“It is this process of transmutation, or redemption of Spirit from Matter, alike in the individual and in the universal, which constitutes the theme of all sacred scriptures, the object of all true religions, the task of all true churches.
And they are the several stages of this process which constitute respectively the Fall of Adam through the yielding of the Eve in him to the serpent of Matter; the going down of Israel or the Soul into Egypt or the world and the body; and the Exodus or flight from the world across the water of separation and consecration into the wilderness of beneficial experience; and the crossing of the Jordan or river of purification to take possession of the promised land of perfection.
They are still the several stages of this process which are represented in the Gospel-history of the typical man regenerate. Whether they be termed water and the spirit, a pure soul and the divine operation therein, or the Virgin Mary and Holy Ghost, it is of these two in each man himself who finally is redeemed that the new man, or man regenerate, the Christ Jesus – who always is the “only begotten son of God” [John 3:16, 18] – is produced.
And it is always by the crucifixion and death on the cross of renunciation of that old Adam, the lower self, and the resurrection and ascension to a condition of final perfection that salvation is finally attained. And the reason why all these eternal verities in the soul’s history are made to centre in the prophet of Nazareth is simply because, recognising in him the tokens of his attainment of perfection in a degree never reached before, and in his history the fitting symbolical correspondences, the Divine Spirit, under whose inspiration the Gospels were composed, selected him as the type of the possibilities of humanity at large.” (Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. Addresses and Essays on Vegetarianism, chapter Vegetarianism and the Bible, pp. 221-222; emphasis added)