CHAPTER XXI

PRAYER AND HEALING

Reserved for the end of the study are two aspects of Christian inculcation that have been perhaps the two chief elements of influence by which the maudlin religion of Christianism has maintained its grip on the Occidental mind for ages. Much of what has been presented here is of more immediate interest to theologians than to the common man. But these two items now to be considered do touch the general life very closely. So strong indeed is their influence that their critique here expounded will have close to epochal value if it be found based on truth and sound reason.

First to be scanned is the great religious ritual practice which in a variety of forms falls under the general designation of prayer.

It must be prefaced that by no means is prayer a distinctively Christian formulary. With likely truth it can be said that all religions have used and exalted prayer as an integral element in their systems. Indeed prayer is hardly even to be limited to religion as an interest disparate from secular life. It may be said to be a common or universal human resort or psychological expression. It comes out as a natural and spontaneous manifestation of man's sense of his relation of dependence upon the force or forces rated as beneficent that order the life of the cosmos. So long as man conceives his life to be the responsible concern of a Power greater than himself, a view that the general course of his experience constrains him to take, he is impelled by the strenuosity of conditions at times to cry aloud to this Power for aid, consolation, succor. It is but natural that man the creature should be moved by the impulse to seek communion with the Power conceived to be his Parent. It is understandable that God's earthly children should be moved to carry to this King of Life their deepest desires, cares and woes. The natural involvements of man's situation constrain him to turn in varied degrees of realistic earnestness to this source of blessedness.

It is therefore not of prayer as distinctly a Christian usage, but rather

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as a general mood of human motivation that the critique here is set forth. It is a broad effort to institute an examination of the whole rationale of prayer, in the interests of a deflation of much of the provable superstition that attaches to it, and of an appraisement of its place and value in the life of religion balanced by philosophical intelligence.

But the word itself needs succinct definition at the outset, lest the discussion keep missing the mark of precise reference. Like many words in the dictionary it has several shades of meaning. It certainly has a formal meaning and an informal one. Formal prayer would of course be the class of prayers uttered in the formality of religious services, or under some institute of formal procedure, or spoken in set forms of language. This form of prayer might be and usually is made in a public service, but could be, and often is, the utterance of an individual in privacy. It is spoken according to a formula, premeditated or extemporaneous.

Then there is another kind of prayer which will fall closely within the orbit of the connotation of the word chiefly to be considered here. It might be called the informal prayer, a free spontaneous outspeaking, either orally or silently, of the inner feelings of the individual; a voluble or silent call of the human mind and heart to the deific powers conceived to be disposed to hear and respond to such an entreaty. It may not even come to outspoken utterance at all; it may be only a welling up in consciousness of the unformulated aspirations of the Ego. It may indeed even so lack explicit formulation as not even to be well defined in the mind of the one thus praying. Prayer in this sense may reach out and embrace a very large segment of a person's entire activity in life, and it virtually does so in the case of people of whom it is heard said often that their whole life is a prayer.

In both senses, or definitions, prayer has been declared to be a communion of man in mortal life with the Supreme Power conceived to have generated his existence, and religiously believed to be keeping a beneficent oversight over human affairs, as well as being credited with the ability to interpose its will in the stream of mundane history. This definition of prayer applies very widely, and is part of the general religious theory of many of the so-called modern spiritual cult systems. Prayer is thus defined to be the communion of the spirit of man with the mind or spirit of Deity. It is of course instituted or initiated by man at his lowly station and addressed by him to the All-Father.

Many applications of its meaning in this higher form of definition

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run out into such diffuse vagueness as to render difficult of sensible discussion certain items of the critique. For example, in the case of many splendid humanitarian and very truly spiritual persons who do not engage in any ostensible exercise of prayer at all, it would by no means be true to say that they do not pray, if the more expanded definition of prayer is considered. In this wider spread of the word's connotation they may be the truest prayers of all. Their own spiritual minds may be silently in closer and more productive harmony of consciousness with the Cosmic Mind than would be the case with those who professedly devote themselves to formal praying.

It can be said at this point, then, that if the sense of the word "prayer" is confined to this broadest reference of the term, this critique can have no stricture of a negative sort to offer. In this its loftiest connotation prayer becomes a name for the expression of the highest aspiration of mankind, his most consecrated disposition to attune his mind, heart and soul to the will of the Supreme. As this disposition is the most worthy, the most holy of any of which man is capable, there is no occasion or foothold for derogation. Considered as the human being's most reverent and conscientious approach to the Power of beneficence in charge of the world, it stands haloed in the most sanctified of man's upward reachings. If people express their prayer in their lives, and if this is the ultimate summation of the meaning of the term, prayer must be considered a noble form of the expression of man's vital relation to a diviner world.

But there is a very justifiable critique of prayer when it is considered as a formal and express utterance, either spoken or silently meditated, of a person's address to the anthropomorphic God of conventional ideation in religious practice. This restriction of definition would still leave it covering all ecclesiastical or churchly prayers, or those in the home, or the "closet" of the individual. It embraces all prayers formally addressed to the God power, those in the Prayer Book, or the Daily Devotion Manual, or lifted up from the pulpit or at the bedside or family table. This form of prayer constitutes a part of every conventional religion's service, the other portions being a tribute of praise in song, a Scripture reading and a hortatory sermon. Of this form of prayer there is the ground for a very justifiable and very sharp critique.

Such prayers, it can be said with little chance of refutation, are prayers of appeal, of petition for blessings, of asking for the direct beneficent attention of Supreme Being to the special pleas and enumer-

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ated gifts or dispensations in behalf of those praying, or others mentioned by them. To be sure they generally postpone the begging portion until a few sentences have generously been devoted to expressing the pleaders' gratitude for life itself and its manifest blessings and opportunities. Then the humble petitioners invoke divine Goodness that they be granted pure hearts and blameless lives to merit the boundless benevolence of Providence. The listening Deity is then assured that we are willing to let him make us wiser, nobler, more seriously consecrated children, more worthy to receive his unending care and love. Then the door is wide open to send up the special pleading for lists of favors and blessings which he is told he has the power, if he but have the will, to dispense in our direction, "to usward," as some one has put it. If only the formal position be uttered with the requisite fervor and unction, it is felt that the ear of Divine Beneficence has effectually been reached and there is a good chance of a gracious dispensation in response to our humble devoutness.

When one reflects--as any honest mind must reflect--that this sort of thing has been the unchallenged habit of religions from remote times and the undeviating custom of practically all Christians through the long run of their history, and then add the consideration, as we do now, that a moment's sane envisagement of it reduces it all to the veriest essence of irrational folly, it becomes one of those items here aggregated to substantiate the charge that Christianity has subjugated the human mind under the power of an atrocious imbecility.

For in the form crudely expounded the practice must face the implications of ridiculous illogicality in the very nature of the phenomenon under observation. In the first place there is the basic asininity of our presuming that our voiced petition will reach the attention of the Deity to whom it is addressed, at any rate in any way or manner at all approximating our naive presumption that "He" is standing by with listening ear. The very form, occasion and spirit of our address carry the suggestion that this God is some Being in the absurd form and dimensions of the old anthropomorphic God of the past thought of uncritical devotees. One does not have to raise the--as it will seem--irreverent or scurrilous question of how this one God of crude conception can listen to, reflect upon and adjudge, not to add act upon, the millions of circumstances necessarily involved in making his response to the myriads of prayers addressed to him at one and the same time. The critique simply leaves the matter at the point of the utter naiveté of mind which counts with certainty that a Being competent to hear

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and answer the millions of petitions is actually giving minute attention.

The explanation of the pleaders is that God is spirit and that Infinite Spirit is everywhere present, and is able to hear and respond. Few indeed rise to this more abstruse exposition; but even this is vague, uncertain, problematical. It rests indeed finally only on the assertions of Scripture that God hears and answers prayer. What "He" is, how "He" is present, and how "He" can hear and answer are questions left all in the basket of faith. No one stops to take a realistic view of what the simple belief that God hears and answers prayers necessarily involves.

A second stricture is even more glaring in its testimony to childish crudity of thought. This is the item of the absurd persuasion that it is devoutly befitting for men to address formal requests for benisons which on any of the established presuppositions in the case, the divine Being addressed must be presumed to know all about infinitely better than the postulants themselves can know. If anything could be more puerile in its irrationality than the presumption of lowly mortals to speak up and instruct Omniscient Deity in precisely what ways he should be best advised to bless his children, it would be hard to find even in the field of irrational religion. Indeed many prayers include in their exordium the flat statement: "O Lord, thou knowest all our needs better than we can know them." What, then, in the name of all logical sense is the good of turning and directing the divine Mind toward the exact methods to be used in assuring us of the blessings we think we ought to have? All this is so highly ridiculous that it is past belief indeed to realize that the sanity of ages has not caught up with it and banished it to its proper limbo of oblivion.

Along with this goes the kindred reflection that "He" not only knows both what we would ask for, what we need and what we should have, better than we can possibly know these things ourselves, but that there has never been a moment in our lives when "He" has not been both ready and eagerly watching for every opportunity to advance to us every single blessedness which, in the just dispensation of love and beneficence it is possible or fatefully permissible for him to vouchsafe to us. The average prayer of Christians puts them in a position of ridiculousness quite analogous to that of a small child who would come every day to his school-teacher and devoutly plead that she be good and generous enough to exert herself to pour knowledge and understanding into him,--in spite of his stupidity and inattention.

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And this holds up in high light the exact ineptitude of the general prayer. From this angle of consideration it is all supremely inane. What must "God" be thinking of his children when they show themselves still so dull and "dumb" that they go on century after century failing to realize that he has organized the cosmic situation and the hierarchical order in such a way that in almost automatic fashion every creature of his Providence will duly receive that highest possible meed of blessing that he has qualified himself to appropriate, and that God himself can not pour in more than the vessel will hold? If fancy might be permitted a moment's fling in the anthropomorphic spirit, one is sanctioned in believing that God himself might grow weary, possibly justifiably exasperated (the Old Testament says that he waxed wroth!), in being called upon to listen to these incessant pleadings from his people, to whom he has without end in his inspired Scriptures given the rock assurance that not a sparrow falls without his notice, and that he has already provided for attention to their every impulse of need, by sending into their very own hearts and minds the power of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter. What can it be but the most perspicuous sanity to suggest that "God" would feel like saying to the army of pleaders: Run along now; don't keep continually bothering me--I have cosmic work to do. Look within and without, and you will feel my spirit watching to help you at every turn, at every instant. Until you do this there is little I can do for you; you must awaken the seed of your own power that you permit to slumber within you before my beneficent will can bring you the larger life you ask for. I have planted my spirit within you, so that you can not fail to find its ever-present help and blessing. If you will not find and use the power I have delegated to you, you can not benefit by any other bounty I can allocate to you. You must absorb the smaller rills of my living stream of power before you can be filled with the mightier tides.

But now comes the most deplorable item, one which goes beyond mere ridiculousness to positive harm of the costliest sort for humanity. This point registers a charge against Christianity of such gravity that it places that religion henceforth under the onus of admitting its erroneous position with due humility, or receiving the brunt of a heavy condemnation from all minds awakened to right perception. It is the charge here laid before the court of a more enlightened human opinion, that Christianity, through its chimerical misconception and misapplication of the force of prayer, has precipitated into the organic body of general thought a virus of intellectual error that has done more to

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paralyze the spontaneous initiative of the divine powers struggling to come from latency to active function in humanity than any other single influence generated in the religious life. This is a grave accusation and must be accompanied by supporting data.

The particulars of the charge are to be found in the basic fact that prayer of the kind sketched above, inflicts upon the human soul a veritable palsy. How, it will be flung back, can this severe accusation be substantiated? Simply, the answer is, by the very conditions of the activity involved. In this common form of prayer the soul of the suppliant is put in such a relationship to the divine Power that its own independent initiative is crippled, being afflicted with the consciousness of its own impotence and dependence. The prayer itself dramatizes and tremendously reinforces the sense of the helplessness of the divine fragment in man, and rivets upon consciousness the lamentable hypnotization of its own self-generative genius. In such prayer the outer intelligence of the petitioner puts itself in the position of a sycophantic servility, renounces, so to say, its own inherent prerogatives of self-initiated action and stands before the divine throne as a naked suppliant. It perpetrates upon the human consciousness the greatest of all psychological crimes, inasmuch as it slays the sole incentive to the growth of the seed-divinity in man, namely the outer man's sense of the need to awaken the slumbering god within his own bosom. It keeps the nub and focus of the job to be done up in heaven (or over in Judea), when the work is to be accomplished in the individual's home.

The prayer attitude totally ignores this call upon the innate powers of immanent deity in the person's own subjective life, blocks any reliance upon them and deflects any and all attention of the outer mind from the only power that is actually available, that lying unused within and provided by God for just such usage. Prayer thus is a reaching out of the personal energies to call in the aid of a power exterior to the individual consciousness and not regarded as operable by the human agency; and by this very fact it commits against the individually deific power the crime of disinheritance of its incarnational birthright.

The divine soul is in the human constitution precisely for the evolutionary purpose of undergoing an experience that will push it to the deployment of its energies under the stress and strain of the exigencies of its incarnation in these fleshly bodies in the world milieu. It is for a long time as though dead, suffering death, enduring the death of a

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sort inflicted upon it by the inertia of matter under whose power it descends, lying dormant in the tomb of death--the physical body. From this wintry torpidity it must be awakened. In the long run of incarnational experience events themselves will finally arouse it to awareness of the meaning and the teaching power of all that happens to it. But all is a haphazard, a chance hit or miss run of affairs, until at last the intelligence of the outer mind instructed by adequate philosophy becomes well oriented to the knowledge that for the methodical and successful, if not more rapid, progress of the soul's grasp on evolutionary rationale, the direction of the outer mind inward upon its own activities is a requisite and an advantage of unsurpassed benefit.

As long, then, as the outer mind leaps over the latent intelligence within the man himself and looks to and calls upon a supposed power exterior to his own resources, man is committing a costly malfeasance against his own soul. Thus is built up the gravest of the accusations against Christianity. It is almost indisputable, if rightly estimated, that the mental fixations superinduced upon the consciousness of the Christian millions over the centuries by the egregious hallucinations of the prayer vogue have produced one of the most shocking wastes of psychic energy in the long course of human life.

Prayer of the begging sort is bad enough as a fatuity itself, but it becomes positively heinous in its being pushed forward to take the place of something else which should be the truer expression of man's spirit under the stress of testing. For it obtrudes and becomes a substitute for an activity of the spirit on its own part that constitutes in all cases the only chance for victory. However futile it may appear in itself, it becomes infinitely hurtful through its holding off any real effort of the soul to come awake to its mightier prerogatives, which it thus lets die of atrophy for want of stimulation and challenge. This is the supreme charge against prayer for blessings: it lets the deity within man atrophy for lack of exercise.

It is the nature of that deity that, lying long asleep within the inner depths of consciousness, it can be awakened only by the knocking on the outer door from outside. It takes the shocks and jolts, the vicissitudes and exigencies of the outer man's experience in the actual world to arouse it from slumber. The god lying in "death" in the tomb of physical man can be roused for his resurrection only by the severity of the experience of the outer personality. When the eventualities of fortune threaten the outer self with actual hardship, loss or suffering,

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then the superficial mind of man is driven to seek the resources of its inner but mostly silent partner in the duality. Man's extremity is his god's opportunity. Put more philosophically, the outer man's need and suffering are the inner god's call to awakening and action. Here, incidentally, is the philosophical rationale of the need of suffering and indeed that likewise of the existence of so-called evil.

But as long as the outer mind is deluded by the belief that help is to be sought and obtained from a predicated source of power once localized in a man in history, or still wielded by an omnipotent God above the heavens, the pressure that could be exerted upon the slumbering deity within the man himself is never brought to bear. An influence that could bestir torpid or unborn divinity to conscious activity in the actual range of man's own initiative is diverted away from its proper locale of operation and spent in total futility out upon a historical fiction, or an empty region of the cosmos, while the power that is to be trained to function is held in longer slumber. Prayer directed to a power transcending man's own reach or exercise perpetrates the tragedy of holding the divinity in man fast bound in the arms of "death,"--the death of spirit on the cross of matter. Of all tragedies this is the most grievous, the most woeful.

Then there is the consideration which it seems incredible the Christian mind has not seen and obliterated from the situation. It has to do with the base sycophantic attitude so manifest in the prayer motive. It has most direct reference to the prayers that ask for lavish blessings--and how few do not! We speak of the debasing psychological effect of the eternal posture of begging, pleading, imploring. It is frightfully aggravated nearly always by the additional emphasis in God's ear of man's wretched status as miserable sinner and worm of the dust. To win God's greater pity the human feels he must begin with an exaggeration of his own foulness and unworthiness. The more wretched we can make ourselves to be in God's sight, the more may God be disposed to "have mercy upon us, miserable sinners."

Had not the wholesome natural strength of man's belief in himself been shattered or overpowered by the religious insinuations as to our inherent baseness (through Adam's first sin), prayer of the pleading sort could never have gained a mass vogue. For nothing but such a dire perversion of natural human feeling could have kept forever in abeyance the instinctive sense of the ignominy of begging. When has begging ever been held honorable in secular human life? On the contrary it has ever been despised as ignoble and the mark of human

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failure and baseness. Yet Christianity and other religions have given it a place of honor. Whether we agree with Nietzsche or not, it is readily possible to appreciate the solid ground of his anathemas against Christianity as "slave morality." It is the exaltation of human wretchedness as a claim on Deity. It colors with the pink hue of a virtue the very lack of virtue. It sanctifies weakness and failure.

So far has this bent of ideology gone in Christianity that it has perpetrated the kindred crime of categorizing in despicable light the very best of man's righteous exertions. An oft-repeated dictum from the pulpits is that man's highest human nobility is in the sight of God as filthy rags. And then a Christian world affects to be surprised when the righteousness of man's actions fails from sheer feebleness, and a world is engulfed in the maelstroms of rash unrighteousness. What can Christendom expect after eighteen centuries of teaching that man's earnest endeavors are worthless in God's sight? The evidence thus accumulates that false Christian prepossessions have been responsible for world debacle.

If God could be dramatized as disposed to tell his children to run along and not weary him with endless supplications, also he might be pictured as adding: Do stop groveling at my feet and pleading for mercy. I did not make you to crawl in shame in the dust. I made you to stand up and make a fight of it. I can't awaken your divinity until you do battle on your own account. Nothing but your effort will unchain the sleeping giant of my power within you. If you will arise from the dust and fight upon your feet, you will be surprised to find that the resources I have provided and buried in your own constitution come forth for your help at just the right time. Do you expect to have beneficence fed to you as you lie supine or grovel in the dirt? Up off your knees and to the fight! A blessing given to you without your winning it could not even be held. I have not generated you for a race of marionettes, but to be gods in your own right. Up and cease this miserable groaning! You, my sons, are soon to be gods; and gods do not grovel in the dust.

On its record for eighteen centuries Christianity must go down in history as the religion that deprecated human goodness and raised to universal honor and dignity the base human instinct of beggary. If it can be charged that any religion on earth has ground the spirit of mankind down in the dust of the consciousness of its meanness, the religion that must bear the onus of that accusation is Christianity. The chief psychological measure used in Christian propaganda of the

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evangelistic sort has been to throw the hapless prospective proselyte helpless in its arms by first paralyzing his human resistance with the obsession of the sin consciousness. Nearly all Christian evangelism--renewed and accentuated in the very Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City as this is written--has aimed to drag down the healthy spirit of humans by the stupefying narcotic of the exaggerated self-accusation of sin. Christianity finds it hard to win new converts without reducing them emotionally to such wretchedness of self-depreciation that they surrender the last remnants of reason and human worth and throw themselves in abject abasement on the promised mercy of God. With all our searching we can find nothing in Paganism to match this sin against the Holy Spirit, man's basic rational intelligence. Language will exhaust itself in vain to characterize properly the enormity of this perversion of right human ideation, but it may not be untrue to say that infinitely worse than any reputed slaying of the Son of Man upon a wooden cross in the long past is the unending crucifixion of the divine Christ in the present lives of Christian believers.

The word "surrender" crept naturally into one of the sentences just written. This, too, comes in for its share of the strictures on prayer. It is a natural accompaniment of the prayer motive and technique. One can hardly descend to the prayer motive without having surrendered his own sense of initiative and divine prerogative. If one asks a higher Power to pick one up out of the mire, one must have let go of all grip on oneself. The incessant evangelical cry has been the need of the sinner to "surrender" to God. In this word has been embalmed another measure of the abject beating down of the human spirit. Self-abasement was not enough; the last step is surrender. With this the ruination of the human integrity is complete. Man has quit. He has thrown up the fight. He has cast himself on the mercy of God; and one may well wonder what God can do with a creature who will not fight for the values he has been promised, but which are his for the winning. The Old Testament represents Deity as losing all patience with his Israel children who will not fight the good fight, and railing out upon them with the hot fury of his anger. For even man's groping logic assures him that beneficence can not be held or enjoyed by the creature without the initial exertion to develop the qualities by which alone its enjoyment can become a reality.

Surrender! A man in his natural sanity would logically presume that surrender is the last thing God would wish his creatures to do with

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any power or faculty generated in the course of evolution to carry man onward to his goal. Only on the very limited and of course permissible sense of letting go or renouncing evil tendencies on the purely brutish side of the duality is the word legitimately to be introduced into the spirito-ethical purview. A man does well, obviously, to "surrender" his selfishness, his remnants of animal ferocity, his narrow besotted addictions that have accrued and clung to him from the animal stage of his evolution. A drunkard does well to "surrender" himself to a more manly aspiration for self-control. A miser does well to surrender his gloating over mere gold, and let the sweet tides of human charity and fellowship inundate his soul.

But "surrender" in its Christian evangelical sense is not saved by any reasonable limitation to this acceptable usage. One is implored to let go one's human grasp on the whole supervision of the life process, and relax every effort that the mind would normally conceive to be conducive to the well-being of the individual. Surrender here means ceasing to make a further fight of it with the instrumentalities ordinarily believed to be the proper ones for the ends of all living. And again enters the damning factor of a paralysis of self-endeavor on the part of the individual. As in the case of "sin," it is all an emphasis on the negative side, whereas all accentuation should be laid on the grasping of the positive elements as the instruments of uplift and salvation. It is enough to insist that evil should be given up. God has insisted that the creature must turn from his evil way to gain eternal life. All rewards are promised to "him that overcometh." But when this due understanding is emotionally overmagnified into the egregious persuasion that man must cease fighting with the powers of reason and judgment and will which he finds he must use to solve the problems of his earthly life, it is going to ridiculous and disastrous lengths of false assumption. Instead of the misunderstood urge to surrender, it would be far saner and more wholesome to urge the unawakened person to take a better grip on himself. For God is not going to save any of his earthly creatures from the necessary and salutary exertion of saving himself. The very economy of the cosmos is based upon every creature's ultimate control over the forces and powers which evolution sets before him the task of bringing under intelligent direction. The divine self in man is to become the conscious king over the "seven elementary powers" of the purely human creature. These lower and more physical energies are to be administered by humans risen to mastership of every agency in the repertoire of powers. "Know

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ye not," Paul reminds us, "that we are to manage angels, let alone mundane things?" The cosmic intelligence can not use weaklings, incompetents, grovelers in the dust, pleaders for mercy, beggars for favors. Therefore it puts its recruits for service in its higher work through a fairly rigorous school and program of training, calling for the exercise and development of the powerful forces to be wielded by the future lords of angelic hierarchies in the mighty work of creation. For all God's creatures are to become conscious coworkers with him in his vast and endless labor. Christianity has been for centuries quite out of harmony with the spirit and temper of this enterprise. Instead of inspiring its multitudinous devotees to face up to the effort with courage and resolution, it has afflicted them with the miasmatic obsession of unworthiness, of helplessness and surrender. From the start its votaries thought it more glorious to be thrown to the lions or burned at the stake than to fight a living battle. For they not only succumbed to it as dire injustice and brutal tyranny, but wildly sought and provoked it when it might have been obviated.

The final word in the critique of prayer comes to utterance in the statement that it has deadened man's own initiative. It has been used as a craven excuse and self-deluding justification for cowardly shirking of the obligation to act. It is the retreat and refuge of souls who lack the proper knowledge and the divine heroism needed to solve difficult problems and dangerous situations by forthright action. It is the attitude and the spirit of children running to their parents or elders for help when trouble threatens. It is so much easier and safer to sit at home and pray that God will interpose to adjust international antagonisms and impasses than to take hold and with the exertion of the divinest resources within our own control reach just decisions. Nothing can be more pitiable than to see the head of a great or a lesser religious community call upon his adherents over the earth to unite to pray for the righteous settlement of grievous wrongs or difficulties, when the divine power of initiating righteous action has been placed within human control and lies there inert and undeveloped until called upon for just such exertion. The loving parent will safeguard his child as long as it has no abilities developed to make his own way. But as these abilities unfold in their due order, the wise parent puts the child on its own resources and devices. To continue doing its work for it would be to stunt its growth. Such is the Father's relation to his children on earth. If man does not solve his own problems, he will remain the child. Prayer is the evidence that he is afraid to let go

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the Father's hand and apply his own resources and bring out his own powers. Prayer is the resource of a soul still lingering in childlike dependency, the fledgling still afraid to trust its own wings. When resorted to by those who could and should act, it is the recourse of cowardice. Beyond calculation is the volume of human suffering and tragedy of every sort that has had to be endured by the substitution of inaction and prayer for resolute exertion on the physical plane. The mistaken notion that prayer can be substituted for courageous action has afflicted humanity with untold calamity.

Christian apologists have stoutly insisted that Christianity was undermined and bled of its more virile temper by the stealthy and insidious infiltration into its primitive motivations of the enervating currents of negative and passive ideology assimilated from India. There could be some substance to this complaint. The Hindu religions inordinately stressed denial of the value of this physical life, proclaiming all blessedness as springing from the total renunciation of the interests that hold life in the body. Hindu philosophy had no sympathy with a doctrine that localized true wealth in the earthly experience. Surcease of human woe in unconsciousness and the lulling call of the dreamy bliss of Nirvana stupefied Hindu zest for the physical life, in which the magnificent Greek philosophy had localized its supreme values--until the fatal "failure of nerve." India may be largely responsible for all this. Greece herself possibly succumbed to the lethal seduction, and turned her effort from earth to heaven. It is the sign of the beginning of the decay of a religion unenlightened by philosophy. It must be true that God wants us to graduate from the kindergarten stage of dependence and prayer and evolve our own resources through the exertion of the germinal divine power he has endowed us with. "When I was a child I spake as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things." There are really few people who believe that "God" hears and answers prayers. But there would be few who on reflection would not think that he must take due note of heroic action. In the end, therefore, there is only one effective form of prayer, and that is action. The Zohar of the ancient Hebrews says again and again that the powers above bestir themselves to action only in response to a stirring on the side of the powers below. God can not be sure of your full sincerity until you act. It is God speaking through Emerson's pen when he says: Your actions (or failure to act) shout so loudly that I can not hear what you say--in prayer.

In the same general category of weaknesses exhibited and inculcated

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by Christian forms of ideology must be mentioned the singular doctrine of the forgiveness of sins and the vicarious atonement. They are twin progeny of the same doctrinal leaning. All arose out of the misconception of the basic elements in the doctrines that effect the final harmonization of the two long conflicting natures in man's dual constitution. Man, says Plato, is the union of a god's mind with the physical elementary powers of an animal body. "Through body it is an animal; through intellect it is a god." A long conflict ensues from the beginning of their copartnership in the physical existence, growing out of the animal man's inability to transform his selfish instincts quickly to the altruistic or cooperative function of the god-soul germinating within. But as the outer man gradually unfolds his own powers of intelligence and finally grasps the rationale of the plan for perfect unification of its forces with the divine order of a higher creation, the two warring elements are reconciled and make a mutual rapprochement of their efforts. This is theologically called the reconciliation, the atonement. As it was the initiative and control exercised by the higher soul that engineered the successful outcome of this eventual "marriage," it was the soul that was given credit for the work. So from the standpoint of the human level it was vicarious for the physical man.

Properly held in this rationale, the doctrine of vicarious atonement can be, and is an item of true understanding. But twisted out of sensible relation and misapplied to false personal "history" and in the wrong world, it has wreaked havoc with sane intelligence. It worked over finally, in the lowest levels of mentality, into the idea that a man was sent to earth to save mortals the effort to save themselves. This divine emissary obligingly took upon himself the onus and labor of relieving man of the natural consequences of his blind blundering. Man's sins were washed away in the red blood that flowed forth--two pints or thereabouts of it--from the wounded side on Calvary!

But what was washed away by the doctrine thus outrageously misinterpreted was the rational sanity of millions of hapless victims of bad thinking. The words of the doctrine can remain as beautiful poetry, but become ruinous if taken for personal biography. The atonement, the reconciliation between God and man in the latter's constitution, the marriage of the spirit from above and animal soul from below, is effectuated through the suffering, the sacrificial oblation of the descending unit of divine mind. And the transformation of animal soul into spiritual immortality could not be achieved without

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the immolation of the god-soul on the altar of matter, or its "death" in the tomb of body.

A mortal is enlightened by knowing these teachings of the arcane science relative to his life effort. But to mistake the scene in so unconscionable a way as to think the doctrine means the salvation of the mortal wholly without reference to his own accomplishment of the felicitous outcome by exertions initiated and persisted in under the severest trial is to slay again the spirit of self-responsibility that alone can avail to win the crown. If the perversion of meaning works to the mental conclusion in the general mind, as precisely it has done, that a sheer affirmation of "belief" in the man Jesus will bring the magical result without further struggle by the individual, it sinks the mind into delusion and stultification of its faculties. And this has been the outcome of Christianism's misteaching.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If prayer and its corollary psychological influence have steeped the Christian mind in delusion, even more atrociously has the same thing been done by the Christian prepossession in the matter of "healing." Again a theme that would require a whole treatise in itself must be compacted within a half-chapter.

It is a common idea that Pagans rested their faith in the beneficence of life on what the Greeks called physis or nature, while Christianity presented the knowledge and operable science of the higher principle of divine soul or God's spirit, brought to earth for the first and only time by the incarnation or epiphany of Jesus of Nazareth. The notion is utterly false, but it well serves the purpose of introducing the brief dissertation here presented on the matter of Christian healing.

The vogue of Christian healing was launched through the mistaken belief that the Gospels were a biography of a living individual. In the Gospels the man Jesus (assuming he lived) performed a run of "miracles," mostly in the field of physical healings. And when "he" said that we shall do even greater things than those recorded of him, the whole Christian mind was set off on the wild pursuit of miracle-working. Only in the modern day has there been the carrying of this implication of religious theories about bodily healing into its wildest exploitation in the fantastic assumptions of Christian Science; but something little short of this extreme delusion has been fermenting in Christian practice over the centuries. Indeed so prominent a place has healing made for itself in Christian motivation that no individual propagation of a new evangelistic movement or message could hope

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to win a hearing unless it was able to add to its preachment the psychological stimulus of reputed cures of all maladies. If his message led to healings, it was thus divinely certified. If his preaching was attended by miraculous manifestations, it was of God. No dissertation is needed to remind us how pitiably eager and excitable the common people are over the report that a healer is repeating what Jesus did. It is one of the most pathetic of human manifestations, repeated time and again in all religious history. The study of the tides of fervor and frenzy that have swept over the populace in Christian history is one of the most eerily fascinating, if dispiriting, of pursuits.

And again it has to be declared that Christian practice and belief have plunged millions into wild hallucination, contorting a thing otherwise beautiful and ennobling into an instrument of outlandish folly. The tragedy was fastened hard on the Christian mentality by the reputed historicity of the Gospel "miracles." As long as these "incidents" were held, as Origen held them, to be dramatic representations of the power of the immanent Christ spirit to heal all men's imperfections and maladies, and so taken as only types of inner purifications, they served the splendid end of inciting men to let the divine ferment work its benign influence upon their minds and eventually upon their bodies. This understanding directly promoted the culture of the higher Self in all right-minded and thoughtful and earnest persons. It engendered the efficacy of spiritual religion at its best. It awakened the slumbering infant god within and challenged or provoked the exercise of his powers.

But the moment the intelligent view was misplaced and the gross physical meaning was substituted, the door was open to the entry of a host of preposterous assumptions, all eventually ruinous to balance and wholesome influence. And with this development Christianity thrust its people into one more of the long list of its imbecile infatuations and went madly careening after another of its illusive mirages.

The investigation of religious healings is a most fascinating one, too vast for any competent treatment here. But a cursory scanning of its main features may yield much profit along with our general survey. Nearly every one of hundreds of cult movements has come into being through remarkable manifestations in the category of spiritual cures of illness and functional disease. "Miracle" can lay claim to a vast body of ostensible evidence of the most extraordinary character and generally valid authenticity. "Cases" of miraculous cure and recovery in a wide variety of maladies run into great number. There is no

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intention here to deny a record of vast proportions and of challenging nature. On a shallow view of this record the case for the actuality of healing and for the substantiation of the claims advanced might be thought to be impregnably established. But what is here posited is the assertion that a deeper and more scientifically oriented insight quite thoroughly invalidates all the common presuppositions in the case. A more competent knowledge of the divine-human psyche in man yields an explanation of the phenomena that decidedly negates the common beliefs and the theoretical assumptions on which they are based.

Popular views are hardly ever based on more accurate technological knowledge on any matter, but persist in spite of such default. They are generated by the most naive conceptions and only slowly give way to correction as bits of technical detail filter out from fonts of true scientific discovery. The subject of healing is just now in process of being liberalized by new findings in the scientific aspects of the study. Common belief is being forced to a change of view. As the new light increases it will effect an emendation of unsupportable beliefs in this field. And a prodigious chapter of wretched human gullibility, deception and fanaticism in religion will happily be brought to its finis.

As is ever the case when crude belief or naive supposition is replaced by more accurate knowledge, the boundless area of "miracle" and the "supernatural" is reduced by so much, and what was believed to lie over in that territory is brought down into the familiar ground of the natural and the explicable. Much of the "romance" of religious excitability is thus lost, and religion does not take too kindly to this dismantling of its airy castles and roseate paradises of faith.

But fact, however disillusioning, is both more salutary and more intrinsically romantic in the end. The romance of truth is always more thrilling than the romance of dream or illusion. For it is dream actualized. No magic of the supernatural can overmatch the magic of the natural or the actual. Religion has all too largely tended to become the lure of the supernatural, the miraculous and the magical, when the real power and expansion of life is only to arise from the love and cultivation of the natural. Man must extract his blessedness from the constant, the regular, the normal. For here is where the laws that work for his beneficence operate. Man's happy ongoing comes through his obedience to law. Miracle excites because it ostensibly violates or transcends law. The human mind has stood wrapt in wonder before "miracle," which can bring it little general good, while ever standing callous and lethargic in the presence of that everyday miracle of life

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and nature through the agency of which alone is true benison to be won.

But whether it is emotionally acceptable to Christian pietists or not, the findings of a more empirical psychological science offer an explanation of the whole run of "miraculous" phenomena that at one stroke strips the entire range of such manifestations of all its former aura of magic and miracle and reduces it wholly to the level of a natural function. Cures may still appear wonderful, but not more wonderful than that mysterious, though now common phenomenon constantly handled with growing scientific skill, which offers the key to knowledge of what law is in operation,--the phenomenon of hypnotism.

"Miracles" matching in variety and marvel those recited in the history of healing cultism can be, and are being duplicated every day now in the clinical laboratories of psychiatrists. Without the fanfare and sensational emotionalism of the evangelical procedure, cures and transformations of mind and character are daily being wrought by the practitioners of the cultus of the "unconscious." At last the lid of the conscious mind is being lifted long enough to enable observation to be made of the effective operation of the great Overmind, as well as the Undermind, both of which function at levels out of range of the normal waking consciousness. In these strata of worlds of consciousness are found the forces that work the supposed "miracles" of faith. And "faith," after all the ages of blind belief that it could command the offices of God's benevolence and power, is now found to be nothing but a predisposing agency of self-hypnosis. Ever since T. J. Hudson's The Law of Mental Medicine and The Law of Psychic Phenomena and Freud's discovery of the "unconscious," the miraculous aspects of the age-old religious healing phenomena have been doomed to dissipation in the light of common knowledge and a perfectly understood rationale. The day of miracle in this field of superstition and human credulity is happily at an end. There is at hand a law that explains it, and in the domain of the natural. It is the law of suggestion; the law of hypnotism. One hypnotizes oneself by the intensity of a single suggestion or by constant repetition of a suggestion; and once hypnotized, the individual is capable of many a demonstration of wonder-working that we formerly were wont to assign to the agency of the gods. And once more Christian belief in a divine power outside the individual is dispelled as a rank error, a construction of ignorance, and the mind is forced to acknowledge the active factor of causation as a power resident and operative within the human constitution, not in

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remote Judea or in cosmic heavens. And it is remarkable how this consideration dramatizes the entire fallacy of Christian belief: it has placed practically all the potent values of theology outside the human house, and has had man looking everywhere but within himself for the location of those powers which effectuate his salvation. At last empirical science, whose findings can not be gainsaid or withstood, breaks down the last rampart of theological superstition in Christianism and demonstrates in the laboratory that the Christ who heals the soul and body of man is a power submerged deep in the constitution of man himself, and is not one that could in the remotest way be dependent upon the historical coming of a Son of God in the flesh of one man at any time.

Hypnotism need not be induced by overt manipulation or by an operative; one can hypnotize oneself. And the agency can be a suggestion, a philosophy, a persuasion, a conviction, a belief, an infatuation, a book, a sermon, a piece of music, a personality, an addiction of any kind. Hold a conviction long enough and it ends by holding you. A habit is something which you say a person has (from habeo, Latin, I have). In reality it is something that has the person. Faith, great lauded virtue of the Christian system, is now found to be but the surrender of the conscious critical mind to the hypnotizing tendency of an idea or belief of some kind. But woe to the one surrendering his critical mind to any idea but one that is in full accord with truth and reality! Surrender you mind to a belief that is chimerical, and you have surrendered yourself to a demoniacal obsession. Psychoanalysis is the science of unseating those demoniacs from their control of a mind.

The burden of this book is that the supreme charge against Christianity is that it has caused the obsession of untold millions of minds with a series of fatuous beliefs which have motivated centuries of human actions perpetrating a body of follies, fanaticisms, cruelties and inhumanities unmatched in all history. And the instructive difference between Christianity and, let us say, Greek philosophy, is now seen in startling clarity, as the difference between surrender of the mind in Christianity to a series of wild and chimerical fancies in no wise based on any correspondence with truth and reality; while Greek philosophy was a system of intellectual propositions based on a complete harmonization with the known realities, the forces and elements of man's constitution and the laws of the cosmos.

From the day on which it was demonstrated that a manipulator of hypnotism could run a darning needle through the forearm of a mes-

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merized subject without his feeling any pain, and that hypnotism could be employed in surgical operations instead of anaesthetics, it should have been clear that the secret law that produced religious "cures" was in our possession. It only remained to demonstrate the identity between the various processes of suggestion subjectively administered and the actual physical manipulation of the mesmerist to prove up the solution of the mystery. Religious hysteria is now at last unmasked. Its outer aura of emotional excitability, assumption of the presence and activity of divine power and interposition of the hand of God himself are all now rudely dispelled, and the human at last, after centuries of the grossest belief in the play of Providence or of demons or spirits, can face the known realities of his own consciousness. He can be shown that the most startling manifestations in the realm of his own conscious life can be explained as just the consequences of his own ill-understood and ill-controlled mental activities. No longer need mortals be tossed emotionally about by the weirdest fancies of superstition or belief in agencies working in the great realm of the unknown, to alarm, frighten or delude the ignorant mind of the human. We stand at last liberated from twenty centuries of religious nightmare that is not to be charged solely to Christian nescience, being common to the strata of ignorance in all humanity, but at any rate a nightmare that ran to horrifying extremes under Christian sway.

It is nearly incredible, too, that there has never been in Christian thinking the clear insight to discern a glaring flaw in the philosophy which countenanced and perpetuated the vogue of healing, the true bases of which now reveal the non-divine and non-sanctified character of the phenomena. So romantically were the manifestations cast in the realm of the miraculous that there was inevitably granted to all such proceedings the rank and character of divinely accredited occurrences. No one ever stopped to question the moral legitimacy of the seemingly providential cures. If a diseased person could reach a healer and be healed, there was no question but that it was the will of God that he be healed. No one stopped to think what that presupposition did to the moral law. On the one side stood the more rational Christian recognition of the universal reign of law in the spiritual as well as in the natural world. If there was no other witness to this, there is at least Drummond's book, The Natural Law in the Spiritual World. Kant was certainly not unchristian or anti-Christian; and his two eternal sources of wonder were, as he said, the starry heavens above him and the moral law within. Christianity's incessant boast of its superi-

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ority over the heathen philosophies was that it recognized and related human conduct to the play of the moral law; whereas the Pagan world could not envisage such an abstraction of the subjective processes. Therefore it can be affirmed that Christianity regarded the moral law as God's mode of righteous rulership of the world.

So here is the postulation of the moral law as the norm of righteousness and justice on the one side of Christian philosophy, and a belief of miracles of healing on the other, with the possibility of a clash between the two imminent at any time. The implications inseparable from the belief in miracle fly straight in the face of the postulations inherent in the moral law.

For how do physical illness, disease, infirmity come? By a whimsical, random, wanton dispensation of a Providence that can perpetrate no injustice? No Christian would so ascribe ill fortune. Christianity, a bit uncertainly indeed, still clings to the concept of causation under divine law. Therefore people's diseases and cripplings, such as rheumatism, gout and the functional disorders of the body and toxic pollution of the blood, must be attributed to unintelligent and unwise and unnatural habits of living. Perhaps if simple truth was recognized, some ninety percent of all such maladies are engendered by the single item of wrong addictions in the eating habits. People habitually eat too much, or too frequently, or wrong combinations, or use devitalized foods. At any rate this is a prominent aspect of the situation and will serve to illuminate the argument. It is real and demonstrable enough to give valid force to the assertion that the afflictions for the cure of which people flock en masse to a healer have been brought upon them by their own violation of the moral law, in this case the law of moderation and correctness in diet.

Well, then, a mind that looks to see the righteous play of the moral law will have to ask the question (that will of course shock minds hypnotized with piety): what right does a habitual violator of the moral law have to be healed by the touch of a person wielding some form of magnetic power currents in his dynamic person, when there is not on the part of the suppliant the intimation of a single item of change from the course that superinduced the evil condition? What becomes of our reverence for the moral law if we can see it flouted and the evil consequences of its violation swept away from the breaker of the law without his mending his way in the slightest degree? The Jesus figure himself in one case made the relief or cure of illness dependent on repentance and "sinning no more." This at least main-

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tains regard for the ineluctable rule of the moral forces. But in the furore that has always accompanied the demonstrations of faith healings no one has paused to reflect on the question how and why the obvious violators of the laws of life, established for beneficent evolutionary purposes and safeguarded in that beneficence by having inevitable suffering attendant upon their violation, were entitled to escape, by the intervention of some healer's offices, from the natural consequences of their breaking the law, with no prerequisites of repentance or correction of bad habits, or even the intention or the promise to cease the practices causing the disorder. Life does not distribute its largesse in indiscriminate disregard of the moral law. And what moral right does a healer have to go about dispensing manipulations that amount in effect to the enablement of people to escape, apparently and temporarily at any rate, the natural salutary effects of their violation of the laws of eternal justice? Or what right have the people to flock to grasp the aid of such a manipulator, to escape the very thing that alone will warn them off continued violation?

The sane philosophy of pain and suffering is that they are ordained under the law of beneficence to warn us away from the courses of violation in which we stupidly and obdurately persist. The uses of pain and evil hap are divinely ordered for their pedagogical utility. Pain teaches man when nothing else will. If he can violate law and escape the pains, he will plunge on to his ruin. Pain is the divine brake on the wild car of man's wilful waywardness. If anything steps in to deprive him of the full play of this teaching element, he will be bereft of the one factor that can save him from worse tragedy. And obviously the healings, as commonly manifested, do thus interpose to obviate the natural consequences of violation of the great law of good.

The likely possibility in the case is that such seemingly efficacious cures are only hypnotizations at any rate and will not last. Indeed the record largely reveals that they "wear off" in a short time, precisely as a hypnotizing force does. The conclusion is that they have been vastly overrated in significance all down the centuries. But that Christian ideation can have been so blind for two millennia to both the psychological nature and the moral connotations of this matter of faith healing is a sad attestation again of the puerile numbness to which erroneous beliefs can reduce the human mind.

So we have the doctrines of salvation, of prayer, of the forgiveness of sins, of the vicarious atonement, and finally of the traditional belief in

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healing, all raised in Christian polity to a place of great power in the life of devotees, and all contributing with never-failing force to hypnotize the believer with the persuasion that he can sin and escape the consequences. It is as clear as anything can well be that Christianity is thus responsible for the general spirit of lawlessness so evident throughout all Christian history, and so extremely menacing to all cultural control at this present. Whatever may be alleged to the contrary and whatever may be the failings and aberrations of sane wisdom in other lines among non-Christian faiths, in none of them has there been so manifest a disregard of the inviolability of the moral law as has been demonstrated in all ages under Christianity. The Greeks had their Fate, or Fortune, or Nemesis; the Egyptians their Thoth making an indelible record in the book of life and weighing the good and evil deeds of the soul in the scales of the balance; the Hindus had their Karma; the Mohammedans their Kismet. Christianity nullified its asseverated law of cause and effect, or reaping in the exact measure of the sowing, by the exaggerated and misapplied doctrine of forgiveness and by asserting that the rigor of the moral law of the old dispensation--an eye for an eye--would be softened by the love and mercy of the Christ interceding for erring men at the throne of God.

We hear much of religion and philosophy, art, music, poetry being hugged to the bosoms of multitudes of people as mechanisms of escape from the rough commonplace of actuality into realms of romantic idealism. It is submitted here, on the evidence adduced, that of all religions serving as sheer modes or channels of such escape motivation, Christianity must be reckoned as, though in a different way and on a different side, about equal to the lethalizing religions of India. And the infinite tragedy of Christianity is that it has been an escape not from dispiriting realism into romantic idealism, but an escape from reality into infatuation and delusion. For the pall of false historical and literal acceptance under which the orthodox Christian mind lives has hallucinated that mind with eerie forms of unreality, so that the Christian lives in a world in which reality is minimized to irrelevance and imagination is stimulated to seek real values in a set of utterly unreal theological postulates. This is not an escape; it is a fall into dementia.

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CHAPTER XXII

THE NIGHT IS LONG

In dropping the curtain on this intellectual scenario it seems desirable to undertake a presage of the immediate future, pivoting on the point of the present from our fairly close view of the past to prospect on the outcome of the forces still at work in the field of religious culture. It was stated at the outset that it was impossible for any one to grasp the rationale of the present world situation without a knowledge of what eventuated in the cataclysmic third century. For the forces of mental blindness and crafty duplicity which then overmastered the minority powers of philosophical balance and sane intelligence, are the same forces that have perpetuated themselves in weighty influence down to their straining activity at the present moment. And now, forced to relax their hold upon the more northern lands of Europe by the powerful rebellion of the Protestant movement in the sixteenth century, they are stretching every nerve of their slowly increasing might to regain the political dominance they haughtily exercised over the political fortunes of Europe through the middle centuries of the Christian era. For a recovery of that mastership is tantamount to rulership of the entire globe. Now as then the aims, attitudes, methods and prime characteristics of the monster force of popular nescience and low-pitched intellectualism are recognizable as the same unchanged and unchanging earmarks of that fatal third century debacle of sanity and triumph of a baneful mass inferiority.

But now the forces that were then largely the spontaneous and unorganized, the loose but massive expression of low-grade intelligence, asserting themselves in ponderous resentment against the dominance of an esoteric philosophical hegemony itself reduced at the period to a somewhat less noble standard than before, are no longer loose and unorganized, but massively unified and directed by perhaps the most astute psychological craftiness in the history of mankind. After ages of a career of repeated loss of power and prestige from lack of an all-

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controlling central authority, this giant engine of mass mediocrity of intellect and the blind persuasions of faith that are its congenial byproducts, has through the driving force of its own aspirations for survival and for power, learned to discipline itself to the extreme degree of resigning all individual independence into the hands of a centralized organ of rulership. It is aimed to achieve success through the avoidance of the crippling influences of purely democratic division and fragmentation of power. So that, as Guignebert so handily phrases it, a movement that sprang into being out of the impulse of free individuals to escape what was considered a tyranny of generalized traditional systems of the Pagan world and to take a stand for an unfettered faith in the native motions of the human spirit itself, came in the end to be enchained by the organic systematism of a psychological tyranny unmatched in the annals of religion.

What has occurred, of course, is better understood in the light of common appreciations, when it is simply recognized that a smart and alert thinking group within the movement, taught by observation and analysis of past failures and weaknesses in its career, saw at last the dire consequences of unfettered freedom of religious impulses and mystical extravagances, and resolved to obviate these annoying dispersals of strength springing from democratic liberalism by clamping upon the entire movement the bans and bands of a supreme authority that no individual or group would dare, as in the middle centuries, to disregard. For the most part the loyalties inspired by blind faith were strong enough to hold the entire corporate unit together in spite of the abrogation of personal liberties of thought, so that the desired solidarity was acquired without too serious expression of rebellious dissent. And once this imperious domination and command of instant obedience and subservience was attained, there was developed and perfected the most ingenious polity of mental sway over the stolid masses of adherents ever to be manipulated by any oligarchy of leaders in known history.

The terms of this astute polity were dictated by the findings from a study of human psychology unparalleled in its shrewdness and deftness. The constitution of the regime was framed of the principles observed in operation over the years. Within the frame and spirit of a movement ostensibly religious there was built up a machinery of governance even more rigidly mechanical in its running than the corporate enginery of any secular government. And with all power wielded by the unchallengeable head of the hierarchy, there thus exists

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in the modern world this monstrous embodiment of unbounded political ambition wielding as its sword of power the enslaved but docile adherence and psychological loyalties of the massed populace of the middle and lower classes.

These elements of the population, numerous as always, it strategically aims to increase rapidly by the sanctified preachment of the godliness of large families and obstruction of the modern propaganda of birth control. Precisely as in the days of its first fanatic upspringing it appeals to and fastens its grip upon the lower classes. These it aims to hold by conditioning their minds, particularly in childhood, through the inculcations of teaching and the motivations of fear, as well as through the rituals and pageantries so impressive to the young. Critical questioning and challenge are met and generally silenced by the resources of "explanation" unbelievable in its speciousness and subtlety. Much of the unpalatable history of the movement is touched up for better appearance, deftly recolored, artfully ignored or openly denied. Among major items of this policy program is, of course, the vast overestimate of the number of Christian martyrs under the Roman persecutions, and the unconscionable softening down and mild palliation of the unspeakable inhumanities and tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, the slaughter of the Albigenses and all that record of unthinkable horror. Indeed the history that touches the movement itself has been almost entirely rewritten to conduce at every point to the enhancement of the reputation of this organic entity and to redound in subtle ways to the discredit of its opponents. Its inner board of strategic polity keeps vigilant watch upon every turn of event in the world, indeed upon every vein of cultural development in science, philosophy and education, and concocts measures both aggressive and defensive calculated to turn every such significant incident to its advantage.

As ignorance was its mother and the source-spring of its world power, it is bound to cherish ignorance as its patron saint and monitor forever, for the breath of knowledge would wither it away. Therefore it keeps its clientele ignorant, conditioning what it is pleased to call its educational system with just those elements which tend to make the reception and retention of its principles enduring. As it forcefully blocked the European mind from the privilege of thinking freely for over fifteen centuries, it fights every new discovery of secular knowledge, since new light and truth promises generally to prove inimical to its traditional fixations. The damaging impact of new knowledge must be held to a minimum.

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As it arose out of the spirit of envy, resentment and hatred of esoteric philosophy as purveyed by the Mystery Schools of the ancient world, it runs true to character by standing in inveterate hostility to the groups which, surreptitiously during the Middle Ages and now again openly in the modern period, have aimed to restore the dissemination and culture of the ancient metaphysical sciences in the domain of free religious and philosophical culture. Hence it is the sworn enemy of Masonry, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Anthroposophy, Protestantism and Humanism. It must oppose its power to these cultures because they essay to include the offices of intellectual or rational philosophy in their several systematic approaches to the progress of spiritual science. To the extent to which they succeed in intellectualizing religion with philosophy, they reduce in their lives the predominance of the religious influence and increase that of the rational principle. As this procedure proportionately disarms the power of sheer faith and fortifies the spirit of critical rationality, the consequences would always be menacing and fatal to the control which is so much more smoothly maintained over minds swayed by faith alone.

And this is basically true in spite of the effort of no mean subtlety put forth by the Christian theology to utilize the deepest sophistries of the rational faculty to accredit the reign of faith. This reduced the situation to a paradoxical and quizzical status of using rational processes to fasten ever more firmly the clamps that hold immovable a posture of mind based on faith, the antithesis of reason. Even this paradox is given the semblance of rationality by the subtle definition slipped illegitimately into the word "faith," to make it carry the essence of intuitional certitude. In the airy spiritual or mystical stratosphere of human consciousness there is indefiniteness enough to permit intimations of this sort to maintain a claim of some validity. The central impulse and moving spirit of the Christian movement must ever be generated from the side of faith and religion, as distinct from the mainsprings emanating from the side of intelligence, knowledge and philosophy. It fights the warfare of faith against the spirit of search for truth; of religion against philosophy and science. If it could have had its way, science as the world knows it since the seventeenth century would have died a-borning. For it did make every effort of its scourging power to crush it. Science and rationalism ever menace it.

There emerges from all this staggering truth the cheering reflection that it was only when this monstrous gag of pious faith on the free

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use of the mind was removed and the stifling pressure of "holy Church" was loosed that the Western mind began to move forward to the achievement of more progress in knowledge and the development of power to ease the burden of physical effort than had been attained in the endless centuries of religious domination. The issue has proven beyond all cavil that the religion of faith fastened ruthlessly upon the West by the fanatical zealots of the third century has lain like a blight upon the human mind over all the period, until the unconquerable spirit of free investigation forced the horrid tentacles of the octopus to relax its clammy grip in the seventeenth century.

But even the loosening of the death-hold of pious faith by the young giant of physical science has not by any means assured the future predominance of culture over ignorance. The power of ignorance can reach out and subvert science as it once quenched philosophy. It also can convert science slyly into its own ends. Radio, television, atom power can be turned to the service of evil conceptions. Water can not rise higher than its level, and science can only put into the hands of common low humanity the more ready instruments for the ribald revel. One of the immediate results of the perfection of television is that five million people spend their evenings watching young men pound each other's heads where ten thousand only could do so before. Marvelous inventions do but scatter the lowest forms of tawdry cheapness over a wider area. They therefore drag mediocrity still lower.

The measure of culture is in man, and as man is either base or noble, he converts all he touches to base or noble uses. Ignorance, the admitted essence and genesis of all human evils, will win its victories as long as men do not bestir the latent divinity within themselves and rise out of dullness into intelligence. To hold its own seat on the throne, to perpetuate its own reign, ignorance must block interest and progress in the cultivation of philosophy, that final culture of the soul of man which enlightens him as to what use to make of all other knowledge. For even knowledge itself, as pure mental acquirement, is not of much more utility to man than are the things produced by science. Both science and knowledge are morally neutral; they are not either good or bad in themselves. As the ultimate criterion of good or evil is to be localized in the interior of man's conscious being, things become good or bad only in the moral consequences which accrue from the uses to which men apply them. A base man may use either a marvelous invention or a wonderful bit of knowledge, as of the effect of poison, for the most beastly of purposes.

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It is philosophy, "divine philosophy," as the Greeks called it, which in the end gives the human mind both the light by which it can discriminate between the good or evil use of things. When the high pursuits or the innate love of philosophy are in eclipse, the world sinks into the lower levels of baseness and evils multiply. And the religion that holds its loyal adherents to a level less elevated than their possible attainment is the foulest of all treacheries and betrayals. "To your faith add virtue, and to virtue knowledge" is still the motto of a true Christianity that has been flouted for eighteen centuries by an ignorant and now insolent Christianism. The eclipse of high Pagan philosophy by Christianity in the third and fourth centuries still stands as the direst fatality in the life of the world.

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century must, in spite of terribly serious reservations, be regarded as the most important and right-motivated development in Western history. It saved the West from complete demoralization; it saved for humanity the chance to regain its freedom to study philosophy and to develop science. But--expressing a whole volume in a sentence or two--it stopped lamentable leagues short of its real goal. It took one step or two, when it should have taken ten to its true objective. The Reformers did not lack courage; they boldly attacked a scorpion whose sting was death. But they did lack the knowledge of what had been thrown away in the third century, and what therefore had to be restored to make a thorough job of their valiant effort. Tragically they did not then have the benefit of the translations of the mighty spiritual lore of old Egypt, and lacking this they could only approach the Scriptures, which they wisely made the authoritative guide of the moral and spiritual life of Christians, with blind eyes. Had they possessed the Egyptian backgrounds and basic principles of divine philosophy, they could have gone back and refurbished and illuminated with brilliant light the great work of Philo first, then of Origen, in rehabilitating the Scriptures in the full true splendor of the esoteric meaning which they still hold, but which has been a light beyond the range of their limited vision, an ultra-violet too high pitched for them to catch.

If the debacle of lofty spiritual intuition in the third century was the infinite tragedy of early Christian influence, the failure of the Protestant Reformation to go its full length in repairing the damage done in the initial catastrophe was the hardly less serious tragedy of later Christianity. It was neither radical nor thorough enough, lacking the recapture of the true norms of judgment and interpretation, which

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are only now coming out to clear discernment in the more competent reading of Egypt's books, to bring to an end, but could only weaken and baffle for a time, the dismal forces of ignorance and the sly manipulation of its dupes by designing ecclesiastical authority. And without the full clear light of esoteric understanding and the restored mystical reinterpretation, far beyond what Origen could make of it, the available intelligence of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Melanchthon was not adequate to carry the movement the far further lengths it would have to go to complete the reconstruction of the mangled theological doctrinism and fortify it to maintain its position against counter attack. Nor was there then, nor, lamentably, is there now, the acumen or the genius on the part of Protestants to accept the drastic revolution in their own order of theological science still clearly necessary before a rehabilitation of Christianity to its pure pristine status can be achieved. For the very potentiality of adequate acumen or genius needed not only to restore "Origen's allegories," but to carry their light and their release of understanding far beyond where he left them clear on to the apex of their splendid shining in minds expanded to power to glimpse the brilliance of inspired philosophy has been blunted and deadened in all Christian minds by centuries of obscurantism and an erroneous approach.

The reawakening and reconditioning of that obtuse mind, still lulled to somnolence by the hypnotic influence of ages of arrant tradition, and prolonged by its narcotizing of the sensibilities of each generation's childhood, is going to be a nearly hopeless expectation. Yet the future of civilized man depends upon its success. If the new Reformation does not quickly set in and move forward this time to complete renovation of modern religion, lifting it from an infamous past to the culture of the emotions stabilized by philosophical intelligence, infinite further catastrophe appears inevitable for the race. Religion must be rewed to philosophy. For religion, as pure emotional content, functions only as devotion. But devotion uninstructed as to its wholly right and beneficent objective, or devotion to what, has proven to be close to the most infernal force, capable of endless infamy and inhumanity, known to history. Religion separated from philosophy always stalks abroad as a potential but eventually actual menace to all the interests of higher good that must be stabilized by sound knowledge. The element of human consciousness, then, that is the ultimate factor indispensable for good, is the intelligently discriminating intellect.

Only when the present leadership in religion will muster the wis-

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dom and the courage to place Christianity back again on those fundamental archai of cosmological and anthropological truth of that arcane system from the primal spring of which it first flowed forth, only to be polluted by the muck and mire of the channels of low human mentality through which it had to make its course out into the lowlands of history, will any organic motif under the name of Christianity be empowered by the law of divine sanction to function toward the evolutionary apotheosization of the race. Then and then only can the blind man's tapping staff of "faith" be exchanged for the open-eyed vision of the path illuminated by the bright lamp of instructed intelligence.

Mankind is admittedly today facing a crisis considered the most dangerous in its history. Civilization, so-called, confesses itself menaced with imminent possibility of eradication. An analysis of the world situation in its outer appearances should at any rate present to ordinary understanding the lay-out of the forces at work as they fall under open observation. Such a sketch should fortify the mind with the primary principles needed to be studied and applied.

Lying immediately under the eye, then, of any one who will be observant, are seen to be two predominant forces of personnel, purpose and policy, embodied in the activities of two strong and intensely vigorous groups of partisans. Both are distinctly bent upon the purpose of dominating the entire world. As, quite understandably, any group harboring a plot aiming at world control would not dare proclaim or let slip its real intent to common knowledge, the first strategy of such a predatory motivation is to disguise its real drive under the name, style and semblance of a high-sounding and broadly generalized romantic ideality, or utopian humanitarianism. Every such bold scheme will show itself masquerading behind a cloak or front of this sort. This stratagem has been openly proclaimed by a publicist of one of the two parties as the routine formula of successful deception to attain fixed goals. It is even more patent, if unattested, in the constant moves and ruses of the other of the two parties.

The party of the first part in this sketch is the political bureau of a bakers' dozen men, which is concealing its actual motives behind the mask of the idealistic politico-economic dream known as Communism; the party of the second part is the ecclesiastical organization perpetuating the system herein called Christianism, and hiding its grasping ambitions behind the skirts of "holy religion." Both render sham and temporizing homage to democracy; but democracy will disappear com-

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pletely if either gains final control. Democracy is instantly wiped out by the first party when it gains power; democracy has been hardly a reality at any time in any land dominated by the religious grip of the second party. An observation of a friend in casual conversation ventured the assertion that any country long dominated by the religion of Christianism and indurated under the ecclesiastical power of pietism, is in any true sense incapable of democracy. If either of the two parties wins total control, all democratic liberties will vanish.

It is most significant and interesting to note that, all too short and wholly incomplete as was the Protestant Reformation, its results have provided modern civilization with its only stalwart bulwark of defense and its only robust promise of salvation. For a survey of the world situation reveals that of those nations which yet stand together, so to say, in the breach to stem the tide of disintegration hurtling madly against its walls, the ones that furnish the only appreciable hope of holding the ground successfully are those five or six whose populations are still predominantly Protestant. The United States, Canada, England, Holland, Luxemburg, Norway, Denmark,--these six or seven peoples are left to save the gains of individual freedom from total abrogation by either of the two parties under discussion. Even these, in so far as they are insidiously infiltrated and undermined by influence from either or both the two parties, are weakened in their position on the side of liberty. The treacherous sapping and sabotaging of France's strength in the Second World War, under the domination of the religion which is the second party's mask, is a notable instance of the specification here made. Tersely it can be said, with little chance of refutation, that in the contemporary "cold war" being waged for the absolute rulership of the world, and in the possible actual war believed so imminent, the side that will fight for the essentials of true democracy and civilized freedom on this globe will be those Protestant populations; and they will have to wage this life and death struggle with little substantial help from those nations long and still conditioned to ignorance, blind belief, superstition and poverty by a Church striving desperately to regain the political power it once held and so frightfully abused. All the countries of Central and South America, Spain, Portugal, Italy not only can not be counted on to lend any considerable help in the crisis of war, but on the other hand will even have to be supported and defended by the power and effort of the Protestant countries. France alone is a question-mark; it is an uncertain quantity. The Protestant spirit has still some weight in its councils. But self-interest, inward

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corruption and the insidious Fascist bent inherent in the dominant ecclesiastical establishment that still has the French under its thrall, render it extremely undependable in the conflict to save human liberties. It was the collapse of France internally in the Second World War that permitted events to shape up into the outline of supreme peril for human society.

If, as the Papal encyclicals endlessly reiterate ad nauseum, the Christian religion of faith and piety is the one rampart of human society and the one sword of conquering might, and the old first form of organization of Christianity is the one true embodiment of that redoubtable Christian power, why should the naive mind not expect that it would be that true Christian Church and its warriors of the spirit that would be standing at the point of danger, all powerful to avert disaster? Instead it is the godless rebels, the lost souls of Protestants, who alone stand to make the fight and save Christian civilization. And again history speaks in the bluntest of tones to belie the unctuous claims of this degenerate pietism, this "ersatz" Christianity. This same putrid corruption of human sanity, as history now records, rose up to smother the interior light of man's divine self in the early centuries. It ran its brutal course and dragged its blood-stained trail of slaughter and ruthlessness down through the centuries. And still the same blind force, though not now blindly directed, it is gathering its strength to make another supreme effort to stifle the free spirit of mankind under the blanket of its imposed doctrinism and its regimented faith.

The New Reformation may under Providence be in time to avert this ineffable horror. The old knowledge that Christianism suppressed is now once again, and this time in competent understanding, available to restore Christianity to its true bases. The Reformers had not the help of the Rosetta Stone. But it is here now; and through its hieroglyphic lines we are able again to hear the voice of old Egypt's sapiency. Listening to that oracular voice, that logos of the wisdom out of which grew the primal true Christianity, a wiser world will rebuild the philosophical religion of the divine soul in man.

It remains only to epitomize in a few final words the two or three outstanding features in the indictment of this religion on the charge of having afflicted the minds of humans with the most heinous of hypnotic delusions. The work here being concluded has enumerated, charted and analyzed the nefarious influence of a host of minor errata

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in the dogmatic program of this institution. They are all ancillary to several others that are central and basic.

As Nietzsche said that the dictionary failed to supply him with words competent to register his utter detestation of the "slave morality" of this "Christian" faith, much the same accusation has to be entered here. The mind finds the strongest superlatives falling blunt and dull upon the paper in its effort to present the true picture of the havoc wrought in the conscious life of the world's citizenry by the impregnation of what Jung calls the "collective unconscious" of half the world with prepossessions of a weird and irrational list of indoctrinated ideas that in the end turn into the most corrosive obsessions and unseat the reason. It is not in the least degree an exaggeration to proclaim that the Christian religion, in the forms and conceptions in which it has been put forth or preached and expounded for sixteen centuries, has demented Western man. This general declaration is what the work has undertaken, as far as a gargantuan project could be achieved within the restricted number of its pages, to support by massed data.

The gross charge that is entered against this system of faith is that of having fastened upon the collective mind of the Occident first the idea that the salvation of the individual and the world from evolutionary catastrophe was effectuated only by the advent to earth, the personal life, the teaching of a new dispensation, and finally the suffering and death of one certain man in history; and, second, of having likewise fastened upon this general body of thought the prepossession that at the death of the body the eternal destiny of the surviving consciousness, or soul, would be lived out in one or other of two regions, the one a place of ineffable bliss, the other a limbo of unbearable but never-ending torment of body and soul.

These two impositions of an authoritative religious dictatorship have demented and derationalized the Western mentality through a process of mass hypnotization staggering in its extent and its depredations in the sacred field of conceptual life.

It should require no elaborated dissertation to establish the recognition that the predication of the human existence of the Christos principle as a man of flesh has forged in the collective acceptance of Christendom the most fatal of all misunderstandings. Crime committed in ignorance is still catalogued as crime, whether violating the civil or the moral law. In whatever of the two categories obtaining, the crime of which this work accuses Christianity--the crime of the third century--

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must forever rank as the most corroding and devastating of all crimes which can be committed against the divine soul of man: the crime of having deprived the outer mind of humanity of the knowledge that the saving power in life is a power central and operative only in the interior region of man's own conscious being. For long it has slumbered in a deathlike trance; but later it is to be awakened by the impingement upon it of the actual experiences, the pains and joys of the outer personality, the body and its senses. The greatest crime that can be perpetrated against the mortal on earth is to deceive people with the fairy tale or the Santa Claus myth that a man was born, lived and died two thousand years ago, whose suffering, death and resurrection have achieved the opening of the gates of Paradise for all men who will mentally be hypnotized with the story.

How can language paint in realistic hues the psychological monstrousness and deadliness of this gigantic deception? To slay a man's mind is to murder him. The worst feature of such psychological murder is that the hypnotization veils off utterly from the conscious man the knowledge of the presence and potential kingship in his own life of the babe of Christhood slumbering in his cradle in each mortal.

In summation, then, the indictment takes the form of the charge that Christianity has committed the greatest of all possible crimes against the human being, in that it has caused to be lost to the outer mind of men the supreme blessedness of conscious knowledge of the divinity within its own sphere of agency, while wasting in utter futility the awful mass of sentimental devotion of that outer consciousness upon the intimations tied up in a myth. To have mistaken the fictitious outer veil of the myth for actual occurrence and thus to have diverted the saving power of psychic effort and devotion away from the place of focus within the individual's own center of being, where alone regenerative work can be effected for each life, is again the commission of the direst of perversions. This most disastrous of all deadly crimes Christianity has committed. And this according to its own exuberant asseverations.

For, ironically enough, the one supreme claim on which it bases its allegations of superior excellence and power is precisely the thesis that it gave in the person of Jesus of Nazareth the one solid support on which the mind of a mortal can rest in irrefragible assurance that a divine principle has been brought to man on earth. This essay asserts that the claim thus announced is the one thing that not only has not made divinity available to any man, but has sharply and blindingly

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cut him off, by a fatal hypnotization, from the living possibility man always has had of finding divinity ever available to him in a place infinitely nearer than Judea and closer than 33 A.D.,--namely in the unexplored recesses of his own consciousness. The Christian allocation of the Christos, as the power with which man is to effect an intimate relation of atonement and union, outside the human breast and brain, in a remote episode in history (as to which there is yet not a shred of authentic evidence), must stand as the crowning sin of a civilization calling itself cultured. The Christian system has loosed and perpetuated this consummate enormity.

And of companion status is the second accusation: that Christianity has caused its billions to be haunted through life by the fear of suffering an endless torture in a horrid limbo known as hell when earth life is done, as a consequence of some indiscretions or unwisdom of human conduct,--if not bought free of the dire penalty for thirty or more pieces of silver. Again language admits its inadequacy to depict the psychological havoc wrought upon the mass mind by this phantom bogie of theological dementia. This haunting dread of endless suffering in hell, with even the pursuing malignity of a hypothecated and entified Devil in every moment of life--so that even the emancipated Luther threw his ink-well at him--is the twin psychological crime this monstrous engine of ignorance has wreaked upon its countless victims, who, hypnotized by faith when not by fear, dance in tune to every sophism the crafty manipulators pipe out. The demoralization of the Christian nations by these two hypnotizations stands at the head of all historical infamies. These might well be said to be the two arms of the cross of infamy and death upon which the real Christos, awaiting his recognition in the breast of every man, is being crucified by Christianity. Doubtless it is apt enough in the unconscious ironies that history itself shapes out, that Christianity is the religion that has made actual the crucifixion of the Christ in two distinct senses: the one in the false belief of the historical death of an actual man-Christ on a wooden cross in Judea, A.D. 33: the other in the portentously real crucifixion, in mystical consciousness, of the Christ-spirit on the cross of human mental crudity and neglect.

And at the sharp summit of all human refinement of fiendish criminality stands the consummate charge brought by history against this foul schematism that cloaks ulterior purpose under the mantle and mask of holy religion. In the court of common intelligence it has been decreed over and over again that the one crime that must carry the

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foulest stigma of all is that which deliberately aims to exploit the most sacred motivations of the human psyche, in the expression of which man is both holiest and noblest and at the same time most easily victimized by designing cunning,--the forces that make man a religious being. The conniving shrewdness of implacable human ambition to dominate the earth, which has evolved the colossal machinery invented to catch and enchain the divinest motions of the human spirit, for the express end of enslaving the masses in a mental (and economic) bondage to its Juggernaut of ecclesiastical power,--this, if recognized for what it truly is, should be branded as the foulest of all foul things. Even the most wretched crimes of passion or ignorance find some measure of extenuation. But the crime of plotting to use the sacredest aspirations of life as the tool with which to build world empire,--this is the nadir of the despicable in all human consensus. Christian historians themselves have had ample justification in characterizing this or that period of ecclesiastical governance in Christian history as a veritable sink of iniquity, a putrid cesspool of infamy. No words of ours could surpass in luridness their frank descriptions.

If the masses of "dumb driven cattle" thus exploited by cloaked deviltry can not be awakened to rise in their collective might and, directed by better intelligence, cease to lend themselves, and to sacrifice their hapless children, to this soulless Moloch, there will be another two thousand years of Dark Age Christianism. The world faces that situation and that choice now.

Heathen darkness, then Christian light, has been the cry of the founders and perpetrators of the "Christian" faith. This work for the first time presents the truth as the exact reversal of this order: Pagan light, then "Christian" night. And anxiously, with the annual recurrence of the Christmas festival as these words are being written, comes the phrase from the Christmas hymn heard in the church of our boyhood days: "Watchman, tell us of the night." The Pagan light is smothered in dire and apparently dawnless darkness of the Christian night. With infinite anxiety the world should be sending up the cry to the watchman on the heights of prophetic vision: What of the night? "What its signs of promise are?" Can he descry any first faint gleams of returning dawn? Will the long spiritual night and winter of human spiritual genius come to an end at last? Will the ineffable radiance of the divine message of Hermes, Orpheus, Plato and Zoroaster, even of Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus and Plutarch, of Philo, Clement, Origen, Dionysius and Erigena, and those

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who kept the candle of philosophical knowledge and recondite esotericism burning in subterranean grots during all the centuries when the ecclesiastical monster beat down every effort to set its light again on the hilltops, even quenching finally the glorious outburst in the fourteenth century Renaissance of the Platonists in Italy,--will the long-buried light arise to irradiate the human mind again with the joyous exuberance of rational delight? Can the ancient mountain spring of high truth be cleared of the muck of accumulated ignorance so that the living waters of intelligence can gush forth again to wash away the dams of hypnotic indoctrination of false theses and irrigate thirsty souls once more with the delectable drink of divine philosophy?

Within hours after the last paragraph was written, in which was used the poetic figure in the Yuletide hymn, Watchman, tell us of the night, our daily perusal of the New York Times brought under the eye a brief notice of a newly published religious book under the title: Watchman, What of the Night?, by the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett. A nine-line summary of it reveals that it is a tract for the times based on four convictions. If these four convictions are the concise epitome of the place and function of Christianity in the world of 1950 by so eminent an ecclesiastic as the Archbishop of York, they may well serve as a brief for a concluding synthesis of our work. The four theses are: first, that the world is in revolution; second, that Christianity has now become the religion of no more than a minority; third, that its gospel is definitely supernatural; and forth, that this gospel will alone overcome the dangerous evils that threaten mankind.

On the first thesis--the world in religious revolution--what can any sane man conclude from this but that after two thousand years of its complete dominance of the Western world by this endlessly proclaimed one true and saving religion, that world has ceased regarding Christianity as its savior and has turned in violent revolt against it?

On the second thesis--that it is held only by a minority, and, he might have added, that minority composed in its bulk of the less thoughtful section of the populations, those who let "leaders" do their critical thinking instead of thinking for themselves, and who are in the churches by force of tradition and social pressure--what again is to be concluded but that the one true religion has failed? Only one question arises: Has it failed because of its intrinsic demerit and inadequacy, or because the majority of Western humanity has failed it? Has the religion failed the men of sixty generations, or have the men failed it? If the latter answer is snapped up to spare Christianity the ignomin-

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ious verdict of nearly total failure, then the age-old debate as to the comparative worth and efficacy of one religion as against another has been an empty and aimless waste of words. For this would relegate the decision finally and incontrovertibly to the side of the men and exonerate the religion. The ultimate resolution of the debate would be that it is not religions that succeed in making men better beings, but always men that succeed in making religions better. Splendid humans can make a splendid religion out of even an erroneous set of doctrinal ideas, rising superior even to wrong influences; low humans can and always do tear down a pure, high and true religion to basest failure.

But it is Christianity and its apologists and protagonists that have forever held and bandied the claim that the heathen religions had lowered and degraded their votaries, while loudly vaunting that the Christian faith had proved its truth and superiority by the fruits of its influence upon the West. It is therefore Christianity that must, on the basis of its own principle of criticism, holding the religion, not the men, responsible for historical outcomes, accept the conclusion now that this religion has finally demonstrated its failure. If the spurning of a religion that has had infinite time to prove its value by a large majority of those who should by now have been lifted to near-divine beatitude by so lofty, so true, so deifying a religion, is not the conclusive evidence of its failure, one asks what greater marks are demanded?

On the third point--that the Christian gospel is definitely supernatural--let the briefest possible comment be complete assent. This work has endeavored to establish that Christianity was doomed to failure precisely because it was supernatural, and therefore not adapted to benefit man, who must live his life in the environment of nature, and must find his highest good in the harmonization of his life with natural law. A religion that despises the natural, as Christianity has flagrantly done (particularly in its debasement of the body) and implants in men's minds the notions that their greatest exaltation and blessedness is to be won by catching up at a supernal power in the hope that it will lift them above the ordained provenance of natural law, is destined at once and continually to cut man off in disordered eccentricity and derationalization from the play of the normal evolutionary offices of his relation to nature.

Man's natural powers are gradually, of course, to be entwined with the mental and spiritual energies deployed into his life by the Paraclete, which flow from within or "from above," as Paul says. Precise

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delimitations on the meaning of "natural" and "supernatural" must be stated here, else there is confusion everywhere. Christian teaching has always erred in giving a false connotation to "supernatural," making it refer to forces of magic and miracle which it has dissociated entirely from the prerogative and conscious control of man himself. Christianity took the supernatural--which should never be considered in any other sense than is expressed by the better word "supernormal"--and placed it up and outside of man's own domain, and only to be begged for as by a poverty-stricken suppliant, when all the while it should have been declared a potential function of his own nature and always within the reach of his own aspiration. No religion can render man the one prime service religion should supply unless it instructs him in the knowledge that nothing is more marvelous, magical and miraculous than the laws of beneficence that regulate and support his entire life, be it on the physical or the spiritual side. He must be taught that two widely separated and diverse vibration rates and frequencies of cosmic intelligent power are lodged and operative within the province of his bodily life, and that the one is commonly denominated "natural," in Greek terms, "physical," while the other is designated "spiritual" or "divine." But the woeful disservice that misinstruction can render the human, thus constituted, is to hypnotize his reason with the false notion that only the natural is himself, and the supernatural (supernormal) or spiritual is something or somebody else,--a god or God.

So it has eventuated that this religion has misused the term "supernatural" in such a way as to deprive its adherents of the one and only saving knowledge possible for man as a potential culturist, that the saving divinity, or spiritual vibration, is a force resident within and available to the personality of man at all times.

A religion teaching such a perversion of crucial knowledge set the seal of its own failure and doom upon history and human evolution. Christianity essayed in blind philosophical ignorance to convert man to God, but bound man's intellect to the notion that God was to be found only in Jesus of Nazareth.

The final, consummate catastrophic error of Christianity that destined it to supreme fatuity lay in its inculcation of the idea that man was to be converted to the Deity resident somewhere else than in himself. Speaking of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, which incidentally he says, since Paul's account and that in Acts differ so

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widely, must be concluded to be a "literary" and not a "historical" story, Dr. Robert Norwood remarks in his The Heresy of Antioch (p. 39):

"No other conversion is genuine. Only as we find ourselves can we enter the Kingdom of God."

Man has found neither God nor himself in Christianity, except in instances where the irrepressible divinity in individuals was powerful enough to dissolve the encrusting armor and shackling influences of false theology, because he was taught by Christianity to look for God in the vacuous spaces of heaven, and thus missed both the God who is in the heaven of man's own higher consciousness and the God of cosmic infinity. For the God in his own upper area of realization is his own Higher Self, a fragment of the infinite Godhood. The Pagan religious philosophies stressed abundantly the element that could be called "supernatural"; but they did not deprive man of the supreme benison of knowing that the divinity that could be invited or incited to lift man above his common level was integral within himself. Man's genius is a divinity, declared Heraclitus; and Plato asserts we are divine on the mental side.

As to the fourth item--that the gospel of Christianity will alone overcome the dangerous evils that threaten mankind--here is the millionth parrot reiteration of that purely stereotyped and mechanical confident assertion that Christianity can not be conceded any possibility of failure, and still uttered in blind disregard of the historical failure now being evidenced as never before. What sound reason can the Archbishop advance to support the claim that a gospel that has written the ghastliest record in blood and insanity across the pages of twenty centuries of history will alone save humanity now? If it has not saved mankind in so long a period, with complete opportunity, what grounds are there to think that it can do any better now? There are none that one can see. The argument seems to be that since Christianity after a long age in human history is now held by only a minority, is fantastically supernatural, and humanity is revolting against it, therefore it is the sole savior to which we can turn. That is the logic one finds in the Archbishop's four points.

Well indeed may we anxiously query the watchman: What of the night? For we are still enshrouded in the deep shadows of Christian darkness, and one of the most ominous signs on the still unstreaked

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horizon is the wretched miscalculation and the egregiously false assumption found in books put out by Christian spokesman.

The Christianity that we have had since the third century is decidedly not the sole power by which the world will overcome its menacing evils. Christianity has itself killed the nuclear core of the saving power that it may once in some measure have possessed. No influence from the side of religion save the power that comes from the certain knowledge that man can call upon the potentially infinite source of wisdom lying as yet largely untapped within his own constitution will avail to save him from the misleadings and hallucinations of the most bizarre fetishism ever to befuddle men capable of better thought. No religion but one that will place deity universally back in the conscious recesses of man's own nature will be potent enough to save him. And even that potency can not be stirred to action and development of function until the outer earthly man knows that the power of salvation must be worked by himself and from within himself. A religion that puts the least block in the way of all men's knowledge that the only deity that can save them from ills fostered by their own ignorance is the infant god who must be recognized, cared for, loved and brought to growth by the exercise of its fledgling powers within themselves, must be seen for what it is,--a scourge of the earth.

The always and finally crucial question is whether men can acquire from any religion the rudiments of higher knowledge and apply them with consummate wisdom to the definite diminution of the savage instincts brought up in the subconscious from the past stages of animal evolution and to the corresponding expansion of the superior mind of the immanent god. The god only conquers and takes his seat on the inner throne as the personality "lets the ape and tiger die" out of his consciousness. The "dying daily" unto the flesh and the world is Paul's way of stating this. The interests of the flesh mean "death," says the Apostle, while those of the spirit mean life and peace. But for man to pray to some power outside himself to give those interests a shove forward and galvanize them into function, and to stand waiting until that supposititious external power turns on the current for him, is to invite the final stultification and paralysis that a false religion can afflict man with.

The vital question is not whether a given religion can save mankind; for this very framing of the matter implies that man is a puppet and rises or falls by the character of the religion he happens to be born into. The final test is whether man can implement the verities and

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motive springs of influence in his religion so as to assimilate and incorporate their salutary powers into his own history. In the end man's salvation lies in and with himself. God in his unerring wisdom has dowered man with the energies and faculties requisite to effect his own salvation. Indeed any vicarious salvation would disorder the operation; would throw the factors in it out of proper collaboration with each other; and let the evolving intelligence that needs the exercise of self-reliance for ultimate victory stand deprived of its indispensable training for godhood.

The Christian preachment that man is to be saved by Infinite Goodness or by sheer mental assent to the historical implications of the literalized Gospels must be set down, when at last sanity can register in the human brain, as the most colossal ineptitude and costliest tragedy of the ages. Alongside it the Christian conception that the human family is to be redeemed by a power that was implemented through its incarnation in only one person in history, must finally be recognized as the most chimerical fantasy of delusion that ever infatuated mankind. There is nothing to match the imbecile notion that the power that is to uplift the race from animal savagery to love and graciousness could have been made available for all men through its sole incorporation in the flesh of one single man. That all men should have to look to this one man as the author and finisher of their salvation is beyond all words the coronal fatuity of all time. No doctrine in all the realm of ideal conception could be half so fatal as this.

That a Christ-principle was made available to work for the salvation of mortals from the hell of unregenerated animal propensity here on earth,--that is a doctrine sane and cheering. For this principle would be equally distributed to all men potentially, and would be found standing in time of need at every man's side. It can be established on firm philological ground that neither the term "Lord," nor "Jesus," nor "Christ" ever had been taken as referring to a living person until the debacle of all intelligence in the third century of the Christian movement opened the door to such an untoward blunder. Christianity has never been able to offer so much as a line in answer to the question a ten-year-old child will ask, why God let eons of time pass by before he despatched his only Son to the planet to provide for man the one and only hope of escape from certain perdition. The sheer idea of the implementation of human deification through the agency of any one man, walking in body like other men, at a given moment in history, is itself the most preposterous of suppositions. The thought

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that a religion which broadcast so bizarre an idea to the world should have been swept on to a dominating position in that part of the world assumed to be the summit product of human civilization, is a phenomenon as inexplicable as it is portentous and dispiriting.

While it is true that man does not stand in relation to a religious philosophy as a mere marionette, to be made good or bad as he is influenced by a good or bad religion, nevertheless the issues of life are mightily determined by the ideology that haunts and possesses any brain. If man is to implement a religion to its highest beneficence, instead of being merely implemented by it, it is still a matter of immense moment what religion he becomes addicted to for the building of the house of his life. Even the tilling of a farmer's field depends largely upon the efficiency of the plowing instrument. So the perfectibility of life, which rests always and ultimately upon the strength of the spirit and the intelligence of the mortal chiefly concerned, nevertheless can be vastly aided, or as disastrously thwarted, by the true fitness of the philosophy resorted to.

It happens that man is himself both the plowman and the field he is plowing. It becomes tenfold more important, then, whether he used for self-cultivation a philosophy that works well or one that will thwart healthy growth. A philosophy serves his mental and spiritual bodies--for he has such, as Paul assures us--much as food serves his physical corpus. All alike thrive on suitable food and suffer from wrong feeding. This essay has endeavored to show beyond all dispute that the mental and spiritual segments in the life of the West have for long ages been fed upon a supposed diet of surpassing religious quality, which turns out to be totally indigestible and productive of severe illness in those partaking of it. The psychological health of the Occident during those centuries has been ruined by a diet of improper ideological nutriment provided by Christianity. The symptoms of the disease have been bigotry, hatred, separativeness, failure of brotherhood, violence, ignorance, greed, laziness, corruption, falsity, political chicanery, immorality, superstition, eccentricity, fanaticism, forgery, insanity, persecution, war and slaughter.

While there has been a great measure of fruit of better quality, intermixed with the depravity that stands as the record of this disease, it can be attributed to the fact that it has inevitably enlisted many of sterling native character, whom even so eccentric a theology could not corrupt. Strong and impeccable Christians have at times almost made the religion one to be respected, as they attached the credit of their own

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virtue to its practice. Christianity did retain the shell of Pagan constructions of truth, and vigorous characters could revivify the dynamic force of the original sense, as their own lives gave meaning to the dead formularies. And this says that there is a certain modicum of Pagan wisdom still active in aspects of the system. Truth is still powerful, no matter how caricatured. The true lineaments of the original beauty can at times be glimpsed through the present distortions.

So the dissertation closes with the note on which it began,--the clarion call to the modern world to return to the primitive Christianity which the founder of Christian theology, Augustine, proclaimed had been the true religion of all humanity before the execrable wantonness of impiously pious religionism in the third century laid desecrating hands upon its beauteous light and befouled it with smoke and smudge of bad oil. But that true Christianity is also true Egyptology, true Hellenism, true Zoroastrianism, true Hebraism, true Hinduism, true Buddhism, true Platonism and Neo-Platonism, true esotericism in all religions. When that true religion is taken up again, man will have recovered the necessary intellectual basis of world brotherhood.

Only then will the long shadow of the third century be dispelled as the strong light of the restored true Christianity rises on the modern day and illumines the world universally with the benignant rays of the primeval revelation of truth to mankind.