A Victorian’s Religious Beliefs

SOME THINGS I BELIEVE

1. I believe in one, Personal God the Father of All.

2. I believe that God is all-wise, all-just, and all Good, omnipresent, and almighty.

3. I believe that God created man – the Spirit-man – in His own Personal image. And formed his Body out of the dust of the ground – out of the Earth’s foods, just as it is formed now, by the Spirit-form collecting and using the foods of the Earth, and gradually forming, and developing, the Body from within.

4. I believe that man, at the first, was marked by the absolute ignorance of inexperience. But, continuing to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, or of Experience, which he discovered for himself, he began to not “fall” but rise, and has been rising ever since, and now he occupies a very lofty position in the Universe.

5. I believe that the principle of Right and Wrong has ever existed, and that man’s expressions of both sides of this principle in his life arise mainly from his experiences in his search for knowledge, but that man is free to use, and often does use, this principle knowingly for the promotion of either, or both, Right and Wrong. There is no other “origin of evil”.

6. I believe that there has forever been much more of the Right than of the Wrong in all mankind, and that the Human Race is ever slowly, but steadily, improving, and spreading humane and Godly movements over the face of the Globe, so as to let its peoples have happiness, and heaven on earth.

7. I believe that God only desires mankind to obey his laws, to live good lives, to reverence and love Him – their Father – to love one another.

8. I believe that God, through the operation of the natural laws of human of human constitutions, rewards all beings proportionally, and exactly, according to both their good and their evil works, and that these rewards begin at once, with the good or evil Act. And that thus, all being “give an account of themselves to God” - that there is no other kind or form of rewards and punishments, either in this world or any other world, and that no beings ever have, or ever can escape from their own complete personal responsibility.

9. I believe that when man leaves this world he, his spirit-being, will go to a better one, that when his Body dies on Earth shi soul is born in Heaven. That is his day, his only day, of compete spiritual Birth. And in that spirit-land all beings will gradually, and finally, become more perfect “even as our father which is in Heaven is perfect”, WHY NOT?

I have well given my mind to these questions; and held the foregoing reasonable Beliefs for most of my life since I was age 21. I am now 70. These Beliefs appear to me to be in harmony with all the changeless laws and processes of man’s Existence in his relation to both this world, and the Spirit-World to which he is going.

George Burgess – June 1899