CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY (Parts 1 – 11 inclusive)

By Eugene Halliday

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The thirty-three essays that go to make up Eugene Halliday’s ‘CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY’ were first published between the months of June 1974 and February of 1977, in the parish magazine of ‘St Michael and All Angels Church - located in Manchester 23, UK.

These essays are presented in three parts:

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY (Parts 1 – 11 inclusive);

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY (Parts 12 – 23 inclusive);

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY (Parts 24 – 33 inclusive).

Paragraph numbering has been added by me, to facilitate ease of reference.

Bob Hardy

2013

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part One

(Originally published in June of 1974)

1.01 We are going to study Christian Philosophy. But before we do so, we will first shortly define the difference between Christian Philosophy, philosophy in general, and science.

1.02 Science approaches the problem of the world by using the human sense-organs to collect information about things, relations and events, and then uses reason to produce theories which might explain the known facts and aid prediction of events. If predicted events then occur, it is accepted that for practical purposes the theories are true.

1.03 Philosophy in general starts with certain ideas which are taken as basic, like the idea of ‘Unity’ or of ‘Substance’, on the basis of which it tries to construct by strict logic a coherent system of reality and man's relation to it.

1.04 The authority of science rests on the information amassed by the use of the human sense organs, organised by human reason. The authority of philosophy in general rests on certain ideas found in the human mind and assumed to be basic, and the application to these of strict logic.

1.05 But Christian Philosophy derives its authority, not from masses of scientific information gained by using our physical sense organs, nor from ideas assumed to be basic in the human mind. Christian philosophy rests on the words spoken by Jesus Christ. Only that philosophy which can be shown to derive logically from Christ's words can legitimately be said to be Christian. Let us examine some of the words of Jesus and draw from them the basic truths of Christian philosophy.

1.06. Jesus says, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” (John 6.63). Here He says clearly that by His words we can come into relation with Spirit, and can live in a way that is not possible for us without His words. This means that the words of Jesus must be very special words; words which, if we accept them in the right way, can open the door into a totally new kind of life.

1.07 The first fourteen verses of John's Gospel constitute a prologue to the whole message of this scripture. The first verse says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Verse fourteen says, "And the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

1.08 The Greek word here translated as ‘Word’, is ‘Logos’. ‘Logos’ means ‘Word’, but it means also ‘Ratio’. Thus it is quite correct for us to translate this verse, "In the beginning was the Ratio of all things, the Reason for their existence, and the Ratio was with the God, and the Ratio was God.” Then we can say, “This Ratio became flesh, or was embodied in the only begotten Son of the Father.”

1.09 Even the words of the prologue to John's Gospel must be tested by the words of Jesus Christ Himself, but as we shall see later, the ideas expressed in this prologue are given the support they need.

1.10 If we accept Christ's statement that His words are spirit and life, and see in Him the Son of God that He many times declared Himself to be, we can see that He embodies in Himself the Ratio, the divine Reason of all things, the principle by which all things have come into being and exist.

1.11 Verse Three of John's Gospel says, "All things were made by Him (by the Word, or Ratio, or Divine Reason) and without Him was not anything made.”

1.12 We know that there is a ratio, or law of proportion, in all things. We see the evidences of it in all natural things, in the way that crystals grow their geometrical forms; in the patterns of snow-flakes; in the arrangements of petals of flowers; in the way that trees branch out and spread their leaves to gain maximum light and air; in the way their roots continually divide to find the moisture and minerals they need for their maintenance. Everywhere we look, if we use our intelligence, we see evidences that the Universe in which we live is permeated and ruled by a great Principle of Reason, the Logos-Word or Ratio of all things.

1.13 Scientists assume some Principle or Ratio as the basis of the possibility of their science. Philosophy in general assumes this Ratio as the basis of all valid human thinking. Christian philosophy declares this Ratio on the authority of Jesus Christ, for He declares His Unity with the Creator of all things in his words, “I and my Father are one.”

1.14 The Unity of God is the origin of the Ratio or proportion which manifests in all things. If there were no unity at the basis of the Universe, there could be no Ratio, no principle of proportion between things, and therefore no possibility of Justice or of Love. (What the relation is between Justice and Love we shall see later).

1.15 Now, if we accept Jesus' words that He is one with God the Father, Creator of all things, and that His words are spirit and life, we will see that His words must be parts of the great Word, parts of the Logos-Ratio or Supreme Reason by which all things came into being. Then we will pay special attention to His words; we will not treat them as we deal with the words we daily use to refer to the things of the outer material world. We will realise that when we hear words of Jesus Christ, we are hearing words of power, which can lead us into the world of spirit, and give to us the very means of real life, more abundantly than we have ever known before.

1.16 The life of mankind as we see it generally showing itself in the material world, is but a shadow of the real life possible for us. Ordinary life from day to day is a life of materially conditioned activities, of routine procedures, of repetitive patterns of behaviour which tend, by their sheer repetition, to become shorn of all real meaning.

1.17 Meaninglessness in life in the physical world has become increasingly the concern of modern existentialist philosophy. Materialistically based civilisations, their activities dedicated to conveyor-belt systems of production for consumer societies, visualise an endless spiral of ever-increasing, ever-accelerating production of commodities, with planned obsolescence and inbuilt rot to guarantee the continuance of the cycle of production and consumption, while the consumers stand by with unvoiced but visible uneasiness, awaiting deliveries of the ‘goods’.

1.18 In order to free ourselves from the meaninglessness of the Mammon-mechanism of a materialistically grounded existence, we need a New Word, a Word of Life, which will indicate for us a direction and goal for all human activities. Jesus Christ gave us this New Word, the Word of Spirit and Life, which, if we will receive it, will transform our whole way of looking at reality.

1.19 In chapter 13, verse 34, of John's Gospel, Jesus says, “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye shall have love one to another.”

1.20. After nearly 2,000 years, in our materialistically grounded world of human civilisations, we do not see much evidence that people have taken seriously these words of Jesus. We do not see much loving kindness and mutual helpfulness in the competitive world of the rat race, where material success and the pursuit of worldly honours occupies most men's minds. In such a world it is not surprising that an Archbishop of Canterbury should predict a diminishing number of real Christians, nor that the increased value of the few will be in proportion to the decrease in numbers. Christ Himself said, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22.14). This idea of the ‘few chosen’ is one of the most difficult ideas in Christian Philosophy.

1.21 Let us consider for a few moments the world as we observe it to be. In it, man occupies a most peculiar position. He lives on a planet (our earth) moving in a certain orbit in the solar system, in unique conditions not found on other planets. On our planet we find a fantastic number of different forms of life, from the tiniest bacteria to the greatest whales, from the simplest single-celled creatures like the amoeba, up to the most complex multi-celled organisms like our own.

1.22 Life has called into being innumerable forms of creatures, but only one of these forms has been chosen to receive consciously the influx of divine spirit, and this one form is that of man. Of all the immense number of living forms called into existence, only man has been chosen to become the lord of his own being, “Many are called, few chosen.” Man is of the few. To belong to mankind is to belong to the chosen few.

1.23 The fact of the choosing of man from amongst the vast number of living beings in the universe, makes him a very special case. For the fact that he has been so chosen means that he himself is also to choose. Man is a being with an inbuilt possibility of exercising a power of choice, a possibility built into him by his Creator.

1.24 This fact of the possibility of choice in man makes him indeed into a very special case. For this possibility makes him responsible for his own actions, for his thoughts and for his feelings, for his hopes, his dreams, his aspirations, and his ambitions.

1.25 But this possibility of choice in man is not always exercised, and where it is not exercised, it is as if he did not possess it. And if a man does not use a talent which has been given him, it may be taken away from him. Chapter 25, verse 29 of the Gospel of Matthew warns us of this possibility in Christ's parable of the talents, where are His words, “Unto him that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

1.26 Here we see that, because of his possibility of choice, man has a very high responsibility in the world, and in the parable of the talents he is warned of the possibility of the withdrawal from him of his capacity for choice, if he neglects to use it.

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part Two

(Originally published in July of 1974)

2.01 We have seen that, as human beings, we have a capacity for choice, and we have seen from Christ's parable of the talents that if we do not use this capacity, we may have it taken away from us. We have read and heard Christ's new commandment, that we love one another as He has loved us, and that by this fact of our love one for another, all men shall know that we are His disciples.

2.02 By these words we are placed in a position of responsibility. Having read or heard the words of Jesus, either we decide to give them serious thought, or not. If we decide not to take them seriously we have chosen to disregard the most important words ever uttered to mankind, and we must at some time suffer the consequences of this disregard. But if we decide to give the words of Jesus serious consideration, we place ourselves in a very special relation with Him.

2.03 God, our Creator, knows thoroughly our capacities, which He himself has given us, and He knows the tremendous difficulties under which we live in the material world, which of all worlds is the most dangerous for us, for it continually acts upon us, on our minds and hearts, to draw us out from our innermost self, in which God's Spirit speaks to us in a still small voice, to draw us out into the world of time and matter, away from the innermost world of eternity and spirit.

2.04 If we seriously consider the new commandment of Jesus, that we should love one another as He has loved us, we have chosen ourselves as serious considerers of His Word, and by this choice we have brought ourselves into relation with the centre of our being, for the centre of our being is that place in us in which we do all our most serious, intense considering. We can see this by the fact that when we are not being serious in our innermost thoughts about anything, we say that we are being ‘superficial’. ‘Superficial’ means ‘on the face’ of things. Superficial thinking does not go below the surface of events; it does not get down to the serious things and deep problems of life's implications.

2.05 When, by our serious consideration of the words of Jesus, we bring ourselves into the centre of our being, when we thus cease to be merely superficial in our attitude to His words, we begin to see the world in a different way from the way in which materialistic men or women see it. For if we seriously consider His new commandment as a possible basis for human relationships, we also see that if we accept His commandment and begin to put it, or try to put it, into operation, we place ourselves in a very peculiar position in relation to other human beings in the world. We must find ourselves in this new, peculiar position, because of the millions of people on earth, very many of whom have not given serious consideration to Christ's new commandment, and many who have heard it, have not yet begun to give it serious consideration.

2.06 Thus the question is raised for us, how shall we relate to these people, how shall we put our new aim into application? If we intend to be serious, that is, to conduct our life-activities from the true centre of our being, how shall we relate to other human beings whose own actions may spring not from the centre of their being, but from some very superficial considerations?

2.07 Let us consider what constitutes the essential difference between deep, serious consideration of things and superficial consideration of them.

2.08 In deep, serious consideration we take the ideas that we are to consider and bring them into the real depths of our being; we bring them into intimate relation with our very essence, with our soul, which is what it is because our Creator breathes the Divine Spirit into us. In bringing ideas into relation with our deep, essential self, we place ourselves in a position in which any decision we make about these ideas, or any action we may make upon the basis of them, acts back upon our own essence. In the depths of our being, in the midst of our serious considerations about how we shall stand in relation to these considerations and how we shall, because of them, relate to the world, we are acting upon our own souls. we are creating ourselves, creating ourselves in the very same way by which God created us in the first place, at our coming into existence.

2.09 All creation begins in a process in the depths of a creator. The creation of the world began in a process in the depths of God, in the depths of Universal Being. One of God's creations was man, and in this creation God made a creature who was also a creator, like his Creator. All creatures made before man were not given this same capacity of creation. An animal’s reproduction of progeny is not creation in the same sense in which man can create a new world out of his own will and feelings and mental processes. Animals do not seriously consider their relations with each other, nor seriously consider their relation to the universe in which they live. The animals that graze in a field, walking slowly from one end of it to the other, slowly fattening themselves, do not do so with the conscious, serious intent of later walking into the slaughter house to receive the ‘humane killer’ which prepares them for their appearance on the dinner table.

2.10 But human beings, put in a situation, begin at some point to ask themselves why they are there, what service is being done by their presence, and to whom.

2.11 Now, it is just this fact that is most important for us to realise. We have something inside us that is peculiar to us. We have a capacity for choice, a potentiality of freedom. Either we shall use it, or we shall lose it. And if we use it we act upon ourselves as God acted upon Himself in bringing the world into being. We have been created as beings able to continue the work of creation, and we have been placed in a peculiar position in which the shape of things to come, within ourselves and outside ourselves, is in our hands. Not that we are not at the same time also in God's hands, but we have the freedom to participate in His work of creation, either to work in agreement with His plan, or to ignore His plan, or to work against it.

2.12 Let us clarify our position a little further. There are people in the world who have not yet heard Jesus Christ's new commandment. These people have no problem whether to give serious consideration to Christ's words or not. Thus they cannot be held responsible for their non-application of these words. They cannot be accused of ignoring them, cannot be accused of deliberately working against them.

2.13 But those people in the world who have heard of these words, or have read them, can be held responsible for their attitude towards them. These people either react superficially to Christ's words, or give them serious consideration in the depths of their souls. If they react superficially to them, they are in the position of a man who is given some valuable information, but is too preoccupied to find out what is its value to him. If those people who give Christ's words some serious consideration decide that their application might interfere with their own private purposes, then they can be held responsible for a conscious decision to reject His words, and as His words are essential expressions of His being, responsible also for a conscious rejection of Christ Himself.

2.14 With ordinary people it is possible to disagree with their words without disagreeing with their own selves, for we can say of someone with whom we disagree, "That man doesn't know what he is talking about," or, "He doesn't really mean what he says." But with Jesus Christ we cannot take this attitude, for He does know what He is talking about, and He does mean what He says. His tremendous authority made the men of His day take sides, for and against Him. For nearly 2,000 years this same authority has divided those members of the human race who have received His message into two camps: those who are for Him, and those who are against Him, for He Himself said, "Those who are not for Me are against Me." His philosophy does not allow fence-sitters. The fence-sitters are either indifferent to the results of Christ's appearance in the world, or are waiting to see these results before making up their minds which side to take. But fence-sitters cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven, for this Kingdom is only for those who are decisive, and so free.

2.15 Because we cannot ignore the words of Christ in the way that we can ignore the words of other men, because He demands that we take Him seriously, if we do not take Him seriously we do not reject merely his words, but we reject Him, His very Self, for He is so innerly consistent with Himself in all levels of His being that to reject any part of him is to reject all of Him, and with Him the God with whom He is one. For He says, "I and My Father are One," and, "I am come to do the will of Him who sent Me." Thus to reject Christ is to reject the God with whom He is one.

2.16 This might startle some people who think that they believe in God, and yet do not believe in Jesus Christ, who is one with God. But in order to believe in the God of Jesus Christ we must believe also in Jesus Christ. Many people think that they believe that there is a God, a creator of the world, but have no clear idea about His nature. For them God is just a non-definable cause of all things, a non-personal power, whose presence in all things gives them their existence and continuance. But this God is not the God of Jesus Christ.

2.17 The God of Jesus Christ is intensely personal, and personally concerned for His creatures who are also creators, those into whom He has breathed His own creative spirit, so that they can participate with Him in the work of creation. And of these are the human beings among whom we count ourselves. We are also co-creators with God, by the example and power of God in Jesus Christ.

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part Three

(Originally published in August of 1974)

3.01 Having declared His oneness with God, Jesus tells us that although He is God's Son, yet He can do nothing of Himself. In the fifth chapter of St. John's Gospel, verses 19 to 23, Jesus says, "The Son can do nothing of Himself but what He seeth the Father do; for whatever things so ever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth; and He will shew Him greater works than these, that ye may marvel. For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom He will. For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgement unto the Son. That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent Him."

3.02 Whatever power Jesus has He does not claim this for His own, but declares it to have been given to Him by God. Here we can see the ground of His humility, for He knows that whatever power He has, whatever ability to quicken or vitalise the minds of men He may possess, He does so only because he is a recipient of the Father's Will, which is itself the Supreme Source of all power.

3.03 If we ourselves are to gain this same vitalising capacity we must do as Jesus does, we must go to God the Father, through Jesus. Why should we not go directly to God? Why should we try to reach the Father God through His Son?

3.04 Jesus says, "He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent Him." God the Father loves His Son and shows Him all that He Himself does. As the Father has life in Himself, so he has given to his Son to have life in Himself. And he has given him also authority to execute judgement, because he is the Son of Man.

3.05 This authority, given by God the Father to his Son Jesus, is the ground of our approaching the Father only through the Son, who declares Himself to be the Door through which alone men can pass into God's presence.

3.06 There is nothing in man that is not also in God, for in Him we live, move and have our being. That power which in man we call his ‘will’ God also has, but in infinitely greater measure. And it is this power which we call ‘God the Father’, The Infinite Divine Will.

3.07 This Divine Will has created and continually sustains the Word, or Logos, or Ratio of all things. And it is this Word which is incarnate in Jesus and speaks to mankind. The divine Will (or God the Father) does not Himself judge man, for will as such is not the judge.In our own minds we know that when we judge something or assess it or evaluate it, we do not do it by direct immediate action of our will. But we refer the thing that we wish to judge to our intellect or reason. For it is by reason, which compares things, that we are enabled to judge whether one thing is like another or not, and it is by its similarity to a standard that we are able to assess the value of anything. But what is the origin of our reason, our faculty of judgement? It is the ratio which gives to every thing its form and relationship with everything else. And it is this Ratio which in St. John's Gospel is called the Logos, or Word, which is incarnate in Jesus.

3.08 Why do we say that this Ratio or Word is incarnate in Jesus? Because He himself declares that the words He says to us are Truth and Life. He says that He is one with God, and that this God is his Father, who has given life and authority to execute judgement to the Son, because he is the Son of Man also, and so experiences in His incarnation exactly what it means to be a man. From His divine Father, Jesus receives the power and will to operate as the Ratio of all things, the supreme Universal Truth.

3.09 From His human body's experience of man's nature in the world, Jesus gathers the knowledge of all man's reaction tendencies in this world. From the conjunction of his universal Reason or Ratio with his experiences as a man in the world Jesus receives his authority to judge all things.

3.10 The ordinary mind of man judges things by referring them to some kind of standard built up from experiences in the world. The mind of Jesus judges things, not from standards derived from the material world, but from the Will of His divine Father. Jesus says, “My judgement is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the Will of the Father which hath sent Me.” The judgement of Jesus is just, because He wills only what His divine Father wills, the balancing of all things. Justice and true balance are the same.

3.11 In the material world in which we live, we see everywhere men struggling to attain some kind of balance in their lives. The biologist defines a living organism as a self-balancing system, or as a system which, when disturbed by a stimulus of some kind, tends towards restatement of its equilibrium. We can see this tendency to re-establish our balance in a physical sense if someone, without warning us, gives us a push. At once our muscles react to stop us falling down.

3.12 The same holds true in the psychological sense: if we habitually think in a certain way about a certain subject, or if we have a strong belief in something as true, and someone contradicts our belief, we find our mind at once reacts to defend its position.

3.13 But many of our beliefs are false, many of our attitudes to the events of daily life have not been thoroughly reasoned out. And many of our standards of right and wrong are not based on the Will of God, but on our private purposes.

3.14 It is easy to see that if a child does not receive a proper basis of actions from its parents or teachers, it will tend to build up its own system of values, and to react to each stimulus it receives in certain ways, in order to maintain its balance.

3.15 Each living organism has to live within itself, within its own skin. What it knows of the world in which it lives depends on the kind of experience it has in that world. On the basis of this experience it tends to act in certain ways in order to maintain its equilibrium or to restore it when it is lost.

3.16 Because we have to live within ourselves and can judge of the things of the world only insofar as they stimulate us and thus provide us with data on which to exercise our reason, so we are dependent on these data for the attainment of our freedom.

3.17 If a child is brought up to believe that ‘Nature is red in fang and claw’, that all living beings are engaged in a dreadful struggle with each other for survival, then that child will tend to react to this belief, either by fighting, fleeing, or feigning. If the child thinks itself strong enough to deal with the threat of an attack it will tend to fight. If it thinks itself not strong enough to be able to fight effectively it will tend to flee. If it is not strong enough to defend itself and is unable to flee, it will tend to feign, that is, to sham disease or death in the hope the enemy will overlook it as unworthy of attention. (Certain spiders show this ‘feign’ response by going into a chronic convulsion when unexpectedly tapped. To outward appearance they seem dead, but after a few minutes undisturbed, they suddenly loosen their legs and run away).

3.18 The belief that stands as the basis of our general responses to life in the world we call our ‘Governing Concept’, because by it we govern our reactions to our experiences in the world. The governing concept ‘Nature is red in fang and claw’ has produced thousands of years of suffering for mankind, wars following wars with an almost predictable periodicity.

3.19 The governing concept, “Love one another,” given to us by Jesus, if acted upon, could change human relationships so radically that the promise of a, "new heaven and a new earth," would be fulfilled.

3.20 But although we know that this would be so, although any ordinarily intelligent person would be prepared to admit in principle that the new commandment of Jesus is the only real hope for mankind, yet in practice this commandment is ignored, sometimes even by those who are supposed to believe in its truth on religious grounds, for, they say, “It is a council of perfection, beyond mankind's power to obey.” Yet Jesus said, “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” And as the Incarnation of God's Truth, He cannot command us to become something beyond our capacity to be. Somehow, because God's Son has commanded us to be perfect in this way, it must be possible for us. How? We have the words of Jesus to tell us: “For as the Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom He will.”

3.21 By applying ourselves to the Son of God, as God's embodied Truth, we can discover in Him the means to our quickening, our vitalising. The key is in the words, “As the Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom he will.” The Father is the Divine Will, the Creative Power hidden within all things. The Son is the Divine Reason or Logos.

3.22 The Divine Will raises the ‘dead’ by immediate action upon them of His Infinite Power. Who are the ‘dead’?

3.23 Jesus spoke often in parables. He contrasts the ‘quick’ and the ‘dead’. The ‘quick’ are those of mankind whose minds are alert to receive new truths and to see new applications of the One Eternal Truth. The ‘dead’ are those whose mental processes are so established in old routine patterns that they are unable to open themselves to the New Commandment of Jesus. The dead are those who still operate on the governing concept ‘Nature is red in fang and claw’. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” was Moses' attempt to reduce the damage caused by the old law of Fang and Claw. Before his day there was no real attempt to deal justly with the facts of mankind's tendencies to act and react. His, "Eye for an eye," law was an improvement on the old, vicious, fear-impelled destructive reaction of one man to another's aggression, which would kill the other for even a minor damage. But valuable as it was for reducing the destruction caused by the Fang and Claw law, Moses' commandment was not yet the Law of Love of Jesus.

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part Four

(Originally published in September of 1974)

4.01 The Law of Love given to us as a new commandment by Jesus Christ requires us to understand what He meant by ‘love’. He did not mean desire for pleasurable relations with persons or things. He commanded us to love as He himself loved, that is, to sacrifice ourselves for each other. "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” The love of Christ is a sacrificial love, not a love that wants something pleasing for itself. We can define Christ's love as a will to work for the development of the best potentialities of being.

4.02 “My Father works, and I work,” says Jesus. Here He expresses His view of our world; it is a place in which we have an opportunity to work for the development of the highest possibilities of mankind. What are these highest possibilities? To answer this we must examine man's nature.

4.03 Man is a very special kind of being. There are living organisms below him, animals, plants, micro-organisms; and there are beings above ordinary man as man's intelligence is above that of the animals and plants and lower organisms.

4.04 Ordinary man on earth, in millions of instances, tends to think of himself as the highest living organism. He knows of no being as intelligent as he conceives himself to be. He knows that he can think, can reason about the world in which he lives in a way that is impossible to the animals, and he sees nothing above himself more able to control the direction of future events that his own technology has made possible for him.

4.05 But not all men are ordinary. History has seen men of high intelligence, men who have not conceived themselves to be the most highly developed of all living beings. These men, long before the historical appearance of Jesus, had conceived that man is a special being, standing midway between two worlds, a world of material things, and a world of spiritual intelligences.

4.06 Jesus Christ supports the view of man as a special being by calling on man to bring himself into oneness with Himself and with God. This call to man shows that man does in fact stand between two worlds, in a position in which he may choose to identify with the principles of either. What are these two worlds and what are their principles?

4.07 The world to which Christ calls us is a world in which the ruling principle is Unity, Oneness, inter-relationality.

4.08 The world from which Christ calls us to turn away is a world the ruling principle of which is disunity, separativity, and the pursuit of individual ego-centred power, which Christ calls, “Mammon.”

4.09 In the threefold temptation undergone by Jesus in the wilderness, the devil, Satan, defines the principles of Mammon-diabolism very clearly. The making of stones into bread symbolises purely materialistic living. The recommendation that Jesus rely on God's special protection of Him if He should throw Himself down from the pinnacle of the temple shows the determination of Satan to teach his followers how to utilise even God's promises for their own egotistic ends. The offering to Jesus of world dominion in exchange for Satan worship shows the real purpose of the devil's entry into man's world. Materialism, utilisation of Truth for egotistic purposes, and world domination, are the three legs of the devil's tripod.

4.10 Today, few people believe in the devil other than as a personification of a tendency to do evil actions or to think or feel with harmful intentions. The devil, once believed in as a real being, has become for most people a mere figure of speech. But if we accept the words of Jesus as true we must re-think our attitude to the Prince of Evil, for in the eighth chapter of John's Gospel, verse forty four, Jesus says of his opponents, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lust of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar, and the father of it.” Here Jesus does not appear to be talking about a figure of speech but the real being, one who from the beginning was a murderer and the father of lies.

4.11 The problem of the origin of evil has occupied human thinking for thousands of years, and has been approached in many ways. One of the offered solutions, which we might call the solution of kind-hearted people, is that evil is simply a product of error, that no-one does an evil act, or thinks untruly, or feels harmful, except under some form of provocation. This view finds an excuse of some kind for every evil act. A man violently attacks a neighbour, and kind-hearted people say the attacker had ‘lost his temper’, that he for some time ‘had not been very well’, that he was ‘under a strain’, that he had recently ‘lost someone precious to him’. Any or all of these may be true, but another person under similar misfortunes may not react to them in the same way. The same kind-hearted people hold that juvenile delinquency is a product of ‘bad up-bringing’, ‘bad home conditions’, ‘bad social conditions’, ‘bad example’, etc. This view treats human behaviour as if it had no cause other than external conditions and internal inability to attain self-control. There is here no assumption that the human being has inside himself sufficient free intelligence or will by which he may choose from within himself what he will feel or think or do.

4.12 Of course, there are many occasions where the kind-hearted view would be the right one to adopt. Self-control is difficult to attain, bad upbringing, bad home conditions and bad social environment and bad example do exist, and for these it is intelligent and kind-hearted to make allowances. But these things do not of themselves fully explain the different behaviour patterns of different persons under the same conditions.

4.13 Another view of evil is that it arises from some kind of energy which has not risen above the level of blind impulsive action. Here evil is simply the product of a ‘life-force’ which is essentially self-preserving in its tendency and which in its self-defensive activities may attack what ever impedes its movements or threatens its existence. Again we can see some grounds for accepting this view. Primitive life-forms exist which act in this self-defensive manner, which impulsively attack and seek to destroy whatever opposes their activities. From this level of existence was taken the view that nature is red in fang and claw, that every man is for himself.

4.14 But the human being is not merely impulsive in his behaviour. Man can think, can study his actions and their results, and by his own inner motivation can work to gain self-control, so that he can determine the direction his life shall take.

4.15 It is here, in his capacity for self-study, that man shows himself as having something within himself which we do not see in the animal world. By turning his attention inwards a man can examine his own motivations, can modify his attitudes towards his own being and to others in his environment; and he can modify also his attitude to the world at large, and to the universe and to the life principle inside himself and in all other living beings.

4.16 So discovering within himself a principle by which he may modify his attitude to all things, a man finds himself in a position where he will be presented with the need to make a decision to live his life according to some principle, either of Truth or of falsity.

4.17 If a man decides to base his life upon Truth, he undertakes to see things as they really are, to think clearly, to feel sensitively, and to act upon what the Truth declares is best to be done.

4.18 But if he decides to base his life upon untruth, he undertakes to falsify every fact which might impede his private purposes, to think illogically, to feel insensitively and to act only on that basis which will allow him to continue in untruth.

4.19 At this point we must ask ourselves what is the spiritual position of a man who decides to base his life upon untruth, and what is the position of any living being who makes such a decision.

4.20 Here we come to the crucial point in the problem of the existence of the devil as a living being able to make a decision.

4.21 A decision can be made only by a living being. It cannot be made by an indeterminate, edge-less life-force. A life-force or universal energy not embodied in some form of being cannot decide upon any particular direction of action. Petrol poured out on the ground and vapourising in the air does not act in any particularised direction, but held in the tank of a car and led along the petrol pipe into the carburettor and into the cylinders, when ignited by the sparks from the plugs can act to drive the car along the road to some particular chosen destination. For the life-force to be used decisively it must be embodied in a being.

4.22 A man can make a decision to live his life on the basis of Truth or Untruth only because he exists as a being. Without this being-existence the life-force could not be decisive.

4.23 If we now apply this principle to the problem of the existence of the devil, we can see that if any living being, human or other, can decide to use Untruth as a means of fulfilling its purposes, this being must come under Christ's definition of the devil as a ‘Father of Lies’, and as there must have been at some point in time a first being to make such a decision, this being must be the first devil, the ‘Prince of Lies’, the ‘liar from the beginning’.

Once the ‘Prince of Lies’ has introduced into the universe the activity of lying, the universe itself has become tainted, for now, instead of everything in the universe being simply what it is and representing itself as it is, and looking like what it is, there is now a being who misrepresents whatever it is, who denies that things are what they are.

4.24 And once the principle of lying, of misrepresentation, has been introduced into the world by the ‘Prince of Lies’, the necessity now exists for other living beings with the capacity for choice to choose between Truth and Untruth. Of those who take the same course as the ‘Prince of Lies’, Jesus says, “Ye are of your father the devil; he was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth.”

4.25 The living being who commits himself to lying not only metaphorically murders truth, he also actually reduces the life-possibilities for anyone who believes him. We have seen enough examples in history, including in our own day, to be convinced that the man who commits himself to Untruth in pursuit of his private purposes, if he can do so, will destroy anyone who threatens to frustrate his intentions. In the modern, as in the ancient world, the torturing and murdering of those who dare to stand out for Truth, shows us that the devil is still going about on earth, aided by his children.

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part Five

(Originally published in October of 1974)

5.01 We have seen that for the life-force to be used decisively it must be embodied in a being. This necessity for embodiment is the key to the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ. Without the incarnation or embodiment of the life-force, this force could not manifest any given direction of activity; its action would be haphazard, aimless. Similarly, without the embodiment of the principle of Truth, Truth would not be able to gain expression in the world; and without the embodiment of the way of Spiritual living, we would never be able to see this way demonstrated for us in the physical world.

5.02 Thus, when Christ Jesus says, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life," He means that He embodies, incarnates these in His own Being. He is not telling us about some abstract ideas of a theoretical Way of existing, of a theoretical Truth of the Universe, of a theoretical Life, which might theoretically exist in our minds. He is this way, this truth, this life; and that, because He has done so, it is possible for us to do the same, that we ourselves can embody the Same Way, the Same Truth, and the Same Life, and in so doing can change our being into the same kind of being that he is.

5.03 But the moment we seriously consider this possibility we find that something already embodied in us tends to feel uneasy, tends to divert our thinking, and to cloud our understanding.

5.04 Obviously, if we seriously decide to embody the Way and the Truth and the Life of Christ in our own being, there is much in our daily living that will have to be changed. Christ has told us to take up our cross daily and follow Him. He has given us certain rules of life; He has told us to do many difficult things, not the least of which is to turn the other cheek when we have been injured.

5.05 It is not easy to turn the other cheek. There is something inside us, some force whose nature seems to be of the very essence of retaliation. And this force is embodied in us. It is not just a theoretically possible force, which under certain circumstances might be conceived to become possibly operative. It is an embodied force, a force incarnate in us, which is very real and very strong and operative in us, now.

5.06 This same force was in the body of Jesus, because if it had not been in Him, the temptation in the desert would have been meaningless. Jesus became incarnate in a physical body in order to do battle with the devil on the devil's own ground, in the devil's own world, the world of which Jesus said, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” The battle with the enemy, if it is to be absolutely decisive, must be fought on the enemy's own ground, there, where one's chance of winning is the least, for if we can win here, we can win everywhere.

5.07 At home on our own territory, our confidence is naturally at its highest. We have right on our side, the right of the life force which for millions of years has fought with its greatest intensity when protecting its own territory. This kind of right is natural, that is, it is a right of our natural physical bodies, the right that our instincts, our animal instincts tell us is right - the animal instinctive of self-defence, the right to fight for survival.

5.08 Jesus had to deal with this right in Gethsemane. His physical body did not desire to be put to death. Naturally it felt that it had a right to survive. We have to face the facts of our experience. Our bodies do not like pain, they shrink from it, and not merely from the physical fact of it, but also the mental anticipation of it. The mere thought of pain, the mental image of human bodies under torture, historically has been often quite sufficient to bring to heel masses of people, and to bring them under the dominion of materialistic and tyrannical powers. This shows that our physical body, as part of the material world, and our mind when identified with it, is enemy territory when viewed from the standpoint of the Way, the Truth and the Life of Jesus.

5.09 For this Way and Truth and Life require us to oppose the natural tendencies of our physical body, the tendencies to avoid pain, to evade unpleasant situations, in fact to oppose all the functions of what we call our physical, animal self, insofar as these can influence us and frighten us and dispose us to abandon the Way and Truth and Life of Christ rather than place ourselves in a position where we might have to endure a painful or distressing experience, or perhaps, as Jesus did in Gethsemane, to face and choose death rather than abandon the principle to which we have dedicated ourselves.

5.10 If Christ had remained in the security of that heavenly condition of Power which He had before His birth as a human being; if He had launched His mighty inter-world missiles and destroyed from afar the evil embodied in the devil and the devil's children, so that evil had vanished from the world, no more to be seen by mankind; and if in the destruction of this evil, individual men and women had played no part; if they had not themselves fought or helped to fight the battle on the devil's own territory, that is, in that part of the human physical body where the merely natural survival impulses dwell and where the materially conditioned human ego-impulses have their abode, then Christ's victory over the devil and his followers would have had no special human significance. It would have been merely the victory of the infinitely superior powers of the omnipotent God over the inferior powers of a very much less than omnipotent devil. There would here have been no to-and-fro of battle, no stress and strain of the swinging fortunes of earthly wars, and thus no opportunity for uncovering hidden depths of heroism in the human heart.

5.11 We must he very clear about what we mean by our statement that our physical body exists in the material world which Christ says is not the world in which He is building His Kingdom. We are not saying that our physical body itself is evil. That has been said in the historical past and has led to much worthless and unnecessary suffering on the part of certain kinds of men who have misunderstood the body's real position in the divine purpose.

5.12 Far from being itself evil, our body is the Temple of the Living God. When Jesus said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again,” He referred to His physical body.

5.13 But although the human body is God's Temple, the real place in which God is to be worshipped, “In Spirit and in Truth,” yet, like a Temple or Church built by man, it can be entered by beings who are not worshippers of God. It can be broken into, its furnishings and contents damaged by vandals and unbelievers. The human body can be invaded not only by disease-bearing bacteria, but also its brain, and the mind identified with it, can be invaded by alien ideas, by destructive emotions and impulses. It is possible for the human body, brain, and mind to be taken possession of by energies whose whole intent is to falsify truth and to destroy all reference to the way of life which Christ demonstrated for us.

5.14 We are not to deceive ourselves about this. We live in a material world with our physical body, a world whose very principle is materialism, a world which by its very nature tends to induce unbelief in all things which are not visible to our physical eyes. We live in a world where matter and material objects tend to dominate our consciousness and make us believe that only that is true which we can sense with our five physical sense organs.

5.15 Because of this fact, because we live with our physical bodies in the material world, we are in danger. We human beings are very special beings; we stand in our physical bodies, in a material world which is not the true dwelling place of our souls. We are assailed every moment from below by the forces of materialism, atheism and bad faith, and are called from above by the voice of Jesus Christ, to worship in Spirit and in Truth the God of Life everlasting.

5.16 Thus we stand between two worlds, and these worlds are the dwelling places of living intelligences, not of abstractions, not of merely hypothetical possible beings. And the living intelligent beings who dwell in these two worlds are at war. These beings have taken sides in a colossal war, the end of which will result in a separation of the combatants into two wholly different camps.

5.17 No compromise is possible between these combatants, for the war is about Truth and its enemy Falsity, and between these two there is no compromise possible. A truth is a truth; a falsity is a falsity. Twice one is two; it is not a compromise somewhere between the two numbers. A triangle has three sides, not nearly three, or slightly over three. And at once we hear in our minds a voice say, “But surely such clarity applies only to mathematical or geometrical or logical problems, not to the problems of living human beings in the everyday world.” This voice admits the suitability of unambiguous truth in all merely logical problems, but denies its appropriateness in matters concerning human living relationships.

5.18 Here is the thin end of the devil's wedge. It is true that human relationships are much more complex than the relationships which exist between numbers and geometrical shapes and logical operations. But it is not true to say that because of this fact we should not aim at Truth and clarity wherever we can find it. If we are unable to find a point of real agreement between two individuals, or two groups or two nations, and so are driven for the time being into a compromise position, this is not to say that real agreement is impossible, or that compromise is the real aim of discussion. Always the real aim of any discussion is to disclose the truth of the discussed situation. The fact that this is often difficult to disclose in a complex human situation, is no ground for abandoning the pursuit of Truth and the substitution for it of an uneasy compromise.

5.19 Until mankind recognises that every compromise arrived at by abandoning Truth is bound to breed further argument and conflict, there will be no lasting peace on earth or goodwill to men.

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part Six

(Originally published in November of 1974)

6.01 It is important for us to understand more fully what our special position as human beings embodied in the material world means for us.

6.02 We live incarnated in a physical body which is in part composed of elements of the material world. We say ‘in part’ so composed because we are not merely of material elements, we are not just bundles of chemical substances derived from the earth. The living human body is more than a compound of material molecules and atoms and sub-atomic particles; it is a body in which organising forces are at work, forces which work always towards health and true function.

6.03 These health-creating, organising forces are quite different in their action from some other forces which also dwell inside our bodies. For there are forces in our body, and in our mind, which act against our health, against the principle of life in us, against true function and harmonious organic inter-relationships. These anti-life forces in us are the forces of evil which are also antiTruth, anti-Beauty, and anti-Goodness

6.04 If we observe a healthy animal in action, say a thoroughbred race horse, we see embodied the Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. We see the Truth in its perfection of form, we see the beauty of its perfect function, and we see the perfection of its power, all three interrelated in such a way that we have no difficulty in understanding that these three factors presuppose each other. We see that if the horse were a different shape, it would have to move in a different way to use its energy. Shape, Movement and Energy are the same as Form, Function and Power, which are called Truth, Beauty and Goodness. A horse that had not the true shape of a well-bred horse, would not have the beautiful movement of such a horse, nor be able to use effectively its power. When we contemplate the intimate interrelationship of Form, Function and Power, or of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, we are contemplating the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, the Trinity incarnated in Jesus Christ, who embodies Truth for Perfection, Beauty for the Way of Life and Goodness for its power.

6.05 The anti-Christ or Devil Principle must therefore be the opposite of the Trinity. For Truth he offers us the Lie; for Beauty, Ugliness, and for Goodness, Evil. And we as human beings, standing between these two Trinities, must choose to which we shall give ourselves, which we shall embody, which we shall serve.

6.06 We cannot make ourselves too clear about the difficulties of our position as we stand between the two worlds, or two systems of opposing forces, one set of which calls us to the Eternal Life of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, and the other set of which tempts us to the merely temporal life of materialism, untruth, ugliness and evil.

6.07 We live between two worlds. One working eternally to create a life of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, which is the Christ Life; the other working towards the precipitation of conditions which, if they succeeded, would make the Christ life impossible on earth. And the war between these two worlds is a real war.

6.08 But the weapons of the two opposing armies are as opposed as the armies themselves. The forces of evil fight with the weapons of violence, of ugliness and of lying propaganda. The forces of Good fight with the weapons of Loving Goodwill, beautiful deeds and the world of Truth. Christ describes the weapon with which He fights. He says, “I will come and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.” Christ, as Son of Man, has a sharp two-edged sword going out of His mouth. This two-edged sword is the Sword of Truth, the sword that is the Spiritual Word that cuts to the right and to the left, against ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-nots’. For there are two kinds of anti-Christ impulses in man, the ‘Have’ kind which, having great power or wealth, are swollen with Pride and Arrogance, and the ‘Have Not’ kind, which, having little or no power or wealth, are shrunken with negativity and envy of those who have.

6.09 To the Mind of Christ these two, the proud, arrogant men of power and wealth, and the negative men who desire to join the men of power, are equally wrong, for neither of them are concerned with the real state of their inner, spiritual being, but only with the external trappings of material existence. Here we come to one of the most important elements of Christian Philosophy, which throws a light upon man in his mediating position as he stands between the two worlds.

6.10 Existence on the earth involves unavoidably certain facts which we have to accept. To be born on earth in a physical body is to be born in a certain place, at a certain time, in a certain country as a member of a certain social group, at a certain social level within that group, within a certain family, of particular parents. It is unreal to ignore such facts. Christ did not close His eyes to them. If we do so we place ourselves at a profound disadvantage, for if we do not see the world as it is, we cannot adequately adjust ourselves to its conditions.

6.11 Now, when we accept, as human beings, our mediating position, a position in which two worlds mix, the world of Truth and the world of Falsity, we see also that we stand normally between all pairs of opposites, between the highest and the lowest, the most powerful and the weakest, the richest and the poorest, the healthiest and the most sick, the overfed and the starving. And we see that in this position we are required to choose what attitude we shall take to the whole complex of the world in which we find ourselves.

6.12 And there is another fact that we have to accept; the fact that the world is not static, that the wheel of fortune turns, that the high may be brought low and the low raised, that the rich can become poor and the poor rich, the healthy may become ill, and the sick may recover, the too clever may over-reach themselves, or the slow comprehenders acquire, step by step, a knowledge of Truth. In our unstable, mixed world nothing is absolutely unalterable, nothing is guaranteed beyond all doubt.

6.13 In the midst of a whirling mass of events, a world of no absolute guarantees, can we find no security at all? But for one fact we would answer, “No, we can find no security.” This one fact is in the words of Christ: “I am come to do the will of Him that sent Me.” In this one statement is contained the whole of Christian Philosophy, the Philosophy of the Divine Will.

6.14 Let us think about this very carefully. We know that all the great men of the world have one thing in common - a will dedicated to the attainment of some goal. The will, self-nailed to an idea that some particular aim has at all costs to be attained, is the only power that we know of that has been able to give us even a hope of an effective guarantee that something can be made certain in the world. Everything else in our mental and physical life is subjected to external conditions; our ideas, our feelings and emotions and attitude of mind, all vary under the influence of different stimuli. But our will, once set in a certain direction, is able to pursue its intent, even to the point of death. For thousands of years men have given evidence that the will once focussed on a defined goal, can sacrifice itself wholly to that goal's realisation.

6.15 Even a little child can demonstrate the will's power of convergence upon a goal. Once its will is set to do some particular thing, it can override all other considerations. The child exhibiting a tantrum when stopped by its mother from doing something its will is set upon, shows something of the great energy which may be commanded by the will. And this demonstration, by a child untrained in mental concentration, shows something of the will's potentiality for self-convergence upon a chosen goal.

6.16 If the little child in a tantrum can converge so much energy of will upon the attainment of a purpose, how much more energy can be focussed on a goal by a man who has trained and dedicated himself to that goal's realisation.

6.17 Christ says, “I came down from Heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of Him who sent me. And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which He hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. And this is the will of Him that sent me, that everyone which seeth the Son and believeth on Him, may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.”

6.18 Christ here clearly states the will of God for man: that everyone who sees Christ as God's Son, come to fulfil God's will, may have everlasting life. Christ Jesus has come to do, not the will of an individual man born on earth, but the will of the Creator of the Universe, the will of God that every human being who can believe that God wills everlasting life for mankind shall be able to share in that life. Here is the certainty that all men seek, and yet that all do not recognise when it is offered to them, the only real ultimate certainty possible, the certainty that is based on the will of the Creator of all things, a certainty not based on anything external to God, for He is all-embracing.

6.19 Nor is this certainty based on any idea about what man is, or may be, apart from God, for man cannot be apart from God. This certainty is the certainty of omnipotence, self-dedicated to realise a goal designed by itself, the certainty of All-powerful Will, Self-committed to the creation of the conditions of everlasting life for those of mankind who believe in this intent.

6.20 There is here a very interesting psychological point for us to consider. We know that we are most efficient in doing something when we most firmly believe that we can do it. The Olympic high jumper who believes fully that he can clear the bar is more likely to do so than the one who doubts his capacity. The man who doubts has doubleness in his mind, and this doubleness may split his will, destroy the unity of his power, and make impossible the attainment of his goal. If we are to gain the everlasting life offered to us by God through Christ, we must recognise that belief in God's will that we shall have this life is essential to its attainment.

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part Seven

(Originally published in December of 1974)

7.01 Doubt, as we have seen, implies doubleness of mind and this means a splitting of the will. In certain situations doubt may be very useful. A mother about to bath her baby may not be quite certain about the temperature of the water. She is in a state of doubt about it and so tests it carefully with her elbow before immersing the baby. Also, when listening to a salesman trying to sell us some commodity we may doubt the veracity of some of his statements and insist on a demonstration before we commit ourselves to buy. We can say that in any material situation where we have not been able to examine all its components, we are justified in maintaining some degree of doubt.

7.02 But when we are considering intimate human relationships, we find that too much doubt about the intentions of the persons in the relationship may endanger its harmony. We need to trust each other in all essentials. Minor misrepresentations of fact must be disregarded, or allowances made for them. Most people tell small white lies in order to avoid hurting their friends. Most people diplomatically avoid statements of truth which might cause unnecessary friction, or they avoid giving each other information about facts which might result in disruption of relationships in private life, in business or in politics.

7.03 But though experience of daily life in human society on earth may justify certain degrees of doubt about our relationships with each other, yet this doubt has no place whatever in our relationships with our Creator. For whilst we can justify to some degree keeping an eye on each other in our daily life's interrelationships, we cannot make this in any way meaningful in relation to God, on whom we certainly cannot keep an eye, though He can certainly do so on us.

7.04 Our relationships with God, the All-knowing, All-powerful source of our being is not in any way like that of our relationship with each other. We can study each other's behaviour, examine each other's statements, check on each other for consistency, make agreements with each other, and in some cases legally enforce them. But we cannot do any of these things with God, except perhaps insofar as He has given us the Sacred Scriptures and has embodied Himself in Jesus Christ. We are not equipped to stand in judgment upon Him. If we study the scriptures, we need more than our ordinary intellect to enable us to understand them; we need divine Grace. If we try to understand Jesus Christ today, apart from the scriptures themselves, we can know nothing of Him, unless again we receive insight by Grace.

7.05 We are therefore placed in a position where we are required to believe or disbelieve in God and Jesus Christ, not by first examining the evidences in the scriptures, for those can never be finally certain and conclusive, but by an act of will.

7.06 In dealing with human beings it is natural for us to keep some degree of doubt. Even Jesus was doubted, and He did not condemn Thomas for desiring to test the reality of the nail-holes in His hands, because Jesus was in a human form, visible and tangible and it is permissible to test all material things.

7.07 But we cannot test God in any way whatever, for by the very definition of His Being as Infinite, He is beyond our finite, limited capacity to grasp or observe Him.

7.08 Now, if we are told that there is an ultimate source of our being, and that this source is infinite, invisible, intangible and incomprehensible, we cannot say "let us see this ultimate source with our eyes, let us grasp it with our hands, let us comprehend it with our minds". We are placed in a position where belief in such a source is not baseable on any information we may gain from our physical sense organs, nor from the exercise of our reason or intellect. Our belief or unbelief must therefore rest on our will to believe.

7.09 According to the kind of universe we like to exist, according to our desire that there should be, or not be, an all-powerful, all-knowing God ruling that universe, so will we believe or not believe in Him. Our belief about God is not based on our intellectual capacity, for some great intellectuals have been atheists; nor on the evidence of our sense organs, for "No man has seen God at any time". It is based, and can be based, only on our will to believe, our desire that He shall Be, and that He shall have created and will maintain the universe in which we live; that He is our Father, that He cares for us, and that ultimately He will lead us into everlasting life.

7.10 Not every man or woman desires or wills that there shall be a God, Creator of all things, all-powerful overseer of the world and all beings in it. "Men love darkness rather than light, because their ways are evil." What do these words imply?

7.11 If a man desires to cheat another man out of his means of livelihood, or out of the fruits of his good labour, this man who desires to cheat will probably not desire to believe in an all-seeing God, the Creator and Ruler of the universe, able to reward or punish any man for his deeds or misdeeds.

7.12 The evil man, the man who consciously and deliberately works to reduce the living potential of other human beings, cannot afford to believe in an omniscient, omnipotent Creator who is also the ever-present Ruler of the world. Thus the evil man prefers not to have an enlightened mind; he prefers the darkness of ignorance about everything that might suggest to him that the All-Knowing God is a reality.

7.13 So people of good nature find it very difficult to believe that there arc persons who freely will to do evil deeds. These good natured people believe that any person who does an evil deed cannot help doing so, that such a person has had "bad" (that is, unfortunate) parents, or has been somehow mis-educated, or has not had a proper opportunity to learn what life is about, or is not very well in health, and so on. These good natured people judge the rest of the world from themselves, from their own nature, and they become internally very unhappy if they allow themselves to think that there may be some persons in the world who, with no external excuses of mis-education, or of bad example, or ill health, consciously and freely will to do evil things. A world in which conscious evil has a place is very uncomfortable for good natured people. But it is just such a world that Jesus Christ says exists.

7.14 This problem is bound up with the nature of man's will. Either it is free or not. Either man can choose what kind of actions he shall will to do, or he cannot. If he cannot, he is merely some kind of machine, a robot, very complicated in his inner working parts, but still a robot.

7.15 Now, there are in the world many people who believe that man is a kind of machine. Most of these people are fairly well equipped intellectually and have thought about man and his behaviour deeply enough to have become aware that man's organism, his physical body, with all its separable organs and nervous system, is in many ways like a very complex machine. The number of people who believe that man is a kind of machine has increased with the development of experimental science.

7.16 Artificial limbs and parts of the body can be made and fitted. Artificial kidneys and artificial pacemakers for the heart, all these and numerous other successes of surgery and medical electronic technology have encouraged the belief that the human being is a machine and nothing more.

7.17 Some people prefer to believe that man is merely a machine, and others do not. The ones who prefer to believe that man is a machine do so because this belief relieves them of various responsibilities. If man is merely a machine then there is no need to consider his feelings and emotions. A machine does not have feelings or emotions. If man is a mere machine, then any cries or other sounds that may be emitted from his organism can be ignored as mere products of the friction or of other inter-actions of his parts. There are no cries of horror, no groans of living suffering flesh, no sobbing of anguished souls, but only the sounds of frictive surfaces rubbing on each other, a squealing no more significant than that of the brakes on a motor-car, or the shrieking of steam issuing from an escape-valve in a steam-engine.

7.18 But to the people, ordinary good-natured people who prefer to believe that man is not merely a complicated machine, every sound a living human being utters may be an evidence of human joy, sorrow, pleasure, or pain, happiness or misery, and all of them signals originating in the human soul, which is no machine, but the very vital, real presence of a spark of divinity itself. For these people believe that "God breathed His spirit into man, and man became a living soul". And these people are made uncomfortable by any actions which result in unnecessary, avoidable human suffering; these people would not willingly and deliberately inflict damage on any human being, and they cannot believe that other people would do so. These good-natured ones live in the hope that they are right in their belief that no human being would do an evil act to another one if he could possibly avoid it.

7.19 But there are other kinds of human beings in the world. These believe that the good-natured ones are simply weak-willed or unintelligent, or unrealistic, and that they are here in the world to be taken advantage of, to be duped, misled and sacrificed for the purposes of the strong-willed, intelligent and ‘realistic’.

7.20 Not only dictators and men seeking political position for the sake of the power it confers have held this view. For every Hitler or Mussolini who fails in the attempt to enslave the world, there are others striving to take their place.

7.21 Arrogant men of all ages of history have preferred to believe that the masses of people are in existence merely for the convenience of their leaders. These men have used all their intelligence to perpetuate this view amongst their own kind and have effectually divided the world into two camps, a camp of predators and a camp of the prey. They have seen themselves as lions feeding on the bodies of gentle deer, or as wolves ravening amongst sheep.

7.22 In the ancient world these lion men and wolf-men dared to show themselves as they were, in their lion or wolf skins; today they are more diplomatic and oblique. But no matter how adept they have become at concealing their real intentions they are still basically what they were in nature, a fact which raises the very important and momentous question, "Can the leopard change its spots?"

7.23 On the cross Christ looked down upon His enemies and prayed, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do". Yet of these same enemies He had said that they were of their father, the Devil, who was a liar from the beginning. How could He say that they did not know what they were doing, and yet hold that they were children of the Evil One?

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part Eight

(Originally published in January of 1975)

8.01 In the ninth chapter of St. John's Gospel, Jesus says, "For Judgement I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see may be made blind." Some of the Pharisees who were with Him, then asked Him. "Are we blind also?" Jesus replied, "If ye were blind, ye should have no sin; but now you say, "We see; therefore your sin remaineth."

8.02 Jesus here says that He has come into our world to bring Truth to those who do not already know it: and to make those who in their intellectual pride think that they know the Truth become aware that they do not. The Pharisees here represent men who think that they do not need Christ's Truth, who think that they have already in their own mental powers a sufficient guide for their lives. But the Truth that Christ brings is not that of man's intellect, but the Truth of the Eternal Spirit.

8.03 The intellect of man in his spiritually unenlightened state has nothing in it except the information put into his mind through his physical organs of sense, through his eyes, ears, nose, taste, and touch. The intellect cannot tell man anything whatever about spiritual things. It can be very well informed in many things of the material world, and in being so well informed can give rise to pride, which can impede spiritual perception. Thus when Jesus says that He has come into our world to give sight to those who see not, and to make blind those who think themselves already enlightened, some of the Pharisees cynically ask Him, "Are we blind also?" meaning "Have we no understanding?".

8.04 To this Jesus says to them, "Those who do not understand cannot be called sinners but those who claim to have understanding, if they disregard the Truth show themselves to be sinners."

8.05 Jesus here speaks to the same kind of men, some of the Scribes and Pharisees, whom He has already said were of their father, the Devil, who was a murderer and a liar from the beginning.

8.06 Yet, having declared these men to be of the Devil, murderer and liar, Jesus, hanging on the Cross where they had placed him, says, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."

8.07 How can He say that they are of the devil, and like the devil murderers and liars, and yet say that they do not know what they are doing?

8.08 A man may be intellectually well informed, know many things of the material world, know how to take advantage of men who are less informed in the affairs of this world, and yet know nothing at all of the spiritual world.

Thus an intellectually well-developed man, proud of his own mental talents, may very cunningly deceive his fellow men in matters relating to the physical world. He may lie and cheat his way to wealth and power. He may even destroy his rivals, perhaps indirectly by clever business manipulations, or perhaps, in certain cases, even directly, by physical violence. In today's world we daily hear and see enough evidence of this in bombing outrages and murders.

8.09 Because we know that such things happen in our world we can say that there are still men on earth who do the devil's work, who lie and murder, who believe that to lie and to murder is the only way to preserve their own way of life.

8.10 It is not difficult for us to understand this if we know anything of the facts of human history; if we know that since history first began men have fought each other for the seats of power. Cain, the first son born of a human being, killed Abel his brother. Men of royal households have murdered their brothers to secure for themselves the throne. Women have poisoned their rivals. All this we know, and knowing it, we cannot be surprised if such bad examples have born evil fruit. We cannot be surprised if some of our fellow men are led astray into violence and untruth. And of some of them we can say with Jesus, "Father, forgive them: they know not what they do."

8.11 Let us accept that the spiritually unenlightened mind of man cannot know anything whatever of spiritual things. Let us recognise that such a spiritually unenlightened mind may be very clever in dealing with the affairs of the material world. Let us admit that many of the so-called great men of human history have been very well equipped to handle the daily affairs of human life, with all its intrigues and manipulations, deceits and jugglings of the power game, at whatever level it is played.

8.12 But let us remember also that such clever men, however far their knowledge of material things extends, have no knowledge of spiritual things, have no awareness of the distortions their lies introduce into their own souls. And let us remember that those who do violence to their fellow men also unknowingly do violence to their own minds. Let us remember that the murderer of another, murders also his own soul.

8.13 Remembering all this, we shall understand also Christ's words of forgiveness on the Cross.

8.14 Which one of us is aware of all the effects of our actions upon ourself? Which one of us can follow the course of our nervous energy when we misrepresent something to one of our fellow men? Do we think that the words of Truth and of Falsity within our mind follow the same nerve paths?

8.15 When we tell the truth about a thing, the word of Truth that we have spoken finds its way in our mind to another word of truth recorded in our soul, and the words of truth stored in our memory integrate themselves together into a consistent pattern, and this pattern of Truths confers peace of mind upon us. Perfect mental consistency brings peace into our soul.

8.16 But if we tell a lie, an untruth stored in our memory cannot attain to consistency with the Truth that is in us. Now we have in our mind an area of inconsistency, which simply because it is inconsistent cannot allow us to rest in peace.

8.17 Every untruth recorded in our soul is a zone of inconsistency and so of disquiet. "There is no rest for the wicked."

8.18 In the same way, if we harbour in our mind any violent or destructive intention, this intention does violence to our soul, destroys our own inner peace. It is absolutely impossible that this should be otherwise. Wherever we hold in ourselves a desire to harm another human being, we hold also in our self, consciously or unconsciously, a guard against suffering similar harm.

8.19 The tendency of a living being, when violence is attempted against it, is naturally to defend itself. Thus, if we intend harm to another being, we know that, as soon as this other being finds out about our harmful intent, he will tend to defend himself. And we have thus placed ourself in a position in which we may have to defend ourself against his defence, which, if he is very afraid, may become an aggression. The history of persistent inter-family feuds of the past gives us sufficient illustration of the truth of all this.

8.20 Now, let us add to all this the idea that Christ gives us, that God, who is our Father, the generative, Intelligent Power of the Universe knows all that is being done by His creatures. Let us remember that the unenlightened mind of man cannot know any thing of the truth of this statement that the human intellect, fed only by information received through its physical sense organs, is not equipped to pronounce upon the truth or falsity of anything beyond the material world.

8.21 Man's physically informed mind, unless enlightened by the Spirit of God through Christ, cannot see the far-reaching effects that lies and violence have upon the human soul. Psychologists tell us that fear can cause us to suppress unpleasant ideas and that these suppressed ideas can introduce tensions into our mind, and that these tensions can pass from our mind to our body, there to produce various disorders. But what psychologists cannot tell us is what damage such fear can do, not only to our body but also to our Soul.

8.22 We live today in a period largely materialistic and atheistic in outlook, but if we will look into history we will find that there are fashions in belief as in clothes, that in a real sense beliefs are clothes to the mind. The physical universe shows unmistakable evidence that everything in it operates in a cyclic manner, that things come and go only to come again. This is why we can see in history periods of belief followed by periods of unbelief, again followed by periods of belief. But beyond this great cyclic wheel of the physical world is another world, where Truth remains constantly itself, the world of divine spirit.

8.23 The world of divine spirit is God's world, the world in which the Will of God is supreme. Here God's Will establishes Eternal Truth, which is always and everywhere itself, unchanging, undeviating in its being and action. Here there is no question of any difference between ‘seeming’ and ‘being’ as there is in the world of time and matter as we experience it.

8.24 We know that in the time-matter world in which we live our physical lives, many things exist which are not as they appear to be. We have cars deliberately made with inbuilt rot, politely called ‘planned obsolescence’, which does not show on the surface, and is not advertised as such by the manufacturers. We have misrepresentation as well as representation in party politics. We have Watergate incidents and their equivalents in countries other than America. We hear descriptions of the characters of individuals so inconsistent that they cannot possibly all be true. Lies and deceit are everyday coinage in various fields of human activity. Hence the experienced adult tends to take everything he hears with a grain of salt. Every word spoken, every picture displayed is subjected to examination before acceptance as genuine.

8.25 But in the world of the divine spirit it is quite otherwise. There everything is exactly as it appears to be. There is no misrepresentation, no deviation from the Truth. A thing is wholly and thoroughly itself throughout itself. Absolute selfconsistency is the characteristic of God's Will and Truth. There is, "no shadow of turning," there, no abandoning of God's Word, no changing of God's Will once declared. God honours His Word, fulfils minutely His declared intentions.

8.26 To the man who lives by his wits this idea of honouring one's word can be very frightening.

8.27 Where would such a man be if a perfect lie-detector were invented and made freely available for everyone to buy?

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part Nine

(Originally published in February of 1975)

9.01 To honour one's word is to live in Truth. But, said Pilate to Jesus, "What is Truth?" and Jesus remained silent. Why did He not answer Pilate? Was it because Jesus could not answer? No. It was because Truth is Whole, and speaking cannot express wholeness. The Truth that Jesus referred to is the Absolute Truth, the Truth that contains all possible expressions, all statements and significances, all things and relations of things, all conceivable events, comprehended absolutely in one supreme eternal act of infinite consciousness.

9.02 When we make a statement about any particular thing or relation or event in the material world, our statement has a finite reference, that is, it refers to some limited fact or situation. Limitation or finite-ness is the distinguishing mark of everything we encounter in the material world. For example, if I say, "The telephone is on the table," my words have finite or limited reference; they refer to a certain kind of device called a ‘telephone’, which we use when we wish to talk to people at a distance when our ordinary means of talking face to face cannot be used; and to another thing that we call a ‘table’, which we use to place things on in order to eliminate bending down to the ground to pick them up. Any statement we can make about any material thing has this distinguishing characteristic or finiteness or limitation.

9.03 But when we come to consider the whole of Truth no finite statement can possibly cover its significance. Whole Truth is not expressible in limited words, that is, words of finite application. No number of limited statements, no matter how great their number, could possibly express the infinite Truth.

Has the infinite Eternal Truth then no possibility of expression? We have some words like, for example, the words ‘infinite’ or ‘unlimitedness’ which refer to that which is unlimited. But these words do not give us any positive significance that our minds can grasp. They are negative words, words that say that there is a not-finite or not-limited something-or-other the nature of which we cannot clearly define.

9.04 If the Truth that Jesus refers to is the infinite unlimited, is it therefore absolutely beyond expression in the world in which we live? Is it not possible for us to express this Truth in some way so that we can demonstrate our awareness of it? We cannot give it proper expression in words only, because words are but part of the total expression of the Infinite Eternal Truth. How then can the Truth be expressed?

9.05 We have a word which we often use in ordinary everyday life, which through over-familiarity and frequent use has for most people lost its essential mystery. This word is ‘Being’.

9.06 We talk of ‘being’ in a certain physical or mental state. We say the baby is ‘being’ good, or ‘being’ naughty, and so on. We talk of ‘being’ aware, or of ‘being’ unconscious of something. We call ourselves human ‘beings’. Very seldom do we ask ourselves what ‘being’ means.

9.07 The word ‘being’ is part of the verb ‘to be’, the part that expresses the idea of continuity of presence or continuity of action. The continuity of anything in time we refer to as the continuity of temporal ‘being’ of that thing. When we think of the everlasting continuity of universal and infinite power we refer to it as ‘Absolute Being’ or Eternal Infinite Being. It is obvious that no particular set of words, no verbal expression on its own can adequately express this Absolute Being, which is the Being of Eternal Truth to which Jesus referred.

9.08 Now, apart from verbal expressions of Being, what other modes of expression have we available for our use? If no set of words can convey the Truth of which Jesus speaks, what other mode of expression can we use?

9.09 ‘Being’ is part of the verb ‘to be’. A verb is an action word, that is, a word used to draw our attention to some act done, some operation performed, some work accomplished. The word ‘Being’ refers to continuity of action of some kind. We are in being so long as our modes of activity maintain themselves in the way proper to them. We have no more being than we have continuity of recognisable action. Our very being is our action pattern continuity.

9.10 Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Here He is talking about His being, His continuity of ' action. Jesus is all actuality, all action. There is nothing passive about Him, nothing at the mercy of events. He is pure Being, that is, pure actualising of His own will. It is His will to do the Will of God, who is the All-father, the Infinite Generative Power hidden in all things.

9.11 "I am the Way," says Jesus. A ‘way’ is not a paved road; it is a path that we make with each of our steps as we go along. We make our way through the world. Our way is something we make, something we create as we move through our life. Thus when Jesus says that His Being is His Way He means that His very being, the continuity of His action-pattern is He himself. He is the Way, the very Being-action-pattern, the embodiment of His Will, which is one with the Will of His Father.

9.12 This means that He is, in His Being, absolute self-consistency. He is at one with Himself and with God, His Father, in His Will, His feeling and His thought.

Now, self-consistency is the mark of Truth. A thing is true to itself insofar as it is self-consistent. For example a triangle is true to itself if it has three sides, a square if it has four; a plant is true to itself if it grows in accordance with its own nature; an animal is true to itself if it acts in accordance with its type; a man is true to himself if he accurately assesses his experience; a human being is truly human if humaneness characterises his behaviour. The Saviour of the World is truly Himself if He embodies in His words, thoughts, feelings, will and deeds every saving principle, every world-preserving and world-developing intention and operation.

9.13 Jesus Christ is the Way, because a Way is a path made where no path previously existed, a pathway from ignorance to knowledge, from indifference to love, from passivity to absolute activity.

9.14 "I am the truth," says Jesus. He means that Truth which is absolute self-consistency of thought, of ideas, is in absolute harmony with His feelings and will. Jesus Christ is the Truth, that is, His very Being is nothing but the selfconsistency of His Thought, Feeling and Will, which He holds in absolute harmony with the Will of God.

9.15 "I am the Life," says Jesus. Life is a process in which the divine spirit permeates the material world and organises it until the world-matter is wholly brought under the government of the Spirit. Living bodies are simply material elements organised and controlled by spirit. Wholly living bodies are wholly controlled by spirit. Partially living bodies are partially controlled by spirit.

9.16 The spirit is God; to be alive is to be controlled by God. To prefer life is to prefer to be controlled by God. To prefer not to be controlled by God is to prefer not to be alive. This may seem strange, but it is nevertheless true. God is the Supreme Creator of all beings. It is His Will that all beings should work together in perfect harmonious inter-function, to the infinite increase of joy in life. Inter-function is the actual interrelatedness of ways of behaving. Where interrelatedness fails, there behaviours or patterns of action cease to be relevant to each other. Where action-patterns are not correlated harmoniously together, there life is impossible.

9.17 If we will as God wills, we will to correlate our activities together and we increase our participation in life, in the process of living. The amount of life we have is the amount of correlation of our activities with each other. A tree uprooted and placed in a vacuum-chamber in cold storage is not in its proper place and so cannot inter-function with its environment. Its roots cannot seek for minerals and food substances in the earth; its branches cannot stretch themselves in the air and sunlight they need. Such a tree cannot live.

A human being, taken out of human society and totally isolated from possibilities of interrelationships with other human beings, cannot function, cannot operate as a full human being.

9.18 "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life," says Jesus, and means that He is, in His very own being, the incarnated true pathway of life. His actions, His thoughts and His feelings are spiritual powers, actual energies, that constitute His very Being in an absolutely self-consistent Way.

9.19 Such a self-consistent Being, True and self-vitalised, cannot fall into disintegration, and so must be eternal. By His tremendous self-consistency of Being, by the fact that His very own living process is the Way of true Life, Jesus Christ was able to pass through His crucifixion and Death and to resurrect Himself, that is, to reconstitute Himself by the coincidence of His own thought, feeling and will. For Him the material body which he used as His vehicle on earth was but a manifestation of the Spirit, the Power of the Eternal Creator. For Him matter was an instrument entirely subservient to His will. His Whole Being was, and still is, an expression of perfect self-consistency of thought, feeling and will, that is, of Truth, Love and Power.

9.20 And Jesus tells us that the victory He has won, the self-consistency He has attained, is possible for all of us who will walk with him in His Way, according to His Truth, living as He lived and still lives.

9..21 He still lives because absolute self-consistency cannot but be absolutely perfectly integrated in itself. Where there are no inconsistencies there are no causes of possible disintegration.

9.22 Here is where Jesus shows us how to become immortal. Immortality is unbreakability, the state in which a being can resist any attack made upon it from outside its being. Jesus is irrefragable, that is, unanswerable, irrefutable, unbreakable, because of His absolute self- consistency.

9.23 His self-consistency means that He is not at war with Himself. His thought agrees with His feeling, with His Will. There is no disagreement in Him about who He is, what He is, how He is, why He is, where and when He is, as He is.

9.24 Because of this absolute freedom from disagreement in and with Himself, all attacks on His being are rendered of no avail, all fall away as vaporous fantasies in the light of the zenith sun.

9.25 Jesus tells us that we, too, can gain self-consistency, we, too, can bring our thought, feeling and will into full agreement, and so we, too, can become irrefragable with Him. In the total self-consistency of our mind and heart and action we also can become immortal, we also can dissolve away all causes of disintegration so that when we leave our physical body to return to the spiritual world from which we came, we, "Shall not be hurt of the second death."

9.26 The first death is that which we experience when we leave our physical body at the end of our earth-life. The second death is the disintegration of our thought, feeling and will after we have undergone the first death and left the physical world, a disintegration we must undergo if during our earth-life we do not gain self-consistency of thought, feeling and will.

9.27 How to gain this we shall see by better understanding Jesus.

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part Ten

(Originally published in March of 1975)

10.01 The Self-consistency of Jesus Christ gives Him the right to declare Himself to be the Way, the Truth and the Life. How has He attained this self-consistency of thought and feeling and will? He tells us that what He sees the Father-God do in secret, that He, the Son, does openly. He means He tunes His will to the will of God, which is hidden in the Infinite Power which is itself the Power of God's Will. Hidden in its infinity, this power, this will of God, is invisible to ordinary human vision, but by tuning His own will to the Will of God, Jesus becomes able to know this will. He becomes able to see what God intends for His creation, what is His will for the whole of humanity; and Jesus makes His will one with the will of God. He ‘at-ones’ Himself with God, His will becomes one with God's will, indistinguishable from God's will.

10.02 Having at-oned His will with God's will, Jesus in this at-one-ment becomes the Christ, the Annointed One, the Onely Begotten Son of God. The Greek word which we translate ‘only begotten’ means ‘generated in a unified way’, made one, made into a unity with the power which is its source, that is, with God.

10.03 There is no other way of becoming one with God, of becoming the Onely-Begotten Son other than by making one's will identical with the will of God. Jesus makes His will identical with God's will and in doing so becomes the Christ. He is the first of all God's children to do this. He has a unique position in relation to God. He is God's Onely Begotten Son, and He is also the first human being to bring His will into absolute oneness with the will of God. He has by this unification of His will with God's will a unique relation to God and a unique relationship with mankind. No other being in the whole of creation has this double relationship in the way Jesus Christ has it. He was the first human being to attain it. He is the first human being to be able to maintain it. He is the first human being to be able to guarantee for all time and for eternity that His will will remain one with God's will. No other being can be the first to attain this position. Any human being who will follow in Christ's footsteps and will as He wills can become as He has become, in every respect except one, that is, except His firstness.

10.04 Now, Jesus became Christ, became the spiritually annointed one, the supreme King of Kings, the greatest of all human beings by making his will one with God's will, and He tells us how we too can attain to His state of at-oneness with the will of God.

10.05 The way to this attainment is simple; it is to turn the other cheek. This simple recommendation conceals a most important secret, the secret of how we can bring our life into harmony with God's purpose for us, for mankind.

10.06 This recommendation to turn the other cheek has been the centre of argument for nearly two thousand years. It has been hated by the worldly and ambitious and revengeful; it has been misunderstood by the very persons who would wish to obey it.

10.07 There is art in turning the other cheek, an art based in a science, a divine science. We know that for every science or knowledge that we have, there is a most efficient way of using it. This most efficient way we call an art. An art is a way of using some special knowledge. Thus we say every science has a corresponding art, every art a corresponding science.

10.08 To understand the deepest meaning of Jesus' recommendation that we turn the other cheek, we must remind ourselves of some of the facts of science, especially of the fact that all matter is a behaviour of energy, or a way in which energy operates. There is no matter other than energy held together in a certain way.

10.09 If at this point some materialist thinker should say that Jesus could not have known that matter is only a behaviour of energy, that the knowledge of His day was not sufficiently developed to be able to make the statement that is now commonplace in science, we reply to this in two ways: firstly that the idea that the whole universe of matter is nothing but a play of energy is an ancient idea, well put forward centuries before the historical appearance of Jesus: and secondly, that Jesus Christ was not merely an historical figure born about 2,000 years ago, but the incarnation of universal intelligence which we call the Logos or Word of God. And this universal, this cosmic intelligence contains and is the source, not only of whatever true ideas science has so far discovered but also of all the ideas that science may discover in the future. The Cosmic Intelligence, the Logos of God is the source and origin of all knowledges whatever, and Jesus Christ's mind was and is totally at one with this intelligence.

10.10 Let us now consider the science and art of turning the other cheek. Let us accept that all matter is nothing but a manner of operation of energy. One of the laws of physical science says that, "To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

10.11 We can accept this law for all non- intelligent beings because we can see it in operation all around us. A car may get out of control and smash into a solid wall, striking it at 70 miles an hour: and the effect on the car is as if the wall had been traveling at 70 miles an hour and struck the car! To every action (the striking of the car against the wall) there is an equal and opposite reaction, (the striking of the wall against the car).

10.12 We see this law in certain circumstances operating also among human beings. A man loses his temper and strikes another man with his fists; and the struck retaliates by striking back with a similar blow, or a woman shouts at another woman who then shouts back. A father may lose his temper and say some thing harsh and critical to his son and the son at once replies with similar words to his father. A mother may under stress scream at her disobedient daughter and the daughter return the scream. A cat may spit at another cat and receive a spitting response. A dog may bark or growl at another and receive back a bark or growl. We could go on enumerating examples of such actions and reactions.

10.13 But let us suppose that we decide to try out the recommendation of Jesus, that we turn the other cheek intelligently and with love. Suppose that when we are attacked in some way we do not immediately react like a man reacts when he loses his temper, or a woman reacts when she is under stress, or an animal reacts when it is afraid. Suppose that we have understood the other deeper implications of, "Turn the other cheek." What happens to the energy which would have been used in the reaction to the attack? And what happens to the energy in the attacker when his action does not produce the reaction he expects from the one he has attacked? Certainly the effect of his action cannot be the same if there is no retaliatory reaction to it.

10.14 Let us consider this more closely. If an aggressive act of one man is met by an equally aggressive counter-action from the man against whom the original aggressive act is directed, the two opposing energies cancel out. Each man feels justified in what he has done. Each man feels that the other was wrong, that the other man has been, "Taught a lesson," and that, "he will be a bit more careful next time."

10.15 But if the recipient of an attack does not counter-attack when he has the power to do so, the attacker is forced to re-examine his action. This is a very important point. If an attacker is not counter-attacked simply because the person he attacks is too weak, or too afraid, to counterattack, then the attacker can feel himself superior, can view the recipient of his attack as a weakling or coward. The attacker then has no occasion to examine himself or his actions. He can pride himself on his superiority and feel himself selfjustified. Now, if no counter-attack comes when an act of aggression has been made against a man who is clearly no weakling and no coward; the energy of the attack has failed to produce its expected result. The attacker is thus forced to reconsider his position in relation to the one he has attacked.

10.16 This forced reconsideration process induced in the attacker's mind is a heaping of coals of fire upon his head.

10.17 Every person desires to be justified in his actions. This is a principle with very far reaching implications. Whatever a man does he feels a need to find a reason why he did it. If he does an evil act he explains it to himself as an act necessitated by the evil things which he sees in the world around him. If he uses violence against someone he tries to justify it by referring to other violence which he feels might be directed against him. If he behaves in a cunning way he seeks to justify his cunning by pointing out the cunning of others. When he deceives someone he thinks the deception justified because of the deceitful nature of other men. Always he explains himself to himself, balances his mind by representing himself as one living in a world such that he must behave exactly as he does. Where he fails to justify himself he feels uneasy, anxious or guilty.

10.18 The reason for this continually attempted self justification is because man is essentially a spiritual being, a being whose source is in God. A particular individual may not like to think of himself as a spiritual being, because his private purposes are not justifiable if this is so, but his dislike of his spiritual origin is itself a proof of it. The animals do not consider their origin, nor have they any vocabulary by which they could do so, but human beings do consider it and have some ideas about it and words which refer to such ideas.

10.19 It is true that some few human beings are born congenitally deaf and dumb, and possibly blind as well, but we all think of such beings as very unfortunate and unable to develop their human potentialities to the full. And I have myself seen two young boys who through certain very unusual circumstances had no words at their command and so could not express their inner conditions of thought, feeling and will, and could not respond to questions put to them in wordform. But such examples rather prove the rule than break it. Human beings in general do have some vocabulary, have received some education and have encountered the problems of human origins. And so human beings in general do seek to justify their actions, their feelings and their thoughts wherever they come into relation with other human being

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Eugene Halliday – Part Eleven

(Originally published in April of 1975)

11.01 The human being shows quite clearly his tendency towards self-justification. For every act that he does in full consciousness he has a reason. For any act that he does not in full consciousness he has some rational explanation; he claims absent-mindedness, or forgetfulness, or distraction, or pre-occupation with something else. Never does he think of his actions as absolutely uncaused.

11.02 Thus, if a man attacks another, physically or in words, he has inside himself some self-justifying explanation, and he also expects some kind of reaction from the person he attacks, generally an action of counter-attack either in physical form or in words. If this counter-attack comes then the man who receives it at once justifies his original attack. Obviously, he thinks the counter-attacker is an aggressive person who quite rightly has been beaten to the punch and so brought to a halt before he had time to extend his aggression.

But if a man on being attacked does not react with a counter-attack, and if this man is not afraid, and is calm and obviously intelligent, then the attacker is compelled to re-think his own position. He can no longer feel so sure that his attack is justifiable.

11.03 We have said that man's tendency to justify himself for his actions derives from the fact that man is essentially a spiritual being, a being whose source is in God. Man's body is made of matter taken from the earth, but he became a living soul by the inbreathing into his body of God's spirit. This means that the life principle and intelligence and sensitivity in man is from the divine spirit. In consequence of this fact, at his highest level of awareness man knows quite clearly that he is a spiritual being, originating in God, and having as his real property a knowledge of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. And he knows that not only he himself, but all human beings share in this spiritual trinity.

11.04 If at his top level of awareness man knows that he and all other human beings originate in God, then he knows also that he cannot justify an attack against any of them. He knows that his real duty to other human beings is to treat them as the spiritual beings they are.

11.05 But an aggressive man may seek to justify his aggression by pointing to the aggressive behaviour of other men. He may say either that he does not believe that human beings are spiritual beings which derive from God, or that if they are, yet they do not always behave as if they are and so deserve being treated as if they were not. He may say that if people do not behave like spiritual beings they do not deserve to be thought of as such. A man who behaves like a beast, he may say, should be treated like a beast. But Jesus Christ says the opposite. A man is a spiritual being. If he behaves as if he is less than this, yet he is still to be related to as a spiritual being, for by relating to him in this way he will be reminded of his spiritual origin and have to re-consider his actions.

11.06 The aggressive man who seeks to justify his aggression by denying mankind's origin in God places himself in a peculiar position. He reduces himself in his own mind to a level lower than he actually knows himself at his highest level to be.

11.07 Every man, whether he cares to admit it or not, knows that in certain situations he prefers to know the Truth. And even if he prefers to know the Truth only once in his life he shows himself in this moment to be a spiritual being. For to know Truth and to prefer to know it is a spiritual act.

11.08 Having known or preferred Truth, even if only once in his life, a man has encountered in himself the spirituality which God breathed into him. He may later find this fact uncomfortable to remember, he may wish he had never experienced this preference for Truth, yet the fact of the experience of this preference he cannot eliminate. By hard, intense effort he may drive it from his waking consciousness, drive it down deep into his unconscious mind, but in this "unconscious" the record of his experience remains as an area of inner psychological disquiet, a hidden zone of anxiety and malaise. We cannot eliminate absolutely from our being the records of our real experiences. Deep down within our heart of hearts we know what we have done, know what we have thought and felt, and what our motives have been.

11.09 Because of this deep inner knowledge, no man can rest easily in his soul when he has done an unjustifiable act. He knows in the innermost centre of his being that he cannot justify such an act.

11.10 Let us consider again the case of a man who attacks another man. If the attacked man reacts to the attack by counter attack, then the attacker may be able to represent himself to himself as justified. But this representation does not actually justify him. He may make a show to himself of self-justification; make a mental image of himself as right to have aggressed, but this mental image is a fabrication that cannot deceive the innermost centre of his being.

11.11 Further, let us consider the situation when the aggressive man meets in the man he has attacked, not a man quick to react with counter-aggression, but a man who, though quite unafraid, yet remains calm, quiet in his own soul, observing the aggressor intelligently yet gently, absorbing the energy of the aggression into his being in How does it stand now with the aggressor? Can he justify his attack? The one against whom the attack has been made stands there before him, unafraid, unreactive, calm, gentle, intelligently observant. Manifestly he is not being deliberately non-reactive, just to annoy the aggressor further, or to taunt him into further aggressive acts. He is just standing there, bathed in intelligence, comprehending the aggressor's condition, seeing his difficulties, understanding his human situation and the general causes of man's aggressions against fellow men.

11.12 Does the aggressor now feel satisfied with his aggression? Clearly it has not disturbed the recipient of it, and what man likes to fail? In the presence of this calm, intelligent, unafraid, nonreactive man the aggressor is compelled to reexamine his own aggressive action, and not merely his action, but his motive for it.

11.13 It is this compelled self-examination that is meant by the "coals of fire" which are heaped on the head of the unjustifiable aggressor.

11.14 The calm gentle, intelligent, non-reactive receiving of aggressive acts is what is meant by turning the other cheek. What it does to the aggressor is to compel his reconsideration of his position as the aggressor. It makes him face himself as he is inside himself It forces the inner self re-examination which will place his foot on the next rung of the ladder of spiritual evolution. It gives him the opportunity to open a doorway into a higher part of his being. It gives him a moment of self-illumination in which he remembers his freedom. And freedom is spirit. It reminds man that he is a spiritual being rooted in God.

True, this reminding can be painful, may be so painful that the aggressor feels that he must at once re-attack in order to break down the calm intelligence of the one who stands quietly before him.

11.15 This is a reaction we often see in an aggressor whose aggression has failed to produce the response he expected and designed to get. For if by further attack the receiver of it is broken down and reduced to the desired reactivity, if he loses his calm, dignified intelligence and falls into sub-human violence, then the attacker can feel himself relatively superior to his opponent, and so justified in his original aggression.

11.16. If the unjustified aggressor is compelled to self re-examination by the intelligent, gentle non-reactivity of the one who stands before him, how is it with this non-reactive one himself, how is it with this one who has understood the recommendation of Jesus, that we turn the other cheek?

11.17 Firstly, inside this man of intelligence is operative the spirit that God breathed into man, the spirit that made man into a living soul. This man is not a reactive, mechanical man that any other man can trigger into sub-human reactions. This man is one in whom freedom shows itself, and freedom is spirit. This man stands forth clearly as a spiritual being, a being in whom the divine presence shines.

11.18 Secondly, because of the free intelligence in him, this man understands the plight of the aggressor. He understands that all aggressiveness, all violence, is rooted in fear. And he understands the origin of this fear to lie in identification with finiteness, with limitation. The man who believes himself limited, who is identified with the deficiencies that limitation implies, lives in fear. He does not know that perfect Love casts out fear for his fear does not allow him to see clearly what ‘perfect love’ means. He is in a closed circle, built by his own definition of himself as finite.

11.19 Thirdly, understanding the plight of the aggressor, the man of free intelligence, the spiritual man, understands that apart from God's direct action the aggressor can be helped out of his plight only by the demonstration of non-reactivity of the spiritual man. The man of free intelligence thus stands in relation to the aggressor as a mediator of divine Grace. For the function of divine Grace is precisely to liberate a man from the dark circle of self-precipitated limitation.

11.20 Jesus Christ is full of Grace. What is Grace? Most simply expressed in a single word, it is freedom. But this freedom is not that blind, impulsive, pushing activity that springs from ignorance and lack of control, and represents itself to itself, after the fact, as freedom. The freedom of Jesus Christ is the Grace that comes from perfect intelligence balanced in full self-knowledge and deliberate whole conformity with the Will of God. Only out of this deliberately willed self-conformity with God's will was Jesus filled with the divine Grace which is perfect freedom.

11.21 The Spirit which is God Himself, the spirit that, “Blows where it lists”, is free absolutely, unconstrained by anything, self-directed from within itself. It is the source of every real freedom that any human being may exhibit. It is the basis of all activities that intelligent individuals hold sacred and essential for their ultimate well-being.

11.22 Each minutest moment of time this divine Spirit adjusts its mode of action according to its own infinitely intelligent purpose, so that what is done in time in the world, by man or other beings, shall not be able to impede the development of God's whole plan for the realisation of the ultimate divine goal, which is the perfected whole human being in fellowship with all men, with Jesus Christ and with God.

11.23 The moment-by-moment adjustment of God's spirit to the world situation and to the activities of men cannot be comprehended by ordinary man's mode of thinking and so might seem arbitrary and non-rational. Yet behind this apparent arbitrariness is the Cosmic Plan which God holds within the depths of His Spirit; the plan that embodies itself only in the man who has become able intelligently to turn the other cheek, calmly, lovingly, and unafraid in the presence of the aggressor.