Matthew on the Kingdom of Heaven

Matthew the Apostle, Franz Hartmann · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages pairing five verses of Matthew xiii in the King James Version with a long passage of commentary from Franz Hartmann's With the Adepts, chapter 6. The subtitle on the title page reads "On Philosophia, the Wisdom of Love."

The gospel passage is the disciples' question about why Jesus speaks to the crowd in parables, and the answer — that it is given to them to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven and not to the others; that whoever has, to him shall be given, and whoever has not shall lose even what he has; and that he speaks in parables because seeing they do not see and hearing they do not understand. The commentary treats this as the same story told in every mythology: the Fall of Man. So long as man's will and imagination were one and identical with the will and imagination of the spiritual creative power in nature, he knew the truth and was all-powerful; when he began to think and imagine differently from that power, he lost sight of truth and could see only his own fancies. The remedy given is correspondingly hard — to see truth again a man must give up his own way of reasoning and let Reason act in him — with the sour comparison that one may as well ask a miser to surrender the treasure of a lifetime as ask a modern scientist to give up his crooked ways. The passage closes with a warning to a would-be founder of a secret society, that appealing to the clever and cunning, the vainglorious, the ambitious and those wanting occult powers to gratify curiosity or selfish desire will certainly fail. The gospel verse is then glossed plainly: to him who has the love of wisdom in his heart, abundant light will be given, and from him who is filled with selfish desires, what little understanding he has will be taken away.

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