He begins by not only admitting the justice of every imputation and charge made against the Latin Church as to the originality of her dogmas, but by taking a seeming delight in anticipating such charges; for he points to every dogma of Christianity as having existed in Pagan rituals in Antiquity. The whole Pantheon of Heathen Deities is passed in review by him, and each is shown to have had some point of resemblance with the Trinitarian personages and Mary. There is hardly a mystery, a dogma, or a rite in the Latin Church that is not shown by the author as having been “parodied by the Curvati”—the “Curved,” the Devils. All this being admitted and explained, the Symbologists ought to be silenced. And so they would be, if there were no materialistic critics to reject such omnipotency of the Devil in this world. For, if Rome admits the likenesses, she also claims the right of judgment between [pg 079] the true and the false Avatâra, the real and the unreal God, between the original and the copy—though the copy precedes the original by millenniums.
Our author proceeds to argue that whenever the missionaries try to convert an idolater, they are invariably answered:
We had our Crucified before yours. What do you come to show us?[131] Again, what should we gain by denying the mysterious side of this copy, under the plea that according to Weber all the present Purânas are remade from older ones, since here we have in the same order of personages a positive precedence which no one would ever think of contesting.[132]
And the author instances Buddha, Krishna, Apollo, etc. Having admitted all this he escapes the difficulty in this wise:
The Church Fathers, however, who recognized their own property under all such sheep's clothing ... knowing by means of the Gospel ... all the ruses of the pretended spirits of light; the Fathers, we say, meditating upon the decisive words, “all that ever came before me are robbers” (John, x. 8), did not hesitate in recognizing the Occult agency at work, the general and superhuman direction given beforehand to falsehood, the universal attribute and environment of all these false Gods of the nations; “omnes dii gentium dæmonia (elilim).”(Psalm xcv.)[133]
With such a policy everything is made easy. There is not one glaring resemblance, not one fully proven identity, that could not thus be made away with. The above-quoted cruel, selfish, self-glorifying words, placed by John in the mouth of Him who was meekness and charity personified, could never have been pronounced by Jesus. The Occultists reject the imputation indignantly, and are prepared to defend the man as against the God, by showing whence come the words plagiarised by the author of the Fourth Gospel. They are taken bodily from the “Prophecies” in the Book of Enoch. The evidence on this head of the learned biblical scholar, Archbishop Laurence, and of the author of the Evolution of Christianity, who edited the translation, may be brought forward to prove the fact. On the last page of the Introduction to the Book of Enoch is found the following passage:
The parable of the sheep rescued by the good Shepherd from hireling guardians and ferocious wolves, is obviously borrowed by the fourth Evangelist from [pg 080] Enoch, lxxxix, in which the author depicts the shepherds as killing and destroying the sheep before the advent of their Lord, and thus discloses the true meaning of that hitherto mysterious passage in the Johannine parable—“All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers”—language in which we now detect an obvious reference to the allegorical shepherds of Enoch.
“Obvious” truly, and something else besides. For, if Jesus pronounced the words in the sense attributed to him, then he must have read the Book of Enoch—a purely Kabalistic, Occult work, and he therefore recognised the worth and value of a treatise now declared apocryphal by his Churches. Moreover, he could not have been ignorant that these words belonged to the oldest ritual of Initiation.[134] And if he had not read it, and the sentence belongs to John, or whoever wrote the Fourth Gospel, then what reliance can be placed on the authenticity of other sayings and parables attributed to the Christian Saviour?
Thus, De Mirville's illustration is an unfortunate one. Every other proof brought by the Church to show the infernal character of the ante-and-anti-Christian copyists may be as easily disposed of. This is perhaps unfortunate, but it is a fact, nevertheless—Magna est veritas et prevalebit.
The above is the answer of the Occultists to the two parties who charge them incessantly, the one with “Superstition,” and the other with “Sorcery.” To those of our Brothers who are Christians, and twit us with the secresy imposed upon the Eastern Chelâs, adding invariably that their own “Book of God” is “an open volume” for all “to read, understand, and be saved,” we would reply by asking them to study what we have just said in this Section, and then to refute it—if they can. There are very few in our days who are still prepared to assure their readers that the Bible had [pg 081] God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter.