be the veiled statement of some great Truth? The pur- pose of a name is to call up, by a single word, the complete idea of the thing named, with all those qualities and relations that make it what it is, in- stead of having to describe all this in detail every time we want to suggest the conception of it. The correct name of a thing thus conveys the idea of its whole nature, and accordingly the correct Name of God should, in some manner, be a concise statement of the Divine Nature as the Source of all Life, Wis- dom, Power, and Goodness, and the Origin of all manifested being. For this reason the Bible puts before us "the Name of the Lord," not only as the object of supreme ven- eration, but also as the grand subject of study, by means of which we may command the Power that will provide us with all good and protect us from The Sacred Name 151 all ill. Let us, then, see what we can learn regard- ing this marvellous Name. The Bible calls the Divine Being by a variety of Names, but when we have once got the general clue to the Sacred Name, we shall find that each of them implies all the others, since each suggests some par- ticular aspect of THAT which is the all-embracing UNIT, the everlasting ONE, which cannot be divided, and any one aspect of which must therefore convey to the instructed mind the suggestion of all the others- We will therefore seek first this general clue which will throw light on more particular appellations. I think most people will agree that the specially personal Name by which the Divine Being is called in the Bible is Jehovah. If any Name, throughout the entire range of Scriptures, seems to invest the Divine Being with a distinct individuality it is this one, and yet when we come to inquire into its meaning, we find that it is precisely the most emphatic statement of a universality, which is the very antithesis of all that we understand by the word "individual." The clue to this discovery is contained in the state- ment that God revealed Himself to Moses by the Name Jehovah (Ex. vi. 3) ; for since the Bible con- tains no statement of any other revelation of the Divine Name to Moses, except that made at the burn- ing bush, we are at once put upon the track of some connection between the Name Jehovah and the com- 152 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning maud received by Moses to tell the children of Israel that I AM had commissioned him to deliver them. Now, the Name which in English is rendered "Je- hovah," is composed of four Hebrew letters, Yod, He, Wau, He, thus spelling "Yeve," and this is the word which we have to analyze. And this brings us to the fact that the whole Hebrew alphabet is invested with a certain symbolical character,- because, in the estimation of learned Jews, it exemplifies the great principle of Evolution, for they rightly consider that Evolution is nothing else than the working of the Divine Spirit through all worlds, whether visible or invisible. It would require a long study to take the reader through the detailed examination of every letter, but the general idea may be stated as follows: The letter Yod is a minute mark of a definite shape, though little more than a point, and a careful inspection of the Hebrew alphabet shows that all the other letters are combinations of this initial form. It is thus the "generating point" from which all the other letters proceed, each letter being in some way or other a reproduction of the Yod; and, accordingly, it has not inaptly been regarded as a symbol of the all-originat- ing First Principle. If, therefore, a Name was to be devised which should represent the mystery of the Divine Being as at once the Unity, which includes all Multiplicity The Sacred Name 153 and the Multiplicity which is included in the Unity, the logical sequence of ideas required that the Hebrew form of such a word should commence with the letter Yod. The name of the letter is suggested by the sound of the in-drawing of the breath, and thus indi- cates self-contaiuedness. The opposite conception is that of the sending forth of the breath, which is represented by the sound He, and this letter thus indicates that which is not self-contained, but which emanates from the Source of Life. Yod thus repre- sents Essential Life, while He represents Derived Life. The letter "Wau" or "Vau," taken alone, signifies "and," and* thus conveys the idea of a "Link." This is followed by a repetition of the "He," so that the second portion of the Sacred Name conveys the idea of a plurality of derived lives connected together by some common link, and is, therefore, the symbol of the Unity passing into manifestation as the Multi- plicity of all individual beings. The whole Name thus constitutes a most perfect statement of the Divine Being, as that Universal Life, which, to use the apostolic words, is "over all, and through all, and in all" ; so that once more we are .brought back to what the Master said was the funda- mental statement of all Truth, namely, that God is THE ONE, thus indicating that Unity of Spirit from 154 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning which all individualities proceed and in which they are all included. But the second portion of the Divine Name is EVE (the Hebrew He corresponds with the English E), which we have found to be the individualised Life- principle or the Soul, and thus this portion of the Sacred Name not only denotes Multiplicity, but also indicates the fact that the derived life stands towards the Originating Life in the relation of the feminine to the masculine. If this feminine nature of the Soul relatively to the Universal Spirit be steadily kept in mind, it will be found to contain the key not only to many passages of Scripture, but also to many facts of Nature both in the inner and outer worlds. The words of Isaiah liv. S, "Thy Maker is thine husband," are not a mere figure of speech, but a statement of the great fundamental law of human personality ; and this relative femininity of the Soul, which in this pas- sage is pronounced so unequivocally, will be found, on investigation, to be assumed as a general prin- ciple throughout Scripture. We have already seen from the story of "the Fall," that Eve represents the soul as distinguished from the body;, and just as the Bible opens with this as- sertion of the feminine nature of the Soul, so it closes with it, and a large portion of the magnificent sym- bolism of Revelation is occupied in depicting, under the form of two mystical "Women," the generalized The Sacred Name 155 history of the adulterous soul and of the faithful soul, which as "the Bride" joins with "the Spirit" in the universal invitation to all who will, to drink of the water of Life and live for ever. It is, then, this mystery of the femininity of the ioul as a general principle of Nature, and its neces- sary relation to the corresponding Masculine principle, that is the great truth enshrined in the Sacred Name Jehovah. The first letter of the name implies "self- containedness," the statement in the universal of all that we mean individually when we speak of our- selves as "I"; and the remaining portion is the form of a verb expressing continuous Being, and the whole Name therefore is the exact statement of "I AM" which was made to Moses at the burning bush. The Name "Jehovah" is thus the concealed state- ment of the great doctrine of Evolution seen in its spiritual aspect. It is the statement that every form of manifestation is an unfolding of the ONE original principle, and that beside this original ONE reap- pearing under infinite variety of forms there is no other. But further, this Name is a statement that the pass- ing of the Unity into that infinite galaxy of Life which, though now sometimes sorrowing, is destined to become one glorious rose of myriad petals, each of which is a rejoicing creative being, can take place oidy through Duality. Is this a mystery? Yes, the 156 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning greatest of mysteries, including all others, for it is that universal mystery of Attraction upon which all research, even in physical science, eventually abuts; and yet that Duality must be established before Unity can pass into all the powers and beauties of external manifestation, is a proposition so self-evident as to be almost absurd in its simplicity; indeed, the very simplicity of the great universal truths is a stumbling- block to many who, like Naaman, expect something sensational. Now, this very simple proposition is, that in order to do any kind of work there must not only be some- thing that works, but also something that is worked upon ; in other words, there must be both an active , and a passive factor. The scope of this book will not allow me to discuss the process by which the Duality is evolved from the Unity, though physical science supplies us with very clear analogies. But in general terms, the Universal Passive is evolved by the Universal Active as its necessary complement, and provides all those conditions which are required to enable the Active Principle to manifest itself in the varied forms that constitute the successive stages of Evolution ; and the interaction of these two reciprocal principles throughout Nature is as clearly indicated by the Sacred Name as the principle of Unity itself. And the Threefold nature of all defined being at once follows from the recognition of these two inter- The Sacred Name ijS7 acting principles, for whatever is produced by their interaction can be neither a simple reproduction of the Active principle alone, nor of the Passive alone, but must be an intermingling of the two, combining in itself the nature of both, and thus possessing an in- dependent nature of its own, which is not exactly that of either of the originating principles. Other and very important deductions again follow from this one, but they cannot be adequately entered upon in an introductory book like the present; still, enough has now been said to show that the Name "Jehovah" contains in itself the statement of the Three Fundamental Principles of the Universe, the Unity, the Duality, and the Trinity; and by their in- clusion in a single word affirms that no contradiction exists between them, but that they are all necessarj' phases of the Universal Truth which is only ONE. Much search has been made by many for what the Cabalists call "the Lost Word," that "Word of Power," the possession of which makes all things possible to him who discovers it. Great students in by-gone days devoted their lives to this search, such as Reuchlin in Germany, and Pico Delia Mirandola in Italy, and, so far as the outside world judges, without any result; while later centuries discredited their studies by comparison with the practical nature of the Baconian philosophy, not wotting that Bacon 158 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning himself was a leader in the school to which these men belonged. But, now the tide is beginning to turn, and improved methods of scientific research are approaching, from the physical side, that One Great Centre in which all lines of truth eventually converge; and so the fast- spreading recognition of Man's spiritual nature is leading once more to the search for "the Word of Power." And rightly did the old Hebrew builders and their followers in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries connect this "Lost Word" with the Sacred Name ; but whether because they purposely surrounded it with mystery, or because the simplicity of the truth proved a stumbling block to them, their open writings only indicate a search through endless mazes, while the clue to the labyrinth lay in the Word itself. Are we any nearer its discovery now? The answer IS at once Yes and No. The "Lost Word" was as close to those old thinkers as it is to us, but to those whose eyes and ears are sealed by prejudice, it will always remain as far off as though it belonged to another planet. The Bible, however, is most explicit upon this subject, and as in the children's game the hidden thimble is concealed from the seekers by its very conspicuousness, so the concealment of the "Lost Word" lies in its absolute simplicity. Nothing so common-place could possibly be it, and The Sacred Name 159 yet the Scripture plainly tells us that its intimate familiarity is the token by which we shall know it. We Heed not say "Who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? But the Word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it" (Deut. xxx. 12). Realize that the only "Word of Power" is the Divine Name, and the mystery at once flashes into light. The "Lost Word" which we have been seeking to discover with pain, and cost, and infinite study, has been all the time in our heart and in our mouth — it is nothing else than that familiar expression which we use so many times a day — I AM. This is the Divine Name revealed to Moses at the burning bush, and it is the Word that is enshrined in the Name Jehovah; and if we believe that the Bible means what it says, when it tells us that Man is the image and likeness of God, then we shall see that the same statement of Being, which in the universal applies to God, must in the individual and particular apply to Man also. This "Word" is always in our hearts, for the con- sciousness of our own individuality consists only in the recognition that I AM, and the assertion of our own being, as one of the necessities of ordinary speech is upon our lips continually. Thus the "Word of i6o Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Power" is close at hand to every one, and it continues to be the "Lost Word" only because of our ignorance of all that is enfolded in it. A comparison of the teaching of Moses and Jesus will show that they are two complementary statements of the one fundamental truth of the "I AM." Moses views this truth from the standpoint of universal being, and sees Man evolving from the Infinite Mind and subject to it as the Great Law-giver. Jesus views it from the standpoint of the individual, and sees Man comprehending the Infinite by limitless expansion of his own mind, and thus returning to the Universal Mind as a son coming back to his natural place in the house of his father. Each is necessary to the correct understanding of the other, and thus Jesus came, not to abrogate the work of Moses but to complete it. The "I AM" is ever in the forefront of His teaching: "I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life"— "I AM the Resur- rection and the Life" — "Except ye believe I AM ye shall perish in your sins." These and similar say- ings shine forth with marvellous radiance when once we see that He was not speaking of Himself per- sonally, but of the Individualized Principle of Being in the generic sense which is applicable to all man- kind. What is wanted is our recognition of that innermost self which is pure spirit, and therefore not subject The Sacred Name i6i to any conditions whatever. All conditions arise from one combination or another of the two original conditions, Time and Space; and since these two primary conditions can have no place in essential being, and are only created by its Thought, the true recognition of the "I AM" is a recognition of the Self, which sees it as eternally subsisting in its own Being, sending forth all forms at its will and with- drawing them again at its pleasure. To know this is to know Lif e-in-itself ; and any knowledge short of this is only to know the appear- ance of Life, to recognize merely the activity of the vehicles through which it functions, while failing to recognize the motive power itself — it is recognizing only "EVE" without "YOD." The "Word of Power" which sets us free is the whole Divine Name, and not one part of it without the other. It is the separation of its two portions, the Masculine and the Feminine, that has caused the long and weary pilgrimage of mankind through the ages. This separation of the two elements of the Divine Name is not true in the Heart of Being, but Man, by reasoning only from the testimony of the outward senses, forcibly puts asunder what God for ever joirTs together ; and it is because the Bridegroom has thus been taken away that the children of the bridechamber have been starved upon meagre fare, coarse and hardly 1 62 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning earned, when they ought to have feasted with con- tinual joy. But the Great Marriage of Heaven and Earth at last takes place, and all Nature joins in the song of exultation, a glorious epithalamium, whose cadences roll on through the ages, ever spreading into fresh harmonies as new themes evolve from that first grand wedding march which celebrates the eternal union of the Mystical Marriage. When this union is realized by the individual as subsisting in himself, then the I AM becomes to him personally all that the Master said it would. He realizes that it is in him a deathless principle, and that though its mode of self-expression may alter," its essential Beingness, which is the I Myself con- sciousness in each of us, never can : and so this prin- ciple is found to be in us both Life and Resurrection. As Life it never ceases, and as Resurrection it is continually providing higher and higher forms for its expression of itself, which is ourself. No matter what may be our particular theory of the specific modus operandi by which this renewal takes place, there can be no mistake about the prin- ciple ; our physical theory of the Resurrection may be wrong, but the Law that Life will always provide a suitable form for its self-expression is unchangeable and universal, and must, therefore, be as true of the The Sacred Name 163 Life-prmciple manifesting itself as the individuality which I AM, as in all its other modes of manifesta- tion. When we thus realize the true nature of the I AM that I AM, that is, the Beingness that I Myself AM» we discover that the whole principle of Being is in ourselves, not "Eve" only, but "YOD" also; and this being the case, we no longer have to go with our pitcher to draw temporary draughts from a well out- side, for now we discover that the exhaustless spring of Living Water is within ourselves. Now, we can see why it is that except we believe in the I AM we must perish in our sins, for "sin is the transgression of the Law," and ignorant infrac- tion of the Law will bring its penalty as certainly as wilful infraction. "Ignorantia legis neminem excusat" is a legal maxim which obtains throughout Nature, and the innocent child, who ignorantly applies a light to a barrel of gunpowder, will be as ruthlessly blown up as the anarchist who perishes in the perpetration of some hideous outrage; if, therefore, we ignorantly controvert the Law of our own Being we must suffer the inevitable consequences by our failure to rise into that Life of Liberty and Joy, which the full knowl- edge of the power of our I AMness must necessarily carry with it. Let us remember that Perfect Liberty is our goal. 164 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning The perfect Law is the Law of Liberty. The Tree of Life is the Tree of Liberty, and it is not a plant of spontaneous growth; but as the centre of the Mys- tical Garden it is its chief glory, and, therefore, de- serves the most assiduous cultivation. But it yields its produce as it grows, and does not keep us waiting till it reaches maturity before giving us any reward for work ; for if maturity means a point at which it will grow no more, then it will never reach maturity, for since the ground in which this Tree has its root is the Eternal Life-in-itself, there is nowhere in the universe any power to limit its growth, and so, under intelligent cultivation, it will go on expanding into increasing strength, beauty, and fruitfulness for ever. This is the meaning of the Scriptural saying, "His reward is with him and his work before him." Ordi- narily, we should suppose it would be the other way; but when we see that the possibilities of self -expansion are endless and depend on our intelligent study and work, and that at every step of the way we are bound to derive all present benefit from the degree of knowl- edge we are working up to, it becomes clear that the sacred text has kept the right order, and that always our reward is with us and our work before us ; for the reward is the continually increasing joy and glory of perpetually unfolding Life. All along the line our progress depends on working up to the knowledge we possess, for what we do not The Sacred Name 165 act up to we do not really believe; and the power which will overcome all difficulties is confidence in the Eternal Life-in-ourself, which is the individualized expression of the ONE I AM that spoke to Moses at the burning bush. For what is meant by the burning bush? Surely, as we see the refugee feeding Jethro's flock in the solitudes of the desert, and gazing on the Fire en- veloping the bush without consuming it, we realize that here again we are turning over the pages, of a sacred picture-book, which first attracts the little child with its vivid scenes painted in glowing colors of a wonderful Eastern life in the dim far-back ages — that prompts him as he grows older to ask the mean ing of the pictures — and at last reveals it to him in the discovery that they are pictures neither of the East nor of the West, not of this century nor of that, but of all time and of all place, and that he himself is the central figure in them all. The Bible is the picture-book of the evolution of Man, and this particular picture of the "burning bush" is that of human individuality in its imity with the all- enveloping Fire of the Universal Spirit of Life. The "bush" represents "Wood," which, under its Greek name of "hule/' we recognize as the generic term for "Matter"; and the "burning bush" thus signifies the union of Spirit and Matter into a single whole, that perfectness of manifested Being in which the lower 1 66 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning principles of the individual are recognized as form- ing the vehicle for the concentration of the All-orig- inating Spirit. The "bush" still remains a bush, but it is a glorified bush sending forth a glorious aura of warmth and light, from the midst of which proceeds the creative voice of the I AM. This is the great truth symbolized by the revelation to Moses as he fed his father-in-law's flock in the wilderness, and, as the same revelation comes to each one of us now, the words of that other Prophet of whom Moses spoke become clear to us, and we see that by realizing the true being of the I AM in our- selves, we grasp that principle which will put an end to our infraction of the Law, because it is the very Law itself for ever becoming personal with our own personality. This, then, is the great truth which we learn from the Name "Jehovah." As the Name is infinite, so also will be the expansions of its meaning, but this book not being infinite, I have been able only to touch on the broad outlines of its vastness; still enough has been said to give the clue we were seek- ing, to elucidate the meaning of other forms of the Sacred Name. Naturally, the reader will first think of that other Name, of which it is written that there is none other under heaven whereby we may be saved, which state- ment at once confronts us with the astonishing as- The Sacred Name 167 ^ertion that we are saved by a Name. "What's in a name?" asks Shakespeare — or Bacon (?) A good deal, we may suppose, when we meet with such a statement as this, or its Old Testament equivalent, "the Name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous runneth into it and is safe." But we have already found that the Great Name of the Old Testament is something very different from a merely personal appellation, and the same is true of the Great Name of the New Testament also. It is, indeed, the Name of that Prophet of the I AM whom Moses predicted as completing the work which he had begun ; but precisely because he is the Representative Man of all ages, his Name must represent all that constitutes Perfected Humanity. And it is so with a Divine simplicity. It is the combination of the earthly name with the heavenly; Jesus, at that time a very common name among the Jews, and Christ, which is not a name but a descrip- tion, "the Anointed One." Each name is the proper complement of the other, and together they indicate the sublime truth that the anointing of the Divine Spirit is the birthright of every human being, only awaiting our recognition of our true nature to show Itself with power. The carpenter — ^the workman with his everyday name — is the Christ; and the les- son to be learned is that the ONE I AM is in every man, and that that forming of Christ in us, which St. i68 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Paul speaks of, is a personal development in accordr ance with recognizable laws inherent in every human being. If Christ is the Great Example, it must be as the Example of that which we have it in us to become, and not of something entirely foreign to our nature; and it is because of this community of nature that He is "the first-born among many brethren." The space at my disposal will not allow me to enter here into the deeply important questions of the Nativity and the Resurrection. The Bible affirms them both, and they are the necessary and logical results of that specialized and selective line of Evolu- tion of which I have spoken on page 5 ; but to show the sequence of cause and effect by which this is brought about, and its dependence upon the initial Impersonal nature of the Universal Mind is not to be done in a few pages. If, however, I should meet with sufficient encour- agement from the readers of the present volume, I hope to follow it up with another in which these topics will be discussed, and in the meanwhile we may learn from the generalization contained in the Great Name of the New Testament, that lesson of the Brotherhood of Humanity which the Master has impressed upon us in the words, "The King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me" (Matt. xxv. 40). The Sacred Name 169 The Name of Jesus Christ is, therefore, the proclama- tion of the inherent Divine nature of Man, with all its limitless possibilities, and is thus once more the statement of the Bible's initial proposition that Man is made in the image and likeness of God. And these thoughts recall yet another of the Divine Names which teaches the same lesson, Immanuel, "God with us," or, as it might perhaps be better ren- dered, "God in us," "Immanent God," the finding of God in ourselves, which is in exact accordance with the Master's teaching that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. This Name, which occurs in Isaiah vii, 14, speaks for itself, and should be compared with the description given in Isaiah ix. 6, 7, which is the old familiar Christmas text, "Unto us a child is bom," etc. Now, whoever the "us" may be, the prophet clearly speaks of the Wonderful Child as being born to them, they are the parents and He is their Child ; but in the description which follows we are told equal- ly clearly that He is "the Everlasting Father"; and the teaching of Jesus leaves us in no doubt that "the Father" is the Divine All-creating Spirit, which is therefore "the Father" of the "us" who are the par- ents of the Child. This lands us in a curious paradox. There can be no reasonable doubt that the word "us" is here spoken of human personalities, and that in the same breath the Divine Being who is spoken of as their 170 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Father is announced to them as their Child. We have therefore here a sequence of three generations, the /Father of the parents, the "us" who are the parents, and the Child who is born to them; and since the Father of the parents and the Child of the parents is said to be the same Being, there is no avoiding the conclusion that the Wonderful Child is his own Grandfather, and vice versa. This is one of those sacred puzzles of which many- instances occur in the Bible, and whose meaning is clear enough when we know the answer, and the pur- pose of which is to lead us to look for an answer, which will put us in possession of the great truth which it is the purpose of all Scripture to teach us. The riddle propounded by Isaiah, "What is that which becomes its own grandson?" is substantially the same with which the Master posed the scribes when He asked them how David's son could at the same time be his Lord (Luke xx. 41) ; and the identity of the question is apparent from the fact that in the passage in Isaiah we are told that this Wonderful Child shall sit on the throne of David, A further description of him occurs in Isaiah xi. i, where we again find the same three stages — first Jesse, next the stem proceeding out of Jesse, and lastly the Rod or Branch growing out of the stem. Now Jesse is the father of David, and, therefore, "the Branch" is the same person regarding whom Isaiah and JesuS The Sacred Name 171 propounded their conundrums. Placing these four remarkable passages together, we get the following description of the Wonderful Child : His name is Immanuel. His father's name is David. His grandfather's name is Jesse, And He is His own grandfather and Lord over His father. What is it that answers to this description? Again we find the solution of the enigma in the names, "Jesse" means "to be," or "he that is," which at once brings us back to all we have learned concerning the Universal I AM — ^the ONE Eternal Spirit which is "the Everlasting Father." "David" means "the Beloved," or the man who realizes his true relation to the Infinite Spirit; and the description of Daniel as a man greatly beloved and who had set his heart to understand (Daniel X. 11), shows us that it is this set purpose of seeking to understand the nature of the Universal Spirit and the mode of our own relation to it, that raises the individual to the position of David or "the Beloved." This is in strict agreement with the Master's teach- ing to the woman of Samaria, that the Eternal Spirit, which is "the Father," seeks those who will worship, not according to this or that traditionary form, but in spirit and in truth, having a real knowledge of what it is they worship and of the true nature of 172 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning the mental act they perform — "we know what we worship" is the mark by which Jesus distinguishes the worship of the "Israelites indeed," the "People of the I AM," from that of the Samaritans, though fully recognizing the right intention of their worship of the "unknown God." It was after his successful wrestling with the Divine Being, and in consequence of his determination not to let go until it had been fully revealed, that Jacob obtained the name of "Israel." Then from the individual's illimiinated recognition of the Truth of Being — ^thc discovery that he him- self is the concentration of the Universal Spirit into particular personality — ^there necessarily arises the re- production of the Universal Spirit in the Individual Mind, This is r^-generation ; that is to say, the sec-, ond generating of the Divine UNIT as another Unity or manifestation of itself in the form of the Indi- vidual, in no way differing in nature from the original all-embracing Unit, but only in mode of expression, having now become individual personality with all the attributes of personality. On the plane of the universal, the place of these more highly specialized attributes was Iheld by a- generic tendency towards life-givingness, increase, and beauty; and this generic tendency the reproduced Unit now follows up with the additional powers it The Sacred Name 173 has evolved by the attainment of self-recognizing in- dividuality. The new personality thus generated may be con- sidered as the child of the individual soul which gives birth to it; and since there is only ONE Spirit any- where and everywhere, it can be only another mode of the original ONE — consequently the "Son" who is thus bom to David "the Beloved," is Himself "the Everlasting Father," and thus the answer to the sacred puzzle is that the man, who has really learned the inner meaning of the words "know thyself," discovers that the true I AM in himself is one with the Univer- sal I AM, which is the root of all individualized being. It is in the light of these sublime truths, that the Name of "the Son" is equally with that of "the Father" the Sacred Name, in the true knowledge of which salvation is alone to be found. For what do we mean by "Salvation?" "That we might be saved from the hand of all that hate us," is the answer; that is, from the power of everything that in any way militates against our enjojmient of the fullest life. That we might attain to continually increasing degrees of Life was the declared object of the Master's mis- sion, and, therefore, salvation means the power to ask and receive that our joy may be full; and the only way this power can ever come to us is by the recognition of our own possibilities as being each of us the image and likeness of God. 174 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Therefore it is written, "to them gave He power to become the Sons of God, even to them that believe in His Name"; and the word rendered "power" may also be rendered as "right," so that this passage assures us both of our power and right to take possession of our inheritance as sons and daughters of the Almighty," Now, mark well that this promise is not held forth as a reward for the acceptance of some theological speculation, which conveys no real meaning to us, and which by its very terms must be incapable of proof; but it is the natural and logical outcome of the initial proposition with which the Bible opens, that Spirit is the ONE and Only Source, Origin, and Substance of all things, a self-evident truth the con- trary of which it is impossible to conceive. What I here call "Spirit'' you may, if you please, call "the Unknowable," or x, or denote it by a single stroke; the name or symbol we choose is quite im- material, so long as we grasp the fact that the initial originating Power must of necessity reproduce itself all the way down the scale, no matter how different the forms under which it does so. In whatever way we may denote it, it is always the Great Expressor; and all that is, we ourselves included, is its Expression of Itself; so that the whole teaching of Truth may be summed up in the words, "The Expressor and the Expressed are ONE." Work out the problem in any way you will and you The Sacred Name 175 wUl never arrive at any other final result than this; and so we always come back to that fundamental axiom which Jesus announced as the supreme state- ment of the LAW. This is the great truth enshrined in every form of the Sacred Name ; and therefore, it is that every form of the Great Name, when rightly understood, is found to be "the Word of Power."" But we must never forget that the opening descrip- tion of Man, as made in the image and likeness of God, has added to it the words "male and female created He them;" and if we grasp the full significance of this statement, we shall see that the recognition of Truth is not complete unless we realize the place of the Passive or Feminine element in Being. It is for this reason that in ancient times initiation could be entered upon either along the Doric or Ionic line, the former being more especially the initiation for males and the latter for females; but by whichever line it was commenced, a perfect initiation implied a return along the opposite line, in accordance with St. Paul's dictum that "neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord" (I, Cor. xi. 2), and, therefore, there are not wanting in Scripture statements of the Sacred Name answering to this fact. One of the most remarkable of these is found in Hosea, ii. 16: "And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call Me Ishi, and shalt call Me no 176 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning more Baali." What is the meaning of this change of Name? Realize that a name has a meaning, and it becomes clear that some radical change must be in- tended. But this cannot be any change in the Divine Being, for from first to last the Scripture bears em- phatic testimony to the unchangeableness of "God," "I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed," says the Old Testament. "The Father of lights with whom there is no variable- ness, neither shadow of turning," says the New (Mal- achi, iii. 6, and James i. 17). The change cannot, then, be in the nature of "God," and, therefore, cannot be a change in the Law by which that nature expresses itself ; consequently, it can only be a change in the conditions under which that Law is working. Now, this is precisely the sort of change that is spoken of . "Baali" means Lord, the master of a servant, the proprietor of a slave. "Ishi," on the other hand, means "Husband," and the change of name, therefore, indicates a change in the condition of some feminine element towards its correlative mascu- line element. This corresponding change is stated in Isaiah Ixii. 4: "Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken, neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate ; but thou shalt be called Hephzibah and thy land Beulah ; for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be mar- ried." The word "Hephzibah" is rendered in the The Sacred Name i^y margin "my delight," which is sufficiently significant, but its derivation is from the Semitic root ''hafz," which in all its combinations always carries the idea of protection or guarding; and the name Hephzibah may, therefore, be more accurately rendered "a guarded one," thus at once recalling the words in which the New Testament describes those "who by the power of God are guarded through faith unto sal- vation" (i Peter i. 5, R.V.). Now, the change indicated by these names is that of a female slave who is set free by her master and then married by him, and I think it would be impos- sible to hit upon a more accurate analogy for describ- ing the emancipation of the soul from bondage, and its establishment in a relation of confidence and love towards the Divine Universal Mind. We must never forget the feminine nature of the soul relatively to the Universal Mind. Their union produces the Wonderful Child who shall rule all things, and who is the Essential Male called in the Bible "the Son"; but the soul itself is, and always must be, feminine. Until she becomes illuminated, the soul can only conceive of God as a master whom she is bound to obey, and hence she strives to keep in His good graces by sacrifices, ceremonies, and observances of all sorts — he is "Baali" and must be propitiated. But when the liberating light breaks upon her, she discovers that the Universal Principle 178 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning has hitherto held this relation to her because she had conceived of it only in this way, and had thus provided it only with such conditions as compelled it to exhibit itself in this form. Now she learns that these conditions are not im- posed by the Universal Principle itself, but that it must of necessity follow that line of expression which each particular individuality opens up for it; and when this is clearly perceived, with all the conse- quences tiiat flow from it, the soul finds that she is no longer a slave but is in perfect Liberty, and that her relation to the Great Mind is that of a beloved wife, guarded, honored, and treated on terms of equality. This is the truth illustrated, as St Paul tells us, in the allegory of Sarah and Hagar. Hagar, the slave, is expelled, and Sarah, the Princess, takes her place. These two symbolical women, like the two "women" of Revelations, indicate two opposite conditions of the soul; and similarly their "sons," like the offspring of those two other "women," repre- sent the respective powers which these two conditions of soul generate — the one living in the wilderness of secondary causes and becoming an archer, that is, re- lying upon the use of external means, not understand- ing the true nature of causation, and therefore depend- ent for his results upon just happening to make a good shot, and often making very bad ones — ^the other^ The Sacred Name 179 like Isaac, the acknowledged heir of all the Father's possessions, assuming gradually more and more of his powers and responsibilities, until by the com- bined influence of natural growth and careful training, he at last attains that mature development which qualifies him to participate in th^ administration of the paternal authority, The true relation of the individual soul to the Uni- versal Principle could not be more perfectly depicted than by the names >|shi and Hephzibah. We have only to turn to any well-ordered family to see the force of the illustration. The respective spheres of the husband and wife as the heads of such a house- hold are clearly defined. The husband provides the supplies and the wife distributes them, and each has that confidence in the other which renders any inter- ference with one another's action quite unnecessary. This is the precise analogue of the relation between the individual and the Universal Mind. The indi- vidual mind is not the creator of power, but the dis- tributor of it; just as in physical science we realize that we do not create energy, but only change its form and direction. But exactly as the universal store of Nature from which we draw physical energy does not dictate to us in what form, in what quantities, or for what purpose we shall use it, so in like manner the Universal Principle does not dictate the specific con- ditions under which it is to be employed, but will i8o Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning manifest itself according to any conditions that we may provide for it by our own mental attitude; and therefore the only limitations to be laid upon our use of it are those arising from the Law of Love. Liberty without Love is Destruction, and Love with- out Liberty is Despair, Just as in photography we need for the production of a perfect image the combined action of an ac- celerator and a restrainer, so to produce perfect images of the Divine strength, beauty, and gladness, we re- quire a self -projecting force, which is the full liberty of Creative Power combined with a directing and re- straining force which is the tenderness of wisdom and love ; and so in the description of the Perfect Woman we read that in her mouth is the Law of Kindness. Hephzibah, the Perfect Woman, rules her household wisely in love, and so applies the raw material which she can draw from her husband's storehouse without stint that, by her diligence and understanding, she converts it into all those varied forms of use and beauty, which are indicated under the similitudes of domestic provision and merchandise in the thirty- first chapter of Proverbs. We find, then, two aspects of the Sacred Name, one which presents it as the Universal I AM, the all-productive Power which is the root of all mani- festation, and thus includes all individualities within itself, involving them in the circulus of its own move- The Sacred Name i8i ment; and the other indicative of the reciprocal rela- tion between this Power and the individual soul. But there is yet a third aspect under which this Power may be viewed, and that is as working through the individual who has become conscious of his own rela- tion to it, and of his consequent direction and instruc- tion by it. In this sense the Old Testament enumerates its Names in the text I have already quoted, "His Name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace" (Isaiah ix. 6). In the Book of Job this is called "the Interpreter" (xxxiii. 23), and in the New Testament this Name is called "The Word." What may be the nature of the Divine self-con- sciousness in itself is a matter on which we can in no way profitably speculate— to do so is trying to analyze that which, as the starting-point of all else, must neces- sarily be incapable of analysis for the simple reason that there can be nothing before the First. But what we can realize is the mode in which we experience our own relation to the Originating Spirit, and this will be found to form a threefold recognition of it, corresponding with what I have said above. Our primary recognition of the Spirit is that of an all- embracing Universal Principle, a simple Unity; but gradually we shall come to find that our perception of this Unity contains enfolded in it a threefold rela- tion to our personality which implies the existence i82 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning of a corresponding threefold aspect in the Unity. We must always recollect that all we can know of God is our own consciousness of our relation to Him, and eventually we shall find that this relation is first, generic, as to the Creating Spirit; secondly, specific, as forming a particular class of individuals holding a special relation to the Spirit; and thirdly, individual, as differentiated units of this particular class. Thus by a Law of Reciprocity, we realize "the Father" or Parent Spirit, "the Son" or Divine Ideal of Human Personality, and "the Holy Spirit" as the operation of the Original Spirit upon the individual, resulting from the individual's recognition of his relation to the Father in a Divine Sonship. Seen in this light, the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity ceases to be either a contradiction in terms or the conception of a limiting anthropomorphism, but on the contrary it is found to be the statement of the highest experiences of the human soul. With these preliminary remarks, I would lay par- ticular stress upon the Name given to the Universal Principle in its Third aspect, that of manifestation through the individual mind. In this sense it is emphatically called "The Word," and a study of com- parative religions shows that this conception of the Universal Mind, manifesting itself as Speech, has been reached by all the great race-jeligions in their deeper significances. The "Logos" of Greek phi- The Sacred Name 183 losophy, the "Vach" of the Sanskrit, are typical in- stances, and the reason is to be found, as in all state- ments of truth, in the nature of the thing itself. The Biblical account of creation represents the work as completed by the appearing of Man; that is to say, the evolutionary process culminates in the Creative Principle expressing itself in a form differing from all lower ones in its capacity for reasoning. Now, reasoning implies the use of words either spoken or employed mentally, for whether we wish to make the stages of an argument plain to another or to our- selves, it can only be done by putting the sequence of cause and effect into words. The first idea suggested by the principle of Speech is, therefore, that of individual intelligence, and next, as following from this, we get the idea of expressing individual will; then, as we begin to realize the re- ciprocal relation between the Universal Mind and the individual mind, which necessarily results from the latter being an evolution from the former, our con- ception of intelligence and volition becomes extended from the individual to the Universal, and we see that because these qualities exist in human personality, they must exist in some more generalised mode in that Universal Mind, of which the individual mind is a more specialized reproduction ; and so we arrive at the fesult that the Speech-principle is the highest expres- 184 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning sion of the Divine Wisdpm, Power, and Love, whose combined action produces what we call Creation. In this sense, then, the Bible attributes the creation of the world to the Divine Word, and it therefore rightly says that "In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with God, and The Word was God," and that without The Word "was not anything made that was made"; and from this commencement, the natural sequence of evolution brings us to the crown- ing result in the manifestation of The Word as Man, at first ignorant of his Divine origin, but nevertheless containing all the potentialities which the recognition of his true nature as the image of God will enable him to develop. And when at length this recognition comes to any one he arises and returns to "The Father," and in the discovery of his true relation to the Divine Mind, finds that he also is a child of the Almighty and can speak "the Word of Power." He may have been the prodigal who has wasted his substance, or the respectable brother who thought that only limited supplies were doled out to him; but as soon as the truth dawns upon him he realizes the meaning of the words, "Son, thaU art ever with Me, and all that I have is thine." In its Third aspect as "the Word," the Universal Principle becomes specialized. In its earlier modes it is the Life-prinr ciple working by a Law of Averages, and thus main- taining the race as a whole, but not providing special The Sacred Name 185 accommodation for the individual. And it is incon- ceivable that the Cosmic Power, as such, should ever pass beyond what we may call the administration of the world in globo, for to suppose it doing so would involve the self-contradiction of the Universal acting on the plane of the Particular without becoming the particular; and it precisely by becoming the par- ticular, or by evolution into individual minds, that it carries on the work beyond the stage at which things are governed by a mere Law of Averages. It is thus that we become "fellow-workers with God/' and that "the Father" is represented as invit- ing His sons to work in His vineyard. By recogni- tion of his own true place in the scheme of evolution, Man learns that his function is to carry on the work which has been begun in the Universal, to still fur- ther applications in the Particular, thus affording the key to the Master's words, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work"; and the instrument by which the instructed man does this is his knowledge of the Sacred Name in its Threefold significance. The study of the Sacred Name is the study of the Livingness of Being and of the Law of Expression in all Its phases, and no book or library of books is sufficient to cope with such a vast idea. AH any writer can do is to point out the broad lines of the subject, and each reader must make his own personal application of it. But the Law remains for ever, i86 BibU Mystery and Bible Meaning that the sincere desire for Truth produces a corre- sponding unfoldment of Truth, and the supreme Truth is reached in that final recognition of the Divine Name, "God is Love." VIII. THE DEVIL IT is impossible to read the Bible and ignore the important part which it assigns to the Devil. The Devil first appears as the Serpent in the story of "the Fall," and figures throughout Scrip- ture till the final scene in Revelations, where "the old Serpent, which is the Devil and Satan," is cast into the lake of fire. What, then, is meant by the Devil? We may start with the self-obvious proposition that "Grod" and the "Devil" must be the exact op- posites of each other. Whatever God is, the Devil is not. Then, since God alone is, the Devil is noL Since God is Being, the Devil is Not-Being. And so we are met by the paradox that though the Bible says so much about the Devil, yet the Devil does not exist. It is precisely this fact of non-existence that makes up the Devil; it is that power which in appearance is, and in reality is not; in a word, it is the Power of the Negative. We are put upon this track by the statement in II. Corinthians, i. 20, that in Christ, all the promises of God are Yea and Amen, that is, essentially Affirm- 187 i88 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning ative; in other words, that all our growth towards Perfected Humanity must be by recognition of the Positive and not by recognition of the Negative. The prime fact of Negation is its Nothingness ; but owing to the impossibility of ever divesting our Thought of its Creative Power, our conception of the Negative as something having a substantive existence of its own becomes a very real power indeed, and it is this power that the Bible calls "the Devil and Satan," the same old serpent which we find beguiling Eve in the Book of Genesis. It is equally a mistake to say that there is an Evil Power or that there is not. Let us examine this paradox. A little consideration will show us that it is im- possible for there to be an Infinite and Universal Power of Evil, for unless the Infinite and Universal Power were Creative nothing could exist. If it be creative then it is the Life-principle working always for self-expression, and to suppose the undifferen- tiated principle of Life acting otherwise than life- givingly, would contradict the very idea of its living- ness. Whatever tends to expand and improve life is the Good, and therefore it is a primary intuition from which we cannot get away, that the Infinite, Originat- ing, and Maintaining Power can only be Good. But to find this absolute and unchangeable **Good,^' we require to get to the very bed-rock of Being, to that The Devil 189 as yet undifferentiated Life-in-itself inherent in, and forming one with, universal primordial Substance, of which I have spoken in a former chapter. This all- underlying Life is for ever expressing itself through Form; but the Form is not the Life, and it is from not seeing this that so much confusion arises. The Universal Life-principle, simply as such, finds expression as much in one form as another, and is just as active in the scattered particles which once made a human body as it was in those particles when they cohered together in the living man ; this is merely the well-recognized scientific truth of the Conservation of Energy. On the other hand, we cannot help perceiving that there is something in the individual which exercises a greater power than the perpetual energy residing in the ultimate atoms; for, otherwise, what is it that maintains in our bodies for perhaps a century the unstable equilibrium of atomic forces which, when that something is withdrawn, cannot continue for twenty- four hours ? Is this something another something than that which is at work as the perpetual energy within the atoms? No, for otherwise there would be two originating powers in the universe, and if our study of the Bible teaches us an3^hing; it is that the Orig- inating Power is only ONE; and we must therefore conceive of the Power we are examining as the same Power that resides in the ultimate atoms, only now 190 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning working at a higher level. It has welded the atoms into a distinct organism, however lowly, and so to distinguish this mode of power from the mere atomic energies, we may call it the Integrating Power, or the Power which Builds-up. Now, evolution is a continuous process of building- up, and what makes the world of to-day a different world from that of the ichthyosaurus and the pterodactyl, is the successive building up of more and more complex organisms, culminating at last in the production of Man as an organism, both physically and mentally capable of expressing the Life of the Supreme Intelligence by means of Individual Con- sciousness. Why, then, should not the Power, which is able to carry on the race as a perpetually improv- ing expression of itself, do the same thing in the in- dividual? That is the question with which we have to deal ; in other words. Why need the individual die ? Why should he not go on in a perpetual expansion ? This question may seem absurd in the light of past experience. Those who believe only in blind forces, answer that death is the law of Nature, and those who believe in the Divine Wisdom answer that it is the appointment of God. But, strange as it may seem, both these answers are wrong. That death should be the ultimate law of Nature contradicts the principle of continuity as exemplified in the Lifeward ten- dency of evolution; and that it is the will of God is The Devil 191 most emphatically denied by the Bible, for that tells us that he that has the power of death is the Devil (Hebrews ii. 14). There is no beating about the bush; not God but the Devil sends death. There is no getting out of the plain words. Let us examine this statement. We have seen that whatever God is, the Devil, must be the opposite, and, therefore if God is the Power that builds up, the Integrating Power, the Devil must be the power that pulls down, or the Dis- integrating Power. Now, what is Disintegra- tion? It is the breaking up of what was pre- viously an "integer" or perfect Whole, the separation of its component parts. But what is it that causes the separation? It is still the Building-up Power, only the Law of Affinity by which it works is now acting from other centres, so as to build up other organisms. The Universal Power is still at its building work, only it seems to have lost sight of its original motive in the organism which is falling to pieces, and to have taken up fresh motives in other directions. And this is precisely the state of the case ; it is just the want of continuous motive that causes disintegration. The only possible motive of the All-originating Life-prin- ciple must be the expression qi Life, and, therefore, we may almost picture it as continually seeking to embody itself in intelligences, which shall be able to 192 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning grasp its motive and co-operate with it by keeping that motive constantly in mind. Granted that this individualization of motive could take place, there appears no reason why it should not continue to work on indefinitely. A tree is an or- ganized centre of life, but without the intelligence which would ^nable it to individualize the motive of the Universal Life-principle. It individualizes a cer- tain measure of the Universal Vital Energy, but it does not individualize the Universal Intelligence, and, therefore, when the measure of energy which it has individualized is exhausted it dies; and the same thing happens with animals and men. But as the particular intelligence advances in the recognition of itself as the individualization of the Universal Intelligence, it becomes more and more capable of seizing upon the initial motive of the Uni- versal Mind and giving it permanence. And suppos- ing this recognition to be complete, the logical result would be never-ceasing and perpetually-expanding in- dividual life ; thus bringing us back to those promises which I have quoted in the opening pages of this book, and reminding us of the Master's statement to the woman of Samaria that "the Father" is always "seeking" those who will worship Him in spirit and in truth; that is, those who can enter into the spirit of what "the Father" is aiming at. But what happens, in the absence of a perfect recog- The Devil 193 nition of the Universal Motive, is that sooner or later the machinery runs down, and the "motive" is trans- ferred to other centres where the same process is re- peated, and so Life and Death alternate with each other in a ceaseless round. The disintegrating process is the Universal Builder taking the materials for fresh constructions from a tenement without a tenant; that is, from an organism which has not reached the meas- ure of intelligence necessary to perpetuate the Uni- versal Motive in itself, or, as the Master put it in the parable of the ten virgins such as have not a supply of oil to keep their lamps burning. This Negative disintegrating force is the Integrat- ing Power working, so to say, at a lower level rela- tively to that at which it had been working in the or- ganism that is being dissolved. It is not another power. Both the Bible and conjmon-sense tell us that ultimately there can be only ONE power in the universe, which must, therefore, be the Building- power, so that there can be no such thing as a power which is negative in itself; but it shows itself negative- ly in relation to the particular individual, if through want of recognition he fails to provide the requisite conditions for it to work positively. Work it always will, for its very being is ceaseless activity; but whether it will act positively or nega- tively towards any particular individual depends en- tirely on whether he provides positive or negative 194 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning conditions for its manifestation, just as we may pro- duce a positive or a negative current according to the electrical conditions which we supply. We see, then, that what gives the Positive Power a negative action is the failure to intelligently recog- nize our own individualization . of it. In the lower forms of life this failure is inevitable, because they are not provided with an organism capable of such a recognition. In Man the suitable organism is present, but he seeks knowledge only from past experiences which have necessarily been of the negative order, and does not, by the combined action of reason and faith, look into the Infinite for the unfoldment of limitless possibilities; and so he employs his intelli- gence to deny that which, if he affirmed it, would be in him the spring of perpetual renovation. The Power of the Negative, therefore, has its root in our denial of the Affirmative; and so we die be- cause we have not yet learned to understand the Prin- ciple of Life; we have yet to learn the great Law, that "the higher mode of intelligence controls the lower." In consequence of our ignorance we at- tribute an affirmative power to the Negative; that is to say, the power of taking an initiative on its own account, not seeing that it is a condition resulting from the absence of something more positive; and so the power of the Negative consists in affirming that to be true which is not true, and for this reason it is The Devil 195 called in Scripture the father of lies, or that prin- ciple from which all false statements are generated. The word "Devil" means "false accuser" or "false affirmer," and this name is, therefore, in itself suffi- cient to show us that what is meant is the creative principle of Affirmation used in the wrong direction, a truth which has been handed down to us from old times in the saying "Diabolus est Deus inversus." This is how it is that "the Devil" can be a vast im- personal power while at the same time having no ex- istence, and so the paradox with which we started is solved. And now also it becomes clear why we are told that "the Devil" has the power of death. It is not held by a personal individual, but results quite nat- urally from that ignorant and inverted Thought which is "the Spirit that denies." This is the exact opposite to "the Son of God," in whom all things are only "Yea and Amen." That is the Spirit of the Affirmative, and, therefore, the Spirit of Life ; and so it is that the Son of God was manifested that "He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is the Devil, and deliver them who, through fear of death, were all their life-time subject to bondage" (Hebrews ii. 14), Again, we are told that the Devil is Satan. This name appears to be another form of "Saturn," and may also be connected with the root "sat" or "seven," Saturn being in the old symbolical astronomy the out- 196 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning ermost or seventh planet. In that system the centre is occupied by Sol or the Sun, which represents the Life-giving principle, and Saturn represents the op- posite extreme, or Matter at the point furthest re- moved from Pure Spirit. Now, taken in due order, Matter or Concrete Form is as necessary as Spirit itself, for without it there could be no manifestation of Spirit, in other words, there could be no ^^ristence at all. Seen from this point of view, there is nothing evil in it, but on the contrary, it may be compared to the lamp which con- centrates the light, and gives it a particuJlar direction, and in this aspect Matter is called "Lucifer" or th« Light-bearer. This is Matter taking its proper place in the order of the Kingdom of Heaven. But if "Lucifer" falls from heaven, becomes rebellious, and endeavors to usurp the place of "Sol," then it is the fallen Archangel and becomes "Satan," or that outer- most planet which moves in an orbit whose remote- ness from the warmth and light of the Sun renders all human life and joy impossible, a symbolism which we retain in our common speech when we say that a man has a saturnine aspect. Thus "Satan" is the same old serpent that Received Eve ; it is the wrong belief that sets merely secondary causes, which are only conditions, in the place of First Cause or that originating power of liho^gti* which The Devil 197 makes enlightened Man the image of his Maker and the Son of God.* But we must not make the mistake of supposing that because there is no Universal Devil in the same sense as there is Universal God, therefore there are no individual devils. The Bible frequently speaks of them, and one of the commissions given by the Mas- ter to His followers was to cast out devils. The words used for the Devil are in the Greek, "Diabolos," and in the. Hebrew, "Satan," both having the same general meaning of the Principle of Nega- tion; but individual devils are called in the Hebrew, "sair," a hairy one, and in the Greek, "daimon," a spirit or shade, and these terms indicate evil spirits having personal identity. Now, without stopping to discuss the question whether there are orders of spiritual individualities which have never been human, let us confine our at- tention to the immense multitudes of disembodied human spirits which, under any hypothesis, must crowd the realms of the unseen. Can we suppose them all to be good? Certainly not, for we have no reason to suppose that mere severance from its phy- sical instrument either changes the moral quality or *For die all-important distinction between Causes and Conditions^ see chapter ix. of my Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science. igS Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning expands the intelligence of the mind, and therefore, if there is such a thing as survival after death at all, we cannot conceive of the other world otherwise than as containing millions upon millions of spirits in various stages of ignorance and ill-will, and con- sequently ready to make the most unscrupulous use of their powers where opportunity offers. The time is fast passing away when it will be pos- sible to regard such a conception as fantastic, and taking our stand simply upon the well-ascertained ground of thought-transference and telepathy, we may well ask, if such powers as these can be exercised by the spiritual entity while still clothed in flesh, why should they not be equally, or even more powerfully, employed by spirits out of the flesh ? This opens an immense field of inquiry which we cannot stop to investigate; but setting aside all other classes of evidence on this subject, the experimentally ascertained facts of telepathy bring to light possi- bilities which would explain all that the Bible says regarding the malific influence of evil spirits. But the inference to be drawn from this is not that we should go in continual terror of obsession or other injury, but that we should realize that our position as "sons and daughters of the Almighty," places us beyond the reach of such malignant entities. Our familiar principle, the Law of Attraction, is at work here also. Like attracts like; and if we The Devil 199 would keep these undesirable entities at a distance, we can do so most effectually by centering our thoughts on those things which we know from their nature cannot invite evil influences. Let us follow the apostolic advice, and "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things" (Philippians iv. 8). Then,, however far the Law of Attraction may extend from us into the other world, we may rest assured that it will only act to bring us in touch with that innumerable company of angels and spirits of just men made perfect, of whom we are told in the twelfth chapter of Hebrews, and who, because they are joined in the same worship of the ONE Divine Spirit as our- selves, can only act in accordance with the principles of harmony and love. I will not attempt the analysis of so important a subject in the short space at my disposal, but I would caution all students against tampering with anything that savors of ceremonial magic. However little acknowledged in public, it is by no means unf requently practised at the present day, and, if on no other grounds, it should be resolutely shunned as a power- ful system of auto-suggestion capable of producing the most disastrous effects on those who employ it. 200 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning No New Thought reader can be ignorant of the power of auto-suggestion, and I would therefore ask each one to think out for himself what the tendency of auto-suggestion conducted on such lines as these must be. "I speak as unto wise men, judge ye what I say." The Bible is by no means silent on this subject, but I may sum up its teaching in a few lines. It assumes throughout, the possibility of intercourse be- tween men and spirits, but with the exception of the Master's temptation, where I understand a symbolic representation of the general principle of -evil, the Power of the Negative which we have already con- sidered, it should be remarked that all its record is of appearances of good angels as ministering spirits to heirs of salvation. Nor were these visitants sought after by those who received them, their appearance was always spon- taneous; and the solitary instance which the Bible records of a spirit appearing whom it was sought to raise by incantation, is of the appearance of Samuel to Saul, announcing that his rebellion had culminated in this act of witchcraft, and this was followed by the suicide of Saul on the next day. If, then, our study of the Bible has led us to the conclusion that it is the statement of the Law of the inevitable sequences of cause and effect, this uniform direction of its teachings must indicate the presence of certain sequences in this connection also, which fol- The Devil 201 low definite laws, although we may not yet understand them. This knowledge will come to us by degrees with the natural expansion of our powers, and when it arrives in its proper order we shall be qualified to use it; and if we realize that there is a Universal Mind capable of guiding us at all, we may trust it not to keep back from us anything it is necessary we should knoyir at each stage of our onward journey. Do we want knowledge? The Master has promised that the Spirit of Truth shall guide us into all truth, "Should not a people seek unto their God instead of unto them that have familiar spirits?" (Isaiah viii. 19). There is a reason at the back of all these things. We thus see that the whole question of the power of evil turns on the two fundamental Laws which I spoke of in the opening pages of this book, as form- ing the basis of Bible teaching; the Law of Suggestion and the Law of the Creative Power of Thought. The conception of an abstract principle of evil, the Devil, receives its power from our own auto-suggestion of its existence; and the power of evil spirits results from a mental attitude which allows us to receive their suggestions. Then, in both cases, the suggestion having been ac- cepted, our own creative power of Thought does the rest, and so prepares the way for receiving still fur- ther suggestions of the same sort. Now, the antidote to all this is a right conception of God or the Uni- 202 Bible Mystery and Bible Mewing versal Spirit of Life as the ONE and only originating Power. If we realize that relatively to us, this Power manifests itself through the medium of our own Thought^ and that in so doing it in no way changes its inherent quality of Lif e-givingness ; this recogni- tion must constitute such a supremely powerful and all-embracing Suggestion as must necessarily eradicate all suggestions of a contrary description; and so our Thought being based on this Supreme Suggestion of Good, is certain to have a correspondingly life-giving character- To recognize the essential One-ness of this Power is to recognize it as God, and to recognize its essential Life-givingness is to recognize it as Love, and so we shall realize in ourselves the truth that "God is Love." Then, "if God be for us who can be against us ?" and so we realize the further truth that "perfect love casteth out fear," with the results that in our own world there can be no devil. IX. THE LAW OF LIBERTY TL TOTHING is more indicative of our ignorance I Xl regarding the purpose and meaning of the Bibki than the distinction which it is often sought to draw between the Law and the Gospel. We are told of different "dispensations/' as though the Divine method of conducting the world changed after the fashion of political constitutions. If this were the case, we should never know under what system of administration we were living, for we could only be informed of these alterations by persons who were "in the know" with the Divine Power, and we should have nothing but their bare assertion to depend on, that they were "in the know." This is the logical outcome of any system which is based upon the allegation of specific determinations by a Divine Autocrat. It cannot be otherwise, and therefore all such systems are destined sooner or later to fall to pieces, because their foundation of so-called "authority" crumbles away imder the scrutiny of intel- ligent investigation. The Divine orderings can only be known by the Divine workings, and the intelligent 203 204 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning study of the Divine working is the only criterion which the Bible, rightly understood, anywhere sets up for the recognition of Truth. The whole of the Psalms are based entirely dn this principle, and the Master claimed their testimony to His mission. He himself spoke of tradition as ren- dering void the true Law of God; and so far from claiming to introduce any new dispensation, he em- phatically declared that his special business was to ful- fil the Law, that is, to demonstrate it in all its com- pleteness. If the Law taught by Moses is true, and the Gospel preached by Jesus is true, then they are both true together, and are simply statements of the same Truth from different standpoints ; and the proofs of their truth will be found in their agreement with one another, and with the universal principles of Nat- ural Law which we can learn by the study of ourselves and of our environment. If the Old and New Testaments are right in saying that the foundation of all other knowledge is that God is ONE, then we may be certain that we are on a wrong track if we think that Divine truth can be different at one time to what it is at another. We realize the principle of '"continuity" throughout phy- sical nature, and if we see that the physical must orig- inate in the spiritual, we cannot deny the extension of "continuity" throughout the entire system; and there- fore, if the messages of the Old and New Testaments The Law of Liberty i2o"5 are both true, we may expect to find the same prin- ciple of "continuity" running through both. On in- vestigation this will be found to be the case, and no truer definition can be given of the Gospel than that it is the Law worked out to its logical conclusions. The Law which the Bible sets forth from first to last is the 'Law of Human Individuality. The Bible is the Spiritual Natural History Book of Man. It begins with his creation by evolution from the king- doms which had preceded him, and it terminates [with his apotheosis — the line is long, but it is straight, and reaches its glorious destination by an orderly sequence of cause and effect. It is the statement x)f the evolution of the individual as the result of his rec- ognition of the Law by which he came to be a human being at all. When he sees that this happened neither by chance nor by arbitrary command, then, and not till then, will he wake up to the fact that he is what he is by reason of a Law inherent in himself — the action of which he can therefore carry on indefinitely, by cor- rectly understanding and cheerfully following it. His first general perception that there is such a Law at all is followed by the realization that it must be the Law of his own individuality, for he has only discovered the existence of the Law by recognizing himself as the Expression of it ; and therefore he finds that before all else, the Law is that he shall be himself. 2o6 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning But a Law which allows us to be entirely ourselves is Perfect Liberty, and thus we get back to St. James* statement that the Perfect Law is the Law of Liberty. Obviously it is not Liberty to allow ourselves to ' be depressed into such a mental attitude of submission to every form and degree of misery as coming to us "by the will of God," that we at last reach a condition of apathy in which one blow more or less makes very little difference. Such teaching is based on the Devil's beatitude — "Blessed are they that expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed" — ^but that is not the Gospel of Deliverance which Jesus preached in His first discourse in the synagogue of Nazareth. Jesus* teaching was not the deification of suffering, but the fulness of Joy; and He emphatically declared that all bondage, ever3rthing which keeps us from enjoying our life to the full, is the working of that Power of the Negative which the Bible calls the Devil. To give up hope and regard ourselves as the sport of an inexorable fate is not Liberty. It is not obedience to a higher power, but abject submission to a lower — ^the power of ignorance, unintelligence, and negation. Perfect Liberty is the consciousness that we are not thus bound by any power of evil, but that, on the contrary, we are centers in which the Creative Spirit of the Universe finds particular expression. Then we are in harmony with its continual progressive movement towards still more perfect modes of ex- The Law of Liberty 207 pression, and therefore Its thought and our thought, Its action and our action, become identical, so that in expressing the Spirit we express ourselves. When we reach this unity of consciousness we cannot but find it to be perfect Liberty; for our own self-ex- pression, being also that of the All-Creating Spirit as It manifests in our individuality, is no longer bound by antecedent conditions, but starts fresh from the standpoint of Original Creative Energy, This is Liberty, according to Law, the law of the All-Creating Harmony, in which God's way and our way co-incide. The idea of Liberty, without a uni- fying Harmony as its basis, is inconceivable, for with every one struggling to get their own way at some^ body else's expense, you create a pandemonium; and that is just why there is so much of that element in the world at the present time. But such an inverted idea of Liberty is based on the assumption that Man does not possess the power of controlling his condi- tions by his Thought; in other words, the flat denial of the initial statement of Scripture regarding him that he is made "in the image and likeness of God." Once grant the creative power of our Thought and there is an end of struggling for our own way, and an end of gaining it at some one else's expense; for, since by the terms of the hypothesis we can create what we like, the simplest way of getting what we want is, not to snatch it from somebody else, but to 2o8 Bible Mysten^f. and Bible Meaning make it for ourselves ; and, since there is no limit to Thought there can be no need for straining, and for every one to have his own way in this manner would be to banish all strife, want, sickness, and sorrow from the earth. Now, it is precisely on this assumption of the cre- ative power of our Thought that the whole Bible rests. If not, what is^ the meaning of being saved, by Faith? Faith is essentially Thought; and, there- fore, every call to have Faith in God is a call to trust in the power of our own Thought about God. "Ac- cording to your faith be it unto you," says the New Testament, "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he," says the Old Testament. The entire Book is nothing but one continuous statement of the Creative Power of Thought. The whole Bible is a commentary on the text, "Man is the image and likeness of God." And it comments on this text sometimes by explaining why, by reason of the ONE-ness of the Spirit, this must necessarily be so; sometimes by incitements to emotional states calculated to call this power into activity; sometimes by' precepts warning us against those emotions which would produce its inverse action; sometimes by the exaniple of those who have successfully demonstrated this power, and conversely by examples of those who have perverted it; sometimes by statements of the terrible consequences that must inevitably follo\»t such The Law of Liberty 209 perversion; and sometimes by glorious promises of the illimitable possibilities residing in this wonderful power, if used in the right way; and thus it is that "all Scripture is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." All this proceeds from the initial assumption with which the Bible starts regarding Man, that he is the reproduction in individuality of that which God is in universality. Start with this assumption, and the whole Bible works out logically. Deny it, and the Book becomes nothing but a mass of inconsistencies and contradictions. The value of the Bible as a store- house of knowledge and a guide into Life, depends entirely on our attitude with regard to its f imdamental proposition. But this proposition contains in itself the Affirma- tion of our Liberty; and the Gospel preached by Jesus amounts simply to this, that if any one realizes himself as the reproduction, in conscious individuality, of the same principles which the Law of the Old Testament bids us recognize in the Divine Mind, he will thereby enter upon an unlimited inheritance of Life and Liberty. But to do this we must realize the Divine image in ourselves on all lines. We cannot enter upon a full life of Joy and Liberty by trying to realize the Divine image along one line only. If we seek to reproduce the Creative Power without its correlatives of Wisdom iand Love, jve 2IO Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning shall do so only to our own injury ; for there is one thing which is impossible alike to God and Man, and that is to plant a seed of one sort and make it yield fruit of another. We can never get beyond the Law that the effect must be of the same nature as the cause. To abrogate this Law would be to destroy the very foundation of the Creative Power of Thought, for then we could never reckon upon what our Thought might produce; so that the very same Law which places creative power at our disposal, neces- sarily provides punishment for its misuse and re- ward for its right employment. And this is equally the case along the two other lines. To seek development only on the line of Knowledge is to contemplate a store of wealth, while remaining ignorant of the one fact which gives it any value, that it is our own; and, in like manner, to cul- tivate only Love makes our great motive power evap- orate in a weak sentimentality which accomplishes nothing, because it does not know how and does not feel able. So, here we see the force of the Master's words when he bids us aim at a perfection like that of our "Father" in heaven, a perfection based on the knowledge that all being is three-fold in essence and one in expression; and that, therefore, we can attain Liberty only by recognizing this universal Law in ourselves also, and that accordingly the Thought that The Law of Liberty 211 sets us free must be a simultaneous movement along all three lines of our nature. The Divine Mind may be represented by a large circle and the individual mind by a small one, but that is no reason why the smaller circle should not be as perfect for its own area as the larger; and, there- fore, the initial statement of the Bible that Man is the image of God is the charter of Individual Liberty for each one, provided we realize that this likeness must extend to the whole three-fold unity that is ourself and not to a part only. Our Liberty, therefore, consists in being ourselves in our Wholeness^ and this means the conscious exer- cise of all our powers, whether of our visible or in- visible personality. It means being ourselves, not try- ing to be somebody else. The principles by which any one ever attains to self- expression, whether in the humblest or the most ex- alted degree, are always the same, for they are Mnt- versals and apply to every one alike, and, therefore, we may advantageously study their working in the lives of others ; but to suppose that the expression of these principles is bound to take the same form in us that it did in the individual who is the object of our hero-worship, is to deny the first principle of mani- fested being, which is Individuality. Ifi some one towers above the crowd it is because he has grown to that height, and I cannot permanently 212 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning attain the same elevation by climbing on his shoulders, but only by growing to the same height myself. There- fore, the attempt to copy a particular individual, how- ever beautiful his character, is bondage, and a relin- quishing of our birthright of Selfhood. What we have to do in studying those lives which we admire, is to discover the universal principles which those persons embodied in their way, and then set to work to embody them in ours. To do this is to realize the Universal I AM manifesting itself in every Individuality ; and when we see this, we find that the statement of the Law of Individual Liberty is the declaration that was made to Moses at the burning bush, and is the truth which Jesus proclaimed when He said that it was the recognition of the I AM that would set us free from the Law of bondage and death. In speaking of the I AM as the Principle of Life, neither Jesus nor Moses used the words personally, and Jesus especially avoids any such misconstruction by saying "If I bear witnesss of Myself My witness is not true"; in other words, He came to set forth, not Himself personally, but those great principles common to all mankind, of which He exemplified the full development. When a little child is first told that God made the world, it accepts the statement without doubting, but immediately and logically follows it up with the ques- tion, then who made God? And the unsophisticated The Law of Liberty 213 mother very often gives the correct answer, God made himself. There is the whole secret, and when we come down — or rather when we rise — ^to the level of these souls whose pure intuitions have not been warped by arguments drawn only from the outside of things, we see that the principle of continual self- creation into all varieties of individuality, affords the true clue to all that we are and to all that is around us; and when we see this, the teaching regarding the I AM in ourselves becomes clear, logical, and simple. Then we understand that the Law of our Whole Being — ^that which is Cause as well as Effect — is the reproduction in Individuality of the same power which makes the worlds ; and when this is understood in its Wholeness, we see that this principle cannot, as mani- fested in us, be in opposition to its manifestation of itself in other forms. The Whole must be homo- geneous — that which is homogeneous cannot v act in opposition to itself — and consequently this homogeneous principle, which underlies all indi- viduality, and is the I AM in each, can never act contrary to the true Law of Life; therefore, to know ourselves as the concentration of this principle into a focus of self-recognition, is to be at one with the Life-Principle which is all that is in all worlds and under all forms. It is this recognition of our own Individuality as being a reproduction of the Universal Principle in 214 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning the whole personality that constitutes belief in "the Son," or the principle of spiritual sonship, which brings us out of the bondage of ignorance and im- potence into the liberty of knowledge and power. But the reader, who is still within the trammels of the traditional exegesis, will probably say, if this be so, what is meant by such texts as that contained in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, "He was wounded for our transgressions," etc.? and the answer is that the personality here spoken of it still the same Typical Man — the Divine Son — who is described by Isaiah as "the Wonderful Child," only seen from another point of view. This is the description of him in his pre- natal stage, that is, before his manifestation as the Son whose Name is Wonderful, Counsellor, etc. And this brings us to the consideration of a very recondite subject, the question whether "Spirit" ever does pass into unconsciousness. Whether from the physiological or the psychological side, there is im- portant evidence tending to the conclusion that "Spirit" is never in a condition of unconsciousness ; and if this is the case with that concentration of pure Spirit which is the individualized I AM in each of us, how can we conceive its suffering from those transgressions of the Law of our own being, which result in all the misery, pain, and death that the world has witnessed. If the Spirit in us is the very Impersonation of the Law of Life, what woundings, what bruisings it must The Law of Liberty 215 suffer in the course of educating the lower principles into self-recognition and spontaneous compliance with the true Law of the Individuality in its Wholeness ? Then we see that it is only by the infinite persist- ence of the Spirit, in its struggle towards perfecting the vehicles of its self-expression, that the Individ- uality in all its completeness can ever be brought to maturity, and the crown set to the work of Evolution which commenced far back in the dim unfathomable past ; we realize St. Paul's meaning in saying that the Spirit groans with unutterable groanings, for it is that principle which St. John tells us cannot sin (I, John iii. 9, and v. 18), that is, cannot act contrary to the true Law of Being; and thus a peculiar emphasis is set on the injunctions, "Grieve not the Spirit," "Quench not the Spirit," for the individualized Spirit is the intensely Living Centre of ourselves — the I AM that I Myself AM in every one of us. The question of the ultimate consciousness of the individuality under the outward semblance of uncon- sciousness, as in trance, or under the conditions induced by hypnotism, or anaesthetics, involves problems of a scientific character which I hope to have an opportunity of discussing on another occasion ; but even supposing there is no such latent consciousness of suffering as I have suggested, we may well transfer the whole description of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah to the conscious sufferings of the outer man. That, at any 2i6 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning rate, is a "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," and the reason of these sufferings is the want of Wholeness; they are the result of trying to live only in one portion of our nature — and that the lower — instead of in the Whole, and, consequently, these suf- ferings will continue until we realize that even balance of all parts of our nature which alone constitutes true individuality, or that which is without division. By the buffetting of experience, the lower person- ality is being continually driven to inquire more and more into the reason of its sufferings, and as it grows in intelligence, it sees that they always result from some wilful or ignorant infraction of the Law of Things-as-they-are, as distinguished from Things-as- they-look; and so by degrees the lower personality grows into union with the higher personality, which itself is the Law of Things-as-they-are become Per- sonal, until at last the two are found to be ONE, and the Perfected Man stands forth Whole. This is the process to which the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews refers, when he says that "though he were a son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered," thus indicating a course of edu- cation which can only apply to a personality whose evolution is not yet completed. But by these suffer- ings of the lower personality the salvation of the entire individuality is at length accomplished, for being thus led to study the Law of the Whole, the The Law of Liberty 217 lower or simply intellectual mentality, at last dis- covers its relation to the Intuitive and Creative Prin- ciple, and realizes that nothing short of the harmonious union of the two makes a Complete Man. Until this recognition takes place, the real meaning of suffering is not understood. To talk about "the Mystery of Pain" is like talking of the mystery of broken glass if we throw a stone at a window — it is of our own making. We attribute our sufferings to "the will of God," simply because we can think of nothing else to attribute them to, being ignorant alike of ourselves as centres of causation and of God as the Universal Life-Principle, which cannot will evil against any one. So long as we are at this stage of intelligence, we esteem the lower personality (the only self we yet know) to be "stricken and smitten of God" — we put it all down to God's account — while all the time the cause of our wounding and bruising was, not the will of God, but our own transgressions and iniquities — transgression, the infraction of the Law of Causation, and iniquity, unequalness, or the want of even balance between all portions of our Individuality, without which the liberating recognition of our own I AM- ness can never take place. This reading of this wonderful chapter takes it out of the region of merely speculative theology, and brings it into a region where we can understand its 2i8 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning statements as links in a chain of cause and effect con- necting the promised redemption with facts that we know, and starting from causes whose working is obvious to us. This reading in no way detracts from the value of this passage as a prophecy of the great work of the Master, for it is a generic description applicable to each, in his degree, who in any way labors or suffers for the good of others; and the description is, there- fore, supremely applicable to Jesus, in whom that perfect Individualization of the Divine of which we speak was fully accomplished. The Law of Man's Individuality is, therefore, the Law of Liberty, and equally it is the Gospel of Peace ; for when we truly understand the Law of our own individuality, we see that the same Law finds its ex- pression in every one else, and, consequently, we shall reverence the Law in others exactly in proportion as we value it in ourselves. To do this is to follow the golden rule of doing to others what we would they should , do unto us ; and because we know that the Law of Liberty in ourselves must include the free use of our own creative power, there is no longer any inducement to infringe the rights of others, for we can satisfy all our desires by the exercise of our knowledge of the Law. As this comes to be understood, co-operation will take the place of competition with the result of remov- The Law of Liberty 219 ing all ground of enmity, whether between individuals, classes, or nations; and thus the continual recogni- tion of the Divine or *'highest" principles in our- selves brings "peace on earth and good-will among men" naturally in its train, and it is for this reason that the Bible everywhere couples the reign of peace on earth with the Knowledge of God. The whole object of the Bible is to teach us to be ourselves and yet more ourselves. It does not trou- ble itself with political or social questions, or even with those of religious organization, but it goes to the root of all, which is the Individual. First set people right individually, and they will naturally set them- selves right collectively. It is only applying to man- kind the old proverb, "tzike care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves" ; and, therefore, the Bible deals only with the two extremes of the scale, the Universal Mind and the Individual Mind. Let the relation between these ,two be clearly under- stood, and all other relations will settle themselves on lines which, however varied in form, will always be characterized by individual Liberty working to the expression of perfect social harmony. X. THE TEACHING OF JESUS IN this chapter I shall endeavor to give a connected idea of the general scope and purpose of the Master's teachings, the point of which we, in great measure, miss by taking particular sayings sep- arately, and so losing the force which pertains to them, by reason of the place 'they hold in His system as a whole. For, be it remembered, Jesus was teach- ing a definite system, not a creed, nor a ritual, nor a code of speculative ethics, but a system resulting from the threefold source of spiritual inspiration, intel- lectual reasoning, and experimental observation, which are the three modes in which the Universal Mind manifests itself as Conscious Reasoning Power or "the Word." And therefore this system combines the re- ligious, philosophical, and scientific characters, be- cause it is a statement of the action of universal prin- ciples at the level where they find expression through the human mind. As we proceed, we shall find that the basis of this system is the same perception of the unity between the Expressor and the Expressed, which is also the 221 222 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning basis of the teaching of Moses, and which is summed up in the significant phrase I AM. Jesus brings out the consequences of this Unity in their relation to the Individual, and therefore presupposes the teach- ing of Moses, regarding the Universal Unity, as the necessary foundation for its reflection in the individual. The great point to be noted, in the teaching of Jesus, is His statement of the absolute liberty of the individual. That was the subject of His first dis- course in the synagogue of Nazareth (Luke iv. i6) ; He continued His teaching with the statement, "the truth shall make you free"; and He finished it with the final declaration before Pilate, that He had come into the world to the end that He should bear witness to the Truth (John xviii. 37). Thus, to teach us the knowledge of Liberating Truth was the beginning, the middle, and the end of the great work which the Master set before Him. Now, there are two facts about this teaching that deserve our special attention. The first is that the perfect liberty of the individual must be in accordance with the will of God; for on any other supposition Jesus would have been teaching rebellion against the Divine will; and, therefore, any system of religion which inculcates blind submission to adverse circum- stances, as submission to the will of God, must do so at the cost of branding Jesus as a leader of rebellion against the Divine authority. The Teaching of Jesus 223 The other point is that this freedom is represented simply as the result of coming to know the Truth, If words mean anything, this means that Liberty in truth exists at the present moment, and that what keeps us from enjoying it is simply our ignorance of the fact. In other words, the Master's teaching is that the essential, and, therefore, ever-present Law of each individual human life is absolute Liberty — it is so in the very nature of Being, and it is only our ingrained belief to the contrary that keeps us in bondage to all sorts of limitation. Of course, it is ea&y to explain away all that the Master said, by interpreting it in the light of our past experiences; but these experiences themselves consti- tute the very bondage from which He came to deliver us, and, therefore, to do this is to destroy His whole work. We do not require His teaching to go back to the belittling and narrowing influence of past ex- periences; we do that naturally enough so long as we remain ignorant of any other possibilities. It is just this being tied up that we want to get loose from, and He came to tell us that, when we know the Truth, we shall find we are not tied up at all. If we hold fast to the initial teaching of Genesis, that the Divine Principle makes things by itself becoming them, then it follows that when it becomes the indi- vidual man, it cannot have any other than its own natural movement in him; that id, a continual push- 224 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning ing forward into fuller and fuller expression of itself, which, therefore, becomes fuller and fuller life in the individual ; and, consequently, anything that tends to limit the full expression of the individual life must be abhorrent to the Universal Mind expressing itself in that individuality. Then comes the question as to the way in which this truth is to be realized, and the practical way in- culcated by the Master is very simple; it is only that we are to take this truth fof granted, that is all. We may be ready to exclaim that this is a large demand upon our faith, but after all it is* the only way in which we ever do anything. We take all the operations of the Life-principle in our physical body for granted, and what is wanted is a similar confidence in the work- ing of our spiritual faculties. We trust our bodily powers because we assume their action as the natural Law of our being; and in just the same way we can only use our interior powers, by tacitly assuming them to be as natural to us as any others. We must bear in mind that from first to last the Master's teaching was never other than a veiled statement of Truth: He spoke "the word" to the people in parables, and "without a parable spake He not unto them" (Matt. iv. 34). It is indeed added "and when they were alone He expounded all things to His disciples"; but if we take the interpretation of the parable of the sower as a sample, we can see how The Teaching of Jesus 225 very far these expositions were from being a full and detailed explanation. The thickest and outermost veil is removed, but we are still very far from that plain speaking among "the full-grown" which St. Paul tells us was equally dis- tant from his own writing to the Corinthians. I say this on the best authority, that of the Master Himself. We might have supposed that in that last discourse, which commences with the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel, He had withdrawn the final veil from His teaching; but, no, we have His own words for it that even this is a veiled statement of the Truth. He tells His disciples that the time when He shall show them plainly of "the Father" is still future (John xiv. 25). He left the final interpretation to be given by the only possible interpreter, the Spirit of Truth, as the real significance of His words should in time dawn upon each of His hearers, with an inner meaning that would be none other than the revelation of The Sacred Name. As this meaning dawns upon us we find that Jesus no longer speaks to us in proverbs, but that His parables tell us plainly of "the Father," and our only wonder is that we did not discern His true meaning long ago. He is telling us of great universal principles which are reproduced everywhere and in everything with special reference to their reproduction on the plane 226 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning of Personality. He is not telling us of rules which God has laid down in one way, and could, had He chosen, have laid down in another, but of universal Laws which are the very Being of God, and which are, therefore, inherent in the constitution of Man, Let us,, then, examine some of His sayings in this light. The thread on which the pearls of the Master's teaching are strung together, is that Perfect Liberty is the natural result of knowing the Truth. "When you find what the Truth really is, you will find it to be that you are perfectly free," is the centre from which all His other statements radiate; but the final discovery cannot be made for you, you must each make it for yourself, therefore, "he that hath jars to hear let him hear." This is nowhere brought out more clearly than in the parable of the Prodigal Son, The fact of son- ship had never altered for either of the two brothers, but in different ways they each missed the point of their position as sons. The one limited himself by separating oflf a particular share of the Father's goods for himself, which, just because of being a limited share and not the whole, was speedily exhausted, leav-* ing him in misery and want. The other brother equally limited himself by sup- posing that he had no power to draw from his Father's stores, but must wait till he in some way acquired a The Teaching of Jesus 227 specific permission to do so, not realizing his inherent right, as his Father's son, to take whatever he wanted. The one son took up a false idea of independence, thinking it consisted in separating himself and, to use an expressive vulgarism, in being entirely "on his own hook," while the other, in his recoil from this con- ception, went to the opposite extreme, and believed himself to have no independence at all. The younger son's return, so far from extinguishing the instinct of Liberty, gratified it to the full, by plac- ing him in a position of honor and command in his Father's house; and the elder sen is rebuked with the simple words, "Why wait for me to give you what is yours already ? All that I have is thine." It would be impossible to state the relation between the Indi- vidual Mind and the Universal Mind more clearly than in this parable, or the two classes of error which prevent us from understanding and utilizing this re- lation. The younger brother is the man who, not realizing his own spiritual nature, lives on the resources of the lower personality, till their failure to meet his needs drives him to look for something which cannot thus be exhausted, and eventually he finds it in the recog- nition of his own spiritual being as his inalienable birthright, because he was made in the image and likeness of God, and could not by any possibility have been created otherwise. 228 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning Gradually, as he becomes more and more conscious of the full effects of this recognition, he finds that "the Father" advances to meet him, until at last they are folded in each other's arms, and he realizes the true meaning of the words, "I and my Father are ONE." Then he learns that Liberty is in union and not in separation, and realizing his identity with the Infinite he finds that all its inexhaustible stores are open to him. This is not rhapsody but simple fact, which becomes clear if we see that the only possible action of the un- differentiated Life-Principle must be to always press forward into fuller and fuller expression of itself, in particular forms of life, in strict accordance with the conditions which each form provides for its manifes- tation. And when any one thoroughly grasps this principle of the differentiation through form of an entirely undistributed universal potential, then he will see that the mode of differentiation depends on the di- rection in which the specializing entity is reaching out. ■ If he further gets some insight into the boundless possibilities which must result from this, he will realize the necessity, before all things, of seeking to repro- duce in individuality that Harmonious Order which is the foundation of the universal system. And, since he cannot particularize the whole Infinite at a single stroke, which would-be a mathematical im- The Teaching of Jesus 229 possibility, he utilizes its boundless stores by par- ticularizing, from moment to moment, the specific de- sires, powers, and attractions, which at that moment he requires to employ. And, since the Energy from which he draws is in- finite in quantity and unspecialized in quality, there is no limit either of extent or kind to the purposes for which he may employ it. But he can only do this by abiding in "the Father's" house, and by conforming to the rule of the house which is the Law of Love. This is the only restriction, if it can be called a restriction to avoid using our powers injuriously; and this restriction becomes self-obvious, when we con- sider that the very thing which puts us in possession of this limitless power of drawing from the Infinite is the recognition of our identity with the Universal One, and that any employment of our powers to the intentional injury of others is in itself a direct denial of that "unity of the Spirit which is the bond of peace." The binding power (religio) of Universal Love is thus seen to be inherent in ^the very nature of the Liberty, which we attain by the Knowledge of the Truth; but except this there is no other restriction. Why? Because, by the very hypothesis of the case, we are employing First Cause when we consciously use our creative power with the knowledge that our Thought is the individual action of the same Spirit 330 ^ Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning which, in its universal action, is both the Cause and the Being of every mode of manifestation; for the great fact which distinguishes First Cause from sec- ondary causation is its entire independence of all conditionsj because it is not the outcome of conditions but itself creates them — it produces its own conditions step by step as it goes along.* If, therefore, the Law of Love be taken as the foundation, any line of action can be worked out suc- cessfully and profitably; but this does not alter the fact that a higher degree of intelligence will see a much wider field of action than a lower one, and, therefore, if our field of activity is to grow, it can only be as the result of the growth of our intelligence; and, consequently, the first use we should make of our power of drawing from the Infinite should be for steady growth in understanding. Life is the capacity for action and enjoyment, and, therefore, any extension of the field for the exercise of our capacities is an increase of our own livingness and enjoyment, and so the continual companionship o f the Spirit of Truth, leading us into con- tinually expanding perception of the limitless pos- sibilities that are open to ourselves and to the whole race, is the supreme Vivifying Influence; and thus ♦For fuller explanation regarding our use of First Cause, see my Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science, The Te^aching of Jesus 231 we find that the Spirit of Truth is identical with the Spirit of Life. It is this consciousness of companionship that is the Presence of the Father; and it is in returning to this Presence and dwelling in it that we get back to the Source of our own spiritual nature, and so find ourselves in possession of boundless possibilities with- out any fear of misusing them, because we do not seek to be possessors of the Divine Power without be- ing possessors of the Divine Love and Wisdom also. And the elder brother is the man who has not thrown off the Divine guidance as the younger had done, but who has realized it only in the light of a restriction. Always his question is "Within what limits may I act?" and, consequently, starting with the idea of limi- tation, he finds limitation everywhere; and thus, though he does not go into a far country like his brother, he relegates himself to a position no better than that of a servant — ^his wages are measured by his work, his creeds, his orthodoxies, his limitations of all sorts and descriptions, which he imagines to be of Divine appointment, while all the time he has im- ported them himself. But him also "the Father" meets with the gracious words, "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that T have is thine"; and, therefore, as soon as this elder brother becomes sufficiently enlightened to perceive that all the elements of restriction in his beliefs, save 3^ Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning only the Law of Love, have no place in the ultimate reality of Life, he too re-enters the house, now no longer as a servant but as a son, and joins in the festival of everlasting joy. We find the same lesson in the parable of the Talents. The use of the powers and opportunities we have, just where we are now, naturally opens up sequences by which still further opportunities, and, consequently, higher development of our powers be- come possible ; and these higher developments in their turn open the way to yet further expansion, so that there is no limit to the process of growth other than what we set to it by denying or doubting the prin- ciple of growth in ourselves, which is what is meant by the servant burying his talent in the earth. "The lord" is the Living Principle of Evolution which obtains equally on all planes, and nothing has been more fully established by science than the Law that as soon as progress stops retrogression begins, so that it is only by continual advance we can escape the penalty with which Professor Aytoun threatens, us in his humorous verses, that we shall "Return to the monad from which we all sprang, Which nohody can deny." But on the other hand, the employment of our fac- ulties and opportunities, so far as we realize them, is, by the same Law, certain to produce its own re- The Teaching of Jesus 2^ ward. By being faithful over a few things we shall become rulers over many things, for God is not un- mindful to forget your labor of love, and so day by day we shall enter more and more fully into the joy of our Lord. The same idea is repeated in the parable of the man who contrived to get into the wedding feast without the wedding garment. The Divine Marriage is the attainment by the individual mind of conscious union with the Universal Mind or "the Spirit"; and the feast, as in the parable of the Prodigal Son, sig- nifies the joy which results from the attainment of Perfect Liberty, which means power over all the re- sources of the universe, whether within us or around us. Now, as I have already pointed out, the only way in which this power can be used safely and profitably is through that recognition of its Source, which makes it in all points subservient to the Law of Love, and this was precisely what the intruder did not realize. He is the type of the man who fails in exactly the opposite way to the servant who buries his Lord's talent in the earth. This man has cultivated his powers to the uttermost, and so is able to enter along with the other guests. He has attained that Knowl- edge of the Laws of the spiritual side of Nature iwhich gives him a place at that Table of the Lord, which is the storehouse of the Infinite; but he has 334 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning missed the essential point of all his Knowledge, the recognition that the Law of Power is one with the Law of Love, and so, desiring to separate the Divine Power from the Divine Love, and to grasp the one while rejecting the other, he finds that the very Laws of which he has made himself master, by his knowl- edge, overwhelm him with their own tremendousness, and by their reflex action become the servants who bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness. The Divine Power can never be separated with impunity from the Divine Love and Guidance. The parable of the unjust steward is based upon the Law of the subjective nature of individual life. As in all the parables, "the lord" is the supreme Self- evolving Principle of the universe, which, relatively to us, is purely subjective, because it acts in and through ourselves. As such it follows the invariable Law of subjective mind, which is that of response to any suggestion that is impressed upon it with suf- ficient power.* Consequently, "the lord" does not dispute the cor- rectness of the accounts rendered by the steward, but, on the contrary, commends him for his wisdom in recognizing the true principle by which to escape the results of his past mal-administration of the estate. *I have discussed tihs subject at greater length in my Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science. The Teaching of Jesus 235 St. Paul tells us that he is truly approved "whom the Lord commendeth/' and the commendation of the steward is unequivocally stated by Jesus, and, there- fore, we must realize that we have here the state- ment of some principle which harmonizes with the Life-giving tendency of the Universal Spirit. And this principle is not far to seek. It is the acceptance by "the Lord" of less than the full amount due to Him. It is the statement of Ezekiel xviii. 22, that if the wicked man forsake his way "he shall surely live and not die. All his transgressions that he hath com- mitted shall not be mentioned unto him ; in his right- eousness that he hath done he shall live." It is what the Master speaks of as agreeing with the adversary while we are still in the way with him; in other words, it is the recognition that because the Laws of the uni- verse are not vindictive but simply causal, therefore, the reversal of our former mis-employment of First Cause, which in our case is our Thought demonstrated in a particular line of action, must necessarily result in the reversal of all those evil consequences which would otherwise have flowed from our previous wrong-doing. I have enlarged in a previous chapter on the opera- tion of the Law of Suggestion with regard to the question of sacrifice; and when we either see that the Law of Sacrifice culminates in No Sacrifice, or 236 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning reach the place where we realize that a Great and Sufficient Sacrifice has been offered up once for all, then we have that solid ground of suggestion which results in the summing-up of the whole Gospel in the simple words, "Don't do it again." If we once realize the great truth stated in Psalni xviii. 26 and II. Samuel xxii. 27, that the Divine Universal Spirit always becomes to us exactly the correlative of our own principle of action, and that it does so natiirally by the Law of Subjective Mind, then it must become clear that it can have no vindictive power in it, or, as the Bible expresses it, "Fury is not in Me" (Isaiah xxvii. 9). But for the very same reason we canot trifle with the Great Mind by trying to impress one character upon it by our thought, while we are impressing another upon ourselves by our actions. This is to show our ignorance of the nature of the Law with which we are dealing; for a little consideration will show us that we cannot impress two opposite sug- gestions at the same time. The man who tried to do so is described in the parable of the servant, who threw his fellow-servant into prison after his own debt had been cancelled. The previous pardon availed him nothing, and he was cast into prison till he should pay the uttermost farthing. The meaning becomes evident when we see that what we are dealing with is the supreme Law of our The Teaching of Jesus 237 own being. We do not really believe what we do not act up to; if, therefore, we cast our fellow-servant into prison, no amount of philosophical speculation in an opposite direction will set us at liberty. Why? Because our action demonstrates that our real belief is in limitation. Such compulsion can only proceed from the idea that we shall be the poorer, if we do not screw the money out of our fellow-servant, and this is to deny our own power of drawing from the Infinite in the most emphatic manner, and so to de- stroy the whole edifice of Liberty, We cannot impress upon ourselves too strongly the impossibility of living by two contradictory principles at the same time. And the same argument holds good when we conceive that the debt is due to our injured feelings, our pride, and the like — the prin- ciple is always the same; it is that perfect Liberty places us above the reach of all such considerations, because by the very hypothesis of being absolute free- dom, it can create far more rapidly than any of our fellow-servants can run up debts; and our attitude towards those who are thus running up scores should be to endeavor to lead them into that region of ful- ness where the relation of debtor and creditor cannot exist, because it becomes merged in the radiation of creative power. But perhaps the most impressive of all the parables was that in which, on the night when He was be- 238 Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning tfayed, the Master expressed the great mystery of God and Man by symbolic acrtion rather than by words, girding Himself with a towel and washing the dis- ciples' feet. He assured Peter that though the mean- ing of this symbolic act was not apparent at the time, it should become clear later on. A wonderful light is thrown on this dramatization of a great principle by comparing it with the Master's utterance in Luke xiii. 35-37. The idea of girding is very conspicuous in that parable. First, we are bidden to have our loins girded and our lights burn- ing, like uflto men that wait for their Lord. Then we are told that, if the servants Afe found thus pre- pared, when the Lord doeis come the positions will be reversed, and He will make them sit down and Will gird Himself and serve them. Now, what Jesus in this parable taught in words, He taught on the night of the Last Supper in actd. There is a strict parallel ; in both cases the Master; the Lord, girds Himself and serves those iJp-ho had hithefid aciGOUnted themselves His servants. The e^rniyhia& reduplication of this parable shows that here we have something of the very highest importance presented to us; and> undoubtedly, it is the veiled statem