We have seen that the Bible teaching regarding Man starts with two great facts: first, that he is the image of God, reproducing in individuality the same Universal Mind which is the Origin of all things, and thus reproducing also its creative process of Thought; and, secondly, that he is ignorant of this truth, and so brings upon himself all sorts of trouble and limitation; and it is the purpose of the Bible to lead us step by step out of this ignorance into this knowledge — step by step, for it is a process of growth, first in the individual, then in the race, and this growth depends on certain clear and ascertainable Laws inherent in the constitution of Man. Now the peculiarity of inherent Law is that it always acts uniformly, making no exception in favour of anyone, and it does this as well positively as negatively.
But this was not to be done by making any false statement of the Law, for Truth can never come out of falsehood; it must be done by presenting the Truth under such figures as would indicate the real relations of things, though not explaining how these relations arise, because to undeveloped minds such an explanation would be worse than useless. Hence came the whole system of the Mosaic Law.
Whatever name we give it, it is always the ONE Self-existent and Self-transforming Power of which everything is some mode of manifestation, simply because there is no other source from which anything could come. This ultimate deduction of reason is the recognition of the Unity of God and could not be more clearly stated than in the words which Isaiah puts into the mouth of the Divine Being, repeating the phrase in two consecutive sentences as though to lay additional stress upon it: "there is none beside Me ... I am God, and there is none else" (Isaiah 45:21,22). That is to say, "God" — or as we have learnt from the instructions to the woman of Samaria, Universal Spirit — is all that is.
This is the great Truth on which the mission of Moses was founded, and therefore that mission starts with the announcement of the Divine Name at the Burning Bush. "Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come into the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM; and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you".
So the name after which Moses inquired turned out to be no name, but the first person singular of the present tense of the verb TO BE, in its indicative mood. It is the announcement of BEING in the Absolute, in that first originating plane of Pure Spirit where, because the Material does not yet exist, there can be no extension in space, and consequently no sequence in time, and where therefore the only possible mode of being is the consciousness of Self-existence without limitation either of space or time, the realisation of the "universal Here and the everlasting Now", the concentration of the All into the Point and the expansion of the Point into the All. [see also Lecture 3 in The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science — Ed].
In whatever way we may interpret the story of Moses' meeting with the Divine Being at the burning bush, one thing is evident: it indicates the point in his career when it became plain to him that the only possible way for the Liberation of mankind was through the universal recognition of that Truth which till now had been the exclusive secret of the sanctuaries. What, then, was the great central Truth which was thus announced in this proclamation of the Divine Name? It has two sides to it. First, that Pure Spirit is the ultimate essence of all that is, and as a consequence the All-presence, the All-knowledge, the All-livingness, and the All-lovingness of "God". Then as the corollary of the proposition that "Spirit is all that is", there must be the converse proposition that "all that is is Spirit"; and since Man is included in the "all", we are again brought back to the original description of him as the image and likeness of God.
But in those days people had to be educated up to these two great truths, and they have not advanced very far in this education yet; so from the time when Moses' eyes were opened to see in these truths not a secret to be guarded for his private benefit, but the power which was to expand to the renovation of the world, he realised that it was his mission to set men free by educating them gradually into the true knowledge of the Divine Name. Then he conceived a great scheme.
Still it was impossible for these thinkers who had arrived at the great knowledge to pass over the multitudes without allowing them at least a few crumbs from their table. The true recognition of the "Self" must always carry with it the purpose of helping others to acquire it also; but it does not necessarily imply the immediate perception of the best means of doing so, and hence throughout antiquity we find an inner religion, the Supreme Mysteries, for the initiated few; and an outer religion, for the most part idolatrous, for the people. The people were not to be left without any religion, but they were given a religion which was deemed suited to their gross apprehension of things; and in the hands of lower orders of priests — themselves little, if at all, better instructed than the worshippers, these conceptions often became very gross indeed. Nevertheless, in their first intention, the "idols" were not without meaning.
The cultured Greeks laughed at the Egyptian temples as places where, in the midst of a magnificent edifice, when the sacred curtain of the innermost sanctuary was withdrawn, there was revealed an onion or a cat. Yet here was surely enough to prompt an intelligent person to enquiry. Why did the innermost sanctuary contain no Apollo Belvedere or other marvel unique and worthy to be enshrined, but only one of those wretched animals which disturbed the rest of the Greek traveller, newly arrived in Egypt, by nocturnal caterwaulings which must have been a marked feature in cities where pussy held undisputed sway? Or why was the odoriferous onion that lay by tons for sale in the markets here set upon a pedestal as an object of reverence? Surely there must be some deep significance in elevating such common objects to the central place of mystery. Yes: because in these commonest of common things there appeared the Great Central Mystery of LIFE more than in the sculptured marble of Phidias or Praxiteles.
Thus the Egyptian religion signified, to all who had the "nous" to penetrate it, the All-presence of the Eternal Living Spirit as the ONE true object of worship, to be found not only in temples, but in streets and fields, in all places alike. It signified this to those who had the intelligence to lift the veil, and this meant, perhaps, one in ten thousand of the population; and as soon as he had penetrated the real meaning, his lips were sealed, for he was admitted to the Mysteries. For the rest, the priests had such trivial superficial explanations as those which, ages later, they sought to palm off upon Herodotus; it was no part of their business to lift the veil of Isis.
And so Moses saw the generations toiling on and on in an ignorance which could not but have disastrous consequences sooner or later. Under the paternal rule of a truly illuminated priesthood, such a relation between the inner and the outer religion might be employed to maintain a condition of peaceful well-being for the masses during their intellectual infancy; but he saw that this state of things could not go on indefinitely.
From the standpoint of the governed, this benign, paternal government could not go on for ever, and equally so from that of the rulers. What guarantee was there of a perpetual succession of priests illuminated not only in head but also in heart? Egypt was old when Moses was a youth, and the signs of decadence were not wanting; for the cruel oppression of the Israelites, whom four centuries of naturalisation should have placed on equality with their fellow-subjects, was the very reverse of all that was truest in the inner teaching of the Egyptian temples. It was the index of practical atheism. The Science of the temples continued, but it had reached the bifurcation of the Way, and it had taken the Left-hand Path.
And if this was the case in Egypt, which led the van of civilisation, what was to be expected from the rest of the world? What was the outlook into the future with an intellectual development expanding only on the material side, without any knowledge of those spiritual truths in which lies the real livingness of Life? Surely nothing but the ultimate destruction of mankind in internecine strife, led up to by long ages of that awful spiritual condition in which the outward polish of materialised intellectuality only serves to place additional resources at the disposal of the unmitigated savage within.
This is the work of generation upon generation, very far from being accomplished yet; and the only way to inaugurate it was by a new departure in which the great announcement that had hitherto been reserved as the last and final teaching must become the first and initial teaching. The supreme secret of the Mysteries must be made the starting-point of the child's education; and therefore the mission to Israel must open with the declaration of the I AM as the All-embracing ONE.
A sentence consists of a subject, copula, and predicate, but in the announcement of the Divine Name made to Moses, there is no predicate. The reason is that to predicate anything of a subject implies some special aspect of it, and thus by implication limits it, however extensive the predicate may be; and it is impossible to apply this mode of statement to the Universal Living Spirit. There can be nothing outside it. Itself is the Substance and the Life of all that is or ever can be. That is an ultimate conception from which it is impossible to get away.
Therefore, the only predicate corresponding to the Universal Subject must be the enumeration of the innumerable — the statement of all that is contained in infinite possibility — and, consequently, the place of the predicate must be left apparently unfilled, because it is the fullness which includes all. The only possible statement of the Divine is that of Present Subjective Being, the Universal "I" and the ever-present "AM". Therefore I AM is the Name of God; and the First of all the Commandments is the announcement of the Divine Being as the Infinite ONE.
I have discussed the subject of the Unity of Spirit in my Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science, but I may repeat here the truth that, mathematically, the Infinite must be Unity. We cannot think of two Infinites, for as soon as duality appears, each member of it is limited by the other, else there would be no duality. Therefore we cannot multiply the Infinite. Similarly, we cannot divide it, for division again implies multiplicity or Numbers, and though these may be conceived of as existing relatively to each other within the Infinite, the very relation between them establishes limits where one begins and the other ends, and thus we are no longer dealing with the Infinite.
Of course all this is self-evident to the mathematician, who at once sees the absurdity of attempting to multiply or divide Infinity; but the non-mathematical reader should endeavour to realise the full meaning of the word "Infinite" as that which, being without limits, necessarily occupies all space and therefore includes all that is. The announcement that God is ONE is, therefore, the mathematical statement of the Universal Presence of Spirit, and the phrase "I AM" is the grammatical statement of the same thing.
And because the Universal Spirit is the Universal Life Itself, "over all, through all, and in all", there is yet a third statement of it, which is its Living statement: the reproduction of it in the man himself; and these three statements are one and cannot be separated. Each implies the two others, like the three sides of an equilateral triangle, and therefore the First of all the Commandments is that we shall recognise THE ONE. As numerically all other numbers are developed from unity, so all the possibilities of ever-expanding Life are developed from the All-including UNIT of Being, and therefore in this Commandment we find the root of our future growth to all eternity. This is why both Moses and Jesus assign to it the supreme place.
The mission of Moses, then, was to build up a nationality which should be independent both of time and country, and which should derive its solidarity from its recognition of the principle of THE ONE. Its national being must be based upon its expanding realisation of the great central Truth, and to the guarding and development of that Truth this nation must be consecrated; and in the enslaved but not subdued children of the desert — the children of Israel — Moses found ready to hand the material which he needed. For these erstwhile wanderers had brought with them a simple monotheistic creed, a belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which, vaguely though it might be, already touched the threshold of the sacred mystery; and four hundred years of residence in Egypt had not extinguished, however it may have obscured, the great tradition. Here, then, Moses found the nucleus for the nationality he designed to found, and so he led forth the people in that great symbolic march through the wilderness whose story is told in the Exodus.
To the details of that history we may turn more intelligently after we have gained a clearer idea of what the great work really was which Moses inaugurated on the night of the first Passover. Perhaps some of my readers may be surprised to learn that it is still going on and that they are called upon to take a personal part in continuing the work of Moses, which has now so expanded as to reach themselves. But all this is contained in the commission which Moses first announced to those he was to deliver and grows naturally out of its unfoldment. The people he was to lead into liberty were "the people of God", and since "God" is the I AM, they were "THE PEOPLE OF THE I AM". This was the true name of this nation, which was to be founded upon an Eternal Ideal instead of on the historical conditions of time and the geographical conditions of place; and this essential name of the New Nation has been as accurately translated into its equivalent of "Israel" as we shall later see the essential Name of God has been translated by the word "Jehovah". "The People of God" led forth by Moses were proclaimed by the very terms of his commission to be "The People of the I AM".
Now the history of this people is dignified by a succession of Prophets such as no other nation lays claim to; yet the great Prophet who first consolidated their scattered tribes into a compact community, in prophesying the future of the people he had founded, passes over all these and, looking down the long centuries, points only to one other Prophet "like unto me". We constantly miss those little indications of Scripture on which the fuller understanding of it so greatly depends; and just as we miss the point when we are told that Man is created in the likeness of God, so we miss the point when we are told that this other prophet, Jesus, is a prophet of the same type as Moses.
The whole line of intervening prophets were not of that type. They had their own special work, but it was not a work like that of Moses. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the rest sink out of sight, and the only Prophet whom Moses sees in the future is brought into his field of vision by his likeness to himself. Any child in a Sunday school, if asked what it knew about Moses, would answer that he brought the children of Israel out of Egypt. No one would question that this was the distinctive fact regarding him, and therefore if we are to find a Prophet of the same type as Moses, we should expect to find in him the founder of a New Nationality of the same order as that founded by Moses — that is to say, a nationality subsisting independently of time and place and cohering by reason of its recognition of an Eternal Ideal.
In the parallel case of the announcement to Moses at the burning bush, the translators did not attempt to introduce any predicate; they felt what I have pointed out: that no predicate could be sufficiently extensive to define Infinite Being; but here, supposing that Jesus was speaking of himself personally, they thought it necessary to introduce a word which should limit his statement accordingly. Now the only comment to be made on this passage of the English Bible is to note carefully that it is exactly what Jesus never said. In this connection he made no personal application of the verb "to be". What he said was, "Except ye believe that I AM, ye shall die in your sins" (R.V.). Now, if the criterion by which we are to recognise him as the Prophet predicted by Moses is his reproduction of the doings of Moses, then we cannot be wrong in supposing that his use of the I AM was as complete a generalisation as was employed by Moses.
On the same principle on which theologians or grammarians would particularise the words to the individuality of Jesus, they might particularise them to Moses also. But going back to that generalised statement of Man which is the very first intimation the Bible gives of him, we find that if I AM is the generalised statement of "God", it must also be the generalised statement of "Man", for man is the image and likeness of God. Whatever is true of one is true of the other, only conversely and, as it were, by reflection; so that whatever is universal in God becomes individual in man.
If, then, Jesus was to duplicate the work of Moses, it could only be by taking as the foundation of his teaching the same statement of essential Being that Moses took as the foundation of his; and therefore we must look for a generic, and not for a specific, application of the I AM in his teaching also. And as soon as we do this, the veil is lifted and a power streams forth from all his instructions which shows us that it was no mere figure of speech when he said that the water which he should give would become, in each one who drank it, a well of water springing up into everlasting life. He came not to proclaim himself, but Man; not to tell us of his own Divinity separating him from the race and making him the Great Exception, but to tell us of our Divinity and to show in himself the Great Example of the I AM reaching its full personal expression in Man.
This Prophet is raised up "of our brethren", he is one of ourselves, and therefore he said, "The disciple when he is perfected shall be as his Master". It is the Universal I AM reproducing itself in the individuality of Man that Jesus would have us believe in. He is preaching nothing but the same old Truth with which the Bible begins, that Man is the image and likeness of God. He says, in effect, Make this recognition the centre of your life and you have tapped the source of everlasting life; but refuse to believe it and you will die in your sins. Why? As a Divine vengeance upon you for daring to question a theological formulary to which some narrow-minded ecclesiastic applies the words of the Vincentian canon, "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus", when his formulary has never even been heard outside such limits as both historically and geographically give the lie direct to his assertion of "always", "everywhere", and "by all men"? Certainly not. Truth has a surer foundation than forms of words; it is deep down in the foundations of Being; and it is the failure to realise this Truth of Being in ourselves that is the refusal to believe in the I AM which must necessarily cause us to perish in our sins. It is not a theological vengeance, but the Law of Nature. Let us inquire, then, what this Law is.
And in turn, the subjective entity reacts upon the objective life, for if there is one fact which the advance of modern psychological science is making more clear than another it is that the subjective entity is "the builder of the body". And this is precisely what, on the information we have already gleaned from the Bible, it ought to be; for we have seen that the statement that man is the image of God can only be interpreted as a statement of his having in himself the same creative process of Thought to which alone it is possible to attribute the origin of anything. He is the image of God because he is the individualisation of the Universal Mind at that stage of self-evolution in which the individual attains the capacity for reasoning from the seen to the unseen, and thus for penetrating behind the veil of outward appearances; so that, because of the reproduction of the Divine creative faculty in himself, the man's mental states or modes of Thought are bound to externalise themselves in his body and his circumstances.
This, then, is the Law of Man's Being. I do not stop to discuss it in detail as, writing for New Thought readers, I assume at least an elementary knowledge of these things on their part; and accordingly, this being the Law, we see that the more closely our conception of ourselves approximates to a broad generalisation of the factors which go to make human personality, rather than that narrow conception which limits our notion of ourselves to certain particular relations that have gathered around us, the more fully we shall externalise this idea of ourselves. And because the idea is a generalisation independent of any particular circumstance, it must necessarily externalise as a corresponding independence of circumstances; in other words, it must result in a control over conditions, whether of body or environment, proportioned to the completeness of our generalisation.
The more perfect the generalisation, the more perfect the corresponding control over conditions; and therefore to attain the most complete control, which means the most perfect Liberty, we need to conceive of ourselves as embodying the idea of the most perfect generalisation. But complete generalisation is only another expression for infinitude, and therefore we have again reached the point where it becomes impossible to attach any predicate to the verb "to Be"; and so the only statement which contains the whole Law of Man's Being is identical with the only statement which contains the whole of God's Being, and consequently I AM is as much the correct formula for Man as for God.
The transgression of which Jesus speaks is the transgression of the Law of the I AM in ourselves, the non-recognition of the fact that we are the image and likeness of God. This is the old original sin of Eve. It is the belief in Evil as a substantive self-originating power. We believe ourselves under the control of all sorts of evils having their climax in Death; but whence does the evil get its power? Not from God, for no diminution of Life can come from the Fountain of Life. And if not from God, then from where else? God is the ONLY BEING — that is the teaching of the First Commandment — and therefore whatever is is some mode of God; and if this be so, then however evil may have a relative existence, it can have no substantive existence of its own. It is not a Living Originating Power. God, the Good, alone is that; and it is for this reason that in the doctrine of THE ONE and in the statement of the I AM is the foundation of eternal individual Life and Liberty.
So then the transgression is in supposing that there is, or can be, any Living Originating Power outside the I AM. Let us once see that this is impossible, and it follows that evil has no more dominion over us and we are free. But so long as we limit the I AM in ourselves to the narrow boundaries of the relative and conditioned and do not realise that, personified in ourselves, it must by its very nature still be as unfettered as when acting in the first creation of the universe, we shall never pass beyond the Law of Death which we thus impose upon ourselves.
In this way, then, Jesus proved himself to be the Prophet of whom Moses had spoken. He made the recognition of the I AM the sole foundation of his work; in other words, he placed before men the same radical and ultimate conception of Being that Moses had done — but with a difference. Moses elaborated this conception from the standpoint of the Universal; Jesus elaborated it from that of the Individual. The work of Moses must necessarily precede that of Jesus, for if the Universal Mind is not in some measure apprehended first, the individual mind cannot be apprehended as its image and reflection.
But it takes the teaching of both Moses and Jesus to make the complete teaching, for each is the complement to the other, and it is for this reason that Jesus said he came not to destroy the Law but to fulfil. Jesus took up the work where Moses left off, and expanded Moses' initial conception of a people founded on the recognition of the Unity of God into its proper outcome of the conception of a people founded on the recognition of the unity of Man as the expression of the Unity of God. How can we doubt that this latter conception also was in the mind of Moses? Had it not been, he would not have spoken of the Prophet like unto himself that should come hereafter. But he saw the ages during which his great idea must germinate within the limits of a single nationality before it could expand to humanity at large; and therefore before Jesus could gather into one the "People of the I AM" from every nation under heaven, it was necessary that one exclusive nation should be the official custodian of the great secret and mature it till the time was ripe for the formation of that great international nationality which is only now beginning to show forth its earliest blossoms.