The most important doctrine of essential Christianity, which links it with the Esoteric Philosophy, with Platonism, Neo-platonism, the Hindu philosophies, and countless others, is the doctrine of the Father and the Son. It is strange how little the usual church interpretation of Christianity has made of this: the ignoring or twisting of this vital truth is a most significant sign of the decadence of the original gospel. The Father is the Divine Spirit within every man: it is Atman. See The Key to Theosophy, chap, vii and chap. x. The Son is Manas, or (more accurately) Atma-Buddhi-Manas, the Christos, the self, the Ego or thinking Manas, the Logos or Son of soul and spirit, the Man-God, the Word-made-flesh. (See Key, chaps, v and x). The most frequent mention of the subject in the Bible is found in John's Gospel, where we read:
The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth . . . for as the Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth them, even so the Son quicken-eth whom he will. . . . As the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself, (chap, v)
The servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever, (viii, 35. Referring to the mortal personal man and the permanent Man.) If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. (36)
This Gospel is clearly, in part at least, a Gnostic gospel; but we find the same Gnostic coloring elsewhere. See for instance Matthew, xi, 27:
All things are delivered to me [Christos] of my Father: and no man know-eth the Son but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.
Reference to the Gospels will reveal many other apposite quotations, with which we cannot burden the present writing. The God-Man is a cardinal doctrine of religions in their original purity, though this sublime truth has either been ignored or degraded into something evil or absurd. The Mithras of Mithraism was such a God-Man, as was the Gnostic Abraxas; we have the Father and Son in Osiris and Horus; and so on, for instances of which see The Secret Doctrine. All this gives the true key to the evolution of Man by convergence of an evolution from below upwards with an evolution from above downwards; and declares the existence in Man of an immortal Divine Self, who crucifies himself on the Cross of mundane existence, in order to make fully manifest on earth the Divine Nature, and who thereby redeems the lower nature of man. This is the true salvation, and it is our own Christos who is the real Mediator between God and Man, the real accomplisher of the At-One-Ment. Truly Theosophy, so far from being the opponent of Christianity, is its interpreter, its redeemer.
It is not faith in a particular person that saves man, but faith in his own Divine Nature; so the same way of salvation applies equally to all men, whatever their religion. What can be thought of those who, whether in the name of religion or of science, deny this Divine Nature, making of man either a creature born in sin and unable to help himself, or a mere intellectual animal?