The coming of your Messiah was more than you have supposed, because grander and more imposing than its assumed supernaturalisms was its enthronement of two central ideas. One was the adoption of the sentiment of brotherhood as a means of adjusting the relations of men with each other, and the other was the inauguration of spiritual hope as a guide in the actions of life. Out of this beginning has come all that is good in your social progress. The general acceptance of these ideas, as agencies in your civilization, began its work by weakening the old society, and it finally destroyed it by extinguishing the bands of physical force which held it together. The cultivation of these inspirational beliefs in their purity, as they were bestowed upon you by the divine intelligence, would have soon brought to you the same peace and good will that they have shed upon the inhabitants of Mars; but you were not to be indulged so soon in this happy offering. The few who had been dominating the many for ages, appropriating their earnings, and even sacrificing their lives, in a lust for power and wealth, were not to let escape them so fine an opportunity to hold the simple-minded by a new agency, ten-fold more subjugating than the old method of coercion by force. The religious superstition of the age, a mere diversion for the untaught multitude, inert and unpromising, was vitalized by the infusion of these new, humane and spiritual impulses; and, with many added ingeniously contrived supernaturalisms, and an attractive moral code, it was built up into a system and organized into a society which has borne its heavy weight upon your progress, and spread its dominion more successfully than the war-like legions it supplanted. It has accomplished no good which is not entirely due to the irresistible expansion of the truths it appropriated at its inception out of nature’s evolutionary process of social development, viz., the regard for one another, as a guide in all the actions of life, and that hope eternal which spiritualizes and elevates our existence.
The coming of your Messiah was less than you have believed, because you have mistaken a personality, in which the genius of advanced and salutary doctrines manifested itself, for a part and presence of the Deity himself. As the promulgation of thoughts that were conceived under the inspiration and pressure of a natural force in the process of social development is less than the awful presence and verbal communication of the Deity, so, in the same degree, was the coming of your Messiah less.
But you will have a second coming, my brother, unperverted by the craft of your seers, and uncontaminated with the superstitions of a crude society like the first. It will be of you and a part of you, raising you up to a higher esteem of yourselves, glorifying you as the progenitors of all good, under a divine and irresistible law of betterment. It will relieve you of the evil thoughts that have condemned and degraded you. The new hope, like a newly discovered strength, will push out in all directions, in the exercise of its salutary work. Instead of discourse and exhortation to the lowly and down trodden, with promises as impossible of denial as of verification, it will lift them upon their feet by the strong hand of a better social method. Like the first coming, its symbolic picture will be carved into monuments, reproduced in all the departments of art, and cherished as the chief reminder of your duties and obligations to the Deity. It will be no symbol of anguish and sorrow, like the first, but in place of it THE DIVINE FIGURE OF A STRONG MAN SUPPORTING AND ENCOURAGING A WEAK ONE. Yes, my brother, you will have a s-e-c-o-n-d c-o-m—
What is all this? I raise myself upon my couch The sun is an hour up. Through my window I see an enquiring group, marvelling at my tardiness. My cows linger for their milking, and utter their complaints in a gentle lowing. My pet deer stand with their large wondering eyes fixed upon me, and the appearance of my face at the pane has drawn toward me my whole restless and scrabbling flock of poultry, impatient for their morning feed. I look toward the easy chair and it is empty. My celestial visitor has departed.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] Draper’s Intellectual Development of Europe.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: