Spencer Heath Archive

Item 256

“Transcribed from notes a year or more old. September, 1945. S.H.”

1944?

Society a Divine Manifestation

In all the realm of nature and the Universe God manifests Himself in Substance, Power and Eternality. Religion gives us the conviction and Science confirms that we are the Children of God. For He has wrought into our bodies a portion of His Substance, of His Power, and into the duration of our lives a portion of His Eternality. Man is from God, of God must ever be and ever return. Into our bodies He has wrought a portion of His infinite Substance, into our activities a portion of His infinite Energy and Power, and into the duration of our lives a portion of His infinite Eternality. In our Substance, in our energy (activity), and in our duration He has given us portions of His triune nature: Fatherhood for being, Sonship for service and the Inspiration of His Holy Spirit for our eternal life.

 

     To know God is this: It is to know the ways and works of God as manifested finitely in us and infinitely in the Cosmos from which and into which we are created, as parts of which we must ever be and remain, and from which we can never be cast out. To know God is to know Him in ourselves, in each other and in all else that is.

     Each separate life is a breath and a spark. In our united lives of social brotherhood under the golden rule of service by exchange is the higher body, the higher Kingdom of God. And in the succession of generations of social-ized men is a higher continuity, duration and Eternality of God.

     Into this holy city and citizenship, this divine community and communion, God manifests His being, His activity and His continuity in the highest human degree. In this higher form, higher than the individual form, the single life attains its highest freedom. This is the freedom to realize (actualize) the divine and creative nature in the unity of the life with the social whole as God’s special instrument of His creative will in His continuous rebuilding of the world.

     As the divine nature necessitated and so commanded chaos into light, so did He command life into the cosmic dust of an inorganic world. So did the pulsations of His spirit breathe into living forms the rhythmic continuity of their successive generations and recurrent lives. Into the micro-cosmic units of His infinite being He bequeathed a power of attraction, of love, to draw them unto one another in ever higher organic unities and thus ever more into the nature of and unto God. The grand pageant of organic evolution is God’s bringing of his fragmentary creatures and creations into ever higher organic unities of His substance, His power and His eternity. His substance is manifest in their structural forms, His power in their functional capacity, and His eternity in the duration — the rhythmic continuity of their successive lives.

 

     Thus is God manifested in the individuals and in the generations of men. The love of God has lifted them to a height transcendent above all lower forms. And here the life of God sustains them, but His love, His principle of attraction and integration, must be endlessly invoked to lead them into transcendence——into a more abundant and still diviner life. Life, in its units, is existent but temporal; love is transcendent and eternal. It draws the units together into harmonies of being and becoming and ever molds them into higher and diviner, more enduring wholes. Life, in its substance and activity, is but a partiality, a transiency of the divine. Love is the activity that lifts it into continuous spring times of renewing creation, in ever renewing completeness. To life in its infinitude we can impute no quantitative change; but in its changing rhythms new forms evolve, new qualities and powers emerge. And in the social integration of mankind in a world-wide Kingdom of Heaven through universal and impersonal love objectified in services by exchange is God’s last emergent and transcendent living form.

     The divine love, all unknown to them, draws men slowly into relationships of mutual service by contract, accord and exchange. This employment of energy in mutual services withdraws it from the primordial chaos of conflict and wars. Thus human energy is divinely transformed. In this transformation the social organism is born, and to the extent of this transformation it develops and grows. Out of nomadic chaos emerges a new creation of the Cosmic Dream, three-fold in its nature, in the image of God. Its three persons or departments have to do with coercion, co-operation, and with consecration. In these three contrasting forms of activity the interrelations among men are (1) compulsive and oppositional; (2) mutual and reciprocal; and (3) spontaneous and inspirational. They may be fitly symbolized by the terms, Citadel, Market and Altar, as the three basic institutions of community or civilized life.

     In the protection of the Citadel the Market functions to sustain the communal life; and from the efficiency of the Market, as the transformer of individual energy into social energy (flowing from the one to the millions and from the millions back to the one) comes all the freedom and leisure for spontaneous play and exercise of the intellect and creative imagination unconstrained. As the Citadel begets and guards the Market, so does the Market sustain the Altar — the entire culture, the Holy Spirit of the Society. In the first is all power to protect (or destroy). The second manifests the Divine Kingdom of service by the golden rule of covenant, consent and exchange in peace and accord, redeeming all men as brothers and sons from dearth and death into an abundance of life. And under the inspiration of the divine, the creative spirit, the Altar endows the Society with far more than a mere vegetative and unprogressive existence; it confers a spiritual power to venture unknown realms of intellect and imagination, a creative power to ever more rebuild its world and transcend its past. This is the ecstasy to which the divine in man aspires, for which his heart yearns and in which his destiny must be fulfilled; to emerge from creature to creator, become a full participant with God in the perpetual springtime of His Cosmic Process.