THEOSOPHICAL LECTURE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLII, Issue 10108, 16 October 1917, Page 2

THEOSOPHICAL LECTURE.

A lecture entitled "Saint ami Sinner; I heir filed goal the .same,” drew an interested audience lo the ICmpiro Mall on Sunday night to hear Miss Christie, national lecturer for the Tlieosophieal Society in New Zealnul. A *)rief outline is as follows:—Tuere are people who, becau.se of a .strange mental obliquity or quirk, are ,able to believe simultaneously in two doctrines which are mutually destructive, viz.: (lj God is l.ovo, love so pure and great that it i renders M ini omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. {2) 'Ums loving His children and knowing ttie future of every one, He deliberately creates thousands whom He knows will chose evil instead of good and so reap eternal misery, and this while being all-power-ful Me. allows, though Me could prevent it. To such people my title must seem lo state an impossibility, hut to those who cannot hold such contradictory mental concepts, 1 say it is possible for saint and sinner to reach finally the same goal. First, because bo' b live, move and have their being in Gud and so are part of Him, therefore nmereiilly pure and divine; thus evil is but good in lhe making, the present sinner is the future saint. Second, We nunc from the centre of God’s being and in list return to our source, and into (hat only the pure and consciously divine can enter; thus our work as hnmrii) beings is to control our vehicles, our various bodies, so that the divine within can become manifest, and as we become conscious of it we speedily return to our source—the bosom of the Fattier. The return is compulsory and the goal sure, so with a knowledge of the law and our assets—(a) inherent divinity and (b) free-will wo can face ilie evolutionary journey with confidence. Keineurnation—or re-birth into a body of flesh—is the method with Karma, the law of cause and effect to bring to us i lie results of all our efforts and lie- ■harvests of all one sowing. .Many earth-lives are necessary that we may leant all, enjoy and suffer all that ibis life can give, and that justice may be done to every soul. All that hampers our free-will is self-created and must he self-destroyed. What makes it so difficult for ns lo steadfastly tread the path is our forgetfulness of the past. Wo made our choice millions of years ago and are only now realising that we are temporarily lost and have been wandering in the wilderness for many life-periods; but now we have rediscovered the old path and the old knowledge, and know that this was a necessary stage in the evolutionary journey- There must at first he many liven of effort without the memory of any life but the present. The knowledge' of our individual past would crush us; so would the knowledge of the lutine. lint when wo can believe in reincarnation and that we reap in one life what, we have sown in the past, we have reached the point where We can bear all the knowledge of pa-t and future that we can find. Tints lile after life we learn uqiil the sinner becomes the saint- flip, perfected niiin, full of knowledge and power, Pure and consciously divine, he lakes the ‘'second birth” and enters the kingdom of hoavon as a little child. He is saved. No one is eternally lost, tint all are temporarily so until the first great initiaLion is passed.