CHAPTER 28 *
Udraka gives a feast in Jesus' honour. Jesus speaks on the unity of God and the brotherhood of life*. Criticises the priesthood. Becomes the guest of a farmer.
2 Udraka made a feast in honour of his guest, and many high born Hindu priests and scribes were there.
3 And Jesus said to them, With much delight I speak to you concerning life--the brotherhood of life.
4 * The universal God is one, yet he is more than one; all things are God; all things are one.
5 * By the sweet breaths of God all life is bound in one; so if you touch a fibre of a living thing you send a thrill from the centre to the outer bounds of life.
6 * And when you crush beneath your foot the meanest worm, you shake the throne of God, and cause the sword of right to tremble in its sheath.
7 * The bird sings out its song for men, and men vibrate in unison to help it sing.
8 * The ant constructs her home, the bee its sheltering comb, the spider weaves her web, and flowers breath to them a spirit in their sweet perfumes that gives them strength to toil.
9 * Now, men and birds and beasts and creeping things are deities, made flesh; and how dare men kill anything?
10 * 'Tis cruelty that makes the world awry. When men have learned that when they harm a living thing they harm themselves, they surely will not kill, nor cause a thing that God has made to suffer pain.
11 A lawyer said, I pray you, Jesus, tell who is this God you speak about; where are his priests, his temples and his shrines?
12 * And Jesus said, The God I speak about is everywhere; he cannot be compassed with walls, nor hedged about with bounds of any kind.
13 * All people worship God, the One; but all the people see him not alike.
14 * This universal God is wisdom, will and love.
15 * All men see not the Triune God. One sees him as the God of might; another as the God of thought; another as the God of love.
16 * A man's ideal is his God, and so, as man unfolds. Man's God to-day, to-morrow is not God.
17 * The nations of the earth see God from different points of view, and so he does not seem the same to every one.
18 * Man names the part of God he sees, and this to him is all of God; and every nation sees a part of God, and every nation has a name for God.
19 * You Brahmans call him Parabrahm; in Egypt he is Thoth; and Zeus is his name in Greece; Jehovah is his Hebrew name; but everywhere he is the causeless Cause, the rootless Root from which all things have grown.
20 * When men become afraid of God, and take him for a foe, they dress up other men in fancy garbs and call them priests.
21 * And charge them to restrain the wrath of God by prayers; and when they fail to win his favour by their prayers, to buy him off with sacrifice of animal, or bird.
22 * When man sees God as one with him, as Father-God, he needs no middle man, no priest to intercede;
23 * He goes straight up to him and says, My Father- God! and then he lays his hand in God's own hand, and all is well.
24 * And this is God. You are, each one, a priest, just for yourself; and sacrifice of blood God does not want.
25 * Just give your life in sacrificial service to all of life, and God is pleased.
26 When Jesus had thus said he stood aside; the people were amazed, but strove among themselves.
27 Some said, He is inspired by Holy Brahm; and others said, He is insane; and others said, He is obsessed; he speaks as devils speak.
28 But Jesus tarried not. Among the guests was one, a tiller of the soil, a generous soul, a seeker after truth, who loved the words that Jesus spoke, and Jesus went with him, and in his home abode.