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GOD second birth, which is common to most of the Indian religions and Christianity is the root-doctrine of the idea of the fatherhood of the Teacher.
As said in the Key of Knowledge, " It will not surprise modern theology a little to be told that
its error of regarding God as a maker is ultimately traceable to the notion of the second birth, which .....is ground ed on the doctrine of baptism, i. e., initiation into the secret science of the soul. If modern theologians would but reflect on the matter, they would not be slow to realise that the fatherhood of the clergy, which prevails in almost all the ancient religions of the world, can have reference not to the physical body but to the initiation of the soul in the mysteries of the spiritual side of Life, poetically described as the birth of man in spirit, or simply as the second birth. It is with the notion of this second birth that the idea of the fatherhood of tie clergy is associated ; for the guiu (spiritual preceptor) who bring it about, and who is entitled, for that reason, to all the respect, if not to greater reverence, than what is dae to the progenitor of one's physical person, is ite cause or author, and must be described as · father' to keep up
the metaphor. 6 Now because the Tirthamkara (God) is the greatest and the
most worshipful guru of all, nobody is better entitled than He to the title. This was the original idea ; but when the true teaching of religion was lost sight of in the underground mazes of mythology, and the conception of divinity was replaced with erroneous notions of the latterday theology, which insists on reading the mysterylanguage of its scriptures in a literal sense, the purity of the original conception of the fatherhood of God also
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