A Suffering God.—The teacher said: "The idea of a suffering God was foolishness to the Greeks, who considered a God as a tyrant gloating over the sufferings of men. But the seeming contradiction is solved if one supposes that a Holy Being deposits itself, so to speak, in humanity, and that humanity then becomes defiled. That is a boundless grief like his who has deposited the best part of his soul and his emotions with a woman. If she then goes and defiles herself, she defiles her husband. Or a father's nature has passed over to his children, and he wishes to see his best impulses continued and multiplied by them, and his likeness ennobled. If the children dishonour themselves, the father suffers; the stem withers when the roots are injured.
"Such I imagine to be the feelings of God the Father when the sinfulness of humanity grows noisome and dishonours Him, and perhaps threatens to affect His own holiness. He will be wroth and lament—perhaps even feel Himself defiled—rather than cut off the cancerous limb of humanity. Christ is no more represented as beautiful, but with features distorted by the sins of others; these he has taken on himself or drawn to himself, for he who approaches pitch is defiled. In order to be free from the impure element he must die by the destruction of the body. Incarnation involved the greatest suffering of all.
"But the death of Christ may also signify that the Father freed himself from the sins of humanity, and broke off connection with the evil race who dishonoured Him. He who will now seek Him must rise to His heights, and gain admission by a pure life. He Himself will descend no more into this valley of filth; the air is too thick, the company too mixed. And that is why things are as they are."
The Atonement.—The teacher said: "The work of the Atonement has been very difficult for me to understand. Often I have tried to explain in a way satisfactory to myself, but without success. If God had offered up His Son as an atonement for mankind, there would necessarily have been peace and paradisal quietness on earth, but such is not the case. The period of the Roman emperors before Christ was indeed terrible, but the next thousand years were no better; they rather resembled a deluge in which the old nations were exterminated by barbarians. The second millennium was better, very much better. The third will perhaps close with a complete reconciliation between humanity and God. Everything points to that, though the heathen may reign for a while as instruments of chastisement, and executioners and possessors of wealth. The Egyptian has an important part to play, and slavery is not bad as a school of discipline. In the desert one learns the difficult art of loneliness, and in the strange land of Assyria one feels a wholesome home-sickness. Still, when the Egyptian raises his stick to strike, comfort yourself with Christ's words to Pilate, 'Thou wouldest have no power over Me, if it were not given thee from above.' And when you eat the bread of the heathen, think like the Maccabees, 'I eat thy bread, but I do not sacrifice upon thy altar.' Everything is tolerable so long as we do not let ourselves be beguiled into believing that those who are in power are God's friends and favourites. Our fine gentlemen who imagine that they are forwarding development and are the sole trustees of right, progress, and illumination, are only children of this world. Let that be granted them, and much good may it do them!"
When Nations Go Mad.—The teacher said: "Nations are sometimes seized by madness as by other diseases. The Javanese are said to suffer from chronic madness; the men run amuck with a knife in order to slay; the women suffer from a mania for mimicry; if they see anyone throw something into the air, they imitate the gesture; they can even under such circumstances throw their children away. The Japanese again are attacked by megalomania; someone begins to shout, 'We will conquer China!' and his cry is taken up by the whole town and the whole land. The French were raving when, in 1870, they sang 'A Berlin,' and did not even reach the Rhine. Paris was captured. But the French declared it was not captured, but had surrendered. When the enemy had marched in peaceably and spared the town, and after peace was concluded the French set their own town on fire. That was madness. Then they shot down thirty thousand of their own countrymen, while in the war itself only eighty thousand French had fallen."
"But some nations are seized by a mania for suicide. I know a land from which people emigrate at the rate of a hundred a day; in which the only important industry—iron-mining—is hampered by an export duty; that is suicide. In the same land, where the taxes are generally collected by levying distraints, they voted forty million pounds for the army; but when the muster-rolls came to be made up, the men were not to be found. In the same country the State maintains a railway of a hundred miles in length; recently the train came in with one passenger, whose journey had cost the State more than a thousand kronas. That is suicide."
The Poison of Lies.—The teacher said: "Let us return to life, and to men whom we think we know better than anything else, although self-knowledge is the hardest of all. A perpetual accusation which people bring against each other is that of lying. All lie more or less—by omitting principal points and emphasising secondary ones, or by colouring matters of fact. Often they do it with an excusable purpose; for instance, when a friend is being spoken about.
"But there are men who seem to be composed of falsehood and deceit. Such are the liars from necessity, who lie in order to obtain something; such, too, are the liars from ostentation, who lie in order to be superior to others, and to keep them down. One may be poisoned in the atmosphere which they spread around them.
"There is a pair of liars whom I have never seen, but often heard spoken about. When I merely hear about them and their falsehoods, I feel my brain affected, and their poison works telepathically on my nerves. The pair are dogged by misfortune, and live alone. They tell each other lies also, and pretend to themselves that they are martyrs, although their misfortunes are solely due to their deceits. They believe that they are persecuted by men, while, on the contrary, men fly from them. Such they have been since childhood, and seem unable to change. Perhaps their mendacity is a form of punishment, for 'they that hate the righteous shall be guilty.'"
Murderous Lies.—The teacher continued: "When one lives on intimate terms with liars, one runs a risk of becoming a liar oneself. One believes what they say, bases his views on their falsehoods, spreads their false reports in good faith, defends their sophistries, and is entangled in their deceits. Moreover, one's whole view of life is distorted, one loses contact with reality, lives in a fictitious world of feeling, regards friends as foes and foes as friends, thinks one is loved while one is hated, and vice versa.