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Redundancy of the Gods

Was Christ born at a time when there was a gap

in the market for a new religion?

H P Blavatsky suggests that existing religions

of the day were already in decline.

Posted 20/12/06

 

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The extract below is from H P Blavatsky’s key to Theosophy which is in the form of a discourse with an enquirer. In this part  of the discourse HPB explains that the differences between Buddhism and Christianity are primarily a result of the differences in circumstances under which Gautama Siddartha and Christ were preaching.

 

What she has to say about the circumstances in which Christianity arose suggest that Christ was alive at a particularly opportune time to conduct his ministry

 

From The Key to Theosophy

 

Read history and think over it. At the time the events narrated in the Gospels are alleged to have happened, there was a similar intellectual

fermentation taking place in the whole civilized world, only with opposite results in the East and the West. The old gods were dying out. While the

civilized classes drifted in the train of the unbelieving Sadducees into materialistic negations and mere dead-letter Mosaic form in Palestine, and into moral dissolution in Rome, the lowest and poorer classes ran after sorcery and strange gods, or became hypocrites and Pharisees.

 

Once more the time for a spiritual reform had arrived. The cruel, anthropomorphic and jealous God of the Jews, with his sanguinary laws of "an eye for eye and tooth for tooth," of the

shedding of blood and animal sacrifice, had to be relegated to a secondary place and replaced by the merciful "Father in Secret." The latter had to be shown, not as an extra-Cosmic God, but as a divine Savior of the man of flesh, enshrined in

his own heart and soul, in the poor as in the rich.

 

No more here than in India, could the secrets of initiation be divulged, lest by giving that which is holy to the dogs, and casting pearls before swine, both the Revealer and the things revealed should be trodden under foot. Thus, the reticence of both Buddha and Jesus-whether the latter lived out the historic period allotted to him or not, and who equally abstained from revealing plainly the Mysteries of Life and Death-led in the one case to the blank negations of Southern Buddhism, and in

the other, to the three clashing forms of the Christian Church and the 300 sects in Protestant England alone.

 

 

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