The Perfect Way: Or, The Finding of Christ

by Anna Bonus Kingsford

Overview

Anna Kingsford (1846–1888) published her first book at the age of 13. A passionate anti-vivisectionist, she also championed womens' rights and vegetarianism. Leaving behind her husband and daughter, she travelled to France to study medicine, accompanied by the writer Edward Maitland. The pair shared a fascination with the spiritual and became leading members of the Theosophical and Hermetic societies. This book, first published anonymously in 1882, is a collection of lectures on theosophical topics delivered to a private audience in summer 1881. It explores the basis of all religions, the nature of the soul, spiritualism and the feminine aspect of the divine, and also discusses blood sacrifice, vegetarianism, pantheism and the teachings of the Kabbalah and the Bhagavad Gita. The author hoped this wide-ranging study of allegories, symbols and myths would 'restore and rehabilitate the truth', reconciling mind and heart, religion and science, and promoting liberty and reason.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108028110
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/19/2011
Series:	Cambridge Library Collection - Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge
Pages:	382
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

Read an Excerpt

THE PERFECT WAY; THE FINDING OF CHRIST. LECTURE THE FIRST. INTRODUCTORY. Part I. The purpose of the Lectures, of which this is the first, is the exposition of a system of Doctrine and Life, at once scientific, philosophic, and religious, and adapted to all the needs and aspirations of mankind. This system is offered in substitution, on the one hand, for that traditional and dogmatic Conventionalism which, by its failure to meet the tests of science and to respond to the moral instincts, is now by thoughtful persons nearly -or wholly discarded ; and on the other hand, for that agnostic Materialism which is rapidly overspreading the world to the destruction of all that is excellent in the nature of man. 2. But although offered in substitution both for that which experience has shown to be defective, and that which is so recent as to be only now in course of reception, the system to be proposed is not itself new; and its present exposition represents, not an Invention as ordinarily understood, but a Restoration. For, as will be shown indubit- chapter{Section 4ably, there has been in the world from the earliest ages a system which fulfils all the conditions requisite for endurance ; a system which, being founded in the nature of Existence itself, is eternal in its truth and application, and needs but due understanding and observance to enable man by means of it to attain to the highest perfection and satisfaction he can by any possibility imagine or desire. And, as also will be shown, this system is no other than that which all the great religions of the world have, under various guises and with varying degrees of success, striven to express. 3. Our object, therefore, is to restore andrehabilitate the Truth, by divesting it of all the many limitations, degenerat...

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. Introductory; 2. The soul, and the substance of existence; 3. The various orders of spirits, and how to discern them; 4. The atonement; 5. The constitution of existence: its nature and unity; 6. The Fall (No. I); 7. The Fall (No. II); 8. The Redemption; 9. God as the Lord; or, the divine image; Appendices.