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It is part of my work in the spirit world to be at hand when people are making their entrance into these lands as residents, so that I speak from first-hand experience when I tell you of the abject terror that consumes so many poor souls when their moment of transition has come. Instead of the winter of their earthly lives passing gently into the glorious fresh, fragrant spring of their new life in these lands, they arrive here with that terror full upon them.
Such beliefs are relics of pure paganism, but this wicked fiction has been kept up and disseminated by the Churches of earth as a measure of inspiring fear into the hearts of their faithful. As a former priest of the Church, I regret deeply and earnestly, that I ever gave tongue to such misguided teaching. And there are hosts of others like me.
According to the ancient books and chronicles a deliverer would be sent, but of the time and place and circumstances of his coming no man knew. At length, at a period which is reckoned at about two thousand years ago a great being was born upon earth. By some he was hailed as the long-awaited deliverer; by others this was rigorously denied. After nearly two thousand years have passed, there still remains the same divided thought as to whether God sent His deliverer.
The birth upon the earth-plane of that illustrious soul so many years ago was eventually to stir men's minds as they had not been stirred before. Manuscripts were supposedly containing the many acts and words performed and spoken during his short life on earth, together with his teachings.
From this, there has been built up a vast theology, so abstruse, so complex, so incomprehensible that no man can explain it, and so controversial that scores of distinct and separate and opposed religious sects have arisen upon the earth-plane, each claiming to be more or less the only true means of the soul's salvation.
As a priest of one of the principal of these religious denominations, I upheld, when I was upon earth, all its doctrines and creeds. When I eventually came to live in the spirit world, I found that the whole of my theological knowledge was completely negative or stultified by my first sight of the truths of the spirit world, of its people, and of its laws. I found that as far as the people of earth were concerned, they had never lived for one single fraction of a moment under the wrath of God, for the all-sufficing reason that the Great Father of Heaven cannot entertain wrath against any person or persons whatsoever for any reason or reasons whatsoever.
How do I know this, it may be asked? The answer is simple: it is common knowledge in the spirit world. We, in these realms, all know it. Therein lies the immeasurable beauty of it. It is apparent at every turn. The Wrath of God is a stupid and wicked fiction.
Numberless false theories have been propounded from it, and numberless false doctrines have been formulated. The most elementary acquaintance with the laws of the spirit world will at once show that the wrath of God is a contradiction of terms. The two words cannot exist together. That is also common knowledge in these realms, elementary knowledge. The wrath of God, indeed!
But that is not all. Jesus, the great teacher who was born upon earth two thousand years ago, was cast out of the earth world violently and shamefully by the people of earth. This tragic transition was an act of expiation to the Eternal Father for the wrath He felt and as a means of saving the earth world's inhabitants. So it is still taught in the churches of earth. A blood sacrifice of His only son!
Such beliefs as these are primitive and barbaric, and monstrous when viewed in the light of the great truths of the spirit world as we know and understand them here.
The road of salvation was always the same. To teach that one great soul should suffer all the torments of persecution and a horrible death in order to save the world from damnation, and to teach same that this same tragedy should be demanded by the Father of Heaven to appease His wrath, is not only revolting in itself to us here in the spirit world, but it is far, far worse - this the grossest libel, the greatest defamation, to put it at its very least, that could ever be contemplated upon the character and nature and the very essence of the Great Father of the universe.
All this, you will perhaps say, is a far cry from the supposed story of our first parents. It is not so really. Adam and Eve were our first parents, so you are taught. They committed the first sin, and were punished by being cast out from their garden of paradise. Up to this time these individuals were strangely constructed.
They were, in fact, immortal in their physical bodies while at the same time they were living upon a corruptible earth. They lost this strange attribute when they committed their sin, death was introduced. The whole race of mankind that was to come was involved in the crash, and it was only the promise of the visitation from on high to the earth-plane of one who would redeem the earth world that made life possible upon it.
I have tried to show you that this story is fantastic and in doing so to bridge the immense gap between the formation of the world, with its subsequent steady evolution, and that era which commenced two thousand years ago.
Adam and Eve as our first parents had no existence in fact. The story is a fantasy. Jesus was born upon earth two thousand years ago, and he is today an immense force upon the earth-plane. That is fact. The fantasy and the fact have no relation whatever to one another, but the Church has made the one dependent and consequent upon the other.
From this there has arisen all the strange variety of religious sects and religious observances that are to be seen throughout the earth. It is against every law of the spirit world that one person can assume responsibility for another's wrong doing. There are no merits belonging to another person of which we can avail ourselves and by which we can evade our responsibilities.
But, it will be said, this great soul who perished so tragically, is different. He is one apart. He is Divine. He is the Son of God come down to earth to redeem us. He is, in fact, God Himself. With God all things are possible. Therefore, by virtue of his Divinity, Jesus will wash away our sins if we have sufficient faith and do what the Church teaches. We must be repentant, of course, and being repentant, we have one who will plead our cause by the merits of his supreme sacrifice we shall he saved. That is a very comforting and comfortable thought belief, but there is just one flaw. It simply is not true.
The truth, as we can see it in the spirit world, is that most religion, as it is at present constituted upon the earth-plane, is itself nothing but sheer superstition. It is superstition begotten of ignorance or lack of knowledge of the truths of life as it is lived in the spirit world.
God is not some dread Being who must be constantly appeased, propitiated, and dreaded because of the fearful punishments with which He can inflict us upon the instant. We know that to be a completely fantastic conception of the Greatest Being whose desire is the happiness of all living creatures.
Mercy implies the remission of some penalty or part of a penalty that has been incurred by the commission of an offence. If some person has committed an offence against us, the person who committed it has himself to blame for the consequences. We can forgive sincerely, but the penalty still remains. It is a penalty, which the individual inflicted upon himself. God has not done so. It is not an offence against God. No person on earth or in the spirit world can offend the Supreme Being. No base thought or idea, no act, however evil or barbarous, no vice, no obscenity, no blasphemies or maledictions, can come within a thousand miles of the Father of the universe.
Any one of the catalogues of spiritual horrors, which I have just enumerated, can, and will, woefully injure a fellow mortal, but most of all they will injure the perpetrators. They have not offended God; they have brought dire disaster upon themselves. They have broken the laws of the spirit world, among the chief of which is the law of cause and effect. Would the Father of Heaven mitigate one iota of the punishment due to breaking of one of the natural laws? If He were to do so, where would strict justice be?
The idea that man is constantly offending God is crude. Allied with it is the similarly crude notion that God inflicts punishments not only upon individuals, but upon whole nations and continents.
We, in the spirit world, may know little of the will of God, but at least we know what He would never do. He would never cause suffering, of any nature whatsoever, to any single living creature, whether upon your earth or in the spirit world.
From the Father of Heaven can come only that which is good and that which is for the happiness of humanity. The Father cannot be offended. He has no forgiveness to give. He does not condemn; He does not punish, nor does He relegate to others either the power or the right to punish. The offences, which the great majority of mankind commit, are offences against natural laws, the laws that govern the spiritual nature of man, and those offences themselves react upon the one who commits them. We may offend fellowman, and we can, and we should, obtain his forgiveness. Then we can proceed to put ourselves in proper spiritual order.
In doing so, we shall have the help of the spirit world under the guidance of the Father of the universe Himself, through His ministers of the spirit world. We have not offended God; we have broken certain spiritual laws. If you were to cast yourself from a high wall in total disregard of the law of gravity, you would have no one to blame but yourself because your physical body was drawn violently towards the ground at the cost of broken limbs or other injuries. In this respect you h
ave broken the law of gravity, but you have offended no one, injured no one, in this case, but yourself. The spiritual laws must be respected just as you upon earth respect the law of gravity, a law that is ever-present and so potent.
The Christian does not realise that much of his religion has been taken bodily from that of the 'heathen' ...
One of the principal articles of belief among early generations of man upon earth was the belief in the absolute need of offering sacrifices to the gods. They were mostly blood sacrifices of either human beings or animals. The offering of blood, it was earnestly believed in those far off days, was the only oblation acceptable to the gods, and the only means of appeasing their wrath.
How this could have pleased, or conciliated, or helped the particular god was one of the 'mysteries' of religion. This primitive and barbaric belief of the essential need for blood sacrifices has passed in the Christian religion, where people are still being taught upon earth that God sacrificed His only son upon the cross for the salvation of mankind.
Could any belief be of a more terribly gross nature; could any belief be ever a greater travesty of the very nature and essence of the Great Father of heaven and earth? Could any belief be more barbaric and horrible?
Is it to be wondered at when folk say that they do not know how to love God as they are taught to do by their religious instructors, when they are told that God, the Father, demanded not only a blood sacrifice, but that the sacrificial victim should be His only son. Could this be a God of love?; is a question that would spring to the mind of any normally constituted person.
To essay an answer to such a question is to lead one into a wilderness of theological complexities which have little relation to the truth. The maintenance of such a doctrine as that God demanded a blood sacrifice of his son is to impute the most horrible and diabolical qualities to the Father of the universe. This sacrifice, ecclesiastics will tell you, was necessary for the remission of the sins of the people on earth. God demanded it, it will be affirmed. That is pure paganism, and without a vestige of truth behind it.
We are each responsible for our own sins. We must pay the penalty ourselves for any transgressions of spiritual laws; no one can do that for us. Thus is true justice administered throughout the spirit world to all alike, impartially, infallibly, and exactly.
‘Redemption’ cannot be bought for us. But even if redemption were to be bought, by some strange mutation of spiritual laws, it would be a worthless article because there is no individual in the spirit world, or upon earth, who could for one instant of time substantiate the claim of being a redeemer. Even the most illustrious souls, who dwell far and away above us here in these realms of light, even they have no power to remove the burden which mortal man can lay upon himself by the life he has led upon earth. Man is his own redeemer. He always has been, and he always will be.
We cannot shift on to other shoulders the weight which we must carry ourselves. But we shall have every assistance in lightening that burden, and the means to do so will be shown to us readily upon our merest wish. That is as far as any person can go.
- Editor's note: Notice the parallels here with Paul's discussion in Galatians 6 concerning "burden" and helping a brother with a fault.
The Father of Heaven asks for no appeasement; He requires none. Neither does he need placating by the offering of sacrifices, albeit they be bloodless sacrifices.
A sacrifice of body and blood, that is to say, a religious service wherein a piece of bread is held to be the body of Jesus, and a cup of wine to be his blood, becomes, in the eyes of us here in the spirit world, a revolting conception.
If it is felt that a commemorative gathering would be helpful, then there is no reason why some description of service should not be held. But any suggestion, any thought even, of body and blood should be ruthlessly expunged.
Incidentally, such service has very little spiritual value, if any at all. The spirit world is not concerned with ritualistic observances whether they embody strange doctrines or not. The theologian will claim that such services are necessary for man upon earth if he is to have the grace of God upon him. That is rubbish.
A church service, of which the vital or central part is based upon a false doctrine, is completely worthless spiritually. Again, the object of such service must be taken into consideration. If it is intended as an act of propitiation to the Father, it is valueless. The Father needs no acts of propitiation.
If the service is performed because it is alleged that God demands worship, then again it has no significance. God does not ever demand worship of any kind or description. If the service be held for the remission of the sins of the congregation, then once more the service is of no avail.
The most magnificent service ever conducted in the largest and most ornate cathedral with the maximum of solemnity, pomp, and ritualistic display, and in the presence of a whole hierarchy, will not, in the smallest, minutes degree remove from a single 'sinner' one fraction of the burden which a mis-spent life has loaded upon the shoulders of the breaker of spiritual laws. No pleading, however eloquently delivered or prolonged, will achieve that object.
Those peculiar religious devices, known to the orthodox world as the sacraments, through which, it is held, the grace of God will descend upon man, are just man-made institutions whereby the people can be kept in proper subjugation. Mysteries are necessary in maintaining the Church's power and authority. It would never do for the people to know as much as their ministers of the Church.
By withholding as much as possible, their fear of God is increased, and with that well inculcated, the people will do just as they are told. The authority of the Church will be maintained and all will be well, so authority itself may think.
All is not well. All is very ill, indeed, with the countless thousands who have been misled, misguided, and befooled by their supposed religious mentors. The Church has built up an elaborate system of observances and doctrines, most of which, it will be claimed, have their foundation in the New Testament because they were actually instituted by Jesus himself.
Dishonest or ignorant scribes have put into the mouth of Jesus sayings which we, in the spirit world, know positively he could never have uttered. Jesus is supposed to have spoken about his Church. That is a falsity of the worst kind.
On no occasion was Jesus interested in establishing any Church. He dealt solely with spiritual truths; he was at no time concerned with the creation and establishment of peculiar sacramental devices upon which man's salvation would have to depend...
Jesus was the great exemplar of communication between our two worlds, yours and mine. He showed that with proper development and under proper auspices it is indisputably right for the two worlds to hold a normal converse through the exercise of psychic faculties in a normal rational way...
As we see things in their clear light in the spirit world, we regard the Church on earth - and by Church I mean all those religious bodies who nominate themselves Christian - we regard the Church upon earth not as a help to man in his spiritual progression, but as a downright and deliberate hindrance. The Church is blocking the way to the diffusion of spiritual truth and knowledge throughout the earth world...
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