| “Runs through all time, extends through all extent, Lives undivided, operates unspent.” |
Normal use that insures growth and development, range and power of action, is also, from first to last, a refining process; while misuse and abuse of these powers degrade and brutalize inevitably.
It follows, therefore, as the bodily structure and functions fail under normal use those of the spiritual body open, develop and unfold. First the seed, then the plant, then the flower and finally the fruit “of a well-spent life.”
There is no “theory” or “guess-work” about it. It becomes, step by step, a matter of conscious, intelligent, individual experience. We know it just as we know that fire will burn or that we are here now, living, breathing, and acting.
If I thrust my finger into a flame, all the philosophers and metaphysicians of the world could not “argue” me out of the experience of the fact of “burn” and “pain”; nor could theologians succeed any better by quotations from Scripture! Man is so constituted that the facts of experience are stubborn things; and the more open to reason the individual the more convincing the facts of experience. Ignorance, superstition, and fear recede in the presence of these Lights of man’s intelligence, as do dogma and despotism, that seek to enslave the human soul.
Theologians tell us that it is exceeding dangerous to take all this responsibility upon ourselves, thus appealing to ignorance, superstition, and fear.
I would answer: I refuse to take the responsibility of disregarding or disobeying the Law which the Divine and Universal Intelligence has placed at the very foundation of man’s being; and I am so unorthodox as to imagine and believe that God knew what he was about, even better than the theologians, or the “Infallible” Italian who misinterprets God, Nature, and Man.
To-day, as I write, “God’s Vicegerent” is instigating and promoting a “Holy War” in Priest-ridden Spain, over the temporal power of the Vatican, angered to the point of murder over the “posting of notices of places of public worship,” other than Catholic.
They would rather turn the world into one “City of the Dead,” than yield one point of Freedom, Enlightenment, or Self-government to man.
And men still call this Religion, and cast aside the crucifix for the sword, the gun and the firebrand. The Inferno has never yet been portrayed or even outlined. Its name is Priestcraft and Intolerance under the name of “Religion.”