dreams and visions; although they may be puzzled, like Peter, subsequent events will bring to them a clearer understanding of the lesson.
In the 10th chapter of Acts, we read:
Peter went up upon the housetop to pray, about the sixth hour: and he became hungry, and desired to eat: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance; and he beholdeth the heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending, as it were a great sheet, let down by four corners upon the earth: wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts and creeping things of the earth and birds of the heaven. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common and unclean. And avoice came unto him again a second time, What God hath cleansed, make not thou common. And this was done thrice: and straightway the vessel was received up into heaven.
Now while Peter was much perplexed in himself what the vision which he had seen might mean, behold, the men that were sent by Cornelius, having made inquiry for Simon's house, stood before the gate, and called and asked whether Simon, who was surnamed Peter, were lodging there. And while Peter thought on the vision, the Spirit said unto him, Behold, three men seek thee.
Peter was still bound by the Jewish teaching that there was no salvation for any except those of his faith, and this vision was to break the bondage of such narrowness and show him that the gospel of Jesus Christ is for all people. In a vision the Lord had already instructed Cornelius, the Roman soldier, that he should send certain of his servants to Joppa and fetch Peter to Caesarea.
Some advocates of flesh eating make the mistake of giving a literal interpretation to Peter's vision, holding that the Lord commanded him to kill and eat "all manner of fourfooted beasts and creeping things of the earth and birds of the heaven," and that God has cleansed them and thus prepared them for food for man. If this view of the vision should be carried out literally, we should eat all fourfooted animals, including skunks, all the creeping things, and all birds of the air, including vultures. We know, however, that the vision is to be taken in its symbolizing meaning. Peter was to appropriate and harmonize in his inner consciousness all thoughts of separation, all uncleanliness and impurity, narrowness, selfishness--the thoughts that bring diversity and separation.
We have within us, bound in the cage of the subconsciousness, all the propensities and the savagery of the animals. In the regeneration these are brought forth and a great reconciliation takes place. We find that there is really nothing unclean, except to human consciousness. In the original creative idealism of Divine Mind, everything was made perfect and sanctified and pronounced "very good." But God did not tell man to eat everything because it was good in its place.
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food.
When man has regenerated and lifted up the beasts of the field, he will carry out the injunction given to the original Adam and name them "good."
Man's body represents the sum total of the animal world, because in its evolution it has had experience in nearly every type of elemental form. These memories are part of the soul, and in the unregenerate they come to the surface sporadically. Sometimes whole nations seem to revert from culture to savagery without apparent cause, but there is always a cause. These reversions are the result of some violent wrenching of the soul, or of concentration, to the exclusion of everything else, on a line of thought out of harmony with divine law. When the soul is ready for its next step in the upward way, a great change takes place, known as regeneration. Jesus referred to this when He said to Nicodemus: "Ye must be born anew." In one of its phases the new birth is a resurrection. All that man has passed through has left its image in the subconsciousness, wrought in mind and matter. These images are set free in the regeneration, and man sees them as part of himself. In his "Journal," George Fox, the spiritual-minded Quaker, says:
I was under great temptations sometimes, and my inward sufferings were heavy; but I could find none to open my condition to but the Lord alone, unto whom I cried night and day. I went back into Nottinghamshire, where the Lord shewed me that the natures of those things which were hurtful without, were within the hearts and minds of wicked men. The natures of dogs, swine, vipers, of Sodom and Egypt, Pharaoh, Cain, Ishmael, Esau, etc. The natures of these I saw within, though people had been looking without. I cried to the Lord saying, "Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils?" And the Lord answered, "It was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak of all conditions?" In this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also, that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that also I saw the infinite love of God, and I had great openings. As I was walking by the steeple-house side in the town of Mansfield, the Lord said unto me, "That which people trample upon must be thy food." And as the Lord spake he opened to me that people and professors trampled upon the life, even the life of Christ was trampled upon; they fed upon words, and fed one another with words; but trampled under foot the blood of the son of God, which blood was my life: and they lived in their airy notions talking of him. It seemed strange to me at the first, that I should feed on that which the high professors trampled upon; but the Lord opened it clearly tome by his eternal Spirit and power.
In the regeneration man finds that he has, in the part of his soul called the natural man, animal propensities corresponding to the animals in the outer world. In the pictures of the mind, these take form as lions, horses, oxen, dogs, cats, snakes, and the birds of the air. The visions of Joseph, Daniel, John, and other Bible seers were of this character. When man understands that these animals represent thoughts, working in the subconsciousness, he has a key to the many causes of bodily conditions. It is clear to him that the prophets of old were using symbols to express ideas, and he sees that to interpret these symbols he must learn what each represents, in order to get the original meaning.
According to Genesis, the original creation was ideal, and through man the ideal was given character and form. Adam gave character to all the beasts of the field: "and whatever the man called every living creature, that was the name thereof." To the spiritually wise it is revealed that, when man is fully redeemed, he redeems and purifies and uplifts the animals in himself. The animal world will go through a complete transformation when the race is redeemed. As Isaiah says, "the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox." Some even go farther than this, and say that in the millennium there will be no necessity for animals; that they are, in reality, the dissipated forces of the human family and that when those forces are finally gathered into the original fount in the subjective, there will be no more animals in the objective; that in this way man will be immensely strengthened and a certain connection will be made between the so-called material and the spiritual.
Chapter VIII
Understanding
REFERENCE to the dictionary shows the words wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and intelligence to be so closely related that their definitions overlap in a most confusing way. The words differ in meaning, but various writers on the mind and its faculties have given definitions of these words in terms that directly oppose the definitions of other writers. There are two schools of writers on metaphysical subjects, and their definitions are likely to confuse a student unless he knows to which class the writer belongs. First are those who handle the mind and its faculties from an intellectual standpoint, among whom may be mentioned Kant, Hegel, Mill, Schopenhauer, and Sir William Hamilton. The other school includes all the great company of religious authors who have discerned that Spirit and soul are the causing factors of the mind. Compilers of dictionaries have consulted the former class for their definitions, and we have in consequence an inadequate set of terms to express the deep
