Bryan
Guest
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 Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 11:21 am Post subject: Belief and responsibility |
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"But someone asks if the advocates of New Thought believe in and accept
the divinity of Jesus? Yes. They go even farther than their orthodox
friends in accepting that divinityˇ They do not require the
performance of miracles as a necessary step, to prove the divinity of
that gentle soul. They see divinity in every act of his life. Whoever in
the sincerity of his soul could utter the Sermon on the Mount requires
no other proof of his divinity. They see divinity also in every man,
--slumbering, perhaps, and only waiting to be called forth into
development and expression.
"With most of us the Christ within is asleep in the ship, and only as
the winds and waves of life beat therein, threatening us with shipwreck
and destruction, do we find courage to wake the Gentle Master to still
the raging tempests. If the sole divinity of Jesus is denied, the
divinity of all men is affirmed.
"Jesus taught the unity of life, the unity of God and man. He understood
the great secret of life and developed the divine principle in himself,
so that in the consciousness of truth he could say, I and the Father are
one. He is the one great masterful ideal, toward whose perfection man
should continually and forever strive.
"The advocates of New Thought conceive of the vicarious atonement as a
plan which permits the individual to shift his responsibility to
another, and therefore as an evasion of the law of cause and effect,
that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. Let this thought
sink deep into your soul.
"Neither do they agree that a belief in a particular creed is a
prerequisite to man's eternal welfare. The thinking man cannot set aside
the results of reason and the voice of intuition, to adopt a particular
belief because he is so bidden, when the voice of his own soul conveys a
different meaning. Jesus had little or nothing to say about belief, but
he had much to say of life and methods of living.
"They regard man as possessing the potential attributes of divinity
within himself and that he is conscious of these divine qualities which
make him man; that it is man's privilege, duty, and function to develop
those qualities, attributes, and possibilities, in the great school and
discipline of life."
Abel Leighton Allen
From "The Message of New Thought"
http://website.lineone.net/~newthought/tmontinx.htm |
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