A later, far higher phase of the law of sacrifice, is that wherein no reward is thought of, or desired. Reaching manhood, humanity grapples with the duties and accepts all the grave responsibilities of an advanced evolutional stage. Duty becomes the motor of action, self-mastery and love of one’s fellows the very keynotes of man’s music. The animal part of his nature becomes subordinate to the higher self. The third great lesson of sacrifice works within, the lesson, viz. to do right simply because it is right, to give because giving is owed by each to all, and not because giving will in any shape be pleasing to or rewarded by God.
During the various stages of progress, the pain aspect of sacrifice is clearly seen. Nevertheless, a soul’s passionate grip upon things physical and sensuous relaxes, and a day arrives when to give spontaneously, freely, lavishly, is purest joy. Then is man’s life merging into Divine life, and sacrifice is no more pain. Vital dissonances cease to rend man’s heart, for his inner consciousness has soared above the selfish separateness of phenomenal existence into realms of nature where unity and love are the all-prevailing principles of life. We know these principles in action through the beautiful, selfless earthly pilgrimage of Him we call the Saviour of Mankind, whose whole career was an At-one-ment with the Divine.
The “Vicarious Atonement” doctrine of Western faiths to-day is both an ecclesiastical device for increasing priestly power and a misapprehension of the law we have been considering—the law of sacrifice, by which the worlds are made, by which the worlds are living now, and by which alone the union of man with God is brought about. That noble doctrine of antiquity was changed by Mediæval Christianity into a picture of the Godhead—Father and Son, in opposition to one another—a picture that “shocks all reverence, and outrages reason by bringing all manner of legal quibbles into the relationship between the Spirit of God and man.” (Four Ancient Religions, Annie Besant, p. 166.) Again, a race whose reasoning faculties are developed must needs repudiate the Church’s dogma of “Imputed Righteousness”—a righteousness not inwrought or attained to, but applied externally—a covering to what is corrupt and base, yet deemed sufficient to secure a perfunctory pardon of sin, a non-merited Divine favour.
The real At-one-ment with the Divine, whereof Jesus the Christ is our Archetype, admits of no substitutions, no subterfuges, makes no fictitious claims. It signifies an actual transformation or process of change, the inner consciousness passing from the lower to function on higher levels of being.
It is easy, however, to apprehend how the necessity of thinking of all supra-physical things, i.e. the finer phenomena of existence, by means of analogies and figures of speech that are purely physical, led to much of error in the earlier stages of human development; and there is a sense in which the “robe of righteousness” is a not inapt analogy or figure. When speaking of the pilgrimage of the soul, the picture presented is that of a concrete toiler, ascending slowly, breathing heavily, sighing and evidencing effort to all our outer senses, yet we know that the soul’s best efforts are mostly hidden from sight and hearing and touch. But no confusion arises. The mental conception to which the figure points is that of efforts as great though directed to evils that are chiefly mental, emotional, moral, not physical. Similarly, the “robe of righteousness” figure must not be overstrained. Man’s soul is clothed upon by, or clothes itself in (it matters not which, we say) robes or garments of flesh, and of finer physical elements than flesh, elements intangible to his five senses. The flesh garment or body is constantly changing, and so are the bodies of desire and of thought. The changes occur through the action and interplay of diverse subtle forces. Fresh elemental matter is borne in from without to replace the atoms of structures tending to decompose, while a process of selection, determination and assimilation proceeds through the action of forces within.
But the same laws of growth apply to realms of nature less open to observation, and a careful selection and choice of material is as potent and necessary in building the bodies of desire and thought as in building the body of solid flesh. And what are the available materials here? In the hidden life of our own thought and feeling we are conscious of an unceasing flow of transient states, or we may express it, currents of emotional and mental vibrations reaching us from we know not whence, waves breaking upon us from without. If we deliberately choose the elevated moods, the purest, swiftest vibrations, and seek habitually to retain these and make them our own, sweetness and light must inevitably characterize the habitation we are slowly building for our inner consciousness. In other words, the vehicles of our feeling and thought will become as “robes of righteousness.”
Desires, passions, emotions form what has been called the astral body;[[17]] aspiration and thought or the action of reason, imagination and the artistic faculties, create a still subtler, or mind-body, while the blend of the two is what we are accustomed to observe as ruling character. And when the physical is cast off at death, man’s consciousness passes into his subtle bodies and into regions of bliss whither we may not follow, but of which St. Paul gives us a glimpse when he says “we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, Eternal in the Heavens.”
[17]. A real body of subtle matter interpenetrating the flesh body and visible to some clairvoyants.
Now, to minds permeated by cruder ideas of man’s body and soul the above will seem mystical and unreal. Nevertheless, there are many minds, scientifically trained to a close observation of the manifold phenomena of life with all the finer forces and elements in nature, that are ready to accept a truer conception of the complex constitution of man. To all such, the proof of the actual existence of these transcendental vehicles of consciousness lies in hypnotic and other psychic phenomena, and in the evidence of experience. For, given a certain amount of intimate intercourse, and the man within the man shows himself to the eye of his friend through expression, attitude, gesture. But what the mental eye sees behind the veil of flesh must exist in some form. Hence the eye discerns not the consciousness, but its phenomenal garment or vehicle, and the texture organized is coarse, brutal, degraded or animal, sensuous, selfish, or of a finer and purer nature, divinely human, indicating the grade and quality of the animating principle or soul within.