CHAPTER XIV.

The electric creed.

The “Electric Principle of Christianity” opened as follows: 

“From all Eternity God, or the supreme spirit of light, existed, and to all Eternity He will continue to exist.  This is plainly stated in the New Testament thus:  ’God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’

“He is a Shape of pure Electric Radiance.  Those who may be inclined to doubt this may search the Scriptures on which they pin their faith, and they will find that all the visions and appearances of the Deity there chronicled were electric in character.

“As a poet forms poems, or a musician melodies, so God formed by a Thought the Vast Central Sphere in which He dwells, and peopled it with the pure creations of His glorious fancy.  And why?  Because, being pure Light, He is also pure Love; the power or capacity of Love implies the necessity of Loving; the necessity of loving points to the existence of things to be loved—­hence the secret of creation.  From the ever-working Intelligence of this Divine Love proceeded the Electric Circle of the Universe, from whence are born all worlds.

“This truth vaguely dawned upon the ancient poets of Scripture when they wrote:  ’Darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.  And God said, Let there be light.  And there was light.’

“These words apply solely to the creation or production of our own earth, and in them we read nothing but a simple manifestation of electricity, consisting in a heating passage of rays from the Central Circle to the planet newly propelled forth from it, which caused that planet to produce and multiply the wonders of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms which we call Nature.

“Let us now turn again to the poet-prophets of Scripture:  ’And God said, Let us make man in our image.’  The word ‘our’ here implies an instinctive idea that God was never alone.  This idea is correct.  Love cannot exist in a chaos; and God by the sheer necessity of His Being has for ever been surrounded by radiant and immortal Spirits emanating from His own creative glory—­beings in whom all beauty and all purity are found.  In the images, therefore (only the images), of these Children of Light and of Himself, He made Man—­that is, He caused the Earth to be inhabited and dominated by beings composed of Earth’s component parts, animal, vegetable, and mineral, giving them their superiority by placing within them His ‘likeness’ in the form of an electric flame or germ of spiritual existence combined with its companion working-force of will-power.