Unity of Law and of Life - Class Consciousness

Scripture Readings: Deuteronomy 28; Isaiah 59 and 60. 

Texts: "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people." Proverbs 14: 34. 

"For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted." Isaiah 60: 12 

"And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children. In righteousness shalt thou be established; thou shalt be far from oppression; for thou shalt not fear; and from terror; for it shall not come near thee." Isaiah 54:13 and 14. 

Cause and effect; Collective or class consciousness. 

Christianity, in its work, is individualistic; it reaches the mass only through the individual. Whenever the Church has forgotten this truth and has sought to reach the individual through the mass, though there might seem to be some temporary advantage, the final result was ever to lower the Church to legalistic standards of the world; and through ostracism and persecution, to seek to drag even the individual Christians down. Church federationists and all modern schools of collectively should take warning from this fact of history. 

There is a good and scientific reason for this. Sin is not external but internal. It is not like surface dirt working down into the pours and so corrupting the tissues; it is rather like a disease, originating in the heart, and in all the centres of the life, and developing from within, working toward the skin with corrupting influences, until it reaches the outer covering covered with eczema and sores. If the difficulty was from without the cure also might be external and collective. One could turn a hose on a crowd of unclean children and cleanse them, but since the disease is from within the cure must also be internal and individual. 

What would be the use of washing the skin collectively, and outwardly when the corrupting source is internal in each one and forever coming out. All forms of legalism and of collectivity only make "clean the outside of the cup and platter," leaving all the rottenness within to ferment, and multiply and ever press outward. Nothing can truly lift the mass that does not begin by transforming, and purifying the soul of the individual, and only Christ can do this. 

Christ never spent any time seeking to uplift and transform a crowd. He did uplift and transform many a multitude, but He did it only by uplifting and transforming its individual units. Christ never sought to save the soul of a crowd, for the simple reason that He knew the crowd had no soul to save. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as a public conscience, or public righteousness, civic righteousness, or unrighteousness. The expressions are simply figures of speech. It is important to know this, for half the arguments of the Federationists, and of the National Reformers, and of all forms of collectivity rest on ignoring this fact, and in arguing as if this figure were a fact. 

Public righteousness or unrighteousness is the average standard of the righteousness or unrighteousness of the individual. The public conscience is the standard of toleration, approval or disapproval created by the average conscience of the individual. We want to emphasize these homely truths for two reasons: First because the world and the Church both greatly need to have them emphasized; and secondly because we wish to guard against being misunderstood. Nothing that we shall hereafter say in this discourse must be understood in contradiction to these fundamental facts. 

But while all this is true as to causes, they must all be individual, yet there is a wonderfully sympathetic relationship, through the laws of heredity and environment, between the individual and the mass. Even between the individual and the mass and the physical earth itself, in ways we may not be able to fully explain or understand. We read in Hamlet "There are more things in heaven and in earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in our philosophy", and this is still true in spite of the advance in knowledge since then. 

We once read from the pen of the great naturalist, John Burroughs, interesting article on birds. He stated there seemed to be a "class consciousness" in birds of which we seem incapable of. You have seen birds flying in closely formed flocks, wheeling and turning, up and down, East and West, North and South, with great speed; no one bird in command, and each bird only a few inches from his fellow, and yet never touching, never interfering with each other. Man can only move on a plain surface; yet try to imagine a hundred men in close formation, moving quickly in various directions, without any one to command them. See how utterly impossible it would be; yet birds do it and with great speed. 

Burroughs says it is class consciousness that is the explanation, or perhaps we should call it flock consciousness, yet this needs explaining fully much as the original phenomenon. Did God give the lower animals so called, mental or spiritual powers in which He never intended us to have any part? Or did He intend us to have part in them only we have lost the power because through the changed conditions sin has brought in, what would have been a great blessing would now be a great curse? 

Admitting the truth of what John Burroughs says, how can we explain flock consciousness unless we first conceive of an omnipresent power, and mind, and spirit to which each individual bird is instantaneously, and perhaps unconsciously responsive? This being true God is really holding those birds in the hollow of His hand and playing with them as we play with a ball. And why should this be an impossible thought, when we are told in Scripture that He careth for them, and without Him not a sparrow falleth? Are not we, through radio, coming into touch with just such an invisible and omnipresent power? And as fast as we are able to do so, in spite of our selfishness and sinfulness, coming in touch responsively with His invisible and omnipresent Mind? Did not all the writers of the Bible, in just so far as their spiritual attainments made it possible, have a class consciousness through responsive touch with just such an omnipresent, and invisible Spirit? 

Do not the scriptures teach that there is one God, "The Fountain of Life", and that all life is one in Him? One God, omniscient, the source of all Truth, and that all truth is one in Him? He dwelleth in the light, in the truth, which none hath approached or can approach, but all our progress into truth is growing into the true thought concerning Him. The Scriptures also teach that there is one God, Almighty, and there is no power but of him. That there is one God, who is Love and "he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him." 

These same Scriptures also teach that through sin we are out of responsive touch with this Great Universal Source of Life, of Truth, of Thought, of Power, and of Love, and have established a rebellious individual and class consciousness of our own. And it is the work of Christ and of redemption to bring us back into individual and collective consciousness and responsiveness to this One source of life, love, power and truth; so that He may live in us and work in us and express Himself through us, we becoming His body and He the Head, the mind. And Christ says in His prayer, that when all this is realized we would be one with God, and in God, as He was one with the Father." I in Thee, and Thou in me, and that they also should be one in us." 

There is much in our present state of development, mentally and spiritually, we cannot understand, yet we are persuaded if we let all these things have their true and relative weight many things will become plain which have seemed dark. We shall see that God is not arbitrary; that His blessings, and cursings both upon people and upon the land work themselves out unavoidably and inevitably from cause to effect: 

BLESSINGS

He said to Israel, If ye will diligently hearken, carefully hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all my commandments, the Nation of Israel shall stand forever; it shall be the head and not the tail, the controlling nation. That all nations should borrow of them and they should lend to all and borrow from none; and that all nations should come to them to be taught the truth, asking who is this wonderful people with this wonderful law and God. And God gave them laws which would naturally work out this way if observed. But if they would not keep this law from the heart, through this omnipresent Spirit, they would be sure to transgress it, and this is precisely what they did. 

History shows that every one of the curses predicted were fulfilled in the captivity of Babylon, and especially in the final destruction of Jerusalem under Titus, and the dispersal of Israel; and all these curses came about naturally and unavoidably from the result of their own choice and action, just as the blessings would have come through obedience. God's law was not arbitrary, but wonderfully wise and loving. Because of unbelief, they did not enter into the Spiritual rest that might have been theirs, they did not keep the Spiritual law, selfishness was not eradicated. This led to the transgression of all the individual and national regulations which put them in antagonism with them- selves individually, thus weakening them as a nation. 

Other nations were watching the development of this internal weakness, to strike them at the weakest time and place. God, in love, sent prophet after prophet warning them, and last of all He sent His own Son. When Jesus knew they would reject and crucify Him He foretold their doom. Then He wept over Jerusalem. Even the blessings and curses upon the land itself I am persuaded come in the same way. There is a wonderful sympathetic relation between the land and its inhabitants, which, though we may not be able to explain it, we, to some degree, have all felt it. 

Paul says, "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now" Together with what? With us. For the creation itself was made subject to vanity, because the creation itself, also, shall be free from" corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." For illustration, the curse of sin among the people rests upon the land; Palestine once the most fruitful of lands a land flowing with milk and honey, has for centuries been practically a desert. Man, through sin, destroyed himself, and his own civilization and somehow the rain ceases to come, and the land becomes a desert. 

Some of these laws are mysterious, and we cannot understand them, tho we can see their results. We can see that if men yield their souls to God, and to the inner workings of His Spirit, and his laws, he will subdue in them all hatred and covetousness, both individually and collectively or nationally. How plain it is that man's own selfishness and antagonisms are destroying the world. Oh, that men would yield to the unifying spirit of love; become flock conscious, united in life to the source of all life; united in mind to the Spirit of all Truth; united in heart to the source of all love, then would the prayer of Jesus come true, "that they all may be one as He and the Father are one. not far from any one of us. "The Kingdom of Heaven is nigh unto you."