Between September 1941 and March 1942 Charles and Cora Fillmore gave a series of twenty-two classes known as Mysteries of the Four Gospels. In nearly each class, Charles begins by explaining the purpose of the classes. He says:
These lessons are giving to our consciousness "Mysteries of the Four Gospels". We mean by that that there are truths in the Gospels that have not yet been interpreted in Unity literature and we are running through these different statements of Jesus' teachings and finding points that havn't been dwelt upon nor the spiritual interpretation brought out in the Unity literature.
So what we have here is new content from Charles Fillmore — over twenty lessons in all — never published before or since by Unity — content that Charles Fillmore believed had not been adequately covered after fifty years of Unity Bible interpretation.
Besides that, there are other reasons Mysteries of the Four Gospels is important:
- The transcript, prepared by someone who referred to himself/herself as the Reporter, is similar to a stenographer's transcript or a court reporter's transcript — an unedited portrayal of what really happened. When you read the transcript you will get a sense of what it was like to be in an early Unity class.
- We see a human side of Charles and Cora that does not come through in the books or magazine. Charles often opens the lesson with a clumsy or self-deprecating way of leading the music, Cora sometimes chimes in when Charles gets things out of order and we get glimpses of how Charles typically spoke and his periodic poor use of English grammer.
- There is a remarkable four-part structure to each of the lessons: Opening music led by Charles, Meditation and a short lesson led by Cora, a longer lesson and interpretation by Charles, closing with a Healing Pool led by Charles and Cora. This format appears to work well and I wonder if teachers and ministers would not benefit from experimenting with it in classes and services.
This project has been on my to-do list for a few years — ever since I found Mysteries of the Four Gospels in the Unity Archives. The problem has been finding the time to transcribe the PDF into plain text for posting on the Internet. It's tedious work. Well, for the past two weeks I have been tending to extended family affairs with lots of free time, but limited access to Internet. I've been able to transcribe 13 of the 21 lessons and I have enough Internet access to upload these lessons and to send this email.
Thanks to those of you who have transcribed the remaining eight lessons into plain text. These Mysteries of the Four Gospels, transcribed by you, are now available to everyone in our digital world for the first time since 1942.
Many blessings
