Gerald Massey's Lectures - Society in evolution - Awardspace

4. The purity of a meek and gentle spirit.
5. The purity of holiness.
6. The purity by which the body became a temple of the Holy Ghost.
7. The purity which gave the power of healing the sick and of raising
the dead; i.e., the spirits of the dead!
8. They attained the mystic state of Elias, who was the Essenic Christ!
And in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, Bishop Lightfoot rises to
explain that the Essenes were Fortune-tellers!
Orthodox Christianity knows nothing of Spiritualism to-day, and consequently can know
nothing of Spiritualism in the past, because it is fact alone that can prove the fact. They
reject it because it was repudiated by the founders of the historic faith; because it offers
no facts to prove, whereas it does offer facts that furnish us with disproof of a physical
resurrection. But it is absolutely necessary to be a phenomenal Spiritualist, or at least to
know that phenomenal Spiritualism is founded upon facts of possible human experience,
before we can take the first step toward really understanding this matter of the
beginnings, or gauge the impassable gulf of difference that lies between the Gnostic
Religion and Historic Christianity. With the Gnostics knowledge was the foundation of
their faith; but the Historic Christians made faith the basis of knowledge, and the first
demand of the new faith was for the convert to believe that all the mythical typology of
the past had been made literally true in the present. By faith the fable was crystallised
into the dogma of historic fact.
The Gnostic doctrines of the pre-Historic religion were formulated as being those of
knowledge, faith, and immortality. Knowledge was fundamental. On this their faith was
founded by means of a first-hand acquaintanceship with those facts which gave them
their faith for the present, and sustained it with something more than the hope or promise
of continuity for the future. Knowledge, Faith, and Immortality! Historic Christianity was
based upon faith without that knowledge, and those who knew the least were actually
considered and designated the better believers, just as it is in the Salvation Army of today.
Lord Bacon, in a most unworthy utterance, affirmed that "the more irrational and
incredible any divine mystery is the greater the honour we do God in believing it, and so
much the more noble is the victory of faith." Such, however, was the teaching of the
Church whose divine mysteries were manufactured from misinterpreted mythology. Nor
was it very difficult to literalise the mystical representation when a man like Origen could
maintain that the planets were animated bodies and rational beings.
All the secrets of the great knowledge of the interior and mystical life, which M. Renan
calls the "Most glorious creation of Christendom," were in possession of the Gnostics of
various lands long ages earlier, whilst their modus operandi of ascertaining the truth was
now to be rejected and denounced as damnable by the corporeal Christians, or carnalisers
of the Christ. They not only let go, they anathematised the knowledge that was already
won from nature, and prohibited the means of continuing it or of recovering it again.
The Gnostics, as Irenæus shows, pointed out the very serious error that was committed by
those who imagined that the Christ had arisen in a mundane body, not knowing that
"flesh and blood do not attain to the Kingdom of God!"
The Christ of the Gnostics was a mystical type continued from mythology to portray a
spiritual reality of the interior life. Hence the Christ in this human phase could be female
as well as male; Sophia as well as Jesus; the spirit of both sexes. It was impossible for
such to become historical, or be made so, except by ignorantly mistaking a mythical
Impersonation for a Hermaphrodite in Person!
What, for example, is the actual base of the "Great Renunciation" ascribed to the Buddha
or the Christ in the doctrinal, mythical, or spiritual phase? It is this:--When the soul of
man came to be considered as a divine principle of celestial origin, it was figured as