U N I T Y
continued
Thought teaching of reincarnation which was incorporated into Unity beliefs. Not believing in the Word of God, Fillmore had to have some kind of hope to hold out to his fol lowers. He makes it sound very cheerful: “We fall asleep without any sense of apprehension and for a little while the soul leaves the body. If we have a good conscience we rest peacefully and acquire strength for the new day’s work. If worried, anxious, or guilty, we are troubled by dreams that distress us . . . The soul leaves the body to mortal dissolution, yet it does not fail to return in due time to take up a body—as long as it be lieves in the limitations of sense . . . If his life has been according to the Golden Rule . . . his soul basks in the sunshine of a world Elysian and his hope of heaven is for a sea son fulfilled” (Talks on Truth, pp. 47,48). Of course, this is all fiction. There is not one word of truth in it. The Word of God makes very clear what happens to a believer at death. Paul wrote: “ For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to de part, and to be with Christ; which is far better” (Phil. 1:23); “ For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens . . . whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord . . . absent from the body . . . present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:1, 6, 8). For the Christian, death means that his spirit goes to be with Christ and his body is laid in the grave until the resurrection when spirit and body will be reunited. This is the only body we shall ever have. As for the resurrection of the body, it will not be raised until that great day when they “ . . . that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth” (John 5:28, 29). The gay little picture Fillmore
painted of the spirit flitting about from body to body is somewhat obliterated by these horrible concep tions: “Material selfishness starves the soul and devitalizes the physical body . . . when death overtakes such a one, the inner, as well as the outer, life changes environment. The material avenues are lost to the outer, and the soul finds itself in a hell of desires without the flesh sensations with which to express it self . . . the body consciousness, the peace of union for all the attributes of man, has been removed, produc ing in the life consciousness a great gulf or chasm that cannot be crossed, except by incarnation in another body” (Talks on Truth, pp. 156,157). This reveals to what lengths the imagination not under the control of God’s Spirit can go. Fillmore even declared he could remember his previous incarnations! Have W e Lived Before? by Er nest C. Wilson is the Unity text book on reincarnation. He explained why the doctrine of “ rebirth” was not discussed in the Scriptures as follows: “ It was a very generally accepted doctrine (and still is) in most Oriental coun tries. We who so generally accept the Bible in this country forget that its origin was in the Orient. To Bible writers there was no point in emphasizing a doctrine that was already familiar” (p. 40). This is such a sickly argument that his case would have been strengthened by its omission. Sup pose we applied that theory to sal vation, redemption, atonement, cre ation and all the other “ generally accepted doctrines” in the Bible! H e claimed that Christ was reincarnated: “Jesus de mands of the Pharisees, ‘What think ye of Christ? whose son is he?’ They answered, not as one might ordinarily expect, ‘the son of Joseph,’ but ‘the son of David.’ In other words, He was
the reincarnation of David” (p.41). What ignorance of the Scriptures this betrays! Jesus Christ is called “ the son of David” throughout Holy Writ; that He was a descendant of David was proof of His deity and kingship. Evidently the goal of Unity is the same as that of the Hindu, the extinction of the flame of life, final emancipation, reunion with Brah ma, cessation of being. “With each degree of dawning spiritual con sciousness we are coming closer to that great ultimate, the incarnation of Christ. We should not be con tent with less than that . . . Our human incarnations are steps along the way to the great incarnation” (p. 61). The only difference be tween this and the Hindu and Bud dhist teaching is just in names; they use Christ whereas the East Indian re lig ions use “Nirvana” and “ Brahm.” A few more excerpts will serve to show how completely Unity has embraced this repulsive and blas phemous conception: “Reincarna tion is the gospel of the second chance . . . Reincarnation is God’s loving answer to that universal cry of the human heart distressed by its missing of the shining mark . . . Imagine some circumstance taking a person into the beyond in the midst of a busy life of youthful activity . . . Is he not likely to seize the first favorable opportunity of re-entering the portals of birth, choosing, if he has earned a choice, such a parentage and such environ ment as will help him to have the experiences and the opportunities that his soul needs and desires . . . You will continue your progress from the point where you left off, and you will rear a new body, per haps a finer one . . . Eventually we believe you will have purified your mind . . . and jou r body . . . to such a degree that you do not need to relinquish it to corruption but will be able to quicken it to spiritual expression as did Jesus the
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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