However deep the mysteries we may encounter, there is nothing unnatural anywhere. Everything has its place in the due order of the Great Whole. A mistaken conception of this Order may lead us to invert it, and by so doing we provide those negative conditions whose presence calls forth the Power of the Negative with all its disastrous consequences; but even this inverted action is perfectly natural, for it is all according to recognisable Law, whether on the side of calculation or of feeling.
These Laws of the Universe, whether within us or without or around us, are always the same, and the only question is whether through our ignorance we shall use them in that inverted sense which sums them all up in the Law of Death, or in that true and harmonious order which sums them up in the Law of Life. These are the things which under a variety of figures the Bible presents to us, and it is for us by reverent, yet intelligent, inquiry to penetrate the successive veils which hide them from the eyes of those who will not take the trouble to investigate for themselves. It is this Grand Order of the Universe that is symbolised by Solomon's Temple.
If the purpose of Moses had been only that of a national lawgiver and founder of a political state, a Lycurgus or a Rollo, it would have found its perfect attainment in the reign of Solomon; but Moses had a far grander end in view, and looking down the long vista of the ages he saw, not Solomon, but the carpenter who said, "a greater than Solomon is here" (Matt. 12:42; Luke 11:31). And the way for the carpenter could only be prepared by that long period of decadence which set in with the first days of Solomon's successor. "The People of the I AM" are concealed among all nations and must be brought forth by the Prophet, who should realise the work of Moses not only in a national, but also in a universal, significance.
These are the three typical figures of Hebrew history; the beginning, the middle, and the end Moses, Solomon, Jesus; and the three are distinguished by one common characteristic: they are all Builders of the Temple. Moses erected the tabernacle, that portable temple which accompanied the Israelites in their journeyings. Solomon reproduced it in an edifice of wood and stone fixed firmly upon its rocky foundation. Jesus said, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again" (John 2:19); but "he spake of the temple of his body" (John 2:21).
St Paul gives us an important key to the interpretation of Scripture when he tells us that its leading characters also represent great universal principles, and this is pre-eminently the case with Solomon. His name, in common with the names Salem and Jerusalem, is derived from a word signifying Wholeness (Sαlim, the Whole), and therefore means the man who has realised "the Wholeness", or in other words the Universal Unity. This is the secret of his greatness.
He who has found the Unity of the Whole has obtained "the Key of Knowledge", and it is now in his power to enter intelligently upon the study of his own being and of the relations which arise out of it, and to help others as he himself advances into greater light. This is the man who is able to become a Builder.
But such a man cannot come of any parentage; he must be the "Son of David"; and it was to test their knowledge in this respect that the Master posed the carping scribes with the question as to how the Son of David could also be his Lord (Matt. 22:43-46). As rulers in Israel, they should have known these things and instructed the people in them, but they would not come, as did Nicodemus (John 3:1-2), to him who would teach them; and so, like Hiram (1 Kings 5), the architect of Solomon's Temple, the Master was murdered by those who should have been his scholars and helpers.
To define what is primarily feeling is to attempt the impossible; but the essence of the feeling consists in the recognition of such a reciprocity of nature that each supplies what the other wants, and that neither is complete without the other. In the last analysis, the reason for this feeling is to be discovered in the relation of the Individual to the Universal Mind as each being the necessary correlative of the other, and it is the recognition of this truth that makes David the father of Solomon.
When this recognition by the individual mind of its own nature and of its relation to the Universal Mind takes place, it gives birth to a new being in the man; for he now finds not that he has ceased to be the self he was before, but that that self includes a far greater self, which is none other than the reproduction of the Universal Self in his individual consciousness. Thenceforward he works more and more of set purpose by means of this greater self, the self within the self, as he grows into fuller understanding of the Law by which this greater self has become developed within him.
He learns that it is this greater self within the self that is the true Builder, because it is none other than the reproduction of the Infinite Creative Power of the Universe. He realises that the working of this power must always be a continual building up. It is the Universal Life-Principle, and to suppose that to have any other action than continual expansion into more and more perfect forms of self-expression would be to suppose it acting in contradiction to its own nature which, whether on the colossal scale of a solar system or on the miniature scale of a man, must be that of a self-inherent activity which is forever building up.
When anyone is thus intellectually enlightened, he has reached that stage of development which is signified by the name David: he is "beloved" that is to say, he is exercising a specific individual attraction towards the Spirit in its universal and undifferentiated mode.
We lose the key to the whole teaching of the Bible if we lose sight of the truth that the Universal cannot, as such, initiate a course of action on the plane of the particular. It can do so only by becoming the individual, which is precisely the production of the intellectually enlightened man we are speaking about. The failure to see this very obvious Law is the root of all the theological discordances that have retarded the work of true religion to the present time, and therefore the sooner we see through the error, the better.
Anyone who has advanced to the perception of this Law necessarily becomes a centre of attraction to Undifferentiated Spirit in its highest modes, the modes of Intelligence and Feeling, as well as in its lower modes of Vital Energy. This results from the very nature of the evolutionary hypothesis. All creation commences with the primary movement of the Spirit, and since the Spirit is Life-in-itself, this movement must be forever going on.
To take an analogy from chemistry, it is perpetually in the nascent state that is, continually pressing forward to find the most suitable affinities with which to coalesce into self-expression. This is exactly what Jesus said to the woman of Samaria: "The Father [Universal Spirit] seeketh such to worship Him (John 4:23); and it is because of this mutual attraction between the individual mind that has come to the knowledge of its own true nature and the Universal Mind that the person who is thus enlightened is called "the Beloved"; he is beginning to understand what is meant by Man being the image of God and to grasp the significance of the old-world saying that "Spirit is the power that knows itself".
As this intellectual comprehension of the great Truth matures, it gives rise to the recognition of an interior power which is something beyond the intellect but not yet independent of it, something regarding which we can make intellectual statements that clear the way for its recognition, but which is itself a Living Power and not a mere statement about such a power.
It may seem a truism to say that no statement about a thing is the thing, yet we are apt to miss this in practice. The Master pointed this out very clearly when he said to the Jews, "Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have everlasting life, and they are they which testify of Me" (John 5:39). He said in effect, "You make a mistake by supposing that the reading of a book can in itself confer Life. What your Scriptures do is to make statements regarding that which I am. Realise what those statements mean, and then you will see in me the living example of the Living Truth; and seeing this, you will seek for the development of the same thing in yourselves. The disciple, when perfected, shall be as his Master".
The Building-Power is that innermost spiritual faculty which is the reproduction in the individual of the same Universal Building-Power by which the whole Creation exists, and the purpose of intellectual statements regarding it is to remove mental obstacles and to induce the mental state which will enable this supreme innermost power to work in accordance with conscious selection on the part of the individual. It is the same power which has brought the race up to where it is, and which has evolved the individual as part of the race.
All further evolution must result from the conscious employment of the Evolutionary Law by the intelligence of the individual himself. Now it is this recognised innermost creative power that is signified by Solomon it must be preceded by the purified and enlightened intellect and therefore it is called the Son of David and becomes the Builder of the Temple. For the Master's statement shows that, in its true significance, the Temple is that of Man's individuality; and if this is so with the individual, equally it must be so in the totality of manifested being, and thus it is also true that the whole Universe is none other than the Temple of the Living God.
It would be far too elaborate a work for the present volume to enter in detail into the symbolical statements of both physical and supraphysical nature contained first in the Tabernacle and afterwards in the Temple; but as the Universal Mind inspired the builders of the Pyramid with the correct knowledge of the cosmic measures, so the Bible tells us that Moses was inspired to produce in the Tabernacle the symbolic representation of great universal truths; he was bidden to make all things accurately according to the pattern showed him on the Mount, and the same truths received a more permanent symbolisation in Solomon's Temple.
An excellent example of this symbolism is afforded by the two pillars set up by Solomon at the entrance to the Temple: the one on the right hand, called Jachin, and the one on the left, called Boaz (1 Kings 7:21). They seemed to have had no structural connection with the building but merely to have stood at its entrance for the purpose of bearing these symbolic names. What, then, do they signify? The English J often stands for the Oriental Y, and the name Jachin is therefore Yakhin, which is an intensified form of the word YAK or ONE, thus signifying first the principle of Unity as the Foundation of all things, and then the Mathematical element throughout the Universe, since all numbers are evolved from the ONE, and under certain methods of treatment will always resolve themselves again into it.
But the mathematical element is the element of Measurement, Proportion, and Relation. It is not the Living Life, but only the recognition of the proportional adjustments which the Life gives rise to. To balance the Mathematical element we require the Vital element, and this element finds its most perfect expression in that wonderful complex of Thought, Feeling, and Volition which we call Personality. The pillar Jachin is therefore balanced by the pillar Boaz, a name connected with the root of the word "awaz", or Voice.
Speech is the distinguishing characteristic of Personality. To clothe a conception in adequate language is to give it definition and thus make it clear to ourselves and to others. A distinct statement of our idea is the first step in the operation of consciously building it up into concrete existence, and therefore we find that in all the great religions of the race, the Divine Creative Power is spoken of as "the Word".
This is the Narrow Way that leads us into the building not made with hands (2 Cor. 5:1), within which all the mysteries shall be unfolded before us in a regular order and succession. He who climbs up some other way is a thief and a robber (John 10:8) and brings punishment upon himself as the natural effect of his own rashness; for, knowing nothing of the true Order of the Inner Life, he plunges prematurely into the midst of things of whose real nature he is ignorant, and sooner or later learns to his cost the truth of the Scriptural warning, "whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him" (Eccl. 10:8).
We may not enter the Temple save by passing between the pillars, and we cannot pass between them till we can tell their meaning. It is the purpose of the Bible to give us the Key to this Knowledge. It is not the only instruction it has to give, but it is its initial course, and when this has been mastered, it will open out into deeper things, the inner secrets of the sanctuary. But the first thing is to pass between Jachin and Boaz, and then the Divine Interpreter will meet us on the threshold and will unfold the mysteries of the Temple in their due order, so that as each one is opened to us in succession, we are prepared for its reception and thus need fear no danger, because at each step we always know that we are dealing with and have attained the spiritual, intellectual, and physical development qualifying us to employ each new revelation in the right way.
For the opening of the inner mysteries is not for the gratification of mere idle curiosity; it is for the increasing of our Livingness; and the highest quality of Livingness is Life-givingness; and every measure of Life-givingness, be it only the giving of a cup of cold water (Matt. 10:42) means use of the powers and knowledge which we possess. The Temple instruction is therefore intended to qualify us as workers, and the value to ourselves of what we receive within is seen in the measure of intelligence and love with which we transmute our Temple gold into the current coin of daily life.
Each individual is a temple himself, as St Paul tells us, and at the same time a single stone in the construction of the Great Temple which is the regenerated race, that "People of the I AM" which was inaugurated when Moses first pitched the tabernacle in the wilderness. But the process must always be an individual one, for a nation is nothing but an aggregation of individuals, and therefore in considering the metaphor of "the Stone" as applied to the individual, we shall realise its wider application also.
Now the Master was executed on the charge of blasphemy for asserting the identity of his own nature with that of God. The subjection of the Jews to the Roman rule placed the power of life and death in the hands of a tribunal which could not take cognisance of such an offence "Take ye him and judge him according to your law" (John 18:31), said Pilate when the charge of blasphemy was preferred before him; and in order to bring him to execution it became necessary to substitute for the original charge of blasphemy one of high treason, so as to bring it within the jurisdiction of the court. "Whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar" (John 19:12) and so the inscription fastened to the cross was "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews" (John 19:19). But the true reason why Jesus was hunted to death was expressed by the scribes, who mocked the sufferer with the words "He trusted in God; let Him deliver him now if He will have him, for he said 'I am the son of God'." (Matt. 27:43)
The teaching of Jesus was the inversion of all that was taught by the official priesthood. Their whole teaching rested on the hypothesis that God and Man are absolutely distinct in nature, thus directly contradicting the earliest statement of their own Scriptures regarding Man, that he is the image and likeness of God. As a consequence of this false assumption, they supposed that the whole Mosaic Law and Ritual was intended to pacify God and make him favourable to the worshipper, and so in their minds the entire system tended only to emphasise the gulf that separated Man from God.
But they would not face the question of the reason of these things. They had received a certain traditional interpretation of their Scriptures and their Ritual and, as Jesus said, made the real commands of God void by their traditions. They were tied by "authorities", and this at second hand. They did not inquire what Moses meant, but only followed on the lines of what somebody else said he meant; in other words, they would not think for themselves. They were content to say, "Our Law and Ritual are what they are because God has so ordered them"; but they would not go further and inquire why God ordered them so.
With them, the whole question of revelation became the question whether Moses had or had not made such an announcement of the Divine Will, and so their religion rested ultimately only on historical evidences. But they did not face the question, "How am I to know that the so-called prophet ever received any communication from the Divine at all?" In the last resort, there can be only one criterion by which to judge the truth of any claim to a Divine communication, which is that the message should present an intelligible sequence of cause and effect.
It is a principle that no great system can endure for ages, exercising a widespread and permanent influence over large masses of mankind, without any element of Truth in it. There have been, and still are, great systems influencing mankind which contain many and serious errors, but what has given them their power is the Truth that is in them and not the error; and careful inquiry into the secret of their vitality will enable us to detect and remove the error.
Now had the leaders of the Jews investigated their national system with intelligence and moral courage, they would have argued that its manifest vitality and elevating spiritual tone showed that it contained a great and living Truth. This Truth could not be in the mere external observances and the promised results, and therefore the vitalising Truth must be in some principle which supplied the connection that was apparently wanting. They would have argued that God could not have arbitrarily commanded a set of meaningless observances, and that therefore these observances must be the expression of some LAW inherent in the very nature of Man's being.
In a word, they would have realised that, to be true at all, a thing must be within the All-embracing Law of Cause and Effect, and that religion itself could be no exception to the rule it must, in short, be natural because, if God be ONE, He cannot introduce anywhere an arbitrary and meaningless caprice subversive of the principle of Order throughout the Universe. To suppose the introduction of anything by a mere act of Divine Volition, without a foundation in the sequence of the Universal Order, would be to deny the Unity of God, and thus to deny the Divine Being altogether.
Had the rulers of Israel, therefore, understood the meaning of the first two Commandments, they would have realised that their first duty, as instructors of the people, was to probe the whole Mosaic system until they reached the bedrock of cause and effect on which it rested. But this is just what they did not do. Their reverence for names was greater than their reverence for Truth and, assuming that Moses taught what he never did, they put to death the teacher of whom Moses had prophesied as the one who should complete his word in building up "the people of the I AM".
Thus they rejected "the Stone of Israel", and in so doing they fought against God that is, against the Law of Spirit in Self-evolution. For it was this Law, and this only, that the Carpenter of Nazareth taught. He came not to destroy the teachings of Moses and of the Prophets, but to fulfil by showing what it was that, under various veils and coverings, had been handed down through the generations. It was his mission to complete the Building of the Temple by exhibiting Perfected Man as the apex of the Pyramid of Evolution.
This was the teaching of Jesus. When the Jews sought to stone him for saying that God was his Father (John 10:31), he replied by quoting the 82nd Psalm, "I said ye are gods", and laid stress on this as "Scripture that cannot be broken" that is, as written in the very nature of things, that signatura rerum [signature of things Ed.] by which each thing has its proper place in the universal order. He replied in effect, "I am only saying of myself what your own Law says of every one of you. I do not set myself forth as an exception, but as the example of what the nature of every man truly is". The same mistake has been perpetuated to the present day; but gradually people are beginning to see what the great truth is which Jesus taught and which Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms had proclaimed before him.
Perfected Man is the apex of the Evolutionary Pyramid, and this by a necessary sequence. First comes the Mineral Kingdom, lying inert and motionless, without any sort of individual recognition. Then comes the Vegetable Kingdom, capable of assimilating food, with individual life, but with only the most rudimentary intelligence, and rooted to one spot. Next comes the Animal Kingdom, where intelligence is manifestly on the increase, and the individual is no longer rooted to a single spot physically, yet is so intellectually, for its round of ideas is limited only to the supply of its bodily wants. Then comes the fourth or Human kingdom, where the individual is not rooted to one spot either physically or intellectually, for his thought can penetrate all space. But even he has not yet reached Liberty, for he is still the slave of "circumstances over which he has no control": his thoughts are unlimited, but they remain mere dreams until he can attain the power of giving them realisation. Unlimited power of conception is his, but to complete his evolution he must acquire a corresponding power of creation. With that he will arrive at perfect Liberty.
Throughout the Four Kingdoms which have yet been developed, the progress from the lower to the higher is always towards greater liberty and therefore, in accordance with that principle of Continuity which Science recognises as nowhere broken in Nature, Perfect Liberty must be the goal towards which the evolutionary process is tending. One state more is necessary to complete the Pyramid of Manifested nature: the addition of a Fifth Kingdom, which shall complete the work for which the four lower Kingdoms are the preparation the Kingdom in which Spirit shall be the ruling factor, and thus the Kingdom of Spirit which is the Kingdom of God.
These considerations bring out into a very clear light one meaning of Daniel's prophecy of "the Stone", cut out without hands, which grew until it filled the whole earth (Daniel 2:34,35). It is that same "Stone" of which Jesus spoke and is bound by the inevitable sequence of Evolution to become the Chief Cornerstone that is, the angular or five-pointed stone in which all four sides of the Pyramid find their completion. It is that headstone capping the whole, of which it is written that it shall be brought forth with shouts of "Grace, grace unto it" (Zech. 4:7).
The establishment of this Fifth Kingdom is a natural process of growth, a great silent revolution which will gradually change the face of society by first changing its spirit; and for this reason the Master said, "The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation". Outward forms of government will perhaps always vary in different countries, but the recognition of Man as the true Temple must produce the same effects of "justice, mercy, and truth" in every land, so that war and crime, ignorance and want, sickness and fear shall be known no more, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away (Isaiah 35:10).
This is the meaning of the Building of the Temple, and in studying it we must remember that the sacred symbols apply not only to Man but also to his environment. The Tabernacle of Moses and the Temple of Solomon not only represent the Microcosm but also the Macrocosm. And this leads us to the threshold of a very deep mystery: the effect of the spiritual condition of the human race upon Nature as a whole, regarding which St Paul tells us that the entire creation is waiting in anxious expectation for the revealing of the sons of God (Rom. 8:19).
The Building of the Temple is thus a threefold process, commencing with the individual man, spreading from the individual to the race, and from the race to the whole environment in which we live. This is the return to Eden, where there is nothing hurtful or destructive.
The expulsion from the spiritual "Garden of the Lord" led man into a world that brought forth thorns and thistles, and the earth was "cursed for his sake"; that is to say, the mental attitude resulting from "the Fall" induced a corresponding condition in Nature; and by the same Law, the mental attitude which is restoration from "the Fall" will produce a corresponding renovation of the material world, a state of things which is described with poetic imagery in the eleventh chapter of Isaiah.
This influence of the human race upon their surroundings, whether for good or for evil, is only the natural result of carrying out to its final consequences the initial proposition of the Bible that Man is the image of God. This is the affirmation of the inherently creative power of his Thought; and if this be true, then the collective Thought of the race must be the subtle power which determines the prevailing conditions of the natural world.
This balance between good and evil is undoubtedly the present state of things, but it is the reflection of our own Thought, and the remedy for it is therefore that knowledge of the inner Law which shows us that we ourselves are producing the evils we deplore. It is for this reason that the Apostle warns us against emulations, wrath, and strife (Gal. 5:20). They all proceed from a denial of the Creative Power of our Thought in other words, the denial that Man is the "image of God". They proceed from the hypothesis that good can exist only "within certain limits", and that therefore our work must not be directed towards the producing of more good, but to scrambling for a larger share of the limited quantity of good that has been doled out to the world by a bankrupt Deity.
Whether this scramble be between individuals in the commercial wotld, or between classes in social life, or between nations in the glorious name of murder with the best modern appliances, the underlying principle is always that of competition based on the idea that the gain of one can only accrue by another's loss; and therefore what prevents us today from "entering into rest" (Psalm 95:11; Heb. 4:3) is the same cause that produced the same effect in the time of the Psalmist: "they could not enter in because of unbelief" and "they limited the Holy ONE of Israel". So long as we persist in the belief that the truly originating causes of things are to be found anywhere but in our own mental attitude, we condemn ourselves to interminable toil and strife.
He cannot divest his Thought of its creative power, but it rests with him to choose between Life and Death according to the way in which he employs it. As each one realises that conditions are created from within and not from without, he begins to see the force of the Master's invitation: "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28). He sees that the only thing that has prevented him from entering into rest has been unbelief in the limitless power of drawing from that inexhaustible storehouse; and when we thus realise the true nature of the Divine Law of Supply, we see that it depends not on taking from others without giving a fair equivalent, but rather on giving good measure pressed down and shaken together (Luke 6:38) [a Biblical expression of abundance, originally referring to grain Ed.].
The Creative Law is that the quality of the Thought which starts any particular chain of cause and effect continues through every link of the chain, and therefore if the originating Thought be that of the absolute goodness-in-itself of the intended creation, irrespective of all circumstances, then this quality will be inherent not only in the thing immediately created, but also in the whole incalculable series of results flowing from it.
Therefore, to make our work good for its own sake is the surest way to make it return to us in a rich harvest, which it will do by a natural Law of Growth if we only allow it time to grow. By degrees, one after another finds this out for himself, and the eventual recognition of these truths by the mass of mankind must make "the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose" (Isaiah 35:1). Let each one therefore take part joyfully in the Building of the Temple, in which shall be offered, forever, the twofold worship of Glory to God and Goodwill to Man.