Up to now Numerology has been associated with the idea that its students must belong to the domain of dreamers of dreams, or those who live in some world of their own. In consequence of this idea the average "man in the street" has put aside such studies as not being useful or practical.
It has also been drummed into his ears that all such studies bordered on witchcraft and were in some way or the other associated with the Devil.
Being brought up to go to church every Sunday and hearing every time he went that he was "a miserable sinner," dammed to punishment and torment both in this life and the world to come, he in the end believed that he was "a miserable sinner," and so dared not seek for any knowledge that might enable him to shake off the chains of conventionality and custom that ground him down and kept him in mental and intellectual slavery.
We are indeed "of little faith," we children of men. We forget that we were made "in the image and likeness of God," and, in the forgetting, we have sold our birthright for "the mess of pottage" of man-made beliefs.
We do not dare to think for ourselves, for our "teachers" alone have wisdom? But they long ago locked the doors of significant and crucial knowledge, and the keys have rusted for want of use.
In Numerology there is nothing antagonistic to Religion or to our present-day acceptance of the idea of God. On the contrary, we will but honor God the more by our more perfect obedience to Nature's laws. In no text or passage in Holy Writ are we told that God desires human beings to suffer except as the consequence of their own acts; on the contrary, we are everywhere shown that man brings suffering and punishment on himself by his disobedience of Nature's commands. As a logical sequence, it must follow then that if we move with the laws of life and are in harmony with them we must become more happy, healthy, and successful, and consequently nearer that state of perfection that is the ultimate object of Divine design.
What would you think of a workman in a factory who, instead of moving with the wheels of, say, a weaving machine, attempted to force them in a contrary direction? Would he not be crushed, injured, or perhaps lose his life? We would call him a fool, and he would not even gain our sympathy, and if he brought such a fatality on himself by ignorance, our sentence on him would be perhaps even more severe. Yet we call Nature unjust, cruel, or any other name that may fit into the circumstances - we! who do not even take the trouble of seeing which way Natures irresistible forces are moving. We pray. "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," but we have no more intention of even trying to find out what is the "will" which is obeyed in heaven, and broken by us every second, than if the sacred prayer had never been made.
Our cities and suburbs are filled with broken lives, our workplaces and mistaken charities are hideous proofs of the failure of our system. Our churches are monuments to the unknown, while the known lives with us in every action of our daily life and suffers with us when in our blindness we bring about the evils we could so easily avoid. We have tried every creed, and they have failed to comfort us. We are told to cry that we are "miserable sinners": we are worse, for we are ignorant sinners, and it is our ignorance alone that keeps us miserable.
How, then, will you accept this thought of another way of looking at life that I bring you in these numerology web pages? It may give you a new interest in life. It may yet become a religion to you, but if it does, it will only unfold the hidden truth of your other religions, the key of whose mysteries you entrusted to priest and prelates, who lost it in their cloisters or buried it in their ceremonies.
If you should decide to try the system which is presented on these pages you will find that if you are unsuccessful it will bring success, if you are already successful it will bring further success, and to one and all it will bring a new interest in life, and a higher conception of life itself.
James R. Bivens
