Seen and Unseen Part 36

They tell me here that He was the _first_ to attain to the full stature of the _Divine Man_ as he existed in the thought of the Absolute.

Spiritual evolution is the process, apparently the only process, whereby a Son of G.o.d in this sense can appear. And aeons of time have been necessary to produce this fine Flower of Humanity. Your own band are helping me to understand this. _Having attained, being the anointed One_, it is given to Him to bring the whole race after Him.

This is quite a different conception from my former one, and the one held by most of those whom in old days we called Unitarians.

_You_ have had to _unlearn_, or rather to drop, some of the husks of old tradition which have been guarding the truth for you, whereas I have still _to come up to the truth_; but the point reached will be the same, whether the approach to it is from north or south--do you see?

In Christ Jesus, they tell me, we are _all_ new creatures, as a matter of fact; because, consciously or unconsciously, we are working together with Him to realise and manifest ourselves, as made after the Image of G.o.d.

He is the example and the pledge for us. St Paul saw this, of course, and your present position illuminates his teaching for me enormously. So I have much to thank you for, Kate. It is easier to learn from those we know and trust, than from strangers.

And, moreover, when we can learn from the loved ones on earth _as well as through the loved ones here_, it makes the links in the golden chain complete, and helps us to realise the unity and solidarity of our common existence, _in the Father--with the Son_. H. D.

II

Another morning I had told H. D. that I had been reading an article in _The Nineteenth Century--and After_, I think, ent.i.tled "An Agnostic's Progress," and asked if he had sensed it through me at all.

H. D.--Yes. We will begin with that this morning. I am very glad you read it, for it is curiously like my own experiences in the same line.

Since coming over here, and thereby coming into such direct touch with you, I have been able to grasp the key to much that puzzled me on the other side.

As my views became more spiritualised I saw there _must_ be more truth in the Christian religion than outsiders supposed, and yet I knew it could not be absolutely true _in the form in which it has been handed down_.

_That_ was for me unthinkable, because I saw it would be a sudden and catastrophic incursion upon a cosmos of Law and Order.

It would mean G.o.d working in the highest departments of His Creation, as He is never seen to work in the lower ones. And my faith in Him prevented my entertaining such an idea! Schemes and plans of salvation belong to the comparative childhood of the race, not to the full-grown spiritual man. They are still in the fairy-tale stage, holding a truth, but acting only as the husk of the truth.

The unity of the race; the necessity for self-sacrifice in realising that unity: that by giving our life for our brothers we save our _Life_, which is that unity in which the brethren are included--all this I could accept in Christ's teaching or the teaching of the Apostles; but the rest: the detail, the carefully arranged _scheme_ of the Atonement, etc., as dogmatic doctrines--all these seemed to me so obviously the desperate attempts of man at a certain stage of development to fit in spiritual facts with the most probable theories; and to say that men who wrote of these things were inspired, and _therefore infallible_, was absurd.

Even in my short life, I had seen the world pa.s.s through several stages of belief and a.s.similate them in turn.

As a child, I was told that G.o.d was angry with people for sinning and breaking His commandments, and so Jesus Christ offered to come and die on the cross to appease His just wrath.

That seemed a great puzzle to me, because, although it might account for what happened _before_ Christ came and _until_ He came, I could not understand why G.o.d _should go on letting people come into the world_ who would break His laws, and make Him still more angry for centuries and centuries. That seemed to me, as a child, so unnecessary.

Later I was told it was not G.o.d's anger but His sense of justice that had to be appeased and satisfied, which was a distinct step in advance.

A little later, however, I read that this was not the hidden truth of the doctrine. The religious world (the thoughtful section of it) now arrived at the idea that it was not G.o.d who needed to be satisfied or appeased in any of His attributes, but MAN, and that G.o.d--in the person of his Son--came into the world to reconcile the world to Him, and not Himself to the world.

This was a complete _boulevers.e.m.e.nt_ of the whole situation, though it came so gradually that few appreciated that fact.

The last suggestion appeared to me by far the most luminous. In human life it is invariably the _lower_ nature that needs to be reconciled and conciliated; whilst the higher nature, in proportion to its development, is forgiving and tolerant and wide-minded, and does not prate about its own high sense of justice requiring to be appeased. The best type of _man_ punishes a wrong-doer in order that he may learn to do better and leave off tormenting and wronging his fellow-creatures; not to appease any instinct in his own breast, for that would be egotism, no matter how we might try to disguise the fact.

Now if it would be a blot upon the best conceivable _man_ to be egotistical, _a fortiori_ must it be upon G.o.d.

To conceive otherwise is to make G.o.d in the likeness of the lower and not the higher humanity. I thought all that out very clearly.

Still this crux remained for me, that to be suddenly, at any arbitrary moment in the world's history, obliged, as it were, to send an absolutely divine part of Himself into the world, was the way a _man_ would act faced by an unforeseen catastrophe, but not the way in which G.o.d has acted throughout the rest of our history.

A succession of teachers, enlightening the world by degrees, and culminating in the ANOINTED Son of G.o.d--the Flower of Humanity--_this_ is entirely in line with the processes of Nature and the laws of G.o.d, so far as we know them.

All progress has its culminating point.

aeons have pa.s.sed to produce the most exquisite crystals, the highest forms of vegetation, of animals, of men. Then came the slow processes of civilising and educating men; the dim instincts of fear and propitiation, merging, by slow degrees, in the first conceptions of Love, as something apart from desire, and so forth.

Was I to be expected to shut my eyes to all these known facts, and bolt down the theories contained in one Book, written by human authors, no matter how admirable?

I felt it was impossible.

Then I remembered with relief that these very dogmas, as a matter of fact, were in so fluent a state, that my own bare fifty years of living had seen at least four different high-water marks!

Here again therefore, under my very eyes, was the universal law of progress working, the moment it _could_ work, by being released from the swaddling-clothes of the Roman Catholic Church, which, so far as it is orthodox, is fossilised.

I saw also that the whole body of dissent had moved on, taking up its pegs and planting them a little further on each time; till a City temple, with its widening theology, was an established fact.

Progress everywhere--slow, but sure--and the pace getting quicker, even in my short span! Still, the _uniqueness_ of Jesus of Nazareth and His influence over the nineteen centuries was a puzzle.

Buddha's influence has lasted longer, Mahomet's almost as long (the two cancel any way), but I have always recognised an _advance_ in the teaching of Jesus Christ. He brought a fresh element, in the personal note of the Sonship with G.o.d.

I was at this point when I came over here. Now through your mind I have been able to see, and, oddly enough, to quicken in your soul, the seed already planted there.

They tell me the illumination came to you years ago, at Oberammergau--no, not when you were there for the Pa.s.sion Play--four years earlier.

You took it in with your head then, not with your heart. Old traditions were too strong, I suppose, and you had not made up the last little bit of your mind, to be true to the convictions that had come to you through your prayers for light.

And so you have gone on, see-sawing to and fro, not really believing the old orthodox ideas, but not courageously sweeping them away for yourself. So although the key was in your hands, you have not used it until now. You have given me the key, and I have been allowed, as _my_ New Year's gift, to fit it in the door.

This is how Jesus Christ has stood so long at the door of _your_ heart and knocked. He could only enter through the one door--namely, _that one opened in the highest point of your spiritual realisation_. I see now that He comes in at that door in each soul, and, as spiritual evolution unfolds in each heart, so is the special position of that door shifted; but the fact of His presence is the vital one! It was not possible for Him to do otherwise than hide His face, as it were, whilst you were barring His only door of access--_i.e. your true point of realisation_.

It all seems so clear to me now. And this is how He comes to so many in different guises.

He is the Perfected Manifestation of G.o.d, as the Divine Man--the Flower of Humanity.

But He can come into the heart in the narrowest creed, so long as the holder of that creed is at _his true point of growth_ and not trying to stifle G.o.d's gift of ever-advancing truth by cowardly want of trust, or fear of being worse off in the end, by being absolutely honest to himself and his own convictions in the present.

It has been a long message, and you have taken much of it awkwardly, but on the whole it represents what I wanted to say. H. D.

III

H. D.--I feel now that you want to know what I meant by telling Miss R.

it was the _likeness_ to the old world which puzzled me here.