not. We are too apt to regard Beauty as a merely superficial thing, and
do not realise all that it implies. This was not the case with the great
thinkers of the ancient world--see the place which no less a one than
Plato gives to Beauty as the expression of all that is highest and
greatest in the system of the universe. These great men of old were no
superficial thinkers, and, therefore, would never have elevated to the
supreme place that which is only superficial. Therefore, we shall do
well to ask what it is that these great minds found in the idea of
Beauty which made it thus appeal to them as the most perfect outward
expression of all that lies deepest in the fundamental laws of Being. It
is because, rightly apprehended, Beauty represents the supremest living
quality of Thought. It is the glorious overflowing of fulness of Love
which indicates the presence of infinite reserves of Power behind it. It
is the joyous profusion that shows the possession of inexhaustible
stores of wealth which can afford to be thus lavish and yet remain as
exhaustless as before. Read aright, Beauty is the index to the whole
nature of Being.
Beauty is the externalisation of Harmony, and Harmony is the
co-ordinated working of all the powers of Being, both in the individual
and in the relation of the individual to the Infinite from which it
springs; and therefore this Harmony conducts us at once into the
presence of the innermost undifferentiated Life. Thus Beauty is in most
immediate touch with the very arcanum of Life; it is the brightness of
glory spreading itself over the sanctuary of the Divine Spirit. For if,
viewed from without, Beauty is the province of the artist and the poet,
and lays hold of our emotions and appeals directly to the innermost
feelings of our heart, calling up the response of that within us which
recognises itself in the harmony perceived without, this is only because
it speeds across the bridge of Reason with such quick feet that we pass
from the outmost to the inmost and back again in the twinkling of an
eye; but the bridge is still there and, retracing our steps more
leisurely, we shall find that, viewed from within, Beauty is no less the
province of the calm reasoner and analyst. What the poet and the artist
seize upon intuitionally, he elaborates gradually, but the result is the
same in both cases; for no intuition is true which does not admit of
being expanded into a rational sequence of intelligible factors, and no
argument is true which does not admit of being condensed into that rapid
suggestion which is intuition.
Thus the impassioned artist and the calm thinker both find that the only
true Beauty proceeds naturally from the actual construction of that
which it expresses. It is not something added on as an afterthought, but
something pre-existing in the original idea, something to which that
idea naturally leads up, and which presupposes that idea as affording it
any _raison d'être_. The test of Beauty is, What does it express? Is it
merely a veneer, a coat of paint laid on from without? Then it is indeed
nothing but a whited sepulchre, a covering to hide the vacuity or
deformity which needs to be removed. But is it the true and natural
outcome of what is beneath the surface? Then it is the index to
superabounding Life and Love and Intelligence, which is not content with
mere utilitarianism hasting to escape at the earliest possible point
from the labour of construction, as though from an enforced and
unwelcome task, but rejoicing over its work and unwilling to quit it
until it has expressed this rejoicing in every fittest touch of form and
colour and exquisite proportion that the material will admit of, and
this without departing by a hairbreadth from the original purpose of the
design.
Wherever, therefore, we find Beauty, we may infer an enormous reserve of
Power behind it; in fact, we may look upon it as the visible expression
of the great truth that Life-Power is infinite. And when the inner
meaning of Beauty is thus revealed to us, and we learn to know it as the
very fulness and overflowing of Power, we shall find that we have
gained a new standard for the guidance of our own lives. We must begin
to use this wonderful process which we have learnt from Nature. Having
learnt how Nature works--how God works--we must begin to work in like
manner, and never consider any work complete until we have carried it to
some final outcome of Beauty, whether material, intellectual, or
spiritual. Is my intention good? That is the initial question, for the
intention determines the nature of the essence in everything. What is
the most beautiful form in which I can express the good I intend? That
is the ultimate question; for the true Beauty which our work expresses
is the measure of the Power, Intelligence, Love--in a word, of the
quantity and quality of our own life which we have put into it. True
Beauty, mind you--that which is beautiful because it most perfectly
expresses the original idea, not a mere ornamentation occupying our
thoughts as a thing apart from the use intended.
Nothing is of so small account but it has its fullest power of
expression in some form of Beauty peculiarly its own. Beauty is the law
of perfect Thought, be the subject of our Thought some scheme affecting
the welfare of millions, or a word spoken to a little child. True Beauty
and true Power are the correlatives one of the other. Kindly expression
originates in kindly thought; and kindly expression is the essence of
Beauty, which, seeking to express itself ever more and more perfectly,
becomes that fine touch of sympathy which is artistic skill, whether
applied in working upon material substances or upon the emotions of the
heart. But, remember, first Use, then Beauty, and neither complete
without the other. Use without Beauty is ungracious giving, and Beauty
without Use is humbug; never forgetting, however, that there is a region
of the mind where the use is found in the beauty, where Beauty itself
serves the direct purpose of raising us to see a higher ideal which will
thenceforward permeate our lives, giving a more living quality to all we
think and say and do.
Seen thus the Beautiful is the true expression of the Good. From
whichever end of the scale we look we shall find that they accurately
measure each other. They are the same thing in the outermost and the
innermost respectively. But in our search for a higher Beauty than we
have yet found we must beware of missing the Beauty that already exists.
Perfect harmony with its environment, and perfect expression of its own
inward nature are what constitute Beauty; and our ignorance of the
nature of the thing or its environment may shut our eyes to the Beauty
it already has. It takes the genius of a Millet to paint, or a Whitman
in words, to show us the beauty of those ordinary work-a-day figures
with which our world is for the most part peopled, whose originals we
pass by as having no form or comeliness. Assuredly the mission of every
thinking man and woman is to help build up forms of greater beauty,
spiritual, intellectual, material, everywhere; but if we would make
something grander than Watteau gardens or Dresden china shepherdesses,
we must enter the great realistic school of Nature and learn to
recognise the beauty that already surrounds us, although it may have a
little dirt on the surface. Then, when we have learnt the great
principles of Beauty from the All-Spirit which is it, we shall know how
to develop the Beauty on its own proper lines without perpetuating the
dirt; and we shall know that all Beauty is the expression of Living
Power, and that we can measure our power by the degree of beauty into
which we can transform it, rendering our lives,
"By loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought."
XVI
SEPARATION AND UNITY
I
"The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me" (John xiv,
30). In these words the Grand Master of Divine Science gives us the key
to the Great Knowledge. Comparison with other passages shows that the
terms here rendered "prince" and "world" can equally be rendered
"principle" and "age." Jesus is here speaking of a principle of the
present age so entirely opposed to that principle of which he himself
was the visible expression, as to have no part in him. It is the utter
contradiction of everything that Jesus came to teach and to exemplify.
The account Jesus gave of himself was that he came "to bear witness to
the Truth," and in order that men "might have life, and that they might
have it more abundantly"; consequently the principle to which he refers
must be the exact opposite of Truth and Life--that is, it must be the
principle of Falsehood and Death.
What, then, is this false and destructive principle which rules the
present age? If we consider the gist of the entire discourse of which
these are the concluding words, we shall find that the central idea
which Jesus has been most strenuously endeavouring to impress upon his
disciples at their last meeting before the crucifixion, is that of the
absolute identity and out-and-out oneness of "the Father" and "the Son,"
the principle of the perfect unity of God and Man. If this, then, was
the great Truth which he was thus earnestly solicitous to impress upon
his disciples' minds when his bodily presence was so shortly to be
removed from them--the Truth of Unity--may we not reasonably infer the
opposing falsehood to be the assertion of separateness, the assertion
that God and man are not one? The idea of separateness is precisely the
principle on which the world has proceeded from that day to this--the
assumption that God and man are not one in being, and that the matter is
of a different essence from spirit. In other words, the principle that
finds favour with the intellectuality of the present age is that of
duality--the idea of two powers and two substances opposite in kind,
and, therefore, repugnant to each other, permeating all things, and so
leaving no wholeness anywhere.
The entire object of the Bible is to combat the idea, of two opposing
forces in the world. The good news is said to be that of
"reconciliation" (2 Cor. v. 18), where also we are told that "all things
are from God," hence leaving no room for any other power or any other
substance; and the great falsehood, which it is the purpose of the Good
News to expose, is everywhere in the Bible proclaimed to be the
suggestion of duality, which is some other mode of Life, that is not the
One Life, but something separate from it--an idea which it is impossible
to state distinctly without involving a contradiction in terms.
Everywhere the Bible exposes the fiction of the duality of separation as
the great lie, but nowhere in so emphatic and concentrated a manner as
in that wonderful passage of Revelations where it is figured in the
mysterious Number of the Beast. "He that hath understanding let him
count the number of the Beast ... and his number is six hundred and sixty
and six" (Rev. xiii, 18, R.V.). Let me point out the great principle
expressed in this mysterious number. It has other more particular
applications, but this one general principle underlies them all.
It is an established maxim that every unity contains in itself a
trinity, just as the individual man consists of body, soul, and spirit.
If we would perfectly understand anything, we must be able to comprehend
it in its threefold nature; therefore in symbolic numeration the
multiplying of the unit by three implies the completeness of that for
which the unit stands; and, again, the threefold repetition of a number
represents its extension to infinity. Now mark what results if we apply
these representative methods of numerical expression to the principles
of Oneness and of separateness respectively. Oneness is Unity, and
1 × 3 = 3, which, intensified to its highest expression, is written
as 333. Now apply the same method to the idea of separateness. Separateness
consists of one and another one, each of which, according to the
universal law, contains a trinity. In this view of duality the totality
of things is two, and 2 × 3 = 6, and, intensifying this to its highest
expression, we get 666, which is the Number of the Beast.
Why of the Beast? Because separateness from God, or the duality of
opposition, which is also a duality of polarity, which is Dual-Unity,
recognises something as having essential being, which is not the One
Spirit; and such a conception can be verbally rendered only by some word
that in common acceptance represents something, not only lower than the
divine, but lower than the human also. It is because the conception of
oneself as a being apart from God, if carried out to its legitimate
consequences, must ultimately land all who hold it in a condition of
things where open ferocity or secret cunning, the tiger nature or the
serpent nature, can be the only possible rule of action.
Thus it is that the principle of the present age can have no part in
that principle of Perfect Wholeness which the Great Master embodied in
His teaching and in Himself. The two ideas are absolutely incompatible,
and whichever we adopt as our leading principle, it must be to the
entire exclusion of the other; we cannot serve God and Mammon. There is
no such thing as partial wholeness. Either we are still in the
principle of Separateness, and our eyes are not yet open to the real
nature of the Kingdom of Heaven; or else we have grasped the principle
of Unity without any exception anywhere, and the One Being includes all,
the body and the soul alike, the visible form and the invisible
substance and life of all equally; nothing can be left out, and we stand
complete here and now, lacking no faculty, but requiring only to become
conscious of our own powers, and to learn to have confidence in them
through "having them exercised by reason of use."
The following communication from "A Foreign Reader," commenting on the
Number of the Beast, as treated by Judge Troward in "Separation and
Unity," is taken from _EXPRESSION_ for 1902, in which it was first
published. Following is Judge Troward's reply to this letter.
Dear Mr. Editor.--A correspondent in the current number of
_Expression_ points out the reference in the Book of
Revelation to the number 666 as the mark of the Beast,
because the trinity of mind, soul, and body, if considered as
unity, may be expressed by the figures 333, and therefore
duality is 333 × 2 = 666.
I think the inverse of the proposition is still more
startling, and I should like to point it out. Instead of
multiplying let us try dividing. First of all take unity as
the unit one and divide by three (representing of course the
same formula, viz., mind, soul and body). Expressed by a
common fraction it is merely 1/3, which is an incomplete
mathematical figure. But take the decimal formula of one
divided by three, and we arrive at .3 circulating, i. e.,
.3333 on to infinity. In other words, the result of the
proposition by mathematics is that you divide this formula of
spirit, soul, and body into unity, and it remains true to
itself ad infinitum.
Now we come to consider it as a duality in the same way.
Expressed as a vulgar fraction it is 2/3; but as a decimal
fraction it is .6666 ad infinitum. I think this is worth
noting.
Yours very faithfully,
A Foreign Reader.
Brussels, Aug. 14, 1902.
* * * * *
Dear Editor.--I return with many thanks the very interesting
letter received with yours, and I am very glad that my
article should have been instrumental in drawing forth this
further light on the subject.
This, moreover, affords an excellent illustration of one
great principle of Unity, which is that the Unity repeats
itself in every one of its parts, so that each part taken
separately is an exact reproduction (in principles) of the
greater Unity of which it is a portion. Therefore, if you
take the individual man as your unit (which is what I did),
and proceed by multiplication, you get the results which were
pointed out in my article. And conversely, if you take the
Great Unity of All-Being as your unit, and proceed by
division, you arrive at the result shown by your foreign
correspondent. The principle is a purely mathematical one,
and is extremely interesting in the present application as
showing the existence of a system of concealed mathematics
running through the whole Bible. This bears out what I said
in my article that there were other applications of the
principle in question, though this one did not at the time
occur to me.
I am much indebted to your correspondent for the further
proof thus given of the correctness of my interpretation of
the Number of the Beast. Both our interpretations support
each other, for they are merely different ways of stating the
same thing, and they have this advantage over those generally
given, that they do not refer to any particular form of evil,
but express a general principle applicable to all alike.
Yours sincerely,
T.
London, Aug. 30, 1902.
II
It may perhaps emphasize my point if I remind my readers that it was the
conflict between the principles of Unity and separation that led to the
crucifixion of Jesus. We must distinguish between the charge which
really led to his death, and the merely technical charge on which he was
sentenced by the Roman Governor. The latter--the charge of opposition to
the royal authority of Cæsar--has its significance; but it is clear from
the Bible record that this was merely formal, the true cause of
conviction being contained in the statement that of the chief priests:
"We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself
the Son of God."
The antagonism of the two principles of Unity and separation had first
been openly manifested on the occasion when Jesus made the memorable
declaration, "I and my Father are one." The Jews took up stones to stone
him. Then said Jesus unto them, "Many good works have I shown you from
my Father; for which of those works do ye stone Me?" The Jews replied,
"For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that
thou, being a man, makest thyself God." Jesus said, "Is it not written
in your law, I said ye are gods? If He called them gods, unto whom the
Word of God came (and the Scriptures cannot be broken), say ye of him,
whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, thou
blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?" Here we have the
first open passage of arms between the two opposing principles which led
to the scene of Calvary as the final testimony of Jesus to the principle
of Unity. He died because he maintained the Truth; that he was one with
the Father. That was the substantive charge on which he was executed.
"Art thou the son of the Blessed?" he was asked by the priestly
tribunal; and the answer came clear and unequivocal, "I am." Then said
the Council, "He hath spoken blasphemy, what further need have we of
witnesses?" And they all condemned him to be worthy of death.
Jesus did not enter into a palpably useless argument with judges whose
minds were so rooted in the idea of dualism as to be impervious to any
other conception; but with a mixed multitude, who were not officially
committed to a system, the case was different. Among them there might
be some still open to conviction, and the appeal was, therefore, made to
a passage in the Psalms with which they were all familiar, pointing out
that the very persons to whom the Divine word was addressed were styled
"gods" by the Divine Speaker Himself. The incontrovertibleness of the
fact was emphasised by the stress laid upon it as "Scripture which
cannot be broken;" and the meaning to be assigned to the statement was
rendered clear by the argument which Jesus deduced from it. He says in
effect, "You would stone me as a blasphemer for saying of myself what
your own Scriptures say concerning each of you." The claim of unity with
"the Father," he urges, was no unique one, but one which the Scripture,
rightly understood, entitled every one of his hearers to make for
himself.
And so we find throughout that Jesus nowhere makes any claim for himself
which he does not also make for those who accept his teaching. Does he
say to the Jews, "Ye are of this world; I am not of this world?" Equally
he says of his disciples, "They are not of the world, even as I am not
of the world." Does he say, "I am the light of the world?" Equally, he
says, "Ye are the light of the world." Does he say, "I and my Father are
one?" Equally he prays that they all might be one, even as we are one.
Is he styled "the Son of God?" Then St. John writes, "To them gave he
power to become sons of God, even to as many as believe on his name;"
and by belief on the name we may surely understand belief in the
principle of which the name is the verbal representation.
The essential unity of God and man is thus the one fact which permeates
the whole teaching of Jesus. He himself stood forth as its living
expression. He appealed to his miracles as the proofs of it: "it is the
Father that doeth the works." It formed the substance of his final
discourse with his disciples in the night that he was betrayed. It is
the Truth, to bear witness to which, he told Pilate, was the purpose of
his life. In support of this Truth he died, and by the living power of
this Truth he rose again. The whole object of his mission was to teach
men to realise their unity with God and the consequences that must
necessarily follow from it; to draw them away from that notion of
dualism which puts an impassable barrier between God and man, and thus
renders any true conception of the Principle of Life impossible; and to
draw them into the clear perception of the innermost nature of Life, as
consisting in the inherent identity of each individual with that
Infinite all-pervading Spirit of Life which he called "the Father."
"The branch cannot bear fruit except it abide in the vine;" the power of
bearing fruit, of producing and of giving forth, depends entirely on the
fact that the individual is, and always continues to be, as much an
organic part of Universal Spirit as the fruit-bearing branch is an
organic part of the parent stem. Lose this idea, and regard God as a
merely external Creator who may indeed command us, or even sometimes be
moved by our cries and entreaties, and we have lost the root of
Livingness and with it all possibility of growth or of liberty. This is
dualism, which cuts us off from our Source of Life; and so long as we
take this false conception for the true law of Being, we shall find
ourselves hampered by limitations and insoluble problems of every
description: We have lost the Key of Life and are consequently unable to
open the door.
But in proportion as we abide in the vine, that is, consciously realise
our perpetual unity with Originating Spirit, and impress upon ourselves
that this unity is neither bestowed as the reward of merit, nor as an
act of favour--which would be to deny the Unity, for the bestowal would
at once imply dualism--but dwell on the truth that it is the innermost
and supreme principle of our own nature; in proportion as we consciously
realise this, we shall rise to greater and greater certainty of
knowledge, resulting in more and more perfect externalisation, whose
increasing splendour can know no limits; for it is the continual
outflowing of the exhaustless Spirit of Life in that manifestation of
itself which is our own individuality.
The notion of dualism is the veil which prevents men seeing this, and
causes them to wander blindfolded among the mazes of endless perplexity;
but, as St. Paul truly says, when this veil is taken away we shall find
ourselves changed from glory to glory as by the Lord the Spirit. "His
name shall be called Immanuel," that is "God _in_ us," not a separate
being from ourselves. Let us remember that Jesus was condemned by the
principle of separation because he himself was the externalisation of
the principle of Unity, and that, in adhering to the principle of Unity
we are adhering to the only possible root of Life, and are maintaining
the Truth for which Jesus died.
XVII
EXTERNALISATION
Who would not be happy in himself and his conditions? That is what we
all desire--more fulness of life, a greater and brighter vitality in
ourselves, and less restriction in our surroundings. And we are told
that the talisman by which this can be accomplished is Thought. We are
told, Change your modes of thought, and the changed conditions will
follow. But many seekers feel that this is very much like telling us to
catch birds by putting salt on their tails. If we can put the salt on
the bird's tail, we can also lay our hand on the bird. If we can change
our thinking, we can thereby change our circumstances.