The Christ of the Holy Grail by James Macbeth Bain (KnowledgeBorn Library)

8/9/2019 The Christ of the Holy Grail by James Macbeth Bain (KnowledgeBorn Library)

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The Christ of the HolyGrail

or

The Great Christ of the Cosmosand

The Little Christ of the Soul ;Being a word of spiritual doctrineto the practical mystics of our dayy

and supplementary to" The Brotherhood of Healers"To which will be added in good time

The Hymns of the Christ-childto the Christ-mother

Written byJAMES L. MACBETH BAIN

The Theosophical Publishing Society1 6 1, New Bond StreetLondon, W.

1909Printed by Garden City Press Ltd., Letchworth


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There is no copyright on any of my writings,for they belong to every soul who needs them andwho can use them for its blessing. Only untothis end have they been given me.

Therefore no one who uses them in any wayfor the service of the neighbour need ask mypermission for so doing. And anyone can usethem in translation or reproduce them in any waywithout even naming me.For they are no more mine than they are thine,

human soul, dear to thy Christ, the Mother of theages of our race, in whose name and in whoseWill of Blessing these words of the hidden Christof my soul are now sent forth.


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Offered in Love's remembranceto the many souls in the seen and unseenwho have blessed the years of my lifeand nourished me ivith their love,

among whom I would namein the high honour of Her service,

Xillie,the gentle and lowly and loving companion

of my days,the friend and lover and servant of all the

feeble and defenceless little ones as well in thebrute body as in the human body of

the Lord of Life.

"He prayeth best who loveth bestAll things both great and small."


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THE CONTENTS

It is not until I have completed this book that Ifind that its word is triune.

Part I. concerns the Holy One of Blessing, theFather and the Mother, the Unnameable, and inits body is found the life or whole doctrine of theother two parts.

Part II. concerns the Genesis and Growth andLife of the Son of God in the soul.

Part III. concerns the powers of the Holy Spiritthe Comforter, or the spirits of the Christhood inwhose communion is the fellowship of the HolyGhost.

The headline of each page is a useful indicatorof its contents.


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Foreword

This is not a carefully elaborated body ofdoctrine. Rather is it a composite of intuitionsor inspirational feelings that have come to mefrom time to time on the great theme.

I know that they are rich in suggestion, andthat those who are qualified through a spiritualand intellectual unfoldment will find in them thevery sweetness of the doctrine of the ever imma-nent and ever transcendent Christ.For the bearing of them has been of such asweetness to me that I seem even now and aftermany days to taste it still abiding in my mouth.

I give tliem to you, dear soul, very much as theyhave come to me, in order that they may be asliving seeds of a strong fertility in your mind.For the greater my experience as a minister ofsouls by thought or voice or pen the more fullyam I persuaded, were this necessary, that if theword is inspired of the Holy One the less meddlingthere be of the human hand about it the morepotent it is for the bearing of blessing.And I can testify that the blessing borne tosouls through any words I have written has beenaccording to their utterly pure and simple spon-laneity.And so it is and ever must be with the word ofthe Spirit. It must arise as a spontaneous wordout of or through the clean, intelligent, and well-ordered soul, otherwise it is mingled with the

I


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ii The Liberty of the Free Spiritimperfections of the effort of the limited con-sciousness. And I do solemnly declare that wereI able, as I am not, to so order this great doctrinethat it would form a whole and philosophictreatise, I would not. For we do not so easilyor so willingly fall into the errors of our fore-runners in the procession of the light-bearers untoman. And even the freeborn among us mustbeware of the formulating and systematisingheresy of our old nature, if ours would be a livingscripture a fit expression of the word of Life.For the truth must always be found hidden, asit were, in the word. Then is it a catholic word,appealing to the divine light in every soul whohears it, howsoever divergent may be the opinionsof that mentality. And here I would say, forthere is need, that the fact that I wrote

" TheBrotherhood of Healers " has given rise to theassumption in the minds of many that I havebeen founding a new order of spiritual endeavour.People seem to take it for granted that it shouldbe so, and have even written in the public pressof me as the founder of this Brotherhood.Now be it well understood, once and for all,that nothing is, or could be, farther from my aimor desire.

I can say in all the simplicity of truth that Ihave learned too much of the ways of the wisdomof the Spirit through the vital failure in ourworld's history of institutionalism in spiritualthings to allow myself to be allured by this craftydevice of the old world-spirit, a device which atone time would have had power to tempt me.The real thing, even the thing of life, cannot beorganised of man. The Spirit refuses to be fixedor stereotyped in any system of human con-struction. And well it is for us if we realise thisso clearly that we shall never be tempted to makeunto us any likeness of the One.


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Unto my name I deny any following KTo many sympathisers, who still call themselves

Anglican or Presbyterian, Theosophist or Bap-tist, Agnostic or Spiritualist, and others of widelydiverging opinions, who have found in mywritings the note of the catholic word of life, Ihave had serious occasion to declare that I amno emissary of any society on earth, that I amforming no new sect, and that nothing would painme more than that my name should be used forthe building of any new order. For I am but anatom in the great social body, and I desire thatmy name be lost therein even as my personality isalready merged in its will.And so it is that I now declare that they whowould best show their love of me, and who havethought to honour me by recognising me as thefounder of an order of healers, will do so byallowing my name as a man to cease, to absolutelycease from being associated with any living wordI may have been alloived to utter. Do those wholove me well understand this well? I am but avoice crying ; and I would that my voice be recog-nised to be as impersonal as the voice of thewinds. Indeed, only a voice am I, and I desireand seek not for any followers as a man. And Iknow that here, too, I am guided by the finewisdom of the Spirit of Truth. And ye who knowthe Spirit of Truth will say it is well.Unto me or unto my name I deny any following,and I do so once and for all. Let the disciples bethose of the never dying Christ, related to meonly insomuch as the living Christ has spoken inand through me. And being only a sower of theseed, I assure you I have not taken upon me anycare as to whether that seed would yield much orno fruit. That care I have left in the will of theBlessed Spirit, knowing well that if it be in thewill of the Spirit that there be fruit, the seedsown would contain the power of fruit-bearing,


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iv Whom these Writings serve bestand, there surely would be fruit; and if it be notso, no care, no labour on my part would avail itin the least. And I know that here, too, I amguided by the fine wisdom of the Spirit of Life.

I shall yet give in a second " Brotherhood ofHealers," if such be the Will, an account of someof the works and the very beautiful ways of theworking of some of these brotherhoods who seekto heal the diseased of mind and body. Forindeed with the desire to heal and the comingtogether to that end, very rare and truly marvel-lous powers of healing such as I have spoken ofin " Brotherhood of Healers," p. 30, have beendeveloped in not a few. And such are the signsof the power of the ever present Spirit of Life inhealing or blessing. And they who are alive inthe Spirit of Life cannot but show forth the work-ings of this power.These writings are intended to be of specialservice to those earnest and intelligent minds,cleric and laic, who, failing to find the food theyneed in the external churches, have either comeout of them or, lingering still about their doors,are utterly dissatisfied with the bread therebroken, yet know not where to go for their food.Now, I have every reason to be sure that suchsouls will here find something of the livingChrist, and I would ask those of my readers whomay be in touch with any dissatisfied yet open-minded minister of religion to place this or anyof my works in his hands. For I have had suchtestimony, not only from Free Church and Angli-can ministers, but also in secret confidence fromJesuit priests, to the power of these writingsin their minds that I am warranted to ask thisservice for those I would indeed gift with the bestof my life, even the men who do desire to blessthe Christ-body, but who know not yet the powerof the spiritual doctrine for the service of the


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The Holy Christ vliving Church in the soul of man. Let me furtheradd that when in these writings I speak of theHoly Christ I imply in the word "Holy" not onlythe absolute purity from all quality but also theoneness of the Christ-essence, that for us It aloneis, being the only real, ultimate or abidinghuman essence; and that it is the unifying powerwho manifests in human reunions when the unityof soul of which we have spoken is effected. Forit is only in the realisation of this unity of soulin any gathering that any good can come untothose souls who constitute the unified body ofmediatorial service.

I have hitherto refrained, and that greatly tomy cost in many ways, from all the ordinarymethods of advertising my writings, trusting thedivine wisdom to bring them to those ready forthem. And I declare that my trust has beenwell met. If I suffer this book to pass in theordinary way entirely through my publishers'hands it is that the labour of personal corre-spondence entailed in my heretofore method ismore than I can fulfil. And I ask interestedreaders to think kindly of this hint before theywrite to me. For this favour I do pray. Yet isanyone, who needs and earnestly desires a spiritualservice, heartily invited to write me.N.B. I have used the word " Christ " where" Christos " might be considered to be the rightword i.e., for the immanent One, in deference tothe use of the well-known name of our holyIndweller. But the use of the Greek word is onlyprovisional and for the sake of differentiation.And as our doctrine unfolds itself towards theunity of concept the use of this term ceases.


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invitation to tbe jfeast ot tbe Dots(Brail

Come, let us break the Bread of Life in holylove together. Let us drink of the new wine ofjoy, the ever young life of our ageless Christ.Let us pass the cup of blessing unto one another.Let us be glad in the gladness of the salvationof God.O Bread of Heaven, thou art the very sweet-ness of God to our whole being. O Cup ofBlessing, in Thee is the great joy of our life.Thee we bless with the hands of the love of ourbody, our soul and our mind. For Thou hastfilled our whole nature with the joy of God'sstrength.And ye souls, well beloved, ye little ones ofthe mediatorial Body of the Christ, who still abideby the elements of matter, having need of theirservice, right heartily we invite you unto theFeast behind the veil of the senses.For ye will yet come, in the day of your

stronger vision, unto the spiritual discerning ofthe Body of the Lord of Life.And unto you there will be no more need ofthe symbols, nor any power of illusion, nor anybonds, either in the psychic or in the materialdegree of Life. For when your own Christ, eventhe Living Sun of your soul, illumines you, yewill not need the light of moon or candle.Know this to be your sure inheritance, faithfulsouls, well beloved of the Holy One. And so toyou again the Spirit calls :Come now unto the Feast of the Inner Light.Welcome, welcome are ye in the name of theKing of Joy. Freely, freely flows the wine.Fully, fully is shed the Divine Substance. Drink,drink and eat abundantly, souls well beloved ofthe Mother of Life, the Nourisher, the Comforterof your days.


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Wheresoever and whensoever any number ofpurified human souls, incarnate or decarnate,have come together, drawn thereto by the puredesire to receive and communicate good, beingunified in the Spirit of Love, and having thusbecome in very fact one soul in the will ofblessing, there arises spontaneously and is formedout of the manifold elements of their individualisedsoul-substances a body of divine service. This,in the degree of the human, is the mediatorialBody of Christ, the vessel of the service of Love,and it assumes a form that is visible to thespiritual seer who sees beyond the shadows of thephantomal into the inner realities of the degreeof Life. It appears as a chalice or cup, symbolof the service of Life in all degrees of manifesta-tion. Its body is composed of the substance ofall souls present, seen and unseen, who are inthe will of blessing, and the purity and nobility ofits body is that of the souls constituting it, andits efficiency for service is their efficiency. Andso its power is to draw unto it both from aboveand from beneath, and to transmute the waters ofPsyche flowing therein out of the lower into thewine of the new or higher life.For the pure soul who ever suffers for sins notits own is the cup or vessel for the mediating ofthe Power of Life, and it fulfils its functionaccording to its individuality. It receives of theLife-stream of the Highest as it is shed anddescends into our human degree, for it is worthyand fit for such a use. And in the long processof the transmutation of the nature elements of


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'Behold the Lamb of Cod 3the soul of blameless suffering, whereby it hasindeed become the cup of heavenly gold, out ofits heart has been pressed the wine of God's joyfor the gladdening of the heart of others, and outof its passional life-blood has been distilled thesweet drink of the children, and now its substanceis given as the food of the love of the Christ-Mother to the little ones.

Behold, ye who can see, and reverence in sucha soul the Lamb of God who suffers for and bearsaway the sin of the world. Behold in its blame-less and willing suffering the perpetual sacrificeof the living Christ. Behold in the transmutationof its elements a veritable transubstantiation ofthe body of man into the Body of God, i.e., ofthe human soul into the Divine soul who hascome unto the strength of vicarious suffering.To the seer, the inflow of the power of theHighest into its body often takes the appearanceof the descent of the Dove, symbol of the richnessin fruit-bearing of the principles of Life thusbeing communicated.

For, according to the law of the attraction ofaffinities, out of the higher is drawn unto it thefiner individualised essences or powers of themore fully evolved of the Body of Christ-servicewho can enter the soul of pure love, generated inthis unified body of goodwill and service as intoa congenial air.And their sweet life is shed within this body aswithin a cup.And this is the pouring forth of the fine sub-stance of the Christ, even the shedding of HisLife.And it is manifested in the soul as the GreatPeace of the Great Joy. For in it is the Christ-essence and power, rich in Divine fecundity. Andonly in virtue of it can the soul bear the fruit ofblessing, and only in the fruit-bearing of Christ


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4 The "Bread and the Winecan the soul taste of the Great Peace of the GreatJoy. For she is delivered of her burden of fruit,and there is peace. But the fruit-bearing comesbefore the peace. And the White Dove is therichness of the fruit-bearing Christ who is theLove of God. And once Its whiteness has blessedthe soul, she is no more barren. And as it abidesin the soul so is her fruit-bearing. " For withoutme ye can do nothing."Now the Christ substance thus poured forth isboth the Bread and the Wine. For it is theliving or spiritual manna, diffuse, and passing asa fine rain through the soul that is fed thereon.And it is the fine fruit of the true vine, even thewine of God, ever new and sweet to the soul,for it gladdens her with the joy of the undyingStrength. And it is the only food to satisfy thehuman need. For only by a spiritual substancecan the spiritual or deathless soul of man be fed.And sure as the individual souls of this body ofservice are so nourished so surely are the needyones incarnate or decarnate who never fail to bedrawn into such a service by the light of the Lovegenerated in the mediatorial body, nourished.And sure as the souls of the mediatorial bodydrink of the wine of Life so surely do thesethirsty and weary ones drink of the Cup of Bless-ing, and to them it is the very wine of salvation.For the chalice being formed of the manifoldelements of all souls present is a whole vessel, aunified body of human power, perfect in itschannelhood in which the lowliest soul will finda common substance and through which it maytherefore come unto the feast. And herein isfound the raison d'etre of all such gatherings infellowship. For our needy brother or sister whosits by us becomes a partaker of the commongood, and is blessed or healed in body or soulaccording to the power and faith generated in the


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Unending the "Beauty of Christ 5unified body of service. And this giving andreceiving of a good is according to the greatsocial law of the solidarity of the human kind.And its fulfilment is unfailing. For in it worksthe very Life of the Holy One of mankind.Now this is the mystery of the Holy Grail, andto those who so see and understand there is inthe present degree no further mystery nor anyneed of the service of the material symbol.(Yet many abide under this service, not for theirown need but for the sake of the little ones, andsuch a service is good. Yet is there a betterway of service for these faithful souls.) Neithercan they return unto the service of the symbol, forit is no longer unto them a word of Life. But itis only the Galahad within us, even the sinless orimmortal Christ of the new or clean soul, who seesthe hidden truth of the mystery. And until wehave become so in our innermost and our outer-most it will abide unto us a mystery.And when we have become so there will yetremain, for the joy of the future degrees of ourunfoldment, the unending beauty of the manifoldMystery of Life in the forthpouring of the Christ-essence through the service of the Holy Grail ofthese degrees. For this service is not onlythroughout all our planet's life, but also through-out all the universes of our Cosmos from theinnermost even unto the outermost.O human soul, unending is the beauty, inex-haustible is the fulness of the richness of thyChrist.


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PREFATORY to the hymns to the Christ in" Breaths of the Great Love's Song " (p. 63) arethese words : " They are sung for the comfort ofthe little ones to the Spirit of the Great LoveWhom we in Christendom name the Christ, butWho is named by other names among otherpeoples ; Who is the true Genius or Excellency ofthe human soul ; Who is the Best of our Ideal inall that to us is true and good and beautiful in artor science or any work of the human body or soulor mind ; Who is the creative principle therein ;and Whose is the power of the whole system ofour universe even in the realms of the mineral,vegetable, and animal as truly as in those of thesoul and the spirit of mankind."The word "Christos" (anointed) implies electionor choice because of supreme excellency.And in as much as the word is sweet-soundingboth in itself and to the ears of those who have

been born into its music, also of great power,ancient, and so generally used in its equivalentsamong the most advanced of Aryan peoples, as,e.g., in Krishna to the Hindu and as Kraosha tothe ancient Persian, that it has undoubtedlybecome consecrated by use into a great service ofblessing, I use it both as the Christos and as theChrist, this distinction being only nominal, andserving only to present the Holy One of ourblessedness under the double aspect of manifesta-tion as the macrocosmic, transcendent, GreatChristos of our spiritual universe, and as the

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The Power of the Name 7microcosmic, immanent, inborn or little Christof the human soul.For there is verily a power of blessing in thename, a very charm of life in its utterance, asmay be proved by the soothing or controlling its

frequent silent repetition brings ; and we knowthat very wonderful works of healing, whether itbe of obsession or of ordinary disease, can beaccomplished by the use of the holy name.But be it noted that in order to this use it mustbe a very word of power in the soul of the healer.To use it as a merely magical word would beonly to make of your attempt a foolishness andof yourself a derision even to the obsessing entity.It must be felt to be a name of the Holy Spirit inWhom work all the healing powers of our naturefor the blessing of man or beast or plant.Now the Christos is the Great Love, and theGreat Love is the Christos ; and it matters notwhether we speak of the Holy One of blessing asthe Christos or as the Great Love, inasmuch asour Holy One virtually transcends all our ideas

of personality.Long have I sought for a word whereby bestto name our Holy One, and no better word have

I found in our feeble tongue than that of theGreat Love, for in the realisation of the GreatLove we realise all that is of good in the humanIdeal.For where the Great Love is there is the wisdom

and the power. And the Christos reveals Itselfto every mind according to the degree of thatmind's unfoldment.To the child mind the Holy One can revealItself as a child, and can speak the word of truthin the tongue of the kindergarten.Thus the "Gentle Jesus " of our childhood's


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8 What the Name means to mehymn was the very word for us then. And in thisdegree of spiritual unfoldment rite and symbolhave their use.But to those who are no longer children inmind, and to whom kindergarten symbolism nolonger speaks, the Christos can reveal Itself in away that will satisfy the demands of their strongerintelligence.Thus will the Holy One continue to bless themwhile in no way calling for the sacrifice, orviolating the laws, of their pure reason, but even inthe fulfilling of these very laws will it bless them.And so I use the word " Christ " because Iknow of no better term to express the best orthe highest that I can conceive as the illuminatingDivinity of our human genius, and because it isthe word of power to my soul. But if in the nameof Jesus Christ (or in any other holy name) youfind your full realisation of the divine power inmankind, then let the use of that name serve you,as indeed it well may.Many good souls do I know who cannot hearthis sacred name but with a certain repugnance.Nor can we wonder at them when we think of allthe evil whereby the human kind has beentormented in this holy name. But none the lessthe name belongs to these pure ones, and not tothose who have falsely appropriated and wrong-fully used it.For the soul whose life is only Love the Christis a word of realisation of all that is sweetestand best in its Ideal, as it brings into the degreeof human apprehension something of the sub-stance of what in Itself is necessarily hid fromand utterly incomprehensible to us.

Need I say that I approach this, the highestand most momentous theme of contemplation for


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The Way of living doctrine 9the human soul, in the spirit of the deepestreverence. Indeed, when of late years I havefelt constrained to speak of it before the public,I have hardly been able to do so lest any un-warranted word or any imperfectly uttered ideamight convey a false impression to the sensitivehuman soul of this, to her, the greatest truth shemay receive.But there are times of clear-seeing, feeling, orperceiving of holy Truth ; and we know whenthese times are. They can only be when all isquiet in the soul, and when the voice of God alonespeaks there.And when these times of clear-seeing, or feel-ing, or perceiving of Truth have come, I amsatisfied that what is then given is of God, is aspure light as can shine through my soul, and canbe safely given to my fellows as a word of livingdoctrine.And it is only because, through many years ofthe deepest and sweetest and most enrichingexperiences of these holy intuitions through mysoul when in truth she is at her best of powerto receive, note, and communicate faithfully tomy mind of the word of the pure Spirit, I havebeen assured and reassured to the full satisfactionof my quietest and keenest judgment that a deeptruth, unutterably precious to the human mindhas been so well proved to me, and so broughtinto my realisation that I cannot but give it asmy best gift unto her whom I would serve well,that I now venture to utter a little of what Ifeel to be of the Truth on this great and holydoctrine.

For there is only one way of receiving of thepure doctrine of the Christhood, and that is bylearning only from the holy or Christ-Spirit as itspeaks in and through the new or clean soul. Andthey who have ears to hear will hear the Word of


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io The living Word speaks to-dayliving knowledge Who is even now, as of old,speaking in the soul of the race.

But be it noted that the present-day utteranceof the Word is not dependent on the authority ofany records of past utterances, though it gladlyjoins hands with them in the good fellowship ofsuccession so far as the love of and loyalty tothe fuller light will permit. And even as the sonthough independent of the father yet joys in thesuccession, so do we joy in our goodly heritageof past illuminations, gratefully recognising allwe owe to them. Yet is the needful illuminationever in the present; and in the present day wemust look for it if we would find it. For it isthe same Word who speaks yesterday, to-day,and for ever. And the soul of man is the book ofGod, and there we must seek the Word, and notin any ancient manuscript. Therefore

we neednot to build, and we shall not build our doctrineon any records of the alleged utterances of anymaster-builder, if in very truth we can hear theWord speaking in our soul. This I can well say,for my love and reverence of our scriptures Ihave often made known (" Song of the Cross,"P. III.). I ask my spiritual reader if it is notout of the blind and truly materialistic attitude ofthe many exegesists of the past, and their slavishbondage to the letter or story of events that havearisen the manifold controversies with theirattendant woes unutterable.

But if we abide by the mystical interpretation,and be guided by the light of the Holy Spirit inthe new or clean soul, we shall never go astray.True, the doctrine of the Christ implied in these

intuitions differs vastly from the so-called evan-gelical doctrine of the churches, yet it is theancient, the classic, the truly catholic andevangelical.And not only must it appeal to and satisfy the


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This is the ancient doctrine uintelligent and spiritual mind of our day, but itis strictly in accord with the profoundest utter-ances of our Scriptures on the great theme.And even as an expression of the great humansoul it is not new. For it is indeed the mysticdoctrine, and has had its prophet, uttering itaccording to his individual light, in everyillumined soul who has been used to speak theliving Word, whatever may have been the tonguein which he spoke. Our Old Testament, in itsmany expressions of the divine Compassion wholoves to pass by transgression, caring only forthe oblation of a broken and a contrite heart, isreplete with the beauty of this Great Love wholoveth all. Indeed there is a grandeur of theChrist ideal in these ancient inspirations unsur-passed in any Scriptures I know.Nor will the truly spiritual soul of any Christian,however unlettered he may be, be hurt by anyword of this doctrine. It will only be blessed by

it. This I do most solemnly vouch for, becauseI know that in these intuitions are latent theelements of the food of the spiritual soul. Yetare they potent in the same degree with theelements of death to the old selfhood or earthlysoul who would receive them.And if there is anything, dear reader, in yoursoul that is hurt by their power, then thank Godthat it is so hurt ; and pray that it may bewounded unto the death. As your soul's healerI would counsel you to receive more of these dis-solving elements, and to receive them gladly ; forit is not the living Christ in you who is hurt, butthe old opinionative selfhood who is hurt; and hebelongs to death.

3-In this doctrine of the living Christ nothingthat is of any good to the human soul is taken


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ii The tree Is known by her fruitaway; but all that is of good under the usualinterpretation is re-found in a clearer light andwith a fuller significance. Of this more later on.I cannot tell what it has been to me to have had,through this pure perception of the Christ in thesoul, restored far more than ' ' all the goodmethought that I had lost " in the cruel tearingaway from me of my childhood's faith. The joyof it has more than counterbalanced the greatdistress I passed through during the long periodof devastation. But without the distress therecould not be the joy.To speak personally, for I owe it to my readerto do so, this illuminating principle has given tome the adoring love and the blessedness of thislove of the Christ, and that in a way in which Icould never have received it under the churchlyinterpretation.Since I have thus known the Christ after thespirit and not after the flesh, I have not onceknown the failure of the holy Power in me tobless a body, to cheer a soul, to strengthen intrial, and to enable to overcome in temptation.When there has been such failure it is becausethe Power of the living Christ, even the joy-bringing, the mighty Love, is not active in mysoul. For the measure of our joy is accordingto the power of the Love we can embody. Andthe power and facility of embodiment is accordingto the development of the spiritual or Christ soulin us. And there is no limit in the degrees ofthis unfoldment, and no end to the joy of theLove. Indeed, so great at times is the realisationof the Love that I must restrain the stream offeeling lest it should be too much for the strengthof my heart.Now, surely the tree is known by her fruit.And if we can look into our soul quietly, and com-muning with her in pure truth, find that our mode


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How may We name the Holy One 13of apprehension has thus borne us blessing andonly blessing, whereby we have been enabled tobless others, then may we be sure that it is ofGod.

Fain were I to use a pronoun that would conveysomewhat of even my very feeble apprehension ofthe essence of the Holy One. But we have touse our very poor English tongue, and even speakof the One who is above all sex-differentiation as" He." I use this pronoun as seldom as possible,preferring to use even " It " or the term " TheHoly One." Yet is this in no way an efficientterm. For the One whom we are naming " theChristos," "the Holy One," is really unnameable,Whom to seek to describe is almost a profanity.Unutterable is the Holy Essence, and who canutter the unutterable? When the inspired soul ismost fully conscious of the realisation of the HolyOne in the great joy of the illumining inflow, itbows in silence. It can utter no sound. And thisbowing in silence is the only mode of deep utter-ance, and is therefore the best word.Yet may we be permitted, because of ourfeebleness, to speak of the Holy One as the GreatSun of the Great Love in Whom is all the potencyof our life, from Whom proceed for the humankind all light and warmth, all joy and blessed-

ness, and without Whom there could indeed beno life for the soul or body of man.Or we may thus speak of the Holy One as theGreat or Cosmic Man-woman, the perfection orIdeal of mankind, Whose work is to bring forthin our race many sons and daughters of his kind ;ay, to bring every human soul unto the birth ofhis own principle of divine Sun-life.Thus do we follow upon the light given us


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i 4 The Cosmic Christthrough our highly-inspired brother, EmmanuelSwedenborg, while happily we have learnedthrough

him to deny the crudities of the mediaevalinterpretation, which, we must confess, do bedimhis fair and stupendous vision of the HeavenlyOne.

May we then venture to say that the Christosis the One Sun of the human spiritual universe,solar and cosmic, the Sun both of this outersystem appreciable to our powers of comprehen-sion and of which the visible sun is but theexternal image, and the Sun of the vast immensity,invisible to our eyes, even the Great Supra-mundane system or Deep Heaven of humanityinto the heights of which the eye of not even thestrongest spiritual seer among men has yet pene-trated, the Holy Sun in Whose Body there isverily what we may call brain and heart, arteryand lung, vein and nerve, through Whose activitythere is ever radiated all the life-essences thatcirculate through and vivify the whole inner andouter, spiritual and physical planetary system, andWhose substance is in no way alien to ours, butis verily the same, even bone of our bone andflesh of our flesh?May we venture to say that in the forth-

breathing or radiation of the Inner or SpiritualSun there is the continuous forth-giving of thisHoly Substance of the Logos, known as theprocess of creation, both in the redemptivemerging of the Christ life in the material degreeof manifestation (a labour truly of pain and aperpetual crucifixion) and in the ever-living flowof the Holy Substance in that most plastic andhighly tenuous degree, which, though invisible toour eyes, is yet vastly more dense in reality andof incalculably more inherent power, even in the


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Christ the first-born of the Creation tjdegree of what we must name "the Deep of God'sPower ' ' ? May we say that it is indeed theBreath of our Christos which so fills this Deepthat there cannot be one point of emptiness in itsvastness? I feel that we depart not from thepath of truth, and that we only bow in love andreverence before the Spirit of the Holy One Whois the Truth when we venture so to suggest.

6.

The Great or cosmic Christ doctrine, as pre-sented even in its most universal application inour Scriptures, has suffered from the unjust andunwarranted appropriation of its significance bythe human mind to the human kind.Thus has the Christos come to be thought ofas only a glorified man, instead of, as is the holytruth, the good Spirit of the whole of the earth-soul in all her elements or parts and theiractivities.For even in these Scriptures our Christ is

spoken of as the first-born or best of everycreature, unto Whose perfect manifestation in thecreature the whole creation groans and travailsin one labour.

Every soul, who is so far evolved spiritually asto realise her kinship with every creature of thisearth, thus loving them in the all-embracing love,will bear me out when I affirm that the Idea ofour Christos cannot come short of this planetaryuniversality.We may truly speak of the lowlier orders ofour creation as the outer garmentings of the HolyOne, provided we realise that these outergarmentings are of the living Body, permeatedby and quick in the divine essence to a degreecorresponding to their place in the order oforganic development.

In" all the visions of the great seers of our


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1 6 The Great Warmth of LoV*Bible, wherein the living creatures or beasts fulfiltheir part, this most beautiful and utterly satisfy-ing truth is as truly implied as it is clearly utteredby Krishna in the Bagavad Gita. And I havebeen privileged to know more than one modernseer of spiritual things whose testimony to theseholy realities of the Great Christ-body is assatisfying and as pure as the word of any of theilluminati of the past ages. (See Ps. 148.)

Surely it must be a sweet thought for the loversand defenders of the lowlier creation that inserving these animal bodies, and through thesebodies their souls, in holy love, they are indeedserving the Christos, the Holy Mother of ourcosmos, through whom we all are, and in whomwe all, as creations of her breath, come and gothroughout our manifold lives.

The Christos, blessed be the name, is indeedthe Holy Spirit of all our planet's physical, aswell as of her psychic and spiritual good.

It is the Power of life or blessing that is nowimmanent in the soil and air and water, and in allthe elements of our earth's living body. It isthe Great Warmth of Love whom we speak of asthe Over-soul, who ever broods over our worldand ever travails in the labour and anguish of hersoul, bringing forth the higher from the lower,the finer from the grosser, through a process ofperfect economy wherein no pain is lost, nor anysweat nor any tear is shed in vain, and whomanifests from time to time as need and oppor-tunity arise in the greater or riper souls of menand women who become sons or daughters ofGod. The Christos is the Creative Power work-ing in these elements of our earth, ever bringingforth through the soul of nature order out of*what


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The Travail of the Christ Soul 17appears to be chaos, and beauty out of what wedeem the foul or ugly.And so we may contemplate the Holy One asthe Father-Mother Love of our planet ; for it hasin it the power of life, bringing forth ever ofIts kind.But who can speak of the travail of the soul ofthe Christos in this work of the long ages ?

Surely no human word can utter it, nor tell ofthe work of the Redeeming Power. For thesinless One groans, as it were, in the labour andanguish of the great soul of mankind as it slowlyevolves out of the lower degrees of animality.For it is the very life-principle and consciousnessof the Holy One who is now labouring for birthin the great human soul even as it has labouredthrough the millenniums of the periods of the racesthat have arisen out of one another in the ages ofour earth's life.And thus the Cosmic Christos, the Heavenly orIdeal Man-Woman, has travailed and travails inthe labours of the individualising Christ. And soit will continue to labour until in the fulness oftime "The Son of the Man," or, as we wouldsay now, the perfect offspring of the heavenlyMan-woman comes to be realised as incarnate inmankind.For in and through the aforesaid labouring the

perfect Christ-organism is formed in the individualsoul, a small or microcosmic sun so to speak,which corresponds in every way with the Christos,the Macrocosmic or Universal Sun.Not one ion of its organism is ever wanting,and it functions when in health in all its parts.And this is now the quickened or energised

generator of energy in our soul, and it has thepower to quicken unto the generation of energythe Christ-principle hid in other souls.And in order to be renewed in the power ofc


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1 8 Our Woman the LoVer of Christquickening we have thus imparted to other soulsall we have to do is to turn to the Soul Universal,and thus allow the Christ in us to draw unto itfrom the inexhaustible fulness of the Christos thatwhich can alone restore our soul.Of this more will be said further on.For the Christ is the very vitality of the soul,

the one living principle in the individual con-sciousness.There is nothing the inner man so desires asthis life-principle ; and as they in whom it is trulymanifested can indeed aver out of their abundant

experience, there is nothing that is more keenlysought after by all souls. I say this verydeliberately, for I know it to be the simple truthas testified to me by many of the best of our kind.The fact is that the human soul must have thisholy Thing. Her quest for it corresponds in thespiritual degree with the demand of the heart forlove in the physical degree. She knows so wellthat without it she cannot live.

Swift, swift and keen, ay, more swift and keenthan the flair of any fine-nosed hound is she toperceive it. And soon as she does perceive it,she, as it were, throws herself into its arms inthe utter abandonment of the old and barren self-hood. Thus does the woman in us ever followthe Christ wheresoever He goes. And whetherit be hid in the story of the Marys of Palestine,following Jesus Christ, or the Gopees of Brinda-ban abandoning themselves, their husbands andchildren for the ever young Krishna, the teachingis the same. The heart must have the greatestand sweetest love possible to it, and the soul musthave her very Best, even her Holy Christos.The great difficulty such finely wrought sensi-tives of the living Christ have often to face ishow to continue to fulfil in this now highly evolvednerve body the very full and sometimes very


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Christ the Life Principle 19trying service such a quest imposes on them.But of this I reserve a fuller word on the Serviceof Souls. For the Christ in us does draw allsouls unto It. And if all souls are not so drawnwe may be sure that our Christ either has notbeen born in us or has not yet come unto thewholeness of Its perfect life.

8.

And surely it has been known to all trulycatholic illuminati of the ages, and is a sweetknowledge to us, that the Holy Christos is thelife principle of the great spiritual body ofhumanity, diffused throughout and manifestingtherein, according to the periods, seasons, orcycles of its growth through the night and day,the ebb and flow of its process of steadyunfoldment.And there is not one member of this body, howlow soever it be in mental or spiritual degree ofprogression, that is not, even to this degree, aspiritual power in this great Christ-Body.Need I say that in this relationship thedecarnate and incarnate are as one; and thatsure as every human soul we meet in the fleshis, in its very, its innermost, its only real or un-dying essence of the Christ-Body, so surely doesevery soul who has gone from us into the unseenbelong to the One or Holy Body, and is in It ; ay,even though that soul may be suffering the painsof what we know to be the hell-state of the soul.For these pains kill not the very, the innermost,the only real or undying essence, but only cleanse

it from garmentings or clinging defilements whichmust be consumed of the fire of the pure Spirit;for such is their stuff.Where there is a human soul there is a facultyof the Holy Body. Thus all "our dead" are indeed


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20 The Christ Melodyin Christ.; And as a spiritual essence they cannever be out of the substance of the Holy One.For not one of His members can be lost.

9-To utter the fulness of this conception of the

Christos is not possible, and who would attemptthe impossible? May we talk together for a littleof the utterance of the Holy Word as the note ofBeauty in sound ; and even though we appear towander afield, yet it is in the field where bloomthe finest flowers of the Christ-beauty and wheresing the purest notes of the Christ-melody ; for ofa truth it is by music, in song or poetic word,that the sweet aroma of the Christ substance isbest communicated? And so it is that all thehymns of the prophets and poets of God in alltongues, and notably, I think, in the HebrewPsalms given under the name of Isaiah, sing thisGreat Beauty. And this is equally so of theinspired creations of all truly spiritual composersof music, among whom our Beethoven may stillbe honoured as one of the finest and greatestbecause of the power of blessing in his music.For, I repeat, all divine music, as indeed all inscience and art that utters the soul of the good,the true and the beautiful, is uttering of thisunutterable Christ-soul. Yet is there in musicthe finest or highest utterance of the Christ-soul.Therefore it is well to speak of it now. I speakhere of music as a deep, spiritual creation, thevery holy thing born in the soul. And I use theword " divine " in its highest significance. Fornot all music is so divine, and thus a power ofblessing or healing. And though all music isgood in its own degree, yet is it a good relativeonly to those in its degree. The music-genius isever in quality according to the soul throughwhom it speaks. There is music that is elemental


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The Holy Note in Sound *ior crude, and not spiritual nor beautiful. It isunwholesome, and breathes not life. It can hurt,degrade, enslave or enfeeble. There is also musicthat excites and wearies, strains and exhausts thenerve-body. Such music is of man and not ofGod, of the labour and ferment of the humanmind and not of the inspiration of the HolyChristos. The latter arises as the supreme wordof the Holy One in the soul. For the note ofmelody comes after the stress and storm ofemotion, even as spiritual and mental harmonycome after the labour and anguish of mind andsoul. And the music of healing or blessing issuch as comes through a soul that has attainedunto the unity or harmony of the Holy Child, ourever-young Christ. The holy note, i.e., the soundof perfect harmony, which in the fulness of timeawakens within the soul, is the finest and ultimateword of the Holy Spirit of Blessing, even ourChrist, as it evolves a new creation within us.

It is the pure word of pure doctrine. It is theliving Logos, differentiated or individualised in,and according to, our personal soul. It is thesweet sound of the Christ child who ceases neverto utter in us its own joyous deathlessness. Thusit is the greatest potency that can become mani-fest in us, and is therefore the finest or mosteffective power we can use for the blessing orhealing of a soul. And even as a power for ourown blessing the mirthful melody which sings inus and gladdens us, and makes us laugh with thejoy of God, is the word of the laughter of our ownever young and ageless Christ.For the Christ of the soul manifests in andthrough the subconscious selfhood, that abyss ofour being, hidden deep from the superficial andevanescent mentality, where is the abiding of allour power, where dwells our inborn divinity.In this deep it creates, out of this deep it


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*x The Power of Songbrings forth our inspiration and all our strength.

It emerges as a power of song, a note of puremelody, a thought or feeling of perfect form.And this is the word of the hidden Christ of thehidden soul. _Hence it is that pure and deeply inspired melody ;has the power of healing in it.And here I again must speak from my ex-perience. I have often found that the melodieswhich have thus arisen within me have, even afteryears, still the power in them to comfort orstrengthen me. For they are the word of my^own Christ, my Healer, to me.

Ay, and the sorrow-laden harmony that laboursheavily through its various phases is indeed anuttering of the same Christ-soul as it travailsthrough and in the manifold degrees of oursuffering kind.Often have I been asked why, in the deepestmusic of the soul, there is so sad a note, and Iwould say here that I feel that in it the one, orHoly Christ-soul is a-labouring in our bonds ofhuman limitations, and is uttering to us the greattruth, if we can but hear it, that in the self-held orpersonal affections there is of need a sadnessarising from the realisation of these limitations,and of their sure issue in the soul devoted tothem in such deboires as ennui or jealousy, or inthe toute lasse, tout passe, tout casse of death.Only the music that is born in and of the

realisation and power of the one or self-trans-cending Love, even the whole Christ in the soul, ~-has no note of sadness in it. For in it sings theOne who never grows weary, decays, or dies.And it blesses ever, and only blesses. It redeemsthe weary soul out of all her infirmity. It setsher free from the powers of the merely psychicor unabiding realms that had long time made herto serve in their dark and narrow prison-house


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24 Christ the Genius of all Healthand look for it to join with them in the play oftheir young life.

But the Christ is the good genius of the healthof our flesh as well as of our mind, who speaksand ever speaks in us, sometimes as a longing,sometimes as an all-impelling desire. And if wecan only hear or recognise and obey His voicewe shall surely be well guided in all that belongsto our physical well-being. For this is the veryword of God in our flesh who tells us what weshould eat and drink, and what we should avoidas food, who tells us where we should live andwhere we should do our work best. And it is ourmost serious duty to give unto the Christ of ourflesh such conditions of health as we can.

But many, because of the confusion of theirsoul, cannot hear the voice, and many cannotdistinguish it from the cryings of their vitiatedappetites, and many who both hear and acknow-ledge it cannot, because of the circumstances andconditions of their social bondage, over whichthey have no control, obey it as they would.And so the social body suffers and the soulgrows weary, and the only ray of light that canpenetrate our dark apprehension of this great woeis that even out of this long and weary sufferingof the flesh, the Christ of the soul, the agelessChild will yet arise the sweeter, the purer, thetenderer in beauty for this long and weary suffer-ing in the bondage of our social misery. So itis, I verily believe, for all in whom the undyingChild has come to birth. But what of those whoare verily crushed into utter ineptitude throughthe continuous load of oppression ? Are not theyretarded in their spiritual growth? And are notwe who tolerate such a woeful state of society thevery sinners against this Body of our Lord ? But


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The Great "Beauty 25I dare not, because of her intense pain thereon,engage my soul further at this time on this darktheme. Yet even here is no suffering in vain.

Instead of attempting to utter now my feebleapprehension of this great Cosmic Soul of Beauty,I would suggest to those of my readers who wouldcare to go with me into this fair field that theyread the twelve hymns to the Christ in the" Breaths of the Great Love's Song," where avery faint aroma of my deepest realisation of thisCosmic Beauty may be felt. Thus shall I bespared the labour of repetition.In these Hymns our Christos is the FragrantSpirit whose Breath is in all the good breaths ofnature, the joyous Spirit who is the Light of oursoul at all times, the All-indwelling in whom isno near, no far, the All-pervading One from whomwe cannot fall, the Holy Mother Love who islowlier than us all, the Overshadowing One, theBearer of Ageless Youth, the Deathless Spirit, theSoul of Life, the Will of Health, the neverchanging Blessedness, the Ocean of Love.Also in the Song of the Cross, under thetitle of The Selfless Love, I sing of the Christne'er to be Lost, even the Great Love. Butpermit me to declare most solemnly that all thisis but as the feeble babbling of a child in theeffort of my soul to utter what she feels of this^Great Beauty. For our Christos is in all that \blesses ; and until we hear the Holy One even inthe song of the thrush or in the voice of thewinds and the waters we have not found our all-satisfying Christ. And unto the soul who socomes into the full realisation of the Christ asthe Great Love, the Holy One becomes "veryGod of very God," and its word of recognition isin this wise : " My own sweet and blessed Christ,


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26 The 'Body of the Holy OneI love Thee with all my soul and my strength. Thouart more to me than words can tell. Thou artmy one Good, my only God. Thou art the greatBeauty of my soul. Thou art the Alpha andOmega of my whole being. Thou art my wholeBlessing. Thy sweetness is the very sweetnessof life. Be so sweet in me, O thou sweetness ofGod's Love, that I shall never fail to sweetenevery soul into whom I enter."

Indeed, indeed, soul of man, know well thatonce you have found your Christ, your

Christ hasbecome the keynote of the one song of your wholelife. And only to the sound of that holy notecan you ever henceforth awaken into enthusiasm.No theme that does not move in some way onor around that holy note will be of any vitalinterest to you. But, but, when you realise inyour degree what the substance and body of theHoly One really is, you will feel that there is nowork of blessing, visible or invisible, of man orbeast or plant or stone, that does not vitallyconcern you.

And now to speak a little more fully, andaccording to promise, of the relationship of theindividualised or little Christ of the soul to theChristos of our spiritual Cosmos, we would firstrefer our readers to the word in this book on theGenesis and Growth of the Christ in the Soul,and then say that the doctrine of the CosmicChrist, far from denying that of the humanisedor microcosmic Christ, really implies it. The oneis the necessary correspondent of the other. TheChrist immanent could not be without the Christtranscendent. While they are dual in manifesta-tion, they are one in essence, and cannot be trulyapprehended but as one. Yet to our finite seeingthey are as two aspects of the Holy One. But,


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/ am Thou and Thou art I 27to the soul who once feels It as It is, these modesof apprehension so live in the Essence that itcan only say " I am Thou, and Thou art I. " Andthere is no longer in contradistinction innermostor outermost, hidden within or transcending theconsciousness, but the never failing, never passingsense of the whole Presence of the Holy One ofBlessing, the Christ of our Cosmos.Yet even the jouissance of this abiding sensewill not make us feel that all we need is withinus. We shall still stretch forth the hands of ouraspiration towards that which is highest, and wemust continue to look unto our Holy One if wewould be saved from the power of the lowerdegrees of our selfhood. Our forefathers erredin dwelling too much on the transcendent. Andwe, having tasted the sweetness and use of thedoctrine of the immanent, have been carried awayto opposite error, and have only seen theimmanent ; so I must deny the wholeness of muchof the more advanced teaching of our day onthis theme. Well do I know the power of truthcontained in the teaching that our salvation must|\be from within. The all-importance of our mentalattitude towards the details of our living e.g.,that we can, if we will, really make of our liveswhat we will cannot be over-estimated. But weshould not allow the realisation of this great truthto close our vision to the whole truth, that thereis a continuous influx of life from that which ishigher than we. And so, to say that the Christis the whole of humanity incarnate and decarnateis a truth. But it is not the whole truth. Norcan it as an ideal continue to satisfy the humansoul. The time will come when the most ardentlover of our kind will find the need for theunifying consciousness, and will realise thatwithin and around this body of humanity theremust be the indwelling, all-embracing One. And


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z8 The Greater and the Lesser Sunthis is our Holy One, the immanent, the trans-cendent Christ, the one all-blessing Power of ourCosmos individual and universal.

14.While the truth of the doctrine of the Cosmic

Christ cannot depend on any facts of our world'shistory, and would not be invalidated were itproved e.g. , that Jesus Christ never lived onearth yet it denies not the story of the blessedlife, but gladly receives it as a beautiful demon-stration of what should be expected from theoperation of its principles in the human soul.And that this must be so in the very nature ofthings is evidenced not only by the spiritualintuitions of the soul, but even by the findings ofvery sure, physical science, which in these dayshas demonstrated the very remarkable corre-spondence between the atom or molecule ofphysical matter as composed of electrons positiveand negative and our solar system, wherein therelationships of the electrons within the atom toone another and to the atom correspond roughlyto the relationships of the planets to one anotherand to the solar system. But it is an ancientdoctrine that each atom is a microcosmic universeor solar system, and that size or immensity inspace, and length or vastness in time are relativeto consciousness. I speak not as a physicist, forI am not qualified even to state this theory interms of physical science, yet I do feel that wehave the Light of the reason of things in ourminds when we venture to infer by analogy thateven as in the physical degree the solar systemthus corresponds with the atomic system, so inthe spiritual degree the system of the Great Sun,our Christos, corresponds to the system of thelesser Sun, our inborn Christ. Yet is the spiritualdoctrine not really an inference. This welcome


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Christ, the human Unity of PoWer 29testimony of science comes to us not as a surprise,but as what we would have expected accordingto the nature of things, and what we had longfelt to be.

The Christ who is thus formed in the soul isthe whole human Unity of power, the perfectnew Adam, and is, in a sex-transcending sense,male and female. For want of a better word Ihave spoken of It as the microcosmic Man-woman, but we do so under protest, as we carenot for the expression. It is the whole one whohas now become in you and me after the orderof the cosmic Man-woman of the heavens ofmankind, even our Christos. And thus in ourChrist we are potent to quicken souls, and tobring forth offspring. And as the children of theChristos are beyond sex, being pure Spirit, so theoffspring of the whole Christ in the soul arebeyond the limitations of sex, and are thereforedeathless, even as their great Prototype andGenerator is the Deathless One.And many, many are the offspring of the Christ ^in the soul ; and they never return unto the waysof the olden selfhood.They may appear to be drawn back to theformer degrees of their psyche. But it is only

for a time and for a service, or to gather a neededpsychic stuff and according to the great law ofebb and flow in life's processes. They can nevermake their abiding there. This is the progressionof the One Life in its deathless seed. The lawis unfailing ; and I give the word as a sure comfortto any weary or feeble soul.Thus is the Christ the Life-Bearer in each ofus. This is what is spoken of as the Divinefeminine in man as well as in woman. For inthe man as truly as in the woman our Christ-


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30 Womanhood the fruit-bearing' woman brings to the birth the spiritual soul inmany. And in Christ we are neither male norfemale, but a whole human soul wanting innothing. But it is only the sex-transcendinglove-principle, even the power of the Holy Spiritin us who can bear this sinless or deathlessoffspring.And we honour our womanhood the fruit- \bearing, by naming It the divine feminine, andaffirming most solemnly that It is none other than /the motherhood power in God's essence.And this motherhood or Christ principle isimmanent in every human soul, though in themany it has not yet come unto the great joy of itsholy service, even the power of fruit-bearing.Yet, unto this sweet consummation do all herlabours and agonies tend. For the human soulcan no more be satisfied with the bringing forthof many children of the flesh or of the intellect,than she can be with the attaining of all worldlyhonour. She can only be satisfied in bearing thegood fruit of Life in other souls through theChrist in her. She must, she must, if she would

I live, bring forth these children of the deathlessdegree.And so the cry of the Christ-woman in us tothe Power of the Holy Christos is : "I am as Thy

spouse. Let me bear thy fruit, or I die."For, as the Christos is the Best and Highestto the human soul, she can and does call on It

for its descent into her as a cleansing, renewingand fertilising or enrichening power. And theHoly One comes and blesses her. And the bless-ing never fails nor wearies. Much would I sayon this great mystery which I may not say here.But the beauty is unending. And well may theancient prophet thus exhort the suffering Christ-soul of his day : Sing, O barren, thou that didstnot bear ; break forth into singing thou that didst


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We can bless our Holy One 3 1not travail with child ; for more are the childrenof the desolate than of the married wife, saiththy Holy One. And there is never anguish norbitterness to the soul who bears this sinlessoffspring.For they are of the one or holy Christ-seedwherein are not found any of the elements ofdeath. No disintegrating principle workstherein ; for they are of a whole substance, andthe sense of separateness can never come intotheir body of thought.They are the perfect fruit in the spiritualdegree of the wholeness of Christ, manifesting inand through an organism that now correspondsto the living whole. Therefore there is no discordnor any waste of power. But there is the greatjoy of the great peace of the Great Love. Andthis is the only great Life for us ; for in it is thesweetness of service, even the joy of giving cheeror blessing to every soul.Now we can and will give, as the firstfruits ofthis enrichening, our blessing unto the Holy One.We can say : O Christ, I bless Thee with the wholelove of my soul. I bless Thee with all the powerof my heart and mind. And sure as we do, sosurely does the Holy One receive the tribute ofour love. No word shall I speak of the modes ofthe soul's apprehension of this great fact. Itsjoy we leave to the sweet realisation of those whocannot but bless the Great Love by the gift oftheir best blessing. But I counsel those whowould know the joy unutterable of the power ofthe indwelling Christ to tell often their love tothe Holy One, to utter often their blessing of theGreat Lover of the creation. And they will knowthe sweetness of the response. For to the loverthe Christ is the one Lover. And there is no endto the blessing of the Holy One.The Christ transcendent nourishes the Christ


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3 2 /foW the Holy One nourishes our Christof the soul by influx of power, (i) through all theagencies of good around us in the visible world.When any blessing comes to us through anyhuman or indeed any planetary agency^ it is thenourishing of the Good Mother of our kind, evenour Christos ; and we should receive it as such inreverence, adoration and love.

(2) Through the great host of God in the unseen,those ministering spirits who serve the heirs ofChrist's salvation, i.e., all souls, and that mostfrequently and most effectively when we are noteven aware of their service. They do infuse thesweet and subtle essences of the Christ-substanceinto our soul. They do this day and night, inour sleeping and in our waking ; and we arenourished thereby. Never do they cease fromthis sweet service, for it is their love work. Andthey no more weary in the continuous fulfilmentof this sacred service than do the winds andwaters weary in their song. But I dare not giverein here, otherwise when would my courserweary of going? Indeed, indeed, I have reasonto believe that were I to give to my Fiery Onefull course here, he would very speedily bear meout of this earth-body. And it is not yet full time.

16.The Christ of the soul of man is the one essence

of the true consciousness of the whole man ; notonly the consciousness of being conscious, or themental realisation that I am I, but the one verysweet Light of the whole body and soul and mind,the great and utter radiance of a shadowlesspurity.And the soul in whom dwells this Light willnot be subject to illusion (though it may for somegood reason serve in Maya, yet it does so know-ingly and willingly) ; for it knows the eternalReality, and it sees the One Thing as it is,


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Christ, the Divinity of oar Sout 33discerning it even amid the passing show of thephenomena in which it fulfils its service.

Only let the holy Flame have a pure oil, orsoul-substance, in which to burn, and the soulthus illumined will know all things. For the Lightshines from its hidden centre forth through theinnermost even unto its outermost degrees. And,inasmuch as it is a microcosm, all that is of ouruniverse is there represented microcosmically.And, when the sweet and holy Christ-light shinesfrom within its deepest, the heights and deepsand darknesses of its hidden parts are so illuminedthat, in its degree, it enters into the realisationof the God-consciousness, and it can say then :I know all things.

The Christ of the soul of man is the principleof divinity in the soul. And as truly as we liveaccording to this holy Ideal, as truly as we judgeof our living in the light of this Ideal, so surelyshall we fall into no sin. And as truly as wesinners turn from the desires of the lower degreeand give our love and all the power of our soulunto the aspiring towards this holy Ideal, sosurely shall we be delivered from our sin andsaved from the burden of its guilt.For the Holy Light illumines the deeps of thesoul, giving it to see the Truth hid within thesedeeps, thus bringing into its new realisation allits good. And no soul who thus hears, sees, orfeels this living Truth can ever wilfully yield theirChrist a sacrifice to the elements of their old,unclean selfhood either in thought or word ordeed. Often has it come to me as with the shockof a sudden, a stunning blow, to perceive howutterly insensitive some good souls are to the realessence of the Great or Christ Love. I knowthose who have been most devout, as we say,

D


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34 Christ the Key of oar HeaVenfrom their child days, but in whom the power ofthe Great Love has not yet made itself known.For they are apparently void of the "unselfing"love of the neighbour. Yet do these good soulsonly need the awakening of the Christ who willgive them the Life and the Light of the soul, andthey will love the neighbour more than self.For if only the soul sees itself in the light ofthe Holy One who is its highest and best andtrue Self, even the indwelling Christ, no one ofits most cherished unworthinesses will pass un-noted or uncondemned. Verily no. For if onceit has seen the One who is the Light of the GreatLove, never, never can it surrender its Holy Oneunto its evil genius. Never indeed. Thus theChrist becomes the one Power to save us fromthe dominion of our lower degrees. And it is onlyby calling on our Holy One by pure thought oraspiration towards the Ideal, or by the actualvoice of the soul, that we can receive of the powerof our Highest to overcome the now unworthyfamiliars of our olden home, these most subtleand insidious enemies of our new and only good.Now the realisation of this power of the Indwelleris to be able to say at all times : I can do allgood through my own Christ. And surely as werealise this so surely shall we be able to do allwe will to do.

18.For the only key to open to us our Heaven is

in the realisation of this Holy Ideal, even thePerfect Love, wherein we love every soul. Andnot until we have received this key can we enterour Heaven of blessed life. We know this to betrue from our manifold and unfailing experiences.For has it not been thus and always that, untilwe have surrendered our whole nature to the One


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Christ oar Liberator 35Love that is, until we know and feel that thereis no soul whom we do not love, or whom wewould not bless that we cannot make any soulsubservient to our will, using it for the attainmentof our ends, how noble soever they may be, butrather that we must serve every soul, thus layingon the Altar of the One Love all our personallikings and dislikings, suffering them to be con-sumed of the holy Fire, we have not known peaceor joy or any fulness of life.And no healing or blessing that is wrought ofthe holy Christ of the soul can enslave or bind inany way the subject of its activity. And thus thehealing of the Christ in us differs from much ofthe healing of the lower, magnetic or personaldegrees. For the Christ is the liberator of thesoul. And no one in whom the Christ works

I desires to become a personal power or self influ-{ ence in any life, being careless even of fruits.And the soul unto whom the power of the healingChrist has been thus communicated is set freeto fulfil its functions not only as the healer of its

I own body but as the healer of others. And itknows that it is free. This word may be of use/ to many in these days of manifold modes ofhealing, none of which, however, we condemn ;for even in the personal degree the Christ principleworks when the self-giving will is active in theyet mingled soul of the healer.Thus is our Christ, who is the Keeper of thedoor of our Heaven, also our Liberator, and whenthe door has been opened our hymn of gladnesswill be : " O Christ Thou Great Love, Thou hastindeed delivered me out of the lowest hell, forThou hast saved me from myself. Thou, O Christ,art the Keeper of the door of my heaven. Thouhast opened unto me the way of Life, the blessed.Thou hast opened and no man can shut. ForThou art the Key of Life."


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36 Christ the only Saviour19.

Verily the Holy Christos, the Blessed One, theGreat Lover of mankind, by whatsoever name Hebe named among the peoples of the earth, is theonly sure refuge for the soul of man.And every soul who indeed commits herself tothe care of the Blessed One will realise in thefulness of time that she is a precious, yea, anintegral and all-essential power of His Holysubstance.Thus will she find herself received of Him atlast, i.e., assumed into the blessedness of theholy Substance, and that consciously.For it follows from the doctrine of correspon-dence between the macrocosmic and the micro-cosmic that we can call on our Holy Christos inour time of need ; and sure as we call, so surelymust we be heard of the One who hears everythrob and feels every breath throughout Hiscosmic body.But it must be the cry of the soul, the word ofa living, pure, and true desire." O Christ, Thou art the only Saviour," is thusa word of simple truth. For if there is anythingI have come to realise it is the truly blessed factthat this elevation of the Christ-power to therealm which transcends our ordinary concept ofthe personal does in no way take from us themighty human service of the Christ as the Saviourof the soul of man.To me it has meant the realisation of the greatredemptive service.Hence it is that I can stand sympathetically bymy zealous brother of the Salvation Army andwish Godspeed to his ardent word, for I knowthat a great cosmic fact, albeit incomprehensibleto us both, abides the bedrock of his crudedoctrine, and gives to it a very power of life.


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serves this Word our social need f 37This I know, this I solemnly declare to be the

deep truth as I have found it continually spokenwithin me through these years of a maturer andfuller light, and while, indeed, my spiritual visionhas not dimmed, that the Great Law, the BlessedOne is indeed the Lover and the Healer, theRedeemer and the Liberator, the Enlightener, theSaviour of the soul of man.Thus I can solemnly declare, for the goodreason that I have, during these years, provedwell the power of my Holy One to save me fromdespair, ay, and from the deep darknesses of theshadow of death.

And to the strong soul of service that laboursto-day for the blessing of the social body whatcomfort and what strength issue as the fruit ofthis sweet doctrine? How serves this word thesocial need of the day? This must abide the greatcriterion of its power even as that of any teaching.The degree of the Christhood is that of theKingdom of the Heaven of humanity ; and sure asit is, so surely must its corresponding state cometo be on earth. As in the higher, so in the lower ;as in the inner, so in the outer. For the spiritual :. \ \or inner is always the formative. The soul ofthings in the process of formation is the idea,mould, or pattern according to which the outerform is built. And this is so sure a law of naturein all her degrees that we may safely state itdogmatically.

Therefore, this cosmic law being recognised,it follows that to those who accept the doctrine ofthe Christhood there can be no possible doubt asto the eventual redemption of the race from thelower degrees in which it at present lies, and fromwhich even history proves that it is slowly butsurely emerging. For in the higher, or inner,


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3 8 Cleave to Christor Christ-degree is the sure prophecy of what isto be even here on our earth.And so, ye pioneers of the better day, ye whohave suffered as such, giving" your substance,

your will, your very lifeblood as the price of theredemption of your kind, ye may well be of goodcheer, knowing that, sure as in the great Ideal orChrist-degree, the principle of true brotherhood isalready realised, so surely in this the woeful sphereof your present labours, all that is best in youraspirations and all that is highest in your idealswill yet come to be.For ye who are the first-born of the race andthe most mature fruit of the travail of the GreatSoul of our kind, ye are the sure manifestors ofthe will of our Universe. And sure as ye in yourlimited degree of unfoldment will the good andonly the good of the whole Body of our Christ,and can will none other will, so surely do weknow that the One Will who is in all and overall is willing the One Good, the absolute andunlimited blessedness of all. This our firm faitharises out of sure knowledge and is based on theeternal principles of Being. The Will of Godalone is, the Will of Good alone can be fulfilled.And now, dear soul, whosoever you be, I wouldend this talk with you by beseeching you, in the

last words by which my saintly father ere passingbesought my sisters, to "cleave to Christ."Howsoever feeble be your vision of the HolyOne, cling to the Christ in it ; for it will give placeto one less crude soon as your mind is capableof receiving the more spiritual word of Life.And as long as it speaks to your soul, even inits crudity is hid the power of the living Christ";and I would not take this good from any little one.

21In the Name of the One we may not name, who

is our Holy One of Blessing.


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fforeworfc onUbe Gbrssm ot tbe GbristNeed I say that the doctrine of the chrysm of

the soul by the power of the Christ is independentof any event in our world's history, and would notbe touched were it proved, e.g., that our Jesusnever lived on earth. It is a spiritual, i.e., auniversal doctrine. For the chrysm, thougheffected in the individual soul, transcends itspersonal relationships. Jesus may have been bornin Bethlehem, but our Christ, the ageless, thedeathless One, has neither birth nor death in timeand space. And it is better to speak of Christ asthe Living One than as the Risen One, for Christcould never be laid in a tomb.

I am now constrained to speak as plainly as Ican, for many good and intelligent souls do Iknow who, being yet bound by the ties of thepersonal and historic, careful about the grave-clothes of Jesus Christ, are sorely hamperedthereby in their spiritual course, and my Christwould serve their need even as I love them. Forour Christ, even the Great Love in us, is alwaysthe liberator of soul and mind. And my Christwould set my brethren free from the thraldom ofthe mind and will of death.For the word that spoke to their childhoodcannot now satisfy their intelligence. The adora-tion of Jesus was then a good. But who canestimate the hurt that has come to Christendomthrough the clinging of the stronger spiritualintelligence to this adoration of Jesus instead ofthe Holy One who was pleased to dwell in Jesus?Not only an utterly untenable and self-contra-dictory doctrine, but the dead literalism, theblank materialism, ay, the idolatry of the churches,with all its unspiritual fruit in the lives of the

39


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40 Why rob Jesus of His beauty ?people has been the result of this carnal interpreta-tion of the Gospel of Christ.(Why rob our strong brother of his great humanbeauty by adoring and praying to him as to God?Why "wrong that soul of sweet love?) Have not

superficial unrealities taken the place of the greatethical and spiritual realities? And a self-savingdoctrine of death is given instead of the self-giving doctrine of Life. For the external wordnot only fails to dissolve the self-loving elementsof the soul but it gives them a sure sustenanceand so perpetuates the actual hell of the earthlymind. And the fruit of the falsifying of a truthis baneful in proportion to the power of the lifehidden in that truth.What has the carnal or historic interpretationdone for my beloved Scotland, a land " gospel-beaten," but not with the true gospel of the lifeand beauty of the living Christ? Have not thebest of her sons turned from this priestly wordwith loathing and will have no more of it?But in her soul of silent strength she has long-time groaned and laboured for the coming of theeternal gospel of the Ageless One. And even inthese days the firstborn of her sore travail arereceiving the word of Life. For I know no soulof stronger and finer elements for the use of thespiritual gospel than the soul of this people. AndI believe she is called, if she so wills, to servethe Christ as the receiver and the giver of the wordof Life to the world. But before the great soul ofthis people can do this work she must havelearned to love not this world nor worship thepowers thereof.I shall not speak of any of the records of thelife of Jesus other than those given in our gospels,as my main object in now writing is to help thestudent and lover of these scriptures towards afuller light and understanding of them.


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Some personal evidence 4 1My opinion, and I give it as such and not as

doctrine, is that the one we know as Jesus (thename may not have been just so, but that mattersnot) lived and worked the blessed works verymuch as recorded of him. Not to believe thisseems on the face of the internal evidence of therecords of his life, exquisitely living andmarvellously vivid and na'ive pictures of a life asthey are, to be most unreasonable, while theacceptance of the story as a literature not abovethe possibility of errors of narration, satisfies allreasonable demands.And even to those, who may see in it a greatmyth-story or part of one, this acceptance ofmaterial facts in time and space which correspondto the inner or spiritual realities of which they arebut the forthshadowing can only be acceptable.They who know most of the working of thehidden ways of the Spirit will deny no materialfact recorded as miracle even to the feeding of thefive thousand, for we know that as in the inner soin the outer, and as in the higher so in the lowerplanes of manifestation, and that the one is com-plementary of the other and necessary to it in theeconomy of the cosmos.But I have also much evidence which to me ismost real and most satisfying, not only that Jesuslived as the great healer through whom the Christblessed those of his day and country, but also thathe is still living in the sphere of a greater potency,even the inner realm of causative power, whencehe even to-day exercises a mighty will of blessingthat is ever working in the soul of mankind as anunfolding, uplifting and inspiring energy towardsits higher realisation of the Christ-life.For the blessed one is garmented even nowmore gloriously in the high beauty of the Christ-hood than when he lived on earth; and when incommunion with the beautiful one I only feel that


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42 The illumination of JesusI am not worthy to kiss the hem of his garment.But this knowledge, to me so real and worthyof faith, and given in a manner too sacred forpublication, cannot be now the possession of everylover of the Truth. And I therefore only give itin passing as a sure fact of my experience. Andout of this most solemn declaration a seed ofsilent thought, whose fruit may yet be towardsthe deep things of God, may fall into some earnestmind there to germinate in good time towards aneven fuller apprehension of this Truth than is nowmine.

It is recorded that when Jesus had been baptisedin the Jordan (thus publicly avowing himself tobe now dead to the powers of the old, earthlyselfhood) he saw the heavens open and the Spiritdescend on him in the form of a dove; and heheard a voice saying: This is my beloved son inwhom I am well pleased. And John the Baptiseralso heard the voice. Now what is the inter-pretation of this beautiful story in the light ofour present-day knowledge of psychic and spiritualthings ?

Is it necessary for me to say that Jesus was soillumined that he could both see and hear whatwas happening in the inner plane of manifesta-tion, and that h& could thus both see and hearwhat the ordinary man and woman of this earthhave not yet the faculty to perceive?And he saw the Spirit or Power of God shineout of the Innermost, and the appearance was thatof a dove. For the dove represents, and that forreasons very obvious to observers of the ways ofthese gentle creatures, the power of Life in Loveand the richness of the will of Love to bear fruit.Thus may it be said to symbolise the Motherhoodof God (p. 3).That this symbol was thus used by most ancientpeoples is evident from the fact that the sign


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The crucified Dote 43of the dove on the cross, signifying the passionof Spirit in Its Love-mode of life as It consciouslymerges Itself in matter for its quickening andredeeming, has actually been discovered in thesedays cut in stone, thus testifying that the doctrineof the Cross has come out of the ages, and cannotbe claimed as the personal property of any creed.Surely the passion of the Heart of God is anageless doctrine.And I have often been told by those who areable to see into this inner world that when theconditions have been best for the manifestationof spiritual power the holy Presence has appearedamong them in the form of a white dove, themodes of the appearance varying with the presentservice of Life. Only last week the wife of aminer in Scotland asked me the meaning of hervision of the white dove bearing a ring, symbolof the union of the spouse of her heart with theGreat Love. Another illiterate brother sees itshedding a fragrant dew, and this phenomenon,objectively and actually manifested, betokens the \gift to that brother of the power of healing.

It has been seen in a radiance of glisteningwhiteness, either to hover over or to alight uponthe head of the servant of the Spirit. And theywho see this, know that the words will be thewinged words of Life: and the serving one isconscious of the illumination; and the awakingto the inspiring power is in time according tothis coming and in degree according to thebrightness of the Light. And over every servantof this inspiring One shines the holy Light.Also I have been told in sweetest trust by most 'saintly people that at the time of their illumina-tion and chrysm they have seen the dove comeand make its abiding as within the breast. Andthere it dwells as their Comforter. Some haveeven heard it sing its sweet plaint within the soul.


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4.4 Whom does the Dot> repres

The Christ of the Holy Grail by James Macbeth Bain (KnowledgeBorn Library)

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Transcript of The Christ of the Holy Grail by James Macbeth Bain (KnowledgeBorn Library)