THE DIVINE OFFERING
I take the present opportunity of a new edition to add a few pages on
certain points which appear to me of vital importance, and the connection
of which with the preceding chapters will, I hope, become evident as the
reader proceeds. Assuming the existence in each individual of a creative
power of thought which, in relation to himself, reflects the same power
existing in the Universal Mind, our right employment of this power becomes
a matter of extreme moment to ourselves. Its inverted use necessarily holds
us fast in the bondage from which we are seeking to escape, and equally
necessarily its right use brings us into Liberty; and therefore if any
Divine revelation exists at all its purpose must be to lead us away from
the inverted use of our creative faculty and into such a higher
specializing of it as will produce the desired result. Now the purpose of
the Bible is to do this, and it seeks to effect this work by a dual
operation. It places before us that Divine Ideal of which I have already
spoken, and at the same time bases this ideal upon the recognition of a
Divine Sacrifice. These two conceptions are so intimately interwoven in
Scripture that they cannot be separated, but at the present day there _is_
a growing tendency to attempt to make this separation and to discard the
conception of a Divine Sacrifice as unphilosophical, that is as having no
nexus of cause and effect. What I want, therefore, to point out in these
additional pages is that there is such a nexus, and that so far from being
without a sequence of cause and effect it has its root in the innermost
principles of our own being. It is not contrary to Law but proceeds from
the very nature of the Law itself.
The current objection to the Bible teaching on this subject is that no such
sacrifice could have been required by God, either because the Originating
Energy can have no consciousness of Personality and is only a blind force,
or because, if "God is Love," He could not demand such a sacrifice. On the
former hypothesis we are of course away from the Bible teaching altogether
and have nothing to do with it; but, as I have said elsewhere, the fact of
our own consciousness of personality can only be accounted for by the
existence, however hidden, of a corresponding quality in the Originating
Spirit. Therefore I will confine my remarks to the question how Love, as
the originating impulse of all creation, can demand such a sacrifice. And
to my mind the answer is that God does not demand it. It is Man who demands
it. It is the instinctive craving of the human soul for _certainty_ that
requires a demonstration so convincing as to leave no room for doubt of our
perfectly happy relation to the Supreme Spirit, and consequently to all
that flows from it, whether on the side of the visible or of the invisible.
When we grasp the fact that such a standpoint of certainty is the necessary
foundation for the building up in ourselves of the Divine Ideal then it
becomes clear that to afford us this firm basis is the greatest work that
the Spirit, in its relation to human personality, could do.
We are often told that the offering of sacrifices had its origin in
primitive man's conception of his gods as beings which required to be
propitiated so as to induce them to do good or abstain from doing harm; and
very likely this was the case. The truth at the back of this conception is
the feeling that there is a higher power upon which man is dependent; and
the error is in supposing that this power is limited by an individuality
which can be enriched by selling its good offices, or which blackmails you
by threats. In either case it wants to get something out of you, and from
this it follows that its own power of supplying its own wants must be
limited, otherwise it would not require to be kept in good temper by gifts.
In very undeveloped minds such a conception results in the idea of numerous
gods, each having, so to say, his own particular line of business; and the
furthest advance this mode of thought is capable of is the reduction of
these various deities to two antagonistic powers of Good and of Evil. But
the result in either case is the same, so long as we start with the
hypothesis that the Good will do us more good and the Evil do us less harm
by reason of our sacrifices, for then it logically follows that the more
valuable your sacrifices and the oftener they are presented the better
chance you have of good luck. Doubtless some such conception as this was
held by the mass of the Hebrew people under the sacrificial system of the
Levitical Law, and perhaps this was one reason why they were so prone to
fall into idolatry--for in this view their fundamental notion was
practically identical in its nature with that of the heathen around them.
Of course this was not the fundamental idea embodied in the Levitical
system itself. The root of that system was the symbolizing of a supreme
ideal of reconciliation hereafter to be manifested in action. Now a symbol
is not the thing symbolized. The purpose of a symbol is twofold, to put us
upon enquiry as to the reality which it indicates, and to bring that
reality to our minds by suggestion when we look at the symbol; but if it
does not do this, and we rest only in the symbol, nothing will come of it,
and we are left just where we were. That the symbolic nature of the
Levitical sacrifice was clearly perceived by the deeper thinkers among the
Hebrews is attested by many passages in the Bible--"Sacrifice and burnt
offering thou wouldest not" (Psalms xl: 6, and li: 16) and other similar
utterances; and the distinction between these symbols and that which they
symbolized is brought out in the Epistle to the Hebrews by the argument
that if those sacrifices had afforded a sufficient standpoint for the
effectual realization of cleansing then the worshiper would not need to
have repeated them because he would have no more consciousness of sin
(Hebrews x: 2).
This brings us to the essential point of the whole matter. What we want is
the certainty that there is no longer any separation between us and the
Divine Spirit by reason of sin, either as overt acts of wrong doing or as
error of principle; and the whole purpose of the Bible is to lead us to
this assurance. Now such an assurance cannot be based on any sort of
sacrifices that require repetition, for then we could never know whether we
had given enough either in quality or quantity. It must be a once-for-all
business or it is no use at all; and so the Bible makes the
once-for-allness of the offering the essential point of its teaching. "He
that has been bathed does not need to be bathed again" (John xiii: 10).
"There is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus" (Romans
viii: i).
Various intellectual difficulties, however, hinder many people from seeing
the working of the law of cause and effect in this presentment. One is the
question, How can moral guilt be transferred from one person to another?
What is called the "forensic" argument (i.e., the court of law argument)
that Christ undertook to suffer in our stead as our _surety_ is undoubtedly
open to this objection. Suretyship must by its very nature be confined to
civil obligations and cannot be extended to criminal liability, and so the
"forensic" argument may be set aside as very much a legal fiction. But if
we realize the Bible teaching that Christ is the Son of God, that is, the
Divine Principle of Humanity out of which we originated and subsisting in
us all, however unconsciously to ourselves, then we see that sinners as
well as saints are included in this Principle; and consequently that the
Self-offering of Christ must actually include the self-offering of every
human being in the acknowledgment (however unknown to his _objective_
mentality) of his sin. If we can grasp this somewhat abstract point of view
it follows that in the Person of Christ every human being, past, present,
and to come, was self-offered for the condemnation of his sin--a _self_-
condemnation and a _self_-offering, and hence a cleansing, for the simple
reason that if you can get a man to realize his past error, really see his
mistake, he won't do it again; and it is the perpetuation of sin and error
that has to be got rid of--to do this universally would be to regain
Paradise. Seen therefore in this light there is no question of transference
of moral guilt, and I take it this is St. Paul's meaning when he speaks of
our being partakers in Christ's death.
Then there is the objection, How can past sins be done away with? If we
accept the philosophical conclusion that Time has no substantive existence
then all that remains is states of consciousness. As I have said in the
earlier part of this book, the Self-Contemplation of Spirit is the cause of
all our perception of existence and environment; and consequently if the
Self-Contemplation of the Spirit from any center of individualization is
that of entire harmony and the absence of anything that would cause any
consciousness of separation, then past sins cease to have any part in this
self-recognition, and consequently cease to have any place in the world of
existence. The foundation of the whole creative process is the calling into
Light out of Darkness--"that which makes manifest is light"--and
consequently the converse action is that of sending out of Light into
Darkness, that is, into Notbeing. Now this is exactly what the Spirit says
in the Bible--"I, even I, am He that blotteth out thy transgressions"
(Isaiah xliii: 25). Blotting out is the sending out of manifestation into
the darkness of non-manifestation, out of Being into Not-being; and in this
way the past error ceases to have any existence and so ceases to have any
further effect upon us. It is "blotted out," and from this new standpoint
has never been at all; so that to continue to contemplate it is to give a
false sense of existence to that which in effect has no existence. It is
that Affirmation of Negation which is the root of all evil. It is the
inversion of our God-given creative power of thought, calling into
existence that which in the Perfect Life of the Spirit never had or could
have any existence, and therefore it creates the sense of inharmony,
opposition, and separation. Of course this is only relatively to ourselves,
for we cannot create eternal principles. They are the Being of God; and as
I have already shown these great Principles of the Affirmative may be
summed up in the two words Love and Beauty--Love in essence and Beauty in
manifestation; but since we can only live from the standpoint of our own
consciousness we can make a false creation built upon the idea of opposites
to the all-creating Love and Beauty, which false creation with all its
accompaniments of limitation, sin, sorrow, sickness, and death, must
necessarily be real to us until we perceive that these things were not
created by God, the Spirit of the Affirmative, but by our own inversion of
our true relation to the All-creating Being.
When, then, we view the matter in this light the Offering once for all of
the Divine Sacrifice for the sin of the whole world is seen not to be a
mere ecclesiastical dogma having no relation of cause and effect, but to be
the highest application of the same principle of cause and effect by which
the whole creation, ourselves included, has been brought into existence--
the Self-Contemplation of Spirit producing corresponding manifestation,
only now working on the level of Individual Personality.
As I have shown at the beginning of this book the cosmic manifestation of
principles is not sufficient to bring out all that there is in them. To do
this their action must be specialized by the introduction of the Personal
Factor. They are represented by the Pillar Jachin, but it must be
equilibriated by the Pillar Boaz, Law and Personality the two Pillars of
the Universe; and in the One Offering we have the supreme combination of
these two principles, the highest specialization of Law by the highest
power of Personality. These are eternal principles, and therefore we are
told that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world; and because
"thoughts are things" this supreme manifestation of the creative
interaction of Law and Personality was bound eventually to be manifested in
concrete action in the world conditioned by time and space; and so it was
that the supreme manifestation of the Love of God to meet the supreme need
of Man took place. The history of the Jewish nation is the history of the
working of the law of cause and effect, under the guidance of the Divine
Wisdom, so as to provide the necessary conditions for the greatest event in
the world's history; for if Christ was to appear it must be in _some_
nation, in _some_ place, and at _some_ time: but to trace the steps by
which, through an intelligible sequence of causes, these necessary
conditions were provided belongs rather to an investigation of Bible
history than to our present purpose, so I will not enter into these details
here. But what I hope I have in some measure made clear is that there is a
reason why Christ should be manifested, and should suffer, and rise again,
and that so far from being a baseless superstition the Reconciling of the
world to God through the One Offering once-for-all offered for the sin of
the whole world, lays the immovable foundation upon which we may build
securely for all the illimitable future.