Great Throughts Treasury

"The absolute demonstration of man’s mastery of fate and command of all condition - the victory of man - all men in this racial man, this elder brother of mankind in his triumph over sin, fear and death! But one thing had remained in my mind as necessary to prove to the mass of men to-day man’s absolute supremacy over death in all its forms as an attribute of his oneness with God, with Eternal Life, Perfect Love, Perfect Justice, Omniscience and Omnipotence."

"For this cause he came into the world; that he might be a witness to the truth; a living, unimpeachable witness of the truth that shall make us free - the truth of man’s religion (reunion) with God, through absolute spiritual self consciousness - with God - with the Eternal, Omnipotent and Omniscient Source and Fountain of Life, “in whom we live and move and have our being,” without whom we are not!"

"Man is to know himself, and with full command of his conditions and unlimited time for action, is not only to soar toward, but absolutely attain to heights of being and of beauty hitherto undreamed of, and bringing fairly within his realization a heaven on earth, in true grandeur and happiness as far transcending the heaven of the orthodox Christian as that heaven transcends the heaven of the savage."

"At daybreak of Friday, the 11th of May, 1895, I woke into full and absolute knowledge of the great fact which to me proves man's immortality here and now, and in the body of flesh we know. I know that a man had lived nearly nineteen hundred years, and, knowing only fuller and fuller life with the passing of the years, had lived and still lives in the same body in which, in the beginning of that period, he walked the earth a man of flesh and blood. This man, in whom humanity came to full flower with the conscious manifestation of his oneness with eternal life in the thirty-third year of his present incarnation, has really destroyed the last enemy, which is death."

"I have said I knew this greatest fact in the history of humanity in a moment; that what before was as unknown to me as was the Western continent to Columbus before he sighted land, became in an instant a known reality, as much a part of my consciousness as was the air I breathed; a truth as yet faintly comprehended in its fullness, but a truth firmly grasped, irrevocable and indestructible; an eternal verity written in the letters of fire on my brain and in my heart—and so on the mind and in the heart of this age, and of all future ages."

"Opening my eyes on the first rays of morning light illuminating my room, I thought of the oneness of Eternal Light and Life in a vague way, when my attention was seemingly diverted by the image of a monk's tonsured head; and I thought of the crown of thorns it symbolized. Then the whole sublime tragedy of the passion moved vividly and rapidly before my eyes; the scourging, the pillory, the cuffs and blows, the jibes and jeers, the mockery and derision of that crowning with thorns; the painful progress of Golgotha, hooted by the blind and cruel mob; the torture and ignominy of the nailing to the cross, the cry of agony telling that the last dregs of the cup had been drained; the shout of victory that proclaimed "It is finished!" I saw then the spear thrust."