 TRINITY ATOMIC TEST SITE On Monday morning, July 16, 1945, the world was changed forever when the first atomic bomb was tested in an isolated area of the New Mexico desert. Conducted in the final month of World War II by the top secret Manhattan engineer district, this test was code named TRINITY. The TRINITY test took place on the Alamogordo bombing and gunnery range about 230 miles south of the Manhattan Project headquarters at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today, this 3,200 square mile range, partially located in the desolate Hornada del Muerto Valley, is named the White Sands Missile Range and is actively used for non-nuclear weapons testing. Before the war, the range was mostly public and private grazing land that had always been sparsely populated. During the war, it was even more lonely and deserted because the ranchers had agreed to vacate their homes in January 1942. They left because the War Department wanted the land to use as an artillery and bombing practice area. In September 1944, a remote 18x24 square mile portion of the northeast corner of the bombing range was set aside for the Manhattan Project and the TRINITY test by the military. The selection of this remote location in the Hornada del Muerto Valley for the TRINITY test site was from an internal list of eight possible test sites. Besides the Hornada, three of the other seven sites were also located in New Mexico, the Tolerosa base near Almagordo, the Lava Beds, now the El Mapa National Monument south of Grants, and an area southwest of Cuba and north of Thoreau. Other possible sites not located in New Mexico were an Army training area north of Blythe, California in the Mojave Desert, San Nicolas Island, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California, and on Padre Island south of Corpus Christi, Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. The last choice for the test was the beautiful San Luis Valley of south-central Colorado, near today's Great Sand Dunes National Monument. Based on a number of criteria that included availability, distance from Los Alamos, good weather, few or no settlements, and that no Indian land would be used, the choices for the test site were narrowed down to two in the summer of 1944. The first choice was the military training area in Southern California. The second choice was the Hornada del Muerto Valley in New Mexico. The final site selection was made in late August 1944 by Major General Leslie R. Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project. When General Groves discovered that in order to use the California location, he would need the permission of its commander, General George Patton. Groves quickly decided on the second choice, the Hornada del Muerto. This was because General Groves did not want anything to do with the flamboyant Patton, who Groves had once described as the most disagreeable man I had ever met. Despite being second choice, the remote Hornada was a good location for the test because it provided isolation for security and safety, was only 230 miles south of Los Alamos, and was already under military control. Plus, the Hornada enjoyed relatively good weather. The history of the Hornada is in itself quite fascinating, since it was given its name by the Spanish conquerors of New Mexico. The Hornada was a shortcut on the Camino Rial, the king's highway that linked Old Mexico to Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico. The Camino Rial went north from Mexico City till it joined the Rio Grande near present El Paso, Texas. Then the trail followed the river valley further north to a point where the river curved to the west, and its valley narrowed and became impassable for the supply wagons. To avoid this obstacle, the wagons took the dubious detour north of the Costa Hornada del Muerto. Sixty miles of desert, very little water, and numerous hostile apaches. Hence the name Hornada del Muerto, which is often translated as the journey of death or as the route of the dead man. It is also interesting to note that in the late sixteenth century the Spanish considered their province of New Mexico to include most of North America west of the Mississippi. The origin of the code named Trinity for the test site is also interesting, but the true source is unknown. One popular account attributes the name to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the Manhattan Project. According to this version, the well-read Oppenheimer based the name Trinity on the fourteenth holy sonnet by John Dunne, a sixteenth century English poet and sermon writer. The sonnet started, batter my heart, three-person to God. Another version of the name's origin comes from the University of New Mexico's historian, Furnick M. Saz. In his 1984 book The Day the Sun Rows Twice, Saz quotes Robert W. Henderson, head of the engineering group in the Explosives Division of the Manhattan Project. Henderson told Saz that the name Trinity came from Major W. A. Lex Stevens. According to Henderson, he and Stevens were at the test site discussing the best way to haul jumbo, see below, the thirty miles from the closest railway sighting to the test site. At the Valt Roman Catholic, Stevens observed that the railway sighting was called Pope Sighting. He then remarked that the Pope had special access to the Trinity and that the scientists would need all the help they could get to move the 214-ton jumbo to its proper spot. The Trinity test was originally set for July 4, 1945. However, final preparations for the test, which included the assembly of the bombs plutonium core, did not begin in earnest until Thursday, July 12. The abandoned George McDonald Ranch House, located two miles south of the test site, served as the assembly point for the device's core. After assembly, the plutonium core was transported to Trinity site to be inserted into the thing or gadget as the atomic device was called. But on the first attempt to insert the core, it stuck. After letting the temperatures of the core and gadget equalize, the core fit perfectly to the great relief of all present. The completed device was raised to the top of a 100-foot steel tower on Saturday, July 14. During this process, workers piled up mattresses beneath the gadget to cushion a possible fall. When the bomb reached the top of the tower without mishap, installation of the explosive detonators began. The 100-foot tower, a surplus forest service fire watch tower, was designated point zero. Ground zero was at the base of the tower. As a result of all the anxiety surrounding the possibility of a failure of the test, a verse by an unknown author circulated around Los Alamos. It read, From this crude lad that spawned a dud, there next to Truman's axe uncurled, low the embatter's savant stood, and fire the flop heard round the world. A betting pool was also started by scientists at Los Alamos on the possible yield of the Trinity test. Yields from 45,000 tons of TNT to zero were selected by the various betters. The Nobel Prize-winning 1938 physicist Enrico Fermi was willing to bet anyone that the test would wipe out all life on Earth, with special odds on the mere destruction of the entire state of New Mexico. Meanwhile, back at the test site, technicians installed seismographic and photographic equipment at varying distances from the tower. Other instruments were set up for recording radioactivity, temperature, air pressure, and similar data needed by the project scientist. According to Lansing Lamont in his 1965 book Day of Trinity, life at Trinity could at times be very exciting. One afternoon, while scientists were busily setting up test instruments in the desert, the tail gunner of a low-flying B-29 bomber spotted some grazing antelopes and opened up with his twin 50-caliber machine guns. A dozen scientists, under the plane and out of the gunner's line of vision, dropped their instruments and hugged the ground and tear as the bullets thudded about them. Later, a number of these scientists threatened to quit the project. Bunkers built three observation points 5.68 miles, 10,000 yards, north, south, and west of ground zero. Code named Able Baker and Pittsburgh, these heavily built wooden bunkers were reinforced with concrete and covered with Earth. The bunker designated Baker, or South 10,000, served as a control center for the test. This is where head scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer would be for the test. A fourth observation point was the test base camp, the abandoned Dave McDonald Ranch, located about 10 miles southwest of ground zero. The primary observation point was on Campania Hill, located about 20 miles to the northwest of Trinity, near today's Stallion Range Gate, off New Mexico 380. The test was originally scheduled for 4 a.m., Monday, July 16, but was postponed to 5.30 due to a severe thunderstorm that would have increased the amount of radioactive fallout and to have interfered with the test results. The rain finally stopped at 5.29.45 a.m. mountain wartime. The device exploded successfully, and the atomic age was born. The nuclear blast created a flash of light brighter than a dozen suns. The light was seen over the entire state of New Mexico and in parts of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico. The resultant mushroom cloud rose to over 38,000 feet within minutes, and the heat of the explosion was 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun. At 10 miles away, this heat was described as like standing directly in front of a roaring fireplace. Every living thing within a mile of the tower was obliterated. The power of the bomb was estimated to be equal to 20,000 tons of TNT, or equivalent to the bomb load of 2,000 B-29 superfortresses. After witnessing the awesome blast, Oppenheimer quoted a line from a sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita. He said, I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. In Los Alamos, 230 miles to the north, a group of scientists' wives who had stayed up all night for the not-so-secret test saw the light and heard the distant sound. One wife, Jane Wilson, described it this way. Then it came, the blinding light no one had ever seen, the trees illuminated leaping out, the mountains flashing into life. Later, the long, slow rumble. Something had happened all right, for good or ill. General Groves' deputy commander, Brigadier General T. F. Forell, described the explosion in great detail. The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No man-made phenomena of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggar description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the noonday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevice, and ridge of the nearby mountain range, with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described, but must be seen to be imagined. Immediately after the test, a Sherman M4 tank, equipped with its own air supply, and lined with two inches of lead, went out to explore the site. The lead lining added twelve tons to the tank's weight, but was necessary to protect its occupants from the radiation levels at ground zero. The tank's passengers found that the one hundred foot steel tower had virtually disappeared, with only the metal and concrete stumps of its four legs remaining. Surrounding ground zero was a crater almost two thousand four hundred feet across, and about ten feet deep in places. Desert sand around the tower had been fused by the intense heat of the blast into a jade-colored glass. This atomic glass was given the name Adamcite, but the name was later changed to Trinitite. Due to the intense secrecy surrounding the test, no accurate information of what happened was released to the public until after the second atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan. However, many people in New Mexico were well aware that something extraordinary had happened the morning of July 16, 1945. The blinding flash of light, followed by the shock wave had made a vivid impression on people who live within a radius of one hundred sixty miles of ground zero. Windows were shattered one hundred twenty miles away in Silver City, and residents of Albuquerque saw the bright light of the explosion on the southern horizon and felt the tremor of the shock waves moments later. The true story of the Trinity Test first became known to the public on August 6, 1945. This is when the world's second nuclear bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, exploded one thousand eight hundred fifty feet over Hiroshima, Japan, destroying a large portion of the city and killing an estimated seventy thousand to one hundred thirty thousand of its inhabitants. Three days later, on August 9, a third atomic bomb devastated the city of Nagasaki and killed approximately forty-five thousand more Japanese. The Nagasaki weapon was a plutonium bomb, similar to the Trinity device, and it was nicknamed Fat Man. On Tuesday, August 14, at seven p.m. Eastern wartime, President Truman made a brief formal announcement that Japan had finally surrendered and World War II was over after almost six years and sixty million deaths. On Sunday, September 9, 1945, Trinity site was open to the press for the first time. This was mainly to dispel rumors of lingering high radiation levels there as well as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Led by General Groves and Oppenheimer, this widely publicized visit made Trinity front page news all over the country. Trinity site was later encircled with more than a mile of chain-link fencing and posted with signs warning of radioactivity. In the early 1950s, most of the remaining Trinitite in the crater was bulldozed into an underground concrete bunker near Trinity. Also at this time, the crater was backfilled with new soil. In 1963, the Trinitite was removed from the bunker, packed into fifty-five gallon drums, and loaded into trucks belonging to the Atomic Energy Commission, the successor of the Manhattan Project. Trinity site remained off limits to military and civilian personnel of the range and closed to the public for many years, despite attempts immediately after the war to turn Trinity into a national monument. In 1953, about seven hundred people attended the first Trinity site open house sponsored by the Alamogordo Chamber of Commerce in the missile range. Two years later, a small group from Tolerusa, New Mexico, visited the site on the tenth anniversary of the explosion to conduct a religious service and pray for peace. Regular visits have been made annually in recent years on the first Saturday in October instead of the anniversary date of July 16 to avoid the desert heat. Later, Trinity site was opened one additional day on the first Saturday in April. The site remained closed to the public except for these two days because it lies within the impact areas for missiles fired into the northern part of the range. In 1965, range officials erected a modest monument at Ground Zero. Built of black lava rock, this monument serves as a permanent marker for the site and as a reminder of the momentous event that occurred there. On the monument is a plain metal plaque with a simple inscription, Trinity site, where the world's first nuclear device was exploded on July 16, 1945. During the annual tour in 1975, a second plaque was added below the first by the National Park Service, designating Trinity site a national historic landmark. This plaque reads, This site possesses national significance in commemorating the history of the USA. Jumbo. Lying next to the entrance of the chain-link fence that still surrounds Trinity site are the rusty remains of Jumbo. Jumbo was the codename for the 214-ton thermos-shaped steel and concrete container designed to hold the precious plutonium core of the Trinity device in case of a nuclear misfire. Built by the Babcock and Wilcox Company of Barberton, Ohio, Jumbo was 28 feet long, 12 feet 8 inches in diameter, and with steel walls up to 16 inches thick. The idea of using some kind of container for the Trinity device was based on the fact that plutonium was extremely expensive and very difficult to produce. So much thought went into a way of containing the 15-pound plutonium core of the bomb in case of 5,300 pounds of conventional high explosives surrounding the core exploded without setting off a nuclear blast, and in the process, scattering the costly plutonium, about $250 million worth, across the desert. After extensive research and testing of other potential containment ideas, the concept of Jumbo was decided on in the late summer of 1944. However, by the spring of 1945, after Jumbo had already been built and transported with great difficulty to the Trinity site by the Eckley Corporation of Pittsburgh, it was decided not to explode the Trinity device inside of Jumbo after all. There were several reasons for this new decision. First, plutonium had become more readily, relatively, available. Second, the project scientist decided that the Trinity device would probably work as planned. And last, the scientist realized that if Jumbo were used, it would adversely affect the test results. And add 214 tons of highly radioactive material into the atmosphere. Not knowing what else to do with the massive $12 million Jumbo, it was decided to suspend it from a steel tower 800 yards from ground zero to see how it would withstand the Trinity test. Jumbo survived the approximately 20 kiloton Trinity blast undamaged, but its supporting 70 foot tall steel tower was flattened. Two years later, in an attempt to destroy the unused Jumbo before it and its $12 million cost came to the attention of a congressional investigating committee, Manhattan Project Director General Groves ordered two junior officers from the Special Weapons Division at Sandia Army Base in Albuquerque to test Jumbo. The Army officers placed eight 500 pound conventional bombs in the bottom of Jumbo. Since the bombs were on the bottom of Jumbo and not the center, the correct position, the resultant explosion blew both ends off Jumbo. Unable to totally destroy Jumbo, the Army then buried it in the desert near Trinity site. It was not until the early 1970s that the impressive remains of Jumbo still weighing over 180 tons were moved to their present location. Schmidt-McDonald Ranch House The Schmidt-McDonald Ranch House is located two miles south of ground zero. The property encompasses about three acres and consists of the main house and assorted outbuildings. The house, surrounded by a low stone wall, was built in 1913 by Franz Schmidt, a German immigrant and homesteader. In the 1920s, Schmidt sold the rats to George McDonald and moved to Florida. The ranch house is a one-story, 1,750 square foot adobe mud brick building. An ice house is located on the west side, along with a nine foot four inch deep underground cistern. A 14 by 18.5 foot stone addition, which included a modern bathroom, was added onto the north side in the 1930s. East of the house there is a large divided concrete water storage tank and a windmill. South of the windmill are the remains of a bunk house and a barn which also served as a garage. Further to the east are corrals and holding pens for livestock. The McDonalds vacated their ranch house and their thousands of acres of marginal rangeland in early 1942, when it became part of the Almagordo bombing and gunnery range. The old house remained empty until Manhattan Project personnel arrived in 1945. Then, a spacious room in the northeast corner of the house was selected by the project personnel for the assembly of the plutonium core of the Trinity device. Workmen installed workbenches, tables and other equipment in this large room. To keep the desert dust and sand out, the room's windows and cracks were covered with plastic and sealed with tape. The core of the bomb consisted of two hemispheres of plutonium, PU-239, and an initiator. According to reports, while scientists assembled the initiator and the PU-239 hemispheres, jeeps were positioned outside with their engine draining for a quick getaway if needed. Detection devices were used to monitor radiation levels in the room, and when fully assembled, the core was warmed to the touch. The completed core was later transported two miles to ground zero, inserted into the bomb assembly, and raised to the top of the tower. The Trinity explosion on Monday morning, July 16, did not significantly damage the McDonald House. Even though most of the windows were blown out and the chimney was blown over, the main structure survived intact. Years of rainwater dripping through holes in the metal roof did much more damage to the mud brick walls than the bomb did. The nearby barn did not fare as well. The Trinity test blew part of its roof off, and the roof has since totally collapsed. The ranch house stood empty and deteriorating for 37 years until 1982, when the U.S. Army stabilized it to prevent any further damage. The next year, the Department of Energy and the Army provided funds to the National Park Service to completely restore the house to the way it appeared in July 1945. When the work was completed, the house with many photo displays on Trinity was opened to the public for the first time in October 1984 during the semiannual tour. The Schmidt McDonald Ranch House is part of the Trinity National Historic Landmark. The National Atomic Museum, Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico Since its opening in 1969, the objective of the National Atomic Museum has been to provide a readily accessible repository of educational materials and information on the atomic age. In addition, the museum's goal is to preserve, interpret, and exhibit to the public memorabilia of this age. In late 1991, the museum was chartered by Congress as the United States' only official atomic museum. Prominently featured in the museum's high bay is the story of the Manhattan Engineer District, the unprecedented $2.2 billion scientific engineering project that was centered in New Mexico during World War II. The Manhattan Project, as it was more commonly called, developed, built, and tested the world's first atomic bomb in New Mexico. This display also includes casings similar to the only atomic bombs ever used in warfare. Dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these two bombs help bring World War II to an end in mid-August 1945. The story of the Manhattan Project's three secret cities, Hanford, Washington, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is also presented in this area. A portion of the museum, the low bay, is devoted to exhibits on the research, development, and use of various forms of nuclear energy. Historical and other traveling exhibits are also displayed in this area. Also found in the low bay is a museum's store, which is operated by the museum's foundation. Adjacent to the low bay is the theater. The featured film is David Wolper's classic 1963 production, Ten Seconds That Shook the World. This excellent film is a 53-minute documentary on the Manhattan Project. Other films relating to the history of the Atomic Age are available for viewing and check out from the library. Next to the theater is a library department of energy public reading room, containing government documents that are available to the public for in-library research. The library also has many nuclear-related books available for reference and check out. Located around the outside of the museum are a number of large exhibits. These include the Boeing B-52B jet bomber that dropped the United States last airburst H-bomb in 1962, and a 280-millimeter 11-in. atomic cannon, once America's most powerful field artillery. Also found in this area is a Navy T-A7C, a modified A7B Corsair II fighter bomber, a veteran of the Vietnam War. Many other nuclear weapons systems, rockets, and missiles are found in this area. In front of the museum are a pair of Navy Terrier missiles. The Terrier was the Navy's first operational surface-to-air missile. To the south of the museum, next to the visitor's parking lot, is a Republic F-105D Thunder Chief Fighter bomber. Further south is a World War II Boeing B-29 Superfortress. This plane is similar to the B-29's Enola Gay and Boxcar that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. The National Atomic Museum is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, except for New Year's Day, Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The museum is located at 20358 Wyoming Boulevard Southeast on Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Guided tours for groups are available by calling in advance. At mission and tours are free, and cameras are always welcome. End of Trinity Atomic Test Site by the National Atomic Museum Recording by James Christopher JX Christopher at yahoo.com A World Religion by Annie Besant This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Among the many names with which the love and reverence of man have appealed to the Supreme Being, there is none perhaps more full of significance, none whose implications are more important than the well-known Masonic title, The Great Architect of the Universe. An architect is not a builder, an architect is one who plans, and one who hands over his plan to many others to carry out, bit by bit, stone by stone, but under all the diversities of the many builders, under all the movement and world of a great mass of workmen, all are moved to a single end, all are contributing to the carrying out of a single plan, to make an idea manifest in material matter to the world when the plan is carried out in form. Now there are many ways of reading history, sometimes in the school, a mere mass of dates and names, utterly uninteresting, a matter of memory and not of thought, is given as history, but that is not history, that is only the dry bones, the skeleton of history, and the one that has only read history in that way knows nothing of its reality in its teaching. Or again you might read history a little more wisely, not thinking only of the names of kings and statesmen, but realizing the movements of peoples, understanding the great forces by which nations rise, rule, and fall, and so play their part in the theatre of the world, but even that is not history in its deepest sense, it is still the corpse, the muscles are there, the nerves are there, the skin, the features are there, but it is a dead body and not a living one. You only begin to understand the fascination, the enthralling interest of history, when you see the events on earth as the projections thrown down onto the earth of spiritual realities and higher in mightier worlds. When you begin to see in the events of history the working of a mighty plan, the shaping of a great purpose, the carrying out down here of the thoughts conceived in the spiritual world, then your body becomes alive, then the form takes on the attribute of the living man pulsing with life. History rises up before you and you realize that the outer events are but the shadow of the realities, and that the realities that cast the shadows are the spiritual truths of the universe, and as that thought begins to show itself history becomes illuminated and the outlines of the plan shine through the tangle of events. Even looking back say a century and a quarter, how different was the world then, how separate in its parts, how ignorant the nations of each other, how profound the darkness which failed the east from the west and the west from the east. From time to time before that, as in the reign of Elizabeth, a stray traveller may have gone over to the eastern lands and brought back some message of the wonders there, of delicate art, of exquisite craftsmanship, of treasures which dazzled the imagination of the west. But those travellers, you and far between, knew nothing of the thoughts of the people, though they admired their handiwork, knew nothing of the religions that they followed, nothing of the philosophy that they studied, nothing of the scriptures on which their lives were built. It was scarcely more than 120 years ago when first a touch of eastern science was brought over to western lands, when the great mayor of Paris, Bayilly, who perished later in the reign of terror, first drew the attention of Europe to the marvelous astronomy of the east. Then there came over some of the stories of the popular faith, copies of some of the pictures, the scriptures, used in the temples of that ancient faith. There you have the beginning, the foundation, of the science called comparative mythology, which in the last century has received such an enormous impulse by the researchers of the archaeologists and the antiquarian. You will find in some of the earlier books of the 19th century the beginnings of that free-thought movement which gradually blended with scientific materialism and made a dangerous foe, menacing the very life of religion. Some of the books which are classics came from France, especially towards the close of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Then a little later, Englishmen joined in the study. But still the best of the east did not come over here. Only some of the religious stories and many of the external superstitions came. It was only comparatively lately, in the days of Max Muller, when that splendid series of the sacred books of the east was published, that gradually the European mind awakened to the world treasures of philosophy and wisdom that lay buried in the literature of the east. The German philosophers had touched upon it. Emerson, the famous American essayist, possessed the one copy that existed in America in his day of that well-known Hindu scripture, the song Celestial. Since that time how great the change, every educated man knows something of the sacred literature of the Hindu, of the Buddhist, of the Chinese, has tried to read and endeavor to grasp and understand. And now we find in the universities they are beginning to have chairs of Oriental literature, so that eastern knowledge and western knowledge may supplement each other, instead of being regarded as antagonistic to each other. And you can see, if you look through that century, the wonderful change that has come in two directions. First, the gradual bringing of India under the rule of Great Britain, and the familiarizing of Great Britain with the Indian thought of the past and of the present. On the other hand, the uprising of the Far East, grappling in a death struggle with a western nation, the war between Russia and Japan, which left the great eastern power triumphant. Can you catch under that no glimpse of a plan, no working of a determinant end, in guiding the east and west along the road beneficial to humanity at large? Is it not true that the eastern and western minds are drawing together, the one philosophically metaphysical, the other fond of every science that deals with matter? How that eastern mind, subtle and spiritual, is gradually becoming wedded to the western mind, scientific and practical, seeking to turn discoveries and knowledge to the practical prosperity of man. How the eastern ideals are again taking their place, tempered with the practicality of the west. How the eastern lack of public spirit is gradually being made good by the altruism and the public spirit and patriotism of the west. How Britain is working in India, how India is reacting on Britain, until you can see gradually forming, amid the dust and the turmoil of the present, the outlines of a mighty world empire, with east and west together, mighty world powers linking and marching side by side, until India shall no longer be a constant menace, a danger in the moment of Britain's weakness, but shall be a buttress and a strength, the oldest and the youngest branches of the Aryan family joining hands in one mighty empire, which by the peace it will make, will offer a fit field for the spread, for the teaching of a world religion. All religions now have passed, for all readily educated and thoughtful persons, out of the stage in which they tried to convert each other, into the stage when they tried to understand and learn from each other. All religions are different with a purpose. If great truths start to express themselves fully, it cannot be through a single faith, nor by a single intellectual presentment. And if you will look for a moment at the religions of the world as a whole, you will find that every religion strikes a different note. And not one of these notes is to be spared in the making of the mighty cord, which shall arise from humanity to God. For religion is a search for God, and every religion gives us a letter of his name. And only when the rivalries are over and each religion is speaking out of its letter will the mighty name shine out complete, through the contribution that every faith has made. The most cursory glimpse of the world's faiths, living and dead, will convince you of the truth of what I say. For every one of them gives out a different note. Every one of them contributes something special to the making of the world religion of the future. Not in monotone, but in chords and harmony comes out the great revelation of God to man. One religion would be a monotone. The world's religions make a full harmonious chord. And think how different is the dominant idea that goes out from every faith. Think of Hinduism, the oldest of the world's religions. One of your scotch-divines, who lived for a very long time in India as a missionary and founded the Great Christian College at Madras, Dr. Miller, has said what, in his opinion, is the contribution of Hinduism to the religious thought of the world. He summed it up as a proclamation of the eminence of God and the solidarity of man. In those two phases you have but one truth. For if God be imminent in all, then the lives animated by a single life must form one vast solidarity. The one life in all means the brotherhood of the many. Only when we realize that God is seen in everything do we feel that all lives belong to that single life. Then from Parsism comes out the note of purity, purity of thought, of word, of deed. That is the formula that every Parsi repeats day by day as he ties his sacred thread. And Buddhism gives right knowledge, right understanding, right thinking. That is the great message of Buddhism to the world. Greece speaks of beauty, and Rome speaks of law, and the message of Egypt is science. Christianity gives the message of self-sacrifice, Judaism that of righteousness, and so on, one after another. You see that every religion has its special idea that it gives to the religion of the future. And all those pearls of truth, not one must be lacking when religion's great necklace of jewels is placed round the neck of humanity. So looking thus at the religions as each contributing its own thought above all others, realizing that the political and social condition of the world is gradually making an area where the world religion can grow up, let us next ask, what would be the conditions of such a religion, and what its special gifts to the world? First of all, I do not believe that the religions of the time will disappear as religions. I believe that they will be related to the world religion, as say, the various churches of Christendom are related to Christianity. It is just as you find many a church, many a sect, just as you find many varieties of thought and teaching, but they all look up to the Christ as the supreme teacher, and accept his gospel as the foundation of their message. So in the world religion the great religions will still exist, each one appealing to a special type and a special temperament of mankind, existing as sects of a single faith, existing as branches of a single tree, realizing their fundamental unity, but preserving their valuable diversity, for by construction and not destruction will come the fulfilling of the great religious law. For surely diversity is the very condition of a universe and of all its beauty. One expression of truth could never exhaust the contents of a spiritual truth. The intellect divides, separates, classifies. It can never give the full rounded all of the sum which is truth. A part of it, a fragment of it, an aspect of it, yes, that the intellectual presentment can give, but we need to have them all in order that the mini-face truth may shine out for the helping and teaching of man. So I look for a great world religion where each religion will have its place, where each great faith will present its own aspect of the truth, but where we all shall learn from every faith the special view it has to teach, and so widen our minds, enlarge our hearts, and deepen our reverence for the greatness of the truth. Looking for a moment at that conception, how shall we find that which unites? How shall we discover the method by which the intellectual presentment shall find a common origin in the spiritual truth? I will take two illustrations to show you exactly what I mean, and they are closely connected with each other. I spoke of the different ways of reading history. Let me take for a moment one great drama played on the stage of the world familiar to you all, the life of the Christ. Now there are two ways in which you may regard it. One tends to divide, the other tends to unite. You may take it purely and entirely as the history of one man, however divine. A life led in the face of the world, great, inspiring, noble, but only a single life, however divine, with a single life's contents. Round that idea there has been much of controversy, much of struggle, much of antagonism. Questions of scholarship arise, the age of documents, the various readings, how long this manuscript has existed, what particular date can be given to that manuscript, come down or discovered perhaps in some church ruin, some ancient monastery. There is all the turmoil of intellectual strife, all the arguing of scholars and controversialists, everything which makes for controversy and nothing which makes for inspiration. Now it is a story of a single life. Most people agree now that the idea put forward by Strauss that the Christ's story is a myth is entirely out of court. That was one of the lines of attack very popular in the last century, but I doubt if any scholar today thinks for one moment that the Christ did not really exist on the stage of history and teach and preach in Palestine. It is the history then of a life which had the most enormous effect upon mankind. But is that all it is? Or is there something deeper and greater which shall unite where scholarship and criticism divide? Never yet did a great spirit live on earth and live a life which was his alone, with no bearing upon his brethren, with no touching of the mankind to which he came. There is a deeper meaning in the history of the Christ in which that life shines out in parable and drama as it were. It is the story of the experience of every human spirit as he unfolds from seed into flower and fruit. It was declared by a great teacher that Christ is the firstborn among many brethren. It is declared that all men are partakers of the divine nature, and surely that history loses nothing of its charm. If below the history of one man, however divine, you see your own history as you shall lead it, as you gradually rise from the carnal to the spiritual, and begin to realize the possibilities that lie latent in the spirit that is man, then the whole unfolding of that story becomes the expression of a great mystical truth. The birth of the Christ in Bethlehem stands for the birth of the Christ in every one who is rising into realized divinity, in every one of those in whom St. Paul's phrase is being realized, my little children, of whom I travel in birth again until Christ be formed in you. Then you begin to see in that birth the birth of the Christ, in every human spirit you begin to see the growth in favor with God and man. You see the spirit in the moment of baptism, when the life flows down upon him from above. You see him in the glory of transfiguration, when the human spirit begins to realize its own divinity. You see him in the agony of the passion, when the soul approaching deity finds out its human weakness and agonizes in the last ordeals of the saint. You see him risen and ascended in the man who has attained the full stature of the Christ. And so you realize, however historical the story, it has a deeper spiritual meaning which underlies the whole, that Christ was living the story of all mankind, as well as a single life in Palestine, 2000 years ago. Now it is that mystical story that unites. It is true for all men of every faith, true for all in their upward climb, true for all in their realization of divinity within themselves. And then it becomes an inspiration, the most potent that man can have for realizing the unity. He also realizes through that the possibility of a personal achievement. And then for the first time the words of Christ become literally possible of fulfillment. Be thee therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. For a man that is only a man, that command must remain forever unfulfilled. But for a man in whom the seed of God is sown, there is no perfection impossible for him as he passes from strength to strength. That is the mystical interpretation, and the religion of the future must be based on mysticism. See how that is carried out in one of the dogmas of the churches in regard to the atonement. See how it shows how much of truth there is in it, and how much of human error has veiled the spiritual truth. For in the ideal of Christ as an external savior, however exquisitely beautiful and lovable from the standpoint of those he helps, there is always some feeling of unrest, of disturbance, in as much as someone outside is the helper, and gives us that which we do not realize for ourselves. But in the mystical view of the atonement with the birth of Christ in the human spirit, it is a Christ within instead of a Christ without. It is the unfolding of a life instead of the imputation of the righteousness of another. There is nothing of legality, nor contract, nor materialism, but the opening up of a life that transforms and makes atonement because it transforms man into God. You may say, are you against religious dogma? No. Dogma has its place in all teaching of truth. Science has it, just as much as religion. It is quite dogmatic to say that if you put hydrogen and oxygen together at a certain temperature, they will combine. A statement of truth imposed by authority from outside, that is what dogma is, and any such statement of truth is necessary for learning and for teaching. That is what critics of religious dogmas very often forget. But a dogma, not to be mischievous, must be based on experience and verifiable by experience, and that is sometimes the weak point of religious dogma. But it ought not to be so. All the great religious dogmas are based on experience, though not on the experience of modern people. But that is the fault of the modern people, and not the fault of the dogma. Every great spiritual truth thrown into dogmatic form, and imposed on the odd man by church, or pope, or book, has its origin and human experience in relation to divinity. For the religious consciousness is universal, and the great dogmas of the faiths of the world are built on that testimony of the religious consciousness of mankind. You say, how do you know it? Because you find them in every faith, you find them in every age. Every nation possesses the same truths, although in different words, the same great fundamental truths on which every religion is based. They are common truths, and they have been known by the experience of man in touch with the invisible worlds. Now there is no reason in the world why you should not again be able to verify these truths for yourselves, as in a moment I will show you. But what I want to put to you now is that the difference between the man who accepts the dogma and the mystic is this. The authority of the receiver of the dogma is outside him, and he has no knowledge which verifies the dogma. But the mystic knows the truth by sight. The spirit has faculties as well as the body. There is a science of the spirit as much as a physical science. The spirit can gain knowledge experimentally as well as the body. And when a man has reached a certain stage of evolution, he needs no other authority to teach him religious truth. For within the depths of his own spirit there wells up the truth which the other sees from the outside. And an inner authority, and not an outer authority, reveals the truth that the mystic knows. He does not believe in God because the church says, God is. He believes in God because he has found God within himself, and the spirit knows that is where God is, and not can ever shake that knowledge. The dogma standing on authority may be undermined by other authority. The dogma based not on a demonstration, but on a church or a book, may be shaken to pieces when other books are read and other religions are looked into. But your knowledge, your own experience, your own realization of the deity within you, which makes you able to recognize the deity without you, that nothing can shake. For it is your very own, and you know it. You hold it. And if all the world were to rise against you, it would not be shaken. That is the position of the mystic. He knows Christ within him. There is the spirit that is knowledge. And he recognizes that which agrees with the key note of his own spirit. For there is but one spirit in many bodies, one life in many forms, one God in many temples. And so there comes to be one word and one knowledge, and that belongs equally to all who will to know, and not only to believe, to unfold within themselves the faculty of knowledge which lies within the spirit of every son of man. Now mysticism unites. For all the mystics of the world agree on the fundamentals of the spiritual consciousness. Dogmatists quarrel. Mystics reinforce each other. And on the development of the spirit and man, the religion of the future must depend. Those grow into knowledge. They will be the pillars of the religion of the future. And dogma will have its proper place in the teaching of the younger and inexperienced, until they have grown into religious manhood. So the mischief of dogma will disappear. It will take its rightful place as part of the education, the religious education, of the man. The dogmas will be taught in many forms in the different faiths. And the one mystical truth they embody will be taught in the religion, the world religion, as expressed in different ways in the churches. But another thing that religion must give us is the science of religion. If religion be true, each of you has those faculties I spoke of, which are to the spirit what the senses are to the body, and the reasoning mind to the intelligence. It is part of the duty of religion to teach us how to unfold those faculties in ourselves, in order that we may know. And religions do teach it, and have taught it. Only it has slipped so much out of sight today. Useful as was much that was done in the Reformation. Priceless as is the importance of the assertion of liberty of thought and liberty of judgment. One great harm was done to Christianity by that movement. It robbed the protesting communities of much of that occult knowledge which has come down from the days of the apostles and the disciples, in the unbroken succession of the Church of Rome. The teachings of the Roman Church today contain far more occult science than is found in the bishops and the clergy of the communities that take the name of Protestants. It has methods of teaching, methods of training, ways of meditating, which in every great faith are the only ways of awakening those faculties which enable you to know and not only to believe. The faith which leads to man's perfection is laid down in some great Roman Catholic manuals, and is identical in its stages, its beginnings and its endings, with that same faith as taught in Buddhist treaties as laid down in the Hindu science of yoga. You might take what you like there, and you will find the teaching the same, the discipline the same, the methods of progress the same. Only the words are different. Rome speaks of purification as the first step of that faith. The Hindu and the Buddhist call it the probationary path, on which certain qualifications are to be gained, and the qualifications are given one by one exactly, as what is wanted to control and to discipline the moods of the mind, and to make a man calm and pure and strong. Then you come to the next step, which Rome calls the path of illumination. The Hindu and the Buddhist call it the path of initiation, and mark out the various stages on the path, all the great initiations through which the disciples pass. The ending for both the Roman calls union, the Hindu and the Buddhist call liberation, but in both cases it means the realization of divinity, the union of the human spirit with the divine. A few months ago I was reading with some care a Roman Catholic treaty that any one of you might read with the greatest prophet if you care at all about the scientific side of mysticism. It is written by a Jesuit father, and in the translation is called, the Graces of Inferior Prayer. It has received the approval of the Pope and of some of the high officials of the Roman Catholic Church. Now in that book, at the end of it, in dealing with union, the writer speaks of the deification of man. Man becomes divine. The union between God and man. So close, so utter, that man is deified. Now I confess, I was surprised to find a phrase so strong outside of the Theosophical, Hindu and Buddhist treaties. I did not know that Rome would go so far in explaining what the end of the path connoted, and then I remembered that I ought to have known it. For one of the great teachers of the Church, St. Ambrose, gave the noble sentence, Become what you are. Does it sound a paradox? It contains a great and profound meaning. Become the manifested God that you are already in seed and in germ. For if you think for a moment, you cannot become that which you are not. Only that which exists in you and possibility can ever be manifested by you in actuality. You must have it within before it can show itself without. And in that great sentence of St. Ambrose, the idea of the universal religion is declared. The human spirit is divine, the offspring of God. Become then an outer manifestation, that which you are in inner reality. And the world religion of the future will bring out the way again inside of the people. Will show them how to walk. It will lead them into a knowledge of their own divinity, mystical in its teaching, so that the teaching can be translated by all the religions into the very dogmas, scientific with the knowledge of the spirit, so that men may learn to develop the spiritual faculties and then use them for the perfecting of their own nature, with no antagonists, for it will be universal, with no quarrels within it, for it will be all inclusive. That mighty world religion is to be proclaimed by the supreme teacher, the teacher of angels and of men. That in very truth is on the threshold, its foot is at the door. Look around you, and you will see the signs of the change. Look abroad over the world, and you will recognize that mighty synthesis is coming, into which all the world faith shall be built and know themselves as one. When religious hatreds have passed, when religious controversies have disappeared, when men have learned the supreme truth so often preached, so little practiced, let him that loveeth God, love his brother also. When out of the world religion has grown the world peace, when out of the world faith has grown the world service, then religion shall be what it ought to be, the helper of the downtrodden, the protector of the weak, the teacher of the ignorant, the razor of the fallen. Then religion will not only tie man to God, but man to man, and it will be realized that knowledge of God is best expressed in service to man. End of A World Religion by Annie Besant