By the same author 
 
 i. An Eastern Exposition of the Gospel of 
 Jesus according to St. John, being an 
 Interpretation thereof by the light of /nana 
 Yoga. 
 
 2. A Commentary on St. Matthew in terms of 
 
 Godly Experience (or Jn&na Yoga). 
 
 8vo, cloth, 264 and jo8 pp. respectively. Each 
 $2.00 ?iet, postpaid. 
 
 Commentaries upon St. John and St. Matthew, by Sri Parananda. 
 These two volumes are worthy of more than mere passing notice for 
 the unusual reason that they are not of merely literary value. In no 
 sense are they critical, or of the same character as the critical exegesis, 
 to which our Nineteenth Century divines have accustomed us. They 
 are, in fact, purely spiritual interpretations, as the title page of one of 
 them puts it, " By the Light of the Godly experience of Sri Parananda. ' ' 
 Both volumes are of the highest value as guides to the spiritual teach- 
 ings of a Jnana Yogi. That on St. John has still greater claim to 
 attention for its lengthy explanation of the difficult first chapter, which 
 explanation necessarily includes the whole plan of spiritual evolution, 
 with an account of the meaning of " The Word." The entire Com- 
 mentary is of the highest spiritual import. 
 
 While, as has been said, critical exegesis in no sense exists, critical 
 translation does, and the exact meaning of Greek terms is given in 
 many puzzling cases, as well as the Sanskrit equivalent. They are 
 illuminating commentaries, and the English in which they are given 
 is remarkably clear and pure." — Theosophical Quarterly. 
 
 Manchester Guardian : There are beautiful and noble things admir- 
 ably put in these brief notes. . . . Readers will find a real interest and 
 value in the book as putting in striking relief the practical realism of 
 the New Testament." 
 
 3. The Spirit of the East contrasted with the 
 
 Spirit of the West, being a lecture deliv- 
 ered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts 
 and Sciences at the opening meeting of its 
 session of 1905-1906. 
 8vo, cloth, j 2 pp. 40 cents net, postpaid.
 
 The 
 Culture of the Soul 
 
 Among 
 
 Western Nations 
 
 BY 
 
 P. Ramanathan, k.c, c.m.g. 
 
 (Solicitor-General of Ceylon) 
 
 In Greece, every Stoic was a Stoic, but in 
 Christendom where is the Christian ? 
 
 — Emerson. 
 
 Ring out the darkness of the land, 
 Ring in the Christ that is to be. 
 
 — Tennyson. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, 
 
 New York and London 
 
 Gbe •Knickerbocker prese 
 1906
 
 Copyright, 1906 
 
 Bv 
 
 Myron H. Phelps 
 
 Gbe 1?nfcfeerbocfeer press
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 It was in the spring of 1903 that the writer 
 first met Mr. Ramanathan at his home in 
 Colombo, and he had the privilege of hearing 
 from him during the ensuing year many dis- 
 courses touching the deepest questions of 
 human life. On his return to America he 
 took occasion to make known his high opinion 
 of Mr. Ramanathan as a spiritual teacher, 
 with the result that invitations to visit and 
 teach in America were sent to him by many 
 having such questions at heart, among them 
 a large number of the members of the Mon- 
 salvat School for the Comparative Study of 
 Religion. He responded to these invita- 
 tions, and has spent a number of months in 
 this country, giving many addresses before 
 the Monsalvat School, the leading universi- 
 ties and various learned societies of the 
 Eastern States. He is now upon his home- 
 ward journey. 
 
 in
 
 iv Prefatory Note 
 
 Mr. Raman£than leaves many friends in 
 America; many who have received from him 
 a new light, a new hope, and a new inspira- 
 tion, which they believe will ever continue to 
 illumine and cheer their pathway through 
 life. It was at the earnest request of some 
 of these friends, who desired to have in perma- 
 nent form a few at least of the priceless jewels 
 of wisdom which they had heard from his 
 lips, that the manuscript of this volume was 
 prepared and left with the writer of these 
 few lines to be given to the world. May it 
 carry far and wide the fruits of the profound 
 insight of the author into spiritual realities, 
 and the aroma of his sweet and gentle 
 presence. 
 
 Myron H. Phelps, 
 of the New York Bar, 
 Director of the Monsalvat School. 
 
 i East Thirty-Ninth St., 
 
 New York, May, 1906.
 
 SRlf 
 URL 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 On " Faith " or Love of God as a Prod- 
 uct of Sound Teaching i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 On Scripture and its Interpreta- 
 tion 33 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 On the Traditional Oral Interpre- 
 tation of the Scriptures, and the 
 Disastrous Consequences of its 
 Loss to Western Nations .... 57 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 On the Key of Knowledge or the 
 Fundamental Experiences of the 
 
 Sanctified in Spirit 83 
 
 v
 
 vi Contents 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 PAGE 
 
 On the Law and the Prophets of An- 
 cient Jud^a . . . 127 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 On the Teachings of the Psalmists 167 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 On the Practical Nature of the 
 Doctrines of Jesus as Regards 
 the Conversion of Self-Love into 
 Perfect Love 195
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ON "FAITH" OR LOVE OF GOD AS 
 A PRODUCT OF SOUND TEACHING
 
 Confession of Cardinal Newman that the dogmas 
 of the Church are beset with intellectual diffi- 
 culties and cannot be explained. 
 His escape from atheism and disbelief of the dogmas 
 
 through inborn faith in God. 
 Acceptance of dogmas impossible without faith in 
 
 God. 
 The wide prevalence of unbelief among Western 
 nations due to wrong interpretations of the term 
 Faith. 
 Attempted definition of Faith by ministers of the 
 
 Church considered. 
 Faith is not identical with belief, but is the attach- 
 ment or bond of love which springs from belief. 
 It is the equivalent of Sansk. bhakti and Gr. 
 
 pistis, derived from rt. bhadh, to bind. 
 It is not antecedent to, but an immediate con- 
 sequence of, belief. 
 It may be made to dawn in the heart by sound 
 teaching. 
 A man of spiritual discernment, apt to teach and 
 convince the gainsayer, is necessary to produce 
 love of God. 
 
 Example of Jesus and of St. Paul as effective 
 
 teachers. 
 " Faith cometh by hearing " (a spiritual minded 
 
 teacher) (Rom. x: 17). 
 The parable of the Sower, illustrative of the 
 truth that waxing of the love of God depends 
 upon waning of the love of the world. 
 Wrong rendering of ekballei in Matt, xiii: 52, 
 in the English version, misses the whole 
 meaning of that chapter.
 
 St. Paul's definition of pistis or Faith (Heb. xi: i). 
 
 The Evangelists' use of pistis (Matt, xxiii: 23) for 
 agape (Luke xi: 43), to denote love of God. 
 
 True meaning of the expression henotes tes pisteos 
 
 (Eph. iv: 13), rendered "Unity of faith," is oneness 
 in love. 
 
 Fellowship of the perfected spirit with the evei 
 Perfect Spirit (or God) is also expressed by the 
 formula "the Father is in me and I am in the 
 Father" (John xiv: 11). 
 
 This is "the mystery of Faith" or Godly Love, which 
 should be cherished in the heart as the central 
 doctrine of true religious life (I Tim. iii: 9). It 
 is also called "the mystery of Godliness" (ib. 
 iii: 1 6).
 
 ON "FAITH" OR LOVE OF GOD, AS A 
 PRODUCT OF SOUND TEACHING 
 
 Cardinal Newman has candidly observed 
 that he was able to save himself from the 
 perils of atheism only because he was en- 
 dowed with the needful faith in God, for, 
 said he, "every article of the Christian creed, 
 whether as held by Catholics or by Protest- 
 ants, is beset with intellectual difficulties, and 
 it is a simple fact that for myself I cannot 
 answer those difficulties" (Apologia Pro Vita 
 Sua, ch. v). He explained that the strength 
 of his belief in the existence of God was in 
 inverse ratio to his inability to prove it. 
 Were it not for this special feature of his 
 mind, he tells us that his difficulties would 
 have landed him in doubt, and that argu- 
 ments drawn only from the structure of the 
 world and the general facts of human society 
 
 5
 
 6 Soul Culture 
 
 would have led him to be an atheist, a pan- 
 theist, or a polytheist. As it was, though 
 he was born and bred in the Church of Eng- 
 land, his studies resulted in the conviction 
 that the Anglican interpretation of scripture 
 was quite erroneous; that its special beliefs 
 and practices were nowhere sanctioned in 
 antiquity; that the attempts of the theo- 
 logians to dress it up doctrinally and aesthe- 
 tically ended in the "veriest of non-entities," 
 and that it was his duty to accept the 
 Roman Catholic Church as "the oracle of 
 God." He joined that Church, but alas! 
 the oracle of God, as he himself says, did not 
 remove his difficulties as regards any of the 
 articles of the Christian creed. On his con- 
 version he was not conscious of any change, 
 intellectual or moral. To the day of his 
 death neither his learning nor his resources 
 as a prince of the Church are known to have 
 availed aught in the solution of the intellec- 
 tual obstacles of his earlier days. Feeling in 
 his heart for certain only the existence and 
 power of God, he did not allow his difficulties
 
 Faith or Love oj God j 
 
 to engender doubt or disbelief. Believing ( 
 faithful to the last, without, however, being 
 able to produce reasons for his belief, he 
 waited in patience. 
 
 How many intellectual Christians are 
 there in the world who, like Cardinal New- 
 man, notwithstanding the difficulties of the 
 dogmas of the Church, believe without 
 doubting? Very few indeed. Such gen- 
 uine believers as he have in truth no difficul- 
 ties, for difficulties, that is, obstacles to faith, 
 exist only to unbelievers. 
 
 He belonged to the class of believers whose 
 faith is innate, who have glimpses of the 
 heaven they seek. Who that is given to 
 fervent praying and to silent communion 
 with merciful Providence has not borne 
 testimony to joys which he knew not of 
 before? Is it not within the experience of 
 every one who rises above his cares and 
 worldly surroundings and, with attention 
 fixed inwards, beseeches the Divine Spirit 
 to help him on in faith and charity, in good- 
 ness and love to all, that he has quivered in
 
 8 Soul Culture 
 
 limb and faltered in accent, felt himself 
 moved to tears and calmed beyond descrip- 
 tion in the great Presence? Descending 
 from that holy region, has he not felt that 
 consciousness, purified of its worldly attach- 
 ments, is instinct with Peace? Such glimpses 
 of light and joy are assurances of the reality 
 of God. They who have experienced this 
 blissful state require no proof for belief in 
 Him. They want no reasons for such be- 
 lief, for they are spiritually -minded already. 
 If the allegiance to the church of this 
 class of believers is found to rest, not on a 
 conviction of the truth of its dogmas, but 
 upon an innate belief in God, upon a fore- 
 taste of heaven actually experienced in 
 prayer and meditation, while "waiting 
 upon" the Lord, what are other men, born 
 as Christians and bred as intellectual 
 athletes, who are not endowed with piety or 
 spiritual experience, to do? How are they 
 to overcome the obstacles which bar the 
 acceptance of Jesus and the Church? Are 
 the unbelievers not to be ministered to, are
 
 Faith or Love of God 9 
 
 they to be allowed to drift to atheism, on the 
 plea that they deserve damnation because 
 they have not been gifted with faith? A 
 brave seeker after God has recorded the re- 
 sult of her pilgrimage to an eminent divine, 
 whom she speaks of as a "learned patristic 
 scholar, full of the wisdom of antiquity." 
 The last of her difficulties was the divinity 
 of Christ, and she hoped to have them cleared 
 by the worthy doctor. 
 
 "He treated me," she says, "as a peni- 
 tent going to confession seeking the advice of 
 a director, not as an inquirer struggling after 
 truth, and resolute to find more firm stand- 
 ing ground in the sea of doubt, whether on 
 the shores of orthodoxy or of heresy. He 
 would not deal with the question of the di- 
 vinity of Christ as a question for argument; 
 he reminded me 'you are speaking of your 
 Judge'; when I pressed some question . . . 
 'it is not your duty to ascertain the truth,' 
 he told me sternly. 'It is your duty to 
 accept what the Church has laid down for 
 your acceptance. Did not the Lord promise
 
 io Soul Culture 
 
 that the presence of the Spirit should be 
 ever with his Church, to guide her into all 
 truth ? ' 
 
 '"But the fact of the promise and its 
 value are the very points on which I am 
 doubtful,' I answered. 
 
 "He shuddered. 'Pray, pray,' he said; 
 ' Father, forgive her for she knows not what 
 she says.' 
 
 "It was in vain I urged that I had every- 
 thing to gain and nothing to lose by follow- 
 ing his directions, but that it seemed to me 
 that fidelity to truth forbade a pretended 
 acceptance of that which was not believed. 
 
 '"Everything to lose? Yes, indeed you 
 will be lost for time and lost for eternity.' 
 'Lost or not,' I rejoined, ' I must and will find 
 out what is true, and I will not believe until 
 I am sure.' 
 
 '"You have no right to make terms with 
 God,' he answered, 'as to what you will 
 believe and what you will not believe. You 
 are full of intellectual pride.' 
 
 "I sighed hopelessly. Little feeling of
 
 Faith or Love o] God 1 1 
 
 pride was there in me just then, and I felt 
 that in this rigid, unyielding dogmatism 
 there was no comprehension of my difficul- 
 ties — no help for my stragglings. I rose, 
 and thanking him for his courtesy, said 
 that I would not waste his time further, that 
 I must go home and just face the difficulties 
 out, openly leaving the Church and taking 
 the consequences. Then for the first time 
 his serenity was ruffled. 
 
 "'I forbid you to speak of your disbelief,' 
 he cried ; ' I forbid you to lead into your 
 own lost state the souls for whom Christ 
 died.' 
 
 "Slowly and sadly I took my way back 
 to the railway station, knowing that my 
 last chance of escape had failed me." 
 
 This is truly a typical case, for, in the 
 words of Cardinal Newman, "what a scene, 
 what a prospect does the whole of Europe 
 present at this day, and not only Europe, 
 but every government and every civilisation 
 throughout the world, which is under the 
 influence of the European mind ? . . . . How
 
 12 Soul Culture 
 
 sorrowful is the spectacle presented to us by 
 the educated intellect of England, France, 
 and Germany." It is all drifting, he said, 
 to atheism in one shape or another. 
 
 The unbelief of the present day is due not 
 a little to the difficulties which exist as to 
 the meaning of the terms pistis, pcitho, and 
 monogenes huios which have been rendered 
 respectively "faith," "believe," and "only- 
 begotten son"; the nature and capacities 
 of the soul; the methods needful to develop 
 spirituality as distinguished from intellec- 
 tuality; the significance of Christhood; 
 and the relation which God bears to the 
 world and to souls, sanctified and unsancti- 
 fied. 
 
 As regards faith, some dignitaries of the 
 Church declare it to be a supernatural gift 
 of God which enables us to believe without 
 doubting whatever God has revealed. But 
 the numerous Anglican divines who have 
 contributed to the Lux Mundi, and who 
 profess to be responsible for that volume as 
 containing "the expression of a common
 
 I 
 
 Faith or Love of God 13 
 
 mind and a common hope," avow in distinct 
 terms that it is incapable of definition or ex- 
 planation. They say "faith robbed of its 
 habitual aids to expression is summoned to 
 show itself on the field in its own character. 
 And this is just what it never can or may 
 do. It can only reiterate, in response to the 
 demand for definition, 'faith is faith,' 'be- 
 lieving is believing.' Why then let our- 
 selves be distressed or bewildered by finding 
 ourselves reduced to this impotence of ex- 
 planation?" But yet an explanation, if 
 not a definition, has been bravely attempted 
 in the first essay, which consists of about 
 fifty pages, in the course of which Faith is 
 said to be an active principle, a source of 
 energy, a tentative probation, a fluctuating 
 effort in man to win for himself a valid hold 
 upon things that exist under the conditions 
 of eternity, an instinct of relationship, the 
 discovery of an inherent sonship; it is the 
 primal act of the elemental self, an heroic 
 and chivalrous moral venture; and they 
 sum up their exposition as follows :
 
 14 Soul Culture 
 
 " Faith, then, is from first to last a spiritual 
 act of the deepest personal will, proceeding 
 out of the central core of the being, where 
 the self is integral and whole, before it has 
 sundered itself off into divided faculties. 
 There, in that root-self, lie the germs of all 
 that appears in the separate qualities and 
 gifts — in feelings, in reason, in imagination, 
 in desire; and faith, the central activity, has 
 in it, therefore, the germs of all these several 
 activities. It has in it that which becomes 
 reason, yet it is not itself the reason. It holds 
 in it imagination. It is alive with that which 
 desires, craves, loves, yet it is not itself 
 merely an appetite, a desire, a passion. In 
 all these qualities it has its part; it shares 
 their nature; it has kindred motions; it 
 shows itself, sometimes through the one, and 
 sometimes through the other, according to 
 the varieties of human characters." It is 
 for the readers of the learned authors of 
 Lux Mundi to say whether or not this 
 exposition of Faith has "distressed" or "be- 
 wildered" them.
 
 Faith or Love oj God 1 5 
 
 May "Faith" be explained in clearer 
 terms? The crown of all faiths is faith in 
 God, which with some persons is a natural 
 inclination of the mind (as in the case of 
 Cardinal Newman), and with others a thing 
 to be acquired, like faith in any other matter. 
 The machinery of religion exists for the pur- 
 pose of not only strengthening faith in God 
 where it already exists, so as to drown by its 
 intensity the mischievous faith in the world 
 (I John v: 4), but also of creating faith in 
 Him where none exists. A religion which 
 fails to recognise this twofold duty argues 
 itself radically defective, and of this two- 
 fold duty that of ministering to unbelievers 
 is obviously the more urgent. 
 
 "Faith" is commonly supposed to be 
 identical with belief, and lexicographers 
 define those terms to mean the assent of the 
 mind to the truth of what is declared by 
 another, resting on either the manifest truth 
 of what he utters or his own authority. But 
 faith is much more than belief. // is the 
 attachment or bond of love which springs from
 
 1 6 Soul Culture 
 
 belief. My belief that railway trains ply 
 between New York and Boston does not 
 lead to any bond of love, but my belief that 
 my teacher has done me good evokes at once 
 an attachment in my mind. I allow myself 
 to be influenced by it whenever his name is 
 mentioned. I refuse to believe ill of him 
 without the surest proofs, and am ready to 
 act upon his suggestions, whether he gives me 
 his reasons or not. This love or attachment, 
 which is born of my belief in the goodness or 
 ability of a person, is the meaning of Faith. 
 It is the equivalent of the Sanskrit bhakti 
 (love of God, of spiritual guide, etc.), which 
 in Tamil lips becomes patti ; in Greek, 
 pistis (through peitlio); in Latin, fides ; 
 in English faith ; all derived from the root 
 bhadh, the fuller form of which is bhandh, 
 to bind. 
 
 This bond of love or attachment when it 
 relates to God is known as pistis, or love of 
 God, and it dawns in the heart when one 
 believes that God exists, and will help one on 
 in love and light if sought in all earnestness.
 
 Faith or Love oj God 1 7 
 
 It is not antecedent to but is an immediate 
 consequence of belief. Love of God is the 
 earliest meaning of pistis and faith, as shown 
 by the derivation of those words. It will be 
 also seen presently (p. 26) that the evangel- 
 ists have used pistis synonymously with 
 agape, which is acknowledged to mean 
 love. 
 
 The rise of faith or love of God usually 
 takes place through the instrumentality of a 
 teacher, for the truths which relate to God 
 and to the soul, till made manifest in actual 
 experience, must of necessity rest solely on 
 the authority of the person who propounds 
 them. His private character, attainments, 
 and bearing are the credentials of his author- 
 ity. Without them a mind that is not cred- 
 ulous will refuse to incline towards him. 
 Where faith or love of God is not innate it 
 manifests itself primarily as love of pupil to 
 teacher, founded upon reasons sufficient to 
 the mental calibre of the pupil. The purer 
 the life of the teacher, the greater his in- 
 sight, the more masterly his exposition, the
 
 1 8 Soul Culture 
 
 stronger will be his hold on the pupil. It 
 was by such personal qualities that Jesus 
 created in the minds of the unbelieving Jews 
 and Gentiles faith in himself and, by means 
 of that faith, faith in the God he preached. 
 The grand assurance of his words and the 
 wonderful acts he performed in the name of 
 God, his overflowing love and pure disinter- 
 estedness, his unblemished life and utter con- 
 tempt for things worldly, were the grounds 
 upon which thousands and thousands were 
 led to accept him as a true teacher, and to 
 take on trust what he taught regarding God. 
 He was eminently great at teaching. He 
 taught and preached in the cities (Matt. 
 xi: i). He taught in the temple of Jeru- 
 salem daily (Matt, xxvi: 55). He called 
 himself "teacher" (didaskalos, Matt, xxvi: 
 18), and is constantly referred to by others 
 as "teacher." He therefore had learners 
 or "disciples" (mathetai) who followed him 
 about and learned of him. He invited all to 
 "follow" him and "learn of" him, but drew 
 a broad distinction between those who were
 
 Faith or Love of God 19 
 
 "worthy" (Matt, x: 36) and not worthy 
 to follow him. 
 
 Paul too stood forth as a teacher, declar- 
 ing "faith (pistis or love of God) cometh by 
 hearing" (Rom. x: 17), that is, listening 
 intelligently to and understanding what is 
 communicated by a sanctified teacher. He 
 taught his hearers the knowledge of God 
 according to their capacities, distinguishing 
 between the worldly and the Godly, or, as he 
 said, the "carnal" (or "natural ") and the 
 "spiritual," and conveyed to each suitable 
 information, treating some as "babes in 
 Christ" (1 Cor. iii: 1) and giving them 
 "milk" or "strong meat" according to their 
 respective needs. He taught them publicly 
 and from house to house (Acts xx: 20), dis- 
 puted with devout persons and in the market 
 daily with them that met with him (ib. xvii: 
 17). He insisted that teachers of the gospel 
 should be "apt to teach" (I Tim. iii: 2), 
 "holding fast to the faithful word (or the 
 word of love), as he hath been taught, that 
 he may be able by sound doctrine to exhort
 
 20 Soul Culture 
 
 and to convince the gainsayers" (Titus i: 9), 
 and he explained that by sound (or health- 
 giving) doctrine was meant "doctrine which 
 is according to godliness" (I Tim. vi: 3), 
 that is, according to those who have become 
 one with God by sanctincation of the Spirit, 
 and not according to the conceits of those 
 who are great in book lore or worldly wis- 
 dom, for, said Paul, "without controversy, 
 great is the mystery of godliness" (I Tim. iii: 
 16). Mark the words "without contro- 
 versy": incontrovertibly, most assuredly, 
 "godliness" is a mystery, is a profound secret, 
 known only to those who by daily "waiting 
 upon" the Lord "in spirit and truth" (John 
 iv: 23), have attained oneness with Him. 
 Those who have not come to the knowledge 
 of this secret called "Unity of Faith," or one- 
 ness with God in love, are men who spoil 
 you through "philosophy and vain deceit" 
 (Col. ii: 9). A knowledge of sound doctrine, 
 or doctrine which assuredly heals the soul 
 of corruption or worldliness, is essential to a 
 true teacher.
 
 Faith or Love of God 21 
 
 Jesus was even more emphatic than Paul 
 as to the necessity of understanding what had 
 been communicated, for he said, "when 
 any one heareth the word of the kingdom 
 and understandeth it not, the evil one cometh 
 and snatcheth away that which hath been 
 sown in the heart" (Matt, xiii: 19). Al- 
 most the whole of this chapter is devoted to 
 the inculcation of the duty of not only hear- 
 ing but understanding the truths taught. It 
 opens with the parable of the sower: "Be- 
 hold, a sower went forth to sow, and as he 
 sowed some seeds fell by the wayside, and 
 the birds came and devoured them; and 
 others fell upon rocky places where they had 
 not much earth ; and straightway they sprang 
 up, because they had no deepness of earth; 
 and when the sun was risen, they were 
 scorched ; and because they had no root, they 
 withered away. And others fell upon the 
 thorns; and the thorns grew up, and choked 
 them; and others fell upon good ground, 
 and yielded fruit, some a hundred-fold, 
 some sixty, some thirty" (verses 3-8). Jesus
 
 ii Soul Culture 
 
 explained the parable as follows (see Re- 
 vised Translation of 1881): "when any- 
 one heareth the word of the kingdom, and 
 under standeth it not, then cometh the evil 
 one, and snatcheth away that which hath 
 been sown in his heart. This is he (the word) 
 that was sown by the wayside. And he 
 (the word) that was sown upon the rocky 
 places, this (rocky place) is he that heareth 
 the word, and straightway receiveth it with 
 joy, yet when persecution ariseth he straight- 
 way stumbleth. And he (the word) that 
 was sown among the thorns, this (thorn) is 
 he that heareth the word and the care of the 
 world and the deceitfulness of riches choke 
 the word, and he becometh unfruitful. And 
 he (the word) that was sown upon the good 
 ground, this (good ground) is he that heareth 
 the word and under standeth it, who verily 
 beareth fruit and bringeth forth, some a hund- 
 red-fold, some sixty, some thirty" (verses 
 19-23). Jesus then proceeded to illustrate 
 the parable of the sower by the parables of 
 the wheat tares, of the mustard seed, and of
 
 Faith or Love of God 23 
 
 the leaven, in order to show the necessity of 
 fixing the mind on and understanding clearly 
 the truth of what is taught, and by a few 
 more parables he desired to impress upon his 
 disciples that, when the doctrines he preached 
 were really understood, renunciation of the 
 world at heart woidd necessarily follow and 
 readily lead to Faith or love of Cod, for that 
 which obstructs the rise of faith in or love of 
 God is the faith in or love of the world. 1 
 
 The waxing of the love of God depends 
 indeed upon the waning of the love of the 
 world. Emphasising this great truth, one 
 of the disciples said, " Know ye not that the 
 
 1 The parable of the hidden treasure shows that 
 when the truth of the teaching is felt it must nec- 
 essarily lead to renunciation of the world at heart. 
 
 The finding of the treasure is the discovery of 
 the meaning of the teaching. Being overjoyed, 
 the finder hopes to find other treasures in the field 
 (or the kingdom of God), and for its sake he gives 
 up all his worldly possessions. 
 
 The parable of the pearl merchant emphasises 
 the truth that such renunciation is inevitable. 
 
 And the parable of the drag net is intended to 
 explain the same spiritual experience of human 
 nature.
 
 i\ Soul Culture 
 
 love of the world is enmity with God?" 
 (James iv: 4). "If any man loves the 
 world," said another disciple, "the love of 
 the Father is not in him" (I John ii: 15). 
 
 Jesus concluded his teaching for that day 
 by asking his disciples, "Have ye understood 
 all these things?" And upon their answer- 
 ing in the affirmative, he said, "therefore" 
 (meaning, since you say you understand me, 
 you will have no difficulty in seeing that) 
 every scribe (that is, every qualified follower 
 of mine) who hath been taught of the king- 
 dom is like unto a man that is master of a 
 house who throws out of (ekballei) its store- 
 room (and renounces for ever) all possessions 
 new and old. 
 
 It is not a little surprising that the trans- 
 lators of both the authorised and revised 
 versions of the Bible have rendered ekballei as 
 "bringeth forth," for such a rendering misses 
 the meaning of the whole chapter, which is 
 one of the most important in the New Testa- 
 ment, declaring as it does the great truth 
 that the "treasures" of the kingdom of God,
 
 Faith or Love of God 25 
 
 known as the "graces" and the "powers" 
 of the spirit, are not to be had until the so- 
 called treasures of worldly life have been 
 thrown away, until, as St. Paul says (Phil. 
 iii: 8), "they are all counted as dung so as to 
 win Christ." Had the translators given to 
 this word the sense of casting or throwing 
 out, as they did to ckballetai in Matt, xv: 17, 
 there would have been a better chance of 
 understanding the argument of Jesus in- 
 volved in the word "therefore" (dia touto) in 
 verse 52. As it is, no better interpretation of 
 this passage is suggested by the commenta- 
 tors than this: the man who is instructed 
 in the truths of the kingdom will produce out 
 of his stores of learning the teaching of the 
 Old Testament supplemented by the doc- 
 trines of the New Testament! And this, in 
 the face of the well-known truths that learn- 
 ing puffeth up and love edifieth (I Cor. viii: 
 1), and the wisdom of the world is foolish- 
 ness with God (I Cor. iii: 19). 
 
 Erroneous interpretations of this nature 
 arise from a want of what St. Paul describes
 
 16 Soul Culture 
 
 as "the hearing of faith" (or love) akoe 
 pisteos (Gal. iii: 2), that is, the hearing and 
 intelligent understanding of the principles 
 which relate to the development of Faith in, 
 or love of, God. A qualified teacher and a 
 discerning pupil are thus necessary for Faith, 
 where it is not innate (Rom. x: 14, 15). 
 
 Viewing Faith, not as a product of credul- 
 ity, but of effective teaching, Paul defined it 
 as "the substance of things hoped for, and 
 the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. xi: 
 1), that is, the realisation or actual experience 
 of that love towards God which was long the 
 object of our search, and the basis on which 
 the spiritual kingdom, unseen by carnal 
 eyes, is felt to be really existent. 
 
 Pistis was the religious term among the 
 ancient Greeks for love of God, correspond- 
 ing to the Sanskrit bhakti or s'raddhd. Early 
 Christians appear to have adopted that sense 
 of the word and also to have often used agape 
 in the same sense. 
 
 A comparison of the following verses from 
 the Evangelists will show beyond all doubt
 
 Faith or Love of God 27 
 
 that pistis and agape have been used synony- 
 mously by them. In his discourse on the 
 misguided life of the scribes and Pharisees, 
 Jesus is recorded in the Greek to have said, 
 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees! for 
 ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin 
 {i.e., you are careful enough to pay the taxes 
 due on the smallest garden herbs) and have 
 left unheeded the weightier matters of the 
 law, namely, the spirit of discernment 
 (krisis) (which enables one to know the true 
 object of the law) ; mercy (eleos or pity for 
 the faults, sins, or sufferings of others); and 
 love of God (pistis)" (Matt, xxiii : 23). 
 Luke's record is as follows: "Woe unto you, 
 Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and 
 every herb, and pass over (i.e., do not mind, 
 do not care to cultivate) the spirit of discern- 
 ment (krisis) and the love (agape) of God" 
 (Luke xi: 42). Thus we see that the Evan- 
 gelists have used pistis for agape. And in 
 Jesus' forecast of the events that were to 
 happen in the years following his crucifixion 
 occurs this passage: "Because iniquity shall
 
 28 Soul Culture 
 
 abound, the love of God of many a man 
 (agape ton pollon) will shrink, but he that 
 standeth firm to the end, the same shall be 
 saved" (Matt, xxiv: 12, 13). And as love of 
 God and love of neighbour are, as explained 
 by Jesus in Matt, xxii: 39, similar in sub- 
 stance, we find agape used in connection 
 with both God and man: agapeseis ton 
 theon, love thy God, and agapeseis ion 
 plesion, love thy neighbour. 
 
 St. Paul often uses pistis for love of God, as 
 also for belief in God, and agapeior two grada- 
 tions of love, viz: love of neighbour or man 
 and love of Christ or God. In I Thes. v: 8, 
 he speaks of children of light putting on 
 pistis (love of God) and agape (love of man) 
 as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as 
 a helmet, and watching for the day of the 
 Lord (ib. v: 2). And in Eph. iv he im- 
 pressed on his disciples the duty of loving 
 one another, "forbearing one another in love" 
 (verse 2) — till we all come to a knowledge of 
 Christ (verse 13); and he amplified the same 
 truth in Eph. iii: 14-19, as follows: "I bow
 
 Faith or Love of God 29 
 
 my knees unto the Father . . . that he 
 would grant you according to the riches of 
 his glory, . . . that Christ may dwell in 
 your hearts through the way of love of God 
 (pistis), that ye, being rooted and grounded 
 in neighbourly love (agape), may be strong 
 to apprehend (with all the saints) what is 
 the breadth and length and depth and height 
 (of that love of God), and to know the love 
 (agape) of Christ which passeth knowledge, 
 that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of 
 God." 
 
 It is noteworthy that the scriptural mean- 
 ing of Faith as Love has survived in common 
 English in the expression "faithful dog." 
 
 Paul explains that Love of God (pistis) is 
 to be developed gradually out of self-love, 
 till, attaining its fullest growth, or the state 
 called Christly Love, the perfected saint 
 becomes one with God in Love — in henotes 
 tes pisteos, as he terms it (Eph. iv: 13). 
 
 Henotes tes pisteos is oneness in Godly 
 love. If the rendering of the Septuagint 
 translators, namely, "unity of faith," is to
 
 30 Soul Culture 
 
 stand, it should be understood as meaning 
 oneness of the perfected spirit with the ever 
 Perfect Spirit or God, in regard to love. 
 There is oneness, not in power, but only in 
 love or peace. Endeavour, said St. Paul, 
 to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of 
 peace, meaning thereby that oneness of the 
 perfected spirit with God is attainable by the 
 love-bond called peace (Eph. iv: 3). 
 
 Henotes tes piste os, or at-one-ment with 
 God in love, is a great spiritual experience 
 realisable in earthly life by due culture of the 
 spirit or soul up to its utmost growth, and is 
 known to the Sages of India as dtma pilranam 
 (spiritual fulness), and to the Sages of Judaea 
 as pleroma iou Christou (fulness of Christ; 
 Eph. iv: 13). It is only in this state of 
 Perfect Love, as Jesus called it in the Sermon 
 on the Mount (Matt, v: 48), that complete 
 fellowship with God (I John iii, Phil, ii: 6) 
 or unity is possible. 
 
 The development of love to its full matur- 
 ity is spoken of by St. Paul as the formation 
 of Christ in man (Gal. iv: 19), as the putting
 
 Faith or Love oj God 3 1 
 
 on of the New Man, evolved in righteousness 
 and holiness by the renewal or remodelling 
 of the mind (Eph. iv: 23, 24), that is, by- 
 altering erroneous modes of thought and 
 guiding oneself by the principles of eternal 
 life. 
 
 St. Paul speaks of the development of the 
 soul or spirit to its full maturity {helikia, 
 Eph. iv: 13) called Christhood or Messiah- 
 ship, as a mystery, the mystery of Christ in 
 man (Col. i: 27); and of the oneness of 
 Christ (or the perfected spirit) with the ever 
 Perfect Spirit called God, as a mystery also, 
 the mystery of God and Christ (Col. ii: 2). 
 
 This mysterious fellowship in actual ex- 
 perience was denoted by Jesus by the words 
 "I (the perfected son) am in the Father, and 
 the Father is in me" (John xiv: 11). It is 
 co-existence in indivisible union. Owing 
 to the union being intimate and inseparable, 
 he said on another occasion, "I and the 
 Father are one" (John x: 30). Those happy 
 expressions convey the deep truth that the 
 Perfected Spirit enters into union with the
 
 32 Soul Culture 
 
 ever Perfect Spirit and remains in insepara- 
 ble fellowship with It in love and righteous- 
 ness unto eternity. 
 
 This indeed is the meaning of henotes tes 
 piste os. Henotes or unity is not in belief but 
 in love. Considering the actual growth of 
 the Spirit or Soul, and the exact relation it 
 bears to God (as certified by those who have 
 attained its fullest growth and entered into 
 indivisible union with God), and remember- 
 ing also the fact that pistis has been used by 
 the Evangelists as a synonym for agape, de- 
 noting love, we ought to render henotes tes 
 piste os as Unity of Love (and not unity of 
 belief merely), meaning thereby the great 
 spiritual experience known to the perfected 
 spirits, to wit, the oneness of such spirits 
 with God in love and peace for all time. 
 
 This is "the mystery of faith" (musterion 
 tes piste os) or godly love which St. Paul 
 insisted should be cherished in the heart as 
 the central doctrine of true religious life (I 
 Tim. iii: 9). It is also called "the mystery 
 of Godliness " (ib. iii: 16).
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 SCRIPTURE AND ITS INTER- 
 PRETATION 
 
 33
 
 Difficulty of interpreting the texts of the Bible. 
 
 Is literal meaning to prevail or intended meaning? 
 
 The wresting of the Scriptures by the " unlearned" 
 
 and "unstable" (II Pet. iii: 16) began in the first 
 
 century. 
 
 Who are the "unstable " and the "unlearned"? 
 
 The exegesis of the Jewish Scriptures how guarded. 
 
 Translation of the Hebrew Bible in Greek, 
 
 called the Septuagint version, in the time 
 
 of Ptolemy Philadelphus (284-247 B.C.). 
 
 Interpretation of the hidden truths of the Bible 
 
 must be according to the meaning intended to 
 
 be conveyed by the Biblical Sages who were men 
 
 of deep spiritual experience. 
 
 Why the Sages spoke in parables. 
 
 Jesus on interpretation — "Go ye and learn 
 
 what that meaneth." 
 Philo's methods of interpretation. 
 The views of the Christian Fathers, Clement 
 and Origen, of the Catechetical School of 
 Alexandria. 
 Counter influence of the literal interpretation 
 of the School of Antioch, and the final sup- 
 pression of spiritual interpretation. 
 Proper interpretation of the Bible cannot be lost 
 so long as men of deep spiritual experience exist 
 on earth. 
 
 The comforting words of Jesus: "There is 
 nothing covered that shall not be revealed" 
 (Matt, x: 26). "Seek and ye shall find" 
 (ib. vii: 7). 
 
 34
 
 The Revelation to St. Paul (Gal. i: 11-20). 
 His teachings not received from man, but re- 
 ceived from God in Spiritual Communion. 
 Importance of holding fast to the interpretation 
 or knowledge vouchsafed to Sages in Spiritual 
 Communion. 
 Orthodoxy or Right Teaching is the teaching that 
 is consistent with the spiritual experience of 
 sanctified men. 
 
 They are "able ministers not of the letter, but 
 of the spirit " (II Cor. iii: 6). 
 Spiritual experience is the "Key of Knowledge" 
 (Luke xi: 52) or the "Keys of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven" (Matt, xvi: 19). 
 
 35
 
 SCRIPTURE AND ITS INTERPRE- 
 TATION 
 
 The determination of the true meaning 
 and scope of "Faith" in the expression 
 "Unity of Faith" does not settle the difficul- 
 ties of the intellectual unbeliever. For, 
 though with the help of that definition he 
 may feel that he has a right to linger still 
 in the Christian fold, yet must he own that 
 his desire to "have Faith" in God, that is, 
 to love and rely on God and to know God in 
 truth, cannot be gratified without sound 
 doctrine as to the nature of God, of the spirit 
 in the human body, and of the world, and as 
 to the relation which they bear to each other. 
 The Bible contains many a doctrine relating 
 to these subjects. It records the sayings 
 and doings of the Lawgivers, Prophets, and 
 Saints whose names they bear. But who 
 can interpret the texts of the Bible in the 
 sense intended by the writers? 
 
 37
 
 38 Soul Culture 
 
 When words are used to express one's 
 meaning, are such words to be construed 
 literally or according to the meaning in- 
 tended by the author? Is the literal mean- 
 ing to prevail or the intended meaning? 
 Obviously the intended meaning. But who 
 can declare the intended meaning? Ob- 
 viously those who know the speaker thor- 
 oughly, or who have lived lives precisely 
 similar to those of the speaker. A worldly 
 saying is best interpreted by a man of worldly 
 experience. Even so, a spiritual saying is 
 best interpreted by a man of spiritual ex- 
 perience. Experience indeed is the touch- 
 stone of interpretation. 
 
 The true interpretation of the Bible has 
 always been a matter of dispute from the 
 earliest times. St. Peter, referring to the 
 written documents current in his day as 
 the sayings of Jesus, or the Reminiscences 
 (memorabilia) of Jesus Christ, or the Gospel 
 of Peace, said, "according to the wisdom (or 
 spiritual experience) given unto him, Paul 
 hath written unto you, as also in all his
 
 Written Tradition 39 
 
 Epistles, ... in which are some things hard 
 to be understood, which they that are un- 
 learned and unstable wrest as they do also the 
 other Scriptures, unto their own destruction" 
 (II Peter iii: 16). 
 
 The "unstable" are those who, not being 
 established in God, know not God and have 
 no spiritual discernment; and the "un- 
 learned " are those who have not learnt at the 
 feet of those who have spiritual discernment. 
 
 The exegesis of the Jewish Scriptures was 
 carefully guarded by the Rabbis of Jerusa- 
 lem in the voluminous writings known as the 
 Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Tal- 
 mud. The earliest of these interpretations 
 was the midrash (instruction) divided into 
 legal and homiletical expositions. The 
 Halacha or legal exposition dealt with the 
 Pentateuch and deduced therefrom a collec- 
 tion of precepts, entitled Halachoth. The 
 homiletical exposition called the Hagada 
 related to the whole of the Old Testament in 
 its practical application to religious, ethical, 
 and social questions.
 
 4-0 Soul Culture 
 
 The moral and ritual rules of the Talmud, 
 which are precepts not explicitly stated in the 
 Bible, are all founded on Cabbala or tradi- 
 tion handed down from generation to genera- 
 tion. This Rabbinic system of exegesis 
 called the Cabbala (Heb. Quabbalah, tradi- 
 tionary interpretations, from Kabal, to re- 
 ceive) declared that every text of the Bible 
 was capable of a fourfold interpretation 
 denoted by the letters P. R. D. S., which 
 stood for the words Peshat (explanation), 
 Remez (hint), Danish (homily) and Sod 
 (mystery). The Rabbis said that on this 
 basis the Law was explainable in forty-nine 
 different ways. 
 
 When Jerusalem submitted to Alexander 
 the Great, in 322 B.C., he caused a great 
 number of the Jewish captives to be de- 
 ported to Alexandria, which he had newly 
 built in Egypt, and in 301 B.C. Ptolemy 
 Soter carried off many more thousands of 
 Jews for settlement in the same city. Within 
 a few years the new settlers prospered 
 vastly by intercourse with the Egyptians
 
 Written Tradition 41 
 
 and the Greeks and other foreign races who 
 flourished in Alexandria. At the request of 
 Ptolemy Philadelphus (in 284-247 B.C.), 
 who was engaged in collecting the laws of all 
 nations for the great library at Alexandria, 
 a body of most learned Jews, numbering 
 about seventy, undertook the translation of 
 the Hebrew Bible into Greek, which afterward 
 became famous as the Septuagint (lxx), 
 came into use in the synagogues, and led to 
 an outburst of Jewish literature. Copies of 
 this Alexandrian version found their way into 
 Palestine, and in the time of Jesus Christ the 
 .original Hebrew version had fallen into disuse. 
 The quotations of the Apostles of Jesus ap- 
 pear to have been made from the Septuagint. 
 One of the most cultured among the Alex- 
 andrine Jews was Philo Judseus, of the Levite 
 tribe, born in the days of Jesus. A master 
 of the literature of his nation and of that of 
 the Greeks and possessed of much spiritual 
 insight, he wrote copiously of the Jewish 
 Faith and insisted, as Jesus and St. Paul had 
 done, that the interpretation of the Bible
 
 \i Soul Culture 
 
 should be according to the meaning intended 
 by the speaker. "Thou hast hid these 
 things from the (worldly-) wise and prudent 
 and hast revealed them unto babes (or 
 the unworldly)," said Jesus in Matt, xi: 25, 
 speaking of the mysteries of the kingdom of 
 heaven, which is in us, in the spirit within 
 the body. "The cares of the world and the 
 deceptive nature of riches and desires for 
 other (worldly) things entering in, choke the 
 word of God" (Mark iv: 19). So that the 
 carnal minded "hearing, hear not, and see- 
 ing, see not, neither do they understand" 
 (Matt, xiii: 13). When, therefore, they — 
 whether priests or laymen — enter upon the 
 task of interpreting those passages in the 
 Bible which relate to spiritual experiences 
 or truths, "they are blind leaders of the 
 blind" (Matt, xv: 14), bound both to fall 
 into the ditch. Nor is it useful for the man 
 who has spiritual insight to try to communi- 
 cate the deeper experiences of the spirits to 
 one who "cannot hear," that is, who hear- 
 ing cannot understand. "Why do ye not
 
 Written Tradition 43 
 
 understand my speech ? " asked Jesus. " Even 
 because ye cannot hear my word," said he 
 (John viii: 43). "Every one of the truth 
 heareth my voice" (ib. xviii: 37). Those 
 who are fit for hearing spiritual truths are 
 the Godly minded, not the worldly ones. 
 "My sheep (i.e., the Godly minded) hear 
 my voice, and I know them, and they follow 
 me" (ib. x: 27). Others "do err," by mis- 
 understanding the words (Matt, xxii: 29). 
 and get into perilous frames of mind, be- 
 coming controversial, angry, spiteful, and 
 even murderous. "Give not that which is 
 holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your 
 pearls before swine, lest they trample them 
 under their feet, and turn again and rend 
 you," said Jesus (Matt, vii: 6). 
 
 Therefore, in addressing a promiscuous 
 gathering it is necessary to speak or write 
 in allegory, parables, or proverbs. "I shall 
 open my mouth in parables" said the Psalm- 
 ist (Ps. lxxviii: 2). So the prophet after 
 crying out " Hear, ye dcaj, and look, ye blind, 
 that ye may see " (Is. xlii: 18), and "The
 
 44 Soul Culture 
 
 eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and 
 the ears of them that hear shall hearken" 
 (Is. xxxii: 3) said in allegory, "Now will 
 I sing to my well beloved a song of my beloved, 
 touching his vineyard'' (Is. v: 1), and 
 again, "Wherefore do ye spend money for 
 that which is not bread, and your labour for 
 that which satisfieth not? Hearken dili- 
 gently unto me and eat ye that which is good 
 and let your soul delight itself in fatness" 
 (Is. lv: 2). Jesus said, "Go ye and learn 
 what that meaneth" (Matt, ix: 13): such 
 sayings as "They that are whole need not a 
 physician, but they that are sick " (ib.); 
 "Give us this day our daily bread;" "Our 
 Father which art in Heaven;" "Thy king- 
 dom come;" "I and my Father are one 
 (John x: 30);" "I am a son of God" (ib. 36). 
 "These things have I spoken unto you in 
 proverbs" (ib. xvi: 25), explained Jesus. He 
 usually taught in proverbs or parables, and 
 the disciples said unto him, "Why speakest 
 thou in parables?" And he answered "Un- 
 to you (the spiritually minded) is given
 
 Written Tradition 45 
 
 to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of 
 heaven, but to them (the worldly minded) it is 
 not given" (Matt, xiii: 10-12). 
 
 Ever faithful, Philo reproduced in his 
 works to the best of his ability this occult 
 or esoteric principle of teaching. He ex- 
 plained that the interpretation of the Bible 
 should be verbal (literal) for the illiterate 
 and the elementary in faith, and allegorical 
 for those who are mature enough in spirit 
 to crave for the inner meaning of the words. 
 
 By allegory is meant a speech or discourse 
 which conveys a meaning different from the 
 literal one (alios, other, and agoreuo, I 
 speak). 
 
 Parable (parabole), comparison, derived 
 from para, by the side of, and ballo I throw, 
 means a discourse which suggests only a com- 
 parison between two things. God and soul, 
 being purely spiritual, cannot be explained 
 sufficiently by words. No description on the 
 part of a person who has known them can 
 make another know them, even as the taste 
 of water cannot be expressed in words.
 
 46 Soul Culture 
 
 They are to be known personally and not by 
 hearsay. Therefore, Sanctified Sages, who 
 know the "Son" and the "Father" in actual 
 experience as transcending quantity and qual- 
 ity, can only say "they are like this." The 
 discourse barely reaches the subject aimed 
 at. It only indicates it without actually 
 touching it. The hearer must labor hard on 
 the lines indicated, and attain the goal in 
 actual experience. 
 
 Proverb and Parable stand alike for the 
 Hebrew work mashal. The Greek transla- 
 tors rendered mashal in the Septuagint as 
 paroimia, and the Latin equivalent of it in 
 the Vulgate is proverbiwn, meaning primar- 
 ily similitude. It is applicable to any kind 
 of simile or allegory. 
 
 Philo's esoteric interpretation is frequently 
 quoted by Clement and Origen, two of the 
 greatest of the Christian Fathers of the great 
 Didascaleion or Catechetical School of Alex- 
 andria which claimed as its founder the 
 Evangelist St. Mark. St. Clement disapproved 
 of bodily or literal (sarkikos) interpretation
 
 Written Tradition 47 
 
 and emphatically declared that "noth- 
 ing should be deduced from Scripture but 
 what is in accordance with the Divine Nature" 
 (Stromata, ii: 16). To whom is this Divine 
 Nature known but to the Sanctified in Spirit ? 
 (John x: 36.) Their spiritual knowledge is 
 obviously the truth in matters relating to 
 the Spirit. Origen taught that as man con- 
 sists of body and soul, so the words of Scrip- 
 ture relate to the visible and the invisible, 
 and that the inner (esoteric) meaning or 
 spirit of the words could not be discovered 
 unless the interpretation were made histori- 
 cally, morally, and mystically. But the 
 influence of the Catechetical School of Alexan- 
 dria was gradually shattered by the School 
 of Christians established at Antioch, the capi- 
 tal of the Greek Kings of Syria, and so at 
 last the mystic exegesis or spiritual interpre- 
 tation of the Bible perished. 
 
 But the proper interpretation of the Bible 
 cannot be lost so long as men of deep spiritual 
 experience exist on earth. The words of 
 Jesus are comforting: "There is nothing
 
 48 Soul Culture 
 
 covered that shall not be revealed, nothing 
 hid that shall not be known" (Matt, x: 26). 
 "Ask and it shall be given unto you: seek 
 and ye shall find; knock and it shall be 
 opened unto you" (ib. vii: 7). 
 
 St. Paul knocked and it was opened unto 
 him, — all the mysteries of the kingdom of 
 heaven. "God hath revealed them unto us 
 (i.e., me) by his spirit. . . . Now we (i.e., 
 I) have received not the spirit of the world, 
 but the spirit which is of God, that we might 
 know the things which are freely given to us 
 by God: which things also we (i.e., I) speak, 
 not in the words which man's wisdom (or 
 worldly experience) teacheth, but which the 
 Holy Spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual 
 things with spiritual. But the natural man 
 receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, 
 for they are foolishness unto him, neither 
 can he know them, because they are spiritually 
 discerned" (I Cor. ii: 10-14). 
 
 Thus it is clear that one who is not blessed 
 with Spiritual Discernment cannot compre- 
 hend spiritual truths, and ought therefore
 
 Written Tradition 49 
 
 to "walk after the traditions" or traditional 
 interpretation of those who have spiritual 
 discernment (II Thes. ii: 15 and hi: 6), and 
 not to exercise one's private judgment in 
 matters relating to the spirit. "Judge 
 nothing before the time until the Lord come, 
 who will bring to light the hidden things of 
 darkness and make manifest the counsels 
 of the heart" (I Cor. iv: 5), was the em- 
 phatic declaration of Paul. Mark the words, 
 "until the Lord come," not objectively, out- 
 side of the human organism, in nubibus, but 
 subjectively, as Peter explains it, "until the 
 day dawn, and the day star arise, in your 
 hearts" (II Peter i: 19). Paul impresses on 
 Christians, as an essential condition of faith- 
 ful discipleship, that they should not venture 
 to judge or criticise the Traditional Inter- 
 pretation until the finding of Christ in their 
 hearts, until by proper methods they have 
 cleansed their consciousness of every trace 
 of worldliness and made their souls as radiant 
 and pure, as "godly," as Jesus' was. Then 
 and then onlv would be made manifest "the
 
 $o Soul Culture 
 
 counsels of the heart," that is, the mysteries 
 of the spiritual side of man: then and then 
 only would they be able to "Judge," to dis- 
 cern, whether the Traditional Interpreta- 
 tion delivered to them by him and Sages like 
 him is or is not consistent with Truth. 
 
 In the teachings of the disciples of Jesus 
 which have come down to us, there is little 
 to show that the mysteries of the kingdom 
 of God were "made manifest" to them all. 
 They had heard his discourses, followed him 
 about, seen his works, and even performed 
 miracles, but as to their personal knowledge 
 of the truth taught them there is hardly any 
 evidence which may be called satisfactory 
 (cf. Acts i: 5; ii: 2-13; and Matt, vii: 22). 
 John, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," 
 stands on a different footing. He must be 
 considered more than a historian of Jesus, 
 because, like Jesus, he bears original testi- 
 mony to the kingdom of God. "The Life" 
 (called the Light of men in John i: 4) he 
 declared "was manifested and we have seen 
 It, and bear witness and show unto you that
 
 Written Tradition 51 
 
 Eternal Life which was with the Father and 
 was manifested unto us" (I John i: 2). Life 
 eternal is the unchanging "I am" or Pure 
 Spirit in man, and its glory John did behold 
 within himself, the glory of the Father, as 
 well as the glory of the Son (John i: 14), 
 identically the same in substance, being one 
 in spirit — in Unity of Faith (I Cor. vi: 17; 
 Eph. iv: 3). Speaking, therefore, from per- 
 sonal experience, John spoke almost if not 
 quite as authoritatively and uncompromis- 
 ingly as Jesus did, " Believe not every spirit" 
 (pneuma) [every man who poses as a puri- 
 fied soul, claiming to know the mysteries of 
 the kingdom] "but," said he, "try the 
 spirits whether they are of God" (I John iv: 
 1); and his Epistle contains ample instruc- 
 tions to distinguish the true from the false 
 spirit. 
 
 To return to Paul. His exposition was 
 also based on his own spiritual experience. 
 He is not known to have seen or heard Jesus 
 in life. He avows that he proclaimed the 
 truth of the Kingdom of God, not second
 
 $1 Soul Culture 
 
 hand, but as manifested to him in his own 
 consciousness. "I certify you, brethren," 
 said he to the Galatians, "that the gospel 
 which was preached of me is not after any 
 man. For I neither received it of man, 
 neither was I taught it. . . . But when it 
 pleased God, who separated me from my 
 mother's womb (that is, my soul from sensu- 
 ous life), and called me by His grace, in order 
 to reveal His Son in me, . . . immediately 
 I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither 
 went I up to Jerusalem to them who were 
 Apostles before me; but I went into Arabia 
 and returned again unto Damascus. Then 
 after three years I went up to Jerusalem to 
 see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. 
 But other of the Apostles saw I none, save 
 James, the Lord's brother. Now the things 
 which I write unto you, behold, before God 
 I lie not" (Gal. i: 11-20). Thus let into the 
 mysteries of the kingdom of God, — made to 
 realise the great spiritual experience called 
 Unity of Faith or oneness with God in love, 
 — he likened himself to a "wise master
 
 Written Tradition $$ 
 
 builder," and said simply and truly, "I 
 have laid the foundation; . . . other foun- 
 dation can no man lay than that which is 
 laid, which is Jesus Christ. . . . But let 
 every man take heed how he buildeth there- 
 upon . . . for the day shall declare it" 
 (I Cor. iii: 10, 13). He means that the foun- 
 dation which was revealed to him was identi- 
 cal with the foundation which was revealed 
 to Jesus, namely, "the son" (Matt, xvi: 16, 
 18) or the perfected Spirit in whom God 
 abides as in a temple, and through whom 
 God reveals all the principles of true life. 
 The evil of men who, "seeming to be wise in 
 this world" (I Cor. iii: 18), attempt to ex- 
 pound the doctrines or to prescribe practices 
 for the attainment of the Temple of God, 
 which is the spirit in the body, is also clearly 
 pointed out. When the day dawns, and the 
 day star arises in the heart, its light of "fire 
 shall try every man's work of what sort it 
 is: if any man's work abide which he hath 
 built thereupon, he shall receive a reward; 
 if any man's work shall be burned, he shall
 
 54 Soul Culture 
 
 suffer loss" (I Cor. iii: 15). The absolute 
 certainty of exposure of unsound doctrines 
 and practices as soon as "Unity of Faith" 
 or Godly Experience is attained, and their 
 mischievous effects on both him who pro- 
 pounds and those who adopt them, could not 
 have been more impressively declared. 
 
 The simple duty of "babes in Christ" is 
 to work according to the Traditional Inter- 
 pretation, that is, the communication made 
 to Sages by God in spiritual communion, in 
 order that by "love of the truth" (pistis 
 aletkcias) taught by the qualified teacher and 
 " sanctification of the spirit" (or complete 
 purification of the soul from its worldly 
 attachments), they may be "saved "(II Thes. 
 ii: 15), that is, healed of corruption, so as 
 to be rendered fit for fellowship with God. 
 
 According to Jesus and his Apostles, in- 
 deed according to the very nature of things, 
 no man can know whether the Traditions or 
 communications from God made to those 
 who are in fellowship with Him are consistent 
 or not with truth except after his own
 
 Written Tradition 55 
 
 "salvation," except after he himself has had 
 the great experience of Unity of Faith, or 
 at-one-ment with God in love. 
 
 The ultimate standard of Orthodoxy (right 
 teaching) is this actual experience of the 
 spirit, or complete knowledge of the spirit, 
 or full "spiritual discernment" (I Cor. ii: 14). 
 As worldly Truths are accepted on the 
 testimony of men great in the knowledge 
 of the world and tested in due course by 
 one's own experience, so Spiritual Truths 
 must be accepted at first on the testimony 
 of men great in the knowledge of the spirit, 
 and brought ultimately in the fulness of 
 time to the touchstone of one's own experi- 
 ence of the spirit. 
 
 St. Paul declares that his preaching of 
 Christ in man (Col. i: 27) is not "the tra- 
 ditions of men, after the rudiments of the 
 world" (Col. ii: 8), that is, traditions 
 founded upon the material or sensual percep- 
 tions of men. They are not "philosophy" 
 (ib.) or speculative thought, for "the wis- 
 dom of the world is foolishness with God"
 
 56 Soul Culture 
 
 (I Cor. iii: 19). He means to say that the 
 knowledge of things founded upon the reports 
 of the senses and inferences of thought is 
 utterly misleading as regards knowledge of 
 God, who transcends thoughts, who is Pure 
 Spirit. The traditions relating to the spirit 
 are traditions after Christ (Col. ii: 8), that 
 is, traditions according to those who have 
 attained the maturity of the spiritual state 
 called the Fulness of Christ (Eph. iv: 13) — 
 "doctrine which is according to Godliness" 
 (I Tim. vi: 3), that is, truths ascertained in 
 the deep spiritual communion known as 
 "Unity of Faith" or Oneness with God in 
 Spirit. This actual knowledge of God makes 
 men able interpreters, "not of the letter, but 
 of the spirit" (II Cor. iii: 6), of books of 
 Spiritual Experiences, like the Bible. Jesus 
 referred to this knowledge of the soul and 
 knowledge of God as "the Keys of the King- 
 dom of Heaven" (Matt, xvi: 19), or the 
 "Key of Knowledge" (Luke xi: 52), that is, 
 the Key called Knowledge of Truth Eternal.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 ON THE TRADITIONAL ORAL INTER- 
 PRETATION OF THE SCRIPTURES, 
 AND THE DISASTROUS CONSE- 
 QUENCES OF ITS LOSS TO 
 WESTERN NATIONS 
 
 57
 
 Jesus taught wholly by word of mouth, and his 
 traditions were not available in writing for many 
 years after his crucifixion. 
 Why such traditions were meagrely and even ob- 
 scurely committed to writing. 
 St. Paul's reference to oral and written traditions 
 
 (IIThes. ii: 15). 
 The Catholic Church's claim that the oral inter- 
 pretation is still in its custody denied by the 
 reformed churches. 
 
 Archbishop Thomson's views considered. 
 The investigations of Papias, Bishop of Hier- 
 apolis, 140 A.C. 
 The loss of oral tradition led to multiplicity of inter- 
 pretations of the written tradition. 
 Attempt of Emperor Constantine to settle a creed 
 for Christendom by a conclave of Bishops. 
 
 The first CEcumenical Council held at Nicaea, 
 
 A.C. 325, and other councils. 
 Difficulties of distinguished Churchmen with 
 regard to the dogmas. 
 Christianity converted into Churchianity by literary 
 and historical problems, full of vain "questions 
 and strifes of words" (I Tim. vi: 4). 
 Effect of these controversies on the educated intel- 
 lects of Western lands. 
 
 Rise of agnosticism, irreverence, materialism, 
 
 and atheism. 
 Wide prevalence of self-love. 
 Nature of self-love considered. 
 Self-love a menace alike to the household and 
 state. 
 
 58
 
 Dangers of education devoid of spiritual knowledge. 
 Commercial dishonesty. 
 Immorality in politics. 
 Sensationalism in literature. 
 Poverty and crime in cities. 
 Infidelity and belief in externals. 
 True goal of civilisation is love of God and love of 
 
 fellowmen. 
 Necessity for right interpretation of the Bible, so 
 as to make it a book of living spiritual force among 
 the people. 
 Practicability of such interpretation through the 
 Jivanmuktas or Jndnis of India. 
 
 59
 
 ON THE TRADITIONAL ORAL INTER- 
 PRETATION OF THE SCRIPTURES, 
 AND THE DISASTROUS CONSE- 
 QUENCES OF ITS LOSS TO 
 WESTERN NATIONS 
 
 Jesus delivered his tradition wholly by- 
 word of mouth, and so did his disciples for 
 many years after the crucifixion. Then by 
 degrees his sayings and doings were com- 
 mitted to writing meagrely and even ob- 
 scurely, lest they should be misunderstood, 
 misapplied, or despised, or should lead to 
 the injury or destruction of the bearers of 
 the traditions. " Give not that which is holy 
 unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls 
 before swine, lest they trample them under 
 their feet, and turn again and rend you," 
 said Jesus (Matt, vii: 6), knowing that it 
 was the habit of his countrymen to discredit 
 and persecute prophets and Sages from city 
 to city (Matt, v: 12, xxiii: 37). The work 
 
 61
 
 62 Soul Culture 
 
 of redemption of those who hunger and 
 thirst for Peace, when actively carried on, 
 has always involved the redeemers in danger, 
 for the simple reason that the doctrines re- 
 lating to the Sanctification of the Spirit 
 falsify the ways of the worldly-minded, both 
 teachers and the taught, who are the blind 
 leading the blind. The seeds of truth are, 
 therefore, not acceptable to them and should 
 not be given to them. It is not only Jesus 
 who suffered crucifixion, but Peter also; and 
 Paul was beheaded (A.C. 68). And as to 
 those who by native disposition or previous 
 culture are qualified to receive the truth, 
 only so much of it should be given at a time 
 as the intellectual and spiritual condition 
 of each can assimilate. Therefore did Isaiah 
 say in impressive language "the word of 
 the Lord was unto them precept upon pre- 
 cept, line upon line; here a little, there a 
 little; that they might go and fall backward, 
 and be broken and snared and taken" 
 (Isa. xxviii: 13). The necessity of "snaring" 
 those born and bred to the ways of the world,
 
 Unwritten Tradition 63 
 
 and taking them captive only gradually and 
 by a slow leavening process, did not permit 
 Paul and other masters to record openly even 
 for these spirits the Traditions relating to 
 the Kingdom of God. From such causes 
 arose the meagreness and obscurity of the 
 Scriptures. It should not be supposed that 
 the Scriptures are not part of the traditions, 
 for Paul clearly says that the traditions were 
 written and unwritten. "Stand fast and 
 hold the traditions which ye have been 
 taught, whether by word or our epistle" 
 (II Thes. ii: 15). The Scripture is the 
 written Tradition, and its necessary com- 
 plement is oral tradition. 
 
 It is maintained by the Catholic Roman 
 Church that the traditional oral interpreta- 
 tion of Scripture, "coming first from God 
 and continually taught, is in all desirable 
 ways kept alive by a body of trust- 
 worthy men successively chosen in a divine 
 or divinely appointed manner, and well 
 instructed, who are moreover protected by 
 God as a body from teaching what is wrong
 
 64 Soul Culture 
 
 or handing down unfaithfully to others the 
 doctrine committed to them" {Catholic Be- 
 lief, by the Very Rev. Dr. J. di Bruno). 
 The Protestant Sects, on the other hand, 
 deny the existence of any such oral tradition. 
 "Beyond the Bible nothing exists," said the 
 late Archbishop Thomson, of the Church of 
 England. "When Athanasius is vindicat- 
 ing (A.C. 319) against Arius the divine char- 
 acter of our Lord, it is notable that he does 
 not appeal to the traditions or the like; he 
 appeals text by text to the blessed word of 
 God. "When Thomas Aquinas, in the days 
 of a great new literature then reviving (A.C. 
 1275), has to grapple with the mighty task 
 of putting in its proper place that new litera- 
 ture, he again appeals constantly to the 
 final law and word, the Divine Books. . . . 
 So, when we come down to the present 
 moment, we are obliged to admit that, if 
 indeed it should ever happen that criticism 
 should undermine the authority of the Word 
 of God, it leaves us nothing beyond. . . . 
 The Bible is the authority of High Churchmen
 
 Unwritten Tradition 65 
 
 and Low Churchmen, the authority of every- 
 one who in the name of God preaches Christ's 
 gospel day after day. There is no other 
 ultimate authority. However we may en- 
 deavour to interpret and associate the 
 word of Scripture with other teaching, all 
 acknowledge that the Word of God sets 
 forth Christ and his nature; that it needs 
 nothing to interpret it practically in all 
 the great outlines of the Christian faith" 
 {Address to the British and Foreign Bible 
 Society, delivered at Exeter Hall on May 7, 
 1890). 
 
 It is idle to deny the difficulties of inter- 
 preting what are expressly declared in the 
 Bible to be the mysteries of the Kingdom of 
 God (Mark iv: 11), the mystery of Godli- 
 ness (I Tim. iii: 16), the hidden wisdom 
 (I Cor. ii: 7), the many hard sayings (John 
 vi: 60), proverbs (John xvi: 25) and para- 
 bles (Matt, xiii: 34, Luke viii: 8), the mys- 
 tery of the gospel of peace (Eph. vi: 15, 19), 
 the mystery of Christ in God (Col. i: 26, 
 27), or the formation of Christ in man
 
 66 Soul Culture 
 
 (Gal. iv: 19), or the mystery of the Unity of 
 Love (Eph. iv: 13), and other mysteries. It 
 is equally idle to deny oral traditions alto- 
 gether, because St. Paul refers to them 
 especially (II Thes. ii: 15; I Cor. xi: 2), and 
 Jesus' sayings were obviously not all com- 
 mitted to writing lest "dogs" and "swine" 
 should read them. It is also incorrect to 
 say that Thomas Aquinas appealed to the 
 Bible as the final law, for (as Dr. T. M. 
 Lindsay points out) this great writer, whom 
 Pope John XXII canonised, insisted that 
 "Revelation is not Scripture alone, for 
 Scripture taken by itself does not correspond 
 exactly with his descriptions ; nor is it Church 
 tradition alone, for Church tradition must so 
 far rest on Scripture. Revelation is a divine 
 source of knowledge, of which Scripture and 
 Church tradition are the channels" (Art. 
 "Aquinas," in Encyclop. Britannica). The 
 unwritten tradition, delivered by Jesus, John, 
 Paul, and others, had ceased to influence the 
 Church long before the controversies which 
 necessitated the calling of the CEcumenical
 
 Unwritten Tradition 67 
 
 councils came to a head, not because the 
 unwritten tradition never existed, but be- 
 cause it was lost. 
 
 In the first century, the Christian Church, 
 known among orthodox Hebrews as the 
 minim or Heretics, was itself split up into 
 many Heresies or Schools of Doctrines, man- 
 ifesting much hatred towards each other. 
 In the earliest decades after the Ascension 
 we see the Judaso-Christians engaged in a 
 severe conflict with the Gentile Christians, 
 owing to a complete misunderstanding of the 
 spiritual meaning of the doctrines of Jesus. 
 The oral traditions of the great Master were 
 already lost to the Judaisers. After the sepa- 
 ration of the disciples of Jesus, commonly 
 known as the Apostles of Jesus, their imme- 
 diate disciples and fellow-labourers worked 
 in different centres and were known as 
 the Apostolic Fathers, such as Barnabas (the 
 companion of St. Paul and the author of 
 the Epistles of Barnabas), Clemens Romanus 
 (the Bishop of Rome, 93-101 A.C.), Igna- 
 tius (the Bishop of Antioch, martyred 109
 
 68 Soul Culture 
 
 A.C.), Polycarp (the Bishop of Smyrna, mar- 
 tyred 1 66 A.C.), and Hermas (the author of 
 the Pastor of Hermas). Their days were 
 full of factions. The different Christian 
 Churches were holding fast to the Bible so 
 far as it had been put together, but had not 
 the Key of Knowledge to interpret truly the 
 texts which created the manifold misunder- 
 standings. Papias, the Bishop of Hierapolis, 
 who wrote a book called the Expositions 
 of the Oracles of the Lord, about the year 
 140, declares that he did his best to inves- 
 tigate the traditional interpretations of 
 Jesus by inquiring of those who had "at- 
 tached themselves to the elders" what 
 Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, 
 John, Matthew, and other disciples of the 
 Lord had delivered to them (Bishop Light- 
 foot's Apostolic Fathers, p. 527, et seq.). He 
 speaks so apologetically of the oral tradi- 
 tions which he had gathered, as to clearly 
 indicate that, even in the early part of 
 the second century, it was hopeless to at- 
 tempt to restore them. The loss of the oral
 
 Unwritten Tradition 69 
 
 exposition would of course necessitate a 
 multiplicity of "interpretations," varying 
 according to the number of factions then 
 in existence, and this is precisely what the 
 testimony of Bishop Papias establishes. 
 
 Though among the Christian sects there 
 was great misunderstanding as to the mean- 
 ing of the many mysteries of the Kingdom 
 of God, the reverence they felt for Jesus and 
 his Apostles, their firm belief in a future 
 state, their contempt for sensuousness, their 
 purity of character in private life, and their 
 constant expectation of the coming of Christ 
 and the reign of God, sorely troubled the 
 Roman government. It saw how Christ- 
 ianity thrived in spite of its edicts and 
 persecutions; how Christian martyrs march- 
 ing to the fagots that were ready to con- 
 sume them prophesied that the Saints would 
 inherit the earth ; and how in many ways this 
 new religion, spreading itself into the towns 
 and the civil and military services of the 
 Roman Empire, dared to match itself against 
 it and Judaism together.
 
 jo Soul Culture 
 
 In the third and the commencement of 
 the fourth centuries, the dissensions among 
 Christians grew to be so widespread that 
 Emperor Constantine thought it prudent in 
 the interest of general peace to bring about 
 a reconciliation, and for that purpose to con- 
 vene an assembly of ecclesiastics of every 
 rank, sect, and denomination, computed at 
 two thousand forty-eight persons, of whom 
 three hundred and eighteen were bishops 
 (Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire, III, chap, xx, p. 39). This was the 
 first (Ecumenical Council, held at Nicaea in 
 Bithynia, A.C. 325. The session lasted about 
 two months and resulted in the adoption of 
 the Nicene Creed. 
 
 From the third to the middle of the fifth 
 century the chief problem of theological 
 speculation was as regards the central doc- 
 trine itself of Christianity, namely, the person 
 of Christ and the function of Christ. Four 
 great councils attempted to solve this funda- 
 mental difficulty. They were held at Nicaea, 
 as already said, in 325; at Constantinople
 
 Unwritten Tradition 71 
 
 in 381; at Ephesus in 431, and Chalcedon 
 in 451. 
 
 The Chalcedonian Creed ranks next in 
 authority to the Apostles' Creed (Acts x: 
 36-43) and the Nicene Creed. Six hundred 
 and thirty bishops and deputies met in 
 Chalcedon, a city opposite Constantinople on 
 the Bosphorus, at the request of Emperor 
 Marcianus, in order to settle the controver- 
 sies raised on the subject of the Person of 
 Christ by the Eutychians and Nestorians. 
 The proceedings during the three weeks of 
 the council's session were so tumultuous that 
 the lay commissioners of the Emperor had 
 to urge the Church dignitaries to keep order, 
 saying that such vulgar outcries (ekboeseis 
 demotikai) were disgraceful. By a majority, 
 the Eutychian and Nestorian controversies 
 were over-ruled and a Creed adopted. 
 
 What though conclaves of learned Bishops, 
 backed by the authority of puissant Em- 
 perors, undertook to determine for Western 
 Nations what the Christian Creed should be? 
 It is admitted by some of the most sagacious
 
 72 Soul Culture 
 
 of Christian theologians to be only a formula 
 of words, difficult to understand and impos- 
 sible to realise. The great Athanasius, 
 Bishop of Alexandria, candidly confessed 
 that as often as he tried to meditate, for 
 instance, on the divinity of the Logos, 
 his efforts recoiled on themselves, and the 
 more he thought of it, the less he compre- 
 hended it (Athanasius, Tom. i, p. 808). St. 
 Augustine (A.C. 430) also owned that there 
 are more things in the Bible he did not un- 
 derstand than those he did. And we have 
 the testimony in our own days of Cardinal 
 Newman that " every article of the Christian 
 Creed, whether as held by the Catholics or 
 by the Protestants, is beset with intellectual 
 difficulties, and it is simple fact," said he, 
 "that for myself I cannot answer those diffi- 
 culties." Thus has dogma taken the place 
 of the quickening precepts of Jesus and 
 Paul. The Christianity taught by these 
 masters has been, alas, "killed " (II Cor. 
 iii: 6) by unsound interpretation, and there 
 remains now instead Churchianity , or an
 
 Unwritten Tradition 73 
 
 aggregate of different literary and historical 
 problems full of vain "questions and strifes 
 of words" (I Tim. vi: 4), wholly incapable 
 of making man wise unto salvation (II Tim. 
 iii: 15). The educated intellects of the West- 
 ern world, in full appreciation of the fact 
 that, if moral principles and the personal 
 history of the heroes of the Bible were 
 expunged from it, little would remain for 
 intelligent comprehension or practical accept- 
 ance, have agreed, some to discredit the 
 lights of the Church, others to view the sal- 
 vation preached by Jesus as an idle fancy. 
 What disastrous consequences have flown 
 from a want of sound religious knowledge 
 and belief in a future! People have become 
 steeped in worldliness, materialism, irrever- 
 ence, and atheism. 
 
 A worldly minded person is a stumbling 
 block unto himself and to every guileless 
 person. He is what St. Paul calls a Lover 
 of Self. To give the full sense of the words 
 in II Tim. iii: 2-7: "In the domestic circle, 
 the Lover of Self or self-lover pays no heed
 
 74 Soul Culture 
 
 to the voice of his natural guardians, is de- 
 void of affection for those whom he should 
 love, is unthankful, not willing to oblige, nor 
 easily pacified. Abroad, he puts on the 
 appearance of goodness without believing 
 in its virtue, is false in friendship, given to 
 belittling others, boastful of his own deeds, 
 unforgiving, scornful, much inclined to the 
 pleasures of the senses, easily urged by ex- 
 ternal influences, and led away by divers 
 desires." 
 
 A person actuated by self-love is a menace 
 alike to the household and state. Mere 
 intellectual education makes the self-lover 
 skilled in the art of doing without compunc- 
 tion what others of fine feeling are ashamed, 
 or have not the heart, to do. He is often 
 a clever rogue — great in evading detection. 
 When selfish persons take to economical life 
 and deal with the creation and distribution of 
 commodities necessary for the maintenance 
 and comfort of the body, they adulterate 
 foodstuffs, resort to mean devices in pro- 
 duction, and charge excessive prices for the
 
 Unwritten Tradition 75 
 
 articles made or carried. Others resort to 
 what is called "pooling" in America, or the 
 sweeping together of commercial interests 
 so as to form monopolies or "trusts," the 
 profits of which go to enrich them at the 
 expense of the ordinary consumer. They 
 raise and lower prices at will and care not 
 for the fate of the petty trader. Not con- 
 tent with the advantages enjoyed by them, 
 they invade the political arena and buy up 
 largely the elective power of the people. 
 They then press on all sides upon the gov- 
 ernment and endeavour to control legisla- 
 tion at their will. In the field of literature, 
 too, their baneful influence is in the ascen- 
 dant. They form the largest portion of the 
 nation, and their taste for reading is all in 
 the line of sentimental and sensational 
 amusement. Consequently, those who are 
 engaged in the production of books, maga- 
 zines, and newspapers find themselves 
 obliged to write and publish what is funny, 
 fanciful, and thrilling, to the serious neg- 
 lect of the higher life of humanity. The
 
 j 6 Soul Culture 
 
 materialism of the age has affected the very 
 teachers of spirituality. Many and wealthy 
 are the churches, and learned and eloquent 
 are the preachers, but the congregations and 
 the rulers thereof have agreed to don and 
 doff their religion with their Sunday clothes. 
 The constituted leaders of religion do not 
 appear to have a hold on the people and 
 they are all, with the exception of a few, 
 drifting to the perils of a life devoid of a 
 goal. As to the scientists, who are nobly 
 labouring in colleges and other places, their 
 discoveries have been applied to the further 
 materialisation of the country by sensuous 
 seekers of the "almighty dollar." 
 
 Spirituality may be said to be just trying 
 to live in exceptional places only, for the 
 self-lover is rampant everywhere. An un- 
 developed multitude — undeveloped in love 
 and light, undeveloped in the art of distin- 
 guishing between that which is perishable 
 and imperishable — undeveloped in spiritual 
 discernment — has been made immensely 
 powerful by the elective franchise and is
 
 Unwritten Tradition yy 
 
 rapidly disintegrating the influence for good 
 of the highest and best part of England and 
 other countries on both sides of the Atlantic. 
 In the East end of London and other poverty- 
 stricken cities of the Western world, gaunt 
 women with tangles of matted hair and wild 
 eyes move through filthy courts amidst 
 filthier men deep in drink, gibbering, and 
 cursing. When I turn from this, says a 
 cultured Englishman, speaking of England 
 in particular, and see deadly respectability 
 quaffing its wine and discussing the rise and 
 fall of stocks; when I see the struggle, the 
 fear, the envy, the profound infidelity in 
 which the monied classes live; when the 
 faces of their children come to me pleading, 
 pleading — every bit as the children of the 
 city poor — for one touch of nature; of child- 
 ren who have been stuffed with lies all their 
 lives, who have been told that they cannot 
 do without this and that and a thousand 
 things, all of which are wholly unnecessary; 
 of children who have been taught to rever- 
 ence ridicule, and sleep in unbelief and act
 
 78 Soul Culture 
 
 against all their truer instincts till their 
 young judgments are confused and their 
 finer impulses actually cease to be a guide 
 to them; when I hear and see the droning 
 and seesawing of pulpits, when the vision 
 of perfect vulgarity and commonplaceness 
 called society arises upon me with all its 
 theory of what it is to be a lady or a gentle- 
 man, of exclusiveness and of being in the 
 swim, of the drivel of aristocratic connections, 
 of drawing-rooms and animated clothes pegs; 
 when I see the sea of infidelity and of belief 
 in externals spreading among town coun- 
 cillors, cabinet ministers, members of Parlia- 
 ment, generals, judges, bishops; when I look 
 for help from the guides and see only a 
 dead waste of simpering faces, 0! England, 
 whither, strangled, tied, and bound, art thou 
 come? asks this spiritually-minded man. 
 
 Similarly situated are other countries of 
 Europe and America. Their governors find 
 themselves paralysed in the performance of 
 their duty of keeping order amidst this 
 seething selfish humanity.
 
 Unwritten Tradition 79 
 
 Are not the complex problems of western 
 civilisations due to an imperfect appreciation 
 on the part of the governors and the governed 
 as to what Progress is? Does not true Pro- 
 gress mean growth of the Spirit in Light and 
 Love? Is not Civilisation the force in- 
 tended to develop self-love into neighbourly 
 love, and neighbourly love into Christly 
 Love, or the love that would labour for 
 others unthanked and even unrecognized, 
 just as God works in the world of men for 
 their own good, unseen and caring naught 
 for their praises and abuses? What have 
 the governments of Christian countries done 
 to develop spiritual growth? Is not the 
 first step in this growth the distinction be- 
 tween the perishable and the imperishable, 
 between the body and the spirit, and what 
 book is there in the West which contains so 
 much teaching on Spiritual Discernment as 
 the Bible? Should it not be rightly inter- 
 preted and made to be a living force among 
 the people, instead of the discredited book 
 it has become?
 
 80 Soul Culture 
 
 It is earnestly submitted that though the 
 dogmas of the Church are, in the words of 
 Cardinal Newman, "beset with intellectual 
 difficulties" and are not to be explained, yet 
 the doctrines of Jesus are neither difficult to 
 understand nor inexplicable, for the simple 
 reason that he taught those who were hunger- 
 ing for Light nothing more than what he 
 actually knew as real Truth and what may 
 still be verified by similar seekers. No longer 
 should his authority be made to rest only on 
 the historical and literary problems relating 
 to the authenticity of the books of the New 
 Testament and the dogmas of the Church, 
 for then Jesus and the other Sages of Judaea 
 will continue till the end of time to be im- 
 peached. The most certain proofs of their 
 genuineness are to be found in the experi- 
 ences of those living men who have pro- 
 gressed in spirit and attained the same state 
 which they did. It is only they who can ex- 
 plain the true meaning of the words and acts 
 of Jesus. "God has made us able ministers 
 of the New Testament," said Paul, "not of
 
 Unwritten Tradition 81 
 
 the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter 
 killeth, but the Spirit giveth life" (II Cor. 
 iii: 6). Books of Spiritual Knowledge are 
 not to be interpreted by men of worldly learn- 
 ing but by men who by sanctification have 
 attained to a knowledge of God, and to 
 whom the mysteries of the Kingdom of God 
 have been laid bare. As the unwritten 
 Traditional Interpretation of the words of 
 Jesus have been lost to the nations of 
 the West, the only way of restoring the 
 "Spirit" or the true meaning of the words 
 of the Bible is to secure their interpretation 
 by "able ministers" from the East who are 
 now living, and on whom the effulgence of His 
 grace has been shed. 
 
 They are called in India Jivanmuktas (the 
 Liberated Ones) or Jndnis (Knowers of God). 
 They are the "anointed" of God. The 
 Western Nations of the world know of only 
 one Christ, but India knows of scores in each 
 generation, busy saving seekers from the 
 perils of atheism and materialism, and lead- 
 ing them to God. May they restore to
 
 82 Soul Culture 
 
 Western Nations the "Key of Knowledge" 
 (Luke xi: 52) — the Key called Knowledge 
 of God — and interpret truly the teach- 
 ings of Jesus, and the earlier Sages of 
 Judaea!
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 ON THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE, OR 
 THE FUNDAMENTAL EXPERI- 
 ENCES OF THE SANCTI- 
 FIED IN SPIRIT 
 
 83
 
 The sanctified in spirit are known in India as 
 Jnanis or Jivanmuktas. 
 Their nature described. 
 Ignorance of Europeans in India of the Esoteric 
 
 side of Spiritual India. 
 Difference between teachers of worldly learning* 
 
 sectarian teachers, and teachers of Truth 
 
 Eternal (or Jnanis). 
 Where Jnanis are to be found in India, and 
 
 how they are occupied. 
 Their works called the Jndna Sdstras (or Guide 
 Books to Perfect Light and Love) intelligible 
 only to the spiritually-minded. 
 Their doctrines: 
 
 Difference between worldly experience and 
 
 spiritual experience. 
 The range of the knowable, thinkable, and 
 
 sensible. 
 God is knowable directly by the soul, but 
 
 not thinkable by the mind. 
 He is vedyam (Bhag. Gita, xi: 17), but avdn- 
 
 manasa gocaram. 
 Soul will not know God until it separates itself 
 
 from its impurities. 
 Their doctrine of renunciation. 
 "Ascent" of soul towards God. 
 Attainment of Godliness (Brdhmi sthiti) . 
 "Rising" of soul in glory of the sun. 
 Isolation of Spirit or Aloneness (Kaivalya). 
 Atma dariana or Siva dars'ana, corresponding 
 
 to appearance of Christ and knowledge of 
 
 God. 
 
 84
 
 The "melting of the elements," or realisation 
 in spiritual communion of the "burning up" 
 of the bonds of worldliness. 
 The "end of the world." 
 
 Cessation of the recognition of differen- 
 tiated existence. 
 "Death " of the worldly spirit and " birth " 
 of the Godly spirit. 
 Meaning of the formula "Know the soul 
 through the soul." 
 Knowledge of God dependent on "separation" or 
 "freeing" (in spiritual communion) of the soul 
 from the sensibilities induced by the excitations 
 of the senses and mind. 
 The difficulties of Western Psychologists. 
 The answer of the Jndnis. 
 
 Four degrees of Sanctification, or death unto 
 
 the world. 
 The position of Jesus in the class of Brahma- 
 
 vid. 
 Inappropriate translation of the expres- 
 sion monogenes huios in regard to Christ. 
 It means alone-become Son, not only- 
 begotten. 
 Jesus and St. Paul on attainment of Christ- 
 hood. 
 The practice of the art of knowing the soul by the 
 soul. 
 
 Attainment of the "fulness" or "freedom" of 
 
 the soul. 
 Unspeakable repose or Peace of the soul. 
 
 85
 
 Reality of the Kingdom of God. 
 
 The teachings in the Vedas and Agatnas. 
 
 Veddnta and Saiva Siddhdnta expositions. 
 Nature of religions. 
 
 86
 
 THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 OR 
 
 THE FUNDAMENTAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 OF THE SANCTIFIED IN 
 
 SPIRIT 
 
 In India those who have the "Key" 
 called "Knowledge of God" are known as 
 Jndnis, or Knowers of the Truth or Wisdom; 
 and the Light, Wisdom, or Knowledge they 
 possess is Jndnam. They are also called 
 Jivanmnktas, or the Freed Ones, freed from 
 bondage to folly or corruption or ignorance. 
 Other men are not of the Truth. Being 
 attached to the false shows and pleasures of 
 the world they are a-Jndnis, unwise men, 
 men in darkness, whose knowledge is fool- 
 ishness (a-Jndnam), because it makes them 
 to think that the Body is the Self or 
 Ego that knows; to believe that the only 
 happiness available to man is through seeing, 
 hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, or 
 
 87
 
 88 Soul Culture 
 
 through thinking and speaking of things 
 past, present, or yet to come; to mistake the 
 world for the goal to which it is the ap- 
 pointed way ; and to rest assured that nothing 
 exists beyond the plane of thought and the 
 senses. In their ignorance they esteem as 
 folly the long-suffering humility of the 
 Jndnis; their love of all beings, great and 
 small, good or bad; their inability to hate, 
 and unwillingness to exact satisfaction for 
 wrong done; their sense of thankfulness 
 under all conditions; their refusal to judge 
 others; their want of concern for the mor- 
 row, and their disregard for things deeply 
 valued by the multitude. But the more en- 
 lightened of the a-Jndnis of India, who form 
 a small fraction of the two hundred and 
 fifty millions of Hindus who inhabit the 
 country, feel drawn to the Jndnis, and it is 
 to them they have always gone, from the 
 remotest times to the present day, when 
 craving for Light. 
 
 Europeans in India know something of 
 the exoteric or outer side of spiritual India,
 
 The Key of Knowledge 89 
 
 as exemplified in the symbolic worship car- 
 ried on in the temples, but almost nothing 
 of its esoteric or inner side. The vast 
 majority of the natives themselves are 
 ignorant of its existence, though many an 
 exegesis is to be found, especially in Sanskrit 
 and Tamil. Such works, however, are diffi- 
 cult to understand; and devotees who have 
 been initiated into the subjective (esoteric) 
 form of worship, — "worship in truth and 
 in spirit ' ' — are unobtrusive and far from 
 communicative. But yet earnest seekers, 
 who fail to find satisfaction in the objective 
 (exoteric) method, soon discover that this 
 system, which no longer appeals to them, is 
 really intended as a stepping-stone to the 
 subjective (esoteric), and that the key of the 
 latter is in the hands of the Jndna-gurn or 
 Teacher of Godly Wisdom, otherwise called 
 Knowledge of God. Tired of the so-called 
 enjoyments of the world and thirsting for 
 the sanctification of the spirit, they go in 
 quest of him, crying to him now, as in days 
 of yore, "O saint, teach thou, for thou art
 
 90 Soul Culture 
 
 the way, and there is no other for us;" "0 
 saint, thou art my way, thou art my way" 
 (Maitrdyana Brahmana Upanishad, trans- 
 lated by Max Miiller, in the fifteenth volume 
 of "The Sacred Books of the East," pp. 290, 
 299). Occasionally, the saint comes to the 
 very door of the seeker. 
 
 Of all teachers, the Jn&na-guru is acknow- 
 ledged to be the greatest. Unlike the Vidyd- 
 guru, who imparts knowledge on any given 
 secular subject; unlike the Samaya-guru, 
 who imparts knowledge on any given relig- 
 ion, the Jndna-guru is concerned with the 
 very foundation of knowledge, with Truth 
 eternal, unchangeable. He is therefore a 
 teacher of teachers, a guru in the real sense 
 of the term, and hence called a Jagat-guru, 
 or Loka-guru, a Preceptor or Light of the 
 world . 
 
 He is found mostly in secluded places 
 from Cashmere (Kashmir) to Cape Comorin 
 (Kumari) living in the utmost simplicity. 
 Some are so dead to the world as to go wholly 
 unclad, seeing nothing but the reign of God
 
 The Key oj Knowledge 91 
 
 everywhere. To them (and indeed every 
 other Jndni), men, women, and children are 
 all alike without any distinction whatever 
 of sex, age, color, creed, or race. Some 
 Jndnis are often mighty in attainments 
 (Siddhis), but power by itself is not con- 
 sidered their distinguishing characteristic. 
 What are called miracles are often performed 
 by men who are not in fellowship with God, 
 and who therefore misuse the powers en- 
 trusted to them. The truth is that God is 
 the author of all forms of power, and He alone 
 is the worker of all miracles, from the making 
 of a mineral cell and the growing of a blade 
 of grass to the suspension of myriads of 
 stellar systems in space. Jesus always de- 
 clared miracles to be God's works and not 
 his own, and he condemned the display of 
 the gifts of prophecy and miracle on the part 
 of those who did not know God as works of 
 iniquity (Matt, vii: 22). Knowledge of God 
 and the consequent rest fulness of spirit, 
 called the Peace that transcends all thought, 
 is indeed the only characteristic of Jndnis.
 
 91 Soul Culture 
 
 Many of them are well known and much 
 resorted to for instruction and advice; 
 others, undiscovered, perform worldly duties 
 in different walks of life, like ordinary folk; 
 but ripe souls are drawn to them and learn 
 of them in secret the way to God. These 
 Jndnis in domestic life make the kindliest 
 and best of fathers, husbands, brothers, and 
 citizens, though never so entangled in those 
 relations as to forget for a moment the grace 
 of God, which assigned to them and others 
 their respective spheres in life for freedom. 
 
 It is such masters, who have attained ful- 
 ness in love and Godly knowledge, that 
 demonstrate to seekers in India that God 
 can be known by man, while on earth and in 
 the body. Sound doctrine is necessary to 
 disestablish the mind from sensuous objects 
 and establish it in the spirit, and then many 
 an arduous work, having in view the develop- 
 ment of righteousness and perfect love, 
 should be undertaken. For mere study of 
 the principles relating to God, soul, and the 
 world will not and cannot secure for the
 
 The Key oj Knowledge 93 
 
 student actual knowledge of God. What 
 he reads in books or hears from living lips 
 is, so far as he is concerned, only hearsay 
 knowledge. What is needed is personal 
 knowledge. 
 
 According to the Jn&nis, beings and states 
 of beings complete the range of the knowable. 
 The knower of all these is the soul. It 
 knows some of them through the senses, and 
 some through the mind which draws infer- 
 ences; and some it knows directly without 
 the aid of either the senses or the mind. 
 The first and second kinds of knowledge are 
 knowledge of objects of sense and of mind, 
 and together constitute worldly experience; 
 but the third kind of knowledge is know- 
 ledge of the soul or spirit and God, and is 
 spiritual experience. The Jn&nis teach that 
 the sensible and thinkable things are all of 
 nature (prakriti) or "flesh" or cosmic stuff, 
 but that God, who is the evolver of nature, 
 mental and material, is not graspable by the 
 senses or mind, but knowable only by the 
 Soul, which is itself spirit, like God. Their
 
 94 Soul Culture 
 
 expressive saying is, God is vedyam (Bhag. 
 Gita, xi: 17) the knowable, but avdnmanasa 
 gocaram, inexpressible and unthinkable. 
 Just as the milk of the cow, which pervades 
 her lymphatic system, is draw able only at 
 the teat, Jndnis say that God, who is Spirit, 
 Love, and Light, though existent everywhere, 
 is knowable only in that part of his temple 
 called the Spirit or Soul; that souls in bond- 
 age to Folly or Corruption (Avidya) are like 
 pure water mixed with ink, unable to see 
 itself as something different from the cor- 
 ruption it is in; that the Soul is the being 
 which loves and knows; and Folly the false 
 being which hates and works lawless deeds 
 through the instruments of the Soul, namely, 
 the mind, the senses, and the faculties of 
 speech and action; and that if measures be 
 taken to separate the Soul from Folly, the 
 Soul will first know itself and then God who 
 is in it. Knowledge of God is impossible 
 till the Soul renounces all its impurities and 
 stands in the likeness or "image" of God 
 fit for fellowship with God. The Doctrine of
 
 The Key oj Knowledge 95 
 
 Renunciation, and the practices necessary 
 for forsaking corruption, form the sum and 
 substance of the teaching of the Jn&nis. 
 This work of renunciation of impurity on 
 the part of the disciple must be carried on 
 from day to day, it may be for years together, 
 before God manifests Himself to the seeking 
 Soul. 
 
 When it awakens to a sense of its bondage 
 to corruption and gradually releases itself 
 from its carnal attachments, it is said to 
 "ascend" towards God, who is in the soul. 
 That part of the Vedas which is called Up- 
 anishad treats of this "ascent" or "rise" 
 from corruption to in corruption. "He who 
 in perfect rest rises from worldly attach- 
 ments and attains the highest light, comes 
 forth in his own proper form. This is the 
 immortal soul " (Maitr. Brah. Up., n-12). 
 Numberless are the books written by Jn&nis 
 to expound this doctrine of Godliness 
 (Brdhmi sthiti) contained in the Vedas and 
 Agamas. The oldest of these books are in 
 Sanskrit and Tamil. Some in Sanskrit are
 
 g6 Soul Culture 
 
 known to Western scholars, but not any in 
 Tamil. Their works in Tamil deserve to be 
 studied, especially those in the form of 
 hymns. One of the ancient psalms of 
 Manikka-vasakar, daily chanted by hund- 
 reds of thousands of Tamils in South India 
 and Ceylon, is as follows: — 
 
 "O Siva, abiding in the limitless region of 
 holiness, who, darkness dispelled, has granted 
 me grace this day; 
 
 To abate thoughts, I thought of Thy way of 
 rising from the bosom of the soul in the glory 
 of the sun ; 
 
 I thought of the non-existence of everything 
 but Thyself; 
 
 I thought of Thee and Thee only, — having 
 worn off thought, atom by atom, and drawing 
 closer for union with Thee as one; 
 
 Nothing art Thou, yet nothing is without 
 Thee. 
 
 Who, then, can think of Thee?" 
 
 — Tiruvasakam, Koyit Tiruppadikam, 7. 
 
 God as Absolute Being, or Being Uncon- 
 ditioned by quality or quantity, is indeed un- 
 thinkable, nor is he to be perceived by the 
 senses, as Immaculate, Infinite Spirit, but 
 yet, as such, he is knowable. He is to be
 
 The Key oj Knowledge 97 
 
 known by the soul only when the mind runs 
 down to a calm and lies quite still. When 
 in spiritual communion thoughts are wholly 
 abated and sleep does not intervene, the 
 soul stands by itself like a steady flame, un- 
 obscured by sleep and unagitated by thought. 
 In this state of isolation or aloneness, called 
 kaivalya, the soul knows itself and God who 
 is in it. The gradual elimination of thought 
 "atom by atom," as the Master quoted 
 above says, draws the soul out from the dust 
 heap of thought and enables it to see itself 
 more and more, till at length, when the last 
 trace of thought is "worn off," the soul 
 appears, as declared in the Maitrayana 
 Upanishad, in its "own proper form" as 
 Unconditioned Being, in unspeakable re- 
 pose. This is called by the Agamic Jnanis 
 dtma-darsana, or knowledge of the soul, corre- 
 sponding to the "manifestation" or "appear- 
 ance" of Christ within man (John xiv: 21; 
 Matt, xxiv: 30). Then is realised Siva-dar- 
 sana, or knowledge of God, who manifests 
 himself only within the Spirit though He
 
 98 Soul Culture 
 
 pervades all the Universe. This is "His 
 way," His usual method, of manifesting 
 Himself to those men who worship Him spirit- 
 ually, "in truth and in spirit," as Jesus said. 
 The Veddnta Jndnis speak of these two ex- 
 periences as Vikalpa Samddhi and Nir- 
 vikalpa Samddhi. 
 
 Just as the soul enshrined in the body 
 "rises" from the body, God enshrined in the 
 Soul "rises" from the Soul and manifests 
 himself to the Soul. These are the two 
 fundamental experiences of human nature, 
 the one leading necessarily to the other; 
 and this is the goal of life — the knowledge 
 of God. After attaining it, there is nothing 
 more to attain here or elsewhere. Progress 
 with all its toils ends. The long sought for 
 Rest has come. No longer do pure and im- 
 pure thoughts strive against each other for 
 mastery; no longer do kind and unkind 
 words flow alternately from the lips; no 
 longer does the flesh strive against the Spirit, 
 nor the Spirit against the flesh. Differentia- 
 tion between oneself and others has ceased.
 
 The Key of Knowledge 99 
 
 Peace reigns. In the consuming fire of Truth 
 (Jndndgni), all the beggarly elements of 
 egotism and desire have been burnt, and 
 infinite Bliss (dnanda) survives, bearing 
 witness to the Godly nature of man's con- 
 sciousness (dtmd). 
 
 Thou art the indestructible Bliss, which 
 appears the instant all the world (Jagat) of 
 thought and the senses, like nuggets of gold, 
 is dissolved into an ocean without waves or 
 current. 
 
 To this day I have not thus realised Thee! 
 
 Can I attain this happiness by only singing 
 Thy praises in verse? 
 
 When, O Lord, wilt Thou establish me in 
 the region of holiness and grant me, a sinner, 
 the bliss of the state resulting from non-differ- 
 entiation? — Tdyumdnavar, Panmdlai, 9. 
 
 The "dissolution" of the "world" (Jagat), 
 which occurs to each man as soon as his 
 mind ceases to differentiate, — as soon as all 
 thoughts have run down to a perfect calm, 
 — is also known as the "death" of the much 
 mistaken Jiva-ahankdra (or worldly spirit) 
 which veils the true Ego (parama-ahan-
 
 ioo Soul Culture 
 
 kdra), which alone knows itself and is the 
 basis of all knowledge, temporal and spir- 
 itual. Another great Sage of South India, 
 who lived about two thousand years ago, 
 and whose psalms are on the lips of 
 every cultured Tamil of the present day, 
 well said, 
 
 I became like the dead: 
 Of all thought was I void: 
 None but I remained: 
 I knew no further change. 
 
 — Venkddar, Arat-pulambal, 49. 
 
 The Master means to say that when the 
 Jiva-ahank&ra (or worldly-minded I) dis- 
 solved itself by non-differentiation, the par- 
 ama-ahankdra (or Divine I) stood forth 
 unchangeable, liberated from nescience or 
 worldliness, and hence known as Jivan- 
 mukta. Another Sage sang as follows, — 
 
 My heart has hardly throbbed for thee; 
 But little have my thoughts dissolved; 
 Divorced I am not from the body, so hard to sepa- 
 rate. 
 I have not died: I am still in a whirl.
 
 The Key oj Knowledge 101 
 
 The "I" that ought to die is the earth- 
 bound or worldly I, that knows not its true 
 status and is therefore led captive by worldly 
 thoughts. The true Ego (or Atmd) can 
 never die. It is eternal. 
 
 The death of the worldly or sinning I 
 (Jiva-ahankdra) is the "crucifixion" of the 
 sinner, — the "old Adam." When old Adam 
 is crucified, the heaven-born Adam, the Son 
 of God, the true Ego (parama-ahankdra) 
 appears (I Cor. xv: 45, 47). 
 
 The words "world" (Jagat) and "worldly 
 I" denote differentiated existence. The sum 
 of human affairs and interests, or, in a re- 
 stricted sense, that portion of them which is 
 known to any one, is popularly understood 
 to be the "world," which in truth consists 
 of names and forms only; and the worldly I 
 exists only when one is conscious of differ- 
 entiated names and forms, that is, of 
 thoughts. The "end or dissolution of the 
 world" (ndma-rupa-ndsa) is thus another 
 expression for the "death" of the worldly I. 
 The "world" dissolving or ending is the
 
 102 Soul Culture 
 
 same as the worldly I "dying; " and the 
 "death" of the "worldly I " is the same as 
 the "end" of the "world." These expres- 
 sions denote cessation from differentiation 
 in spiritual communion. When sitting for 
 worship one is alive to the reports of the 
 senses or is thinking of the things of flesh or 
 worldly life, he is in the state of differentia- 
 tion, which is the opposite of Unification, or 
 Peace, or Rest. 
 
 The "world," in the language of Sages, 
 means everything except pure consciousness; 
 means not only the material universe, but 
 also mind and its products called thoughts, 
 and the senses and objects perceived by 
 them. And God, as Being True or Un- 
 changeable, and the Being who pervades 
 this everchanging and therefore untrue 
 "world," cannot be found in the face of the 
 world. Since He is its substrate He will not 
 reveal Himself, in His own true character as 
 Absolute Being, if looked for in the "world." 
 Well has a Master sung, —
 
 The Key of Knowledge 103 
 
 O Thou who in all things dost vibrate! 
 
 O Thou stainless consumer and container of the 
 
 World! 
 O Thou king of the celestial hosts! 
 
 Thou the only one, without a second! 
 
 Though, appealing to Thee aloud, I have sought for 
 
 Thee throughout the world (loka), 
 Yet I have not found Thee there. 
 
 — Tiruvcisakam, Arutpattu, 2. 
 
 In His own true nature, as He was before 
 the beginning of the "world," and will be 
 after its end, He is to be "seen" (that is, 
 known) only where the "world" is not, that 
 is, only in the reign of pure consciousness. 
 Therefore the Master, who declared that God 
 was not to be found in the "world," pro- 
 claimed also that he found Him elsewhere, in 
 "resplendent Tillai" or the region of pure 
 consciousness or dtmd: 
 
 1 found Thee, immaculate and blissful, in resplen- 
 
 dent Tillai, 
 Having overcome the darkness of desire, 
 The perception of forms, and the thoughts of "I" 
 
 and "Mine;" 
 I, who had been drawn into the vortex of caste, 
 family and birth, who was worse than a help- 
 less dog; —
 
 104 Soul Culture 
 
 I saw Thee, who had cut away my bonds of misery 
 
 and held me to Thy service. 
 — ib. Kandapattu, 5. (The ten hymns attesting 
 
 knowledge.) 
 
 This immaculate and formless being of the 
 Deity "seen" beyond the veil of thought, in 
 the region of pure consciousness, is His un- 
 thinkable form, nishkala svarupa. His sa- 
 kala svarupa or thought-form, assumed for 
 purposes of grace, is according to the form in 
 which He has been thought of by the earnest 
 devotee. 
 
 The separation of the soul from thought 
 and sense impression is known in spiritual 
 communion as separation from the body or 
 the flesh, as attested by the words of the 
 great Sendanar: 
 
 Meditating on the peerless ways in which He led 
 
 me captive, 
 Having separated me from the Body, 
 Which knows not what it is to be established; 
 Meditating also on the gracious manner in which He 
 
 cherishes the faithful; 
 Let me sing in praise of Him only who took me unto 
 
 Himself, etc. 
 
 — Sendanar, Tiru-palldndu, 3.
 
 The Key of Knowledge 105 
 
 Another Master sings, — 
 
 Hear, O Bird, dwelling in groves laden with luscious 
 
 fruit! 
 Raise thy notes to the Giver of all things, 
 Who, spurning the celestial regions, appeared on 
 
 earth for the purpose of claiming man as His 
 
 subject. 
 Pray that the King may come, who spurning the 
 
 flesh entered my soul, made it like Himself and 
 
 stood forth the only One. 
 
 — Tiruvasakam, Kuyilpattu, 4. 
 
 "The flesh" or "body" includes not only 
 the tangible body (sthula sarira), but also the 
 subtle body (sukshma sarira) consisting of 
 those invisible instruments of knowledge 
 and action which are found to function in 
 various parts of the tangible body. The 
 complete " spurning of the flesh," therefore, 
 means complete isolation from the flesh, which 
 state is also spoken of as being wholly "dead 
 to the world" (of thought and the senses). 
 When this occurs, the soul becomes nish- 
 kala, immaculate (unspotted by the least 
 rudiments of the flesh), godlike. Drawing 
 the soul from the mind-sheath (kosha) or
 
 106 Soul Culture 
 
 womb (garbha) in which it has been en- 
 cased, God "frees" or "separates" it from 
 its carnal bonds and causes it to be "as Him- 
 self." Compare the words of St. Paul, 
 "When it pleased God, who separated me 
 from my mother's womb, to reveal the Son 
 in me," etc., Gal. i: 15. This separation 
 from the limitations of the mind is essential 
 to the spiritual birth of the Son or Soul 
 (dtmd). Then only does He, who from eter- 
 nity lay hidden in the Soul, become mani- 
 fest; and manifested, He absorbs the soul 
 by His sun -like glory and remains "the Only 
 One." 
 
 All the doctrines and practices which are 
 calculated to lead to the knowledge of the 
 soul, and through that knowledge to the 
 knowledge of God, are locked up in the mystic 
 formula dtmdnam dtmand pasya (know the 
 soul through the soul), which in the language 
 of Jesus is represented by the expression, 
 "I (the Spirit) bear witness of myself (the 
 Spirit)" (John viii: 18). 
 
 It is necessary to try and understand in
 
 The Key oj Knowledge 107 
 
 modern modes of thought the truths that 
 lie embedded in these most holy formulas. 
 In the darkness of deep sleep Consciousness 
 is so obscured that it knows nothing, not 
 even its own existence. When it first 
 awakes it knows nothing in particular till 
 a vague desire to know arises within it, and 
 sets the mind to think, or the senses to per- 
 ceive, something. Then begins a knowledge 
 of some definite thing. But so rapidly do 
 the senses strike on the Consciousness, and so 
 constantly do thoughts present themselves 
 from the moment it wakes to the moment it 
 falls asleep, that Consciousness is "cheated 
 with the blear illusion" that it is identical 
 with the body. The truth, however, as ex- 
 perienced by Jndnis, is that Consciousness 
 (or the Knower, or the Soul) is wholly dis- 
 tinct from the mind (which thinks) and the 
 senses, just as the latter are distinct from 
 the body. " Separate from the mind and the 
 senses, yet reflecting the qualities of all of 
 them, the dtmd (soul) is the Lord and Ruler 
 of all" (Svctasvatara Upanishad, iii: 17).
 
 108 Soul Culture 
 
 Consciousness or the Soul knows the senses 
 and the mind, but they are not subtle enough 
 to know the Soul, their "Lord and Ruler." 
 It knows itself. Nothing else can know it. 
 Hence the mandate, "know the soul through 
 the soul." The soul is a witness (sdkshi) 
 unto itself. The mind (including the reason) 
 and the senses, being constructed of cosmic 
 stuff or "flesh," cannot know the soul! 
 
 It is difficult to establish these truths by 
 reasoning, for the basis of reasoning is com- 
 parison of one thing with another and draw- 
 ing inferences therefrom, and there is 
 nothing in the world without us which may- 
 be compared with the soul within. The only 
 proof possible in these circumstances is an 
 appeal to the spiritual experience or actual 
 knowledge of the Spirit of the class of people 
 called Jndnis. Their experience declares (i) 
 that the body is the tabernacle of the Soul 
 and its instruments; (2) that the mind (or 
 the subtle organs of thought) and the senses 
 are the instruments of the Soul, whereby 
 the Soul is brought into relation with the
 
 The Key of Knowledge 109 
 
 objective world; (3) that the mind is not 
 subtle enough to know the Soul; (4) that 
 the Soul may be freed from its primeval 
 taint of evil or worldliness; (5) that when 
 freed from evil or worldliness the soul knows 
 itself as naturally as the bound soul knows 
 the mind and the world without; and (6) 
 that peace (or infinite love, irrespective of 
 objects of love) and knowledge (or power of 
 knowing, irrespective of objects of knowledge) 
 are the fundamental features of the freed soul. 
 How few among us recognise even the 
 first named of these truths! Metaphysicians 
 of repute have argued that the mind, so far 
 from using the body as its instrument, is 
 only a property, power, or function of the 
 body. Professor Bain, desiring to follow a 
 middle course, defines man to be "an ex- 
 tended and material mass, attached to which 
 is the power of becoming alive to feeling and 
 thought, the extreme remove from all that 
 is material" (Mind and Body, p. 137); and 
 observes that the contention that the mind 
 uses the body as its instrument "assumes
 
 1 1 o Soul Culture 
 
 for mind a separate existence, a power of 
 living apart, an option of working with or 
 without a body. Actuated by the desire of 
 making itself known, and of playing a part 
 in the sphere of matter, the mind uses its 
 bodily ally to gratify this desire; but if it 
 chose to be self-contained, to live satisfied 
 with its own contemplations, like the gods 
 as conceived by Aristotle, it need not enter 
 into cooperation with any physical process, 
 with brain, senses, or muscular organs. I 
 will not reiterate the groundlessness of this 
 supposition. The physical alliance is the 
 very law of our mental being; it is not con- 
 trived purely for the purpose of making our 
 mental states known; without it we should 
 not have mental states at all" (ib., p. 132). 
 The learned Professor's criticisms abound 
 with difficulties of his own creation, which 
 however do not affect the truths of spiritual 
 experience. By the light of this experience, 
 the Soul (or the I that knows) is found to 
 be very different from the mind whose func- 
 tion is to think. It will be readily admitted
 
 1 tie Key of Knowledge 1 1 1 
 
 that it is not the senses (Jnanendriyas) but 
 the internal faculties of thought (antah- 
 karanas) that think. The Jndnis declare 
 that the invisible organ of thought and the 
 other invisible organs of breath, nutrition, 
 and action, which in co-relation form the 
 subtle body (sukshma sarira) of the soul and 
 function in different parts of the tangible 
 body, are in the nature of a covering or 
 sheath (kosha) of the soul, being "bound" 
 to it by the " worldliness " or folly inherent 
 in the soul (Jivdtma). From olden times, 
 they say, the soul {Jivdtma) was permeated 
 with this feeling of want and craving and 
 lay in a stifled condition. For the merciful 
 purpose of liberating the soul from this piti- 
 fully obscured condition, God evolved the 
 world out of worldly rudiments and en- 
 dowed the soul, firstly, with the "mind-and- 
 breath mechanism" called the subtle body, 
 and secondly, with the tangible body as the 
 mud-home of the subtle body, and so brought 
 it into relation with the outer world. The 
 craving or greed for gratification thus became
 
 ii2 Soul Culture 
 
 (through the "subtle body") the desires 
 of touch, taste, hearing, sight, and smell, 
 and the desires of the intellect. The mind- 
 and-breath organism has, therefore, been 
 called a "lamp," or instrument of illumina- 
 tion to the obscured soul. When the light 
 of true knowledge, let into the soul through 
 the channels of the mind and the senses, 
 dispels by degrees the density of the worldly 
 taint or ignorance inherent in the soul, the 
 mind and the senses find less and less enjoy- 
 ment in the field of carnality. It is within 
 our e very-day experience that, with the 
 gradual decline of desire for anything, our 
 thoughts on that subject become fewer and 
 less active, and it is only natural that when 
 all desires are eschewed, thoughts should run 
 down to a complete calm. This truth is 
 expressed in the formula nir&sd (or non de- 
 sire) is sam&dhi (peace). All "enlightened" 
 men, that is, men consciously admitting 
 light and thus actively wearing off, atom by 
 atom, the density of their cravings, are on the 
 high road to sam&dhi. They are destined
 
 The Key of Knowledge 113 
 
 to speedily enter the spiritual kingdom, 
 the holy and blissful region of pure conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 The converse proposition, that the prac- 
 tice of the art of pacifying thoughts leads to 
 attainment of uirdsd, that is, emancipation 
 from desire, is found to be equally true. 
 Without tarrying on this part of the subject 
 it is needful only to say that, as the efface- 
 ment of all desire causes thought to disap- 
 pear, leaving the soul serene and limitlessly 
 conscious, Mr. Bain's question whether the 
 mind may have a separate existence, and in 
 that state of independence possess an option 
 of working with or without the body, ad- 
 mits of a ready answer. If all desires have 
 been permanently expunged from the soul, 
 the mind becomes quite inactive and has no 
 power over the body. 
 
 Such a contingency occurs only in the 
 case of that class of Jndnis known as Brahma - 
 varishta, who by unceasing spiritual com- 
 munion have isolated themselves from desire 
 so completely that it never rises from
 
 1 14 Soul Culture 
 
 the expanse of consciousness in any form 
 whatever. The only indications that they 
 are not dead are warmth in the body and 
 growth of hair and nails, if clipped. The 
 senses do not perceive, the mind does not 
 think, in this state. Though dead in the 
 worldly sense, they are not dead spiritually. 
 They live on from year to year without food 
 or drink. 
 
 A less advanced Jndni is the Brahma Var- 
 iydn, in whom desire is not completely anni- 
 hilated. Therefore he is able to rest in 
 Samddhi only for limited periods, emerging 
 therefrom for a short while, during which 
 devotees revive his recollection of earthly 
 affairs and pray for blessings. Granting 
 them, he again relapses into the peaceful 
 state. The late R£j£ Rajendral£la Mitra, 
 one of the most distinguished sons of India, 
 said that in 1842 he saw a Jndni whom some 
 wood-choppers had brought up to Calcutta 
 from the forests of the Sunderbunds. The 
 saint was found sitting cross-legged under a 
 lofty banian tree, amidst a wild profusion
 
 The Key oj Knowledge 1 1 5 
 
 of heavy roots, which in course of growth 
 had entwined themselves round his limbs. 
 The "fools and blind" cleared the wood and 
 carried the Sage, dead as he was to the 
 world, to Calcutta, where he was taken pos- 
 session of by two men even more ignorant 
 than the wood-choppers, for unable to rouse 
 him "by shouting, pushing, and beating, 
 they put fire into his hand and plunged him 
 into deep water in the Ganges with a rope 
 about his neck, as though he were a ship's 
 anchor, and twice kept him there all night. 
 They pried his tetanus jaws apart, put beef 
 into his mouth, and poured brandy down 
 his throat. Finally, to prove their own 
 shamelessness, and to make their memory 
 hateful for ever, this Hindu Rajd, and this 
 Englishman set upon the poor saint an aban- 
 doned creature of the other sex to pollute 
 him with her unholy touch!" (Colonel 01- 
 cott's Lecture at the Town Hall of Calcutta 
 in 1882 on "Theosophy, the Scientific Basis 
 of Religion.") At last by violent methods 
 they awoke him, and all he said was, — "O
 
 1 1 6 Soul Culture 
 
 Sirs, why did you disturb me? I have done 
 you no harm." Shortly after, he attained 
 Videha Mukti or liberation from the sthula 
 and sukshma bodies. 
 
 A third class of Jndnis is represented by the 
 Brahma Varan, who suspends mind and breath 
 for a few days at a time, returning to the ways 
 of life readily at the close of the Samadhi. 
 
 By far the largest number of Jndnis, how- 
 ever, belong to the class of the Brahma Vid, 
 who isolates himself only for a few hours 
 each day, not necessarily every day. These 
 are the saints who are most useful to the 
 world, because all their thoughts run with 
 amazing fruitfulness in the groove of paw- 
 pakaram or service to others. Jesus is a 
 brilliant example of this type, for in addi- 
 tion to knowledge of God, he possessed sid- 
 dhis (or spiritual powers) of a very high 
 order. When drawn too much into the 
 vortex of worldly life he sought solitude for 
 the purpose of reestablishing himself in the 
 fulness of peace. "He went up into a 
 mountain apart to pray. . . . He was there
 
 The Key of Knowledge 117 
 
 alone " (Matt, xiv: 23) is often said of Jesus. 
 He is also said to have been fast asleep on 
 board a ship when a great storm was blow- 
 ing and covering the craft with tremendous 
 waves (Matt, viii: 24). Even a drunken man 
 would have returned to his sober senses in 
 such rolling and pitching, creaking and roar- 
 ing, "but Jesus was asleep." He was really 
 in Samddhi, "dead to the world" of thought 
 and the senses. His disciples were able to 
 move him out of that peaceful state, only be- 
 cause his desires, still lurking in the soul, 
 stirred and set the mind-and-breath mechan- 
 ism in motion, as demonstrated in the case of 
 the ill-treated saint of the Sunderbunds. It is 
 a truth worth realising that even the best of 
 desires are, in comparison to Peace, a burden. 
 The blissfulness of Rest is infinitely superior 
 to un-rest, however refined. Rest is abso- 
 lutely good, and all forms of Un-rest, from 
 the highest, are bad in relation to Rest. 
 Therefore did Jesus say on a memorable 
 occasion, feeling the desecration of un-rest, 
 "Why callest thou me good? There is no
 
 1 1 8 Soul Culture 
 
 one good but one, that is God" (Matt, xix: 
 1 6). Therefore also do men who have 
 tasted of that Rest feel ever inclined to go 
 back to it, as to a haven, from the agita- 
 tions of thought, the troubles and turmoils 
 of life, and to stand alone quite isolated 
 from all that is worldly. 
 
 This "alone becoming" of the soul, known 
 in India as Kaivalya, is what is indicated by 
 the Greek phrase monogeues huios, in John 
 i: 18, rendered inappropriately in Englisn 
 as "the only -begotten son." How can Jesus 
 Christ be considered the only son of God, 
 when he himself taught the doctrine that 
 others also could be as perfect as God in love 
 (Matt, v: 48), and as gifted as himself in 
 miraculous powers (ib. xvii: 20). It will also 
 be borne in mind that St. Paul said that it 
 was possible for all men by due culture to 
 attain the fulness of Christ (Eph. iv: 13). 
 Nor must it be forgotten that Jesus took 
 pains to expose the popular fallacy that 
 Christ was the son of David (Matt, xxii: 42). 
 "What think ye of Christ?" he asked of the
 
 The Key of Knowledge 119 
 
 Pharisees. They said, "He is the son of 
 David." If he be the son of David, said 
 Jesus, how is it that David addresses him as 
 Lord in Ps. cxi? Is it customary for a father 
 to call his son Lord ? They answered not a 
 word, and verse 46 records "neither durst any 
 man from that day forward ask him any more 
 questions." Jesus meant to say that, though 
 flesh was necessary to produce flesh, Christ 
 was not flesh, and Christ, being pure Spirit, 
 did not need a fleshly father like David to 
 beget him. He expressly said that Christ 
 was "before Abraham" (John viii: 58), 
 who lived many centuries before David. 
 Christ is the Soul that has been freed from 
 its bondage to worldliness, and blessed with 
 the knowledge of God. "Truth (or grace 
 of God) shall make you free," said Jesus 
 (John viii: 32). "Sanctify them through 
 thy Truth," he cried (John xvii: 17), even 
 as he himself was sanctified (John x: 36). 
 To stand alone, quite isolated from all that 
 is worldly, is Sdnti in Sanskrit, from which 
 Sanctification comes.
 
 120 Soul Culture 
 
 The experiences of Jnanis of the different 
 degrees of Rest or "death unto the world," 
 as above described, ought to make it clear 
 to "learned philosophers" that the mind 
 and the senses are but instruments of the 
 soul, and that, if desire were wholly elimi- 
 nated from the soul, the mind and the sense 
 organs would fall prostrate on the bosom 
 of the soul, even as a spinning top falls on 
 the ground as soon as its force is exhausted. 
 This is one of the most certain facts known 
 in Samddhi, 
 
 When the mind, ceasing to whirl, falls like a top 
 
 which has spent its force, — 
 Just then, the gloom of ignorance dispelled, 
 Did I know myself, independent, like unto space, 
 
 devoid of light and shade ? 
 Did I then, joining myself with the Infinite Peace 
 
 which lies within me, pass into the transcend- 
 
 ingly blissful state? 
 
 — T&yumanavar, Tejomaydnandam, 4. 
 
 A few more words may be added in ex- 
 planation of dtmdnam dtmand pasya. We 
 know, as a fact, that we see, hear, touch, 
 taste, and smell; and we know also that we
 
 The Key of Knowledge \ii 
 
 think. The expressions, "I know that I 
 feel," "I know that I desire," "I know that 
 I think," mean only that one is conscious of 
 those states of being, — namely, the states 
 of feeling, of desiring, of thinking. Con- 
 sciousness, therefore, is the Be-ing which 
 knows, and must not be confounded with 
 the states or sensibilities induced in con- 
 sciousness through the excitation of the 
 senses and thoughts. When such sensi- 
 bilities are discarded what remains is con- 
 sciousness pure, which soon overflows in all 
 directions, boundlessly, like the rays of the 
 sun through space. This experience is known 
 as dtmd purana, meaning literally, in the 
 words of St. Paul, the fulness of the spirit. 
 This is the liberated soul {dtmd in moksha), 
 the Be-ing, the "I am," which partakes of 
 the "glory " of God : known as Sa'cciddnanda, 
 that is, sat, eternal unchangeable existence; 
 bit, pure consciousness, infinitely expanded; 
 dnanda, bliss or absolute peace. In plain 
 words, when consciousness is purified to the 
 requisite degree, it is found as a matter of
 
 122 Soul Culture 
 
 fact (i) to survive all phenomena and re- 
 main unchangeable; (2) to possess the know- 
 ledge that is not limited by time or place; 
 and (3) to overflow with an unspeakable 
 repose and love for all living beings, the like 
 of which is unknown in any other state. 
 
 European science admits the world of the 
 senses (the "sensible" world, as it is called), 
 and the world of thought (the "extra-sensi- 
 ble" world), and is quite familiar with their 
 laws and conditions; but it refuses to ac- 
 knowledge the world — I would rather say, 
 the region — of pure consciousness (the 
 "supra-sensible" world). "We cannot say," 
 wrote the late Mr. G. H. Lewes, "that a 
 supra-sensible world is impossible; we can 
 only say that, if it exists, it is to us inaccessi- 
 ble" {Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. I, p. 
 270). And Professor Bain declares that in 
 the senses and thoughts "we have an alpha- 
 bet of the knowable, . . . but we cannot 
 by any effort pass out of the compass of the 
 primitive sensibilities" (Sec. 19 of the 
 chapter on the Physiological Data of Logic).
 
 The Key of Knowledge 123 
 
 The denial of the region of pure conscious- 
 ness (the J nana Bhumi), because of its 
 fancied inaccessibility to experience, is a 
 notoriously false argument, Mr. Lewes himself 
 having pointed out elsewhere that, "before 
 a fact could be discredited by its variance 
 from one's notion, the absolute accuracy of 
 the notion itself needed demonstration" 
 {Problems, etc., i: 353). 
 
 No further emphasis is now required to 
 bring home the fact that the existence of the 
 region of pure consciousness is not a matter 
 of theory or speculation. This state of "god- 
 liness" is indeed a "mystery" (as attested 
 by St. Paul in I Tim. iii: 16), in the sense of 
 being beyond human comprehension until it 
 is explained and realised. It is within the 
 actual experience (Svdnubhava) of Jndnis, 
 and is known to them as Brdhmi sthiti, or 
 Siva-loka, or chitambara, or chitdkdsa, the 
 blessed state, the spiritual kingdom, the 
 Kingdom of God, the reign of infinite con- 
 sciousness or light. It is the most real of all 
 regions, because when it is reached it is found
 
 124 Soul Culture 
 
 to be further irresolvable, hence unchange- 
 able, that is, everlasting. It is, moreover, 
 strictly verifiable in experience, that is, at- 
 tainable by others, provided that, by native 
 disposition and previous culture, one is sympa- 
 thetic enough to persevere in all earnestness 
 and faith in the way marked by the Master. 
 
 When this state is attained, then will be 
 realised in actual experience the truth that 
 God is in the soul. Upon this spiritual ex- 
 perience is founded the doctrine of "God 
 in me, and I in God." 
 
 Both the Vedas and A gam as teach this 
 doctrine in those parts of them which are 
 called Jndna Khdnda (the section that re- 
 lates to spiritual enlightenment). 
 
 The Agamas are a graduated elaboration 
 of the four Vcdas, and are known as the fifth 
 Veda. The final or eternal truths relating to 
 God, having been revealed to the Jndnis, the 
 way of attaining God has been worked out 
 in the Agamas under four principal stages 
 known as ckarya (gOod conduct), kriyd 
 (symbolical worship), yoga (subjective union
 
 The Key of Knowledge 12.5 
 
 through sense control, breath control, and 
 thought control), and jndna (hearing and 
 understanding the principles of eternal life). 
 The charya stage is called san-mdrga, or 
 the good way of lawful or ethical conduct, in 
 which God is distantly or vaguely conceived; 
 the kriyd stage is ddsa mdrga, or the way 
 of the servant, in which God is conceived as 
 Master or King; the yoga stage is putra 
 mdrga, or the way of the son, in which God 
 is viewed as Father; and the jndna stage is 
 saha mdrga, or the way of the friend and equal, 
 in which Soul is considered to be striving for 
 fellowship with God. 
 
 The final or eternal truths are known in 
 the Vedas as Veddnta and in the Agamas as 
 Saiva Siddhdnta, and the entire graduated 
 way is known as soupana mdrga (ladder way, 
 or path of ascent). 
 
 Agreeably to the needs and capacities of 
 each people, have Religions or Bonds of 
 Spiritual Thought been given them, marked 
 by some one or more of the features of the 
 stages above named. Some religions do not
 
 1^6 Soul Culture 
 
 carry their votaries beyond the stage of 
 ethical conduct; others not beyond ritual 
 worship; very few teach subjective union; 
 and only one at the present day is able to 
 impart a full knowledge of those principles 
 and practices which result in the actual at- 
 tainment of God. As spiritual thought gets 
 mixed with error in the progress of years, 
 owing to the imperfections of the minds of 
 those who receive and give out such thought, 
 religions become materialised and intolerant of 
 each other. Hence come diversities and con- 
 flicts. Such religions perish with the people 
 who have perverted the original germs of truth. 
 It matters not in what land or sphere of 
 society a man is born if in humble spirit he 
 acts up to the faith he was born in. In due 
 time he will be moved to a higher form of 
 faith, and so onward from one life to another, 
 till all his thoughts get centred in God. Life 
 and death are like waking and sleeping. As 
 the same being that is awake sleeps and wakes 
 again, so he that lives dies, to live again on 
 earth till full knowledge of God is attained.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 ON THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS 
 OF ANCIENT JUD^A 
 
 127
 
 The relation of the Judaic Way to the teachings 
 of the Jndnis of India, and of Jesus and his 
 Apostles. 
 Manifestation of God to Abraham. 
 The gift of the Law to Moses. 
 Path of righteousness. 
 The reward of obedience. 
 Punishment for wandering from the law. 
 Offerings for forgiveness. 
 Sanctification by atonement. 
 The times of the Judges (B.C. 1400-1200). 
 
 Decline of the Priesthood. 
 Samuel's School of the Prophets. 
 
 The spiritual doctrine of the prophets. 
 The Sadducees and Pharisees. 
 Their beliefs. 
 
 Writings of Philo and Josephus. 
 Doctrine of Transmigration of Souls. 
 Popular belief as to General Resurrection of 
 the Dead. 
 
 Ignorance of the Jewish Priesthood. 
 Captivity of the people in Chaldaea. 
 Prophet Ezekiel in Babylon (587 B.C.). 
 Purport of his Vision of the Dry Bones. 
 Necessity of separating the belief of the 
 multitude from the teaching of Ezekiel 
 and Daniel. 
 Popular belief as to the Coming of the Messiah. 
 Fusion of the two popular beliefs. 
 The Essenes. 
 
 Their beliefs, according to Philo and Josephus. 
 Jesus supposed by some to be an Essene. 
 
 128
 
 The three orders of Judaism represent each a stage 
 in the Way to the Goal, which is God. 
 
 The Sadducees and Pharisees espoused the 
 shell or exoteric phase of Judaism, and the 
 Essenes its inner kernel. 
 The expression "The Law and the Prophets" in- 
 tended to denote this distinction between outer 
 and inner worship. 
 
 129
 
 THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS OF 
 ANCIENT JUDAEA 
 
 Let us now consider the Judaic Way, so 
 as to see what relation its teachings bear on 
 the one hand to those of the Jndnis of India, 
 and on the other to those of Jesus, Paul, and 
 other Christian Saints. 
 
 It is said that when the early ancestors 
 of the Jews were dwelling on the eastern 
 side of the Euphrates and were serving in- 
 ferior gods, the all-powerful God called on 
 Abraham to leave the land of his fathers and 
 proceed to Canaan, saying, "I will make thee 
 a great nation, and I will bless thee and 
 make thy name great, and thou shalt be a 
 blessing" (Gen. xii: 2, 3). Known in later 
 times as the "God of Abraham, the God of 
 Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exod. iii: 6) 
 — the god whom Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob 
 worshipped with full acceptance — He re- 
 vealed Himself to their descendant Moses 
 
 131
 
 132 Soul Culture 
 
 on Mount Horeb, as Ydvch (Jehovah, the 
 self -existent). Ehyeh ashar Ehyeh (I am 
 what I am) was the name which He vouch- 
 safed of Himself to Moses (ib. iii: 14) — the 
 Aham of the Jndnis, a name for Pure Spirit. 
 He also declared, "I appeared unto Abra- 
 ham, Isaac, and Jacob by the name of El 
 Shadai (the all-powerful, corresponding to 
 Isvara), but by my name I. H. V. H. 
 (Jehovah, self -existent, corresponding to 
 Svayambhur of the Jndnis) was I not known 
 to them. And I have also established my 
 Covenant with them to give them the land 
 of Canaan (Region of Peace), the land of 
 their pilgrimage wherein they were strangers " 
 (Exod. vi: 3-4). 
 
 The manifestation to Moses at Mount 
 Horeb was followed by the grant of the Law 
 at Mount Sinai for the instruction of his 
 people. Jehovah said unto Moses, "Come 
 up to me unto the Mount and be there, and 
 I will give thee Tables of stone and the Law 
 (thorah), even the Commandments" (Exod. 
 xxiv: 12) or the Word of God (I John, ii: 7),
 
 The Law and the Prophets 133 
 
 and He gave unto him "two tables of testi- 
 mony, tables of stone, written with the finger 
 of God" (Exod. xxxi: 18), in order that by- 
 observance of the Law they might progress 
 in the pilgrimage to Peace, otherwise called 
 Canaan. 
 
 According to the Law thus delivered, 
 Wickedness or Sin consisted of wandering 
 from the Law to the right or to the left 
 (Josh, i: 7) — going off from the path of 
 Righteousness — and was punishable with 
 divers forms of sorrow, including disease and 
 death (Levit. xxvi: 14-41, Exod. xxxii: 
 33). Obedience to the Law, or Uprightness 
 of Spirit, was rewarded with joys, such as, 
 abundant harvest, deliverance from misfor- 
 tune, and conquest of enemies (Lev. xxvi: 
 3-12). 
 
 Offerings to God for the purpose of obtain- 
 ing His forgiveness formed a most important 
 part of the Tradition of Moses. As sins are 
 committed in ignorance or forgetfulness of 
 the existence and power of God, an offering at 
 His temple would indicate an acknowledgment
 
 i'34 Soul Culture 
 
 of Him, a desire to avoid punishment here- 
 after. It was therefore enjoined on Jews 
 that there should be a "sin-offering" in ex- 
 piation of the sin and preparatory to access 
 to God; then a ' burnt-offering" as sym- 
 bolical of the offending mind and body burnt 
 and surrendered to God; and lastly a "meat- 
 offering" by way of thanksgiving. The 
 offerer brought the sin-offering, a young 
 bullock, to the door of the tabernacle, laid 
 his hand upon the head of the animal, in 
 token of the victim standing for him and 
 bearing the burden of his guilt, and killed 
 it before the Lord. Thereupon the priest 
 dipped a finger in the blood of the victim 
 and sprinkled it seven times before the veil 
 of the sanctuary, — the "holy place within 
 the veil," where the seat of mercy was (Levit. 
 xvi : 2) — putting some of the blood upon the 
 horns of the altar of sweet incense, and throw- 
 ing the rest at the bottom of the altar of 
 the burnt-offering. The fat of the animal 
 was also collected from certain parts of the 
 body and burnt upon the altar. The
 
 The Law and the Prophets 135 
 
 "burnt -offering," which might be the male of 
 the herd, or of the flock, or of the fowls, was 
 similarly dealt with, but the priest burnt 
 the whole of the victim on the altar, and 
 being an offering made by fire, it was "of 
 a sweet savour unto the Lord." The priest 
 was then commanded to ''make an atone- 
 ment" for him as regards his sin, and said the 
 Lord, "it shall be forgiven" (Lev. iv: 26). 
 "Ye shall keep my statutes (laws) and do 
 them," that is, Ye shall bear in mind my 
 words, and act according to them, for "I am 
 the Lord which sanctify you" (Lev. xx: 8), 
 meaning, none of the inferior gods hitherto 
 worshipped have the power of healing you of 
 corruption; only I can. Therefore, "Sanc- 
 tify yourselves, and be ye holy " (Lev. xx: 7). 
 During the time of the Judges (B.C. 
 1 400-1 200), the priesthood had sunk into 
 ignorance and corruption, and the people, 
 becoming themselves too worldly and having 
 no means of learning the spirit or inner 
 meaning of the Mosaic creed, came to think of 
 ceremonial observances as ends per se, or as
 
 136 Soul Culture 
 
 convenient forms of justifying themselves 
 only before the world. 
 
 In this state of vain formalism Samuel 
 (B.C. 1 1 50), who had been dedicated to God 
 from infancy in the tabernacle of Shiloh, 
 grew to be a man of deep spiritual insight, so 
 that his fame as a ndbi or Knower of God 
 spread in the country, and made Shiloh the 
 resort of those who came to consult him. 
 From the gift of prophecy and the position 
 he occupied as Judge, he commanded uni- 
 versal reverence. "Behold!" he declared, 
 "to obey is better than sacrifice and to 
 hearken better than rams" (I Sam. xv: 22), 
 that is, heartfelt obedience to whatever has 
 been enjoined by the Law is better than 
 merely carrying offerings to the Temple; 
 and hearing expositions of the Spirit of the 
 Law is better than making sacrifices at the 
 altar. To enlighten his countrymen and wean 
 them from their worldly ways he founded 
 several schools of spiritual instruction, 
 called "The Companies of Prophets" 
 (I Sam. xix: 20), in which the Law and its
 
 The Law and the Prophets 137 
 
 proper interpretation were carefully studied, 
 as also sacred poetry, music, and sacred 
 dance. Oral, as distinct from symbolical, 
 teaching was henceforth transferred from 
 the priestly to the prophetic order. The 
 students who graduated in these colleges 
 disseminated the knowledge they possessed 
 according to their opportunities; but actual 
 prophets — that is, those who had the gift 
 of prophecy — held religious seances weekly 
 or monthly (as may be gathered from 
 Elisha's life), for the building of the faith of 
 the people. They not only preached morals 
 and religion but also sang and discoursed on 
 history and patriotism. After the establish- 
 ment of these colleges, prophet after prophet 
 arose, proclaiming the inutility of sacrifices 
 when divorced from inner faith. 
 
 "Hear the word of the Lord, ye children 
 of Israel," said Hosea (B.C. 780), "for the 
 Lord hath a controversy with the inhabi- 
 tants of the land, because there is no truth, no 
 
 mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land 
 
 As they were increased, so they sinned
 
 138 Soul Culture 
 
 against me (iv: 1—7) .... They sacrifice 
 upon the tops of the mountains and burn in- 
 cense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars 
 and elms (iv: 13). / desired mercy and not 
 sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more 
 than burnt offerings" (vi: 6). 
 
 "Wherewith," said Micah (B.C. 710) "shall 
 I come before the Lord and bow myself be- 
 fore the high God? Shall I come before Him 
 with burnt offerings, with calves of a year 
 old? Will the Lord be pleased with thou- 
 sands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers 
 of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my 
 transgression, the fruit of my body for the 
 sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O 
 man, what is good, and what doth the Lord 
 require of thee, but to do justly, and to love 
 mercy and to walk humbly with thy God" 
 (vi: 6-8). 
 
 "To what purpose is tire multitude of 
 your sacrifices unto me, saith the Lord," said 
 Isaiah (B.C. 750). "I am full of the burnt- 
 offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts, 
 and I delight not in the blood of the bullocks;
 
 The Law and the Prophets 139 
 
 or of the lambs or of the goats. . . . Bring 
 no more vain oblations. Incense is an abom- 
 ination unto me; the new moons and sab- 
 baths, the calling of assemblies . . . and 
 even appointed feasts my soul hateth . . . 
 I am weary to hear them" (i: 11-14). 
 
 "Behold! the days come, saith the Lord," 
 said Jeremiah (B.C. 606), "that I will make a 
 new covenant with the house of Israel; . . . 
 I will put my law in their inward parts, and 
 write it in their hearts." 
 
 Ezekiel said (B.C. 580) "saith the Lord 
 God, repent and turn yourselves from your 
 transgressions .... make you a new heart 
 and new spirit (xviii: 30, 31). 
 
 It is said that, after the return of the Jews 
 to Jerusalem from Babylon, they gradually 
 became divided into parties or schools, the 
 chief of whom were known as the Saddncees 
 and the Pharisees. 
 
 The Sadducees (Tsedukim the righteous) 
 were strict followers of the written laws of 
 Moses and were drawn from the more opulent 
 and distinguished ranks of Jewish society.
 
 1 4-0 Soul Culture 
 
 In the supposed absence of a single text in 
 the whole of the Pentateuch referring to re- 
 wards and punishments in a future life, they 
 did not believe in such a doctrine or in the 
 resurrection of the dead. They believed 
 that the pains and pleasures experienced in 
 the world were meted out by Jehovah ac- 
 cording to each man's works. They there- 
 fore endeavoured to observe the written law 
 of Moses in all its severity, without taking 
 advantage of the mitigations introduced 
 under the sanction of the traditions of the 
 Elders and maintained by the Pharisees. 
 The Sadducees believed that Jehovah was 
 in "the heaven of heavens" (Deut. x: 14), 
 served by a few angels (Gen. xix: 1), and 
 attended by myriads of saints (Deut. xxxiii: 
 2), and that His anger would "burn into 
 the lowest sheol" (ib. xxxii: 22) or pit. 
 The Sadducees were part of the aristoc- 
 racy of the land and were interested in 
 politics. 
 
 The Pharisees, whose name meant "Sepa- 
 ratists' (Periishim), were the party who are
 
 The Law and the Prophets 141 
 
 said to have come into existence sometime 
 after the conquest of Palestine by Alexander 
 the Great, in order to stem the current of 
 Hellenic modes of thought and life which 
 had by degrees flowed into the country since 
 then. Their policy was to conserve the 
 national element not only in politics but 
 also in religion, and they were therefore 
 exceedingly popular. By their austerity they 
 drew into their party the body of the Jewish 
 people. They believed that Moses received 
 an oral law to complete and interpret the 
 written law contained in the Pentateuch; 
 that he delivered the oral law to Joshua, 
 that Joshua delivered it to the Elders, that 
 the Elders delivered it to the Prophets, and 
 the Prophets to the men of the great Syna- 
 gogue; that the object for which the written 
 law was delivered was attainable all the more 
 easily by interpreting it by the light of the 
 teaching of the Synagogue; that though the 
 general course of matters was pre-ordained, 
 yet man was a free agent in many respects, 
 and that external purity and ceremonial law
 
 142 Soul Culture 
 
 were essential to salvation. They therefore 
 regulated their conduct in life by a network 
 of intricate rules as to what was clean and 
 unclean, proper and improper, necessary 
 and unnecessary, with the result that the 
 majority of the Pharisees, who lost sight of 
 the end and aim of all this formalism, became 
 noted for their bigotry, hypocrisy, and pride. 
 
 As regards their notions of the soul and a 
 future life Josephus, the Pharisee and his- 
 torian of the Jews, who flourished in the first 
 century of Christ, records that the sect to 
 which he belonged believed that every soul 
 was imperishable, and that, while the souls of 
 good men passed over or migrated into other 
 bodies, those of bad men suffered eternal 
 punishment. Philo, the Jewish philosopher, 
 who was a contemporary of Jesus, goes 
 further and declares that all, but those who 
 have known God, must pass into another 
 body. 
 
 The fact of the prevalence of a belief on 
 the part of the Jews in the transmigration 
 of souls, or as they called it "the rising from
 
 The Law and the Prophets 143 
 
 the dead," is supported by the Scriptures, 
 for when Herod heard of the fame of Jesus 
 he said unto his servants, "this is John the 
 Baptist; he is risen from the dead, and there- 
 fore mighty works do show forth themselves 
 in him " (Matt, xiv : 2) ; and we learn that this 
 was not only his own idea, being a Jew, but 
 the common talk in Jewry, some saying that 
 John was risen from the dead, others Elias, 
 and others still one of the old prophets 
 (Luke ix: 7, 8). Furthermore, Jesus him- 
 self said of John the Baptist, "this is Elias 
 which was for to come" (Matt, xi: 14); "I 
 say unto you that Elias is come already, and 
 they knew him not, but have done unto him 
 whatsoever they listed" (referring to John's 
 imprisonment and execution, Matt, xvii: 12; 
 cj. also John i: 21). As the spirit of Elias 
 did not come straight from heaven clad in 
 flesh as John the Baptist, but entered the 
 womb of Elizabeth of Hebron and was clad 
 there with a body in the fulness of time and 
 then received the name of John, it must be 
 admitted that the doctrine of the Trans-
 
 144 Soul Culture 
 
 migration of Souls formed part of the Phari- 
 saic creed (to say nothing of the views of 
 Jesus), and that the expression "rising 
 from the dead" meant also transmigration 
 of the soul. 
 
 With this doctrine of transmigration or 
 rising anew (anastasis) of souls was bound up 
 the belief in the necessity of a sojourn in sheol, 
 "the land of darkness and of the shadow 
 of death, without any order" (Job x: 22), 
 in the lower parts of the earth (Ps. lxiii: 9, 
 Prov. xv : 24), to which the "shades" or 
 subtle bodies of both the "just" and the 
 "unjust" souls were consigned, the former 
 to rest in comfort, the latter to writhe in 
 torment. It is recorded that King Saul once 
 desired a woman "with a familiar spirit" to 
 "bring up" Samuel, with the view of learn- 
 ing from him the issue of the war with the 
 Philistines; that responding to the summons 
 of this woman, the shade of the Prophet, 
 "ascending out of the earth" and wrapped 
 in a mantle, approached Saul and said to 
 him, "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring
 
 The Law and the Prophets 145 
 
 me up?" and that after declaring to kim 
 the course of events, the Prophet concluded 
 with these words: "the Lord will also deliver 
 Israel with thee unto the hand of the Philis- 
 tines, and to-morrow shalt thou and thy 
 sons be with me" (I Sam. xxviii: n-19) 
 in sheol. 
 
 In the case of Lazarus (the brother of 
 Martha), who had been dead and buried four 
 days before Jesus came into Bethany, we 
 find that his spirit was not only summoned 
 presumably from sheol, like Samuel of old, 
 but was made to pass into his corpse and to 
 respond to the call of Jesus, so that "he that 
 was dead came forth bound hand and foot 
 with grave clothes, and his face was bound 
 about with a napkin" (John xi: 44). This 
 was spoken of as the resurrection of Lazarus, 
 and many people came to see him whom 
 Jesus had raised from the dead (ib. xii: 9). 
 The earlier incidents of this resurrection 
 scene prove also the common belief of the 
 times that there was to be a general resur- 
 rection of the dead on a particular day.
 
 146 Soul Culture 
 
 When Jesus stepped into Martha's house 
 she said, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my 
 brother had not died, but I know that even 
 now whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God 
 will give it thee." Jesus saith unto her, 
 "thy brother shall rise again." Martha mis- 
 understanding him replied, "I know that he 
 shall rise again in the resurrection at the last 
 day " (ib. xi: 21, 24). 
 
 The broad features of the Universal Resur- 
 rection are supposed to be contained in the 
 following "prophecy" (Rev. i: 3), "I saw the 
 dead, small and great, stand before God, 
 and the books were opened, and another 
 book was opened, which was the Book of 
 Life; and the dead were judged out of those 
 things which were written in the books, ac- 
 cording to their works. And death and hell 
 were cast into the lake of fire. . . . And who- 
 soever was not found written in the Book 
 of Life was cast into the lake of fire" 
 (ib. xx: 12-15). 
 
 This doctrine of the General Resurrection 
 was of all others the most opposed by the
 
 The Law and the Prophets 147 
 
 Sadducees. There was no authority what- 
 ever for it in the Mosaic Law. 
 
 The historical books of the old Testament 
 and the researches of modern scholars show 
 that this doctrine was derived from Baby j 
 Ionian sources. 
 
 Conservative as the Jews were, direct and 
 personal as was the government of their 
 God, they went the way of all hearts of flesh, 
 "a-whoring after other gods" (I Chron. v: 
 25), from the earliest times (Exod. xx: 3; 
 Deut. iv: 19; Judges viii: 33; x: 16) ; not 
 only after images of wood and metal, trees 
 and high places, but also money, woman, 
 familiar spirits, and other abominations. 
 The decline of the national faith may be said 
 to date from King Solomon (1030 B.C.), who 
 after building the great temple for Jehovah 
 worshipped nevertheless Milcom and Molech, 
 the gods of the Ammonites, Astoreth of the 
 Zidonians, and Chemosh of the Moabites 
 (I Kings xi: 5). Ahaz (B.C. 741) is reported 
 to have "walked in the way of the Kings of 
 Israel, yea, he made his sons to pass through
 
 148 Soul Culture 
 
 the fire according to the abomination of the 
 heathen . . . and he sacrificed and burnt 
 incense in the high places and on the hills 
 and under every green tree" (II Kings, xvi: 
 2-4, II Chron. xxviii: 4). The unrighteous- 
 ness of Israel had already passed into a pro- 
 verb. "And the children of Israel did secretly 
 those things that were not right against the 
 Lord their God, and they built their high 
 places in all their cities . . . and they set them 
 up images . . . and wrought wicked things" 
 (II Kings xvii: 9-12). National ignorance 
 and apostasy had reached their zenith in the 
 reign of Manasseh (B.C. 696-641), who during 
 the fifty years he ruled in Jerusalem reared 
 up altars for Baal and the hosts of heaven, 
 and observed times, as appointed by astro- 
 logers, used enchantments, and dealt with 
 familiar spirits and wizards (II Kings xxi: 
 3-6). The Mosaic law was violated in all 
 respects. Indeed its very principles were for- 
 gotten, for in Josiah's reign it is recorded that, 
 in the course of repairing the House of the 
 Lord in Jerusalem, a solitary book of the law
 
 The Law and the Prophets 1 49 
 
 was discovered (B.C. 621) among the debris, 
 and carried to the King, who hearing the 
 words of the law read rent his clothes and 
 wept at the deep degradation of the people 
 and the priests. He then "sent and gathered 
 together all the elders of Judah and Jerusa- 
 lem, and the King went up into the house 
 of the Lord, and all the men of Judah and 
 the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the priests 
 and the Levites and all the people, great and 
 small. And he read in their ears all the words 
 of the book of the covenant that was found 
 in the House of the Lord. And the Kine 
 stood in his place and made a covenant be- 
 fore the Lord to walk after the Lord and 
 to keep his commandments and his testi- 
 monies and his statutes, with all his heart 
 and with all his soul, to perform the words 
 of the covenant which are written in this 
 book. And he caused all that were present 
 in Jerusalem and Benjamin to stand to it . . . 
 and Josiah took away all the abominations 
 out of all the countries that pertained to 
 the children of Israel, and made all that were
 
 150 Soul Culture 
 
 present in Israel to serve the Lord their God. 
 And all his days they departed not from 
 following the Lord" (II Chron. xxxiv: 29-33). 
 Upon his death, however, they relapsed into 
 their old ways, and continued so until they 
 were taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar, 
 King of Babylon, and marched off (B.C. 599) 
 to Chaldaea, "all Jerusalem, and all the 
 princes, and all the mighty men of Salem . . . 
 and craftsmen and smiths. None remained, 
 save the poorest sort of the people of the 
 land" (II Kings xxiv: 13, 14). 
 
 It was most probably during the captivity 
 that the Jews, in ignorance of their religion, 
 allowed themselves to pass under the do- 
 minion of customs and superstitions which 
 were wholly foreign to the Law of Moses. 
 It has been admitted by Mr. Isaac D'Israeli 
 that the Rabbins have no good reason for 
 referring to Moses and Mount Sinai the twelve 
 folios of the Babylonish Talmud or "the 
 Doctrinal," on the authenticity of which 
 such "legends" have found acceptance with 
 the Scribes and Pharisees, whose want of
 
 The Law and the Prophets 1 5 1 
 
 spiritual discernment Jesus condemned 
 severely (Matt, xxiii: 23). 
 
 The first clear mention of the doctrine of 
 the General Resurrection of the Dead in the 
 Old Testament is supposed to occur in the 
 book of Ezekiel (B.C. 587), who was long resi- 
 dent in Babylon, having been taken thither 
 as captive in his twenty-fifth year. Know- 
 ing that his countrymen believed in the gen- 
 eral resurrection, he appears to have utilised 
 it for the purpose of raising the national 
 faith from the slough of corruption and de- 
 spondency into which it had fallen. He 
 maintained that the Jews were still the chosen 
 people of the Lord. It was true that the 
 nation with whom the old covenant was 
 made had been driven from the fatherland, 
 its temple and altar destroyed, and its priest- 
 hood disbanded; it was true that the 
 "bones" of Israel lay scattered in barbarous 
 countries, intermingled with the bones of 
 the uncircumcised ; but yet the covenant of 
 God stood, because the Lord had declared to 
 him that he would clothe "the dry bones"
 
 152 Soul Culture 
 
 (or poverty of worldly spirit), of "the dead" 
 (or those who have been dead unto the world 
 and become alive unto the Lord) with " flesh " 
 (or the fulness of spirituality), and lead 
 them back to Israel (or the realm of Peace) 
 in the vigour of (eternal) life. Such was 
 the tenor of Ezekiel's impressive Vision of the 
 Dry Bones, which, be it remembered, was 
 expressed only for the purpose of inculcating 
 a grand spiritual truth, viz., that those who 
 are dead unto the world shall be reborn as 
 sons of God. "The hand of the Lord," he 
 declared, "was upon me and carried me out 
 in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down 
 in the midst of the valley, which was full of 
 bones, and caused me to pass by them round 
 about, and behold! there were very many 
 in the open valley, and lo! they were very 
 dry. And He said unto me ' Son of man, can 
 these bones live?' And I answered, '0 Lord, 
 thou knowest.' Again He said unto me 
 ' Prophesy upon these bones and say unto 
 them, ye dry bones, hear the word of the 
 Lord.' Thus saith the Lord God unto these
 
 The Law and the Prophets 153 
 
 bones: 'Behold, I will cause breath to enter 
 into you, and ye shall live; and I will lay 
 sinews upon you and will bring up flesh upon 
 you, and cover you with skin, and put breath 
 in you, and ye shall live, and ye shall know 
 that I am the Lord.' So I prophesied as I 
 was commanded, and as I prophesied there 
 was a noise and behold a shaking, and the 
 dry bones came together, bone to his (its) 
 bone; and when I beheld, lo! the sinews 
 and the flesh came up upon them, and the 
 skin covered them above, but there was no 
 breath in them. Then said He unto me, 
 ' Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of 
 man, and say to the wind thus saith the Lord 
 God: 'Come from the four winds, O breath, 
 and breathe upon these slain that they may 
 live.' So I prophesied as He commanded 
 me, and the breath came into them, and they 
 lived and stood up upon their feet, an exceed- 
 ingly great army. Then He said unto me, 
 1 Son of man, these bones are the whole house 
 of Israel. Behold, they say, our bones are 
 dried and our hope is lost, we are cut off our
 
 154 Soul Culture 
 
 parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto 
 them, thus saith the Lord God: Behold! 
 O my people, I will open your graves and 
 cause you to come up out of them and bring 
 you into the land of Israel ; and ye shall know 
 that I am the Lord, when I have opened your 
 graves, O my people, and brought you up 
 out of your graves; and I shall put my Spirit 
 in you and ye shall live, and I shall place you 
 in your own land. Then shall ye know that I, 
 the Lord, have spoken it and performed it, 
 saith the Lord'" (xxxvii: 1-14). 
 
 The last part of this prophecy beginning 
 with "O my people, I will open your graves, " 
 is a good illustration of an allegory within 
 an allegory, for it conveys, in words charac- 
 teristic of the vulgar doctrine of the Resur- 
 rection of the Body, a great truth relating to 
 the conversion or Regeneration of the Spirit. 
 If worldly minds be substituted for "graves, " 
 holy land or state of perfection for "the land 
 of Israel, " and freeing the mind of its worldli- 
 ness for "opening of the grave," the meaning 
 of the second allegory will be clear.
 
 The Law and the Prophets 155 
 
 When Ezekiel and Daniel are quoted "as 
 the first distinct authorities on which this 
 belief (in the General Resurrection of the 
 Dead) might be grounded" (Dean Milman's 
 History of Christianity, Vol. I, p. 73, revised 
 edition of 1875), we must carefully distinguish 
 their own creed from that of the masses of 
 their countrymen whom they were en- 
 deavouring to "snare" and press into "the 
 way of life," — to convert from error and 
 lead unto Truth. 
 
 Another great doctrine taught by the 
 Prophets to their countrymen was the Ad- 
 vent of the Messiah (the anointed), who was 
 to spring from the " seed " of David, appear in 
 the "Temple" on "Mount Moriah," summon 
 together the "dispersed tribes," conquer all 
 their " enemies " and establish a "universal 
 empire," the centre of which was to be 
 " Zion," the holy city. 
 
 To the Prophets the Messiah or Christ did 
 not mean a person made of flesh and blood, 
 but a soul sanctified by apt methods. Isaiah 
 expressly says that Christ is without form or
 
 156 Soul Culture 
 
 proportion and yet is transcendingly beauti- 
 ful (liii: 2). It is only those who have been 
 blessed with the fundamental experiences re- 
 ferred to at Chapter iv, p. 98, that know, and 
 bear witness to, the great truth that, when 
 the little light, little love, and little peace 
 which exist in the human heart grow wider 
 and wider and attain their fullest maturity, 
 they run one into another and form an In- 
 finite whole, a supremely real and sacred 
 Personality, called the Anointed of God, be- 
 cause of this grace fully shed upon It and 
 making It of His own likeness. The "dis- 
 persed tribes," known also as the "tribes of 
 the earth," are understood by the sanctified 
 to be the different instruments of knowledge 
 and action given by God to aid the soul in 
 its progress towards Him, but which, being 
 urged by Folly, have gone worldwards, away 
 from God and the care of the Soul; and "uni- 
 versal empire" is the domination of God in 
 all man's thoughts when his conversion from 
 worldliness to godliness has taken place by 
 the grace of God; and Zion is the Soul thus
 
 The Law and the Prophets 157 
 
 sanctified in the human body and forming the 
 real temple of God. 
 
 But the ignorant multitude and even 
 learned scribes and Pharisees had very differ- 
 ent and conflicting ideas of the Sanctified 
 Soul or Messiah or Christ. "Each region, 
 each rank," says Dean Milman, "the Baby- 
 lonian, the Egyptian, the Palestinian, the 
 Samaritan; the Pharisee, the Lawyer, the 
 Zealot, arrayed the Messiah in those attri- 
 butes which suited his own temperament. 
 Of that which was more methodically taught 
 in the synagogue or the adjacent school, the 
 populace caught up whatever made the 
 deeper impression. The enthusiasm took an 
 active or contemplative, an ambitious or a 
 religious, an earthly or a heavenly tone, ac- 
 cording to the education, habits, or station 
 of the believer; and to different men the 
 Messiah was man or angel; he was King, con- 
 queror, or moral reformer; a more victorious 
 Joshua, a more magnificent Herod, a wider- 
 ruling Caesar, a wiser Moses, a holier Abra- 
 ham; an angel, the Angel of the Covenant,
 
 158 Soul Culture 
 
 the Metatron, the Mediator between God 
 and man. . . . While this was the religious 
 belief, some there were, no doubt, of the 
 Sadducaic party, or the half-Groecised ad- 
 herents of the Herodian family, who treated 
 the whole as a popular delusion" (Hist. 0} 
 Christianity, i, 80). 
 
 The bulk of the Jews, who knew nothing 
 of the inner truths of Judaism, mixed up the 
 Coming of the Messiah with the General 
 Resurrection of the Dead, which having been 
 borrowed from Babylon during the captivity, 
 formed the leading article of the schism be- 
 tween the Pharisees and the Sadducees. 
 
 Reference must now be made to another 
 section of the Jews known as the Essenians, 
 who are mentioned by Philo, a contempo- 
 rary writer, as an old established sect. 
 
 Josephus wrote of them as follows: "They 
 cherish mutual love beyond other men; they 
 reject all pleasures as sinful, and look on 
 temperance and a conquest over their passions 
 as the greatest virtue. There prevails 
 among them a contempt of matrimony, but
 
 The Law and the Prophets 159 
 
 they receive the children of others and edu- 
 cate them as their own while yet tender and 
 susceptible of instructions. They despise 
 riches. . . . Their food is of the plainest 
 kind. . . . They avoid all swearing . . . and 
 consider their word the same as an oath. . . . 
 If any one wishes to join their sect he must 
 undergo a year's probation, and when he has 
 proved himself, is made a partaker of the 
 waters of purification. There are also those 
 among them who foretell things to come. 
 ... It also deserves our admiration how 
 much they excel all other men in virtue and 
 righteousness to such a degree as hath never 
 appeared among other men. . . . There are 
 about four thousand men who live in this 
 way, and neither marry nor keep servants, 
 thinking the latter tempts men to be unjust, 
 and the former gives a handle to domestic 
 quarrels " (Wars of the Jews, II, chap, viii, and 
 Antiquities , XVIII, chap. i). 
 
 And Philo says that the name "Essenian" 
 means holy; that they aimed at attaining the 
 highest holiness in the worship of God, not
 
 160 Soul Culture 
 
 by sacrificing animals but by purity of heart ; 
 that they left learning and logic to vain and 
 subtle metaphysicians, and contented them- 
 selves with the acquisition of virtue and the 
 knowledge of God; that they all lived in com- 
 mon, in thinly populated places and deserts; 
 that their food was coarse bread seasoned with 
 salt, and their drink plain water; that they 
 assiduously practised humility and considered 
 their aim in life to be death to the world, 
 and that many of them delivered magnificent 
 visions, and were hence called Prophets. 
 
 Philo belonged, according to Jerome, to 
 the priestly class of the Jews. He was one 
 of the most learned men of the age, having 
 devoted his best resources to a careful study 
 of esoteric Judaism as it was understood at 
 the time of Jesus, whose contemporary he 
 was. His exposition of it is supposed by some 
 men learned in philosophies to be deeply 
 tinged with the principles of the Pytha- 
 gorean, Stoic, and Platonic schools, which 
 flourished in Alexandria where he usually 
 lived. But it matters little whence his
 
 The Law and the Prophets 1 6 1 
 
 knowledge of the doctrines was derived, or 
 whether his principles are to be viewed as 
 Judaic or Hellenic or Hellenistico-Judaic, 
 seeing that those of them at least which are 
 cited below are assuredly the doctrines of 
 Jesus and other sanctified souls also. 
 
 According to Philo's exposition, God is 
 Perfect Being, transcending all quantity and 
 quality, and therefore unchangeable, eternal, 
 free, and self-sufficient. In Him inheres 
 Logos (rendered in the English Bible as the 
 Word), which is the operative principle of 
 creation (theoi logos hede kosmoposottntos), 
 the power or intelligent force which causes 
 the cosmic element {hide) to evolve as the 
 beautiful and orderly universe. The world 
 (kosmos) is not born of, or developed from, 
 God, but from the rudiment, stuff, or materia 
 (called hide, the material cause) of the world. 
 Originally all souls were of the image of God, 
 but those of them that were attracted by the 
 world became afflicted with evil and subject 
 to sin; and the body in which they are clothed 
 is a real "prison, a coffin, or a grave for the
 
 1 62 Soul Culture 
 
 soul which seeks to rise again to God." 
 Man, being a captive to sense, cannot of his 
 own power escape from the fetters of the 
 world. "As moral effort can bear fruit only 
 with God's help, so too God himself is the 
 goal of that effort. Even in this life, the truly 
 wise and virtuous is lifted above his sensible 
 existence and enjoys in ecstacy the vision 
 of God, his own consciousness sinking and 
 disappearing in the divine light. Beyond 
 this ecstacy there lies but a further step, viz., 
 entire liberation from the body of sense (or 
 the tangible body) and the return of the soul 
 to its original condition. It came from God 
 and must rise to Him again. But natural 
 death brings this consummation only to 
 those who, while they lived on earth, kept 
 themselves free from attachment to the 
 things of sense; all others must at death 
 pass into another body" (Prof. E. Schurer 
 on "Philo," Encyc. Brit, xviii, 762, ninth 
 ed.). 
 
 Another learned writer observes, "The 
 Essenes bore one of the most momentous
 
 The Law and the Prophets 1 63 
 
 parts in the development of Judaism. Christ- 
 ianity stands in so close connection with 
 them that John the Baptist and Jesus Christ 
 himself have by some been pronounced to 
 have issued from their ranks. 
 
 " Josephus, Philo, Pliny, Eusebius, and the 
 Fathers generally were long considered the 
 sources and the only sources from which 
 the genuine history of this fraternity could 
 be deduced. Strange that for so many cen- 
 turies the real and genuine sources — the 
 Talmudic writings — should never have been 
 thought of. These, together with Josephus 
 and Philo, Pliny, Makrisi, and Abulfarig 
 better enable us to form an idea of the com- 
 munity. . . . The Mishna, Beraitha, and 
 Talmud speak of the advanced Pharisees in 
 general as Chasidim (pious men), Nazirim 
 (abstinents) and Toble Schacharitti. . . . They 
 became the forerunners of the Christian 
 Gnostics and of the Jewish Cabbalists. ... As 
 they had sprung from the Pharisees, so they 
 again merged into them. The remaining part 
 became Therapeutce or (Ascetic) Christians "
 
 1 64 Soul Culture 
 
 (Chambers' Encyclopedia, Art. "Essenes," 
 vol. iv, pp. 427-428). 
 
 The foregoing survey of religious thought 
 among the Jews ought to make it clear that 
 Judaism consisted of three orders of beliefs 
 in the days of Jesus, namely, those held by 
 the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes. 
 They were not three separate systems but 
 parts of a whole. Each was a stage in the 
 Way to the Goal which the Jews aspired to 
 reach. The Sadducees, being too literal in 
 the interpretation of the Law delivered by 
 Moses, occupied the first stage; then came 
 the Pharisees; and nearest the goal stood the 
 Essenes. For all the three fraternities were 
 agreed that salvation meant the Healing of 
 the Corruption of the Soul and attainment of 
 God. Their common ideal was to see God 
 (Gen. xxxii: 30); to be with God (Gen. 
 xxvi: 24; Deut. xviii: 13; Josh, iii: 7; Judges 
 vi: 12; I Sam. x: 7; I Kings viii: 57; Isa. 
 xli: 15); to sit at the right hand of God 
 (Ps. ex: 1); to talk with God (Gen. xxxv: 
 13); to wait upon the Lord (Isa. xl: 31); to
 
 The Law and the Prophets 165 
 
 have the thought established on God (Prov. 
 xvi: 3); to find rest (Isa. lvii: 20); to have 
 peace (Isa. lvii: 21; Jer. xxiii: 17); to find 
 grace or favour in His sight (Judges vi: 17); 
 to be blessed of the Lord (Gen. xxvi: 29); 
 to have power with Him or to prevail over 
 Him (Gen. xxxii: 28); to be able not to let 
 Him go without a blessing (Gen. xxxii: 26); 
 to cleave unto Him (Deut. x: 10, 20; Josh, 
 xxiii: 8); to love the Lord (Deut. xxx: 16; 
 Josh, xxiii: n); to serve God (Deut. x: 20); 
 to serve Him in sincerity and truth (Josh, 
 xxiv: 14; I Sam. xii: 24); to fear Him 
 (Gen. xxii: 12; Deut. x: 20, Josh, xxiv: 14; 
 I Sam. xii: 14); not to turn aside from 
 following the Lord (I Sam. xii: 20; Josh, 
 i: 7); to be upright and eschew evil (Job i: 
 8) ; to walk before Him in integrity and up- 
 rightness (I Kings ix: 4); to be perfect (Gen. 
 vi: 9; ib. xvii: 1; Deut. xviii: 13; I Kings 
 viii: 61 ; Job i : 8). 
 
 According to the Sadducees "the way" 
 (Deut. xi: 27) to perfection and God, — "the 
 way of life" (Deut. xxx: 20) as opposed to
 
 1 66 Soul Culture 
 
 "the way of death" (Jer. xxi : 8), — "the 
 good and the right way" (I Sam. xii: 23), 
 was the observance of the written law of 
 Moses; according to the Pharisees, the ob- 
 servance of the written law, tempered by the 
 traditional oral law; and according to the 
 Essenes, a heartfelt adherence to righteous- 
 ness founded on a complete renunciation of 
 worldly life (which the law of Moses sought to 
 spiritualise by a system of fasting and sac- 
 rifice), and single-minded devotion to those 
 practices which had been organised if not 
 originated in Judasa by Samuel the prophet for 
 the purpose of effectually sanctifying the soul. 
 The Sadducees and Pharisees espoused the 
 outer shell or exoteric phase of Judaism, and 
 the Essenes its inner kernel or esoteric phase. 
 "The Law and the Prophets" is the ex- 
 pression used among the Jews to denote this 
 distinction. It includes the whole of the 
 Judaic way, fulfilled by the supremely grand 
 teaching of the Psalms on Oneness of Love or 
 "Unity of Faith."
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 ON THE TEACHINGS OF THE PSALMS 
 
 167
 
 The Psalms are songs of either seekers of God 
 (Yogis), or of those who have sought and found 
 God (Jndnis). 
 In illustration of their teachings, a few Psalms 
 
 considered. 
 Lessons of the first Psalm: 
 Greatness of Blessedness. 
 
 Nature of Blessedness and of happiness 
 of the worldly-minded. 
 How to attain Blessedness. 
 
 Should suppress tempting thought at the 
 
 very outset. 
 Should never entertain it. 
 Should not court temptation, but hold aloof 
 from it. 
 
 The corruption that rises in the mind as a 
 tempting thought lurks in the mind, 
 the senses, and other members of the 
 body. 
 Necessity for isolating the spirit from 
 corruption and withdrawing the energy 
 of the Spirit from the offending member. 
 Should avoid derision, raillery, and caustic 
 wit, because they choke the growth of 
 love. 
 Should revel in love of God with simple 
 minded devotion. 
 Must practise meditation daily. 
 Nature of meditation. 
 
 168
 
 Benefit of meditation. Expansion of 
 spiritual discernment, sound bodily 
 health, and spiritual happiness. 
 Evils of worldliness. 
 Lessons of the second Psalm: 
 
 It is usual for those who would be spiritual to 
 be tempted to abandon their efforts to attain 
 God. 
 How corruption makes a grand effort to over- 
 come the awakened soul. 
 The design of the Lord in regard to souls which 
 have been quickened by hearing the word 
 of God, explained. 
 It is His will that the seeking soul shall become 
 
 a Son of God or Christ. 
 After attaining Christhood, the sanctified 
 soul shall for ever be the ruler of his own 
 household, the members whereof will serve 
 him truly, without any longer acknow- 
 ledging the sway of corruption. 
 Lessons of the third Psalm: 
 
 Abatement of thought in spiritual communion 
 
 is a work of extreme difficulty. 
 But with the help of the Lord it is possible to 
 overcome the vagaries of thought and attain 
 Peace. 
 The Lord is the author of all salvation. It is 
 He who blesses those who acknowledge Him 
 to be the sovereign ruler of the universe. 
 
 169
 
 Other illustrations: 
 
 "Be still and know that I am God" (Ps. xlvi: 
 
 10). 
 "He bringeth them unto the desired haven" 
 (ib. cvii: 30). 
 The Psalms are a book of the spiritual experiences 
 of those who, knowing that life on earth was 
 meant for the kingship of the spirit over flesh, 
 make it their business to attain it amidst the 
 turmoil of worldly engagements, by beseeching 
 God daily and hourly for strength and purity. 
 
 170
 
 THE TEACHING OF THE PSALMS 
 
 Reading the Psalms by the light of those 
 godly men called Jndnis or Jivanmnktas ,who 
 have attained a full knowledge of God, it is 
 not difficult to identify the Psalms as the 
 Songs of either seekers of God or those who 
 have sought and found God. In India 
 these two classes of spirits are commonly 
 called Yogis. Strictly, however, Yogis are 
 only seekers; those who have succeeded in 
 the search are Yuktas or Jndnis (knowers). 
 In the Book of Psalms we have the out- 
 pourings of both Yogis and Yuktas, and 
 from these songs may be collected many 
 a doctrine of Truth and Grace, and many 
 an exercise in Godliness. In illustration, 
 the first three Psalms may be taken and 
 considered at some length. 
 
 The first Psalm is clearly that of a Jndni 
 (or knower of God). It explains in the 
 first three verses how growth in Blessedness 
 
 171
 
 172 Soul Culture 
 
 or Peace is to be secured, and in the next 
 three verses how the schemes of corruption 
 or the son of perdition (II Thes. ii: 3), to keep 
 the soul in his captivity, are reduced to 
 naught by the omniscient grace of God. 
 
 Like Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the 
 Psalmist's exhortation begins with the great- 
 ness of Blessedness. This is the keynote of 
 the Psalm. One who knows in actual 
 experience what Blessedness is, knows also 
 the doctrines and practices necessary for 
 its realisation, because it is by such paths 
 he attained Blessedness. 
 
 " Blessed is the man 
 
 That walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly 
 Nor standeth in the way of sinners 
 Nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful." 
 
 Blessedness is spiritual joy as distinguished 
 from worldly joy. The highest of spiritual 
 joys is that within the experience of those 
 only who have attained God, as the result 
 of their ability to isolate the spirit from all 
 its surroundings, even from sense impres- 
 sions and thoughts. When the spirit thus
 
 The Psalmists 173 
 
 stands Alone, it is supremely peaceful. 
 This peace, trancending all thought and 
 therefore all modes or changes, is Blessed- 
 ness. Next to it comes the happiness of 
 those who would be blessed. Their chief 
 desire is to keep the mind well established in 
 the spirit, and the tongue .and hand devoted 
 to works that relate to the growth of spirit- 
 uality in themselves and others ; but as such 
 instruments have often to combat opposing 
 forces lurking in those very instruments, 
 the happiness of this class of persons though 
 uplifting is occasionally tinged with sadness. 
 And as regards the happiness of all other 
 beings, it is rooted in some passing worldly 
 desire. It begins at the moment of grasp- 
 ing the object desired and ends with the 
 relaxing of that grasp. The duration of 
 each sensuous enjoyment is thus very short. 
 If wanting in novelty, enjoyment diminishes; 
 if oft repeated, it is fatiguing. Neverthe- 
 less, the minds which pursue sensuous 
 pleasures stalk sensuous objects, knowing 
 nothing of the more refined and durable
 
 174 Soul Culture 
 
 happiness of seekers of God, or the unspeak- 
 able blessedness of those who have found 
 God. 
 
 The great Psalmist declares that the man 
 who "walketh not in the counsel of the un- 
 godly" will attain the spiritual joy called 
 Blessedness. The spirit which strives for it 
 should never hearken to the promptings of 
 corruption or wickedness, which in Psalm 
 ii: i is spoken of as the "heathen," and in 
 Psalm x: 18 as "the man of the earth," the 
 very expressions used by St. Paul in I Cor. 
 xv : 47, to denote the spirit of error work- 
 ing mysteriously within the instruments of 
 knowledge and action for its base purposes. 
 "As is the earth, so are they that are earthy" 
 (ib. 48). The "Ungodly" are the spirit of 
 error and its emanations. 
 
 The man who labours for Godliness must be 
 wakeful enough to suppress at the very out- 
 set a tempting thought. He must not enter- 
 tain it for a second. 
 
 The divine Psalmist further explains that 
 the high estate of Blessedness can never be
 
 The Psalmists 175 
 
 reached by one who " standeth in the way of 
 sinners." "Sinners" is another name for 
 the ungodly. They are the spirit of error 
 and its different manifestations. They stand 
 estranged from God. Their characteristics 
 are those of the "wicked" who, says the 
 Psalmist in x: 4, "will not seek after God; 
 God is not in all his thoughts." Lying con- 
 cealed in the senses and in the faculties of 
 thought and speech, and in the hands, feet, 
 and other limbs, he has trained all of 
 them to be his allies in sin, much to the 
 injury of the soul for whose benefit they 
 were created. 
 
 What is enjoined by the Psalmist is that 
 the God-loving spirit should not court temp- 
 tation by standing in the way of the tempter, 
 as if to meet him. It should on the contrary 
 stand out of his way and hold itself aloof from 
 him. It therefore follows that Isolation is 
 the surest remedy against the onslaughts 
 of corruption; not life in lonely places, but 
 the standing aloof of the spirit from the 
 seducing ministers who, entangled in the
 
 176 Soul Culture 
 
 meshes of worldliness, will do its bidding if 
 the energy of the spirit is not promptly with- 
 drawn from them. Just as in sleep the sub- 
 sidence of energy into the spirit causes the 
 activities of the senses and other faculties 
 of thought, speech, and movement, to cease, 
 so in waking moments also the spirit should 
 not lend its energy to the ministers that 
 would function in obedience to the man of 
 the earth. 
 
 Eyes were given to see what is good and 
 beautiful in life, but under the captivity of 
 Corruption eyes delight in beholding sensu- 
 ous scenes. Ears were given to hear sound 
 doctrine — the doctrine that heals the soul 
 of its corruption — but, from association 
 with the spirit of error they love to hear 
 gossip, scandal, and other kinds of vain and 
 evil talk. In the same way, other instru- 
 ments, given to help the spirit towards God- 
 liness, drag him deeper into the mire of 
 worldliness. When your servants sinfully 
 betray you into the hands of your enemy, 
 that is, the evil spirit within you, what other
 
 The Psalmists 177 
 
 course is there for you, the spirit, than to 
 withdraw from them your supplies of energy 
 needful for action ? 
 
 The Psalmist next describes some of the 
 habits of the carnally-minded man, other- 
 wise called the heathen or the sinner within 
 the body. He and his forces are "scornful." 
 The weapon of wickedness is not argument, 
 but ridicule. It leers, makes faces, despises. 
 Professing love for truth, it is ever on the 
 watch to bring it into disrepute by the slyest 
 methods. It is painfully egotistic. "I did 
 this, not you." "But for me, things would 
 have gone wrong." "What did he do? 
 Nothing at all." "He is no good." Such 
 are its formulas of self-appreciation and 
 depreciation of others. It is always differ- 
 entiating between itself and others. If con- 
 vinced of its own superiority, it gloats over 
 the fact and loses no opportunity to remind 
 others of their comparative smallness. If, 
 on the other hand, it feels they are superior, 
 it will not only refuse to acknowledge that 
 fact, but will even hate them for their
 
 178 Soul Culture 
 
 superiority, ever waiting for an opportunity 
 to misrepresent them. "They hate me with- 
 out a cause," said the spiritual man of worldly 
 men (Psalm lxix: 4; John xv: 25). 
 
 To be with the scorner and copy his ways 
 of derision, raillery, and caustic wit is to 
 choke the seeds of Love and Truth in the 
 Soul. The blissfulness of Spiritual Life will 
 not be vouchsafed to one who practises such 
 works of the Fool (Ps. xiv: 1 ; ib. xlix: 13). 
 
 Isolating himself as much as possible from 
 the sinful and scornful spirit of error, the 
 seeker after God should "delight in the Law 
 of the Lord," says the anointed Psalmist. 
 He must ascertain what that Law is and then 
 obey it with glowing enthusiasm. 
 
 "If thou wilt enter into life" (or Eternal 
 Life or knowledge of God, John 17: 3), said 
 Jesus, "keep the Commandments" (Matt, 
 xix : 17); and in answer to the question, 
 "Which is the greatest commandment in 
 the Law?" he said, 'Thou shalt love the 
 Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with 
 all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is
 
 The Psalmists 179 
 
 the first and great commandment. And the 
 second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself. On these two com- 
 mandments hang all the Law and the Pro- 
 phets (Matt, xxii: 36-40)." 
 
 The true seeker is he who doth " meditate 
 day and night" upon the supremely beautiful 
 and all comprehensive Love of God. Having 
 learnt from the Anointed Teacher the differ- 
 entiating ways of Darkness or Hate, the apt 
 disciple should cultivate the art of unifying 
 himself in spirit with all others, by remember- 
 ing that bodies are only vestments of the 
 spirit, and that it is time vainly spent to note 
 the disparities between bodies that are de- 
 stined to fall off and rot. He should meditate 
 particularly how God, the Infinite Spirit, 
 stands evenly in the finite spirits of all living 
 bodies and maintains and protects them all 
 unceasingly. He should find exemplifications 
 of the Lord's mercies and continuously make 
 his mind run upon the grace that has been 
 shed upon him and all others in numberless 
 ways. In this manner he should expand
 
 180 Soul Culture 
 
 his spiritual discernment so as to establish 
 himself more and more upon God ; even as in 
 days of yore he allowed his mind to run on 
 worldly things and found himself established 
 on sensuousness or worldliness, with the 
 result that he was never happy for any length 
 of time but was tossed about like a dry leaf, 
 a plaything of every passing humour. 
 
 The Psalmist, having himself passed from 
 worldliness to Godliness, gives his disciple 
 the assurance that by the practice of medita- 
 tion on Godly Love day and night, that is, 
 twice a day at least, "he shall be like a tree 
 planted by rivers of water that bringeth 
 forth its fruit in its season." How pleasing 
 is a tree loaded with luscious fruit! How 
 much more precious is it when, by reason of 
 its establishment on the banks of a perennial 
 stream of fresh water it yields a perennial 
 harvest! Even so, the seeker who, divorced 
 from the ways of the flesh, establishes him- 
 self on Truth and Love by daily meditations 
 and deep spiritual communion, grows strong 
 in spirit and brings forth the fruits of the
 
 The Psalmists 181 
 
 spirit, called Christhood, and the power of 
 healing the corrupt maladies of other souls 
 by effective instruction. 
 
 "Its leaf also shall not wither," says the 
 Psalmist, of the tree that draws life from 
 the pure stream. He means the powers of the 
 body and mind, for worthy purposes, will not 
 diminish or disappear, while spiritual strength 
 in all its austerity is being gained. "Seek 
 ye first the kingdom of righteousness," said 
 Jesus, "and all these things shall be added 
 unto you" (Matt. 6: 33). It is a great 
 mistake to suppose that the development of 
 spirituality disqualifies one for worldly 
 work. 
 
 Furthermore the Psalmist declares, "what- 
 soever he doeth shall prosper." Prosperity 
 here does not mean attainment of worldly 
 possessions. The man of God cares naught 
 for the perishable "treasures" of worldly 
 life. He is not moved by gaining or losing 
 them. He cares only for spiritual progress. 
 If the spirit prospers in Love and Truth, his 
 happiness is complete.
 
 1 82 Soul Culture 
 
 "Not so the ungodly, but like the chaff 
 which the wind driveth away," says the 
 Psalmist. Worldly-minded men are reck- 
 less and cannot hope for the fulfilment of 
 Love or Blessedness. Their works in search 
 of happiness bring them no happiness. 
 They may be likened to wind-tossed chaff. 
 
 "Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the 
 judgment, 
 Nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous." 
 
 The Master means that, as ungodliness is not 
 steadfast nor established in Truth and Love, 
 it will never see the day of judgment or dis- 
 cernment, which is the great spiritual ex- 
 perience known to the Jivanmuktas of India 
 as dtma darsanam (appearance of the spirit), 
 and to the Jivanmuktas of Judea as the Com- 
 ing of Christ. And for want of such know- 
 ledge the sinful spirit, which stands estranged 
 from God, cannot be with sanctified spirits. 
 
 "For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous 
 But the way of the ungodly shall perish." 
 
 It is impossible to deceive God. He knows 
 who is righteous and who is not. Being
 
 The Psalmists 183 
 
 omniscient, he never allows the ungodly 
 spirit of error to thwart the efforts of the 
 meditative soul to attain by Isolation, Alone- 
 ness, or Sanctification the highest form of 
 happiness, viz., Blessedness. 
 
 The second Psalm is also the outpouring 
 of a Jndni. It continues the ideas begun in 
 the first Psalm. After describing the ways of 
 those who hunger and thirst after righteous- 
 ness, — who in India are called Mumukshus 
 or seekers of freedom from the entangle- 
 ments of worldliness, — the Anointed One 
 of the Lord — called in India Jndni or Jivan- 
 mnkta — proceeds to explain how the spirit 
 of error makes, in this freedom-loving state 
 of the soul, one final and great attempt to 
 keep it within its captivity, urging the minis- 
 ters of the soul not to go with the soul into the 
 path pointed out by the Sacred Teacher, but 
 to rebel against him and the Lord who sent 
 him. It is further explained that such re- 
 bellion will be vain, and the Psalmist con- 
 cludes his inexpressibly sweet song by an 
 exhortation to the ministers of the souJ Xo
 
 184 Soul Culture 
 
 stand by and serve the soul truly in fear of 
 the invincible power of the Lord. Let us 
 consider the Psalm in some detail. 
 The first verse is, — 
 
 "Why do the heathen rage 
 And the people imagine a vain thing?" 
 
 The Hebrew word goiim, rendered in Greek 
 as ethne, and in English as gentiles and hea- 
 then, stands for the beings that delight in the 
 heath or jungle of lawlessness. They hate 
 the commandments of the Lord laid down 
 for the guidance of the spirit. They are 
 the essence of carnality, which, inhering 
 in the instruments of knowledge and action 
 of the soul, leads them into the sensuous side 
 of life, into unspiritual ways. 
 
 "Why do the heathen rage?" Why is 
 the corrupt spirit in a state of great excite- 
 ment? The answer is, because the Anointed 
 Teacher or Jnana Guru has come to explain 
 to the Mumukshu, or seeker of Freedom, that 
 he should be on his guard against it, an utter 
 heathen.
 
 The Psalmists 185 
 
 "Why do the people imagine a vain 
 thing?" The people are the ministers of the 
 soul created out of cosmic stuff or flesh and 
 given to the soul to help it in its career from 
 darkness to Light. Being creatures of flesh, 
 these ministers have a natural tendency to 
 espouse the cause of darkness, and are there- 
 fore called "his strong ones" in Psalm x: 10. 
 It is by means of these powerful ministers 
 that the spirit of error consummates its work 
 of darkness or evil. In Psalm xii: 4 the 
 Psalmist speaks of them as saying, "With 
 our tongue we shall prevail, our lips are our 
 own, who is Lord over us?" Their habit 
 is to "puff" at the Lord (ib. 5). 
 
 Knowing that the J nana Guru has arrived, 
 and that the days of Corruption and its 
 "strong ones" are on the decline, they in- 
 dulge in idle and futile schemes. It is a 
 fact within the experience of Mumukshus 
 that, when they are under the instruction of 
 the J nana Guru, the question often arises 
 in their minds, Is it really necessary to thus 
 develop the fire of austerity in us? Is there
 
 1 86 Soul Culture 
 
 no other way of attaining God ? The Psalm- 
 ist declares in the second verse that such 
 doubts are the creations of the spirit of 
 Error or Corruption. It runs as follows: — 
 
 "The kings of the earth set themselves, 
 And the rulers take counsel together 
 Against the Lord and his Anointed, saying 
 Let us break their bands asunder 
 And cast away their cords from us." 
 
 The kings of the earth are the rudiments 
 (Col. ii: 8) or elements (Gal. iv: 3) of the 
 flesh which hold the soul in captivity (Gal. 
 v: y). Because these powers of the earth 
 or flesh dominate the soul, they are called the 
 "kings of the earth" or earthly kings. In 
 Matt, xxiv: 30, Jesus spoke of them as the 
 "tribes of the earth." Keenly alive to the 
 critical state of affairs, upon the appearance 
 of the Anointed Teacher they draw them- 
 selves together resolutely, and work insidi- 
 ously within the reason and will of the 
 seeking spirit. They conspire against God 
 and him who was sanctified and sent into 
 the world (John x: 36) to reclaim the seeker
 
 The Psalmists 187 
 
 of freedom, saying, "Now that they are going 
 to bind us by their cords of fire, we shall soon 
 be consumed like fagots. Let us make one 
 final effort to throw away these bonds and 
 escape with the soul, who is wavering in 
 loyalty to us." 
 
 The assurance of the Psalmist given in 
 verses 4 and 5 is that God who lies unseen 
 in the heart smiles at their folly, for who can 
 resist His omnipotence? He will manifest 
 himself as a Consuming Fire (Deut. v: 24; 
 Jer. xxiii: 29; Luke xii: 49; Heb. xii: 29) 
 and burn up the cords of captivity, saying 
 to them (verse 6): "Ye, powers of darkness, 
 fancy that ye are kings, but now learn the 
 truth that the king in the body is the spirit ; 
 that the senses, the faculties of thought and 
 speech and all other instruments which I 
 have placed in the body are the subjects of 
 that king; that the spirit whom I have 
 anointed with my grace shall for ever be in 
 fellowship with me in the holy state called 
 Zion." 
 
 Then the Anointed Psalmist declares in
 
 1 88 Soul Culture 
 
 verses 7-9 what the plan of God's salvation 
 is, as revealed to him in spiritual communion. 
 It is his design and will that the spirit in the 
 body shall one day attain the holy state 
 called Christhood or Sonship of God; that that 
 day shall be known as that of the re-birth of 
 the spirit ; that such re-birth shall be prayed 
 for in all earnestness ; that the Lord shall then 
 graciously overcome the corrupt power which 
 holds the spirit in captivity and shall endow 
 the righteous spirit with sufficient strength 
 to dissipate the machinations of corruption 
 and remain in purity for ever. 
 
 In verses 10-12 the Sanctified Psalmist 
 exhorts the powers of darkness, which had 
 dominated the spirit, to behave with pru- 
 dence and never to assume the role of kings 
 in respect of the spirit hungering for right- 
 eousness, but to do homage to it, for the 
 simple reason that it put its trust in the 
 Anointed Teacher and in God who has sent 
 him to such spirit. 
 
 The first two Psalms are the utterances of 
 a J'ndna Guru. The third is the song of a
 
 The Psalmists 189 
 
 Mumukshu, striving hard to obtain union 
 with the Lord. 
 
 Meditating upon the eternal truth that 
 all power belongeth to the Lord (Ps. lxii: 11) 
 and earnestly endeavouring to realise the doc- 
 trine of self-surrender taught in the prayer 
 "Thine is the kingdom, thine the power, 
 and thine the glory for ever," the Mum- 
 ukshu sits in yoga or spiritual communion 
 and endeavours to dismiss from his con- 
 sciousness the memories of the worldly life 
 which revolve on the pivots called "I" and 
 "mine." Do what he may to forsake these 
 conceits and the thoughts that are linked to 
 them, they creep in and hold him fast to the 
 things of the earth. He shakes off one coil 
 of thought only to find himself entangled in 
 another. Though no longer running after the 
 vain shows of the world, the spirit is still over- 
 laid with worldly desire, and its bifurcations 
 called like and dislike are the subtle forms on 
 which memories and expectations thrive. It 
 is in this helpless state of entanglement that 
 the seeker after God sang the third Psalm.
 
 190 Soul Culture 
 
 "How are they increased that trouble me, 
 Many are they that rise up against me, 
 Many which say of my soul 
 There is no help for him in God." 
 
 This may be rendered as follows: When 
 I sit in silence for spiritual communion with 
 Thee, Lord, how thickly do thoughts 
 crowd around me, how incessantly, how act- 
 ively (Ps. xxxviii: 19) do worldly memories 
 and hopes, which I believed were dead and 
 buried long ago, disturb the quiet of my soul. 
 I appeal to thee to blot out my transgressions 
 or vagrant thoughts (Ps. li: 1). The corrupt 
 spirit, which beats up such thoughts, taunts 
 me, saying, "Your God will not help you. 
 Why do you struggle against me? Why do 
 you not continue to delight in things worldly 
 as of yore?" 
 
 "But Thou, O Lord, art a shield for me. 
 My glory and the lifter up of mine head. 
 I cried unto the Lord with my voice 
 And he heard me out of his holy hill." 
 
 Which means: Thou, Lord, art my pro- 
 tector, strong enough to cast down my cap- 
 tors; my illuminer in the sea of darkness;
 
 The Psalmists 191 
 
 the sustainer of my spirit, not letting it be 
 drowned in the struggle against the waves 
 of thought. brother seekers, in dire dis- 
 tress I cried to the Lord for help and his grace 
 flowed into me from within my inmost being. 
 
 "I laid me down and slept, 
 I awaked, for the Lord sustained me. 
 I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people 
 That have set themselves against me round about." 
 
 Which means: Hear, brother seekers; my 
 prayer was answered, for I was not dis- 
 turbed in spiritual communion. My thoughts 
 calmed down and I was in comparative 
 peace, with the Lord's help. It matters not 
 how many thoughts arise again, for so long 
 as the Lord sustains me in all mercy, I know 
 I shall have strength to keep them down. 
 
 "Arise, O Lord, save me, O my God, 
 For thou hast smitten all my enemies upon the 
 
 cheek bone. 
 Thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly. 
 Thy blessing is upon thy people." 
 
 Which means: Do not, O Lord, let me re- 
 main long in the antechambers, but draw
 
 192 Soul Culture 
 
 me unto Thyself into the Holy of Holies. 
 Save me altogether from the powers of dark- 
 ness. Thou hast reduced almost to naught 
 its hold of me. It is Thine now to wholly 
 save Thy seekers and grant them the fulness 
 of bliss. 
 
 Abatement of thought and wakefulness in 
 spiritual communion secure for the soul the 
 greatest of all blessings, called Stillness or 
 Peace. It is assuredly the greatest blessing, 
 for in stillness alone does the Soul know God. 
 Clear space or sky cannot be seen when a 
 dust storm is blowing. Neither can the Soul 
 know God, who is the substrate of all nature, 
 when a cloud of thoughts rises and envelopes 
 the Soul, and prevents it from seeing itself, 
 or God who is in it. Therefore has the Lord 
 said, "Be still, and know that I am God" 
 (Ps. xlvi: 10), meaning, if you be still, then 
 will you know that "I AM" is God. If you 
 admit your insufficiency for yourself, if you 
 feel that you are indeed weak and need His 
 Power, he will help you to overcome your 
 worldly thoughts and other troubles of life.
 
 The Psalmists 193 
 
 'They cry unto the Lord in their trouble 
 And He bringeth them out of their distresses. 
 He maketh a storm a calm, 
 So that the waves thereof are still. 
 Then are they glad because they be quiet; 
 So He bringeth them unto their desired 
 haven." — Ps. cvii: 28-30. 
 
 This will suffice to show the priceless 
 strata of spiritual thought which lies em- 
 bedded in the Psalms. They are full of the 
 actual experiences of either seekers of God, 
 or those who have sought and found God. 
 These hymns in the Old Testament attest, 
 over and over again and in words of highest 
 assurance, the great and mysterious fact 
 that, when the soul, tired of the domination 
 of corruption, finds itself utterly unable to 
 overcome it and appeals to God as the only 
 power that can help it, God does in truth 
 respond to the prayer and make the soul 
 free from such corruption, and king of its 
 own ministers of knowledge and action. 
 
 This kingship of the spirit over the flesh 
 by the grace of God, — this overthrow of 
 impurity and attainment of independence
 
 194 Soul Culture 
 
 by the spirit that hungers for it, — is the 
 Crown of Life (James i: 12) on earth, which 
 every one who knows the value of birth 
 should labour for. The Psalms are truly the 
 highest teaching of the Old Testament. It 
 is time to consider the doctrines set forth in 
 the books of the New Testament.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 ON THE PRACTICAL NATURE OF THE 
 DOCTRINES OF JESUS, AS RE- 
 GARDS THE CONVERSION 
 OF SELF-LOVE INTO 
 PERFECT LOVE 
 
 »95
 
 The "good Shepherd" and his "sheep" are the 
 
 True Teacher and the spiritually-minded ripe 
 
 for instruction. 
 
 Christ in what sense "King" and "royal Priest." 
 
 Proper function of Christ, to draw qualified souls 
 
 near unto God; to show the way to God. 
 Doctrines of Jesus not his own, but God's. 
 Principles of Spiritual Life how discovered. 
 Revelation of God in deep spiritual communion. 
 God is illuminer, and Apostles are the illu- 
 mined. 
 Apostolic knowledge is actual knowledge of 
 God as distinguished from hearsay knowledge 
 or inferential knowledge gathered by study 
 of nature. 
 Difference between spiritual and worldly ex- 
 perience. 
 God and Apostle as Father and Son in fellow- 
 ship. 
 Sermon on the Mount delivered to the spiritually- 
 minded, who feel the desecration of unrest and the 
 want of something higher than the world can give. 
 Souls who delight in unrest or excitement 
 
 cannot understand the sermon. 
 Likes and dislikes, worldly hopes and fears, the 
 
 cause of unrest and sorrow. 
 Our thoughts are our burdens. 
 
 The past, the present, and the future, as 
 regards perishable things, are the three 
 fagots of thought destined to be gradu- 
 ally consumed by the fire of spiritual 
 
 196
 
 knowledge, when the end for which 
 they were collected has been fulfilled. 
 Perfection of spiritual growth and conquest of care 
 and sorrow, the great theme of the Sermon. 
 Necessity for changing old modes of thought 
 centred in attachments to perishable things 
 and fleeting pleasures, for right modes of 
 thought centred in imperishable things. 
 Doctrine of Repentance or turning of mind 
 from worldliness to Godliness, the prologue 
 to the sermon. 
 Worldly life is preparation for knowledge of God 
 
 as Infinite Love. 
 The Sermon on the Mount, a series of lessons on 
 soul culture. 
 
 Difference between soul culture and mind 
 
 culture. 
 First lesson in soul culture relates to Spiritual 
 Love. 
 
 The parent of Spiritual Love is neigh- 
 bourly love. 
 And neighbourly love is born of sex love. 
 Gradations of neighbourly love. 
 Highest grade of such love called phil- 
 anthropy. 
 Spiritual love is higher even than phil- 
 anthropy, because enemies and friends 
 are loved alike by the spiritual man. 
 Such unbounded love necessary "that 
 ye may be the children of your 
 Father" (Matt, v: 43). 
 
 197
 
 Impossibility of becoming a Son of 
 
 God without infinite love. 
 To love others because they love us 
 is only a type of self-love. 
 Spirit or Soul is that which loves. 
 
 Corruption or Folly is that which 
 
 hates and frets and worries. 
 To be spiritual, the spirit must go on 
 loving to the end, no matter what 
 others do (John xiii: i) . 
 Must increase more and more in love 
 (I Thes. iv: 9, 10). 
 Growth in love is growth in spirit. 
 
 Three stages of spiritual growth 
 (helikia, Eph. iv: 13). 
 Perfect (spiritual) love is always associated 
 with fulness of joy, called blessedness. 
 The Sermon on the Mount is the gospel of the forma- 
 tion of the Perfect Spirit or Christ in man (Eph. 
 
 iv: 13). 
 
 Mere intellectual education cannot build up 
 this Perfection of Love in the human 
 heart. 
 Other methods necessary for discarding carnal 
 mindedness and acquiring spiritual minded- 
 ness. 
 Intellect must be established on the spirit. 
 The principles of spiritual unfoldment are different 
 from principles of worldly life, and are intended 
 only for those spiritually grown. 
 
 198
 
 The aim of laws and customs of worldly life 
 being the suppression of the element of 
 selfishness in love, so that Love itself may 
 not be choked, Apostles of God do not inter- 
 fere with worldly injunctions given by legis- 
 lators, judges, sectarian teachers of religions, 
 and social leaders. 
 
 The teachings of Apostles are only for those 
 who are not satisfied with their own teachers. 
 "I am not come to destroy the Law or the 
 Prophets" (Matt, v: 17). 
 
 God's "drawing" of the spiritually-minded to 
 Himself through his Apostles (John vi: 44,45). 
 
 "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs " 
 (Matt, vii: 6). 
 The Spiritually grown, as enumerated by Jesus 
 (Matt, v: 3-1 1) are, 
 
 1. The poor in spirit. 
 
 Meaning of "poverty of spirit." 
 
 2. They that mourn. 
 
 Meaning of "mourning." 
 
 3. The meek. 
 
 Meaning of "the meek." 
 Meaning of "inheriting the earth." 
 
 4. They who hunger and thirst for righteous- 
 ness. 
 
 Meaning of "righteousness." 
 
 In what way they will be " filled." 
 
 5. They who are persecuted for righteousness 
 sake. 
 
 Steadfast love for righteousness. 
 
 199
 
 6. The merciful. 
 
 Meaning of mercy of man and mercy of 
 God. 
 
 7. The pure in heart. 
 
 8. The peace-makers. 
 
 Necessity for pacifying one's own mind, 
 
 so as to attain the Stillness which the 
 
 Psalmist spoke of. It is essential to 
 
 knowing God in Spiritual Communion. 
 
 St. Paul on "casting down imaginations" 
 
 (II Corx: 5). 
 Without abatement of thought and wake- 
 fulness in spiritual communion, the 
 "Peace that passeth understanding" 
 (Phil, iv: 17) cannot be reached in 
 actual experience. 
 Peace, derived from Lat. pax, pacts, is 
 same as paksha in Sanskrit, meaning 
 Love. 
 Peace-making or the art of making Per- 
 fect Love, in what way to be compared 
 with the art of making butter. 
 The final achievement of the art of making Peace 
 is the emergence of the long hidden soul from the 
 heart as Infinite Love called Christ or Son of 
 God. 
 Jesus' exposition of the signs of the "coming" or 
 appearance of Christ, and of the "end of the 
 world" (Matt. xxiv:). 
 
 These are matters of inner experience in spirit- 
 ual communion, not objective phenomena. 
 
 200
 
 Why the appearance of Christ or the Perfected 
 Soul should be called the second birth of 
 the soul. 
 
 Its "first birth" was its "fall" into world- 
 
 liness. 
 It is "quickened" by hearing the word 
 
 of God. 
 Its "second birth" is its "rise" to Godli- 
 ness. 
 
 201
 
 ON THE PRACTICAL NATURE OF THE 
 
 DOCTRINES OF JESUS, AS REGARDS 
 
 THE CONVERSION OF SELF LOVE 
 
 INTO PERFECT LOVE 
 
 When Jesus heard that the Scribes and 
 Pharisees had excommunicated the man 
 whom he had cured of blindness, he gra- 
 ciously sought him out and consoled him with 
 the truth that the restoration of his sight 
 came from God through his Son, and that 
 that Son was himself. "For (granting) dis- 
 cernment (krima)," said he, "I am come into 
 this world, that they who see not might see, 
 and they who see might be made blind." 
 Some of the, Jews heard these words and 
 remarked, "Are we blind also?" (John ix: 
 35-40). Then he delivered the parable of 
 the good Shepherd and the sheep who hear 
 his voice, which they did not understand. 
 The good Shepherd is the True Teacher from 
 God whom only the spiritually-minded can 
 
 203
 
 204 Soul Culture 
 
 understand; the bad shepherds are worldly- 
 minded teachers who expound religions 
 wrongly, and so mislead their hearers; and 
 True Teachers (or Apostles) are sent into the 
 world to help not only those who, caring 
 naught for sensuous enjoyments, are worthy 
 of spiritual knowledge, but also those who, 
 in spite of their fondness for dogma and 
 ritual, deserve to know the truth that 
 intellectual satisfaction with creeds and 
 apologetics will not give them the spiritual 
 discernment needed for realising God in 
 their hearts as an uplifting, joyous, and 
 supremely pacific Power. 
 
 Sometime afterwards, seeing Jesus at the 
 porch of the temple of Solomon, the Phari- 
 sees gathered round him and said, "If thou 
 be Christ, tell us plainly." He replied, "I 
 told you, and ye believed not; ... ye 
 believe not, because ye are not of my sheep. 
 . . . My sheep hear my voice and follow me" 
 (John x: 24-27). They understood him to 
 say that he was Christ, and that they were 
 not spiritually-minded enough to recognise
 
 Doctrines of Jestis 205 
 
 him as such. He added, "I and my Father 
 are one." The Jews took this for blasphemy- 
 arid picked up stones to hurt him. He then 
 reminded them of the saying in the Psalms 
 (lxxxii: 6), "Ye are gods, and all of you are 
 children of the Most High," and said, "Say 
 ye of him whom the Father hath sanctified 
 and sent into the world 'thou blasphemeth,' 
 because I said I am a Son of God" (John x: 
 36). He meant that their conception of 
 Christ or Son of God did not accord with 
 their Scriptures, nor with spiritual experi- 
 ences, for Sons of God were men whose 
 spirits had attained sanctification, and whose 
 work in the world was to teach the truths 
 relating to spiritual development. 
 
 And when the Jews led him before Pon- 
 tius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judasa, 
 upon the false charge that he posed as King 
 of the Jews, he explained, "My Kingdom is 
 not of this world. If my Kingdom was of 
 this world, then would my servants fight 
 that I should not be delivered to the Jews. 
 But now my Kingdom is not hence." Pilate
 
 206 Soul Culture 
 
 rejoined, "Art thou then a King?" Jesus 
 owned the title in these words : "Thou sayest 
 that I am a King. To this end was I born; 
 and for this cause came I into the world, 
 namely, that I should bear witness unto the 
 truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth 
 my voice" (John xviii: 33-37). 
 
 The investment of every spirit with a 
 human body in this world was ordained by 
 God in order that the spirit may rise from 
 its condition of subjection to folly or corrup- 
 tion and become a King, not in the sense of 
 a ruler of extensive square miles of earth, 
 nor a ruler of people attached to the things 
 of the earth, but in the sense of being in- 
 dependent of the. restless selfishness and greed 
 for gratification which torment the spirit. 
 When freed altogether from the beggarly 
 elements of corruption, the spirit is said to 
 be sanctified; and it is then fit to teach those 
 who hunger and thirst for righteousness and 
 peace. The spirit thus qualified to teach 
 the doctrine and practices necessary for sanc- 
 tification is called an Apostle of God or one
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 207 
 
 sent into the world to bear witness unto the 
 truth; and the spirits ripe for hearing and 
 understanding such principles are the sheep 
 who hear the voice of the teacher, and follow 
 him with cheerfulness and one-minded devo- 
 tion. They understand and obey the 
 Apostle. He is their "good shepherd," a 
 veritable "king" unto them, their Lord 
 (kitrios) and Teacher (didaskalos) (John 
 xiii: 13), belonging to "a royal priesthood," 
 chosen to "shew forth the praises of him 
 who has called you (the seekers) out of dark- 
 ness into light" (I Pet. ii: 9). 
 
 The "royal priesthood" referred to by 
 St. Peter was the high spiritual status at- 
 tained for the first time in Judaea by King 
 Melchisedek, of Salem, to whom Abraham 
 paid tithe and received from him a blessing. 
 It is recorded in Gen. xiv: 18, 19 that Mel- 
 chisedek was a priest of "the Most High 
 God." The body or flesh cannot be priest. 
 It is the spirit that quickens by the grace of 
 God, and grows to its fullest maturity or per- 
 fection in love and light; and it is such a
 
 208 Soul Culture 
 
 perfect spirit that is called Christ. St. Paul 
 speaks of Jesus as "made an high priest for- 
 ever after the order of Mclchiscdck (Heb. v: 
 10); that is, the spirit in Jesus and the spirit 
 in Melchisedek belong to the same high-priest- 
 hood of God, because of their perfection. 
 And in the same epistle (vii: 2, 3) St. Paul 
 says Melchisedek is the King of Righteous- 
 ness and of Peace, without father, without 
 mother, without descent, having neither be- 
 ginning of days nor end of life, but made of 
 the image (aphomoiomenos) as a son of God: 
 meaning, that the spirit in Melchisedek is 
 pacific, aboriginal, and eternal. And then 
 St. Paul declares once more in emphatic 
 language that Jesus is another priest after 
 the similitude (kata ten homoioteta) of Mel- 
 chisedek (ib. vii: 15): meaning, that the 
 spirit in Jesus is not the same as the spirit 
 in Melchisedek, but similar to it, being pacific, 
 aboriginal, and eternal. Even so, in Psalms 
 ii: 7 and ex: 1,4, we hear the Psalmist pro- 
 claiming to those who have ears to hear, not 
 only his own attainment of Christhood, but
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 209 
 
 also the general ordainment of God that 
 he who strives for perfection shall attain it 
 and be for ever a priest (Heb. cohcn, Gr. 
 hiereus) that is, a drawer of qualified spirits 
 near to God. Hence the famous sayings 
 that Christ shows the way to God and is the 
 Way to God. St. Paul referred, in Gal. i: 
 1-16, to his own attainment of Christhood, 
 called also the Resurrection from the 
 Dead (Col. i: 18). He said he had "many 
 things to say and hard to be uttered" of the 
 order of Melchisedek or the King of Right- 
 eousness, but that the Hebrews were dull of 
 hearing and were not grown in spirit suffi- 
 ciently to understand the doctrine relating to 
 the beginning of the formation of Christ 
 (logos tes arches toil Chrislou) (Heb. v: 11-14; 
 Gal. iv: 19). He particularly warned all 
 the brethren in Christ to avoid foolish ques- 
 tions regarding the genealogy of Christ (Titus 
 iii: 9; I Tim. i: 4), for Christ being spirit has 
 no genealogy. ' 
 
 The texts quoted from the Old and the 
 New Testament (Gen. xiv: 18, 19; Ps. ii;
 
 210 Soul Culture 
 
 7 and ex: i, 4; Heb. v: 11-14; ib. vii: 15; 
 Gal. i: 1, 16, etc.) have proved a stumbling- 
 block to those who are wedded to the be- 
 lief there is only one Christ for all time in the 
 Universe, and that that Christ is Jesus. It 
 has been already shown in Chapter iv that 
 this belief is not consistent with the teach- 
 ings of Jesus or Paul, nor with the actual 
 experiences of the Sanctified Spirits of India, 
 according to whom Perfected Spirits in 
 human bodies are indeed righteous and peace- 
 ful and without parentage or genealogy, 
 because eternal and co-existent with God. 
 God is in every spirit and every spirit is in 
 God from eternity. The spirit that is in 
 bondage to darkness does not know that it 
 lives and moves in God (John i : 5 ; Acts xvii : 
 28); but the spirit that has been freed from 
 darkness has full knowledge of God, and they 
 stand in the relation of Son and Father in the 
 sense that God is the upholder or bearer of 
 the spirit, the sower of it in the body, and the 
 gatherer of it from the body. 
 
 Jesus taught of God and the sanctified
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 211 
 
 spirit called Christ, as all Apostles, urged by- 
 God, have taught from the remotest ages to 
 the present day. " I do nothing of myself, 
 but as my Father has taught me I speak 
 these things" (John viii: 28). God reveals 
 to all His devoted seekers His own mysterious 
 existence within the spirit after graciously 
 uncovering the spirit itself which lies myste- 
 riously within the body (Col. i: 27; ii : 2), 
 so that in spiritual communion the risen 
 spirit knows itself and God who is within it. 
 It is then able to teach other seeking spirits 
 how to attain God. Such teachers are the 
 Apostles of God. They speak from personal 
 knowledge of Christ and God. "Verily, 
 verily, I say unto thee," said Jesus, "we 
 speak what we do know" (John iii: 1 1). 
 
 This actual knowledge of the soul and God 
 is spiritual experience, as distinguished from 
 worldly experience. The latter consists of 
 the reports of the senses and the correlation 
 of sense perceptions; but the former relates 
 to that which the senses cannot perceive, not 
 even with the aid of the telescope and micro-
 
 212 Soul Culture 
 
 scope. The scanning of the sky, the air, the 
 fire, the water, and land cannot reveal God 
 or the Soul, but when the soul, isolating it- 
 self by degrees from sense perceptions and 
 the agitations of thought, enters in spiritual 
 communion the holy state called Peace, it 
 knows itself to be something different from 
 the senses and the mind; it knows itself to 
 be Light and Love, and thereafter knows God 
 as the Infinite Substrate of all life, the great 
 Upholder and Illuminer of everything that 
 exists in the Universe. This is the greatest 
 of all discoveries, the discovery of God in the 
 soul. It is the unveiling of the profoundly 
 mysterious fact expressed by the formula 
 "I am in the Father and the Father in me" 
 (John xiv: n), signifying that the spirit, 
 when sanctified, enters into fellowship with 
 God. 
 
 The Jews among whom Jesus laboured 
 did not know that there was anything beyond 
 worldly experience. "Ye do not receive 
 our testimony," said he to them (John iii: 
 n). They were crassly ignorant of things
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 213 
 
 spiritual. He tried to convince them by 
 other arguments that eternal life or actual 
 knowledge of God (John xvii: 3) was attain- 
 able by learning of Sons of God (ib. v: 25). 
 He referred to the testimony of John the 
 Baptist, the miraculous powers of God 
 entrusted to him, and the texts in the old 
 Testament that bore upon the coming of the 
 Sanctified in Spirit, and added, "Ye will not 
 come to me that ye may have life. I know 
 you. Ye have not the love of God in you." 
 Considering the course of events since the 
 days of Jesus and the manner in which Christ- 
 ian dogma and literature have grown, it is a 
 pardonable error on the part of Western 
 Nations to ascribe to Jesus, and Jesus only, 
 the different passages in the Old Testament 
 which announce a Messiah for man's salva- 
 tion. The redemption of man by Infinite 
 Mercy went on for aeons before Jesus and 
 will go on for ceons after the nations that de- 
 light in the name of Jesus have passed away. 
 It is foolish to attempt to monopolise God or 
 His Apostles. So long as men live in the
 
 214 Soul Culture 
 
 universe God will continue to send to them 
 His Apostles, as occasion demands, of His 
 bounty. What are called Messianic pro- 
 phesies are not peculiar to the Jews but come 
 within the general Divine Law of the "draw- 
 ing" or "calling" of the Spirit to God, which 
 Jesus so frequently taught (John vi: 44, 65; 
 ib. xii: 32; Matt, xxii: 14). This is also 
 known as the choosing of the qualified spirits. 
 "Hearken my beloved brethren," said St. 
 James (ii: 5), "hath not God chosen the poor 
 of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the 
 Kingdom which he hath promised to them 
 that love him?" This is a general promise 
 or decree. Such is the bounty of God from 
 the beginning of time and will be so to the 
 end. 
 
 Jesus, who had attained the acme of 
 spiritual maturity called Perfect Love, and 
 who thus became an Apostle of God, de- 
 livered his Sermon on the Mount to his 
 "sheep" or band of earnest disciples, in 
 order that they might enter the same holy 
 state of Blessedness, wherein the flesh does
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 215 
 
 not war against the spirit, wherein Peace or 
 Perfect Rest reigns. 
 
 The vast majority of souls do not care for 
 poise or rest: they delight in excitement. 
 The wilder it is the more "enjoyable" is 
 it to them. Some love fight and blood- 
 shed; some, cruel sport and fun; some, lewd- 
 ness; some, dances, theatres, shopping, and 
 tattle; some, mischief and practical jokes; 
 some, loud laughter, brag, and bluster; some, 
 gay dress, dainty meals, and useless talk. 
 They are all carnally-minded; and their 
 happiness being rooted in the gratification 
 of the senses is never stable. If gratified 
 the senses soon crave for more; and if not 
 gratified they irritate. In this way the 
 sensuous pleasures of the carnally-minded 
 are much mixed with pain, to say nothing of 
 their grossness, which makes the ears dull 
 of hearing and the mind incapable of 
 understanding the principles of true life. 
 It is not given them to know the higher 
 forms of happiness available to those who 
 despise self-indulgence, who restrain their
 
 216 Soul Culture 
 
 likes and dislikes so as to live a well-balanced 
 life. 
 
 But persons desiring a higher life are often 
 weighted with divers cares. Domestic duties 
 and social engagements follow one another 
 in quick succession, leaving no time or peace 
 of mind to meditate on the numerous mercies 
 of God. Earnest, hard-working parents 
 have often to think of the waywardness of 
 their children and of the constant troubles 
 which some of them create in the household 
 through extravagance, immorality, or other 
 forms of reckless conduct. Many dutiful 
 wives are burdened with the heartlessness 
 of their husbands; and many having lived 
 together lovingly for years suffer the pangs 
 of separation from them by death. Old 
 fathers and mothers, who had generously 
 spent their all in educating and establish- 
 ing in some industry their children, find 
 themselves unwelcomed and uncared for. 
 Disease, disappointments, misfortune, pov- 
 erty, neglect on the part of friends and rela- 
 tions, and insult on the part of the haughty
 
 Doctrines oj Jesus 217 
 
 and the shameless, swell the bundle of cares. 
 Bygone memories, present conditions, and 
 future prospects, if disagreeable, bring 
 wretchedness. Under the weight of these 
 three bundles of thought man labours heavily 
 along the journey of life, knowing not how • 
 to be rid of them. Do what he may, he can- 
 not force himself from them, howsoever 
 learned he may be. "How glad I would be 
 if I could wipe out the past and cease to think 
 of the future!" he says to himself. "Even 
 the present worries me. Is there no peace 
 on earth ? Why am I a creature of hopes 
 and fears, likes and dislikes, a thing of con- 
 tradiction and strife? Why am I tormented 
 in this way? Is there no remedy for strife, 
 for sorrow, and for fear born of impending 
 danger or trouble?" 
 
 To persons who have found that their 
 thoughts are not themselves, and who feel 
 that their thoughts are their burdens, Jesus 
 said, "Come unto me all ye that labour and 
 are heavily laden, and I shall give rest unto 
 you. Learn of me and you shall find rest
 
 218 Soul Culture 
 
 unto your souls" (Matt, xi: 28, 29). His 
 ministry or service to those growing in spirit 
 related to the greatest of all human problems, 
 namely, the conquest of care and sorrow. 
 This is the practical value of the Sermon on 
 the Mount to "Western Nations. 
 
 He began his ministry with the Doctrine 
 of Repentance (Matt, iv: 17). The Greek 
 word metanceo, rendered repent, signifies in 
 truth to change one's thoughts. Jesus meant 
 that the sorrows and fears of man were due 
 to his own wrong modes of thought, and 
 that, if he changed those modes, he would 
 attain the desired freedom. His answer to 
 the souls who longed to be free was precisely 
 the same as that given by other Sanctified 
 Teachers in India, Judea, and other places, 
 viz., " Tumyoxxv thoughts from things perish- 
 able to things imperishable" (Ps. li: 10, 
 lxxxv: 4, 8; I Kings viii: 47; Jer. xxv: 5, 
 etc.). It is usual for men to walk after the 
 flesh (II Pet. ii: 10); to try the ways of the 
 flesh first, and then turn to the Lord (Lam. 
 iii: 40). It is only after experiencing the
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 219 
 
 truth that "flesh lusteth against the spirit" 
 (Gal. v: 17), and that "he who soweth to the 
 flesh shall reap corruption" (Gal. vi: 8), 
 that the mind loses faith in the flesh and pro- 
 ceeds to abide in the spirit. Schools and 
 colleges full of worldly learning create in the 
 students who flock to them the belief that 
 the vast array of human bodies and the 
 houses, shops, and parks, which together 
 make up towns, are the most valuable and 
 permanent treasures of a country. The 
 youthful learners, knowing nothing of the 
 invisible souls in bodies, nor of the require- 
 ments of souls, nor of God who reigns 
 throughout the universe, fancy their bodies 
 to be themselves, their likes and dislikes to 
 be the surest motives to action, and the law 
 of retaliation to be the most proper guide to 
 conduct in regard to others. Mistaking the 
 flesh and its cravings for the spirit and its 
 aspirations, they sow to the flesh and reap 
 abundant harvests of trouble and sorrow. 
 "No flesh shall have peace," said Jeremiah 
 (xii: 12). It is full of strife and sorrow.
 
 220 Soul Culture 
 
 Therefore, " Be transformed, by the renew- 
 ing of your mind," said St. Paul (Rom. xii: 
 2). Turn your mind from worldliness to 
 Godliness, from selfish love to perfect love, 
 so that you may be as blessed as God, said 
 Jesus. 
 
 The study of the world and of all things 
 of the flesh in it befits man for knowledge of 
 God in whom there is no strife, because He is 
 all Love. Those who crave for Peace must 
 grow in Love. The Sermon on the Mount 
 is a series of lessons on Love culture or Soul 
 culture, for Love is another word for Soul. 
 
 Just as men of the world, in imparting 
 lessons in worldly life, lay stress on body 
 culture and mind culture as necessary for 
 physical and mental strength, so men of God, 
 called upon to lead thoughtful spirits to God, 
 dwell upon soul culture as necessary for the 
 expansion of Love; and the first lesson in it 
 is about Spiritual Love, which is not sex 
 love or animal love. The love of one spirit 
 for another apart from sexhood, color, creed, 
 or country is the beginning of spiritual love.
 
 Doctrines oj Jesus 221 
 
 Its parent is neighbourly love, which, won- 
 derful to relate, springs from sex love. A 
 selfish male, be he man or animal, consort- 
 ing with a female, finds his sense of differen- 
 tiation lapsing into the sense of unity. Two 
 human beings may become one through sex 
 love, and all the progeny born of their loins 
 also become one with them. This love for 
 one's wife and children is neighbourly love 
 in its first stage of growth. Its second stage 
 is love for one's castemen or cooperators. 
 The third stage is love for fellow-townsmen; 
 the fourth for fellow-countrymen; and lastly 
 for man, irrespective of country, color, or 
 creed. In this last stage neighbourly love 
 is called philanthropy, which is the beginning 
 of spiritual love. If unwedded persons in 
 this life have neighbourly love, it must be 
 considered to be the result of thoughtful 
 experiences in past lives on earth. Higher 
 than philanthropy is spiritual love, because 
 enemies and friends alike are loved by the 
 spiritual man. 
 
 Jesus said, "Ye have heard that it hath
 
 222 Sottl Culture 
 
 been said, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour but 
 hate thine enemy,' but I say unto you, Love 
 your enemies, do good to them that hate you, 
 that ye may be the children of your Father, for 
 He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the 
 good and sendeth rain on the just and the 
 unjust. If ye love them which love you, 
 what reward have ye ? Do not even the pub- 
 licans the same?" (Matt, v: 43-47). 
 
 It is indeed the work of selfish love to 
 love those only who love us. To love others 
 because they love us is really to love oneself. 
 Self-love is common to animals also. Even 
 centipedes, crocodiles, and tigers love those 
 of their species which love them. The spirits 
 in human bodies must do more than those in 
 animal bodies. Human beings should ex- 
 pand self-love into neighbourly love, and 
 neighbourly love into spiritual love, by lov- 
 ing irrespectively of the friendly or hostile 
 moods of others. Such moods are passing 
 phases of the mind, and not characteristics 
 of the spirit. God is Spirit, God is Love. 
 Therefore Spirit is Love. That which loves
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 223 
 
 is Spirit. That which hates and frets is not 
 the spirit, but the corrupt thing called Folly, 
 which stands much mixed with the Spirit. 
 If love is to be Godly, it should not make 
 mountains of the manifestations of Folly; 
 nor should it be misled by the agreeable and 
 the disagreeable, the pleasant and the un- 
 pleasant, because such sensations are of 
 the mind and not of the spirit. Howsoever 
 agreeable or disagreeable other spirits may 
 make themselves in their foolishness, the 
 spirit that would rise above animality or 
 carnality should not treat those who pose as 
 "enemies" differently from those who pose 
 as "friends." It should have pity for spirits 
 afflicted by bondage to Folly. They do not 
 know the perilous consequences of that 
 species of folly called hatemaking. What- 
 ever they may do, we must go on loving right 
 through, love to the end (John xiii: 1). He 
 that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, for 
 God is Love" (I John iv: 16). 
 
 Increase more and more in brotherly love, 
 said St. Paul (I Thes. iv: 9, 10). Growth in
 
 224 Soul Culture 
 
 spirit is growth in love. Just as the body 
 has a growth marked by different character- 
 istics and denoted by the terms infancy, 
 youth, middle age, and old age, the spirit 
 has a growth of its own, which St. Paul 
 speaks of as helikia, the characteristics of 
 which are denoted by the terms self-love, 
 neighbourly love, and Perfect Love. 
 
 'That ye may be the children of your 
 Father," said Jesus, expand neighbourly 
 love into Perfect Love (Matt, v: 45-48). 
 "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father 
 in heaven is perfect" (v: 48). Why should 
 the perfection or full growth of Love be the 
 goal of all human endeavour in earthly life? 
 Because God is Perfect Love. Love and 
 Joy go together. The greater the love, the 
 greater the joy; fulness of love is fulness of 
 j°y (John xv : n; xvii: 13) and fulness of 
 spiritual joy is Blessedness. Therefore the 
 last verse (48) in Matthew v stands intimately 
 linked with the opening verses in the same 
 chapter which deal with Blessedness, the high- 
 est form of Happiness known in the Universe.
 
 Doctrines oj Jesus 225 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount is of the utmost 
 practical value to all who would grow in 
 spirit, grow in true, durable happiness. It 
 is the gospel of the formation of the Perfect 
 Man (aner teleios), or Perfect Spirit, or Son of 
 God, or Christ (Eph. iv: 13). Mere intellec- 
 tual education cannot produce this fulness of 
 spiritual growth, because the intellect or 
 reason is only an instrument of the soul, and 
 the culture of this instrument will not of it- 
 self add an iota of righteousness or love to 
 the soul. Intellectual improvement does 
 not mean spiritual improvement. It is only 
 when the intellect is established on the spirit 
 that it is really helpful to it in its growth. 
 Carnal mindedness leads the spirit worldward, 
 but spiritual mindedness leads it Godward. 
 The Sermon on the Mount is a marvellously 
 beautiful exposition of the principles, long 
 held secret (Matt, xiii: 35), of that Infinite 
 Love, Light, and Joy which characterise 
 God when standing in intimate relation with 
 all spirits and worlds, and which he merci- 
 fully vouchsafes to those who would labour
 
 226 Soul Culture 
 
 to attain his image or likeness in those re- 
 spects, and in those respects only; for we 
 cannot be like him in power. He can 
 create, maintain, and destroy worlds and 
 universes, but we cannot produce even a 
 mineral cell or a snow crystal or a vegetable 
 seed or a blade of grass. To him belongeth 
 all power (Ps. lxii: u; Matt, vi: 13; xxviii: 
 18). Even the little power of movement, 
 understanding, and construction which we 
 possess is his. It has all been lent to us 
 (Matt, xxv: 14—30). 
 
 The principles that relate to spiritual un- 
 foldment and spiritual happiness are in 
 many ways different from the principles of 
 worldly life, or the ideals and practices of 
 communities who live in villages and towns 
 for social and industrial purposes. One of 
 these ideals is to go to church on Sundays, 
 and worship with hands and other bodily 
 limbs, standing, sitting, and kneeling, and 
 uttering set formulas of speech. Other 
 duties relate to the feeding and dressing of 
 the body, the amusement of the mind, the
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 227 
 
 conciliation of friends, the care of the church 
 and state, and the acquisition of fame and 
 wealth. National laws and customs, social 
 rules, home observances, and all other regu- 
 lations made by men for men in various 
 spheres of activity have for their object the 
 promotion of considerate thought, good will, 
 and peace. They are limitations put upon 
 those who would otherwise display the free- 
 dom of the wild ass, and seriously injure 
 themselves and others with whom they 
 hold intercourse. Godly men therefore have 
 great respect for laws and customs. They 
 do not thrust their spiritual doctrines on 
 those who are satisfied with themselves and 
 their surroundings. Accordingly, in his Ser- 
 mon on the Mount Jesus forbids his disciples 
 to urge any one to break the rules of the order 
 to which he belongs. "Think not that I am 
 come to destroy the law or the Prophets," 
 said he, "I am not come to destroy but to 
 fulfill" (Matt, v: 17). The injunctions of 
 lawgivers are intended to restrain self-love, 
 that is, to keep down the element of selfish-
 
 228 Soul Culture 
 
 ness in love, so that love itself may not be 
 choked, but may advance to its second stage 
 of growth, called neighbourly love; and the 
 spiritual foreshadowings and exhortations 
 of austere poets, called prophets, show the 
 vainglory of the perishable things of the 
 world and the necessity of fixing the mind 
 on the things of the Spirit. Those who have 
 carefully considered the words of, and the 
 real meaning intended to be conveyed by, 
 these two classes of teachers, and long to 
 hear more of neighbourly love and spirit- 
 ual mindedness, will be drawn in due course 
 to the Apostles of God, and receive from 
 them the higher instruction needed for 
 attaining the third and last stage of spiritual 
 growth, known as Perfect Love (Matt, v: 
 48); or the Love that transcends breadth 
 and length, depth and height (Eph. iii: 18). 
 "No man can come to me,' said Jesus 
 "except the Father who has sent me draw 
 him" (John vi: 44), except it be given unto 
 him (to come to me) by my Father" (ib. vi: 
 65). It may happen that, when an Apostle
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 229 
 
 comes into a city or speaks on a public plat- 
 form, persons may go to hear him out of 
 curiosity or other worldly motive, but that 
 is only coming in contact with the body, one 
 body going to meet another body. Coming 
 together corporeally does not exemplify the 
 great and mysterious drawing, which all 
 Apostles know as of absolute truth. It is 
 only when a spirit, dissatisfied with sensu- 
 ous gratification and the hollowness of 
 worldly knowledge, awakens to the necessity 
 of searching for something more real, that 
 it is led on from place to place, it may be 
 through different lands and across oceans, 
 to the full grown spirit called an Apostle of 
 God. It is such thirsty spirits that are 
 qualified to drink of him. Those who are 
 spiritually unripe cannot appreciate his in- 
 struction. Indeed, his principles will be dis- 
 tasteful to them. Often they will turn away 
 from him with vehement impatience, espe- 
 cially if they be perched upon high places, 
 delivering wrong doctrines to the multitude. 
 Roused by fear and jealousy, they may seek
 
 230 Soul Culture 
 
 to discredit him in various ways. There- 
 fore, said Jesus, "give not that which is holy 
 unto the dogs; neither cast ye your pearls 
 before swine lest they trample them under 
 their feet and turn again and rend you" 
 (Matt, vii: 6). The methods of rending the 
 Apostle may extend from ridiculing his doc- 
 trine to crucifying his body. 
 
 Jesus named eight classes of persons as 
 properly qualified to hear the final truths 
 relating to the perfection of Love and Happi- 
 ness. They are the "poor in spirit," "they 
 that mourn," "the meek," "they who 
 hunger and thirst after righteousness," "the 
 merciful," "the pure in heart," "the peace- 
 makers," and "they who are persecuted for 
 righteousness' sake." These are the "sheep" 
 who hear the voice of the good shepherd, 
 the persons who, hearing the eternal princi- 
 ples of Godliness, are fit to understand them 
 without difficulty, enter diligently upon the 
 practice of them, and attain the blessedness 
 which Jesus, like the Apostle who sang the 
 first two Psalms commented upon in the
 
 Doctrines oj Jesus 231 
 
 preceding chapter, glorifies in the opening 
 words of the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 The "poor in spirit" are they whose likes 
 and dislikes are of the fewest, and whose 
 spirits therefore feel poor in regard to sensu- 
 ous enjoyments. "0 Bhikshu," said a Sage 
 of India, "empty, empty thy boat, for sooner 
 will it run towards Freedom." A Bhikshu 
 •is one who is conscious that his interest in 
 the vain shews and idle amusements of 
 worldly life has waned greatly. His posses- 
 sions, however great, count for little in his esti- 
 mation, such as rank, position, wealth, bodily 
 beauty, and marble halls. They appear to 
 him to be "uncertain riches" (I Tim. vi: 17), 
 to be plainly perishable treasures, and his 
 mind (called "boat " by the Sage, because it is 
 that which was designed to carry the spirit 
 to God) has ceased to be attached to them. 
 To such a pilgrim spirit the work of empty- 
 ing the mind of all thoughts relating to car- 
 nal things cannot be difficult. Worldly 
 likes and dislikes, and the puffed-up sense of 
 "I" and "mine," are obstacles to spiritual
 
 i^i Soul Culture 
 
 instruction. If the mind is unentangled 
 by them, it will readily grasp the truths re- 
 lating to God. Hence the necessity for 
 emptying the mind of its lumber. The poor 
 in spirit depleted of worldly cravings are, 
 in the words of St. James (ii: 5), "the poor 
 of the world rich in faith" (that is, love). 
 They are the Lord's own poor spirits. "For- 
 get not the congregation of the poor," said 
 the Psalmist (lxxiv: 19). They receive from 
 the Lord the gift of ripeness for understand- 
 ing the doctrine of Blessedness. 
 
 Even so are "they that mourn" (Matt, 
 v: 4). When one feels depleted of the con- 
 ceits of I-hood and my-hood, a sadness settles 
 on his heart and face. He goes through his 
 appointed duties well enough, he may even 
 participate in social amusements and keep 
 up an air of merriment, but everything 
 strikes him as being so vain and hollow that 
 he often debates within himself whether life 
 is worth living. He does not understand the 
 change that has come over him, nor the 
 raison d'etre of the great panorama of life
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 233 
 
 with all its unexpected developments and 
 shifting scenes of weal and woe. He con- 
 fesses his utter inability to comprehend him- 
 self or the world around him, and groans in 
 spirit that the world, once so full of interest 
 and joy to him, has become so uninteresting 
 and gloomy, though he is not afflicted by 
 disease or physical separation from any 
 person or thing. What means this great 
 change from optimism to pessimism? he 
 asks. 
 
 Another class of mourners consists of those 
 who have fallen from plenty to poverty, or 
 lost some dear relation or friend, or been un- 
 justly accused and condemned to forfeit 
 rank, social position, or personal liberty, or 
 are bedridden through disease. There is 
 much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the 
 case of most of them, but a few become 
 thoughtful. They see now what they could 
 not see before — the uncertainty of life and 
 the perishability of everything corporeal. 
 They become sad. Passing through the fire 
 of misfortune, their minds, purified of the
 
 234 Soul Culture 
 
 dross of worldliness, are now prepared to 
 hear and understand the principles that re- 
 late to the imperishable pleasures of life 
 summed up in the word Blessedness. 
 
 These two classes of mourners shall indeed 
 "be comforted," said Jesus, when they learn 
 and realise the truths of spiritual life. They 
 shall be lifted out of pessimism and placed 
 in everlasting joy, which is spiritual op- 
 timism. 
 
 The meek shali be blessed, for they shall 
 inherit the earth (Matt, v: 5). This was 
 the teaching of the Psalmist also: " The 
 meek shall inherit the earth, and shall 
 delight themselves in the abundance of 
 Peace" (Ps. xxxvii: 11). The " blessedness " 
 referred to by Jesus is called "peace" by 
 the Psalmist. 
 
 These are synonymous terms in the lips 
 of the Apostles of God. The meek are they 
 who "fret not, because of evildoers . . . 
 and . . . cease from anger" (Ps. xxxvii: 
 1); who are not haughty or high minded 
 (Rom. xi: 20), but practise the art of
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 235 
 
 forbearance and self-effacement, which de- 
 velops loving kindness amazingly. They 
 shall soon have the fruit of embodiment, 
 for the spirit was invested with an earthly 
 body only that it may grow in love and at- 
 tain Blessedness. The inheritance derivable 
 by embodiment or incarnation is perfect 
 Peace and Blessedness. 
 
 They who hunger and thirst after righteous- 
 ness (Matt, v: 6) are also mature enough 
 in spirit to understand and practise the prin- 
 ciples of true life. Most people are satis- 
 fied with themselves. To dress, eat, make 
 merry, and sleep well is the acme of their 
 happiness. They love amusement, fun, and 
 laughter, as much as good food, stylish dress, 
 and long-drawn sleep. Some want also work 
 and literature of some sort to fill their cup. 
 It is only the fewest of the few who turn 
 their attention inwards and search their 
 hearts. Of what avail is luxury and external 
 cleanliness if worldliness rules the mind? 
 What is the good of being a "whited sepul- 
 chre," clean outward but inward full of filth?
 
 236 Soul Culture 
 
 The daily discovery of the many subtle ways 
 in which the principle of impurity encom- 
 passes the soul while engaged in the trans- 
 actions of worldly life, and the earnest 
 desire to overcome it, and to live not only 
 according to law but also with a heartfelt 
 regard for the rights and needs of others, is 
 the commencement of the "hunger and 
 thirst after righteousness." When upright- 
 ness in thought, word, and deed is the one 
 food for which the soul cries, the Lord will 
 not suffer it to famish (Prov. x: 3). He 
 will fill it with gladness. "Oh that men 
 would praise the Lord for his goodness," 
 cried the Psalmist, "for he satisfieth the long- 
 ing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with 
 goodness" (Ps. cvii: 8, 9). "Blessed is he 
 that doeth righteousness at all times" 
 (Ps. cvi : 3), for the "voice of rejoicing and sal- 
 vation is in the tabernacles of the righteous" 
 (Ps. cxviii: 15). 
 
 Those who are steadfast in their love for 
 righteousness, and suffer hardships, such as 
 jibes and jeers, insults and injuries, at the
 
 Doctrines oj Jesus 237 
 
 hands of undiseerning people, will also be 
 given spiritual joy. 
 
 The merciful too will be blessed. They 
 who avoid the temptations of making life 
 burdensome to their enemies, rivals, or sub- 
 ordinates, or who show loving-kindness 
 promptly to those who stand in need of help, 
 will have their own burdens lightened and 
 their way to perfect love made straight and 
 clear. 
 
 Similarly, the pure in heart, or those who 
 are without guile, will have the power of 
 understanding the doctrine of perfect love 
 and readily pursuing the methods necessary 
 for the attainment of such love and so enter- 
 ing into actual fellowship with God. 
 
 Blessed also shall peacemakers be, for they 
 shall be called sons of God (Matt, v: 9). 
 "Peacemakers," as commonly understood, 
 are those who strive to promote harmony 
 between persons who have misunderstood 
 each other; but what is intended in this verse 
 is pacification of one's own thoughts. Op- 
 position and insult, fears and disappointments,
 
 238 Soul Culture 
 
 agitate the mind. If sorrow and trouble 
 are to be avoided, the thought that pro- 
 vokes them must be calmed by a process 
 of "never minding." As soon as the mind 
 thinks of the cause of the agitation, this must 
 be dismissed from it : the mind must not be 
 allowed to return to it. None of the inci- 
 dents connected with it should be contem- 
 plated. "Cast down imaginations," said 
 St. Paul, "that exalt against God" (II Cor. 
 x: 5), that is, abate all thoughts that rise 
 against the Spirit of Infinite Love, for the 
 interests of the Soul are greater than those 
 of the body. The mind should not make 
 mountains of a matter which relates after 
 all only to a lump of flesh, that is, our body 
 or some other corporeal possession which 
 will soon perish or pass away. Life was 
 given most assuredly for love, not hate; for 
 peace, not strife; for wisdom, not folly. By 
 such considerations, many a man is found in 
 every country to be letting his thoughts run 
 down to a comparative calm in worldly life, and 
 he has his reward : he is naturally qualified
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 239 
 
 to follow the teachings of the Apostle as 
 to the making of Perfect Peace in spiritual 
 communion, the "Peace which passeth under- 
 standing" (Phil, iv: 7), the Peace which 
 ordinary men cannot understand or think of. 
 Such peacemakers shall be called, shall be 
 known among sanctified men, as Sons of 
 God, said Jesus; or Christs, said St. Paul, for 
 by due instruction and in due order (I Cor. 
 xv : 23) we "all come unto (that is, grow to 
 be) a perfect man (that is) come unto (or 
 reach) the stature (or status) of the fulness 
 of Christ" (Eph. iv: 13). It is the God 
 of Peace who makes man perfect (Heb. xiii: 
 20), through his Apostles, who bring to quali- 
 fied spirits the Gospel of Peace, which to all 
 others is a mystery (Eph. vi: 15, 19). Jesus 
 Christ, like other Apostles of God, came and 
 preached Peace (Eph. ii: 17), and those who 
 have been thought worthy of the Gospel of 
 Peace should "keep the unity of the spirit in 
 the bond of Peace," said St. Paul (Eph. iv: 
 3), that is, they should take care to maintain 
 their union with God by the chain called
 
 240 Soul Culture 
 
 Peace. It is their duty and privilege to be 
 making Peace or Perfect Love, so as to enter 
 into fellowship with God. The word 
 "Peace," derived from Lat. pax, pacts, is 
 the same as paksha in Sanskrit, which means 
 love. 
 
 Like a good housewife who intelligently 
 makes butter by submitting milk to the differ- 
 ent processes of boiling, churning, and sepa- 
 rating, the man who would be good and 
 acceptable to God must make love out of 
 the kindness of his heart. Except for worldly 
 life he will not know the difference between 
 love and hate, nor the good and bad conse- 
 quences of either. Home and society are 
 the purifying fires necessary for bringing the 
 milk-pan, called the heart, to the boiling 
 point, when love and hate rise to the surface. 
 Once invisible, now they are manifest to the 
 spirit. This compound of love and hate, 
 which may be called the "cream" of human 
 nature, is supposed to be the sum and sub- 
 stance of life, the be-all and end-all of exist- 
 ence, beyond which people fancy nothing
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 241 
 
 remains but death. This is so in the case 
 of most persons. But most assuredly they 
 are re-embodied and sent back to earthly life 
 again and again to learn to see the desecra- 
 tion of hate and its parent folly. And so in 
 every generation there arise a few persons 
 who have discernment enough to perceive 
 that in this life they should "churn the 
 cream" by the instrument called reason, and 
 separate that which is sour from that which 
 is sweet. This work of separating love from 
 hate and gathering together the fragments 
 of love during the process of consideration 
 and meditation, so as to make daily the lump 
 or "body" of love grow larger and larger, 
 becomes to them the real meaning and chief 
 concern of earthly life. To form the body 
 of Christ within us (Gal. iv: 19), even as a 
 good housewife forms balls of butter, is in- 
 deed possible to those who have loving-kind- 
 ness enough in them to practise the art of 
 allowing their thoughts to run down to a 
 beautiful calm. 
 
 The subsidence of all thoughts in spiritual
 
 i\i Soul Culture 
 
 communion, while un conquered by sleep, is 
 known to Sages as the "end of the world" 
 (Matt, xxiv: 3). Then comes Love to the 
 fore, even as the sun comes out of the clouds. 
 This is called the "rising of the da}' star in 
 our heart" (II Pet. i: 19), or the "Day of 
 the Lord" (II Pet. iii. 10) or the "Coming 
 of Christ" (Matt, xxiv: 3, 27). 
 
 The learned Scribes and Pharisees who sat 
 on the seat of Moses did not understand the 
 spirit of his teachings. They, said Jesus, 
 were careful enough to pay the taxes due on 
 such little garden produce as mint, anise, 
 and cummin seed, but wholly neglected to 
 heed the weightier matters of the law, namely, 
 discernment of the spirit (krisis), mercy to 
 men (eleos), and love of God (pistis). They 
 decked themselves in striking garments and 
 imposed on their congregations burdensome 
 rules and practices, which did not give them 
 any knowledge whatever of God. They 
 have shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against 
 men, he cried; they neither go in themselves, 
 nor suffer others that are entering to go in.
 
 Doctrines 0} Jesus 243 
 
 Behold, O Jerusalem, your house of God 
 is desolate for want of true worshippers 
 (Matt, xxiii: 4-38). 
 
 Jesus turned from the worldly minded 
 Scribes and Pharisees to his disciples and 
 prophesied the destruction of the great 
 Temple. On previous occasions he had 
 spoken to them of the day of Judgment 
 (Matt, x: 15), and of the end of the world 
 (ib. xiii: 40-49), and now that he referred to 
 the destruction of the temple, they thought, 
 in terms of the popular belief of the times, 
 that the Messiah, who was to spring from the 
 line of David, was about to appear on Mount 
 Moriah, and establish a universal empire. 
 So they asked him, while seated on the Mount 
 of Olives, which commanded a good view 
 of the Temple, "When shall these things be? 
 What shall be the signs of thy coming, and 
 of the end of the world?" 
 
 Jesus then took great pains to dispel from 
 their minds the popular delusion regarding 
 these two subjects. His exposition is given 
 at length in Chapter xxiv of St. Matthew.
 
 244 Soul Culture 
 
 "Take heed that no man deceive you," said 
 he: the "coming of Christ" is not an event 
 that takes place abroad, but is an experience 
 within you, so that if any man say Lo, here 
 is Christ, or there is Christ, believe it not. 
 He is not to be found in the desert or in moun- 
 tain caves. Nor is the coming of Christ 
 associated with signs and wonders in the 
 outer world, such as earthquakes, wars, 
 famines, and plagues. The signs occur within 
 the body only. They are all spiritual signs 
 or signs manifested to the spirit in the spirit 
 itself. It is not meet that such spiritual 
 experiences should be divulged too openly, 
 but Jesus has specified some of the signs 
 (Matt, xxiv: 29-31); and so have Peter 
 (II Pet. iii: 10-12) and Paul (I Thes. iv: 16). 
 These signs are vouchsafed to the spirit at 
 its "rising" or "coming" or "re-birth" in 
 order that it may not have any doubt of its 
 Own True Being. They consist of internal 
 sounds, like trumpet blasts and blowing of 
 gales; sights like lightning flashes; and the 
 feeling of all one's I-ness and my-ness
 
 Doctrines of Jesus 2.45 
 
 consumed in a great melting furnace. Amidst 
 a distressing sense of a general conflagration 
 and "melting" of the elements of thought, 
 and of a crumbling up of all mental states, 
 comes an indescribable Calm, accompanied 
 with a great and hallowing Effulgence, which, 
 growing every instant, innundates the whole 
 body and, getting beyond its bounds, like a 
 river that has swept over its banks, flows in 
 every direction far and wide as Love Absolute, 
 as Love unconditioned by quantity or quality. 
 This grand spiritual experience or dis- 
 covery on the part of the full-grown Soul 
 that it is Perfect Love, transcending all 
 finiteness, is incomprehensible (John iii: 
 4, 9, 10) to the "natural man" (I Cor. ii: 14). 
 His mind cannot grasp this infinite knoivlcdge 
 (John xvii: 3), this soul-knowledge, called 
 Atma darsana by Sages in India. But if his 
 selfish love, or the love that is in bondage 
 to worldly likes and dislikes, gradually puts 
 away such fetters and learns of Godly men 
 the methods of attaining Perfect Love, it will 
 soon grow into neighbourly love, and then
 
 246 Soul Culture 
 
 in due time into Perfect Love which is as 
 wide as space. "Rooted and grounded in 
 love," said St. Paul, it is indeed possible 
 in spiritual communion "to comprehend, 
 with all the saints (i.e., as all sanctified men 
 have experienced heretofore), what the 
 breadth and length and depth and height is" 
 of that Perfect Love (Eph. iii: 17, 18). 
 
 This wonderful manifestation (John xiv: 
 20) or appearance (during spiritual com- 
 munion) of the Spirit as Perfect Love in all 
 its formless beauty (Isa. liii: 2) is known as 
 its "second birth" (John iii: 3; I Pet. i: 23), 
 in reference to its "first birth" or appearance 
 in worldliness. In order to emancipate it 
 from worldliness, it was given many a body 
 and many a sphere of action. During these 
 careers on earth, encased in the mind-organ- 
 ism called by Sages the "womb" of mother- 
 nature (Sansk. garbha : see Anugita, chap, 
 v.; Gr. koilia: see Ps. xxii: 9 and Gal. i: 15), 
 the spirit learns the dangers of being in asso- 
 ciation with impurity and at last craves to 
 be free from it. "Deliver me, my God,
 
 Doctrines of Jesus i^rj 
 
 out of the hand of the wicked, out of the 
 hand of the unrighteous and cruel man," it 
 cries. "Thou, who hast shewed me great 
 and sore troubles, shalt quicken me again; 
 and shalt bring me again from the depths of 
 the earth " (Ps. lxxi : 4, 20). "Turn me from 
 vanity and quicken me in thy way, in thy 
 righteousness. Thy word hath quickened 
 me" (Ps. cxix: 37, 40, 50). Hearing the 
 sound doctrine of Godliness, the soul is 
 quickened in its mind-womb. 77 then knows 
 it is something other than the mind and senses. 
 It is certain that it is neither thought nor 
 sense perception. The man of God teaches 
 him that, like God, it is Love, not the love 
 that springs from sexhood, but the love that 
 stands isolate from all that is flesh, even as 
 God is Love, purest and perfect. If the spirit 
 labours for its fullest maturity, by perform- 
 ing its round of worldly duties in utmost 
 love and by waiting upon the Lord daily 
 in spiritual communion, according to the 
 methods known to the sanctified, it will 
 most assuredly outgrow the limitations of
 
 248 Soul Culture 
 
 the mind, and be delivered in its own proper 
 form as Boundless Love. This delivery of 
 the Spirit from the entanglements of mind 
 and body, and the knowledge of its indepen- 
 dent existence as Perfect Love, is the second 
 birth of the spirit. The first birth is its fall 
 into worldliness. The second birth is its 
 rise to Godliness, or full knowledge of God, 
 while on earth and in the body.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abatement of thought, 192. 
 "Able ministers of the spirit," 56. 
 Abraham, 131. 
 
 God of, etc., 131. 
 Agamas, 124. 
 
 Agape vs. pistis, 17, 26-28. 
 
 Agnosticism and atheism, rise of in the West, 73. 
 Alexander the Great, 40. 
 Alexandria, 40. 
 
 Catechetical School of, 46, 47. 
 Aloneness (of spirit), 97, 103-106, 118. 
 Allegories, proverbs and parables, value of, 43-46. 
 Anointed Teacher, 183, 184. See Christ. 
 Antioch, School of Christians at, 47. 
 Apostle of God, defined, 206. See Christ. 
 
 is the Son, in actual fellowship with God, 211, 
 212. 
 Apostles are the illumined, 211. 
 Apostolic Fathers, 67. 
 
 knowledge is actual, direct, knowledge of God, 
 211, 212. 
 Apostasy among the Jews, 147-151. 
 Aquinas, Thomas, views as to oral tradition, 64, 66. 
 Athanasius, difficulties of, with Christian creeds, 72. 
 Atheism threatens the West, says Cardinal Newman, 
 
 Attn a-darsana (knowledge of the soul), 97, 182. 
 A tmdna-dtmani pasya, 106, 130. 
 A tma in tnoksha, 121. 
 
 Attainment of God, four stages leading to, 124. 
 of Christhood, 98, 99, 188, 210, an, 243-248. 
 Augustine, difficulties of, in interpreting the Bible, 
 72. 
 
 249
 
 250 Index 
 
 Avdnmanasa gocaram, God is, 94. 
 
 Babylonish captivity, influence of, on Jewish faith, 
 
 150. 
 Bain on the relations of the mind and the body, 109. 
 Barnabas, 67. 
 Bible, the great value of the teachings of the, to 
 
 the West, 79. 
 Birth of the spirit, first, 246. 
 
 second, 246. 
 Blessedness, greatness of, 172-175. 
 
 fleeting nature of other enjoyments, 173. 
 the two contrasted, 173. 
 Brahma sthiti (Godliness), 95, 123. 
 Butter-making as an illustration of the way in which 
 love for God may be developed, 240, 241. 
 
 Cabbala, 40. 
 
 Carnally-minded, the, characterised, 215. 
 Catechetical School of Alexandria, 46, 47. 
 Caustic wit, raillery, etc., danger of, 177, 178. 
 Chalcedon, Council at, 71. 
 Christ, formation of, in man, 30, 241. 
 "before Abraham," 119. 
 the West knows of but one, but India of many 
 
 in each generation, 81, 210. 
 every spirit when perfected becomes, 210. 
 
 as all sanctified teachers declare, 211. 
 is the soul freed from bondage to worldliness, 119. 
 in what sense king, 205, 206. 
 
 a sanctified spirit, an Apostle of God, the "Good 
 Shepherd," "King," " Son," Teacher, 206, 207. 
 a royal Priest, 207-209. 
 
 a high priest after the order of Melchisedek, 208. 
 function of, to draw souls to God, 213-214. 
 "coming of," a matter of inner experience, 244. 
 
 that experience outlined, 240-248. 
 difficult Bible texts for those who believe in but 
 
 one, 210. 
 See I ivanmnktas and Jnanis. 
 Christhood, Messiahship, 31. 
 
 Divine plan of salvation designs every spirit to 
 attain it, 188.
 
 Index 251 
 
 Christhood — Continued. 
 Sonship of God, 188. 
 
 a matter of actual experience and personal knowl- 
 edge, 211, 212, 245, 247. 
 
 See mukti and Freedom. 
 Christ Jesus, an Apostle or Son of God, 210, 211, 214. 
 not the only Son of God, 81, 118, 210. 
 taught how to gain release from the burdens of 
 
 thought, 217. 
 his first teaching "Repent," i.e., change your 
 thoughts, 218; turn your thoughts to imper- 
 ishable things, 218. 
 taught the development of Perfect Love, 222-224. 
 his Sermon on the Mount, 225-242. See Sermon 
 
 on the Mount. 
 care he took to dispel the idea of an external 
 "coming of Christ," 243. 
 Christly fulness, 30. 
 Church creeds and dogmas, difficulties of, 5, 72. 
 
 of Nicasa, Chalcedon, etc., 70. 
 Churchianity has taken the place of Christianity 
 because of the lack of spiritual knowledge, 72. 
 Disastrous consequences to the West, 73-78. 
 Commercial dishonesty, a result of self-love fostered 
 
 by absence of spiritual ideals, 74-76. 
 Corrupt influences in public life due to prevalence 
 
 of self-love, 75. 
 Civilisation, defined, 79. 
 
 true goal of, love of God and man, 79. 
 Commandments given to Moses, 132, 133. 
 Consciousness, of the freed spirit, 121. 
 the Knower, the Soul, the Spirit, 107. 
 pure, region of, 123. 
 Councils, various, 70, 71. 
 
 Crown of Life, the kingship of the spirit over the 
 flesh, 194. 
 
 Day star, its rising in the heart, 49. 
 Derision, scorn, spirit of, dangerous, 177, 178. 
 Desires, decline of, leads to Peace, 112, 120. 
 Disciples of Jesus, not all had spiritual discern- 
 ment, 50.
 
 252 Index 
 
 Doctrine, of appearance or coming of Christ, 97, 
 
 244-246. 
 of Blessedness and how it may be attained, 172- 
 
 177. 
 of "Be still, and know that I am God," 192. 
 of Christhood, 188, 210, 211, 243-248. See 
 
 mukti and Freedom. 
 of conquest of care and sorrow by the control 
 
 of thought, 216-218. 
 of drawing qualified spirits to God, 214, 228, 229. 
 of Faith, 15-19- 
 of Faith (love of God) following sound teaching, 
 
 17, 19. 
 of "Faith cometh by hearing," 19. 
 of "Father in me and I in Him," "I and the 
 
 Father are one," 31. 
 of fellowship with God, 31. 
 
 of freedom, 121, 210. See Christhood and mukti. 
 of the formation of Christ in man, 30, 225, 241. 
 of the "Good Shepherd" and his "sheep," 203, 
 
 204. 
 that God is in the soul, 123, 124. 
 of the growth of the spirit, its three stages, 224. 
 of hearing and understanding, 21-23. 
 of human perfectibility, 225. 
 of intended vs. literal meaning, 37 et seq. 
 of isolation, aloneness, 97, 103-106, 118. 
 of the knowable as distinguished from the sen- 
 sible and the thinkable, 93, 94, 107, 108, 120- 
 
 123. 
 of knowledge of God, 56. 
 of Law the way to Love, 226-228. 
 of man's capacity to know God, 97. 
 of the maturity of the spirit, 31, 224. 
 of meditation, its value, 179, 180. 
 of the Messiah, 155-158, 213. 
 of "no man can come unto me except the Father 
 
 draw him," 228. 
 of Oneness with God in love, 20, 29-32, 51. 
 of Perfect, Godly, or Christly Love, 220, 224, 
 
 225, 228. 
 of the quickening of the spirit, 247.
 
 Index 253 
 
 Doctrine of appearance of Christ — Continued. 
 
 of renunciation of the world, 23. 
 
 of repentance, 218. 
 
 of the resurrection among the Jews, 144-155. 
 
 of a "royal priesthood," 207. 
 
 of salvation, 188. 
 
 of second birth or rebirth, 246, 248. 
 
 of self-surrender, 189. 
 
 of Sonship to God, 188, 210. 
 
 that the soul can only be known by the Soul, 
 106, 108. 
 
 that the Spirit is that which loves, 222. 
 
 that that which hates is Corruption or Folly, 223. 
 
 of spiritual discernment, 48, 55. 
 
 of necessity of understanding the true teaching, 2 1 . 
 "Drawing" or " calling" of the spirit of God, 214. 
 
 Ekballei should be read "cast away," 25. 
 
 " End of the world," conies when the mind ceases 
 
 to differentiate, 99. 
 Esoteric interpretation of Scriptures lost to the 
 Christian world, 46, 47. 
 known, however, to the spiritually wise, 48. 
 advocated by Origen and the Alexandrian School, 
 
 46, 47- 
 Exoteric worship only a stepping-stone to esoteric 
 
 worship, 89. 
 Essenes, 158-163, 164, 166. 
 
 Jesus possibly an Essene, 163. 
 Experience, an, typical of religious conditions in 
 
 the West, 9. 
 
 "Faith," variously and unsatisfactorily inter- 
 preted in the West, 12. 
 
 efforts of Church leaders to define the term, 12. 
 
 in the New Testament means love as well as 
 belief, 15. 
 
 follows upon belief, 16. 
 
 equivalent of Sansk. bhakti and Gr. pistis, 16. 
 
 or love of God, may be developed by proper 
 teacher, — " Faith cometh by hearing," 17, 19. 
 Fellowship of Christ with God, 31, 210.
 
 254 Index 
 
 Formation of Christ in man, 30, 241. 
 Freedom of the soul, 119, 121. 
 Fulness of Christ, 30. 
 
 General resurrection, doctrine of, 151 
 God, is in the soul, 124. 
 
 folly of attempting to monopolise Him or His 
 Apostles, 213. 
 
 may be known by man, 56, 94, 103-106, 210, 211. 
 
 of Abraham, etc., 131. 
 
 His Plan of Salvation, 188. 
 Growth of the spirit, 224. 
 "Good Shepherd," the, and his sheep, 203, 204. 
 
 "Heathen" defined, 184. 
 
 Helikia, Christly maturity, 31. 
 
 Henotes tes pisteos, 29-32. 
 
 Hermas, 68. 
 
 Hule, the material cause of the world, 161. 
 
 "I am," name for pure spirit, 132, 192. 
 
 Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, 67. 
 
 Infidelity and belief in externals following upon 
 
 lack of sound spiritual instruction, 77, 78. 
 Interpretation, should be based upon oral tradition, 
 61 et seq. 
 true, difficulty of arriving at, 38. 
 
 needed to make Bible a living force, 80, 81. 
 impossible to the worldly-minded, 42, 43. 
 possible to those having spiritual discern- 
 ment, 47; that is, possible by the aid 
 of Jndms or Jivanmuktas, 81. 
 unsound, disastrous consequences of, 73-78. 
 
 Agnosticism, irreverence, materialism, 
 
 atheism, 73. 
 
 Self-love; its nature and results, 73-76. 
 
 Commercial dishonesty, immorality in 
 
 politics, poverty and crime in cities, 
 
 and the like, 75, 76. 
 
 Interpretations of the scriptures, various, Papias 
 
 on, 68. 
 Irreverence, rise of, in the West, 73. 
 Isolation or aloneness(of the spirit), 97, 103-106, 118.
 
 Index 255 
 
 Jehovah, the self-existent, 132. 
 Jesus, greatness as a teacher, 18. 
 
 impressive qualities of character, 18. 
 
 was a jndni, 116. 
 
 had great spiritual powers, 116. 
 
 in samddhi (in storm at sea), 117. See Christ 
 Jesus. 
 Jews, early history of, 131. 
 
 apostasy among, 147-151. 
 
 ideals common to all sects of, 164, 165. 
 
 their beliefs as regards a Resurrection, 145; and a 
 Messiah, 155. 
 Jiva-ahankdra, 100, 10 1. 
 Jivanmuktas or Jndnis, 81, 87, 171, 182, 183. 
 
 necessity of resorting to, for true meaning of 
 Bible, 81, 82. 
 
 characteristics of, 88, 91, 92. 
 
 also called Jndna-gurus (Teachers of godly 
 wisdom), 89, 90, 184, 185. 
 
 and Jagat-gurus or Loka-gurus (World Teachers) 
 
 9°- 
 where found in India, 90. 
 
 fourfold classification of, 113-117. 
 
 doctrines of, 93-108. 
 
 Spiritual and worldly experience contrasted, 93. 
 
 Range of the thinkable, sensible, and knowable, 
 
 93. 94- 
 God is knowable, but not sensible or thinkable, 
 
 94- 
 
 Renunciation, or forsaking impurities, 95. 
 
 "Ascent of soul towards God," 95. 
 
 "Rising" of the soul in glory of the sun, 96. 
 
 Isolation, aloneness (of spirit), 97. 
 
 Appearance or coming of Christ, 97. 
 
 Knowledge of God, 97. 
 
 "Melting of the elements," or, "burning up" 
 
 of the bonds of worldliness, 99. 
 The "end of the world" — cessation of the 
 
 recognition of differentiated existence, 99, 100. 
 Death of worldly, and birth of Godly, spirit, 100, 
 
 101. 
 "Know the soul through the soul," 106, 108.
 
 256 
 
 Index 
 
 Jivanmnktas or Jndnis, doctrines of — Continued. 
 
 Only by separation of the soul from the "flesh " 
 can God be known, 103-106. 
 
 Summary, 108. 
 
 See Christ. 
 Jndndgni, fire of Truth, 99. 
 Jndna Khdnda of the Vedas, 124. 
 John the Apostle, his Christhood, 50, 51. 
 Josephus, his account of the Essenes, 158, 159. 
 Josiah, his reestablishment of the Law, 148. 
 Joy and Love increase together, 224. 
 
 Kaivalya (aloneness), 97. 
 
 "Key of knowledge," 56. 
 
 "Kings of the earth" (Ps. ii : 1), defined, 186. 
 
 Knower, Soul, Spirit, or Consciousness, 107, 108. 
 
 Know the soul by the soul, 106, 120. 
 
 Knowing as distinguished from perceiving by the 
 
 senses and thinking, 107, 108, 120-123. 
 Krisis (discernment), 27. 
 
 Law, given to Moses, 132, 133. 
 nature of, 227. 
 purpose of, to convert self-love into neighbourly 
 
 love, 226—228. 
 respect of true teacher for, 227. 
 Lewes on "supra-sensible" world, 122. 
 Lux Mundi, 12. 
 
 Likes and dislikes are the cause of sorrow and un- 
 rest, 215. 
 Literal vs. intended meaning, 38. 
 Loka-guru (world-teacher), 90. 
 Love of God, follows belief in Him, 16. 
 
 developed by the true Teacher, 17. 
 waxes as love of the world wanes, 24. 
 may be made to grow from the kind- 
 ness of the heart, 240, 241. 
 of the world, estrangement from God, 23. 
 of self, St. Paul on, 73. 
 
 spiritual, the first thing taught of by men of 
 God, 220.
 
 Index 257 
 
 Love — Continued. 
 
 arises within the family and expands to embrace 
 
 all men, 221; enemies as well as friends, 222. 
 to the end, 223. 
 developed by Law, 226-228. 
 and joy increase together, 224. 
 neighbourly, 228. 
 neighbourly, is developed from selfish love, 220, 
 
 221. 
 and from the latter Perfect Love, 222-224. 
 
 Masters, Jndnis or Christs, 81, 82, 87-92. 
 Materialism, spread of in the West, 73. 
 Meditation, value and nature of, 179. 
 Messiah, doctrine of, among the Jews, 155-158. 
 
 Jesus not the only, 213. 
 Messianic prophesies refer to the "drawing" of 
 
 qualified spirits, 213, 214. 
 
 not peculiar to the Jews, 214. 
 Messiahship or Christhood, 31. 
 Melchisedek, 207. 
 
 belonged to a royal priesthood, 207. 
 
 Jesus of the same order, 208. 
 
 Paul likewise, 209. 
 Mistranslations: 
 
 "faith" (in the sense of belief), 12, 16. 
 
 "only-begotten son," 118. 
 Monogenics hnios, true meaning of, 12, 118. 
 Moses, 132. 
 Mukti (freedom), 116. See Christhood and 
 
 Freedom. 
 Mystery of Christ in man, 31. 
 
 of faith, or Godly love, or Godliness, 32. 
 "Mysteries" of the Bible, 65. 
 
 Ndbi, Knower of God, 136. 
 
 Newman, Cardinal; his difficulties with church 
 
 dogmas, 5. 
 Nicrea, Council of, 70. 
 Nirdsa, leads to samddhi, 112. 
 
 art of pacifying thought leads to, 113.
 
 258 
 
 Index 
 
 Offerings prescribed by Mosaic law, 133-135. 
 "Only-begotten son," a mistranslation, 118. 
 Oral tradition, importance of, 49-56. 
 
 delivered by Jesus and Paul, 61, 62. 
 
 Roman church claims to possess, 63. 
 
 Protestant sects deny, 64. 
 Orthodoxy is the teaching of the spiritually dis- 
 cerning, 55. 
 
 Pacifying thought, art of, leads to Nirasa, 113. 
 
 Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, 68. 
 
 Parable of the Good Shepherd, 203. 
 
 Parables of the Sower, Hidden Treasure, etc., 21-23. 
 
 proverbs and allegories, value of, 42-46. 
 Path to God, stages of, 124. 
 Paul, greatness as a teacher, 19. 
 when he attained Christhood, 51-53. 
 on the self-lover, 73. 
 Peace, absolute, attainment of, 121. 
 greatest of blessings, 192, 237-240. 
 -making, dismissing worldly thoughts, 237-240. 
 Pearls, cast not, before swine, 43. 
 "People" (Ps. ii : 1), defined, 185. 
 Perfectibility of the human spirit, 224, 225, 228. 
 Pistis, 16. 
 
 vs. agape, 26-28. 
 Pharisees, 140, 141, 164, 166. 
 
 Philo insists on interpretation according to in- 
 tended meaning, 41, 45. 
 Pleroma tou Christou (fulness of Christ), 30, 121. 
 Politics, immorality in, due to development of self- 
 love consequent upon lack of spiritual knowl- 
 edge, 75. 
 "Pooling" to secure unfair advantages in trade 
 
 due to same, 75. 
 Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, 68. 
 Poverty and crime in Western cities, 77. 
 Progress, definition of, 79. 
 
 true goal is God, 79. 
 Prophets, their rise among the Jews, 137. 
 Protestant sects deny oral tradition, 64.
 
 Index 159 
 
 Psalm i interpreted, 172-183. 
 
 ii interpreted, 183-188. 
 
 iii interpreted, 189-192. 
 Psychology of the West, difficulties of, 109. 
 
 Qualified, those who are, to hear the final doctrine; 
 eight classes of, 230-240. 
 
 Raillery and derision, spirit of, dangerous, 177, 178. 
 
 Rebirth of soul, 246. 
 
 Repentance means change of thought, 218. 
 
 Religions, why various, 125. 
 
 Renunciation, follows understanding, 23. 
 
 leads to Faith or Love of God, 23. 
 
 enjoined by Jesus, 24, 25. 
 Rest, Peace, or Blissfulness, 117. 
 Resurrection, Jewish belief in, 145, 146. 
 
 opposed by the Sadducees, 146, 147. 
 
 general, Ezekiel, 1 51-154. 
 "Rising from the dead" of the Jews, 142, 143. 
 Royal priesthood, 207. 
 
 Roman Catholic Church, her claim to interpret the 
 Scriptures, 63. 
 
 Saccit&nanda, 121. 
 Sadducees, 139, 140, 164, 166. 
 Salvation, Divine plan of, 188. 
 Samddhi, follows on nirdsa, 112. 
 
 vikalpa and nirvikalpa, 98. 
 Samuel, 136. 
 
 his "companies of prophets," 136. 
 Santi, sanctification, the standing alone, isolated 
 
 from all that is worldly, 1 19. 
 Sanctified in spirit, Jivanmuktas or Jndnis, 81, 87- 
 
 92, 206. 
 Scorn, derision, spirit of, dangerous, 177, 178. 
 Schools of spiritual instruction among thi- Jews, 136. 
 Schools, Christian, of Alexandria and Antioch, 46, 
 
 47- 
 Scripture, Christian, why meagre and obscure, 63. 
 
 Second birth of the soul, 246.
 
 160 Index 
 
 Sensationalism in Literature and the Press follows 
 perversion of taste due to unspiritual ideals, 75. 
 Self-love, depicted by St. Paul, 73. 
 
 a menace to society, 74-78. 
 Septuagint, how produced, 40, 41. 
 Sermon on the Mount, 225 et seq. 
 practical value of, 225. 
 an exposition of the principles of Infinite Love, 
 
 Light, and Joy, 225. 
 only the spiritual-minded can understand it, 229; 
 
 and see 203—207. 
 formation of the Perfect Spirit, 225, 226. 
 disciplinary value of Law and Custom, 226, 227; 
 
 respect of Godly men therefor, 227. 
 "drawing" of the qttalified, 228, 229. 
 classes of qualified persons: 
 
 (1) the poor in spirit, 231. 
 
 (2) they that mourn, 232. 
 
 (3) the meek, 234. 
 
 (4) they who hunger and thirst for righteous- 
 ness, 235. 
 
 (5) they who are persecuted for righteousness' 
 sake, 236. 
 
 (6) the merciful, 237. 
 
 (7) the pure in heart, 237. 
 
 (8) peacemakers, 237-240. 
 
 Jesus taught the Gospel of Peace, as have all 
 other Apostles, 239. 
 
 formation of the body of Christ, 241. 
 "Sheep, my, hear my voice," 204, 214. 
 Sheol, 144. 
 
 Shepherds, good and bad, 203, 204, 207. 
 Siddhanta, 125. 
 
 Siva-dardana (knowledge of God), 97. 
 Signs of the "coming" of Christ, 244. 
 Soul, Spirit, Consciousness, or Knower, 107, 108. 
 
 Know the, by the soul, 106, 120. 
 Sorrow and unrest, caused by likes and dislikes, 
 
 215- 
 Sower, parable of, 21, 22. 
 Solomon, his worship of "other gods," 147. 
 Sonship of God, Christhood, 188.
 
 Index 16 1 
 
 Spirit, isolation or aloneness of, 97, 103-106, 118. 
 See Christhood. 
 
 freedom of, 121. 
 
 sanctification of, is the freeing from corruption, 
 206. 
 
 is that which loves, 222, 223. 
 
 three stages of growth of, 224. 
 
 first birth of the, its fall into worldliness, 246. 
 
 quickening of the, 247. 
 
 second birth of the, 247, 248. 
 Spiritual discernment, alone can interpret, 48. 
 
 is the true ultimate standard of orthodoxy, 55. 
 Spiritual love is the first thing taught of by men 
 
 of God, 220. 
 St. Clement, views as to interpretation, 46. 
 Stages or paths of the Agamas, four, 124. 
 ' ' Supra-sensible ' ' world , 122. 
 
 Talmud, 39, 40. 15°- 
 
 Teacher, true, character and attainments of, 17. 
 
 Teachings of the Vedas and Agamas, 124. 
 
 Temptations must be avoided, 175. 
 
 Tempting thoughts should be suppressed at the 
 very outset, 174. 
 
 Thomson, Archbishop, his views as to oral tradi- 
 tion, 64. 
 
 Thoughts the great burden of men, 216. 
 
 how to escape therefrom taught by Jesus, 217, 218. 
 
 Tillai (region of pure consciousness), 103. 
 
 Traditional interpretation, importance of, 49 et seq. 
 
 Treasure, hidden, parable of, 23. 
 
 Understanding the teaching, necessity of, 21. 
 
 Jesus emphatic about, 21. 
 
 followed by renunciation, 23. 
 Unfairness in trade due to the self-love fostered by 
 
 unsound spiritual instruction, 74. 
 Unity of Faith or Oneness with God in love, 20, 29- 
 
 3 2 . 5 1 - 
 "Unlearned" and "unstable," the, 39. 
 
 Vedas, 124. 
 Vedanta, 125.
 
 262 Index 
 
 Vedyam (knowable), God is, 94. 
 Vidya-guru (teacher of secular things), 90. 
 
 Wakefulness, great importance of, 192. 
 West, drifting towards atheism, says Cardinal New- 
 man, 12. 
 deplorable consequences of misinterpretation of 
 
 the Scriptures in the, 73-79. 
 agnosticism, materialism, etc., of, 273. 
 "Womb" of the spirit, 52, 246, 247. 
 Worldly-mindedness, Paul's description of, 73. 
 Worldliness, evils of, 182, 183. 
 
 Worldly life a preparation for knowledge of God, 
 220. 
 
 Ydveh, Jehovah, 132. 
 
 Yogi (seeker), 171. 
 
 Yukta (he who has attained), 171.