Part 36 (2/2)

Still this crux remained for me, that to be suddenly, at any arbitrary moment in the world's history, obliged, as it were, to send an absolutely divine part of Himself into the world, was the way a _man_ would act faced by an unforeseen catastrophe, but not the way in which G.o.d has acted throughout the rest of our history.

A succession of teachers, enlightening the world by degrees, and culminating in the ANOINTED Son of G.o.d--the Flower of Humanity--_this_ is entirely in line with the processes of Nature and the laws of G.o.d, so far as we know them.

All progress has its culminating point.

aeons have pa.s.sed to produce the most exquisite crystals, the highest forms of vegetation, of animals, of men. Then came the slow processes of civilising and educating men; the dim instincts of fear and propitiation, merging, by slow degrees, in the first conceptions of Love, as something apart from desire, and so forth.

Was I to be expected to shut my eyes to all these known facts, and bolt down the theories contained in one Book, written by human authors, no matter how admirable?

I felt it was impossible.

Then I remembered with relief that these very dogmas, as a matter of fact, were in so fluent a state, that my own bare fifty years of living had seen at least four different high-water marks!

Here again therefore, under my very eyes, was the universal law of progress working, the moment it _could_ work, by being released from the swaddling-clothes of the Roman Catholic Church, which, so far as it is orthodox, is fossilised.

I saw also that the whole body of dissent had moved on, taking up its pegs and planting them a little further on each time; till a City temple, with its widening theology, was an established fact.

Progress everywhere--slow, but sure--and the pace getting quicker, even in my short span! Still, the _uniqueness_ of Jesus of Nazareth and His influence over the nineteen centuries was a puzzle.

Buddha's influence has lasted longer, Mahomet's almost as long (the two cancel any way), but I have always recognised an _advance_ in the teaching of Jesus Christ. He brought a fresh element, in the personal note of the Sons.h.i.+p with G.o.d.

I was at this point when I came over here. Now through your mind I have been able to see, and, oddly enough, to quicken in your soul, the seed already planted there.

They tell me the illumination came to you years ago, at Oberammergau--no, not when you were there for the Pa.s.sion Play--four years earlier.

You took it in with your head then, not with your heart. Old traditions were too strong, I suppose, and you had not made up the last little bit of your mind, to be true to the convictions that had come to you through your prayers for light.

And so you have gone on, see-sawing to and fro, not really believing the old orthodox ideas, but not courageously sweeping them away for yourself. So although the key was in your hands, you have not used it until now. You have given me the key, and I have been allowed, as _my_ New Year's gift, to fit it in the door.

This is how Jesus Christ has stood so long at the door of _your_ heart and knocked. He could only enter through the one door--namely, _that one opened in the highest point of your spiritual realisation_. I see now that He comes in at that door in each soul, and, as spiritual evolution unfolds in each heart, so is the special position of that door s.h.i.+fted; but the fact of His presence is the vital one! It was not possible for Him to do otherwise than hide His face, as it were, whilst you were barring His only door of access--_i.e. your true point of realisation_.

It all seems so clear to me now. And this is how He comes to so many in different guises.

He is the Perfected Manifestation of G.o.d, as the Divine Man--the Flower of Humanity.

But He can come into the heart in the narrowest creed, so long as the holder of that creed is at _his true point of growth_ and not trying to stifle G.o.d's gift of ever-advancing truth by cowardly want of trust, or fear of being worse off in the end, by being absolutely honest to himself and his own convictions in the present.

It has been a long message, and you have taken much of it awkwardly, but on the whole it represents what I wanted to say. H. D.

III

H. D.--I feel now that you want to know what I meant by telling Miss R.

it was the _likeness_ to the old world which puzzled me here.

<script>