Chapter 3

Gathering all together in one embrace; the whole race of man, one undivided family. Its divine "Trinity" is Evolution, Progress, Liberty. Many minds reject this assumption of facts, because of the necessity which a recognition of them would involve for a readjustment of mental processes, and religious beliefs affecting their daily experience.

HEAVEN.

Millions of enfranchised souls pass from earth life and find the spirit world--the "Summerland"--a Heaven, and stay therein for vast lengths of time. The change from this life of toil, and misery to an existence of rest from all pain and sorrow of earthly existence is really Heaven enough for the average human mind. A place of beautiful surroundings, where everything necessary for their comfort is furnished them, without money and without price and, best of all, where they no longer fear being grabbed up and punished by the devil for their sins of ignorance committed when in the body. It is not possible for us, plunged, as we all are, into the vortex of this difficult existence, to realize what all this means to the world-weary. If one shall halt by the way, or fall aside from the great unending procession nothing stops. The terrible, tumultuous waves of humanity roll on, and the lost are not missed or mourned for, save by the few that were responsible for their coming, or for the awful lack of help and tendance that made them failures in the battle of life.

The great army of the commonplace, the neither positively good nor the very bad, is the largest class of all humanity. The most pestiferous and difficult to adjust to the law of progress and advancement. Hold one of them out of hell by the hair of the head, and when he is let go he only drops further in, and nothing teaches him but the "slings and arrows" of misfortune, and every dreadful experience that can be handed out to him. Much of this almost universally deplorable condition--it may be the whole of it--has been induced by false, unreasonable religious teachings. The human mind needs every inducement to effort to overcome its natural inertia instead of being put to sleep by promises of being exempt from all responsibility connected with its final redemption.

NATURE SPIRITS.

The "dwellers at the threshold" are the individualized entities of the elements of nature. Air, fire, earth depths, and seas. These belong to the domain of nature, pure and simple, and are met and controlled by the affinities of the chemicals of the material, physical organization of the individual. The most potent of these leading in the degree of material success to be achieved in dealing with material life.

Money getting in the mines, earth depths. All manufactories that require raging and continuous flame; ships to sail, and conquer water spirits; electrical and etherial forces that move in the air currents. These are the soulless, irresponsible "goblins" and "gnomes," "Fire spirits" and "_ignes fatui_" of the nether world. All human beings who progress at all have to deal with one or more of these forces. Beginning in blind ignorance, through struggle, the mortal will is developed and the mere animal man has set his foot upon a low rung of the ladder of the ascending series. Next, man has to deal with the primal races. The "Missing link" which will never be found save at the "threshold" where it combines its forces with those of man's other natural enemies, and keeps jealous watch and ward at every point of egress of the soul which seeks to enlarge its domain. Finally the will of man, with its long heredity of war with these potentialities, "at enmity with God," resisting the divine; even as these have striven to hold him in a perpetual slavery, is in its last struggle. The vast aggregation of human will, set free from the clog of the flesh, knowing nothing of the divine, seeing no guiding light, combines its forces, and commingles its powers with whatever its endless tentacles can reach. These are the powers and principalities of the air. These are the demons, "bad spirits," "devils" and "familiars" of the literature of the ages, and the presiding geniuses of many a phenomenon resulting from modern research into the mysteries of nature. As their intelligence exceeds that of the underlying grades, so just in that degree is their power increased, and used, to block the gateway that opens upon the path. Their abodes lie in outer darkness, or are illumined only by flashes of fictitious, and evanescent light from the expiring embers of earthly exhalations, and the phosphorescent gleams of decaying forms. The soul that has received an illumination from the Divine has in its keeping a talisman of power, yet none can escape these watchful ones.

"Here eyes do regard you in eternity's stillness." "Choose well; your choice is brief, but yet endless." The winged fiend, the "Appolyon," must be met and settled with at every turn of the way that leads to the kingdom which the Christ came to establish, and whose best name is "peace." In this grade, love finds no home, but its great prototype, the lust of the flesh, stealing ever the livery of heaven, lures on tender souls to their sad undoing.

By help of divine love alone can the soul journey safely onward and upward through this great concentrated, immediately-environing earth grade. It is solidly compact, sleepless and untiring, seeking ceaselessly whom it may win to its realm. It is the unrecognized longing of the soul for restoration to its divine heritage of love.

EXPERIENCE.

Experience is at the same time the surest and the slowest teacher of men. Wisdom, the crowning glory of humanity, is but an enlarged perception of man's needs, and how to meet them, based upon individual experience and observation of the effects of natural law upon all. An individual is an epitome of the world--society. Discipline is everywhere considered indispensable to the individual. Far more is it so to the world of society. Anarchy and revolution are no more efficient for the body politic than for the individual. Growth, slow and gradual, aggregation of power and wisdom through the education and enlightenment of its individual members, is the only safe and sure way to permanency and enduring life.

SPIRITUALISM.

In Spiritualism alone is to be found an expression of the religion of Jesus of Nazereth. It is truly democratic, giving to saint and sinner alike both here, in this life, and after death, an opportunity for redemption. Its first mission to the world is the proof it gives of a continued existence in which is still experienced all the idiosyncracies which marked the individual in earth life. This fact has either been ignored by certain classes of minds, or has been taken by them as proof positive of the hellish origin of its phenomena, whereas in this very expression of characteristic life lies its wonderful power and potency. From long-continued educational influence people out of churches, as well as inside of the influence of their superstitions, have come to idealize death, its awe-inspiring mystery and its strange variety. It is thought, by them, to be a sudden translation from a lower condition to a higher, wherein, through some divine hocus-pocus, the members of certain so-called "Evangelical" churches, no matter how worldly-minded, and selfish, or however false to their teachings they have been, or how false their lives to the divine ethics taught by the Lord, whose name they assume as their prerogative, that their through tickets to the supernal spheres are assured. It is believed that death purges them of all their sympathy with and attraction to mortal life, and that they are forever absolved from all their responsibilities, and freed from dependence upon the inter-relationships between the two conditions. Exactly the reverse is true. Multitudes of souls only begin their true living, their comprehension of life's meanings, after death has sifted them out of the ashes and lifeless embers of their mistaken ideas, or vicious indulgences. Shall these, then, be brought beneath the ban of limitless darkness, and exiled from the "many mansions" of our Heavenly Father's and Mother's house? A tiny rap, untraceable to any material source, a table moved by invisible force, a closed and locked piano skillfully played upon by unseen hands; these were the first links in an endless chain of eternal benefits pouring down from the smiling heavens upon the benighted children of earth. Again was heard "the voice as of one crying in the wilderness" of this world's marts for barter, and selfish gain; "Let him who hath ears to hear, let him hear." "The grave has lost its victory" and death is but a halt called in mercy and loving tenderness, that your weary souls may be refreshed by a draught from nature's founts and bountiful resources that you may mount upward as on the mighty wings of eagles; or discover for your wandering feet the path of rectitude and safety.

PHENOMENA.

All expressions of nature are phenomenal. Man is of all the most wonderful. A tiny spark of spirit encased in matter, by the irresistible law of progress evolving powers of brain, thought, consciousness, reason, intuition; unfolding, expanding; realizing finally his at-one-ment with his source, the cause of him--God--man immortal, illimitable. At certain points of unfoldment seemingly lost, great hue and cry from many--pin heads--who think they have discovered God, a failure. Watch out and see. Give the Lord a chance. Nothing is done with yet. In a very old hook of Hebrew history, there are recorded well-attested accounts of phenomena, which are so distinctly outside of the ordinary happenings of this material existence, that they were always recognized as being of a purely spiritual origin, method and purpose. Within the last century the same experiences have been vouchsafed to present humanity. Millions of people have attested the truth of a continuance of these same phenomena; they having taken place within the range of their own personal experience. And why not? The Creator knows what his children need in this, as well as in other ages. That human souls, the lives of human beings, persist after physical death, does not prove their eternal existence along the lines of highest soul evolution. The greatest possible unfoldment is not a gift of God. It is held only by the individual soul as the result of age-long study, and toil, through manifold embodiments, long-continued self renunciation, and sacrifices not yet known or understood. Its initiations are endless; its revelations of the infinite law are, at times, too seemingly trifling for recognition; but as the lapidary leaves no facet of the jewel uncut and unpolished, so the guardians--the guides and teachers of the candidates for spiritual unfoldment--omit no least lesson or discipline that can aid in perfecting the individual soul.

It is the meanest kind of bosh teaching people that there will be eternal punishment for ignorant wrong-doings in this short kindergarten experience of life, making them believe their last chance for anything better is gone forever. Half the sins that are committed here anyway are either sins against the conventionalities, or they have been hatched up by some unsext priests and have nothing to do with the case. Besides, the sins of the body in many a poor mortal are left with the body in the grave.

The ages, the aeons required for the perfecting of any given soul, are known only to its Creator, or how great must be the accumulation of ages ere the whole human family--the children of God--will respond to the eternal roll-call that shall usher in the redeemed of every land and clime, not one "Lost," or gone astray. Those who have stepped forth into the arena of this present manifestation of life on this planet, have, each in their place, their responsibility and task, to keep alight the beacons of reason, and intelligence, as guides to truth, and to pander never to the powers of ignorance and superstition, however manifested by Church or State.

MEDIUMSHIP.

Mediumship today is clearly an abnormalism. But the history of the world has been that the so-called abnormalisms of one generation are the accepted, commonplace realisms of the succeeding types. Sight, the desire to see, existed first in the mind of the unfolding human brain; the will joined its forces to aid the work of liberation and the visual nerves began to form and grow. The imprisoned soul within kept pushing on, until gradually the beautiful, complex organ of sight was evoluted and the soul possessed a window through which it could see things for itself. The evolutionary processes attending mediumship quite correspond to this physical process. Man demands to know concerning those things that have long been hid, and to understand the "deep things of God," and so the soul of him is saying, "I, too, have visions unspeakable," and closing up the avenues of his external sight, he sees and apprehends truth, a light upon his path, of which in his previous, darkened state he had never conceived. The intuitional faculties being the true interpreters of the immortal soul, are capable of unlimited cultivation, unlike those of the intellect which have always the limitations of cerebral organization. These powers are as limitless as God, and only through the expansion and recognized rational, practical use and application of these faculties--now sometimes falsely named supernatural--can the human race pass out from its present environment of darkness, and crime, and reaching upward expand into a saving knowledge of the truth, as made known by the Christs.

THE MIGRATIONS OF OUR RACE.

Vast numbers of times has the human race marched around this world on which we live. Each journey of the whole family has embraced a cycle of time. Each cycle has been rounded up by some great cataclysm of nature, which has left the earth desolated, in ruins, to rest from the invasions of its nomadic children.

Of the truth of these great convulsive throes of the planet we have many ancient legendary accounts. The Biblical accounts, and the irrefutable testimony of the globe itself, as recorded in the veined strata which have held their record for ages inviolably concealed, until man should finally bring to the unmasking of her secrets an intelligence clarified from the mists of superstition, and illuminated by the intuition not only of the soul, but of the intellect and reason.

THE DISCIPLINE OF LIFE.

"The mills of the gods grind always, They grind exceeding small, And with great exactness grind they all."

Their "hoppers" are too numerous to be counted. Physical pain, sorrow of many sorts and kinds, losses and crosses innumerable, unending disappointments, holding back the ambitions from all satisfactory realization of pet schemes, and finally, physical death. Not one human creature escapes. Into the hoppers they go, again and again, time after time, till the refining process is completed and the soul is fit to stand in holy and exalted presence, and to be set to do the work of the Master. Here and there some gifted soul realizes that its anguish means "growing pains." A was described as a "good man who let the Lord do anything He wanted to, to him."

The discipline of this life is hard to bear; but if people will not learn the lesson intended, here and now, they will be forced back through reembodiments until this life can teach them nothing more, and they have finally earned a right to a place in the heavens--the home of the gods--where perfect peace abides.

Men are naturally gregarious. In all phases of life they seek sympathetic comrades, or followers that they can hypnotize to do their will. They instinctively set themselves off into classes, and while this is useful as a protection from invasion, conditions in India show the evils of class-caste distinctions carried to a ridiculous extreme. The vast, surging, unyielding predatory classes on this earth consist of those who have but lately--comparatively--emerged from the animal kingdom, and have not yet been put through the mill of reincarnation times enough to rid them of their wild beast "tricks and manners," and make of them men and women fit to have around. The dreadful thing is, having to live on the same planet with them, and endure their terrible onslaughts upon the peace, and happiness of the unfolded, the civilized portions of the race. But all are of common origin. Such as they are, all have been, and such as the highly developed, educated and useful class are now, they will surely become.

HOMOGENEITY OF THE RACE.

The "dreamer" who passes through this life, satisfied with the creations of his own fancy, adds nothing to the practical needs or demands of his day and time. In all the years and ages of the intellective life of the planet, such men and women have lived and walked their little round atween the two oceans which bound the shores of birth and death.

But a truer concept of the meanings of an earthly existence has arisen in the minds of gifted humanity. The cloister gives way to the open court; the inspired ones are seeking the roads which may lead out from hazy, unproven cloud-land into the brightness of the everyday, practical life which the world must have experience of, along all lines, among all classes, high and low, ignorant and learned, ere it can dislodge the incubus of superstition, and undevelopment under which it has staggered along, through devious ways of despair and unbelief, to awaken at last to a realization of the final destiny of humanity.

To the average mind the far-off, unascertained and dim, is what is most attractive. Sending missionaries to the so-called "heathen," or speculating upon the social conditions of people supposed to be living on other planets, is of vital interest to their soaring minds. Any amount of money and good red blood of humanity, if need be, are not too large a price to pay for the gratification of these projects of unsatisfied mentality. The vast body politic, the struggling, seething masses of humanity grope and dig along their appointed ways, and the progress of the entire race of man toward an enlightened homogeneity is at a seeming stand-still. The homogeneity of the whole race in its absolute entirety, is the key-note of the life which is to be here, on this mortal earth, and thus every experience of individuals or of nations becomes of vast importance.

Every event, small or great, that serves to illustrate the possibility of fellowship, and brotherhood among the children of men, is a milestone on the way to this recognition of the homogeneity of the human race. In obedience to this law, this demand of the evolutionary forces our brave sons, and lovely daughters, are, all unconsciously to themselves, following the beckoning hand of noblest progress toward peace, and mutuality, and are allying themselves with the representatives of races and peoples hitherto considered foreign and unrelated to us, in all ways save the commercial. What bonds shall ever be forged between the nations of the earth that can supersede such ties of love and fealty to family and home?

The external aspects of these alliances, though yielding honors, and coveted opportunities, are of the smaller importance compared with the amazing factors of peace and amity between the nations that are silently and certainly working themselves out toward the beautiful exemplification of the universal Fatherhood of God, the inextinguishable sentiment of the final unity of his earthly children.

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One of the strangest phases of human life here is the almost universal resistance to improvement. But this conservative attitude is also a balance, prevents running off on tangents.

OF GOD.

It has been popularly reported that science has driven God out of the world. Science has refuted ignorant beliefs, driven superstition out of the minds of people, and opened many minds to the great facts of life as against the silly beliefs of primitive peoples. It is thought by many that the history of all God's doings is writ in the Holy (?) Book--the Bible. From the study of his character, one might fancy that "Great Jove of Mount High Olympus" was come again with only his name changed from Jove to Jehovah, for He brought with him all the "high days," and ceremonies, and every vice and delinquency, and outrage that had marked pagan rule. He gave special directions as to the killings-off of the Hitites, and the Jebusites and all the other ites. There weren't to be any Ites or any other "furriners" left alive to pester his chosen people. He went right on giving directions as to how these people were to be disposed of, making such awful suggestions, specially as to the women, that if He had not been known to be God, He might have been recognized as the Head-up Devil. It has been written: "By their fruits ye shall know them." What are the results, the "fruits," of the Jehovian dispensation? They are just exactly such as must naturally follow the teachings and influences of the spirit of hate and vengeance; the suppression of reason, holding back the progress of the race, fettering the brains of men with bonds of ignorance and superstition, a network of lies and myths. Through the dominance of selfishness and greed, the boasted freedom of men has been lost--they are slaves to a man-made religion. So science has served the highest interest of humanity in doing all it can to drive out this sort of a God, with his hell and eternal punishment, from the world. The reasoning, thinking world has outgrown such a wicked, despotic God, and is demanding quite another sort of Deity. Humanity has to be taught what it must have to equip it for its higher, nobler destiny. Justice to all in equal measure; Reason and Love must abide and work out their results, their "fruits," in human lives. The unanimous refusal of the framers of the "Constitution" of the United States to set forth therein the will of God, and his commands was wise and farseeing. It has raised up a barrier against the encroachments of every form of popular religion and has given a semblance to freedom of thought and speech.

All along the way, seers and prophets--inspired mediums--have wrought and sung of the days to come when all the earth should rejoice in peace and good will. The magnificence of their inspired and inspiring words, their immortal melodies of praise of the Creator will stand while this world lasts. The fact that his people had diviner instincts than had He whom they worshipped as God, showed that "Yahweh" was only the guardian spirit of the great and wonderful Hebrew race.

The greatest discovery of the past century, far greater than any revelation of science or knowledge of past ages, revealed by modern research is the discovery of a God of Love. Not of that sentimental expression of maudlin emotion that soon evaporates in hypocritical make-believe; but the profound recognition of the rightful consideration of every human being, regardless of race, color or belongings.

OF JESUS.

The knowledge we have gained through the study and research of earnest, truth-seeking souls who have found that all known religions have a common root--have the same basis of truth--is a proof of the value of the revelations given to the world through the teachings of our Christ.

From no other have we been given, in an externalized, practical form, those great, eternal religious principles which must forever stand as the rule and guide of human souls. No ancient philosopher had evolved to a God-likeness that enabled him to go beyond a high stand-point of moral perfection, or to give to his disciples what was most needed by the world for its comforting in the accumulating, expanding experiences incident to earthly life.