[aron]

I googled Barber's connection to Penn-Lewis and found the following, which amends my previous thoughts. But rather than remove the previous post, this makes an addendum. The caution in MEB's letter to Panton remains, and in some ways is amplified.

"In that same year (1923), Penn-Lewis asked Margaret E. Barber to seek a Chinese translator for her works. Barber soon found an ideal Chinese messenger for the Welsh prophetess in Nee: he was versed in English, ardent in his new-found faith [Nee was saved at 17 years old in 1920], restless and ambitious, and yet frail in body like Penn-Lewis herself. However, the role of translator that Barber had conceived for him was too confining. As we have seen, by late 1923 Nee began putting out the Present Witness and Testimony, an irregular journal..." ~Xi Lian, Redeemed by fire: the rise of popular Christianity in China, p. 164.

"By 1928, he had completed his magnum opus, The Spiritual Man (Shuling de ren), a book that promised to lead Christians into the "innermost part of one's being" where one encounters the "life of God." Such a journey would begin with the intricate and vital distinction between 'soul' ('self-consciousness') and 'spirit' ('God-consciousness'), one that almost all Christians had failed to make. The spiritual man, made alive by the 'God-consciousness', leaves behind 'useless' human efforts - driven merely by one's own will or emotions (the 'soul') and manifested in profitless 'zeal' - and enters into 'the life of God Himself.' In the concluding chapter, titled 'Victory over Death', Nee exhorted the spiritual Christian to have faith 'that we shall not die, that we shall live to see the Lord... and that moment will not tarry for long." Nee made no specific mention of the fact, however, that such teachings were already found in Penn-Lewis' Soul and Spirit, published a decade or so earlier..." Xi, p. 165.

So Xi Lian's study removes my earlier guess that MEB had disliked J P-L, since here MEB points J P-L to WN as her Chinese translator. But this ties in with the idea that the 20 y/o WN was aggressively, even dangerously ambitious, and seized upon translation of J P-L as his ticket to stardom. And lo and behold in a few years a three-volume tome of his "deep spiritual experiences" came forth, largely culled from J P-L and uncredited.

If you read early WN you're reading J P-L, and if you read J P-L you are reading... what? This is where the Freemasonry concern comes in. This may not dovetail as neatly with my first hypothesis of MEB's warning about the young and precocious WN, but it dovetails nonetheless.

And it goes back to my original critique of WN's message, from the op. All this Christian-climbs-the-ladder-into-God focus completely misses the gospel message, which is Jesus being the One who is with the Father, expresses the Father. Jesus alone is our focus, not our spirituality. Our spirituality will deceive us, and one day we'll be in court, like WN (and RZ, and others), being exposed as shams and frauds. Don't go there. Stay away from gurus and guru-land. Ya know, 'Seer of the Divine Revelation' and all that.