(To be continued.)
GODS, HEROES AND MEN.
BY AMOS J. JOHNSON.
According to Theosophy every man is a God incarnate. In his real nature, each man is a spark from the Divine Flame, which descends from the Infinite Fountain of Life and courses through Eternity on a pilgrimage, the purpose of which we can but faintly conceive.
Great mystics have said that "the universe exists for the sake of the soul's experience," and that the purpose of life is that the soul may reach perfection. The term embraces infinity, perfect virtue, wisdom, power, perfect altruism. Each department of Nature must be carried on to a full completeness and the soul may not rest content with achieving merely its own perfection, but must labor for the perfection of the great Whole.
Reaching from the One White Light of Absolute Being down to the tiniest atom of matter, each plane of existence is governed by Divine Intelligences. All one can say is that after reaching to the highest conception possible to us of the Divine Intelligences that rise above us and to the highest knowledge attainable of the Divine Worlds, still stretching far beyond the highest, beyond the utmost reach of human thought, there exists: What? "An omnipresent, eternal, boundless and immutable Principle, on which all speculation is impossible, since it transcends the power of human conception and can only be dwarfed by any human expression or similitude. It is beyond the reach and power of thought, unthinkable and unspeakable."
This is the postulate of sublime and everlasting Deity. As far as we may go in endless Eternity, yet above and beyond all there reigneth absolute Law.
Recognizing then, that the great unknowable Deity is beyond our ken, our study must be confined to the lesser Deities, though some of these seem unknowable; but we may partially learn the relation they bear to men.
All the great religions present a series of divine Presences, and generally a triune Godhead stands as the primal object of all adoration. The Hebrew Bible traces three Deities, the highest of these being the Most High God, supreme ruler over all, and synonymous with Law; the second Deity is God, the Elohim, a great hierarchy, or rather a series of hierarchies of Gods, who formed the earth and filled it with living creatures and endowed man with his human nature; while the third in rank among the ancient Hebrews was Jehovah, who stands as their tribal Deity. The distinction between the Most High God and Jehovah is clearly shown in Deuteronomy (32: 8-9), where it says: "When the Most High divided the nations, their inheritance, when He separated the Sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people.... The Lord's [Jehovah's] portion is his people, Jacob is the lot of His inheritance."