What I Believe

Chapter 10

We say that it is hard to live in accordance with Christ’s precepts!  How can it be otherwise than hard while we conceal our state from ourselves and earnestly try to maintain the trust that our state is not what it really is?  Calling that trust ‘faith’ we exalt it into something sacred, and either by violence, by working upon the feelings, by threats, by flattery, or by deceit we seek to allure others to that false trust.  A Christian once said, ‘Credo quia absurdum,’ and other Christians now enthusiastically repeat the words, thinking a belief in absurdities is the best way to the truth.

A clever and learned man observed to me, a short time ago, in the course of conversation, that the Christian doctrine was of no importance as a doctrine or morality.  ‘We find the same,’ he said, ‘in the teachings of the Stoics, the Brahmins, and in the Talmud.  The substance of the Christian doctrine is in the theosophical teaching contained in the dogmas.’  That means that what is eternal and general to all humanity, what is necessary for life, and what is rational, is not of most value.  But what is quite incomprehensible, and therefore unnecessary, but in the name of which millions have been put to death, is the most important point of Christianity!

We have formed an erroneous idea of life, both as concerns ourselves personally and the world in general.  We have based it on our own wickedness and on our personal lusts; and we look upon that erroneous idea – united only by outward observances to the doctrine of Christ – as most important and necessary to life.  Were it not for that trust in what is but falsehood, which has been upheld by men for ages, the falsity of our view of life, as well as the truth of Christ’s doctrine, would have become manifest long ago.

Awful as it may seem to say so, I sometimes think that if the doctrine of Christ, with the Church teaching that has become a part of it, had never existed, those who now call themselves Christians would be nearer than they are now to the doctrine of Christ; i.e., to a rational idea of the true happiness of life.  The morality taught by all the prophets would not then have been a closed book for mankind.  Men would have had their petty preachers of the truth, and they would have believed them.  But now that the whole truth has been revealed, it seems so awful to those whose deeds are evil that they have interpreted it falsely, and men have lost their trust in the truth.  In our European world the saying of Christ, that ‘He came into the world in order to bear witness of the truth, and that he who is of the truth hears Him,’ has long since been answered in the words of Pilate, ‘What is the truth?’  We have taken in earnest these words of Pilate’s, expressive of such sad and deep irony, and we have made them our faith.  In our world not only do all live without knowing the truth, and without a desire to know it, but also with the firm conviction that of all idle occupations the i…