In the third chapter of St. John are found the memorable words of Jesus to Nicodemus concerning the new birth. The light which our previous chapters throw upon the orange principle, discovers a new meaning in the teaching which so perplexed the Master of Isreal, though he was learned in the doctrines of Moses and the inspired utterances of the prophets. Our contention is that the great Way-Shower came not only to perfect in himself the body of the resurrection, but also to enlighten others as to the slow but sure methods necessary to its attainment.

Jesus' saying: "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God," embodies a two fold proposition, to wit, that he can be born again, and that consequently he can see the kingdom of God. Let us now build a brief teaching upon the new birth and the Kingdom.

The resurrection of the Master was a new birth; one inaugurating an era of possibilities which, however long in the perfecting, did actually begin on Easter Morn. His teaching that man must be born of water and of the spirit is not contrary to our view for, as Jesus said, what is born of mere flesh is flesh. Powerless of itself, the flesh must be raised and purified to the requisite degree by the Spirit and by water.

To the word water the Church has given only a literal interpretation; but, in the arcane symbology, water represents the lower astral element of personal will; while, in this instance, spirit signifies that divine Astral Light the Spiritual Will. Water is the medium in which fluids of differing specific gravity can be made to mingle; so, at bottom, the baptismal water symbolizes the union in man of both his personal and spiritual will. In brief, the body that is to be is ever perfecting through the combined powers of the entire man.

"The Kingdom of God" of which Jesus spake to Nicodemus, what is it? We must take exception to the almost universal reply that Heaven alone is that Kingdom. Heaven is really the place of rest and recuperation; but the true abode of man is on the renovated earth mentioned by Isaiah. It is in the new Jerusalem of the Revela tor. It is in the orange physical world whose components are to correspond with the orange physical of man.

As for the resurrected body of the Lord, its coarser physical particles were thrown off. So, as we have said elsewhere, from the perfected substratum of the earth, the dying shell shall be discarded to swing in space as a dead world, or else to be drawn from its orbital path to become a mere satellite of some planet and its evolving races.

In verses 14 and 15 of the chapter here dealt with, Jesus says: "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth on him should not die, but have eternal life." Evidently the Master is speaking of his crucifixion, and its effect upon his following, but, like all inspired teachers, he, the greatest among them, hid meaning within meaning. Thus that lifting up signified the acquisition of a body whereto his followers should look as their divine pattern.

This body, to shape and cohere in the faithful, and for the furtherance of which the sacrament of the Lord's supper was in part instituted, was ardently desired of Paul, and this desire was breathed into all his epistles as not for himself alone, but for the faithful whom he admonishes thus: "My little children of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you." Voicing his personal aspiration, he also says: "If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead." Again, speaking for all believers: "Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body?"

Paul the optimist perhaps underestimated the difficulties for himself, and especially for his followers, of early attainment to what Jesus in his answer to Nicodemus called eternal life. To the Initiate Apostle that life was the fulness of being due to the possession of the Christ body. The incomplete condition of the faithful without that body, Paul has symbolized in the much misunderstood verse from 1st Thessalonians, chapter 4, "But I would not have you to be ignorant, Brethren, concerning them which are asleep." We hold that only the physical is indicated as sleeping, since as yet it had acquired no vital force wherewith it could rise from the grave. Paul however gives assurance that this end shall be attained: "For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him."

In view of the words of Jesus to the Sadducees: "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living;" it is unbelievable that the divinely commissioned Apostle would subscribe to a theory so at variance with the unswerving spirit of the Master's teaching as is that of the sleep of the dead. Neither could he, the Initiate of the Greater Mysteries, have shared in that popular belief of the Jews which relegated the souls of the disembodied to the dark regions of the underworld.

The Gospels give manifold sayings of Jesus which contain other than surface meanings. Let us quote some of many inwardly relating to the body of the new birth. "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." "As the Father that raiseth up the dead quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom he will." "For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given the Son to have life in himself."

Certain sayings inwardly recognize the mystic efficacy of the Lord's supper in furthering the body of the new birth. Thus: "I am the bread of life;" "Whoso eateth of my flesh hath eternal life." "This is the bread which came down from heaven that a man may eat thereof and not die." "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him." Lest a gross interpretation should be given to this last, Jesus said: "It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing. "

We contend that to Peter, and to Paul especially, and even to the church of the first three centuries, the chief event in the life of Jesus the Christ, and in fact the very crowning of his work, was rather his resurrection than his death; and that Paul in this foresaw for the Christian world its greatest boon. Did he not say: "If Christ be not raised your faith is vain: ye are yet in your sins." Our view is of course remote from that of Augustine and Calvin and his kind, and is by no means in harmony with certain dogmas gradually raised on the death of the Master.

In answering the question as to the Lord's death the Apostle says: "That through death he might destroy the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." This bondage was the inherited race fear of Sheol, that dreary abode soon to rob them of physical life and its fulness, and to imprison them, as it did father Adam, as mere joyless shades no better than those peopling the Greek and Roman Hades which, in its lowest division, touched the gulf of Tartarus that abode of unquenchable misery.

Now however, the resurrection of Christ proved to the faithful the possibility of a body fit to inhabit brighter spheres, and in fact the brightest. The exact constitution of that body was not known, and little inquired into. Enough that rescue was possible through this body of deliverance and of the new birth.

Because of the prevailing belief in the soul's descent to Sheol, a belief inherited from Judaism, itself a borrower, speculation was rife in the early Church concerning the whereabouts of Jesus during the time between his death and his resurrection. According to Peter, he went and preached to the spirits in prison; those who were sometime disobedient in the days of Noah.

In "The Heart of Things," and in the chapter "The Resurrection," it was said that the foundation atoms of the physical body of the great Master of physical life suffered on the cross a profound shock, but not actual pralaya, that which is commonly understood as death. What before had been universal experience, unless we accept as true the traditional ascent of Elijah, was not for the Master, for within three days the foundation physical atoms recovered tone, and repaired and revitalized the broken body. Hence we conclude that notwithstanding his descent to the underworld, the chain binding his soul to his physical body was unbroken.

Concerning the foundation atoms and their office in the new birth both of men and things, a teaching more ample and particularized than any preceding one, is next in order.

H.