Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers | Page 8

a Spirit, to being Spirit, is a natural, easy and
beautiful evolution.
The thought of angels, devils, heavenly messengers, like Gabriel and
the Holy Ghost, constantly surrounding the Throne, is a suggestion that
comes from the court of the absolute monarch. The Trinity is the
oligarchy refined, and the one son who gives himself as a sacrifice for
all the people who have offended the monarch is the retreating vision of
that night of ignorance when all nations sought to appease the wrath of
their god by the death of human beings.
God to us is Spirit, realized everywhere in unfolding Nature. We are a
part of Nature--we, too, are Spirit. When Moses commands his people
that they must return the stray animal of their enemy to its rightful
owner, we behold a great man struggling to benefit humanity by
making them recognize the laws of Spirit. We are all one family--we
can not afford to wrong or harm even an enemy.
Instead of thousands of warring, jarring families or tribes, we have now
a few strong federations of States, or countries, which, if they would
make war on one another, would today quickly face a larger foe.
Already the idea of one government for all the world is taking
form--there must be one Supreme Arbiter, and all this monstrous
expense of money and flesh and blood and throbbing hearts for
purposes of war, must go, just as we have sent to limbo the jangling,
jarring, jealous gods. Also, the better sentiment of the world will send
the czars, emperors, kings, grand dukes, and the greedy grafters of
so-called democracy, into the dust-heap of oblivion, with all the
priestly phantoms that have obscured the sun and blackened the sky.
The gods have gone, but MAN IS HERE.
* * * * *
The plagues that befell the Egyptians were the natural ones to which
Egypt was liable: drought, flood, flies, lice, frogs, disease. The
Israelites very naturally declared that these things were sent as a
punishment by the Israelitish god. I remember a farmer, in my
childhood days, who was accounted by his neighbors as an infidel. He

was struck by lightning and instantly killed, while standing in his
doorway. The Sunday before, this man had worked in the fields, and
just before he was killed he had said, "dammit," or something quite as
bad. Our preacher explained at length that this man's death was a
"judgment." Afterward, when our church was struck by lightning, it
was regarded as an accident.
Ignorant and superstitious people always attribute special things to
special causes. When the grasshoppers overran Kansas in Eighteen
Hundred Eighty-five, I heard a good man from the South say it was a
punishment on the Kansans for encouraging Old John Brown. The next
year the boll-weevil ruined the cotton crop, and certain preachers in the
North, who thought they knew, declared it was the lingering wrath of
God on account of slavery.
Three nations unite to form our present civilization. These are the
Greek, the Roman and the Judaic. The lives of Perseus, Romulus and
Moses all teem with the miraculous, but if we accept the supernatural
in one we must in all. Which of these three great nations has
contributed most to our well-being is a question largely decided by
temperament; but just now the star of Greece seems to be in the
ascendant. We look to art for solace. Greece stands for art; Rome for
conquest; Judea for religion.
And yet Moses was a lover of beauty, and the hold he had upon his
people was quite as much through training them to work as through his
moral teaching. Indeed, his morality was expediency--which is reason
enough according to modern science. When he wants them to work, he
says, "Thus saith the Lord," just the same as when he wishes to impress
upon them a thought.
No one can read the twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth
chapters of Exodus without being impressed with the fact that the man
who wrote them had in him the spirit of the Master Workman--a King's
Craftsman. His carving the ten commandments on tablets of stone also
shows his skill with mallet and chisel, a talent he had acquired in Egypt,
where Rameses the Second had thousands of men engaged in sculpture
and in making inscriptions in stone.

Several chapters in Exodus might have been penned by Albrecht Durer
or William Morris. The commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto
thyself any graven image," was unmistakably made merely to correct a
local evil: the tendency to worship the image instead of the thing it
symbolized. People who do not contribute to the creation of an object
fall easy victims to this error. With all the stern good sense that Moses
revealed, it is but fair to