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19. VEGETARIANISM AND THE BIBLE
THERE are very many persons for whom the arguments
scientific, social, economical, and even moral, in favour
of a vegetable diet, do not suffice, but who require in addition the sanction of
the Bible. As we are prepared to meet inquirers at this point also, I have drawn
up a short paper in solution of what may be called the religious difficulty in
the way of vegetarianism, which I will now read to you. You will perceive as I
proceed that I make no question of the authority of the Bible. The only
question, if there be one, will be of the interpretation of the Bible, or at
least of certain parts of it. And the more effectually to obtain a patient and
tolerant hearing for anything I may say at variance with your accustomed
beliefs, I will remind you in advance that while belief in the infallibility of
the Bible is one thing, and is compatible with that spirit of humility with
which alone things sacred should be a approached, belief in the infallibility of
one’s own interpretation of the Bible is another thing, and is incompatible with
such spirit of humility. Of course, this exordium may be altogether uncalled
for, as it may turn out that the views expressed by me are already your own. But
however this may be, it is necessary for the proper
advocacy of our Cause that they be stated.
First of all, then, as to the character and
purpose of the Bible. It is before all
other things a religious book; not a scientific, or historical, but a religious
book. And, further, as religion is not a thing of the outer sense and reason,
but relates to the Soul, the appeal of the Bible is not to the outer sense and
reason, but to the Soul.
Agreeing on these premises, we ought to have no
difficulty in agreeing on these other premises also. As the Soul is not
perishable like the body, but is immortal, and many become eternal, the
teachings necessary for it must refer, not to persons, things, or events, which
are of time and transitory, but
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must consist in verities,
which are eternal, and capable of perpetual application.
And again, as the Bible, in being a religious book and
addressed to the Soul, or spiritual part of man, deals with things inward and
spiritual, and not with things outward and material, it is in the spiritual
signification, and not in the outward form, that its true value consists and
must be sought.
On this last point the Bible itself speaks decidedly,
saying that the Letter is dead and Killeth, but the
Spirit alone hath and giveth life. And not this alone,
but the Bible insists also on the necessity, to the reader or hearer, of an
inner sense of his own by means of which alone he can discern its inner meaning.
Constantly it is said, in reference to some utterance of which the principal
meaning is so deeply concealed as to constitute it a mystery – “He that hath
ears to hear, let him hear.” And constantly does it speak reproachfully of
persons who have eyes that see not and ears that hear not the mystic meaning
hidden beneath its symbolical phrases. And so far from approving of blind,
unintelligent assent, it repeatedly exalts a Spirit of Understanding as the
chief of divine gifts. And in doing this, it may be observed, the Bible is not
inconsistent with itself when, enumerating the divine graces Faith, Hope, and
Charity, it declares the first of these to be Charity. For
Charity is one with Love, and Love is one with Sympathy, and Sympathy is the
first and last step to Understanding. Now, it is to your Understanding
that I appeal for recognition of that which I shall say on this occasion.
From the premises thus laid down, there follows this
important conclusion, which is a master-key to the interpretation of Scripture.
All that is true in it is spiritual, and no dogma or doctrine is true that seems
to bear a physical meaning, or that is not spiritual.
If it be true, and yet seem to us to have a material
signification, we have yet to seek the interpretation. That which is true, is
for Spirit alone. (1)
Now, not only does the Bible address itself to the
Soul, but it contains, and is, the history of the Soul. And it is written, as
would be expected from its Egyptian origin, in hieroglyphics, or sacred symbols,
the method usual to the Egyptians, and adopted from them by the Hebrews, or, it
may be, the
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method of the Hebrews, or
sacred people, from the first, and by them introduced into
For “Idolatry is Materialism, the common and original
sin of men, which replaces Spirit by Appearance, Substance by Illusion, and
leads both the moral and intellectual Being into
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error, so that they
substitute the nether for the upper, and the depth for the height. It is that
false fruit which attracts the outer senses, the bait of the serpent in the
beginning of the world;” (1) and this alike for the race and for
each individual who has ever lived, for all are liable to its attraction.
We ought then to know, for the right understanding of
the mystical scriptures, that in their esoteric, or interior and real, sense,
they deal, not with material things, but with spiritual realities; and that
neither is Adam an actual man, but denotes rather the lower personality or
intellectual force in every human being; nor is Eve an actual woman. But denotes
the feminine element in every human being, namely, the Soul or moral conscience;
and she is therefore called the “Mother of the Living” or spiritually alive, namely, those in whom the Soul
has attained self-consciousness. Nor is
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by whose spirit,
working within him, he has been created. And thus created has been and will be
every man who ever lived or will live.
But the process includes a point called the Fall. Yielding to the outward impulses of the lower nature
ere she is sufficiently strong to resist them, Eve puts forth her hand and
plucks the fruit which, as she is spiritual, and it is material – is Matter – is
forbidden to her. In other words, and divested of allegory, the Soul, or higher
self, falls beneath the power of the lower self and loses the intuition of
Spirit and the man, no longer sustained by her, follows her in her fall. The
lower self, with the bodily appetites and reason, becomes sole ruler, and its
offspring is Cain, the murderer and even the torturer of his brethren, human and
animal. And when Abel, who, as minister of the Soul and her intuitions,
represents the prophet, offers to God the “firstlings of his flock,” [Genesis 4:4], namely, the “Lamb” of a pure and gentle heart, makes his appearance, he
is forthwith slain by Cain, who, as the slave of sense, offering of the “fruits
of the ground,” [Genesis
4:3], or lower nature, represents the priest.
(1)
In this view, then Abel was no initiator of blood and
death to innocent creatures either for sacrifice or for food. His “Lamb”
signified simply the holiest and highest of spiritual gifts which, rejected and
slain from the foundation of the world, is represented in the Apocalypse as
finally occupying the throne of God, surrounded by all those who, redeemed
through following it, have the Father’s name written on their foreheads. For it
is still the Soul that, under the appellation of the woman, when purified from
Matter, becomes the Bride of the Spirit, and Mother of the eternally living;
while it is the Soul persisting in evil who is styled “Mother of Abominations,”
and who shares the doom of “Babylon,” or “that great city” the world or system
of civilisation in which Matter is exalted to the holy place of
God in the Soul, and the body is made all and in all.
The same spiritual truth recurs again and again in the
sacred books, under various allegorical forms. Always are tenderness of heart
and purity of habit the accompaniments of the higher life; always are bloodshed
and flesh-eating the results of a fall to a lower level. The story of the Deluge
illustrates the same truth, and to the slaughter of animals adds
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drunkenness. In this parable, man is represented, after a period of declension into
utter materialism, as once more, under a flood of intuition, regaining that
height of perfection, the full consciousness of his spiritual nature. But no
sooner does he come down from the mount of purification and regeneration, than
he betakes him again to grossness and bloodshed, such that the Deity is
represented as giving him up as hopeless, saying it was of no use to punish him,
and giving him reluctant permission, to use flesh for his food. For such is the
obvious and true meaning of the passage so confusedly translated in the ninth
chapter of Genesis.
And yet we constantly find a permission, which was the result of a fall, pleaded
as an excuse for declining to make any effort at recovery! That such recovery is
not regarded in the Bible as impossible, is shown by the appointment of a symbol
of hope in the rainbow with its seven rays. For this is again the type of the
Woman or Soul, who, when restored to purity, and divinely illumined, manifests
the Seven Spirits of God of which the Soul always bears the potentiality in her
bosom, and in virtue thereof will some day again be the producer of men “made in
the image of God”.
The feud, already referred to, between prophet and
priest, as the ministers respectively of the Soul and of sense, of the pure life
and of bloodshed, is carried on throughout the whole of the Bible, until it
culminates in the murder by priests of the greatest of prophets. For the
prophets were not shedders of blood; and all the narratives which represent
Moses, Samuel, Elijah, and other prophets as engaged in slaughtering either
their own people or the neighbouring tribes –
narratives which for their apparent horror are at once a stumbling-block to the
faithful and an occasion of scoffing to the unbelievers – represent simply the
conflicts of the Soul with the evil tendencies of the man it animates. And had,
moreover, the translators of the Bible been duly fitted for their task, first,
by their possession of the requisite knowledge of Hebrew; secondly, by their
possession of the requisite insight into divine things; and, thirdly, by their
freedom from prepossession in favour
of a sanguinary conception of divine character, they would have rendered into
English the names of the victims of these massacres, instead of retaining them
in the original; and thus we should have seen in these narratives but an
anticipation of the method pursued in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Holy
War.
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And as to the writers themselves of the Bible, we may well believe that,
could they have foreseen to what depths of dulness a
regimen of flesh and stimulants can reduce an otherwise not unintelligent
people, living two thousand years after them – the dulness
shown by our taking their parables as literal truths – they would have renounced
forthwith their favourite method, and spoken plainly.
No other than the method described was that of Moses.
Learned in all the Mysteries of the religion of the Egyptians, he delivered like
mysteries to his own people, teaching his initiates the spirit of the heavenly
hieroglyphs, and bidding them, when they made festival before God, to carry with
them in procession, with music and with dancing, such of the sacred animals as
were, by their interior significance, related to the occasion. And of these
animals, he chiefly selected males of the first year, without spot or blemish,
to signify that it is beyond all things needful that man should dedicate to the
Lord his intellect and his reason, and this from the beginning and without the
least reserve. The priests, then, were idolaters, who, coming after Moses, and
committing to writing those things which he by word of mouth had delivered unto
Israel, replaced the true things signified by their material symbols, and shed
innocent blood on the pure altars of the Lord. (1)
The prophets, then, as already said, were not shedders
of blood. They dealt not with things material, but with spiritual
significations. Their lambs without spot, their white doves, their goats, their
rams, and other sacred creatures, are so many signs and symbols of the various
graces and gifts which a mystic people should offer to heaven. Without such
sacrifices is no remission of sin. But when the mystic sense was lost, then
carnage followed. The prophets ceased out of the land, and the priests bore rule
over the people. Then, when again the voice of the prophets arose, they were
constrained to speak plainly, and declared openly that the sacrifices of God are
not the flesh of bulls or the blood of goats, but holy vows and sacred
thanksgivings, their mystical counterparts. For, as God is Spirit, so also are
His sacrifices spiritual. It is but folly and ignorance to offer material flesh
and drink to pure Power and essential Being. In vain, even for us, have the
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prophets spoken, and in vain has Christ been manifested. (1) For
the whole burden of Christ’s teaching and moral of Christ’s life by which He
vindicated at once the Law and the Prophets, is that a man cannot be saved by
any act of another, or by any process occurring outside himself; that “none can
by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him” [Psalm 49:8]; that, therefore, not burnt-offering, nor any physical
or material sacrifice whatever, could save man from his sins and their
consequences, but only a lowly and contrite heart, and a pure spirit within the
man himself, and a life in accordance therewith. Only let us once read the Bible
with vision, unobscured by a veil of blood, and
undistorted by prejudice, and its whole mystery – the mystery of our fall and of
our redemption – becomes clear as the cloudless sky. For then we can trace as
occurring in our own souls the whole process from beginning to end which the
Bible from Genesis to the Revelation sets forth under types and parables
precisely after the manner of our Lord Himself. And, doing this, we come to Know
absolutely by the personal experience of our own souls that the secret and
method of the Christ is no other than that process of inward purification and
regeneration whereby alone the spirit in man returns to its original condition
of purity, making him a new man, at one with God, who is pure Spirit. It is this
process of transmutation, or redemption of Spirit from Matter, alike in the
individual and in the universal, which constitutes the theme of all sacred
scriptures, the object of all true religions, the task
of all true churches. And they are the several stages of this process which
constitute respectively the Fall of Adam through the yielding of the Eve in him
to the serpent of Matter; the going down of Israel or the Soul into Egypt or the
world and the body; and the Exodus or flight from the world across the water of
separation and consecration into the wilderness of beneficial experience; and
the crossing of the Jordan or river of purification to take possession of the
promised land of perfection. They are still the several stages of this process
which are represented in the Gospel-history of the typical man regenerate.
Whether they be termed water and the spirit, a pure soul and the divine
operation therein, or the Virgin Mary and Holy Ghost, it is of these two in each
man himself who finally is redeemed that
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the new man, or man
regenerate, the Christ Jesus – who always is the “only begotten son of God” [John 3:16, 18] – is produced. And it is always by the crucifixion and
death on the cross of renunciation of that old Adam, the lower self, and the
resurrection and ascension to a condition of final perfection that salvation is
finally attained. And the reason why all these eternal verities in the soul’s
history are made to centre in the prophet of Nazareth is simply because,
recognising in him the tokens of his attainment of perfection in a degree
never reached before, and in his history the fitting symbolical correspondences,
the Divine Spirit, under whose inspiration the Gospels were composed, selected
him as the type of the possibilities of humanity at large.
But even while thus rejecting as idolatrous,
blasphemous, and pernicious in the highest degree the doctrine as ordinarily
understood of Vicarious Atonement, we still see in “Christ Jesus” “the only
begotten Son of God,” [John
3:16, 18] and still cling fast to His blood and cross as
the sole means of salvation. But it is the Christ Jesus, or man reborn of a pure
soul and spirit, as Jesus Himself declared that all must be born – even
precisely as He is dramatically described as having been born – within
ourselves, to whom we look for salvation. And the means are His cross of
self-sacrifice, renunciation, and purity of life; and the reception into
ourselves of that “Blood of God” which is no mere physical blood – between which
and moral imperfection is no congruous relation – but which is the life of God, even pure Spirit, which is God, and which God is
ever freely shedding for His creatures, giving them of His own life and
substance.
How pernicious is the doctrine of vicarious atonement
as ordinarily accepted may be seen in the world’s present condition,
intellectually, morally, and spiritually, no less than physically. Man ever
makes himself after the image of his God, that is, after his idea of God. And
believing in a God who is unjust, selfish, and cruel, man cannot be other than
unjust, selfish, and cruel also. It is precisely this misrepresentation of the
divine character, and this perversion of the true and only possible doctrine of
the atonement into one that makes man’s salvation a process external to himself
and dependent on the action of another than himself, which, by falsifying
Christianity, have ensured its failure, and, instead of a world ordered on the
principles of justice, sympathy, and
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purity, have given us a
world of wrong-doing, selfishness, and sensuality. According to the true gospel,
as declared by the prophets, the substance of humanity is not material and
created, but spiritual and divine. And man rises out of his lower into his
higher nature by subordinating the former to the latter, and so rising wholly
into that higher, becoming thereby divine – for between Spirit and Matter there
is no boundary line. The knowledge of this was the priceless treasure of which
In conclusion: that at which we aim is no reform of
institutions merely, or promotion of benefits merely material, but a radical
renovation of the very Substance of men themselves on every plane of their
nature, with a view to the realisation of the
long-promised “new heaven and new earth wherein dwelleth
Righteousness,” [2 Peter 3:13] and the advent of that perfected state, the New
Jerusalem, or City which hath God for its light, and which cometh down from the
heaven of man’s own celestial region, even that kingdom of heaven which is
within him, but which can never be realised by those
who persist in so ordering their lives as to make bloodshed and injustice
necessities.
“He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God?” [Micah 6:8] “They
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shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.” [Isaiah 65:25]
And if it be asked what is the source of, and what the authority for, these interpretations, the reply is that there is but one source and authority for truth, and that is the Soul of man himself, and that to obtain access there, and to know of the doctrine, it is necessary to do the Father’s Will, and to live the pure life required. For the Soul sees divinely, and never forgets what she has once learnt. And all that she knows is at the service of him who duly tends and cultivates her. From her comes, directly and without admixture of human alloy, that which has just been said. And no other source or method is there of divine revelation. It is true, as is commonly supposed, that divine revelation is uttered by a voice from heaven. But the heaven is the innermost sanctuary of the temple of man himself, and the voice is that of God speaking therein. Only where the soil, which is the body, is pure and purely nourished, so that no noxious exhalations arise to obscure the atmosphere, can the man and his Soul thus hold converse together. Living as does the world to-day, it cannot know the potentialities of humanity. Hence it regards one foremost example as divine, at the expense of the rest of the race, whereas all are divine, if they will but let themselves be so. And revelation is, no less than reason, the natural rightful possession of man. Only let him live purely, and he will reverse the Fall.
FOOTNOTES
(215:1) See
A.K.’s Illumination Concerning the Prophecy of the Immaculate Conception, in Clothed with the Sun, Part I, Nº.
iii.
(217:1) See
A.K.’s Illumination Concerning the Interpretation
of the Mystical Scriptures, in Clothed with the Sun, Part I, Nº. v.
(218:1) See Biographical Preface, p. 28.
(220:1) See
A.K.’s Illumination Concerning the Interpretation of the Mystical Scriptures, in Clothed with the Sun,
(221:1) See
A.K.’s Illumination Concerning the Interpretation of the Mystical Scriptures, in Clothed with the Sun,
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