In considering the spiritual illumination of the race one is confronted by two very distinct and essentially contradictory views or explanations,—one, the traditional, regards the process as paroxysmal—that revelation has been made only at intervals and through chosen media. The other regards the process as continuous, as the expression of a Divine appeal, an entrance-seeking which is universal, constant, and unvarying.
The climaxes of religious history certainly suggest intermittence; that, in keeping with human conditions, or with His unapprehended determinations, God has, at certain times, revealed the Truth through prophets and seers, whose wisdom and inspiration are to be thought of as miraculous impositions rather than normal realizations. This was the Levitical, as it is very largely the present orthodox apprehension, and it readily affiliates with those ideas of foreordination and predestination which have dominated Calvinistic theology. The absence of greater lights in a period of history is regarded as an evidence of a pause in revelation, their disappearance, proof of its consummation.
In this view, also, emphasis is naturally laid upon literal interpretation, and the "thus saith the Lord" of some Scripture declarations is given supreme authority as the final court of appeal.
An altogether different apprehension of the subject is attained through an understanding of the uninterrupted radiation of divine Love, which, without selection or reserve, ever seeks its own, and the disclosures of which are limited, or debarred by human incapacity or irresponsiveness, and by these alone. As a room is more or less perfectly lighted at noontide according to the cleanliness and transparency of its windows, so man's illuminations or inspiration is determined by his receptivity, his openness to Truth.
This leads one A correction was made in the February 7, 1901 Sentinel: "In the article in the February Journal on "The Withheld Disclosures of Truth" by John B. Willis, the following corrections are made. Page 672, line 4 substitute one for me." to think of the "Beacon Lights" of religious history as having received a larger revelation through their responsiveness to a Divine address which did not pass by other men, but which failed to find access to other men.
Accepting this fundamental law, that Truth's disclosure is in the measure of man's spiritual responsiveness and apprehension, we come into possession of a canon of interpretation which is of the utmost significance in determining the spiritual values of Scripture statement.
In opening the Bible we shall be led, under its guidance, to inquire, First: What was the writer's sense of Truth? Second: What were the social, political, educational, and religious conditions and experiences which may have shaped the expression of this sense? and Third: In what respect, if any, does it differ from the sense of Truth expressed and demonstrated by Jesus?
In answering these questions, the advancing intelligence, the deepening spiritual insight of the race will contribute their every gain, and we shall be able to distinguish more and more clearly between the chaff and the wheat, the incidental and the essential, the passing and the permanent, the human and the Divine.
To illustrate: In reading of the institution of the Ten Commandments and the Temple service as given in Exodus, one meets with a concept of God which, to say the least, is startling to Christian thought to-day.
In the second commandment, for example, the making and worship of idols is interdicted for the reason that God is "a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate" Him. Now, though the fullest credit be given to the claims of criticism respecting the debasement of the simpler and purer Mosaic code, by the annotations of a later age, it seems quite clear that God was thought of, both in the Mosaic era and yet more distinctly in later times, as capable of being moved and inflamed by human passions.
In speaking of the relation of God to the chosen race, the repeated and elaborated use of the illustration of the husband and wife, the lover and his affianced bride, seems to be authoritative upon the point. But admitting this to be true, it is not difficult to understand how the anthropomorphic conception, this thought that God would punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty, came to be, when we remember that in the childhood of a race the idea of the Supreme Being has always been fashioned largely "by the character of the existing political government."
To Israel, "God" appealed first of all as the king of kings, and just such conduct had been the every-day expression of the kingship which had embittered all the years of their bondage, the formative influence of their life experience could not have been immediately annulled.
That this concept does violence to the teaching of Jesus, and is contradicted by many inspired writers, both before and after him, no one will question. Ezekiel (18: 2–4, 19, 20) explicitly denies God's responsibility for the so-called law of the hereditary transmission of evil; while St. John's understanding of the Divine Nature represents the very antipodes of this Levitical idea; they both disallow, therefore, that literal interpretation of this and kindred passages which, unhappily, still finds a place in some Evangelical thought.
The higher rank and authority of the later ideal are universally recognized and the apparent difficulties will disappear to one who accepts the manifest fact that Moses (or some later writer) either withheld from the common people his highest sense of Truth until they were better able to receive it (after the manner of the Egyptian priests and teachers), or else he did not immediately become receptive to the more spiritual sense of the Divine Nature. In either case the law of Truth's disclosure obtains. "Only gradually," says a great teacher, "could Israel learn that the highest righteousness is not that which destroys but that which transforms."
Further, the thought of sacrifice, as it appears in these early ordinances, presents a similar contrast to the thought of later Old Testament writers—David, Psalm 51: 16; Isaiah, 1: 11; Micah, 6: 6–8, etc.—and of Jesus and the apostles. To the ritualistic Jew, sacrifice was a gift from disobedient and offending man to a righteous and offended God, in order that His wrath might be placated, His favor restored. Jesus taught, and demonstrated in his passion, that true sacrifice is quite the opposite, viz.: a gift from the one wronged to the wrong-doer, and that its purpose is not the appeasement of wrath, but the manifestation of Love. "I lay down my life for the sheep," said he, and "As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world."
Upon the sacrificial service of the Temple, regarded with the most sacred veneration by his people, as ordained of God in every particular, Jesus simply turned his back. Its truth was subject, in part, to the expression of a human sense, and it was therefore imperfect and temporary: tolerated of God until the fulness of time when the race would be better prepared to receive that revelation of His spiritual nature and requirements embodied in the life and ministry of Jesus. Here again we must see how inevitable it was that the disclosures of Truth should be unapprehended and therefore withheld, when we remember the antecedent experience and surroundings of the chosen race. For four centuries Israel breathed the atmosphere of an imperious paganism, and this thought of God and what was due Him could but bear its impress. Ethical development must be a matter of time and of growth, for it is the reward of endeavor. "To him that overcometh," and to him only, is the promise. Retaining the religious sense of their pagan environment, they would retain in part its ordinances and ritual, and we need not be surprised, therefore, to find that the tabernacle, and its furnishings, etc., closely resemble the temples of the Egyptians. The Holy Place, dark and secluded within a series of approaches, or courts, the Ark, the table of offering (shew-bread), the altar of burnt offerings, the slain beasts, the priests, the processions, etc.,—all these things, as witness the Theban temples and tombs, were but a part of "the spoil of the Egyptians." The Israelites were privileged to take of their gold and silver, but they came away laden with other and baser metals also, for the vehicles of a pagan sense could not be discarded until a nobler, more spiritual sense was reached. The association of error with Truth in religious expression is the inevitable outcome of their association in religious concept. To fail to discriminate between the Truth and the error, between the material and the spiritual concepts in David's writings, would be a mistake no less lamentable than to fail to discriminate between the moral and immoral in David's life and conduct, and the absence of such discrimination has been the bane and breakdown of the dogma of verbal inspiration. We must not forget that Israel made very great strides as they came out of Egypt. Their awakening recognition of God as a righteous God who demands righteousness alone of His people; their thought of sacrifice, in some degree, as emblematic and suggestive, as voluntary and not of constraint, and that it demanded an unblemished offering,—these things present revolutionary contrasts to the pagan thought in which they had lived; but though their advance was thus signal they did not reach their goal at a bound, the fulness of their inheritance was reserved to be the prize of patient obedience.
Turning to a later period, it is to be seen that Jesus and the apostles were subject to the limitations imposed by this law. At times he could do no mighty works because of their unbelief, and not infrequently it is manifest that he was compelled to speak through figure and parable in terms of his hearer's receptivity to Truth, rather than in the terms of his own sense of Truth. This incomplete expression does not impair the integrity of his understanding of Truth, it simply places limits upon the fulness of his revelation of Truth.
The apostles not only found these limitations in those to whom they ministered, but it is apparent that they were by no means free from such hindrances in themselves. When we find the disciples, after having spent two years or more with the Master and having been commissioned by him to teach and to heal, disputing among themselves about their respective rank and distinctions in heaven; and when we see Peter at Antioch, after a yet more mature experience, compromising with a wretched pretence and deception which evoked Paul's scathing protest and condemnation, we have abundant evidence that while inspiration frees, quickens, and exalts, it does not immediately dehumanize, and that for the apostles, as for us, the higher spiritual sense waits upon progression.
In Paul's epistles, there are many indications that his Pagan-Jewish conception of sacrifice wrestled long with his Christian sense for mastery, and his distinct growth is revealed in passages like that of Romans, 5: 8–10, where he states clearly that salvation is not effected by the reconciliation of an offended God through the death of an innocent victim, His Son, but by the sinner's realization of the infinite Love revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and his assimilation of the Truth, his re-living of the life of Jesus.
Christian Science in its persistent discrimination between the true and the false, the real and unreal man, reveals the conditions in which this law of the disclosure of Truth is grounded. The true man, the God-child, receives the revelations of divine Mind without hindrance and reflects them without distortion; but in the degree to which "mortal mind" dominates in human consciousness, in that degree is spiritual Truth debarred; for, as Paul declares, the "natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: ... neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." Realizing, as we must, that none of the inspired writers had as yet reached a purely spiritual consciousness, the association of somewhat of error with the Truth in their sense of things, is to be anticipated, it could not have been otherwise. Their "thus saith the Lord" is not the cloak of a "pretentious hypocrisy," but simply an habitual form of expression in declaring their deepest ethical convictions.
Further, this law not only interprets religious history, as well is it the interpreter and prophet of our individual experience. As man comes to himself he finds God, and the revealings of Spirit can be delayed in us only by deadness to its call. As taught so clearly in the parable of The Prodigal Son, the one constant factor of the universe is divine Love, and the heights of the spiritual life are reached by maintaining a state of constant receptivity to that Love. "He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed... Let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord."
Realizing that the essential fact of Revelation is the individual apprehension of abiding and universal Truth, that divine Love waits at the door of every heart to make known the riches of the wisdom of God, and that nothing but irresponsiveness upon our part delays His triumphant and glorious entrance, one is quickened to a new sense of his spiritual inheritance and possibilities and in joyous humility he turns to welcome that larger freedom, that completer Sovereignty, that more illumined and efficient service which was so clearly defined in Jesus' call and commission to his disciples in every age.
Nothing is more discouraging, depressing, and defeating than the personal sense of incapacity for good which may be and often is the outcome of the belief of favoritism in revelation, and surely nothing could be more stimulating to the spiritual life, than the re-awakened thought of what it means to be a child of God.
From this point of view the history of the discovery and development of Christian Science reveals that natural and orderly course of events which is altogether in keeping with the assurance and manifest anticipation of Jesus.
To a high order of spiritual consciousness and receptivity the word was committed which is making all the world to blossom as did once the Judean hills. Christian Science with all its beneficent achievements is a monument Page 678, line 1 substitute monument for movement. to the spiritual exaltations and possibilities attending a devotion to Truth's discovery and demonstration, which has been equally unflagging and unselfish, and if Truth's disclosures seem at times to be withheld from us so that we seem to be confused and inadequate, we may be sure that a considerable, if not complete explanation will be found in the inconstancy and intermittence of our openness to Truth's loving appeal.
