"In their real and divinely intended sense, its doctrines are eternal verities, founded in the nature of Being. As ecclesiastically propounded, they are blasphemous absurdities."
"All the mistakes made about the Bible arise out of the mystic books being referred to times, places, and persons material, instead of being regarded as containing only eternal verities about things spiritual."
"The Bible was written by intuitionalists, for intuitionalists, and from the intuitionalist standpoint. It has been interpreted by externalists, for externalists, and from the externalist standpoint. The most occult and mystical of books, it has been expounded by persons without occult knowledge or mystical insight"[70].
Thus gradually but surely we learnt that Ecclesiastical education has rigidly excluded from its curriculum all those branches of study which could throw light on the real nature of existence, and consists in learning what other men have said who, themselves, did not know, but were mere hearsay scholars lacking the witness in themselves.
We marvelled much as to how the priesthoods will comport themselves when compelled to recognise the fact that a New Gospel of Interpretation has actually been vouchsafed from the world celestial in correction of their perversion and mutilation of the former Gospel of Manifestation, and suppression of the true doctrine of salvation. Will Cain and Caiaphas still have the dominion, and ecclesiasticism be as ready to crucify the Christ on His second coming as it was on His first? And if not, how will it find courage to face the world with the humiliating confession that all through the long ages of its history, while arrogantly claiming to be the faithful and infallible minister of the Gospel of Christ, it has persistently withheld that gospel, and, losing the key to its meaning, has substituted for the wholesome "bread" of divine truth, the "stones" of innutritious because unintelligible dogmas; and for the "fish" of the living waters, the "serpents" of the letter which kills? and that when men have rightly suspected that Christianity has failed, not because it is false, but because it has been falsified, and have sought to their own inner light for the truth of which ecclesiasticism had defrauded them, it dealt out to them pitiless anathema and persecution, making the earth a scene of torture and slaughter in assertion of the right of the priesthoods to teach wrong?
That the work committed to us implied nothing less than the fulfilment of the prophecies of which the promise of the Second Coming of Christ was the culmination, while intimated to us from the outset, was gradually unfolded into full assurance, and we were enabled to see that the very terms in which it was couched implied a spiritual advent, and one which should disclose the perfect system at once of science, philosophy, morality, and religion, of which Christ is both the foundation and the consummation. For the "clouds of heaven" in which it was to take place, were no other than the heaven of the kingdom within man of his restored spiritual consciousness. "That wicked one," "the son of perdition," and "mystery of iniquity" then to be revealed and destroyed, was no other than the inspiring evil spirit of an ecclesiasticism which had received indeed its doctrines from above, but their interpretation and application from below. And the "Spirit of His mouth," and the "Brightness of His Coming" were no other than a new Word of God, in the form of a New Gospel of Interpretation, so potent in its logic and so luminous in its exposition as to indicate the Logos Himself as its source, and the "Woman" Intuition, "clothed with the Sun" of full illumination, as its revealer.
We saw, too, that with this "Woman" thus rehabilitated, God's "Two Witnesses,"—who have so long lain dead in the streets of "that great city" wherein the Lord, the divinity in man, is ever systematically crucified; the city of the world's system as fashioned and controlled by an ecclesiasticism shrouded in the threefold veil of Blood, Idolatry, and the Curse of Eve,—will rise and stand on their feet, and ascend to the heaven of their proper supremacy, vice Lucifer deposed and fallen. And in them Lucifer himself will regain his lost estate, vindicating his title to be called the Light-bearer, the bright and morning star, the herald and bringer-in of the perfect day of the Lord God. For, as the Intellect, he is the heir of all things, if only he be begotten of the Spirit, and be no bastard engendered of the Sense-Nature.
For—as we had come to learn—God's Two Witnesses in man are ever the Intellect and the Intuition, when duly unfolded and united in a pure spirit. Under such conditions the Shiloh comes, and mounted on them man rides triumphant as king into the holy city of his own regenerate nature. But divorced from her, the Intuition, and—leagued with the Sense-Nature—knowing matter only and the body, the Intellect becomes "prince of devils" in man, the maker of men into fiends, and of the earth into a hell. Wherefore his fall from the heaven of his power, on the advent of that whole Humanity, of whom it is said, "the Man is not without the Woman, nor the Woman without the Man, in the Lord," the humanity of intellect and intuition combined, has ever been exultingly hailed in anticipation by all true seers and prophets.
The chief points of the doctrine, the prospect of the restoration of which has thus been the sustaining hope of the percipient faithful in all ages, may be summarised as follows:—
The doctrine which, first and foremost, it is the purpose of the Bible to affirm, and of the Christ to demonstrate, and in which reason entirely concurs, is no other than that of the divine potentialities of man, belonging to him in virtue of the nature of his constituent principles, the force and the substance of existence. These are the duality of the "heavens" which God is said to "create," meaning to put forth from Himself, "in the beginning," and of the mutual interaction of which all things are the product, varying according to the plane of operation, alike for creation and redemption, generation and regeneration. And that which Jesus really affirmed in the memorable but little understood words, "Ye must be born again, or from above, of Water and the Spirit," was both the possibility and the necessity to all men of realising the potential divinity belonging to them in virtue of the divinity of their constituent principles. And in affirming this He affirmed both the necessity and the possibility to every man of being born exactly as He Himself, as typical man regenerate, is said to have been born, of Virgin Mary and Holy Ghost, and also His own identity in kind with all other men. And He affirmed, moreover, the utter falsity of that priest-constructed system, which, ignoring Regeneration, insists on Substitution, as the means of salvation. For "Virgin Mary," and "Holy Ghost," are but the mystical synonyms with "Water and the Spirit," the substance and force, or soul and spirit, of which, man is constituted, in their divine because pure condition, the product of which in man is the new regenerate selfhood called, as by St Paul, the "Christ within." Begotten in man as matrix, of the pure Spirit and Substance which are God, this new selfhood is son at once of God and of man; and in him God and man are "reconciled" or "at-oned." And that man is said to be saved by his blood, is because the "blood of God" is pure spirit, and it is the pure spirit in the man that saves him; and that he is called the only-begotten Son of God, is not because God begets no other of his kind, but because God, as God, begets directly none of any other kind.