This is indeed——
| “Eternal Progress moving on, From state to state the spirit walks.” |
Death is neither the end nor the beginning. It is only a change in pitch, a shifting of keys, and the same old Song of Life goes on, if we have but learned the score, and caught the harmony.
Salvation is not a thing accomplished once for all. We have only to consider the monotony, the poverty of invention, and imagination, of those who have tried to portray the joy of the Redeemed in heaven, in order to realize what a bore it would soon become, if that were all.
Inspiration, achievement, and eternal progress, with more and more helpfulness to others, with plane after plane achieved, revealing plane after plane beyond—does not this appeal far more strongly to the highest and best in us all?
And pray, what is this, but the Great Work, that I have tried herein to outline, and as taught and lived by Jesus, and every great Master the world has ever known? Each has achieved in his own degree, worded it in his own way, and “stepped out of sunlight into shade, to make more room for others.”
Long before the birth of Jesus, it was said, “The wise and peaceful ones live, renewing the earth like the coming of Spring.” And having themselves crossed the ocean of embodied existence, help all those who try to do the same thing, without personal motive.
I have endeavored to give a general outline of the Great Work, drawn from history, tradition, philosophy, and symbolism, down to the present year of grace. I find many corroborations, many things pointing in the same general direction. But I find but one concise and definite formulation of the scientific theorem, in which the outline is clear, and the analogy complete, and thereby made accessible and apprehensible to the open-minded and intelligent student.
Such students need experience no real difficulty in finding a clew to the labyrinth of life, or, as our ancient brothers put it in regard to the Magnum Opus—“a key to the closed palace of the king.”
This is the purpose of the “Harmonic Series” of books. They need rest upon no authority beyond the intrinsic evidence of truth, on every page. If they are not consistent in themselves, then they must fall in pieces. The only appeal to the reader is: read them carefully, analyze your own mind and soul, and come to your own conclusions. If they find no response, no answering chord in you, then they were written for someone else, or in vain.