THEOSOPHICAL LECTURE.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 March 1918, Page 3

THEOSOPHICAL LECTURE.

"Saint and Sinner: Their Final Goal the Same," drew a good audience to hear Miss Christie -in the Theosophical Society's loom lust night. Some of the most important points were (1) the doctrines that God is love, is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, and (2) knowing all, seeing all, and being all powerful, He creates millions whom He knows will choose evil, and then condemns to eternal hell for so doing, are mutually destructive. A God of Love could not do this, for Divine love is also' wisdom and justice, and that would be wickedly, cruelly unjust, and no logically minded person could hold two such contradictory mental ajneepts. Theosophy teaches us that God is Love, and that we aro parts of God, divine in essence and inherently pure; that we arc indeed gods in the making, as evil is good in the making, and the present sinner is the future saint. From God we came and to God we must consciously return, plus the experiences of the long evolutionary journey. The return is compulsory and tho goal is sure, but we must find the quickest method of return and the best road, and having chosen our road we must tread every step of it; there is no turning back. What makeß our task so difficult is the fact that we have only just discovered that we are lost, temporarily lost, souls, that although no one can be eternally lost, we find our path strewn with thorns of our own planting and blocked with impediments we have in the past dropped upon it. and our bodies are full of limitations wo have made in them. We made all these, and none but ourselves can remove or destroy them. The' method of return is by short stages, by reincarnation in different countries, nations, positions, in the body first of one sex and then of another, until we know all because we have experienced all. This reincarnation gives time and op. pcrtunity after opportunity; while Karma, the law of cause and effect, shows us that inevitably man reaps what he sows, and therefore learns in time to sow only that which lie wishes to reap. He knows that sin brings sorrow, so ceases to sin. He knows that within the cage of his self-made environment lie has free will, and that despite the mistakes he allows his body to make he is pure because he is divine, and that his mind, his will, his power, are all expressions and part of God's mind, ctod's will, and the power of God, and that lie has his destiny in his own hands, to mako or mar. So struggling towards the goal of conscious oneness with God he changes from sinner into saint, becomes first a little child in the kingdom of Heaven, and then the perfected man transformed into the image of God.