THE “NEW GOSPEL OF INTERPRETATION”

• THE “NEW GOSPEL OF INTERPRETATION”: Being an Abstract of the Doctrine and a Statement of the Origin, Object, Basis, Method and Scope of the Esoteric Christian Union. Edward Maitland. Published under auspice of the Esoteric Christian Union, whose President-Founder was Edward Maitland. London, Lamley & Co., 1892. 93 pp.

Information: This book was a very rare one, very difficult to find. We now have the complete text of The “New Gospel of Interpretation” in this site. As far as we can see, its message is still of the greatest importance to the well being of the world. May it be a sign of the times.

Thanks are due to Mr. Gabriel Buist and to Mr. Ralph Johnson for helping us in photocopying the original work in England, and to Mr. João Batista Fagundes Cunha, from Brazil, for helping us with the work of making the digital version of it.

Below we have its title page, the Abstract of Argument and Leading Subjects of Sections, and the links to the sections of the book, with the complete Html text.

“Not to destroy but to construct; or, rather, to destroy by construction; to
conquer error by the full presentment of truth.” – St. Dionysius the Areopagite.

“We mean you to lay bare the secrets of the world’s sacrificial system.”
– Charge to the recipients of the New Gospel of Interpretation.

Distinction between the Esoterical and Ecclesiastical as regards both method and criterion. (9)

The Bible insists on the Esoteric sense and the appeal to the Understanding as against Authority; citations in proof. (12)

The manifoldness of the sense of Scripture; fourfold interpretation of Genesis 1. (16)

The Bible throughout denounces Ecclesiasticism for its materialisation of things spiritual, announcing its overthrow by means of a special revelation. The Bible contains clay and dross as well as gold. (18)

Charges it with having recourse to sorcery; “Lucifer,” “Baal,” “Molech,” “King of Babylon,” etc. (21)

And declares it to be of diabolical origin, and for that reason insisting on a blood-loving God; citations in proof. The Apocalypse a prospective history of the Church. “The Beast” and his “number.” (23)

“Michael the prince.” The “Woman” by whose fall comes man’s fall, and by whose restoration man’s redemption, not a woman, but the Soul as represented by the Intuition; explanation of this faculty from the New Interpretation. (27)

The Fall, which is that of the original Church of Christ, brought about by Ecclesiasticism acting under Satanic control, by means of the depravation of man’s spiritual consciousness, to the destruction of the equilibrium between the intellect and the intuition, in virtue of which, and which alone, man is able to understand. “The order of Melchizedek.” Revelation the supreme common-sense. The duality of Original Being in respect of the two factors Force and Substance, constitutes God the universal Father-Mother, and Generation the method both of Creation – which is manifestation – and of Redemption – the latter being called Regeneration, a process necessitating Re-incarnation. Why these essential doctrines were suppressed in favour of salvation by Substitution. (32)

The Esoteric and true doctrine of Divine Incarnation. The mission of Christ the demonstration to others, by His own example, of man’s divine potentialities. The gospels fragmentary only. Love, the redeemer. The “Forgiveness of Sins” and the doctrine of “Karma.” Evolution the manifestation of Inherency; the inherency of existence is divine; wherefore evolution is accomplished only by the realisation of divinity, and is the process of the individuation of divinity. Of this, the real Gospel of Christ, the keynote is the divinity of the substance of existence as the feminine principle in Being, whence the permanence and perfectibility of the individual. (38)

“The mystery of Redemption” and the “Twelve Gates of Regeneration,” and Christ as the supreme result thereof, as set forth in the New Interpretation. (42)

Christ is, therefore, the fulfilment, not the subversion, of the divine-natural order, the realisation in every man of his own divine potentialities, belonging to him in virtue of the divinity of his constituent principles. In denying Substance, Ecclesiasticism has not only deprived man of his divine birthright, but has made itself Anti-Christ, and committed the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. Definitions of these sins. (49)

Man the individuated expression of principles subsisting in God, who is therefore to be “understood by the things which are made.” Difference of this doctrine from anthropomorphism. The dualism of Sex the expression in ultimates of the dualism of Force and Substance subsisting in Original Being, and common to all planes and modes of manifestation, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, as well as physical. (52)

By its denial of the Divine Duality and suppression of the Understanding in favour of authority as the criterion of truth, Ecclesiasticism has blasphemed also the Logos as the Reason of God both in God’s self and in His manifestation in man, and has accordingly systematically perverted all the doctrines of religion, from Reason converting them into Unreason, with the result of placing itself between man and God, not as mediator to bring them together, but as separator to trust them asunder and keep them apart, to the undoing of the work of Christ. (55)

The guilt of the rejection and crucifixion of Christ, rests not upon the Jews, against whom Ecclesiasticism has directed it, but upon Ecclesiasticism itself. And now that it finds the world passing from under its sway, it seeks to strengthen its hold by heaping on yet more and more of the element which has been the Church’s bane, namely materiality, in the shape of an enhanced ritual, thus redoubling the appeal to sense instead of proffering the interpretation which alone can save religion and the world. Its failure to understand, and its consequent perversion of, the Church’s dogmas, illustrated by its action in regard to the doctrine of the “Assumption of the B.V.M.” The true meaning of this doctrine and its relation to the incoming dispensation and the New Interpretation. “The Kingdom of the Mother of God.” (58)

The world’s present state. As the Inquisition served as index to mark the spiritual level of the preceding age, so the institution of Vivisection marks that of the present age; signifying the total

extinction of the “Woman,” Intuition, and therein of the moral and spiritual consciousness, it denotes the culmination of the Fall to its lowest point, and the extinction of Humanity in all respects save the outward form. From being grossly corrupt, the intuition is now entirely suppressed, to the total destruction of man’s mental balance, and therein of his status as a rational being. As the last attempt of the powers of evil, working as ever through the world’s Ecclesiasticisms, to abolish God out of the world and establish human society on the ethics of hell, the acceptance of vivisection by Christendom as a legitimate method of research has been made the occasion of the delivery of the New Gospel of Interpretation which is to save the world. (62)

The Bible represents the “revelation of that Wicked One” the controlling spirit of Ecclesiasticism, and the manifestation anew of the Christ, whereby that influence is to be destroyed, as interdependent and simultaneous. The Bible forecasts of this event are manifold – e.g., Esther, Daniel, Michael, the Abomination of Desolation, the budding of the Fig-tree, “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” “even My hour is not yet come,” “Behold thy Mother,” “If I will that he tarry till I come,” “in the clouds of heaven,” “the spirit of His mouth and the brightness of His coming.” (68)

The expressions “virgin-born,” “twice-born,” “Son of the Woman,” “Sons of God,” all imply man regenerate through a pure intuition; the Deluge, the Exodus, the Return from the Captivity, the Parable of the Prodigal, etc., also imply the Church’s deliverance from the bondage of Ecclesiasticism and its regeneration through the restoration of the intuition: God’s “two witnesses.” Michael, Melchizedek, and the constellation Libra. (72)

The “Man bearing a pitcher of water.” The Zodiac, the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx and the Obelisk, all alike as now interpreted “signs and witnesses to the Lord in the land of Egypt,” testifying to the doctrine of the Duality in Unity, and the

Equilibrium of its two factors as the condition of perfection: the equilibrium this is, not between Spirit and Matter, or God and Nature; but between the two modes of Spirit, Force and Substance, whether in the Unmanifest or Manifest. “Jachin and Boaz;” “Pillars of Hercules.” (74)

This society owes its origination to the recognition, by a group of students of spiritual religion, of the occurrence in the present age of a restoration of faculty and knowledge corresponding to that predicted in the Bible, as exemplified in the writings called the New Gospel of Interpretation. This gospel is not new itself, but new only by reason of its having been suppressed, forgotten, and lost. Its identity in spirit, derivation, kind and method with all previous divine revelations. The Christ born again among the animals. Love, the recognition of the Omnipresent Self. (78)

The Church of the Regeneration, its characteristics. “Roma” reversed; “Peter;” “Mystery;” “the dry bones live;” “the vessels of the house of the Lord” restored, and the temple rebuilt. “Gog, Magog, and Armageddon.” (82)

The message of the New Interpretation to the Ecclesiasticisms, especially that of Science. The condition of the priesthoods of the future. The present disintegration of society preparatory to re-integration on the basis of the New Interpretation. The Lord rules. “Solve, Coagula, Fige.” The “Bow in the clouds.” (85)

Conclusion. For those who know the spiritual nature and history of the World, so far from there being any antecedent improbability in the event herein declared, it was a moral certainty, such that its failure to occur would have constituted an irregularity as perplexing and disastrous as that of the day to follow the night, the summer the winter; that which it means being man’s completion in his proper divine image, by his promotion to his spiritual manhood, and the regeneration of Church and World. (91)

The Esoteric Christian Union.

Organisation. Methods. Scriptures of the Future. Books Recognised by the Society as Appertaining to the New Gospel of Interpretation.