“... the existence, in all times of the world’s history, of persons with abnormal faculties, initiates of the great mysteries and depositors of the secrets of antiquity, has been affirmed by a testimony far too universal and persistent to admit of denial.... He who would be an adept must conform to the teaching of those demons, predicted leaders of the last apostasy, who forbid to marry, and command to abstain from meat.”
“We have never met with a single reported instance of a spirit entering the lower spheres with the glad tidings, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” On the contrary, among Spiritualists, as with Theosophists and Buddhists, sin can be expiated only by personal suffering.... “Sin,” shrieks the familiar of “M. A. Oxon,” “is remediable by repentance and atonement and reparation personally wrought out in pain and shame, not by coward cries for mercy, and by feigned assent to statements which ought to create a shudder.”
Mr. Pember, therefore, believes in vicarious atonement in its crudest form? He teaches that “repentance and faith” save man from the consequences of his actions!
After describing the “Perfect Way” as “an ecclesiastical compound of Heathenism” (with a capital H), the author proceeds to expound the doctrine of reincarnation as therein set forth. Nothing can be fairer or more correct than this exposition, at the conclusion of which we read:
“Jews, Christians, Buddhists and Mahommedans ... will become able to unite in a universal belief that sin is expiated by transmigrations and in the worship of ‘the Great Goddess’[Goddess’]. The conception of a second league of Babel has been formed in the minds of Theosophists.”[Theosophists.”]
And even then, would not such a league be better than the sectarian wars, the religious persecutions, the tests and disabilities which still disfigure Christendom in the name of religion?
Further on the author refers to the occult axiom that “whereas God is I AM, or positive being, the Devil is NOT, and remarks:
“There is little doubt that the culminations of the Mysteries was the worship of Satan himself... It would appear, then, that from remote ages, probably from the time when the Nephilim [the fallen angels of Satan’s Host] were upon earth, there has existed a league with the Prince of Darkness, a Society of men consciously on the side of Satan, and against the Most High.
“The spells by which spirits may be summoned from the unseen are now known to all; and those unearthly forms which in past times were projected from the void only in the labyrinths, caverns, and subterranean chambers of the initiated, are now manifesting themselves in many a private drawing-room and parlour. Men have become enamoured of demons, and ere long will receive the Prince of the Demons as their God.”
Theosophy, says Mr. Pember, will become the creed of the intellectual and the educated, while Spiritualism influences the masses of mankind. And he traces the influences of Theosophy and Buddhism in “Broad-Churchism, Universalism, Comtism, Secularism, and Quietism.” Nay, even under the Temperance movement he spies the lurking serpent of esoteric teaching and guidance, and he cites letters from Christian friends complaining that these and other philanthropic movements are being swamped, and their periodicals occupied by Theosophists, who work on Buddhist principles.