“We find that the civilization of the present age has reached a point where science and mechanics have obliterated space, and, in a sense, time. The whole world, the ancient and the modern, is rapidly being spread before the public gaze, and our race of today is eagerly gathering all the grains of wheat, the great central truths that have matured in the mind of civilizations from earliest times, throughout its successive stages to the present.
Libraries, so ancient that history has no record of the people that made them, are now being unearthed. Nations, so far removed in the dim twilight of the past that we have no means of knowing the time of their existence, are now presenting the very details of their domestic life to our scrutiny. All these things demonstrate the fact that the race has now reached a state of development where it feels the need of, and consequently is about to gather, the ripe fruitage of all ages.
The race is delving into the quarries of the present and of the past, that, from the work of the hewers of all nations and all times, it may construct a temple of knowledge transcending Solomon’s in all its glory, transcending anything that has ever existed upon the planet. While the accumulating of knowledge has been going on so rapidly during the last century, the mind of the scientist has been intently fixed upon material manifestation. He has searched wisely and diligently for causation in every physical direction, until he has reached the last residuum of matter, a mere “point of force”, and he can go no further until he recognizes the source and nature of this force.
As there are small cycles of national development and race development, so there are great cycles of world development—planetary cycles. If we had a history of the Grand Cycle preceding the present one—”the elder world” (ii. Esdras vii. 13), to which there are numerous incidental references in our Bible and of which the sacred books of the East speak so positively, then we should find, that while its people reached a high state of maturity and spirituality, they were a race-round lower than the present humanity.
It is true that everything follows a certain sequence—cause and effect run through everything that we know. But let us trace back a little further. Let us turn the telescope upon space. Way yonder we see a nebulous mass, bright and luminous as a flaming sun, but, as we carefully observe it, we find that we can look through it at some great sun in the far distance, as if the nebula were but a thin veil over the face of the star; thus proving beyond question that this nebulous matter is what has been denominated “luminous gas.”
Many theories have been advanced concerning this luminous substance, and many have concluded that it is gas heated to great intensity. At the same time they tell us that it is floating in a medium a hundred, if not a thousand times colder than the temperature at the north pole. But no one has attempted to tell us why this luminous gas, interpenetrated by and floating in such cold, can remain heated to the intensity claimed. They may philosophize and try to explain how it is possible for intense heat to be retained when interpenetrated and surrounded by intense cold, but the fact remains, that nothing that is known to man makes it possible for a cloud of gas to remain heated for one second in a medium so contrary to heat—to say nothing of the untold years that it is supposed to have remained in this state.
In order to account for its luminosity under such conditions, we must look for something beyond the experience of everyday life. The recent discovery of radium, however, evinces the fact that it is possible for an element of nature to remain in a luminous state, and actually heated to a certain degree, which even the cold of liquid air cannot extinguish. Is this new-found element on the borderline between Spirit and the natural world? If we interrogate the Bible, we find there, numerous accounts of visitations from the spirit-world, sometimes in a flame of fire, as God appeared to Moses in a burning bush, and the bush was not consumed. At other times, the person of the visitant was said to be as shining as the light, or as bright as the sun.
When a Holy One from the spirit-world enters a man’s presence, though it be in the darkness of the night, in the darkest room, the darkness is at once dissipated and all is bright and luminous. The luminous brightness is not seen merely with the spiritual eye but with the natural eye as well. We read that God is Spirit and dwells in the light that no man can approach. Again, the assertion is emphatic that by the word of God the worlds were made, and surely we cannot believe that God created something from nothing; therefore, God created from himself. And this nebulous matter of which worlds are formed is the substance of spirit, a substance which is the emanation of a thought of Divinity.”
Hiram Butler
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 