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From Bethlehem to Calvary - Chapter Seven - Our Immediate Goal - The Founding of the Kingdom
This religious will is in expression now, not turned to theology or to the formation of doctrines and occupied with their enforcement, but to love and service, forgetting self, giving the uttermost that is possible for the helping of the world. This will breaks down all barriers and elevates the children of men wherever the will to be so helped is found. And it is something that is organizing slowly in the world today, its quality that of universality, and its technique that of loving service. Men everywhere are responding to the same inner spiritual impulse which is illustrated for us in the beautiful tale which is related of the Buddha. It runs as follows: "In the belief that He had attained unto the last stage of perfection the Buddha was about to abandon existence in finite space and time, to relinquish all sorrow and suffering for the pure being of bliss universal and eternal. At that moment a buzzing gnat was snapped up by a passing bat. 'Stay,' mused the Enlightened One, 'the state of perfection I am entering is but perfection of myself, a unique perfection, my wholeness is a unique wholeness; not yet then am I a being universal. Other beings still suffer imperfection, existence, and resultant death. Compassion unto these still awakes within me when I contemplate their suffering. 'The way of life unto perfection I have, in truth and in deed, illuminated for them: but can they tread that way without me? 'The unique perfection of myself I dreamed, the perfection of my own character and personality is but imperfection while one other being - one single gnat - still suffers imperfection of its identical kind. 'No being may reach bliss alone: all must reach it together, and that, the unique bliss proper to each. For am I not in every other being and is not every other being in me?' [284] With still small voice in every self thus speaketh the Buddha, by its inspiration to inner character, its aspiration to outer personality, perpetually transmuting this self into not-self, each reality dependent on the other, an everlasting way of life to tread to perfection of each, of all." - Eros and Psyche, by Benchara Branford, p. 355. Christ emphasizes the same lesson, and always His disciples have sought, in their place and time, to teach the law of service. Sometimes it seems as if the two extremes lived on in the consciousness of man - the notorious and ambitious, and the great world servers. Hitherto the sequence has been: service of ourselves, of our family, of those we love, of some leader, some cause, some school of politics or religion. The time has come when service must expand and express itself on broader and more inclusive lines, and we must learn to serve as Christ served, to love all men as He loved them and, by the potency of our spiritual vitality and the quality of our service, stimulate all we meet so that they too can serve and love and become members of the kingdom. When this is seen clearly, and when we are ready to make the needed sacrifices and renunciations, there will be a more rapid manifestation of the kingdom of God on earth. The call is not for fanatics or for the rabid devotee who, in attempting to express it, has so marred divinity. The call is for sane and normal men and women who can comprehend the situation, face what must be done, and then give their lives to expressing for the world the qualities of the citizens of the kingdom of Souls: love, wisdom, silence, non-separativeness and freedom from hatreds and partisan, creedal beliefs. When such men can be gathered together in large numbers (and they are gathering rapidly) we shall have the fulfilment of the angels' song at Bethlehem, "On earth peace, good will toward men."
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