THE PURIFYING FIRE
W. John Murray
The Astor
Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.
Their mantel dark, their grisly shadows
spread,
Stained with spots of deepest sanguine
hue,
Warm drops of blood, on earth’s
black visage shed,
Supplied the place of pure and precious
dew,
The moon and stars for fear and sprites
were fled.
The shrieking goblins, each where
howling flew,
The furies roar, the ghosts and fairies
yell,
The earth was filled with devils, and
empty hell.
. . . . .
O shadows vain! O fools, of shades
afraid!
-- Torquato Tasso.
“Sweet are the uses of
adversity which like the toad, ugly and
venomous,
yet hides a precious jewel in its
head.” --Shakespeare.
[177] The
seeing, feeling, immaterial life
principle which controls the body is
called the soul. Intellect is that
attribute of the soul which adjusts the
relation existing between the
soul’s perceptions and ambitions;
it is never satisfied until its
adjustment bears the seal of
Truth’s approbation. During the
interval in which the intellect is
seeking this approbation the soul suffers
through its separation from that which is
necessary [178] to its completion.
Sorrow, therefore, is soul-sickness.
Souls differ more than bodies, and
“as the thing more perfect is, the
more it feels of pleasure and of
pain.” In the travail of sensitive
souls inspiration is born. Sorrow is the
woof [threads] in the texture which makes
the swaddling clothes of genius, the name
given by the ancients to the influences
of Divinity.
Galileo was
made blind, and Milton became
blind in the midst of their unselfish
ministry for the welfare of science and
art. Beethoven was deaf at thirty-seven.
Demosthenes, the greatest orator of
antiquity, was a victim of stuttering, as
was Aristotle. Schumann, Donizetti and
Lenau were victims of mental illness. The
immortal Tasso was a sufferer from
insanity and spent the best years of his
gifted life under absolute restraint in
an asylum. The inspired Leopardi was a
pitiful invalid, and the spiritually
minded Pascal endured a life of
implacable torture. All of the greatest
minds which have contributed to the
intelligence of the universe, have been
children of “sorrow and acquainted
with grief” with one exception.
Shakespeare’s name does not appear
on the martyr’s list. Because of
the incontrovertible association of
inspiration with suffering, it is
interesting to trace the influence of
sorrow upon superior minds, and for that
reason we will compare the lives of two
great men--undoubtedly equals in
intellectual capacity--Dante, a martyr to
suffering, and Shakespeare, the man of
pleasure.
[179] Both
of these men were universal. “Like
Descartes’ universe, Shakespeare
had his center everywhere and his
circumference nowhere.” Dante,
unlike Shakespeare, had his center and
his circumference in God. To both,
their convictions constituted their
religion. The English genius was early
converted to the gospel of pleasure, and
his life was colored by its creed. Dante
believed himself to be only an individual
spoke in the great wheel of the universe;
he consecrated his life to the cause of
universal equity, and he died for his
convictions. The brains of both these men
were workshops within which they clothed
with shape the children of their
thoughts.
Shakespeare
spoke through the medium of character and
his revelations are remarkably true to
the vices and weaknesses of human nature.
Dante likewise clothed the children of
his fancy in the garbs best fitted to
their several roles, but the figure about
whom his greatest interest centers wears
a celestial robe. Shakespeare’s
great genius lay in his alchemic power to
quicken the puppets of his imagination
into life, while the essence of the
Latin’s genius was in his ability
to “join earth to heaven.” At
this point these great artists cease to
be analogous in the manifestation of
their extraordinary genius. Shakespeare
confined his pen to earthly phenomena.
Dante recognized God as the only reality,
and the Divine Law as the only law;
therefore to him, men’s codes were
infinitesimal [180] links fashioned, for
the most part, to protect the personal
ownership of universal benefits. As
compared with Shakespeare’s work,
Dante’s is as metaphysically
superior as a torch is superior to a
candle. This does not belittle the
eternal value of the productions of the
greatest intellect that the
English-speaking world has produced.
Instead it does justice to Dante
Alighieri. For the Englishman, love was a
pastime. For the Latin, it was a sublime
ideal characterized by the chastest
purity. He transmuted grief into
spiritual verse, as his struggling soul
wended its way Godward in the
intellectual search for Truth’s
benediction. During his wanderings and in
banishment he still glorified the Love
which is almighty.
“The glory of Him who moveth
everything
Doth penetrate the universe and
shine
In one part more and in another
less”
sang Dante
as he unlocked the door between earth and
Heaven. Occasionally Shakespeare’s
intellectual humor strikes on the flint
of Truth, causing a heavenly spark of
wisdom to fly upward, but every page of
Dante’s scintillates with
innumerable showers of divine fire.
Unlike Shakespeare, there is no sparkle
of humor in Dante’s verses, but the
melody of his “dulcet symphony of
Paradise” may be likened to a
cascade of pearls descending in a silver
urn. [181]
“O Power divine, lend’st
thou thyself to me
So that the shadow of the blessed
realm
Stamped in my brain I can make
manifest
. . . . .
The Truth, in which all intellect finds
rest.”
This was the
prayer of the divinest of the poets. His
prayer has been abundantly answered, for
Dante Alighieri’s intellect found
its repose in Truth. Shakespeare’s
intellect rarely rested upon Truth or
Christ, but by its magic it has made
entertaining pleasantry out
“Of every malice that wins hate
in Heaven,
Hypocrisy, flattery...
Falsification, theft, and simony,
Panders, and barrators, and like
filth.”
Shakespeare’s mighty intellect
rested on earth, while Dante’s,
through suffering found its way to Truth
and won Her benediction.
Sorrow,
therefore, is the shadow that accompanies
the soul in its search for knowledge at
which it [of necessity] must arrive in
order to identify itself with its own
reality as an idea in Mind. Affliction is
often the way to God.
“The
Man who, without sin, was born and
lived” was a Man of sorrow; and for
that reason alone sorrow cannot be
considered a complement of sin. David
said: “Many are the afflictions of
the righteous; but the Lord delivereth
them out of them all...It is good
for [182] me that I have been afflicted,
that I might learn thy statutes.”
And he frankly confesses that his
progression towards Truth was fraught
with suffering, whereas before the
intellect turned heavenward, he knew
naught of sorrow.
In
Ecclesiastes we read that in “much
wisdom is much grief,” and that he
who “increaseth knowledge
increaseth sorrow.” The soul is in
a position similar to that of a person
who, having lost his identity, comes to
consciousness within strange walls. The
soul is a captive of sense, imprisoned by
ignorance. The past is a blank, the door
of the future closed, and yet the soul
divines by intuition that it is not what
it seems, nor is it where it belongs.
Nature taking her course from
“Divine Intellect,” impels
the soul to begin the search to prove its
identity. The first faculty that the soul
uses is reason, but reason’s wings
barely suffice to bear the captive to
Intellect. Here reason leaves it, and
Intellect, the soul’s advocate,
commences the search for Truth which
alone can establish the soul’s
identity with divinity. But while this
search is going on the royal captive of
sense suffers an agony of suspense.
Intellect is ever trying to bear it on
towards Truth, while the senses hold it
back by fixing its attention on the past.
There are moments when the soul is
quickened by mental flashes that illumine
its dungeon with their effulgence of
hope, but because these flashes have come
from the fire-flies of sense they are
fleeting and lead nowhere, and again the
soul is cast [183] down. Ever vacillating
between ephemeral hope and constant
despair, shadows become realities to the
soul until the earth seems filled with
weeping, and hell reigns everywhere.
The soul is
pregnant with Spirit, but until it
reposes in Truth it is not delivered.
When the hour for deliverance comes,
however, and the inspiration is brought
forth in the form of the soul’s own
divinity, it sees even as it is seen and
its work is complete. As the acorn
contains the seed of the oak, so the soul
has within itself the stamp of the
potential Life principle which is
identified with Spirit, but like the
fruit of the oak, the soul must discard
its mask in order to assume the form of
its potential self, of which it is only
conscious by inspiration.
It is the
quickening or vitalizing of the real that
causes the death of the unreal, and the
soul, situated between constructive force
and destructive energy, is acted upon by
both vibrations. The body receives the
reflex action of its dominating
principle, which is the soul, and suffers
or enjoys according to the soul’s
dictates. Jesus has likened the
soul’s travail to that of a mother,
saying: “A woman when she is in
travail hath sorrow, because her hour is
come, but as soon as she is delivered of
the child, she remembereth no more the
anguish for joy; and ye now therefore
have sorrow, but I will see you again,
and your heart shall rejoice, and your
joy no man taketh from you.”
It has been
said that man is a sentient being [184]
forming a link that connects the hell of
ignorance with the heaven of intelligence
and that he has three phases of
life--that of existence, or the plane of
sensation, of human, or the plane of
reason, and that of the divine, or the
plane of Intelligence--on any one of
which he may reside. Travail commences
with the soul’s departure from the
sense plane in search of its divine
entity of Intelligence, and it continues
until the captive, liberated from sense,
reposes in Spirit. Sorrow, then, must be
redeemed from its association with sin
and be recognized as an ambassador of
Intelligence, pleading for the
soul’s liberation from the world of
sense.
Among the
women whose sacred sorrow has blessed the
earth, two figures stand forth upon a
dark background of pain,--Mary the woman
chosen because of her chastity to be the
mother of Jesus, and Joan of Arc, whose
purity was transmuted into Power in the
flames ignited by “envy, arrogance,
and avarice” which afflict
“the world, trampling the good and
lifting the depraved.” When tempted
to belittle the office of sorrow, it
would be well to remember these women who
came unto their own through much
tribulation. Sorrow is not always the
consequence of sin; it is the crucible in
which the precious metals of character
are tested before they are poured into
the mold of Spirit. To realize this is to
transmute sorrow into joy.
Death is
perhaps the greatest cause of grief. But
why should it be so, when “that
which thou [185] sowest is not quickened
except it die”? To die is not to
abandon Life. For the so-called dead to
return to this plane of consciousness is
as impossible, as a general rule,
as it would be for you to re-enter the
dream, in which you perhaps last night
were the principal actor. By death,
planes of consciousness are transcended.
To transcend a state of being through
death is to close that chapter of
existence never to be reopened. Jesus
transcended materiality by the divinity
of his life and not by his death. For
this reason he was able to return to the
same state of consciousness that he
entertained before death, for it was
always the spiritual state.
To die is to
awaken from the dream of life in matter.
When we awaken from the dreams within the
dream we are not sad to be awake, for we
realize that the loved characters that we
parted from are more really ours in our
waking moments, even though oceans roll
between us. When death awakens us we do
not pine for the wraiths of mere
existence; for with the awakening from
mere existence is born the realization of
Life, and the knowledge of the unreality
of the characters our loved ones played
on that plane of existence which we have
just transcended by death. Hence the
knowledge of the spiritual reality of the
lives of those we love is full
compensation for their loss as actors in
the drama of dreams. To be awakened from
the dream of sense is to become conscious
of life as a reality and to possess all
that which in the earth dream possesses
our imagination. [186] To die in the Lord
is to awaken to the realization that we
have left the shadow of things in
order to attain unto the substance
of things and the divine individualities
of Being.
Existence is
a dream in which the personalities we
knew and loved or hated are but the
shadows of the divine individualities
that have their eternal habitation in the
life which is God. Today, fleets of
ship-like clouds sail on an azure sky,
but the shadows they cast envelop the
hoary heads of the giant Alps in veils of
somber black. It is thus that celestial
beauty appears somber in contact with the
earth, and minds that shine in heaven
“on earth do smoke.” To
remember that mortality is put off to don
immortality is cause for rejoicing. To
weep for the dead is to dishonor the
living. We profane sorrow when we neglect
the living to mourn for the dying. To die
is to leave the chrysalis of seeming and
ascend into the reality of being. God has
united existence to life in such a way
that they can never be put asunder.
Travailing pains proclaim the coming of
joy; sorrow makes transparent the things
of Spirit, and transplendent the jewels
of character, “as a fine ruby
smitten by the sun.”
Paul asks:
“Who shall separate us from the
love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or
distress, or persecution, or famine, or
nakedness, or peril of sword?”
And he
answers his own question: “Nay, in
all these things we are more than
conquerors [187] through him that loved
us. I am persuaded that neither death,
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,
nor powers, nor things present nor things
to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any
other creature, shall be able to separate
us from the love of God which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Finally, my
brethren, rejoice--Rejoice
always--Rejoice evermore--and
again I say rejoice:--
And--“Beloved, think it not
strange concerning the fiery trial
which is to try you, as though some
strange thing happened unto you: But
rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of
Christ’s suffering; that, when his
glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad
also with exceeding joy.”
Next: Regeneration
and Reincarnation
* * * * *
The Astor Lectures
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
