Chapter II
THE SECOND COMING
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“He came unto His own and
His own received Him
not.”
--St.John 1:11
[21] When
Jesus said to his disciples: “It is
expedient for you that I go away,”
he set forth one of the soul’s
greatest necessities. When he promised:
“If I go away, I will come to you
again,” he voiced that which has
puzzled the human mind from that day to
this. The second coming has been a hope,
an expectation with many, a delusion to a
great many more, and, to some, a foolish
impossibility.
In 1849
Dr.Chalmers, one of the most noted
divines of the Anglican Church, gave it
as his opinion, based upon mathematical
observation of spiritual truth in the
Bible, that in the year 1865, or
thereabouts, Jesus would again manifest
himself to the earth in person. So
careful had Dr.Chalmers been in spiritual
investigations and observations, as well
as mathematical calculations, that when
Jesus did not appear in person in the
year 1865, 1866 or 1867, he became
discouraged and said on his deathbed that
it was one of the [22] greatest
disappointments of his life, because
everything in the Holy Scriptures pointed
to the second advent at that time.
Others
prophesied the same thing, and it is very
remarkable that these prophecies were
made concerning the years about the time
that Dr.Chalmers predicted the second
coming. The second appearance of Jesus of
Nazareth did not materialize, so those
who have devoutly hoped for it and
fervently prayed for it, from time to
time, have become discouraged until,
today, the second coming is rather
scoffed at by some. Strange to say, there
are still others who believe profoundly
in its possibility.
Is it not
rather astonishing that two thousand
years of Christianity, two thousand years
of Christian living, have not served to
disabuse the human mind of the
possibility of the second advent of the
Master? Is it not equally astonishing
that four thousand years of Judaism have
not yet eradicated from the Jewish mind
the belief in the first coming of the
Messiah? Does not the devout Jew look
with just as confident expectation to the
first advent of the Messiah as does the
devout Christian of the old school to the
second advent of Jesus?
What strange
hope is this that all of the
incrustations of centuries of materiality
have not been able to crush successfully?
What strange expectation is it, that four
thousand years of Judaism and two
thousand years of Christianity have not
sufficed to kill in the human breast? Is
[23] it possible that we have not
understood what Jesus meant when he said
he would come again? Is it possible that
our eyes are holden, that we cannot see?
Some one has said that the expectation of
a second appearing of Jesus is like
looking out upon the horizon by means of
a telescope for something which is as
near to us as our hands and feet.
These are
rather mystical utterances, to be sure,
and it is only as we study them and
dissect and analyze the words of Jesus
himself concerning the second appearing
that we begin to catch even a faint
glimpse of what he meant. It was
expedient for his immediate disciples
that he go away, because if he had not
gone away he could not have sent the Holy
Comforter to them. Personality, ever true
to self between human consciousness and
its comprehension of Divine Principle, is
that opaque bar which ever stands between
the soul and its reception of the
unadulterated, impersonal truth. It has
always been expedient for all men, in all
times and all places, that personality
disappear in order that principle become
the order of the day and the foundation
of demonstrable sciences.
It would be
deplorable if personality went away
without leaving a fitting substitute for
itself. It is a sad thing when a teacher
leaves a school in which the pupils have
loved her. It would be infinitely sadder
if, during the time of her office, she
had not done her duty. What is the duty,
after all, of a personal teacher? Is it
not to inculcate [24] living, vitalizing
principles? If a teacher is teaching
children mathematics, what is she
doing--solving their mathematical
problems for them? Occasionally; but only
by way of example. The time must come
when each child must work out his own
mathematical salvation, and hence she is
a great teacher who impresses the living
principles of mathematics upon the
plastic mind, so that whether she goes or
stays, it is able to work out its own
salvation mathematically.
Is not the
impressed principle of mathematics a very
fair substitute for the personal teacher
of mathematics? Is it not better and more
efficacious in the economy of the
child’s understanding than the
personal teacher could ever be? Is it not
expedient for them that she do go away
occasionally from the classroom and leave
them to their own work?
This is what
the Great Teacher did, the Teacher of
teachers, the greatest Teacher the world
has ever seen. During his brief stay of
three years, leading the disciples, he
had been impressing upon their plastic
spiritual mentalities the principle of
being. He had been unfolding to them,
with mathematical precision, the unity of
God; the perfectness of man; and the day
came when he saw that all he had ever
unfolded to them was mere intellectual
quotation. They had heard it with the
ears; they had taken it in with the
intelligence, and it had become a mental
subject to them. But it was not a living,
working principle. Just so long as he
stayed, they went to him with [25] all
their difficult problems like children in
a school-room.
“Why
could not we cast him out?”
“Because,” said Jesus in
substance: “you are not applying
the principle in your own lives. You feel
a sense of great confidence that if
you fail, I can succeed;
and so you sit down comfortably and wait
for the desired end. If that desired end
be an application to me in the time of
your distress, it is good for the
patient, but not good for you; the
patient is cured, but you are not using
your power. So it is expedient that I go
away, but I will come to you
again.”
And when did
he come to them again? After his
ascension these disciples, who had had
the glorious privilege of sitting at his
feet, listening to his enunciation and
elucidation of Divine Principle, revealed
by their very loneliness, very depression
and discouragement and very willingness
to go back to their own vocations, that
all he had ever told them had been little
more than a mere intellectual
acquirement. The very disappearance of
Jesus filled them with discouragement.
The strongest of them all, the most
impulsive of them all, said he was going
fishing. He was going back to his nets,
concluding too hastily that the letter of
Jesus’ teaching was, so far as he
personally was concerned,
undemonstrated.
But when
once a man has put his hands upon the
plough, even though he is not ploughing
deep furrows and planting seeds of truth,
he cannot go back comfortably. When once
the human [26] mind has become even
partly convinced of the reality and
genuineness and demonstrability of Divine
Science, it would be impossible for that
mind to go back, just as it is impossible
for a child to forget its numeration
tables when it has advanced in
mathematical science.
So they,
inclined between doubt and hope, fear and
discouragement, marveled what was to
become of them, finally coming back again
to that which they believed
intellectually to be the truth, and
holding on to it with grim determination,
even though they were not able
spiritually to demonstrate it. Every
human soul will come to that; it is the
wilderness in a man’s life. It is
the crystalization of development, when a
man is neither a worm nor an angel. It is
a necessary period of spiritual
evolution, a trial of the soul, and when
that has served its purpose, men are
really ready for the great event, and
this great event takes place usually on a
pentecostal morning. They had overcome
their doubts; they had overcome their
fears; they had become re-integrated with
a holy desire to be of service, to
promulgate the doctrines of Jesus, to go
out into the world and obey his commands,
reform the sinner and heal the sick. They
were all assembled together in one place
and, significantly, they were all of one
mind.
All Divine
Scientists are sure that spirituality is
the only Substance; that Good is the only
law; that Love is the only force; and so,
when they [27] come together in one
place, they are all of one mind on these
essential, fundamental principles of
Being.
On the
pentecostal morning these first Divine
Scientists were all in one place and of
one mind, and, when men are all in one
place and of one mind, something is sure
to happen; and the thing which happened
on the pentecostal morning was the Second
Coming. It was not the reappearance of
Jesus, as it had been in the upper
chamber after his crucifixion. It was a
revelation to their own inner souls of
the realization, the genuineness, the
demonstrability of the science that he
had unfolded to them. It was an inner
spiritual conviction infinitely more
potent than any verbal utterance to which
he had given voice. It was God’s
way of talking to them in the language of
ideas. No oral sound, no visible
personality, but the communication of God
Himself through the channels of spiritual
receptivity.
The second
coming has been experienced all through
the centuries wherever minds and hearts
and souls have been ready to receive it.
It is not like a new comet--a something
appearing suddenly so that millions and
billions of people may see it. It can be
perceived only by the awakened spiritual
soul.
It is said
in the Scriptures concerning the
ascension of Jesus: “And a cloud
received him out of their sight.”
Our text is thus interpreted: “And
when ye see these things”--such
things as are now transpiring in Europe
and America: [28] famines, strikes,
agitations, crimes and
perplexities--“look up, and lift up
your head; for your redemption draweth
nigh,” and “the Son of man
cometh in a cloud.”
These clouds
are not black spots in the atmosphere;
they are the various phases of mental
opaqueness--spiritual density--not
outside of us, but in us. It is a cloud
in us which makes it difficult for us to
perceive the presence of Christ, and so
it is not without great and deep
spiritual significance that “A
cloud received him out of their
sight” and “he cometh again
in a cloud.” What does it mean?
Christ has never been absent; it simply
means that we have indeed been looking
out upon the great and distant horizon
with a telescope in order to locate and
discover that which is within us.
The greatest error of the human mind is a
tendency to look out from itself for
something that can be found only
within itself.
“When
shall the Kingdom of Heaven come?”
asked the Pharisees. They were looking
for a second coming, and Jesus said:
“The Kingdom of Heaven is within
you. You shall not say of it, Lo here or
Lo there; it cometh not with
observation.” It does not appear to
the physical eye; it appears to the
awakened spiritual senses of man.
What are the
signs of the times? Were ever the
prophetic utterances of Jesus more
significant of any time than they are of
the present day? Was ever the world at
large in such a state of distress and
agitation: nation against nation, [29]
brother against brother, father against
child? One could easily become
discouraged if one could not see the end
thereof. One could easily feel that it is
indeed the fulfillment of the prophesy,
and the second coming of Christ is
nothing more than this: the end of the
world.
That is
another thing which men have prophesied
but which has not yet come to pass,
because the prophecy has been so
variously and almost universally
misunderstood. The end of the world has
appealed to us as the rolling-up as of a
scroll of this physical earth and the
disappearance thereof in a mist. I do not
think that Jesus was speaking in this
sense at all. If one looks up the word
world in the Greek lexicons he
finds that it means age. Jesus was
not speaking of the world quite so much
from a physical point of view as he was
of the age of materiality--the age of
sensuality. And when he was prophesying
the end of this age through the second
coming of Christ; through the revelation
to human consciousness of the fact that
Spirit is the only Substance and that
matter is an ephemeral presentation--a
phenomenal result of irregular and
unscientific thinking--he was prophesying
the disappearance of
materiality--of human
consciousness; not the rolling-up of the
physical earth and the disappearance
thereof, but the destruction in the human
mind of everything that is unlike God
and, through this destruction in the
human mind, the revelation of the New
Kingdom--the New Heaven and the New
Earth. We have [30] looked for the
destruction of this; we have expected
some great cataclysm of nature to wipe it
out of existence and leave us like specks
in a world of etheric space.
What hides
the New Heaven and the New Earth from us
today? The old idea of Heaven and the old
idea of earth form the curtain which now
hides from our spiritual vision the
presence of the Kingdom of God and the
presence of the earth of God’s
creation, in which there is nothing
poisonous, nor impure, nor imperfect.
The second
coming of Christ is the spiritual means
and methods by which this curtain of
materiality is rolled up and discloses to
our present view the Kingdom of God which
has always existed and will ever
continue; which exists now in all its
beauty, harmony, continuity and
power.
It is not
coming to us from afar off. That is why
Jesus said: “The Kingdom of God
cometh not with observation.” You
shall not see it like a floating speck in
the atmosphere, coming from afar off. You
shall see it when the curtain of
materiality is rolled up in your soul;
and there you will see, with illumined
vision in the presence of God, the
reality of Christ, the perfectness of man
made in the image of God, and the
spiritual universe that is unsusceptible
to discord and decay.
Whatever is
clouded is in us. The sooner we admit it,
the sooner we realize where the cloud is,
and the sooner we seek enlightenment in
order that it may be dissipated, the
better for us. The [31] world has never
been nearer to heaven than it is today;
it is suffering its way into the Kingdom
of God. It is not a difficult matter for
a physician who detects the incipient
phases of disease to prognosticate the
situation and state of its development
and to prophesy the hour of its crisis.
He can tell you to watch the seventh, or
twelfth, day, as the case may be. Once he
determines the nature of the malady he
can do that with all mathematical
exactitude. He is prophesying a thing
that has not come to pass, but it will
come to pass, from his point of view. The
patient’s case must reach a
crisis.
If a
physician can prognosticate or prophesy
by means of his detection of incipient
disease in human consciousness the hour
or the day at which this disease must
reach its crisis, is it not possible by
just a little stretch of the imagination
to conceive the possibility of Jesus--the
Greatest Physician of all
physicians--feeling the pulse and taking
the temperature of the world’s body
and prophesying with mathematical
exactness the very things we have read in
the text? It requires only a little more
knowledge of spiritual anatomy. It
requires only a little more understanding
of the psychology of the human soul.
The Great
Physician prophesied the very thing that
is taking place today. The world faces
its crisis. Its fever of sensuality and
depravity has reached its height.
Sometimes patients die when they arrive
at this stage, but the Great Physician
[32] says: “No, the patient will
not die. The world will live. It will
live by the grace of God when the hour
comes;” the very hour which is upon
us. We can lift up our heads; the
redemption of the world is nearer than we
think, for the war drove men into the
solitary seclusions of week-end retreats,
forced to their knees women who have not
prayed in years, and distilled in the
hearts of children a new veneration for
God.
It has not
happened without purpose. Everywhere you
find men turning, in most cases to their
old religions, in many to the new. For
what? Rest, peace and comfort. When a
thing has grown so horrifying that it
becomes nauseating and disgusting, men
naturally turn from it, and to whom shall
they turn? We have cried for centuries:
“My Lord delayeth his
coming.” A man whose vision is
clear sees in the cloud the Son of man;
sees already at the door, through the
mist of all this carnality and depravity,
the manifestation of the Holy Spirit;
invisible to most, dimly visible to some,
but clearly discernible to others.
“Behold, I stand at the door (of
human consciousness) and knock.”
Divine Science is clamoring for admission
and receptive hearts are taking it in. It
is true, as true as God is true.
And now let
us come to the prophecy of 1865 and see
if Dr.Chalmers was so grievously
mistaken. I think the only mistake the
dear man made was in believing that the
second coming would be personal. In 1865
human thought had [33] reached the place
where it was ready for a new revelation
of God, and whether it came through
P.P.Quimby, or Mary Baker Eddy, or Warren
F. Evans; or whether it was floated in on
the waves of Emerson’s philosophy,
it matters not. The thing arrived in
1865. That was the year in which this new
thought of God and man and the universe
was born.
Dr.Chalmers
was incorrect only in one thing: not his
mathematical calculations, not his
spiritual observations and expectations,
but his material expectation. He looked
for spiritual truth to manifest itself in
a material way, and it cannot do so.
Jesus had done all that he could. He
appealed to the sense of man--aroused men
to the recognition of an indwelling power
in themselves. He had accomplished his
purpose.
The
Physician had done his best, and now it
remained for that which said: “I
will come again.” It came again and
has been coming again; it came again in
our great country with a force that is
overwhelming, and what did it meet?
Opposition. Was it not scoffed at,
ridiculed, sneered at, dragged through
the courts? Has it not had to fight for
its very breath, and yet has it not
succeeded?
That which
was born in the cradle in America has
grown up and matured in England. The
thing is born again and the forces of
hell and earth can never stifle it. It is
here to stay. It is the second coming; it
is the revelation of God to [34] human
consciousness, the mathematical
presentation of Truth. It is that by
which the individual--when he understands
it--may solve all the problems of his
life.
I believe
that prophecy can be so mathematically
correct that you can determine the day
and the hour of the crisis, just as a
physician can foretell the crisis in a
fever case. It is a hopeful thing. Let us
not despair because of the terrible thing
portending; let us rather repeat the
encouraging words, the admonition of
Jesus: “When these things begin to
come to pass, then look up, and lift up
your heads;--for your redemption draweth
nigh”--your salvation is nearer
than you think.
Already the
fields are white for the harvest. You who
are studying this new-old demonstrability
of Truth, have in you that which is
sacred, that which is sweet, that which
is powerful. Hide it not under a bushel;
use it not merely to personal purpose:
the world has need of it. Circulate your
literature, talk whenever you have an
opportunity. Be not ashamed; there will
come a pentecostal morning when you will
tell the Truth to the world. Some may
scoff and some may say that you are
intoxicated; but if you are it is with
the Spirit of God, inflamed with the
Master’s compassion for a suffering
world.
You mission
is a marvelous one. The second coming is
taking place every day you study, every
day you search the Scriptures, every day
you enter into the silence and realize
your unity with God.
Chapter
3
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
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