CHAPTER IV.

HEREDITY VS. PROGRESS.

The past is a fearful burden which the present is
compelled to carry.

The memory of past follies, failures, and weak-
nesses, prevents our rising to the full altitude of our
power " to take the tide of fortune " at the moment
when it offers success. In great and trying emer-
gencies man loses sight of himself and the past, and,
surprising himself, is truly great. It is the knowledge
— or supposed facts — of the past which retards
progress. Ideas of heredity leave us little hope.
We argue that our ancestors have made us what
we are, and therefore they and they only are to
blame for our sins. Heredity makes mere machines
of us or, as Paul says, " pots, some made to honor
and some made to dishonor."

The conclusion is self-evident that if a creator be
admitted or assumed (other than the creature) the
maker must take upon himself the entire responsi-
bility for that which he makes, and it is upon this
ground that fault-finding, blame or curses are pre-
dicated.

A beginning establishes an end ■ — a first proves a

HEREDITY VS. PROGRESS. 49

last — a highest establishes the lowest — a personal
God makes a personal Devil possible. This assump-
tion is the foundation of thrones, crowns, caste, hered-
itary rights, " blue blood/' etc. to the end of slavery.

The right to blame or to curse others for what
they do, inheres in an unwarranted and false assump-
tion of superiority. Of course the " right of way "
belongs to the first, and the right to make the law
and to judge another, also belongs to the maker ; for,
indeed, who can be so capable of judging of a ma-
chine as the constructor of it. /

But the judgment, taking the form of an uttered
eurse from the creative lips of Jehovah sounds
curious and ominous to me and to the world. This
first curse is the beginning of heredity. It has re-
verberated from sun to sun, from pole to pole, from
center to circumference in worlds and atoms,
throughout the vast cycles of time, till the grass and
even the very fruits and flowers of the earth have
become tinctured with its poisonous and malign in-
fluence and even man comes into existence, a living,
howling curse. It ferments in his blood and, boiling
over, froths on his lips, or, descending in lust, is
transmitted to posterity.

The wail of a new born babe — the first sound it
makes — is a protest against the hereditary burden
it senses, and wrhich grows in time into violence and
crime, — the curse materialized.

Ideas are hereditary, as well as disease, insanity,
flesh and blood.

50 THE TEMPLE OF THE ROSY CROSS.

Everything which obstructs progress shortens
human life and limits power, — as false ideas, disease,
inharmony, violation of one's own sense of justice and
right. All these and more are hereditary and the
mainspring and foundation of material action, upon
which foundation we build ourselves into a temple
of the living God, or hovels in which vermin crawl
and hiss.

The belief m a creator who uttered the first curse \ is
a hereditary poison which destroys freedom and even
the soul itself. Besides it furnishes an excuse for
men to curse ; for that which God does, every
" God-like' ' person should at least try to do.

Furthermore, Justice and Mercy are the highest
attributes of the spirit, and any false or low estimate
which man may conceive of these powers, is sure to
debase his nature and disease him physically.

The concept of God's justice as set forth in the
legend of the creation and the fall of man, is a con-
ception unworthy of a savage, though it has been
accepted in its literal aspect as absolute truth, and
worshiped from time immemorial, until it has become
the soul of individuals, families and governments.

Possibly Adam and Eve deserved punishment for
disobedience ; but the serpent had disobeyed no
command and had been guilty of nothing but speak-
ing the truth.

God had made the serpent, had given him that
" subtile " nature which belongs to intelligence and
had placed no restrictions upon his use of the same ;

HEREDITY VS. PROGRESS. 5 1

and then to punish him without mercy, for using the
powers He had given him in imparting to poor stupid
Eve the truth which God withheld, is certainly a
strange sort of justice.

The hereditary descent of such ideas of the highest
and most ennobling attributes of the human soul
must account for the lost and degraded condition in
which man to-day is.

The truth of heredity no one can deny. It is the
anchor of progress. It is the almost insurmountable
barrier between man and the abode of the Gods.

It is the Karma of the Buddhistic cult : without it
forms would cease to be. The curse exists in nature ;
but in all fairness, let us give the great mind who
originated the legend of Genesis, the credit of hon-
esty and candor, as well as power of thought. He
never supposed that any thoughtful person would
take literally, that which common sense and nature
demonstrate as impossible. Who has heard God,
and who has seen Him at any time ?

There are two classes of facts, — those which are
known and those which are unknown : those of the
senses and those of the intellect, and these antago-
nize each other while truth resides in and between
them, — the soul thereof ; as heredity on one hand,
progress on the other, with God represented by man,
between, for whom and by whom they are made.

Were it not for his will, man would not be here.
He loves and wills to exist. The ancient writer of
Genesis called this love and will, " The Elohim ; "

52 THE TEMPLE OF THE ROSY CROSS.

which, when literally considered and allegorically
written about, became objectified, personified and
called God ; and as such, hereditarily transmitted, it
becomes the foundation of theology.

Moses, when codifying the laws of nature, repre-
sents God as declaring to the Jews, — "I the Lord,
thy God, am a Jealous God ; visiting the iniquities
of the fathers upon the children to the third and
fourth generation of those who hate me."

Taken literally, we behold jealousy and injustice
exalted and personified as God ; but when taken in
its spiritual significance, it has the following meaning.
Love, the highest attribute of the spiritual nature of
man, the warmth and life of his blood, and the ruler
and giver of all his pleasure, should be the only
actuating principle of his life, should be kept pure,
simple and clean in thought, and should not be in-
flamed by images or lustful pictures in the mind, as
idols to be looked at or served ; for thereby lust
would become the ruling force, another God, of
violence, which by fermentation in the blood would
produce jealousy; in which "the blood runs cold "
with hate, and diseases, which take hold on death,
and are not cured " to the third or fourth genera-
tion/'

Jealousy is inflamed or lustful love, which en-
genders hate and crime and produces syphilis and all
manner of diseases hard to cure. It is a fact, though
scarcely known, that the ancient Jews were sex
worshipers ; St. John corroborates this by saying,

HEREDITY VS. PROGRESS. 53

"God is love," and Isaiah exclaims, — "our God
is a consuming fire" — sexual fire — burning lust.

In those times all peoples were sex worshipers,
and resorted to all manner of methods of excitement,
debaucheries or excesses, which were called worship
or serving ; and Moses, seeing the evil of it, enacted
laws to preserve cleanliness, purity, simplicity, one-
ness, wholeness, or Holiness or one method of wor-
ship, for the sole and only purpose of preventing
disease.

" God is love," love is law, method, order, oneness.
The only way through the meshes of Karma and the
only remedy for hereditary ills, is in the Ego itself,
the prime actor and representative of God in these
bodies. Things are more than they appear to be.
We are hidden from ourselves and the great truth of
heredity is covered up in the individual himself.
Being made conscious of failures and wrong actions,
we are ashamed of ourselves and immediately find
excuses behind which to hide. The blame of another
for our acts or misfortunes shows our shame and
infernal egotism. The search for external causation
is prompted by our attempts to escape the pain of
self condemnation. We know that we act ; and that
we suffer and enjoy by reason thereof. What I am
to-day, my thoughts and acts in this life and other
stages of existence, have made me.

Memory carries my past life along with me in so
far as it is able to do so. It is thus stored up for re-
flection, to become the material of which my body is

54 THE TEMPLE OF THE ROSY CROSS.

made. But, when memory fails to connect me with
other lives I have lived, and I find myself in possession
of a body fresh from my mother, a body of which I
know nothing, and over which I have no power though
confined within it and compelled to learn to use it, I
know by this that I am not the body, but am sepa-
rate from it ; yet I am compelled to inhabit this
body, to take it up slowly and laboriously atom by
atom and to learn to use it and make it my own.

What is this body but dead memories of past
events, a reminder of what I have formerly been and
done ? Acts follow us through our parents, taking
nothing but an outer gloss or appearance from them ;
but our club feet, hunch backs, insanity and diseases
are our own.

Accept them. Be not ashamed. * Try " to do
better.

BODY AND SPIRIT, 55