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[I was not content, and took time to consider what had been written. It was very contrary to any opinions I then held, but I was conscious of an extremely powerful and elevating influence during the time the writing was going on. I wished to get rid of the influence before I replied.

 

On the following day I had an opportunity of resuming my argument. I objected to what had been said, that such a creed would not be acknowledged as Christian by any member of a Christian Church, that it was contradictory to the plain words of the Bible; and that such views appeared even to be the subject of special denunciation as those of Anti-Christ. Moreover, I suggested that such vaguely beautiful views, as I admitted them to be, had a tendency to take the backbone out of faith. It was replied:—]

 

Friend, you have opened points on which we shall be glad to speak with you. As to our authority, we have touched on that point before. We claim it to be devine, and we await with confidence the acceptance of our mission when the times are ripe for our teaching. That time must come after much steady preparation, and we are quite prepared to find that none can yet accept in full the teaching which we promulgate, save the little band to whom it is given to precede in progressive knowledge the rest of their fellows. We say that this does not strike us with surprise. For, think! has it ever been that a fuller revelation has found acceptance among men at once? The ignorant cry has always been raised against progress in knowledge that the old is sufficient: that it has been proven and tried; whilst of the new, men say that they know nothing save that it is new and contradictory of the old. It was the self-same cry that assailed Jesus. Men who had laboriously elaborated the Mosaic theology, which had served its time, and was to give place to a higher and more spiritual religion: men who had drawn out the minutiae of this system until they had reduced it to an aimless mass of ritual, a body without a spirit, aye, a corpse without life: these cried out that this blasphemer (so they impiously called the Saviour of man’s religion) would destroy the law and dishonour God. The Scribes and Pharisees, the guardians of orthodox religion, were unanimous in their disbelief of Him and of His pretentions. It was they who raised the howl which finally led the Great Teacher to the Cross. You know now that He did not dishonour God: and that He did but demolish man’s glosses on God’s revealed law in order that He might refine and spiritualise its commands, and raise if from the dead by infusing into it spiritual life and power, by breathing into it vitality and giving it renewed vigour.

 

In place of the cold and cheerless letter of the law which prescribed outward duty to a parent—a duty discharged without love, with scanty dole grudgingly offered,—He taught the spirit of filial affection springing from a loving heart, and offering the unbought and ungrudged tribute of affection to earthly parents and to the Great Father. The formalism of mere external conventionality He replaced by the free-will offering of the heart. Which was the truer, the nobler creed? Did the latter override the former, or did it not stand to it rather as the living man to the breathless corpse? Yet they who were content to buy off from filial duty at the poor cost of a few paltry coins scornfully given were they who finally crucified the Christ, as a man who taught a new religion blashphemously subversive of the old. The scene at Calvary was the fitting culmination to such a religion.

 

Again, when the followers of the Crucified stood forth to declare their gospel to a world that cared not for it, and which was not prepared to receive it, the charge against them perpetually was that they taught new doctrine which was subversive of the old faith. Men taxed their ingenuity to discover horrible accusations which they might charge upon them. They found nothing too monstrous to be delivered by those who were eager to credit any accusation of the new faith which “Everywhere was spoken against.” They were lawless; yet so rigidly respectful to the established faith, and to the “powers that be,” that no cause of blame could be discovered. They were devourers of infants: they who were the followers of the loving and gentle Jesus. Nothing was too monstrous to be believed about them; even as men now wish to believe everything that can discredit us and our mission.

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Has it not been so ever since? It is the story of all time that the new is spoken against and discredited in religion, in science, in all with which man’s finite mind deals. It is an essential quality of his intelligence that such should be the case. The familiar commends itself: the new and strange is viewed with suspicion and mistrust.

 

Hence it is not any legitimate cause for surprise that when we teach a spiritualised Christianity we should at first be met with incredulity. The time will come when all men will admit, as you do, the beauty of the creed and recognise its divine origin.

 

It is not wonderful that our message should seem to contradict some human utterances. Nay, that it should really controvert some details of the teaching given through human minds more or less undeveloped in days long past is to be expected. We have no desire to hide the plain fact that there is much in some parts of the Bible which does not amalgamate with our teaching, being, indeed, the admixture of human error which came through the mind of the chosen medium. We need not repeat on this head our previous argument which is familiar to you.

 

Revelation, as contained in your Bible, includes many progressive developments of the knowledge of God which are in themselves irreconcilable in minute detail. And, moreover, it contains much admixture of human error which has filtered in through the medium. You can only arrive at truth by judging of the general drift. Private opinions selected without reference to the body of teaching are but the sentiments of the individual, valuable as showing his mind, but not in any way binding as of faith. To imagine that an opinion uttered many centuries ago is of binding force eternally is mere folly. Indeed, all such opinions are contradictory in themselves, and are contradicted by other and opposite opinions contained within the same volume. No doubt it was a current belief, at the time when many of the writers of books in the Bible composed the treatises which you call inspired, that Jesus was God, and harsh denunciations are made against any who should deny the dogma. No doubt also that the same men believed also that He would, in mysterious manner, return in the clouds to judge the world, and that before their generation shoud die. They were mistaken in both beliefs, and over one at least more than 1800 years have rolled and still the return is unaccomplished. So we might push the argument were it necessary.

 

What we wish to impress on you is this: You must judge the Revelations of God by the light which is given you: in the mass, not by the dicta of its preachers: by the spirit and general tendency, not by the strict phraseology. You must judge of us and our teaching, not by conformity to any statement made by any men at any special time; but by the general fitness and adaptability of our creed to your wants, to your relations with God, and to the progress of your spirit.

 

What, then, is the outcome of our teaching? How far does it square with right reason? How does it teach you of God? How does it help your spirit?

 

You have been taught in the creeds of the orthodox churches to believe in a God who was propitiated by the sacrifice of His Son, so far as to allow a favoured few of His children to be admitted to an imagined heaven, where for ever and for evermore, with monotonous persistence, their occupation should be the singing His praise. The rest of the race, unable to gain admission to this heaven, were consigned to a hell of indescribable torment, perpetual, endless, and intolerable.

 

These miserable ones failed of bliss, some of them because they had not faith; and others, because they had evil surroundings by which they were degraded. And others fell, being assailed with fierce temptations, by which they were led away and seduced to sin. And others were incarned in debasing and sensual bodies, and were overcome of ungoverned passions. And others could not understand what was wanted from them, though they tried, and would fain have done what they could. And others had intellectual inability to accept certain dogmatic propositions which they had been taught to believe essential to their salvation. And others had not, when bodily existence ceased, assented to certain statements which were able to secure them the entry into the heaven we have described. And so they perished everlastingly; and on their endless torments, from a height of serene and secure, the blessed who

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have gained their bliss through a faith in certain dogmatic assertions, though many of them had been men of grievous and degraded lives, look with the satisfaction of undisturbed and changeless repose.

 

A life of gross sensuality, or of sloth, or of offence against all law, you are taught, is remediable by and act of faith. The grossest and most sensual ruffian may, by a cry on his deathbed, find himselft instantaneously fitted for admission into the immediate presence of the God whom he has all his life blasphemed. He, the impure, base, degraded, earthy spirit admitted to association with the refined, the noble, the pure, the holy, in the immediate presence of the stainless perfection of the all-pure God!

 

And yet the half is not told, but enough by way of contrast. We tell you nothing of such a God—a God of whom reason cannot think without a shudder, and from whom the fatherly instinct must shrink in disgust. Of this God of Love, who shows His love in such a fashion, we know nothing. He is of man’s fashioning, unknown to us. We pause not to expose the miserable pretence that such a human idol can ever have been aught but the figment of a barbarous mind. We do but ask you to wonder with us at the presumptuous ignorance and folly which has dared to paint such a caricature of the pure and holy God. Surely, friend, man must have been in a degraded spiritual condition ere he could have pictured such a Deity. Surely, too, they who in this age have not shrunk from such a creation must have sore need of a Gospel such as that we preach.

 

The God whom we know and whom we declare to you is in very truth a God of Love—a God whose acts do not belie His name, but whose love is boundless, and His pity unceasing to all. He knows no partiality for any, but deals out unwavering justice to all. Between Him and you are ranks of ministering spirits, the bearers of His loving message, the revealers from time to time of His will to man. By His spirit-messengers the train of ministering mercy is never suffered to fail. This is our God, manifested by His works, and operating through the agency of His ministering angels.

 

And you yourselves, what of you? Are ye immortal souls, who by a cry, a word, by and act of faith in an unintelligible and monstrous creed can purchase a heaven of inactivity, and avoid a hell of material torment? Verily, nay. Ye are spirits placed for a while in a garb of flesh to get training for an advanced spirit-life, where the seeds sown in the past bear their fruit, and the spirit reaps the crop which it has prepared. No fabled dreamy heaven of eternal inactivity awaits you, but a sphere of progressive usefulness and growth to higher perfection..

 

Immutable laws govern the results of deeds. Deeds of good advance the spirit, whilst deeds of evil degrade and retard it. Happiness is found in progress and in gradual assimilation to the Godlike and the perfect. The spirit of divine love animates the acts, and in mutual blessing the spirits find their happiness. For them there is no craving for sluggish idleness; no cessation of desire for progressive advancement in knowledge. Human passions and human needs and wishes are gone with the body, and the spirit lives a spirit life of purity, progress, and love. Such is heaven.

 

We know of no hell save that within the soul: a hell which is fed by the flame of unpurified and untamed lust and passion, which is kept alive by remorse and agony of sorrow: which is fraught with the pangs that spring unbidden from the results of past misdeeds; and from which the only escape lies in retracing the steps and in cultivating the qualities which shall bear fruit in love and knowledge of God.

 

Of punishment we know indeed, but it is not the vindictive lash of an angry God, but the natural outcome of conscious sin, remediable by repentance and atonement and reparation personally wrought out in pain and shame, not by coward cries for mercy, and by feigned assent to statements which ought to create a shudder.

 

Happiness we know is in store for all who will strive for it by a consistent course of life and conduct commendable to reason and spiritual in practice. Happiness is the outcome of right reason, as surely as misery is the result of conscious violation of reasonable laws, whether corporeal or spiritual.