Part 39 (1/2)
This is why certain nations, at the child point of development, _must_ be treated as children. They don't realise the appeal to the spiritual, and will only misconceive you and your motives, and read cowardice in your attempt to treat from a standpoint they have not reached.
It is the same with certain religions, and this is the cause of much failure in mission work.
Theosophy and Roman Catholicism appeal strongly to comparatively immature minds.
Those who care more for form than for essence are always in the immature stage.
They love big words and mysterious sayings and doings. To have something apart from others--whether it be happiness or knowledge--is their idea of bliss. Hence in most theosophists, as in all Roman Catholic converts, you find this note of immaturity and monopoly. I say _converts_, because those born in the Roman Catholic faith are on different ground. Their spiritual life may grow and develop in spite of the creed limitations into which Fate has cast them, but those who deliberately _choose_ such limitations give the best possible proof of their own standpoint. And the same may be said also of all strict creed religions.
They have their great and valuable uses, as prison bars have their uses in a community which has not learnt to respect the rights and property of its neighbours.
Withdraw these bars and you let loose upon society a pestilential crew of murderers and marauders. Relax the bars of creed and you will find the same result. But as bars are not necessary for the advanced souls who recognise that to murder or defraud their fellow-creatures leads to their own misery, apart from any detection or punishment, so creeds are not necessary, under a corresponding evolution of the spiritual instinct, which tallies with the social and moral instincts noted above.
And as treadmills and oak.u.m picking can be dismissed in the one case, so can much of the theological machinery for the discipline and punishment of sinners against spiritual laws be dispensed with, in the case of those who are, spiritually speaking, _coming of age_.
They come then into the full liberty of Sons of G.o.d, and shall be no more treated as servants, _but as sons_, as the Apostle puts it.
This brings me to my special subject.
There are many things of great and transcending interest which we are obliged to keep secret from our younger children, partly because they would fail to understand, but still more because they would _misunderstand_, and this to their own hurt and disadvantage; not to speak of possible injury to others through them.
Spiritual Evolution is the true Doctrine, but it is not food for babes in spiritual life.
To have an unlimited series of advancing lives and advancing experiences unfolded before their eyes would not only dismay and bewilder, but would also paralyse their energy for good, and terribly augment their capacity for evil--for the _not good_.
Until they are sufficiently versed in spiritual experience to realise the difference between purity and impurity, good and evil, G.o.d and the world, fame and peace, pleasure and happiness, the peace which pa.s.ses understanding and the false glamour of sensual pa.s.sion and sensuous self-indulgence, so long it is dangerous for them to know, with absolute certainty, the real facts of the case.
Even the terrible and abhorrent pictures of an Eternal h.e.l.l, of endless flames and of undying worms, have had their uses.
In this form alone could the thoroughly immature mind be made to realise the discomfort and misery that would inevitably attend wrong-doing. It _was_ a truth, although not a literal truth. Many literal truths convey a false impression to the immature mind, whilst a symbolic truth may convey as true an impression as such a mind is capable of receiving.
The old ideas of Heaven and h.e.l.l are already doomed; but other ideas, equally untrue from the literal point of view, still hold their own, and will be more slowly eradicated. It is well this should be so. The world at large is not prepared yet to take this further step.
Frequent examinations have been found useful and inevitable in school training, both as a test of progress and still more as an encouragement.
If you tell a school of boys and girls in January that a grand examination will be held the following December, do you suppose they will work as well and as diligently as if they knew there will be short examinations at Easter and more important ones at midsummer?