Footsteps of Israel : from Eden to the City of God

Front matter

| FROM EDEN TO THE CITY OF GOD J aya feats ae J: SEMA ay Hak Ubi iti

BOSTON PUBLIC LI BRARY

Carl C. Wzurr 1770

Contents

INTRODUCTION Mea The al Yea ee ee

PARADISE LosT; oR THE DREAM OF MATE- RIALISM ,

THE WoMAN AND THE SERPENT .

Chapter I Paradise Lost; Or The Dream Of Materialism

Shall the dust praise Thee? shall it declare Thy truth? — Ps. 30:9.

Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of ?— Isa. 2: 22, which had its rise in Abraham, the great pioneer of

monotheism, and which was later identified by the name of Israel, constitute the central feature of the history of nations, because God’s revelations were given to men through that people. These revelations, attested by ample proof, and preserved in the Hebrew sacred writings, have been, and are still today, the inspiration of enlightened progress and the foundation of regenerative religion. The footsteps of Israel, therefore, are the footsteps of humanity spiritually awakening to the facts of divinity.

“Search the Scriptures,” said Jesus, because ‘‘ they are they which testify of me,” —of “Immanuel,” “the Son of the Highest,” the hope and promise and glory of Israel, the light which was to lighten the Gentiles, the Saviour of the world. “The testimony of Jesus,” wrote St. John the Revelator, “is the spirit of prophecy ”; and the testimony of Jesus was, that he was the Son of God. The one objective of Scriptural teaching, the final goal towards which all prophecy and revelation point, is the attainment of that universal understanding of God in which Jesus’ testimony will be seen to be true, not of one individual only, but of every man.

To course and destiny of that remarkable race

Israel has a sound of sweet melody, because it was first voiced to human ears from the lips of an angel, and has never lost its heavenly tone. It is found in that quality of human thought which, like Jacob, is seeking to know God, and which is rising, however slowly and painfully, towards the consciousness of spiritual life. Israel, in its national and spiritual aspects, was the absorbing theme of the Scriptural writers. They dwelt lovingly upon the past glories and the future greatness of the people who were to be “a peculiar treasure’”’ unto the Lord, the while, in all honesty, they exposed their weaknesses and shortcomings. They pointed to the great destiny which lay before them as God’s “ witnesses” in the earth, while in humiliation they mourned over the national apostasy. They turned from the shame and sorrow of the captivity to contemplate the bright vision of | the restoration. Although Israel was to be known, in a distinguishing sense, as the people of God, the patriarchs and prophets never lost sight of the fact that the seal and confirmation of that exalted relationship lay in their fidelity to His covenants.

The Biblical records naturally begin with God. The opening sentence, in its evident intent, affirms that God is the one origin or source of all things, and that there was nothing before Him. If one would grasp the full significance of that divine revelation, which extends in an arc of glory from the first to the last verses of the Bible, marking the completed course of human redemption, ever lighting the way to the kingdom of heaven, but never mingling with the shadows of earthly delusions; if one would catch the unbroken sweep of that wonderful vision, as it came to patriarch and prophet, Messiah and apostle, he must begin his mental journey at that same point of recognition, and keep that encircling bow of divinity ever in view.

_ Although we may not yet have learned all that is involved in the first sentence of the Bible, and in St. John’s statement that “without Him was not anything made,” we should know this much, that the fatal mistake of the

PARADISE LOST 3 ages has been in relinquishing that position, and in taking the stand of the materialist, that without Him many things are made. The plain teaching of the Scriptures is, that whatever does not lead human thought to know God as the one Cause, the universal Father, must somewhere in the line of progress be discovered to be false and useless ; for the consciousness of enduring life and joy is not to be found outside the knowledge of God and of His Son.

Continuing our reading of the opening chapter of Genesis, we come to the most important statement concerning man which human language records, namely, that he was created in the image of God. Nothing greater could be said of man, and nothing less would be consistent with his Divine source. To lift humanity to the realization of this divine relationship is the plain purpose of the atonement, and the end of Biblical prophecy and revelation. This inspired utterance unites man to God beyond the possibility of separation. It declares the eternality of _ God’s likeness or manifestation, since the phrase “in the beginning,’ in relation to God and His image, is equivalent to no beginning. In the words credited to an early Christian writer, “ There certainly was not a time when God was not the Father.” ‘The creative intelligence which we name God necessarily expressed His own thoughts in man and the universe, since there was no other creative consciousness, so that what we call creation is simply the manifestation of the Creator’s own being and nature, and not an aggregation of things foreign to Himself and independent of His government.

The simple record of the six days of divine unfoldment with which the Bible opens, presents the ideal universe, the new earth and heaven, and the new man, towards the perception of which human sense has been slowly moving. ‘This first record has stood, and must so stand to the end, for that perfection of things which is to appear when time has run its full course, when the realities of being shall no longer be seen “in a glass darkly’ but face to face. Thus one may see, as in i FOOTSTEPS OF ISRAEL prophetic vision, the coincidence of the first and last chapters of the Bible, not as the bringing in of a new or unknown state, but as the awakening to the reality of things as they have always been.

In the story of the garden of Eden, which closely follows the first record of creation, but which is generally understood to be of different authorship, we find a second statement concerning man, a statement which is as ignoble as the first is glorious — namely, that he was formed of ‘‘the dust of the ground.” In the first instance man is described as the imaging forth of Deity. His nature and character, therefore, partake of and express divinity, and could have no possible affinity with evil. This second statement, however, unequivocally represents man as evil, as that which is God’s unlikeness, a creature of the earth, not of heaven, whose nature is sensual and sinful, and whose inherent depravity absolutely dissociates him from any divine origin. One cannot conceive that the likeness of God should possess an evil sense, and because it is inconceivable we should know that it is impossible.

Thus at the very outset of human history we encounter the highest and the lowest concepts of both Creator and creation. Theologians and others have presumed to declare and to teach that these contrary statements are identical, with the result that mortals have come to think of the Creator as a being of like passions as themselves, and of His image as originally but a clod of earth which later developed into a depraved mind. The very natural result of teaching the unity of these opposite descriptions of man has been to leave the first out of sight as having no present application to human salvation, and to honor the dust of the ground as the basic factor in creation. This has necessarily perpetuated a very humanized conception of Deity, and a far from helpful conception of His government as virtually subordinate to an inferior power.

“What must I do to be saved?” has been the age-long appeal of humanity. Oppressed and tormented by the bestial instincts and propensities too common to the race,

PARADISE LOST P mortals have been encouraged to submit to these conditions on the ground that they were derived from their primeval parents; but these evils were not inherited from the pure offspring of Deity. The great fear, which weighs so heavily and universally upon human consciousness that it has been named the “ king of terrors,” did not originate in the revealed truth of man’s likeness to God, but in the opposite teaching, that man is material and sinful. Believing that the earth is the universal mother of men, and that the “dust of the ground” constitutes their natural condition, it is held to be inevitable that men must return to dust again. Here, then, in the generally accepted theory that man originates and exists materially, and possesses a nature and consciousness unlike the divine, lies the necessity for a Saviour and a Deliverer, so that one need not be a prophet to see along what line human redemption must come and upon what basis it must be worked out.

The problem of salvation is, therefore, as old as humanity. From the beginning of time, according to the Hebrew calendar, we find the human mind in captivity, but a captivity so subtle as to be not recognized for what it is. Long accustomed to this “durance vile,’ disinclined to resist its vanities and weaknesses, mortals have succumbed to the argument that materiality is man’s normal and necessary state of being. From that standpoint of belief they are, by their own consent, both helpless and blind, — helpless because they will not leave their eroveling in the dust, and blind because they will not lift their eyes above the flesh and see God.

The perverted but too popular teaching, that the materiality of man’s origin and existence, which is presented in the second chapter of Genesis,is of God, and must be accepted as true and good, a teaching which has been unlawfully imposed upon the unresisting because unenlightened human mind, is the error that binds humanity to the chariot wheels of sensualism, and that entrenches evil, in the guise of nature, in the world’s centers of education. It should be obvious that this error must be reversed and the human footsteps which have been wrongly taken be retraced, before the state of being indicated in the first chapter of Genesis can be consciously attained.

Apparently, then, the redemption of mortals will not lie in their translation to some unknown and distant sphere, but in their spiritual transformation, or that process of mental correction alluded to by St. Paul, in which mortality, or the sense of life as material, is to be laid off or outgrown. In other words, it is the mental journey, going on since Adam, by which human thought has been gradually advancing towards the apprehension of the truth of being as spiritual and divine. It is apparent that the prophet Isaiah perceived these things, for instead of adopting the orthodox opinion of his day, he bravely crossed swords with the legendary theory of man’s creation from dust. ‘Cease ye from man whose breath is in his nostrils,” he said, ‘‘ for wherein is he to be accounted of?” plainly implying that such is not the kind of man which God created.

Although popular theology has generally accepted the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden as literal history, it is being viewed to an increasing extent in the light of an allegory, and we read that it was so regarded by some of the Jews of more modern times. St. Augustine believed the story to be historically true, but that it also embodied a spiritual meaning. It might be well to remind the reader at this point that the earlier books of the Bible, as we now have them, were compiled many centuries after the events recorded had taken place. In Genesis particularly we have the legends and traditions which had come down through many generations of the primitive Hebrews, and which were naturally more or less invested with the symbolism of a highly imaginative and poetic race.

The story of Eden would appear to be the earliest of these legends of which we have record. Its language is plainly metaphorical, but it is not improbable that, as in the case of other legends, it arose from something more tangible than human imagination. It is indeed highly

PARADISE LOST. A probable that about this time something transpired which so deeply stirred the human consciousness and became so strongly impressed upon the primitive thought of mankind that it became accepted as the beginning of history. It has been long supposed that that event was the creation of man from “the dust of the ground,” but modern discovery and research have exposed the fallacy of that supposition. It is now known that mortals inhabited the earth ages before the reputed time of Adam, although nothing has come down to us out of that practically unknown period to indicate any definite apprehension or perception of divinity, and without some clear recognition of the law of good, history could have no legitimate starting-point. From a careful study of this and subsequent Scripture, it would appear that what impressed itself upon the thought of mankind at this time was the discovery, in a degree at least, of the distinction between good and evil; in other words, there arose in human consciousness some dawning recognition of the law of God which unveiled the evil of evil.

How this came about is related in the story. In her encounter with a serpent that could talk, evidently intended to explain the appeal of evil as a subtle suggestion, the woman became aware that an acceptance of what it urged upon her would be inconsistent with her recognition of God’s demands. The language implies that while she perceived something of the source and nature of the temptation into which mankind had entered, she did not discover the way out of that mental captivity. The rising up in human thought of the supposition that there is something taking place outside the realm of good, something that has substance, intelligence, and power, was plainly what the serpent represented; so that what the woman from her higher standpoint of spiritual discernment discovered was, that she, in common with other mortals before and since, had been beguiled into believing what was not true. Thus interpreted the story can be readily understood as illustrating the process of evil in -the thought and experience of every human being;

whereas its literal acceptance would leave one hopelessly stranded amid irreconcilable inconsistencies and absurdities.

Eve had begun to see, in a rather vague way, what St. Paul long afterwards saw clearly, that evil and the carnal mind are one. Therefore what the inhabitants of the garden were warned against was a wrong mental state; in other words, thinking falsely about God and man. From the opening sentence, “‘ And there went up a mist,” to the final expulsion from the garden, the story presents a delineation in metaphor of that spurious claim to consciousness which the Revelator describes as deceiving “the whole world,’ which obviously means that the whole world is under the spell of the suggestion that good is not infinite and supreme, and is not, therefore, the whole of man’s life. It is perfectly certain that the world would not be deceived in accepting the testimony of the serpent if that testimony were true.

It is noteworthy that throughout this narrative the man of dust makes no claim of being godlike, nor do his speech and conduct indicate a divine origin or relationship. On the contrary, his inglorious record, right up to the present day, confirms the conclusion, beyond reasonable question, that Adam was not the man spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis as being the image of Deity. This was very clearly St. Paul’s understanding when he counseled the Ephesians to “put off . . . the old man,” for his advice would be nothing short of blasphemy if the “old man,” or the Adam man, were of the same lineage as the “new man” or son of God. While ordinary theological teaching has interpreted the story of Eden as confirming the belief that God created man materially, this story is seen upon closer and unprejudiced study to point out the evil attaching to that belief.

As described in the metaphor, the ‘ deep sleep’ which came upon Adam is undoubtedly symbolic of materialism, a view which would seem to be confirmed by some later Scriptural passages, for the story makes no reference to his awakening. This would be a serious omission, after

PARADISE LOST 9

_ such a momentous sleep, if the story were intended to be taken literally. Scholastic theology has made the rather clumsy mistake of ignoring this point entirely, for the great lesson of the allegory will be found to hinge upon it, inasmuch as it unmistakably teaches the unsubstantial nature of a so-called existence separate from God, as well as the suffering which must attend that supposition. It is evident from the narrative that Adam was not awake to the truth of creation, in which man is the image of God, but was asleep in the dust of the ground. Even now, in this twentieth century, one has but to scan the record of events to realize that, for the great mass of mankind, that sleep has remained unbroken. Mortals are still dreaming that they are awake in the coils of the serpent of materialism, and attempting to hide their nakedness from God. For that matter we need look no further than our own mental life to discover how fast asleep we are, much of the time, to the heavenly facts of good, and how easily imposed upon by the suggestions of evil. It is very plain, therefore, that the man featured in this parable was not the expression of divinity, else materialism, with all that term includes, would be the verity of being, and the human hope of redemption an eternal mockery.

That sin, in its varying phases and degrees, is inseparable from the sensuous consciousness of mortals, is a lesson which may be gleaned from this parabolic story, and which we must learn if we would rightly understand the human problem of salvation. Because there is nothing in the spiritual sense of things which men ought not to know, or which could possibly separate them from God, or lead them into a sense of condemnation and guilt, we must naturally and necessarily turn to the fleshly or material sense to find the source of mortals’ temptation and degradation. FE vil is not something that exists and operates independent of the carnal mind: it is the carnal mind; and this identifies the serpent of Eden and the devil of the later Scriptures, neither as a snake nor as a man, but as that iniquitous sense which would hold men ite) FOOTSTEPS OF ISRAEL to “the dust of the ground” as the center and circumference of their being.

It is this physical sense, not the spiritual, which closes the eyes of mortals to the things of God, the unseen things which the apostle declared are eternal, the things which “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.” But if the material eye and ear do not cognize the things “ which God hath prepared for them that love Him,” it naturally follows that these senses do not and cannot cognize the man and universe which He created, or made manifest. The only logical inference is, that what appears to physical sense, not being the “things which God hath prepared,” must be the phantasmagoria of a false and sinful sense, or the objectified thoughts of the so-called carnal mind, and not a divine creation at all. By what process of reason or fancy can one intelligently conceive of the grandeur and glory of the Infinite as appropriately expressed in a man made of dust, and a woman fashioned from a piece of his bone? Such grotesque figures may have a fitting place in the fairyland of Oz, where scarecrows talk and tin men go about, but to call them the work of God is to caricature His handiwork. Shakespeare caught a glimpse of the illusory nature of material things when he wrote,

We are such stuff As dreams are made on.

The story of Eden does not set a seal of degradation or of condemnation upon the man whom God created, as has been wrongly taught, but points to the mistake and the folly of giving evil a place in consciousness. It shows also that mortal and sensuous existence, as set forth in the creation, temptation, and demoralization of the man of dust, is of the false nature of a dream, a dream, however, of years and centuries and millenniums, and which still waits to be dispelled at the full appearing of the Christ. The psalmist of Israel who sang, “I shall be satisfied when I awake, with Thy likeness,” evidently did not look upon materiality as the truth of his being.

PARADISE LOST II

There are a number of appeals in the Scriptures to awaken. ‘Sleeper, awake, arise from the dead, and the Christ shall give thee light,’ urged the apostle. (Eph. 5:14, Twentieth Century New Testament.) But why the call to awake, if one’s mundane experiences represent the reality of his being! And why the call to arise from the dead if life inheres in matter! Nothing can be more obvious or certain than this, that if a material sense of persons and things expresses the reality of God’s creation, then men are not asleep in that sense but awake, and man’s immortality would consequently and necessarily be a myth.

Returning to the story, we find the woman and the man falling victims to the argument that evil was something they were privileged to know, and that to know it would enlarge their understanding and increase their prestige. The serpent insinuated that God had deceived them in limiting their consciousness to good alone. The bitter experience that followed apparently opened their eyes to the error into which they had been led. The fruit of this false knowledge was found to be fear and shame and suffering; and they heard, as it seemed to them, the voice of God pronouncing a curse upon the participants in this great tragedy. Henceforward, in sorrow and trouble, mortals were to struggle with their material thoughts of life, until the seed of the woman should ultimately destroy all sense of materiality.

The point of this parable is plainly not limited to ancient times. Notwithstanding the sorrows of human experience, the mistake of Adam and Eve is being repeated by mortals today. If the inhabitants of the garden had the prerogative to maintain their sense of good intact, without entering into a knowledge of evil, men and women have still the same prerogative. It is dishonest, therefore, to condemn Adam and Eve for being enticed by the serpent’s suggestions, when we are doing precisely the same thing. If evil in the year one, or at the beginning of recorded time, was the delusive belief that man’s life and intelligence are not God, Spirit, but something else, liable to change to imbecility and death, it is the same lie still, and it will continue to be so, and to impose its delusions upon men, until they acknowledge and obey only the Mind which was in Christ Jesus.

“The fruit of that forbidden tree” which; in the words of Milton, ‘brought death into the world and all our woe,’ was not an apple, or any other form of earthly fruit, but a mental'experience. It was the human partaking of or entering into a sense of being that was entirely foreign to God and His creation. St. Paul properly classified this delusive sense of things as the fleshly mind, or the mind that finds its consciousness in matter. “The carnal mind,” the apostle writes, “is enmity against God,” thus identifying materiality with the loss of paradise, and with all human error. His preceding statement, “to be spiritually minded is life and peace,” full of profound and glorious significance, reveals the all-important fact, which Christendom has largely overlooked, that paradise can be regained only as men turn from material-mindedness to spiritual-mindedness. We should maintain the classification of consciousness given in the Scripture just quoted, and no longer affirm that evil is properly any legitimate part of human knowledge.

The Bible from cover to cover isa condemnation of the carnal mind. Nowhere within its pages is the dust of the ground likened to the being of Deity or to His likeness. At no point do the sacred records endow the flesh with the qualities and substance of divinity. The influence of materiality in human experience has never disclosed the faintest trace of the heavenly, but on the contrary it has ever proved the means and the medium of evil. The serpent’s nefarious machinations in beguiling the hearts of men in this year of our Lord in nowise differ from its nefarious machinations in the garden of Eden. Submission to materialism still shuts human consciousness out of paradise, and the earth accordingly brings forth its thorns and thistles, while mortals continue to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows.

“Except a man be born again,” said Jesus, “‘ he cannot

PARADISE LOST 13 see the kingdom of God,” clearly teaching that the man of dust is not the man which came forth from God, else a second birth would not be required of him. We read also in Isaiah, ‘‘ Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind,’ —but wherefore should they not be remembered if God created them? and why the necessity for new heavens and earth if what materially appears is the truth about them? ‘“ What God doeth, it shall stand for ever,’ says the Scripture. Of a surety, the human sense of materiality, with its perpetual round of sorrow and trouble, can be nothing more substantial than the “deep sleep’? of Adam, from which Christianity, understood and made practical, is the awakening.

Chapter II

And the Lord God said unto the serpent, ...I will - put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. — GEN, 3:14, I5.

And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ. — Rev. 12:17.

up the study of Israel in its broader aspects, and

one that cannot logically be separated from the prophecies relating to the latter days, is that the movement of the human consciousness towards its ultimate freedom from evil began with woman. It was the woman in the story, not the man, who recognized the character of evil and its method of attack; therefore it was the woman, not the man, towards whom the enmity of the serpent was directed. “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed,” and then follows that first great prophecy of Scripture, which includes in itself all subsequent prophecy, that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent’s head, or, in other words, destroy the carnal mind.

In this announcement woman’s destiny, as the channel through which a redemptive knowledge of the truth is to reach mankind, is set forth in unmistakable terms. ‘This should be kept well in mind for it is the key to the ultimate fulfilment of the prophetic Word. In the story the man apparently had not awakened to any feeling of enmity towards the serpent, and would seem to symbolize that purely physical sense of being which is fully at home in the body. He represented that state of mortal thought which is too much in sympathy with materiality to discern its evil nature, or to make any sustained protest

FACT which cannot safely be overlooked in taking against its influence. On the other hand, the fact that woman first expressed that higher quality of thought which called forth the enmity of evil should not only establish her advanced moral and spiritual status, but her logical leadership in moral and spiritual reform.

One has but to read the history of nations, from the standpoint of their treatment of woman, to have this view confirmed. It will be found that the most spiritually enlightened nations are those which accord to woman the freest opportunity to express her rightful place in the universe. In the proportion that woman’s equality in all ways with man has been acknowledged and given unobstructed scope, the moral tone of the national life has invariably improved. On the other hand, other things being equal, the most benighted and spiritually unprogressive peoples are those who treat their women as inferiors. Woman’s right to fulfil her high mission has been opposed at every turn by the sensual egotism of the mortal man, expressing its evil will in despotism and slavery. Unquestionably, the only possible true democracy must include the acknowledgment of woman’s equality with man, not as a favor, but as an inherent right.

That which has stood and still stands in the way of the moral betterment of the race is the sensual apathy of the man who is “of the earth, earthy’; and after six thousand years following the Edenic prophecy, it is highly significant that the enmity of evil is still directed against the woman and her seed, against her high place in prophetic fulfilment, and her spiritual leadership in the work of bruising the serpent’s head.