The Life Everlasting | Page 6

manners;
for this is what thousands of professing Christians do, and the clergy
are by no means exempt.
I know very well, of course, that I must not expect your appreciation, or
even your attention, in matters purely spiritual. The world is too much
with you, and you become obstinate of opinion and rooted in prejudice.
Nevertheless, as I said before, this is not my concern. Your moods are
not mine, and with your prejudices I have nothing to do. My creed is
drawn from Nature--Nature, just, invincible, yet tender--Nature, who
shows us that Life, as we know it now, at this very time and in this very
world, is a blessing so rich in its as yet unused powers and possibilities,
that it may be truly said of the greater majority of human beings that
scarce one of them has ever begun to learn HOW to live.
Shakespeare, the greatest human exponent of human nature at its best
and worst,--the profound Thinker and Artist who dealt boldly with the
facts of good and evil as they truly are,--and did not hesitate to contrast
them forcibly, without any of the deceptive 'half-tones' of vice and

virtue which are the chief stock-in-trade of such modern authors as we
may call 'degenerates,'--makes his Hamlet exclaim:--
"What a piece of work is man!--how noble in reason!--how infinite in
faculty!--in form and moving how express and admirable!--in action
how like an angel!--in apprehension how like a god!"
Let us consider two of these designations in particular: 'How infinite in
faculty!'--and 'In apprehension how like a god!' The sentences are
prophetic, like so many of Shakespeare's utterances. They foretell the
true condition of the Soul of Man when it shall have discovered its
capabilities. 'Infinite in faculty'--that is to say--Able to do all it shall
WILL to do. There is no end to this power,--no hindrance in either
earth or heaven to its resolute working--no stint to the life-supplies on
which it may draw unceasingly. And--'in apprehension how like a god!'
Here the word 'apprehension' is used in the sense of attaining
knowledge,--to learn, or to 'apprehend' wisdom. It means, of course,
that if the Soul's capability of 'apprehending' or learning the true
meaning and use of every fact and circumstance which environs its
existence, were properly perceived and applied, then the 'Image of God'
in which the Creator made humanity, would become the veritable
likeness of the Divine.
But, as this powerful and infinite faculty of apprehension is seldom if
ever rightly understood, and as Man generally concentrates his whole
effort upon ministering to his purely material needs, utterly ignoring
and wilfully refusing to realise those larger claims which are purely
spiritual, he presents the appearance of a maimed and imperfect
object,--a creature who, having strong limbs, declines to use the same,
or who, possessing incalculable wealth, crazily considers himself a
pauper. Jesus Christ, whom we may look upon as a human Incarnation
of Divine Thought, an outcome and expression of the 'Word' or Law of
God, came to teach us our true position in the scale of the great
Creative and Progressive Purpose,--but in the days of His coming men
would not listen,--nor will they listen even now. They say with their
mouths, but they do not believe with their hearts, that He rose from the
dead,--and they cannot understand that, as a matter of fact, He never

died. seeing that death for Him (as for all who have mastered the
inward constitution and commingling of the elements) was impossible.
His real LIFE was not injured or affected by the agony on the Cross, or
by His three days' entombment; the one was a torture to His physical
frame, which to the limited perception of those who watched Him 'die,'
as they thought, appeared like a dissolution of the whole Man,--the
other was the mere rest and silence necessary for what is called the
'miracle' of the Resurrection, but which was simply the natural rising of
the same Body, the atoms of which were re-invested and made
immortal by the imperishable Spirit which owned and held them in
being. The whole life and so-called 'death' of Christ was and is a great
symbolic lesson to mankind of the infinite power of THAT within us
which we call SOUL,--but which we may perhaps in these scientific
days term an eternal radio-activity,--capable of exhaustless energy and
of readjustment to varying conditions. Life is all Life. There is no such
thing as Death in its composition,-- and the intelligent comprehension
of its endless ways and methods of change and expression, is the Secret
of the Universe.
It appears to be generally accepted that we are not to know this
Secret,--that it is too vast and deep for our limited capacities,-- and that
even if we did know it,