Newspaper Page Text
INTO MAmiOUS LIQHT
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Since entering the room John Marsden had not
spoken except to give Deveaux a courteous but brief
greeting. When he began to ridicule the Word of
God, John was filled with emotions which knew no
words of expression. The breath came and went
more quickly, his eyes seemed ablaze from some
fire within, his nostrils were distended, while his
hands grasped the arms of the chair in which he sat
to hold himself within his seat. But at Deveaux’s
lost words, wings of majesty seemed to lift him to
standing, and in a voice so deep, so vibrant that his
words trembled as they attempted to picture the
thoughts which burst forth from his very soul, he
said:
“You think that in this room only the Word of
God will cleave to you, do you, Julian Deveaux?
Remember that ‘in the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
And ‘the Word of God is quick and powerful, and
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to
the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the
joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the
thoughts and intents of the heart.’ * * * ‘the
worlds were framed by the Word of God.’ Have
your wall paper torn down and other paper placed
in its stead, stop up your ears, try to banish the
Word from you with taunts and jeers! 0 man, in
Him you live and move and have your being. The
air you breathe is the breath of God, your food and
drink he produces for you by the kiss of the sun
and the fall of the rain. The bed upon which you
lie is but a cushion to rest you within his arms.
The earth upon whch you stand is but his foot
stool.”
“God is not a being with a human form, except
as he is in Christ, His Son, sitting apart in some
material heaven, millions of miles away from us.
Science has become the “handmaid of religion,”
and enabled us, to a greater degree than ever before
in the history of man, to lift our conceptions of
God up to infinity and eternity. It has done away
with that crude idea—of God being a mechanic—
Creator, standing above and outside of the natural
world, and making all things out of nothing. We
now realize that God is the life at the heart of all
things. All nature is but God’s visible manifesta
tion—‘his garment so to speak, or, better, his body
—himself being the soul of all, the power that
energizes all, the intelligence that shines through
all, the will that directs all, the cause and explana
tion of the whole wonderful evolutionary process
that has brought into existence worlds and main.’ ”
“ ‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship him
must worship in spirit and truth;’ ‘God is our
Father;’ we are his children; in him we must abide
for every moment of this life as well as for eternal
life.”
“The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills
and the plains,
Are not these, 0 soul, the vision of Him who
reigns ?
The ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man
cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this vision—were it
not He?
Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with
Spirit can meet—
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands
and feet.”
“And, Julian, God is not simply that “Infinite
and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed”
in the physical universe alone. It is easy to be
carried away with physical science and invention in
this marvelous age, and come to think that these
are all. In exploring the wonderful continent of
matter, it is easy to lose sight of the other more
wonderful continent of mind; and in the study of
the latter, to go still further astray from the most
The Golden Age for July 19, 1906.
By LLEWELYN STEPHANS.
glorious of all continents, that of Spirit. How
vain men boast of their mental faculties, their keen
insight, their clearness of vision, their logical pow
ers of reasoning, and their infallible judgment.
How I shudder when I must face a devil-possessed
man who is so small i nsoul that he reflects a God
smaller than himself; who has so quenched the
Spirit of God born within him, that God would have
to all but slay him with suffering or death, to awak
en that spirit within him to the possibility of ‘see
ing him who is invisible.’ ”
“And, Julian Deveaux, you! you! you! are such
a man. How I have wrestled with God for you,
that you might come into the marvelous light of all
truth as it is revealed in Christ Jesus; that you
might have born within your soul the spirit of
truth, and right, and love, and hope, and duty, and
worship of your heavenly Father, and those things
of the soul which lift man into the very heart of
the Infinite God.”
The moment John Marsden stood up and began
speaking, Julian Deveaux was startled out of his
jeering mood. When he caught the fire of John’s
eyes, his own fell. By degrees his head bent lower
and lower until it rested within his hands. As his
spirit grew more and more humble, so his form re
flected without in the lowly posture of bended knee
and finally throwing himself prone upon his bed
with such a groan as John had never heard from
human lips.
The Bible scene came to John of the man with
an unclean spirit who dwelt among the tombs and
whom no man could tame, but who was crying and
torturing himself night and day; “but when he saw
Jesus afar off, he cried with a loud voice, and said,
“What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of
the most high God. I adjure thee by God, that
thou torment me not.” For Jesus had said unto
him. “Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.”
“Julian, I do not wonder that your soul groans
in agony because of its having been so demon-pos
sessed all these years. Tt seems almost beyond hu
man comprehension that God could be just, at the
same time, so merciful as to forgive and make pure
the soul of a man so stained with sin as yours is;
yet. he saved the thief on the cross; ho redeemed
Paul, who said of himself that he was the chief of
sinners; he released from the bonds of darkness and
superstition such men to uplift fallen humanity
as Luther and Calvin: and in this day in our own
city has shown himself alone as the divine power
that saves such mon as Jerry McAuley and Samuel
11. Hadley. Julian, instead of your being eternally
damned, and becoming more and more possessed of
demons who will finally drive you to insanity, in
some mysterious way God is casting out these de
mons who have possessed you for so many years,
and by degrees is clothing you with the garment of
right-mindedness. Tt is God’s own spirit who is
knocking at the door of your soul. Tt is He who is
putting his word before your eyes, to your oars and
at vour heart. Julian, arise and lot him in.”
John’s last words wore spoken in almost a whis
per as ho placed a gentle hand upon Julian’s head
in tender pleading.
Put at John’s touch, ho sprang up as if he had
be n 'i si nick by a terrible blow, exclaiming:
“And oven yon are using every effort to hasten
the fatal hour, instead of cheering my last mo
ments. When my reason is dethroned, you would
have the demon of religion to possess me wholly,
and thus obtain for vonrself and vour follow fanat
ics supremo hellish jov in witnessing the taunts and
jeers and laughter of my gay world at mo. their
chief.—when T have hoen chained in the bottom
less nit trying to cover my agony in the robes and
r'flmious cant of a priest. T sent for you with some
fooling of tenderness, believing that what T had to
tell you of my will would give you more pleasure
than anything else it was in my power to do for
you. But now you make of me almost a madman
on the spot. Your preaching takes me back to the
time I was taken from my governess, at the age of
eleven years, and placed in a Diocesan Institution
in Paris, in which my training for the priesthood
was begun, and which training lasted fifteen years.
It was not in one day or at one stop that I found
myself in a hell on earth. Almost as soon as I en
tered the Institution, I felt that the religious ideal
my sainted mother had bequeathed to me was low
ered, and my thoughts of God brought down to an
inferior level. Instead of the God of heaven, I
had the God of the priest, the “wafer god,” be
fore which our childish knees were made to bow.
Wo were forbidden to have a friend or confidant.
We were obliged to go to confession at least once
a month, and that was not a good school for sin
cerity, nor, indeed, for morality; and I found that
the Roman Catechism, with its distinctions between
venial sins and mortal sins, and the classes into
which lies arc divided—lies of jest, lies of duty,
lies of crime—tended rather to deform than to re
form the conscience. One tutor T had for a certain
time, solemnly taught his pupils that every morning
the Pope found a, letter from God on his window
sill: and when I inquired as to the of paper
upon which these communications were written,
T was commanded to say ten rosaries as a punish
ment for asking an unseasonable question.”
*‘As T grew older my soul sickened and harden
ed. Many times I planned to escape, hut no crimi
nal was ever in a more guarded prison, for my
father had sold me to the priesthood, I was their
slave, their tool.”
“The first years, T tried to hope that when I
grew to understanding and when manhood had
ripened my judgment, the apparent unchristian con
duct and inconsistencies of almost all the prelates
with whom T came in contact, would he explained
and the truth become evident to me. But as the
double doctrine of the church of Rome was thread
by thread woven about me, and T found myself
veiled in the garment whose name is “Priest of the
Holy Church,” I was initiated into the inner work
ings of the masterpiece of Satan, a building in
which the father of lies is comfortably housed and
of which nothing truly Christian remains but the
facade, the inscriptions and the names. And from
this well guarded building great lights are sent out
—searchlights and blind lights—upon the world’s
common, ignorant herd, who are held deluded
prisoners and captives. When I think of the mil
lions blinded and enslaved by this double-headed
monster, it almost makes a roaring lion of me, and
many has boon the time when T could hardly re
strain myself from running through the streets and
crying from the honstops, ‘come out of her, ye peo
ple, and free yourselves from the serpent’s coils
while ye may.’ For the papal head teaches that
ecclesiastical duty is law. and moral duty is habit:
that the moral habit is helpful doubtless to primi
tive. simple folks, hut it is dead and lifeless in it
self. and often crushes the spirit; and, moreover,
that any method which serves “The Church” is not
only permissible hut laudable. God’s glory and
Christ’s teachings were then but the armour and
shield to hide the real pretensions of the Vatican:
and the Papacy, with all its promises of what “the
church” will do to save lost souls, opens hut one
floor to heaven,—.“the church”—anfl no one can
get into “the church” without the aid of priests,
anfl then when one is in the church, he is told that
ho cannot approach God except through the priests
again, anfl by doing what the priests command, anfl
believing those things taught from the altar and
the confessional box. This system at once affirms
anfl denies the individual conscience, inasmuch as
that conscience must ever be sought in the dogmas
anfl direction of the “Institution.”
(To be continued.)
11