[All of the above] throws light on the transfiguration scene on the mount. There were present there Peter and James and John with Jesus; or ים Iami, James, _Water_; יבשה, Peter, _Earth_; דרה, John, _Spirit_, _Air_, and יבור Jesus, _Fire_, _Life_—together INRI. But behold Eli and Moses met them there, or אלי and למה or _Eli_ and _Lamah_, or 113 and 345. And this shows that the scene of transfiguration was connected with the one above set forth.(286)
This kabalistical reading of the Gospel narratives—hitherto supposed to record the most important, the most mystically awful, yet most real events of the life of Jesus—must fall with terrible weight upon some Christians. Every honest trusting believer who has shed tears of reverential emotion over the events of the short period of the public life of Jesus of Nazareth, has to choose one of the two ways opening before him after reading the aforesaid: either his faith has to render him quite impervious to any light coming from human reasoning and evident fact; or he must confess that he has lost his Saviour. The One whom he had hitherto considered as the unique incarnation on this earth of the One Living God in heaven, fades into thin air, on the authority of the properly read and correctly interpreted _Bible_ itself. Moreover, since on the authority of Jerome himself and his accepted and authentic confession, the book written by the hand of Matthew “exhibits matter not for _edification_ but for _destruction_” (of Church and _human_ Christianity, and only that) what truth can be expected from his famous _Vulgate_? _Human_ mysteries, concocted by generations of Church Fathers bent upon evolving a religion of their own invention, are seen instead of a _divine_ Revelation; and that this was so is corroborated by a prelate of the Latin Church. Saint Gregory Nazianzen wrote to his friend and confidant, Saint Jerome:
Nothing can impose better on a people than verbiage; the less they understand the more they admire.... Our fathers and doctors have often said, not what they thought, but that to which circumstances and necessity forced them.
Which then of the two—the clergy, or the Occultists and Theosophists—are the more blasphemous and dangerous? Is it those who would impose upon the world’s acceptance a Saviour of their own fashioning, a God with human shortcomings, and who therefore is certainly not a perfect divine Being; or those others who say: Jesus of Nazareth was an Initiate, a holy, grand and noble character, but withal human, though truly “a Son of God”?