So much for one of the two great truths. The other, which is the greater because it includes its companion, is this: Man has within himself all the potentialities of his own life. This is true of the universe as a whole, and, therefore, necessarily so of all that therein is.
The sum of both truths is that the salvation of the world is wholly dependent upon productive laborers and that they must look individually only to the exertion of their own mental and physical powers and collectively to co-operation with each other for the accomplishment of their mission.
Through the whole of my past ministry in the field I rang out these great truths and rang a great lie in by representing that the salvation of the world depends upon a potentiality which is in the sky and not in man, that heaven is above the earth and hell below it, not on it.
When I commenced my present ministry in the study,
I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell; And by and by my Soul return'd to me, And answer'd 'I Myself am Heaven and Hell!'
Omar, the poetic astronomer, might have added a stanza which would have closed. "I myself am God." This is, in effect, what Jesus did say: "I and my Father are one." This is as true of you and me and of every man, woman and child as it was of Jesus.
And Jesus represented that God, both as Father and Son, dwells in the hearts of believers. But every relevant fact which has been scientifically established as such (and there is a whole mountain of such facts) points to the conclusion that Christians are no more divine than other people, and that, as to his essential nature, no man would be less divine than he is if Jesus had never been born.
Gods in the skies (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha) are all right as subjective symbols of human potentialities and attributes and of natural laws, even as the Stars and Stripes on a pole, Uncle Sam in the capitol and Santa Claus in a sleigh are all right as such symbols; but such gods are all wrong, if regarded as objective realities existing independently of those who created them as divinities and placed them in celestial habitations.
What is true of the gods is equally so of all the supernaturalistic dogmas of the several traditional interpretations of religion. Insofar as they are not pure superstitions they are symbols of imaginary events which people think should or must have occurred in the past or should or must occur in the future; not statements of historical events which have occurred or are to occur.
So far I have not found it necessary to renounce the Christian God or any of the things which go with him and I have no idea of doing this, any more than I have of renouncing the American Uncle Sam and the things which go with him, but I place the Brother Jesus of the Christian religion and the Uncle Sam of the American politics on the same footing with each other and with others of their kind as subjective realities. I could be a Jew and an Englishman as conscientiously as a Christian and an American. Many of the early Christians were also Pagans, worshippers of other Gods than Jesus.