Too long the Christian world has accepted the legendary Hebraic God, in the place of our real "Father who art in heaven." The teachings of Jesus—the testimony he gave of the love of God, if taken to the heart—must dispose forever of the perception of God as a Being of cruelty and revenge, and given over to low attributes. The Creator of the universe—"without whom was nothing made"—manifests to us through the action of eternal and unchangeable law. This is demonstrated to us by and through his vice-gerents, the angels of his who do his pleasure. Down, down from the supernal regions, from the supernal plane of being, comes the Divine Mandate which is made known to the human soul through the instrumentality that can penetrate the surroundings, and best make manifest the inspiration, the warning, or the perception of the undeviating law which holds all human experience and its sure results in its care and keeping. And those who dwell upon the threshold of the door which opens upon the life eternal are those who have loved and who still do love the children of earth—fathers, mothers, children, friends who have walked the earth by our sides, and whom no starry crowns, and no glorious heaven could tempt away from the work of blessing and comforting the sorrowing souls still left on earth to mourn the loss of their loving companionship, and sympathy. And this is God's "Special Providence" made manifest in our lives whenever and wherever we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
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Once the soul really looks forth and sees, there can be, after that, no more sleeping. All is effort, weighing, balancing, deciding, groping painfully along, or running swiftly the race, bracing against fearful odds, or bravely out-riding the storm. Taking it all as it comes, it is increasing action, motion, change.
HUMAN DESTINY.
Confucius, long considered the oldest and wisest of all the ancient teachers, when he was consulted upon an abtruse point of ethics, said in effect: "Ask the ancients. I do not know." The results of modern research are constantly undermining the first-recorded ideas concerning the age, and the degree of scientific and religious culture of the race, and we may well feel like turning from the authenticated historical records with which we are familiar to ask of the old, old world the occult meanings of the messages graven on pillar and on chiselled stone. The records which have survived the storm and stress of the ages bringing down to us unexpected knowledge of the lives, the achievements, and the histories of far-off, long-buried, hidden and lost peoples, communities, and even distinct personalities, were carefully planned and exactly executed by those who, already perceiving the mutability of all human life, and all its affairs, who—in a word—realizing that "the fashion of this world passeth away," sought to immortalize and perpetuate forever an absolute history of their own, and kindred races, by the uprearing of vast, imperishable monuments and temples, and abodes of men. The pyramids, majestic rock-hewn places of worship, and subterranean crypts are but the fingerposts of destiny. The voice of the weird spirit of "Memnon" who sits enthroned within the awful wastes of the desert sands, moans on and on, ever the same awe-inspiring warning. "Listen, listen, vain, evanescent, puerile chrysalis, man! Such as thou art, so were these most ancient of days over the history of whose toilsome, groping lives we keep forever jealous watch and ward. As they are today, so shall ye become. A little space, a few cycles of time, and all that lives and stalks abroad in the full plentitude of energy and ambition shall become resolved into the unfathomable the unreadable mysteries of the ages."
Not after such fashion shall we of this age of widespread enlightenment write our history on the annals of the planet's life, and evolution. All that has gone before this time—the closing in of the vast cycle—has been, in a way, fragmentary, comet-like; the whole race of mankind has marched around the globe again and again. The leaders—the head—were the favored few, priests and kings, warriors and nobles; the vast tail, the untaught, the unawakened, the ignorant, servile masses, the grovelling slaves, but a remove from the beasts of burden.
The spur of necessity, the development of ambition, and avarice, and the unfolding of the ego in man forced him along upon unknown paths, kept him separate from his kind, and built up the distinct races, in order that the individuality of each might become distinctly marked and recognized, that each, in his own special environment, might become the highest possible expression of what climate, soil and other influences, incident to the natural heredity could evolve in the lives and beings of given races of men. It is as though Nature had disported herself in bringing to life an infinite variety and diversity among her perfected children. But men, here and there, have always shown the golden cord of kinship to astonish and bewilder the unwary and unthinking.
The virtue and honor of a race are considered mere superstition and a perpetuation of injustice and wrong, or are accepted as a lesson in charity and brotherhood. Thus is ever growing and becoming established the entire homogeneity of the race. We have girded the earth, and established our fiery rule in the depths of the seas; the time for the fulfilling of a prophecy far reaching in its results is even now at hand. "That which is spoken in the closets, shall be shouted from the housetops." Far and wide it is whispered in secret places, lest it be known of selfish greed or ambitious tyranny, and this it is that the human heart conceives, and human lips proclaim: "Liberty! liberty!! liberty!!!" Room for noble thought, freedom for grand and acceptable work in the cause of human enlightenment, and the soul's redemption. The whole vast aura of the earth, the illimitable ether trembles and thrills with the majesty of the word. High above the thunder-roll of human discontent and awful pain, blazes the lightning of thought, and the undying aspiration of the soul. And thus shall we tell our story—thus record the history of the now oncoming race. Not in material emblems only, consecrated to the forces of nature; but in the spiritual records which tell of the freeing of humanity from the tyranny of effete religions, and the upbuilding of a new composite race, fear free, and worshipful only of recognized universal truth.
ETHICAL LAW.
Setting aside all our hereditary beliefs, all our theological teachings let us try to consider the true teachings of Jesus as differentiated from the instructions given by Moses for the guidance of the Jews. Moses never told his people to love and forgive their enemies. Jesus made a strong point of this, even bidding his disciples to forgive injuries to the seventieth time. Moses impressed upon his people the excellence of revenge, always demanding "an eye for an eye," a life for a life. Jesus said all that sort of compensation rested forever with God, that He alone, who saw and knew the hearts of men, could deal justly with them. The old Jewish law stoned to death the immoral woman—not the man—O no! certainly not! Jesus said to a flagrant woman brought before him by a rabble of men: "Let him that is without sin cast the first stone." What divine sarcasm, and how they are said to have slunk away under his perception of them!