Theos-Talk Archives (September 2002 Message tt00177)

Dear Dallas,

Very relevant article to our discussion on BN-study. However, you did not
post to BN-study but only here at Theos-World.

Larry

On Fri, 27 Sep 2002 17:24:02 -0700 <dalval14@earthlink.net> writes:
> Sept 27 2002
> 
> Dear Larry and Reed:
> 
> I think this will be of interest.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> LUCIFER TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY: "Greetings..."
> 
> 
> ================================
> 
> Lucifer: I # 4, Dec 1887, pp 242-51
> 
> (not H P B -- Harte? or B. Keightley ? )
> ================================
> 
> 
> LUCIFER TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, GREETING!
> Lucifer, Vol. I, No. 4, December, 1887, pp. 242-251
> 
> MY LORD PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND,
> We make use of an open letter to your Grace as a vehicle to
> convey to you, and through you, to the clergy, to their
> flocks, and to Christians generally - who regard us as the
> enemies of Christ - a brief statement of the position which
> Theosophy occupies in regard to Christianity, as we believe
> that the time for making that statement has arrived.
> Your Grace is no doubt aware that Theosophy is not a
> religion, but a philosophy at once religious and scientific;
> and that the chief work, so far, of the Theosophical Society
> has been to revive in each religion its own animating
> spirit, by encouraging and helping enquiry into the true
> significance of its doctrines and observances. Theosophists
> know that the deeper one penetrates into the meaning of the
> dogmas and ceremonies of all religions, the greater becomes
> their apparent underlying similarity, until finally a
> perception of their fundamental unity is reached. This
> common ground is no other than Theosophy - the Secret
> Doctrine of the ages; which, diluted and disguised to suit
> the capacity of the multitude, and the requirements of the
> time, has formed the living kernel of all religions. The
> Theosophical Society has branches respectively composed of
> Buddhists, Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees, Christians and
> Freethinkers, who work together as brethren on the common
> ground of Theosophy; and it is precisely because Theosophy
> is not a religion, nor can for the multitude supply the
> place of a religion, that the success of the Society has
> been so great, not merely as regards its growing membership
> and extending influence, but also in respect to the
> performance of the work it has undertaken - the revival of
> spirituality in religion, and the cultivation of the
> sentiment of BROTHERHOOD among men.
> We Theosophists believe that a religion is a natural
> incident in the life of man in his present stage of
> development; and that although, in rare cases, individuals
> may be born without the religious sentiment, a community
> must have a religion, that is to say, a uniting bond - under
> penalty of social decay and material annihilation. We
> believe that no religious doctrine can be more than an
> attempt to picture to our present limited understandings, in
> the terms of our terrestrial experiences, great cosmical and
> spiritual truths, which in our normal state of consciousness
> we vaguely sense, rather than actually perceive and
> comprehend; and a revelation, if it is to reveal anything,
> must necessarily conform to the same earthbound requirements
> of the human intellect. In our estimation, therefore, no
> religion can be absolutely true, and none can be absolutely
> false. A religion is true in proportion as it supplies the
> spiritual, moral and intellectual needs of the time, and
> helps the development of mankind in these respects. It is
> false in proportion as it hinders that development, and
> offends the spiritual, moral and intellectual portion of
> man's nature. And the transcendentally spiritual ideas of
> the ruling powers of the Universe entertained by an Oriental
> sage would be as false a religion for the African savage as
> the groveling fetishism of the latter would be for the sage,
> although both views must necessarily be true in degree, for
> both represent the highest ideas attainable by the
> respective individuals of the same cosmico-spiritual facts,
> which can never be known in their reality by man while he
> remains but man.
> Theosophists, therefore, are respecters of all the
> religions, and for the religious ethics of Jesus they have
> profound admiration. It could not be otherwise, for these
> teachings which have come down to us are the same as those
> of Theosophy. So far, therefore, as modern Christianity
> makes good its claim to be the practical religion taught by
> Jesus, Theosophists are with it heart and hand. So far as
> it goes contrary to those ethics, pure and simple,
> Theosophists are its opponents. Any Christian can, if he
> will, compare the Sermon on the Mount with the dogmas of his
> church, and the spirit that breathes in it, with the
> principles that animate this Christian civilization and
> govern his own life; and then he will be able to judge for
> himself how far the religion of Jesus enters into his
> Christianity, and how far, therefore, he and Theosophists
> are agreed. But professing Christians, especially the
> clergy, shrink from making this comparison. Like merchants
> who fear to find themselves bankrupt, they seem to dread the
> discovery of a discrepancy in their accounts which could not
> be made good by placing material assets as a set-off to
> spiritual liabilities. The comparison between the teachings
> of Jesus and the doctrines of the churches has, however,
> frequently been made - and often with great learning and
> critical acumen - both by those who would abolish
> Christianity and those who would reform it; and the
> aggregate result of these comparisons, as your Grace must be
> well aware, goes to prove that in almost every point the
> doctrines of the churches and the practices of Christians
> are in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus.
> We are accustomed to say to the Buddhist, the Mohammedan,
> the Hindu, or the Parsee: "The road to Theosophy lies, for
> you, through your own religion." We say this because those
> creeds possess a deeply philosophical and esoteric meaning,
> explanatory of the allegories under which they are presented
> to the people; but we cannot say the same thing to
> Christians. The successors of the Apostles never recorded
> the secret doctrine of Jesus - the "mysteries of the kingdom
> of heaven" - which it was given to them (his apostles) alone
> to know.1 These have been suppressed, made away with,
> destroyed. What have come down upon the stream of time are
> the maxims, the parables, the allegories and the fables
> which Jesus expressly intended for the spiritually deaf and
> blind to be revealed later to the world, and which modern
> Christianity either takes all literally, or interprets
> according to the fancies of the Fathers of the secular
> church. In both cases they are like cut flowers: they are
> severed from the plant on which they grew, and from the root
> whence that plant drew its life. Were we, therefore, to
> encourage Christians, as we do the votaries of other creeds,
> to study their own religion for themselves, the consequence
> would be, not a knowledge of the meaning of its mysteries,
> but either the revival of mediaeval superstition and
> intolerance, accompanied by a formidable outbreak of mere
> lip-prayer and preaching - such as resulted in the formation
> of the 239 Protestant sects of England alone - or else a
> great increase of skepticism, for Christianity has no
> esoteric foundation known to those who profess it.	For even
> you, my Lord Primate of England, must be painfully aware
> that you know absolutely no more of those "mysteries of the
> kingdom of heaven" which Jesus taught his disciples, than
> does the humblest and most illiterate member of your church.
> It is easily understood, therefore, that Theosophists have
> nothing to say against the policy of the Roman Catholic
> Church in forbidding, or of the Protestant churches in
> discouraging, any such private enquiry into the meaning of
> the "Christian" dogmas as would correspond to the esoteric
> study of other religions. With their present ideas and
> knowledge, professing Christians are not prepared to
> undertake a critical examination of their faith, with a
> promise of good results. Its inevitable effect would be to
> paralyze rather than stimulate their dormant religious
> sentiments; for biblical criticism and comparative mythology
> have proved conclusively - to those, at least, who have no
> vested interests, spiritual or temporal, in the maintenance
> of orthodoxy - that the Christian religion, as it now
> exists, is composed of the husks of Judaism, the shreds of
> paganism, and the ill-digested remains of gnosticism and
> neo-platonism. This curious conglomerate which gradually
> formed itself round the recorded sayings (????a) of Jesus,
> has, after the lapse of ages, now begun to disintegrate, and
> to crumble away from the pure and precious gems of
> Theosophic truth which it has so long overlain and hidden,
> but could neither disfigure nor destroy. Theosophy not only
> rescues these precious gems from the fate that threatens the
> rubbish in which they have been so long embedded, but saves
> that rubbish itself from utter condemnation; for it shows
> that the result of biblical criticism is far from being the
> ultimate analysis of Christianity, as each of the pieces
> which compose the curious mosaics of the Churches once
> belonged to a religion which had an esoteric meaning. It is
> only when these pieces are restored to the places they
> originally occupied that their hidden significance can be
> perceived, and the real meaning of the dogmas of
> Christianity understood. To do all this, however, requires
> a knowledge of the Secret Doctrine as it exists in the
> esoteric foundation of other religions; and this knowledge
> is not in the hands of the Clergy, for the Church has
> hidden, and since lost, the keys.
> Your Grace will now understand why it is that the
> Theosophical Society has taken for one of its three
> "objects" the study of those Eastern religions and
> philosophies, which shed such a flood of light upon the
> inner meaning of Christianity; and you will, we hope, also
> perceive that in so doing, we are acting not as the enemies,
> but as the friends of the religion taught by Jesus - of true
> Christianity, in fact. For it is only through the study of
> those religions and philosophies that Christians can ever
> arrive at an understanding of their own beliefs, or see the
> hidden meaning of the parables and allegories which the
> Nazarene told to the spiritual cripples of Judea, and by
> taking which, either as matters of fact or as matters of
> fancy, the Churches have brought the teachings themselves
> into ridicule and contempt, and Christianity into serious
> danger of complete collapse, undermined as it is by
> historical criticism and mythological research, besides
> being broken by the sledge-hammer of modern science.
> Ought Theosophists themselves, then, to be regarded by
> Christians as their enemies, because they believe that
> orthodox Christianity is, on the whole, opposed to the
> religion of Jesus; and because they have the courage to tell
> the Churches that they are traitors to the MASTER they
> profess to revere and serve? Far from it, indeed.
> Theosophists know that the same spirit that animated the
> words of Jesus lies latent in the hearts of Christians, as
> it does naturally in all men's hearts. Their fundamental
> tenet is the Brotherhood of Man, the ultimate realization of
> which is alone made possible by that which was known long
> before the days of Jesus as "the Christ spirit." This
> spirit is even now potentially present in all men, and it
> will be developed into activity when human beings are no
> longer prevented from understanding, appreciating and
> sympathizing with one another by the barriers of strife and
> hatred erected by priests and princes. We know that
> Christians in their lives frequently rise above the level of
> their Christianity.	All Churches contain many noble,
> self-sacrificing, and virtuous men and women, eager to do
> good in their generation according to their lights and
> opportunities, and full of aspirations to higher things than
> those of earth - followers of Jesus in spite of their
> Christianity.	For such as these Theosophists feel the
> deepest sympathy; for only a Theosophist, or else a person
> of your Grace's delicate sensibility and great theological
> learning, can justly appreciate the tremendous difficulties
> with which the tender plant of natural piety has to contend,
> as it forces its root into the uncongenial soil of our
> Christian civilization, and tries to blossom in the cold and
> arid atmosphere of theology. How hard, for instance, must
> it not be to "love" such a God as that depicted in a
> well-known passage by Herbert Spencer:
> The cruelty of a Fijian god who, represented as devouring
> the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture
> during the process, is small compared with the cruelty o£ a
> god who condemns men to tortures which are eternal. . . . .
> The visiting on Adam's descendants through hundreds of
> generations dreadful penalties for a small transgression
> which they did not commit; the damning of all men who do not
> avail themselves of an alleged mode of obtaining
> forgiveness, which most men have never heard of; and the
> effecting a reconciliation by sacrificing a son who was
> perfectly innocent, to satisfy the assumed necessity for a
> propitiatory victim; are modes of action which, ascribed to
> a human ruler, would call forth expressions of abhorrence.
> . .2
> Your Grace will say, no doubt, that Jesus never taught the
> worship of such a god as that. Even so say we Theosophists.
> Yet that is the very god whose worship is officially
> conducted in Canterbury Cathedral, by you, my Lord Primate
> of England; and your Grace will surely agree with us that
> there must indeed be a divine spark of religious intuition
> in the hearts of men, that enables them to resist so well as
> they do, the deadly action of such poisonous theology.
> If your Grace, from your high pinnacle, will cast your eyes
> around, you will behold a Christian civilization in which a
> frantic and merciless battle of man against man is not only
> the distinguishing feature, but the acknowledged principle.
> It is an accepted scientific and economic axiom to-day, that
> all progress is achieved through the struggle for existence
> and the survival of the fittest; and the fittest to survive
> in this Christian civilization are not those who are
> possessed of the qualities that are recognized by the
> morality of every age to be the best - not the generous, the
> pious, the noble-hearted, the forgiving, the humble, the
> truthful, the honest, and the kind - but those who are
> strongest in selfishness, in craft, in hypocrisy, in brute
> force, in false pretence, in unscrupulousness, in cruelty,
> and in avarice. The spiritual and the altruistic are "the
> weak," whom the "laws" that govern the universe give as food
> to the egoistic and material - "the strong." That "might is
> right" is the only legitimate conclusion, the last word of
> the 19th century ethics, for the world has become one huge
> battlefield, on which "the fittest" descend like vultures to
> tear out the eyes and the hearts of those who have fallen in
> the fight. Does religion put a stop to the battle? Do the
> churches drive away the vultures, or comfort the wounded and
> the dying? Religion does not weigh a feather in the world
> at large to-day, when worldly advantage and selfish
> pleasures are put in the other scale; and the churches are
> powerless to revivify the religious sentiment among men,
> because their ideas, their knowledge, their methods, and
> their arguments are those of the Dark Ages. My Lord
> Primate, your Christianity is five hundred years behind the
> times.
> So long as men disputed whether this god or that god was the
> true one, or whether the soul went to this place or that one
> after death, you, the clergy, understood the question, and
> had arguments at hand to influence opinion - by syllogism or
> torture, as the case might require; but now it is the
> existence of any such being as God, at all, or of any kind
> of immortal spirit, that is questioned or denied. Science
> invents new theories of the Universe which contemptuously
> ignore the existence of any god; moralists establish
> theories of ethics and social life in which the
> non-existence of a future life is taken for granted; in
> physics, in psychology, in law, in medicine, the one thing
> needful in order to entitle any teacher to a hearing is that
> no reference whatever should be contained in his ideas
> either to a Providence, or to a soul. The world is being
> rapidly brought to the conviction that god is a mythical
> conception, which has no foundation in fact, or place in
> Nature; and that the immortal part 'of man is the silly
> dream of ignorant savages, perpetuated by the lies and
> tricks of priests, who reap a harvest by cultivating the
> fears of men that their mythical God will torture their
> imaginary souls to all eternity, in a fabulous Hell. In the
> face of all these things the clergy stand in this age dumb
> and powerless. The only answer which the Church knew how to
> make to such "objections" as these, were the rack and the
> faggot; and she cannot use that system of logic now.
> It is plain that if the God and the soul taught by the
> churches be imaginary entities, then the Christian salvation
> and damnation are mere delusions of the mind, produced by
> the hypnotic process of assertion and suggestion on a
> magnificent scale, acting cumulatively on generations of
> mild "hysteriacs." What answer have you to such a theory of
> the Christian religion, except a repetition o£ assertions
> and suggestions? What ways have you of bringing men back to
> their old beliefs but by reviving their old habits? "Build
> more churches, say more prayers, establish more missions,
> and your faith in damnation and salvation will be revived,
> and a renewed belief in God and the soul will be the
> necessary result." That is the policy of the churches, and
> their only answer to agnosticism and materialism. But your
> Grace must know that to meet the attacks of modern science
> and criticism with such weapons as assertion and habit, is
> like going forth against magazine guns, armed with
> boomerangs and leather shields. While, however, the
> progress of ideas and the increase of knowledge are
> undermining the popular theology, every discovery of
> science, every new conception of European advanced thought,
> brings the 19th century mind nearer to the ideas of the
> Divine and the Spiritual, known to all esoteric religions
> and to Theosophy.
> The Church claims that Christianity is the only true
> religion, and this claim involves two distinct propositions,
> namely, that Christianity is true religion, and that there
> is no true religion except Christianity. It never seems to
> strike Christians that God and Spirit could possibly exist
> in any other form than that under which they are presented
> in the doctrines of their church. The savage calls the
> missionary an Atheist, because he does not carry an idol in
> his trunk; and the missionary, in his turn, calls everyone
> an Atheist who does not carry about a fetish in his mind;
> and neither savage nor Christian ever seem to suspect that
> there may be a higher idea than their own of the great
> hidden power that governs the Universe, to which the name of
> "God" is much more applicable. It is doubtful whether the
> churches take more pains to prove Christianity "true," or to
> prove that any other kind of religion is necessarily
> "false;" and the evil consequences of this, their teaching,
> are terrible. When people discard dogma they fancy that
> they have discarded the religious sentiment also, and they
> conclude that religion is a superfluity in human life - a
> rendering to the clouds of things that belong to earth, a
> waste of energy which could be more profitably expended in
> the struggle for existence. The materialism of this age is,
> therefore, the direct consequence of the Christian doctrine
> that there is no ruling power in the Universe, and no
> immortal Spirit in man except those made known in Christian
> dogmas. The Atheist, my Lord Primate, is the bastard son of
> the Church.
> But this is not all. The churches have never taught men any
> other or higher reason why they should be just and kind and
> true than the hope of reward and the fear of punishment, and
> when they let go their belief in Divine caprice and Divine
> injustice the foundations of their morality are sapped.
> They have not even natural morality to consciously fall back
> upon, for Christianity has taught them to regard it as
> worthless on account of the natural depravity of man.
> Therefore self-interest becomes the only motive for conduct,
> and the fear of being found out, the only deterrent from
> vice. And so, with regard to morality as well as to God and
> the soul, Christianity pushes men off the path that leads to
> knowledge, and precipitates them into the abyss of
> incredulity, pessimism and vice. The last place where men
> would now look for help from the evils and miseries of life
> is the Church because they know that the building of
> churches and the repeating of litanies influence neither the
> powers of Nature nor the councils of nations; because they
> instinctively feel that when the churches accepted the
> principle of expediency they lost their power to move the
> hearts of' men, and can now only act on the external plane,
> as the supporters of the policeman and the politician.
> The function of religion is to comfort and encourage
> humanity in its life-long struggle with sin and sorrow.
> This it can do only by presenting mankind with noble ideals
> of a happier existence after death, and of a worthier life
> on earth, to be won in both cases by conscious effort. What
> the world now wants is a Church that will tell it of Deity,
> or the immortal principle in man, which will be at least on
> a level with the ideas and knowledge of the times. Dogmatic
> Christianity is not suited for a world that reasons and
> thinks, and only those who can throw themselves into a
> mediaeval state of mind, can appreciate a Church whose
> religious (as distinguished from its social and political)
> function is to keep God in good humor while the laity are
> doing what they believe he does not approve; to pray for
> changes of weather; and occasionally, to thank the Almighty
> for helping to slaughter the enemy. It is not "medicine
> men," but spiritual guides that the world looks for today -
> a "clergy" that will give it ideals as suited to the
> intellect of this century, as the Christian Heaven and Hell,
> God and the Devil, were to the ages of dark ignorance and
> superstition. Do, or can, the Christian clergy fulfill this
> requirement? The misery, the crime, the vice, the
> selfishness, the brutality, the lack of self-respect and
> self-control, that mark our modern civilization, unite their
> voices in one tremendous cry, and answer - NO!
> What is the meaning of the reaction against materialism, the
> signs of which fill the air today? It means that the world
> has become mortally sick of the dogmatism, the arrogance,
> the self-sufficiency, and the spiritual blindness of modern
> science - of that same Modern Science which men but
> yesterday hailed as their deliverer from religious bigotry
> and Christian superstition, but which, like the Devil of the
> monkish legends, requires, as the price of its services, the
> sacrifice of man's immortal soul. And meanwhile, what are
> the Churches doing? The Churches are sleeping the sweet
> sleep of endowments, of social and political influence,
> while the world, the flesh, and the devil, are appropriating
> their watchwords, their miracles, their arguments, and their
> blind faith. The Spiritualists - oh! Churches of Christ -
> have stolen the fire from your altars to illumine their
> séance rooms; the Salvationists have taken your sacra-mental
> wine, and make themselves spiritually drunk in the streets;
> the Infidel has stolen the weapons with which you vanquished
> him once, and triumphantly tells you that "What you advance,
> has been frequently said before." Had ever clergy so
> splendid an opportunity? The grapes in the vineyard are
> ripe, needing only the right laborers to gather them. Were
> you to give to the world some proof, on the level of the
> present intellectual standard of probability, that Deity -
> the immortal Spirit in man - have a real existence as facts
> in Nature, would not men hail you as their savior from
> pessimism and despair, from the maddening and brutalizing
> thought that there is no other destiny for man but an
> eternal blank, after a few short years of bitter toil and
> sorrow? - aye; as their saviors from the panic-stricken
> fight for material enjoyment and worldly advancement, which
> is the direct consequence of believing this mortal life to
> be the be-all and end-all of existence?
> But the Churches have neither the knowledge nor the faith
> needed to save the world, and perhaps your Church, my Lord P
> rimate, least of all, with the mill-stone of £8,000,000 a
> year hung round its neck. In vain you try to lighten the
> ship by casting overboard the ballast of doctrines which
> your forefathers deemed vital to Christianity. What more
> can your Church do now, than run before the gale with bare
> poles, while the clergy feebly endeavor to putty up the
> gaping leaks with the "revised version," and by their social
> and political deadweight try to prevent the ship from
> capsizing, and its cargo of dogmas and endowments from going
> to the bottom?
> Who built Canterbury Cathedral, my Lord Primate? Who
> invented and gave life to the great ecclesiastical
> organization which makes an Archbishop of Canterbury
> possible? Who laid the foundation of the vast system of
> religious taxation which gives you £15,000 a year and a
> palace? Who instituted the forms and ceremonies, the prayers
> and litanies, which, slightly altered and stripped of art
> and ornament, make the liturgy of the Church o£ England?
> Who wrested from the people the proud titles of "reverend
> divine" and "Man of God" which the clergy of your Church so
> confidently assume? Who, indeed, but the Church of Rome! We
> speak in no spirit of enmity. Theosophy has seen the rise
> and fall of many faiths, and will be present at the birth
> and death of many more. We know that the lives of religions
> are subject to law. Whether you inherited legitimately from
> the Church of Rome, or obtained by violence, we leave you to
> settle with your enemies and with your conscience; for
> mental attitude towards your Church is determined by its
> intrinsic worthiness. We know that if it be unable to
> fulfill the true spiritual function of a religion, it will
> surely be swept away, even though the fault lie rather in
> its hereditary tendencies, or in its environments, than in
> itself.
> The Church of England, to use a homely simile, is like a
> train running by the momentum it acquired before steam was
> shut off. When it left the main track, it got upon a siding
> that leads nowhere. The train has nearly come to a
> standstill, and many of the passengers have left it for
> other conveyances. Those that remain are for the most part
> aware that they have been depending all along upon what
> little steam was left in the boiler when the fires of Rome
> were withdrawn from under it. They suspect that they may be
> only playing at train now; but the engineer keeps blowing
> his whistle and the guard goes round to examine the tickets,
> and the breaksmen rattle their breaks; and it is not such
> bad fun after all. For the carriages are warm and
> comfortable and the day is cold, and so long as they are
> tipped all the company's servants are very obliging. But
> those who know where they want to go, are not so contented.
> For several centuries the Church of England has performed
> the difficult feat of blowing hot and cold in two directions
> at once - saying to the Roman Catholics "Reason!" and to the
> Skeptics "Believe!" It was by adjusting the force of its
> two-faced blowing, that it has managed to keep itself so
> long from falling off the fence. But now the fence itself
> is giving way. Disendowment and disestablishment are in the
> air. And what does your Church urge in its own behalf? Its
> usefulness. It is useful to have a number of educated,
> moral, unworldly men, scattered all over the country, who
> prevent the world from utterly forgetting the name of
> religion, and who act as centers of benevolent work. But
> the question now is no longer one of repeating prayers, and
> giving alms to the poor, as it was five hundred years ago.
> The people have come of age, and have taken their thinking
> and the direction of their social, private and even
> spiritual affairs into their own hands, for they have found
> out that their clergy know no more about "things of Heaven"
> than they do themselves.
> But the Church of England, it is said, has become so liberal
> that all ought to support it. Truly, one can go to an
> excellent imitation of the mass, or sit under a virtual
> Unitarian, and still be within its fold. This beautiful
> tolerance, however, only means that the Church has found it
> necessary to make itself an open common, where every one can
> put up his own booth, and give his special performance if he
> will only join in the defence of the endowments. Tolerance
> and liberality are contrary to the laws of the existence of
> any church that believes in divine damnation, and their
> appearance in the Church of England is not a sign of renewed
> life, but of approaching disintegration. No less deceptive
> is the energy evinced by the Church in the building of
> churches. If this were a measure of religion what a pious
> age this would be! Never was dogma so well housed before,
> though human beings may have to sleep by thousands in the
> streets, and to literally starve in the shadow of our
> majestic cathedrals, built in the name of Him who had not
> where to lay His head. But did Jesus tell you, your Grace,
> that religion lay not in the hearts of men, but in temples
> made with hands? You cannot convert your piety into stone
> and use it in your lives; and history shows that
> petrifaction of the religious sentiment is as deadly a
> disease as ossification of the heart. Were churches,
> however, multiplied a hundred fold, and were every clergyman
> to become a center of philanthropy, it would only be
> substituting the work that the poor require from their
> fellow men but not from their spiritual teachers, for that
> which they ask and cannot obtain. It would but bring into
> greater relief the spiritual barrenness of the doctrines of
> the Church.
> The time is approaching when the clergy will be called upon
> to render an account of their stewardship. Are you
> prepared, my Lord Primate, to explain to YOUR MASTER why you
> have given His children stones, when they cried to you for
> bread? You smile in your fancied security. The servants
> have kept high carnival so long in the inner chambers of the
> Lord's house, that they think He will surely never return.
> But He told you He would come as a thief in the night; and
> lo! He is coming already in the hearts of men. He is coming
> to take possession of His Father's kingdom there, where
> alone His kingdom is. But you know Him not! Were the
> Churches themselves not carried away in the flood of
> negation and materialism which has engulfed Society, they
> would recognize the quickly growing germ of the
> Christ-spirit in the hearts of thousands, whom they now
> brand as infidels and madmen. They would recognize there
> the same spirit of love, of self-sacrifice, of immense pity
> for the ignorance, the folly, and the sufferings of the
> world, which appeared in its purity in the heart of Jesus,
> as it had appeared in the hearts of other Holy Reformers in
> other ages; and which is the light of all true religion, and
> the lamp by which the Theosophists of all times have
> endeavored to guide their steps along the narrow path that
> leads to salvation - the path which is trodden by every
> incarnation of CHRISTOS or the SPIRIT OF TRUTH.
> And now, my Lord Primate, we have very respectfully laid
> before you the principal points of difference and
> disagreement between Theosophy and the Christian Churches,
> and told you of the oneness of Theosophy and the teachings
> of Jesus. You have heard our profession of faith, and
> learned the grievances and plaints which we lay at the door
> of dogmatic Christianity. We, a handful of humble
> individuals, possessed of neither riches nor worldly
> influence, but strong in our knowledge, have united in the
> hope of doing the work which you say that your MASTER has
> allotted to you, but which is so sadly neglected by that
> wealthy and domineering colossus - the Christian Church.
> Will you call this presumption, we wonder? Will you, in
> this land of free opinion, free speech, and free effort,
> venture to accord us no other recognition than the usual
> anathema, which the Church keeps in store for the reformer?
> Or may we hope that the bitter lessons of experience, which
> that policy has afforded the Churches in the past, will have
> altered the hearts and cleared the understandings of her
> rulers; and that the coming year, 1888, will witness the
> stretching out to us of the hand of Christians in fellowship
> and goodwill? This would only be a just recognition that
> the comparatively small body called the Theosophical Society
> is no pioneer of the Anti-Christ, no brood of the Evil one,
> but the practical helper, perchance the savior, of
> Christianity, and that it is only endeavoring to do the work
> that Jesus, like Buddha, and the other "sons of God" who
> preceded him, has commanded all his followers to undertake,
> but which the Churches, having become dogmatic, are entirely
> unable to accomplish.
> And now, if your Grace can prove that we do injustice to the
> Church of which you are the Head, or to popular Theology, we
> promise to acknowledge our error publicly. But - "SILENCE
> GIVES CONSENT."
> 
> =========================================================
> BEST WISHES,
> DALLAS
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to 
> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 
> 
> 
> 


________________________________________________________________
GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO!
Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less!
Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit:
http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/.