and ritualistic observances of the Church. After a careful study, pursued without prejudice, of the system of Buddhism, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, while acknowledging in it much that is divinely true, and identical with Christianity, I am still constrained to say, "I take my refuge in Jesus the Christ." In every age of the world God has raised up extraordinary men, and imparted to them a high degree of light from the living Word. Such were Moses, Zoroaster, Confucius, Plato, and above all Gautama the Buddha. There was many a stray beam of the living light of the Logos in all their systems, but it does not come in a form to be easily and practically appropriated by the souls of men in general. And if Jesus should say to me as he did to the twelve select disciples, when many of his shallow followers were leaving him, "Will you also go away?" I should be constrained to say, as all the world's great teachers passed in procession before the mind, "Lord, to whom shall I go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." (John vi. 68.) In Jesus we may come into saving contact with the "Word of Life.” (1 John i. 2.) In no person was there ever so conscious a union with God, as even Renan affirms. The philosopher Porphyry was united to God, as he says, but twice in his life, while his teacher Plotinus had been six times. They had come to the perception of their own inner divine spirit, the Augoeides, or shining One, of the philosopher initiates. But a conscious and inseparable union with God was the normal condition of Jesus. And there is no shorter or better route to the attainment of the highest spiritual light and life than a sympathetic conjunction with Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. For that eternal Life which was with the Father is manifested in him, and brought within our grasp. In the Pauline development of Christianity, when rescued from the dogmas of a theology that has been grafted upon it, and freed from the shell of exoteric Judaism and restored to its primitive meaning, we find God's response to our soul's inmost needs. It is the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation for both soul and body, to every one that believeth. But, according to Paul, my salvation in Christ is not to be viewed as an event to transpire in a distant or near future, but a genuine faith apprehends and appropriates it as an eternally existing fact. "The head of every man is Christ, and the head of Christ is God." (1 Cor. xi. 3.) That is, the highest region of our being, the immortal Ego, and real self, is inseparable from the Christ, the God-Man, and the Man-God, and that spiritual and divine entity was never lost, or diseased, or unhappy. It is not the head, the summit of human nature, the spirit, that needs to be washed or cleansed. That is already pure; but it is the feet, the animal soul; and if these are washed, we are then clean every whit. This is one of those profound sayings of Jesus that even the apostles did not understand until they were initiated more fully into the mysteries of the kingdom of God. (John xiii. 4-10.) All men were created in Christ, as I have before said, somewhat as an artist creates his picture or statue, in idea. This is the real and immortal entity. So in Christ; or, as a man in Christ," as Paul expresses it, I am perfect and complete. This is the true idea of my existence, the divine plan of my life. If I believe this of myself and of Christ, and steadfastly maintain this idea and belief, it will work itself out into an ultimate expression, and translate itself into even a bodily manifestation. This idea of ourselves has been lost to our consciousness, and the divine plan may have been temporarily marred. But Paul teaches that we may be created anew in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God before ordained that we should walk in them. (Eph. ii. 10.) Through Jesus, the divine ideal becomes the actual. Every one of us was made for a use in the grand economy of the universe. To find out what we are created for, and to do that use, is our highest health and happiness. Jesus sought to find in those he healed the true idea of their 66 being, and to so create them anew as to make it an actuality. We should do the same. It has been said of Gautama the Buddha, that his life is "the history of a soul in search of spiritual rest, of the various experiments by which he vainly sought to find it, of the success that at last crowned his efforts, and finally of his life-long endeavour to communicate to others the blessing he seemed to himself to have obtained." The answer of Buddhism to the inquiry, "O where shall rest be found, is in the extinction or "snuffing out" of desire. Desire, it is said, begets will, and will is force, and force is matter, and matter is evil. So the descent from desire to matter and unrest is in as direct a line downward as that pursued by an apple in falling from the tree to the ground. There is much of truth in this. The answer of Jesus, speaking as the Christ, is "Come unto (or up to) me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matt. xi. 28-30.) In the doctrine of the Christ and of his relation to me as constituting my inner and true self, we find a secure refuge from sin and disease. When, by a supreme act of faith, I perceive that my spiritual self is included in him, as the Collective or Universal Man, I have found myself, and found it in Christ, as Paul expresses it. So far as I believe this it becomes to me a conscious reality, and in him I am possessed of all good that can be an object of desire, and have nothing to ask. (John xvi. 23.) We have reached the true Nirvana, or snuffing out of desire, when we can say, "Thou, O Christ, art all I want; This is not so much an extinction of desire, as it is its complete satisfaction and fulfilment. As disease in its essence, as the word radically signifies, is a state of unrest and disquietude, when I have found my real self in Christ, and in him every need is met, I am in a state of true health. "Now rest, my long divided heart, Fixed on this blissful centre, rest, Nor ever from thy Lord depart, With him of every good possessed." No one is ever entirely satisfied with himself until, he finds his real self; or, as Plotinus would express it, until the man that I am here is united to the man that exists in True Being, or the Christ. But why was man from a pure spirit reduced to the bondage of the senses, and imprisoned in matter? The reason is given by Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. The intelligent creation, or man as an intelligent spiritual being, was made subject to vanity (which is the maia or illusion of the senses and of matter of the Buddhists), not willingly or our part, and consequently it is not what we are condemned for, but it was done by the reason of him who hath subjected us to this in hope of deliverance. For the " creature," says Paul, shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, which is the designation of man as a pure spiritual intelligence. Then he will connect in his own personality the two extreme links of existence, the Alpha and the Omega, or spirit and matter. The evils and sufferings of our present sensuous condition are only travailing pains that are followed by the birth of a higher state. (Rom. viii. 18-22.) All this was taught Kabalistically or symbolically in one of the early chapters of the Book of Genesis. The marriage of the Beni Elohim or sons of God, which represents our spiritual nature, with the "daughters of men," the psyche of the Greeks, or the mind on the sensuous and material plane, gives birth to a higher race, mighty men, and men of l'enown. From this union of our higher with the so-called lower nature, we have a race of men who can consciously dwell in the world of sense and at the same time in the realm of spirit, like Jesus "the son of man who is in heaven." CHAPTER XXIII. THE KABALISTIC JUSTICE AND PAUL'S RIGHTEOUSNESS OF FAITH, AND THEIR CURATIVE POWER. IN the philosophy of Plato and the Oriental Theosophy the word "justice" had an occult meaning far transcending its ordinary signification. In the popular mind it had, and still has, the same meaning as equity, but among the philosopher initiates it was something more, and much more. Plato says in the "Cratylus" that he learned from the sacred mysteries that justice is the same as cause, it being the most penetrating of all things. But in stating this, he says, he seems "to inquire farther than is becoming, and to pass beyond the trench." He therefore puts it into the mouths of others, of whom he asks the meaning of the word, to give its full signification. One man gives it as his opinion that justice is the sun, because the sun's light penetrates and influences everything, meaning of course the spiritual sun, whose light is pure truth. Another is made to say that justice is that intellect of which Anaxagoras speaks when he affirms that intellect-by which he means a pure deific or spiritual intelligence-orders and is the cause of all things. It is a rectitude of thought, a perception of things on the square, to use a Masonic symbol. These higher intellectual perceptions, uninfluenced by the illusions of the senses, and which are the rays of a divine intelligence, are "the righteousness of faith" of which Paul speaks. It is the faith of the Christ, the intellectual perception that belongs to the crest or summit of our being. It is the faith of the "Son of God," the Kabalistic designation of |