Book
Description
The Timeless Manual on the Art of Living Harmoniously and
Successfully. One of the foremost spiritual teachers of the 20th
century, Emmet Fox offers people of all faiths powerful strategies and
practical guidelines for bringing health, happiness, and true
prosperity into their lives and the lives of others. Treasured by over
a million seekers, this enduring spiritual classic reveals how to
transform negative attitudes into life-affirming beliefs, understand
the nature of divine wisdom, tap into the power of prayer, develop a
completely integrated and fully expressed personality, and claim our
divine right to all of life's abundance. Fox shares the keys to shaping
our lives into what we really want them to be.
Preface
THIS book is the distilled essence of years of Bible and metaphysical
study, and of the many lectures I have deliv-ered. It would have been
easier to have made it twice its present length. My object, however, is
to present the reader with a practical manual of spiritual
develop-ment, and, with this end in view, I have condensed the subject
matter into the smallest compass possible, be-cause, as every student
knows, conciseness of expres-sion is of the greatest assistance in
mastering any subject.
Do not imagine that you can assimilate all that it contains in one or
two readings. It should be gone over again and again until you have
thoroughly grasped the utterly new outlook upon life and the absolutely
fresh scale of values which the Sermon on the Mount pre-sents to
mankind. Only then will you experience the New Birth.
The study of the Bible is not unlike the search for diamonds in South
Africa. At first people found a few diamonds in the yellow clay, and
they were delighted with their good fortune, even while they supposed
that this was to be the full extent of their find.
Then, upon digging deeper, they came upon the blue clay, and, to their
amazement, they then found as many precious stones in a day as they had
previously found in a year, and what had formerly seemed like wealth
faded into insignificance beside the new riches. In your exploration of
Bible Truth, see to it that you do not rest satisfied in the yellow
clay of a few spiritual discoveries, but press on to the rich blue clay
under-neath. The Bible, however, differs from the diamond field in the
sublime fact that beneath the blue clay there are more and still more
and richer strata, await-ing the touch of spiritual perception—on and
on to Infinity.
As you read the Bible, you should constantly affirm that Divine Wisdom
is enlightening you. That is the way to get direct inspiration.
I have followed a convenient modern custom among writers of
metaphysical books in capitalizing certain words that signify aspects
or attributes of God.
CHAPTER
1
What Did Jesus Teach?
JESUS Christ is easily the most impor-tant figure that has ever
appeared in the history of mankind. It makes no difference how you may
regard him, you will have to concede that. This is true whether you
choose to call him God or man; and, if man, whether you choose to
consider him as the world's greatest Prophet and Teacher, or merely as
a well-intentioned fanatic who came to grief, and failure, and ruin,
after a short and stormy public career. However you regard him, the
fact will remain that the life and death of Jesus, and the teachings
attributed to him have influenced the course of human history more than
those of any other man who has ever lived; more than Alexander, or
Cae-sar, or Charlemagne, or Napoleon, or Washington. More people's
lives are influenced by his doctrines, or at least by the doctrines
attributed to him today; more books are written and read and bought
concerning him; more speeches are made (call them sermons) con-cerning
him; than concerning all the other names mentioned put together.
To have been the religious inspiration of the whole European race
throughout the two millenniums dur-ing which that race has dominated
and moulded, the destinies of the entire world, culturally and
socially, as well as politically, and through the period in which the
whole of the earth's surface was finally discovered and occupied, and
in its broad outlines shaped by civiliza-tion; this alone entitles him
to the premier position in world importance.
There can hardly, therefore, be a more important undertaking than to
inquire into the question of what Jesus really did stand for.
What did Jesus teach? What did he really wish us to believe and to do?
What were the objects that he really had at heart? And how far did he
actually succeed in accomplishing these objects in his life and in his
death? How far has the religion or movement called Chris-tianity, as it
has existed for the last nineteen centuries, really expressed or
repre-sented his ideas? How far does the Christianity of today present
his message to the world? If he should come back now, what would he say
of the self-styled Christian nations in general, and of the Christian
churches in particular—of the Angli-cans, the Baptists, the Catholics,
the Greek Orthodox, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Quakers, the
Salvationists, the Seventh Day Adventists, or the Uni-tarians; to cite
them alphabetically? What did Jesus teach?
This is the question which I have set myself to an-swer in this book. I
propose to show that the message which Jesus brought has a unique value
because it is the Truth, and the only perfect statement of the Truth of
the nature of God and of man, and of life, and of the world; and of the
relationships which exist between them. And far more than this, we
shall find that his teaching is not a mere abstract account of the
uni-verse, which would be of very little more than academic interest;
but that if constitutes a practical meth-od for the development of the
soul and for the shaping of our lives and destinies into the things
that we really wish them to be.
Jesus explains to us what the nature of God is, and what our own nature
is; tells us the meaning of life and of death; shows us why we make
mistakes; why we yield to temptation; why we become sick, and
impoverished, and old; and, most important of all, he tells us how all
these evils may be overcome, and how we may bring health, happiness,
and true prosperity into our lives, and into the lives of others, if
they really wish for them, too.
The first thing that we have to realize is a fact of fun-damental
importance, because it means breaking away from all the ordinary
prepossessions of orthodoxy. The plain fact is that Jesus taught no
theology what-ever. His teaching is entirely spiritual or metaphysical.
Historical Christianity, unfortunately, has largely con-cerned itself
with theological and doctrinal questions which, strange to say, have no
part whatever in the Gospel teaching. It will startle many good people
to learn that all the doctrines and theologies of the churches are
human inventions built up by their au-thors out of their own
mentalities, and foisted upon the Bible from the outside; but such is
the case. There is absolutely no system of theology of doctrine to be
found in the Bible; it simply is not there. Worthy people who felt the
need of some intellectual explanation of life, and also believed that
the Bible was a revelation of God to man, drew the natural conclusion
that the one must be with-in the other; and then, more or less
unconsciously, pro-ceeded to manufacture the thing that they wished to
find. They did not have the spiritual or metaphysical key. They were
not upon what is called the Spiritual Basis, and consequently they
sought a purely intellec-tual or three-dimensional explanation of
life—and there can be no such explanation.
The actual explanation of man's life lies in just the fact that he is
essentially spiritual and eternal, and that this world, and the life
that we know intellectually, is, so to speak, but a cross section of
the full truth con-cerning him and a cross section of anything—from a
machine to a horse—never can furnish even a partial explanation of the
whole.
Glimpsing one tiny corner of the universe, and that with only
half-opened eyes, and working from an ex-clusively anthropocentric and
geocentric point of view, men built up absurd and very horrible fables
about a limited and man-like God who conducted his universe very much
as a rather ignorant and barba-rous prince might conduct the affairs of
a small Orien-tal kingdom. All sorts of human weaknesses, such as
vanity, fickleness, and spite, were attributed to this be-ing. Then a
farfetched and very inconsistent legend was built up concerning
original sin, vicarious blood atonement, infinite punishment for finite
transgres-sions; and, in certain cases, an unutterably horrible
doctrine of predestination to eternal torment, or eter-nal bliss, was
added. Now, no such theory as this is taught in the Bible. If it were
the object of the Bible to teach it, it would be clearly stated in a
straightforward manner in some chapter or other; but it is not.
The "Plan of Salvation" which figured so promi-nently in the
evangelical sermons and divinity books of a past generation is as
completely unknown to the Bi-ble as it is to the Koran. There never was
any such arrangement in the universe, and the Bible does not teach it
at all. What has happened is that certain ob-scure texts from Genesis,
a few phrases taken here and there from Paul's letters, and one or two
isolated verses from other parts of the Scriptures, have been taken out
and pieced together by divines, to produce the kind of teaching which
it seemed to them ought to have been found in the Bible. Jesus knows
nothing of all this. He is indeed anything but a Pollyanna, as they
say, or cheap optimist. He warns us, not once but of-ten, that
obstinacy in sin can bring very, very severe punishment in its train,
and that a man who parts with the integrity of his soul—even though he
gain the whole world—is a tragic fool. But he teaches that we are only
punished for—and actually punished by—our own mistakes; and he teaches
that every man or woman, no matter how steeped in evil and uncleanness,
has always direct access to an all-loving, all-pow-erful Father-God,
who will forgive him, and supply His own strength to him to enable him
to find himself again; and unto seventy times seven, if need be.
Jesus has been sadly misunderstood and misrepre-sented in other
directions too. For instance, there is no warrant whatever in his
teaching for the setting up of any form of Ecclesiasticism, of any
hierarchy of offi-cials or system or ritual. He did not authorize any
such thing, and, in fact, the whole tone of his mentality is definitely
antiecclesiastical. All through his public life he was at war with the
ecclesiastics and other religious officials of his own country. They
first hindered, and then persecuted him, with a perfectly sound
instinct of self-preservation—they felt instinctively that the Truth,
as he taught it, was the beginning of the end for them—and they finally
had him put to death. Their pretensions to authority as the
representatives of God, he ignored completely; and for their ritual and
their ceremonies he evinced only impatience and contempt.
It seems that human nature is very prone to believe what it wants to
believe, rather than to incur the labor of really searching the
Scriptures with an open mind. Perfectly sincere men, for example, have
appointed themselves Christian leaders, with the most imposing and
pretentious titles, and then clothed themselves in elaborate and
gorgeous vestments the better to im-press the people, in spite of the
fact that their Master, in the plainest language, strictly charged his
followers that they must do nothing of the kind. "But be ye not called
Rabbi: for one is your master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren"
(Matt. 23:8). And he denounced the Pharisees as hypocrites because
"they love the chief seats," and "bind heavy burdens, grievous to be
borne," with all sorts of rules and regulations.
Jesus, as we shall discover later on, made a special point of
discouraging the laying of emphasis upon out-er observances; and,
indeed, upon hard-and-fast rules and regulations of every kind. What he
insisted upon was a certain spirit in one's conduct, and he was
care-ful to teach principles only, knowing that when the spir-it is
right, details will take care of themselves; and that, in fact, "the
letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life," as was so obviously seen
in the sad example of the Phari-sees. Yet, in spite of this, the
history of orthodox Chris-tianity is largely made up of attempts to
enforce all sorts of external observances upon the people. A strik-ing
case in illustration of this is the Puritan attempt to enforce the Old
Testament Sabbath upon Christians, although the Sabbath law was a
purely Hebrew ordi-nance, and the ferocious penalties involved in
neglect-ing it applied exclusively to the desecration of Saturday; and
in spite of the fact that Jesus particularly dis-couraged superstitious
Sabbath observance, saying that the Sabbath was made for man and not
man for the Sabbath, and making a point of doing anything that he
wanted to do upon that day. He clearly indi-cates throughout his
teaching that the time has come when man must make each and every day a
spiritual Sabbath by knowing and doing all things in a spiritual light.
It is obvious that even if the Hebrew Sabbath were binding upon
Christians, then, since they do not ob-serve it in keeping Sunday, they
will still incur all the consequences of Sabbath breaking.
Many modern Christians do, however, realize that there is no system of
theology in the Bible unless one likes to put it there deliberately,
and they have practi-cally given up theology altogether; but they still
cling to Christianity because they feel intuitively that it is the
Truth. There is really no logical justification for their attitude,
since they do not possess the Spiritual Key which alone makes the
teaching of Jesus intelligi-ble, and so they endeavor to rationalize
their attitude in various ways. This is the dilemma of the man who has
neither the blind faith of orthodoxy nor the spiri-tual interpretation
of Scientific Christianity to support him. He has not a leg to stand on
that does not belong to the old-fashioned Unitarian. If he does not
reject miracles altogether, he is at least very uneasy about them. They
embarrass him, and he wishes they were not in the Bible at all, and
would be glad in his heart to be well rid of them.
A "Life of Jesus" recently published by a well-known clergyman clearly
illustrates how false this posi-tion is. In this book he concedes that
Jesus may have healed some people, or helped them to heal them-selves,
but he draws the line there. He explains away into nothingness all the
other miracles. They were the usual fantastic legends that center about
all great his-torical figures, he thinks. On the lake, for instance,
the disciples were thoroughly frightened, until they
thought of Jesus, and the thought of him calmed their fears. This was
subsequently exaggerated into an absurd tale that he had come to them
in person walking upon the water. Another time, it appears, he reformed
a sinner, raising him out of a grave of sin, and this was expanded,
years and years afterwards, into a ridicu-lous legend that he had
really revived a dead man. Again, Jesus prayed fervently one night, so
that he looked most radiantly happy, and Peter, who had fal-len asleep,
woke up with a start; and years afterward he told some confused story
about believing that he saw Moses there—so much for the
Transfiguration. And so forth. And so forth.
Now, one must extend every sympathy to the special pleadings of a man
enthralled by the beauty and mys-tery of the Gospels, but who, in the
absence of the Spiritual Key, seems to find his common sense and all
the scientific knowledge of mankind flouted by much that these Gospels
contain. But this simply will not do. If the miracles did not happen,
the rest of the Gospel story loses all real significance. If Jesus did
not believe them to be possible, and undertake to perform them—never,
it is true, for the sake of display, but still constantly and
repeatedly—if he did not believe and teach many things in flat
contradiction to eighteenth-and nineteenth-century rationalistic
philosophy, then the Gospel mess-age is chaotic, contradictory, and
de-void of all significance. We cannot ride away from the dilemma by
saying that Jesus was not interested in the current beliefs and
superstitions of his time; that he took them more or less for granted
passively; because what really interested him was character. This is a
fee-ble argument, because character must include both an intelligent
and a vital all-round reaction to life. Char-acter must include some
definite beliefs and convic-tions concerning things that really matter.
But the miracles did happen. All the deeds related of Jesus in the four
Gospels did happen, and many oth-ers too, "the which, if they should be
written, every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not
con-tain the books that should be written." Jesus himself justified
what people thought to be a strange and won-derful teaching by the
works he was able to do; and he went further and said, referring to
those who study and practice his teaching: "The works that I do, ye
shall do, and greater works."
Now what, after all, is a miracle? Those who deny the possibility of
miracles on the ground that the uni-verse is a perfect system of law
and order, to the oper-ation of which there can be no exceptions, are
perfect-ly right. But the explanation is that the world of which we are
normally aware, and with whose laws alone most people are acquainted,
is only a fragment of the whole universe as it really is; and that
there is such a thing as appealing from a lower to a higher law—from a
lesser to a greater expression. Now the appeal from the lower to the
higher law is not really a breach of law, for the possibility of such
an appeal is part of the major constitution of the universe, and,
therefore, in the sense of a real breach of law, miracles are
impossible. Yet, in the sense that all the ordinary rules and
limita-tions of the physical plane can be set aside or overridden by an
understanding which has risen above them, miracles, in the colloquial
sense of the word, can and do happen.
Let us suppose, for the sake of example, that on a certain Monday, your
affairs are in such a condition that, humanly speaking, certain
conse-quences are sure to follow before the end of the week. These may
be legal consequences, perhaps of a very unpleasant na-ture following
upon some decision of the courts; or they may be certain physical
consequences in the hu-man body. A competent physician may decide that
a perilous operation will be absolutely necessary, or he may even feel
it his duty to say that there is no chance for the recovery of the
patient. Now, if someone can raise his consciousness above the
limit-ations of the physical plane in connection with the matter—and
this is only a scientific description of what is commonly called
prayer—then the conditions on that plane will change, and, in some
utterly unforeseen and normally impossible manner, the legal tragedy
will melt away, and to the advantage, be it noted, of all parties to
the case; or the patient will be healed instead of having to undergo
the operation, or of having to die.
In other words, miracles, in the popular sense of the word, can and do
happen as the result of prayer. Prayer does change things. Prayer does
make things happen quite otherwise than they would have happened had
the prayer not been made. It makes no difference at all what sort of
difficulty you may be in. It does not mat-ter what the causes may have
been that led up to it. Enough prayer will get you out of your
difficulty if only you will be persistent enough in your appeal to God.
Prayer, however, is both a science and an art; and it was to the
teaching of this science and this art that Jesus devoted the greater
part of his ministry. The Gos-pel miracles happened because Jesus had
the spiritual understanding that gave him greater power in prayer than
anyone else before or since.
One other attempt to interpret the Gospels must be taken into
consider-ation. Tolstoy endeavored to put forward the Sermon on the
Mount as a practical guide to life, taking its precepts literally, at
their face value, and ignoring the spiritual interpretation of which he
was unaware, and excluding the Plane of Spirit in which he did not
believe. Discarding the whole of the Bible except the four Gospels, and
discounting all mir-acles, he made a heroic but futile attempt to
combine Christianity and material-ism; and, of course, he failed. His
real place in history turns out to be not that of the founder of a new
religious movement, but that of the man whose practical anarchism,
promulgated with all the fire of genius, paved the way for the
Bolshevik Revolution, even as Rousseau had cleared the road for the
French Revolution.
It is the Spiritual Key that unlocks the mystery of the Bible teaching
in general, and of the Gospels in par-ticular. It is the Spiritual Key
that explains the miracles and shows that they were performed in order
to prove to us that we too can perform miracles, and thereby overcome
sin, sickness, and limitation. With this key we can afford to discard
verbal inspiration and all su-perstitious literalism, and yet
understand that the Bi-ble really is the most precious and most
authentic of all man's posses-sions.
Externally, the Bible is a collection of inspired docu-ments written by
men of all kinds, in all sorts of cir-cumstances, and over hundreds of
years of time. The documents, as we have them, are seldom originals,
but redactions and compilations of older fragments; and the names of
the actual writers are seldom known for certain. This, however, does
not affect the spiritual purpose of the Bible in the slightest degree;
it is in fact quite immaterial. The book, as we have it, is an
inex-haustible reservoir, of Spiritual Truth, compiled un-der Divine
inspiration, and the actual route by which it reached its present form
does not matter. The name of the writer of any particular chapter is
really of no more importance than would be the name of his amanuensis,
if he employed one. Divine Wisdom is the author; and that is all that
concerns us. What is called the Higher Criticism concerns itself
exclusively with externals, completely missing the spiritual content of
the Scriptures, and from the spiritual point of view is of no
importance.
History, biography, lyrical and other poetic forms are various mediums
through which the spiritual mes-sage is given in the Bible; and, above
all, the parable is used to convey spiritual and metaphysical truth. In
some cases, what was never intended to be more than a parable was, at
one time, taken for literal statement of fact; and this often made the
Bible seem to teach things which are opposed to common sense. The story
of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden is a case in point. Rightly
understood, this is perhaps the most wonderful parable of all; it was
never intended by its author to be taken for history, but
literal-minded people did so take it, with all sorts of absurd
consequences.
The Spiritual Key to the Bible rescues us from all these difficulties,
dilemmas, and seeming inconsisten-cies. It saves us from the false
positions of Ritualism, Evangelicalism, and what is called Liberalism
alike, be-cause it gives us the Truth. And the Truth turns out to be
nothing less than the amazing but undeniable fact that the whole outer
world—whether it be the phys-ical body, the common things of life, the
winds and the rain, the clouds, the earth itself—is amenable to man's
thought, and that he has dominion over it when he knows it. The outer
world, far from being the prison of circumstances that it is commonly
supposed to be, has actually no character whatsoever of its own, either
good or bad. It has only the character that we give to it by our own
thinking, it is naturally plastic to our thought, and this is so,
whether we know it or not, and whether we wish it or not.
All day long the thoughts that occupy your mind, your Secret Place, as
Jesus calls it, are moulding your destiny for good or evil; in fact,
the truth is that the whole of our life's experience is but the outer
expres-sion of inner thought.
Now we can choose the sort of thoughts that we en-tertain. It will be a
little difficult to break a bad habit of thought, but it can be done.
We can choose how we shall think—in point of fact, we always do
choose—and therefore our lives are just the result of the kind of
thoughts we have chosen to hold; and therefore they are of our own
ordering; and therefore there is perfect justice in the universe. No
suffering for another man's original sin, but the reaping of a harvest
that we our-selves have sown. We have free will, but our free will lies
in our choice of thought.
This is in essence what Jesus taught. It is, as we shall see, the
underlying message of the whole Bible; but it is not expressed with
equal clearness throughout. In the earlier portion of the book it
shines through but dimly on the whole, as the light from a heavily
shrouded lamp; but, as time goes on, veil after veil is removed, and
the light shines ever stronger and stron-ger, until, in the teaching of
Jesus Christ, it pours forth clear and unimpeded. Truth never changes,
but what we have to deal with on this plane is man's apprehen-sion of
the Truth, and, throughout historical time, this has been steadily and
continuously improving. In fact, what we call progress is but the outer
expression corre-sponding to mankind's continuously improving idea of
God.
Jesus Christ summed up this Truth, taught it com-pletely and
thoroughly, and, above all, demonstrated it in his own person. Most of
us now can glimpse intel-lectually the idea of what it must mean in its
fullness, and much that must inevitably follow from a compe-tent
understanding of it. But what we can demonstrate is a very different
matter. To accept the Truth is the great first step, but not until we
have proved it in do-ing is it ours. Jesus proved everything that he
taught, even to the overcoming of death in what we call the
Resurrection. For reasons which I cannot discuss here it happens that
every time you overcome a difficulty by prayer, you help the whole of
the human race, past, present, and future, in a general way; and you
help it to overcome that special kind of difficulty in particu-lar.
Jesus, by surmounting every sort of limitation to which mankind is
subject, and in particular by over-coming death, per-formed a work of
unique and incal-culable value to the race, and is therefore justly
enti-tled the Saviour of the world.
At what he deemed an opportune moment in his public ministry, he
decided to sum up the whole reach-ing in a series of lectures extending
probably over sev-eral days, and speaking probably two or three times a
day. This arrangement has been compared by someone, and not inaptly, to
a kind of summer school, as we have such things today.
He took this opportunity to summarize the message, to dot the i's and
cross the t's, so to say. A number of those present naturally took
notes, and, later on, these notes were edited into what we know as the
Sermon on the Mount. The authors of the four Gospels each se-lected the
material for his monograph in accordance with his own purpose; and it
is Matthew who gives us the most complete and carefully arranged
version of the address. His setting forth of the Sermon on the Mount is
an almost perfect codification of the Jesus Christ religion, and I have
therefore chosen it as the text for this book. It covers the
essentials. It is practical and personal. It is definite, specific, and
yet widely illu-minating. Once the true meaning of the instructions has
been grasped, it is only necessary to begin putting them faithfully
into practice to get immediate results. The magnitude and extent of
these results will depend solely upon the sincerity and thoroughness
with which they are applied. This is a matter which each individ-ual
has to settle for himself. "No man can save his brother's soul, or pay
his brother's debt." We can and should help one another on special
occasions, but in the long run each must learn to do his own work, and
"sin" no more, lest a worse thing befall him.
If you really do wish to alter your life, if you really do wish to
change yourself—to become a different person altogether in the sight of
God and man—if you really do want health and peace of mind, and
spiritual development, then Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, has
clearly shown you how it is to be done. The task is not an easy one,
but we know that it can be accom-plished, because there are those who
have done it—but the price must be paid, and the price is the actual
carrying out of these principles in every corner of your life, and in
every daily transaction, whether you wish to or not, and more
particularly where you would much rather not.
If you are prepared to pay that price, to break really and truly with
the old man, and start upon the creation of the new one, then the study
of the great Sermon will indeed be to you the Mountain of Liberation.
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