ages, with the one only desire, to know and to have power that will enable you to become a co-worker with them for the salvation of the human family. I say if you can unselfishly and unreservedly consecrate your life thus to God and to humanity and work for the purification and preparation of yourself for that purpose, you will soon find that the Christ of Nazareth still lives, is still on earth, and will accept you, and as soon as he has prepared you by purification so that you are worthy, he will introduce you to the Father; he will introduce you as a member of the sons of God, the Eternal Brotherhood of the heavens. From that time you will no longer belong to earth: you will no longer feel dependent upon the favors of men of any class; from that time you will realize your high calling, that you are indeed princes of God, princes of the Most High God. Think of it: not princes of the kings of the earth. No: but princes of the kingdom of heaven; a prince of that kingdom of which any man would be honored to be accepted as a member.

(To Be Continued.)

We always find that our stock of appreciated good can never be really diminished. When the chief desire of the eyes is taken, we can afford a gaze to hitherto unnoticed possessions; and even when the topmost boughs are lopped, a thousand shoots spring up from below with the energy of new life. So it will be with you; but you cannot yet look beyond the present, nor is it desirable that you should. It would not be well for us to overleap one grade of joy or suffering; our life would lose its completeness and beauty.

George Eliot.

KNOWING JESUS.

By Enoch Penn.

In his prayer to the Father as recorded by St. John (xvii. 3.) Jesus said, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." These words imply that without knowing Jesus there is no eternal life. And while it is evident that this knowledge must be more than that of the intellect, yet we believe that it is well to have, in so far as we may, an intellectual understanding of Jesus, his place, work, and our true relation to him.

We are all familiar with the standard orthodox idea concerning the Christ, how God created the world and man, how man sinned, how his sin demanded an atonement, and that Divine Justice could not otherwise be satisfied; so that God having created man, who failed to be what he intended he should be, found that the only way to save him from his wrath was to send his only son Jesus into the world to live a sinless life and to be unjustly slain, that, having suffered the penalty of sin which he had not committed, he could commute the penalty of those who had sinned. Hence, becoming a vicarious atonement for sinful man. And we have been taught and once believed, that to accept him as a vicarious sufferer was to know him, to have a saving knowledge of him. In other words, a knowledge of him that would save us from the penalty of sin. Howbeit, man should seek to be saved from sinning, from his tendency or willingness to sin, rather than simply from the consequences of his sins.

The strong hold of this doctrine, in spite of its being illogical and crude (aside from its being considered not mete that man

should criticise the plan devised by Divine Wisdom), is principally by virtue of two things, first, by sincere repentance many of them have been converted; that is they gained a knowledge within their own hearts that they had fulfilled the essential requirements of escape from the condemnation of past sins. And also, those who were really converted found that a change had come over them, in the language so often used "the things I once loved I now hate, and the things I once hated I now love;" hence, they were led to believe that they had obtained a saving knowledge of Christ. But had they? What, in view of the law, is that which is understood as "conversion?" To be "converted" is to so fully repent of past sins and, by virtue of that repentance, to so completely repel those sinful thoughts and actions that we have escaped from them, pushed them from us, pushed them out of our very nature; and, because we had parted from our sinful doings, we received the consciousness within of the Divine approval. We were forgiven, because we had conformed to the law, which law is, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." The fact that we attributed our consciousness of forgivness to the assumed vicarious atonement of Jesus upon the cross of Calvary, made no difference in the immediate result to us. We had fulfilled the requirements of the law and obtained the results, regardless of our lack of understanding and consequent mistaken explanation.

We can imagine some faithful soul asking, "If that is true, if we were forgiven simply because we repented and turned from our sins, why then did Jesus die upon the cross?" We would answer that question by asking another. If Jesus had not died. and risen from the dead, how would we have had proof of the fact that he had conquered death, and that by following him so also might we? For we must remember that it was to bring immortality to light that he came.

The second difficulty is that the church has ignored the fact

that Jesus came to bring immortality to light; that is, to show men how to overcome death. They teach that after death we will have another life in heaven, this makes the proof of their belief an impossibility, until too late.

We are of those who believe that "conversion" however complete and real, is not the seal of final acceptance; for some "fall away;" and we accept that the teachings of Jesus were to the effect that we might attain immortality in this world. We see also that conversion does not conquer death; in fact, the church claims nothing of the kind for it; but rather that it prepares one for death. So far as we know, however, Jesus made no effort to prepare men for death, but rather to escape death, prepare them for a continued existence, for immortal life; for, it is evident that if he could raise himself from the dead he could not have died save from choice.

If these things are true, the church has not in conversion nor in faith a saving knowledge of Christ, and indeed they make no pretense of having a knowledge of anything or anyone that will save them from death. However, Jesus' words imply that to know him is necessary to immortal life. Before he went away he said, "I go to the Father," that is, he returned to the spirit world; but again he said, "Lo, I am with you alway;" so that while we may not meet him in the flesh yet we have his words for it that he has not left the world but is still with his people.

But who and what is Jesus the Christ? A Christ is an anointed one. The name Jesus the Christ means the anointed savior. In olden time men were anointed to be kings, high priests and prophets. (The anointing was symbolic, and therefore the promise of receiving, from the one who had ordered it, the power to be and do that for which they were declared to be anointed.) Jesus is recognized by the Christians to be their King and High Priest; that is, he is the one whom God has anointed to be the King and High Priest of this world. The king

has authority to rule, and through the high priest comes knowledge from God; and, Jesus declared himself our High Priest in fact when he said, "No man cometh unto the Father but by me," in other words, I stand between God and all men to give them of the things of God; by no other means can they obtain them. But what and who is he? Did he begin his existence here upon the earth, even as we? Did he develop to where he was and is by the processes of evolution through many incarnations?

The peculiar wording of the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews leaves us in doubt whether Jesus was or was not a reincarnation of Melchisedec, but the statement, "Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered," if spoken of Jesus, would lend color to the thought that he gained his knowledge by experience, even as we, and that he was the first man who attained to Godlikeness, became a manifestation of the word of God. St. John speaks of Jesus as the Word which was in the beginning, apparently he here refers to the thought underlying the creation of man; for, we are told that in the beginning the object in mind was expressed in the word, or words, "Let us make man after our likeness," and John's statement that Jesus was the Word, would mean that Jesus had become "after our likeness," that he was the embodiment and manifestation of that word spoken in the beginning as expressive of the intention, of the object, of the creative body called God, or Gods, the Elohim. This would make Jesus the first perfected man, the first ripe fruit of the body of humanity and, in point of development our elder brother; but, his words to the Jews implied that they were where they were through one process while he was where he was by a different process. He said to them, "Ye are from beneath; I am from above." Also, of his disciples he demanded, "What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?" If we recognize that he had descended from a higher realm, rather than ascended to his then present condition on the earth by evolutionary development