Setting aside all our hereditary beliefs, all our theological teachings let us try to consider the true teachings of Jesus as differentiated from the instructions given by Moses for the guidance of the Jews.
Moses never told his people to love and forgive their enemies. Jesus made a strong point of this, even bidding his disciples to forgive injuries to the seventieth time. Moses impressed upon his people the excellence of revenge, always demanding "an eye for an eye," a life for a life. Jesus said all that sort of compensation rested forever with G.o.d, that He alone, who saw and knew the hearts of men, could deal justly with them. The old Jewish law stoned to death the immoral woman--not the man--O no! certainly not! Jesus said to a flagrant woman brought before him by a rabble of men: "Let him that is without sin cast the first stone." What divine sarcasm, and how they are said to have slunk away under his perception of them!
How is it now with the Christian religion in the so-called Christian nations? Where on the face of the earth is there a community or a people that is governed and controlled by the real teachings of the Christ?
All our jurisprudence is based upon the laws given to the Jews by their leader and lawgiver. We take the lives of those people who are guilty of breaking certain laws of ours based upon the laws of Moses, and while we do not stone the life out of those women--not men--whom we prove guilty of breaking the seventh commandment, we do build up against them walls of conventionality, and of uncharity harder than the rocks once used for the killing of their bodies.
Consider this beautiful law now in operation in the state of New York.
If a poor, starving, homeless, hopeless human being, maddened by the bitter woes of life, seeks surcease of pain by throwing off his own individual life, by committing suicide, the law insists that such a one shall be not only forced back to a continuance of a horrible existence here, but that each and every one of such sinners shall be punished by imprisonment and fine. If that isn"t serving the devil, what in the name of common sense is it? Where are the good Samaritans among the pretended followers of the loving Christ? What sort of a reckoning will such lawmakers have to meet, and what penalties undergo under the applied judgment of the Great Teacher and exemplars? "Woe to him through whom offences come," he said, and again: "Because ye did not give aid and comfort to the least of these, I will not call you of my flock." Could anything be more brutally unmerciful than such a law as this in its dealings with the most helpless, forlorn, and seemingly G.o.dforsaken of all earth"s children--the voluntary suicide?
How the demons must gloat over the lost souls who formed and enforced such a fiendish law! Why this everlasting "harking back" to Moses, while posing as followers of teachings utterly at variance with his?
Let us admit that we are Jews and stop persecuting them because they are not Christians, or let us try to know what Christ Jesus really meant us to understand by his ethics of love and good will to men.
Many people have lost all their faith in the immortality of the soul, because Moses did not preach it. It is quite possible that even the worshipped Moses did not know everything that men may yet come to know about this, and anent a world of other things. Neither did the troglodytes, nor the cliff dwellers know of electricity or the X-ray!
But Jesus knew of the life--the eternal, unquenchable life--of the soul beyond this mortal existence, and he knew and taught the way and the life that leads to that higher life. All through his teachings run this under-current of belief in the value of the individual soul, and instructions as to the highest and best way to evolve it from its lowest estate up to the Infinite.
Fancy what a revolution would come to the whole so-called Christian world if the ethics of Jesus, so plainly set down in his legacy to the children of men, were understood and lived! What wrong and injustice would be done away with, what works of mercy would be wrought!
HUMAN LIFE.
From the earliest soul consciousness to this very hour the mystery of human life has been, and is the subject of greatest interest. What is the origin of man? What is he here for? What is the everlasting purpose of him? And what, O what is his destiny, here or hereafter?
The woeful story told in the Bible of the origin and the "Fall of man,"
entailing untold miseries and uncomprehended anguish upon the whole human race, has never been believed in by thinking minds. Especially all that "rot" about G.o.d"s repenting Himself of having made man in his own image, and then setting Himself up in his only Son--a sacrifice to Himself--for the sins of the folks He had just made and set agoing, and told to subdue and master the planet He had made for them to live on; but this yarn caught the fancy of infantile and puerile minds, and also of the designing priests and theologians who have never, to this day, tired of "baring the backs" of humanity to this "devil"s rod,"
increasing, and multiplying the tortures of the minds of such as could be made to accept such stuff by fears which could never be comprehended or justified even in the minds of such children.
Our Heavenly Father has never set "metes and bounds" to the souls of his earth children; there is no hidden mystery that cannot be fathomed by them; there is no knowledge withheld from the earnest seeker after truth. But first of all, the mind must be clarified and set free from the blasphemous superst.i.tions engendered by the crude beliefs taught by theologians. The developed mind, and reason must arouse to rage and resistance in view of the wreck and ruin of untold millions of lives, the result of false teachings.
ANIMAL LIKENESS.
People have a way of saying of those they admire greatly: "She has the face of an angel," or "She is a perfect beauty," "Beauty beyond compare," et al, according to their ideas of what const.i.tutes absolute beauty; but the human countenances that have in them no faintest suggestion of the kingdom below us are very rare. If one looks attentively at the faces of the crowd as it surges along the most attractive street, there may be seen on review surprising resemblances.
A man looking like an elephant, another like a toad, bull dogs and wolves galore, beneficent faces of old people, calm and patient, resembling work-worn horses, always folk of both s.e.xes who suggest sheep,--now and again a cantankerous billy goat. You may be sure that the vast numbers of reptiles are not left out of the human representation, and the birds, too. The "eagle eye," and the carnivorous beak require no introduction to the menagerie, they belong there. But the felines have it, the cats, little and big, monopolize the show. Men regard a recognized resemblance to the king of beasts--the lion--a compliment to their natural powers and rightful rulership, while women have to put up with being considered cats, and many of them prove by their cattish doings their resemblance to their animal ancestry. There are babies everywhere about. It is disheartening to peer into their tiny faces and see in so many of their eyes no "speculation," no suggestion of intelligence. They remind you of the eyes of a fish.
Human beings have through them strains suggestive of the animal kingdom. It seems quite right to expect each one to act like the creature he resembles, when under the stress of violent emotion.
NATURAL SUPERSt.i.tION.
At the creation of the race there was thrown around it such safeguards as should tend to its continuance. These were, of course, implanted in the crude mentality of undeveloped man. Underlying all the rest and the most important to its perpetuation was fear. The ignorant child has no fear of consequences attendant upon any action; experience teaches him to know what they are, and how to protect himself from them. This was the first lesson of primitive man, and when, through the exercise of his inventive faculties, he had mastered his visible foes, the animal monsters surrounding him and threatening his life, and he found himself confronted by the action of terrible forces which he could not grasp or see, he, by a.n.a.logy, endowed them with personality, and such attributes as he knew himself to be possessed of, adding thereto powers and possibilities which were limited only by his own imagination. This was the very beginning of the working of the mental in him, and while it was most grotesque and unreasoning, it yet drew a sharp line between the mere animal and the animal man, and his whole life being spent in conflict with his foes, he naturally carried forward his growing perceptions of the existence of supernatural powers which were influencing his life upon the same basis, i. e., of an unending warfare, wherein he must always be the one attacked and vanquished. Fear of the animal world developed into a shivering terror of the invisible, and so deep and lasting was this first impression of the spiritual world upon his crude faculties, that it was made an universal heredity among all races and peoples. It exists everywhere today, even among those who profess to be living in the light of a higher revelation of G.o.d"s purpose in the life of man.
ADAPTIVENESS OF MAN.
The most surprising and extraordinary quality of mind manifested by man is his ready power of adaptation to whatever may become a part of his earthly experiences. It, alone, a.s.sures his continual progress upon all lines of growth connected not only with his earthly but also his immortal career. Great inventions, unexpected discoveries, and astounding revelations may stagger him for a moment; but the facility with which he finally absorbs all the hitherto unknown outworkings of science and natural law, and a.s.similates them to his inner sense of the fitness of things, changing all his relationship to his material life, and forcing himself to a readjustment not only of his mental perceptions, but also of his external existence gives proof sufficient of his being not only favored of the G.o.ds, but also of his near kinship with them. The marvels of mechanics, the divinely beautiful representations of art, and the exalted inspirations of literature were never so sought after, or so appreciated by large portions of the race as at the present time. The peasant"s cot today is made comfortable and beautified by accessories which within our historical knowledge could not be commanded by kings and princes possessed of great riches.
The spiritual origin of the splendid architecture of the great "white city" and later of the southern expositions is perfectly apparent to the eye of the mystic and the seer, and these vast, concentrated exhibits of the world"s work are object lessons of which the influence can never be outlived even by the careless and un.o.bserving. Today the great leaders of men, led by inspiring thoughts which would have appalled their forefathers, perfect schemes for overcoming the obstacles inhering in the vast forces of nature, and harness them into subservience to the growing needs of the race.
What devil-worshippers those old chaps were! To him they ascribed all power over things animate and inanimate, and the effrontery of the man who should have even mentioned the possibility of talking over a wire, thousands of miles, or of utilizing the forces of Niagara, or of hundreds of inventions now in use in the most commonplace surroundings would have been met with condign punishment. Our inventors would be in dungeons instead of their comfortable laboratories, and our great engineers would long ago have lost their heads. What a time we have had getting the devil out of our mechanical life! Now he can only rule in the immaterial world, in the crude imaginations of the ignorant and superst.i.tious.
DEVIL WORSHIP.
The Infinite Mind is in all things, everywhere what we are not. Where we are full of impatience, He is calm and unmoved; wherein we grope blindly, He, seeing the end from the beginning, is well content with his own handiwork, and with the final outcome of the souls of his earthly children. Many of the imperfections and individual shortcomings of people are laid aside in the dark crucible of physical death and the grave. Such of these tendencies as are carried over into the next plane of being, persisting in the spirit, are there dealt with as disease or ignorance, the results of malformation or bad environment. G.o.d is love, not hate, and "rejoiceth not in the death of the wicked," nor in the punishment of the wrongly educated; for a large portion of the sin and seeming iniquity of humanity is the result of heredity and of a misunderstanding of the laws of G.o.d expressed through nature. Undoubtedly there have been good men and true among those who sought to interpret G.o.d"s law aright and formulate a code for the guidance and discipline of humanity in accordance with justice and equity. But their premises were all wrong. They took for their foundation the old Jewish history wherein the G.o.d of the Hebrews was always represented as a jealous being, rejoicing in revenge and rapine, and in all that the enlightened world can conceive of as characterizing a devil. So the modern world has been committed to a devil worship.
Nowhere is the ethical teaching of Jesus recognized in our laws. It is the old Hebraic att.i.tude toward life and G.o.d.
FANATICISM.
Physical death is the fulfilling of a natural law everywhere prevailing; a change, which the mutability of all material creations renders necessary, and salutary, and, when received without the prejudices engendered by education, pleasing. Religion has nothing to do with it, and more than that it ought to influence every act of life.
No more has religion anything to do with the intercourse of disembodied spirits with those in the form. That also is wholly controlled by laws inherent in the nature of things, and will, when the ridiculous hue and cry raised by sensualistic minds has somewhat abated, resolve itself into a fixed fact having no more direct bearing upon human affairs than any other form of social intercourse. It has taught no new code of morals; it has not overthrown, so much as it has revealed the true state of things. It has revived the spiritual teachings of him by whom the world--called from him Christian--professes to be guided and controlled.
Fanaticism is the law of some minds, and it will display itself in whatever arena they are engaged. In politics the man they vote for is almost a G.o.d. In mechanics, they have invented a machine which shall ensure "perpetual motion;" in chemistry, the elixir of life, or a cure for all the ills of human life; in morals, the kingdom of heaven is speedily coming through the intervention of their dead friends.
The truest religion is that which adheres most faithfully to nature"s laws; for strive we ever so hard, we must return to them. They are G.o.d"s will made manifest, and the mind most free from prejudice engendered by false education is the one which secures to itself the most harmony, making possible that removal of "mountains" so often quoted--meaning the inevitable obstacles of spiritual life.
Christ said: "The kingdom of heaven is within you" and he might have added that of h.e.l.l also. Here is the beginning, if not the ending of all growth and reform. There seems to be a universal tendency or wish to escape from one"s self, and most so-called reforms begin at the surface--the ultimate--rather than at the centre. This should be an education to children, teaching them that their temptations are to be dreaded only as they are responded to by something within, and that loses all power with them as they gain self-knowledge and self-control.
TRUTH.
The demand for a knowledge of the truth, G.o.d"s truth, is as old as the world, the world of intellect and knowledge, the world we know about, and of which we have a more of [Transcriber"s note: or?] less true history. This cry of earnest and thoughtful men and women for truth, "nothing but the truth" has rung adown the ages from the pagan, and the nature worshipper through all the countless phases of belief to our modern presentations of inspired faith. Everyone who dares to think must realize how this longing of humanity has been met and exploited in times past by ignorant and self-seeking people, and suffering humanity has been imposed upon by superst.i.tions and false teachings which have left it in sorrowful dissatisfaction, or lost in the mazes of doubt and unbelief.
The fool hath said in his heart "there is no G.o.d." Life is too short and too full of interest in other directions for us to turn aside to combat fools of any sort. If we admit into our inner consciousness the absolute recognition of the existence of a supremely loving and wise G.o.d whose attributes are more marvelously great and grand than it can ever enter into the heart of man, or the mind of the highest archangel to conceive, we shall have taken the first step toward so positing ourselves toward him, as we perceive him embodied in his works, as to begin to see some faint indications of the divine purpose concerning the souls of men created in his image. All that we know of his laws and his intentions toward us, as indicated by our experiences here and now, embodied as we are in matter, supplies the whole of the data from which we infer truth, the truth as it is in G.o.d.
We find, first of all, that we are set here a h.o.m.ogenous race, for as the means of communication between widely separated branches of the family become established and easy, our horizons expand, racial prejudice and antagonisms vanish, new interests and fresh sympathies arise, and we are thus brought to recognize the fact of our common origin.
What a dull and deadly uninteresting place this planet would be without the differentiation of the races! What if the whole united world were Irish or German, Russian, or even loudly pervading, a.s.sumptive American! What an awful element of boredom would be added to our existence; and yet there are people so blind to this most wonderful expression of G.o.d"s Providence, that they limit their sympathetic regards to a chosen few, and virtually cast all other peoples into outer darkness. This applies especially to religious prejudices and beliefs. Let"s see about this: your antecedents were, so far as you know, Scotch and English, but by some providential intervention you are now American. You are expected to scorn and despise all other clans and races, and to condone all the faults and crimes of these which have been so honored by you, and this is called patriotism, and makes you feel virtuous and popular, and it is necessary and right--politically considered--but not from the standpoint of the occult, the spiritual side of existence. There is a wise intention and purpose in the blending of the races in their intermarriages, it is for the breaking down of prejudices as old as the race itself, that have ever kept the peoples of the earth apart.
There is but one law of evolution, and that which holds for the individual epitomizes that of a nation, or a world. So as we see people at a certain stage of their unfoldment of individuality exhibit an extreme egotism, amounting almost to an insanity, by isolating them, by confining them to the radius of their own mentality, so it is with the different tribes and races and nations of the world. They are set apart to grow their own peculiar traits of character, possible only to their prescribed environment, that they may thus push forward their own special gifts and endowments to their own ultimates. This is but a phase of their evolutionary process, a cla.s.s preparation looking toward a wider experience, wherein it shall come to be seen that all the world is akin. Referring again to the unit man. The shibboleth of the just present past time has been individualism which, rightly understood, means simply that the soul of man has progressed to a point where occult forces can lay hold on the crude being and shape it into a worthy likeness of its divine Maker, and it must there stand alone, until it feels its at-one-ment with the Divine and sees and acknowledges the higher law and purpose of its being, and furthermore recognizes why it has been called into existence.
Truth is like certain chemicals. It can only be retained by the mind wherein it finds an adapted affinity, and then it has in each a distinctly individual expression according to the mental and moral status of that mind. But laws and principles are stationary and unchangeable; it is our own personal knowledge which varies and changes with our growth. We may ignore and denounce certain phases of phenomena, but the phenomena work on just the same, unaffected by our beliefs or disbeliefs. The loss is ours if we willfully close our eyes and ears against the enlightening message which it would bring to us in pa.s.sing our way.