The Arena, Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891

by Various

For a sufficiency of material food from day to day, we rightly ask by the proper use of each faculty and member God has given us, to compel the earth to yield up its resources for our sustenance, which it would do in ample abundance for all, were it not for the inordinate greed and lust, or the gross lethargy, of that many-phased, still unhumanized beast that man has to conquer in himself. But happy is he who hungers for the manna of law and the bread of truth, whose prayer is a sincere desire to be so fed thereon that there shall be such strength in the muscles of his soul as shall make of him a power for good to all with whom he comes in contact.

As to our enemies, we can no longer cherish feelings of resentment toward anyone, however they may misconstrue our purest motive, or malign our best intent. We see that every one must show, when tested, the exact degree of growth he has attained. Hence, the slander and persecution, the “all manner of evil” falsely arrayed against us, we apprehend as the necessary means to determine our fidelity to the truth to which we have pledged allegiance, and to prove that what is of good cannot come to naught though all the powers of earth and hell be set against it. To forgive, aphiemi, is to cause advancement, to bear away burdens. Thus we see it as an axiom that only as we aid the weak, instruct the ignorant, develop the undeveloped, can we receive in turn what we most need to carry us farther forward on the upward path.

Lead us not into temptation, is what we silently say when our thought and action show that we have well learned the lessons that were for us in past trial and tribulation, and so order our course that the leading of His laws, by which alone God ever guides, brings to us joy instead of pain. Then, whatsoever may betide, as men count weal or woe, we see the gold pass from the fire freed from its base alloy. Then all the prayer is answered as with the eye of the prophet to whom the future is as now, we see the soul delivered from, born out of evil, poneros, which well represents the six days or epochs of labor, strife, and friction, of gestation in materiality, that precede and prepare the way for the Sabbath day to dawn.

The word “amen” is a Hebrew term for faith, which it defines as a firm prop or support, a foundation that abides. It pictures to us faith, not as emotion or credulity, nor the mere belief in, or acceptance of, some formulated creed; but as that clear assurance of what the present will produce or what the future has in store, which can only come as we perceive how God, by laws immutable, has ruled throughout the past. And faithful prayer is oneness of the will of man with that of God, through knowledge of His laws and glad obedience thereto. Thus, this word, as a symbol, stands for that which is the first and last of all true prayer.

The works of Jesus, like his words, were all of a symbolic character, in that each so-called miracle foreshadowed a result to be realized as a common heritage of men through the age-lasting evolution of the same intelligence that then produced the transient tokens of its presence. In the New Testament there are four words used, in the original Greek, which have been translated as descriptive of miraculous occurrences.

Their basic meaning is as follows: 1, dunamis, power, energy, a faculty or ability to do; 2, ergon, a work, an arrangement in order, with purpose and skill; 3, teras, to turn, to resolve, to excite wonder or fear; 4, semeion, the word most frequently employed, indicates a sign, mark, or token by which a thing is shown, something used to represent something else. Our word “miracle” is often and erroneously used for a phenomenon supposed to have occurred outside the realm of law. Yet, in the strictest sense, the bursting of a blade of grass from out the ground, the conception and birth of any form of life, are as stupendous miracles, marks of creative power, as the mind of man can ever contemplate.

The wise and great in any department of progress have always towered like gods above their fellowmen. The natural product of their lives has been a constant miracle to those about them. In spiritualizing the story of the prodigies performed by Jesus, we would not question the psychic power, transforming virtue of such an one as he, who was fitted to convey a re-creative influence to the world. But we would wish to show how far those phenomenal evidences of power and intelligence transcended the domain of mediumistic wonder-working or spiritistic occultism. This is easily accomplished as we continue to apply the same principle of interpretation that has already shown us that the supposed miraculous conception and birth of the Christ was but a consummation of the plan, and in obedience to the same laws by which the heavens were made, the earth begotten and born, mineral and vegetable kingdoms formed and sustained, animal life brought forth and evolved, and, finally, man progressively created in the image, according to the likeness of his God. Because the same spiritual nature that the typical man so perfectly embodied has been begotten in our souls and is seeking to express itself along the lines he pointed out, the truth, of which his so-called miracles were illustrative and prophetical, is made apparent. His walking on the sea of Galilee, or bidding its tempestuous waves be still, was not so marvelous a proof of power as has been the advancement of the principle he represented upon the seething ocean of humanity, causing the tumultuous tides of lust and passion, sin and ignorance to subside. The literal narrative of the miraculous draught of fishes vouchsafed to the disciples affords but a feeble symbol of the abundant life that has come to men and nations who have cast their nets, put forth their efforts, in obedience to the injunctions of the Law-giver of the New Testament.

The wonder of the marriage-feast is re-performed as Christ attends the wedding of our souls to truth, that union which cannot by man be put asunder. As this takes place the water turns to wine; that within our mental make-up which before was unformed, unstable, in a condition of flux and change, becomes vivified with creative power, and bubbles and sparkles with newness of life and inspiration, refreshing and stimulating the soul with higher emotions and desires, imparting to the very cells and tissues of the body a reconstructive tendency to health.

By the breaking of the bread of life, the hidden manna of the Word, the reality behind appearance, the multitude of faculties is fed and that unseen assembly nourished whose lives are linked with ours at this Lord’s Supper of the soul. Blinded perceptions are restored to sight from day to day, and gifted with a constantly enlarging field of vision in the realm of truth and law. The understanding that was deaf vibrates with joy in response to the call of a salvatory science. The antitypes of palsied arm and crippled foot, which are the lack of power to do and of ability to advance in a higher, mental life, are healed by the transforming touch that makes its impress on the soul when first made conscious, that by its own free will its highest ideals are to become realities. Even those who have been so earth-bound and selfish as to be lifeless, cold, and dead to the knowledge of God and love to the neighbor are commencing to arise in answer to the spirit of the approaching altruistic age. Accompanying this present resurrection, the veil is being rent that for so long has intervened between this life and the next. And although no outward cloud is sundered for a personal Messiah to descend to rule as temporal prince, the denser fogs of a gross materialism are parting fast before the rising glory of that day whose dawn we see afar on the horizon. For the signs are many and are strikingly apparent that those splendid souls, the wisely great ones of the past, the saviors and educators of the race, are to co-operate with us in the formation of that kingdom and republic which their prophetic vision saw and fervent words foretold. Then, as a spiritual reality, will we understand the truth symbolized by the doctrines of the church concerning the resurrection of the dead and communion with the saints, as the first fruits of them that slept appear to us. And what is now prefigured by the phenomena and personations of modern spiritualism, will then become a blessed fact as our missing loved ones labor with us for our and their redemption and the good of all mankind. Had they been permitted, or were they able, to return for any other purpose, the result would be the furtherance of selfishness and materiality. Spiritualism, with its convincing tests of an unseen intelligence, and its crude communications, sustains the same relation to the angelic intercourse which it simulates, that the symbolic conversion, baptism, and bread and wine of the church bear to the organic experiences of a true life. They are all, alike, signs and forms, shadows cast before the substance drawing nigh, the Christ that is to be.

Our present space will not permit us now to even touch upon, much less delineate, the all-important principles symbolized by the recorded martyrdom of Jesus, and the doctrine of atonement. But they, and all the eschatology of the Gospels, and with which the apocalyptic book of riddles is filled, will be readily unravelled as we still farther trace the working of those laws already seen, that are not restricted in their operation by relations of time and space, but govern through the ages the travail of the embodied or disembodied soul. Suffice it then to say that hell and heaven are not the names of places to which the wicked or the good are called upon to go. Sheol, Gehenna, Hades, Tartarus, and the opposite Kingdom of God, are terms expressing symbolically the experiences and conditions of undeveloped and developed souls here as well as hereafter.