London Lectures

 of 1907

 By

 Annie Besant

 President of the Theosophical Society

 London and Benares

 The Theosophical Publishing Society

 City Agents: Lund, Humphries & Co. , Ltd. 

 Adyar, Madras: The _Theosophist_ Office

 New York: John Lane

 Chicago: The Theosophical Book Concern

 1907

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Contents

PART I

PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY

THE PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS

THEOSOPHY AND THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

PART II

THE PLACE OF PHENOMENA IN THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL AUTHORITY

THE RELATION OF THE MASTERS TO THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

THE FUTURE OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

PART III

THE VALUE OF THEOSOPHY IN THE WORLD OF THOUGHT

PART IV

THE FIELD OF WORK OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

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Part I

Psychism and Spirituality

The Place of Masters in Religions

Theosophy and the Theosophical Society

_Three public Lectures delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, on 16th, 23rd, and 30th June 1907. _

Psychism and Spirituality

Our subject to-night consists of two words: psychism--spirituality. Iam going to speak to you on the subjects denoted by these two words, because there is so much confusion about them in ordinaryconversation, in ordinary literature, and out of that confusion muchof harm arises. People think of one thing and use the name of theother, and so continually fall into blunders and mislead others withwhom they talk. I want to-night to draw a sharp and intelligibledivision between psychism and spirituality; if possible, to explainvery clearly what each of them means; so that, thoroughlyunderstanding the meaning of the things, people may choose forthemselves which of the two they desire to evolve, or unfold, withinthemselves. For if a person, desiring to unfold the spiritual nature, uses the means which are only adapted for developing the psychicnature, disappointment, possibly danger, will result; while, on theother hand, if a person desires to develop the psychic nature, andthinks that he will reach that development quickly by unfolding hisspiritual powers, he also is equally doomed to disappointment; but inthe second case, only to disappointment for a time. For while it isnot true that the great psychic is necessarily a spiritual person, itis true that the great spiritual person is inevitably a psychic. Allthe powers of Nature are subject to the Spirit, and hence, when a manhas truly unfolded his spiritual nature, there is nothing in the lowerworld which is not open to him and obedient to his will. In thatsense, then, the man who follows the spiritual path will notultimately be disappointed if he is seeking psychic development, butthe very seeking for it will, on the spiritual path, act as a certainbarrier. I shall return to the point again presently, and show you inwhat sense, and why, it is true that the development of the psychicpowers may hinder the unfolding of the spiritual. 

Now, to distinguish clearly between the two, I will begin with twobrief definitions. They will be expanded naturally in the course ofthe lecture, but I will define each of these two words in a singlesentence so as to make the definition clear and brief. Spirituality isthe Self-realisation of the One; psychism is the manifestation of thepowers of consciousness through organised matter. Each word of thatdefinition has its own value. We are far too apt, in our ordinarythought and talking, to limit the words "psychical, " "psychic, " or"psychism" in a quite illegitimate way, and the popular use of theterm is illegitimate. It is generally used amongst us to mean unusualmanifestations of the powers of consciousness, whereas, properlyspeaking, the word ought to cover every outer manifestation ofconsciousness, whether on the physical, on the astral, on the mental, or on the buḍḍhic plane. It does not matter in what world youare moving, in what matter your consciousness is acting; so long asit is utilising organised matter for its own expression so long arethose manifestations psychic, and are properly included under the termpsychism. You may perhaps wonder why I lay stress on this. You willsee it at once if I remind you that unless we keep this definition inmind--accurate, legitimate as it is--we shall be making a divisionbetween the manifestation of the consciousness on the physical and onthe astral and mental planes, between its manifestation in thephysical and those in the astral and mental bodies; and if we do thatthe whole of our thought will be on mistaken lines. You needpractically to be pressed back to what you know of consciousness onthe physical plane, before you can thoroughly follow itsmanifestations on the astral and on the mental. If you try to separateoff manifestations which are the same in kind though differing indegree, according to the fineness of the matter which is employed, ifyou try to separate them off, you will always regard what you callpsychism--that is, astral and mental manifestations in the subtlerbodies--in an artificial and unwise manner. If, on the other hand, yourealise that consciousness is one, that its manifestation on any planeis conditioned by the matter of the plane, that it is one in essence, only varying in degree according to the lessening or the increase ofthe resistance of the matter of the planes, then you will not beinclined to take up exaggerated views with regard to what people areso fond of calling psychism. You will not denounce it in the foolishway of many people, because in denouncing it you will know that youdenounce all intellectual manifestations, an absurdity of which veryfew people are likely to be guilty; if you take your intellectualmanifestations in the physical world as admirable things, to be alwaysencouraged, strengthened, developed, then you will be compelled, byparity of reasoning, to understand that the manifestations of the sameconsciousness in finer matter, astral or mental, are equally worthy, and no more worthy, of development, of consideration. You will notfind yourself in the absurdly illogical position of declaring it agood thing to train the physical plane consciousness, while it isdangerous to cultivate the astral and mental plane consciousness. Youwill understand that all psychism is of the same kind, that on eachplane the development of psychism has its own laws; but that it isabsurd to admire the working of consciousness on the lower plane, andshrink from it as something dangerous, almost diabolical, when itappears on a plane higher than the physical. 

It is this rational and common-sense view which I want to impress uponyou to-night, to get you out of the region of mystery, marvel, wonder, and fear, which to so many people surround what is called psychism; tomake you understand that you are unfolding consciousness, showing outyour powers on one plane after another according to the organisationand the fineness of the bodies in which your consciousness is working;and that if you will only keep your common sense and reason, if youwill only not allow yourself to be terrified by what at present isunusual, you may then walk along the psychic pathway in the astral ormental world, as resolutely, and with as great an absence of hysteria, as you walk along the psychic pathway in the physical world. That isthe general idea; and, of course, this is the meaning in which, afterall, the word is often used down here. When you say "psychology" youdo not mean only the workings of consciousness in astral and mentalbodies; you mean the whole consciousness of the man, the workings ofthe mind, wherever the mind is active; the whole of that you includeunder "psychology. " Why, then, when you change its form, should younarrow it down, as though that which is mind on one plane is not alsomind on all planes on which the mind is able to function?

Now let us consider for a moment the workings of the mind on thephysical plane: they are familiar. There is, however, one importantpoint about them. In the materialistic science of the last century youhad very widely spread, amongst scientific men, the view that thoughtwas only the result of certain kinds of vibration in certain kinds ofmatter. I need not dwell on that. But you are aware that both inEngland, and more especially in France and Germany, most elaboratedisquisitions were written to prove that thought was only the productof nervous matter. You rarely, I think never, now find a well-trainedscientist prepared to commit himself to that position. Those whosurvive as representatives of that same school may do so, but they areliterally survivals. The mass of psychologists of to-day admit thatthe manifestations of mind cannot any longer be regarded as theresults of vibrations in the physical brain, that at least we must gobeyond these limitations when dealing with the results of the studyof consciousness, as it is now studied amongst scientific men. Theywill no longer, then, regard thought as the product of matter. Theycertainly will not be prepared to go as far as I now propose to go, and say that the thinking organism is the production of thought--thevery antithesis, you will agree, of the other position, but which isvital to the understanding of the unfolding of the powers ofconsciousness through matter. It is recognised in ordinary biologythat the function appears before the organ. There I am on safescientific ground. It is recognised that the exercise of the functiongradually builds up the organ. All the researches into the simplerforms of organisms go to prove that. It is also recognised that whenthe exercise of the function has built the organ in a very simpleform, the exercise of the function continually improves the organwhich originally it builded. So far we are hand in hand with ordinaryscience. I think I shall not go too far in saying that a large numberof the more scientific psychologists of to-day will at least agreethat the brain as you find it in the adult man is very largely theresult of the exercise of thinking through the earlier years of life. I do not think they would go so far as to say that thinking hasliterally produced it. They would, however, judging by very manythings that have been said, be willing to admit that by hard thinkingwe can improve our apparatus of thought. That is one reason forthinking hard--in order to think better. And the harder you think, themore will your thinking instrument improve. 

In my next step, however, I cannot by any stretching of ordinaryscience persuade it to accompany me, or give me a foundation; for thepoint is that your consciousness, working on the next plane above theone on which the organ of consciousness is being built, is the shaperof that mechanism. To put it concretely: your physical brain is builtup from the astral plane, and it is your consciousness working inmatter finer than the physical which builds up the brain in theforming child within the limits laid down by karma. Now, that is ageneral law for healthy evolution. You will see the importance of thislaw a little further on. Every body which we possess--physical, astral, mental, buḍḍhic--is always built up by consciousnessworking in the plane next above it; the next plane, or world, is aworld very much more "next" than you are next each other sittinghere--not far away beyond the stars, removed by great spaces. It isinterpenetrating you in every portion of your being. It is only "next"in the sense that the solids, liquids, and gases of your bodies arenext each other in the body--not far away, but here. So that theworking is of the closest and most intimate kind. Some of you who arestudents of Theosophical literature will remember that H. P. B. Hasspoken of all of us as working in the astral consciousness. You willsee that you are not working with a physical consciousness in theliteral sense of the term, if you think for a moment. How much do youknow of the consciousness working in the various cells and tissues ofyour physical body? Practically nothing, except when you are ill. Onlywhen the body is disorganised do you become conscious of that working. Normally, the motion of your blood, the building up by assimilationof your muscles and nerves, the life of your cells, the protectiveaction of some of the living cells in your body--the "devourers, " asthey are called--go on without your knowledge, without your thought, without your giving one moment's conscious attention to them. In thePerfect Man, the consciousness of all this is ever present, but in us, imperfect, it is not; we are not yet sufficiently vitalised andunfolded to carry on the whole of our consciousness, with fullawareness of all its activities. We are only able to manage a verysmall part of it, and so have let go the consciousness that keeps atwork the physical body, to concentrate ourselves in a higher world, and utilise the nervous mechanism as the apparatus of our thinking. That law obtains, then, all through. If you want to organise and buildup your astral body, you can only do it from the mental plane. Youmust raise your thought to a higher power by concentration, by regularmeditation, by deliberately working on the consciousness, before youcan raise it to that power from which it shall be able to organiseyour astral body, as it has already organised your physical body. Thatis the reason why meditation is necessary in all these things; becausewithout the creative power of thought we cannot organise the body inthe world which is nearest to the physical. 

Now, supposing that we recognise that our consciousness working in thephysical brain, the instrument over which we have complete control, iscontinually at work contacting the outer world, using the brain as aninstrument on which it can play, and continually bringing down fromhigher worlds impressions which it transmits more or less perfectlyto the physical plane, we need not dwell upon our ordinary thinking. Let us take thinking a little more unusual, where the finer part ofthe brain, its etheric matter, is being more largely vitalised, moredefinitely used. The powers of the imagination--the creativepower--the artistic powers, all creative in their nature, theseutilise most the ethers of the brain, and, by working in those, bringinto activity the lower and coarser matter of the dense brain. Now, the thought passes from the consciousness through vehicle aftervehicle to find its clear expression here. But do you not have manymental impressions that are not clear, not well defined, and yet whichimpress you deeply, and of which you feel sure? They are of manykinds, and reach you in many ways. What is important to you is simplythis for the moment: that being surrounded by the astral and mentalworlds, contacts from these are continually touching you, continuallycausing changes in your consciousness. If your astral body werethoroughly organised like your physical, the impressions made would beclear and sharp like the physical. If your mental body were wellorganised, the impressions of that plane, the heavenly plane, would beclear and sharp like the physical. But as the astral and mental bodiesat this stage of evolution are not well organised, the impressionsreceived by them, causing changes in the consciousness, are vague andindeterminate, and it is these which are generally called "psychic. "And when you have a Psychical Research Society, it is not dealing withthe ordinary processes of thought, but with those which are notordinary; and all those things to which it gives many strange namesare all workings of the consciousness, in sheaths or bodies of whichit has not yet gained the mastery, which it has not yet definitelyorganised for its purposes. Slowly and gradually they becomeorganised, and strenuous thinking is the method for the astral body, and the working of the pure reason is the method for the mental body. Let us consider with regard to this, whether there is any other way ofbringing the astral body and mental body into activity. For you mayhave noticed that I used the word "normal" evolution, orderlyevolution on the lines of natural evolution, always from above. Butyou may stimulate it from below. It is possible to stimulate theastral body, at least, from the physical plane, but you do it at thecost of higher evolution a little later on, and the reason you can doit is simple enough. In the astral body are all the centres of yoursenses. You know how after death a man's desires are the same as theywere during his physical life. You know how in dreams your desiresresemble desires that you may have in your waking consciousness. Thecentre of all your psychic powers, of your conscious powers, thecentres of these are in the astral, and if (especially with yoursenses, each of which has its own centre in the astral body) youoverstrain the physical senses down here, you will get an action onthe astral plane, but an unhealthy, because disorderly one, one notgoing along the line of evolution but trying to create from belowinstead of from above. None the less, you may have some results, andin the two famous Indian systems for developing the powers of theconsciousness, and for unfolding the consciousness itself, you havethis recognised, and you read of Râja Yoga and of Hatha Yoga, of theKingly Yoga and of the Yoga of Effort. The Yoga of Effort is HathaYoga, and is practised by physical means and followed by physicaleffects. The eye is stimulated in certain ways, and the effect ofstraining the physical eye is to bring about a certain limited kind ofclairvoyance. You can gain it in that way by gazing into crystals, andso on. They do stimulate the centre of physical sight, but not theastral; and that is why they cannot go very far. You can get a certainamount of clairvoyance by these means, but you are only expanding yourphysical sight, and working on centres of the astral body connectedwith the physical organ of vision, the eye. The true astral sight isan entirely different thing. That comes from a centre of its own inthe astral body. It has to be created from the mental body, as theorgan of the physical was from the astral. The centre of that sightwill be in the mental body and not in the astral, and only the organof it in the astral body. The method of the Kingly, the Râja Yoga, isalways by thought--concentrate, meditate, contemplate, think: by thatmeans, in a healthy, normal, natural way you will inevitably developthe powers of sight on the astral, as in the course of Nature thepowers of sight were developed on the physical plane. And if yourealise that your consciousness is one, building its bodies for itsfuller and more complete expression, that you are here in order tobecome masters of matter instead of its slaves, to become lords ofmatter, using every organ of matter for knowledge of the world towhich that matter belongs, and not to be blinded by it, as we are forso long a time in our climb upwards, then you will see that thisnatural development of astral powers is inevitable in the course ofevolution, and all that you can do is to quicken it, following theline which Nature has traced. As Nature slowly will evolve in everyhuman being the power of using the astral body as freely as you usethe physical body now, so can you quicken the coming of that day foryourselves by understanding the powers of thought and turning them tothe object you desire to obtain. There are many ways in which this maybe done, and many rules you may learn for your guidance. Those rulesmay be summed up under two heads: clear and strenuous thinking, discipline for the bodies that you are trying to evolve; and also, Ishould add, for the body below them in evolution. Those are the twogreat laws for the safe evolution of these so-called psychic powers, what I call the powers of the consciousness on the astral and mentalplanes. There must be a discipline for the bodies, for you have tochoose the material which will serve you best in the work you aredoing out of the innumerable combinations of matter with which Naturepresents you. You must choose the combinations that will serve yourpurpose, which you can utilise in the building of the organs of senseon plane after plane. Just as really as the man who is a drunkard willinjure his nervous system by his excesses, and by supplying coarse andover-active compounds will injure the physical body, so making it aless useful instrument for the man--as any excess, not onlydrunkenness, but gluttony, profligacy, and so on--as these injure thephysical body as an instrument of consciousness, and to have full andperfect consciousness here we must train, discipline, build up ourbody with knowledge and with self-control, so also is that true on thehigher planes. A regimen is necessary when you are dealing with theorganisation of the subtler matter of the astral and mental worlds, for you cannot build up your physical body out of the coarsercombinations of matter on the physical, and have finer combinations onthe astral and mental. The bodies have to match each other. They haveto correspond with each other; and as you find all sorts ofcombinations related the one to the other on every plane, you mustchoose your combinations on the physical if you desire to choose themalso on the astral and mental. You cannot make your physical bodycoarse, and organise the astral and mental bodies for the finerpurposes of the man; and you must settle that in your minds if youwish to try to develop these higher powers of consciousness. Not onlybecause if you gather together the coarser materials of the astralworld, you will find yourself hampered by them in the higherexpression of consciousness, but also because the presence of thesecombinations in you exposes you to a number of dangers on the astralplane. The purer the elements of your astral body, the safer you arein your earlier wanderings on that plane. It is important to mentionthis, because in some of the schools of thought which are trying onlyto develop astral powers, you will find that they deliberately useother methods in order to make their astral body active. Many schoolsof the "left hand path" in India will use spirits, wines, meats of allsorts, in order to bring about a certain astral condition, and theysucceed, because by these means they attract to themselves, and for atime govern, the elemental powers of those lower planes--theelementals of the lower astral worlds. So that you may find that anIndian, who knows a little of this and wants to use it for his ownpurposes, will deliberately use these things which are attractive tothe elementals of those lower worlds, and gather them around him anduse them. But he does it knowing what he does, and aiming at thatwhich he desires to conquer. But amongst those who practise blackmagic of the higher kinds--of the mental kinds--you have an asceticismas stern and rigid as has ever been used by those who are trying todevelop their higher bodies for nobler ends. It is a mistake to thinkthat the brothers of the dark side are, as a rule, licentious andindifferent to what you call morality. On the contrary, they areexceedingly strict. Their faults are the faults of the mind, not thefaults of the lower desires, of the organs of the different bodieswhich may gratify them. Their faults are the more dangerous faults ofmental powers misused for personal ends. But they realise very wellthat if they want the mental powers and the higher ranges of thosepowers, they must be as rigid in the discipline of the lower bodies asany pupil of the White Lodge could be. Take it, then, that to developin this way, a regimen for the bodies, as well as the strict workingand training of the mind, is absolutely necessary. But with these theresult is sure. You cannot set a time for the result, for it dependswhere the worker is beginning in his present life. In all thesematters Nature's laws will not permit of what is called miraculousgrowth, and if you find persons developing psychic powers veryrapidly, when perhaps they have been meditating only a few months, itis because in a previous life they have cultivated these powers andare taking up their lessons again in a more advanced class ofevolution, and not in the infant class, as many do in the presentlife. So that there are differences. Some now beginning are not likelyto succeed in their present incarnation; but if that discourages them, one can only say: "If you do not do it now, you will have to beginagain next life, and so on and on and on. For Nature's laws cannot beviolated, and Nature knows no favoritism and no partiality. Some timeor other you have to begin, and the sooner you begin the sooner willyou succeed. "

Now the whole of this, you will remark, is the training, theorganising of _bodies_. And psychism implies that. You must train, purify, organise, in order that the powers of the consciousness mayshow forth. You will see very fully now why at the beginning I urgedyou to realise that the whole of these manifestations are similar inkind, so that when you find someone saying to you: "Oh! So-and-so is apsychic, " as though that were to condemn the person; "Such-and-such aperson is a mere clairvoyant, " and so on, as though the fact ofpossessing clairvoyance were a disadvantage rather than an advantage;then the proper answer is: "Are you prepared to go the whole way withthat?" Many Indians do so (it is the point to which I said I wouldreturn); they say that the siḍḍhis, the powers of consciousnessmanifested on the lower planes, are hindrances to the spiritual life. And so they are in a sense. The spiritual life goes inwards: allpsychic powers go outwards. It is the same Self in either case--theSelf turning inwards on Itself, or the Self going outwards to theworld of objects. But it does not make one scrap of difference whetherit goes out to physical, astral, or mental objects: it is all theobjective consciousness, and therefore the very reverse of thespiritual. But the Indian does not shrink from that as ordinarily theman in the West does. He is perfectly honest. He says: "Yes, thepowers of the intellect applied to the objects of the world are ahindrance in the spiritual life. We do not want them, do not care tothink about it. We give up all the objects of the physical plane whenseeking the Self. " And if you are prepared to say that, then by allmeans turn aside from psychism, but do not at one and the same timeencourage intellectuality on the physical plane and denounce what youcall psychism on the others, because that is mere folly. If it isbetter to be blind here than to see--and the Indian will tell you itoften is, because it shuts out all the distracting objects of thephysical plane--if you are prepared to say that, and say: "Yes, Iwould rather be blind than see, " then you may go on to denounce seeingon the astral plane. But if you value your physical sight, why notvalue the astral sight--it is a stage higher--as well? and the mentalsight--which is a stage higher yet--as well? Why denounce astral andmental, and praise up the physical? Why admire the power of sight ofthe painter, who sees more shades than you can see, and denounce thesight of the clairvoyant, who sees very much more than the cleverestpainter? They all belong to the object world; they all lead the Selfaway from the realisation of himself, and they are all exactly on thesame level. It seems strange when one sees the same person exaltingthe psychic on the physical plane and denouncing it on the astral andmental. 

But now let us turn to "spirituality" and see what that means. "TheSelf-realisation of the One"; not the declaring that all men are one, that all men are brothers: we can all do that. Anyone who has reacheda certain stage of intellectual knowledge will recognise the unity ofmankind; will say, with the writer in the Christian book, that God hasmade all men of one blood--quoted again from what is called a Paganbook. That intellectual recognition of the unity is practicallyuniversal among educated people; but very few are prepared to carryout the intellectual recognition into practical life and practicaltraining. Now for the development of what are called psychic facultiessome amount of retirement from the world is very useful. For thedevelopment of the spiritual consciousness no such retirement isnecessary. In fact, for the most part, except in the earlier stagesperhaps, seclusion is a mistake; for the world is the best place forthe unfolding of the sense of unity, and best amongst men and womenand children can we call out the powers of the spiritual life. Andthat for a simple reason. In the lower world the Spirit shows itselfout by love, by sympathy; and the more we can love, the more we cansympathise, the greater will be the unfolding of the consciousness ofthe Self within. It was a true word of the early Christian Initiate, that if a man loves not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall helove God whom he hath not seen? And if the perfection of thespiritual consciousness be that vision of the Supreme, theconsciousness which knows itself to be one with God, then the way tothe realisation will be by the partial realisation of loving sympathy, for which the world is the most fitting field, and our brethren aroundus the natural stimulus. Love, sacrifice, these are the manifestationsof the Spirit on the physical plane, as is right knowledge also. Forthe Spirit is not a one-sided thing, but a Trinity, and knowledge isas necessary as love. The special value of love lies in its unifyingpower, and in the fact that it makes what the world calls sacrificenatural and delightful. You know it in your own experience. Just inproportion as you love another is it a joy and not a sorrow to give upthings in order that the happiness of the other may be increased. Itis no sacrifice for a mother to give up personal enjoyment for thesake of giving it to her children. A deeper joy is felt in thehappiness of the child than could possibly have been felt in theenjoyment of the thing by herself; a sweeter, finer, profounderhappiness is the enjoyment of the happiness of the beloved. And that alittle widens out the consciousness, and hence family life is one ofthe best schools for spiritual unfolding; for in the continualsacrifices of the family life, springing from love and rendered joyfulby affection, the Self feels itself a larger Self, and reaches thesense of unity with those immediately around. And after the family thepublic life, the life of the community, the life of the nation: thesealso are schools for the unfolding of the spiritual consciousness. Forthe man who is a good citizen of the community feels the life of thecommunity as his own life, and so becomes conscious of a larger Selfthan the narrow self of the family. And the man who loves his nation, his Self widens out to the boundaries of the nation, and he isconscious of a larger Self than the self of the family, or thecommunity within the State. And just in proportion as the lovewidening does not grow superficial and shallow (for if you have only acertain amount of water and you make your dish wider and wider, thewater will become shallower and shallower) does it approach spirituallove. Too often love becomes unreal with those who try to love thefar-off when they do not love the near. But if you avoid thetemptation, and remembering that the Spirit has no limitations, andthat you can draw and draw and draw on the love within you and neverfind the bottom of the source of love; if you are strong enough to dothat, then the love of the family, of the community, of the State, will widen out into the love of humanity, and you shall know yourselfas one with all, and not only with your family, or your community, oryour nation. All these local loves are schoolmasters to bring us tothe wider love of man. But do not blunder in the idea that you canhave the wider unless you have gone through the narrower; for the badhusband, the bad citizen, the bad patriot, will never make a reallover of humanity. He must learn his alphabet before he can read inthis book of love, and must spell out the letters before he maypronounce the word. None the less, these successive stages are allstages towards the spiritual life, and prepare the man for theconsciously spiritual realisation. And if you would really trainyourself for the unfolding of this life within you, practise it onthose who are nearest to you by meeting them with love and sympathy inthe daily paths of life. Not only those whom you like, but those youcare not for as well; not with those who love you only, but with thosewho dislike you also. Remember that you have to break downbarriers--barriers of the bodies that bar you out from your fellowSelves in the worlds around you, and that breaking down of thebarriers is part of the training in the spiritual life. Only asbarrier after barrier is broken down, only as wall after wall islevelled to the ground, will the freedom of the Spirit become possiblein manifestation on every plane and in every world. The Spirit is everfree in his own nature and his own life, but, confined within thebarriers of the body, he has to learn to transcend them, before, onthese planes of matter, he can realise the divine freedom which is hiseternal birthright. So long as you feel yourself separate from others, so long are you shut out from the realisation of the unity; so long asyou say "my" and "mine, " so long the realisation of the Spirit is notyet possible for you. Love of individual possessions, not onlyphysical but moral and mental, not the vulgar pride of physical wealthonly, but moral pride, intellectual pride, everything that says "I" asagainst "you, " and does not realise that I and you are one--all thisis against the spiritual life. Hardest of all lessons when broughtdown to practical life; most difficult of all attainments when effortis made to realise it, and not only to talk about it and imagine it. It is best practised by continual renunciation of the individualpossessions on every plane, and the constant thought of unity. Whenyou are trying to live the life of the Spirit, you will try to bepure. You do well, but why? In order that you may be pure, and leaveyour impure brethren in their impurity? Oh no! You must try to bepure, in order that there may be more purity in the world to shareamongst all men, because you are pure. You are not wanting to be purerthan others, but only gathering purity that you may spread it in everydirection, and most joyous when your own purity lifts someone from themire, who is trampled into it under the feet of the world. You want tobe wise. You do well; for wisdom is a splendid possession. But why? Inorder that you may look down on the ignorant and say: "I am wiser thanthou, " as the pure man might say: "I am holier than thou"? Oh no! butin order that the wisdom that you gather may enlighten the ignorant, and become theirs and not only yours. Otherwise it is no spiritualthing; for spirituality does not know "myself" and "others"; it onlyknows the One Self, of whom all forms are manifestations. 

We dare not call ourselves spiritual until we have reached that pointwhich none of us as yet has reached, for to reach it means to become aChrist. When, looking at the lowest and basest and most ignorant andvilest, we can say: "That is myself, in such-and-such a garb, " and sayit feeling it, rejoicing in it--because if there are two of you, andone is pure and the other impure, and the two are one, then neither isperfect, but both are raised above the level of the lowest--that isthe true atonement, the real work of the Christ; and the birth ofChrist within you means the willingness to throw down all walls ofseparation, and the stature of Christ within you means that you haveaccomplished it. 

For the most part we claim our unity above; we do not take pride inclaiming our unity below; we are glad to say, "Yes, I also am Divine;I am a Christ in the making; I am one with Him. " Harder to say: "I amone with the lowest of my brethren, sharing with them the same Divinelife. " Yet our Divinity is only realised as we recognise that sameDivinity in others. You may remember that exquisite story of OliveSchreiner, breathing the very essence first of the unspiritual, andthen of the spiritual life. In the first case a woman, pure andspotless, her garments shining with whiteness, and her feet shod aswith snow, went up to the Gates of Heaven and trod the golden streets. And as she trod them in her shining robes the angels shuddered back, and said: "See, her garments are blood-spotted, and her sandals arestained with mire and blood. " From the throne the Christ asked:"Daughter, how is it that your garments are blood-spotted and yoursandals stained?" And she answered: "Lord, I was walking in miry ways, and I saw a woman there down in the mire, and I stepped upon her thatI might keep my sandals clean. " The Christ and the angels vanished, and the woman fell from heaven, and wandered again in the miry ways ofearth. Once again she came to the heavenly portal and trod the goldenstreets, and this time she was not alone. Another woman was with her, and the garments of both were blood-flecked, and the sandals of bothwere stained with the mire and blood of earth. But the angels seeingthem pass by, cried out: "See how whitely their garments shine! Andsee how white are their feet!" And the Christ, when they came beforethe throne, said: "How come ye here in garments that are soiled?" Andthe answer came: "I saw this my sister trampled upon, and I bent downto lift her up, and in the picking of her up my garments were soiled, but I have brought her with me to Thy presence. " And the Christ smiledand lifted them up beside Him, and the angels sang for joy. For it isnot the sin and the shame that are shared that soil the garments ofthe Spirit, and leave upon it the mire of earth. 

If, then, you would lead the spiritual life, go downwards as well asupwards. Feel your unity with the sinner as well as with the saint. For the only thing that makes you divine is the Spirit that lives inevery human heart alike, in all equally dwelling, and there is nodifference in the divinity of the Spirit, but only in the stage of itsmanifestation. And just as you and I climb upwards and show more ofthe spiritual life in the lower worlds, should we raise our brethrenwith us, and know the joy of the redeemer, and the power of the lifethat saves. For Those whom we call Masters, Those who are the Christsof the world, Those are reverenced and beloved, because to Them thereis no difference, but the sinner is as beloved as the saint--nay, sometimes more, because compassion flows out to the weaker more thanto the strong. 

Such is the spiritual life; such the goal that every man who wouldbecome spiritual must place before his eyes. Very different from thepsychic, and not to be confused with it--the unfolding of the divinityin man, and not the purification and the organisation of thevehicles. Both are good, both necessary, and I finish with the wordswith which I began, that while to be psychic is no proof ofspirituality, to be spiritual is to possess every power in heaven andon earth. Choose ye each your road. Tread whichever you will, butbeware that by the growth of your powers here, in separation, you donot delay the growth of the spirituality which is the realisation ofthe unity of the Self. For everything which divides becomes evil, bythe very fact of its dividing; every power which is shared is a wingto carry us upwards, but every power that is kept for the lower selfis a clog that holds us down to earth. 

The Place of Masters in Religions

Everyone of us who belongs to any special religion can trace back alongthe line of his religion further and further into the past, until hecomes to its beginning, its first Teacher. And round that Teacher isusually a group of men and women who to the Founder of the religion aredisciples, but to those who accept the religion later are teachers, apostles. And this is invariably true. The Hebrew, if you ask him, willtrace back his religion to the time of the great legislator Moses, andbehind Him to a yet more heroic figure, Abraham, the "friend of God. "Look back to some yet older faith, the faith of Egypt, of Chaldea, ofPersia, of China, of India, and you will find exactly the same thing istrue. The Parsî, representative of a splendid tradition, but whosereligion, as it now, is, as has been well said, "a religion offragments" only--he will trace back his religion to his own greatProphet, the Prophet of the Fire, who led the exodus from the centre ofAsia and guided His people into what we now call the land of Persia. Egypt, if you ask her story, will show you heroic figures of her past, and amongst them that great King and Priest, Osiris, who, slain, as theold legend tells us, rises again, as Lord and Judge of His people. Buḍḍhism, spread in the far East, will trace back its story to theBuḍḍha, and will declare in addition to that, that not only is theBuḍḍha the Teacher of that particular faith, but that a livingperson still exists on the earth as Teacher, as Protector, whom theycall the Boḍhisaṭṭva, the wise and the pure. India will tellyou of a great group of teachers gathered round their Manu, thetradition of whose laws is still preserved, and is still used as thebasis of the social legislation administered now by the English rulers. And round that great Lawgiver of the past, wise men are gathered whosenames are known throughout the land, each of them standing at the headof some noble Indian family, that traces its ancestry backward andbackward till it ends in the Sage, the Teacher. And this is equally trueof more modern religions. Take the Christian religion, and the Christiantraces his religion back until it finds its source in the personality ofthe Prophet of Judea, of Jesus the Christ. And it is interesting, as oneof those strange parallels which meet us often in the comparative studyof religions, that just as the Buḍḍhist has his Buḍḍha andalso his Boḍhisaṭṭva, so the Christian has the two names:Christ, representing the living Spirit, a stage in the spiritualunfolding, the name representing a stage, an office, rather than aspecial man, and joined to that the individual name of Jesus, in orderto mark the intimate connection, as some would say the identity, betweenthe two. But just as among the Buḍḍhists the distinction is drawn, so among the early Christians you will find a similar distinction wasmade between the man Jesus and the spiritual Christ. So that in thoseearly days many of those who were called "Gnostics" divided the two in asimilar fashion, although uniting them at a certain stage of theteaching, of the ministry. And if you take the latest born of thereligions, the Mussulmân, the religion of Islâm, that again is tracedbackward to a Prophet, the Prophet Muhammad, the great Prophet ofArabia. Universally this is true, that the religion traces itself backto a single mighty figure, whom some call a "God-man, " a man too divineto be regarded as wholly like those amongst whom he lived and moved andtaught; above them and yet of them, closely bound to them by a commonhumanity, although raised above them by a manifestation of the Godwithin, mightier, more complete, more compelling, than the manifestationin the ordinary men and women around Him. So with all religions, and inthat thought of the divine figure, the Founder of every faith, you havethe fullest, the truest, the most perfect conception of that which weTheosophists call the ideal of the Master. All such mighty beings by theTheosophist would be given the name of Master. And not by theTheosophist alone, for that word in other religions has been applied tothe Founder, the Chief of the faith. Nay, to the Christian it shouldcome with special force, with special significance, for it was the namethat Christ the Teacher chose as best expressing His own relationship tothose who believed on Him, to those who followed Him. "Neither be yecalled masters, " He said; "for one is your Master, even Christ. " And soagain you may remember that, in speaking to His disciples, He said: "Yecall Me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am. " So that to theChristian heart the name Master should be above all other names sacredand beloved, since it was the chosen name of their own Teacher, the namethat He claimed from His disciples, that name that He used asrepresenting His relation to them. So this idea of a Master in religioncertainly should be one which comes with no alien sound, no foreignsignificance, among those who look up to the Master Christ. And exactlythe same idea is that of a Master in any great religion; it is a commonidea--it signifies the Founder, the Teacher, divine and yet human. Tothat point I will return later. 

Let us study the central idea of these Masters a little more closely, and see what are the special characteristics which mark Them in thereligions of the past. If you go back very, very far, you will alwaysfind that the Master wears a double character: ruler, law-giver, on theone side; teacher upon the other. In all the old civilisations this ischaracteristic; for in those days the idea had not arisen of sacred andsecular, or sacred and profane, as we say in the modern world. To theold civilisations there was no such thing as sacred history and profanehistory; no division was made between sacred science and secularscience; all history was sacred, all science was divine. And so much wasthat the case that, when you find an ancient pupil asking of an ancientteacher as to divine science, the answer was given: "There are two formsof divine science, the higher and the lower. " And the lower divinescience was made up of all the things that now you call literature, science, and art; all those were run over by name, and summed up underthe heading of the lower divine science. The higher, supreme Sciencewas that knowledge of God, to which accurately the word Wisdom oughtonly to be applied. So that to their thought Deity was everywhere, andthere was only variety in the manifestations of Deity. All Nature wassacred. God expressed Himself in every object, in every form. All thatcould be said was that through one form more of His glory came thanthrough another. The form might be more or less transparent, but theinner radiant light was the same in all. And it was natural, inevitable, with such a conception of Nature and of God, that the Master, theFounder, of a religion should unite in His sole person the office alikeof the Priest and of the King. And so you find it. The only likeness inmodern days is not now a very fortunate one in the eyes of many--theKing-Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. For so ill had the duties ofthe King been performed in that high seat, that the people lost thesense of the divinity, and revolted against it, and cast it off, andleft that Pontiff shorn of his royal character. But far back in the oldcivilisations, in the one person the two offices were united. ThePharaoh of Egypt was truly the Lord of the triple diadem, but also thesupreme Priest in every temple of his land. So also in Chaldea, inIndia, and in many another land; and wherever that is the case you finda certain outline given to the civilisation, differing in detail, butmarvellously similar in the broad touches of that sketch. You find thatin those days the Priest-King, the Ruler of the land and the supremeTeacher of his people, shaped the polity of the nation as he shaped thedoctrines taught in the temples of the religion. Both the religion andthe polity have the keynote of duty. And always with increasing powerthere came greater weight of responsibility, heavier burden of duty; andthe freest in those civilisations were the poorest. Those who wereregarded as the children of the national household were ever cared forwith extremest care. The very fact that they were the lowest indevelopment gave them the greatest claim on the divine Man who ruled, sothat all through the note of those civilisations is the note whichto-day would be called socialistic--with one enormous difference, thatthe most wise ruled. The result, in a sense, would be the result thatthe Socialist dreams of, the absence of poverty, the universality ofsome form of work done for the State as a whole, a duty of each man tobear a share of the burden; but the burden grew lighter and lighter asit came downwards to the younger members of the family, of the nation;the duty the most burdensome was placed on the highest. And you willfind that, while still the tradition remained, it was very difficultsometimes to get rulers and governors of large States and small. Itcomes out in the Chinese books. The Emperor sends down word thatSo-and-so is to be governor of a State, and So-and-so, in thosedegenerate days, generally tried to escape from it, because of thetremendous burden that the governorship imposed. For in the case of theold Rulers, in the days when the divine Kings were the Kings and Priestsof the people, anything that was wrong in the nation was related to theRuler, and not to the people at large. Remember the words of one greatTeacher of later days, Confucius, when a King turned to him and said:"Master, why is there robbery, why is there murder in my land? How shallI stop it?" His stern answer was: "If you, O King, did not steal andmurder, there would be no robbery and no murder in your land. " Alwaysthe highest with the weight of responsibility; the younger with theright to enjoy, to be happy, to be cared for. Where food was short, theywere the last to starve, and the King the first; where anything wentshort of material things, they were the first to be given their share, and the King the last. Such was the outline of the social organisation. Slight traces of it remain even to the present day. You can see tracesof it in the civilisation that was destroyed in Peru by the conquerors, the Spanish conquerors, of that land. Some traces of it still remain inIndia, although degraded and decayed. The note is always the same: thehigher, the more burdened; the higher, the harder the life; the higher, the greater the duty. For that is the type of the Master, and the idearan through the whole of the civilisation. He, the Priest-King, mightyin knowledge and in power, must bear upon his broad shoulders the burdenthat would crush a weaker man. And so downwards through all the degreesof ruler, in proportion to the power and its expansion, so in proportionthe weight and the responsibility. 

They passed away from earth as humanity grew out of its infant stage. My phrase is too strong--I should not have said: "They passed awayfrom earth. " They passed away into silence, not from earth; thereonmany of Them still remain. But They drew back from the outer position, from outer power, and became the great company of Elder Brothers ofhumanity, only some of whom remained in close touch with the race. 

And that is the next point in the idea of the Master. Those whofounded a religion were bound to remain wearing the body of man, fixedto the earth, bound to the outward semblance of humanity, so long asthe religion lived upon earth which They had given to it. That was therule: no liberation for the Man who founded a religion until all whobelonged to that religion had themselves passed out of it, intoliberation, or into another faith, and the religion was dead. Thedeath of a religion is the liberation from all bondage of the Masterwho gave it to the world. He in a very real sense is incarnate in thereligion that He bestows. While that religion lives and teaches, whilemen still find in it the expression of their thought, so long thatdivine Man must remain, and guide and protect and help the religionwhich He gave to earth. Such is the law. No Master may leave ourhumanity while that which He started as a human school is stillexisting upon earth. Some have passed away, and would no longer bespoken of as Masters--the name given to Them in the occult world isdifferent--but Those who have passed away have passed away becauseTheir religions are dead: the Masters of ancient Egypt, of ancientChaldea, have gone from this earth into the mighty company of Thosewho no longer bear the burden of the flesh. But the Masters of everyliving religion live on earth, and are the links, for the people ofthat religion, between God and man; the Master is the divine Man, onewith his brothers, who look to him for help, one with the God aroundand above, and through Him the spiritual life is ever flowing. Theword "mediator, " applied in the Christian scriptures to the Christ, signifies a real and living relation. There are such mediators betweenGod and man, and they are all God-men, true Christs. Such linksbetween the God without and the God within us are necessary for thehelping by the one, and for the manifestation of the other. The Godwithin us, unfolding his powers, answers to the God without us, andthe link is the God-man who shares the manifested nature of divinity, and yet remains one with His brethren in the flesh. A bondage, yes. But a voluntary bondage--a bondage assumed in the day in which theMessenger came forth from the great White Lodge to bring a newrevelation, to found a new divine kingdom upon earth. Heavy theresponsibility of a divine Man who takes upon Himself the tremendousburden of speaking out to the world a new Word in the divinerevelation. All that grows out of it makes the heavy burden of Hisdestiny. Everything which happens within that communion of which He isthe centre must react upon Him, and He is ultimately responsible; andas that divine Word is always spoken in a community of men and womenimperfect, sinning, ignorant, that Word is bound to be distorted andtwisted, because of the medium in which it works. That is why everysuch Teacher is called a "sacrifice"--Himself at once the sacrificerand the sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice that man may make to man, asacrifice so mighty that none in whom Deity is not unfolded to thegreatest height compatible with human limitation is strong enough tomake it, is strong enough to endure it. That is the true sacrifice ofthe Christ; not a few hours' agony in dying, but century after centuryof crucifixion on the cross of matter, until salvation has been wonfor the people who bear His name, or until they have passed under someother Lord. Hence is that road always called "the Way of the Cross. "Long before Christianity came to birth, the "Way of the Cross" wasknown to every Initiate, and Those were said to tread it whovolunteered for the mighty service of proclaiming the old messageagain in the ears of the world of the time. A sacrifice: for none maytell, who volunteers for the service, what lies before the religionthat He founds, what shall be the deeds of the community that Hebegins on earth. And every sin and crime of that religion, or thatChurch, falls into the scales of Karma stamped with the name of theFounder. He is responsible for it, and bearing that responsibility isthe mighty sacrifice He makes; and the result is inevitable; for in aworld imperfect no perfection can be perfectly mirrored. As thesun-ray falling upon water is twisted and distorted, so is it with therays of a perfect truth falling in amongst a community of imperfectmen; and no action down here can be a perfect action, for "action, " itis written in an ancient book, "is surrounded with evil as a fire issurrounded with smoke. " The imperfection of the medium makes the smokeround every Word of Fire, every Word of Truth. And the Founder mustendure the pungency of the smoke, if He would speak the Word of Fire. The realisation of that, however dimly, however imperfectly, makes thepassion of gratitude in the human heart to those Men who bear theirinfirmities and open up the way to God for man. It is that which insome forms of popular Christianity has been distorted in speaking ofthe sacrifice of the Christ, when it has been made a sacrifice, notfor man, sinful and foolish, but to the Father of all perfection, whoneeds no sacrifice of suffering in order to reconcile Him to thechildren sprung from His life. That is one of the distortions of theignorance of man; that the falsification which has been spoken in thename of religion and has obscured the perfect love of God--for everydivine Man who comes out is a manifestation of the divine heart, and arevelation of God to man. And how could it be that the Master ofCompassion, who wins human hearts by the tenderness of His love, couldbe a Revealer of God, if there were not in God a compassion mightierthan His own, and profounder than His humanity, as God is greater thanman? But the splendor of the truth dazzled the eyes of those to whomit was presented, and their own ignorance, and fear, and limitation, imposed upon that perfect sacrifice the terrible aspect of a sacrificeto God--an aspect which it assumed, not only in Christianity, but inother faiths as well. For the most part, not always, in the elderreligions they understood that the story of the life and death was anallegory, a "myth, " as they called it, revealing a deeper truth. Andso they avoided the pain and the sense of revulsion which has rousedthe conscience of civilised man to revolt against the cruderpresentments of the doctrine; the great truth of the sacrifice istrue, but it is not a legal, a contract, sacrifice, made between man'srepresentative and God; but the effort of the divine to make itselfunderstood, and the voluntary binding of the sacrifice to the crossof matter until His people are set free. And then, as I said, Hepasses on into other worlds, to other work, and is no longer called aMaster of the Wisdom. 

Now, looking at this idea, let us ask: "What is the work of theseMasters in the religions of the world, and why is it that this thoughtof the Masters has been so revived in the modern world, and made somuch more living, in a sense, than it has been for many a long year?"In the early days of Christianity, as I said, you find the idea; butit has largely vanished from the Churches as a living truth, and theythink of Jesus, the Christian Master, as risen from the dead andascended into heaven. And the materialising spirit of ignorance hasmade the ascent a going away, and the Man has gone, although the Godremains. But that is only a materialisation of the older truth; for, according to the truth, heaven is not a faraway place to which peoplego. No one _goes_ there; they only open their eyes and see it on everyside around them. For heaven is a state of the psychic life which isrealised in the higher bodies, the bodies of the mental plane, and itdoes not need to go hither and thither, North, South, East, or West, to find it; for, as the great Teacher said: "Behold, the Kingdom ofHeaven is within you"--not far away, beyond the sun or moon or stars. And the ascension of Jesus to heaven, as the Church of England putsit--in words that sound very strange in modern ears, because they havelost their mystic meaning and are only taken in what S. Paul used tocall the "carnal" interpretation--in the fourth article of the Churchof England, was that He ascended into heaven, taking with Him His"flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man'snature. " Now when you take that in the literal and crudesignification, naturally the thoughtful man revolts against it. Whatis this about a physical body and physical bones going up through theair into the sky? And where has it gone to? The modern man cannotbelieve it in that sense, and so he loses the spiritual verityenshrined in words of symbolism and of allegory. For the fact thatJesus the Master went away, but still dwells on earth in the flesh, that is the truth which the article tries to indicate; and not that Heis gone far away into a far-off heaven to sit at the right hand ofGod, whence He shall come again to judge. He lives in the body, andalso lives in the midst of the Church, which is His true mysticalbody; and so long as that Church exists, so long as that Church isfound on earth, so long its Master shall live within it, and shalldwell in a human body. He is not gone away, He has not ascendedanywhere in the literal sense, but is permeating the whole of HisCommunion, and living upon earth until the last Christian has passedaway to liberation, or is born into some other faith. That is theinner meaning. He lives and may be reached. And if the teachings ofthe Theosophical Society have any value for the Christian Church, itis because they are bringing back to live in Christian hearts thisliving truth of the bodily ever-presence of the Christ amongst them. Theosophists who are Christians, and remain within the limits of theChristian Church, have gained a vivid view of this real humanity ofJesus. They learn that He may be reached as truly now as when Hewalked near the sea of Galilee, or taught in the streets of Jerusalem, that they may know Him with as real a sense of His presence, maylearn from Him as truly as any apostle or disciple in the past, thatit is a living and real presence--not only, as the Roman CatholicChurch says, in the Sacrament of the altar, but in the experience ofthe Christian heart. And it has never been left without a witness. Look all through the history of the Christian Church, and see how oneafter another has come into living touch with the Master Jesus. Everygreat saint has proclaimed his own experience as regards his contactwith his Lord. And only in comparatively modern days, and in partsonly of the Christian Church, has that great and vivifying truth beenlost sight of. The Greek Church has never lost it; the Roman CatholicChurch has never lost it. The testimony of the saints in those ancientcommunions bears witness to the continuing connection between theChristian and the Christ. You find it in some of the extremeProtestant communities also, where they bear a living testimony to thereality of the personal communion. Not through books and churchesonly, but within the living heart of man, visible sometimes even tophysical eyes, shining out in the vision of the saint, speaking in therapture of the prophet--it has never quite passed away fromChristianity. It is coming back more strongly year after year, comingback with increased vitality, with more reality and strength behindit; coming back because the Christ within the Church, finding thatforgetfulness was coming over the modern mind, has, as in the oldendays, used a scourge of whipcord instead of only the voice of love. For inasmuch as the voice of love was not listened to, and the realityof His presence was being forgotten, He has used the whip of what iscalled the Higher Criticism to drive men out of books back to theliving Master of the Christian faith. When you build the house of yourfaith on books and manuscripts, on councils and traditions, you arebuilding on the sand, and the storm has come--the storm of criticism, of investigation, of scholarship, and the house of faith totters, because it is founded on the sand. But build the house of your faithon the rock of human experience, on the one rock on which every trueChurch is founded, the individual touch between the human Spirit andthe divine, the personal experience of the human man on earth with thedivine Man in the heaven, beside and around him, and you build thehouse of your faith on a rock that nothing can shake nor destroy, andit will shelter you, no matter what storms may rage outside. And so, as in the temple, the whip has been used in order that men may learnwhat they would not learn by the gentle instruction spoken only in thewords of the friend. The enemy has been used for it, the foe, theassailant, who has made sharp his weapons, and has cut many of the oldmanuscripts in pieces; and the result of that is that the ChristianChurch is thrown back upon the Christ Himself, no longer seen dimlythrough history, but in vivid reality before the eyes of the heart ofthe Christian, and that He will give to Christianity a new life. Themystic belief will come back, and the literal interpretations willfall away. And when that is done, then Christianity shall have renewedits youth and its power, and shall know that the Master is living inHis Church, and is still the Master of life and death, as in the oldendays. 

And by a very real instinct you will find that the most earnestChristians cling to the humanity of Jesus, and that is the value ofthe Master to us, when inside our hearts is written the truth of Hisexistence. If there were only such men as we, and God, the gulf wouldbe too vast, the difference too terrible--nothing to encourage us tobelieve that Divinity was within us. We seem so trivial, so foolish, so childish, that we hardly dare sometimes to believe that we aretruly God. It seems impossible for us in our modern life, with all thefollies in which we spend ourselves, with all the childish ambitionsand terrors with which we amuse or frighten ourselves. This littlemodern life seems so petty and so vulgar that we scarcely dare tobelieve ourselves divine. We speak of the old heroic days, and thinkthat if we had lived then, we too should have been heroic, as theheroes and martyrs and saints of earlier times. But in truth humanityis just as divine to-day, as it ever was in the past. And if thedivine were manifested in us as it was in the great ones of the past, we should be heroic as they were; it is not circumstances that makethe difference, but only that the God within us is more in the stageof childhood than in those mighty ones of the past, in which He hadrisen to the stature of divine manhood. And when we think of theMasters and realise that They are; still more, perhaps, when in somehappy moment we catch a glimpse of such divine Men, or feel Theirpresence closer than that of a human friend, ah! then it is that theinspiration which flows from Them, as from a ceaseless source, encourages and vivifies the life within. For we realise that it wasnot so very, very long ago that They were as we are, plunged down inthe trivialities of earth; that They have climbed above them by theunfolding of the God within. And what They have done, you and I mayalso do. They are a constant inspiration and encouragement forhumanity. They are men, and only God as we are God; the onlydifference being that They have God more manifest in Them than He isin us. They also in Their day were weak and foolish; They also stroveand struggled, as we strive and struggle now; They also failed, as weare failing now; They also blundered, as we are blundering now; andThey have risen above it all, strength after strength revealed inThem, wisdom and power and love growing ever more and more divine. Andwhat They have done, you and I can do. For They are truly but thefirst fruits of humanity, the promise of the harvest, and notsomething strange, miraculous, and far away. The Christian clings tothe manhood of Jesus for the reason that as "He hath suffered, beingtempted, He is able to succour them that are tempted. " And it is atrue instinct, a wise faith, for it is by coming into touch with suchlinks between humanity and God, that you and I in time will becomedivine. In Him that divine seed of Spirit has unfolded into flower andfruit. When you sow a seed in the soil of your garden, you sow it inthe full belief that it will grow, that it will become a plant withleaf and flower and fruit. And you believe it by all the promise ofthe past, which has proved that out of such seeds grow such flowers;all that is behind you to make your faith a reasonable faith; and whenyou plant that trivial thing, a little larger than a pin's head, andhide it in the darkness of the ground out of sight, you have a livingfaith within you that out of that seed shall grow the perfect flower. Have the same faith for the seed of divinity that is planted withinyou, though it be planted in the darkness of your heart. Even if atpresent the first little shoot has not come up above the darkness ofthe soil in which it is buried, none the less the seed is there; itwill grow and ripen into the perfect fruit. It must be so. There areno failures for the divine Husbandman, no seed which is not living, which falls from His hands into the ground. And near us the Mastersstand ever, the living truth of what man can be--nay, what he shall bein the centuries to come. They are proofs of what you and I shall be, the finished copies of the statues which lie as yet so rough, sounhewn, in the marble of our humanity. That is Their value for allmen, and part of Their work is to help us to become what They are, tofoster in us every shoot of the spiritual life, to strengthen in usevery effort and struggle towards the light. Theirs the glorious work, not only of building up mighty faiths, but of living in them, andpouring out spiritual life on the heart of each who enters within theportals of those faiths. That is Their splendid work; and if Theosophyis doing much in all the religions of the world to make them more realto their adherents, and give to them fresh vitality and strength andvigor, it is only because it is the latest impulse from the Masters ofthe WISDOM, and so is the most convenient channel through which thatlife may be poured into all the religions of the world. Only thelatest of the impulses. All religions have been born out of such animpulse, and the only difference between this and the earlier impulsesis that while they each founded a religion and round that religion awall was built, so that there were believers inside the wall andunbelievers outside, round this spiritual forthstreaming no walls areto be built, but the waters are to spread everywhere withoutlimitation, without exception. That is the specialty in the message ofTheosophy. It belongs to all alike. As much yours, though you do notcall it by that name, perhaps, as it is theirs who call it by thatname. It is only living, because it lives in every religion; it isonly true, because it comes from the same Masters of the eternalWISDOM, belongs equally to all, to every religion that cares to takeany of the truth that it has re-proclaimed. And all over the world theglad message is going. There is not one religion which is now living, amongst whose adherents Theosophy is not spreading, and making thembetter members of their religions than they were before. For there ismany a man and woman, in East and West alike, who had gone away fromthe religion into which they were born, because the mystic element hadvanished and the literal sense of the doctrines was in truth theletter which killeth, while the spirit that was life seemed to haveescaped. Many such men and women, in East and West, have come backwith joy to the religion in which they were born, in realising that itis only an expression of the one divine WISDOM, and that the Mastersof the WISDOM live and move amongst us. 

And it may be that if the world grows more spiritual, it may be thatif Spirit again becomes triumphant over matter, after passing throughthe darkness which was necessary in order that the intellect might bethoroughly developed and might learn its powers and its limitations;it may be that, in days to come, when the world is more spiritualisedthan to-day, climbing as it is again the upward arc, these livingMasters of the world's religions will come amongst us again visibly asin the earlier days. It is not They who keep back in silence. It is wewho shut Them out, and make Their presence a danger rather than anencouragement and an inspiration. And every one of you--no matter whatyour faith may be, Christian, Hinḍu, Buḍḍhist, Theosophist, what matters it?--every one of you who makes the Master of your ownfaith a living reality, part of your life, nearer than friend andbrother, every such believer and worker is hastening the day of joywhen the world shall be ready for the open reception of the Masters, that They may move visibly amongst humanity once more. That it may beso, open your heart to every breath of truth; that it may be so, openyour eyes to every ray from the one eternal Sun. In the past the worldwould have none of the Masters. They slew the Christ; they made theprophets outcasts. And until in our heart the love of the Masterawakens, until with passionate longing, with continual insistence, wecall to the divine Men the welcome, without which They may not come, They must remain hidden. Only when there comes up from heart afterheart one vast chant of devotion and appeal, only then will They cometo the many as They have already come to the few, and show out thevisible splendor of Their manhood, as the glory of Their divinity hasever been upon the earth. 

Theosophy and the Theosophical Society

I want to put before you clearly and plainly what Theosophy means, andwhat is the function of the Theosophical Society. For we notice veryoften, especially with regard to the Society, that there is a gooddeal of misconception touching it, and that people do not realise theobject with which it exists, the work that it is intended to perform. It is very often looked upon as the expression of some new religion, as though people in becoming Theosophists must leave the religiouscommunity to which he or she may happen to belong. And so a profoundmisconception arises, and many people imagine that in some way orother it is hostile to the religion which they profess. Now Theosophy, looked at historically or practically, belongs to all the religions ofthe world, and every religion has an equal claim to it, has an equalright to say that Theosophy exists within it. For Theosophy, as thename implies, the Divine WISDOM, the WISDOM of God, clearly cannot beappropriated by any body of people, by any Society, not even by thegreatest of the religions of the world. It is a common property, asfree to everyone as the sunlight and the air. No one can claim it ashis, save by virtue of his common humanity; no one can deny it to hisbrother, save at the peril of destroying his own claim thereto. Nowthe meaning of this word, both historically and practically, theWISDOM, the Divine WISDOM, is a very definite and clear meaning; itasserts the possibility of the knowledge of God. That is the pointthat the student ought to grasp; this knowledge of God, not the beliefin Him, not the faith in Him, not only vague idea concerning Him, butthe _knowledge_ of Him, is possible to man. That is the affirmation ofTheosophy, that is its root-meaning and its essence. 

And we find, looking back historically, that this has been asserted inthe various great religions of the world. They all claim that man canknow, not only that man can believe. Only in some of the more modernfaiths, in their own modern days, the knowledge has slipped into thebackground, and the belief, the faith, looms very large in the mind ofthe believer. Go back as far as you will in the history of the past, and you will find the most ancient of religions affirming thispossibility of knowledge. In India, for instance, with its antiquecivilisation, you find that the very central idea of Hinḍuism isthis supreme knowledge, the knowledge of God. As I pointed out to youthe other day with regard to this old Eastern religion, all knowledgeis regarded in a higher or a lower degree as the knowledge of God; forthere is no division, as you know, in that ancient faith, between thesecular and the sacred. That division is a modern division, and wasunknown in the ancient world. But they did make a division inknowledge between the higher and the lower; and the lower knowledge, or the lower science, called the "lower divine science, " was thatwhich you will call "science" nowadays, the study of the externalworld. But it also included all that here we speak of as Literature, as Art, as Craft--everything, in fact, which the human brain can studyand the human fingers can accomplish--the whole of that, in one grandgeneralisation, was called "Divine Wisdom, " but it was the lowerdivine Wisdom, the inferior knowledge of God. Then, beside, or ratherabove that, came the Supreme Knowledge, the higher, the superior, thatbeyond which there was no knowledge, which was the crown of all. Now, that supreme knowledge is declared to be "the knowledge of Him by Whomall things are known"--a phrase indicating the Supreme Deity. It wasthat which was called the supreme knowledge, or, _par excellence_, theDivine Knowledge, and that old Hinḍu thought is exactly the same asyou have indicated by the name Theosophy. 

So, again, classical students may remember that among the Greeks andthe early Christians there was what was called the Gnosis, theknowledge, the definite article pointing to that which, above allelse, was to be regarded as knowledge or wisdom. And when you findamong the Neo-Platonists this word Gnosis used, it always means, andis defined to mean, "the knowledge of God, " and the "Gnostic" is "aman who knows God. " So, again, among the early Christians. Take such aman as Origen. He uses the same word in exactly the same sense; forwhen Origen is declaring that the Church has medicine for the sinner, and that Christ is the Good Physician who heals the diseases of men, he goes on to say that the Church has also the Gnosis for the wise, and that you cannot build the Church out of sinners; you must build itout of Gnostics. These are the men who know, who have the power tohelp and to teach; and there can be no medicine for the diseased, noupholder of the weak, unless, within the limits of the religion, theGnostic is to be found. And so Origen lays immense stress on theGnostic, and devotes page after page to a description of him: what heis, what he thinks, what he does; and to the mind of that greatChristian teacher, the Gnostic was the strength of the Church, thepillar, the buttress of the faith. And so, coming down through thecenturies, since the Christian time, you will find the word Gnosticused every now and again, but more often the term "Theosophist" and"Theosophy"; for this term came into use in the later school, theNeo-Platonists, and became the commonly accepted word for those whoclaimed this possibility of knowledge, or even claimed to _know_. Anda phrase regarding this is to be found in the mystic Fourth Gospel, that of S. John, where into the mouth of the Christ the words are put, that the "knowledge of God is eternal life"--not the faith, nor thethought, but the knowledge--again declaring the possibility of thisGnosis. And the same idea is found along the line of the HermeticScience, or Hermetic Philosophy, partly derived from Greece and partlyfrom Egypt. The Hermetic philosopher also claimed to know, and claimedthat in man was this divine faculty of knowledge, above the reason, higher than the intellect. And whenever, among the thoughtful and thelearned, you find reference made to "faith, " as where, in the Epistleto the Hebrews, it is said to be "the _evidence_ of things not seen, "the same idea comes out, and Faith, the real Faith, is only thisintense conviction which grows out of the inner spiritual being ofman, the Self, the Spirit, which justifies to the intellect, to thesenses, that there is God, that God truly exists. And this is sostrongly felt in the East that no one there wants to argue about theexistence of God; it is declared that that existence cannot be provedby argument. "Not by argument, " it is written, "not by reasoning, notby thinking, can the Supreme Self be known. " The only proof of Him is"the conviction in the Spirit, in the Self. " And thus Theosophy, then, historically, as you see, always makes the affirmation that man canknow; and after that supreme affirmation that God may be known, thenthere comes the secondary affirmation, implied really in that, and inthe fact of man's identity of nature with the Supreme, that all thingsin the universe can be known--things visible and invisible, subtle andgross. That is, so to speak, a secondary affirmation, drawn out of thefirst; for clearly if in man resides the faculty to know God as God, then every manifestation of God may be known by the faculty whichrecognises the identity of the human Spirit with the Supreme Spiritthat permeates the universe at large. So in dictionaries and inencyclopedias you will sometimes find Theosophy defined as the ideathat God, and angels, and spirits, may hold direct communication withmen; or sometimes, in the reverse form, that men can holdcommunication with spirits, and angels, and even with God Himself;and although that definition be not the best that can be given, it hasits own truth, for that is the result of the knowledge of God, theinevitable outcome of it, the manifestation of it. The man who knowsGod, and knows all things in Him, is evidently able to communicatewith any form of living being, to come into relation with anything inthe universe of which the One Life is God. 

In modern days, and among scientific people, the affirmation which isthe reverse of this became at one time popular, widely accepted--notGnostic but "Agnostic, " "without the Gnosis"; that was the positiontaken up by Huxley and by many men of his own time of the same schoolof thought. He chose the name because of its precise signification; hewas far too scientific a man to crudely deny, far too scientific to bewilling to speak positively of that of which he knew nothing; and so, instead of taking up the position that there is nothing beyond man, and man's reason, and man's senses, he took up the position that manwas without possibility of knowledge of what there might be, that hisonly means of knowledge were the senses for the material universe, thereason for the world of thought. Man, by his reason, could conquereverything in the realm of thought, might become mighty in intellect, and hold as his own domain everything that the intellect could graspat its highest point of growth, its highest possibility of attainment. That splendid avenue of progress Huxley, and men like Huxley, placedbefore humanity as the road along which it might hope to walk, full ofthe certainty of ultimate achievement. But outside that, beyond thereason in the world of thought and the senses in the material world, Huxley, and those who thought like him, declared that man was unableto pierce--hence "Agnostic, " "without the Gnosis, " without thepossibility of plunging deeply into the ocean of Being, for there theintellect had no plummet. Such, according to science at one time, wasman; and whatever man might hope for, whatever man might strive for, on, as it were, the portal of the spiritual universe was written thelegend "without knowledge. " Thither man might not hope to penetrate, thither man's faculties might never hope to soar; for when you havedefined man as a reasoning being, you have given the highestdefinition that science was able to accept, and across the spiritualnature was written: "imagination, dream, and phantasy. "

And yet there is much in ordinary human history which shows that manis something more than intellect, as clearly as it shows that theintellect is greater than the senses; for every statesman knows thathe has to reckon with what is sometimes called "the religiousinstinct" in man, and that however coldly philosophers may reason, however sternly science may speak, there is in man some upwellingpower which refuses to take the agnosticism of the intellect, as itrefuses to accept the positivism of the senses; and with that everyruler of men has to deal, with that every statesman has to reckon. There is something in man which from time to time wells up withirresistible power, sweeping away every limit which intellect orsenses may strive to put in its path--the religious instinct. And evento take that term, that name, even that is to join on this part ofman's nature to a part of nature universal, which bears testimony inevery time, and in every place, that to every instinct in the livingcreature there is some answer in the nature outside itself. There isno instinct known in plant, in animal, in man, to which nature doesnot answer; nature, which has woven the demand into the texture of theliving creature, has always the supply ready to meet the demand; andstrange indeed it would be, well-nigh incredible, if the profoundestinstinct of all in nature's highest product on the physical plane, ifthat ineradicable instinct, that seeking after God and that thirst forthe Supreme, were the one and only instinct in nature for which thereis no answer in the depths and the heights around us. And it is notso. That argument is strengthened and buttressed by an appeal toexperience; for you cannot, in dealing with human experience and thetestimony of the human consciousness, leave entirely out of court, silenced, as though it were not relevant, the continual testimony ofall religions to the existence of the spiritual nature in man. Thespiritual consciousness proves itself quite as definitely as theintellectual or the sensuous consciousness proves itself--by theexperience of the individual, alike in every religion as in everycentury in which humanity has lived, has thought, has suffered, hasrejoiced. The religious, the spiritual nature, is that which is thestrongest in man, not the weakest; that which breaks down the barriersof the intellect, and crushes into silence the imperious demands ofthe senses; which changes the whole life as by a miracle, and turnsthe face of the man in a direction contrary to that in which he hasbeen going all his life. Whether you take the facts of conversion, orwhether you take the testimony of the saint, the prophet, the seer, they all speak with that voice of authority to which humanityinstinctively bows down; and it was the mark of the spiritual man whenit was said of Jesus, the Prophet: "He taught them as one havingauthority, and not as the scribes. " For where the spiritual manspeaks, his appeal is made to the highest and the deepest part inevery hearer that he addresses, and the answer that comes is an answerthat brooks no denial and permits no questioning. It shows its ownimperial nature, the highest and the dominant nature in the man, andwhere the Spirit once has spoken the intellect becomes obedient, andthe senses begin to serve. 

Now Theosophy, in declaring that this nature of man can know God, bases that statement on identity of nature. We can know--it is ourcontinual experience--we can know that which we share, and nothingelse. Only when you have appropriated for yourself something from theoutside world can you know the similar things in the outside world. You can see because your eye has within it the ether of which thewaves are light; you can hear because your ear has in it the ether andthe air whose vibrations are sound; and so with everything else. Myriads of things exist outside you, and you are unconscious of them, because you have not yet appropriated to your own service that whichis like unto them in outer nature. And you can know God for exactlythe same reason that you can know by sight or hearing--because you arepart of God; you can know Him because you share His nature. "We arepartakers of the Divine Nature, " says the Christian teacher. "Thou artThat, " declares the Hinḍu. The Sufi cries out that by love man andGod are one, and know each other. And all the religions of the worldin varied phrase announce the same splendid truth of man's Divinity. It is on that that Theosophy founds its affirmation that the knowledgeof God is possible to man; that the foundation, then, of Theosophy, that the essence of its message. 

And the value of it at the time when it was re-proclaimed to the worldwas that it was an affirmation in the face of a denial. Where Sciencebegan to cry "agnosticism, " Theosophy came to cry out "gnosticism. " Atthe very same time the two schools were born into the modern world, and the re-proclamation of Theosophy, the supreme knowledge, was theanswer from the invisible worlds to the nescience of Science. It cameat the right time, it came in the right form, as in a few moments weshall see; but the most important thing of all is that it came at thevery moment when Science thought itself triumphant in its nescience. This re-proclamation, then, of the most ancient of all truths, was themessage of Theosophy to the modern world. And see how the world haschanged since that was proclaimed! It is hardly necessary now to makethat affirmation, so universal has become the acceptance of it. It isalmost difficult to look back to the year 1875, and realise how menwere thinking and feeling then. I can remember it, because I was init. The elder amongst you can remember it, for the same reason. Butfor the younger of you, who have begun to think and feel in the latertimes, when this thought was becoming common, you can scarcely realisethe change in the intellectual atmosphere which has come about duringthese last two-and-thirty years. Hardly worth while is it to proclaimit now, it is so commonplace. If now you say: "Man can know God, " theanswer is: "Of course he can. " Thirty-two years ago it was: "Indeed hecannot. " And that is to be seen everywhere, all over the world, andnot only among those people who were clinging blindly to a blindfaith, desperately sticking to it as the only raft which remained forthem to save them from being submerged in materialism. It isrecognised now on all hands; literature is full of it; and it is notwithout significance that some months ago _The Hibbert Journal_--whichhas in it so much of the advanced thought of the day, for whichbishops and archbishops and learned clerics write--it is not withoutsignificance that that journal drew its readers' attention to "thevalue of the God-idea in Hinḍuism. " And the only value of it wasthis, for man: that man is God, and therefore can know God; and thewriter pointed out that that was the only foundation on which, inmodern days, an edifice that could not be shaken could be reared upfor the Spirit in man. That is the religion of the future, thereligion of the Divine Self; that the common religion, the universalreligion, of which all the religions that are living in the world willbe recognised as branches, as sects of one mighty religion, universaland supreme. For just as now in Christianity you have many a sect andmany a church, just as in Hinḍuism we find many sects and manyschools, and as in every other great religion of the world at thepresent time there are divisions between the believers in the samereligion, so shall it be--very likely by the end of this century--withall the religions of the world; there will be only one religion--theknowledge of God--and all religious sects under that one mighty anduniversal name. 

And then, naturally, out of this knowledge there must spring a largenumber of other knowledges subservient to it, that which you hear somuch about in Theosophical literature, of other worlds, the worldsbeyond the physical, worlds that are still material, although thematter be of a finer, subtler kind; all that you read about theastral, and mental, and buḍḍhic planes, and so on--all theselower knowledges find their places naturally, as growing out of theone supreme knowledge. And at once you will ask: "Why?" If you arereally divine, if your Self is the same Self of which the worlds are apartial expression, then it is not difficult to see that that Self inyou, as it unfolds its divine powers, and shapes the matter which itappropriates in order to come in contact with all the different partsof the universe, that that Self, creating for itself bodies, will beable to know every material thing in the universe, just as you knowthe things of the physical plane through the physical body. For it isall on the same lines: that which enables you to know is not onlybody--that is the medium between you and the physical world--but theKnower in you is that which enables you to know, the power ofperception which is of consciousness, and not of body. Whenconsciousness vanishes, all the organs of consciousness are there, asperfect as ever, but the Knower has left them, and knowledgedisappears with him; and so, whether it be in a swoon, in a faintingfit, in sleep, or in death, the perfect instrument of the physicalbody becomes useless when the hand of the master workman drops it. Thebody is only his tool, whereby he contacts the things in a universewhich is not himself; and the moment he leaves it, it is a mere heapof matter, doomed to decay, to destruction. But just as he has thatbody for knowledge here, so he has other bodies for knowledgeotherwhere, and in every world he can know, he who is the Knower, andevery world is made up of objects of knowledge, which he can perceive, examine, and understand. 

And the world into which you shall pass when you go through the portalof death, that is around you at every moment of your life here, andyou only do not know it because your instrument of knowledge there isnot yet perfected, and ready there to your hand; and the heavenlyworld into which you will pass out of the intermediate world next tothis, that is around you now, and you only do not know it because yourinstrument of knowledge there has not yet been fashioned. And so withworlds yet higher, knowledge of them is possible, because the Knoweris yourself and is God, and you can create your instruments ofknowledge according to your wisdom and your will. 

Hence Theosophy includes the whole of this vast scheme or field ofknowledge; and the whole of it is yours, yours to possess at yourwill. Hence Theosophy should be to you a proclamation of your ownDivinity, with everything that flows therefrom; and all the knowledgethat may be gathered, all the investigations that may be made, theyare all part of this great scheme. And the reason why all thereligions of the world teach the same, when you come to disentanglethe essence of their teaching from the shape in which they put it, thereason that they all teach the same is that they are all giving youfragments of knowledge of the other worlds, and these worlds are allmore real than the world in which you are; and they all teach the samefundamental truths, the same fundamental moral principles, the samereligious doctrines, and use the same methods in order that men maycome into touch with the other worlds. The sacraments do not belong toChristianity alone, as sometimes Christians think; every religion hasits sacraments, some more numerous than others, but all have some. Forwhat is a sacrament? It is the earthly, the physical representative ofa real correspondence in nature; as the catechism of the Church ofEngland phrases it: "An outward and visible sign of an inward andspiritual grace. " It is a true definition. A sacrament is made up ofthe outer and inner, and you cannot do without either. The outer thingis correlated to the inner, and is a real means of coming into touchwith the higher, and is not only a symbol, as some imagine. The greatchurches and religions of the past always cling to that reality of thesacrament, and they do well. It is only in very modern times, andamong a comparatively small number of Christian people, that thesacrament has become only a symbol, instead of a channel of living anddivine power. And much is lost to the man who loses out of hisreligion the essential idea of the sacrament; for it is the linkbetween the spiritual and the physical, the channel whereby thespiritual pours down into the physical vehicle. Hence the value thatall religions put upon sacraments, and their recognition of theirreality, and their priceless service to mankind. And so with manyother things in ceremonies and rites, common to all the differentfaiths--the use of musical sounds, a use which tunes the bodies sothat the spiritual power may be able to manifest through them and bythem. For just as in your orchestra you must tune the instruments to asingle note, so must you tune your various bodies in order thatharmoniously they may allow the spiritual force to come through fromthe higher to the lower plane. It is a real tuning, a real making ofharmonious vibrations; and the difference between the vibrations thatare harmonious and the vibrations that are discordant, from this pointof view, is this: when all the bodies vibrate together, all theparticles and their spaces correspond, so that you get solidparticles, then spaces, and then solid particles, and spaces again, corresponding through all the bodies; whereas in the normal conditionthe bodies do not match in that way, and the spaces of one comeagainst the solid parts of the other, and so you get a block. Whensounds are used, the mystical sounds called manṭras in Hinḍuism, the effect of those is to change the bodies from this condition tothat, and so the forces from without can come into the man, and theforces in him may flow out to others. That is the value of it. You areable to produce mechanically a result which otherwise has to beproduced by a tremendous exertion of the will; and the man ofknowledge never uses more force than is necessary in order to bringabout what he desires, and the Occultist--who is the wise man on manyplanes--he uses the easiest way always to gain his object. Hence theuse of music, or manṭras, in every faith. Pythagoras used music inorder to prepare his disciples to receive his teachings. The Greek andthe Roman Catholic Churches use special forms of music to produce adefinite effect upon the worshippers who hear them. All of you must beaware that there are some kinds of music which have the remarkableeffect upon you, of lifting you higher than you can rise by your ownunassisted effort. Even the songs of illiterate Christian bodies dohave some effect upon them, in raising them to a higher level, although they possess little of the true quality of the manṭra. InTheosophy you find all these things dealt with scientifically--a massof knowledge, but all growing out of the original statement that mancan know God. 

Now it is clear that in all that, there is nothing which a man of anyfaith cannot accept, cannot study. I do not mean that he will accepteverything that a Theosophist would say; but I mean that the knowledgeis knowledge of a kind which he will be wise to study, and toappropriate so far as it recommends itself to his reason and hisintuition. And that is all the man need do--study. All this knowledgeis spread out for you freely: you can take it, if you will. TheTheosophical Society, which spreads it broadcast everywhere, claims init no property, no proprietary rights, but gives it out freelyeverywhere. The books in which much of it is written are as free tothe non-Theosophist as to the Theosophist. The results of Theosophicalinvestigation are published freely that all who choose may read. Everything is done that can be done by the Society to make the wholething common property; and nothing gives the true Theosophist moredelight than when he sees the Theosophical teachings coming out insome other garb which gives them a different name, but hands them onto those who might be frightened perhaps by the name "Theosophy. " Andso, when we find a clergyman scattering broadcast to his congregationTheosophical teaching as Christian, we say: "See, our work is bearingfruit"; and when we find the man who does not label himself"Theosophist" giving any of these truths to the world, we rejoice, because we see that our work is being done. We have no desire to takethe credit of it, nor to claim it as ours at all; it belongs to everyman who is able to see it, quite as much as it does to anyone who maycall himself "Theosophist. " For the possession of truth comes of rightto the man who can see the truth, and there is no partiality in theworld of intellect or of Spirit. The only test for a man's fitness toreceive is the ability to perceive; and the only claim he has to seeby the light is the power of seeing. 

And that, perhaps, may explain to you what some think strange in ourSociety--we have no dogmas. We do not shut out any man because he doesnot believe Theosophical teachings. A man may deny every one of them, save that of human brotherhood, and claim his place and his rightwithin our ranks. But his place and his right within our ranks arefounded on the very truths that he denies; for if man could not knowGod, if there were no identity of nature in every man with God, thenthere would be no foundation for our reception of him, nor any reasonfor welcoming him as a brother. Because there is only one life, andone nature, therefore the man who denies is God, as is he who affirms. Therefore each has a right to come; only the one who affirms knows whyhe welcomes his brother, and the one who denies is ignorant, and knowsnot why he has a right within our ranks. But those of us who try to beTheosophists in reality, as well as in name, we understand why it isthat we make him welcome, and it is based on this sane idea, that aman can see the truth best by studying it, and not by repeatingformulæ that he does not understand. What is the use of putting adogma before a man and saying: "You must repeat that before you cancome into my Church"? If the man repeats it not understanding it, heis outside, no matter how much you bring him in; and if he sees it, there is no need to make that as a portal to your fellowship. And webelieve, we of the Theosophical Society, that just because theintellect can only do its best work in its own atmosphere of freedom, truth has the best chance of being seen when you do not make anyconditions as to the right of investigation, as to the claim to seek. To us, truth is so supreme a thing that we do not desire to bind anyman with conditions as to how, or where, or why, he shall seek it. These things, we say, we know are true; and because we know they aretrue, come amongst us, even though you do not believe them, and findout for yourself whether they be true or not. And the man is betterworth having when he comes in an unbeliever, and wins to the knowledgeof the truth, than is the facile believer who acknowledges everythingand never gets a real grip upon truth at all. We believe that truth isonly found by seeking, and that the true bond is the love of truth, and the effort to find it; that that is a far more real bond than therepetition of a common creed. For the creed can be repeated by thelips, but the seeing of truth as true can only come from the intellectand the spirit, and to build on the intellect and the spirit is afirmer foundation than to build on the breath of the lips. Hence ourSociety has no dogmas. Not that it does not stand for any truths, assome people imagine. Its name marks out the truth for which it stands:it is the Theosophical Society; and that shows its function and itsplace in the world--a Society that asserts the possibility of theknowledge of God; that is its proclamation, as we have seen, and allthe other truths that grow out of that are amongst our teachings. TheSociety exists to spread the knowledge of those truths, and topopularise those teachings amongst mankind. "But, " you may say, "if itbe the fact that you throw out broadcast all your teachings, that youwrite them in books that every man can buy, what is, then, the good ofbeing a member of the Theosophical Society? We should not have anymore as members than we have as non-members. " That is not quite true, but it may stand as true for the moment. Why should you come in? Forno reason at all, unless to you it is the greatest privilege to comein, and you desire to be among those who are the pioneers of thethought of the coming days. No reason at all: it is a privilege. We donot beg you to come in; we only say: "Come if you like to come, andshare the glorious privilege that we possess; but if you would rathernot, stay outside, and we will give you everything which we believewill be serviceable and useful to you. " The feeling that brings peopleinto our Society is the feeling that makes the soldier spring forwardto be amongst the pioneers when the army is going forth. There aresome people so built that they like to go in front and facedifficulties, so that other people may have an easier time, and walkalong a path that has already been hewn out for them by hands strongerthan their own. That is the only reason why you should come in: noother. Do not come to "get"; you will be disappointed if you do. Youcan "get" it outside. Come in to give, to work, to be enrolled amongstthe servants of humanity who are working for the dawn of the day of anobler knowledge, for the coming of the recognition of a spiritualbrotherhood amongst men. Come in if you have the spirit of the pioneerwithin you, the spirit of the volunteer; if to you it is a delight tocut the way through the jungle that others may follow, to tread thepath with bruised feet in order that others may have a smooth road tolead them to the heights of knowledge. That is the only advantage ofcoming in: to know in your own heart that you realise what is coming, and are helping to make it come more quickly for the benefit of yourfellow-men; that you are working for humanity; that you are co-workerswith God, in making the knowledge of Him spread abroad on every side;that you are amongst those to whom future centuries will look back, thanking you that you saw the light when all men thought it was dark, and that you recognised the coming dawn when others believed theearth was sunk in midnight. I know of no inspiration more inspiring, of no ideal that lifts men to greater heights, of no hope that is sofull of splendor, no thought that is so full of energy, as theinspiration, and the ideal, and the hope, and the thought, that youare working for the future, for the day that has not yet come. Therewill be so many in the days to come who will see the truth, so many inthe unborn generations who will live from the hour of their birth inthe light of the Divine WISDOM. And what is it not to know that one isbringing that nearer? to feel that this great treasure is placed inyour hands for the enriching of humanity, and that the bankruptcy ofhumanity is over and the wealth is being spread broadcast on everyside? What a privilege to know that those generations in the future, rejoicing in the light, will feel some touch of thanks and gratitudeto those who brought it when the days were dark, to those whose faithin the Self was so strong that they could believe when all otherthings were against it, to those whose surety of the divine knowledgewas so mighty that they could proclaim its possibility to an agnosticworld. That is the only reason why you should come into the vanguard, that the only reason why you should join the ranks of the pioneers. Hard work and little reward, hard words and little praise, but theknowledge that you work for the future, and that with the co-operationof Deity the final result is sure. 

Part II

The Place of Phenomena in the Theosophical Society

Spiritual and Temporal Authority

The Relation of Masters to the Theosophical Society

The Future of the Theosophical Society

_Four Lectures delivered to the Blavatsky Lodge, London, on 13th and27th June, 4th and 11th July 1907. _

The Place of Phenomena in the Theosophical Society

I have taken for these four lectures, confined to members of theTheosophical Society, four subjects of great interest to ourselves, and in dealing with them I propose to ask you to look at them from awide standpoint rather than a narrow one, and to consider theTheosophical Movement and the Theosophical Society, not as an isolatedmovement or Society, not as a separate thing, but rather as one of aseries of spiritual impulses, like to its predecessors in its nature, interested in the same questions, and subject to the same conditionsas those that preceded it in time. 

We find, looking back over the history of the past, that greatspiritual impulses occur from time to time, and each of these in thepast has founded a new religion, or stamped some marked change in areligion already existing. The spiritual impulse that brought to birththe Theosophical Society is to be thought of as of the same nature asthose which founded one religion in the world after another. And if weregard it in this way we can sometimes, looking at the wholesuccession of such movements, recognise certain definite principlesworking in all of them, and then apply those principles to themovement of our own time. And this seems to me to be a wiser and sanerway of regarding the Theosophical Society than looking upon it asunique and isolated. Certainly it is more easy to see our way in thesolution of difficult problems of our own time, if we regard theseproblems as similar in nature to the problems that have been presentedto our predecessors. Because always, in dealing with the problems ofour own time, we are apt to be confused and bewildered by secondaryissues that rise up around them, complicating them, perhaps largelyclouding them, when we try to understand; whereas if we can catchsight of the underlying principle and study it apart from anydifficulties of our own time, we are then able to apply that sameprinciple, as discovered apart from the circumstances of the moment, and in that way there is a hope of applying it more justly amid themore exciting incidents of our own day. And it is that which I want todo in these lectures--to take our movement as a part of a worldseries, to study the principles that underlie the whole of thatseries, to trace out the working of these principles amongst thesocieties that have preceded us in the spiritual world, and then, having grasped them, to apply them to the solution of the problems ofour own time. For there is a tendency in the Theosophical Society tonarrow itself down to its time, instead of trying to widen out thethought of its time. It is a tendency which we see affecting everyreligion, every church, every great society, and it is useless torecognise this fact in the history of others unless we apply the factfor instruction in our own. 

Now in all the religions of the past, so far as we have any knowledgeof them in history or from what are called the "occult records, " thereis one thing we see in their early days--the presence of happeningsregarded as abnormal. I have used the word "phenomena, " but it is avery stupid word. One uses it because it is generally used; there isno justification in using that particular word in relation to someouter manifestations rather than to all. Properly speaking, "phenomena, " of course, will cover the whole of the objects in theworld, in the Not-Self, everything outside the Self; but the word hasbeen narrowed down, especially in our own time, to those occurrencesin the world around us, in the Not-Self, which are unusual, which seemto be abnormal, which are the results of laws which are not familiar, and therefore which are regarded by some people as supernatural, byothers, speaking more carefully, simply as superphysical. And we losemuch by separating off what we call "abnormal" happenings, theso-called "phenomena, " from the normal every-day happenings of life. For there is no fundamental difference between them. All planes areequally within the realm of law; all worlds, denser or grosser inmaterial organisation, are equally worlds moving by order and law. There is nothing really abnormal in Nature. Some things happen moreseldom than others--are unusual; but the very idea of abnormal seemsto me in many respects mischievous and harmful. It is better to lookon the whole world-system--universe, call it what you will--as a partof a definite order in which all the things that happen happen by law, in which there no gaps, no abnormalities, but only limitations of ourown knowledge at a certain time. All the gaps in Nature are gaps inthe knowledge of the observers of Nature. There is nothing miraculousor supernatural, but everything is the orderly product of Natureworking along definite lines and guided by definite intelligence. 

And one reason why it is so important to recognise this is in order toclear away the atmosphere of wonder, of marvel, of awe, of reverence, that is apt, very much to the detriment of the observers, to enshroudeverything unusual, every manifestation of a force with which we arenot familiar, everything that in the old days was called "miraculous. "And one thing I want strongly to impress upon you is, that ineverything that can be called a "phenomenon, " you ought to deal withit according to the same laws, according to the same canons ofobservation, as you deal with the phenomena with which you are mostfamiliar on the physical plane. You should not regard an unusualphenomenon as one which is necessarily to be regarded with reverencein any way. You should not necessarily talk in whispers, when speakingabout what we call "phenomena. " It is better to talk in your naturalvoice, and apply your ordinary common sense and the laws of sanejudgment in every case. If you do that instead of getting alarmed orastonished, if you will stand on your feet instead of falling on yourknees, your study of the other worlds will be more profitable, and thedangers you are likely to meet will be very much diminished. 

To come back to the point of the beginnings of all religiousmovements, we find that all begin in the atmosphere of "phenomena. "The divine Man who founds the religion, and those who immediatelysurround Him, are always people who have a knowledge of more worldsthan one. And because they are possessors of that first-handknowledge, they are able to speak with authority. Now, the authoritythat should be recognised in all these matters is simply the authorityof knowledge. 

Another of the difficulties we want to clear away in studyingphenomena is the idea that the happening of a certain thing by a lawthat we do not understand in the realm of matter gives any sort ofauthority on questions of spiritual knowledge, or gives a person aright to speak with authority on things not concerned with theparticular laws under which that phenomena takes place. The mischiefof the old idea of miracle was that it was supposed to be a proof, notof knowledge of another world or other forces, but of the title of themiracle-worker to speak with authority on religious and moralquestions; while, as a matter of fact, the knowledge of what occurs onthe astral plane, the knowledge of what occurs on the mental plane, orthe power to utilise the forces of these planes in the production ofcertain happenings here which are not usual, these things by no meansgive a man any authority to speak on moral problems or to decide onspiritual questions. That is a matter of the utmost importance, forknowledge of the astral and mental worlds is the same in kind asknowledge of the physical world; and it no more follows that aclairvoyant or clairaudient, or a man who can use any of the powers ofsubtler planes down here, has more authority on religious and moralquestions than a good mathematician, a good electrician, or a goodchemist. You are not likely, on the physical plane, to fall into theblunder of thinking that because a man is a good chemist he hasauthority on moral problems: you will at once see the absurdity. Butmany of you do not see that the same is true when you deal with goodchemists or electricians belonging to the astral or mental planes. They have no more authority _quâ_ their knowledge of these planes thanthe chemist. I often wish that in the Theosophical Society the oldfable of the Jewish Rabbis was better remembered and applied. TwoRabbis were arguing, and one of them, to support his side of theargument, made a wall fall down; whereupon the other Rabbi sensiblyremarked: "Since when have walls had a voice in our discussions?" Thatspirit is of enormous importance, and does not in any sense touch thefact that you find the great Founders of religions and the illuminatedmen who surrounded them were men who had power to produce phenomena ofvarious kinds, to heal the sick, to make the lame to walk, and so on, and that phenomena always accompanied the great religious Teacher inthe past. These things did not give Him His religious authority: theywere simply the outcome of His knowledge of natural laws; for a manwho is thoroughly spiritual has matter subject to him on every planein Nature. But it by no means follows that the man who can manipulatematter on the lower planes is therefore able to speak with authorityon the higher. The fact that the spiritual man is always a greatpsychic, always has power to utilise higher forces for controllingphysical matter, that fact, while true, does not prove the truth ofthe opposite idea, that the man who has power over matter isnecessarily highly unfolded as regards the spirit. It is true, ofcourse, that the founders of religion were men surrounded with cloudsof phenomena, and the reason for that is the one I have just stated:that to the truly spiritual man matter is an obedient servant; to usea quotation from an Indian book: "The truly spiritual man all thesiḍḍhis stand ready to serve. "

Now it was necessary for the founding of religions and for theteaching of many of the doctrines of religions which had to do withworlds invisible to the physical eye, that the man who firstpromulgated these doctrines should be a man who had a first-handacquaintance with the conditions they described. For you must rememberthat in every religion there are two sides to its teaching: the sideof the spiritual truths known only to the unfolded divineconsciousness; the side of the existence of other worlds than this, and of the conditions existing in those worlds--important to men, asthey have to pass into those worlds after death, important to menalso, as much of the symbolism, the rites and ceremonies, areconnected with what we may roughly call occult science. As theBuḍḍha said when speaking of worlds beyond the physical: "If youwant to know your way to a village and particulars about the village, you ask a man who lives there and who has gone along the roads leadingto it: and so you do right to come to me when you want to know aboutthe Ḍevas and about the invisible worlds, for I know those worldsand I know the way thereto. " So that looking back to these greatspiritual Teachers and Revealers of the unseen, we find they arealways men of first-hand knowledge. That first-hand knowledge wasshared by Their immediate followers, who carried on the teaching ofthe system after the Teacher had withdrawn. And it matters not whatreligion you take, living or dead, you will find it equally true, thatphenomena were common in the earlier days of the teaching of thatreligion. 

Now let me take two typical religions, one Eastern and one Western, with regard to the continuance of the phenomena of the earlierdays--the Hinḍu religion in the East for the Eastern example, andthe Roman Catholic Church in the West for the Western example. In boththese great religious movements we find a continuance of phenomena;neither Hinḍuism as typical of Eastern teaching, nor RomanCatholicism as the most widespread form of Christianity in the West, has ever taken up the position that the life which showed itselfthrough the earlier teachers was cut off and no longer irrigated thefields of the religion. On the contrary, you find both these typicalreligions claiming continuity of life and of knowledge. Amongst theHinḍus it is a commonplace to assert the possibilities of yoga, that a man can now, as much as in the days of the Manu or of the greatṚiṣhis, do what They did, can free himself from the physicalbody, can travel into other worlds of the systems, can acquainthimself with the forces and objects of those worlds, and carry on asdefinite a study of the Not-Self in those worlds, as anyone who wishesto do so may carry on a definite study of the Not-Self in the physicalworld. The claim has never been given up; the practice never whollydisappeared. So also with the Roman Catholic communion. There hasbeen there a succession of saints and of seers who have always claimedto be in direct touch with other worlds, and who have claimed andexercised the powers of those worlds manifestly on the physical plane. To-day in the Roman Catholic Church similar phenomena are said tooccur, and certainly the evidence offered for these phenomena is farmore easily verifiable than the evidence offered for such phenomena inthe earlier centuries of the Christian story. So also among theHinḍus it is more easy to prove nowadays the powers possessed by ayogî, than it is to prove the possession of those powers thousands ofyears ago in the obscurity of the earlier days of Hinḍuism. Consequently you find amongst Roman Catholics and Hinḍus a definitebelief that these things are still possible; and the only thing thateither will say with regard to their happening is that the greaterdescent of the people as a whole into materiality has made thepossession of these powers a far rarer qualification of a believer inone or other of the religions, than was the case in the early days ofenthusiasm, and of a greater outpouring of spiritual life. There is nodoubt, so far as Christianity is concerned, that the sacred books ofthe Christians entirely support the Roman Catholic contention. I amnot going into the question of the authenticity of particular phrases;I simply take the New Testament, as it is admitted to be a sacredbook. There you have placed in the mouth of Jesus the distinctdeclaration that those who believe on Him should do greater works thanHe did; and in one passage--rejected, I know, as not in the originalmanuscripts by many scholars, but still coming down from a greatChristian antiquity--you have the distinct statement that they shallbe able to drink poison, and so on. So it is clearly a part of thedefinite Christian teaching and tradition, that these so-calledabnormal powers are within the reach of believers in Christianity. Andso also with regard to Hinḍuism. 

Now another thing is to be observed in this connection: that as thereligion has gone on generation after generation, century aftercentury, there has been a diminution of the powers, and a much lessfrequent happening of these so-called miracles. Side by side with theweakening of these powers and the lessening in number of the phenomenahas been also the gradual lessening of the power of the religion overthe minds and lives of men. The inroads of other forms of thought, theslackening of the grasp of the believer on the realities of the unseenworlds, have diminished religious authority, and the power of thoseunseen realities has weakened as time has gone on. So if we take thecase of Hinḍuism or Christianity we find them giving back beforethe inroads of a more materialistic philosophy, before the inroads ofa self-assertive science. We find among cultured and thoughtful peoplein the East and West there has been a great slackening of hold on theteachings of religion, and that the power exercised over the lives ofbelievers has become much less real than in earlier days. That isinevitable, the result of the efflux of time, and the need for therecurrence of spiritual impulses lies in that fact, which is everrepeating itself. Just in the same way in which we read in the_Bhagavaḍ-Gîṭâ_ that by the efflux of time this yogadisappears, and then some teacher comes in order to restore vividnessto the life, so it is over and over again in the case of every greatspiritual movement. 

Now when we apply these manifest principles and facts to the latestspiritual movement, that which gave birth to the Theosophical Society, we find that we are running through, in a very short time, the sameseries of facts as characterised the religions of the past. Here also, as with them, a great outburst of phenomena in the earlier days;H. P. B. Living in a cloud of phenomena and those who came in touch withher bathed in phenomena of all kinds. You can see the result of thatearly training in our late President, Colonel Olcott, to whomphenomena in connection with the Theosophical Society were the mostnatural things in the world. He had no hesitation in talking of them, was always bubbling over with his experiences of them in the past. Youmust remember, when he was over here, how much he thought about them, the pleasure he took in recalling his earlier experiences, and ofshowing the material articles produced phenomenally in those earlierdays; and you cannot take up _Old Diary Leaves_ without findingyourself face to face with every-day happenings of phenomena. Lifethen seemed to be made up of the abnormal, in the sense in which thatword is used. The normal for the time being had disappeared. If aduster had to be hemmed, an elemental did it. If pencils were needed, a hand was put forward, twisted the pencils about, and there weretwelve in place of the one, and so on. Much greater people than H. P. B. Were concerned in producing these phenomena. Colonel Olcott tells ushow H. P. B. On one occasion drank some lukewarm water which a Masterdrew from a water-skin on a camel, and magnetised, and made herbelieve it to be coffee. On his removing the magnetism before she hadfinished drinking, she found to her disgust that she had been drinkingthis lukewarm water. The present-day Theosophist would probably haveobjected to such playfulness, but such things were continuallyhappening in the early days. When Colonel Olcott came into the Societyhe came straight from the investigation of spiritualistic phenomena--athoroughly well-trained observer, beginning with a good deal ofscepticism, and beaten out of it by his own observations ininnumerable spiritualistic séances. So that when he came in touch withH. P. B. He was no credulous, unobservant person, overborne by a numberof wonderful happenings, but a thoroughly equipped and cold-bloodedand well-trained observer of the super-physical, and he naturallybrought his powers of observation to bear on these wonderfulhappenings. He has left on record the full stories of these earlierdays. You may find similar stories, not to the same extent indeed, inMr. Sinnett's book, _The Occult World_. There we find similarinstances, similar marvels worked by H. P. B. In order to arouse hisattention, and to prove to him the existence of certain laws; whichotherwise would have remained, so to speak, in the air. So there werealso there a large number of unusual happenings--letters inpillow-cases, letters on branches of trees, and so on. You would alldo well to re-read the _Old Diary Leaves_ or _The Occult World_. Eachone of you should deliberately ask himself: "Why do I believe thesethings to be true?" Because it seems to me that most members of theTheosophical Society are rather slipping into the position of themodern Christian, that in order that a miracle may be true it must beold, and if it happens nowadays it must immediately be discredited. That is not rational. But it is a perfectly rational position to takeup with all phenomena to say: "I shall not accept one of them unlessthoroughly satisfied with the evidence on which it rests"; that is aperfectly reasonable attitude; but what seems to me a little lessreasonable is to swallow wholesale the phenomena of the early days, and to look very much askance at anything that happens now; to glanceback proudly to the past, and to regard anything which might happennow as wrong, as undesirable. Because if that is the right position, then it ought to be applied all round; it ought to be applied to theearly phenomena of the Society as much as to anything that may occurnow; and the same rigid demand for evidence should be made as is madeat the present time. But, on the other hand, if the evidence be asfull and as satisfactory now as that which supported the earlierphenomena, then it does not seem quite reasonable to accept theearlier and deny the later. 

Let us for a moment see how far the Society has been going along thesame line as that along which the other religions have gone--thegradual disappearance of phenomena and the substitution for them ofteaching appealing to the reason only, and not to the senses, claimingits authority on grounds which appeal to the consciousness in man, asfar as is practicable divorced from matter, or to that consciousnessworking through comparatively thick and gross veils of matter. Afterthe Coulomb difficulty there was a cessation almost entirely of thesephenomena in the Theosophical Society. Two reasons led up to that:first, the utter disinclination of H. P. B. Herself to continue toexpose herself to the attacks of people with regard to her good faith. She was so maligned and slandered, so many friends turned against herand spoke of the powers she possessed as fraudulent and as tricks, that when her Master raised her from the bed that might have been herdeath-bed, and would have been, save for His coming to her atAḍyar, she made the condition that she should not be forced toproduce phenomena in the way she had been forced before; that sheshould be allowed to put that aside. The consent was given. Lion-hearted as she was, she shrank from the storm of slander thatbroke on her. The other reason was that people belonging to theSociety took fright. The pressure of public reprobation was so strong, the force of unbelief so crushing, that the members of the Societyitself shrank back and were afraid to face public opinion, ignorantand persecuting as it was; and it is pathetic and interesting to readthe letters she wrote in the years immediately succeeding the Coulombdifficulty, in which she pointed out that those to whom she hadbrought the light were ashamed to stand beside her under theconditions to which she was then exposed. She complained that thewritings in the Society were changing their character; that they wereno longer occult and full of teaching of the unseen, but had becomepurely philosophical and metaphysical; that her own journal hadturned aside from its earlier occultism, and confined itself toarticles addressed only to the intellect; and she says in one of theseletters: "Say what you may, it was my phenomena on which theTheosophical Society was founded. It is my phenomena by which thatSociety has been built up. " It was a natural feeling of halfresentment against the policy of the time, that had left her in thelurch, and put the Society upon a different footing. It was inconnection with that terrible time, in the turmoil and whirl ofconflicting opinions, that those words recorded of her Master, spokento herself, in one of the records left to the Society, occurred, inwhich He said: "The Society has liberated itself from our grasp andinfluence . .. It is no longer . .. A body over the face of which broodsthe Spirit from beyond the Great Range. " Along those newer lines theSociety went, and there are many who will say: "They are better lines. It is better that these abnormal happenings should fall into thebackground, that they should not be presented to a scornful andsceptical world, that we should rely on the literature that we have, without desiring to increase it by new knowledge, in which much canonly be gained by abnormal means. Better to rest on what we have, andnot try to add to it. " Very many of our members take that view, and itis a perfectly reasonable view to take, a view which ought to have itsplace in the Theosophical Society, a view which is useful ascorrecting the tendency to undue credulity, which otherwise might holdon its way unchecked. For the life of the Society depends on the factthat it should include a vast variety of opinions on all thequestions on which difference of opinion is possible; and it is notdesirable that there should be only one school of thought in theSociety. There should be many schools of thought, as many schools asthere are different thinkers who can formulate their thought, and eachstanding with an equal right to speak and of claiming a respectfulhearing. None of them has a right to say: "There is no place for youin the Theosophical Society. " Neither must the person who is strong onthe subject of phenomena try to silence those who meet phenomena withdisbelief, or who think them dangerous; nor should a person who standsonly on philosophy and metaphysics say to the Theosophical acceptor ofthe phenomena: "Your views are wrong and dangerous. " Perfect freedomof thought is the law and life of the Society; and if we are not fitfor that, if we have not reached the position where we can understandthat the more we can enrich the Society with differences of opinionand different standpoints, the more likely is it to do its work andlive for centuries to come, when other new avenues of knowledge unfoldbefore it, we are not ready to be members of the Theosophical Societyat all. 

Now the Society has gone along those lines, along which every religionhas gone, from the time of the Coulomb trial. What has been the effectof that on religions? A weakening power. We have to beware that thesame thing does not take place with us that has taken place with thedifferent religions of the past; we should take care--especially in anera wherein ordinary science on the physical plane is pressing onwardsinto the higher realms of the physical plane, and on to the verythreshold of the astral plane, and bids fair to cross that thresholdand demonstrate its teaching there--lest we, who claim to be in theforefront of this great movement, do not fall into the background, andbecome unworthy of carrying on the standard of knowledge. Therefore Iwould claim for the Society its place as a seeker after new knowledge, investigation by what we call clairvoyance, the definite and regularcarrying out of the third object, which has been far too muchneglected of late years; practically, where many years ago the Societywas leading the way in the investigation of the hidden laws in Natureand the hidden powers in man, it now has to take a back seat withregard to the contributions it is making under that particular objectfor which amongst others it was founded. For more work has been doneof late years by the Psychical Research and similar Societies than bythe Theosophical Society, and that is neither right or wise--notright, because as long as we keep such research as one of our objectswe ought to live up to it; not wise, because the lessons we havelearnt, the various theories we have studied, are better guides toinvestigation than anything which the other Societies have, who havenot yet been able to formulate theories but are simply in the state ofcollecting phenomena. For that reason it seems to me that the Societycan do work here which the others cannot. They collect and verify withpatient care masses of most interesting and valuable phenomena. Thework done by the late Mr. Gurney and Mr. Myers, and a large number oftheir co-workers, is invaluable work from the standpoint of theTheosophical student. But there is no order in it; there is no reasonin it. It is a mere chaos of facts, and they cannot explain orcorrelate them. They cannot classify or place them in order. They haveno world-embracing knowledge which enables them to place each fact inits own place, and to show the relation of one set of facts to theother. There are splendid observations, but no co-ordination andbuilding of them into a science; and it seems to me that it is a dutyof the Theosophical Society, not only to deal with the facts thatothers have verified, but to carry on researches by properly qualifiedpersons among its own members; to utilise its magnificent theories, its knowledge--for they are more than theories--for the explanation ofnew phenomena, for the gradual evolution of new powers among greaternumbers of its members; and I do not believe that in that there is somuch danger as some people fear. I do not believe that the study ofthe hidden side of Nature is so perilous a study as some think. Allresearches at first hand in the early days of a science have somedanger: chemistry, electricity, had dangers for their pioneers, butnot dangers from which wise people and brave should shrink; and I fearfor the future of the Theosophical Society if it follows the track ofmany of the religions and lets go its hold of knowledge of the otherworlds, and comes to depend on hearsay, tradition, belief in theexperience of others, and the avoidance of the reverification ofexperience. For it must be remembered that in giving a vast mass ofknowledge to the world, H. P. B. Distinctly stated that these are factswhich can be reverified by every generation of observers; she did notgive a body of teaching to be swallowed, to be taken on authority, tobe accepted by what is called faith; but a body of verifiableteachings, facts to be examined over again, facts to be experimentedon, to be carefully studied, as the scientific man studies the part ofthe world he knows. Unless we can do that, I fear we shall tend onlyto become another religion among the religions of the world; that wealso shall lose our power over the thought of our generation, and tothat which has been done so splendidly in past years--the spreading ofthese ideas so that they are becoming commonplace now among culturedand intellectual people--pause will be given, and the spreadinginfluence will be checked, because we have left part of our workundone, part of our message unsaid. And I would urge on you inrelation to this that which I said in a sentence at the beginning ofmy address, that there is one condition of research into these matterscommon to ordinary science and to the science of the higher worlds, and that is a balanced judgment, acute and accurate observation, and aconstant readiness to reverify and recast earlier observations in thelight of the later ones that are made. All science grows bymodification as more and more facts are collected by the scientificobservers, and no scientific man would make any progress in hisscience, if he were always in the reverential attitude of the devoteebefore a spiritual truth when he is working out experiments in hislaboratory. You may show reverence to great beings like the Masters, there the posture of reverence is the right one; but when you aredealing with the phenomena of the astral plane there is no more needto show reverence than with phenomena of the physical plane. It is outof place, and if you make that atmosphere round it, you will alwaysbe at the mercy of misconception and error of all kinds. You must try, in all psychical research, in all weighing of observation ofphenomena, to cultivate the purely scientific spirit, indifferent saveto the truth and the accuracy of the results, looking on every matterwith a clear eye, without bias and without prejudice; not seeking forfacts to verify a doctrine already believed in, but seeking for factsin order to draw conclusions from them as to the laws and truths ofthe unseen world. There is no other safe way of investigation, noother reasonable condition of mind in face of the objective world; andif it be possible amongst us to break down this wall between thephysical, astral and mental, to see all objects in all worlds assimply part of the Not-Self which we are studying, dealing with themin the same way, interpreting them in the same spirit, then we arelikely to add largely to our knowledge without risking the loss of ourjudgment or becoming mere enthusiasts, carried away by marvels andunable either to observe accurately or judge correctly. The place ofphenomena in the Theosophical Society seems to me to be a constantplace. They must be recognised as fit objects for the study of theTheosophist. We must recognise frankly that our future literaturedepends on the development of these powers which can be utilised inthe worlds beyond the physical; that we are not satisfied to be onlyreceivers, but also desire to be investigators and students; thatwhile we will check the observations of to-day by the observations ofthe past, and hold our conclusions lightly until they have beenrepeatedly verified, we will not be frightened back frominvestigation by the idea that psychism is a thing to be disliked, tobe shrunk from, to be afraid of. Some of you think that I have laidtoo much stress, when speaking of observations in the other worlds, onthe probability of mistake. Some have blamed me from time to timebecause I have guarded myself so much by saying: "It is likely thatmistakes have come into these observations. " But it is only by keepingthat frame of mind, that reiterated observation can correct theblunders which we inevitably fall into in our earlier investigations. There is no scientific man in the world who, when making experimentsin a new branch of science, is not well aware that he may blunder, islikely to make mistakes, likely to have to correct himself, to findout that wider knowledge alters the proportion between his facts. AndI have tried to lay stress on the fact that these things are true asregards the astral plane as much as they are true of the physical;that it is not a question of revelation by some highly evolved being, but a question of observation by gradually developing beings--a very, very different thing. And unless you are prepared to take up thatreasonable position, unless you will allow the investigator to makemistakes and to correct them, without calling out too loudly againstthem, or abusing them for not being perfect and invariable, you willbuild a wall against the gaining of further knowledge, and cramp theSociety, and give it only tradition instead of ever fresh knowledge, ever widening information. 

So that I declare thus the place of phenomena in the TheosophicalSociety: I declare that it was founded with them, built up by them, nourished by them, and that they ought to continue to be a departmentof our work, a proper subject for our investigation. Only, do not getconfused by bringing faith into the region of phenomena. There is onlyone thing to which the word faith ought really to be applied: and thatis the conviction of Deity within us. That is the real faith, thefaith in the Self within, an unconquerable, imperial conviction of theDivinity which is the root of our nature. That faith is truly abovereason; that conviction transcends all proofs and all intellect; butnothing in the object world is an object of faith; all are objects ofknowledge. If you can keep that distinction clear in your mind; if youcan remember that the only warranted conviction above reason is thatconviction of your eternity, then you may go safely into the region ofphenomena, into the manifestations and happenings of the objectiveworld, with clear judgment, clear sight, unbiased mind; and knowledgeshall reward you in your researches into Nature, for Nature always hasa reward for the seeker into her secrets. 

Spiritual and Temporal Authority

I am to speak to-night, as you know, on "Spiritual and TemporalAuthority, " and I have chosen this, with the other subjects, asbearing on questions of immediate interest to the TheosophicalSociety. But in dealing with each of these, as on the first occasion, I want, if I can, to lift you above any controversy of the moment, andto put before you broad outlines rather than mere details, and to leadyou to look at all these questions from the wider standpoint of theexperience of the past, trying to apply that experience as far as youcan to the questions, the difficulties, of the present. And thisquestion that I have chosen for the subject of our thought to-night isone which carries us back into the very beginnings of human history onour globe, which we may trace downwards through civilisation aftercivilisation, and we can then study, as it were by contrast, many ofour modern civilisations. And out of all this it may be that we shalllearn some lesson for our own small affairs of the moment. For localaffairs are only really interesting as we see them as manifestationsof the great principles which work out in the history of humanity; andwe can only rightly, I think, understand the power of theTheosophical Movement, if we see it in its proper place in history, and not as a mere bubble on the water of the present. 

Now, far, far back--I suppose some people will say "not in history, " forthe time I am speaking of is what would be called "prehistoric"--whenthe great Lords from the planet Venus came to our globe to guide andtrain the humanity which just then had come to the birth, we find agroup of Teachers and Rulers, not belonging to our humanity at all, but, as I said, coming from the planet Venus, from the far more highlyevolved humanity living in that world. They came for the specificpurpose of making the evolution of the new humanity more rapid thanotherwise it would be. For, as you know, at that time humanity wasfacing a very terrible danger. The bodies had evolved up to a certainpoint, the brooding Spirit was over each body, but the intellectualevolution had scarcely begun to dawn; mind, as we know it now, hadscarcely asserted itself; only mind, as we see it in the animals, hadbeen slowly unfolding its powers in the upward-climbing towards thelight. And as it is always true that any force which is poured down intoa body must necessarily flow along the channels which that body hasprepared for it, in these animal men, as we may call them, when theyreceived a new influx of spiritual life--or, if we prefer the phrase, "as the influx grew stronger and stronger"--that new life, thatadditional force, inevitably ran into animal channels, lacking theguiding and directing force of the intelligence. Hence the immediateresult of any increased down-pouring from the spiritual plane was anincrease in animality in the growing man; and his body, growing up outof the animal kingdom, influenced by that--although, as you remember, human from the beginning, yet retracing its ancestry in those earlydays--was driven by the incoming life into various lines of activity, harmless to the brute, but that would have been destructive to theupward-climbing human being. Hence the need for a swift intervention onthe part of the Guardians of all humanities; and our planetary Logoscalled to His help humanity from a chain older than His own, so that Hemight have for His infant children guides that would protect themagainst danger, and would lead them upwards more swiftly than theythemselves could have climbed alone. Hence the coming of those MightyOnes, and it was They who were the first Adepts, Masters, for ourhumanity. There is no other term for the moment to apply to them, although the term "Master" is really inappropriate: They were far higherin the Occult Hierarchy than Those we speak of as the Masters of Wisdomand Compassion. They became the first Teachers and Kings of our childhumanity, and They were of many grades. "Divine Kings" They are calledin the old records; Teachers and Kings in one. They established thepolities of the infant nations; They gave to those same nations theirreligions; and in those early days, as in the days that will close ourhuman history, there was no distinction recognised between "sacred" and"profane. " It was seen that Spirit, clothing itself in matter, should beregarded in each of its tabernacles as a single individual. Spirit andmatter were not regarded, so to speak, as distinguished from eachother, save in quality. The two combined into the making of the man. Andthe man's life was a human life, and the body guided by humanconsciousness; but the body was not thought of as separate from theSpirit, nor the Spirit from the body; both were combined into a singlebeing. And in all true organisations that is the point which is to beaimed at: that the informing life shall shape and mould the organismwhich is thus expressing the life on planes of matter; that thatorganism shall ever be an organism spirit-inspired, life-shaped, so asto become more and more perfectly the expression of the life which itenfolds. We shall see presently that for a time, when Spirit becameutterly blinded by matter, that matter, as it were, took the upper handand claimed to be monarch. But in those far-off days it was stillrecognised that Spirit was the master of matter, and the Gods walkedamongst men and were recognised by men as their Teachers and Kings. Andhumanity in its infancy clung to These, who were as fathers and mothersof the race, and looked to Them for everything necessary to nourish anddevelop the young life. So that looking back to those earlier days, thegreat lawgivers like the Manus were at once Kings and Priests. They gaveeverything to the humanity that They guarded: literature, science, art, architecture, everything which was necessary to the national life. Andunder that mighty protection grew up the vast civilisations of the past. You find traces of them, of course, in Egypt; traces of them, in fact, everywhere in the older, the now dying, or dead peoples. And theseKing-Priests, these King-Prophets, summed up in Their own divine personsall the ruling powers of Spirit and matter alike. The State was aChurch, or the Church was a State. 

Gradually, as these Great Ones withdrew, as Those who only lived forservice saw that humanity had begun to take its first steps, andneeded less physical guidance and visible helping, others still great, but not as superhuman as the earlier ones, took up the royal andpriestly rank. Still the two ran together: the temporal and spiritualpower in one pair of hands; and so on and on, from Atlantis downwards. Some traces of it still survive, as in the Indian civilisation, wherethe ideal of the monarch is always that of the Divine representativeupon earth. But in India, after the earliest days, you see thebeginning division, and the offices of the King and of the Teachergradually diverged the one from the other. And as time went on, andman grew a little older in his childhood, those who ruled over theState gave away out of their hands the teaching of the religion. Rightly and well; for it was necessary that humanity should learn toguide itself. It was on the downward arc still, not yet beginning itsupward climbing, and it had to plunge deeper and deeper into matter. The eyes of the Spirit had to be blinded in order that the eyes of theintellect might open, and so gradually prepare humanity for a loftiermanifestation of the spiritual life. 

And then we find that with the dividing of the two offices, the Kingsgrew less and less fathers of their peoples, and became more and moretyrants over the nations. In the elder days the principle that wastaught was clear and simple: the greater the power, the greater thesacrifice; the greater the power, the greater the duty. And on thatprinciple of the Law of Sacrifice the old civilisations were built up;to that they owed their splendor; to that the long ages through whichthey lived and flourished; to sacrifice, as the very basis of thenational and religious polity, they owed the vigor, the young vigor, of humanity. Their literature was grandiose; their architecturemagnificent; their art sublime. The traces of divinity ran through thewhole of it. But, beautiful as it was, it would not have been wellthat it should have lasted, for had it been so, mankind would havegrown to depend too much upon the manifested Divine life walkingincarnate side by side with it. And it was necessary that the growingchild should prove his own limbs, and the growing intelligence shouldlearn to depend upon itself. Then we come to a long period when thetyranny of the King brought out more and more strongly the usefulnessof the Teacher, and when the Teacher was continually standing betweenthe power of the tyrant and the helplessness of the people; whenreligion became a shield for the weak, a strong check for the violenceof power. And we pass thus through all that long period of humanhistory where the oppressed found their only refuge in the priests ofthe religions, and found them a sure protection against the sword ofthe secular power. So went on for hundreds, nay, for thousands ofyears, the growth of humanity; and the two powers went further andfurther apart, coming more and more the one into opposition with theother. And the people, the nations, gradually grew in power, grew inintelligence, to a considerable extent. The priest was still theteacher, and still the schools and the temples were united. Unfortunately, after a while the religions became corrupted as well asthe royalties, and priests began to share the worldliness that hadalready degraded the Kings; and then, with the failure of thepriesthood, practically ceased the education of the people for manyand many a long century, and intelligence was not developed, and thepower of the mind was not assisted to manifest itself. 

And so onward and onward till we come to Middle Age Europe, and wefind a down-trodden proletariat, an indifferent and luxurious kingshipand priesthood, allied now to oppress, not to raise. Therefore, contest between the Church and the State, until the Pontiff of Romeremained the only representative of the union of the spiritual andtemporal authority--his spiritual authority enormous, his temporalauthority growing smaller, and badly used, so that in the States ofthe Church in Italy there was almost the acme of bad temporalgovernment; and there was little to choose, really, between the Statesof the Church and the odious tyranny of Naples. In the States of theChurch the old ideal of the Priest-King was degraded to its lowestpoint, and neither on the side of Pontiff, nor on the side of King, was the ruler of Rome the father, the shepherd of his people, butoften only a devouring wolf. Hence the last degradation of a oncemagnificent office. 

Meanwhile the Democracy was growing, and numbers were beginning toclaim their power, until the people, having seen how badly Kings andpriests could rule, thought that they could not, after all, do verymuch worse themselves, if they seized authority by the power ofnumbers, and took the helm of the States, of the Nations, into theirown rough and untrained grip. And so has risen in the modern life ofEurope the power, as it is called, of the Democracy. Practically, atthe present time, Democracy may be said to be on its trial. It cannotclaim so far to be a very splendid success, but its trial is not yetover, and many a year may yet lie before it, in order that the worldmay have an object-lesson to show that the only true authority is theauthority of Wisdom, and not the authority of numbers; and that it isnot possible for humanity to take its next step onwards until it hasmanaged to draw out of the lessons of the past and of the present someway of blending, some way of uniting, the different experiencesthrough which it has passed. For all who study the world's unfoldingand believe that this world is not alone, but is a part linked withother worlds, and that other beings above humanity take their share inhumanity's evolution--all who thus look at history and see the powersthat lie behind the veil and that pull the strings of those whom wecall kings, and statesmen, and generals, and the mighty ones of earth, they know that no great human experiment can be void of its value, andno great human experiment but has some fruit of wisdom to be gatheredfrom it. So that no wise man, no thoughtful Theosophist, should lookwith a feeling of repulsion and anger on the experiments that arebeing made all over the world to-day in the effort of the nations torule themselves by numbers rather than by wisdom. For it is anecessary experience. Only in this fashion can the lower mind completeits evolution and be ready to give up its sceptre to that Pure Reasonwhich is to be the mark of the Sixth Race, which is to find itsexpression in the polity of that coming Race. Out of all theseexperiments we are to learn, out of all successes and all failures weare to spell out, the lesson whereon the next civilisation will bebuilt, whereby its foundation will gradually be laid. For if one seesthe Theosophical Society aright, it is as one of the builders of thatcoming time, one of the builders of the civilisation that has not yetreally dawned on earth, the civilisation of the Sixth Root Race, withthe experiments that will go before it in the Sixth and Seventhsub-races of the Fifth. For these experiments take long in the making, and, as a great teacher once said: "Time is no object with us. " Thereis plenty of time for all the experiments, and all the blunders, andall the failures; and all the successes of the future will grow out ofthese, because every failure rightly seen is the seed of a comingsuccess, and only by the failures that we make in our ignorance maythe plant of wisdom be sown, and presently flower and bear fruit forthe feeding of the nations. So that there is time enough, and no needfor impatience, when we see the blunders of our various democraticgovernments. But there is much need that thoughtful people should takecare so to see the signs of the time, and so to understand the forcesat work, that the same blunder be not made in the days of the presentas was made at the close of the eighteenth century in France; forthere also was a time when an effort was made for a great stepforward, a step too big, apparently, to be possible of being thentaken, a step which only caused the drowning of the forward movementin blood, and has thrown France backward, and not forward as somepeople suppose; for ever since that time she has had a cancer at theheart of her, and no effort that has been made has borne due fruit. Nay, it is even possible that that was her opportunity in which shefailed, and that the opportunity will have to pass to other peoples, to be worked out by other hands. 

Looking at the democracies of to-day, we see that both the greatpowers are rejected, King and priest alike, royalty reduced to a merepuppet, priesthood looked on with suspicion and with hatred; and inboth cases one is bound to admit that there is much justification, forthey are the result of the harm that unbridled power in Church and inState alike have wrought to the people, who are now revolting againstboth. But the revolt is only a passing thing. Humanity does not reallychange; only passing manifestations of it change; and though thepassing manifestations be counted by centuries, what is that in thelength of a day counted by myriads of years, and to peoples who arespiritual intelligences unfolding their powers in humanity? Kingshipand priesthood are mighty powers, and the need for them deep-rooted inthe nature of humanity. Only on the upward path they are differentfrom what they were on the path of descent, and the way in which thoseare to be shaped and moulded and again made mighty, that will be theanswer of human experience after it has proved the rule of ignoranceto be a mistake and a failure. Gradually, in some way that as yet wedo not see, a way will be found of discovering the wise, who alonehave the right to rule. For there is no authority for theintelligence, there is no authority for the free intellect of man, save the authority of Wisdom, to which the intellect bows because itis itself in flower. And those who develop the intelligence of men, ashumanity is beginning to evolve its intelligence, they will only findtheir Kings and Priests where they see a wisdom greater than theirown, a knowledge which transcends theirs, but is the promise of whatthey themselves in the future should become. And out of all thebirth-throes of the present, and the ugly shapes which humanity takeson, will come the fairer birth of Wisdom, when again it shall sit onthe combined throne of King and Priest. For it is necessary that humanlife should regain its unity, and that again the Spirit shall be knownto be master, and the body its instrument, its tool, its expression. And on the upward-climbing arc we have again to come to the samelevels that we passed in our downward-going arc of the ages of thepast. In the half circle we had first the Priest-King; and then thetwo side by side, co-operators; and then the separation and therivalry; and, finally, an evil junction to oppress the ignorant andthe poor. And slowly we shall have to climb on the path where Spiritis manifesting more and more, and matter is becoming more and moreobedient, until each of those stages is again seen in the history ofhumanity, and until, at the end, Spirit shall be lord unchallenged, and matter obedient servant, carrying out his will. And in thehumanity of the great Sixth Race in which Buḍḍhi, or PureReason, is to be the mark, in which Wisdom will be the shaper ofhumanity's plans, and the strength of matter will be used in order tocarry them out, in those days there will be the building-up of thedual authority once more, and the shaping of it to diviner ends thaneven in those early days of the infant humanity. And in those days, again, ruler and priest shall be one, until at last the unity shall berealised in the life of those who are to accomplish their humanevolution upon earth; until finally in each spiritual individual thesetwo characteristics are unfolded, and each man is King and Priest, uniting the two phases in his own individuality, and learning, in thatdual power, to become the servant of those who are less evolved thanhimself. You see a touch of that when the Christian religion was sentout into the world, a glimpse of the splendid ideal when the Apostle, writing to his infant Church, spoke of them as "Kings and priests untoGod"; in each individual this identity is to be at last achieved, sothat no outer rule is any longer necessary, the inner rule beingenough. That unity will mark the closing scenes of life on earth ineach of those whose human evolution will be finished, who will have topass on into other worlds when they shall have united again each ofthese in their own persons, and shall use that twofold power for thetraining of the humanity below them, ascending towards the point whichthey shall have gained and shall occupy. 

Such the vast sweep of humanity's evolution: from Spirit, throughdensest matter, upward-climbing again to Spirit, bearing with it allthe powers that by the experience in matter it has gained. Such thegreat sweep, and the great history. What relation has that to ourlittle Society and our little movement? Some would be inclined to say:"None; no relation at all. You cannot bring down into so small amicrocosm those great principles shown out in their working in amacrocosm. " And yet if you and I, in our tiny personalities, repeat inminiature the life of the Logos in the vast sweep of His creativeactivity, who shall say that in a movement such as ours there is notsimilarly a retracing of the lines along which humanity at large hasto grow? And who shall say whether we may not understand our movementbetter, and guide it more wisely, if we recognise thesecorrespondences of the great growth of the world to the small growthof our Movement--a world-reflection in a tiny mirror? For it is notrue humility to lessen too much the varied operations of the GreatWhite Lodge in the world of men, any more than it is a true humilityfor the individual to be ashamed to claim his divine inheritance, andlook upon himself as a "mere worm of earth. " The men or women who onlyfeel themselves to be of the earth, and not of Deity, their livesbecome more vulgar and common than they ought to be; for it is a greatthing to realise possibilities and to see correspondences, and to takeout of them their inspiring value, their invigorating force. And justas you and I have the right to say that we are Gods in the making, andthat there is nothing in the great power of the LOGOS that does notlie hidden in germ within ourselves, just as we have the right to saythat, as man best understands himself when he knows himself divine andrealises the possibilities within him, and sees the road to Deitywhich he is to tread, so is every spiritual movement great inproportion to the realisation of its one-ness with the greatworld-movement, and small and petty when the men and women whocompose it can only keep their eyes on the muck of the earth insteadof looking up to the crown of stars that the angel holds over theirhead. So that I do not fear to provoke a false pride, but rather toget rid of a false humility, when I ask you to see in this Movement, which belongs to the Great Lodge and is its child, to see in it thesame forces at work that you see working in the world-history, and torealise that here also correspondences exist, and that we may guideour Movement most worthily by seeing those correspondences andutilising them for the common good. 

So let us pause now, after these high flights, in the little valley inwhich we live, and see whether in the Theosophical Society any suchprocess of events may be seen as has been played on the great worldtheatre, in the drama of evolving humanity. For mind! we have no meaningunless we are related to that, and our Movement has no sense unless itretraces the steps of the great world drama, as every great spiritualmovement does, from the time of its birth to the time of its passingaway, and its incarnation in some other form. I do not claim it for ourSociety only, but for all great spiritual movements--churches, religions, call them what you will. 

Now, we began our Movement as humanity began its education. There wasno difference between spiritual and temporal. The whole Society wasregarded as a spiritual movement; and if you go back to those earlydays, and read the earliest statements, you will find it said thatthis Society existed in what then were called three Sections: First, Second, and Third. The First Section was the Brotherhood, the ElderBrothers of Humanity; the Second, those who were striving to lead thehigher, the more spiritual life, and were in training for the purpose;and the Third Section made up the bulk of the Society. Those threeSections were the Theosophical Society. So that it began on a verylofty level; and its First Section, the Elder Brothers, Those whom wespeak of as Masters, They were regarded as forming the First Sectionof the Society, and as part of it; and the Society has linked closelythe Second and Third Sections under the First, as in the days when theGods walked with men, in the early story of humanity. And They cameand went far more freely then than later, and mingled more with theSociety, taking a more active part in this work; and it is wonderfulto read some of the old letters of the time, and the close andintimate knowledge shown by those great Teachers of the details of thework of the Society, even of what was written about it in an Indiannewspaper, and what ought to be answered, and so on. And the Societygrew, became more numerous, and spread in many lands; and naturally asit spread, many of these ties somewhat weakened so far as the Society, as a whole, was concerned--not weakened with individuals, but somewhatweakened with the Body at large. And so things went on and on, untilthe Society passed through the same stage through which humanity hadpassed when the Priest-Kings entirely disappeared, and when thosewords were spoken by one of the Great Ones: "The Society has liberateditself from our grasp and influence, and we have let it go; we make nounwilling slaves. .. . Out of the three Objects the second alone isattended to; it is no longer either a Brotherhood, nor a body overthe face of which broods the Spirit from beyond the Great Range. " Andwhen that time was well established a change was made in theorganisation of the Society. It was no longer, so to speak, one andindivisible, but two parts were made--Exoteric and Esoteric; and, asyou know, for some time the Colonel fought against that, thinking itmeant an unwise and dangerous division of authority in the Society, until, as he was coming over here with his mind in opposition to theproposal that H. P. B. Should form the Esoteric Section, he received, onboard the steamer on which he travelled, a letter from his Mastertelling him to carry out what H. P. B. Wished; and, ever obedient as hewas, for when his Master spoke he knew no hesitation, when he arrivedhere in England he did what he had been told, and authorised theformation of what was then called the Esoteric Section of theTheosophical Society. You can read all this for yourselves; it is allin print. Then came that distinct cleavage of Exoteric andEsoteric--the two heads, H. S. Olcott and H. P. B. , one wielding thetemporal and the other the spiritual authority in the Society. Itmeant that the Society had ceased to be the spiritual vehicle it wasin the earlier days. It meant, as was printed at that time, that someof the members wished to carry on the Society on its original lines, and so they formed themselves into this Section under her, on theoriginal lines. So it went on, like that time in the history ofhumanity, in order that certain faculties might grow and becomestrong, and that the spiritual side for a time might seem apart, andthe other might go its own way unruled. Many difficulties grew out ofit, but still they were not insuperable--a certain clashing ofauthorities from time to time, and certain jealousy between the oneand the other. These things were the inevitable concomitants of theseparation, of the differences between the spiritual and temporalsides, the Spirit and the body, as it were. So things went on untilthe President passed away. When H. P. B. Left us, she left me in chargeof her work, as her colleague did in Aḍyar lately, thus unitingagain the two powers, the two authorities, in a single person. 

Now, what does it mean to the Society? That is the question for us. What is it to bring forth in our Movement? Ill or well? It is onlypossible, at this beginning of the road, to point out the two thingsthat _may_ happen. For the Society and its President together willhave to settle which of the two shall come. It may be that They, whofrom behind look on, may foresee what is coming; or it may be, as itoften is, that They also are not able completely to say what shallcome out of the clashing wills of men, differing views, possibleantagonisms. Two possibilities there clearly are before us, either ofwhich, I suggest, may come. For you and for me it is to decide whichshall come. And I can only tell you how it seems to me, and you mustjudge and act as you think right. For at last our Society, likehumanity, has reached the point when the individual must do his duty, and must no longer be a child guided entirely from without, but a manwith the God within co-operating with the God without. Hence it is nota question for any to decide for us: we have to decide it forourselves. And as I say, I can only put to you what seem to me the twopossibilities. Let me take the bad possibility first. It may be thatI, in whose hands these two powers now are placed, shall prove tooweak to bear that burden, too blind to walk along that difficult path. It may be that I shall err on the one side or on the other, eithermaking the Society too exoteric and empty, a material thing, or, onthe other hand, pressing too far the spiritual side, with all thatthat means. It may be that the task is too great, and that the timehas not come. I recognise that as possible; for in all questions ofpeoples, persons, and times, experiments may be made which it is knownwill fail, in order that out of the failure fresh wisdom may begathered, and it may be that this shall be a failure. And if so itmatters not, for out of that failure some higher good will spring. That is the conviction of those who know that the Self is ever in us, and that the Self can never perish; so that it matters not whatcatastrophe may come, provided faith in the Self remains secure withHis endless possibilities of recovery, and greater powers ofmanifestation. And it may quite well be that, in hands as weak andknowledge as limited as mine, failure will meet this great experimentwhich the Masters are making, and that we shall find that neitherPresident nor Society is fit to take that step forward, are both stilltoo childish, not sufficiently mature, and therefore not able to treadthe path which is the path upwards to the spiritual life, when theorganisation shall again become but the mere outside veiling of thespiritual life, carrying the message of regeneration to the world, andthe birth of a new civilisation. That is one possibility that shouldbe faced. And the other?

The other is that we may permit the Great Ones to be sufficiently intouch with our little selves to send Their forces through us, and thatTheir life shall become the life of the Society; that out of thisrejoining of spiritual and temporal a greater spirituality shallcirculate in every vein and vessel of the Society, and it shall becomeagain truly a vehicle of the Masters of the Wisdom. It may be that itis preparing for a greater and a nobler life, making the place readyfor some greater one to come, who shall worthily and strongly wieldthe power that I am bound to wield too weakly, but yet, perhaps, strongly enough to make that preparation possible. Perhaps you and Itogether are strong enough and wise enough to till the field, whereanother shall sow the seed that shall grow up into a greatercivilisation and mark a step forward in the history of humanity. Thatis our great opportunity, that the possibility that I see openingbefore us in this policy now changed for the second time. It may bethat we have learned enough in the last eighteen years to tread thispath rightly, to tread it sufficiently to prepare a field for agreater one to come; and that is the hope in which I live at thepresent time. I believe that it is possible, if only we can rise tothe height of our great opportunity, that someone will come from thefar-off land where greater than we are living, and take thisinstrument and make it fit to be a tool in a Master's hand--someDisciple greater and mightier than I, someone belonging to the samecompany, but far wiser and far stronger than I. And that such a onewill take this Movement and make it a little more what the heart ofthe Masters desires--more truly a Brotherhood, more full of knowledge, more really linked to the higher worlds by a centre of wiseOccultism--that seems to me the great possibility which is openingbefore us. But, as I said, I know not if we are great enough to takeit, or are still too small; but it is to that great work that I wouldinvite your co-operation; it is to that mighty task that I would askyou to address yourselves. At least believe in the possibility of it;at least raise your eyes to that great stature to which it may be ourSociety shall attain. For if we can rise to it, then it means that weshall be builders of the next civilisation, that our hands shall takepart in the making of the foundation of the humanity that is still tobe born; it means that we shall be its forerunners, its heralds, thatwe shall be the messengers whose feet shall be fair upon themountains, telling of the coming of a greater man, of the birth of amore spiritual humanity. And even supposing that, accepting thatideal, we fail, supposing that we are not strong enough, and wiseenough, and unselfish enough, to do it, then, then--if I may quote thewords of Giordano Bruno--"It is better to see the Great and fail intrying to achieve it, than never to see it, nor try to achieve it atall. "

The Relation of the Masters to the Theosophical Society

Those of you who have been present in the Queen's Hall on Sundayevenings will remember that I spoke there a fortnight ago on "TheRelation of Masters to Religions. " There, of course, I dealt with thesubject in the most general possible way, while here I propose to dealwith it more closely; but I must ask all of you, as I asked you lastThursday and the preceding Thursday, to remember that in dealing withthe Theosophical Society we are only dealing with one part of aworld-wide and, as I might say, century or millennium-wide story--thestory, practically, of the relation of the spiritual world to thephysical. Although I am now going to deal specially with the relationof the Masters to our own Society, I would ask you all to bear in mindthe more general relation of which I have spoken elsewhere. I do notwant to repeat what there I said, but I want to recall to your mindsthe leading principle that the Theosophical Society cannot claim anexclusive right to any special spiritual privilege, that the spiritualprivileges that it enjoys are part of the general spiritual heritageof the world, and that you have to consider any special case inrelation to those general principles. So that in thinking of theMasters in relation to our own Society, we must bear in mind how verywide are their relations to all great spiritual movements, to allreligions, and that all who are spoken of in the different faiths asFounder or Founders of a particular religion would fall under thename, Master. 

Now I was hesitating a moment in completing that sentence, because onealmost has to explain that in thus using the word one is including in ita little more than is included under the term in the specialsignificance with which we are going to use it now; for in the case ofthe religions of the Hinḍus, the religion of the Buḍḍhists, andthe religion of the Christians, when we speak of the Founder of each ofthese religions, we are speaking of great personages who, in the OccultHierarchy, are higher than those whom we call Masters: in the case ofHinḍuism, the Manu, who is the Lord really of the whole of the FifthRoot Race; in the case of Buḍḍhism, the Buḍḍha, who is ateacher of all gods and men before He takes up His place as theilluminated, the supreme Buḍḍha. And in the case of the ChristianReligion also, there is something peculiar in the life of the Founder. You have there, in the first place, a being whom we call by the nameJesus, in himself a disciple, but living in the world at that time underexceedingly strange and peculiar conditions. Some of you may have readwith some amount of care that section of the third volume of _The SecretDoctrine_ which is called "The Mystery of the Buḍḍha. " I am boundto confess that as it stands there it is very confused, partlyintentionally, I think, on the part of the writer, but also partly inconsequence of the fact mentioned in that volume, that you have thereput together a large number of fragments, and they were put together bymyself at a time when I knew very much less of the arrangement, so tospeak, of those relationships between the higher and lower worlds than Ido now. Hence there is some darkness there that belongs to the subject, and some that belongs to the incompetence of the compiler. The result ofthe two together is a good deal of confusion to any student who has notthe key to it. I am only concerned for the moment with one of thesestatements, with what are called "the remains of the Buḍḍha"--nota very comfortable name, because it gives one the idea of a corpse--thatis, empty bodies of the Buḍḍha on the various planes. Those havebeen preserved on the higher planes for special purposes, and areoccasionally used under very peculiar conditions, when subtle bodies ofa very pure and very lofty character are needed for some particularpurpose. Now in the case of Him who was known as Jesus, the subtlebodies were these particular bodies that are kept on the higher planes, and He was allowed to use these for a number of years, holding them, asit were, as tenant for the great personage who was to take possession ofthem later. Then came the lofty being known as the Boḍhisaṭṭva, who took possession of these vehicles which had thus been kept ready forHim, and He who was the disciple and now is the Master Jesus took birthlater as Apollonius of Tyana, and so passed onwards step by step untilhe became one of the Masters of the Wisdom. 

I made that slight digression because otherwise I should have conveyeda slightly false impression by the phrase "all Founders of religions. "We mean amongst ourselves by the word "Master, " when used accurately, a very distinctly marked rank in the Occult Hierarchy; He is a beingwho has attained what is called "liberation" in the East, what iscalled "salvation" in the West; a being whose soul and Spirit havebecome unified, who lives consciously on the highest plane of our ownuniverse--the fivefold universe--and whose centre of consciousness ison the âṭmic, sometimes called the nirvâṇic, plane. Living infull consciousness on that plane, He has no sense of bondage in anyform with which He may ally Himself. He has passed during HisArhaṭship beyond all desire for life in form, or life out of form. He has thrown away those fetters; together with the limiting"I-making" faculty, the limit of individuality, that also has gone. His consciousness, then, working on this âṭmic plane, worksindifferently up and down through all the five planes, and the wholeof these together form to Him but a single plane, the plane of Hiswaking consciousness. That is an important point to remember, forthere is often a certain confusion of thought with regard to this term"waking consciousness. " It ought not to mean simply the consciousnessthat you and I may have as waking consciousness, confined to thephysical world; but the consciousness which--enlarging stage by stageas the active centre of consciousness rises through the planesinwards--is aware of all which is below that centre; and is awarethereof without it being necessary for the person to leave thephysical body, in order that that consciousness may be in an activeand working condition. The waking consciousness is the normal, dailyconsciousness, and may include the physical plane; or physical andastral; or physical, astral, mental; one more when you take in thebuḍḍhic; one more when you take in the âṭmic; and providedthat the person whose consciousness is spoken of does not need toleave his active body, his body of action, in using his consciousnesson any of these planes, does not have to throw the body into trance inorder to be conscious on any or on all of them, we speak always, then, of that consciousness as being "his waking consciousness. " Somedisciples, for instance, will often include in the wakingconsciousness the astral, mental, and even buḍḍhic planes; butit is characteristic of the Master alone that He unites in His wakingconsciousness the whole of the five planes on which our universe isgradually unfolding. So that we may define the position of the Master, for the moment, as that of a Person who has reached liberation; themeaning of that being that he is living in the Spirit consciously;that he is in conscious relation to the Monad, above the âṭmicplane; his centre of consciousness is there, and as the result of thecentre of consciousness being in the Monad, the whole of the fiveplanes become part of his waking consciousness. As regards the bodiesthere is also a difference: the whole of the five bodies of theseplanes act for Him as a single body, His body of action. That does notmean, of course, that He cannot separate off the parts if He needs todo so; but it means that in His ordinary, normal condition, the wholeof His bodies are only layers of a single body, just as much as solid, liquid, gases, and ethers, for you and me, form our physical body, andwe need not trouble to distinguish the matter belonging to onesub-plane or another. So to the Master, the matter of the whole ofthese planes forms His body of action, and although He is able toseparate one part from another if he desires, normally He will beworking with the whole of them together, and the whole will constitutethe instrument of His physical or waking consciousness. 

It is hardly necessary to add to that definition that He is one who isalways in possession of a physical body; it is implied in the verydescription I have been giving. That part of it is important only, orchiefly, when you are considering the question of liberation inrelation to a number of different classes, as we may say, in thisgreat Occult Hierarchy, the names in the West are not familiar, andthere is no particular need to trouble you with them for the moment inthe Samskṛiṭ form. Speaking generally, you have a class I havejust alluded to, the Masters who possess the physical body, andanother who are without that body, and are therefore not calledJîvanmukṭas (the name you so often find in our books in relation tothe Masters) but Mukṭas, with a prefix which means "without abody. " Then again you may have other classes, Beings who performvarious functions in the universe; some, for instance, animate thewhole of the physical universe, and are distinguished as being what iscalled blended with matter, the class that gives the sense of life, of consciousness, to all those things in Nature which so much impressthe mind occasionally when we are face to face in solitude with somesplendid landscape--some great forest, perhaps, in the silence. Weneed not go into these various classes; I only mention them in orderto separate from the rest that particular class of freed, liberated, or, if you like the Christian term, "saved, " persons, who no more needcome involuntarily into incarnation, but who are free both as regardsconsciousness and as regards matter. 

Now these great Beings that I have just defined ought to be separatedin your thought for a very practical reason that we shall see in amoment; they ought to be separated in your thought from those stillmightier Beings in the grades of the Occult Hierarchy that stretchfurther and further upwards into the invisible worlds. For you lose agreat deal practically when you mass the whole of them together, andfail to recognise the particular function of a Master, as regards theworld in which He voluntarily takes incarnation. It is the kind ofdistinction that we have sometimes put to students as regards the useof the words Jesus and Christ; Jesus denotes specifically the man, theliving man, the Master, who is still in possession of a physical body, and in close relation to the physical earth; the Christ, in a highersense, is an indwelling spiritual being, who can be reached by theSpirit, but not seen as such by the eyes in any phenomenal world. Soagain there is the yet loftier Being to whom the name of Christ isapplied amongst the Christians, when they are speaking of One we callthe Second LOGOS; these are Beings of different grades, and indifferent relations to mankind; but the Master, as Master, is a man, and the manhood must never be forgotten. It was on that point thatH. P. B. Laid so much stress in speaking of those Beings with whom shehad come into physical contact, whom she knew in their physicalbodies; and one thing, as you know, which she protested against inrelation to this type of Being was the putting Them too far away fromhuman love and sympathy, making Them belong to a class of beings towhom at present They do not belong, and hence making a gulf betweenThem and humanity which ought not to be made, because the making of itdestroys Their value to the people who make it. A phrase she onceused, that I have quoted to you before, is the complaint that "theyhave turned our Masters into cold far-off stars, instead of livingmen, " and on the fact that They are living men she continuallyinsisted; for it is by virtue of that living manhood that They areable to play the part that They play in the evolution of the race. Others have other work to do as regards humanity, as regards thedestinies of the nations, and so on, but these particular people arestill in close touch with the humanity to which They belong, and Theydeliberately refuse to go on away from it, remaining with it untilhumanity, at least with regard to very, very large numbers of itsmembers, has reached the position in which They stand to-day, as thepromise of what humanity shall be, the first-fruits of humanity as itis. They are specially concerned with the direct teaching, training, and helping of man, in the quickening of his evolution; and the reasonthe body is retained is in order that this close personal touch maybe kept, primarily with Their disciples, and then through Theirdisciples with comparatively large numbers of people. And it is amarked and significant fact, that just in proportion as a religion haslost touch with this aspect of the Divine Life which we call the Lifeof the Master, so has it tended to become more formal, less highlyvitalised, less spiritual, with less of the mystic element in it, andmore of the literal; so that it becomes necessary in the efflux oftime that every now and again a Master should come forth from theGreat White Lodge, and testify again upon earth to the reality of thetie between the Elder Brothers of the race and the younger brotherswho are living constantly in the physical world. 

Now one distinguishing mark of a Master, His chief function, we maysay, is to perform the greatest act of sacrifice which is known in theOccult Hierarchy, save the act of the One who is called The GreatSacrifice, the Silent Watcher, whose sacrificial act is still greaterthan the sacrificial acts performed by Those who are spoken of asMasters. This particular act of sacrifice, occurring from time to timeat the beginning of a new epoch in religion and civilisation, isperformed by one of the Body, who volunteers to start a furtherspiritual impulse in the world, and to bear the karma of the impulsethat He generates. That may not appear to you at first glance, unlessyou have gone into the subject carefully, to be such a transcendentact of sacrifice as it really is. It may seem a comparatively smallthing to start such an impulse, and very vague probably are the ideasof many of you as to what is implied in the statement "bearing thekarma, " which the generation of the impulse implies. The great act ofsacrifice lies not only in the truth that He is wearing a physicalbody of coarse matter, which hampers Him from time to time, but thatHe cannot lay that body aside, once He has used it for giving thisgreat spiritual impulse, until that impulse is entirely exhausted, andthe religion, or the association, to which it has given birth hasvanished out of the physical world. Take, for instance, the case ofthe Master, Jesus: He--by His own voluntary act of course, in thebeginning, for it is always a volunteer who comes forward; such asacrifice cannot be imposed--He, voluntarily, giving up His body, andlater taking from the Boḍhisaṭṭva the guarding of the infantplant of which the Boḍhisaṭṭva had sown the seed which was togrow into the great tree of Christianity, taking that from Him, Hebound Himself by the acceptance of that work to remain in the bonds ofthe physical body until the Christian Church had completed its work, and until the last Christian had passed away, either into liberation, or re-birth into some other faith. It is the same with the other greatreligions, so many of which are now dead--the religion of Egypt, ofChaldea, and many another. The Masters who had to do with those havelong since cast away Their physical bodies, and thereby ceased to bewhat we call Masters, because the religion that each gave to the worldhad done its work, and no souls remained who could be further helpedby passing through the teaching and the training of that particularreligion. This is the central idea of the act of sacrifice, and itbecomes the more a sacrificial act because the One who undertakes thistremendous task cannot tell how the impulse will flow in all itsdetails, cannot even estimate the amount of difficulty, of delay, nay, of mischief, that may grow out of the impulse that He has given. Inthe first place, He Himself is limited by these bodies that He hasassumed. He cannot use the whole of His vast consciousness within thelimitations of a physical brain and a physical body. Thus, although Hehas unified His bodies and is able, so to speak, to run up and downthe ladder of the planes as He will, He is still largely limited inHis activities where He is working in the unplastic matter of thephysical plane; and so, when He undertakes a work like this, Hegenerates causes whose effects He cannot thoroughly calculate, Hetakes the risk which surrounds every great undertaking, He submitsHimself to the conditions of this task upon which He enters, and He isobliged, having once taken it, to bear it until success or failure hascrowned the effort that He makes. 

Those of you who have carefully thought on these subjects will realisethat while the knowledge of a Master is, as regards you or me, practical omniscience, it is by no means omniscience on His own plane, relative to the problems with which He has to deal and which He has tosolve. A Master amongst Masters, a Master within the Great WhiteLodge, He is amongst His peers, in the presence of His Superiors, andthe problems with which that Lodge has to deal, the questions on whichthat Lodge has to decide, are, if I may use the phrase, as difficultand as puzzling on that plane of being as the problems that we have todecide down here are on our plane. Hence the possibility ofmiscalculation, the possibility of error, the possibility of mistake;and you can well understand that these beings are subject to suchlimitations when you remember the startling assertion that even theLord Buḍḍha Himself, high above the Masters, that even Hecommitted an error in His work on the physical plane. When, then, aMaster volunteers to serve as what may literally be called thescapegoat of a new spiritual movement, He takes up a karma whose wholecourse He is unable to see. And it need not, therefore, be a matter ofsurprise that when the time was approaching when another greatspiritual impulse might again be given, according to cyclic law, whenthe two who volunteered to undertake the task, to make the sacrifice, offered Themselves in the Great White Lodge, differences of opinionarose as to whether it was desirable or not that what we now call theTheosophical Society should be founded. 

The time came, as most of you know, I suppose, for an effort of somesort to be made. It had been so since the fourteenth century, for itwas in the thirteenth century that in Tibet a mighty personage thenliving in that land, promulgated His order to the Lodge that at theclose of every century an effort should be made to enlighten the"white barbarians of the West. " That order having gone forth, itbecame necessary, of course, to obey it; for in those regionsdisobedience is unknown. Hence at the close of each century--as youmay verify for yourselves if you choose to go through historycarefully, beginning from the time when Christian Rosenkreuz foundedthe Rosicrucian Society late in the fourteenth century--you will findon every occasion, towards the close of the century, a new ray oflight is shed forth. Towards the close of the last century--I do notmean the one to which we belong, but the century before, theeighteenth--a mighty effort was made, of which the burden fell upontwo great personages closely connected with the Lodge, though neitherof them, I believe, at that time was a Master--he who was then knownas the Comte de St. Germain, who is now one of the Masters, and hiscolleague in that great task, closely allied to him, of a nobleAustrian family, known to us in later days as H. P. B. When those madetheir attempt to change the face of Europe, they failed, the time notbeing ripe; the misery and the wretchedness of the epoch, thedegradation of the masses of the population, the horrible poverty, theshameful starvation, all these were the rocks on which split, and wasbroken up into foam, the spiritual wave of which those two personageswere the crest. The karma of that, for the one whom we know of asH. P. B. , was the trying and suffering incarnation that she spentamongst us, when she founded, under the order of her Master, theTheosophical Society, and gave her life to it that it might live. Andit was that fact, that the last great spiritual effort had beendrowned in bloodshed, it was that which gave her her marked horror ofmixing up the spiritual movement with a political effort, which madeher realise that before a spiritual movement could be successful inthe outer world it must shape, raise, remodel the conscience of thosewho were affected by it, that it must not dare to put its hand as awhole to any great political or social movement before it was strongenough to control the forces which it evoked. Hence her shrinkingfrom all idea of this Society plunging, as a Society, into politicalwork or social reform. Not that individuals of the Society might notdo it, not that members of it might not use their best thought andenergy in order to bring forward and strengthen any movement which wasreally for the benefit of mankind; but that the Society as a Society, as the vehicle of this great torrent of life, must not pour thattorrent into any physical and earthly vessel, lest again it shouldbreak the vessel into pieces, lest again it should put the hands ofthe clock back, instead of forward, as was done in France. So for thistime it was to be a spiritual movement, and the work was to bespiritual, intellectual, and ethical. Those were to be its specialmarks, this its special work; and when the two great Teachers who wereidentified with the movement--her own Master and His closest co-workerin the Great White Lodge, the two who over and over again in centuriesgone by had stood side by side as fellow-workers in the civilisationsof the past--when They volunteered for this great emprise, doubt, as Isaid, arose among Their peers. The lesson of the eighteenth centurywas not forgotten; the question inevitably arose: "Is the West readyfor a movement of this sort again? Can it be carried on in such anenvironment without doing, perhaps, more harm than the good which itis capable of accomplishing?" And so, much discussion arose--strangeas that may sound to some, in connection with a body of workers sosublime--and most were against it, and declared the time was not ripe;but these two offered to take the risk and bear the burden, offered tobear the karma of the effort, and to throw their lives into theshaping, guiding, and uplifting. And as the question of time is alwaysone of the most complicated and difficult questions for Those who haveto deal with the great law of cycles and the evolution of man, it wasfelt that it was possible that the effort might succeed, even althoughthe time was not quite ripe, the clock had not quite struck the hour. And so permission was given, and the two assumed the responsibility. How the earlier stages were made is familiar to you all; how theychose that noble worker Their disciple, known to us as H. P. B. , andprepared her for the work she had to do; how in due course They senther to America to search there for a comrade who would supply what waslacking in herself--the power of organisation, the power of speakingto men and gathering them around him, and shaping them into a movementin the outer world. And you all know the story of how they met; youall know how they joined hands together. One of them has put the wholething on record, for the instruction of the younger members of theSociety now and in centuries to come. The movement began, as you know, closely watched over, constantly protected by those two who had takenthis burden of responsibility upon Themselves. And you may read inmany of H. P. B. 's letters, how continual in those days was the touch, how constant the directions; and it went on thus year after year--forthe first seven years at least of the Society's life, and a littlemore; you may read in the issue of the _Theosophist_ (June) a letterfrom one of these same Teachers, showing how close was the interesttaken, how close the scrutiny which was kept up in all the details ofthe Society's work. In publishing that letter I thought it only rightto strike out the names which occur in the original. It would not beright or fair to print those publicly yet, as you can perfectly wellsee when you are able to supply the blanks which are left for names. You may read in that letter how the Master who wrote it had beenwatching the action of a particular branch, how He had marked inconnection with another branch some of the members of the branch whowere working ill or not well; how He pointed out that such-and-suchmembers would be better out of the branch than in it, were hinderersrather than helpers--all going to show how close was the watch whichThey then kept upon the branches of Their infant Society. And so againyou may read in other letters than that, suggestions of writingletters to newspapers, and so on, which would strike you as verytrivial if they came from the Masters at the present time; how aletter might be written here, an article answered there; how a leadingarticle ought not to be allowed to remain with its false suggestionsto the injury of the Society, and so on. But there came a time, withthe increase of the numbers in the Society, when many came in who hadnot the strong belief of the outer founders in the reality of the lifeof the Masters and Their connection with the Theosophical Society, anddisputes and arguments arose. And if you turn back to the_Theosophist_ of those days you will see a great deal of discussiongoing on as to who were the Brothers, and what They did, and whatrelation they bore to the Society, and so on; until at last They grewa little weary of this continual challenging of Their life, and work, and interest, and gave the warning which still exists amongst thepapers of the Society, that unless before a very short time thesequestions were set at rest, and the fact of Their relation to theSociety was generally recognised, They would withdraw again for a timeinto the silence in which They had remained so long, and would waituntil conditions were more favorable before they again took Theiractive part in the guiding of the Society's work. Unfortunately thewarning was not taken, and so the withdrawal into the comparativesilence took place, and the Society entered on that other cycle of itswork on which, as you know, the judgment of the Master was passed inthe quotation I made the other day, that "the Society has liberateditself from our grasp and influence, and we have let it go; we make nounwilling slaves. It is now a soulless corpse, a machine run so farwell enough, but which will fall to pieces when. .. . Out of the threeobjects, the second alone is attended to; it is no longer either aBrotherhood, nor a body over the face of which broods the Spirit frombeyond the great Range. " Thus Their relations to the Society of thetime altered, became less direct, less continual. Their directinfluence was confined to individuals and withdrawn for the Society atlarge, save as to general strengthening, not because They desired itshould be so, but because so the Society desired, and the Society ismaster of its own destiny, and may shape its own fate according to thewill of its majority. Still They watched over it, though not permittedto "interfere" with its outer working so much as They had done in theearlier days, and H. P. B. Was obliged to declare that They did notdirect it. The relation remained, but was largely in abeyance, latentto some extent, as we may say, and They were waiting for the time whenagain the possibility might open before Them of more active workwithin the movement which They had started, whose heavy karma Theywere compelled to bear. 

The fact that They bear the karma of the Society as a whole, seems tome one which members of the Society ought never to forget; for, cominginto this movement as we have done, finding through the Society theteachings which have changed our lives, having received from it thelight which has made all our thought different, which has renderedlife intelligible, and life on other planes familiar, at least intheory, and to some in practice, it would seem that the very commonestgratitude, such as men or women of the world might feel for some smallbenefactions shown by friend to friend, that even that feeling, smalland poor as it is, might live in the heart of every member towardsThose who have made the existence of the Theosophical Societypossible. I do not mean, of course, in those who do not believe in thefact of Their existence; and there are, quite rightly and properly, many such amongst us; for it is the foundation of the TheosophicalSociety that men of all opinions may come within its ranks and benefitby the splendor of its teachings, whether or not they accept them oneby one. Their non-belief does not alter the fact that the teachingscome to them through the Society, and from Those who made the Societya living organism upon earth. Nor do I mean in saying that thisfeeling of gratitude should exist in the heart of each, that anyoneneed take the particular view of the Masters which I myself take, founding that view, it may be, on more knowledge than very many ofthose who reject it personally can be said to possess. In all thesematters every member is free, and I am only urging upon you yourresponsibility at least to try to understand, where you touch mattersof such far-reaching importance; and at least to consider that youshould not add to the burden on those mighty shoulders more than youcan avoid adding. Now none of us, whatever we may happen to know--thedifferences of knowledge between us are trivial as compared with thedifference between all of us and Them--can surely escape the duty ofconsidering whether by his own ignorance, and carelessness, and folly, and indifference, he is adding to that burden which They bear. ForThey cannot avoid taking the karma that you and I largely generate, byvirtue of Their unity with this Society, and the fact that Their lifecirculates through it, and that They have sacrificed Themselves inorder that it may live. By that sacrifice they cannot avoid sharingthe karma that you and I are making by every careless thought, byevery foolish action, by every wilful or even not wilful ignorance, the burden that They have taken out of love for man and for hishelping. And I have often thought, when I have been trying dimly tounderstand the mysteries of this divine compassion, and the greatnessof the love and of the pity which moves those mighty Ones to mixthemselves up with our small, petty selves, I have often thought howstrange must seem to Them, from Their position, the indifference withwhich we take such priceless blessings, the indifference with which weaccept such mighty sacrifice. For the love that These deserve at ourhands is surely beyond all claim of kindred, of blood, of touchbetween man and man; the claim that They have upon us, these Men whoare Masters and Teachers, for what They have given and made possiblefor you and me, seems to me a claim beyond all measuring, a debtbeyond all counting. And when one looks at the Society as a whole, andrealises how little as a whole it takes account of those deep occulttruths into touch with which it has come, how little it realises howmighty the possibility that these supreme acts of sacrifice haveopened before every one of us, it seems almost too sad to be credible, too pathetic to be expressed; one realises how sometimes Their heartsmust be wrung, as the heart of the Christ was wrung when He stood andlooked over Jerusalem, and knew that the people to whose race Hebelonged were driving further and further away their possibilities, and were despising that which He had brought for their redemption. Howoften His cry: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophetsand stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I havegathered thee together as a hen gathereth her chickens under herwings, and ye would not"--how often must that same cry go out from theheart of the Masters, when They look at the movement for which Theyare responsible, and realise how little its greatness is understood bythose who are its members, and are reckoned within its pale. [1] For ifeven for one brief hour you could realise the heart of the Master, and what He feels and knows with regard to this movement which is His, it seems to me that in the light of even that brief meditation therewould be a throwing away of personalities, there would be a tramplingdown of silly pride, a casting aside of careless obstinacy, a yearningto have some share in the sacrifice, and to give ourselves, howeverpetty we may be, side by side with that sublime sacrifice which Theyare making year after year for us, unworthy of Their compassion. Andyet nothing less than that is the movement which lives by Their life;nothing less than that is the relation of the Masters to theTheosophical Society. They bear it in Their heart, They bear it onTheir shoulders, They offer daily sacrifice that this spiritual effortmay succeed in the helping and the uplifting of the world. And They, so great, speak to us, so small; and none will surely refuse to listenwho catches one glimpse of the possibility of Their speech; none willreject Their pleading, who can hear one whisper of that Voice; and theone thing that one hopes for, that one longs for, with regard tooneself and to all who are members of the Society, is that amongst usthere may be some ears found to hear the voice of the Masters, andsome hearts mirroring enough of their compassion to at least sacrificethemselves for the helping of the world. 

[Footnote 1: This was spoken some weeks before the issue of Mr. Sinnett's extraordinary manifesto, denying "the things most surelybelieved among us. "]

The Future of the Theosophical Society

There are two futures of the Theosophical Society to which we mayaddress our attention: the immediate future, and a future further off. And I am going to begin with the future further off, because it isonly by recognising the nature of that future that we can properlydevise the means whereby we may bring it about. For in all humanaffairs it is necessary to choose an end to which effort should bedirected, and the nature of the end will govern the nature of themeans. One of the great faults, I think, of our modern life is to livein what is called a hand-to-mouth way, to snatch at any momentaryadvantage, to try to bring about something which serves as animprovement for the moment without trying to understand, withoutcaring to consider, whether in very many cases the temporaryimprovement may not bring with it a more fatal mischief than thatwhich it is intended to remedy. And at least in the TheosophicalSociety, where we try to study tendencies, and to understand somethingof the forces which are working around us in life, we ought to avoidthis popular blunder of the time, we ought to try to see the goaltowards which we are moving, and to choose our immediate methods withreference to that goal. Of course, when I speak of a goal and an end, I am using the terms in a relative, not in an absolute sense--thegoal, the end which is within a measurable distance, and so may betaken as a point towards which the roads on which we travel shouldtend. Let us, then, look first on that goal, and see its nature andthe kind of methods which will help to realise it upon earth. 

You are all familiar in the Theosophical Society with the theory ofcycles, so that you are accustomed to look upon events as tending torepeat themselves on higher and higher levels of what has been calledthe "spiral of evolution. " For while it is true that history does notrepeat itself upon the same level, it is also true that it does repeatitself upon successively higher levels, and that anyone who isstudying Theosophical teaching as to the evolution of man, theevolution of globes, the evolution of systems, the evolution ofuniverses, may very much facilitate his study by grasping the maintruths which underlie each of these in turn. We are continuallyrepeating on a higher plane that which we have done upon a lower. Ourterms are a constant series of repetitions, so that if we understandtheir meaning in one series we are able to argue to their meaning inanother. And I have often pointed out to you with respect to theserecurring cycles of events, and recurring terms, that especially amongHinḍus, and in the Samskṛiṭ language, you find whole seriesof terms, the meaning of each of which varies with the term fromwhich the series starts; so that if you know them once, you know themfor all occasions. Take a very familiar case. Let me remind you of theword "samâḍhi. " That is a relative term, and is the last of aseries, which has regard to the waking consciousness of the individualand the plane on which the centre of the waking consciousness isfound. So that before you can say what the word "samâḍhi" means forany individual, you must ascertain on what plane of consciousness hisnormal centre is at work; and when you know that, then you can pass upstep by step until you come to the term in the series which isrepresented by that word "samâḍhi. " It is the same over and overagain in our Theosophical studies, and especially do we find this tobe true in the characteristics--important in this particularrelation--the characteristics of the great Races, the Root-Races, asrepresented in miniature in the sub-races of each Root-Race. If we canfind out those characteristics, trace them and see how they arebrought about in the course of evolution in the small cycle which isnearer to us, the cycle of the sub-race, then it is comparatively easyfor us, as regards the future, to foresee the appearance of thosecharacteristics in the Root-Race that corresponds to the sub-race. AndI shall want to use that method in dealing with the future of theSociety; it is for that reason that I draw your attention to thesecontinually recurring cycles of times and events. Now if we look backto the Fourth Root-Race, we can study in the history of that Race theevolution of the Fifth. We can see the methods used to bring aboutthat evolution. We can trace the means which were employed in orderthat that evolution might be made secure; and we can see, by studyingthat which lies behind us, that the fourth sub-race of that Root-Raceshowed out the characteristics of the Fourth Race as a whole; that thefifth sub-race of that Fourth showed out some of the characteristicsof the Fifth Root-Race that was to follow in the course of evolution. And in this way, applying the analogy, if we can trace out to someextent for ourselves the characteristics of the sixth sub-race whichis to succeed our own fifth sub-race, then we shall be on the track ofthe line of evolution which will bring about the Sixth Root-Race whenthe time for its coming strikes. Let us glance back for a moment tosee the main points of the evolution of a sub-race and a Race. 

When our own Fifth Root-Race was to be evolved, certain types werechosen out of the fifth sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race, and theywere chosen by the Manu who was to guide the evolution of the FifthRoot-Race. Those types showed out in a comparatively germinal fashionthe mental characteristics which were to grow out of the selectedgroups. And you may learn, if you care to do it, how those choiceswere made, and how the first choice was a failure. Chosen as it was bythe wisdom of the highly exalted being whom we speak of as the Manu, none the less the material in which He tried to work proved toostubborn, too little plastic, to adapt itself to His influencestriving to shape and to mould it. And in consequence, after prolongedefforts, He threw aside the families that thus He had selected, andbegan making a new choice, a fresh selection, in order to see if thesecond choice would prove more fortunate than the first. And the wayHe chose them was a simple and effective one: He selected a certainnumber of His own disciples and sent them out as messengers to thevarious nations of the world, that constituted that part of the greatFourth Race which He had chosen for His second experiment. He sentthem into nation after nation, with the mission to gather out of thatnation those who appeared to be the most promising for the work whichHe had to carry out. They tried in various fashions, sometimes bydirect invitation, where the characteristic that was being sought wasclearly developed, namely, the lower mind. It was the development ofthe lower manas that was the keynote of the selection; for the FifthRoot-Race was to show out that development of the lower manas. I say"lower manas" rather than "manas"; because the full development of themânasic principle in man is reserved for the Fifth Round, and not forthe Fourth, and we, of course, are still in the Fourth Round. ThatFourth Round, pre-eminently kâmic, must necessarily color everyevolution which goes on during its existence, and high as we maystrive to raise mânasic powers amongst us, we cannot escape from thefundamental vice of our birth, from the mânasic standpoint, that weare plunged in kâmic matter, and that the matter in which we work ismatter of the Fourth Round, adapted to the kâmic principle, and notmatter of the Fifth, adapted to the mânasic. Hence the best thing thatwe can do is to evolve the lower manas, manas deeply tinged with kâma. Out of that Fourth Race, then, were selected the people who showedmost plainly the budding of this intelligence which was needed, themessengers of the Manu striking a note which attracted those in whomthis lower mânasic principle was more highly developed than amongtheir comrades and peers. Gradually from different nations groups ofmen and women gathered round the messengers of the Manu, who thenbegan to lead them away from their own people, from their own nation, from all their surroundings, in order to seek the appointed placewhere the Manu was grouping those on whom the great experiment was tobe made for the second time. Slowly and gradually they were thusgathered together out of the nations into which the fifth sub-race ofthe Fourth Race had spread. And the flower of those nations, attractedby the key-note struck by the messengers, gradually gathered round theManu, and became the material, the nucleus, of the new Root Race. Asyou know, He took them far away to the Sacred Land, shutting them awayfrom the masses of the Fourth and Third Race peoples, and dividingthem by physical barriers from all that might contaminate and stain. Very, very different were those people from the generations whichthousands upon thousands of years later were to spring from them inphysical succession; rather, to the people about them were they folkwho were developed in an uncongenial fashion, people who were by nomeans looked up to and admired in the nations amongst whom they dwelt, amongst whom they had grown up. For the building of a new type is notmade out of those in whom the type of the old Race, that which isbefore those who are selected for a changed line of evolution, hasflowered. The triumphs of evolution in the Fourth Race, as the FourthRace judged them, were by no means the best material for the buildingof the Fifth. Those who were most admired in the Fourth, those whowere regarded as the flowers of their own nations, were those in whomthe kâmic faculty, with its allied psychic powers, was most developed, was most triumphant. For you must remember that in the very differentcivilisation of those days, psychic powers were playing an enormouspart in all the most highly developed people of the time. Where thedawning principle of manas began somewhat to triumph over the kâmic, there the psychic faculties inevitably diminished in their power, andshowed themselves very much more feebly than in the leaders of thetime, those who were the pioneers of the civilisation of the day. Thefaculties most valued at that time were least to be recognised inthose who were the chosen of the Manu; for what He was seeking was thedawn of the intellectual principle, and where that dawns, the psychicfor a time is submerged. I cannot dwell now on the reason for that;the psychism of the time was the psychism of the whole of the astralbody, and not the psychism which succeeds the intellectualdevelopment, which is the result of a higher organisation of that bodyinto special organs of astral senses--the well-known chakras. Thereason is well known among all students of the different stages ofevolution, and the only reason I allude to it now is because I wantyou to recognise a very significant fact: that those who were chosenout of that civilisation by the Manu, in order that he might make anew Race out of them, were not the people who were the leadingexamples of the highest civilisation of the time. Those were leftbehind in their own environment. Those were left behind to carry ontheir evolution along the lines already becoming the lines of thepast, and not the lines of the future. And these people in whom thepsychic powers were less shown, and in whom the less valuedintellectual power was germinating, on lines more fitted for thedevelopment in future, they were chosen out for the building of theFifth Race, and carried away from their Fourth Race surroundings intothe far-off land of their education. There of course they remaineduntil the time came when the Manu incarnated amongst them--and so on. That is old history on which I need not dwell. 

Let us apply those same principles to the choosing out of anotherRoot-Race, and we shall see that just as then, for the fifth Root-Race, the mânasic principle was selected, so in the choosing out for a SixthRoot-Race, the buḍḍhic principle must be the one which must besought for in order that the material may be shaped in which it will bepossible for it in its turn to develop. There again I must remind youthat the buḍḍhi of the Sixth Root-Race in this Round will besomething very different from the evolution of the pure buḍḍhicprinciple in its own Round, the Round that belongs to it in the futureevolution of humanity: it will be buḍḍhic contaminated with kâma, showing out much of the kâmic characteristics--inevitably, inasmuch asit must work in kâmic matter. Hence you must not take quite your idealbuḍḍhi, such as you may fancy it in its perfection--themagnificent principle of Pure Reason, in its higher intuitive power--buta shadow, a reflexion of it, such a shadow and reflexion as is able totake its veils, its garments, from the matter of our own Round. None theless, that will be the distinguishing, the dominant principle of theSixth Root-Race, and therefore I ask you to fix your mind on that as thegoal towards which all roads in the present should tend. Far-off indeedit is, counting as we count time; but tendencies show themselves long, long before they appear upon the surface, recognisable to the eye of theflesh. In each sub-race appears a principle which manifests itself morefully, more thoroughly, in the corresponding Root-Race; and therefore, though it will only be possible for us at the present time to worktowards the next sub-race of our own Fifth Race, which is alreadybeginning to appear upon the surface of our globe, none the less is ittrue that in quickening the evolution of that sub-race it is the nextRoot-Race to which we must look for our guiding principle; that is thefar-off Pole-star by which we must guide our ships at the present time, that the point towards which we must steer, however far off we mustsorrowfully admit that it is. 

Let us then, recognising that fact, that the Sixth Root-Race will bethe embodiment of the next principle in us, the buḍḍhicprinciple, that of Pure Reason--as distinguished from Intellect, whichis Reason reflected in Activity--when you realise that, and rememberthat the note of buḍḍhi is union--not yet unity but union--youwill find that as much as you require for your guiding principle inthe evolution of the corresponding sub-race, whose foot is now on thethreshold. So that in this fashion, though seeming to go so far abroadinto the past and the future, I bring you to the practical questionof the next step forward in human evolution. 

The next thing you must remember is that the flowering of the FifthRoot-Race will go on long, long after the beginning of the sixthsub-race is seen. For these Races and sub-races overlap each other;and just as at the present time the majority of mankind belongs to theFourth Root-Race and not to the Fifth, but the Fifth Root-Racedominates the evolution of the world, although still in a minority, sois it of sub-races also. The sixth sub-race will be at first in analmost inappreciable minority, but coloring the whole; thenmultiplying more and more, until it becomes an appreciable minority. Then, as it grows more and more numerous, and nations are born of it, it will begin to dominate and lead the civilisation of the then world. But even then the Fifth Race will be in an enormous majority for agesand ages yet to come. The fifth sub-race has not yet touched itshighest point, has not yet asserted itself to the point to which itsevolution will reach in the centuries that lie immediately before us. It is nearing its highest point; it is climbing rapidly now to itszenith; but still many years of mortal time intervene between thepresent day and the day when it will rule in the height of its power. It is climbing fast in these days; but still, compare it with thecorresponding point in the Atlantean civilisation, and you willrealise that it has not yet climbed to its highest point. For everyRace must overtop the Race that has gone before it, and we have notyet reached even the level of the old Atlantis in knowledge, andtherefore in power over the lower nature, although, as I said, theclimbing now is rapid, and will become more and more rapid with everyten years that pass over our heads. For there is that speciality inevolution, that it ever goes forward at an increasing rate. The moreit develops its powers, the more swiftly do those powers multiplythemselves; so that, to quote a well-known phrase of a great Teacher, "it grows not by additions but by powers. " And this civilisation ofours will rush forward more and more rapidly with every decade thatpasses. Still, the very fact that it has not reached the highestlevels of the Fourth tells you that time lies before us in thebuilding of the sixth sub-race, and that is our immediate work. Weneed not trouble now any further about the Sixth Root-Race; forwhatever builds the sixth sub-race amongst us is contributing to thebuilding of that Root-Race of the future. The same faculties aredemanded, although then at a higher level, and we can come down to ourhumbler level and consider what the sixth sub-race is to be. And inthat we shall realise the work and the future of the TheosophicalSociety. 

The great characteristic of that Race is to be union, and all thattends to union is a force which is working for the coming of thatsub-race, no matter whether very often the force looked at fromwithout is often repellent. It is not the outer manifestation of themoment, but the tendency, the direction of the force which isimportant. There may be many things, more beautiful on the surface, which have accomplished their aim, and are on the downward pathtowards decay, whilst the things that are rising, still below thehorizon, have, as all germinal things have, much about them that isrepellent and that will be used up in the growth of the comingcreature, before it really manifests upon earth. It has been said by aMaster that if we could see with the eye of the Spirit the generationof the human being, his ante-natal life, we should understand thegeneration of worlds, the generation of universes. And that, again, isa general principle. Let us see one or two lessons that we may drawfrom it at the moment. 

Take the evolution of a seed into a plant, and what do you find? Atiny germ surrounded by a mass of nutrient matter; and before thattiny germ will show itself in root, and stem, and leaf above theground and become visible to the eye of the observer on the earth, that nutrient material must be absorbed by the growing germ, andchanged into the exquisite tissues of the plant that is to be. And so, if you take the growing germ, animal or human, how unlike is thatbudding creature from the animal or the man that shall be! How lackingin beauty in many of the methods of its growth, of its nutrition, ofits gradual shaping! And by what marvellous alchemy of inspiring lifedoes the living germ gather into itself all the nutrient matter thatsurrounds it, and shapes it into organ after organ, until the perfectcreature is ready to be born into the world. And as in these cases, sowith the growth of a sub-race, of which the germ is planted now. Howmuch has to be done before it is ready for the birth-hour, that yet isat a measurable distance from the moment that the germ is planted inthe womb of time. Try to realise the analogy by means of the imagethat I have suggested, and it will not then seem so unlikely to you, that which is true, that in our own times again many messengers havecome out from the Manu of the future, in order that those messengersmay strike certain keynotes, which mark the chief characteristic ofthe child that is to be. That note is well known at the present time:we call it Brotherhood. 

Now notice at the present time how many such messengers are foundscattered throughout the world, and how the varied organisations ofmen of every kind are tending in that direction, and are more and morerecognising that as the keynote of their progress and their evolution. There are, so far as I know, only two great organisations at thepresent time that have deliberately taken Universal Brotherhood astheir motto, their cry, in the world: the one is Masonry, the other isthe Theosophical Society. Those are the only two which proclaimUniversal Brotherhood. For although many religions declareBrotherhood, they do not make it universal; it is a Brotherhood withinthe limits of their own creed, and a man to become a brother must comewithin the limits of the religion. See how clearly that is declared inthe great and universal baptismal ceremony which marks the entrance ofthe child into the Christian Church. In that sacrament he is "_made_ achild of God. " He was not a child of God before, from the Churchstandpoint. He was born under the wrath of God, in the kingdom ofSatan. In the ceremony of baptism he is made a child of God, an heirof the kingdom of heaven; and that is the keynote of the Churcheseverywhere: those outside are not children of God. And you mustremember that it is that Fatherhood of God which connotes theBrotherhood of man. Only by the rooting in the Father-Life is theBrother-Life intelligible. And because the Theosophical Society knowsno limit of creed, no limit of religion, and declares that every humanbeing is, in his own essential nature, one with the Supreme Life andthe Supreme God, because of that its Brotherhood is universal, andknows none as outside its pale. Every man, no matter what he is, isrecognised as brother. He comes not into the Brotherhood, nor can hebe cast out from it. His Spirit, his Life, places him in it: it is afact beyond us, above us. We have no power either to create it or todestroy. We recognise the great fact, and we do not call ourselves theUniversal Brotherhood, but only a nucleus in it--a very differentthing; the Brotherhood is as universal as humanity, that is ourfundamental doctrine, and it implies that Brotherhood is as universalas Life. So also with Masonry, where it is rightly seen andunderstood--no barriers of creed, all men equally welcome within theMasonic Lodge. I say "where rightly understood, " for there are landswhere Masonry has spread, where the Lodge has become exclusive as thecreed has become exclusive; and among American Masons, I believe, thenegro, as negro, is not admitted into the Masonic Lodge. But that isthe denial of Masonry, a disgrace to it, and not a triumph. Andalthough it be true that Masonry has lost widely its knowledge, itstill for the most part remains a Brotherhood, and in that it has init the link of a life that will not die, and that has everypossibility of revival throughout the earth. 

Quite outside these two, limited brotherhoods are proclaimed in everydirection now. The Church asserts it within its own limits. Allreligions assert it within their respective limitations. Outsidereligions and churches the same cry is heard. Socialism declares it, and tries to build its policy upon it. Everywhere this cry ofBrotherhood is heard, although it has not yet been lived, and that isone of the signs of the coming birth of the sub-race, in whichBrotherhood shall be the dominant note of its every civilisation, andin which a civilisation that is not brotherly, in which there areignorant people, and poor people, and starving people, and diseasedpeople, will be looked at as barbarous, and not really as civilisationat all. Its note is Brotherhood, the dominant note of the coming day. And because we have taken that as our first object, we have a right tocall ourselves a nucleus thereof; and because we definitely recogniseit, we can consciously co-operate with nature. That is the realstrength of our Movement--not our numbers, they are comparativelysmall, but our conscious working with the forces that make for thefuture. The Theosophical Society is a fragment of the vastTheosophical Movement which is surging upon every side around us; butthis we have that enables us to be on the crest of that great wave, that we know for what we are working, we understand the tendencieswhich make for the future. Hence in our Theosophical Society we mustabove all else hold up this word, and work for it in every phase ofhuman activity. That word marks out for your Theosophical Lodges whatmovements you should help, and what movements you should not help. Itis no use to pour water into a broken vessel, and every vessel thathas not on it the name or the principle of Brotherhood is a brokenvessel that will not hold water for the coming time. But everymovement, however mingled with ignorance, with folly, with temporarymischief, which seeks after Brotherhood and strives to realise it, isa living vessel, into which the Water of Life may be poured; and withthose movements you should work, trying to inspire and to purify, toget rid of that which comes from ignorance, and to replace it with thewisdom which it is your sacred duty to spread abroad among thechildren of men. So that in your public work you have this greatkeynote. 

And that leads me to pause for a moment on that spreading SocialistMovement that you see around you on every side. Now, it is making onetremendous blunder that I need not dwell on here, but that I shalldwell on to-morrow night in addressing a Socialist Society. They areforgetting the very root of progress, they are forgetting the buildingof brothers, out of which to build a Brotherhood hereafter. They thinkthat the future depends on economic conditions, on who holds land, andwho holds capital. These conditions are conditions to be discussedcarefully, to be worked out intellectually. But whatever ownership youhave of any of the means of life, if the life is poisoned, it cannotbe healthy in the midst even of a well-arranged society. For societygrows out of men, and not men out of society, and until that isrealised all schemes must fail, for they are founded on sand, and noton rock. You who have studied and understand, to some small extent atleast, the powers which are working in the world of the present, youought to be able to help to eliminate the evil and to strengthen thegood. And the Theosophical Society, among these movements of the day, must hold up firmly a true ideal. It is the function of the prophet, of the spiritual teacher, to hold up the ideal, and point ever towardsit, so that individuals may have it ever before their eyes and choosethe roads which lead in the right direction. 

And again, the principles that I have put to you may explain to youwhy this Theosophical Society, so weak, is yet so strong--weak in itsnumbers, weak in the qualifications of its members, not numberingamongst its adherents the most learned and the most mighty of theearth, made up of very mediocre, average people, not the great leadersof the civilisation of the day; but in them all, else would they notbe members of the Theosophical Society, is the dawning aspirationafter a nobler condition, and some willingness to sacrifice themselvesin order that the coming of that condition may be quickened uponearth. That is the justification of our Society now. We are like thenutrient material that surrounds the germ, and the germ grows out ofthe love, and the aspiration, and the spirit of self-sacrifice, whichare found in our movement, however little developed to-day. And thefact that we recognise it as duty, as ideal, is the promise for thefuture. We are what our past has made us; we shall be what our presentis creating; and if within your heart and mine the longing for thenobler state is found, that marks our place in the future, and ourright to be among the earlier members of the sub-race that is nowpreparing to be born. For our thoughts now are what we shall be in ournext life; our aspirations now mark our capacities then. You know howthe intermediate life is spent, between the death that will close yourpresent lives and the birth that will open the portal of your nextlives. You know that in the heavenly places you will be weaving intofaculty, into capacity, every thought and every aspiration towards thehigher life which in these days of your weakness you are generating, and are trying to cherish and cultivate. It is not you as you are whowill make the future, but you as you shall be, self-created from youraspirations now. And just in proportion as each of you nourishes thoseaspirations, and cherishes those ideals, and tries, however feebly, towork them out amid the limitations of your past which cramps yourpresent life, just so far will you, in the interval between death andbirth, make the nobler faculties which shall qualify you to be born inthe sixth sub-race upon earth. That should be your keynote in yourlives now, that the inspiring motive, the controlling power. And ifyou want to assure yourselves that that sub-race is on the threshold, as I said, then look at the world around you, and measure the changewhich is coming over it. I said we were weak in numbers, that we areonly average and mediocre people; but what about the spread of ourideas? What about the way in which, during the last thirty years, these Theosophical ideas have spread through this Fifth Racecivilisation, have permeated its literature, are beginning to guideits science, are beginning to inspire its art? That is the proof ofthe strength of the force, despite the feebleness of the vehicles inwhich that force is playing. Very clearly not to you nor to me is thespread of these ideas due, but to the Mighty Ones behind the Society, who give the forces in which we are lacking. For the whole Movement isTheirs; They are working outside as well as within. And Their outsideworking shows itself in the innumerable movements which are alltending in the same direction. It is not we who have spread the ideas. The ideas are scattered in the mental atmosphere around us, and ouronly merit is that we caught them up a little more quickly than otherpeople, and realise that they are a part of the Eternal Wisdom. Thatis our only claim, our only prerogative--consciously, deliberately wechoose these ideas, and however weakly we carry them out, none theless the choice has been made and registered in the books of Destiny. For whether you will or not, you must grow in the direction of yourthought; and you cannot be part of this Movement without your thoughtbeing more or less colored by the Theosophical ideal. 

People often say: "Why should I come into the Theosophical Society?You give us your books. You spread your knowledge broadcasteverywhere. I can buy it in the book-shops. I can hear it in thelectures. Why should I come in?" And I always say: "There is no reasonwhy you should come in, if you do not wish to come. Take everything wecan give, and take it freely. You are more than welcome to it. We areonly trustees for you. And if you do not care to be among thepioneers, by all means stay outside, and walk along the smoother pathswhich others have carved out for you. " But there is one reason that Imay say to you--I do not say it to those outside--there is a reasonwhy you should be within it. You are more in touch with the forcesthat make the future. You are surrounded, bathed, in the atmosphere inwhich the future shall grow. All that is good in you is nourished bythose forces. All that is harmonious with them is strengthened bytheir overmastering might. You cannot be amongst us without sharingthat inspiration; you cannot be a member without sharing the lifewhich is poured out unstinted through all the vessels of theTheosophical Society. Outside it is not worth while to say this, forthat is not a reason for inducing people to come in; but you mayrejoice that good karma in the past has brought you into the Societyin the present. It has given you the right to have this opportunity ofa nobler birth in the coming time, has given you the opportunity oftaking part in that great work which is beginning to be wrought amonghumanity. It gives you, from your life in the heavenly places, touchwith powers and opportunities that belong to these ideals in the worldof men, and it gives you the possibility there of touch with theMighty Ones whom here, however unworthily, we strive to follow. Sothat it is a great thing to be within it, and it means much for thefuture of you, if you can keep in it. For the immediate future of theTheosophical Society is the work of building that next sub-race whichis to come. That is the work for which consciously it ought to beworking now. In proportion as you realise it, so will be the strengthof your labor; in proportion as you understand it, so should be yourshare in the gladder work of that happier time. For the future of theTheosophical Society is to be the mother, and even the educator, ofthe child sixth sub-race which already is going through its ante-natallife. That is its future, secure, inevitable; yours the choice if youwill share that future or not. 

Part III

The Value of Theosophy in the World of Thought

_An Address on taking office as President of the Theosophical Society. Delivered at the Queen's Hall, Langham Place, London, W. , on 10th July1907. _

The Value of Theosophy in the World of Thought

You will have seen on the handbill announcing the lecture, that we areholding this meeting in connection with my taking office as Presidentof the Theosophical Society, and it is my purpose, in addressing youto-night, to try to show you, at least to some small extent, what isthe value which the Society represents, as regarded from thestandpoint of human activities, manifested in the world of thought. Iwant to try to show you that when we say THEOSOPHY we are speaking ofsomething of real value which can serve humanity in the variousdepartments of intellectual life. I propose, in order to do this, tobegin with a very brief statement of the fundamental idea ofTheosophy; and then, turning to the world of religious thought, to theworld of artistic thought, to the world of scientific thought, andlastly to the world of political thought, to point out to you how thatwhich is called Theosophy may bring contributions of value to each ofthese in turn. 

Now Theosophy, as the name implies, is a Wisdom, a Divine Wisdom; andthe name historically, as many of you know, is identical with thatwhich in Eastern lands has been known by various names--as Tao, inChina; as the Brahmaviḍyâ, in India; as the Gnosis, among theGreeks and the early Christians; and as Theosophy through the MiddleAges and in modern times. It implies always a knowledge, a Wisdom thattranscends the ordinary knowledge, the ordinary science of the earth;it implies a wisdom as regards life, a wisdom as regards the essentialnature of things, a wisdom which is summed up in two words when we say"God-Wisdom. " For it has been held in elder days--although in moderntimes it has become largely forgotten--that man can really never knowanything at all unless he knows himself, and knows himself Divine;that knowledge of God, the Supreme, the Universal Life, is the root ofall true knowledge of matter as well as of Spirit, of this world aswell as of worlds other than our own; that in that one supremeknowledge all other knowledges find their root; that in that supremelight all other lights have their origin; and that if man can knowanything, it is because he is Divine in nature, and, sharing the Lifethat expresses itself in a universe, he can know at once the Life thatoriginates and the Matter that obeys. 

Starting from such a standpoint, you will at once realise thatTheosophy is a spiritual theory of the world as against amaterialistic. It sees Spirit as the moulder, the shaper, the arrangerof matter, and matter only as the obedient expression and servant ofthe Spirit; it sees in man a spiritual being, seeking to unfold hispowers by experience in a universe of forms; and it declares that manmisunderstands himself, and will fail of his true end, if heidentifies himself with the form that perishes instead of with thelife which is deathless. Hence, opposed to materialism alike inscience and philosophy, it builds up a spiritual conception of theuniverse, and necessarily it is idealistic in its thought, and holdsup the importance of the ideal as a guide to all human activity. Theideal, which is thought applied to conduct, that is the keynote ofTheosophy and its value in the varied worlds of thought; and the powerof thought, the might of thought, the ability that it has to clotheitself in forms whose life only depends on the continuance of thethought that gave them birth, that is its central note, or keynote, inall the remedies that it applies to human ills. Idealist everywhere, idealist in religion, idealist in art, idealist in science, idealistin the practical life that men call politics, idealist everywhere; butavoiding the blunder into which some idealists have fallen, when theyhave not recognised that human thought is only a portion of the whole, and not the whole. The Theosophist recognises that the Divine Thought, of which the universe is an expression, puts limitations on his ownpower of thought, on his own creative activity. He realises that thewhole compels the part, and that his own thought can only move withinthe vast circle of the Divine Thought, which he only partiallyexpresses; so that while he will maintain that, on the ideal dependsall that is called "real" in the lower worlds, he will realise thathis creative power can only slowly mould matter to his will, andthough every result will depend on a creative thought, the resultswill often move slowly, adapting themselves to the thought that givesthem birth. Hence, while idealist, he is not impracticable; while hesees the power of thought, he recognises its limitations in space andtime; and while asserting the vital importance of right thought andright belief, he realises that only slowly does the flower of thoughtripen into the fruit of action. 

But on the importance of thought he lays a stress unusual in modernlife. It is the cant of the day, in judging the value of a man, that"it does not matter what he believes but only what he does. " That isnot true. It matters infinitely what a man believes; for as a man'sbelief so he is; as a man's thought, so inevitably is his action. There was a time in the world of thought when it was said with equalerror: "It does not matter what a man does, provided his faith isright. " If that word "faith" had meant the man's thought in itsintegrity, then there would have been but little error; for the rightthought would inevitably have brought right action; but in those daysright thought meant only orthodox thought, according to a narrow canonof interpretation, the obedient repetition of creeds, the blindacceptance of beliefs imposed by authority. In those days what wascalled Orthodoxy in religion was made the measure of the man, andjudgment depended upon orthodox acquiescence. Against that mistake thegreat movement that closed the Middle Ages was the protest of theintellect of man, and it was declared that no external authority mustbind the intellect, and none had right to impose from outside thethought which is the very essence of the man--that great assertion ofthe right of private judgment, of the supreme principle of the freeintelligence, so necessary for the progress of humanity. But like allthings it has been followed by a reaction, and men have run to theother extreme: that nothing matters except conduct, and action aloneis to be considered. But your action is the result of your thought ofyesterday, and follows your yesterday as its expression in the outerworld; your thought of to-day is your action of to-morrow, and yourfuture depends on its accuracy and its truth, on its consonance withreality. Hence it is all-important in the modern world to give back tothought its right place as above action, as its inspirer and itsguide. For the human spirit by its expression as intellect judges, decides, directs, controls. Its activity is the outcome of itsthinking; and if without caring for thought you plunge into action, you have the constant experiments, feeble and fruitless, which solargely characterise our modern life. 

Pass, then, from that first assertion of the importance of rightthinking, to see what message Theosophy has for the world of religiousthought. What is religion? Religion is the quenchless thirst of thehuman spirit for the Divine. It is the Eternal, plunged into a worldof transitory phenomena, striving to realise its own eternity. It isthe Immortal, flung into a world of death, trying to realise its owndeathlessness. It is the white Eagle of Heaven, born in theillimitable spaces, beating its wings against the bars of matter, andstriving to break them and rise into the immensities where are itsbirthplace and its real home. That is religion: the striving of manfor God. And that thirst of man for God many have tried to quench withwhat is called Theology, or with books that are called sacred, traditions that are deemed holy, ceremonies and rites which are butlocal expressions of a universal truth. You can no more quench thatthirst of the human Spirit by anything but individual experience ofthe Divine, than you can quench the thirst of the traveller parchedand dying in the desert by letting him hear water go down the throatof another. Human experience, and that alone, is the rock on which allreligion is founded, that is the rock that can never be shaken, onwhich every true Church must be built. Books, it is true, are oftensacred; but you may tear up every sacred book in the world, and aslong as man remains, and God to inspire man, new books can be written, new pages of inspiration can be penned. You may break in pieces everyceremony, however beautiful and elevating, and the Spirit that madethem to express himself has not lost his artistic power, and can makenew rites and new ceremonies to replace every one that is broken andcast aside. The Spirit is deathless as God is deathless, and in thatdeathlessness of the Spirit lies the certainty, the immortality ofreligion. And Theosophy, in appealing to that immortal experience, points the world of religions--confused by many an attack, bewilderedby many an assault, half timid before the new truth discovered everyday, half scared at the undermining of old foundations, and thetearing by criticism of many documents--points it back to its owninexhaustible source, and bids it fear neither time nor truth, sinceSpirit is truth and eternity. All that criticism can take from you isthe outer form, never the living reality; and well indeed is it forthe churches and for the religions of the world that the outworks ofdocuments should be levelled with the ground, in order to show theimpregnability of the citadel, which is knowledge and experience. 

But in the world of religious thought there are many services, lessimportant, in truth, than the one I have spoken of, but stillimportant and valuable to the faiths of the world; for Theosophybrings back to men, living in tradition, testimony to the reality ofknowledge transcending the knowledge of the senses and the reasoningpowers of the lower mind. It comes with its hands full of proof, modern proof, proof of to-day, living witnesses, of unseen worlds, ofsubtler worlds than the physical. It comes, as the Founders and theearly Teachers of every religion have come, to testify again bypersonal experience to the reality of the unseen worlds of which thereligions are the continual witnesses in the physical world. Have youever noticed in the histories of the great religions how they growfeebler in their power over men as faith takes the place of knowledge, and tradition the place of the living testimony of living men? That isone of the values of Theosophy in the religious world, that it teachesmen to travel to worlds unseen, and to bring back the evidence of whatthey have met and studied; that it so teaches men their own naturethat it enables them to separate soul and body, and travel without thephysical body in worlds long thought unattainable, save through thegateway of death. I say "Long thought unattainable"; but thescriptures of every religion bear witness that they are notunattainable. The Hindu tells us that man should separate himself fromhis body as you strip the sheath from the stem of the grass. TheBuḍḍhist tells us that by deep thought and contemplation mindmay know itself as mind apart from the physical brain. Christianitytells us many a story of the personal knowledge of its earlierteachers, of a ministry of angels that remained in the Church, and ofangelic teachers training the neophytes in knowledge. Islam tells usthat its own great prophet himself passed into higher worlds, andbrought back the truths which civilised Arabia, and gave knowledgewhich lit again the torch of learning in Europe when the Moors came toSpain. And so religion after religion bears testimony to thepossibility of human knowledge outside the physical world; we onlyre-proclaim the ancient truth--with this addition, which somereligions now shrink from making: that what man did in the past manmay do to-day; that the powers of the Spirit are not shackled, thatthe knowledge of the other worlds is still attainable to man. Andoutside that practical knowledge of other worlds it brings by thatsame method the distinct assertion of the survival of the human Spiritafter death. It is only in very modern times that that has beendoubted by any large numbers of people. Here and there in the ancientworld, like a Lucretius in Rome, perhaps; like a Democritus in Greece;certainly like a Chârvâka in India, you find one here and there whodoubts the deathlessness of the Spirit in man; but in modern days thatdisbelief, or the hopeless cynicism which thinks knowledge impossible, has penetrated far and wide among the cultured, the educated classes, and from them to the masses of the uneducated. That is the phenomenonof modern days alone, that man by hundreds and by thousands despairsof his own immortality. And yet the deepest conviction of humanity, the deepest thought in man, is the persistence of himself, the "I"that cannot die. And with one great generalisation, and one method, Theosophy asserts at once the deathlessness of man and the existenceof God; for it says to man, as it was ever said in the ancient days:"The proof of God is not without you but within you. " All the greatestteachers have reiterated that message, so full of hope and comfort;for it shuts none out from knowledge. What is the method? Strip awayyour senses, and you find the mind; strip away the mind, and you findthe pure reason; strip away the pure reason, and you find thewill-to-live; strip away the will-to-live, and you find Spirit as aunit; strike away the limitations of the Spirit, and you find God. Those are the steps: told in ancient days, repeated now. "Lose yourlife, " said the Christ, "and you shall find it to life eternal. " Thatis true: let go everything that you can let go; you cannot let goyourself, and in the impossibility of losing yourself you find thecertainty of the Self Universal, the Universal Life. 

Pass again from that to another religious point. I mentionedceremonies, rites of every faith. Those Theosophy looks at andunderstands. So many have cast away ceremonies, even if they havefound them helpful, because they do not understand them, and fearsuperstition in their use. Knowledge has two great enemies:Superstition and Scepticism. Knowledge destroys blind superstition byasserting and explaining natural truths of which the superstition hasexaggerated the unessentials; and it destroys scepticism by provingthe reality of the facts of the unseen world. The ceremony, the rite, is a shadow in the world of sense of the truths in the world ofSpirit; and every religion, every creed, has its ceremonies as theoutward physical expression of some eternal spiritual truth. Theosophydefends them, justifies them, by explaining them; and when they areunderstood they cease to be superstitions that blind, and becomecrutches that help the halting mind to climb to the spiritual life. 

Let us pass from the world of religious thought, and pause for amoment on the world of artistic thought. Now to Art, perhaps more thanin any other department of the human intelligence, the ideal isnecessary for life. All men have wondered from time to time why thearchitecture--to take one case only--why the architecture of the pastis so much more wonderful, so much more beautiful, than thearchitecture of the present. When you want to build some greatnational building to-day you have to go back to Greece, or Rome, orthe Middle Ages for your model. Why is it that you have no newarchitecture, expressive of your own time, as that was expressive ofthe past? The severe order of Egypt found its expression in the mightytemples of Karnak; the beauty and lucidity of Grecian thought bodieditself out in the chaste and simple splendor of Grecian buildings; thesternness of Roman law found its ideal expression in those wondrousbuildings whose ruins still survive in Rome; the faith of the MiddleAges found its expression in the upward-springing arch of Gothicarchitecture, and the exquisite tracery of the ornamented building. But if you go into the Gothic cathedral, what do you find there? Thatnot alone in wondrous arch and splendid pillar, upspringing in itsdelicate and slender strength from pavement to roof, not there onlydid the art of the builder find its expression. Go round to anyout-of-the-way corner, or climb the roof of those great buildings, andyou will find in unnoticed places, in hidden corners, the love of theartist bodying itself forth in delicate tracery, in stone that lives. Men carved for love, not only for fame; men carved for beauty's sake, not only for money; and they built perfectly because they had love andfaith, the two divine builders, and embodied both in deathless stone. Before you can be more than copyists you must find your modern ideal, and when you have found it you can build buildings that will defytime. But you have not found it yet; the artist amongst us is too muchof a copyist, and too little of an inspirer and a prophet. We do notwant the painter only to paint for us the things our own eyes can see. We want the artist eye to see more than the common eye, and to embodywhat he sees in beauty for the instruction of our blinded sight. We donot want accurate pictures of cabbages and turnips and objects of thatsort. However cleverly done, they remain cabbages and turnips still. The man who could paint for us the thought that makes the cabbage, hewould be the artist, the man who knows the Life. And so for our newArt we must have a splendid ideal. Do you want to know how low Art maysink when materialism triumphs and vulgarises and degrades? Then seethat exhibition of French pictures that was placed in Bond Street someyears ago, which attracted those who loved indecency more than thosewho loved the beautiful, and then you will understand how Artperishes where the breath of the ideal does not inspire and keepalive. And Theosophy to the artist would bring back that ancientreverence which regards the artist of the Beautiful as one of thechief God-revealers to the race of which he is a portion; which seesin the great musical artist, or the sculptor, or the painter, aGod-inspired man, bringing down the grace of heaven to illuminate thedull grey planes of earth. The artists should be the prophets of ourtime, the revealers of the Divine smothered under the material; andwere they this, they would be regarded with love and with reverence;for true art needs reverence for its growing, and the artist, of allmen--subtle, responsive, sensitive to everything that toucheshim--needs an atmosphere of love and reverence that he may flower intohis highest power, and show the world some glimpse of the Beauty whichis God. 

And the world of science--perhaps there, after the world of religion, Theosophy has most of value to offer. Take Psychology. What aconfusion; what a mass of facts want arrangement; what a chaos offacts out of which no cosmos is built! Theosophy, by its clear andaccurate definition of man, of the relation of consciousness to itsbodies, of Spirit to its vehicles, arranges into order that vast massof facts with which psychology is struggling now. It takes into thatwonderful "unconscious" or "sub-conscious"--which is now, as it were, the answer to every riddle; but it is not understood--it takes intothat the light of direct investigation; divides the "unconscious"which comes from the past from that which is the presage of thefuture, separates out the inheritance of our long past ancestry whichremains as the "sub-conscious" in us; points to the higher"super-conscious, " not "sub-conscious, " of which the genius is thetestimony at the present time; shows that human consciousnesstranscends the brain; proves that human consciousness is in touch withworlds beyond the physical; and makes sure and certain the hopeexpressed by science, that it is possible that that which is nowunconscious shall become conscious, and that man shall find himself intouch with a universe and not only in touch with one limited world. That which Myers sometimes spoke of as the "cosmic consciousness, " asagainst our own limited consciousness, is a profound truth, andcarries with it the prophecy of man's future greatness. Just as thefish is limited to the water, as the bird is limited to the air, soman has been limited to the physical body, and has dreamed he had notouch with other spaces, to which he really belongs. But yourconsciousness is living in three worlds, and not in one, is touchingmightier possibilities, is beginning to contact subtler phenomena; andall the traces of that are found in your newest psychology, and aresimply proofs of those many theories about man which Theosophy hasbeen teaching in the world for many a century, nay, for many amillennium. 

And physics and chemistry is there anything of value alongTheosophical lines of thought and investigation, which might aid ourphysicists and our chemists, puzzled at the subtlety of the forceswith which they have to deal? Has it never struck some of the moreintuitive physicists and materialists that there may be subtlersenses which may be used for investigation of the subtler forces? Thatman may have in himself senses by the evolution of which he will ableto pierce the secrets that now he is striving vainly to unveil? Has itnever even struck a physicist or a chemist that, if he does notbelieve in the possibility of himself developing those subtler forces, he might utilise them in others in order to prosecute further his owninvestigations? They are beginning to to do that in France. They arebeginning to now try to use those whom they call "lucid"; that is, people who see with eyes keener than the physical; they are beginningto use those in medicine, are using them for the diagnosis of disease, are using them for the testing of the sensitiveness of man, arebeginning to use them to try to discover if man has any body subtlerthan the physical. And while I would not say to the scientific man:"Accept our theories, " I would say to him: "Take them as hypotheses bywhich you may direct your further experiments, and you may go on andmake discoveries more rapidly than you can at the present time. " Forthere is many a clairvoyant who, put before a piece of some elementalsubstance, could describe it very much better than is done by yourfractional analysis. And along other lines--chemical andelectrical--surely there is something a little unsatisfactory, when afew years ago men told us that the atom was composed literally ofmyriads of particles, and during the last year it has been suggestedthat perhaps one particle is all of which an atom is composed. Mightit not be wise to try to get hold of your atoms by sight keener thanthe physical, as it is possible to do, whether by the ordinaryclairvoyant who is sometimes developed up to that point, or by anuntrained sensitive whose senses are set free from the limitations ofthe physical brain, and from that sensitive try to gather something ofthe composition of matter which may guide you in your more scientificsearch? I realise that what one, or two, or twenty people see, is noproof for the scientific man; but it may give a hint wherebymathematical deductions may be made, and calculations which otherwisewould not be thought of. So that I only suggest the utilising byscience of certain powers that are now available, keener than those ofthe ordinary senses--a new sort of human microscope or humantelescope--whereby you may pierce to the larger or the smaller, beyondthe reach of your physical microscopes and telescopes, made of metaland not of intelligence showing itself in matter. 

Is there anything of value in Theosophical ideas, shall I say to thescience of medicine? Some say it is not yet a science, but worksempirically only. There is some truth in that; but are there not hereagain lines of investigation which the physician might well study? Forinstance, the power of thought over the human body, all that mass offacts on which partly is built up such a science as Mental Healing, orwhat is called Faith Cure, and so on. Do you think that these thingshave been going on for hundreds of years, and that there is no truthlying behind them? "The effects of imagination, " you say. But what isimagination? It does not matter of what it is the effect, if it bringscure where before there was disease. If you put into a man's body adrug that you do not understand, and find that it cures a disease andrelieves a pain, will you throw the drug aside because you do notunderstand it? And why do you throw the power of imagination asidebecause you cannot weigh it in your balance, nor find that itdepresses one scale more than the other? Imagination is one of thesubtlest powers of thought: imagination is one of the strongest powersthat the doctor might utilise when his drugs fail him and his oldmethods no longer serve his purpose. Suggestion, the power of thought. Why, there are records of cases where suggestion has killed! Thatwhich has killed can also cure, and man's body being only a product ofthought, built up through the ages, answers more rapidly to itscreator than it does to clumsier products from the mineral andvegetable kingdoms. Here again I only ask experiment. You know thatyou can produce wounds upon the body of the hypnotised patient, in astate of trance. By suggestion lesions are made, burns are caused, inflammation and pain appear by the mere suggestion of a wound. Ablister is placed on a patient and forbidden to act; the skin isuntouched when the blister is removed: a bit of wet paper is given bythought the qualities of the blister, and it will raise the skin, withall the accompaniments of the chemical blister. Now these things areknown. You can see the pictures of wounds thus produced, if you will, in some of the Paris hospitals, for along this line the Frenchman isinvestigating further than the Englishman has done. And along thatline also lies much of useful experiment to be brought to the reliefof the diseases of humanity. 

But as I have touched upon medicine, let me say--for I ought here tosay it--that there are some methods of modern medicine which Theosophyemphatically condemns. It declares that no knowledge which is gainedfrom a tortured, a vivisected creature, is legitimate, even if it wereas useful as it has been proved to be useless. It declares that allinoculations of disease into the healthy body are illegitimate, and itcondemns all such. It declares that all those foul injections of modernmedicine which use animal fluids to restore the exhausted vitality ofman are ruinous to the body into which they are put. Here again France, by the very excess of its methods, is beginning to recoil before theresults which have come about. Only two years ago I was told by aleading physician of Paris that many of the doctors had met together tolook at the results which had grown out of the methods that for yearsthey had been following without hesitation and without scruple, and thatthey feared that they had caused more diseases than they cured. Why arethese things condemned as illegitimate? Because the building up of thehuman body is the building by a living Spirit of a temple for himself, and it is moulded by that Spirit for his own purposes. The higher powersof intelligence have made the human body what it is, different from theanimal bodies out of which, physically, in ages long gone by, it hasgrown. Your delicacy of touch, the exquisite beauty and delicacy of yournervous system, these things are the outcome of the higher powers of theSpirit expressing themselves in the human body, where they cannotexpress themselves in the animal form. And if you ignore this, if youforget it, if you forget that this splendid human temple built up bythe Spirit of man through ages of toil and of suffering, to express hisown higher qualities--compassion, tenderness, love, pity for the weakand the helpless, protection of the helpless against the strong--if youforget the whole of that, and act as a brute even would not act, incruelty and wickedness to men and animals alike, you will degrade thebody you are trying to preserve, you will paralyse the body you aretrying to save from disease, and you will go back into the savagerywhich is the nemesis of cruelty, and ruin these nobler bodies, theinheritance of the civilised races. 

I pass from that to my last world, the world of political thought. NowTheosophy takes no part in party politics. It lays down the greatprinciple of human Brotherhood, and bids its followers go out into theworld and work on it--using their intelligence, their power ofthought, to judge the value of every method which is proposed. And ourgeneral criticism on the politics of the moment would be that they areremedies, not preventions, and leave untouched the root out of whichall the miseries grow. Looking sometimes at your party politics, itseems to me as though you were as children plucking flowers andsticking them into the sand and saying: "See what a beautiful garden Ihave made. " And when you wake the next morning the flowers are dead, for there were no roots, but only rootless flowers. I know you mustmake remedies, but you should not stop at that. When you send out yourRed Cross doctors and nurses to pick up the mutilated bodies that yourscience of war has maimed, they are doing noble work, and deserve ourlove and gratitude, for the wounded must be nursed; but the man whoworks for peace does more for the good of humanity than the Red Crossdoctors and nurses. And so also in the political world. You cannotsafely live "hand-to-mouth" in politics any more than in any otherdepartment of human life. But how many are there in the politicalparties who care for causes and not only for effects? That is thecriticism we should make. We see everywhere Democracy spreading; butDemocracy is on its trial, and unless it can evolve some method bywhich the wise shall rule, and not merely the weight of ignorantnumbers, it will dig its own grave. So long as you leave your peopleignorant they are not fit to rule. The schools should come before thevote, and knowledge before power. You are proud of your liberty; youboast of a practically universal suffrage--leaving out, of course, onehalf of humanity!--but taking your male suffrage as you have it, howmany of the voters who go to the poll know the principles of politicalhistory, know anything of economics, know anything of all theknowledge which is wanted for the guiding of the ship of the Statethrough troubled waters? You do not choose your captains out of peoplewho know nothing of navigation; but you choose the makers of yourrulers out of those who have not studied and do not know. That is notwise. I do not deny it is a necessary stage in the evolution of man. Iknow that the Spirit acts wisely, and guides the nations along roadsin which lessons are to be learned; and I hope that out of theblunders, and the errors, and the crudities of present politics therewill evolve a saner method, in which the wise of the nation will havepower and guide its councils, and wisdom, not numbers, shall speakthe decisive word. 

Now there is one criticism of politics that we often hear in thesedays. It is said that behind politics lie economics. That is true. Youmay go on playing at politics for ever and ever; but if your economicfoundation is rotten, no political remedies can build a happy andprosperous nation. But while I agree that behind politics lieeconomics, there is something that lies also behind economics, and ofthat I hear little said. Behind economics lies character, and withoutcharacter you cannot build a free and a happy nation. A nationenormous in power, what do you know of the way in which your power iswielded in many a far-off land? How much do you know about your vastIndian Empire? How many of your voters going to the poll can give anintelligent answer to any question affecting that 300, 000, 000 of humanbeings whom you hold in your hand, and deal with as you will? Thereare responsibilities of Empire as well as pride in it, and pride ofEmpire is apt to founder when the responsibilities of Empire areignored. And so the Theosophist is content to go to the root of thematter, and try to build up for you the citizens out of whom yourfuture State is to be made. Education, real education, seculareducation, is now your cry. They tried secular education in France;they destroyed religious teaching; they tried to give morality withoutreligion. But the moral lessons had no effect: they were too cold anddull, and dead. Is it not a scandal that in a country like this, wherethe vast majority are religious, you are quarrelling so much about thetrifles that separate you, that the only way to peace seems to be totake religion out of the schools altogether, and train the childrenonly in morality, allowing an insignificant minority to have its way?Why! we have done better than that in India, we Theosophists. HinḍuTheosophists have founded there a College in which, despite all theirsects and all their religious quarrels, they have found a commonminimum of Hinḍuism on which their children can be trained inreligion and morality alike. I grant it was a Theosophical inspirationthat began the movement; but the whole mass of Hinḍus have fallenin with it, and are accepting the books as the basis of education. Government has recognised them, and has begun to introduce them forthe use of Hinḍus in its own schools. That is the way in which weTheosophists work at politics. We go to the root to build character, and we know that noble characters will make a noble and also aprosperous nation. But you can no more make a nation of free men outof children untrained in duty and in righteousness, than you can builda house that will stand if you use ill-baked bricks and rotten timber. Our keynote in politics is Brotherhood. That worked out into life willgive you the nation that you want. 

And what does Brotherhood mean? It means that everyone of us, you andI, every man and woman throughout the land, looks on all others asthey look on their own brothers, and acts on the same principle whichin the family rules. You keep religion out of politics? You cannot, without peril to your State; for unless you teach your people thatthey are a Brotherhood, whether or not they choose to recognise it, you are building on the sand and not on the rock. And what doesBrotherhood mean? It means that the man who gains learning, uses it toteach the ignorant, until none are ignorant. It means that the man whois pure takes his purity to the foul, until all have become clean. Itmeans that the man who is wealthy uses his wealth for the benefit ofthe poor, until all have become prosperous. It means that everythingyou gain, you share; everything you achieve, you give its fruit toall. That is the law of Brotherhood, and it is the law of national aswell as of individual life. You cannot rise alone. You are bound toostrongly each to each. If you use your strength to raise yourself bytrampling on your fellows, inevitably you will fail by the weaknessthat you have wronged. 

Do you know who are the greatest enemies of a State? The weak, injuredby the strong. For, above all States, rules an Eternal Justice; andthe tears of miserable women, and the curses of angry, starving men, sap the foundations of a State that denies Brotherhood, and reach theears of that Eternal Justice by which alone States live, and Nationscontinue. It is written in an ancient scripture that a Master of Dutysaid to a King: "Beware the tears of the weak, for they sap thethrones of Kings. " Strength may threaten: weakness undermines. Strength may stand up to fight: weakness cuts away the ground on whichthe fighters are standing. And the message of Theosophy to the modernpolitical world is: Think less about your outer laws, and more aboutthe lives of the people who have to live under those laws. Rememberthat government can only live when the people are happy; that Statescan only flourish where the masses of the population are contented;that all that makes life enjoyable is the right of the lowest and thepoorest; that they can do without external happiness far less thanyou, who have so many means of inner satisfaction, of enjoyment, bythe culture that you possess and that they lack. If there is not moneyenough for everything, spend your money in making happier, healthier, purer, more educated, the lives of the poor; then a happy nation willbe an imperial nation; for Brotherhood is the strongest force onearth. 

Part IV

The Field of Work of the Theosophical Society

_The Presidential Address delivered to the Convention of the BritishSection of the Theosophical Society, held in Essex Hall, London, 7thJuly 1907. _

The Field of Work of the Theosophical Society. 

It is my duty now to bring to a close this Convention, and to bid youall farewell, to scatter to your various places and to do, let ushope, with fresh courage and deeper knowledge, the varied works whichyou are called upon to perform. And let me, before I take up thesubject upon which I am to speak--"The Field of Work of theTheosophical Society"--let me, ere beginning that subject, say oneword of gratitude to her without whom the Theosophical Society couldnot till any field, nor sow any seed--to H. P. B. , our Teacher and ourHelper, let us offer our heart's gratitude; for without her we couldnot have met together, without her we could not have learned theTheosophical teaching. It may be that many of us have learned muchsince she first taught us, but she was the first Teacher, and theBringer of the Light. It may be that some, since they met her, haveknown their Master face to face; but it was she who led them to Hispresence, she to whom the possibility in this life was due. It maywell be that had she not come some other might have come to do thework, but that matters not to us; that she did it is her claim to ourhomage, and we, who live in the light she brought, may well paytribute of gratitude to her. 

What is the Field of our Society's work? It is sketched in our ThreeObjects; and those of you who have looked upon the Objects with care, in the various recensions through which they have passed, may havenoticed that each one of them covers one of the aspects of humanconsciousness. In the first, that which declares the truth of theUniversal Brotherhood, we have the field of work of the Activityaspect, the active principle of the consciousness, of the Spirit, which seeks expression in service to the race. In the second, thestudy of the religions and the philosophies of the world, we have thefield of work for the Cognition aspect of consciousness, that whichgathers together the fruit of knowledge; it is the Knower gatheringthe food by which he unfolds his powers. And in the third we have thefield of work of the Will, the Power aspect of the consciousness, thedeepest root of our being, that by which the worlds exist, as they aresupported by the Wisdom, as they are created by the Activity. So thatwhen we thus look at the objects of the Society and realise therelation that they bear to our conscious selves, we see that the fieldof the work of the Theosophical Society is wide as the world, andknows no limit where Will and Knowledge and Activity can make theirway. And it is true, now and always, that everything which helps andbenefits man is Theosophical work, and that nothing can be excludedfrom the sphere of our work which includes every aspect ofconsciousness. So let us take this natural, this scientific divisionof our work, and see what we may do in each field which offers itselfto the appropriate power in our nature. 

The first will naturally cover all active working for humanity, allservice which one can offer to another; and it will be well, in thedays that lie before us, if we realise that there is no scheme forhuman helping, no possible effort for human uplifting, which isoutside the field of work of the First Object of our Society. EveryLodge of the Society should make it one of its activities to servehumanity in the place where the Lodge is founded; and the value of theLodge should be in the knowledge that is there gathered with theobject of spreading it. For Theosophy should be your touch-stone as tothe value of every scheme, as to the tendency of every proposition. Inall the countless schemes around us in these active times, some workonly for the moment; others, based on sound principle, are preparingthe world for a better and happier future. By your Theosophicalknowledge you can judge the value of every such scheme, and throwyourselves into those alone which work on lines beneficial to thefuture, which are laying the foundations of a civilisation greaterthan our own. For among the many schemes and many methods there areways in which each man inspired by the Spirit of Brotherhood may findwork that satisfies his reason and is justified by his conscience. Andthere is no one particular method, no one special road, along whichthe Society, as Society, can go. It lays down the principle ofBrotherhood as an active working spirit in the life of every member, and then it leaves the member free to use his own judgment and his ownconscience as to which among the many methods recommends itself mostto him as an individual. So that in speaking of that field of work, itis not for me to say: "This plan, that method, the other means, thatis what you ought to follow"; but only that you are not carrying outthe First Object of the Society, unless you are engaging your activityin some task which in your intelligence and conscience is working forthe benefit of your fellow-men. That is a point I want to put to yourLodges; for when I see questions discussed as to giving new life toLodges, vivifying Lodges, and so on, I know well that the only causefor the need of such discussion is because men allow the life tostagnate within the Lodge, instead of sending it forth a living streamto fertilise the place in which the Lodge is built. There would be nolack of life were it not that you keep it bottled up for your ownadvantage, for your own needs. The source of life is inexhaustible, and it only ceases to flow where there is stagnation, because it isnot allowed to run out to the people who have need of it, but is keptwithin the narrow limits of a Lodge. If you worked as well as talked, if you labored as well as discussed, if you served as well as praisedservice, there would be no time and no need to discuss how the Lodgesof the Theosophical Society shall be vivified. 

Your Lodge should be your place of inspiration, the place where youlearn how you are to serve, the place where you find the bread oflife. But the bread of life is meant to feed the hungry, and not tosurfeit those already filled, to feed the hungry crowds around youstarving for knowledge, that life may be made intelligible and thustolerable to them; and it is yours to feed the flock of the GreatShepherd, and to help those who, without this Wisdom, are helpless. And all need it; not the poor alone, nor the rich alone, but everychild of man. For the one thing that presses upon all alike, thebitterness of life, is the sense of wrong, the want of intelligibilityin life, and therefore a feeling of the lack of justice upon earth;that is the sting which pierces every heart; whether the heart belongto the rich or the poor, it matters not. When you understand life, life becomes bearable; and never till you understand it will it ceaseto be a burden grievous to be borne; but when you understand it, everything changes. When you realise its meaning, its value, you canput up with the difficulties. And our work with regard to those aroundus is to bring that knowledge, and by that knowledge to lift them to aplace of peace. That is the work which demands to be done, and whichyour Lodges have the duty of doing. For there ought not to be onescheme for human helping, in any place where a Lodge of theTheosophical Society is established, where in that Lodge workers maynot be found ready and eager to give labor to the helping of theirbrothers amongst whom they live. What is the use of prattling aboutUniversal Brotherhood, if you do not live it? Sometimes, indiscussions on Brotherhood, it is spoken of as though it only meantsoft words and well-turned phrases, sentimentality and not reality. Itmeans work, constant, steadfast, unwearied work, for those who requireservice at our hands; not soft words to each other, but work for theworld, that is the true meaning of Brotherhood. 

Pass from that to our next field of work, sketched out by our SecondObject. Without that you cannot rightly work for Brotherhood, for youwill not understand the knowledge already garnered. You must learn inorder to teach, you must study in order to understand, and this Objectis not carried on in our Lodges as effectively as it ought to be; forit is translated into one man studying, and pouring out the fruits ofhis study into the open mouths round him on every side. That is allvery well in the beginning when the young bird comes out of the egg. It is necessary that the father and mother bird should pour food intothe wide open beak; but some of you ought to have gone beyond that inthe thirty-two years of life of the Society: you ought to be ready tohelp, and not only to be helped. And the life of the Society will notbe healthy while so few are students, and therefore so few are fit toteach. Every Lodge should have its classes for study under thisobject. There are other ways in which you must learn as well as by theteaching of brother Theosophists, and there is a plan they are justadopting in the Paris Lodge for the work of the coming winter, whichis a very good one; instead of Theosophists studying the books ofscholars, and then giving out what they have learned, the French Lodgeis inviting leading representatives of the various branches ofthought, those specially interesting to us, in order that they may puttheir knowledge from their own standpoint, and that the Theosophistmay have the advantage of listening to them at first hand. That seemsto me a very admirable plan, and I know not why in some of the LondonLodges you should not try to take a leaf out of our French neighbor'sbook, and why one Lodge at least should not try, if only for one sixmonths, to bring to that Lodge some leader in the world of thought, who shall tell it what he believes, and explain the lines of his work. If you could persuade specialists along the many lines of study, religious and philosophical, to give you the fruits of their work, youwould learn more rapidly, you would learn the spirit of a school in amore satisfactory manner, than when you are only studying books, andthen giving out the books you have read. You value, and rightly value, the knowledge that Mr. Mead brings you along his special lines ofstudy, but why should you not have that same advantage similarly fromothers who follow other lines of thought, and would speak similarlyfrom first-hand knowledge? There is a life in it that there never isin second-hand knowledge, a vigor and strength in it that you cannever get when it has only been learned second-hand, and then pouredforth. Men who study deeply are glad to find audiences who are willingto listen to the results of their study, and who will give them gladhearing when they come out into the world from the study to tell whatby labor and toil they have learned. And so I suggest that some of youshould see whether you might not make your Lodges more valuable if, instead of always going round the same wheel of a few local lecturers, you tried to win to each locality now and again a really learned andwell-trained man, and then, with your own Lodge as a nucleus ofhearers, gather round them others also who would be only too glad ofthe opportunity that your Lodge would give in the place where ithappens to be. You have Lodges in the suburbs, Lodges in the townsoutside the area of London, and how glad many of these would be, ifyou made yourselves the channels for knowledge of that sort to bepoured out amongst them. There is one line of work you might well takeup, and the country Lodges might do the same, winning down from Londonnow and again some thinker who would come and give the benefit of hisstudy; and if you were known all over England as the places where suchknowledge might be gained, and the bringers of such within the reachof your fellow-townsmen, the Society would profit by your labor aswell as those who immediately benefit by the effort. And wherever youdeal with the study of a religion, learn it from the lips of one whobelieves it rather than by the exposition of one who does not; foronly so will you catch the spirit of the different religions. If youwould learn about Roman Catholicism, win a Roman Catholic student orpriest to come and tell you how his Church appeals to him; or if youwant to learn about the Church of England, win some clergyman who willcome and tell you what that Church means to him; or aboutBuḍḍhism, win a Buḍḍhist to come and tell you what his ownreligion is to him; and so with the Hinḍu, and on and on, all roundthe different religions. For none can really tell what a religion isto its followers who does not believe in it, and no one can give youits spirit who does not feel it. And it is in that way that yourTheosophy should lead you into sympathy with every form of religiousthought, learning it as it comes from the mouth of a believer, and notin the sort of warmed-up fashion in which one who does not believe itre-cooks it for his fellow Theosophists. There, it seems to me, isyour field of work under the Second Object; and out of this studywould grow literature, illuminating these various religions andphilosophies, and from your classes should be evolved teachers, tocarry to the different communities the results of their study ondifferent lines, thus bringing the Second Object to the helping of theFirst. 

I had a letter the other day from a good member of the TheosophicalSociety, and the writer said, being a Christian, that Christian linesof work attracted her, and she thought she ought to leave the Societyin order to help people along those lines. But what sort of Theosophyis that? You who are Christians, or believers in any other faith, youshould become Theosophists to help your own religions, and to bringthem the life, not by leaving the Society, but by learning in theSociety to help them; that is the duty of every believer in whateverreligion you may happen to believe. For you should be messengers tothe various religions, helping them to understand more deeply thanmany of them do to-day; and if you would understand that that is partof your duty, to help your own faiths, to enlighten those who will notcome to the Theosophical Lodge but yet will listen to the fellowbeliever offering them the knowledge that in the Lodge he has gained, then the spread of our doctrines, rapid as it is, would be far morerapid and along healthy lines. For we do not exist as a Society simplyto study, but to spread the light, and every religion should be thericher and the fuller in proportion to the number of Theosophists thatit enrolls amongst its followers. 

Pass to the Third Object. There also we have work to do, and we cannotwork for Brotherhood effectively without understanding the nature ofman. And I feel that one or two who criticised the Society thisafternoon on that point had the right to make the criticism that theydid; for, while in the earlier days that Third Object was so carriedout in the Society that it was the leader in the fields of all suchresearch, it certainly now has fallen into the background, and is onlya gleaner in the fields where others are reaping, and that is notright. The knowledge that you have in theory as to the constitution ofman and nature, should be a guide to you in researches, and not simplyremain theoretical knowledge. That which was said this afternoon aboutthe Psychical Research Society is true. It goes into everythingunusual with a prejudice against it, rather than with a feeling thatthere is something to be learned; but on the other hand, one is boundto say that during the last ten or twelve years that Society has donemore to familiarise the public with these facts of the hidden powersof man than our own has done in practice, though we have done muchmore in theory. Now I am not in favor of much experiment preceding astudy of theory; I believe that we need the theory in order toexperiment wisely; but I also believe that having a true theory weshould use it to guide our investigations, and thus to add to theknowledge of the world. A part of our work, it seems to me, that liesbefore us in the coming time, is to help the world to walk wiselyalong those roads of research on which it has entered now. You cannotprevent it going forward along them, knowledge is already too widelyspread for that; but what you can do is to help men to walk wisely, and to avoid many a pitfall into which otherwise they would be verylikely to fall. And along those lines there is very much to be done:plans to be worked out, methods of research to be planned and tested;and I hope before very long to see some groups in our Society thatwill take up this special line of work as part of their activities, and, headed by someone who knows practically something of that withwhich he is dealing, will then help the younger students to learnwisely and to experiment carefully. And in these matters it is well, so far as you can, to bring the more scientific members of the Societyinto touch with this work; for one of the reasons that Spiritualismfell into discredit for a time was because the scientific and thethoughtful abstained from it, and left it in the hands of thecredulous and the unwise. The leaders of the scientific world whoought to have joined in the work which Sir William Crookes, AlfredWallace, and others began, instead of following them and strengtheningtheir hands, turned their backs on it all, leaving it to be carried onby those who knew far less than they, and who were not accustomed toaccurate observation and careful recording of phenomena. Now leadingscientific men are beginning to work at it. Along all lines ofpsychical research work should be done by us, if we do not mean tocancel the Third Object in our Society. 

Thus, then, a great field of work opens out before us, so wide afield, so great, that you would have no need to ask for work if youwould only begin to labor along these lines. And take that other lineabout which Mrs. Cooper Oakley spoke--the line of Historical Researchinto Mysticism. Has it ever struck you how much of the work of ourforerunners remains unknown, because their work is not scanned bysympathetic eyes? How many of the pioneers in the past centuries lieunder a heap of calumny, because none has tried to understand, nonehas tried to realise, the nature of their work? Men like Paracelsus, Cagliostro, and many another whose name I might mention, who arecrying out, as it were, for research, and thought, and labor onmystical and occult lines. There again I have good hope that somereally efficient work will be going on; for to my mind one of thepurposes for which our Presidency should exist is to act as a centreround which every country may gather together, and thus communicatewith each other, and form bodies scattered all over the world formutual aid. The strength of our Society is in that unity of thought, which can only be brought about as one part of the Society realisesthat other parts are linked with it, as it ought to be, by thePresident of the whole. For the Presidency would be an idle show, ifit is not to be a centre for inspiration and labor. The great workdone by the late President is, as I have said elsewhere, practicallycomplete; he has given the Theosophical Society an organisation bywhich it can work and live; ours to use the organisation that he made, ours to employ this splendid instrument which is now in our hands forworld-wide labor and for world-wide helping. That is the work to whichI would summon you now, and pray your help. Let us not stand apart onefrom the other, and work always along isolated lines; in addition tothe isolated work, we should have the combined work; for many oftencan bring about a result which one cannot do. Take, for instance, thegreat libraries of Europe, far, far apart. It is very laborious for aperson to travel all over Europe and labor alone in them all; but ifwe had students working in every great library, we should have feederswho would send in to a common centre the result of their work, whichcould then be shed over the world. 

Along those lines the Society will become respected, when it is knownfor honest and useful work in all departments of human activity. Thereis no good in glorifying it by words and saying what a splendid thingit is, unless we justify ourselves to the world by the work which wecontribute for the world's helping. 

In this way, then, I would ask you to look at our great field of work. Laborers are wanted. There is more than work enough for all, and inthis work the principle that must guide us is, as we have so oftensaid, freedom of thought, freedom of expression. But let it beunderstood in the Society, for there is danger of this beingforgotten, that there is freedom for those who assert as well as forthose who deny; that all alike are free. Those who know have a rightto speak, and there should be no outcry against them; those who do notbelieve have a right to say they do not believe, and there should beno outcry against them because they believe not But there is a dangerlest those who believe not should think that they have the only rightof speech, and that those who experience have no right to say out thatwhich they know to be true. It is the danger which dogs the steps ofFreethought everywhere. You can see it in France at the present time, where the Freethinker, smarting against the oppression of the Church, tries to silence the Church, as he has been silenced in the past; butit is a bad reaction, and we cannot have that within theSociety--there must be liberty for all. I do not wish to impose my ownbeliefs on any man or woman in the Society, but I claim the rightamongst you to speak the truth I know, and to bear witness to thereality of my Master whom for eighteen years I have served, withoutbeing attacked vehemently by those who deny my experience. I knowwhereof I speak. I ask you not to believe; that is your own choice. Iask you not to accept; that is for you to decide. But you have noright to try to stop my lips, nor to say that the assertion of mybelief is outside the liberty allowed in the Theosophical Society. I, as President, will defend to the utmost the right of each to speak histhought--believers and non-believers of every type; but I will notrecognise the right of any to impose upon the Society a dogma ofunbelief, any more than a dogma of belief. Only by that liberty of allcan we live and grow; only by the perfect freedom, and the recognitionof every man's right to speak, no matter what he says, can the healthof the Society be secured. For in the years that lie before us thereis much new knowledge to be gained, many new facts to be discovered, many new experiences to go through, and we must not discourage theseekers and investigators by making it difficult for them to speakamongst us. We need every fact that any human being can bring to us. We have the right to challenge the fact and investigate it, and eitherto say: "It is fact"; or: "To me it is not fact"; but we have no rightto say to any human being: "You shall not search nor speak, " for thatwould be the death-knell of our liberty, that the denial of thefoundation on which we stand. 

And so let us go forward to a future, I hope, fairer than anything wehave in our past. Let us welcome all thought, all refusal of thought, all investigation, all speech, however different it may be from ourown speech and thought, and doing this with full respect of each foreach, full recognition that minds are different, and that each mindhas its own sphere in which it can do useful work for all, let usencourage in our Society every school of thought, every form ofopinion, every expression of thought which is in a man's mind. And outof all that clash of opinion, out of all that discussion, Truth shouldcome out stronger, richer, larger than ever. And never mind ifsometimes falsehoods are spoken; never mind if sometimes mistakes aremade. An old scripture says: "Truth conquers, not falsehood"; for Godis Truth, and nothing that is not drawn from His Life can live, nothing that is drawn from His life can die; and realising that, wecan go forward fearlessly into the unknown future, sure that to bravehearts and true lives every experience, every failure, every mistake, is only another rung of the ladder by which we climb from ignoranceinto knowledge, from the bondage of matter into the liberty ofSpirit. 

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