Father to the Son, and of the Son to Humanity in the Gnostic Gospel of St. John. Hence also the teaching of St. Paul, whose Christ never was the personal Jesus of Nazareth, though it has been made to appear so in some parts of his Epistles; and though he may have considered that Christ to have had a special incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth.

Compare with the explanation just given the table of the Seven Principles, on page 30, and you will see how accurately the correspondences hold good. The three higher principles correspond to the three Logoi, and constitute the divine; the four lower are the manifestation of these and constitute the human. The three higher are the Individuality, the four lower are the Personality. Of the three higher, Atma is the Father, Manas is the Son. Atma is spoken of as the HIGHER SELF; Manas is the Higher EGO; while the four lower principles are the manifestation of this Ego in its finite aspect of the temporary personality. This holds good whether applied to the universe as a whole, or to man individually. We can only know God, cosmically, through the manifested universe-hence the importance of natural science. We can only know him in full by knowing ourselves, for we are made in his image and likeness. Hence we must look within if we would find God. "The problem of the Ego in man is the problem of God in the universe." But we

can only really know when we become the thing we desire to know. Real knowledge is identity, not external cognition. Hence St. Paul says: "Now we see in a mirror darkly "; our knowledge is an external cognition, a reflection merely. But when we attain "unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ", then we see "face to face ". Thus it is only as we become the divine, it is only as "" we put on Christ", it is only as we put aside all that is personal and temporal, that we learn the true secret of the divine and eternal. In theosophical language this is "union with our HIGHER SELF. '

So long then as the Church teaches a personal God-whose personality was coloured by the racial characteristics of a peculiar people ”—and a personal Christ to correspond thereto, there can be no difficulty in answering the question we asked in Part I, page 5. All that is personal is temporary and finite.

But we have further evidence against the identity of the Jehovah of the Old Testament and the 'Father' of the New Testament. We have seen that Jehovah becomes in one of his permutations, or aspects, Cain, representing man at a later period of evolution. This is because Man is the Divine become the Human. Humanity itself is the Son in one of his aspects. As 'matter' is the reverse aspect of 'spirit'; as 'evil' is the reverse aspect of 'good'; as light' is the reverse aspect of

' darkness'; so is Humanity the reverse aspect of Divinity, and the Devil the reverse aspect of God. Hence the saying, Demon est Deus inversus. And in the anthropomorphic deity, Jehovah, of the Old Testament, we have the fullest possible exemplification of this. When the divine is dragged down into matter, when the sublime conception. of the absolute Unity of all in that absoluteness which is the "invisible God", is dragged down into a mere magnified image of human passionsit is no longer Deus, but Demon. The God of the Old Testament who repents, and hates, and curses, and tempts men to their own destruction, never was and never could be the Father' of the Christ. It was only the latest and most materialistic perversion of the ancient Mysteries, known as Ecclesiastical Christianity, that could adopt such a Father'. And if Jesus were with us now, He would answer the modern Pharisees as He answered those of His own time, when they claimed to be Abraham's seed: "I speak the things which I have seen with my Father: and ye also do the things which ye heard from your father. They said unto him, We have one Father even God. Jesus said unto them, If God were your father, ye would love Me.

.

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and stood not in the truth, because there was no truth in him. (John viii. 38-44.)

Thus did Jesus, the Initiate, the Christos-one with the divine Father-repudiate the inverted image, the human conception, the God of the Jews, the religion of forms and formulas, of bigotry and priestcraft, which the Pharisees represented. And though Jesus thus repudiated the Jewish God, the Church has shown itself no wiser than the Pharisees, and the latter have had a terrible revenge in passing off upon Christendom this same anthropomorphic Jehovah, as the personal God of the Christian faith. For in his name the "works of the devil " have been repeated now for many centuries.

Thus does the Old Testament portray the fall — truly a fall in every respect; the spirit fallen into matter, the god fallen into the human, the sublime conceptions of the ETERNAL fallen into the ridiculous conceptions of the temporal. No longer is it man created in the image of God, but God created in the image of man.

And if Christianuy still means the acceptance of such a God, if Jehovah, the tribal God of a small sub-race, with a national history of a few thousand years only, be still declared to be the FATHER who is revealed to us through the Christ of the New Testament-so be it. Between such Christianity and Theosophy there is an impassable gulf.

But there is another and a better Christianity rising up, like a Phoenix, out of the fire of controversy, which is burning to ashes the old fetishes

and shibboleths. And as it rises from the flames it grows more and more into the likeness of the glorious truth which Sages and Initiates have proclaimed in all ages-the immortality of man because of his divinity. Whether the new Gospel be called Christianity or Theosophy, matters little perhaps for they are one and the same.

Truth is immortal, and man is immortal; yet must both needs suffer crucifixion. And though as yet we cannot penetrate this mystery, though as yet the reason why Man should set out on his long pilgrimage through the universe, why the law of progress should be self-sacrifice, and life be only consummated through death, can only be dimly guessed at by us; yet when once we have realised that we are co-workers with the divine; that it is not we who live, but the divine that liveth in us, we have realised that which makes us no longer the children of wrath, but the children of redemption; and we plant our feet on the PATH which leads us back to our eternal home.

"FOR SINCE BY MAN CAME DEATH, BY MAN CAME ALSO THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD. FOR AS IN ADAM ALL DIE, SO ALSO IN THE CHRIST SHALL ALL BE MADE ALIVE."