The episode of Cain and Abel will be dealt with in the next chapter, and I will therefore pass on at once to the Deluge. As most of my readers probably know, this story is not confined to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, but is met with in one form or another in all the most ancient traditions of the world, and this universal consensus of mankind leaves no doubt of the occurrence of some overwhelming cataclysm which has indelibly stamped itself upon the memory of all nations.
Whether science will ever succeed in working out the problem of its extent and of the physical conditions that gave rise to it remains to be seen, but it does not appear unreasonable to associate it with the tradition handed down to us by Plato of the sinking of the great continent of Atlantis, which is said to have once occupied the area now covered by the Atlantic Ocean. I am well aware that some geologists dispute the possibility of any radical changes having ever taken place in the distribution of the land and water surfaces of the globe, but there are at least equally good opinions on the other side, and if there is any fact in the world's history regarding which tradition is unanimous, it is the catastrophe of the Deluge.
And here I would draw attention to the fact that the Bible specially warns us against the opinion that no such catastrophe ever took place, and points out this opinion as one of the signs of the time of the end, speaking of it as determined ignorance, and telling us that a similar catastrophe, only by fire instead of water, will at some future period overwhelm the existing world (2 Peter 3); and I would add that the possible conditions for such an event may not unreasonably be inferred from certain facts in the science of astronomy. It is not my present purpose, however, to enter into the scientific and historical aspects of the Deluge tradition, but to point out its significance in that inner meaning of the Bible which I wish the student to grasp.
The psychic world is an integral part of the universe, and the psychic element is an integral part of man; and it is in this circulus that we find the plastic material which forms the nucleus for those attractions which eventually consolidate as external facts. The psychic realm is therefore the realm of tremendous potentialities, and the deeper our knowledge of its laws, the greater we see to be the need for bringing these potentialities under a higher control.
Now the opening verses of Genesis have shown us that "water" without the movement of the Spirit is darkness and the abode of chaos. The movement of the Spirit is the only power that can control the turbulence of "the waters" and bring them into that harmonious action which will result in forms of Life, Beauty, and Peace; and in the world of Man's Mind this movement of the Spirit upon "the waters" takes place exactly in proportion as the individual recognises the true nature of the Divine Spirit, and wills to reflect its image and likeness.
Where this recognition takes place, the psychic forces are brought under the control of a harmonising power which, reflecting itself into them, can only produce that which is Good and Beautiful, on a small scale at first because of our infantile knowledge of the powers with which we are dealing, but continually growing with our growth until the whole psychic world opens out before us as a limitless realm filled with the Glory of God and the Love of Man and the shapes of beauty to which they give rise.
But if a man forces his way into that realm on no other basis than his individual strength of will, he does so without reckoning that his will is itself a product of the psychic plane, and only one among untold organised entities and unorganised forces which sooner or later will overpower him and hurry him to age-long destruction — "age-long", for I use the Bible word aionios which, as the learned Farrar has shown in his Eternal Hope, does not mean absolutely endless; yet, if we reflect what may be included in this word — infinite periods, perhaps, of withdrawal and renewal of our whole planetary system — we may well stand aghast at such prodigious ruin.
But if such dangers are in it, may we not say that we will have nothing to do with the psychic realm? No, for by our nature we are always immersed in it; it is within us, and we are, and always must be, inhabitants of it, and we are always unconsciously using its forces and being reacted upon by them. What we need, therefore, is not to escape from what is an essential part of our nature, but to learn to vivify this otherwise dark realm with the warmth of Divine Love and the illumination of Divine Light.
The earth filled with violence was the outward correspondence of the inward mental state of the masses of mankind and we may, therefore, well imagine what the nature of their operations in the symbolic world of "Water" must have been. This state of things had been growing for generations until at last the inevitable result arrived, and the moral deluge produced its correspondence in the physical world.
The uninstructed reader will doubtless smile at my reference to a psychic environment, but those who have obtained at least some glimpses beyond the threshold will see the force of my argument when I direct their attention to the signs of a recurrence of a similar state of things at the present day. Research in various directions is making clearer and clearer the reality of the psychic forces, and increasing numbers are beginning to get some measure of practical insight into them; and while I rejoice to say that we see these opening powers being employed for the most part under the direction of sincere religious feeling and with charitable intention, yet there are not wanting reports of opposite uses, and this in connection with specific localities where the inverted employment of these great powers is secretly practised according to methodised system.
I cannot too strongly warn the student against any connection with such societies, and their existence is a terrible comment upon the Master's description of the latter days which, he expressly tells us, will reproduce the character of those which immediately preceded the flood. The sole safeguard is in recognising the Divine Spirit as the only Source of Power and in regarding every action, whether of thought, word, or deed, as being in its form and measure an act of Divine worship. This is what St Paul means when he says "Pray without ceasing". What needs to be cultivated is the habitual mental attitude that leads us to see God in all things, and it is for this reason that the foundation of conscious spiritual Life is that First Commandment to the consideration of which we are approaching.
It was, therefore, in consequence of their entire denial of the Divine Spirit that the antediluvians raised up an adverse power which at last became too strong for them to control. And here let me once for all set the student right with regard to those passages of the Bible in which God is represented as making up His mind to inflict injury, as in the announcement of the impending deluge. These expressions are figurative. They represent the entrance upon the scene of that Cosmic Law of Disintegration which necessarily comes into play as soon as the highest directing power of Intelligence is inhibited; and therefore as soon as a man wilfully thrusts from himself the recognition of the Universal Spirit in its higher manifestations as the Guardian and Guide, he ipso facto calls it into action in its lower manifestations as the Universal Cosmic Force.
The reason for this will appear more clearly from a careful study of the relations between the Personal and the Impersonal modes of Spirit, but the explanation of these relations would occupy too large a space to be entered upon here, and the reader must be referred to other works on the subject. In the present connection it is sufficient to say that we can never get rid of God, for we ourselves are manifestations of His Being, and if we will not have Him as the Good, we shall be compelled to accept It as the Evil. This is what the Master meant when he said in the parable that on the lord's return to his city, he ordered those who would not accept him to reign over them to be slain before him.
On the contrary, such investigations as I have been able to make into the subject convinces me that the Bible numbers are calculated with the most rigid accuracy, and with the very deepest thoughts of the results to which they will work out — only this is done according to a certain symbolic system known as Sacred Numeration; and the very impracticability of the figures when tested by ordinary arithmetic is intended to put us upon enquiry for some deeper meaning below the surface. To explain the principles of sacred Numeration would be beyond the scope of an elementary book like the present, and probably few readers would care to undertake the requisite amount of study; but we must not suppose that the numbers given in the Bible are without significance whenever ordinary methods of calculation fail to elucidate them. The whole meaning of Scripture is not upon the surface, and in the present connection we are expressly pointed to a symbolic signification in 1 Peter 3:20,21; and the recurrence of the Ark as a sacred emblem in the great race-religions clearly indicates it as representing some universal principle.
The Zoroastrian legend of the flood throws some light upon the subject, for Yima, the Persian Noah, is bidden by Ahura Mazda, the Deity, to bring "the seeds of sheep, oxen, men and women, dogs and birds, and of every kind of tree and fruit, two of every kind, into the ark and to seal it up with a golden ring and make in it a door and a window". The significance of the Ark is that of a vehicle for the transmission of the life-principle of beings from an old to a new order of life, and all that is not included in the Ark perishes.
This is the generalised statement of relations which the Ark sets forth and, like all other generalisations, it admits of a great many particular applications, ranging from those which are purely physiological to those which are in the highest degree spiritual, and the study of comparative religion will show us that the idea has been employed in all its most varied applications; yet, however varied, they all have this common feature: they signify something which conveys individual life safely through a period of transition from one order of manifestation to another.
The Ark, as the sacred vessel, plays a conspicuous part throughout Scripture, but in the present connection we shall best realise its meaning by considering it as the opposite principle to that from which it affords deliverance. If "Water" signifies the psychic principle, then the Ark signifies that which the psychic principle supports, and which has an opposite but corresponding nature — that is to say, the Body. The Ark is not independent of the Water but is constructed for the purpose of floating upon it; and similarly, the body is expressly adapted to man's psychic nature so as to make with it and the spiritual principle of Life a Whole individuality.
Now it is precisely in the recognition of this Wholeness that refuge from all psychic entanglements is to be found. We must always remember that the body equally with the soul is the instrument of the manifestation of the Spirit. It is the union of the three into a single Whole that constitutes the full reality of Life, and it is this sacredness of the body that is typified by the sacredness of the Ark. The Ark of Noah was a solid construction, built on a pattern all the details of which were laid down to scale by the Divine Architect and it thus exemplifies the accurate proportions of the human body; and in passing it may interest the reader to note that the proportions of the human body numerically represent the principal measurements of the solar system and also form the basis of the proportions observed in such ecclesiastical architecture as is designed according to canonical rules, of which Westminster Abbey and Milan Cathedral are good examples.
I cannot, however, stop to digress into this very interesting subject, and for our present purpose it will be sufficient to say that the Ark with its living freight is typical of the fact that the full realisation of Life is only attained in the Threefold Unity of body, soul, and spirit, and not by their dissociation. It is the assertion of the solid, living Reality of the work of the Spirit as distinguished from those imperfect manifestations which are the subterranean root of the true manifestation, but are not the real solid thing itself. It is the protest of healthy reality, which includes the psychic element in its proper order as the intermediary between the purely spiritual and the purely material, as against the rejection of the corporeal element and total absorption in the psychic — a condition which prevents the spirit from attaining to self-expression as a synthesis, which alone is the completion of its evolutionary work.
For this reason undue absorption in the psychic sphere is contrary to the Spirit; and however we may apply to it the word "spiritual" in the sense of not being corporeal, if the psychic element is not taken in its proper connection with the two others, it is as far from being "spiritual" in the true sense of the word as the material element itself. The true reality is in the harmonious interaction of the Three-in-ONE. God's world is a world of Truth in which evanescent shapes do not take the place of Reality, and for these reasons the Bible everywhere insists on nothing short of the fullness of perfect realisation, and the Ark is one of the figures under which it does so.
Now a building naturally signifies a habitation, and the building of the Tower of Babel to escape the waters of a flood is that reaction against the psychic element which denies spiritual things altogether and makes of the body and its physical environment the one and only dwelling-place of man. It is the same error as before of trying to erect the edifice of Wholeness on the foundation merely of a part, only now the part selected is the corporeal instead of the psychic. Arithmetically it is the attempt to make out that one-third is the same as ONE. The natural consequences soon follow in the confusion of tongues.
Language is the expression of Thought, and if our ideas of reality include nothing more than the infinitude of secondary causes which appear in the material world, there is no central Unit around which they can be grouped and consequently, instead of any certain knowledge, we have only a multitude of conflicting opinions based upon the ever-changing aspects of the world of appearances. Quot homines tot sententiae [there are as many opinions as there are persons — Ed]; and so the builders are dispersed in confusion, for theirs is not "the city that hath foundations whose builder and maker is God" [Hebrews 11:10].
In other words, historical realities become the very summing-up and visible form of abstract principles, and therefore we are justified by the Bible itself in finding in its personages types of principles as well as historical characters.
I will not, however, here open the question whether the three Patriarchs were actual personages or, as some critics tell us, were merely the legendary ancestors of certain groups of wandering tribes, the Beni-Ibrahim, the Beni-Ishak, and the Beni-Yakub, which subsequently coalesced into the Hebrew nation. However interesting, the discussion of the historical facts would be remote from my present object, which is to throw some light upon the inner meaning of the Bible, and for this purpose we may be content to take the simple narrative of the text for, whether actual or legendary, the only way in which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob can affect us at the present day is as characters in a history the significance of which will become clear if we read between the lines.
But from this latter point of view the biblical statement of the national origin of Israel carries enfolded within it the hidden statement of those great principles which it is the purpose of the Bible to reveal. And here let me draw attention to the method adopted in Scripture. There are certain great universal principles which permeate all planes of being from the highest to the lowest. They are not many in number, and the relations between them are not difficult of comprehension when clearly stated; but we find difficulty in recognising the identity of the same principles when we meet with them, so to say, at different levels, as for example on the physical and the psychic planes respectively, and consequently we are apt to imagine them much more numerous and complicated than they really are.
Now, the purpose of the Bible is to convey instruction in the nature and use of these principles to those in whose hands this knowledge would be safe and useful, while concealing it from others; and in a manner appropriate to this object, it continually repeats the same few all-embracing principles over and over again. This repetition is firstly unavoidable because the principles themselves are few in number; next it is necessary as a process of hammering-in and fixing it in our minds; and lastly it is not a bare repetition, but there is a progressive expansion of the statement so as to conduct us step by step to a further comprehension of its meaning. Now this is done in a variety of ways, and one of frequent occurrence is through the use of Names.
Sacred Nomenclature is as large a study as Sacred Numeration, and indeed the two so shade off into one another that they may be regarded as forming a single study, and I will therefore no more attempt in the present book to elucidate the one system than the other, for they require a volume to themselves; but this need not prevent us considering occasional instances of both, and the names of the Patriarchs are too important to be passed over without notice. The frequency with which God is called in Scripture the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob shows that something more must be referred to than the mere fact that the ancestors of the Jews worshipped Him, and the consideration of some of the prominent points in the history of these allegorical personages will throw a light on the subject which will be very helpful in our further investigation.
Under the figure, therefore, of wrestling with "a man", we perceive that what Jacob wrestled with was the great problem of his own relation to the Universal Spirit under its twofold aspect of Universal Energy and Universal Intelligence, allegorically represented as a powerful man; and he held on and wrestled till he gained the blessing and the New Name in which the nature of that blessing was summed up. The conditions are significant. He was alone. Father of a large family as he was, none of his dear ones could help him in the struggle. We must each solve the problem of our relation to the Infinite Mind for ourselves; and not our nearest and dearest can wrestle for us.
And the struggle takes place in the darkness. It is when we begin to find that the light we thought we possessed is not the true light, when we find that its illuminating power is gone, that we rise nerved with an energy we never knew before and commence in earnest the struggle for the Light, determined never to let go until we win the victory. And so we wrestle till the day begins to break, but even then we must not quit our hold; we must not be content until we have received the New Name which marks our possession of that principle of Light and Life which will forever expand into brighter day and fuller livingness. "To him that overcometh will I give ... a New Name (Rev. 2:17).
But Jacob carries with him the mark of the struggle throughout his earthly career. The angel touched the hollow of his thigh, and thenceforward he was lame. The meaning is simple enough to those who have had some experience of the wrestling. They can never again walk in earthly things with the same step as before. They have seen the Truth, and they can never again unsee it; their whole standpoint has been altered and is no longer understood by those around them; to those who have not wrestled with the angel, they appear to walk lamely. [Compare the "Fisher King" in the Holy Grail legend - Ed]
What, then, was the New Name that was thus gained by the resolute wrestler? His original name of Jacob was changed to Israel. The definition of Israel given in the seventy-third Psalm is "such as are of a clean heart", and Jesus expressed the same idea when he said of Nathanael, "Behold an Israelite indeed in whom is no guile"; for the emphasis laid upon the word "Israelite" at once suggests some inner meaning, since Nathanael's nationality was no more remarkable under the circumstances than that of an Englishman in Piccadilly.
The great fact about the spiritual Israel is therefore cleanness of heart and absence of guile — in other words, perfect sincerity, which again implies singleness of purpose in the right direction. It is precisely that quality which our Buddhist friends call "one-pointedness", and on which, under various similitudes, the Master laid so much stress. This, then, is the distinctive characteristic which attaches to the name of Israel, for it is this concentration of effort that is the prime factor in gaining the victory which leads to the acquisition of the Name. This is fundamental, and without it nothing can be accomplished; it indicates the sort of mental character which we must aim at, but it is not the meaning of the Name itself.
Hence the general conception conveyed by the syllable "Is" is that of a feminine spiritual principle manifesting itself in individuality — that is to say, the "Soul" or formative element — and it is thus indicative of all that we mean when we speak of the psychic side of nature. How completely the Assyrians identified themselves with the cultus of this principle is shown by the name of their country, which is derived from "Ashur".
It is only in the combination of all three elements that the true Reality is to be found, whether we study it in its physical, psychic, or spiritual aspect. We may for particular purposes give special prominence to one aspect over the two others, but this is for a time only, and even while we do so, we realise that the particular mode of Life-Power with which we are dealing derives its efficiency only from the fact of its being permeated by the other two.
We cannot too firmly impress upon our minds that, though there are three modes, there is only ONE LIFE; and in all our studies, and in their practical application, we must never forget the great truth that the Living Power which we use is a Synthesis, and that whenever we make an analysis we theoretically destroy the synthesis. The only purpose of making an analysis is to learn how to build up the synthesis; and it is for this reason that the Bible equally condemns the opposite extremes of materialism and sorcery. It tells us that "dogs and sorcerers" are excluded from the heavenly city, and when we understand what is meant by these terms, it becomes self-evident that it cannot be otherwise.
It is for this reason, also, that we find the Israelites so often warned both against the Babylonian and the Egyptian idolatries, not because there was no great underlying truth in the worship of those nations, but because it was a worship that excluded the idea of WHOLENESS. "Wilt thou be made whole?" is the Divine invitation to us all; and the Egyptian and Assyrian worships were eminently calculated to lead their votaries away from this Wholeness in opposite directions.
But that both the Assyrian and the Egyptian worship had a solid basis of truth is a fact to which the Bible itself bears this remarkable testimony: "In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land; whom the Lord of Hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance" (Isaiah 19:24,25). The Israelite worship was as essentially that of the principle represented by "El" as those of Egypt and Assyria were of the two others, and it needed the blessing of those two extremes by the recognition of their relation to the central, or spiritual, principle to constitute the realisation of the true Divine Sonship of Man in which no element of this threefold being — body, soul, or spirit — is alien from unity with "the Father".
This, then, was the significance of the New Name given to Jacob. He had wrestled with the Divine until the light had begun to dawn upon him, and he thus acquired the right to a name which should correctly describe what he had now become. Formerly he had been Jacob — i.e. Yakub, a name derived from the root "Yak" or "One". This signifies the third stage of apprehension of the Divine problem which immediately precedes the final discovery of the great secret of the Trinity-in-Unity of Being. We realise the ONE-ness of the Universal Divine Principle, though we have not yet realised its Threefold nature both in ourselves and in the Universal.
If we look through the history of Abraham we find the masculine element especially predominant in it. He is the father of the nations that are to spring from him, he receives the covenant of circumcision, he is a warrior and goes forth to victorious battle, and the change of his name from Abram to Abraham is the substitution of a masculine for a neuter element.
In Isaac's history the feminine element is equally predominant. His name is connected with the laughter of his mother (Genesis 18), and his marriage with Rebekah is the pivot round which all the events of his life centre; and again, his acquiescence in his own sacrifice marks the predominance of the passive element in his character. To him there comes no change of name; he is neither leader, warrior, nor spiritual wrestler, but the calm, contemplative man who "went out to meditate in the field at eventide"; he is typical of the purely receptive attitude of mind, and therefore the syllable "Is" is as indicative of his nature as the masculine syllable "Ra" is of his father's, or the neutral and purely mathematical conception indicated by the syllable "Yak" of his son's.
It is of little moment at the present date how much of the book of Genesis is legendary and how much historical, and we can afford to view calmly such little inaccuracies on the face of the document as when we are told, in Exodus 6:3, that God was not known to Abraham by the name Jehovah, and in Genesis 22:14, that Abraham called the place where he was delivered from sacrificing Isaac "Jehovah-jireh". There are two typical schools of Biblical interpretation, one of which is historically represented by St Augustine and the other by St Jerome. Augustine, who was not an Orientalist and had not studied the original Hebrew, took his stand upon the textual accuracy of the Bible and urged that if once any inaccuracy were admitted to exist in it, we could not be certain of anything in the whole book. Jerome, who had made an accurate study of the original Hebrew, admitted the existence of inaccuracies in the text from the operation of the same natural causes which affect other ancient literature, such as errors of copyists, variations of oral tradition, and even possible adaptation to the requirements of something which the transcriber believed to be an essential doctrine.
These two representative men were not separated by an interval of centuries but were contemporary and actually in communication with each other, and we may therefore see from how early a date Christendom had been divided into blind reverence for the letter and intelligent enquiry into the history of its documents. St Jerome was the father of the Higher Criticism, and with such a respectable authority to back us, we need not be afraid to attribute any such casual errors as the one now in question to those natural causes which render all ancient documents liable to variation, and the point to which I would draw attention is that merely superficial contradictions which can be reasonably accounted for on purely natural grounds in no way affect the general inspiration of the Bible.
And by "inspiration" I mean an inner illumination on the part of the writers leading them to the immediate perception of Truth, which illumination is itself a fact in the regular order of Nature, the reason of which I hope to make clear in a subsequent volume. The books of the Pentateuch, as we possess them, were written by Ezra and his scribes after the return from the Babylonian captivity — those writers whom the Jews call "the men of the Great Synagogue", and whose writings were separated from the time of Moses by exactly the same interval that separates Tennyson's Idylls of the King from the date of the actual King Arthur.
This alone leaves a sufficiently wide margin for errors to creep into such earlier documents as these writers may have availed themselves of; and we must next reflect that another interval of several centuries separated them from the copies conveyed to Egypt in the second century before Christ for Ptolemy Soter's Greek translation, commonly known as the Septuagint. The "Temple Standard" Pentateuch, preserved at Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, can hardly have been the original document written by Ezra; but even supposing it to have been so, what became of it at the destruction of Jerusalem? Tradition says it was sent by Josephus to the Emperor of Rome; and written, as it is said to have been, on bulls' hides, we may well imagine that it perished by damp or other agencies, neglected as a barbarous relic in a city whose energies were concentrated on maintaining its position as arbitress of the world by conquest and diplomacy; at any rate, the document was never heard of again, and the oldest Jewish versions of the Pentateuch now extant are not older than the tenth century.
Under these circumstances we need not be surprised if variations have found their way into the text nor need we trouble ourselves much about them if we reflect that the real place where Truth exists is in Nature, and not in books, and that the book is merely a record of what others have learnt without book; and, moreover, owing to the deep reverence with which both Jewish and Christian Scriptures have been preserved, we may say that any errors or contradictions discovered in the text no more affect the body of the Truth contained in the Bible as a whole than the dust on the outside of an orange affects the value of the fruit. It is this inner truth that we are seeking, and if we at all realise the Master's statement that the Kingdom is within, superficial discrepancies will not present any difficulties to us.
Their successive statement in the symbolical history indicates the need for the preparatory study of each in detail if we would arrive at the True Light; and it is precisely the discovery that this separate study is by itself insufficient that brings us to the point where we have to wrestle in the darkness with the Divine Angel until the day dawns. We must unite the three principles into a single Unity, and thus learn to form the name "Israel"; and in so doing we discover that it has now become our own name, for we find that the kingdom of heaven — the realm of eternal principles — is within us, and that therefore whatever we discover there is that which we ourselves are.
Our wrestling ceases: the Divine Wrestler has put his name upon us, and the day is beginning to dawn; but as yet it is only the earliest hour of daybreak; it is the true sunlight, but it is still low on the horizon, and we must not make the mistake of supposing that this early morning hour is the same as the mid-day glory — in other words, we must not suppose that because we have once and forever finished wrestling with an unknown antagonist in darkness, therefore we have nothing more to do.