Bonwick says ("Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought"): "What is commonly called the _Christ idea_ of humanity, thus appears to have been the hope and consolation of the ancient Egyptians so many thousand years ago."
That which thus appears and disappears, dies out and is born again, is the spiritual light in the soul of man.
The diversity of man's intellectual activities exercise, elaborate, and deepen his mental perceptions, and these largely concern the things of sense and time, his appetites, passions, desires, and ambitions.
Back of and beyond all these lie the things of the spirit. On the physical plane of life the former obscure and crowd out the latter, which are thus continually in need of renewal.
In adapting the new revelation to the conditions of life on the physical plane, it is intellectualized and theologized. Pundits and theologians undertake to _explain_ what it all means and how it happened to be. Hence arise wrangles, disputes, and finally creeds, dogmas, and persecution.
"Men fight like devils for the love of God." This is the ultimate history of every religion known to man.
Meantime, the soul of man, a spiritual being dwelling in a material body on the physical plane, is seeking real knowledge of spiritual things.
This real knowledge is an experience of the soul. It concerns, and is comprised in, the _living of a life_. It is more than mind or intellect.
It is _knowledge_ gained by experience. "This only I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see."
"Whether in the body or out of the body, I know not, but I saw things impossible to utter."
Gradually man's _idea_ of God and his conception of Nature have changed and enlarged.
Man, as a spiritual being, is part of a spiritual universe. He has been able to harmonize his concept of God and Nature progressively as he has gained larger views and deeper insight of both. He is no longer a puppet of infinite caprice, nor a somewhat "improved animal."
The idea of man as a "fallen god" with the capacity to regain his heavenly estate, is far nearer the truth.
As man advances in knowledge through the combined experiences of his spiritual nature and his physical embodiment, his beliefs change, his horizon enlarges, and his concepts become elevated and purified. The past is apprehended and utilized and the future intelligently anticipated. He begins to understand.
This means the recognition of law and order, permanency, _Foundation_, and stability.
The birth stories, the portents, signs and wonders that announce, accompany, or follow the birth of a Messiah or Avatar, are almost identical. A common instinct seems to have led all scripture-compilers to infer a simultaneous stimulus of nature and man upon the appearance of what the Hindoo calls an Avatar.
Men, too, seem prepared to expect such an advent as its necessary time approaches. It is an instinct which tells them that "the darkest hour precedes the dawn."
In the Christian scriptures the premonitions and birth stories are found largely in the Apocryphal books. Doubtless the copying and substitution from the lives of Christna and Buddha were too plain.
At the death of Jesus the seismic, astral, and cosmic disturbances are graphically described, as befitting the death of a god. "The veil of the temple was rent in twain," etc.
The simple fact is that mankind feels instinctively in the soul the far-reaching influences at work. The spiritual nature is stirred to its depths, and when he tries to describe what he sees and feels, his emotions, fears, or aspirations being at white heat, his imagination draws from the folklore of other times, races, and religions, to express what he so powerfully, but vaguely senses.
But beyond all this, the time of great religious revivals and social upheavals is likely to coincide with seismic disturbance, tidal waves and the like, owing to the conjunction of planets under the general law of cycles. Man is completely involved with and evolved from the bosom of Nature. His freedom is determined by knowledge and obedience to Law.
From the mystic Hymns of Orpheus, with the legends of Gods, demigods, and heroes, and the personification of the varied powers of man and nature, arose the Greek Pantheon, which, in poetic concept, romantic and dramatic embodiment and expression, as a concise and complete whole, has probably never been equaled by man.
True, every essential element, under a different name and detail, may be found elsewhere, but never equaled in concise and constructive folklore and mythology.
But running underneath all this, like a vein of gold under the mountain, was the philosophy of Plato. Grasping the _One_ from the many, Unity from the fantastic diversity, he came to the individual experience of the human soul and its conscious mastership over the body and the things of sense and time.
Civic pride, patriotism, and heroism, walked side by side with dialectics, and the pantheon of the gods and the achievements of warriors rivaled each other on the stage, as themes for the poetic philosopher and dramatist.
Mythology and folklore here furnished a background from which the philosophy of the mysteries and the real science of life gained a hearing.
Plato and Pythagoras generalized, and with many reservations represented that which they had been taught in the mysteries of Egypt.
Greece, with its triumphs in literature, in the drama and in art, and all its magnificent civilization, knew no Avatar.
Jacolliot, in his "Bible in India," has shown conclusively that not only the whole Greek pantheon, its folklore and mythology, and even its civil code were adopted from the Laws of Manu and the far older Aryan civilization, including even the names of heroes.
The fame of Greece rests upon its _Genius fo Construction_ in Art and Architecture and the Drama, and upon the open door it gave to Philosophy.
There was no dominant priesthood to close the door of progress.
It utilized all the past and built and beautified the present.
It bequeathed no creed nor dogma to the future, and yet its civilization was transcendent and is immortal.
It had its canons of Art and of Architecture. These it demonstrated by constructive work. It illustrated, explained and exemplified, but it did not argue nor dogmatize.
The world for two thousand years has been "going back to Greece" and trying to explain how it all happened, just as we have been trying to explain Goethe's "Faust."
Genius is transcendent and immortal.
With the decline of Greece there arose the Genius of the Tiber, Imperial Rome, and the Caesars.
Rome created an _Avatar_ out of the "Babe of Bethlehem." Having enthroned Jehovah, it proceeded to deify Jesus, and then by substitution to take the place of both.
Imperial Rome, the "Scarlet Mother of the Tiber," assumed the government and dictatorship of the world. Imperial, dogmatic, relentless, the arbiter of the fate of humanity on earth and beyond.
Here was arbitrary, relentless _power_ at any cost, to be maintained on any terms. "The end always justified the means."
In the civilization of Greece, the Individual, the citizen was first, and association and co-operation built the State.
With Rome the Individual is nothing but a pawn, an accessory to the Church. It was and is the Church first, last, and all the time. The Individual can claim no right nor prerogative except as a concession from the Church.
The contrast is extreme and absolute between the Genius of Greece and that of Rome.
As the Genius of Greece was adapted from the older Aryan, so also was that of Rome, from the Brahmans, through Egypt.
Among the various Avatars of old India designated as "Incarnations of Vishnu," Siva "_the destroyer_," was often in evidence.
Rome proceeded to adopt the Hindoo Trinity--Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva--(the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer), and to so shape its creed and dogmas as to secure and maintain the power of Mother Church, simply with a change of names--"Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."
It has enslaved nations and slaughtered millions in order to maintain its power. For more than fifteen hundred years it has maintained its relentless warfare against the inalienable rights of the Individual, and the inevitable progress of humanity.
It has escaped the execration of the world only by its priestly trick of deifying Jesus and sophisticating every doctrine that he taught.
Supporting its pretensions by Mariolatry, the Auricular Confession, and its army of spies and inquisitors, it has dominated mankind, impoverished whole nations, devastated provinces and murdered all who opposed its progress wherever and whenever it has gained civil power.
Rome is to-day the literal and visible reincarnation of _Siva_, the _Avatar of Destruction_. She has originated nothing. Her mass and all her ritualistic mummeries are adopted from paganism at its worst stage and in its most degenerate form, and she awaits the fate that befell Egypt and all her predecessors, "Sodom, Gomorrah, and the cities of the plain."
Protestantism has hitherto "protested" only in part. Refusing Mariolatry and auricular confession, Protestantism, by accepting the miraculous conception, the deification of Jesus and the vicarious atonement, has kept Rome in countenance.