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A Series of Lessons in Mystic Christianity988
blood over the altars and the stones of the floor of the courts. Once more
He saw the senseless mummery of the priestly ceremonies, which seemed
more pitiful than ever to His developed mind. He knew that His vision had
shown that He was to be slaughtered even as the sacrificial lambs, and there
arose in His mind that comparison which stayed with Him ever after—that
picture of Himself as the Lamb sacrificed on the Altar of Humanity. As
pure as was this figure in His mind, it seems pitiful that in the centuries to
come His followers would fall into the error (as equally cruel as that of the
Hebrews) of imagining that His death was a sacrifice demanded by a cruel
Deity to satisfy the Divine Wrath which had been kindled by the sight of
Man’s shortcomings and sins.
The barbarous conception of a wrathful God whose anger against His
people could be appeased only by the bloody slaughter of innocent
creatures, is fully equalled by the theological dogmas that the same Divine
Wrath could be, and was, appeased by the blood of Jesus, the Master who
had come to deliver the Message of Truth. Such a conception is worthy of
only the most barbarous and primitive minds. And yet it has been preached
and taught for centuries—in the very name of Jesus Himself—and men
have been persecuted and put to death because they refused to believe
that the Supreme Creator of the Universe could be such a malignant, cruel,
revengeful Being, or that the One Mind of All could be flattered and
cajoled into forgiveness by the sight of the death of the Man of Sorrows.
It seems almost incredible that such a teaching could have arisen from the
pure teachings of Jesus, and that such has been Man’s incapacity to grasp
the Inner Teachings, that the Church built upon Jesus’ ministry has adopted
and insisted upon the acceptance of such dogmas. But this baneful cloud
of ignorance and barbaric thought is gradually lifting, until even now the
intelligent minds in the Church refuse to accept or teach the doctrine in its
original crudity, they either passing it over in silence, or else dressing it in a
more attractive garb.