“No personage unique, abnormal, unthinkable, of hybrid constitution and disorderly generation, then, is He the Christ of the Bible, of God, of Nature, and of the Gnosis, such as is that of Ecclesiasticism.
Counterpart in man of the Logos in the Godhead, He is the Perfect Reason of God in manifestation; the fulfilment, not the subversion, of the divine-natural order, the realisation, alike for the individual and for the universal, of the divine potentialities proper and common to all in virtue of their derivation and constitution, by the indefeasible law of Heredity; the matured fruit of the seed implanted in every man, the seed of his own regeneration; the demonstration of the “precious jewel” of divinity “borne in the forehead of the toad,” symbol alchemic for matter. And in Him, as thus defined, is restored to man the Saviour of which his priests have defrauded him.
Generation, degeneration, regeneration, – these are the three terms of man’s spiritual history. The first and the last are the work of God; the second is the work of man himself. For all things are by generation, being the product of the interaction of Force and Substance, as respectively Father and Mother, the result depending on the will of the generator.
Once generated, man is free to degenerate himself, until his time comes to be regenerated. His possibilities on this behalf are dependent on the use he has made of his period of freedom. Evolution is by generation; but the ladder thereof may be descended even until a condition is reached wherein regeneration is impossible, and extinction inevitable. The period of Grace implied by the “seventy times seven” has then elapsed for him.
The “denunciatory” expressions, so-called, of the Bible and the Creed, are simply affirmations of the necessity to salvation of the observance of the laws of being. It is with the life spiritual as with the life physical. The conditions essential to life must in both cases be respected. And just as the physiologist speaks affirmatively only when he declares that but for the fulfilment by man’s physical system of certain functions, he will undoubtedly perish, expressing himself in the technical language of his craft; so also do they speak affirmatively only who assert the same of man’s spiritual system. The conditions of the life eternal, like those of the life temporal, are founded in the nature of things; and there is nothing arbitrary in the affirmation of them by those who know, even though the language used be technical, and not understood of the uninstructed. Dogmatism consists only in the positive assertion of that which the asserter himself does not know positively.
The Bible specifies two sins as of peculiarly heinous and fatal character, the nature of which its official expositors have failed to discern, or at least to disclose. They are called “Anti-Christ” and the “Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.” They are essentially one in kind, though their manifestations are various.
The key now restored convicts Ecclesiasticism of representing the systematic commission of them in all their manifestations, from the beginning.
“He is Anti-Christ that denieth the Father and the Son.” [1 John 2:22] The Father and the Son are denied by denying the Mother. For to exclude, as Ecclesiasticism has excluded, its feminine principle, Substance, from divinity, is to render impossible the relationship denoted by the terms Father and Son, seeing that they imply and involve Spouse and Mother.
Similarly as regards the sin against the Holy Ghost. Alike in repose and in activity, in the Godhead and in manifestation, the divine unity must comprise the duality, Force and Substance, Father and Mother, to render possible that eternal generation whereby are creation and redemption, and therein the manifestation of God in Christ.
That the sin of this denial in respect of the Holy Ghost “shall never be forgiven neither in the world that now is, nor in that which is to come,” [Mark 3:29] is because, as a sin against the essential principle both of Being and of Becoming, it bears its own penalty with it. Denying the Universe to be generated of God, and constituted of God’s own force and substance, it denies it to be a manifestation of God; denies, therefore, that correspondence between God and creation in virtue of which the “invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things which are made.” [Romans 1:20]
And it denies regeneration as the process of the manifestation of God through individuation in man, to deny which is to deny Christ as the crown of evolution, and therein of creation.
Positing as the material of existence, something which, not being essentially God, is unreal and unrelated to God, such denial constitutes the negation of any vital relation between God and the Universe, as parent and offspring, to the exclusion of the idea of duty, as from one to the other in either direction. And regarding God as Force only, and not Substance; Will only, and not Love; it substitutes for a living God and a living Universe but mechanical, inconscient cause and effect.
The expression of Jesus, “My Father and your Father, My God and your God,” [John 20:17] is an affirmation of the divinity of substance, and consequently of the consubstantiality of God and man. It is only Ecclesiasticism that has made man a “child of the devil.” Doing which it has ascribed to him precisely the paternity which Jesus ascribes to it as when, addressing his ecclesiastical persecutors and slayers, he says, “Ye are of your father the devil.” [John 8:44]. (Edward Maitland. The “New Gospel of Interpretation”, pp. 49-52; emphasis added)