- 18 - • At first he did not know who he was, or what mission he was destined to fulfill as a mortal. However, soon after he had reached the age of reason, Jesus began to exhibit great mediumistic powers. These consisted of the gifts of clairvoyance and clairaudience, which gradually attained great perfection, enabling him to communicate with the spirit world, to see the spirits as a clairvoyant, and as a clairaudient to hear the words spoken by them. These gifts with which the maturing youth was endowed were nothing new; many others before him had possessed them. But in the case of this envoy of God, the gifts were developed to the highest degree attainable by man. Through his communication with the Divine spirit world he was taught, while on earth, everything he needed for the execution of his task, for in these matters he, as a mortal, was as ignorant as all the rest. • Jesus had no recollection of his previous state as the highest of God’s spirits, because in every instance, the incarnation of a spirit in a material body destroys all memory of the past. Therefore, the things that Christ preached while he was on earth were taught to him by the spirit world, as Moses had learned all those things which he later proclaimed to the people by inquiring of God in the Tabernacle. Thus, Jesus passed from boyhood through adolescence to manhood, and as he grew older, his wisdom increased, not only in the way in which this is the case with all people as they mature, but also, above all, by reason of the teachings he received from the Divine spirits. Hand in hand with this went the growth of his goodness, or, as your Bible expresses it: Luke 2: 52: ‘Jesus grew in age and wisdom and became day by day dearer to God and to man.’ It was real progress and not merely a gradual disclosure of himself, as your religion maintains. As a mortal. Christ was not perfect from the outset, as no spirit incarnated in human form can be perfect. All matter is inherently base and full of imperfections. Even a spirit that enters, pure and flawless, into the garment of flesh must, during its life as a human being, fight its way step by step through the debasing influence of evil toward perfection. The weaknesses and failings of every human body react upon the spirit it houses, and it, however perfect it may be, must constantly wrestle with them and can never quite free itself from them during its earthly existence. This is a part of human nature from which not even Christ was exempt. To his last breath he had to fight against these failings, and more than once he succumbed to human weakness in his battle with Evil. In the garden of Gethsemane even this mighty conqueror turned faint and weak, praying that the Father might let the cup of suffering pass from him, yet adding: ‘Not my will, but Thine be done.’ He knew that it was the Father’s will that he must suffer, and his outcry reveals the weak, imperfect mortal, whose nature, being human, quails and rebels at the thought of an agonizing death. A perfect being would have said: ‘Father, send whatsoever torments thou wilt and deemest best. I will endure them.’ He would not have said: ‘Take them away.’ And it was human frailty that spoke through him from the Cross, when he uttered the plaint: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ This cry would never have been uttered by a human being perfect in every way, but such
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