The real beginning of this came from two sayings purported to have been the words of Christ.  While hanging upon the cross a man nailed to another cross, begged Jesus to save him.  Jesus was an adept, highly clairvoyant.  He saw that the man was good—­probably better than the people who had hung him there to die—­and that if he was a thief, as they said, he had stolen things for the benefit of his people for food and for sandals and things for the family.  So he said:  “This day you shall be with me in the spirit world.”  Some clever person caught on to this and said to himself:  “That settles it, if one man can go straight through without being laid up in the ground after death, all can.”  This view furnished an altogether different outlook and gave people a new idea of the law.  Jesus assured his disciples that the kingdom of heaven would come on earth very soon, in fact, while they were yet alive.  Well, he knew a lot about the soul, and immortality and all that, but nothing at all about evolution, or electricity, or what wonderful unfoldment of brain and magnificent works man should achieve.  The Nazarene, like all seers and prophets, was simply mistaken in point of time.  He did not give the Creator time enough to bring all things to pass, and if the people who think this world is actually coming to an end pretty soon would just think once that the Creator does not set things agoing solely for the purpose of destroying his work, and let him have his own way and time, they would save themselves much trouble.

THE CREATOR.

God—­the all-creative Spirit—­is the most positive element, or force in nature, and nothing is or can have existence in the external world that is not conceived and formed first in the matrix of the spirit.  So it is in the realm of the invisible that the law of progress, of unending evolution takes its rise and becomes operative.  Still, however clearly defined may be a truth, a law in the mentality of the higher powers, it can only be externalized to the degree comprehended by the mind through which it is given to the world.  All that saves this world from being in a state of utter darkness is the fact that from its very beginning there have been souls capable of being illuminated by the light from the higher life, spirits so grounded in a faith in its certainties that they have shone out upon the stern and awful path trod by the human race like beacon lights above a stormy sea, or beaming stars shedding a calm radiance upon a trackless waste.

RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE.