THE ROSICRUCIAN
FELLOWSHIP
An International Association
of Christian Mystics

What is the essential
difference between the
teachings of the
Rosicrucian Philosophy and
the Orthodox Church?

There are many, but perhaps the principal one is the teaching of orthodoxy that at each birth a newly created soul enters material existence fresh from the hand of God, that it lives here in a material body for a longer or shorter span of time and then passes out by death into the invisible beyond, there to remain for all eternity in a state of happiness or misery according to what it did while here in the body.

The Rosicrucian teaching is that each soul is an integral part of God, which is seeking to gain experience by repeated existences in gradually improving material bodies and that, therefore, it passes into and out of material existences many times; that each time it gathers a little more experience than it previously possessed and in time is nourished from nescience to omniscience – from impotence to omnipotence--by means of these experiences.

Our sense of justice revolts against a teaching which sends one soul into a home of culture and a noble family where it has the advantage of wealth, where moral teachings are implanted in the growing child, but sends another into the slums, its father a thief and the mother, perhaps, immoral, and where its teachings consist in lying, stealing, etc. If here only once, all should have the same chance if they are to be judged by the same laws, and we know that no two people have the same experiences in life. We know that where one meets many temptations, another lives comparatively untouched by the storms of life. Therefore, when one soul is placed in a moral environment and another in immoral surroundings, it is not right to send the one to a heaven of enjoyment and eternal bliss for doing the right he could not help doing, nor is it just to send the other to a hell for stealing and robbing when the environment and the conditions into which he was thrown were such that he could not help himself.

Therefore, the Rosicrucian teaching holds that we come into whatever place is best fitted for us by our previous experiences in former lives, and that we get just what we deserve in all cases; that all experiences which come to us are just what we need to give us the appropriate impetus for our next step in unfoldment.