"_And entering into the sepulchre they saw a young man sitting on the
right side clothed in a long white garment, and he saith unto them, be not
affrighted, ye seek Jesus of Nazareth--He is risen! He is not here_!"
When we read the Bible with its story of human lives and their great,
wonderful mysteries, we find among them, the greatest of all--the
marvellous one of the Christ birth and death, and as we read we are amazed
at the many confusing ideas of Jesus and His teachings. His disciples
themselves did not understand Him, though He sought always to clearly
interpret Himself; often when He spoke metaphysically they interpreted Him
physically.
There was throughout all the Christ history something so great, so holy,
so inclusive that it was too large for them to comprehend, and for all
eternal ages, the developing minds of men will be the same. They will keep
busy with their attempts at explanation of His life and His words.
Jesus quitted the world in benediction, and He left to those who followed
Him and His precepts, a great inextinguishable hope.
It matters little to those who really understand Truth, whether Jesus the
Christ lived, or whether He was only a symbol worked out by the
imagination of men and priests; be the origin what it may, Christianity
_still_ stands; and Religion still holds sway after centuries of
ridicule and generations of secular and scientific analysis. Something
unknown and uninterpreted beats and surges in the hearts of men, and
brings into expression in every age the clinging to a great mysterious,
wonderful, unseen agency that somehow works its way along the silent
avenues of the human soul.
The man Jesus may or may not have lived. Humanity may keep its birthright
of contradiction forever on this point, but higher than the limited
understanding of the few there lives the Truth of the great Christ spirit
which the name Jesus embodied, and which for centuries gone, and centuries
to be, will wax strong and flourish in the consciousness of men, as they
pass one by one into recognition of it.
Great and sacred was the day of Jesus' birth, and great and sacred was the
day of his death, for both revealed the stages of our human selfhood, and
both point our minds to deeper meanings of existence.
Jesus' life as we follow it from the manger to the cross was the
unmistakable story of the pathway of every human life and each little
action was a part of the great mosaic which each life is setting for
itself, and from which it shall one day read its own great AT-ONE-MENT.
The birth of the Christ consciousness comes to each soul as the dawn of
self-awakening. It is the first faint glimmer of a new world, and the
first hint the soul of man has of union with its source.
This first dawn of consciousness is purely a possession of the inner self,
and those who feel it only follow first by faith. This faith is buffeted
and attacked by the things of life until it is tried and becomes
steadfast.
In this first dawn of consciousness of the Christ self we are always
strangers to ourselves and asleep in the manger of natural things and
natural senses. We go on for years, and as consciousness grows stronger we
search and search for we know not what; craving pursues us, we go hither
and thither seeking, seeking--finding and losing.
The world and the things tangible are never wholly satisfactory in
themselves; we know instinctively that they are not all there is, there is
a deep, vital something in us that speaks its hidden messages into our
being, and we are driven on from sensation to sensation, crying for that
open sesame of union which will bring peace to our soul.
Then passing into deeper unfoldment we come into the real work of life, we
meet with responsibilities and its experiences; we are baffled again,
buffeted, besieged by the perplexities of doubt and fear and human
discontent and we feel that, strive as we will, we are not yet at home.
The ten thousand things of the human life entangle us,--the touch of
sickness, the expressions of so-called sin,--the baffling consequences of
our seeming mistakes,--all these draw us from the cradle of
unconsciousness out into the vital power of a self-conscious life, and
push us onward to our union with Cosmic Consciousness, or the risen
Christ.
On the self-conscious plane life goes on, driven on every side by human
experiences and at last turns back upon itself, and then in the Gethsemane
of its own making, it stands where earth and its perplexing joys are lost
and heaven and its hidden joys are yet unknown, and then facing the
expressions of its now half-revealed consciousness it cries out from the
depth of its soul's despair, "If it is possible, let this cup pass," and
it does not see the purpose in Gethsemane.
Human life at this stage of unfoldment has _fixed laws_, and the soul
meets in them the inexorable command to pass on to its own crucifixion,
the worked out sentence of its own judgments, and it goes onward bearing
its own cross which is built from the consequences of the laws with which
it has related.
The laws of human self-consciousness are hard to work out; each life faces
sometime, somewhere the proof of itself. There comes a day to all when
anything that is less than the truth slips off, and the soul stands bare
at the bar of the universal justice ready to be judged by the laws which
it has made for itself.
There are hours of human crucifixion that it were well to die on, for the
soul that wanders back from these fierce Mounts of Transfiguration has
paid the price of human transgression of law by human pain, and is purged
and cleaned by the fierce fire of its own igniting.
The path of human living out leads every life up the steps of Calvary
carrying its own Cross and it plaits the thorns and pierces the side of
"Him who in our life again is spit upon and crucified" until, at last, the
great human God-self within us is released through transmutation, and the
grave clothes of our dead self no longer entomb us; then the resurrection
day is at hand, and the Consciousness of God bursts into the
self-conscious mind, and the stone is rolled away from the sepulchre.
The human mind bursts forth in illumination and it passes with the Christ
birth on to the table-land of human comprehension and revelation of its
infinite union.
In this moment of glorified illumination we feel and know that every
moment behind us has been that this hour may be; we feel then that every
moment is a special moment; every life a special life, protected by the
ALL LIFE, and that everything on our human pathway, high or low, has led
us on to this supreme moment of conscious union with our God.
When the Christ Consciousness is risen within us, we feel the universality
of life written everywhere on everything; there is but one starting point
for all thought--God. There is but one ending place for all human
faith--God.
We are filled with a keener sense of the ONENESS of life, and we are
thrilled again and again by the nearness and greatness of God in the world
which He projected from Himself.
The Father which we sought in self-consciousness has become real and
tangible, and the sense of everlasting UNITY is in our hearts.
With this great God-self alive within us, we never fear that God will ever
pass away from any part of his Creation. We know too well, then, the truth
that "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without
end," earth is destined to become a heaven in the lives of men as fast as
they develop to the place of understanding, and find the real holy ground
within the center of their own being.
God, or the Universal Cosmic Consciousness, has always been revealed to
men through the risen Christ consciousness within the self. The men of old
who walked with Him were those who had lifted their personal mind to the
level of the Universal Mind, so that from the shores of the Infinite
Wisdom great thought waves of Love, Truth and Peace beat in on them and
filled them, and their lives became a center of illumination for all.
There never was and there never can be any conflict between the power of
human consciousness and God consciousness. Truth is always Truth, and
Truth in the hearts of men build them back into the Great Harmony.
The Absolute never contradicts itself; as fast as lives are unfolded to
the Christ Consciousness, they leave the old thought life like an empty
tomb and push themselves into a glorious human expression, just as the
Easter lily rising above the dust and mould of earth, pushes itself upward
into the clear sunlight of a world where flowers are revealed, just so the
soul pushes on through consciousness and self-consciousness, into the
glory of the risen Godhood.
We can hear the voice of the Universal calling us through our Christ
Consciousness today, just as it called to men throughout the ages, and we
know that everything that throbs with natural life or comes into objective
expression in our human world, is really only the voice of the Universal
Cosmic mind speaking in the holy language of the human heart.
Every experience, every heartache, every joy, every despair, every
pulse-beat is only the text by which the great child mind of the world is
spelling out _God_.
The Risen Self comes into realization of the great white light of the
soul, and it enables us to see _all_ life in its completeness. Human
effort and human endeavor glow with an unexpected radiance when seen from
the table-land of the risen truth.
The human soul then rejoices in its Divine possibilities. Jesus said: "I
do always the things that pleaseth the Father," and the voice from heaven
said: "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased."
When we turn to those who ask for proof of the risen Christ-self within
us, we have only to point to them the empty tomb of the old lives which
men everywhere leave behind them. If we desire we can go farther and point
them to the production of those in whom this great consciousness is
waking; all human life that is alive with thought and faith and deed, is
vibrant with a great vital spiritual force.
The signs of God Consciousness and the conscious union of God and men is
rampant everywhere in the natural world. Every factory, every steamship,
every invention, every composition, everything in form sets its seal upon
the genuineness of the existence of the spiritual exaltation of the minds
of men, and higher than the things of the natural world, there stands the
achievements of the mental and inspirational souls; the libraries with
their tens of thousands of written pages, the art museums and galleries of
precious dreams; all over the world there are hung on walls and chiselled
into glistening marble the story of the glory-gazing of some
Christ-illumined soul. And again sounded forth from thousands of churches
each Sabbath morning, there is swelling out majestic songs sung by
myriads of voices now, but sung _first_ in the silence of some dim,
deep soul-dream, in the Christ consciousness of some risen mind. That
grand harmony was born on the table-lands of human illumination,
registered on the human brain, and worked out into tangible form here on
earth to bear witness to the home-land of the God-man.
Christ consciousness is the final destiny of every soul; it is what we
really live by and today we know, as never before, that in order to
advance and grow, we must consecrate and bring it here and now, into its
fullest expression in our life.
There are bound to be born, at first, many things on this table-land of
new understanding that will be worked out indifferently by our limited
brain, and when challenged by the strain and stress of life they will
depart because they will be unable in their present form to answer to the
great world's need. But increasing consciousness makes everything more
powerful, and as we go on we learn to build sublime and lasting things, to
stand the test of time because they have their root, not in the old
thought self, but in the unfolded risen self, and they are grappled to the
heart of the very Rock of Ages.
Standing, then, risen from the dust world of our old defeats, our human
minds receive new illuminations and rejoice in them. Law becomes the
essence of our daily living and the mind of man the direct inspiration of
the Almighty. We dare to trust our risen mind to the uttermost for in it
is GOD himself enshrined.
In this new spiritual perception we rely more and more on our intuitions,
illumination and revelation, for it is human Godness, backed by the
strength of unnumbered hosts of higher consciousness.
We know at last that all our daily living is not a matter of outward signs
but of inward sight; all external things may contradict us, yet in sublime
confidence we shape our way while the Christ voice within us speaks forth
its messages, telling us all the holy and uplifting stories of our daily
life. Over the trials and wreckage of our common years we follow it; out
from a silence that is known only to ourselves we bring the lessons that
have burnt their truth into our souls.
In the power of this risen self we stand with our faces upturned, with our
whole life opened to God, and human effort, human growth, human hope,
love, joy,--all are joined in the sense of Divine resurrection.
This is the consciousness of God in the human soul; this is the
Resurrection morning and it makes us NOW the Sons of God, and from the
darkness of our Old Thought growth we lift our hearts away into a new Life
Divine. We open our eyes in the radiance of a light that never grows dim,
then standing with an all-seeing soul vision, we can point to the long
years behind us through which we have worked out our soul's salvation and
closing the door on the empty tomb of our dead self we say with all the
serenity of our new-found God-consciousness:
"I know whom you seek. He is not here. He is Risen!"