See other formats

Full text of "The Theosophical quarterly"

The Theosophical Society, as such, is not responsible for any opinion 
or declaration in this magazine, by whomsoever expressed, unless con- 
tained in an official document. 

THE THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY has completed its seventh year 
and with this number enters upon a new cycle. Let us all hope 
that it will continue to grow in usefulness and strength as much 
during the next term as it has during the past seven years. 
Those who have been familiar with the magazine since its inception 
do not need to be reminded of its accomplishments, but they will perhaps 
pardon us if we mention a few of the articles it has published, which, 
we feel sure, will prove to be permanent additions to the literature of 
religious philosophy. 

Not all of the little volume called Fragments appeared in the QUAR- 
TERLY, but much of it did. Nor is it necessary to speak of the value 
of this work to its friends, for too many of us use it constantly as a 
book of devotion; and those who do not, admire it as a helpful and 
stimulating work, full of that intense religious zeal and devotion which 
we have come to associate with the writings of the author. We take 
pleasure in calling attention to the new "Fragment" which appears in 
this issue and we are glad to be able to announce that these instalments 
are likely to continue until a new volume, as large as the present one, 
can be made up and printed. Much of the material for this new volume 
is already in existence and available. It will probably all appear first 
in the QUARTERLY. 

The Bhagavad Gita, so admirably translated by Mr. Johnston and 
which has since appeared in book form, has already achieved a place 
in literature. It is being used as a standard at some of our universi- 
ties, and has brought the translator a portion of the attention which 
his indefatigable labour in the cause of Sanscrit literature has long 
deserved. By certain scholars it is considered the best translation which 
has been made of this great poem, while the comments are quite up to 
the level of what would be expected from so ardent a disciple of 







v * c 



2 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Sankaracharya. The Bhagavad Gita is destined to become more and 
more a necessary handbook for Western scholars, philosophers and 
religious students, and it is no mean achievement to have been the 
means of presenting this translation of this great work to the Western 
world. 

"The Religion of the Will" is another remarkable and original work 
for which we are indebted to Mr. Johnston. This series of articles, which 
we all followed with such interest and profit, is to appear in book form 
in the near future. It presents the subject of human psychology in a 
manner quite new to the West, and without confusing the reader with 
technical and Sanscrit terms, makes very plain some of the most subtile 
and delicate of the distinctions which appear in Hindu philosophy. 
Particularly in its description of the psychic nature does this work show 
an interesting originality, while its emphasis upon the Will as the funda- 
mental basis of human and divine nature, gives to the West a new con- 
ception of religion and a new religious philosophy. It is a work which 
will be more and more read as it is understood. 

These by no means exhaust the list of noteworthy contributions 
from Mr. Johnston, but we do not propose to go over the list of articles 
published during the past seven years. This is but an informal chat 
by the Editor with his readers about some of the special features which 
emphasize the value of the magazine. We cannot speak of them all, 
but only of a few which, for one reason or another, have most appealed 
to us. Among these are the occasional contributions by Prof. Mitchell, 
notably his article on "Meditation," which has been reprinted and which 
has had a large general sale, and his more recent article on "Theosophy 
and the T. S." which, to use the vernacular of the street, filled a long 
felt want. This article will also be republished before very long and 
should serve as an answer for inquirers about Theosophy and the Theo- 
sophical Society for some time to come. 

To Jasper Niemand we are indebted for many fine and helpful 
things, but not so many as we would wish. Particularly lately there has 
been a sad dearth of articles signed by this well known and eagerly 
sought name, and one of the chief wishes with which we start the new 
cycle is that we shall be privileged to print something by this author in 
each number. There is still a great work awaiting her facile and 
brilliant pen in commenting upon The Voice of the Silence, for which 
there is no one in the society better equipped by experience, training 
and ability. Let us all unite in the hope that she will be granted the 
strength and the time to bestow this additional gift upon her grateful 
admirers. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 3 

There are many others who deserve mention and whom it would 
be a pleasure to mention, but we must not weary our readers with cata- 
logues of names. Rather let us glance a moment into the future and 
see what its special promise may be. First the Fragments already 
alluded to. Then the completion of Mr. Johnston's translation of Patan- 
jali's Yoga Sutras. Here again we have a piece of work, which will not 
only add to that author's reputation, but which is a contribution of 
very great value to our literature. Patanjali, one of the greatest and 
most recondite of Eastern writers, has remained a sealed book to most 
of us owing to the unfamiliar form in which his previous translators 
had left his precepts. They might as well have remained in the original 
tongue for all the good we were able to get out of them. But now they 
are becoming available as fast as Mr. Johnston reduces their meaning 
to modern form; and we can add to our accumulated store of Eastern 
knowledge a new and illuminating interpretation of the facts of spiritual 
life and nature. 

These two things alone would make our magazine of value to all 
students of Theosophy and the Eastern Religions, but there are other 
needs to supply that will not be overlooked. We are not necessarily 
all specially interested in the East or in the Eastern way of looking at 
things. The West too has a great literature which is still undigested 
and misunderstood. There is large opportunity for the requisite ability 
to interpret the work of our best Western authors in terms of religious 
devotion and spiritual growth. A beginning of this has already been 
made in the recent article, the first of what we hope will be a long 
series, on "Theosophy and Secular Literature." Dante, perhaps the 
greatest of all Western writers, has had the inner meaning of his 
Divine Comedy laid bare before us with a sympathetic and practised 
hand. In this issue much of the gold which lies concealed in the 
rugged and irregular verse of Walt Whitman has been shown us, and 
in future numbers we expect to print a continued series of articles on 
Goethe, Blake, Burke, Carlyle, Emerson and others who have contributed 
more than is usually suspected to the world's stock of religious 
knowledge. 

Altogether, without further specification, we believe that we can 
promise our readers a continuance of the best we have had in the past 
and some additional features which will tend to increase the interest 
of the magazine. And it must never be forgotten by our readers that 
the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY pays no one for their writings. Every- 
thing published, everything which ever has been published, was a free 
gift from the author; for, save the actual printing and binding, no one 
connected with the magazine receives any compensation for his services. 
It is doubtful if such a publication has been produced before under 



4 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

such conditions. We believe that much of its spirit, much of the atmos- 
phere which surrounds the magazine, and of which we hear a good 
deal from our readers, is due to this fact. We neither pay money nor 
make money ; and a large part of our circulation is given away. 

Some years ago a generous member volunteered to subscribe for 
copies of the magazine to be sent to the great public libraries. Some 
hundreds of offers were sent out under this arrangement and in the 
most part were gladly accepted. In fact, there were only six refusals. 
Two from the libraries of Boston, which used to be the center of 
learning and culture in this country! The other refusals were from 
purely sectarian institutions, libraries run by denominational colleges 
or Christian Associations. Just why the authorities of these institu- 
tions thought it wise to protect their students from our contact they 
did not explain, but it was doubtless caused by complete ignorance of 
the purpose and character of the publication. The rest of the libraries 
have in almost all cases asked for a continuance of the subscription, 
while many of them have bought or asked for the back numbers of the 
magazine and for fresh copies for permanent binding. So far as pos- 
sible these requests have been complied with. 

We must recognize the fact, however, that there are really com- 
paratively few persons in this country or in Europe who are genuinely 
interested in religion. We say genuinely for there are many who are 
interested, who would read one article, or one number, of this magazine 
with pleasure and profit, but whose interest is never very long sus- 
tained. It is a sad fact, but it is a fact and there is no use blinking it.- 
Consequently we must not expect a large circulation, nor must the Soci- 
ety expect or anticipate a large membership. It is not in the nature of 
things, nor is it in any sense our purpose in the work. 

Our duty is to offer our philosophy to any one who may wish it ; to 
be ready for the inquirer; to satisfy the seeker. To expect more than 
this would be as useless as to dash one's self against a stone wall. 
There is neither use nor profit to be derived from fighting the inevitable, 
and it is inevitable at the present time to find but very few who have 
the insight, the devotion, the strength and the persistence to refuse 
the call of the world and to accept the call of service. It is the same 
appeal which the Masters of Life have made throughout the ages, and 
it will meet with the same inadequate response in our day and genera- 
tion as it has met with in all previous times. Therefore, my friends, 
we have an up-hill fight ahead of us, for we have all the evil, all the 
materiality, all the sloth and inertia of the world to contend with, 
before we can hope for any great measure of success. But the need 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 5 

is the greater and therefore our response to the call should be the more 
earnest, the more determined; our sacrifice the readier, our devotion 
the stronger. Let us then go forward into our new year with hearts 
made courageous by the greatness of the demand and with a courage 
which no failure can discourage. C. A. G., JR. 



Elsewhere in this issue we print in full the official report of the 
Annual Convention of the Theosophical Society, held on April 30, 
and May I, 1910, at Cincinnati, Ohio. It is a document replete with 
interest to those concerned in the work of the Theosophical Movement, 
even though much that made the Convention itself noteworthy in help- 
fulness can find no place in its formal record. 

For thirty-five years the Society has pursued unswervingly the 
initial purposes for which it was founded. Within itself and upon its 
open platform have been focussed the world's religious aspiration and 
scientific and philosophic thought. For more than a third of a century 
its history has charted the upward progress of man's spirit; and in the 
difficulties and trials through which it has passed have been reflected 
the barriers which confront each human soul. In the deepest and truest 
sense its history is a "human document," and the lessons which it 
teaches are the lessons of our common humanity the obscuration of 
prejudice, sectarianism and antagonism, and the clarifying power of 
open minded tolerance, sympathy, and recognized unity of aim and 
heart. It has demonstrated that whatever difficulties we encounter have 
their origin within ourselves and never in circumstances or in others. 
Prejudice, misunderstanding and ridicule from without have been out- 
lived and outworn and even turned to our account. Again and again 
such opposition has added to our ranks and strengthened our cause. 
But a divided purpose within ourselves, suspicion, sectarianism, failure 
in tolerance, or a turning away from the theosophic principles upon 
which our work must rest, these have never appeared amongst us 
but to disrupt and paralyze our work, even to its outermost organiza- 
tion. More than once we have needed the drastic use of the surgeon's 
knife, and the great Lords of Karma who guide our destiny have not 
scrupled to cut deep. Looking back, therefore, over the long road we 
have travelled, turning upon the present the light of our past, and seek- 
ing in the condition of our external organization an index of our inner 
health, we have reason for profound gratitude that in this Convention 
there was no division of opinion upon matters of policy and govern- 
ment, no opposing factions, or conflict of interests, but that the past 
year marked an unbroken growth in the spirit of unity and a consistent 
building upon constitutional foundations whose stability had been proved. 



6 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

The growth in unity and the disappearance of former national 
divisions are instanced in the report of the Chairman of the Executive 
Committee and in Mr. Raatz's letter of greeting from the German 
Branches. No less cheering are the reports of the Secretary and 
Treasurer; the one showing the increase in numbers and branches and 
the widening distribution and sale of the Society's publications, and 
the other the generous and universal response that has been made to 
the needs of the work and the consequent firmer establishment of the 
Society's finances. In all departments of its external organization the 
Convention report shows us that the Theosophical Society has prospered. 

Though, as we have said, a sound and united organization may 
properly be a matter of congratulation, as an index of internal harmony 
and well being, it is not in the machinery of the Society's administra- 
tion, nor in the reports of its officers, that the interest and helpfulness 
of the annual conventions are found. The true life of the Theosophical 
Society is the life of the theosophic spirit manifesting in its autonomous 
branches and leavening through the life and work of its exponents the 
thought and spirit of the age. It is a spirit that transcends organiza- 
tion and owes nothing to administration, though organization and admin- 
istration break down when it is infringed. It escapes analysis and 
definition; yet is revealed in brotherhood and helpfulness, in open- 
mindedness, tolerance, sympathetic understanding and the recognition 
of the unity behind all partial truths. It is the spirit which draws man's 
soul in aspiration toward the central source of life the spirit of the 
limitless and the eternal, of religion and of truth. Such a spirit must 
quicken and enkindle all it contacts, and as we see its light burning, 
here dimly, there brightly, in the hearts of our fellow members, at home 
and abroad, we are sent away cheered and encouraged and with renewed 
will to make it live more strongly within ourselves and to follow more 
faithfully where it leads. 

It is when considered from this point of view that the recent Con- 
vention is most noteworthy. Very simply, very directly, without pre- 
tence or thought of self the delegates reported upon the work of their 
Branches and submitted their local problems for the advice of their 
fellow members. Where mistakes had been made they were not con- 
cealed, but the cause of failure was sought that it might not again arise 
or be repeated in another Branch. These verbal reports and discussions 
could receive but brief mention in the official report of the Convention 
proceedings, but through them the gain of each Branch was made the 
property of the whole Society, and the harvest of the year's work was 
reaped as the ability to work more wisely and efficiently in the years 
to come. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 7 

From successes and failures alike one simple fact emerged in bold 
relief: wherever the theosophic spirit and attitude had been maintained 
the work had prospered, wherever they had been abandoned the result 
had proved sterile and dead. This is the one great lesson which has 
been repeated with added clearness in each year of the Society's exist- 
ence. Yet endlessly repeated and simple as it is, it is by no means easy 
to adhere to in practice. It is not that we have not understood the 
truth and value of the theosophic attitude, but that we have not as yet 
fully established our mental processes upon it, nor acquired the self 
control and poise which are necessary for its preservation. 

It is easy to give intellectual assent to the fairly obvious fact that 
every honest view or opinion must have its origin in some aspect of 
truth, and to believe that all aspects of truth are of vital significance 
and necessary to the whole of which they are a part. It requires, too, 
but a very elementary knowledge of human nature and the psychology 
of apperception to realize that we can only impart new truths as we are 
able to connect them with the truths already in our hearers' minds. 
And from these two self evident premises common sense, even unaided 
by experience, must draw the inevitable conclusion that, whether we 
would learn from others or seek to help them, the first necessity is to 
understand the truth or aspect of the truth which is theirs, and follow 
it bade as far as we are able to the central source of reality from which 
it streams. It is clearly no difficult matter to perceive this and with it 
the corollary that in our dealings with others it is the truth which they 
possess rather than their errors which we should seek out and dwell 
upon. To tell a man that he is wrong never yet altered his opinion 
unless his error was contrasted with his truth. It is never our truth 
but his own which converts him, and the measure of our persuasion 
is the measure of our understanding and appeal to the verities to which 
he holds. 

All this is clearly enough known to each and all of us; yet we are 
still curiously prone to let it slip into the background of consciousness 
precisely when we have the greatest need to base our words and acts 
upon it. In the stress of general discussion we still too often play the 
partisan; though, if we were asked, we would say unhesitatingly that 
that which is partisan cannot be theosophic. In the championship of 
our personal opinions we are led to forget our deeper obligation of 
faithfulness to the theosophic ideal of the unity of truth. And so again 
and again we lose our hold upon the theosophic spirit and method, which 
alone can make our work live in the world, and undo in an evening of 
forget fulness what we have slowly builded through months or years 
of effort. 



8 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Such a case came before the recent Convention, brought up by a 
Branch President as one of those points of failure whose lesson would 
be profitable to all. It is a strong branch; one which, particularly in 
the early days when the Society was the object of no small ridicule and 
attack, had done valiant service in spreading a knowledge of the great 
Eastern religions and of Madame Blavatsky's teaching of the funda- 
mental unity and common source of all religious faiths. Perhaps because 
habituated to opposition and misrepresentation this branch found it diffi- 
cult to orient itself in the changed conditions it had itself aided in 
establishing. It had had to contend so long with a narrow sectarian 
dogmatism in the representatives of the different Christian denomina- 
tions in its locality that it had grown to take such opposition for granted 
and to assume its presence even after it had in fact been dissolved in 
the more liberal and genuinely religious spirit of the present day. Like 
all branches, its meetings are open to the public and its invitations to 
attend them had been widespread. Yet it was taken off its guard 
when these invitations were accepted by its erstwhile opponents, who 
were made to listen, not to a theosophic discussion in the spirit of unity, 
but to an attack upon Christian dogma, the opportunity "to get even" 
being too sudden and pressing a temptation to be resisted by certain 
members. The result was inevitable. The visitors left at the end of 
the evening determined never to repeat such an unpleasant experiment 
and convinced "from personal experience" that the Society's preaching 
of liberality and unity was sheer pretence. In that one failure to pre- 
serve the theosophic spirit and attitude the branch belied the essential 
principles of its existence and nullified the effect of long years of 
patient labor. 

Yet it is safe to say that in another mood or less suddenly tempted 
the very members guilty of this breach of courtesy would have ably 
and loyally championed the spiritual interpretation of the dogmas they 
had attacked. Indeed no other course would be open to them in con- 
sonance with the personal beliefs which they had professed even while 
stultifying. It may be well to make this point quite clear and repeat 
here in substance something of what was said on the Convention floor. 

It is a truism, endlessly emphasized and repeated, that within the 
Theosophical Society all the great world religions stand on an equal 
footing. Each is the object of reverent inquiry and research, as descrip- 
tive statements of the experimental science of the soul's life and growth. 
No religious system is excluded, none can claim special ownership or 
dominion. Yet there is one which, though on official parity with all the 
rest, is peculiarly associated with the name theosophy and with the 
Theosophical Society. And the reason for this is that it can find no 
home where all are not admitted, for it is the attempt to formulate 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 9 

their synthesis and point their central unity. This is the system which 
Madame Blavatsky brought us in fragmentary form as a reinterpreta- 
tion of ancient wisdom, a restatement of the knowledge of the soul's 
pathway possessed by those masters of life who had consciously trav- 
elled it and at whose bidding she wrote and worked. 

Those of us who believe in the great Lodge of Masters, whether 
our belief rest on personal knowledge or intellectual conviction, must 
recognize that from this immortal brotherhood came the founders of 
all the world religions as well as the initial impulse for the formation 
of the Theosophical Society. We cannot, therefore, take this view 
without perceiving that "the faiths are all brothers, all born of the 
same mystery," all rooted in the same changeless science of the soul. 
And we cannot be true to the light that has been given us unless we 
recognize its presence and its guidance in the great systems that for 
centuries have been the open channels for the world's aspiration and 
religious life. As the Masters have not deserted the Society they 
founded so are they working ceaselessly within the great religions they 
established in the past, and we cannot seek to become their fellow 
servitors and disciples without assuming the obligation of loyalty to 
their aims and a faithful seconding of their work. 

Theosophy and Christianity, therefore, so far from being opposing 
or separate systems, are indissolubly united in their common source, 
their common truth, and their common leadership. The symbols in 
which their teachings are couched differ, as do our mental images of 
to-day from those which our ancestors used a thousand years ago. But 
it is the part of the Theosophist to see within the symbol to the truth 
which it depicts, and to be able of his own knowledge to testify to its 
reality and its worth. There is no Christian or Buddhist symbol which 
is not equally and of necessity a theosophic symbol. There is no article 
of the Christian faith of which the Theosophist cannot say: "Yes, I 
too believe, and in this tenet there is more truth and deeper meaning 
than you yet see." Even in the overgrowths and distortions of age-long 
misunderstanding we can find and uncover the spark of truth which 
they conceal. 

This is the obligation of the Theosophist to the great religious 
faiths ; and, in this time and country, it is peculiarly our obligation to 
Christianity. For us many veils have been lifted, but the vision we 
have been vouchsafed must be used for all who aspire to the life of the 
soul. They must be aided to see even as we have seen, the constant out- 
pouring of their Master's help and love, and the presence of that great 
order of disciples, servants of the living Christ, whose ceaseless labors 
have never failed the Christian Church. 



io THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

It is true that the world has grown in these nineteen centuries since 
the birth of Jesus. The Hebraic legalism which first obscured his mes- 
sage and the scholastic philosophy which formulated and hardened it, 
are alike in dissonance with our modem thought. There are many, 
therefore, who believe that their growth has taken them away from 
the ancient systems, and that Christianity can no longer give them the 
spiritual sustenance they need. To such, perhaps more than to all 
others, Theosophists can render deep and lasting service. For within 
the old interpretation they have outgrown, we can show a deeper, richer 
significance; and through the pathway of their own faith, all but lost 
to them, we can lead them back to the truths of the Spirit for which 
they have hungered. 

Such is our opportunity and obligation. But to fulfill it we have 
need for more than knowledge of theosophy and Christian teaching. 
An intuitive sympathy and understanding which do not fail, a self 
control which is never off its guard, and a poise which is not shaken, 
must be made permanently our own. It is not an easy task. The 
service in which the Theosophist is enlisted commands all the power of 
mind and heart and soul. But its rewards are great, and in the Mas- 
ters' service and by their help we can do what alone we could not hope 
to accomplish. We shall fail many times even as the branch reporting 
at Convention failed at a crucial test. But the ideal is clear before us 
and in its light we turn hopefully to the years ahead. 

H. B. M. 



"The Will of the Master is invincible: and is it not thy will? Thou 
<art invincible if thou so wiliest it." 

BOOK OF ITEMS. 



FRAGMENTS 



LIFE calls us more and more to greater depths of self-surrender. 
At each step it seems that we have given our all, but as we pass 
on we realize how imperfectly we have done it; and the fuller 
sacrifice must be made. At first this pictures itself to us as a 
dreary waste of effort to which we are impelled we hardly know how, 
but which holds and constrains us in the end in spite of our repeated 
evasions and long continued endeavours to escape. So the first surrender 
is more often made half sullenly, without love or enthusiasm, and in 
the deadness following so inadequate a performance we find justification 
of our worst fears. But the Compassion of the Divine Law accepts 
with calm patience whatever poor offering we make, and awaits in 
immortal sureness the day when a better comprehension will reap a 
finer harvest. For Life, the great Teacher, graves deep her lessons in 
the events and circumstances of each existence, and in time, a fuller 
knowledge is borne in upon us by accumulated pressure, which no 
denials, nor frenzy of rebellion may remove; and so a further step, 
and with each step more light, more comprehension. 

As these processes are repeated, so often repeated! through long 
periods of time, maybe, the point is reached when somewhat of the 
meaning of it all begins to dawn upon us, and with that dawning is found 
the first spring of love and moving outward of the heart. 

It is as if a man had wearily climbed until he had reached some 
high plateau and there, in the sweep of wide vistas, in invigorating air, 
and the rolling clouds of the blue heavens above him, he first glimpsed 
somewhat of the genuine zest and abundance of life, and wondered why 
he had lingered so long in the narrow and pestilential valleys beneath 
him. 

So he saith: No longer shall I be made to do this thing, but of 
myself shall I do it. And for the first time he lives, having taken life 
into his own hands. But these periods of consideration may not last 
long. Life knows only too well that we would content ourselves with 
dreams and visions, barren of fruit, and so again the spur of circum- 
stance mercifully constrains us, and we climb and labour again. Each 
attainment brings wider vision, greater distances spread out before us; 
we breathe finer, purer air; more perfect proportions and nobler views 
are ours, and withal the trained eye, the wary step, the taughtened 
muscle of the experienced mountaineer. We journey from here then 
with a species of exultation. Circumstance is not needed to spur us, 
since our own desire supplies magnificent incentive, and the ardour of 
our love, concentrated on one object, burns with steadfast flame. 



12 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

One day, in a flash of insight, it becomes clear to us that the steep 
paths we have toiled upon were no mountains of difficulty, nor barriers 
or tests of fate, but the conquest and surrender of our own natures 
which verily proved ladders by which we might climb into heaven 
when once we attempted to scale. And with that realization comes a 
sense of how poor our work has been; and a great longing to make it 
better; and from this humility a new love is born no less fervent, but 
with an added tenderness ; and with that tenderness a peace, for it too 
is self-surrender. 



When the eyes no longer are blinded by their tears; when the ears 
no longer are deafened by the din of material life, then the soul, resting 
within, may see and hear. 

When the voice has learnt the language of heaven, then the soul 
may commune with other souls. 

When the heart is emptied of self, and the personal life has been 
washed away in the tide of complete renunciation, then the soul, no 
longer a prisoner, may dwell among men. 

Thus I venture to paraphrase these beautiful portions of Light on 
the Path that their connection with what I have written may be clear. 

CAVE. 



THEOSOPHY AND CONVERSION 



THEOSOPHISTS cannot fail to be interested in the varieties 
of religious experience. The book of that title, by Professor 
William James, has been read by most of us, and will rank for 
years as one of the best introductions to the study of Theosophy. 
It is incomplete, because it draws only upon the experience of those who 
have been influenced by Christianity; but that deficiency is inevitable 
at present, partly for lack of statistics. Whatever the cause and 
interest in such things, which means demand, will remove it the fact 
remains that while religions have been compared historically and philo- 
sophically by many writers for many years past, not a single book has 
been written, so far as we are aware, which, in a spirit of fair inquiry, 
undertakes to compare their psychological effect. Even within the 
different departments of Christendom, Professor James was a pioneer. 
The field of his predecessors had been narrower and their reports had 
not been human documents. We hope for the day when someone, 
gifted with the sympathy of Professor James, will draw upon Buddhism, 
Hinduism, Mohammedanism, and upon other religions, for the experi- 
ence, past and present, which will provide the basis for a universal 
comparison. 

That that day is approaching rapidly cannot be doubted by anyone 
who is alive to the progress being made, in a theosophic sense, by even 
the most orthodox section of the churches. We find, for instance, the 
Editorial Secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 
Canon Robinson of Ripon, in a recent work on The Interpretation of 
the Character of Christ to Non-Christian Races: An Apology for Chris- 
tian Missions (Longmans & Co., London), speaking of "the increasing 
recognition of the measure of truth which is common to Christianity 
and to all other great religions of the world" ; and of missionaries them- 
selves as "coming more and more to understand that the Church of 
Christ is not an enclosure within which alone truth is to be found, and 
beyond the limits of which there is nothing but falsehood and error, 
but that it is rather a focus and centre of attraction toward which, drawn 
by its centripetal force, all that is good and true and helpful in other 
religions must sooner or later tend." For Christ Himself, for the living 
Master, an attitude such as that, after all these centuries of intolerance, 
must be a source of infinite joy. It is proof that His cause is triumph- 
ing, and that those who in sincerity have sought to serve Him, but 
who, too often, have stood in His way, are being saved at last by their 
good intention. Prejudice and intellectual arrogance are barriers very 
difficult to overcome. To have broken them by force and that could 



- 



14 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

have been done would have shattered the narrow foundation upon 
which Christianity, exoterically, has stood. It was best to leave the 
superstructure alone, and, little by little, to broaden and deepen the 
foundation which the minds and passions of men had fashioned. It 
has been the work of what must have seemed like ages; and it is not 
finished yet. But marvellous progress has been made, and while, doubt- 
less, the success achieved has been due primarily to the unceasing 
labour of Christ and of those who are consciously His companions and 
disciples, we can afford now to recognize the devotion of those who, 
although ignorant and bigoted, have in any case served Him with their 
undying love. Such love leads at last to wisdom ; and it is that love which, 
by slow degrees, is transforming those who have it and there are mis- 
sionaries among them into a nearer likeness to Him; and which, 
therefore, is giving them more of the understanding and sympathy and 
splendour of vision which are as the breath of His life. Stated differ- 
ently, it is the love with which He has been served, even by the ignorant 
and bigoted, which has supplied Him with much of the material for 
the slow but steady broadening of Christian foundations. 

That that work is not yet completed is the reason why the science 
of comparative religious psychology is studied to-day by Theosophists 
only not, of course, confining that term to members of the Theosophical 
Society. Another ten years, perhaps, will give us a book, similar to 
that by Professor James, but including the experiences of "J ews > Turks, 
infidels, and heretics." 

Meanwhile, however, it is well to be thankful for what we have, 
and for what we are receiving, a recent noteworthy addition being a 
treatise by Harold Begbie, published in London under the title Broken 
Earthen-Ware, and in this country (Fleming H. Revell Co.) as Twice- 
Born Men: A Clinic in Regeneration (A Footnote in Narrative to 
Professor William James's "The Varieties of Religious Experience"}. 
Mr. Begbie writes as an open-minded recorder of facts. He does not 
attempt to persuade ; and he does not argue, except to point out that the 
phenomena he describes are in no sense paralleled by the phenomena 
of hypnotism. He tells us of religious conversions, by which, in the 
words of Professor James, a self hitherto divided, and consciously 
wrong, inferior, and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, 
superior, and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious 
realities. He gives the intimate personal history of numbers of such 
cases, which came under his own observation, and declares that con- 
version is the only means by which a radically bad person can be 
changed into a radically good person. 

Hypnotism cannot do this. Hypnotism, after many weeks of opera- 
tion, can cure some men of one or another vice. It can cure some men 
of drunkenness; but in that case, so far as our own observation serves 
us, the insobriety of conduct becomes accentuated in some insobriety 



THEOSOPHY AND CONVERSION 15. 

of the mind. In the same way, some physical impediment, removed by 
hypnotism, is driven, not out, but in, and becomes active as a corre- 
sponding peculiarity of the patient's mental processes. The sufferer 
himself is not aware of this; neither, presumably, is the hypnotist; 
but an unbiased observer is. 

Hypnotism, therefore, involves serious penalties, and is very limited 
in its scope. Its most ardent champion would not claim for it that, in 
the twinkling of an eye, it can so alter the character of a man that he 
not only then and there stands free from tyrannical passions, but is 
filled with a great enthusiasm for righteousness, and feels "as if he 
had fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of Paradise." Only con- 
version can do that. And if anyone doubts that conversion can do it, 
let him read Mr. Begbie's record of Twice-Born Men. From among 
the cases he chronicles, two examples will suffice. They are typical. 

The first is the case of the man who described himself, later, as 
the "Tight Handful." The father of this man was a soldier, who had 
served at Balaclava, and who was steady, sober, and self-respecting. 
After leaving the army, he became Police Inspector at Charing Cross 
Station in London. The man's mother was a hard-working woman, as 
steady and sober as her husband, devoted to her children, and their 
sole support after the father's death. This child of hers, the Handful, 
joined the army as a drummer-boy at the age of fourteen. At fifteen 
he went to Ireland; at sixteen he was in India. By this time he was 
swearing, smoking, drinking, and fighting "like a man." But he had 
qualities. He was smarter and quicker than the average; stronger, 
better set-up, able to carry more liquor without detection; a first-class 
shot. He enjoyed a quarrel, and studied the Queen's Regulations in 
order to pick one. He became "a barrack-room lawyer." He made 
sure of his ground, and then, as he said, "raised hell." 

While in India, he fell in with a corps of the Salvation Army. He 
became conscious of a call. He used to go down to the services and 
prayer-meetings, always in a state of liquor, sometimes very drunk, 
and "chuck out" those of the worshippers who failed to reach the 
standard of that which he deemed a seemly religious propriety. In 
barrack-room and canteen, he defended the Army, pot in hand, with a 
crackle of oaths. Religion provided him with a new excuse for argu- 
ment and quarrel. It did not affect his conduct in the least. 

He was made a corporal, and when he left India was well on his 
way to become lance-sergeant. He was a useful soldier, but it was 
truly said of him that he had got "the devil of a temper." After his 
return to England, this temper, and the drinking which accompanied 
it, obtained an increasingly strong hold over him. He fought with the 
police and was reduced to the ranks. Nothing mattered to him now. 
He had thrown away his chances. Twice he came near to murder. 
Finally he left the service. His colonel appealed to him, argued with 



16 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

him, to stay on and earn a pension. He not only resisted these appeals, 
but brought a charge against the regiment concerning his kit. The 
colonel drew his own check for six pounds, and gave it to the ex-soldier, 
with apologies. In spite of this, the Handful left his regiment in a 
blaze of indignation. 

He became a door-keeper at a public-house (a saloon). In a sin- 
gle month he had made five appearances before his master for being 
drunk on duty. Then he was dismissed. Next, he married. His wife 
was a little, pale, soft-voiced, delicate girl. Her meekness became the 
trial of his life. His temper grew worse. He was dismissed from 
position after position. More and more his poor little wife "got on his 
nerves." When the mood seized him, he would pull her out of bed, 
and drive her, and the child which had been born to them, into the 
cellar or out into the streets. His wife never complained of his drunk- 
enness or of his idleness ; never replied to his taunts ; never reproached 
him with the suffering which he brought upon her and their child. 
She drove him almost insane with rage. But he never once laid hands 
upon her. His method was to threaten, again and again, with eyes full 
of hate, to murder her. Next to his wife, their child exasperated him 
more than any other thing. He simply longed to kill it. He cursed it; 
he set his teeth, and stood over it with hands trembling with a passion 
of desire to throttle it. 

This state of things lasted for three years. The man's wife was 
a Christian. All through those three years of horror, she continued to 
pray for the reformation of her husband. But there were times when 
the burden was too great for her. Twice she attempted to commit 
suicide. 

Her husband realized at last that he would infallibly kill the woman. 
He became afraid of himself. One night, after a worse disturbance 
than usual at home, he went out into the streets and passed a hall of 
the Salvation Army. The sudden impulse to enter took possession of 
him. After listening to the service and to an appeal to those present 
to repent and confess their sins, the Handful went forward and kneeled 
at the penitent form. He was asked if he felt that he had been saved. 
His reply was, "I am the same as I came in." He went home and 
drove his wife into the coal-cellar. He was worse than ever after this 
effort to be saved. 

Once again he turned for help to the Salvation Army; again he 
did the difficult thing of going publicly to the penitent form, and once 
again he experienced no relief. 

He was conscious, in the words of Professor James, of being 
wrong, inferior, and unhappy. He wished to become right, superior, 
and happy. Conversion having failed, he tried more beer. Drink 
helped him to resolve that what he needed was adventure. He decided 
to drive his wife and child out of the house forever; to sell his furni- 



THEOSOPHY AND CONVERSION 17 

ture; to leave London, and to become a wanderer for his own pleasure. 
So he drove his wife and child away. When they were gone, he found 
that she had left for him, on the mantelpiece, most of the money for 
the rent. Such meekness was infuriating, but it made him think; it 
made him again wish that he could be converted. 

At this time he was working as a guard on the Twopenny Tube, 
the Subway of London. On his first journey that day he heard a 
voice. "He tells you quite calmly, and with a conviction nothing can 
shake, that as distinctly as ever he heard sound in his life, he heard that 
morning a voice, which said to him : 'It is your fault and not God's, 
that you can not be saved ; you won't trust. 1 " 

As Mr. Begbie says, "it really does not signify whether we call 
it a struggle between two worlds or between the higher and the lower 
natures, whether it is the immense conflict of a Hamlet or the effort 
of a clerk to be more industrious and honest at his duties" the experi- 
ence is essentially the same; the effort to surrender one's own will to 
a better will, the necessity of losing one's life in order to save it, of 
yielding to some greater love and deeper wisdom. Dimly, vaguely, this 
man knew that he had to surrender himself to Christ. He surrendered. 

Directly he had surrendered, following the hearing of the voice, 
he became aware of an extraordinary peace. The effect was instanta- 
neous. It was as if a typhoon had dropped suddenly to the stillness of 
a lake. And in this peace he heard, not another voice, not some one 
from outside, or the voice of his own soul, speaking to his personal 
consciousness, but the echo in his mind of words which he had heard 
long ago without understanding them "he that cometh unto Me I will 
in no wise cast out." 

These words repeated themselves incessantly, so that while the 
train roared through the darkness, he was aware of nothing else. They 
filled him with an indescribable joy. He knew that he was saved. 

The effect of this experience was noticed at once by others. At 
the end of that trip, or in less than ten minutes, he found himself the 
center of a group of his mates asking him what had happened: his 
appearance was so changed. The over-mastering passion for drink 
which had ruled him like a tyrant, the rage and resentment which had 
made him a demon, and the hatred of life which had corroded him 
vanished, and passed out of his life as if they had never been there. 

In a few days this man had found his wife, and had told her his 
story. They agreed to begin life again. They joined the Salvation 
Army. That, says Mr. Begbie, was six years ago. During those six 
years this man has worked enthusiastically for the Army without pay 
of any kind. He is sober, industrious, and self-controlled. His happi- 
ness is infectious. He loves his home, and confesses, with a smile, that 
he has learned even to put up with a baby! 

Could legislation of any conceivable kind have saved this man from 



i8 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

his temper, or have transformed his home from a place of torment to 
a place of peace? Science would have condemned him as hopeless and 
incurable. Religion is the only power that could effect so miraculous 
a change the religion, not of habit, but of conscious communion with 
the divine. 

The case of the Handful is not by any means the most remarkable 
which Mr. Begbie records. The man had lost control over himself to 
the point which verges on insanity. But he was not vile. Another 
man, Burrup by name, "The Lowest of the Low," was unspeakably 
vile. Of the twelve years preceding this man's conversion, he had 
passed nine in prison. The remaining three years he had spent in the 
most degraded license infamous, friendless, despised by thieves and 
murderers. He began to wonder if he could be decent. He knew a 
man called the Puncher, at one time a prize-fighter, who, from having 
been a notorious crook, had become a Salvationist. "I had watched 
the Puncher's life," Burrup said afterwards ; "I had seen it running 
clean and straight; and I resolved all of a sudden that if God could do 
such a miracle as that, I would have a cut at it too." As Mr. Begbie 
says, the desire was the miracle. It was a movement of the soul. 
Whatever the cause of his awakening, he desired to be better. And he 
did not sit still; he acted. He went straight to a hall of the Salvation 
Army, and, after the prayers and hymns, marched to the platform, knelt 
down at the penitent form, and asked God for mercy. 

That same instant, the past dropped from him like a ragged 
garment. He was conscious of a great cleansing. Dumb and breath- 
less, he knelt with his face in his hands, aware only of the radiance, 
the peace, and the joy. He did not think "I am forgiven," or "I am 
saved"; he only knew vividly, and yet in a state of dream, that he was 
at last perfectly happy. And when he came out of his dream, what he 
said was: "I have been given a second chance." 

It is long since he was converted, and to-day, we are told Burrup's 
home is one of the brightest and happiest in London. Like the Handful, 
he gives time and money and work to the Army, earning his own living 
in outside employment. 

Are such cases peculiar to Christianity? They are not. People 
born in other parts of the world are converted from lives as bad as 
those we have described, to active devotion and self-sacrifice, as Bud- 
dhists, Hindus or Mohammedans. A history of the Theosophical 
Society would contain many instances of conversion. The writer knows 
of one case in which a young man, of some education, was converted 
from what he has described as an utterly selfish, aimless and futile 
existence, unintelligently irreligious, to a life of hard work for the 
Society, simply as the result of seeing the word Theosophy placarded 
on a wall. He had never heard of Theosophy before; knew nothing 
about it: but as he gazed at that placard, he knew that he had met 



THEOSOPHY AND CONVERSION 19 

his fate, that this thing was his was himself. He continued his walk 
only to telegraph for books, and then returned home to surrender some 
pleasure he had intended to give himself, feeling (and this was the real 
proof of his conversion) that it would not now be right for him to 
inconvenience his family as his hour-dead selfishness had sanctioned. 

Conversion, then, is a world-wide phenomenon. What is its 
explanation? Mr. Begbie, in despair, uses the word "miracle." But 
perhaps his use of it would be like our own as expressing the action 
of some spiritual and divine power, greater than all the powers of the 
material world. The soul is the real man, and the soul, in this life, 
reaps what it has sown in an immemorial past. We bring with us our 
qualities and the defects of those qualities, all of our own making. 
Life is a school a school for souls. Up to a certain point in our 
career, we may exhibit a residue of vileness, or, to use other terms, we 
may be working our way through a layer of accumulated inertia or 
vice: some lesson to be learned; some defect to be overcome. But 
"never judge human nature on its lowest level." Granted that a man 
really is human, and that his soul has not wholly left him, there is 
always a chance that it will struggle through and conquer. The prayers 
of others, being spiritual potencies, will be of enormous' help. But they 
will be ineffective, at least in that especial direction, unless the soul 
itself, from within, has succeeded in reaching the heart of the man, if 
only for an instant. To break through the shell of the personality; to 
enter and to turn the heart : that is the purpose of the soul. When the 
pent-up evil has expended itself, and on the supposition that the entire 
nature has not become tainted and corrupt, it needs but a touch from 
without to precipitate the new birth, the birth from above. 

And let us remember in this connection that vice is merely the 
outcome of misdirected energy. Drunkenness is an effort to escape 
from the monotony of the habitual consciousness. There is more chance 
for the vicious man than for those who are lukewarm and neither cold 
nor hot. There is more chance for the drunkard than for those who 
lack even the sense to be weary of their own limitations. Energy 
misdirected can be redirected. But where there is no energy there is 
nothing to affect. Some men, as the result of past achievements, are 
born both good and powerful. But it is not surprising that many of 
the most active workers in religion (St. Augustine among them) have 
been those whose conversion has been unexpected and astonishing. 

Many years ago, at Adyar, it is said that one of the teachers of 
wisdom was asked who, among the students of that period, was the most 
advanced spiritually. The Brother surprised his questioners by naming 
a man who was a drunkard, saying that when he had overcome that 
one bad habit, he would forge ahead of them all. 

It would be a mistake however, to regard conversion as implying 
always a revulsion from some extreme of evil. This is very clearly 



20 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

shown by Mr. Henry W. Clark in his recent work on Laws of the Inner 
Kingdom (Fleming H. Revell Co.) a work of profound insight and 
significance. In language strictly orthodox, but in a spirit purely theo- 
sophical, Mr. Clark discusses such questions as "Partial Discipleship," 
"The Transformation of Experience," "Three Kinds of Discipleship," 
"The Christ in the Christian," and also "Paul's Conception of Conver- 
sion" bringing out under this last head, that when St. Paul told his 
readers to present themselves unto God "as alive from the dead," he 
was urging upon all who wish to be religious the need for a very 
definite and positive abandonment of themselves. No one can afford 
to put on religion as a man puts on his overcoat. "Men will scarcely take 
our religion seriously so long as we do not take it very seriously our- 
selves." A real experience there must be, and something must be gone 
through, before we are entitled to label ourselves with the Christian or 
with any other religious name. Further, as Mr. Clark says, a man is 
always, however outward appearances may disguise the fact, getting 
either better or worse, not necessarily in the things he does, but in the 
thing he is. . . . Even the young whose lives have been morally 
sheltered, round whom an atmosphere of spirituality may have been 
wrapped from their earliest days, must pass over from a spiritual indefi- 
niteness and indeterminateness to a positive spiritual culture. . . . It is 
not merely a matter of emphasizing something which we slurred over too 
negligently before. It is a definite acceptance of a definite ideal, and 
a definite bending of the whole nature to its quest. 

At that point, Mr. Clark makes a statement which, until thoroughly 
understood, will suggest one of the most repellent features of material- 
istic religion dependence upon a Deity entirely separate from ourselves, 
upon an extra-cosmic and anthropomorphic God. A mystic, whether 
Christian or other, revolts against that conception. He knows that 
instead of being by nature wholly vile, he is by nature essentially united 
with all that is divine in the universe and beyond it. 

Mr. Clark says that we must pass from spiritual indeterminateness 
to a positive spiritual culture, but that the change is not a matter of self- 
improvement; it is a matter of surrender (reminding us of the Hand- 
ful's "You won't trust"). 

"What you have now to do is not to work upon yourself, with all 
kinds of moral processes and all kinds of moral machinery, in an attempt 
to create the new life, the new self, which you have found that you need. 
What you have to do is to put your nature, emptied of all effort except 
the effort to submit, into the grip of God's, so that you may get a new 
will derived from God's will, new impulses born out of the impulses 
that dominate God Himself, a veritable new soul, so to say, that is the 
offspring of the very spirit of God." 

But then, within a page or two, he explains at least for those 



THEOSOPHY AND CONVERSION 21 

who have ears with which to hear: and if some are without ears, it is 
not his fault. 

"The secret consists not simply in letting what is in us grow, but in 
an identification of ourselves with God. The divine within us needs to 
be enfolded by the divine without us in order to be matured. Once again 
we have to present ourselves to God. In Him we must be lost, if the 
true self in us is ever to be found." 

It is the mystical theology of the Gita; the practical mysticism of all 
the saints. "By this knowledge thou shalt see all things and creatures 
whatsoever in thyself and then in Me. ... I am the Self which is 
seated in the hearts of all beings. ... I established this whole 
universe with a single portion of Myself, and remain separate." And 
Krishna is echoed by St. Catherine of Siena. Those who truly love 
Him (as Logos), she was told, "are another Myself, inasmuch as they 
have lost and denied their own will, and are clothed with Mine, are 
united to Mine, are conformed to Mine." Jacob Boehme too (in The 
Super-Sensual Life) : "When thou art quiet or silent, then thou art 
That which God was before nature and creature, and whereof He made 
thy nature and creature; then thou hearest and seest with That where- 
with God saw and heard in thee before thy own willing, seeing, and 
hearing began." 

There is identity; the separateness is merely an illusion but an 
illusion so real that the purpose of evolution itself may be described as 
an effort to overcome it. Of ourselves we can do nothing; of ourselves 
we are incapable of virtue, incapable of conquest, incapable of love. 
For the Theosophist as for the Christian that is the first lesson. It is 
the lesson of humility. And it is a lesson not easily learned. We cling 
with pathetic vanity to our intelligence, to our "strong will" or to our 
modesty; and to the belief that our personalities, in spite of manifest 
defects, are in some way sufficient, if not superior. All of that must go. 
"Self-preoccupation, self-broodings, self-interest, self-love" all must go. 
The Self must conquer the self. The self must surrender to the Self. 
We must learn to live in the Eternal. "Not till the whole personality 
of the man is dissolved and melted . . . not until the whole nature 
has yielded and become subject unto its Higher Self can the bloom 
open. . . . Look for the Warrior, and let him fight in thee. Take 
his orders for battle, and obey them. Obey him, not as though he were 
a general, but as though he were thyself, and his spoken words were 
the utterance of thy secret desires ; for he is thyself, yet infinitely 
wiser and stronger than thyself." 

Describe it as you choose there must be surrender of the personal 
will, to someone or to something which, at first and for many a long 
day, will seem to be separate from ourselves. Alexander MacLaren 



22 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

did not speak the language of Light on the Path, yet, to this extent, he 
taught the same doctrine: 

"The one misery of man is self-will, the one secret of blessedness 
is the conquest over our own wills. To yield them up to God is rest 
and peace. What disturbs us in this world is not 'trouble,' but our 
opposition to trouble. The true source of all that frets and irritates, 
and wears away our lives, is not in external things, but in the resistance 
of our wills to the will of God expressed by external things." 

Yet, though we speak of surrender, just as we speak of self-sacrifice, 
the disciple knows nothing of either. For him the voice of the Master 
is the voice of the Higher Self, because he knows them to be the same. 
And he thinks no more of surrender. Ambition, the desire of comfort, 
the desire for sensation, the hunger for growth one and all are for- 
gotten. His sole desire in life, the passion of his heart, is to forestall 
his Master's wishes; to give that Master more and ever greater power 
over and in and through himself. . . . Can one of us say that we 
do not need to be converted? Years ago or yesterday we may have 
known some turning of the heart which brought us insight and a new 
and wonderful peace. But should we rest content with that? Should 
conversion be regarded as final? "Every ultimate fact is but the first 
of a new series." Conversion should lead to Initiation; and of Initia- 
tions there are many. Wherever we stand, there are greater heights of 
service to be conquered. Theosophy sets no boundary to human attain- 
ment. It says, as Christ said, and still says to His disciples, Be ye 
perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. And Theoso- 
phists believe that it is our duty, no matter how blunderingly, to try, 
ever to keep trying; and that, with Eternity before us, if we begin now 
there should be time for success. T. 



'Every moment brings the power to live it: 
Every duty brings the power to do it: 
Every ideal brings the power to manifest it." 

BOOK OF ITEMS. 



THE THREE DESIRES 



THE first three of the numbered rules of Light on the Path must 
appear somewhat of an unequal character to bracket together. 
The sense in which they follow each other is purely spiritual. 
Ambition is the highest point of personal activity reached by the 
mind, and there is something noble in it, even to an occultist. Having 
conquered the desire to stand above his fellows, the restless aspirant, in 
seeking what his personal desires are, finds the thirst for life stands 
next in his way. For all that are ordinarily classed as desires have long 
since been subjugated, passed by, or forgotten, before this pitched battle 
of the soul is begun. The desire for life is entirely a desire of the 
spirit, not mental at all; and in facing it a man begins to face his own 
soul. But very few have even attempted to face it ; still fewer can guess 
at all at its meaning. 

The connection between ambition and the desire of life is of this 
kind. Men are seldom really ambitious in whom the animal passions 
are strong. What is taken for ambition in men of powerful physique 
is more often merely the exercise of great energy in order to obtain full 
gratification of all physical desires. Ambition pure and simple is the 
struggle of the mind upwards, the exercise of a native intellectual force 
which lifts a man altogether above his peers. To rise to be pre-eminent 
in some special manner, in some department of art, science, or thought, 
is the keenest longing of delicate and highly-tuned minds. It is quite a 
different thing from the thirst for knowledge which makes of a man a 
student always a learner to the end, however great he may become. 
Ambition is born of no love for anything for its own sake, but purely 
for the sake of oneself. "It is I that will know, I that will rise, and by 
my own power." 

"Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition; 
By that sin fell the angels." 

The place-seeking for which the word was originally used, differs 
in degree, not in kind, from that more abstract meaning now generally 
attached to it. A poet is considered ambitious when he writes for fame. 
It is true; so he is. He may not be seeking a place at court, but he is 
certainly seeking the highest place he knows of. Is it conceivable that 
any great author could really be anonymous, and remain so? The 
human mind revolts against the theory of the Baconian authorship of 
Shakespeare's works, not only because it deprives the world of a splendid 

Reprinted from Lucifer, Vol. I, page 476. 

3 



24 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

figure, but also because it makes of Bacon a monster, unlike all other 
human beings. To the ordinary intelligence it is inconceivable that a 
man should hide his light in this purposeless manner. Yet it is con- 
ceivable to an occultist that a great poet might be inspired by one 
greater than himself, who would stand back entirely from the world and 
all contact with it. This inspirer would not only have conquered 
ambition but also the abstract desire for life, before he could work 
vicariously to so great an extent. For he would part with his work 
forever when once it had gone to the world; it would never be his. 
A person who can imagine making no claim on the world, neither 
desiring to take pleasure from it nor to give pleasure to it, can dimly 
apprehend the condition which the occultist has reached when he no 
longer desires to live. Do not suppose this to mean that he neither 
takes nor gives pleasure; he does both, as also he lives. A great man, 
full of work and thought, eats his food with pleasure; he does not 
dwell on the prospect of it, and linger over the memory, like the glut- 
tonous child, or the gourmand pure and simple. This is a very material 
image, yet sometimes these simple illustrations serve to help the mind 
more than any others. It is easy to see, from this analogy, that an 
advanced occultist who has work in the world may be perfectly free 
from the desires which would make him a part of it, and yet may take 
its pleasures and give them back with interest. He is enabled to 
give more pleasure than he takes, because he is incapable of fear 
or disappointment. He has no dread of death, nor of that which 
is called annihilation. He rests on the waters of life, submerged and 
sleeping, or above them and conscious, indifferently. He cannot feel 
disappointment, because although pleasure is to him intensely vivid and 
keen, it is the same to him whether he enjoys it himself or whether 
another enjoys it. It is pleasure, pure and simple, untarnished by per- 
sonal craving or desire. So with regard to what occultists call "prog- 
ress" the advance from stage to stage of knowledge. In a school of 
any sort in the external world emulation is the great spur to progress. 
The occultist, on the contrary, is incapable of taking a single step until 
he has acquired the faculty of realising progress as an abstract fact. 
Someone must draw nearer to the Divine in every moment of life; there 
must always be progress. But the disciple who desires that he should 
be the one to advance in the next moment, may lay aside all hope of it. 
Neither should he be conscious of preferring progress for another or 
of any kind of a vicarious sacrifice. Such ideas are in a certain sense 
unselfish, but they are essentially characteristic of the world in which 
separateness exists, and form is regarded as having a value of its own. 
The shape of a man is as much an eidolon as though no spark of divinity 
inhabited it; at any moment that spark may desert the particular shape, 
and we are left with a substantial shadow of the man we knew. It is 
in vain, after the first step in occultism has been taken, that the mind 



THE THREE DESIRES 25 

clings to the old beliefs and certainties. Time and space are known to 
be non-existent, and are only regarded as existing in practical life for 
the sake of convenience. So with the separation of the divine-human 
spirit into the multitudes of men on the earth. Roses have their own 
colours, and lilies theirs; none can tell why this is when the same sun, 
the same light, gives the colour to each. Nature is indivisible. She 
clothes the earth, and when that clothing is torn away, she bides her time 
and reclothes it again when there is no more interference with her. 
Encircling the earth like an atmosphere, she keeps it always glowing and 
green, moistened and sun-lit. The spirit of man encompasses the earth 
like a fiery spirit, living on Nature, devouring her, sometimes being 
devoured by her, but always in the mass remaining more ethereal and 
sublime than she is. In the individual, man is conscious of the vast 
superiority of Nature; but when once he becomes conscious that he is 
part of an invisible and indestructible whole, he knows also that the whole 
of which he is part stands above Nature. The starry sky is a terrible 
sight to a man who is just selfless enough to be aware of his own little- 
ness and unimportance as an individual; it almost crushes him. But 
let him once touch on the power which comes from knowing himself as 
a part of the human spirit, and nothing can crush him by its greatness. 
For if the wheels of the chariot of the enemy pass over his body, he 
forgets that it is his body, and rises again to fight among the crowd of 
his own army. But this state can never be reached, nor even approached, 
until the last of the three desires is conquered, as well as the first. They 
must be apprehended and encountered together. 

Comfort, in the language used by occultists, is a very comprehensive 
word. It is perfectly useless for a neophyte to practise discomfort or 
asceticism as do religious fanatics. He may come to prefer deprivation 
in the end, and then it has become his comfort. Homelessness is a 
condition to which the religious Brahmin pledges himself; and in the 
external religion he 'is considered to fulfill this pledge if he leaves wife 
and child, and becomes a begging wanderer, with no shelter of his own 
to return to. But all external forms of religion are forms of comfort, 
and men take vows of abstinence in the same spirit that they take pledges 
of boon companionship. The difference between these two sides of life 
is only apparent. But the homelessness which is demanded of the neo- 
phyte is a much more vital thing than this. It demands the surrender 
from him of choice or desire. Dwelling with wife or child, under the 
shelter of a family roof-tree, and fulfilling the duties of citizenship, the 
neophyte may be far more homeless, in the esoteric sense, than when he 
is a wanderer or an outcast. The first lesson in practical occultism usually 
given to a pledged disciple is that of fulfilling the duties immediately to 
hand with the same subtle mixture of enthusiasm and indifference as the 
neophyte would imagine himself able to feel when he had grown to the 
size of a ruler of worlds and a designer of destinies. This rule is to be 



26 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

found in the Gospels and in the Bhagavad Gita. The immediate work, 
whatever it may be, has the abstract claim of duty, and its relative 
importance or non-importance is not to be considered at all. This law 
can never be obeyed until all desire of comfort is forever destroyed. 
The ceaseless assertions and reassertions of the personal self must be 
left behind forever. They belong as completely to the character of this 
world as does the desire to have a certain balance at the bank, or to 
retain the affections of a loved person. They are equally subject to the 
change which is characteristic of this world; indeed, they are even more 
so, for what the neophyte does by becoming a neophyte is simply to enter 
a forcing-house. Change, disillusionment, disheartenment, despair will 
crowd upon him by invitation ; for his wish is to learn his lessons quickly. 
And as he turns these evils out they will probably be replaced by others 
worse than themselves a passionate longing for separate life, for sen- 
sation, for the consciousness of growth in his own self, will rush in upon 
him and sweep over the frail barriers which he has raised. And no 
such barriers as asceticism, as renunciation, nothing indeed which is 
negative, will stand for a single moment against this powerful tide of 
feeling. The only barrier is built up of new desires. For it is per- 
fectly useless for the neophyte to imagine he can get beyond the region 
of desires. He cannot; he is still a man. Nature must bring forth 
flowers while she is still Nature, and the human spirit would lose its 
hold on this form of existence altogether did it not continue to desire. 
The individual man cannot wrench himself instantly out of that life of 
which he is an essential part. He can only change his position in it. 
The man whose intellectual life dominates his animal life, changes his 
position; but he is still in the dominion of desire. The disciple who 
believes it possible to become selfless in a single effort, will find himself 
flung into a bottomless pit as the consequence of his rash endeavour. 
Seize upon a new order of desires, purer, wider, nobler; and so plant 
your foot upon the ladder firmly. It is only on the last and topmost 
rung of the ladder, at the very entrance of Divine or Mahatmic life, that 
it is possible to hold fast to that which has neither substance nor 
existence. 

The first part of Light on the Path is like a chord in music; the 
notes have to be struck together though they must be touched separately. 
Study and seize hold of the new desire before you have thrust out the 
old ones ; otherwise in the storm you will be lost. Man while he is man 
has substance and needs some step to stand on, some idea to cling to. 
But let it be the least possible. Learn as the acrobat learns, slowly and 
with care, to become more independent. Before you attempt to cast out 
the devil of ambition the desire of something, however fine and elevated, 
outside of yourself seize on the desire to find the light of the world 
within yourself. Before you attempt to cast out the desire of conscious 
life, learn to look to the unattainable or in other language to that which 



THE THREE DESIRES 27 

you know you can only reach in unconsciousness. In knowing that your 
aim is of this lofty character, that it will never bring conscious success, 
never bring comfort to you, that it will never carry you in your own 
temporary personal self to any haven of rest or place of agreeable 
activity, you cut away all the force and power of the desires of the lower 
astral nature. For what avail is it, when these facts have once been 
realised, to desire separateness, sensation or growth? 

The armour of the warrior who rises to fight for you in the battle 
depicted in the second part of Light on the Path, is like the shirt of the 
happy man in the old story. The king was to be cured of all his ills by 
sleeping in this shirt ; but when the one happy man in his kingdom was 
found, he was a beggar, without care, without anxiety and shirtless. 
So with the divine warrior. None can take his armour and use it, for he 
has none. The king could never find happiness like that of the careless 
beggar. The man of the world, however fine and cultivated he may be, 
is hampered by a thousand thoughts and feelings which have to be cast 
aside before he can even stand on the threshold of occultism. And, be it 
observed, he is chiefly handicapped by the armour he wears which isolates 
him. He has personal pride, personal respect. These things must die 
out as the personality recedes. The process described in the first part of 
Light on the Path, is one which takes off that shell, or armour, and casts 
it aside forever. Then the warrior arises, armourless, defenceless, 
offenceless, identified with the afflicters and the afflicted, the angered and 
the one that angers; fighting not on any side, but for the Divine, the 
highest in all. 



"It adds immeasurably to life's seriousness to remember that we 
are responsible for every touch we give to any life that falls in the 
slightest way under our influence." 

J. R. MILLER. 




I 



II 

WALT WHITMAN* 

N Sidney Lanier's journal there is this entry to the account of 
his great contemporary: 



"Whitman is poetry's butcher. Huge raw collops slashed from 
the rump of poetry, and never mind the gristle is what Whitman 
feeds our souls with. As near as I can make it out, Whitman's argu- 
ment seems to be, that, because a prairie is wide, therefore debauchery 
is admirable, and because the Mississippi is long, therefore every 
American is God." 

Only a poet can understand a poet, and when a man so genuinely 
poetic as Lanier failed utterly to appreciate the depth and breadth of 
Whitman's spirituality, it is not surprising that prosaic minds should 
hold opinions even more grotesque. Popularly, Whitman is thought 
of as an apostle of disorder, rebellious for rebellion's sake; he is said 
to teach anarchy, free-love, everything destructive to civilisation and 
morality; and his loose verse, so divergent from the verse norm, is 
called the fit expression of a lawless, barbaric, indecent nature. It is 
maintained further that his optimism has no philosophic root, but is 
the bawl of vulgar, self-complacent Americanism the vociferation of 
a crude world absorbed in materialism. 

Whitman is so far from being the product or the prophet of 
new world complacency that no foreign denouncer of American aims 
and practices is more scathing than he. In Democratic Vistas^ he 
writes thus of American conditions: 

"For my part, I would alarm and caution even the political and 
business reader, and to the utmost extent, against the prevailing 
delusion that the establishment of free political institutions, and plentiful 
intellectual smartness, with general good order, physical plenty, industry 
(desirable and precious advantages as they all are) do, of themselves, 
determine and yield to our experiment of democracy the fruitage of 
success. With such advantages at present fully, or almost fully, possessed 
the Union just issued, victorious, from the struggle with the only foes 
it need ever fear (namely, those within itself, the interior ones) and 
with unprecedented materialistic advancement society, in these States, 

* The writer is glad to acknowledge indebtedness to The Creed of Buddha. 
t 1871. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 29 

is cankered, crude, superstitious, and rotten. Political, or law-made 
society is, and private, or voluntary society, is also. In any vigor, the 
element of the moral conscience, the most important, the vertebra to 
State or man, seems to me either entirely lacking, or seriously enfeebled 
or ungrown. 

"I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, 
like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, per- 
haps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United 
States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles 
of the States are not honestly believed in (for all this hectic glow, and 
these melodramatic screamings) nor is humanity itself believed in. What 
penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spec- 
tacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. 
The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scorn- 
ful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the litterateurs 
is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, the most 
dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation 
is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false 
deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. 

"An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Wash- 
ington, who is led by the course of his employment regularly to visit 
the cities, north, south, and- west, to investigate frauds, has talked much 
with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes 
of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. 
The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all 
their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in 
corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration ; and the judiciary is 
tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non- 
respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, 
tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to 
kill time. In business (this all-devouring, modern word, business) the 
one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's ser- 
pent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is 
our magician's serpent, remaining today sole master of the field. The 
best class we show is but a mob of fashionably dressed speculators and 
vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on the 
visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors are to be 
discovered, existing crudely and going on in the background, to advance 
and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less terrible. 

"I say that our New World democracy, however great a success 
in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, 
products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial, popular intellect- 
uality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and 
in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results. In vain 
do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying 
the antique, beyond Alexander's, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. 
In vain have we annexed Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for 
Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being 
endowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, 
and then left with little or no soul. . . . 

"Shutting our eyes to the glow and grandeur of the general super- 
ficial effect, coming down to what is of the only real importance, Per- 
sonalities, and examining minutely, we question, we ask, Are there, 



30 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

indeed, men here worthy the name? Are there athletes? Are there 
perfect women, to match the generous material luxuriance? Is there 
a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are there crops of fine 
youths, and majestic old persons? Are there arts worthy freedom and 
a rich people? Is there a great moral and religious civilisation the 
only justification of a great material one? Confess that to severe eyes,, 
using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat 
Sahara appears, these cities, crowded with petty grotesques, malforma- 
tions, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, 
in shop, street, church, theatre, bar-room, official chair, are pervading 
flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity . . . with a range of 
manners or rather lack of manners (considering the advantages enjoyed) 
probably the meanest to be seen in the world." 

To suggest a cure for these unwholesome conditions is Whitman's 
task. His method of procedure is indirect. To improve national 
institutions he holds himself absolutely aloof from those institutions. 
He has no ingenious scheme of paper government to substitute for 
existing forms. He is propagandist of no eugenic or suffrage party. 
He concerns himself not at all to overthrow the powers that be. He 
does not fret at injustice and the oppression of the downtrodden. For 
Whitman is not a politician but a poet. Political and religious insti- 
tutions are not to him things imposed upon man from without by 
tyrannical power; they are entirely man made, and reflect perfectly 
man's condition. What distinguishes the poet from the politician is 
the faculty of seeing below the surface into the heart of man as the 
motive power of things; the politician thinks institutions are endowed 
with a life of their own. The reformer endeavors "by sheer force to- 
re-arrange circumstances which arise out of the forces of human nature 
itself." The poet endeavors to expunge evil from the heart of man. 
That endeavor is Whitman's. 

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions, 

But really I am neither for nor against institutions 

(What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruc- 
tion of them?) 

Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these States 
inland and seaboard 

And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large that 
dents the water, 

Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument, 

The institution of the dear love of comrades. 

The way of deliverance that Whitman points out is avowedly neither 
novel nor original. 

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are 

not original with me, 
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next fo> 

nothing. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 31 

It is the "small old path that stretches far away," and Whitman is 
one more witness for the Ancient of Days. He summons all men to 
enter upon the path of soul growth, the path of sword-pangs ("Think 
not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, 
but a sword"), the path that is a lifelong Arjuna contest between the 
spiritual nature and foes of its own household. 

As I pondered in silence, 

Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long, 

A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect, 

Terrible in beauty, age, and power, 

The genius of poets of old lands, 

As to me directing like flame its eyes, 

With finger pointing to many immortal songs, 

And menacing voice, What singest thouf it said, 

Know'st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards? 

And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles, 

The making of perfect soldiers. 

Be it so, then I answered, 

/, too, haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than 

any, 
Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance and 

retreat, victory deferred and wavering, 
(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last), the field the 

world, 

For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul, 
Lo, I, too, am come, chanting the chant of battles, 
I above all promote brave soldiers. 

The way of escape from evil WTiitman names the "Open Road." 
He sees men with hurried gait and anxious countenance travelling 
many roads, searching for happiness, and finding the grave. One 
places happiness in the gratification of sensual desire, and, by a course 
of gross indulgence, speedily brings on premature decay of the body. 
But in the search for sensations, that man may discover an unexpected 
pleasure, independent of the appetite, such as gain. A taste of new 
pleasure leads the man to sacrifice coarser delights for a gratification 
less certain, and one that demands from him prolonged exertion. He 
quits his former road; his companions see only what he loses, not the 
new pleasure. Another man has been long travelling the road toward 
wealth; unremitting effort does accumulate gold, but, here, too, grati- 
fication dulls enjoyment, and the grave ends all. This man, too, chances 
upon an unknown pleasure that is independent of wealth intellectual 
activity. He sacrifices gold for learning, and turns into a new path. 
He knows that he gains a better thing, but his friends see only the 
thing he renounces. Every road that man travels toward a goal of 
happiness requires such a sacrifice of a lower for a higher pleasure. 
The governor gives up freedom, and loads himself with responsibility 



32 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

for the pleasure of having men obey him. The artist surrenders the 
necessities of life, and feels himself rewarded by the music of flower 
bells trembling on their stems, the tumultuous harmony of the winds, 
"the lustre of the long convolvuluses." 

Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn, 
The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
And murmuring of innumerable bees. 

Yet when man has passed over the whole scale of pleasure, has refined 
away every grossness, and has raised himself from the coarse enjoy- 
ment of flesh to the esthetic delights of imagination, he has not really 
changed his condition. Pleasure is short lived, gratification palls, and 
the grave yawns. To these unhappy mortals vainly travelling on many 
roads Whitman calls aloud that they shall enter another road opening 
that moment before their feet a road that leads on beyond the inn of 
Death the road of spiritual development. 

To travel this path a man must do what he has done before, 
surrender "the dearer for the better." At each step upward the sacri- 
fice has been greater also the gain. Here the sacrifice is greatest 
and the gain greatest. A man has to renounce, "lose," himself before 
he finds the "better," the pearl of matchless lustre. Those who refuse 
to make the sacrifice know only what is surrendered, not what is won. 
As every step upward has brought on a long and hard struggle for 
the "better" treasure, so the "Open Road" is a ceaseless battle for Life 
against life. 

My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion, 
He going with me must go well armed, 

He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, 
desertions. 

Entrance to the path is possible through sympathy alone, and sym- 
pathy is the quitting of one's own standpoint and the taking of 
another's standpoint. It means that one ceases to judge others by one's 
own standard of right and wrong, and shares the standards and 
actions of others. The practice of sympathy has unexpected and 
amazing results. First, it greatly enlarges individual experience; the 
sympathetic individual has made his own the lives of those about him, 
he sees, hears, thinks, and feels with their organs, he is not one man 
but many men. 

To take the best of the farmer's farm and the rich man's elegant villa, 
and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and the fruits 
of orchards and flowers of gardens, 

To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through, 
To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you go, 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 33 

To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter them, 

to gather the love out of their hearts, 
To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave them 

behind you, 
To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for 

travelling souls. 

Participation in the experience of others overturns the solid seeming 
walls of time and space to speak of which with levity, Emerson says, 
is, in the world, a sign of insanity. 

It avails not time nor place distance avails not, 

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many 

generations hence, 

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, 
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, 
Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river and the bright 

flow, I was refreshed. 

These and all else were to me the same as they are to you, 

I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river, 

The men and women I saw were all near to me, 

Others the same others who look back on me because I looked forward 

to them. 

What is it then between us? 

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us? 
Whatever it is, it avails not distance avails not, and place avails not. 

Then along with expansion sideways, as that taking into oneself of 
the lives of others may be called, there is expansion upwards. In 
conscious striving to know one's neighbor one has unconsciously 
developed a sense of the Presence of God. (Is not this fulfillment of 
the promise implied in the words of St. John : "He that loveth not 
his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath 
not seen"?) God is no longer a theoretical Being postulated by the 
intellect. He is closer than hands or feet. He is Infinity, yet He 
dwells within one, and through Him and by Him and for Him, man 
lives. 

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass 

all the argument of the earth, 

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, 
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, 
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my 

sisters and lovers, 
And that a kelson of the creation is love, 

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, 
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God, 
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and 
about death). 



34 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Participation in the lives of men and of God develops in man a vivid 
sense of immortality. Duration after physical disintegration is not a 
speculation or theory ; man knows that he is life eternal and shall never 
see death. 

Of the terrible doubt of appearances, 

Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, 

That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, 

That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only, 

May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining 

and flowing waters, 
The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are 

(as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real something 

has yet to be known, 
(How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and 

mock me! 

How often I think neither I know, nor any mart knows aught of them) 
May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed but 

seem) as from my present point of view, and might prove (as 

of course they would) nought of what they appear, or nought 

anyhow, from entirely changed points of view; 
To me these and the like of these are curiously answered by my lovers, 

my dear friends, 
When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding 

me by the hand, 
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason 

hold not, surround us and pervade us, 
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I 

require nothing further, 
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond 

the grave, 

But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied, 
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me. 

I swear I think now that everything without exception has an eternal 

soul! 
The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have! the 

animals ! 
I swear I think there is nothing but immortality ! 

Realisation of eternal life inspires Whitman's joyous songs of welcome 
to death. This last enemy he really overcomes. He does not lead it 
a captive chained but unsubdued. He overcomes it by making it a 
friend. Death is not to him a grinning skeleton on white horse ruth- 
lessly mowing harvests of men, but, as to St. Francis, a sister. He is 
against the gruesome traditions of art in calling death "delicate," an 
epithet the suggestiveness of which brings to mind Homer's word for 
Andromache, keodei, fragrant the fragrance of incense burnt in sacri- 
fice. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 35 

Come lovely and soothing death, 

Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, 

In the day, in the night, to all, to each, 

Sooner or later delicate death. 

Praised be the fathomless universe, 

For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, 
And for love, sweet love but praise! praise! praise! 
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death. 

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, 

Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? 

Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, 

I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly. 

Approach strong deliveress, 

When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead, 

Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee, 

Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O death. 

From me to thee glad serenades, 

Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee, adornments and feastings for 

thee, 

And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting, 
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night. 

The night in silence under many a star, 

The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, 

And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veiled death, 

And the body gratefully nestling close to thee. 

Over the tree tops I float thee a song, 

Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies 

wide, 

Over the dense-packed cities all and the teeming wharves and ways, 
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O death. 

So far there is nothing new or startling in Whitman's thought. 
To come to the knowledge of God's love through loving one's neighbor 
is the world-old teaching of Buddha and of Christ. However, Whit- 
man does become startling and unintelligible to many by reason of 
complete obedience to his own precept. As Wesley took the world for 
his parish, Whitman took the universe for his neighborhood. One can 
understand the expansion of his consciousness to include his nation and 
continent. 

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, 
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, 
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, 
Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse and stuffed with the stuff that 
is fine, 



36 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest 

the same, 
A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable 

down by the Oconee I live, 
A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest 

joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth, 
A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, 

a Louisianian or Georgian, 
A boatman over lakes Or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, 

Buckeye ; 
At home on Canadian snow-shoes or up in the brush, or with fishermen 

off Newfoundland, 

At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking, 
At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan 

ranch, 
Comrade of Californians, comrade of free Northwesterners (loving 

their big proportions), 
Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and 

welcome to drink and meat, 

A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest, 
A novice, beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons, 
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, 
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, 
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest. 

One can follow him also until his sympathy embraces the experience 
of man back to the creation. 

I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over, 

My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths, 

Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and 

modern, 

Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years, 
Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun, 
Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, pow-wowing with sticks in 

the circle of obis, 

Helping the lama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols, 
Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere 

in the woods a gymnosophist, 
Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, 

minding the Koran, 
Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, 

beating the serpent-skin drum, 

Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assur- 
edly that he is divine, 
To the mass kneeling or the puritan's prayer rising, or sitting patiently 

in a pew, 
Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my 

spirit arouses me, 

Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land, 
Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 37 

But the aeons of human history are limits too strait ior this mighty- 
hearted hero. He makes his own the experiences of lower forms of 
life animals, plants, rocks, dust, nebula. 

Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me, 

Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there, 
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, 
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon. 
Long I was hugged close long and long. 

Immense have been the preparations for me, 
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me. 

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen, 
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, 
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me. 
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me, 
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it. 

For it the nebula cohered to an orb, 
The long slow strata piled to rest it on, 
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, 

Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it 
with care. 

Somewhat similar participation in the life of nature is described by 
men like Wordsworth and St. Francis. One needs only recall how 
preposterous appeared to Dr. Arnold the lines "To me the meanest 
flower that blows," etc. to know how strange this poetic sympathy 
may seem to unsympathetic minds. Yet if one considers it thought- 
fully, one will believe that the miracles recorded of St. Francis and 
others are not supernatural and incredible phenomena but the normal 
working of the law of sympathy. It was because the "little brother" 
could feel with his sisters, the birds, that he preached them a sermon; 
because he understood the wolf of Gobbio that he reconciled it and the 
townsmen. So far, then, one follows Whitman, with hesitation, perhaps, 
yet with the knowledge that Whitman is not alone in rejoicing over 
the common things of nature. Traherne, for example, thought the dust 
and stones of the highway as precious as gold. And one grows emulous 
of Whitman's imaginative vision when he writes: 

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, 
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg 

of the wren, 

And the tree-toad is a chef-d'ceuvre for the highest, 
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, 
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery. 
And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue, 
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. 



38 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

But when his sympathy proceeds from the world of nature to find life 
in the realm of man's creations, humble and prosaic as well as noble, 
the reader begins to doubt Whitman's sanity. Yet he is doing no more 
than Emerson said the true poet should do: "For, as it is dislocation 
and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, 
who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole re-attaching even 
artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight 
disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry 
see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the 
landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet 
consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great 
Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider's geometrical web. 
Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles and the gliding train 
of cars she loves like her own." These sentences from Emerson should 
make the following stanza from the "Song for Occupations" less wild and 
unreasoned. 

House-building, measuring, sawing the boards, 

Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering, tin-roofing, shingle- 
dressing, 
Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing, flagging of side-walks by 

flaggers, 

The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-kiln and brick-kiln, 
Coal-mines and all that is down there, the lamps in the darkness, echoes, 

songs, what meditations, what vast native thoughts looking through 

smutched faces, 
Iron-works, forge-fires in the mountains, or by the river-banks, men 

around feeling the melt with huge crowbars, lumps of ore, the 

due combining of ore, limestone, coal, 
The blast-furnace and the puddling-furnace, the loup-lump at the bottom 

of the melt at last, the rolling-mill, the stumpy bars of pig-iron, 

the strong, clean-shaped T-rail for railroads ; 
Oil-works, silk-works, white-lead-works, the sugar-house, steam-saws, 

the great mills and factories, 
Stone-cutting, shapely trimmings for fagades, or window or door-lintels, 

the mallet, the tooth-chisel, the jib to protect the thumb, 
The caulking-iron, the kettle of boiling vault-cement, and the fire under 

the kettle, 
The cotton-bale, the stevedore's hook, the saw and buck of the sawyer, 

the mould of the moulder, the working-knife of the butcher, the 

ice-saw, and all the work with ice, 

The works, the tools of the rigger, grappler, sail-maker, block-maker, 
Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mache, colors, brushes, brush-making, 

glazier's implements, 
The veneer and glue-pot, the confectioner's ornaments, the decanter and 

glasses, the shears and flat-iron, 
The awl and knee-strap, the pint measure and quart measure, the counter 

and stool, the writing-pen of quill or metal, the making of all sorts 

of edged tools, 
The brewery, brewing, the malt, the vats, every thing that is done by 

brewers, wine-makers, vinegar-makers, 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 39 

Leather-dressing, coach-making, boiler-making, rope-twisting, distilling, 
sign-painting, lime-burning, cotton-picking, electro-plating, electro- 
typing, stereotyping, 

Stave-machines, planing-machines, reaping-machines, ploughing-machines, 
thrashing-machines, steam wagons, 

The cart of the carman, the omnibus, the ponderous dray, 

Pyrotechny, letting off color'd fire- works at night, fancy figures and jets ; 

Beef on the butcher's stall, the slaughter-house of the butcher, the butcher 
in his killing-clothes, 

The pens of live pork, the killing-hammer, the hog-hook, the scalder's 
tub, gutting, the cutter's cleaver, the packer's maul, and the 
plenteous winter-work of pork-packing, 

Flour-works, grinding of wheat, rye, maize, rice, the barrels and the 
half and quarter barrels, the loaded barges, the high piles on 
wharves and levees, 

The men, and the work of the men, on ferries, railroads, coasters, fish- 
boats, canals; 

The hourly routine of your own or any man's life, the shop, yard, store, 
or factory, 

These shows all near you by day and night workman! whoever you 
are, your daily life! 

In that and them the heft of the heaviest in that and them far more 
than you estimated, (and far less also), 

In them realities for you and me, in them poems for you and me, 

In them, not yourself you and your soul enclose all things, regardless 
of estimation, 

In them the development good in them, all themes, possibilities, hints. 

If one ponders Whitman's last words one discovers that after all the 
thought is familiar. He merely applies the old teaching: "Whatsoever ye 
do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus" ("From Whom 
all beings come, by Whom all this is stretched forth, Him honoring, each 
by his own work, the son of man finds success"). 1 He is teaching that 
no occupation is an end in itself, but is disciplinary, Karmic, and can, 
through consecration, be opened into the way of salvation. 

The "Open Road" of ceaseless conflict against selfish aims, Thomas 
a Kempis earlier called "The Royal Road of the Holy Cross" the road 
that lies open before every man, prince or peasant, clerk or churl. A few 
sentences from the Imitation will prove the essential likeness of the two 
writers. 

Behold all is in the cross, and in dying lies all ; and there is no 
other way to life and true inward peace but the way of the holy cross 
arid of daily mortification. 

Walk where thou wilt, seek what thou wilt, and thou wilt find no 
higher way above, no safer way below, than the way of the holy cross. 

Dispose and order all things according as thou wilt and as thou 
seest; and thou wilt never find but that thou hast always something to 
suffer, either willingly or unwillingly, and so wilt thou ever find the cross. 

The cross therefore is always ready, and everywhere awaits thee. 

Thou canst not escape it, whithersoever thou runnest; for vvhither- 

1 Bha farad Gita. 



40 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

soever thou goest, thou carriest thyself with thee, and always shalt 
thou find thyself. 

Turn thyself upwards, turn thyself downwards, turn thyself with- 
out, turn thyself within thee; and everywhere thou shalt find the cross. 

If thou carry the cross willingly, it will carry thee, and bring thee 
to thy wished-for end ; thither, to wit, where there will be an end of 
suffering, though here there will not be. 

If thou fling away one cross, without doubt thou wilt find another, 
and perhaps a heavier. 

Dost thou think thou canst escape that which no mortal could ever 
avoid? What saint was ever in the world without his cross and tribu- 
lation ? 

For neither was Jesus Christ our Lord, so long as he lived, one 
single hour without the pain of his passion : It behoved, saith he, Christ 
to suffer, and to rise again from the dead, and so enter into his glory. 

And how dost thou seek another way than this royal way, which 
is the way of the holy cross? 

Whitman declares quite frankly that high courage is necessary in one 
who would travel that way. 

Listen! I will be honest with you, 

I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes, 

These are the days that must happen to you: 

You shall not heap up what is call'd riches, 

You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve, 

You but arrive at the city to which you were destin'd, you hardly settle 

yourself to satisfaction, before you are call'd by an irresistible 

call to depart. 
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who 

remain behind you, 
What beckonings of love you receive, you shall only answer with 

passionate kisses of parting, 
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach'd hands 

toward you. 

The abundant quotations must clearly prove that in Whitman all 
sense of separateness and all ambition were destroyed. His obedience 
to the earlier rules of discipleship should bring him to the later and 
more difficult rules. There should be evidence of his endeavor to "Hold 
fast to that which has neither substance nor existence." Such evidence 
is found in the poem "Passage to India." It is as unforgettable as the 
"Open Road," and carries his experience out beyond human perception 
and imagination. 

O soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me, 

Thy circumnavigation of the world begin, 

Of man, the voyage of his mind's return, 

To reason's early paradise, 

Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions, 

Again with fair creation. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 41 

O we can wait no longer! 

We too take ship, O soul! 

Joyous, we too launch out on trackless seas, 

Fearless, for unknown shores, on waves of extasy to sail, 

Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,) 

Caroling free, singing our song of God, 

Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration. 

With laugh, and many a kiss, 

(Let others deprecate, let others weep for sin, remorse, humiliation,) 

O soul, thou pleasest me, I thee. 

Ah, more than any priest, O soul, we too believe in God, 
But with the mystery of God we dare not dally. 

soul, thou pleasest me, I thee, 

Sailing these seas or on the hills, or waking in the night, 

Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time, and Space, and Death, like waters 

flowing, 

Bear me, indeed, as through the regions infinite, 
Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, lave me all over, 
Bathe me, O God, in thee, mounting to thee, 

1 and my soul to range in range of thee. 

Thou transcendent, 
Nameless, the fibre and the breath, 

Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them, 
Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving, 
Thou moral, spiritual fountain affection's source thou reservoir, 
(O pensive soul of me O thirst unsatisfied waitest not there? 
Waitest not haply for us somewhere there the Comrade perfect?) 
Thou pulse thou motive of the stars, suns, systems, 
That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious, 
Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space, 

How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if out of 
myself, 

1 could not launch, to those, superior universes ? 

Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God, 

At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, 

But that I, turning, call to thee, O soul, thou actual Me, 

And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs, 

Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death, 

And fillest, swellest full, the vastnesses of Space. 

Greater than stars or suns, 

Bounding, O soul, thou journeyest forth ; 

What love than thine and ours could wider amplify? 

What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours, O soul? 

What dreams of the ideal ? what plans of purity, perfection, strength ? 

What cheerful willingness for others' sake to give up all ? 

For others' sake to suffer all? 

Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev'd, 
The seas all cross'd, weather'd the capes, the voyage done, 



42 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain'd, 

As fill'd with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found, 

The Younger melts in fondness in his arms. 

Passage to more than India! 

Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights? 
O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those? 
Disportest thou on waters such as those? 
Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas? 
Then have thy bent unleash'd. 

Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas ! 

Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems ! 

You, strew'd with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach'd you. 

Passage to more than India ! 

O secret of the earth and sky! 

Of you, O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers! 

Of you, O woods and fields! Of you, strong mountains of my land! 

Of you, O prairies ! Of you, gray rocks ! 

O morning red ! O clouds ! O rain and snows ! 

O day and night, passage to you! 

-O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter! 
Passage to you! 

Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins! 

Away, O soul ! hoist instantly the anchor ! 

Cut the hawsers, haul out, shake out every sail! 

Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough? 

Have we not grovell'd here long enough, eating and drinking like mere 

brutes ? 
Have we not darken'd and dazed ourselves with books long enough? 

Sail forth steer for the deep waters only, 
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me, 
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, 
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. 

O my brave soul! 

O farther, farther sail! 

O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God? 

O farther, farther, farther sail ! 

Such is the reform Whitman proposes to America, of corrupt 
government, material aims, and savage manners. He withholds his 
hands from existing institutions. He clamors for no extension of 
suffrage, no remission of taxes or tribute. He preaches no kingdom of 
this world. He is the prophet of a spiritual democracy, a Kingdom that 
is inward, Heaven. The rebellion he incites is against the tyrannical 
power of Satan ; his comrades are indeed revolutionists, valiant men who 
are turning from darkness unto light. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 43 

One should, perhaps, suggest outward practices that result from this 
inward life. Whitman censured the manners of America the meanest 
in the world. Manners, we Americans are often fond of saying, are 
superficial, and give no true impression of the man. How different is 
Emerson's estimate: 

"The infallible index of true progress is found in the tone man 
takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books, nor 
actions, nor talents, nor all together can hinder him from being defer- 
ential to a higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his home 
in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the 
build, shall I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let 
him brave it out how he will." Is not our national disregard of courtesy 
the surface blotch of a deep disease? We are blind to spiritual realities; 
we have little faith in the moral equality of man, "the happiness that 
is to be found by virtue in all conditions." 

Hence the national delusions, wealth and education. Accumulation, 
financial or intellectual, that wraps thicker and tighter bands about the 
spiritual nature is the false goal. That mistake of means for ends leads 
to contempt for humble life to be lowly, without money or book- 
learning, is a degrading misfortune. The obscure and unlearned believe 
that untruth as firmly as those unhappy with many burdens. There is 
no genuine self-respect. Contempt in the mighty generates envy in the 
weak. And the two bring forth fruit of bitterness, of reviling, of self- 
assertion. Men are unwilling to render service to another. Service 
seems degrading. How different the older society that Shakespeare 
paints, the society that Carlyle, with insight, declared was the outward 
manifestation of mediaeval Catholicism. 

"Thou art thrice nobler than myself," Mark Antony exclaims to 
his dying slave. Orlando and Adam, Brutus and Lucius are splendid 
examples of self-respect in master and slave, and prove that degradation 
is not of a man's condition but of his nature. Whitman's teachings are 
those of mediaeval Catholicism, of Christianity. Christianity manifests 
itself in outward practice as gentleness the fruit of humility. A Chris- 
tian can stoop to any man's feet and courteously clean his boots ; for 
every menial act is ennobled by the Master to whom it is dedicated. 

"Who sweeps a room as for thy laws, 
Makes that and th'action fine." 

Some peculiarities of Whitman should receive comment, as they 
repulse many readers. First there is his strange mode of writing, the 
"catalogue" style, an example of which is the extract on page 38. 
Similar passages often make an entire poem, as "Salut au Monde," and 
may seem a meaningless list of words, an inventory of junk. But the 
catalogue style, like his thought, is not original with him, though he 



44 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

uses it more persistently than other writers. The "Canticle of the Sun" 
is a brief catalogue of God's creatures, and the canticle of the Book of 
Common Prayer, "Benedicite, omnia opera Domini" is a similar cata- 
logue. So too is the tenth canto of the Gita: "Of the sons of the 
Mother, I am Vishnu; among lights, I am the rayed Sun; of the storm 
lords I am Marichi; in the mansions of the night, I am the moon," etc. 
But though the mode of composition be the same in these several writ- 
ings, the results widely vary. The "Canticle of the Sun" is poetry; so, 
too, is the Benedicite, and the Gita, but the Whitman extract is not. It 
is interesting as spiritual biography, but it is not literary. His inven- 
tories are often crude material for poetry, used unformed because Whit- 
man was deficient in education. His taste and judgment were untrained. 
His sole dependence upon the interior guide did not lead him to see that 
the conventions and prejudices of society are as truly parts of the Whole 
as house-building, measuring, sawing the boards. He would not profit 
by conventions, cut across them, and his work suffers. 

Deficiency of taste explains also his imagery of sexual function. 
One may say, as Professor Carpenter does, that Whitman's motive and 
use are not indecent and obscene: 

"As man is divine only as a perennial element in Nature, he is 
divine by virtue of his power of self -continuation, by virtue, that is, 
of his power of propagation. Hence, man's function of propagation and 
its instruments are, from that point of view, essential and noble." 

The explanation is not sufficient. Familiarity with the usages of the 
world would have curbed Whitman's impulse to mention frequently and 
distinctly the sexual organs because their function is divinely sanctioned. 
That a thing is sacred does not make it matter of speech. Whitman 
is a genius but not a gentleman. 

Yet when all subtractions are made he remains an inspired and 
inspiring writer. He is the inheritor of Emerson's idealism, and like 
Emerson he is a prophet America should obey. 

c. c. c. 



"Take courage and turn your troubles, which are without remedy, 
into material for spiritual progress." 

ST. FRANCIS DE SALES. 



THE TRANSFER OF CONSCIOUS- 

NESS 



(A PAPER READ BEFORE THE NEW YORK BRANCH OF THE THEOSOPHICAL 

SOCIETY.) 

THE title of this paper presupposes certain facts, raises certain 
questions. If a transfer of consciousness is possible there must 
be at least two realms in which consciousness can exist. Other- 
wise, to speak of its transfer would be a meaningless contradic- 
tion. The fact that consciousness can be shifted from one to another 
of these realms is also a presupposition hidden in the terms of the 
subject. 

Nor are these propositions difficult to prove, if such proof is re- 
quired. The existence of the Theosophical Society whose real work 
rests upon those two facts, the testimony of our membership in that 
Society, and of the experience of innumerable men and women, past 
and present, who have worn other labels all are abundant evidence that 
such a change in our base of operations is not only quite conceivable 
theoretically, but perfectly possible practically. Whether it comes to 
us paradoxically through the Upanishads of Ancient India, or symbol- 
ically in the Bhagavad Gita, by the struggle of Arjuna on the field of 
fratricidal war ; whether it rings out epigrammatically hundreds of years 
later from the shores of Palestine: "Except a man be born again he 
cannot see the kingdom of God" ; x whether it rises to the surface in 
fourteenth-century Florence, veiled in the language of mediaeval Roman 
Catholicism ; or whether it bursts into life in our own time in The Voice 
of the Silence, Sartor Resartus, or Rabbi Ben Ezra, we recognize it as 
one message the message of the duality which is in man, and of his 
power to make the higher supercede the lower. 

But our concern is not primarily with the fact, rather with the means 
of this transfer. What are the characteristics of these two realms of 
consciousness? Under what conditions can consciousness be trans- 
ferred? What results follow the placing of consciousness in one realm 
or in the other? Is such a transfer the result of a natural growth, is 
it the effect of a voluntary effort of will, or is it a change imposed from 
without? Are these two realms in which consciousness can exist mu- 
tually exclusive, or can consciousness be transferred to the second and 
still remain in the first? And, finally, what is the rationale of such a 
transfer? 

*John, 3:3. 

45 



46 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Perhaps there is no better way to treat the subject than as it would 
be treated in a theosophical meeting, by the synthetic method: to let 
the great seers of all ages and races who have spoken to their own times 
speak again to us and to test once more our deep conviction that under- 
neath varying forms of expression great spiritual teachers express the 
same fundamental truths. When among those who testify on this sub- 
ject we find thinkers as far separated by time and race as the authors 
of the Upanishads and Robert Browning, Jesus of Nazareth, the Apostle 
Paul and Thomas Carlyle, Dante and the author of Light on the Path, 
we begin to understand that the theme is in no sense confined to any 
time, race, or particular religion, but that it is rooted deep in the funda- 
mental subconsciousness of man as man. 

The most conspicuous characteristic of the subject as a whole is 
paradox. "Light on the Path has been called a book of paradoxes, and 
very justly; what else could it be, when it deals with the actual personal 
experience of the disciple ?" * "Kill out ambition." "Work as those 
work who are ambitious." "Kill out desire of life." "Respect life as 
those do who desire it." 2 From The Voice of the Silence and Sartor 
Resartus comes the same paradoxical testimony. "Give up thy life if 
thou wouldst live." 3 "It is only with Renunciation that life properly 
speaking may be said to begin" : 4 other renderings of "he that loveth his 
life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it 
unto life eternal." 5 This, in turn, merely restates the teaching of the 
Upanishads: "When all desires that lodged in the heart are let go, the 
mortal becomes immortal and reaches the Eternal." 6 "The better is 
one thing, the dearer is another thing; these two bind a man in opposite 
ways. Of these two it is well for him who takes the better; he fails 
of his object who chooses the dearer." 7 

"For," says Carlyle, "the God-given mandate, Work thou in -well- 
doing lies mysteriously written in Promethean Prophetic Characters, in 
our hearts ; and leaves us no rest, night or day, till it be deciphered and 
obeyed; till it burn forth in our conduct, a visible, acted Gospel of 
freedom. And as the clay given mandate, Eat thou and be filled, at the 
same time persuasively proclaims itself through every nerve, must not 
there be a confusion, a contest, before the better Influence can become 
the upper ?" 8 

We are already on the track of answers to several of our questions. 
The characteristics of these two realms of consciousness are onoosed 



1 Light on the Path, p. 61. 

5 Light on the Path, p. i. 

" The Voice of the Silence, p. 5. 

4 Sartor Resartus, II, IX. 

t John, 12:25. 

' ; Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad, IV, 4, 7. 

' Katha Upanishad, II, X. 

8 Sartor Resartus, II, IX. 



THE TRANSFER OF CONSCIOUSNESS 47 

polar opposites. The law of the first is, "Eat thou and be filled"; the 
law of the second, "Work thou in well-doing." The law of the first is 
egotism, self-interest "the snake of self," which must be taken in a 
steady grasp and conquered. 1 The law of the second is "Love not 
pleasure, love God," "the Everlasting Yea wherein all contradiction is 
solved : wherein whoso walks and works it is well with him" 2 the 
better and not the dearer. Or, to speak in terms of evolution, the law 
of the first is Darwin's struggle for life; the law of the second is 
Drummond's struggle for the lives of others. 

Moreover the "excellent passivity" so frequently referred to by 
Carlyle during his earlier stage of development gives way to disinterested 
activity. The same contrast of negative and positive is apparent in the 
first two chapters of Light on the Path. The negative maxims, "Kill out 
ambition," "Kill out desire of life," are followed by the positive teaching: 
"Out of the silence that is peace a resonant voice shall arise. And this 
voice will say, It is not well ; thou hast reaped, now thou must sow."' 
In the Rabbi Ben Ezra of Browning is this verse: 

"Rejoice we are allied 
To That which doth provide 
And not partake, effect and not receive! 
A spark disturbs our clod; 
Nearer we hold of God 
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe." 

Strikingly similar is the teaching of Krishna to Arjuna: 

"Thy right is to the work, but never to its fruits; let not the fruit 
of thy work be thy motive, nor take refuge in abstinence from works. 

"Standing in union with the Soul carry out thy work, putting away 
attachment, O conqueror of wealth ; find refuge in soul-vision, for pitiful 
are those whose motive is the fruit of their works." 3 

Let us consider for a moment the conditions of this transfer. Twa 
things seem to be inevitable. First a persistent, uncompromising devo- 
tion to one's highest ideal ; secondly, as a result of this devotion, struggle, 
suffering, which end in peace. In theosophical language the first step has 
been phrased thus: 

"Do you perceive, further, that at first you are obedient to your 
own ideal of the Master and your own highest conceptions of duty and 
selflessness? In other words, you are obedient to yourself? No Man, 
no outside power, constraining you? No forcing of your judgment in 
uncongenial channels? When the student first presents himself to the 
Master, which he does through his mind, in his desire to approach Him, 
the Master lays this first command of obedience on him, saying: 'Obey 
Thyself and thy highest ideal of duty.' " * 

1 Light OH the Path, p. 44. 
'Sartor Resartus, II, IX. 

Bhagarad Gita, II. 47. 48. 

Cavi, Fragment!, p. 79. 



48 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

In Carlyle's case this highest ideal appears to have been truth. 
" Truth,' I cried, 'though the Heavens crush me for following her : no 
Falsehood! though a whole celestial Lubberland were the price of 
apostasy.' " 1 And the inevitable suffering is explained as follows : 
"Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the eagle when he moults 
is sickly; and to attain his new beak, must harshly dash off the old one 
upon rocks." 1 The wrench of renunciation gives way to "the silence 
that is peace." 2 And in the deep silence the mysterious event will occur 
which will prove that the way has been found. 8 

It is worth while to compare this "silence that is peace" with Car- 
lyle's Centre of Indifference, "through which," he says, "whoso travels 
from the Negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass." Take, 
for example, this passage: 

" 'The hot Harmattan wind had raged itself out ; its howl went silent 
within me; and the long-deafened soul could now hear. I paused in 
my wild wanderings; and sat me down to wait, and consider; for it was 
as if the hour of change drew nigh. I seemed to surrender, to renounce 
utterly, and say: Fly then false shadows of Hope; I will chase you no 
more. I will believe you no more. And ye too, haggard spectres of 
fear, I care not for you; ye too are all shadows and a lie. Let me rest 
here: for I am way- weary and life weary; I will rest here, were it but 
to die ; to die or to live is alike to me ; alike insignificant' And again : 
'Here then as I lay in that CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE cast, doubtless by 
benignant upper Influence, into a healing sleep, the heavy dreams rolled 
gradually away, and I awoke to a new Heaven and a new Earth. The 
first preliminary moral Act, Annihilation of Self (Selbst-todtung), had 
been happily accomplished; and my mind's eyes were now unsealed, and 
its hands ungyved.' " 4 

Here as in Light on the Path is the struggle, the final yielding of 
the will, the silence of outer sounds, and the new sight of the awakened 
soul which like the resonant voice teaches the same old lesson of eternal 
life, tells of the same "small old path" which the seers know. 

Again in the Gita we read how the soul of Arjuna turned this way 
and then that, how he "sank on the floor of the chariot, in the midst of 
the host, dropping his bow and his arrows, his heart shaken with sorrow." 
And to Krishna he said: 

"Overwhelmed with pity and fear of sin I ask thee, for my vision 
of duty is obscured, Which is better? Tell me clearly! I am thy 
disciple! Teach me! I appeal to thee! For I see no way to drive 
away my grief and this fever in all my powers, though gaining wealth 
and mastery of the earth without a rival, or even overlordship of the 
gods !" 8 

1 Sartor Resartus, II, VII. 

2 Light on the Path, II. 
Ibid, I. 

* Sartor Resartus, II, IX. 

Bhagavad Gita, II, 7, 8. 



THE TRANSFER OF CONSCIOUSNESS 49 

And the clear, calm voice of the Master upbraids him for cowardice 
in his duty and for lack of soul vision. 

"Arjuna said : 'What is the description of one firm in perception, of 
one firm in soul vision, O thou of the flowing hair? He who is firm in 
soul, how does he speak? How does he sit? How does he go?' 

"The Master said: 'When he offers up all desires that dwell in the 
heart, O son of Pritha, in soul rejoicing in the Soul, then he is said to 
be firm in perception. Whose heart is untroubled in sorrows, who in 
pleasures is unallured, from whom lust and fear and wrath have gone, 
that silent one is declared to be firm in soul.' " 1 

Truly there is neither East nor West, but the Soul of man is one 
and no mere clothing of time or race can separate it. 

We have asked ourselves what are the results of centering the 
consciousness in either of these realms. Jesus said: "He that loveth 
his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it 
unto life eternal." 2 Attributed to the Apostle Paul is this teaching, 
"He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he 
that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." 8 "For 
to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and 
peace." * Or we can read the lesson in the language peculiar to 
Theosophy, remembering always that "The psychical body is the realm 
of the passions and desires, of all selfish and self-seeking impulses." B 

"He who sets his heart and all his desires on the life of the psychical 
body shall lose it, since this is the way of death ; but he who weakens the 
psychical body and passes through the resurrection into the spiritual 
body shall transform his life, raising it to a condition which is inherently 
immortal and thus keeping it to life eternal." 6 

The Kingdom of God it seems is within us, and laying up our treasure 
there we shall find a place safe from the corruption of moth, rust, and 
decay, and safe, too, from the violence of thief and destroyer. 

Is this transfer of consciousness the result of a natural growth, is 
it the effect of a voluntary effort of will, or is it a change imposed from 
without? According to Light on the Path it can be any of the three. 

"When one of these subjects of time decides to enter on the path 
of Occultism, it is this which is his first task. If life has not taught it 
to him, if he is not strong enough to teach himself, and if he has power 
enough to demand the help of a master, then this fearful trial, depicted 
in Zanoni, is put upon him. The oscillation in which he lives, is for 
an instant stilled ; and he has to survive the shock of facing what seems 

1 Bkagavad Gilo, II, 54-56. 

* John, 12:25. 
Gal. 6:8. 

4 Romans, 8:6. 

* Johnston, The Parables of the Kingdom, p. 19. 

* Johnston, The Parables of the Kingdom, p. a. 



50 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

to him at first sight as the abyss of nothingness. Not till he has learned 
to dwell in this abyss, and has found its peace, is it possible for his eyes 
to have become incapable of tears." 1 

Carlyle for we must believe him to be the original of the enigmatic 
Professor Teufelsdroch appears to have united the first and the second 
method. The period of natural growth he expresses thus : 

" 'A nameless Unrest urged me forward ; to which the outward 
motion was some momentary lying solace. ... A feeling I had, that 
for my fever-thirst there was and must be somewhere a healing Foun- 
tain.' " 2 Perhaps the old, old text was ringing in his inner ears, 
"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for 
they shall be filled." 3 Then follows the Everlasting No : " 'Behold thou 
art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's)'"; and 
the will element enters when he makes answer : " 7 am not thine, but 
Free, and forever hate thee.' " 4 It is from this hour, we are told, that 
he dates his spiritual New-Birth; from that time, perhaps, directly he 
began to be a man. 5 

To the question: Are these two realms of our consciousness 
mutually exclusive ? the answer alas ! is "Yes." "No man can serve two 
masters : ... ye cannot serve God and Mammon" is but one way of 
expressing the perfectly evident truth that one cannot go in opposite 
directions at the same time. The death or disintegration of the psychical 
nature seems always to be a condition of the birth of the spiritual. It 
is "when all desires that lodged in the heart are let go" that "the mortal 
becomes immortal and reaches the Eternal." "It is only with Renun- 
ciation that life, properly speaking, can be said to begin." 

Yet the situation is really not so appalling. The lesson which Death 
taught of old to the Sacrificer's son, he teaches again and forever to the 
son of each new Sacrificer. Though he is still a king of terrors to him 
whose consciousness is centered in his psychical nature, to the initiated, 
who has passed through the new birth from above, he has, as of old, lost 
his sting, failed at the moment of his complete success. 

"For what teaching could bring a more wonderful sense of the 
largeness and hidden riches of being than this : that our sincerest friend 
is the once dreaded king of terrors ; that Death teaches us what no other 
can the lesson of the full and present eternity of life? We need not 
wait till our years are done for his teaching: that wisdom of his, like 
every other treasure of life, is all-present in every moment, in full abun- 
dance, here and now. It is the teaching of Death that, to gain the better, 
we must lose the dearer; to gain the greater, we must lose the less; to 
win the abundant world of reality, we must give up the world of fancy 

1 Light on the Path, p. 44. 

2 Sartor Rcsartus, II, IV. 
1 Matt. 5:6. 

Sartor Rcsartus, II, VII. 
Sartor Resartus, II, VII. 



THE TRANSFER OF CONSCIOUSNESS 51 

and folly and fear which we have so long held dear: we have been 
learning it all these years since we began ; learning also Death's grim 
jest, that there is no sacrifice possible at all, for while we were painfully 
renouncing the dearer, his splendid generosity had already given us the 
better new worlds instead of old." 1 

In this grim jest the paradox is complete and pain becomes joy. 

Now what is the rationale of this transfer of consciousness? Why 
in the nature of things should the placing of consciousness be so critical, 
so determining a factor in man's life, that his eternal destiny depends 
on its location? Without any hint of dogmatism in so vast a theme, it 
may be suggested that the testimony of these great thinkers the witness 
of their experience points uniformly to the theory that consciousness 
is the determining factor in the universe the one ultimate reality and 
that its nature, in the last analysis, is positive, dynamic, creative. 

"Therefore I summon age 
To grant youth's heritage, 
Life's struggle having so far reached its term : 
Thence shall I pass approved 
A man, for aye removed 
From the developed brute ; a God though in the germ." 2 

LOUISE EDGAR PETERS. 



"The world is full of discouraged people and we have power to say 
a hopeful word or do a kindness which will drive the discouragement 
from their hearts." 

J. R. MILLER. 



1 Johnston, From the Upanishads. 
* Rabbi Ben Ecra. XIII. 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 



THE THEOSOPHICAL CONVENTION 

THE annual convention of the Theosophical Society, held this 
year at Cincinnati on April 3Oth and May ist, was reported 
and discussed at length by the group of students whose talks 
have formed the basis for the two preceding numbers of "The 
Screen of Time." Those who had attended the convention agreed that 
it had been a great success. It was characterized, as one of them said, 
by "unanimity of devotion." The Observer was asked to summarize 
his impressions. 

"I cannot say," he responded, "that a new note was struck. Some- 
thing better than that was done. A note, long heard by the few, was 
brought within hearing of the many. That note was the note of disci- 
pleship. All of us seemed to agree that the day of intellectual disserta- 
tion has passed; that we have outgrown the wish to convert others to 
our way of thinking, or to an intellectual acceptance of certain doctrines 
associated with the name, Theosophy. Discipleship for ourselves, and 
discipleship for all who seek it this was taken to be the better and the 
higher way which has opened before us. In other words, the convention 
showed a developed and really splendid understanding of the theosophic 
method. Instead of trying to impose our own ideals upon others, we 
have learned to look for and to discover ideals unlike our own, and to 
point out to those who have them, some height which their own unaided 
vision has not permitted them to see: then to encourage the faith that 
this, the crown of their ideal, can be attained, and that in all ways they 
should loyally strive to make it live within themselves. 

THEOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY 

"Our attitude towards Christianity perhaps affords the best illus- 
tration of the forward step we have taken. We no longer speak in 
negative or in destructive terms. We no longer say to the orthodox, 
'That is not the right view; this, our view, gives the real meaning.' We 
accept their view as true, knowing that every symbol has many meanings, 
one within the other the outermost true for children and the innermost 
true for those beyond us who have regained the child-state we have 
lost. So it is that within the truth now seen, we suggest a deeper truth 
not as replacing the old, but as illuminating it ; not as being antagonistic 
to any belief now held, but as supplementing it. In the same way, if 
any man, once a Christian, tells us that he is one no longer, and intimates 
that he has learned too much, we realize that he has not learned enough, 
and tell him frankly that he has seen the rind but knows nothing of the 

s* 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 53 

fruit within it. If we are masters at our business, we should be able 
to lead him back to an understanding of the things he has misunderstood 
or has not perceived." 

THE THEOSOPHIC METHOD 

"Was there no opposition to this more tolerant attitude to this 
more theosophic spirit?" 

"There was not. There seemed to be a general recognition of the 
fact that we cannot escape from symbolism so long as we remain human, 
and that Christian symbolism, among other kinds, contains the funda- 
mental truths of life which are needed universally by those who are 
seekers either of love or of wisdom. Granting that much, the rest follows 
logically: to attack existing forms, or to criticize misinterpretations, is 
to harden and to give strength to the very things which should be 
rendered permeable. What we have to do is to infuse into these things 
the spirit of Christ, which, of course, is the spirit of Theosophy; and 
we can do that, not by injecting foreign doctrines, but by exemplifying, 
in our own lives, the discipline and obedience and self -surrender which 
are the foundation of all discipleship, whether that term be used or not." 

"Can it be," asked the Philosopher, "that we are outgrowing the 
vanity of our own wisdom ? It sounds almost too good to be true ! And 
yet, ordinary good taste might have led us to this point before now. In 
the presence of belief, to hear a man bragging of the things in which he 
does not believe; or in the presence of scepticism, to parade our stock 
of affirmations, is worse, in a way, than to force ourselves upon an 
unwilling host." 

The Objector, for several minutes, had been harboring a protest. 
"Do you mean," he suggested, "that at a Branch meeting we should sit 
still and let the other fellows do the talking?" 

"Hardly ! At a Branch meeting we should, of course, say whatever 
we have to say frankly and fearlessly. But surely with tact and 
courtesy too not as if we were maniacal dentists, wishful to extract 
the decayed beliefs of our guests! 

"Let me make my point more definite. Suppose, for instance, at 
a Branch meeting, after an opening talk on Karma, some visitor were 
to question us about the forgiveness of sins, showing himself a believer 
in that doctrine: should we inform him, in more polite language, that 
he is an idiot to cherish an exploded superstition? Or should we think 
of the great truth which his belief suggests, telling him that we also 
believe in the forgiveness of sins, not in the sense that physical or 
mental effects can be removed, but that, because Karma governs activity 
on all the planes, repentance does actually counteract more serious and 
tragic injury to the moral nature? Further, that prayers for forgiveness 
are powerful for the same reason that they generate a spiritual energy 
which can be used (by Christ, if you choose), to nullify, on the moral 



54 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

plane, the evil results of wrong conduct? . . . Teaching such as 
that will help your visitor to understand his own religion better. And 
he will want more of it. The ignorant and more hasty method will 
merely drive him away." 

The Objector grumbled but did not protest. Instead, he changed 
the subject. "I wish the Gael would say something," he remarked. "He 
at least is stimulating." 

SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE 

The Gael, apparently, had not heard a word of the earlier conversa- 
tion. Without respect of persons or of subject he continued, aloud, the 
thread of his own meditation. 

" 'who never, never again 

Through all the rise and set and set and rise of pain 

Shall hear the lips of her whom I loved naming my name.' 

"The love of Manus mac Tormod," he murmured. "Just the 
far-thrown shadow of the great Love. But the power of it ! And here 
am I, with this moth-eaten remnant which I choose to call a heart, 
incapable yes, by all the dear gods, incapable of loving the Man of 
all men as that poor damned derelict loved the girl of his silly dreams." 
He was striding up and down the room now, immersed in his trouble. 
"Has all the world dried up? But at least we know what it ought to 
be a raging torrent, a consuming, inextinguishable fire! With a love 
like that, one could tear the heavens asunder. It ought to be so easy. 
Think, think of all He does for us. But I call for it, and the heavens 
just smile. Dead it is that I am the shadow of a man, crying for life!" 

"If you will sit down and keep cool," said his particular friend, the 
Sage, "you may discover that the problem is not insoluble. It will 
remain so, however, if you continue to exude such inordinate quantities 
of carbonic acid gas, or whatever the uncomfortable thing is which 
people distribute when they rage around a room and call themselves 
names. I admit there is a lot of truth in what you say, but please realize 
also that what you really want is a short cut to perfection and that what 
you really need is patience. Remember Chuang-tsze: 'You look at an 
egg and expect to smell roast chicken.' " 

The Gael is not easily subdued. Changing his mood like the wind, 
he turned to his auditors collectively and appealed to them with mock 
despair : 

"He speaks to me of Patience," he said; "and I have stayed his 
friend for years upon years. Little he knows what that means! Why 
man" turning now directly to the Sage "I am Patience itself." Then, 
changing again : "The long-drawn sigh of it in the trees who made that 
song but I? And if not I, then God, my Brother: it is the same. 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 55 

Shocked, Mr. Orthodox Person in the corner? If you were as reverent 
as I am, you would not have exiled Him beyond the stars. And let 
me tell you, if you leave Him there much longer, He will die of cold 
and loneliness. But that is not the point, which is, that if anything 
could make me impatient" striding the room again "it is the Sage's 
carefully balanced calculation: be good and you will be happy; be 
patient, and you shall have jam on your bread for supper! In the name 
of all that is holy, what is Occultism if not a divine intolerance of Time ; 
a defiance of all limitations; a violence against things as they are?" 

SHORT-CUTS IN OCCULTISM 

The Neophyte came to the rescue. "Your virtues, dear boy, are 
innumerable as the sands of the sea. So thick they are upon you that at 
moments they hide your moderation ! Let us see wherein we agree. 
No one can seriously suppose that Occultism enables us to skip any 
step in the orderly development of our powers. The whole race of men, 
without exception, in order to attain Wisdom, must accumulate certain 
experience ; must overcome certain faults ; must acquire certain virtues ; 
must transfer the centre of consciousness from the unreal to the Real. 
Those who are saints and sages those whom we, as Theosophists, call 
Masters have forced their way ahead of the mass by accomplishing 
in a short time that which the majority of the race will achieve only after 
the passage of milleniums. They have done this by tremendous effort 
and long self-sacrifice, inspired by the needs of 'that great orphan, 
Humanity.' But instead of their short-cut having saved them labour, 
it brought them unremitting toil, and experience in so concentrated a 
form that for most of us the strain would be unendurable. They could 
not omit one step of the journey. They took more steps in a shorter 
time. A plant, the growth of which is forced in a hot-house, is a good 
illustration it blooms under the same laws of life as the slow-growing 
plant in the garden. You are entirely within your rights in calling upon 
the Universe to quicken you. Possibly that prayer is being answered 
in the asking, the first effect in your consciousness being a passion of 
contempt for yourself, in the sense of your lower nature, as you know 
that nature to be. Let me suggest, however, that we need to be patient 
with that as with all other things. I do not mean self-satisfied. There 
is a vast difference between the man who sees in himself no fault at 
all ; the man who sees his deficiencies and is so disgusted that he loses 
all serenity because of them; and the man who, while recognizing clearly 
his failings, sets to work ardently but serenely to replace them with 
strong virtues and with powers of service." 

BHAKTI YOGA 

"Further," added the Sage, seeing that the Gael had subsided, "no 
heart is withered which has retained the desire to love. That desire 



56 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

is a miracle of God working in it a proof in itself that we are much 
nearer to divinity than in our pessimistic moods" (with a very gentle 
smile) "we try to persuade ourselves and perhaps declare that we are! 
Our trouble perhaps is that we look for sensible devotion; for some 
noticeable out-pouring of the heart the fact being that the desire is in 
itself the thing desired. 

"Yet, if we would increase the strength of our love, there are few 
better ways than that of dwelling in thought upon the Master's love 
for us 'how strong in its tenderness, how delicate in its sympathy, how 
constant in its devotedness, how ardent yet how compassionate in its 
zeal.' Thought and meditation of that sort will produce in our hearts 
a similarity of sentiment and of interest, a likeness of mind, a mutual 
confidence as between friend and friend and at last a conscious 
communion." 

EXHAUSTION 

"I do not want to change the subject too violently," the Student 
now remarked, "but what you have been saying reminds me of a problem 
that has bothered me for years. I want an antidote for nervous and 
physical exhaustion. I reach a point at times when I can work no 
more, and when every sort of 'practice,' whether of meditation or of 
prayer, becomes a burden too heavy to be borne. So for a week or 
more I have to relax to the extent, practically, of abandoning everything 
that involves effort of the mind or will. So far as I can see, this 
exhaustion is due to leakage. My question, then, really should be: how 
stop the daily leakage? How conserve energy?" 

Everyone was prepared to tell him all about it. They would 
prescribe for his individual case. But the Student is not satisfied easily, 
and the only answer which he accepted as enlightening was prefaced 
by the remark that it would be impossible to tell him what he personally 
ought to do, because everyone must solve such questions for himself 
the cause as well as the cure differing somewhat in each instance. 
Nevertheless, certain general suggestions might be of help, and the first 
was that such exhaustion is due very often to over-crowding ourselves 
with more work than we ought to undertake. The "leakage" probably 
comes from lack of concentration and from lack of detachment. 

"We do not approach each task with complete attention or with one- 
pointedness of effort. We allow our minds to wander to the task last 
bungled or to the difficulties of the next. And we do not sufficiently 
give to our worldly calling what the old spiritual writers call a divine 
or 'supernatural' intention. In the language of theology, no duty need 
be dull, and for that reason, exhausting, if we see the angel who brings 
it to us and who watches our performance and Karma, be it remem- 
bered, is not a blind law of mechanics, but the expression of wisdom 
and of an infinite love. 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 57 

DETACHMENT 

"Quite as important as concentration is detachment, if we would 
truly conserve and dedicate our energies. And detachment is not widely 
understood. Only yesterday, I was reading this: 'The attachments of 
human nature are very strong. We become attached to certain places, 
friends, plans, methods of action, even to certain tastes and fancies, till 
without them life seems dull and miserable. And a man's attachment 
to his life and to his own will is deeply rooted and intense. . . . We 
ought to be able to pray that we, being freed both in body and mind, 
may with ready heart accomplish those things which God commands.' 
It is true that 'he who gives himself to God must have a lion's heart'; 
yet, when once that gift is made, completely and beyond recall, the lion's 
strength comes with it. You remember, in Light on the Path, where 
it speaks of the Warrior? Well, if we were in fact 'unconcerned in the 
battle save to do His bidding/ can you imagine how much of our energy, 
spiritual and mental and nervous, which we now fritter away, would be 
saved to us and for Him?" 



THE ESCAPE FROM EXHAUSTION 

"I can see the truth of that," answered the Student. "But how 
about the cure for this sort of incipient paralysis which wrong habits 
of thought bring upon us? I have been tempted at times to have 
myself examined for hookworm!" 

"Still speaking generally, we may be sure that to attempt to cure 
such a condition by inactivity would, in nearly all cases, be dangerous. 
The advice usually given is to persist in our practices with most deter- 
mination when there is the least inclination to do so. What is true of 
love is true of meditation, of spiritual reading, of prayer. 'Do not even 
the publicans the same?' There is merit in meditating when we feel 
inclined to meditate. But we begin to achieve things in and over 
ourselves when we compel ourselves to do what we regard as a duty 
in spite of disinclination." 

At this point the Student suggested that perhaps the true cause 
of inertia is lack of interest. He had found in his own experience, that, 
if he were sufficiently interested, he was never "too tired." 

"Which," suggested the Philosopher, "takes us back to the lament 
of the Gael. For what you have said is only another way of saying that 
if we were to love as we ought to love as, for instance, the Master 
loves us we should be unconscious of effort as of sacrifice. Imagine 
a mother, ill in bed, who hears suddenly the shrieks of her child in the 
next room: does not her love give her the strength of ten men? Does 
she stop to think how tired she is, or how feeble, once she hears those 
cries of pain and the call of her name? Truly, it resolves itself at last 
into a question of love, of how much we love. Love is the power that 



.58 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

can move mountains. Nothing else, surely, will ever move the spiritual 
will." 

There was a pause, and the Recorder saw his chance. "There is 
a department in the QUARTERLY/' he said, "which is worthy of your 
most purposeful support. I need not tell you its name. Will not 
someone suggest a topic?" The request, at first, was not treated as 
seriously as it deserved, until one of those present, of better under- 
standing, suggested that many of our readers feel themselves to be 
limited in their opportunity to help, and that it would be useful to point 
out a way by which everyone, no matter how situated, can be of service 
to the Cause. The Recorder promptly asked what that way might be, 
-and elicited, gradually, something to this effect: 

THE LODGE AND PRAYER 

"There are what might be described as a positive and a negative 
side to the Lodge. The latter provides the spiritual energy which the 
former expresses in action. To speak of the one as contemplative and 
of the other as active, would, however, be misleading, for the reason 
that the contemplative is just as active as the other, though it confines 
its activity to the higher planes. These two sides of the Lodge are 
complementary and mutually dependent. Action in the world of mind, 
or of matter, would be still-born unless it were supported by the 
meditation and prayers of those whose lives are devoted to that form 
of service. 

"This should suggest an answer to the question asked by so many 
whose home duties are exacting: What can I do for the Cause? They 
can pray for its success. They can wish and long for its success. By 
so doing, they will beget an energy which Masters can use: and no 
Master will be deaf to such prayers. But it is best to be specific and 
one-pointed. Pray for a particular Branch, or group. Perhaps devote 
a certain day of the week to special departments or centres of the work. 

"W. Q. Judge was a great spiritual director. He knew the needs 
and capacities of individual students. There were scores of students 
to whom he would never have given this advice: but he did give it at 
least to one. Possibly there are others now to whom it will be helpful. 
He advised this student, who desired to help but whose family duties 
made outer work almost impossible, to pray (using that word) for the 
success of certain groups and Branches, on certain days of the week, 
saying that the real and best and highest service could be rendered in 
this way, and that the outer work would in any case be helped and 
benefited immensely. It always is possible to reserve certain intervals 
during the day for activity of that sort. And if the desire to help be 
strong and pure, a prayer will repeat itself in the heart, as an undertone, 
from morning until night. Nor will it by any means cease at night. 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 59 

On the contrary, a time will come when the prayers of the day will 
become the deeds of true sleep. Enormous is the power which a pure 
heart can generate. And there is no need to be an orator or a writer 
or to have wealth for the traveling in this road. Without moving is 
such work done. Yet, naturally, having been born into this world of 
action, those who can act should do so. There is need for laborers of 
every sort. Our tendency is, however, to look for visible results, and 
to attribute an undue importance to what is, after all, merely the outside 
of things. The real work is invisible always. It is the soul of an action 
that lives and counts, when the act itself has been forgotten." 

CREATIVE INTENTION 

"In that connection," remarked the Neophyte, "it is unfortunate 
that so few people realize the importance of the intention with which 
they do things. Take, for instance, the mite-boxes which have been 
issued recently to all members of the T. S. who wanted them: suppose 
that money is put into these boxes without thought, it stands to reason 
that nothing but money has been contributed. Suppose, on the other 
hand, that whenever a piece of money is put into the mite-box, the 
contributor thinks intently, or prays, that the money may be -accom- 
panied by power and success to the movement in which, presumably, he 
is interested. Suppose that many hundreds of members contribute 
regularly every morning, and that all of them unite in this strong 
volition or prayer and really from their hearts : imagine the tremendous 
effect in the unseen and real world the powerful stream of energy and 
support !" 

A MORNING SACRIFICE 

"By the same token," said the Observer, "it used to worry me that 
I consumed an hour or more every day in the process of washing and 
dressing. An hour every day amounts to nearly three years out of a 
life-time of three-score years and ten. Yes, it bothered me so that I 
figured the whole thing out. It was enough to drive one into some 
No-Washing Society. But then I began to think, and it struck me that 
all of civilized humanity is doing the same thing, and that a practice 
so universal could not be fortuitous. There is design and purpose in 
all things necessarily in this too. What could it be? Next I remem- 
bered that ablutions play an important part in all the old religions, and 
that, for the Hindu, washing forms an essential part of his prayer, 
particularly of prayers for purification. So it dawned upon me at last 
that what had seemed such a hideous waste of time could and should be 
used as a spiritual process, and was probably so intended. We should 
use the outer as a symbol of the inner, or as an aid to concentration 
the thought and the will, or prayer, being that the evil in us be expelled ; 



60 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

that sin be washed away, and that we may become pure as tabernacles 
of the Most High." 

"As an apologist for the Almighty, you certainly are ingenious," 
said the Objector. "But I would hate to have to spend an hour every 
day scraping sins into my bath and wash-basin. It would add horribly 
to the day's labour!" 

"If you think," laughed the other, "that you could get rid of your 
sins in less than three out of your prospective seventy years, you flatter 
yourself. Seriously, however, I am not suggesting that every minute 
of my hypothetical hour should be passed in just that way. There are 
the coming day's work and other things to be considered. But I do 
mean that there ought to be thought of purification, and that my point 
well illustrates what the Observer and others have said this afternoon 
about the importance of a conscious and spiritual intention." 

A PRACTICAL, CULTURED MYSTIC 

"If the Recorder's request still stands" this from the Student 
"I think the readers of the 'Screen' would like to know of a book which 
I am reading, and which, in any case, I should like to advertize. It is 
really of value. It is called Stray Thoughts on Character, and is by 
Mrs. L. H. M. Soulsby, who is, I believe, the principal of some college 
for girls in England. The book is published by Longmans, Green & Co. 
It is particularly valuable because it contains theosophic and profoundly 
true teaching in orthodox form. The author is a practical and cultured 
mystic. A quotation on the title-page from Rahel tells the purpose of 
the book: 'The future comes not from before to meet us, but streams 
up from behind over our heads.' Mrs. Soulsby reveals the source of 
her inspiration in this passage : 'The power of the spiritual nature over 
the mental and physical is being more and more practically realized; 
in fact it is often spoken of as if it were a new discovery of to-day 
(I suppose she refers there to 'New Thought'), instead of being the 
secret, the open secret, which St. Paul claimed to have learned, the 
secret of Tauler, and St. Teresa, and Jacob Bohme, and William Law, 
and so many more. . . . We do not realize the power of our own 
will or the mighty forces which are ready to aid us. We are like Elisha's 
servant at Dothan, and we need to have our eyes opened to the chariots 
and horses of fire around us to the unseen world, which gives the 
meaning and value to the world we do see.' That, of course, is a general 
statement; but she can be and for the most part is intensely practical 
and concrete. Listen to this: 

THE MOULDING OF CHARACTER 

' 'If parents and teachers would combine to ensure an uninterrupted 
two years' course of good habits in children, education would not be the 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 61 

lamentable failure it very often is with our present system or rather, 
no system of spasmodic efforts, spread over many years. 

" 'Let us be thankful that bed, washing, food, and lessons, afford 
such an easy, simple, unintrospective means of teaching life's highest 
lessons of self -discipline, and of the facing of responsibilities. The 
child who has learnt to be ascetic as to food and bed, and dutiful over 
lessons, is practically safe from the sins of the flesh. 

" 'No knowledge of evil and no warnings guard any one against evil 
passions the only safeguard is the habit of duty and of self-control, 
which brings those passions into subjection. 

"'What gets a girl into serious mischief in later life? Is it not 
the habit of doing what is pleasant at the moment: the habit of drifting 
through life, instead of having the day clearly marked off by the striking 
of the clock of duty? We may, or may not, think a life of Rule neces- 
sary, as Church- women ; but it is most certainly necessary as a guard 
against the dangers of this world of Misrule, in which we and our girls 
are placed. 

" 'I plead for minute, and anxious, and unremitting training in self- 
control in rising, washing, eating, and lessons, because these apparently 
simple nursery rules are the great though indirect means of conquering 
our lower nature.' 

"Could any advice be more sound and more occult, in the true sense 
of that word? And is there any one of us who would not be the better 
for following it? If parents and teachers in this country were to realize 
its truth, and were to deal with their children accordingly, the character 
of our population would be improved one hundred per cent, in a single 
generation." 

THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 

"There can be no question about that," interrupted the Observer. 
"The children of this country are not brought up at all. Some fatuous 
idea of 'Liberty,' I imagine. Perhaps, on the other hand, just the moral 
laziness of parents. They begin to think of discipline when a boy is 
big enough to break the furniture and so becomes expensive. Elemen- 
tary obedience should be perfect by the time a child is seven, otherwise 
it will have to be self-acquired, if ever, after a man is forty and then 
with infinite difficulty and suffering. Really, it is a shame. Over and 
over again parents have said to me, almost with pride, 'We can do 
nothing with him. He simply will not do what he is told' ; and they have 
said this before the child a brat of six or seven, whose spanking should 
have been done in the cradle." 

"That is the secret of it," the Mother commented: "children are 
spoiled as infants. Discipline should begin on the day of a child's birth. 
Its life should be regulated like clock-work. If it cries at night it should 
be left to cry. It will soon discover that at that time sleep is its duty. 
As it is, a crying child is nursed or rocked. A Parish Visitor told me 
not long ago that she had been calling on a poor woman in a tenement. 
There was a baby, and she noticed that the mother was constantly pick- 
ing up the child's rattle from the floor, and that the child as constantly 



62 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

threw it down again. Remarking on this, the tired mother replied that 
the baby cried if she did not pick it up. It seemed to her to be sufficient 
explanation. In most cases, however, the mothers are phlegmatic up 
to a certain point, allowing their children to do as they choose, and then 
break into paroxysms of rage, during which they beat any child within 
reach, almost regardless of whether the reason for it is understood or 
not. Rich women, whose children 'get on their nerves', hire nurses to 
do their work for them, the result being that the children of the rich 
have very much the same moral training, or lack of it, as the children 
of the tenements. Constant, steady pressure; unfailing evenness of 
temper; absolute regularity no feeding or eating between meals, no 
yielding to 'just half an hour more' at bed-time, and a boy ought to 
grow into a man. The same principles, of course, apply equally to 
girls." 

"I am so glad I was born before all these things were discovered," 
volunteered the Objector, with a sigh of considerable relief. 

"It might have been better for some of us if we had not been 
that is, unless we had been born before such things were forgotten. 
. . . You follow me?" asked the Mother. The Objector bowed. 

CHILDREN AND RELIGION 

"While we are on the subject of children," ventured the Recorder, 
"I wish someone would suggest how they can best be taught religion. 
And what, under that head, should they be taught?" 

"Good, old-fashioned, orthodox Christianity, taught by the child's 
mother," answered the Sage. 

"You say more than you mean," protested the Philosopher. "You 
would not threaten them with an everlasting Hell. I agree that they 
ought to be made familiar with the stories of the Old and of the New 
Testament the Old carefully selected and edited. And I do not 
approve of giving them scraps from other religions, because a child is 
proud of its knowledge and displays it to other children. In time, this 
unnecessary and undigested familiarity with the names and tenets of 
exotic religions, stamps a child as peculiar, both in the eyes of its friends 
and in its own eyes and that is most unhealthy. It is different, of 
course, if a child can be brought up alone, or with the children of its 
own family only. I am supposing a Public School education a 
calamity, in my opinion, but one that, in this country, can rarely be 
avoided." 

"The most important thing in the religious education of a child," 
remarked the Gael with unusual terseness, "is to give him a sense of the 
invisible; to make the unseen real to him. This can be done by means 
of fairy-stories, or with the aid of Christian legend and history, or in 
any way you choose. But it must be done if the child is to escape 
materialism. And if you rely on fairy-stories alone, the insanity of 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 63. 

grown-up people will presently crush your child into the belief that such 
stories are not true, while there is still a respectable minority, even of 
grown-ups, which asserts its belief in an unseen though real Christ." 

CHRIST FOR CHILDREN 

"I have in my pocket a letter, or, rather, the copy of a letter," said 
the Student, "which in my opinion gives expression to what the Gael has 
suggested. The writer is the god-father of the boy, of about eight, to 
whom it is written. It was read to me for my opinion, and I asked the 
writer for a copy. I should explain, before reading it, that the boy 
who received it has been brought up practically without religion of any 
sort, and that my friend had led up to this letter by others in which he 
had tried in many different ways to emphasize the reality of things 
beyond the reach of the physical senses. By the way, as showing how 
responsive children are to that sort of suggestion, this small boy's 
sister, who is not more than six, when an earlier letter was being read 
to them in which my friend had said that 'some people are so foolish 
that they won't believe in things they cannot see,' interrupted with the 
remark, 'Why, they must be crazy: you can't see the inside of a tree!' 
. . . The letter reads as follows: 

" 'Such a nice, nice letter from you. It gave me so much pleasure. 
A real Easter letter, full of love and of gladness. I did like it so much. 
It is a very nice letter. And there is a kiss at the end which I am 
going to lock up in a box and keep, and then, sometimes, when no one is 
looking, I shall take it out and remember. 

" 'It is Easter Sunday or will be when you read this. Do you 
know what they do in Russia? (Russia, you have heard of in school 
a big country on the other side of Europe, much further away than 
England.) On Easter Sunday in Russia all the people who meet on 
the streets run up to one another and kiss one another and cry out, 
"Christ is risen, Christ is risen." Yes people who are strangers to each 
other all sorts of people rich and poor. Isn't that queer? To tell 
you the truth, I would not like it at all some strange man with a bristly 
beard running up and throwing his arms round my neck, and, with tears 
in his eyes, crying out, "Christ is risen !" Yet it does show, doesn't it, 
what a wonderful day it is, when people feel the gladness of it so strongly 
their hearts so full of joy that they forget who are friends and who 
are strangers and remember only that the other man has the same joy. 

" 'A man I know told me once that he had been shut up in a town 
during a war. The enemy were all around the town and no one could 
get out. There was not enough to eat. The people inside the town 
were very hungry and very miserable. They were like prisoners in a 
prison. They all suffered together. After weeks and weeks of suffer- 
ing, at last another army appeared a friendly army, which drove away 
the enemy, and which entered the town with wagons and wagons piled 
high with food, and with bands playing and banners flying. My friend 
told me that men and women and children who had been shut up in the 
town so hungry and wretched just went wild with joy, and that they 
hugged and kissed one another and cried out, "We are saved, we are 
free; thank God, thank God" and that people in the town who had 
never spoken before did the same thing. 



64 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

" 'Well, on Easter Sunday a great many people feel the same way 
that they have been saved or rescued, because Christ, that wonderful 
man and Son of God a sort of big and very wise and loving Brother 
is still alive to help them. You have no grown up and big brother. 
Perhaps you think it would be nice to have one some big strong man, 
who loved you very much, and who would always be willing to play 
with you, and who would understand just exactly what you want and 
what you think and what you feel; and who would always smile, and 
who knows about school (because he went to school and remem- 
bers) and who knows what the other boys say and ask, and what the 
girls say and do who just knows everything and understands every- 
thing who knows your school and your friends and your thoughts, and 
who would always know how to advise you, and to whom you could go 
and tell everything without being afraid or ashamed, because you know 
he will understand and will never laugh at you, even in his heart. It 
would be very nice to have an Elder Brother like that wouldn't it? 

' 'Well, the fact is that you have such an Elder Brother and dear 
too. And if ever you are naughty, he is most awfully sorry ; and 
when you are good and kind he is most immensely glad. Who is this 
Elder Brother? Why, it is Christ: because he is the Elder Brother to 
everyone who knows about him and wants him to be their friend and 
companion and helper. All you have to do is to say in your mind 
"Christ, please, I would like to have you for my very big Brother and 
best friend." He hears and knows what you say. And, then after that, 
the more you talk to him in your mind (just as you now talk to "your- 
self") the nearer he comes to you and the oftener he is with you. 

" 'Perhaps you will be able to see him in your mind, and perhaps 
you won't some people can; but there are thousands and thousands of 
people who have never seen him but who know his voice as well as their 
own although it sounds, at first, just like a part of their own mind 
speaking to them. And, really, seeing doesn't much matter, because you 
can't see me while this letter is being read to you (except in your head 
if you shut your eyes) and you can "imagine" Christ, if you try often, 
just as easily as you can "imagine" me to be speaking this letter. You 
know that the letter does come from me, because you know my voice in 
the letter the way I say things and the "feel" of the letter. You know 
that there is always love in my letters ; and there is always love in his 
voice even if he is obliged sometimes to scold you. He will only scold 
you because he sees some way to make you happier; and he will praise 
you just as often and, I hope, oftener than he scolds. 

" 'It's not a good plan for a boy to talk much about these things. 
You just hide it away in your heart. Some people laugh at you if you 
tell them, because they don't know. Why they don't even know the 
talks you have in your mind with yourself when you talk to yourself. 
Of course they don't know about your other "inside" things. I never 
talk about it except to the people I know will understand. But the fact 
is that Christ is the Elder Brother of all those who want him to be their 
best friend. And he loves children particularly children and lilies. 
That is why there are so many lilies on Easter Day. 

" 'But now such a long letter and I want to write to too.' " 

The Philosopher was pensive. "I suspect," he said, "that those 
children, in the end, will gain by having been brought up without 
religion." T. 



ELEMENTARY ARTICLES 



THEOSOPHY THE KEY TO A KNOWLEDGE OF HUMAN NATURE 

A LEXANDER POPE truthfully and beautifully said, "The 
/ \ proper study of Mankind is Man," but few of us devote our- 
JL V. selves to this study, and those who do find it very difficult. 
Humanity however, is the greatest theme of study as it is the 
greatest object of service. Of all knowledge the knowledge of human 
nature is the most important, for it is essential to the best and truest 
success and usefulness in life. Lord Beaconsfield in a famous address 
before the University of Edinburgh said that the two fundamental 
conditions of success, were to know one's self, and to know the needs 
of one's age or epoch. Where, and how can we get this precious knowl- 
edge ? In our colleges the organization and working of the human mind 
is studied as an abstract, and not as a practical science. In the college 
and out of it man's environment is studied with deep earnestness, and 
all things in heaven and earth are searched and questioned. Some of 
the richest, noblest, and most powerful minds have devoted all their 
time and strength to fathoming the wonders of the universe, but man, 
the crowning glory of the world, they have neglected, and these white 
haired sages have gone to the grave ignorant of the beautiful and 
majestic powers of their own minds. That Theosophy gives us a more 
complete revelation of the nature and destiny of man than either science 
or religion can be easily proved. 

What is Man? From whence, and what is his destiny? To these 
questions science with all its facts, and philosophy with its deductions 
can give but inadequate and unsatisfactory answers, so man remains 
still the arch problem of the twentieth century. Man the Knower, the 
reasoner, the liar, the murderer; man the sage, but also the sinner; he 
that weighs worlds in his balance and controls the mysterious forces 
that surround him, yet is the slave of his own desires, passions and 
appetites he, surely, is our greatest problem. In truth the human mind 
seems to be the borderland of two worlds, the battlefield of two forces, 
for here light and darkness, good and evil seem to blend. Is he a Prince 
of Eternity, or a child of the earthly and mortal? Our modern science 
has not yet solved the problem of man, but has devoted a good deal of 



66 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

time and study to the subject. In all the earlier works of natural history 
man was simply regarded as the Genus Homo, and was generally 
described as merely a distinct species. This error came from emphasis- 
ing too much the anatomical resemblances, and ignoring the cerebral 
differences. Later, Cuvier placed man in a distinct order, the Bimana. 
Then Professor Owen, a very distinguished Zoologist and Comparative 
Anatomist, arranged the Mammalia into four groups according to the 
development of the brain, and accorded man his rightful supremacy in 
the Archencephala that is, beings with a ruling brain. 

But does man differ from the ape and the lion only as they 
differ from the sloth and the bat? Is it sufficient to make him simply a 
distinct class? With the light of Theosophy on this great problem we 
have to answer, no. The difference is greater than can be signified by 
mere diversity of class. The entire animal kingdom lives on a plane of 
unassisted nature, unclothed, and except in a few instances unhoused. 
Both the Herbivora and the Carnivora take their food unprepared, and 
all are creatures of instinct and impulse, utterly devoid of moral senti- 
ment, and consequently of conscious responsibility. They are altogether 
incapable of rising to the level of abstract thought, ignorant of first 
principles, and wholly deficient in imagination; in truth they are merely 
organic and sentient machines. Can we compare such beings with man 
who has subdued the earth to his purposes, covered the land with cities 
and the sea with ships ; who lives under an abiding sense of responsibility, 
and with a glorious hope of immortality? He ascends from fact to 
principle, and so interprets the sublime facts of the universe; and 
although he has attained to splendid realizations in the social, literary, 
and religious spheres, has still an ideal of unattainable excellence that is 
at once a guide and a prophecy of never-ending progress. Surely, then, 
man is separated from the animals as they are from the vegetables, and 
as vegetables are separated from minerals. 

Take anthropoid apes. The ape, like any quadruped, is simply the 
creature of instinct. He is governed by his passions and affections, what 
they prompt him to do, he does, regardless of consequences, which he 
cannot foresee, and indifferent to the suffering he may inflict, and with 
which he cannot sympathise. He has neither prudence nor conscience, 
reverence or benevolence. Of justice he seems not to have the remotest 
conception, and of mercy he is wholly incapable, while to the truly 
sublime moral altitude of worship he never even remotely approaches. 
Can we compare such a being with man ? In man, despite all his errors 
and sins, integrity and veracity are abiding principles, and although 
anger and revenge may rule him for a season, yet from his gentle heart, 
more especially the heart of woman, pity ultimately distills like the dew 
of heaven, and mercy, springing out of the profoundest sympathy, falls on 
the object of suffering, like the summer rain on parched ground. The 
soul of the ape is of the earth, earthy, but in man there is ever an aspira- 



KNOWLEDGE OF HUMAN NATURE 67 

tion heavenwards, and a struggle Godwards. Man becomes a sage and a 
poet, and oftentimes rises yet higher, becoming a saint and a prophet, 
dwelling in the light and partaking of the love of infinite perfection. 
Intellectually he ascends from facts which are temporal to principles 
which are eternal ; while through his imagination he rises from the plane 
of mere utility, which is earthly, to that of beauty which is heavenly. 

The scientific study of man has regarded him almost exclusively as 
an animal, and as a result of this undue attention to the lower elements 
of his compound being, the higher moral and spiritual elements have 
been almost entirely overlooked. It is doubtful if any works on com- 
parative anatomy have yet done justice to his intellect and beyond all 
question they have conspicuously failed in the treatment of his moral 
nature. What can we say of the scientific study of man that purposely 
neglects to take into consideration the phenomena of mesmerism and 
clairvoyance? Without some knowledge of these strange facts it would 
seem that our acquaintance with the profounder elements of man's 
nature can be only partial and superficial. And what can we think of 
an Anthropology which neglects the study of dream life? We cannot 
have a really complete knowledge of human nature until we have studied 
this mysterious province of our compound being, where the ordinary 
laws of waking perception seem inverted, so that in place of objective 
realities exciting perceptive impressions, it is subjective ideas and con- 
ditions which seem to evoke a corresponding environment. We cannot 
be said to have completely studied human nature until we have probed 
this problem to its profoundest depths, and attempted the solution, not 
only of ordinary but of extraordinary dreams that is, those which are 
obviously clairvoyant and predictive. We may go even further than 
this and include that weird realm of the occult and spiritual of which 
our modern science knows nothing, but from which a great many scientific 
men shrink with unutterable abhorrence. No study of man can be 
complete which leaves out such great problems as those of second sight, 
presentiments, and the visions of seers, for these things underlie some 
of the greatest movements of history. A Science of Man that utterly 
fails to account for the appearance and career of such men as Gautama 
Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, and Mahommed is surely far from perfect. 
The successive advents of these beings have changed the face of the 
world, and altered the current of history. They founded religions and 
inaugurated eras. Without them humanity would have lacked its most 
powerful impulses to advancement, and its most efficient aids to progress. 
These were pre-eminently men with all the highest attributes and qualities 
of true manhood in full flower. It is true they were master-minds, they 
were exceptional in the greatness of their endowments, still they were 
men, the archetypes of the men of the far-off future, and a perfect 
science of man must be able to explain them. 

If we turn to religion or rather, to theological teaching we do 



68 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

not get much better satisfaction. These theological teachings are rejected 
and ridiculed by scientific men, and thousands of Christian teachers no 
longer accept the doctrine of human nature held by their fathers. 
Genesis is no longer interpreted literally but looked upon as poetry 
whose symbols we do not understand. Many of these teachers accept 
in some form the modern doctrine of evolution and are trying to reconcile 
the teachings of science with the Bible, but few of them have any 
definite, satisfactory teaching on the origin, nature, and destiny of man. 
This is not saying that there is no definite teaching in the Bible on this 
great theme, for that would not be true. All through the Book there 
are scattered occult teachings that are essentially the same as our Theo- 
sophical teachings, such, for instance as the eighth Psalm, and St. Paul's 
definition of man as body, soul, and spirit (physical, psychic, and spir- 
itual). The old mechanical interpretations of the Bible are rapidly 
passing away and more spiritual interpretations are taking their place, 
but many of these teachers have not yet found definite ground. So that 
neither in the religious nor in the scientific teaching of to-day do we find 
man so clearly analyzed and defined as we do in our Theosophical teach- 
ings. We are told that the Theosophical theory of nature, life and man 
is founded upon knowledge gained by wise men in the past, and that 
students to-day may acquire this knowledge if they will comply with 
the conditions. They give us an account of the past and future of our 
planet and of others, with the true doctrine of the evolution of man 
and the world. Theosophy teaches that ether (sometimes called Akasa, 
and sometimes the Astral light) is a universal substance in which all 
thoughts, acts, and events are recorded, and that after receiving the 
necessary training the student may become able to read this book of the 
Recording Angel. It further teaches that the real, permanent man is 
spirit, a ray from the One Spirit, and thus a part of all. This spirit 
passes through a series of experiences by repeated reincarnations in suc- 
cessive races and planets, the accumulated experience of each incarnation 
being retained leads the soul toward perfection, and when that point has 
been reached all these experiences will be remembered. After each 
incarnation the grosser elements are cleansed away and the soul has a 
period of rest and refreshment, during which the experiences gained in 
the last incarnation are worked up into faculty for the next life. The 
law of Karma rules man's life, so that, "whatsoever a man soweth that 
shall he also reap." There is no such thing as luck, for the nature of our 
present incarnation depends upon the way we lived and thought in 
previous incarnations. The joy and sorrow measured out to us here 
is the outcome of our own lives. This is a key to the mystery of suffer- 
ing and sorrow and to the problems of social condition; the contrasts 
between wealth and poverty, culture and ignorance, virtue and vileness. 
It explains why a genius musical or other may appear in a family 
destitute of such power. It also explains the occurrence of accidents, 



69 

misfortunes, and untimely deaths, as well as the frequent cases of unfit- 
ness of environment, which are sometimes so extreme as to paralyze all 
endeavor, thus filling the soul with despair, and often with bitterness. 
It explains, too, why some individuals are possessed of such psychic 
powers as clairvoyance, clairaudience and psychometry: it also fully 
explains the phenomena of spiritualistic seances. 

With its fine analysis of man's sevenfold nature Theosophy gives the 
fullest directions for self-culture, teaching that character is the end of 
knowledge. It shows us how to eradicate selfishness in all its forms : 
how to control all the appetites and desires of the lower nature, and to 
subordinate all material interests to the spiritual will. It teaches that 
the performance of every duty without desire of reward, leaving results 
to the great law, with the cultivation of a broad generous sympathy and 
unselfish work for others will transform the character. It further 
gives us directions for the cultivation of the inner, spiritual man by 
meditation and communion with the Divine. To those who so desire it 
gives a specific course of training by which the inner faculties may be 
aroused and developed, thus helping to a yet higher plane of spiritual 
development. In short, as a revealer of man's origin, history, growth, 
and destiny, Theosophy has no equal, and as a guide to self-knowledge 
and character development it is supreme. 

JOHN SCHOFIELD. 



"The unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure 
duties is hardening the character to that temper which will work with 
honour if need be, in the tumult or on the scaffold." 

R. W. EMERSON. 




r= " 

OOF 



Spiritual Letters of Edward Bouverie Pusey. (Longmans, Green & Co.) 

"My peace I give unto you can only be said by the Master to the beloved 
disciples who are as himself. There are some even among those who are ignorant 
of the Eastern wisdom to whom this can be said, and to whom it can daily be said 
with more completeness." Dr. Pusey is one whose explanation of his religious 
experiences might seem ludicrous to many who are beginning their acquaintance 
with Eastern wisdom; but through his devotion Pusey reaches the peace higher 
than the intellectual plane that these beginners covet. What vivid spiritual experi- 
ence is his ! recalled again and again in his sermons, not in self glorification but 
by way of setting before his hearers the rich treasure that may be theirs. "It is 
not a Presence to be touched, handled, seen, heard, felt by our bodily senses; yet 
nearer still, because it is where the bodily senses fail, where the outward eye cannot 
reach, the outward ear cannot hearken; but, when the outward senses fail, then 
the inward eye sees a light, brighter than all earthly joy; the inward ear hears His 
Voice ; the inmost soul feels the thrill of His Touch." 

"He left us, but to be closer to us; He left us in Bodily Presence, but to be 
present still more nearly in Spirit; not without us any longer, as Teacher, Guide, 
Comforter, but, through that other Comforter, within us ; withdrawn from our 
bodily sight, to fill our souls ; no longer to be touched or handled by our hands, 
that His Spirit might be made manifest to our spirit, that we might touch Him 
with the hands of our heart, feed on Him with the cravings of our spirit, see Him 
with the eyes of our mind, be enlarged to receive Him, and, being expanded, be 
filled with Him, and be 'one with Him and He with us.' " 

"Seek we Him in our thought, words, and actions. So, in all things seeking 
Him, shall we at length find Him, and ourselves be found in Him; yea, He, who 
shall manifest Himself more fully then, shall, according to His most true Promise, 
in earnest thereof, while hidden from the world, manifest Himself to them who 
are also hidden from the world in Him. He shall impart to us more of our true 
life, even Himself." His travel over the path brought to Pusey knowledge of 
those things in human nature which make the path so difficult; in the Spiritual 
Letters, Pusey appears as a physician of souls. He is as well acquainted with the 
subtler maladies as is a practitioner with fevers and chills. The evasions and 
subterfuges of the human spirit as it endeavors to shirk its bounden duty he 
exposes and reproves. He sees that mortification is often merely an offering at 
the altar of self-love. "This love of praise eats out the good of everything; you 
are casting out with your own hands any treasure you may acquire, and taking 
in sand to sink your vessel. Do then be resolute as to this. When you have made 
an offering to God, do not ask for it back again to sacrifice it to self. Such 
things as 'hinting at self's abstinent living and unworldliness in town' what are 
they but a more refined worldliness? How much better when people in simplicity 
enjoy self and are thankful, than seemingly to give up self in order to make self- 
praise one's end !" He writes to one whom he directs : "To give up your own 



REVIEWS 71 

will is better than abstinence from meat." He warns against all mere external 
practices which by separating one from his fellows foster spiritual pride. "Society 
is not the place for looking devout. You had better make it a place for recreation 
altogether, only in the fear of God, than try to obtain a higher tone of mind, and 
then see what people think of it. Better to do common duties in a common way 
than attempt things higher and then abuse them to idolatry. You should think 
yourself unfit for it, until you have more self-mastery. Avoid any outward action 
in society which may betray any inward good feeling." "The idea of dress 
seems almost to be a monomania with you. Which dress does our Lord commend, 
that of John the Baptist or the gay clothing of kings' houses? . . . The change 
of dress was bad as an overt act." He points out the harm of ecclesiastical 
employments which coddle the soul in complacency. "Your chief occupation 
(sacred embroidery) though it is for the glory of God, and for the honor of 
His Sacrament, is still solitary, involves no sacrifice of your own will, or giving 
way to others. It is so far a mode of life, which would foster a habit of following 
your own way, dislike of being put out, in fine, self-will and selfishness, because 
it does not draw out love." He is very patient with the weaknesses and prejudices 
of others, and is genuine in his desire to help them grow ; he is willing to do 
without meat if that food causes others to offend. "With regard to external acts 
of reverence, I think with you, that any such acts as would excite general atten- 
tion, as the 'kneeling in going out of Church, out of reverence to the Altar,' etc., 
are better avoided." "Why should people say 'Mass' instead of the Holy Eucha- 
rist? They might have gone far to Catholicise England, if they would have 
taught as dear John Keble did, without whom they very probably would not have 
taught at all." 

Pusey does much more, however, than reprove shortcomings. He is a master- 
builder, and gives to his flock, in his own special words, those directions for the 
upbuilding of the spiritual nature which are immemorial. "I think almost you 
might do better, if you did not think so much about your manner. Throw your- 
self into another's mind, and you would not be rude and rough. You think of 
showing kindness to them. What probably you need to see, is what would be 
kind to them; i. e. I think you have not studied other minds enough, being 
always busy about your own. Whereas, I think that if you were to observe your- 
self less, you would learn that self-forgetfulness which you really want." "The 
first stone in every building is humility honestly to own your own nothingness. 
You are wishing for something large. You answered, and honestly, 'Yes,' when 
I said, 'You want more elbow-room?' Unless any one have dug deep by humility 
and so reached the living Rock, their humility is but like the house of cards, at 
which children play; each story is carefully fitted together, and placed on that 
below it, but the higher the little builder raises it, the more certain it is to fall." 
"I never look beyond the day: everything beyond is dreamland, with which I 
may have nothing to do." "Take care about the day-dreaming. It is such special 
vanity, and so unreal; picturing yourself as being what you would never be, and 
robbing God in imagination." He understands as few Christians do that para- 
doxical teaching of the Master which is in accord with the Upanishads that by 
losing life one gains Life. "I would have you anxious for nothing, except for the 
grace of God. Whatever of natural good qualities you have will remain all the 
safer, when penetrated by that grace. St. Paul retained all his individuality. 
So did St. Peter and St. John. One sees the individuality even when 
they wrote, inspired and, as it is said of them, 'full of the Holy Ghost.' 
You will be yourself still, but ensouled, I hope, with the grace of God." And, 
in his own way, he apprehends and sets forth the law of Karma. "You must 
not allow yourself in morbid or misgiving feelings. . . . The immediate occa- 



72 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

sion of this is that, I fear, there is something unhealthy about your sorrow and 
self-reproaches; there may be a secret impatience or irritation that you cannot 
at once be what you would, which is not true patience or humility. We are what 
we have made ourselves; and we must pray God to unmake and remake us, and 
must not be vexed if, while we are pulling down the old decayed wall we daubed 
over, the dust fly in our eyes, or bats and unclean creatures flit about us. Only 
let us strive that they do not nestle again, and the loathsome sight of them may 
do us good." 

Pusey recognized the advantage and the necessity to the Church of monastic 
orders societies of devout men and women who through meditation and godly 
lives accumulate a fund of power that radiates through the Church universal, and 
checks her tendency to compromise and secularise herself into a worldly institu- 
tion. A good portion of his energy was directed to the revival of these Catholic 
institutions within the English Church, and many of his letters are written to 
those whose thoughts are toward the convent. But his thought is never that the 
monastery is a royal road to Heaven. Any condition of life is a royal road. ("The 
circumstances really do not matter," writes Cave, "since in any we can accom- 
plish our destiny.") He writes: "What a great mystery life is! God sends us 
into the world, to form us amid life's daily nothings and trials for that character 
which we are to have throughout eternity; and every trial is like the blow of the 
statuary which makes the unshapen block take the form of beauty which He wills 
for it." One of the best letters is to a mother whose endless duties seem a long 
distraction from God. "You have indeed an anxious, yet blessed charge to rear 
so many young plants for Heaven. Yours seems Martha's office, tending Christ in 
those He has made His. Yet it need not distract one, so one endeavor to keep 
Him always before one. The mode of service, not the service, changes. There 
is often less time to be alone with God, but so you may learn to be with God in 
all you do, and do all to Him. Such is the way in which most must be perfected. 
Few have leisure. It is through and in toil that most must win God. Mary's lot 
is for most hereafter. Yet Mary's spirit may be amid Martha's toil. You will 
find in whatever degree you can practise it, that the habit of committing single 
actions, again and again, through the day, to God, in their beginning, middle, end, 
does still the soul very much, and makes life a continual living in the Presence 
of God." That letter recalls the familiar lines of Pusey's friend, Keble, the 
"hermit spirit." 

If in our daily task our mind, 

Be set to hallow all we find, 

New treasures still of countless price, 

God will provide for sacrifice. 

The daily round, the trivial task, 
Should furnish all we ought to ask, 
Room to deny ourselves, a road 
To lead us daily nearer God. 

A long paragraph from another letter shows the mildness that Pusey com- 
bined with firmness. "And now, since you have made me in a sort a spiritual 
adviser, I will mention two things to you, and you will not be mortified at my 
naming them, or at my having seen or heard of them. Not to keep you in suspense, 
I would say at once (with all affection for your general character) that there is 
one prominent fault, which people least like to be charged with, though so many 
have it, over self-esteem, or to speak very plainly, vanity. Knowing very little of 
your early life, I have no grounds, as I have no reason to judge, how much of a 



REVIEWS 75 

fault this is; nor could I say precisely, on what it turned, what was its principal 
subject. I might suspect, perhaps, even personal appearance, or something about 
the person or connected with it, was a subject (as it is a most capricious quality, 
and they said of an eminent German linguist, Schlegel, that he was vain of every- 
thing which was his, down to his elbow-chair). This you can tell far better than 
myself; whether it be this, or conversation, or general ability, or acquirements, or 
whether it floats about different things, it will in some shape or other, constitute 
your trial for some time. And it is of course a very important one, because it has 
a tendency to corrupt everything we do, by infusing self-satisfaction into it. It 
is easier to write than to say this, though you will believe I have some reluctance 
even in writing it; but having seen good sort of people in whom it has grown 
up even to advanced life, and knowing what a bane it is to spiritual progress, and 
a hindrance altogether, I could not but think it right to name it. It is often useful 
that a person should know that any given quality is perceptible to others; it makes 
them realise more the degree in which it is in them; and I doubt not that, in 
earnest as you are about yourself, you will set yourself vigorously to correct it" 
There is no arrogance nor self-esteem throughout the volume. Pusey is indeed 
a shining example of humility. When Keble became his confessor Pusey refused 
to make his confession within the church : "It would forever blacken the sanc- 
tuary," he explained. When it became his duty to listen to confessions, he did so 
on his knees, unwilling to exalt himself above the penitent. 

The volume displays a knowledge of human acts and motives such as one 
finds in a great dramatist, but a purpose altogether different. As one reads on, 
the words of Emerson rise in the mind : "Converse with a mind that is grandly 
simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthi- 
est to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that in the infinite 
riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling 
a little air in a vial, when the whole earth, and the whole atmosphere are ours. 
The mere author, in such society, is like a pickpocket among gentlemen, who has 
come in to steal a gold button or a pin." A poet with Pusey's insight would have 
burst into a rapture of verse and have charmed us with haunting beauty. But 
in making us richer, he would have made himself poorer. We read the words 
of Carlyle or Whitman or Wordsworth but our blaze of enthusiasm is damped by 
incidents of their lives. "They should have sealed their lips, guarding the vision 
in their hearts till they had wrought it into the fabric of their lives." As we 
pass from these Letters, however, to the man Pusey, we gather the gold of a noble 
life. There is none of the splendor or glamor of literary fame, but the radiance- 
of treasure laid up immortal in the Heavens. C. 



QUESTIONS 

VBltffaXfnttNni 



ANSWE 




QUESTION 116. Can someone throw light on the theory of intuitional knowl- 
edge for instance by analogy with the fourth dimension of space?* 

ANSWER. Some time ago I had the pleasure of hearing a member of the 
T. S., Mr. Mitchell, give a very good analogy between intuitional knowledge and 
the fourth dimension. I do not know that it has been published and as in any case 
I believe it will help those who chance to read this, I will endeavor to repeat it. 
I cannot improve upon Mr. Mitchell's exposition of the analogy in any way and 
what follows is as nearly what he said as I am able to remember. 

Suppose that we were beings whose power of sight was one dimensional. We 
could then see only in a geometric line and what we would see of the world about 
us would be only what lay in that line. Next, suppose that we were beings whose 
power of sight was two dimensional. We could then see only in a geometric plane 
and what we would see of the world about us would be only what lay in that plane. 
For example: let the reader suppose that he is a being whose power of sight is 
two dimensional and that the plane in which his sight lies is represented by the 
page he is reading, supposing that to be flat and of wide extent. Now the reader 
can see, by turning about, anything that lies in the plane of the paper but can 
see nothing outside of it. Then suppose that we were beings whose power of 
sight was three dimensional, as we are, then we could see the whole of the two 
dimensional plane at one glance and in our own space we can see all around us 
by turning about. For example we can see the four walls, ceiling and floor of 
a room but we can only do this by turning and twisting about and looking first at 
this small part and then at that. Now suppose that we were beings whose power 
of sight was four dimensional. We could then see all of the room at one glance 
without turning about and seeing first this small part and then that and adding 
them together. We could see the whole room at once, every minute part, at the 
same time. 

This brings us to the analogy. The intellect may be likened to a power of 
sight that is three dimensional. By the intellect we gain this small fragment of the 
knowledge of a subject and then that small fragment, and so on until at last we 
are able to piece our fragments together and attain a whole and complete knowl- 
edge of the subject. Intuition may be likened to a power of sight that is four 
dimensional. By intuition we may gain a knowledge of a subject not by the piecing 
together of fragments but as a whole and all at one time at a glance, as it were. 

L. 

QUESTION 117. What is it that reincarnates? 

ANSWER. Everything in a man which is capable of receiving an idea and 
responding to it every part of the consciousness which can, of its own inherent 
power, react directly to any suggestion, on any plane that reincarnates. 

That which incarnates is not exactly the same in any two earth-lives. Very 
slowly, life by life, the ego exhausts its interest in the experiences of the lower 



*See review of The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained ', Vol. VII, page 380. 
74 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 75 

nature, and withdraws its attention, its magnetism, its powers from the crude 
angers, lusts, and greeds of the animal mind. 

As each of these lower mind appetites becomes replete with experience and 
the pain of it, the ego's attraction toward that appetite ceases; to the idea of that 
appetite the ego no longer responds or reacts. That tiny section of the great lesson 
has been learned forever, and the portion of consciousness to which that appetite 
formerly appealed no longer incarnates as a part of that ego. By the same 
method, consciously or unconsciously, bit by bit, the active field of the higher 
nature is enlarged. 

When the ego comes to understand the method of its own evolution when 
the man really grasps the idea that he may will to transfer his centre of con- 
sciousness from the lower to the higher nature then for the first time it is 
possible for the real self, the "father in heaven" to become the master of the 
evolution of that ego through all succeeding incarnations. P. 

ANSWER. The Self. To answer thus may seem to shirk the question, which 
appears to seek a definition and analysis, but it is the least misleading answer I can 
find. Reincarnation is an Eastern doctrine, part of the great religious system of 
the Upanishads and of Buddhism which is built upon it. And in this system the 
Self is limitless and infinite and not to be defined. The instant it is defined it is 
limited and the instant it is limited it ceases to be the Self. So strongly was this 
felt that Buddha remained silent to all questions upon the nature of the Soul 
a silence eloquent of his faith but which has been misconstrued into negation 
by many western critics. 

But even if we do not take such an all-embracing view of the Self as this 
we still lack words to answer. In the autumn the leaves wither and fall, and the 
sap leaves the branches. In the spring the tree blossoms again. What is it that 
has flowered? that blooms again thus from year to year? At night we fall 
asleep and wake again in the morning. What is it that has slept and waked, 
losing certain old moods and waking to new, yet keeping others unchanged and 
continuous. These questions are as difficult to answer in words as is that which is 
asked us, and it may well be that the answers are the same that that which sleeps 
and wakes, or dies and is born again, varies with the individual. 

QUESTION 118. What is the attitude of Theosophy toward movements for 
social betterment, of which we hear so much? 

ANSWER. As Theosophy is Truth, or Divine Wisdom, and not an "ism" or 
circumscribed system of belief, I do not perceive how Theosophy can be said to 
assume an "attitude" toward anything. Perhaps the question had been better put : 
"What is the attitude of the movements for social betterment toward Theosophy?" 
or in other words, "To what degree do such movements partake of Divine Wis- 
dom?" And as to this, it seems opinions may differ, and I can only offer my own. 

I believe these movements partake of the nature of Divine Wisdom (and are 
therefore "theosophical") just to the extent that the results sought are the 
upbuilding and strengthening of godlike human character ; and that they are 
deceptive just to the extent that the glamor of material illusion (mere physical 
betterment) is made their prime object. The adherents of many of these move- 
ments have yet to learn a certain occult law, one time expressed in the words, 
""Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things 
shall be added unto you." 

But no Theosophist will condemn the social betterment movements in toto. 
If we will examine carefully any one of them which has shown a lasting vitality, 
if we will look behind the often mistaken methods, beneath its always faulty expres- 
sion, we shall find something real, something true, a living power as though a 



76 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

divine ray of the Soul were struggling to express itself in the lives of men. This, 
is the real germ of spiritual power within such movements. That men continue 
to mistake the shadow for the substance is partially my fault and yours. 

The Theosophical Society is a perfectly liberal association, and cannot, as a 
society, be bound to any other organization or program. But that same liberal 
principle leaves the individual member entirely free to work in any other body he 
may see fit to enter or connect himself with. And I believe his attitude toward 
the various movements for social betterment, of the day, should be not only 
tolerant, but cooperative in so far as he can lend his effort to lead them to look 
inward and not outward, characterward and not matterward, for the solution of 
their problems. A. I. M. 

ANSWER. This question can be answered in many ways, and from several 
points of view. 

We may quote from the statement printed each month on the last page of 
this magazine, and say that the Theosophical Society (a very different thing from. 
Theosophy, mind you), welcomes any work which has for its object the bettering 
of humanity. But that only shifts the question, which becomes a query as td 
whether any specific "movement for social betterment," really benefits humanity. 

Or we may say that Theosophy has no attitude towards such movements. 
Theosophy, i. e., Wisdom-Religion, has no direct connection with any plan of 
social reform. One is a religion, all-inclusive, complete in itself : the others are 
men-made efforts to do specific things which are worthy and useful according to 
your point of view. One person may think giving soup to the hungry a fine work ; 
another may be perfectly genuine in believing that it encourages pauperism. I 
know an enthusiast who spends her life showing little children how to grow lettuce 
and radishes and what not, in the vacant plots of New York City. It is admirable 
work. Others devote themselves to cooking, sewing and housekeeping schools ; 
still others to teaching mothers how to care for their babies, and boys how to resole 
their own shoes. All admirable. Still others believe these to be palliatives only 
and wish to cut the gordian knot of poverty and ignorance by bringing about some 
general social reform, some socialistic program. One sees at once that the widest 
and most honest difference of opinion can exist as to the usefulness and value of 
these kinds of humanitarian work and the question arises, "Does Theosophy throw 
any light on the whole subject? Can we use it as a touchstone to determine 
whether or not these things are worth while, and of several, which is the best?" 
I think the answer would be something like this : 

Theosophy would not be what it purports to be, namely, the Wisdom Religion, 
if it could not illumine all the problems of human life. In this particular case, 
if one might dare to speak in its name, it would say, "All human suffering, all 
misery, all the problems with which socialism and philanthropy and humanitarian 
work try to deal, all these are controlled by Karma, by the Law of Cause and 
Effect, which seeks always to force individuals to a greater and clearer and more 
perfect obedience to Divine Law. If we would do away with misery and unhap- 
piness, we must do away with the ignorance of Divine Law, the infraction of which 
causes the misery and unhappiness. We may palliate the results of this diso- 
bedience, we may wipe away the tears caused by pain, we may spend our lives in 
a loving and self-sacrificing effort to undo the effects which individuals are suffer- 
ing, and all this is fine and noble and commendable. But the wise man would try 
to strike at the root of the whole trouble, ignorance of the Laws of Life, and he 
would spend his time and energies teaching people these laws, so that new causes 
of misery would not be created. This seems more worth while than to try to 
alleviate those already in existence and which must work themselves out to the last 
iota of a perfect balance." Therefore I should say that the attitude of Theosophy 
towards movements for social betterment is sympathetic, but it does not think these 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 77 

movements strike at the root of the difficulty ; that to be most useful and to do the 
most good, people should devote themselves to the task of teaching the ignorant the 
laws of the spiritual world, the breaking of which is the cause of all human 
suffering. Obviously the first thing to do is to study those Laws of Life and so 
fit yourself for your mission. G. HIJO. 

ANSWER. Theosophy as a rule of life exists for the benefit of the whole 
world, and to every good and charitable enterprise its members should always stand 
ready to lend a helping hand. Founded as Theosophy is on the basis of universal 
brotherhood, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color, its attitude 
towards all movements for social betterment should be one of sympathy and 
assistance. K. H. 

ANSWER. Theosophy is concerned with every side of life, every human 
activity. But the all-absorbing concern of Theosophy is the spiritual side of man 
and its development, because this is the immortal part of man, and the only part 
in the long run which is worth while. "For soul helps flesh more now, than flesh 
helps soul" may be true of our social as well as of our individual life in fact it 
must be either "helps" or "hinders." In so far as schemes for social betterment 
strengthen the Divine part of man in so far are Theosophists absorbingly inter- 
ested in them or should be. And let the questioner ask himself frankly if he 
knows a social reformer worthy of the name who does not set up before him the 
ideal of more widespread and highly developed character. L. E. P. 

ANSWER. "All Theosophists are only too sadly aware that in Occidental 
countries especially, the social condition of large masses of the people renders it 
impossible for either their bodies or their spirits to be properly trained, so that the 
development of both is thereby arrested. As this training and development is 
one of the express objects of Theosophy, the T. S. is in thorough sympathy and 
harmony with all true efforts in this direction." 

"In the present state of society, especially in so-called civilized countries, we 
are continually brought face to face with the fact that large numbers of people are 
suffering from misery, poverty, and disease. Their physical condition is wretched, 
and their mental and spiritual faculties are often almost dormant. On the other 
hand, many persons at the opposite end of the social scale are leading lives of 
careless indifference, material luxury, and selfish indulgence. Neither of these 
forms of existence is mere chance. Both are the effects of the conditions which 
surround those who are subject to them, and the neglect of social duty on the 
one side is most closely connected with the stunted and arrested development on 
the other. In sociology, as in all branches of true science, the law of universal 
causation holds good. But this causation necessarily implies, as its logical out- 
come, that human solidarity on which Theosophy so strongly insists. If the action 
of one reacts on the lives of all, and this is the true scientific idea, then it is only 
by all men becoming brothers and all women sisters, and by practising in their 
daily lives true brotherhood and true sisterhood, that the real human solidarity, 
which lies at the root of the elevation of the race, can ever be attained. It is this 
action and interaction, this true brotherhood and sisterhood, in which each shall 
live for all and all for each, which is one of the fundamental Theosophical prin 
ciples that every Theosophist should be bound, not only to teach, but to carry out 
in his or her individual life." (From The Key to Theosophy pp. 231-234, "The 
Relations of the T. S. to Political Reforms.") 



I T-S-ACUVTITES i 



THE ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE THEOSOPHICAL 

SOCIETY 

The Annual Convention of the Theosophical Society was held at Cincinnati, 
Ohio, on April 30, 1910. 

MORNING SESSION 

The Convention having been called in accordance with the Constitution, was 
declared to be in session and members and friends were warmly welcomed by Mr. 
Charles Johnston, Chairman of the Executive Committee. 

TEMPORARY ORGANIZATION 

Mr. Johnston called for nominations for temporary Chairman and temporary 
Secretary of the Convention. 

Upon motion Mr. G. H. Brittain, of Dayton, Ohio, was unanimously elected 
temporary Chairman, and Mrs. L. F. Stouder, of Fort Wayne, Ind., temporary 
Secretary. 

Upon motion the Chair appointed a Committee on Credentials, consisting of 
Mr. H. B. Mitchell, of New York, Mr. Albert Mendenhall, of Dayton, and Mr. 
F. C. Benninger, of Cincinnati, Ohio. 

While waiting for the report of the Committee, the Convention was addressed 
by Mr. Hargrove, of New York, Mr. Smythe, of Toronto, Mr. R. Mitchell, of 
Toronto, and Mr. Roberts, of Middletown, Ohio. 

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON CREDENTIALS 

The Committee on Credentials reported that the credentials submitted had 
been examined and found satisfactory, the following 35 Branches, entitled to cast 
a total vote of 173 votes, being represented by delegates or proxies. 



Aurora, Oakland, Calif. 
Baltimore, Baltimore, Md. 
Blavatsky, Seattle, Wash. 
Boston, Boston, Mass. 
Cincinnati, Cincinnati, O. 
Dayton, Dayton, O. 
Denver, Denver, Colo. 
Detroit, Detroit, Mich. 
Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, Ind. 
Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Ind. 
Middletown, Middletown, O. 
New York, New York, N. Y. 
Pacific, Los Angeles, Cal. 

78 



Providence, Providence, R. I. 
Queen City, Seattle, Wash. 
Stockton, Stockton, Cal. 
Terre Haute, Terre Haute, Ind. 
Toledo, Toledo, O. 
Toronto, Toronto, Can. 
Unity, Indianapolis, Ind. 
Venezuelan, Caracas, Venezuela. 
London, London, England. 
Newcastle, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Eng. 
South Shields, South Shields, Eng. 
Norwegian, Christiania, Norway. 
Arvika, Arvika, Sweden. 



T. S. ACTIVITIES 7 

Swedish, Stockholm, Sweden. Flensburg, Flensburg, Germany. 

Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Neusalz, Neusalz, Germany. 

North Berlin, Berfin, Germany. Steglitz, Steglitz, Germany. 

West Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Suhl, Suhl, Germany. 
Dresden, Dresden, Germany. 

Upon motion the report was accepted and the Committee on Credentials 
discharged with thanks. 

PERMANENT ORGANIZATION 

The Chair then called for nominations for permanent Chairman and Secretary. 

Upon motion Dr. Tenney, President of Cincinnati Branch, was elected per- 
manent Chairman, and Mrs. L. F. Stouder, of Fort Wayne, Ind., permanent 
Secretary. 

Upon motion a vote of thanks was given Mr. Brittain for the successful 
manner in which he discharged the duties of temporary Chairman. 

Dr. Tenney, on taking the Chair, called for the Report of the Executive 
Committee. Mr. Charles Johnston, Chairman, responded as follows : 

REPORTS OF OFFICERS 
REPORT OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE FOR THE YEAR ENDING APRIL 30, 1910 

Fellow-Members : 

The Executive Committee is once more able to make a report which must 
fill every member and well-wisher of the Theosophical Society with profound 
gratitude and gladness. During the year since the last Convention, we have had 
a steady flow of new recruits, with more energetic work by our existing member- 
ship. The most notable gain is the formation of a Swedish National Branch, thus 
adding one more to the new lands in which our international body lives and works. 
Very encouraging, too, is a large recent accession in South America, where we 
have always had a nucleus of enthusiastic and effective members. We have also 
added many members and several Branches in the United States ; and in Germany 
we have gained many new members of our Society. Further, our German Branches 
have taken what seems to me a very important step, in coming more directly 
into contact with the heart of the Society, by taking the status of Branches of 
the Theosophical Society, rather than Branches of the German National Branch. 
This National Branch now takes its place as a voluntary federation of those of 
our Branches which have the German tongue in common, and which unite in work 
in the same field. The report of our ever loyal and indefatigable Secretary will 
give you further details of these accessions ; I have already said enough to show 
how important and encouraging they are, in this thirty-fifth year of the Theo- 
sophical Society. 

This very favorable account of our corporate work encourages me to turn 
to a very remarkable forward movement not so much within the Society as without 
it: a forward step which is a veritable triumph of the Theosophical Movement 
Let me illustrate what I mean by two concrete facts, within the last few months. 
These are the successful organization and completion of two series of lectures 
on Comparative Religion, on the great world-religions which form so important 
a part of our studies as a Society. One series was delivered at the house of the 
Episcopal Bishop of New York, Dr. David H. Greer, by Dr. Knox, a Presbyterian 
Clergyman and Professor of the Union Theological Seminary of New York. The 
other series was organized by Dr. Randall, one of New York's foremost Baptists. 
In both series of lectures the great world-religions, including Christianity, were 
treated in what we are accustomed rightly to regard as the Theosophical way;. 



So THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

in the spirit of tolerant and faithful research, whose object is spiritual truth and 
not doctrinal difference. In both series the unity of spiritual experience was clearly 
portrayed, and one may fairly say it was evident that but one further step in 
advance was needed to bring the reverend lecturers to the front line of the Theo- 
sophical position ; the recognition, namely, of the reality of the Lodge of Masters. 
For from the perception of the unity of spiritual life it is but a short step to the 
perception of the spiritual and immortal brotherhood of those who have entered 
it; to the recognition of the truth that members of this high brotherhood, Masters 
of the Lodge, founded all the great world-religions and work ceaselessly therein, 
and that Jesus of Nazareth takes his place as a Master of the Lodge. When this 
position is reached, and one is justified in saying that it soon will be reached, 
then the work of our martyrs and witnesses will be justified, and we shall see 
clearly that our great leaders did not toil in vain. 

These are, I believe, the most vital facts of the Theosophical Movement during 
the year just closed. Both within and without the Theosophical Society there 
has been a great and consistent advance. The religious thought of the world is 
steadily drawing nearer to the Theosophical position, and to a better understanding 
of the aims and purposes of the Society. The old prejudices and misconceptions 
are being overcome, and theosophists, no longer regarded as a sect apart, are being 
recognized, notably by the different Christian denominations, as the friends and 
helpers of all religious endeavor, of all aspiration to the central truth and reality 
-of life. Your Committee, therefore, lays this report before you with a feeling at 
once of profound gratitude and of ardent hope for the future. 

CHARLES JOHNSTON, 
Chairman Executive Committee. 

Upon motion the above report was accepted. 

The Treasurer's report being called for, Mr. Mitchell asked permission to 
present first the report of the Secretary, with which he had been entrusted. 

REPORT OF THE SECRETARY, T. S., FOR THE YEAR ENDING APRIL 30, 1910 
I. New Branches and Members 

The Secretary begs to report that during the preceding year diplomas have 
been issued to 123 new members as follows: In the United States, 46; in England, 
12; in Germany, 33; in Norway, 6; in Sweden, 13; in South America, 12, and in 
Canada, i Total, 123. 

During the same period the Society has lost by resignation 4, and by death 9. 

Charters have been issued to three new Branches in the United States the 
Unity Group at Indianapolis, Ind., on August 5, 1909, the Oceano Branch, Oceano, 
Cal., on October 22, 1909, and the Terre Haute Branch, at Terre Haute, Ind., on 
January 5, 1910. 

To the "Theosophical Society Swedish National Branch" at Arvika, Sweden, a 
charter was issued on September 5, 1909. 

Charters have also been issued to nine Branches in Germany, as follows: 

Theosophical Society, Berlin Branch, Germany. 

Theosophical Society, North Berlin Branch, Berlin, Germany. 

Theosophical Society, Flensburg Branch, Flensburg, Germany. 

Theosophical Society, Schoneberg Branch, Schoneberg, Germany. 

Theosophical Society, Suedende Branch, Suedende, Germany. 

Theosophical Society, Suhl Branch, Suhl, Germany. 

Theosophical Society, Munich Branch, Munich, Germany. 

Theosophical Society, Dresden Branch, Dresden, Germany. 

'Theosophical Society, Neusalz Branch, Neusalz, Germany. 



T. S. ACTIVITIES 81 

2. The Sale of Books 

The Secretary is very much encouraged with the sale of books during the past 
year. This is not only satisfactory as indicating the want felt and supplied by 
our literature, but also shows a profit to be applied to increasing our effort in this 
direction. 

The remaining copies of the Abridgment of the Secret Doctrine, by Miss 
Hillard, have been turned over to the Secretary and the proceeds from the sale 
of these books will go toward printing a new edition. This book has proved to 
be so indispensable to all students of Theosophy that it has become a standard work. 

It is also encouraging to note the ready sale of the books published by this 
department of our work, and realize that our literature, with its message of light, 
love and faith, is finding its way into every quarter of the globe. 

3. Correspondence 

The Secretary is pleased to report a larger and more varied correspondence 
than ever before. Every year of experience in this work leaves a deeper impres- 
sion of the breadth of opportunity that inevitably comes within the sphere of this 
office and which time and physical strength can only limit. 

4. The Theosophical Quarterly 

The circulation of the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY is continually increasing, 
and the quality and breadth of the subject matter has been such that we are finding 
libraries and institutions of learning glad to give us a larger audience expressing 
their appreciation and preserving the volumes for future use. All this has been 
accomplished, notwithstanding the fact that all the contributions to its columns, 
the assistance of the members in its distribution, in fact, all the work consequent 
upon the issuing of such a journal, has been cheerfully given as a labor of love. 

5. A Word Personal 

As another year of service draws to a close the Secretary cannot refrain 
from expressing an appreciation of the satisfaction derived from realizing the 
helpful suggestions, prompt responses, patient forbearance and kind thoughtful- 
ness ever extended to her, and to assure her co-workers in office of her constant 
appreciation and gratitude for assistance so frequently and so freely given. 

Respectfully submitted, 

ADA GREGG, 
Dated April 25, 1910. Secretary. 

Upon motion the Secretary's report was accepted with thanks. 
The Treasurer's report was then read, as follows : 

REPORT OF THE TREASURER, T. S. 
April 24, 1909 April 26, 1910. 
Receipts. Disbursements. 

Dues $703.90 Secretary's Office $318.72 

Contributions 1,311.16 Theosophical Quarterly 

Theosophical Quarterly 207.71 (Six Nos., Jan., 1909, to 

April, 1910) 1,879-00 

$2,222.77 Contribution returned to do- 
nor 250.00 



$2447.72 
Balance April 24, 1909 382.33 Balance April 26, 1910 157-38 



$2,605 10 $2,605 10 



H. B. MITCHELL, 
April 26, 1910. Treasurer. 

6 



82 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

In presenting this report the Treasurer pointed out that the deficit of $288.07 
appearing in the statement of the previous year, had been entirely removed 
through the generous response that the members had made to the Society's need. 
Though the cash balance of $157.38 was somewhat less than the advance payments 
received on account of dues for the coming fiscal year, the Society was wholly 
free from all indebtedness, and if the receipts from the mite-boxes continued as 
they now promised the Treasurer believed that the finances of the Society need 
no longer be a source of anxiety to its members. 

Discussion of the Secretary's and Treasurer's reports followed their presenta- 
tion, ways and means being considered for minimizing the work of the two 
offices and increasing their efficiency. In particular the Convention desired to 
record the deep and heartfelt gratitude of the Society for the efficient, faithful 
and ceaseless labors of the Secretary in the many details of her office, and its 
sense of the great value of her work and untiring devotion. 

Upon motion an adjournment was taken until 3.30 P. M. 



AFTERNOON SESSION 

On reconvening the Chair was authorized to appoint a committee of three 
to serve as a Committee on Resolutions, the following being named : 

Mrs. Gordon, Hamilton, O., Mr. E. A. Allen, Cincinnati, O., Mr. Charles 
Johnston, New York. 

As a Committee on Nominations the following were appointed: 

Mr. Manning, Cincinnati, O., G. W. Roberts, Middletown, O., E. T. Hargrove, 
New York. 

REPORTS FROM DELEGATES 

While waiting for the work of the Committees to be completed the Chair 
called for the Branch Reports from the delegates. This is an especially inter- 
esting and helpful part of the Convention. The spirit of brotherhood becomes 
manifest in the rejoicing in another's success, in the ready sympathy in another's 
apparent failure and in the willingness to suggest methods and to aid our fellow 
workers. 

NEW YORK 

Among those who addressed the members were Mr. H. B. Mitchell, of New 
York, who expressed for Mr. Griscom, the greetings of a fellow worker and his 
regrets at not being able to be present at the Convention. Continuing, he said: 

"The work of the New York Branch has been reported from time to time in 
the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY and I believe that most members of the Society 
are familiar with its chief features. We have tried to build each department 
of our activity strictly upon the fundamental principles which underlie the Society 
itself. Thus, for example, all who attend our meetings are made to realize that 
what we consider vital and important is not that one opinion or another should 
triumph, but that the truth in each opinion should be found and revealed, and 
that some vision should be gained of the central unifying truth from which all 
these partial truths must spring. We have tried never to depart from this, the only 
theosophic attitude, and I believe it can be said we have been successful. We have 
at least gained greatly from the attempt, and have proved the tremendous potency 
of the theosophic method, and the great increase of power and clearness of vision 
which result from such collective effort. Many times our visitors have spoken 
of this: of the fact that at our meetings the significance of their own thought has 



T. S. ACTIVITIES 83 

been apprehended more clearly than they themselves had perceived it, and that 
in the synthesis of the discussion it has been reflected back to them as they 
would have wished to have expressed it had their insight been deeper and their 
grasp of their own truth more complete. 

"We have sought to manifest the same theosophic attitude and method in 
our relations with the religious and scientific movements in the city. Innumerable 
as these are we have tried to prove that the theosophist is in fact, as well as in 
name and theory, the friend and helper of every honest search for truth and 
every genuine aspiration toward the inner life of the soul. But most important 
and most interesting has been our work in the three great branches of the Chris- 
tian Church : the Greek, the Roman, and the Protestant. The New York Branch 
gladly adds its testimony to the truth of what you have already heard in the 
report of the Chairman of the Executive Committee. The old misconceptions are 
disappearing and the true relation of the Society to Christianity is being recog- 
nized. We are no longer regarded as a separate sect, but rather as those who 
seek the eternal message of the Soul through all its manifold expressions, and 
find it clear and compelling in the teachings of Christ and in the lives of that 
long line of Christian saints and mystics that have kept the link unbroken and 
handed down the torch of his illumination even to the present day. Our training 
in the theosophic attitude and method, the rich heritage of teaching entrusted 
to our care, our loyalty to the theosophic spirit and our efforts to lead the theo- 
sophic life, all these would be far less than we know them to be, did they 
not enable us to do in the ChristFan Church what we can do for the visitor at 
our meetings: point the way to a deeper understanding of the truths primarily 
its own, and yet no more its own than they are ours. 

"There are many other aspects of the work in New York of which some of 
my fellow delegates may tell you. Year by year the work has grown as the theo- 
sophic methods have proved their power. I do not refer to increased member- 
ship alone, though this has its own significance, but rather to the increase of 
opportunity and the deepening responsibility which wider opportunity must always 
bring. No small part of this responsibility concerns our relation to the Christian 
churches and the demonstration that the Theosophical Society is indeed unsec- 
tarian, with no wish or will to proselytise, but rather to lead each and every 
man to a clearer perception of his own light and the truths of his own faith." 

Following Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Hargrove and Mr. Johnston spoke of different 
phases of the work in New York, the latter saying in part: "One interesting fact 
in our Branch has not been brought out by my fellow delegates. A number of 
our younger members, young in the Society, that is, finding that the older students 
were quite unwilling to depart in the regular meetings from the theosophic 
method of general discussion and assume instead the position of teachers, organ- 
ized a class of their own, to which they invited the older members, one at each 
meeting, to come and address them or to act as an oracle to decide difficult 
questions. Thus a new nucleus has been forming within the old and has proved 
that it has the will and initiative to carry on the work forcefully and vigorously. 
It brings us cheer and encouragement to see the younger generation thus preparing 
to care for the work of the future." 

TORONTO 

The Convention was fortunate in having two members present from the 
Toronto Branch, and listened with marked attention to short talks, both delightful 
and instructive, from Mr. Smythe and Mr. Roy Mitchell. 

In closing, Mr. Smythe insisted upon the duty of a theosophist to be "wide 
open to truth, regardless of the source of that truth." 



84 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

INDIANAPOLIS 

Mr. W. D. Butler reported the work in Indianapolis as successful and 
progressing. 

Mrs. Evans, of Indianapolis gave the reasons for forming a new Branch in 
that city, and conveyed to the members the regrets of Mr. Bruce at not being 
able to be present. 

Mrs. Wright, of Nashville, Tennessee, reported a field ripe for missionaries. 

DAYTON 

The Dayton Branch was well represented and seemed to be fully alive to 
certain wrong methods they had been pursuing and were now seeking to correct. 
Mr. A. I. Mendenhall, speaking upon this, said : "We have not found it difficult 
to get visitors to our meetings but we have found it difficult to keep them and 
make them come again. For when we have invited them, and they have come, 
we have too often made them listen to an attack upon their beliefs. It has often 
hurt me deeply, and as I have listened to the reports of the other Branches, it 
has been easy to see where we have failed. There are other and better ways of 
imparting truth and winning comrades than to make a vicious attack upon what 
we believe to be their errors. Let us offer people what they want. Let us help 
them to find what they are seeking. Then they will come to us, and if we treat 
them courteously while they are our guests, they will come again." 

Mr. G. H. Brittain followed Mr. Mendenhall in speaking of the Dayton 
Branch. Visitors, he said, were invited to speak on that which was of interest 
to them and were then followed by members or other visitors who often com- 
pletely disagreed with the first speakers. Though the effort should be to insist 
upon the same tolerance for the beliefs of others which we demand for our own, 
they had not always been successful in maintaining it. 

Mr. Vermillion told of the large number of members in the Society who 
had first joined through the Dayton Branch but had then moved from Dayton 
and were now scattered throughout the country. He compared the Branch to a 
training ship receiving and keeping members long enough to give them an 
insight into the teaching and methods of the Society, then sending them to distant 
stations to form the nuclei of other Branches. Many of those thus removed from 
Dayton still kept their membership in the Branch and corresponded with its 
officers. 

Mr. Garst spoke of the conditions in the Dayton Branch in much the same 
manner as his fellow members had done. 

The reports from the Dayton delegates aroused considerable discussion and 
drew forth suggestions as to the manner of receiving different beliefs and how 
they could be correlated and unified in the light of theosophy. The orthodox 
Christian teaching of the virgin birth of Christ had been mentioned as one of 
the doctrinal points which had frequently aroused attack in the meetings. Mr. 
Johnston urged that, whatever differences of opinion occurred, the theosophic 
principles of tolerance and courtesy be kept inviolate, and pointed out that in 
this difference, as in all others, the theosophic method could reveal a common 
ground for agreement. "Let it be shown," he said, "that the birth of Christ refers 
to the birth of the inner, divine and spiritual man from the psychic and natural 
man. Let it be compared with St. Paul's statement of 'the new man born from 
above,' and let it be known that we perceive deep significance in the teaching of this 
virgin birth a teaching which we accept not as applying to the physical man 
but to the spiritual man, to the true Christ. Let us strive to show that this, like 
all religious teachings, is given symbolically, and to understand the teaching we 
must first understand the symbols and then apply them to the teaching and then 



T. S. ACTIVITIES 85 

make the practical application of them to our own lives. What is needed is a wide, 
sane interpretation of symbols, of the symbols to be found in all religions and 
in which their deepest truths are wrapped. But above all we need to hold fast 
to that spirit of tolerance and courtesy which must be the foundation of all our 
work, and which must forever forbid an unwarranted attack upon a belief dear 
to the heart of an invited guest, whether this belief has its origin in the teachings 
of childhood, or in the reasoning of maturity." 

Mrs. Gordon, of Hamilton, Ohio, and Mr. Chamberlain, of Hartwell, Ohio, 
also spoke briefly upon the conditions of the work and outlook in their respective 
Branches. 

CINCINNATI 

As a fitting climax the members of Cincinnati Branch contributed the final 
reports from the delegates. 

Mr. E. A. Allen, giving a brief review of the work, said : "The weekly meetings 
are held Tuesday evening. At these meetings members and guests are urged to 
take part and give expression to their thoughts. Although they may differ widely 
in opinion, they do so in the theosophic spirit and our effort is always to find 
common ground. In arranging the yearly syllabus each member is given at least 
two subjects, open dates being filled by invited speakers." 

Mrs. Whitney, President of the Ladies' Class, reported an encouraging condi- 
tion of that part of the work. 

Mr. F. C. Benninger, Secretary of the Branch, urged the wider introduction 
and use of the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY. 

Miss McCormack told of the use that had been made of Miss Hillard's 
Abridgment of the Secret Doctrine, which had been found very helpful in the 
study class. 

Miss Margaret Hohnstedt reported upon the use of the Branch Library, which 
now contained several hundred volumes. Any one, whether a member or not, 
could have the books free for one week. After that a charge of five cents a week" 
was made, the money collected being used for re-binding, for new books and 
replacing the wornout volumes. 

Dr. Tenney, the President of the Branch, took the opportunity to express his 
thanks to the members in Cincinnati for the sincere and loyal support which they 
always gave to a presiding officer, and for the genuine spirit of brotherhood they 
maintained. 

LETTERS OF GREETING AND BRANCH REPORTS 

The Chair then called for the Letters of Greeting and Reports from Branches 
represented by proxy. Extracts from these were presented by Mr. Johnston, and 
they were ordered printed in the official report. The Convention heard with especial 
pleasure the reports and greetings from the European branches, showing the closer 
consolidation with the parent international body that had been accomplished during 
the year. 

THE UNION OF GERMAN BRANCHES 

To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 
DEAR BROTHERS AND SISTERS: 

Another year has passed and we have met together to draw up an account of 
the work we have done during the past year for the Theosophical Society and for 
all mankind, and to learn if we have made progress in experience and knowledge. 
If we find that the past year has proved successful we shall nevertheless surely 
refuse to believe it to be the result of our own efforts, but humbly acknowledge 
that we owe it to our Elder Brothers, who have more experience and wisdom than 
we, and who are guiding our efforts. 



86 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

It has been said somewhere, that although our Theosophical Society has been 
carried over into the new century, not all danger is passed and several years in 
the new century can be termed critical. If this is true, then the past year may be 
called especially critical, because it adds the critical phase of a short cycle of ten 
years to the general critical period of the long cycle. And if our Society has, not- 
withstanding, proved successful, made progress and gathered experience on the 
outer and inner planes, then our courage will be doubled ; we shall enter upon the 
new short cycle with increased confidence and endeavor to fulfill our duties and 
carry on our work conscientiously and faithfully. 

In regard to our work in Germany, one point may be especially mentioned, as 
it is surely of interest to all. This is the entire reorganization of the "T. S. in 
Germany." Owing to the fact that we have ceased to be a national branch, a 
resolution was passed at our last Convention to change the Constitution in agree- 
ment with the new order of things and also the name of the Society. In all 
probability the name "Union of German Branches of the Theosophical Society" 
will be adopted. This denotes another step towards the expression of unity in 
the organization of the Theosophical Society. Every local branch has thus been 
granted the right as an organization to feel and work as a direct branch of the 
Theosophical Society. No national organization can prove a hindrance. The 
national branches have ceased to be a prominent part of the "T. S." ; even more, 
they have ceased to exist as branches of the "T. S." And therefore our German 
Union has only duties in Germany and not in the international Theosophical 
Society. 

The difference in language is, generally speaking, one of the slight hindrances 
to the German society in realizing fully the unity with the international 
"T. S.," but year after year hindrances will gradually vanish, until we all feel 
ourselves members of the one "T. S.," which covers the whole earth. 

I hope that the present Convention will manifest so much strength that the 
whole "T. S." may attract the attention of the Masters, the members of the White 
Lodge, in ever higher degree, so that the connection between the Heart of the 
World and our Society may be more and more strengthened. 

With brotherly greetings from all German members, I am, 

Yours sincerely, 

PAUL RAATZ. 

BERLIN BRANCH 
Greeting and Report 
To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 

GREETINGS : 

The members of the Berlin Branch come to express their heartiest and most 
cordial greetings and wishes for the Convention. 

The past year has been a good one for our Branch. Some new members have 
joined and only very few of the old ones left. We have now 95 members, most 
of whom come regularly to the meetings. We had twenty lectures, fifteen evenings 
on which we studied the Gupta Vidya in open meetings, and six evenings were 
devoted to social meetings of our own members. Besides, there was a class of 
members for the study of the Secret Doctrine, every Tuesday, and one for the 
Voice of the Silence, fortnightly on Saturdays. 

In order to further the individual contact between members, we have appointed 
a special committee, which has made it a point to try to bring members in closer 
touch with each other by personal interview, as well as by correspondence. The 
work of this committee has shown fair results. 

All in all, we see that our movement is living and growing here in a way that 



T. S. ACTIVITIES 87 

is very encouraging and significant of the help which we receive through the 
combined efforts of the members of the T. S. in the world. 

It is a great thing to know this, and one reason more for us always to extend 
our hands in earnest and sincere co-operation with all our fellow workers. 

Fraternally yours, 

E. J. WIEDERHOLD, Secretary. 

WEST BERLIN BRANCH 

To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 
GREETINGS : 

Though none of the members of the West Berlin Branch can be at the Con- 
vention in person, yet we are with you in spirit. Our heartiest wishes and best 
hopes are there, that the Lord of the harvest and the attention and influence of 
our Elder Brothers may really be present; that the next tasks of our beloved 
Theosophical Society may be known and accomplished with pure love, great powers 
and inspired knowledge. This can only take place, if all members do their duty 
and all support as much as possible our common aims, especially, now, the Treasurer 
in his efforts to carry out the further issue of the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY. 

The smallest gifts can make a large sum in the end for this purpose! 

Fraternally yours, 
MAGDALEN A BOLDT, Librarian. WILLI BOLDT, President. 

Report 

As we ever hear the voice: "It is not well; thou hast reaped, now thou must 
sow," as well in reference to the Branch as a whole, as to its single members, we 
try patiently to sow the love, power and knowledge we have received and to deal 
fraternally with those who are in want of it. 

Therefore we have done the following: 

Schoneberg, a suburb of Berlin, counting 150,000 inhabitants, is our working 
place, and according to our programme we had regular meetings, with lectures and 
discussions in our own rooms. The subjects of the lectures were Christian, theo- 
sophical and philosophical. After a lecture there was at the next meeting only a 
discussion on a topic taken from Mr. Judge's "Ocean of Theosophy." 

In the summer season we only met together occasionally and read and discussed 
once a translated extract from Mr. Mitchell's "Talks on Religion." On Sundays, 
when the weather permitted, members often made excursions together in the green 
woods. During the autumn and winter we were again active publicly, although 
we only held our meetings on each second Friday in the month. We hope to work 
again weekly in the forthcoming period of activity this year. 

From October, 10x19, we met in the restaurant in Schoneberg, Vorberg-Strasse, 
No. I. Here the topics of lectures were drawn from Goethe's philosophy and 
Christian-Theosophical ideas. The most recent subjects were : "Is the fate of man 
subjected to pure accident?" and "My God . . . how hast Thou glorified me!" 
on Good Friday. 

The public lectures were held by members of our own Branch, as well as by 
members of "Branch Berlin" and once "Nord Berlin." 

The Friday evenings between two lectures were spent by our members in 
studying H. P. B.'s Key to Theosophy, followed by informal conversation on the 
subjects. These evenings were also visited by guests who had attended the public 
lectures and from the Branches in "Steglitz" and "Nord Berlin." 

All discussions were good opportunities to listen to others, to listen to the 
thoughts which fill their hearts and minds and to become conscious of what was 



88 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

in our own hearts and learn to know our own needs and the needs of others. Our 
members take part also in the common study of The Voice of the Silence, in 
which members of four Branches join. 

Our own members visited other Branches and took part in a number of meetings 
held to further high ideals. 

During the year three new members were admitted, so that we were six, but 
our fellow-founder and Secretary, Mr. Horicke died. Of the new members one 
has resigned. Our young fellow-member, Mr. Rothhaupt, was chosen as the Cor- 
responding Secretary of our Branch. 

The number of members is five ; one dwells at a distance, but corresponds with 
us. For the purpose of propaganda we used first, programmes; now pamphlets 
and invitations. Publications of meetings are made in five newspapers. Our 
library has been a great help to interested people. It contains 205 books, most of 
which were given by our true fellow-worker, Mr. Horicke. Theosophisches Lebcn 
brought often the monthly report of our Branch, and we thank the department of 
our international THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY for many attentions and important 
articles. 

We try to seek the fittest means to help our fellow-men; not to seek results, but 
to lay them upon the altar of the bright Alaya, the Self, that is in all men, in all 
affairs and in all around us. 

Fraternally yours, 

MAGDALENA BOLDT, Librarian. WILL: BOLDT, President. 

NORTH BERLIN BRANCH 
Greeting and Report. 

To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 
DEAR COMRADES: 

We send you greetings and good wishes for a successful Convention. 

Generally speaking, we are able to give a good report of our work. Our 
Branch has at present 20 members. Two have resigned and two have entered during 
the past year. Our activities as a whole have been successful. We hold a public 
meeting weekly, with a lecture and discussion, and twice monthly a study class for 
members meets, to which guests are also welcome. We gratefully appreciate the 
help which members of Berlin Branch and several friends have given us. Among 
these friends who have lectured at our meetings were two public-school teachers 
and one clergyman. 

Since October our Branch has rooms of its own. We are happy in having a 
strong nucleus of visitors, who are striving to comprehend the spiritual truths of 
Theosophy. A spontaneous expression of unity in thought has often occurred. In 
July, August and September public lectures were not held, but the study class con- 
tinued its work and, strange to say, had more participants than in winter. We 
are studying the Key to Theosophy. The largest number of persons present at any 
meeting was 62, the smallest 18. Our Corresponding Secretary maintains a lively 
correspondence with the members of other German Branches. 

With firm trust in the prosperity and progress of the Theosophical Society, the 
members of North Berlin Branch sends you good wishes and greetings. 

MAX DE NEVE, ERNST JOHN. 

The following was also received from the North Berlin Branch: 
North Berlin Branch begs the members, in Convention assembled, to take into 
consideration if it would not be wise to change Section 15 of the Constitution, so 



T. S. ACTIVITIES 89. 

that each member of the Society who receives the QUARTERLY may pay a small sum 
for each copy, said sum to be fixed by the Executive Committee; or that a certain 
sum for each copy of the QUARTERLY be fixed until the deficit has been paid. When 
this is paid, the Executive Committee may annul, reduce or regulate the sum as 
circumstances require. 

[As previous notice is required for a change in the Constitution, and as the 
Treasurer's report showed that the deficit in the Society's finances had been met 
by the generous contributions received from the members, no action was taken oa 
this proposal.] 

STEGLITZ BRANCH 
Greeting and Report. 

To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 
DEAR COMRADES: 

The members of the Steglitz Branch T. S. beg to send you their heartiest greet- 
ings and most sincere wishes for the present Convention. 

We trust that the results of our work in the past year, which will be 
reported, will prove most satisfactory all over the Society, and hope that much 
inspiration and courage for the future may be gained for all from the present Con- 
vention. 

We have seen with great satisfaction by the reports in the THEOSOPHICAL. 
QUARTERLY from our various sister Branches that everywhere a great activity has 
been unfolded ; we have also noticed the change of method which has taken place 
throughout the work of all Branches, and it seems to us that a great and strong 
impulse is radiating through all Branches, inspiring them for right work. We are 
happy to say that we also have felt this impulse and have gone without hesitation 
to direct our work into the new channels. Though there was at first a very slight 
shadow of doubt in the hearts of some members whether the change we made might 
not prove to be a disaster, we could soon all experience the great benefit that 
was derived from it. When in former times we felt always much trouble and 
sorrow how to interest and teach and content our visitors and members, we felt 
now suddenly relieved of this burden, finding that all was arranged by itself as by 
a miracle, and much better than heretofore. 

We had made no syllabus of lectures, but resolved that the discussion of each 
meeting should bring forth the topic for the next discussion. There was always 
some one ready to offer himself to initiate the discussion and we were very glad 
to see, that in almost all cases it was our visitors who voluntarily offered themselves 
to do this. We made it also a practice to give to our visitors always the precedence, 
the members standing back to leave the first word to our visitors, and we experi- 
enced a very great reward indeed to see the interest and animation with which our 
meetings were attended. We also made it a point when speaking to use a very plain 
and unassuming language in order that we might be intelligible to the most simple 
mind and might encourage each to give us his opinion. We avoided direct con- 
troversy with any one, letting each keep his own opinion, as we thought that if he 
desired he could always learn from the opinions the others expressed. The topics 
which were discussed at our meetings during the winter 1909-10 were the following: 
What is happiness? The path to bliss. The true Self of man. How to reach 
to the true Self. Is it possible to be true in all circumstances of life? (continued). 
What is development? The inner development. What is fate? Has man a free 
will? What is resignation? Practical and theoretical Theosophy and their value. 
The Origin and Goal of man (twice continued). What is faith? What is love? etc. 

Most of these topics were suggested by our visitors, whose assistance at our 
meetings was very satisfactory. There were always between 15 and 25 persons- 



90 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

present, and though the number of our members has not increased during the past 
year on the contrary we have lost a member we are very satisfied with the 
result of our work. 

We have had amongst our visitors dogmatic Christians, as well as materialists 
and Spiritualists. All have told their opinions, many of them have become our 
regular visitors and friends, and though none of them as yet has joined the Society 
because we do not urge anyone to do so there was on the other side not one 
who left us without approving our work and becoming our friend. 

Thus we have good reason to look forward with hope and courage for the 
work in the coming year, trusting that the help of the Masters, which so evidently 
has been with us during the past year, may remain with us also in the future. 

We have a feeling that all our sister Branches throughout the Society will 
have had the same experience as to this point and we are therefore sure that the 
feeling of joy and gratitude which all will bring with them to the Convention will 
give to this a force of harmony and inspiration as never experienced before. 

Though not present in the body, we will be with you in heart and mind, and 
offering you once more our heartiest greetings and best wishes, we remain, dear 
Comrades, very fraternally and cordially yours on behalf of the members of the 
Steglitz Branch Theosophical Society, 

RICHARD WALTHER, Secretary. LEO SCHOCH, President. 

FLENSBURG BRANCH 
To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 

DEAR BROTHERS: 

The members of the Flensburg Branch in Germany send a hearty wish for the 
welfare of the members of the T. S. in convention assembled. May the blessing of 
the Master attend your endeavours, and may this year's Convention become a foun- 
tain of strength and blessing for future members of the Society which shall fill 
them and us in the time of discouragement with new inspiration and inexhaustible 
endurance and patience, so that we shall not shrink back because results are not 
evident or interest or brotherliness seem to fail, especially in a time of trial. At 
this time our T. S. is undergoing such a trial, as you probably already know, dear 
brothers. Let it be a token that our brotherhood does not cease at our money-bags. 
This test is all the harder with us, because the realization that we are members of 
the Mother Society in New York has not been as yet fully appreciated by many 
of us, and because we have as yet done little to arouse and strengthen it. In the last 
few years I have in vain endeavoured to create some progress towards this change. 
To point out the dangers attending such indifference did not meet with any recogni- 
tion. The call of Brother Mitchell has placed this danger now plainly before our 
eyes, and to my great pleasure Brother Raatz, Berlin, seems inclined to publish the 
information concerning the Conventions of the Mother Society, of most importance 
to us, in the Theos. Leben. I hope that in the future each Branch will send its 
contribution to New York, and that this will result in strengthening the conscious- 
ness of the members of their connection with the Mother Society in New York. 
For up till now, many do not seem to have known that they owed a contribution to 
New York. We paid 2 marks yearly to the treasury of the Society in Berlin, and 
from there a part of this sum was sent as the contribution of all the Branches to 
the main treasury in New York. This arrangement was evidently a mistake, which 
will be righted, I hope, at the next Convention in Berlin. 

Should, however, our members once realize their joint liability to the parent 
Society, it would be of the greatest importance that the contents of the THEOSOPH- 



T. S. ACTIVITIES 91 

f 

ICAL QUARTERLY be accessible to them. In my judgment it should not be that a 
part only of the proceedings of the main Convention should be annually accessible 
in the Thcos. Lcben. The best things which the QUARTERLY offers remain closed 
to the most of us, as always, namely, its spiritual and other very useful contents. 
Would it not be possible, without making any demands on the treasury of the 
parent Society, for an abstract in German to be published monthly? This begin- 
ning might be enlarged later, when the sheet would have gained a regular circula- 
tion. The subscription price would, of course, have to be moderate. What do 
you think about it, dear brothers? The whole project is, of course, only my own 
idea and earnest wish, and I should be very grateful to you if you could advise me 
on this matter. Fraternally yours, 

MARTENS, President. 
Report. 

General meetings i Members 17 

Members' meetings 8 Newly enrolled o 

Committee meetings ' . . . 6 Left I 

As in previous years, our public evening readings have taken place weekly 
throughout the year, with an average attendance of 8 to y persons. 

During the winter-half of the year we advertised our meetings once a month 
in the newspapers, with very good results. Among the numerous visitors we found 
many eager souls whom we could often approach in a few moments of friendly 
conversation. 

We believe that we can see how the comprehension of and the longing for the 
Truth are everywhere spreading. 

Our evening study classes could only be held irregularly this past winter, as 
our president, Brother Martens, was ill. We found much material for study in 
Key to Theosophy. 

We have 233 volumes in our library, of which 51 were lent. 

EGGERT BUHMANN, Secretary. 

DRESDEN BRANCH 
Greetings and Report. 

To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 

The Dresden Branch sends you most heartfelt greetings and best wishes. May 
the spirit of Brotherhood preside over your deliberations and illumine all your 
actions. For thus from the meeting of different opinions each man will find his 
own more clear, and you will be wholly united despite all differences of nationality 
or of view. 

We have ourselves experienced this in the Dresden Branch, where we have 
not yet outwardly regained our standing of last year (having had then 21 members 
and now only 19), but where we have come inwardly very close to one another. 

This finds fts expression in the large attendance at our regular Tuesday even- 
ing meetings, where many guests have declared to us that they were made to feel 
very much at home. They say it is "so different" with us from what it is in other 
so-called Theosophical societies. 

This is naturally a strong incentive to us to strive still more earnestly to foster 
brotherhood and harmony, and to draw forth the lessons of the spiritual life that 
we may ever lay greater and better offerings upon the altar of the Highest 

Fraternally, 

D. W. ZIPPEL, President. 



92 

THE NORWEGIAN BRANCH 

Christiania, Norway. 

To the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 
FRIENDS : 

The Karmic Wheel of our Society has again made its annual revolution between 
two Conventions and brought us where we now are. 

What are our accomplishments while we have been swept along helplessly ir< 
the turn? 

This question presents itself to us to-day, and as to the outer work of the 
Society and its Branches the answer will be given in the different reports of 
activity which may be read at the Convention. 

But what about our inner activity? What has the Society as a whole accom- 
plished on this line, and what the different Branches and individual members? 

On this head nothing can be reported no proper answer can be given on this 
question. 

But some further questions might perhaps throw some light on the nature of 
the answer and also serve as suggestions for our work in the coming year. 

As a Society, as Branches, and as members: Have we been true to the Cause? 
Have we been faithful in our inner and outer work? Have we never failed in 
carrying out the Principles of Brotherhood? Have our motives always been 
blameless? Has unselfishness been prevalent in all our endeavors? 

If not, then we have failed in our duties, and we have probably all failed more 
or less. 

For the coming year I will make this suggestion : Let us in all things continu- 
ally try to throw ourselves entirely upon the Law. 

Friends, I have to bring you a greeting of sympathy and brotherly love from 
the Norwegian Branch of the Society. 

Fraternally yours, 

THOMAS H. KNOFF. 
Report. 

The Branch work during the winter has been carried on in the following way: 

There has been a Branch meeting at least four times a month, on Thursday, at 

8.30 P. M. The first and third meetings of the month have been public meetings, 

at which one of the members have given a lecture or read a paper. The second and 

fourth meetings have been reserved for a Study Class. 

Syllabus of Lectures or Papers Read: 

1. The Spring and the Life. 

2. Suggestions for Tyros in Theosophy. 

3. The Theosophical Movement of the Middle Ages. 

4. The Theosophical Movement of the Present Day. 

5. Periodicity and the Cyclic Laws of Nature and Man. 

6. Theosophy and its Conformity to Law. 

7. The Bible and the Kabala. 

8. The Numbers and Cycles of Norway. 

9. Christ in Man. 

10. The Doctrine of Reincarnation and the Law of Causality. 

11. Paracelsus and the Cosmic Evolution. 

12. Our Solar System. 

13. Theosophy and Teetotalism. 

14. The Lotus and the Caduceus (to be read on April I4th). 
The average attendance at the public meetings has been about 40. 

The Study Class has devoted its time to the study of Bhagavad Gita, the door 



T. S. ACTIVITIES 93 

being left open to outsiders who might wish to be present. Unexpected interest 
has been taken in this work. 

The attendance at the Study Class meetings thirteen in all has been from 
13 to 28, in average about 20. 

The members, as well as visitors, have on the whole shown increasing interest 
in our Branch work this year. In spite of this we have only had two new members 
admitted. One member has resigned. 

Our Branch has now 27 members. This doesn't show much outer progress. 
But the strength of a Branch does not depend so much on numbers as on principles 
of work, and I am glad to say that there has not been the slightest sign of dishar- 
mony in our Branch, the principles of true Brotherhood having on the outer plane 
at all events always been prevalent in all our Branch work. 

THOMAS H. KNOFF, 
Chairman of the Committee of the Norwegian Theosophical Association. 

BRITISH NATIONAL BRANCH 

To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 
DEAR FELLOW MEMBERS: 

On the occasion of the Annual Convention we beg to offer our hearty con- 
gratulations and greetings to the members of the Theosophical Society in America. 
We hope the Convention will be highly successful and prove to be another mile- 
stone on our road of progress. 

Here, in England, we have progressed steadily, for not only have we increased 
our membership, but our organization is better and the workers more keen and 
enthusiastic. 

During the year we have published two more of our series of pamphlets, which 
brings the number up to four, and we have the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY fairly 
well circulated in this country. We are now making arrangements to publish Pro- 
fessor Mitchell's article, "The Theosophical Society and Theosophy," in pamphlet 
form. 

As each year goes by we find our work and responsibilities increasing, but I 
hope that all our members will be helped and refreshed by the Convention and be 
ready to start on the year's work again. 

One of our members has called attention to a part of our ideal. It is an ideal 
of service. That service is due to our fellow-men in a very special manner. It is 
not enough for us to hold conventions, to meet together and discuss our projects 
of work, but what is required is an efficient devotion to the objects of the Theo- 
sophical Society to make them practically real and to make our lives instinct with 
them as a part of our own growth and evolution. Evolution deals in two senses 
with the life of man. The animal man evolves by virtue of the environment and 
his power of adapting himself to that environment. The Theosophist evolves by 
adapting the animal man to the operations of a higher environment and a higher 
law. 

Therefore, it seems that one part of the deliberations of the Convention of 
the Theosophical Society must be the acquisition in some degree of means by which 
to make this part of our ideal manifest. 

With all fraternal greeting, believe me, 

Yours sincerely, 

ARCHIBALD KEIGHTLEY, 
April 20, 1910. Gen. Sec. British National Branch. 



94 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

VIRYA BRANCH 

Denver, Colo. 
Greeting and Report. 

To 'the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 
DEAR FELLOW MEMBERS : 

The Virya Branch T. S., of Denver, Colo., sends greetings to the Convention, 
mingled with regrets that none of its members can attend at this time. 

The Virya Branch has held meetings each month since September, 1909, and 
while our membership has not increased, we are encouraged by the interest mani- 
fested in the meetings and subjects studied. As a Branch we feel that we are not 
doing very much, but the individual members are interested and working along 
so many different lines for the betterment of civic, social and working conditions, 
that we feel we are each helping in the work as best suits the abilities of each. 

Wishing all success to the Convention in every way, and individually being 
thankful that I belong to such a Society, I remain, 

Fraternally yours, 

BERTHA L. GORICH, President. 

PACIFIC BRANCH 

Los Angeles, Cal. 

To Our Fellow-Members in Convention Assembled: 
FRATERNAL GREETING: 

When we look back into history, and on the influence that one age has had 
upon another, we feel that such assemblies as this, seemingly of no great import 
among the world's current events, must not only mark new epochs in the growth 
of knowledge and good will, and in the development of religious thought and 
feeling, but they must strike deeper and lay the foundations of a higher, more 
spiritualized civilization, the flower of ages to come. And we send this thought 
to you, with congratulations, that it may enter into your deliberations. 
From the members of the Pacific Branch. 

WALTER H. Box, Secretary. 

QUEEN CITY BRANCH 

Seattle, Wash. 
Greeting and Report. 

To the Members of the T. S. in Convention Assembled: 

It is my privilege again to send most hearty greetings from Queen City Branch 
T. S. to those who year after year stand loyal and true to the principles of our great 
philosophy. We may all note the signs of human progress due to right thinking, 
and the enrolled or unenrolled student may feel a degree of quiet contentment that 
the work done in the past was not amiss. Among other signs of progress here in 
Seattle we note the formation of a Non-Sectarian Executives' Alliance, whose object 
is to become acquainted with each others' teachings. One representative from each 
progressive society will speak at each meeting. 

Mr. Clark was invited to represent the Theosophical Society. In his first 
lecture, May 15th, he will tell why he is a Theosophist. Meetings are held for the 
public every two weeks, and a meeting of the members each alternate week, for 
discussions. 

Allow me to report that we hold open house for all inquirers, and meetings 
once each week, responding to invitations for talks at any place desired. Individ- 
ually members are active in theosophical work in their own spheres. 

We wish to be remembered by you all, as we shall remember you, especially 



T. S. ACTIVITIES 95 

on the day of the Annual Convention, and assure you we shall read with deep 
interest the results of your deliberations in the magazine of which we are so 
proud the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY. 

Yours sincerely, 

JENNIE S. CLARK, Secretary. 

H. P. B. BRANCH 

Seattle, Wash. 
Greeting and Report. 

To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 
DEAR FELLOW- STUDENTS : 

The H. P. Blavatsky Branch sends most hearty greetings for a successful and 
harmonious outcome of our coming Convention. 

Our T. S. Work consists at present in supplying regularly five public libraries 
with the QUARTERLY, including the State University Library, which are very pleased 
to keep it on their tables ; also two book stores are kept supplied by us, while 
another book store handles the QUARTERLY independently. 

As a Branch we are not now doing public work, though each does individual 
work as he can. But I am sure the Seattle students will again come forward, and 
do as we formerly did, when the time is ripe. And meanwhile each one is trying 
to fit himself for that time. 

Fraternally, 

FLORA FRIEDLEIN, Secretary. 

PROVIDENCE BRANCH 

Providence, R. I. 
Report. 

To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 
GREETING : 

The present year has resulted in the addition of three members to the roll of 
the Providence Branch and the loss of one. The average attendance at the Sunday 
meetings has been 15 and many of the leaflets have been distributed. Providence 
papers insert notices of our meetings free of charge and the Providence Journal, 
under the heading of Letters to the Editor, has opened its columns to brief state- 
ments of our philosophy in its relation to current events. 

An address has been given at one of the State Institutions, a number of 
attendants doctors and their wives being present. After the meeting an informal 
gathering was held at the home of the head physician and much interest manifested. 
Some of the ladies are studying and a class may be formed later. A number of 
influential people are reading and altogether we find that the quiet, determined 
effort to keep a centre from which Theosophy can be disseminated, is acting as a 
leaven, and is doing its work. 

Fraternally, 

JENNIE SHELDON. 
STOCKTON BRANCH 

Stockton, Cal. 

To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: 
DEAR FELLOW-MEMBERS: 

Stockton Branch T. S. sends hearty greetings to all and best wishes for the- 
success of the Convention. 

Fraternally yours, 

A. C. KELSEY, Secretary. 
The Chair then called for the 



-96 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

REPORT OF THE COMMITTE ON RESOLUTIONS 

Mr. Johnston, as Chairman of this Committee, reported that there were no 
resolutions requiring debate. 

The Committee desired to express its gratitude that the affairs of the Society 
were in such harmonious and effective working order. 

Upon motion the Committee was given power to incorporate and file a report 
thanking the Branches for their letters of greeting and good wishes. 

Upon motion the Sunday afternoon meeting was announced for 3 o'clock. 

The Chair then called for the 



Mr. E. T. Hargrove, as Chairman of this Committee, reported the following 
nominations : 

For Treasurer: Mr. H. B. Mitchell, of New York. 

For Secretary: Mrs. Ada Gregg, of Brooklyn. 

For Members of the Executive Committee : Dr. Archibald Keightley, of 
London ; Mr. Paul Raatz, of Berlin. 

The Convention being heartily in favor of the selections made by the Com- 
mittee, the Secretary was instructed to cast a single ballot for the members nomi- 
nated, which being done, the members were declared elected. 

Upon motion the Convention adjourned until 8.15 P. M. 



EVENING SESSION 

Upon reconvening the evening was spent in further discussion of subject 
matter for meetings, how best to present it, and how to advance the different 
Branches and individual activities connected with the work. Mr. Mitchell spoke 
also upon the lessons of the Convention. 

Upon motion a unanimous vote of thanks was given to each and every 
member of the Cincinnati Branch for the cordial welcome given to the visiting 
delegates and friends. 

Upon motion a special vote of thanks was given to Dr. Tenney, who pre- 
sided over a meeting remarkable for good will and kindly feeling. 

Upon motion a vote of thanks was given the Secretary of the Convention. 

There being no further business before the Convention, upon motion the 
Convention adjourned. 

[Signed] L. F. STOUDER, 

Secretary of the Convention. 



On Sunday afternoon, following the Convention, Mr. E. T. Hargrove gave 
-a. public address on the text, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
reap." 

In the evening Mr. Charles Johnston lectured to a well-filled hall upon "The 
Spiritual Revival." We hope this lecture will appear as an article in a later issue of 
-the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY. 







The Theosophical Society, as such, is not responsible for any opinion 
or declaration in this magazine, by whomsoever expressed, unless con- 
tained in an official document. 

CHRISTIANITY AND "HEATHEN" RELIGIONS 

FROM the standpoint of the Theosophist there are two great prob- 
lems before the Christian churches, the solution of either or both 
of which will mean a great spiritual advance for the world; and 
will mean, moreover, a notable approach of Christendom to what 
the founder of Christianity intended it to be. These two problems are, 
first, the relation of the various divisions of Christendom among them- 
selves, with the resolution of discords into harmony; and, secondly, the 
establishment of a right relation between Christianity and what are called 
the "heathen" religions. We shall try to consider these two problems in 
their order. 

Regarding the relations of the divisions of Christendom among them- 
selves, three noteworthy events have to be recorded. The first and 
earliest of these is the contest between Spain and the Vatican. The 
second is the change of the Coronation Oath of the Kings and Queens 
of England. The third is the great World Missionary Conference held 
in Edinburgh in the summer. In each of these events, a fundamental 
Theosophical principle is involved, and it is well worth our while, as 
students and lovers of the Theosophical spirit, to consider how far the 
problems involved are being solved in a Theosophical way, in harmony 
with those principles of toleration and unity which we believe to be the 
fundamental realities of life. 

The struggle between Spain and the Vatican is a part, and a most 
important part, of the great contest which is being fought out in the 
Latin Catholic countries between the Vatican and the civil government. 
One may say that the first act in the drama was laid in Italy, immediately 
after the establishment of "United Italy" as a modern nation. The great 
difficulty in this establishment was the Papacy, and in particular, the 
claim of the Bishop of Rome to be, not only a temporal sovereign, but 

7 97 



98 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

even a "King of Kings," a claim conceived by Gregory VII and made 
effective by Innocent III. In the autumn of 1870 the armies of United 
Italy entered Rome, dispersing the Vatican Council, which had just 
decreed Papal infallibility, and stripping the Bishops of Rome of all 
territory except the grounds of the Vatican, the Lateran and certain other 
small estates. Thereafter the Popes ceased to be in any real sense 
temporal sovereigns. 

But the Vatican has maintained toward the civil power of Italy an 
attitude of unforgiving rancor. On the one hand, the Popes, while making 
a world-wide grievance of their loss of territory, have absolutely refused 
to accept the funds set at their disposal by the Italian government in 
compensation; and these funds have now accumulated to the extent of 
more than twenty-five million dollars. And, on the other, the Popes 
have "boycotted" the Kings of Italy with the same unforgiving rancor, 
so that even the other day the enlightened Catholics of Perugia were 
reprimanded and punished by the Pope for expressing their loyal regard 
for their Sovereign, the King of Italy. Thus in Italy the Vatican practi- 
cally countenances the spirit of rebellion, for non-recognition of the law- 
ful sovereign is rebellion. A further grievance in Italy is the regulation 
of the religious orders by the civil power. In 1873 tne religious corpora- 
tions were declared to be no longer legally competent to hold land, and 
the possessions they formerly had reverted to the State, or to the local 
governments, or to the parishes. The religious orders were brought 
under the civil law. 

In France, the contest between the Vatican and the civil power is 
so iccent that it is in all our memories. It was fully commented on at 
the time in these Notes and Comments. The immediate conflict had two 
causes: first, the unceasing campaign carried on by many French 
Catholics and members of religious orders against the government of the 
Republic, which they denounced as "a government of Jews and Free- 
masons," and therefore no true government at all. And this although 
it again and again received the hearty endorsement of the great majority 
of Frenchmen, particularly in regard to its attitude toward the Vatican. 
The fomenting of the spirit of rebellion by the adherents in France 
of the Vatican was thus the first cause of strife; the dogged obsti- 
nacy of the Vatican in the discussions concerning the Concordat was 
the other. The proposal of the French government would have 
left the Roman Catholic Church in France in possession of ample 
revenues from the State; but, just as in Italy, the Vatican preferred the 
grievance to the revenues, and many of the priests were, in consequence 
of the obstinacy of their masters at Rome, brought to the verge of 
starvation. So the Roman Catholic Church in France was disestablished 
and disendowed, and the teaching religious orders were expelled, in reality 
for fomenting the spirit of rebellion against the civil government. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 99 

In Spain the question is much the same. The civil government has, 
for the present, attempted to do two things : first, to bring the religious 
corporations within the civil law; and, secondly, to secure to other 
religious bodies besides the Roman Catholics a greater freedom of public 
worship. In the negotiations with the Vatican, the Spanish premier, 
Senor Canalejas, has shown himself reasonable, urbane, and tolerant of 
that peculiar intolerance at the Vatican which makes it so difficult to 
negotiate with. He has, indeed, shown a wiser moderation than did the 
successive premiers of France, who handled this question during the 
fight over the French Concordat. And once again he has been met with 
dogged obstinacy which refuses the least concession, and at the same time 
with what we have already commented on in the case of Italy and France, 
a practical fomenting of the spirit of rebellion ; though up to the present 
in Spain it has taken the form of a contest against the prime minister 
rather than against the government. 

For those who have been born in countries accustomed to a liberal 
form of government, it would be wholly superfluous to argue that the 
ecclesiastical authorities of every religious body must be subject to the 
civil power, since they are citizens, and therefore subject to the laws and 
government of their country, precisely like any other citizens. Yet, as 
we have seen, not only in Italy, but also in France and Spain, the Roman 
Catholic authorities put themselves in a position of independence of the 
civil government of the country, and even go further, and assume an 
attitude of open hostility. It is not too much to say that in no liberal 
and enlightened country could this attitude be tolerated for a moment. 

The excuse which the Vatican makes to itself is, doubtless, that it 
has some kind of commission from the Founder of Christianity, which 
sets it above the law, and gives the See of Peter the right, nay, even 
the duty, to dictate to the civil government, to hold the attitude of a 
King of Kings. Something very like this has been said in recent docu- 
ments emanating from the Vatican, which practically repeat the declara- 
tions of Hildebrand and Innocent the Third. Now the noteworthy thing 
is that, not only was no such commission ever given by Jesus to his 
disciples, but it is even in flat contradiction to the principles which he 
explicitly declared. When asked whether it was lawful to pay tribute to 
Tiberius, he replied: "Render to Cesar the things which are Cesar's, 
and to God the things which are God's." Lest we might be in doubt as 
to the precise scope of this reply, we have further the detailed applica- 
tion of it by Saint Paul, writing, curiously enough, to the Church at 
Rome: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is 
no power but of God : the powers that be are ordained of God. Whoso- 
ever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. . . . 
For this cause pay ye tribute also : for they are God's ministers. Render, 



ioo THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

therefore, to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; fear to 
whom fear, honour to whom honour." 

The most singular thing is that we have an even clearer enuncia- 
tion of the same cardinal principle from Saint Peter himself, who writes 
as follows: "Submit yourself to every ordinance of man for the Lord's 
sake : whether it be to the king, as supreme, or unto governors, as unto 
them that are sent by him for the punishment of evil doers, and for the 
praise of them that do well. . . . Honour all men. Love the 
brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king." 

If Paul and Peter, in thus echoing the words of their Master, could 
thus explicitly command the disciples of the early churches to recognize, 
honor and obey the authority of a pagan ruler like Nero, is it not an 
extraordinary thing that the successor of Paul and Peter in the Roman 
See believes himself justified in failing to recognize, and even openly 
opposing the Christian and Roman Catholic ruler of Italy to-day? Is it 
not perfectly evident that, in taking the position we have described, 
whether in France, Spain or Italy, the Vatican is in flat contradiction to 
the teaching of Peter and Paul, and what is far more important, to the 
express command of the Master himself? 

We have dealt with this grave and vital question somewhat at length, 
because it is part of a question even more vital: the whole attitude of 
the present authorities of the Roman Church. And this attitude of the 
Vatican is so vital, because it forms the chief obstacle to the establish- 
ment of a true relation between the Roman Church and other Christian 
bodies, such as the Greek and Anglican Churches, and the various Protest- 
ant organizations, in Germany, England, America and elsewhere. Just 
as, in dealing with the civil governments of Italy, France and Spain, the 
Vatican takes the attitude that, in case of difference, it is necessarily right 
and they are necessarily wrong; so, in every case of difference with other 
Christian organizations, the Roman Church invariably takes the attitude 
that it is right and they are wrong. And it is this attitude which, so long 
as it continues, makes a true relation between the various parts of Chris- 
tendom impossible. It is a violation of the fundamental principle, which 
the Theosophical Society exists to affirm, that in case of difference, instead 
of there being one necessarily right and the rest necessarily wrong, all 
may be right, each in his own way, and each beholding his own portion 
of truth. We believe that a recognition of this is the beginning of true 
intellectual and moral life, and that to admit the truth in the position 
of others is one of the best ways of increasing our own stock of truth. 

The Roman Church must recognize this, in its relation with other 
Churches. It must recognize the fact that the Greek Church has its own 
vital principles and essential organization, of high value because formed 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 101 

in the territory in which the Christian Church had its first expansion and 
its most vigorous early offshoots: the regions of Greece and of Greek- 
speaking Asia Minor to which so many of Paul's letters were addressed, 
the region of the seven churches addressed by John, the region to which 
Peter sent his first epistle. The Greek Church holds, and has always 
held, that the government of the Church was committed not to Peter 
alone, but to all the disciples; as the Master himself said: "Whatsoever 
ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever 
ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven;" thus extending 
to all the disciples the authority given in an earlier conversation to Peter. 
The Greek Church holds that every church founded by an apostle, such 
as those of Antioch and Alexandria and Smyrna, are apostolic sees, 
and therefore on an equality with Rome. The Greek Church holds 
that the Church should be governed by Councils, by the collective relig- 
ious consciousness of all duly qualified members, and not by the dictates 
of a single infallible bishop; and in this, the Greek Church lies far 
closer to the primitive government of the apostolic times than does the 
Church of Rome. 

In like manner the Anglican Church, and the other religious bodies 
formed in that great period of human awakening which is called the 
Renaissance, the period which saw the discovery of new continents, 
new sciences and new arts, have their own peculiar qualities and 
virtues ; each of them reflecting, perhaps more truly than the others, 
some particular note in the deep and wonderfully varied teaching 
of the Master. The peculiar quality of all the Churches and 
religious bodies which sprang up as a consequence of the move- 
ment which we call the Reformation is, that they have revived, in 
religious life, the activity of the individual intellect and moral nature, 
in contrast with the collective intellectual and moral life of the Greek 
Church, and the highly centralized authority of Rome. To this awaken- 
ing of individual intellectual and moral life is due the fact, of weighty 
spiritual importance, that it is within the regions chiefly affected by the 
Reformation that we have had the greatest scientific development, the 
most illuminating and creative discoveries which have made this so dis- 
tinctly a scientific age. Once more, it is within the region touched by the 
Reformation that the best work is being done to bring about a prac- 
tical reconciliation between the awakened and sincere intellectual life of 
our times, and the religious life handed down by the Christian Churches: 
work such as that of Sir Oliver Lodge, in one field, and that of Harnack 
in another. We mention only these two, but they are typical of a vast 
tide of mental and spiritual force. 

The Roman Church, on its part, has admirable and wonderful 
qualities, a great tradition, and a marvellous power. And we confidently 



102 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

hope that all these treasures will one day be made available, not only 
for all Christendom, but for all mankind. But before this can take 
place, before the Roman Church can come into a true relation with 
other Christian organizations, it is absolutely essential that the doctrine 
of papal infallibility, which was so repugnant to many good Roman 
Catholics when it was brought before the Vatican Council in 1870, be 
abrogated in letter and in spirit. Such an attitude as that of the Vatican 
toward the King of Italy, or the governments of France and Spain, 
must become an impossibility; and, in general, the mental position: "I 
am tight and you are wrong," must be given up, and for it must be 
substituted the position: "I may be right, and you also may be right." 
Since this true humility is of the very essence of the teaching of the 
Master, there is no insurmountable obstacle to its adoption at Rome, 
just as there is, or should be, no insurmountable obstacle to a reversion 
to the principles so eloquently advocated by both Peter and Paul of the 
acceptance of the civil government by the Church. 

The religious bodies which came into existence as a result of the 
great intellectual movement called the Reformation, laid, as we saw, 
great stress upon individual intellectual and moral life, sometimes 
unwisely to the exclusion of collective consciousness and life. In reality, 
both are essential and indispensable: both individual and collective life, 
individual and collective intelligence, both individual and collective 
consciousness; just as, in a symphony, the individual perfection of each 
instrument and each part is not less essential than the unification of 
all instruments and parts in the general harmony. Neither the indi- 
vidual nor the collective is possible without the other. This is the 
fundamental law of spiritual life. 

These religious bodies of the Reformation period and the following 
centuries, thus laying stress on individual thought and life, sometimes 
laying on these an excessive stress, almost inevitably carried within 
themselves the tendency to still further fission and subdivision. Extreme 
self-assertion brought about the formation of innumerable sects, each 
of which, perhaps, had some valid and real principle at its foundation. 
Thus, the Congregationalists believe in self-government by the Con- 
gregation, which is certainly right in a definite range of activities ; the 
Presbyterians believe in the authority of the Presbytery, the collective 
body of elder disciples, which as certainly contains a genuine truth; 
the Methodists believe in the spiritual Method exemplified by Wesley, 
the method of individual mystical consciousness; and so on. And, if 
we take these energetic and religious bodies as a whole, it is certain 
that they contain not only valuable principles, but also an energy and 
driving power of a high value, and very vital to human progress. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 103 

It is, therefore, a matter which should fill us with profound satis- 
faction, that these religious bodies of the Reformation period and the 
centuries which have followed the Reformation, have in recent years, 
while keeping their hold on their vital principles and their high moral 
energy, done much to counteract the tendency to fission and division, 
the centrifugal tendency, which has been their great weakness from the 
beginning. While retaining their hold on the individual spiritual con- 
sciousness, the "inner light" so faithfully followed, for example, by the 
Society of Friends, they are gaining a greatly broadened and deepened 
insight into collective consciousness, that profoundly valuable spiritual 
law which forms the strength of the Greek Church, and, in spite of papal 
doctrines of infallible central authority, forms the strength of the Roman 
Church also. 

The unification of the religious bodies of the more modern period 
brings us very naturally to the Edinburgh Conference, which one of our 
valued contributors has so ably described elsewhere in this number. 
This Conference had its strength; it also had its weakness. Its strong 
side, on which our valued contributor has laid stress, was the spirit 
of unity, of genuine brotherhood, which brought together, and held 
together, the followers of so many divergent denominations, so many 
different and sincerely differing bodies, full of so much vital energy 
and moral earnestness. And most promising and commendable was 
the tolerant and brotherly co-operation in the Conference between those 
religious bodies and the Anglican Church, which has a definite hold on 
the principle of collective spiritual consciousness in life, the principle 
which through centuries has been the vital power of the older Churches. 
Nothing could be more hopeful, nothing could be more genuinely 
Theosophical than the way in which all these bodies, so individualistic 
in principle, came together and worked together, in brotherly tolerance 

and co-operation. 

i 

This, it seems to us, was the strong side of the Conference. It had 
also its marked side, not so much of weakness as of incompleteness, of 
immaturity, of insufficient information, of inadequate understanding. 
And this immaturity and inadequacy came out in a marked way in two 
directions: first, in the attitude of the Conference toward the older 
Churches, the Greek Church and the Roman Church; and, secondly, 
and perhaps of even deeper importance, in the attitude of the Confer- 
ence toward the so-called "heathen" religions. In both these directions 
the attitude of the Conference, with all its vigor and moral sincerity, 
was marked by incompleteness, immaturity, inadequacy, a distinct 
failure to understand. 

With regard to the great historic Churches, the Greek Church and 



104 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

the Roman Church, the Edinburgh Conference did, it is true, adopt an 
attitude at once liberal and sincere. The Anglican Bishop of Southwark 
declared his conviction that there could be no true unity unless Roman 
and Greek Christians were included in the plan. In this, Bishop Brent, 
of the Philippines, concurred. "It is of no use," he is reported as 
saying, "to talk of a national Christian Church in China, or anywhere, 
until you have included in your vision the Roman and the Eastern 
Church." He continued, "The Roman Church will not come to us ; we 
must go to them. The Roman Church is not the Vatican, but the 
millions of faithful Christians; we must go to them, not to proselyte, 
but to move and change to such a spirit that in God's good time they 
will realize that they are nearer us and we nearer them than any of us 
think. AYork for unity, pray for unity, but think not of the consumma- 
tion of unity until you have included the members of these great 
historic churches." 

There was, it is true, this sincere and earnest recognition of the 
great historic Churches. But there was not, in the Conference, any 
real representation either of the Greek or of the Roman Church. And 
if, in spite of this grave deficiency, we find the Conference hailed as 
the "greatest," "magnificent," "unsurpassed," even more, as "the most 
Catholic Council since that of Nicsea," then we are constrained to think 
that the members of the Conference and their friends either fail to 
realize or realize very inadequately and incompletely, the tremendous 
spiritual significance of the Roman and Greek Churches, as well in 
their difference as in their likeness. No religious gathering in which 
these two great Churches, with the profound spiritual forces and 
powers which they embody, were unrepresented, can rightly be spoken 
of as catholic; that is, universal; nor can it wisely be compared with 
the earlier Ecumenical Councils, which, with all their imperfections, 
did nevertheless genuinely endeavor to represent the whole of Christen- 
dom. Each of the great historic Churches has a tremendous and invalu- 
able secret, and it is a sign of immaturity and incompleteness of thought 
not to give the fullest recognition to this. Each Church must retain its 
own profoundly distinctive spirit, while putting away its imperfections ; 
and through the harmonious co-operation of these spirits, not through 
any principle of unison and monotony, will come the true unity. To 
continue the musical simile, neither strings alone nor brass alone, can 
ever make a symphony orchestra; and the Church must have the quality 
of the full orchestra, perfect individual development of each part, in 
all its distinctive quality and color, combined in the perfect unity of 
the whole. 

We feel inclined to take grave exception to the attitude of the 
Edinburgh Conference toward the so-called "heathen" religions. Let 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 105 

us take as a characteristic example, the words quoted by our contributor 
from the address of Dr. Robert E. Speer, Secretary of the Presby- 
terian Board of Foreign Missions of the United States: "It is because 
we believe Christianity to be the perfect and absolute religion that we 
can afford to take a generous attitude towards the religions we meet 
on the mission field." Dr. Speer must forgive us if we say that his 
mental attitude towards the said religions seems to us precisely the 
same as the attitude of the more intelligent adherents of the Vatican 
towards other divisions of Christendom ; let us say toward that to 
which Dr. Speer himself belongs. We can imagine some of our friends 
in the Roman Church repeating almost the words of Dr. Speer, and 
saying: "It is because we believe Roman Catholicism to be the perfect 
and absolute Church, that we can afford to take a generous attitude 
toward the other Christian bodies," with the hope of ultimately 
gathering them into the Roman fold. 

In just the same spirit a converted Brahman, Dr. K. C. Chatterji, 
told the Conference that "they must study sympathetically the diffi- 
culties of Hinduism in the way of accepting the distinctive doctrines of 
Christianity." With all due respect to the liberal and intelligent mind 
of Dr. Chatterji, we can see no reason why Hinduism should accept 
"the distinctive doctrines of Christianity," for this reason, if for no 
other, that "the distinctive doctrines of Christianity," such as the 
teaching of the Trinity, the Incarnation, salvation, and universal 
brotherly love, were all admirably and profoundly represented in 
Hinduism, centuries before "they gathered pearls in Galilee." 

We are strongly convinced that Jesus himself would not have 
spoken or thought of his teaching as "the perfect and absolute religion," 
in any sense implying that the older religions, let us say, of Egypt and 
India, are false and founded on error. Such an expression would be 
totally foreign to the spirit of him who said of himself that he w r as 
"meek and lowly in heart." His teaching is true. The older religions 
are also true; further, they contain many sides of truth, each accord- 
ing to its own character and history, which are less completely repre- 
sented, or not represented at all, in the teaching of Jesus as recorded 
for us by his disciples. We cannot believe that Jesus, or any Master, 
would ever say of his teaching that it is "the perfect and absolute 
religion." Such an assertion is quite out of harmony with the splendid 
humility which is an essential quality of every Master; it is out of 
harmony with the tremendous and abysmal infinitude of Truth, and 
the vastness of the immeasurable Eternal. No teaching, no religion, 
can ever give "a perfect and absolute" account either of Truth or of 
the infinite God. 



106 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

We therefore hold that the Edinburgh Conference marks a change 
in attitude of Christian missions of immense value and import, and 
which we cordially endorse. At the same time we realize that Chris- 
tian missions have a further step to take; namely, the recognition 
that each religion has its own inner life and light, and does not require 
to be supplanted by another religion; its followers should be aided to 
find and assimilate the truth contained in their own religion. This 
was the spirit, the genuinely Theosophical spirit, which inspired a 
religious Conference held two or three years ago in Wales, and on 
which we commented at the time, when an eloquent adherent of missions 
declared that the true work of the missionaries should be, to make the 
Hindu a better Hindu, and the Buddhist a better Buddhist, rather 
than to induce them to renounce their own religion for another. 

Let us for a moment consider the question from another point 
of view. A recent dispatch from Washington, commenting on a recent 
work by Dr. Edwin M. Bliss, brings out the very interesting fact that 
Oriental religions are already widely represented in the United States. 
Thus there are Buddhists, Confucianists, Bahaists and others, repre- 
senting the religious life of India, China and Persia, who are engaged 
in an organized way in the spread of their doctrines in this country. 
A Confucian Society founded by the Chinese students of Columbia 
University in 1907 seeks to demonstrate that Confucianism is a real 
religion, worthy of the most earnest consideration. Buddhism has its 
organized worship and propaganda among the Chinese and Japanese 
residents of the United States ; and the Vedanta Society has branches 
in several large cities, from New York to San Francisco. Dr. Bliss 
also includes the work of Theosophists as a part of the influence of 
Oriental religions in this country. 

All this suggests, what is profoundly true and of vital import, 
that, if there are many organized Christian missions to Oriental lands, 
there are, on the other hand, many organized influences for the spread 
of the religious ideas of the Orient in Christian countries, and particu- 
larly in America. And even deeper, and of wider scope, is the general 
influence of Oriental thought on Christendom, an influence flowing in 
part from translations of Oriental scriptures, such as The Sacred 
Books of the East, and in part from the work of the Theosophical 
Society. 

It is not too much to say that the influence of Oriental, and 
especially Indian, thought on our understanding of Christianity is 
already revolutionary. It is not too much to say that, without an 
insight into Oriental thought, we can never understand Christianity. 
It is well within the truth to say that our knowledge of the religious 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 107 

thought of the East, and particularly of India, is making us able to 
recognize in Christianity principles of supreme value which have been 
obscured for centuries; and, further, that the great religions of India 
are furnishing principles and thoughts which were incompletely and 
imperfectly represented in Christianity. We can see, therefore, how 
deep, how vital, how illuminating and inspiring is the influence which 
is being exercised by Oriental religions on our understanding of Chris- 
tianity, on our ability to see the real purpose and meaning of its 
Founder. 

I 

Here is the clue to the true work of Christianity and Christian 
missions in the realms of these same Oriental religions. The teaching 
of Christianity should help the devotees of these religions to bring to 
the light many elements in their religions which are now obscured by 
superstitions and overgrowths of error. Buddha sheds a flood of light 
on the mind of Jesus. Jesus illuminates the humane purpose of Buddha. 
The urbane and lucid spirit of Shankara helps to make Buddha and 
Jesus more intelligible, more easily grasped by alert and awakened 
minds, and at the same time brings them closer together, building a 
bridge between them. Perhaps unconsciously, the gifted and eloquent 
author of those two very valuable books, The Creed of Buddha, and 
The Creed of Christ, attained his wonderful insight by applying alike 
to Buddha and to Christ the powerful and lucid method of Shankara, 
with its depth and its intellectual excellence. 

Thus, we are convinced, should the followers of each great religion 
deal with the others, receiving and giving inspiration and light. In 
this way can a true relation be brought about between Christianity, 
with its high dynamic power, and the Oriental religions, with their deep 
understanding of spiritual consciousness. And in the same way, the 
way of tolerance, of mutual acceptance and love, can a true relation 
be formed between the divisions of Christendom. 



"To suffer is to work. All sorrow, accepted in obedience and 
resignation is accomplished progress." One of the XXII Rules of the 
Will from Hermes. 



FRAGMENTS 



SWIFT as the light flies and more brilliant, and vibrant with an 
energy and power born of the spiritual world and alone found 
there, streams upon us and over us the force of the Lodge, and 
we bathe perpetually in its glory. 

Yet, seeking some conception of our own making, formed in reflec- 
tions of the material world beneath, we fail to recognize that flood of 
life surrounding us. Abstract, we call it, since what we seek has such 
rigid definiteness that we must hurl ourselves against it as a rock to 
become aware of its presence. And still the light floods on and we draw 
sustenance and power from it unknowingly. "Abstract" forsooth ! Yet 
who has ever by act of faithful will turned his attention towards it, and 
failed to realize its specific and individual guidance and inspiration? To 
each it brings an insight, a strength and consolation ; universal in power 
and oneness, but unique for that one life; shared in as a general experi- 
ence by all who trust themselves to its power, but with a specific 
message and significance for each disciple, as special as though he alone 
in all the world had being. And this special message for him is the 
message he in turn must give forth ; that which he alone having received, 
he alone can impart. 

To the truth of this has attested the long line of followers of the 
light ; a noble army of saints and seers. They found nothing of abstrac- 
tion in it, but a definiteness which created purpose, and enabled a fullness 
of expression and accomplishment which stands over against the vague- 
ness of material lives with sharp distinction. Moreover, they found 
confidence instead of uncertainty, peace at each level of achievement, 
instead of satiety; and above all, joy. 

I wish that this idea of the path of "unutterable woe" could be 
banished from men's minds, and left to those making the Great Renun- 
ciation, whose concern it is, and who alone are able to understand its 
meaning. Seen through the darkened glass of ordinary perception, and 
interpreted in material terms of value, the result is utterly false ; and 
I am indeed of those who would that truths man cannot understand were 
withheld until such time as discipline and instruction may give enlighten- 
ment and prepare the way for comprehension. 

Not alone among pupils but among teachers also have pearls been 
cast before swine. So absolute is the law of nature's privacy, that her 
secrets cannot be imparted save to those whose worth makes under- 
standing, and if told, a worse confusion than the tongues of Babel results. 

Lo! the Christ said, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light." 
Was this a trick to lure confiding souls? A siren voice leading to the 
rocks of destruction, or worse yet, the morasses of despair? 

Answer disciples of all ages and degree! You who know that that 
voice never deceived ; that those promises, though we may have to await 
their fulfillment, are as sure as Life and Time, Oh ! ye of little faith, 
as sure as the only sure thing in all your material universe, as sure as 
Death ! 

CAVE. 



108 



REMINISCENCES OF 
H. P. BLAVATSKY 



THOSE who knew Mme. Blavatsky at all are divided into two op- 
posing camps : there is no third party of indifference. Such is the 
penalty of force of character, and even her enemies could not 
deny that to Mme. Blavatsky. Even among her friends are some 
who shake their heads over what they call the Blavatsky or "H. P. B. 
Legend." These have arrived at their conclusion by way of much 
analysis, by submitting all they knew of Mme. Blavatsky to cold criticism. 
They examine her life from the point of view of motive not the 
motive of what she strove to accomplish, of that message which she 
brought to the world but from the point of view of self-interest, of 
the personal advantage which she might obtain by her actions and 
words. Yet some of these "legend" propounders would call themselves 
her friends and regard the position Mme. Blavatsky might have gained 
by self-advertisement as the object of her work, in place of the spread 
of what she taught being advanced at the expense of all she held dear. 
Such results must arise from an analysis of possibly self-interested 
motive as a brief method of estimating human beings, in place of the more 
difficult task of a synthesis drawn from character. Such detractors, by 
whatever motive they may be actuated, only make an analysis of acts 
and words which they misunderstand, and, self-sacrifice being beyond 
them, they are confined to the narrow limit of self-interest for the 
moving urgencies of human life. They do not judge from an integrating 
synthesis of character as displayed in adherence to objects held up to 
others as ideals. Looking back now to a period twenty years ago, I have 
seen nothing which has caused me to alter the opinion I then formed, 
but much which has confirmed it. Mme. Blavatsky was among the great 
souls who sacrifice themselves for humanity, and as such she was held 
up to derision and scorn. I do not assert that she was omniscient or 
that she never made errors when dealing with men and women around 
her. But I do most sincerely say that she never wilfully injured anyone; 
that she was always ready to lay aside her own comfort and advantage 
for the sake of another; that vigorous and impulsive as the human side 
of her was, she was essentially straight and just towards others ; and 
that the motive for her actions was so true to spiritual law that her 
errors and mistakes (if they were such) were better guides than the 
most accurately reasoned judgment of her "candid friends." At least 
I may say that I am quite sure that I would have trusted the ordering 
of my life to her, knowing the confidence would not be betrayed from 



109 



I io THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

any point of view. Many of us did: I can only add that I wish I had 
been able to go further than I did. 

The first time I ever saw Mme. Blavatsky was in 1884, shortly after 
I had joined the Theosophical Society. A meeting had been called and 
was being held in the chambers of a member in Lincoln's Inn. The 
reason for the meeting lay in differences of opinion between Mr. Sinnett 
on the one hand and Mrs. Kingsford and Mr. Maitland on the other. 
Colonel Olcott was in the chair and endeavored to adjust the differences 
of opinion, but without success. By him were seated the contending 
parties, Mohini M. Chatterji and one or two others, facing a long narrow 
room which was nearly filled with members of the Society. The dispute 
proceeded, waxing warm, and the room steadily filled, the seat next to me 
being occupied by a stout lady who had just arrived, very much out of 
breath. At the moment some one at the head of the room alluded to 
some action of Mme. Blavatsky's, to which the stout lady gave confirma- 
tion in the words "That's so." At this point the meeting broke up in 
confusion, everybody ran anyhow to the stout lady, while Mohini arrived 
at her feet on his knees. Finally she was taken up to the end of the 
room where the "high gods" had been enthroned, exclaiming and pro- 
testing in several tongues in the same sentence and the meeting tried to 
continue. However, it had to adjourn itself and so far as I know, it 
never reassembled. Next day I was presented to Mme. Blavatsky, who 
was my stout neighbor of the meeting. Her arrival was totally unex- 
pected and her departure from Paris was, she told me long afterwards, 
only arranged "under orders" half an hour before she left. She arrived 
at Charing Cross without knowing the place of meeting, only knowing 
she had to attend it. "I followed my occult nose," she told me, and by 
this means got from the station to Lincoln's Inn and found her way to 
the rooms on foot. Her arrival was singularly opportune, for it broke 
up a meeting which declined to be peaceful, in spite of all the oil which 
Colonel Olcott was pouring on its troubled waters. Mme. Blavatsky 
returned to Paris almost immediately and I did not see her again until 
she returned to London to stay in Elgin Crescent. Of that time I have 
no clear remembrance. I was busy all day, and many evenings was 
unable to be present at the causeries which were then held. I did not 
keep a diary and I was much occupied with hospital work. That autumn 
circumstances caused Mme. Blavatsky to take rooms in Victoria Road 
shortly before she left London for Birkenhead, to go to India. I then 
had the privilege of staying in the house with her and others, and each 
evening we had great times of talk and queries, the detail of which I 
do not remember. So I did not make use of opportunities and advan- 
tages which were mine and cannot relate things which would be of very 
great interest to this narrative. I remember travelling with the party 
by the Great Western Railway to Birkenhead to see them off and vaguely 
recall hearing of some traitorous people who were attacking Mme. Bla- 



REMINISCENCES OF H. P. B. HI 

vatsky and whom she had trusted. This evidently was the earliest 
rumbling of the storm which was so soon to burst. 

Then came the general work of the Theosophical Society, which 
was interrupted by the explosion caused by the report of the Society for 
Psychical Research, drawn up by Dr. Hodgson. Mme. Blavatsky was 
assailed on all sides and the doubt cast upon the phenomena associated 
with her was considered to discredit the ethical and moral teaching which 
through her means and work had been placed before the world. I heard 
the resume of the report read at the meeting and afterwards read the 
report as issued. Both at the meeting where the resume was read and 
afterwards when I read the report it struck me as a very inconclusive 
document, one based on hearsay evidence, and evidence which was tainted 
and doubtful and on evidence which was not properly tested. It did not 
have weight against fully authenticated evidence of a direct nature which 
supported Mme. Blavatsky. At the time she had returned to Europe 
by way of Italy and I afterwards heard of her at Elberfeld and at Wurz- 
burg and then at Ostend and that she was in very seriously bad health 
and busily engaged in writing the Secret Doctrine. 

It was in 1886 that the position of affairs in England induced me, 
among several others, to write to Mme. Blavatsky at Ostend to ask 
advice as to what should be done to further the work. She sent a long 
reply to me and, I believe, to the others also, and at a later date in 
consequence of that letter I went to Ostend to see her. She was 
then living in the company of Countess Wachtmeister, to whom those 
who loved Mme. Blavatsky owe a deep debt of gratitude for her devoted 
care. 

My purpose in going to Ostend was, as I say, to see Mme. Blavatsky 
and to ask her advice as to the best way of carrying on the work of the 
Theosophical Society. She had replied to our letters saying that 
the work could be done, and to myself she had written that such 
work needed a leader and an unflinching will and determination on 
the part of that leader. She had also stated, on the opinion 
of one of her occult friends whom she consulted, that it was possible 
that I could be such a leader and could do it. Thus I naturally 
wished to see her and to have her advice and assistance on the means 
to be adopted. I really had no idea as to what could best be done and 
I wished to avoid unnecessary errors at the outset. When I look back 
on the methods of those who came forward to "save the Society" at 
different times, I fancy that in going to Ostend I avoided one of their 
dangers, for almost invariably one of their proposed means of salvation 
was to throw overboard and disavow the founders of the Society. I was 
then and am now fully convinced that the Society was founded by the 
Masters of Wisdom, whose messenger and agent for the purpose was 
H. P. Blavatsky. 

I had purposed to stay at the hotel, and, leaving my luggage, I went 



ii2 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

to call. I purposed, but Mme. Blavatsky disposed, and I very soon 
found myself made to stay in the same house with her. Mme. Blavat- 
sky was very busy with her book, writing articles for Russian papers, 
by which she supported herself, and answering her voluminous corre- 
spondence. I was handed a huge package of MSS. a quantity which 
by after experience would have made one of the volumes afterwards 
printed and asked what I thought of it. It was naturally of absorbing 
interest and I spent many hours over it. The few days which I spent 
in Ostend two or three were mainly occupied with this reading and 
in efforts to follow the intention of the book The Secret Doctrine. 
In its form at that time it was a series of essays of the greatest interest 
and information, but, as it seemed to me, it had no consecutive plan. 
It was a chaos of possibilities, but by no means a void, even if it was 
without form. The days were busy. I was given breakfast, but Mme. 
Blavatsky and the Countess had their coffee in their rooms. Then I 
set to work on the MSS., while Mme. Blavatsky worked in her own 
room and was invisible till a late hour of the afternoon. She might 
come out for her dinner, but her meals were the despair of her maid 
who prepared them, for they were very moveable feasts. In the evening 
she emerged and then came talk on her proposed visit to England, the 
work to be done there, on the Secret Doctrine, and on general subjects. 
Most of the evening, while talking, she played her "patiences," talking 
as she arranged her cards. Of the calumnies against her she said very 
little singularly little, it seemed to me, in view of what I had heard 
and knew of her character and with a reserve and dignity which 
commanded my respect and admiration. As for the object of my visit; 
she would come to England, but she could fix no time. As for the 
"S. P. R." report, it was "a back number" and all in the day's work, 
though it was clear that she had deeply felt the defection of many who 
had had the best reasons for trusting her. So I returned to England 
and we began to look for places to which she might come. Ten days 
after my return we were startled by the news that she was most seri- 
ously ill and that recovery was improbable, well-nigh impossible. With 
each report the situation grew more grave. 

It was Sunday, and another of our group, who had invited her, a 
medical man, went with me to ask advice from a leading London special- 
ist. That evening our friend left for Ostend, where matters hung in 
the balance for a few days. The "impossible" happened and he returned 
with the news that the crisis was over. In a short time Mme. Blavat- 
sky announced that she was free to come to England. 

At this time I again crossed to Ostend, following a relative who 
had preceded me, and we arranged for her journey and safely convoyed 
her over to Dover and thence to Maycot in Norwood. The journey 
promised to be difficult, for Mme. Blavatsky was still a very sick woman 
and found it very difficult to move about. Also, though the start at 



REMINISCENCES OF H. P. B. 113 

Ostend was comparatively easy, it was very different on arrival at 
Dover, where the poor old lady had to be carried at low tide up the 
steep and more or less slippery steps of the pier: also the crossing had 
not been smooth. 

The evening we arrived was busy. No time was to be lost and 
her writing materials had to be got ready that evening for her start at 
work the following morning. She was at her desk as usual and there 
was considerable trouble because all her books were not yet unpacked. 
Naturally the one wanted was the last of the batch, but such was fate 
and all in the day's work. For me, life was one long wrestle in the 
mazes of the Secret Doctrine, with the effort to suggest a grouping and 
arrangement and the correction of the foreign turns of language, at the 
same time retaining Mme. Blavatsky's very distinctive style. The task 
was rendered all the more difficult by the absolute indifference of the 
author. "Make it as you see best, my dear," was the almost invariable 
reply, and the matter was not made any better by the others called in 
to help. They insisted that the original language was to be left unaltered, 
so that readers of the book might have the chance of taking their choice 
of the writer's meaning. Meanwhile the said writer threatened me with 
the direst pains and penalties if it was not put into "right English." 
Naturally I preferred the "deep sea" of Mme. Blavatsky's favour. 
Living abroad as she had been, her brain was full of language idioms 
other than English, and the result of her writing the book in English 
was a literal translation of "foreign" idioms, with most surprising 
results. 

It was no very long time before Mme. Blavatsky's presence began 
to be felt. People began to gather round her, and Maycot became the 
scene of the pilgrimage of a good many people who had retained 
their interest. There were many who had got into touch with the inner 
side of life. These at least knew that Mme. Blavatsky was a reality. 
They knew that whatever doubt might be thrown on the account of the 
way external phenomena happened, the real knowledge of the unseen 
worlds and states of consciousness was possessed by Mme. Blavatsky 
and that in those realms of which they had some cognizance, Mme. 
Blavatsky was their master, and knew far more than they. It was a 
remarkable experience to see those who came. Some had private inter- 
views : others were received in company with us who lived in the house. 
And the method of treatment! At times argumentative: at others 
sarcastic: very rarely appealing for credence or justice: always the 
same driving energy which spared neither herself nor any other who 
might in any way further her Master's work. NO matter what their 
separate interests might be, Mme. Blavatsky was a uniting link. For 
the most part they were all being welded together into a united body 
whose support could give to her a platform which should gain considera- 



114 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

tion for the Theosophical philosophy ; and it was her mission to obtain a 
hearing for this in the western world. 

The nominal day began for Mme. Blavatsky before 7 a. m. When 
it really began I do not know. The body had to have its sleep, for it 
could not be driven too hard. But I had reason to believe that many 
hours of the night were spent in writing, though this never interfered 
with her usual hour to get to her desk. She was invisible till she called 
for her midday meal. I say midday, but it was a very movable meal and 
might be called for at any hour between twelve and four, a proceeding 
which naturally disconcerted a cook. Woe betide any disturber of those 
hours of work, for the more quiet she was, the more seriously was she 
engaged. Thereafter came callers, whom she might or might not see, 
if they had no appointment, and of these she made many. But Maycot 
was a long way out of London proper, and we had to face the disap- 
pointed pilgrims ! Finally at 6.30 came for Mme. Blavatsky the evening 
meal, which was taken in company with the rest of us. The table 
cleared, came tobacco and talk, especially the former, though there was 
plenty of the latter. I wish I had the memory and the power to relate 
those talks. All things under the sun and some others, too, were dis- 
cussed. Here was a mind stored with information gathered in very exten- 
sive travels, an experience of life and experience of things of an "unseen 
nature," and with it all an acuteness of perception which brought out the 
real and the true and applied to it a touchstone which "proved the perfect 
mass." Of one thing Mme. Blavatsky was intolerant cant and sham and 
of hypocrisy. For these she had no mercy ; but for genuine effort, how- 
ever mistaken, she would spare no trouble to give advice and readjust- 
ment. She was genuine in all her dealings, but I learned then and later 
that she at times had to remain silent in order that others might gain 
experience and knowledge, even if in gaining it they at times deceived 
themselves. I never knew her to state what was not true; but I knew 
she had sometimes to keep silence, because those who interrogated her 
had no right to the information. And in those cases, I afterwards 
learned that she was accused of deliberate untruth. One of her regrets 
comes to my mind as I write: "for then you will know that I have 
never, never deceived anybody, though I have often Seen compelled to 
let them deceive themselves." In all senses Mme. Blavatsky held that 
"There is no religion higher than Truth," and the position in which she 
was thus placed must have been one of the many phases of her 
martyrdom. 

The evenings passed in such talks, and all the while she arranged 
her "patiences." Many were the games at which I thus assisted 
in silence, gently indicating any opportunities which I saw of placing 
the cards. Sometimes these were acceptable, but at others, peaceful 
progress was interrupted by the effort to rap the disturbing finger on 
the table with her knuckles. There were times when an adroit with- 



REMINISCENCES OF H. P. B. 115 

drawal of the finger led to the knuckles rapping the table, and then 
"on my head" was it. Among other things which I learned was the 
fact that while Solitaire occupied the brain, H. P. B. was engaged in 
very different work, and that Mme. Blavatsky could play Solitaire, take 
part in a conversation going on around her among us others, attend to 
what we used to call "upstairs" and also see what was going on in her 
own room and other places in the house and out of it, at one and the 
same time. 

It was at one of these tobacco parliaments that Mme. Blavatsky 
stated her difficulty in getting her views expressed in the Theosophist. 
This was the magazine which she had started with Colonel Olcott in 
India. It was under his charge and he edited it in India and not un- 
naturally he conducted it on his own lines. But with the commence- 
ment of Mme. Blavatsky's work in England a more immediate expres- 
sion of her views became a matter of importance. So a new magazine 
was proposed and decided on and steps were taken to secure its publica- 
tion. Oh, but there were discussions as to its title !_ "Truth," "Torch," 
and a variety of others were offered as suggestions and rejected. Then 
came the "Light-bringer" and finally "Lucifer," as an abbreviation. But 
this was most vehemently opposed by some as being too diabolical and 
too much opposed to les convenances. Perish the word! This secured 
its instant acceptance, and those who read the first number of Lucifer, 
and also that part of the Secret Doctrine which deals with the Fallen 
Angels, may see for themselves the information which those discussions 
gained for us out of Mme. Blavatsky's inner consciousness. Even if it 
was not planned from the outset, the result was to reveal a fund of 
information of vital interest in dealing with the mystery of Manas. 

The gathering together of many threads which led to the coming to 
Mme. Blavatsky at Norwood of those interested in spiritualism, Masonic 
lore, the Kabbalah, astrology and many kindred subjects, proved that 
Maycot was too far distant from central London and that it was also 
too small. So a move was decided on, and with the return of Countess 
Wachtmeister the household was moved to 17 Lansdowne Road. 

Then followed a time of still more arduous work. The editing of 
Lucifer, the work on the Secret Doctrine, of which I copied the entire 
first volume and part of the second on a typewriter (only to find it 
useless), the coming of interested callers in numbers and from all parts 
of England and the continent, with the formation of the Blavatsky 
Lodge and its meetings, made a very busy winter. The Secret Doctrine 
began to be printed and in this and in Lucifer Mme. Blavatsky's idiosyn- 
crasy of regarding page-proof as being equivalent to manuscript, led to 
much argument and expense. It was not merely that she would divide 
a page after the type was all locked in the forms and insert a quantity 
of fresh matter, but she would with much care and precision of scissors 
cut out and then paste in a single sentence in an entirely different place. 



ii6 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Woe betide the zealous sub-editor who protested on behalf of the printers 
and the provision of funds. "Off with his head" or his metaphysical 
scalp were the orders of the Queen of our wonderland. Nevertheless 
the account for corrections of the Secret Doctrine came to more than the 
original cost of setting up! 

The Blavatsky Lodge was originally started as a body of people 
who were prepared to follow H. P. B. implicitly and a Pledge embodying 
this was drawn up. We all took it and the meetings began. Every 
Thursday evening they were held in Mme. Blavatsky's room, which was 
thrown into one with the dining room. Members flocked in, so that the 
rooms were too small, the interest being in the questions which were 
propounded for Mme. Blavatsky to answer. Some of the results were 
printed in "Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge." At this time the 
increase in membership was such that those who entered signed the roll 
of membership and the Pledge almost mechanically. I was led to write 
an article for Lucifer, entitled "The Meaning of a Pledge" and I handed 
it to Mme. Blavatsky. When she had read it through I was subjected 
to what I have since learned is called epilation, for I was divested of 
my scalp hair by hair. Exactly why I did not know, nor was I told. 
But when the process was finished somebody "upstairs" or "within" 
accepted the article and was rather pleased with it as being timely. But 
the result was the removal of the Pledge as a condition .of membership 
in the Lodge. 

The procedure under such circumstances is worth recalling. 
You would, as I did, present your thesis or remarks. It would be 
received vehemently, be opposed with a variety of eloquence an elo- 
quence calculated to upset your balance, and the impression given that 
you were a most evilly designing person, aiming to upset some of 
Mme. Blavatsky's most cherished plans of work. But with your sin- 
cerity of purpose becoming plain, there would come a change in 
Mme. Blavatsky. Her manner would change, even the expression of 
her face. "Sound and fury" evaporated, she became very quiet, and 
even her face seemed to become larger, more massive and solid. Every 
point you raised was considered and into her eyes those wonderful 
eyes came the look we learned to recognize. That look was one to be 
earned as a reward, for it meant that the heart had been searched and 
that guile was not found, also that H. P. B. was in charge. 

Some people have advanced as a theory to account for these changes, 
that Mme. Blavatsky was the scene of mediumistic oscillations or that, 
at least, she was the scene of action of not merely double but of multiple 
personality. These suggestions are really the wildest of hypotheses 
much less, working hypotheses. To those who know the laws which 
govern the relation of the physical instrument to the subtle astral and 
spiritual forces which dominate it, the explanation is simple. But I 
will put forward my own theory. For the purposes of the theosophical 



REMINISCENCES OF H. P. B. 117 

work that body was an instrument used by one of the Masters, known to 
us as H. P. B. When he had to attend to other business, the instrument 
was left in charge of one of his pupils or friends, who ran the body as 
an engineer directs his machine when taking duty for another. But the 
substitute engineer has not the same sympathy with his machine or 
instrument as the regular man and is "outside the machine." I conceive 
that, just as the engineer and his machine overcome the inertia of matter, 
so the body and its tendencies proved no light task to control in the 
absence of the real owner and head engineer. And a certain letting off 
of steam was the result. But the energy was not wasted but used up 
in the work. 

It must be remembered that during all this time of stress and 
effort Mme. Blavatsky was still a sick woman, always suffering pain 
and often hardly able to walk. But her inflexible will and devotion got 
her from her bed to her writing table and enabled her to persist in the 
carrying through the press of the Secret Doctrine, to edit Lucifer, write 
her Russian articles and those for Lucifer, the Theosophist, the Path, 
when it came out, Le Lotus Bleu, to receive her visitors both in private 
and in public, and in addition to deal with an enormous private corre- 
spondence. It was at this time I got seedy. I got a form of erysipelas 
with high fever, and had to stay in bed. It so happened that Mme. 
Blavatsky's physician was calling and he looked in on me. What was 
said I do not know, but as I lay in a kind of stupor I found that 
Mme. Blavatsky had made a progress up two flights of fairly steep 
stairs (she who never went up a step if it could be helped, on account 
of the pain so caused) and had arrived to judge for herself of her 
doctor's report of me. She sat and looked at me, and then she talked 
while she held a glass of water between her hands, and this water I 
afterwards drank : then she went downstairs again, bidding me to 
follow. 

Down I went and was made to lie on the couch in her room and 
covered up. I lay there half asleep while she worked away at her 
writing, sitting at her table in her big chair, with her back towards me. 
How long I was there I do not know, but suddenly just past my head 
went a flash of deep crimson lightning. I started, not unnaturally, and 
was saluted through the back of the chair with "Lie down, what for do 
you take any notice?" I did so and went to sleep and, after I had been 
sent upstairs to bed, I again went to sleep and next morning was quite 
well, if a little shaky. Then I was packed off to Richmond and forbidden 
to return till I was strong. This was the only time I saw the crimson 
light, though I have seen, and others saw, the pale blue light attached 
to some objects in the room and then flitting about. One of us rashly 
touched it one day when Mme. Blavatsky was in the next room. He 
got an electric shock and was also electrified by sounds of wrath from 
Mme. Blavatsky, greeting him by name and asking what on earth he 



meant by meddling with what he had no business to touch and by making 
an impertinently curious intrusion into matters with which he had no 
concern. I am sure he has not forgotten either the shock or rap to his 
knuckles or the rap to his curiosity. I know he remembered the shock 
to his arm for a long time. 

The meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge were out of the ordinary. 
The discussions were informal and all sat round and asked questions 
of Mme. Blavatsky. All sorts and conditions of men and women were 
present and one part of our delight was for Mme. Blavatsky to reply by 
the Socratic method ask another question and seek information on her 
own account. It was a very effective method and frequently confounded 
the setter of the conundrum. If it was a genuine search for informa- 
tion which dictated the question, she would spare no pains to give all 
information in her power. But if the matter was put forward to annoy 
her or puzzle, the business resulted badly for the questioner. The meet- 
ings took up a lot of time, but Mme. Blavatsky enjoyed the contest of 
wits. All nations would be represented in those rooms on Thursday 
nights, and one could never tell who would be present. Sometimes 
there would be unseen visitors, seen by some but not by others of us. 
Results were curious. Mme. Blavatsky felt the cold very much and her 
room was therefore kept very warm, so much so that at the meetings 
it was unpleasantly hot very often. One night before the meeting time, 
I came downstairs to find the room like an ice-house, though fire and 
lights were fully on. I called H. P. B.'s attention to this, but was 
greeted with a laugh and "Oh, I have had a friend of mine here to see 
me and he forgot to remove his atmosphere." Another time I remember 
that the rooms gradually filled until there was no vacant seat. On the 
sofa sat a distinguished Hindu, in full panoply of turban and dress. 
The discussion proceeded and apparently our distinguished guest was 
much interested, for he seemed to follow intelligently the remarks of each 
speaker. The President of the Lodge arrived that night very late, and 
coming in looked around for a seat. He walked up to the sofa and sat 
down right in the middle of the distinguished Hindu, who promptly, 
and with some surprise, fizzled and vanished! 

During this winter affairs had been moving in America and there 
had been a gradually increasing interest in things Theosophical. Mr. 
Judge's steadfast work began to take effect and it was proposed to 
gather all the threads together and hold a Convention of the various 
Branches and members in Chicago. I heard of the mere fact as one of 
general interest but a day or two after I was called to Mme. Blavatsky's 
room and asked "Arch, when can you start for America"? I suppose 
I was like a pussy-cat and needed stirring up, but I was off in three 
days by the City of Rome and took with me a long letter from Mme. Bla- 
vatsky to the Convention. The voyage was an odd experience for me, 
as I had never been on an ocean trip before or to such a distance. Also 



REMINISCENCES OF H. P. B. 119 

I had been torn up by the roots out of a busy life, which occupied every 
moment. On board in my cabin my attention was attracted to a number 
of little taps and cracks. These might naturally be due to the ship. But 
my attention was enforced to a series of little flashes of light, especially 
at night. The point to me was that these flashes and also these taps and 
cracks invariably associated themselves in my mind with the idea of 
H. P. B., and by this time I had begun to learn that most of these "hap- 
penings" meant something. Afterwards by letter, and later when I re- 
turned, I found she could tell me accurately what I had been doing during 
my journey to and from and throughout my stay in America. I was told 
that these taps and cracks and flashes were the coming and going of 
elemental forms of force which took a snapshot of me and my proceed- 
ings. On my return the household proved to have increased very con- 
siderably. More workers had gathered round and there was work for 
them all to do. Life went on at increasing pressure, each of us having 
a special relation to H. P. B., each receiving a different treatment. Tot 
homines, quot sententiae, and the variations of daily routine and life 
were all adapted to the testing and strengthening repair of any defect 
in character which might affect the work we were doing. As I look 
back to over twenty years ago, one can see so many privileges which 
were extended, but of which one failed to avail oneself. But such 
reflections only show the arduous work in which Mme. Blavatsky was 
engaged. Though the Secret Doctrine was now published, there was 
the regular demand from the various magazines, besides an increase in 
her already voluminous correspondence. 

It was about this time that one day Mme. Blavatsky showed great 
concern over the affairs of the editor of one of the magazines then 
published. He had been to see her some time before and had thereafter 
started the magazine. It had met with considerable success, but naturally 
had also met with difficulties. Entering her room one day I found 
Mme. Blavatsky discussing with the others present and with much sym- 
pathy, the difficulties of the editor. So far as I remember now, he had 
sacrificed a good deal of position and his means of support, in order 
to bring out the magazine; and in consequence of issuing the recent 
number was in actual want of food. The discussion continued and 
Mme. Blavatsky grew very silent. At last she exclaimed, "Well, I will," 
and turned to me, asking if I had a 5 note. I replied that I had not, 
but could easily send for one. Then I remembered that I had just sent 
one away in a letter and went to see if the letter was still in the house. 
I found it had not yet been posted and opening the envelope I brought 
it to H. P. B. She thanked me and said she only wanted it for a few 
moments. I offered it to her but she told me to retain it and to fold it 
closely, which I did. She then asked for her tobacco basket and handing 
this to me asked me to put the rolled-up note inside. I put it in but 
she said I was to bury it in the tobacco. I placed it on the arm of her 



120 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

chair at the end. She then rested her hand on the basket and apparently 
went into "a brown study," while the rest of us went on talking, I watch- 
ing her closely. In a minute or so she said with a sigh "open it and take 
your note." So I took the basket and opened it and took the note which 
I unfolded, only to find a second note with a different number rolled up 
inside. The second note was sent to the editor and I hope it proved 
as efficient in relieving his troubles as Mme. Blavatsky intended it 
should be. 

I afterwards asked why she needed my note, when she could as 
easily have precipitated her note without it. She replied "There is your 
mistake. I had to get my friend to disintegrate the note at his end of 
the line, while it was easier for me to have a mould on which to pour 
the disintegrated particles of matter and it did not require so precise an 
astral picture on my part." I then asked why and how she could get 
such notes and was given to understand that under certain circumstances 
of merit she had the right to call on certain funds and on certain centres 
in charge of her occult friends for such aid for others. The precipitated 
note was of an entirely different number and series from mine and was 
in no sense a reduplication: that would have been dishonest and there- 
fore impossible to H. P. B. 

As nearly as I can recall it was during this winter that we had a 
visit from Mr. Judge. I had met him before in America and at 
Mr. Sinnett's house, where he dined when passing through London on 
his way to Fontainebleau (where Mme. Blavatsky then was in 1884) on 
his way to India. It was only a brief visit but it was concerned with 
the work he was doing in America, where in consonance with Mme. Bla- 
vatsky's efforts in England, he was working to revive the spread of 
Theosophy in America. Just at this time, too, there was beginning to 
be formed the Esoteric School of Theosophy. With this Mr. Judge had 
a good deal to do and assisted Mme. Blavatsky in drawing up the rules 
which were necessary and in carrying into organization and external 
expression those regulations which essentially belong to the inner, unseen 
life of man. Then and afterwards, while H. P. B. was always chief, she 
alluded to Mr. Judge as her chief aid. 

The following spring I again had to go to the American Conven- 
tion, but there are no especial incidents to relate. On my return I found 
that Mme. Blavatsky had been away for a time and during her absence 
had commenced the writing of the Voice of the Silence. She was also 
engaged on the Theosophical Glossary and had begun the Key to Theos- 
ophy, though this was published much later. Life went on at the same 
high pressure of work and it was evident that Mme. Blavatsky's work 
was in the act of solidifying around her a very wide field of interest. 
At the close of this summer I was obliged to leave London on account 
of a relative's health and departed to New Zealand. Therefore I was 
not present when a very great stir and accession of energy resulted in 



REMINISCENCES OF H. P. B. 121 

the decision to remove from Lansdowne Road to the house at Avenue 
Road. I returned to find the preparations for a move already so far 
advanced that a week after my return the move was made. It resulted 
in a still larger activity for Mme. Blavatsky, for she had a larger staff 
of helpers and a lecture hall had been built to give room for the meetings 
of the Blavatsky Lodge. More office room was required, as the house 
had now become the headquarters of the European Section, for the 
British Section was now no longer the only European organization of 
the Society. With increased numbers came a strain on the commissariat 
department and therefore the new lecture hall became the household 
refectory in the intervals of the meetings. Mme. Blavatsky still had 
her meals in her own rooms, but when her hours of work were over she 
would come and join in the general talk during the evening and play her 
patiences as in former times. The preparation of Mme. Blavatsky's 
meals became a part of the devoted service of certain members of the 
household. It was to be a privilege to so aid her to secure good sus- 
tenance, and might prove a gain to her health. All she wanted was so 
easy to prepare and very simple. So it was, but her devotion to her 
work and forgetfulness of time, made the service very difficult. One 
has to remember that Mme. Blavatsky's health was very poor, her 
rheumatism was very painful and her digestion difficult. The body 
needed food very quickly after the driving energy of H. P. B. had been 
taken off. It was driven mercilessly and in its broken state the instru- 
ment reacted, sometimes to the amusement of H. P. B. I gathered that 
some of H. P. B.'s friends and pupils were left in charge of it and that 
it ran away sometimes. But this "running away" was utilized both in 
the education of her friends of the interior worlds in the exercise of a 
difficult control, and in the testing of the self-control and devotion of the 
household who sought to serve Mme. Blavatsky. 

As ever, early at work, word would be given that she wanted her 
dinner at one o'clock, but she must not be disturbed till she rang. One 
o'clock would come and go : as also two o'clock (even three, some days) 
and still no bell. By such time the simple dinner, being simple, was irre- 
trievably spoiled. Just then the bell would ring and the body needed 
its food in a hurry. And then, to all appearance, the body was a frac- 
tious invalid very fractious! It complained very forcibly, with a rare 
command of language, and bitterly, of the broken promises of those 
who had faithfully promised that the dinner would be ready. Tearful 
protestations and explanations ensued with further promises of a fresh 
dinner in a very few minutes and great was the striving to get ready. 
Then usually it became my privilege to brew some coffee on a machine 
I had got for her and kept ready, the process of which she seemed never 
to tire of watching. With the coffee to drink and some rusks to eat 
the exhaustion passed and the despised dinner (or some other got ready) 
would reappear and the storm centre would shift. But though she was 



122 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

perfectly jolly, laughing and amused the while I entertained her, the 
thunderstorm would roll up again with the return of the devoted dinner- 
maker. Even the weakness of the bodily ailments were turned to the 
testing of the devotee and the ability to "stand fire." I was not in the 
area of these storms, it was not for me, "I was another kind of a hairpin." 
In the meantime I had the pleasure of being of help, until coffee taken, 
dinner consumed, I was told to "get out" and H. P. B. was off to work 
again. 

With the close of that summer I had to leave England again, going 
by way of New Zealand to San Francisco where I had letters from 
H. P. B. and did the work I had to do. Then returning on the way 
home I arrived at New York and was detained there by the illness of 
the relative I was with; and on May 8, 1891, received the news of 
Mme. Blavatsky passing from this life. 

In these brief notes and reminiscences there is no pretence to give 
a full account. It would demand a far abler and deeper spiritual under- 
standing than mine to write a life of H. P. B. All I can testify to is 
that she knew no weariness in the cause to which she was devoted ; that 
she was noble in every sense of the word; that those who had opportunity 
to know her loved her, and that she was worthy of all their devotion. 
What we were able to give in the cause she served was returned many 
times over. But it was not for what she so freely gave that H. P. B. was 
loved. It was for what she was and what she represented. And with 
that, all is said. 

ARCHIBALD KEIGHTLEY. 



"Surely the truth must be that whatsoever in our daily life is law- 
ful and right for us to be engaged in, is in itself a part of our obedience 
to God; a part, that is, of our very religion. Whensoever we hear 
people complaining of obstructions and hindrances put by the duties of 
life in the way of devoting themselves to God we may be sure they are 
under some false view or other. They do not look upon their daily 
work as the task God has set them, and as obedience due to Him. We 
may go further and say not only that the duties of life, be they never 
so toilsome and distracting, are no obstructions to a life of any degree 
of inward holiness; but that they are even direct means, when rightly 
used, to promote our sanctification." 

H. E. MANNING. 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
MODERNISM* 



THREE years have passed since Pius X set his bull "Pascendi 
Gregis" as a dam in the great river of catholic progress. 
Though the dam remains it has failed signally in the purpose 
for which it was placed. Part of the force of the obstructed 
thought current has made its way over the banks and flowed quietly 
through the adjoining, less arid fields of protestantism, refreshing, stim- 
ulating half sluggish streams of spirituality and of thought; part, 
banking up silently behind the dam, awaits the moment of opportunity 
when it will rush through with all the concentrated power of a delayed 
impulse. 

To all who are interested in the future of religion, Roman Catholic 
Modernism is a movement which deserves the closest attention. It is 
almost equally significant to catholic and to protestant, for the religious 
situation has changed radically in the last ten years. Vertical cleavages 
in individual denominations between old and new, tradition and progress, 
have given place to one great horizontal cleavage, which can be fairly 
stated thus: Shall the scientific movement with its devotion to truth 
and its reliance upon facts, which has entered into and transformed 
every other department of our life, be allowed to enter into our religion 
and, if need be, transform that? Pius X has answered this question 
emphatically in the negative. The modernist answers it with equal 
emphasis, but affirmatively. 

In fact the characteristic which stands out most clearly in the 
personality of the modernist is his love of truth. For truth he will 
bear starvation, calumny, excommunication. Always respectful to the 
claim of authority where he believes that claim to be valid, he is firm 
in adherence to his position in insistence on his double right to freedom 
of thought and to the privileges of catholic worship. He stands for 
"the most scientific science with no apologetic basis," and, as he claims, 
the most catholic religion. He believes in the possibility of a synthesis 
which will unite the two. 

Thus we find the Abbe Loisy, after having written an epoch-making 
book on the relation of the Gospel and the Church, remarkable for both 

It is needless to remind the reader that there are as many kinds of Modernism as 
there are individual Modernists. Nevertheless Modernists have been classified. I have used 
the term to represent the attitude and tentative religious philosophy put forth by Abbe Loisy, 
Father Tyrrell and others of their group. If I have been over influenced in my estimate of 
Modernism by the writings of Father Tyrrell, it is because I believe that he was "the most 
penetrating observer of the present Modernist movement" and that more nearly than anyone 
else he has carried the root ideas of Modernism to their logical conclusions. AUTHOR. 

"3 



124 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

breadth and detail of critical workmanship, meekly allowing himself 
to be silenced by the authority against the perversion of which he pro- 
tests, and, at the same time, refusing to retract. Catholic to the core, 
he petitions for the privilege of celebrating in his room that mass from 
the public celebration of which he has been debarred. Anathemas 
cannot make him less a catholic; they cannot make him less a critic. 

With those who lie to protect the truth Coleridge's "orthodox liars 
for God" Modernists have scant patience. For, in the words of Father 
Tyrrell, "it is just upon us that the burden falls in these days when truth 
will be denied no longer." "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and 
the children's teeth have been set on edge." "Because they continually 
purchased edification at the cost of truth, we have to buy back truth 
at the cost of infinite scandal." Again, in his reply to Cardinal Mercier : 

"Your Eminence, the principle that divides Medievalism from Mod- 
ernism is at the root moral, rather than intellectual; a question less 
of truth than of truthfulness, inward and outward of a rigorous 
honesty with oneself that makes a man ask continually: Is this what 
I really do think, or only what I think that I think? or think that I 
ought to think ? or think that others think ? that teaches him intellectual 
modesty and humility and detachment; that restrains his impatient 
appetite for the comfort and self-complacency of a certitude (natural 
or supernatural) which entitles him to be contemptuous, arrogant and 
dogmatic toward those who differ from him. 

"It is a question of respect for the liberty of other minds; of a 
scrupulous veracity that will make no concession to the exigencies of 
edification, nor deem any loose statement justifiable in support of what 
is believed to be a revealed truth; nor imagine that such pious tam- 
perings with the truth can ever be God-pleasing and meritorious." 
"Those Modernists who put their trust in the spread of truth, will labour 
in vain unless they first labour for the spread of truthfulness; nor are 
they faithful to their 'method of immanentism' if they hope for an 
intellectual before a moral reform. What would it avail to sweep the 
accumulated dust and cobwebs of centuries out of the house of God; 
to purge our liturgy of fables and legends; to make a bonfire of our 
falsified histories, our forged decretals, our spurious relics; to clear 
off the mountainous debt to truth and candour incurred by our ancestors 
in the supposed interests of edification; what would it avail to exter- 
minate these swarming legions of lies, if we still keep the spirit that 
breeds them? In a generation or two, the house swept and garnished 
would be infested as before. The only infallible guardian of truth 
is the spirit of truthfulness." Or in the words of A. L. Lilley: 
"It is idle to invoke religion, with its sanction of altruism, as a 
mere social expedient, if religion be not true, or be no more than a 
useful illusion. Grown men cannot be kept in order by the bogies of 
their infancy. Tell them that their altruistic and humanitarian instincts 
feebler, though not less real, than their egotism, are but tricks of crafty 
Nature for her own ends, and they will fight Nature as they fight one 
another but to their destruction." 

In this spirit the modernist proceeds to study the Bible and the 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERNISM 125 

Church. He possesses in large measure the technique of the scientific 
expert the historian; and the experience of the religious expert the 
saint. Examining the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, he 
finds them to be not infallible in the letter full even of contradictions 
and of other defects as historical documents but priceless as a record 
of the religious experience of the Jewish and early Christian peoples, 
a progressive revelation of God, which far from ceasing with the death 
of Christ or of the Apostles, has persisted through all the varied phases 
of the Church's life, and is alive to-day. This progressive revelation 
he unifies under the name of tradition. It has ever expressed itself in 
terms of poetry and life symbols, not in intellectual statements, and 
is to be distinguished sharply from the mass of judgments which 
has been made upon it theology. Revelation is the subject matter of 
theology the religious experience which theology classifies and judges. 

"Nothing could ever come from the understanding but theology or 
philosophy or systematic thought. Revelation, on the other hand, is a 
transforming and heightening, not of the active, but of that receptive 
part of our mind which evades our free control; and which we may 
compare to the sense of hearing. We listen, we do not speak ; we receive, 
we do not give ; we are shown something, we do not show." "Revelation 
is referred to those presentations of the other world which are shaped 
and determined by man's inward religious experience, individual and 
collective. Here it is that man seems to be guided and taught, not 
through the ordinary ways of knowledge, but more or less supernaturally, 
by a divine spirit in direct communication with his own ; and this in the 
interests of conscience and duty and worship, not in those of speculative 
curiosity. Hence the peculiarly sacred character attached to revelation 
as distinct from theology." "To look for a perfect adequation between 
two such totally different orders of truth the prophetic truth of revela- 
tion, the scientific truth of theology is a root error of theologism. 
A revelation that ignores the check of theology, that speaks in a dead 
language, that uses an obsolete and unintelligible thought system; a 
theology that ignores the check of revelation, the continual progressive 
self-manifestation of God in the religious life of humanity both these 
are alike fruitless." 

Here we find two distinct types of knowledge important to one 
another, yet capable of creating great confusion if not clearly distin- 
guished. One mystical, moral, the changeless kernel of the varying 
forms of religious symbolism; the other an intellectual explanation of 
that kernel, the outermost husk which grows, bursts, falls off and 
ultimately takes its place in the museums of antiquated thought forms. 
Moreover, like Newman, the modernist holds that "the criterion of pres- 
ent expressions of the ever revealed truth is not their identity with, or 
subjection to, those of the past, but their conformity to supernatural 
experience of the present." 

This is the very essence of the chief contribution which Modernism 
has made to the religious thought of to-day: emphasis on the distinc- 



126 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

tion between two orders of knowledge, and explanation of the nature 
and importance of the knowledge of faith. For the knowledge of faith 
is to the modernist religion: "A sense of superhuman beings with 
whom man can enter into practical relations." Nor does he mean pure 
subjectivism. The author of The Programme of Modernism writes 
as follows : "For us the realities of history and faith are equally objec- 
tive but belong to different orders of truth the former to the sensible 
and natural order, the latter to the supersensible and supernatural. But 
while historical truth is established by sensible experience faith postulates 
a supernatural light." Neither does the modernist slip into the error 
of the mere visionary and neglect the ethical side of religion. "The 
mystical need of conscious communion and self -adjustment with the 
supersensible and superhuman world, to which the sensible and human 
world is felt to be subordinate, seems distinct from the 'moral' need until 
the character of the superhuman order is realised as 'moral,' and till the 
voice of Conscience moral, intellectual, and aesthetic is accepted as the 
voice of God. Nor till then is it felt that obedience to every sort of 
conscience puts man in harmony with the universe of being, and is the 
very essence and inwardness of religious worship and sacrifice." 

This sense of the importance of the supersensible element in religion 
is emphasized and developed in Father Tyrrell's posthumous work 
Christianity at the Cross-roads. Like Loisy he is in opposition to the 
prevailing ideas of liberal protestantism. Christ, he says, whatever he 
was, was in no sense a liberal protestant. The liberal protestant theo- 
logians in attempting to make Christ acceptable to their generation have 
departed from the Christ of history. Just those elements in Catholicism 
which are repugnant to the modern mind are characteristic of Christ. 
In the main the Catholic Church has stood for the standards and values 
of Christ. The transcendency of the Kingdom is a case in point. The 
tendency to identify the Kingdom of Jesus' teaching with a regenerated 
social order, manifested in liberal protestantism, is a false move. This 
is in no sense Christ's peculiar message. What there is of social 
righteousness in his presentation of the Kingdom, he received from 
Jewish tradition and passed on. His conception of the Kingdom is 
expressed symbolically in the picture of his immediate and glorious 
reappearance. To the "idea," the kernel of this symbol the transcend- 
ence of the Kingdom the Catholic Church has, in the main, been 
blindly true. 

Moreover, the identification of the Kingdom with a righteous social 
order is a step in the wrong direction in that Society is only relatively 
more permanent than the individual. The Kingdom for which man 
yearns is not a temporary, righteous, natural order but a permanent 
supernatural order. Liberal protestantism attempts to supply this need 
by faith in this world; Jesus by faith in another world. If the Catholic 
Church in her insistence on the transcendent has mistaken the symbol 



127 

for the reality, she must suffer her disappointment as the prophets of 
old suffered theirs. 

Can we trust the moral and distrust the religious intuitions of Jesus ? 
Is it possible that the purest of all hearts did not see God? Can 
righteousness hold its own when it has been deprived of all transcen- 
dental meaning? No. Jesus has satisfied the mystical as well as the 
moral needs of humanity, and the latter have depended on the former. 
We must, therefore, abandon the apocalyptic Kingdom and retain what 
it stands for. We must frankly admit the principle of symbolism. 
Man's need of harmony between him and the transcendent is the very 
essence of religion. Morality unites him dynamically with God, but 
for the union to be conscious the transcendent interpretation is neces- 
sary. Only an eternal and universal end can explain the imperative and 
absolute character of right. Both the social and apocalyptic Kingdoms 
are symbols : the earlier inadequate expressions which, when taken 
literally, fail to meet man's spiritual needs. "Not till he resigns the 
desire to see what is hopelessly beyond the range of his present vision is 
his faith pure and unshaken. Faith believes that this need relates to 
another order of experience; that the present order serves only to evoke, 
exercise and strengthen it, but can never satisfy it. This implies that, 
in his deepest being, man belongs already to that other order. He has 
a power, whose meaning and purpose are hid from him through lack of 
a proper object for their exercise. A cage-born bird, he wonders what 
his wings are for. He tries to make a heaven out of earth, as it were 
ropes out of sand. He was made for something else he does not know 
what. Like the domesticated beaver he builds his dams across the floor ; 
he cannot tell why. Not till he is in his native river will he understand 
his restless instinct ; and the river is beyond all his present experience and 
imagination a missing link in his mind." * 

"Christianity is then, pre-eminently, the Gospel of immortality and 
eternal life; not of a shadowy survival in Hades; not of a prolongation 
of a kind of existence that could never conceivably satisfy our deepest 
spiritual need; but of that spirit life itself in its full self-consciousness. 
It brought home to men, as a felt and effectual reality, the notion of 
another life, which robbed this of all value except as related to it and 
illuminated by it." 

The struggle of good and evil in the world, in other worlds, and in 
ourselves is explained : we are the battle ground of individualistic, anti- 
spiritual forces and disinterested, universal love. Sin acquires added 
significance as defiance of the transcendent. The one motive which 
will make men fight against sin is faith in the transcendent value and 
significance of our moral efforts independent of their success or failure. 

But the rudiments of the transcendent life are necessary to under- 
stand it. This world and the other the spiritual and the phenomenal 
are not opposed. They are part of one great whole. Because the 
spiritual is strangled by its present medium of expression, have we the 
tight to conclude that it can express itself without any medium? 



128 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

"We know that each sense opens up a new phenomenal order that else 
had been non-existent for us, and that by it our spirit has been liberated 
indefinitely. What had it been without the world of colour or of music ? 
What might it be were other worlds opened to our consciousness? And 
what probability is there that we are not blind and deaf to a thousand 
worlds around us ? If, then, the only transcendent life we know is thus 
related to the phenomenal, what right have we to assume that the satis- 
faction it seeks means a release from, and not a fuller embodiment in, 
the phenomenal; or that the transcendent order involves the negation, 
and not the completion of the phenomenal? . . . The transcendent 
is not the spiritual as opposed to the phenomenal; but the whole as 
opposed to an infinitessimal fraction of possible spiritual experience." 

Yet this spiritual which ever utters itself and is addressed through the 
phenomenal has abiding value apart from its expression. Just as the 
apocalyptic "idea" of Jesus has abiding value apart from its imagery. 

The Church of the Modernist is a society for which the collective 
religious experience, interpreted by bishops and Pope, is the rule of 
faith : a society founded by the "Christ of history" and inspired by the 
"Christ of faith." It is the mystical body of Jesus who is defined as 
"the Divine Spirit acting the role of a man." 

The superiority of Catholicism as a vehicle for the religious spirit 
lies, to the Modernist, in certain characteristics of its history and of its 
structure. It is a natural religion, has grown by a natural process 
"God working through universal laws of man's nature" rather than 
"a reasoned out synthesis the product of man's freedom." It is 
adapted to human nature in its entirety to every level of culture. It 
has affinities with other religions thereby giving it a certain solidarity 
with all religions of the world. Catholicism contains within itself the 
two principles necessary for the development of a religion : one "a prin- 
ciple of wild luxuriance, of spontaneous expansion and variation in every 
direction : the other, a principle of order, restraint, and unification." 
And "if it is the Church's duty to make room for all even at a certain 
sacrifice of uniformity, it is the duty of all to make reciprocal efforts 
towards reunion, even at a certain sacrifice of individuality." The 
Church thus aspires to the simplicity of an organism in which the greatest 
multiplicity of structure and function is most perfectly unified the 
direct opposite of the simplicity of Puritanism which is the simplicity 
of impoverishment. Her identity with the early Church is the identity 
of life the identity of the child and the man. She would die if she 
returned to her primitive simplicity as easily could a man return to 
his cradle. 

In attempting to understand and explain the laws of religious 
growth, the Modernist does not confine himself to the study of Chris- 
tianity. In two numbers of // Rinnovamento selected at random there 
are, among others, these articles and reviews. They will suffice to give 
the reader an idea of the Modernist's breadth of interest: "The 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERNISM 129 

Religious Future of the Anglican Church," "The Upanishads," "The 
Mysticism of Plotinus," "Christ and Our Time," "Rationalism and 
Pessimism in Ancient India," "Folk-Lore in the Old Testament," "The 
Solar Theology of Roman Paganism." 

It is significant that Modernism, starting from a basis of "the most 
scientific science," is proving itself to be religiously constructive. It is 
building up a mystical theory of religion that will stand the test of 
experience and sanity; a theory of the Church which will stand the test 
of historical criticism, and is capable of infinite adjustment ; a theory 
of tradition which unites the present, the past, and the future; and a 
science of spiritual life which takes as its subject matter the experience 
of all races, and of every religion. Can it be that James Martineau was 
thinking prophetically of these men when he pictured faith terrified at 
the prospect of the advance of Science, and the relegation of the entire 
cosmos to the realm of natural law: "while inexorable Discovery pene- 
trated the past, taking the centuries by thousands at a stride, she kept 
beside upon the wing, watching with anxious eyes for the terminal edge 
which looked into the deep of God ; till at last, weary and drooping, she 
could sustain the flight no more, and, to escape falling into the fathom- 
less darkness, took refuge in the bosom of her guide, not to be repelled 
or crushed, as she had feared, but as we shall see, to be cherished and 
revived." 

This is not all. If the Church of the past has been found wanting 
in intellectual honesty, she has suffered no less criticism for her lack 
of moral sincerity and consecration. And the burden of that weakness 
too has fallen heavily on the Modernist. If he must "buy back truth at 
the cost of infinite scandal," he must buy back moral sincerity at the cost 
of infinite sacrifice. Nor is he wanting here. In the introduction "To 
the Reader" of the first number of the Revue Moderniste Internationalle 
there is this paragraph. "Possibly it is necessary to return to the Six- 
teenth Century and then to Jesus Christ to find an age similar to ours, 
where man feels himself driven to sacrifice his goods, his family, his life 
to reply to the appeal of a God. We need much courage in our hearts, 
much faith in the future and in the inner light which lightens our way 
to overturn the idols formerly revered, still threatening, but which often 
had no more force than we were pleased unwittingly to accord them." 

If to lead the life gives one light by which to know the doctrine, are 
we not justified in maintaining that the tentative religious philosophy 
which has sprung from European Modernism deserves close attention 
from the whole religious world? 

LOUISE EDGAR PETERS. 



PATANJALFS YOGA SUTRAS* 

TRANSLATED WITH A COMMENTARY 

BY 

CHARLES JOHNSTON 



THE section of the Sutras which follows, the second part of 
the second book, is concerned with practical spiritual training, 
that is, with the earlier practical training of the spiritual man. 
The most striking thing in it is the emphasis laid on the 
Commandments, which are precisely those of the latter part of the 
Decalogue, together with obedience to the Master. Our day and 
generation is far too prone to fancy that there can be mystical life and 
growth on some other foundation, on the foundation, for example, of 
intellectual curiosity or psychical selfishness. In reality, on this latter 
foundation the life of the spiritual man can never be built; nor, indeed, 
anything but a psychic counterfeit, a dangerous delusion. 

Therefore Patanjali, like every great spiritual teacher, meets the 
question : What must I do to be saved ? with the age-old answer : Keep 
the Commandments. Only after the disciple can say: These have I 
kept, can there be the further and finer teaching of the spiritual Rules. 
It is, therefore, vital for us to realize that the Yoga system, like 
every true system of spiritual teaching, rests on this broad and firm 
foundation of honesty, truth, cleanness, obedience. Without these, 
there is no salvation ; and he who practises these, even though ignorant 
of spiritual things, is laying up treasure against the time to come. 

TRANSLATION OF BOOK II, PART 2. 

26. A discerning which is carried on perpetually is the means 
of liberation. 

Here we come close to the pure Vedanta, with its discernment 
between the eternal and the temporal. St. Paul, following after Philo 
and Plato, lays down the same fundamental principle: the things seen 
are temporal, the things unseen are eternal. 

Patanjali means something more than an intellectual assent, though 
this too is vital. He has in view a constant discriminating in act as 
well as thought; of the two ways which present themselves for every 
deed or choice, always to choose the higher way, that which makes for 
the things eternal: honesty rather than roguery, courage and not 
cowardice, the things of another rather than one's own, sacrifice and 
not indulgence. This true discernment, carried out constantly, makes 
for liberation. 



* Copyright 1909, by Charles Johnston. 
'3 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 131 

27. The soul vision which is the final goal of liberation is 
sevenfold. 

The sevenfold consciousness of the spiritual man, who stands forth 
liberated from psychic trammels, is more fully set forth in the later 
sutras. It is a consciousness of the eternal, the blissful, the pure. In 
the text, we are not told what the seven qualities of this consciousness 
are, so that for explanation we must have recourse to the commentary. 
There we told that the temporal mind, not yet liberated, has these 
seven characteristics : first, the desire to know ; second, the desire to 
be free ; third, the desire of bliss ; fourth, the desire to fulfil all duties ; 
fifth, the quality of sorrow; sixth, the touch of fear; seventh, the chill 
paralysis of doubt. 

These are the shadows of the sevenfold consciousness of the 
liberated spiritual man, who, instead of the first, has firmly established 
wisdom ; instead of the second, realized liberation ; instead of the third, 
a deep and ever increasing delight; instead of the fourth, the certainty 
that all duties are fulfilled: I have finished the work which thou gavest 
me to do; and, for the fifth, sixth and seventh, joy, fearlessness and the 
firm-set being of the Eternal. 

28. From steadfastly following after the means of Yoga, comes 
the light of wisdom in full discernment. 

Here, we enter on the more detailed practical teaching of Patanjali, 
with its sound and luminous good sense. And, when we come to detail 
the means of Yoga, we shall be astonished at their simplicity. There is 
little that is mysterious in them. They are very familiar. The essence 
of the matter lies in carrying them out. 

29. The eight means of Yoga are: the Commandments, the 
Rules, right Poise, right Control of the life-force, Withdrawal, Con- 
centration, Meditation, Illumination. 

These eight means are to be followed in their order, in the sense 
which will immediately be made clear. We can get a ready understand- 
ing of the first two, by comparing them with the Commandments which 
must be obeyed by all good citizens, and the Rules which are laid on 
the members of religious orders. Until one has fulfilled the first, it is 
futile to concern oneself with the second. And so with all the means 
of Yoga. They must be taken in their order. 

30. The Commandments are these: non-injury, truthfulness, 
abstaining from stealing, from impurity, from covetousness. 

These five precepts are almost exactly the same as the Buddhist 
Commandments: not to kill, not to steal, not to be guilty of inconti- 
nence, not to drink intoxicants, to speak the truth. Almost identical 
is St. Paul's list: Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill, 
thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet. And in the same spirit is the 



132 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

answer made to the young man having great possessions, who asked, 
What shall I do to be saved, and received the reply: Keep the 
Commandments. 

This broad general training, which forms and develops human 
character, must be accomplished to a very considerable degree, before 
there can be much hope of success in the further stages of spiritual 
life. First the psychical, and then the spiritual. First the man, then 
the angel. 

On this broad, humane and wise foundation does the system of 
Patanjali rest. 

31. The Commandments are not limited to any race, place, time 
or age. They are universal ; they are the great obligation. 

The Commandments form the broad general training of humanity. 
Each one of them rests on a universal spiritual law. Each one of them 
expresses an attribute or aspect of the Self, the Eternal; when we 
violate one of the Commandments, we set ourselves against the law 
and being of the Eternal, thereby bringing ourselves to inevitable 
confusion. So the first steps in spiritual life must be taken by bringing 
ourselves into voluntary obedience to these spiritual laws, and thus 
making ourselves partakers of the spiritual powers, the being of the 
Eternal. Like the law of gravity, the need of air to breathe, these great 
laws know no exceptions. They are in force in all lands, throughout 
all times, for all mankind. 

32. The Rules are these: purity, serenity, fervent aspiration, 
spiritual reading, and perfect obedience to the Master. 

Here we have a finer law, one which humanity as a whole is less 
ready for, less fit to obey. Yet we can see that these Rules are the 
same in essence as the Commandments, but on a higher, more spiritual 
plane. The Commandments may be obeyed in outer acts and absti- 
nences ; the Rules demand obedience of the heart and spirit, a far more 
awakened and more positive consciousness. The Rules are the spiritual 
counterpart of the Commandments; and they themselves have finer 
degrees, for more advance spiritual growth. 

33. To conquer transgressions, the weight of the imagination 
should be thrown on the opposite side. 

Let us take a simple case, that of a thief, a habitual criminal, who 
has drifted into stealing in childhood, before the moral consciousness 
has awakened. We may imprison such a thief, and deprive him of all 
possibility of further theft, or of using the divine gift of will. Or we 
may recognize his disadvantages, and help him gradually to build up 
possessions which express his will, and draw forth his self-respect. If 
we imagine that, after he has built well, and his possessions have 
become dear to him, he himself should be robbed, then we can see how 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 133 

he would come vividly to realize the essence of theft and of honesty, 
and would cleave to honest dealings with firm conviction. In some 
such way does the great Law teach us. Our sorrows and losses teach 
us the pain of the sorrow and loss we inflict on others, and so we cease 
to inflict them. 

Now as to the more direct application. To conquer a sin, let 
heart and mind rest, not on the sin, but on the contrary virtue. Let the 
sin be forced out by positive growth in the true direction, not by direct 
opposition. Turn away from the sin and go forward courageously, 
constructively, creatively, in well-doing. In this way the whole nature 
will gradually be drawn up to the higher level, on which the sin does 
not even exist. The conquest of a sin is a matter of growth and 
evolution, rather than of opposition. 

34. Transgressions are injury, falsehood, theft, incontinence, 
envy, whether committed, or caused, or assented to, through greed, 
wrath, or infatuation; whether faint, or weak, or excessive; bearing 
endless fruit of ignorance and pain. Therefore must the weight be 
cast on the other side. 

Here are the causes of sin: greed, wrath, infatuation, with their 
effects, ignorance and pain. The causes are to be cured by better 
wisdom, by a truer understanding of the Self, of Life. For greed cannot 
endure before the realization that the whole world belongs to the Self, 
which Self we are ; nor can we hold wrath against one who is one with 
the Self, and therefore with ourselves; nor can infatuation, which is 
the seeking for the happiness of the All in some limited part of it, 
survive the knowledge that we are heirs of the All. Therefore let 
thought and imagination, mind and heart, throw their weight on the 
other side; the side, not of the world, but of the Self. 

35. Where non-injury is perfected, all enmity ceases in the 
presence of him who possesses it. 

We come now to the spiritual powers which result from keeping 
the Commandments; from the obedience to spiritual law which is the 
keeping of the Commandments. Where the heart is full of kindness 
which seeks no injury to another, either in act or thought or wish, this 
full love creates an atmosphere of harmony, whose benign power 
touches with healing all who come within its influence. Peace in the 
heart radiates peace to other hearts, even more surely than contention 
breeds contention. 

36. Where truth is perfected, it brings the reward of all rites. 
Here is implied the belief that all sacrificial rites and acts of 

worship win a necessary reward from the celestial powers; and we are 
told that he who is perfected in truth wins these rewards without rites. 
The power of truth in his soul, his oneness with the truth and reality 



134 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

of things, is a strong, inevitable force, to which all things respond, as 
he who has faith can remove mountains. 

37. Where cessation from theft is perfected, all treasures pre- 
sent themselves to him who possesses it. 

Here is a sentence which may warn us that, besides the outer and 
apparent meaning, there is in many of these sentences a second and 
finer significance. The obvious meaning is, that he who has wholly 
ceased from theft, in act, thought and wish, finds buried treasures in 
his path, treasures of jewels and gold and pearls. The deeper truth 
is, that he who in every least thing is wholly honest with the spirit 
of Life, finds Life supporting him in all things, and gains admittance 
to the treasure house of Life, the spiritual universe. 

38. For him who is perfect in continence, the reward is valor 
and virility. 

The creative power, strong and full of vigor, is no longer dissi- 
pated, but turned to spritual uses. It upbuilds and endows the spiritual 
man, conferring on him the creative will, the power to engender spir- 
itual children instead of bodily progeny. An epoch of life, that of man 
the animal, has come to an end ; a new epoch, that of the spiritual man, 
is opened. The old creative power is superseded and transcended; a 
new creative power, that of the spiritual man, takes its place, carrying 
with it the power to work creatively in others for righteousness and 
eternal life. 

39. Where there is firm conquest of covetousness, he who has 
conquered it awakes to the how and why of life. 

So it is said that, before we can understand the laws of Karma, 
we must free ourselves from Karma. The conquest of covetousness 
brings this rich fruit, because the root of covetousness is the desire of 
the individual soul, the will toward manifested life. And where the 
desire of the individual soul is overcome by the superb, still life of the uni- 
versal Soul welling up in the heart within, the great secret is discerned, 
the secret that the individual soul is not an isolated reality, but the ray, 
the manifest instrument of the Life, which turns it this way and that 
until the great work is accomplished, the age-long lesson learned. Thus 
is the how and why of life disclosed by ceasing from covetousness. 

40. Through purity comes a withdrawal from one's own bodily 
life, a ceasing from infatuation with the bodily life of others. 

As the spiritual light grows in the heart within, as the taste for pure 
Life grows stronger, the consciousness opens toward the great, secret 
places within where all life is one, where all lives are one. Thereafter, 
this outer, manifested, fugitive life, whether of ourselves or of others, 
loses something of its charm and glamor, and we seek rather the deep 
infinitudes. Instead of the outer form and surroundings of our lives, 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 135 

we long for their inner and everlasting essence. We desire not so much 
outer converse and closeness to our friends, but rather that quiet com- 
munion with them in the inner chamber of the soul, where spirit speaks 
to spirit, and spirit answers; where alienation and separation never 
enter; where sickness and sorrow and death cannot come. 

41. To the pure of heart come also a quiet spirit, one-pointed 
thought, the victory over sensuality, and fitness to behold the Soul. 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, who is the 
supreme Soul ; the ultimate Self of all beings. In the deepest sense, 
purity means fitness for this vision, and also a heart cleansed from all 
disquiet, from all wandering and unbridled thought, from the torment 
of sensuous imaginings; and when the spirit is thus cleansed and pure, 
it becomes at one in essence with its source, the great Spirit, the primal 
Life. One consciousness now thrills through both, for the psychic 
partition wall is broken down. Then shall the pure in heart see God, 
because they become God. 

42. From acceptance, the disciple gains happiness supreme. 
One of the wise has said: accept conditions, accept others, accept 

yourself. This is the true acceptance, for all these things are what they 
are through the will of the higher Self, except their deficiencies, which 
come through thwarting the will of the higher Self, and can be con- 
quered only through compliance with that will. By the true acceptance, 
the disciple comes into oneness of spirit with the overruling Soul; and, 
since the own-nature of the Soul is being, happiness, bliss, he comes 
thereby into happiness supreme. 

43. The perfection of the powers of the bodily vesture comes 
through the wearing away of impurities, and through fervent aspira- 
tion. 

This is true of the physical powers, and of those which dwell in the 
higher vestures. There must be, first, purity; as the blood must be 
pure, before one can attain to physical health. But absence of impurity 
is not in itself enough, else would many nerveless ascetics of the cloisters 
rank as high saints. There is needed, further, a positive fire of the will ; 
a keen vital vigor for the physical powers, and something finer, purer, 
stronger, but of kindred essence, for the higher powers. The fire of 
genius is something more than a phrase, for there can be no genius 
without the celestial fire of the awakened spiritual will. 

44. Through spiritual reading, the disciple gains communion 
with the divine Power on which his heart is set. 

Spiritual reading meant, for ancient India, something more than it 
does with us. It meant, first, the recital of sacred texts, which, in their 
very sounds, had mystical potencies; and it meant a recital of texts 



136 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

which were in themselves divinely emanated, and held in themselves 
the living, potent essence of the divine. 

For us, spiritual reading means a communing with the recorded 
teachings of the Masters of wisdom, whereby we read ourselves into 
the Master's mind, just as through his music one can enter into the 
mind and soul of the master musician. It has been well said that all 
true art is contagion of feeling; so that through the true reading of true 
books we do indeed read ourselves into the spirit of the Masters, and 
share in the atmosphere of their wisdom and power. 

45. Soul-vision is perfected through perfect obedience to the 
Master. 

The sorrow and darkness of life come of the erring personal will 
which sets itself against the will of the Soul, the one great Life. The 
error of the personal will is inevitable, since each will must be free to 
choose, to try and fail, and so to find the path. And sorrow and dark- 
ness are inevitable, until the path be found, and the personal will made 
once more one with the greater Will, wherein it finds rest and power, 
without losing freedom. In His will is our peace. And with that peace 
comes light. Soul-vision is perfected through obedience. 

46. Right poise must be firm and without strain. 

Here we approach a section of the teaching which has manifestly 
a twofold meaning. The first is physical, and concerns the bodily 
position of the student, and the regulation of breathing. These things 
have their direct influence upon soul-life, the life of the spiritual man, 
since it is always and everywhere true that our study demands a sound 
mind in a sound body. The present sentence declares that, for work 
and for meditation, the position of the body must be steady and without 
strain, in order that the finer currents of life may run their course. 

It applies further to the poise of the soul, that fine balance and 
stability which nothing can shake, where the consciousness rests on the 
firm foundation of spiritual being. This is indeed the house set upon a 
rock, which the winds and waves beat upon in vain. 

47. Right poise is to be gained by steady and temperate effort, 
and by setting the heart upon the everlasting. 

Here again, there is the twofold meaning, for physical poise is to 
be gained by steady effort of the muscles, by gradual and wise training, 
linked with a right understanding of, and relation with, the universal 
force of gravity. Uprightness of body demands that both these 
conditions shall be fulfilled. 

In like manner the firm and upright poise of the spiritual man is 
to be gained by steady and continued effort, always guided by wisdom, 
and by setting the heart on the Eternal, filling the soul with the atmos- 
phere of the spiritual world. Neither is effective without the other. 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 137 

Aspiration without effort brings weakness; effort without aspiration 
brings a false strength, not resting on enduring things. The two 
together make for the right poise which sets the spiritual man firmly 
and steadfastly on his feet. 

48. The fruit of right poise is the strength to resist the shocks 
of infatuation or sorrow. 

In the simpler physical sense, which is also covered by the wording 
of the original, this sentence means that wise effort establishes such 
bodily poise that the accidents of things cannot disturb it, as the captain 
remains steady, though disaster overtake his ship. 

But the deeper sense is far more important. The spiritual man too 
must learn to withstand all shocks, to remain steadfast through the 
perturbations of external things and the storms and whirlwinds of the 
psychical world. This is the power which is gained by wise, con- 
tinuous effort, and by filling the spirit with the atmosphere of the 
Eternal. 

49. When this is gained, there follows the right guidance of 
the life-currents, the control of the incoming and outgoing breath. 

It is well understood to-day that most of our maladies come from 
impure conditions of the blood. It is coming to be understood that 
right breathing, right oxygenation, will do very much to keep the blood 
clean and pure. Therefore a right knowledge of breathing is a part 
of the science of life. 

But the deeper meaning is, that the spiritual man, when he has 
gained poise through right effort and aspiration, can stand firm and 
guide the currents of his life, both the incoming current of events, and 
the outgoing current of his acts. 

Exactly the same symbolism is used in the saying: Not that which 
goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the 
mouth, this defileth a man. . . . Those things which proceed out of 
the mouth come forth from the heart . . . out of the heart proceed 
evil thoughts, murders, uncleanness, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. 
Therefore the first step in purification is to keep the Commandments. 

50. The life-current is either outward, or inward, or balanced; 
it is regulated according to place, time, number; it is either long or 
short. 

The technical, physical side of this has its value. In the breath, 
there should be right inbreathing, followed by the period of pause, when 
the air comes into contact with the blood, and this again followed by 
right outbreathing, even, steady, silent. Further, the lungs should be 
evenly filled ; many maladies may arise from the neglect and consequent 
weakening, of some region of the lungs. And the number of breaths 
is so important, so closely related to health, that every bulletin records it. 



138 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

But the deeper meaning is concerned with the currents of life; 
with that which goeth into, and cometh out of the heart. 

51. The fourth degree is concerned with external and internal 
objects. 

The traditional interpretation of this is, that it is concerned with 
the relation of the breath to certain centers in the body, in which are 
nerve- forces related to exceptional astral powers; and the commentators 
detail the centers and their forces. 

The inner meaning seems to be that, in addition to the three degrees 
of control already described, control, that is, over the incoming current 
of life, over the outgoing current, and over the condition of pause or 
quiescence, there is a fourth degree of control, which holds in complete 
mastery both the outer passage of events and the inner currents of 
thoughts and emotions; a condition of perfect poise and stability in 
the midst of the flux of things outward and inward. 

52. Thereby is worn away the veil which covers up the light. 

The veil is the psychic nature; the web of emotions, desires, argu- 
mentative trains of thought, which cover up and obscure the truth by 
absorbing the entire attention and keeping the consciousness in the 
psychic realm. When hopes and fears are reckoned at their true worth, 
in comparison with lasting possession of the Soul; when the outer reflec- 
tions of things have ceased to distract us from inner realities ; when argu- 
mentative thought no longer entangles us, but yields its place to flashing 
intuition, the certainty which springs from within, then is the veil worn 
away, the consciousness is drawn from the psychical to the spiritual, 
from the temporal to the Eternal. Then is the light unveiled. 

53. Thence comes the mind's power to hold itself in the light. 
It has been well said, that what we most need is the faculty of 

spiritual attention; and, in the same direction of thought it has been 
eloquently declared that prayer does not consist in our catching God's 
attention, but rather in our allowing God to hold our attention. 

The vital matter is, that we need to disentangle our consciousness 
from the noisy and perturbed thraldom of the psychical, and to come 
to consciousness as the spiritual man. This we must do, first, by puri- 
fication, through the Commandments and the Rules ; and, second, 
through the faculty of spiritual attention, by steadily heeding endless 
fine intimations of the spiritual power within us, and by intending our 
consciousness thereto; thus by degrees transferring the center of con- 
sciousness from the psychical to the spiritual. It is a question, first, of 
love, and then of attention. 

54. The right Withdrawal is the disengaging of the powers 
from entanglement in outer things, and their return to the quality of 
consciousness. 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 139 

To understand this, let us reverse the process, and think of the one 
consciousness, centered in the Soul, gradually expanding and taking on 
the form of the different perceptive powers; the one will, at the same 
time, differentiating itself into the varied powers of action. 

Now let us imagine this to be reversed, so that the spiritual force, 
which has gone into the differentiated powers, is once more gathered 
together into the inner power of intuition and spiritual will, taking on 
that unity which is the hall-mark of spiritual things, as diversity is the 
seal of material things. 

It is all a matter of love for the quality of spiritual consciousness, 
as against psychical consciousness, of love and attention. For where 
the heart is, there will the treasure be also; where the consciousness 
is, there will the vesture with its powers be developed. 

55. Thereupon follows perfect mastery over the powers. 

When the spiritual condition which we have described is reached, 
with its purity, poise, and illuminated vision, the spiritual man is coming 
into his inheritance, and gaining a complete mastery of his powers. 

Indeed, much of the struggle to keep the Commandments and the 
Rules has been paving the way for this mastery; through this very 
struggle and sacrifice the mastery has become possible; just as, to use 
Saint Paul's simile, the athlete gains the mastery in the contest and the 
race, through the sacrifice of his long and arduous training. Thus he 
gains the crown. 

(To be continued.) 



"You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape 
from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by 
perverting or mutilating one's nature." 

GEORGE ELIOT. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR 
LITERATURE 



III 
GIOVANNI Pico, EARL OF MIRANDOLA 

"Love God while we are in the body we rather may than either define 
or know Him. By loving Him we more profit ourselves, have less trouble, 
please Him better. Yet had we rather, ever seeking Him by the way of 
speculation, never find Him than, by loving Him, possess that which 
without loving were in vain found." 

TO include the illustrious Earl of Mirandola in "Secular Liter- 
ature" along with Dante, Whitman, Goethe, Burke, Words- 
worth may seem strange. These companions are men whose 
position in the literary world is not questioned. Pico has no 
such reputation; he is in the Limbo of scholarship. He was celebrated 
in his own century throughout civilised Europe, and in a circle of 
brilliant intellects was called the "Phoenix of the Wits," but his erudition, 
his piety, and his courtesy are now scarcely a memory. Literature 
does not claim him, and a certain "fancifulness" in his writing excludes 
him from the decorous company of theologians and philosophers. Yet 
in the life of this forgotten cavalier there is a real interest and satisfaction 
for men of to-day. For Pico was not only a mystic but an occultist, 
as far as might be. He divined a secret doctrine of the universe, and 
endeavored to learn the doctrine. 

Pico's century brought to the small Latin world, from Constanti- 
nople, a knowledge of the older Greek civilisation, and Pico entertained 
as his guest and tutor one of those Greek scholars who had fled from 
the triumphant Turk. Introduced by this teacher to the writings of 
Plato and of Plotinus, Pico, like his contemporaries, gave days and nights 
to loving companionship with these masters ; and their soaring imagina- 
tions disclosed to him a universe vaster than the triple world which 
mediaeval rationalism had mapped and marked so precisely, leaving no 
coast or sea unknown. With no professional interest in the Church, 
Pico and his friends turned in revulsion from a mean and petty dogma 
to the noble pagan faith of the past. Longer and deeper study led them 
back to their Christian inheritance. For these Italians of the Renaissance 
discovered as the Church Fathers had done earlier, the fundamental unity 
of Platonic and Christian teachings the one inspiration that quickened 
both. And that theosophic discovery led the Italians to theosophic 
practice they could not call the Greeks heathen. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 141 

Pico's biography was composed soon after his death by his nephew, 
and, after a decade or two, was put into English by a man who loved 
and revered him as he revered the Greeks Sir Thomas More. This 
account of Pico is so full of charm that I shall let Sir Thomas tell the 
story, and shall, myself, merely modernize Sir Thomas's spelling and 
obsolete words. 

Pico had, of course, no ordinary birth. Actual records trace his 
descent through noble ancestors to the period of Charlemagne, but a 
sense of the fitness of things led the biographer still further back until 
in the Emperor Constantine he found a root worthy of this noble scion. 
Pico was born in 1463. 

"A marvellous sight was there seen before his birth: there 
appeared a fiery garland standing over the chamber of his mother while 
she travailed, and suddenly vanished away; which appearance was 
peradventure a token that he which should that hour in the company 
of mortal men be born, in the perfection of understanding should be 
like the perfect figure of that round circle or garland, and that his 
excellent name should round about the circle of this whole world be 
magnified: that his mind should alway, as the fire, aspire upward to 
heavenly things, and his fiery eloquence should with an ardent heart in 
time to come worship and praise Almighty God with all his strength." 

His training until the period of youth was secular. "In the fourteenth 
year of his age by the commandment of his mother (who longed exceed- 
ingly to have him become priest) he departed to Bologna to study in the 
laws of the Church ; which when he had two years tasted, perceiving that 
the faculty leaned to nothing but only mere traditions and ordinances, 
his mind fell from it." Leaving Bologna and its lifeless dogma Pico 
was for many years unsettled, now journeying to famous scholars, now 
reading in retirement at Mirandola, seeking in philosophy that wisdom 
and joy which he had not found in theology. "After this [the two years 
in Bologna] as an eager student of the secrets of nature he left these 
common trodden paths, and gave himself wholly to speculation and 
philosophy, as well human as divine. For the obtaining whereof (after 
the manner of Plato and Apollonius) he scrupulously sought out all the 
famous doctors of his time, visiting studiously all the universities and 
schools, not only through Italy but also through France. And such 
indefatigable labor gave he to those studies that while yet a beardless child 
he was both reputed, and was indeed a perfect philosopher." In the 
course of his wandering he went, in 1484, to Florence, where Lorenzo 
de' Medici had assembled a little company of men fervent in their devo- 
tion to Plato. Pico's mind and heart made him at one with these friends, 
and it was he who urged Ficino, the leader of the group, to translate 
Plotinus as he had already done Plato. In 1486, Pico journeyed on to 
Rome where he remained for a year, challenging the scholars of all 
Europe to enter into intellectual combat with him. "Now he had been 



142 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

seven years conversant in these studies when, full of pride and desirous 
of glory and men's praise (for yet was he not kindled in the love of God) 
he went to Rome, and there (coveting to make a show of his skill, and 
little considering how great envy he should raise against himself) he 
proposed nine hundred questions of divers and sundry matters, as well 
in logic and philosophy as theology, picked and sought with great study, 
both out of Latin authors and Greek and partly also out of the secret 
mysteries of the Hebrews, Chaldees, and Arabs: and many things, 
further, drawn out of the old obscure philosophy of Pythagoras, Trisme- 
gistus, and Orpheus, and many other strange things not only unknown 
but even unheard of before that day except by a few specially wise men. 
All which questions he fastened and set up in open places that they 
might be to all people the better known and offered to bear the expenses 
of all men who would come thither out of far countries to dispute with 
him." Not daring to expose themselves to Pico's mental steel, the pride- 
wounded schoolmen expressed their resentment by bringing charges of 
heresy against him; thirteen of his nine hundred propositions, they 
declared, were subversive of the faith. "Then joined they [the school- 
men] to them some good simple folk who, out of zeal for the faith and 
a pretence of religion, should impugn those propositions as new things 
to which their ears were not accustomed. But he, not bearing the loss 
of his fame made a defense for those thirteen propositions a work 
of great erudition and elegance and stuffed with the knowledge of many 
things. Which work he compiled in twenty nights. But the book in 
which the whole nine hundred questions with their conclusions were 
contained (for as much as there were in them many things strange and 
not fully declared, and were more mete for secret communication of 
learned men than for open hearing by common people, who for lack of 
training might take hurt thereby) Pico desired himself that it should not 
be read. And so was the reading thereof forbidden." 

That spectacular year at Rome ended Pico's worldly career. He had 
won fame and glory only to find it petty, despicable, and dangerous. He 
gave over selfish pursuits and drew the moral reins tightly. "Women's 
blandishments he changed into the desire of heavenly joys, and despising 
the blast of vain glory which he before desired, now with all his mind he 
began to seek the glory and profit of Christ's Church, and so began he 
to order his conditions that from thenceforth he might have been ap- 
proved even though an enemy were his judge. From thenceforth he 
gave himself day and night most fervently to the study of Scripture, in 
which he wrote many noble books which well testify both his angelic wit, 
his ardent labor, and his profound erudition. Great libraries it is incred- 
ible to consider with how marvellous celerity he read them over and 
wrote out what pleased him. Of the old fathers of the Church, so great 
knowledge he had as it would be hard for one to have who had lived 
long and had done nothing else but read. Of the newer divines he had 
so good judgment that it would seem there was nothing in any of them 
unknown to him, for he held all things as if their works were ever before 
his eyes." 

The new life of stern morality increased his renown by the addition 
of Christian virtues to intellectual prowess, and the princely humanists 
who ruled the Italian territories endeavored to draw him to their courts 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 143 

which he would have made splendid. But he now avoided foolish debates 
and discussions. "It was a common saying with him that such alterca- 
tions were for a logician and not mete for a philosopher. He said also 
that such conversations greatly profited as were conducted with a peace- 
able mind to the disclosing of truth, in secret company without great 
audience. But he said those disputes did great hurt that were held 
openly for the ostentation of learning and to win the favor of the common 
people and the commendation of fools." 

To his contemporaries, Pico's learning seemed universal. Not only 
Greek Platonic and Neo-Platonic literature was familiar, but recondite 
tongues and books were drawn upon to catholicise his mind and temper. 
He writes from Paris to a friend : 'After great fervent labor with much 
watching and indefatigable travail, I have learned both the Hebrew lan- 
guage and Chaldaic, and now I have set hand to overcome the great 
difficulty of the Arabic tongue. These, my dear friend, are things I 
have ever thought, and still think, appertain to a noble prince." It was 
not merely the reading of academies that Pico was doing in these strange 
tongues. He had gone through the Cabala, he was working at cosmog- 
ony, and he was seeking in those antique records some ray of the secret 
light that should illuminate the dark vastnesses of space. 

I have said Pico is in the Limbo of scholarship. The words are 
lightly used. I do not mean he is one of the assertive crowd who to-day 
so complacently wear their honors. He is rather that treasure almost 
lost to the modern world a man of culture. Through the extravagant 
praise of his nephew and of Sir Thomas one easily perceives those rare 
qualities that made his attainments appear almost an effect of magic. 
Pico was a spiritual alchemist. In the alembic of his mind he revolved 
the crude material of information until, heated by the fire of his spirit, 
the raw ingredients disappear, fused into the pure gold of culture. With 
all his nights and days of labor and his isolation for research, Pico 
remained what he was born a cavalier, a courtier; like St. Paul he 
added the world's best gifts to fervor of spirit. "He was of cheer always 
merry and of so benign nature that he was never troubled with anger. 
And he said once to his nephew that whatsoever should happen (fell 
there never so great misadventure) he could never, he thought, be moved 
to wrath unless his chests perished in which his books lay that he had 
with great travail and watch compiled. But forasmuch as he considered 
that he labored only for the love of God and the profit of His Church, 
and that he had dedicated unto Him all his works, his studies, and his 
deeds, and because he saw that since God is almighty they could not 
miscarry but by His commandment or sufferance, he verily trusted, since 
God is all good, that He would not suffer him to have that occasion of 
heaviness. O very happy mind which no adversity might oppress, which 
no prosperity might enhance ! Familiarity with all philosophy could not 
make him proud, fluency in Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic besides Greek 
and Latin could not make him vainglorious, nor could his noble blood 
puff up his heart." 



144 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

After Pico's conversion Savonarola became his friend, and urged 
him toward holy orders. For a time the cowl and girdle seemed his 
duty, and he declared one day to his nephew that he should distribute his 
wealth among the poor, and, carrying the cross, go barefoot through the 
world, preaching in every town and castle. The call was not, however, 
imperious, and Pico served the Church only as layman. But at his death 
in 1494, Savonarola, as if in recognition of the scholar's ascetic spirit, 
robed the dead man's body and buried it in the habit of the friars. "Of 
outward observances," writes the nephew, "he gave no very great force. 
We speak not of those observances which the Church commandeth to 
be observed, for in those he was diligent; but we speak of those cere- 
monies which folk bring up, setting the very service of God aside, Who 
is (as Christ saith) to be worshipped in spirit and in truth. But in the 
inward affections of the mind he clave to God with very fervent love 
and devotion." Pico wrote himself to this same nephew: "When I stir 
thee to prayer I stir thee not to the prayer which standeth in many words, 
but to that prayer which in the secret chamber of the mind, in the privy 
closet of the soul, with lively affection speaketh to God, and in the most 
lightsome darkness of contemplation not only presented! the mind to the 
Father but also uniteth it with Him by unspeakable ways which only they 
know who have experienced it." 

His life is a striking example of humility in high places, and of 
the turning away of the spirit from all the wisdom of men to the hidden 
Wisdom of God. "The little affection of an old man or an old woman 
to Godward (were it never so small) he set more store by than by all his 
own knowledge as well of natural things as godly. And oftentime in 
communication he would admonish his familiar friends how these mortal 
interests diminish and end, how uncertain and precarious is our life. 
Wherefore he exhorted them to turn up their minds to love God, which 
was a thing far excelling all the skill and knowledge it is possible for us 
in this life to obtain. The same thing also in the book which he entitled 
De Ente et Uno, he treateth when he interrupteth the course of his argu- 
ment, and, turning his words to Angelus Politianus (to whom he dedi- 
cateth that book) he writeth in this wise. But now behold, O my well 
beloved Angelo, what madness possesseth us. Love God while we are 
in the body we rather may than either define or know Him. By loving 
Him we more profit ourselves, have less trouble, please Him better. 
Yet had we rather ever seeking Him, by the way of speculation, never 
find Him than, by loving Him possess that which without loving were in 
vain found." 

The most important of Pico's formal writings are the Heptaplus, a 
comment upon the book of Genesis which contains his speculations on 
cosmogony, and the work just mentioned, De Ente et Uno, a setting forth 
of the Platonic conception of God as essentially the Christian conception. 
These two treatises are not accessible to the present writer, who is, 
moreover, unpractised in the discussion of occultism and systematic 
philosophy, and unable adequately to present Pico's works, were they 
at hand. Various comments upon these two writings come from men 
who would measure the unsearchable riches of the spirit with the yard- 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 145 

stick of the physical intellect. To such men these writings, like many 
others, are "the wildest possible jumble of incompatible ideas, which not 
even the most dextrous legerdemain can twist into the remotest sem- 
blance of congruity." Perhaps it will be sufficient to present to theoso- 
phist readers one such comment. They may succeed where the com- 
mentator has failed, and intuitively feel the aspiration that led this Italian 
to div'ne a secret doctrine, though it was not granted him to see more 
than a few broken rays of light. A commentator writes thus: 

"In the dedicatory letter prefixed to the Heptaplus Pico explains to 
Lorenzo the scheme of the work, and the motives which induced him to 
undertake it. Besides the inestimable advantage which he derived from 
being the immediate recipient of divine revelation, Moses, it appears, 
was the greatest of all philosophers. Was he not versed in all the science 
of the Egyptians, and was not Egypt the source whence the Greeks drew 
their inspiration ? True it is that Moses has not the least the appearance 
of a philosopher, but even in the account of the creation seems only to be 
telling a very plain and simple story, but that must not be allowed to 
detract from his claims. Doubtless he veiled a profound meaning under 
this superficial show of simplicity, and spoke in enigmas, or allegories, 
even as Plato and Jesus Christ were wont to do, in order that they might 
not be understood except by those to whom it was given to understand 
mysteries. 

"In all true wisdom there should be an element of mystery; it would 
not be right that everyone should be able to understand it. 

"The interpretation is worthy of the proem. In the threefold divi- 
sion of the Tabernacle Pico finds a type of the three spheres angelic 
or intelligible, celestial, and sublunary which, with man, the microcosm, 
make up the universe; and thus has no difficulty in understanding why 
the veil of the Temple was rent when Christ opened a way for man into 
the super-celestial sphere. These four worlds are all one, not only 
because all have the same first principle and the same final cause, and are 
linked together by certain general harmonies and affinities, but also 
because whatever is found in the sublunary sphere has its counterpart 
in the other two, but of a nobler character. Thus to terrestrial fire 
corresponds in the celestial sphere the sun ; in the super-celestial, seraphic 
intelligence. Similarly, what is water on earth is in the heavens the 
moon, and in the super-celestial region cherubic intelligence. 'The ele- 
mentary fire burns, the celestial vivifies, the super-celestial loves.' What 
cherubic intelligence does, Pico forgets to say ; but, fire and water being 
opposed, it is clear that it ought to hate. 

"In the intelligible world God, surrounded by nine orders of angels, 
unmoved Himself, draws all to Himself; to whom in the celestial world 
corresponds the stable empyrean with its nine revolving spheres; in the 
sublunary world the first matter with its three elementary forms, earth, 
water, and fire, the three orders of vegetable life, herbs, plants, and trees, 
and the three sorts of 'sensual souls,' zoophytic, brutish, human, making 
together 'nine spheres of corruptible forms.' 

"Man, the microcosm, unites all three spheres ; having a body mixed 
of the elements, a vegetal soul, and the senses of the brute, reason or 
spirit, which holds of the celestial sphere, and an angelic intellect, in 
virtue of which he is the very image of God. 



10 



146 



THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 



"Now it is true that Moses in his account of the creation appears to 
ignore all this, but it is not for us on that account to impute to him 
ignorance of it. On the contrary, we must suppose that his cosmogony 
is equally true of each of the four worlds which make up the universe, 
and must accordingly give it a fourfold interpretation. A fifth chapter 
will be rendered necessary by the difference between the four worlds, 
and a sixth by their affinities and community. 

"We have thus six chapters corresponding with the six days of 
creation. A seventh is devoted to expounding the meaning of the Sab- 
bath rest; and to indicate this sevenfold division of the work Pico entitles 
it Heptaplus." 

Here we may leave Pico and his commentators. Pico will always 
interest those who watch the development of the English race on account 
of his influence upon Sir Thomas More and John Colet. Within a few 
decades after Pico's death, these Englishmen, kindled at his flame, were 
endeavoring to reform and rejuvenate the Church from within, to restore 
that purity of spiritual doctrine which their study of Greek sources had 
shown them was so remote from the rationalistic corruption of Latin 
theologians. 

C. 



"I think that I see why pain is our only solvent. Work may be 
hard, but also it sustains and energises. Happiness, even the purest, 
clings round the fibres of our nature like a vine, stifling and arresting 
when it grows strong. But in pain the reliance upon the personal nature 
is broken up, we find ourselves at last in a place where there is no hope; 
there is no issue thence. And then at last the personal and psychic 
natures are dissolved beneath the salt wave of sorrow, the self-reliance 
shaken, the vistas all closed, then we see the only light, the only hope, in 
Him. So it seems to me quite clear why pain is the only teacher." 

From a private letter. 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET 
DOCTRINE 



PART I 
EVOLUTION 

PUTTING aside all technical and Sanskrit terms as far as possible, 
let us try to deal in this study not with complicated and puzzling 
details, but with the broadest and simplest aspects of what appears 
to us to be truth. Emerson says, "We know truth when we see 
it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake, that we are awake." 
In the very beginning of this study one is confronted with two 
great problems of which it is necessary to have some clear understanding 
before going on. What is meant by the terms "God" and "man"? 
Many definitions of both are fully given in the theosophical manuals, 
and above all in The Key to Theosophy and the Secret Doctrine, but 
their very fullness is sometimes an obstacle in the path of the beginner, 
and it has been thought advisable, therefore, to frame a skeleton as it \vere, 
of the chief teachings of the Secret Doctrine, to be filled out by the results 
of the student's own study and reflection. For no study, however per- 
severing, no mere heaping up of facts, will be of much avail, unless 
accompanied by the sifting processes of thought that shall separate 
the wheat from the chaff, and prepare the bread of life for the heavenly 
banquet. But no system of philosophical or religious thought can be 
formulated without some expression, however crude and inadequate, 
of our conception of the Absolute Unity in whom we live and move 
and have our being. In The Key to Theosophy there is a very beautiful 
extract from a kabalistic poem, which expresses such a conception as 
well as so lofty an idea can be expressed. 

"Thou art One, the root of all numbers, but not as an element 
of numeration, for Unity admits not of multiplication, change, or form. 
Thou art One, and in the secret of Thy Unity the wisest of men are 
lost, because they know it not. Thou art One, and Thy Unity is never 
diminished, never extended and cannot be changed. Thou art One, 
and no thought of ours can fix for Thee a limit or define Thee. Thou 
ART, but not as one existent, for the understanding and vision of mortals 
cannot attain to Thy existence, nor determine for Thee the where, the 
how, and the why, etc., etc." 

To this majestic conception of the Divine Unity, we may add the 
theosophical teaching that all Nature, objective and subjective, what is 
within us and what is without, is. U'as, and ever tvill be One Absolute 



148 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Essence, from which all things proceed, and to which all things 
must return. Upon the absolute identity of all spirits with the 
One Spirit, depends the conception of Universal Brotherhood, the 
outcome and realisation of this identity. And as all mankind is 
in reality of one Essence, infinite and eternal, whether we call it 
"God" or "Nature," or prefer to give it no name other than "THAT/' it 
follows that nothing can affect one nation or one man without affect- 
ing all nations and all men, as a pebble thrown into a quiet lake sends 
ripples in every direction, till they die out upon its shore, or as the 
report of a cannon traverses the ether with vibrations that never end. 

In the twelfth chapter of Isis Unveiled, Vol II, we find ten proposi- 
tions stated as the fundamental principles of Eastern philosophy, and 
slightly condensed, they read as follows: 

I. There is no miracle. Everything is the result of law. 

II. Nature is triune; there is a visible, objective nature; an invisi- 
ble, indwelling and energising nature, the exact model of the other and 
its vital principle, and above these two, Spirit, source of all forces, 
alone, eternal, and indestructible. The lower two constantly change; 
the higher third does not. 

III. Man is also triune; he has his objective physical body; his 
vitalising astral body or soul, the real man; and these two are brooded 
over and illumined by the third, the sovereign, the immortal Spirit. 
When the real man succeeds in merging himself with the latter, he 
becomes an immortal entity. (The trinity of nature is the lock of magic; 
the trinity of man the key that fits it. Isis II, 635.) 

IV. Magic as a science, is the knowledge of these principles; as 
an art, its application in practice. 

V. Arcane knowledge misapplied is sorcery ; beneficently used, true 
magic or WISDOM. 

VI. Mediumship is the opposite of adeptship, one is controlled, the 
other controls. 

VII. All things that were, that are, or that will be, are recorded 
in the astral light, and are visible to the initiated adept. 

VIII. Races of men differ in spiritual gifts. 

IX. One phase of magic is the voluntary and conscious with- 
drawal of the astral body from the physical. Inert physical matter 
may be disintegrated, passed through walls, and re-combined in certain 
cases and under certain conditions but not living animal organisms. 

X. The corner-stone of Magic is an intimate, practical knowledge 
of magnetism and electricity, their qualities, correlations, and potencies, 
and a familiarity with their effects on animals and men, as well as a 
knowledge of the qualities of plants and minerals. 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 149 

These "fundamental principles," simple as they appear on the sur- 
face, comprise, if rightly understood, the most important teachings of 
occultism, while the truth demands a knowledge of "the natural sci- 
ences" such as is possessed by no one living man. 

Another view of the fundamental propositions of the Secret Doc- 
trine will give us 

(A.) An Omnipotent, Eternal, Boundless and Immutable PRINCIPLE, 
which is beyond the range of human thought. It is Omnipotent, because 
it is Power ; it is eternal, because it has neither beginning nor end ; it is 
boundless, because it is infinite, and is best symbolised by a sphere whose 
centre is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere; it is 
immutable because it is devoid of all attributes, and in it is neither 
variableness nor shadow of turning. It is "Be-ness," rather than 
Being, and is beyond all human thought or speculation. 

This "Be-ness" is symbolised in the Secret Doctrine under two 
aspects. On the one hand absolute, abstract Space, the one thing that 
no human mind can exclude from any conception, or conceive of by 
itself. To think of ourselves as somewhere, and to think of all other 
things more or less distant from ourselves, as somewhere else, in fact, 
is perhaps as near as we can get to an idea of Space, but it is far from 
an idea of abstract Space. 

On the other hand, we have absolute, abstract Motion, representing 
unconditioned consciousness. And as consciousness is inconceivable to 
us apart from change, Motion best symbolises change, its essential 
characteristic. V. K. Clifford, the mathematician and philosopher, was 
thinking of this essential characteristic of motion when he said "In 
point of fact we do nothing all day but change our minds." Like the 
shifting figures of a kaleidoscope, one combination of ideas is swiftly 
followed by another, and one can never get the same figure twice. 

This abstract Motion is the ONE LIFE, eternal, invisible, but omni- 
present, without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular mani- 
festations. We have, then, as the fundamental proposition of the 
Secret Doctrine, this metaphysical ONE ABSOLUTE or BE-NESS. From 
this "Causeless Cause" the occultist derives the "First Cause," or the 
Logos (the Word of St. John), for the "first" cannot be the Absolute 
because it is conditioned and finite, and is but a manifestation of the 
Absolute. But as soon as we pass from this phase of thought, which 
to us is absolute negation, duality begins, in the contrast of Spirit (or 
Consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object. These are the first 
of what the Eastern philosophers have called "the pairs of opposites ;" 
but Spirit and Matter are not to be regarded as independent realities, 
but rather as two aspects of the Logos, constituting the basis of con- 
ditioned Being. Apart from Universal Substance, or that which under- 
lies (sub stans) Matter in all its grades of differentiation, Universal 



ISO THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Thought (the root of all individual consciousness) could not manifest 
itself as that individual consciousness without a vehicle of matter, 
because at a certain stage of development, a physical basis is necessary 
to focus a ray of the Universal Mind. And apart from Universal 
Thought, Universal Substance would remain an empty abstraction. 

Duality therefore is the very essence, as it were, of the Existence 
of the manifested Universe. But just as the opposite poles of Spirit 
and Matter are but aspects of the One Unity in which they are synthe- 
sised, so there exists in the manifested universe the guiding power of 
all manifestation, the "Thought Divine," transmitted and made mani- 
fest through the intelligent Forces which are the architects of the 
visible world. Thus from Spirit or Universal Thought comes our 
consciousness; from Universal Substance the several vehicles in which 
that consciousness is individualised and attains to ^//-consciousness; 
while the Divine Energy in its varied manifestations, is the mysterious 
link between Mind and Matter, the animating principle electrifying 
every atom into life. 

(B.) The second fundamental axiom affirms the eternity of 
the whole Universe as a boundless plane, the periodical field of 
numberless universes. "The Pilgrim" the title given to the Monad 
or Unit of consciousness during its cycle of incarnations is the only 
eternal principle in us, being an indivisible part of the Universal Spirit. 
Furthermore "the appearance and disappearance of Worlds, is like a 
regular tidal ebb of flux and reflux." This is a manifestation of the 
absolute universality of the law of periodicity recorded in all depart- 
ments of nature. 

(C.) Thirdly, the Secret Doctrine insists upon the identity of all 
Souls with the Universal Over-Soul, itself an aspect of the Unknown 
Root, and (D.) the obligatory pilgrimage of every Soul through "the 
cycle of Necessity" or incarnation, in accordance with cyclic and 
Karmic law. In other words, no purely divine Soul can have an inde- 
pendent conscious existence before it has passed through, (first) every 
elemental form of the phenomenal world of that cycle of existence to 
which it belongs, and (second) has acquired its individuality, first by 
natural impulse and then by self-devised efforts modified by its Karma, 
thus ascending through all degrees of intelligence from that of the 
mineral to that of the holiest archangel. The pivotal doctrine of the 
esoteric philosophy admits no privileges or special gifts in any man, 
except those won by his own Ego through personal effort during a long 
series of reincarnations. This is the greatest point of difference between 
the "orthodox" and the theosophical systems, the one dependent on the 
sacrifice of an innocent being for the sake of a humanity doomed from 
the beginning to sin and evil, the other holding that man alone can 
work out his own salvation, and that every step is conditioned by 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 151 

immutable Law. The orthodox view of the atonement is, of course, 
but the outer and exoteric dogma, the esoteric doctrine is the inner and 
spiritual teaching. But this is not the place to do more than suggest 
the difference between the two conceptions, and we will now pass on 
to the study of the Stanzas in the first volume of the Secret Doctrine. 
The Secret Doctrine itself is based upon these Stanzas, taken from an 
archaic MS. known as The Book of Dsyan (phonetically Djan). It is 
written in Senzar, the secret sacerdotal tongue known to all priests and 
initiates, and is the original work from which the oldest religious books 
of all nations were compiled. 

The history of cosmic evolution is traced in these Stanzas, and is, 
so to speak, an abstract formula of that evolution not an account of 
all its stages and transformations. It is a formula which can be 
applied to all evolution, from that of the earth upward in an ever-ascend- 
ing scale. Having described the evolution of the earth and of man, 
and the history of the Races from the First down to our own (the 
Fifth) in the Fourth Round, the old book goes no further, but stops 
with the beginning of the Black Age, and the death of Krishna, just 
(in 1907) 5,008 years ago. It must be remembered that the first seven 
Stanzas treat only of the cosmogony of our own planetary system and 
what is visible around it after a period of dissolution and re-absorption 
into the Divine Life of the Universe in accordance with the law of 
periodicity before-mentioned. It seems needless to remind the student 
that each great Cycle of Existence is called a Manvantara, and is divided 
into seven Rounds during which the Monad goes through the sum total 
of experience possible upon this planet, circling down through matter, 
which becomes grosser with each Round, and then having to reascend 
through ever finer and purer grades to Spirit. Each Round is the 
home, so to speak, of seven Races of men, and these again are divided 
into Sub-races and Family Races. The seven Stanzas then of The 
Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, describe the seven great stages of evolution 
spoken of in the Purdnas as "the Seven Creations," and in the Bible 
as "the Seven Days of Creation." 

I. The first Stanza describes the ONE ALL before the first flutter 
of reawakened manifestation. And here we are warned that any descrip- 
tion of such a state is impossible ; it can only be symbolised, or suggested 
by the negatives of all those most abstract attributes which men feel, 
rather than conceive. "Alone, the One form of existence stretched 
boundless, infinite, causeless, in dreamless sleep; and Life pulsated 
unconscious in universal Space." 

II. The second stage of evolution is to a Western mind so like 
the first, that the student's intuition only can enable him to grasp the 
meaning of the allegorical terms used. In fact all these Stanzas appeal 
to the inner faculties, rather than to those of the ordinary physical brain. 



152 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

III. Stanza III continues the description of the re-awakening of 
the Universe after a period of Cosmic Night, and depicts the coming 
forth of the Monads from their state of absorption within the ONE, 
and the emergence of the New Life, the manifested Logos, from the 
depths of the great Dark Waters. 

IV. Stanza IV shows the differentiation of the "Germ" of the 
Universe into the septenary hierarchy of conscious Divine Powers, who 
are the active manifestation of the One Supreme Power. They are the 
intelligent Beings who adjust and control evolution, as they embody in 
themselves those manifestations of the ONE LAW which we know as 
"the laws of Nature." This stage of evolution is spoken of in Hindu 
mythology as "the creation of the Gods." 

V. In Stanza V the process of world-formation is described; first, 
diffused Cosmic Matter, then "the fiery whirlwind," the first stage in the 
formation of a nebula. That nebula condenses, and after passing through 
various transformations, forms a planet or a solar system, as the case 
may be. "The Deity becomes a Whirlwind"; that is, Eternal vibration 
in the Unmanifested, changes to vertical motion in the manifested. The 
Whirlwind is also identified with Fohat, "Wisdom becomes Fohat," 
says the Commentary on Stanza V. Fohat the Spirit of Life, is the 
Divine Life and Love, the Logos, the potential Creative Power, the 
active Creative Power, cosmic Motion, cosmic Electricity, etc., etc., 
according to the plane on which it acts, and the sense in which the term 
is used. As in the most ancient Greek cosmogony, Eros is the third 
person of the primeval Trinity (Chaos, Gaea, and Eros), and has noth- 
ing in common with Anteros or Cupid, so Fohat is one thing in the 
unmanifested Universe, and quite another in the physical world. In the 
unmanifested Universe, Fohat is simply the potential creative power, 
an abstract philosophical idea. In the manifested universe he is the 
occult, electric, vital power, which under the will of the Creative Logos 
gives to all forms that impulse which in time becomes Law. As Divine 
Love (Eros) the electric power of affinity (chemical and otherwise) 
is shown allegorically as trying to bring pure Spirit into union with 
the Soul, the two constituting in man the MONAD, and in Nature the 
first link between the ever-unconditioned and the manifested. Fohat is 
the "Spirit" of ELECTRICITY, which is the LIFE of the Universe. 

VI. Stanza VI indicates the next step in the formation of such 
a world as ours, and brings the history of its evolution down to its 
Fourth great period (or Round), that in which we are now living. With 
the fourth verse of Stanza VI, ends that portion of the Stanzas relating to 
universal Cosmogony. From this verse on, the Stanzas are concerned 
only with our solar system in general, and the history of our globe in 
particular. The cosmic periods that separate these verses are of 
immense duration. 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 153 

VII. Stanza VII continues the history of the earth and of the 
Creative Powers, and traces the descent of life down to the appearance 
of Man upon this planet. This ends Vol. I of the Secret Doctrine, while 
the development of "Man," from his first appearance on this earth in 
this Round, forms the subject of Vol. II. 

The commas inclosing "Man" in the last sentence, are very signifi- 
cant, and point to a condition or conditions of being quite different 
from anything we should call man. The Commentary on this verse 
says that Mankind in its first prototypal shadowy form, is the offspring 
of the Elohim (creative spirits) of Life; in its physical aspect it is the 
direct progeny of the lowest Spirits of the Earth ; for its moral, psychic 
and spiritual nature it is indebted to a group of divine Beings whose 
name and characteristics will be given hereafter. 

But man's physical development took place at the expense of the 
spiritual inner man and nature. The three middle principles of earth 
and man became with every race more material, the Soul stepping back 
to make room for the physical intellect ; the essence of elements becom- 
ing the material and compound elements now known. 

It were an impossible task to give in a few pages even the merest 
outline of the Secret Doctrine, and all that can be done here is to set up 
a few guide-posts, as it were, to point out the way to the student. The 
all-important teaching, the corner-stone of the temple, is the Unity of 
all things with the Divine, and when this has become a conviction, it 
dominates the whole structure, and we realise that we are indeed "a 
temple not built with hands, eternal in the heavens." 

And now to turn our attention to a few of the most important 
details that describe the evolution of ourselves and our environment. 

In the first place we are struck by the omnipresence of the number 
seven, which meets us at every turn, and which it is quite unnecessary 
to emphasize here. But after a long and careful comparison of these cor- 
respondences, it seemed that the principal reason for the importance of 
this number lay in its relation to life, and in one of the many hidden 
places of the Secret Doctrine was found an explanation of the mystery 
in the statement that in our world the rhythm of life is in sevens, 
because that is the rhythm of our Mother the Moon, who in dying 
imparted her life to her child the Earth, according to the great Karmic 
law. Other planets and stars and solar systems, have other rates of 
vibration : in them the rhythm of life throbs faster or slower as the 
case may be. The Sun is the heart of our solar system, and there is a 
regular circulation of the Life Essence throughout that system, like 
that of the blood in the body, the Sun contracting as rhythmically at 
every return of that essence, as the human heart does, only instead of 
a few seconds, it takes the solar blood ten or eleven years to make its 
rounds. See the scientific theory of the recurrence of sun-spots. 



154 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

With Stanza VI we begin the study of the elements, seven in 
all, although only four are yet fully manifested, the fifth only in 
part, as we are barely within the second half of the Fourth Round, 
and the Fifth element can only manifest fully in the Fifth Round. With 
each Round, or cycle of existence, a new element develops, but in 
accordance with the general law, not suddenly, but gradually, and over- 
lapping, as it were, those already known, and those belonging to the 
future. The element of the present or Fourth Round, is, of course, 
Earth, the lowest and most material point of our evolution, and as we 
pass that point and the balance turns towards Spirit, Ether, the element 
of the Fifth Round, manifests itself in various ways, and day by day 
brings some new quality into use. 

But, differentiated as they were in the beginning, these elements 
were not the compound bodies known to the science of to-day. Occult- 
ism has always taught that the recognised chemical elements of to-day 
will sooner or later be found to be only modifications of a single mate- 
rial element, and also that in reality there is neither Spirit nor Matter, 
but simply numberless aspects of the ever-hidden One. 

Neither the stars nor the sun can be said to be made up of those 
terrestrial elements with which science is familiar, though they, and a 
host more, still unknown, are all present in the outer robes of the sun. 
And our globe has its own special laboratory, on the far-away outskirts 
of its atmosphere, crossing which every atom and molecule differentiates 
from its primordial nature. The essence of cometary matter, for 
instance, is totally devoid of any of the characteristics with which 
science is acquainted, and even that matter, during its rapid passage 
through our atmosphere, undergoes certain changes in its nature. 

Metaphysically and esoterically there is but ONE ELEMENT, and at 
the root of it is the Deity ; and the so-called seven elements of which 
five have already manifested, are the garment, the veil of that Deity, 
direct from whose Essence comes MAN, whether physically, mentally, 
or spiritually considered. Fire, Air, Water, Earth, are but the visible 
garb, the symbols of the invisible Souls or Spirits, the Cosmic Gods. 
The hierarchies of these potencies or Forces, have been classified on a 
graduated scale of seven from the ponderable to the imponderable. 
They are septenary in their real cosmic gradation, from their chemical 
(or physical) to their purely spiritual composition. 

Akasa, Divine Flame, Ether, Fire, Air, Water, Earth, are the 
cosmic, sidereal, psychic, spiritual, and mystical principles, pre-eminently 
occult on every plane of being. 

After this enumeration of the elements, Stanza VI says that "Fohat 
builds seven small worlds revolving, one giving birth to the other. He 
builds them in the likeness of older worlds." This doctrine of the seven 
small worlds, or the "Planetary Chain," so-called, was at first taken in 
altogether too material a sense ; and was understood to mean a string of 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 155 

globes, of which our earth was the lowest and most material, instead of 
seven states of matter and consciousness, through which our earth must 
pass, on its way to purification, so that the fourth Globe corresponds 
to the fourth Round as a condition of being. The Earth was described 
as on the fourth and lowest, because the most material, plane of matter, 
and as the organs of perception are always adjusted to the medium 
in which they function, it naturally follows that we can normally per- 
ceive only material things, unless we are gifted with those higher senses 
which are only to be the ordinary possession of a future Humanity. 
Therefore any planets or stars which are visible to us must be on the 
same plane of matter as our own. 

Our Earth, as the visible representative of its invisible "chain of 
globes" (or states of matter and consciousness) has to live like the 
others, through seven Rounds or life-cycles. During the first three it 
forms and consolidates ; during the fourth it settles and hardens ; during 
the last three, it gradually returns to its first ethereal form ; it is spiritu- 
alised, so to speak. First the descent into matter, then the re-ascent to 
Spirit : this is the history of man, of planets, of solar systems. 

When a "planetary chain" (that is, a planet composed of these seven- 
fold conditions of matter and consciousness), is in its last "Round," or 
cycle of life, before finally dying out it sends all its energy into a neutral 
centre of latent force, and thereby calls into activity a new nucleus of 
undifferentiated matter. Thus the Moon poured forth all her higher 
principles into the Earth, finally transferring to the Earth's most mate- 
rial and lowest condition, her life-forces and powers, while she herself 
became virtually a dead planet, in which rotation has almost ceased. 

Among the many septennates we encounter, are the seven kingdoms 
of Nature; first, three degrees of elementals or nascent centres of forces, 
which range from complete unconsciousness up to semi-perception ; then 
the mineral kingdom, the turning-point of evolution; then three stages 
on the ascending, objective physical side; physical meaning here differ- 
entiated for cosmic purposes, but quite subjective to us on our plane. 

It is evident then, that we have in the seven kingdoms of nature, 
three separate schemes of evolution which are interwoven and inter- 
blended at every point, the Monadic, or Spiritual, the Intellectual, and 
the Physical. These three are the finite aspects or reflections, on the 
field of cosmic illusion, of the ONE REALITY. 

The Monadic Evolution is concerned with the growth and develop- 
ment of the Monad into self-consciousness. This of course, refers to 
the individual Monads or Egos, in conjunction with 

The Intellectual Evolution, represented by the Solar Spirits (or 
Ancestors) ; the givers of intelligence and consciousness to man, and the 

Physical Evolution represented by the astral shadows of the Lunar 
Spirits (or Ancestors), around which Nature has built the present 
physical body. 



156 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Each of these three systems has its own laws, and is ruled and 
guided by different sets of the higher Intelligences, and it is the union 
of these three streams in his nature, that makes man the complex being 
he now is. Man, or rather his Monad, has existed on the earth from 
the very beginning of this Round. But up to our own Fifth Race, the 
external shapes which covered those divine astral doubles, changed and 
consolidated with every sub-race; the physical structure of the fauna 
and flora of the earth changing with it, as they had to be adapted to 
the ever-shifting conditions of life on this globe during the geological 
periods of its formative cycle. And thus they will go on changing with 
every Root-race, and every chief Sub-race, down to the last one of the 
Seventh in this Round. 

Every Round repeats on a higher scale the evolutionary work of 
the preceding Round. With the exception of some of the higher anthro- 
poids, the Monadic inflow or inner evolution, is at an end until the next 
cycle of existence. 

In the infancy of the Third Race, while they were yet in a state of 
purity, the "Sons of Wisdom" who had incarnated in that race pro- 
duced by will-power a progeny called "the Sons of Will and Yoga." 
It was not a Race, this progeny, but the living Tree of Divine Wisdom. 
There were other "Sons of Will and Yoga" produced by a second 
spiritual effort, but the first one remains to this day the One and the 
Supreme. It is he who holds spiritual sway over the initiated Adepts 
throughout the world. He is the Initiator, called "the Great Sacrifice," 
for sitting at the threshold of LIGHT he looks into it from the circle of 
Darkness which he will not cross; nor will he quit his post till the last 
day of his life-cycle, because the lonely pilgrims on their way back to 
their home are never sure of not losing their way in this limitless desert 
of illusion called earth-life. The Watchers or the Builders, are the 
Guardian Spirits who reigned over man through the whole period of 
the Golden Age, and furnished the many and various nations with their 
divine Kings and Leaders. They had finished their own cycle on the 
Earth and other worlds in the preceding Rounds, and the elect of our 
humanity will take their places in future life-cycles when they shall 
have risen to higher systems than ours. 

The teaching is then, that in order to become a divine, fully- 
conscious god even the highest the primeval spiritual Intelligences 
must pass through the human stage. And this does not apply to man- 
kind alone, but to all Intelligences that have reached their appropriate 
equilibrium between Matter and Spirit as we have, ever since the middle 
point of the fourth Root-race of the fourth Round was passed. Each 
Entity must win for itself the right to become divine through its own 
experience. 

The refusal to admit, in the whole solar system, of the existence 
of any other intellectual beings on the human plane, is the greatest con- 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 157 

ceit of the age. All that science has a right to affirm is, that there are 
no invisible Intelligences living under the same conditions as men. It 
cannot deny the possibility of there being worlds within worlds under 
totally different conditions from our own, nor can it deny that there 
may be a certain limited communication between some of those worlds 
and ours. To the highest of these worlds, we are taught, belong the 
seven purely divine Spirits; to the six lower ones belong hierarchies 
that can occasionally be seen and heard by men. 

The highest group of the hierarchy of Creative Powers, is composed 
of the "divine Flames," the first and last of which, are collectively, the 
Logos. "The highest group is also spoken of as 'the Fiery Lions/ 
and the 'Lions of Life,' whose esotericism is securely hidden in the 
zodiacal sign of Leo" (Life). This is one of the dark sayings occasion- 
ally thrown out, upon which the student may sharpen his wits. At the 
Divine FLAME are lit the three descending groups. Having their poten- 
tial being in the higher group, they now become distinct and separate 
entities. 

The celestial Beings of the second Order are still formless, but 
more definitely substantial. They are the prototypes of the incarnating 
Monads, and through them passes the Ray, furnished by them with its 
future vehicle, the divine Soul (Buddhi). 

The third Order corresponds to Spirit, Soul, and Intellect (At ma, 
Buddhi, Manas). 

The fourth Order are substantial Entities. This is the highest 
group among the atomic forms, and the nursery of the human, con- 
scious, spiritual Souls. They are called the "Units of Life" and con- 
stitute, through the order below their own, the great mystery of human, 
conscious, and intellectual being. For the latter are the field wherein 
lies concealed the germ that will fall into generation. That germ will 
become the spiritual potency in the physical cell that guides the develop- 
ment of the embryo, and which is the cause of all heredity. This inner 
soul of the physical cell this "spiritual plasm" that dominates the 
germinal plasm, is the key that some day must open the gates of the 
terra incognita of the biologist. 

The fifth Order is a very mysterious one, and is supposed to contain 
in itself the dual attributes of both the spiritual and the physical aspects 
of the universe, the two poles, so to speak, of the Universal Intelligence, 
and of the dual nature of man, the spiritual and the physical. 

The sixth and seventh Orders partake of the lower qualities of the 
Quaternary. They are conscious, etherial Entities as invisible as ether. 
They are Nature-Spirits or Elementals, of countless kinds and varie- 
ties. They are all subject to Karma, and have to work it out in every 
cycle. The sixth Order, moreover, remains almost inseparable from 
man, who draws from it his mental and psychic principles, all his prin- 
ciples, in fact, but his spirit and his body. It is the Divine Ray alone 



158 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

that proceeds directly from "the One." Stanza VII says: "Through 
the countless rays, the Life-ray, the One, proceeds like a thread through 
many beads. Life precedes Form, and Life survives the last atom of 
Form" (in the external body). 

This verse expresses the conception of a life-thread running through 
many generations. That is to say, the spiritual potency in the physical 
cell, guides the development of the embryo, and is the cause of all the 
hereditary faculties and qualities of man. It is the "eternal cell" of 
Weismann, plus "the spiritual potency." "The functions of the Uni- 
versal Life on this earth, are of a fivefold character. In the mineral 
atom it is connected with the lowest principle of the Spirits of the earth 
(the sixfold Spirits) ; in the vegetable particle with their second prin- 
ciple, prana or individual life; in the animal with both these, plus the 
third and fourth, the astral body and the emotional nature; in man the 
germ must receive the fruition of all the five principles, the fifth being 
Mind, or the Intellectual Soul. Otherwise he will be born no higher 
than an animal, a congenital idiot." Thus in man alone is the Unit of 
Life complete. As to his seventh principle, Atma, or the Divine Ray, 
it is but one ray of the universal Sun. Each rational creature receives 
but the temporary loan of that which has to return to its source, while 
the physical body is shaped by the lowest terrestrial lives, through 
physical, chemical, and physiological evolution. "The Blessed Ones 
have nought to do with the purgations of matter." (Chaldean Book of 
Numbers.) 

The greatest problem of philosophy relates to the physical and 
substantial nature of life, which is denied by modern science. The 
believers alone in Karma and reincarnation, dimly perceive that the 
whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations, 
whether in or apart from the physical body. 

On our nascent globe, the Monad or Unit of Life, is first of all 
shot down by the law of evolution into the lowest form of matter, the 
mineral. After a sevenfold gyration in the stone (or rather in that 
which will become metal and stone in the fourth Round) it creeps out 
of it into some low form of vegetable life, say the lichen. Passing 
thence through all the other grades of vegetable matter, into what is 
termed animal matter, it has now reached the point at which it has 
become the germ, so to speak, of the animal that will develop into 
physical man. All this, up to the fourth Round, is formless as matter, 
and senseless as mind. For the Monad, or Unit of Life per se, cannot 
even be called Spirit; it is a ray, a breath of the Logos, which having 
no relations with conditions and relative finiteness, is unconscious on 
this plane. 

Therefore, besides the material which will be needed for its future 
human form, the Monad requires (a) a spiritual model or prototype 
for that material to shape itself upon, and (b) an intelligent conscious- 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 159 

ness to guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed 
by senseless though living matter, nor by the homogeneous Monad. It 
is only when from a potential androgyne, man has become separated 
into male and female, that he can be endowed with a conscious, rational, 
individual Soul, the Mind-soul, to receive which he has to eat of the 
fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. 

The rudimentary man of the first two and a half Races, was only 
the first gradually developing into the most perfect of mammals, 
therefore when the hour strikes, the Celestial (solar) Ancestors, Entities 
from previous worlds, step in on our plane, (as the Lunar Ancestors 
had stepped in before them for the formation of physical or animal 
man) and incarnate in the bodies prepared for them. 

Each new Round develops one of the compound elements known 
to science. Thus the first Round, we are taught, developed but one 
Element, and a nature and humanity in what may be called "one dimen- 
sional Space." The second Round brought forth and developed two 
elements, Fire and Air, and its humanity if we can give that name to 
beings living under conditions unknown to us was a two dimensional 
species, to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense. 
The expression may be regarded, on one plane of thought, as equivalent 
to the second characteristic of matter, corresponding to the second per- 
ceptive faculty or sense of man. "From the second Round," says the 
Commentary, "Earth, hitherto a foetus in the matrix of Space, began 
its real existence; it had developed individual sentient Life, its second 
principle" (in the septenary division). "The second corresponds to the 
sixth principle (the Spiritual Soul) ; the latter is life continuous ; the 
former, life temporary." The centres of consciousness of the Third 
Round, destined to develop into humanity as we know it, arrived at a 
perception of the third element, Water. Those of the fourth Round 
have added Earth as a state of matter to their stock, as well as the other 
three elements in their present condition. None of the so-called Ele- 
ments were in the same condition in the three preceding Rounds, as 
they are now. They could not have remained the same, for Nature is 
never stationary during the great Cycle (of Life), and every form of 
life, including Man, is always adapting its organism to the then reigning 
elements. It will only be in the next, or fifth Round, that the fifth 
element, Ether, will be as familiar to all men as Air is now. And only 
during that Round will those higher senses, the growth and develop- 
ment of which Ether subserves, be susceptible of complete expansion. 
A partial familiarity with the next characteristic of matter, permeability, 
which should develop concurrently with the sixth sense (let us call it 
normal clairvoyance), may be expected to develop at the proper period 
in the fifth Round. But with the new element added to our resources 
in the next Round, permeability will become so manifest a character- 



160 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

istic of matter that its densest forms will seem to man's perceptions 
no more obstructive than a thick fog. 

Since this was published in 1888, the Roentgen ray photographs 
have shown us that such effects are possible even now. Elsewhere 
we are told that the conditions of life and the elements themselves in 
the Sixth and Seventh Rounds, are so entirely outside of our present 
state of consciousness, that it is impossible even to name them. 

"Who forms Man, and who forms his body?" asks Stanza VII, 
and the answer is "the LIFE, and the LIVES/' Here man stands for 
the spiritual, heavenly man, the real and immortal Ego. The Com- 
mentary says : "Fire alone is ONE, on the plane of the One Reality ; on 
that of manifested, hence illusive being, its particles are fiery Lives, 
which live and have their being at the expense of every other life which 
they consume. Therefore they are named the DEVOURERS. . . . Every 
visible thing in this Universe was built by such LIVES, from conscious 
and divine primordial man, down to the unconscious agents that con- 
struct matter, and disintegrate and differentiate the germs of other 
lives in the elements." 

Thus Occultism disposes of the so-called Azoic (lifeless) Age of 
science, for it shows that there never was a time when there was no 
life upon the Earth. Wherever there is an atom of matter, a particle 
or a molecule, even in the most gaseous condition, there is life in it, 
however latent and unconscious. Whatsoever quits the neutral state, 
becomes active life. 

We are taught that every physiological change, all diseases, and all 
the obstructive phenomena of life, are due to those unseen Creators and 
Destroyers, that are called in such a loose and general way microbes. 
It might be supposed that the microbes of science are identical with the 
"fiery lives," but this is not true. The "fiery lives" are the seventh and 
highest division of the plane of matter, and correspond in the individual 
with the One Life of the universe, but only on that plane, the lowest 
in the cosmos. The microbes of science are the first and lowest sub- 
division on the second plane that of material life. The preservation 
and destruction of the physical body of man, are due to the alternate 
functions of the "fiery lives," as "builders" and "destroyers." 

Thus proceed the cycles of septenary evolution in septennial Nature, 
i. The spiritual or divine; 2. The psychic or semi-divine; 3. The 
intellectual ; 4. The passional ; 5. The instinctual ; 6. The semi-corporeal ; 
7. The purely material or physical nature. The lowest, of course, is 
the one dependent upon, and subservient to, our five physical senses, 
which are, in truth, seven. 

The Universe manifests periodically, in order that through the Ever- 
Becoming, every cosmic atom passing from the formless and intangible 
down to matter in full generation, and then back again, re-ascending 
at each period nearer to the final goal, that each atom may reach 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 161 

through individual merits and efforts, that plane where it re-becomes 
the one, unconditioned ALL. 

The fundamental Law is that system upon which is hung the 
philosophy of all the rest. It is the omnipresent Reality, impersonal 
because it contains all and everything. Its impersonality is a funda- 
mental conception of the system. It is latent in every atom of the 
Universe, and is the Universe itself. 

The Universe is the periodical manifestation of this unknown 
Absolute Essence. It is best described as neither Spirit nor Matter, 
but both. 

The Universe with everything in it is called ILLUSION, because 
all is temporary therein. Yet the Universe is real enough to the con- 
scious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself. 

Everything in the Universe, throughout all its Kingdoms, is CON- 
SCIOUS, that is endowed with a consciousness of its own kind, and on 
its own plane of perception. Because we cannot perceive any signs 
of consciousness in stones, for instance, we have no right to say that 
none exists. (Especially as we are told that the consciousness of each 
thing is of a special kind, and is active on its own plane of perception. 
As H. P. B. says elsewhere: "In relation to its own plane of conscious- 
ness and perception, the ant has as good an intellect as ours, and over 
and above instinct, shows very high reasoning powers." Trans. 
B. Lodge, I, 13.) 

The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards. We 
see that every external motion is produced and preceded by internal 
emotion, will, and thought. As no outward motion or change in man's 
external body can take place, when normal, unless provoked by an 
inward impulse given through emotion, will or thought, so with the 
external or manifested Universe. The whole Kosmos is guided, con- 
trolled, and animated by an almost endless series of hierarchies of 
sentient Beings, each having a mission to perform. They vary 
infinitely in their respective degrees of intelligence, for each of these 
Beings either was, or is to be, a man, if not in the present, then in a 
past or future life-cycle. They are either incipient or perfected men, 
and differ morally from terrestrial human beings, only in being devoid 
of the feeling of personality, and the human emotional nature. 

It is on the acceptance of the theory of the Unity of all in Nature 
in its ultimate Essence, that mainly rests the belief in the existence 
of other conscious beings around us besides the spirits of the dead. It 
is on the right comprehension of the primeval evolution of Spirit- 
Matter and its real Essence that the student has to depend for the only 
sure clue which can guide his subsequent studies. 

There is but one indivisible and absolute Omniscence and Intelli- 
gence in the Universe, but the first differentiation of its reflection in 
the manifested world is purely spiritual, and the beings generated in it 

it 



162 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

can have no human consciousness till they have acquired it, personally 
and individually. 

The whole order of Nature evinces a progressive march towards 
a higher life. The whole process of evolution, with its endless adapta- 
tions, is a proof of the design in the action of the seemingly blindest 
forces, and shows that what is called "unconscious Nature," is in 
reality an aggregate of forces manipulated by semi-intelligent Beings, 
guided by high Planetary Spirits, whose collective aggregate forms the 
manifested Word of the unmanifested Logos, and constitutes at one 
and the same time, the MIND of the Universe, and its immutable LAW. 

KATHARINE HILLARD. 
(To be continued.) 



"In every age there have been Sages who had mastered the absolute 
and yet could teach but relative truths. For none yet born of mortal 
woman in our race, has, or could have given out, the whole and the final 
Truth to another man; for every one of us has to find that (to him) final 
Knowledge in himself. As no two minds can be absolutely alike, each 
has to receive Supreme illumination through itself, according to its 
capacity, and from no human light. The greatest adept living can reveal 
of the Universal Truth only so much as the mind he is impressing it upon 
can assimilate, and no more." 

H. P. B. in Lucifer, Vol. I. p. 426. 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 



T 



MISSIONARIES AND A MISSIONARY 

** ^ J ^HE attack on Mayor Gaynor, the trouble in Spain, aero- 
plane flights, the drowning of bathers what else does the 
SCREEN reflect? Please enlighten me," said the Recorder. 

"Why leave out the Wrongs of Ireland, and the Weather?" 
asked the Cynic. 

But the Neophyte was more helpful. "Try to think of some little 
thing," he said, "which escapes general observation but which conceals 
possibilities. The real work of the world is not done in the open. 
Results are seen there, but the Great Ones and their servants pull the 
wires from behind. To use another simile, it is the planting of the 
seed, and its growth beneath the surface, that we should try to watch 
if we would understand what the Lords of Life are doing and what 
it is that the present signifies." 

This encouraged the Philosopher, who is slow to speak, and to whom 
others, therefore, are the more inclined to listen. "Have any of you 
heard of a missionary called Stokes an Anglican missionary who is 
working in British India?" 

The Gael flared: "May Baal burn the whole brood of them," he 
said. "I know them. I've seen them at work. So much a convert, 
and you baptize them several times over to swell the receipts. Also, in 
times of famine, you buy babies for an anna, and baptize them at two 
hundred per cent, profit. Also, you catch the lowest caste of sweeper 
I forget his name now and tell him the white man is his brother (which 
the average missionary is}, for which good reason he should worship 
the white man's God, symbolized by the rupee, instead of the black man's 
Devil. The last I saw of that particular convert was at Darjeeling: 
he had sold out to another Padre, and was being dragged by the scruff 
of the neck to the Church of his first conversion by a muscular and 
furious Lay Reader." 

"Missions in India are ridiculous, of course," commented the 
Observer. "But there are parts of the world where they do good. They 
are helping to abolish 'smelling-out' by the Kaffir witch-doctors 
among other horrible practices ; and the Moravian Brethren set the 
example of establishing Trade Schools, in which the African native 
is taught to work." 

Neither the Gael's onslaught nor the Observer's faint praise per- 
turbed the Philosopher. "This particular missionary," he said, "happens 
to be acting as the agent of a Master of the Master who is known 
historically as Jesus Christ." Then he relapsed into silence. 

163 



164 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

The Gael, in spite of himself, admired such calm assurance. But 
he spoke with a slight rasp: "Pardon me, but may I ask which of the 
two took you into his confidence?" 

"Both," answered the Philosopher; and began to read. 

There was a minute or two of silence. "Get some dynamite," said 
the Gael. The Philosopher looked up and grinned. "You may judge 
for yourselves, if you like. 

A SPIRITUAL ADVENTURE 

"The first I heard of this man was in an article, written by himself, 
and published in a missionary journal called The East and The West. 
It appeared that he had, in a literal sense, taken the Vow of Poverty, 
and was living the life of one of the Friars of St. Francis among the 
lepers and the plague-stricken of India. He had done this at first 
simply from a desire to imitate Christ; but he soon found that his 
manner of living opened the homes and the hearts of the natives, which, 
until then, as to all other Sahibs, had remained tight-closed to him. 
But the natives did not accept him blindly: they tested him. He had 
gone to a plague-infected village, carrying with him nothing but a 
blanket, a water-vessel called a lota, a few medicines, and a Greek New 
Testament. He did not enter the village, but spread his blanket on 
the ground under a banyan tree outside the village boundary. 'It is,' 
he says, 'almost always 1 better to let people come to you than to go to 
them.' At last the headman of the village and a number of others came 
to ask him what he wanted and who he was. 'I told them that I was 
a 'bhagat' (a person who devotes his life to religious exercises), and 
that, having heard that so many were dying, my heart had been filled 
with pity. I had come, therefore, desiring to serve them, and had 
brought with me certain drugs which might be able to cure them.' " 

"The old trick," said the Gael. "Sneak in under the pretext of 
curing the sick, and then convert the women to the extent of making 
them discontented without the least chance of making them Christians." 

"In this case," replied the Philosopher, "conversion to another creed 
was not the aim. The aim was to do what Christ would have done: 
that and no more. One of the most significant and happy character- 
istics of Stokes is his respect for Hindu ideals. Listen to what he 
says: 

" The Indian has an ideal, and it is a very high one. To be sure it 
differs from our own, just as the Oriental temperament differs from our 
temperament. Yet, although they have a lofty and noble ideal, there 
are very few who even try to live up to it. The reason for this is that 
they do not consider it possible of attainment; hence they draw a clear 
line between what they ought to do and what they can do. In India, 
therefore, our mission is not to present to the people an ideal, but to 
convince them that they can attain to their own ideal, and that the way 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 165 

to do this is Christ. There is no country in the world where there is 
such a deep realization of the superiority of the Spiritual over the 
Material ; and when India once becomes convinced that spiritual perfec- 
tion is within the reach of every man, it will astonish the world. The 
ideal of the East and the ideal set before men by Christ are in all main 
points identical, hence the Friar's greatest privilege is so to live Christ 
before men that the people of India, seeing the beauty of this life, may 
become convinced that spiritual perfection is a possibility to the Chris- 
tians if to no one else. When they have realized this, we shall not need 
to implore them to come to the Master.' " 

"But why want them to go to Christ?" asked the Objector. "They 
have their own Masters. The fact that they are born into the world as 
Hindus should suggest that they were meant to be Hindus and not 
Christians." 

"We can discuss that later. All I want to prove to you now is that 
Stokes cannot fairly be accused of trying to get people merely to accept 
a creed, or, in fact, of anything like what you would describe as ordinary 
missionary methods. His attitude is extraordinarily liberal as well as 
devout a rare combination. He is not a fanatic. 'There were no 
religious meetings,' he says, 'as I had made it a rule never to talk of 
Christ unless questioned about Him.' What he is working for is a life, 
not a creed." 

"But why a life of literal poverty? Dead-letter in one respect, 
dead-letter in all." 

"That, too, we can consider later. Let me tell you first how his 
villagers tested him. 

TESTING A HOLY MAN 

"After he had introduced himself to them as a 'bhagat,' and had 
mentioned that he wished to help the sick, they gave him permission to 
try his drugs on some of the lowest caste in the village. Then they 
asked him where he intended to lodge, to which he replied that he would 
remain where he was, under his banyan tree. As to food, 'God can 
provide food.' So they allowed him to stay. And he set to work at 
once among the low-caste sick. When evening came, he was roughly 
and rudely summoned before the headmen of the village, many of whom 
sneered and jeered at him, while others brought a filthy brass dish, with 
stale food, and ordered him to eat. He did so, without protest puz- 
zled by their conduct, as Hindus naturally are courteous; but he was 
determined, even in this respect, to imitate what he believed to be the 
example of Jesus. So for several days they ordered him about, with 
many insults, while he, although sometimes tempted to leave, continued 
to nurse the sick, reminding himself that Jesus was spat upon and yet 
remained patient and gentle. 

"At last, one evening, the man who seemed to be the ringleader, 
after behaving even more objectionably than usual, ordered Stokes 



166 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

sharply back to his tree. Stokes, still with his ideal before him, turned 
humbly and gently to go. Almost at once his tormentor, a Sikh but 
I had better read to you what Stokes says: 

" 'He pulled off his turban, and laying it at my feet, bowed almost 
to the ground before me, exclaiming at the same time, 'Maharaj,' which 
means 'great king,' and is the title by which bhagats are commonly 
addressed in Northern India. Then he walked over to the tree with 
me, explaining the while how the villagers had not believed that there 
could be bhagats among the foreigners, and how they had resolved to 
test me. 'Now/ he concluded, 'I know that you are truly a bhagat of 
God, for you are gentle, and when men insult you, you do not become 
angered. Moreover, you love everyone, even the low castes and the 
children, and speak mildly to those who torment you. Thus did Guru 
Nanak Dev and Raja Gopi Chand, and by this sign all bhagats may 
be known.' 

THE REWARD OF MERIT 

"From that time the attitude of the people changed absolutely. 
They became his intimate friends, pressing choice foods upon him, and 
trusting themselves implicitly to his medical treatment. Before long 
the villagers began to call him their bhagat, and his fame so spread that 
he received urgent invitations to visit neighboring villages. He seems 
to have made no attempt to use his influence for propagandist purposes, 
having made it his rule, as I have said, never to speak of Christ unless 
directly questioned. 

"But it was not only in villages, or among the poor, that he was 
made welcome. In a segregation camp, while nursing a case of small- 
pox, he was visited freely by Hindus of all castes, by Sikhs, Moham- 
medans, bhagats, 'and even members of the Arya Samaj.' Since he 
became a Friar, he says, 'I have come into close touch with many of 
those Indians who are, as a rule, most difficult of access, and have been 
in houses where no other European has ever set foot.' Further : 

" 'I have occasionally met with opposition and often with ridicule. 
It would have been strange had this not been so, and one of the greatest 
fields of opportunity would have been lacking for the display of forbear- 
ance and patient love. There is nothing which so kindles the admiration 
of the thoughtful Indian as that love which "suffereth long and is kind." 
Patient humility in the face of domineering arrogance will secure a 
hearing in India where everything else fails, and the Friar, by strictly 
obeying the Master's directions in Matt. v. 39-44, can make all opposition 
work together for the glory of God.' 

THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE IMITATION 

"Since that article in The East and The West was written, in 1908, 
Stokes has obtained permission from the Bishop of Lahore to found an 
Order called 'The Brotherhood of the Imitation of Jesus.' The aim 
of the Brotherhood is 'the Imitation of Jesus and His service in India.' 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 167 

The chief spheres of service of the Brotherhood are, first, 'It shall seek 
to glorify God in Jesus Christ by becoming the servant of all who are 
afflicted, especially those stricken with plague, cholera, small-pox, and 
leprosy,' and, second, 'It shall enter upon educational work for the 
young.' It is declared to be the aim of the Brotherhood 'to show forth 
Jesus Christ and His love by life and work rather than by word' ; and 
it is provided specifically in the Rule that the Brothers 'shall never force 
Christianity on the notice of non-Christians/ and that 'they shall as far 
as possible avoid criticizing the life, work, or methods of others and 
always in love esteem others better than themselves.' The Brothers 
pledge themselves to poverty and to celibacy. There is a Novitiate of 
two years. After admission as a full Brother, withdrawal is allowed 
after a year's notice of intention." 

"That," said the Observer, "is sensible : a perpetual vow of celibacy, 
in an Order of that sort, is a grave mistake. In Burma the Buddhist 
monks may take vows for a limited period only, but may renew them if 
they wish to do so. But what started him going? What gave him the 
idea of becoming a little Brother of St. Francis?" 

"I suspect that you have suggested a part of the answer," replied 
the Philosopher. "It is evident, from his writings, that he has drawn 
much of his inspiration from the life of St. Francis. But it is equally 
evident that he has had first-hand experience of his own. In an intro- 
duction to some poems which he wrote, and which were published at 
the request of his friends, the Warden of St. Augustine's College at 
Canterbury refers to the author as one who, 'having seen whether in 
the body or out of the body God knows, but in any case with convincing 
clearness a vision of the Lord Jesus, toil-worn and travel-stained, 
trudging on foot along an Indian high-road, has found in that vision a 
call to give his life, from love of his Master, to the service of his Indian 
brothers.' Then, in one of the poems, which he calls, 'And the Light 
Shone into the Darkness,' he supplies what is perhaps the more direct 
answer to your question." 

"Please, please don't read us his poems," murmured the Gael. "I'm 
beginning to be convinced, and you'll spoil another of my illusions. Let 
me imagine his poems !" 

The Philosopher laughed. "Dear man," he said, "forget that I 
called it a poem. I'm not at all sure that it is one, and really, in this 
case, I do not care. Because he speaks of an experience as genuine as 
any that happened to the Saints an experience devised for him in terms 
of his own consciousness and his own needs, but as authentic, so far 
as it goes, as the vision of St. Paul. And in an age when many of the 
most orthodox, the clergy included, regard such things as belonging only 
to the past, it is a treat beyond words to find proof, in language akin to 
their own, that they are wrong, and that, even among themselves, there 
are those who know." 



168 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

"Very well," said the Gael, resignedly, closing his eyes and begin- 
ning to fan himself. "But leave out as much as you can. I'm not 
feeling very strong and every dreadful poem you read to us because, 
you know, your choice is extraordinary leaves me uncomfortable for 
weeks. But I always told you I am patient. Go ahead." 

AN EVER-NEW STORY 

Thus encouraged, the Philosopher explained that the earlier part 
of the poem describes the search of a man for peace. "He sought it in 
pleasure, in travel, in things of sense; but ever his soul became more 
restless, whispering its need for God. Then, when the man sought 
more violently to drown his spirit in forgetfulness, the whisper rose into 
a cry, thrilling with pain and sorrow. 'Husks! Husks! these all are 
husks/ it said ; 'Thou who wast made to be a son of God, why wilt thou 
cast thy heritage away, seeking for rest where rest was never found?' 
Still the man would not obey ; he would not look upward. So, whenever 
comfort seemed near, again and yet again the tyrant soul drove him forth, 
a wanderer, until at last, in weariness and despair, the man longed for 
death and for oblivion. It was then, after climbing all day, in burning 
sun, among the mountains, that he lay down with no hope in him but to 
die. The world itself seemed dead. 

"I slept, or seemed to sleep, but all at once 
I felt a hand upon my shoulder laid. 
Too weak I was to rise, but panting lay, 
Striving to pierce the blackness with my eyes. 
Yet feared I not, for from that gentle hand 
There flowed a power which thrilled my soul to life ; 
A power which told of love past human ken, 
Of sympathy with all man's woes, of peace 
And joy to come upon a world forlorn, 
Of sin o'ercome, and Heaven opened wide. 
At last, in awe I whispered tremblingly: 
*O thou who, speaking not, dost comfort give ! 
O thou who, in one moment, by a touch, 
Hast given peace so great that all those things 
Which dragged me down and filled me with despair 
Seem far away, or easy to be borne ! 
Thou in whose presence my poor restless soul 
Ceases to cry for rest and lies at peace, 
Who art thou? 

Oh, tell me, art thou human or divine? 
If human, then in what place dost thou dwell? 
May I bide with thee ever be thy slave? 
Wherever thou dost lead I'll follow thee; 
For whether thou art God or man, I know 
That thou art he in whom help may be found. 
Oh, I have wandered all this wide world o'er 
Seeking for peace, but always sorrow found. 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 169 

And now, at last, when I, about to die, 
Had laid me down, that peace has come to me. 
Leave me not, therefore, wheresoe'er thou art; 
Have pity on my sorrows, for 'tis thou 
Who, taking all away, can'st give me rest.' 

"From out the dark a voice came clear and calm, 
Quite low, and yet so full of melody, 
So full of pathos, ringing so with love 
That my poor soul, all thrilled and dazed with joy, 
Could scarce make out the meaning of the words. 
'O little lamb, I came to seek thee here. 
Thou askest who I am and where I dwell. 
I am Thy Shepherd though thou knewest not, 
I have been seeking thee the whole world o'er, 
Aye, calling, but thou would'st not answer me. 
For I have loved thee, my poor little one 
So loved that I did shed my blood for thee. 
Had'st thou but known it, I was ever by, 
But thou would'st never yield thyself to me. 
For thou wast seeking peace in lands afar, 
And little thoughtest thou that at thy side 
The giver walked and sought his gift to give; 
Yea, sought to give, but thou would'st never take. 
Thou soughtest peace below, but thou hast found 
It is not there, so I have come to help, 
And give thee what thou long hast sought in vain.' 

"Then silence fell ; and yet I felt the hand 
Still sending forth its message to my soul. 
I did not speak, for something said within: 

'Keep silence, listen, pray ! ' ' 

There was a pause. "Is that all?" asked the Gael. 

"Oh, no! There is a lot more. It just begins to be interesting 
where I left off. But you can buy the book if you want to. Its title is 
The Love of God, and it is published by Roffey and Clark at 12 High 
Street, Croydon, England, price one shilling and eight pence. You have 
enough before you for discussion. What do you think now of my 
original statement: that Stokes really is acting in India as an agent of 
that Master?" 

OF WHAT USE? 

"Forgive me if I seem utilitarian" this from the Student "but 
what possible good can Stokes accomplish? Granting his sincerity, his 
devotion, and, so far as I can see, the genuineness of his inspiration, it 
seems unlikely, none the less, that he would be given a task at once 
so hopeless and so futile as that of converting the natives of India to 
Christianity. I do not believe that Christ himself would wish it. Those 
people belong elsewhere. They are very well provided for. The great 
Lodge is quite as much concerned in their welfare as in our own. No 



170 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

need to go through a list of those who have been sent to them, Rama, 
Krishna, Buddha, Shankaracharya, and a score of others. A dozen times 
I have heard you say, and I have agreed, that the fact of our having 
been born in the West is good evidence that we are intended to work 
for, with and as Christians. Surely you would not argue differently 
for India?" 

"I wish the Buddhist were here," interjected the Gael. "It would 
be interesting to know his opinion. . . . But here he comes. My 
evocation, did you say? Too big a word! But coming persons, like 
coming events, do cast their shadows before when they have shadows, 
which is not always. . . . Sugata, Happy One, tell us : can you imagine 
how a Christian missionary could render perfect service in India spiritual 
service ?" 

"My friend, you asked me once to imagine God, and I told you 
then that my imagination is so feeble an instrument that I am com- 
pelled to use it with care." 

"But think, Sugata; please think! Do not limit the possible." 

Sugata "thought." It is curious to watch him do that. Did you 
ever see a brain stand quite still, or look down upon a lake so calm that 
it seemed immovable? 

"I can imagine a wonder," he said. "If a white man were to go 
to India as a Christian, and were to live as that Splendour lived in 
Palestine were to live like a Bhikkhu, without house or servants or 
money, free from anger, made pure by love for his Master, full of truth, 
energy, joy, peace, compassion, with mind at rest, earnest in contempla- 
tion, gifted with the jewel of silence, were, in short, to live as our 
own monks live, though, if possible, with greater sweetness and more 
complete devotion, that white man, so living, would carry a blessing to 
all India. . . . This also comes into my mind a saying of the Blessed 
One in the Mahavagga: 'Whosoever, O Bhikkhus, would wait upon 
me, he should wait upon the sick.' " 



"I suppose you mean," said the Student, "that a really good man 
carries a blessing wherever he goes?" 

"More than that I mean," was the reply. "Not being a Hindu, I 
can speak frankly. For some reason or other (the Buddhist is always 
polite), white men are regarded, particularly by the Brahmins, as 
materialistic and as incapable of spirituality. As a race, the Hindus 
consider themselves more advanced spiritually than the people of the 
West. Further, judging only by what they have seen of it in India, 
and, to some extent, from their knowledge of European history, they 
have come to despise Christianity. If, then, a white man and a Chris- 
tian, content that his life rather than words should speak for his Master's 
glory, were to live among them as a real Sadhu (holy man), do you not 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 171 

see the effect? They would say, 'If a white man and a Christian can 
do it, then surely, with all my advantages, I at least should try!' He 
would shame them into effort. And I can see, too, that the influence 
of such a man would be far more beneficent than is the influence of 
those white men who adopt the Hindu religion and who attempt to 
become regular yogis of one or another school. In their case the 
Brahmins say, 'You see, they have to come to us to find out what religion 
means ; they have to imitate our holy men and become Hindus in order 
to gain wisdom and deliverance.' Such a reflection does not help the 
Brahmins." 

"If that is your opinion," interjected the Gael, "you will be inter- 
ested to know that, according to the Philosopher, there is a man in India 
now who seems to be doing very much as you have imagined." Then 
he told the Buddhist about Stokes. "How much of it is true," he went 
on, "I of course do not know. But there is this to be said in the man's 
favor: he is a layman, not a priest." 

Knowing something of the Gael's prejudices, we laughed. But the 
Buddhist was "thinking." Presently, more to himself than to us, he 
murmured : " 'Ingratitude is not among our vices.' ... So the West 
repays its debt. So much has India done, seen and unseen. It well 
may be. But will this white man have sense enough to know that his 
work goes deeper than the making of converts?" Then, turning to the 
Philosopher : "He is in some way licensed by a Bishop : does this mean 
that he will have to make reports, and that his work will be judged by 
outer results by the number of baptisms or by other gains to his 
church?" The Philosopher shrugged his shoulders he did not know, 
but he seemed to fear it. 

"It will be hard for him," the Buddhist continued ; "but if he is the 
right man and really how shall I say it ? commissioned, then he will 
not work for results, he will work for love; and he will be helped to 
resist the pressure of expectation, that of his Bishop and of his friends, 
who will not know enough to understand, or have faith enough to trust. 
He, himself, will need great faith. He must cling fast to that Master's 
hand. ... I will pray also to the Blessed One to help him." 

THE POSSIBLE ACHIEVEMENT 

"You don't seem to think he has much chance of converting India," 
remarked the Cynic. 

"No one can do that," replied the Buddhist, gravely. "It was tried, 
you may remember. But I do not think he is intended to convert people, 
except to nobler lives. There may, of course, be some exceptions. 
European education, only half digested, has deprived a great many 
Hindus of faith in their own religion, and they know more of Herbert 
Spencer than of any of their old philosophies. In such cases it is possible 
that the religion 'in their bones' will respond to Stokes' appeal ; although, 



172 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

even then, I think he will serve chiefly as half-way house on their 
return to the beliefs of their forefathers." 

"Do you not think," questioned the Philosopher, "that this sort 
of religious example, coming from a white man and a Christian, will 
do something to improve the relations of the races? It should, I imagine, 
tend to raise the British, and, so to speak, the British religion, in the 
estimation of the Hindus." 

"One man alone could hardly do that. But if the movement which 
Stokes has started meets with sufficient support in England, or among 
the English-speaking peoples; if a considerable number of young men 
join his Brotherhood and devote their lives to it as he is doing, I agree 
cordially with you that it will inspire a new respect for India's con- 
querors. It would be difficult to realize, in this country, how profound 
is the reverence adoration is not too strong a word which visible 
saintliness arouses in the heart of a Hindu. Literally, he worships it." 

THE REQUIREMENTS 

"What, may I ask, do you mean by 'visible saintliness' ?" this from 
the Objector. 

"I mean that in India it is not sufficient to have what you people 
call a 'kind heart,' with ways that sometimes are unkind. Speech and 
action must accord with intention. Every nation has its own code of 
social manners, by which men are judged ; and, in the same way, its own 
code of religious manners. In a Protestant country, celibacy is regarded 
as eccentric. In a Catholic country, celibacy is considered to be one of 
the essentials of a strictly religious life. In India, the requirements go 
much further than that, and anyone who wishes to influence the Indian 
people religiously, must 'talk their language' to the extent of living as, 
for thousands of years, all holy men in their experience have lived. He 
must be without possessions without wife or children or home or 
money. More than that, he must have made what we call 'the ten 
precepts for novices' * so much a part of himself that their violation 
would be impossible, and must also have gone far towards feeling, living, 
and exemplifying the principles which underlie the Four Noble Truths 
and the holy Eightfold Path.f Finally, if he attempts to appear other 
than he is ; if he adopts that manner of life, not for its own sake, but for 



'The ten precepts for novices are given in the Mahavagga, I, 56, as follows: 

"Abstinence from destroying life; abstinence from stealing; abstinence from impurity; 
abstinence from lying; abstinence from arrack and strong drink and intoxicating liquors, which 
cause indifference (to religion); abstinence from eating at forbidden times; abstinence from 
dancing, singing, music, and seeing spectacles; abstinence from garlands, scents, unguents, 
ornaments, and finery; abstinence from (the use of) high or broad beds; abstinence from accept- 
ing gold or silver." EDITOR. 

t The sacred books of Buddhism are full of allusions to the Four Noble Truths, which explain 
the nature, the cause, and the cessation of suffering, the fourth and last being "the Noble 
Truth of the Path which leads to the cessation of suffering: that holy eightfold Path Right 
Belief, Right Aspiration, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Means of Livelihood, Right 
Endeavor, Right Memory, Right Meditation." EDITOR. 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 173 

selfish reasons or in order to make converts, believe me, he will be dis- 
covered more quickly than it takes to tell it. As a race, the Hindus are 
wonderfully intuitive ; and there are some things which they know." 

"Hush, Sugata!" murmured the Gael. "If you go on talking like 
this you will put all Protestant missionaries out of business." 

THE EFFECT OF MISSIONS 

The Buddhist gazed at him. "Have I your permission," he said, 
"to say what is in my heart?" 

"Of course you have," answered the Gael, with just a shade of 
uneasiness. 

"But have I your permission to speak of what I think is an offence?" 

"You will greatly favour me by doing so" for the Gael can be 
relied upon to rise to an occasion. 

"With your so generous consent, my friend, I will speak: I do not 
think we ought to be unjust, even lightly ; and I do not think that you 
are just towards missionaries. There have been, and there still are, 
many saintly men among them men who would shame any one of us, 
by the greatness of their devotion and self-sacrifice. And although, 
often, they have not been as wise as they have been good, we must 
remember that purity of intention, combined with energy, is service 
which the Great Ones can always use. Even when missionaries have 
distinguished themselves chiefly by the bitterness of their attacks upon 
other religions, as they have done, at times, against Buddhism, this has 
had, indirectly, a good effect: it has consolidated the ranks of Buddhists 
throughout the world; it has called our attention to the fundamental 
principles of the Blessed One's teaching, unifying our aspiration and 
purpose, to the neglect of petty differences of interpretation. Not for 
many hundreds of years have Buddhists in Japan, in China, Burma, Siam, 
Ceylon, Thibet and elsewhere, felt themselves so nearly in harmony. 
And this I attribute very largely to the common and widespread strictures 
of Christian missionaries. In a sense, too, they have shamed us into a 
revival of activity. There was a time when Buddhist monks, following 
the commands of the Blessed One, proved themselves as fearless and 
as active as any missionaries whom the world has seen. But that time 
passed, and it is only recently, since Christians have set us the example 
a good one in this respect that the old spirit of propaganda has begun 
to stir in us again. Believe me, if the men you scorn had not had good- 
ness of intention, the effect of their work could not so easily have been 
used for our benefit. Most of them, I am sure, have done the best they 
knew how. If only for our own sakes, let us try to be fair: to the just, 
let us be just; to the unjust let us also be just." 

The Gael, I think, was rather astonished by this rebuke. But the 
Buddhist had spoken with such simplicity, and with such evident humility, 



174 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

that the impression he made was like that of offering a gift. And 
the Gael accepted it. 

A GAELIC CATHOLICISM 

"Happy One, I thank you," he said. "I shall in any case think 
gratefully of what you have had to say." Then he reacted. With an 
inscrutable twinkle in his eyes, which he checked immediately, he turned 
his back on the rest of us and harangued the Buddhist. "I am, as you 
know, a Catholic. That is why all the gods are mine why the old 
gods of my people are brothers and cousins to me the gods who came 
to earth again as the Saints of my Church ; and that is why I hate priests, 
and why these Protestants (waiving a hand as if to introduce us) fill 
my soul with anguish and my heart with despair blind wanderers from 
the fold! What is it that is known to them? What, but the outer 
darkness, and a rule of thumb! Afraid to believe; afraid even to dream 
lest, perchance, they find themselves in some haunted palace of man's 
long desire. [The Gael chants when he is cursing.] Ah! the Church, 
Mother of magic and of mystery : what is she to them whose sole excuse 
for being is a 'No'! They talk to me of Rome: but must not the 
Church, a Light of so much Glory, cast some dark shadow on the earth? 
They talk of Popes corrupt or profligate or blind : but they forget the 
office; and if there must be five thousand years of failure before the 
triumph, is not all greatness born the self -same way? Let them leave 
Time to Him as well as Victory! . . . But, in spite of their assurance 
and it is staggering there is, as you of course are aware, only one Chris- 
tian Church, my own. Hence, I feel responsible for the vagaries of 
all those who, escaping to foreign lands, call themselves the representa- 
tives of Christianity. Perhaps my freedom of criticism springs from that 
sense of responsibility. Their performances as a rule are so humiliating. 
Failing to be truly Catholic, they fail to be truly Christian. Instead of 
greeting all gods and all prophets as heralds of the Church; instead of 
claiming them as our own, they carp and criticize and marry." 

"Man," spoke up the Sage, "this is an outrage. We have not 
mentioned the Scarlet Woman for weeks. And you forget that 
you are not self-explanatory. . . . Still, to suppress you now 
would divert the conversation from its earlier drift, and, although the 
Buddhist has already answered to my own satisfaction the question 
raised by the Objector about Poverty, I would like to ask him what he 
thinks of the suggestion that such a literal interpretation of Christ's 
teaching in that respect involves a risk of worshiping the letter at the 
cost of the spirit. The Objector said, I think, 'Dead-letter in one respect, 
dead-letter in all.'" 

Deliberate as the Buddhist always is, he seemed to choose his words 
with unusual care. "I have not found," he said, "any evidence among 
the white race that Poverty, either material or spiritual, either of posses- 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 175 

sions or of speech, is likely to become a cause of stumbling." There was 
a pause. Then he smiled and continued : 

THE WEST WITHOUT CHRISTIANITY 

"But before going into that question, I want to say a word or two 
more on the subject of Christian missions not in answer to the eloquence 
of our friend, the Gael, because that seemed inspired by some issue 
how shall I say it ? domestic and among yourselves, upon the intricacies 
of which it would not be courteous for me to intrude (the Student, at 
this point, shamelessly guffawed). I remember, many years ago, when 
I was first sent to Europe to study your civilization, reading something 
of Greek history. Vaguely I recollect that one of the captive daughters 
of Priam was offered, a living sacrifice, on the tomb of Achilles ; that, 
even at the height of Grecian culture, hecatombs of prisoners were 
sacrificed in war; that revenge was regarded as a duty; that forgiveness 
was thought of with contempt. Yet, in all of Europe, there was no 
higher standard either of ethics or of hospitality than in Greece. Why 
was the Star of Splendour compelled to take a Jewish body? Have 
you thought of that? . . . So, then, what would Europe be to-day 
if it had not been for Christian missionaries, who, often as slaves, and 
at the risk of torture, preached by word and deed the doctrine of divine 
compassion, of supreme self-sacrifice? As a Buddhist, I owe it to the 
Blessed One to speak that word for His friends." 

"May I add this?" asked the Philosopher: "that, honestly, I think 
much of the criticism of missionaries is hopelessly out of date. Not only 
their methods, but their whole attitude has changed radically in recent 
years. At the request of the inexorable editor of the QUARTERLY, I 
have just been reviewing a monthly report called The Spirit of Missions, 
with special reference to the Edinburgh conference; and I was amazed. 
You can read my review, if you want to, in the October issue no 
opinions of mine, but quotations from the report. It is folly to beat the 
air; and the truth is that the missionary movement has stepped out of 
its old rut and occupies a position to-day which, relatively to its past, is 
enlightened. . . . But now, Sugata, before we separate, will you not 
answer the Sage's question about Poverty? All of us are interested in 
that." 

THE Vow OF POVERTY 

The Buddhist responded at once. "Apart from the fact," he said, 
"that it is more necessary as the garb of a religious man in India than a 
black coat is to a preacher here, Poverty is certainly an aid to a life of 
devotion. It is not always practicable. I, for instance, could not travel 
in America without money. There are places, you know, where poverty 
is a crime; and we must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. 
But whenever and wherever it is practicable, Poverty is easier to bear, 
in the real sense, than Wealth." 



176 

The Neophyte interrupted: "Perhaps that is why, of the sym- 
bolical temptations in the wilderness which preceded the active mission 
of Jesus, the temptation to relieve hunger by spiritual and occult power, 
was the first, and therefore, presumably, the easiest of the three to 
resist; while fame and glory constituted the second, wealth and power 
the third and last of the series." 

"Possibly," replied the Buddhist. "In any case, while actual and 
literal Poverty, either voluntary or involuntary, may be of great assist- 
ance in spiritual progress, it would be a mistake, in my opinion, to 
regard it as necessarily the highest path. He who has attained to true 
Poverty, which is poverty of spirit, regards both wealth and its absence 
with complete indifference, except in so far as the one or the other is 
likely to be more effective as a means to his end, which is service. A dis- 
ciple possesses nothing personally. He holds everything in trust and 
not, of course, material possessions only, but everything which the 
ordinary man regards as exclusively his own, such as his leisure, his 
thoughts, his desires, his energies of every kind, physical or mental, 
aesthetic or spiritual. Not a glance from his eye, not a word from his 
lips, which is not backed by the prayer, 'Thy will be done, not mine.' 
That is Poverty. But it follows that such a man, if it should suit his 
Master's purpose, which is his own, would leave behind him at a 
moment's notice, and without hesitation or regret, the possessions to 
which most of us cling. I suspect, however, that few can do that until 
after they have learned, at some time in their career, and probably 
by direct experience, that poverty really has no terrors. It spells free- 
dom rather than constraint. It is the fear of it, not the thing in itself, 
that withers: but fear of anything does that." 

"Sugata," said the Student, "if you say much more I'll go home and 
resign !" 

The Buddhist smiled. "No," he said ; "you will go home and sleep, 
and, in the language of the Gael, you will tread the path of beauty and 
of infinite desire. In that world, my friend, just on the other side of 
dream, all these things, so hard and cold in words, are like the fragrant 
flowers of a garden. To understand them, all you have to do is to 
wear them next your heart. May you bring their sweetness back with 
you when morning dawns." T. 



"He who lives in life as if he were in Eternity, and in Eternity as if 
he were in life, is free" BOEHME. 



ELEMENTARY ARTICLES 



THEOSOPHY AND CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

THERE are three remarkable paragraphs on page nine of the 
last QUARTERLY that indicate what the Screen in the same number 
suggests as our attitude towards Christianity. Let me quote the 
first paragraph and a sentence from each of the other two. 
"Those of us who believe in the great Lodge of Masters, whether 
our belief rests on personal knowledge or intellectual conviction must 
recognize that from this immortal brotherhood came the founders of all 
the world religions as well as the initial impulse for the formation of 
the Theosophical Society. We cannot, therefore, take this view without 
perceiving that the faiths are all brothers, all born of the same mystery ; 
all rooted in the same changeless science of the soul. And we cannot be 
true to the light that has been given us unless we recognize its presence 
and its guidance in the great systems that for centuries have been the 
open channel for the world's aspiration and religious life. As the Masters 
have not deserted the Society they founded so are they working cease- 
lessly within the great religions they established in the past, and we 
cannot seek to become their fellow servitors and disciples without assum- 
ing the obligation of loyalty to their aims and a faithful seconding of 
their work. Theosophy and Christianity, therefore, so far from being 
opposing or separate systems, are indissolubly united in their Common 
Source, their common truth, and their common leadership." And the 
two last sentences in the third paragraph read as follows ''For us many 
veils have been lifted, but the vision we have been vouchsafed must be 
used for all who aspire to the life of the soul. They must be aided to 
see even as we have seen, the constant outpouring of their Master's help 
and love, and the presence of that great order of disciples, servants of 
the living Christ, whose ceaseless labors have never failed the Christian 
Church." 

If this be our attitude we shall not only be interested, but encouraged 
and delighted with the outcome of the "World's Missionary Conference" 
that met in Edinburgh last June. Although the Roman and Greek 
churches were not represented it was the most Catholic Council ever 
convened by the Christian Church. It was made up of twelve hundred 
delegates from 178 Missionary Societies, and coming from some 30 



12 



T7 



178 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

countries, some of them came from continents unknown to St. Augustine 
and St. Athanasius. Practically all the Protestant churches were repre- 
sented Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Presby- 
terians, Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, Seventh Day Baptists and 
Seventh Day Adventists and others. 

What a lesson in Ethnology it must have been to see Caucasian and' 
Mongolian in all their varieties present in one large hall. The Catholic 
brother with his long brown robe and cord, with a cross on his breast; 
Christians from India, Persia, China and Japan, some with turbans and 
flowing robes of various colors, with others in ordinary Western dress. 
Along with Lords, Archbishops and Bishops were native evangelists from 
many lands. Belgians, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Swiss, Germans, 
with men from America, Australia, India, Africa, Syria, China, Japan, 
and the Islands of the Sea all joined in singing the looth Psalm "All 
people that on earth do dwell." 

From any point of view it was a very remarkable gathering of 
ecclesiastical leaders, great scholars and educationalists, sagacious and 
successful business men ; men of wisdom and experience in administra- 
tion; men high in councils of state; and a multitude of earnest, conse- 
crated faithful workers from many mission fields. Among those present 
were Yasuka Harada, President of Doshisha, Kyota, Japan; Dr. K. C. 
Chatter ji, Panjaub, India a man greatly revered throughout India as 
a native minister with over half a century of devoted service to his credit ; 
Cheng ching-yi of Shanghai, and a number of veteran missionaries from 
all lands. The United States was represented by Theodore Roosevelt, 
W. J. Bryan, Seth Low (formerly President of Columbia University) 
and over four hundred other men and women. For ten days this mar- 
vellous gathering of the wealth of material, intellectual and spiritual 
force of Christiandom devoted itself earnestly to one great purpose how 
to give to the whole world the message of eternal life. It came together 
with a remarkable program. For four years officials have been gathering 
information from experts, and for eighteen months eight commissions 
consisting of one hundred and sixty men have been studying and tabulat- 
ing this information, and their reports formed the subject of the confer- 
ence deliberations. The reports give us the most perfect picture of the 
world and its peoples in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the 
Theosophist will find a large amount of valuable help in pursuing the 
second object of the Theosophical Society the study of ancient and 
modern religions. 

Never during this generation has there been such a gathering for 
the promotion of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without dis- 
tinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color, which means that it was a 
great Theosophical Meeting. 

The faults and weaknesses of missionaries and of missionary 



THEOSOPHY AND CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 179 

methods of the past were exposed without much mercy, and better 
methods recommended. 

The report of the Commission dealing with non-Christian religions 
will prove of great interest to Theosophists. The views put forward by 
missionaries and experts as to the ways of presenting Christianity to 
peoples under the influence of these other religions must have dazed 
some "old theology" Christians, for they were surely revolutionary. The 
indiscriminate condemnation of heathen religions as bad in the lump and 
in every detail is denounced, while on the other hand missionaries are 
urged sympathetically to study these religions with a view to finding out 
the good points in them. Missionary after missionary bore testimony 
against the old idea that the heathen were living in midnight darkness 
without any knowledge of God or spiritual things. Dr. K. C. Chatterji, 
(Punjaub) declared that "missionaries had been too eager and ready to 
expose the evils of Buddhism, and too little disposed to study it with a 
view to pointing their appeals to the Hindu mind. They must study 
sympathetically the difficulties of Hindus in the way of accepting the 
distinctive doctrines of Christianity." 

Dr. Robert E. Speer, Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign 
Missions, United States, delivered a remarkable speech under this section. 
He said, "It is because we believe Christianity to be the perfect and 
absolute religion that we can afford to take a generous attitude towards 
the religions we meet on the mission field." They could afford to lay 
down their goods for the freest inspection and criticism. He believed 
the reaction of the non-christian religions when once we have captured 
the peoples under those religions, would mean the incalculable enrichment 
of our Christianity. Could they suppose that they, only a section of the 
earth's inhabitants, with an experience limited by time and race, had got 
all the truth there was in Christ and his teaching? There was a sense 
in which the non-christian religions were an expression of the national 
life of those who lived under them, and these nations when they came 
under Christianity would bring their distinctive racial contributions to 
the understanding of the Gospel. Only when they saw the Gospel applied 
to the whole life of humanity, and working itself out under all conditions, 
could they fully realize its riches, and only in that fullest realization 
would they see the solution of many of their provincial and racial prob- 
lems. They needed an immense quickening and deepening of the life of 
the church at home. They had had some great visions in that conference 
of possibilities for the Gospel ; might they learn the great lesson of where 
the power was to come from by which they would subdue the world. 

This spirit of tolerance and wisdom seems to have filled the confer- 
ence and manifested itself not only in the discussion of intellectual 
religions such as Buddhism, Shintoism, and others, but also when dis- 
cussing Animism, the religion of fear so common in Africa. Herr 
Warneck, of Sumatra, Missions Inspector of the Rhineland Missionary 



180 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Society, is one of the greatest authorities on this subject, and he told 
the conference that "The fear was very real and efforts are made to 
banish the spirits, to appease them by sacrifices, and even to deceive them. 
Fear in various forms tyrannizes over the Animist in every situation of 
life. The vision of the world in which his religiousness is rooted is 
extremely dark. Even his own Soul is a hostile power against which he 
must ever be on his guard. It is fond of leaving him: it allows itself 
to be enticed away from him. The souls of relatives are easily wounded, 
and woe to him who even unintentionally offends them! Primitive man 
has to fight his way amid the throng of souls of the people around him 
and must continually bargain or fight with invisible and sinister powers. 
To this must be added fear of the dead, of demons, of the thousand spirits 
of air, earth, water, mountains, and trees." 

Perhaps, nowhere was the charitable spirit more manifested than in 
the discussion of Polygamy. What is a man to do who has been brought 
up in a polygamous society, and having a plurality of wives dependent on 
him when he becomes a Christian? It is easy to say "let him dismiss 
all but the first," but the commission dealing with this question says, on 
the authority of missionary experts, that that would mean the condemn- 
ing of the women discarded to lives of immorality. The conference 
recommends that monogamy be the inflexible rule for young married 
converts, but favors a rule adopted in some mission fields of not rejecting 
from Christian Communion polygamous converts during the transition 
period, but excluding them from office. The Conference was indisposed 
to pass a dogmatic opinion but would leave the missionary to the guidance 
of the Spirit. The same tender spirit was shown in dealing with ancestor 
worship in China, an ancient custom that seems to be in the very blood 
of the people. The desire of the Conference seemed to be to find some 
higher meaning in the custom and to lead the people to that, and a 
memorial service for ancestors, converting the worship into respect and 
veneration for those gone before was suggested. 

Even for the Moslem world there was no bitterness but sympathy, 
and while there was regret because of the great revival of Moham- 
medanism, especially in Africa, yet its good points were recognized and 
the fact that it produces a type of manhood superior to that of the races 
it has converted. Still there was a determination to Christianize even 
these, for where Moslem prevails we find degraded womanhood ; political 
insecurity; injustice and oppression for the great mass of the people. 
The message of love, equality and brotherhood must be given to all the 
world. 

Every true Theosophist will rejoice that at last all the Protestant 
denominations have reached the point where they can overlook their 
differences of doctrine and ritual. This means a great deal for the edu- 
cation and uplift of the masses of Asia and Africa the awakening to 
new life of sleeping peoples. In a recent year over twenty- four millions 
of dollars was contributed for Protestant missions, but the new informa- 
tion and the new enthusiasm generated by the conference will greatly 
inciease both the income and the force, and the idea of Universal Brother- 
hood will march triumphantly forward. 

JOHN SCHOFIELD. 




The Universality of Jesus, by the Reverend G. A. Johnston Ross, Fleming H. 
Revell Company. Mr. Ross's volume was published during his pastorate at St. 
Columba's Church (Scotch), Cambridge, England; it makes one wish that his year 
of service now ending in the American Presbyterian Church may be but the first 
of a long residence among us, and that the whole American organization may be 
kindled by his spirituality. The volume is a gratification to Theosophists because 
it evidences the leavening of the lump. It is a plea, from without, for the principal 
aim and object of the society the large unity which is not uniformity, but which 
arises, like harmony in music, from multiform sound. "In all this there is the 
working of one influence, one central idea: that that which had come to men in 
Christ Jesus had come for all men, and was available for all. It was the function 
of St. Paul to draw out in manifold detail the implicates of this central idea; and 
as we now, reading his writings, try to trace the growth of his mind, it becomes 
evident that the more he saw of the working of Christianity in the world, the more 
he came under the influence of the 'universalistic' idea of a reconciliation, a 
gathering together of all things into one. And this he, in common with the whole 
apostolic community, traced to the activity, undiminished by death of Christ in the 
world of the Christ in whom the 'universalistic idea' was incarnate in whom, as 
Paul said, there was 'neither Jew nor Greek, Barbarian, Sythian, bond nor free'; 
nay, in whom to use his most daring word of all 'it pleased the Father that all 
fullness should dwell,' the 'fullness of the Godhead in bodily form.' " 

"We believe that this Catholic Christ is by his living Spirit moving still in the 
hearts of men for the fulfillment of the designs of God. It is true the spirit of 
provincialism dies hard : in political life, where men are so slow to realize that the 
catholicity of Jesus has altered the content of the idea of patriotism, and is the 
herald and regulator of a larger and more cosmopolitan ideal than that of the older 
nationalism : in ecclesiastical life, where, to the infinite saddening of many hearts, 
pride and fear of man are raising barriers where the Catholic Christ would fain 
destroy them: in our moral life, where a kindly and hospitable good-will struggles 
with the bitterness and selfishness of narrow sympathies. And yet the Catholic 
Christ must triumph; and for His triumph we must work and watch and pray 
not without suffering, for he who, declining the role of proselytiser, sectary, parti- 
san, works for the larger unity that is to be, must endure the frequent reproaches 
of the belligerent brother who lives for the victories of the hour, and 
the success of his particular party. But just here is the 'patience of the saints'; 
they who have seen the vision of the Universal Jesus will wait and work and pray, 
even though around them are the thickets and stockades of a militant sectarianism 
and though the air is full of the obscure riots of party cries striving in all they 
do to contribute to the fulfillment of their High Priest's prayer for a truly catholic 
unity corresponding to the Universality of His person, when there shall be, the 
whole world over, but one flock and one Shepherd." 

Mr. Ross leaves aside all theological and critical disputation, and writes with 
the knowledge of personal experience. "I propose to set out upon an examination 
of the memoirs of Jesus, in the interest of a certain truth about Him an aspect 
of His uniqueness which it is important that in these days we should clearly see: 
the truth that in Him is presented to our view the Representative Man, in whom 
the idea of the species is incarnated, in whose person 'all that belongs to the per- 
fection of every man* is included, and who will continue to draw men everywhere 
to Himself because He has realised in Himself the final type of Humanity, so that 
in Him 'the separate individualities of men find a supreme unity.' " The rationalistic 

181 



182 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

plan of salvation that many theologians of all centuries have constructed receives 
no correction or addition from this fervent pastor who follows the guidance of 
intuition. The Master is to him not the Paschal Lamb nor the Head of the Corner 
but "the Universal Human Norm" : His life the mould in which is fashioned the 
life of the humanity He came to create, His death the symbol and spring of the 
universal experience by which men emerge into spiritual freedom. The great 
experiences of His life are seen now to be prototypes of generic spiritual experi- 
ences of mankind : 'it is the lot,' said Pascal, whose gaze so pierced the spiritual, 
'it is the lot of every Christian to have those things happen to him which happened 
to Jesus Christ.' " Mr. Ross writes of the Master not as God mediating between 
the wrath of God and an outcast creature, but as a central unifying force, merging 
and reconciling in Himself humanity. "It was in and through Him that grew up 
the very conception of the unity of a common brotherhood of man, underlying all 
racial differences. It was because 'the world was in His heart' that humanity 
became conscious of itself in Him ; and to-day the hope and prospect of the aboli- 
tion of race-hatred lie in the wider knowledge of Him who is related most closely 
to all men, divesting Himself with consummate ease of all that is local and national, 
entering every nation and every heart as 'coming unto His own,' the one true 
cosmopolitan, the ultimate symbol of the humanity that is to be." 

"And, finally, to see clearly the catholicity of Jesus, is to feel assured of the 
future universality of His sway. We begin to catch a glimpse of that vision which 
so fascinated the eyes of Paul in his later years of an age-long purpose of God 
to bring about through Christ the 'reconciliation,' the 'gathering together' of the 
scattered and disparate elements of creation. The nations of the earth Jew and 
Gentile alike have had for ages each their own discipline in separation : sister 
races, they have been 'gardens enclosed.' Heroes and leaders of thought God had 
raised up, each the embodiment of His people's ideals, alike the expression and the 
helper of the national discipline. But in the fullness of the time the New Man 
appeared, whose nationality was frontierless, whose sympathies were wide as the 
love of God, whose appeal was to the humanity He represented. In Him began 
the reconciling movement, and the nations as they knew Him began to draw 
together. We are but at the beginning of this process still ; for how little is He 
truly known. But we are beginning to see the nations bringing their 'glory' their 
distinctive contribution to the fullness of His Kingdom. We here out in the 
West understand but a fragment of His colossal mind : the mystical collectivism 
of the East must ally itself with the aggressive individualism of the West, ere His 
wisdom, which so perfectly holds the balance between the two or rather envelops 
both, can be translated and made plain. It is time to be done with hasty scorn of 
Eastern thought as though we Westerns, who use a foreign text-book for our 
religion, perfectly understood. No ; we cannot comprehend Him alone." 

To all this we say "Amen." We are grateful to Mr. Ross for his words, and 
congratulate the little flock that receives such teaching from him week after week. 

C. 

The Hibbert Journal, for July, contains, as usual, articles of value and interest. 
There are contributions by Professor William James, who introduces "A Pluralistic 
Mystic"; Professor Jethro Brown, who defends the better sort of philosophical 
anarchy, but who forgets, incidentally, that although Love is Christ's supreme 
law, it is a law and not a whim : still less a chaos of uncoagulated impulse ; Pro- 
fessor E. Armitage, on "Why Athanasius won at Nicaea" ; Professor A. K. Rogers 
on "Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy" ; Mr. John Jay Chapman on "The Comic." 
Mr. Chapman has hit on a very profound truth. "One great difficulty," he says, 
"that a child or a man has in learning anything, comes from his trying too hard 
to understand. Once imagine that our understanding of a thing comes from our 
ceasing to prevent ourselves from understanding it, and we have the problem in its 
true form." But he does not explain that it is mental activity which stands in the 
way of perception; nor does he distinguish between the personal will and the 
Divine or Universal Will when he insists that "all Will is illusion." If, by com- 
plete surrender of the personal will, we were to make ourselves free channels for 
the Divine Will, knowledge and understanding would flow into us as surely as air 
into a vacuum, the fact of course being that the higher Will is simply Wisdom 



REVIEWS 183 

in action. And this suggests a general criticism of The Hibbert, valuable and 
instructive as it is. It lacks simplicity. All true and great things are simple. More 
than that, they are refreshing. But after reading The Hibbert the desire of the 
present reviewer is to lie down and sleep : an instinct, perhaps, to get back to unity 
and in any case to simplicity. Intellect in coruscations; scintillating and almost 
dazzling mental flights, sometimes piercing the heavens or the fringe thereof and 
then leaving us in darkness greater than before. If only someone would say: 
"Stop talking ! Knowledge is possible. There is That within you which knows. 
Still the mind, and listen. Then be, do, live the thing that you hear. There is no 
other path, but it is a sure one, and it leads to God." This advice, if followed, 
would put an end to The Hibbert Journal and to our own : which would be 
a calamity ! Nevertheless we believe in counsels of perfection. They may not in 
all respects be practicable at present, but they are practicable always in our own 
hearts. We can begin there ; and, in a thousand years from now perhaps there 
will be no need even for the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY. Meanwhile, next to our 
own, The Hibbert is the best of Quarterlies, and we wish it continued success. 
It is a fact, however, that Knowledge is possible. Could not that be slipped in as 
a footnote to the next issue, just to revive the general reader? T. 

The Spirit of Missions, for August, gives an exhaustive account of the World 
Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh last June. Christians of all the Protest- 
ant denominations were represented officially. The conference was remarkable, 
not only for the sense of unity and for the enthusiasm which it evoked, but as 
showing the enormous improvement which has taken place during the past fifty 
years in the understanding by Christians of Christ's religion. This was shown, 
first, in the improved attitude of the different sects toward each other of which 
the co-operative purpose of the conference was almost sufficient evidence. It was 
voiced particularly by the Bishop of Southwark, and by Bishop Brent of the 
Philippines, both of whom declared that there could be no true unity unless Roman 
and Greek Christians were included in the plan ; and by Dr. Gore, Bishop of 
Birmingham, who made the following noteworthy pronouncement : that "docu- 
ments like the Thirty-nine Articles and the Westminster Confession were so full 
of controversy and, in view of their origin, so necessarily partial in statement, that 
they could not be regarded as belonging to the universal substance of the Christian 
faith." The same improvement was shown in the attitude of the missionaries them- 
selves towards the non-Christian religions. That The Spirit of Missions should 
realize this is not the least extraordinary feature of the situation, because, just as in 
war, it is the non-combatants at home who usually are more blood-thirsty than the 
men who are doing the fighting, so it is the men who stay at home and shout for 
missions who generally are more intolerant than those in the mission field. And The 
Spirit of Missions, published in New York, expresses approval because : "It was evi- 
dent from the report and its discussion that no people more fully appreciate what is 
good in non-Christian religions than the missionaries who are endeavoring to 
lead their followers into the fulness of the Christian life." The report referred 
to, on "The Missionary Message in Relation to the Non-Christian Religions" (a 
few years ago they would have been described as "heathen"), was written almost 
entirely by missionaries. So, we are told, "it is, therefore, all the more significant 
that the Commission should have been able to report a substantial agreement that 
the true method of approach is that of knowledge and charity (in ten years from 
now it will be "sympathy" instead of "charity"), combined with a seeking for the 
noble elements in the non-Christian religions, in order that they may be used as 
steps to higher things." In the summary (p. 661) supplied by the Rev. Dr. Pott, 
President of St. John's University, Shanghai, the presentation of the report in 



184 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

question is said to have been "an event of unique significance, because it showed 
so clearly the growth of an irenic spirit in the place of one that was iconoclastic." 

X. 

The July Open Court opens with an editorial, "In Memory of Mr. E. C. 
Hegeler," and has for frontispiece a portrait of Mr. Hegeler, the president and 
founder of The Open Court Publishing Company. In an essay on "Prophecy and 
Inspiration" Mr. James B. Smiley of Chicago treats of the sources of these ideas 
in primitive peoples. Following closely upon this discussion of the history of 
inspired prophets comes a brief editorial account of a little story of Bjornson's 
about Wise Knut, a neglected peasant boy of Norway, who suffered in childhood 
from "epilepsy" and heard voices, and who, as he grew older, was considered by 
his neighbors to be God-inspired. Mr. William M. Payne's book on Bjornstjerne 
Bjornson is used as a basis for a short account of "Bjornson and His Work," and 
two of his lyrics are quoted in Payne's excellent English translation. In the 
August issue, there is an article of considerable interest by Bertha Johnston on 
"Hasan and Husain," the Passion Play of Persia. References in this play to Christ 
and to Christianity are frequent and favorable Jesus being reverenced by Moham- 
medans almost as much as by Christians. Thus, in one instance, a family cry 
in chorus to AH, "When thou openest thy mouth thou givest us life; thou makest 
the dead to live by thy Christlike influence." An article on the religions of Syria, 
translated from the French of F. Cumont, shows wide research and scholarship. 
It is an article to lay aside and index for later reference. T. 

The Monist (July) revives the old controversy about the difference between 
the Greek word hypostasis and the Latin word persona. As late as the sixteenth 
century, this controversy resulted in the death of Servetus at the stake on the 
accusation of Calvin ; but we trust that the day of its more fatal significance has 
passed. "The Sayings of Jesus in the Talmud," endeavors to prove that Jesus 
did not draw upon that or upon any other Jewish source for his teaching, but 
that, on the contrary, the Rabbis stole from him. We doubt if they did; but we 
feel confident that Jesus owed little to Jewish teachers except the example of 
what not to do and say. The article furnishes some early instances of "mental 
reservation" the Rabbi Agiba, among others, having discovered that it was legiti- 
mate to swear with the lips but to make the oath void in the heart. It reminds 
us that Judaism is still "the old man of the Sea" in its effect, morally and 
theologically, upon Christianity. It is but fair to remember, however, the greatness 
of individual Jews and the mysticism of some of their writings. Further, that our 
Western human nature has cherished its Hebraic burden as a prize after its own 
heart. It is probable that an alloy was necessary, and that without the ferocity and 
materialism of early Jewish influence, Christianity would never have been accepted 
in the West. The time is near at hand, let us hope, when the last of the dross 
will be burnt out. The present reaction towards the Theology of the Greek 
Fathers is one of the signs which give hope. T. 



ANSWERS 




QUESTION 119. How far is the cultivation of one's (esthetic appreciation, per 
se, justifiable from a theosophic standpoint, in one who has not extraordinary or 
even unusual talent? 

ANSWER. Being founded on the sense of measure and adequacy, true 
aesthetic appreciation is a very useful handmaiden to the development of theo- 
sophical perception. We ought to cultivate it as much as we can. V. J. 

ANSWER. There is a good deal of difference between the cultivation of one's 
taste for the beautiful, which is meant, I suppose, by aesthetic appreciation, and the 
devotion of a person of little or no talent to some special art. But in any case 
there is one rule which seems to cover both. Any cultivation of one's taste or 
one's talents is laudable as long as it does not interfere with the welfare or even 
the pleasure of others or conflict in any way with one's duty to one's self. 

K. H. 

ANSWER. Every artistic effect, great or small, results from order and law, 
and a fine appreciation of poetry or architecture discovers and recognizes the law. 
Cultivation of taste thus becomes a discipline in the perception of law that works 
out through various media and may be auxiliary to morality. H. P. M. 

ANSWER. The cultivation of any faculty for its own sake is never justifiable 
from a theosophic standpoint. If by the special cultivation of the aesthetic faculty 
one can render greater service to others, that special culture will be justifiable, but 
we must take care that we do not sacrifice a greater good to secure this. J. S. 

ANSWER. Self development is always right when it does not conflict with the 
development of others. Many people have believed that the search for and expres- 
sion of pure beauty is as literally an approach to God as love of truth or devotion 
to duty. Much of the best in art is based on this conviction. Apparently the 
ideals of truth, beauty, and duty are not contradictory but complementary, and 
are all three not only right but, from a theosophical standpoint, obligatory. "To 
each temperament there is one road which seems the most desirable." But "all 
steps are necessary to make up the ladder." If the questioner will run over in 
his mind instances in history where exclusive attention has been paid to any one 
of these three lines of development, he will see that the results have not been 
altogether good. For instance, the devotion to duty of the Puritan Fathers has 
produced a reaction. Why? Because they neglected the ideals of beauty and of 
impartially sought truth. The love of beauty in art has often led its votaries to 
forget their social and moral obligations, and sometimes even truth. The love of 
truth in the natural sciences has during the last half century often belittled both 
the love of beauty and the devotion to duty. Similar instances of this tendency 
are the paintings of Hogarth and the romances of Zola. And the reaction is 
inevitable. It is important that a normal balance be maintained. V. V. V. 

185 



186 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

QUESTION 120. Can more light be thrown on the true meaning of the words 
in the third chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, "the duty of another is full of danger"? 
I know very well that it is dangerous to try to help one who seems to succumb to 
calamity, but it cannot be that fear of danger should be an excuse for neglecting 
the effort to help, even if it must be done by neglecting one or another of our 
own duties. 

ANSWER. The inquirer seems to have misunderstood the real meaning of the 
quotation from the Gita. The stress is not laid upon one man's helping another, 
but on his leaving his own duty to do that of somebody else. "The wise man 
seeketh for that which is homogeneous with his own nature," says the preceding 
paragraph, and concludes by saying: "It is better to do one's own duty even 
though it be devoid of excellence, than to perform another's duty well. It is better 
to perish in the performance of one's own duty: the duty of another is full of 
danger." 

But this has nothing to do with helping another person, or with neglecting 
that person's need. Some people say that it is wrong to help others in distress 
because you would be "interfering with Karma." You can no more interfere with 
Karma than you can pluck the sun from the sky at mid-day. It is the other man's 
Karma that has brought him to that pass, and it is your good Karma that has 
brought you there to have the privilege of helping him. Certainly the fear of 
danger should never enter into the question. K. H. 

ANSWER. I never saw any danger in trying to help, if I can, where help is 
wanted, whether it be to support one who seems to "succumb to calamity" or in 
other cases. To abstain from helping from fear of danger is cowardice; and to 
try to help where it is not my duty, thereby neglecting my own duties, is always 
a mistake. But the thing is to have the never failing discernment between my 
own duty and the duty of another. Meanwhile it is better to run the risk of being 
too eager to help others, when it is not my special duty, than to leave off helping 
when I ought to have done so. In the first case charity is misled by ignorance ; 
in the second charity is suppressed from selfish fear, or at best from lack of right 
judgment. T. H. K. 

ANSWER. In the saying about the duty of another there is nothing about not 
helping even those who do not help themselves. The effort to help always is a 
duty. I understand the saying in the Bhagavad Gita to be a warning against 
meddlesomeness of every kind and degree. It is not the helping which is a danger, 
but the deciding on what the other's duty is and the forcing of this duty on him. 
The Pope at Rome meddles when he prescribes how the Germans or the Spaniards 
should behave, and in most cases, the socialists meddle when their eyes are turned 
to the misdeeds of individuals and classes. V. J. 

ANSWER. Many of us are inclined to shirk an unpleasant or commonplace 
duty which is peculiarly our own, in order to perform a task which is somewhat 
remote or has the glamor of distinction or heoism about it, but which can be done 
just as well by another. To such I believe the warning in the Gita is directed. 
Moreover I have noticed that this teaching of the Gita is reinforced by the action 
of Karma in those lives of which I have immediate knowledge. L. E. P. 

ANSWER. The admonition in the Bhagavad Gita that "the duty of another is 
full of danger," does not necessarily imply that we should refrain from assisting 
and encouraging anyone in the performance of his duty, through fear of calamitous 
results as a subterfuge for our own neglect, if the opportunity is ours for assist- 
ance. I take it that the duty of another with its accompanying Karma should not 
be undertaken by other than the one whose duty it is, for any vicarious interfer- 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 187 

ence becomes an assumption of the Karma attached to the duty, and removes the 
responsibility and attendant lesson from the one for whom it is intended. 

A. L. L. 

QUESTION 121. What may be Manu's punishment for a soul on its way to 
reincarnation, expecting to incorporate in the embryonic child of earth, after erring 
in extreme foods, either animal or vegetable? (From a German letter upon the 
closing passages of Chapter VIII of Ocean of Theosophy.) 

ANSWER. As is well known to many students of Theosophy, thought is 
a very potent occult power. Thoughts every thought generated during our 
lives become centers of more or less energy upon some plane of being; centers 
which are not dissipated merely by the death of the body. Thoughts put forth 
in the world of desire rationalize certain elemental forces of nature, which 
thereby attain a sort of entityship and a very definite kinship to their occult 
parents. Such kamic creations are exceedingly real things, and they have a 
most positive and unavoidable connection with their creators. When the human 
ego, fading out of Devachan, once more takes on the veils of earth-life 
and wakes to consciousness in the world of desire, these skandhas which he 
left behind each a center of kamic thought generated by himself in previous 
earth-life crowd about him and have an active part in forming his new condition. 
They are the pregnant seeds from the old personality which find new earth, new 
moisture, and new warmth in the new personality. The same law holds true of 
the skandhas on the astral plane, etc. 

In view of these facts (howbeit but loosely stated) I believe it is not difficult 
to see "what may be Manu's punishment for a soul after erring in extreme foods." 

However, I cannot agree to the word "punishment" in its common meaning. 
Also I would suggest that "food" in Eastern theosophical literature may refer to 
other and more important bases of sustenance than merely physical, animal, or 
vegetable foods. A. I. M. 

ANSWER. The question is a little mixed, but seems to ask what will be the 
punishment of a soul on its way to reincarnation who has indulged too freely 
in "extreme foods" whatever they may be. In the eighth chapter of The Ocean 
of Theosophy Mr. Judge says "if the road to incarnation leads through certain 
food and none other, it may be possible" that certain practices will lead to trans- 
migration, which is then a "hindrance." The italics are the writer's, who can 
quote H. P. B. herself as saying that that food should be eaten (in moderation, 
of course) which best conduces to the well-being of the student in question, 
whether it be animal or vegetable, and that too much attention should not be given 
to diet in any case. Eat the food that is set before you and don't talk about it. 
A soul is not "punished" "on its way to reincarnation." Its spiritual shortcomings 
have their harvest of Karma in its shorter and less conscious Devachan, its sins 
of the body in its next physical body. V. J. 

QUESTION 122. Where were the agents of the Lodge of Masters in the his- 
torical periods from 400 to 1200 B. C. or after Hypatia till Mahommed and from 
Maliommed to Khunras? In which lands were the absent agents: In Arabia or 
Persia or Syria? And what were their names? 

ANSWER. This question can be answered only by a person who knows where 
they are now. The fact that our teachers have not given us any clew to the 
latter question ought to be taken for a sign that all wondering as to their where- 
abouts in any age or country is unprofitable curiosity. The only safe answer to a 
question like this is the statement that then as now they are on the respective 
planes they earned access to by hard work in order to do still harder work. 

V. J. 



i88 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

ANSWER. I do not know. The available data, historical and even legendary, 
do not answer these questions, so far as I am aware. Nor do I see what useful 
purpose would be served if we knew the names of these remote and obscure agents, 
for we do not know their teachings, and it is their philosophy, and not their names 
which is important. 

It is probable that Manes, the half mythical father of Manichaeism, who lived 
in the East in the sixth or seventh century, was an agent. There are many traces 
of him and of his teaching in Servia, Bulgaria, and Constantinople, gradually 
spreading Westward, until, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, it can be discovered 
in a score of places in Western Europe. But if this guess were confirmed, I cannot 
see that we would be any better off. We know too little of what he really taught. 
Even the oldest manuscripts in the possession of our museums, only date back 
to the tenth or the thirteenth centuries and there are very few of those of the 
earlier date, consequently, all we know about earlier times is from copies, and the 
people of those days only copied what they considered of special importance. As 
the copyists were invariably monks they naturally confined their attention almost 
exclusively to documents relating to Christianity. Hence the absence of data about 
early movements outside of Christianity. JOHN BLAKE. 

QUESTION 123. Will you kindly suggest some books for a beginner to read, 
and, if possible, state the order in which they should be read? 

ANSWER. It is very difficult to prescribe a course of reading without know- 
ing the circumstances of the reader, what he has already studied, and what line 
of study he wishes to pursue. If devotional, Light on the Path, The Voice of the 
Silence, and Letters that Have Helped Me, in this order, should supply him for 
a long time; if philosophical, The Ocean of Theosophy and The Key to Theosophy 
would prepare the way for The Secret Doctrine. The writer feels, as has been 
said, that an adequate list cannot be given without knowing something of the 
circumstances of the student. K. H. 

ANSWER. All beginners do not require the same food. If one enters Theos- 
ophy from the side of the intellect one needs such books as Sinnett's Esoteric 
Buddhism, and The Occult World, Judge's The Ocean of Theosophy, and Mme. 
Blavatsky's The Key to Theosophy. Then one may pass to Mme. Blavatsky's 
heavier works I sis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. If, on the other hand, one 
enters Theosophy from the devotional side such books may be suggested as 
Through the Gates of Gold and Light on the Path, Fragments by Cave, 
Letters that Have Helped Me by Jasper Neimand. The Bhagavad Gita and any 
of the Upanishads with explanatory introductions by Charles Johnston. The order 
given is as good as any, I think. Many have found that to browse in the 
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY is particularly helpful to beginners. V. V. V. 

ANSWER. There are many quantities and kinds of Theosophical books avail- 
able for inquirers of or beginners in the Theosophical doctrine, but the meta- 
physics of some are too intricate for the first introduction. The particular books 
and the order of their sequence for beginners will vary according to the ideas of 
different persons, and I do not believe that there can be any fixed rule in this 
respect. There is an intellectual and a spiritual side to this question, the enquirer 

being the determining factor, in harmony with his demand. However, since the 
question has been asked, I would suggest the following books, colored with my 
thought: The Ocean of Theosophy; Gospel of Buddha; The Light of Asia; The 
Song of Life; Through the Gates of Gold; Letters that Have Helped Me (2 vols) ; 
The Bhagavad Gita; Light on the Path; The Religion of the Will; The Culture of 
Concentration; Meditation. A. L. L. 




REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE THEOSOPHICAL 

SOCIETY 

(BRITISH NATIONAL BRANCH) 
HELD AT 19 HIGH STREET, MARYLEBONE, LONDON, ON MAY 29, 1910. 

The meeting was called to order by the General Secretary at 3.15, and Mr. 
Clarke was elected Convention Secretary. 

It was proposed by Mr. Kennedy and seconded by Mr. Hammond that 
Dr. Keightley take the chair. Unanimously carried. 

It was proposed by Dr. Keightley and seconded by Mrs. Trood that Messrs. 
Wilkinson and Clarke act as Committee on Credentials. Unanimously carried. 

The Committee on Credentials then reported that the following members were 
present and were of good standing: Mrs. Bagnell, Mr. A. D. Clarke, Mrs. Graves, 
Mr. W. Hammond, Miss Home, Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, Dr. Keightley, Mrs. Slator, 
Mr. and Mrs. Trood and Mr. J. Wilkinson, the latter holding twelve proxies from 
the South Shields Branch. 

Greetings were then read from The Berlin Branch, the West Berlin Branch, 
Mr. Paul Raatz (Germany), the Norwegian Branch, Colonel Knoff (Norway), the 
Newcastle Branch, Mr. Basil Cuddon, Mrs. Holdsworth Fisher, Miss Trood. 
Mr. J. Wilkinson also reported the activities of South Shields, and conveyed 
greetings from that Branch to the Convention. A Report and greeting were read 
from the London Lodge. It was noted that no Report was presented from the 
Consett Lodge. 

SECRETARY'S REPORT 
FELLOW-MEMBERS : 

Since our last Convention, held in May, 1909, the progress of our Society has 
been quiet and steady. We do not claim to have made a great stir in the world, 
but we have gone on steadily with our work in various centres. Twelve new 
members have joined, and we have lost three by resignation. No new Branches 
have been formed, but you will hear, by the Reports of the Branch Secretaries, that 
the meetings have been held regularly, and that these meetings have been well 
attended and that those present have shown an increasing interest in the subjects 
under discussion. 

The Treasurer's Report will be laid before you, and, while the financial 
strength might be greater, the balance is on the right side, and I feel sure that, if 
the need arise for our work, the financial aid will be forthcoming. 

The Report of the Corresponding Secretary to the Executive Committee will 
be laid before you, and I think it shows that full advantage has not been taken of 
the energy and fidelity with which Mrs. Graves has conducted it. On this head 
we may, I think, with profit, discuss the means by which, in so scattered a Society 
as ours, we secure inter-communication on subjects of interest to Branches and 
members. 

189 



190 



THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 



The Report of the Pamphlet Committee will be laid before you, and this shows 
a very satisfactory state of affairs. Still I think we may, with advantage, discuss 
the means by which this activity can be furthered and increased. 

ARCHIBALD KEIGHTLEY. 

It was proposed by Mr. Hammond and seconded by Mr. Kennedy that the 
Secretary's Report be adopted. Carried unanimously. 

TREASURER'S REPORT 
The Theosophical Society (British National Branch). 

10 Eastbourne Avenue, Walker, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 

May 19, 1910. 
DEAR FELLOW-MEMBERS: 

I have much pleasure in presenting my Report for the past year. In doing so 
I am glad to say I consider it the most successful one I have yet put before you, 
and for this reason : that a greater number of members have contributed to the 
General Fund, and it is my contention that the greater the number the more repre- 
sentative it is of the Branch as a whole. For it is not the amount we give, but 
the spirit in which it is given. So, if we each give what we can, whether it be the 
full amount or only a portion, we shall be doing our part in enabling the Branch 
to pay its way, and to help the Society further in any way necessary. 
Appended herewith is our financial statement : 



1909. i s. d. 

June. Balance in hand 6 9 6 

Donations by Conven- 
tion Lecture o 5 3 

Subscriptions 8 7 o 



1909. s. d. 
Convention Expenses includ- 
ing Report 5 18 8 1 

Subscription to T. S 2 i 8 

Letter re Subscriptions o 5 2 

Postage o 9 g 1 

Balance 6 6 5 



15 19 15 i 9 

Yours fraternally, 

E. HOWARD LINCOLN, Hon. Treasurer. 

It was proposed by Mr. Hammond and seconded by Mr. Kennedy that the 

Treasurer's Report be adopted. Carried unanimously. 

/ 

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY'S REPORT 

Oulton Lodge, Aylsham, Norfolk. 

The Plan has been carried out on the same lines as formerly, but, owing 
chiefly, I think, to the difficulty of finding members with sufficient leisure time to 
take up the office of Corresponding Secretary for the English Branches (of which 
there are five), the work done in this line between English members has been 
somewhat irregular. The Corresponding Secretaries for the London and New- 
castle Branches have written to me very regularly, reporting work done and letters 
received ; but Sunderland has not been able to provide itself with a Corresponding 
Secretary, and those for South Shields and Consett have found themselves unable, 
for lack of time, to correspond with any method or regularity. New members who 
have expressed a desire to receive letters have been written to by me, and enquirers 
have been replied to, pamphlets distributed in some cases, and books and courses 
of study suggested. 

Some interesting letters have been received from the members in the United 



T. S. ACTIVITIES 191 

States who co-operated so cordially in the Plan during the previous year, and 
through the courtesy of the members to whom these letters were addressed I have 
been enabled to read them. They are full of interesting and encouraging informa- 
tion about the work of the T. S. in America. 

We have kept in close touch with the work in Germany, as besides the Reports 
which I have from time to time received from Mr. Leopold Corvinus, who is Cor- 
responding Secretary to the Executive Committee, one or two of our members, as 
well as I myself, have been in regular correspondence with some of the members 
of the Berlin Branch, which has led to the interchange of much practical informa- 
tion, together with many helpful ideas and suggestions. I received in January 
an interesting letter from the Corresponding Secretary of Flensburg, in Germany, 
where there is an active Branch of the T. S., and have had one or two short notes 
from Vienna, but correspondence with England has not been taken up there, as I 
had hoped it might be. I append a Report from Mr. Corvinus. 

Lieut.-Colonel Knoff, President of the T. S. in Norway, has from time to time 
reported to me the work of the Norwegian Branch, which is steady and active. 
The Norwegian members as a rule do not speak English, so correspondence with 
that country is not easy to arrange. 

With regard to the correspondence work as a whole, I have a very great belief 
in the value of the idea. If steadily and systematically carried on, it cannot, I 
think, fail to be of great use in promoting brotherly feeling and sympathy between 
the various Branches and the unattached members. It should be a source of unity 
and consolidation, and although the results may not, at the moment, be as marked 
and apparent as we should like them to be, I think there is much to encourage us, 
both in the sympathy which our efforts have met with from several of the English 
members, as well as from the cordial way in which our brother members in 
America and Germany have co-operated with us. 

In conclusion, I will only say that as I know that the correspondence is felt by 
several individual members to be of great value to themselves and to have in it 
many possibilities of help and utility as we each in the T. S. look upon ourselves, 
not as single personalities, but as parts of one great united whole the scheme 
should be worth continuing; for we must remember that what we do for one other 
person, we do for all ; and while results are not our affair, no smallest work which 
is undertaken from a pure motive, and out of devotion, can be wasted. 

With cordial greetings to the Convent-ion, I am, 

Respectfully and fraternally, 

ALICE GRAVES, 
Corresponding Secretary to the Executive Committee, 

May 26, 1910. 

It was proposed by Mr. Kennedy and seconded by Mr. Hammond that the 
Report be adopted. Carried unanimously. 

REPORT OF THE PUBLICATION COMMITTEE 
Marlborough House, High Street, Manchester Square, London, W. 
DEAR FELLOW-MEMBERS : 

We have pleasure in laying our Annual Report before you for your considera- 
tion. 

Since the last Convention we have published one pamphlet, namely, "The Vow 
of Poverty," by Jasper Niemand; and an article by Professor Mitchell, entitled 
"Theosophy and the Theosophical Society," is ready for publication. 

We have to report that this activity has been most useful, and we consider 
that it can be made still more useful in the future. Run upon the present lines the 
pamphlets are self-supporting, and may even be said to have made a profit. 



192 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

During the year the following numbers have been distributed: 

"The Influence of Theosophy in Daily Life" 100 

"The Constitution of the Theosophical Society" 36 

"The Vow of Poverty" 220 

356 

We have in hand : 

"The Influence of Theosophy in Daily Life" 250 

"The Constitution of the Theosophical Society" 164 

"The Vow of Poverty" 280 

694 

We owe the sum of eleven shillings and four pence to the printer, but as we 
have 694 copies in hand we are in a good position financially. 

We trust that you will help the Committee in distributing the pamphlets, a 
number of which can be had on "Sale or Return," and your suggestions will be 
thankfully received. 

ARTHUR D. CLARKE, Chairman, 
JULIA W. L. KEIGHTLEY, 
BASIL CUDDON. 

It was proposed by Mrs. Graves and seconded by Mr. Kennedy that the 
Report be adopted and the Convention recommend that publication be made 
three or four times a year if possible. Unanimously carried. 

Mr. Clarke proposed and Mr. Kennedy seconded that Dr. Keightley be re- 
elected General Secretary. Carried unanimously. 

Mrs. Graves proposed and Mr. Clarke seconded that Mr. Lincoln be re-elected 
Treasurer. Carried unanimously. 

The Committee were unanimously elected as follows : Mrs. Graves, Mr. Maw- 
son, Miss Home, Mrs. Potter, Mr. Clarke, Mr. Cuddon, Mr. Wilkinson. 

Dr. Keightley proposed and Mr. Wilkinson seconded that Mrs. Graves be 
re-elected Corresponding Secretary. Carried unanimously. 

Mrs. Bagnell proposed and Mrs. Trood seconded that the Pamphlet Committee 
be re-elected as before, namely, Mrs. Keightley, Mr. Cuddon and Mr. Clarke. 
Carried unanimously. 

It was proposed by Dr. Keightley and seconded by Mr. Wilkinson that the 
next Convention be held at Newcastle, on Whit Sunday of next year, subject to 
change on emergency. 

A general discussion then followed and the meeting adjourned at 5.40. 

ARTHUR D. CLARKE, Convention Secretary. 
Marlborough House, High Street, Marylebone, London, W. 

NOTICE 

The Secretary T. S. has a large number of copies of the old magazines; com- 
plete files of The Path and The Theosophical Forum, many Lucifers, Theosophists, 
Oriental Department Papers, etc., etc. Members and students wishing to complete 
their files or to acquire the old magazines are thus given an opportunity which does 
not often occur. 

The Secretary will be glad to reply to questions and to give definite informa- 
tion about prices by mail. 




The Theosophical Society, as such, is not responsible for any 
opinion or declaration in this magazine, by whomsoever expressed, unless 
contained in an official document. 

THE FUTURE OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 

A FEW weeks ago, or, to be quite definite, on November the 
seventeenth, The Theosophical Society had a birthday. Having 
completed its thirty-fifth year, it most auspiciously entered its 
thirty-sixth, through which it is now soberly yet confidently 
progressing. The writer of these lines, who became a member of The 
Theosophical Society before that vital body had completed its tenth year, 
and has ever since been proud of membership therein, is moved by the 
thought of this so recent anniversary to look forward to the future of 
The Theosophical Society, and to record here certain thoughts thereon. 
The writer asks all readers to bear in mind the sentence immediately 
above the title of these notes, the declaration that The Theosophical 
Society, as such, is responsible neither for the Notes, nor for the retro- 
spects and prospects which they contain. The writer alone is responsible 
for all views and opinions expressed, and for the validity of certain 
quotations to be made. 

For it is a wonderful thing, among many wonderful things con- 
nected with The Theosophical Society, that it has no dogmas even 
concerning its own existence and origin ; while many of those who love 
The Theosophical Society best, and have been recipients of its bene- 
factions longest, are convinced that it owes both its foundation and its 
continuance to the love and guidance of the Elder Brothers, The 
Theosophical Society, as such, makes no such claim, nor indeed any 
claim at all save the fine tacit claim that is made by its wonderful and 
beneficent existence. And, what is even more notable and wonderful, 
it is those very Elder Brothers who are most insistent that a belief in 
their existence shall not be made stuff of the conscience for any member 
of The Theosophical Society, nor in any way matter of dogma or authori- 
tative declaration by anyone. Any member is free, and must remain 

II ' 



194 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

free, to enter The Theosophical Society, and hold and express the fullest 
disbelief in the springs of living water, even while refreshing his soul 
thereat; just as any member is free to hold and to express the fullest 
and most explicit belief in the Elder Brothers, their powers and their 
guardianship of the Theosophical Movement: a right of which the 
writer of these lines hereby makes use, though claiming no authority 
whatever, nor binding anyone else to a like belief. 

As to the future of The Theosophical Society, then, it happens that 
there is certain testimony coming from a source, it is alleged, which 
has certain advantages of outlook, of clear-eyed vision into the future, 
such as the rest of us hardly possess: coming, in fact, it is said, from 
one among many Elder Brothers, and from one to whom others look 
up, as a leader and chief, one of distinguished wisdom even in that 
august company of the wise. This testimony was put on record a good 
many years ago, under circumstances rather noteworthy and significant, 
which we shall find it profitable to review. And we shall see, perhaps, 
that, although thirty years have rolled by since the pregnant sentences 
to be quoted were set down, yet their heart of significance is by no 
means exhausted, nor are they in any sense obsolete or out of date. 

Thirty years ago, The Theosophical Society was five years old, had, 
in fact, just completed its fifth year. And five wonderful years they 
had been, since the day of initiation, November 17, 1875, in New York, 
through the first years of life in America, until the time when the 
central activities of the Society were transferred first to England and 
then to India. In India and Ceylon very much had been done. Vital 
energies had been stirred into action; secrets long hidden had been 
brought again to light; Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, Parsees, had been 
approached and appealed to, each through the deeper side of his own 
religion. Then, toward the end of 1879, the two chief workers for 
The Theosophical Society in India, came into more intimate and cordial 
relations with certain leading men in the Anglo-Indian community. 
These two chief workers were Mme. H. P. Blavatsky and Colonel H. S. 
Olcott, and, among others, they gained one friend among the Anglo- 
Indians, who has put us all under a lasting obligation. This is Mr. A. P. 
Sinnett, then editor of The Pioneer at Allahabad, and, as such, one 
who had many good friends among the Englishmen who were bearing 
the heavy burden of the government of India, and carrying out that 
superb work of conservation which future ages will comprehend and 
value, at more nearly its true worth. 

Mr. Sinnett and his friends, and perhaps one should mention par- 
ticularly his good wife, were interested first in the splendid and perplex- 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 195 

ing personality of Mme. Blavatsky, an admirable portrait-sketch of 
whom, by one whom she herself loved and admired, was lately printed 
in these pages. They were interested in her wonderful mind, her 
narratives of travel through many lands, her high and humane ideals, 
and her ardent and ardently expressed sympathy for Oriental life. 
They were interested even more, perhaps, in certain wonderful happen- 
ings which seemed to surround her, in certain wonderful faculties she 
possessed. Most of all, they were interested in what she told them of 
the Elder Brothers of the race, the august hierarchy of just men made 
perfect, who watch over the destinies of humanity, and of whom she was 
a faithful follower and disciple. It was they, she said, who had founded 
The Theosophical Society; she herself and her associates in that foun- 
dation, Colonel Olcott, W. Q. Judge and the rest, had been only instru- 
ments and executants of the higher wisdom of these perfect sages. 

The group of Anglo-Indian officials became profoundly interested 
in this wonderful message. They eagerly seized the opportunity to learn 
more of it, which came within their reach, when Mme. Blavatsky came 
to Simla among the hills, accompanied by Colonel Olcott, early in Sep- 
tember of the following year, 1880. The marvellous realities which were 
brought within their ken, the marvellous personalities with whom they 
were brought into touch, during the eventful month or two which fol- 
lowed, are admirably and accurately set forth in Mr. Sinnett's invaluable 
book, The Occult World, from which many of us gained our earliest 
lessons in Theosophical lore. 

Through the ripeness of the time, and with the abundant help of 
certain of the great Order, who ardently desired to take or make this 
opportunity to give certain priceless truths to the world, Mme. Blavatsky 
was able to establish direct communications between one or two of the 
Elder Brothers, on the one hand, and Mr. Sinnett, Mr. Hume and others 
of a small group of Anglo-Indians, on the other. She was able, with 
the help of the Elder Brothers, to prove conclusively that these Elder 
Brothers possessed and used powers and knowledge little short of miracu- 
lous; powers miraculous, indeed, in that their use has been the basis of 
all events in history which we look on as miracles. Mr. Sinnett and his 
associates obtained irrefragible evidence of the reality of these powers, 
and of their constant and finely modulated use, and of the illimitable 
vistas opened up to humanity by the truth that like powers are the 
ultimate heritage of us all. 

They reached these high conclusions, step by step, and making each 
step sure before they took the next; and they came to realise the won- 
derful things that might be done, the wonderful things that they them- 



196 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

selves, perchance, might do, if they could put the knowledge, gained 
and still to be gained, in some systematic way before their fellows, before 
the educated and scientific leaders of the Western world. At the same 
time they thought they saw that, in the early years of The Theosophical 
Society, many blunders had been committed, many disadvantages heaped 
up, which would stand in the way of the new work they had caught a 
glimpse of, and greatly impede its realization. So they took counsel 
together, and drew up certain proposals for the alteration and renovation 
of The Theosophical Society, and these proposals they submitted to the 
Elder Brothers with whom Mme. Blavatsky had brought them into rela- 
tions. To the said proposals the Elder Brothers gave very explicit 
answers; and, in doing so, they foreshadowed the future of The 
Theosophical Society, in certain letters of which we are happily able 
to avail ourselves. 

Meanwhile, these activities at Simla had not been without their 
shadow. Not only blank unbelief but even keen hostility was aroused; 
and these reacted on the movement in a way which threatened possible 
dangers. These are thus described in a letter from the Master, the 
Elder Brother with whom Mr. Sinnett had frequently corresponded, 
and whom he knew, as he tells us, as Mahatma Koot Hoomi. Writing 
at the close of 1880, after Mr. Sinnett had left Simla among the hills 
and descended to Allahabad in the plains, this Master said : 

"You see, then, that we have weightier matters than small societies 
to think about ; yet The Theosophical Society must not be neglected. The 
affair has taken an impulse which, if not well guided, might beget very 
evil issues. Recall to mind the avalanches of your admired Alps, and 
remember that at first their mass is small, and their momentum little. 
A trite comparison, you may say, but I cannot think of a better illus- 
tration when viewing the gradual aggregation of trifling events growing 
into a menacing destiny for The Theosophical Society. It came quite 
forcibly upon me the other day as I was coming down the defiles of 
Kouenlun Karakorum you call them and saw an avalanche tumble. 
I had gone personally to our chief . . . and was crossing over to 
Lhadak on my way home. What other speculations might have followed 
I cannot say. But just as I was taking advantage of the awful stillness 
which usually follows such cataclysms, to get a clearer view of the 
present situation, and the disposition of the 'Mystics' at Simla, I was 
rudely recalled to my senses. A familiar voice, as shrill as the one 
attributed to Saraswati's peacock which, if we may credit tradition, 
frightened off the King of the Nagas, shouted along the currents 
'. . . Koot Hoomi, come quicker and help me !' and, in her excitement, 
forgot she was speaking English. I must say that 'the old Lady's' tele- 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 197 

grams do strike one like stones from a catapult. What could I do but 
come?" Master Koot Hoomi, having consulted the chief, the Maha 
Chohan, as his title would seem to be, put on record the answer of that 
Master of Masters, in a letter which we proceed to quote : 

THE MAHA CHOHAN'S LETTER 

"The doctrine we promulgate being the only true one, must sup- 
ported by such evidence as we are preparing to give become ultimately 
triumphant, as every other truth. Yet it is absolutely necessary to 
inculcate it practically, enforcing its theories unimpeachable facts for 
those who know with direct inferences, deduced from, and corrobor- 
ated by, the evidence furnished by modern exact science. 

"That is why Colonel O., who works but to revive Buddhism, may 
be regarded as one who labours in the true path of Theosophy, far more 
than any other man who chooses for his goal the gratification of his 
own ardent aspirations for occult knowledge. Buddhism, stripped of its 
superstitions, is eternal truth, and he who strives for the latter is striving 
for Theosophia, divine wisdom, which is a synonym for truth. 

"For our doctrine to react practically on the so-called moral code, 
or the ideas of truthfulness, purity, self-denial, charity, etc., we have 
to preach and popularize a knowledge of Theosophy. It is not the 
individual and determined purpose of attaining oneself Nirvana, the 
culmination of all knowledge and absolute wisdom which is, after all, 
only an exalted and glorified selfishness but the self-sacrificing pursuit 
of the best means to lead our neighbour in the right path, to cause to 
benefit by it as many of our fellow-creatures as we possibly can, which 
constitutes the true Theosophist. 

"The intellectual portion of mankind seems fast to be dividing into 
two classes: the one unconsciously preparing for itself long periods of 
temporary annihilation or states of non-consciousness, owing to the delib- 
erate surrender of their intellect and its imprisonment in the narrow 
grooves of bigotry and superstition a process which cannot fail to lead to 
the utter deformation of the intellectual principle ; the other unrestrainedly 
indulging its animal propensities with the deliberate intention of sub- 
mitting to annihilation pure and simple, and in case of failure to millen- 
iums of degradation after physical dissolution. Those intellectual classes 
reacting upon the ignorant masses, which they attract, and which look 
up to them as noble and fit examples to be followed, degrade and morally 
ruin those whom they ought to protect and guide. Between degrading 
superstition and still more degrading brutal materialism, the white dove 
of truth has hardly room where to rest her weary, unwelcome foot. 



198 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

"It is time that Theosophy should enter the arena. The sons of 
Theosophists are more likely to become in their turn Theosophists than 
anything else. No messenger of the truth, no prophet, has ever 
achieved during his lifetime a complete triumph, not even Buddha. The 
Theosophical Society was chosen as the corner stone, the foundation of 
the future religions of humanity. To achieve the proposed object a 
greater, wiser and especially a more benevolent intermingling of the 
high and low, of the alpha and omega of society, was determined upon. 
The white races must be the first to stretch out the hand of fellowship 
to the dark nations, to call the poor despised "nigger" Brother. This 
prospect may not smile to all. He is no Theosophist who objects to this 
principle. In view of the ever-increasing triumph, and at the same time 
misuse, of free thought and liberty (the universal reign of Satan, Eliphas 
Levi would have called it), how is the combative natural instinct of man 
to be restrained from inflicting hitherto unheard of cruelties and 
enormities, tyranny, injustice, etc., if not through the soothing influence 
of Brotherhood, and of the practical application of Buddha's esoteric 
doctrines ? 

"For as everyone knows, total emancipation from the authority of 
the one all-pervading power or Law called God by the priests, Buddha, 
divine wisdom, and enlightenment, or Theosophy, by the philosophers 
of all ages means also the emancipation from that of human law. 
Once unfettered, delivered from their dead weight of dogmatic interpre- 
tations, personal names, anthropomorphic conceptions, and salaried 
priests, the fundamental doctrines of all religions will be proved identical 
in their esoteric meaning. Osiris, Krishna, Buddha, Christ, will be 
shown as different names for one and the same royal highway to final 
bliss Nirvana. Mystical Christianity that is to say, that Christianity 
which teaches self-redemption through man's own seventh principle, the 
liberated paramatma (Augoeides) called, by the one, Christ, by the other, 
Buddha, and equivalent to regeneration or rebirth in spirit will be 
found just the same truth as the Nirvana of Buddhism. All of us have 
to get rid of our own Ego, the illusory apparent self, to recognize our 
true Self in a transcendental, divine life. But if we would not be selfish, 
we must strive to make other people see that truth, to recognize the 
reality of that transcendental Self, the Buddha, the Christ, the God, of 
every preacher. This is why even exoteric Buddhism is the sure path 
to lead men toward the one esoteric truth. 

"As we find the world now, whether Christian, Mussulman, or Pagan, 
justice is discarded, and honor and mercy both flung to the winds. In a 
word, how since the main objects of The Theosophical Society are 
misinterpreted by those who are most willing to serve us personally are 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 199 

we to deal with the rest of mankind, with that curse known as the 
"struggle for existence," which is the real and most prolific parent of 
most woes and sorrows, and all crimes? Why has that struggle become 
the almost universal scheme of the universe? We answer: because no 
religion, with the exception of Buddhism, has hitherto taught a practical 
contempt for this earthly life; while each of them always with that 
one solitary exception has, through its hells and damnation, inculcated 
the greatest dread of death, therefore do we find the struggle for life 
raging most fiercely in Christian countries, most prevalent in Europe and 
America. It weakens in 'Pagan' lands, and is almost unknown among 
Buddhist populations. In China during famine, and where the masses 
are most ignorant of their own and of any other religion, it was remarked 
that those mothers who devoured their children belonged to localities 
where there was none, and that, where the Bonzes alone had the field, 
the population died with the utmost indifference. 

"Teach the people to see that life on this earth, even the happiest, 
is but a burden and an illusion; that it is our own Karma the cause 
producing the effect that is our judge, our Saviour in future lives 
and the great struggle for life will soon lose its intensity. There are 
no penitentiaries in Buddhist lands, and crime is nearly unknown among 
the Buddhist Tibetans. 

"The world in general, and Christendom especially, left for two 
thousand years to the regime of a personal God, as well as to its political 
and social systems based on that idea, has now proved a failure. If 
Theosophists say : We have nothing to do with all this, the lower classes 
and inferior races (those of India, for instance, in the conception of the 
British) cannot concern us and must manage as they can, what becomes 
of our fine professions of benevolence, philanthropy, reform, etc? Are 
these professions a mockery? And if a mockery, can ours be the true 
path? Shall we devote ourselves to teaching a few Europeans, fed on 
the fat of the land, many of them loaded with the gifts of blind fortune, 
the rationale of bell-ringing, cup-growing, of the spiritual telephone and 
astral body formation; and leave the teeming millions of the ignorant, 
of the poor and despised, the lowly and the oppressed, to take care of 
themselves and of their hereafter, the best they know how? 

"Never. Perish rather the Theosophical Society, with both its 
hapless founders, than that we should permit it to become no better than 
an academy of magic and a hall of occultism. That we, the devoted 
followers of that spirit incarnate of absolute self-sacrifice, of philanthropy, 
of divine kindness, as of all the highest virtues attainable on this earth 
of sorrow, the man of men, Gautama Buddha, should ever allow the 



200 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Theosophical Society to represent the embodiment of selfishness, the 
refuge of the few, with no thought in them for the many, is a strange 
idea, my brothers. 

"Among the few glimpses obtained by Europeans of Tibet and its 
mystical hierarchy of 'perfect Lamas,' there is one that was correctly 
understood and described. The incarnation of the Bodhisatva, Padma- 
pani or Avalokiteshvara, and of Tsong-ka-pa, that of Amitabha, relin- 
quished at their death the attainment of Buddahood, i. e., the summum 
bonum of bliss, and of individual, personal felicity, that they might be 
born again and again for the benefit of mankind; in other words, that 
they might again and again be subjected to misery, imprisonment in the 
flesh, and all the sorrows of life, provided that they, by such a self- 
sacrifice, repeated throughout long and weary centuries, might become 
the means of securing salvation and bliss in the hereafter for a handful 
of men chosen among but one of the planetary races of mankind. 

"And it is we, the humble disciples of these perfect Lamas, who are 
expected to allow the Theosophical Society to drop its noblest title, that 
of the Brotherhood of Humanity, to become a simple school of philos- 
ophy! No, no, good brothers, you have been labouring under this 
mistake too long already. He who does not feel competent to grasp the 
noble idea sufficiently to work for it, need not undertake a task too heavy 
for him. But there is hardly a Theosophist in the whole Society unable 
effectually to help it, by correcting erroneous impressions of outsiders, if 
not by actually himself propagating this idea. Oh, for noble and unselfish 
men to help us effectually in India in that divine task. All our knowl- 
edge, past and present, would not be sufficient to repay them. 

"Having explained our views and aspirations, I have but a few more 
words to add. To be true, Religion and philosophy must offer the solu- 
tion of every problem. That the world is in such a bad condition 
morally, is conclusive evidence that none of its religions and philosophies 
those of the 'civilized' races less than any other have ever possessed 
the Truth. The right and logical explanation on the subject of the 
problems of the great dual principles, right and wrong, good and evil, 
liberty and despotism, pain and pleasure, egotism and altruism, are as 
impossible to them now as they were 1881 years ago. They are as far 
from the solution as they ever were. But to these there must be some- 
where a consistent solution, and if our doctrines will show their com- 
petence to offer it, then the world will be the first to confess that there 
must be the true philosophy, the true religion, the true light, which gives 
truth and nothing but the truth." 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 201 

So far, the letter of the Maha Chohan, which comes to us with this 
endorsement: "An abridged version of the view of the Chohan on the 
T. S. from his own words given last night. K. H." One thing must 
strike every thoughtful reader of this notable epistle: the wonderful 
degree to which the ideals therein expressed, thirty years ago, have 
penetrated and inspired the general thought of mankind, in a way that 
would then have been thought well-nigh impossible. Science is far less 
materialistic, far more transcendental, far more occupied with the 
invisible things behind matter, than it was thirty years ago ; indeed, some 
of its most noteworthy workers are giving the best of themselves to the 
demonstration of the soul's immortality. Religion is far less dogmatic, 
less narrow and bigoted now than then, as witness the many approaches 
to union which we have chronicled, and, above all, the far more intelli- 
gent attitude of so many toward other religions than that in which they 
were brought up, a general broadening of view, which is as encouraging 
as it is significant. To repeat the words of the august correspondent, 
the space has markedly widened, whereon the white dove of truth may 
rest its weary, unwelcome feet. 

Parliaments of religions have been organized, parliaments of races 
are in process of organization, and movements for peace have become 
international. The whole atmosphere of humanity has grown brighter 
and clearer in these significant thirty years. And, while a part of this 
general opening of the heart of mankind is due, without doubt, to that 
cyclic change and renewal on which all Theosophists have laid such 
stress, very much is also beyond question due to the very agencies repre- 
sented by our august letter-writer and his fellow-workers. So much, 
indeed, has been accomplished and attained, in the sense of this letter, 
that one might almost say that The Theosophical Society's mission is 
complete, its work successful and perfected. 

We should only have to read the letter again, to correct this too 
hasty, though wisely optimistic, conclusion. For on re-reading, we could 
hardly fail to be struck with one sentence: "The Theosophical Society 
was chosen as the corner stone, the foundation of the future religions 
of humanity." Though much has been done toward the growth of 
tolerance, of good will, of scientific and religious breadth, there still 
remains an infinite deal to do, before we can be said in any sense to have 
accomplished the high and superb task laid down for us in the sentence 
quoted. 

What is to be done in detail, we shall not try to indicate. Broadly, 
what has to be done, would seem to be this, and the task is as tremendous 
as it is inspiring: We must come to understand, by direct and authentic 



202 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

experience, the verity of the spiritual world, of spiritual law, of the 
spiritual man, so that we can give an account of them as trustworthy 
as a skilled botanist could give of the plants in a suburban garden. We 
must be able to tell these things, because we have seen and known them. 
Only thus can men be once more taught to believe and know the things 
of their immortality. Only thus can the great burden of evil be lifted, 
by showing the divine reasonableness, potency and immediate presence 
of the immortal good. We have to some extent popularized the lore of 
spiritual things. There remain spiritual things themselves, to be learned, 
not from tradition and hearsay, but in their living reality, so that they 
can be taught for the saving and illumining of mankind. 

When not only the religion of the West, in which most of us were 
born, but every great religion worthy of the name, has within it a 
nucleus of those who have tested and know the things of our immortality, 
the life and law of the spiritual man, and his growth in the divine light 
which flows from the Eternal ; and when the teaching of this firmly poised 
and illumined nucleus has infused the whole mass of the followers of 
each religion, enkindling and inspiring them to set the things of the 
immortal above the things of the mortal, the clear light serene of the 
spiritual above the murky clouds of the material; then, perhaps, it will 
be possible to say that the work laid down for The Theosophical Society 
by this august Teacher has been measurably completed, its task fulfilled. 
But, then, since the Soul is infinite, its growth and splendor without 
limit, new and unimagined vistas of holiness and power and service will 
have opened before us, under the rays of the immortal light. 



"The fact that He wills it, is what gives importance to any act. 
And we should do nothing which He does not will." 

THE BOOK OF ECHOES. 



GEORGE FOX 



IF one reads the journal of George Fox by the light of a belief in 
the unity, rather than the variety, of religious experience, double 
value is given to an absorbing book. To listen to his narration is 

to hear retold the story of St. Paul; to discover St. Francis in 
English garb; to have Jacob Boehme revoiced in down-right Anglo- 
Saxon. Each has been vouchsafed the vision, each has responded with- 
out capitulation and has given the implicit obedience which stamps him 
with the hall-mark of true discipleship. If we can but vividly enough 
sense the individuality of the men who have been thus uplifted, with their 
especial limitations of environment and personality, we can better under- 
stand why just such portion of the truth was entrusted to each, how 
necessary it was to withhold lest the pitcher should overflow. Our 
fellow-man is ever a profitable and proper study: it is the children that 
are perenially new not the toys. 

George Fox, speaking our own tongue, to a people of like traditions, 
within our own historical consciousness, produces the potent sense of 
actuality which is often blurred when we turn to older teachers. No 
record could give us a clearer sense of "tactile values," of being able 
not merely to see, but to actually feel the solid reality of the man, than 
these pages of the journal. It is as though a portrait had been painted 
for us by his great Dutch contemporary, so Rembrandt-like is its com- 
pelling domination of the varying background, so golden the light, so rich 
and sombre the shadow. 

The story of his life is inherently simple; personalities, possessions 
and desires are the elements of a complicated plot, and we hear how at 
the very outset these were swept away forever. 

"I was a man of sorrows in the time of the first workings of the 
Lord in me. Travelling up and down as a stranger in the earth, having 
forsaken all evil company and taken leave of father and mother, I was 
brought from outward things to rely on the Lord alone. Then, oh then 
I heard a voice which said 'There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can 
speak to thy condition.' My heart did leap for joy. I was come up in 
spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God; all things 
were new, and all creation gave unto me another smell than before, 
beyond what words can utter. I saw all the world could do me no good ; 
if I had had a king's diet, palace and attendance, all would have been as 
nothing, for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power. 
Knowledge of the spirit is life. This I knew experimentally." 

The message with which he was surcharged, which over and again 
he felt driven to deliver demanded no preface, no after-word of clucida- 



03 



204 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

tion: "There is that of God within you. Hark! Christ himself will 
speak immediately to your condition!" If he could but voice this truth 
with sufficient force, his work was finished, his hearers were fit to shift 
for themselves and he was free to pass on to the work of arousing other 
men. In squire, priest and artisan, in criminal and king he looked only 
for the hidden Christ, regarding each and all as equal in their high 
heritage. Listen to the finality of the interview with Cromwell, then at 
the pinnacle of his power : "As I was turning he caught me by the hand, 
and with tears in his eyes said, 'If thou and I were but an hour of a day 
together, we should be nearer one to the other/ adding that he wished 
me no more ill than he did his own soul. I told him if he did he wronged 
his own soul, and admonished him to hearken to God's voice. Then 
I went out." Neither here nor elsewhere is there a stepping stone to a 
next relation. Each scene is complete, linked to the next only by the 
stalwart figure with the broad Quaker hat, the unshorn hair and leathern 
small-clothes. 

A fact worth marking is that the seemingly trivial eccentricities of 
his manner and speech were what first riveted attention and insured him 
a hearing. He could have preached equality with the voice of men and 
of angels and it would have forced neither resistance nor conviction, but 
the visible symbol of his undoffed hat roused such a storm of rage and 
abuse among the smug class-worshippers, that all his powers of argument 
and eloquence were given full scope in lulling it. Time and again he 
was imprisoned for refusing the formal oath of allegiance; so time and 
again magistrates and justices were forced to hear the truth that lay 
behind the refusal, to accord his reasons some measure of consideration. 

Among the typical genre pictures which he shows us, those of the 
courts of justice are especially illuminating. Their devious and pro- 
crastinating methods give good and sufficient ground for the bitterness 
of his invective ; abstract justice was almost non-existent, and it was for 
abstract, not personal, justice that he clamored. His one recorded dis- 
obedience to the inner voice, with its swift reprimand, is in this connec- 
tion: 

"At Mansfield there was a sitting of justices about the hiring of 
servants, and it was upon me from the Lord to go and speak to them. 
So I walked toward the inn where they sat, but finding a company of 
fiddlers there I did not go in but thought to come in the morning. When 
I returned they were gone, and I was struck blind that I could not see. 
The innkeeper told me they were to sit that day at a town eight miles off. 
My sight began to come to me again and I went to the house where they 
were and exhorted them not to oppress the servants in their wages ; and 
I exhorted the servants to do their duties and serve honestly. They all 
received my exhortation kindly, for I was moved of the Lord therein." 



GEORGE FOX 205 

The dark, almost unbearably realistic portrayal of the prisons in 
which he lay, added to the knowledge that thousands upon thousands of 
Friends suffered even worse horrors, leaves no wonder that the Quakers 
have then and now felt prison reform as one of their sacred trusts. The 
following glimpse of Scarborough Castle does not sear the eyes as do 
those of Carlisle and Launcester, but it is printable and will serve. 

"I desired the Governor to go into my room and see what a place I 
had. I had got a little fire made, and it was so filled with smoke that 
when he was in he could scarcely find his way out again; and he being 
a papist I told him that this was his purgatory! Soon after I was 
removed into a worse room where I had neither chimney nor firehearth. 
This being toward the sea side and lying much open, the wind drove in 
the rain forcibly, so that the water came over my bed and ran so about 
the room that I was fain to skim it up with a platter. My body was 
benumbed, and my fingers swelled till one was grown the size of two." 

His endurance is throughout incredible. Winter or summer he 
goes, often for days, without shelter or food; he endures violence and 
loss of blood, not merely with stoical calm, but with grim joy in his 
opportunities. Here is a page, taken almost at random from the multi- 
plicity of such episodes. 

"Now on a sudden the people were in a rage and fell upon me in a 
steeple-house, knocking me down and trampling upon me. So great was 
the uproar that some tumbled over the seats for fear. They led me out, 
some taking hold by my collar, some by my arms and shoulders, and 
having furnished themselves with staves, hedge-sticks and holm-bushes, 
they beat me on the head till they had deprived me of sense so that I 
fell down upon the wet common. When I recovered I lay still, and the 
power of the Lord sprang through me, so that I stood up again in that 
strengthened power, and stretching out my arms cried 'Strike again.' 

"There was in the company a mason, a rude fellow, who with his 
walking rule-staff gave a blow with all his might just over the back of 
my hand as it was stretched out, so that I could not draw it to me again, 
and the people cried, 'He hath spoiled the use of his hand forever.' But 
I looked at it in the love of God (for I was in the love of God toward 
all them that persecuted me), and after a while the Lord's power sprang 
through me again, and through my hand and arm, so that in a moment 
I recovered strength in the sight of them all." 

Striding with him on his mission through Leicestershire and Corn- 
wall, down through the southern counties and northward into Wales, 
we can look far and wide over the England of the pre-reformation. We 
can contact the "light and chaffy priests" whom he pronounces to be 
"but empty shallow casks"; we can probe into the countless curious 
religious sects which had sprung up like mushrooms, futile protests 
against the dogmatism of the established church; as we cross with him 
into the home of the covenanters, we can almost feel as he does "the 
Seed of God to sparkle about like innumerable points of fire." 



206 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Here are two scenes which kindle the reader with a sense of divine 
immanence as do the prophecies of the Old Testament. The first is 
just after his release from Derby jail in the winter of 1651, when stalk- 
ing, head-bowed, over the bleak hills, he suddenly lifted his eyes and saw, 

"Three steeple-house spires and they struck at my life. I asked 
what place that was and they said Lichfield; immediately the word of 
the Lord came to me that I must go thither, and I went by my eye over 
hedge and ditch, till I came to a great field where shepherds were keeping 
their sheep. There I was commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. 
I stood still, for it was winter, but the word of the Lord was like a fire 
in me; so I pulled off my shoes and walked on; as soon as I was got 
within the city, the word of the Lord came to me again saying, 'Cry woe 
to the bloody city of Lichfield' ; there seemed to me to be a channel of 
blood through the streets and the market place appeared like a pool of 
blood. I went up and down crying with a loud voice 'Woe to the bloody 
city of Lichfield' and no one laid hands on me. When I had disclosed 
what was upon me, I felt myself clear and went out of the town in peace, 
and returning to the shepherds took my shoes of them again; but the 
fire of the Lord was so in my feet that I did not matter to put on my 
shoes again, till I felt the freedom of the Lord to do so ; then after I had 
washed my feet I put on my shoes again. After this a deep consideration 
came upon me, for what reason should I be sent to cry against that city ; 
but afterwards I came to understand that in the Emperor Diocletian's 
time one thousand Christians were martyred in Lichfield." 

The second is a vision, veritably prophetic, in the year 1652, at the 
beginning of a new era of successful ministry. "As we traveled we 
came near a very great hill called Pendle Hill, and I was moved by the 
Lord to go up to the top of it, which I did with difficulty, it was so very 
steep and high. When I was come to the top I saw the sea bordering 
upon Lancashire and the Lord let me see in what places he had a great 
people to be gathered; there was a multitude of folk in white raiment 
by a river-side, coming to the Lord; and the place that I saw them in 
was about Wensleydale and Sedbergh." 

An entire freedom from ambition, a high resolve to make use of 
all spiritual gains for the common good, insured to him the poise and 
equilibrium which he maintained without deviation under the stress and 
strain of great supernormal powers. It is the "leading" or "opening" 
which he covets, not the ecstacy. Controlled by this balance wheel, he 
could undergo with safety so deeply mystical an experience as this : 

"Then I was made to speak and open things to many people who 
came from far and near to see me. There was one Brown who had 
great prophecies and sights upon his death-bed of me, of what I should 
be made instrumental by the Lord to bring forth. When this man was 
buried, a great work of the Lord fell upon me, to the admiration of 
many who thought I had been dead, and many came to see me thus, for 
about fourteen days. I was much altered in countenance and person, 
as if my body had been new moulded or changed. . . . My sorrows 



GEORGE FOX 207 

and troubles began to wear off, and tears of joy dropped from me ; I saw 
into that which was without end, things which cannot be uttered or 
expressed by words. The same eternal power of God which brought 
me through, was that which afterward shook the nation, priests and 
people." 

It was now that he felt himself endowed with the special faculty of 
discernment which he so frequently used thereafter, a power of sensing 
the spiritual and moral condition of his hearers, and so of sympathetically 
comprehending their difficulties : "The Lord showed me that the natures 
of those things which were hurtful without, were within, in the hearts 
of wicked men, as the natures of swine and vipers, of Sodom and Egypt ; 
and I cried aloud, saying, 'Why should I, who was never addicted to 
commit those evils, be thus troubled?' And the Lord answered that it 
was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I 
speak to all conditions? Such is the infinite love of God." 

Close upon this revelation comes a pause, while he hesitates for a 
moment between two callings, the healing of the sick and the maimed, 
making a strong counter appeal, an appeal which he felt himself singu- 
larly fitted to answer: "I was at a stand in my mind whether I should 
not practice physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and 
virtues of things were so opened to me by the Lord; but I was imme- 
diately taken up in spirit to see into another and more steadfast state. 
The Lord showed me that all such as were faithful should come up into 
that state in which the works of creation and the virtues thereof may be 
known through the Divine Word by which they were made." After that 
there is neither hesitation nor doubt; he knows absolutely whither he is 
summoned. For proof that he heard aright, we have the witness of 
practical results, of his sane, devoted life. 

There were others in the movement who mistook love of power for 
altruism, the promptings of self-love for the inner voice. Notwithstand- 
ing his prophetic forewarning, it is probable that Friend James Naylor's 
fall into fanaticism and self-exaltation was the crudest blow which came 
to Fox during his entire ministry. So many accusations against the 
Society had here apparent verification, that an intolerable weight was 
added to the burden of unjust criticism. At this distance we see it as a 
mere ripple, at the time it must have assumed the proportions of an 
engulfing wave. 

In the case of Fox himself, his personality was an entirely negligible 
quantity ; with a faith real enough to be creative, of an intensely optim- 
istic and practical disposition, he set promptly forth to remove moun- 
tainsof indifference and hostility. Men whose divine inlet was choked 
and impeded were to him abnormal, and to do away with this primal 
defect was clearly the first step in the work of practical reform. To be 
sure, he was sorely exercised "to cry for justice in their courts; to 



208 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

declare against deceitful merchandise, cheating and cozening in fairs; 
in warning such as kept public houses that they should not let people 
have more drink than would do them good; and also in warning school 
mistresses to teach children sobriety"; but after all these were minor 
matters, corollaries to his central theme. If "the Lord's power sounded 
so in their ears that they were amazed, and could not get it out of their 
ears," his hearers might be trusted to order their own lives; if when he 
prayed "the Lord's power was so great that the house seemed shaken" 
apathy would end and each would seek for himself the path of right living. 
The last twenty-four years of his life were largely concerned with 
organization, certain disruptions during his long imprisonments proving 
that the Society was too loosely knit to insure future usefulness. Yet, 
constantly there is a touching solicitude for the individual members of 
his flock, a patient shouldering of the burden of their growing numbers, 
personal acceptance of the responsibilities of each and all. His account 
of the bitter trials of the year 1670 culminates in a very remarkable 
psychic crisis : 

"As I got upon my horse again, a great weight and oppression fell 
upon me, so that I was hardly able to ride. I came with difficulty to a 
Friend's house and there I lay, exceeding weak, and at last lost both 
hearing and sight. Divers Friends who practiced physic would have 
given me medicines, but I was not to meddle with any, for I was sensible 
I had a travail to go through ; therefore, I desired none but solid, weighty 
Friends about me and though I could not see, I discerned their spirits, 
who were honest-hearted and who were not. Few thought I could live, 
but I felt the Lord's power inwardly supporting me. I lay at the widow 
Dry's all that winter, warring in spirit with the evil spirits of the world 
that warred against Truth and Friends. It was a cruel, bloody time, 
yet in due course it pleased the Lord to allay the heat of this violent 
persecution. I plainly felt, and Friends near me took notice, that as 
persecutions ceased I came from under the travail that had weighed 
upon me, so that I began to recover beyond all expectations." 

Among his first cares was the founding of schools where his people 
might be taught "whatsoever things were civil and useful in creation"; 
for to be a poor organ of God when one might be a good one belonged 
among the high sins. Yet not by schools were ministers to be made ; he 
keenly felt the deep value of silence up to the moment of clear inspiration. 

Undoubtedly he belived that his Society, for which he disclaimed the 
name of sect, would become universal, each member a vital organic part, 
acting freely for the good of the whole. Indeed, its growth while he 
was in the saddle was phenomenal. He could count over fifty thousand 
followers in England; he had established vigorous branches in Holland 
and America, and through William Penn had instituted a holy common- 
wealth. Why should it not embrace the world? His faith was in the 
power of the spirit, and he discounted the dynamic power of his own 



GEORGE FOX 209 

personality. His death which came in 1691, with almost no previous 
abatement of work, left his people without a leader who could march 
forward gathering recruits by the mere force of his presence. The 
phenomenal growth inevitably slackened, and the world had to await a 
new prophet. 

Wesley, one hundred years later, found a fresh audience eagerly 
awaiting the message. The England of Fox was cleaner, cruder, more 
savage, that of Wesley more self-conscious, more wanting in faith and 
strength; but each man in turn roused all that could respond to the 
immediate presence of God. 

A brief sketch gives no just conception of the man George Fox, 
too much must necessarily be omitted ; the sheer bulk of this voluminous 
journal helps to bring him home to us. We may wonder and weigh and 
distrust the first hundred pages, but as we go on and on and still on, 
his words grow to have the force of a sledgehammer's incessant blows; 
conviction of its truth is beaten in upon our brain; the pregnant terse 
sentences are of the very substance of the man. We must believe. 

Such a life, built upon the rock of charity and self-denial, lived in 
conscious, divine inter-communication, could not fail to bring marvellous 
power to his teaching. His faith in, and stirring appeal to "that of 
Christ within" each man, inevitably compelled response. Every deed and 
thought and word was tuned to the fundamental keynote of his philos- 
ophy, all of richness and depth and harmony which he gained during the 
years were resolved again into the same dominant tone: 

"As people come into subjection to the Spirit and grow up in the 
image of the Almighty, they may receive the Word of Wisdom that 
opens all things and come to know the hidden unity in the Eternal 
Being." A. E. 



"It is not martyrdom to pay bills that one has run into one's self." 

"Failure after long perseverence is much grander than never to have 
a striving good enough to be called a failure." 

GEORGE ELIOT. 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 

TRANSLATED WITH A COMMENTARY 

BY 

CHARLES JOHNSTON 



THE third book of the Sutras is the book of spiritual powers. 
In considering these spiritual powers, two things must be under- 
stood and kept in memory. The first of these is this: These 
spiritual powers can only be gained when the development 
described in the first and second book has been measurably attained; 
when the commandments have been kept, the rules faithfully followed, 
and the experiences which are described have been passed through. For 
only after this, is the spiritual man so far grown, so far disentangled 
from the psychical bandages and veils which have confined and 
blinded him, that he can use his proper powers and faculties. For this 
is the secret of all spiritual powers: they are in no sense abnormal or 
supernatural overgrowths upon the material man, but are rather the 
powers and faculties inherent in the spiritual man, entirely natural to 
him, and coming naturally into activity, as the spiritual man is disen- 
tangled and liberated from psychical bondage, through keeping the 
commandments and rules already set forth. 

As the natural man is the limitation and inversion of the spiritual 
man, all his faculties and powers are inversions of the powers of the 
spiritual man. In a single phrase, his self-seeking is the inversion of 
the Self-seeking which is the very being of the spiritual man: the cease- 
less search after the divine and august Self of all beings. This inversion 
is corrected by keeping the commandments and rules, and gradually, as 
the inversion is overcome, the spiritual man is extricated, and comes 
into possession and free exercise of his powers. 

The spiritual powers, therefore, are the powers of the grown and 
liberated spiritual man. They can only be developed and used as the 
spiritual man grows and attains liberation through obedience. This is 
the first thing to be kept in mind, in all that is said of spiritual powers 
in the third and fourth books of the Sutras. The second thing to be 
understood and kept in mind is this: 

Just as our modern sages have discerned and taught that all matter 
is ultimately one and eternal, definitely related throughout the whole 
wide universe; just as they have discerned and taught that all force is 
one and eternal, so co-ordinated throughout the whole universe that 



Copyrighted, 1909, by Charles Johnston. 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 211 

whatever affects any atom measurably affects the whole boundless realm 
of matter and force to the most distant star or nebula on the dim confines 
of space; so the ancient sages had discerned and taught that all con- 
sciousness is one, immortal, indivisible, infinite; so finely correlated and 
continuous that whatever is perceived by any consciousness is, whether 
actually or potentially, within the reach of all consciousness, and there- 
fore within the reach of any consciousness. This has been well expressed 
by saying that all souls are fundamentally one with the Oversoul; that 
the Son of God, and all Sons of God, are fundamentally one with the 
Father. When the consciousness is cleared of psychic bonds and veils, 
when the spiritual man is able to stand, to see, then this superb law comes 
into effect: whatever is within the knowledge of any consciousness, 
and this includes the whole infinite universe, is within his reach, and may, 
if he wills, be made a part of his consciousness. This he may attain 
through his fundamental unity with the Oversoul, by raising himself 
toward the consciousness above him, and drawing on its resources. The 
Son, if he would work miracles, whether of perception or of action, 
must come often into the presence of the Father. This is the birth- 
right of the spiritual man; through it, he comes into possession of his 
splendid and immortal powers. 

If these two things be kept in mind, the difficulties of the following 
sentences will disappear. 

TRANSLATION OF BOOK III, PART i. 

i. The binding of the perceiving consciousness to a certain 
region is Attention (dharana). 

Emerson quotes Sir Isaac Newton as saying that he made his great 
discoveries by intending his mind on them. This is what is meant here. 
I read the page of a book while thinking of something else. At the end 
of the page, I have no idea of what it is about, and read it again, still 
thinking of something else, with the same result. Then I wake up, so 
to speak, make an effort of attention, fix my thought on what I am 
reading, and easily take in its meaning. The act of will, the effort of 
attention, the intending of the mind on each word and line of the page, 
just as the eyes are focussed on each word and line, is the power here 
contemplated. It is the power to focus the consciousness on a given 
spot, and hold it there. Attention is the first and indispensable step in 
all knowledge. Attention to spiritual things is the first step to spiritual 
knowledge. 

3. A prolonged holding of the perceiving consciousness in that 
region is Contemplation (dhyana). 

This will apply equally to outer and inner things. I may for a 
moment fix my attention on some visible object, in a single penetrating 



212 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

glance, or I may hold the attention fixedly on it until it reveals far more 
of its nature than a single glance could perceive. The first is the 
focussing of the searchlight of consciousness upon the object. The 
other is the holding of the white beam of light steadily and persistently 
on the object, until it yields up the secret of its details. So for things 
within; one may fix the inner glance for a moment on spiritual things, 
or one may hold the consciousness steadily upon them, until what was 
in the dark slowly comes forth into the light, and yields up its immortal 
secret. But this is possible only for the spiritual man, after the com- 
mandments and the rules have been kept; for until this is done, the 
thronging storms of psychical thoughts dissipate and distract the 
attention, so that it will not remain fixed on spiritual things. The cares 
of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word of the spiritual 
message. 

3. When the perceiving consciousness, in this contemplation, is 
wholly given to illuminating the essential meaning of the object 
contemplated, and is freed from the sense of separateness and per- 
sonality, this is Meditation (samadhi). 

Let us review the steps so far taken. First, the beam of perceiving 
consciousness is focussed on a certain region or subject, through the 
effort of attention. Then this attending consciousness is held on its 
object. Thirdly, there is the ardent will to know its meaning, to illumine 
it with comprehending thought. Fourthly, all personal bias, all desire 
merely to indorse a previous opinion and so prove oneself right, and 
all desire for personal profit or gratification must be quite put away. 
There must be a purely disinterested love of truth for its own sake. 
Thus is the perceiving consciousness made void, as it were, of all per- 
sonality or sense of separateness. The personal limitation stands aside, 
and lets the All-consciousness come to bear upon the problem. The 
Oversoul bends its ray upon the object, and illumines it with pure light. 

4. When these three, Attention, Contemplation, Meditation, are 
exercised at once, this is perfectly concentrated Meditation (san- 
yama). 

When the personal limitation of the perceiving consciousness stands 
aside, and allows the All-conscious to come to bear upon the problem, 
then arises that real knowledge which is called a flash of genius; that 
real knowledge which makes discoveries, and without which no discovery 
can be made, however painstaking the effort. For genius is the vision 
of the spiritual man, and that vision is a question of growth rather than 
present effort ; though right effort, rightly continued, will in time infallibly 
lead to growth and vision. Through the power thus to set aside personal 
limitation, to push aside petty concerns and cares, and steady the whole 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 213 

nature and will in an ardent love of truth and desire to know it ; through 
the power thus to make way for the All-consciousness, all great men 
make their discoveries. Newton, watching the apple fall to the earth, was 
able to look beyond, to see the subtle waves of force pulsating through 
apples and worlds and suns and galaxies, and thus to perceive universal 
gravitation. The Oversoul, looking through his eyes, recognized the 
universal force, one of its own children. Darwin, watching the forms 
and motions of plants and animals, let the same august consciousness 
come to bear on them, and saw infinite growth perfected through cease- 
less struggle. He perceived the superb process of evolution, the Over- 
soul once more recognizing its own. Fraunhofer, noting the dark lines 
in the band of sunlight in his spectroscope, divined their identity with 
the bright lines in the spectra of incandescent iron, sodium and the rest, 
and so saw the oneness of substance in the worlds and suns, the unity 
of the materials of the universe. Once again, the Oversoul, looking with 
his eyes, recognized its own. So it is with all true knowledge. But 
the mind must transcend its limitations, its idiosyncracies ; there must 
be purity, for to the pure in heart is the promise, that they shall see 
God. 

5. By mastering this perfectly concentrated Meditation, there 
comes the illumination of the perceiving consciousness. 

The meaning of this is illustrated by what has been said before. 
When the spiritual man is able to throw aside the trammels of emotional 
and mental limitation, and to open his eyes, he sees clearly, he attains to 
illuminated perception. A poet once said that Occultism is the conscious 
cultivation of genius; and it is certain that the awakened spiritual man 
attains to the perceptions of genius. Genius is the vision, the power, 
of the spiritual man, whether its possessor recognizes this or not. All 
true knowledge is of the spiritual man. The greatest in all ages have 
recognized this and put their testimony on record. The great in wisdom 
who have not consciously recognized it, have ever been full of the spirit 
of reverence, of selfless devotion to truth, of humility, as was Darwin; 
and reverence and humility are the unconscious recognition of the near- 
ness of the Spirit, that Divinity which broods over us, a Master o'er 
a slave. 

6. This power is distributed in ascending degrees. 

It is to be attained step by step. It is a question, not of miracle, 
but of evolution, of growth. Newton had to master the multiplication 
table, then the four rules of arithmetic, then the rudiments of algebra, 
before he came to the binomial theorem. At each point, there was 
attention, concentration, insight; until these were attained, no progress 
to the next point was possible. So with Darwin. He had to learn the 
form and use of leaf and flower, of bone and muscle ; the characteristics 



214 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

of genera and species ; the distribution of plants and animals, before he 
had in mind that nexus of knowledge on which the light of his great 
idea was at last able to shine. So is it with all knowledge. So is it with 
spiritual knowledge. Take the matter this way: The first subject for 
the exercise of my spiritual insight is my day, with its circumstances, 
its hindrances, its opportunities, its duties. I do what I can to solve it, 
to fulfill its duties, to learn its lessons. I try to live my day with 
aspiration and faith. That is the first step. By doing this, I gather a 
harvest for the evening, I gain a deeper insight into life, in virtue of 
which I begin the next day with a certain advantage, a certain spiritual 
advance and attainment. So with all successive days. In faith and 
aspiration, we pass from day to day, in growing knowledge and power, 
with never more than one day to solve at a time, until all life becomes 
radiant and transparent. 

7. This threefold power, of Attention, Contemplation, Medita- 
tion, is more interior than the means of growth previously described. 

Very naturally so; because the means of growth previously 
described were concerned with the extrication of the spiritual man from 
psychic bondages and veils ; while this threefold power is to be exercised 
by the spiritual man thus extricated and standing on his feet, viewing 
life with open eyes. 

8. But this triad is still exterior to the soul vision which is 
unconditioned, free from the seed of mental analysis. 

The reason is this : The threefold power we have been considering, 
the triad of Attention, Contemplation, Meditation is, so far as we have 
yet considered it, the focussing of the beam of perceiving consciousness 
upon some form of manifesting being, with a view to understanding it 
completely. There is a higher stage, where the beam of consciousness 
is turned back upon itself, and the individual consciousness enters into, 
and knows, the All-consciousness. This is a being, a being in immor- 
tality, rather than a knowing; it is free from mental analysis or mental 
forms. It is not an activity of the higher mind, even the mind of the 
spiritual man. It is an activity of the soul. Had Newton risen to this 
higher stage, he would have known, not the laws of motion, but that 
high Being, from whose Life comes eternal motion. Had Darwin risen 
to this, he would have seen the Soul, whose graduated thought and being 
all evolution expresses. There are, therefore, these two perceptions: 
that of living things, and that of the Life; that of the Soul's works, and 
that of the Soul itself. 

9. One of the ascending degrees is the development of Control. 
First there is the overcoming of the mind-impress of excitation. 
Then comes the manifestation of the mind-impress of Control. 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 215 

Then the perceiving consciousness follows after the moment of 
Control. This is the development of Control. 

This is a difficult sentence. Its meaning seems to be this : Some 
object enters the field of observation, and at first violently excites the 
mind, stirring up curiosity, fear, wonder; then the consciousness returns 
upon itself, as it were, and takes the perception firmly in hand, steadying 
itself, and viewing the matter calmly from above. This steadying effort 
of the will upon the perceiving consciousness is Control, and immediately 
upon it follows perception, understanding, insight. 

Take a trite example. Supposing one is walking in an Indian 
forest. A charging elephant suddenly appears. The man is excited by 
astonishment, and, perhaps, terror. But he exercises an effort of will, 
perceives the situation in its true bearings, and recognizes that a certain 
thing must be done; in this case, probably, that he must get out of the 
way as quickly as possible. 

Or a comet, unheralded, appears in the sky like a flaming sword. 
The beholder is at first astonished, perhaps terror-stricken ; but he takes 
himself in hand, controls his thoughts, views the apparition calmly, and 
finally calculates its orbit and its relation to meteor showers. 

These are extreme illustrations; but with all knowledge, the order 
of perception is the same: first, the excitation of the mind by the new 
object impressed on it; then the control of the mind from within; upon 
which follows the perception of the nature of the object. Where the 
eyes of the spiritual man are open, this will be a true and penetrating 
spiritual perception. In some such way do our living experiences come 
to us ; first, with a shock of pain ; then the Soul steadies itself and controls 
the pain ; then the spirit perceives the lesson of the event, and its bearing 
upon the progressive revelation of life. 

10. Through frequent repetition of this process, the mind 
becomes habituated to it, and there arises an equable flow of per- 
ceiving consciousness. 

Control of the mind by the Soul, like control of the muscles by the 
mind, comes by practice, and constant voluntary repetition. 

As an example of control of the muscles by the mind, take the 
ceaseless practice by which a musician gains mastery over his instrument, 
or a fencer gains skill with a rapier. Innumerable small efforts of 
attention will make a result which seems well-nigh miraculous; which, 
for the novice, is really miraculous. Then consider that far more won- 
derful instrument, the perceiving mind, played on by that fine musician, 
the Soul. Here again, innumerable small efforts of attention will accu- 
mulate into mastery, and a mastery worth winning. For a concrete 
example, take the gradual conquest of each day, the effort to live that 



216 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

day for the Soul. To him that is faithful unto death, the Master gives 
the crown of life. 

11. The gradual conquest of the mind's tendency to flit from 
one object to another, and the power of one-pointedness, make the 
development of Meditation. 

As an illustration of the mind's tendency to flit from one object 
to another, take a small boy, learning arithmetic. He begins : two ones 
are two; three ones are three and then he thinks of three coins in his 
pocket, which will purchase so much candy, in the store down the street, 
next to the toy-shop, where are base-balls, marbles and so on, and then 
he comes back with a jerk, to four ones are four. So with us also. 
We are seeking the meaning of our task, but the mind takes advantage 
of a moment of slackened attention, and flits off from one frivolous 
detail to another, till we suddenly come back to consciousness after 
traversing leagues of space. We must learn to conquer this, and to 
go back within ourselves into the beam of perceiving consciousness itself, 
which is a beam of the Oversoul. This is the true one-pointedness, the 
bringing of our consciousness to a focus in the Soul. 

12. When, following this, the controlled manifold tendency and 
the aroused one-pointedness are equally balanced parts of the per- 
ceiving consciousness, this is the development of one-pointedness. 

This would seem to mean that the insight which is called one- 
pointedness has two sides, equally balanced. There is first, the manifold 
aspect of any object, the sum of all its characteristics and properties. 
This is to be held firmly in the mind. Then there is the perception of 
the object as a unity, as a whole, the perception of its essence. First, 
the details must be clearly perceived; then the essence must be com- 
prehended. When the two processes are equally balanced, the true 
one-pointedness is attained. Everything has these two sides, the side of 
difference and the side of unity; there is the individual and there is the 
genus; the pole of matter and diversity, and the pole of oneness and 
spirit. To see the object truly, we must see both. 

13. Through this, the inherent character, distinctive marks and 
conditions of beings, according to their development, are made clear. 

By the power defined in the preceding sutra, the inherent character, 
distinctive marks and conditions of beings and powers are made clear. 
For through this power, as defined, we get a twofold view of each object, 
seeing at once all its individual characteristics and its essential character, 
species and genus; we see it in relation to itself, and in relation to the 
Eternal. Thus we see a rose as that particular flower, with its color and 
scent, its peculiar fold of each petal ; but we also see in it the species, 
the family to which it belongs, with its relation to all plants, to all life, 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 217 

to Life itself. So in any day, we see events and circumstances; we also 
see in it the lesson set for the Soul by the Eternal. 

14. Every object has its characteristics which are already 
quiescent, those which are active, and those which are not yet 
definable. 

Every object has characteristics belonging to its past, its present and 
its future. In a fir tree, for example, there are the stumps or scars of 
dead branches, which once represented its foremost growth; there are 
the branches with their needles spread out to the air; there are the buds 
at the end of each branch and twig, which carry the still closely packed 
needles which are the promise of the future. In like manner, the 
chrysalis has, as its past, the caterpillar; as its future, the butterfly. 
The man has, in his past, the animal ; in his future, the angel. Both are 
visible even now in his face. So with all things, for all things change 
and grow. 

15. Difference in stage is the cause of difference in development. 
This but amplifies what has just been said. The first stage is the 

sapling, the caterpillar, the animal. The second stage is the growing 
tree, the chrysalis, the man. The third is the splendid pine, the butterfly, 
the angel. Difference of stage is the cause of difference of development. 
So it is among men, and among the races of men. 

1 6. Through perfectly concentrated Meditation on the three 
stages of development comes a knowledge of past and future. 

We have taken our illustrations from natural science, because, since 
every true discovery in natural science is a divination of a law in nature, 
attained through a flash of genius, such discoveries really represent acts 
of spiritual perception, acts of perception by the spiritual man, even 
though they are generally unconscious. 

So we may once more use the same illustrations. Perfectly 
concentrated Meditation, perfect insight into the chrysalis, reveals the 
caterpillar that it has been, the butterfly that it is destined to be. He 
who knows the seed, knows the seed-pod or ear it has come from, 
and the plant that is to come from it. 

So in like manner, he who really knows to-day, and the heart of 
to-day, knows its parent yesterday, and its child to-morrow. Past, 
present and future are all in the Eternal. He who dwells in the Eternal, 
knows all three. 

17. Sound and meaning and the thought called up by a word 
are confounded because they are all blurred together in the mind. 
By perfectly concentrated Meditation of each separately, there comes 
an understanding of the sounds uttered by all beings. 



218 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

It must be remembered that we are speaking of perception by the 
spiritual man. 

Sound, like every force, is the expression of a power of the Eternal. 
Infinite shades of this power are expressed in the infinitely varied tones 
of sound. He who, having entry to the consciousness of the Eternal, 
knows the essence of this power, can divine the meanings of all sounds 
from the voice of the insect to the music of the spheres. 

In like manner, he who has attained to spiritual vision can perceive 
the mind-images in the thoughts of others, with the shade of feeling 
which goes with them, thus reading their thoughts as easily as he hears 
their words. Everyone has the germ of this power, since difference 
of tone will give widely differing meanings to the same words, meanings 
which are intuitively perceived by everyone. 

18. When the mind-impressions become visible, there comes 
an understanding of previous births. 

This is simple enough, if we grasp the truth of rebirth. The fine 
harvest of past experiences is drawn into the spiritual nature, forming, 
indeed, the basis of its development. When the consciousness has been 
raised to a point above these fine subjective impressions, and can look 
down upon them from above, this will in itself be a remembering of past 
births. 

19. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on mind-images is 
gained the understanding of the thoughts of others. 

Here, for those who can profit by it, is the secret of thought- 
reading. Take the simplest case, of intentional thought transference. 
It is the testimony of those who have done this, that the perceiving mind 
must be stilled, before the mind-image projected by the other mind can 
be seen. With it comes a sense of the feeling and temper of the other 
mind and so on, in higher degrees. 

20. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on the form of the 
body, by arresting the body's perceptibility, and by inhibiting the 
eye's power of sight, there comes the power to make the body 
invisible. 

There are many instances of the exercise of this power, by mesmer- 
ists, hypnotists and the like; and we may simply call it an instance of 
the power of suggestion. Shankara tells us that by this power the 
popular magicians of the East perform their wonders, working on the 
mind-images of others, while themselves remaining invisible. It is all 
a question of being able to see and control the mind-images. 

21. The works which fill out the life-span may be either imme- 
diately or gradually operative. By perfectly concentrated Meditation 
on these comes a knowledge of the time of the end, as also through 
signs. 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 219 

A garment which got wet, says the commentator, may be hung up 
to dry, and so dry rapidly, or it may be rolled in a ball and dry slowly; 
so a fire may blaze or smoulder. Thus it is with Karma, the works that 
fill out the life-span. By an insight into the mental forms and forces 
which make up Karma, there comes a knowledge of the rapidity or 
slowness of their development, and of the time when the debt will be 
paid off. 

22. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on sympathy, com- 
passion and kindness, is gained the power of interior union with 
others. 

Unity is the reality; separateness the illusion. The nearer we come 
to reality, the nearer we come to unity of heart. Sympathy, compassion, 
kindness are modes of this unity of heart, whereby we rejoice with those 
who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. These things are learned 
by desiring to learn them. 

23. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on power, even such 
power as that of the elephant may be gained. 

This is a pretty image. Elephants possess not only force, but poise 
and fineness of control. They can lift a straw, a child, a tree with 
perfectly judged control and effort. So the simile is a good one. By 
detachment, by withdrawing into the soul's reservoir of power, we can 
gain all these, force and fineness and poise; the ability to handle with 
equal mastery things small and great, concrete and abstract alike. 

24. By bending upon them the awakened inner light, there 
comes a knowledge of things subtle, or obscure, or remote. 

As was said at the outset, each consciousness is related to all 
consciousness ; and, through it, has a potential consciousness of all things ; 
whether subtle or obscure, or remote. An understanding of this great 
truth will come with practice. As one of the wise has said, we have 
no conception of the power of Meditation. 

25. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on the sun comes a 
knowledge of the worlds. 

This has several meanings: First, by a knowledge of the constitu- 
tion of the sun, astronomers can understand the kindred nature of the 
stars. And it is said that there is a finer astronomy, where the spiritual 
man is the astronomer. But the sun also means the Soul, and through 
knowledge of the Soul comes a knowledge of the realms of life. 

26. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on the moon comes 
a knowledge of the lunar mansions. 

Here again are different meanings. The moon is, first, the com- 
panion planet, which, each day, passes backward through one mansion 



220 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

of the stars. By watching the moon, the boundaries of the mansions 
are learned, with their succession in the great time-dial of the sky. 
But the moon also symbolises the analytic mind, with its divided realms ; 
and these, too, may be understood through perfectly concentrated 
Meditation. 

27. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on the fixed pole-star 
comes a knowledge of the motions of the stars. 

Addressing Duty, stern daughter of the Voice of God, Wordsworth 
finely said: 

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong 

thus suggesting a profound relation between the moral powers and 
the powers that rule the worlds. So in this sutra, the fixed pole-star is 
the eternal spirit about which all things move, as well as the star toward 
which points the axis of the earth. Deep mysteries attend both, and the 
veil of mystery is only to be raised by Meditation, by open-eyed vision 
of the awakened spiritual man. 

(To be continued.} 



FRAGMENTS 

The Master said to me: Come child, and I answered, Nay, Lord. 
And He said again: Thou wilt not obey me? And I replied: Thy 
words, Lord, are Come. And to come to Thee I must depart far from 
Thee into the dark world whose shadows lie so thick and sullen behind 
me. There shall I find thee in Sacrifice and labour; for the Spiritual 
world lies not apart from it, but luminous in its folds. Through Thy 
words speak Thy Spirit, and Thy Spirit I obey. 

And the Master's eyes glowed deep. He laid his hand upon my head 
and said again: 

Come, child of my heart. And I knew I had understood. 

CAVE. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR 
LITERATURE 



IV 
EDMUND BURKE 

"Every sort of moral, every sort of civil, every sort of politic 
institution, aiding the rational and natural ties that connect the human 
understanding and affections to the divine, are not more than necessary, 
in order to build up that wonderful structure, Man; whose prerogative 
it is, to be in a great degree a creature of his own making; and who, 
when made as he ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place 
in the creation." 

BURKE'S lifelong effort to set forth the sanity and wisdom of the 
social order ended with his philosophical display of the wrong- 
ness of the Revolutionists in France. His Reflections on the 
French Revolution are the "late ripe fruit of an old tree" ; in them 
he restates in an entirely individual manner these immemorial principles 
of life which find recurrent expression in the Upanishads, in the Gospels, 
in the Platonic Dialogues, and in the poems and prayers of many a 
Western devotee. In a generation of unbelievers, he towers lofty as the 
champion of a faith too profound for short plummets. And his long 
effort of defense, which to his own eyes, as to others, must sometimes 
have seemed futile, had the crowning success of ushering in a new period 
of faith, of which Wordsworth is the representative a period Burke 
did not see but which he divined. For he believed unshakenly in the 
ultimate triumph of his principles ; that conviction, and no success of the 
moment, kept him unflaggingly at work when maligned by his opponents 
and deserted by those he had trusted. In the Reflections he has elo- 
quently stated the inadequacy and error of revolutionary principles. 
That his conclusions are, by many, not accepted, a hundred years after 
the event, is no argument against the universality of their application; 
it is only a proof that the tares must grow along with the wheat till 
harvest. The eighteenth century was the heyday of tares; up and up 
they had grown, until in the Revolution, they reached a height too great 
for their root, and fell. Burke was seed of new wheat. Again and 
again the wheat will be choked, but it always seeds itself, and in the 
harvest will be garnered. 

The French Revolution was the culmination and overthrow of a 
movement that manifested itself certainly two centuries earlier. In 1595 
Richard Hooker wrote, at the end of his first book on Ecclesiastical 
Polity, "Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat 



222 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world, all things in 
heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and 
the greatest as not exempted from her power, both angels and men, and 
creatures of what condition soever though each in different sort and 
manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of 
their peace and joy." Hooker did not perceive the inferences to be drawn 
from his conception of law. Nor has the church he defended yet seen 
them, except a few individuals; nor entered upon its vast inheritance. 
For such a Law implies growth, development, evolution, and points to 
a theory of life and the universe opposed to the cumbrous weight of dead 
matter bound by each generation upon the shoulders of its successor, 
from old Jewish days downward. The classical revival brought to the 
Church a choice similar to that of Apostolic times to remain selfishly 
separate, a Jewish sect, or to accomplish its mission among the nations 
which He hath made of one blood. St. Paul built up the Church with 
the Gentiles. In the Renaissance, the chance was given it to buttress its 
walls and to spire its towers with the marbles of Greece. For a time 
it seemed that pious and cultivated scholarship might relax the hard 
pride of the Church overstrained with its mistaken effort at domination ; 
that humble learning might reveal to this belligerent one the true domi- 
nation won without strife, far back in the past. We have seen that 
Mirandola and his friends were heralds of a new dawn. In England, a 
little later, a group of men at Cambridge turned to Plato for proof of 
Christian truths which were then commonly denied. But the sun waits 
long ; the clouds slowly break. The Church heeded not the rich antiquity 
that lay awaiting appropriation; it entered into hot dispute over petty 
possessions of the moment. It descended from spiritual worship, unity 
and concord to the evil of controversy, prolific of its kind. And in post- 
poning its coming of age, it made itself ridiculous and discredited, by its 
endeavor to force men of sharpened intellects and broadened vision and 
cultivated manners to accept as science the superstitious ignorance of 
an indecent Bedouin tribe that had scarcely emerged from the fetichism 
of savagery. When Mother Church made so great a blunder, it is not 
surprising that the dissenting parties she should have guided and pacified 
made a blunder of the same kind. The Church turned from a concep- 
tion of law as dynamic to the static code of Jerusalem. It was a falter- 
ing of imagination, an inability to feel mystery, and a terrified shrinking 
from a thing so strange and independent of man as life. The Church 
preferred a mechanical system of things to a spiritual, the cut and dried 
integuments of a mummy to elusive vitality; it refashioned the actual 
world into a threefold abode well directoryed, and lost every glimpse 
of the immortal realm of silence. The Puritans' mistake was similar 
but smaller, carrying one degree lower down the stupidity of the parent. 
It was the dynamic, the organic, the developing that was too great and 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 223 

elusive for their apprehension. For them the last word on Church 
polity was spoken to the Apostles, and the volume then sealed. There 
the Church must remain, fixed, with no power of renovation and repair, 
dead. The Puritan opposed, tooth and nail, those changes of polity and 
worship which were evidence of immanent life. Burke has a phrase that 
well describes all that outcry and strife, "the dissidence of dissent, and 
the Protestantism of the Protestant Religion." And these words bring 
to mind some others descriptive of the Inferno 

Various tongues, 

Horrible languages, outcries of woe, 
Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse, 
With hands together smote that swell'd the sounds, 
Made up a tumult, that forever whirls 
Round through that air with solid darkness stain'd, 
Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies. 

Thus religion, established and dissenting, had made itself rational, 
losing imaginative vision and spiritual insight. And rationalism in religion 
begot rationalism in philosophy and science. "Man as the minister and 
interpreter of nature," wrote Francis Bacon in the first aphorism of his 
Novum Organum, "does and understands as much as his observations 
on the order of nature, either with regard to things or the mind, permit 
him, and neither knows nor is capable of more." There is the cleft 
between spurious religion and spurious science which, later, by the 
crumbling away of religion, became a wider and wider chasm. The 
first and last words upon the suprasensual had been said by immoral 
Arabs; to change or add to those dicta meant devilish wickedness and 
destruction. There was left, then, as the only field for man's curiosity 
and activity, "things" and the "mind" physics and psychics. Francis 
Bacon in his scientific work was like Faraday. "I shut fast the door of 
my laboratory when I open the door of my chapel," the later scientist 
said. Bacon, who investigated the secrets of matter, the martyr of the 
experimental method in things secular, accepted unquestioningly the 
dogmas of Jewish tribes. The experimental method was applicable only 
to things and the mind, he thought. Of any higher realm man could 
investigate nothing, for what such a realm is, was already fully known 
through the revelations of Ezekiel and his fellow prophets. Bacon's 
successors were less careful about the use of the two doorways, and 
gradually the chapel door fell from its hinges and the walls toppled. 
Locke had some curiosity about things supernal, but he declared that 
"All knowledge is generalization from experience." One would not ques- 
tion that truth except for Locke's limitation of experience to the physical 
and mental senses. But after Locke, speculators like Hume, gaining 
greater familiarity with things and the mind, began to declare that things 
and minds as they are in fact never could be formed into Ezekiel's 



224 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

ritualistic synagogue. Here then is a second element of opposition to 
harassed Mother Church, like the opposition of the Puritan, a child 
of her own breeding. To the positive dogmatism of a rationalist religion 
there squares itself the negative dogmatism of a rationalist science. 

Into rational England in 1727 came a young Frenchman just released 
from imprisonment for atheism. For the first time in his life Voltaire 
was satisfied. Here was wisdom! Here was life! Here was apparent 
the whole duty of man ! After an enthusiastic visit and pleasant relations 
with Hume and other philosophers, Voltaire returns to eclaircise his own 
land, and reforms it along English lines. Two years later, in Dublin, 
Edmund Burke was born. 

By the time Burke was ready for service, the astral rationalism had 
formed its physical instrument. So far we have considered speculation; 
now comes practice. Rational religion and rational science produce 
rationalism in politics. Burke confronts those contentious opponents 
with a religion that is scientific in essence and poetic in form. The 
political theory which he maintains against their revolutionary methods 
is fruit on the tree of his religion. Burke, in the Senate, and Wesley, 
in the field, saved England from the horrors of France. 

His preparation for service was not usual. Born of a mixed mar- 
riage, his mother a Roman, his father an English communicant, he 
learned, in family life, the fundamental unity of heart that underlies 
variant expressions of belief, and when he came to marry, he followed 
his father's example, taking a Roman Catholic wife. On account of 
these connections he was slandered his whole life-time as a disguised 
Papist. Then, he was very early sent by these parents to a Quaker 
schoolmaster who won his affection and reverence, and whose son 
became his close friend. These Quakers completed his course in toler- 
ance. From Dublin he went up to London for law. But his reading was 
perfunctory and soon ceased. "Law quickens and invigorates the mind, 
but, except in those very happily born, does little to open and liberalize 
it," he wrote later. He pleased his father as long as he could, then 
surrendered his allowance, in order to follow his own inclination, the 
study of literature. For about nine years he is wandering, reading, 
observing, reflecting, in the mountains of Wales, in France, over England, 
taken sometimes for a spy, sometimes for an adventurer in search of 
an heiress a puzzle to good people who did not understand why a 
grown man and a poor man should not have some settled employment. 
One letter of this period to his schoolmaster's son is significant. "I 
spent four hours yesterday, in a library," he writes, "the best way in 
the world of killing thought." Not until he is in mezzo del camin, thirty- 
five years old, is he ready for work. By that time the principles which 
governed him were clearly and fully formulated ; we do not see them in 
development, they grew underground during those desultory years. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 225 

From his first political writing until his death, to one region of the globe 
after another, America, England, India, Africa and France, he makes 
a consistent application of his principles: "The principles that guide 
us in public and private, as they are not of our devising, but moulded 
into the nature and essence of things, will endure with the sun and the 
moon long, very long after Whig and Tory, Stuart and Brunswick, 
and all such miserable bubbles and playthings of the hour, are vanished 
from existence and from memory." In a century of material, rational 
and atheistic thinking, he comes to the government of a great empire 
with the imagination of a poet of the very first order. It is that poetic 
faculty of insight that ranks him with the first few of England ; not the 
rhetoric and paragraph building that is all American youth get out of 
his writings. It is poetry that makes his great sentences unforgetable; 
with him, as with a few others, words become more than symbols there 
is transubstantiation that evokes from the accidental real substance. 

Burke repeats over and over again that politics is only morality 
enlarged, that the government of Empire is an extension of family 
government. "Nations are governed by the same methods, and on the 
same principles, by which an individual without authority is often able 
to govern those who are his equals or his superiors ; by a knowledge of 
their temper, and by a judicious management of it." And later in the 
same pamphlet, he writes, "It is therefore our business carefully to 
cultivate in our minds, to rear to the most perfect vigor and maturity, 
every sort of generous and honest feeling that belongs to our nature. 
To bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service 
and conduct of the commonwealth ; so to be patriots as not to forget we 
are gentlemen." The enlarged morality that he brought to the service 
of the state was the early lesson learned in home and school, of uniformity 
sacrificed for harmony of one cause lying under many manifestations. 
Burke's sympathy and charity were so hearty that, in his American 
writings, many entirely misapprehend his motive for conciliation, and 
fancy him an honest New England patriot. His consideration of the 
colonies and their difficulties was from the political standpoint. But as 
the very eating and drinking of a devout man are consecrated, so 
Burke's statecraft is religious as well as political ; and it shows to the 
priest and the church as well as to the state their proper course. He 
looked upon the American difficulties as the fermentation of the old 
Puritan leaven. To the free thinking part of those colonies represented 
by Franklin and Jefferson, he paid little heed. It was the "dissidence 
of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion," with which 
he had to deal. And his method is the only one that is ever applicable 
to dissentients, "genuine simpilicity of heart is an healing and cementing 
principle." He refuses to discuss at all the abstract right of the question. 
Such debates are suitable only for schoolmen and sophists. His business 

IS 



226 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

is the present, "Dissent is here: what in the name of God are you 
going to do with it?" A decision as to the metaphysical right of either 
side would not give peace. And peace is the one thing desirable. There- 
fore he sought it in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts ; sought 
it in the spirit of peace and through principles purely pacific. "Not 
peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the 
labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations ; not peace to arise out of 
universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; 
not peace to depend on the judicial determination of perplexing ques- 
tions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex 
government. ... I propose, by removing the ground of difference, 
and by restoring the former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in 
the mother country to give permanent satisfaction to the people." 
Harmony can be restored only by concession. And concession must 
come from the older and wiser party. The mother country must recog- 
nize the willfulness in her children, and moderate it by her gentle counsels. 
An attitude toward wayward members other than conciliating acts as a 
spur. Affection, not metaphysical speculation, forms the real ties, light 
as air but strong as links of iron. Many nowadays will give an intel- 
lectual assent to Burke's proposition, though they have not that centering 
of the attention in the spiritual realm which is necessary for putting it 
in practice. But in the material age to which he was prophet, even intel- 
lectual assent was refused. Burke, denounces his mole-eyed contem- 
poraries, and does it politely, by suggesting that such despicable folk are 
not to be found in English state circles. "All this I know well enough 
will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and 
mechanical politicians, who have no place among us; a sort of people 
who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who 
therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement 
of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly 
initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles, which, 
in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial 
existence, are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics 
is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go 
ill together." 

A teaching of the Wisdom Religion is that intellectual illumination 
comes as the result of moral practice, "Keeping the commandments 
brings knowledge of the doctrine." Burke is one more witness to the 
law. His tolerance and sympathy led him to a clear understanding of 
the nature of government; the theory of governing he formulates might 
be printed as a corollary to a sentence in the Gita: "The knowledge 
whereby one Eternal nature is perceived in all beings, undivided though 
beings are divided, know that knowledge to be of Substance." "Govern- 
ment is an institution of Divine authority, yet its forms, and the persons 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 227 

who administer it, all originate from the people." It is the old familiar 
thought of a Divine Eternal Spirit that comes perenially to manifestation 
in temporary and varying forms. The endeavor to make uniform those 
varying manifestations would check the movement of the spirit; the 
spirit would escape, leaving an empty shell. He sees that government 
is part of the great whole, nature, and that the part works after the 
pattern of the whole, as a portion of matter cast from a rotating sphere 
continues, in miniature, the same rotation. "By a constitutional policy, 
working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our 
government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy 
and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the 
goods of fortune, the gifts of providence, are handed down to us, and 
from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed 
in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and 
with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of 
transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, 
moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human 
race, the whole at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, 
in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied 
tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation and progression. Thus, by 
preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we 
improve, we are never wholly new ; in what we retain, we are never 
wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles, to 
our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but 
by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we 
have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; 
binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic 
ties ; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affec- 
tions; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their 
combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our 
sepulchres, and our altars." Hence while Burke's affection binds him to 
his native limited monarchy, the best form for the English in their 
circumstances he cannot declare that that form of government is abso- 
lutely the best. Its excellence is wholly relative. "I reprobate no form 
of government merely upon abstract principles." It is best for the 
English, but, not for the Athenians, or for African tribes. Nor can 
he give any definition of what liberty and a free government are; all 
these things are relative; "a free government," he writes, to the sheriffs 
of Bristol, "is what the people think so; and they and not I are the 
natural, lawful and competent judges of this matter." Is not the law 
of Karma implicit in his teaching? As of government, so of religion, 
no one of the perishing vehicles can be named absolutely the best. Each 
is best for the tribe or race whose Karma has produced it. Hence for 
any nation to attempt to impose its government or religion upon another 



228 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

is futile and impious. Those political and religious forms are temporary 
things for the discipline of the spirit. When the spirit has outgrown its 
present casing it will take on a new. So Burke discountenances the 
proselyting zeal of missionaries religious and political. "It is not morally 
true that we are bound to establish in every country that form of religion 
which in our minds is most agreeable to truth, and conduces most to the 
eternal happiness of mankind." He heartily favors the example of gentle 
and godly lives brought before those who are savage and ungodly. But 
he wishes other nations and tribes to develop naturally from within, from 
their own germ. He does not desire that all men be whitewashed in 
order to appear as white men. In a century that mistook its indifference 
and hostility to religion for toleration, Burke is a striking example of 
genuine reverence and charity. Two Brahmin priests sent from India 
on matters of state were so lodged in London that the religious cere- 
monies, which were their obligations, were impossible of performance. 
Hearing of their discomfort and involuntary neglect of office, Burke 
received them into his home, and had a greenhouse prepared, according 
to the requirements of their ritual, for their use in duties that to them 
were sacred and bounden. 

The sense of growth, of germinal expansion, of a natural course, 
in a word, of evolution, made him hostile to revolutionary proceedings. 
To declare the whole past one error, to blot it out, to begin anew, was to 
him folly, ignorance, madness an endeavor to push spires skyward when 
the foundations were demolished. His standard of a statesman is "a dis- 
position to preserve and an ability to improve taken together." "Every- 
thing else," he writes, "is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execu- 
tion." But to preserve and at the same time to improve, and with due 
consideration of that silent but powerful agent, time, is difficult. Revolu- 
tion evades, and slips aside from difficulty. 

"This it has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to 
confront, and to overcome; and when they had overcome the first diffi- 
culty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties ; 
thus to enable them to extend the empire of their science; and even to 
push forward, beyond the reach of their original thoughts, the landmarks 
of the human understanding itself. Difficulty is a severe instructor, 
set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legis- 
lator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better 
too. Pater ipse colendi hand facilem esse viam voluit. He that wrestles 
with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist 
is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an inti- 
mate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all 
its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial. It is the want of 
nerves of understanding for such a task, it is the degenerate fondness 
for tricking short-cuts, and little fallacious facilities, that has in so many 
parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers. 

"It is this inability to wrestle with difficulty which has obliged the 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 229 

arbitrary Assembly of France to commence their schemes of reform with 
abolition and total destruction. But is it in destroying and pulling down 
that skill is displayed? Your mob can do this as well at least as your 
assemblies. The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand is more than 
equal to that task. Rage and phrensy will pull down more in half an 
hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred 
years. The errors and defects of old establishments are visible and 
palpable. It calls for little ability to point them out ; and where absolute 
power is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish the vice and the 
establishment together. The same lazy but restless disposition, which 
loves sloth and hates quiet, directs the politicians, when they come to 
work for supplying the place of what they have destroyed. To make 
everything the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to 
destroy. No difficulties occur in what has never been tried. Criticism 
is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed ; and 
eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination, 
in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition. 

"At once to preserve and to reform is quite another thing. When 
the useful parts of an old establishment are kept, and what is super- 
added is to be fitted to what is retained, a vigorous mind, steady, perse- 
vering attention, various powers of comparison and combination, and 
the resources of an understanding fruitful in expedients, are to be 
exercised; they are to be exercised in a continued conflict with the 
combined forces of opposite vices, with the obstinacy that rejects all 
improvement, and the levity that is fatigued and disgusted with every- 
thing of which it is in possession. But you may object 'A process of 
this kind is slow. It is not fit for an assembly, which glories in per- 
forming in a few months the work of ages. Such a mode of reforming, 
possibly, might take up many years.' Without question it might ; and it 
ought. It is one of the excellencies of a method in which time is amongst 
the assistants, that its operation is slow, and in some cases almost 
imperceptible." 

Again his sense of evolution led him to inveigh against anarchy and 
similar errors of deluded zealots, who glimpse indeed the reality of the 
Spirit, but are dazzled and blinded by its splendor. 

lo credo, per 1'acume ch'io soffersi 

Del vivo raggio, ch'io sarei, smarrito, 

Se gli occhi miei da lui fossero aversi. 

Dimly perceiving the Immortal and Unchanging, they never understand 
that the Eternal Radiance wills for itself an illusive manifestation of 
shadows, which, however, have a temporal reality. To the true spiritual- 
ist of every religion, Buddha, St. Francis, Emerson, \Vhitman, these 
shadows partake somewhat of the Divine Nature. Reverence and love 
is due them as the temple of the Soul. True spiritualists are in no 
combat with things as they are, but accept the universe and its offspring 
as divine instruments of perfection instruments of the Lonely One 
instruments of every man. They make the illusive shadows serve to 
bring them nearer to Substance. 



230 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

In a world of sense they live, 
By sensible impressions not enthralled, 
But by their quickening impulse made more prompt 
To hold fit converse with the spiritual world. 

Now the State is one of these Shadows, instruments, not an end but a 
way toward the end. Emerson truly writes: 

"To educate the wise man the State exists; and with the appear- 
ance of the wise man the State expires. The appearance of character 
makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs 
no army, fort, or navy he loves men too well; no bribe, or blast, or 
palace, to draw friends to him ; no vantage ground, no favorable circum- 
stance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, 
for he is prophet; no statute-book, for he has the law-giver; no money, 
for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, 
for the life of the Creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. 
He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer 
and piety of all men unto him need not husband and educate a few, to 
share with him a select -and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic ; 
his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers." 

Burke is in accord with Emerson, "Men are qualified for civil liberty 
in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own 
appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; 
in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above 
their vanity and presumption ; in proportion as they are more disposed to 
listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery 
of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will 
and appetite be placed somewhere and the less of it there is within, the 
more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution 
of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions 
forge their fetters." With the appearance of the wise man the State will 
disappear. But who among us is wise? Surely all would depart as did 
the accusers from the adulterous woman. Hence, rightly to appreciate 
civilisation is a hall-mark of sanity, since none but the insane would 
attribute to themselves sufficient wisdom to dispense with its discipline. 
And it is against such insanity that Burke is protesting when he writes 
those, probably his greatest, paragraphs about the sacredness of the 
State and of its administrators who stand to us in the person of God 
Himself. "They conceive that He who gave our nature to be perfected 
by our virtue," writes Burke, "willed also the necessary means of its 
perfection. He willed therefore the State." 

"We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the 
basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort. In 
England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of super- 
stition, with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might 
have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred 
of the people of England would not prefer to impiety. We shall never 
be such fools as to call in an enemy to the substance of any system to 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 231 

remove its corruption, to supply its defects, or to perfect its construc- 
tion. If our religious tenets should ever want a further elucidation, we 
shall not call on Atheism to explain them. We shall not light up our 
temple from that unhallowed fire. It will be illuminated with other 
lights. It will be perfumed with other incense, than the infectious stuff 
which is imported by the smugglers of adulterated metaphysics. If our 
ecclesiastical establishment should want a revision, it is not avarice or 
rapacity, public or private, that we should employ for the audit, or receipt, 
or application of its consecrated revenue. Violently condemning neither 
the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, since heats are subsided, the Roman 
system of religion, we prefer the Protestant ; not because we think it has 
less of the Christian religion in it, but because, in our judgment, it has 
more. We are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal. 

"We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his consti- 
tution a religious animal; that Atheism is against, not only our reason, 
but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if, in the moment 
of riot, and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the 
alembic of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should 
uncover our nakedness, by throwing off that Christian religion which 
has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilisa- 
tion amongst us, and amongst many other nations, we are apprehensive 
(being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some 
uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take place of it. 

"First, I beg leave to speak of our church establishment, which is 
the first of our prejudices, not a prejudice destitute of reason, but 
involving in it profound and extensive wisdom. I speak of it first. It 
is first, and last, and midst in our minds. For, taking ground on that 
religious system, of which we are now in possession, we continue to act 
on the early received and uniformly continued sense of mankind. That 
sense not only, like a wise architect, hath built up the august fabric of 
states, but like a provident proprietor, to preserve the structure from 
profanation and ruin, as a sacred temple purged from all the impurities 
of fraud, and violence, and injustice, and tyranny, hath solemnly and 
forever consecrated the commonwealth, and all that officiate in it. This 
consecration is made, that all who administer in the government of men, 
in which they stand in the person of God himself, should have high and 
worthy motives of their function and destination ; that their hope should 
be full of immortality; that they should not look to the paltry pelf of 
the moment, nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, 
but to a solid, permanent existence, in the permanent part of their nature, 
and to a permanent fame and glory, in the example they leave as a rich 
inheritance to the world. 

"Such sublime principles ought to be infused into persons of exalted 
situations; and religious establishments provided, that they may contin- 
ually revive and enforce them. Every sort of moral, every sort of civil, 
every sort of politic institution, aiding the rational and natural ^ties that 
connect the human understanding and affections to the divine, are not 
more than necessary, in order to build up that wonderful structure, Man ; 
whose prerogative it is, to be in a great degree a creature of his own 
making; and who, when made as he ought to be made, is destined to 
hold no trivial place in the creation. But whenever man is put over 



232 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

men, as the better nature ought ever to preside, in that case more par- 
ticularly, he should as nearly as possible be approximated to his 
perfection. 

"The consecration of the state, by a state religious establishment, is 
necessary also to operate with a wholesome awe upon free citizens; 
because, in order to secure their freedom, they must enjoy some determi- 
nate portion of power. To them therefore a religion connected with the 
state, and with their duty towards it, becomes even more necessary than 
in such societies, where the people, by the terms of their subjection, are 
confined to private sentiments, and the management of their own family 
concerns. All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be 
strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust; and 
that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great 
Master, Author, and Founder of Society. 

"This principle ought even to be more strongly impressed upon 
the minds of those who compose the collective sovereignty, than upon 
those of single princes. Without instruments, these princes can do 
nothing. Whoever uses instruments, in rinding helps, finds also impedi- 
ments. Their power is therefore by no means complete; nor are they 
safe in extreme abuse. Such persons, however elevated by flattery, 
arrogance, and self-opinion, must be sensible that, whether covered or 
not by positive law, in some way or other they are accountable even here 
for the abuse of their trust. If they are not cut off by a rebellion of 
their people, they may be strangled by the very janissaries kept for their 
security against all other rebellion. Thus we have seen the king of 
France sold by his soldiers for an increase of pay. But where popular 
authority is absolute and unrestrained, the people have an infinitely 
greater, because a far better founded, confidence in their own power. 
They are themselves, in a great measure, their own instruments. They 
are nearer to their objects. Besides, they are less under responsibility 
to one of the greatest controlling powers on earth, the sense of fame and 
estimation. The share of infamy, that is likely to fall to the lot of each 
individual in public acts, is small indeed ; the operation of opinion being 
in the inverse ratio to the number of those who abuse power. Their own 
approbation of their own acts has to them the appearance of a public 
judgment in their favor. A perfect democracy is therefore the most 
shameless thing in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also the 
most fearless. No man apprehends in his person that he can be made 
subject to punishment. Certainly the people at large never ought: for 
as all punishments are for example towards the conservation of the people 
at large, the people at large can never become the subject of punishment 
by any human hand. It is therefore of infinite importance that they 
should not be suffered to imagine that their will, any more than that of 
kings, is the standard of right and wrong. They ought to be persuaded 
that they are full as little entitled, and far less qualified with safety to 
themselves, to use any arbitrary power whatsoever; that therefore they 
are not, under a false show of liberty, but in truth, to exercise an un- 
natural, inverted domination, tyrannically to exact, from those who 
officiate in the state, not an entire devotion to their interest, which is 
their right, but an abject submission to their occasional will ; extinguish- 
ing thereby, in all those who serve them, all moral principle, all sense of 
dignity, all use of judgment, and all consistency of character; whilst 



233 

by the very same process they give themselves up a proper, a suitable, 
but a most contemptible prey to the servile ambition of popular syco- 
phants, or courtly flatterers. 

****** * * 

"Society is indeed a contract, subordinate contracts for objects of 
mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure but the state 
ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agree- 
ment in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other 
such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to 
be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other 
reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to 
the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is 
a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in 
every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership 
cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not 
only between those who are living, but between those who are living, 
those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of 
each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of 
eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting 
the visible and the invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned 
by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each 
in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, 
who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to 
submit their will to that law. The municipal corporations of that uni- 
versal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their 
speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear 
asunder the bonds of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it 
into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. 
It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen, 
but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no dis- 
cussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to 
anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule; because this neces- 
sity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things, 
to which man must be obedient by consent or force; but if that which 
is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the 
law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast 
forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and 
virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, dis- 
cord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow." 

The last portion of Burke's teaching to which I would call attention 
is again a corollary of that one law of growth : "The knowledge whereby 
one eternal nature is perceived in all beings, undivided though beings are 
divided." A rationalized church, and a rationalized science gave issue 
to a rationalized society, a social order to be brought about by the levelling 
of ranks. Burke's comment on the effort is brief but adequate ; he calls 
it usurpation of the prerogatives of nature, an effort to change, by force, 
circumstances which rise out of human nature itself. 

"They have much, but bad, metaphysics; much, but bad, geometry; 
much, but false, proportionate arithmetic; but if it were all as exact as 



234 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

metaphysics, geometry, and arithmetic ought to be, and if their schemes 
were perfectly consistent in all their parts, it would make only a more 
fair and sightly vision. It is remarkable, that, in a great arrangement 
of mankind, not one reference whatsoever is to be found to anything 
moral or anything politic; nothing that relates to, the concerns, the 
actions, the passions, the interests of men. The legislators who framed 
the ancient republics knew that their business was too arduous to be 
accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an under- 
graduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had 
to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They 
had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those 
habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They 
were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first pro- 
duced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst 
men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the 
periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their 
several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the 
quality of the property itself, all which rendered them as it were so many 
different species of animals. From hence they thought themselves 
obliged to dispose their citizens into such classes, and to place them in 
such situations in the state, as their peculiar habits might qualify them 
to fill, and to allot to them such appropriated privileges, as might secure 
to them what their specific occasions required, and which might furnish 
to each description such force as might protect it in the conflict caused 
by the diversity of interests, that must exist, and must contend, in all 
complex society: for the legislator would have been ashamed, that the 
coarse husbandman should well know how to assort and to use his sheep, 
horses, and oxen, and should have enough of common sense, not to 
abstract and equalize them all into animals, without providing for each 
kind an appropriate food, care, and employment ; whilst he, the economist, 
disposer and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy 
metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks but as men in 
general." 

The social order that Burke declares the true one, is what his imagi- 
native vision, his spiritual eyes, discern. The rationalizers perceived 
only the inequalities of human life, and sought to make all men happy 
by an equal division of things. Beneath the surface Burke saw . . v 
"the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions ; in which 
consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous 
fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men 
destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to 
aggravate and embitter that real inequality, which it never can remove; 
and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of 
those whom it must leave in an humble state, as those whom it is able 
to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy." He declares 
that it is possible to construct an order, which, without confounding 
ranks, would produce a noble equality, and hand it down through all 
the gradations of social life. These ranks, inequalities and varying 
conditions are again discipline for the spirit, by which the individual 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 235 

gains rich experience. "Taking it for granted that I do not write to the 
disciples of the Parisian philosophy, I may assume, that the awful Author 
of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence; and 
that having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according 
to our will, but according to his, he has, in and by that disposition, vir- 
tually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us. 
We have obligations to mankind at large, which are not in consequence 
of any special voluntary pact. They arise from the relation of man to 
man, and the relation of man to God, which relations are not matters 
of choice." 

Burke's private life is a pleasant picture. His large money indebted- 
ness to his friend, the Marquis of Rockingham, is sometimes mentioned 
as dishonor and dishonesty. But any group of people that has worked 
devotedly for principles which they believe are moulded in the nature and 
essence of things will understand the relations of the two men. Burke 
began his public life as secretary to the Marquis, who was leader of 
one section of the Whigs. In a short time Burke and the few nobles 
who held with the Marquis found their convictions were common; 
but Burke formulated for them those beliefs which they held vaguely. 
In the years when all effort seemed futile, and the wisest course 
an entire giving up of protest, Burke's zeal kept the band together 
and his genius gave to posterity those pamphlets and speeches which 
even his detractors ungrudgingly praise. It was Burke who brought 
the members of the party together. It was he who dispatched agents 
to the colonies and it was he who received from these agents reports 
and accounts of conditions of life in far countries. He was in con- 
stant communication with the courts and ministers of the continent, 
learning from their envoys those things which it behooves a statesman to 
know. Now Dr. Johnson once said that a stranger who should turn aside 
under a balcony from a passing shower, and should find Burke sheltered 
there, would discover in five minutes Burke's towering greatness. So that 
it is not impossible that colonial agents and foreign envoys would have 
done reverence to his genius in Grub Street. But it is also possible that 
neither the Marquis of Rockingham, nor Burke, was willing that the 
personal poverty of the real leader of the Whigs should represent the 
party to England and to foreign nations. With money (70,000, it is 
said) advanced by his friend, Burke established himself at Beconsfield, 
the estate of Edmund Waller. When the Marquis died he left Burke's 
promissory memoranda among his papers, cancelled. The incident 
testifies to the magnanimity of both men. 

Farming at Beconsfield, in the intervals of state affairs, Burke is 
seen as eager in his pursuit of all the economic sciences as were the 
French philosophers. He writes to Arthur Young, the agricultural 
expert of that day, for the reasons of deep versus top plowing. When, 



236 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

in successive seasons, carrots do not fatten his hogs, as text-books said 
they should, he seeks out the reason by laboratory methods. He is eager 
for every legitimate improvement that makes life more convenient. But 
his motive is quite different from that of the ordinary social reformer 
of his day as well as ours. To the philosophe, the universe and life 
were bounded by the flaming ramparts of the earth ; it became man's duty 
to make this miscreated planet as habitable as possible for the space he 
should pass upon it. To Burke, the gross and trivial things of earth 
gave opportunity for discipline. In working upon the difficulties of 
inanimate perverseness, man's will becomes strengthened and purified. 

With a brief account of his relations with his constituents at Bristol, 
this narrative shall end. He was elected representative for that, the 
second commercial city of the kingdom, in 1774. In a speech at the 
poll, he opened to the electors very clearly his conviction as to a 
representative's duty: 

"It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, 
to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to 
his own. But his unbiased opinion, his nature judgment, his enlightened 
conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set 
of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor 
from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, 
for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative 
owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, 
instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. 

"If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without 
question ought to be superior. But government and legislation are 
matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort 
of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; 
in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide ; and where those 
who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from 
those who hear the arguments?" 

Acting upon this conviction, he sacrificed in two or three matters, 
the local interests of Bristol, to the welfare of the kingdom and Empire. 
He thus so displeased his constituents that in 1780 they refused him 
re-election. Burke had sought re-election, and made one of his great 
speeches in explanation of his parliamentary conduct during those six 
years. But when he perceived that the electors would not again choose 
his services, he did the unusual thing of coming before them with an 
address of thanks and farewell, instead of taking leave in the usual 
manner by letter. His short speech is a model of dignity and urbanity. 
But between the sentences, one hears the dropping of tears over 
Jerusalem. 

"I am not in the least surprised, nor in the least angry at this view 
of things. I have read the book of life for a long time, and I have read 
other books a little. Nothing has happened to me, but what has hap- 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 237 

pened to men much better than me, and in times and in nations full 
as good as the age and country we live in. To say that I am no way 
concerned, would be neither decent nor true. The representation of 
Bristol was an object on many accounts dear to me; and I certainly 
should very far prefer it to any other in the kingdom. My habits are 
made to it ; and it is in general more unpleasant to be rejected after long 
trial, than not to be chosen at all. 

"But, gentlemen, I will see nothing except your former kindness, 
and I will give way to no other sentiments than those of gratitude. 
From the bottom of my heart I thank you for what you have done for 
me. You have given me a long term, which is now expired. I have 
performed the conditions, and enjoyed all the profits, to the full; and 
I now surrender your estate into your hands, without being in a single 
tile or a single stone impaired or wasted by my use. I have served the 
public for fifteen years. I have served you in particular for six. What 
is past is well stored. It is safe, and out of the power of fortune. What 
is to come is in wiser hands than ours; and He, in whose hands it is, 
best knows whether it is best for you and me that I should be in 
parliament, or even in the world. 

"It has been usual for a candidate who declines, to take his leave 
by a letter to the sheriffs ; but I received your trust in the face of day, 
and in the face of day I accept your dismission. I am not, I am not 
at all ashamed to look upon you; nor can my presence discompose the 
order of business here. I humbly and respectfully take my leave of 
the sheriffs, the candidates, and the electors; wishing heartily that the 
choice may be for the best, at a time which calls, if ever time did call, for 
service, that is not nominal. It is no plaything you are about. I tremble 
when I consider the trust I have presumed to ask. I confided perhaps 
too much in my intentions. They were really fair and upright; and 
I am bold to say, that I ask no ill thing for you, when on parting from 
this place I pray that whomever you choose to succeed me, he may 
resemble me exactly in all things, except in my abilities to serve, and my 
fortune to please you." 

All literature receives its value in proportion as it is applicable, 
beyond the moment and locality, that called it forth, to the needs of 
mankind generally. Burke showed to his contemporaries in the eight- 
eenth century the right conduct of life. And his counsels are true for 
us. We believe he enunciated universal principles that "genuine sim- 
plicity of heart is an healing and cementing principle" that "magna- 
nimity" in church as well as in state "is not seldom the truest wisdom; 
and a great empire [or church] and little minds go ill together". 

c. c. c. 



REINCARNATION. 



IT is a rich human experience to know a mountain to know it and 
love it completely. One comes to sense the individuality, the 
character of a mountain, and there is always some one outlook-spot 

from which that character best reveals itself. 

Wherever mountain lovers and mountain climbers gather, two 
questions will be heard: "From what side should the mountain be 
approached?" "Which trail is most practicable?" These questions have 
even greater pertinence when we consider a mountain in human expe- 
rience like Reincarnation ; for man is at once the subject of Reincarnation 
and its observer he is the mountain and the climber. 

A subject like Reincarnation has many vantage points, and many 
trails leading to it a separate trail for every climber at the start, but 
before the peak is reached all trails unite. My own way of arriving at 
the ancient doctrine was a rather rocky road; not one to be recom- 
mended, but it is the trail I know best. 

Fifteen or twenty years ago, my attitude toward life, if expressed 
in verse, would be well rendered by Fitzgerald's translation of the 
Persian poet, where he says : 

. . . "could you and I with him conspire 
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things, entire 
Would we not shatter it to bits and then 
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire!" 

Youth is by tendency anarchistic, and proverbially irreverent. At 
that time I was wholly convinced that this world was inherently a place 
of injustice. I recognized that through historic periods the ideal of 
justice and the common standard of justice, as between man and man, 
had been constantly revised for the better. But it seemed equally clear 
to me that complete justice could never prevail in this earth-life. 
Things were very much awry. Not only did "the hand of the Potter 
shake" but Jove had evidently "nodded" more than once while the plans 
and the laws of this old world were a-making! 

Theologians, I thought, might very well explain that the "seven 
days" of creation represented vast ages but, if this world as a place for 
human beings were a fair sample, then Creation had been a scamped, 
bungling piece of work, on which more time might have been spent to 
advantage. Of course, nothing could be done about the matter, but, 
just for my own satisfaction, I set about the formulating of a proper 
plan for creation one that would give to everyone a fair deal in the 

A paper read before the New York Branch of the T. S. 
38 



REINCARNATION 239 

game of life. A new and just scheme of creation seemed quite feasible, 
until I attempted to work out the details of the plan, on paper; then I 
found possible but two types of the world-scheme. In one, human 
beings would be reduced to mechanical puppets, without freedom of 
will and without adequate reason for being. In the other, they had 
freedom and a lot of other fine things but I could not find any way of 
arranging to give them justice in one lifetime. My scheme for a grand 
Clearing-house, through which all men's actions were to be justly 
rewarded, involved problems of an inelastic currency with which not 
even an insurgent Congressman would care to grapple. 

It was quite a different sort of problem, however, which next 
confronted me. Granting that troublesome details might be worked 
out satisfactorily, what would be the real mainspring of human action 
in that new scheme of things? Throughout history could be traced 
a tremendous motive toward progress. In my own heart I knew that 
back of mere right and wrong, back of justice and injustice, and beyond 
all considerations of reward and punishment there existed in the universe 
some tireless, unseen power that drove men on. This tremendous 
driving force seemed to be on the mental plane, and the question natu- 
rally arose "Were the old magicians and soothsayers right when they 
declared that man himself was omnipotent as soon as he discovered 
his own powers?" 

Were there then powers latent in man which would make it possible 
for him to equalize the warring forces of his own nature, to harmonize 
the awful discord of life, and to achieve justice? This query led me 
to read everything I could find on the latent forces and the states of 
man traces of Hermetic teaching, the Od force, mesmerism, spiritual- 
ism, Kaballa, black and white magic. Steeped in the drippings of that 
kind of literature, the mental saturation point was soon reached and the 
search abandoned. 

The years were passing; I tried atheism, but there seemed even 
less satisfaction in that than in the suppositional one-sided contract 
which my pastor urged as existing between me and a very pious man, 
who lived a very sad life and was finally crucified by a mob. I was a 
very much perturbed and a very unhappy young man. More years 
went by, and finally I decided to take the consensus of opinion held by 
the "heathen" philosophers and try for a little to live in accordance 
with it. Then the force aspect of Karma and Reincarnation came to me, 
explaining a thousand things which before were the blindest of riddles. 
For the first time I had something solid to rest on, something which 
appealed to me as being true through all ages, and a period of peace 
followed. The world was all right, and God was all right, and I was 
all right; so I began establishing friendlier relations with all three. 

It was never for a moment a question whether or not I should 



240 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

believe in Reincarnation. I needed that doctrine in my thinking, and 
when it came I recognized it as the keystone of the arch, for lack of 
which I had been obliged to stop building. This old world became a 
better place. Justice did reign. Right and progress were not ephemeral 
but eternal. That is the rough country through which my way came 
to the foot of the mountain. A little later it led into the marked trail 
of the Theosophical Society, where I have found companionship of 
seasoned climbers who have experience of the trail in all weathers, and 
maps of the old, old Path to which it leads. 

Now, practically, what difference does Reincarnation make to me, 
anyway not philosophically, but everyday, in business? In the first 
place, it makes a lot of difference in the way I feel about the other 
fellow. I know that he, like myself, is on a tremendously long journey, 
and if he is now a bigger, stronger, saner, kindlier man than I, why, 
good for him! He has learned the lessons of experience better than I, 
in this and in former lives. I need not be jealous of him. All I need 
is just to obey better, and then, in another incarnation or two, I shall 
be stronger and saner and more useful myself. If the other fellow 
makes mistakes that hurt me, some of them mistakes that I have learned, 
in some life or other, not to make, I don't have to charge them up to 
his naturally mean disposition, and dislike him. He too is learning not 
to make mistakes, through making them. 

Then, the realization that I am in the middle of a very long journey 
through a just world, ought to bring a high kind of constructive 
patience. It ought to make me honest, really honest, because I know 
that this is a world founded on wonderfully just and honest laws, and 
because the inevitable results of sham and evasion and sharp practice 
are kindergarten lessons that I have been at for many life-times already. 
A complete mental certainty that I am coming back here, just as often 
as it is necessary, to learn strength and poise and the use of my will, 
should suggest to me that it is worth while to be economical of my 
resources, that it is the part of wisdom not to be spendthrift of time, 
vitality, opportunity. A knowledge of the laws of Karma and Reincar- 
nation certainly does lead a man to look his failures in the eye and 
acknowledge them wholly his own. 

It is healthy for a man to recognize that his spiritual nature, his 
highest self, is his real self; that his intellectual, rational mind is a 
lower self; that his psychical, emotional nature is lower yet; and that 
his physical body is as empty of traits and desires, as blameless, as his 
overcoat. I have trouble enough keeping patient with my pig-headed 
rational mind, but that is not a circumstance to the trouble of keeping 
on speaking terms with my stupid emotional nature. That emotional 
nature is my dolt-child, it wants only to experience, to feel. I find myself 
talking to it, the way one talks to a backward-boy, trying to make it 



REINCARNATION 241 

understand the conditions of life, the kind of friends, and the kind of 
unlearned lessons that it insists upon foisting on that innocent looking 
kid that I shall be when next I am a two-year-old. 

Then, the great method of Karma and Reincarnation gives a clearer 
notion of what deity itself must be. It is rather necessary to think about 
deity once in a while, downtown; the game of cross-purposes and the 
intense competition would make a man cynical, if he had no conception 
of deity and of an orderly universe to use as a background for it all. 
It is restful to realize occasionally that an overbrooding power and 
intelligence and love has so planned this "Scheme of Things, entire" 
that each one of us comes into each lifetime under ideal conditions for 
transmuting some portions of the aboriginal dross of our nature into 
the gold of character. 

A conviction of the truth of Reincarnation is our title deed to a 
sense of humor, to a sense of freedom, to a sense of perspective. When 
I first grasped the idea of Reincarnation and what it implied, I heartily 
wished that I might know enough about my last incarnation to know 
what my name then was, and where my then body was buried, so that 
I might go and sit on my own tombstone and drum my heels in pure 
joy of emancipation from that old fear of death. But Reincarnation 
points forward and not back. This victorious sense of proportion 
should banish the vague fears and dreads and worries of life. We can 
afford to smile kindly and appreciatively but still to smile at ourselves 
and at everybody else who is not afraid to be smiled at. 

A triumphant sense of humor not irony, satire or wit, but real 
humor may be found throughout the teachings of every advanced soul. 
I cannot believe that Jesus was a sanctimonious soul who mostly wept. 
No man could be so great as Buddha without the peace of a great sanity 
in his heart, and Buddha is depicted with a wonderfully comprehending 
and humorous smile; the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upanishads fairly 
glow with the quiet humor of Krishna and other sages. The truth of 
evolution through Reincarnation gives us a right to the knowledge that 
on the high plane where the harmony of the universe can be heard as 
song, the humor of the universe may be felt as joy. 

K. D. P. 



"Those who serve Him are radiant. Their faces reflect the sun 
of His Consciousness" BOOK OF ITEMS. 



16 



INTELLECTUAL PROCRUS 
TEANISM* 



WHEN Doctor Van Vohris asked me to come to Muncie 
and talk to this Club, he said to me that its membership 
was made up of intelligent and independent thinkers. 
This appealed to me. I am interested in the really inde- 
pendent thinker. The independent thinker, while always in the 
minority, has always led the van in the World's progress. While 
this is true, one of the rarest of all things is the thinker who is not 
only independent but is also at the same time fair, open-minded 
and unbiased. Many a self-proclaimed independent thinker is simply 
a man who is in a state of rebellion and unrest. He is dissatisfied 
with generally accepted beliefs, teachings and doctrines, but when 
he gives voice to his protest we are apt to find that he is more of 
a "kicker" than thinker, and that he falls within one or the other 
of two classes: 

First: He is a mere iconoclast or negationist, who, dissatisfied 
with the existing social fabric or with existing beliefs and creeds, 
would simply scuttle the ship in which we are embarked, or 

Second: He is one who has formulated to his own satisfaction 
a different social scheme or a new creed or code of doctrine to which 
he thinks all should subscribe. He has a hobby of his own, and 
like the Scotchman, his "doxy" is "orthodoxy," and the other man's 
"doxy" is "heterodoxy." 

The story of Procrustes and his bed, while of doubtful historical 
authenticity, is illuminative of the mental attitude of average 
humanity. Procrustes would have had all men fit his bed. If they 
were too short they must be stretched, or if too long must have 
enough of their anatomy amputated, so that they would just fit. 
It of course went rather hard with those whose physical propor- 
tions did not conform to the established plans and specifications. 
The old Greek robber chieftain was only applying to the physical 
man what the great majority of mankind have in all ages insisted 
on applying to the intellectual man. Strangely enough, while the 
Procrustean method of producing physical uniformity has been 
universally denounced as barbarous, there has been until compara- 
tively recent years, almost equal agreement in all ages and among 
all peoples that his method was not only proper but commendable 

* Address by Hon. R. W. McBride, Ex-Judge Indiana Supreme Court, read before the 
Humanitarian Club at Muncie, Ind., February 14, 1909. 



INTELLECTUAL PROCRUSTEANISM 243 

as applied to the intellectual man. Creeds have been formulated, 
and when any were found who did not appear to be intellectually 
adjusted to the bed thus made for them, the gentle surgery of fire 
and sword, thumbscrew and rack has been employed to bring about 
a proper adjustment. 

The quality of such action for the purpose of establishing 
Orthodoxy in belief, does not differ essentially from the methods 
adopted by Procrustes to bring about Orthodoxy in size. 

Socrates was compelled to drink the cup of hemlock because 
he was suspected of heresy. Jesus was nailed to the cross as a 
heretic Jew. Nero fattened his wild beasts with the flesh of heretic 
Romans, and the methods adopted by the Spanish Inquisition, by 
Calvin at Geneva when he caused the burning of Servetus, by 
Henry IV, and Henry VIII, of England, when hundreds of alleged 
heretics were burned at the stake, by the actors in the bloody scenes 
of St. Bartholomew's Day in France, and even by some of our 
woithy New England forebears, were all essentially Procrustean. 

It is a manifestation of a spirit and a tendency common to 
humanity everywhere, that seems to need only opportunity to 
manifest itself. The sword of Islam drank the blood of hundreds 
of thousands, only because from the viewpoint of Mohammedanism 
they were heretics, while the Christian Crusaders of Europe battled 
in many bloody campaigns against those same Mohammedans 
because they had a different point of view. 

The tendency of the human mind to formulate creeds or plat- 
forms of belief, and to insist that every other person must profess belief 
in them or be deemed heretic, has always seemed to me as irra- 
tional as it would be to adopt a standard size of hat or shoe and 
require all persons to make their heads or their feet fit the standard. It 
is essentially Procrustean. 

During the century last past, there has been a marked tendency 
towards greater liberality. This has been especially marked during 
the last thirty years, although we still hear occasionally of trials 
for heresy. 

It is my purpose to say something of a movement which, in my 
opinion, has been one of the most potent of these liberalizing 
influences, while at the same time one of the least recognized, viz. : 
the Theosophical movement. Please understand distinctly, however, 
that I shall simply endeavor to correct some widely prevalent mis- 
conceptions concerning the Theosophical Society and concerning 
Theosophy itself. 

"Have you any of Bacon's works?" inquired a gentleman of 
the proprietor of a certain bookstore. "Nothing but 'The Swine 
Breeders' and 'Pork Packers' Manual' " was the reply. The answer 



244 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

of this intelligent vendor of books may cause a smile, but he came 
quite as near the mark as do many quite intelligent people who 
attempt to discuss Theosophy. 

Few words have been more misunderstood or more often mis- 
applied in recent years, than the word "Theosophy." It is probable 
that the conception of Theosophy in the mind of the average indi- 
vidual is that it is a compound of mysticism and charlatanism, with 
a preponderance of charlatanism. Some imagine it to be another 
name for Spiritualism, as was made evident by an article in the 
Indianapolis News, some years ago, published on the first page under 
the flaming headline "Theosophy's Victim." The article reported 
the suicide of a young woman who had become insane on the subject 
of Spiritualism. There was nothing to indicate that the young 
woman had ever heard of Theosophy, but it was obvious that the 
intelligent headliner and others responsible for the makeup of the 
News supposed that Theosophy was only another name for Spiritualism. 

Others imagine Theosophy to be a creed or code of doctrine to 
which one must subscribe to be an orthodox theosophist, and as 
this imaginary creed seems to them to contain some things not found 
in other established and recognized creeds, they fight shy of it lest 
they may be disturbed in some cherished belief. This is especially 
true of that class of religious people who are strong in theology, 
and whose ideas of Deity, the universe, of the present, the past and 
the future, and of the whence, the what, and the whither of man, 
are embalmed in certain theological formulae. 

The question "What is Theosophy?" is akin to Pilate's question 
addressed to Jesus "What is Truth?" Bacon says Pilate did not 
wait for an answer to his question. If he had, we might find in 
that answer an exposition of Theosophy. However, to those who 
understand the derivation of the word, the name itself tells what 
Theosophy is as the word means literally, the wisdom or knowledge 
of God, knowledge of things divine, knowledge of things concerning 
God. But while it is easy to tell what Theosophy is, it is a very 
different task to undertake to tell what is Theosophy. That is to 
say, what things we may with confidence say constitute true 
Theosophy. Before one can claim to speak with authority and to 
declare that this or that or the other is Theosophy, he must claim 
direct inspiration from Divinity. Only the tongue or pen that is 
inspired by the Infinite and Supreme Intelligence should attempt 
to pronounce "God's Very Truth," the knowledge and wisdom of 
God. As I can make no claim to inspiration, I shall not attempt 
the task. I can only speak from the standpoint of one who for more 
than twenty years has been a student trying to learn something of 
Iheosophy. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism, published in 1883, was the 



INTELLECTUAL PROCRUSTEANISM 245 

first publication of recent years to attract general public attention 
to the subject of Theosophy. It is probable that to the minds of the 
great majority of living people who have heard or read of Theosophy, 
the word suggests the system of philosophy outlined in that book, 
and elaborated in I sis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine, and other works, 
by H. P. Blavatsky, W. Q. Judge, and others. 

The impression also seems to be widespread that Theosophy is 
something that was previously unknown to the world at large, ancf 
that the claim is made for it that prior to the publication of Esoteric 
Buddhism, it was in fact esoteric and known only to the adepts and 
the initiates of the far East. This impression has doubtless grown 
out of the assumed identity of Theosophy with the system of Cos- 
mogony, of Evolution, and of the Development of Humanity, out- 
lined by Sinnett and Madame Blavatsky. It is claimed for this 
particular system of theosophic philosophy, that it was in part pre- 
viously esoteric and known only to the initiates, the adepts or 
"Wise Men of the East" and by them imparted to their "Chelas" or 
pupils under the veil of symbolism and allegory. Indeed, as the 
philosophy is given out in Esoteric Buddhism, Isis Unveiled, and 
The Secret Doctrine, it is claimed that the language used is largely 
symbolic, and carries a hidden meaning, so that it is in a measure 
still esoteric. It is also true that that philosophy belongs in the 
field of Theosophy and of theosophical study, but this does not 
necessarily justify an assertion of the identity of Theosophy with 
that particular philosophy. 

Theosophy is ages old. While not always designated by the 
name of "Theosophy" we find it was taught in ancient India, Egypt, 
Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome, among the Jews and 
the Arabs, and on down through medieval times to the present. 
The Jewish "Kabbala" is, or is at least claimed to be, in large part 
theosophical, and so also of the "Sufism" of Arabia, while the 
Neo-Platonists of the early Christian Church were essentially theos- 
ophists. Indeed, the Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that the term 
"Theosophy" was used by the Neo-Platonists and early Christian 
thinkers, to express the highest knowledge of God within the reach 
of the human mind. History and co-temporary literature has pre- 
served the names of scores of men who taught or professed to teach 
Theosophy or that which they claimed was Theosophy or Divine 
knowledge. Among the number we find the names of Apollonius 
of Tyana, Dionysius the Areopagite, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Para- 
celsus, Cagliostro, Swedenborg, St. Martin, Jacob Boehme, Oettin- 
ger, Tauler, Eckhart, Franz Von Baader, Schilling, and Molinos, and 
in quite recent years H. P. Blavatsky. Nor is a theosophical society 
by that name a new thing. In 1783 a theosophical society was 



246 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

organized and was still in existence in 1788. Its special purpose 
was to promote the teachings of Swedenborg. Most, if not all, of 
the persons above named have at one time or another been 
denounced as frauds or as self-deluded fanatics, although now most 
of them are recognized as having been honest and sincere, even if 
mistaken. 

The peculiar characteristic common to all so-called theosophical 
teachings, is that they are all based on the assumed existence of a 
Supreme and Divine Intelligence or Divine essence. Whenever and 
wherever Theosophy has appeared, and under whatsoever name or 
guise it has been taught, it has been the irreconcilable foe of mater- 
ialism, atheism, and agnosticism. While varying in the form of 
expression, it has also and always assumed the universal reign of 
law as an emanation from that Supreme and Divine Intelligence, 
a law that is perfect, all-embracing, and self-executing, that reaches 
from the Infinitely great to the Infinitely small, that leaves no pos- 
sible contingency unprovided for, and no possibility of ultimate 
injustice to any person or anything. Another feature common to 
all theosophical teaching is that man is an immortal spirit, that 
the body is only its temporary abiding place. The Encyclopedia 
Britannica says: 

"It is characteristic of Theosophy that it starts with an explica- 
tion of the Divine Essence, and endeavors to deduce the phenomenal 
universe from the play of forces within the Divine Nature itself." 

The same authority also says: 

"The transcendent character of its Godhead definitely dis- 
tinguishes it from the speculative philosophies which might other- 
wise seem to follow under the same definition. A historical survey 
shows, indeed, that Theosophy generally arises in connection with 
religious needs, and is the expression of religious conviction or 
aspiration." 

People shy at the word "Theosophy," because they don't know 
and don't take the pains even to consider what Theosophy really 
is. The word is a "bogie." Many good people who shy at the name 
are themselves sincere seekers after that truth for which true Theos- 
ophy stands. They are, however, like the good woman who refused 
absolutely to allow the use of sodium chloride in certain culinary 
operations, and insisted that the only thing proper to be used 
was salt. 

Ignorance and inertia are the two chief foes of Theosophy. In 
Physics, we give the name "inertia to that tendency of a body to 
continue in a given state." If the body is at rest, it requires force 
to overcome its inertia and set it in motion, while if it is in motion it 
requires force to overcome its inertia and make it stop. The same tendency 



INTELLECTUAL PROCRUSTEANISM 247 

applies to mental states. Having acquired a certain mental bias, or having 
adopted certain opinions, it requires force to effect a change, and as 
in Physics, the more dense and heavy the body, the harder it is to 
overcome its inertia, so in the matter of mental inertia, the more 
dense the intellect the greater is the difficulty of overcoming its 
tendency to remain fixed. This tendency of the human intellect 
did not disappear when men reluctantly abandoned their belief in a 
flat earth, or in a sun and moon that moved around it and stopped 
and stood still at the command of a Jewish general, or of an earth 
that was only six thousand years old. Now all intelligent men 
know that Galileo was right, and they smile at the vaporings of the 
theologians of less than a generation ago in their attempts to 
discredit the revelations of geology. 

Mental inertia, under the name of conservatism, has been a 
brake on the wheels of progress, a barrier obstructing the stream 
of human development. It held the cup of poison to the lips of 
Socrates; it nailed Jesus to the cross; it battened on the blood of 
the early Christian martyrs, and fed the fires of the Inquisition; 
it forced Galileo to recant, and Luther to rebellion. It populated 
the Bastile and for more than seventy years maintained human 
slavery under a government based on the proposition that all men 
were born free and equal. Under the influence of mental inertia, 
creeds act on the intellect like the bandages on the feet of the 
Chinese girl babies. 

True Theosophy at all times and everywhere stands for truth. 
The student of genuine Theosophy cannot afford to be dogmatic, 
but should be always receptive of the truth. It is not as important 
to know whether the particular teachings of Swedenborg or of 
Madame Blavatsky are indeed Theosophy in the sense of being 
knowledge that came to them as direct emanations from the divine 
mind, as it is to know that there is a divine mind, a Supreme center 
and source of consciousness and intelligence. This is the funda- 
mental assertion of Theosophy, the foundation upon which all 
theosophical study must rest, and the only matter concerning which 
Theosophy is dogmatic. All who believe in this need have no fear 
of the study of Theosophy, as they have already embraced its entire 
creed. I shall not, in this paper, enter into any discussion of the 
teachings that have from time to time been put forth under the 
name of Theosophy. I believe, however, that they are all worthy 
of study. Of the Theosophical Society of these later years, I can 
speak with some confidence, as I have been a member of it for some 
twenty-three or twenty-four years. It was organized October 30, 
1875, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Colonel Henry S. Olcott, 
William Q. Judge, General Abner Doubleday, and others. The 
objects of its organization, as stated in its constitution, were: 



248 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

"(a) To form a nucleus of Universal Brotherhood without dis- 
tinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour. 

"(&) To promote the study of Aryan and other Eastern liter- 
atures, religions, and sciences, and to demonstrate the importance 
of that study. 

"(0 To investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the 
psychical powers latent in man." 

The motto adopted by the Society was: 

"There is no Religion Higher than Truth.." 

The government of the Society was vested in its members, and 
its constitution contained the following: 

"Complete tolerance and freedom of action and belief shall be 
granted to each member or Branch, but no member or Branch shall 
have power to commit the Society to any religious, political or social 
dogmas." 

The Society, in the plan of its organization, left no possible 
ground for the formulation of doctrine or dogma of any character. 
It assumed the existence of four facts: 

First That in origin and ultimate destiny, all men of all races 
have interests in common, out of which in time a universal spirit 
of fraternity might be developed. 

Second That the most promising pathway to the hearts of men 
leads through the field of religion; that no one can be harmed, 
while all may be benefited, by a dispassionate, an unprejudiced and 
intelligent study of the various forms of religious belief, and that 
it is better to try to find upon how many points all men are agreed 
or can agree, rather than to seek out and emphasize the points of 
difference between them. 

Third That the Infinite Intelligence that rules the universe has 
left no possible contingency unprovided for; that law, all-prevailing 
and unerring, governs everywhere and everything, from the infinitely 
great to the infinitely small, and that many of these laws are as yet 
unexplained. 

Fourth That man is possessed of certain latent psychical 
powers that are worth investigating. 

These purposes were not stated as matters of belief, but were 
assumed as facts, concerning which there would be no controversy 
in the minds of intelligent men. 

At the time of Madame Blavatsky's death, May 8, 1891, the 
Society had branches in every civilized country, and its membership 
was numbered by thousands, while the so-called theosophical liter- 
ature numbered several hundred volumes, ranging from pamphlets 
of a few pages to Isis Unveiled in two large volumes, and the Secret 
Doctrine, in three large volumes. The writings of Madame Blavatsky 



INTELLECTUAL PROCRUSTEANISM 249 

were devoted to the exposition of a system of philosophy purporting 
to explain the origin and destiny, not only of humanity, but of the 
entire universe. She claimed no credit to herself for this philosoph- 
ical system, and always insisted that she was a mere amanuensis, 
writing as she was instructed to write by certain "Adepts, Mahatmas 
or Masters." The remaining so-called theosophical literature was 
largely, if not entirely based upon the works of Madame Blavatsky. 
They contained nothing that could be called original except as they 
endeavored to elaborate or explain her teaching. 

As one who was in touch with the movement during the life 
of Madame Blavatsky, I know that she would have been the last 
person to insist that the system of Theosophy given out by her 
should be accepted as a creed. I had some personal correspondence 
with her, and have in my possession at least one autograph letter 
from her. I also had the honor of presiding over the last Conven- 
tion of the Theosophical Society, held in Chicago, prior to her death. 
Her health was such that she was not able to attend in person, but 
addressed a letter to the Convention which contained the following 
language : 

"Let it be understood once for all, that there can be no such 
thing as a Theosophical Pope." 

She endeavored to make as emphatic as possible the statement 
that the philosophy as given out was not intended as a dogmatic 
statement of doctrine that must be accepted by those who would 
be members of the Society. One of the fundamental teachings of 
that philosophy was that each individual must be responsible for 
himself, and that each must learn to know for himself. We cannot 
know things by proxy. In the building of character, we cannot 
build on the knowledge or beliefs of others. As a matter of necessity 
in the maintenance of organized society, we are compelled to act on 
evidence and accept a preponderance of evidence as establishing a 
given fact. This is considered necessary to give stability to the 
social fabric, but all men know that error and injustice often result. 
This rule is of doubtful value in the building of individual character. 
All of the potentialities for the complete and symmetrical develop- 
ment of each individual, are as fully bound up in him as are the 
potentialities of the mighty oak bound up in the acorn. While the 
development both of the oak and the man will be influenced largely 
by their environment and their opportunities, the potentially perfect 
oak and man sleep in the germ of the acorn or of the ovum. You 
cannot add to the real girth of the oak by tying strips of wood to its 
trunk, nor can you add anything to your intellectual or moral stature 
by merely affirming your belief in a statement of doctrine made by 
another. You must know. The real and enduring things, all of 



250 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

the things that accomplish results, are invisible. Without exception, 
the material things that we can see and touch are transient forms, 
subject to change and constantly changing. The things that work 
the changes can be neither seen or handled. 

We may hire men to erect a building for us, and entrust to them 
the selection and placing of all of its material, but we cannot hire 
men to build a character for us, nor can the thoughts of others enter 
into and become parts of the structures of our own characters until 
we have made them our own, not by a mere affirmation of our 
belief in them, but by digesting and assimilating them. 

As the visible forms with which we come in contact are only the 
outward manifestations of the workings of the invisible realities, if 
we wish to know the "eternal verities" we must learn to look beyond 
the form to that which builds and shapes it. These ideas run through 
the entire system of philosophy put forth by Madame Blavatsky. 
They are coupled with the claim that each man has within himself 
the key to all of nature's mysteries. Whether this system of phil- 
osophy does in fact furnish a solution of the mysteries of the 
universe and of life, it is at least worthy of study. Mere denuncia- 
tion of new ideas ordinarily evidences no more than the inertia of 
fossilized prejudices and beliefs. 

The fossil three-toed horse of the Bad Lands, if it could speak, 
would doubtless denounce as untrue the claim that its descendant 
the horse of to-day has only one toe, or if forced to admit the fact 
it would probably denounce the one-toed creature as a monstrosity 
and no true horse. 

I shall not attempt to expound or discuss that philosophy. Nor 
shall I affirm its truth. I will only say that to my mind it furnishes 
a reasonable and probable explanation of many of nature's mysteries, 
especially in its exposition of the law of Karma, and its teaching 
concerning reincarnation, while its study gives one a conception of 
Divinity and of the Divine mind that is sublime beyond the power 
of expression. 

It seems to me that the law of Karma especially involves a 
conception of the divine intelligence that is of surpassing grandeur. 
It has always been a mystery to me how intelligent men could be 
satisfied with a conception of a so-called omniscient and omnipotent 
God, who could become angry with creatures he had made because 
they had disobeyed his commands, and in his anger condemn not 
only the guilty but untold millions of their unborn descendants to 
an eternity of damnation. Anger so fierce and unrelenting that it 
could only be appeased after ages of misery and suffering, by allow- 
ing his son to take up the burdens of human existence and suffer and 
die an ignominious death, and even then when that supreme sacri- 



INTELLECTUAL PROCRUSTEANISM 251 

fice had been made, to leave the manner of salvation so uncertain 
that today, after nearly two thousand years devoted to its study by 
millions of earnest and devout men, we find in the United States 
alone something more than one hundred and fifty different religious 
denominations, each of which profess Christianity, but each of which 
has a different understanding of the manner in which men may have 
the benefit of that salvation. It may be claimed that this picture 
is overdrawn, but an analysis of the creeds nominally professed, with 
their literature, will show that the indictment is not only backed by 
abundant proof, but that it might be drawn in many counts. I do 
not say, nor do I think, that many intelligent people of today do in 
fact entertain these beliefs. They take their creeds as they take 
the medicines prescribed for them by their physicians, without inves- 
tigating the ingredients. 

The law of Karma involves a conception of a Divine Intelligence 
that reaches through the unbeginning and unending eternities, leaves 
no possible contingency unprovided for, with no possible necessity 
for any change in the divine plan, no possibility of divine anger, 
and no possibility of final injustice to any creature. 

In the domain of Physics, men universally recognize and 
acknowledge the unvarying and unerring action of the law of cause 
and effect. Karma is nothing more nor less than the application 
of that law to the lives of men and of nations. It is that law which 
Jesus recognized when he declared that men must reap as they 
have sown. It involves of necessity, no idea of either punishment 
or of reward, but rather the idea that whatsoever comes to men 
comes as a consequence of what they have thought or done. It 
magnifies beyond measure our conception of God, and of his infinite 
wisdom. It does away with the barbarous ideas concerning the 
advent of Jesus among men and his mission, while it detracts nothing 
from the ineffable glory and beauty of his character, or of the divine 
purity of his teachings. 

Of reincarnation I will only say that it seems to me to follow 
naturally and in a measure necessarily in order that Karma may 
do its perfect work. 

Notwithstanding all this, the Society has been a potent factor 
in the revolt against intellectual Procrusteanism, and the system of 
philosophy put forward by Madame Blavatsky, not as a dogma, 
but as a possible and probable explanation of the universe, and of 
the "whence, what and whither" of man, whether accepted as satis- 
factory and conclusive or not, has cast a flood of light on many a 
dark and intricate problem. 

R. W. McBRiDE. 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET 

DOCTRINE 



PART II 

THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES 

WE have seen that the all-important point in the theosophical 
teaching, is the unity of all things with the Divine, and that 
only upon this foundation can the cornerstone of Universal 
Brotherhood be laid. For this idea of brotherhood does not 
mean an aggregate of more or less similar and sympathetic beings, it 
means the absolute identity of all the rays with the One Divine Ray, 
"the One manifested Life, the Breath of the Absoluteness." The differ- 
ences that we see, the obstacles in the way of realizing this oneness of 
mankind, are/ all illusions, belonging to this material plane, and have 
nothing to do with the Real Man, the re-incarnating Ego, except in so 
far as matter affords him a stage as it were, on which to play his many 
parts, and through the trials and tribulations of the body and the soul to 
work his way up to the purified and perfected spirit. 

There are two ways of studying the seven-fold nature of man, down- 
wards from above, and upwards from below. We can take the descent 
of the soul into matter as our starting-point, and trace its gradual invo- 
lution through ever-thickening veils of matter, till it becomes united with 
the physical body, or we can begin with the material, and follow the 
gradual ascent of the inner man, to spirit. With the brief sketch of 
evolution as taught by theosophy just given, it seemed necessary to begin 
again with the highest point in our study, and as the evolution of the 
Kosmos is governed by the same laws as rule the earth and man, the 
three schemes of evolution are inextricably interwoven and interblended 
at every point. With the gradual consolidation of the earth upon which 
man as we know him was to live, the consolidation of his physical body 
began, and the fourth Element, earth, made its appearance, with the 
senses fitted to function therein. There never was a time, we are told, 
when life did not exist upon this earth, but the life of those early periods, 
was without any of the characteristics by which we know it now. "Life 
precedes Form," says the Commentary, "and Life survives the last atom 
of Form," that is, the external body. 

The seven fundamental transformations of the matter of the 
heavenly spheres, are given as: I. The homogeneous. II. The aeriform 
and radiant (the gaseous). III. The curdlike (nebulous). IV. The 
atomic, ethereal; (the beginning of motion, hence of differentiation). 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 253 

V. The germinal, the fiery (differentiated, but composed of the germs 
only of the elements in their earliest states). VI. The four-fold, vapory 
(the future earth) ; and VII, Cold, and dependent (on the Sun for light 
and life). 

When evolution has run through the whole cycle of seven "globes" 
(or states of matter and consciousness), on our Earth, that is one Round, 
and every Round, on the descending scale, is a grosser and more material 
copy of the preceding Round. On the ascending scale evolution spirit- 
ualises and etherealises, so to speak, the general nature of each "globe," 
so that when the seventh stage in whatever Round is reached, the nature 
of everything in process of evolution, returns to its first spiritual condi- 
tion, plus each time a higher degree of consciousness. In the first 
Round, the globe having been built by the primitive fire-lives, had no 
solidity nor other qualities, save a cold brightness, neither form nor 
color; it was only towards the end of the Round that it developed one 
element, Fire^ which from its simple essence became in our Round the 
FIRE we know. The first human types did not resemble the men of 
to-day either in form or nature, but in the first Round were only dimen- 
sionless images from the astral regions. Hence the term men would 
be here a very misleading one, and is used only as an equivalent for 
"thinking entities." 

From the second Round, Earth began its real existence; it devel- 
oped the second element, AIR, and individual Life, its second principle. 
The second corresponds to the sixth principle (the Spiritual Soul) ; the 
latter is life continuous ; the former, life temporary. 

The third Round developed the third element, WATER; while the 
fourth Round transformed the gaseous fluids and plastic form of our 
"globe" into the hard, crusted, grossly material EARTH. She will reach 
her true ultimate form only towards the end of the cycle, after the seventh 
Round. Our globe is so far only in its fourth state, the astral body of 
desires, of dark egotism, the progeny of the lower Mind. "It is not the 
human body that is the grossest of our principles, but verily the real 
animal centre, the animal Soul, for our body is but its shell, through 
which it acts." 

It will only be in the fifth Round, as before said, that the fifth 
element, ETHER, will be as familiar to all men as air is now. 

We have glanced at the different phases in the evolution of our earth 
and of the elements that make life possible in its different phases of exist- 
ence, and we come now to the study of man as we know him, ourselves 
in short. This will be again a case of guide-posts to a road, rather than 
the road itself, the subject is so complicated, and the space so small. 
We must try then to indicate the most important points, and when we 
find ourselves hopelessly lost, patiently wait for more light. It will 
certainly come. 



254 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

I. In the first place, we know that man is composed of a physical 
body, gifted with five senses now, and the promise of two more here- 
after as the conditions of matter and consciousness become spiritualised, 
and enable man to function on higher planes. That there are even now 
occasionally human beings who have reached a point of higher develop- 
ment than their fellows, shows that these faculties will one day be the 
property of all, for the tide of evolution never recedes, it always seeks 
a higher level. 

II. Next comes the astral body, the model upon which the physical 
body is built, as our great skyscrapers go up, first the mere outline of an 
office-building, till bit by bit the whole structure is filled out and com- 
pleted, according to the architect's plan. But the analogy is defective 
in that the astral body, like the physical, is molecular, and does not 
outline in any way the physical body, but interpenetrates every part of it. 
To withdraw the astral body from the physical, is not the simple thing 
that many students believe, but really means the withdrawal of every 
astral molecule from its place in the physical body. The white cor- 
puscles of the blood are formed from astral matter in the spleen, and can 
slip through Jhe walls of the blood-vessels, or ooze out of a medium's 
side during a seance. They are the sanitary police of the body, devouring 
the bacterial germs. H. P. B. (in Lucifer, Jan., '89) calls the spleen 
"the physical vehicle of the Protean Double." As there are many kinds 
of astral bodies, with many names, it would be more exact to call the 
second principle "the Linga Sarira," but it seems unnecessary to be so 
particular here, and better to use the English name whenever possible. 

It is the astral body that forms the bridge between our physical 
sensations and our consciousness. Just as a telegraph operator receives 
a message, and forwards it to the person for whom it is intended, so a 
sensation received by our nerves is transmitted by them to the brain, 
and thence to the corresponding seat of sensation in the astral body, 
whence it is reflected to the lower mind, and comes into consciousness. 
Science has never yet bridged the gap between the physical brain and 
consciousness, and only when the existence of many gradations of matter 
between the physical and the mental are accepted, will the problem be 
solved. 

It is upon the model of the astral body that the physical body is 
built, and when it dies, the astral dies and disintegrates with it, more 
or less slowly. For this reason, among others, cremation is so desirable, 
as it frees the particles of the physical and astral bodies at once, instead 
of subjecting them to a long process of decay. 

III. The third principle is LIFE, although it cannot properly be 
numbered, as it pervades every atom of the universe. In the very 
beginning of her teaching H. P. B. warned her pupils not to think of 
these principles as water-tight compartments, but rather to consider them 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 255 

as having each its seven gradations, and all as interpenetrating and 
mingling with each other. Life is like the ocean, and we are like the 
drops of water that compose it, there is no possibility of saying that 
nere one drop leaves off and another one begins. 

The Life-principle, on our plane, is but the effect and result of the 
intelligent action of the "Host," or collective Principle, the manifesting 
Life and Light. The "nervous Ether" is the lowest principle of the 
primordial Essence, which is Life. The Sun is the storehouse of vital 
force, which is the noumenon of electricity. It is the action of cosmic 
electricity upon a compound or even a simple body, that produces life. 
When a body dies, it passes into the same polarity as its male energy, and 
repels, therefore, the active agent, which losing its hold upon the whole, 
fastens upon the parts or molecules, this action being called chemical. 

The fourth principle, the animal Soul, completes the Quaternary, 
or fourfold man, and includes the passional, instinctual, and emotional 
nature. It is called sometimes the body of Desire. It is this principle 
that binds us to earth-life. "It is not the human body that is the grossest 
of all our principles," says H. P. B., "but verily the middle principle, 
the real animal centre ; whereas our body is but its shell, the irresponsible 
factor or medium, through which the beast in us acts." 

The "breath of life" breathed into the nostrils of Adam, is life and 
the animal soul conjoined, it is these two together that make the "Vital 
Spark." When united to the lower part of the Mind, it becomes Kama- 
Manas, or the normal brain-intelligence, and joined to the Life-principle, 
it pervades every part of the body, as the vital force, or Vitality. During 
life, Kama has no form or body, but after death it takes a form composed 
of astral matter, and becomes what is known as the Kama-Rupa. It 
possesses consciousness of a very low order, and is always attracted to 
the lowest type of mediums. Such a Body of Desire is a very dangerous 
associate, and is the entity often spoken of as a "spook." 

The persistence of the Kama-rupa after death, depends upon the 
character of the dying person. The more intellectual and spiritual his 
life has been, the less vitality will the Kama-rupa have, and it will quickly 
fade out into nothingness. But if during the man's life on earth, his 
animal nature was predominant, the Kama-rupa would last a long while 
after the death of the body. In case of sudden death or suicide, the 
person is doomed to fill out the measure of his days within the sphere 
of the earth. 

The fourth principle then, which completes the fourfold man, the 
Quaternary, leaves him a perfect animal, with the potential higher qual- 
ities still undeveloped. Stanza IV, Part II of the Secret Doctrine gives 
us a wonderfully complete sketch of the evolution of the fourfold man 
up to the point where it was impossible to make further progress without 
Mind. "The Breath (that is, the human Monad) needed a form; the 



256 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Fathers (the Lunar Ancestors) gave it. The Breath needed a gross 
body; the Earth moulded it. The Breath needed the Spirit of Life; the 
Solar Ancestors breathed it into its form. The Breath needed a mirror 
of its body (that is, an astral shadow) ; 'we gave it our own,' said the 
Creative Powers. The Breath needed a vehicle of desires (the emotional 
soul) ; 'It has it,' said the Drainer of Waters (the fire of passion and 
animal instinct). The Breath needs a mind to embrace the Universe. 
'We cannot give that,' said the Fathers. 'I never had it,' said the 
Spirit of the Earth. 'The form would be consumed were I to give it 
mine,' said the Great (Solar) Fire. . . . 

"(Nascent) Man remained an empty senseless phantom." 

This is the summing up of occult knowledge in the poetic language 
of the East. Modern psychology would say that not until the processes 
of evolution had perfected the physical brain, could it become a fitting 
instrument for the use of the mind, but after all, to the psychologist mind 
is only a function of the brain. Very different is the conviction of the 
occultist. The Voice of the Silence says: "Have perseverance as one 
who doth evermore endure. Thy shadows (personalities) live and 
vanish; that, which is in thee shall live forever, that which Knows, for 
it is the man that was, that is, and will be, for whom the hour shall never 
strike." 

IV. The human Monad referred to in Stanza IV, Vol. II, as the 
Breath, is the reincarnating Ego, the Ray of the Divine Spirit, eternal and 
unchangeable, the string upon which are threaded the countless beads 
of the personalities, "that live and vanish." The Monad, Manas, the 
Man or the Thinker, is very clearly described in The Key to Theosophy. 
"Try to imagine a 'Spirit,' a celestial Being, divine in its essential nature, 
yet not pure enough to be one with the ALL, which union it can achieve 
only by passing individually and personally, that is, spiritually and 
physically through every experience that exists in the manifested Uni- 
verse. It has, therefore, after having gained such experience in the 
lower Kingdoms, to pass through every experience on the human planes. 
This individualised 'Thought' is what we theosophists call the real human 
EGO, the thinking Entity imprisoned in a case of flesh and bones. Once 
imprisoned, or incarnate, the Mind is always dual, that is to say the 
rays of the eternal, divine Mind, considered as individuals, assume a 
two-fold attribute, their essential, heaven-aspiring mind (the higher 
Manas) and the human quality of thinking, or animal cogitation, ration- 
alised, owing to the superior quality of the human brain, which is the 
lower Mind (or Manas)." 

That is, to put it still more plainly, the mind is always dual, and 
when we are considering it as an individual Entity, is composed of the 
heaven-aspiring intellect, which we call the higher mind, and the reason- 
ing power which we have in common with the animals (but in a higher 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 



257 



degree, owing to the superior development of the human brain), which 
we know as the lower mind. 

This conception of the dual character of the mind, solves many 
problems in connection with the intelligence of animals, and enables us 
to realise that an animal may be possessed of a physical body, an astral 
form, vitality, instinct, even a large share of intelligence, and yet be 
devoid of the higher mind, the reincarnating Ego. As to vegetable or 
mineral monads, the more correct expression would be "the Monadic 
Essence" manifesting in that form of matter called the mineral (or 
vegetable) kingdom. . . . The tendency towards separation into 
individual Monads is gradual, and in the higher animals, comes almost 
to the point. "Man is a perfected animal, the vehicle of a fully devel- 
oped Monad, self-conscious, and deliberately following its own line of 
progress, whereas in the insect, and even in the higher animals, the 
higher Triad of principles is absolutely dormant." (Transactions Blavat- 
sky Lodge, I. 13.) Precisely the same thing is said in the Secret Doc- 
trine, and in Vol II, p. 81, we have these emphatic words: "Between 
man and the animal whose Monads are fundamentally identical there 
is the impossible abyss of Mentality and Self-Consciousness." But we 
must remember that these higher principles are not non-existent in the 
animal, they are dormant or latent, to be developed in due time. "The 
animal has an astral body that survives the physical a short time, but 
its (animal) Monad does not re-incarnate in the same, but in a higher 
species, and has no Devachan, of course. It has the seeds of all the 
human principles in itself, but they are latent." (S. D. II, 196.) 

The best analysis of the higher principles in man, put in the simplest 
way, is that given in The Key to Theosophy, p. 175, beginning with the 
higher Mind, in order to keep the sequence we have used hitherto. 



Id o 

fc w 

fc 

H 

8 O 



"The Inner or Higher Ego is Manas, the fifth principle, 
so-called, independently of Buddhi, (The Spiritual Soul). 
The Mind Principle is only the Spiritual Soul when merged 
into one with Buddhi. It is the permanent Individuality, or 
the Re-incarnating Ego. 



H S 

t-H 
> 



The Spiritual Divine Ego, is the Spiritual Soul or Buddhi, 
in close union with Manas, the Mind-principle, without which 
it is no Ego at all, but only the Atmic vehicle. 



258 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 



to 

4 

The HIGHER SELF is Atma, the inseparable Ray of the 
Universal and ONE SELF. It is the God above more than 
5-- within us." 

*^ M 

t^^ 

B 

It will be evident, then, that the highest in us is that Eternal Exist- 
ence which we share with every particle of Life and Intelligence in the 
universe, and that in conjunction with the Spiritual Soul and the Mind, 
makes up the trinity in Man, and forms the permanent Individuality or 
the Reincarnating Ego. Strictly speaking, there are but five principles 
in man, the lowest, the physical body, being an illusion, and the highest 
being that Breath of the Divine which over-shadows man, rather than 
forms a part of him. But for ordinary purposes, the sevenfold division 
is more convenient. 

KATHARINE HILLARD. 

(To be continued.} 



"If thou thinkest twice, before thou speakest once, thou wilt speak 
twice the better for it." 



"Silence is wisdom, where speaking is folly; and always safe." 



"Never give out while there is hope; but hope not beyond reason, 
for that shows more desire than judgment." 



"They have a right to censure that have a heart to help; the rest is 
cruelty, not justice." 



"Serving God concerns the frame of our spirits, in the whole course 
of our lives, in every occasion we have, in which we may show our love 
to his Law." 

WILLIAM PENN'S "Some Fruits of Solitude." 



A LOST CAUSE. 



IN a narrow cell, the man condemned to die at sunrise sat motion- 
less, as he had sat for hours, his face buried in his hands, his 
heart filled with a great despair. 

It was not the thought of what the morning would bring that 
troubled him, for long ago he had made the sacrifice of his life and 
some inner voice had warned him that though the cause he fought for 
might triumph, he would find death through it; but it was alas! not 
to be death in the hour of victory, but in the hour of defeat. For he 
had failed utterly, miserably; the cause he had given his whole life 
to, was irretrievably lost. 

This thought it was which crushed him, down into the very dust, 
and filled his heart with anguish unspeakable; not the misery of a 
personal defeat, but a deeper, nobler sorrow, arising from the knowl- 
edge that the cause he had made his own, which to him was the most 
sacred thing in life, which he had induced so many others to join and 
fight for, was lost was dead, could never be called to life again. 

Wearily, but searchingly, his mind travelled back over the past, 
scrutinizing each act and word of his own, of his most trusted fol- 
lowers, seeking to find in them some clue which might give him the 
reason of their failure, for he felt they should not have failed and 
therein lay the sharpest sting of all. 

Back over many years his memory wandered, back to the day 
when in his childish mind the great idea began to germinate and he 
had, half unconsciously, pledged himself to the cause, for which at 
sunrise he would die! It had grown with his growth and almost 
before boyhood had been left behind, he had gained a small knot of 
followers, filled with the same zeal as himself, convinced as he was 
that this cause was right, was noble, sacred even, one to which they 
might fitly consecrate their whole life, and it was right. Right itself 
they had fought for, even now in the hour of supreme defeat the 
man's faith never wavered, he only asked himself wearily how such 
things could be, how Wrong could be triumphant, Right defeated. 

It was this absolute faith in the righteousness of his cause, which 
had animated his whole life and made him what he was. It had car- 
ried him over the hardships of his youth, the trials and disappointments 
of his early manhood, the anxieties and stress of these later years. 
This belief it was which had flashed from his eyes, coloured his voice, 
made him speak as though inspired, had gradually drawn many hearts 
to him and made of him their Hero, almost, as they believed, their 
Saviour ! 

59 



26o THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

For he had had a great following, the best and noblest in the land; 
and for years he had taught and trained them, filled them with his own 
ideals, his own high beliefs. For long they had worked and waited 
together patiently, biding their time, determined to strike only when 
the hour was fully ripe, and always he had preached hope to them, 
hope and confidence, for, he declared, they were fighting for the Right, 
for justice, liberty; not for themselves but for others, and this being 
so they could not fail, such a cause must prevail against all odds. 

How his heart had gone out to them, his children as he always 
called them, and truly they were more to him than sons in the flesh 
could have been; and they they had given him all their love, their 
faith, their confidence, and how had he repaid them? Where were 
his children now? His heart contracted at the thought, a hard sob 
shook his frame. Many of his followers he knew, (and these were 
the more fortunate) had died fighting; others, like himself, had been 
taken prisoners and must now, like him, be awaiting death, while the 
remnant were fugitives, hunted from place to place, tracked down like 
wild beasts, having lost everything but their bare life. Moreover they 
had not been alone, these followers of his, all had loved ones depend- 
ent on them, whose fate he dared not think of, and in the silence of 
that dark night he seemed to hear hundreds of piteous voices crying 
out to him; mothers asking of him their sons, wives their husbands, 
young girls their lovers and brothers, little children their fathers, and 
he was powerless to help them. 

Yet he knew he had done his best and utmost, had neglected no 
precaution, been guilty of no carelessness. His devotion to his cause 
had been whole hearted and selfless, he had fought only to liberate 
and raise his people, but he had failed, and in failing had doomed 
them to an oppression far greater than that from which he had sought 
to free them. 

His mind travelled on over the coming years and realizing what 
they must bring to his beloved country, his self-restraint broke down, 
the heartbroken man sobbed aloud. . . . 

At that moment he felt a touch on his shoulder and started hastily 
to his feet, for he thought it must be the gaoler come to tell him the 
night was nearly over. But to his amazement he saw that a stranger 
stood by his side; a man he had never seen before, yet whose tall 
figure and face full of dignity and power, seemed somehow familiar 
and filled him with confidence and a sense of peace. He would have 
spoken, but, stopping him with a gesture, the stranger grasped his 
hand and said: 

"You must come with me, Friend, for there is something I would 
show you and our time is short." 

Even as he spoke the prisoner felt his cell vanish, disappear 



A LOST CAUSE 261 

beneath his feet, for a moment he seemed to be rushing through 
space, then he felt ground beneath him and realized that he stood on 
some lofty mountain top, below which masses of clouds and vapour 
swirled. 

"Look down," said his guide, "and tell me what you see." 

The man gazed steadily in the direction pointed out to him; he 
saw the mists shift, dissolve and vanish and lo! at his feet stretched 
out half a world, flooded with sunshine. To his amazement he per- 
ceived that vast though this area was, every detail of it was clear to 
him. He could have counted the men moving about so busily on plain 
and mountain and in the crowded cities; could have told what each 
one was doing. 

"I see," he said simply, "many lands, some that I know, others 
unknown to me and in them I see men and women, living and working 
as they have always done." 

"Look again," said the stranger, laying his hand gently on the 
prisoner's shoulder. 

A mist hid his view for a moment, when it cleared the light 
seemed stronger, more penetrating than before and in it he saw points 
of brightness, moving about on the earth. Looking at them more 
intently he perceived them to be splendid figures, men of royal stature, 
with radiant faces, clad in shining armour and aglow with strength 
and power. Around these warrior figures clustered the ordinary mor- 
tals, turning faces of love and gratitude towards them, calling down 
blessings on them. 

Pointing them out to his companion, the prisoner asked who they 
were? 

"They are the just and righteous Causes," he answered, "that 
have triumphed in the world against great odds and have brought 
incalculable good to mankind." 

"Ah!" cried the man, "but my Cause was just also, was wholly 
righteous, why could it not triumph!" 

He would have turned away in bitterness of heart, but his guide 
pressed his shoulder firmly and bade him look again, with clear eyes 
and earnest mind. 

At first he noticed no change in the scene, but slowly he became 
aware of other presences, perceived other forms standing behind the 
shining warriors. Forms still greater and more majestic, but almost 
diaphanous, filled with such radiance, light and glory that at the sight 
of them his heart throbbed and his soul was filled with ecstasy. From 
one point to another his eyes wandered and saw everywhere behind 
the warriors these splendid, godlike forms; saw too that in some places 
the warriors were fighting, seemed hard nressed, and that always they 



262 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

drew their strength from those others, who were stronger than 

themselves. 

He turned impulsively to his companion and said: 

"Master, who are these glorious ones, and what their mission?" 

Tenderly the other looked down into his eyes and his voice came 

like music as he answered: 

"They are the Souls of the Lost Causes, Friend, without whose 

help no Cause can ever hope to triumph." 

"How can that be," exclaimed the prisoner, "for a lost Cause is 
one that has failed and is therefore dead and useless." 

"There is no Death," came the grave answer, "what men call death 
is only change into a fuller, more glorious existence, which at this 
moment you are perceiving faintly and will know fully when you have 
cast aside this clogging, hampering cloak men call the body and set 
the great spirit free. Even so it is with Causes you say are lost and 
dead. No righteous Cause can die, no Cause for which men have 
fought selflessly, devotedly, for which they have laid down their lives 
and sacrificed what was dearer to them than life itself, can ever fail. 
Down in the world, it is true, and to the dull eyes of men and women 
they may appear to die and vanish, but in reality they only change, 
leaving the earthly sphere in order to gain Life, Life spiritual and 
immortal Then from those Higher Planes they may return to earth 
again, purified, filled with strength and knowledge, made powerful to 
bless and raise mankind, and without the help and inspirations of 
those Lost Causes, no Cause can hope to win." 

Entranced, spellbound, the man hung on his words and from the 
very depths of his heart exclaimed : 

"Master, could I but know my own Lost Cause was such as these, 
I should die more than content." 

"Look behind you," was the answer, and looking he saw beneath 
him his own dear land and a cry escaped him, for he beheld it torn, 
ravaged, worse even than his worst dreams of it had been. Yet even 
as he looked he saw a spark of hope come into the eyes of his people, 
a moment ago so dull with misery, heard them whispering together 
eagerly, noticed that they were all gazing at some distant point. Fol- 
lowing their gaze his heart leapt within him, for there, greater than 
the greatest, more radiant than all the others, moving slowly towards 
the people came the Cause he had called lost. With it, yet of it, he saw 
all his dear companions; those who had fought and died for it! those 
who yet lived and suffered for it all splendid, spiritualized, well-nigh 
unrecognizable, eagerly pressing forward to bring hope and help and 
blessing to their people, and in the end a great and final Liberation. 

With a cry of joy he stretched out his hands, sprang forward to 
join his comrades, only to find the vision vanished and himself back 
in his narrow cell which the cold, grey light of dawn was filling ! 
******** 

Ere long the great prison woke to a new day and throwing open 
the cell door noisily, the gaoler called to the prisoner that the guard 
had come to fetch him, but the Man who had Failed heeded him not, 
for with face buried in his hands he was weeping, tears of purest 
happiness at the thought of his own Yost Cause. E. M. S. 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 



How HISTORY is MADE 

THE subject of conversation was the political situation in France. 
Someone suggested that it is typical of the methods we revere 
that the sting is being taken out of Socialism, not by a Con- 
servative, but by a Socialist by M. Briand, the Premier: that 
this well illustrates the consideration for others, and the use of all that 
is best in others and in the views of others, which those methods always 
display. 

"It would be interesting," said the Student, "to watch the politics 
of Europe from the inside, and really to see the Master and his com- 
panions at work." 

We had a visitor with us. He was puzzled by the Student's assump- 
tion. "Do you mean," he asked, "that, in your opinion, the Master and 
his companions concern themselves with world politics? I have thought 
of them as working for and with souls." 

The Student explained of course they work for and with souls; 
but is not this another way of saying that they work for the development 
of real men, of whole men, of men who will embody wisdom and power 
and love, and who will express the highest qualities of every race? It 
must be so, if perfection is the aim. And in that case, must not the 
different racial characteristics be worth preserving? Is not the genius 
of the French or of the English an important factor in the total char- 
acter being evolved? Must not all national and international develop- 
ments have a direct bearing upon the growth of souls? Perhaps, he 
suggested, this is easier to understand if we think of the soul as the sum 
of all the qualities that are worth while, and that we should like to become 
permanent, in human nature. "If the universe exists for the purposes 
of soul, why suppose that any part of the universe fails to serve those 
purposes, and why exclude the Master from participation in the activities 
of so vital a part as the intercourse of nations and the conflict of political 
beliefs?" 

Our visitor a young but intuitive and thoughtful member of the 
Theosophical Society was quite open to conviction. But there was 
more that he wanted to know. "Do you mean," he asked, "that they 
would interfere and impose their own wills upon the natural course of 
events?" 

"You speak of them as if they stood outside of nature. They are 
as much a part of nature's organism as the heart is a part of the body. 
They work with nature, as one of them once wrote. In the same letter, 



264 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

as you may remember, it was said that they never pretended to be able 
to draw nations in the mass to this or that crisis in spite of the general 
drift of the world's cosmic relations. 'The cycles must run their rounds. 
Periods of mental and moral light and darkness succeed each other as 
day does night. . . . And we, borne along on the mighty tide, can 
only modify, and direct some of its minor currents.' They are able, 
in other words, to divert some part of the world's energy into useful 
channels. To account for the results produced, 'men have, in different 
ages, invented theories of the interposition of gods, special providences, 
fates, the benign or hostile influences of the stars.' " 

RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

"So far as France is concerned," interrupted the Philosopher, ''its 
history is full of events which can be explained in no other way. Con- 
sider, for instance, the achievements of Joan of Arc. Often, however, 
the event itself is small, and suggests the participation of unseen influence 
only to those who are familiar with the methods of which we have been 
speaking. Always, in some way, such participation makes for Brother- 
hood. . . . And that reminds me of an editorial by Ernest Daudet in 
the Paris Figaro of November 8th, which I happen to have brought with 
me. He speaks of the organization recently of a Ligue des devoirs de 
I'homme. I do not for one moment imply that this League is the outcome, 
directly, of the Master's efforts. But, as Daudet says, the formation of 
such a League is certainly one of the more hopeful signs of the times. 
He points out that France is suffering to-day from years of silence about 
duty, while rights have been proclaimed with abusive iteration. He 
quotes Lacordaire as saying that in morals as in logic there exists a 
certain number of universal and immutable principles, upon which all 
sane behaviour necessarily must be based, and that rights are merely 
the egoistic reflection of duties. There is the same difference between 
them as between earth and heaven regarding earth, for the purpose, 
as an inverted shadow of the spiritual world. People have been pois- 
oned, says M. Daudet, by oratorical flattery and by ceaseless declarations 
of their rights : they should be reminded that the famous pronouncement 
of 1789 is meaningless unless based upon the duties which the several 
clauses express in terms of right. Thus, when the Declaration assures 
to every citizen the right to do whatsoever will not injure others, the 
duty implied is consideration for the welfare of others. Emphasize that, 
instead of the 'right,' and the Declaration becomes spiritual instead of 
material. Brotherhood is impossible on any other basis. The letter 
which was published on the first page of the QUARTERLY of April, 1908, 
makes this very clear: and in my opinion a personal opinion the 
writer of that letter knew whereof he spoke. If you will allow me, I 
will read a brief extract : 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 265 

" Theosophy says that for the realization of this Brotherhood 
[arising from the fact of "the oneness or identity of all souls with the 
Oversoul"], man must become a more spiritual being, must grow into 
closer contact with the soul where this condition perpetually obtains, and 
that all which makes man more spiritual makes of necessity for Brother- 
hood, and all which tends to make him more material, makes against it.' 

"It was pointed out in the same letter that a 'material attitude 
towards reform' is a far greater bar to genuine progress than the things 
which it is sought to redress, and that any turning of men's minds 
towards the body, and away from the soul, must be materialistic in its 
tendency." 

"I agree with you fully," said the Student. "And how strange that 
such a view should be regarded as Conservative if not as reactionary! 
Somewhere on your shelves" tuining to our host "I have seen a copy 
of Mazzini's Essays. No one can deny him the title of consistent 
Revolutionist. And yet, in his essay on 'Europe: Its Condition and 
Prospects,' written in 1852, there is a passage which fits in so remark- 
ably with what the Philosopher has been saying, that really it is worth 
reading." 

The book was found, and the Student turned quickly to the passage 
he had in mind. "Incidentally," he continued, "Mazzini insists, and I 
think he is right, that the great French Revolution was not, philosoph- 
ically speaking, a programme: it was a resume. It did not initiate; it 
closed an epoch. Then he goes on, still referring to that Revolution 

" 'In its most characteristic manifestations, it has never gone beyond 
the point of progress already (intellectually) reached, the emancipation of 
individuality. This is why, after having embodied its idea in a Declara- 
tion of the Rights of Man, of the individual, it was only capable of ending 
in a man in Napoleon. Right, that is to say, the individual asserting 
himself, was its life, its soul, its strength. Duty, that is to say, the 
individual submitting himself to the idea of a collective aim to be attained, 
never was its directing thought. That thought was the obligation, the 
necessity of fighting for the conquest of the rights of each; it made, so 
to speak, duty subservient to rights. It never rose in action to the height 
of putting forward a Declaration of Principles. Its definition of Life 
has always been whatever efforts have been made to prove that it went 
beyond it the materialist definition the right to physical well-being. 
It is so even now. And Europe is now agitated and unconsciously led 
by the other eminently religious definition of life as a mission; a series 
of duties, of sacrifices to be accomplished for others, in view of an 
ulterior moral progress.' 

"You have in that extract, as I see it, an admirable statement, by a 
radical, of what the world needs to-day : a Declaration of man's Duties. 
The Declaration of Rights was accepted by millions as their own expres- 
sion. How superb it would be if a Declaration of Duties could be 



266 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

accepted with the same enthusiasm! It would not contain a single new 
idea. It would echo the declarations of every great Teacher of every 
race and epoch. But it could, to-day, be supported by a mass of 
philosophical explanation and of scientific knowledge which, in the 
memory of Europe and America, would be original perhaps even 
illuminating." 

The Cynic objected : "How about the Will?" he questioned. "Men 
or women who proclaim their rights, who fight for their rights, who 
scratch for their rights, are inspired by the desire to take. It is an 
animal desire, and is therefore very powerful. What you suggest sup- 
poses a desire to give. From whence, quite suddenly, is so novel a 
desire to -spring? Why, after ages of indifference, should humanity 
become possessed of a wish to do its duty?" 

"You know as well as I do," said the Sage, "how widespread is the 
desire to help a vague desire, if you choose, but none the less sincere. 
Many of those who shout from the house-tops about the rights of others, 
are moved by this general impulse. Their heads are muddled but their 
hearts are sound. They see the misery of the more evident sort 
imagining their own feelings into the circumstances of others and, 
instead I of regarding this as the symptom of some inner condition, they 
treat effect as cause and seek means to drive the symptom in. It is like 
hiding dust by sweeping it under the furniture. Whether social or 
physiological ailments are in question, the popular remedy at present is 
the same. Nevertheless, the desire to help exists; and if people could 
be made to understand, they would serve valiantly and well." 

"But it is difficult," commented another. "A Declaration of man's 
Duties would have to begin with the first duty he owes to society : with 
his duty to improve his own character. How prosaic, in comparison 
with waiving a red flag on a barricade! Tell people that a man who 
remains quietly at home, intent upon his daily avocation, upon its perfect 
performance, and upon the improvement of his own character by means 
of that performance tell them that he is doing more to help humanity 
than a man of loose life who stumps the country on behalf of some 
reform, and, if they happen to approve the reform, they will think you 
almost crazy. . . . But I agree with the Sage: there are thousands 
upon thousands who possess the will : all that they need is understanding. 
Give them that, and a Declaration of Duties would meet with response 
as wide and as enthusiastic as that accorded to the Declaration of 1789. 
Meanwhile, to be logical, we have to admit that the best way to hasten 
the coming of that day, is quietly to do the thing we advocate. We must 
begin on ourselves." 

"I hate self-evident propositions," said the Gael. "And there is no 
need to rub it in. Fifty times a day am I reminded, 'Begin on yourself ; 
and I come here for rest ! Don't say it" (turning on the Sage) : "I see 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 267 

it in your eye the only way to get rest is to accept the suggestion. 
I have accepted it. I am accepting it right now. What do you suppose 
I'd be saying to you if I were not, instead of talking in this placid, lamb- 
like way? The language I have in the other half of my brain! Really 
I respect it: it's gorgeous. Offer it up? Dear man what a scandal 
in heaven. And I don't need an audience. It's all about you and your 
talk of Duty, and I'm going for a walk to admire it in peace." 

A SIDE-LIGHT ON CHARACTER 

And the Gael got up and left. It amused the Sage. "It takes him 
that way when he has been feeling particularly devotional. A sort of 
reaction, I suppose. Yet, it seems to me sometimes, that he feels devo- 
tional always, until he talks ! Wasn't it Thomas a Kempis who said that 
he felt himself a worse man whenever he opened his mouth? But what 
the Gael calls his 'talks in his head' seem to be of a different order. 
Once he told me about them, and recounted a conversation which, so 
far as I can remember, ran somewhat as follows: 
" 'Big brother, why am I such an ass ?' 
" 'Dear boy, God made you that way ! Blame Him.' 
" 'But surely that is not true : I must have made myself.' 
" 'Yes ; but God could have stopped it if He had wanted.' 
"The Gael said he saw no answer to that so he changed the subject. 
" 'Big brother, why can I not always be as happy as I am now, in 
your presence; why can I not always have you near?' 

" 'Because you do not always want it, my son ; you do not always 
want me.' 

"And the Gael remarked that the simplicity of it reduced him almost 
to tears. . . . Well, most of us are queer ; but the Gael is multiple." 
"Who was the big brother ?" asked the visitor. 

HIERARCHIES IN NATURE 

The Sage looked at him, and then replied with scarcely perceptible 
deliberation: "The Gael did not say. It may have been a part of his 
own consciousness. He spoke of it merely as 'a talk in his head.' But 
I think our western world takes a very narrow view of such things : it 
limits possibilities unwarrantably. It is unthinkable that in a universe 
which consists of matter in so many different states of solids, liquids, 
gases and the ether to begin with it is only in and through the solid 
state that consciousness can express itself. St. Paul reminded us that 
all flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, 
another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. He was 
cataloguing the elements of which the civilization of that day had knowl- 



268 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

edge, and he apportioned creatures to each of the elements. Then he 
added: 'There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial.' Why 
not? And why only of one sort? May there not be room for sub- 
human as well as for super-human kingdoms for those who have mas- 
tered and passed through the human stage, and for those who have not 
yet attained to it? May it not be that much of the triviality of the 
seance room, for instance, is due to some kind of elemental creatures, 
functioning, possibly, in and through one sub-division of the ether? And 
that the wretched medium, without knowing what he is doing, acts as 
a connecting link between that world and this focussing, as it were, 
and also colouring, the undeveloped consciousness, or consciousnesses, of 
which I speak? Whether you feel inclined to accept that explanation 
of certain 'spiritualistic' phenomena or not, the fact remains that there 
is unbroken tradition pointing to the existence of such sub-human 
creatures, visible only to persons called clairvoyant, or to those who, 
without possessing that faculty naturally, become clairvoyant in special 
circumstances or when labouring under peculiar nervous stress. 

"None of that, in the nature of things, can be healthy. It is not 
under the control of the will; it implies a negative instead of a positive 
condition, and it involves an approach to that plane of existence from 
below instead of from above. Mediumism leads to madness never to 
knowledge. 

"But if you reverse everything I have said, and apply it, reversely, 
to the spiritual world, it would follow that there must be beings of dif- 
ferent orders who function in what St. Paul calls 'celestial bodies' in 
immortal bodies, in 'resurrected' bodies. I speak of those who, while 
still living, have been 'raised from the dead' and who have put on 
'incorruption.' I have been using the language of St. Paul, but you 
will find exactly the same doctrine in Buddhism and in all the great 
divisions of Hinduism : there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual 
body. Further, the spiritual body is evolved and is brought to birth, 
in the case of the really great, during the life of the physical body. For 
them, the passing of the physical body brings with it no break in con- 
sciousness. And by 'really great' I do not mean only the greatest: I 
mean great disciples as well as great Masters. They would at all times 
and in all places be just as conscious of the spiritual world, as we are 
conscious of the physical world; and they would have this consciousness 
together with our own. You will at once think of historical characters 
whose lives are explicable on no other basis. Our 'intimations of 
immortality,' our intuitive perceptions, our occasional recognition of 
unseen influence all these are experiences which suggest the develop- 
ment of those higher powers or faculties which are latent in all men. 
My point is that there is no sudden jump : it is a gradual, though some- 
times less gradual, evolution. 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 269 

PSYCHIC AND SPIRITUAL POWERS 

"If you will grant the possible existence of such 'super-men' (not 
in the Nietzschean sense!), whether still functioning in physical bodies 
or only in bodies which, normally, are invisible, I do not see how you 
can avoid the conclusion that every spiritual aspiration must bring us 
into contact with the spiritual world and, therefore, with the men of that 
world. The widespread belief in saints, and in the efficacy of prayer 
to saints, must have some basis in fact. Ordinarily, of course, both 
cause and effect are seen through the prism of some elaborate 
theological system, which distorts and often stultifies. But suppose 
an unprejudiced and disciplined mind, so familiar with its prejudices, 
if exist they must, that it is easy to disentangle them from fact. 
Suppose an ardent and continuous aspiration towards the things of the 
spirit. Suppose, in brief, a highly trained, self-controlled and, at the 
same time, a spiritual nature, with a clear understanding, intellectually, 
of these things, regarding all of them as natural, and as capable of 
verification. Imagine, finally, that a number of people work together 
and are able to test results by comparison. Do you not see that 
investigation in a scientific spirit, and much real knowledge, should be 
possible ? 

"Please understand me, however; I am not speaking of psychic 
research I am speaking of its opposite. Nor am I speaking of clair- 
voyant examination of physical or psychic things a counterfeit of 
genuine experiment, and a counterfeit that ought to be branded as such 
on every possible occasion. It is deplorable that, in more than one 
instance, this perverted and misleading type of occultism (so-called) 
should have been circulated under the name of Theosophy. 

"All that I have in my mind is spiritual development, based upon 
moral development, and leading to knowledge. Clairvoyance, clair- 
audience, and the rest, are the dark and dangerous shadows of the real. 
The faculty of intuition is the best clue to my meaning. Grant that it 
may become active continuously and you will see still further. Grant, 
again, that in our ordinary sense-experience, we receive millions of 
impressions which escape us, and you will perhaps be willing to admit 
that a trained observer of spiritual impressions may be able to register 
and profit by a great many which pass unnoticed by the ordinarily 
religious man. 

"But the Cynic is thinking that Light on the Path contains an 
admirable statement of this subject, and that it provides us with a 
standard for discrimination in a very brief form!" 

The Cynic ignored the accusation. "You were talking," he said, 
"about the Gael. Do you imply that his spiritual faculties are open? 
His conduct, like mine, seems often to give you concern." 



270 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

"If I were your wife," smiled the Sage, "I should be very much 
concerned; because, as I've told you before, some day your heart will 
break, and only then will you really be worth while. Yes, believe me, 
you will be a wonder then. Meanwhile your barrier amuses you, and, 
so long as it does that, you must stay where you are valuable, in any 
case, whenever you help to keep me to the point ! . . . That the Gael 
has two sides to his nature, no one can deny. All of us have. That is 
why we love you, Mr. Cynic, in spite of your cynicism ! To assert that 
his spiritual faculties are open, in the full sense, or in anything like the 
full sense, would be ridiculous. But my point is that the spiritual 
faculties of everyone who is sufficiently interested in spiritual subjects, 
say, to read the QUARTERLY, must necessarily be opening, and to some 
extent open. Why deny that to the Gael? Why deny him 'talks in his 
head' on a level higher, in any case, than his ordinary consciousness? 
Why deny anyone such experience ? It should be our mission, rather, to 
help people to recognize the innumerable experiences spiritual, I mean 
which they allow to pass unnoticed, and which, even if noticed, they 
regard as of little value. Poor people notice more than the rich, partly 
because their outer experience is less crowded and their inner experience 
is les$ over-laid." 

A BOOK OF MANY CLAIMS 

The Student broke in: "I have been asked by the editor of the 
QUARTERLY," he said, "to review a book by Dr. Rudolf Steiner called 
The Way of Initiation, or How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher 
Worlds. Here it is. And honestly I have not the time to read it, and 
would not know what to say about it, even if I had. Yet it seems that 
Dr. Steiner has quite a following in Germany, and in some other 
European countries too; so we ought to review it, as the editor says. 
Now if one of you will read it for me, and will mark it in the margin, 
and will tell me what to say, I will gladly do the rest." 

The suggestion was received with the contempt it deserved. But 
one of those on whom we rely most, finally opened the book and began 
to read it. The rest of us continued to talk about some details of the 
work. In a very few moments, however, the substitute reviewer an 
old member of the Society, trained originally in the school of W. Q. 
Judge looked up with the remark, "It is hopelessly psychic, and can 
lead to nothing but psychic and lower astral development. It is also 
very pretentious. Its ethics are good enough, up to a certain point; but 
its science is all wrong. Listen to this: 

" 'Place before you the small seed of a plant. It is then necessary, 
while contemplating this significant object, to create with intensity the 
right kind of thoughts, and through these thoughts to develop certain 
feelings. In the first place, let the student clearly grasp what is really 



ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 271 

presented to his vision. Let him describe to himself the shape, colour, 
and all other qualities of the grain of seed. Then let his mind dwell upon 
the following train of thought: 'This grain of seed, if planted in the 
soil, will grow into a plant of complex structure.' Let him clearly 
picture this plant to himself. Let him build it up in his imagination. 
And then let him reflect that the object now existing only in his imagi- 
nation will presently be brought into actual physical existence by the 
forces of the earth and of light. . . . The real seed, therefore, con- 
tains something invisible which is not present in the imitation. It is 
this invisible something on which thought and feeling are now to be 
concentrated. ... If that is accomplished in the right way possibly 
not until after numerous attempts an inward force will make itself felt. 
And this force will create new powers of perception. The grain of 
seed will appear as if enclosed in a small luminous cloud. The spiritual- 
ized vision of the student perceives it as a kind of flame. This flame is 
of a lilac colour in the centre, blue at the edges.' 

"And so forth. Later, you are to contemplate human beings in 
the same way. Different colours. 'Yellowish red in the centre and 
reddish blue or lilac at the edges.' Impressions come and go, fade 
and reappear ever so much like the cat's smile in Alice! What 
unhappy people what idiots! Trying to work, of course, from below, 
instead of from above, and developing, consequently, all sorts of psychic 
illusions. Dangerous, too. Madness and a few other possibilities 
ahead of them. Not the glimmer of an understanding of what spiritual 
knowledge means. And pretentious stupidly mysterious. What do 
you think of this? Those who know 'have allowed a greater portion of 
the occult training and the necessary warning to be published. Only so 
much is here imparted as this permission allows.' Apply personally for 
the remainder! For instance, 'The adept in occultism could, indeed, 
say much concerning these paths, much that might seem strange to an 
uninitiated hearer.' And this, with a preface by a friend, describing 
the author as an adept, and concluding with the pathetic exclamation, 
'Behold a master of himself and of life !' 

"The ethics are common-place when not misleading notice a ridicu- 
lous banalite at the top of page 72, and the enunciation of a principle, a 
few pages further on, which would lead inevitably to isolation and death 
instead of to spiritual growth. Take it away, please : I've had enough. 
It makes me woozy!" 

POPULAR ESTIMATES 

The Student had been given his review, but was not satisfied. 
"How account for so considerable a following in Germany?" he asked. 

"Why, anyone with psychic powers, who will talk about them, 
and who will help other people to cultivate them, can get a following," 
was the reply. "There is nothing strange about that. What do 



272 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

most people want? Health, wealth, material prosperity, material results. 
A good fortune-teller could draw a larger following in New York 
City to-day than the greatest of spiritual directors. This will not 
always be so: but it is true of to-day. Look at some of the most 
prosperous movements in this country: what are they but subtle, when 
not bare-faced appeals to human selfishness? The larger the mix- 
ture of good in them, the more dangerous they are ; and when they wear 
the cloak of religion or of occultism, as they so often do, it is time that 
we, in the name of both, protested. Imagine Christ or Buddha telling 
their disciples to meditate on the astral counterpart of physical objects; 
or to think of themselves as wealthy in order to acquire wealth! That 
is the test, and, if another be needed, compare such teaching with Light 
on the Path, as has been suggested already this evening. Just to take 
the taste of this thing out of my mouth, let us conclude with what 
Light on the Path advises : 

" 'Grow as the flower grows, unconsciously, but eagerly anxious 
to open its soul to the air. So must you press forward to open your 
soul to the Eternal. But it must be the Eternal that draws forth your 
strength and beauty, not desire of growth. For in the one case you 
develop in the luxuriance of purity; in the other you harden by the 
Ibrcible passion for personal stature/ " 

"That is only a brief extract; but it contains more religion, more 
occultism, and more Theosophy, than many volumes of such trash as 
floods the market under all three names. And if you mention The Way 
of Initiation at all, please tell the truth about it literally. We cannot 
wish to be unkind ; but it is not kindness to pretend that a harmful book 
is innocuous. Doubtless it is well meant. The money-changers may 
have been excellent men. None the less, like 'matter in the wrong 
place,' they were driven out of the Temple." T. 



"The upward step must be taken sometime if life is to become the 
sacrament that Jesus Christ has shown us that it should be. The demand 
to have surroundings made exactly to the order of the individual must be 
renounced, and there must be substituted for it the will to come into the 
line with the Divine ordering of the universe, before all the happenings 
and mis-happenings of men and things fall into their right relation to 
the soul" JOAN M. FRY. 



MENTARY 




How MAY WE HELP OTHERS 

QUESTION 120 in the October QUARTERLY includes the follow- 
ing sentence, "I know very well that it is dangerous to try to 
help one who seems to succumb to calamity." I have found 
among Theosophists a common feeling that it is not safe to 
help one who is unfortunate because it would be "interfering with their 
Karma," and because you might have to share the bad Karma of the 
one you try to help. I do not know of any good foundation for this 
belief, on the other hand it seems to me that it is a superstition that 
Theosophists share with a great many other people. It is said that the 
founder of the Rothschild banking house made it a rule, and gave it as 
advice to the younger members of the firm, "never to have anything to 
do with an unlucky person," his belief being that you would share his 
bad luck. To fail to help another who is in need of help that we can 
render would be a double sin; it would be cowardly, and also a failure 
to perform a duty. "As we have opportunity let us do good unto all 
men," is a good motto to have. This does not mean that we are to 
neglect our own duty in order to do that of another, for that would be 
assuming the Karma attached to the duty, and at the same time not only 
releasing the other person from the responsibility, but robbing him of 
the benefits that would come to him by the performance of his own duty. 
But to help one who is in distress, or sick, or one who is trying to 
conquer a bad habit is quite another thing. We need not be afraid of 
"interfering with his Karma" if he is in real need of help, for it would 
seem to be his Karma to receive our help if we have an opportunity to 
render it. Of course, there should always be discernment between our 
own duty and that of another, but fear of danger from doing a good 
deed should never hinder a Theosophist from helping another. Nor 
should we confine our help to those who are ready to accept our 
philosophy and enter on the Path. The first aim of the Theosophical 
Society and the individual Theosophist is to form a nucleus of a 
Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, 
sex, caste or color, and therefore to be ready to join hands with any 
individual or institution that is helping the elevation and advancement 

18 n 



274 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

of humanity. Therefore the first duty of a Theosophist is to be ready 
to help in any way he can, all who are in need, whether that need be 
physical, social, intellectual or moral. At the same time we must 
remember that all our help must be unselfish. If we help only people 
to whom we are attracted those of our own way of thinking or simply j 
to forward our own spiritual development, we show ourselves to be not 
only selfish, but guilty of prejudice and partiality. 

To feel compassion is not enough, for the Voice of the Silence tells 
us that, "Inaction in a deed of mercy becomes an action in a deadly sin," 
and that, "Inaction based on selfish fear can bear but evil fruit." A 
true Theosophist seeks to cultivate unselfish love, and is ready to work 
for all who suffer and need help, not because he knows that every 
unselfish deed, every effort to help another, and every duty done for 
its own sake lifts him a step higher in the scale of being, transmuting 
something of the animal soul into the human and spiritual. No, not for 
this, but because his aspiration has awakened that higher self that prompts 
to philanthropy and to unselfish performance of duty. It is probably 
true that when one begins to try to live the life he is helped by the 
knowledge that in proportion as he benefits others he brings blessings 
to himself, but later that motive ceases to prompt him, and he will go 
on helping others whether he himself gains or loses by it. 

Universal Brotherhood is no longer a dream meaning nothing for 
the present, and only a rosy prophecy for the future. He comes to feel 
that it is his first and main business in life to advance this great cause, 
and Theosophy teaches that this can only be done by a persistent self- 
sacrifice through every moment of waking life. We are told that the 
results of such a life and such a training are greater, wider and deeper 
than we can at present comprehend. One who knew has told us that, 
"He who does not practise altruism, he who is not prepared to share 
his last morsel with a weaker or poorer than himself; he who neglects 
to help his brother of whatever race, nation or creed whenever and 
wherever he meets suffering, and who turns a deaf ear to the cry of 
human misery; he who hears an innocent person slandered and does not 
undertake his defence, as he would undertake his own is no The- 
osophist" * 

As man develops, the consciousness rises higher and higher, from 
the personality to the individuality, and this gives an ever widening bond 
of fellowship between men, and an ever increasing tendency to think 
and to sympathise with others. As man seeks to develop himself he 
feels more and more saddened by the misery, poverty and sin that are 
all around him, and would gladly do something to lighten the heavy 
burden of the world, but knows not what to do or where to begin. 
Sometimes he tries, but the results discourage him, for he seems to do 



* Lucifer, Vol. I, p. 169. 



HOW MAY WE HELP OTHERS 275 

more harm than good, and it seems to him a hopeless task. Theosophy 
comes as enlightener and helper here for it teaches how even the weakest 
of us may help. It states clearly that we can help by right thought, and 
then goes on to explain in a scientific way how this is accomplished. It 
teaches that there is an inner soul atmosphere from whose waves and 
vibrations the soul receives thoughts, ideas, and impressions ; that through 
this aerial ocean mind communicates with mind. It is by means of this 
etherial agent that the thoughts of the great and good, and pure may 
flow into our souls, so helping us to cast out evil thoughts and become 
pure and good ourselves. But we ourselves help to give character to 
this inner thought-world, for every thought we think, every action we 
perform, every word we speak is reflected in this translucent atmosphere 
as in a mirror. Not only the loving thoughts and words of the mother, 
but the cry of brutal rage, and the shrieks of misery that strike our 
earthly atmosphere, penetrate to, and are re-echoed and prolonged in 
this inner atmosphere, and through it affect other souls. Our silent, 
secret thoughts and our inner life are indelibly photographed on this, 
to us, invisible soul-atmosphere. So we are told that the fruits of 
murderous thoughts are seen in deeds of violence; that thoughts of 
selfish greed and ambition produce the sweatshop with all its horrors. 
But on the other hand it is true that an army of true thinkers can silently 
act on the surrounding world through this etherial medium, and if 
persistent enough could chase away the discord and misery so prevalent 
in our cities, and so give us a better and happier world. In this way 
we can all help, for the silent aspiration for a better social organization, 
the deep, earnest desire for the brotherhood of man will have its effect 
because mind acts on mind. 

The long pondered thought will produce results, perhaps by moving 
another soul who will be able to do far more than we can. The world 
is made up of units, and if every unit would come into harmony with 
the divine mind, the misery and discord that send pain vibrating through 
this sad and sorrowing world would be changed into a glorious song of 
joy. This much is clear, then, the man who betters his own life is better- 
ing the atmosphere of the world. If we are making our own life purer 
we are making the moral struggle of the future easier for ourselves, and 
helping the upward trend of humanity. Let us remember, too, that 
our power to help in this respect is largely increased by our union with 
other souls who have the same object in view, as, for instance, the 
Theosophical Society. We are joined together to render definite service 
to humanity by the diffusion of noble and lofty thoughts, and so every 
faithful member of the society becomes one of the lifters of the world, 
and lifts with a mightier power than if he stood alone. Any band of 
earnest men and women who know the power of thought and plan and 



276 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

think together will make far more progress than if they worked by 
physical agencies alone. 

There are other ways, too, in which we may help others as well as 
by definite thought for particular persons or agencies. There is power 
in speech when it is the expression of a charitable spirit. Quite often 
a few words of sympathy and hope spoken to one in trouble have lifted 
the burden and given the troubled one a new start. Sometimes a word 
of warning kindly spoken has turned the erring one from the path of 
danger and led him to a new and better life, so saving him from much 
pain, and bringing joy to his friends. More than once in my own 
experience the expression of faith in one who had lost faith in himself 
has induced him to try again to conquer his bad habit, and finally enabled 
him to overthrow it. Every Theosophist is an optimist believing that 
the very worst people can be made better, and that good will ultimately 
conquer evil. So he goes on his way trying to help everywhere and 
never despairs if results are not what he expected. If we have not a 
great gift of speech, and have not trained ourselves to think intensely 
and with concentration, we may still do kindly deeds and let our love 
speak through these little acts in private life, and we may rest assured 
that the cup of cold water given in this spirit will get its reward. And 
further, if we can neither speak nor write there is plenty of good litera- 
ture that we may put into the hands of others and by that means render 
immeasurable service, especially if the work is done with a sincere and 
earnest desire to help. Our own QUARTERLY, for instance, put into the 
hands of some who were not at all familiar with Theosophy, and given 
to others who knew a little but were antagonistic, has led them to inquire 
further, so they have had their views of life entirely changed, and them- 
selves have begun to render service. If we can help to lead a man 
from a life of selfishness to one of service and sacrifice we have done 
him the greatest possible service. There are sick people who would have 
better physical health if they could be led to forget themselves and 
think about others and try to render some little service. It will often 
require great patience to lead our sick friends to see this, but it is worth 
while to try it. There are crowds of boys and girls to whom we may 
render service in many ways, but we may be especially helpful by giving 
to them some of the great truths that have come to us. No one who so 
desires will fail to find ways in which he may render the greatest service 
to his fellowmen, and when the opportunity appears we need not be 
afraid to use it. 

JOHN SCHOFIELD. 







The Biblical Theology of the New Testament, by Ezra P. Gould, D.D. (The 
Macmillan Co., New York). Not many years ago, we understand, the author was 
deprived of his incumbency for being heterodox, if not heretical. To-day, his book 
is recommended to theological students by the Examiners for the Diocese of New 
York. It ought, therefore, to represent the current view of orthodoxy. 

Compare the author's view of the nature of sin, with the theories in vogue 
when the Theosophical Society was founded. "The loss," he says, "that the evil 
man incurs is in himself; it affects not what he has, but what he is. He loses his 
soul, or, as Luke puts it, he suffers the loss of himself. Sin is self-destruction, 
and in this sense the man who sins sets the powers of the universe at work against 
himself" (p. 22). And could anything be more theosophical than this? "There is 
an esoteric teaching addressed to the disciples alone in regard to the fortunes of 
the Kingdom, and their own prospects in connection with it, but this does not 
include any of the teaching in regard to the law of the Kingdom, which is a 
common matter. . . . They (mankind in general) are dwellers in this world, 
but since it is now an alien world, their affections are to be concentrated on the 
spiritual order toward which the world tends. Combine this with the prayer 
taught by our Lord, that God's Kingdom may come, and his will be done here on 
earth as in heaven, and what does it mean, except that there is an ideal order 
not yet realized, but sure to come, because it is latent in humanity f And the 
thing that he enjoins on men is, therefore, faith, that is, the spiritual sense which 
puts men in connection with this spiritual order, and clothes them with its powers" 

(p. 40- 

The author is wrong, of course, when saying that St. Paul "held strongly to 
the Pharisaic doctrine of a bodily resurrection, not of a spiritual immortality": 
but that is because he is not familiar with the teaching concerning the reality of 
the spiritual body, which was given in the Lesser Mysteries. How splendidly right 
he is, none the less, when saying that St. Paul "identified man himself, the ego, 
the personal principle, with the higher part of man, which is not invaded by sin. 
Sin is to him an alien thing which has usurped dominion over his actions, but 
against which the higher part, the man himself, rebels. . . . The principle 
of righteousness in him therefore does not have to be created, only discovered, 
and freed from the domain of the flesh" (p. 65). Better, this, than the old insist- 
ence upon the fundamental and inherent evil of our nature ! We recommend this 
book, first to those who would know what Christianity is tending to become; and 
next to those who would hasten the day either by converting certain of the clergy 
or certain of their friends. T. 

The disappointment formerly expressed by prominent European modernists, 
that this movement has called forth no response among American Catholics, should 
be allayed. The Open Court Publishing Co. brought out last summer a book by 
an American priest, who signs himself "A Modernist." Letters to His Holiness 



77 



278 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Pope Pius X is an honest attempt to educate American Catholics to the importance 
of the present crisis in the Church. 

In Part I the author gives a detailed answer to the question: Why has the 
educated modern world rejected Catholicism? Not, as the Papacy has maintained 
because it is under the sway of Satan and Free-Masonry, but because the Church 
has persistently opposed the four great ideals of the age : Freedom of conscience, 
representative government, the separation of Church and State, and intellectual 
freedom. The crimes of "official, Papal, Roman Catholicism," from Inquisition 
days to our own, are recited with a wealth of detail and a painstaking accuracy 
that are, to say the least, convincing. The sole hope for a better day is a cour- 
ageous and intelligent laity. The reforms which scholarship and spirituality demand 
are profound and perilous, but "with Truth set before an upright mind, and the 
Christ-ideal before a reverent heart, the result of religious thought and investiga- 
tion cannot but be salutary and safe." 

Part II, called Faith and Criticism is an effort to make clear the results of 
critical investigation of the Bible, and an inquiry into the nature of true religion. 
The conclusion, as might be expected, is an appeal for a more spiritual religion, 
founded on personality, character, and our interior relation to God. Disciplinary 
and administrative reforms in the Church are necessary steps in the attainment 
of this goal. L. E. P. 

The Necromancers, by Robert Hugh Benson, is a strong exposition of the 
moral, mental and physical dangers which threaten the medium and the seance 
haunter, and is especially valuable in that the phenomena are given due credence. 

It is of interest to Theosophists since it shows the similarity of our viewpoint 
to that of a scholarly Roman Catholic. 

The Master-Singers of Japan, by Clara A. Walsh, one of the Wisdom of the 
East Series, published by E. P. Dutton & Co. This artistically-bound little volume 
is a collection of Japanese masterpieces of poetry, translated with varying success 
by several well-known scholars, as Mr. D. T. Susuki and Lafcadio Hearn. It is 
always difficult adequately to translate poetry, and especially so in the case of 
Japanese, where we have the typical expression of a people whose mental processes 
and psychology are strange and almost incomprehensible to the West. The poems 
are little odes of five or six lines, full of hints and suggestions but half expressed, 
which do not bear translation. Examples will best show what exquisite little 
gems some of these poems are, written, by the way, in the early eighth century, 
when only a few rhymes were being carved on the drinking horns of our forefathers. 

ILLUSION. 

That which we see in sleep, 
Is that alone a dream? 
To me the world itself 
Is not what it may seem, 
But just a phantasy! 

To obtain the full thought, it is obvious that the translator sacrificed rhythm and 
diction. Again : 

MOONLIGHT ON THE PINE-TREES. 
Here, while I stand alone, 
Shadows mysterious thrown 
By the dark mountain pines 
Lie at my feet. 



REVIEWS 279 

At the clear moon I gaze, 
Muse in a thousand ways 
On what my soul divines 

Dimly of life. 

The collection is interesting also as giving an insight into the mentality and 
point of view of the cultured Japanese. Such understanding of the Eastern mode 
of thought is more and more in demand, and this book is an entertaining and inter- 
esting contribution. A. G. 

Routledge Rides Alone* by W. L. Comfort. The heart of the reviewer sank 
very deep indeed the other day when he received a courteous note from Mr. Com- 
fort which stated that he was forwarding a copy of the above named book for 
notice in the QUARTERLY and that its basic theme was the Ancient Wisdom of 
India. Occult novels are the bete noir of the theosophical reviewer. Since Bulwer 
Lytton no writer with sufficient talent to treat such high themes has turned his 
attention to occultism, if we except The Idyl of the White Lotus, which after all 
is hardly a novel. So it was something of a relief to find a distinctly readable 
book, belonging it is true to the class called sensational ; full of battle, murder and 
sudden death, but acceptably written, full of elan, of go, and, beyond all, leaving 
that most dangerous of subjects, love, where it belongs in a novel. An occult 
novel is bad enough, but an occult novel which treats of occultism mixed up with 
love is simply impossible unless done with the genius of a Balzac or a Stevenson. 

In this story the occultism, not very much of it, or of an obtrusive kind, keeps 
to itself, and the lovers have sense enough to know that they are lovers, they want 
to be lovers, and they have no secret hankering to immolate themselves upon the 
altar of their higher natures. They have the usual adventures which keep them 
apart for a decorous length of time and they are finally married by the "occultist" 
just before he follows his "guru" up into the mountains forever. 

If Mr. Comfort knows anything about occultism or "Gurus," he manages to 
disguise his knowledge very completely. His "Guru" is the ordinary Indian 
faqueer, or fakir, who spends his time in Hatha Yoga practices, showing signs 
of occasional clairvoyance, and fails to convince us of his knowledge, power or the 
spirituality we have learned to associate with the name. 

Leaving out the occultism and from the ordinary standpoint of a good story, 
we can conscientiously recommend the book to anyone who wants an exciting tale 
of adventure. 

"The Cheapening of Religion," by James Pagan, Atlantic Monthly, October. 

"The Seven Worst Sermons," by William Austin Smith, Atlantic Monthly, 
November. 

Truly it is encouraging and hopeful to find in a secular magazine such appeals 
to the clergy as are made by Mr. Pagan and Mr. Smith. The appeals are not 
those by which the churches have been so long harangued the call to arms for 
ballot and all other reforms. The strange and hopeful thing about these articles 
is that they sound a retreat from the streets; they call back the priest from his 
militancy to the solitude and silence of his church. Indeed, these two writers are 
so bold as to say that when the priest quits his spiritual stronghold he is imperilling 
those whom his duty it is to protect. Mr. Pagan writes on "The Cheapening of 
Religion," which has come about by confusing it with scientific and socialistic 
experiments. Once upon a time, he writes, the word religion meant "simply and 
solely the conscious relation between man and God, and the expression of that 



Published by J. D. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia. 



28o THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

relation in human conduct." But now, "the liberal churches have thrown the word 
into the literary scrap-heap, have invited all manner of well-meaning people or 
associations of people, to make use of the word as they think fit, and to attach to 
it all manner of ethical, scientific, or socialistic systems by means of which future 
races may be more than thoroughly washed, fed, housed, measured and enlight- 
ened." The result of this confusing of terms is a "tendency to do away with 
religious observance, and to convert religion itself into a guess of constantly 
diminishing importance," so that clergymen even "apologise for introducing spirit- 
uality into human affairs until some kind of social justice has been secured." 
A recent sermon for the feast of St. Michael and All Angels x c~brroborates Mr. 
Pagan's statement. The clergyman upon that day apologised for taking so senti- 
mental a subject as angels one that seemed to belong only to stage romance and 
fiction. Mr. Fagan quotes Phillips Brooks upon the ministry, and exhorts the 
priest to abandon all else and stick to his business of spiritual instruction. " 'God's 
purpose on the earth is man, and the primary and final concern of the Christian 
minister is human character.' Once in the arena there is no help for it. The 
minister must come out for the open shop or against it. He must be socialist or 
anti-socialist. Sooner or later he must be female suffragist or anti-suffragist. He 
must come out for an eight-hour day or against it. Meanwhile, under these circum- 
stances, his congregation being human, only a man-miracle could retain his spiritual 
jurisdiction." 

"Let the minister choose whom he will serve. Let him specialise ; and seeing 
that the primal and final concern of the Christian minister is human character, let 
him specialise at his own business, and stand to his guns." 

Mr. Smith passes in review types of sermons which are hurtful and especially 
condemns a self-satisfied intellectualism that is little more than higher criticism 
diluted in seminary note-books. Both men write as if the things they condemn 
were waning; they have prevailed, they have done their harm, and the world is 
beginning a wholesome reaction. That is why the articles are hopeful. They 
incite to work for what is ahead. "The classic age of preaching is yet to come, 
when some great artist-preacher, as none has ever yet been, shall discover in his 
implement a 'new dimension of art.' There are signs that our century may see his 
appearing. . . . Humanity had never placed such high stakes upon civilisation 
as in the dreams of our age of science ; but she is again discovering within her dark 
corridors the same old pathetic family skeletons of the race. So far, in answer 
to those high hopes, we have only gnawing hunger. Alas ! Civilisation does not 
save. Here is matter for the pith of giant souls, of which we shall soon hear 
more, in literature as well as in the pulpit." C. 

In an interesting work, Tolstoi and His Problems (Funk and Wagnalls Com- 
pany), by Aylmar Maude, there is a paragraph which will particularly interest our 
readers. After telling of many works which Tolstoi caused to be translated into 
Russian, in order to shed light on his own and others' problems, Mr. Maude writes : 
"Among books not translated at Tolstoi's suggestion but commended by him, I 
recollect the philosophical writings of Shankaracharya, translated into Russian by 
Vera Johnston. . . ." These Russian translations were made, in part, from 
material which appeared in the Oriental Department, in Mr. Judge's days. 




QUESTIONS 

mi 



ANSWERS 




QUESTION 124. How is it possible that we should get a continuous development 
from a chain of earth lives? We do not start where we left off or begin again on 
the lessons we failed to learn in a past incarnation; but we start again as babies, 
and go through the same meaningless routine with pretty much the same difficulties 
to overcome in pretty much the same order. 

ANSWER. Because the real life, that of the ego, is continuous. But when it 
puts on a physical body it comes into relation with that law of ebb and flow which 
governs progress in the physical world. For there are two pupils in the school 
of life, the higher nature and the lower nature. They must learn together, but their 
tasks are not the same. While the body is being prepared, through the stages of 
babyhood and youth, as a suitable vehicle, the ego is not losing an opportunity; 
it has its own work. 

Perhaps the laws that govern memorizing may throw some light on the situa- 
tion. In the psychological laboratories they have discovered that the normal child 
learns a poem most readily by reading and re-reading it as a whole. By this 
method he outstrips the one who learns line by line, memorizing each line before 
passing on. The first child is working with the law of association, getting his 
picture complete and in sequence. The line by line memorizer works against that 
law, for, by the constant repetition of a single line, he associates the last word of 
each line with its first word, and so makes artificial difficulties for himself. 

The reincarnating ego seems to learn its poem under the conditions approved 
by experimental psychology. It starts back, with each earth life, at the beginning, 
passes sketchily in review the lines already learned, and, when its vehicle is fully 
developed, takes up its real task, the portion not yet learned, just where it ceased 
at the close of the last earth life. I. P. 

ANSWER. This question is full of incorrect assumptions. How does the 
querent know that we do not start each life where we left off on the last one, or 
begin again to learn the lessons we failed to learn? The teaching is the direct 
contrary. It is true of course that in order to get here at all we have to go through 
a rather tedious physical development before we pick up the threads of our 
evolution, but once we reach maturity, the inference is that we do begin on just 
the same lessons and pick up the threads just where we left them at our death. 
Perhaps some confusion arises from a lack of comprehension of what are the 
lessons we are supposed to learn. They are not the practical things of life. We 
may have died in one life just as we were learning how to make pie. It is hardly 
necessary to suppose that our next existence will begin with a lesson in pie making. 
There are several million other ways of teaching us the same things that knowing 
how to make pie would have taught us. The point is not that we should know 
how to make pie but that our characters should be permanently impressed with the 
result, whatever that might be, of knowing how to make pie. 

81 



282 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

In a word, we incarnate in order to build up character, to develop our souls, 
to learn the fundamental virtues. The way in which we are taught these, the 
experiences through which we learn them, none of these circumstances matter. 
What matters is the eternal fruits of these experiences, whatever they may be. 
We can learn carefulness, patience, thoroughness, conscientiousness, by making 
bread as well as by making pie ; so why resume the lessons in pie making which 
death may have interrupted when our new life contains endless opportunities to 
learn these same virtues in other and simpler ways. Nature would take the line 
of least resistance, and that might very well take us to a country where they had 
never heard of pie, but where many other things are made which we would have 
to learn to make. 

From this point of view the early routine of each life ceases to be "meaning- 
less," for our education and upbringing all helps us to learn life's lessons, to 
impress the eternal verities upon the center of our being until its very essence is 
permanently changed by what we have learned. G. H. 

ANSWER. If this were true there would be no law of Karma and the doc- 
trine that we reap what we sow would be false. The great law governs so that 
there is no "meaningless routine" in any life; we come back again to the lessons 
we have failed to learn. While a man may start again as a baby, he starts pre- 
sumably, with a different climate and surroundings. In one life he may be born 
to the life of a mountaineer or a forester, while in another life he may live on 
the plains or the sea shore. One life may be lived amid the luxury and plenty of 
a tropical island, while he may next be born to a life of hardship, and ceaseless 
struggle with nature. He may be born into a home of wealth and culture, and in 
the next incarnation he may find himself in a home of poverty and ignorance, out 
of which he must come only by struggle. While in each case he begins as a baby 
and goes on through the different stages of life to old age, yet each life teaches 
its own lessons. J. S. 

QUESTION 125. The attitude of some writers for the QUARTERLY in regard to 
Socialism has often puzzled me. Why would not Socialism be the best possible 
basis for building up the sort of character and spirituality for which Theosophy 
stands? By removing the materialising and degrading tendencies of extreme 
poverty and of extreme wealth, it would give freer play to the higher aspirations 
of man. By removing the possibility of great personal wealth it would emphasize 
the idea of the State or of humanity rather than individual gain as a goal for 
which to work. 

ANSWER. You can never make a good building out of bad bricks. Socialism 
teaches that all that is necessary to make man good is to change the conditions in 
which he lives, that man's moral character depends entirely upon his condition, and 
that if you change this you make him happier and better. Theosophy teaches the 
opposite that if you correct the evil in the individual the social conditions will 
change for the better. Any theory of reform based on selfishness will fail. No 
one looks upon the wretchedness, misery and struggle of the masses with more 
compassion than the Theosophist, and no one is more anxious to cure the ills and 
right the wrongs of the multitude than he; but he has learnt by experience. We 
soon learn that to feed and clothe the body and help meet these urgent needs does 
not solve our problem. We expected by this to create conditions that would be 
favorable to moral and spiritual welfare, but instead of helping we have injured, 
we have made them more selfish and more clamorous for physical comforts and 
pleasures, while the moral and spiritual instincts have been dulled or silenced. 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 283 

The Thcosophist knows that present conditions are the results of evolution, the 
outcome of the working of the human race in past centuries and cannot be changed 
by magic. We are in these conditions because we have earned them and we must 
slowly work our way out of them. The Theosophist will co-operate wherever 
he can with all who are seeking to uplift and bless humanity. He will do his best 
to make men think not only of private weal, and private wealth, but also of 
common weal and common wealth, for that is the law of Brotherhood. 

J. S. 

ANSWER. The whole question of the advisability of a socialistic system of 
government rests on the conception of pain. The Socialist believes that pain is 
an evil, and endeavors to remove it wholesale; the theosophist believes that pain is 
a blessing a necessary evil which results in ultimate good. Because it is the 
reaction, upon individuals or groups of individuals, of natural laws which have 
been broken, to remove the pain before its lesson has been learned would be as 
disastrous as to remove the hurtful effect of fire or of sharpened steel upon the 
human body. Pain is a warning. 

Or the matter may be expressed thus. Theosophists as well as socialists 
endeavor to remove pain, but the theosophist considers the socialist's program 
superficial. He thinks that it touches only the external effects of the real cause 
which is the breaking of spiritual law. He would cut deeper and procure enduring 
relief by removing the cause. J. X. 

ANSWER. Socialism like Christian Science rests on the fallacy that what is 
true of the spiritual world is true of the material world also. Christian Science 
teaches that the law of health which is a valid law of the spiritual man is also 
a law of the physical man. Socialism likewise applies the spiritual law of unity 
of all souls to the material world, where the laws of diversity, competition, and 
strife prevail. E. H. X. 

ANSWER. Theosophy recognises "a moral equality of mankind"; it believes 
that in any circumstance man is free to choose what he will do. This is the 
freedom of the will. The choice is the thing that counts, and that bears fruit of 
Karma. Socialism cannot perceive this inner, real equality, and therefore sets to 
work to arrange, against the order of Nature, an artificial, material, mechanical 
equality. H. P. M. 

ANSWER. The theosophical movement is concerned especially with the pro- 
gressive illumination of the soul, an illumination which finally results in its awak- 
ening to a full and permanent knowledge of its immortal and indestructible nature. 
The human soul is immortal, but it has to acquire self-consciousness of this fact 
by experience, generally through hostile environment, and through its association 
with the pairs of opposites. The law of Karma, including the adjustment of the 
actions in previous embodiments, determines and regulates the experience needed 
by each evolving entity. It is not the amount of property, wisdom, and power 
possessed by the personality which constitutes the apparent injustice, but the wrong 
use of these by the possessor. If altruistically bestowed in helping others, too 
much wisdom, power, or wealth cannot be had. But if selfishness is the dominant 
characteristic of the possessor he needs the tests and experiences of wealth or 
poverty to cure his selfish tendencies. 

It seems that all experiences are necessary through many embodiments in order 
to attain the state of Adeptship. One cannot secure the results of any career 
without living its life. In the end one must be industrious in order to secure 
within himself the results of industry. The same is true of every factor connected 



284 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

with life. One must be pure, chaste, loving, studious, helpful, diligent in order 
to reap the harvest of self-conscious character resulting only from a career 
actuated by these qualities. While Theosophy teaches the law of compensation, it 
also teaches the law of Karma and the fact of previous embodiments. The "All 
Seeing Eye" is ever upon us, and the Book of Life contains our records 
those of this incarnation and of all previous ones. None of our experience is 
without educational results, nor could any be left without depriving us of the 
lessons learned thereby. Real socialism will prevail when men get rid of their 
selfishness and not before. But all present and past accounts of this and of 
previous embodiments must be adjusted before this can take place. Every life in 
space will have to go through the same course of education by experience in order 
to reach the goal of perfection. 

Socialism obtains now on the spiritual plane, where there is a complete absence 
of the illusions of separateness and private ownership. Theosophists are engaged 
in the study and investigation of soul problems and are seeking knowledge of 
spiritual laws, which, when followed, will produce enduring results no matter 
what distinctions of wealth there may be. When all have acquired this spiritual 
knowledge by following spiritual laws there will be no more social problems, 
for justice, brotherly love, and efficiency will follow as a necessary consequence. 

W. A. R. T. 

ANSWER. Socialism as understood by me only contemplates man's material 
welfare, and paradoxically arranges mankind into antagonistic classes. I fail to 
understand how this condition can ever be a basis for building character or real 
brotherhood, when the Divine Unity is not considered. The social fabric as 
designed by man himself, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, will continue 
as it is until man comes into a realization of his own individual responsibility, through 
the inherent Divinity within himself, and to a realization of the universality of all 
souls, irrespective of extremes in material conditions and of race, creed, sex, or 
color. Man cannot be cajoled, coerced, or legislated into an ideal existence. 
That must be a growth from within outwards, for the soul, which is real, is 
greater than its vehicle, which is an ephemeral material body. It seems to me 
that so-called Socialism is Utopian as constructed, for it lacks the recognition and 
application of universality in the spiritual meaning, and without such a basis it 
cannot be practical or convincing. A. L. L. 

ANSWER. Socialism is a hindrance to spiritual development and to building 
up the kind of character which goes to eternity, for two reasons: first, it is too 
much concerned with externals, taking external conditions for causes when they 
are only a fleeting result, and also making of external conditions a goal, and so 
defeating the purpose of life; secondly, the establishing of the socialistic order 
of things is accompanied by watching and disparaging the other man's ways, and 
otherwise meddling with the duty of another, which is a most dangerous bent of 
mind for the performance of one's own duties and the appreciating of one's own 
delinquencies. V. J. 

ANSWER. Socialism is excellent as a statement of the ills of society and as a 
protest against the selfish use of wealth and opportunity. When it becomes con- 
structive the case is different. Socialists have not yet worked out their program 
well enough intellectually, nor have they sufficient practical experience to support 
it, to give us confidence that they can cure, or even ameliorate the ills to which 
society has always been heir. The social question is complex, and must be met 
by a complex system of adjustment. No simple panacea is going to do the work. 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 285 

"Government ownership of the tools of production" sounds well, but are our 
present government owners so untainted by greed and dishonesty that we dare 
trust them with more power than they now have? Men human men it must be 
remembered, will always be behind any system, and on their ability and integrity 
the success of the system will always ultimately depend. What right have we 
to assume that the taint of these government owners would disappear if their sphere 
of influence were enlarged? Would a despotism of the working class be less 
onerous than that of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie? If we are in the frying 
pan why get a panic and leap into the fire? 

Slow, sane, experimental progress in social reform is what is needed, a reform 
instigated by sincere good will to all men and strengthened by the conviction of 
the organic unity of society and the consequent inter-dependence of all its parts. 

Nevertheless, if the program of the socialist is founded on a fallacy, it is 
necessary, for the sake of fairness, to say that if he could be convinced of the 
utter unworldliness and sincere spirituality of those who warn him that a man's 
life consists not in the abundance of things that he possesses, he would be very 
much more likely to listen respectfully to their warnings and to put their doctrines 
to the proof. It is the old question of the pound of precept and the ounce of 
example. L. E. P. 

QUESTION 126. "Of course I can see the fallacy of the rampant, destructive 
type of Socialism, or the kind that centers a man's soul in his stomach, and says 
if he is fed and clothed properly all will be well. But there are some who ire 
socialists because they are individualists, and that is the sort of thing I ant 
trying to unravel. They say that the individual in the majority of cases has no 
chance to develop what is best in him under the present system. I haven't any 
doubt at all that this is true. In fact, I am getting more and more socialistic in 
feeling, and as it is against all my interests, environment and wishes to be so, 
I think that it may perhaps be an honest conviction that is drawing me." 

ANSWER. We think not. We think it is sentiment which is drawing you; 
a sentiment which does honor to your heart, but neither to your head nor your 
religious faith. You say, indeed, your whole proposition rests upon the state- 
ment that the majority of individuals under the present system have no chance 
to develop what is best in them. Leaving aside for a moment the reply that 
if this were true the present system would be instantly changed by the powers 
which rule the Universe, and turning to the statement itself, we do not believe 
it is true. You say you do not doubt its truth. We do. We believe it to be 
absolutely and entirely false, and we believe that this mistake is at the root of 
nine-tenths of all successful socialistic propaganda. 

Instead of its being true that hardship prevents development, we believe the 
facts of life, the results of universal experience point to the direct opposite 
being the case. It is only when we take a very short-sighted and a purely 
material view of life that we can believe that hardship prevents development 
Such a view leaves out the spiritual structure of the universe; the basis upon 
which the whole of evolution rests; and it leaves out of account the element 
of time which is so important a factor in the problem. If we look at evolu- 
tion from the point of view of milleniums instead of a few years, we neces- 
sarily alter our conclusions in many important particulars, and in none more 
important than in this question of the effect of hardship upon human develop- 
ment. But to get a proper perspective from which to view this matter we 
must dig deep into the laws of the spiritual world. 



286 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

The object of evolution is the attainment of ^//-consciousness. At the 
dawn of evolution the soul was conscious, but not .^//-conscious. In order to 
become self-conscious the soul had to make for itself a vehicle or image in 
which it could be reflected, and it is the viewing of itself in this image which 
develops self-consciousness. Therefore it created the personality, vitalizing it 
with a portion of itself, and in order that it should have a sufficiently independent 
existence, the soul had to grant the personality a considerable element of free- 
will. With free-will there came into the world the breaking of law, and with 
the breaking of law there came into the world pain and suffering. 

Pain and suffering, often spelt with capital letters, are not things in them- 
selves as we are too prone to imagine. They are only results of things, results 
of the breaking of the laws of the universe. They have no independent 
existence and would instantly and forever disappear if we ceased to break the 
laws. Pain and suffering, all hardships of whatsoever kind, are nature's efforts 
to readjust inharmonious and disarranged forces which have been started by 
the free-will of individuals. If our wills acted in harmony with the Divine Will 
all pain and suffering would instantly disappear forever. 

Nor is it proper to consider pain as a punishment, as we are wont to call 
it. We have gradually learned to associate an entirely wrong idea with suffer- 
ing when we call it punishment. God never punishes, in the sense in which that 
word is ordinarily used. There is an automatic readjustment of the laws of 
the universe which too often causes us to suffer pain, but it is quite as incor- 
rect to call this punishment as it would be to say of a stone flung into the air 
that the law of gravitation is punishing it by making it fall back to the earth. 
Jt may hurt the stone to fall back; it may even break it to pieces if the fall be 
far enough and if it should land upon something as hard or harder than itself; 
but why say that the stone is being punished? So with us. If we break a law, 
whether the law of gravitation, or any other, all the forces of the universe tend 
to correct our breach, and most often this causes us pain and we call it punish- 
ment. These are only words after all which we have given to processes of nature 
which accompany the working out of Nature's laws. 

The Socialist would forcibly intervene in this universal process of nature 
and step between the man and the consequences of his breaches of Nature's laws. 
It can be done for a time, for nature is very patient. A stone flung into the 
air may catch upon some ledge of rock, or upon the roof of a house and stay 
there in apparent safety for many years. But it is not safe. The force needed 
to bring it back to earth is there always, latent, but ready to act upon the 
instant when restraint is withdrawn. Sooner or later that house will wear out 
and tumble down, or, if Nature became impatient, she might give it a little 
earthquake shake which would bring it and the stone it supports back to mother 
earth in the twinkling of an eye. So with political or legal efforts to enable us 
to avoid the consequences of our acts. They may be effective temporarily, but 
the forces which we started are there, ready to act the instant restraint is 
removed, and if there is too great delay, Nature may, and often has, brought 
the whole elaborate structure down about its creators' ears. 

C. A. G., JR. 




NOTE. The Secretary of the Theosophical Society, Mrs. Ada Gregg, 159 
Warren Street, Brooklyn, New York, will be glad to answer inquiries with regard 
to the aims and work of the Society, to furnish information as to the time and 
place of the local Branch meetings, to all of which visitors are welcomed, or to 
receive and forward applications for membership. Orders for theosophical books 
and publications may also be addressed to the Secretary. 

THE NEW YORK BRANCH 

The regular fortnightly meetings of the New York Branch were resumed on 
October 15th, along the same lines as had proved so successful in preceding years. 
These meetings are held on alternate Saturday evenings, from half-past eight to 
half -past ten o'clock, in Room 47 of the Benedick, 80 Washington Square, East. 
The topic of the evening is presented in an address of about twenty minutes dura- 
tion by the member chosen to lead the discussion. This is followed by shorter 
talks from others, each person present taking up that phase of the subject which 
appeals particularly to him. The whole is then the subject of general discussion 
and the meeting closes with a synthetic summary of the different aspects of the 
question considered. 

The work of this Branch, through its numerous informal activities, had 
attracted so many inquirers, and so much misconception of the true nature and 
purposes of the Society had been found to exist among them, that it was decided 
to devote the first half of the winter's program to a discussion of fundamental 
principles. Accordingly, the following syllabus was constructed, dealing explicitly 
with the aims, character and history of the Society, but capable of being so treated 
as to reveal the underlying principles and to indicate their application to the 
problems of daily life. Thus in discussing the theosophic attitude and method, 
the effort was made not only to clarify the philosophical principles upon which 
they rest and to show how every department of the Society's work assumes the 
one and is carried on through the other, but also to apply these principles to our 
personal lives, to our view and treatment of ourselves and of others, and to 
various types of ethical and social problems. 

TOPICS FOR THE REGULAR MEETINGS 

October 29. "The Purposes for which the Theosophical Society was Founded." 
November 12. "The Stated Objects of the Society, and the Basis of Brotherhood." 
November 26. "The Theosophic Attitude and Method." 
December 10. "The History of the Theosophical Society." 
December 17. "Theosophy and the Theosophical Society." 
January 7. "Madame Blavatsky and the Hidden Forces of Nature." 
January 21. "Contributions of the Theosophical Society to the Trend of Modern 
Thought." 

87 



288 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

February 4. "The Theosophic Spirit." 
February 18. "The Theosophic Life." 

In addition to these regular Saturday meetings, a well attended study class 
is conducted by the younger members of the Branch on alternate Friday evenings. 
This class meets at 80 Washington Square at half-past eight o'clock, and to it, as 
to the regular meetings, all who are interested are cordially invited to come. It 
has chosen as its text Mr. Johnston's translation of the Bhagavad Gita, and has 
the rare good fortune to have the translator present in person and so have at its 
command his thorough knowledge of the original texts and his wide acquaintance 
with the Indian Scriptures. 

On all sides the Branch reports an openness of opportunity which widens year 
by year and is full of the richest promise. In every department of thought, and 
particularly in the new tide of spiritual life flowing through the Christian churches, 
there is evident an eager seeking for the message which theosophy and the theo- 
sophic life can bring. In consequence, over and above its own meetings, much of 
the most fruitful work of the Branch is done informally by its members through 
other organizations. But vital and far reaching as this work is and has been it 
can hardly be dealt with here. 

THE DAYTON BRANCH 

The same sense of new life and of deepening promise which is felt in the 
work of the New York Branch is manifest in the reports from the other American 
Branches. Thus we learn that the Dayton Branch has increased its membership 
-and that its meetings are attended by a continually growing number of visitors, 
who come and "come again." "Every night new faces are appearing the majority 
of which are of young people. We have been inviting those outside our organiza- 
tion to speak to us, and they always give us good theosophy, by whatever name they 
call it. We have grown more tolerant to our church friends. They come, and 
they come back again and again. We are trying to learn other peoples' language 
and have a greater respect for other peoples' opinion. We try to help them on 
their own ground. And our members are getting closer together. We have never 
missed a meeting during hot weather. Hot weather theosophy seems to be our 
best. Those behind our movement never go on a vacation, and therefore we do 
not freeze up in summer and thaw out in winter." 

The report continues telling of the assistance given the Branch by the press, 
and its cordial relations with the ministers of many of the churches. Here, as in 
New York and all over the world, the rising tide of the spiritual life is felt in 
Christianity. 

These two reports are but typical of the many that have reached us from the 
Branches in America, in England, in Germany, in Norway and Sweden, and wher- 
ever the work of the Society is carried on. The old barriers have fallen, and our 
opportunity is limited only by what we ourselves are or can become. We set our 
faces to the new year filled with profound gratitude for the past, for the high 
privilege of service and of opportunity that is ours, and with the steadfast resolve 
to fulfill with all that in us lies, the obligations such opportunity and such privilege 
have brought. 




The Theosophical Society, as such, is not responsible for any 
opinion or declaration in this magazine, by whomsoever expressed, unless 
contained in an official document. 

THREE BOOKS ON THE MYSTERIES 

ONE of the noteworthy things of this wonderful time of ours, 
perhaps its most vital and promising characteristic, is the 
growing general understanding of the place that the Mysteries 
and the Keepers of the Mysteries hold in the life of mankind 
and of the world. We are coming into a recognition, which every day 
makes fuller and deeper, that this visible humanity of ours, with its 
tragedies and comedies, and its vanity and its sorrow, is not left alone 
and unguarded, to stumble and sin amidst infinities. We are coming 
with ever-growing clearness to perceive the august presence of the Elder 
Brothers in the veiled background of our stage. 

It will be a long time before we fully realize what the Elder 
Brothers are doing, and how much they are doing; before we can clearly 
discern their splendid share in our particular fates, and, at the same 
time, in the large movements, religious, political, national, in the world 
about us; before we can recognize the touch of the Masters in life and 
death alike. But we are making headway. We are moving in the right 
direction, moving forward at once with sureness and with speed. A little 
while ago this humanity of ours was like a crew of common sailors trying 
to navigate the ship, knowing nothing of navigation, of compass or 
sextant or chronometer, and unable either to see or to hear the captain 
and his officers. Now, some of the crew have waked up to the fact that 
we have the captain and officers aboard, and are determined not only to 
find and identify them, but further, so far as is possible, to make their 
presence and benign guidance known to all the crew. And those who 
are illumined by this determination have the heartening certainty that 
their right effort to do this will find cordial and effective co-operation 
from the captain and officers who, all the time, have had the real though 
unrecognized direction of the ship. To drop metaphor and parable: 
the life of each individual, and the life of mankind, will become infinitely 
more bearable, sane, illumined, holy and wise, in measure as we and 

19 9 



290 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

they discern the near presence of the Masters, and, discerning, begin to 
co-operate with the Masters in what, age after age, they have been 
trying to do. 

As a step toward the Keepers of the Mysteries, we may begin by 
seeking to understand what the Mysteries are, and what part they play, 
and have always played, in the life and history of the world. The writer 
to whom is entrusted the arrangement of these "Notes and Comments" 
has on his table three books on the Mysteries, or on aspects of them ; and 
some account of these, enriched by the light they inevitably shed on each 
other, with, perhaps, brief added comment, cannot fail to clear up in all 
our minds this great and vital theme, thus bringing us a little nearer to 
understanding the work and inspiration of the Masters of Life. 

Two of these three books were published only a few months ago. 
The third is of older date, yet practically unknown, at least in English. 
And the three books have this in common : each presents with vividness 
and force one side of the Mysteries, while each has a marked limitation, 
due, it would seem, to seeing that one side too dominantly, and thus 
presenting it at the expense of other sides not less vital to an under- 
standing of the whole august theme. We shall try, first, to give the 
essence, the positive contribution, of each of the three books; then to 
point out what seems to us the limitation of each; and, finally, perhaps, 
we may be able to gather the threads together, and to take a general 
view of the Mysteries, in the past and in the present, as revealed by our 
detailed survey. 

The first of the three books is called The New Testament of Higher 
Buddhism, by Timothy Richard, D.D., Litt.D., of the English Baptist 
Mission to China. The essence and positive contribution of this book 
is its illuminating and enthusiastic account of certain aspects of Bud- 
dhism, belonging to what is called the Mahayana School, the School, that 
is, of the Great Vehicle. So admirable and germane to the Theo- 
sophical cause is much that Dr. Richard has to say, that we venture to 
quote at some length from his Introduction. 

In the section entitled "The Leading of God in Contemporary 
Religious Movements," Dr. Richard says: "By comparing the dates of 
great conquerors, of great sages and founders of religions and civili- 
zations, we find that there was a simultaneous movement operating, 
indicating that they were brought about by causes common to them 
acting universally. Thousands of years B. C. we find polytheism all over 
the world, attended by multitudes of religious ceremonies. About the 
fifth and sixth centuries B. C. there arose in China, in India, in Babylon, 
in Judea, and in Greece a large number of prophets and sages who laid 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 291 

more emphasis on ethics than on religious ceremonies paid to a multitude 
of gods. From the beginning of the Christian era onwards for a 
thousand years, we find monotheism and ethics superseding ancient 
polytheism, in Europe under Christianity, in western Asia under Moham- 
medanism, in India producing the Bhagavat Gita, and in the Far East, 
China, Korea, and Japan, under Confucianism and New Buddhism . . . 
In our day we are face to face and side by side with the choicest and 
most enlightened souls, who, while realising the immanence of God, are 
striving to obtain a glimpse behind the veil into the transcendency of 
God and recognise the Divine current of spiritual force which inspires 
all nations and races with modern Life, Light and Love." 

In comment on this, we may say, that, while we think Dr. Richard 
is unduly discouraged about the polytheistic ceremonies belonging to the 
period "thousands of years B. C," which ceremonies were, in the main, 
most illumining dramas of the Mysteries, and no mere superstitions, and 
while we think Dr. Richard, moved, perhaps, by an unconscious bias, is 
in error in putting the Bhagavad Gita into the period after the beginning 
of the Christian era, yet we could ask for no better testimony to our 
thesis of the presence and operation of the Lodge of Masters than his 
recognition of the cyclic law guiding the energies of the "great sages and 
founders of religions and civilizations," the "prophets and sages" who 
made themselves felt at the same time in China, India, Judea and Greece. 
Nor could we demand a better definition of the Lodge force than that 
contained in Dr. Richard's sentence: "the Divine current of spiritual 
force which inspires all nations and races with Life, Light and Love." 

We have only the highest commendation and admiration for 
Dr. Richard, when, comparing Christianity and Buddhism, he writes: 
"Both the Christians and the Buddhists regard their chief object of 
worship as Divine and full of compassion for human suffering. The 
Christians speak of their Saviour as voluntarily leaving the glory of 
heaven, where He was equal with God, and coming down, lower than an 
angel, to be man, suffering the shameful death of the cross for those who 
were so cruel as to crucify Him, and praying for them: 'Father, forgive 
them; for they know not what they do.'. . .When devout Buddhists read 
these sentiments, they find much that commends itself to them as of 
exceptionally high merit. On the other hand, when the Christian reads 
the vows of Amitabha (Dharmakara), which are here summarised as 
saying he did not wish to go to heaven if his followers could not enjoy 
the same perfections as he had. . .or when they read the twelve vows of 
the Buddhist Great Physician, namely, to descend to earth to make men 
godlike, to teach the new and living way, to save men from hell and 
make them holy, to befriend the friendless, to give hope to womankind, 
to feed hungry spirits with spiritual food, and clothe them with garments 



292 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

of righteousness, (and the like) when devout Christians read these 
sentiments, they will find much that will commend itself to them as of 
exceptional merit, and will remind them strongly of their own Great 
Physician. Thus both Christians and Buddhists, by dwelling on their 
respective ideals rather than on their respective imperfections, will find 
themselves inspired to co-operate and exert themselves more than ever 
before for the salvation of their fellow-men, and to study each other's 
most sacred books. There are dry bones in both religions. What is 
needed is the Creative Spirit of the Christians, called the Merciful 
Kwanyin by the Buddhists, to make these dry bones live again !" 

Dr. Richard continues : "The time of universal intercourse dawned 
upon mankind with the advent of steam and electricity within the last 
century. With this there has arisen the feeling that the next step in 
religious evolution is not a monopoly of any one of these competitive 
religions but a federation of all, on a basis that acknowledges with 
gratitude all that is best in the past in different parts of the earth as 
Divine, and then finally following the one which surpasses all the rest 
in authority and in usefulness to the human race." In this thought, 
"not a monopoly of any one of these competitive religions but a federa- 
tion of all, on a basis that acknowledges with gratitude all that is best in 
the past in different parts of the earth as Divine," we have an expression 
of a view fundamentally Theosophical ; of the inspiring thought, indeed, 
that stands behind the Theosophical movement. 

We should not quite agree with Dr. Richard, that, after this federa- 
tion of religions, we are to make a choice among them, and finally follow 
one among them. In the "Notes and Comments" in our last number, 
something was said of this, when the words of an august personage were 
quoted, regarding the Theosophical Society as "the foundation stone 
of the future religions of humanity." Our personal belief is, that the 
federation of religions in the Theosophical spirit will be one of the forces 
which will illumine a certain number of the foremost living followers of 
each religion, bringing them to that point on the path where they can 
really discern and understand the laws of life and death, of resurrection 
and spiritual development; in virtue of this illumination, coming into the 
presence of the immortal Children of Light, they will thenceforth form 
a channel, an open road, as it were, between the two worlds, between the 
Lodge of Masters and our common humanity; this body of spiritual 
men will form the heart of our religions, each of which will thenceforth 
be able to teach, with sure practical touch, the science of holiness, the 
art of immortality, the verified truth of spiritual life. The solution of 
the future lies, we believe, in the formation of such an Inner Body of 
all religions. 

In no sense would this conflict with the final words of Dr. Richard. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 293 

"There would be no difficulty in getting the most intelligent to recognise 
Moses and the prophets of Israel, Confucius and Mencius, the Sages of 
China, Mohammed, God's ambassador to the Arabs, as all sent of God. 
And the final step in religion is foreshadowed by the firm belief of 
Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians, that the supreme Saviour of men 
must be God Incarnate. Latently, if not expressed, Confucianism, 
Taoism, and Shintoism base their claim to obedience on the belief that 
their teaching is derived from Heaven, where alone Power, Wisdom, 
Justice, and Mercy are to be found in perfection. The Religion of the 
future which will satisfy all nations and all races will not be born of any 
party cry, but will be born from the habit of looking at the highest and 
permanent elements in all religions and gladly recognising all that helps 
to save man, body, soul, and spirit, individually or collectively, as Divine. 
The whole intelligent world is getting tired of the struggle concerning the 
different doctrines and practices of the various religions and their sub- 
divisions into many hundreds of sects, but all are eager to know what 
light any or all of them can throw on. . .how to deliver all human hearts 
from the disease of selfishness and sin, that they may be made right with 
God and man." 

After so much that is admirable and to our purpose in Dr. Richard's 
book, it may seem ungracious to hark back to the limitation in his view 
which we have already spoken of. Yet justice compels us to do so. 
The limitation is this : In the substance of his book, Dr. Richard gives 
us an admirable, eloquent, spiritual and inspiring account of Mahayana 
Buddhism, the New Testament, as he calls it, of the great Sakyamuni's 
teaching. Yet in that very title he reveals his bias, his failure, as it 
appears to us, rightly to understand the original teaching of Siddhartha 
the Compassionate. Dr. Richard falls, indeed, into the very error which 
has been so admirably and completely refuted by the author of The Creed 
of Buddha, in that superb work, which we commented on so fully in a 
former number. Like so many scholars, Dr. Richard believes that the 
original teaching of the Buddha was atheistic and nihilistic, and that it 
had no heart of spiritual life and light. He fails to understand the 
reality, as we deem it, of esoteric Buddhism; would deny, perhaps, that 
Buddha had an inner teaching. 

There is, of course, a seeming support for this negative view, in the 
often quoted passage in which the Buddha, then at the point of death, 
declared to his disciples that he had kept nothing back, had not offered 
the people an outer doctrine merely, had not kept his hand closed on an 
esoteric teaching. But we believe that this support is only seeming; 
that the Buddha wished to impress on his hearers the fact that he was 
not, like the Brahmans, establishing a closed caste with hidden scriptures. 
But the evident indication of an esoteric Buddhism lies everywhere 



294 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

through his teachings. For instance, does he not, in the Akankheya 
Sutta, describe the Four Trances, and the mystic powers, including 
spiritual vision, spiritual hearing, and the other powers of the spiritual 
man. The true esoteric Buddhism is, then, the new view of the world, 
which is revealed to him who has "mastered the Four Trances," the 
higher strata of consciousness, and who is in possession of the developed 
powers of the spiritual man. And that real esoteric Buddhism, which 
is implicit everywhere in the Buddha's teaching, and was not, therefore, 
kept back in a closed hand, is, we are convinced, the true source of the 
Mahayana, the "New Testament Buddhism," as Dr. Richard calls it. 

But the matter goes a little further. Failing, as we think, to find 
the true source of the Mahayana, in the developed teaching of Siddhartha 
the Compassionate himself, and in the world-view which comes from not 
only hearing but following his precepts, Dr. Richard makes a suggestion 
as to the origin of the Mahayana which, we are convinced, is entirely 
misleading. The theology of the Mahayana school, he says, "is Christ- 
ian in everything almost but its nomenclature. Ashvagosha was the 
Apostle Paul of Buddhism, and lived only about fifty years after Paul. 
Where Ashvaghosha got his ideas we do not know. Some say from the 
Apostle Thomas, who is supposed to have been together with him in the 
court of Gondophorus or Kanishka. But we await further light on the 
historic meeting-place of Christianity and New Buddhism before more 
definite pronouncements can be made." 

A little later in his work, Dr. Richard reaches a greater definiteness 
in his surmises, which expresses itself thus : "If it be, as it is more and 
more believed, that the Mahayana Faith is not Buddhism, properly 
so-called, but an Asiatic form of the same gospel of our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ, in Buddhistic nomenclature, differing from the 
Old Buddhism just as the New Testament differs from the Old, then it 
commands a world-wide interest, for in it we find an adaptation of 
Christianity to ancient thought in Asia, and the deepest bond of union 
between the different races of the East and West, namely, the bond 
of a common religion." Here, we venture to think, Dr. Richard has 
allowed himself to be led away from the path of true criticism and true 
science. The remedy would be a thorough study of the ancient 
Upanishads, where he will find the fine essence of all the teachings which 
so greatly command his admiration in the Mahayana that he tries to 
trace them back to Galilee. This limitation, is however, no very great 
matter, and the corrective is ready to our hand. But the substantive 
gain of Dr. Richard's work is immense, and we heartily express our 
obligation to him. 

We come now to the second of our three books, The Apocalypse 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 295 

Unsealed, by James M. Pryse. The purpose of the book may best be 
set forth in Mr. Pryse's own words : "Every thoughtful student of the 
literature of the ancient religions, including that of early Christianity, 
can not but be impressed by the fact that in each and all of them may be 
found very clear intimations of a secret traditional lore, an arcane science, 
handed down from times immemorial. This secret body of knowledge 
is repeatedly alluded to in the New Testament, as also in the Upanishads 
and other ancient writings, in whose pages a few of the arcane doctrines 
are cautiously unveiled; and from the meagre glimpses thus afforded of 
the system it is clearly apparent that it was essentially the same in all 
the old religions and philosophies, constituting, in fact, their common 
esoteric basis." 

Mr. Pryse further holds that "the Apocalypse is the key to the New 
Testament; more, it is in very truth the key of the Gnosis. . .much that 
is given in it had already been very clearly and openly stated in the 
writings of Plato (with which the Apocalyptist was evidently familiar) 
and of other Greek Initiates, as well as in the Buddhistic and Brahmanical 
scriptures. . .The Apocalypse is, as its title implies, an account of the 
initiation of Joannes himself. In the subtitle he calls it 'the Initiation of 
Anointed lesous,' that is, of his own illuminated Nous, the 'witness' for 
the universal Logos, as loannes in the material world, the 'slave' 
(doulos) of the true Self, is the 'witness' for the individual Logos." 

With very much of this we are in hearty accord. We should like 
at this point, however, to enter a caveat. In an earlier page, Mr. Pryse 
writes: "Now, in plain words, what does this very occult book, the 
Apocalypse, contain ? It gives the esoteric interpretation of the Christos- 
myth; it tells what 'lesous the Christos' really is; it explains the nature 
of 'the old serpent, who is the Devil and Satan' ; it repudiates the profane 
conception of an anthropomorphic God; and with sublime imagery it 
points out the true and only path to Life Eternal." So far Mr. Pryse. 
We should like, however, to put on record, as our personal opinion, that 
the Anointed lesous, or Jesus, is not identical with the "illuminated 
Nous," or Higher Self, of loannes, the disciple John, except in so far 
as any Master is to be considered the Higher Self of his disciple. Nor 
can we let pass the phrase "the Christos-myth" without recording our 
personal belief that, while Christos may be used in a wide and general 
spiritual sense, it generally refers, in the New Testament, to that Master 
whom we know as Jesus ; and, further, that the whole story of that 
Master, from the Incarnation (though the teaching of the Virgin Birth 
is materialised and misunderstood), through the ministry, to the Cruci- 
fixion and Ascension, is a true history of the life-work of a real Master, 
whose teaching to his disciples, so far as they understood it, is embodied 
in the Gospels. 



296 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

We are further persuaded that this same Master, acting now in the 
"immortal body," of which Mr. Pryse has so much to say that is excellent, 
continued to watch over and guide his disciples throughout the period 
covered by the books of the New Testament, including the Apocalypse; 
which is, we believe, what Mr. Pryse calls it, a record of the initiation of 
John ; but which is further, what he fails to bring out clearly, the record 
of John's initiation by the same Master whose visible life and work John 
had earlier depicted in his wonderful and mystic Gospel. And we are 
persuaded that, throughout the Apocalypse, John has recorded and pre- 
served many genuine sayings of that Master, such, for example, as the 
superb passage which Mr. Pryse renders thus : "Because you say, 'I am 
rich, I have become rich, and I have lack of nothing,' and do not know 
that you are the worn-out, pitiable, beggarly, blind and naked one, I 
advise you to buy from me gold tried by fire so that you may be rich 
and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and the shame of 
your nakedness not be apparent and eye salve to anoint your eyes so 
that you may see. As many as I love, I confute and instruct. There- 
fore be emulous and reform. Behold! I am standing at the door and 
gently tapping. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I shall 
visit him ; and I shall dine with him, and he with me." 

The version which we have just quoted is, without doubt, very literal, 
and corrects certain errors in the Authorised Version. In that sense, 
it brings out an element of truth concealed by the King James version, 
and is, to that extent, a gain. Yet, it seems to us, in gaining one kind of 
truth, Mr. Pryse, through his method of translating, has sacrificed or 
overlooked another kind of truth; that essence, namely, which is con- 
tained in the rhythm of an occult book; what Mr. Pryse would, no doubt, 
call its mantra. And, whatever be the imperfections of the English 
Authorised Version, it has this supreme merit, that through much of it 
there is present this superb quality of spiritual rhythm, which should in 
no wise be tampered with. It seems to us that, just as behind such a 
work as Light on the Path, or The Idyll of the White Lotus, there stood 
the true author, the inspirer, the Master, compelling the spiritual sense 
into beautiful rhythms, so, behind a work destined to have such a world- 
wide influence as the authorised English Bible, the Master may also have 
stood, breathing into it those superb rhythms which give it literary immor- 
tality. In Light on the Path, or in The Idyll of the White Lotus, the 
characteristic rhythms are Greek, one might even say Homeric; for 
example, we may quote from the former such a sentence as this : "Look 
foi the flower to bloom in the silence that follows the storm;" which is 
markedly dactylic; or, from the latter, "Each man is his own absolute 
lawgiver, the dispenser of glory or gloom to himself," where the second 
part of the sentence has the same quality. And with these we might 
compare such a sentence as this: "Behold I send you forth as sheep in 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 297 

the midst of wolves; be ye, therefore, wise as serpents and harmless as 
doves ;" or such a sentence as this : "Consider the lilies how they grow, 
they toil not, neither do they spin ; yet Solomon in all his glory was not 
arrayed like one of these." It seems to us that no amount of literalness 
will condone the destruction of such a rhythmical quality as this, and we 
cannot say that we are persuaded by Mr. Pryse's variant of the superb 
phrase : "Behold, I stand at the door and knock." 

For the most part, however, we are inclined to believe that Mr. Pryse 
has reached true conclusions concerning the Mystery teaching in the 
Apocalypse, and has successfully solved many riddles, including "the 
number of the Beast," the "six hundred, three score and six," and much 
of the arcane symbology to which such vast stores of industry have 
hitherto been uselessly applied. Mr. Pryse takes much the same view of 
the "second death" as was taken in certain articles in THE THEOSOPHICAL 
QUARTERLY two or three years ago, though he has evidently reached his 
conclusion along lines of his own. His book is a genuine and valuable 
contribution to the study of the Mysteries ; especially valuable as showing 
the presence of the Mystery teaching, in essence and in detail, within the 
covers of the New Testament. Mr. Pryse rather turns the tables on 
such a scholar as Dr. Richard, who is tempted, as we saw, to derive all 
that is best in the Mahayana from St. Thomas ; for Mr. Pryse shows that 
a part, at least, of the New Testament owes its very life to the presence 
of the older doctrine of the Initiates, the "just men made perfect," the 
sages and seers whom Dr. Richard so eloquently referred to in a passage 
we quoted at the outset. 

In his Introduction, Mr. Pryse writes thus of spiritual seership: 
"When the sushumna impinges upon the brain there follows the lofty 
consciousness of the seer, whose mystic 'third eye' now becomes, as it has 
been poetically expressed, 'a window into space.' " This suggests a 
passage in another book, the third of the three which we had in mind in 
writing the subtitle of these "Notes and Comments." This is the Popol 
Vuh, the very ancient Sacred Book of Central America, edited and 
translated by Brasseur de Bourbourg, an autographed copy of which, by 
a fortunate coincidence, is at this moment before us. Before we quote 
the passage in question, we may say, by way of introduction, that, when 
the Spaniards came to Central America, immediately after the expeditions 
of Columbus, they found the so-called "Indians" in possession of a script, 
which might almost be called an alphabet, in which they had many books. 
Further, in the years immediately after the Spanish Conquest, some of 
the most intelligent and enlightened "Indians" learned Spanish, and the 
Latin alphabet, and re-wrote some of their ancient books in the Latin 
letters ; while, at the same time, learned Spanish monks made dictionaries 



298 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

and grammars, some of which, in the original Mexican editions, are still 
extant, and which embody an accurate and extensive knowledge of the 
old "Indian" languages. 

Brasseur de Bourbourg, bringing these various instruments of 
knowledge together, has printed a text, and a translation in French, of 
one of these ancient books, under the title Popol Vuh, the Sacred Book. 
He gives an account of the vistas of antiquity revealed by it, and by the 
traditions which accompany it; with the migrations of the early races 
from certain lands to the east of Central America, whence they were 
displaced by natural cataclysms. Further, he declares, again and again, 
in passages which we would fain quote, did space permit, that the 
possessors of these ancient books had a system of Mysteries, which he 
compares to Masonry, and that this record is a symbolic account of 
certain of the events of the Mystery dramas, which were thus handed 
down and perpetuated to our own day, even though often quite misunder- 
stood. This whole subject demands and deserves something more than 
the cursory treatment which we are compelled here to give it, and we 
may, perhaps, take it up again at a more convenient time. 

But we cannot leave the subject without bringing out, first, the fact 
that we thus find evidence of the Mysteries in Central America, centuries 
ago, long before the beginning of our era, in Brasseur de Bourbourg's 
opinion; and, secondly, calling attention to the tradition that these Mys- 
teries came to America from the East, that is, across the Atlantic. Our 
personal belief is, that they came, if not from Egypt, then from that now 
hidden source whence Egypt herself drew some of her arcane wisdom. 
But we must leave this as merely a suggestion, and return to our point of 
departure, the passage concerning the mystical "third eye." 

In the Popol Vuh, there are many exceedingly interesting traditions 
of the early races of mankind, and the successive attempts to create, 
which strongly call to mind parts of The Secret Doctrine. One of these 
is as follows : "A wonder and a true marvel was their creation and the 
making of them, by the Creator, the Former, the Engenderer, by Him 
who gives being: having the appearance of men, they were therefore 
men; they spoke and reasoned, they saw and heard, they moved about 
and handled; men perfect and beautiful, whose faces were as the face 
of a man. Thought dwelt in them and they saw, and as soon as they 
raised their eyes, their vision embraced all things; they knew the whole 
world, and when they looked, their vision turned in an instant from the 
vault of heaven to behold again the surface of the earth. Things most 
hidden they beheld at will, without need of moving beforehand; and 
when they turned their vision toward the earth, they beheld all that it 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 299 

contains. Great was their wisdom ; their genius extended over the woods 
and the rocks, over the lakes and the seas, over the mountains and the 
valleys; men truly worthy of admiration. 

"They saw everything under heaven ; then they gave thanks to the 
Creator and the Former, saying: Truly we offer you all thanks. We 
have received being, we have received mouths, we have received faces, 
we speak, we hear, we think, we walk; we perceive and know as well 
what is far off as what is at hand. We see all things great and small in 
heaven and upon earth. Thanks then be to you, we have been created, 
O Builder, O Former; we exist, said they, thus giving thanks for their 
being and their formation. They completed the measurement and the 
survey of all things that exist, to the four corners and angles of the 
heavens and the earth. 

"But the Builder and the Former heard this with displeasure. 
Therefore they took counsel anew, saying: What shall we do with 
them? Let their vision be contracted, so that they may see only what 
is on the surface of the earth. They will be as gods; therefore let us 
mar a little our handiwork, that they may lack something ; else they may 
wish to equal Us who have made them, Us whose wisdom extends afar 
and comprehends all. Thus spoke the Heart of the Heaven, the Storm- 
god, the Thunderer, the Former. Then a mist was breathed over the 
pupils of their eyes by the Heart of the Heaven, and their vision was 
veiled like the face of a mirror when it is breathed on; thus the apple 
of their eyes was darkened ; they saw only what was close at hand ; this 
alone remained clear to them." Tradition says that the pristine spiritual 
vision thus veiled can once more be awakened by the Mysteries, and that 
this is the mystical "third eye" spoken of by the latest translator of the 
Apocalypse. 

Thus, like some strange bouquet of flowers gathered from the 
Himalayas, from the Nile, from Yucatan, we bring together our frag- 
mentary evidences of the Mysteries ; seeking thus to show their universal 
presence and inner identity among all the races of mankind. They shine, 
here and there, like lamps behind a curtain ; a curtain which hides from 
view the august Guardians of the Mysteries. But it may be that, for 
this age of ours, the curtain may be somewhat withdrawn ; the mirror 
purified of the film that was breathed upon it, may once more give back 
pure light. What solace for mankind, whether in living or in dying, to 
know something of the immortal Guardians, ever close at hand and 
rendering effective service, even though they be hidden behind the veil. 



FRAGMENTS 



WHEREVER you have the intensely religious spirit made 
self-conscious you have Theosophy, regardless of forms or 
names. For Theosophy has nothing to do with forms. It 
is a spirit. 

On the lower side Theosophy is a certain attitude towards life; 
on the higher side, a spirit of complete surrender and dedication 
to the Divine. As St. Paul says, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in 
me." There speaks the Theosophist; and whosoever so speaketh and 
liveth is a Theosophist, whatever form of religious belief he may hold, 
whatever label he may wear. 

But this must be conscious and intelligent on his part; no general 
seeking, no vague relation. Men may attain great heights of spirituality, 
but undeterminedly and almost unaware. The Theosophist on the other 
hand is fully aware; knows whither he is going, and why; and has 
started with open eyes upon that "small, old path, that stretches far 
away," under his Master's guidance. 

To become a Theosophist is to experience the "new birth from 
above." 

"Verily, verily, I say unto thee. Except a man be born of water 
and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. That which 
is born of the flesh is flesh ; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." 

The Churches, therefore, should say, like the prophet John, standing 
and calling in the wilderness (of material life) "I indeed baptise you 
with water unto repentance; but he that cometh after me is mightier 
than I ... he shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost and with fire." 

The Theosophist is he who has received this second baptism. He 
truly is twice-born. No man is a Theosophist in the mere fact of being 
a Fellow of the Theosophical Society, nor because he holds any 
philosophy, or system of metaphysics. 

All such conventional and intellectual definitions can have no place 
in that which is vital and dynamic, a question of exterior adjustments, 
of interior relations above all, concerning those things which in very 
fact and essence the man is; not in the least what he may appear to be, 
nor what he may possess. 

If only we could make this clear, not merely to the outside public, 
but to our own members! He is a Theosophist who has been "born 
again," who has been baptised "with the Holy Ghost and with fire," 
whose life is "hid with Christ in God." When our Fellows realize this, 
they will be slower to claim a title than which there is none higher for 
a man to bear. This it is which gives Theosophy its wonderful, drawing 
power, in spite of the misunderstanding, calumny, and ridicule which 



300 



FRAGMENTS 301 

at all times have surrounded it; in spite of the far more hurtful mis- 
interpretation of those who blindly claim to be its adherents. 

This it is which causes each Theosophist to become a magnet to 
which all spiritually minded men instinctively turn. It draws the 
dawning spiritual perceptions as the sun draws the flower, and awakens 
it to light and life and perfection of bloom. 

"I, if I be lifted up shall draw all men unto me," said the Master. 
But it is not his message which draws; it is the divine potency of his life 
and of what he is. 

In the depths of the throbbing heart of life an infinite Peace abides. 
That Peace we seek, having found the Path. It is not the peace of a pass- 
ing content, but of a whole hearted resignation; not the peace of circum- 
stance or condition, or of any outward thing whatsoever; nor, of mind, 
nor of heart ; but the Peace of the Spirit and of Eternity. To it failure 
and success alike are equal, since there can be but success; discord 
and harmony as existing in this lower world of contrasts, forming, each, 
needful portions of the one great Symphony of Silence with which the 
higher world is filled. We hear that to which we listen; that to which 
our attention is directed, we perceive. May the Father give us right 
power to hear and see! 

"He that hath an ear let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the 
Churches." CAVE. 



"No one can have a true idea of right until he does it; any genuine 
reverence for it till he has done it often and with cost; any peace in- 
effable in it till he does it always and with alacrity" 

MARTINEAU. 



THE ALTAR OF LIFE 



IN the observation of Man, and his destiny, there is one indisputable 
fact with which we are at once confronted; it challenges our 
attention ; we cannot evade it ; we cannot escape it. This fact is : 

There is one factor common to all men, one thing with which 
all have to deal, and which each has to master, in some degree at least ; 
this common factor is Life. 

We all live, and must live on, in one mode or another, in one form 
or another, upon one plane or another, until we understand Life and 
become masters of Life at some one, or more, of the many points with 
which we are confronted: when we have achieved such knowledge we 
enter upon still wider modes of existence and partake still more fully of 
Life. And this truth is applicable to every mode of existence, to every 
form of Life. The universe teems with lives ; no created thing can turn 
from Life and lay it down, dreaming of an end. No man that ever lived 
has ever seen Death. We have only seen Life changing its mode of 
action. 

Take, for example, the new born child. It has at once to master 
the power of breathing upon a new plane of matter, in a new mode: 
this it does master, or it turns back into the unseen. Then it must acquire 
powers of digestion, of assimilation, of hearing, of seeing, of walking; 
finally, of thinking and the use of the wonderful brain. In all this, 
there is some sub-consciousness at work, with which we have but small 
acquaintance, and with which we are not at the moment concerned. Our 
present point is this: the child, in its growth and development runs 
through a wide gamut of experience, and acquires powers upon various 
planes of Life : when it is fully grown, it enters upon a still wider area 
of achievement, for now it must learn how to think, how to think 
rightly in relation to its environment and how to adapt its thought to its 
aims in Life. So that Life tests and teaches, teaches and tests as we 
pass along its spiral ; and this is true of every life in any world : it must 
be true of all, being true in any. 

This being so, we set out upon the great adventure with one sure 
clue in our hands. For Life is at once the great adventure and the 
hidden secret, the beginning, the goal, the prize. Whatever our desire, 
we obtain it by living, and by utilizing that which Life has brought to 
us; even when we fail, it is still through having lived, but in a sense 
obstructive to our true desire and hope. That our very bodies fall out 
of line and "die" so soon, being so vulnerable to disease, age, and the 
like, is because of the misuse of Life, because the congeries of Lives 
within them tend to a fuller, separated Life of their own. 

303 



THE ALTAR OF LIFE 303 

Look at it as we will, Life meets us at all points, and must be under- 
stood, and then mastered by us. The man who succeeds, whether in 
a material sense, or in the sense spiritual, is the man who has grasped 
to some extent some group of the Laws of Life. Life has many planes 
and values, and it depends upon the man himself, and upon the nature 
of his desire, whether he succeeds or fails. He who attains has done 
so because he has understood how to set about making his effort; the 
man who fails has not known how to apply his Life powers to the end 
he had in view. So evident is this, that if we will consider mankind and 
their efforts, we are soon able to discern why the one fails, and why 
another has met with success. Achievement comes through the right 
effort having been made, and made persistently, in the right way. 
And on the other hand the failure has come about because the man has 
failed to understand some of the Laws of Life. And yet these Laws 
are all simple so simple. For this very reason, perhaps, the crowd has 
passed them by. 

As we study Life, we are at once struck with this primary fact: 
All the true powers of Life are spiritual powers. It is not the material 
with, or in which, a man works, nor is it the environment in which 
he lives which achieves his ends. We have innumerable instances of 
persons born and living amidst poverty and ignorance, whose great 
success has lain in the accumulation of wealth. We have read in the 
pages of history how the deep scientific secrets of the world have often 
been revealed as by magic to some simple student, one of reverent mind 
who really found what he sought, not through his mental equipment, 
but through the intuition of the quiet and trusting heart. Courage, 
not cannon, has won the day of battle. Endurance has outstayed the 
host of foes even the ice, the cold, the sirocco, the whirlwind and all 
the irate wardens of Nature. When Saul the persecutor journeyed to 
Damascus, and, being struck down upon the way by a great light, arose 
as Paul the Christian teacher, was it some material power that wrought 
that change which has echoed down the centuries? Or was it rather 
some spiritual Life that smote his heart as he lay prone, and thereby 
converted him? In a word, it is the spiritual qualities wielded by man- 
kind that win each prize of Life; even the most sordid miser has won 
his luxury of possession by the exercise of an adamantine will that faced 
hunger, thirst, desires and wants to gratify the master passion. He 
exercised the will by the means of which the Saints have attained 
but he misapplied it. And so, too, it is not the preacher who converts 
his fellow men, but his Life speaking through his words to the hearts 
of his hearers. 

When we have grasped this great truth, that all the powers of 
Life are spiritual powers, we are ready to take another step onward. 
We wish to exercise these powers, to prove them, to exert them to some 
desired end. This brings us to a moment of vital import; for now we 



304 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

face a choice. In what direction will we apply them? "Under which 
King?" 

Whatever the decision, we make a fresh discovery as must be when 
Life itself is the great adventure and all its secrets are fresh joys. We 
find that we are deficient in the spiritual power necessary to the attain- 
ment of our object, whatever that may be: we lack the weapons 
necessary to our battle. We have not the courage, or the self-denial 
needed; we are poor in perseverance, in hope, in self-trust, or what not 
else; above all, we are beggared of faith. This last lack is by far the 
most serious, for faith, faith in our destiny, in our self, in the possibility 
of attainment, is an absolute essential to success. No man or woman 
undertakes to reach to eminence in the material world, who has not a 
burning belief that success is possible, is even sure and certain, and 
to himself or herself. Each time that Jesus of Nazareth was entreated 
to confer some miraculous boon, what was His answer? Did He not 
say : "Dost thou believe that I can do this thing ?" Without faith, faith 
in His power and His compassionate will to exercise that power, the 
longed-for gift could not be bestowed. At the root of all power lies 
faith. If we are wanting in faith, we must acquire faith, somehow, 
or we are undone. 

But there is yet another power, going hand in hand with faith and 
equally necessary: that power is will. We speak in modern phrase of 
the "will to live," and yet how rarely do we remember the strict accuracy 
of this phrase. We have seen what a vast work we accomplished while 
we were still in our infancy; we did so under the guidance and the 
imperious mandate of the "will to live" deeply hidden in the soul. Where 
we fail, our will and our faith are lacking; we may not be able to touch 
the weak spot within our nature with the finger of introspection, but it 
is there : nothing is impossible to the soul which has these two spiritual 
powers in their fullness, whether that soul work "in heaven" or upon the 
gross and crude material of the earth. You and I alike do all that we 
do by virtue of these twin, spiritual powers; that which we do not will 
to do, and do not believe we can do is not done by us: we stand aside 
and behold others among our fellows bearing away the prize. 

There is still a third necessary power, and it also is a spiritual 
potency. I refer to the power of the imagination. This it is that the 
old mystics and alchemists called the creative power, the "image making 
power." By the exercise of this power, we are able to contemplate the 
goal to which our thoughts and our efforts tend, and to render an account 
of that goal to ourselves, to say whether or no it seems a possible thing 
to us. Each one of us unconsciously uses this power each time a new 
thing is attempted, no matter how small it may be ; we embrace it with our 
imagination and see it as if it were already done, in the mirror of the 
mind, before we attempt to do it at all. And when we have not used 



THE ALTAR OF LIFE 305 

this power, our action is abortive; the deed drops, still-born, from our 
sphere. 

Thus we see that our common Life, so far as it is known to us, 
is governed, ruled, conducted by the use of spiritual powers, no matter 
in what direction, or upon what material these are used by the human 
spirit. It remains to be seen in what direction these powers are most 
wisely and most successfully used. Let us then consider the question 
of Life. 

We, each one of us, are acquainted with fragments of Life only. 
Life as a great Whole escapes our mental vision, because it is too vast 
for the mind to conceive. Again, we are only able (humanly speaking) 
to take note of limited areas of Life : there are regions of land and water, 
of air and ether, of sunlight and darkness; formless worlds, conditions 
of substance, immense spaces of experience and of consciousness alike, 
of which our human thought has never dreamed. Each man concerns 
himself only with those phases of Life which stand nearest to his diurnal 
consciousness, which are most immediate to his own experience, and upon 
these he uses such powers of discernment, of understanding, of mastery 
or of avoidance as it may please him to use or to neglect. We live in 
narrow sections only ; our sight reaches only to the rim of near horizons, 
and our god-like powers, hidden in embryo within us, are atrophied for 
want of recognition and use. 

Is this as it should be? Does it not behoove us to ask ourselves 
why, and for what purpose, we are here at all ? Why are we embedded 
in material life as the oyster in its shell, with perhaps some least infil- 
tration of the vast spiritual ocean into our surrounding shell? Surely 
the answer to this question is a simple one. We are here for the same 
reason which is operative in all that we do or leave undone : we are here 
because we wished, and hence willed, to be here. Some say that this 
cannot be true, and that we, all of us, often find ourselves in situations 
which are painful, distressing, unwished for; repugnant, even, to every 
fibre that quivers within us. That may be so, in the immediate sense. 
But if it be true that every effect has a cause, and that all causes must 
work themselves out in the sphere of their creator, then we are indeed 
bound to concede that the distasteful situations of Life have been brought 
about by ourselves ; in some deeply hidden fashion, 1 it may be, but still 
caused by ourselves, and by no other. Action and re-action being equal 
and contrary in direction, we need not marvel at the many transforma- 
tions of Life. 

If, on the other hand, you say that effects may exist without a cause, 
and that the cause and its creator its evolver, rather are not inter- 
related, why, then, Life is not consecutive, and is not governed by law 
or order at all. And to this you, not improbably, will refuse to assent. 
Or you live amid a mad confusion. 

So let us consider that we willed to be where we stand today, and that 



306 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

the human spirit within each one of us has obtained satisfaction, experi- 
ence, opportunity and teaching by the situations in which we find our- 
selves ; that, given the free exercise of our will and choice, our lives are 
now as that spirit willed the environment to be. Could we but discover and 
have touch with that inner spirit, all would be well with us, for we should 
understand that every event of our lives is an opportunity, is helpful and 
is willed by our soul. Denial of our purely personal desires, of the 
whims and wants and cravings of the human mind would then appear 
to us in a truer aspect; we should discern a spiritual purpose beneath 
the denial, and the will of the soul in bringing about each experience 
through which we pass would be seen in its true aspect, in its Life- 
renewing and Life-sustaining power. We should all at once leap into 
the comprehension that the "will-to-live" comprizes the whole of Life 
Life in its entirety and its unity; that the will of the soul is towards the 
Whole, and not towards the circumscribed parts. We are the heirs of 
Universal Life, and towards that immeasurable Whole the human spirit 
hastens, even as the strong runner runs his race in joy. 

But we are in truth circumscribed, and by a jailor of our own 
choice. Our mind it is that shuts us away into a region of exceeding 
definiteness and precision, where only the things visible to the gross 
senses are apprehended. The testimony of these senses is what we term 
"reality": all other testimony is excluded as being "unreal." An odd 
error, this, for us to make, since the unseen things of Life, the things 
that escape the senses, are really those which we value most ! Happiness, 
contentment, love, peace, joy these are our treasures, nor would we part 
with the least portion of these for material possessions of any sort, were 
we bidden to choose. We value the material possession only in the 
degree in which we suppose that it can obtain for us the longed-for and 
rarer treasures of the heart; once sure that the material wealth will 
beggar us of these higher values, we are willing to cast away the visible 
power for the invisible ones. Who would desire wealth of any kind, 
once he were sure that it would make him utterly miserable? Even 
those who crave material and lower things are looking, all unknown to 
their own minds, for the spiritual riches, really. The ambitious man 
wants power ; could he but see that self-control is the greatest of powers, 
he would concentrate upon that, casting away all lower forms. He who 
seeks passion, in time embraces the deepest discontent ; he endures all the 
miseries of satiety and one day learns that not lustful passion but a very 
passion of divine and all compassionate love was that of which his spirit 
whispered him, while he so blindly sought. Every possession which men 
so eagerly desire, and so perseveringly pursue, has thus its hidden lesson. 
We see the forms of our desire changing continually in the kaleidoscope 
of our lives, weaving patterns ever brighter and more splendid, until 
at last we come upon that mysterious and rapturous moment in which 



THE ALTAR OF LIFE 307 

we see that what we so ardently seek, that perfect happiness pursued 
with age-long desire, is Life itself; it is the Soul. 

Behind all manifestation there lies, invisible but imperial, the Soul, 
the Mover, the Ruler of Life. This it is which the heart of man desires; 
this it is of which the human spirit sings in the ambient spaces of our 
dreams. The Soul is everywhere ; and Life is the altar of the Soul. 

Once this mighty secret in its divine simplicity dawns upon our eager 
imaginations, how changed are all the issues of our daily lives. Life 
becomes holy to us. In each moment of the diurnal round we find a 
meaning, a beauty, an aid. For now we understand that the high Soul 
seeks us even more ardently than we seek it; it is the hidden lover of 
all mankind. Life is the method and manifestation of that Soul which 
we seek, and our portion of Life is the daily bread which we entreat 
at the hand of the Father in Heaven. 

Life, then, continuous and eternal, is the altar of the Soul. What 
will we lay upon that altar? What shall be our daily sacrifice? What 
the bread for which our petitions arise? 

Each one of us must answer these questions for himself. But 
answer them each one must. Aeons of delay, if you will; the hour 
will strike for each when the answer must be found, and consciously 
found. What is our burnt offering, consumed in the fires of our lives? 
What do we bring to the altar of the Soul? Is it our patience? Is it 
our faith? Our love? Are we consecrated to the service of the Soul? 
Do we eat, as Krishna said, only the food which remains from the 
sacrifice? Or do we refuse our hearts and our treasures to the altar? 
Is it our discontent, our desire, our passion and our greed that we cherish, 
and is it at the altar of self that we worship, rather than at that of the 
Soul? If this we do, we do but cheat ourselves. The human spirit will 
not be so cheated. At the end of ages it will still make its claim upon us. 
In the long, long course of time, as men know time, the hour comes 
when we must acknowledge the Soul. 

Why not, then, acknowledge that great Soul here and now? Are 
we happy as we now live? Let us look into our hearts. 

The heart of man is the source from which all his energies flow; 
all his powers have their rise in his heart. So, too, at the Heart of Life 
abides a sweetness and a power which all feel, but which few recognize. 
Denied of most, derided by many, unperceived, often, by those whose 
intuition dumbly hints at its presence, this silent bounty pours forth upon 
the careless world, mellowing the whole round of Nature. 

What is its source? Why comes it? Whither does it go? 

These questions the ages, rising and falling, have not answered. 
But here and there among the human hosts men and women have sensed, 
as by some finer mode of perception, the outpour of this sweetness. Some 
of these have essayed to convey it to the listening world in the highest 
accents of art, of music, of song. Thus a volume of noble sound has 



308 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

some down to us. But the soundless song, the spheric music, has 
escaped expression. Then there are others who have felt the music in 
their hearts and who have tried to render its sweetness in terms of 
action : the patriot, the mother, the children of self-sacrifice one and all 
have heard it thus, distilling its essence into the cold, material life. Still 
others there are, the best beloved children of the Soul, who have 
pressed the meaning of the silent music close and closer to their hearts, 
living it out day after day, until their lives keep time with the eternal 
harmony : some of these lives are glorified, they are made identical, they 
are merged into light, they become one with the hidden lover in the heart. 
In these a boundless compassion is the outward sign of the interior light. 
All others are orphans: they wander to and fro among lifeless forms 
and cast moulds of thought, casts which the free and fluid life forces have 
broken and thrown aside. And yet they clutch at empty creeds and 
ancient formulae. And why? Because in the general and instinctive 
movement towards some abiding form of happiness, we all feel the joyful 
impulse of the Soul, even when our actions most seem to deny it. 
Humanity is indeed orphaned if it deny the Soul. Each orphan feels 
that he has a right to which he was sealed from the hour of his birth, 
a right to some real and entire joy, and that Life the Life encountered 
at each turn of the days and the nights (Oh! those nights') has 
beggared him of this. Bitter is the complaint of the disinherited. When 
wordless, then most bitter. It fills the earth and reverberates back from 
the stars through the thin and chilling air. Some there be, indeed, who 
enjoy Life in matter; these say that they are joyful, that they voice no 
complaint ; but the challenge of their lives summons Fate to the bar and 
forms her worst arraignment. Now and again some lover of his kind, 
some great captain clad with war, some golden hearted hero, some saint 
on earth who lives for God alone, some statesman modelling the life of 
his era and handing the pattern down the centuries, some 

" singer, hidden 



In the light of thought, 
Singing songs unbidden, 

Till the world is wrought 
To sympathy with hopes 

And fears it heeded not" 



these think to have found happiness, to have touched that unalloyed 
delight which looks out from the eyes of childhood and which the fullness 
of nature continually presages. But all who find the treasure lose it. 
Under the subtle alchemy of Life, happiness breaks up at the purely 
human touch; some volatile, spiritual essence escapes; the precipitate 
thrown down is sorrow. 

Why should this be so? Is there, then, no permanent substratum 
to human joy? Is the fabric of heart's delight but the chill of nightmare, 



THE ALTAR OF LIFE 309 

the mist of dream? The weaver within the breast of man can he weave 
no more enduring web than these ? When the human dreamer wakes, the 
glory has faded from off the inner sky and Life lies cold and grey about 
him until some other will-o-the-wisp beckons again across the morass and 
lures him on, and on. Again he pursues Again he grasps and misses 
what? A shade! Again he stumbles, falls, arises, and stands disillu- 
sioned under a steely sky. Ever and ever he seeks, because without some 
hope of happiness whatever the kind or mode mankind cannot live. 
Man lives on, because he hopes for something, he knows not what; he 
hopes something may arrive, something may change into the happiness 
he feels must await him, at some turn of the road ; no matter how low or 
degraded its form, or how elemental its nature, he believes that it exists 
for him, it must find him one day and he lives on. So he waits; he 
finds, or seems to find ; he touches and that which he possesses is but a 
wraith* of joy; the spirit and the soul of happiness have fled. 

Must this reiterated process be a barren one, of necessity? Surely 
not : that is as if we were to say that the formula of Life yields an ash, 
but no result. This can only be the case under the hands of a tyro, one 
unlearned in the science of Life. He who studies Life at close, inner 
range and impersonally, and who reverences while he studies, finds that 
we are in truth happy only when we lose ourselves. Self-consciousness 
is the grim spectre haunting all mankind, barring the way of escape into 
the wider universe. If this be so, it were wiser to take a broader and a 
fresher view, starting anew upon this vital search. It seems most 
difficult for us to do this, as if some fear, like a drawn sword, barred 
the way. And in truth each man does fear to lose himself, to lose that 
fixed body of thought which represents each to himself. Yet what if this 
which we so fear to lose be actually an enemy which, octopus like, 
strangles that shy and vital essence which we seek? What if our self- 
consciousness enmeshes and confines the Soul? 

How, then, to find the Soul? Each man must do this for himself. 
But each must obtain some hint from Life, the Life about him and of 
which he is a unit, the Life of which he forms a part. The clue is near 
at hand. Life emits a light by which it reveals itself. Life is common 
to all: Why, then, does each use Life as if he were set apart? Life is 
impersonal, but we use it personally. This simple fact once we recog- 
nize it, alters the whole focus of Life. Viewed from this new standpoint, 
the path is seen to be straight and cleared of all its mazes. 

One wise in the science of Life once said something to the effect 
that the spiritual is neither personal nor impersonal ; it is not an abstrac- 
tion: but seek to find the impersonal in the personal, and there is the 
spiritual; your difficulty is solved. 

With this in mind, our maze still winds, but is a maze no more. All 
our actions, when we relate them to the larger, the Universal Life, 



310 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

become symbols; within the action is a spiritual, an impersonal meaning 
which ensouls, as it were, the action, and so relates it to the great Life. 

To take a concrete and a very simple example: a woman sweeps a 
room. She is doing this because she is paid to do it, and so earns a 
livelihood; or she does it because it is a part of her daily home duty; 
it has to be done, it is a part of her work. So, she sweeps, doing it 
well as to the mechanical part of its nature, and but little more. An- 
other woman comes, taking up the same work, but as she sweeps, a pure 
motive is singing at her heart : she is doing this work as if to the Lord ; 
in her heart, her intent, her will she is doing the life work He has given 
into her hand; the Lord decreed her necessity and her labour, and the 
deed is done as if for Him. Can we not see the difference in spiritual 
dynamics between the first worker and her who hath swept the house 
and found her piece of silver, rejoicing and praising God? The differ- 
ence of the forces engendered by each is enormous and wide. The one, 
working personally, living as to herself, was shut in by an airy barrier, 
imponderable but rigid as the barrier between element and element; the 
constriction of a lower order of force shut into a vicious circle, revolving 
around herself. The second woman, sensing with fine intuition the 
omnipresence of that Divine Life which we sometimes call "God," works 
as one bowed to Its Rule, vowed to That Service; and thus serving in 
this impersonal manner, she becomes a co-worker with the Supreme: 
through her life the spiritual forces are freely playing, divinely working 
out their appointed ends far, far beyond her visible sphere of action; 
and she herself, in her degree and place, is evolving from her apparent 
limitations the spirit that ensouls every atom of Life. 

And so with any other action. As we eat, drink, work, play, stand, 
sit, fall, rise, give, take, every single action symbolizes something of the 
Universal Life. That largest Life is mirrored in the least deed of man 
or woman ; their intent in each deed declares the nature of their alliance, 
whether with Evolution or with Devolution. He who seeks the hidden 
meaning within his daily actions and who views them in the light of their 
inner significance, raises no barriers, enters no entanglements, and finds 
a light emanating from Life which does illumine the darkness of his 
Consciousness, does purify it from the haunting ghosts of self -conscious- 
ness, does lift and strengthen his heart and wash clean the tablets of 
the mind. 

"That life is carnal in which our spirit, meant for God, is dragged 
at the chariot- wheels of our lower life; and that is spiritual which is 
ruled and mastered by the Spirit. Secular business is spiritual if it is 
ruled by the divine Spirit according to the law of righteousness. Politics 
are spiritual, commercial and municipal life are spiritual, and everything 
that develops our faculties is spiritual, if we will allow the divine Spirit 
to rule in all according to the law of righteousness, truth and beauty." 

And then so many come, asking, "What, precisely, do you mean by 



THE ALTAR OF LIFE 311 

the term Spirit?" They, it would appear, would like to touch, taste, 
see the Spirit. Surely there are very few amongst us who cannot discern 
the spirit of an act, the spirit in which it is done, and whether it be a 
spirit of truth and of mercy, a spirit of wide and deep bearings and of 
outlook upon Life. Or is it still true what some of the elder alchemists 
said, that "the discernment of spirits" is a rare gift? And readers have 
looked solemn and wise, thinking that ghosts were meant! 

Dealing in this wise with our personal lives and rinding the impersonal 
significance within them, we come by degrees to the perception that 
Life is in reality an altar, whereupon we lay our sacrifices, offering up 
the personal motives, desires and viewpoint upon that altar of the Soul. 
So offering, our sacrifice is accepted and then real Life begins. We 
learn of Life all that we need to know. Our self -consciousness no longer 
imprisons the inner nature. The soul within, freed from the tangled 
nets of personality, looks about the inner world, sees, comprehends, and 
then Ah ! my friends, have you ever seen the butterfly, freed from the 
cocoon, sitting stunned in the shade awhile ; and then, the breath of the 
wide, free Life touches it, and oh! the rapturous dash into the blue 
ether, the wide and ever-widening circles of Life as God meant it to be ! 
When the inner Life begins, and the inner joy is tasted, Life, your 
Life, my Life; has become an indivisible portion of the Universal Life, 
an altar of the Soul. 

Shall we not, then, lead our lives as priests serving at a mighty 
altar? Shall we not be consecrate? Shall not our daily life be to us as 
the daily bread from the hand of Divinity? For if we can so envisage 
Life, our narrow horizons vanish like mists gathered up by the sun; in 
the place of a fretted and paltry existence, now fevered by a selfish hope, 
now chilled by a selfish despair, we shall find ourselves secure, joyous, 
vibrant with faith, ripened and enriched with compassion which shall 
wear a spiritual likeness to the Compassionate Law and Soul from which 
it sprang. Each moment shall be freighted with a splendid meaning: 
our very human sorrow shall be sanctified with courage and trust. In 
the smallest act we shall feel the touch of a spiritual purpose, the breath 
of a diviner sphere beyond our ken, perhaps, but not beyond the intuitive 
insight of our faith. There will be nothing small, nothing petty or mean 
or circumscribed in our lives as we shall then live them, for each event 
will be irradiated with Life. 

Our present consciousness is mainly of the lower self, the self almost 
wholly concerned with Life upon a gross plane. We are largely ignorant 
of, or indifferent to the Life of higher regions; we have tasted, but we 
lack the courage to pursue with unfaltering will the Life which wells 
up in the heart. When we feel the touch of that Life we taste happiness ; 
but all too soon we seek to perpetuate some chosen form of happiness; 
we wish to find our delight there where we are used to perceive it, 
that is, in consolidation, in perpetuation, in possession, in inertia, in rigid 



312 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

crystallization around some preferred mode of living, of experience. 
Then great Life, the All-Compassionate, arises and breaks our puny 
mould. Happy are we if we perceive the Compassion within the seeming 
disaster, and know that all which we lay cheerfully upon the altar of Life 
partakes of the nature of sacrifice; that all willing sacrifice is already 
of the Soul. 

At the core of Life the Soul, the unknown lover, waits. Nothing 
so small but the heart of it harbours the Presence. The planets know it 
well; the ion is its chosen home; it sings in the corn, it aspires on every 
wing, but its goal and prize is Man, Man the orphaned one. Divinely 
it yearns towards him, trembling into music in his heart. Since the heart 
of Man, his source of Life, is the interpreter of this Light, how blessed 
are we if we hearken to the aspirations and the inspirations of our hearts, 
and translate them into our daily actions. 

J. W. L. KEIGHTLEY. 



"Nan-yung Khu hereupon took with him some rations, and after 
seven days and seven nights arrived at the abode of Lao-tsze, who said to 
him, 'Are you come from Khu's?' 'I am,' was the reply. 'And why, 
Sir, have you come with such a multitude of attendants?' Nan-yung 
was frightened, and turned his head round to look behind him." 

Indirectly explaining his question, Lao-tsze said to him afterwards: 
"Can you flee from the allurements of desire? Can you become a little 
child? . . . [A little child} is calmly indifferent to things, and fol- 
lows their current" In reply, Nan-yung asked, "And are these all the 
charactristics of the Perfect man?" Lao-tsze replied, "No. These are 
what we call the breaking up of the ice, and the dissolving of the 
cold. . . . The Perfect man does not allow himself to be troubled 
by the consideration of advantage or injury coming from men and things; 
he does not . . . form plans, or enter on undertakings; he flees 
from the allurements of desire, and pursues his way with an entire sim- 
plicity. . . . He whose mind is thus grandly fixed emits a Heavenly 
light. In him who emits this Heavenly light men see the True man. 
When a man has cultivated himself up to this point, thenceforth he 
remains constant in himself. When he is thus constant in himself, what 
is merely the human element will leave him, but Heaven will help him. 
Those whom their human element has left we call the people of Heaven. 
Those whom Heaven helps we call the Sons of Heaven. Those who 
would by learning attain to this, seek for what they cannot learn." The 
Writings of Kwang-Tsze, in "The Texts of Taoism, Vol. II, pp. 78-82. 



PATANJALFS YOGA SUTRAS 

TRANSLATED WITH A COMMENTARY 

BY 

CHARLES JOHNSTON 



LET it be clearly kept in mind that what is here to be related of 
the spiritual man, and his exalted powers, must in no wise be 
detached from what has gone before. The being, the very 
inception, of the spiritual man depends on the purification and 
moral attainment already detailed, and can in no wise dispense with 
these or curtail them. 

Let no one imagine that the true life, the true powers of the spiritual 
man, can be attained by any way except the hard way of sacrifice, of trial, 
of renunciation, of selfless self-conquest and genuine devotion to the weal 
of all others. Only thus can the golden gates be reached and entered. 
Only thus can we attain to that pure world, wherein the spiritual man 
lives, and moves, and has his being. Nothing impure, nothing unholy 
can ever cross that threshold, least of all impure motives or self-seeking 
desires. These must be burnt away, before an entrance to that world 
can be gained. 

But where there is light, there is shadow ; and the lofty light of the 
soul casts upon the clouds of the mid- world the shadow of the spiritual 
man and of his powers; the bastard vesture and the bastard powers of 
psychism are easily attained ; yet, even when attained, they are a delusion, 
the very essence of unreality. 

Therefore ponder well the earlier rules, and lay a firm foundation 
of courage, sacrifice, selflessness, holiness. 

TRANSLATION OF BOOK III, PART II. 

28. Perfectly concentrated Meditation on the center of force in 
the lower trunk brings an understanding of the order of the bodily 
powers. 

We are coming to a vitally important part of the teaching of Yoga: 
namely, the spiritual man's attainment of full self-consciousness, the 
awakening of the spiritual man as a self-conscious individual, behind 
and above the natural man. In this awakening, and in the process of 
gestation which precedes it, there is a close relation with the powers of 
the natural man, which are, in a certain sense, the projection outward 
and downward, of the powers of the spiritual man. This is notably 
true of that creative power of the spiritual man which, when embodied 

Copyright, 1909, by Charles Johnston. 

3'3 



314 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

in the natural man, becomes the power of generation. Not only is this 
power the cause of the continuance of the bodily race of mankind, but 
further, in the individual, it is the key to the dominance of the personal life 
Rising, as it were, through the life-channels of the body, it flushes the 
personality with physical force, and maintains and colors the illusion that 
the physical life is the dominant and all-important expression of life. 
In due time, when the spiritual man has begun to take form, the creative 
force will be drawn off, and become operative in building the body of the 
spiritual man, just as it has been operative in the building of physical 
bodies, through generation in the natural world. 

Perfectly concentrated Meditation on the nature of this force means, 
first, that raising of the consciousness into the spiritual world, already 
described, which gives the one sure foothold for Meditation; and then, 
from that spiritual point of vantage, not only an insight into the creative 
force, in its spiritual and physical aspects, but also a gradually attained 
control of this wonderful force, which will mean its direction to the body 
of the spiritual man, and its gradual withdrawal from the body of the 
natural man, until the overpressure, so general and such a fruitful source 
of misery in our day, is abated, and purity takes the place of passion. 
This overpressure, which is the cause of so many evils and so much of 
human shame, is an abnormal, not a natural, condition. It is primarily 
due to spiritual blindness, to blindness regarding the spiritual man, and 
ignorance even of his existence; for by this blind ignorance are closed 
the channels through which, were they open, the creative force could 
flow into the body of the spiritual man, there building up an immortal 
vesture. There is no cure for blindness, with its consequent over- 
pressure and attendant misery and shame, but spiritual vision, spiritual 
aspiration, sacrifice, the new birth from above. There is no other way 
to lighten the burden, to lift the misery and shame from human life. 
Therefore let us follow after sacrifice and aspiration, let us seek the 
light. In this way only shall we gain that insight into the order of the 
bodily powers, and that mastery of them, which this sutra implies. 

29. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on the center of force 
in the well of the throat, there comes the cessation of hunger and 
thirst. 

We are continuing the study of the bodily powers and centers of 
force in their relation to the powers and forces of the spiritual man. 
We have already considered the dominant power of physical life, the 
creative power which secures the continuance of physical life; and, 
further, the manner in which, through aspiration and sacrifice, it is grad- 
ually raised and set to the work of upbuilding the body of the spiritual 
man. We come now to the dominant psychic force, that power which 
manifests itself in speech, and in virtue of which the voice may carry 
so much of the personal magnetism, endowing the orator with a tongue 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 315 

of fire, magical in its power to arouse and rule the emotions of his 
hearers. This emotional power, this distinctively psychical force, is the 
cause of "hunger and thirst," the psychical hunger and thirst for sensa- 
tions, which is the source of our two-sided life of emotionalism, with 
its hopes and fears, its expectations and memories, its desires and hates. 
The source of this psychical power, or, perhaps we should say, its center 
of activity in the physical body is said to be in the cavity of the throat. 
Thus, in the Taittiriya Upanishad it is written: "There is this shining 
ether in the inner being. Therein is the spiritual man, formed through 
thought, immortal, golden. Inward, in the palate, the organ that hangs 
down like a nipple, this is the womb of Indra. And there, where the 
dividing of the hair turns, extending upward to the crown of the head." 

Indra is the name given to the creative power of which we have 
spoken, and which, we are told, resides in "the organ which hangs down 
like a nipple, inward, in the palate." 

30. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on the center of force 
in the channel called the "tortoise-formed," comes steadfastness. 

We are concerned now with the center of nervous or psychical force 
below the cavity of the throat, in the chest, in which is felt the sensation 
of fear; the center, the disturbance of which sets the heart beating mis- 
erably with dread, or which produces that sense of terror through which 
the heart is said to stand still. 

When the truth concerning fear is thoroughly mastered, through 
spiritual insight into the immortal, fearless life, then this force is 
perfectly controlled; there is no more fear, just as, through the control 
of the psychic power which works through the nerve-center in the throat, 
there comes a cessation of "hunger and thirst." Thereafter, these forces, 
or their spiritual prototypes, are turned to the building of the spiritual 
man. 

Always, it must be remembered, the victory is first a spiritual one; 
only later does it bring control of the bodily powers. 

31. Through perfectly concentrated Meditation on the light in 
the head comes the vision of the Masters who have attained. 

The tradition is, that there is a certain center of force in the head, 
perhaps the "pineal gland," which some of our Western philosophers 
have supposed to be the dwelling of the soul, a center which is, as it 
were, the doorway between the natural and the spiritual man. It is 
the seat of that better and wiser consciousness behind the outward 
looking consciousness in the forward part of the head; that better and 
wiser consciousness of "the back of the mind," which views spiritual 
things, and seeks to impress the spiritual view on the outward looking 
consciousness in the forward part of the head. It is the spiritual man 
seeking to guide the natural man, seeking to bring the natural man to 



316 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

concern himself with the things of his immortality. This is suggested 
in the words of the Upanishad already quoted: "there, where the 
dividing of the hair turns, extending upward to the crown of the head"; 
all of which may sound very fantastical, until one comes to understand it. 
It is said that when this power is fully awakened, it brings a vision 
of the great Companions of the spiritual man, those who have already 
attained, crossing over to the further shore of the sea of death and 
rebirth. Perhaps it is to this divine sight that the Master alluded, who 
is reported to have said: "I counsel you to buy of me eye-salve, that 
you may see." It is of this same vision of the great Companions, the 
children of light, that another seer wrote: 

"Though inland far we be, 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither, 
Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the Children sport upon the shore 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 

32. Or through the divining power of intuition he knows all 
things. 

This is really the supplement, the spiritual side, of the sutra just 
translated. Step by step, as the better consciousness, the spiritual view 
gains force in the back of the mind, so, in the same measure, the 
spiritual man is gaining the power to see : learning to open the spiritual 
eyes. When the eyes are fully opened, the spiritual man beholds the 
great Companions standing about him ; he has begun to "know all things." 

This divining power of intuition is the power which lies above and 
behind the so-called rational mind; the rational mind formulates a 
question and lays it before the intuition, which gives a real answer, often 
immediately distorted by the rational mind, yet always embodying a 
kernel of truth. It is by this process, through which the rational mind 
brings questions to the intuition for solution, that the truths of science 
are reached, the flashes of discovery and genius. But this higher power 
need not work in subordination to the so-called rational mind, it may 
act directly, as full illumination, "the vision and the faculty divine." 

33. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on the heart, the 
interior being, comes the knowledge of consciousness. 

The heart here seems to mean, as it so often does in the Upanishads, 
the interior, spiritual nature, the consciousness of the spiritual man, 
which is related to the heart, and to the wisdom of the heart. By 
steadily seeking after, and finding, the consciousness of the spiritual 
man, by coming to consciousness as the spiritual man, a perfect knowledge 
of consciousness will be attained. For the consciousness of the spiritual 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 317 

man has this divine quality : while being and remaining a truly individual 
consciousness, it at the same time flows over, as it were, and blends with 
the Divine Consciousness above and about it, the consciousness of the 
great Companions; and by showing itself to be one with the Divine 
Consciousness, it reveals the nature of all consciousness, the secret that 
all consciousness is One and Divine. 

34. The personal self seeks to feast on life, through a failure to 
perceive the distinction between the personal self and the spiritual 
man. All personal experience really exists for the sake of another: 
namely, the spiritual man. 

By perfectly concentrated Meditation on experience for the sake 
of the Self, comes a knowledge of the spiritual man. 

The divine ray of the Higher Self, which is eternal, impersonal and 
abstract, descends into life, and forms a personality, which, through 
the stress and storm of life, is hammered into a definite and concrete 
self-conscious individuality. The problem is, to blend these two powers, 
taking the eternal and spiritual being of the first, and blending with it, 
transferring into it, the self-conscious individuality of the second; and 
thus bringing to life a third being, the spiritual man, who is heir to 
the immortality of his father, the Higher Self, and yet has the self- 
conscious, concrete individuality of his other parent, the personal self. 
This is the true immaculate conception, the new birth from above, 
"conceived of the Holy Spirit" ; of this new birth it is said : "that which 
is born of the Spirit is spirit: ye must be born again." 

Rightly understood, therefore, the whole life of the personal man is 
for another, not for himself. He exists only to render his very life and 
all his experience for the building up of the spiritual man. Only through 
failure to see this, does he seek enjoyment for himself, seek to secure 
the feasts of life for himself; not understanding that he must live for 
the other, live sacrificially, offering both feasts and his very being on the 
altar; giving himself as a contribution for the building of the spiritual 
man. When he does understand this, and lives for the Higher Self, 
setting his heart and thought on the Higher Self, then his sacrifice bears 
divine fruit, the spiritual man is built up, consciousness awakes in him, 
and he comes fully into being as a divine and immortal individuality. 

35. Thereupon are born the divining power of intuition, and the 
hearing, the touch, the vision, the taste and the power of smell of the 
spiritual man. 

When, in virtue of the perpetual sacrifice of the personal man, daily 
and hourly giving his life for his divine brother the spiritual man, and 
through the radiance ever pouring down from the Higher Self, eternal 
in the Heavens, the spiritual man comes to birth, there awake in him 
those powers whose physical counterparts we know in the personal man. 



318 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

The spiritual man begins to see, to hear, to touch, to taste. And, besides, 
the senses of the spiritual man, there awakes his mind, that divine coun- 
terpart of the mind of the physical man, the power of direct and imme- 
diate knowledge, the power of spiritual intuition, of divination. This 
power, as we have seen, owes its virtue to the unity, the continuity, of 
consciousness, whereby whatever is known to any consciousness, is know- 
able by any other consciousness. Thus the consciousness of the spiritual 
man, who lives above our narrow barriers of separateness, is in intimate 
touch with the consciousness of the great Companions, and can draw on 
that vast reservoir for all real needs. Thus arises within the spiritual 
man certain knowledge which is called intuition, divination, illumination. 

36. These powers stand in contradistinction to the highest 
spiritual vision. In manifestation they are called magical powers. 

The present translator is not quite certain of the meaning of the 
difficult sentence of which the above is offered as a translation. It 
appears to be this : The divine man is destined to supersede the spiritual 
man, as the spiritual man supersedes the natural man. Then the disciple 
becomes a Master. The opened powers of the spiritual man, spiritual 
vision, hearing, and touch, stand, therefore, in contradistinction to the 
higher divine power above them, and must in no wise be regarded as the 
end of the way, for the path has no end, but rises ever to higher and 
I higher glories ; the soul's growth and splendor have no limit. So that, if 
the spiritual powers we have been considering are regarded as in any sense 
final, they are a hindrance, a barrier to the far higher powers of the 
divine man. But viewed from below, from the standpoint of normal 
physical experience, they are powers truly magical ; as the powers natural 
to a four-dimensional being will appear magical to a three-dimensional 
being. 

37. Through the weakening of the causes of bondage, and by 
learning the method of passing, the consciousness is transferred to 
the other body. 

In due time, after the spiritual man has been formed and grown stable 
through the forces and virtues already enumerated, and after the senses 
of the spiritual man have awaked, there comes the transfer of the domi- 
nant consciousness, the sense of individuality, from the physical to the 
spiritual man. Thereafter the physical man is felt to be a secondary, 
a subordinate, an instrument through whom the spiritual man works; 
and the spiritual man is felt to be the real individuality. This is, in a 
sense, the attainment of full salvation and immortal life; yet it is not 
the final goal or resting place, but only the beginning of the greater way. 

The means for this transfer are described as the weakening of the 
causes of bondage, and an understanding of the method of passing from 
the one consciousness to the other. The first may also be described as 



PATANJALFS YOGA SUTRAS 319 

detachment, and comes from the conquest of the delusion that the personal 
self is the real man. When that delusion abates and is held in check, the 
finer consciousness of the spiritual man begins to shine in the background 
of the mind. The transfer of the sense of individuality to this finer 
consciousness, and thus to the spiritual man, then becomes a matter of 
recollection, of attention ; primarily, a matter of taking a deeper interest 
in the life and doings of the spiritual man, than in the pleasures or occu- 
pations of the personality. Therefore it is said: "Lay not up for your- 
selves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where 
thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in 
heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do 
not break through nor steal: for where your treasure is, there will 
your heart be also." 

38. Through mastery of the upward-life comes freedom from 
the dangers of water, morass, and thorny places, and the power of 
ascension is gained. 

Here is one of the sentences, so characteristic of this author, and, 
indeed, of the Eastern spirit, in which there is an obvious exterior 
meaning, and, within this, a clear interior meaning, not quite so obvious, 
but far more vital. 

The surface meaning is, that by mastery of a certain power, called 
here the upward-life, and akin to levitation, there comes the ability to 
walk on water, or to pass over thorny places without wounding the feet. 

But there is a deeper meaning. When we speak of the disciple's 
path as a path of thorns, we use a symbol ; and the same symbol is used 
here. The upward-life means something more than the power, often 
manifested in abnormal psychical experiences, of levitating the physical 
body, or near-by physical objects. It means the strong power of 
aspiration, of upward will, which first builds, and then awakes the 
spiritual man, and finally transfers the conscious individuality to him; 
for it is he who passes safely over the waters of death and rebirth, and 
is not pierced by the thorns in the path. Therefore it is said that he 
who would tread the path of power must look for a home in the air, 
and afterwards in the ether. 

Of the upward-life, this is written in the Katha Upanishad: "A 
hundred and one are the heart's channels; of these one passes to the 
crown. Going up by this, he comes to the immortal." This is the power 
of ascension spoken of in the sutra. 

39. By mastery of the binding-life comes radiance. 

In the Upanishads, it is said that this binding-life unites the upward- 
life to the downward-life, and these lives have their analogues in the 
"vital breaths" in the body. The thought in the text seems to be, that, 
when the personality is brought thoroughly under the control of the 



320 

spiritual man, through the life-currents which bind them together, the 
personality is endowed with a new force, a strong personal magnetism, 
one might call it, such as is often an appanage of genius. 

But the text seems to mean more than this, and to have in view 
the "vesture of the color of the sun" attributed by the Upanishads to the 
spiritual man; that vesture which a disciple has thus described: "The 
Lord shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his 
glorious body"; perhaps "body of radiance" would better translate the 
Greek. 

In both these passages, the teaching seems to be, that the body of 
the full-grown spiritual man is radiant or luminous, for those, at least, 
who have anointed their eyes with eye-salve, so that they see. 

( 

40. From perfectly concentrated Meditation on the correlation 
of hearing and the ether, comes the power of spiritual hearing. 

Physical sound, we are told, is carried by the air, or by water, iron, 
or some medium on the same plane of substance But there is a finer 
hearing, whose medium of transmission would seem to be the ether; 
perhaps not that ether which carries light, heat and magnetic waves, but, 
it may be, the far finer ether through which the power of gravity works. 
For, while light or heat or magnetic waves, travelling from the sun to 
the earth, take eight minutes for the journey, it is mathematically certain 
that the pull of gravitation does not take as much as eight seconds, or 
even the eighth of a second. The pull of gravitation travels, it would 
seem "as quick as thought" ; so it may well be that, in thought trans- 
ference or telepathy the thoughts travel by the same way, carried by the 
same "thought-swift" medium. 

The transfer of a word by telepathy is the simplest and earliest 
form of the "divine hearing" of the spiritual man ; as that power grows, 
and as, through perfectly concentrated Meditation, the spiritual man 
comes into more complete mastery of it, he grows able to hear and 
clearly distinguish the speech of the great Companions, who counsel and 
comfort him on his way. They may speak to him either in wordless 
thoughts, or in perfectly definite words and sentences. 

41. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on the correlation of 
the body with the ether, and by thinking of it as light as thistle-down, 
will come the power to traverse the ether. 

It has been said that he who would tread the path of power must 
look for a home in the air, and afterwards in the ether. This would 
seem to mean, besides the constant injunction to detachment, that he 
must be prepared to inhabit first a psychic, and then an etheric body ; the 
former being the body of dreams; the latter, the body of the spiritual 
man, when he wakes up on the other side of dreamland. The gradual 
accustoming of the consciousness to its new etheric vesture, its gradual 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 321 

acclimatisation, so to speak, in the etheric body of the spiritual man, is 
what our text seems to contemplate. 

42. When that condition of consciousness is reached, which is 
far-reaching and not confined to the body, which is outside the body 
and not conditioned by it, then the veil which conceals the light is 
worn away. 

Perhaps the best comment on this is afforded by the words of Paul : 
"I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, 
I cannot tell ; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell : God knoweth ;) 
such a one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man, 
(whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) 
how that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, 
which it is not lawful for a man to utter." 

The condition is, briefly, that of the awakened spiritual man, who 
sees and hears beyond the veil. 

43. Mastery of the elements conies from perfectly concentrated 
Meditation on their five forms: the gross, the elemental, the subtle, 
the pervading, the essential or objective. 

These five forms are analogous to those recognized by modern 
physics: solid, liquid, gaseous, radiant and ionic. When the piercing 
vision of the awakened spiritual man is directed to the forms of matter, 
from within, as it were, from behind the scenes, then perfect mastery 
over the "beggarly elements" is attained. This is, perhaps, equivalent 
to the injunction: "Inquire of the earth, the air, and the water, of the 
secrets they hold for you. The development of your inner senses will 
enable you to do this." 

44. Thereupon will come the manifestation of the atomic and 
other powers, which are the endowment of the body, together with 
its unassailable force. 

The body in question is, of course, the etheric body of the spiritual 
man. It is said to possess eight powers : the atomic, the power of assimi- 
lating himself with the nature of the atom, which will, perhaps, involve 
the power to disintegrate material forms; the power of levitation; the 
power of limitless extension; the power of boundless reach, so that, as 
the commentator says, "he can touch the moon with the tip of his finger" ; 
the power to accomplish his will ; the power of gravitation, the correlative 
of levitation ; the power of command ; the power of creative will. These 
are the endowments of the spiritual man. Further, the spiritual body is 
unassailable. Fire burns it not, water wets it not, the sword cleaves it 
not, dry winds parch it not. And, it is said, the spiritual man can impart 
something of this quality and temper to his bodily vesture. 

21 



322 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

45. Shapeliness, beauty, force, the temper of the diamond : these 
are the endowments of that body. 

The spiritual man is shapely, beautiful, strong, firm as the diamond. 
Therefore it is written: "These things saith the Son of God, who hath 
his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass: He 
that overcometh and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give 
power over the nations : and he shall rule them with a rod of iron ; and 
I will give him the morning star." 

46. Mastery over the powers of perception and action comes 
through perfectly concentrated Meditation on their fivefold forms; 
namely, their power to grasp, their distinctive nature, the element 
of self-consciousness in them, their pervasiveness, and their objec- 
tivity. 

Take, for example, sight. This possesses, first, the power to grasp, 
apprehend, perceive; second, it has its distinctive form of perception; 
that is, visual perception ; third, it always carries with its operations self- 
consciousness, the thought : "I perceive" ; fourth, sight has the power of 
extension through the whole field of vision, even to the utmost star; 
fifth, it presents its reports as something objective to consciousness. 
So with the other senses. Perfectly concentrated Meditation on each 
sense, a viewing it from behind and within, as is possible for the spiritual 
man, brings a mastery of the scope and true character of each sense, 
and of the world on which they report collectively. 

47. Thence come the power swift as thought, independence of 
instruments, and mastery over matter. 

We are further enumerating the endowments of the spiritual man. 
Among these is the power to traverse space with the swiftness of thought, 
so that whatever place the spiritual man thinks of, to that he goes, in that 
place he already is. Thought has now become his means of locomotion. 
He is, therefore, independent of instruments, and can bring his force to 
bear directly, wherever he wills. 

48. When the spiritual man is perfectly disentangled from the 
psychic body, he attains to mastery over all things and to a knowledge 
of all. 

The spiritual man is enmeshed in the web of the emotions: desire, 
fear, ambition, passion ; and impeded by the mental forms of separateness 
and materialism. When these meshes are sundered, these obstacles 
completely overcome, then the spiritual man stands forth in his own 
wide world, strong, mighty, wise. He uses divine powers, with a divine 
scope and energy, working together with divine Companions. To such 
a one it is said: "Thou art now a disciple, able to stand, able to hear, 
able to see, able to speak, thou hast conquered desire and attained to 



PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRAS 323 

self-knowledge, thou hast seen thy soul in its bloom and recognized it, 
and heard the voice of the silence." 

49. By absence of all self-indulgence at this point, also, the 
seeds of bondage to sorrow are destroyed, and pure spiritual being is 
attained. 

The seeking of indulgence for the personal self, whether through 
passion or ambition, sows the seed of future sorrow. For this self- 
indulgence of the personality is a double sin against the real ; a sin against 
the cleanness of life, and a sin against the universal being, which permits 
no exclusive particular good, since, in the real, all spiritual possessions 
are held in common. This twofold sin brings its reacting punishment, 
its confining bondage to sorrow. But ceasing from self-indulgence 
brings purity, liberation, spiritual life. 

50. There should be complete overcoming of allurement or 
pride in the invitations of the different regions of life, lest attachment 
to things evil arise once more. 

The commentator tells us that disciples, seekers for union, are of 
four degrees : first, those who are entering the path ; second, those 
who are in the realm of allurements ; third, those who have won the 
victory over matter and the senses ; fourth, those who stand firm in pure 
spiritual life. To the second, especially, the caution in the text is ad- 
dressed. More modern teachers would express the same truth by a 
warning against the delusions and fascinations of the psychic realm, 
which open around the disciple, as he breaks through into the unseen 
worlds. These are the dangers of the anteroom. Safety lies in passing 
on swiftly into the inner chamber. "Him that overcometh will I make a 
pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out." 

51. From perfectly concentrated Meditation on the divisions of 
time and their succession comes that wisdom which is born of 
discernment. 

The Upanishads say of the liberated that "he has passed beyond 
the triad of time" ; he no longer sees life as projected into past, present 
and future, since these are forms of the mind; but beholds all things 
spread out in the quiet light of the Eternal. This would seem to be the 
same thought, and to point to that clear-eyed spiritual perception which 
is above time; that wisdom born of the unveiling of Time's delusion. 
Then shall the disciple live neither in the present nor the future, but in 
the Eternal. 

52. Hence comes discernment between things which are of like 
nature, not distinguished by difference of kind, character or position. 

Here, as also in the preceding sutra, we are close to the Kantian 



324 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

doctrine that distinctions of order, time and space are creations of the 
mind; the threefold prism through which the thing-in-itself appears to 
us distorted and refracted. When the prism is withdrawn the thing-in- 
itself returns to its primal unity, no longer distinguishable by the mind, 
yet clearly knowable by that high power of spiritual discernment, of 
illumination, which is above the mind. 

53. The wisdom which is born of discernment is starlike; it 
discerns all things, and all conditions of things, it discerns without 
succession : simultaneously. 

That wisdom, that intuitive, divining power is starlike, says the 
commentator, because it shines with its own light, because it rises on high, 
and illumines all things. Nought is hid from it, whether things past, 
things present, or things to come; for it is beyond the threefold form 
of time, so that all things are spread before it together, in the single 
light of the divine. This power has been beautifully described by 
Columba: "Some there are, though very few, to whom Divine grace 
has granted this: that they can clearly and most distinctly see, at one 
and the same moment, as though under one ray of the sun, even the 
entire circuit of the whole world with its surroundings of ocean and 
sky, the inmost part of their mind being marvelously enlarged." 

54. When the vesture and the spiritual man are alike pure, then 
' perfect spiritual life is attained. 

The vesture, says the commentator, must first be washed pure of all 
stains of passion and darkness, and the seeds of future sorrow must be 
burned up utterly. Then, both the vesture and the wearer of the vesture 
being alike pure, the spiritual man enters into perfect spiritual life. 

Thus are described the birth, the growth, the powers and endow- 
ments of the spiritual man, with that high state to which, through purity, 
he attains. 

(To be continued.) 



"Infinite Pity, yet also infinite rigour of Law! It is so Nature is 
made. But a man who does not know rigour, cannot pity either. His 
very pity will be cowardly, egoistic sentimentality or little better." 

CARLYLE. 



THE ORDEAL 



I HAD gone to bed tired after a long day of exacting work, and I 
had reached that borderland, between waking life and sleep, where 
the life currents begin to flow in soft and regular waves, when the 

mind's activity is stilled and when the field of consciousness is dim 
and faint. Suddenly I felt the Power. From some deep recess of my 
being it welled and flowed in ever-increasing volume. I knew the Master 
was at hand for that is a sign of his appearance. Steadily it rose until 
my whole being thrilled with its vibrant life. To this point I had often 
gone before, for it was an accustomed experience, but this time it con- 
tinued with augmenting force until I had to hold myself together by act 
of will, for its mighty waves threatened to ingulf my consciousness. 

Then, out of the darkness and silence within, came a voice which 
said "Thy hour has struck! Summon thy forces and come with me 
unresisting." 

"Master," I replied, "thou art the force upon which I have relied, 
and thou art here. What other forces can I summon?" 

"My son, I may not help thee in the ordeal now before thee. Thy 
own power must be thy sole resource. It is for this hour that I have 
been training thee for years and thou wilt find, I trust, that the anguish 
thou hast endured so patiently will bear rich fruit. But the Brethren 
await. Come !" 

I felt a thrill of pain shoot through me, like the breaking of adhe- 
sions which bind a stiff joint or muscle; then a sensation of movement, 
as if slipping out of some old wrappings, and in an instant I was 
standing free. I could not see, but I could feel a light and life surround- 
ing me which gave me courage. Then the Master took my hand and 
again said. "Come!" A sensation of incredibly rapid motion followed 
for a short time, and then I found myself at rest, alone. I knew the 
Master had left me to face whatever might betide. For a few seconds, 
as we reckon time, during which I tried to calm my anxious mind, 
dismiss my growing sense of apprehension, and quiet the beating of my 
heart, all was dark and still. I waited expectantly, and all the stories 
I had read of the trials and tests of disciples came streaming into my 
mind. I did not know whether to expect some sudden call upon my 
strength and courage, or some long drawn out strain on faith or love. 
The activity of my mind increased from moment to moment until it flew 
wildly from thought to thought, which came crowding into the field of 
consciousness so fast as to tumble over one another. I endeavored to 
curb this useless and distracting jumble, but found that it was beyond 
my strength. I could not concentrate my mind. I tried to force myself 



3*5 



326 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

to think of the Master, to repeat prayers or bits of the devotional book 
I love; but some power greater than my own was pushing these other 
thoughts into my mind. That gave me a clue to what was happening. 
I kept up my efforts to stop the flow of outside thoughts; I resisted all 
I could; and I watched and waited. I soon noticed that the thoughts 
began to change their nature. At first they had been about the tests and 
trials of the neophyte, which, after all, was appropriate enough to the 
occasion. Although preventing concentration at least they were com- 
paratively harmless. Soon, however, they took on a distinct quality, a 
purely personal note, difficult to describe. It was no longer general 
recollections, but what was going to happen to me: would I succeed; 
were my fellow disciples going through the same test, would I do better 
than they did; would they fail and would I succeed; or by chance would 
they succeed and would I fail? Then followed envious, jealous 
thoughts : I remembered all their faults, my mind became a cesspool of 
objectionable ideas, tending to glorify myself at the expense of others. 
This went on until I was horrified at my ability to give countenance to 
such a mass of uncharitableness. Then suddenly my heart sank with 
horror as I discovered that this hideous maelstrom was all of my own 
creation. I recognized all these thoughts as my own, and I remembered 
when and where I had given many of them birth. But this conscious- 
ness brought its own remedy, for my very horror enabled me to rally 
my will, and I forced my mind to receive and hold thoughts of an opposite 
character. I remembered my kindly feelings, my hopes for my fellow 
disciples, my desire for their success, my efforts to help them, the many 
ways in which they were superior to me, their special virtues and 
excellences of character and soul. For a time, it seemed to me a long 
time, my mind was a battle ground of these contending thoughts, my own 
creations ; and the good and generous battalions won. They gradually 
met and pushed out of my consciousness every unkind, envious or jealous 
thought that sought entrance, and I knew that the first test had been 
passed. 

The conscious strain relaxed and I had time to breathe freely and 
to wait the next onslaught of the enemy, which I now knew was only 
the other part of myself. Soon I got the clue to the direction from 
which the attack would come, and I trembled, but braced myself for what 
I felt was to happen. 

Into my mind began to pour a frightful stream of sensual thoughts ; 
every evil and prurient story I had ever heard or read, every lewd sight 
or picture, every coarse or impure feeling, every experience I had ever 
lived that was tinged with this poison. And this time it was not merely 
thought, but the curtain of darkness which had walled me round, grad- 
ually lightened and, as if by some perfect cinematoscope, picture after 
picture was thrown into relief in vivid colors and with living forms. 
I knew the things were not real, were but reproductions of my own past 



THE ORDEAL 327 

fancies and imaginings, but they looked real and were indescribably 
vivid and alluring. 

The series went on for an interminable time, as did the thoughts 
that accompanied them. I knew that I must keep myself separate from 
them, that I must preserve my consciousness of being outside and dif- 
ferent from them, while at the same time I knew that they were my own 
past creations. I knew that if for one single instant I lost my sense of 
individuality and thought one of these thoughts in the sense of identi- 
fying myself with it, I would be lost. If for an infinitessimal part of a 
second, one of them became my thought, instead of a phantasmagoria 
conjured out of the past, I would have failed. 

I knew, too, that the only protection against this failure was my 
own past efforts to purify my mind and heart; the countless times I had 
deliberately and consciously expelled impure thoughts and throttled 
impure desires; the power created by self-imposed discipline; by acts 
' of denial, restraint and control. My will was, for the time, the play- 
thing of those contending forces, and I a frightened and ashamed 
spectator of the struggle. 

But again the higher won. The whole mass of evil forces seemed 
to concentrate into a final image of the most indescribable and alluring 
beauty, and when that failed to move me, the whole vile crew faded away 
and again for some moments I was left in peace. 

The silence lasted longer than before and for quite awhile I had 
no indication of what the next trial would be. I grew uneasy, restless, 
troubled. I wondered if there was something I should do. My uneasi- 
ness increased; I grew afraid; I felt cold chills chase each other up my 
spine. I felt an evil force surrounding me that grew and grew. Vague 
forms of horror, awful shapes, suggestions of fearsome things, intangible 
ideas of terror, floated before my mind's eye. What, thought I, had 
I to summon from my past, to do battle with this new enemy? I 
searched my consciousness in vain ; this was a new experience. And 
then I knew that this was not a negative struggle like the other two. 
I was not a mere spectator, waiting the issue of a fight between con- 
tending forces. This time it was a battle between me and the forces of 
evil in the world. I, the real inner I, was an active, not a passive 
participant. The thought increased my terror, but served to stimulate my 
will. As if in response to my resistance, the power opposing me seemed 
to double in volume and intensity. It surrounded me on all sides, and 
hemmed me in, coming closer and ever closer, until I had a feeling of 
being stifled. My heart beat wildly, sweat streamed from every pore, 
and my breath came in deep irregular gasps. I knew I could not keep 
up such an effort long. 

Then gradually, out of the darkness, a face took shape and became 
clearer and clearer and approached nearer and nearer; a face of such 
indescribable malignity, such relentless cruelty, such cold intelligence, 



328 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

such irresistible will, that I screamed with terror. I could feel my blood 
and brain slowly freeze. The wall of evil crushed down upon me more 
and more. I became frantic, mad, as those burning eyes approached. 
For one wild instant I tried to ignore the presence, as I had once heard 
a disciple advised to do, and I fancied I saw a gleam of amusement pass 
over the calm of that icy countenance. I ignore it? Ye gods! 

Nearer and nearer it came until the pressure ate into my very soul 
and turned my will to water. A merciful oblivion began to steal over 
me, and yet I knew that if it overpowered me I would be lost. My very 
consciousness grew dim. I can only describe it by saying that my light 
began to go out. I knew it was the end. 

I shrieked wildly to my Master for help; and yet I knew that he 
could not respond. I knew that I, alone, had to fight and conquer that 
awful power, and I knew that it could sweep me aside as a whirlwind 
scatters autumn leaves. I was lost. Some weakness in the past, some lack 
of preparation, some failure of strength or will, left me defenseless, and I 
wondered why my Master, knowing this, had brought me to the test. 
Then instantly I knew that this could not be true. That somewhere, 
somehow, there was a power that was superior to this, that could 
combat it, could sweep it aside as easily as it could demolish me. This 
thought gave me strength to think. I knew that the good powers in the 
universe were stronger than the evil powers: I knew that these good 
powers would help me if I let them, if I gave them a means by which 
they could manifest. So gathering all my remaining strength of body, 
mind and soul, I made one, wild, desperate effort, inward and upward, 
to reach this ocean of beneficent Power. There was an instant of 
exquisite agony, a rush of mighty forces, a blinding light, and 
I broke through. The evil forces disappeared as if by magic and I 
heard the sound of my Master's voice, saying, "Well done." Strains of 
triumphal music filled my ears. I lay, face downward, too weak to 
move, on the steps of an altar, before which stood my Master. He had 
been within three feet of me during all this awful time. At each side, 
were seated many of his august companions, while behind me, as I 
afterwards discovered, were scores upon scores of the lesser brethren, 
filling the body of the room. 

But what followed I may not reveal. The first two tests I have 
described are the third and fourth through which the neophyte must 
pass. The last one belongs to a different category. 

MEN-TEK-NIS. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR 
LITERATURE 



GOETHE'S FAUST 

GOETHE was one day fretting with Eckermann because people 
were persistently sending letters to inquire what idea he meant 
to embody in his poem. "From heaven, through the world, to 
hell would be something," he exclaimed. His words are sug- 
gestive. The Faust presents some of the experience of the great orphan, 
man; it depicts acts and scenes along the Way that leads out from 
Eternity back to Eternity. This dramatic poem, issuing out of the 
eighteenth century only a few years after the death of Burke in 1797, 
sets forth another portion of truth that humanity needs. In his much 
needed work in defense of government and order against revolutionists, 
Burke often becomes over-zealous, and sees these things as ends. With 
all his splendid gifts Burke had not the saving comic sense, and some- 
times is ludicrous in his denunciation of opinions different from his own. 
Goethe follows upon Burke as a timely corrective; for, by showing that 
evil has a disciplinary value, he implies that good is not its own end. 

Goethe takes as hero of his drama a man of aspiration who is 
stumbling along the way. The poet's object of course is to bring his 
hero forward to the journey's end, and he can accomplish this only by 
showing that there is a divine sanction, as it were, for sin. "All steps 
are necessary to make up the ladder. The vices of men become steps 
in the ladder, one by one, as they are surmounted" ["I cried to the Lord, 
saying, 'Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit 
those evils?' and the Lord answered, That it was needful I should have 
a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions!' and 
in this I saw the infinite love of God." George Fox's Journal]. Aspir- 
ation will bring man to evil and through it: "Man will err, so long as 
he struggles onward" (Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt). But 
"a man of earnest endeavor through all defeat and dismay believes stead- 
fastly in the right outcome of his effort." Sin is thus not a fixed Satanic 
principle, but mistaken strokes of the prentice as he learns to master his 
tool. This, Goethe declared, is the central thought of the drama, and 
he puts the message upon the lips of angels. 

Wer immer strebend sich bemiiht, 
Den konnen wir erlosen. 

Goethe found his theme suggested in the Old Testament drama, 

39 



330 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Job. His purpose was to make a new application of the principles that 
are there clearly enunciated, but that are not always appreciated. The 
unknown author of Job was bold enough to make evil the means by 
which the patriarch is brought to God. Job, the lordly dweller in the 
land, had long worshipped the God of his fathers in all punctiliousness, 
and deserved, he thought, good treatment in return. But that traditional 
and national god was not a Reality to Job only a word sounding in his 
ears. Cast out from sleek comfort, and brought to face suffering and 
sorrow, Job curses the Master of the show who 

plays 

Upon this chequer-board of Nights and Days: 
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays, 
And one by one back in the Closet lays. 

Not till he has broken his god of tradition, and ceased from his god of 
rhetoric does God fire Job's heart. The bitter experience with evil is 
the travail pain out of which comes forth the new creature that sees God 
with its eye. In a brief "Prologue in Heaven" Goethe skillfully recalls 
the Old Testament drama, and hints at the final victory of the modern 
Job whom Jehovah now gives over to be tested by "his servant," Mephis- 
topheles. "I do not hate you and your fellows," Jehovah good-humoredly 
says to his imp. 

Herr Faust, Doctor and Professor, is a type of the eighteenth 
century in its triumph which is failure. The philosophers of the 
eclaircissement taught that man was to find his duties and pleasures 
within the "flaming ramparts of the world" in a very definite universe 
that had imposed no infinite obligations upon its rational creature. 
Dr. Faust has for years devoted himself arduously to study of "things 
and the mind," 

Philosophy, Law, Medicine, 
And Theology as well! 

He has freed himself from all fear of hell and the devil, and, after much 
toil of ingathering, he sits down now to a "Feast of Pure Reason." But 
he finds his banquet nothing more than mummy skins and corpse bones. 
A true eighteenth century mind, a "Benthamee," Carlyle would say, 
would find satisfaction if not nourishment in that repast. Dr. Faust is 
more than an eighteenth century rationalist. "Two opposing natures 
dwell within me, and each seeks to be freed from the other's restraint." 
His higher nature revolts, protests against the mind and its limitations, 
and stretches lame hands toward unseen heights he cannot reach. 

O for wings to lift me from cold earth 
And bear me to the fire-hearted sun. 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 331 

For Dr. Faust, as for Dante, the road sunward is longer than he thinks 
and different. He has for some time been at work upon a translation 
of the New Testament, and has accomplished his task as far as the fourth 
Gospel. The very first sentence of St. John perplexes him. As a higher 
critic he feels that the traditional writing, logos, is incorrect, and must 
be amended. It is not rational to think "the Word" was "in the begin- 
ning." He considers various readings which seem more rational, and 
concludes that what St. John really wrote is this: "In the beginning 
was the tangible Deed (im Anfang war die That). As he contentedly 
thus writes down his translation, Mephistopheles of the prologue steps 
forth into the room, in the guise of a scholar. In answer to the pro- 
fessor's query after his name, he replies : "I am the spirit of negation." 
The professor is to learn his lessons with this master, a debased Vergil, 
as it were, who has been cast out from the service of Beatrice. 

Their compact is simple. The professor is weary of books. Culti- 
vation of the intellect has ended in intellectual paralysis. Arduous inves- 
tigations have brought dust and ashes to the scholar. He requests 
Mephistopheles to take him out among men where he can live their lives, 
learning their joys and pains. He hopes he may somehow escape the 
prison of himself by making their experiences his own win a certain 
enlargement by bringing their personalities into his own. He does not 
expect happiness from this, but a sensation less deadening than his 
former life afforded. The compact is made. The devil pledges himself 
to serve all the doctor's whims, and makes but one small proviso: the 
moment Faust finds satisfaction and joy in the new life, that moment 
their relation changes Faust must then serve the devil. 

Several scenes follow and culminate in the Gretchen episode. They 
are so vivid that they are read by many as the cantos of the Inferno are 
read in forgetfulness that they are details of a whole. The picturesque 
contrast of a red-suited fiend and yellow-haired innocence at the spinning- 
wheel has given rise to a belief that the Gretchen tragedy was Goethe's 
goal. It is only one experience a finely executed episode planned by 
Mephistopheles. The drunken revelry in Auerbach's Keller had no 
attraction for Faust, and Mephistopheles then arranged a love affair; his 
hope was by this early to capture his victim, or, perhaps, to lead Faust, 
through remorse, to suicide. One line of the Gretchen episode is signi- 
ficant. As Faust foresees the consequences of his act, he exclaims: 
"This victim is a sacrifice to Hell." The intrigue does not end as the 
devil expects. Instead of contentment or remorse there is repentance, 
and a rising to life on a higher level. 

The death of Gretchen ends Part One; Part Two begins with the 
repentance and the after life. Very many years intervened between the 
writing of these two parts. Goethe wrote the second part shortly before 
his death in 1832, senza amore; he was driven to it by admiring friends 
who esteemed his powers greater than he knew them to be. Goethe was 



332 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

unable to carry out the design he had partly outlined, so that the diffuse, 
wearisome and fantastic Part Two is little more than poudre aux yeux. 
Carlyle and others try to find subtle symbolism in its mad imagery. 
Occasionally, a fragment in this barbaric hodge-podge suggests large and 
great things. The dialogue about the "Mothers" is such. Goethe uses 
that symbol for those forces or beings that are familiar to us through 
Plato the archetypal Ideas. "They (the mothers) are Goddesses who 
sit nobly enthroned in solitude. No space surrounds them, nor does time 
have existence there ... To mortal men they are wholly unknown, and 
even beings higher than men, think and speak of them with difficulty. 
No road leads to their august abode. For they dwell in an untrod land 
which no foot shall ever tread. Who enters that strange land, sees 
nothing before his eyes, has no sound in his ears, nor any ground beneath 
his feet." "Yet," Faust replies to his companion, "in that- strange and 
vacant land I shall find the All of things." Literary folk find much of 
interest in the marriage of Faust to Helen of Troy; they say this 
represents the union in Goethe of classical and romantic art. The boy 
Euphorion, born of that marriage, somehow stands for Lord Byron. 
So, one student after another has left an obligation to put meaning into 
the many thousand lines. In truth, they were never articulated, and 
contribute nothing to the allegory. Phantasmagoria! 

Toward the end of the last act Goethe takes up threads again, and 
puts in a x few pages all that he was able to tell of the continued journey. 
The two companions have travelled over earth, and the compact still 
holds. Faust's one hundredth year finds him lord of a large domain. 
One area of this domain is worthless on account of the breaking of the 
sea; a pestilent swamp mars another tract. The aged landlord is eager 
that his laborers shall complete two great projects a dike to exclude the 
sea, and trenches to drain the marsh. The significant thing about Faust's 
enthusiasm is this : He knows he shall receive no profit from these im- 
provements ; he makes them for the benefit'of others whom he shall never 
see. He stands in extreme feebleness on the terrace directing the work. 
The flown years fly again through his mind. He contrasts his lively 
interest in things of earth with his former desire to fly from the world 
toward the fire-hearted sun. He pictures the thousands who will live 
through his labors. Contemplation of their activity brings the fatal 
words to his lips. "This is joy indeed," he murmurs, and in murmuring 
falls to the ground. Service for others brings deliverance from the 
devil. For as Mephistopheles rushes forward, at those words, to claim 
his due, he finds only a corpse; and hosts of angels fill the air, bearing 
off Faust's spirit. 

Goethe said he could close his drama no otherwise than through the 
imagery of the Church. He models the last scene of all upon mediaeval 
frescoes. In this scene there is a shadow of resemblance between 
Goethe's symbols and Dante's. The angels fly with Faust's spirit to 



THEOSOPHY AND SECULAR LITERATURE 333 

a steep mountain filled with holy folk who toil toward the summit. 
Suddenly the Blessed Virgin hovers over the mount, and one of her 
attendants, Gretchen, prays that the new born Faust may be entrusted 
to her for instruction in the new life. The petition is granted, and the 
spirits ascend to the new life of the spheres. As they disappear, voices 
there above chant a mystic chorus: "All visible things are types and 
symbols of real things unseen." 

Alles Vergangliche 
1st nur ein Gleichnis ; 
Das Unzulangliche 
Hier wird's Ereignis. 

Goethe's failure is unmistakable. His poem, vaguely conceived, and 
very imperfectly executed, comes to an end with the birth of the spiritual 
nature, the heavenly man. He indeed suggests that there is a new plane 
of experience for the heavenly man. But the thought seems never to 
have entered his mind that he should write a third part to his poem for 
setting forth the new life. If he had had the intention, the confusion of 
Part Two is surely warrant for saying he could never have brought his 
design to execution. 

There is another significant thing in the Faust that has not been 
mentioned its magic. Many romantic writers, as Hawthorne and Poe, 
have told strange tales of occult doings. Things occult interest them 
because they are picturesque and startling. They have no more under- 
standing of occult laws and forces than other artists have of things divine 
when they add Zeus or Venus as charming ornaments to picture or poem. 
Goethe is not of that number. His magic is more than picturesque. He 
seems to have won knowledge of the "hidden unity in the Eternal Being," 
to have been familiar with the idea of a Planetary Spirit, and other 
occult tenets. Every one remembers from Sartor Resartus the words of 
the Erdgeist to Faust. 

In Being's floods, in Action's storm, 

I walk and work, above, beneath, 

Work and weave in endless motion! 

Birth and Death, 

An infinite ocean; 

A seizing and giving 

The fire of the Living: 

'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply, 

And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by. 

This finer knowledge comes after long discipline in the spiritual life, we 
are taught. A mark of spirituality is constructiveness. One cannot 



334 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

say that Goethe's life was constructed.* And that mark, as rhetorical 
structure, is not upon his works Faust in verse, Wilhelm Meister in 
prose. His occult knowledge seems then illegitimate gain. It brings 
to mind sentences from Esoteric Buddhism. "The 'progress toward 
absolute evil,' arrested by the cataclysms of each race in turn, sets in 
with the acquisition, by means of ordinary intellectual research and 
scientific advancement, of those powers over Nature which accrue even 
now in adeptship from the premature development of higher faculties 
than those we ordinarily employ... It is enough to say that they [the 
powers] are such as cannot but be dangerous to society generally, and 
provocative of all manner of crimes which would utterly defy detection, 
if possessed by persons capable of regarding them as anything else but 
a profoundly sacred trust. Now some of these powers are simply the 
practical application of obscure forces of Nature, susceptible of discovery 
in the course of ordinary scientific progress . . . Such powers in the hands 
of persons willing to use them for merely selfish and unscrupulous ends, 
must not only be productive of social disaster, but also for the persons 
who hold them, of progress in the direction of that evilly-spiritual exalta- 
tion, which is a far more terrible result than suffering and inconvenience 
in this world." Is Goethe a type of those who through sheer intellect, 
divorced from spiritual aspiration, "progress toward absolute evil"? 
Emerson seems to have answered affirmatively when he wrote that Goethe 
was "incapable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment." "I dare not 
say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has 
spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable of a 
self-surrender to the moral sentiment. There are nobler strains in poetry 
than any he has sounded. There are writers poorer in talent, whose tone 
is purer and more touches the heart. Goethe can never be dear to men. 
His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but to truth for the sake of 
culture. He has no aims less large than the conquest of universal nature, 
of universal truth, to be his portion : a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, 
nor overawed ; of a stoical self-command and self-denial, and having one 
test for all men, W hat can you teach me? All possessions are valued 
by him for that only; rank, privileges, health, time, Being itself." 

C. 



* Consider, in contrast, this passage from George Fox's Journal. "Great things did the Lord 
lead me into, and wonderful depths were opened unto me, beyond what can by words be declared; 
but as people come into subjection to the Spirit of God, and grow up in the image and power 
of the Almighty, they may receive the Word of wisdom that opens all things, and come to know 
the hidden unity in the Eternal Being." 



WILLIAM SHARP=FIONA 
MACLEOD 



IN the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY for January, 1907, there appeared 
an account of a curious case of double personality, as studied by 
Dr. Morton Prince of Boston, who called his book The Dissociation 

of a Personality. The personality in question was that of a young 
lady of 23, an extremely delicate person of neurotic heredity and very 
unhappy childhood, who seemed at intervals to be possessed by not one, 
but four different intelligences, who completely monopolised the "real 
Miss Beauchamp's" consciousness, and only after a long struggle of some 
six years, were the intruders finally expelled by the aid of a complicated 
system of hypnotism and suggestion. 

And now an entirely different case comes before the public, still a 
case of double personality, but this time the secondary personality, if we 
may use the expression, of a much finer and more spiritual type than the 
first one. William Sharp had been known as a writer for some years, 
and possessed a wonderful gift of charm that attracted to him many of 
the prominent poets and essayists of his day, notably Dante Rossetti and 
his gifted sister Christina, George Meredith, Tennyson, Dowden, Philip 
Bourke Marston, the Janviers, Stedman, Stevenson, and many others, in 
England and America. He married his cousin Elizabeth Sharp, after 
an engagement of nine years, in October, 1884; she had an income of 
$175 a year, and he, to use her own picturesque phrase, "had $150 in 
his pocket." Their relatives furnished a little house in West Kensington 
for them, and they began their new life with high hopes. Their busy 
pens had to work incessantly to keep the wolf from the door, and it is 
no wonder that much of William Sharp's writing at this period could 
only be called hack work. But there were glimpses of something higher 
always hanging about him, memories of childhood, and strange and 
beautiful dreams, the seeds as it were, that were to blossom into won- 
derful flowers of legend and poetry later on. He was born in Paisley, 
but his father loved the West Highlands so well that he took a house 
every summer somewhere between the mountains and the sea. Here 
William's old nurse Barbara, told him wild stories of Vikings and the 
heroes of ancient Celtic sagas, whose adventures he loved to enact. 
During his sixth year, the family had a house for the summer on the 
great heather-clad hills of Loch Long, where the boy especially delighted 
in a little pine wood nestling on the hill-side above the house. It was a 
holy place to him, he felt there was some great power behind the beauty 
he saw ; behind the wonder of the wind, and the sunshine and the silences 



335 



336 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

he loved, that made him long to be one with it all. And so he built a 
little altar of rough stones under a swaying pine, and laid white flowers 
upon it as an offering. Sometimes he threw such offerings, with many 
more of his childish treasures, into the loch, hoping to move the mys- 
terious sea-god whom his nurse told him dwelt there, into appearing to 
his little worshipper. It is interesting to remember that George Sand, 
as a little child built an altar of stones under the trees, and laid her 
childish offerings on it. 

There was little or nothing in Sharp's early writings to suggest the 
psychic side of his life, but everything in his personality; and it seems 
strange, now that the secret is out, that any of his friends could have read 
Pharais and not have seen William Sharp's hand in every line of it. 
But he was apparently busy with monographs on the poets and criticism 
of many kinds, as well as poems, elegiac and lyric. In 1893 he sets down 
in his diary that he has written "the first part of a Celtic romance called 
Pharais." In Rome he had found "the desired incentive towards a true 
expression of himself," says his wife, "in the stimulus and sympathetic 
understanding of the friend (E. W. R.) to whom he dedicated the first 
of the books published under his pseudonym." During the writing of 
Pharais the author began to realise how much the feminine element 
dominated in the book, and he decided to issue the volume under the 
name of Fiona Macleod, "which flashed ready-made" into his mind. 
Mrs. Janvier, one of the first of the few friends let into the secret, asked 
him "why he chose to send forth good work under the' signature of a 
woman?" He answered, "I can write out of my heart in a way I could 
not do as William Sharp, and indeed I could not do so if I were the 
woman Fiona Macleod is supposed to be, unless veiled in scrupulous 
anonimity.. . .My truest self, the self who is below all other selves, must 
find expression, yet I cannot, save in this hidden way." And later he 
wrote: "Sometimes I am tempted to believe I am half a woman, and 
saved by the hazard of chance from what a woman can be made to suffer 
if one let the light of the common day illuminate the avenues and vistas 
of her heart." 

Pharais* was published in 1894, and created a sensation in the 
literary world A few keen-eyed critics suspected Sharp of its author- 
ship, but the world-at-large clung to their discovery, or what they 
thought their discovery of the predominant feminine element in the book, 
and refused to believe that a man could have woven so fine and delicate 
a web of poetic legend. 

The next year The Mountain Lovers was published, and Sharp fled 
from the gloom of London, "that vast reservoir of all the evils of civilised 
life," to the fresh keen air of Arran, the smell of the pines, the heather, 
and the bracken, and the salt weed upon the shore. Here, in the vast 

* Paradise. 



WILLIAM SHARP FIONA MACLEOD 337 

solitudes, his other self became more and more real to him. "There is 
something of a strange excitement," he wrote to his wife, "in the 
knowledge that two people are here ; so intimate and yet so far-off. For 
it is with me as though Fiona were asleep in another room. I catch 
myself listening for her step sometimes, for the sudden opening of a 
door. It is unawaredly that she whispers to me. ... It seems passing 
strange to be here with her alone at last." The illusion was kept up 
furthermore by the presentation of various copies of Pharais and The 
Mountain Lovers to Meredith and other literary lights, and Sharp went 
so far as to write of "his cousin, Miss Fiona Macleod" to Edward Clodd, 
president of the Omar Khayyam Club, of which Sharp had just been 
elected a member. To the Glasgow Evening News, which had cast some 
doubt on the existence of Fiona Macleod (seeming to consider her as a 
sort of Celtic "Mrs. Harris") Sharp wrote: "Miss Fiona Macleod is 
not Mr. William Sharp, Miss Fiona Macleod is not Mrs. William Sharp, 
Miss Fiona Macleod is Miss Fiona Macleod." And the better to guard 
his secret, he kept up a simultaneous fire of articles by Wm. Sharp, 
which effectually masked the new and startlingly original legends and 
poems by F. M., of which he and his wife continually spoke and wrote 
to each other as of something entirely outside of themselves. So when 
his wife was in Italy, he wrote to her: "There can be no question that 
F. M.'s deepest and finest work is in this Washer of the Ford volume 
(just published). As for the spiritual lesson that nature has taught me, 
and that has grown within me otherwise, I have given the finest utter- 
ance to it that I can.. . .Than The Last Supper I shall never do anything 
better. Apart from this intense inner flame that has been burning 
within me so strangely and deeply of late I think my most imaginative 
work will be found in the titular piece The Washer of the Ford." 

To the writer The Last Supper is the finest thing Sharp wrote, and 
his friend T. A. Janvier wrote to him : "The stories seem to be the result 
of some outside force constraining you to write them.... Of all in the 
book, my strongest affection is for The Last Supper. It seems to me 
to be the most purely beautiful and the profoundest thing that you 
have done." 

The central story of The Archer was one of the tales which the 
author valued most, and a curious coincidence happened concerning a 
part of it. That "arbitrary fantasy" is the record of a dream, or vision, 
which the author had at Tarbert. In a letter from Mr. Yeats received 
shortly after, the Irish poet related a similar experience which he had 
had, a vision of a beautiful woman shooting arrows among the stars. 
"That night she appeared to Symons who is staying here, and so 
impressed him that he wrote a poem on her, the only one he ever wrote 
to a dream." By this time Fiona was corresponding with many of 
Sharp's friends, and some of her own, and to Ernest Rhys the Welsh 
poet, she wrote in December, 1906, parrying his questions in a very 



338 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

characteristic and charming way. "Fiona," she told him, "was the 
Gaelic diminutive of Fionaghal (Flora). For the rest I was born 
more than a thousand years ago, in the remote region of Gaeldom known 
as the Hills of Dream. There I have lived the better part of my life, 
my father's name was Romance, and that of my mother was Dream. 
I have no photograph of their abode, which is just under the quicken- 
arch immediately west of the sunset-rainbow. You will easily find it. 
Nor can I send you a photograph of myself. My last fell among the 
dew-wet heather, and is now doubtless lining the cells of the wild bees. 
All this authentic information I gladly send you !" 

It was a tremendous strain upon William Sharp to keep up with 
the two sides of his nature, because while he wished F. M. to develop 
under the veil of secrecy he had thrown about her, he was anxious that 
the reputation of W. S. should be maintained. The needs of the two 
natures were not always alike, and sometimes created a complex 
condition, that ended in a nervous collapse. 

In 1899 The Dominion of Dreams was published, and W. S. writes 
to a friend: "This book is at once the deepest and most intimate that 
F. M. has written.. . .If ever a book (in the deeper portion of it) came 
out of the depths of a life it is this ; and so, I suppose, it shall live for 
by a mysterious law, only the work of suffering, or great joy, survives, 
and that in the degree of its intensity. ... In one of the stories in this 
book, The Distant Country, occurs a sentence that is to be inscribed on 
my gravestone when my time comes * : "Love is more great than we 
conceive, and Death is the keeper of unknown redemptions." This is 
the last sentence (except a quoted proverb) of The Distant Country, 
and Fiona herself says of that tale, if tale it can be called, that there is 
nothing in her writings "to stand beside it as the deepest and most 
searching utterance on the mystery of passion." And elsewhere she 
says: "I no longer ask of a book, is it clever or striking, or is it well 
done, or even is it beautiful, but out of how deep a life does it come. 
That is the most searching test.. . .Do not speak of the spiritual life as 
'another life'; there is no 'other' life; what we mean by that is with 
us now. The great misconception of Death is that it is the only door to 
another world." And again : "There is a great serenity in the thought 
of death, when it is known to be the Gate of Life." 

"It was our habit, when talking to one another of the F. M. writings, 
to speak of 'Fiona' as a separate entity," says Mrs. Sharp, "so that we 
should not be taken unawares if suddenly spoken to about 'her books.' 
It was William's habit also to write and post to himself two letters on 
his birthday letters of admonition and of new resolutions, which he 
would give to his wife with a smile, saying 'Fiona is rather hard on me, 
but she is quite right.' " 

* And he had his wish. 



WILLIAM SHARP FIONA MACLEOD 339 

In December, W. S. and his wife were together in that most beautiful 
place in the world, Taormina in Sicily, and on a drive in the mountains, 
when the beauty of a warm April day suddenly changed to snow and a 
piercing wind, the poet's enfeebled frame received its death blow. Four 
days afterwards, he suddenly leant forward with shining eyes and 
exclaimed in a tone of joyous recognition, "Oh the beautiful 'Green Life' 
again !" and sank back with the contented sigh, "Ah, all is well." 

The title of F. M.'s romance, Green Fire was taken from a line in 
Cathal of the Woods, "O green fire of life, pulse of the world, O Love!" 
And the deeper meaning of the expression "Green Life" so familiar 
to all who knew F. M. is suggested in a sentence at the close of the 
book: "Alan knew that strange nostalgia of the mind for impossible 
things. Then, wrought for a while from his vision of green life, and 
flamed by another green fire than that born of earth, he dreamed his 
dream." 

Shortly before he died, William Sharp had prepared letters to be 
sent after his death to several friends whom he thought might be 
offended by his reticence as to F. M., telling them that he and he only 
was the author in the literal and literary sense of all written under 
the name of "Fiona Macleod." "It is a mystery which I cannot explain," 
he wrote, "perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to 
understand. The rest is silence.' " 

In surveying the dual life as a whole, Mrs. Sharp says that she found 
that "W. S." was the first to find himself, while his twin, "F. M." 
remained passive, or a separate self. But when "she" awoke to active 
consciousness, "she" became the deeper, the more impelling, the more 
essential factor. This severance and the resulting conflict, sometimes 
caused the flaming of the dual life to become so fierce that "Wilfion" 
as Mrs. Sharp called the inner and third Self that lay behind that dual 
expression, realised the necessity of bringing the two separated selves 
into some kind of conscious harmony. This is what he meant when he 
wrote in 1899 to Mrs. Janvier (who was in the secret), "I am going 
through a new birth." 

Although the difference between the two literary expressions was 
so marked, they had one thing, at least, in common, the psychic quality 
of seership. As F. M. he dreamed dreams, and "got in touch with 
ancestral memories of his race," and as W. S. he also saw visions from 
his childhood up, and a few of his friends knew him as psychic and 
mystic, who knew nothing of him as Fiona Macleod. W. B. Yeats, the 
Irish poet, and one of Sharp's intimates, considered him as the most 
extraordinary psychic he had ever encountered. He really believed that 
Fiona Macleod was a secondary personality, "as distinct as those one 
reads about in books of psychical research." W. S. could set himself to 
work normally, but for the F. M. self, he had to wait upon mood, or seek 
conditions to induce it. But the psychic, visionary power belonged exclu- 



340 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

sively to neither; it influenced both, and was subject to laws he did not 
fully understand. 

"I remember from early days," writes Mrs. Sharp, "how he would 
speak of the curious 'dazzle in the brain' which preceded the falling 
away of all material things and preluded some inner vision of Great 
Beauty or symbolic import that would pass as rapidly as it came." 

"Once he saw in waking vision those Divine Forges he had sought 
in childhood. On the verge of the Great Immensity that is beyond the 
confines of space, he saw Great Spirits of Fire standing at flaming anvils. 
And they lifted up the flames, and moulded them on the anvils, into 
shapes and semblances of men, and the Great Spirits took these flaming 
shapes and cast them forth into space, so that they should become the 
souls of men." 

In fact the phenomena in the Beauchamp case were physical- 
psychical, those in Sharp's case were psychical-spiritual. Mrs. Mona 
Caird wrote of him : "He was almost encumbered by the infinity of his 
perceptions; by the thronging interests, intuitions, glimpses of wonders, 
beauties, and mysteries which made life for him a pageant and a splen- 
dor such as is only disclosed to the soul that has to bear the torment and 
the revelations of genius." 

"And I would add," says Mrs. Sharp in the last sentence of her 
book, "to quote my husband's own words ever below all the stress and 
failure, below all the triumph of his toil, lay the beauty of his dream." 

KATHARINE HILLARD. 



"Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known." 

JOHN RUSKIN. 



"Exactness in little duties is a wonderful source of cheerfulness." 

F. W. FABER. 



"FRAGMENTS OF A DUAL 
CONSCIOUSNESS" 



THE Hibbert Journal for October, 1910, contains an interesting 
and important article on dual consciousness. The author is a 
Catholic, in her early youth an agnostic. She narrates with 
"scrupulous accuracy" a series of incidents in which under stress 
of danger or strong effort of will, her normal personal, fearful conscious- 
ness has given place to a consciousness at once impersonal and fearless, 
free from limitations of time and place, and unmoved, or even triumph- 
ant, at the near approach of death. Instances also are recorded where 
she seemed to hear through her ears what she knew she did not so hear, 
phrases which gave her some peace and courage "just enough to make 
the situation bearable," and which, as she says, "had a meaning which 
expanded with my life and understanding." Cases of second sight, too, 
are recorded as having come within her personal knowledge. 

The article is interesting, as every honest and sane record of mystical 
experience must be; it is important in that it marks a turning point in 
the methods of psychical research from the cul-de-sac of the seance room 
and of the investigation of brain states to the investigation of states of 
consciousness per se, in accordance with the more fruitful methods of 
Hindu psychology. The double nature of consciousness can be ex- 
plained, it is suggested, by a consideration of the principles of man as 
given in Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism. The normal personal conscious- 
ness is identified with Lower Manas, the super-normal consciousness with 
"Higher Manas Spiritual man." The seven principles of man are 
enumerated, and it is evident that the author possesses a fair general 
impression of their functions in union with Higher or Lower Manas. 

From an article on Philosophical Theories and Psychical Research, 
by James H. Hyslop, in the same issue, we learn that "in the last analysis, 
it is the existence of a collective and organic mass of facts that establishes 
any scientific truth, and psychic research is no exception to this. The 
crucial evidence in it is not any single incident, however valuable such 
may be for silencing an objection, but a collective mass of incidents 
having an organic unity that makes any opposing hypothesis applying 
to the individual incident seem unreasonable." In the interest of such 
a collective mass of incidents, I offer some facts from my own experience, 
which may fairly be classed with those of Miss Cole as "fragments of a 
dual consciousness." 

In my early youth I passed through a period of religious doubt and 
questioning which was, I think, more intense and distressing than most 
are called to endure. The details are not of special interest ; let it suffice 
to say that it was against the theory of life and of the universe expressed 



341 



342 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

in Calvinistic theology that my spirit first took arms. Actively antagon- 
istic to that system, I had no other to fill the void it left. I was in a 
state of positive despair. Moreover, the situation was complicated by 
certain conditions which shut me off not only from human sympathy, 
but from the possibility of an outlet to my distress of mind through any 
kind of activity physical, emotional or intellectual. Everybody and 
everything was taken from me. I was obliged to face that particular 
"abyss of nothingness" in complete isolation. At that time I remember 
distinctly thinking that, if there were any super-human power in the 
universe interested in developing in me the qualities of self-control, poise, 
patience (in all of which I was conspicuously deficient), that power 
could not possibly have conceived a more ingenious scheme for the 
development of those qualities than the set of circumstances in which 
I was then involved. Since I have been occupied with the study of 
theosophy, I have smiled often at the ingenuous penetration of my 
thought. 

This state of things continued for years. Once only I had a sudden 
strong conviction that things would be all right if I could only stick it 
out. What the "all right" might mean or what the sticking it out might 
involve, I did not know, but the conviction carried the force and calm 
of a message of authority. Consequently it strengthened my grit, and 
the memory of it long served to keep alive the feeling that perhaps the 
whole thing was not so mad and purposeless as it appeared. Having 
renounced hope of finding any response to my doubts and questions 
among friends or acquaintances, I searched the faces of strangers for 
one who would understand, sure that, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, 
I should know my wedding guest at sight, and with equal insistence force 
him to listen to my tale. One such I found a clergyman of the right 
sort, to whom these things were understandable if not understood, and 
on the sympathetic inspiration he gave, I lived for about two years. 
But it was not until I chanced upon Sartor Resartus that I knew there 
were others who had struggled in the same deep waters, yet who had 
come through to a farther shore. 

During this entire period there was manifested a tendency to 
compose poetry bad enough poetry, let me confess, but nevertheless 
rhyme or blank verse, coming often as easily as any prose. In the spring 
of 1891 I had occasion to write a poem of some length on the motto, 
Per ardua ad astra through trials to the stars. Though it amounts to 
nothing as literature, for the style reflects clearly the immaturity of my 
age, it is a fairly good symbolic explanation of the introduction to the life 
of occultism, a life (and a philosophy) of which at that time I knew not 
even the name, but the preliminary steps of which I was already unwit- 
tingly and unwillingly taking. In spite of no, rather because of my 
evident immaturity, I believe it to be a fragment of another, a supra- 
normal consciousness. 



FRAGMENTS OF A DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS 343 

The poem consists of a prologue, three songs, a summary, and an 
epilogue. The prologue I give for the sake of clearness. 

"Death silence ruled the world, as night assumed 
The sceptre of her power, and the sky, 
Mourning for a departed day, hung dark 
And lowering o'er the earth. The universe 
Was bowed beneath the pressure of some woe 
Too great for speech. I listened, while the wind 
Sighed my own thought, and the o'erhanging clouds 
Rolled and thundered with its awful weight. 
Then, stung by despair, I groped blindly on 
Not knowing whither, till struck down, I slept. 
Slept? rather waked, for every sense grew clear 
And pulses of celestial music beat 
And quivered in the growing threads of light. 
Ever in soothing undertones the music grew 
With the increasing light until 
I knew it for a voice. 

Then all the stars took up the glorious strain, 
And murmured with the wind accompaniment 
To one gladsome song. 'Sing on forever 
Heavenly voice,' I cried, 'and I will listen.' 
So e'en in saying this, I caught the thought 
Of that celestial music." 

Then follow the songs of the constellations. Orpheus tells how, 
"a child of heaven born of earthly pain," he reached the stars through 
love and the aspiration of art music. Hercules attained through work. 
Andromeda sings of her triumph through sacrifice. The epilogue points 
to faith "our keener sight," symbolised by the polar star, which will guide 
us into those realms which are the goal of all human striving. To 
anyone familiar with occult philosophy or even with Sartor Resartus no 
commentary is needed. The Everlasting No, the Centre of Indifference 
are in the prologue. The rest of the poem is a series of variations on 
the theme which Carlyle has named The Everlasting Yea. 

It was characteristic of this period that whatever I wrote came to 
me, whole or in parts as the case might be, but ready made, preceded 
nearly always by more or less trying throes of birth. There are two 
instances, however, of complete poems which came suddenly and quietly 
after I had retired for the night, one just before, the other just after 
I had fallen asleep. I cannot remember which was which, and I did 
not make a note of this. One was a song or hymn for a special occasion 
which I had wished for some time to write. It contains four verses, six 
lines in each verse, and the rhymes are rather complicated. As it is 
without special significance I will not give it. The other also came 



344 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

without preliminary effort, and the memory of the incident is still vivid, 
though it is now twenty-one years since it occurred. I was seized with 
a sudden intense feeling that there was something in my consciousness 
to be written down. I leaped from my bed, rushed to my desk, grasped 
a torn piece of letter paper and a pencil, and wrote to dictation. I wrote 
just as fast as my fingers would move, listening intently, and under the 
terrible pressure of a fear that what I failed to get could never be 
replaced. The voice which dictated was perfectly clear: the "clear, 
penetrating, and quiet" of The Hibbert Journal's contributor describes 
it accurately. I did not see the ideas pictured in words or in symbols; 
it was a voice I heard, but soundless I heard nothing. All this I 
remember as clearly as though it had happened yesterday, and I should 
not hesitate to stake my reputation for sanity on the accuracy of these 
statements were they verifiable. When I had finished writing I saw 
that the paper was covered, and there was not room for another line. 
But the poem was complete. I then read and wondered what it all meant. 
It incited a sort of mild interest, but I did not understand one sentence 
from another. I noticed, too, that the metre was one I had not before 
used, and, so far as I remembered, or now remember, was unfamiliar. 
Later the conviction dawned on me slowly that the poem was a prophecy 
of my inner life, a conviction which I have since learned to call a fact. 
But I did not quite believe it at first. I was interested, merely, to see 
whether it would so turn out. At length I copied it into a note book and 
dated it with year and month. From time to time I reread the poem, 
wondering if it really would turn out to be a prophecy, and always a 
little sceptical. Particularly was I a sceptic regarding the prediction 
that I should be Christianized. I was very antagonistic to the prevalent 
church Christianity, and, by conviction, something of a scientific mate- 
rialist. For me then church Christianity and scientific materialism 
divided the field of life solutions between them, and though the latter 
was always unsatisfying and inadequate, I was driven to it by the 
negative process of rejecting the only alternative. It probably would 
have remained impossible for me to accept the Christian explanation of 
the universe had I not through theosophy fallen in with the esoteric 
interpretation of Christianity. The word theosophy had then no mean- 
ing for me, and of esoteric Christianity I had never even heard. 

The poem follows. Technical errors have been reproduced, for 
the sake of "scrupulous accuracy." 

"I had a dream, I dreamed I stood 
On the smooth verge of a steep precipice : 
Behind, a wood, enticing fair; 
Beneath, a gulf of great abysmal space. 
I could not to the wood. Alas ! 
I knew too well the horrors therein hid ; 
That yawning gulf I knew not yet 
And fain would fling myself into its depths, 



FRAGMENTS OF A DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS 345 

If there I might find peace, or death. 

O Peace ! O Death ! Are ye then so far off, 

Or sleeping now, or deaf or cruel 

That ye come not when I do call you so? 

O Power that ever urgest me on ! 

Why may I not forever clinging here 

Escape from worse? Why must I on 

To unknown woe and fiercer strife? 

Is there no end to sin or pain or time ? 

O dull and blinded mortal eyes, 

That seeing, see not clearly nor perceive ! 

O hard and crooked mortal hearts! 

That in your pride ye will not understand! 

O hope, of all, most undeserved ! 

E'en as I cried for help the help was near. 

Behold an isle most glorious, fair, 

And lovely, with a beauty far beyond 

Aught I had dreamed of or desired. 

And in the peace and glory of that Isle 

There walked all spirits beautified 

And clean, in whom no guile was found nor sin, 

Through Jesus Christ and his pure blood. 

And blindness ! blindness ! most incarnate blind 

To be so near and not to see. 

O ever looking down, how could I think 

To find a rest or peace or love 

To fill my soul. I'll hie me to that Isle 

And not stand here forever lone 

Because I lack the courage or the will. 

And there I woke; but still that Isle 

Shines clearly in my vision, up above, 

And when I look upon its light 

A great peace fills my soul, and a great love. 

So ever looking upward now 

I'll keep this goal in view ; until the time 

When I shall join those spirits that I saw." 

The symbolism I would explain as follows. The "smooth verge of 
a steep precipice" is the Path the path of life the straight and narrow 
way or literally the finding and following the intuitions of the Higher 
Self. The "wood enticing fair" is the ordinary life of the world with 
its hidden hypocricies, meannesses, and vulgarities. The "gulf of great 
abysmal space" is the vast unknown region of possible adventure and 
interest, outside one's own peculiar class or circumstances. The desire 
to "fling myself into its depths" is the perfectly human craving to escape 
from the friction and stress of one's own peculiar place and duty in the 
hope that elsewhere one may find peace, if only the peace of death. It is 



346 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

the state of mind which gives point to the warning in the Bhagavad Gita: 
"The duty of another is full of danger," the state of mind of him who 
has not yet learned that peace is subjective. The "Power that ever 
urgest me on" is the Power which, according to Emerson, drags us with 
sullen reluctance along the path of life. The "isle most glorious, fair, 
and lovely, with a beauty far beyond aught I had dreamed of or desired" 
is the higher spiritual consciousness of beings who through the persistent 
sacrifice of their lower personal to their higher spiritual natures, have 
become beautified and clean, guileless and sinless immortals. The blood 
of Jesus Christ means, of course, the sacrifice of the heart and its per- 
sonal emotions. "Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Master 
its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart." All this I have 
verified in my own inner experience, but not until I read Light on the 
Path did I understand. When I began to read I experienced the most 
vivid sensation of melting. It seemed as though interiorly I was disinte- 
grating at such a rate that in a few moments there would be nothing left. 
For a moment I felt anxious, then relieved, when, after the melting had 
ceased, I seemed still to be physically intact. This experience I have 
since connected with the phrase "not until the whole personality of the 
man is dissolved and melted not until the whole nature has yielded and 
become subject to its higher self, can the bloom open." * 

TWO other fragments, from a mass of vague or presumably spurious 
ones, may be of interest. When walking through the poorer districts 
of New York City in the interest of social service, I have sometimes felt 
a clear, illuminating sense of love and good-will take possession of me. 
This mood has been marked by the quality of universality and apartness 
described by A. M. F. Cole. 

I was once obliged to carry through a situation which required an 
almost impossible amount of self-control and tact, not knowing definitely 
what the issue was or what the outcome ought to be. Throughout I 
was conscious of a feeling of perfect freedom from responsibility, and 
a sense that I should be taken care of. I gave myself up to this, and 
played my role with an easy resourcefulness and poise of which normally 
I was utterly incapable. The same feeling of apartness from things 
which concerned me vitally, described by The Hibbert Journal contributor, 
and the sense of being an agent merely were strong. With the passing 
of the crisis the support ceased, and I felt for a time hardly up to the 
average of my normal self. 

Doubtless many similar experiences in the life of the man and woman 
of today, probably all inspiration in the ancient and popular sense that 
is, breathing from a higher self and telling more truth than we know* 
come under the head of fragments of a dual consciousness. If those 
who have such material would give it out with strict accuracy and without 
shame, psychologists might be able to gather a basis of fact sufficient for 
safe organization. M. S. CRAIGHEAD. 

* Light on the Path, p. 9. 

* Chesterton: George Bernard Shaw, p. 120. 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET 

DOCTRINE 



PART III 
REINCARNATION AND KARMA 

REINCARNATION and Karma have been rightly called "the 
twin doctrines of theosophy," because they are so inseparable, 
one logically involving the other, and it is almost impossible to 
speak of Karma without bringing in reincarnation, or of reincar- 
nation without mentioning Karma. Karma is Eternal Law and Absolute 
Justice, reincarnation makes the action of that law and justice possible. 
One of the universal problems of the world, the question that confronts 
all men when they begin to think, is first, how to reconcile Divine Justice 
and Mercy with the terrible sin and suffering in the world, and second, 
how to solve the problem of one man's life of comfort and luxury, side 
by side with his brother's existence of incessant toil and struggle. What 
can explain the misery of the thousands of little children that perish 
every year in the dark and noisome tenements of our great cities, while 
the parents that brought them into the world are living like dogs with 
no hope of a better future? Can we wonder at the murders and suicides 
that we hear of every day, when we realise that they take place among 
people who have no idea of Divine Justice and no trust in Divine Love? 

And besides the accidents of birth and station, how many men of 
more than average goodness are struggling painfully through life 
weighed down by a burden of inherited tendencies that gradually sap 
the strength and paralyse the energy of the character, and little by little 
drag the balance down to the side of evil. Should the man be held 
responsible for the outcome of such tendencies when perhaps he has not 
been given the strength to struggle against his insidious foes? 

It is a wise old French proverb that says : "to know all is to pardon 
all." But only Divine Omniscience knows for how much of a man's 
Karma that man is directly responsible, and how much belongs to that 
of his race, his nation, and the people among whom his lot is cast, in all 
of which he is necessarily involved. Therefore no man should speak 
of another's trials as his punishment, or say of them, "that is his Karma," 
for the parti-colored threads of life are impossible to disentangle, and 
what seems to us righteous retribution, may be the last trial of a saint, 
or the first step upward of the future prophet. 

Nor is it right to say, as some theosophists do, "the good Karma 
will take care of me," for Karma is not "good," any more than it is evil, 
nor does it "take care" of any one, being absolute and unerring Law. 



347 



348 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

"The Blessed Ones have naught to do with the purgations of matter." 
They are concerned with higher things. 

Another frequent mistake is to speak of "interfering with Karma," 
as if one finger of little man could stop the cogwheels of the Universe. 
It is supposed by many that to help a person in distress is to interfere 
with his Karma, because his distress is a part of it, and therefore should 
not be relieved. But is it not just as truly your Karma which has made 
you able to help him? One might say with Emerson's Rhodora, "the 
self-same Power that brought me there brought you." 

Another element in the seeming injustice of fate (and here we take 
up the thread of reincarnation again) is the shortness of life's span. 
Even seventy years is not enough under the most favorable circum- 
stances, to create a character, to weed out its evil tendencies, and 
strengthen its good ones, to develop its powers, and give a chance for 
the achievements of the poet, the painter, the musician. How few men 
have lived to see the fulfilment of their dreams of beauty or usefulness! 
Of how many glorious youths that died in the heyday of their promise 
it might be said " 'Tis not a life, 'tis but a piece of childhood thrown 
away." 

But to the believer in reincarnation all these problems are solved 
by "the twin doctrines," and instead of a capricious Deity, lifting one 
man to heaven, and thrusting another into hell at his own pleasure, 
Eternal Justice metes out to every man the harvest of his own sowing in 
balances that can never weigh wrong, and he is given all eternity in which 
to develop the soul, and lead the inner man to perfection. Every good 
deed, every kind word or thought is stored up for him, and will help to 
make his next life better and nobler than this one. Not one life, but 
thousands of lives, if necessary, are his in which to learn the lessons of 
the higher life, and the today and tomorrow of every man depend upon 
his yesterdays, and the use he has made of them. What he has sown 
he shall most surely reap, and in the measure he meted it to others. 

But it is not enough to make assertions, we should be able to give 
a reason for the faith that is in us. In the first place, what is the 
meaning of "reincarnation" which is sometimes confused with "metem- 
psychosis," a very different thing? The word reincarnation suggests 
at once the soul as a dweller in the flesh, and if once imprisoned in a 
fleshly tabernacle, why not many times ? The word metempsychosis lays 
more stress upon the dweller, and was once applied to animals as well 
as to human beings. The latter, according to this doctrine, were doomed 
to reincarnation in an animal form as punishment for their sins, the 
dominant sin of the man finding its fitting habitation in the brute whose 
nature most nearly represented that sin. And the evil traits of men, 
their cruelty, their greed, their vices of every kind, went after their 
death, it was believed, to increase the sum of cruelty and greed in the 
universe, to make the tiger more cruel, the lion more fierce, the shark 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 349 

more rapacious. Pythagoras, according to Shakespeare, thought the 
soul of a man's' grandmother might inhabit a bird, but Malvolio "thought 
nobly of the soul, and in no way approved that opinion." Nor was it 
long before the doctrine of reincarnation superseded that of metem- 
psychosis, and men began to think so nobly of the soul that they could 
not believe it could go backwards into animal bodies. 

The objections to reincarnation have been founded for the most 
part on a misconception of the real meaning of its teaching. In the first 
place it must be understood what it is that reincarnates. Man has 
already been described as a complex entity, of a sevenfold constitution, 
endowed with a physical body, an astral body, a portion of the all- 
pervading Life, and that partially developed mind many of whose 
characteristics he shares with the higher animals. These four prin- 
ciples form what is generally known as the Quaternary, while the higher 
Mind and Atma-Buddhi, or the Spirit-Soul, made one with the Mind 
(or Intellectual Soul) form the human Trinity, sometimes called the 
Triad. Beginning with the lowest principle, the physical body, every 
one knows that it must decay at death and that the astral form decays 
step by step with it as soon as the life-principle departs, and that "the 
body of desire" (or the Kama-rupa) the sum of man's passional nature, 
the emotional Soul, has but a short and precarious existence, after death, 
the length of its survival in the astral world depending, as already said, 
upon the more or less spiritual tendencies of the Ego. His Kama-rupa 
will dwell for a time on the astral plane clothed in a body made up of 
astral matter. If a man be of average goodness during his life-time, 
all that is pure and unsoiled in his nature will return after his death to 
its source in the Universal Mind, and the astral matter that is to be the 
mould of his next body will be gradually purified and made ready for a 
better master than the last. 

All men pass from the portals of death into a state analogous to 
the dream-state, in which the soul, wearied by the cares and trials of life, 
rests from its labors, and carries out its highest ideals into a fulfilment, 
which if purely subjective, is none the less real to that soul.* While a 
man dreams, the outer world is lost to him, it ceases to exist, and the 
scenes and characters of his dream are realities to the sleeping Ego, who 
has lost all cognisance of waking existence. 

Life as a whole runs in a cycle exactly corresponding to its smaller 
divisions. A man wakes from the quiet sleep of night to the activities 
of a new day. He fills his day with toil or pleasure or study, and 
returns again to the sleep of night and the rest that will enable him to 
go back to work when the next day begins, with renewed physical 



* To understand this description of the state of the soul between incarnations it must be 
remembered that in Eastern philosophy the outer world of manifestation is regarded as "the 
great delusion," the rainbow-nued projection of the white light of the Oversoul in which all 
souls share. Thus as "the Kingdom of God is within," the soul enters a deeper reality as its 
consciousness is indrawn. EDITOR. 



350 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

strength and quickened mental powers. During that period of sleep 
which we call unconsciousness, he may have received much spiritual help, 
that assisted the growth of the inner man, and aided him to develop his 
latent powers, but which he seldom recognises for what it is. So in the 
longer cycles, he has his periods of activity, his longer or shorter times 
of absolute rest, and then a new life with higher powers. The rest that 
comes between two active periods, or reincarnations, is called Devachan, 
or "the Kingdom of the Gods," and is, like our dream-life, wholly sub- 
jective. During this time, the Ego carries out all the long-cherished 
ideals of its last life, and for the time being, becomes the ideal reflection 
of the man it was when last on earth. As it is a subjective condition, 
there can be no consciousness of death in Devachan, and "nothing will 
be wanting to make the disembodied state one of perfect happiness... 
The Ego in Devachan lives its intermediate cycle between two incarna- 
tions, surrounded by everything it had aspired to in vain, and in the 
companionship of every one it had loved on earth . . . Spiritual, holy love 
is immortal, and love beyond the grave has a magic and divine potency 
which reacts on the living, . . . for love is a strong shield, and is not 
limited by space or time." (Key to Theosophy, p. 150.) 

Devachan, then, is the heaven that we make for ourselves, the 
reward of the aspiring soul, but what of r its punishment ? And here we 
have- again the action of Karma, which is Absolute Justice. It is neither 
logical nor just, according to theosophy, to punish in the spirit the sins 
committed in the body, and for which the body is largely responsible. 
Therefore all sins that mar man's record in this life are to be punished 
in the physical body of other incarnations, just as he is suffering now 
from the retribution due him not only from his last life-cycle, but from 
all his previous lives on earth, however numerous they may have been. 
During the active periods of existence, the Ego builds the temple of 
his soul, eternal in the heavens, and fills it with treasures that moth and 
rust cannot corrupt. Then comes the peaceful rest in which he grows 
spiritually, and gradually prepares for a better life than the last. Mean- 
while the "stern daughter of the voice of God," inexorable Karma, has 
been making up his balance-sheet, and his new life will be conditioned 
by the past, and will be hampered as that has been, by all the sins and 
errors which have stained the fair pages of his record. 

The Ego then receives after death only the reward of the unmerited 
sufferings endured during its past incarnations. "The whole punish- 
ment after death, even for the materialist, consists therefore in the 
absence of any reward, and the utter loss of the consciousness of one's 
bliss and rest . . . Karmic punishment reaches the Ego only in its next 
incarnation." H. P. B. herself told the writer that in the case of an 
atheist who had led a moral life and had devoted himself to working 
for humanity, the time between incarnations would be short, perhaps 
only a few months, because he had ignored the spiritual side of his 



A SUMMARY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE 351 

nature, and laid up for himself none of those treasures in heaven which 
should have been his portion after death. This rapid resumption of life 
on earth would be the natural result of another Karmic law which 
icgulates the time of reincarnation in normal cases. If the Ego, during 
its life on earth and its rest in Devachan has been storing up spiritual 
knowledge and experiences to which it is continually adding, it is not 
until all this spiritual provision has been exhausted that it is forced to 
yield to the thirst for earth-life, and to return to the physical plane. 

One of the most frequent objections to the doctrine of reincarnation 
is the fact that we have no recollection of our past lives. But why 
should we? The organ of memory is the brain, and as long as the Ego 
resides in the physical body, all its records are imprinted on the brain. 
When the body dies, the memory also perishes, and with a new body 
we get a new brain, with all its tablets blank. Memory as a function of 
the physical brain is incapable of carrying its treasures over to another 
life, but as Swedenborg rightly said, there are two memories, the mental 
and the spiritual, and the spiritual memory is a function, not of the 
brain, but of the higher consciousness. As the Ego grows more and 
more spiritual, as that part of his nature becomes more and more 
developed, he learns to think of his present life as the ordinary man 
thinks of an old coat, which has nothing to do with the man himself, 
and is presently to be thrown away like all worn-out garments. Some 
flash of recollection may come across the brain-memory occasionally, 
born of some dear association with the long forgotten past, but for real 
memories of past incarnations we must wait until the memory of the 
soul is ours. As a rule, people who remember, or think they remember, 
their past incarnations, always remember themselves as the central figure 
in the picture. Marie Antoinette and Mary, Queen of Scots, for instance, 
are very favorite subjects for incarnation (I have met several of them 
myself), but I never met any one who claimed to have incarnated in the 
beggar at the door of either of these great ladies, or the scullion in their 
kitchen. And yet the beggar or the scullion might have attained a height 
of spiritual growth that neither queen had reached. 

"The spiritual Ego of man moves in Eternity like a pendulum 
between the hours of birth and death," says the Key. "At the solemn 
moment of death, every man, even when death is sudden, sees the whole 
of his past life marshalled before him in its minutest details. For one 
short instant the personal becomes one with the individual and all- 
knowing Ego. But this instant is enough to show him the whole chain 
of causes which have been at work during his life. ..and he feels and 
knows the justice of all the suffering that has overtaken him. . .As the 
man at the moment of death has a retrospective insight into the life he 
has led, so at the moment he is re-born on earth the Ego, awaking from 
the state of Devachan, has a prospective vision of the life which awaits 
him, and realises all the causes which have led to it. He realises them 



352 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

and sees futurity, because it is between Devachan and re-birth that the 
Ego regains his full manasic consciousness." 

Nothing has been said so far of the possible loss of the soul, a 
terrible, but a very infrequent, consequence of conscious persistence in 
evil, the deliberate choosing of the worse instead of the better, for its 
own sake. The trend of the universe is towards perfection, and so 
long as a spark of good survives in the soul there is hope of its final 
redemption. Annihilation, moreover, is never instantaneous, and may 
require centuries for its accomplishment. With every incarnation the 
entity who has chosen the path of evil "sinks lower and lower until the 
evil force gradually wears itself out, and such a personality perishes, 
separated from the source of life. It finally disintegrates, to be worked 
up into other forms of living things, but as a separate existence it is lost." 



This brief introduction to the study of theosophy can only indicate 
its most important teachings, and leaves the student to supply the missing 
links, which are very numerous. Theosophy has been described as a 
science, a philosophy and a religion, but here its scientific side has hardly 
been mentioned, although it is so often found anticipating the most 
niodern discoveries in physics, astronomy, etc. 

Next to the teaching of the Divine Unity, which involves that of 
Universal Brotherhood, the law of Karma is certainly the most impor- 
tant, as laying such stress upon individual responsibility, and the unerring 
action of Law. "Man's fate is what he himself makes it," says the Key 
to Theosophy, pp. 236-7. "Once grasp the idea that universal causa- 
tion is not merely present, but past, present, and future, and every action 
on our plane falls naturally and easily into its true place, and is seen in 
its true relation to ourselves and others." 

And if the student desires a summary of its religious teaching, let 
him take this passage from Isis: "There being but One Truth, man 
requires but one church, the Temple of God within us; walled in by 
matter, but penetrable by any who can find the way; the pure in heart 
see God" (Isis, II. 635.) 

KATHARINE HILLARD. 



WHY I BECAME A THEOSOPHIST. 



I FIRST heard of Theosophy in a newspaper notice of a Society 
formed by a Russian Countess, Henry S. Olcott, and W. Q. 
Judge. The newspaper man either misunderstood or misrepre- 
sented, though at that time I had no means of knowing the 
facts. Some years later a friend bought a copy of Isis Unveiled. We 
sketched over the first volume and in our wisdom pronounced it a 
mass of mystical trash, and let it go at that. 

I cannot recall a time when I was not dominated by an insatiable 
desire and curiosity to "know." With a mystical tendency I combined 
a logical demand for proof. The being aware of this tendency led me to a 
severity of examination of evidence that ran to the extreme. I accepted 
nothing on authority, I felt that if anything was unproven, it was 
untrue. A "revelation" without supporting evidence, to me was only a 
fairy tale. As a boy, the reading of the Bible led me to question it, 
instead of accepting it. A "miracle" in its sense of a suspension or vio- 
lation of a natural law, was a direct falsehood. I came later to under- 
stand that it was an intelligent application of natural forces by a master 
mind, acting in harmony with instead of in violation of law, miraculous 
only because not understood by the many. 

I suppose a relation of my various wanderings in search of knowl- 
edge of whence man came, why he is here, whither he is bound, would 
only open an experience paralleling that of thousands of others, who 
have trodden the path, stumbling in the dim light, led astray by Jack-o'- 
lanterns, pricked by the brambles, mired in the bogs, overtaken by 
darkness, discouraged by doubts, and longing for light. 

The logical element led me dangerously near Materialism, the 
mystical tendency held me to a belief in future existence, and immor- 
tality. Yet while never doubting immortality I sought logical proof 
for it, a proof that would satisfy reason. I became a regular attendant 
at church, but Revelation and Faith confronted me, and I was able 
to find but little evidence of the Sabbath teaching in the week day 
observance, so I drifted away. Ingersoll dazzled me, but Agnosticism 
seemed but a road ending in a quagmire. Then Spiritualism and its 
claims were looked into, examined and dropped. Then followed a long 
period of drifting, and a desultory study of Morals and Ethics, and 
later another trial of Spiritualism and membership in a Spiritist Society, 
believing I could study it better from an inside view. 

Spiritualism did for me what other cults had not. It suggested 
proof of something beyond this life, something discarnate, if not excar- 
nate. If its claims were true, it robbed the grave of its terrors and 
gave comfort to many a mourner. I was disgusted however by finding 

23 353 



354 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

that most of its votaries were "test hunters," seekers after fortune 
telling at cheap rates. Many of its professors were frauds and trick- 
sters, but a select few were believers in the philosophy, earnest, honest, 
faithful. Study and examination of the claims put forth satisfied me of 
the existence of forces and powers, outside of man, with which it was 
possible under certain conditions and circumstances to communicate; 
but what they were, I could not decide. Some might be "spirits" 
of those who had existed on this earth in human form, others cer- 
tainly were not. Assertion was strong, but proof was too weak to 
carry any conviction. 

I had read Bulwer's Strange Story and his Zanoni. I read them 
again and discovered more in them than before. Some of the theories 
advanced seemed plausible and worthy of examination. I had heard 
of Madame Blavatsky and of the Theosophical Society, through the 
newspapers, but without interest. Somehow, somewhere, I had learned 
that Reincarnation was a Theosophical belief, and it had struck me 
as a reasonable one. 

A couple of friends who left the Spiritist Society when I did, 
attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society in the city of which 
our town was a suburb. They suggested that I attend the next meet- 
ing with them. I questioned them as to what they thought of the 
teachings. They answered that they did not see much in it to attract, 
but it was interesting, and the members seemed pleasant, intelligent 
people. A few weeks later, I visited the Society with them, arriving 
about the opening of the evening's session. I found thirty to forty 
persons present. The President or Chairman began by stating the 
objects of the Society "To form the nucleus of a Universal Brother- 
hood . . . the study of ancient and modern religions, philoso- 
phies, and sciences . . . the investigation of the unexplained laws 
of nature, and the psychical powers latent in man." This statement 
was followed by the motto, "There is no higher religion than Truth." 

All these things appealed strongly to me, this was what I had 
been looking for, had sought but not found. I was still more surprised 
and attracted, when the Chairman stated that the Society had no creed 
and that any one was eligible to membership who was in accord with 
the objects of the Society, and who would concede to others the same 
tolerance he claimed for himself. 

In the Branch whose meeting I attended it is the custom for a 
member to prepare and read a paper on some subject, along the lines 
set forth as the objects of the Society, after which there was discus- 
sion open to all present, whether members or not. The subject of the 
paper for the evening was Reincarnation, and I listened with attention 
and interest. After the matter had been discussed for a while, I asked 
some questions. They were answered pleasantly, kindly and clearly. 
I learned much about Reincarnation that evening. 



WHY I BECAME A THEOSOPHIST 355 

The seeming inequalities of life were explained away. The suf- 
ferings of the deserving, the exaltation of the vile, the triumphs of 
wrong, the disasters of right could be accounted for, if there were 
more lives than one, and each life but a day of eternity. If in the plan 
of life Right and Justice were to triumph, Reincarnation was a neces- 
sity. The doctrine had seemed reasonable; later I came to know that 
it was necessary and inevitable. When the meeting adjourned, I was 
introduced by my friends to some of the members, and 1 asked one 
of the officers why no collection had been taken up. He replied, "Our 
rule here is that it shall cost nothing to listen to Theosophical teach- 
ings. The members pay all expenses." I asked if they would accept 
me a non-believer as a member, as I did not wish to accept benefits 
without a return. I was accepted as a member and became a regular 
attendant. 

I carried home a book from the Branch library and read it. It 
defined a number of Theosophical beliefs which might or might not 
be true, I was unable to judge. I did not accept, but would not reject, 
until I knew more of the matter. The papers read at each of the 
meetings and the discussions following always interested me, though 
there was much in them that I could not follow or understand, yet 
from each and all I learned something, a little here, a little there. I 
bought a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, which Edwin Arnold called the 
"Song Celestial," and was delighted with it. It was instructive, inspir- 
ing. The masterly presentation of the ideas charmed me, the poetic 
imagery delighted me, the ideas themselves had a sublimity that deeply 
impressed me. I read Isis Unveiled a second time. It did not seem the 
mystical trash that I had thought it before ; I could see in it a vast amount 
of labor, a great fund of information, a familiarity with Religions, Philoso- 
phies and Sciences, such as is rarely possessed by any one person. 

It was evident that the writer must have been diligent in research, 
fortunate in opportunities, with a rare capacity for understanding and 
teaching (so far as permitted) that which she had learned. As to 
the correctness of its deductions I was too ignorant to decide. Some 
seemed reasonable, more possible, and many absurd; I could only 
withhold my judgment until better able to decide. I read Cave's Frag- 
ments and this work was a delight to me, for I found no difficulty in 
understanding and accepting it; nothing in it seemed strange, but all 
was as natural as it was beautiful and inspiring. It presented truth 
with clearness, brilliancy and beauty ; not seeming to show a new thing, 
but showing familiar things in a new light, whose rays showed one's 
handful of pebbles to be sparkling gems. I followed this with the 
Voice of the Silence. It interested me greatly and taught me much. 
It seemed to awaken thought, to suggest rather than inform, to inspire 
rather than to teach, to urge rather than to satisfy. It offered no gifts, 
but showed rewards for those who earned them. My next book was 



356 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 

Light on the Path. Strange how natural it seemed, how like a descrip- 
tion by one who had journeyed over the route, making it plain for 
those who chose to follow, telling all that was necessary and no more; 
a worthy companion to the Voice of the Silence. One fact impressed 
me very strongly in reading these two books, and in listening to the 
various papers read so many ideas seemed a re-awakening of old 
memories rather than an acquisition of information. It puzzled me 
much, but it seems to be fully explained by Reincarnation. 

When the subject of Karma was first presented to me, it jarred 
on me. It seemed like Fate, Predestination. If man was an automaton, 
the sport of a Creator who for his own ends created some to be saved 
and others to be eternally tortured, all faith in Deity seemed absurd, 
and the best rule of life would be, "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, 
for to-morrow we die." But when further study showed Karma to be 
the eternal Cause and Effect, I recognized that every day we weave 
the strands of the rope by which Karma binds, that we plant the seeds 
which bring forth the fruits of which we must eat, that we set in 
motion the forces which bless or curse our future, that we are in all 
things the arbiters of our own destiny, that what we are in this exist- 
ence was largely decided by ourselves in former lives and that we are 
deciding every day what we shall be in our future lives, that whatever 
conies to us, of joy or sorrow, of pleasure or pain is what we have 
earned for ourselves, that Karma is eternal justice, that it is a twin 
with Reincarnation, and that both are necessary and inevitable if right 
and justice are the end of all things, if this is a Universe of Law, and 
not of blind Chance. So I found that I believed in Reincarnation, that 
I believed in Karma, that one was necessary to the other. Theosophy 
seemed to me to have answered all my questions, to have solved all 
my doubts, to have reconciled the mystical and logical sides of my 
nature, to have proved immortality, to have demonstrated that man's 
own saviour is himself, and himself alone, that our Heaven and Hell 
is of our own creation, that it is with us everywhere, and at all times. 
It was evident to me that there is something in man that is from God 
and aspires at all times to return whence it came, helped by its experi- 
ences, its sufferings, its errors and repentances, its hopes, fears, all its 
various experiences in its various lives and existence; and that 
returning, in its Nirvanic existence forming part of the infinite, it yet 
preserved its individuality as a grain of sand preserves its individuality 
in the desert of which it is a part. 

And now when I come to answer the question of Why I became a 
Theosophist, I find I have already answered it in telling how I became 
a Theosophist. So far as belief is concerned I am a Theosophist. So far 
as practice is concerned I hope to be, no matter how often I may falter 
and fall. It has taught me to desire to live the life however weak my 
efforts may be. WM. H. LYONS. 



APOLLONIUS OF TYANA' 



PART III 

PERHAPS that part of our philosopher's life about which least is 
known is his sojourn in Egypt. This is the more astonishing when 
we consider that he must have remained in that wonderful land 
for nearly twenty years. Philostratus, it is true, has pages and 
pages of flowery rhetoric purporting to deal with this time, but a trifling 
inspection of them shows that it is little more than an attempt to fill in 
the gaps of historic fact with legendary rigmarole. The biographer of the 
sage would have us believe that the event of chief importance during his 
travels in Egy