Los Angeles herald., 1905-08-28
DR.. HENRY FRANK LECTURES
AT VENICE
CLAIMS NEW THOUGHT is OLD
Speaker Declares Christianity Has
Been Perverted, Beolouded and
PrIest-Rldden for Over
Thousand Years

Special 10 Inc fteIHius
VENICE. Aug. 2L7-Dr. Henry Frank
Of New York was welcomed by a
crowded house this afternoon when he
delivered his famous lecture on Mes
sage OF the New Thought" DR.. Frank
sold in part;
"As old as the heart Of man Is the
yearning for light and love and truth;
and as old as humanity has been the
faith that truth Is eternal and the
universe is benefcent. This is the
burden and substance of the new
thought. It is only new because the
cry of the dreamy Hindoo the astutc
Jew, the keen Athenian, the austere
Egyptian and the primitive European
is translated into modern language and
made resonant with the eloquence Of
rejuvenated hope.
For centuries, through priestly op-
preston and churchly perversion, the
common intelligence had been blighted
and the heart of man benighted. Once
in the earliest stages of human thought
the gods dwelt close by man and
walked with him on earth. But anon
they were estranged and sought far
heights on Olympus. Sinai, or Thibe-
tan peaks.
Then all the world was changed;
heaven vanished as promised state of
earth and became a dream of future
existence, salvation was not a triumph
Of individual embodiment but a pur-
chased privilege from some offended
gloom.
Says Priestism Prevails
For over one thousand years Chris
tianity has perverted and beclouded its
primitive conceptions and sank from
humanitarianism to priestism, from the
religion of love and sympathy to that
of conflict and partisanism.
THE idea Of God entertained in the
primitive Christian church was pre-
cisely that of the so-called new thought.
So long has it been submerged beneath
perverse influences that when again 1t
is resurrected we think of 1t as some-
thing strange. But all the fathers of
the church believe in a universal, all
They had no room in their theology for
the hell or the heaven or the damnation
that we have so long been terrified by.
THE early church knew God as love
and not as hate, as friend and father
and not as Judge and tyrant. God was
always good and his universe must be
as good as he.
Likewise for over thousand years
we misconceived the nature and char
acter of Jesus the Christ, because of
perverse and benighting theology.
THE fathers Of the early church did
not think of Jesus as an exclusive
savior; they knew that he had been in
the world before in other forms and
they sought to exalt the spirit in Jesus,
the universal Christ, which he en-
bodied, and not the man Jesus whom
false teachers compelled men to wor-
ship as God.
But the new thought has also VEN
tured in the field of philosophy and
science and here has attained triumphs
no less distinguished than in theology.
The distinctive principle of its philos-
ophy is the unity of the universe.
"A bad God can never make good
men; and good God, If he is good, can
have no room in his universe for evil.
Therefore to imagine that evil is a
permanent and essential quality of the
infinite universe is to malign the Gol
who reigns, and make a farce Of mis-
creation"
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