THE DEVIL OF DARKNESS
IN THE
LIGHT OF EVOLUTION.
(Fuller Egyptian and
Gnostic Data, with references to authorities,
may be
found in the Author's
NATURAL
GENESIS.")
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|
THERE
are two things which I have come to look upon as constituting the unpardonable
sin of the father and mother against the helpless innocence of infancy. The
one is in allowing their little children to run the risk of blood-poisoning—such
as was once suffered by a child of mine—from the filthy fraud of vaccination. The other is in permitting the mind and soul of their children
to be inoculated with the still more fatal virus of the old, false, orthodox
dogmas and delusions, by allowing them to believe that the fables of ancient
mythology are the sacred and solely true "Word of God," if they are
found in the Hebrew Scriptures—the one book of the religiously ignorant. Generation after generation we learn, unlearn, and relearn the same lying,
legendary lore, and it takes the latter half of all one's lifetime to throw off
the mass of corrupting error instilled into us during the earlier half, even
when we do break out and slough it off in a mental eruption, and have to
find ourselves in utter rebellion against things as they are. Unfortunately, the
mass of people never do get rid of this infection, nor of the desire to give
their disease to others.
2. The fact of the matter is,
the Christian dogmas and doctrines began as such with being unintelligible and
inexplicable; they were to remain as mysteries; and any true explanation of
them is death to their false pretentions. It is my method to explode by
explaining them. Take the doctrine of the Trinity for example. Can any
theologian throughout all Christendom to-day give us any intelligible account of
its origin and primary meaning? Not one. For that we must go to mythology, which
was earlier than our theology, and which alone enables us to explain its
primitive mysteries. The natural genesis of the Trinity was found, and is to be refound, in lunar phenomena. The moon, in mythology and chronology, was a
time-measurer of a three-fold nature. At fifteen days of age, or full-moon, it
was the mother-moon. Hence Ishtar, in Akkad, is designated Goddess 15. The
lessening, waning moon was her little one, the child of the moon, who became the
virile one, the adult, as the horned new moon, the reproducer who was fabled to rebeget himself on the mother moon, and thus become his own father, as a natural
mode of describing natural phenomena.
3. These three are eternally
one in external nature—a Trinity always manifesting monthly, and the
triple aspect was humanly, or naturally, expressed by means of the mother,
child, and reproducing male, which three are also one in the total human being. In the Christian Iconography, you will sometimes see the Virgin Mary enthroned
in the new moon, with the child in her arms, and these two, with the horned or
phallic moon, constitute the Christian Trinity in Unity. Such was the
primitive mode of thinking in things, afterwards continued in a mystical
or doctrinal phase. Such, I affirm to be the origin of the Trinity in
mythology, which preceded religion; and when this is applied abstractly, to the
nature of deity, or to mind in nature, by means of metaphysic, the result is an
imposition, and he or she who practices imposition, consciously or not, is an
impostor. No such thing can be known as a triune or triangular God; but we are
able to show how such types originated. When our words are examined, we shall
frequently find that our metaphysic has been abstracted, or falsely filched from
primitive physics, as was the Trinity by Plato, which was continued by the
Christian Fathers, who tell us that but for Plato they would never have
understood the doctrine of the Trinity. As with the Trinity, so it is with the
origin of the theological Devil. The crucial question of the savage man, Friday,
was too fundamental for the theology of Robinson Crusoe. Friday asks, "But,
if God much strong, much mighty as the devil, why God no kill the devil, and so
make him no more wicked?" Crusoe, imitating other theologists, not knowing
what to say, "pretended not to hear him." (I am told this passage has
been omitted from certain recent editions.) To give an answer to that question
we shall have to go round to work. It would never do to begin a lecture on this
subject like the well-known chapter headed "Snakes in Iceland," which
consisted of the statement, "there are no snakes in Iceland!" If I
did, my lecture might be summed up in the words, "there is no devil."
But every belief, superstition, and mental type, had its natural genesis once,
the devil included.
4. The result of 14 years' research in the Records of the Past
is a personal conviction that the human mind has long suffered an eclipse, and
been darkened and dwarfed in the shadow of ideas, the real meaning of which has
been lost to the moderns! Myths and allegories, whose significance was once
unfolded to the initiates in the ancient mysteries, have been adopted in
ignorance, and re-issued as real truths divinely vouchsafed to mankind for the
first and only time when found in the Hebrew writings! The earlier religions
had their myths interpreted by means of the oral and unwritten Wisdom. We have
ours misinterpreted; and a great deal of what has been imposed
upon us as God's direct, true, and sole revelation to man, is a mass of inverted
myths, under the shadow of which men have been cowering as timorously as
birds in the stubble, when a kite in the shape of a hawk is held hovering
overhead to keep them down; as I have seen it practised in England!
5. The parables and types of
the primeval thinkers have been elevated to the "Sphere," as the
"hawk," or "serpent," the "bull," or the
"crab," that give names to certain groups of stars, and we are
precisely in the same relationship to these religious parables and allegories as
we should be to astronomical facts, if we thought the serpent and bull, lion,
sea-goat, and ram were real animals up in heaven, instead of constellations with
symbolical names. The Jews picked up various traditions of other races. Moses,
they tell us, was an initiate in all the learning of the Egyptians. And these
myths have been so handled as to efface their primitive features altogether. They have been so "sweated" down, by later theologies, to make capital—get
gold-dust, as it were, out of them—that they can only be recognised by
comparison with the earlier copies yet extant among other nations, from which
the Jews derived their versions.
6. Fossil remains, found in the lowermost strata of human
thought, have been preserved as divine patterns for the ignorant and
superstitious of later ages. The simple realities of the earliest times were
expressed by signs and symbols, and these have been taken and applied to later
thought, and converted into theological problems and metaphysical mysteries, for
which our theologians have no basis whatever, and can only wrangle over en
l'air; they cannot touch solid earth with one foot when they want to kick
opponents with the other; and when they try to bite you very viciously they
find that they have only been furnished with a set of teeth that are false. The
only possible way of exposing the false pretensions of theological dogmas is by
explaining them from the root, and showing what they meant as mythos. The
orthodox teaching which is founded on the "Fall of Man," is shattered,
even as a pane of glass is fractured at a blow, when once we can apply the
Doctrine of Development.
7. The Hebrew devil, or
Satan, means the opponent or adversary, and the first great natural adversary
recognised by primitive man was Darkness—simply darkness, the constant and
eternal enemy of the light—that is, the power of darkness was literal before
it became metaphorical, moral, or spiritual.
8. Hence darkness itself was
the earliest devil or adversary, the obstructor and deluder of man, the eternal
enemy of the sun. We speak of the "jaws of
darkness;" and darkness was the vast, huge, swallower of the light, night
after night. We know this was identified as the primary power, because the
primitive or early man reckoned time by nights, and the years by Eclipses. This
mode of reckoning was first and universal. So many darks preceded so many days. The dark power is primarily in all the oldest traditions and cults of the human
race. Hence sacrifice was first offered to the powers of darkness. The
fore-words of universal mythology are "there was darkness." All was
dark at first within the mind; and the all was the darkness that
created dread without. The influence of night, the eclipse, and the black
thunder-cloud being first felt, the primitive man visibly emerges from the
shadow of darkness as deeply impressed and indelibly dyed in mind as was his
body with its natural blackness. The black man without was negroid within, as
his reflection remains in the mirror of mythology. The darkness then, in natural
phenomena, was the original devil that put out the light by swallowing it
incessantly, as the subtle enemy, the obstructor, deluder, and general adversary
of man. The first form of the Devil was female, called the Dragon of Darkness,
who was Tiamat in Akkad, and Typhon in Egypt. Typhon gave birth to Sut, who
became the Egyptian devil—our Satan—and who was represented by the Black
jackal, the voice of Darkness; and Sut, the black one, gives us the name of
Soot, the black thing. Angro-Mainyus, the Persian devil, was the black one of
the two powers of Light and Darkness.
9. Primitive man, however, did not imagine or personify a
devil behind visible phenomena, that caused the darkness. Darkness itself was
the devil, and even as late as the Parsee Bundahish (which means the aboriginal
creation) external darkness is the devil.
10. The seven devils or seven heads of the old Dragon, in the Akkadian
myths of creation, are born in the mountains of sunset, which shows the same
natural genesis in physical phenomena. They had their birth-place where
the sun went down. At the same place, in the West, the Egyptians stationed the
Great Crocodile that swallowed down the lights, sun, moon, and stars, as they
set each night, in its wide-open jaws of darkness. Hence the crocodile was an
ideograph of the swallowing darkness—and of earth, or the waters below, called
the Abyss; and the tail of the crocodile remained in the Egyptian hieroglyphics
as the sign of Kam—that is, of blackness or darkness. The crocodile was the
typical Dragon of the waters below, the old Typhon, as the serpent was of the
waters, or overwhelming darkness, above. Hor-Apollo tells us the Egyptians
represent the mouth by a serpent, because the serpent is all mouth. This was
another figure of the swallower, as the Akhekh and the Apap serpent. Akhekh
signifies darkness, and Apap means that which rises up vast and gigantic—in
short, the monster—the typical Apap being based on the great African
rock-snake. Here, then, is the reason why the mythical dragon and the old
serpent are identical or interchangeable in mythology, each being a
representative of the devil of darkness and of Satan, that old serpent, who
imaged the evil which was first perceived in physical phenomena. Out of the
darkness leapt the lightning-bolt, and in the deep waters lurked another subtle
foe of life, and thus the jaws, the fang, and the sting of death were assigned
to the devil of darkness, who gradually assumed the character of man's mortal
enemy that brought death into the world. The course of this development can be
traced from the beginning, in physical darkness, to the culmination, in a
psycho-theistic phase, for everything yields to an application of the
evolutionary method—and you may depend upon it that evolution has come into
the world to stay; and evolution and the Hebrew genesis cannot co-exist in the
same mental world.
11. The earliest mode of representing the eternal alternation of external
phenomena called night and day, or darkness and light, the good and bad, is to
be found in the universal myth of the Two Brothers, who are born twins,—very
imperfect versions of which may be found in the legends of Cain and Abel, and of
Esau and Jacob. In this myth, the Dark and Day are born twins of the Great
Mother, and these brothers are pourtrayed as always being at enmity with each
other, and in conflict before their birth, as are the darkness and the light
when struggling at dawn! They fight one another in the effort of each to get
born first. This becomes the well-known struggle of the birthright, which is
universal in mythology. Far more perfect versions of the same mythos are extant
among the blacks of Australia, the Red Indians of America, the Bushmen and
Hottentots of Africa, more perfect, because simpler, nearer to nature, and less
moralized. It is the myth of Sut-Horus in Egypt. Sut-Horus is the dual
manifestor of dark and light, who is depicted with the double head of the black
vulture of night and the golden hawk of light, upon one body. The dark one was
born first, because darkness was first cognised; but they both continued to
struggle for supremacy after birth, as they had done before it, because they
dramatised the ceaseless and endless alternation of night and day, of dark and
light, seen in the heavens at eve and dawn, in the orb of the moon, and the
lengthening of darkness, or of light, in autumn and in spring! Here again the
dark power is the devil, the bad dev, and the light is the good power, the
bright dev.
12. The same conflict, based upon the
alternation of light and dark- ness, is pourtrayed as the struggle of St. George, our solar hero, who conquers the dragon just as Horus overthrows the
Apap dragon upon the monuments of Egypt. And when the devil's knell is rung
annually at Horbury, in Yorkshire, England, that is in celebration of the
death of the Dragon of Darkness; and the same custom is also continued in
ringing out the old year, on the last night in December. When in New South Wales
I picked up a tradition of the blacks. The Devil, called Mullion, lived in a
very tall tree, at Girra, on the Barwon river, and used to eat black fellows!
They tried to burn down this vast tree, in which the Devil of darkness dwelt,
but the fires were always put out by invisible spirits. Then they got a red
mouse, put a lighted straw in his mouth, and started him up the tree. The loose
bark caught fire, the tree blazed for weeks, the devil was burned out, and never
came back again. This red mouse is also a type of Horus in Egypt. Naturally,
then, the devil of darkness was the first divinity, because the dark power is
primal! When it came to worshipping, or, rather, to propitiating, by
offering the fruits of fear, it was the dark power that predominated,
because this struck terror and elicited fear. "Primos in orbe deos fecit timor!" Sometimes
these twins of darkness and light are called the ugly and beautiful brothers. And here the persistence of the mythical types may be noticed, for these two are
not only continued as the Sut-Horus, or double Horus of Egypt, but they are
likewise extant in that museum of mythical types, the Catacombs of Rome, as the
Twin-Christs, one of which is pourtrayed as the beautiful youth; the other is
the little, old, and ugly Christ. Just as it was in the pre-Christian times,
from which these figures were a Gnostic survival.
13. Next, Mind becomes an element in the manifestation of phenomena; and in the American myths, the born twins are called the bad mind and the good
mind. In this phase the twin-brothers are not only mental, they are also
moralized on their way to becoming the dual divinity, or modern God and Devil. In the Avesta, and other Persian Scriptures, for example, the twin-brothers can
be traced from the Natural Genesis in phenomena, as light and darkness, to their
becoming personified as divinity and devil, in Ahura-Mazda, the God of mental
light, and Angro-Mainyus, the devil of mental darkness. Here the older bogey of
the night has been found out! Men had dipped into the dark, and suffered from
the shadow of eclipse so long, and passed through them so often and so safely,
that their essential unreality was discovered at last. Thus Angro-Mainyus, the
black mind, is only accredited with the creation of all that is untrue, unreal,
and utterly delusive in nature. The light had now become the enduring reality,
and darkness was only its deluding shadow. They now recognised that the dark one
in the physical, mental, or moral domain, was only negative and negational; the
bright one, the god of light, the good mind, was the Supreme Being, the reality,
therefore the author of all that was finally real and eternally true! These are
the two causes of the universe—it is said;—they were united from the
Beginning, and, therefore, are called the Twins, and the Persian
"Revelation" contains the Gnosis and explanation of the doctrine
concerning these twin spirits.
14. Such was the natural origin of that doctrine of duality, which
is discussed now-a-days as a metaphysical mystery, and as if it were a
reality from the root of it, made known to the world by direct revelation! The
origin of Good and Evil in the nature of man considered as a being of flesh and
spirit, as the personal embodiment of two opposite principles, assumed to have a
spontaneous or automatic tendency towards good on the part of the one which is
supposed to originate in the spirit, and the other to originate in the flesh, as
a natural antagonist, is traceable to this most primitive interpretation of the
duality called good and evil in external phenomena, which was continued in the
mental and moral, and lastly in the psycho-theistic phase of thought. In its
latest stage the doctrine is destructive of individual responsibility in man and
of personal unity in deity, or the operating Intelligence. There was no
revelation, no new point of departure in phenomena, nothing added to nature or
human knowledge in these later views of mythology into metaphysic, philosophy,
or theology, in which the supposed revelation of newer truth was largely founded
on a falsification of the old.
15. We are not only contemporaries of savage men in many of our
current customs and benighting beliefs, we are also the victims of his leavings—various
of our superstitions being the primitive fetishism that still survives in the
last stage of perversion.
16. But now for a development of the Devil!
17. In Egypt the old Devil of
darkness, as Sut-Typhon or Sevekh, the Crocodile-headed divinity, acquired a
soul in the stars and a place in heaven, as Plutarch says. To him was given the
Crocodile or Dragon Constellation in the planisphere, whose casting out of
heaven is described in the Book of Revelation, and in the Persian Bahman Yasht,
where Sut, or Sevekh the Dragon, that old serpent, is identified as Satan, the
eternal adversary of souls, just as it is in the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead. Thus, the devil that first rose up in revolt, as the natural darkness, called
the Dragon of the deep, the rebel against the light-god, was gradually
transformed into a supposed starry or spiritual being, the vice-dieu of the
dark, who, in the Christian scheme, is still considered to be the supreme
power of the two, or if their dominions be equally divided, he is supreme
below and the light-god above—just as it had been from the beginning.
And, finally, our theology has made the primal shadow of physical
phenomena substantial in the mental sphere, and from the external darkness
of that beginning extracted and internalised the modern devil in the end!
18. I have now given you a sample
of what I meant by our being in the shadow of ideas whose original signification
we have not understood.
19. There is no devil such as
Milton saw! And as you must know, much current theology has been derived from
"Paradise Lost." The hawk that has been flying or flown to keep timid
souls cowering down to the ground, is not the real bird of prey after all. You
may trace every motion of it to the end of the string held in the puller's hand! When you go close up to it, the devil of theology is not alive. It is a bogus
bug-bear, hideous, but harmless as that scarecrow in the field, the imposture of
which had been found out and despised by a small bird who had built its nest,
and laid and hatched its eggs in one of the grim monster's waistcoat pockets.
20. We have an old saying that the
devil is an ass! But, in Egypt, the devil as Sut or Satan was the ass—the ass
that carried the Christ as Horus, the saviour. This was the ass that was
figuratively kicked out in the Christian sport of "beating the ass," when
that pastime used to be practised up and down the aisles of Christian
churches, and the priest used to bray three times, and the people
responded like asses!
21. The German devil was at one
time the red-bearded thunder, the Voice of Darkness! which takes us back to Sut-Typhon, who, as Plutarch informs us, was of a reddish complexion. It is
common for our giants to be endowed with a red streaming comet's tail of a beard! Our forefathers, the Norsemen, had little respect and no reverence for the
devil; and as to hell, why, if you did not get to heaven, then hell was the next
best place in the other world, if there were but two!
22. To be sure, they were badly off
for firewood in the Norse hell; and spirits sat shivering in the presence of
the cold, uncomfortable goddess Hela, who was blue with cold, and it was trying
to think how they were keeping it up overhead—they who had climbed to the top
of the tree, Ygdrasil, or secured a seat in Valhalla where the wine-cups flowed
and the fagots flared, and the merry dancing flames might be reflected on the
windows of a heaven that was closed against them. For the North-Men knew nothing
of a hell of everlasting fire. If they had, it might have proved the more
attractive place of the two; as one of our missionaries once discovered. He had
gone out to Greenland to carry the Gospel of Good Tidings, and illustrate it
with the aid of an eternal fire! But he found himself in the wrong latitude as
regards the effect of fire. He pictured it in the warmest colours, and was
surprised at the result! Instead of seeing awe and terror whitening their
faces, or the tears trickling down them, as he had expected, they were
blubbering in quite another fashion, for the whale's fat began to run and
glisten on their relaxed faces, which he saw rounding and brightening into full
moons of happiness and jollity; and instead of wringing their hands at the
prospect he had pictured, they sat as if spiritually warming them at this
"everlasting bonfire," that was so earnestly warranted never to go out!
23. If this were the gospel of good
tidings, why had they not heard the glorious truth before? Such a welcome and
delightful change from the life they had lived in their inclement, wintry
climate! They had never dreamed of conditions so delightful! So far from
shunning such a place for ever, as he desired them to do, they were quite ready
and willing, all of them to go to it at once, and stay there forever.
24. The mythical devil was pretty
much dying out, until it was revived and sublimated by the theology of Luther,
Calvin, and Milton. The Romish Church did not deify the devil as the Protestants
have done. She was better acquainted with the tradition of his creation and the
earthly nature of his character. It was her cue to keep dark. And the devil of
the Middle Ages is a poor devil enough without grandeur or terror! A very
fallen intelligence, indeed, whom Romish saints can tweak by the nose with
red-hot tongs, or the simplest countrymen have cunning enough to outwit. Instead
of the arch-enemy of God and man, majestic in his dark divinity, infernally
inspired, as Milton pictures him, he has become a grotesque image; the
story-teller's most popular figure of fun, on a par with the giants of our
nursery lore, whom the clever, redoubtable, little Jack, always gets the better
of! Indeed, both devil and giant as well as the serpent and dragon, had
one origin, and the orthodox Satan is, after all, the popular monster of
mythology. Luther and Calvin doubled the devil, and placed one at
each end of their scheme of things, the upper or bright God being rather
the worse devil of the two!
25. They put the doctrine of dualism as perplexingly as did the
negro preacher who told his congregation there were but two roads open to them—one
of these led directly to destruction, and the other went straight to perdition. "Stop a bit, brudder," cried one of the congregation; "hold hard,
whilst I get out ob dis!" And there are many people who desire to become
followers of that negro, and "get out ob dis."
26. The Satan of sacerdotal belief, then, is not a being
for God or man to kill, but an effigy in shoddy that only wants to be
ripped up to show you that it is stuffed with sawdust!
27. Some people may cry out in an
agony of earnestness, as Charles Lamb stammered in his fun, "But this is
doing away with the devil; d-d-d-don't deprive me of my devil!" "We
hope for better things. How shall we be able to force people into thinking as we
do, and frighten them into our fold of faith, for the glory of God, if we
have no devil for our ferocious shepherd-dog?" And there is no doubt but
that, in giving up the orthodox Hell and ancient Devil, we are losing one of the
most potent motive powers. Our difficulty is how to find a substitute for the
appeal to selfish fear. The fact remains that the devil is a fundamental part of
the Christian scheme! No devil, no Redeemer! And those who will
yell at me, and call me a blasphemer, know that well enough. I sympathise with
them. They begin to see dimly, what we see clearly, that orthodox Christianity
is answerable with its life for the literal truth of these stories of the Devil,
the Fall of man, and the doctrine of a dying deity's atonement. Its life is staked
upon the stories being true; and its life must pay the
forfeit of their being found to be false! And false they are, however their
defenders may squirm and wriggle, until the backbone of all manhood is changed
into caoutchouc.
28. I can imagine that people who
are not sure of their own souls, whether they are lost or are not yet found,
unless their Hebrew Genesis be true, will feel the world is a rather hollow
affair without their accustomed devil. It will be like depriving them of half
their heaven on earth, and the whole of it hereafter, to take away the devil. What on earth, or in another place, will they do? those who are so virulent by
nature for the Calvinistic sulphur, if, after all, there is no brimstone there;
and they have passed out of this life with their itch for hell red-hot upon
them, and there is no Old Scratch to console them after all? One would like to
believe in just a very little hell for their dear sake! They have so devoutly
believed in a big one for ours.
29. There is devil enough,
however—only of another kind than the one we have played with. We have talked
of the devil long enough; but to a Spiritualist, for instance, the devil exists
for the first time in some of the facts made known by modern Spiritualism—facts
which are as much matters of personal experience and constant verification to
myself and myriads of others as are those of your ordinary life! Think for
a moment tentatively of there being a personal motive on the other side—a
vested interest in our wrong doing—degraded spirits present with us in the
enjoyment of our most secret sins—the ghosts of old dead drunkards
haunting the drinker's live warm atmosphere, because in that there may
pass off into spirit-world some ghostly gust of the old delirious delight,
and you may get at a real, present, self-interested, manifold, tempting
devil that altogether surpasses the mythological monster of theology!
30. The devil and hell of my creed
consist in that natural Nemesis which follows on broken laws, and dogs the law
breaker, in spite of any belief of his, that his sins, and their inevitable
results can be so cheaply sponged out, as he has been misled to think, through
the shedding of innocent blood. Nature knows nothing of the forgiveness for sin. She has no rewards or punishments—nothing but causes and consequences. For
example, if you should contract a certain disease and pass it on to your
children, and their children, all the alleged forgiveness of God will be of no
avail if you cannot forgive yourself. Ours is the devil of heredity, working in
two worlds at once. Ours is a far more terrible way of realising the hereafter,
when it is brought home to us in concrete fact, whether in this life or the life
to come, than any abstract idea of hell or devil can afford. We have to face the
facts beforehand. No use to whine over them impotently afterwards, when it is
too late. For example—
|
In the olden days when Immortals
To earth came visible down,
There went a youth with an Angel
Through the gate of an Eastern town:
They passed a dog by the road-side,
Where dead and rotting it lay,
And the youth, at the ghastly odour,
Sickened and turned away.
He gathered his robes about him;
And hastily hurried thence:
But nought annoyed the Angel's
Clear, pure, immortal sense.
By came a lady, lip-luscious,
On delicate, mincing feet:
All the place grew glad with her presence,
All the air about her sweet;
For she came in fragrance floating,
And her voice most silvery rang;
And the youth, to embrace her beauty,
With all his being sprang.
A sweet, delightsome lady:
And yet, the Legend saith,
The Angel, while he passed her,
Shuddered and held his breath! |
31. Only think of a fine lady who, in this life, has been wooed and
flattered, sumptuously clad, and delicately fed; for whom the pure, sweet, air
of heaven had to be perfumed as incense! and the red rose of health had to fade
from many young human faces to blossom in the robes she wore, and every sense
had been most daintily feasted, and her whole life summed up in one long thought
of self—think of her finding herself in the next life a spiritual leper, a
walking pestilence, a personified disease—a sloughing sore of this life which
the spirit has to get rid of—an excrement of this life's selfishness at which
all good spirits stop their noses and shudder when she comes near! Don't you
think if she realised that as a fact in time, it would work more effectually
than much preaching? The hell of the drunkard, the libidinous, the
blood-thirsty, or gold-greedy soul, they tell us, is the burning of the old
devouring passion which was not quenched by the chills of death. The
crossing of the cold, dark river even was only as the untasted water to the
consuming thirst of Tantalus! In support of this, evolution shows the
continuity of ourselves, our desires, passions, and characters. As the Egyptians
said, Whoso is intelligent here will be intelligent there! And if we haven't
mastered and disciplined our lower passions here, they will be masters of us for
the time-being hereafter.
32. There is no such possibility as
death-bed salvation! No such thing as being "jerked to Jesus" if
you are converted on the scaffold! These old passions of ours burn and
burn, and will and must burn on till they burn out. That, they tell us, is as
absolutely necessary a process in the spiritual world as in the case of a fever
in the physical body, which may be fed frightfully by the impurities of the
previous life. Moreover, the fever will rage so long as it is supplied with
fresh fuel. So long as the infatuated spirit does not try to put out the fire,
and give the spiritual nature its one chance of throwing off the infernal
disease, but lusts in imagination after that which fed the flame at first, and
stirs the fire that kindles with every sigh for the old flesh-pots of evil
passion still; and will come back to earth to prowl in filthy places, and snuff
the ill odours of the lowest animal life; seeking in vain for some gust of
satisfaction in shadowy apparition, as a spirit earth-bound, and
self-bound to earth. Such is the teaching inculcated by our facts,
accept or reject them whosoever may!
33. For, where the treasure is
there will the heart be also. Think of that, you treasure-seekers in the earth,
who have found and laid your treasures on the earth; whose treasures represent
the life you have spent on the earth! You have put the better part of your life
into them. They are your better part. But you cannot take them away with
you! The only treasure we can carry away with us must be laid up within. Now,
Spiritualism reveals the possibility of the spirit's being doomed to haunt this
treasure-house of earth until every particle of that hoarded wealth has been
redistributed and restored to the channels for which it was intended by the
Maker, and the first stage on its way back may be that the riches so carefully
gathered and miserly garnered shall be the means of sinking your spendthrift son
down to the lowest range of spiritual penury. For the Creator whom we postulate
will not be baulked in carrying out his purposes by any temporary obstructions
like these, and if you have hindered here you will have to help hereafter, when
you do at last get into line with Natural Law.
34. You have been amused with a dolly devil long enough,
whilst inside of you, and outside of you, and all round about you, the
real devil is living, working with a most infernal activity, and playing
the very devil with this world of ours. Not an ideal devil, but a
legal devil, with a purpose and a plan; the devil in reality!
35. We have been following a
phantom of faith, and the actual veritable devil has been dogging us indeed!
This is not a Satan of God's making. Not an archangel ruined, who, in falling,
found a foothold on this earth for the purpose of dragging men down with him to
that lower deep for which he is bound, but a devil to be recognised by his
likeness to ourselves! the devil that is our worser self! the devil of
our own ignorance, and the deification of self—a devil bequeathed to us by the
accumulated gains of centuries of ignorant selfishness, and selfish ignorance—a
devil to be grappled with and wrestled with and throttled, overthrown, and
overcome, and put out of existence—not only in the struggle against all that
is evil in the isolated, individual life; our devil has grown too big and is
too potent for that; but by the energies of all collected and clubbed, and made
co-operant to destroy the causes of evil whensoever and wheresoever these can be
identified, whether as Religious, or Political, Moral, or Social. We stand in
Heaven's own light and cast the evil shadow of Self, and say it is the devil. And then our theologists have the blasphemous impudence to make God the author
of this dark shadow of ourselves, which we shed on his creation; and assume it
to be an eclipse from another world of Being.
36. No doubt it may be shown that
the Operative Power we postulate is responsible for certain natural conditions
which inevitably result in what we recognise to be evil. Nor will he shirk his
responsibility in that matter. It was a necessary part and process in the human
education, in strict accordance with the laws of evolution. But we see more and
more every day that such evil was good in the making. We may trace many of the
healing springs of heavenly purity filtering through this dark stratum of earth. Also, we are apt to look on things at first sight as evil which we finally find
to be blessings in disguise. A piercing vision will perceive the deeply
underlying intention of good working upward through many a superficial
appearance of evil. Seen in the light of Evolution, the existence of evil is no
longer a mythological mystery to be made the most of by pious ignoramuses for
preaching purposes, but a necessary concomitant of development; one of the
conditions by means of which we grow into conscious human beings to attain the
higher life.
37. Indeed, whether there be a God
or not, it was impossible to discuss the matter intelligently until the doctrine
of Creation, by the slow processes of evolution, had been taken into account.
38. This shows us that the evil for
which Nature is responsible, is a means of evolving in us the very consciousness
of good. The moment we recognise evil, and have acquired the consciousness of
its existence, the responsibility for its existence becomes ours. Here is a
problem set for us to solve by way of education. Here is a foe to fight to the
death, whether as a misguided passion in the individual, or a disease in the
life of a nation. Here is something to be turned into good—a devil to be
converted. The moment man sees so far, he must accept the responsibility
for the continued existence of the evil, and war against it as he would if
clearing any other jungle from poisonous reptiles. Ours is not a doll to dandle,
and claim divine parentage for, but a misbegotten devil of ignorance, and a
miscarriage of humanity in the past.
39. We see that life comes into
visible being according to conditions. Where these are unprepared and not
humanised, the life takes the lowest forms, those of reptiles and weeds,
poisonous plants, thorns, thistles, and briars, forms inimical to man, and
therefore considered to be evil. Then man comes to cultivate and modify, and
turn the evil into good. The whole world of natural evil has to acknowledge its
master. Let me give you an illustration. Pain, for example, is a consequence of
imperfect conditions. It is the signal of the sentinel that warns us of the
enemy. And how those faithful sentinels stand in the outworks of the body, to
guard the more vital parts from approaching danger. It is necessary to warn us,
or we should do most foolish things, as a child might, but for this warning of
pain, thrust his hand in the fire and have it consumed! The soul's health is
continually protected by this warning sentinel of pain, mental and corporeal. Pain is necessary, then, to the development of consciousness, and the perfecting
of conditions. It is the reminder that there is something wrong; therefore
something to be remedied. It is a part of the process in our education. Also,
the loftiest pleasures of our spiritual life continually flower from a rootage
in the deepest pain. I am not here to preach a gospel of the blessedness of
suffering for the poor and needy—the victims of this world's laws. But
suffering, as I read the Book of Life, is an incentive to effort; and the
greatest pressure from without will sometimes evolve the strongest character
from within, by evoking the greater force of effort. As Shakespeare points out,
the flowers of March are not so fine as the flowers of June, but the finest
flower of March is finer than the finest flower of June! It has overcome more
opposition, and turned it to account. Perhaps in consequence of the pressure, it
has established a nearer relationship at root to the source of life. Pain is but
a passing necessity, for, as it is the result of imperfect conditions, it
follows that pain itself must pass away as those conditions are perfected—and we
are here to improve and perfect them. God does not destroy the devil of pain
right off, by working a miracle at a moment's notice! For God is not that
Automaton of the sects—that weather-cock atop of creation which they
suppose will veer round at every breath of selfish prayer. You are
called upon to ascertain what is the law of the case, who is the
law-breaker, and how is the law to be kept. You must look out for
natural consequences, and effects that follow causes, not for rewards and
punishments!
40. You know that a little bile in
the blood may cause great mental distress! But it is perfectly absurd to ask
God to save you from these blacks in your eyes and blue devils in your brain. You must look to your liver, and obey the laws of health. Eschew tobacco and
take less whisky, or coffee, as the case may be. God works no immediate miracle
in response to your offer of a tempting opportunity! He intends man to get rid
of evil as he grows enlightened enough to deal more wisely with our human
conditions in the process of—what? Of becoming manlier and womanlier. |
Our Science grasps with its transforming hand;
Makes real half the tales of fairy land;
It turns the deathliest fetor to perfume;
It gives decay new life and rosy bloom;
It changes filthy rags to virgin white,
Makes pure in spirit what was foul to sight. |
41. We burn the darkness and the density out of earthly matter, and
transfigure it into glass, which we can see through. We are here to apply a
similar process of annealing to our dense, unexcavated, earthy humanity, so that
the light from heaven may shine through it purely! We are here to try and clear
away these visible causes of obstruction which have been bequeathed to us by
ages on ages of horrible ignorance, and not look forward helplessly to their
being burned out of human souls by an eternity of hell-fire, or, backwards, for
a salvation supposed to have taken place some eighteen centuries ago, but which
is no nearer now than it ever was, on the terms set forth by orthodox teachings.
42. It was impossible to see
anything clearly, or get any glimpse of justice above or below, in heaven, or
earth, or hell, under the old creed, which proclaims that pain and suffering
constitute the curse wherewith God has unjustly afflicted all for the sin
of one, instead of the beneficent, though stern, angel of his presence and
bearer of his blessing: that it was an eternal decree, to be executed through
all eternity, instead of an awakener in time, that calls to action now and at
once, for the changing of the present conditions in which Humanity crawls, as it
were, upon all fours, or hobbles on crutches, as if we were born mental
cripples.
43. We all know there is an awful
deal of suffering in the world that cannot be considered as a mere individual
question! —sufferings that we do not individually cause, and are not
personally responsible for—sufferings bequeathed to us as individuals and as
members of the State; for we have to bear the accumulated burdens of centuries
on centuries of ignorance, or, worse still, of wilful crime, and, worst of all,
of wrong made sacred by religious sanction, and supported by Law and the Press. And the burden of the many crushes the individual to the earth; and the God of
Justice appears to be blind to the case—makes no rush to the rescue, even when
we suffer for the sins of others. Be sure even these can be turned to eternal
account. But, he has this lesson to convey to the world—
44. Humanity is one. And the
power that is has instituted certain laws—laws that operate for the
species rather than the individual, an important distinction to be made in any
interpretation of nature; laws that deal with the species as one in
spite of our manifold diversities and our deified doctrine of
every-one-on-his-own-hook-ism. He does not put forth his hand to take you off
your hook when it happens to run into you particularly sharp, flesh or soul, and
makes you supplicate or swear. Establish what private relationship you
can with your Maker, and derive what spiritual succour you may whilst bearing
the burden, or writhing on the iron that enters you, the laws that do deal with
humanity in the aggregate, and operate for the good of the species, will go
grinding on with their larger revolutions that subserve eternal interests whilst
crushing terribly many smaller claims of individual life For, mark this, the
Eternal intends to show us that humanity is one, and the family are more than
the individual member, the nation is more than the family, and the human race is
more than the nation. And if we do not accept the revelation lovingly, do not
take to the fact kindly, why then 'tis flashed upon us terribly, by lightning of
hell, if we will not have it by light of heaven, and the poor neglected scum and
canaille of the nations rise up mighty in the strength of disease, and
prove the oneness of humanity by killing you with the same infection.
45. It has recently been shown how
the poor of London do not live, but fester in the pestilential hovels called
their homes. To get into these you have to visit courts which the sun never
penetrates, which are never visited by a breath of fresh air, and which never
know the virtues of a drop of cleansing water. Immorality is but the natural
outcome of such a devil's spawning-ground. The poverty of many who strive to
live honestly is appalling.
46. And this disclosure is made
with the customary moan that such people attend neither church nor chapel, as if
that were the panacea.
47. I should not wonder if these
revelations result in the building of more churches and chapels, and the
consecration of at least one or two more bishops.
48. The Bishop of Bedford said the
other day—"It was highly necessary that in these times when the poor have
so little earthly enjoyment, the joys of heaven should be made known to
them." It is not possible to caricature an utterance so grotesque as that.
49. How appallingly unjust it seems
that the victims of this world's laws should be handed over as ready-made
victims of Nature's laws—that the most helpless poor should be the favourite
thriving ground for tape-worms—just because they are in such a poverty. This
is hard, but so it is, and so it will and must be till the lesson is learned and
applied—that the human family is one, and all are bound up together by certain
laws willy-nilly; that we are our brother's keeper for all our Cain-like
questionings of the fact. We cannot shirk our responsibility; and you are not
allowed to get out of the grip of the violated law of the whole, on any pretence
of individuality or limited liability. It is we who create the fevers to feed on
the poor, when we allow others to get rich by permitting the filth and the
poisoned air and water that are sent into the world sparkling with purity; when
we allow the rights of property to over-ride the interests of humanity. It is we
who breed the diseases and literally invent the hungry, hundred-mouthed
tape-worms that get their living out of poverty-stricken blood and hungry
stomachs, churning the slime of gnawing emptiness, because we created, or
continue, the laws that doom the many to poverty and its parasites of prey.
50. Providence—that is a very
comprehensive name— providence does not
create poverty. The cupola of heaven overhead is like the inverted horn of
everlasting plenty, pouring down its blessings of abundance in sunshine and
shower, in air and dew, in ripening fire and purifying frost, and the harvests
never fail the world over. All round, all ways, there is plenty for all—if not
in one country, there is in another. There is no failure on the part of
Providence, the Creator of plenty.
51. This neglected garden of our
world, which has in it every element of a paradise, if rightly planted and
properly tended, has been left to run to weeds of sin and ignorance and crime,
in the most wasteful way. Heavens of spirit-worlds around us are for ever sowing
the divine seed-germs broad-cast over our earth, and they have to scatter a
harvest in order that we may grow a single grain, because the human conditions
are so un-receptive, the fields are so neglected, the soil so unprepared to
receive their bounty! The heavens around us are ever ready to pour out
blessings in a larger measure than we are to make a lap for receiving them. All
they ask are the conditions under which we may receive most abundantly.
52. We are the manufacturers of
misery! We have sedulously cultivated or permitted all manner of foul
conditions, and then in the midst of some calamity, for which we are criminally
responsible, that comes home to all, the praying machine of the State is set
rotating with a furious forty-thousand-parson-power, and God is implored to stay
his hand or work a miracle forthwith on behalf of us poor human worms, who ask
the Creator to take particular notice of these our penitential writhings at his
feet! The Bishop of Truro said recently that we are approaching a period
of pain and peril, and the situation calls for strong words and strong
prayers. You must cry aloud or the Lord won't hear you!
53. Standing face to face with
certain facts, the result of things as they are, and have been, the atheists
exclaim,—"There is no God! If there were an omnipotent God such things
would not be tolerated by him!" But by an "omnipotent God," is
meant a god with power to change, at a moment's notice, all that is fixed for
ever. Let me assure our free-thought friends, that Evolution necessitates a new
idea altogether of the operative power! It abolishes the incompetent personal
Creator of the Hebrew Genesis! But, in presence of evolution, it is useless to
demand that, if there be a God, it shall prove itself to be the deity of the
orthodox, which, as I said before, is a sort of eternal weather-cock on the
summit of creation, that may be made to veer round as it is blown about by every
breath of selfish human prayer, if people collect together in sufficient numbers
to blow it round! A vain idea of divinity whosoever entertains it. The deity
who is belaboured so unmercifully, and, as I think, so cheaply, by Robert Ingersol, is the god of the non-evolutionary theory of creation, the impossible
monster of the past. "Did God govern America when it had four millions of
slaves?" asks Ingersol. Well, why not? in accordance with the Laws of
Evolution, seeing that slavery has come to an end! If he had put an end to it, ab
extra, Americans could not have had the credit of doing the work, and might
never have evolved the consciousness that slavery was criminal.
54. God did not put an end to
slavery as an outside Governor of Men; but who shall say that the power, the
will, the perception, the affection, or whatsoever we can express by analogy
with the human—that is called God—was not operant, and, therefore,
governing, within the souls of the men who rose up foremost in revolt against
the accursed wrong, and called upon their fellows to cast it out? Possibly the
existence of God, then, does not depend upon the particular visible way of
working that may be so easily indicated! Slavery only existed pro tem,
to come to an end, and, therefore, was consistent, like other educational forms
of evil, with the divine government, according to the laws of evolution.
55. The argument of the non-theist
is continually directed and limited to the false premises and inadequate
conclusions of the orthodox, which it is as easy and cheap to pulverise as it is
to pummel a sack of straw! We can know nothing of an omnipotent God who plays
fast and loose with the conditions of law! Were it so, all human foothold and
trust in the stability of the universe would be gone. Education would be
impossible. We are first taught by means of the fixed facts, in order that we
may found on solid earth, not on the ever-shifting sands—with prayers for God
to catch them now and again, and keep them quiet, for God's sake! I
rather think it would be more just to reply, there is not sufficient
manhood and intelligence in you to put an end to the evils you deplore! "I, God! gave the earth for all;"
and you permit the initial iniquity of absolute private property in land,
whereby one man may clutch a county all to himself, and a few may claim a
country. You allow the rights of property to over-rule and over-ride
the interests of humanity!
56. If your national property is
doubling every thirty years, so is the national pauperism! You allow the
"one" to possess the soil, and the thousands to be driven off and
exported as refuse, in order that game may multiply, and the human parasites of
earth may pursue their savage sport! I gave the land for all; to be the
property and grazing ground of each living generation brought to birth; and you
allow it to be locked up by the dead hand of the past, for the benefit of the
few! These few framed the laws that inevitably doom the many, sooner or
later, to poverty, to man-made sufferings, to diseases and miseries
innumerable, all of which get mixed up with a supposed inscrutable origin
of evil and other grotesque and fallacious views, endorsed and inculcated
by the current theology for the benefit of parsons and patrons, which are
only fit to be made a mock of, and to be laughed into oblivion!
57. And here, let me say, that whilst recognising the inexorableness
of the natural law in certain spheres of operation, where it works like the
bound Samson of blind force for the good of the species, I find that
Spiritualism introduces a consciousness akin, and, at least, equal, to the
human, into the working of law in a realm beyond the immediately visible. It
shows the existence of subtler forces and modes of law for dealing with man the
individual, and the culminating consciousness of creation. When the mind of man
had been evolved on this earth, remember, a new factor was introduced amongst
the natural forces—one that was destined to greatly modify and counteract them; fetter the fire, and ride the ocean waves; guide the lightning, and train it
to carry messages; bridge the planetary spaces, and outstrip Time itself. In
like manner, the knowledge of an existence beyond the visible present—no
matter by what means—and of intelligence operating in hidden and extraordinary
ways, introduces a new factor among the forces now to be reckoned with as mental
modifiers in certain domains of law. The unseen world can no longer be the same
when we learn that Intelligence is there; no more than this world could remain
the same after the advent of man! And when we can identify the consciousness there
as being akin to the human here, we know all that is necessary for
putting a conscience into the previously inexorable law, and an eye into
the image of blind force. Here we get a margin that would take a long while to
fill in with possible annotations. Man is no longer alone in the universe!
There are other intelligences, affections, powers of will and work, beside his;
and in relation to him this just makes all the difference in the manifestation
and interpretation of the law that is blind and inexorable in its lower
range. We begin to distinguish! Here are the means for a
possible response to invocation, and to the need of mental help!
58. The now demonstrated fact of Thought-Transference,
which was familiar enough before, in common with other kindred phenomena,
to many of us, opens up a vista of immortal possibility in the mode of
mental manifestation, and in the modification of supposed hard-and-fast,
or immutable, law, in relation to life in its higher phases!
59. It seems to me that this fact
alone turns the ground of mere materialism into a kind of Goodwin Sands! We
extend this thought-transference upwards or round us by means of living
telegraphic mental lines! The operators on which at one end can work, and only
work according to the conditions at the other end. At present I do not perceive,
and cannot pretend to know, when and where we can touch Conscious Source itself
along these lines. Who does know anything of God, in the domain of things? or
who has any right to pretend to know, or to be paid a salary for pretending to
know, anything of God personally, or a personal God? To me the question as to
the personality of God is altogether premature. I can wait for a few future
lifetimes to find out God.
60. In a sense it may be "there is no God yet, but there's one
coming!" and you will find the saying a profound one if you think it over
for a month. We ourselves, of the race of man, are only in the condition of
becoming (let us cultivate a becoming modesty!); and such is the human
apprehension of the cause of becoming. The eye, as Goëthe has said, can only
see what it brings with it the power of seeing; and so, in a sense, a God is
not yet, but one is coming. The deity hitherto set up for worship is more or
less an effigy of the God of primitive or savage man. If that be a true
likeness, why, then, men ought not to become Atheists merely—they ought not to
marry and propagate, but commit suicide forthwith! It is such an outrage on all
human feeling, this primitive portraiture of Eternal power, that the moral
revolt is certain, and the mental result is atheism. I assert that non-theism is
sometimes, and in some natures, the necessary revolt of the most inner
consciousness against the abortion called God! They shut their eyes altogether
to get rid of a representation so unsightly and unworthy; and better is such
blindness than much false seeing. I say it is the real Presence operating within
that is at war with this hideous sham set up for worship without. I seldom use
the name of God myself in speech or writing now, it has been so long taken in
vain—so profaned by the orthodox blasphemers. It has been so degraded as a
brand and hall-mark, made use of to warrant the counterfeit wares that are
passed off upon the ignorant and unsuspecting, who think them genuine so long as
they are stamped with that name, as to have become quite discredited.
61. For myself, I have come to
apprehend a Conscious Source of all, working outwardly from the core of things,
by means of what we term matter, and understand as the Laws of Evolution. A
Conscious Source of all! I cannot state that consciousness in words, but it
appears to me that this is the work of phenomena which do actually state it in
the process of appealing to, or becoming, the Consciousness in us. But I am
utterly unable to personify this Power! Also, I find the essence of the
whole matter is sacred to privacy. The more intuition, the less
blabbing—the more reverence, the more reticence. The facts of an
abnormal or extraordinary nature that came under my own cognisance during
many years of my life, which were continually occurring and verified,
proved to me that Mind exists and operates out of sight!
62. By degrees these facts peopled
the unknown void with life and intelligent beings; that finally gave one bit of
foothold on the very first step of a ladder which will stand up for the first
time when one tries to prop it against the sky! That one step bridges the dark
void of death for me. I don't trouble myself, for myself, about the other world
at all—that's all right, if we are! It is for this world people need to be
helped. Life is not worth living if we are not doing something towards helping
on the work of this world. It is only in helping others that we can truly help
ourselves. And we have reason to think that
myriads of those who have already left this life with false hopes of salvation
are only too glad to help themselves by coming back and helping us to carry on
the work of this world.
63. It is only when we pass out of
the domain of self, that the unseen helpers can steal in upon us, and help us as
Agents for those who are Agents for others, and so on and on, until the whole
vast universe is filled and quick with modes and motions, and forms of being all athrob with subtly-related life; all radiating from central source to uttermost
limit; all unified in one eternal consciousness, in which the soul of man, full
statured and full-summed, may possibly become conscious that it touches God at
last, as a presence, a power, a principle, and may then be made aware that it
did so unconsciously from the first.
64. Our orthodox teachers in the
present are responsible for playing into the hands or claws of the devil that
was created for them in the past. They are the consecrators of all the
ignorance, robbery, and wrong! In England the sinister army of forty thousand
men in masks, as it has been truly termed, is paid from the national revenue to
act the part of a secret Sunday police! Their chief representatives are the obstructives of sane and humane legislation to-day as ever. A man can't marry
his wife's sister because of them.
65. At the debate on the Pigeon
Bill in the House of Lords, some time since, not a single bishop was found to
lift up his voice on behalf of the poor dumb and miserably-murdered doves. Not a
man was to be found behind any one of the aprons! Every bishop present in the
House voted against opening the Museums and Picture Galleries on Sunday! They
say, in effect, If you won't come to church, d—n you! you shan't go anywhere
else, if we can help it! They want to stand just where they have always
stood, at the end of the long dark passage through which mankind slowly
emerges out of darkness into day—in the very entrance of the light, to
shut out the face of heaven itself from those who are groping their way
through the gloom, and bid them in God's name to go back and religiously
keep to the obscurity of the cave, if they would be saved!
66. Each Sunday they trail the red
herring across the scent of their followers, so that their attention may be
drawn off from this world and all the wrongs we are sent here to remedy. They
promise that those who remain sufficiently poor and wormlike in spirit during
this life, shall rise erect from the grublike condition in death, full-fledged,
to soar as winged angels in the next life. They have exalted the lot of Lazarus
as a Scriptural Ideal for the most needy and miserable to live up to, as if the
cowering outcast and diseased starveling of earth were the proper model man for
the heavens. They keep us the lying farce of insisting that man is a fallen
creature, and persist in preaching their doctrine of his degradation and
damnation in order that people may go to them to be saved—and pay well for it.
67. The Secularist asserts that the
orthodox cult and theology are a hopeless failure for this world, and as a
Spiritualist I affirm that they are also a fraud for the other.
68. False beliefs are, and forever
must be, opposed to all real and true doing. And these false beliefs have from
the beginning been bitterly opposed to every truth revealed by science; and
every advance made for humanity has had to be made in spite of them.
Moreover, this doctrine they teach, of saving yourselves and "devil take
the hindmost," is most miserably degrading to any true sense of real
manhood or womanhood. He wouldn't be much of a hero who in the midst
of the battle took it into his head that the first duty of man is to get
himself saved!
69. They get up a horrible
hullabaloo in the rear, as if all hell were let loose after you, on purpose to
frighten the blind and foolish, and make them rush through the one door open in
front of those who are fleeing from the wrath to come, at which they take tax
and toll. But there is no hell, there is no devil, close after the hindmost of
those who are furiously fleeing from the avengers of the "fall of
man." Moreover, it's of no use rushing. However fast you go you carry your
own heaven or hell inside of you, whether for this life or any other. All this
is a bogus business, with the mythical devil for bogey. The world is not yet on
fire with the final conflagration, nor can they set it on fire with the painted
flames of a pictorial hell. A little girl was once asked what she must first do
to be saved; and the innocent replied, "Get lost." Moreover, before we
join in the stampede of self-salvation at the call of those who cry
"fire" when the theatre is crammed, let us be sure that we have grown
a soul that is worth saving. If we had, I doubt whether we should manifest such
a consuming anxiety of utter selfishness, or be in such an infernal hurry to get
it saved anyhow. Those who are truly desirous of saving or helping others,
seldom trouble much about their own souls. Theirs is the burden of a nobler
care. Theirs is a loftier inquietude than any sense of self can ever give. They
lose all such unworthy fears for themselves in the thought of others. They are
like that grand captain of the "Northfleet," of whom I proudly wrote
some years ago— |
"Others he saved. He saved the name
Unsullied, that he gave his wife,
And, dying with so pure an aim,
He had no need to save his life." |
70. I also hold their other cowardly doctrine, that of vicarious
sacrifice, to be the real, if indirect, cause of Vivisection. It would have been
impossible for a nation of animal lovers like the English to tolerate the
vivisection of the dog, for example, man's first friend in the wilderness of the
early world, his ally in the work of civilisation, unless the motor nerve and
conscience of the race had been paralysed by the curare of vicarious
suffering. The beastly cruelties of its practitioners, which are flaunted in our
faces with intent to terrorise the conscience of others, could not have been
permitted by men who had not been indoctrinated by the worship of a
vivisecting deity, whose victim was his own son! And these myriads
of slowly murdered dogs and rabbits, cats and frogs, cannot have the consolation
of knowing that vivisection is salvation, and they are saviours of the human
race from the consequences of its own crimes against nature, and sins against
self! It is impossible to establish the throne of Eternal Justice by the
violation of all that is human, as is fruitlessly attempted on this ground of
the orthodox Creed. It is impossible for you to save or serve humanity by
sacrificing all that constitutes the essence of humanity, as is done in this pourtrayal of a vivisecting deity, who is the responsible operator, with his own
son for suffering victim. And this victim of vicarious punishment is held forth
as a lure to draw humanity toward a father in heaven of such a nature as that!
We may depend upon it that this preaching of what is called Christianity, to get
a Sunday sensation, or solace out of it—this plunging of the theological poker
red-hot into your seventh-day dose of spiritual flip to give it a zest—this
using of hell-fire as a persuader, after the manner of the furnace heated
beneath the turkeys, which persuaded the poor things to dance to music played in
quick time—this weekly whipping of the devil round the stump is, as the
Americans say, pretty well played out; there is nothing new to be said. Suppose
we go to work and try to do something, instead of making ourselves
miserable on Sunday, doing nothing but putting ourselves through all the
postures and impostures of the orthodox Sabbatical fashion? In future, mankind
will not herd together, like terror-stricken cattle in a thunder-storm, to
deprecate the wrath of their God, and offer him praise and presents by way of
propitiation, and as a bribe for him not to lose his temper! Good God! What an
idea of a God! It is precisely the elemental god of Browning's Caliban,
and of the primitive savage! In future, I say, men will not look
upon it as a sacred duty to herd together, on purpose to praise and
glorify their God one day in seven with their psalm of conceit: |
"Let all Creation hold its tongue,
While I uplift my Sunday song;" |
lest,
being a jealous God, he should blight their harvest, or peradventure burst the
boiler of the Excursion Train. Nor will men form leagues, religious or
otherwise, on purpose to think alike and make all other people think the same. They cannot think alike if they are ever to grow. The lower the type the greater
the likeness! The loftier the development the larger the diversity! That is
the Natural law. We may co-operate to work, but not to think
alike. That could never be free-thinking. Nor will mankind henceforth
allow their arms to be paralysed for action by
being fixed or "bailed up" in the posture of prayer. We say,—It is a
farce, a pitiful one, not a laughable one, for you to pray for God to work a
miracle for the kingdom of heaven to come, when you are doing all you can, all
your lives, to prevent its coming, or doing nothing to hasten its coming. It is
the sheerest mockery of God and man! You were sent here to create the kingdom,
to work it out by living that law of love proclaimed as laying down the life in
love for others, and the very reason why the kingdom does not come, and cannot
come, is because you stand in the way of its coming. And you, and all who think
and act as you do, praying for the better day to come, must be swept out of the
way in order that it may come.
71. Get up from your knees and work
for it! Take your weapon in hand and fight for it! Turn fiercely on the devil
that dogs our own footsteps, and rescue those that fall by the way and succumb
to the powers that make for evil. Turn on the devil—not theoretically, but
practically, having ascertained the work that needs to be done. Turn on the
devil, not singly, but associated together for doing, instead of believing and
talking and praying for God to do! What the Eternal Worker asks of us, as I
apprehend the whole matter, is that we shall become conscious co-workers with
him in carrying out the divine purposes in proportion as we can make them out!
He does not want us to be fear-bound and devil-driven slaves! Not beasts in
blinkers, not laggers behind, forever probed by the goad of sheer and sharp
necessity; not blind obeyers of his sternest laws that go grinding on
willy-nilly, hauling and hurling us along with them in their incessant, vast
revolution! but seers of his work, intelligent interpreters of his will, and
sharers in his life and love.
72. In conclusion. There is no
origin of evil in the moral domain that is not derivable from ignorance. "The wickedness of a soul," said Hermes, "is its ignorance;"
and there is no devil in the moral domain except in the devilish determination
to do the wrong or permit the wrong to be done, after we have
evolved the consciousness that recognises the right!
73. The reason then why God does
not kill the devil is because man has unconsciously created or permitted all
that is the devil finally; and here or hereafter he has to consciously destroy
his own work, and fight himself free from the errors of his own ignorance. Not
man the individual merely, but man as part of the whole family of universal
humanity. Not man as mortal simply, but as an immortal, standing up shoulder to
shoulder, and marching onward step by step and side by side with those who are
our elders in immortality, and who still unite with us, and lend a hand to
effect in time the not altogether inscrutable, but slowly-unfolding,
purposes of the Eternal. |
――――♦――――
LUNIOLATRY,
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
ALSO
GREEK
MYTHOLOGY
AND
THE
GOD
APOLLO. |