Six Theosophic Points, and Other Writings

4. In the baptism of infants the Word of God enters into union and connection with them in the covenant, and is the first stirring in this world; as a smouldering in wood that begins to glimmer, but the wicklet is often after darkened and extinguished. Moreover, in many a child that is begotten of wholly godless essence, it is not susceptible.

5. Christ said: Suffer little children to come unto
me, for of such is the kingdom of God ( Mark x. 14) .
Not dogs, wolves, toads or serpents, but children,

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in whom the essence is not wholly devihsh. For many a child is baptized in the wrath of God, for which the parents are to blame. An evil tree bears evil fruit, says Christ.

6. And though He is come into this world to save what was lost, yet it depends also on the essence of that which will let itself be helped. For an animal-man may attain the image [of God], if he turn round and suffer the Word that became man to draw him. If not, then he remains in his animal essence an evil beast.

7. But we are not to suppose that baptism lays the first foundation of the human essence, and is wholly the first enkindling cause of the divine fire. No, that is not so; for a child becomes through the parents' essence a spirit, as also flesh and blood, with espousal of the constellation of the spirit majoris mundi.

8. At the time when a child in the womb has attained to life, then immediately divine or hellish essence glimmers from the primal fount and origin.

9. And if but a small spark of the divine essence be active, the child is susceptible of baptism. And though it should die unbaptized, yet the spark is in God's Mystery, and glimmers in God's kingdom, and is kindled in the fire of God. For it dies in the Mysterium of the Father, and glimmers up in the Mysterium of the Son who became man.

10. The parents' baptism and covenant is its baptism and covenant. The reconciliation has taken place in human blood, in the right true human essence. God's word or heart has given itself top. 92 the shut up, dead, human essence; not to the earthly part, but to the heavenly part. Not to the part that Adam by his imagination introduced, which is earth; but to the part which was given to Adam from the angelic world, which he corrupted and poisoned with the earthly craving for in the craving earthly, coarse, animal flesh was produced.

11. This part has the right human essence, and in this part God became man. And this same part has the ground of the angelic world, for it takes its origin from the angelic world.

12. But if most frequently godless parents are immersed wholly in the wrath of God, and so beget children in the wrath; then is their seed shut up in death, and has in it nothing of the right human essence, which is moving, save only what the constellation in the spirit ma j oris mundi has in itself. There certainly the divine power has some movement; but the wrath's power exists as opposite, and is heavy. Nevertheless, there is no impossibility; for the incarnation of God, his becoming man, is presented to all souls in the life's light.

13. But baptism contains something else. God's essence (as the water of eternal life born of God's gentleness) must move the right human essence (with Adam shut up in death), and yield itself up there as a new life or a living essence. God's water must baptize ; the Holy Spirit must be the operant.

14. But I say, according to my knowledge, that the water of eternal Hfe, upon which the Holy

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Spirit broods, will hardly yield itself up to the poison of wrath and death, where there is not an essence of desire [toward God] .