The Theosophical quarterly

JULY, 1917

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.

THEOSOPHY AND WAR

HOW many of those who read the title, "Theosophy and War,"
have a feeling of wonder that members of The Theosophical
Society can countenance war; since our First Object contains
the words, "a universal brotherhood of humanity, without dis-
tinction of race ? " Is there not a flagrant contradiction in the fact that
The Theosophical Society in Convention has just passed resolutions
enthusiastically endorsing the entry of the United States into the war
against Germany? Yet as much as two years ago, an earlier Conven-
tion passed resolutions urging that very action, and urging it precisely
in the name of our First Object, precisely in the name of universal
brotherhood; and we, members of The Theosophical Society feel tri-
umphant at the decision of the United States; we feel enthusiastic
gratitude for the splendid majorities by which both the Senate and
the House of Representatives have voted for that action and have pro-
claimed the obligation of universal military service, in this righteous war.

Is there not, seemingly, a flat contradiction in this? For many
people, perhaps, there is. And our present purpose is, to make clear
that there is no contradiction; that we are bound, by the spiritual prin-
ciples which we support and which bind us together, to take just this
action; that, in a profoundly real sense, this is pre-eminently our war.

A closer reading of the First Object of The Theosophical Society
will suggest, what is the deeper truth: that we do not hold that the
universal brotherhood of humanity is already existent, manifest in the
present life of the nations. It does exist eternally in the heavens; but
it is up to the present made manifest only in the spiritual world; only
in the Lodge of Masters, in whom so many of us believe. We believe
in a spiritual brotherhood, a brotherhood of our immortal souls, not
a material conglomerate; our First Object is, "to form the nucleus of a
universal brotherhood of humanity," to be realized in the far distant
future ; not to proclaim a brotherhood already existing.

2 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

On what spiritual principle must that future brotherhood be
founded? On the principle of spiritual liberty, the liberty of each soul,
of each group of souls, of each nation, to unfold and develop in freedom,
according to its own inherent divine character, its own inner divine
nature, the revelation of which has been entrusted to it by the Supreme
Eternal. In this sense, the spiritual character of each man, each group,
each race and nation is sacred ; the unfoldment of that inner, spiritual
nature according to its own law and individuality, is a most sacred
obligation. We are, therefore, opposed to the levelling internationalism
which would obliterate distinctions of race, as we are opposed to move-
ments which seek to obliterate the spiritual difference of sex, and for
identical reasons. Unless there be difference, there can be no harmony,
no melody even ; nothing beyond the monotonous strumming of the
tom-tom. Harmony and melody are possible, just because the seven
notes of the scale, and the scales themselves, have each one its pro-
foundly distinctive character, wholly unlike any other. And we look
for the fine music of that larger harmony which God will play on
"*,<axilhe seven strings of the races of men. The differences of these races
spring from, and make manifest, in the belief of many of us, the deep,
eternal differences between the seven Rays of the Logos, the ever-
lasting Word of God.

Therefore, in our profound conviction, there is no elect and chosen
race to which the All-Highest has given to dominate other races, to
deny and obliterate their national spirit, to force them into a hard
monotony. In this sense, there can be no "chosen people" ; though there
may be races elect through heroism and the power of sacrifice. There-
fore this war against Germany and Germany's coadjutors is pre-
eminently a Theosophical war ; because Germany and the German spirit
are based upon a dogma which cuts at the root of our faith; because
Germany seeks with brutal violence to break the strings of the divine
instrument, to make the eternal harmonies forever impossible, to replace
them by the harsh monotone of the savage's tom-tom.

It is well worth while, at this point, to demonstrate this German
do^ma ; to show that the brutalization of other races is not merely the
boast of her bragging generals, but the cardinal principle of her national
creed, the first principle of her spiritual life, if one may apply that
word to a principle which directly violates the deepest spiritual law.
The seeds of the German evil were sown precisely by those men who
are exalted as the supreme revealers of the German spirit: by Kant,
by Fichte, by Hegel, who prepared the way for Nietzsche, for Treitschke,
for Bernhardi.

As concerns Kant, a Frenchman who has studied him profoundly,
in the clear and critical spirit of France, has recently written : "As for
the Critique of Pure Reason, the fundamental and irremediate dis-
tinction between the T and the 'not-F ends by discrowning science of

NOTES AND COMMENTS 3

its character of certainty, and by dethroning reason. Our supposed
incapacity to conceive the essence of things and beings imposes upon us
the state of doubt, of phantasy, of permanent arbitrariness, benumbs us
as regards the external world, and loses itself, now in a gloomy and
sulky scepticism, now in a haughty refusal to come to a conclusion.
It is the school of mental paralysis, of dreams that lose themselves in
the void, of chimeras regarded as divine. Everyone has his cloud-
zone, his refusal to come to an understanding on certain fundamental
principles which are neither restrictive nor prohibitive, his refusal to
be bound (religio). . . . All the systems founded on the sensible
to the detriment of reason owe their origin to Emmanuel Kant. He is
the father of that squinting view, of what I shall call that mental double-
vision, which decomposes the aspect of life, of the real, into two elements
thenceforth incapable of coming together again: the conceiver and the
conceived, the perceiver and the perceived. . . . We know whither leads,
and has always led and will lead, this road : to individualism. . . . This
is strikingly conspicuous in the very text of the fundamental law of
Practical Reason : 'Act in such a way that the maxim of the will may at
the same time have validity as a principle of universal legislation.' . . .
In the wake of these words come Fichte, Stein and Bismarck, the mili-
tant nationalism which springs from the Kantian criticism by the exten-
sion of the sacred and inviolate 'ego' to the German nation."

The extension of the sacred and inviolable "ego" to the German
nation was elaborated by Fichte and Hegel. Fitchte, in his Addresses to
the German Nation, delivered in Berlin in the winter of 1807-1808, car-
ried Kantian individualism forward to the bellicose conception of the
necessary predominance of the German state. One of the old tribal
Teutonic names was "Alleman"; Fichte bases on this name the dogma
that the German is "All-man," essential humanity. His famous Addresses
preach that the Germans must dominate humanity, because their All-
manism gives them "the power to reach everything and to absorb every-
thing in their nationality." He affirms that Germany is "the chosen
people." Germany is not a people ; Germany is The People. In speaking
of Germany, one should say: The People, as one says, The Bible.
Germany is The Race, not one race among others but the typical race.
Germany is Humanity, because Germany alone retains the primitive
model of man, which has been defaced in other lands.

Germany is Humanity. . . . Here, then, according to Nietzsche,
another prophet of theirs, is the portrait of that Divine Man : "those
very men are to the outside world, to things foreign and to foreign
countries, little better than so many uncaged beasts of prey . . . they
revert to the beast's innocence of conscience, and become rejoicing
monsters, who, perhaps, go on their way, after a hideous sequence of
murder, arson, violation, torture, with as much gaiety and equanimity
as if they had merely taken part in some student gambols. . . .

4 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Deep in the nature of all these noble races there lurks unmistakably the
beast of prey, the blond beast, lustfully roving in search of booty
and victory. From time to time the beast demands an outlet, an escape,
a return to the wilderness . . . Germany is Humanity. . . ."

Hegel set the keystone on the arch of militant Pan-Germanism.
"\Ye Germans have received from Nature," he said, in his lectures
before the Berlin University in 1816, "the supreme mission to be the
guardians of the sacred fire, as to the Eumolpides of Athens was con-
fided the preservation of the Eleusinian mysteries, and to the inhabitants
of Samothrace that of a purer cult, as in times past the Universal Spirit
gave to the people of Israel that from the breast of that people the
spirit should come forth renewed." Hegel proclaimed that the State
— meaning, of course, the German State — was absolute power, and should
be venerated as incarnate God. Whence it results, according to him,
that there are no moral relations between States. From this, it further
results that each State, in determining its conduct, can consult only
its own interests and its own power. Victory is, for the people that
wins it, the irrefutable proof of its right to conquer. History, which
records the struggles, the defeats and victories of peoples, is the judg-
ment of God Himself. This Hegelian gospel is thus rephrased by the
German philosopher of history, Treitschke: "God no longer speaks to
princes by prophets and by dreams ; but there is a divine vocation where-
ever an occasion is presented to attack a neighbor and to extend one's
own frontiers." The Pan-German prophet, Bronsart von Schellendorf
makes this quite concrete: "We proclaim from henceforth that our
nation has a right not only to the North Sea but to the Mediterranean
and the Atlantic as well. So we shall annex successively Denmark,
Holland, Belgium, the Franche-Comte, northern Switzerland and Livonia ;
then Trieste and Venice, and finally the north of France, from the
Somme to the Loire. . . . We must not lose sight of the task of
civilization laid upon us by the will of Heaven." Finally, Maximilian
Harden: "Germany strikes! When she has subdued new realms for
our genius, the priests of every faith will bless the God of War."

So the gospel of the German War Office, which showed its faith
by its works — in Belgium — is likewise the gospel of the German philos-
ophers, of the German universities. It is equally the teaching of the
German church, as is demonstrated by a book of sermons recently
translated, with the title, "Hurrah and Hallelujah !", which, among other
startling blasphemies, teaches that "Humanity is to be redeemed by the
Passion of Germany."

This, perhaps, makes sufficiently clear that the German gospel is
a negation of fundamental spiritual law, and will, if logically put in
force, lead to the spiritual annihilation of Humanity. So it becomes
equally clear that to this gospel every follower of Theosophy must

NOTES AND COMMENTS 5

stand unalterably opposed. Light and darkness are not more opposed
than is Theosophy to this German dogma.

But, it may be said, should not Theosophists limit themselves to a
moral and spiritual opposition ? Is there not something radically untheo-
sophical in this ardent support of war, even for a righteous end? That
plea is, it seems to us, equally bad in religion and in science. Taking the
religious standpoint, are we not taught that God, putting all good things
within our reach, nevertheless demands that we shall toil and sacrifice
to get them; and what is war but the organization of sacrifice and toil?
What, after all, is the ultimate weapon of offence, but the human will,
inspired by valour, of which all other weapons are but the expressions
and contrivances? What is the final power of defence, but the cour-
ageous willingness to endure pain and death? A battle, with its guns
and steel, simply represents the opposing pressure of two wills; and,
hitherto, no other way has been found, in which these two wills can
fight their contest. The battles, therefore, fought in France are the
direct conflict of the will for righteousness against the will of evil.

Biological science teaches exactly the same lesson. We are deeply
indebted to the great and reverent spirit of Darwin for demonstrating
conclusively and with fullest detail, that terrestrial activity is a never
ceasing "struggle for life," an unrelenting life-and-death warfare, in
which the conflicting organisms must at every instant hold their own by
fighting, on pain of instant and irremediable death. This warfare goes
on, every second, within our own bodies, between the creative and the
destructive forces ; our medical science has quite clearly shown that
maladies, epidemics, plagues are literally battles between the powers of
life and the hosts of death. This scientific age of ours which, in its
curious blindness, knows more of jellyfish than it knows of angels,
which recognizes malefic bacteria but does not yet recognize devils —
though certain departments of psychology may be drawing nearer to
that recognition — nevertheless sees clearly this fundamental truth: life
is war; its warp and woof are woven of everlasting conflict.

God has prepared for us infinite gifts, but on condition that we
fight for them and win them; through conflict, every step of progress
in material life has been won; through ceaseless life-and-death conflict.
With spiritual life, it is exactly the same. If we want spiritual gifts,
we shall have to fight for them. If we wish to establish the nucleus of
universal brotherhood, we must fight for it, not merely in some theo-
retical field of argument, but on the battlefield. If a nation has incar-
nated in itself the active powers of evil, forces which would annihilate
the spiritual life of universal brotherhood, and seeks by force of arms
to maim and slaughter those who defend that spiritual life, then we must
fight our battle on that ground, precisely at the point where the conflict
is being waged.

For yet another reason, we who are followers of Theosophy and

6 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

members of The Theosophical Society are of necessity at war with
Germany: the motto of The Theosophical Society is, "There is no
religion higher than Truth;" and against truth, as against the faith
of the plighted word, Germany wages ceaseless warfare. One man
in Germany, Liebknecht, has had the courage to speak the truth; he is
now in prison for it. He boldly said: "This war was begun by a lie;
it is being carried on by lies." Maximilian Harden who, in other things
accepts the German gospel, nevertheless has the candor to exclaim:
"Let us abandon our contemptible efforts to justify Germany's conduct:
have done with this lying attempt to deceive the enemy. We did not
plunge into this formidable adventure against our will, as a nation set
upon. We wanted this war, and we were right in wanting it. . . ."
But even he says nothing of the lying attempt to deceive the German
people, an effort which is still conscientiously carried on. An effort to
deceive the German people; nay, an effort to deceive God Himself.
At a solemn Mass, for peace, recently celebrated in Saint Stephen's
Cathedral in Vienna, the Cardinal officiating, in the presence of the
newly crowned Emperor and Empress, entered the presence of God with
this same lie upon his lips, a lie twice reiterated in the course of one
brief prayer. What more profound unfaith, what deeper insult could
be conceived, to the Truth that we revere?

A pathetic, horrible belief in the power of lying; this, and meth-
odical violation of the plighted word of honour, systematic, self-justi-
fied breach of treaties, which has given the world that striking phrase,
"a scrap of paper." Who, in the last analysis, is the supreme arbiter
and guarantor of covenants? Who, but God Himself? Is not the bond
between God and man called the first covenant? What phrase did
Saint Paul find, best to express the new relation between God and man,
established by Christ's death? He called it "the new covenant," and the
record of it is called, universally, the New Testament. Such supreme
authority is there for the sanctity of plighted faith, the faith which Ger-
many systematically and methodically breaks, whether it be the guar-
antee of Belgian neutrality or the humane rules of The Hague Con-
ventions, to which Germany is a signatory.

That nation, therefore, seeks to establish a system of world domina-
tion on lying, on treachery, on the breach of the plighted word, and
equally on systematic defamation. Are we not bound, then, as fol-
lowers of Theosophy, as members of The Theosophical Society, whose
motto is : "There is no religion higher than Truth," to fight against
that system to the death, and to fight at every point where the conflict
is waged ?

But there is, in the minds of many people, a rooted misgiving:
the thought that religion necessarily forbids war; that Christ himself
has taught that war is necessarily sinful. The Theosophical Society

NOTES AND COMMENTS 7

has, as an additional object, the comparative study of religions. It is,
therefore, a fitting part of our task to examine this objection.

It appears to be true that Buddhism absolutely forbids war, and
interdicts the taking of any life whatsoever, under any circumstances.
But that extreme form of Buddhism equally sets itself against every form
of worldly life, and would turn all men into monks and nuns. Let
the pacifists, therefore, who take their stand upon this principle, carry
it to its logical conclusion, as do the Buddhist devotees ; let them not be
content to denounce war; let them renounce every phase of worldly and
family life and take the yellow robe and the beggar's bowl.

But we may set against this, the older religion of India, in which
the Warriors were the highest caste; the religion, whose scripture is
the Bhagavad Gita, with such a sentence as this : "There is nothing
better for a warrior than a righteous war." And this command was
given quite literally, on the field of battle, on the eve of a mighty con-
flict. The whole of the Gita rings with the command, "Therefore
fight!"

We have been told that the young men of our nation are going about
downcast, dreading the horror of the trenches — which our allies have
endured with uncomplaining valour these three years. This seems to us
unjust to a courageous nation ; but let us think rather of the splendour
of the trenches ; the white light of Eternity is beating down on them.
The names of those who fall are written in the Book of Life. The Holy
Powers will never forget.

Pacifists who entrench themselves behind the teaching of Christ
habitually quote the saying, "Resist not evil." It seems to us that they
misunderstand it ; that the Master's true purpose was this : the Jewish
nation had just passed through a period of savage wars; a fierce war
lay immediately before it. The Jews had fought savagely, with the
bitterest personal hatred, animosity, resentment. It was, we believe, to
this feeling that the Master addressed his rebuke, forbidding, not war-
fare, but personal hatred and revengefulness. And in truth, no feeling
is more opposed to the true spirit of the warrior, who must conquer
personal feeling, as he must conquer the fear of death, if he is to fight
effectively at all.

On the other hand, the highest personal commendation Christ ever
gave, was to a soldier, to the centurion full of faith. Was there not then
a perfect opportunity to rebuke the warrior's life, had the Master been
so minded? Yet not a syllable of rebuke was uttered.

The Master's tremendous sentence has been often quoted: "Think
not that I am come to send peace on earth : I am come not to send peace,
but a sword." But perhaps it will be said that this is a metaphor, a
parable. But surely this is no parable: "He that hath no sword, let
him sell his garment and buy a sword." One would like to see that
sentence blazoned above the doors of the Peace Societies, accredited to

8 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

its author. No; pacifists who take a religious ground should quote
Buddha, not Christ, but they should follow Buddha to the logical limit.
Above all, they should keep away from the Bhagavad Gita. We believe
that, concerning Christ, they are completely mistaken. We believe that,
in a very real sense, this is Christ's war ; that the Powers and the soldiers
of the Entente are fighting for the cause of Christ.

Again, there is confusion concerning the duty to forgive "until sev-
enty times seven." Are we commanded to forgive the infamies commit-
ted by the Germans, the Austrians, the Bulgarians, the Turks ? No ; there
is no such command. Christ's complete teaching is recorded in the third
Gospel :

"If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him ; and if he repent,
forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and
seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt for-
give him."

Neither on earth nor in heaven is there forgiveness for obdurate,
unrepented sin. It is an obligation of honour, and of religion, not to for-
give, but to exact reparation "to the uttermost farthing." The words
again are Christ's.

There is a profound spiritual reason : only through the suffering of
completest reparation can the soul of the evil-doer come to full realization
of the evil done, and so work off the heavy burden of that debt, and come
back again to spiritual health. It is, therefore, a debt of honour which we
owe to these befouled and burdened souls, to aid them, by exacting the
utmost reparation, to get rid of their lethal burden.

But the warfare of Christ, the warfare of the Spirit, has a far
wider range. It touches every part of life, every task and endeavour.
And, if we, members of The Theosophical Society, are full of a triumph-
ant thankfulness that the nation among whom The Theosophical Society
was founded has entered the war, we have a further object in view,
besides the winning of this present conflict, and the crushing defeat of
the nations that take their stand on lying, on cruelty, on treachery, on
broken faith. For we hold that, as all life is warfare, so the lessons
of this active war, now being waged in France, are eternal lessons and
are to be applied throughout all life.

For the soldier is perfected through obedience — which is, in the last
analysis, obedience to a spiritual principle — courage, discipline, complete
self-sacrifice. And these are the requisites of the eternal warfare, the
essential conditions of really good work, in any field whatever. Many
a man of science is of necessity an ascetic; many have made a practice
of fasting, in order to refine the perceptive faculties ; while the willing
endurance of hardship, in a spirit of self-sacrifice, is the invariable con-
dition of many branches of research. And there must be the still greater
sacrifice: the love of Truth for the sake of Truth, the entire readiness

NOTES AND COMMENTS 9

to surrender one's own views and preconceptions, at a moment's notice,
before the faint, dawning light of a new truth. This is, in the most real
sense, obedience to a spiritual principle; this is true self -surrender.
And only through such obedience and self -surrender has any real dis-
covery in science ever been made.

Exactly the same thing is true of art. If a poet seeks inspiration,
the divine infusion of the breath of beauty, he must of necessity sacrifice
the lower perception to the higher, the lower to the higher self. He
must go out of himself into God's idea of beauty, of harmony, of the
inner truth of things, thereby informing and transforming the outer.
Only when that transformation has taken place, only when outer things
have been taken up, dissolved in the light of the spirit, and reformed
along eternal lines, does the poet bring forth the substance of genuine
poetry. And there must be surrender of the personality to that which
is greater, truer than the personality. How was Shakespeare able to
create type after type, both men and women? Only by going out of
himself, into these other types, and infusing into them the breath of
life. And so completely did he do this, that it is almost impossible to
find, in his works, his own personality, his private view or preference
in anything; in contrast, let us say, with Byron, whose own personality
is in everything that he wrote. There is, in Shakespeare, a certain
limitation, a reluctance to rise to the immortal part of man, to see the
divine Logos in all men ; and that limitation runs through all his work,
which, therefore, speaks only haltingly to the immortal. So that the
greater sacrifice of self, if he had risen to it, would have made him a
far greater poet.

This rising to the immortal man, through self-surrender, is the
doorway of all the best art. What gives Greek sculpture its supreme
value? — what but the fact that it is a revelation of the divine in human
form, a visible manifestation of the God in man ? And without a
real entering into the divine nature, preceded by the completest self-
surrender, it would have been wholly impossible for the sculptors of
Hellas to have rendered in lovely marble the godlike majesty of Zeus,
the dignity and inspiration of Athene, the beauty of Apollo. Why is
the painting of Italy supreme? Because it reveals the divine in human
form, and with an inspiration, a tenderness, a realization of the beauty of
holiness and of sacrifice that even Hellas did not reach.

Discipline too, the ceaseless effort to perform a task in exactly
the right way, to attain to perfection in each detail of work, is a neces-
sary element in all success, whether in art or science, in commerce or
manufacture. Treatises have been written on the mathematical perfec-
tion of the Parthenon, in which seemingly straight lines are really most
delicately calculated curves, allowance being made, not only for the
pressure and stress of natural forces and the strength of materials, but

10 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

also for the effect of parallel or divergent lines upon our vision. What
perfection of measurement, of proportion, of anatomy, in an Apollo.
What a knowledge of the properties of colours, and of their effects
upon each other, in a good Italian painting. And how many dis-
coveries in science have been made, simply by the application of finer
and finer measurements, by the conscientious application of what is
finely called "chemical cleanness."

And, with sacrifice and discipline and obedience, there must be the
most courageous devotion, the vigorous flow of the spiritual will, the
immortal man in action through the mortal. Without that tremendous
driving force, nothing real or great has ever been accomplished, or can
ever be accomplished. And it is because the warrior in a righteous war
must fill his heart with obedience, discipline, self-sacrifice and courage,
that we believe in the divine revelation through a righteous war. This
righteous warfare is essentially Theosophical, a splendid application of
the Theosophical life. Take the three rules in Light on the Path: "Kill
out ambition; kill out the desire of life; kill out desire of comfort."
No one can be a soldier worthy of the name, who does not learn these
three rules. And in the same inspired treatise, the divine self is called,
not the Seer only, but the Warrior.

Because we believe in these principles, because they are of the
very essence of true Theosophy, therefore we are heart and soul for
this righteous war. Heart and soul, too, for the continued, conscious
application of these same principles, when the forces of righteousness
have won the war, inflicting final and crushing defeat upon the malig-
nant and treacherous powers of evil. We are wholly consistent, there-
fore, in our joy and reverent gratitude that the United States is now
enlisted in the war, taking a place amid the ranks of those who are
fighting in this holy cause. This country has, we believe, high courage,
great powers of devotion, though they be not yet fully evoked. But we
have much, nay, almost everything still to learn, in self-surrendering dis-
cipline; very much still to learn concerning sacrifice. There is to be
seen, in the streets of Paris, and of every town in France, a tragical
inscription : "Mourning in twenty- four hours." When the hour comes
for us too to read the same sign daily and hourly in our own streets,
when the black livery of bereavement is as familiar to us, to the men
and women and children of America, as it is to all in France, then we
shall know something more of sacrifice, of sacrifice as a divine sacra-
ment. And, if we are reverent and full of aspiration, as befits the
soldiers in a holy war, we shall so deeply learn this divine lesson, that
we shall carry it forward into the days beyond the war, and keep it as
a purifying inspiration in every detail and act of life. In this way,
this war against the foul and treacherous forces of evil may bring
righteousness to reign on earth, and hasten the coming of the Kingdom.

FRAGMENTS

THE disciple starting on the Way seeks three gifts: liberty, life,
and happiness. Deep within his soul he finds the desire for them,
a flaming desire that burns unquenchably and ever more and
more brightly as he contemplates it. Here, at the threshold,
appears his first test, a test of his intuitive power to read his own heart,
as well as to realize theoretically wherein true satisfaction consists.
For the illusions cast upon the Screen of Life, which the untrained
mind looks upon, not through, would tell him, by means of his lower
senses, that the road to that which he seeks lies along the flowery path
of self-indulgence, where glitter of lights, and blare of trumpets, and
thrills of a mysterious excitement invite and fascinate him. All the
wondrous mirage of psychic life lies spread before his inexperienced
vision, and he is like a peasant boy in the midway of some great city.
Here, as I said, at the very inception of his journey, he must possess
the ability to discriminate ; he must be able to turn off the artificial
light of the lower world from the Screen upon which he gazes, so as
to see through it to the reality beyond. Then this psychic world of
apparent beauty and attraction is reduced to the tawdry ugliness and
cheap imitation of the midway in the morning sunshine, possessing no
allurements whatever, but sickening in its sights and odours, — empty,
dust-blown, desolate. The experienced man of the world realizes these
facts of the city's midway even in the midst of the illusions of the
night, and so holds himself aloof and is not deceived. To him it rep-
resents no temptation : his enjoyments and ambitions are of a higher
order, and therefore more intense as well as finer. In like manner,
the occultist walks the midway of material life, experienced, balanced,
understanding, and, because so completely understanding, never harsh or
indifferent.

This truth — that the occultist is the grown-up, cultured, experienced
man, in the midst of the ignorant, vulgar crowd of ordinary men, is
rarely appreciated.

Before the beginner can have intuitive perception of these simple
facts, he must have gained some mastery of his grosser senses ; he must
be able to hear somewhat above their clamour, to see through their
smoke and fog, to free his mind from the vertigo they cause, and thus
to think in spite of them. Until he can accomplish this to some degree,
he cannot even start upon the Way.

12 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

For, at the threshold test, without the power to discriminate, the
beginner will most likely plunge into the roaring maelstrom of sensation,
fondly believing that the trinity he seeks exists there, and so be caught,
perhaps for long periods of time, until the compassionate Law, which
reigns even in Hell, casts him up out of its vortex, by the very process
of its cyclic churning, and leaves him exhausted, half-dead, upon its
margin. The awfulness of it lies in the possibility that life may even be
altogether extinct, since for every personality there exists the danger of
the "second death," — only in fact to be avoided if that personality be
welded fast to the immortal spirit.

If, however, the disciple starting on the Way, has glimpsed suf-
ficient of these truths to keep him to the right turning (like the level-
headed peasant boy who might say to his companions: "I don't intend
to go in for that sort of thing; I came here to work and I am going to
make the most of my chances"), and so by that fact steps over the
threshold of immortal life and passes his first test, he is immediately
confronted by an admonition, which may seem to him the denial of all
his hopes — bidding him not to work for reward — to seek no results. He
knows that liberty, life and happiness are what he desires, and in his
eyes they are supreme rewards, worth all the sacrifice he is prepared to
make. Without hope of their ultimate attainment, he can see no satis-
faction in sacrifice or in labour; and so bewilderment, discouragement,
perhaps bitterness overtake him, and he faces his second test, for the
proper meeting of which a further enlargement of his perception is
required. Many linger a long while over the solution of this problem,
waving back and forth in vain endeavours, suffering greatly, held by
this second curtain of the Screen and the illusions of the lower world
upon it. Others have divined the trick at a flash, and thein laugh is
echoed back by the angels, as they pass through the mirage of the cur-
tain's folds.

Results? No! If we seek a result, we seek (and find, God help
us) a transient thing; for that which ends, which in its very nature is
an end, cannot be immortal. Therefore the liberty which is a result,
cannot be the real, the eternal liberty; nor the life and happiness which
are rewards, the everlasting ones we crave. A trinity of Being is our
desire, not mere endlessness of extension. We desire fulness of realiza-
tion, completeness of possession, an eternity of joy, illimitable, inex-
haustible consciousness, — God.

A reward is but a fragment of this; a goal, a temporary stop-

FRAGMENTS 13

ping place, a result, a finality, — on the other side of which there must
be a blank or a recommencement.

So our admonition really means this : that we are to seek the
whole, not a part; that we are to be content with nothing less than
everything. And because we are thus admonished, we find a dazzling
promise held before us: encouragement, not its reverse. Also we see
our danger: that to seek anything less than the whole, is ultimately
to lose even the part. For the reward slips away, becoming stale; the
result proves unsatisfactory or dead (unless we stultify our own power
of growth, in which case both we and our reward die together) .

We become aware that the desires for liberty, for life, and for
happiness are the cries of the immortal soul for the God from whom
it came; and that we may climb back to that Bliss which is both our
origin and our heritage, on the arm of the dear Master whose child
we are.

Liberty, therefore, cannot be licence, but consists in self-restraint,
leading to complete self-mastery on every plane of consciousness: the
self-mastery essential to realization of any kind ; the detachment which
alone gives perspective, without which sight is myopic to blindness.

Life, to be worth having, must be that which has been laid down
in glorious proof of this self-mastery; not the torn bit snatched in a
selfish scuffle, too crumpled and meaningless, when won, for any other
purpose than to be tossed aside. For one of the paradoxes of life is
that we must either surrender it, and so gain it ; or else seize it, later to
cast it aside because, in the very seizing, we have made it worthless;
the divine law being thus unfailingly operative. We can defeat our own
ends, but never its ends.

Happiness is the essential fruit of the liberty of renunciation, as it
is the heart of life; and it has no smallest participation in the life of
self-seeking and anarchy, nor in the excitement which the powers of dark-
ness provide to cover its absence or to deny its existence. Our bodies
are made of the roadside dust, but our spirits are made of the stars;
and our souls are one with flowers and spring sunshine, and the breath
of the summer light, and the colour of the trees in autumn, and the
cold whiteness of the mountain snows.

O Lodge of Life, God's treasure house on earth, in thee are locked
these mysteries of Eternal Love, safe from the devils of the lower world
who storm its heights in vain; safe from the traitors lodging in our

hearts, — kept for our heritage forever.

CAVE.

THE HEART OF FRANCE

"When Jesus was come into the temple, the chief priests
and the elders of the people came unto him as he was teaching,
and said, By what authority doest thou these thingsf and who
gave thee this authority?"

[Jesus replied] "The Kingdom of God shall be taken from
you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof."
—Matthew XXI, 23, 43.

NOTHING succeeds like success. Since 1870, the nations of
the world, idolizing the Prussian conquerors, have gone to
school to Germany, with the desire to imitate German efficiency
and success in the educational system, in manufactures and
trades, in matters musical, artistic and scientific, — even in matters reli-
gious, declaring that one's faith should be modified to accord with the
most recent speculations of some theological professor. This worship of
success — German success — was true of England, of America, and to
a considerable extent, of France herself.

To-day the appalling principles of evil that animated the dazzling
activities of Germany, intellectual and practical, are revealed to us —
if we have eyes open to see through the veils of prosperity and self-
indulgence and self-satisfaction.

Principles of Evil! Our blind worship of efficiency and success
was misplaced. To-day, we can admire in Germany, and in the Ger-
mans, only the zeal and whole heartedness with which they execute
their principles: "the children of this world are in their generation
wiser than the children of light."

The success that America, since the Civil War, has been worship-
ping, along with the rest of the world, is the illusion of material pros-
perity, the fallacy of apparent success. France is destined, however,
to strive for real success, to bring to completion the stupendous under-
taking of which the Easter Resurrection marks a victorious stage — the
establishment, namely, of one law, one will, one realm, — in earth as in
Heaven, — and one supreme ruler, Christ the King. The real France
has been coming to herself again, during these eye-opening years of
struggle with evil. Let us hope she will come to clear recognition of
the duty to which, through old vows, she stands committed.

The history of France, its legends and traditions, bear witness to
this self-devotion of France to the cause of Christ. A widely accepted
tradition narrates that some time after the Ascension, the Jews con-
strained certain of the most fervent of His followers to board a dis-
mantled vessel and deliver themselves to the mercy of the waves.
Among them were the three Maries, Martha, Lazarus and St. John. Con-

»4

THE HEART OF FRANCE 15

ducted by Providence, the bark touched the shore of Provence at the
extremity of the Isle of Camargue. The poor exiles, miraculously
delivered from the perils of the sea, journeyed throughout Southern
Gaul and became the first apostles. One of the Maries withdrew to a
cave in the desert of Sainte-Baume, to meditate and to pray. St. John
returned to the East. Those who remained received further instruction
from the Master upon many points that had been interrupted by the
shortening of His brief period of work. Their lives of prayer con-
secrated the neighbourhood which continued to be their headquarters,
and made it, for future generations, a centre of religious life and force.
So renowned indeed did it become, that later, the young convert, Patrick,
journeyed thither to deepen his hold upon truth, carrying back thence
to Ireland and Scotland the impression he received of the Master as
a Living Teacher and Friend. The sojourn of the holy band has only
the authority of tradition. But even as tradition, we can see in that
life of consecration and prayer, a force that contributes toward under-
standing the inspiration of the first King of France, Clovis. The con-
version of Clovis was not that of a savage chieftain who suddenly
decides upon baptism for himself and his tribe. Clovis was a states-
man. He had unified warring factions, created an entity, a state. Like
any other artist, or creator, he did not relish the dismemberment of
his production. He had long been married to a Christian Queen; he
enjoyed, for years, personal friendship with St. Genevieve; he was not
ignorant of the Christian teachings and claims. The kindling of his
flame was effected on the battlefield. He knew that the issue of the battle
would be decisive either for the destruction or the preservation of the state
which he had been instrumental in forming. There are two elements in
conversion : first, a recognition of one's own powerlessness against over-
whelming odds that seem destined to victory ; and, secondly, a recognition
of the Master's ability to triumph over those very forces that threaten to
crush us. Need, personal need, outer or moral need, brings men to con-
version. As I read the story of Clovis's conversion, I interpret it in this
way. His personal need and desire — to preserve his state — in a dire
strait, drove him to invoke the Man God whose existence he had long
pondered. His cry for help, brought him, I believe, some consciousness
of the Master's presence, of the Master's human sympathy with his aims,
of the Master's compassion for him in his extremity. Then, recognizing
the magnanimity of the Master's interest and sympathy, as a great nature
would, Clovis threw himself in self-abandonment on that divinely human
heart which beats only for the happiness of men, His children. With
gratitude, and compassion and love, kindled by these very qualities in the
Master, Clovis gave his all to Christ. He did not, as we do, present that
vague and damp thing that we think of when we use the word "soul ;" he
did not reserve for himself all that makes life interesting. Clovis gave
himself body and soul, all that he was and had, his treasure, his state. His
power of vision was sharpened as his whole past life moved before his

16 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

eyes in that moment of extremity. He recognized how worthy indeed his
long efforts had been, but, also how small had been his own part in that
undertaking. For, with death threatening, he understood facts that
before he had misunderstood. He saw that his worthy ambition was not
a goal suggested by his own active intellect, but an inspiration given by the
Royal Master who endeavours to guide men aright through their own un-
wise scheming. He saw that his part had not been that of originator, but
of executor — he had carried out, in some measure, the designs entrusted
to him. He recognized the Living Christ, standing before him, as the
Source of all that had made his life worth while — he saw his ambitions
proceeding from the mind and the heart of Christ, a part of Christ's
beneficent plan for the world. He saw the Living Christ as the Goal
toward which all the true desires of his nature tended. In an ecstacy of
humility and gratitude, Clovis threw himself before those Royal pierced
feet; "This thing for which I have sweated and bled, this people, this
nation, this kingdom, it is not mine, O Christ, but Thine. Make it the
beginning of Thy Kingdom on earth." Then, rising to his feet, with a
sense of vaster issues now at stake, — no longer his kingdom, but Heaven's
colony that was to be saved or lost, Clovis rushed into the thick of battle
and won.

Such was the conversion and the donation of Clovis! Such was the
consecration of France to copartnership with Christ in His work of
reclaiming the bad lands of humanity — to make the stone heap and sand
stretches of man's heart a blossoming garden. That great unfinished task
of the Master's includes not only the vague benefits that we associate with
our immortal souls ; it includes also instruction in the arts and sciences, in
the principles of government, in moral and social virtues and graces — His
task is to civilize and humanize man.

An editorial in the New York Tribune for March 14th, 1917, headed
France and the Disease of Democracy, contains these sentences : "The
latest crisis in French politics again discloses that disease which has been
revealed in all three of the great democracies during the present war
crisis. Like Britain, like the United States, France is to-day at the mercy
of parochial politicians, elected primarily because of their concern for the
selfish and petty interests of their districts and without regard to the
questions affecting the life of the nation. . . . Politicians who at a
moment of national peril think of their own political fortune and of the
power and of the prestige which they deem their right." One may, surely,
without discrediting democracy as a whole, turn back to the outgrown
monarchical period of France for an example of rulers who were not
politicians, men who were forgetful of self-interest, and who led France
to give herself lavishly for an ideal. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Louis !
What splendid leadership those names recall! St. Bernard drew men
after him to whatever cause it was his duty to champion. How shadow-
like contemporary senators and ministers are when we recall Bernard's
courage and power ! How drab their acts ! One longs for personal

THE HEART OF FRANCE 17

heroism to equal St. Bernard's on that early morning in the old church of
Aquitaine. He was celebrating Mass; there was a thronging congrega-
tion ; the Duke of Aquitaine was present. This Duke was opposed to
Bernard in an ecclesiastical matter that affected vitally the political situ-
ation of France. Conference and argument had failed to change the
Duke's opinion. Suddenly, at the moment of the Elevation, Bernard puts
the Wafer back on the altar, leaves the Sanctuary, and strides resolutely
through the congregation to the Duke's side. The ducal men-at-arms are
on guard. Bernard is only a monk — and is in his opponent's fortress. But
unflinching and unabashed, he demands of this provincial ruler how long
he will keep his King waiting.* The terrified Duke drops to his knees
and promises everything — to escape Bernard's intolerable countenance.
St. Louis is praised even by a historian who rates men and events from
the material standpoint of political economy. "From this time forth,"
writes Professor J. Moreton McDonald, referring to St. Louis and the
Crusades, "wherever she fought, whatever cause she adopted, France
stands out as a real nation, endowed with glorious and peculiar national
qualities." Is triumphant democracy, in France, in America, in Russia,
making herself loved through such noble leaders? "St. Louis made
kings so beloved," writes Georges Goyau (of the Revue des deux
Mondes} "that from his time dates that royal cult, so to speak, which
was one of the moral forces in olden France, and which existed in no
other country of Europe to the same degree. Piety had been for the
kings of France, set on their thrones by the Church of God, as it were
a duty belonging to their charge or office; but in the piety of St. Louis
there was a note all his own, the note of sanctity."

Joan of Arc is less of a mystery, if one believes that the Master
accepted Clevis's donation as simply as Clovis made it. Such a gift
involved France in the way of sacrifice, the Way of the Cross.
Judging merely from the view point of the world, there are
Americans who would conclude that the subjection of France to Eng-
land, in the 15th century, would not have been an irreparable injury —
though, to-day, we unequivocally conclude that the pollution of a square
inch of non-Prussian territory by Teuton barbarians is a calamity dis-
graceful to every non-protesting nation that calls itself civilized. Eng-
land is a land with the ideals of a gentleman; it is valorous and heroic.
It is a worthy thing to spread the ideals and practices of a gentleman;
it upbuilds and civilizes. But for all his preciousness — and, in America,
one is in no danger of overestimating those qualities which make up a
gentleman — there is a vast difference between a gentleman and a Chris-
tian. A gentleman may be an incipient or unconscious Christian. But
a Christian is a conscious gentleman. Between those two stages,
unconscious and conscious, there is a difference like that between the inno-
cence of a child and the purity of a man. A child is morally clean because

* i. e., waiting to descend from Heaven into the Wafer.
2

18 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

it is ignorant of evil ; while a man who is pure has had to learn the exist-
ence of and to face all evil, continuing clean, however, in spite of that
knowledge. Had France been subjugated by England, she might have
had no despicable fate, yet humanity would have lost those qualities
and charms which the ideals of a Christian add to those of a gentleman,
completing them. For France is the thin end of the wedge that the
hands of Heaven are driving through the hardness of this world. To
rescue the wedge, the Powers of Heaven sent Joan of Arc against the
English, who at that period were threatening the national unity of France.

No other explanation than that explains the mysterious peasant
child, who, in the presence of ancient peers, shone with a courtesy
which she had learnt, as an old chronicler puts it, in the court of Heaven.
Do you know that military experts who have studied the tactics of that
17 year old girl, declare she possessed a knowledge of artillery tactics,
worthy of modern times? If she learnt courtesy in the court of Heaven,
why may she not also have learned, from Michael and his Angels, mili-
tary and artillery manoeuvres? St. John, our holy Apostle of love, does
not represent Heaven as a conference of pacifists — ''there was war in
Heaven," he wrote.

A second peasant daughter of France, a 17th century nun, the Blessed
Margaret Mary, is less known to us, aliens and Protestants, than is Joan
of Arc, only, I think, because her mission and outer life are less dramatic
and tragic than Joan's. Her mission is, however, of no less significance.
For through her, we have learned again, what we constantly forget, the
secret of the Master's continued humanity. He came to her, not in a
morbid vision, but bodily, in the chapel and garden of her convent, telling
her in plain human words, that He is Man as well as God, and that His
human Heart differs from other human hearts in no way save in the
excess of its love and desire to be loved. "I thirst for the hearts of men,"
He said to her. By His direction, that obscure nun sought to reach the
great King, Louis XIV, to give him the message from Heaven's King —
that the banners of France would triumph when Heaven's symbol, the
Master's human Heart, was blazoned with the heraldic devices of earth,
and France openly ratified her consecration vows and undertook what
her saints and rulers had pledged her to — the adventure of the Cross.

We should be erring gravely to think that this religious fervour and
aspiration is a thing of the past, and that modern-day France is only the
happy hunting ground of pleasure seekers. France produced as rich a
harvest of saints in the nineteenth century as in the twelfth and thir-
teenth. While the froth of life flecked the streets of Paris, and narrow
viewed politicians were turning venerable religious centres like Clairvaux
into prisons and workhouses, the religious fire of France burned on, in
what monasteries were left to it, and in the homes of the people. In the
nineteenth century, among many others, there was Mother Barat, who
founded the Order of the Sacre Coeur, with its admirable system of edu-
cation for women of the upper class. The Carmelite convent at Dijon

THE HEART OF FRANCE 19

trained Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity to a saintly life; and at Lisieux,
that other Carmelite flower, Soeur Therese, opened in exquisite beauty.
How truly gay is convent life, is shown in the pages of her Autobiogra-
phy. She died in 1897, aged twenty-three. Her letters, her talk, bind
contemporary France in with the traditions of the older centuries. What
human charm and humour there is in her narrative of spiritual things.
Here is an account given by one of the novices whom Therese guided
with counsel :

"Being somewhat of a child in my ways, the Holy Child — to help
me in the practice of virtue — inspired me with the thought of amusing
myself with Him, and I chose the game of ninepins. I imagined them
of all sizes and colours, representing the souls I wished to reach. The
ball was — love.

"In December, 1896, the novices received, for the benefit of the
Foreign Missions, various trifles towards a Christmas tree, and at the
bottom of the box containing them was a top — a rare thing in a Carmelite
convent. My companions remarked: 'What an ugly thing! — of what
use will it be?' But I, who knew the game, caught hold of it, exclaiming:
'Nay, what fun ! it will spin a whole day without stopping if it be well
whipped ;' and thereupon I spun it 'round to their great surprise.

"Soeur Therese was quietly watching us, and on Christmas night,
after midnight Mass, I found in our cell the famous top, with a delight-
ful letter as follows :

To My Beloved Little Spouse
Player of Ninepins on the Mountain of Carmel.

Christmas Night, 1896.

My beloved little Spouse, — I am well pleased with thee ! All the year
thou hast amused Me by playing at ninepins. I was so overjoyed, that
the whole court of Angels was surprised and charmed. Several little
cherubs have asked Me why I did not make them children. Others
wanted to know if the melody of their instruments were not more pleasing
to Me than thy joyous laugh when a ninepin fell at the stroke of thy love-
ball. My answer to them was, that they must not regret they are not
children, since one day they would play with thee in the meadows of
Heaven. I told them also that thy smiles were certainly more sweet to
Me than their harmonies, because these smiles were purchased by suffer-
ing and forgetfulness of self.

And now, my cherished Spouse, it is my turn to ask something of
thee. Thou wilt not refuse Me — thou lovest Me too much. Let us change
the game. Ninepins amuse me greatly, but at present I should like to
play at spinning a top, and, if thou dost consent, thou shalt be the top.
I give thee one as a model. Thou seest that it is ugly to look at, and
would be kicked aside by whosoever did not know the game. But at the
sight of it a child would leap for joy and shout : 'What fun ! it will
spin a whole day without stopping!'

20 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Although thou too art not attractive, I — the little Jesus — love thee,
and beg of thee to keep always spinning to amuse Me. True, it needs a
whip to make a top spin. Then let thy Sisters supply the whip, and be
thou most grateful to those who shall make thee turn fastest. When
I shall have had plenty of fun, I will bring thee to join Me here, and our
games shall be full of unalloyed delight. — Thy little Brother,

JESUS."

It is not the convents alone that produced heroic religious souls.
There are noteworthy examples of aspiration in the secular life of
France. Some individuals of this class have become known through their
literary work ; others remain entirely obscure. Charles Peguy and Ernest
Psichari are among the former. Peguy died leading his division at the
Marne. When the call to the colours came, in 1914, he was urged not to
volunteer so as to save his talents for his country. With a clear percep-
tion of spiritual values, and realizing that, in a truer sense, he would be
saving his talents by death in battle, he replied: "What I am about to
do is worth thirty years of writing." One aim of his writing was to
awaken his countrymen so that they might claim their great inheritance
from the past. He held up to the new generation the ideal of national-
ism, of a chivalrous and Christian France, continuing in the 20th century
the aims which had kindled the saints and heroes of ancient and
mediaeval years. He wrote of France : "The Pharisee nations call thee
light minded, because thou art nimble. But God says : I have weighed
thee and do not find thee light in the balance; people that designed the
cathedral. I do not find thee wanting in faith ; people that invented the
crusade, I do not find thee wanting in charity ; and, as for hope there is
none elsewhere than in France." Peguy's friend, Psichari, who has also
given his life in the war, is an even more conspicuous example of reaction
against the scepticism that, for a period, was fashionable among the Intel-
lectuals. Psichari was the grandson of Renan. He grew up in his grand-
father's mode of thought. Then, as a soldier, he passed through a phase
when his religion of doubt failed him — he came out of the struggle, estab-
lished in the religion of faith. When he died, in the retreat from Charle-
roi, he was a member of The Third Order of St. Dominic. He left a
record of his intellectual and spiritual development, interwoven with a
thin veil of romance, and published as The Voyage of the Centurion.
Here is a paragraph from that book which describes the awakening
realization in Psichari of what his country, France, really stands for, in
the history of civilization : "He has been sent there by a people who
know well what blood of the martyrs is worth. He well knows what it
is to die for an idea. He has behind him twenty thousand Crusaders —
a whole nation of those who have died with drawn swords, with prayers
fixed on their lips. He is the child of that blood. It is not in vain that
he suffered the first hours of exile, nor that the sun has burned him, nor
that solitude has wrapt him under her great veil of silence. He is the

THE HEART OF FRANCE 21

child of pain. . . . Thou art not the first,' says a voice which he
did not recognize — it is the voice of the motherland which he has railed
against — 'thou art not the first that I send to this infidel land. I have
sent others before thee. For this land is mine, and I have given it to my
sons, that they may suffer there, that they may learn suffering. Others
have died before thee. And they did not ask these slaves to teach them
how to live. Look, my son, how they bore themselves in this great under-
taking, in this great French adventure, which was the adventure of the
pilgrimage of the Cross. . .' "

A diary edited by the Reverend A. Poulain gives a glimpse into the
interior of French homes. It reveals a life so different from what most
Americans find on the sidewalks of Paris. The volume is a spiritual
autobiography ; the writer's name is not revealed. She is referred to as
Lucie Christine ; her life covers the period from 1870 to 1908 — what we
think of as a decadent and irreligious section of French History. She
was the mother of a family, and raised her children dutifully, while, at
the same time, leading an interior life of great fervour. Her aspiration
brought her some realization of Christ as a living Master and Friend.
One entry reads thus: "Jesus came to visit me. ... I also saw
around Jesus the souls of the Elect . . . interceding for the world,
for France, for our congregations." Then there is this : "This morning
I asked of Jesus and obtained in Holy Communion that grace of union
and of special vision in which my Communion and second prayer of yes-
terday entirely consisted. By this grace, which I have spoken of for a
long time past, the soul sees Jesus in the place of her own poor being and
loses the sentiment of her own presence in the Presence of God. She sees
with her interior sight the Son of God made Man, the second Person of
the Adorable Trinity, with His Two Natures. In place of her own poor
being she finds the height, the depth, the breadth, the sublimity of God.
She does not see this as if God had expelled her from that place, but as if
she had been absorbed and transformed into God Himself; she loses
herself in the ineffableness of the Divine Ocean, and has no longer any
consciousness of herself except by the exquisite sentiment which this
vision, this knowledge which inflames her with love, procures her."

The records of these three individuals, chosen from many, show
what was at work, silently in France, before the war came. All of us
know what has been taking place since the war began. So splendid is that
right-about-face toward religion that many pray, perhaps, that the war
may not end, until the conversion of France is somewhat complete, and
the whole nation understands its mission as His wedge. The happy sacri-
fices made by all classes in France will act as a spiritual momentum carry-
ing the nation toward its goal. Misunderstandings of many kinds will
clear up, between civic and cleric, between the Catholic nation and the
claims of Rome which the nation is not inclined to take too seriously.
The nation will reestablish its old direct connection with the Master, as
many of its individual citizens have done. How great an advance for

22 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

civilization it will be when a single nation shall declare that it is waging
war not for democracy, but for Christ's Kingdom ! One of the good
things brought us by the war is a letter from a priest, a sub-lieutenant
of infantry, written on the eve of an advance which he knew would be
perilous and in which he did receive a mortal wound. There is no pagan
lament or gloom in this farewell to earth, but Christian joy flowing from
direct knowledge that for a Christian death is gain. "To die young, to
die a priest, as a soldier, during an attack, marching forward, while per-
forming the priestly function, perhaps while granting absolution . . .
to give one's life for the Church, for France, for all those who carry in
their hearts the same ideal as I do, who are quickened by the same faith
. . . and for the others too that their eyes may at last be opened to
the light and that they may know the joy of believing: Ah! truly Jesus
spoils me! How glorious it is ! (Que c'est beau!). . ."
That is the spirit which burns in the heart of France.

C. C. CLARK.

That piety which sanctifies us, and which is a true devotion to God,
consists in doing all His will precisely at the time, in the situation and
under the circumstances, in which He has placed us. Perfect devoted-
ness requires, not only that we do the will of God, but that we do it with
love. God would have us serve Him with delight; it is our hearts that
He asks of us. — Francis de la Mothe Fenelon.

EASTERN AND WESTERN
PSYCHOLOGY

III
PHYSICAL CONSCIOUSNESS: THE FIRST PLANE

THERE is a curious story in the Chhandogya, one of the oldest
and most mystical Upanishads, which may be translated some-
what as follows:

The Devas and the Asuras — the angels and demons — both
of them sprung from the Lord of Beings, strove together. The Devas
sacrificed by offering the syllable Om; by this, said they, we shall pre-
vail. They entered into the nasal breath with their aspiration; but the
Asuras pierced it with evil; therefore through this, he perceives both
that which is fragrant and that which is foul, for they pierced it with
evil. And so the Devas entered voice with their aspiration ; but the
Asuras pierced it with evil ; therefore he speaks both truth and falsehood,
for voice was pierced with evil. And so they entered sight with their
aspiration; but the Asuras pierced it with evil; therefore by it he
sees both that which should be seen and that which should not be
seen, for it was pierced with evil. And so the Devas entered hearing
with their aspiration ; but the Asuras pierced it with evil ; therefore he
hears both what should be heard and what should not be heard, for it
was pierced with evil. And so the Devas entered mind with their
aspiration ; but the Asuras pierced it with evil ; therefore with it he
conceives both that which should be conceived and that which should
not be conceived, by it he wills both that which should be willed and
that which should not be willed, for mind was pierced with evil. And
so there is this higher vital breath ; the Devas entered this by their
aspiration ; the Asuras, coming to this, fell to pieces, as something would
fall to pieces, by coming against a hard rock. Thus verily, as some-
thing coming against a hard rock would fall to pieces, so does he fall to
pieces, who desires evil for one who knows this ; and he who drives him
away, he indeed is as a hard rock. Because of this, therefore, he does
not perceive both things fragrant and foul, for he has driven evil away,
and whatever he eats or drinks, by this he guards the lives.

The makers of this old mystical tale sought to show, in a parable,
which, nevertheless, comes close to literal truth, that this two-sidedness
runs through every phase of our physical perception: we see good and
evil; we hear good and evil; we will good and evil; we act out good
and evil. But there is in us the higher spiritual breath, the spiritual
will and intuition ; this the devils were not able to enter, but fell back
from it, broken to pieces, as some brittle thing falls back broken from

»3

24 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

a rock. And this spiritual breath, the power of intuition and spiritual
will, nourishes and upbuilds the other powers, building up a dwelling of
like nature to itself.

So far the parable. Its application to our subject — the plane or field
of physical consciousness — is this: there are, as it were, two layers of
our physical consciousness and our physical action, a lower and a higher
layer ; or, one may say, there are two ways of using each power, a lower
and a higher way. The lower way is that which is inspired from beneath
— pierced by the Asuras; the higher way is that which is inspired from
above, breathed into by the aspiration of the Devas. Or, to put it yet
another way, any act can be performed in obedience to either one of two
motives : the motive of self-will, which is of the Asuras, the demons ; and
the motive of divine will, which is of the Devas; these two powers, the
good and evil angels, meeting and contesting in every act and percep-
tion of ours, and we ourselves having the power to throw the victory
to either side, to the Asuras or to the Devas, to the good angels or the
evil, according as our motive is self-will or the divine will acting in us.

This sounds perhaps, not merely mystical but even mythical; this
contest of good and evil angels in our every act. So it may be worth
while to clear the air by showing that biology, the material science of
life, recognizes just the same kind of conflict.

All organisms, in the view of biology, all living things, whether they
be plants or animals, very simple or very highly developed, go through
a series of acts. Plants draw in nourishment through their roots, chemi-
cal elements soluble in water, building materials in liquid form, such as
ammonia, phosphoric acid, potash; they draw in, through the pores of
their leases, when these are exposed to sunlight, further nourishment
from the air, carbonic acid, which is divided into carbon and oxygen;
the carbon combining with the hydrogen in the water sucked up by the
roots, the oxygen being breathed forth again. And so the plant grows,
puts forth leaves and flowers, forms fruit or seed, and thus prepares
for a new generation of that same plant.

But besides these evident activities there is a second range of activ-
ities, of far finer quality, which can hardly be detected in one genera-
tion 01 even in many generations ; but which, in the long run, and when
studied in large spaces of time, are seen to be immensely important.
By virtue of certain forces — we can hardly yet call them efforts in the
case of plants — certain forms of plant life progress; others halt and then
retrogress, falling into degeneration. In the forests of the Carboniferous
period, there were many kinds of trees. A few of them were the
ancestors of the trees in our present forests ; many of them have ceased
altogether from the earth, or are represented only by dwarfish relations,
like the equisetums, the mare's-tails of our marshes. There were, it
would seem, in those ancient forests, certain individuals which, by the
infinite accretion of small differences, were destined to develop into our
present trees. There were others, by no means distinguishable at the

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 25

time, which were to fail in these infinitely numerous, hardly perceptible
accretions, and were destined, in consequence, to die, to fall out of the
battle for life and immortality.

The same thing, in a much more manifest way, in animal life.
Biologists trace a line of ascent, up from primal protoplasm to our own
bodies, so far the most perfect organism in the world. But, besides
the organisms which lie along this direct line in an ascending series,
there are other organisms without number, which diverged or fell away
from the line by infinitely small gradations ; organisms which have either
ceased altogether to exist, like the extinct dinosaurs, or which, like the
lower animals about us to-day, have taken directions of growth which can
never lead up to the highest organic form; so far, they are as complete
failures as are the animals which are actually extinct.

There is, therefore, the one line of complete success, the line which,
according to biological theory, led up to our own marvellously formed and
articulated bodies. There are, on the other hand, the many lines of
failure. Each line is the sum of an infinite number of small acts or
activities, imperceptible at the time, hardly perceptible even when taken
in thousands; but, none the less, quite decisive. These and these acts
and activities made for progression along the true line, the line of life
and infinite upward progress; those and those acts and activities made
for digression, for retrogression, for degeneration, for ultimate death
and extinction. The geological strata are storehouses of forms which
thus strayed from the path, of lines which have failed of posterity, of
extinct peerages in the nobility of life.

So that, for each minutest act or. activity, there were two possible
ways : the way which would make for progression along the royal line ;
and the way which would make for digression, for retrogression. These
two potencies, these two possibilities, or the forces which determined
them, are the angels and the demons of our parable, the Devas and the
Asuras. Where the Deva conquered, the activity was realized in such
a way as to make for the upward path. Where the Asura won, the
activity was carried out in such a way as to make for digression, for
retrogression.

So far, the biologists have refused to speculate concerning these
Devas and Asuras. They have gone as far as recognizing that these
and these activities made for progress, whether they were activities of
the whole organism, or activities within the organism — activities of the
germ plasm. But they have been chary of telling us why, under what
impulsion, the activity turned the one way or the other way. It just
"happened" so, and is not susceptible of explanation. So they solve
a mystery by a mystery. Darwin built up his whole fabric of evolu-
tion out of two things: the occurrence of favorable variations, which
gave certain organisms an advantage over their brothers and sisters;
and their consequent success, their survival in the struggle for life.
Among their progeny again there were more gifted children and less

26 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

gifted; there were advantageous variations. Their fortunate possessors
once more survived and begat sons and daughters, unequally endowed.
And so it went on, until the coming of man, the king. The whole
thing, the whole progression from the speck of protoplasm to Darwin
himself, was the sum of happy accidents, of infinitely small drives for-
ward, which were the outcome of sheer good luck.

Bergson saw that this is somewhat hard to credit : so many, so
infinitely many minute special providences, playing the deciding role in
this supposedly materialistic system. So he postulated an elan vital, a
vital drive, at work from the beginning, and having, in a sense, a
predetermined goal. Where, in each minute activity, the vital drive pre-
vailed, that activity took place in the main line of progression ; where
the forces of inertia, of obstruction, prevailed, that activity swerved
aside, and took its place in the line of retrogression. So we come
back again to our Devas and Asuras.

Bergson evidently felt that the fortunate, the progressive activity,
took place under the impulsion of a force from above, a force coming
down into the material world from a spiritual plane above it ; and that,
when the activity of the organism responded to that force from above,
the activity was a success ; it made for progression along the royal road.

At the time, it would evidently be exceedingly difficult to discern
between the successful activity and the unsuccessful; that which is to
make for further progress and that which is to make for digression.
Indeed, the appearances might well be against the truth. Thus, we
may imagine that, among the Miocene apes, there were two contending
parties, those who were for continuing their free, swinging life among
the tree-tops, and those who were for coming to the ground. This serene
life, we may imagine the tree-top party saying, gives us the free air of
heaven ; it makes for high security, and gives us wide horizons. Why
should we go down to the earth, among so many dangers, to breathe a
lower air? But the others took their decision and came to earth. The
upshot is, that the tree-top party are still swinging among the tree-
tops, in Further India and Borneo and Equitorial Africa, while the down-
to-earth people have built Athens and Rome. This is, of course, only an
illustration, a parallel ; we do not at all vouch for its historicity.

But it seems clear that only through the event, the outcome, the
arrival at the end of the road, can unfailing discernment be reached.
It is easy, now, looking back along the biologist's line of ascent from
the monad to the man, to say that these and these activities, these
and these decisions, made for progression along the royal road, while
the others, which may have seemed excellent at the time, made for
retrogression and extinction.

The mystics, whether of the East or West, have always refused to
accept Darwin's fancy that the infinitely numerous small forward steps
took place by chance and were but happy accidents. And indeed, if
we set it down baldly, there is something incredible in the idea that

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 27

the fine mechanism of the eye with its self-adjusting diaphragm in the iris,
its self-focussing crystalline lens, to say nothing of the adjustment of
the colour nerves, or the sheer fact of sight at all, has been built up by
a string of happy chances ; that the beauty of the lilies, the lovely melody
of the thrush and nightingale, nay, such master-melodies as the Upa-
nishads and the Gospels, are merely the accumulation of infinite happy
chances which began to befall the monad, and which have been succeed-
ing each other ever since. The mystics have always believed that the
spiritual world above is perpetually shining through this nether world;
that these lovely and wonderful things, the bird's song, the lily's radi-
ance, the parables of the Upanishads and the Gospels, are all revela-
tions of the spiritual world, breaking through the clouds of this lower
world; nay, that each minutest step forward, in the whole evolutionary
chain, is the direct response and result of a spiritual force and impulse
impinging at that point, and creatively urging each living thing along
the royal road.

The whole of our progress hitherto has been won through the
battle of these forces that make for development, against the forces
that make for retrogression and degradation; through the conflict
between the Devas and the Asuras, the angels and the demons. And
exactly the same law holds for our further progress, for every act and
activity in our present lives ; there is at each point, for each activity and
act, the pull of the two forces, upward and downward ; and our advance
along this further road, the path of our immortality, depends on our
discerning between the two, and responding to the upward pull. And,
once more, just as it was infinitely difficult, at the time, to decide between
the happy and the unhappy activity in the earlier field of development,
as, for instance, in the controversy between the tree-top party and the
down-to-earth party among the imagined Miocene apes, so it is infinitely
difficult, at that point alone, and with only the knowledge belonging
to it, to decide, concerning our present acts, to see which make for
death, which make for immortality. But, just as it is easy enough, after
the event, to say that the lazy abandonment of the activity of flight by
the dodo and the great auk has meant the extinction of both; as it is
easy, looking back along the biologist's line of ascent, to pronounce
as to the Tightness of each decision in the organic world, so it will be
easy, when we have reached the end of the way, the goal of our
immortality, to declare, concerning each of our acts, that this activity
made for life, while the other held the menace of destruction ; and
therefore, it is easy now, for those who have attained, for those who
have gained the journey's end, to say, concerning our present acts, that
these are good and make for immortality, while those contain the seeds
of ruin and of death.

What we need, then, for our further journey, is just such a diag-
nosis, a pronouncement by those who have attained, which shall touch
all our acts and activities, so that we may eschew the evil and cleave

28 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

to that which is good. Therefore the first need of our mystical train-
ing is some method, or rule of life, which shall cover all our energies
and acts, strengthening and approving the good, while warning us against
the evil. It is a question of fine discernment of the impulsions which
come to us from above, from the spiritual world, and which will gradu-
ally lead us forward and upward to that world, and of responding to
these by act; as, in the biologist's long line of ascent, it was a question
of discernment, by the developing organisms, of those activities which
led onward and upward, as against those which led backward and
downward.

Therefore, it would seem, all the great, ancient Law Codes, like
that of Manu in India, or the Mosaic code, or the laws of ancient Egypt,
are held to have been given by inspiration, to have been revealed from
on high; and, in like manner, all the mystical rules, whether of East
or West, are held to have been given by inspiration.

We may, at this point, give in outline certain of these codes and
rules, making the attempt to see their underlying principles ; to see why,
and in what way, they try to make the discernment between acts to
be performed and acts to be eschewed ; the former making for salvation
and immortality, while the latter make for degradation and death. One
of the best versions of the ancient code and rule of India is that
recorded in the Vayu Purana. The name of this revered scripture sig-
nifies The Ancient Book inspired by the Spirit ; for Vayu, the Wind-god,
is the Spirit, which "bloweth whither it listeth." We may preface the
code itself by giving, for contrast with our somewhat sketchy outline
of the Darwinian scheme, the ancient Indian account of the evolution
of living beings on this earth, through the pressure of the spiritual world
upon the physical world. It is simply an expansion, in vivid detail, of
the pressure of spiritual forces which Bergson saw to be indispens-
able for any clear understanding of ascending development among beings.

Brahma, the Creator, formed mind-born creatures from his own
body and resembling himself. When the Treta — Third — Age had arrived,
and had gradually reached its middle, the Lord then began to form
other mind-born creatures. He next formed beings in whom sattva
(goodness) and rajas (passion) predominated, and who were capable
of attaining righteousness, possessions, love and liberation, together with
the means of subsistence. Devas, too, and Pitris, and Rishis, and
Manus, by whom these creatures were variously ordered, according to
their natures in conformity with the Yuga. When this character of his
offspring had been attained, the self-existent meditated with love upon
mind-born offspring of all kinds and of various forms. Those creatures,
who were described by me to thee as having taken refuge in the world
called Janaloka at the end of the Kalpa, all these arrived here, when
he meditated upon them, in order to be reproduced in the form of Devas
and of other beings. According to the course of the Manvantaras the
least came first, being guided by destiny, and by connections and cir-

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 29

cumstances of every kind. These creatures were always born, under
the controlling influence of, and as a recompense for, their good and
bad karma. He of himself formed these creatures, which arrived in
their several characters of Devas, Asuras, Pitris, cattle, birds, reptiles,
trees, and insects, in order that they might be subjected anew to the con-
ditions of creatures. . . .

This brings us to the ancient polity, the ordained order of civil
and religious life, which is outlined in an earlier passage of the same
scripture :

Brahma, the Creator, determined the respective duties and func-
tions of all mankind. Lord Brahma ordained that power, the sceptre,
and war should be the duty of the Kshattriyas. He then appointed, as
the functions of the Brahmans, the duty of officiating at sacrifices, sacred
study, the receiving of gifts. The care of cattle, commerce, and agricul-
ture, he allotted as the work of the Vaishyas. The practice of the
mechanical arts, and service, he assigned to the Shudras.

Having distributed to the classes their respective functions and
occupations, the Lord then allotted to them abodes in other worlds for
their perfection. The world of Prajapati is declared to be the abode of
Brahmans practising rites; Indra's world that of Kshattriyas who do
not flee in battle; the world of the Maruts that of Vaishyas who fulfil
their duty; the world of the Gandharvas that of Shudras who abide in
the work of service.

So far the Vayu Purana, the Ancient Book of the Spirit. There
are two vital principles in this passage: the first is that, for each type
of character or race, there is an ideal task, a type of work which will
exactly fulfil that individual's need at that time and in that life, and
will give exactly the right development to the spiritual powers which
belong to that character; naturally, almost automatically, leading the
soul forward along the royal road of progress. In a polity which had
for centuries and even millenniums been stable, like that of ancient India,
it was held that, under the orderly action of the law of Karma, each
man and woman would be born into the class or caste which naturally
fitted that soul, the situation in life which that soul had worked its
way up to; thus, a Shudra who, faithful to "the work of service," had
completed, in one or many lives, the tasks belonging to that state,
and had learned its lessons and developed its powers, would, through
Karma, be reborn as a Vaishya, thus inheriting the lessons of the next
class, and entering into larger responsibilities. The faithful Vaishya
would, in the fulness of time, be reborn a Brahman, and thus inherit
the opportunity of study, of the practice of ritual, the whole rule of life
belonging to that caste. Finally would come birth into the highest, the
Kshattriya class, with the added responsibility of rule, with the obliga-
tion of war; so that the fullest exercise would be given to the spiritual
powers of initiative and intuition, this exercise being safeguarded by the
earlier and thoroughgoing training in service and the faithful use of

30 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

materials as a Shudra, in commerce and mutual exchange, together with
the care of living and growing things as a Vaishya, and in the austerity
and study of Brahmanhood. In a social and political age like ours, with
its innumerable confusions, the path of life is far more difficult. But
there is safety in the principle of duty, in that conscientious fulfilment
of "the duties of our state," on which Christian teachers lay such stress.
If we look upon our state of life as an opportunity to fulfil our duties,
to develop the spiritual powers of endurance, of fidelity, of self-sacrific-
ing devotion, we shall reap the fruits of such an ordered social polity
as the Vayu Purana describes.

It is interesting to find that the Vayu Purana, like all the ancient
books of India, lays the greatest stress upon just this moral attitude
towards the duties of our state, declaring that: All external rites are
fruitless for one who is inwardly debased, however energetically he may
perform them. A man who bestows even the whole of his substance
with a defiled heart will thereby acquire no merit — of which a good
disposition is the only cause.

The second vital principle in the passage we have quoted is that
contained in the verses which declare that, after death, the Kshattriya
goes to the heaven of Indra, the Brahman to the heaven of Prajapati, the
Vaishya to the world of the Maruts, the Shudra to the world of the
Gandharvas. This is once more a parable, a symbolic statement of the law
that the spiritual states attained, the planes of spiritual consciousness
reached, depend upon the activities of the will in life, upon the faithful
and self-sacrificing performance of duty ; the true duty being, in each case,
an expression of the spiritual needs, the spiritual stature, of each soul, at
each stage of its progress.

We therefore find that the right performance of duty is the back-
bone of spiritual life, the firm foundation of mystical development, of
spiritual consciousness. Without the faithful performance of duty, in
the spirit of devotion and self-sacrifice, all supposed states of spiritual
consciousness are delusions and highly dangerous delusions. They rep-
resent, not the true unfoldment of the spiritual man, with his larger
consciousness, but fatal by-paths leading to degradation and extinction.
So that the right performance of duty in the outer world is the only
doorway of entrance to the inner world ; and a wise consideration of
duty, of the true duties of each state of life, must form the first chapter
in every sound treatise on mysticism.

The principle underlying this is clear. The whole of evolution has
taken place in obedience to the pressure of spiritual forces from above ;
therefore the life of every organism, of every being, which is on the
royal road of progress, is, at each moment, an expression of spiritual
forces working through physical life. Only by the reception of these
spiritual forces and by complete correspondence with them, can right
life be maintained from moment to moment; only thus can right progress
be made.

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 31

Each stage of life means a larger endowment of consciousness,
a greater exercise of power, than that of the preceding stage. There-
fore it is imperative that this wider consciousness shall be developed
along the true spiritual lines; that the power, the will, shall be used in
perfect harmony with spiritual laws. And so we find that, for each
class, for each caste in the system described in the Vayu Purana,
duties are prescribed which will widen the consciousness and develop
the will in unison with spiritual law.

The most primitive and elementary revelation of the spiritual law
in the physical world is that which is contained in the nature and
properties of lifeless substances, of wood and stone, of brass and iron,
of silver and gold; therefore the handling of these things, the gaining
of practical mastery over them, as artisans, was prescribed as the duty
of the lowest class, the Shudra ; this, with the obligation of service,
the duty of obedience, which is the fundamental spiritual law, since only
by implicit obedience to law can life be maintained at any point even
for a moment.

The second revelation of spiritual law is the growth and develop-
ment of living things, of plants and animals, the law of life. So this
range of activities was prescribed for the second class, the Vaishyas,
as farmers and tenders of cattle. So complete is the revelation of
spiritual law in this world of growing things, that their activities were
made the basis of an admirable book, Natural Law in the Spiritual
World, which had been better named, Spiritual Law in the Natural
World. So rich and detailed is this revelation that Jesus drew many
of his parables of spiritual life from it: Consider the lilies; a sower
went forth to sow ; now learn a parable of the fig tree. . . .

Then, with Brahmanhood, came the study of spiritual life as
recorded in the older revelations, the ancient Sacred Books, — the revela-
tion of spiritual law through illuminated human consciousness ; this,
and the supervision of sacrifices, of acts done through devotion, in
obedience to spiritual commandments.

And lastly, with the attainment of the highest caste, the Kshat-
triya, came the exercise of authority and power and the supreme train-
ing of righteous war. C. J.

(To be continued.)

How shall we rest in God? By giving ourselves wholly to Him.
If you give yourself by halves, you cannot find full rest; there will ever
be a lurking disquiet in the half which is withheld. — Jean Nicolas Grou.

"THE HEARTS OF MEN"

THE Four were at dinner at a great club. Dissimilarities had been
accentuated by the passing years. Coke had become a notably
successful lawyer. His cynical wit made him welcome in the
cleverest circles of Club life. His major personal interests were
believed to be divided between his art collections and charity organiza-
tions. Few who knew him would admit that his brilliant agnosticism or
prosperous bachelorhood had any tinge of regret or desire. Seabury
was the Rector of a great Episcopal parish ; a leader on many philanthropic
lines ; a priest who had twice refused a Bishopric. Gracious was he, even
to suavity, yet men accepted his sincerity. Ryan, too, had taken Orders,
going to a seminary in Rome after graduating, and then putting himself
under a Rule that had curbed his physical nature as it had developed the
intellectual. More austere in appearance than Seabury, in social address
and diplomacy he was the latter's peer. Abrahams, still unkempt, and
with black eyes still glowering beneath black brows, was a Rabbi, a leader
of the Zionists and of all that was Hebrew and Orthodox.

How did such a group come together? What had such polar oppo-
sites in common, to explain their sitting in quartette, in even surface
intimacy? To understand their fore-gathering it is needful to go back
many years:

A quarter of a century and four years before ; four raw, green, and
half-sca.ed Freshman found themselves seated on a bench in the Secre-
tary's office of a great Eastern university. It was the close of the very last
day for registration. In the office no other students were left. Only a
busy clerk and a sad-eyed, youngish widow remained of the crowd that
had filled the office ; a crowd with constantly changing components, yet
with a note of sameness running through it ; only the four boys seemed
unmarked. Yet even they were alike in their shyness and ignorance.

At last the Secretary came out of his private office with two laughing
Juniors. He had almost passed through the outer door when his clerk
called: "Excuse me, Dr. Smith, but these Freshmen — who want
rooms."

The Professor turned abruptly. He looked half-despairingly at the
four lonely figures, who looked back at him in entire despair. Then he
looked at his watch and made an impatient little gesture. "Haven't you
boys any place you could go tonight and then see me in the morning?"
Four heads drooped. Before the answers could come the young Profes-
sor was obviously repentant of his own impatience. "All right," he said,
"I'll come back and see what we can do."

The widow leaned forward with a grim intentness that all but broke
through her self -repression and native reserve. The Professor's eyes
lightened and he put back into his pocket the watch he had been holding

THE HEARTS OF MEN 33

in his hand. "Let me see, Mrs. Pynetree, you say you can take in four.
Your prices are moderate. The committee has approved you. And you
haven't taken any in. Ah, what a happy circumstance for all of us ! Here
are four young gentlemen who know not where to hang their hats and
place their weary heads; here are you, ready to give them a gladsome
welcome, and, let us hope, not too uncomfortable quarters ; and here am
I enabled to keep a most delectable engagement. Miss Standish will
arrange things officially and I will see you young gentlemen whenever I
may be of service." With an airy wave of his hand, the Professor
departed.

So it was that the Four were thrown together, trudging off, bag-laden,
through the September heat, to Mrs. Pynetree's cottage. They trudged in
silence, for they did not even know one another's names. Only that each
had a certificate of admission and that Dr. Smith had sent them on to-
gether accounted for the grouping. Not one of them had a single friend
at the University. Each would be the sole representative of his school.
They had come unheralded. As they trudged along, each felt secretly that
he had come unwelcomed.

Yet for four years they roomed together. Inevitably they made
friends independently of one another, but nothing pried them apart. Some-
times they marvelled at this and would say that they wouldn't leave Mrs.
Pynetree in the lurch, with her little house off the student channels. Yet
sometimes in the conferences, which grew to be almost nightly, however
brief in duration, they would admit that they stayed together because they
wanted to be together. Yet, more often, even they doubted this. •

When they had graduated they had formally vowed to get together
often. As a matter of fact, even Coke and Seabury had met seldom. But
the twenty-fifth anniversary of their class had brought out pledges from
each to attend. Seabury, noting this, had arranged a private reunion of
the Four the night before their class should come together. So it was
that they were now sitting as Coke's guests.

Coke did know how to order a dinner. He and the Club chef con-
sidered that they had accomplished a great work of art. However
successful the dinner was in food effectiveness, it was otherwise a flat
failure. At first there had been sudden spurts of "Don't you remember,"
but the polite interest, so instantly manifested by the others, had seemed
to silence each oral entrant in turn. The dinner was a failure. Each
man was bored. Yet none felt intimate enough to admit it.

"Excuse me, Sir —

"Your car is here, Sir," announced a servant.

Even Coke started when the man reported to him. He had for-
gotten the plan, suggested by Seabury, who still retained a trace of his
boyish romanticism, that they should leave after an early dinner and spend
the night together in their old quarters, secured through the cooperation
of his oldest son, now closing his first year as a student at their old
college.

34 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

The ride was as silent as the latter part of the dinner. Yet even the
ride was cheerful in comparison with the meeting in Seabury's old room,
after they had placed their luggage and got into lounging attire.

Each seated man was staring into vacancy when Seabury got up and
went over to the fireplace. He placed his left elbow upon the mantel and
put a foot on the fender. The attitude was so familiar that the other
three looked up. The gesture with which he pulled his moustache was
new, but the eyes were unchanged. They were once more friendly.

"As my boy might say," began the Reverend Doctor, "this is a
frost!"

Four laughs broke out together. Coke got up and began walking
back and forth. "Why is it?" he asked with a suddenness of persistent
inquiry that was unlike the polished Clubman he had become.

"That's the second natural note," came in Ryan's deep tones, as he
leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head.

"You, too, look like old times," said the Rabbi, turning his chair and
putting his elbows on the table.

There was a moment's silence — kindly and intimate.

Then Seabury spoke out. "I have been thinking" — he began,
only to be interrupted by Coke's "Isn't that dangerous for a Rev. Doc ?"

"So do many think," said Seabury. "And others teach," went on
Coke, pointing a finger at Ryan, who laughed, as he said : "Same old
error, Puck, thinking you think."

"But if the Sea babe wants to exhibit his mental processes, why not
let him," suggested Abrahams.

"Yes, Scab, what were you thinking?"

The Rector grew more earnest in manner. "You boys know how
much we all looked forward to this and how disappointing it has been.
Let's be honest. This reunion is a flat failure. I feel as if I were at a
funeral, with only corpses present, and not even one mourner left to
praise the dead — "

"But what's the reason — there must be something more than the
years? We men certainly have more in common than those four dear,
dead boys?" Coke spoke with more human feeling than he had mani-
fested all evening.

"Puck, you've hit it — we haven't looked for what we have in
common — yet doing that is what pulled us together and kept us together
twenty-five years ago."

"What have we in common, save a memory that's outgrown?" said
Abrahams, twisting his gnarled and knotted fingers together in a tight
clasp. "Bigot, infidel, heretic and Jew — what have we in common?
Seabury, even your church cannot hold us four together."

"Thanks, you old Joshua, you are helping Puck to bring out my
thought. We four grown men are shyer than those poor little forlorn
Freshmen bunked together, willy nilly, by Dilettante Smith, the dear old
fellow. We looked and worked and hungered to find out where we were

THE HEARTS OF MEN 35

alike and human. We men stand apart, afraid of each other. We see
only our differences. Why can't we look below, forgetting externals."

"Externals — Scab — even your latitudinarianism must balk at calling
your faith a suit of clothes." Ryan's voice removed any sharpness from
his words, for an unspoken affection rang through it.

"We didn't notice our clothes then "

"No," spoke up Abrahams, "You fellows were always gentlemen that
way."

"We fellows — please — Rabbi," said Ryan, "You were and are one
of us."

"I am here, thanks be, but can this be real? Can we overlook the
truth and what does set us all apart?"

"That's what I was thinking about," said Seabury eagerly, "Let's
make a bargain. Let's sit down for a good old fashioned parley, as if we
were those boys, those first few days of meeting — seeking to find
wherein we agree. Let's try now that we meet as greater strangers to
find out where we are alike and may pull together."

The three others looked at him with interest stamped upon their faces
and looking out from their eyes. But there was silence until Coke spoke :

"But, my reverend friend, we were boys then, unknown to one
another, interesting in our mysteriousness. Now, do not our known
differences 'set us all apart/ as the Rabbi has said ?"

"Are we not all the more unknown and mysterious because of these
differences? I know the lives we try to lead; I know the good we each
are trying to do; I know we have something in common — what is it?
That's what I want to know ! Let us hunt for where we agree. Could
anything be more unknown and mysterious? Have we ever been more
lonely and more anxious for a friend than right now?"

Four boys, using the bodies of middle-aged men, began to talk
together — sometimes one monologued; sometimes it was a duet; some-
times all talked at once. All became interested in Seabury's quest ; and
joined in what Coke called "the search for a friend." His legal mind,
Seabury's eagerness, Ryan's diplomacy, Abrahams' concentration, were
called upon in changing turn to keep the discourse on the plane of agree-
ment ; on the problem of where they were really at one.

The hours passed. They passed unnoticed by the eager group of
lonely youngsters, seeking to find what they had in common. At last
they grew quiet in thought. Through the silence of the summer dawn
there came the crowing of a cock. Ryan sat up ; turned a strained and
startled face toward his comrades ; then lurched forward to bury his face
in his hands on the table, fairly sobbing as he prayed: "Blessed
Mother, help me. I have been a heretic." Abrahams arose and, lifting
up both hands, declaimed: "God of my fathers, forgive me, I have
forsaken Thee." Seabury, standing at the mantel, looked across at Coke
and hal f -whispered : "What am I — a Jew or a Romanist?" to which
Coke answered: "For God's sake, boys, what is the difference between
us? " G. MCCLEMM.

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF
LEMURIA

II

A FIRST LESSON IN THE LEMURIAN LANGUAGE

"^~TT^HE First Race," says H. P. Blavatsky, in The Secret Doctrine,
"was, in our sense, speechless, as it was devoid of mind on our
_^ plane. The Second Race had a 'sound-language,' to wit, chant-
like sounds composed of vowels alone. The Third Race devel-
oped in the beginning a kind of language which was only a slight improve-
ment on the various sounds in Nature. . . . When the law of evolu-
tion led the middle Third Race to reproduce their kind sexually, an act
which forced the creative gods, compelled by Karmic law, to incarnate in
mindless men, then only was speech developed. But even then it was no
better than a tentative effort. The whole human race was at that time of
'one language and of one lip.' Speech then developed, according to Occult
teaching, in the following order :

"Monosyllabic speech; that of the first approximately fully developed
human beings at the close of the Third Root-race, the 'golden-coloured,'
yellow-complexioned men, after their separation into sexes, and the full
awakening of their minds. Before that, they communicated through what
would now be called 'thought-transference.' . . . This monosyllabic
speech was the vowel parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic languages
mixed with hard consonants, still in use among the yellow races. . . .

"These linguistic characteristics developed into the agglutinative
languages. The latter were spoken by some Atlantean races, while other
parent stocks of the Fourth Race preserved the mother-language. And
as languages have their cyclic evolution, their childhood, purity, growth,
fall into matter, admixture with other languages, maturity, decay, and
finally death, so the primitive speech of the most civilized Atlanteans
. . . decayed and almost died out.

"The inflectional speech — the root of the Sanskrit, very erroneously
called 'the elder sister' of the Greek, instead of its mother — was the first
language (now the mystery tongue of the Initiates) of the Fifth Race."

We have already quoted the same author as saying that "the Poly-
nesians belong to the very earliest of surviving sub-races." We shall
now try to show how completely the Polynesian languages bear out the
above quotation as to the origin and development of speech.

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA 37

First a word as to the general growth of languages, the materials of
which they are made. Speech, in general, is a flow of breath from the
lungs, to which sound and tone are given by the vibration of the vocal
chords ; the change in position of the lips and the mouth giving the differ-
ing sounds which we call vowels. If speech went no further, we should
have the primal "vowel-language." But there are two further elements.
The first is a partial closing of the lips, or a partial, but incomplete, ap-
proach of the teeth, or of the tongue to various points along the palate,
thus causing, for the lips, the sounds of f and v ; for the teeth, the sounds
of s, of th and dh ; for the tongue, the sounds of 1 and r, (formed by the
tip of the tongue, partially, but not completely, stopping the vowel air-
stream ;) the sounds of kh and gh, when the root of the tongue comes
close to the palate. Thus are formed the semivowels or liquids, which
stand half-way between the vowels and the full consonants, or, as the
Sanskrit grammarians better call them, the "contacts." In Sanskrit, there
are five points in the mouth at which full contacts are formed : ( 1 ) the
throat or back of the mouth, where the sounds of k and g (hard) are
formed ; (2) the top of the mouth where, by a contact with the under-
side of the tip of the tongue, turned backwards, a hard t and d are formed,
which are nearly like the very hard t and d of the English language ; (3)
the true dentals, formed by pressing the tip of the tongue against the teeth,
like the soft t and d in Italian and other continental languages. The fact
that Englishmen, not noticing the difference, use their own hard t and d
when pronouncing continental languages, is one of the things which keep
them from "talking like the natives," who use the soft t and d. (4) a
blend between t and sh, with the tongue against the teeth, giving the sound
ch, with its corresponding sonant, j ; and (5) the lip-contact, forming the
labials, p and b. In Sanskrit, there are, for each of these five points of
contact, first, the surd sounds, like k, ch, t, p ; then the sonants, like g, j, d,
b; then the same sounds aspirated, or followed by an immediate out-
breathing, giving the sounds k-ha, g-ha, t-ha, d-ha, ch-ha, j-ha, p-ha, b-ha ;
and, finally, the nasals, formed by setting the organs of the mouth in posi-
tion for pronouncing each group and then sending forth the breath, not
through the mouth, but through the nose ; sounds something like this : nga,
for the throat ; nya, for the ch-sound ; the hard and soft na ; and, finally,
ma, for the lip-contact.

This pretty formidable battery of sounds represents the highest and
fullest development, that of the early Fifth Race. We have given it in
its completeness, as a basis of comparison for the very simple range of
sounds in the extremely early, and, therefore, comparatively undeveloped,
Polynesian languages, those of "the earliest surviving sub-races." And,
at the risk of appearing to bore even the most tolerant readers, we venture

38 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

to arrange these Sanskrit sounds in a little table, to be followed, presently,
by a similar table for the Polynesian tongues :

SANSKRIT CONSONANT AND SEMI-CONSONANT RANGE

ka

k-ha

ga

g-ha

nga

ha

(kha)

ta

t-ha

da

d-ha

na

ra

sha (hard)

ta

t-ha

da

d-ha

na

la

sa

cha

ch-ha

ja

j-ha

nya

ya

sha (soft)

pa

p-ha

ba

b-ha

ma

va

(fa)

(hard)
(soft)

Each of the above sounds (except the two in brackets) has a letter
to represent it in the Sanskrit alphabet, and, in that alphabet, the sounds
are arranged in their physiological order, pretty much as in this table ; first,
the throat sounds, then the sounds of the roof of the mouth, then the
sounds of the ridge of the palate, then the sounds of the teeth, then the
sounds of the lips. Thus a Sanskrit dictionary follows the natural order
of these sounds, as they are formed by the organs of speech, justifying the
idea that this highly scientific arrangement was reached by men who
fully understood the mysteries of sound, men who spoke the "mystery
tongue of the Initiates," as said in The Secret Doctrine. In contrast, our
own alphabet is absolutely unscientific, a mere jumble of sounds without
any order at all ; first, an open vowel, then a lip sound, then a dental
sibilant, then a dental surd, then another vowel, and so on. It is an
adaptation of the Greek alphabet, named from its two first letters, alpha-
beta ; this is, in its turn, an adaptation of the Semitic Phoenician or
Hebrew, where the two first letters are aleph ("an ox") and beth ("a
house") ; our capital A being an ancient picture of the head of an ox, now
turned upside down, while the second letter, B, is a conventionalized
house. In like manner, our G is the head of a camel, the Hebrew
gimel ; while our L is an ox-goad ; they are all blurred pictures, repre-
senting the initial sounds of the objects depicted.

We now come back, duly furnished with bases of comparison,
to the Polynesian languages, with their very early, very slightly
de' eloped, range of sounds.

There are, first, the vowels which, as we shall see, play a very
great part in Polynesian, a survival of the earlier all-vowel language.
Next, there are the semi-vowels or breathings of the throat and lips,
the sounds of ha and wha, va or fa, and the liquids, r and 1. Then
there are three contacts or full consonants : that of the throat, or ka ;
that of the teeth, or ta ; that of the lips, or pa. Throughout the whole
Polynesian regions, of enormous extent, there are (with almost no
exceptions) the surd sounds only, never the sonants ; that is, we find
the sounds ka, ta, pa ; but not the sounds ga, da, ba. Finally, there
is a nasal for each of the three contacts, namely, nga, na, and ma.
To show how undeveloped this sound range is, we shall arrange the

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA 39

Polynesian sounds in the same way as we arranged the very highly
developed sounds of Sanskrit:

POLYNESIAN CONSONANT AND SEMI-CONSONANT RANGE
ka nga ha
ta na la (or) ra
pa ma wa (or) wha (or) fa

And that is all; only nine contacts, instead of the thirty-three of
Sanskrit.

It seems, then, that the beginning was made with streams of vowel-
sound only; that the half-contacts or semi-vowels, breathings and liquids
and nasals, were then developed ; that the full contacts came last, begin-
ning, perhaps, with the lip-contact, which is the easiest and simplest to
make; the contacts of the teeth and throat, the sounds of ta and ka,
coming later. Further, that all the surds were developed first, and then
only later the sonants; the aspirated surds and sonants, as in Sanskrit,
coming last of all.

This gradual development, from pure vowel sounds, through breath-
ings and semi-vowels, to full contacts or consonants, seems to record
exactly that fall into matter described in The Secret Doctrine; it seems to
have gone on parallel with the complete materialization, externalization
and development of the fully formed physical man, remaining as an exact
record and register of that development. And it seems probable that, if
we could get the exact range of consonants natural to each race or sub-
race, we could, using that range of sounds as an index, place the races in
their correct order in the historical plan of development ; that we could
grade all the races by this index alone. So marvellous a thing is language,
so mysterious and magical is sound.

We come, at length, to the Polynesian vowels, the oldest element of
language and the most potent. It is curious and significant that, in the
Polynesian tongues, the vowels still retain their primitive spiritual value ;
many of them, simply, or united, form the divine names, the names of the
Gods. Thus, A means God ; Ao is heaven, the state of the blessed ; ao, as
a verb, means, to regard with reverence ; as a noun, ao means authority ;
aoao means supreme, or, to be supreme ; aio means peace, quietude ; lo is
the mystery God, the Supreme Being who, according to the Polynesian
belief, is everywhere potent, without form, having no house ; they will not
even name that God in a house or among men, but first withdraw to the
wilderness, "where nature is unpolluted." lo also means the soul, life,
power, mental energy. The vowel O alone means space, capacity, the
ability to be contained; and, more familiarly, an enclosure, a garden.
U means that which is fixed or firm, not easily to be shaken or moved.

To come next to words of one or more vowels, genuine survivals of
the primal vowel language; we shall be surprised at their great variety
and expressiveness in Polynesian.

Besides meaning God, the vowel a is also used as an article, as a

40 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

prefix to proper names, as a preposition meaning to, or belonging to ; as
an interjection. Aia means to have authority over, as ao means to reign.
Ae is used to signify agreement, meaning yes, in answer to an affirmative
question, and meaning no in answer to a negative question. The pure
vowel word aeaea, accented on the second and fourth vowels, means to
rise to the surface like a bubble ; aeaea means to pant, to be out of breath,
to breathe hard ; the fundamental meaning evidently being breath, or,
more metaphysically, spirit. Ai means to give life, while aia means an
abode, a place where one lives ; ai is also an interjection of surprise. Ao,
besides meaning personified Light, as a divinity, signifies also daylight,
daytime, dawn; as a verb, ao means to gather, to collect; aoa means to
bark like a dog, while aoaoa is the indistinct noise made by persons at a
distance ; these two last belong to the category of Nature sounds, spoken
of in The Secret Doctrine. Au means smoke, the current of a stream,
and, more materially, a sharp thorn or needle ; auau means to pick out,
as thorns or fish-bones are picked out ; au further means firm, stable, sure,
and, as an exclamation, exactly what "sure" means in American. Also, as
an imitative sound, au signifies a dog's bark, or, as a verb, to bark. Aua
is the name of a small fish. Aua also means "I know not (and care not) !"
Aua has the further meaning of far on, at a distance, while auau has
meanings as different as to lift, and a basket of seed potatoes ; perhaps the
meaning shades thus : to lift, to gather together, to gather in a basket, and
so on. Aue is an exclamation of sorrow, like alas ! It further means a
clamor, a noise of woe.

We have, therefore, of pure vowel words beginning with a, the
following : A, ae, ai, ao, au ; aeae, aeaea ; aia ; aoao, aoaoa ; aua, auau, aue.
This is already a fair illustration of the primal vowel language.

E is used as a sign of the future tense ; as a preposition, it means by ;
it is used as the sign of the vocative case. Ea is an exclamation of sur-
prise ; it further means to rise above water, and, by a development of the
meaning, to return home, as war captives return; and thence liberty,
escape ; while eaea means, to escape repeatedly. Starting from the mean-
ing, to rise, eaea comes to mean exalted, honourable. The beautiful word
eaoia, each letter being distinctly pronounced, means but. Ei is an inter-
jeciion, used at the ends of lines in poetry; while eia means a current or
tide. Eo is said to mean a flat rock, but seems not to be generally used.

The vowel i is used to form indefinite past tenses, and to connect a
verb with its object ; it is also used as a sign of the accusative case, or with
the meaning of to. Accented, i means to ferment; ii has the meaning of
fermented, sour, mouldy ; ia means he, she or it ; with the additional mean-
ings of that, the aforesaid ; ia also means a current or stream, while iaua
means hold ! stay !

The vowel o, besides meaning space, an enclosure, something
contained, comes to mean provision for a journey, a present, and, as a
verb, to penetrate, to go deep, to dig a hole ; then to husk a cocoanut, to
pierce with any sharp instrument. As a possessive pronoun, it means

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA 41

your, belonging to; it is also an exclamation, in answer to a call. Oi
means to shake, to shudder, with an intensive oioi, to be greatly agitated ;
oioi then comes to mean rapid, swiftly, quickly ; to move. Oi, accented on
the second syllable, means to shout; oioi is also the name of a bird and
of a plant. Oa, in Hawaiian, means a board, a rafter ; while oaoa means
split or cleft, like a tree cut into planks. Ou means you, or your ; oue is a
kind of flax ; while ouou means a few, and further, thin, feeble.

U, as we saw, means something firm or fixed ; and then, to reach the
land, to touch, as a boat or ship on the rocks, to come face to face, to face
danger, to run up against anything, to prevail, to conquer. Ua is the back-
bone, uaua is a sinew, a vein, an artery, with the more abstract meanings,
courage, firmness, resolution, a brave man. Backbone has just the same
secondary meanings with us. Ua means rain, to rain, while ue means to
weep. Ua as an adverb means when; it is also used as a particle
of expostulation. Ue, besides meaning the fourth day of the moon's age,
signifies to shake, to tremble, while ueue means to stimulate, to incite ; uei
means to try to set going ; ueue means to call people to war. Ui means to
ask, to inquire ; an invitation ; uiui means to ask questions repeatedly.

When in addition to the five vowels, we take the simple breathing ha,
or the slightly more concrete, but still open wa and wha, we can multiply
our vocabulary many times. Thus, aeha, aewa, ahau, ahe, ahea, aheahea,
ahi, ahiahi, aho, ahu, ahuahua, ahua, awa, awawa, awe, aweawe, awha,
awhe, awheawhe, awheo, awhi, awhiwhiwhi, awhio, awhiowhio, and so on
for the other vowels.

Then come the liquids, 1 and r ; then the nasals ; and, finally, the full
contacts or consonants.

It will be noted that, in many cases, an intensive is formed by
doubling the original word ; awhe, for example, means to gather in a heap ;
awheawhe means to set to work with many persons ; awhio means to wind
about, while awhiowhio means a whirlwind. This is the simplest form
of agglutination, the "gluing together" of words, spoken of, in The Secret
Doctrine, as characteristic of the second period of speech. Here is a
pretty example of agglutination, from Samoan: lagi means sky; lalolagi
means under the sky; lelalolagi means the earth; fa'a lelalolagi
means earthly. If one repeats these words in series, lagi-lalolagi-lelalola-
gi-fa'alelalolagi, one gets an effect that is distinctly Lemurian ; and not in
fancy only, but in reality; the words have actually survived since
Lernurian times.

But there is a further evidence that, in the Polynesian tongues, we
have the survival of a far older all-vowel tongue — the miocene survival of
an eocene speech, as one writer says. The word kanaka has been used very
widely to mean a native of the Hawaiian islands, or indeed of the islands
in general ; it really means a man, a human being, in the Hawaiian tongue.
The word consists of a hard contact, a nasal and another hard contact, each
followed by the vowel a. But, at the other end of Polynesia, the word is
no longer kanaka but tangata ; thus Tangata-maori means a native of New

42 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Zealand, literally "an indigenous man," or, as we say, a Maori. Here again,
the word consists of a hard contact, a nasal and a hard contact, each fol-
lowed by the vowel a ; but, while the three vowels remain the same, the con-
tacts and nasals are altered, interchanged. The Hawaiian form of the word
has the throat contact k ; the dental nasal n, the throat contact k, with the
three a's ; the New Zealand word has the dental contact, the throat nasal,
the dental contact, with the three a's. It is evident that the three a's are the
essential part, the root of the word, the old and original basis, while the
contacts or consonants were filled in later, and filled in differently, at dif-
ferent parts of Lemuria. In Samoan, the tongue of the group of islands
which lie halfway between these extremes, and about two thousand miles
from either end, the word is tagata, the nasal being softened to a sonant,
a sound which is not found in the original range of Polynesian contacts;
in Tahiti, a thousand miles south-east of Samoa, the central nasal is
dropped altogether, or has never been added, and the word is ta-ata. In
Moriori, it becomes rangata. In Fiji it is tamata. In Vanikoro it is rana-
ka. Thus we get the series of forms : Ta-ata, tagata, tangata, rangata,
ranaka, kanaka ; the vowels being the essential thing, while the consonants
are put in, and variously put in, to give the word more substance. The
same thing may be illustrated by another well known word : in Mangaian,
aroa means love, or beloved ; in Maori it is aroha ; in Samoan it is alofa ;
in Hawaiian it is aloha ; showing the substitution, in the one case, of one
liquid for another; in the other, of one breathing for another. In the
same way, atarangi, a shadow, in Maori, becomes akalani in Hawaiian ;
ata-ani in Marquesan. Kaha, a rope, in Maori, becomes aha in Tahiti, 'afa
in Samoa, kaa in Mangaian, kafa in Tongan. So the Samoan word lagi,
meaning sky, which we have already quoted, is in Maori rangi ; in Man-
garevan it is ragi ; in Tahitian it is rai ; in Hawaiian it is lani ; in Motu it
is lai. So we get the series, rangi, rani, rai, lai, lani, lagi ; showing, as
before, that the vowel-combination is the essential element, the real root
of the word, the survival from the all- vowel period.

Two things in this baby-talk of mankind may have seemed very fam-
iliar, even to those who know nothing of Polynesian : first, this substitu-
tion of one consonant for another; second, the doubling of syllables or
words, or even their repetition several times running. The truth is, that
both these linguistic pecularities survive among the small early-Third Race
people who are continually arriving in our midst, and whom we prosaically
call babies, quite overlooking the fact that, in a great many things, they
are a genuine apparition of the long gone sub-races. For have they not
the exact character of the sexless, mindless sub-races, not fully mastering
their material bodies, not yet inhabited by manas? Do they not express
themselves in streams of vowel speech, before they come to the semi-
vowels and liquids, and, finally, the hard contacts or consonants ? And do
they not indulge in the trick of reduplication or repetition, saying, with
entire content, such words as papapapa, or mamamama, or tatatata, which
their progenitors quite unwarrantably take to themselves? And do they

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA 43

not, often to their fourth or fifth year, mix up the consonants just as do
the recognized Lemurians, the peoples of the Polynesian islands, generally
using ta for ka, just as the Maori says tangata for kanaka?

This is but one of many illustrations of the law of reversion or sur-
vival, in accordance with which the individual, in the earlier stages of his
career, reverts to the characteristics of past periods and races, nay, even
of past Rounds. So there are, all around us, opportunities for studying
the most ancient Lemurian speech. We need not go to the South Seas to
hear it. All babies talk it ; all babies, up to a certain age, talk the same
language, and that language is a reversion to the speech of the earliest
races, long before complete humanity had been attained.

So, from our survey of the Highlands of Lemuria, we get these
results : Over this vast space of islands dotted amid the ocean, a space
from twelve to fifteen millions of square miles, or equal to a third or a
fourth of the land surface of the globe, the speech is singularly uniform
even though the island tribes that talk it have been separated from each
other for long ages. And everywhere, with the sameness of speech, there
are the same large, fundamental ideas, the same world-concepts, the same
divinities, the same ancient traditions of the early world. Without doubt,
we are in presence of a once united, though now endlessly subdivided
people, a common culture, a common historical or prehistoric past.

And, at the basis of this vastly extended speech, there is an identity
of metaphysical or spiritual meaning. The vowels, which are its dominant
element, have large, abstract ideas attached to them or, rather, evidently
inherent in them. They stand for heaven, the sky, the soul, life, breath,
space; the great, formless forces and powers that are the root of all
things. And, even after the few, simple consonants or contacts were
developed, the words remained essentially vowel-words; the vowel part
of them is uniform and unchanging, over the whole vast area, while the
hard contacts or consonants are variously filled in, as gutturals in one part
of the Lemurian area, as dentals in another, but, according to an evident
phonetic system, by no means haphazard.

It is interesting that Dana, who wrote an admirable account of the
early days, and of a cruise to the Pacific coast nearly a hundred years
ago, records that a group of Kanakas, whom he found at San Diego, had
a series of very ancient religious chants, which were composed of vowels
only, as though the older speech, before the formation of consonants, had
been preserved as a mystery tongue. It is interesting also that, in the
older Upanishads, there is a tradition which accords closely with the his-
torical evolution of the Polynesian languages; the vowels, we are told,
belong to the gods, to the heavenly world ; the breathings and semi-vowels
belong to the mid-world ; the consonants belong to the material world, the
world of death. Here again is the tradition of a fall into matter, for the
speech of mankind as well as for man himself.

C.J.
(To be continued}

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME

THE CAUSES AND CONDUCT OF THE WAR
INTRODUCTION

A" IERICA has seemed so secure from invasion for so long, that a
habit of regarding the affairs of other continents as "no concern
of ours" has resulted, which in its turn has discouraged study
of world conditions and of international politics. We have become
provincial.

The consequence is that relatively few Americans, even today, could
explain the causes of the present world-war; while if the United States
is to do its part with concentrated vigor and intelligence, not only during
the war, but particularly when the time comes to discuss terms of peace
— it is of vital importance that in this country as elsewhere, there shall be
wide-spread understanding of the factors involved. What all of us
must desire is, not only a peace based upon justice, but a peace based
upon conditions which will eliminate, so far as possible, the causes which
made the present war possible.

The large majority of Americans are now keenly alive to the need
for right understanding and are able to approach the problem without
prejudice. But there are those whose love of peace still makes it difficult
for them to see justification for any war, while others, of German birth
or origin, are unable to reconcile loyalty to their blood-ties with loyalty
to America and the Allied cause.

In the following pages, after dealing with the Causes and Conduct
of the war, it will be shown that the more ardently we love peace, the
more complete must be our approval of America's participation in the
war, and that the greater the loyalty of a German-American to his blood-
ties, the more earnestly he must desire that Germany shall learn, once
for all, that "God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap."

Properly speaking, no one has any right to adopt a new citizenship,
and to swear allegiance to the country of his adoption, unless he abandons
completely all sense of allegiance to the land of his birth. The fact is,
however, that a great many people became citizens of the United States
during times of peace and without considering the possibility that Ameri-
ca might some day be at war with their native land. The resulting posi-
tion is a false one.

Yet, in almost any circumstances, it would be strange if people of
German birth or of German ancestry were not inclined to favor their own
race. Blood is thicker than water. It does not speak well for those who
think otherwise.

Almost inevitably, therefore, when this great war first broke out,

44

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 45

the majority of German- Americans believed that Germany was probably
in the right, and wanted her to prove victorious against France and
England and Russia. Naturally, also, they must have wished the United
States to side with Germany, and must have done what they could to
influence public opinion on Germany's behalf.

Imagine your attitude when suddenly told that your brother has
committed some frightful crime. You declare it impossible. You are
simply unable to believe it. If your brother has been arrested, the
obvious thing to do is to try at once to obtain his release; to take his
part to the uttermost against those who have falsely accused him. Your
brother must of necessity be innocent. Those who accuse him are his
enemies and yours.

Disinterested acquaintances may for years have noticed evidences
in him of increasing moral perversity. They may have said among
themselves that someday there would surely be an outbreak. But you,
his brother — biased in his favor — may have made light of his "peculiar-
ities ;" may have shared the more innocent of them with him. Of bestial
outrage and crime — No, you would never believe him guilty of that !

Suppose, then, that you go to his rescue, taking up the cudgels on
his behalf, confident of his innocence.

Intelligently to defend him you must listen to the charges brought
against him; you must examine the witnesses, and you must obtain
evidence as to what he said and did prior to the event. After you have
done this you will be in a position to decide how you can best serve your
brother, — how you can most truly be loyal to him. In other words, even
the German-American who still has strong Pro-German bias, should not
only be willing but anxious to ascertain the facts and to know as much
as anybody concerning the causes and conduct of the war. Every peace-
lover, also, must desire to change conditions which have proved provo-
cative of war, and is obliged, therefore, like a wise physician, to make
a careful study of the factors, both inner and outer, which have tended
to upset that "balanced and harmonious action and inter-action of all
the parts of the body" which we call health — or peace.

THE CAUSES OF THE WAR

Of what is Germany accused? What has been the nature of her
"outbreak" ?

The President of the United States, after nearly three years of
observation, declared (April 2, 1917) that Germany had thrown "to the
winds all scruples of humanity or of respect for the understandings
that were supposed to underlie the intercourse of the world;" that she
was conducting "a war against all nations" by "the wanton and wholesale
destruction of the lives of non-combatants, men, women and children;"
that "the wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no common

46 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life," and that, finally, the
United States was compelled to align itself against "an irresponsible
government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and
of right and is running amuck."

More specifically, Germany stands accused : —

(a) Of having plotted a ruthless war of conquest as a preliminary
step toward world domination ; and of having begun operations by
violating the neutrality of Belgium which she herself was pledged to
respect and to enforce;

(b) of having outraged every law of God and man in her method of
warfare, in all the territory she occupied, and in all her military
operations both on sea and land ;

(c) of being an outlaw among the nations, by reason of these
crimes and because she continues to glory in them.

It is further declared by her accusers that not until a majority of
her own people insist that those who are responsible for these crimes
and outrages be brought to fair trial, and not until the guilty be adequately
punished, can Germany retrieve her outlawry and be admitted once
more to the comity of nations.

Germany is accused of having plotted a ruthless war of conquest
as a preliminary step toward world domination ; and of having begun
operations by violating the neutrality of Belgium which she herself
was pledged to respect and to enforce.

Under this first head it is essential to read the following:
The Pangerman Plot Unmasked, Berlin's formidable Peace-trap
of 'The Drawn War' by Andre Cheradame, published by Scribner, New
York, 1917, at $1.25.

In the case of the criminal brother, it was suggested that disinter-
ested acquaintances may for years have noticed evidences of his increasing
moral perversity, and may have foretold a serious and perhaps calamitous
outbreak.

Anyone who visited Germany some fifteen years ago, and who
stayed there long enough to renew acquaintance with the German people,
must have been impressed by the popularity of Nietzsche. People who
had not read a line of his writings, pretended to admire him and quite
genuinely approved of such extracts as they heard quoted. Nietzsche
was the fashion. More than that, his self-idolatry was the fashion.
German novels were nauseous with sex self-assertion. Women novelists
were as bad and in some cases worse than the men. The German people
had become Ego-maniacs. They dreamed of themselves as Super-men.
In their personal relations they tried to live as Super-men. Their idea
of a hero, a held, was a man who strode ruthlessly over obstacles — over
any kind of an obstacle, so long as he strode, and so long as he was
ruthless. He had to be ruthless with women (the women wanted him

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 47

to be ruthless). Compassion, pity, as Nietzsche said, must have no place
in his Table of Values: they were the characteristics of slaves. The
German, being a Super-man, must be hard (Werke, vi, p. 312).

In those days it sounded like a joke. Very few foreigners took
the situation seriously. It was well known that Berlin had become the
most licentious city in Europe, and that German licentiousness was
appallingly crude and vulgar. It was well known that illegitimacy had
increased to an amazing extent, not only in the cities but in the country
also. But the immorality of a nation seemed, to most people, to have
no connection with world politics. It was not understood that such
immorality was an expression of self-assertion — of the worship of self
and of ruthlessness — and that there was the closest possible connection
between the pseudo-philosophic talk of the "intellectuals;" the student
Super-man with his shop-girl mistress and his duelling, and the inter-
national self-assertion of the Pan-Germans : "Germans alone will govern ;
they alone will exercise political rights; . . . they alone will have
the right to become land owners. . . . However, they will condescend
so far as to delegate inferior tasks to foreign subjects subservient to
Germany" (Grossdeutschland und Mitteleuropa um das Jahr 1950, pub-
lished under the auspices of the Alldeutscher Verband, or Pan-German
League, Berlin, 1895 ; p. 48. Quoted by Cheradame, p. 4.)

That statement, fathered as it was by the most powerful of German
Leagues in 1895, would have impressed anyone but a German as simply
insane. If an American had said it of Americans, an Englishman of
Englishmen, a Frenchman of Frenchmen, — they would have been greeted
by roars of laughter from their own people. But Germans who did not
agree with it, argued about it as Americans might argue the pros and
cons of Free Trade : as a possibility to be considered, even if rejected.

Only a nation of Ego-maniacs could have desired a world in their
own image. Attainable or not, the Englishman, the Frenchman, the
American, would have repudiated such a prospect for his own nation
as introducing an intolerable monotony ! For a man to admire his own
image to the point of willing and working to force all others into it, is not
merely lunatic, but is a lunacy distinctly dangerous to his neighbors.

Yet, because most people take us at our own valuation, the weak-
minded of other nations were immensely impressed by Germany's self-
satisfaction. Universities in particular were anxious to discover how
the thing was done, that they too might acquire the dogmatic spirit of
Kultur and escape from their own less imposing fallibilty. German
science, German music, German theology, German metaphysics, German
sociology (the economic interpretation of history, for instance), — even
German art and German philology — imposed themselves by sheer impu-
dence of self-assertion, or by their overwhelming ponderousness, and
were accepted with a respect utterly beyond their intrinsic merits. Such
lack of discrimination and of resistance in other nations, naturally reacted
unfavorably upon Germany, tending to reinforce her constantly increas-

48 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

ing egotism. In one sense and to a limited extent, her deep contempt for
other nations was as much the fault of their weakness as of her conceit.

"War must leave nothing to the vanquished except eyes to weep over
their ill-luck (ungluck}. Moderateness (bescheidenheit) would be for us
foolishness," wrote Otto Richard Tannenberg, in 1911 (Grossdeutschland,
die Arbeit des 20 ten Jahrhnnderts, Leipzig; p. 237).

Such a phrase was regarded by Germans as heroic, as grandiose, as
German ! And German it certainly was.

It was no new development. Long before the time of Nietzsche,
there had been innumerable indications of the same obsession (see Prus-
siens d'Hier et de Tou jours, by G. Lenotre; published by Perrin, Paris).

No greater mistake could be made than to attribute to the German
Emperor the sole, or even the chief responsibility for the madness of
his people. He was a victim of the same disease: he also was an Ego-
maniac; he also believed in ruthlessness. But he was and is typically
German. He and Tannenberg and Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Bulow and the
student Super-man, are but branches of the same tree. The Emperor's
speech to his troops at Bremerhaven, on July 27, 1900, before their
departure for China, was symptomatic and in no sense causal. "The
Chinese," he said, "have trampled on international law. . . . Remem-
ber when you meet the foe, that quarter will not be given, and that
prisoners will not be taken. Wield your weapons so that for a thousand
years to come no Chinaman will dare to look askance at a German.
Pave the way once for all for civilization" ( !).

There was that other speech by the Emperor, at Wilhelmshaven
in March, 1898: "For where the German eagle has taken possession and
has implanted his talons in a land, that land is German and will remain
German" (see Germany's War Mania, pp. 67, 75; published by Dodd,
Mead and Co., New York).

There was the Emperor's motto which he wrote in the "golden
book" of the Munich town-hall: "Suprema lex regis voluntas estol"
("May the King's will be the supreme law!") It was the German spirit,
the German attitude — not peculiar to William, but the assertion by
Germany to herself and to the world that she was a law unto herself:
the spirit of the gilded anarchist whom Nietzsche had labelled Super-
man.

And, again, it was not primarily or chiefly the Emperor. German
scientists and philosophers for years past have instilled into the German
mind that, as the anthropologist, Woltmann, said, — "the German is the
superior type of the species homo sapiens, from the physical as well as
the intellectual point of view." Wirth declared that "the world owes its
civilization to Germany alone" and that "the time is near when the earth
must inevitably be conquered by the Germans." Haeckel, the philosopher,
said in a lecture before the Geographical Society of Jena, in 1905, that
"the work of the German people to assure and develop civilization, gives
it the right to occupy the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia,

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 49

and to exclude from these countries the races actually occupying them
which are powerless and incapable."

The Emperor was at one with them ; neither leader nor led. "It is
to the empire of the world that the German genius aspires," he said
at Aix-la-Chapelle, on June 20, 1902. (The New Map of Europe, by
H. A. Gibbons; pp. 29, 31, 62, 151. A suggestive book, marred by
undue straining after neutrality).

The Crown Prince contributed his quota in ways by no means
discreet but none the less significant. He made speeches and wrote
Prefaces, many of which are given in the book already referred to, —
Germany's War Mania. But he also talked, and Ian Malcolm, a well-
known and highly respected member of the British Parliament, who had
in earlier years been attached to the Embassy in Berlin, records in his
War Pictures behind the Lines (Dutton) a conversation he had with the
Crown Prince in January, 1914.

It is worth quoting at length, if only for the light it throws on
the claims of present German apologists that a peace-loving Fatherland
was compelled to take up arms against the intrigues of her enemies.

"Crown Prince. 'After all, you English people ought to be better
friends with Germany than you are.'

"I. M. 'Sir, we are always ready to be friends as you know, but
to all of our overtures your Chancellor replies with an invariable snub.'

"Crown Prince. 'How can we trust you whilst you are allied with
such people as the French or the Russians? You have nothing really
in common with them, and you have nearly everything in common with
us. Together we could divide Europe and keep the peace of the world
for ever.'

"I. M. 'But how would you propose to do that ; given our existing
treaties, how could we break them in order to be better friends with
you?'

"Crown Prince. 'You could shut your eyes and let us take the
French Colonies first of all. We want them.'

. . . The interview closed by my making the trite remark that
now-a-days nobody wanted war, which injured victors and vanquished
in like degree ; to which the Crown Prince vigorously replied :

" 'I beg your pardon ; I want war. I want to have a smack at those
French swine as soon as ever I can.' "

And the Crown Prince, because of his known sentiments, was the
most popular man in Germany. As Ian Malcolm says, he was "the
object of constant demonstrations of popular affection" (pp. 2-4).

It would have been better for the world if disinterested acquaint-
ances had taken such evidences of increasing moral perversity with
greater seriousness. Paradoxically, the danger was so overwhelming
and so immediate that it was incredible. But the incredible happened,
and the question today is whether America, in her selfish desire to

50 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

stand aloof, did not wake up to her danger too late to help save the
world from irretrievable disaster.

Germany was to be made the center of a world system. The
program was simple enough. Diplomatic Germany proclaimed part of
it to the world, while pretending that that part of it was to be carried
out by peaceful means. It was known as the Mitteleuropa doctrine, or
as the Pan-German program.

Outside the German Foreign Office, there was very little concealment
of what the plan really involved. Thus, in 1898, at Manilla, there had
been friction, as everyone knows, between Admiral Dewey and Rear-
Admiral von Goetzen, an intimate friend of the Kaiser. In the course of
a conversation the German Admiral spoke freely about the future,
although aware, as he said, that no one would believe him at that time.
"About fifteen years from now," he declared, "my country will start her
great war. She will be in Paris about two months after the commence-
ment of hostilities. Her move on Paris will be but a step to her real
object — the crushing of England. Everything will move like clockwork.
We will be prepared and others will not be prepared." Then he added :
"Some months after we finish our work in Europe, we will take New
York, and probably Washington, and hold them for some time. We will
put your country in its place, with reference to Germany. We do not
propose to take any of your territory (?), but we do intend to take a
billion or so of your dollars from New York and other places. The
Monroe Doctrine will be taken charge of by us, as we will then have to
put you in your place, and we will take charge of South America, as far

as we wish to Don't forget this, and about fifteen years

from now remember it, and it will interest you" (Naval and Military
Record, No. 33, vol. LII, p. 578).

The particulars of the program have been formulated repeatedly
from 1895 to the present day, not only by the Pan-German League, but
in whole or in part by the most powerful associations in Germany, such
as those which presented to the German Imperial Chancellor, with his
connivance, on May 20, 1915, the Memorial from which the quotations
immediately following are taken. These associations included the League
of Agriculturists, the League of German Peasants, the Provisional
Association of Christian German Peasants, the Central German Manu-
facturers' Union, the League of Manufacturers, and the Middle-Class
Union of the Empire (Le Temps of Paris, August 12, 1915).

Because Germany, although sufficiently supplied, for commercial pur-
poses, with coal and iron, is not rich enough in either of them, without
large additional resources, to be able to carry on a great war against such
a country as the United States, the German plan included, to begin with :

In the west, the seizure of Belgium and its absolute control "by
putting into German hands the properties and the economic undertakings
which are of vital importance for dominating the country" ; the seizure
of Dunkirk, Calais and the French coast as far as the Somme — "which

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 51

will give us an outlet to the Atlantic Ocean" — with the iron districts of
Briey, the coal districts of the departments of the Nord and of the Pas de
Calais, and the fortresses of Verdun, Belfort and the western buttresses
of the Vosges.

In the east, in order to "reinforce the agricultural basis of our
national economy," and so as "to add largely to the number of our people
who are capable of bearing arms," it will be "necessary to take from
Russia" a "considerable extension of the frontiers of the (German) Em-
pire and of Prussia" by "the annexation of at least certain parts of the
Baltic Provinces and of territories situated to the south."

In the south, the seizure or, preferably, the absorption of Austria-
Hungary, the Balkan States and the Ottoman Empire, so as to form
an unbroken block of territory stretching from the North Sea to the
Persian Gulf, from Hamburg to Bagdad, including control of the
Dardanelles, which would greatly facilitate the economic exploitation by
Germany of Russia.

Through Turkey, Germany was to exercise suzerainty over the
entire Mohammedan world. She was to acquire possession of the better
part of China, and of the French, Belgian, Dutch and Portuguese
Colonies, except such parts of these as it might be necessary to give to
England as a sop, until England's turn came to be conquered.

America was to be dealt with later, although as early as 1900, German
maps were published showing large sections of South America as belong-
ing to the German Empire (see Cheradame, pp. 105, 194-195).

A "Great Germany" — to include Holland, Belgium, Switzerland,
Austria, parts of France and parts of Russia — with the vast dependencies
outlined in the preceding paragraphs: this, said Tannenberg in 1911, "is
the goal of the work of the German people in the 20th Century" (ist das
Ziel der Arbeit des deutschen Volkes im Zivanzigsten Jahrhundert; loc.
cit.,p. 267).

It was certainly an ambitious program; but it would be folly to
underestimate the organized intelligence and zeal with which it was
supported. Germans in every part of the world, from the Emperor to
the humblest workman, became spies and conspirators on behalf of this
interpretation of Deutschland uber alles.

Lord Cromer — one of the most experienced and conservative of
statesmen — declared in his Introduction to Cheradame's Pan-German
Plot Unmasked: "That this project has for a long while past been in
course of preparation by the Kaiser and his megalomaniac advisers,
cannot for a moment be doubted. When, in November, 1898, William
II pronounced his famous speech at Damascus, in which he stated that
all the three hundred millions of Mohammedans in the world could rely
upon him as their true friend, the world was inclined to regard the utter-
ance as mere rhodomontade. It was nothing of the sort. It involved
the declaration of a definite and far-reaching policy, the execution of

52

THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

which was delayed until a favorable moment occurred and, notably, until
the Kiel Canal was completed."

The more conservative Germans, such as Friedrich Naumann,
thought it would be a mistake to include Holland and Switzerland "in
our scheme from the outset as fixed quantities, whilst actually they still
have a breathing space before making their decision" (Mitt el-Euro pa,
by Friedrich Naumann, Member of the Reichstag; translation published
by Knopf, New York; p. 10).

Practically without exception, however, all Germans agreed that
as soon as possible the German Empire must extend solidly to the
Persian Gulf.

This basic part of the program alone meant that 127 millions of

GERMANY S PROPOSED FOUNDATION FOR HER NEXT WAR

The minimum contemplated is shown in dark shading. Lighter shading
shows gains in East and West.

non-Germans could be used by the 77 millions of Germans for military and
industrial purposes. If military mobilization were applied to fourteen
per cent of the population, it meant that the Hohenzollerns would have
an army of 21 millions of soldiers at their disposal. It meant also, of
course, the monopoly of several millions of square miles of territory
for economic exploitation ; the possession of strategical points of the
greatest importance (including the Dardanelles), and, above all, the
power thereafter to dictate to East and West the terms on which other
nations might exist (see Cheradame, passim}.

Naturally, there were difficulties in the way which the Germans
themselves were the first to recognize.

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 53

The difficulty which is least understood in America, and the most
thorough understanding of which is essential, if, as a result of this war,
the monstrous ambitions of Germany are to be checked, lies in the very
diverse and antagonistic elements which enter into the make-up of
Austria-Hungary. Germany knew that her dream of world domina-
tion must remain a dream until she had completely absorbed the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. As we shall see, the fear of Germany that
that Empire, on the death of the old Emperor Francis Joseph, would
disintegrate into separate States, some of them anti-German, was one
of the causes which led Germany to precipitate the war when she did ;
for the existence of such independent States would bar her way to the
Dardanelles, and so to the Persian Gulf and to the realization of her
dream.

The German authorities in Vienna count everyone who can speak
a little German as Germanic. None the less, and in spite of such methods
of reckoning, even the Germans can claim only 12 millions of Germans
out of a total population of over 50 millions within the Austrian Empire.
The Hungarians, or Magyars, claim a population of 10 millions, conceding
to the Slavs, including Bohemians (Czecks) and Poles, a total (actually
much larger) of 24 millions, and to the Latins, including Italians and
Rumanians, a total of 4 millions.

The Hungarians are controlled absolutely by their large landed-
proprietors, who are in league with the Prussianized Camarilla of Vienna.
But with very few exceptions the 28 millions and more of Slavs and
Latins, who for centuries have been oppressed outrageously in Austria-
Hungary, not only hate Prussianism, but, in spite of ceaseless obstacles
raised by the Germans and Hungarians, have been becoming, for some
years past, "dangerously" insistent upon their right to genuine political
representation. Some of them have gone so far as to demand
autonomous administrations. Most of the leading Bohemian deputies are
at this moment in Austrian prisons (see The Czecho-Slovakst: An
Oppressed Nationality; Doran Co., New York, 5 cents).

The Germans had no illusions on the subject of the Austro-Hun-
garian army. They despised it. The early disasters at the hands of
Russia were clearly foreseen. But these disasters, in the circumstances,
were exactly what was wanted, for they gave Germany her chance to go
to the rescue, and incidentally to take possession of the large though
disorganized forces which still remained at the disposal of the old
Emperor. The result was a "friendly" absorption of Austria-Hungary,
and the policing of the whole Austrian Empire by German troops.

Germany won the first battle of her war when Russia routed the
Austro-Hungarian armies. She has got Austria-Hungary clinched —
though even now she recognizes and is mortally afraid of elements of
disintegration, proof of which lies in the fact that Friedrich Naumann
thought it necessary, in the midst of the war, to write Mittel-Europa, in
which he says, with the usual German naivete: "To speak quite frankly,

54 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

it sometimes happens that people [Austro-Hungarians] accept help, and
at the same time scold those [Germans] who help them" ! None the
less, in so far as force can make union, Germany and Austria-Hungary
today are one Empire.

Turkey was bought and paid for years ago.

In 1888 — the year in which William II came to the throne — a group
of German financiers, backed by the Deutsche Bank, purchased a conces-
sion to build a railway line in Asia Minor which was designed to be
part of the "all rail route," Berlin-Bagdad-Bassorah (Persian Gulf).

Next year, in 1889, the Emperor made his first move in foreign
politics by visiting the Sultan Abdul Hamid at Constantinople. As
Gibbons says (loc. tit., p. 63) : "The friendship between the Sultan and the
Kaiser was not in the least disturbed by the Armenian massacres. The
hecatombs of Asia Minor passed without a protest. In fact, five days
after the great massacre of August, 1896, in Constantinople, where
Turkish soldiers shot down their fellow-citizens [Armenians] under
the eyes of the Sultan and of the foreign ambassadors, Wilhelm II sent
to Abdul Hamid for his birthday a family photograph of himself with
the Empress and his children."

In 1898, the Kaiser paid his second visit to Constantinople, which
was followed by further railway concessions for the completion of the
Bagdad line to the Persian Gulf. This visit was extended so as to include
the Holy Land, when the Kaiser promised his friendship to "the three
hundred million of the world's Mohammedans."

Abdul Hamid, however, was too wily to put his neck entirely into
the German noose, and too rich to become wholly dependent upon the
German Treasury. The "Young Turks," penniless adventurers, were
more promising material. Enver Bey was in training at Berlin. The
Kaiser did not keep Abdul on the throne. The coup d'etat of 1908, but
more particularly that of January, 1913, which gave the Young Turks
supreme power in the person of Enver Bey, placed Turkey, and as much
of Asia as Turkey controlled, completely at the disposal of Berlin. The
reception accorded the Goeben and Breslau at the Dardanelles, and
Tui key's attack on Russia on October 29, 1914, were a foregone conclu-
sion. To that extent, and so far as the end of her stride in Mesopotamia
was concerned, Germany might have boasted with some show of reason
that she won the war before she began it.

It was the Balkans that stood in Germany's way, and the need to
absorb and to assimilate Austria-Hungary.

Until about 1912, developments had favored Germany's plan. In
1909, Austria (ever unscrupulous, even when a tool), successfully
carried out the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, countries which
are peopled almost entirely by Serbians. This seizure of a huge Slav
territory was a great triumph for the cause of Pan-Germanism, and
was made possible by the threat of the Hohenzollern "shining sword"
and by the exhaustion of Russia, protector of the Slavs, after the war

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 55

with Japan. And instantly Austria set to work, in ways altogether
abominable, to drive the Slav population out of the annexed territory
and to give the lands of the peasants to Germans (Gibbons, loc. cit.
pp. 150-154).

In 1911, the Agadir incident with France nearly precipitated the
conflict. But the Kaiser preferred to bide his time. For one reason,
the Kiel Canal, which had been opened in 1895, had had to be enlarged,
and would not be finished until 1914. Connecting the North Sea with the
Baltic, Germany was in absolute need of the Canal to protect and at the
same time to double the effectiveness of her fleet.

In 1912, things began to go wrong. Greece, Montenegro, Serbia
and Bulgaria united against Turkey. What was worse, the Turks,
trained by German officers, were defeated. Worst of all was the exist-
ence of a Balkan Confederation, which, if permitted to continue, would
have made it impossible for Berlin to "divide and rule."

The success of Serbia was particularly exasperating. It filled the
Serbians of the Austrian Empire with hope of freedom and of a Greater
Serbia. Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Dalmatia and every Serb in the
Empire were affected.

Another blow was the Greek occupation of Salonika, long coveted
by Vienna and Berlin for use as a naval base within striking distance
of Egypt and the East.

So Berlin and Vienna played upon the well-known vanity and
ambition of the Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria — supported, as it was, by
the racial arrogance of the Bulgars, who have well been called the
Prussians of the Balkans — and instigated a Bulgarian attack upon the
Serbians and Greeks. This was in June, 1913. Then Rumania inter-
vened against Bulgaria, and Bulgaria was vanquished. The result was
the treaty of Bukarest of August 10, 1913.

This treaty closely united Rumania, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece,
against Turkey on the one hand and Bulgaria on the other. It also
tended to range these four powers against Germany and Austria, and
to make them lean more and more toward the Triple Entente (Russia,
France and England), — though this tendency was modified later by the
failure of Allied diplomatists to realize that both Bulgaria and Turkey
had been bought and delivered to Germany, and by foolish efforts of
the Allies to conciliate Bulgaria at the expense of Serbia and Greece.

All that Germany saw in August, 1913, however, was her Pan-
German conspiracy more dangerously threatened than it had ever been.
A glance at the map will show that Bulgaria, crippled by the Balkan
wars, could have been crushed at any time by the converging forces of
Serbia, Rumania and Greece; and that thus Germany's road to the
Dardanelles had practically been blocked.

For this reason, and because the death of the old Austrian
Emperor might at any moment have shaken Austria-Hungary into its
constituent racial elements, which would have meant still further

56 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

reinforcement of the Serbian (Slav) barrier between Germany and
the Dardanelles ; and because the German Government and people were
finding it every year more and more difficult to carry the enormous burden
of their military and naval expenditures, — for these reasons Germany,
after the treaty of Bukarest of August 10, 1913, decided to bring about
war as soon as the Kiel Canal could be opened. This was due to take
place in July, 1914.

Meanwhile, in November, 1913, during a visit of the King of the
Belgians to Potsdam, both the Kaiser and General von Moltke, Chief
of the German General Staff, informed King Albert that they looked
upon war with France as "inevitable and close at hand," at the same
time trying to impress him with a belief in the certain and overwhelm-
ing success of German arms. Belgium was to be brow-beaten into
subservience and, if possible, into treachery (Germany before the War,
by Baron Beyens, formerly Belgian Minister at the Court of Berlin;
pp. 36, 37).

As the time drew near, the Kaiser kept in close touch with the Arch-
Duke Francis-Ferdinand, the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne.
They were intimately friendly, and the Arch-Duke was a party to the
German plot. In April, 1914, the Kaiser visited the Arch-Duke at
Miramar, near Trieste. Again he met the Arch-Duke in June, 1914, at
Konopischt, and on this occasion was accompanied by von Tirpitz, of
submarine infamy. The murder of the Arch-Duke on June 28, 1914,
merely provided a pretext for an Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. The
Kiel Canal had been opened on June 24th. The psychological moment
had arrived. On July 28th, war against Serbia was declared.

It is quite obvious to any impartial student of the communications
which passed between the European Governments in July and August,
1914, that England, France, Russia, Belgium, Serbia and Italy were trying
desperately to preserve peace, and that Germany and Austria were
determined to provoke war. Naturally the Teutonic powers tried to
conceal the fact, but if anyone still doubts that they, and they alone were
responsible for the war, he need only read The Evidence in the Case,
by James M. Beck (published by Putnams at $1.25), to have the possi-
bility of doubt removed. Mr. Beck, formerly Assistant Attorney-General
of the United States, analyses exhaustively the diplomatic records of the
period and proves conclusively, on Germany's own showing, that it is
she who was guilty.

But it seems unnecessary now to discuss that issue in detail. Maxi-
milian Harden, the irrepressible, in October, 1914, while still a Super-
man and still expecting victory, voiced the clear understanding of all
Germany when he wrote in his review, Die Zukunft: "Not as will-less
dupes have we taken upon ourselves the enormous hazard of this war.
We have willed it (W ir haben es gewolf). Because we had to will it
and dared to .... Germany, by reason of her achievement, dares

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 57

to exact, and to reach after and obtain, broader Earth-space and wider
fields of action" (October 17, 1914; pp. 69, 79).

Granting that a man has for years premeditated a murder ; that he
has discussed it openly with his family and friends, and that finally, in
the sight of innumerable witnesses, he commits it, — his attempt subse-
quently to wash his hands of responsibility is not likely to be convincing.
He may pose as having been attacked, and may succeed in convincing
himself at times that it is he who is the injured party ; but if he convinces
others it may safely be assumed that their judgment is either biased or
infirm.

The Austrian ultimatum to Serbia was delivered on July 23, 1914.
Its terms involved practically the surrender of Serbian independence. For
the third time in six years, Russia urged Serbia to swallow her pride
and to submit, with the least possible modification, to everything that
Austria demanded. Serbia did so, offering, if her response to the ultima-
tum were found insufficient, to place her case in the hands of the Hague
Tribunal. Austria would not so much as listen. On July 28 she declared
war on Serbia.

England, France and Russia again and again urged Germany and
Austria to submit the matter to arbitration. The request was met with
flat refusal. The Kaiser, to show his reasonableness, declared that all
he wanted was that the Czar should give Austria-Hungary a free hand
against Serbia!

On August 1st, on the ground that Russia had not ceased to
mobilize her forces as Germany had demanded, Germany declared war
against Russia. On August 2nd, Germany demanded of Belgium the
right to use Belgian territory for military purposes against France,
threatening her with "the decision of arms" if opposition were offered.
In reply, Belgium reminded Germany that "the treaties of 1839, confirmed
by the treaties of 1870, make sacred the independence and the neutrality
of Belgium under the guarantee of the Powers and notably of the
Government of His Majesty the King of Prussia." On August 4th,
the German troops crossed the Belgian frontier and hostilities began.

Belgium then appealed to England. Thereupon, acting on the
instructions of his Government, the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir
Edward Goschen, called upon the German Secretary of State, Herr von
Jagow, and informed him that unless the German Government "could
give the assurance by 12 o'clock that night (August 4th) that they
would proceed no further with their violation of the Belgian frontier
and stop their advance, I had been instructed to demand my passports
and inform the Imperial (German) Government that His (Britannic)
Majesty's Government would have to take all steps in their power to
uphold the neutrality of Belgium and the observance of a treaty to which
Germany was as much a party as themselves" (Beck, loc. cit., p. 220).

58 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Herr von Jagow replied that "the safety of the Empire rendered it
absolutely necessary that the Imperial (German) troops should advance
through Belgium."

The British Ambassador then asked to see the Chancellor, Herr
von Bethmann-Hollweg, and later wrote the following oft-quoted account
of his interview:

"I found the Chancellor very agitated. His Excellency at once began
a harangue, which lasted for about twenty minutes. He said that the
step taken by His (Britannic) Majesty's Government was terrible to a
degree; just for a word — 'neutrality/ a word which in war time had so
often been disregarded — just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was
going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than
to be friends with her" (Beck, loc. cit., p. 221).

In reply to the Chancellor's statement that, for strategical reasons,
the violation of Belgian neutrality was a matter of life and death for
Germany, the British Ambassador tried to explain to the Chancellor that
it was "a matter of life and death for the honor of Great Britain that
she should keep her solemn engagement to do her utmost to defend
Belgium's neutrality if attacked": but, in the nature of things, noblesse
oblige had no meaning for the representative of Germany. That a nation
could act for the sake of honor was incredible if only because incom-
prehensible.

It was on that same day, August 4th, that the Chancellor explained
to the Reichstag:

"Here is the truth. We are now in a state of necessity, and
necessity knows no law. Our troops have occupied Luxemburg and
perhaps are already on Belgian soil. Gentlemen, that is contrary to the
dictates of international law. . . . Anybody who is threatened, as
we are threatened, and is fighting for his highest possessions, can only
have one thought — how he is to hack his ivay through."

Incidentally it may be suggested that it is not as a rule the man
whose house is being entered by a burglar who talks about "hacking his
way through." For the burglar, entering the house, such language
wouM not be inapposite.

Germany had calculated that both Belgium and Great Britain would
be governed, not by principle, but by expediency. She has no realization
whatsoever that what is right is wise, and that worldly wisdom, when
true, is merely an interpretation of spiritual law in terms of material
life. She is intellectually blind at that point, as all profoundly selfish
and egotistic creatures must be, seeing that one of the worst penalties
of sin is the intellectual and moral blindness which it induces.

Germany, therefore, had expected Belgium to think first of her own
wealth and safety, and to submit, — thus betraying her international
obligations in general and those to France in particular (see Beyens, pp.
36-38; 320-328).

Great Britain also, it was supposed, would be too considerate of her

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 59

own interests, including a settlement of the Irish crisis, then so acute,
and too anxious to profit commercially by a European war, — to intervene
on a point of honor or through mere sympathy with France.

And as to France : were not all Frenchmen effeminate and cowardly
and degenerate ? Had not every German school-boy been taught as much
by real (because German) Professors? France would simply collapse!

So the sequence of events, as Germany saw it, was to have been: —
swiftly to crush France by over-running Belgium and by seizing Paris;
then to turn round and to stampede Russia; thirdly, either at once to
fall upon England, or to postpone this for a few months until the results
of the earlier victories had been consolidated; fourthly to exact a huge
indemnity from the United States on some pretext which these wars
would have developed ; fifthly, — but there was in fact no end to the
dream, short of universal domination. The German plan has been
outlined in preceding pages in its most conservative character. Even
now, after nearly three years of war, and while many Americans still
refuse to take any part of the plan seriously, — the most influential men
in Germany, including General von Ludendorff, described privately in
Berlin as "Hindenburg's brains," are advocating the incorporation of
all of France as a federated State of Germany, the extension of the
German sphere of influence in Persia and Afghanistan, the reduction of
Poland, Courland, the Baltic provinces, Finland and the bulk of European
Russia to the status of protectorates or annexed territories of Germany
(From Germany's Position Under Good and Bad Peace, quoted by the
New York Times, June 10, 1917). And while America is less often
referred to explicitly, it is notorious that the idea of a mere indemnity is
rejected by many leading Germans as wholly inadequate and unsatis-
factory. They are sanguine of German- American support, once German
troops were landed here, and they argue that unless America were
completely Germanized, the survival of the United States, as an English-
speaking, independent nation, would be a constant menace to the
supremacy of German world-authority.

What it would mean to our women and children if German troops
were to land in this country, will be realized more clearly after the
Conduct of the war has been examined.

Fortunately for America and for the world, Belgium and England
and France totally upset the German calculations, each of them, in their
own way, revealing qualities of unselfish and splendid heroism which
for ages will inspire mankind. Utterly unprepared for war, while
Germany, having chosen her own time, was prepared "to the last button
on the last Grenadier's tunic," — the Allied nations, by their resistance,
enabled Russia under the Grand Duke Nicholas to strike before Germany
had demolished France. The Battle of the Marne completed the repulse

60 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

of Germany and gave civilization an opportunity to organize for victory.

But now, in the light of Germany's war-plan, is it not evident why
she is so anxious to arrange a temporary peace? Officially and unoffi-
cially she has assured the world of her peaceful inclination. Von
Hindenburg sends a wireless message to the Russian Council of Work-
men's and Soldiers' Delegates "announcing German sympathy with the
formula 'peace without annexations or indemnities' " (see New York
Times, June 8, 1917).

Germany has been checked and perhaps knows it ; but she has
reduced Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria to a condition of vas-
salage; she has gained absolute control of a solid mass of territory and
of population stretching from Hamburg well into Asia Minor and
almost to Bagdad. Not only Maximilian Harden, but such organs as the
Frankfurter Zeitung, as early as December, 1915, declared that even if
Germany were obliged, at the end of the first "round," to surrender her
conquests, she would have cut the world in half and would be situated
better than ever before to complete her program of world dominion
(see Cheradame's most important explanation of what he calls "the
dodge of the Drawn Game;" Chapter V, and pp. 64, 109).

"No indemnities" ! The war has cost Germany little in comparison
with what it has cost France and England and poor Belgium. Germany
has lived on the territories and populations she has invaded — on forced
labor, on confiscated wealth, on paper promises — and has tried deliber-
ately to destroy everything which she has not been able to consume.
She is willing enough to let the Allies pay for the ruin she has wrought.

"No annexations" ! Russia restores the Armenians to their mur-
derers, the Turks; Great Britain restores Bagdad to Turkey, and the
German Colonies, so-called, to Germany — thus provoking, incidentally,
a rebellion in South Africa in which Boers and Britons would unite
against England ; for Boers and Britons, as brothers in arms, have laid
down their lives to free those "Colonies," which actually were slave-pens,
from the horrors of German despotism.

"No annexations and no indemnities" — and so leave Germany free
to organize her vastly increased resources, and all the latent wealth of
Asia Minor, and her new army of 21 millions of men (127 millions
of non-Germans to be exploited by 77 millions of Germans), for her
next great war of conquest!

No wonder that President Wilson, in his recent message to Russia
(published in the United States on June 10, 1917), spoke as he did of
German "projects of power all the way from Berlin to Bagdad and
beyond."

"Government after Government," the President declared, referring
unquestionably to the Governments of Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Bul-
garia and probably to that of Greece also, — Government after Govern-
ment, without open conquest of its territory, has "been linked together
in a net of intrigue directed against nothing less than the peace and

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 61

liberty of the world. The meshes of that intrigue must be broken, but
cannot be broken unless wrongs already done are undone ; and adequate
measures must be taken to prevent it from ever again being rewoven
or repaired.

"Of course," he continues, "the Imperial German Government and
those whom it is using for their own undoing are seeking to obtain
pledges that the war will end in the restoration of the status quo ante.
It was the status quo ante out of which this iniquitous war issued forth,
the power of the Imperial German Government within the Empire and
its widespread domination and influence outside of that Empire. That
status must be altered in such fashion as to prevent any such hideous
thing from ever happening again."

No wonder, either — considering that the Allied Governments had
learned at last to take the German plot seriously — that, in reply to Presi-
dent Wilson's request to state their war aims, those Governments declared
on January 10, 1917, that, in addition to the "restoration of Belgium,
Serbia and Montenegro, with the indemnities due them," and "the
evacuation of the invaded territories in France, in Russia and in Ru-
mania, with just reparations," — the Allies were also fighting for "the
recovery of provinces or territories torn in the past from the Allies, by
force or against the wishes of their populations;" for "the liberation
of the Italians, Slavs, Rumanians and Czecko-Slovaks from foreign
domination" ; for "the emancipation of populations subjected to the
bloody tyranny of the Turks"; and for "the expulsion from Europe of
the Ottoman Empire which has shown itself so radically alien to western
civilization."

To fight for less than that would be to fight, not for peace, but for
another war more terrible than this one, and for a war which might well
result in the conquest of the United States of America by a Germanized
Mitteleuropa Empire.

T.

(To be continued}

A soul cannot be regarded as truly subdued and consecrated in its
•will, and as having passed into union with the Divine will, until it has a
disposition to do promptly and faithfully all that God requires, as well
as to endure patiently and thankfully all that He imposes. — T. C. Upham.

LEMENTARY ARTIG

RECOLLECTION AND DETACHMENT

THE very first definite rules which are given the would-be dis-
ciple include what are called in the devotional books, Recollection
and Detachment. A little reflection will show that this is entirely
logical. Put in the very simplest terms, if a man wants to be
good the first thing he must be sure to do is to remember that fact. He
cannot hope to continue on the straight and narrow path very long
unless he remembers that he wishes to walk on it. That is recollection
in its most elementary form. It is remembering what you wish to
remember. Now there are many things that tend to distract our atten-
tion and to draw it away from our main purpose. Any pull on our
five senses will tend to do this: sounds, sights, tastes, feelings, smells,
and all that they stand for, on the mental, moral, and emotional planes,
as well as on the purely physical plane. If we wish to remain recol-
lected, to remember our purpose, we must beware of these distractions,
these pulls on our attention through our senses ; we must, in a word,
cultivate the deliberate habit of disassociating ourselves from these
things; we must practise Detachment. Therefore, at the beginning of
the way, Recollection and Detachment are very necessary rules. But
Recollection and Detachment are really not the simple things they
seem. Like most spiritual truths or laws of life, while they fit the
ordinary facts of the outer life they also go deep below the surface,
into the realms of that mysterious inner nature which it should be our
constant endeavor to bring to active outer manifestation. First it should
be noted that we remember only that in which we are interested. There-
fore we are thrown back at once upon the last article describing our
Initial Motives, and their respective powers. But let us assume an ade-
quate interest, either from fear, from self-seeking, or from love. The
motive whatever it may be, charges us with a desire to live a better
life: we want to do it. The problem is how to do it, how to start.
Experience soon teaches us that a mere resolution to be good only influ-
ences us so long as it keeps in the fore-front of our minds. Once let
our attention be distracted by whatever outside influence and we sud-
denly awaken to the fact that we forgot all about being good, and, during
the period of forgetfulness, we got mad and swore, or we ate too much,

6»

RECOLLECTION AND DETACHMENT 63

or we were mean and ill-tempered, or spiteful, or gloomy, or malicious, or
wicked in some more overt and obvious manner. We did not really want
to do or be any of these things, save momentarily, and in a part of which
we are ashamed and wish to be rid of. We realize keenly that our failure
was not a failure of real desire so much as a failure of Recollection. We
feel sure that if we had remembered our desire to be good at the
moment of temptation, we should have had little trouble in waging
a victorious fight against the enemy. In other words, what we needed
was more Recollection.

It is to be noted that Recollection is a rule for the would-be dis-
ciple, not for the ordinary man. To be potent in a true sense, we
must assume that the man has a conscious desire to be good and that
he will be good, if he remembers. Most people do not want to be good
in that sense, they are not interested, and have nothing to be recol-
lected about. Indeed, the vast majority of people try very hard not
to be recollected, and they spend most of their leisure going from one
distraction to another in a frantic effort to find forgetfulness of self
in any outer activity that promises pleasure or excitement. This is
the secret of the success of the theatre and the novel.

The desire to be recollected is not, however, a hard and fast line
separating the sheep from the goats. Even the would-be disciple can-
not always instantly surmount all temptations by the mere recollection
of his principles. He ought to be able to do so, but things are actually
not so easy. The desire to be good is of a certain power, and will only
surmount temptations of corresponding potency. If we have a weak
desire to be good, and a strong lower nature, with many evil propensities,
we may be sure that we shall have many falls. The struggle upwards
is a long and painful struggle, and is based on countless failures. But
a point must be reached when the Recollection of one's principles has
sufficient power to withstand at least every activity of our lower nature
save what we may call our besetting sins. There are certain directions
in which we are specially weak. If it were not so, we should be dis-
ciples already. It is hardly to be hoped that our incipient desire, — for
we are dealing with first stages, — will be strong enough, even when
remembered, to enable us to surmount all temptations. This need not
discourage us. It is common sense. The thing to do is to start over
again, not once or twice, but a thousand times, cheerful and undepressed,
fiercer and ever firmer in our determination to conquer this and every
other manifestation of our lower nature.

Some of us will continue to get mad and lose our tempers ; others
will continue to gossip and say ill-natured things ; others will be envious
and jealous; still others will give way to the grosser sins of the flesh.
All this is natural, and will pass. Only the good is eternal and persists
forever. The bad in each one of us will be and must be killed out in time,
no matter how long it takes. The time is in our hands. We can make a
short and violent aggressive campaign against our lower natures, which

64 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

is what the disciple is doing, or we can await the long drawn-out fulfill-
ment of spiritual law, which in the progress of time, will stamp out all
evil.

Recollection therefore, is not, at first, an infallible remedy. It
becomes such when a man becomes a disciple ; that is to say, he must be
incapable of deliberate sin before he can be a disciple in the real sense of
that loosely used word. And a man sins deliberately if he sins in spite of
recollection. A corollary of this is that a real disciple must be to
all intents and purposes, always recollected. It is not absolute, for even
the real disciple can still sin without its involving irretrievable disaster.
But his sins are sins of inadvertence, of misunderstanding, rather than
sins of weakness and bad intent. This, however, is a little away from our
main point.

Recollection, while not an infallible remedy against sin, must become
so, approximately, at any rate. Therefore, like everything else in the
spiritual life, it is a progressive thing. It must develop ; develop in
intensity and depth as well as in broadness and extent. It must cover
wider and wider ranges of our activities. I mean that at first Recollec-
tion is simply trying to remember our ideal, and to act accordingly. We
actually do remember in the morning at our prayer time, and a few times,
more or less, during the day, particularly just after doing something we
ought not to have done. From this very elementary stage we must grad-
ually work up until we have trained our bodies to be recollected, so that
they will sit straight and not slouch, so that we have eliminated all objec-
tionable tricks, useless movements, mannerisms and personal idiosyncra-
sies, in a word, until our body is trained to remember that it is the body
of a would-be disciple and behaves accordingly. Then we must train our
emotions to be recollected so that they will not surprise or betray us, by
fear, by anger, by impatience or by any other of the countless influences
which habitually sway people's emotions. We must train our minds to be
recollected, and that is almost the hardest task of all, for our minds are
very untrained indeed, and we hardly know how to go about trying to do
this difficult thing. But it can be done. The mind can be so saturated
with an idea, an ideal, that its influence is perpetually present, in the back-
ground perhaps, but actually present in the sense that it raises its head
and comes to the fore front of the mind the instant anything happens
which makes its presence desirable, and it comes in time to be effective.
It will show an uncanny provision and knowledge of what is likely to
disturb the even course of the disciple, and Will not fail to warn him.
Some people will think I am talking about the conscience, and to them I
should reply by asking them to explain, if they can, the difference
between Recollection and the conscience. There is a difference and it is
a very interesting and instructive difference, but does not belong to the
legitimate field of an elementary article.

Finally, we must have Recollection of the will. When we have that
the battle is almost won, for that means that we are able to bring to bear

RECOLLECTION AND DETACHMENT 65

on each struggle, the supreme weapon at our command. But this also
takes us beyond the field of an elementary article. A recollected will is a
weapon of the full disciple, and is something the would-be disciple is
working towards.

It will be seen from this brief analysis, that there is much to be done
about Recollection, and the point of immediate interest for all of us is to
begin. As usual I would counsel patience and humility. Do not try
everything all at once. Make some few simple rules, — say one for each
of the several planes, of the body, the emotions, the mind, and the will.
Take a simple bodily trick such as crossing one's knees, or twiddling one's
fingers, and stop it. Then take an emotion like habitual impatience, and
stop it. Then take the mind and decide to remember something — any-
thing with a spiritual implication, — say a brief prayer, — at a given time
or times, and do it. All three of these practices will train the will in
Recollection, so you will need no special practice for that. When you have
perfected yourself in these three things, try others. You will learn
Recollection by this simple process, and incidentally, you will learn much
more.

C. A. G.

The Inner Life, by Rufus M. Jones ; — published by Macmillan, price $1.00.

"There is no inner life that is not also an outer life," says Mr. Jones in the
opening sentence of his Introduction; and his effort in this collection of not very
closely knit essays is to demonstrate, on the sure foundation and logic of example
given us by Christ and the Christian mystics, that life is not divisible into
religious or secular, and that "the tendency to dichotomize all realities into halves
and to assume that we are shut up to an either-or selection, is an ancient tendency
and one that very often keeps us from winning the full richness of the life that
is possible for us." The plain man, because he does not go to Church, feels that
he is not religious, and thereby automatically divorces himself from religion and
the things of the Spirit. This mental attitude does not, however, correspond with
the facts. "There is no line that splits the outer life and the inner life into two
compartments."

This thought, though occasionally out of sight, really binds together Mr.
Jones' topics. With the wish to bring home the fundamental unity of life, and
the impossibility of really divorcing the two, he holds man up to himself by
reinterpreting a few common-place inner experiences, and by analysis and appli-
cation of the Beatitudes, of the Christ-life, of St. Paul, and the Johanine Gospel.
The Beatitudes represent life to us as richer in the rewards of a right inner life
than of a life where the inner is used merely as an adjunct to administer the
outer. "The aspiration, and not the attainment, is singled out for blessing. In
popular estimate, happiness consists in getting the desires satisfied. For Christ
the real concern is to get new and greater desires — desires for infinite things."
So Paul demands "a new kind of person, with a new inner nature, a new dimen-
sion of life, a new joy and triumph of soul."

This "Kingdom within the Soul" is to be obtained only by the way of
experience, which each man must find for himself, but which may wisely be
modelled on the recorded experiences and teaching of those who have gone before.
The value of the Quaker form of worship here enables Mr. Jones to grasp a
truth of the spiritual order, which, though essentially Christian — "where two or
time are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst" — is not a domi-
nant note of the great mystical writers, who were for the most part solitary and
isolated individuals in their spiritual struggles upward. "By far," he tells us, "the
most influential condition for effective worship is group-silence — the waiting, seek-
ing, expectant attitude permeating and penetrating a gathered company of persons.
We hardly know in what the group-influence consists, or why the presence of
others heightens the sensitive, responsive quality in each soul, but there can be no
doubt of the fact. There is some subtle telepathy that comes into play in the
living silence of a congregation which makes every earnest seeker more quick to
feel the presence of God, more acute of inner ear, more tender of heart to feel the
bubbling springs of life than any one of them would be in isolation."

This is the fundamental position on which The Theosophical Society is founded,
it is illustrative of the Theosophic method. True Brotherhood is more than good-
will, it is the synthesis and spiritual re-knitting of a new unity, an expanded and

M

REVIEWS 67

yet thoroughly integrated life existing in a unity deeper and more permanent than
the unity of personality itself. So the T. S. is a unit of groups, themselves units
composed of individual members. It is the united push of a larger and upward-
striving consciousness that will ultimately unlock the Golden Gates and liberate
mankind into the world of spirit.

Mr. Jones closes his book with a brief consideration of the mystical "Experi-
ence of God," which he, we think rightly, ascribes to many more persons than those
represented in literature. He sees in it not some exotic manifestation of the
Spirit in man, but rather the natural expression of our religious consciousness, of
that "mystery of goodness," of which it is "not so clear and plain" how we "came
to be possessed." "Religion when it is real, alive, vital, and transforming, is essen-
tially and at bottom a mystical act, a direct response to an inner world of spiritual
reality." This, we feel, is placing mysticism in its true relation, and only when it
is seen and studied in this way will that study profit the soul of man.

Mr. Jones has written a popular book, in fluent, almost slangy terms at times ;
and therefore easy to read. One or two of his definitions are very happy —
"Patience, endurance, stedfastness, confidence in the eternal nature of things,
determination to win by the slow method that is right rather than by the quick and
strenuous method that is wrong are other ways of naming meekness." He might
wisely have added courage to this list. Again, he defines worship as "direct, vital,
joyous, personal experience and practice of the presence of God."

The book is fragmentary, with little organization of ideas, which are some-
times repeated ; but the fragments are in themselves "good and sufficient."

A. G.

Is God Dead? by Newman Floary, is based on a good idea. A rich and happy
man loses fortune and his only son in the war. He is religious in the conven-
tional sense, but his faith breaks down under the strain of his misfortune and,
denying the existence of God, he contemplates suicide. He has some kind of an
experience, not clearly described, during which he sees, as God sees, the inner
workings of the souls and minds of six or seven other individuals who also go
through circumstances connected with the war which test but strengthen their faith.
These several experiences form the main part of the book. The result restores
the doubter to a belief in God, and the book closes with a picture of a footman softly
closing the door as he sees his master on his knees. It is a forceful and convincing
book with much sound argument, and, in spite of its literary defects, one which
we would recommend. J- B.

God the Invisible King, by H. G. Wells (Macmillan Co.), is an interesting
and honest statement of Mr. Wells' conversion. He has attained to the knowl-
edge that God is.

"Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes. This cardinal
experience is an undoubting, immediate sense of God. It is the attainment of an
absolute certainty that one is not alone in oneself. * * * But after it has
come our lives are changed, God is with us and there is no more doubt of God.
Thereafter one goes about the world like one who was lonely and has found a
lover, like one who was perplexed and has found a solution. One is assured
that there is a Power that fights with us against the confusion and evil within us
and without. There comes into the heart an essential and enduring happiness and
courage."

The book contains flashes of true inspiration. Mr. Wells has caught certain
great truths with extraordinary vividness and clarity.

"God is a person. * * * God is a person who can be known as one knows
a friend. * * * He is our king to whom we must be loyal; he is our captain,
and to know him is to have a direction in our lives. He feels us and knows us;

68 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

he is helped and gladdened by us. He hopes and attempts. * * * God is no
abstraction nor trick of words, no Infinite. He is as real as a bayonet thrust
or an embrace.

******

"There is the love God bears for man in the individual believer. Now this
is not an indulgent, instinctive, and sacrificing love like the love of a woman for
her baby. It is the love of the captain for his men ; God must love his
followers as a great captain loves his men, who are so foolish, so helpless in
themselves, so confiding and yet whose faith alone makes him possible. It is an
austere love. The spirit of God will not hesitate to send us to torment and
bodily death.

"And God waits for us, for all of us who have the quality to reach him.
He has need of us as we of him. He desires us and desires to make himself
known to us. When at last the individual breaks through the limiting dark-
nesses to him, the irradiation of that moment, the smile and the soul clasp, is
in God as well as in man. He has won us from his enemy. We come staggering
through into the golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his kingdom henceforth,
until at last we are altogether taken up into his being."

There is much in the book that is admirable. In general, wherever Wells
speaks of his own positive convictions, he speaks truly and well. Unfortunately
he has permitted himself to fall into the very common fault of feeling that to
assert one thing it is necessary to deny something else, as though the amount of
truth in the universe were limited, and if needed in one place it had to be taken
from another. It is this that makes almost everyone except members of The
Theosophical Society assume that if one believes in Christ it is necessary to deny
Buddhism. Wells falls into this error throughout. What he has not experienced
he denies. Further and more serious, what he does not understand, he denies.
There is so much that he does not understand. Of the significance of the Cross
he has no conception whatever. To him it is a meaningless horror.

He is like a man who had spent his life in a village in Holland denying
that the world could contain a hill, let alone a mountain, and who suddenly found
himself on top of a high hill. He is convinced, delighted by the beauty of the
outlook, the bracing air, and he calls aloud his conviction and his delight. All
honour to him. But there are in the world no snow-capped peaks. That is
the superstition of an outworn theology to hold men shackled from the truth.
He has seen mountains and he knows.

But he is honest and he is capable of growth. So short a time ago he had
no faith at all. Doubtless his next book will show that he has bridged many
of the obvious gaps in his belief. A very little knowledge of theosophy would
clear up so many of his difficulties for him.

The cardinal points of his belief are :

I. God is.
II. God is a person.

III. God is finite, not infinite, seeking knowledge rather than omniscient, strug-
gling rather than omnipotent.

IV. "God," as he uses the word, is not the Creator of the universe. That he
refers to as the "Veiled Being" of whom we know nothing. He hopes
that minds will develop later that will be capable of knowing something
of this "Veiled Being."

V. God is the King, the Captain of Mankind, our Leader. All men are
to give themselves to his service ; the State is his instrument and the
destiny of the world is Theocracy, with God as recognized King.

In much that he says of "God" he draws so close to the idea of the Masters,
as familiar in Theosophy, that it seems that it would only be necessary for the
idea to be suggested to him to have him accept it as the keystone of his arch. As

REVIEWS 69

said above, with many of his positive statements, students of Theosophy may
agree cordially. His writing is curiously irregular. A passage that one feels
to have been inspired by the Master whom he calls "God," will be followed by
another obviously written from the standpoint of his own superficial prejudices
and misunderstandings. As a child be seems to have been taught a distortion,
miscalled Christianity, which deeply scarred his inner nature, and resulted in a
prejudice from which he has never recovered, and which still blurs his vision.
Granting his misunderstandings of Christianity and of its founder as the "Saint
of non-resistance," we can only sympathize with his indignant rejection of both.
His God, and ours, is a Warrior God and we are to become "knights in God's
service." This service of God as the , Invisible King, he sees should lead into
every department of life, "the teaching at the village school, the planning of the
railway siding, the mixing of mortar," down to the representation of God on coin
and postage stamp. "To realize God in one's heart is to be filled with the desire
to serve him," and the way to serve him is to do all that we do in his way.

His conversion has brought Wells much light and a splendid certainty that
God is. He believes that it has brought him equal conviction of what God's
will is, and it is here that a little knowledge of Theosophy, of the nature of man,
would save him from a great danger. He knows the light he has received is the
true light, but he has not yet realized man's power to distort that light and color
it with his own preconceptions. Nor does he yet understand how easy it is to
mistake our own will for God's will. For instance :

As those who have had experience have little argument but profound con-
viction of God's existence, so, Wells says, of God's qualities : "if you feel God
then you will know, you will realize more and more clearly, that thus and thus
and no other is his method and intention.

"It comes as no great shock to those who have grasped the full implications
of the statement that God is Finite, to hear it asserted that the first purpose of
God is the attainment of clear knowledge, of knowledge as a means to more
knowledge, and of knowledge as a means to power. For that he must use human
eyes and hands and brains.

"And as God gathers power he uses it to an end that he is only beginning to
apprehend, and that he will apprehend more fully as time goes on. But it is
possible to define the broad outlines of the attainment he seeks. It is the con-
quest of death."

Nevertheless Wells has made a great step forward. He has shown, too, that
he can grow and we shall await his next book with keen interest. Perhaps even
now he is discovering that it is the first step in the spiritual life that he has
taken, not the last, and that humility is the foundation of the life of the soul.

J. F. B. M.

ANSWERS

Readers of THE THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY are invited to send questions to
be answered in this Department, or to submit other answers to questions already
printed where their point of view differs from or supplements the answers that
have been given.

QUESTION No. 213. — Do the Masters live among men in the Western World —
or are they all living together in Central Asia? Are they living in their physical
bodies?

ANSWER. — Everyone who has studied Theosophy for some years should be
able to answer this question satisfactorily to himself. This doesn't mean that it
would be satisfactory to another; but to the questioner it is the best answer that
can be given, since he is not able to appreciate the deeper meaning of another's
answer, unless it re-echoes from his own inner life. The real truth about the Masters
is of no use to us, as long as our spiritual discernment is not sufficiently awake to
grasp it.

What is our conception of the Masters? Most of us think of them as Beings
far, far ahead of the rest of mankind on the evolutionary scale. Some of them
have passed entirely out of the physical plane and have no physical body at all.
Others have still a body that makes it possible for them to work directly on the
physical plane ; but this body may be too refined to stand the atmosphere in the
ordinary world. A Master has told us something to that effect (The Occult World).

But there is another and more peremptory reason for them to keep aloof.
The force that goes out from them would have a tremendous effect upon us. As
said in Fragments I in answer to one who wished to converse with the Master
face to face : "That force you speak of might shake your nature to its very depths.
And do you know what demons might fly out from thence to torment and assail
you? Are you strong enough for them?" — The force of the Masters is strong
enough to extirpate all evil in the world, but as evil still "lives fruitfully" in the
hearts of all men, it would mean to destroy mankind at the same time.

But what about the Christian Master? may be asked. The answer is that
He incarnated in a physical body and only with so much of his real splendour and
force as this body could bear, and as was necessary for his work. He could not
manifest more of His Divine Powers in that body, without doing harm to
His surroundings and counteracting His mission. Surely, He had a reason for His
teachings in the parable of the man that sowed good seed in his field. When his
servants proposed to gather up the tares, he said : "Nay, lest happily while ye
gather up the tares, ye root up the wheat with them."

Thus, I don't think that any real Master can live among men, either of the
Western or of the Eastern world, at the present stage of man's evolution. But
many of their Disciples (Chelas), so far developed that they are "Adepts" com-
pared to people at large, can do so ; and several of them are, no doubt, living in
different places throughout the world at the present time. The physical body of
these Chelas is still gross enough to stand the unwholesome exhalations of the
man of this age. But such Adepts are not known except by some few who are,
themselves, Chelas of a lower degree.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 71

The Masters are not all living in Central Asia, though a good many of them
have chosen that favorable and isolated locality, just as we often go off to healthy
places up in the mountains during the hot season. Meanwhile there may be other
suitable localities on this globe, where they can live, and do live.

Certainly they are living in their physical body, if they still have one. They
would not have striven so hard to develop and keep up this body, as is depicted in
"The Elixir of Life," unless it were useful to them. But there will come a
time when, as said above, a Master has advanced so far that He cannot use a
physical body any longer. Then He sloughs it off; and He is doing so, because
it would be impossible for any kind of a physical body to endure the pressure and
violence of the powers He has now acquired. Then He is called to do more im-
portant and immensely more difficult work on a higher plane of being.

T. H. K.

ANSWER. — If the questioner will read Acts and the Lives of the Saints it is
probable that a pretty firm conviction will grow up that at least one Master lives
among men in the Western world. Reading the Letters of the Master K. H. in
various Theosophical publications, notably in The Occult World, will leave a
similar conviction as to His reality. Light on the Path covers this question — if one
will seek therein for the truth. The Voice of the Silence gives an explanation of
how the Masters may live and appear. S.

QUESTION No. 214. — Has anyone now living ever seen a Master, or known
anyone who has seen one? If so, was the Master seen in the inner or outer world?
Can there be proof of seeing a Master in the inner world?

ANSWER. — Read the history of the early days of the T. S., and you will find
an answer to the first question. Surely Madame Blavatsky, and others too, have
seen a Master. And there are still many in the T. S., as well as outside it, who
knew H. P. B. personally.

Whether any person now living has seen a Master in the outer world I don't
know; but I feel sure that there are some who have seen Him in the inner world,
not vaguely only, but very distinctly. There is no proof of this, that is valid to
anyone except to the seer himself. What would you think of a person who told
you that he had seen the Master face to face in the inner world? If you thought
him absolutely reliable you would begin to think very highly of him, which would
benefit neither you nor him. Or you might perhaps think that he had deceived
himself, or even that he was deceiving you. The wise man that has seen his
Master, doesn't a'dvertise it. The only reliable proof of seeing the Master in the
inner world is, therefore, to raise oneself to that world, which means to make
oneself conscious there, or to develop the inner organs of sense by which to see,
hear, etc., in that world. T. H. K.

ANSWER.— Holmes in either the Creed of Christ or of Buddha says that postu-
lating the soul it must be considered as infinite. Being infinite it cannot be limited.
Neither can it be defined. Therefore it cannot be proved. As it is on the soul
plane that one would know the Master, one may answer this question either "yes"
or "no." There is no equal mass of testimony about any subject compared to the
mass of testimony on the reality of our own great western Master, yet most of
His followers try to banish Him into space as an etherealized impotent Spirit —
why then expect that any "proof" would be satisfactory? If there be real desire
behind this question, and not a purely intellectual curiosity, we might try the
experiment of loving Him. Very few people could "prove" who were their parents
yet most of us find it enough to love them. S.

ANSWER. — We may be pretty sure that people who claim to see Masters are
deluded. Those who could see them would not be likely to make the claim. But

72 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

in the early days of the Theosophical Society it was different. Then it was not a
question of individual merit or development, but of the time and cycle — the Kartnic
opportunity. Then Masters were seen by many different people who have left clear
records of the fact.

As to proof of seeing a Master in the inner world — What do we mean by
"proof"? Most people mean the evidence of the physical senses which are notor-
iously unreliable. In truth, can we "prove" anything? Can we even "prove" that
we are awake and not asleep and dreaming? But we do not want to "prove" it.
We know it. In the same way the evidence of those who have seen Masters in
the inner world shows that they know the truth of what they see with a certainty
far greater than any the physical senses can give. There are some truths that
each man must learn for himself. R. D.

THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY AND MRS. ANNIE BESANT.

New York newspapers of June 24, 1917, contain the following statement :

"Telegrams from Bombay say that the restrictions placed by the Government
on Mrs. Annie Besant and her colleagues are the sequel to a violent home rule
agitation, which was distinguished by a vilification of everything British and
Western . . . Mrs. Besant is head of the Theosophical Society."

Newspapers describing Mrs. Besant as head of the Theosophical Society do
so in good faith, merely repeating Mrs. Besant's own claim. But the society of
which Mrs. Besant is the head has no connection whatsoever with The Theosophical
Society, and is working for objects which are opposed diametrically to those for
which The Theosophical Society exists.

The agitation to which the newspapers refer is wholly contemptible, treacher-
ous and outrageous. Such behaviour, however, cannot surprise any member of
The Theosophical Society who is familiar with the earlier history of the Move-
ment, when Mrs. Besant, at that time a member of the Society, made an equally
contemptible, treacherous and outrageous attack on Mr. William Q. Judge.

T!ie Theosophical Society was compelled then to deny its platform and its
membership to Mrs. Besant and her deluded followers, and from that day to this
has consistently refused to have any relations with them.

For reasons essentially the same, the Government of India has now been
compelled to forbid Mrs. Besant "to participate in any meetings, deliver lectures
or publish her writings."

Great Britain is sacrificing her best in men and treasure for love of righteous-
ness and to free the peoples of Belgium, northern France and Serbia from an
intolerable slavery. She is fighting and dying with France and the other Allies
for the freedom of the world. At such a time to organize against her an agitation
which at best is based upon self-assertion and self-seeking; to take advantage
of her unselfishness, and of the terrible needs of Germany's innocent and tortured
victims, to stab her in the back, — is not only the antithesis of Theosophy, but is
as monstrous a crime as Germany's very worst.

Even if India were suffering from maladministration — and she is not, being
one of the best and most sympathetically governed nations in the world — it would
be no excuse for what Mrs. Besant and her followers have done.

If American "Pacifists" and Pro-Germans were at this time to start a "home
rule agitation" in the Hawaiian Islands, and were to foment a rebellion among
that mixed population — regardless of the fact that home rule there would result
inevitably in the same internecine strife which kept India in agony prior to British
occupancy — it is doubtful whether the American people would feel that justice had
been satisfied by the infliction of so mild a penalty as prohibition to continue such
treachery openly.

REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE
THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

The Annual Convention of The Theosophical Society was held in New York
at 21 Macdougal Alley, on Saturday, April 28, 1917.

MORNING SESSION

The Chairman of the Executive Committee, Mr. Charles Johnston, called
the Convention to order at 10.30 a. m. and asked for nominations for the offices
of Temporary Chairman and Temporary Secretary. On motion by Mr. C. A.
Griscom, seconded by Mr. G. V. S. Michaelis, Mr. Johnston was unanimously
elected as Temporary Chairman. On motion by Professor Mitchell, seconded by
Mr. Acton Griscom, Miss Isabel E. Perkins was elected Temporary Secretary.
The Temporary Chairman asked the pleasure of the Convention regarding organiza-
tion, and Mr. J. F. B. Mitchell moved that the Chair appoint a Committee on
Credentials. This motion was seconded by Mr. K. D. Perkins, and carried. The
Temporary Chairman felt that of necessity the Secretary T. S. and the Treasurer
T. S. should be placed upon that committee, since its activities involve a knowledge
of the different Branches and the standing of the members. He consequently
appointed Professor Mitchell, Mrs. Gregg, and Miss Flora Friedlein, representing
the far West. This committee, after having received the credentials of all the
delegates and proxies present, retired to prepare its report, and the Temporary
Chairman addressed the Convention.

ADDRESS OF THE TEMPORARY CHAIRMAN

It is the great privilege of the Temporary Chairman to welcome members
and delegates to this Convention; and I am convinced, as I think we all are, that
we have never held a Convention of greater importance and vitality. One
remembers Conventions in many lands — in India, under the palm trees, and the
sunshine and the tinkly temple bells that Kipling has recorded, in London, and
elsewhere. Now the Convention has come back to its original starting place, and
this Convention meets not so very far from the original centre of the work which
was in the Mott Memorial Hall, in Madison Avenue. The Society has made
the circle of the globe, and has come home again. That is in a way significant
of our whole life — the T. S. has girdled the globe, gathering life and vitality, and
returns to focus that increased force in its work from its old centre, strengthened
and reestablished.

The Theosophical Society and its work are much more vital than many of us
realize; it is the effective bridge between the spiritual world and the outer world,
a bridge built by spiritual powers and forces, over which they can pass into the
life of mankind and into the making of history. While this Convention can be
contained in a small space, its life and activity affect the whole world far more

73

74

THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

vitally than most of us recognize. In 1915 and 1916 resolutions were passed,
touching on the relation of this Convention to world events and the war. Those
resolutions, which were then expressions of our hopes, have now become realities ;
and I think we could not overestimate the part which The Theosophical Society
has had in turning the tide of thought and feeling from absorption in selfish and
material interests to some recognition of the spiritual issues at stake in this
world conflict. We should realize that our aspirations have potency; that they
can be used for the uplifting of the thoughts and desires of others. If this were
as clear to us as it ought to be, we should strive to hold the wisest and most
far-reaching aspirations, for we should recognize in sober fact that we can so
live and act that what The Theosophical Society is doing and thinking to-day,
the world will be doing to-morrow.

I have great pleasure in welcoming to New York and to this Convention
those delegates and members who have come from a distance ; and on behalf
of the Executive Committee I wish to congratulate each and every one here
present on being permitted to take part in so momentous an occasion as this.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON CREDENTIALS

The report of the Committee was made by Professor Mitchell, who stated
that fifteen Branches were found to be present, in the person of delegates and
proxies entitled to cast seventy-five votes, representing many times that number
of members. There were also a number of foreign proxies, known to be on the
way, which had not arrived owing to the irregularity of the mails. The Committee
recommended that the Branches represented by such proxies be considered as
present, but not as entitled to vote unless their proxies arrived before the Con-
vention adjourned. The Branches represented were as follows — those whose
proxies came after Convention are marked with a star.

Aurora, Oakland, Cal.
Blavatsky, Seattle, Wash.
Blavatsky, Washington, D. C.
Cincinnati, Cincinnati, O.
Hope, Providence, R. I.
Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Ind.
Middletown, Middletown, O.
New York, New York
Pacific, Los Angeles, Cal.
Providence, Providence, R. I.

St. Paul, St. Paul, Minn.
Toronto, Toronto, Can.
Virya, Denver, Colo.
Altagracia de Orituco, S. A.*
Krishna, South Shields, England
London, London, England*
Newcastle, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Eng-
land*

Norfolk, Norfolk, England*
Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela, S. A.

Dr. C. C. Clark moved that the report of the Committee on Credentials be
accepted and that the Committee be discharged with thanks. This motion was
duly seconded and carried.

PERMANENT ORGANIZATION

The Temporary Chairman then stated that the Convention should be perma-
nently organized and requested nominations for the office of Permanent Chairman.
Mr. Ernest T. Hargrove referred to what the Temporary Chairman had said of this
as a great day and expressed his own feeling that we should try to meet it greatly.
He knew of no one whose long and unbroken fidelity to the cause of The
Theosophical Society better fitted him to fill the office of Convention Chairman
than Professor Mitchell, of whom he spoke as not only the President of the
New York Branch and the Treasurer of the T. S., but as a great deal more, an
old and faithful member of the T. S. This nomination was seconded by Mr.
Griscom and unanimously carried. In taking the Chair, Professor Mitchell said :

T. S. ACTIVITIES 75

"What has already been said of the importance of this Convention gives me
a very serious sense of what is involved in serving as its Chairman. Fortunately
I have also heard what led you to elect me ; I am being praised for what is a
great privilege, that of being an old member of the T. S., and we must all agree
that it ought to fit us to do great things greatly, however small they may at first
sight appear to be."

Nominations were asked for the office of Permanent Secretary ; the name of
Miss Perkins was presented by Mr. Hargrove, seconded by Mr. Griscom, and
Miss Perkins was elected. Mr. Griscom moved a vote of thanks to the Temporary
Chairman for his services and also for his address; unanimously carried.

CONVENTION COMMITTEES

The Chairman announced that three standing committees were required to
take charge of the business that might be presented, and Mr. Johnston moved
that the Chairman be authorized to appoint the usual Committees, on Nominations ;
Resolutions ; and Letters of Greeting, with instructions to meet during the recess
and to report at the afternoon session. The Chairman announced the following
appointments :

Committee on Nominations Committee on Resolutions

Mr. C. A. Griscom, Chairman Mr. E. T. Hargrove, Chairman

Mrs. Marion F. Gitt Miss Margaret T. Hohnstedt

Mr. Charles M. Saxe Mr. G. V. S. Michaelis

Committee on Letters of Greeting
Mr. Charles Johnston, Chairman
Dr. C. C. Clark
Mrs. Irene E. Regan

The Chairman then called upon Mr. Johnston, Chairman of the Executive
Committee, for his Report.

REPORT OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

There is a quotation that has been used on similar occasions — Happy is the
nation that has no history. It is such a good quotation that I do not hesitate
to use it again. The Executive Committee exists for emergencies between
Conventions ; it is something like the fire department of the T. S. In one of our
New Jersey villages the fire engine, their only fire engine, was found to be in
bad condition. This suggested serious possibilities, and one of the village worthies
introduced a resolution providing that the fire engine should be inspected two
weeks before each fire. The fire department of the T. S. is inspected oftener than
that; and I hope that it is always in good shape.

The details as to the issuing of Charters and Diplomas, which are executed
by the Executive Committee, rest with the Secretary T. S. and will be covered
in her report. The Committee, therefore, has only to report that it has stood
firm, serene, and steadfast throughout the 365 days since the last Convention.
Fortunately there have been no extraordinary emergencies, no important action
to report. Yet this need not imply that the Committee has not been serving —
it is something like the question of a bridge. If a bridge is in good order and is
open for traffic, there is very little to say about it, but if it is out of order there
is much to say. Your Executive Committee has been in order 365 days, therefore
that is the only fact that needs to be recorded.

It was moved by Mr. J. F. B. Mitchell and seconded by Mr. Acton Griscom
that the report be accepted with the thanks of the Convention, and that its thanks
be also extended to the Chairman of the Executive Committee for his service
during the year. The Chairman announced that it was next our very pleasant duty
to listen to the report of our Secretary, Mrs. Gregg.

76 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

REPORT OF THE SECRETARY T. S. FOR THE YEAR ENDING APRIL 28, 1917

New Members

Year after year, your Secretary begins the annual report with a statement
of the number of new members admitted during the year, and the number of new
charters granted. Prominence is thus given to these statistics, not because the
number of annual accessions is to be taken as a measure of the success of the
year's work, but rather as a record of the Society's new liabilities. Each new
member, each new Branch, may be regarded as a new department in the vast
organization, visible and invisible, through which the Lodge is administering the
work of the world. If each new department can become strong, steady, serviceable,
the whole movement is strengthened and extended. It must be equally true that
failure in one spot reacts upon all; and hence one of our problems is how to
relate the new members to the work and life of the Society. To a considerable
extent that is the responsibility of the local Branches ; you have also entrusted
your Secretary with some special oversight over new members — and their cordial
response to offers of help is one of the many rich compensations of the Secretary's
work. But may I also suggest that every Branch and every member of the T. S.
has also a responsibility for the progress and the growth of the new members.
It is not given to many to correspond with them, or perhaps even to know them,
but I am profoundly convinced that whenever one of our established Branches,
or T. S. members, does a piece of work with thoroughness, devotion, and under-
standing, for the sake of furthering the Theosophical Movement, this act, though
unseen and unknown, is the means of giving very real support and encouragement
to our recruits, to those who are trying to get their bearings, to find their work
in the great Movement which The Theosophical Society represents.

During the past year, one new Branch has been chartered ; and diplomas
have been issued to 33 new members : United States, 20 ; South America, 4 ;
England, 4; Norway, 5.

Correspondence

The correspondence going out from the Secretary's Office falls into two
general classes: (1) letters to members and inquirers who ask for specific informa-
tion, suggestion, or guidance; and (2) letters to those who need help but do not
indicate what they need. This year the Secretary wishes to make a special appeal
to members, particularly to members-at-large, that they shall make more definite
demands, ask more questions, state their problems more freely. It is not that the
Secretary alone would presume to offer assistance in all the problems of the
theosophic life, but there are experienced members who stand ready, through
the Secretary's office, to give generously of their counsel and encouragement.
Help is always to be had in the answering of questions that spring from the real
need of the inquirer; and nothing that is said about the extent of the work of
this office should serve to deter anyone from asking for such assistance. And
further, letters that tell of a definite need can be answered much more readily
than those which are written in general terms. Frequently an isolated member
writes a letter that shows such utter loneliness and deprivation of companionship
as to wring the heart of the Secretary; one longs to try to give something to
that member, but it may take hours to consider the situation and what could
helpfully be said. On the other hand if that member had referred to some
problem on which light was desired ; some bit of reading that was not clear, some
experience which he would like to share with a friend, the reply could be easily
and quickly made.

Branch Activities

The first impression that comes to me in my effort to mirror the activities
of the Branches during the year is the depth of the devotion and the breadth of

T. S. ACTIVITIES 77

the work done. The different reports show that, in spite of the great outer
events that have been claiming the attention of all thinking people, the attendance
at our Branch meetings has been maintained, and in many cases has greatly
increased. In some Branches it has been the distinct aim to interpret present
events in the light of theosophic principles; and this effort must become more
general as we realize the light that has been given us, and the need of the world.

As we find ourselves face to face with the problem of how to let our light
shine on all planes, it is not strange that we should find the Branches reporting,
from different parts of the country, increased activity in working through churches,
clubs, and various other organizations. The reports also refer, with generous
satisfaction, to one and another member who is gifted with the ability to make
addresses, to tell stories, to be the inspiration of some social circle — and truly all
gifts must be requisitioned and used in this time of need. But how about the
smaller and less conspicuous gifts that are likely to be overlooked and so left
unused? The member who can make a good address is not likely to be allowed
to shirk, but then there is the rank and file of every Branch — those whose best
contribution to the cause is their quiet hours of meditation, their constant effort
for perfection in the performance of the humblest duties, their joyous sacrifice of
self for a cause that is dearer than self. If they could only recognise how
absolutely indispensable their unseen contribution is to the work of their Branch,
to the work of the Society, with what courage and enthusiasm they would press
forward, through the most humdrum and the most taxing duties !

The Branch Reports for this year reflect in a curious way the distinct
broadening of outlook and aims that has come to different Branches. They find
it increasingly difficult to report on their work; they realize that the essence of
this work is not expressed by any account of the nature and number of the
meetings held, the new members added, the number of copies of the QUARTERLY
that they have placed, etc. Those facts could be easily told, but it is not easy to
describe the ways in which they have tried to become as leaven in family and in
community life — most of that story must needs be left untold.

Many Branches maintain public meetings, and also meetings for members
only. One Branch uses the members' meetings as preparation for the topics to
be taken up in the public meetings ; others have used the Key to Theosophy in their
members' meeting; and one reports that Mr. Johnston's articles on the "Religion
of the Will" (in the QUARTERLY, July, 1909-January, 1910) have served as an
excellent bridge between the devotional books, like the Gita, and those which
present the theosophic philosophy as such. Another Branch has a regular series
of meetings for inquirers; others use the QUARTERLY as their means of reaching
inquirers, offering to send questions to the department for "Questions and Answers"
— trying at once to supply the inquirer with a line to Headquarters. One of the
most significant reports is from a Branch that has been making a serious and
practical study of the series of QUARTERLY articles on "A Rule of Life"; seeking
to find the barriers that prevent their more rapid advancement, as individual
members and as a Branch; such work done with earnest sincerity must bring
light.

The Theosophical Quarterly

The magazine has never been more generally appreciated than during the past
year. In saying this, I have not in mind so much the growing subscription list,
as the expressions of gratitude that come constantly from members and non-
members. It is in an unusual sense the "organ" of the Society, for it not only
presents in many different forms the truth that has been given to us, but it also
serves many members as a means of expressing that truth. They work over some
problem, and perhaps they find their solution, but do not succeed in giving it
to others as they would wish; until some day the QUARTERLY epitomizes for them

78 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

their own truth, gives it to them in terms in which they can give it to their fellows.
There are members who make full use of the QUARTERLY, and others who
seem to be content with its message to them, without trying to pass that message
on. There are so many ways in which it might be brought before non-members
that I am sometimes tempted to prepare a list of questions to be sent to all
members — making such pointed inquiries as the following: When you read
"Fragments" in the April issue, did you not think of one single friend to whom
you would like to send that message? Do you not know of some public spirited
man who would find his questions answered in "On the Screen of Time?" Have
you no friend who longs for such guidance in inner life as is given in "A Rule of
Life?" Try thinking of the articles in the QUARTERLY as precious stones that you
have the privilege of passing on to those who love jewels — a ruby for this friend,
a diamond for another, a pearl for a third. Then if you cannot spare the money
to buy copies of the magazine for such discriminating giving — write to the
Subscription Department (P. O. Box 64, Station O, New York) ; and ask to have
the magazine sent to your friend ; there is always a supply of copies that could be
used in that way. Or if you think it wiser to send only one single article cut
from the magazine, ask to have a copy sent to you, for cutting up. The magazine
is published for distribution, not as a business venture ; you are helping forward
its purpose whenever you ask to have it sent to someone whom you feel to be
ready to hear its special message.

The Book Department

New editions of Mr. Johnston's Song of Life and The Parables of the
Kingdom have been issued by the Book Department, in attractive form. The
long-desired second edition of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, as translated and
annotated by Mr. Johnston, is soon to be issued ; his work on the edition, which
involved many very valuable additions, is completed — and now it only remains for
the printer and binder to produce the book; it may be looked for by mid-summer.
There are several interesting new publication projects under way, but I have been
asked not to speak of the plans in detail, because it takes so much longer to prepare
and to make books than it does to tell about them ; the Book Department is anxious
lest you should all begin to order the new books and to look for them in the
mails before they can possibly be prepared.

A Personal Acknowledgment

As the work increases, so does the number of the workers ; and yet there
is always a shortage, always more work to be done than those who are privileged
to carry it can possibly compass. Year after year this has been the case ; perhaps
we are in this way being taught to separate essentials from non-essentials. In
thr work that comes to the Secretary's Office, I am greatly indebted for constant
help and co-operation to my fellow officers, and to my long-time friend Mrs.
Gordon. The Assistant Secretary is now responsible for the mailing of the
QUARTERLY, for the QUARTERLY subscriptions and for the book orders. In these
branches of the work, which involve so much detail, many members are giving
generously of their time. The QUARTERLY envelopes are being addressed by Mrs.
Helle, Mrs. Gordon, Miss Graves, and the residents at the "Community House."
In the Book Department, Miss Youngs and Mrs. Vaile are carrying on certain
lines of work that are of constant and increasing assistance.

Perhaps I might be permitted to reply here to offers of help that come from
out-of-town members. There is seldom any of the Headquarters work that can
be sent out to be done, but I do know of one way in which time could be saved
to those who are carrying on the book work. It is desired that members should
use the Book Department freely, constantly — should order books, our own or
those of other publishers, and should make all the inquiries they want to make;

T. S. ACTIVITIES 79

the Book Department is for your service. It can serve you better, with the same
expenditure of time, if you will, so far as possible; (1) send the money to pay
for a book at the time you order it; (2) give your complete address on every letter;
(3) make each order complete in itself — i.e., do not refer to something that you
said about books or magazines in a previous letter, but give full information in
the order itself. These are small points; but the observance of them would set
free much time for other work.

With a deep sense of my obligation to you all for the opportunity to take
my part in this wonderful work for mankind, this report is respectfully submitted.

April 27, 1917. ADA GREGG, Secretary T. S.

MR. JOHNSTON : It is one of my privileges to move a vote of thanks to Mrs.
Gregg for the work that has just been reported upon, and I have been wondering
how we could adequately express our thanks. As she read the report, every
one of us could see that we were getting a synthetic view of the work of the T. S.
in all places, and we have there a picture of the work that Mrs. Gregg is always
doing for the Society — she synthesizes the work of the whole T. S. Just as the
reports of work that is spread over the whole world have been summed up and
passed on to us here, so the work itself comes to a centre in Mrs. Gregg's office
and radiates out from there greatly enriched by passing through her hands. I
have been having my misgivings, I might as well admit, lest, as Mrs. Gregg's
account of the activities of her office proceeded, the Convention might divine
why the Executive Committee was able to make so peaceful a report.

Mrs. Gregg used two phrases which I should like to apply to her work —
"breadth of work," illustrated in the details of the activities of which she has
told us (Branches, Book business, magazine circulation, etc.), and "depth of
devotion," which is harder to illustrate, for being far more vital and spiritual it
is less easy to catalogue. If the T.S. stand firm, as it has for years, a vital part
in that sanity and spirit of harmony is due to our Secretary. Professor Mitchell
has been spoken of as an old member; Mrs. Gregg should be called a perpetually
young member, and some of the joy of youth goes into all the work she does,
giving it a long lease of life after it leaves her hands. When she is writing to a
Branch, that life runs forward into the work of the Branch.

It is impossible adequately to express our debt and our gratitude to her —
I have been casting about for a simile that should throw some light on one side
of her work, the side which it is most difficult to illustrate ; perhaps the decorations
in this room will serve. There are the standards and the many flags, they might
stand for the Executive Committee which represents all nations (incidentally, I
count three British flags among the many here, and that is interesting because
we have three British members on the Committee.) Then there are the lilies and
the roses ; if they were taken away from this room we should know that something
was missing and should want it back again. They are to me an illustration of
the kind of influence that Mrs. Gregg spreads — let us go on record as doing what
we can to express our thankfulness for it.

MR. HARGROVE: I want to second this motion. In the early days of the T.S.
we heard much about phenomena, nowadays we hear much less ; that is because
we have Mrs. Gregg, and she is a perpetual phenomenon, a living demonstration
of the supernatural. Newer members who desire to grow into the spirit of the
Movement will be able to gauge their attainment by their admiration for Mrs.
Gregg. I want to unite with Mr. Johnston in an expression of devout thankfulness
for her.

MR. GRISCOM : In casting about for a phrase which would express what
Mrs. Gregg is and does. I have thought of two; one the hackneyed phrase,
"sweetness and light"; the other the title of a book, Sesame and Lilies. Those

80 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

four words sum up Mrs. Gregg; "sesame and lilies" is specially appropriate because
she has opened up to so many people the spirit and the beauty of the theosophic
life.

THE CHAIRMAN : The Chairman has the privilege of adding a word because
he has been asked by Mrs. Gregg to say that she would like to be allowed to
express her thanks to the Society for the chance it has given her to do this work
for the T.S. Speaking for myself, I believe that what we owe most to her is
the sense she always gives us that she is doing something that is no sacrifice,
but an enormous privilege. I am grateful to her for her constant recognition of
the privilege that is involved in our very membership in the Society, and of the
love that is part of our Brotherhood. The best reason I could advance for
thanking her is that she wants her thanks expressed for the opportunity to serve.

The next order of business being the Report of the Treasurer T.S., Mr.
Hargrove was asked to take the Chair, as a member of the Executive Committee ;
he called upon Professor Mitchell for the Treasurer's Report.

REPORT OF THE TREASURER T.S.

The report that I have to make to-day is reminiscent of times that I thought
had passed away, for the report shows a balance in the general fund of $2.42, and
that the receipts for the year fell below what was expended by some $300; thus
making the showing for the year an actual deficit. Looking back over the past,
this has been almost invariably the situation; the Society long managed with just
barely enough money to do its work — calling upon a few members to make up
the deficit if there was one. Of recent years it has been different, and some of
us have felt rather fearful whenever the year's record showed that more money
had come in than we had found that we could rightly use. To-day there is no
such occasion for apprehension; and now the Treasurer would strongly urge
members to realize that starting the year, as we do, with a balance of $2.42, the
QUARTERLY cannot be produced if the money does not come in. The cost of
issuing the magazine is reduced to the minimum; no salaries are paid for any
of the work on it and there are no payments to the contributors, but the printer
and the binder must be paid, and money for postage is demanded by the post
office. So the Treasurer comes before you to tell you that you have not been
doing your duty in the matter of payments. With this explanatory statement, I
will read the formal report for the year, omitting the cents as I read because often
that is all we remember from a list of figures.

Report of the Treasurer T. S.

From April 20, 1916 to April 26, 1917

GENERAL FUND AS PER LEDGER
Receipts Disbursements

Dues from Members $565.40 Secretary's Office $152.50

Subscriptions to the THEOSO- Treasurer's Office 7.35

PHICAL QUARTERLY 486.12 Printing and Mailing the THEO-

General Contributions 191.41 SOPHICAL QUARTERLY (four

Transfer check from bank 1.00 numbers) 1,407.66

Expense of Subscription Dept,

$1,243.93 of the QUARTERLY 17.10

Balance April 20, 1916 $343.10

$1,584.61
Balance April 26, 1917 $2.42

$1,587.03 $1,587.03

T. S. ACTIVITIES 81

FINANCIAL STATEMENT

(Including Special Accounts)

General Fund

April 20, 1916 $343.10 Disbursements $1,584.61

Receipts 1,243.93 Balance April 26, 1917. 2.42 $2.42

$1,587.03 $1,587.03

Special Publication Account
Balance April 20, 1916 $312.00 Balance April 26, 1917 $312.00

Discretionary Expense Account
Balance April 20, 1916 $483.00 Balance April 26, 1917 $483.00

$797.42

On deposit Corn Exchange Bank, April 26, 1917 $899.68

On hand for deposit 66.94

$966.62

Outstanding checks, not yet cashed 169.20

$797.42

H. B. MITCHELL, Treasurer.

Permit me to say, further, that the bank book is here, the check book, and
the cash book, all three in balance, and open for inspection if any auditing is
desired. I should like also to add my own thanks to the Assistant Treasurer,
Mr. Karl D. Perkins, who, as many of you know, has done most of the work
of the Treasurer's office at a sacrifice of time and convenience that is not under-
standable by those who lead lives more permanently located. He has been away
at the times when we should have liked to send out our receipts more promptly,
and has been obliged to work at great disadvantage. It is to him that I am indebted
for the ability to tell you that the books are balanced, and that we have made a
worthy use of the money intrusted to us.

On motion made by Mr. Griscom and seconded by Mr. Acton Griscom the
Report of the Treasurer was accepted, with a vote of thanks to Professor Mitchell
for the work done by himself and his assistant, Mr. Perkins. Professor Mitchell
resumed the Chair, and called upon Mr. Griscom for the report of the Editor-in-
Chief of the QUARTERLY, who consents to appear only at Convention time, remain-
ing anonymous in the magazine. Mr. Griscom said :

REPORT ON THE THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

There are certain things at Convention that I like to do — talking of Mrs.
Gregg is one of them. Among the things that I do not like is talking about the
QUARTERLY. It seems to me that after fourteen years a magazine should have
reached such a point that you would not expect the editor to talk about it. It is
especially unbecoming of me to do so because, in looking over the Index, the other
day, I found that I am there credited with more articles in the last volume than
anyone else, despite the fact that the chief duty of an editor is, admittedly, to
keep his own stuff out. Nobody else can! I have no statistics for the year to
give you; it has been without important outer incidents.

One idea came to me, however, which may be of interest to you — I found
that for the past year the keynote which ran through the magazine was that of
Discipleship ; practically every article that was published bore directly on Disciple-

82 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

ship. This did not come about through deliberate design, yet there was the fact
that with three or four exceptions, one of them a book review, there had been
nothing in the magazine that did not bear upon the problems of Discipleship, that
was not designed to be of help to us in the effort to lead the higher life. The
range of topics has been wide ; there have, for instance, been discussions of the
war, but those were from the point of view of what each one of us should feel
and should think. There have been biographies of the saints and of great people,
but the underlying purpose was to show what inspiration they could give to us
who are trying to lead similar lives. The sum of the work of the magazine for
the past year has been along the line of personal effort and sacrifice, constantly
presenting ideals of the highest and noblest type.

If there are any suggestions that any of you have to make as to new fields
to be covered, new types of articles that would be helpful, I should be glad to
hear from you.

MR. MICHAELIS : I am sure that we all have a deep sense of the great debt
that we owe to the QUARTERLY and to its Editor ; and that if we had any criticism
to offer on the conduct of the magazine it would be that we do not have more
articles from the Editor. I beg, therefore, to move that this Convention express
its sincere thanks to Mr. Griscom for his editing of the QUARTERLY. This motion
was seconded by Mr. Mitchell, and enthusiastically voted.

THE CHAIRMAN : If it were not for the fact that so large a proportion of
those here present are doing more or less work on the QUARTERLY, I should like
to entertain a motion to thank the contributors and the other workers.

We have now reached the end of what is usually the work of the morning
session ; it has been the custom to confine this session to organization and to the
reports of the officers, so that there may be opportunity during the noon recess
for members to consult about the other matters to be brought up, and for the
several Committees to meet. Mr. Griscom has suggested, however, that instead
of closing now we should hear from visiting delegates, which is one of the most
interesting of the opportunities that the Convention offers. If there is no objection
to that procedure, I will ask Miss Hohnstedt to report on the work of the
Cincinnati Branch.

REPORTS FROM DELEGATES
CINCINNATI BRANCH

Miss HOHNSTEDT: First, let me say that I look forward to this Convention
from one year to the next — you will understand that it is a great pleasure to
me to be here with you. I should like to begin my report by reading to you a
letter of greeting from the President of our Branch, Mr. Guy Manning :

"Once again the members of the Cincinnati Branch send their
greetings to those in Convention assembled at New York. We are keeping
up the good work with doors wide open, and the members loyal and
willing workers, eager to hand on the philosophy that has been so helpful
to them. We attract some interested visitors who take active part in our
discussion, with the result that we are all benefited. The best feeling
always prevails."

That is the feeling of our Branch ; the members arc unitedly willing and
eager to do all that they can. One departure in our work this year is that we
have had certain subjects under discussion for two or three consecutive meetings;
we have tried to discuss them from the philosophical, scientific, and religious
standpoint. All our visitors have come regularly; our average attendance is 19, of
this number we average 9 or 10 members. We have carried on our Study Classes
as usual; in our members' meetings, we prepare for the next topic to be taken up
at the public meetings or else discuss the questions that have already been raised

T. S. ACTIVITIES 83

there. We have monthly classes in the Key to Theosophy, and we also take up
the devotional books. For propaganda we use the QUARTERLY, which we have
placed in all the libraries of the city. We are looking forward to much work
next year.

SAINT PAUL

The Chairman asked for a full report from Saint Paul, being the youngest
Branch in the Society. Responses were made by Miss Goss, the President, and
Mrs. Shaw, the Branch delegate.

Miss Goss: We are babies in the Society; there are only four of us, and
we are all beginners, struggling to help each other. There is complete harmony
among the four, and a spirit of devotion that is rarely equalled. Our active work
has been the study of the Ocean of Theosophy; we hold open meetings which
begin with meditation and reading from Light on the Path, followed by the reading
of some "lay" book that may have appealed to some member, and we close with
some selected biblical passage — in biblical interpretation we get great help from
Mrs. Shaw who is a wonderful Bible student. She is our delegate, and will report
further.

MRS. SHAW: I came only expecting to listen and to learn, but it may be of
interest to you to know that our little Branch grew out of the hunger of two
people for further light; they had come up from years of faithful service in the
path of orthodoxy. They had been led to the conclusion that there was a great
gap between religious teaching and religious experience. It seemed to them that
there must be a bridge between the only world we know and that other world
which they felt must exist somewhere. We cried for light, and the answer came
through association with Miss Goss, a former member of the New York
Branch, who brought to us a knowledge of Theosophy, and through Theosophy
the light has come. Speaking for myself, what I have learned has brought to
me the deepest comfort, the brightest light, the greatest incentive I have ever
had. I feel that all the rest of my life is to be colored by this meeting, and I am
deeply grateful for the association with you. All I can do is to perform the humble
duties that come to me the best I know how — if that is Theosophy, then I am a
deep-dyed Theosophist.

BLAVATSKY BRANCH, WASHINGTON

MRS. GITT : Our Branch meetings have been well kept up during the year,
in spite of various hindrances, such as the illness of members, and a car strike
which was so serious in its consequences that the police warned us not to use
the cars, but we went to the meetings just the same, and none of us was injured
or molested.

I want to refer to what Mr. Johnston and Mrs. Gregg have already
said about the depth of devotion that has characterized the T.S. work this year.
That is true of our meetings in Washington. We are convinced that what counts
most is the inner attitude of members and not the number who attend any given
meeting. We hold semi-monthly meetings, different members presiding and
selecting their own subjects. These subjects are largely drawn from the QUARTERLY
• — we have had some excellent meetings based upon "Notes and Comments." Our
members do much individual work, and we feel that we are growing strong.
The best evidence of this is the harmony that exists in the Branch. I wish that
we could do more during the coming year to increase the circulation of the
QUARTERLY, that we could persuade more people to read it regularly. Mr. Johnston's
"Christianity and War" has been sent to a number of our ministers, and one of
them preached two sermons on it. This seems to me a good time to give out
these pamphlets, when light on the whole problem of war is being so earnestly
sought by many people.

84 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

MlDDLETOWN BRANCH

This Branch was represented by its proxy, Mrs. Gordon of New York, who
was for years a member of the Middletown Branch, and is still called by them their
"absent member." The Branch completed this year its study of the "Yoga Sutras,"
and has recently taken up the "Abridgement of the Secret Doctrine." The meet-
ings, which are held every other week, represent only one of the activities of this
Branch, whose local membership is small — only five — but they are fortunate in
counting among their number several devoted members, whose lives, as Mrs.
Gordon says, are centred in the theosophic movement.

It is in personal work for the cause that this Branch seems to have been
most effective, and that is ceaselessly carried on.

HOPE BRANCH, PROVIDENCE

Mrs. Regan, the President of this comparatively new Branch, represented it
at Convention. The work has been carried on quietly, and with enthusiasm, as from
the beginning. There are public meetings twice a month, and a Study Class every
week. The public meetings are devoted to the presentation and discussion of arti-
cles in the QUARTERLY or selections from "Fragments" — all those present taking an
active part in the discussions. The Branch has inaugurated the policy of sending
the QUARTERLY to persons who, it is hoped, will continue the subscription for
themselves, and so enable the Branch to widen its field constantly. The first and
most important work of this Branch is still felt to lie in building its foundations
on the right principles, and as Mrs. Regan says, it takes a long time to build a
firm foundation.

NEW YORK BRANCH

MR. HARGROVE: Professor Mitchell is President of the New York Branch,
I act as Chairman. Perhaps others may be prepared, this afternoon, to go into
details as to the kind of work we undertake ; I should like to speak now of our
motives and aims. I was greatly impressed by a statement made by the delegate
from the Saint Paul Branch, Mrs. Shaw, who said that their Branch was founded
by two people who had for years been faithful to the truth as they then
saw it, i.e, to orthodox Christianity. One thing that the New York Branch believes
most profundly is, that unswerving fidelity to any truth will lead to the Masters
and to light; the merit lies in the fidelity. We feel that whoever is faithful to the
light he sees, is faithful to the truth, to his own soul, and is in fact a Theosophist
though he may never have heard the word. It is because we as a Branch are so
profoundly convinced of this, that we have been able to carry the light of
Theosophy into the church and into other organizations.

Theosophy is a light; it is not a thing in itself, it is a light. It is not a
church and cannot be compared with a church, nor with any organization the
purpose of which is to spread a particular truth. It is a light that is intended
to illumine all things ; a light which its members should carry with them, so that
wherever they go they may give light. In this it is like the soul, which ought
to illumine men's minds. This does not mean, as we well know, that the mind
has got to stop thinking ; on the contrary, it has to do its share, to contribute its
part, while the soul should illumine all mental processes. That, as the New York
Branch sees it, is the purpose of Theosophy — a leaven that leavens the lump.

Like the other Branches, we have been learning much this year. Events of
the outer world have illustrated before our eyes the eternal truths of Theosophy.
Take such incidents as the Russian revolution ; we ought to learn from that a
great theosophic truth, which is that it does not follow that a country is better
governed by a hundred million fools than by one colossal idiot. We are not
advocating any particular form of government. Individually we may feel that

T. S. ACTIVITIES 85

some particular form of government is the best; but if we look at the problem
with detachment, we shall learn that it is not so much the form of government
which counts, as that which lies back of the form, namely the character of the
individuals concerned. It is the individual, the light within the individual, or the
lack of it, that is important. So this question of government resolves itself for
us into the need that the individual shall strive by all means in his power to
get light into his darkness. Before we can get light we must always begin by
realizing that there is some darkness; if we start by recognizing that there is a
little darkness, even a very little, we may find in time that our darkness is
increasing splendidly! At about that time the light should begin to dawn.

Every Branch must move forward. Growth in numbers is not the important
thing; the real thing is the steady illumination of individuals from within. No
one who has been a member of the T.S. for a great many years can be devoid of
zeal; we realize that we owe everything we are, have, and know to Theosophy.
There are some of us who are doing active work in the Christian church, and
there are those within the church who are not members of the Society, who speak
well of what is being done. We show, I believe, a deeper understanding of church
doctrine than the average exponent of Christianity possesses ; we get it from our
years of study of Theosophy and from the effort to put into practice some of
the Theosophy which we have learned and which we have tried to live. Ultimately
it does all resolve into living the theosophic life, that we may carry the light of
Theosophy into the darkness of the world.

The great question of Brotherhood, which means everything when rightly
understood, is being studied by the New York Branch. We know that it is the
supreme art of life, and that there is nothing more difficult in the world than
the art of right living. Whenever we come into contact with a human being, the
problem of Brotherhood is involved, and every day that one lives one ought to
discover something more about the meaning of Brotherhood. You saw a hideous
distortion of Brotherhood in the fervent pleas from many quarters for peace-
at-any-price ; you revolted from this twist of mawkish sentimentality. Yet that
is a mistake which many people make. They will never begin to be brotherly
until they discover that it is the exact opposite of inhumanity on the one hand
and of sentimentality on the other. These, which are supposed to be opposites,
are so only in the sense that they form the opposite base angles of a triangle,
with Brotherhood at the apex. In spirit, those two base angles are identical. As
a Branch, we are in the habit of bringing our studies back to the question —
what is brotherly? It takes time to see that if we would understand Brotherhood
we must understand the great Masters and Avatars who were its perfect exponents.

The Chairman announced that the time for adjournment had come, and that
luncheon would be served at the Hotel St. Denis at 12.45 ; the New York Branch
extended a cordial invitation to this lunch to all visiting members and delegates.
A motion for adjournment until 2.30 was declared to be in order and was carried.

AFTERNOON SESSION

At 2.30 the Chairman called the Convention to order, and asked whether the
Committees appointed at the morning session were prepared to report. They
were declared to be ready, and the Committee on Nominations was first called,
Mr. Griscom reporting for the Committee.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON NOMINATIONS

The Committee on Nominations as usual has a very simple report to make.
We have to elect a Secretary; Assistant Secretary; Treasurer; Assistant Treas-
urer, and two members of the Executive Committee. For the offices of Secretary

86 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

and Assistant Secretary the Committee nominates the present incumbents, Mrs.
Gregg and Miss Perkins.

THE CHAIRMAN : The report of a Committee needing no seconding, I will
ask you to vote on the candidates proposed as Secretary and Assistant Secretary.
Unanimously elected.

MR. GRISCOM : For the office of Treasurer we propose the name of Professor
Mitchell ; and as Mr. Perkins, the present Assistant Treasurer, is likely to be away
frequently during the coming year, we propose as Assistant Treasurer the name
of Miss Martha E. Youngs of New York. Unanimously elected.

MR. GRISCOM : For the Executive Committee, we propose the names of Judge
McBride of Indianapolis, and Colonel Knoff of Kristiania. Colonel Knoff repre-
sents the Society in Norway and in fact in Scandinavia ; Judge McBride well
represents the old-time spirit of the T.S. We had expected him here to-day, and
I have a special delivery letter from him explaining why he is absent — the reason
is one which I am sure would interest you all. When the European war broke
out his son went over into Canada and enlisted there, was made a captain and
later put into a training camp to train recruits. He wanted to go to the front
when his regiment was called but was considered too valuable as a training officer
to be allowed to go. Finally, feeling that he could no longer endure being left
behind, he resigned his commission and enlisted as a private, and as a private went
to the front in the fall of 1914 in the same regiment in which he had been an
officer. With it he saw much service, being wounded seven times ; he received a
number of decorations for distinguished service, including the Military Medal of
Great Britain, and from France the Croix de Guerre, with the bronze palm, and the
Medaille Militaire. He was in a hospital in London when this country declared
war, having regained the rank of captain, and he has just returned home to
recuperate fully from his injuries. His father reports that he is ready to go
back to Europe as soon as he is fit, hoping that he can go with American troops
and under an American commander. Meanwhile, after spending this week-end
with his parents, he is going to Culver Military Academy as an instructor in
modern trench warfare — thus remaining in the harness while taking the necessary
time for recovery. A visit from such a son seems to your Committee ample excuse
for absence from this Convention. In his letter Judge McBride also says :

"Please convey my best wishes to the members of the Convention,
and give expression in as strong terms as you can of my regret that I
cannot be with them. My son has recovered from all his hurts, except
a hurt to one knee and an injury to his left eye. The hurt to the knee
only bothers him occasionally now. The injury to the eye was caused by
a blow from a piece of shell that fractured the cheek bone, and from a
steel splinter from the same shell that penetrated back of the eyeball and
lodged against the optic nerve. The splinter of steel was successfully
removed, and while his eye is still weak, his sight is growing better, and
he has the assurance of an eminent British specialist in London that bis
recovery from that injury, while slow, will be complete. Pardon me for
troubling you with these details of his injuries, but I thought that they
might interest you and your friends."

Mr. Michaelis moved that the Committee on Nominations be discharged
with thanks, and that a note be made of the fact that the Convention shares the
regret of the Committee that the Society is not to have the services of Mr. Perkins
as Assistant Treasurer.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON RESOLUTIONS

MR. HARGROVE: Mr. Chairman and Fellow Members — On behalf of the
Committee on Resolutions, I beg, in the first place, to suggest the following in

T. S. ACTIVITIES 87

comment on Mr. Griscom's remarks about Judge McBride and the reason for
his absence today:

I. RESOLVED, That the heartfelt congratulations of this Convention
of the T.S. be and hereby are extended to Judge McBride and his family
for the heroic and self-sacrificing service of his son, on behalf of human
brotherhood, at the front in France.

The Committee suggests that this resolution should be sent as a telegram,
io that Judge McBride may show it to his son while he is visiting his family.

The resolution was unanimously adopted, with much enthusiasm. Mr.
Hargrove then read the Committee's second resolution :

II. Whereas, The only binding object of The Theosophical Society
is to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of humanity; and

Whereas, Any form of slander is a direct violation of the principle
of Brotherhood ; and

Whereas, No one who is guilty of evil speaking or of evil listening
can be worthy of membership in the Society; and

Whereas, There is no provision at present by which the Society can
rid itself of unworthy members, therefore,

Be it Resolved, That the following be added as By-Law No. 2:

"The Executive Committee shall have power to expel from
the Society, after proper investigation and due hearing, anyone deemed
unworthy of further membership by reason of violations of Brother-
hood, whenever, in its opinion, the reputation and well-being of the
Society make such a course desirable."

and that the subsequent By-Laws be renumbered accordingly.

Be it further Resolved, That the Secretary be and is hereby instructed
to prepare and to issue to all members a booklet which shall contain the
Constitution and By-Laws as they shall exist at the adjournment "of this
Convention.

It stands to reason that we should have some provision for getting rid
of a member whose conduct makes him a disgrace to the Society. Imagine our
position with a member who was leading a scandalous life. There is no provision
in the By-Laws that enables us to do anything in such a case. Once a member of
the Society, no matter how deplorable his conduct may be, he has the right to
sign F.T.S. after his name, and the Society is helpless. The provision of this
Resolution seems to be only common sense — I do not see that there can be any
question about incorporating it into our By-Laws. The direct reference is to
slander; that, however, is not the only offence contemplated; it would cover any
offence against Brotherhood, which is the binding object for which the Society
exists. No one is expected to jump into an understanding of Brotherhood; the
oldest of our members would admit that it is difficult to understand, and still
more difficult to carry out consistently. But if there is in our ranks a member
who does not wish to learn, then he would prove himself unworthy. It is always
probable that we may sin against Brotherhood, but so long as we are willing
to learn, it is not conceivable that the Society would take action against us ; if
any one should show that he is not willing to learn, then it would be for the
Executive Committee to act, and to deprive him of his membership.

THE CHAIRMAN : Do you wish to hear the Resolution read again, or are
you ready to vote? [The question was called for, and the Resolution unanimously
carried.]

MR. HARGROVE: As to the next Resolution, which we may or may not all

88 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

agree about, it is important that there should be full expression of opinion, for
it concerns all of us vitally. It reads :

Whereas, The Theosophical Society, in Convention assembled, on the
24th day of April, 1915, adopted unanimously the following Resolution,
to wit :

"Whereas, The first and only binding object of The Theosophical
Society is to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Human-
ity; and

"Whereas, In the name of Brotherhood, war as such is being
denounced from many pulpits and lecture platforms, and in news-
papers and magazines, with appeals for peace at any price ; and

"Whereas, Non-belligerents have been asked to remain neutral ;
therefore, be it Resolved, That The Theosophical Society, in Conven-
tion assembled, hereby declares

"(a) That war is not of necessity a violation of Brotherhood,
but may on the contrary become obligatory in obedience to the ideal
of Brotherhood; and

"(b) That individual neutrality is wrong if it be believed that
a principle of righteousness is at stake."

And Whereas, The United States of America, by act of the President
and of Congress, has finally declared that neutrality is no longer possible
in a conflict that involves the deepest principles of righteousness, and has,
in obedience to the ideals of Brotherhood, declared war against those
who are carrying on "warfare against mankind" through "an irresponsible
Government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and
of right, and is running amuck."

And Whereas, By sacrifice alone can evil be overcome and righteous-
ness be established ;

Therefore, Be it resolved that we, the individual members of The
Theosophical Society here present, do hereby express our heartfelt
thankfulness that the country in which the Society was founded has
thus shown its recognition of the ideal of Brotherhood, and

Be It Further Resolved, That we do hereby pledge our utmost
loyalty and endeavour to the cause upon which the country has entered,
until through the energy of sacrifice the war be brought to a victorious
conclusion in accordance with the terms of the President's message.

I shall be greatly pleased if you approve of this resolution because three of
your officers labored over it last night, and it has been carefully discussed and
considered by your Committee appointed to-day. It seems to me that we ought
to be sincerely thankful that the resolution we adopted two years ago, which at
that time ran counter to the expressed official feeling of this country, proved to be
an expression of the soul of the country. In a country, as in an individual, you
have a higher and a lower self. That higher self is made up of courage, of
aspiration, of love for the highest that is recognized. The lower self is made up
of prejudice, of fear, of weakness, of selfishness. It was our privilege two years
ago to speak for the best that is in this nation ; and now it is only right that we
should express satisfaction that the nation has asserted its soul; has come out
positively on the side of Brotherhood.

Since all those who are here are readers of the QUARTERLY, I suppose it is
not necessary to explain that statement. It is inconceivable that any student of
Theosophy should imagine that Brotherhood is approval of everything and every-
body, or, on the other hand, that it means being against everything and everybody.
As members of this Society, we ought to have made Brotherhood the study of

T. S. ACTIVITIES 89

our lives; we should see clearly that its first principle is loyalty to the truth and
to the souls of men. This was illustrated in the QUARTERLY by the case of a
burglar, caught in the act of robbing a house. The foolish sentimentalists who
prate about Brotherhood would say that we must let the poor dear burglar off —
apparently the more of a burglar he is, the dearer he is ; (which would be expressive
of a certain type of Brotherhood). Let us assume that this burglar has a father
and mother, who instead of being fools are members of the T. S.; we will also
assume that they are really devoted to their son. His plight is set before them.
It might go bitterly against the grain, but if they had any sense of duty, any under-
standing of their son's needs, they would say; He must suffer for what he has
done; it is the only way to teach him the wickedness of his conduct. They would
say, Let us make manifest before his eyes the law of Karma; for his sake, and in
the name of Brotherhood, let him be punished.

So it is encouraging that the moral sense of this country, which two years ago
was amorphous and jelly-like, has recently become reasonably substantial. The
majority has come out for Brotherhood; has said that evil-doers must be punished;
that those who have come out openly against the laws of God and man must be
made to realize that sin involves punishment, and that there can be no forgiveness
until there be repentance and expiation.

The Committee recommends that you pass this resolution, and that you, as
individuals, pledge your "utmost loyalty and endeavour to the cause upon which
the country has entered, until through the energy of sacrifice the war be brought
to a victorious conclusion in accordance with the terms of the President's message."

THE CHAIRMAN : Your applause shows clearly the feeling of those present,
but the Chair would wish that this resolution should not be hastily passed. The
principles involved in it go deep into the real life of the Society; the principle of
Brotherhood implies the necessity for combatting false Brotherhood. These things
are too important to be assumed as known to us, and I therefore hope that the
principles of them may have full discussion here today. Two years ago we passed
a resolution (the one just read), of which the one before you now is the logical
sequence. A year ago another resolution was presented which the Resolutions
Committee recommended postponing indefinitely. No part of that is now before
you, but it seems to me that since such a resolution was presented and considered,
even though we refused to vote on it officially, it ought to be read here, as the
connecting link between our action of two years ago and that now proposed. I
will read it from the official report of the Convention of 1916:

"Chairman of the Resolutions Committee : 'The Resolution which I

shall now read is presented by Mr. K. D. Perkins, a delegate from the

New York Branch :

" ' — RESOLVED, That The Theosophical Society in Convention as-
sembled places itself on record as to the present wa. :

" ' — It is the conviction of the Convention that the powers of good
are now ranged over against the powers of evil : that, among the
nations, France is leading the charge of the White Lodge against the
attack of Germany, supported and directed by the Black Lodge and all
the evil forces of the world.

" ' — That this is a time when nations and individuals have chosen
and must now choose to wage war both outward and inward, on one
side or on the other:

" '—That this day of Convention is the eleventh hour and that
choice must now be made ; furthermore, the Society recognises the fact
that in this great conflict between good and evil, to choose neutrality
is to choose hell. —

" 'We do not recommend a vote upon that Resolution, but recommend that
it be indefinitely postponed.'"

90 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Though no action was taken on that resolution a year ago, it seems to be
pertinent to our consideration today. That it was an eleventh hour effort is evident,
and now, even at the eleventh hour, our own nation has acted. I think we cannot
do better than to ask Mr. K. D. Perkins to speak on the resolution now pending.

MR. PERKINS : When Mr. Hargrove and Mr. Johnston spoke this morning
they brought out the fact that the number of delegates and members gathered here
bears no numerical relation to the importance of the Convention, of the issues
involved ; of the results that hang upon our discussions and subsequent actions.
One side of this meeting was brought out and the other perfectly obvious side was
left for us to think over. If intensity of effort is what counts, then it must be
true that each one of us has it in his power by the quality of effort that he is
putting into this moment,, into the duties of everyday life, to bring a mighty acces-
sion to the Lodge itself.

It is clear, as Mr. Hargrove has said, that the soul of the United States has
finally listened, has assumed control, and has acted. There is also the soul
of this Convention of the T.S. If what that soul has done in days past has been
of supreme importance, surely what is taking place at this moment in our hearts
and wills is of no less importance. As we think of this resolution our thoughts
may run forward to the year to come ; what we set our wills and our hearts for
at this time may indeed have its effect on the issues yet to be fought out in France.
This Convention has it in its power to contribute markedly to the cause of Masters
and the Lodge because it is a bridge. Let us put behind this resolution of the
Committee the power of individual support which means individual sacrifice, such
sacrifice as we have seen so splendidly exemplified in the French nation during the
last two years, the sacrifice which goes with true courage. Let us determine in
our hearts that America shall do the right thing; let us remember as the hours
come and go what we said at the last Convention, taking up the words of the
French commander, "They shall not pass," and give all that we can, with real
joy, on the altar of sacrifice, for true Brotherhood.

MR. GRISCOM : I think it may be well to explain the difficulty over a resolu-
tion of this character. A fundamental principle is that the T. S. must not commit
itself to any particular belief, and it would be most unwise for us to step beyond
the limits which the founders wisely set; we must conform to that principle. There
are many things that some of us would like to say, to go on record as willing to
do. I know there was no one in the Convention last year who did not agree with
the spirit and purpose of Mr. Perkins' resolution last year, but we refused, and I
think properly, to commit the Society to what it would have been committed to if
we had passed the resolution. And now there is a way out which will at least give
relief for individual feelings. I have the right to get up and say anything that I
want to say, but that does not commit the Society ; it is only when an official vote
is t .ken that the Society is committed. I should like to see this Convention go
further than this year's resolution takes us. The limitations two years ago did
not prevent our expressing an opinion as to the direction which the law of Brother-
hood would take, and it has taken the country two years to catch up to the views
we announced then. Today I should like to see the Society go on record for the
next two years. I am going to read a resolution which I should like to see passed,
but I know that it is not possible for this Convention to take such action — so when
I have finished reading my resolution I shall move that it be not passed.

Whereas, The world is confronted with a crisis in its spiritual life, and
Whereas, Many persons do not yet realize that the war is a physical
expression of the age-long conflict between the forces of good and of evil,
and

Whereas, This country has at last awakened to the paramount impor-
tance of the conflict, and is beginning to appreciate the moral and spiritual
issues which are involved, and

T. S. ACTIVITIES 91

Whereas, Two years ago this Society, in Convention assembled, took its
stand against neutrality, or any attitude of compromise with the forces of
evil, and thus anticipated the action recently taken by the President and
by Congress, and

Whereas, We members of the T. S. deem it fitting and proper at this
important juncture in the history of civilization that we should again record
our principles and our opinions,

Therefore, be it resolved,

1. The war should be prosecuted with the utmost possible vigour, by
land and by sea, and by all available agencies, until the enemy is thoroughly
beaten.

2. That we should cast in our lot with the Allies, whole-heartedly and
without reservation, and that we should not make or consent to any peace
save in unison with them.

3. That we should give our Allies every possible assistance, with
liberal contributions of money, supplies, munitions, shipping, and above all,
with men.

4. That the resources of the nation, both men and materials, should
be organized on the basis of the war lasting several more years.

5. That every citizen should consider it his duty to contribute his
time, money, and work to the cause, up to the limit of his ability.

6. That as the war is a war of principle, it should be recognized that
spiritual victories are only won by spiritual forces, and that no one is con-
tributing his quota who is not giving what costs him hardship, deprivation,
and sacrifice.

MR. J. F. B. MITCHELL: In comment on Mr. Griscom's resolution, which he
warns us not to pass, I should like to express my personal satisfaction at the oppor-
tunity that is given us to talk over this matter in Convention — whatever limits may
wisely be set to our formal action. It is indeed gratifying that this nation has
thrown itself onto the side of its soul instead of serving the forces of death and
hell. It is clear that as a nation we greatly need to recognize the danger of the
misunderstanding of Brotherhood with which we are already confronted. The
principle of Brotherhood rests, as everyone here knows, on the identity of all
souls with the oversoul ; hence any compromise with evil must necessarily be an
offence against Brotherhood. In this country we are surely going to be tempted
to come to an easy compromise with evil before we have won our victory. It is
not too early to ask ourselves what will happen when Germany makes the first
peace offer which carries on its face an appearance of being genuine. What will
happen when they say they are sorry and will go back and be good. How many
people will then be inclined to say, — let us be magnanimous, let us be generous?
The danger we have to face is failure to go through to the end. We shall be
tempted to abandon the Allies and having set our hand to the plow to turn back.
It is therefore of vital importance that we of this Convention should realize that
we must throw ourselves in for the victory of the soul of the nation until that
victory is won and won completely.

DR. CLARK : Personally I should prefer Mr. Griscom's resolution, but I feel
that the Committee's resolution, if we put our hearts behind it, would really accom-
plish what is desired. It was said two years ago that our action then was in
advance of what the country felt. The Committee's resolution of to-day offers
something for the country to grow up to. It says that what is at stake is Brother-

92 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

hood. Brotherhood implies Fatherhood, and that is a fact which needs to be recog-
nized by this country. Splendid as is the President's message, it suggests that war
is a struggle between certain forms of government against the usurpation of one
ruler. It seems to me that this war is a struggle of evil forces against the forces
of good. The light that Theosophy has thrown on Christian teaching suggests
that this struggle is but the continuation of that war which started so long ago in
Heaven. It is the existence of the spiritual forces that is at stake, those great
forces that come to their center in God.

MR. SAXE: I am grateful to the Committee for this resolution, and grateful
for the speeches upon it which we have heard. I do not feel that I can add any-
thing to what has been said, except to express my heartfelt thanks.

THE CHAIRMAN : It is important, I feel, that the principles enwrapped in
this resolution should be exposed. I have been calling upon delegates, but I should
be glad to hear from anyone present who feels moved to speak to this resolution.

MR. BERRENBERG: I have been in a very peculiar situation with relation to
the war ! though born in this country I have lived in Europe so long that I have
assimilated many German ideas and it was natural for me to become a neutral in
this conflict. The Chairman has said that neutrality is hell, and certainly it has been
very bitter for me. I have tried to find my way to one side or another ; and if
I were going to follow my conviction I should have to oppose this resolution, but
I regard it as the first principle of Brotherhood to make sacrifice.

A!RS. SHELDON : Last year I was the only one who sat still when the resolu-
tion on the war was read ; to tell why I did so is too long and too personal a story,
but I should like to say that today I agree perfectly with the view of Dr. Clark as
to the spiritual principle that is involved in this war. To me there can be no outer
principle that can make true Brotherhood, it has to be for each individual to live
in the light of his divine consciousness, and I believe each should be allowed to
choose, to stand alone. This is a tremendous issue and it cannot be solved with
a few words ; it is the culmination of the ages, it is Karma ; and we have to realize
that great spiritual laws are being expressed through life today. I for one have to
bow to these laws and keep quiet. There is no sacrifice that I would not make,
but I have to wait and see what the way of sacrifice is for me; the matter is
between each person and the God within.

MR. MICHAELIS : This morning as I sat here thinking of the privilege that
was ours, my eye fell on the plaster cast of the cherub orer that door and on the
French flag near it. I tried to imagine what he would think as he looked back
over the centuries of effort and thought, reviewing all that the great ones had done,
and then I thought of what happened on Calvary Hill : surely he would feel that
we had done pitifully little to justify it. Still, after thousands of years of effort
herr is the T. S., something that is continuous, that has courage to face its problem
— and that reminded me of the dramatic story of that humble member of the
Canadian mounted police who, riding through one of the great northwestern
provinces in the storm and the gathering dusk, noticed an exceptional stalk of
wheat, stopped at the risk of his life to gather it, and so made possible the cultiva-
tion of a form of wheat adapted to those northern latitudes, which has resulted in
countless prosperous farms and thousands of sturdy men to fight in this war for
France and for the cause of the Masters. In the T. S. we have people willing to
face what will come from individual effort. We should be glad too that there
are in the T. S. older students who can make it clear to us that Brotherhood does
not mean the sacrifice of our convictions. That would indeed be a dangerous
doctrine. Let us remember that the mobs who burned in the south enjoyed lynch-
ings. Let us remember that each one of us has in him something of the German,
something that loves sin ; so each one may contribute something to this fight, as he
chooses on which side he will serve. Men are dying in France for the great cause,
we here are fortunate in that our poor pitiful sins can be made to do service, for

T. S. ACTIVITIES 93

the conquest of them can give us something with which to fight, here and now, in
the spirit of that greatest of all fighters, who in Gethsemane refused to allow us
to expiate for our own sins. I believe that the triumph of our Lord will be hastened
by what we have the wisdom and the courage to do here today.

MR. ACTON GRISCOM : One point which Mr. Mitchell made might, it seems
to me, be given further attention ; he spoke of fighting to the finish, and asked
what this country would do when the first peace offer came from Germany. I
have been asking myself what the proper punishment for Germany would be;
how far the distinction between German autocracy and the German people can
be made. It is very easy to become confused between the people who are
doing these things and evil powers who are involved in their course of action.
When I was a small boy I used to express regret for my misdeeds because I
saw that I was going to get into trouble. Punishment usually followed, regard-
less of my half-hearted regrets, and then I found myself in some confusion,
for I was conscious that my intentions at the time I was being punished were
good, but down below the confusion I knew that I was only getting what I
deserved. The tendency now is to let the child off from punishment if there
is any feeble sign of repentance. This tendency must also apply to nations,
and I think that we ought to clear up as much as we can the principles
involved in the punishment that should be meted out to the German people.

Miss HOHNSTEDT : At the beginning of the war it was a long time before
I could decide what .side to take. I saw so many good qualities in the German
people ; but as I looked for light I found that where they were efficient they
had turned their power to material ends, they had forgotten the mission of the
soul and what we are here for. I knew then what stand I had to take ; and
since then my attitude has been, not peace at any price, but justice at any
price.

MR. MITCHELL: I have been asked to inquire whether it would not be
possible for those individuals present who would have liked to vote for Mr.
Griscom's resolution, if it had been presented for action, to be given a chance
to express their individual feelings and convictions.

MR. MICHAELIS : I move a vote of thanks to Mr. Griscom for the paper
which he prepared and read to us.

It was moved by Mr. Michaelis and seconded by Mr. Mitchell that those
present extend to Mr. Griscom their personal thanks for the resolution he had
prepared, signifying in that way their agreement with the views expressed. This
vote of thanks was passed amid much applause and the action was unanimous,
with the exception of one person who declined to vote.

MR. HARGROVE: I am asked to speak before the resolution of the Com-
mittee is put to the vote. This resolution is based upon the first object of The
Theosophical Society, Brotherhood. What does it mean? What is it all about?
One speaker has said that this war is an outcome of Karma — so am I, and so
is this building, so is the law of gravity; but you cannot ignore the existence
of a thing just because Karma causes it. We have to deal with things as they
are, and not as we wish them to be. Spiritual life is an outcome of Brother-
hood. One of the most common mistakes in connection with the spiritual life
is the idea that you should ignore facts. It would be a mistake to ignore the
fact that one or two members of The Theosophical Society, even in this country,
were pro-German. It would be foolish if we felt that, in order to be brotherly,
we must not say what we think about the war, lest it should offend those
members. Let us look at the thing in its simplest terms: suppose there were
a member in a Branch, a friend of yours, who was pro-German. Should all
the other members sit around in an artificial hush, and say— We must not say
anything about the war; we must not do anything about it; that would not be
brotherly?

94 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Suppose we were to go back in imagination to the early days of Chris-
tianity. Imagine a family of Jews converted to Christianity — one of them did
not believe in Christ, and those people sat around and said — Hush, we might
hurt his feelings ! Clearly that would not have been right or brotherly. So
in a Branch, if we were to heed the mistaken advice to keep silent, we should
be doing a grievous wrong to the minority. What we ought to do in a Branch
is to go ahead and do the right thing. What is that? Think of H. P. B. —
her principle of action was : speak the truth and abide by it. You have to say
what you think, but do not be personal about it. To go back to the pro-
German friend, and the Branch meeting we were imagining. Another member,
we will suppose, makes a strong statement about the misconduct of Germany.
To make that remark for the purpose of hurting the feelings of the pro-German,
would be abominable. The motive must not be a personal one, but love of the
truth and of justice. If a German member, because of such statements, made in that
spirit, were to have his feelings hurt, he would show complete misunderstanding
of the spirit and purpose of the T. S. If Miss Hohnstedt, having come to a
splendid conclusion about this matter, had decided not to say anything about it,
would she be representing the Society? She has, in this sense, the advantage
of being of German origin ; she can say — It is not a question with me of race
or of ancestry; it is a question of Brotherhood. The more you love these peo-
ple, the more you ought to desire that they shall suffer for their sins.

Are we blind to the fact that they sinned? I do not believe that we are
as convinced of it as we ought to be. I do not believe that there are half
a dozen people in this room who have read consecutively and carefully the
report of the Belgian atrocities as given by the Bryce Commission, or the report
of the Swiss Commission as to what took place in Serbia. Unspeakable and
systematic atrocities have been proved, which were not the acts of isolated
individuals but part of an organized policy of terrorism. It would not be pos-
sible in an audience in which there are women to describe things that were
done over and over again by officers and men of the German armies. It is sin;
frightful, horrible, monstrous sin. Let me ask whether, if your own child were
to do such things, you would say, He is my own child, I must not punish him.
Such infamies as those, and worse in some respects, are being perpetrated to this
very day, in the belief that it is the only way to strike terror into mankind. In
the name of Brotherhood, we have got to show them that such things are met
with a punishment as terrible as the crime.

To the German member, who in many cases does not know the facts, the
thing to do is to insist that for his soul's salvation he shall know them. It is not
a question of blood being thicker than water; the more anxious he is to serve
his nation the more clearly he must see that for the sake of the soul of his people
it is necessary that they should learn that that kind of inhuman outrage brings
down the wrath of God and of man, until it is repented of for ever.

There is another point : we are going on record on behalf of Brotherhood,
and that brings us to a logical inference in another situation. We in New York
are constantly asked by members of outlying Branches how to deal with com-
plications that arise from the proximity of other Societies calling themselves
theosophical. There are, without doubt, a number of such societies in New York,
but they do not bother us. That is partly because it is a big city, and partly
because we are not interested or concerned. We leave them alone, and they
us — if they did not, we should wish to know the reason why. If in a smaller
city there is a Branch of some other society meeting next door, even if you are
friendly with individuals in it, is there any complication? I do not see it.
You may have a very friendly feeling for people in different churches, but you
do not feel obliged to go to their church, nor they to go to your T. S. Sup-
pose that you lived in Utah, and an exceedingly nice Mormon asked you to

T. S. ACTIVITIES 95

come around to the Temple, you might go from sheer curiosity but you would
not keep on going.

Let us look at the facts. There is the Annie Besant Society (it used to
be called the Olcott, the Adyar Society), and there is Mrs. Tingley's Society;
they are just as foreign to The Theosophical Society as the Mormons are.
It is difficult for those who have not been in the Society a long time to appre-
ciate this, but it is so. You may say that a newly enrolled member of the
Annie Besant Society was not mixed up with the past, did not attack Mr. Judge,
has not violated the principles of our Society, etc. — but you overlook the fact
that this person has joined the organization that did do these things, and so
must partake of the life, spirit, and purpose of the institution he has joined. It
is not a question of our meting out personal condemnation. The simple fact
is that the other societies are in some respects working for objects diametrically
opposed to ours. To pretend that they are working for the same thing is not
to be brotherly but nonsensical. Do we not realize that the spiritual life is based
upon common sense? Now to return to our resolution.

This resolution is based on Brotherhood, is built up on Brotherhood, and
must of necessity result in Brotherhood. In drafting it, the question with your
committee was not, how much can we say? but, what is the least we can say
while obeying at every point the needs of the situation and your and our
ideal of theosophic needs and standards ? When you come to read the resolu-
tion, later on, you will find that there is a great deal in it. If you adopt this
resolution, you will go on record as standing flat-footedly for the soul of this
country, and as standing side by side, as far as you are able, with the cause
of the Allies, which I suspect all of us believe to be the cause of Truth and of
Righteousness. We believe that this war is no more than the appearance on
the surface of an age-long conflict. You know that even the largest icebergs seen
floating in the water have the greater part of their bulk hidden out of sight
beneath the water. So it is with this mighty conflict between good and evil.
Those of us who believe in Reincarnation know that we are going on, age after
age, with this same war. What we are doing here is to reaffirm what we hope
is in every case an age-long enlistment to fight under exactly the same banner
under which we have already fought, — for the cause of Masters. We must
all be devoutly thankful that this fight is now out in the open ; that we need
no longer keep silent — thankful that we have the opportunity to speak for the
eternal Gods, whatever name we may give to them. Blood and race are not
the issue. The question is to what extent have we given ourselves to that
Cause, to what extent are we holding back, confused, doubtful, selfish — to what
extent are we in it, body and soul, now and always.

In response to many demands for the question, the Chairman asked for a
rising vote on Resolution No. 3, which had been considered at length. It was
unanimously carried; one person present refrained from voting, either for or
against. The Committee also had certain formal resolutions to present, but the
Chairman asked that they be withheld and that the Committee should not be
discharged until later — to give opportunity for any further resolutions that
members might wish to submit through the Committee. The next order of
business was the report from the Committee on Letters of Greeting, made by its
Chairman, Mr. Johnston.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON LETTERS OF GREETING

The greetings are numerous and cordial and immensely interesting; I am
sure that you would be delighted to hear them all if only there were time.
There are a few which should be picked out from the rest because they are

96 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

distinctly messages to this Convention. The first is from Dr. Keightley. He has
the honour of being the oldest member in the Society and is very dear to our
hearts; no one is better loved. We had hoped that he would be here today, but
his country felt that he was needed in England at this time. We shall hope that
his country may see that others also may need him, and that we may have him
with us before long.

To the Members of the Theosophical Society in Convention assembled :

The Members of the British Branch desire, through me, to send
their heartiest good wishes for a happy and a successful Convention in
this year : —

As we all felt last year, the world-war (and its effects) still occupies
the attention of the greater part of the human race, and now nation
after nation has been drawn into the whirlpool with the exception of
those who cannot assert themselves because of their position, geographi-
cally. It would almost seem that one nation, in its search for world-
domination, has succeeded in compelling all humanity to struggle for their
existence as individual nations. An English author once pointed out that
the law governing animal coalition was the struggle for life, and that the
essentially human stage was only reached when that struggle for life was
replaced by the altruistic law of struggle for the life of others. In
short, self-assertion was to be replaced by self-sacrifice to the common
good. It would seem that this is the lesson humanity has to learn,
and that we, each in his own place and manner, have to make our choice
between external, material benefits and adhesion to the principles which by
great efforts on our part lead us to the increased and essentially human
evolution.

And in this evolutionary progress, the objects of The Theosophical
Society, with the proclamation printed on the back of each issue of the
QUARTERLY, constitute a declaration of principles which can govern our
path for a very long distance. I remember that in one point of indecision
a watchword was given us : — "Avoid facts and stick to principles." The
world is faced today with multitudes of facts. But the principles which
lie behind the facts are neglected in the more obvious adhesion to self-
interest. Therefore let us get away from facts, and by loyal adherence
to principles which we know to be right in the evolutionary progress
of man as man, liberate ourselves and mankind from the thraldom of
material self-seeking. That thraldom is a slavery, and in the name of
God we strive for freedom.

Here, the conditions of work and the exigencies of the military
situation, still contrive to prevent the Branch meetings from taking place
in the evening. In many places the streets are entirely dark, in others
there is so little light that walking is dangerous, and the cars are infre-
quent, or do not run. In the north, some of the most active members
are serving in the army abroad; almost all have some national duty to
perform. We very slowly gain in numbers, and I am glad to say we
have lost no members.

May next year find us at peace, but may no peace come until the
lesson is learned.

ARCHIBALD KEIGHTLEY,

General Secretary,
British National Branch T.S,

T. S. ACTIVITIES 97

There is a very welcome and sympathetic letter from South America, ad-
dressed to Mrs. Gregg, which I shall next ask the privilege of reading to you.

CARACAS, March, 1917.
DEAR FELLOW- WORKER :

With much pleasure I've read your kind favour dated 24th February,
as well as the notice for the assembling of the Convention; and in accord-
ance with them and their contents, I with pleasure send you the report with
the Office-bearers and the new members of the Branch during the year
1916, as well as the credential for the representation of the "Rama Vene-
zuela" in the coming Convention of the Theosophical Society.

The reunion of this body, in this critical moment for the world, we
consider to be a supreme event ; as one other proof — and that, conclusive —
that the triumph of the Good Law is a fact.

United, truly united as we are, we send our salutation, our fervent
gratitude, together with the wishes that the "Rama Venezuela" makes that
the greatest success crown its labours, being as these are, the work of the
world's health.

With best wishes,

I am, yours fraternally,

JUAN J. BENZO, Secretary.

MR. JOHNSTON : There are many other letters that I should like to read but
this Committee must not trespass too far upon the time of the Convention.

THE CHAIRMAN : It has been customary for the Chairman of the Committee
on Letters of Greeting to read selections from the letters, such as he thought
ought to be called to our attention at this time; and a resolution has usually been
adopted authorizing the editor of the QUARTERLY to print such other important
letters as there was not time to read. I know of no further business that need
interfere with the reading of additional letters but visiting members have indicated
the desire to hear further from delegates about Branch work and particularly
about the work of the New York Branch.

MR. HARGROVE: We could hear from members of the New York Branch at
the Branch meeting this evening and I would suggest that we give Mr. Johnston
time to read such of the letters as he specially wishes to read.

MR. MICHAELIS : An address by the President of the New York Branch has
been one of the features of the Conventions which many of us remember with
much pleasure. I hope that time enough may be left for such an address.

MR. JOHNSTON : Many of the letters that have come to the Committee deal
largely with the details of Branch work. The principles to be brought out are
those embodied in the letter from Dr. Keightley which I have already read and I
think we might suspend the reading of letters at this point. It is usual at this
point for some well-meaning person to move that the Chairman of this Commit-
tee shall reply to these letters of greeting. I wish to do what I can to discourage
that resolution. The letters go directly to the Secretary of the Convention for
the making of the Convention report and as it is some time before they can again
reach the Chairman of this Committee, I think it would be more charitable and
practical not to provide for something that is not likely to be carried out.

THE CHAIRMAN : Your pleasure is asked with reference to the recommenda-
tion of the Chairman of this Committee that the editorial board of the QUARTERLY
be asked to include with the Convention report such letters as it feels could to
advantage be incorporated. The vote to that effect was unanimous.

98 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

MR. HARGROVE : The Committee on Resolutions, having received no recom-
mendations from delegates or members, asks permission to present the formal reso-
lutions which are always passed; and which will conclude its work.

4. A resolution providing that Mr. Johnston or some other representa-
tive of the Executive Committee be requested to do all the various things
that should be done with reference to the letters of greeting; — that leaves
him a loophole, and perhaps he can get some assistance from Mrs. Gregg
or Miss Perkins.

5. The usual resolution of thanks to the New York Branch for its
reception of the Convention.

6. The usual resolution authorizing the visits of officers to the
Branches.

The foregoing resolutions were unanimously passed; also the motion made by
Mr. Mitchell and seconded by Mr. Michaelis, that the Committees on Resolutions
and on Letters of Greeting be discharged with the thanks of the Convention. The
Chairman then announced, 1. The meeting of the New York Branch at 8.30, to
which all members and delegates were cordially invited. 2. The public lecture, to
be given by Mr. Charles Johnston, at Hotel Saint Denis, on Sunday afternoon at
half past three. 3. The tea to be given by the New York Branch at the Studio,
following Mr. Johnston's lecture. There being no further business to come before
the Convention, the Chairman asked for a motion to adjourn. Mr. Michaelis
requested permission to anticipate that with a motion that the cordial thanks of the
Convention be extended to Professor Mitchell and Miss Perkins, for their services
as Chairman and Secretary. This motion, put by Mr. Hargrove, was carried. In
response, the Chairman made the following brief address, after which the motion
to adjourn was made, duly seconded, and carried.

THE CHAIRMAN : This closes our business ; it does not close the life of our
Convention. The true life of this Convention is but beginning. Many things have
been said here, and it now remains to live them. Unless they are to be lived there
were no need or use in saying them. Our putting into action of the principles
declared two years ago was followed by the nation. In the spiritual world, as has
been said, numbers are not the important thing — what counts is the extent to which
spiritual principles are lived. We have said much to-day of war, because the laws
of war are the laws of life. There is no compromise in war or in life ; those who
think there is must decline and die. Life is war. That is the cost every one of us
must pay for our deepest life which comes to us from our Master.

To live that life — to make the divine live in us — means ceaseless conflict. If
we are not willing to undertake that conflict, and to struggle daily to overcome
all the manifold evil that is arrayed against us in our own natures, and which
surrounds us in the external world, we cannot keep even the vision of the truth,
and all that has been given to us will have been given in vain.

As we go out now, having listened to much, it behooves us to go out deter-
mined to live much. And in particular, when we read in these Convention proceed-
ings the resolution that we have just passed, I hope that each and every one may lay
firm hold upon the phrase "by the energy of sacrifice." It is only by sacrifice
that we can win our way to victory, can keep our hold on life. What we have said
is nothing unless we make the sacrifice. War, Sacrifice, Brotherhood — these things
mean conflict, and we go forth to enter upon it.

ISABEL E. PERKINS,
Secretary of Convention.

T. S. ACTIVITIES 99

LETTERS OF GREETING

ALTAGRACIA DE ORITUCO, VENEZUELA.
To The Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled:

FELLOW MEMBERS :

The members of the "Rama Altagracia de Orituco" greet you, and at the
same time they desire to be united with you in heart, spirit and purpose. It may
be said, we think, that the vigorous impulse with which The Theosophical Society
has carried forward its spiritual work, since it was founded in New York, is the
realization of the ideal of work initiated at the beginning by our dear Master
H. P. B. Throughout, we see the fruits of that magnificent labour, appearing in
science and philosophy as much as in religion and art. They show that they have
perceived a glimpse of the inner light and that they are moving toward the com-
mon ideal of brotherhood. Therefore, we suppose that, although at present our
Race is involved in material catastrophe and ruin, because of conditions created by
the false concept that men generally hold of the purpose of life, yet beyond this
can be seen the awakening in our Race of a higher spiritual consciousness, emerg-
ing with a new arrangement of things. That result is undoubtedly due to the
efforts and consecration of The Theosophical Society.

Considering the universal conflagration, which affects us also, we believe in
our "Rama" that we must give our attention to the consideration of problems such
as those that the QUARTERLY has been explaining since the beginning of the Euro-
pean war. It has been waging a very serious campaign against the greatest forces
of evil in the world. In our place we have cooperated and have followed the stand-
ard that the QUARTERLY has raised, working in accordance with it. ' The princi-
ples of love and justice need for their defense all our courage, and this is a good
opportunity to serve them with valor and loyalty. This is an important fact of our
theosophical life in the past year.

Furthermore, we have had the happy event of the publication of the transla-
tion of "Patanjali's Yoga Sutras," made by the "Rama Venezuela," from the Eng-
lish edition. In our "Rama" we are studying this remarkable book. Our work has
followed the same plan as in previous years : meetings, readings, etc.

We wish earnestly that you may get full success upon the object and purpose
for which you are to be assembled at this time.

Fraternally yours,

M. DE LA CUEVA,

For the "Rama Altagracia de Orituco."

CARACAS, VENEZUELA.
To the Convention of The Theosophical Society:

I come to fulfil the duty of rendering account of our labours during the past
year; and with such motive I salute respectfully the Convention of The Theo-
sophical Society in the name of the members of the "Rama Venezuela."

Those labours have been a simple continuation of those realized before, with
the sole object of diffusing the Theosophical doctrine and spirit among the Span-
ish-American peoples. An important part of that program of work has been our
review, Dharma. Inspired in the QUARTERLY, many of whose articles it reproduces,
Dharma has managed to be, in this way, an echo of the profound cry of the Mas-
ters which arises continuously from the heart of that great nation called, with
justice, the stronghold of Theosophy. Our work has not been an easy one. Sev-
eral difficulties we have had in sustaining our Review, but it pleases us to be able
to say that our Branch feels itself happy for having been able to conquer them,
and also for having interpreted them as the most interesting proofs of its faith
in the ideal of human fraternity and of its love for the cause of the Masters. It

100 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

pleases me, besides, to announce that the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are already in
circulation in America, translated and edited by our Branch; and we have the hope
that their reading will awaken many souls to the life of things spiritual.

The Branch meets once a week; and in each there are studied theosophical
books, subjects proposed among the members which are considered and threshed
out; and generally the diverse matters which constitute our literature and philoso-
phy are speculated on.

There is an indication which gives a clear confidence in the future of the
Theosophical movement in Venezuela, and this consists in the sale, in promising
manner, of books of our literature. This shows that there are readers of our
spiritual matters. It is to be supposed, therefore, that later on that tendency
will seek an atmosphere in which to manifest and live externally. It satisfies me
to say that that future success is upheld and fortified by the fact that in the heart
of our "Branch" there lives and prospers a faith certain of the triumph of universal
fraternity, and labours according to the measure of its forces, for that triumph.

I offer the most cordial wishes that the labours of the Convention may mani-
fest, for the welfare of the world, the thought and the will of the Masters.

F. DOMINGUEZ ACOSTA, President.

LONDON, S. W. 3.
To the Members of The Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled:

The London Lodge sends greetings and sincere good wishes for the success
of your deliberations. We are with you in spirit, and hope that the meeting
may be a memorable one and that all may receive strength and inspiration for the
work of the coming year.

The black cloud which hangs over mankind externally, affects especially
the deeper things of life. They who could not see God in the sunshine and
among the flowers, or recognize him in the smiles of their fellows, are begin-
ning to hear his voice in the storm and to recognise the signs of his purpose in
the depths of human suffering.

We know that the lesson each of us has to learn is a necessary one.
May we have strength to humbly do our duty and to aid those whose duty is
to help mankind in this day of trial.

Sincerely and fraternally yours,

M. GORDON KENNEDY,
N. KENNEDY,

Joint Secretaries.

ADDITIONAL BRANCH REPORTS

WALKER, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.
DEAR MR. JOHNSTON:

On behalf of the members of the Newcastle-on-Tyne Lodge I am requested
to ask you to represent us at the forthcoming Convention and to use our votes as
occasion arises as you think best. We have not received word of any new resolu-
tions to be put forward, so take it there are none this year. During the past year
we have steadily plodded on in spite of the various difficulties which the war
has produced, and have endeavoured to still keep before us that right spirit
which seems to us the true drawing power of the T. S. As an instance of this
may I be pardoned for quoting from a letter of a new member?

T. S. ACTIVITIES 101

"I wish to convey to you how deeply I appreciate the kind thoughts and
wishes you have addressed to me. It is very helpful to come among friends
with such large sympathies. The T. S. has many attractions, and this striking
one is very encouraging and surely an inducement to join the Society. I have
perhaps a little knowledge of what true greatness means and I hope to learn
more as time goes on. I felt the atmosphere, the first evening I attended the
meeting to be one of hearty goodwill, and am very glad of the privilege to
join the Society. I do hope that I will be able to realize the possibilities before
me, that I may indeed become an active member and worthy the name."
Believe me to be,

Yours sincerely and fraternally,

E. HOWARD LINCOLN,

Secretary.

KRISTIANIA, NORWAY.

In the past year the Karma Branch has as usual continued its meetings once
a week in the evening except in September, October and November, when meet-
ings were held every fortnight only. During the Summer 1916 the meetings were
suspended. As a rule the meetings have been conducted by Colonel Knoff, who
has selected pieces mostly from the theosophical literature, and commented
on them. Afterwards there has been a discussion in which those present have
taken part with great interest. The door has been kept open to all.

In December last one of our earliest members, Mr. Carl Sjostedt, passed
away. The Branch has felt this loss deeply, being much indebted to Mr. Sjostedt
for his faithful work, especially at a time when his help was greatly needed.

The great stir in Europe at the present time seems to draw the attention
away from our little Branch. Meanwhile, we are trying to keep up our work,
knowing that every effort to support the Theosophical Movement is valued and
valuable ; and we are confidently looking forward to the time, when the raging
conflict is over, trusting that good must prevail and that evil will be overcome.

ANNA D. DAHL,

Secretary.

AYLSHAM, NORFOLK, ENGLAND.
DEAR SECRETARY:

I have no activities to report for this year from the Norfolk Branch of the
T. S. as all the members are scattered, — one is a prisoner of war in Germany
and two others are away doing "War Work." So it is not possible to hold any
meetings, but we try to read as much as possible, and we keep up our interest
in T. S. activities. We read the QUARTERLY with keen interest and have found so
many of the articles, especially on war subjects, most admirable. There have been
no new members in the Branch.

We send cordial greetings and all good wishes to the Annual Convention of
T. S.

Yours fraternally,

HOPE D. BAGNELL.

VIRYA BRANCH, DENVER

We can only send our greetings this year to the fortunate members attend-
ing the Convention. Protracted absences and illnesses here have caused some
changes in the apportioning out of Virya work and in the number and character

102 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

of our meetings, now held only on the first Sunday of every month. While
nothing can compensate for our temporary absentees, we have noted in the
attendance of visitors, a marked increase, numerical and dynamic. Our new quar-
ters are more accessible to street cars, in a closer-in neighborhood. While no
new members have been added, these increased individual activities and facilities
have brought about a wider-spread interest in somewhat newer circles. Attendance
is more regular and prompt, and curiously new in quality. The meetings arc
enriched by the presence of several acquaintances who may never join the T. S.
(being satisfied with their own modes of thought), but whose gracious and
stimulating presence and friendly spirit in discussion, evokes appreciative theo-
sophic response. We are learning hard problems in paradoxes : To be tolerant,
flexible, and courteous, while at times, conscience demands firm treatment of
the alien views of passing guests from other Societies, is one problem doubt-
less not confined to our little area of Branch-consciousness.

Deeper questions than those of mere adaptability and flexibility of method,
confront each personally, brought to light by our winter's study of articles from
the QUARTERLY on "A Rule of Life." We take them in connection with the older
but identical teachings of the Gita. In tracing the parallelism between the Gita's
simple yet mighty Manual of Warfare against evil, with these elementary yet
subtle modern teachings regarding Discipline and obedience in practical Theo-
sophic life, in the working world of today, we have been confronted by problems
and paradoxes, great and small ; world-questions, and personal questions, hard
to reconcile with public discussion in a parlor full of strangers. We begin to
suspect that it is not only a race-weakness, but a grave individual aversion to
implicit obedience, and the recognition of superior officers, which retard our
spiritual growth and make life painful instead of simple and spontaneously happy.
These articles on methods of discipline have unearthed startling discoveries in
each one's interior field of thought and emotion. They have ploughed deep, and
the harvest of good seed-thoughts is a matter of patient waiting. They have
drawn deep furrows (with what at the time seemed like "harrowing effects")
upon us all, members both new and old, and friends, acquaintances, passers-by
casual, or otherwise. Our's seems to be an intensive field, more overworked
than neglected at present. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties is in
feeling the necessity for our existence, among so many noble and enthusiastic
workers along somewhat similar lines. The absurdity of our lack of numbers,
strength, opportunity, etc., would annihilate the Virya were it not that wiser
Branches than our's had made from even smaller beginnings a Cause whose effects
will be obvious a thousand years hence. Since we are here, and hard at such
ancient tasks as these of reconciling each one's need of freedom with the self-
sacnfice of each to all, (and the need of absolute joy in our self-imposed dis-
cipline,) we may take comfort in the belief that we are important enough for
the very existence and continuance of the Branch life to be a genuine little
miracle of the Master's care and protection. In a world of warring elements
and factions and dissonances, the presence of our Theosophical Society is to many
of us — watching it nourish, reconcile, explain and transmute our lower natures
into higher heavenly consciousness — the best and most practical proof of the
great miracle of the Master's Love. How can we be other than grateful for
the help so faithfully extended us all since each first entered the ranks? During
the year just past, each member of the Virya has felt more than usually glad of
membership and appreciative of the Society's beautiful sympathy and interest in
all the activities of all its scattered branches.

Faithfully yours,

THE VIRYA BRANCH.

T. S. ACTIVITIES 103

PACIFIC BRANCH, Los ANGELES

I hardly know what to say in regard to the information about special work
that is desired. We have one member who has been working with a so-called
"Voluntary Co-operative Association," for the uplift and benefit of down and
out humanity, supplying them with material assistance, and propagating the Theo-
sophical doctrine among them as well as can be done; and the same member
has joined the Congressional Church for the helpfulness of the members in com-
ing to an understanding of the inner meaning of the Bible, so far as he is afforded
the opportunity, in harmony with our teachings. Two lady members are in
correspondence with friends in other parts of the country on Theosophical sub-
jects, and one of them, a teacher in the Indian school at the agency, sub-
scribed to the QUARTERLY, I have been told. One lady and one male member
of the Branch circulate the QUARTERLY gratuitously among their friends; this
coming issue, nine such copies will be circulated. Another male member is
proselyting among his friends in a city adjacent to this city. Another male
member conducts correspondence on Theosophical matters with absent friends,
and looks after the sale of the QUARTERLY in the stores, and makes himself
generally useful in Theosophical matters during the day with callers at the meet-
ing room.

We all wish you well, and regret that some one of us has never been able
to attend a Theosophical Convention. With much love,

Sincerely,

ALFRED L. LEONARD,

Secretary.

INDIANAPOLIS BRANCH

We are few in number here but we are doing Theosophical work in many
ways. A class of students, who are at work with the Ocean of Theosophy, appear
to be very much taken by its contents. It's a hopeful sign, when people get inter-
ested enough to ask many questions about the different statements in the Ocean.
The effort to make the Ocean fill the place it is expected to fill adds real fire
to our meetings and makes the members feel that the time has been well spent.
Every Friday afternoon, for two hours, we have something going on in the class
that keeps them very busy.

The members of the class carry the seed to places where it takes root, and
soon we have another member. Better still, the members of the class are begin-
ning to understand that the Theosophical study has nothing to do with opinions
or beliefs; that it is a life that must be lived, to know its real meaning.

I hope the Convention will be what all expect it to be, and that the Master's
blessing will be with your efforts.

Fraternally yours,

GEO. E. MILLS,

Secretary.

AURORA BRANCH

Our Branch has for one year adhered to the plan of taking the Sutras of
Pantanjali, in their successive order, as the subject of daily meditation — com-
paring individual results at our meetings. So helpful did we find the exchange
of thoughts, that along in August of 1916 we decided to embody our notes
in a rather more permanent and amplified form. These were typed, and placed
on file at our lodge rooms, and are open to the members who care to peruse them.

At this date we have completed the first book of the Sutras, and after tak-

104 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

ing one afternoon for the examination and summary of the principles involved,
and whatever practical application we have deduced from our understanding of
them, we will begin the second book, in the expectation that, as we seek Truth,
Truth will be revealed to us, to the glorious end that it shall abide with us.

Along with this central activity we have completed the reading of Ancient
and Modern Physics, and Memory of Past Births.

With sincere greetings from the Aurora Branch to those friends whom, not
having seen, we yet do know, I am,

Fraternally yours,

JULIA A. HYDE,

Secretary.

THE ROLL OF HONOUR
A COMMUNICATION FROM THE PRESIDENT OF VENEZUELA BRANCH

Angelo Santos Palazzi, member of the "Rama Venezuela" was married, with
three children. He enjoyed a fair share of wealth. Three years ago he estab-
lished himself with his family in Barcelona, Spain. He was generous and bright,
of fine spiritual qualities and worked for Theosophy. As soon as the war began,
he believed it his duty to fill the place of a soldier in the army of France. Separat-
ing himself from his wife and three children, the little family he loved much, he
went forth to fight. He was decorated for valour, and now we have received
notice of his death, bravely fighting in the Vosges Mountains. He died victoring
France.

Please strike out his name from the book of members of the Society; and
communicate the news to the other companions.

Fraternally yours,

F. DOMINGUEZ ACOSTA.

FROM THE TREASURER'S OFFICE

Members are requested to note that many dues are in arrears for the
year 1917, which has just closed. Prompt payment would be greatly appreciated.
According to our By-laws, dues for the year 1918 became payable on April 30th,
1917; and it would greatly facilitate the work of the Treasurer's Office if all
1918 dues were paid within the month of July. (In case any member does not
find it convenient to pay at this time, please send in a word to that effect.) The
duei are $2.00 for each member; and of the $2.00 received from each member
$1.00 is applied as subscription money for the payment for the magazine that
is sent to each member without additional charge.

H. B. MITCHELL,

Treasurer T. S.

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 PEACE MESSAGE OF BENEDICT XV

THE Letter addressed by Pope Benedict XV "To the Leaders
of the Belligerent Peoples," and published on August 15, de-
serves our most careful study for several reasons : First, perhaps,
for the claims which Pope Benedict makes for himself, with the
spiritual and moral consequences which logically follow from these
claims; second, in order that we may clearly realize the political results
which would ensue from a general acceptance of the Pope's Peace Plan ;
and, thirdly, in order that we may gain a clearer view of certain moral
and spiritual principles involved. It should be said that apparently a
French version of the Pope's Letter was given out by the Foreign Office
in London, while only an English translation appears to have been cabled
to this country; and this English translation is so poor, that it is often
difficult to make out its meaning. We shall try, however, to make no
deductions except from sentences that are absolutely clear.

"Since the beginning of our Pontificate," Pope Benedict begins, "the
horrors of a terrible war let loose on Europe, we had in view above
everything three things to preserve: Perfect impartiality toward all
belligerents as is suitable for him who is the common Father and
who loves all his children with equal affection; continually to attempt
to do all the good possible and that without exception of person, with-
out distinction of nationality or religion as is dictated to us by the
universal law of charity which the Supreme Spiritual charge has con-
fided to us with Christ; finally, as our pacific mission also requires, to
omit nothing as long as it was in our power which might contribute to
hasten the end of this calamity by trying to lead peoples and their leaders
to more moderate resolution, to hasten a serene deliberation of a peace
just and durable."

Pope Benedict claims, therefore, to be "the common Father," loving
all his children — in this case, all the belligerent peoples — with equal
affection ; the "common Father" of all, without distinction of nationality

105

106 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

or religion ; further, Pope Benedict claims an august source for this
"common Fatherhood" ; — "which the Supreme Spiritual charge has con-
fided to us with Christ." This is not quite lucid, but it evidently means
that God has conferred this common Fatherhood upon Pope Benedict,
as the Father entrusted authority to Christ ; practically, that Pope Bene-
dict is the representative of Christ, both in his common Fatherhood,
which embraces all the belligerent peoples, and in the proposals which
he puts forward to compose the differences between them. He presides
as representing Christ; he makes proposals as Christ's representative.
That is the claim.

As Pope Benedict reminds us, he was elected just after the begin-
ning of the World War; in fact, on September 3, 1914, on the eve of
the battle of the Marne; he was crowned on September 6, as that
decisive fight began. Therefore we may expect that, at such a critical
time in his life, Pope Benedict's mind and heart were peculiarly open
and alert, sensitive to impressions of events then taking place in the
world. He knew, therefore, of the assassination, at Sarajevo in Bosnia,
on June 28, 1914, of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian
throne — by Austrian subjects, in an Austrian town. He knew that
Austria, which had planned to destroy Serbia in the summer of 1913,
instantly seized on this assassination as a pretext, and delivered to Serbia
an ultimatum which meant that Serbia must either give up her national
sovereignty or suffer the horrors of armed invasion by Austria. To the
astonishment of the world, Serbia chose the former course, and, in her
reply to the Austrian ultimatum, practically yielded up her national
sovereignty into Austria's hands. But this abject self-humiliation was
quite useless. Austria declared the answer unsatisfactory, and announced
that "the Imperial and Royal Government are themselves compelled to
see to the safeguarding of their rights and interests, and, with this object,
to have recourse to force of arms." This declaration of war against
Serbia dated at Vienna, on July 28, 1914, was the actual beginning of
the World War. On the same day, July 28, the Austro-Hungarian
Ambassador at Berlin telegraphed to Count Berchtold, the Austro-
Hungarian Secretary for Foreign Affairs : "The proposal for mediation
made by Great Britain, that Germany, Italy, Great Britain and France
should meet at a conference at London, is declined so far as Germany
is concerned on the ground that it is impossible for Germany to bring her
Ally before a European Court in her settlement with Serbia." (This is
Document No. 35, in the Austro-Hungarian Red Book.)

It must have been perfectly well known to Pope Benedict that

(1) Austria had delivered an outrageously unjust ultimatum to Serbia:

(2) that, even when Serbia accepted its terms, practically without reser-
vation, Austria announced that this was unsatisfactory, declared war and,

NOTES AND COMMENTS 107

in fact, precipitated the World War; and (3) finally, that both Austria
and Germany declined any form of mediation, arbitration or peaceful
settlement; declined any decision, except that which might be obtained
by force of arms. Benedict XV must have been, and must be, quite well
informed as to who, in fact, began the World War, and on what pretext.
Further, he must have followed the events which followed each other
so swiftly, at this impressionable period of his election. He must have
learned that, at 7 p. m. on August 2, Germany presented to Belgium
"a note proposing friendly neutrality. This entailed free passage through
Belgian territory, while guaranteeing the maintenance of the independ-
ence of Belgium and of her possessions on the conclusion of peace, and
threatened, in the event of refusal, to treat Belgium as an enemy. A
time limit of twelve hours was allowed within which to reply." (This
is Document No. 23, in the Belgian Grey Book.)

Germany demanded permission for her armies to pass through
Belgium on the pretext that France was preparing to attack her. In his1
book, "Germany and the Next War," published a year earlier, Bernhardi
had written : "Let it then be the task of our diplomacy so to shuffle the
cards (die Karten so zu mischen) that we may be attacked by France
. . ." (page 280 in the English translation published by Longmans,
Green and Co.). Bernhardi meant, of course, not to "shuffle" the cards,
but to "stack" the cards, as a cheating cardsharper does. But, even
using this method, German diplomacy failed. France not only did not
attack ; she withdrew all troops to a distance of ten kilometres from her
frontier, in order to make chance collisions impossible. The trick of the
cards having failed, Germany had recourse to another even more ele-
mentary. Announcement was made throughout Germany that French
aviators had dropped bombs on the Niirnberg railways. This was, of
course, simply a lie : "The Magistrat of Niirnberg has avowed to Privy
Councillor Riedel that all reports of the kind are false ; and Professor
Schwalbe has confessed as much in the Deutsche Medizinische IVochen-
schrift of May 18, 1916."

All this must be perfectly well known to Pope Benedict, and is,
without doubt, perfectly well known to him. We have quoted from the
two documents which actually started the World War : Austria's outra-
geous ultimatum, followed by her declaration of war against Serbia ; and
Germany's ultimatum, equally outrageous, to Belgium. These are the
actual causes of the condition which Pope Benedict so eloquently depicts :
"the war continued desperately for another two years with all its horrors.
It became even more cruel and extended over the earth, over the sea,
and in the air, and one saw desolation and death descend upon the cities
without defense, upon peaceful villages and on their innocent population,
and now no one can imagine how the sufferings of all would be increased
and aggravated if other months or, worse still, other years are about to

108 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

be added to this sanguinary triennium. Is this civilized world to be
nothing more than a field of death? And Europe, so glorious and so
flourishing — is it going as if stricken by a universal madness to run into
the abyss and lend its hand to its own suicide ? "

Here, then, is the condition brought about by the war, as Pope Bene-
dict sees it. The documents proving that Germany and Austria prepared,
caused and launched the war, we have just given. No judicial body
could have the slightest doubt as to where full culpability lies, for the
horrors which Pope Benedict deplores. What, then, in the presence of
this quite simple situation, clearly showing the crime, the criminals and
the victims, — what, then, is Pope Benedict's moral attitude? He tells
us himself : "Perfect impartiality toward all belligerents" !

Surely, a more complete moral abdication it would be impossible to
imagine. But the formidable thing, from the spiritual point of view, is
that, in thus making a parade of his moral blindness, Pope Benedict
claims to speak as one entrusted with supreme authority by God, as the
representative of Christ. ... In effect, the essence of the Teutonic
crime is murder and lying. Does Christ in fact maintain towards murder
and lying the attitude of "perfect impartiality"? As quoted by the
Apostle of Love, Christ's attitude is this: "Ye are of your father the
devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do : he was a murderer from
the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in
him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own : for he is a liar,
and the father of it. . . ." (John, viii, 44). Perfect impartiality! . . .
Is it not, on the contrary, the fact that, in his moral judgments, Christ is
unflinchingly just — one may say, absolutely unrelenting? Has he not
given us the exact measure of his own stern justice? "Then shall he
answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not
to one of the least of these ye did it not to me. And these shall go away
into everlasting punishment. . . ." Thus Christ speaks with unmis-
takable decision, for the high integrity of God.

There is, in the Pope's Letter, a later sentence which brings this
nonmoral standpoint into still higher relief, the sentence in which Pope
Benedict says: "As to the damages to be repaired and as to war
expenses, we see no other means of solving the question than by sub-
mitting as a general principle complete and reciprocal condonation. . . ."
The dictionary meaning of condonation is, "pardon, forgiveness," There-
fore Pope Benedict sees no other means of solving the question of the
wrongs inflicted in this most iniquitously contrived war, except mutual
pardon, mutual forgiveness. . . .

Let us try to work this out in detail. Austria plotted the national
destruction of Serbia, and, after Serbia had soundly thrashed her, enlisted

NOTES AND COMMENTS 109

the aid of Germany and Bulgaria and filled Serbia with ruin and deso-
lation. Well, according to Pope Benedict, Serbia is to forgive Austria,
and Austria is to forgive Serbia. . . . Again, Kaiser Wilhelm, in
direct violation of the pledge of Prussia, brought abominable devastation
to King Albert's realm. Then let King Albert forgive the Kaiser, and

let the Kaiser forgive King Albert There was reported, from

Belgium, wholesale outrage inflicted upon Belgian nuns by German offi-
cers and soldiers. Pope Benedict bids the nuns forgive the German
soldiers — and bids the German soldiers forgive the Belgian nuns. . . .
There was, in Belgium and in France, wholesale shooting of women and
children by German soldiers. Let the dead women and children, through
their surviving kindred, forgive the soldiers who bayoneted them; let
these German soldiers forgive the women and children whom they foully
murdered. . . . The men and officers of German submarines mur-
dered over a thousand non-combatants, largely women and children, when,
by the Kaiser's orders, they torpedoed the Lusitania. Let the immortal
Lusitania dead pardon their murderers, and let the murderers forgive
the women and children whom they murdered ; for Pope Benedict sees
no other means but mutual condonation. . . .

But, we may be told, forgiveness, pardon, is a Christian obligation ;
therefore Pope Benedict, in thus asking for mutual condonation, is ful-
filling his duty as a Christian, as "the Father of the faithful," to
repeat his own phrase. We say, on the contrary, that, in thus asking
for the forgiveness of unconfessed, unrepented sin, Pope Benedict is
contravening a cardinal dogma of his Church. According to that teach-
ing, a priest "cannot and may not absolve one indisposed," that is, unre-
pentant; "absolution presupposes on the part of the penitent, contrition,
confession, and promise at least of satisfaction." Absolution is only
possible "where there is true repentance and sincere confession"; there
must be sincere detestation of sin, and "the motive of this detestation
is that sin offends God." We are further told that "God himself cannot
forgive sins, if there be no real repentance." (Catholic Encyclopedia,
"absolution" and "penance.")

When and how, therefore, did Germany and Austria show contri-
tion, confession and promise of satisfaction? Has Kaiser Wilhelm, have
his lesser accomplices, manifested that "real repentance" without which
not even God himself can forgive sins? The very question is full of
stinging irony. And this irony arises from the obliquity of Pope Bene-
dict's moral vision. Surely the exact contrary is the fact: Germany is
notoriously unrepentant; so far from confessing, both she and Austria
continue to lie ; to lie in their prayers even, as to their part in launching
this most iniquitous war — as one of Pope Benedict's Cardinals did, on
a recent and memorable occasion, at Vienna. To teach that the women
of France and Belgium should forgive the men who enslaved them, while

110 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

these remain obdurate, insolent, exultant, is, perhaps, thinkable — though
we hold that Christ taught no such obligation, while the Church of Rome
explicitly teaches that even God himself cannot forgive unrepented sin.
Forgiveness by the victims is, as we say, thinkable ; but is there not a
profound outrage to the moral sense in the suggestion of "mutual"
forgiveness ?

As a practical policy, Pope Benedict gravely proposes a general dis-
armament, and the establishment of a universal court of arbitration
"according to the rules to be laid down and the penalties to be imposed
on a State which would refuse either to submit a national question to
arbitration or to accept its decision." On this, several comments suggest
themselves : first, that disarmament has been discussed again and again,
only to be met with a direct negative, always from Germany. Unless
Pope Benedict has definite certainty (something more substantial than
verbal assurances or scraps of paper) that Germany will now reverse
herself and consent to disarmament, there is something futile and irrele-
vant in making this the foundation-stone of his peace proposal. If he
has made the suggestion while practically certain that Germany will
never accept it and carry it out honestly, then, in making this suggestion,
there is a lack of good faith.

Pope Benedict goes on : "Once the supremacy of right has thus
been established" — that is, by disarmament and arbitration — "all obstacles
to the means of communication of the peoples would disappear by assur-
ing, by rules to be fixed later, the true liberty and community of the
seas, which would contribute to ending the numerous causes of conflict
and would also open to all new sources of prosperity and progress." The
presence in this sentence of the German catchword "the freedom of
the seas," makes it desirable to comment on this rather enigmatical
phrase.

Here is the first comment: "In times of peace the freedom of the
seas has been so long enjoyed by the whole world that men are apt to
take it for granted. . . . Four centuries ago the doctrine of inter-
national law which declares that the high seas are the common property
of all nations was not accepted. On the contrary, a Papal award of
1493 — at a time when the Papacy was the supreme international arbiter —
practically gave a monopoly of most of the world's seas to Spain and
Portugal; and for a century thereafter the ships of all nations but these
voyaged at their peril in the South Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans."
Thus writes Professor Ramsey Muir, in a recent pamphlet, "Mare
Liberum," page 2. It appears, then, that in time of peace the freedom
of the seas has been long enjoyed by the whole world. We do not clearly
see how a condition which has long existed "would open to all new

NOTES AND COMMENTS 111

sources of prosperity and progress." That the great historic violation
of the freedom of the seas was due to a predecessor of Pope Benedict,
is interesting but not relevant.

But there is the other side of the question, the freedom of the seas
in time of war. The author just quoted sets forth very lucidly the
German view on this question, as brought out in the discussions which
led up to the abortive Declaration of London in 1907 — abortive, because
the British Parliament refused to ratify it. Professor Muir says: "The
German view of freedom of the seas in time of war was that a belliger-
ent should have the right to make the seas dangerous to neutrals and
enemies alike by the use of indiscriminating mines ; and that neutral
vessels should be liable to destruction or seizure without appeal to any
judicial tribunal if in the opinion of the commander of a belligerent war-
vessel any part of their cargo consisted of contraband. ... At the
same time she was anxious to secure to belligerent merchant-ships the
right of transforming themselves into war-ships on the high seas. Thus,
a belligerent merchant-ship might sally forth as a peaceful trader under
the protection of the 'freedom of the seas,' and, so long as it carried
no contraband, be safe from interruption by the enemy ; then, picking
up guns in a neutral port, it might begin to sink enemy or neutral ships
which, according to the judgment of its captain, were declared to be
carrying contraband ; and this without reference to any court of law.
Such was — and is — the German doctrine of the freedom of the seas."
("Mare Liberum," pages 12-13.)

Which suggests two comments : First, that the use of a phrase with
such directly opposite meanings in Pope Benedict's Letter, makes not
for clearness but for confusion ; second, that we have here an excellent
illustration of a fundamental fact: namely, that, in all discussion and
controversy, Germany makes any phrase mean exactly what she wishes ;
she seeks to give it, not a fair and honest meaning — for fair-play as an
ideal has for Germany simply no existence — but precisely the meaning
which is most advantageous to the selfish interests of Germany. Thus,
every item in the above-quoted German doctrine of "the freedom of
the seas" is deduced from the fact that the British navy is greatly
superior to the German ; Germany, by a series of tricks, tries to counter-
act this superiority. It is a fair supposition that, had Germany had the
stronger fleet, "the freedom of the seas" would have had no greater
currency than, say, "the freedom of the Belgians."

But, with this unvarying action of the German mind, it is not un-
natural that other nations do not greet with enthusiasm Pope Benedict's
suggestion that they should agree to settle, in conference with Germany,
questions like the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, the reconstruction of
Poland, the future of Armenia and the Balkan States; nor are other

112 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

nations overanxious to have Germany set her signature to further
scraps of paper.

We believe then that, in holding forth the hope of universal dis-
armament, unless he knows that Germany will not only agree to it, but
will really carry it out, Pope Benedict is simply cherishing delusions
and asking others to cherish them. We hold that, in appealing to "the
spirit of equity and justice," so far as Germany is concerned, he is
appealing to something which has no existence ; and that, in seeking
to build a durable peace on Germany's "spirit of equity and justice,"
he is seeking to build a house upon the sand. His persistent ignoring of the
notorious bad faith of Germany must fill the Allies with a pitying scepti-
cism as to the validity of his whole appeal ; while his "perfect impartiality"
between criminal and victim profoundly shocks the moral sense of every
honest nation, of every honest man and woman in the world. No; no
moral clearing of the issues of the World War can be even begun, until
it is recognized, and frankly stated, that justice and righteousness are
with the Entente Allies, while the Central Empires have been fighting,
and are now fighting, for the principles of evil.

That Pope Benedict, claiming to be the representative of righteous-
ness and justice, should counsel a "perfect impartiality," blind to the
difference between good and evil, is disgraceful. That he should do
this in the name of "the Redeemer, the Prince of Peace," invoking the
light and counsel of the Divine Spirit, is more than disgraceful.

As these Notes are written, only one reply to Pope Benedict's Letter
has been made public: That of the President of the United States.
President Wilson takes his ground firmly on moral principle, the prin-
ciple of international honour and the sanctity of international engage-
ments. It is useless and dangerous, he tells Pope Benedict, to try to
found world peace on a treaty with Kaiser Wilhelm, whose government
has made the breaking of treaties a principle of state policy; useless to
form a confederation of nations for the preservation of peace, with the
German Emperor as a party to it, since the actual confederation of
nations which, in 1831, pledged itself to preserve the inviolability of
Belgium, and of which the kingdom of Prussia was a member, furnished
the "scrap of paper" which has passed into history. Germany was also
pledged to solemn observance of The Hague Conventions enjoining
humanity, honesty and protection of noncombatants in time of war,
while Germany has notoriously — and of deliberate purpose — violated
every principle of these conventions. These deliberate violations of her
plighted word of honour by Germany were, of course, just as well known
to Pope Benedict as to President Wilson, yet Pope Benedict does not
hesitate to say that "the honour (of the German army) is safe." One
would like to take the testimony of noncombatants in Belgium and

NOTES AND COMMENTS 113

occupied France, for the most part members of the Church of which
Pope Benedict is head, concerning "the honour of the German
army."

Certain things in President Wilson's Reply are more debatable.
For example, a passage evidently inserted as an afterthought, since it
interrupts the logical sequence of the Reply, takes exception to "economic
agreements." But the fiscal policy of the United States is based upon
an economic agreement, wholly selfish in purpose; while the economic
agreement entered into at Paris by certain of the Entente Powers has
as its sole purpose, to check Germany's power to prepare for "the next
war"; and this is also the chief purpose of President Wilson. And,
as the United States is not a party to the Paris agreement, there would
seem to be a lack of propriety in any criticism of that agreement by the
United States Government, especially any criticism in a sense hostile to
the purpose of the Entente Powers.

President Wilson also speaks deprecatingly of "the dismemberment
of empires," obviously meaning the empires with which the Entente is at
war: the German, Austrian and Turkish empires. But, to begin with,
the United States is not at war with the Austrian and Turkish empires,
and, therefore, has no standing in the future settlement to be made with
these two empires; further, in what he has already written of Poland,
"united, independent and autonomous," President Wilson has already
implied the dismemberment of the Russian, German and Austrian em-
pires, to that extent; and there is the obvious case of Armenia, which
implies a dismemberment of the Turkish empire. Nor could the aspira-
tions of nationalities (to which President Wilson adheres) be realized,
without the dismemberment of the Austrian empire. There is in this
a lack both of consistency and lucidity.

But the United States is actually at war only with the German
Empire and is, therefore, concerned with the German Empire only. And
it would seem that his phrase deprecating the dismemberment of
empires is in fact addressed to "the German people," with whom,
President Wilson has several times said, the United States has no quarrel.
This position appears to us open to grave exception on several grounds.
First, the German Empire has been built up by quite recent acts of
rapacity. If the fact that Alsace-Lorraine was iniquitously taken from
France entitles these two provinces to separate treatment, then the same
reasoning of necessity applies to Schleswig and Holstein, as iniquitously
taken from Denmark only six years earlier. And exactly the same
thing is true of Hesse, Hanover and Nassau, as iniquitously seized by
Prussia in 1866. It is impossible to serve at once the integrity of justice
and the integrity of the German Empire, which has been built up by

114 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

rapacity and injustice. If justice be the criterion, then the German
Empire must be, and ought to be, dismembered.

The President takes this position, inconsistent with historical justice,
in pursuance of his theory that the German people does not share the
blood-guiltiness of this iniquitous war; with this belief, he would condone
the equally iniquitous annexations of Bismarck (with the exception,
perhaps, of Alsace-Lorraine), since this condonation is necessary to
preserve the unity of the German people, even though, in doing this, he
would of necessity fasten Prussian domination upon the German people.
But we do not share the belief that the German people is in any sense
free from blood-guiltiness, or from the fullest responsibility in every act
of cruelty, terrorism and fraud committed by Germany. Nor do we hold
that "the masters of the German people" are in any degree more guilty
than the German people which upholds these masters with servile adora-
tion, and which, in its individual members, has made itself the willing,
eager instrument of every one of these atrocities. The practical test is
this: Was the German people, as a whole, ready to share the plunder?
An accessory after the fact fully shares the guilt of a crime; and
the German people have been accessories not only after, but during and
before the launching of this most iniquitous war. But we may well leave
the disproof of this position to the logic of events. As regards his main
position, the inviolability of international honour, President Wilson seems
to us to stand on the firm rock of spiritual principle.

In the order of nature, necessary tilings, as air, water, earth, the God
of all goodness has made common and easy of attainment. Nothing is
more necessary than breath, sleep, food, and nothing is more common.
Love and fidelity are no less necessary in the spiritual order, therefore
the difficulty of acquiring them cannot be as great as you represent it to
yourselves. REV. J. P. DE CAUSADE, SJ.

FRAGMENTS

THE disciple, if truly a disciple, must also be a priest. He will
live in such close communion with the Master that he will make
of each common act or detail of life a sacrament, and so turn the
bread and water into the Eucharistic flesh and blood — make of
himself a channel that Christ may use to feed with the bread of life,
which is Himself, all those who approach him. To pass this communion
chalice to others, we must first drink of it ourselves, and so we must
watch with the Master in Gethsemane, and be able to pray His prayer
there from our hearts.

Not all of us can hope to reach Calvary, where we can say, "It is
finished," but the Garden is offered each one. Mostly we turn away
from it, and leave Him to suffer there alone for us.

Can we not bear in mind this priestly function in even the smallest
contact with others, for love of Him? making of ourselves tabernacles
where the veiled Christ lives perpetually, to minister to all who approach
the Sacrament of His love?

From a Master. Convention, 1916.

"Throughout each moment of these two following days, bear this
thought constantly in mind: that you have it in your power, by united
effort and devotion, to make of this Convention a momentous one. This
is a day when men are being sifted — as individuals, as organizations, as
nations. It is an accounting day in the Lodge, and the ledgers are being
balanced. Part of the veil has been drawn aside, and men are staring at
realities ; some with sightless eyes, it is true, but others with under-
standing. We held back our hands an instant, and the hounds of hell
leaped forth. And so the crisis — foreseen, in some sense precipitated.

"I am at Verdun, and I send you this from the heart of battle.
Dites, vous aussi, Us ne passer ont pas! "

Comrades : The Master has given us a consign, "Us ne passeront
pas!" Let us use it as a mantram, as they are doing in France, to
galvanize even our cold hearts to the flame of His love and service. Let
us meet each mood, each temptation, each slackening of the will with the
flash of its steel — determined to conquer — to die if need be — but to
conquer eternally for Him. CAVE.

"5

CYCLIC LAW IN ART

WITH COMMENT UPON THE RELATIONS OF ART, SCIENCE AND RELIGIOX

THE History of Art illustrates the parable of the tares and wheat
— good and evil flourish, side by side. It is a piece of changeable
silk; one sees the colour he looks for, sees whatever he brings,
sees his own soul, in fact, — just as the artist himself can not
paint or carve or put into tones or words anything else than his own soul
or lack of soul. But while good and bad art thus flourish side by side,
there are large encircling periods or cycles which govern art production,
just as, on the small scale of a year, the cycle of the seasons controls the
output of tares and wheat. Recognition of these cycles, their orderly
progression, and of the smaller cycles that develop within them, will
clarify and enlarge the understanding of any period of civilization and
also of individual works of art.

For purposes of convenience the year 1858 may be taken as the
beginning in England of one more effort to revive the civilization of
ancient Greece, and to substitute its mode of life for what the pro-
moters of this revival took to be Christian ideals. In 1858, William
Morris published his Defence of Guenevere, a protest and reaction
against mid-century literature of which Tennyson is the shining leader.
The turning toward ancient Greece was part of that reaction. Three
champions of the Greek revival were Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater and
Swinburne. The common effort of these men, and of William Morris,
was to escape from restraint, — Arnold, in the sphere of the intellect,
Pater and Swinburne in the sphere of philosophy, aesthetics and
morals.

At the same time, another group of men were working to spread
abroad acquaintance with Greek civilization — a group of university
scholars, literati of the first rank. These men worked inconspicuously,
and, unlike Arnold and Swinburne, their work and their names are
scarcely known, save to professional students of literature. I refer to
the translations from the Greek made by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and
Ernest Myers. These scholars were not belligerent self-advertisers,
and did not seek the public stage of controversy. But, as scholars and
critics, it was not possible they should be blind to the startling differences
between ancient Greek civilization and the results obtained by the
English would-be-Greeks. In a prefatory sonnet to the translation of
the Odyssey, Andrew Lang suggests that the modern imitators of Greece
would be purged of moral sickness, if they would drink copious draughts
of true Greek vintage.

116

CYCLIC LAW IN ART 117

As one that for a weary space has lain
Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine
In gardens near the Pale of Proserpine,
Where that Aeaean isle forgets the main,
And only the low lutes of love complain,
And only shadows of wan lovers pine,
As such an one were glad to know the brine
Salt on his lips, and the large air again,
So gladly, from the songs of modern speech
Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers,
And through the music of the languid hours,
They hear like ocean on a western beach,
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

Mr. Ernest Myers, in his Introduction to the Odes of Pindar,
written in 1874, warns thus against the methods and aims of those
evangelists whose Bible is Marius the Epicurean: "One symptom of
the renewed influence of antiquity on the modern world is doubtless,
and has been from time to time since the Revival of Letters, a tendency
to selfish and somewhat sickly theories so-called of life, where sensibility
degenerates through self -consciousness into affectation, and efforts to
appreciate fully the delightfulness of life and art are overstrained into
a wearisome literary voluptuousness, where duty has already disappeared
and the human sympathies on which duty is based scarcely linger in a
faint aesthetic form, soon to leave the would-be exquisiteness to putrefy
into the vulgarity of egoism."

To have a concrete example, by which to test general statements
that may be made, I am going to insert (in abbreviation) a familiar
incident from the Iliad, the scene between Hector and Andromache. It
is one of the most celebrated pieces of Greek literature, and no one will
dispute it as characteristic of Greek art and life:

"Hector smiled and gazed at his boy silently, and Andromache stood
by his side weeping, and clasped her hand in his, and spake and called
upon his name. 'Dear my lord, this thy hardihood will undo thee, neither
hast thou any pity for thine infant boy, nor for me forlorn that soon
shall be thy widow. But it were better for me to go down to the grave
if I lose thee ; for never more will any comfort be mine, when once thou,
even thou, hast met thy fate, but only sorrow.' Then great Hector of
the glancing helm answered her: 'Surely I take thought for all these
things, my wife ; but I have very sore shame of the Trojans and Trojan
dames with trailing robes, if like a coward I shrink away from battle.
Yet doth the anguish of the Trojans hereafter not so much trouble me,
as doth thine anguish in the day when some mail-clad Achaian shall lead
thee weeping and rob thee of the light of freedom. So shalt thou abide
in Argos and ply the loom at another woman's bidding, being grievously

118 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

entreated, and sore constraint shall be laid upon thee. And then shall
one say that beholdeth thee weep : 'This is the wife of Hector, that was
foremost in battle of the horse-taming Trojans when men fought about
Ilios.' So spake glorious Hector, and stretched out his arm to his boy.
But the child shrunk crying to the bosom of his fair-girdled nurse, dis-
mayed at his dear father's aspect, and in dread at the bronze and horse-
hair crest that he beheld nodding fiercely from the helmet's top. Then
his dear father laughed aloud, and his lady mother ; forthwith glorious
Hector took the helmet from his head, and laid it, all gleaming, upon
the earth ; then kissed he his dear son and dandled him in his arms, and
spake in prayer to Zeus and all the gods." Why is this piece of poetry
so enchanting — and why is it so unsatisfactory? It is wonderfully beau-
tiful,— its dignity, nobleness, serenity, poise, its delicacy, — there is
nothing else like it. But the situation is one of great pathos — pathos
that fails to move us, that brings, instead of tears, a smile to our faces.
Is not our feeling toward Hector and his wife exactly that of a mother
whose child has been startled by a fall on the grass, without receiving
harm from the fall ? The mother says to the child : "Come, let me kiss
your shoulder and everything will be all right." Her kiss is curative ; the
child romps along the path, the fall forgotten. We smile at the woes
of Andromache and her lord, because we know their pains go no deeper
than can be reached and remedied by the equivalent of a kiss. They
are children. Greek civilization is the culmination of a cycle of child-
hood. Its art, the full flower blooming at the end of a cycle of civiliza-
tion, is the only fully developed and complete art now in the world.

Much qualification is necessary to explain what is meant by "the
cycle of childhood." We live in a new cycle, different entirely from
the Greek; in our cycle, childhood has changed along with everything
else. We associate with childhood un fathomed depths of wisdom drawn
from the Heaven that lies about us in infancy. It is the other aspect
of childhood, and that only, which we must think of as the characteristic
of Greek civilization — unselfconsciousness — the thing which constitutes
the innocence of the child. In the child the faculty of reflection, of self-
reference, has not yet developed — it is conscious of things around it in
the world — it is not conscious of itself. Its life is an April day, sun-
shine, cloud, showers ; sunshine, showers, clouds ; they pass along, and
the total result is pleasant and delightful.

Hector, Andromache, — Antigone, if you object that Homer is archaic
and does not represent Greek life at its culmination — the entire Greek
race, like some five year old child, was incapable of a feeling that could stir
themselves or us. They could not know grief or sorrow such as we are
familiar with — Wordsworth's Michael, for example :

'Tis not forgotten yet
The pity which was then in every heart
For the old man — and 'tis believed by all
That many and many a day he thither went,
And never lifted up a single stone.

CYCLIC LAW IN ART 119

It would not be fair to call the Greeks heartless, because that word
implies the atrophy of faculties through disuse or misuse. It is a term
of reproach. We do not reproach a child who cannot experience tragic
suffering. The Greeks were not heartless ; accurately and literally, they
were unhearted. It is that lack in them that makes us prefer their
headless statues — the Victory, fortunately, lacks the Milo's tell-tale eyes —
empty. The Milo and Andromache are interchangeable. Beautiful
pieces of furniture, animated stone. What man of our cycle would
endure either of them as a companion? It is impossible to name an
individual of our cycle who illustrates fully the Greek type of character.
But Griselda Grantly, the impassive beauty of Barchester, suggests that
unselfconscious, unhearted race : " 'It will kill me,' said Mrs. Grantly
(the breaking of Griselda's engagement to Lord Dumbello), 'but I think
that she will be able to bear it.' On the next morning Mrs. Grantly, with
much cunning preparation, went about the task which her husband had
left her to perform. It took her long to do, for she was very cunning in
the doing of it ; but at last it dropped from her in words that there was
a possibility, — a bare possibility, — a bare possibility, — that some dis-
appointment might even yet be in store for them.

" 'Do you mean, mamma, that the marriage will be put off ? '

" 'I don't mean to say that I think it will ; God forbid ! but that is
just possible. I dare say that I am very wrong to tell you this, but I
know that you have sense enough to bear it. Papa has gone to London,
and we shall hear from him soon.'

" 'Then, mamma, I had better give them orders not to go on with
the marking.' "

The endowment of humanity with heart was accomplished by the
Incarnation. The word "heart" is used in a comprehensive way — it
includes mental things, the faculty of reflection, the faculty of self-
consciousness. It includes the literal meaning of the Greek word logos,
"the mind of God," and also all that is contained in the fact that that
incarnating logos, or mind, the Son, was (and is), also, the Heart of His
Father. The Cycle of the Heart would be no misnomer for our present
cycle — a name that drives deeper into our realization the significance of
the great war. France leads in this war against brutal heartlessness.
And France, alone of the nations, is dedicated to the Heart of Christ,
with victory promised, according to the tradition, when His Heart shall
be blazoned upon her flag of state.

The Incarnation affected the nature not only of man but of every
mote of dust in the universe — of every atom. With our finite intelli-
gences, we are always wronging some part of Christ's twofold nature —
we wrong either His Humanity or His Divinity. I believe we think of
His birth in Bethlehem as a detached thing — as a mathematical point
almost. We would do better to think of that birth as the apex of an
inverted triangle that covers the whole universe. The Infinite Tran-
scendent logos when He came down to earth to dwell with us, took upon

120 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Him not only the flesh of man, but the flesh of fish, the flesh of bird,
the flesh of flower, the flesh of rock. From Transcendent, brooding over
the world, He became Immanent also, resident in every portion of space,
resident in the narrow limits of a human personality. Do you think it
is the idle fancy of a diseased brain when Shelley speaks of the one
Spirit's plastic stress,

. . . bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.
Or maudlin affectation when Wordsworth writes:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
It is not fancy — it is perception of the truth of things.

The Greeks could not write such emotions and sentiments about the
world of nature or about human relations, as Shelley and Wordsworth
have written, because they could not feel them; and they could not feel
them because they were not yet facts to be felt. The logos did not dwell
with the Greeks — He was transcendent only. Their religion is a child's
interpretation of the transcendence they intuitively and instinctively felt.
When we call the Greeks pagans, we should be careful to remove from
that word "pagan" the reproach and condemnation we justly give to
materialists of our day and cycle. The Greeks were spiritual to the
full extent it was possible for them to be. To them, life was not
a fortuitous thing, but something willed and controlled by tran-
scendent deity; they pictured that transcendent deity as the Gods
of Olympus. They sensed the depths of the Justice of Deity ; but their
childish processes could represent that justice only as the inscrutable
ways of Nemesis — Fate. They divined the self-existence of Deity, and
therefore gave to their gods an imperishable immortality. But man had
no share of that glorious immortality (the gap between man and God
was not yet bridged by the Incarnation). They were spiritual enough
to feel intuitively that man's life too must continue. But what dreadful
immortality they rightly gave him! — the sad twilight of the Elysian
fields — a realm of phantoms — free indeed from positive pain and suffer-
ing but full of the negative pain of yearning — futile longing for the
pleasures of earth, sorrow's crown of sorrow — the remembrance of joy
past never to return. No wonder they dreaded their euphemistic Abode
of the Blessed, and shrank from death as an end-all. Think of mighty
Ajax, the slayer of armies, how he wilts and can make no effort even
against the King of Shadows: "O Death, Death, come now and look
upon me ! Nay, to thee will I speak in that other world also, when I am
with thee. But thee, thou present beam of the bright day, and the Sun
in his chariot, I accost for the last, last time, — as never more hereafter.
O sunlight ! O sacred soil of mine own Salamis, firm seat of my father's
hearth! O famous Athens, and thy race kindred to mine! And ye,
springs and rivers of this land — and ye plains of Troy, I greet you also —

CYCLIC LAW IN ART 121

farewell, ye who have cherished my life! This is the last word that
Ajax speaks to you : henceforth he will speak in Hades with the dead." *
What a change has come into the world since that phantom King of
Death was vanquished by the King of Heaven and earth! A French
priest, a soldier in a division ordered to advance "at any cost," writes
thus on the eve of the attack from which he knows he can scarcely
expect to return alive: "To die young, to die a priest, as a soldier,
during an attack, marching forward, while performing the priestly
function, perhaps while granting absolution ... to give one's life
for the Church, for France, for all those who carry in their hearts the
same ideal as I do, who are quickened by the same faith . . . Ah!
truly Jesus spoils me! Que c'est beau!"

The Greek feeling about nature is that of transcendent Deity. How
grateful we should be to them for their spiritual perception of a
transcendent deity who brooded over flower and tree and stream — whom
they represented as the nymphs and other creatures dwelling in flower
and stream without being part of the flower. Today, however, the
sunset itself is breathless with adoration — God is indivisibly united with
His creatures. When the rose fades, and is no longer recognisable as
rose, He is present in the atoms that constitute the former petals. Not
a leaf rots on the highway, wrote Carlyle, but has force in it. We are
engulfed in immortality — we cannot escape it.

What is there hid in the heart of a rose,

Mother-mine ?

Ah, who knows, who knows, who knows ?
A man that died on a lonely hill
May tell you, perhaps, but none other will,

Little child.
What does it take to make a rose,

Mother-mine ?

The God that died to make it knows.
It takes the world's eternal wars,
It takes the moon and all the stars,
It takes the might of heaven and hell
And the everlasting Love as well,

Little child.f

Greek civilization closed the Cycle of Childhood. The Italian
Renaissance is the first flowering of Art in the new Cycle led in by the
Incarnation. Three great manifestations of that Art demand study —
painting, Gothic architecture, and the Divine Comedy,— though the
Architecture flowered outside Italy in the Cathedrals.

The endowment of humanity with new powers, the reflective powers,

* Sophocles.
t Alfred Noyes.

122 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

faculties of mind and heart suggested by the word, logos, the lifting of
Incarnation. Three great manifestations of that Art demand study —
consciousness to consciousness of self, complicates what was simple in
Greek life. Greek life was a fagade, a plane surface; from a mere cir-
cumference it has become a sphere — life is now an interior, chambers
opening out of chambers. In putting Renaissance and Greek Art side
by side, we must remember that we are comparing the final stage of one
cycle with the first stage of another cycle — and that the comparison
cannot be a true one. The Greeks ended a long cycle of development.
Stage one of their cycle would be the true comparison with the Renais-
sance. But stage one is lost to us in buried history. Yet, even in com-
paring two unequal stages, the result is in favour of Christian Art.

Let us begin with Italian painting, and let us recognize that the
relative advantage of the fine arts for a representation of life ranks
thus:

1st and lowest, architecture and sculpture which represent life
static.

2nd, painting, which adds warmth of colour to static conditions.

3rd, music.

4th and highest, poetry, which contains all the others.

Though Greek painting is lost to us, and Greek music, Greek poetry
remains in abundance. But the most salient characteristic of Greek
poetry is, it is statuesque. Hector, Andromache, Antigone, Hermes,
Psyche — the sculpture and the verse are interchangeable. Even if Greek
painting and music remained in any quantity, we should probably find,
that, along with the epic and dramatic poetry, all of Greek Art is re-
ducible to terms of sculpture and bas-relief, the most limited of the
Arts.

Putting Italian painting beside Greek sculpture, we find the Chris-
tian artists defective at many points. The Greeks depicted the truth
as they saw it — the beauty of the human form. The Mediaevals are
depicting the truth as they see it — an interior given to life — a significance
utterly lacking in the objects and incidents of the Greek world — a Divine
Spirit and Presence pervading the world, a Spirit glowing within, and
behind, and below the visible universe, like layer after layer of petals,
until human vision can no longer follow it, but loses itself in the golden
splendour at the heart of the rose. The Italian painters tried in the most
natural way in the world to depict this Spiritual presence — through the
scenes of Christ's life in which the logos revealed itself humanly. They
succeeded in painting transparent light, thus symbolising and suggesting
that the visible world is a transparent veil that reveals (or hides) the
spiritual universe, just as we, the onlookers, wish. But, as compared
with Greek modelling and drawing, what childish efforts — what entire
lack of perspective, making us smile just as the Greek interpretations of
divinity make us smile!

That faulty drawing, perspective, etc., are natural enough, however.

CYCLIC LAW IN ART 123

For while the Cycle of childhood has been forever left behind, the stage
of childhood must continue in human development and in any cycle
whatever. The Mediaeval painters represent the infancy stage of the
new period — the infancy stage with its two aspects already referred to—
depths of wisdom which glows unmistakably on the old canvas, together
with naivete, ineptness and innocence, as shown in their childish
drawing.

But a difficulty, a contradiction, meets us in the Cathedral Archi-
tecture, where proportion, symmetry, balance, perspective are as superbly
set forth as in any Greek statue or temple, where there is no suggestion
of childish incompetence. Is it explicable?

It is explicable — but with difficulty. This difficulty is due to the
domination of Greek philosophy over our thinking — due to the failure
of the Church to develop a philosophy of its own. Greek Philosophy is,
like Greek Art, the most perfectly developed body of Philosophy in our
world. But it belongs to an outgrown world. Like their Art, it deals
solely with externals. Greek Philosophy is the science of external life —
its psychology, its ethics, its logic, its morals, its political science — all have
to do merely with a fagade of life. The Greeks in their whole life, hence,
inevitably in their Art and Philosophy — were superficial; though they
are not to blame for that. They saw clearly what there was to see —
namely, a surface. But with the Incarnation, the interior of life was
revealed. The old philosophy is as inadequate for the new realms of
life as surface measure is to determine the contents of a cube. But,
under the protection of the Church, that outworn mental system of
Greece continues today as the official philosophy of the world. The
disastrous result is the fratricidal war between religion and science.

The function of science in a Christian cycle is to scan and relate
and systemize the laws of the inner states and realms, of which we gain
knowledge through the experience of the Saints. Guided by a spiritual
Church, science would have achieved results fruitful for our souls. But,
in the light of history, who can maintain that steadfast spirituality is a
mark of the Church — of official religion? To what purpose were such
lives as Dante's, Catherine's (Siena), Francis' (Assisi) and Loyola's
and others directed? Was it not to set a spiritual ideal before a Church
that was absorbed in material aggrandizement? A material Church per-
secuted or neglected its Saints until intolerance and indifference were no
longer possible ; then it labelled the experiences of the Saints "Revela-
tion," by which it meant something that happens outside of law and
nature, and waved a prohibitive hand at science. And science, for its
part, was quite content to keep to the field of exterior life, multiplying
the conveniences and luxuries of the body, but, in the main, sterile, and
harmful to the soul, by its concentration upon material life. The result
is a feud between material religion and material science, each fighting
for priority. Instead of a united front against a common enemy, there
is dissension in the ranks, strife among allies, — worse than that, warfare

124 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

between brothers. For Science, Religion and Art do not constitute a
man-made, artificial alliance. They are allies by nature, blood-brothers.
The True, the Beautiful, the Good are children of one birth, generals of
equal rank, commissioned by their King, Christ, for the stupendous
task of civilizing the earth, to make earth a colony of Heaven, to fight
and defeat and put to death all that is untrue, all that is hideous, all
that is evil, — so that one flag shall fly, alike in the colony and in the
mother country, one law prevail in both, one Ruler be crowned, alike
in Heaven and in Earth.

The Cathedrals reveal the beauty and perfection of those inner
realms — the true world from which material science is barred. The
Cathedrals embody in stone the experiences of the great Saints in those
realms — the experiences of the Saints in the higher stages of Contempla-
tion. The orderly stages of Contemplation are the keys that open one
after one the inner halls of consciousness that the Incarnation built on
to the fa$ade of life. These keys are in man's possession, and man has
but to use them to reach conscious intercourse with the logos, transcend-
ent and immanent, divine and human, — to know the Divine Perfection,
its truth and beauty. The Middle Ages — and especially mediaeval
France — were a rose garden of saints, great saints,

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle in the Milky Way.

Their aspirations reached beyond the surface to the heart of life
whence flows the vivifying and unifying Blood. Through aspiration, they
were led, by way of Contemplation, to actual experience of the Divine
Life, Eternal, Spiritual. Contemplation, with its ordered stages, is some-
thing higher and greater than the intellectual processes that suffice for
dealing with the exterior of life. The Cathedrals represent the ex-
periences of the saints when, in Contemplation, they transcended their
minds, transcended their ordinary mental processes and their mental
limitations. Their inner experiences crystallized outwardly as monu-
ments of architecture, perfect in poise, symmetry and proportion, equal
in mere craftsmanship to any achievement of the Greeks, and, in addition,
with a meaning, a significance that cannot be found in Greek Art. Italian
painting, also, reveals that inner world of the Saints (the true world)
but far less perfectly than French Cathedrals do, and in a lower degree.
For as the processes of Contemplation transcend the processes of Intel-
lect, it is impossible to represent correctly in mental terms the realities
experienced in Contemplation. Italian painting, with its faults and
defects, illustrates that impossibility of translating Contemplation into
Intellect. Italian painting records on the mental plane the inner ex-
periences of the saints ; it depicts those experiences as they were remem-
bered by the minds of the saints. To represent three dimensions on
a flat surface one must be familiar with the laws of perspective. The
saints had no mental perspective of truth. Hence the paintings embody

CYCLIC LAW IN ART 125

their mental limitations. Whereas the Cathedrals are direct and im-
mediate embodiments of spiritual truth and beauty unmarred by the
distorting influence of the mind. The Cathedrals are wholly spiritual,
therefore, perfect; the paintings are both spiritual and intellectual —
hence marred by the inaccuracy and imperfections with which the mind
always confuses truth and beauty.

The form of Art — architecture — in which perfect expression was
thus attained, was conditioned by the infancy stage of the new cycle.
In that first flowering of Art, man could reach perfection only in the
lowest form of Art. The higher forms, painting, poetry await his future.
What testimony to the power of Christianity is given by that Gothic
architecture ! Christian Art, in its first essay, at the bottom of its ladder,
equals what was achieved by the pagan cycle only at its apex of develop-
ment in Greece.

A second difficulty and contradiction immediately arises, — namely
the Divine Comedy. It is the most perfect poem in the world, and thus
seems to nullify the conclusion just stated; for it would seem that, in
that first outflowering, man attained perfection, not only in architecture,
the lowest form of Art, but also in the highest form, poetry. But the
Divine Comedy is a work of single authorship, while the Cathedrals
represent generations and centuries of saints. The solitary preeminence
of the poem seems explicable thus. In history, there are minor incidents
that, in one respect, are not unlike the Incarnation itself, namely, in this :
they are inexplicable from the standpoint of earth. They are events
directly controlled by the agencies of Heaven, rather than ends achieved
through human intervention. Joan of Arc is an obvious incident of
this kind, inexplicable in a human way. The opinions of the early Church
Fathers influence one to believe that, among the Greeks, Plato was such
an instrument of Heaven. Similarly, in the realm of Art, the Divine
Comedy is such an event ; it is not the work of man nor of the immanent
logos working through man — it is a work of the transcendent logos, a
free gift from God. It seems, in that early epoch of the Christian cycle,
when man could give adequate expression to spiritual beauty only in the
static terms of stone, as if the Divine Compassion, further to aid and
inspire him, sent a special messenger to reveal the mountain heights of
poetry that still await man's coming of age.

Today, we are still in the cycle of the heart. What then can be
said of present day Art, what about Art of the future? Renaissance
Art marks the first epoch of our cycle — the epoch of childhood. But
the winsome age of childhood, is, in* life, followed by unattractive periods
of transition, when a boy, from being a cherub, becomes a distorted
juncture of ears and shins, and a girl, a flower of grace, passes into a
condition of Futurist lankiness. Cycles of civilization, like children,
reach a stage when they are the despair of those who cherish them —
something to be kept out of sight. Futurist art, with its distortions
and ugliness, most truly represents our present awkward age; our

126 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

unattractiveness, our charmless and graceless condition is reflected
from those canvasses that are too grotesque for caricatures — that are
faithful likenesses.

In despair, we turn for relief to the past, to the Art of Greece. We
should turn to the inevitable future. Greece has passed, never to return —
impossible to revive. Greece looms as a refuge for those whose en-
deavour is to escape the Hound of Heaven — His unperturbed chase
continues throughout our cycle. Such refugees, having turned from
religion, have then sought throughout the universe for harbour: they
were "heavy with the even, when she lit her glimmering tapers, round
the day's dead sanctities." But everywhere they turn they hear the
swift pursuit of the tireless Hound, since every atom of the universe
is His abode. Greece beckons — where men lived content and happy,
undisturbed by His Presence and Pursuit. True. But, saturate them-
selves as they may with Greek Art, they cannot transport themselves
behind the Incarnation into that former cycle of unconsciousness and
care freedom. They cannot escape from their own souls. The Divine
Presence has a centre in their hearts, and His pursuit hounds them out
of any fancied security they make for themselves. Greece, too, fails
them.

We cannot return to Greek conditions. We shall develop an art
that surpasses Greek sculpture just as the statue of bronze excels the
course molds into which the hot metal was poured. The new cycle offers
splendid possibilities. It will pass on from tomboy crudeness to ma-
turity. The great art of our maturity will obey the same laws that
governed Greek production — but on a higher scale, just as our cycle,
though so different, still parallels the stages and epochs — the curve of
development — of the former era. The Greeks were unhearted, but they
were not reprobates. They matured their civilization under Divine guid-
ance, and their art is Divinely inspired. The secret of Greek expression
is much repression. An art to be great must have intense feeling, intense
passion, but this held with a strong hand, so that each line is balanced,
delicate, firm. Where there is tumult, emotionalism, torrents unchained,
the result is a counterfeit of art, which some prefer to the reality. Greek
art is austere in its restraint. They restrained their passion for beauty
of form so that beauty could be manifested. Such restraint is always
necessary in order to convey to others what one perceives or feels.
How can a man make an instrument a medium of expression, — voice,
paint or marble, — until he has control of it ? I may love my friend with
all the strength of my heart, but if I have no control over my voice
I cannot tell him so. If, in a tempest of feeling, I attempt to speak,
only incoherent ejaculations will escape me : to make myself understood
I must control myself, speak quietly, coherently, logically. If I have
no control over the muscles of my face I cannot even smile at him, and
in trying to do so may, instead, make a hideous grimace.

Greek Art thus illustrates, in stone, those principles which, since

CYCLIC LAW IN ART 127

the Incarnation, are the Way of life for us, the inspiration of our efforts ;
for that art is founded upon the principle of sacrifice — the sacrifice of
the less for the greater beauty. It is austere, rejecting the superfluous
in its effort to achieve the last refinement of line. Greek Art is true in
that it is a faithful portrayal of life. Christianity does not deny that
truth or supersede it. Christianity enlarges the field of operation for
those principles which the Greeks manifested in their sculpture. Greek
Art and Christian Religion are not antagonistic, as is sometimes mis-
takenly thought; the relation of our Religion to that bygone Art is a
supplemental one, adding on to the loveliness of the outer world the
splendour of the inner. This true relation of Greek and Christian is
eloquently suggested by one of the Neo-Platonist philosophers — those
Greeks who in their own persons experienced the extension of horizons
that Christ effected. In his essay on Beauty, Plotinus writes: "With-
draw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful
as yet, do as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful;
he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this
other purer, until he has shown a beautiful face upon his statue. So do
you also; cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked,
bring light to all that is shadowed, labor to make all glow with beauty,
and do not cease chiselling your statue until there shall shine out on you
the God-like splendour of virtue, until you shall see the final goodness
surely established in the stainless shrine."

C. C. CLARK.

"All the really great saints have felt about morality as an artist feels
about beauty. They don't do good things because they are told to do
them, but because they feel them to be beautiful, splendid, attractive;
and they avoid having anything to do with evil things because such
things are evil and repellant." FATHER PAYNE.

EASTERN AND WESTERN
PSYCHOLOGY

IV
THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS AND THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE DEVIL

WE have seen that the fundamental fact in physical life, in our
life on the physical plane, is that, on this plane, we are not
subject only to the physical forces belonging to this plane,
but are subject, in an even greater degree, to the continual
pressure of spiritual forces from the planes above ; and that to this
spiritual pressure from above is due not only the whole process of
physical advancement which may be termed biological evolution, but the
whole of our moral advancement also, the unfoldment of our spiritual
evolution. And our response to this spiritual pressure from above
determines the whole of our future progress, our gradual growth into
the world of conscious immortality.

As there are these spiritual forces constantly making for our upward
progress into the life of the realms above us, so there are forces as
constantly at work, hindering and thwarting that advance, tending cease-
lessly to draw us into the path of retrogression, of degeneration. And so
close is the analogy between these forces, as revealed in our moral
experience, and the forces which make for degeneration in the regions
observed by biology, that many biologists have classed them together.
Thus Henry Drummond, writing of Natural Law in the Spiritual World,
drew the closest analogies between biological and spiritual degeneration,
and printed on the cover of his able and intuitive work the picture of one
of the types of biological degeneration, the hermit crab. In like manner
Sir Oliver Lodge, who is a close student of biology though not primarily
a biologist, has described the forces of moral evil as forces of degen-
era.ion in the biological sense; the spiritual equivalent of the tendencies
which draw backward and downward those organisms which have ceased
to grow upward.

It is, however, not quite accurate to speak of these forces as drawing
backward an organism which has ceased to progress. For such an
organism by no means returns to the condition which it had reached at
a previous period. The hermit crab which, borrowing the shell of a
mollusk, has shirked the effort of self-protection, does not by any means
retrace its steps to an earlier crab form; it degenerates but does not
return ; it becomes, in fact, a morbid and mutilated organism, losing its
relative perfection and becoming ugly, weak, unnatural. The forces of
degeneration are not simply forces of recession, nor, in any instance,

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 129

does an organism which has ceased to go forward, return to the condition
which it earlier held. In exactly the same way, in the case of moral
degeneration produced by alcohol, though a drunken man loses the moral
sense, the power of reason, of focussed vision, of articulate speech, of
stable locomotion, all of which an infant also lacks, he does not thereby
become an infant nor retrace his steps along the line of progress. He
reaches a condition which did not exist at any point along that line of
progress ; a condition of actual evil, like the malformation of the hermit
crab. Even a biologist, therefore, must recognize forces of degeneration
and destruction, in addition to the forces which simply retard normal
progress, or make that progress difficult and arduous. And those who
make spiritual life the subject of their experience and wise experiment
will likewise recognize, that, in addition to the tendencies of inertia, of
cowardice, of irresolution, which simply check their growth and make it
arduous, there are other forces which tend toward actual evil, bringing
about morbid and degenerate conditions which are not a return toward
the condition of a child or the condition of the primitive races.

It is of universal experience that, as we recognize the pull of the
spiritual forces which are striving to raise us upward, to lead us to the
realm above us, the realm of our conscious immortality, and, recognizing,
respond to these forces and cooperate vigorously with them, we grow
into the perception that they are not only beneficent, but are also conscious,
endowed with the qualities of personality, and directly responding to the
quality of personality in ourselves. But the experiment must be made,
and the experience must be gained, within our moral and spiritual
consciousness ; it cannot be validly reached by any outside or merely
mental speculation. Sought for and reached in our moral consciousness,
this perception of the personal quality in the powers of good thereafter
becomes the most momentous reality in our experience, and infinitely
aids our further spiritual progress. And this is one of the best attested
facts in all human experience, and by the best witnesses. It is a funda-
mental fact in the real experimental psychology, in all lands, among all
peoples, throughout all times. It further gives us a sound experimental
basis for the view that the forces which make for evolution, including
those which have presided over each step of biological evolution from
the beginning, are not only beneficent forces but are also conscious forces.

The more intuitive biologists have come to this conclusion. Alfred
Russel Wallace, who discovered the great laws of evolution at the same
time as Darwin, and independently of Darwin, marshalled a series of
purely biological evidences to show that, in particular, the physical
evolution of man from an earlier, pre-human form had been carried out
under the direction of conscious spiritual forces, and could not have
been carried out without their interposition. Bergson has put forward
the same view, using as an illustration the marvellous formation of the
eye, which organisms have reached along quite different lines of
development, and therefore independently, not deriving this wonderful

130 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

mechanism from each other ; and Bergson has argued that it is infinitely
unlikely that such a mechanism could be developed twice inde-
pendently by chance, by such an accumulation of happy accidents as
Darwin postulates. It is more than likely that, had Darwin been willing
to accept the action of spiritual forces, even as a working hypothesis (and
a theorist has the right to make use of any working hypothesis) he would
have avoided the innumerable absurdities into which his theory of
accumulated happy accidents has led him; for he has completely failed
to show why the progressive happy accident — the happy accident which
leads the organism forward — should happen at all ; much more has he
failed to show any reason why these happy accidents should happen at
all points, in all periods. Yet this is what his theory of natural selection
in fact demands; failing the occurrence of happy accidents, there would
be no basis at all for selection ; there would be no "fittest" to survive.
The truth is, that Darwin simply accepted the fact without giving an
explanation, and without even trying to explain it. And he could never
have explained it except by admitting the existence of conscious spiritual
forces, guiding the evolution of organisms along lines mapped out in
advance. Had he been willing to accept the existence of these consciously
guiding spiritual forces, he would have instantly found his hypothesis
supported by the well observed and endlessly verified facts of moral and
spiritual experience, thus making it something very much more than a
working hypothesis — a well authenticated reality. Had he done this,
the world would have been saved the tragedy of a materialistic theory
of development, with the immense impulse towards materialism which
has come from it.

The fundamental fact, then, of moral and spiritual experience is that
the quality of personal consciousness inheres in the spiritual powers which
we feel working and striving to draw us upward towards immortality ; to
such a degree that we have a sound basis for supposing that all the
upward forces are conscious, spiritual, personal forces, even though they
may be forms of personal consciousness which it is at present very
difficult for us to conceive. But, when it conies to the forces which make
for upward growth in our moral and spiritual life, our indications are
clearer: we feel ourselves to be in the presence of conscious, personal
beneficence, a benign personal consciousness which has a profound under-
standing, an even deeper compassion, for our human hearts, our human
sorrows. Therefore, in addition to divine helpfulness, we are compelled
by the continuing facts of our experience to credit these interposing
spiritual powers with a depth of human sympathy which would be difficult
to understand in, let us say, angels from some distant sphere, able to
help, but hardly able to understand or compassionate our human sorrows.

In holding and putting forward such a view, we are thoroughly
scientific, basing ourselves on sound experiment and proved experience.
On the contrary, it is the materialistic biologist who perpetually closes
his consciousness to this field of experience, refusing to make the

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 131

experiments which establish it, or to recognize that others have made
and are making them, who is thoroughly and incurably unscientific; and
who, as we have seen, just because he follows this course, is led into
endless perplexities and absurdities.

We shall try, later on, to establish by methodical evidence the reality
of this fundamental law, that the beneficent powers are conscious,
personal, full of a profound humanity. For the present, we shall use
this generalization to illumine the opposite, the darker side of the same
problem, suggesting that continued human experience has likewise shown
that the forces of degeneration, the forces of evil, are also personal,
conscious powers, consciously seeking and working evil.

The great experimental psychologists of the East, who find
Consciousness to be the central fact of personal life, have at the same
time found it difficult to conceive of an infinite number of personal
consciousnesses, coming into being wholly independent of each other.
They found that, as Consciousness is the central fact of personal life,
so communion is the central fact of consciousness. We are conscious
of each other's consciousness, long before we reason about the question;
and, indeed, for the most part, we do not reason about the fact at all,
simply taking it for granted, and acting upon it in every relation of
life. When we speak to each other, we are acting on the innate conviction
that a kindred consciousness is there, ready to respond to our
consciousness, and, in fact, responding to it.

Resting on this universal experience of communion, then, the great
experimental psychologists of the East drew the conclusion that there
must be a bridge of consciousness between the two seemingly separate
consciousnesses; they must have their synthesis in a higher and deeper
consciousness, which embraces them both. So, by ascending steps, they
made their final generalization, naming the ultimate reality "the Supreme
Consciousness of All Beings." And their experience had already
compelled them to assign to this last reality supreme beneficence, infinite
goodness, ceaselessly desiring and working for our perfection.

We shall be fully justified in speaking of this benign Supreme
Consciousness as the Personal God, if we are careful to assign to Him
the essence of our personality, not its limitations and deflections; the
pure quality of spiritual consciousness, not the perversions of our personal
nature. For, in fact, as we meet and respond to the spiritual power
which draws us upward, we do not find in that power these limitations
and perversions; on the contrary, we find a perpetual challenge to
ourselves, to overcome just these limitations and perversions, with active,
effective aid to do it. With this clearly understood, the name, Personal
God, is wholly justified.

Are we, then, led by a like chain of experience and inference to
postulate ah opposite to that God — a single "Personal Devil," the Ahriman
of our Ormazd? I think not, and for this reason: if we yield to the
forces of evil, we find that they lead, not to a deeper unity, but away

132 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

from unity; not to the merging of consciousness in compassion, but to
separation of consciousness, in malice and hatred; not to deeper being,
but to restriction of being. The logical conclusion of this is, not an
evil cosmic unity, but dissolution, annihilation. The true opposite of the
good God is not an evil God with equal power, but Nothingness, Void,
total negation. And the element of personal consciousness, which we
find by experience in the forces of evil, is, in its own colourless essence,
not of evil, but of good. It leads us, not to a Personal Devil, but back to
the same absolute Good, the beneficent Supreme Consciousness. In other
words, that which is real even in the powers of evil, is of God and in
God; only the unreal is of evil. We are, therefore led to think of an
ultimate conquest of evil by Good ; a final purification of evil, the fine
divine essence being sifted from it and restored to the God to whom it
belongs. This will lead us to some such thought as that of the "fallen
angels ;" powers, each of whom still possess a particle of the Divine
Essence. It will lead us, further, to the thought of an ultimate
purification, into which these particles of Divine Essence will be drawn,
returning to the God who gave them; their withdrawal bringing about
the final, irretrievable dissolution of these powers, their complete and
eternal annihilation.

But we shall find that, while completely logical reasoning lead? us
away from the conception of a single Personal Devil, a bad God, even
while we are compelled to accept the fact of personal consciousness in
the powers of evil, yet many religions do, in fact, speak of a Personal
Devil; many also teach or indicate that this Personal Devil is a "fallen
angel," a perverted divine power. We would seem to have a justification
of this second idea in the logical conclusion we have already reached :
while the thought of a Personal Devil may be simply a personification,
a synthesis, of the powers of evil; or he may be, as in Milton's "Paradise
Lost," simply the leader among a host of evil powers, one evil spirit
among many, distinguished by greater energy, but in no sense an equal
opposite of God. Milton, of course, is thoroughly imbued with the idea
that these powers of evil are perverted powers of good ; that the "ethereal
essence" in them is of God. It is the perversion of their nature which is
their own, and that perversion is doomed to ultimate annihilation.

In one of the great scriptures of Temptation, the Tempter is Yama,
the Lord of Death. As it now stands, the "Katha Upanishad" does not
in any way explain the character or history of Yama, but other Indian
books tell us that Yama was a king, the king of one of the earlier human
races who never tasted death; that, when the time came for death to
enter the world, Yama, as king, elected to be the first to die, the first
to meet this new, terrible experience ; and that, after his heroic death,
he became the ruler of the dead ; just as in ancient Egypt, Osiris, after
his sacrificial death, became the judge of the dead. Thus, though Yama
"descended into Hell," this was a voluntary descent, having elements
of atonement ; it was voluntary, like the descent of Christ into Hell, as

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 133

taught in the Creed, this teaching being apparently based on the words
"he went and preached unto the spirits in prison," in the First Epistle
of Saint Peter. But, while Yama is not the Devil, he is, in a very real
sense, the Tempter.

His temptations are addressed to the youth, Nachiketas, whose
history once more reminds us strongly of the Creed, though it is thousands
of years older. For Nachiketas is the only son of a father, who offers
him as a sacrifice; Nachiketas then descends into the house of Death,
remains there for three days and, on the third day, rises again from the
dead. There is the further analogy that the sacrifice of the only son is
made only after the sacrifice of cattle had proved unavailing, thus
strongly reminding us of the teaching of Paul, that the sacrifice of
Jesus superseded the sacrifice of cattle in the temple.

This is one of the most striking likenesses between the religious
teaching of East and West. We shall try to see, later on, how far it
is based on experimental psychology, on spiritual experience.

Nachiketas, reaching the house of Death, after he has been sacrificed
by his father, finds the dwelling empty. After he has waited three days,
or, as the ancient text more graphically says, "three nights," Death
returns and, in order to make amends to Nachiketas for the slight he
has received in waiting three days without a greeting, offers him three
wishes.

Nachiketas immediately asks for the knowledge of immortality:
"This that they doubt about, O Death, what is in the great Beyond, tell
me of that."

Thereupon Death, as Tempter, seeks to draw Nachiketas away from
the quest of immortality by offering him alluring gifts: "Even by the
gods of old it was doubted about this ; not easily knowable, and subtle
is this law. Choose, Nachiketas, another wish. . . . Choose sons and
grand-sons of a hundred years, and much cattle, and elephants and gold
and horses. ... If thou thinkest this an equal wish, choose wealth
and length of days. . . . Whatsoever desires are difficult in the mortal
world, ask all desires according to thy will. These beauties, with their
chariots and lutes — not such as these are to be won by men — be waited
on by them, my gifts. Ask me not of death, Nachiketas."

It is impossible not to be struck by the likeness of this to another
great drama of temptation: "Again, the devil taketh him up into an
exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the
world, and the glory of them ; and saith unto him, All these things will
I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. ..."

Nachiketas, resisting all the allurements of the Tempter, learns the
secret of Death and enters immortality. Whereupon these words follow :
"Rise ye up! Awake ye! and having obtained your wishes, understand
them," as though this scripture of the victory over the Tempter had
been used as a ritual, addressed to a number of participants.

In the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad, there is another scene of

134 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

temptation. The father of Shvetaketu comes to the dwelling of King
Pravahana, the son of Jivala, who offers him a wish. The father of
Shvetaketu asks to be told the answers to certain questions which the
king had earlier asked Shvetaketu, but which the youth had been unable
to answer. The questions concerned immortality.

But Jivala, in the character of the Tempter, answers : "This is
one of the wishes of the gods. Ask instead a wish of men."

The father of Shvetaketu answers: "I know well; there is store of
gold, of cattle and horses, of slave-girls and robes ..." but refuses to
accept anything but the "wish of the gods," the knowledge of
immortality.

The wording of this suggests that there was what one may call a
sacramental formula of temptation and trial ; a phrase which had become
representative of all temptation, as has the phrase, "the kingdoms of
the world, and the glory of them."

It is notable that, in both these Upanishad stories, the Tempter
afterwards becomes the instructor, the Initiator. And Yama is, further,
the Lord of Death, a divine king who has descended into Hell, to perfect
a work which has in it elements of vicarious atonement. The Atharva
Veda says of Yama, "He died the first of men ;" and he is elsewhere
spoken of as a "Prajapati," one of the "Lords of beings," of whom
Brahma is the first.

There is a close likeness here to another great drama of temptation,
the Book of Job, which assigns a divine origin to the Tempter: "Now,
there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before
the Lord, and Satan came also among them. And the Lord said unto
Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said,
From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
And the Lord answered unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant
Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright
man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? Then Satan answered
the Lord, and said, "Doth Job fear God for nought? . . . And the
Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only
upon himself put not forth thy hand. So Satan went forth from the
presence of the Lord."

Thus Satan, "the Accuser," is counted among "the sons of God," as
Yama, "son of the Sun," is counted among "the Lords of Beings ;" and
Satan tempts Job with the permission, almost under the direction of God.

After Job had triumphed over all his temptations, "the Lord gave
Job twice as much as he had before;" the numbers of his possessions
and of his cattle were doubled. It is worth noting that, in the scriptures
of India, the powers of perception and action are called "the cattle which
graze in the pastures of life." If a like symbol is used in the Book of
Job, then, after the victory over his temptations, Job was divinely
endowed with an enlarged scope of life, an added range of perceptive
and active powers — the powers and perceptions of the spiritual man.

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 135

The same story of temptation is told of Prince Siddhartha, of the
family of the Gotamas, who became "the Awakened," the "Buddha," and
is therefore called Gautama Buddha, "the Awakened One, of the family
of the Gotamas."

The temptation of the future Buddha is related at great length, and
with a wealth of Oriental imagery, in the Introduction to the Jataka,
the Book of the Births of Buddha. It begins thus :

"Then the future Buddha turned his back to the trunk of the Bo-tree
and faced the east. And making the mighty resolution, 'Let my skin, and
sinews, and bones become dry, and welcome ! and let all the flesh and
blood in my body dry up! but never from this seat will I stir, until I
have attained the supreme and absolute wisdom!' he sat himself down
cross-legged in an unconquerable position, from which not even the
descent of a hundred thunder-bolts at once could have dislodged him.

"At this point the god Mara, exclaiming, 'Prince Siddhartha is
desirous of passing beyond my control, but I will never allow it!' went
and announced the news to his army, and sounding the Mara war-cry,
drew it out for battle ... in that army, no two carried the same weapons ;
and diverse also in their appearance and countenance, the host swept on
like a flood to overwhelm the Great Being (Prince Siddhartha).

"... He perceived Mara's army coming on like a flood, and said,
'Here is this multitude exerting all their strength and power against me
alone. My mother and father are not here, nor my brother, nor any
relative. But I have these Ten Perfections, like old retainers long
cherished at my board. It therefore behooves me to make the Ten
Perfections my shield and my sword, and to strike a blow with them that
shall destroy this strong array.' . . .

"Thereupon the god Mara caused a whirlwind, thinking, 'By this
will I drive away Siddhartha.' . . . Yet when the winds reached the
future Buddha, such was the energy of the Great Being's merit, they
lost all power and were not able to cause so much as a fluttering of the
edge of his priestly robe.

"Then Mara caused a great rain-storm, saying, 'With water will I
overwhelm and drown him.' . . . But on coming to the Great Being,
this mighty inundation was not able to wet his priestly robes as much as
a dew-drop would have done.

"Then Mara caused a shower of rocks, in which immense mountain-
peaks flew smoking and flaming through the sky. But on reaching the
future Buddha they became celestial bouquets of flowers. . . .

"Then Mara caused a shower of hot ashes, in which ashes that
glowed like fire flew through the sky. But they fell at the future
Buddha's feet as sandal-wood powder. . . .

"Then Mara caused a shower of mud, in which mud flew smoking
and flaming through the sky. But it fell at the future Buddha's feet as
celestial ointment.

"Then Mara caused a darkness, thinking, 'By this will I frighten

136 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Siddhartha, and drive him away.' And the darkness became fourfold,
and very dense. But on reaching the future Buddha it disappeared like
darkness before the light of the sun. . . .

"Mara . . . drew near the future Buddha, and said, 'Siddhartha,
arise from this seat ! It does not belong to you, but to me.'

"When the Great Being heard this he said, 'Mara, you have not
fulfilled the Ten Perfections in any of their three grades; nor have you
made the five great gifts (the gift of treasure, gift of child, the gift of
wife, of royal rule, and last, the gift of life) : nor have you striven for
knowledge, nor for the welfare of the world, nor for enlightenment.
This seat does not belong to you, but to me.'

"Unable to restrain his fury, the enraged Mara now hurled his
discus. But the Great Being reflected on the Ten Perfections, and the
discus changed into a canopy of flowers, and remained suspended over
his head.

"Then the Great Being said, 'Mara, who is witness to your having
given donations?'

"Said Mara, 'All these, as many as you see here, are my witnesses ;'
and he stretched out his hand in the direction of his army. And instantly
from Mara's army came a roar, 'I am his witness! I am his
witness !' . . .

"Then said Mara to the Great Being, 'Siddhartha, who is witness
to your having given donations?'

" 'Your witnesses,' replied the Great Being, 'are animate beings, and
I have no anim-ate witnesses. . . .' Drawing forth his right hand from
beneath his priestly robe, he stretched it out towards the mighty earth,
and said, 'Are you witness to my having given a great donation?' And
the mighty earth thundered, 'I bear you witness!' . . . And the
followers of Mara fled away in all directions. No two went the same
way, but leaving their head-ornaments and their cloaks behind, they
fled straight before them.

"Then the hosts of the gods, when they saw the army of Mara flee,
cried out, 'Mara is defeated! Prince Siddhartha has conquered! Let
us go to celebrate the victory!' And . . . they came with perfumes,
garlands, and other offerings in their hands to the Great Being on the
throne of wisdom. . . .

"It was before the sun had s^t that the Great Being thus vanquished
the army of Mara. And then, while the Bo-tree in homage rained red
coral-like sprigs upon his priestly robes, he acquired in the first watch
of the night the knowledge of nrevious existences ; in the middle watch
of the night, the divine eye; and in the last watch of the night, his
intellect fathomed dependent origination ..."

It is impossible not to feel that this highly coloured narrative lacks
the austere beauty and pathos of the Temptation in the Wilderness, with
its ending, perfect in simplicity, "Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold,
angels came and ministered unto him ;" but it is also impossible not to

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 137

see that the story of Siddhartha has a beauty of its own, the beauty of
high moral truth ; it has comforted and inspired innumerable followers
of the Buddha, and helped them to pass through their temptations.

But, with all their difference in treatment and colour, the two
narratives evidently record like experiences; the parallelism between
them is complete, from the long initial fast (in the case of Siddhartha,
a fast of "seven weeks, or forty-nine days"), to the ministry of angels.

CHARLES JOHNSTON.
(To be continued.)

W hen God calls for a sacrifice, whether it be the loss of a relation or
a friend, the endurance of a sickness or a misfortune, we must make it
in a truly Christian spirit. And God hates rapine in a sacrifice.

In the Old Law, when a sacrifice was offered to God, it was one of
the greatest sins to steal part of the offering, and the sons of Heli, for
this their crowning sin were, by the judgment of God, to die both in one
day. There is a parallel between their rapine and that which takes place
in sacrifices God exacts from us when we refuse submission or willing
endurance to His divine will.

Even in the darkest sorrow God knows best, and will turn every
sorrow bravely borne to the welfare of the sufferer. How, we may
neither know nor see, but then it is that faith enters to help us.

And after all, rapine in a sacrifice only results in embittering the
mind. It brings no consolation, which is precisely what the sufferer needs
most. Generosity in sacrifice is always followed by generosity from God,
in power of endurance, in courage, in contentment and peace of mind, for
God will not be outdone by His creatures in generosity.

LAURENCE BOYLE.

10

"DON'T BLAME ME"

IT was just a vulgar dream.
Feeling as if I were being crushed, I opened my eyes, to see
Something fat, bloated and most unpleasant, sitting on my chest and

stomach.

Its eyes turned in, as if It wanted to look only at Itself. Its long nose
wiggled and twisted as if seeking evil smells. Its hairy ears flapped, as
if It feared to miss something wrong to hear. Its pudgy hands were
restless. Its feet were atrophied from lack of use. The general effect
of its colorings was dirty white and slimy, giving It more the appearance
of being a Worm than man-fashioned. "Get off," I gasped, bracing my
body to hurl It off.

A sigh of self-pity escaped the full, fatuous mouth. "I suppose I'd
better, if I want to keep you alive, and, worse luck for me, I have to do
that, or I'd die myself." It voiced its plaintiveness. It stumped down on
the side of the bed and wept weakly.

"What are you doing here?"

"You invited me — you have urged me to stay. Don't blame me."

"Are you crazy? I don't want you to stay one minute — get out."

"I don't think you are strong enough, and besides you have always
been too kind to me to treat me cruelly just because you can see me now."

"You have never been here before," I declared, yet I knew I spoke
doubtfully against the certainty of Its expression, the one note of
sincerity It had given out.

"Oh ! yes I have, only you have not been able to see me. You
couldn't see me now if you hadn't been listening to those dreadful people
who are talking about practical discipleship all the time," and a shudder
of real fear shook Its jellylike substance. "If you ever get to doing
what they advise I'll have to die ; I'll starve to death and die," Its voice
piped shrilly to a sickening wail.

"For Heaven's sake, what are you ?"

"Don't, don't use that name ; don't even think of Heaven when I'm
'round. It brings on malaria," and It had a chill, unpleasantly.

"But what are you?"

"Don't you know your own pet? Why I am your own Lower Self
— nobody else is responsible for me. Don't blame me."

Blankness began to assault my mind ; negativeness was impending,
but I seized on the clue of the Teaching It had spoken of, and rallied
myself to say. sternly : "Explain yourself — I insist on your talking this
thing out."

"There you go, getting positive — when you do that I am at your
mercy — please let up."

"Go on," I said more sternly.

138

"DON'T BLAME ME" 139

"Don't blame me. I am what you have made me."

I braced myself to look at Its unpleasantness. As I looked It seemed
at once to shrink and to stand out more clearly.

"Please stop looking at me so hard. It is bad for me."

"Talk," I commanded.

"I'd rather whisper, the way I am used- to doing with you, but I am
at your mercy."

"Go on."

"Don't blame me — you have done this. I started out as a clean,
unthinking, thoughtless little animal, depending upon you. Then, as you
grew older and would get negative and slothful and self-indulgent, I
began to put on fat, and soon lost my shapeliness. Then every time you
had an evil thought or did something you knew you ought not to do I
grew in strength. If you were only positively wicked I would not have
to carry all this loathsome fat. I had a good nose once, until you took
to contemplating evil. I had good ears once, until you listened to evil
speaking and foul stories. My eyes were straight until you took to self-
reference in all things."

"Have I got to have you around always ?"

"Not unless you give yourself up to me — then I will live and grow
stronger."

"You have to tell me the truth ?"

"I do, whenever you have the courage to face me and ask."

"Then tell me how to get rid of you ?"

It fell on its weak legs in an agony of supplication. "Spare me." It
wailed, "don't blame me. I am only what you have made me."

"Answer," I demanded.

Its wailing rose and It slobbered in anguish.

I thought hard in my determination to get rid of It. It had said
that studying Discipleship had opened my eyes to Its presence. If the
study of Discipleship could do that, what could not Discipleship do?
Full of the thought of the cleansing power of Master's Love, my will
arose in arms. "I will be a Disciple," I said aloud, in irrevocable
resolution.

It had vanished. U. G.

Our Heavenly Father makes "straight paths for our feet," and, if
we would GO IN His WAY, if we would straighten our wills to His will,
and lay them side by side, there would be no crosses. But when the
path that God points out goes north and south, and our stubborn wills
lead us east and west, the consequence is "A CROSS." . . .

— ANNIE WEBB-PEPLOE.

PARACELSUS

Theosophists. — In the mediccval ages it was the name by
which were known the disciples of Paracelsus of the sixteenth
century. (I sis Unveiled.)

CARLYLE says somewhere that each age has its own faith and
laughs — most unwisely — at the faith of its predecessor. It is
not a question of whether or not a given age be an "age of faith."
All ages have faith in abundance for their needs. The question
is in what does it put the faith that is given it. Is it in the law and the
prophets, the literal inspiration of the Bible, the authority of the church?
Is it in the material world, the evidence of the physical senses and the
power of the analytical, finite mind to deal with an infinite universe?
Or is it in the inner light of the soul, the inspiration and noetic power
of the heart ? Man stands on faith as he might stand on a ladder leading
out of a pit. It is not the fault of the ladder if he uses it to go down
deeper into the darkness, instead of up into the sunlight.

The critical periods in man's history are the times when he is forced
to realize that he has misplaced his faith and that the foundation on
which he has planted his ladder is quicksand and not rock. Plant it
somewhere he must by the inherent law of his being. It may be that
the most honest spot in his horizon is the doubt in his own mind and
then he puts his faith in those doubts. Obviously, at a time when the old
foundations of men's faith have been destroyed, and they are seeking
new, firm ground on which to build, it is of vital importance that they
should be shown the truth and at least given the chance to build on it.

"If the understanding be not thus cleared and illumined, it may catch
every gleam of intuition and spiritual light, only to distort that gleam,
to light with it the false pictures of the lower mind, thus filling the
spiritual life with images of material things. Thus are painted the
material heavens that fill so great a space in certain forms of faith, and
thus it comes that the Most High is represented with purely human
qualities, revengeful, jealous, threatening punishment like the despot of
a down-trodden land.

"From these erring theologies there comes ever a reaction and a
protest, and, confounding the substance with the form, men of strong
unillumined mind reject both faith and fable, and build up speculative
materialisms, which increase the sum of human pain, the dread of death,
the unendurable sorrow of separation.

"For these ills there is no cure like wisdom, no available cure so
potent as the ancient wisdom of India." *

* Introduction to Bhagavad Gita.

PARACELSUS 141

Thus, when old forms are breaking up and before men's minds have
re-crystallized, we would look to see an especial effort made by the Lodge
to bring true ideals into the thought of the world. It is impossible to
over-estimate the value and far-reaching influence of the presence in
the world's thought of real ideals at such times. We have only to see
how the ideas first promulgated by Madame Blavatsky through the
Theosophical Society have colored every department of modern thought,
to realize this. The mere fact that modern thought neither recognizes nor
admits this is of no importance. It was not recognition for which she
worked. The influence of her work on the thought — the essential faith —
of future generations is incalculable. A man's faith is the foundation
of all his action, not what he may call his faith but his real faith. As
has been often pointed out, if a man says he believes in honesty and then
steals, it is obvious that he really believes in stealing and not in honesty.
So men's actions and the history of the world for centuries may be deter-
mined in these critical periods when old faiths have been destroyed and
men's minds are seeking new foundations on which to rest and new forms
around which to crystallize. These new faiths are tested in action, it
may be over centuries, are one by one found wanting and have to be
abandoned in their turn.

Born in 1493, the year after the discovery of the new world, a con-
temporary of Martin Luther and the Protestant reformation, Paracelsus,
like Madame Blavatsky, came at such a formative period in the world's
history when the foundations of men's thought were being shattered.
In both times, fixed ideas long held by the race were breaking up,
destructive attacks were being made on the established church and new
doctrines were arising.

In the sixteenth century the thought of the world was ruled by
narrowness and bigotry. Men were offered their choice between the
corruption of Rome together with the bigotry that led to the Spanish
Inquisition on the one hand, or on the other, rebellion, predestination,
infant damnation and a no less intolerant bigotry. Later, in Madame
Blavatsky's time, the choice lay between the blatant, intolerant material-
ism of science and the still more intolerant believers in a jealous God and
an actual Adam and Eve, created 4004 B. C, neither more nor less. The
spirit of Christianity had been so completely lost in the letter of the
Bible that to call in question a single biblical statement seemed to
threaten the entire religious edifice. The man who could not believe
that an actual whale swallowed an actual Jonah, was not permitted to
believe in Christ. "The choice seemed forced between the extremes of
superstition and materialism, and in consequence, religion was left with-
out vitality, without the sense of immediate reality and the support of
natural law."

In spite of shining exceptions, the tendency of both times was to
neglect entirely the inner life and the inner light and to base all con-
clusions on external things. Nineteenth century science put its faith

142 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

absolutely in the evidence of the physical senses — notoriously unreliable —
and on the ability of the analytical mind to draw correct and all-
inclusive deductions therefrom. Theology put its faith in the literal
inspiration of the Bible or in the authority of the external church. In
the time of Paracelsus "authority" was the great word. Everything had
to be based on "authority." All arguments must proceed from estab-
lished axioms drawn, not from experience but from the writings of some
church Father or revered ancient whose works were universally accepted
and whose least dicta were not to be questioned. Always it was to some-
thing outside of himself that man must look.

In both the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries that on which he
had been accustomed to place his dependence was broken before his eyes.
It then became a question of finding a substitute and of what that sub-
stitute would be. Would narrowness be replaced by narrowness, dog-
matism by dogmatism? Would man still worship an "absentee god"
and must he remain blind to his own powers and his divine possibilities ?

No one can study the life of Paracelsus without being struck by the
remarkable similarity between his life and writings and the life and
writings of Madame Blavatsky. Against the narrow dogmatism of their
ages both hurled themselves with splendid courage. Both set themselves
to shattering the armor-plated walls of prejudice to let in to men's dark-
ened minds the light of the spirit. We feel in each case the same intense
hatred of all hypocrisy and the same power of invective in denouncing it.
Change the names and pronouns, and it would be hard to say whether the
following was written of Paracelsus or of Madame Blavatsky :

"He had the volcanic temperament needed to destroy the old order,
which he knew to be corrupting the world, as he had the piercing insight
which discerned the new order amidst a welter of troubled and heaving
stagnation. But the stagnation had to be laid bare in all its mischievous-
ness to be revealed for what it had become. The very men who had
recognised the degeneracy of the Church were slow to admit its parallel
in the realm of knowledge. . . .

"He had a message to give which needed directness, a reveille to a
new day, . . . and he shouted his message abroad in language that all
could understand, and he shouted abroad as well his titanic wrath at
those who, hearing, closed their ears and sought to stifle his appeal.
There was no time for mincing courtesies ; the world needed a ne"w birth
and had first to pass through the scathing fire of truth, the old earth and
the old heaven had to be shrivelled up as a roll, and a new earth and
heaven had to be discerned in their stead. Paracelsus set his torch to
the waste-heap and scared its blind and dingy guardians, who denounced
him for sacrilege." (Miss Stoddard: Life of Paracelsus.}

On the constructive side, Madame Blavatsky and Paracelsus both
taught the same great doctrine. Both gave their lives in ceaseless effort
to free men from the bonds of ignorance and darkness and to reveal to

PARACELSUS 143

them the road to their own happiness. Both were denounced as char-
latans, reviled, persecuted and slandered all their lives.

"Thou earnest, O Lord, with the living word
That shouldst make thy people free,
But with mocking scorn, and with crown of thorn,
They bore thee to Calvary."

The servant is not greater than his Lord. Truly the world is slow to
change its methods.

Paracelsus, Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus, Bombast of
Hohenheim, to give him his full name and title, was born in 1493 in
Einsiedeln near Zurich. His father was a physician and Paracelsus him-
self seems to have had a good education. At sixteen he entered the
University of Basle, studying chiefly alchemy, medicine and surgery.
Later he was taught by Johann Trithemius, of Sponheim, Abbot of St.
Jacob at Wurzburg, said to have been one of the greatest adepts in
alchemy and magic. This was followed by practical experience in the
laboratory of another celebrated alchemist, Sigismund Fugger who owned
mines in the Tyrol, where Paracelsus learned mineralogy and metallurgy.

Miss Stoddart, in her Life of Paracelsus, gives an interesting por-
trait of Abbot Trithemius:

"Even as a young Benedictine he was celebrated for his learning,
and was made Abbot of Sponheim when he was only twenty-one years
old. From Sponheim he was transferred in 1506 to the monastery of
St. Jacob close to Wurzburg, where he died in 1516. He had a great
renown, and more especially for occult research, believing that the hidden
things of nature were in the keeping of spiritual forces. Students came
to him and if they proved themselves worthy were admitted to his study
where his grim experiments were made. He was learned in all the
knowledge of his day, influenced too by the Renaissance, a lover of art
and poetry as well as a historian and a physician, . . .

"Trithemius was accounted dangerous by the ignorant many. He
had penetrated to some of nature's hidden things, amongst them to mag-
netism and telepathy. In mystical experiments he had found himself
able to read the thoughts of others at a distance. He used a cryptic
language and had a secret chronology by which he interpreted the pro-
phetic and mystical portions of the Bible and of cabalistic writings.
Above all study he insisted on that of the Holy Scriptures, for which he
had a deep devotion and which he required his students to examine with
exact and reverent care. In this he influenced Paracelsus for life, for
Bible study was one of the preoccupations of his later years, and in his
writings we have constant witness not only to his mastery of its language,
but of its deepest spiritual significance.

"That he studied occultism with the abbot and was aware of its
mysterious powers is also sure . . ."

For ten years or so after this Paracelsus seems to have travelled

144 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

very widely, covering most of Europe. According to one tradition he
also went to India where he is said to have been taken prisoner by the
Tartars. The Tartars took him to the Khan with whose son he subse-
quently went to Constantinople. Apparently it was during this stay in
the East that he was taught much of the Eastern Wisdom. Many of the
Eastern tenets which appear in his writings, such as the sevenfold consti-
tution of man, were, so far as we know, unknown in Europe at that time.
His disciple, Van Helmont, says that he received the Philosopher's Stone
in Constantinople in 1521, a statement that appears to be a guarded refer-
ence to his initiation. In this connection Madame Blavatsky says in
I sis Unveiled:

". . . and although there had been alchemists before the days of
Paracelsus, he was the first who passed through the true initiation, that
last ceremony which conferred on the adept the power of travelling
toward the 'burning bush' over the holy ground, and to 'burn the golden
calf in the fire, grind it to powder, and strow it upon the water.' "

Paracelsus then returned to Italy where he served as surgeon in the
Imperial Army participating in a number of campaigns. Unfortunately
we have no details of his military life. In 1525 he returned to Basle
and two years later was appointed a professor of physic, medicine and
surgery. His lectures created a profound sensation. To begin with,
instead of the conventional Latin he lectured in German, doubtless much
to the delight of his students and certainly to the great scandal of his
tradition-loving colleagues. But far worse than that, his lectures em-
bodied his own views, the results of his experience and knowledge
instead of being based exclusively on the statements of the recognized
and accepted authorities, Messrs. Galen and Avicenna. Apparently no
one had dared for many years to express any opinion not founded on their
works and the shock was correspondingly great. As Paracelsus wrote:
"New stars appear and others disappear on the sky. New ideas appear
on the mental horizon and old ideas are lost. If a new comet appears in
the sky, it fills the hearts of the ignorant with terror; if a new and
grand idea appears on the mental horizon, it creates fear in the camp of
those who cling to old systems and accepted forms."

His new ideas, grand and noble as they were, created not only fear
but envy and rage. The rage was enormously increased when in his
capacity of City Physician he secured the passage of a mediaeval Pure
Food and Drugs act which placed the apothecaries of the city under his
supervision as to the purity and genuineness of their drugs and the
reasonableness of their prices. His marvellous success in effecting cures,
moreover, did not tend to allay the professional jealousy of his fellow
physicians. On the whole he seems to have drawn upon himself a storm
of criticism and abuse. The storm came to a head when he criticized
the City Council for a very unjust decision. A rich man, who had been
given up to die as hopeless by the other physicians, called in Paracelsus.
Paracelsus promptly cured him, so promptly in fact that the rich man

PARACELSUS 145

refused to pay the agreed fee on the eminently Teutonic ground that the
cure had been effected so easily that the fee had not been earned. The
City Council sided with the rich miser. The injustice of this so outraged
Paracelsus, who cared nothing for money and treated the poor free, that
he expressed his opinion of the Council. If he did this in his best style
we can understand that he had to leave the city secretly immediately
afterward. In power of invective, he is second only to H. P. B.

For the next few years he travelled from place to place, coming to
Nuremberg in 1530. The "regular" physicians promptly denounced him
as a quack and a charlatan. (It all sounds very modern.) At his request
some cases given up as incurable by the other physicians were put under
his care. In a short time he cured a number of cases of elephantiasis
which had been so sent him. Dr. Hartmann says that testimonials to this
effect may be found in the archives of the City of Nuremberg, but history
is silent as to the effect on the other Nuremberg physicians. There is no
record of their inviting him to remain and instruct them. He wandered
for a number of years more until, attracted by his growing fame, Duke
Ernst of Bavaria invited him to Salzburg. There shortly afterward he
died. There is some obscurity in regard to his death, a widely accepted
version being that it resulted from a treacherous attack by thugs in the
pay of jealous rivals. Madame Blavatsky mentions a tradition current
among the Alsatians that he is not dead but, like Charlemagne, sleeps
in his grave.

It would be as impossible to summarize his writings in an article of
this scope as to summarize The Secret Doctrine. It is in essence the
same teaching. Madame Blavatsky says that to accuse her of plagiarism
from Paracelsus, Eliphas Levi or Buddhism would be like accusing Max
Muller of plagiarising in his Sacred Books of the East from the phil-
osophy of the Brahmins. Obviously she regarded the identity of the
teaching as self-evident.

His work may be divided into three classes :

First: His revolutionary teaching in regard to the methods by
which knowledge was to be obtained. The ceaseless effort of Paracelsus
was to draw men from reliance on external authority back to their own
experience. He used medicine as one of the means to do this, bitterly
denouncing the systems of his day, founded on distorted precepts from
ancient writers, and insisting on experience as the great teacher. This
seems so obvious to us that it is hard to believe that it was ever novel,
not to say revolutionary. For "authority" he substituted the study of
nature, and the inductive method as, so to speak, the introduction to the
acquisition of knowledge. So far modern science goes with him and
acknowledges its obligation by calling him "the forerunner of all scientific
progress from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth." We are so accus-
tomed to this method that it is almost impossible for us to realize how
great was the change which its introduction wrought. Of course Para-
celsus did not originate it any more than he originated any of the truths

146 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

which he gave to his world. Roger Bacon's work, his Opus Magnus,
although not published until the year after the death of Paracelsus, was
written over two hundred and fifty years before. Let us say he redis-
covered it, or if you will, that he only reaffirmed it. In view of the fact
that the achievements of modern science are due to the adoption of his
method, that would be distinction enough.

It is his method, but only the lesser part of his method. The lower,
the side that leads to knowledge of the material, has been developed and
followed. The higher, that which might have led to knowledge of the
divine, has been ignored. He never made the mistake that science makes
to-day of thinking of experimental research as the only or even as the
best way to acquire knowledge. Its limitations he saw clearly. Great as
are the results that have flowed from it, they are as nothing compared
to what may be expected when the world awakes to the possibilities of
his teaching in regard to the direct perception of truth. "The cause of
his (man's) ignorance is that he does not understand how to search in
himself for the powers that are given him by God, and by which he may
arrive at all the Wisdom, Reason and Knowledge concerning everything
that exists, whether it be near him or far away." (De Inventione Artium.)
In this respect he is still centuries in advance not only of his own time
but of ours. Science might do well to inquire, for instance, how he came
to know that man's body and the stars were composed of the same
elements, three centuries before the discovery of the spectroscope.

The rationale of his teaching lies in the fundamental unity of all
souls with the Oversoul. All men are rays of the Divine Consciousness.
Consciousness is one and not separate and hence all that is in the Divine
Consciousness may be known to the consciousness of man.

"Neither the external nor the astral man is the real man, but the
real man in the soul in connection with the Divine Spirit. The astral soul
is the shadow of the body, illumined by the spirit, and it therefore
resembles man. It is neither material nor immaterial but partakes of the
nature of each. The sidereal man is formed out of the same Limbus as
the Macrocosm, and he is therefore able to participate in all the wisdom
and the knowledge existing in the latter. He may obtain knowledge of
all creatures, angels and spirits, and learn to understand their attributes.
He may learn from the Macrocosm the meaning of the symbols by which
he is surrounded, in the same manner as he acquires the language of his
parents ; because his own soul is the quintessence of everything in crea-
tion, and is connected sympathetically with the whole of nature; and
therefore every change that takes place in the Macrocosm may be sensed
by the ethereal essence surrounding his spirit, and it may come to the
consciousness and the comprehension of man."

Second : His outer contributions to scientific knowledge, particularly
medical and chemical. For many of these he is given full credit.

Paracelsus admittedly discovered hydrogen and probably oxygen.
He discovered and used animal magnetism in the treatment of disease

PARACELSUS 147

two hundred and fifty years before Mesmer forced its acceptance on an
incredulous and reluctant — not to say abusive — scientific world. In the
sixteenth century he taught the indestructibility of matter, the persistence
of life and by implication the conservation of energy. He knew and
taught that matter, solid rock for instance, was permeable to certain kinds
of light, a fact usually regarded as a purely modern discovery learned
by the use of the X-ray. He first introduced modern methods in surgery
and it is he rather than Pare who should be called "the father of modern
surgery." He taught the chemical composition of the body and revolu-
tionized the practice of medicine by the introduction of laboratory
methods. Many of our present medicines were first used by him, such
as laudanum, calomel, etc. He said that human beings and the stars were
composed of the same substances, a statement for which he was duly
ridiculed for centuries on the ground that it was manifestly impossible
for him or any one else to know anything at all about the composition of
the stars. The confirmation of his doctrine on this point by the com-
paratively modern discovery of the spectroscope has not in the least
interfered with the continuance of the ridicule in regard to many of his
other statements about which the twentieth century scientist is fully as
ignorant as his predecessor of the eighteenth was on the composition
of the stars.

Take, for instance, his assertion that the "sun shines through the
rocks for the gnomes." Plainly this consists of two statements, first that
the sun shines through rock and second that it does so for the gnomes.
At the time when it was written men found it easier to believe in gnomes
than that the sun could shine through rock, a fact contrary to all experi-
ence and to the plain evidence of their senses. Now we know that even
the densest matter is permeable to certain kinds of light and we take
photographs through a silver plate. But fancy a modern scientist seriously
discussing the existence of "gnomes"! The prejudice against even con-
sidering such a possibility is so strong that the mere mention of the name
in connection with his first statement is sufficient to cause the whole to
be dismissed with a smile at Paracelsus's mediaeval superstition and ignor-
ance, and the truth to which it alludes missed entirely. On what the
modern positive disbelief in the possibility of the existence of "gnomes"
rests beyond violent prejudice and the general habit of denial I do not
know. Of course by "gnomes" Paracelsus did not mean little hump-
backed men with long white beards and pick-axes, but beings who live
in the earth as fishes live in the water. Wherever science has found the
means to look it has found life. There are how many thousands of
microscopic living creatures in a colorless drop of water? Why should
it be assumed that there are no separate lives in the earth which as yet
we have not found the means to see ? In any case whether or not there
are "gnomes" it is obviously illogical for modern scientists, who admittedly
have no evidence one way or the other, to make positive denials.

As Paracelsus says in this connection, the possibilities of nature are

148 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

not limited by man's knowledge of them. "That which is unexpected
will in the future prove to be true, and that which is looked upon as
superstition in one century will be the basis for the approved science of
the next." (Philosophia Occulta.)

Third : His philosophical and religious writings, for which the
world owes him an immense, and as yet unpaid, debt of gratitude. This
was his real work. He uses medicine, chemistry or whatever it may be
of which he is writing as vehicles for his great spiritual doctrine.

Naturally he does not use modern terminology and many of the
truths in his writings are veiled more or less thinly by symbolism. He
was a Rosicrucian and as such sworn to secrecy in regard to much that
he knew. He did not write for the general eye. Many of his passages,
most illuminating when once we have the key, are designedly meaningless
without it. The reader who takes what he says in its dead letter sense
and materializes it, will miss entirely the truth hidden in the symbolism
or the allegory. As Dr. Hartmann points out, it takes a vast deal more
credulity to believe that a man admittedly possessed of such knowledge
as Paracelsus, would consent to write whole volumes of intolerable
rubbish (which some of his books would be if taken in their literal
meaning) than to believe that great spiritual truths were thus hidden
in allegories intended to be understood only by those who possessed the
key in their own hearts.

We may get an idea of the extent to which Rosicrucian writing has
been materialized by contrasting the currently accepted meaning of such
words as "Alchemy," "Magic," "Astronomy," etc., with what Paracelsus
meant by them. Magic we identify with witchcraft, and dismiss it as the
crassest superstition. Alchemy we regard as the effort to make gold out
of baser metals, and smile at its "obvious futility." Astronomy we limit
to the study of the stars as physical bodies.

To Paracelsus, Magic was supreme wisdom. "Magic is great hidden
wisdom, just as that which is commonly called human reason is a great
folly. To use wisdom, no external ceremonies and conjurations are re-
quired. The making of circles and the burning of incense are all tom-
foolery and temptation, by which only evil spirits are attracted. The
human heart is a great thing, so great that no one can fully express its
greatness. It is imperishable and eternal, like God. If we only knew all
the powers of the human heart nothing would be impossible to us."
(De Peste. Lib. I.)

By magical powers he meant spiritual power. "The power which
enabled the saints to work miracles is still alive and is accessible to all."
"It may be acquired by obtaining more spirituality, and making one's
self capable to see and to feel the things of the spirit." "Christ and the
prophets and the apostles had magical powers, acquired less by their
learning than by their holiness. They were able to heal the sick by the
laying on of their hands and to perform many other wonderful but natural
things." In this belief that the miracles of Christ were literally true and

PARACELSUS 149

at the same time in entire accord with natural laws as yet unknown to us,
he was again far in advance, not only of his, but of our own time.

He believed these "magical powers" to be latent in all men. They
are the inherent powers of the soul and will develop with the development
of the soul. "The exercise of true magic does not require any cere-
monies, ... it only requires a strong faith in the omnipotent power of
all good, that can accomplish everything if it acts through a human mind
who is in harmony with it, and without which nothing useful can be
accomplished. True magic power consists in true faith, but true faith
rests in spiritual knowledge, and without that kind of knowledge there
can be no faith."

He might have added in the words of the Gita "He who is perfected
in devotion will find spiritual knowledge springing up in himself in no
long time."

But in insisting as he does on the spiritual character of magic and
on its foundation in faith, he does not in any way detract from the reality
or potency of magical powers. The heart of all his writing is the ascend-
ancy of the inner over the outer, of the spirit over matter. Through the
attainment of true spirituality, the purification of the will and the heart
of man, his union with the divine spirit within him, all power may be
given him. In his Philosophia Sagax he says:

"Faith has a great deal more power than the physical body. You
are visible and corporeal but there is still an invisible man in you, and
that invisible man is yourself too. . . . True faith has wonderful powers,
and this fact proves that we are spirits and not merely visible bodies.
Faith accomplishes that which the body would accomplish if it had the
power. Man is created with great powers; he is greater than heaven
and greater than the earth. He possesses faith, and faith is a light more
powerful and superior to natural light, and stronger than all creatures.
All magic processes are based upon faith. By faith and imagination we
may accomplish whatever we may desire. The power of faith overcomes
all spirits of Nature, because it is a spiritual power, and spirit is higher
than nature. Whatever is grown in the realm of nature may be changed
by the power of faith."

It is this ascendancy of spirit over matter, the inner rather than the
outer, the essence rather than the form, that he strives ceaselessly to
present. To him, all forms were but the vehicles of powers and expres-
sions of them, their "signatures." To those who know how to read
them, each form is a revelation of the character of the force that brings
it into being. Thus by astronomy and the "stars" he means, not the
physical stars that we see, but the cosmic forces of which they are an
outer manifestation. These forces are universal and operative in the
heavens, in the earth and in the constitution of man.

" 'Saturn' is not only in the sky, but also deep in the earth and in the
ocean? What is Venus but the 'Artemesia' that grows in your garden?
What is 'iron' but Mars ? That is to say, Venus and Artemesia are both

150 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

manifestations of the same cause. What is the human body but a con-
stellation of the same powers that formed the stars in the sky ? "

This makes it clear that when in other places Paracelsus speaks of
the influence of a star on men, he does not mean the planet we see but
the operation in man of the particular universal force to which that
particular planet corresponds.

His definition of Alchemy is likewise very different from our idea
of it as a search for material gold. "To grasp the invisible elements, to
attract them by their material correspondences, to control, purify, and
transform them by the living power of the Spirit — this is the true
alchemy."

And again "The Alchemist is one regenerated in the spirit of Jesus
Christ."

A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump, and it would be difficult to
overestimate the effect of the presentation of his teaching during such a
formative period of the world's thought.

Like a beacon light in the darkness of infant damnation, predestina-
tion, doubt and denial, stands out the great doctrine of the inherent
divinity and perfectibility of man. "And it is a great truth, which you
should seriously consider, that there is nothing in heaven or upon earth
which does not also exist in Man, and God who is in heaven exists also
in man, and the two are but One.

"Before man is born, and afterwards, his soul is not perfect, but it
may be perfected through the power of the Will.

"Physical man takes his nutriment from the earth ; the sidereal man
receives the states of his feelings and thoughts from the stars; but the
spirit has his wisdom from God. The heat of the fire passes through an
iron stove, and likewise the astral influences, with all their qualities, pass
through man. They penetrate him as rain penetrates the soil, and as
the soil is made fruitful by the rain, likewise man's soul is made fruitful
by them ; but the principle of supreme wisdom of the universe penetrates
into the center, illuminates it, and rules over all.

"Hail may destroy the fruits of the earth, evil planetary influences
may be attracted by the soul of the earth and cause epidemic diseases,
ana the spiritual center in man may be devoid of wisdom and darkness
reign in its place. The earth, the animal kingdom, and physical man
are subject to the government of the stars; but the spiritual man rules
over the stars and over the elements, and conquers the worlds without
and the world within by the wisdom that comes from God."

J. F. B. MITCHELL.

PARENTHOOD AND
DISCIPLESHIP

A MOTHER'S EXPERIENCE

IT "chanced" that an old family friend, who is also a really great
doctor, came to the resort where I was living. My dear husband
had died there, and I had stayed on month after month ; he seemed

nearer to me there than at home, and that helped to reconcile me to
staying on there, "sacrificing my mother-love to building up my health
for my children's sake." When I heard that our doctor was at the hotel I
went to see him. I knew my family would trust his report, though they
had not been impressed by the warnings of the resort physicians, which I
had sent to them. The family felt that I ought not to be separated so
long from my children.

"Dear Doctor," I said, "it is fortunate you are here. Now you can
tell Ethel and the rest — they'll believe you — that, while I want to go back
to the children and to get rid of poor Fraulein, who is making little
German girls of them, I just can't, for the children's sake. I have no
right to endanger their health." . . .

"Well, well, Mercy, my dear, that does sound pretty bad. Here you
are, hating with all your big heart what Germany now stands for, and yet
letting a hireling make little Frauleins of your daughters. Ethel did tell
me of the bad reports given on your case by the resort physicians. In
fact, she begged me to send for you as soon as I arrived, but I thought
I'd let you come to me — you would have more trust in my diagnosis and
prognosis. Now I want you to remember my one rule, Mercy — you
don't have to come to me, but, when you do, you've got to do what I say.
Will you?"

Although I was not sure whether it was my heart or my appendix
that he would find had gone wrong, on top of my weak lungs, I knew he
would find me in too serious a condition to go home, where I was not fit
to be, and it would be such a relief to have the family letters stopped —
yes, and my stupid, old-fashioned, silly conscience just made to quit
talking. So I agreed to his requirement.

Doctor was certainly painstaking and careful. He gave me several
examinations, and kept me under observation for a week. Then he
promised to give me his decision in three days. The fateful morning
came. I was so upset that I had my maid telephone him to come to my
apartment. I was too weak to rise from the lounge when he came in —
my heart was going so.

"Well, well, Mercy, my dear, this won't do at all ; this is all wrong."

152 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

"Doctor, I know you, I trust you, I will be brave ; but I must know
the truth— the full truth."

"Yes, my dear, you ought to be brave, coming from the stock you
do. I'll give you the truth — and it will be bitter truth ; but will you keep
your promise to do what I say ?"

"We keep our promises, Doctor."

"Humph ! You do when you remember them, and I won't let you
forget this. Get up and dress — dress fast — for your train leaves in three
hours, and you haven't much time."

"To a higher altitude — is it as bad as that?"

" 'Higher altitude' — I hope so, for you're going home."

I sat up — and gasped — the Doctor says I glared, but that is not
true— "Home!"

"Yes. There's nothing physically the matter with you. You can do
the family washing if you want to, now. Get up and get busy. I will wire
Ethel to take Fraulein to Mrs. Max Zimmer, who has been trying for
months to lure her away from you. A telephone message to Mrs. Zimmer
and Ethel's motor will get Fraulein out of your family and into a better
paying position before you reach home. So you must catch the train,
somehow."

I would have had hysterics if I had not been afraid of Doctor —
there was no telling what he might not have done to me. And so it was
that I caught the train, and went home to my children and my duties.

Ethel met me and took me to my own apartment and escaped as
quickly as she could. I was alone with my children. The little girls
looked at me. I looked at them. Not one of the four of us spoke. They
were politely interested, yet their glances made me conscious that my hat
was not on straight.

I wondered what I should say after the complete failure of my
attempts to be demonstrative, in the face of their manifestations of
physical discomfort, and personal discomfiture, when I had clasped them
close. I could hear them thinking: "Now what would Fraulein want us
to say, or to do?" Yet I was their mother; they were (and are!) "my"
children. This may read like the scenario of a "movie-drama," yet I am
afraid it represents the situation between the average child and the
average parent. The circumscribing facts may differ, but how different
is the inner attitude?

My husband's illness had taken, and had kept me, away. Then the
possibility of my having acquired tuberculosis had kept me longer away.
Fraulein Mueller was "a perfect wonder." She had "a veritable genius
for training children" — and I was so incompetent — besides having my
duty to my husband.

The new regime began. At first it was very simple. All I had to
do was to stand by and let the machinery revolve. When I was in doubt
one of the children would say : "But Fraulein always told us to do this" or
"never would let us do that." By following out the methods to which

PARENTHOOD AND DISCIPLESHIP 153

the children were accustomed I found that I had time to get about among
my friends much more than I had hoped for. But one night all three of
the little girls had croup. I was so frightened that I insisted on having
our Doctor, who no longer made family visits, come to see them himself.
He wrote a prescription and then said: "This won't do any real good.
The trouble is not with the children ; it is with you. Children never get
croup — parents give it to them."

My hand flew to my throat — had I croup ?

"There's nothing the matter with your body. You're not even a
'croup-carrier' — you're a croup-giver. You neglect your children, and
you let them eat what they please and eat altogether too much, even
if it were the right thing to eat. Croup always makes me suspect that
children have been eating like pigs — only with less sense."

"But I was doing what Fraulein did — and she kept the children
well."

"Perhaps — though I doubt it. But you are not even doing what she
did. You are doing what the children say she did. You have been
neglecting them worse than you did when you stayed away from them,
and that was bad enough."

I began to cry, but Doctor began to scold, so, of course, I stopped.
(I wonder whether a woman ever cries publicly if she knows that crying
will not do any good?) Before the Doctor got through with me I was
scared enough to take notice, and to do for the children what he wanted
me to do about diet, and hours, and general health rules.

Then my troubles began. The children were first impudent and
then disobedient. "Fraulein" was hurled at me until I really wished she
had never existed, but my hating her did not make the children love me.
All my ease and comfort were gone. The children and I bickered and
quarreled and wept together in a most disgraceful way. We were all
unhappy, and things kept getting worse. I demanded a governess, but
Tom, Ethel's big, phlegmatic husband, who was our trustee, put his foot
down and said I could not afford it — and there was no appeal.

One day when things were what my dear husband would have
called "just plain hell," I went to see Jessie Troy, a schoolmate whose
quiet home and loving daughters were my envy.

"Jessie, I've come for advice. Everything is going wrong with me
and my girls. Everything is right with you and your girls. How do you
do it? Tell me, please," and I threw myself into her warm arms and
wept again.

"Stop crying, Mercy, for you are going out with me and it won't do
to go looking like a wreck."

I stopped, and asked, "Where are we going?"

"Where I learned how to make a home and to bring up my girls. I
want you to get the teaching straight and not through me — but hurry,
dear, or we shall be late and that would be the wrong way to begin."

Before I really knew what had happened we were in Jessie's car,

11

154 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

hurrying down town and over into a poor and dilapidated part of New
York. We stopped in front of a building that might have been a warehouse
or factory, and went upstairs — into a dim and quiet little chapel. Even
now I cannot talk about it. It would be telling something too intimate
to say what that chapel meant to me, even the first time I went into it.

There was a service that seemed to open my heart to the childhood
power of prayer with the certainty of getting help. Then there was an
address or sermon. The first one I heard might as well have been in
Greek, except that it made me want to hear more. I went often, and I
discovered that one reason why I did not understand at first was
because it was all so simple and so practical that I overlooked its power
and truth. Then, too, the teaching hurt. It made one realize that Our
Lord is not a sort of gaseous spirit, somewhere out in the starry space,
with no power even of knowing us. It made one feel that He is a loving
friend, loving one, anxious to help one, and only prevented because one
will not let Him. Soon the teaching made me want to let Him help me,
and then I found I had to "do something about it."

This "doing something," I grew to believe, meant accepting the fact
that God had put me where I ought to be, and had given me the right
things to do. At first, when I found myself growing interested in the
life and the teaching at that little chapel, I longed to work there — I
wanted to lead classes and teach and be busy about church work. But in
time, and it took time, too, for how I did hate to take up the commonplace,
homely duties surrounding me, I began to see that my chance for Heaven
lay in "doing something" about being a real Mother.

There were days — yes, months — when I still regarded my own
children as deadly nuisances, barriers in the way of my making spiritual
progress, but I could not escape the obvious — the Master loves us, He
loves me, He gave me my children to help me, and unless and until I so
accepted them I could not get His Help. So, in time, I grew to be more
and more of a mother — and, in time, I liked it better and better.

It is a pity that parenthood is being so commonly dodged nowadays,
for there is unlimited riches to be got out of it ; not only in the way of
pleasure, but in the way of one's own training. Indeed, as one progresses
in a courageous experimentation in assuming parental responsibility
(however out-of-date this may be) one begins to wonder whether the
parent does not get more out of it than the child. On the material plane,
the child of right parents seems to get everything, and to have the chance
of repayment only in what he may do in turn for his children. One
sometimes wonders how God may regard the relationship. If one really
believes that soul-evolution be the secret of life, parenthood at once
becomes a very great opportunity. Our Lord speaks of "little children."
In the East, we are told, "chela" means child. Perhaps parenthood may
be a means of teaching one how to be a chela or disciple by conscious
experimentation.

Yet "Other people's children" seem to be more interesting nowadays

PARENTHOOD AND DISCIPLESHIP 155

than one's own. This is indicated by two common tendencies : not having
children, or, else, when one has children, putting the responsibility for
them upon others. The "slacker" in parental responsibility is a "slacker,"
whether he or she lives on the East Side of New York, and expects the
public school to do everything, from soup to shoes, from dentistry to a
doctorate diploma, and all without expense; or whether one lives on a
great estate on Long Island, and sees one's children only at the "proper"
time and in the "proper" manner.

I sent my children to the Sunday school of the little church, as I
grew to know it better. "I really don't see how you can do it, Mercy,"
Cousin Caroline said to me one day. "At St. Crcesus' they would meet
just the children you want them to know, while down there in the slums."
She threw up both hands.

"But they are taught religion there," I said.

"Nonsense,"said my cousin, "that won't help them when they are
debutantes."

I found that most of my friends had an uncomfortable feeling about
having their children "too religious." I suppose that it might seem
dangerous in the case of uncontrolled and lawless children ; for their
little minds are logical, they are keen observers, and they might become
critical of their elders. This is bad for the child, and it is also most
uncomfortable for the parent — even if the criticism be based on the truth.

One hears so much in these days about the "handicap of existing
economic organization," whatever that may mean. Then other women
say "What can you expect of children when women are denied the
ballot?" Others talk largely of their responsibility to Society or the
State, always putting emphasis on their sacrifice. Still others object to
"anything that will make a child different." "You must let your girls
mix with other children, so that they will know more of life,"

Even the women who try to take an interest in their children, but
who cling to "scientific pedagogy" or "giving the child a broad human-
itarian outlook" have to admit their helplessness. "Mercy, you can't
expect womanliness in an age of athletics and of growing democracy —
the best we can do is to strive for efficiency."

So many people want their children to be just like all other children,
yet the words "my child" are more than a shibboleth of melodrama.
Probably they vocalize, with the "my" in big capitals, the first surge of
feeling that comes to most parents on the birth of their first child.
When the child is turned over to others, municipal or personal employees,
the sense of personal possession remains, although personal responsibility
be forgotten. "It would hurt me too much to strike my child," says the
average humanitarian and hysterical mother of the XXth Century. She
says it with an unconcealed sense of superiority over the "brute of the
mid- Victorian" (and "mid-Egyptian" and "mid" commonsense period of
any age) who "beats" his or her child. Yet that mother does not know
how truthfully she portrays herself. It would hurt her, it should hurt her,

156 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

to punish her child, but she ought not to be thinking about herself, but
rather what is good for the child. If she thought of the souls involved,
her soul and the child's soul, it might lead to a reversal of attitude.

Looking back over the furnace of experience, through which my little
ones and I have passed together, I wonder why more people do not see the
parallelism in "parenthood and discipleship," and do not seek to use the
help such recognition might bring, in getting training for themselves as
they train their children — in drawing closer to the Master, as they draw
their children closer to them. I have been forced by life itself and its
sorrows to believe that my relations to God and my neighbor are the only
things that count, and that what happens to me, as and for myself, is
utterly unimportant — more than that, becomes deadly uninteresting —
even to me ! "Discipleship" does seem to be what one is here for — call it
"the Path" or "serving God" — words do not count. Actions do count,
and that is where we stick. Like most average Americans — yes, like most
XXth Century people — I had grown to hate rules and restrictions, and to
despise experience and traditions. "The antiquity that survives is of
interest, not because of its age, but for its truth" meant nothing to me.
If anything had stood the test of ages it must, therefore, necessarily, be
out-of-date. Rules and restrictions had the sanction of ages, so — "into
the scrap-heap with 'em," as my nephew says.

Yet the experiment of trying to be a faithful mother, has led me to
the belief that life is nothing but Rule, and that this is unescapable fact
on any plane, in any relation of life, however much we may kick at the
pricks.

In my first reaction against Fraulein's regime I abolished all rules.
I cried out, "Let love be our rule !" But I found that this did not work.
My "middle-sized bear" girl cured me by her logic. I had talked a great
deal about doing things for love, and for the sake of those whom we love
best. She was guilty of a very serious act of disobedience, deliberate, yet,
curiously enough, not defiant.

"You said we should do things for the one we loved best. I thought
it over. I know I love myself best — better than you or Baby or Sister,
and of course more than God. He's too big to love. So I did what I
wanted to for love's sake." Her honesty is rare, but I believe her feeling
to be otherwise.

That children have fancies but lack imagination is one lesson I have
learned. This calls for laying out plans for them, for fancies are poor
guides, and impulses worse. I found that it would not answer to follow
my impulses. I had to weigh the consequences of my decisions, or trouble
ensued. It took too much time to make plans anew each day, so it became
easier, all around, to set up rules as a sort of recurrent planning. It was
easier to insist upon punctuality than to fuss and fume in getting the
children off to school each morning — and it kept them on time when to
rules were added penalties for breaking them.

That rules are a moral prophylaxis for children came out last year.

PARENTHOOD AND DISCIPLESHIP 157

Some very little girls were found to have been making friends that were
not only "impossible" but terribly dangerous. They met at moving
picture theatres, while the different parents supposed their daughters were
interchanging home visits. My oldest girl, then only 13, escaped because
"Mother insists on my coming right straight home from school, no matter
what happens," as she told Cousin Caroline one day, when that imposing
old lady tried to carry the child off with her. Yet Caroline is loudest in
her protests that my regime of rule is destroying all individuality in my
girls.

Even the most irresponsible cousin or parent prefers a child to be
well-mannered — an ill-bred child does so reflect upon one's own family!
And what are good manners but observances of Rule ? In Turkestan the
American College Expedition found that it was a compliment and courtesy
to eat out of one dish, using one's fingers as utensils; while America
prefers forks and spoons. The difference is one of Rule, not of inherent
and ethical distinction. It would have been unmannerly to have disre-
garded the laws of hospitality. All that parent and state can really do is
to implant knowledge of rules of some kind in a child's memory, and to
imprint them on its will and conduct. Do we use this principle in
preparing our children for life? Or do we try to let them avoid the
unavoidable ? There is no escaping from Rule — we do not even eat when
or what we please — we follow rules, and, if we wanted to disregard them,
the family or our very servants would prevent us.

What are fashions but rules?

What is patriotism but consciousness of a civil Rule under which we
live, and which we must support ?

"Ignorance of the law is no defence" is a legal axiom, which Tom
likes to quote to me. It is certainly the mainspring of our social relations.
Because we recognize the infallibility of this principle, we seek to
preserve our children's social status by training them as Disciples of
Convention ; Chelas of Madame Grundy.

Lots of women, I know, would deny this, but even they are rule-
bound; convention-devotees. It may be that they are bound to the
"up-to-the-minute-convention" that they "defy tradition," or "disregard
established conventions," but, poor dears, they are the most slavishly,
stupidly rule-ridden people I know, because they are not volunteers, but
have been drafted, and drafted without having had any real intention to
serve.

The very ability to maintain physical existence depends upon
observance of Rule. If I lean too far out of my apartment window I shall
fall to the pavement 200 and more feet below, so I adopt the Rule of not
leaning out too far, and I teach my children the Rule not to lean out at all.

Take it in the "education" of our children — rules do rule. I should
prefer to use the old New England term "Schooling," for what we call
"education" I believe to be only a small part of real education. Even
the school that stands most firmly on the unstable platform of "developing

158 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

the individual expression" has its rules which must be observed and even
obeyed. The non-observer of rules ends with utter loss of freedom and
generally ends in one of four places, jail, asylum, hospital or a prematurely
occupied grave.

These generalities may explain why it is that I have persisted in
keeping my children under Rule and why it was that, as my love for them
grew, I increased the number and nicety of the rules, and enforced more
exactly their observance. Physically, the child progresses through an
evolution and development before he or she becomes a self-supporting
organism — why should we think it possible to ignore this principle in other
relations of life? Why should I dare to let one of my little girl's
"temperamental peculiarities" govern her conduct, when I have worked so
hard to make her walk aright, and to keep her backbone straight? What
difference is there, I wonder, in God's eyes, between a twisted backbone or
a twisted will, if both were twisted into ineffectiveness through parental
neglect? In either case there was a "temperamental peculiarity" to start
with.

The law of the land will not let me deprive my child of physical food
to the point of starvation. I should be jailed and should lose my control of
my child if I persisted in disregarding this man-made law. It frightens
me often when I ask myself what is God's law, and its penalties, in
regard to inner and spiritual sustenance ?

This is one reason why I have made my daughters go to church.
People who know that I belong to the T. S. ask me how I reconcile the
principle of tolerance, with making my children go to church when they
do not want to go. It is because I do not believe that a child has evolved
enough to know what it really wants, nor what is really best for it. By
some marvel of Omniscience I have been deemed, with all my faults, the
one right person to give my children guidance. I certainly am not going to
put into my place a 14-year-old girl, however much I may admire her. So
I send her to church to give her a structural form for future expression.

In civil law, in mechanical law, there is no such thing as conditional
or delayed obedience — obedience must be instant and exact. I may not
wan* to drive my car on the right-hand side of the road, to use one
illustration. I may want to lean out of the window too far "just for an
instant" — but no consideration is shown to my intention to obey the law
of gravity a little later — I simply splash on the pavement. So it is that I
do not dare to let my children obey tardily, nor do I excuse disobedience.
An Army woman I have heard of taught her sons that tardy obedience
was "disobedience plus cowardice." Is there an uglier vice in man or
woman than cowardice ?

While I hope my daughters may never be permitted to vote (even
should they desire it, which Heaven forbid), yet I know that they will
have both legal and social relations to observe in the future, when they are
personally responsible for their own acts. So it is that I try now to train
them to be considerate of others. It is "my" apartment, but if I let my

PARENTHOOD AND DISCIPLESHIP 159

children disregard the comfort of those in the apartment below us by
temperamental expression in jumping on the floor, I shall be preparing
them to disregard the laws, later, when the punishment must fall on
them — and not upon me. Yet it will have been my neglect or cowardice
which trained them as law-breakers-in-embryo. I say "cowardice"
because it is so often hard for me to be strict with them. To be sure
strictness may sometimes make them think less lovingly of me. What
of that? I am here to prove my love for them, not to try to get a false
love from them today, which they will have to pay for in loss and
suffering tomorrow. I remember the first time I whipped one of my
daughters after I had returned to the family. Right in the middle of the
punishment I stopped and fled, for I found myself enjoying the relief to
my temper in chastising the child. I had a long fight with myself before
I could see that the fault was not in using punishment for the child's
good, but that I needed to correct my attitude, to control my temper.
This was no excuse, however, for depriving the child of training at the
least possible cost to her.

Which is better — to make a child eat properly, even at the cost of a
little physical pain or to let her wreck her health later, when she will
suffer more and will perhaps bring into the world children who will
suffer? If I have to whip a child into good habits now, I would rather
do so than let pain and disgrace whip her without surcease in her maturity.
"I can't make Alice stop eating candy" wails one friend of mine, whose
own wayward aunt is never spoken of nowadays — we do not know
whether she is dead or alive.

Children do grow to do things automatically and by habit, just by
doing them, and it works vice versa. My little girls, as they grow, will
have growing with them the habits of thinking of others, of expecting
penalties for wrong acts and of being obedient. Are not these better
habits than selfishness, gluttony and disobedience — which will be punished
terribly if carried on into maturity? We are members of the animal
kingdom — whether we like it or not. It made my little girls furious to
find human beings so classified, when I took them to the Natural History
Museum. Yet people nowadays seem to forget this. There is no animal
which will not take what it wants, when it can get it without obvious
risk. What good is it to tell Alice that the candy she eats now is bad for
her health later? She cannot understand. She would understand a
severe whipping combined with the certain knowledge that others would
come as often as she broke the rule and ate forbidden candy.

But what has all this to do with discipleship ? I must be very stupid
if I have not made it clear that because I love my children I have learned
to lay my yoke upon them, to make them conform to my Rule for their
own dear little sakes. Does the Master love less courageously than I
love? Has He less wisdom? Should I not rejoice when He lays His
yoke on me, for I, assuredly, should be able to comprehend the love
behind the seeming severity which will persist only until I have learned to

160 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

conform to the plan He has laid out for me. I did not begin to teach my
youngest daughter to read out of an unabridged dictionary. My three
children do not use the same study books nor follow identical regimes.
It would be folly to expect me to explain these distinctions or differences
to them. I find that it is bad for them to give them reasons for my
insisting on a given rule. I must inculcate obedience, not complacent
compliance.

Why then should I dare to consider the Master less wise than I am
and ask Him to make everything clear to me? There is not one of my
dear little girls who would not change her own rule of life if I allowed
her to do so. There is not one of them old enough, nor wise enough, to
make it safe to let her make her own rules. Do I know more than God?
Would it be safe to trust me to order my own Fate ?

In training and educating a child one starts with simple and
elementary lessons. If one wishes to secure perfection, later, one insists
upon an absolute nicety in observance, and an unfailing exactness in
these niceties, before progress is permitted. I could not have used my
musical ability to solace my husband's last days with me if my own mother
and teachers had not been so "merciless" towards me, in insisting upon
those many and painful hours of "stupid" and "useless" practicing. I do
the same with my daughters. Has God a lower standard of excellence of
attainment for His children than we have for ours ? While I have virtues
in embryo, and good qualities lacking in technical excellence, why should I
complain if Life holds me back that I may keep on practicing until I am
capable of learning more difficult lessons? While I cannot be certain of
controlling my tongue, is it not well that I should suffer from Cousin
Caroline's, as a warning of what I might become if I persist in her ways?

Parenthood has taught me to know something more than I had
dreamed I could ever know of what it may mean "to praise, to reverence,
and to serve God, our Lord, and by this means to save his (one's) soul."
On the other hand the seeking to be a disciple has helped me to be a better
parent. One great fact stands out in both — one must be under Rule to
live.

"Under rule" — why that means never letting up — even for an instant.
Take it in the Army — a Regular is never permitted to "let up." A tired
man in civil life may sleep on duty and be forgiven, but in war time the
sleeping sentry is shot. Even in our own national democracy, in war time
both volunteers and drafted men go under the same strict law under
which the Regulars fight. We are taught, by clergymen and biologists
alike, that life is war. So we ought to be Regulars, too, ought we not?
"Regulars" never "let up" when on duty. I do not believe we can afford
to, either. I tried to teach my little girls that "let ups are horrid" — their
own verdict at the end of the experiment. I gave them a "free day"
recently. We were off in the country where no harm could ensue. No
plans were made for the day ; no rules were in force. We were all tired

PARENTHOOD AND DISCIPLESHIP 161

and bored and cross by night fall. It was a wasted day and we none of
us liked it. Is a wasted, unplanned, lawless life any happier?

Of course the Devil is out of fashion nowadays. I did not believe in
his existence until I read a wonderful Life of Jesus, by a great Oxford
professor, who made it clear that, if we postulate Christ as a centre of
divine Consciousness for good, we must postulate as a counterbalance, or
"equal and opposite reaction," Satan, as a centre of consciousness for evil
— and man with his freedom of choice must take sides. Christ does over-
come Satan single-handed, but even Christ cannot save us, when we join
forces with Satan. Is this horribly old-fashioned doctrine? It is simple
fact to any one who, inspired by unselfish love, has fought the Devil to
save a child. There is, I believe, something that must be like a
miniature Devil, trying to get into each one of us, and feed on our souls.
It seems easier for the Devil to get into a child — unless its parents keep
on the watch. I get very, very tired sometimes. I feel as if I must let
something go. "Don't be too hard on the child, ma'am," my old nurse
used to say to my mother. "I won't be," my mother would reply, "and
so I will be hard on myself and punish the child." How few women
nowadays are so wise, so courageous, so loving. It is "hard on the child"
if the parent relaxes discipline and to do that is so easy for the parent.
One's own personal Devil is ready to whisper sophistry, and to plead for
"tenderness," but it is "tenderness" for the Devil and not for the child.

At a meeting of the New York Branch of the T. S., which I
attended, a young man told a story which has more than once nerved me
not to "let up" on a naughty child — for the child's sake. He said that one
of his sisters had trained her dog very carefully. Part of the Rule of the
dog's life was that it must not get up on a sofa. Once in a while the
younger sister would yield to the puppy's pleading, and invite him to lie
on the sofa beside her. The dog never accepted this as a privilege, but
took it as a precedent, and would then get up on the sofa uninvited. It
would take a month of punishment and training to make up for a single
moment's soft-hearted relaxation. Children are very much like puppies
in that sort of thing. One dares never relax — that is if one is working for
their happiness, rather than one's own momentary comfort.

If it makes me sad and lonely not to be able to relax with my children,
during their training, what must be the sadness and loneliness of the
Master that He may not seek solace in relaxing towards me! That
nerves me to try to hasten my own training, that I may "grow-up" and
become His companion-child, as I know my children will become towards
me. But all my love cannot change the evolutionary Law. I must wait
for them to grow, and I, in turn, must wait and trust until I "grow" too.

This rule of no-relaxing as proof of a parent's love brings one up
hard against an "up-to-the-minute" prejudice. Most of the parents of
my acquaintance believe in "free periods" in a child's day, week, month
and year. It is, perhaps, a "free period" for the parent, but it certainly
is bad for the child. I have grown to wonder if the real meaning of

162 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

"vacation" may not be "vacated by the soul, but occupied by the Devil."
I do not always succeed but I do try to keep track of every moment of
my children's lives. If I am not with them, I want them to be doing
something that has been planned, and to be doing that something right.
If they are not alone, I want them to be with some one whom I trust, and
of whom I approve as a beneficial influence in their lives. Now if I have
learned this to be best, why deny equal wisdom and greater power to
God in planning my life in detail? When I believe this, I do not care
about troubles or worries, or even sorrow, for I see them all as part of
God's planning for His child. When my bills seem heavy, and my
finances hopeless, it does not mean to me "hard luck" — it means that I
still need to learn how to plan and to save and to utilize the gifts I have,
before I may get others.

Some of my friends, who know that my children are under a non-
relaxing Rule, tell me that I am Prussian in my ideals. They say they
cannot understand why, if I want Prussian methods used with my
children, I should have sent Fraulein away, and taken so much care on
myself. And while my intuition and experience both declare to me that I
took the right course, it is difficult to explain my reasons for it to those
whose ideals differ so from my own. To me the whole matter is not a
question of methods at all, but of intention and aim. The Prussian
certainly does use childhood training and discipline, but uses them to
destroy free will and to inculcate Kultur. The fact that he uses them does
not mean, to me, that childhood training and discipline are bad. It
emphasizes all the more the Prussian wickedness in that he uses such
splendid things for such base ends. Nothing could have pleased the
Devil more than to see those splendid, undisciplined, unorganized young
Englishmen whose lives were so unhesitatingly thrown away in the
second stage of the war — those days of the first of Kitchener's Army,
when the British Regulars were wiped out, holding the lines imperilled
by their gallant, undisciplined comrades.

Fraulein's intention and aim in training my children was to make
them obedient and efficient, and to make them staunch adherents of
Prussian methods and Kultur; her effort to this latter end was so
insidious that I should have been helpless to counteract it. Her discipline
was admirable but it was not rooted, as I trust mine is, in a determination
to prepare those children to become the faithful servants and soldiers of
our great Master, to train body and brain so that they may faithfully
respond to the demands of the soul that is to use them as its instrument
for service and growth. How can those women who give such intelligent,
unremitting care to the proper training of a hunting dog, to make him
fit for a relatively unimportant service, find fault with the time and
thought and prayers that I give to the training of the animal bodies
through which the souls of my children are to do or to fail to do the
service that the Master desired from them when He mapped out this life
for them? Would they, with their experience as trainers, suggest to me

PARENTHOOD AND DISCIPLESHIP 163

that I substitute for parental rule a council of democracy, composed of a
14-year-old, an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old? Are these children
competent to take the responsibility?

One last word — really a woman's postscript. If you love your
children more than yourself, then sacrifice yourself for them in main-
taining rule — for they will have to accept rule later, or be punished.
And take quite literally Christ's teaching that we must become as little
children, which means to me that we must love and trust Him as we wish
our children to love and trust us.

MERCY FARMER.

We know not exactly how low the least degree of obedience is, which
will bring a man to heaven; but this we are quite sure of, that he who
aims no higher will be sure to fall short even of that, and that he who
goes farthest beyond it will be most blessed. JOHN KEBLE.

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF
LEMURIA

III
Two ATLANTEAN COLONIES IN MEXICO

MME. BLAVATSKY tells us, in The Secret Doctrine, that
Atlantis was the prolongation, and afterwards the survivor of
Lemuria. Several regions still existing seem to have belonged
first to Lemuria and later to Atlantis. Mexico appears to have
been one of these Lemuro-Atlantean regions ; Scandinavia seems to have
been another. Apparently western Mexico, probably including Southern
California, was joined to Lemuria at an immensely remote period,
probably a million years ago, when, as has already been related, certain
groups of birds akin to the scarlet tanagers, inhabited the Lemuro-
Mexican region, which included the peaks of Hawaii. So it comes that
the descendants of these birds are still found both in the Hawaiian Islands
and in the American continent ; one of their peculiarities, in both regions,
is the seasonal change of plumage from scarlet to green.

Professor William Niven has for a number of years devoted his
leisure to the exploration of the buried cities in the valley of Mexico and,
in a profoundly interesting narrative recently contributed to The Mexican
Review, some account is given of his discoveries, which are the more
interesting to us, because they have led him to accept the Atlantean
theory completely, so that he even proposes to give the name Atlantan
to one of the superposed civilizations which he has unearthed.

For he has laid bare a series of successive civilizations, each
destroyed by a natural cataclysm, and separated from its successor by
enormous spaces of time ; one city being built upon the buried ruins of
another, as Schliemann discovered in his excavations at Troy, and, as
we are told, on high authority, in Five Years of Theosophy, there are
several buried cities beneath the present town of Florence. Natural
advantages of position, with regard to a river, a fertile valley, a rich
deposit of minerals, would account for this ; the same advantages would
attract successive peoples to the same site.

Professor Niven discovered the buried cities of the oldest Mexican
civilization he has yet unearthed (the race to which he has given the name
Atlantan), at great depths, in some cases as much as sixty feet below the
present surface. This civilization, which was probably Lemurian rather
than Atlantean, was completely wiped out by a series of volcanic
eruptions, its buried cities being covered with a thick deposit of volcanic
ash: Lemurian prototypes of Pompeii. And it is of immense interest
that, just as the bodies of Pompeian citizens, who were overtaken while

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA 165

fleeing from that famous catastrophe, have been found buried in the
volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius, so escaping "Atlanteans," were
overwhelmed by the falling ashes of the volcanoes close to Mexico City ;
their skeletons have been recovered from depths of sixty feet. This is
the more interesting, because The Secret Doctrine records that "Lemuria
was destroyed by fire; Atlantis by water."

At present, the formation of new layers of soil is going on very
slowly, so slowly that the giant cypress trees at Chapultepec under which
Montezuma walked four centuries ago are practically unaltered in
position. But we may obtain a working average for the rapidity of earth
deposition from other regions. Thus in the Somme valley, dated Roman
coins are found at a depth which shows that soil there has formed at the
rate of three centimetres a century. Sections of peat in Ireland, subjected
to microscopic examination, show fine layers of yearly growth, a thousand
being contained in a foot thick of peat. These two bases of measurement
give the same result: a foot of thickness in a thousand years. If we
apply this standard to the deepest layer of buried cities so far laid bare
by Professor Niven, at a depth of sixty feet, we shall get an antiquity of
sixty thousand years.

But long periods of development certainly stretch back behind even
these ancient cities, since they show a very considerable advancement in
the arts of life, and evidences of very considerable culture, religious life
and scientific knowledge. For example, there is much artistic skill shown
in the design of a censer, decorated with the figure of the god of flowers ;
and small portrait busts, of which Professor Niven has unearthed large
numbers, seem to have taken the place of oil paintings or photographs.
There appear to have been two distinct races, one of marked Chinese
type, the other with Egyptian features, if w"e judge by these small portrait
busts. The former, who in all likelihood came from the west, from the
Pacific side, are probably "Lemuro-Atlanteans ;" the latter, "Atlanteans,"
related to the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians. We are even told
that Chinese characters have been found on some of the objects
unearthed, but these do not seem to be among the most ancient. We are
further told that Carl Lumholtz, who made a reputation by his book on
the cannibals of Queensland, has found in the remote fastnesses of the
Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico, a race in whose language numbers of
Chinese vocables are still found ; this race may possibly be a survival of
the ancient Lemuro-Atlantean colony in Mexico. There is nothing
impossible, or even improbable, in this ; since we have seen that widely
spread elements of the far older Lemurian languages are in common use
throughout the Polynesian islands even to-day. The language of the
Pharaohs has still a living descendant in the Coptic tongue, which was
extensively used in the deciphering of the Demotic and Hieroglyphic
inscriptions; and it is said that there are descendants of the ancient
Chaldeans among the water-carriers of Tiflis.

Among the interesting relics dug up by Professor Niven, there is

166 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

one, a small, rudely carved statuette, which has exactly the features and
appearance of the huge, grotesque statues on Easter Island, some of
which are in the British Museum. The resemblance is so complete that
it irresistibly suggests a former connection between this Mexican colony
and that part of Lemuria of which Easter Island is a survival. "The
Easter Island relics are the most astounding and eloquent memorials of
the primeval giants. They are as grand as they are mysterious ; and one
has but to examine the heads of the colossal statues, that have remained
unbroken on that island, to recognize in them at a glance the features of
the type and character attributed to the Fourth Race giants. They seem
of one cast though different in features — that of a distinctly sensual type,
such as the Atlanteans (the Daityas and "Atalantians") are represented
to have in the esoteric Hindu books . . . the brood of mighty sorcerers."
(The Secret Doctrine, vol. II, p. 224.)

There is abundant evidence of the domination of sorcery in Mexico,
not only at the time of the Spanish conquest four centuries ago, but for
ages before that: the evidence supplied by the existence of a powerful
priesthood practising human sacrifices, in which it was the custom to cut
to the heart of a living victim, thus supplying the powers of evil with a
material basis for manifestation, in a way resembling the materializations
of spiritualistic seances. It appears that these human sacrifices took
place on the flattened summits of the pyramid temples which are
characteristic of the older ruins throughout Mexico, and especially in
Yucatan and the regions further south, in Central America.

The succession of civilizations has been clearly revealed by the
excavations of Professor Niven, as recorded in The Mexican Review.
Above the most ancient level of remains is, as has been already said, a
thick layer of volcanic ashes, showing that this civilization was destroyed
by fire. Then follows a layer of earth, several feet thick. Above this
begin the remains of a second civilization, which Professor Niven, finding
no sufficient indication of its ethnical character, has negatively named
"pre-Aztec." This civilization was evidently destroyed in its turn by
water, since its remains are covered by a thick layer of mixed gravel and
sand, obviously laid down by water, in a series of inundations. Above
this is a second layer of earth, with a layer of remains above it, which
represents a third civilization, which Professor Niven calls "Aztec."

An extremely interesting section of these superposed civilizations is
shown in a hill at San Juan Teotihuacan, some thirty miles to the
south-east of Mexico city. A railroad cutting through the hill gives a
cross section of successive cities, one above the other, the thick blocks of
the paved streets being worn into deep ruts and cavities by the feet of
the citizens passing and repassing through countless centuries. One
feature in this layer of cities is described by Professor Niven, but not
explained : the houses are found to be filled with masses of broken stone,
not with volcanic ash, as at Pompeii, nor with lava, as at Herculaneum.

There are many sites of ancient cities not far from Mexico City and

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA 167

immediately to the south. In the seldom visited valleys of the Sierra
Madre mountains, stretching up to the north-west, towards Arizona, Carl
Lumholtz found the ruins of huge stone fortresses, built of rough blocks.
He also found tribes of "cave-dwellers," who may be the descendants of
some of these old Lemuro-Atlantean colonies. We may be able, later, to
recount some of their world-theories, comparing them with those which
have been already recorded, from the peaks of Lemuria, scattered through
the vast spaces of Polynesia.

There is an important group of Atlantean ruins in the peninsula of
Yucatan, in south-eastern Mexico, a general description of which has also
appeared in The Mexican Review. It seems that the sites of a hundred
and seventy-two cities have already been identified, though so far very
inadequately excavated or described. Most of them are buried in the
densest tropical jungle, fever-infested and inaccessible. It is possible to
pass quite close to these hidden cities without even suspecting their
presence. Two are also so large, that it is estimated that they had each
half a million inhabitants ; and in them are found the pyramid temples, on
whose summits human sacrifices were offered, sacrifices of sorcery, to
invoke the help of powers of evil. The recorder of these discoveries in
Yucatan appears to believe that these huge blocks of hard stone were
cut and even elaborately carved by masons and sculptors using only flint
axes and knives. But this is difficult to believe ; and, as Carl Lumholtz
found fine cutting implements of hardened copper — practically bronze —
among tribes of Indians in the remote Sierra Madre valleys — copper
implements of the shapes made familiar by the discoveries of the Bronze
Period in Europe — it is not too much to suppose that the Yucatan
builders also made use of graving tools of hardened bronze. And no
practical demonstration has been given, that hard rock can, in fact, be
hewn and carved with implements of flint.

This very imperfect account of these vitally interesting discoveries
shows that, while much has been done already, far more remains to be
done ; and it would seem that Carl Lumholtz has hit upon a valuable clue,
though he does not appear to have followed it up: to begin, namely, by
bringing together all the light which might be shed on the past of
Mexico by a detailed and faithful study of present conditions, language,
art processes and so on, among the Sierra Madre Indians and the natives
of Yucatan and Central America. Thus many of the conventional
patterns on earthenware bowls, which he illustrates, and all of which
appear to have symbolical meanings, closely resemble the symbolical
figures in the so-called hieroglyphics found in Yucatan; a clue to the
meaning of the latter might well be found through a study of the former,
just as very valuable clues to the ancient language of the Pharaohs,
recorded in equally mysterious hieroglyphics, were found through a study
of the Coptic language, which is still studied in Egyptian monasteries.

Further, there is the abundant and still little studied literature
gathered and preserved by the early Spaniards, long before the earliest

168 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

settlements made by English colonists on the shores of the New World.
Thus there is a complete and beautifully printed Aztec-Mexican Dictionary,
which was published in Mexico City about the time of Shakespeare's
birth. And there is the wonderful text of the Popul-Vuh, which gives
a marvelously vivid account of some of the earliest races, with their
almost divine powers and many passages in which have admirable
qualities of eloquence and devotional fervour.

But this rich material is almost neglected ; there is little study of it
and less co-ordination. When this study is fully developed and its results
intelligently applied to the monuments excavated in Yucatan and
elsewhere, we may confidently expect that many chapters of Atlantean
history will be restored to the world, and that most valuable
corroborations of The Secret Doctrine will be furnished.

C. J.
(To be continued.)

"The Saint is one who lives life with high enjoyment, and with a
zest; he chooses holiness because of its irresistible beauty, and
because of the appeal it makes to his mind. He does not creep through
life ashamed, depressed, anxious, letting ordinary delights slip through
Jiis nerveless fingers; and if he denies himself common pleasure it is
because, if indulged, they thwart and mar his purer and more lively joys"

A. C. BENSON.

WHY I JOINED THE
THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

STANDING at the window of the living room one November
day, years ago, we watched the storm sweep down the river,
across the cornfields and over the alfalfa-rooted hillside to wrap
its terrible strength around the big old trees that sheltered our
house on the hill's top. Because the lightning tore the heavens open
and the thunder cannonaded, the two older women who, too, had
watched the onrushing storm, fled from the window. Trembling
with fear, my face pressed against the cold glass, I watched the poplars
twist in spirals and the limbs of our tough elms bow until their
branches swept the ground. The next morning we counted the wreck
of fourteen trees, broken and flat on the earth.

One spring, in a later year, the snows melted unexpectedly soon
on the mountains, and the loosened waters rushed down the frost-
stripped sides into the two streams that form the Ohio. The river
rose swiftly in the night. We wakened to find ourselves girdled;
as far back as we could look toward the Indiana boundary line and the
Kentucky hills, reached the waters. Ribboning toward the Indiana
line, was the railroad track, the only dry surface above the stretches
of water. Its protection against the bombardment of the flood was
the heavy sacks of sand that train crews had been piling against
the embankments during the night.

When we "walked the ties," that I might reach the village in
whose school I was teaching, the waters were rising inch by inch.
It was possible the flood could creep upon us more swifty than we
could pick our way over the ties of the railroad bridge and tracks,
and carry us, helpless, across the fearful, desolate waters.

Those two memories of the power of wind and water come back
to me when I try to think of my first gropings toward God. They
left me with indelible images of His power in the physical realm.
Many times since then, in realms other than the physical, I have
seen His sudden devastation at work. I think I should have been
carried with the other wreckage to destruction, had not Theosophy
come to show me glimpses of His purposes.

I wonder if you, my friends in Theosophy, who perhaps were
reared in orthodoxy, can know what this knowledge means to one
who, all her previous years, had been destitute of it? Your knowl-
edge had not to leap, full-armoured, into being. Probably it was
transmuted, but it always was; there were no vacant years when
you walked without the grace of some conception, either vague or
indefinite, of Him.

170 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

During childhood and early womanhood, I think I was searching
for Him rather wistfully in an agnostic home such as the skeptical
science of the past half-century bred, the girls and boys in the neigh-
borhood were church and Sunday-school farers. The children of our
family went to church and Sunday-school with intermittent frequency,
in exact measure as our schoolmates were evangelistically persua-
sive. We wondered a little at their implicit acceptance of the prayers
they said, the songs they sang, the sermons they heard. I puzzled
over the creed when my comrades, at the accepted adolescent age, were
"joining the church."

During heedless University days when I foolishly boasted of unfaith,
came the first ray of Light. With neither warning nor prelude, there
was, one Sunday morning, a rush of understanding through the gates
of the lower mind. Perhaps the morning sermon had turned the
key of those locked doors; perhaps some vigorous metaphysical
teaching of the stormy old professor of our philosophy classes sud-
denly lighted my dark mind-corners. I do not know how nor why
the knowledge came. I remember only the rapt young joy of know-
ing that I knew God was spirit, all-embracing, all-present, all-comforting,
all-divine.

Suddenly to have the clamps on one's understanding loosened,
suddenly to be swept loose and far into a mystic sea would have
been bewildering utterly, I think, had not the knowledge come with
curious, immediate conviction and certainty. Phrases and dogmas from
the prayer-book, pages from the Church fathers, sentences from the
Transcendentalists, leaped into meaning.

There were everyday days and years ; dull hours following that
first radiance : but the quickening had begun. Recrudescent in bleak
months of trial, the knowledge of Him lived. On moonless nights,
I, who previously had had no faith in nor knowledge of the Unseen,
could lay my cheek against the black boles of the trees -and hear the
whispers of their spirit-voices ; on August days I could hear the living
message of the brown hills ; in city street cars I could catch, in the
faces across the aisle, glimpses of tender divinity.

Then in the quick course of years, came Theosophy. A chance
sentence repeated from what "Somebody said" of the teaching of
Karma and reincarnation, rested lightly at first, but with curious
insistence. Its leading brought me to some strange doorways, but
it led me also to the New York Branch of The Theosophical Society.
Of that gracious Karma I am humbly undeserving.

Temperamentally I have been forced to go by the slow route of
satisfying the dull and stupid lower mind. It has been a route that has
wasted precious hours on the journey to Him. I have stopped by
the way to look into cults that were called Theosophical or occult.
In my heart's depth I knew that I was at home in the New York

WHY I JOINED THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 171

Branch; that there I found not merely a teaching in spoken words,
not merely theories laid down on printed pages, but the sole justifica-
tion of occultism and mysticism — lives so unflinchingly and uncom-
promisingly lived as to make them channels of the Most High. There
I found leadership that demanded no applause, that prided itself
with none of the clap-trap of psychism.

In other organizations I watched dear friends led by the revela-
tions, so-termed, of clairvoyants inspired of their master, the devil.
I saw them substitute this grotesque external leadership for the holy
power that can come only from the Master within. I have seen them
apotheosize the mental and astral powers, so ignorant of higher
powers that they did not recognize their own confusion. I have
grieved to watch them go down the dark path on which they have,
with fatal loyalty, surrendered themselves to those whose teaching
is fluent with Theosophical terms, but whose lives are either stagnant
horrors or actively retroversive.

Slowly I have passed from no knowledge of God to a spiritual
hunger for Him. Supplementing the first crude realization of His
power, expressed in the elements of wind and water, and the swift
mystic conception that came on my sacred Sunday long ago, Theos-
ophy has given me an intellectual concept and the beginnings of
higher understanding. It has made me a churchwoman. At the
altar rail, the walls of the flesh down, I know I am fed with the
spiritual food of His broken body and that I drank the blood He shed.

Theosophy extends the hour of communion beyond the chancel.
In daily meditation it helps me to realize the secret meaning of the
prayer-book words that formerly were paganly insignificant and
pantheistic — "and made one body with him that he may dwell in
us and we in him."

Reaching beyond set occasions and hours, Theosophy gives sweet
reasonableness to the plea of the old monk, Brother Lawrence, for
the practice of the presence of God daily and hourly, as the rule
whereby one may live a holy life.

I have lifted only the drop-curtain. I must put aside my other
screens before I shall have True Vision. I have begun barely to
try to make pragmatic my elementary knowledge of Him.

I am glad Theosophy has re-polarized my life. God has been
given to me. Theosophy has replaced intellectual flippancy regard-
ing Him, with the purpose of righteousness — a purpose which, sadly
enough, daily begins, fails and begins again to execute itself.

Some day I shall mount to His very presence. Meantime, in
storm and in silence, in quiet nights and on days of sunlight or down-
pouring rain, in hours of war-cataclysm, or in serene moments of
Divine Union, I am glad to know He holds us in His hand.

G. L. S.

PREPAREDNESS

THE joy of camping is greatly enhanced for most people by the
delight of long weeks of preparation, during which one makes
a careful survey of his needs, and reviews with happy anticipa-
tions the experiences of other camping trips, either his own
or those of the friend in whose steps he intends to follow. Many a
camper gives his leisure moments during an entire winter to planning
out new arrangements for the coming summer, new ways of taking
his chosen companions into the heart of the woods. To be sure he
knows that a thousand chances may render impossible the assembling
of the special party of friends he desires to take with him, but he is
content to go to endless trouble in devising special outfits just suited
to them, individually, on the chance that when the time comes they
may be able to make the trip.

That eager use of the imagination, that happy industry are
indeed admirable, but would they survive the shock if we were to
ask that camping enthusiast whether he had ever tried the experi-
ment of using the same faculties in making some preparation for
another trip that he is certain to take, one of these days — the trip to
that world which is entered through the portal of death. In general
terms we readily admit that all men must die, and yet to come to
closer grips with that inevitable fact frequently appears to be
regarded, even in a soldier, as either unmannerly, or unnecessary, or
morbid — at least by the large majority of people in the Protestant
world. If you pick up a book by an unknown author and find him
speaking of death as a time of spiritual combat, or measuring actions
by the view one will take of them when he stands before a just
God — you feel that you have data sufficient for the conclusion that
the writer is a Catholic. Yet the certainty of the termination of
life is not restricted to the adherents of that church; those outside
its fold are just as surely drawing nearer, momentarily, to their
hour of death. Why, then, this extraordinary conspiracy, as it would
seem, to ignore the inevitable?

One brilliant day last summer, a number of friends sat looking
out onto a woodland, full of flowers, insects and birds, through which
the tide of life seemed to be setting so strong that the first impres-
sion one got from it was of abounding life. Suddenly one of the
number spoke of death, apparently feeling no incongruity between it
and the pulsating life of the day. In some way we all fell quite
comfortably into a discussion of this unusual theme. One argued
convincingly that most men really did not believe in death, — history,
science, and observation to the contrary notwithstanding. There was
much to be said for this theory; all of us had experienced the shock

PREPAREDNESS 173

of surprise that comes when a friend casually mentions how lonely
it will be for him when -we are gone, speaking in a tone that implies
intimate knowledge of the Almighty's plans for our early demise, and
for his own continued existence.

Another was inclined to the view that it was man's intuitive
sense of his immortality that made him such a sceptic as to his own
death. This was challenged by a third who argued that there could
be no immortality for the personality, which was also clearly the part
of a man that refused to entertain the idea of death, balked before
the mention of it. Some one else asked, pugnaciously, Are we ever
really prepared for the death of anybody connected with us? It may
come in ripe old age or at the termination of a long illness, when
our hearts have been torn with the sufferings of the sick person, from
which death is the only possible relief. Even under those circum-
stances death brings a physical shock to the entire family circle, —
and this is quite apart from the grief over the loss of the loved one ;
the advent of death is a distinct shock even to those whose hearts are
not touched.

That is true, we all admitted, but not distinctive of death. One
by one each of the married men present was led to admit that shock
was also incident to having entered the marriage state. It might
come soon or late, but there was a day when one discovered with
a shock that he was married ; he had perhaps moved heaven and earth
to bring it about, finally succeeded, and then discovered, right in the
midst of his joy and satisfaction, that something new and strange
had come over him.

This comparison, far from daunting the first speaker, was
welcomed as unexpected confirmation of the original proposition. It
might similarly be expected that man would experience shock when
he came to consciousness apart from his body, and found that he had
experienced the change of state called death. But what, it was asked,
would he then wish he had done before death put an end to his
activities in that particular physical body? What preparations would
he wish he had made? Presumably it had taken a long time, and
much experience of acute starvation, to convince men that it was
necessary to do long-continued work in their fields in spring and sum-
mer if they wished to avoid going hungry in the cold winter days to
come. Finally that necessity came to be accepted; until now a con-
siderable portion of the work of the world is done in anticipation of
future needs. And it apparently never occurs to the toilers, amid
their frequent and formidable complaints, to find hardship or gloom
in the fact that their work is being done to provide against future
need. They do not think of declaring that it worries them beyond
endurance to be asked to cultivate a field of young corn which cannot
possibly be of use to anybody for three months.

174 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

A hitherto silent member of the group declared that the explana-
tion of our problem was to be found just there. Mankind resolutely
refused to take death into account because there seemed to be nothing
to do about it. Right living surely was the proper preparation for
right dying, and so one did struggle to make his life approach nearer
to his ideal. How would it help him there to be continually calling
up mournful pictures of a Judgment Day, or to close each day with
the dreary thought that it had brought him one step nearer his end?
Was there anything sensible, encouraging, heartening to better
endeavour, that went with such practices?

The friend who had introduced this discussion was becoming
very much amused over the gloom that it was bringing to faces
that were well tutored to an impassive placidity, and so asked the
last speaker what practices he suspected would be indulged in by one
who courted the idea of making definite preparation for death. Much
thinking about it, many dreary prayers and a refusal to do many
pleasant and natural things, because one must some day die, summed
up the various notions advanced. Just how these would prepare a
man for death was not clear to any of those who proposed them.
Finally a business man who was drawn into the circle and had not
heard all the previous discussion, suggested that if he were making
a trip to his Alaska properties he would not get ready to go in any
such indefinite ways as had been outlined; if he did, his business at
home would be left in a snarl and he would find himself only half
equipped for his work in Alaska when he had arrived. Led on by
questions, this man gave a rapid, enthusiastic sketch of his own
methods in preparing his data and equipment for an important busi-
ness trip; both how he made himself ready to meet the situation to
which he was going, and also how he went over the work he had in
hand, to see whether there were any additional provisions he wanted
to make, any messages that he ought to give to those whom he was
leaving, any weak spots that required strengthening before he left.

The positive, resourceful mastery that rang out from this man's
sketch of a common business experience aroused enthusiastic
response; all were agreed that there could be nothing sad or soggy
about such preparations but the comparison was not a fair one for
in the case of the business man's trip there was something definite
to do, while in that matter of death-bed preparation there was not.

Here a laughing but determined protest came from the original
champion of preparedness. Nothing definite to do to get ready for
death? Yet what a bustle of activity there is whenever a man of
affairs suffers some accident that threatens to be fatal. If he is able
to transact business, his lawyer is summoned, business associates are
called, he finds much to do. Then he turns from these affairs, many
of which perhaps could not naturally be transacted until the end of

PREPAREDNESS 175

life, and gives his thought to his family and his personal friends.
How much he has to say to them, warnings, advice, expressions of
confidence, of affection. If time to review life be granted him, how
many odd requests he is likely to make; he recalls a time years
back when he took unfair advantage of a rival, and the desire to offer
reparation possesses him, he cannot rest until that man is sought out
and some amends made to him ; he thinks of a friend who did him a
good turn which he appreciated and meant to repay in kind but in
his busy life the chance to do it never seemed to come. How eagerly
he now devises a way of showing his gratitude and affection. His
failing strength is generously, gladly given in these varied efforts,
yet how many of them could have been done better, done more as he
longs to do them, if done when he sat firmly in the saddle, master
of all his forces and resources.

This statement of the situation appealed to the business man who
heartily declared that he should call that man a poor executive who
habitually left his most important duties until the last of the day,
allowing small demands and perplexities to crowd the bigger things
into the next day; such a man lacked either perspective or the will
to grapple with his problems. If he dealt competently with the big
ones, there would be fewer difficulties to meet in the minor problems
of the day.

It was decided, after much animated discussion, that the same
principles also applied in the conduct of a household or a nursery
full of children, or a religious community ; and if so why not also to the
conduct of one's own life. That very term, conduct of one's life,
rang strange in the ears of most of the circle. It suggested to some
a new occupation which might have elements of interest that they
had as yet failed to find.

A student of Theosophy who had so far limited his contributions
to occasional questions that seemed to keep the discussion going, now
ventured to suggest that life was made fairly exciting in its oppor-
tunities for those who regarded it as a continuous thread, with one
earth-life after another strung like varicoloured beads on to that
vivid life thread. Many a man, after giving fifty years to some pur-
suit that was dear to him, regretted that he could not go on for
another fifty or more with the development of what he had initiated.
He could, in the view of this speaker, for countless fifties of years
if only his interest be centered in one of the fundamental problems of
man's real life ; and in that case he certainly could not dislike to face
the demand that in this life there should be due preparation for the
one to come next after it. He knows that he is now sowing the
seed that will spring up and come to harvest in after lives, and he
sees nothing dreary or morbid in the constant effort to select for
sowing the seeds of fruits that he wishes to reap, nor even in the

176 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

patient tracing out and uprooting of weeds that he does not wish to
allow to seed themselves in his garden for future lives.

The fear of death, then, would not exist for that fortunate man ?
This was a defiant question hurled by an imperious old grande dame,
whose violent knitting throughout the entire conversation had not
disguised her deep interest in the subject. She had held death at
bay so far, but she recognized that the time was coming when she
must face that horror and find a way to pass through his house,
without, as she hoped, yielding to his vassalage. All those present
honoured her for the painful self revelation of that question; and
all turned instinctively to the friend who had first brought forward
this hazardous topic, for they felt that no one else was able to
respond fittingly to the genuine heart-cry behind the outburst.

In quiet vibrant tones came the gentle reply, " 'Dread' is a term
that covers so many different feelings — I find it difficult to answer
either yes, or no, for the hero of that sketch. What a man dreads
is such a telltale! In one sense, may not even a real hero dread
certain encounters? You will, I am sure agree with me," (this was
said with a deferential nod to the grande dame) that a hero could not
dread the possible pain of putting off the phyical body, for that he
would find courage and the will to endure, but it must represent to
him the end of a bit of work given to him to do; we might say, in
the figure already used, the completion of one of the beads on the
precious string of life. The time comes for him to present that
bead before the Great Artist, to ask his acceptance of it — will He
receive it, or will it disappoint Him, and prove a blemish on the
symmetry of the whole? Might it even be so marred as to subject
Him to the scoff and scorn of His enemies who delight to taunt Him
with the failures, the evil things wrought by His children? Dread
of this sort would not be that constrictive force from which we all
turn as from cowardice, it would be dynamic in each day's effort ;
it would give joy to every waking, whether to hard or easy tasks,
because each new day brings another chance to work for that per-
fection in following His will which is our appointed goal."

Simple as those words were, there returned with them the sun-
shine of the day, which for some of us had been blotted out by our
unhappy associations with the subject of death and its demands.
Here was one, at least, who felt no shrinking from death, who with
a sure hand used the knowledge of it as a touchstone. With a
common desire we broke through our customary reserves, the con-
ventions that have made "impolite" any recognition of the deeper
needs of the human soul, — we asked how the last speaker was wont
to make use of death as an initiator. Simply, clearly the question
was answered for us. One of the methods suggested was so definite
and so new to all of us that we thereupon resolved to try it ourselves.

PREPAREDNESS 177

This was the substance of it, as an exercise to be performed at the
end of each month. Set apart a certain time and give it quite com-
pletely to this question — If I knew at this moment that I had just a
month to live what should I wish to do in that time? One obviously
must play fair, must give imagination, expectation, and interest to
the game. First would come, perhaps, the recollection of tasks to
be completed ; looked at in this light we might well discover that
some of them were not duties but rather means by which we had
chosen to cloak our desire to have our own way, regardless of the
needs and the pleasures of others. Evidently such work had better
be abandoned, whether life for us were to last days, months, or
years.

Next might come pictures of duties we had entirely neglected
— how differently they look to us now than when we turned away
from them ! Indeed we could welcome a month in which to pick
up those threads again. Then there is thrown on the screen that
last talk with a tried friend; he was fighting some demon of self-
will and though he had not recognized his foe he asked for help.
The answer one gave him was a pleasantry; and why? It looks in
this clear light as though cowardice was the reason for that jest;
it was such a risk to undertake to speak out honestly, taking sides
against that friend's personality and lining up squarely with and for
his soul. Thank heaven, there may be chances found, in the month
to come, to show real friendship.

Deeper still, the light must search, — it will show virtues that
one began to cultivate and then allowed to fall into neglect, just
for want of interest enough to give them daily and hourly attention.
Then there are the faults, so clearly recognized as such ; some of
them so nearly worn out that little more is needed for their conquest
than the steady, purposeful piercing of them with the unsheathed will.
What might not be done to them, in a month !

So deeper and deeper the searchlight goes, until the field of one's
life is covered. And hand in hand with insight goes resolution.
"This, and this, and this," says Resolution, "you would wish to do
were next month to be your last. It is not mine to promise you
that grant of time, nor indeed the hour on which you have just
entered, but if you really covet the opportunity to attempt those
duties, by all means let us undertake them together, with good will.
Should more than the month be given you, we will at its close con-
sider what gain has been made, and what further attempts these gains
make possible."

There is more than one of that summer's day party who adopted
that practice, and who can testify that it is not dull and despair-
breeding, but has furnished armour and weapons for offense in many
a combat. I.

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME

THE CAUSES AND CONDUCT OF THE WAR

PART II
THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR

TO understand the Causes of the War, it was necessary first to
understand what Germany had been thinking and saying during
the years before the war. So, in the last Screen of Time, before
considering Germany's territorial ambitions and the sequence
of events which culminated in the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, many
recognized authorities were quoted to show that the German attitude of
mind was bound to result as it did, and that the real cause of the war
must be found in the desire of the German people.

The Conduct of the War must remain almost incredible and quite
past understanding, unless it also is seen as the inevitable outcome of the
German character and of the German creed.

Behavior is the result of a man's habitual thinking. There is no
escape from that. If you would change his conduct, his "policy," you
must change his manner of thought, his creed — for his creed consists of
the beliefs he acts upon, not of mere words which he echoes. So long as
Germany thinks as she has been thinking, so long will she provoke wars
for her own aggrandizement and carry them on with the brutality on
which she prides herself.

Very few wrongdoers change their manner of thought, their
habitual attitude toward life, until intense suffering at last forces them
to trace effect to cause, and to recognize the origin of the trouble as
within themselves. Conversion means "to turn away from," and
Germany, as the result of intense suffering, must be brought to the
point at which she will turn away from her evil thinking — from her
perverted pride, her devouring egotism, her unscrupulous brutality, her
treachery, her malice, her vindictiveness, her contempt of the truth.

If the world is to be saved from slavery and barbarism, Germany
must be made to suffer until she turns with all her will, crying to God
and man for forgiveness and mercy. These are old-fashioned words,
but they speak of real things : Germany must repent. Officially and
collectively, she has proved herself a murderer, a violator of women, a
brigand and a thief ; she uses torture, slavery, outrage, as means to her
ends; she is not only unashamed, but she finds proof of her superiority
in her ability to do these things ruthlessly and happily. As far as history
reaches, no such Evil has been seen in the world before.

It is of supreme importance that the simplicity of the situation
be understood. There is and there will be talk of peace. Terms of
peace are discussed. Peace ! There can be no peace with a murderer

,78

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 179

who believes in murder ; no peace with a thug who justifies his outrages
to himself and boasts of them to his friends. If you make peace with
him, you deprive him of his only chance to reform. If you make peace
with Satan, what it means is that you have gone over into his camp ; you
have accepted his standards ; you have submitted to his authority. Our
own salvation depends upon our refusal to compromise with sin. Our
love of comfort, our inertia, our willingness to leave the settlement of
trouble to the future ; our fear of pain, our dislike of sacrifice, our almost
unconquerable self-centredness — all these things conspire to fog the mind
and to weaken the will. Germany offers to restore, let us suppose, some
of the things she has stolen. Possibly she offers to pay damages for
some of the outrages she has committed. Then among weaklings, and
even among the weaknesses of strong men, there will go up a cry for
Peace! And there will be no peace; there can be no peace, so long as
the murderer secretly glories in his crime. There is but one real question :
has he repented? Has he turned with horror from his sin? And, if he
added robbery to murder, is he making restitution merely because he
must, or because he would be miserable unless he did so ?

Has America, have the Allies, moral courage enough to fight things
out to that ideal end? Probably not. Probably their own fatigue will
tempt them, sooner than ought to be, to accept the overtures of cunning,
craven Austria, still used by Germany as a catspaw. So the issue will
be postponed. But there is this one chance against it : that people every-
where shall come to understand what Germany has done and why she
has done it ; that they shall see for themselves the insane thinking and the
hideously perverted desire which caused both the war and its atrocities ;
and that they shall resolve that not until Germany as a nation has
confessed and lamented her own wickedness, can the world be made safe
for decency, or God rest satisfied with the result.

Evil, in other words, must be hated for what it is.

During the early days of the war, a French officer said to Rudyard
Kipling :

" 'Our national psychology has changed. I do not recognize it
myself.'

" 'What made the change ?'

" 'The Boche. If he had been quiet for another twenty years the
world must have been his — rotten, but all his. Now he is saving the
world.'

"'How?'

" 'Because he has shown us what Evil is. We — you and I, England
and the rest — had begun to doubt the existence of Evil. The Boche is
saving us' " (France at War, pp. 41, 42).

But the world is slow to hate. This is because no one can truly
hate who does not intensely love. Perfect hatred of Evil is found in
Masters alone, because in them only is found the most passionate love of

180 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

righteousness. How can impurity be hated except by those who are
pure?

Dilutions of Christ's teaching — blasphemous emasculations of His
life and doctrine — are not the cause but the product of the world's moral
flabbiness in this respect. A Pacifist of necessity is "neither cold nor
hot."

In America, at this great distance, we have not had the opportunity
that France has had to see with our own eyes the damnable hideousness
of Evil. Therefore our national psychology has as yet changed but little.
Possibly it would have been more conducive to our own salvation if the
Pacifists had had their way ; if we had kept out of the war, and had thus
made it easy for Germany to invade our shores as she intended, and to
carry fire and sword and ruthlessness and outrage into our comfort-loving
homes. Then, without so much difficulty, we might have learned to
sacrifice self to Righteousness as we rose in horror against the Evil
thrust upon us.

As things now are, it is most clearly our duty to acquaint ourselves
with the facts. To refuse to look at them because they are revolting, is
to refuse to help ; is to refuse to serve. A general and vague impression
will not sustain us, once we begin to suffer. The "grace of final
perseverance" is given to those who deserve it because they have worked
for it. Profound and immovable conviction is the reward of right
thinking, of honest desire for the truth; and nothing short of such
conviction can give us courage to endure all things, or the fire of
enthusiasm which makes effort creative and victorious.

For that reason it will be necessary, in these pages, to tell the truth
in very plain words. Grown men and grown women — for whom alone
these pages are intended — should be glad to suffer rather than remain in
ignorance and lukewarmness at this time of world purgation. Each one
of us is being tried and tested. Better, surely, to suffer ; better to see and
know these monsters of cruelty, of lust, of depravity, at their devil's
work, than to fail in one's duty at any stage of the conflict, seeing that
to fail would be to fail God as well as country ; would be to fail man as
well as one's own soul.

The philosophy to which Germany's ambition and inherent depravity
have pushed her, and which she uses to justify and even to glorify her
misconduct, has very clearly been outlined by Professor Vernon Kellogg,
who served as chief representative of the American Relief Commission in
occupied eastern France. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly of August,
1917, he shows how it is that in Germany "the pale ascetic intellectual
and the burly, red-faced butcher meet" on the common ground of "no
mercy, no 'women-and-children' appeals; no hesitation to use the torch
and the firing squad, deportation and enslavement."

The German intellectual believes in the Allmacht of a natural
selection based on a violent and ruthless struggle for supremacy. For

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 181

him, "the test of right in this struggle is success in it. So let every
means to victory be used." "He opposes all mercy, all compromise with
human soft-heartedness." He has made himself unable to see that
altruism, or mutual aid, as the biologists prefer to call it, "is just as truly
a fundamental biologic factor of evolution as is the cruel, strictly
self -regarding, exterminating kind of struggle for existence with which
the Neo-Darwinists try to fill our eyes and ears, to the exclusion of the
recognition of all other factors."

It was this philosophy — though he prided himself on having none —
which Nietzsche embodied in his doctrine of the Superman ; and it is this
doctrine of the Superman, characterized by Nietzsche himself as the
opposite of Christianity, which serves Germany to-day as her standard
of conduct and as proof of her superiority over all other peoples.

In his Zur Genealogie der Moral (I, 11), Nietzsche describes the
Germans of his ideal in these terms : "Those same men who are so strictly
kept within bounds by good manners . . . who, in their behavior to
one another, show themselves so inventive in consideration, self-control,
delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship — those very men are, to the outside
world, to things foreign and to foreign countries, little better than so
many uncaged beasts of prey (nicht viel besser also losgelassne
Raubthiere). Here they enjoy liberty from all social restraint . . .
and become rejoicing monsters (frohlockende Ungehener), who perhaps
go on their way, after a hideous sequence of murder, arson, rape, torture,
with as much gaiety and equanimity as if they had merely taken part in
some student gambols. . . . Deep in the nature of all these noble
races there lurks unmistakably the beast of prey, the blond beast (blonde
Bestie}, lustfully roving in search of plunder and victory (Beute und
Sieg}."

It is this "ideal" which Germany has tried to make real, and the
attainment of which by her soldiers of all ranks has filled her civilian
population, including her women, with the most intense pride and
satisfaction. They have been amazed that the world has failed to
recognize such conclusive proof of German pre-eminence. They have
despised the consideration shown to German prisoners in England,
explaining it as evidence of fear and of inherent weakness.

Still calling themselves a Christian people — though their intellectuals
have for long ceased to do so — they have been at pains to explain to one
another that world politics must not be confused by the thought of
religion. Thus Friedrich Naumann, member of the Reichstag, founder
and leader of the Deutsche Volkspartei, and one of the greatest powers
in the Germany of today, declares in his Brief e iiber Religion (5th ed.,
Berlin, 1910; pp. 86, 87) that "we do not consult Jesus when we are
concerned with things which belong to the domain of the construction of
the State and of Political Economy. This sounds harsh and abrupt for
every human being brought up a Christian, but appears to be sound
Lutheranism."

182 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

The German clergy solve the problem more simply by claiming that
Germans are God's chosen people ; that above all things He wishes them
to triumph over the rest of the world, and that whatever Germans do is
done by God. "The German soul is the world's soul ; God and Germany
belong to one another," says Pastor W. Lehmann in his sermon On the
German God (Professor J. P. Bang, in Hurrah and Halleluiah, p. 83).

Few serious writers are so widely read in Germany as Professor W.
Lombard of Berlin, whose formulation of the German creed may be
accepted as final, particularly if the "blond beast" be kept in mind.
"Nietzsche," he says, "was but the last of the singers and seers who,
coming down from the height of heaven, brought to us the tidings that
there should be born from us the Son of God, whom in his language he
called the Superman" (Bang, he. cit., p. 53).

With that as their creed, with that attitude toward the world, no
wonder that, from the Kaiser to the "pale intellectual," from "pale
intellectual" to brute peasant, they behave like devils "for the love of
God" — of their God, who is the very spirit of Evil with whom they have
allied themselves.

The peasant, though he knows nothing of natural selection, nothing
of Nietzsche, nothing of Professor Lombard or even of Pastor Lehmann,
draws by osmosis, as it were, from his acknowledged superiors, from his
officers and masters, encouragement to give free rein to his native
rapacity and lust. A farm for nothing from the Russians ; wine for
nothing and any other plunder from the French ; women for nothing
wherever he goes — license to break loose from the restraints which peace
imposes upon him: this is his desire (for there is no peasant in the world
so brutal as the German), and this it is that makes him willing to submit
to the discipline of those who, as he knows, share in substance the same
desires with him.

"Gefickt [untranslatable] and boozed through the streets of Liege.
. . . We live like God in Belgium" — as a German soldier wrote in his
diary, in August, 1914 (Bryce Report, Appendix, p. 255).

What chance is there for such a creature until he is punished and
knows that he is being punished, more terribly than he had imagined
possible, for the vileness that is in him? What would he care if all that
happened were the removal of a Kaiser and some change in the
Constitution? The misfortunes of others are the only things in life
which amuse him, which appeal to his brutish humor (what else, for
instance, are the Bavarian "joke" stories about?). He would laugh
uproariously if his superiors were punished. It would have no other
effect. He would remain the beast, and the dangerous beast, that he is.
He himself must suffer, and must suffer to the uttermost, before there can
be any hope for him.

Himself a slave, he is filled with the belief that, because a German,
he is entitled to treat the men and women of other races as if they were
animals beneath him. In this respect also, therefore, he is of one heart

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 183

and mind with his superiors, who, with an intelligence which he of course
does not possess, planned to enslave the world.

Such statements as these cannot be quoted too often : "Germans alone
will govern ; they alone will exercise political rights ; . . . they alone
will have the right to become land owners. . . . However, they will
condescend so far as to delegate inferior tasks to foreign subjects
subservient to Germany" (Grossdeutschland und Mitteleuropa um das
Jahr 1950, published under the auspices of the Alldeutscher Verband, or
Pan-German League, Berlin, 1895; p. 48. Quoted by Cheradame, p. 4).

And: "War must leave nothing to the vanquished except eyes to
weep over their ill-luck (unglilck}. Moderateness (bescheidenheit}
would be for us foolishness" (Otto Richard Tannenberg, in Grossdeutsch-
land, die Arbeit des 20 ten Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1911 ; p. 237).

There, plainly set forth, are the German purpose, the German soul,
with Austria-Hungary, like the jackal that she is, trotting in company
to pick up the leavings from the big beast's orgies.

It is difficult for Americans to believe such things, so foreign to their
own inclination and practice. But they are facts, and must be believed,
if we are to do our part in the war. There is proof enough and to spare,
not merely of atrocities beyond number, but of the motive which inspired
those atrocities. That motive is, to enslave the people whom Germany
subjugates.

The United States, Great Britain, France and other nations hold
dependencies — such as the Hawaiian Islands, India, Algiers. But they
hold them in trust. It is their avowed purpose to develop, not only the
resources of territory thus held, but in all ways to benefit the inhabitants
and to give them as much freedom as is consistent with their highest
welfare.

This is not an empty claim. No one who has travelled widely and
who has seen the officials at work who govern such territories, could fail
to recognize that their instinctive motive is to benefit the peoples under
them.

German domination means the exact opposite of this. It means that
Germans, having obtained possession of a country, at once set to work to
exploit it for the exclusive benefit of Germans. Its inhabitants are
enslaved. Every effort is made to cow them, to bring them abjectly to
heel. By means of physical and moral intimidation and outrage, Germany
strives systematically to break their spirit, to murder their souls. Poland,
Alsace-Lorraine, Africa, bore witness to that for years before the war.

Now for the facts — facts which prove that Germany has done, so
far as she was able, according to her desire, according to her nature,
according to her declared principles and purposes. Before dealing with
the center, however, it will be best to examine the circumference of
German action — the works of her servants, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria,
Turkey. "The behavior of a valet will ofttimes reveal his master's
character."

184 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Professor R.-A. Reiss, of the University of Lausanne, a practical
criminologist, visited Serbia to investigate for himself the reports of
Austro-Hungarian atrocities. He had not been convinced by reading
the Serbian complaints. In his Report (How Austria-Hungary Waged
War in Serbia; published by the Librairie Armand Colin, Paris), he
says :

"I conducted my inquiry with every necessary precaution. I did not
limit myself to questioning hundreds of Austrian prisoners and hundreds
of eye-witnesses ; I went to the spot, sometimes with shells bursting
around me, to inform myself of everything that it was possible to
investigate. I opened graves; I examined the dead and wounded; I
visited bombarded towns ; I went into houses and I carried on there a
scientific inquiry, using the most scrupulous methods ; in short, I did my
utmost to investigate and verify the facts which I report in this work."

Confirmed by independent investigators, such as George M.
Trevelyan, the English historian, Dr. Arius van Tienhoven of Holland,
and Jules Schmidt the Swiss engineer, the result is a verdict such as has
rarely if ever been brought against a nation.

Serbian soldiers, when wounded or taken prisoners, were massacred.
Photographs are given of women and children murdered in cold blood.
"At Dobritch, on August 16th, 1914, the soldiers of the 57th Hungarian
regiment bayoneted and killed eleven or twelve children from six to
twelve years of age. This was done by order of First Lieutenant Nagj,"
who stated that he was obeying the commands of his superiors (p. 19 of
the French edition). In a hundred different villages, similar things
happened. Mothers and their daughters were outraged and then
mutilated and then at last murdered, often in the presence of husband
and father (pp. 21, 25, 36). At Chabatz, Hungarian officers, having
driven all the girls and young women into the church, violated them
behind the High Altar (p. 26). In many cases, men, women and children
were driven into houses and burned alive (p. 33).

"Near the railway station at Lechnitza, there is a large common pit
20 metres long, 3 metres broad, and 2 metres deep. In this pit are buried
109 peasants aged between 8 and 80. They were hostages from the
neighboring villages whom the Austro-Hungarians brought to this place,
where they had already begun to dig their grave. They were bound
together with ropes and encircled by a wire. Then the soldiers took
their places on the slope of the railway embankment, about 15 metres
from the victims, and fired a volley at them. All of them fell down into
the pit, and other soldiers immediately covered them with earth, without
ascertaining whether they were dead or only wounded. It is certain that
many of them were not mortally wounded, and some perhaps were not
wounded at all, but were dragged into the grave by the others. They
were buried alive. While this execution was going on, a second group
of prisoners was brought up, among whom were many women, and when

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 185

the first party were shot, these poor people were forced to shout 'Long
live Emperor Francis Joseph!'" (p. 34).

Professor Reiss says : "Very often the victims were mutilated before
or after death. The following methods of killing and mutilating I have
established by evidence : The victims were shot, killed by the bayonet,
their throats were cut with knives, they were violated and then killed,
stoned to death, hanged, beaten to death with the butt-end of rifles or
with sticks, disemboweled, burned alive, or their legs or arms were cut
or torn off, their ears or noses cut off, their eyes put out, their breasts
cut off [a favorite practice of the Germans in Belgium and France], their
skin cut in strips or the flesh torn from the bone; lastly, a little girl of
three months was thrown to the pigs" (p. 38).

Wherever the Austro-Hungarian troops went, "furniture, wardrobes
and linen which could not be carried away, were destroyed. Pictures and
upholstered furniture are smashed, carpets cut to pieces, crockery broken.
The walls are splashed with ink, and the soldiers have left excrement
everywhere" (p. 39). "Faecal matter was found on the tables, in the
crockery, on the floor, etc." (p. 43) ; which also was a favorite practice
of German officers and men in Belgium and France — an unthinkable
bestiality of which there is endless proof.

Concluding his Report, Professor Reiss says : "What I have already
written, as well as the statements of the Austro-Hungarian soldiers which
I have published, show the systematic preparation for the massacres by
officers of superior rank. The following extracts taken from a pamphlet
issued by the higher command and distributed among the soldiers, afford
even better proof of this preparation :

" 'K. u. K. 9. Korpskommando.

" 'Directions for conduct towards the population of Serbia. . . .
Towards such a population all humanity and all kindness of heart are out
of place ; they are even harmful, for any consideration, such as it is some-
times possible to show in war, would in this case endanger our own
troops. Consequently I order that during the whole course of the war,
the greatest severity, the greatest harshness, and the greatest mistrust be
observed towards everyone (Ich befehle daher, dass w'dhrend der ganzen
Kriegerischen Aktion die grosste Strenge, die grosste Hdrte und das
grosste Misstrauen gegen jedermann zu walten hat} ."

So it goes on, explaining in great detail the many occasions on which
"no consideration is to prevent their [the inhabitants'] execution." Thus:
"Every inhabitant who is found outside a village, particularly in the
woods, must be looked upon as a member of a band who has hidden his
weapons, which we have no time to look for. Such people are to be
executed if they appear in the slightest degree suspicious" (p. 47).

And these were the orders of an Austrian General representing his
Government !

When Serbia finally was overrun, through the combined efforts of
Austria, Germany, and Bulgaria ("The Prussia of the Balkans"), and

13

186 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

when active military operations within Serbian territory ceased, the
treatment of the civilian population became worse, if that were possible,
instead of better.

Full information under tHis head can be obtained from the Serbian
Relief Committee of America (70 Fifth Avenue, New York).

In a circular recently issued by that Committee, it is shown that the
Bulgarians are trying to stifle the very idea and name of Serbian
nationality. The use of the Serbian language is not tolerated. The
Bulgarians are imposing on the entire population the Bulgarian language,
religion, and name. Their aim is to denationalize and to enslave the
Serbian people. They have interned all the Serbian teachers and
clergymen, replacing them with Bulgarian teachers and priests. They
confiscate and burn Serbian books ; they destroy Serbian monuments ;
they remove to Bulgaria the agricultural implements, and the machinery
from Serbian factories, so as to destroy the productivity of the country
and to crush still further the spirit of the Serbian people. There is no
cruelty or outrage which the Germans, Austrians and Bulgarians between
them, are not committing, in order to attain their end, which is to turn a
brave and independent people into a nation of terrorized slaves.

Every day brings further evidence that the aim and methods of
Germany and her allies remain the same, and that, though they "speak
with the tongues of men and of angels" about Peace, they are as dis-
honorable, as unscrupulous, as brutal, as they were at the beginning of
the war.

Not the worst, but merely the latest illustration of this, is given
in an order issued by the Bulgarian War Ministry, dated May 20th, 1917,
wlrch was published in the New York Times of October 6th, 1917, with
some preliminary comment by the Serbian Legation, as follows:

"Not long ago, in the Vienna Parliament, Deputy Dr. V. Riber
declared that the horrors of this war affected none of the Allies so ter-
ribly and gravely as the Jugoslav people. Once flourishing cities and
villages are now in ruins. From the district of Nish [Serbia] alone the
Bulgarians have deported more than 30,000 people to the deserts of
Asia Minor. Since the times of Kossovo the Serbian people have
(.xperienced no greater catastrophe.

"Now, we are again in possession of a very important document,
which illustrates the state of affairs prevailing in subjugated Serbia. This
document, which was dispatched by the Bulgarian War Ministry to the
Bulgarian Headquarters Staff, fell into the hands of the British Army
at the Saloniki front.

"From this document, of which we give the exact translation, it is
clearly to be seen that the enforced recruiting of Serbians in the Morava
districts is being conducted by Bulgarians, and that when these recruits
were deported to Bulgaria 'regrettable events' occurred, i. e., the mutiny of
the Serbian recruits in the neighborhood of Karlova, etc.

"Many of these recruits deserted. The Bulgarians punished these

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 187

deserters by whipping and hard labor. Afterward, contrary to the law
of nations and The Hague Convention, these unfortunate deserters were
shot, their houses burned down, their belongings confiscated, and their
families deported from Serbia to Xrpali.

"The Bulgarians also armed their civil population in order to com-
plete the extermination of the Serbian nation."

The text of this military order, which the Times reprinted in extenso,
fully confirms the foregoing statements. It is signed, among others, by
the Chief of the General Staff of the Bulgarian War Ministry.

Are crimes committed in the Balkans too far off to seem real?
But it is just such crimes, and the similar though in some ways more
loathsome crimes committed in Belgium and eastern France, which the
German Government and the German people long to commit in America.
No home would be spared, no woman would be safe, no child but might
wantonly be bayoneted.

Now or later, it must be a fight to a finish between the powers that
make for righteousness and the powers that work for Hell. But if it
be not finished now ; if this cancer on the body of the earth be not
removed to the last root now, — who will guarantee that the best of the
earth's nations can again be assembled to resist her? As America was
slow to come in this time, may not other nations be as slow to come in
then? And meanwhile? Surely the martyrdom in Europe should
warn us!

Treaties will not bind Germany. She has proved that. She will agree
to anything. She will sign anything. She will go through all the motions.
But "where there's a will there's a way." Her will must be changed.
She must suffer until it does change. Her people must be brought to
their knees. T.

(To be continued.)

What is peace? There is peace when there is nothing in man which
strives against God. — St. Augustine.

MENTARY ARTICLE

RECOLLECTION AND DETACHMENT

K£COLLECTION and Detachment are twin doctrines and are
almost always mentioned together. The reason for this is
simple. We cannot hope to maintain Recollection — to be recol-
lected— if we permit ourselves to be swayed by the countless
distractions which each one of us meets every minute and hour of
every day. Detachment is necessary. We must guard ourselves against
the pull of our senses and our emotions, and the vagaries and discur-
sive tendency of our minds. There is a converse to this and it will require
some explanation and elaboration.

Take a typical day. The need for both Recollection and Detach-
ment begins with the first moment of waking consciousness. We are
aroused, perhaps from deep sleep by an alarm clock. All the devotional
books say that we should instantly turn our thoughts toward God. But
we find that, instead of doing this instinctively and naturally and as a
matter of course, we are much more likely to think first that it is very
early; that we are very sleepy; that we got to bed late, perhaps because
we were doing some altruistic work ; that we can do better work if
we get enough sleep and keep our body and nerves in good condition ;
that we can stay in bed ten minutes more if we hurry through our
prayers or toilet. In a word, our minds, backed by the sensuous
demands of our bodies, will give us countless excuses, and often very
subtle and ingenious excuses, why we should not get up.

William James expressed an occult truth when, in his Psychology,
he wrote that the easy way out of our usual morning struggle, is not
by an effort of will, so much as by an effort of mind. He said : stop
thinking about how warm your bed is, etc., etc., and think of some-
thing entirely different. If you do you will at once get up without
effort or struggle. This is only a way of describing a part of what
Detachment means; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that
it describes in part, how Detachment works. Put in the words and
phrases of the religious writer, we could say that the aspirant must
detach himself from the pull of his physical senses, his love of warmth
and comfort, his inertia and his hatred of cold and effort. Recollection
may do this. If he is going to catch a train and has only just time

1 88

RECOLLECTION AND DETACHMENT 189

enough, he will jump out of bed without delay, although perhaps with
a sigh of self-pity. If he is going to do something long desired, — to
see a loved friend — to accomplish a coveted end, he springs out of bed
the instant he awakes, all alive and eager. Think how you felt as a
child when you awoke on the morning of the circus or the picnic. The
knowledge that there is going to be buckwheat cakes and sausage for
breakfast, is sufficient to rouse some people from their sleeper's lethargy,
while the desire for hot coffee influences a great many more persons
than would like to confess to it.

The point of course is that Recollection of some motive which
carries with it a mainspring of action more powerful than the pull of
our lower nature, is essential, or we would sleep late every morning.
Fear is often the motive, — fear of missing the train, fear that we shall
be late at the office, fear that breakfast may be cold. Self-interest
may furnish the motive; — ambition, anticipated pleasure, or more subtle
fears, like the fear that we shall disgrace ourselves, or neglect some
duty. On the other hand love may furnish the motive, as when a
mother gets up many times in a night to tend her baby. Her humanity
may sometimes suggest to her that it is a cold and dreary business,
but on the whole she has little contest with herself, because she wants
to do it more than she does not want to do it.

All this is Recollection ; — Recollection in its most elementary form.
Detachment is the deliberate freeing of ourselves from the power of the
senses, until they cease to influence us, for it is obvious that we are not
safe so long as right action depends upon our finding some motive which
is stronger than our desire to be bad. Some day we may not find such
a motive. Therefore we must not only practise Recollection, but we
must attack the problem at the other end too; — we must strive earnestly
and diligently to lessen the hold which our senses have upon us; we
must withdraw ourselves from their control ; we must detach ourselves
from their allurements and entanglements ; we must practise Detachment.

Recollection and Detachment, therefore, are simply two methods of
accomplishing the same result, — the conquest of our lower nature. In
Recollection we pull ourselves away from our lower nature by grasp-
ing something we want more. In Detachment we push ourselves away
from the same lower nature because, — well, because we do not like
lower nature, we do not want to be under its sway, because we fear
the results of self-indulgence, or because self-interest is a stronger force,
or because we love something or some one better than we do our lower
selves.

It is obvious that there must be an element of Recollection in
Detachment, otherwise we would not strive for Detachment; therefore
we always find Recollection spoken of and inculcated first. The Rescue
Mission worker knows he must awaken a desire for repentance and
reform in the drunkard, before the convert will try to detach himself
from the drink habit.

190 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

It must be obvious by now that Recollection and Detachment are not
mere religious precepts which the aspirant after discipleship must make
part of his Rule of Life: they are universal laws, on all the planes of
being, and whether he knows it or not every human being in the world
is under their sway. Even the deliberately wicked man is subject to
them. Like all universal laws, they are entirely impersonal and impartial,
though they may be given an intensely personal bearing.

The object and purpose of the disciple is to recognize the operation
of these laws and, by taking advantage of that knowledge, to make
them doubly or trebly productive in his own life. He cannot get away
from them, but, by conscious use of them, he can get their power back
of his efforts towards betterment. In other words, he can go with the
current and take full advantage of its impetus.

It is, I presume, quite clear that we can practise Recollection and
Detachment in order to perfect ourselves in wickedness, as well as to
perfect ourselves in goodness. For our purpose, however, we may take
for granted that we wish to grow, to improve, to become bigger, better,
stronger, wiser, kinder, gentler, more loving, more efficient, more useful.
Hardly anyone but would say, "yes," to all this. Well, we know very
well, from sad experience, that it is what wre call our lower nature
which is in our way. The desire to be good is intermittent. Between
times we follow the behests of our lower nature, which are often not
actively bad, and very frequently seem entirely innocent. The desires
of our higher and of our lower natures may run parallel for a time ;
and, as we grow, this should be more and more the case. But another
condition also results. Our very progress throws our actual status into
relief and accentuates the differences between higher and lower nature.
The contrasts and contests tend to become more acute. Even a little
lower nature will spoil a great deal of good, like a little garlic in milk ;
until finally, as we near perfection, it is usually some small sin, some-
thing which in an ordinary man or woman would be almost unnoticed,
which not only mars our achievement, but may actually precipitate a
totil failure. There is no big or little when it comes to sin. Anything
which is not higher nature, is poisonous and — however seemingly
innocent or trivial — must be got rid of. Hence the importance of Mr.
Judge's famous injunction that we should never do anything for the sake
of the lower self alone. Doubtless this is a counsel of perfection, as
any one who tried it for ten minutes will discover, but it is nevertheless,
the ideal which must underlie our efforts.

We must conquer our lower natures completely, so that there is no
lower nature left. It is a very big task indeed ; not any the less difficult
because, at first, we do not know the difference between lower nature
and higher nature, especially at the border line where the contest rages.
But that is a different subject. This section is upon Detachment, which
is one, and one of the chief, methods of conquering our faults. It

RECOLLECTION AND DETACHMENT 191

assumes that we know the fault and, at least at times, want to get
rid of it.

Detachment is the conscious and deliberate withdrawal of our con-
sent to the fault. This means that we put no new power into it ; but
unfortunately, it does not mean that the fault will not continue to attack
us with all the virulence of its stored up energy. Every time we com-
mitted the fault in the past, we gave it a part of the force which is our
divine birthright as sons of God, as rays of the Over-soul. This
energy, this power, must be withdrawn from the fault and taken back
into the higher nature where it belongs. This is done at first by refus-
ing to allow the fault to express itself, and is completed by cultivating
the virtue of which the fault is a perverse expression. In that way we
transfer the power which gave life and force to the fault, to a virtue
which becomes a permanent possession of the higher nature.

The part Detachment plays in this process should be obvious. We
cannot hope to make this transfer of power so long as our desires are
tangled up in the fault; therefore we must cultivate detachment from
the fault. What does that mean? It means that if you are a glutton,
and there are very few people who are not, you must systematically
cultivate an indifference to food. You must deny yourself the kinds
of food you especially like and regulate rigorously the quantity you
permit yourself to eat, until you observe Mr. Judge's rule and never
eat anything for the sake of the lower self alone; that is, because it
tastes good, or you like it. You eat because your body needs food, and
you regulate what and how much you eat as systematically as you feed,
let us say, your horse. You give it so many quarts of oats and so many
pounds of hay, each day. You pay no attention whatever to the fact
that the horse loves sugar and carrots, and at any opportunity will eat
itself sick of them. You know that it will keep well and strong on oats
and hay, so you give it oats and hay, and pay no attention to its desire
for other things. Treat yourself exactly the same way.

No, it is not easy; and to do it at all you must become detached
from food. You must cultivate indifference to it, by acting as if you
were indifferent to it, until you actually do become indifferent to it. Or
perhaps you are already indifferent to what you eat. Some fortunate
people are. If so, let us take some other weakness as an illustration.
Let us assume that you are not above criticizing your acquaintances
and friends, and are a bit of a gossip. Perhaps you do not actually
enjoy a scandal, but you can contemplate the weaknesses of others with
entire equanimity, if not with a certain relish. Most people can. Now
that, as a matter of fact, is a perfectly horrid fault, and comes straight
from the lowest depths of Hell. It is only a devil who is malignant
enough to gloat over the sins of others, and in so far as you have that
tendency, you partake of the nature of the devil. Now, do you not
want to be detached from such a sin? Of course you do. Well, the
way to begin is to deny its least expression. Recollection comes into

192 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

play here, for you cannot hope to stop so ingrained a habit unless you
are on perpetual guard, and remember constantly that you think it abom-
inable to get satisfaction from the contemplation of, and the talking
about, the weaknesses of others. After you make some progress in over-
coming your evil tendency, you can add the next and necessary stage to
the process and cultivate deliberately the qualities of sympathy, toler-
ance and charity, which are, perhaps, the antitheses of your fault. This
gives an outlet to the force in the fault and prevents it from going back
into the fault when you deny it expression.

Every manifestation of the lower nature has to be treated in this
same manner. They all have to be killed out and transmuted into higher
nature. There is no other way. It may seem a soggy prospect, and
if the contest is played with, it is soggy, for a half-way, or partial treat-
ment is hell. On the other hand to start and to prosecute such a
struggle with fire and energy is a perpetual joy and a succession of
victories, each one leaving us stronger, better, happier, freer than before.

C. A. G.

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 opposi-
tion to trouble. The true source of all that frets and irritates, and
ivecrs away our lives, is not in external things, but in the resistance of
our wills to the will of God expressed by external things. — Alexander
MacLaren.

The Heliotr opium, or Conformity of the Human Will to the Divine, from the
Latin of Jeremias Drexelius ; published by the Devin-Adair Co., New York, 1917.

This book was first published in Latin in 1627. The author was one of the
most distinguished ascetical writers of Germany in the seventeenth century. He
was born at Augsburg in 1581 ; became court preacher at Munich, and died in 1638.
His writings were immensely popular. Of one treatise alone, 20,400 copies were
disposed of in Munich before the year 1642; while the total sale of his various
writings is said to have reached the astonishing figure of 170,700 copies.

To the student of Theosophy The Heliotropium — "turning to the Sun" — will
be of particular interest and value. In Christian terms, its teaching is exactly
the same as that which the Bhagavad Gita emphasizes in chapters showing that all
things originate in the Supreme, and that good fortune and ill, health and sickness,
wealth and poverty should be accepted as expressions of the divine will for us.
The doctrines of Reincarnation and Karma explain the operation of justice and
wisdom and love in the distribution of inner characteristics and outer events.
But there are many who believe theoretically in Karma who fail utterly to accept
its decrees as evidence of divine compassion. Drexelius would help them to do this.

The book is full of excellent stories, illustrative of the author's points. We
quote one of these at length, as a fair sample of the book:

"There was once upon a time an eminent Divine who for eight years besought
God with unwearied prayers to show him a man by whom he might be taught the
most direct way to heaven. One day, when he was possessed of an unconquerable
desire to converse with such a man, and wished for nothing so much as to see a
teacher of truth so hidden, he thought that he heard a voice coming to him from
heaven, which gave him this command : — 'Go to the porch of the church, and you
will find the man you seek.'

"Accordingly he went into the street, and at the door of the church he found
a beggar whose legs were covered with ulcers running with corruption, and whose
clothes were scarcely worth threepence. The Divine wished him good day. To
whom the beggar replied, — 'I do not remember that I ever had a bod one.' Where-
upon the man of letters, as if to amend his former salutation, said, — 'Well, then,
God send you good fortune.' 'But I never had any bad fortune,' answered the
beggar. The Divine was astonished at this reply, but repeated his wish, in case he
might have made a mistake in what he heard, only in somewhat different words : —
'Say you so I pray, then, that you may be happy.' But again the beggar replied, —
'I never was unhappy.' The Divine, thinking that the beggar was playing upon
words merely for the sake of talking, answered, in order to try the man's wit, —
'I desire that whatever you wish may happen to you.' 'And here, also,' he replied,
'I have nothing to complain of. All things turn out according to my wishes,
although I do not attribute my success to fortune.'

"Upon this the man of letters, saluting him afresh, and taking his leave,
said : — 'May God preserve you, my good man, since you hate fortune ! But tell me,
I pray, are you alone happy among mortals who suffer calamity? If so, Job
speaks safely when he declares, — "Man born of a woman, living for a short time,
is filled with many miseries." And how comes it that you alone have escaped all

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194 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

evil days? I do not fully understand your feelings.' To this the beggar replied, —
'It is so, sir, as I have said. When you wished me a "good day," 1 denied that I
had ever had a bad one. I am perfectly contented with the lot which God has
assigned me in this world. Not to want happiness is my happiness. Those bug-
bears, Fortune and Misfortune, hurt him only who wills, or at least who fears, to be
hurt by them. Never do I offer my prayers to Fortune, but to my Heavenly Father
Who disposes the events of all things. And so I say I never was unhappy, inas-
much as all things turn out according to my wishes. If I suffer hunger, I praise
my most provident Father for it. If cold pinches me, if the rain pours down upon
me, or if the sky inflicts upon me any other injury, I praise God just the same.
When I am a laughing-stock to others, I no less praise God. For sure I am that
God is the Author of all these things, and that whatever God does must be the
best. Therefore, whatever God either gives, or allows to happen, whether it be
pleasant or disagreeable, sweet or bitter, I esteem alike, for all such things I
joyfully receive as from the hand of a most loving Father ; and this one thing
I will — what God wills. And so all things happen as I will. Miserable is the
man who believes that Fortune has any power against him ; and truly unhappy
is he who dreams of some imaginary unhappiness in this world. This is true
happiness in this life, to cleave as closely as possible to the Divine Will. The Will
of God, His most excellent, His most perfect Will, which cannot be made more
perfect, and cannot be evil, judges concerning all things, but nothing concerning it.
To follow this Will I bestow all my care. To this one solicitude I devote myself
with all my might, so that whatever God wills, this I also may never refuse to
will. And, therefore, I by no means consider myself unhappy, since I have so
entirely transfused my own will into the Divine, that with me there is no other
will or not will than as God wills or wills not.'

" 'But do you really mean what you say ?' asked the Divine ; 'tell me, I pray,
whether you would feel the same if God had decreed to cast you down to hell?'
To which the beggar at once replied, — 'If He should cast me down to hell ? But
know that I have two arms of wondrous strength, and with these I should hold
him tightly in an embrace that nothing could sever. One arm is the lowliest
humility shown by the oblation of self, the other, purest charity shown by the love
of God. With these arms I would so entwine myself round God, that wherever
He might banish me, thither would I draw Him with me. And far more desirable,
in truth, would it be to be out of heaven with God, than in heaven without Him,'
The Divine was astonished at this reply, and began to think with himself that
this was the shortest path to God.

"But he felt anxious to make further inquiry, and to draw forth into sight
the wisdom which dwelt in such an ill-assorted habitation ; and so he asked, —
'Whence have you come hither?' 'I came from God,' replied the beggar. To
whom again the Divine, — 'And where did you find God?' 'Where I forsook all
created things.' Again the Divine asked, — 'But where did you leave God?' 'In
men of pure minds and goodwill,' replied the poor man. 'Who are you?' said the
Divine. 'Whoever I am,' he replied, 'I am so thoroughly contented with my lot
that I would not change it for the riches of all kings. Every one who knows
how to rule himself is a king.' 'Am I, then, to understand that you are a king?'
said the other. 'Where is your kingdom?' 'There,' said the beggar, and at the
same time pointed with his finger toward heaven. 'He is a king to whom that
kingdom on high is transferred by sure deeds of covenant.' At last the Divine,
intending to bring his questions to an end, said, — 'Who has taught you this? Who
has instilled these feelings into you?' To which the other replied, — 'I will tell you,
Sir. For whole days I do not speak, and then I give myself up entirely to prayer or
holy thoughts, and this is my only anxiety, to be as closely united as possible to
God. Union and familiar acquaintance with God and the Divine Will teach all this.'

"The theologian wished to ask more questions, but thinking it would be better
to postpone this to another time, took his leave for the present. As he went away,
full of thought, he said to himself, — 'Lo ! thou hast found one who will teach thee
the shortest way to God ! How truly does S. Augustine say, — "The unlearned start
up and take heaven by violence, and we with our learning, and without heart, lo !
where we wallow in flesh and blood !" And so Christ, when giving thanks says, —
'I confess to thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid
these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.'
Beneath a filthy garment, forsooth, great wisdom often lies concealed. And who
would think of seeking for such Divine learning in a man of so mean an appear-
ance? Who would believe that so much of the Spirit was hidden under such
unlettered simplicity? Lo! those two arms of unconquerable strength, Oblation
of Self and Love of God, draw God withersoever this poor man wills! With these
arms God permits Himself to be closely bound; other embraces He refuses.'"

ANSWERS

QUESTION No. 215. — /j nof reincarnation almost as painful to think of as
annihilation, in that in future lives we will not remember or recognise those whom
we love today?

ANSWER. — How do we know that we do not recognize today those whom we
have loved before? Personally I believe we do. Is not that more real than to
think we love those whom we have been thrown against by the accidents of a
single life? But it is said that our associations are divinely guided. Is this
different in essence from the doctrine of reincarnation? Which is it easier to
believe — that a God moves us like wooden chessmen, or that the divine element
in ourselves seeks out an environment with those whom we love? Is it "annihila-
tion" to look forward to close association — and association in love — with the
added experience of life by life for our soul-memory, and the cleansing of the
slate for the mere animal memory? G. V. S. M.

ANSWER. — The doctrine of reincarnation has never troubled me because Carlyle,
in Sartor Resartus, gave me the key to it. What is it that is really "I"? Is it not
something indestructible like the sense of identity that now, in my fifty-sixth year,
persists, after the many mental changes of an active life? I think of my reincarna-
tions as clothes. In the attic, at home, are still kept my baby clothes and my first
soldier suit. I can still remember the day I put on the (toy) soldier suit. I ara
the same "I" today as the "I" of fifty-one years ago. I am wearing different
clothes today; so are my friends. My present day clothes do not recognize the
costumes worn by my friends thirty years ago. But "I" recognize both the friends
and the costumes. J. W. O.

ANSWER. — This question reminds me of the fact that we do not remember
anything from our birth up to the age of three to five years old. Surely we
loved, in our own way, our mother and father and nurse. We clung to them
and felt happy and safe in their arms. The nurse left perhaps, before we were
four years old, and we forgot her entirely. In some cases the father or the
mother too is lost at that early age. Later we may not even remember that we
ever saw them. Does this fact make our later life miserable or bring us to wish
that we had never been born?

When the child grows older and begins to exhibit some power of memory
and reason, it feels unhappy with the thought of leaving those it loves, or of
losing them ; and it may even wish to die with them. But time passes, and
experience shows that these heartbreaking pangs were temporary moods only, as
they are later in life too at the loss of one very dear to us. We still remember
the beloved friends that are no more at our side, but the memory of the happy
time spent with them causes no distress any longer, — is more like a lovely dream
we once had. Does this recollection of the lost dear-ones ever make us feel so
wretched as to prefer annihilation to continued life? Certainly not. Is it the
confidence in meeting again at the resurrection that pacifies our minds and makes
us again enjoy our present life perhaps even more than before the great loss?
In some cases it may be, but not as a rule. Changes in moods are effects of

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changes in time, surroundings and circumstances. We are outgrowing childhood,
youth, old enjoyments, old sorrows, old memories; and new enjoyments, sorrows,
memories are replacing them. We find other companions that take the empty
places; we are again happy with new friends, embracing new dear-ones.

Let us not be narrow-minded and confine our conception of human life to
one single incarnation. If we consider a long series of incarnations as the days
of the soul, and compare them with the days of our present incarnation, surely we
must come to the conclusion that we are much worse off in the days of our present
life-time than in the days of the soul's life-time, in which we do not remember
the events of the past days. In this connection it seems befitting to quote the
following advice of the Christian Master : "Be not therefore anxious for the
morrow; for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the
evil thereof." Instead of regarding it an unbearable loss not to remember the
details of our last incarnation we should find it a blessing. To remember every-
thing about our last incarnation would, to many ot us, be a source of no end
of miseries; and to all it would mean a great hindrance in pursuing just that
course of training which is wanted by the soul.

Therefore, instead of questioning the wisdom and perfection of the great
evolutionary scheme moulded in the Divine Mind before time was, and overruled
by the presiding Deity, we should study the doctrine of reincarnation well and try
to understand its significance and necessity. And having realized its grandeur to
some extent, and that every incarnation is a new opportunity given us for our
salvation — for the soul's liberation from the bondage of matter — then we can
indeed celebrate the first and all succeeding birthdays of our present incarnation
with exultant hearts, overflowing with gratitude to our Heavenly Father for all
his mercy and love for an ungrateful generation. T. H. K.

ANSWER. — It would be quite as painful without the doctrine of love. The
many instances of "love-at-first-sight" and strong almost inexplicable affection»
(such as are described in Guy de Maupassant's story called "Love") are proof to me
that though our minds have forgotten and do not recognize the clothes or physical
bodies, — have lost the conscious memory of the other pilgrim, the love of the two
souls is but a continuation of the love and companionship of innumerable lives.

"Love is the strongest bond in the universe." If we really believed this it
seems to me we would have to believe in its power to draw together those who
truly love one another — when one takes this thought forward into the lives to come
— all sting, indeed, is taken from death. T. M.

QUESTION No. 216. — / have heard it said that individual help can only be given
in response to a demand. Do not the Masters give individual help in response to
a great need even when there has been no demand and when it can not be said
that the person helped is living in any sense according to the laws of the spirit?
Would not a desperate situation call down help from Masters if there were HO
special merit — whether of sacrifice or spiritual living or incipient discipleship f

ANSWER. — A genuine "need" is a demand ; and the genuine needs of mankind
— of all mankind — are supplied by the Masters perpetually. But it should not be
forgotten that the genuine need may be the need of punishment ; that is, of purifica-
tion, for without pain, there is no purification. And the Masters may deliberately
administer that pain, to bring the purification.

We are too inclined to think that the work of a Saviour is to remove pain,
to guard us from pain. But there is good authority for exactly the opposite belief :
"As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten : be zealous, therefore, and repent. . . ."

C J.

ANSWER. — Surely it depends on what is a real need. Is not such a real need
a demand? Light on the Path speaks of the. ordinary man asking with his mind

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 197

only : but when there is a real need the whole life of the man cries out and
makes the demand even if it be voiceless or beyond the brain-mind. And it is
just such vital demands which are active on the plane of consciousness where the
Masters work and where such demands are always heard. Whether individual help
can be given is entirely another matter and depends on the justice of Karma. The
Masters are always ready to help when They can : but we place ourselves in
"desperate situations" and tie Their hands so that They cannot help; we prevent
the help They would gladly give from reaching us. But in reply to the last part
of the question, I should think that the demand would be the effect of special merit
in some former incarnation. Otherwise I think there could be no demand.

A. K.

ANSWER. — It might be helpful to the questioner to consider this series of
questions from the viewpoint of reincarnations instead of the single life hypothesis.
How dare we deny "special merit" unless we know what has happened in the past?
Indeed how dare we deny "special merit" when we see only the outside of things.
Does prayer have to be vocalized? Is the soul in anguish limited to the expression
of a physical demand? And may not help be given through the mediation and
advocacy of another — perhaps the Master or some one of "special merit" ready to
ransom us for love's sake? As an abstract matter there must be a demand but
as a practical matter it is doubtful if we are fitted to judge whether a demand has
been made or whether merit exists in ourselves or others. G. V. S. M.

ANSWER. — Bourget closes his recent book, Le Sens de la Mart with these
words : "When we feel that God has dropped out of things, in reality He is quite
near us." Is there only one form in which a demand can be made? Are there
not acts, which involve and imply a demand? The action of France toward the
religious Orders may be such an act — an unwillingness, on the part of the national
conscience, any longer to tolerate religious institutions into the veins of which the
Vatican virus had been introduced. It was a loss France brought upon herself,
thus to break with her traditional faith. Was not a demand for something more
genuine involved? May that demand be receiving its answer in the present war
which, by illustrating devotion and self-sacrifice, is bringing France once more
to recognize realities, and the genuine religion that she needs ? A. W.

ANSWER. — Remember that the Masters are the executors of the Law and not
its opposers. Through love for mankind they have consecrated their whole life
to its welfare. They are acting impartially and always on principles and in accord-
ance with the Law. Thus, in the case of a great need they give what help they
can without regard to the worthiness of the man in a desperate situation. Mean-
while, they can, of course, give immensely more help to the good man than to the
sinner, not because the first is a favorite, but since the Law permits it. And since
the desperate situation may be brought on by the Law in order to give a highly
wanted lesson, and to promote the welfare of the one in need, it would be the
opposite of charity to help, till the Law is fulfilled. But the Masters are keeping
a watchful eye on the case and are always ready to help, when help is a blessing.

T. H. K.

ANSWER. — Masters may give help for many reasons. They are always trying
to reach souls and a special need may be a special opportunity. Help may also
come as the Karma of past lives, the fruit of good- deeds done ages ago of which
we have now no conscious knowledge. We are the sum total of all our experience,
not of one life only. Or help may be given because of a man's position involving
the need of others, perhaps the need of a nation. Or again it may be given through
the prayers or the vicarious atonement of others.

But what do we mean by a "desperate situation?" If there has been no merit,
no living in accordance with spiritual laws, now or in the past, there would be no

198 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

individual in the real sense, only a mass of swaying desires. No situation that
concerned only such an elemental self could be really desperate at all.

B. M. H.

QUESTION No. 217. — In reading Air. Johnston's "From the Upanishads" and
reaching the paragraph beginning "If the slayer thinks to slay it, if the slain thinks
it is slain," I recalled at once Emerson's poem Brahma whose opening lines are
almost identical. One line of that poem has always been a mystery to me: "And
one to me are shame and fame." It seems wholly out of key with the rest of tht
poem. I should appreciate an explanation?

ANSWER. — Zeno, one of the ancient Greek philosophers, taught that the soul
is the only reality, and that everything that happens in life is an opportunity for
the soul to prove its power. Thus, health and disease, poverty and wealth are
such opportunities. Can we not see that good repute and ill repute are similar
opportunities? Ought not the soul to stand unshaken either by shame or by fame,
extracting from both the lesson which is there? S. M.

ANSWER. — Does it not mean that one who strives to live the life of the soul,
to tread the Path of discipleship, must be prepared to follow that Path whether
it lead to shame or fame in the eyes of men? There are many parallels to that
passage. For instance, Light on the Path, the end of the third comment, page
68, "... there is neither credit, glory or reward to be gained by this first task
which is given to the neophyte. Mystics have always been sneered at, and seers
disbelieved." Obviously the neophyte would not hesitate through fear of the
shame of being sneered at. Shame or fame would be all one to him if it were
his Master's will. "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you
and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake." (Matt. 5:11)
The same spirit is to be found throughout the Bhagavad Gita. To emote one
passage out of many : "Standing in union with the Soul, carry out thy work,
putting away attachment. O conqueror of wealth; eaual in success and failure,
for equalness is called union with the Soul." J. M.

I T-s-Acnvmes

THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, PACIFIC BRANCH, LOS ANGELES, CAL.

Los ANGELES, CAL., July, 1917.
To the Chairman Executive Committee, T. S.,

and Editor THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY.
DEAR SIRS AND BROTHERS:

Whatever our personal predilections may be, or whatever the star, as it were,
by which we each are inwardly guided, we all with one accord, looked Eastward on
the morning of the Convention day.

By mutual confession, our first thought and mental questioning upon arising
may well be epitomised into: "What of the day? What is the watchword for the
coming Society year?"

Whilst outwardly, at this distance from you, the Convention assembly may
have seemed to us a long way off, and hardly discernable in the scene of active
outward life and striving, that the thought of New York City suggests to us; yet
inwardly we felt we were with you, breathing, shall we say, the same sacramental
inner vitalizing airs, sharing with you the inner life atmosphere, you in New York
have done so much to create. So that the QUARTERLY'S Convention report, which
has just reached us, not only throws a bright light upon outward things, it also
records our deep convictions.

We, the undersigned, therefore desire collectively to declare to you, in more
or less formal way, our individual approval of the preamble and resolutions, rela-
tive to President Wilson's war message, and the entry of America into the war,
which were presented to the Convention by the Committee on Resolutions, and
unofficially voted upon and passed by individual members of the Society then
assembled. And we ask that our own individual indorsement of that preamble and
resolutions be herewith added to the votes of those members then and there given.

Although we judge that the rejected preamble and resolutions, submitted by
Mr. C. A. Griscom, really and more fittingly expressed the thought and feeling,
and intentions of the members who so voted, as it does our own. We would
further like you to know that we also appreciate the very necessary new rule which
provides for the protection of the Society by expulsion, if needs be, of an un-
principled member.

As you doubtless well understand, we merely record our own personal con-
victions. Neither do we intend them to commit the Society or our Branch, in any
way in matters of belief. Nor should it in any way hinder a like free expression
of a different opinion by other members. With you, we realize that each one is
free to choose in such matters, and we heartily thank you and the members in
New York for the fearless, outspoken, and instructive lead you have taken.

We remain very sincerely yours, and with all good wishes for the ensuing
year, as ever.

WALTER H. Box,
ALFRED L. LEONARD,
ERIK BLAKKEN,
AGNES GOOD,

M. ELLA PATERSON,
JULIA M. Box,
AGNES C. ELWING.

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200 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

ADDENDA

If to this the writer may add an after-thought on the Convention proceedings
as a whole, and select from among the many good things then said, a sentence
which seems to him to express more nearly the Convention's keynote, or the watch-
word for the coming Society year, it is, "Victory for the Soul of the nation ! "

For, as he believes, high above all else, by every war move and paramount
commercial and political issue, the Souls of the Nations, the potential spiritual
life of their peoples, of the neutral and belligerent nations alike, are being weighed
as in a balance by the present conflict; more searchingly than at any other time
in the history of the Caucasian races.

I gather from what I recall of Theosophical writings that the times in which
we live are essentially a period of transition. It is a point in our spiritual evolu-
tion the thought of which brings to mind with added force and meaning Shake-
speare's simile of fortune's floodtide in the affairs of men, which, if "omitted" or
allowed to fail of its purpose in life's voyage, binds men in shallows, and in
miseries.

For potential power and its far-reaching effect upon the future, and in its
inner and outer workings, in most all save the elements of human self-effort and
responsibility, the present time is said very closely to correspond to the periods of
evolutionary change and new beginnings in nature. Such times, for example, as
when Nature's Master Builders, living and all unseen on her inner secretive planes,
and with nature's vast purposes in view, give inner birth to those invisible nuclei
of life which afterward, in due course of nature's living fostering processes, spring
up into outer nature as new crystalline formations, or new species of flora, or
animal life, the origins of which, science on the outside so diligently but vainly
seeks ; and when, we are told, the same Master-hand gives to each such hidden
nucleus of plastic germinal life, and potential life qualities, its predominant char-
acteristics, and the necessary impulse withal to carry the fittest amongst its count-
less variations to perfection.

In other words, in the evolution of the race as a whole, our time and age is
essentially the birth hour for certain soul qualities within us, if not for the Soul
Itself.

By every seen and unseen token and factor of this decisive struggle ; by the
right guidance of world leaders, or by their perfidy and inhumanity, "will to power,"
and abuse of intellectual attainments and gifts of inner life, as by the responsive
beats and impulses of the hearts and minds of the people, both high and low ; by
our every effort and incentive; in all that we think and feel and do, and by the
help of Master hands in this common hour of trial, — future standards of human
life and conduct are in the making.

In this hour of travail, midst thunders of human strife, and in the twilight
and silence of the human soul, dominent chords and dissonances, as it were, of
human life and possibility are being sounded, to re-sound and live again in cen-
turies and periods to come as the fundamental principles upon which future civili-
zations will be built, for the Soul's final victory or defeat.

And for our own country, to which it was given to declare a "New Order
of Ages," we pray that its peace, whatever the outward seeming, may in a measure
be as the peace the Master gives to the struggling disciple, a peace which comes
not only with victory, but with deeper inner understanding and the will to obey;
though we pass through sorrow and suffering, inner and outer privation and
want, and the gates of death, as some have done, guided continuously by the
Master's Light. A. E. O.

JANUARY, 1918

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 KARMA OF THE RUSSIANS

WE were told, on high authority, in the last issue of the
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, that this period of the World
War is "a day when men are being sifted — as individuals,
as organizations, as nations. It is an accounting day in the
Lodge, and the Ledgers are being balanced . . . " In the light of a
sentence like that, what can be more appalling than the present position
of Russia, where a nation, once counted among the Allies, seems
determined to cover itself with undying shame. To such a point has the
"Russian Revolution" come. Yet there were many, and among them a
man so wise as General Jan Christian Smuts, who, at the outset, hailed
that revolution as perhaps the greatest event of the world war: a pro-
nouncement that today sounds like the bitterest irony.

We have been counseled always to look beneath events for the
motive which gives them life ; we have been told, further, that "by their
fruits ye shall know them." By what profound corruption of motive
can we account for the fruit of dishonor that the Russian revolution
bears ?

As to the forces for the moment dominant, the so-called "Bolshevik
Socialists," there is no great mystery about their motives. They are
explicit enough in their declarations, and quite clear as to the goal they
have in view. From the beginning, they planned to get hold of the
Russian army, in order to carry through what they call "the social revolu-
tion" in Russia. But their ultimate purpose covers the whole world; if
they succeed in Russia, they will immediately start an active campaign
here, for they have plenty of ardent disciples in America, nay, in the
very centre of New York. Among the Petrograd Bolsheviki, very few
leaders seem to be Russian by blood. Most of them talked a dialect
of German as their mother-tongue and they still think in that German
dialect. Completely turning their backs on the faith of their fathers as

14 *»«

202 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

an absurd and outgrown superstition, they have accepted Karl Marx —
and Marx in his most violent and destructive moods — as their Messiah;
the reign of "the proletariat" represents for them "the coming of the
kingdom."

Like Karl Marx, they are, for the most part, thoroughly materialistic
and anti-Christian; when they think about philosophical ideas, they are
atheists; but generally they think of one thing only — material wealth
and power. They have in mind a world-empire with themselves as
leaders, an empire enriched with the plunder of existing governments,
whom they ferociously call "armed robbers." But Karl Marx's formulas,
with the spoliation of "the proletariat" by "the capitalistic classes" date
from 1850; that is, nine or ten years before Darwin's idea of evolution
came into the world; therefore Marx, though a thorough-going
materialist, is not an evolutionist. He could never see, as Darwin so
clearly sees, that free competition is the greatest instrument of progress,
and therefore of general enrichment. Brought up in a narrow and
densely egotistic corner of German thought, Marx could never see that
the one guarantee of progress and general enrichment is free opportunity
for the exceptionally gifted men, with a reward sufficient to spur them
to extraordinary exertion ; exertion which invariably results in general
enrichment and betterment. Marx could only see the result, the reward,
of exceptional power ; he could never see, and these followers of his, for
the most part men of his race, can never see, first, the exceptional power
which these rewards simply register; and, secondly, that while the gifted
man makes a fortune for himself, he invariably raises a wave of well-
being, that enriches all his neighbors at the same time. He could never
see, what is really quite simple and elementary, that the rich man, the
gifted man whose power has brought great rewards, can profit by his
wealth in one way only: by paying other people for services, and so
immediately restoring the general level of wealth.

Marx declares, and these fanatical followers of his believe, that the
labor of "the proletariat" creates all wealth ; they are incapable of seeing
that, without thought, without intelligence, without the guiding and
organizing will, labor can create almost no wealth ; and that it is the
exceptional gifted man who supplies these things, and therefore really
creates wealth.

So, obstinately blind to the forces of intelligence and will, and with
greedy eyes fixed only on the rewards, the results of these, Marx and
his Bolshevik followers ferociously denounce the gifted men as "robbers,"
and call on "the proletariat" to pull them down and despoil them, thus
taking back for labor the wealth which, they say, labor alone has created.

It is a wild, explosive, destructive philosophy. But we must take
the pains to understand it, as an indispensable measure of safety; for,

NOTES AND COMMENTS 203

within a very short time, we shall face exactly the same kind of move-
ment, with like leaders and the same convictions, that have been raging
for eight months in Petrograd.

The Lenins and Trotsky s believe themselves to be the apostles of
Marx, the new Messiah, apostles destined to lead "the proletariat" into
the promised land; and their promised land is wholly material;
they have no ideal that could not be gratified by money and more money.

These Lenin-Trotsky agitators are aliens in Russia, alien to the great
mass of Russians in blood and creed ; they admit this quite frankly them-
selves, and say they are not Russians but citizens of the world. Having
for centuries had no nationality themselves, but being dispersed among
all nations, they deny the fact and value of nationality, which is the
creation, they say, of "the capitalistic classes." But, since their mother
tongue is a dialect of German — and this is quite as true in New York
as it is in Petrograd — and since their gospel, Das Kapital, is written in
German, they find themselves more in sympathy with Germany than with
any other nation. And they have no radical quarrel with the German
State, since the German State is the greatest and most successful
experiment in Socialism that the world has ever seen; nay, the German
army, with its destruction of individual will and initiative, is through
and through Socialistic and communistic.

So it happens that the Lenin-Trotsky agitators are congenitally pro-
German, in New York as in Petrograd. A very slight modification of
the German State — the substitution of a Marxian tyrant for the Hohen-
zollern tyrant, and it would suit them perfectly. Even now, Germany
almost realizes their ideals.

One thing more: these men, whether in Russia or in the United
States (we shall do well to get it into our heads that they form a single,
closely-knit organization there and here) have no scruples at all, as we
understand scruples; they are thoroughly Germanic in that. They are
logical too, for they scoff at the idea of spiritual law, and recognize
nothing as real except brute materialism, purely material gains to be won
by all available means. They frankly say they have not the slightest
objection to bloodshed; nay, their ideal is, to pour out the blood of the
"bourgeois class," the "capitalistic class," which has so long, they say,
ground down the proletariat in degrading slavery. It is a philosophy of
militant materialism.

These Lenin-Trotsky agitators thoroughly believe in using all
weapons that come to their hands ; and words are among the most potent
of weapons. Therefore they mouth fine phrases about "world demo-
cracy." and "the revolution." We in America attach certain meanings

2(H THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

to these words. Democracy, for us, means ordered liberty under the
American Constitution. The Revolution means the great historic episode
made splendid by the genius of Washington and his generation. And
these words on the tongues of the Lenin-Trotsky agitators have deluded
us — profoundly deluded us — into believing that they hold similar ideals.
That is a wide and dangerous delusion. Democracy, for them, means a
new class tyranny, with themselves as tyrants; the revolution, for them,
means the destruction of the whole existent order, and the substitution
of militant materialism.

Naturally, these Lenin-Trotsky agitators are profoundly and blatantly
indifferent to "the honor of Russia." National honor, they say, is merely
a selfish "capitalistic" trick, to make slaves of the workers, so that they
may lay down their lives for "the capitalistic classes." As has been
already said, they plan to get hold of Russia, and of the Russian army,
in order to force their tyranny on the whole world, by a destructive
international revolution and war. For them, therefore, the Russian
revolution is the golden opportunity, the corner-stone of the kingdom of
their Messiah. That is what the Bolshevik leaders, the Lenins and
Trotskys think about the Russian revolution.

These men constitute one of the two revolutions which started at
the same time in Petrograd last March. We come now to the other
revolution. It was put in motion by the Duma leaders, as a protest
against two things : the ineptitude of some of the Tsar's ministers, an
ineptitude which brought immense disasters upon Russia ; and the open
treason of others, who were, they believed, planning to bring about a
separate peace with Germany, thus betraying the Allies of Russia into
the hands of the enemy. These men, led by the great figures in the
Duma, men like Rodzianko, Milyukoff and Gutchkoff, and by the great
Zemstvo organizers, like Prince Lvoff, had a perfectly definite plan —
which has failed completely. They intended to try, first, to pursuade
Nicholas II to dismiss such ministers as Stuermer and Protopopoff, and
to put in their places men acceptable to the Duma. In other words, they
wanted to repeat, for Russia, the change which took place in England
between the reign of George III (whose ministers were completely
responsible to him) and the reign of George V (whose ministers are
completely responsible to the popular House of Parliament). The
American Constitution, drawn up in the reign of George III, has embodied
and stereotyped the practice then in force, so that our American "ministers
of State" are not responsible directly to our Parliament ; they are not
chosen from Congress, nor appointed by Congress, nor can they (except
in the hardly thinkable case of impeachment) be dismissed by Congress.
Therefore we are in a position to understand the Tsar's point of view.
At any rate, he refused to choose ministers acceptable to, and responsible

NOTES AND COMMENTS 205

to, the Duma, though he did, under pressure from the Duma, dismiss the
pro-German Premier, Stuermer.

The Duma leaders then determined to force the Tsar's abdication,
when they intended to recognize his young son Alexis as heir, guided
by a Council of Regency named by themselves — probably consisting of
themselves. This, their first plan, failed, because Nicholas II refused
to be separated from his son, to whom he is devotedly attached, and
who was constantly with him at army headquarters, from the time the
Tsar himself took command of the Russian forces. The Duma leaders
then developed a second plan : to name the Tsar's younger brother
Michael, Emperor, governing with a constitutional ministry responsible to
the Duma, a ministry which would in all likelihood have included them-
selves. This plan also failed, because Grand Duke Michael was willing
to accept the throne only in case the Russian nation, in a Constitutional
Convention, or Constituent Assembly — the American and French names
for the same thing — should express its absolute approval of that arrange-
ment. Therefore the Duma leaders decided to do two things: they
planned a Constituent Assembly, primarily to pronounce upon the
candidacy of Grand Duke Michael; and they formed a Temporary or
Provisional Government, to carry on the business of administration, until
the Constituent Assembly could be got together.

On the face of it, their plans appear plausible. For without doubt
there were pro-German influences among the Tsar's ministers ; without
doubt there were powerful pro-German currents in the court of the
Russian Empress, a German princess by birth. And, in all probability,
had the Emperor Nicholas been immediately replaced by his brother, as
Michael II, with a strong national ministry formed of tried and trusted
leaders, Russia Avould have gone on fighting among the Allies, as gallantly
as she fought during the late Spring and Summer of 1916. There was
that possibility, which may, in part, justify the Duma leaders. But there
are two further considerations : first, the proverbial practical danger of
"swapping horses while crossing the stream"; second, the grave moral
question of loyalty. As to the practical question, we can see now that
Russia, so far from doing more for the Allies because of the revolution,
has done infinitely worse than the worst mistakes of the imperial regime,
even if it was honeycombed by German agents, as we are told. The
practical result has been disastrous. The Duma leaders, therefore, stand
convicted of an act of almost measureless folly, judging that act by its
fruits. And there is a strong suspicion that they fell into this act of
folly because they were blinded by vanity and personal ambition, two
evil counsellors, who open the doors wide to the Powers of Evil. If
they allowed themselves to be blinded to the possible and even probable
dangers in their path, because they wished to become ministers them-
selves— as they did, in fact, become — then their culpability is great. They

206 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

will stand condemned of a colossal blunder which was, at the same time,
a crime.

But far deeper than this practical question is the spiritual question :
the question of that Loyalty which "surpasses all." What are the evils
that today rage and devastate the Russian State ? They are, each and all,
forms of disloyalty. The soldiers are disloyal to their officers — to the
point of assassinating them. The workmen, munition-makers, railroad
men, are disloyal to their duty, crassly indifferent to the consequent
danger of their brothers at the front. But, far worse, the whole nation,
so far as the Russian nation can be said to have any existence today, is
soaked through and through with disloyalty. We remember how severely
the Duma leaders, men like Rodzianko and Milyukoff, berated the Tsar's
ministers and the court of the Empress for plotting a separate peace with
Germany. That plot was, in reality, the excuse they gave to the world
for the revolution : the danger, they said, was so imminent that instant
surgical action must be taken. But what is the upshot of the revolution ?
What was the outcome, from the very first? The army practically ceased
to fight. An armistice in fact began as soon as the revolution was con-
summated ; and the formal armistice signed early in December only
recognizes a fact that has been in existence for nearly nine months. There
was, it is true, one forward movement at the beginning of July; but it
was made by a portion of the army which the "revolution" had not yet
reached. It was wholly due to the momentum of the old imperial
discipline, at that one point still intact.

So the revolution has led to betrayal and treachery : treachery and
betrayal of the nation's faith, smirching and staining the honor of the
Russian army, which had fought at times with heroic valor for the
Allies' holy cause ; base and gross betrayal, next, of the invaded provinces
of Russia, ground under the heel of Teutonic tyranny ; most cowardly
betrayal of Poland, Serbia, Montenegro and Rumania, to which Russia
was bound by the most imperative ties of honor ; and, greatest of all,
a f jul betrayal of the Western Allies, — France, Britain and Italy ; betrayal
of the cause of Humanity, of the sacred cause for which fight the holy
spiritual powers. Where, after the war, can Russia look for friends?
It is practically certain that Russia's greedy seizure of a "premature and
traitorous peace," will prolong the war by many months, probably by
years ; for the enemy has now begun to hope for further treason and
cowardice, and sees in that cowardice and treason a good hope of ultimate
triumph, a wholesale surrender of mankind to Teuton despotism. But
it is certain that this prolonging of the war will inflict heavy suffering
on the already tried and heavily burdened Allies — on every one of the
nations that stands firm. To begin with the United States, there will be,
in all likelihood a million families, bereaved and orphaned, who will
clearly see that their bereavement is due to Teuton ambition — and Russian

NOTES AND COMMENTS 207

poltroonery. They will hardly view "the youngest democracy" with very
friendly eyes. Nor will Italy, the enslaved inhabitants of eastern Venetia,
feel deep gratitude to the Russians, who have given them into the hands
of their age-long oppressors. England and her younger dominions which,
with one disgraceful exception, have striven and suffered heroically, will
hardly be counted among Russia's future friends. And, finally, France,
in fact involved in this war and in all the horrors and abominations which
she has suffered from her bestial invaders, precisely because she loyally
kept her faith with Russia — what will France say to her traitorous ally?
There remains to Russia the "friendship" of the Teutons — the friendship
of the wolves for the sheep. The essence of the matter is, that this long
and fatal chain of betrayal and disloyalty was begun by the disloyalty
of the Duma leaders who, in their blindness and ambition, broke their
own oath of allegiance, in effect saying to the army: "In the name of
our disloyalty, be loyal to us !"

But there was a second act of disloyalty; perhaps we should rather
call it an act of blind folly. One episode of the "revolution" has been
veiled in darkness, where so much has been paraded in full daylight:
We have not yet been told what terms were made by the Duma leaders,
to buy the support of the revolutionary Socialists for the political changes
they wished to bring about. But, while the terms of that treaty have
been carefully hidden from the world, the result is appallingly clear. It
is a repetition of the stories of mediaeval black magic, in which, to gain
success, men signed a bond with the powers of darkness. They got the
success they bargained for — and then came the payment of the bond, the
forfeit of their souls. So the Duma leaders signed their bond and got
their success ; but they had put themselves into the hands of the powers
of destruction, and now the mortgage has been foreclosed.

But, we may ask ourselves, what of the Russian army? What of
the men in the ranks? What inducements made such an appeal to them
that they have so obstinately trodden the path of dishonor? In the first
place, release from discipline, from the military obligation of obedience.
It may, perhaps, be urged in extenuation that the path of disloyalty and
insubordination was opened wide to them by the very men who should
have safeguarded them, the Duma leaders of the "constitutional" revolu-
tion. Without doubt this is true, and, to their already crushing heavy
account, we must add this supreme act of folly, forced upon the Duma
leaders by their Socialist allies. It was an act of folly, and of the utmost
vanity also; these men persuaded themselves that they were giving a
lesson in true progress to all mankind — to the old, effete nations like
France and England, which maintain "the outworn superstition" of
implicit military obedience. But, even though the Duma leaders must
bear the heaviest responsibility for this act of final folly, this by no
means exonerates the soldiers, the men of the rank and file. The path

208 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

was opened wide for them; true, but the path of evil is always open
wide; "broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction." The powers of
evil see to that. The main culpability of the Russian rank and file would
seem to lie precisely in this: that, from the very beginning, they have
opened their ears wide to every counsel of evil. Evil listening has been
their capital fault.

First, the eager desire to escape from discipline. Next, sloth and
cowardice, in the face of the foe. We have been told in extenuation,
that these men are weary ; that they have been fighting bravely, under
great hardships, often with incompetent, perhaps even traitorous backing,
since the beginning of the war. But in reality the men on the battle-line
have been again and again reinforced; a large proportion of those who
are capitulating now, have seen little active service. Nor has the fighting
been continuous. During practically the whole winter of 1916-1917,
they were neither attacking nor attacked; they were being held back,
in preparation for a great Spring offensive, which was to repeat and
outstrip the triumphs of June 1916; a great offensive which was first
checked by the "revolution," then, when it was launched in July, was
turned into a disgraceful rout by the "democratization" of the Russian
army. Therefore the plea of weariness is only half justified, only half sin-
cere. But let us suppose that they had fought continuously from the first ;
has not France done the same? — France, involved in the war primarily
by her treaty of alliance with Russia, and by her unswerving loyalty,
in the face of large bribes and truculent threats, to the obligations of that
treaty ? The French nation is weary ; the French army is weary. Yes,
but, like heroes, they make that the reason for fighting with finer valor,
with more splendid heroism. There was General Foch's great answer
to one of his commanders who, at the Marne, pleaded that his men were
weary :" "The enemy is more weary still ; attack again !" That has,
from the outset, been the unwavering principle and practice of that army
of heroes.

Yet another bribe which corrupted the Russian army was even more
crude, if possible, more discreditable. They were promised that, if they
supported the "revolution" and stopped the war, "the land would be
distributed." And they gulped avidly at that bait. The wording of this
bribe is ambiguous. Some people have supposed it to mean that the
communal land of the Russian villages, now held in many cases jointly
under the system of primitive Socialism, was to be divided, to be held
in severalty, each peasant receiving and fully owning his own land. If
this were really the meaning, then the object would be in itself good ;
for this communal land tenure, this primitive Socialism, hangs like a
millstone round the neck of agricultural Russia. But the meaning is
in reality quite different. It is a question of seizing the land of the large
holders and dividing it among the peasants; in plain language, an act

NOTES AND COMMENTS 209

of spoliation, of robbery. And nothing speaks so eloquently of the moral
baseness of the Russian soldier-peasants as the fact that they are not
willing only, but wildly eager, to quit the trenches, in order to secure their
share of the spoils, to profit by this "legalized" robbery. Greedy self-
indulgence could go no further.

So far, the heavy Karma of the Russian nation. But we shall be
well advised not to stop at this point ; not to exhaust ourselves in
indignant anger at their base betrayal. We shall do well to bring the
question home to ourselves. We, who have a part in the Theosophical
Movement, have, with that high privilege, a very grave responsibility.
We, and we alone, have been told quite openly of the part being played
in this world war by the powers of good and the powers of evil. We
know, further, the part which spiritual effort must take in this momentous
conflict. Let us see whether we too are not in danger of growing weary
of the fight; let us look well to the question whether these very bribes,
the desire to escape from irksome discipline, sloth, cowardice, self-
indulgence, have not, perhaps, a dangerous allurement for ourselves. For
we know that, heavy as may be the responsibility which the Law lays
upon the Russian soldier, our own responsibility, just because we know
far more, must be infinitely greater. "For unto whomsoever much is
given, of him shall be much required. . . . "

As in a vision of the night He stood before me, and in His voice
was kindness as He said: "I have come to lead you to hidden treasures."
As I followed, my heart grew light, my spirit buoyant. I was conscious
of beauty all about me and of a strength unknozvn before; the fears that
had always walked at my side zvcre left behind, I knew not when or where.
At last He stopped. "Is this where the treasures are hid?" I asked.
"What more do you seek," He anszvercd "than you have found? A
ivorld of beauty, a heart of peace, a sense of boundless life. These are
the treasures that were hidden in your own soul. I am the spirit of
love; by following me you have found yourself."

ANDREW V. V. RAYMOND.

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS

VII

MENDICANT ORDERS
St. Dominic. The Order of Preachers Union through Knoivledge

EARLY in the 13th century, two Orders were founded, one by St.
Dominic, one by St. Francis of Assisi. These are the two great
mendicant Orders.

The mendicant Orders introduce nothing new into monas-
ticism; they make a new application of an old custom. They raise an
old practice into a principle. In doing so, however, they so innovate
upon the established principles of St. Benedict, that they are justly
regarded as a fresh start taken by monasticism.

In order to correct the evils attendant upon irresponsible monks and
hermits who roamed or settled at will, looking for their food to the
charitably minded, St. Benedict brought these individuals together into
communities. He provided that the community should earn its own
living. All outgrowths of the parent Benedictine trunk, at Cluny, Citeaux,
Chartreux, etc., in maintaining that principle of self-dependence, became
great industrial centres as well as houses of religion.

The mendicants retained the community life of St. Benedict, and
tried strictly to adhere to the system of services arranged for the "Hours"
(Matins, Vespers, etc.). But instead of earning its living, the community
was required to beg it. This difference (and others) is so great that it
results in a new type of religious Order. Up to the 13th century the
many Orders, great and small, had all been modifications of the Benedic-
tine, essentially a contemplative Order. With St. Dominic and St. Francis
what we may call a new fatnily has its beginning — the family of active
Orders.

Those who are interested in historical development may well regard
this first quarter of the 13th century as a period of great significance.
It establishes a second type of monk.

It is impossible for an American and a Protestant to make an
unprejudiced approach toward the Dominican Order, on account of the
unsavory connection of that Order with the Inquisition. One or two
facts however mitigate our prejudices. The first of these facts is, that,
notwithstanding much that is righteously detestable in the policy and
conduct of Rome, the Roman Catholic Church transmits a tradition that
is less distorted than the teaching of any Protestant rival. In the Roman
Church the science of the spiritual life is as a mine; in the Protestant
Churches, spiritual science merely outcrops in individuals. We must
distinguish between what is righteously detestable in Rome, and that
which merely cuts across our opinions — well or ill founded. One by one,

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS 211

in the case of individuals and events, we may have seen our Protestant
opinions fall away from us as we studied the facts of the case; examples
are : the teaching about Hell, Purgatory and Heaven ; about the rights
of Rulers; the condemnation of all socialistic tendencies; the insistence
upon a religious control over education, the monastic idea. Examples
of individuals about whom we may have changed our opinion are such
unmodern men as Ignatius Loyola, Thomas Aquinas, and St. Benedict.
Gradually an un-Protestant attitude may have replaced former antip-
athies; without ceasing to detest the Church's policy, we, perhaps, have
grown to believe in advance that Rome's summing up of men and events
is likely to be correct.

In the present case what is at stake is the judgment upon the twelfth
century reformers in the south of France who, under the names Albi-
genses and Waldensians, are commonly presented in history as martyrs
of the Protestant Cause. The Dominican Order arose out of St. Dominic's
efforts against those reformers. When Dominic's life and work is
narrated, it may be possible to make explanations which will justify him
and his canonization.

As a first step toward a fair consideration of St. Dominic's life, we
ought to ascertain a few facts to replace the vague horror which, with
many individuals, is their sole knowledge of the Inquisition. Let us
consult Mr. Henry Charles Lea, a scholar of Philadelphia, whose special
field of investigation has been certain matters of Church History. Among
other books, Mr. Lea has written two studies that specially concern us.
One is a History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages; and the other is a
History of the Inquisition in Spain. These works are in three volumes
each, large volumes. They evidence patient study of original sources.
The two titles give us our first fact of information. In the early 13th
century there was a Papal Inquisition against the heretics in southern
France and other disturbers. It is this Inquisition that is connected with
the origin of the Dominican Order. Nearly three hundred years later, the
Spanish Inquisition came into existence. Mr. Lea describes this latter
organization as an essentially national institution, "entirely Spanish and
entirely royal," organized by their majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella
(patron of Christopher Columbus) against converted Jews. The Spanish
Inquisition was organized without any suggestion from Rome ; it not only
aimed at independence from Rome, but, as it grew in power and enlarged
its activity, it actually made accusations against high officials of the
Church. It was the Spanish Inquisition that persecuted St. Teresa and
St. Ignatius Loyola. It was the Spanish Inquisition that lighted so many
faggots. Though it is true that members of the Dominican Order were
made active in its odious work by the Spanish sovereigns, we must
remember that this occurred more than two hundred and fifty years after
the death of St. Dominic. Religious Orders degenerate after the death
of the founder. We must not hold a saint responsible for the acts of
unaspiring followers, centuries after his impulse has died out.

212 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Mr. Lea's attitude toward these matters of Church History seems
to us typically Protestant and American. What he says of monasticism
is a good example: he calls it a singing of "barren liturgies" — "a selfish
effort of the individual to secure his own salvation by repudiating all
the duties and responsibilities of life." Mr. Lea's opinions therefore are
not likely to err on the side of favour to the Catholics. When we find
him, then, stating that the popular attitude toward the Mediaeval Inqui-
sition is one of exaggeration, it is well to pause and give his words due
consideration. At the end of the first volume of his study, Mr. Lea
summarizes thus: "I am convinced that the number of victims who
actually perished at the stake is considerably less than has ordinarily been
imagined. The deliberate burning alive of a human being, simply for
difference of belief, is an atrocity so dramatic and appeals to strongly
to the imagination that it has come to be regarded as the leading feature
in the activity of the Inquisition . . . Imagination has grown in-
flamed at the manifold iniquities of the Holy Office, and has been ready
to accept without examination exaggerations which have become habitual."
Mr. Lea cites two characteristic Inquisitors in proof of his opinion. He
states that one Bernard de Caux "with an enviable record for zeal and
activity in the relentless persecution of heresy," in his register from 1246
to 1248 does not record a single burning. The second, the model Inqui-
sitor of this period, Bernard Gui, who vigorously prosecuted the heretical
uprisings in southern France, condemned only forty, during fifteen years,
to the death penalty.

These facts are certainly less lurid than the vague imaginations
usually clouded around the Inquisition. Perhaps we can now approach
more open-mindedly the work of St. Dominic. Seventeen years intervene
between the death of the great Cistercian, St. Bernard (1153) and the
birth of St. Dominic (1170). His family was Spanish. His mother
seems to have been truly religious. When her boy was seven years old,
she sent him to her brother, a priest, for schooling. After another seven
years, Dominic passed on to a higher center of learning, where he spent
six years in the usual academic curriculum, and then, four years more
in preparation for Ordination in the Church. He was ordained about
1194, as that year he left Palencia, where he had been studying, and took
up his duties in the Cathedral at Osma, of which he had been made
a canon.

As St. Dominic's Order is a natural evolution from the Order of
Canons, it will be well to interrupt the narrative of his life in order to
understand what this Order of Canons, now for the first time mentioned,
really is.

Canons, though they are usually classed among the four types of
monk, are not an Order in the sense that Jesuits, Carthusians, and others
are. They are not a branch spreading from the root of a great individual-
ity; they are little local communities, which, after many centuries of
existence, were given organization and uniformity by one of the Pope?.

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS 213

as late as 1339. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) thus defines the Order:
"The Order of Canons Regular is necessarily constituted by religious
clerics, because they are essentially destined to those works which relate
to the Divine mysteries, whereas it is not so with the monastic Orders."
That is an excellent definition. Canons are priests ("religious clerics")
whose duty it is to officiate in the formal Church Services (Holy Com-
munion, Baptism, etc.). Monks do not, essentially, have those duties, as
a monk need not be a priest. A Canon is a priest without a parish; he
officiates in an ecclesiastical establishment that is without parish connec-
tions, such as a college chapel or a Cathedral. Usually a group of Canons
grew up in connection with a Cathedral, where the Canons live as
assistants to the Bishop ; they officiate in the Cathedral services, while the
Bishop is active in all matters that concern the entire diocese. There is
much dispute over the facts of when and by whom Cathedral (or col-
legiate) priests were first organized into a group bound by a common
rule — and no convincing conclusion has been reached. One undisputed
historical fact is that St. Augustine, who became Bishop of Hippo
(Africa) in 395, maintained, together with the priests who assisted him
in the office of Canons, a Rule of life, and resided in community. That
Rule, or what is known as that Rule, was adopted, with modifications, by
many later Bishops and other leaders, notably, as we shall see, by St.
Dominic, who made it the foundation of his own Rule.

The Canons' Rule (or St. Augustine's Rule — it will be discussed
later in this article) was less strict that the Monastic Rule. The Canons
usually kept the "Hours" ; but the hard manual labour, the solitude and
seclusion were no part of a Canon's life. Occasionally, however, we do
find certain Bishops prescribing labour, as in the case of the celebrated
Bishop of Metz, Chrodegang, who in 763 brought together his Canons
into a community and adapted for them the Rule of St. Benedict and that
of St. Augustine. Canons did not take the vow of poverty and could
possess property. The Canon's Rule seems a compromise between life
in the world and life in a cloister, a rule suited for those who wish to
lead a religious life, but who are hindered by certain causes from entering
a formal religious Order. For that reason, perhaps, the Canon's Rule
became very popular about the year 1100, when, as we have seen, some
of the austere Orders like the Carthusian and Cistercian, were being
formed. So popular indeed did it become, that in certain well known
cases, the meaning of the word canon (a priest attached to a cathedral
or college) was either deliberately or unconsciously overlooked, and the
word came to be used to denote communities of priests, of a grade less
strict than monks, but living under an Abbot, and engaged in parochial
work. Such were the White Canons of Premontre (a large abbey near
Soissons), and those of St. Victor, near Paris. The founder of the
latter, William of Champeaux, (1106) will be remembered as the friend
who had St. Bernard placed under obedience to a physician, when the
austerities at Clairvaux seemed unreasonable. St. Norbert, the founder

214 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

of Premontre, (1120) was also a close friend of St. Bernard's, and St.
Bernard is said to have given him the land on which the home of the
White Canons was built.

The original use of the word "Canon," a member of a Cathedral
Staff, and the second meaning, a cloistered priest who is less strictly
secluded than a monk, continued together. Later, in the 12th Century,
a distinction was made between "regular" and "secular" Canons. The
word "regular" describes those Canons who adopt a Rule of life.
"Seculars" are those who do not adopt any such rule.

About 1194 St. Dominic finished his period of formal scholastic
preparation and went to the Cathedral of Osma as a Canon. The Bishop
of Osma had given to his Cathedral Staff the Rule of St. Augustine as
their guide. Dominic found this rule of life so congenial that in a few
years he became sub-prior of the community, and shortly after, prior.
Nine uneventful years were spent at Osma; they seem to have been a
period of spiritual preparation.

Dominic's active career began in 1203. The King of Castile in that
year sent the Bishop of Osma on a mission to arrange a marriage for
the Prince. The Bishop took with him his faithful canon, Dominic. The
two travellers, passing from Spain through Provence (the southern part
of France) were brought into contact with members of the Albigensian
sect. That brief contact stirred in Dominic's heart a desire to preach the
truth to these misguided people, and to save them from their error. His
wish was soon realized. In 1204 the Bishop of Osma, with his canon,
Dominic, was in Rome, asking permission from the Pope to resign as
bishop and to go as missionary to the interior of Russia. The Pope sent
him instead, to the interior of Provence as missionary to the Albigenses.

The Albigenses and kindred sects, like the Waldensian, have been
described in other articles published by the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY,*
and they have been too frequently mentioned and defended by historians
and Protestant theologians to make necessary now a discussion of their
position. Practical, moral virtues they had, indisputably. The clergy
of the period, even the monks contrasted unfavorably with them in this
resoect. Dominic clearly recognized the self-denial, and simplicity of
their lives. He recognized it so clearly as to realize that it must be
offset by corresponding austerity in those, who, by intellectual argument,
were endeavoring to expose the errors of the Albigensian doctrines.

It was to meet their practical morality, that, after uncertainty and
discussion, Dominic finally decided on the vow of poverty and upon the
principle of mendicancy for his own followers. Albigensian virtues,
therefore, are unquestionable. But an old proverb attributes many
practical virtues to the Devil himself. And we have read of the self-
denial and austerities practised by members of the Black Lodge. Indis-
putable practical morality, — rare as it is, unfortunately, and precious —

• Mystical Movements of the Middle Ages, January, 1907. The Mission of Certain Heresies,
July, 1916. The Foundations of the Moravian Church, January, 1917.

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS 215

does not excuse other forms of sin, which, though they may be called
sins of misunderstanding, of the intellect, nevertheless have their origin
in subtler forms of immoral volition. Are not many Socialists, and all
varieties of mental scientists upheld today by reason of their blameless
lives — until a study of their teachings brings us to see that those ap-
parently blameless lives are in truth pestiferous. The Albigenses seem
to be in the same category with Socialists and Scientists (Mental, Chris-
tian, etc.). They had laid hold of a distortion of the "hidden wisdom."
They seem even more blameworthy than contemporary heretics, and more
dangerous, because they had penetrated further beneath the veils of the
"secret doctrine." Fundamentally, however, their error seems to have
been the same as that of present day sowers of dissension and discord —
namely, inability to believe a paradox. The Albigenses had a staunch
faith in the "Realities of the Spiritual World." But by reason of that
staunch faith, they denied there was any reality in institutions and
ordinances of the physical world that are commonly regarded as repre-
sentative of spiritual realities. For example they denied the validity of
the Church, its Sacraments, etc. It is a common error, — this inability
to hold fast to a paradox, — it is the error of Christian Science, for
example. It is moral blindness as the consequence of some sin — an
inability to perceive that while only the Absolute is strictly "real," never-
theless all manifested things have a "relative reality." The true "secret
doctrine" unfolds a teaching altogether different from the heresy of the
Albigenses, and of others. (See The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky,
Vol. I, pp. 71, 72, edition of 1893). "Only when we shall have reached
absolute Consciousness and blended our own with it, shall we be free
from the delusions produced by Maya." "Maya, or Illusion, is an element
which enters into all finite things, for everything that exists has only a
relative, not an absolute reality . . . Nevertheless all things are
relatively real, for the cognizer is also a reflection, and the things cognised
are therefore as real to him as himself." Madame Blavatsky thus stated
the paradox of Truth. Those are fortunate whose Karma enables them
to grasp her words and to act upon them.

The Dominican Order arose out of that mission to the heretics of
southern France entrusted by the Pope to the Bishop of Osma, and his
faithful companion, in 1204. The Order became great and powerful
because it supplied a true need. It did not arise out of individual aspira-
tion or caprice, as Orders sometimes seem to originate. The Dominican
Order was a natural growth, an evolution. It came into existence through
the failure of the Cistercian Order to meet an emergency which it was
not its function to meet. It was as if a new organ were needed by the
religious body. Nature quickly developed the required organ — it was
the Dominican Order of Preachers,

The Dominican is an active Order; the Cistercian, a contemplative.
The relation of the new Order to the Cistercian is close, however — per-
haps like that of a hand to the arm.

216 THKOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

St. Bernard's career, his practical wisdom, his influence are dazzling.
I le dwarfs statesmen and politicians. But, as we read his letters, written
from Germany and other quarters of western Europe, and read his longing
for Clairvaux and the cloister life — perhaps we felt a regret that he
permitted himself to be drawn away from that cloister and enter into the
maelstrom of statecraft. What if he did possess power and influence
greater than kings and popes ! That is to be expected. Religion develops
such faculty in its disciples. The affairs of the world were, nevertheless,
not the province of the Cistercians or of St. Bernard. We must regard
as a waste of energy the power he diverted from the channels of Con-
templation for straightening the crooked courses of earth; because, by
broadening those channels, he could have given to the more powerful
forces of the spiritual world more untrammeled access to earth. What he
did was to give his own illumined energy — it was great and splendid —
to the tangled skein of statecraft. W'hat he might have done was lay
another cable from earth to heaven. It is not surprising, therefore, that
St. Bernard's efforts among the Albigenses had a very impermanent result.
The heresy was powerful and dangerous in his day, sixty years before
Dominic began to combat it. In 1145, Bernard went south to stay the
tide of evil in those southern provinces. The conditions he found are
quoted from him by many historians. "The churches are deserted, the
basilicas without worshippers, the people without priests, the priests
exposed to contempt, and Christians without Christ ! They strip our
temples as bare as synagogues, they rob our sacraments of all that is
sacred, they deprive our solemn days of thejr august solemnity ! Men die
in their sins ; and their souls alas ! pass from this life to the dread tribunal
of God, without having been reconciled by the sacrament of penance,
or fortified by holy communion."* In some places that Bernard visited
a temporary enthusiasm was shown ; in others, he was not even listened
to. The permanent result of his mission was nil. Fifty years after his
death the Pope called upon the Abbot of Citeaux to undertake a mission
in Provence to these same heretics. The Bishop of Osma's visit to Rome
coincided with that action of the Pope ; he, too, was told to convert the
heretics of Provence. In order to work in co-operation with the Cister-
cian Abbot, the Bishop with Dominic went from Rome to Citeaux, and
left Citeaux in 1205 for the field of their labour.

The decade from 1205 to 1216 is the period of formation of the
Order which constituted itself formally at the beginning of 1216, and
received official approval and authority from Rome in December, 1216.
The characteristic features of the Dominican Order were moulded by
the pressure of events in the heretical provinces of southern France.

The Abbot of Citeaux was the ranking chief of the mission, and the
Bishop of Osma was subordinate. The Bishop returned to Spain in 1207
to solicit money for the mission, leaving Dominic in France. The Bishop
died that same year. Dominic was thus left to work alone upon the

* Ratisbonne, Life of St. Bernard, p. 330.

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS 217

situation, practically as leader, for, from the beginning, the Bishop and
Dominic had shown themselves the positive and constructive agents among
the missioners.

Let us now consider the characteristics of St. Dominic's Order and
the events that moulded it. First of all, it is a preaching Order — it is
the Order of Friars Preachers. That function distinguishes it sharply
from the Orders so far studied. Their aim is the same as the Dominican,
namely, the salvation of souls. But the older Orders are contemplative.
Their method is, through prayer, meditation and contemplation (and
their accessories, manual labour, etc.) to advance the individual soul
along the road to Reality, and also, through the prayers and meditations
of the individual monks and of the community, to accumulate a spiritual
force available for the salvation of others who, themselves, may or may
not be praying. The Dominican method was devised to meet the case
of misbelievers who needed their fallacies exposed by the logic of preach-
ing. The new Order is a splendid example of a leader meeting adversaries
on their own ground and vanquishing them by their own weapons. The
heresy had spread widely because of great elasticity in the matter of
preaching. While the heretics kept a form of hierarchical organization
with their own bishops, etc., their laymen were sent out to do a kind of
Salvation Army work, corresponding to our modern street corner preach-
ing ; these lay preachers thus carried the doctrine to those who would not
take the trouble to go to the doctrine. They were successful. St.
Bernard, in his effort to check the tide of heretical progress, had written
to the people of Toulouse a warning against these itinerants. His letter
reads thus : "I repeat to you my earnest recommendations never to receive
amongst you any preacher who has not received a mission from the Holy
See (Rome) or the approbation of your Bishop. These foreign preachers
bear the appearance of piety, but they possess not its spirit. They conceal
their poison under the appearance of sweetness; and they have the art
to wrap up their profane novelties in divine language. Distrust these
persons as men who would poison you." Dominic opposed to these foot-
loose preachers, unhampered by parish and diocesan ties, an association
of preachers equally unhampered, men who need not be priests, "free
from any parochial ministry, exempted from the authority of the Bishop,
and devoting themselves solely to preaching wherever need arose."
Dominic's association of Preachers resulted from his quick perception of
conditions and events. A wave of censure had been the only response
to the Abbot of Citeaux when he entered upon the mission. The Abbot
and his companions were journeying with horses. The Pharisaical here-
tics at once condemned them : "See the ministers of a God who went only
on foot, riding; the wealthy missionaries of a God who was poor; the
envoys of a God Who was humble and despised, loaded with honours."
Dominic at once proceeded to undermine that condemnation by persuading
the Abbot to abandon his cumbrous impedimenta, and to trust the issue
of the campaign to the foot soldiers.

15

218 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

A second characteristic is : the Dominicans are intellectual. As he
had met the Albigenses with their own weapons on the ground of morality
and teaching, so Dominic again by clear and logical thought opposed the
Albigenses where they were most complacent and vain. It was said
that the heretics had apprehended a distorted form of occult truth.
Pluming themselves upon their superior knowledge and wisdom, they
looked with scorn upon those who were merely orthodox and exoteric.
Popular preaching had spread the heresy among the lower classes.
Pseudo-occultism would seem to have won the upper class. Many of
the most affluent of the nobles were among the misbelievers. Dominic
arranged, at several of the noble castles, a debate with his opponents.
A subject was chosen, preparation made, books and authorities marshalled
— finally the arguments themselves began in the presence of the count
or knight and a large audience. Some of these debates lasted a week.

These two characteristics — intellectual acumen and evangelical zeal
(like Wesley's, for example) for the salvation of souls, are not always
to be looked for in combination in every Dominican. But if we take as
examples two typical Dominican Saints, Thomas Aquinas and Catherine
of Siena, the foregoing would seem a fair analysis. Dominican zeal for
logic, for a clear presentation of truth reached its climax in the scholar
who arranged in an orderly fashion all the tenets of theology, their con-
sequences and derivatives. And where is more evangelical zeal to be
found than in St. Catherine who accompanied criminals to the place of
execution, to win from them a moment of repentance !

The organization of the Order, up to the securing of official appro-
bation, is marked by a naturalness of growth that again makes its
existence seem inevitable. The first step was taken in 1206. A convent
for women was started that year. In 1215 a centre was found for the
men. The centre for the women was given in appreciation of the mis-
sioners' work. The donor was the orthodox Bishop of Toulouse. The
missioners had greatly relieved the distress caused to the Bishop by the
swarms of heretics in his diocese. Prouille (the name of the Church
donated by the Bishop) was, at the start, not a convent. It was a haven
for women of the better class who had abjured their errors, but who
needed instruction in the right way. Gradually it became a convent.
Dominic, though an active preacher, never erred in undervaluing the
contemplative way of life, and he incorporated into his practice and his
ideal all of the strictly cloistered observances that it was possible for him
to carry out. Nine ladies went into residence in the first house built
by Dominic adjacent to the church of Prouille.

The Preachers themselves, the Friars Preachers, organized them-
selves formally in 1216. They were seventeen in number. Long
preliminary work had of course been done before that formal step
became possible. The same Bishop (Toulouse) who made over Prouille
for the women, established Dominic, sometime before 1214, as chaplain
of the church at Fanjeaux. This gave to the men a centre of their own

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS 219

for worship. A residential centre was acquired for the Preachers in
1215 by the accession to their number of a wealthy young man of
Toulouse ; he made over his patrimony, including a house, to Dominic.
In 1215 the Bishop gave official recognition to the Preachers in his own
diocese. Dominic, however, (wisely, as the sequence of events proved)
did not wish the work of evangelization and its fruits to be at the mercy
of a single Bishop. He was seeking the approval of Rome itself. The
time seemed propitious, for the Pope had just called together a General
Council one object of which should be a consideration of ways and
means for improving morals, and for correcting heresy. Dominic decided
to go to Rome, to declare the results of the ten years of preaching in
Provence, and to obtain, he hoped, in recognition of that labour, a formal
sanction for the Preachers.

But there were difficulties in the way he had not foreseen. From
the year 1100 onward for a century, Religious Orders were being every-
where established. In this present series of articles, only the great Orders
are studied. Smaller Orders made valuable contributions to civilization
and to religious life ; but in most cases they are branches growing out
from a parent stem — and in some cases the branch is the result of per-
sonal idiosyncrasy. The note of personality was so strong and
dangerous in the many Rules submitted by would-be Founders to
the authorities at Rome, that this General Council at Rome to which
Dominic went in great hope, decreed that no new Orders should be
established. "For fear," the decree proceeds, "lest an exaggerated diver-
sity of religious Rules should produce grievous confusion in the Church,
we forbid that anyone whosoever shall henceforth introduce any fresh
ones. He who desires to embrace the religious life may adopt one of
the Rules which have already been approved. In the same way, whoso-
ever shall wish to found a new monastic house shall make use of the
Rule and the institutions of one of the recognized Orders." It was in
vain that Dominic represented to this Council the self-sacrifice and sound
sense of the Preachers. The Council ended its session without granting
the sanction he desired, and, at the beginning of 1216, he had to return
disappointed to his brethren in southern France. During that period of
waiting in Rome, there occurred the incident that Fra Angelico has com-
memorated in painting, — the meeting of Dominic and Francis of Assisi.
The story will be told in connection with St. Francis.

A legend relates that the Pope, very favorably impressed with
Dominic, but unwilling to act against the decree of the Council, bade
him go home and choose one of the old Rules for the proposed new
Order of Preachers. This is what actually happened, though whether in
the manner the legend narrates, some may doubt. The brothers assembled
with Dominic. They were seventeen in all. It is easy to follow in
imagination the deliberations of the seventeen brothers, to enter into
their perplexity, to grope with them for a way out of the cul-de-sac of
the decree. How simply does the inspiration come ! It suddenly occurs

220 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

to Canon Dominic that his little company has but to adopt the Rule which
he himself as Canon of Osma had already observed, namely, the indefinite,
elastic Rule of St. Augustine, (the Canon's Rule). With that Rule
adopted, their difficulties end, for they find themselves within the bounds
mentioned in the decree of the Council. And, at the same time, that
Rule is so general and elastic that it does not prohibit the special work
engaged in by what is really a new Religious Order — an Order of Mendi-
cant Preachers. Dominic went again to Rome, and in December 1216,
he obtained the coveted sanction.

It is custom and courtesy that give to certain writings of St.
Augustine the name "Rule." We have already said that as Bishop
of Hippo, Augustine maintained a community life with his canons.
He has described their mode of life in two sermons. These sermons
and certain letters and treatises on the monastic life contain the general
principles of monasticism. It was the flexibility of these principles,
their adaptability to various groups of people, that made this "Rule
of St. Augustine" so suitable for Canons, and so popular with founders
of Orders in the 12th and 13th centuries. It was this flexibility that
made possible St. Dominic's Order. He and his companions could
continue their work as Preachers and Mendicant Friars, by giving a
general adherence to the general recommendations of Augustine.

Five years later Dominic died — in 1221, at his prime. These five
years were very busy ones. It was the period of rooting the Order
in the soil of Italy, Spain, England, Northern France, and the countries
to the East. That work of propagation involved visits from the Father
Fornder to the new centres established by his sons — journeys to many
great centres.

Dominic's mature life thus forms two easy divisions. Passing
over the years of preparation (to 1194) and the period of apprenticeship
at the Cathedral, his life work begins in 1205 (he was then 35) with
the mission to Provence. During eleven years he worked at a seed
bed, forming the Order of Preachers. During five years more he
transplanted his seedlings into the open.

The long sojourn in Provence terminated with the official estab-
lishment of the Preachers. It must not be inferred from what has been
said of Dominic's energy and success with the Albigenses, that the
heresy had been suppressed. He was energetic, prayerful and success-
ful, but his success lay in demonstrating that the field was white and
ripe for preaching rather than in converting hosts. We are following
in this article the rise of the Dominican Order. We consider facts as
they relate to that and not to the Albigensian sects. It must be remem-
bered that those sects had been in existence much more than a century ;
that they were not confined to some country districts in the south of
France, but were wide-spread, in cities, in Spain, Italy, Switzerland,
Austria. From the view point of true success, Dominic must certainly
be regarded as a great leader from the fact that in the course of

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS 221

eleven years he gathered around him seventeen companions (some of
them converts from the sectarians) willing to take the vows of poverty,
chastity and obedience, and to devote their lives, under his direction, to
evangelical work. Exteriorly, as the world counts success, there was
not much to be placed to Dominic's credit. The mass of misbelievers
were not reached by his handful of Preachers. In 1208, following the
murder by the heretics of Toulouse of one of the Cistercian monks
whom the Pope had commissioned for the work, the Pope called upon
the King of France to suppress the sectarians and rebels. Simon de
Montfort (father of the Simon noted in English History) became chief
of the Expedition, and in many conflicts broke the hostile forces. But
there were several recurrences of the rebellion, and Montfort was killed
in one of these, in 1218. Eventually those southern earldoms and prov-
inces were more closely attached to the northern Kingdom of France.
But the heresies persisted through another century.

Dominic had no delusions in regard to his accomplishments among
the heretics. He saw no possibility, by continuing to preach among
them, of clearing up the situation. On the other hand, he saw that
his company of Preachers could become a very effective instrument
for religion. He decided therefore to extend it beyond parochial and
provincial limits. Accordingly, in 1217, after his return from obtaining
the Roman sanction, he assembled with his brothers, won their sym-
pathy with his views, and sent them off into new fields and new labours.
Seven went to Paris, four into Spain, four remained at Prouille and
Toulouse to guide the original foundations, Dominic himself went to
Rome.

Thenceforward, for five years, the history of the Order is a rapid
increase of members and centres. When Dominic died, in 1221, sixty
monastic houses had been established with a membership of about five
hundred men and one hundred nuns. The largest of these houses were
at the university centres, Paris, Bologna, Palencia (the town in Spain
where Dominic had studied) and, later, Oxford.

The university towns were chosen by preference. Like Ignatius
Loyola, Dominic saw that learning is a valuable instrument for com-
batting distorted truth and its moral consequences. His ideals and aims
for his Order and individual members have much in common with the
more modern Jesuit Order. Indeed, in the world today, the Dominican
and Jesuit Orders are often mentioned (in contrast with contemplative
Orders) as those which attract "men of parts." No small portion of
Dominic's greatness is the wisdom with which he provided for the
various needs of individual members and also for the varied classes of
members in the Order. First of all he drew a clear line between the
duties and mode of life of the monks and the nuns. The convents were
to stand for the purely contemplative side of the religious life. The
nuns, therefore, had no connection, or practically none, with the outside
world. At Prouille, and later convents which Dominic founded or re-

222 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

formed upon the model of Prouille, the nuns were forbidden to leave the
cloister, they might talk with members of their family only behind a grat-
ing, there were no visitors except those few officials (members of the
Order) who directed the affairs of the convent, and these official visitors
transacted the necessary duties (spiritual and temporal) behind a grating.
Here is part of a letter from Dominic to a new convent at Madrid: "My
desire is that in cloistered places — that is the refectory, the dormitory, and
the oratory — silence shall be kept, and that in everything besides the Rule
shall be observed. Let no one leave the convent ; let no one enter it
unless it be the bishop and the other superiors who come to preach or to
visit it canonically." Again, there is this direction : "No sister shall
leave the house where she has made her profession, unless she is for
some necessary purpose transferred from it to another convent of the
same Order." Thus, the daily life of Dominican nuns was a faithful
carrying out of the old Benedictine provisions, the Divine Office at the
"Hours," private prayers and reading, and manual work of spinning,
weaving, etc. The nuns, by their labour could not, however, provide
their own maintenance, and, as they had no contact with the world, they
could not beg it ; Dominic's habit was to transfer to the convents, for
their upkeep, gifts of property etc., which were made to him — or to the
monasteries. He wished to preserve the spirit of poverty and mendi-
cancy, and was unwilling to retain such gifts for the Preachers who
went out into the world and could beg.

The men of the Order — monks, friars, or Preachers as we may
prefer to call them — represent the "active" side of the religious life. No
reader of the QUARTERLY is likely to misinterpret the word "active"
as does Mr. Lea, the scholar and historian quoted earlier. Commenting
upon the improvement Dominic made in the older forms of monasticism,
Mr. Lea writes: "It was not for them (Dominicans) to practise the
strenuous idleness of conventual life, in a ceaseless round of barren
liturgies." That is a great misunderstanding of Dominic's feeling. Dom-
inic made ceaseless efforts to combine with the new duty of preaching the
older duties of monastery life. His early associates testify that he
attended Divine Office with them, passing from one side of the choir to
the other, "exhorting them to sing with energy and devotion." He
planned for the "Night Offices" just as St. Bernard had done: "As soon
as they wake and rise the friars shall together recite the matins of the
Blessed Virgin according to the season, and then repair to the choir."
With all this strict planning, Dominic retained that fundamental elastic-
ity which we have seen is characteristic of the Canon's Rule. He pro-
vided for individual needs: "Those suited to the office of preaching (the
most important in the Order or rather in the Church of God) shall be
employed in no other work. They are to be devoted to reading and study
rather than to the singing of responses and anthems." This mental flexi-
bility of Dominic's was exhibited in an amazing manner at the first
general meeting of the brethren after the membership had greatly

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS 223

increased. He foresaw how later adherents would be apt to follow the
Rule in a literal and mechanical way ; rather than countenance such
idolatry of the Rule, Dominic declared "he would go to every cloister
and hack them (the Rules) to pieces with his knife." That is indeed a
remarkable example of detachment and impersonality!

There is a passage in one of the early records which describes
Dominic at work with his books. That passage shows what St. Dom-
inic meant by study and why, for the sake of such study, he was willing
to dispense his friars from choir duties. In fact such study is but
another form of prayer; it accounts for the power of their preaching.
This comment upon Dominic recalls something similar we have heard or
read about St. Thomas Aquinas — how he studied at the foot of his
crucifix, talking with his crucifix. It makes St. Thomas's place in the
Order seem natural and inevitable. The old Chronicle states : "He never
entered any house where hospitality was given him without first saying a
prayer in the church, if there was one in the place. When the meal was
ended he retired to a chamber where he read the Gospel of St. Matthew
or the Epistle of St. Paul, which he always carried about with him. He
would sit down, open his book, cross himself, and then begin to read
attentively. But presently he became carried away by the Divine Word.
From his gestures it seemed as though he were speaking with some one ;
he appeared to listen, to dispute, to argue ; at times he smiled or wept ; he
gazed straight before him, then lowered his eyes, muttered to himself
and beat upon his breast. He passed incessantly from reading to prayer
and from meditation to contemplation. From time to time he would
press his lips lovingly to his book as though thanking it for his happi-
ness, or bury his face in his hands or his hood and sink still deeper
into his holy ecstasy."

Dominic died in 1221, just at his prime, full of plans for further
evangelical work. His last years were very happy, free from the dis-
tress that so troubled his great contemporary of Assisi. He died,
seeing his Order a useful and effective organization, that had not yet
begun to depart from his ideals for it. That period of decay started
perhaps shortly after his death, in 1227, when the Pope made the Dom-
inicans of Tuscany responsible for the work of Inquisition against here-
tics. The Pope found the Dominicans faithful and effective agents, and
gradually made them Inquisitors in all the European Kingdoms.

SPENCER MONTAGUE.

It is easy to make great sacrifices ivhen God does not ask them, but
to give up our own will in each detail of life is something far harder. — H.
Bowman.

WHY I JOINED THE
THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

_ _. April 30, 1917.

DEAR KATHERINE:

THE recent correspondence between us, wholly earnest and
wholly honest on the side of each, has been yet one more exempli-
fication of the law as stated by St. Paul: "All things work
together for good to those that love God, who are all called
according to his purpose."

The true believer in God cannot regard any page, paragraph, line,
word or jot of his life writing as without significance, or bereft of an
ultimate outworking for good. The meanings are not always made
manifest at once nor in full, but there is a central and unbroken mean-
ing from the beginning to the culmination.

The fact that a certain silence fell between us as to the things of
the soul was not necessarily (as you have seemed to think) indicative on
my part of any "loss of experience," or any spiritual lapse ; nor had you
any right (I say this reverently to you as my one-time teacher) to
conclude definitely concerning the life of my soul, when you had no posi-
tive facts or full knowledge. Acceptance, not judgment, is the part of
really scientific wisdom. Neither you nor I have the vision of omni-
science, and therefore for us is spoken the law, "Judge not." When
the time was ripe the silence was broken ; and then my words, which
broke the silence, conveyed to you that which did not conform to your
personal religious convictions, and this led on your part to an earnest
remonstrance against what seemed to you to be sin, or spiritual retro-
gression, in me.

Your remonstrance, coming when and as it did, acted upon my
thoughts as a precipitant, and helped me to analyze and come to a clear
understanding of my own inward state. I went to the bottom, so to
speak, and brought up all my former credos for examination. Therefore
I say the whole episode between you and me has been but part of the
life chapter, and is not to be disregarded nor regretted, but viewed
calmly and studiously and trustfully.

I am now led to review, as clearly as possible, the history of my
life in those things which we include under the term "religious exper-
ience." Such review will be of no permanent value nor interest to any
save yourself and a few of the nearest friends with whom I hold in
common a fundamental belief in God as the Creator of the universe.

In view of our late correspondence in which you state your doubt
as to my ever having been converted, or ever having known the Christ,
I owe you this courtesy in things spiritual, the courtesy of my soul nar-
rative so far as I can tell it; and, to go deeper yet, owe to you this

WHY I JOINED THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 225

story for the reason that you were for very long my revered teacher as
I pursued the way that leads to everlasting life. You teach me still, for
the power of a truly illumined soul never dies.

I cannot remember when a certain consciousness of God was not
mine, and my memory runs back very clearly to some time before my
sixth year. There was always within me a certain instinctive readiness
to pray ; not so much formal petition as that look toward God which may
be compared to the glances which a little child continually turns toward
the father near whom it may be walking or playing. I believe I was
born His child, a naughty one very often, but always conscious of my
Parentage.

That consciousness of God flashed out in hours of fear, tenderness
and in contemplation of Nature. If I were "afraid in the dark," or in a
storm, or in an empty room, or of losing my mother, my baby soul always
turned to God in this upward glance which is perhaps truest prayer.
When this same baby soul was given a gift or a caress, the reaction
always was a swelling desire and resolution to be "good," rising with such
emotion as to cause genuine pain. Everything in Nature was dearer to
that little child than anything else in the outward world. Born and
reared in a large city, she worshipped before the curb-grown dandelion,
the one far star beyond the city roof, the narrow glimpses of sky, the
smell of rain-wet air. Mother, for very peace's sake, often yielded to
my passionate clamors and took me by boat or car to the green fields
and riverside, mourning because I loved Mother Earth so well that I
could never forego direct contact, and had to be led home a very untidy
child. She did not know what I then felt, later knew, and now more
clearly understand — an understanding that is to deepen — that the dande-
lion has a livingness which my livingness greeted, the wind has a voice
and a being, the stars were other than just stars, the rain something more
than mere water. Everything in Nature was precious and alive, and I
could not not-believe in a Life all around me, although I could not see it
with my eye of flesh. This communion with Nature has grown with my
growth, and if it be "pantheism," with which you have charged me (a
doctrine I know only by its word-derivation, by sporadic literary allu-
sions, and by your mention of it in our correspondence), then I was
born pantheist, and give reverent thanks for that which has been one of
the richest phases of my life on earth !

So much for the child's natural religion, or better her religious
nature.

My mother was an Episcopalian, a communicant of the Church of
England ; and through sermons, from the prayer book, from such writers
as Milton, from a study of the Bible that plunged an immature mind into
subjects too high and deep, I gathered beliefs in a devil and all his angels,
an angry and insulted God, a Savior who must needs be crucified for my
sins (though I could not intelligently understand what 7 personally and

226 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

individually had to do with things that happened before I was born!) ; of
a hell where people were tortured forever. Whenever I saw I was in
danger, I speedily tried to square accounts with the Most High and it
was a relief, when the danger was over, to settle down again into natural
habits of the mind and heart. I promised under fear to "be good."

I was at times "a good girl," and at other times "a bad girl," but
now from the perspective afforded by over fifty years, I know that deep
within myself (unbroken from the beginning) was that which it is
difficult to frame in words, but impossible not clearly to perceive as a
consciousness of God and His Christ. The Methodist Church calls this
"conviction:" well, then, I was "convinced" of God; has called it "hunger
for God :" well, then, I was hungry and also feeding on the eternal bread,
for had I not been so feeding, that unsatisfied hunger in me must have
resulted in the starvation of that me which hungered. The Bible calls
that consciousness of God — "the light which lighteth every man that
cometh into the world :" well, then, that "light" has burned in me always,
and through a life of strange vicissitudes, temporal and spiritual, I have
always been conscious of its presence.

I know that my history is not unlike any other history of this
nature, save as one face is unlike every other face, and so all faces are
unlike ; yet so great is our calling and election that each individual's
history counts eternally.

I came along through the first seven and the second seven years of
my life, as I suppose all girls do, dreaming dreams. Through all dreams
and fears ran this deep urging and longing to be "good." Only one type
of friend or companion ever deeply satisfied me, namely, an individual
with a soul purpose, a central earnestness of some kind. I could romp
and laugh with the wildest ; but a strain of music, the breath of a flower,
a hint of earnestness in conversation, and that central hunger within me
was all attention.

It became time for my confirmation in the Church of England. A
deep sense of solemnity was all mixed up with pride in the flowing veil
and other outward novelties of the occasion. Somehow I gathered the
idea that when the Bishop's hands were laid upon my head, something in
me would change and after that I should have no trouble in being as
"good" as possible. To my dismay, while kneeling at the altar, I dis-
covered that the Bishop had blessed me and passed on while I was
anxiously peeking around to see if a blue-eyed boy in the choir had
noticed my beautiful veil! My fourteen-year-old mind was perplexed
that so terrible a thing could happen, and I nearly came to the conclu-
sion that I was not one of the elect. I transferred my hope for escape
from inherent naughtiness to the hour of my first communion, and re-
call very vividly the horror with which I awakened soon afterward to
the fact that I was the same girl that I had been before. Discouraged
and dismayed, I nevertheless followed the light, or rather it wooed me
by its Holy Shining.

WHY I JOINED THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 227

When I was about eighteen years old I heard a sermon that colored
all the subsequent current of my life. The preacher was a Methodist,
one of the last exponents of that fervent Wesleyan spirit that resembled
the spirit of the ancient prophets. He was a man of culture and of deep
vision. He avoided the easy religious verbiage that refers lightly to
things holy and tremendous. As I listened to his sermon I knew that
I was hearing of something vital, as I had never heard of it before, and
my whole being said, "This is what I have been looking for."

At the close of the sermon he asked if there were any in the house
who desired to know more of this religion and who wished the prayer of
God's people. If there were such, would they stand up? This was the
first time I had ever been in any but an Episcopal Church, and the whole
thing was against my natural inclinations. Shy, intensely self-conscious,
afraid of publicity, sick with inward trembling, yet there seemed for me
no other honest response to the honest appeal than to stand on my feet.
No one else stood.

Later that day some one who knew what I had done assured me
that I had misunderstood the preacher ; that I was a Christian because I
had been confirmed; that I was simply "muddled," and that she had a
book at home that would straighten me out and comfort me. The book
was Hannah Whitall Smith's Christian's Secret of a Happy Life. I read
it and was more wretched than ever before, because Hannah Smith
pointed out very clearly that for which I was looking, the secret of being
"a good girl," the secret of a God-obeying life. I wanted to be and I
felt that all people ought to be as holy as St. Paul. By that act of
standing in the church I was classed by observers either as "convicted"
or "converted." I know now that neither of these terms covered the case:
I was simply doing what I had always been doing, feeling after God.
Could I only then have understood that from the beginning He had been
in my soul — with my soul — why, I dare now to state the wider truth! —
WAS HIMSELF MY REAL SELF, how I might have grown in grace and in
the knowledge of God! Yet even as I write this last sentence I am
recalled by knowledge of the law forever operative: "All things work
together for good to them that love God, who are the called according
to His purpose." I was led in the way that was the Way for me.

In all these events I was in the path of evolution. For some part
in that evolutionary progress and Divine purpose, I was led in the way in
which I was led, and do not now regret any of the way.

One only of all the sermons I heard this saint preach can I recall,
and of that only the central theme; and now, at the age of fifty-five,
that burning message flashes clear: "The Kingdom of God is within
you. The Word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thine heart."
Did I know the meaning ? No, but the truth the preacher proclaimed was
as a seed dropped in good soil to germinate when its own season was
ripe, and not before. He quoted David, and I can still hear the bigness
of his voice vibrant with the truth which it carried. "Though I make

228 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

my bed in hell, Thou art there." Did I know the meaning? No; but I
felt the truth, and feeling was to grow to certain knowledge. Dimly
I used to reason this way: since God abides in "heaven" and equally
abides in "hell," how then can one be different from the other or less
good for man than the other? My thinking was as blind as the
movements of a blind kitten that moves its head about feeling for a
somewhere. Its going, or movement is a content of somewhere to
go. So I felt the oneness of God and sensed His permeation of the
all which He has created out from Himself. I dared not yet disbelieve
in the hell of theology, for I felt there must be some means of dis-
position of the naughty ones. I felt the incompleteness of its teach-
ings but had no better teaching. I was always sure the Sinners would
come home to heaven if they could only understand, and I wanted to
believe that some day they would understand. Now I am sure of this !

A certain urge within me, a certain certainty about God and His
Christ, opened my lips in public so that I became by turn Sunday School
teacher, class and prayer-meeting leader. I suffered fearfully from
nervous tremors whenever I spoke or taught; but I rarely could
refuse an opportunity to "say so," lest I be counted as not "on the
Lord's side." I wanted to do this work — I never could refrain ; yet
I was never perfectly sure of the singleness of my own motives.

My whole religious life was one of ups and downs. Some said I
was vacillating, others said I was moody. There were no doubt these
qualities present; but there were also others. I always had a hungry
mind. Sometimes a flash of truth would gleam across my mind, and
after it my spirit would inevitably follow. Great conflict there always
was, caused, as I now know, by the doctrines I so earnestly tried to under-
stand and accept. Some of these doctrines were: the inherent sin-
fulness of man ; eternal punishment ; the vicarious atonement ; the gift
of the Holy Ghost, called by many Methodists "the second blessing." I
wondered reverently about the resurrection of the body and rested my
doubts on a belief that He who had performed miracles on earth, no
doubt could re-assemble the dissipated parts of my body and some-
how join thereto my soul. Theology did not scientifically or satisfac-
torily bridge the gaps for me.

In revival meeting when I was told that the conversion and
therefore the salvation of individuals depended on me and that therefore
I must "go after souls," I was torn between my desire to do right, with a
deep repugnance at any attempt to unveil the secret retirement of another's
soul, and a feeling I could not explain — that such methods were somehow
unwise. I used to argue to myself in this way: "If the Almighty God
made Mary Jones's chance of heaven rest on my obedience to Preacher
Smith's call to me on some particular evening to 'go after' Mary's soul,
then somehow God was not so Almighty as I felt Him to be and as He
should be! Moreover, if any onJs ULTIMATE salvation depended on my
poor prayers and my "love for souls," why on earth was it that I could

WHY I JOINED THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 229

NOT make myself pray all night long and wrestle that soul into heaven?
Why should my weariness or my human indifference condemn another
to eternal death ? I understand better now !

So the vicious circle of unreasonable doctrines held up before a
reasonable mind kept me blundering along, stumbling, now swiftly and
now with lagging steps, after "holiness."

It would be interesting (to me) to go exhaustively into the psychology
of all those years. Suffice it to say that all the while there lived within
me that central Light so that whenever a crisis came in outward events,
the Light blazed up and my soul somehow saw and followed. Was I
in need ? I felt that God would provide, and He never failed. Was I
in danger? I felt sure of His care here and hereafter. I got hold of
the truth that "there shall no harm befall thy dwelling place," and that
my dwelling place was in the eternal God.

When the supreme love of my life came to me it came in such guise
as to help me see yet more clearly that light within. When my husband
and always lover passed on, I received my first absolute knowledge within
myself that life is continuous and that the spirit leaves the body with
all its functions unimpaired. Nevertheless my heart knew its Gethsemane
of human desolation and perhaps because there was no other way, a
vision was granted me and I saw with or despite the eyes of flesh my
beloved and The Beloved, heard a spoken promise of future care, and no
yawning mouth of hell nor any radiant angel can make me unsee Those
whom I saw, nor forget or disbelieve in their message of love. And they
have kept the word that was spoken to me that June day, 1905.

I may say here that I am no spiritualist and no seer of visions. This
one vision was mine in my hour of need as supremely and as really as
was the vision granted to Saint Paul.

After my husband "went away" I desired more than ever to purify
life and spirit and more than ever I sought, as I had so often sought
before, for the definite gift of the Holy Ghost, the baptism by fire such
as came at Pentecost, "the second blessing." I was sure that unless such
sanctifying by fire were mine I could not live the life which I believed
the Bible calls upon men to live: a perfectly unselfish, pure life; a life
of spiritual power; a life of faith as far as temporal needs are concerned ;
a life of prayer and meditation and service. Christ said : "Be ye perfect
as your Father in Heaven is perfect." / have never known any better
than to believe that He meant what He said, but I thought that He spoke
that word to every one who should read it or hear it. He also said,
"Preach the Gospel to every creature." I was sure that He spoke that
word to me. The secret, then, of attaining this life to which He called
me seemed to be the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I many times before
had sought this baptism. Certain leaders had assured me that if I
"believed" I should "receive." I went so far in my confidence in those
leaders as to affirm "on faith" that I had entered into such an experience ;
but each time followed the discovery that I still remained normally human.

230 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

However, once more I sought ; and I made a bargain with my God, saying
in effect: "If Thou wilt grant me the gift of the Holy Ghost, I will preach
the Gospel while I live." I was as honest when I said those words as I
was when I kissed the lips of my dying husband in good-by.

A great peace fell upon my soul. Somewhere I had heard this : "Act
as if I were and thou shalt know that I am." So I went about my days,
holding my mind hi the attitude of belief that I had received the Holy
Ghost as the answer to my belief; therefore I must preach the Gospel
and live wholly by faith. I gave up an excellent position and began to
follow my husband's evangelistic methods of work. Conscientiously from
day to day I followed what seemed to be the Spirit's voice, and the leading
took me into enough preaching to show me that I was no preacher — or
at least to show me that if I ever were to preach worthily and helpfully,
I needed a new and full course of preparation. Yet I would not give
up. I faithfully followed from day to day what seemed to me to be the
directing voice of the Spirit, and the earthly path led me into the country
in the State of Tennessee and there so far as preaching the Gospel was
concerned, I was as one shut up in the belly of the whale.

It was at this time that you secured the editorial position for me in
England and I was sure that the Spirit was leading me to my goal, for
the journal on whose staff I was to serve was a holiness organ and I
was to have the privilege of a course of Bible training under gifted
leaders. A few days before I was to sail, as you know, I was carried on
a stretcher to the hospital and lay there for weeks helpless and suffering.
I had sold my home ; and when I was able to leave the hospital I was
without money, without strength, stripped of every human comfort. All
was gone save the inner Light that never ceased to assure me. Through
those awful days of trial it turned its concentrated rays on Paul's word :
"I know that all things work together for good to them that love God,
who are the called according to His purpose."

Shall I say that I clung to that truth, or that the truth from that
hour abode increasingly with me? Yet you have told me that you doubt
if I was ever really converted or ever really knew my Master. As well
you might tell me, who have had good eyes for fifty-five years, that I
have been blind all these years !

Following that illness I experienced everything save actual starvation ;
but always I knew Him in Whom I believed and He kept that which I
had committed unto Him.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not for one instant telling a story
of my own righteousness. Too well I know that I was and am abominably
human. I did and said and thought things which saints do not do and
say and think ; but I know now that I was, as I am still, evolving, develop-
ing, growing naturally toward that far-distant Sainthood and was never
once out of my Master's hands or out of the direct path of evolution.
True sainthood is a matter not of one life but is the crowning of many
incarnations.

WHY I JOINED THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 231

Without money or strength I was called to go to M . You

began then to doubt that I was doing right and wrote me to fight for my
spiritual life and "the keen edge of my spiritual experience." I listened
to your words because I knew you to be, as you are, God's own — peculiarly
so. But even to you I could not say that I was what I was not, and my
letters to you could not give the history of an ecstasy which I did not feel.
I was not then spending hours of each day in prayer and Bible study as
I did in E — — . I was doing the rough, hard work of a pioneer
woman on the bare plains. I was not preaching but I was learning ; getting
close to Nature in a vision of her wonders never before dreamed of. I
was enduring heat and cold, doing rough, hard work, learning the lesson
sent me by the Lord of Life. Dare any one say I was not to learn those
lessons, that because I was learning them I was a backslider or fallen
from grace? Shall one not learn all the lessons?

After being in M for a year and a half with my friend M.,

I left her and took up a claim for myself and lived there — with no near
neighbors, practically no money, and no companionship. There for the
better part of three years I lived entirely alone. Did I keep the Sabbath?
Not exactly. In a certain sense all seven days were alike. Did I pray?
Sometimes, as you define prayer; always, as I knew it in my own soul.
While there alone with the daily companionship of the majestic Rockies,
with a door-yard one hundred and fifty miles across, with a stupendous
panorama of wonder and beauty, with unbroken silence around me almost
all of twenty-four hours, I found a great change going on within. One
by one the dogmas of the Church dropped away, and I made the dis-
covery that a lot of my religion lay in or was dependent on outward
forms and fellowships. Severed from Church and Church members,
without Christian comrades, with no outward religious duties, I came at
last to look upon my naked soul, to realize what I really believed for
myself and what I was letting others believe for me. And one night I
went out under the silent stars and looking up, said, "I believe in You!"
I said it over and over again, for it seemed to me that I should die of my
soul nakedness. Everything imposed upon my thought by men and books
was stripped away. Later on I even found myself wondering: "Who and
what is this God in whom I cannot but believe?" The heavenly throne
and the bottomless hell were gone alike, and nothing was left save the
Eternal One.

It is very difficult to put the thought processes of this time into
words but I can perhaps make myself clear by some concrete statements.
The one decision to which I came was that I should never again label as
wrong any overt act the springs of which I could not know as clearly as
God can know them. If I saw a man smoke or drink, I must leave him
with his Maker, ready, of course, to do my part if the man himself opened
the way, by witnessing to him of what I believe to be better methods of
life. If a woman went to the theatre — I myself might even go; for
never having attended any worldly amusements of the kind, how should

232 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

I say what was right or wrong for me or any one else? In other words,
I awakened to the fact that much of my so-called religion was a belief
in certain sayings of others and a credulous following of certain authori-
tative doctrines. My outward life was conformed to ideals laid down
by other people. I decided to find out intelligently and for myself what
are matters of right and wrong, to live my life in my own way, to be,
as far as possible, a normal woman, acting from intelligent understanding
instead of from blind faith. I determined not to be afraid to say "I do
not know" about anything, and never to say "I believe" because some
one else — even though he were a bishop — said to me "This is so."

While visiting a friend in M just before I came to

S , she made the statement (I cannot give her exact words) to

the effect that the central being of each individual is pure spirit. I said
to her, "Do you mean to tell me that there is a place in me or a part of
me that is ivithout sin?" And as she dried the dish that was in her hand,
she said almost casually, as if all the world knew it except myself, "Why,
of course. Pure spirit is pure, is it not? At the center, you are pure
spirit !"

It seemed to me that that moment a chain that had bound my soul
as long as I could remember, was broken and cast aside, and / stood up
straight as every child of God should stand, in the conscious dignity of
my Divine inheritance — of the Divine Ego which just now bears the
name of A S .

This friend it was who put into my hands later the Dore lectures
by Judge Troward, and he showed me that I am one with the Divine and
that I may so develop my Divine Spirit as to fulfil in some life to come
that word of Christ's: "Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is
perfect."

In the past I have had moments of rapture and of ecstasy ; but never
before was it my blessed privilege to draw the satisfying soul breaths that
I drew as I took this big truth into my mind. Shortly after this I came

to S and entered upon a more normal life, as far as this world

is concerned, than in any previous years. I even went to the theatre and
experienced no sense of condemnation. That I do not attend amusements
every night in the week is due to my own choice and sense, not due to
any outside word of authority. That is to say, I have reached the place
of a more intelligent recognition of my central Self, and my hand is now
the directing lever of my life, as it should be. I try to judge no one.
i ASK THAT NO ONE JUDGE ME. I endeavor to walk by the Light within
as I see it.

Two years ago I came into very close relations with a young woman
in whom I saw a spirit at once reverent and just; a mind cultured and
clear; and I ventured now and then to put to her some leading questions.

Your letters so severely arraigning me and warning me of wrath to
come, drove me to severe self-examination; and in the suffering induced
by what you wrote, I talked with my friend who gave me answers from

her heart, answers which always threw me back, as far as accepting them
was concerned, upon my own intelligence. She told me not to be afraid
to analyze any truth and not to lean on any one. She began to talk to
me of evolution and I wondered why it was that through all the years
I had been steered so far from the evolutionary theory. She spoke to me
of the doctrine of reincarnation and I found my mind strangely ready
to take it in. She gave me books to read, urging me always never to
accept a truth that I did not see for myself. She told me, moreover, that
I would be able to put to the proof sooner or later every truth by which
my life is steered. Troward's books had prepared the way for these things
by revealing to me the truth that I am one with Him — that I am essen-
tially Divine ; that the Divine powers are unfolded in the Ego within, even
as the perfect oak tree and all its acorns are unfolded in the one small
nut. As Christ was, so shall I become, when the Ego within shall have
evolved even as did the Master's.

With another friend, who by a very different path had arrived at the
same conclusions as myself touching orthodox belief, I read the books
given me. We asked for more, discussed, thought, meditated ; and in time
each of us independently of the other, was ready to embrace the teachings
of Theosophy. We find that these teachings crown all that is past. They
belittle nothing. They illumine.

I understand now that this life of mine — this Divine Ego enshrined
within my body, has always been; that I have been evolving since the
beginning; that I have been under the guidance of great human teachers
who long ago reached that to which I attain — that I am a much older Ego
than some individuals with whom I am associated, and a much younger
Ego than others; that the events of my present life are concrete results
of past events ; that today's events create or determine the events of my
lives to come.

Theosophy bridges the gaps, illumines the dark places, changes faith
to knowledge, lends a dignity, furnishes a splendor and certainty, to life,
which I always felt life should have. Theosophy is "the wisdom of God,"
a wisdom which is to be evolved in me.

The theosophical teaching meant so much to me that when an
opportunity came to attend the Convention of The Theosophical Society
in New York City, I felt it my solemn duty to embrace that opportunity,
and I am concluding this sketch on the day following the Convention.

Full well I know that you for whom this very incomplete story is
written, and perhaps some others to whom I shall give it, will think me
led far astray. One of the cardinal teachings of Theosophy is that every
man must be permitted to hold his independent beliefs; that one must
never indulge in criticism. One of the leaders said to me yesterday, a
man who holds a responsible position in the University, "If Theosophy
does not illumine the real religion of an individual, whatever that religion
be, then that which he takes for Theosophy is something else. Theosophy
is not a creed, it is rather a light."

16

234 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

And I say unto you, honored friend, and to any one who may read
this imperfect story, that Theosophy has restored to me a faith that
threatened to go out, has given me a sweetness of spirit, a tolerance, a
clearness of vision, a patience with life, a sense of Divine justice, a hope
for all mankind, which I never had before. It has given me back my
belief in the Bible, or, rather, has illuminated a Book that had become
dulled through many misinterpretations and misconceptions. It has made
Christ real to me as never before. It has lifted up and broadened out
and immeasurably strengthened my determination to follow Him. It has
given me purpose and reason. It has shown me how I can, in time, attain
even unto that command, "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven
is perfect."

My mind, built by God, is being increasingly satisfied. My years,
now nearing three score, are to be rich and growing and splendid and I
freely say unto you, I am content, and I go forward.

A. M. S.

P. S. The foregoing was written in the warm afterglow of the
Convention of The Theosophical Society, held in New York City, last
May. Eight months of close study and clean-cut spiritual decisions
confirm all I have written — and more. Devoutly I affirm that the Master
has become and is steadily becoming more real to me; that the Bible
unfolds as I never dared dream it could unfold, in a revelation of
hitherto hidden truth and glory; that all endeavor to "be good" has a
scientific basis and an assured goal. I am more than "content": I am
profoundly and devoutly grateful and am resolved still to go forward.

A. M. S.

Write your name in kindness, love, and mercy on the hearts of those
you come in contact with year by year. — Chalmers.

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF
LEMURIA

IV

LEMURO-ATLANTEAN ASTRONOMY

IN one of the earlier chapters of this study of Lemurian and Atlantean
remains, we saw that, widely dispersed over the whole Polynesian
area which includes much of the Lost Lemuria, there are traditions

of a graded series of heavens and hells, completely corresponding
to the teaching of ancient India concerning the Lokas, or, as we may
prefer to call them, the higher and lower planes of spiritual life. And
these ancient fragments of what we must call the Lemurian Secret
Doctrine are to all intents and purposes identical, in islands separated
by wide ocean spaces of thousands of miles ; further, they have been
preserved unchanged during a period so long that immense and funda-
mental differences have developed between languages which must once
have been a common tongue: differences the nature and meaning of
which we tried to make clear in another chapter. The result we arrived
at was, that the original Lemurian tongue must have been a language
almost wholly made up of vowel sounds ; that consonants, or contacts,
had been gradually developed, through cycles of progressive materializa-
tion : and that, in view of their comparative poverty in consonants or
contacts — as compared with a rich consonant range like that of Sanskrit —
this whole group of Polynesian or Lemurian languages belong to a very
early period in the history of mankind, a period that may well be
millions of years ago. And, since it appeared that, while the different
groups of Polynesian islanders — descendants of the Lemurians — had
seemingly been separated during the long epochs when their languages
were developing in different directions, (for, had these languages come
in contact with each other, they would have been blended or blurred,
instead of showing clean-cut phonetic differences), while at the same time
they possessed identical teachings concerning the spiritual planes or
worlds, with names for them that, beneath their long and slowly developed
phonetic divergences, were identical; it seemed certain that they had all
possessed the same teaching concerning the spiritual worlds while they
were still undivided, that is, while Lemuria was a continuous continent,
not a vast, far thrown galaxy of islands and archipelagos.

If this inference be correct, two things would seem to follow from
it: First, that that period of common possession of this great spiritual
teaching was almost inconceivably remote, belonging to the time of
undivided Lemuria; and, second, that the Lemurians of that day, or
some of them, were in possession of faculties of spiritual vision which
we are accustomed to associate with the Adepts.

•35

236 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

For there is only one way to gain certain and methodical knowledge
of the spiritual worlds, ascending spiritual planes, or successive "heavens,"
whichever we may choose to call them ; and that is, by developing
successively the consciousness which corresponds to them; in fact by
being born into one ascending plane after another; by taking each of
these mansions of the Kingdom of Heaven by violence. And it is just
this successive series of spiritual attainments which is called the cycle
of adeptship, while the successive efforts of attainment, the successive
conquests of the spiritual worlds, are the great Initiations.

The conclusion from our facts would seem to be, then, that some
at least of the Lemurians were Initiates ; that the great Initiations were
a spiritual possession of these Lemurian Initiates, at a period almost
inconceivably remote ; and that the Polynesian teachings concerning the
successive heavens and hells are, in fact, memories and traditions of
the great Initiations, memories which still linger with striking uniformity
and completeness in islands thousands of miles apart, whose inhabitants
were wholly unknown to each other until modern voyagers established
a new connection between them.

Since these chapters of our Lemuro-Atlantean studies were published,
we had the good fortune to receive, through the thoughtful kindness
of Dr. Archibald Keightley, an essay by Mr. Samuel Stuart, which
strikingly corroborates these conclusions ; all the more because Mr. Stuart
is dealing with a wholly different subject, namely, astronomical cycles,
and is only indirectly concerned with the Lemuro-Atlanteans. Probably,
the best way to cover the subject will be, to quote at some length from
Mr. Stuart's valuable paper, and then to indicate, very briefly, how his
conclusions are related with our own. Mr. Stuart begins with an acute
analysis of astronomical cycles, as recorded in the works of certain ancient
nations which paid particular attention to astronomy, and he then proceeds
to examine one great cycle in particular : the cycle of 4,320,000 years,
which, in the ancient Indian system, is called the Maha Yuga, or Great
Cycle. In India, there were a number of cycles based upon the same
figures, and these were divided into dependent cycles ; for example, the
fourfold group of Yugas : Satya Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, Treta Yuga and
Kali Yuga, the last meaning literally "the Age of the Devil," the first
5,000 years of which were completed a few years ago.

Speaking of this cycle, 432 followed by ciphers, Mr. Stuart says:

"It is remarkable that what remains we possess of the Mexican
astronomy, whilst differing in their application, are yet founded upon
the very same numbers as the ancient systems of India, Egypt, and
Chaldea ; and yet these are not such as we have derived from the heavens,
and, therefore, cannot be considered as inevitable results of observation.
Niebuhr remarks that the Etrurian mode of determining time was
extremely accurate, and based on the same principles as the computation
observed by the ancient Mexicans. 'When the Spaniards first arrived
in America they found that their time, according to the Julian, was eleven

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA 237

days in advance of the Mexican time, and the Mexican year at that period,
it is said, differed only two minutes and nine seconds from the present
estimated European year. A day consisted of sixteen hours, a week of
five days, a month of twenty days, a year of eighteen months, making
360 days, to which five days or a week was added to complete the year.
At the end of every 52 years an intercalation of 12^ days was made.'1
We may here note that a day contained 86,400 seconds, and a week of
their reckoning would amount to 432,000 seconds. And if we take their
period of 52 years as corresponding to an hour, in 24 of these there will
be 1,248 years of 365 days, with a correction of 432,000 minutes to add
in order to make the same number of their solar or tropical years ; which
according to the foregoing 52 year cycle would be of 365d. 5h. 46m.
9.23076s. each. The peculiarity of this number 432,000, and a desire to
retain it in their computations, was no doubt the reason why they used
a period of 52 years, which involves a correction not composed of whole
days as we find it in the old world. To make the correction amount to
whole days, they would have used a period of 104 years with a difference
of 25 days. But let us take ten periods of 1,248 years, when the correction
becomes 4,320,000 minutes or 3,000 days ; if we then multiply all by 3,
we obtain 37,440 years of 365 days each, with 1,296,000 minutes, or 9,000
days, or 25 years of 360 days, added. It hence appears that the 25 days
of the Mexican 104 year cycle, when they are multiplied by the Eastern
360, become 25 years of the greater cycle, in which the number of minutes
added are equal to the seconds in ten circles.

"The extraordinary coincidence of the numbers employed by the
Mexicans and by the eastern nations cannot have arisen accidentally,
for in the Greek mythology there is a curious story of the year of 360
days, its division by 18, and the deriviation of the odd five days,2 which
seems very like a version of the Mexican rules. Moreover the number
432 and cyphers is the most ancient we possess, and appears to have been
known to the eastern nations from an immemorial antiquity; it is the
basis of the list of the Chaldean kings given by Berosus (third century
B. C.) and of all the cycles used in India; and as we shall further see,
is the most wonderful monument of ancient astronomical achievement
we possess. Such strange agreements in the astronomical numbers used
in the East and West, when there would appear to have been no con-
nection between the old and the new worlds prior to Columbus, is a very
strong argument in favor of the theory that there was once a time when
they were in communication with each other; or if not that, then the
Hindus, Egyptians and Mexicans must have had a common origin for
their knowledge. And it is here that the theosophical hypothesis as to
the former existence of a great continent where now rolls the Atlantic
Ocean, and which joined together the peoples of the East and the West

1 Wilson's Lost Solar System of the Ancients Discovered, II., 160, 314, 335.

2 Sir Wm. Drummond's Oedipus Judaeicus, 103.

238 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

and made their knowledge have a common resemblance, will supply the
link which is necessary to account for the latter. . . ."

After a minute and very careful criticism of the astronomical calcu-
lations of the motions of the planets, and the amounts by which these
calculations may depart from absolute accuracy, Mr. Stuart comes to
the immediate study of the cycle of 4,320,000 years, the Maha Yuga,
or Great Cycle. He believes it to be a cycle of this nature: At some
immensely remote period in the past, there was a conjunction of all
the planets (namely, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and
Neptune, with, perhaps, other planets as yet unknown to modern astro-
nomy) with the sun; all these bodies being gathered together at the same
point in the heavens ; or, let us say, close to the same fixed star in the
Zodiac. From that point, they then set forth on their circling paths, in
orbital periods of immensely varying length, from the few weeks in which
Mercury traverses his small orbit round the sun, to the centuries in
which remote Neptune makes the same circuit. After the lapse of how
many years, how many centuries, thousands, or even millions of years,
will the planets all return to the same point in the sky — the same fixed
star in the Zodiac, coming once more into general conjunction with each
other and with the sun ? The period, according to Mr. Stuart's reasoning,
is precisely the Maha Yuga of 4,320,000 years. That part of Mr. Stuart's
essay which justifies this exceedingly interesting conclusion is as follows :

"We have then to be guided by the following conditions of our
enquiry :

"(a) We are not justified in assuming that the number 4,320,000 has
been quoted otherwise than exactly, unless it shall be found impossible
to accomodate the mean motions of the planets to it without alterations
which amount to more than five or six seconds in a century ; which are
the limits of accuracy assumed for our present astronomical elements.

"(6) Since all the planets must return to the same place amongst
the stars, it follows that the period must be an exact number of sidereal
solar years without any remainder.

"(f) Because the processional motion of the equinoxes to be used
wi'.h the Maha Yuga has been definitely adopted, therefore the difference
between the sidereal and Julian years in the great cycle is also known, and
cannot be altered without changing all the conditions.

"(d) Whatever may be the number of Julian years which we have
to add to the 4,320,000 sidereal years according to the given precession,
the same should be the amount necessary to bring the planets into their
nearest approach to a general congress according to such tabular results
as we may find it best to adopt.

"(e) As the period known as the Maha Yuga appears to have been
derived by means with which we are not acquainted, it may include planets
which were unknown to us until the last century and a quarter, such as
Uranus and Neptune, and may also have dealt with others yet to be
discovered. We must therefore expect that Uranus and Neptune are

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA 239

to be included, and that we have here another reason for the extreme
length of the period ; since the more planets it includes, the longer it
must be.

"(/) We must also decide, if possible, to what age of the world the
great period more particularly belonged; because according to what has
been said in the foregoing, the mean motions of the planets may have
been different in a remote epoch in the past, from what we find them
today. As we have seen, the period in one of its varieties was quoted
by Berosus about the third century B. C. ; but according to Madame
Blavatsky the Maha Yuga and other great periods have come down to us
from Atlantean times.1 This could not have been less than four or five
million years ago.2

"These things premised, and taking the mean motion of the sun
corresponding to the tropical years as we have found it from a comparison
of Delambre and Lever rier in the foregoing, with precession for 25,920
years, we find that 4,320,000 sidereal years are equal to 4,320,074 Julian
years and 252 days; which is a difference of 27.280 days, or 74.6900
years, due to the excess of one kind of years over the other. The number
of tropical years would be 4,320,166.7500; since the sidereal period
includes 166.75 periods of the equinox.

"We then find upon trial by our best modern tables, that whereas,
the period of 4,320,000 if considered to consist of Julian or tropical
years would not be a planetary period, yet when it is dealt with as
sidereal years and the above difference of 74.6900 added, the motions of
all the planets, including Uranus and Neptune, are so nearly equal as to
bring them into positions which only differ from the point of conjunctions
by an extreme difference which is about one-fifth of the ecliptic. After
making all due allowance for the variations discussed in the preceding
notes, it therefore appears that the claim as to the Maha Yuga being a
cycle of planetary conjunctions is substantially true. And this not only
for planets which we know were discovered by the ancients, but also
including Uranus and Neptune, supposed to be quite unknown to them.

"But the quantities by which the planetary positions differ from the
mean places they ought to occupy, show that the negative quantities are
a little in excess of the positive ; indicating that their mean motions were
somewhat slower than at the present time. If the foregoing reasoning has
been correct, this means that the sun was, in the Atlantean period, rather
nearer to the body about which it revolves than at present; and conse-
quently the planetary periods were longer and their orbits dilated. And
in order to compare the result with modern data, we may (seeing they
differ but little) take an average of the precession in 100 Julian years
according to Leverrier and Newcomb; and after reducing the planetary
tropical motions per century, given by these and Dr. Hill, to sidereal

1 The Secret Doctrine, ii, 51-2; cf. Isis Unveiled, i, 239, as to late discoveries.

2 See the author's article, "The Great Year of the Ancients," in the Theosophist, Jan., 1901,
222, and Feb., 297.

240

THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

places according to the precession for 25,920 years, we find the differences
of the Maha Yuga data are in 100 years :

Neptune (per Newcomb) minus 5.481"
Uranus

Leverier

" Dr. Hill

" Newcomb

plus
plus
plus
plus

2.520
5.589
3.019
4.519

Saturn

Jupiter

Mars

Venus " " minus 1.787

Sun " " minus 5.334

Mercury " plus 4.559

"This is after adding the small quantity 2.641" to the Maha Yuga
results, which appears to be the amount by which the planetary centennial
means motions were slower some four and a half million years ago than
they are at present. We then find that, allowing all the planets to be
exactly upon the place of any given fixed star or immovable point in
the heavens at any given epoch, modern tables show that after a lapse
of 4,320,000 sidereal years, or 4,320,074 Julian years and 252 days, the
planets would differ from such a point by:

Neptune (Newcomb) plus 65.8

minus 30.2
minus 67.7
minus 36.2

minus 54.2 ( (Heliocentric longitudes only),
plus 94.0
plus 21.5
minus 54.7

Uranus

Saturn (Leverrier)

Jupiter (Dr. Hill)

Mars (Newcomb)

Sun

Venus

Mercury

"As none of the outstanding quantities differ from the average place
required by so much as a fifth part of the ecliptic, and the outstanding
errors of the tables, or unknown secular equations, may be responsible
for nearly the whole of these differences, it becomes practically certain
that the Maha Yuga is at least as correct as any of our means of comput-
ing, and therefore that it is a veritable cycle of the planetary motions —
nay, that it is so much superior to anything which we could produce, that
only within the last ten years could \ve completely verify it, and demon-
strate that its exact length has been truly given.

"Allowing for the difference of the centennial precession by the
Maha Yuga, and an average of that used by Leverrier and Newcomb
(24.152"), we then have the following centennial mean sidereal motions:

Neptune 218° 28' 16.450" and Newcomb (plus 24.152") gives it as 218° 28' 24.572"

" " 68 30 33.432

142 7 10.873

154 54 48.102

60 18 36.772

359 22 47.352

197 49 22.472

72 40 55.082

Uranus 68 30 33.311,
Saturn 142 7 13.821,
Jupiter 154 54 48.480,
Mars 60 18 38.650,
Sun 359 22 39.377,
Venus 197 49 18.043,
Mercury 72 40 57.000,

11 11

" Leverrier
" Dr. Hill

" Newcomb
11 11

ii ii

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA 241

"To the Maha Yuga results we have to add 2.641", as per foregoing,
when the outstanding differences will be found as above given.

"The average procession per century by a mean of Leverrier and
Newcomb is 1° 23' 44.065". If we calculate by the Maha Yuga results
we shall find that the following would be the heliocentric longitudes on the
completion of the cycle :

Neptune
Uranus

1°
1

37'

47

Saturn

359

38

Jupiter

Mars

359
359

15
26

Sun

0

0

Venus

2

3

Mercury

359

56

These according to sidereal places.

"The preceding positions and data are all exceedingly striking and
they agree very much more closely than could, under all the circumstances,
be expected ; while the assignable limits of error show that the last results
may be quite accurate. And even if it could be satisfactorily shown that
the future corrections to the planetary motions would be in the opposite
directions to the above outstanding differences, this would not help
objectors to the theory that the Maha Yuga is correct, out of the difficulty
very far ; for the synodic periods derivable from it would still be far more
accurate than any we possessed prior to the year 1820 — and there would
also remain the greater probability in favor of the conjunction rather
than against it. These things being so, the enquiry naturally arises —
where and when, setting aside the reference to the Atlanteans and any
other theosophic or occult explanation, did the ancients become acquainted
with the exact length of this cycle? We have seen that it would have
been impossible for western scientists of the present day to have obtained
its measure from their own data, unless put in possession of its approxi-
mate length from some external source. It thence appears that the
Maha Yuga period is strictly original, and could not have been got up
within the historical period or from western data ; and this being so, and
it being found to agree so nearly with the best, latest, and most refined
efforts of the combined intellectual strength of Europe, it follows that
the archaic scientists were in possession of our astronomical periods ages
before we, with all our boasted superiority to the ancients in such matters,
had arrived at them by slow degrees and intense labor. Moreover this
triumph of the ancients is more than complete; for though it may be
claimed that whatever the archaic astronomers may have accomplished
in reference to the bodies visible to the unassisted eye, they knew nothing
of others, yet by the preceding it appears that our own astronomers can
no longer point to their discoveries of Uranus and Neptune (which were
marvels of telescopic power and intellectual penetration) as a point of
vantage to which the scientists of a hoary antiquity could not attain.

242 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

And indeed, quite independently of the conclusions on this head derivable
from the Maha Yuga, which might be vitiated if any great alteration is
in future made in the mean motions of these two planets (but which
we may predict will consist of thirty seconds per century or multiples
thereof), it is said that one, if not both, of the most distant planets were
known to the ancient writers.1 This escaped notice until modern times,
when by reference to any hand-book on Astronomy we may see that
Uranus was discovered by aid of the first great reflecting telescope used
in England, on the 13th of March in the year 1781 ; though its existence
had been previously suspected, owing to unexplained perturbations in
the movements of Saturn.2 And similarly, the planet Neptune was dis-
covered by us through the unaccounted-for movements of Uranus, on
September 18th, 1846, when it was seen by Dr. Galle with a powerful
telescope, in the very point in the sky where the calculations of Adams
and Leverrier had indicated that it would be found.3 The difficulties
which the discoverers had to face were enormous,4 but it is said that
"both not only solved the problem, but did so with a completeness that
filled the world with astonishment and admiration, in which none more
ardently shared than those who, from their attainments, were best qualified
to appreciate the difficulties of the question."5 And every writer upon
the subject for the last sixty years has sung paeans of victory over this
celebrated performance as the crowning intellectual triumph of the present
day;6 but by the contents of the present paper it appears that the whole
had been forestalled many ages ago by those despised ancients, whom
modern Europeans have been in the habit of looking down upon as the
very impersonations of superstitious ignorance.7 . . ."

Mr. Stuart is, of course, far too careful a student to say that he has
proved his case conclusively, to the point of absolute certainty. But let
us, for the sake of clearness, accept the supposition that the case is proved
conclusively ; that the facts and deductions are entirely correct. What
results will follow?

First, that all the planets, including Uranus and Neptune, and,
perhaps, other planets still unknown to modern astronomy, do, in fact,
come into conjunction with each other and with the sun (that is, gather
together at the same point in the Zodiac, or close to the same fixed star)
at regularly recurring periods separated by the enormous space of
4,320,000 years.

Second, that this fact was the basis of the cycle called the Maha
Yuga, or Great Cycle, which lies at the foundation of the whole Indian
philosophy of world-cycles, and which is suggested by the occurrence of

1 The Secret Doctrine, i, 126, 128; ii, 512, 513. Cf. Isis Unveiled, i, 267, etc.
3 Orbs of Heaven, 127, by Prof. Mitchell.
•Mitchell's Astronomy, 217.
'Ibid, 215, 216.

* Popular Astronomy, 179, ed. 1856, by Dionysius Lardner, D.C.L. For the high attain-
ments and qualifications of Mons. Leverrier and Mr. Adams, see Orbs of Heaven, 138, et seq.
•Mitchell's Astronomy, 211 (Routledge's ed.)
1 Cf. Isis Unveiled, i, 239.

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA 243

the same figures in other ancient astronomical systems, notably the
Chaldean and aboriginal Mexican.

Third, that the fact of such a general conjunction was known to
the astronomers of an immensely remote period, presumably Atlantean or
Lemuro-Atlantean (since the Aryan, the Fifth Race, did not begin to
come into being until a much later period).

Fourth, that these Atlantean or Lemuro-Atlantean astronomers knew
of the existence and orbital periods of both Uranus and Neptune, which
modern astronomers have only quite recently discovered, by the aid of
immensely powerful telescopes combined with highly developed mathe-
matical science.

Which would involve the final conclusion that the Atlanteans or
Lemuro-Atlantean astronomers either had equally powerful telescopes
and an equal knowledge of mathematics; or that they obtained their
knowledge in other ways — by the possession of the occult powers which
would make them high Initiates. For we have been told that, to the
awakened vision of such Initiates, the most distant nebulae, separated,
perhaps, from the sun by spaces which light takes millions of years to
traverse, appear as close, as visible, as "daisies in the next field."

C.J.
(To be continued.)

We are only worth the price at which God values us. True merit
must be weighed in His scales, for it is His judgment which alone can
decide between real and counterfeit virtue. — S. John Berchmans.

ALSACE AND LORRAINE

MODERN history finds it hard to discover the true feeling of
Alsace and Lorraine only because a veil has been thrown over
their own self-expression; while all, literally all, the facts of
the case have been distorted and preverted to serve the purpose
of an unscrupulous conqueror. It must be remembered that it is not
Alsatians or Lorrainers who have made such persistent and indefatigible
claims to German origin, to German intellect, to German likeness and
spirit. It is German conquerors who have made these assertions for
them; and the world always grows to believe, or at least half believe,
what it is told often enough, and with a sufficient air of conviction. The
claims Germany has made and is vigorously making, to a right over
Alsace and Lorraine, have in large measure been believed by the world
at large, though perhaps a few people outside of France, have supposed
that some of their assumptions were rather sweeping. But in the main,
Germany's claim that Alsace-Lorraine was and is German, has been
accepted because the arguments she put forward appeared plausible
enough on the surface, and because the average man is prepared to
accept any reiterated definite statement on a subject about which he
personally has little or no direct knowledge.

The claims of Germany are false. Even a surface examination of
the facts demonstrates that Germany's so-called "right" is an assumption,
and that her whole position is untenable and a premeditated fiction.

Germany bases her claim to Alsace-Lorraine on three major
premises. First, ethnologically, Alsatians and Lorrainers are asserted to
be German peoples, descendants of German tribes. Second, Alsace and
Lorraine, it is said, had belonged by direct political liaison to Germany
since the time of Charlemagne (described as "the first German Emperor."
cf. any German encylcopedia.), and until Louis XIV "seized" them in
1679-1697 (Treaties of Nimwegen and Ryswick, respectively). This
would give Germany possession of these territories for eight or nine
centuries prior to that of France; and, therefore, in 1871, Germany only
recovered that which was legally and rightly hers. Third, Alsatians and
Lorrainers speak German, are German at heart, and, by all signs save
those advanced by a few pro-French extremists, prefer to remain German.

Emphatically, these three claims are historically false and without
foundation in fact. It will become evident that the theories, purporting
to be scientific, which German vanity has created to serve its ends, are
preposterous to an extreme. For it is vanity which has led Germany to
claim all good things as German. And it must be remembered, on this
very account, that recent generations of Germans have been brought
up to believe implicitly any and every falsification of fact which the
satisfaction of this vanity has made necessary, and it must therefore have

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 245

become almost an impossibility for the modern German at this time to
shake himself free from the resulting delusions. For no regard what-
soever has been paid by them to the facts of history ; neither to the outer
events such as treaties or wars, nor to those more subtle mental attitudes
which find expression in these events, as well as more clearly perhaps in
literature and art.

A careful investigation of the German claims regarding Alsace and
Lorraine reveals the absolute necessity of understanding the whole
historic method and treatment which Germans have applied to these
unfortunate peoples. Without a thorough comprehension of this method,
its intellectual dishonesty and consequent scientific inaccuracy, the prob-
lem cannot be solved. History cannot be a thing to conjure with. History
is the unravelling and outer expression of human character and human
thought. Back of every human activity lie the thoughts that planned and
motived it. The history of a nation or of a people differs only from
individual biography in the immensity and complexity of its life — to
which must be added that new factor of a united consciousness, which
arises wherever the hearts of a group are bound together by some spiritual
affinity. "What a man thinks, that he becomes," which is not to say
that what he imagines he thinks will he become, but rather that those
fundamental principles underlying all his thinking processes will react
determinatively on his character, and must inevitably find their realization
sooner or later in outer life.

The German interpretation of history, — equally of its own as of
other countries, — has been systematically and deliberately falsified to
such an extent that the writing of a fair and true account by a German
of any period has become an impossibility. Persistent liars distort the
truth — even its fragments, — when deliberately trying not to; and the
intellectual dishonesty of German thinking is on such a colossal scale,
that unless some special study has been directed towards the examination
not merely of German historical research, but of other branches of
German science, no real comprehension can be reached of how far-
reaching and insidious their perversions have become. American scholar-
ship in particular has lent itself (in the past willingly) to the admiration
of this German product; and it is as yet a hard lesson to learn that a
whole people, under the aegis of "exact science" and "sound scholarship,"
and quite apart from the direct influence of Prussian militarism, could
so basely have misused the intellect and betrayed the trust of men.

But such is the fact, and German histories of Alsace and Lorraine
prove it.

The German people, following such German thinkers as Kant, Fichte,
Hegel, Haeckel, Harnack, Nietzsche, Treitschke, Bernhardi, and many
like them almost as well known, who have led, and in a true sense repre-
sented their fellow countrymen for several generations, have succeeded
not only in preparing and finally precipitating this war, but also in so
impregnating the whole intellectual world with their point of view, which

246 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

is the fruit of their method, that all of literature, art, history, and politics
have felt strongly this influence. Partly by sheer weight and numbers,
partly by an array of accumulated facts and figures (generally untrust-
worthy because selected with a bias), partly because of a certain
complexity and massiveness of mind, they have 'Succeeded in affecting
deeply the scholarship and education of our generation. As a result, now
that war has revealed what it is that Germany and German scholars in
almost every case were striving for, much of the critical study of art,
of literature, of history will have to be restudied and rewritten. For it
must never be forgotten that, however aside from the main issue a branch
of study may be, respected German writers and widely-studied German
university professors, sometimes openly, sometimes sub-rosa, but always
with indefatigable zeal, have maintained the pre-eminence and superiority
of Germany, of the Germans, and of everything which by its excellence
they could claim as resembling even remotely their own lofty German
standard.

This German racial pretension is the philosophical background of
all Pan-German propaganda, the corner-stone of all the Mittle-Europa
scheme, which, by its unscrupulous seizure of territory has finally raised
the issues of Alsace-Lorraine, of Poland, and of the Balkan States. It
is essential to understand this claim, otherwise no true perspective can
be gained of any such complex problem as that which, thanks entirely
to German dishonesty and self-delusion, the history of Alsace-Lorraine
now presents.

Two main causes have led to this extravagant German attitude. The
first and most obvious was the series of military and diplomatic successes
of Frederick the Second and William the First, Prussian kings. From
being disunited, backward, partly civilized peoples, the amalgamated
Germans suddenly found themselves the conquerors of four important
nations, immensely rich and able under the clever and unscrupulous
leadership of Bismark, and the morally degenerate military aristocracy of
Prussia, to become the dominant factor in European politics.

The second cause lay within and behind the outer evidence of the
other, and may be traced in the leading thought and intellectual moulds
of the Germanic peoples throughout their history, though more definitely,
perhaps, since the Protestant Revolt, with its emphasis on self-expression
which develops self-will, and as reinforced by the egotistical philosophies
of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Nietzsche.

The accumulated influence of this intellectual legacy can alone explain
the unanimity with which German scholarship along so many different
lines of research, has lent itself but to one end, — the aggrandizement
of Germany and of everything remotely connected therewith. "The
proud conviction forces itself upon us with irresistible power that a high,
if not the highest importance for the entire development of the human
race is ascribable to this German people," writes Bernhardi (Germany
and the Next War, p. 68). Another well-established writer, Josef Ludwig

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 247

Reimer, said in 1905, "The Kultur of the Germans is actually the
stimulous to our present European Civilisation with which we are con-
quering the world." (A Pangerman Germany, p. 31). So, quite recently,
an eminent doctor of theology and philosophy, a jurist, and professor of
Berlin University, Dr. Adolf Lasson, writes, "The whole of European
Kultur ... is brought to a focus on this German soil and in the
hearts of the German people. It would be foolish to express oneself
on this point with modesty and reserve. We Germans represent the
latest and the highest achievement of European Kultur." (Deutsche
Reden aus Schwerer Zeit, No. 4, p. 13. A series of pamphlets issued
since the war by the Professors of Berlin University and others, typical,
in every sense, of German character and mentality.)

Bald extracts such as these, which might be multiplied ad infinitum,
do not immediately suggest the wide influence which this fundamental
idea has had in affecting all German scholarship — and not alone scholar-
ship, but everything to which the German has turned his attention.
Take, for instance, their conception of art and of artists — it being
remembered that our libraries and colleges are filled with text-books and
"standard" works which are colored with just such falsifications. "Every
great artistic achievement of France and Italy since the time of the
Romans can be traced to families and classes with a strong mixture of
Germanic blood, and, especially in earlier times, to the descendants of
Germanic stocks, who had kept their blood, or at any rate their nature
(Art} pure." (H. A. Schmid — Dr. of Philos., Professor of Art History
at Gottingen — in No. 25 of the above cited series of pamphlets, p. 21.)
This claim is methodically treated, and, to German satisfaction, is proved
concerning at least the whole Italian Renaissance period, by an eminent
anthropologist, lecturer and scholar, Herr Professor Ludwig Woltmann.
He demonstrates that all the famous "Architects, Painters, Historians and
Humanists, Naturalists and Philosophers, Authors, and Musicians" were
of German parentage or descent ; and his list includes exactly one hundred
and seven names. But his reasons? Benvenuto Cellini had a blonde
beard verging on red ; Michael- Angelo Buonarotti, whose real name must
have been Bohn-Rotto, or perhaps Beon-Rad, indicating Saxon origin ;
Leonardo da Vinci, presumably having corrupted his name from Wincke,
must have been of the same stem, etc. Even Dante does not escape, so
the Divine Comedy also should be esteemed as a German classic. (Die
Germanen und die Renaissance in Italien, passim. Woltmann receives
half a column in Meyers' Konversations-Lexicon. He died in 1907.)

So too, religion cannot and does not escape this burlesque. Josef
Ludwig Reimer, jurist, traveler, and author, accredited by inclusion in
Wer ists (Who's Who), "proves" Christ to have been German. In his
book, Ein Pangermanisches Deutschland (Chap. XIV, p. 233), he says,
summarizing the discussion of several chapters : "When we see how very
closely Christ is identified with Germanic Nature [note the order], how
at the same time he rejected the Jews and was in turn rejected by them;

248 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

when we see further that the Homo jitdaeiis contains much German blood,
and in earlier times must of necessity hrve had it still purer than noiv,
especially in such a very mixed neighborhood (Galilee), out of which
Christ sprang, why shall we not be permitted to designate as Germanic
the Being of Christ, which is ours today, and always will remain so;
entirely apart from the plausible evidence of a Chamberlain and of others
who support His Arian origin, and apart also from the sceptical attitude
(even when perhaps deliberate) about the legitimacy of His birth, which
is widely circulated throughout Judaism!"

These quotations, which might easily be multiplied almost indefinitely,
should illustrate to what lengths German vanity has gone. Christ, Greek
art, the Renaissance, Dante, Charlemagne, even Jeanne d'Arc, born in Lor-
raine, are German to the degree in which they were excellent, or to
which their possession might flatter the Germans and increase their
prestige in their own eyes. Nor is this point of view confined to a
small body of Pangermanists. The German school-child is educated in
such ideas, German text-books and encyclopedia are based on them, and
the whole fabric of German thought thus has its basis in vain delusions
and insidious fictions.

PART I.

Returning to the three major German claims to Alsace-Lorraine, —
the ethnological, the historic, and the cultural and personal, — it would
seem best to take up first the ethnological or racial claim. A survey
must be made of a very much controverted question, — \vho and from
whence are the races in Europe ? — which is highly technical in its details,
but at the same time of such a nature that certain fundamental principles
may readily be established by anybody who reads even a resume of the
vast literature involved. For, as Dr. T. Rice Holmes remarks in his
really erudite study of Caesar's Commentaries, the student need not "be
afraid, even if he is not a Celtic scholar or a professional anthropologist,
to form an opinion of his own. For he will observe that the specialists,
in so far as they differ among themselves, are simply drawing their own
conclusions from ascertained facts which are accessible to all." (Casar's
Conquest of Gaul, p. 261).

A study of the languages surviving from earliest days in Europe
indicates a close structural connection between seven great families or
groups — the Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic, Lithuanic or
Lettic, and Albanian, — in fact, all the existing languages except Finnic,
Basque, Magyar, and Turkish. Closely related to these are three Asiatic
groups : Indie, derived from Sanskrit ; Iranic, including Zend, Persian,
etc., and Armenian. The name for this numerous, interrelated family
of speech has been a subject for controversy, especially in the earlier
days after Bopp's Comparative Grammar founded in 1833-35 the science
of Comparative Philology. To call them Indo-Germanic or Indo-
European is not only clumsy, but inaccurate. The first, adopted by Bopp,

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 249

is the favorite term in Germany ; but French and Italian scholars see no
reason why German should be taken as the type of European speech.
Nor do these terms include the Armenian and Iranic branches. Aryan,
a term popularized by Max Miiller, while originally derived from the
supposed center in Asia from whence these sister languages migrated,
is now being used more and more by English, French and German
students alike as a general term to describe not so much this interrelated
family of peoples itself, as the now obsolete theories which dealt with
them.

The origin of the Aryans then, became fo; years a bone of con-
tention, and the modern Pan-German theories of a superior German
race, God's own chosen people, are derived directly from the speculations,
assertions, and conclusions of a long line of German writers on this
question. It culminated in the works of Cuno, Posche, Penka, and
Schrader for scientific theory, and Fichte, Trietschke, Reimer and Bern-
hardi for their amplification and direct application to Pangermanism.

Max Miiller jumped from the conclusion that, behind so many
interrelated languages, there must be one primitive, stock-language, to
the further, and absolutely unwarranted conclusion, that there must have
been also a primitive stock-race. So instead of speaking only of the sources
of the Aryan language, he spoke of an "Aryan race" and an "Aryan
family," and asserted that there was a time "when the first ancestors of
the Indians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Slavs, the Celts,
and the Germans were living together within the same enclosures, nay
under the same roof." He further asserted that because the same forms
of speech are "preserved by all the members of the Aryan family, it
follows that before the ancestors of Indians and Persians started for
the south, and the leaders of the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and
Slavonic colonies marched towards the shores of Europe, there was a
small clan of Aryans, settled probably on the highest elevation of Central
Asia, speaking a language not yet Sanskrit or Greek or German, but
containing the dialectical germs of all." (Lectures on The Science of
Language, 2nd revised edition, pp. 211-212. Delivered 1861).

Dr. Isaac Taylor, an eminent English ethnologist, declares — "Than
this picturesque paragraph more mischievous words have seldom been
uttered by a great scholar." How true this estimate was, Dr. Taylor
himself never knew. For to the German mind, an Aryan root-race, since
it produced Germanic or Teutonic off-shoots, must have been essentially
a German root-race, else how came so distinctive and superior a race
as the Germans of history into being? And once the self-evident fact
be grasped that the modern German language, which is at once the best,
most scientific and most beautiful of languages (vide Fichte) has its
roots in the primitive Aryan language, from whence it may also be traced
as the foundation of practically all European, Iranic, and Sanskritic
languages (!), what conclusion is left but that the German element is
the one enduring, enlightening agent of an all-wise and far-seeing Divine

17

250 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Providence, and is therefore, the leading race in the world? The terms
Aryan and German are consequently practically interchangeable, and so
they will be found in multitudes of German books.

This brand of vicious reasoning, which always returns upon itself,
is characteristic of the German scientific method, though more often in
conclusions formed, than in the logic of facts. For it is typical of the
German that in the ordering of mere facts he can be sequential and
logical to a degree, but when he is called upon to draw conclusions from
those facts, in other words, to deal with the logic of ideas ; he is incapable
of the detachment from self, and of the judgment necessary for coherent,
principled, let alone clear thinking.

Now it is an interesting commentary on the whole scientific and
philosophical basis of the Pan-German claims, that the ethnological theory
on which they are based is today absolutely discredited. French, English,
and even some German scholars agree in showing "conclusively that the
assumption of the common ancestry of the speakers of Aryan languages
is a mere figment, wholly contrary to the evidence, and as improbable
as the hypothesis that a small Aryan clan in Central Asia could have sent
out great colonies which marched four thousand miles to the shores of
Europe." (Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, pp. 4-5). There is not, or
rather, never has been, such a thing as an Aryan race. "It cannot be
insisted upon too strongly that identity of speech does not imply identity
of race, any more than diversity of speech implies diversity of race,"
says Dr. Taylor (p. 5). "Language seems almost independent of race"
(p. 204 et seq.).

As this cardinal ethnological principal bears directly on the fact that
Alsatians speak a language which Germans can understand only with
great difficulty, and the French not at all, it may be useful to note that
in Italy where the south is lapygian, Sicanian, and Greek, and the north
Etruscan, Ligurian, Rhsetian, Celtis, Herulian, Gothic, and Lombard, the
speech is that of Rome, a city which itself "contained an overwhelming
proportion of Syrians, Greeks, and Africans." The actual Latin blood
in Rome was probably extremely small, but its speech extends over Italy,
France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Roumania, part of Canada and the
United States, and practically all of South and Central America. English
likewise, is today replacing Celtic in Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and
Scotland, as well as Latin in other parts of the globe. German has
replaced Celtic in the regions of the Danube and Main, and more recently
has extinguished two Slav dialects, Polabian and Wend. The old
Prussians spoke a sister language of the Lithuanian (Slavs) ; and though
still from forty to sixty per cent Slav, speak German, which was imposed
on them by the conquests of the Teutonic Knights.

Claims to Alsace, then, based on the fact that French is not spoken
except by a minority, do not enter into the question at all ; and any such
claim, put forward in the face of so much self-evident scientific data
which proves the absolute unreliability of the language test, is either

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 251

relying on popular ignorance and credulity to escape detection, or is a
studied factor in a program of wilful deceit. As a matter of fact the
Alsatians speak a dialect of their own, which, though largely German in
vocabulary, is essentially French in structure, differing markedly from
neighboring German. So much is this so, that even five hundred years
ago Troubadour poetry could find expression in Alsatian ; whereas German
imitations, products of the Minnesingers, are in no way equal, lacking
wholly, because of the medium of an entirely different language, the
spontaneous lyrical flow and lightness of phrase characteristic of this
poetry.

A further and final blow was delivered to Max Miiller's Aryan race
theory, by the series of anthropological discoveries that all the existing
races in Europe show conclusive evidence of having lived just where
they now are, back into prehistoric times, while there is no evidence what-
ever to show that they ever migrated from Asia. So entirely without
exception has this been found to be, that "the ultimate result has been
to bring about a conviction not only that there is no such thing as any
pure Aryan race, but that the existence of a primitive Aryan language
is doubtful" (Op. cit. p. 38. Delbriick, Einleitung in das Sprachstu-
dium, pp. 131-137; Bacmeister, Allemanishes Wanderungen, Cuno,
Schrader, etc.)

Modern discovery, therefore, seconded by some of the ablest German
anthropologists, overthrows entirely not merely the probability, but the
possibility of a primitive root-race which was the foundation of modern
European races; and with this fact proves the complete falsity of the
modern German's claim to represent the evolved quintessential perfection
of that original stock. Likewise the German claim, corollary to the main
one, that all neighboring races in Europe, such as the English, French,
Italians, etc., are necessarily off-shoots of the main German stock, and
merely a greater or less dilution of German with native barbarian or
African blood, is equally false and absurd.

Yet this assertion is put forward today fearlessly and repeatedly.
Meyers' Konversations-Lexicon, volume 6, p. 827, explains just how the
French are German, largely because three tribes of disputed Germanic
origin, the Franks, Goths, and Suevi-Alemanni, obtained a partial conquest
of independent northern sections of what is now France (despite the fact
that they were absorbed by the superior culture of the peoples they
overcame). Meyers' encyclopedia corresponds, of course, with the
Encyclopedia Britannica as a standard for reference. Under "English"
the same type of argument is followed, though large parts of England,
such as Wales, and Cornwall, and the red-haired sections of Scotland
and North England, are either aboriginal or Celtic, while Essex, where the
Teutonic element predominated, is about an equal blend of French and
Celtic with Germanic. Only in a remote sense are the English, in Matthew
Arnold's words, "A vast obscure Cymric basis with a vast visible Germanic
superstructure." (On the Study of Celtic Literature, p. 64) : Arnold

252 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

learned his ethnology admittedly from Germans, who at that time were
almost the only students in the field. So Dr. Karl Woltmann, professor at
the Imperial University at Strasbourg, whose volumes on Mediaval Paint-
ing are a standard and erudite reference work in all libraries, claims as a
matter of course that Alfred the Great was German, and he speaks
highly of this typical English king because he "resuscitated the studies
that lay so low ; he had made himself master of the highest culture of
the day, and had taken the first place among the prose zvriters of the
Germanic tongue" (Vol. II, p. 279). This professor claims some of the
best periods of the Dutch School for Germany, because, "The greater
part of the Netherlands belonged in this age to the Duchy of Lotharingia
(Lothringen, Lorraine) and therefore to the German Empire" (p. 282).
There was no "German Empire" at this time, while the Duchy of
Lorraine was independent even of the Holy Roman Empire. Alfred the
Great was really a Gaul, and by no means a German, either in feeling,
character, or mentality.

It is on just such assumptions and inaccurate statements that German
public opinion has acquired the firm belief in its blood-authorship of
England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Alsace-Lorraine, Switzerland,
Denmark, and others. "Would to God Professor Engel were right in
maintaining that the English are Kelts. Then we should not have to be
ashamed of our brothers!" wrote Pastor B. Losche in 1914. One of the
most illuminating revelations of the presence of a motive which for long
has lain back of German science and method, has been the easy volte face
effected on this same race question of England since the war. "England
is now showing on what feeble feet its Germanism rests, how unsound,
how profoundly unworthy of the German Thought it is. It cannot shake
off its bitter accusers — its Shakespeare and Carlyle, its Dickens and
Kingsley. It has committed treason against the spirit of its greatest
men . . . " ; and in the same strain : "Does one German cousin fight
against another ? We good-natured idealists have always dwelt upon this
German cousinship. The three-quarters-Keltic England has no feeling
of common Germanism." (Quoted by William Archer, Gems of German
Thought, numbers 440, 439, and 442.)

From all that has gone before, one definite conclusion is established.
The word Germanic has two uses. It is loosely used to describe a number
of tribes and races which once overran Europe. It is also applied today
by modern Prussians to describe themselves and their Empire ; and these
two applications cannot be reconciled. The modern German is at least
as much a mixture of races and peoples as the Englishman, Frenchman,
or Italian. Prussians are Lithuanians, at least forty per cent Slav ; while
Bavarians are just as conglomerate as Alsatians. No such thing as a
pure Germanic stock survives at the present day. The German racial
pretension, therefore, falls absolutely to the ground, since that which is
today claimed as German is not the German of five, still less of ten or
fifteen, centuries ago.

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 253

Specific German claims about the ethnology of France and of Alsace-
Lorraine may now be more easily disposed of. They rest on the funda-
mental error of mixing the terms race and nationality; of implying that
nationality is ninety-nine per cent a question of race. It is not. Present-
day Americans, from a racial standpoint, whatever else they are, can
neither correctly be restricted to surviving Red Indians, nor can they
at this time be said to exclude, for instance, descendants of African
negroes. It is true that Americans as a race, strictly speaking do not
exist as yet; but as a nationality, however, their self-consciousness and
power cannot be successfully questioned. In almost every case, national
consciousness is an intangible spirit, sometimes limited by natural
geographic boundaries, but quite as often regardless of them ; and it
seems to be more frequently the result of an ideal forged in the hearts,
and exemplified in the persons, of first one and then another of the
great heroes and figures of history. Groups of contiguous peoples catch
fire from the leadership of such individuals, and are drawn together
not primarily by conquest, which often does not last, but rather by their
response to a common ideal, and to the mutual interchange of thoughts
and experiences. King Arthur, legendary as he is in most of the stories,
Alfred the Great, Richard the Lion-hearted, — these men were the active
expression of England's spirit ; they embodied successively the growth of
English national consciousness. In France, Clovis, by his dedication of
France to Christ; Charlemagne by his creation of a Christian Empire,
ruled in a spirit of chivalry made famous by Roland, Oliver, and Bayard ;
St. Louis, crusader King; the Blessed Jeanne d'Arc, — these and a host
of others epitomize France, and gave to her a self-conscious realization of
her mission.

To all of which the German spirit is frankly hostile, rejecting on the
one hand such an interpretation of history, and on the other, claiming
everything French as German, because France was populated by Aryan
and therefore Germanic tribes.

This distinction between race and nationality applies directly to
Alsace and Lorraine. Border countries between Germany and France,
since the days of Caesar, and undoubtedly before, they were the scene
of incessant conflict. As to the earliest known inhabitants, the Com-
mentaries tell us that when the Roman General defeated Ariovistus and
thereby prevented the German Suevi from migration over the Rhine, the
land was inhabited by three Celtic tribes, the Treviri, Mediomatrici, and
Leuci. Treves is one remnant of their nomenclature, while Verdun comes
from the name of an incorporated tribe, the Verodunes. The Germans
claim that the Celts are part of the Indo-germanic stock (Meyers'
Konversations-Lexicon, vol. x, p. 828. — "eine Volkes des indo-germani-
schen Sprachstammes"), or Teutonic race. They base their claim on the
fact reported by Dion Cassius, the Greek historian, by Caesar, by Tacitus
in his Gennania, and other sources, that the Celtae and Belgae were fair-

254 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

haired, blue-eyed, and tall, like their later and better-known conquerors,
the Vandals and Huns.

The literature discussing this claim is vast in amount, and the use
of the term "Celt" is so confused and at times all-inclusive, that the lay-
reader is left hopelessly in the dark. But in the light of recent
ethnological research, the old Celtic problem bids fair to reach an unex-
pected conclusion. Mr. Madison Grant in his exceedingly interesting book
The Passing of a Great Race, opens with the sentence: "Failure to recog-
nize the clear distinction between race and nationality and the still greater
distinction between race and language, the easy assumption that the one
is indicative of the other, has been in the past a serious impediment to
an understanding of racial values. Historians and philologists have
approached the subject from the viewpoint of linguistics, and as a result
we have been burdened with a group of mythical races, such as the
Latin, the Aryan, the Caucasian, and, perhaps, the most inconsistent of
all, the 'Celtic' race. ... It is, therefore, necessary at the outset
for the reader to thoroughly appreciate that race, language, and
nationality, are three distinct things, and that in Europe these three
elements are only occasionally found persisting in combination, as in
the Scandinavian nations" (pp. 3-4).

According then, to the older theories, the Celts, being a part of the
original Aryan or Indo-germanic linguistic stock, are in essence Teutonic
peoples. The German claimants are so eager to cover every conceivable
point which might be used against them, that they frequently conflict
and over-reach themselves. Statements about the inhabitants of early
France and of Alsace-Lorraine afford ample illustration of this. The
Celtic race, identified as such by ancient writers merely on the grounds
of blue eyes and blonde or ruddy hair, cannot be distinguished, as far
as these same ancient descriptions go, from Teutonic tribes such as Van-
dals, Goths, Lombards, and Burgundians. The Germans, possessing
themselves china-blue eyes and blonde hair (not ruddy) instantly claimed
the Celts as Indo-germanic, and Teutonic. But when a little more
research proved that the so-called Celtic race, far from embracing most
of the inhabitants of France, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, northern
Spain and Italy, Belgium, and Alsace-Lorraine, as at first thought because
these peoples spoke Celtic, must instead be limited to either one of three
insignificant, racially distinct, remnants — the Bretons, the Welsh, or the
Scotch Highlander, — then the German scientist (though not, as yet, the
German public) discarded the Celts, and pinned his faith to Goths,
Normans, and Burgundians. So we have one class of Germans (such as
Meyers, Cuno, Schrader. Niehbur, Miillendorf and many others) whose
assertions lead their fellow-countrymen to claim all France and all
Frenchmen as German because they are descendants from the Celts.
Then, in opposition, we have such renowned men as Herr Ottokar Lorenz
and Herr Wilhelm Scherer who contradict this claim in their (for
Germans, most moderate) Gcschlchte Elsasscs. They find it necessary,

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 255

in order to eliminate an inconvenient French ( !) element in Alsace, to
disparage the Celts. Thus, "The Celts, as always happens with moribund
races, were divided into two factions, one of which sought Roman pro-
tection while the other depended upon the Germans." Even Myers,
wishing to come near the truth, states that, "the Alsatians belong, with
the exception perhaps of the inhabitants of the northern part, to the
alemannic, the Lorrainers to frankish Folkstem." (Under Elsass-
Lotheringen, vol. 5, p. 727.) He maintains that both are German in
origin, but the alemannic more purely so. Further on he says (p. 733) :
"The oldest historically known inhabitants of Elsass were the keltic
Sequani and Rauriki, who followed the Germanic Triboker and Nemeter."
We have no knowledge of these last mentioned, practically pre-historic
tribes, but by seeking to preceed the Celts with German tribes, though
quite without warrant, Meyers sought to provide for the most remote
possible German heredity of Alsace.

Comparing and summing, therefore, the statements of these several
scholars, it would be a fair inference to suppose that France (or Italy
or England or Belgium for that matter) became a separate nation through
some mistake on the part of a body of Germans who did not realize
what they were doing; and so, by cutting themselves off from their
fountain-head, and blending with inferior races, they turned themselves
into degenerates and renegades who today are even fighting their Mother.
Apparently, however, such degenerates can produce an occasional Rodin
or Voltaire or Moliere (or Carlyle, etc. and etc.), who is a credit, despite
his handicap, to the parent country.

The facts in the case, as far as they are ascertainable, may briefly
be put as follows :

The original Celts, or at least, users of the Celtic language, some-
where before 1100 B. C. were spread over Central and Western Europe,
long antedating the irruption of the Teutonic tribes. Earliest neolithic
remains place them in Central France, Belgium and Southern Germany ;
they migrated west to England and east into Greece; they were called
Gauls or Celts by the Romans, and Galatians by the Greeks (Cf. De
Quatrefages and especially, Broca). They were "gigantic barbarians,"
with fair, very often red, hair, grey-blue eyes, and brachycephalous or
with rounded skulls. They gave their language to the peoples they
conquered, and were absorbed by the native populations. The only Celtic-
speaking peoples remaining today are the round-skull, or brachycephalic
Breton peasants; the short, long-skull, or dolichocephalous Welshman,
dark in color; and the tall, light, often ruddy Scotch Highlander, also
dolichocephalous. These groups are not physically similar, and their
character and mentality are totally unlike. If one be descended from an
original Celtic race, then the other two are not. The Scotch Highlander
has been identified with the true Scandinavian type, tall, dolichocephlous,
with an index of from 70 to 73, whose general structural and cultural
characteristics places him with the Row Grave and Staengenaes skeletons

256 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

of pre-Teuton invasions, and therefore closely resembling the Swedes,
Danes, and Frisians of today. The Welshman is now generally believed
to be a residuum of pre-Celtic races "of immense antiquity." The French
Bretons, with index over 80, at best are a mixed people, possibly related
to the Slavs and even the Lapps, and having no racial elements in
common with Welsh or Scotch. In passing, it might be noted that the
great mass of Irish are Danes, Norse, and Anglo-Norman, — not Celtic, —
together with a substratum of pre-historic elements similar to the earliest
Welsh. The Irish, therefore, cannot scientifically claim national inde-
pendence on any grounds of race.

About 100 B. C. the Teutons appeared on the scene, — first the
Ostrogoths, the Huns, the Visigoths, the Cimbri, the Suevi, the Helve-
tians, and the Alemanni of the upper Rhine. There is a superficial
resemblance between the Teutons and the Celts. Both races are tall,
large limbed, and fair haired. But they "are radically distinguished by
the form of the skull" (Taylor, op. cit. p. 109).

Ausonius, Lucan, Claudian, Martial, Tacitus, Calpurnius, Flavius,
Propocius, and others, as well as Caesar, describe these invasions; and
German authors have industriously assembled all these quotations (Zeuss,
Die Deutschen, p. 50 et seq.; Posche, Die Arier, p. 25, seq.; Penka,
Or, Ar., p. 122; Diefenbach, Or. Eur., p. 161, seq.; Miillendorf, etc.)
Though fair, the Celtic complexion is more florid and freckled than the
pink and white of the Teuton, while the eyes of the former are green,
grey, and greyish-blue rather than the "cccruli oculi" of Tacitus. Dr.
Holmes thinks that the keen observation of Caesar led him to dis-
criminate between the Germans and the Gauls (Celts), for he describes
the latter as "resembling" the former, but not so tall, so fair, or so
savage (Op. cit. Chapter on "Who Were the True Gauls?").

Caesar's description of these first German invasions of France, which
he met and defeated on the soil of Alsace and Lorraine, are very
indicative in the light of recent events. Speaking of the ravages which
the native Gauls (Celts) of Alsace sustained, he tells us that Divitiacus
the Aeduan reported that about 15,000 Germans had "at first crossed the
Rhine; but after that these wild and savage men had become enamored
of the lands and the refinement and abundance of the Gauls, more were
brought over, until about 120,000 of them were in Gaul." (De Bella
Gallico, i, cap. xxxi). The Commentaries then describe the sufferings
of various Celtic clans, notably the Sequani, exposed as they were on the
border-land to the inroads of alien Germanic hordes. There is much
revealed in Caesar's shrewd description of these same Germanic tribes —
description singularly applicable to modern German claims and methods.
The Sequani were especially dejected for "Ariovistus, King of the
Germans, had settled in their territory, and had seized a third of it, the
best land in the whole of Gaul ; and now he demanded that the natives
should vacate another third, because a few months previously 24,000
Harules had joined him, and he had to find homestead land for them.

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 257

[In other words, as today, they wanted a "place under the sun," room
to "expand," at another's expense.]

Within a few years, the entire population of Gaul would be
expatriated, and the Germans would all cross the Rhine; for there was
no comparison between the land of the Germans, and that of the Sequani,
nor must the standard of living among the former be put on a level with
that of the latter." (I, Cap. XXXI.)

Csesar's victory was only temporary, however, and the Western
Roman Empire collapsed under the repeated blows of the successive
Teutonic hordes. But it is important to note that Celtic culture was
superior to Teutonic, that the close natural alliance between Celtic and
Latin led to the easy spread of the Roman conqueror's tongue, and that
the Teutons did not recognize the Celtic speaking peoples as kin in any
sense; — on the contrary, they called them Welsh, or foreigners. From
this word are derived the names "Wales," "Cornwales" or "Cornwall,"
"Valais," "Walloons," and "Wallachian" or "Vlach."

So much for German claims that the Celts are German.

With the political and military debacle of Rome, Teutonic tribes,
warlike and restless, spread over the whole of Europe. In the fourth
and fifth centuries A. D. the Vandals established a kingdom in North
Africa. Spain fell under the Visigoths, Portugal under the Suevi.
Southern Gaul was also Visigothic ; eastern Gaul, Burgundian ; while the
north was Prankish, until Charlemagne created an Empire and spread
their influence throughout France. Italy was conquered first by the
Ostrogoths and then by the Lombards. The Saxons and related tribes
took the British Isles; while Norsemen and Danes invaded all the costal
areas as far south as Spain.

Politically these conquests were real enough, but in point of popu-
lation, there was no such radical change. As Madison Grant says, "all
Europe had become superficially Teutonized" (p. 162). Alaric's army
which conquered Italy and sacked Rome was very small relative to the
whole population of Italy ; and the actual numerical superiority of Goths
in Theodoric's kingdom at Toulouse, over the layers of Celtic and
Roman population, is very improbable.

The Teutonic element was the ruling, warrior class, and as such
it gave its name to the various kingdoms. But in its turn this position
meant that when the Mohammedan invasions broke the Visigothic and
Vandal kingdoms in pieces, and only Charles Martel and his Franks
prevented the Moors from conquering France as well as Spain, it was
these same Teutonic over-lords who suffered the greatest loss, and were
reduced in numbers.

The fact remains that "In France it is probable that nineteen-
twentieths of the blood is that of the aboriginal races, Aquitanians, Celts,
and Belgse ; while of the later conquerors the descendants of the Teutonic
invaders, Franks, Burgundians, Goths, and Normans, doubtless con-
tributed a more numerous element to the population than the Romans,

258 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

who, though fewer in number than any of the others, imposed their
language on the whole country" (Taylor, Op. cit., p. 204).

To sum up, then, in Lorraine as it emerges out of the Roman period,
there were three main strains of blood — Celtic, then Roman, finally
German; but the last was decidedly subordinate to the other two. The
later Germanic migration of Alemanni and Frankish-Hessian peoples,
settled in the open country. This left the cities in the hands of the Celto-
Roman population, which accordingly impressed its language and laws
upon the invaders. Roughly speaking, by the tenth century, or about
a hundred years after the treaty of Verdun, Lorraine had succeeded in
knitting together these diverse elements and it became as distinct a unit,
with as marked an individuality, as any other national nucleus of Europe.
The people are described by contemporary writers as possessing a char-
acter of their own, and were noted for wit, sensitiveness, a military and
chivalric spirit, and a tendency to mysticism. Tauler and Brother
Lawrence represent the last, while Jeanne d'Arc speaks for their military
and chivalric spirit as well as for their mysticism. Nor should it be
forgotten that it was in Lorraine that the Irish monk Columba found
a congenial home in the sixth century, and laid the foundations for the
future Christianity of the people.

What is true of Lorraine is in almost the same degree true of
Alsace, where, however, there was more settling and inter-marrying
between the Teutons and their subjects. But even Alsace as she emerged
from the Roman period was still essentially Gallo-Frankish. The Celtic
inhabitants had not been entirely dispossessed; and as the later trans-
Rhine Teutonic immigrations had been gradual and less aggressive, there
was less antagonism. They are described with "the characteristics of
activity, enterprise, energy, independence, irony, and badinage ascribed
to the people of the French realm," and they spoke in different localities
both the lingua romana and the lingua teudisca. (For an exhaustive study,
cf. Chas. Schmidt, Les Seigneurs, les paysans, et la propriete rurale en
Alsace.} The solid peasant stock, which made up the back-bone of the
country, reasserted itself, and though modified, it still felt itself to be one
with Celto-Roman traditions, and the new French national spirit infused
throughout France by Charlemagne.

ACTON GRISCOM.
(To be continued)

Have these three things always present to your mind: what you were,
what you are, and what you will be. — S. Bernard.

THE CRUSADES

THE whole Christian world has watched with interest the recent
developments in the East, and in the capture of Jerusalem has
perhaps recalled to memory others of the many capitulations
which Jerusalem has experienced during her long history.
Naturally, for western peoples the greatest interest will center in the time
when last the western nations held this much-disputed soil, during the
great crusading movement nearly ten centuries ago ; and when to this
is added the fact that just about ten centuries more intervened between
that time and the time of the incarnation of the great western Avatar,
this most recent connection between the Holy Land and the West takes
on a new significance.

Doubtless everyone is more or less familiar with the idea of cycles
— the theory that individuals, nations, whole civilizations in fact, return
in regularly recurring periods; a theory which has been conclusively
worked out from the scientific standpoint by W. M. Flinders Petrie in
his book, the Revolutions of Civilisation. And when we consider not
only the millennial recurrence mentioned above but also the fact that each
of these periods has been marked by the most vital and far-reaching
changes for the whole western world, it suggests the possibility, at least,
of a thousand year cycle involving the joint activity and connection of
East and West.

A comparison, even the most superficial, of our own time with that
of the Crusades, shows certain broad characteristics which would seem
further to substantiate the idea. Many of the tendencies which stood
most in need of correction at the time of the Crusades, many of the evils
which would naturally be followed by deep-seated changes, are practically
duplicated in our own day. Of course, it will not do to carry such an
idea too far ; Europe in the XI century was still practically in a state of
barbarism, while according to Mr. Petrie's tables we, at the present stage
of civilization, are well over the crest of the wave, in some respects are
well on toward the period of decay. We must expect difference then ;
but though there is not identity of characteristics there is nevertheless
a parallelism which may well be considered as far as it goes.

To turn first of all to an external feature, is it a mere coincidence
or is there meaning beneath the surface, in the position of the various
European countries at the time of the Crusades ? As in the present day,
so then, France was foremost in the movement, bearing the main burden
of the warfare. To borrow the words of one of the historians, "yielding
readily to ideas, passing quickly from ideas to action, enthusiastic, viva-
cious France has the power of giving an impulse to the nations, as was
seen in 1793, 1830 and 1848, and the thrill aroused in France vibrated
over all western Europe." Italy came second in activity, but her interest
and her work were more commercial than religious. England, because

260 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

of the readjustments necessarily following the Norman conquest, was
unable to enter into the movement at the start, but shared more actively
in the later Crusades. Spain took no part, being occupied first with the
Moors and later with her own Crusade against the Albigenses, and Russia
had not yet taken her place among the nations, being still, so to speak,
in process of formation. As for Germany, occasional individuals entered
into the movement, to be sure, but the nation as a whole looked upon it
with disfavor. During the first wave of enthusiasm, Germany was
occupied with her War of Investitures, and the events of that war would
scarcely lead her to espouse with zeal a movement promoted by a Pope
who had so endeavored to humble her Emperors. But further than this,
Germany had an opportunity as time passed, to see the results so
calamitous to many of the crusaders and to realize the first disadvantages
to those who remained at home. Jealous of their power, the German
barons were quick to oppose a movement which in other countries was
impoverishing the nobles, lessening their number, reducing their military
and political importance, and, as it were, playing into the hands of both
the crown and the lower classes. And by avoiding the loss she missed
also the gain. Hungary, though recently Christianized, was bitterly
hostile to the Crusaders, albeit with considerable reason since the lawless,
undisciplined hordes of the first crusade, travelling entirely without
preparation or provision, overran her territory to the number of eighty
or a hundred thousand — sometimes estimated at two hundred thousand —
seized everything they could lay hands on, outraged the women, attacked
the men, and burned and pillaged the towns, in one case massacring four
thousand citizens. Hungary was not prepared to stop them, but in Bul-
garia, which was equally hostile, the inhabitants attacked and killed them,
reducing their numbers by many thousands. Curiously enough, then, the
alignment of nations was roughly speaking, that of the present day.

As for the general characteristics of the two periods, where we
have as a dominant feature of our own day, materialistic skepticism,
crusading Europe went to the other extreme. There was no lack of
religion, but it was fixed and dogmatic, full of superstition, and with it
went fanaticism, bigotry and intolerance. The XI century, then, was
probably quite as much in need of shaking-up as we are, though for quite
the opposite reason. Then there was lack of unity — lack of unity of
purpose and lack of national unity ; that ferment working close beneath
the surface everywhere at the present day and so tragically evident in
Russia, was one of the great difficulties then as well as now. The reasons
for it were different to be sure: economic conditions, lack of facilities
for transportation and communication, limited trade and commerce,
primitive methods of exchange were the natural preventives. In addition
to these, the whole feudal system, opposing as it did, any centralized
authority, recognizing no common laws, making each feudal lord a law
unto himself with independent jurisdiction over his serfs and vassals,
was a further barrier.

THE CRUSADES 261

Numerous references are made in accounts of the time, to class-
unrest and the wretchedness of the people — it must be remembered that
this was well on toward the end of feudalism, and oppression of the
serfs and privation and misery may well have been common. Whether
this was merely a local condition or sufficiently widespread to have some
influence in the Crusades, is a question. Certainly it was not organized
as is our present-day counterpart of it, for the means of communication
were too inadequate. Whatever may have been its actual value, thousands
of the lower classes flocked to join the Crusades, so many serfs becoming
freedmen in this way (manumission being a result of taking the vow)
that a whole new class of society sprang up.

Like our own day, feudal Europe was cursed with individualism,
resented authority, and lacked discipline, — a lack which cost the lives of
hundreds of thousands in the first Crusade. It may be argued that these
characteristics together with pride, arrogance, avarice and others of the
vices which manifested themselves, are found to a greater or less degree
in every age, being common to unregenerate man, and that in any great
movement, our own war or another, some will be actuated by high ideals
and noble qualities, while others — and usually a great majority, will
blacken the cause with the low aims and evil passions of their kind.
However, there are times when the sins of the world come more nearly
to the surface than others, and the events of the Crusades would show
lack of discipline, among high and low alike, to be one of the crying
evils of the time.

Back of all the more obvious purposes of the Crusades and the
tendencies which they were apparently meant to correct, stands the one
great fact which was given in a recent sermon at the Chapel of the
Comforter, regarding our present World War — namely that from time
to time, the Master tries in one way or another to draw the world to
Him, appealing now to love, now to pity and so on. The world, it was
said, is full of the poison of self, which lulls it to sleep — the sleep of
death. The analogy was used of a man dying of cold who must be
roused from his lethargy if he is to live. The only way to save the
world is to insist that it shall feel ; the only way to make it feel is to
make it suffer.

How this was done for XI century Europe is better left to a more
detailed account of the individual Crusades. The story is more or less
familiar to all — enthusiastic multitudes rushing into the project with
fanatical zeal, meeting all too soon the pitfalls made by their own self-
will and ungovernable natures ; their sufferings by plague, pestilence -and
famine ; the tragic end of countless numbers, mere heaps of bones in the
desert; and the moderate success of the few in their several short-lived
kingdoms and principalities. What the actual results of all this were
to the people who took part in it, what changes may have been brought
about in their own inner natures, is of course impossible to tell. And
yet some indication of it is given in their life subsequent to their arrival

262 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

in the Holy Land. One of the chief indications is their change from
fanatical intolerance to a reasonably generous recognition of their neigh-
bors' views. In the laws drawn up in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, under
the rule of Godfrey of Bouillon, the people were allowed, in almost every
particular, to continue in their usual customs. This even went so far
as to provide for the Syrian population a court under a Syrian official,
though later a change was made to four Syrian and two Prankish officials,
due perhaps to the inefficiency of the natives. Apparently entire toleration
was granted to all ; in the matter of an oath, for instance, Mohammedans
took it on the Koran, Armenians, Syrians and Greeks on the cross, Jews
on the Torah, etc.

According to one Mohammedan authority, the Musselman farmers
found the Prankish rule more agreeable than the Musselman. This meant
an extraordinary amount of adaptation to circumstances. Where king-
doms were being established and westerners were remaining permanently,
it was necessary, of course, to maintain friendly relations with the
surrounding states if possible. The military training and prowess of
both Mohammedans and Franks was one point of contact between them,
especially in view of their mutual contempt for the unwarlike Syrians
and Greeks. But the Franks had come from a civilization which was
just awakening; they had presumably little or no breadth of view, and
certainly no preparation for their experiences in the East. Practical
knowledge of the East and its problems was lacking, as was also any
understanding of its peoples ; their fanaticism and intolerance was an
added barrier. Yet they accomplished the apparently impossible with
remarkable success, and in a comparatively short time, we find one of
their number writing that all who remained in the East had become
orientals. "We have already forgotten the cities where we were born."

No such feeling was entertained, however, by the yearly pilgrims
who continued to come from the West in great numbers, and who
remained too short a time to gain an understanding of the situation.
To them such an attitude toward the unbelievers was apostasy and their
own continued intolerance was a source of much difficulty, as for instance,
when in a siege of Acre, 1104, the Prankish leader agreed to spare the
lives of those who surrendered to him, but soon found himself utterly
unable to prevent their massacre by fanatical Pisans and Genoese. In
spite of the fact that they were often troublesome, unruly and undis-
ciplined citizens, these western newcomers were encouraged or even
urged to remain in the East, for nothing but force of numbers could
secure permanence of the Prankish possessions against the continual
efforts of the Mohammedans.

Even such potential strength and security as the Franks did possess
was by no means utilized, for the new surroundings had done little to
overcome the individualism and aversion to authority with which they
started out. The leaders were unable to get along harmoniously together ;
each wanted, and for the most part secured for himself a kingdom, but

THE CRUSADES 263

instead of uniting their conquests into a strong league under one head,
they remained just so many independent principalities under so many
independent chiefs — practically a copy of feudal Europe. They had
become broader and more liberal but the lesson of unity still remained
unlearned.

This was not the case at home, however; not only did Europe
grow in unity as the Crusades progressed, but every department of her
life, economic, intellectual, religious, took on new vigor, every class of
society underwent a change, the Dark Age was left behind, and a rapid
development began. In certain of the countries, France particularly, the
nobles had joined the Crusades in large numbers, occasionally entire
families leaving the homeland for several generations. This removed
what had previously been the chief source of opposition to kingly rule,
and resulted in a greater centralization of authority and an immense
increase for the crown of both power and wealth. At the same time
a new citizen class was arising, due as before mentioned, to the large
number of serfs released from bondage, some by masters who them-
selves took the cross, others by the papal decree freeing all bondsmen
who did so. Many of these freedmen, hitherto bound to the soil, turned
for a livelihood to industries, of which a number had recently been
imported from the East and others had received fresh impetus from that
source. Thus a class grew up which was independent of the soil and
which, leaving the country, congregated in the towns. The king in turn,
was quick to take advantage of the changing conditions, and by affording
protection to this growing citizen class, still further strengthened his
power.

Besides the new industries and improved methods in old industries,
there were new articles of every description brought from the East, —
new household appliances, fabrics, natural products, fruits, grains, etc.
The increase of import and export trade which resulted, still further
changed and developed the life of the time, for through localities which
had previously been shut off, or hemmed in, by natural barriers of various
kinds, great trade routes grew and commercial centers sprang up. And
perhaps the most important of all economic effects, was the introduction
of a new system of exchange. At the beginning of the Crusades the
means of exchange was primitive, in some localities barter was still the
custom, though coin was largely used even at that date. The crusading
prince, starting out on his journey, had to carry with him in specie, a
sufficient amount to defray all his expenses and pay his men. This was
reasonably safe because of the warlike character of the company, but
the inconvenience of such a method will be apparent. Gradually there
developed the custom of securing letters of credit from some wealthy
person remaining at home, usually at a heavy rate of interest which the
Church tried in vain to regulate. And from this grew a regular system
of letters of exchange and a balancing of debits and credits very similar
to our own modern system.

264 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Big banking houses sprang up, notably those of Genoa, Pisa and
Siena, having offices in all the principal cities of the East and providing
by means of their letters of credit, sums of any size at any time and
place. When the Religious Orders were formed, they of course, made
extensive use of this system and before very long they themselves became
bankers on a large scale. The Knights Templars were especially active
in this capacity ; by the Pope they were given charge of all the vast funds
collected for the Holy Land and in addition they made large loans at very
high interest to the monarchs of the different countries. In time the
regulation of the money traffic of the entire world lay in their power.
Such changes in the commercial life naturally revolutionized the world —
commercially, at least, old national boundaries lost much of their impor-
tance ; old national differences were wiped out ; transportation and travel
became easier and simpler ; the productive power of the communities was
accordingly increased; and interest became united with interest.

But all this growth was merely economic. Other results of the
Crusades were intellectual, moral and spiritual changes equally important
and far-reaching if not more so. With the interchange of thought
between East and \Vest and the resultant widening of view, new energies
were awakened in the intellectual life of the time. The old orthodox
ideas of the Middle Ages became obsolete, their narrow mental barriers
becoming too restrictive. Slowly but surely, men began to shake off the
theological despotism which the Church had so long exercised, to strive
for spiritual freedom, to awaken to the possibility of a breadth of thought
and speculation, the audacity of which would have been considered
impious a short time before. The whole thought of the time became
opened up, the soil prepared for the great and rapid development
including both the Renaissance and the Reformation, which followed
close on the fall of the Eastern Empire and the dwindling of the power
of the Papacy. It has been said that the Renaissance must be "viewed
mainly as an internal process whereby spiritual energies latent in the
Middle Ages were developed into actuality and formed a mental habit
for the modern world" ; and can it not be said with equal truth that the
Cmsades furnished the original impetus to that evolution which, including
the Renaissance in its course, brought the modern world into being and
gave to the nations of the West a common civilization?

JULIA CHICKERING.

Live in this world as if God and your soul only were in it, so shall
\oiir heart be never made captive by any earthly thing. — S. John of the
Cross.

EASTERN AND WESTERN
PSYCHOLOGY

THE INFUSION OF DIVINE LIFE

iN a very valuable study, "Evolution and the Need of Atonement,"*
the author, whose purpose is, to bring about a reconciliation
between biological and spiritual knowledge, hits upon a striking

and brilliant simile for the development of our spiritual life and
consciousness :

"We may assume," he says, "for the sake of argument, that some
form of marine life was the most primitive. Now when a marine
organism begins to adapt itself in the direction of a littoral life, we have
obviously a succession of environmental changes so marked as to produce
a very rapid adaptation, for even the smallest change will be markedly
favorable or unfavorable. The change to a life at first between tide-
marks, then wholly on shore, must introduce such a vast series of new
factors that an incredibly huge number of experimental variations must
occur; some useless, some committing to one line of advance, some to
another. Again, equally obviously, organisms that had gone very far
in adapting themselves to a particular line of development, could not
go very far under the new conditions, for retrogression is impossible;
the majority would fail completely, some few would get on in a lowly
way, their equilibrium-position being reached in a comparatively short
time and comprising relations with a comparatively small range of
environmental conditions. An example of this may be found in the
littoral and land Crustacea. The creatures that succeeded best would be
those who had adapted themselves completely to the simpler conditions of
the sea, yet had not committed themselves by over-specialization, but
were ready to respond to the new stimuli of the shore and the land.
And in just the same way the land organisms which early reached their
equilibrium-position — i. e., the position involving approximately com-
plete adaptation to a small number of conditions — would again be
incapable of what we call 'progress' into a higher and more complex
development. Thus we see that the organism which becomes 'highest'
is that which never reaches a stable position, but is always ready to
respond to the fresh higher environment conditioned by its last progres-
sive variation."

The passage is very carefully written, in order that it may be a
quite exact description of biological law, so far as that law is known.
But the real purpose of the author goes much farther : He is supplying,
from biology, an illustration of the operation of spiritual law; the

• By Stewart A. McDowall, Cambridge University Press.

266 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

operation of spiritual law at the critical stage when we are passing,
or seeking to pass, from material to spiritual life. The author depicts
one of the great critical periods in biological evolution, when the beings
which had hitherto been living in water were beginning a new chapter in
life, emerging from the water and establishing themselves on land,
or, as it would, perhaps, be truer to say, establishing themselves in the
lower strata of the air. They will henceforth dwell surrounded by the
element air, instead of the element water; and success will mean com-
plete adaptation to this finer medium. It is really a new birth; a death
to water-life and a new birth into air-life. Therefore it is a real and
natural analogy with the spiritual rebirth, which is the passage from
a grosser to a finer medium, or, if one prefer the expression, the passage
from a lower to a higher plane. And just because the author is at great
pains to make his biological description as exact as possible, it will pay
to study and ponder over every sentence. It is a genuine parable, fol-
lowing the example of the Western Master, who bases so much of his
spiritual teaching on simple biological analogies.

Before we consider this analogy, it is worth while to turn aside
for a moment, to quote a grim passage in which the author raises and
answers the question: What is the fate of an organism which, having
emerged into the air, elects to return again to life in the water?

"What can we say, then, of a land-organism which once more
betakes itself to the sea? Let us take for example the whale. It can
never return to true gills and fins of the same nature as, or as zoologists
would say, homologous with, those of a fish. At best it can but develop
similar or analogous organs, and it will be so far behind the fish in
adaptation to marine conditions that its efforts may be regarded as
hopeless: it has tried to turn back, failed, and is eventually added to
nature's flotsam and jetsam, being incapable of further progress." Or,
as the Bhagavad Gita says, it "has lost both worlds."

Returning to our first quotation, describing the development which
does not fail, but succeeds, let us try to add to it certain considerations
which we reached in preceding chapters. In the first place, it is quite
evident that the emergence from water-life to air-life would be abso-
lutely impossible unless the air were already there, with its element of
oxygen, giving the possibility of life. In the same way, it would be
entirely impossible for us to emerge from material life to spiritual life,
unless the spiritual world were already there, pervaded everywhere by
spiritual, life-giving force, as oxygen everywhere pervades the nitrogen
and other inert elements of the air. It is interesting to recall that the
earlier name of nitrogen was "azote," — that which cannot support life,
as contrasted with oxygen, which can and does support life. Therefore
our whole possibility of emergence into spiritual life, our possibility of
establishing ourselves on the spiritual plane, depends on the pre-existence
of spiritual life, everywhere present in the spiritual world, pervading the
spiritual plane.

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 267

On the other hand, the presence, even from the beginning, of the
oxygen-containing air was not enough, in itself, to cause the emergence
of living things from the water. Air and water — like the spiritual and
material planes — might have continued in contact for ever, without
bringing about the great transformation, the new birth from above.
The perpetual presence and readiness of the air, of the spiritual world,
was not enough. There was needed the impulse in the water-dwelling
beings, to come forth, first to the borderland between low and high
tide, and then into the clear air.

Orthodox biology simply records the fact of this emergence, but
does not seek to explain it. Darwin practically considered this tremen-
dous step in evolution, like all steps in evolution, as a "happy accident."
But we have seen already, first, that this infinite multiplication of "happy
accidents" is more miraculous than miracles ; and, second, that our
conscious experience in evolution, in spiritual life, gives us excellent
ground for holding that, just as our spiritual evolution is invariably
accompanied by the sense of guidance and help by conscious, responsive
spiritual forces (manifestations of a personal spiritual consciousness
and force), so we are justified in believing that the earlier stages of
our evolution, from the very earliest, must have been guided by con-
scious, consciously acting spiritual forces, though we may not be able
to form any clear idea of their character. So we have ground for
believing that the emergence from water-life to air-life must have been
the result of two things: first, the impulse of growth, the "vital drive,"
in the living things themselves; and, second, the instigation, guidance
and supervision of their emergence by conscious spiritual forces, lending,
at that point, the same aid which we have such full experience of, at a
later point.

But there is a third condition of success, a condition absolutely
indispensable, without which failure is quite certain, even though all
other conditions of success are abundantly present. This essential con-
dition is eternal effort, eternally renewed. There could be no more
fatal mistake than to think that a stage of spiritual life will be reached,
comparatively early, perhaps, at which effort will not be needed; in
which we shall be able to rest in inactivity. We shall find rest it is true,
but it will be the rest of perpetual effort in complete harmony with
spiritual law ; the element of rest lies in that harmony, and by no means
in cessation of effort. On the contrary, at each advance, the effort
required will be greater, more diversified, just as the effort of a man is
infinitely greater and more diversified than the effort of a sea-anemone.
Of course, to compensate, the man has infinitely more power to make
effort than the sea-anemone. So each spiritual advance, far from
bringing "rest," brings the imperative necessity for greater and ever
greater effort; but, in compensation, it brings also greater and ever
greater strength, greater power of effort. Popular religion, as expressed,
for example, in the inscriptions upon tombstones, seems to promise that

268 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

with death comes rest: "Let him rest in peace." But, while there is
rest from one kind of effort, it would seem to be certain that there is
a new effort of another kind, since this is a universe of perpetual motion.
But popular religion has at least this safeguard : It teaches, with entire
definiteness, that effort must continue, because imminent danger continues,
up to the very moment of death; so far, it appears to teach the literal
truth.

We shall be well advised, therefore, at the very outset, clearly to
realize, and courageously to face the fact that we shall reach no condi-
tion of rest which will mean surcease of effort; but, on the contrary, that
without incessant, unbroken, unflagging effort, we can make no progress
at all; nay, each step gained will mean more and greater effort. For
such is the Law of Life universal.

Let us, for a moment, look at this inflexible law from the other
side. There is, as we have seen, the imperative necessity of continuous
effort, never ceasing but perpetually increasing. Yes ; but does not that
mean that we are inherently capable of just that kind of effort ; of effort
which shall perpetually increase, both in quality and in quantity? The
power to make effort is, then, in a sense, the divinest power we have,
and we have it perpetually; further, effort invariably carries compound
interest; each effort made adds definitely and measurably to our capital
of power, our ability to make further effort.

Let us go back for a moment, and see how our biologist has
expressed this law of perpetual and perpetually increasing effort. He
expresses it thus: "Thus we see that the organism which becomes
'highest' is that which never reaches a stable position, but is always
ready to respond to the fresh higher environment conditioned by its last
progressive variation ;" always ready to respond by effort, as each step
is gained.

It would be interesting and fruitful to examine the way in which
this law of continuous and continuously increasing effort works out in
the field of biology, and especially in the passage across that borderland
between water-life and air-life, our symbol of the spiritual rebirth. But,
for the present, we must be content to remind ourselves that in the
biological field the rule is, that each individual must work each day to
secure, often with great difficulty and effort, the food for that day.
Creatures which lay up stores, like the bees, the squirrels, the jays, are
a very small minority. The rest must literally work out the prayer:
"Give us this day our daily bread." And every creature has its enemies,
which ceaselessly beset it, so that every bird, for example, is perpetually
toiling, perpetually vigilant — and perpetually rejoicing. We should learn
all three lessons and apply them all.

We shall try to see, later in this enquiry, how, according to recorded
experience and experimental knowledge, this law of ceaseless and
increasing effort works out in the spiritual world. For the present, how-
ever, we shall consider another side of the problem.

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 269

Three conditions, as we saw, are involved in this transformation
from the material to the spiritual plane, or in its biological analogy.
These are, first, the pre-existence of the higher plane or world, per-
vaded by the powers which support life; second, the inherent drive in
the organism, expressing itself in the power of ceaseless effort; and,
third, the guiding and fostering power of the conscious spiritual forces
which, if our view be true, inspire and oversee both transformations.

If it be true that, as we are making our way from material life
to spiritual life, we are, in fact, guided, guarded, helped, ceaselessly
inspired by spiritual powers which respond by personal consciousness to
our personal consciousness, in what way do those who have immediate
experience of this process describe it? What is the direct testimony of
experimental psychology, in both East and West, concerning this vitally
important experience?

There is a beautiful passage in the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad
which describes, not so much the actual passage to the spiritual world,
as the spiritual condition of those who have made the passage and are
already at home there, freely breathing that finer air; they have largely
received, and perfectly responded to, the infusion of Divine Power from
above, and have become one with the very essence of that Divine Power.
The Divine Life has become their life. It is of high interest and true
significance that, just as Spirit means "breath," the divine Breath of
Life, so the Sanskrit Atma means breath, and, pre-eminently the Divine
Breath, the Holy Spirit. In the passage to be quoted, the word Atma
is translated Soul:

"Thus far of him who is under desire. Now as to him who is free
from desire, who is beyond desire, for whom the Soul is his desire.
From him the life-powers do not depart. Growing one with the Eternal,
he enters into the Eternal.

"When all desires that were hid in the heart are let go, the mortal
becomes immortal, and reaches the Eternal.

"And like as the slough of a snake lies lifeless, cast forth upon an
ant-hill, so lies his body, when the Spirit of man rises up bodiless and
immortal, as the Life, as the Eternal, as the Radiance.

"The small old path that stretches far away, has been found and
followed by me. By it go the Seers who know the Eternal, rising up
from this world to the heavenly world.

"Who knows the Soul, and sees himself as the Soul, what should
he long for, or desiring what should he fret for the fever of life?

"By whom the awakened Soul is known while he dwells in the
wilderness of the world, he is creator of all and maker of all ; his is the
world, for he is the world.

"Even here in the world have we reached wisdom ; without wisdom,
great were thy loss. They who are illumined, become immortal. Others
enter into sorrow.

270 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

"When a man gains a vision of the godlike Soul, the Lord of what
has been and what shall be, he fears no more.

"At whose feet rolls the circling year with all its days, Him the
gods worship as the one, the light of lights, the immortal Life.

"In whom the five hierarchies of beings and the ether are set firm,
him I know to be the Soul. And knowing that deathless Eternal, I too
am immortal.

"They who know the life of life, eye of the eye, the ear's ear, heart
of the heart, have found that eternal Ancient, the Most High.

"This is to be understood by the heart: there is no separateness at
all. He goes from death to death who beholds separateness.

"This immeasurable and unchanging Being is to be beheld as the
One. The stainless Soul is higher than the heavens, mighty and sure.

"Let the sage, the follower of the Eternal, knowing this, strive
to behold it in vision. Let him not meditate on many words, for words
are weariness.

"This is the mighty Soul unborn, who is Consciousness among the
life-powers. This is the heaven in the heart within, where rests the
ruler of all, the master of all, the lord of all. He grows not greater
through good works, nor less through evil. He is lord of all, overlord
of beings, shepherd of all beings. He is the bridge that holds the worlds
apart, lest they should flow together. This is he whom the followers
of the Eternal seek to know through their scriptures, sacrifices, gifts and
penances, through ceasing from evil towards others. He who knows
this becomes a sage. This is the goal in search of which pilgrims go
forth on pilgrimages.

"Knowing Him, the men of old desired not offspring. What should
we do with offspring, they said, since ours is the Soul, the All? They
became saints, ceasing from desire of offspring, the desire of the world,
the desire of wealth. For the desire of offspring is a desire for wealth,
and the desire for wealth is a desire for the world. For these both are
desires. But the Soul is not that, not that. It is incomprehensible, for
it cannot be comprehended ; it is imperishable, for it passes not away ;
nought adheres to it, for it is free ; the Soul is not bound, fears not,
suffers not.

"He who knows is therefore full of peace, lord of himself ; he has
ceased from false gods, he is full of endurance, he intends his will. In
his soul he beholds the Soul. He beholds all things in the Soul. Nor
does evil reach him ; he passes evil. He is free from evil, free from
stain, free from doubt, a knower of the Eternal."

In this beautiful passage, there are the following elements: The
knowing of the divine power the heaven of the heart; the recognition,
in this divine power, of the quality of consciousness, the personal quality
expressed by the words, the Lord, the Shepherd, the Master ; the transfer
of the life, through this infusion of the Divine Life, from this world
to the heavenly world ; the glory of that immortal life in the Eternal.

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY 271

Let us compare with this, certain passages from Western spiritual
experience, which describe not so much the consummation as the process
of the infusion of the Divine Life, or, as it is called "the presence of
God" in the heart. The best passages are, perhaps, those which describe
the spiritual experience of Saint Teresa who, to a pure, courageous and
rejoicing heart, added a clear, well-balanced understanding and a gift
of eloquent expression.

"I used to have," Saint Teresa writes, "at times, as I have said,
though it used to pass quickly away, — certain commencements of that
which I am now going to describe . . . and sometimes even when
I was reading, — a feeling of the presence of God would come over me
unexpectedly, so that I could in no wise doubt, either that He was
within me, or that I was wholly absorbed in Him. . . . For the
soul is already ascending out of its wretched state, and some little
knowledge of the blissfulness of glory is communicated to it."

Again Saint Teresa writes: "So, in the beginning, when I attained
to some degree of supernatural prayer — I speak of the prayer of quiet —
I labored to remove from myself every thought of bodily objects.
I thought, however, that I had a sense of the presence of
God . . ." "It is the settling of a soul in peace, or rather Our
Lord, to speak more properly, puts it into peace, by His Presence, as
He did just Simeon: for all the faculties are calmed. The soul under-
stands after a manner far different from understanding by the exterior
senses, that she is now joined nearer to her God, for that within a very
little while more she will attain to the being made one with Him by
union. . . . Those who are in the prayer of quiet are so near, that
they perceive they are understood by signs. They are in the palace,
close by their King, and see that He already begins here to bestow on
them His Kingdom . . ." "There is raised in the interior of the
soul so great a suavity that makes her perceive very plainly that Our
Lord is very near to her. I call it the prayer of quiet, for the repose
it causeth in all the powers : so that the person seems to possess God as
he most desires . . . though the soul perfectly sees not the Master
that teaches us, yet plainly understands He is with her."

Many of those whom the West rightly calls saints, because they
have experienced and borne witness to this infusion of the Divine Life,
have put on record exactly the same sense of the presence of God in
their hearts. A beautiful expression of this experience is that of the great
French teacher of mystical theology and religious discipline, Father Louis
Lallemant :

"When, after a long cultivation of purity of heart, God would enter
into a soul and manifest Himself to it openly by the gift of His holy
presence . . . the soul finds itself so delighted with its new state,
that it feels as if it had never known or loved God before." And else-
where in the same treatise on Spiritual Doctrine, Father Lallemant
writes very wisely of the renunciation of the world, the mortification

272 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

of worldly desires, on which such stress was laid in the Upanishad
we have quoted. Father Lallemant says: "The reason why we are so
little illuminated by the lights of the Holy Spirit, and so little guided
by the motions of His gifts, is that our soul is sensual beyond measure,
and full of a multitude of earthly thoughts, desires, and affections, which
extinguish within us the Spirit of God. Few give themselves wholly to
God, and abandon themselves to the leadings of the Holy Spirit, so that
He alone may live in them and be the principle of all their actions."

In the Katha Upanishad, we have exactly the same teaching con-
cerning "the desires that dwell in the heart:"

"The great Beyond gleams not for the child, led away by the delu-
sion of possessions. 'This is the world, there is no other,' he thinks
and so falls again and again under the dominion of Death."

It is because of these desires dwelling in the heart, these many
attachments to the familiar, long-inhabited world, that the beginning of
the way is so difficult, so full, not so much of suffering, as of the dread
of suffering. For this reason, so many shrink from the attempt; as,
in our opening parable, we may imagine that the water-dwellers clung
desperately to their familiar world, dreading and shrinking from
emergence into the new world of air and sunlight. Some refused even
to try; some, who tried, turned back, but never found again what they
had lost.

This trial of the beginning of the way, a trial destined to be over-
come, and to dissolve in splendor, has been described with striking like-
ness in the East and the West. Thus we find Father Louis Lallemant
writing :

"At first, divine things are insipid, and it is with difficulty we can
relish them, but in the course of time they become sweet, and so full of
delicious flavor, that we taste them with pleasure, even to the extent
of feeling nothing but disgust for everything else. On the other hand,
the things of earth, which flatter the senses, are at first pleasant and
delicious, but in the end we find only bitterness in them."

So we find the Bhagavad Gita teaching:

"That which at the beginning is as poison, but in the outcome is
like nectar, that is the happiness of Goodness, springing from clear
vision of the Soul. But the happiness which springs from the union of
the senses with the objects of desire, in the beginning like nectar, but
in the outcome like poison, that is declared to be the happiness of
Passion."

It would not be easy to cite two passages which more clearly prove
the identity of spiritual experience, which forms the basis of the real
psychology, the "soul-science," in the East and the West.

CHARLES JOHNSTON.
(To be continued)

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME

THE CAUSES AND CONDUCT OF THE WAR

PART II (Continued)
THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR

THERE can be no peace in the world until the men and women
of Germany repent of their country's crimes. But they will
not repent until suffering has brought them to their knees, and
they will not suffer to that point unless America comes to under-
stand, as she does not yet understand, the nature of Germany's aims
and methods. Again and again it must be repeated and proved that
Germany desires world conquest ; that her idea of conquest is to enslave,
by means of intimidation and outrage, for her own supposed benefit, the
peoples she subjugates, and that when she cannot enslave she murders
them with absolute ruthlessness and with what she considers heroic
good cheer.

As stated already, there is proof of this and to spare. But it will
be best further to examine the circumference of Germany's action —
the works of her servants, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey — before
dealing with her nearer iniquities in France and Belgium.

Blackened by sins so innumerable, so atrocious, it would be impossible
to select the German worst; but Germany's responsibility for the treat-
ment of the Armenians is as cowardly and as hideous an offence as
any of which she has yet been convicted. In "The Causes of the War,"
it was pointed out that the friendship between the Sultan Abdul Hamid
and the Emperor William was at no time disturbed by the Armenian
massacres. As Gibbons says: "The hecatombs of Asia Minor passed
without a protest. In fact, five days after the great massacre of August,
1896, in Constantinople, where Turkish soldiers shot down their fellow-
citizens [Armenians] under the eyes of the Sultan and of the foreign
ambassadors, Wilhelm II sent to Abdul Hamid for his birthday, a family
photograph of himself with the Empress and his children" (The New
Map of Europe, p. 63).

The Emperor William and the Sultan were congenial spirits. The
"Prussianization" of the Poles and Alsatians was conducted on the same
general principles as the "Ottomanization" of the Armenians. With the
advent of the Young Turks, who had been educated in Germany or
by Germans, the program was carried out more radically and con-
sistently. The Adana massacres of 1909, more terrible than the Hamidian
massacres of 1895-6, occurred within a year of the proclamation of the
Young Turk Constitution. The massacres of 1915 — which, as Mr. Henry
Morgenthau has testified, were "encouraged and aided by German army
officers" — were the most atrocious of any. Mr. Morgenthau was the

274 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Ambassador of the United States to Turkey until diplomatic relations
were severed. Speaking in New York on December 10th, 1917, he
further said:

"I was at Constantinople when the massacre began. I was
personally told by the Turkish authorities that their forefathers,
when they took Turkey, determined to destroy the Armenians;
that now, after 450 years, they were going to make up for that
little mistake [of not having exterminated them sooner], and
that they were going to destroy them then. They gloried in the
fact that they were able to accomplish in thirty days what Abdul
Hamid had not been able to do in thirty-one years of his reign.
They were determined to do it — nothing could stop them — and
as I have said before, they could have been stopped if they had
not been encouraged by the Germans, and when all the facts are
known it will be the darkest mark against the Germans of any
of their vandalism."

In a pamphlet entitled The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks, by
Arnold J. Toynbee, with a preface by Viscount Bryce (which can be
obtained from the G. H. Doran Company, 38 West 32nd Street, New
York, for five cents), it is stated:

"Only a third of the two million Armenians in Turkey have
survived, and that at the price of apostatising to Islam or else
leaving all they had and fleeing across the frontier. The refugees
saw their women and children die by the roadside ; and apostacy
too, for a woman, involved the living death of 'marriage' to a
Turk and inclusion in his harem. The other two-thirds were
'deported' — that is, they were marched away from their homes
in gangs, with no food or clothing for the journey, in fierce heat
and bitter cold, hundreds of miles over rough mountain roads.
They were plundered and tormented by their guards, and by
subsidised bands of brigands, who descended on them in the
wilderness, and with whom their guards fraternised. Parched
with thirst, they were kept away from the water with bayonets.
They died of hunger and exposure and exhaustion, and in lonely
places the guards and robbers fell upon them and murdered
them in batches — some at the first halting place after the start,
nthers after they had endured weeks of this agonizing journey.
About half the deportees— and there were at least 1,200,000 of
them in all — perished thus on their journey, and the other half
have been dying lingering deaths ever since at their journey's
end ; for they have been deported to the most inhospitable regions
in the Ottoman Empire : the malarial marshes in the Province
of Konia ; the banks of the Euphrates where, between Syria
and Mesopotamia, it runs through a stony desert ; the sultry and
utterly desolate track of the Hedjaz Railway. The exiles who
are still alive have suffered worse than those who perished by
violence at the beginning.

"The same campaign of extermination has been waged
against the Nestorian Christians on the Persian frontier, and
against the Arabs of Syria, Christians and Moslems without
discrimination. In Syria there is a reign of terror. The Arab
leaders have been imprisoned, executed or deported already,

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 275

and the mass of the people lie paralyzed, expecting the
Armenians' fate, and dreading every moment to hear the decree
of extermination go forth.

"This wholesale destruction, which has already overtaken
two of the subject peoples in Turkey, and threatens all that 60
per cent, of the population which is not Turkish in language,
is the direct work of the Turkish government. The 'Deportation
Scheme' was drawn up by the central government at Constan-
tinople and telegraphed simultaneously to all the local authorities
in the Empire ; it was executed by the officials, the Gendarmerie,
the Army, and the bands of brigands and criminals organized in
the government's service. No State could be more completely
responsible for any act within its borders than the Ottoman
State is responsible for the appalling crimes it has committed
against its subject peoples during the War."

More than one German teacher, stationed in Asia Minor to spread
the blessings of German Kultur, has complained that he would have no
pupils left to instruct, as it was the Armenians and not the Turks who
went to school. Thus, Dr. Martin Niepage, Higher Grade Teacher in
the German Technical School at Aleppo, appealed in vain to the German
authorities "to put a stop to the brutality with which the wives and
children of slaughtered Armenians are being treated here" ( The Horrors
of Aleppo, seen by a German eyewitness; obtainable from the G. H.
Doran Co., New York, for five cents). In a formal report which Dr.
Niepage drew up, he states:

"Out of convoys which, when they left their homes on the
Armenian plateau, numbered from two to three thousand men,
women and children, only two or three hundred survivors arrive
here in the south. The men are slaughtered on the way; the
women and girls, with the exception of the old, the ugly and
those who are still children, have been abused by Turkish
soldiers and officers and then carried away to Turkish and
Kurdish villages, where they have to accept Islam. They try
to destroy the remnant of the convoys by hunger and thirst.
Even when they are fording rivers, they do not allow those dying
of thirst to drink. All the nourishment they receive is a daily
ration of a little meal sprinkled over their hands, which they lick
off greedily, and its only effect is to protract their starvation."

Then he adds:

" 'Ta'alim el aleman' ('the teaching of the Germans') is the
simple Turk's explanation to everyone who asks him about the
originators of these measures."

He concludes his report with the statement:

"Only just before I left Aleppo last May (1916), the crowds
of exiles encamped at Ras-el-Ain on the Bagdad Railway, esti-
mated at 20,000 women and children, were slaughtered to the
last one."

So well had the Turks learned their lesson from their German
masters that "in many places on the road from Mosul to Aleppo," the

276 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

hands of little children were seen "lying hacked off in such numbers,
that one could have paved the road with them" (p. 12).

And these atrocities are being perpetrated today. It is not ancient
history. As in the case of the Serbians, and of the Southern Slavs
within the Austrian Empire, every week brings further news of outrages
as monstrous as any we have recorded. It is so clearly the duty of
American patriots to acquaint themselves with the facts, and then to
make them known to their neighbors — lest devils be forgiven before
they have turned from their wickedness and repented — that we urge
every reader of these pages to obtain full and current information from
the American Committee for Armenian Relief, 70 Fifth Avenue, New
York.

Now for Belgium and France.

Under this head it is important to read the Report of the Committee
on Alleged German Outrages, presided over by the Right Hon. Viscount
Bryce ; published by the Macmillan Company, New York, at 10 cents.

The Committee responsible for this report consisted of men likely
to err, if at all, on the side of the accused. Among them were Sir
Edward Clarke, K.C., and Sir Frederick Pollock, K.C. They discarded
all evidence which was not convincing, and were surprised to find how
often depositions, "though taken at different places and on different dates,
and by different lawyers from different witnesses," corroborated "each
other in a striking manner."

The Appendix, which contains the Residence and Documents Laid
Before the Committee, includes many diaries found on dead German
soldiers. It is printed separately and is also published by the Macmillan
Co., New York ; price 50 cents.

Other books and pamphlets which throw valuable additional light
on the subject are:

German Atrocities: An Official Investigation, by Professor J. H.
Morgan; published by E. P. Button and Co., New York, at $1.00.

The German Terror in Belgium, by Arnold J. Toynbee, published
by G. H. Doran Co., New York, at $LOO.

Belgium and Germany, Te.vts and Documents, collected by Henri
Davignon ; published by Nelson & Sons, 381 Fourth Avenue, New York,
at 25 cents.

The Destruction of Belgium: Germany's Confession and Avoidance,
by E. Grimwood Mears, one of the Joint Secretaries to the Committee
on alleged German Outrages ; obtainable from G. H. Doran Co., New
York; price 10 cents.

The Belgian Deportations, by Arnold J. Toynbee, with a statement
by Viscount Bryce ; published by G. H. Doran Co., New York, at 10 cents.

The German Terror in France, by Arnokl J. Toynbee; published by
G. H. Doran Co., New York, at $1.00.

Their Crimes, translated from the French ; obtainable free of charge
by writing to Cassell & Co., Ludgate Hill, London, E. C, England.

OX THE SCREEN OF TIME 277

Most of these books and pamphlets can be obtained free of charge
by writing to Professor W. Macneile Dixon, 8 Buckingham Gate, London,
S. W. I., England, who generously has made it his business to spread
a knowledge of the facts as widely as possible.

On August 4, 1914, the roads converging upon Liege, in Belgium,
were covered with German Deaths' Head Hussars and Uhlans, pressing
forward to seize the passage over the Meuse. From the very beginning,
this sort of thing happened:

"On the 4th of August," says one witness, "at Herve" (a vil-
lage not far from the frontier), "I saw at about two o'clock in
the afternoon, near the station, five Uhlans ; these were the first
German troops I had seen. They were followed by a German
officer and some soldiers in a motor car. The men in the car
called out to a couple of young fellows who were standing about
thirty yards away. The young men, being afraid, ran off and
then the Germans fired and killed one of them named D . . ."

"The murder of this innocent fugitive civilian," the Bryce
Report continues (p. 10), "was a prelude to the burning and
pillage of Herve and of other villages in the neighborhood, to
the indiscriminate shooting of civilians of both sexes, and to the
organized military execution of batches of selected males. Thus
at Herve some fifty men escaping from the burning houses were
seized, taken outside the town and shot. At Melen, a hamlet
west of Herve, forty men were shot. In one household alone the
father and mother (names given) were shot, the daughter died
after being repeatedly outraged, and the son was wounded. Nor
were children exempt. 'About August 4,' says one witness,
'near Vottem, we were pursuing some Uhlans. I saw a man,
woman, and a girl about nine, who had been killed. They were
on the threshold of a house, one on the top of the other, as if
they had been shot down, one after the other, as they tried to
escape.' "

The Report suggests that the burning of the villages in this neigh-
borhood and the wholesale slaughter of civilians, such as occurred at
Herve, Micheroux, and Soumagne, may have been connected with the
rage of the Germans caused by the resistance of Fort Fleron, whose
guns barred the road to Liege. "Probably thinking that by exceptional
severities at the outset they could cow the spirit of the Belgian nation,
the German officers and men speedily accustomed themselves to the
slaughter of civilians" (p. 11).

The Committee at that point appears to forget that terrorization is a
recognized and prescribed feature of the German war-game. Officially,
in its instructions to German officers (Kriegsbrauch itn Landkriege,
translated into English by J. H. Morgan, The German War-Book}, the
German Government, as early as 1902, warned its officers against
"humanitarian ideas" (humanitare Anschauungen) , and declared that
war must be waged "by all methods which promote the attainment of its
object, subject only to such restraints as it imposes on itself in its own
interest." Further: "To protect oneself against attack and injuries from

278 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

the inhabitants, and to employ ruthlessly the necessary means of defence
and intimidation, is obviously not only a right but a duty of the staff
of the army" (p. 120). Finally: "International law [as interpreted by
the German Government] is in no way opposed to the exploitation of
the crimes of third parties (assassination, incendiarism, robbery and the
like) to the prejudice of the enemy" (p. 85).

It should also be borne in mind that German discipline, both military
and civilian, is intended to brutalize the nature so that "inferior" races
can be treated just as the Belgians were treated.

None the less we must assume that "practice makes perfect." The
character of the German outrages became more and more monstrous.

The Germans entered Liege on August 7th. Arms in private hands
had already been called in by the Belgian police, so that the Germans
might not excuse their murders on the pretext that civilians had fired
on them. The Germans found themselves in peaceful occupation of a
great industrial city. But the forts around Liege had offered unexpected
and exasperating resistance; many German soldiers had been killed, and
the Belgian army was continuing its resistance as it retired on Antwerp,
Ghent and Namur. The unfortunate city of Liege, therefore, was to be
used as an example. On August 20th, a massacre took place in its
streets. There is overwhelming evidence that this, and the burning of
large sections of the city, were premeditated (Toynbee, pp. 47, 48).

Entries in a German soldier's diary, already quoted, show that on
August 19th the German troops were allowed to give themselves up to
debauchery (Bryce Appendix, p. 255) — something which certainly would
not have happened, because German discipline is strict, unless counten-
anced by officers.

Next day (August 20th), houses in the Place de 1'Universite and
elsewhere were fired systematically with benzine, and many inhabitants
were burnt alive in their houses, their efforts to escape being prevented
by rifle fire.

It will be best, however, to allow one of the witnesses to describe
what he saw (Bryce Appendix, pp. 18, 19) :

"Before setting fire to these houses the Germans drove any
inhabitants there were in them into the cellars. All the houses
were inhabited, but some of the inhabitants had got away before
the Germans came up to them. At about thirty of the houses,
I actually saw faces at the windows before the Germans entered
and then saw the same faces at the cellar windows after the
Germans had driven the people into the cellars. One set of
Germans, about twenty in number, would do all this at a house
and then set fire to it. Altogether this took the whole morning.
Before each house was burnt it was thoroughly searched by the
men who brought out all sorts of furniture and put it on to
wagons which were waiting outside. I also saw some of the
men bringing out bags of money and handing them to their
officers. There were about thirty officers in the street. I am
quite sure of this. There were also a crowd of Belgian civilians
in the streets. I actually saw all these houses set fire to. In this
way thirty-five people were burnt. I know this from the list

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 279

which was put up in the police station afterwards and which
I saw. One of the houses which was burnt was the house of a
man I knew. He and two daughters, his nephew and niece were
burnt there. His wife was away at the time. She had gone to
Brussels the day before to see her parents. I know the family
very well. . . . When I was in the Place St. Lambert when
I heard shooting, I went to try and find where it was going on.
In the Rue Soens de Hasse I saw civilians brought out of their
houses. About 150 Germans under eight officers. They were
paying house to house visits, bringing all the people out of the
houses and forming them up in the street. I kept some little
distance away and so did many other Belgians who were with
me. The Belgians from the houses were marched off to the
Place de 1'Universite between files of soldiers. I followed,
keeping about twenty-five or thirty metres behind. When the
Place was reached the Belgians were not formed up in any
order, but the Germans fired on them. I heard an officer shout
an order in German and all the Germans in one part of the
square fired. The firing was not in volleys, and went on for
about twenty minutes. Whilst this was going on other Germans
were going into other houses in the square and bringing out more
Belgians whom they put among those who were being shot.
Altogether thirty-two were killed — all men. I counted the
bodies afterwards. I saw all this from the end of the Rue
Soens de Hasse. There were many Belgians with me, but none
of us were attacked. When I saw any Germans coming I got
out of the way. . . . After the shooting about seven or eight
were finished off with the bayonet. Immediately after the
men had been killed, I saw the Germans going into the houses
in the Place and bringing out the women and girls. About
twenty were brought out. They were marched close to the
corpses. Each of them was held by the arms. They tried to get
away. They were made to lie on tables which had been brought
into the square. About fifteen of them were then violated.
Each of them was violated by about twelve soldiers. While
this was going on about seventy Germans were standing round
the women including five officers (young). The officers started
it. There were some of the Germans between me and the
women, but I could see everything perfectly. The ravishing
went on for about one and one-half hours. . . . Many of
the women fainted and showed no sign of life. The Red Cross
took them away to the hospital. While this was going on other
Germans were burning the houses in the square."

In that German soldier's diary already quoted, under the date August
24th, we read: "We live like God in Belgium" (Wir leben wie Gott
in Belgieri).

And the German official defence? Practically this: Served them
right! (See The Destruction of Belgium, by E. Grimwood Mears).

Worse than that, the cry of the women of Germany was and is:
Served them right ! Had not Belgium resisted the German advance ?

But worse was to come. It was not merely that old women and
children and cripples and priests were shot indiscriminately and wantonly ;
that babies were bayoneted and dangled on bayonets before their mother's

280 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

eyes; it was not merely that whole villages were burned and their in-
habitants thrown back into the flames, under the direction of German
officers and while perfect discipline was maintained ; it was not merely
that nuns, and little girls of twelve, and old women of sixty, and
innumerable married women and single women, were violated in ways
so obscene and so loathsome as to outdo the foulest records of any
criminal court in the world. It was worse than this ; for these German
heroes, in order to impress the "inferior" race with a sense of German
ruthlessness — which in Germany means superiority — developed the prac-
tice of cutting off the breasts of the women they violated and of leaving
them, naked, to die, though frequently the Germans nailed the bodies
of their victims to doors or tied them to trees (Bryce Appendix, pp. 120,
14, 82, 65, 112 and passim}.

Very little has been stated publicly, for obvious reasons, about the
violation of nuns. Cardinal Mercier wrote to von Bissing, the German
Governor-General of Belgium, "that I could furnish him with no exact
information, because my conscience forbade me to hand over to a tribunal
of any kind the information (alas! very precise) in my possession.
Outrages have been committed upon nuns" (Cardinal Mercier, by
Stillemans, p. 74). An officer of the llth United States Engineer
Regiment, in a letter to Robert Ridgeway of the Public Service Com-
mission, says : "A British Chaplain told me that he knows personally
of a Belgian Convent where they found that fifty-seven out of eighty-two
nuns had been violated when the boche fell back" (New York Times,
December 10, 1917).

Perhaps it is necessary to give specific instances of some of the dif-
ferent outrages mentioned. Here is the affidavit of a Belgian soldier :

"We were passing the flying ground outside Liege at Ans
when I saw a woman, apparently of middle age, perhaps twenty-
eight to thirty years old, stark naked, tied to a tree. At her feet
were two little children about three or four years old. All three
were dead. I believe the woman had one of her breasts cut off,
but I cannot be sure of this. Her whole bosom was covered with
blood and her body was covered with blood and black marks.
Both children had been killed by what appeared to be bayonet
wounds. The woman's clothes were lying on the grass, thrown
all about the place. I was near J. B. at the moment we found the
woman. I told Corporal V. what I had seen later on. I was
marching on the outside of the patrol, on grass land, B. being
next to me and the corporal closest to the regiment. J. B. cut the
cords which held the woman up by stabbing them with his
bayonet. The body fell and we left it there. We could not
stop to bury the bodies because we could see the Germans follow-
ing" (Bryce Appendix, p. 14).

Here is another:

"On September 10th we came to the village of Haecht, and
I and some others were sent out as a patrol ; we passed a river
and came to a farmhouse. On the door of the farm I saw a child

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 281

— two or three years old — nailed to the door by its hands and
feet. It was clothed and quite dead. There was no wound of
any sort on the body; the face was horribly drawn with pain.
In the garden of the same house I saw the body of another child,
a little girl of five or six; she had been shot in the forehead"
(Bryce Appendix, p. 119).

And another :

"About 13th or 14th September [1914], we captured the
village of Haecht from the Germans. We had, however, to
retreat again. While resting we found a woman lying in the
road naked to the waist. The breasts were cut right off — both
of them. Lieutenant D. ordered us to cover the woman with
a small German 'tent' we found close by in the haversack of
a German, and we afterwards buried her. My section was
with me at the time" (Bryce Appendix, p. 120).

This is the affidavit of a British non-commissioned officer:

"We were searching a village for a patrol of Uhlans at
3.30 p.m. — a small village of about fifty houses — we found them
in a house ; about ten got outside, but we did not let them get to
their horses and we killed them all. On the ground floor in
the front room — it was a house of about six rooms — there were
ten Uhlans, who immediately put up their hands, and we took
them prisoners. I sent them outside in charge of my men. I
searched the house ; everything was in disorder. On the floor
in the corner near the fireplace I saw two women and two
children, the ages of the former apparently about thirty and
twenty-five. One was dead, the one I judged to be the elder.
Her left arm had been cut off just below the elbow. The floor
was covered with blood. I think she had bled to death. I felt
her other pulse at once. I have been trained as a hospital
attendant before I went into the reserve. She was quite dead,
but not yet quite cold. Her clothing was disarranged, but may
have been because she was rolling about in pain. The house
had farm buildings attached to it, so I presume they were of
the farmer class. I did not examine her for any other wound,
as I was satisfied she had died of hemorrhage. The younger
woman was just alive, but quite unconscious. Her right leg had
been cut off above the knee. As she was on the point of death
I could not summon assistance quickly enough to stop the bleed-
ing even; I was sure she was beyond assistance then. There
were two little children, a boy about four or five and a girl of
about six or seven. The boy's left hand was cut off at the wrist
and the girl's right hand at the same place" (Bryce Appendix,
p. 232).

There are nearly three hundred closely printed pages containing
testimony such as the foregoing and the following:

"As I looked into the kitchen I saw the Germans seize the
baby out of the arms of the farmer's wife. There were three
German soldiers, one officer and two privates. The two privates
held the baby and the officer took out his sword and cut the

19

282 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

baby's head off. The head fell on the floor and the soldiers
kicked the body of the child into a corner and kicked the head
after it. ... After the baby had been killed we saw the
officer say something to the farmer's wife and saw her push
him away. After five or six minutes the two soldiers seized the
woman and put her on the ground. She resisted them and they
then pulled all her clothes off her until she was quite naked.
The officer then violated her while one soldier held her by the
shoulders and the other by the arms. After the officer each
soldier in turn violated her, the other soldier and the officer
holding her down. . . . After the woman had been violated
by the three, the officer cut off the woman's breasts. I then saw
him take out his revolver and point it at the woman on the
ground. . . . 'We ran into the fields and from there saw the
farmhouse had been set on fire" (Bryce Appendix, p. 21).

As an example of the way towns and villages were treated, the case
of Dinant will serve as well as any other. This is from the Belgian
Official Report (see The Crimes of Germany, published by Horace Cox,
London ; pp. 39, 41 ; and Reports on the Violation of the Rights of
Nations . . . in Belgium, by the Official Commission of the Belgian
Government; pp. 81-110) :

"On 15th August a lively engagement took place at Dinant
between the French troops on the left bank of the Meuse and
the German troops coming up from the East. On Friday, the
21st, about 9 o'clock in the evening, German troops coming
down the road from Ciney entered the town by the Rue St.
Jacques. On entering they began firing into the windows of the
houses, and killed a workman who was returning to his own
house, wounded another inhabitant, and forced him to cry
'Long live the Kaiser.' They bayoneted a third person in the
stomach. They entered the cafes, seized the liquor, got drunk,
and retired after having set fire to several houses and broken the
doors and windows of others. The population was terrorised
and stupefied, and shut itself up in its dwellings.

"Saturday, 22nd August, was a day of relative calm. All
life, however, was at an end in the streets.

"On the following Sunday, the 23rd, at 6.30 in the morning,
soldiers of the 108th Regiment of Infantry invaded the Church
of the Premonstratensian Fathers, drove out the congregation,
separated the women from the men, and shot 50 of the latter.
Between 7 and 9 the same morning the soldiers gave themselves
up to pillage and arson, going from house to house and driving
the inhabitants into the street. Those who tried to escape were
shot. About 9 in the morning the soldiery, driving before them
by blows from the butt ends of rifles men, women, and children,
pushed them all into the Parade Square, where they were kept
prisoners till 6 o'clock in the evening. The guard took pleasure
in repeating to them that they would soon be shot. About 6
o'clock a captain separated the men from the women and chil-
dren. The women were placed in front of a rank of infantry
soldiers, the men were ranged along a wall. The front rank of
them were then told to kneel, the others remaining standing
behind them. A platoon of soldiers drew up in face of these

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 283

unhappy men. It was in vain that the women cried out for
mercy for their husbands, sons and brothers. The officer
ordered his men to fire. There had been no inquiry nor any
pretence of a trial. About 20 of the inhabitants were only
wounded, but fell among the dead. The soldiers, to make sure,
fired a new volley into the heap of them. Several citizens
escaped this double discharge. They shammed dead for more
than two hours, remaining motionless among the corpses, and
when night fell succeeded in saving themselves in the hills.
Eighty-four corpses were left on the Square and buried in a
neighbouring garden.

"The day of 23rd August was made bloody by several more
massacres. Soldiers discovered some inhabitants of the Fau-
bourg St. Pierre in the cellars of a brewery there and shot them.

"Since the previous evening a crowd of workmen belonging
to the factory of M. Himmer had hidden themselves, along with
their wives and children, in the cellars of the building. They had
been joined there by many neighbours and several members of
the family of their employer. About 6 o'clock in the evening
these unhappy people made up their minds to come out of their
refuge, and defiled all trembling from the cellars with the white
flag in front. They were immediately seized and violently
attacked by the soldiers. Every man was shot on the spot.
Almost all the men of the Faubourg de Leffe were executed
en masse. In another part of the town 12 civilians were killed
in a cellar. In the Rue en He a paralytic was shot in his arm-
chair. In the Rue Enfer the soldiers killed a young boy of 14.

"In the Faubourg de Neffe the viaduct of the railway was
the scene of a bloody massacre. An old woman and all her chil-
dren were killed in their cellar. A man of 65 years, his wife,
his son, and his daughter were shot against a well. Other
inhabitants of Neffe were taken in a barge as far as the rock of
Bayard and shot there, among them a woman of 83 and her
husband.

"A certain number of men and women had been locked up
in the court of the prison. At 6 in the evening a German
machine gun, placed on the hill above, opened fire on them, and
an old woman and three other persons were brought down.

"To sum up, the town of Dinant is destroyed. It counted
1,400 houses; only 200 remain. The manufactories where the
artisan population worked have been systematically destroyed.
Rather more than 700 of the inhabitants have been killed ; others
have been taken off to Germany, and are still retained there as
prisoners. The majority are refugees scattered all through
Belgium."

It is also characteristic of German methods that those of the survivors
who were deported to Germany, were abominably treated, both during
their journey and after their arrival. M. Tchoffen, the Public Prosecutor
of Dinant, who was one of these prisoners, gives a graphic account of
his experience. He says:

"We were treated like beasts in a menagerie. Officers and
soldiers — and they were everywhere — gave the lead to the
civilians. The women and children kept on insulting and using

284 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

threatening gestures at us. ... The journey lasted twenty-
three hours. Once only had we anything to eat and drink, and
we owed that to the Red Cross" (Belgian Official Report,
pp.99, 100).

Both in Belgium and France, the Germans constantly used civilians
to screen their advance. Thus, at Mons, — "we waited for the advance
of the Germans," states a British officer (Bryce Appendix, p. 176).
"Some civilians reported to us that they were coming down a road in
front of us. On looking in that direction we saw, instead of German
troops, a crowd of civilians — men, women and children — waving white
handkerchiefs and being pushed down the road in front of a large number
of German troops." "They came on as it were in a mass," states a
British soldier, "with the women and children massed in front of them.
They seemed to be pushing them on, and I saw them shoot down women
and children who refused to march." — "I saw the Germans advancing
on hands and knees towards our position," states another; "they were
in close formation, and had a line of women and children in front of
their front rank." A Belgian standing in a side street saw the German
tactics close at hand. He saw six of the victims shot by the Germans
for trying to get away. The Burgomaster of Mons himself had been
seized in the streets, and was driven forward with the others (Bryce
Appendix, p. 177; Belgian Official Report, Vol. II, p. 136).

In France as in Belgium, arson, rape and pillage were the hall-
marks of German occupation. After what has already been related, a
single instance will suffice, — that of Gerbeviller. Here, as also at Lune-
ville, Herimenil, Rehainviller, Mont, Lamath, Fraimbois, St. Barbe, and
at scores of other villages, the Bavarians proved themselves to be just as
brutal as the Prussians.

"From the moment of their entrance into the town the
Germans [Bavarians] gave themselves up to the worst excesses,
entering the houses with savage yells, burning the buildings,
killing or arresting the inhabitants, and sparing neither women
nor old men. Out of 475 houses, twenty at most are still
habitable. . . . [Of the inhabitants] some were led into
the fields to be shot, others were murdered in their houses or
struck down as they passed through the streets, while they were
trying to escape from the conflagration. Up to now thirty-six
bodies have been identified (names follow) . . . Fifteen
of these poor people were executed at a place called 'la Prele.'
They were buried by their fellow-citizens on September 12th
or 15th. Almost all had their hands tied behind their backs;
some were blindfolded. ... In the streets and houses during
the day the town was sacked and most tragic scenes took place.

"In the morning the enemy entered the house of M. and
Mme. Lingenheld, seized the son, thirty-six years of age, who
was wearing the brassard of the Red Cross, tied his hands
behind his back, dragged him into the street and shot him.
They then returned to look for the father, an old man of seventy.
Mme. Lingenheld then took to flight. On her way she saw her

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 285

son stretched on the ground, and as the unhappy man was
still moving some Germans drenched him with petrol, to which
they set fire in the presence of the terrified mother. In the
meantime M. Lingenheld was led to la Prele, where he was
executed.

"At the same time the soldiers knocked at the door of the
house occupied by M. Dehan, his wife, and his mother-in-law,
the widow Guillaume, aged seventy-eight. The latter, who
opened the door, was shot point-blank, and fell into the arms of
her son-in-law, who ran up behind her. 'They have killed me !'
she cried. 'Carry me into the garden.' Her children obeyed,
and laid her at the end of the garden with a pillow under her
head and a blanket over her legs, and then stretched themselves
at the foot of the wall to avoid shells. At the end of an hour
the widow Guillaume was dead. .

"Side by side with this carnage, innumerable acts of vio-
lence were committed. The wife of a soldier, Mme. X., was
raped by a German soldier in the passage of her parents' house,
whilst her mother was obliged to flee at the bayonet's point"
(Rapports et Procfrs-Verbaux d'Enquete de la Commission Insti-
tute en Vue de Constater les Actes Commis par I'Ennemi, pp.
27-29).

Occasionally, even a German began to feel uncomfortable. Thus
(The Crimes of Germany, pp. 20, 33), Private Hassemer, 8th Corps,
writes in his diary on September 3, 1914:

"Sommepy (Marne) : Horrible massacre. The village burnt
to the ground, the French thrown into houses in flames, civilians
and all burnt together."

From another German soldier's diary :

"In this way we destroyed eight houses with their inmates.
In one of them, two men with their wives and a girl of eighteen
were bayoneted. The little one almost unnerved me, so innocent
was her expression."

Truly it is not pleasant to descend into Hell. But if, to spare our
own feelings, we refuse to do so, how can we hate Hell as it must be
hated ; how can we persist as we must persist if the world is to be
protected against such unspeakable depravity, which crowns its own
offence by claiming God as its "unconditional and avowed ally" !

T.

(To be continued}

.EMENTARY ARTICLE

HIGHER AND LOWER NATURE

IN the last section is the statement that at first we do not know the
difference between higher and lower nature, especially on the border-
land where the contest rages. That statement requires elucidation

and amplification.

Men and women live in a perpetual fog of self-deception and self-
created illusions and delusions. They do so chiefly because they want
to. They want to because they would have no peace from the urgings
of their consciences if they did not. The same thought in another and
simpler form is this : we all know what we ought to do, but we pretend
that we do not because we do not want to do it. We cloud the question
deliberately, dragging in any side issue or extraneous circumstance that
will prevent a clear cut decision. As these general statements are not
very convincing, or very clear, I shall use some homely illustration to
explain my meaning.

A crude example would be this : We love hot bread but having
weak digestions, we ought never to eat it. So we seek for every possible
excuse to stifle our conscience and indulge our appetite. We go to a
meal when, on a wheatless day, only hot corn muffins are served. The
rest is easy. It is a patriotic duty to observe the wheatless day ; of
what importance is our digestion in comparison with the great issues
of the war, and our pledge not to eat wheat bread ; ergo, we eat the hot
muffins. We may be uneasy, particularly after the indigestion has begun,
but few consciences are proof against such reasoning. We entirely
ignore two facts ; one that we ought not to eat hot muffins ; and the other,
that there was no reason why we should have eaten the hot muffins
except that we wanted to. All the rest was pure buncombe. We
deliberately tried to fool ourselves.

We all do this sort of thing all the time and every day. The
variations are infinite, but at heart they are always the same. I have
seen a person eat candy, who should not have done so, and apparently
convince himself that he did it to keep it away from a child for whom
it would be bad ; he sacrificed himself for the sake of the child. Yes,
we are just as crude and silly as that.

She likes to have friends to dinner and her husband does not. Does

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HIGHER AND LOWER NATURE 287

she go ahead anyhow and invite them because she wants to and in spite
of his dislike? No indeed. She only asks them because he needs dis-
traction, or because he ought to make friends that would help him in his
profession, or what not. If he objects when he hears they are coming,
does she tell the truth and say, she asked them because she wanted to?
Again no. She argues with him, and tells him about all her good and
disinterested motives, and she goes to bed full of resentment and in tears
because she is so misunderstood. By this time she may be in some
genuine perplexity as to the facts, for they lie buried under hours or
perhaps days of dishonest thinking.

A friend asks us to take a walk, and we do not want to; we want
to stay home and read. Do we say so. Dear me, no. We tell him the
first cock-and-bull story that comes into our head, that we have letters
to write or something — anything; and say we are sorry we cannot go.
And we justify it on the ground of politeness, or that we did not want
to hurt his feelings. This is a little different from the other cases, for
we may face the issue frankly and not even pretend to believe our own lie.
So that is not a very good illustration. Let us seek another, and one
on a little higher plane. Here is a type which I often see.

A man makes a good resolution about some fault, let us say, that
he will not criticize others. He sees someone do something wrong or
do something badly. He is bursting with the desire to tell about it,
but remembers his good resolution. Does he keep quiet? Not often.
He decides that it would be better for the sinner's little guru to know
about this fault so that he can help the sinner to cure it; or the sinner's
friends ought to be told for the sinner's good ; or maybe some individual
ought to know about it so as to guard himself from the result of the
sinner's weakness. There is always some justification, some reason,
other than his love of scandal. Practically no one ever acknowledges to
himself that he is a vicious and malicious gossip, and that that is the
real reason he speaks evil of others.

Or let us take something not so unpleasant. I once decided that
I would try not to defend or excuse myself. It was extraordinarily
interesting and very humiliating to watch the gyrations of my mind
under that strain. I think I kept the resolution for as much as forty
minutes, during most of which I was alone. But the funny thing was
not my unconscious, automatic and immediate breaking of this admirable
rule, but the silly reasons I gave myself when it was not unconscious.
I remember once deliberately excusing and defending myself because I
was afraid a person who was interested in me would be disappointed
and grieved if he thought ill of me where I was not guilty. At my
office it was easy. Of course it was my duty there not to let my
subordinates think I had made mistakes or done stupid things ; that was
not self-defense or self-excuse; it was simply and obviously good busi-
ness. I discovered that my mind could invent forty thousand good and
sufficient reasons why it was my plain duty to defend and excuse myself.

288 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

I also made another very interesting discovery, and that was that I was
nearly always, no, practically always, actually guilty. We are very rarely
unjustly accused. The best, or the most, we can say for ourselves is
that sometimes, though rarely, we are not guilty of just the fault that
is brought to our attention, or that it did not express itself in just the
way pointed out. But that is more than sufficient to enable us to cloud
the real issue. How many, many times we deeply resent a scolding, and
lose its benefit, because the particular detail selected was one we felt
to be unjust. I feel that I must make this point clear by illustration,
for it is one of the commonest of our weapons of self-defense and of
self-delusion. Let us take a liar. He knows he is a liar and is ashamed
of it. It is a sore point with him, and therefore he particularly dislikes
being reprimanded for it. He tells some story full of inaccuracies and
exaggerations, is found out and scolded about it. The chances are that
the person scolding him will, in the arraignment, speak of at least one
detail where he feels that he was within the bounds of truth. That is
enough for the lower nature. He is being unjustly accused, unfairly
scolded. The fourteen lies he did tell are forgotten in his self-righteous-
ness over the little bit of truth. The issue is clouded, the scolding wasted,
the opportunity lost, and he goes off full of resentment and self-
justification. How very often have I seen this operate. Nine times out
of ten when you speak to a person of his faults, the whole effect of
the lecture is completely lost because he does not think himself guilty
of the particular illustration you happen to use. You scold a servant
for being late. They usually are late, and it may be a chronic fault,
but on that particular occasion it was the cook who was not ready. They
go off inwardly triumphant and outwardly indignant because they were
unjustly accused. We are all like that; the only difference is that some
are more so than others. Any little fragment of excuse is seized upon
for complete self-justification. The real facts are carefully ignored, and
kept wrapped up in the cotton wool of self-deception and self-delusion.

I knew one man who read novels because he liked to read them,
but who justified it on the ground that he wanted to improve his literary
style. Lots of people drink because it is necessary for their health. Did
not the doctor recommend it? I defy any one to think of any sin which
people do not commit and then justify. The Germans justify the sinking
of the Lnsitania and the murdering and raping of women. Cannot you
hear countless Germans telling themselves that they were not doing wrong
to do those things, for was it not the order of their superiors, and is it
not their duty to obey their superiors?

The nastier the fault, the more we seek this kind of justification.
People guilty of treachery or disloyalty of any kind invariably have
convincing reasons why this course was justified. When you come to
think of it many novels deal with this theme. They describe the doing
of something wrong and the temptations and reactions of the sinner, and
his method of justifying his act.

HIGHER AND LOWER NATURE 289

We do things we should not because we are tired, or hungry, or
bored, or early, or late, or glad, or sorry, or scared, or whatnot. I mean
we do wrong things which we want to do, and use these conditions as
our excuses. They are pretty feeble excuses but they serve.

This effort of deliberate self-delusion is not confined to the lower
planes from which I have drawn my illustrations, and, of course, it is
the more serious the higher up it is carried. It also becomes more subtle
and more difficult to illustrate and trace. The whole purpose of self-
examination, of which the devotional books make so much, is designed
for no other purpose than to enable us to pierce through the self-created
fog of illusion and deception with which we have surrounded our motives.
Self-examination is a subject to itself of which more anon. This section
is to show its necessity.

The mind is the great slayer of the Real. We habitually use our minds
to obscure and nullify the promptings of our consciences, the admoni-
tions of our friends, the advice and directions of our superiors, whenever
we do not like what our consciences or friends or superiors say to us,
and that is nearly always. We even pretend to ourselves that we do
like to be scolded and that we are grateful, and that we will try to
benefit by the experience, while all the time our minds are busy excusing
and explaining and defending ourselves to ourselves, until any possible
benefit is lost in a cloud of side issues and irrelevancies. Of course I
am writing about things as they are, not things as they ought to be. I
confess that it is deplorable, and also, that fortunately for all of us,
there are people who do not behave this way. But do not run away
with the idea that you are one of them. I have known a few, a very
few, who honestly try to profit by the scoldings they receive. They not
only recognize and accept the existence of their fault, but they are really
grateful to the person pointing it out. Such people have travelled a
long distance on the road to saintliness.

Which one of us prays a really honest prayer? Which one of us
knows what a really honest prayer is? Who goes before the Master
seeing himself as he really is, stripped of all disguise? It is said that
only a disciple who is far along can do it, and that the first time he
sees himself as the Master sees him it is more than his consciousness can
bear. C A. G.

"Set me some great task, ye gods, and I will show my spirit!" "Not
so" says the good heaven, "plod and plough." — Emerson.

Egotism in German Philosophy, by George Santayana, has a distinctly alluring
title to those who wish to see Germany discovered and beaten in every field of her
activity. But a careful reading of the book leaves one almost completely disap-
pointed with the inability of Germanized American philosophy to penetrate the
cardinal viciousness of that by which it is still too inherently dominated. Genera-
tions of American philosophers have gone to school in Germany and learned their
philosophy in German, and the mark of Cain is on them.

Dr. Santayana, true to form, has written with great brilliance of phrase, dis-
playing at once wit, and, where he desired it, merciless condemnation, which reveals
his own personal animus against German "transcendental, metaphysical idealism."
He defines egotism, technically, as "subjectivity in thought and wilfulness in
morals ;" and he indicts the German people with the phrase — "There is no social
or intellectual disease to which, in spots, they do not succumb, c\s to an epidemic :
their philosophy is an example of this." But in an extraordinary way his own
philosophy excuses them.

Although his central theme purports to be a discovery of Egotism in German
thinking in order to prove that "The whole transcendental philosophy, if made
ultimate, is false, and nothing but a private perspective," he is himself so imbued
with the materialistic outlook on life, that probably unconsciously he plays right
into German hands. The best parts of the book, containing less of criticism and
more of descriptive narrative, are those chapters which survey the sweep of German
philosophy — with its setting in Protestant theology, the "heir of Judaism," — and
the revelation of the "Seeds of Egotism in Kant," siezed upon and developed by
Fichte and Hegel. Dr. Santayana sees the Protestant limitation in setting up self-
will and private judgment on the foundation of a more or less fixed revelation; —
the result is "to retain, for whatever changed views it may put forward, the names
of former beliefs." This duplicity is sanctified by the secret feeling that the
categorical imperative is "omnipotent." "God, freedom, and immortality, for
instance, may eventually be turned into their opposites, since the oracle of faith
is internal ; but their names may be kept, together with a feeling that what will
now bear those names is much more satisfying than what they originally stood for."
Ruthlessness, furthermore, is the logical outcome of such a position, for "Kant
expressly repudiated as unworthy of a virtuous will any consideration of happi-
ness, or of consequences, either to oneself or to others. He was personally as
mild and kindly as the Vicar of Wakefield (whose goodness he denied to be
moral because it was natural), but his moral doctrine was in principle a perfect
frame for fanaticism. Give back, as time was bound to give back, a little flesh
to this skeleton of duty, make it the voice not of a remote Mosaic decalogue, but
of a rich temperament and a young life, and you will have sanctified beforehand
every stubborn passion and every romantic crime. In the guise of an infallible
conscience, before which nothing has a right to stand, egotism is launched upon
its irresponsible career." Again, "the categorical principle in morals, like the ego
in logic, can easily migrate."

REVIEWS 291

Fichte and Hegel, building upon this inherited tradition of self-assertion, pro-
claimed that "The German people are called by the plan of Providence to occupy
the supreme place in the history of the universe." In this formulation of history.
Egotism found its complete expression, and a reformulation of the perverted
Messianic Kingdom ideal, whose adherents of old rejected and crucified the Christ.

But the source, though perverted, of the ancient ideal was a revelation from
on High ; the source of the German idea lies in a categorical imperative — "Some-
thing native and inward to the private soul . . . quietly claiming to rule the
invisible world, to set God on his throne and open eternity to the human spirit.
The most subjective of feelings, the feeling of what ought to be, legislates for the
universe." Truly, "Egotism could hardly go further," Hence, though "self-asser-
tion and ambition are ancient follies of the human race," the Germans "think
these vulgar passions the creative spirit of the universe."

So far Dr. Santayana, dealing in a general way with general principles, is right
and just. His expressions are often extreme, for he is constantly carried away
by desire for effective rhetoric; and it is only by holding to his main purpose that
at times one can steer clear of manifold self-contradictions. When, however, he
comes to Nietzsche, apologizing for him, excusing him for his "keener and more
heroic" romanticism, we discover the German in Dr. Santayana's thinking, — the
fruits of admitting for years German dominion and of growing up intellectually
in a Germanized atmosphere.

Dr. Santayana specifically disclaims close connection with German philosophy, —
"I write frankly as an outsider"; but when he adds that his object is to describe
German schools "intelligibly, and to judge them from the point of view of the
layman, and in his interests," we assert that he failed of his last purpose, and
seems unable to assume the position of the former. The kernel of German
philosophy is that the German begins with himself and then ends with himself.
Many philosophies begin with the present human consciousness, but they arrive
at other states and conditions of consciousness. They start with an outlook that
is included within their own narrow experience and they arrive at some com-
prehension of the experience of a whole universe. From a recognition of their
own will, and the right exercise of it, they discover the harmony of co-operating
and uniting with the wills of others. They recognize, in substance, another and
an outside world, more real than they are except in so far as their self-consciousness
enables them to partake of it.

But German transcendentalism, starting with the self's cognition of itself,
never goes outside, but draws everything to itself. External experience is brought
back into the ideas of it, and these are actually identified with that experience.
These ideas in turn are drawn in and identified with the fact that the ego has the
ideas. The Ego then feels "I am I," and adds to this the vague feeling that it is
striving or tending towards something or other. Which sequence of thought, being
reversed, means that the Personal Will, or Personal Geist, absorbs its ideas, its
ideas absorb their outer experience of the phenomenal world; and this phenomenal
world includes all outer things, whether past, present, or future. Therefore, "Earth
and heaven, God and my fellowmen are mere expressions of my Will, and if they
were anything more, I could not now be alive to their presence. My Will is abso-
lute. With that conclusion transcendentalism is complete."

Though Dr. Santayana rejects such a system of philosophy as "a forced
method of speculation, producing more confusion than it found and calculated chiefly
to enable practical materialists to call themselves idealists and rationalists to remain
theologians," how does he criticize it, and what does he offer as better?

The only philosophic grounds of Dr. Santayana's criticism lie in his chapters on
"Egotism and Selfishness" and "Heathenism." An animal's will is a heathen will.
He defines Heathenism as a religion of the will, the faith life has because it is
life, and in its own aims just because it is using them. German philosophy is

292 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

therefore heathen ; God becomes vital energy ; freedom, personality ; immortality,
social progress. Happiness is not for wild animals ; happiness is only for those
who, in Nietzsche's phrase, are "tamed," and Nietzsche thought "the pursuit of
happiness low, materialistic, and selfish."

Now Dr. Santayana, despite his criticism, is heathen in his own way. Whereas
the crude Egotism and Heathenism of Fichte and Hegel and Max Stirner repel
him, he is prepared to forgive Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He himself defines
happiness as "the union of vitality with art." In other words, this animal will to
live and enjoy, the blonde beast roving lustful and free, is all right if restricted
within the prescribed limits of refined and artistic expressions. Admitted that Art
in its true and spiritual sense would be a safe guide, does not this standard, as
things now are, leave it to each individual to determine what is, and what is not,
an artistic expression of his particular vital energies? Is this not exactly a
return to German self-will and egotism under a new guise?

Dr. Santayana claims that the blonde beast must learn wisdom from experience,
a thing which German empiricists never do. But all systems of philosophy,
including mysticism, and every effort to emancipate the individual from the rule
of authority and tradition, can be labelled egotistic, on the principles employed by
Dr. Santayana, because, though these systems are based on experience and not on
subjective ideas, the interpretation of all experience is based on the needs and
interests of each human being, — a return once again to the standard of the personal
ego. Dr. Santayana, on the other side, would have us by no means return to
obedience to a revelation or to an ideal, for, again, he would let instinct rule,
instinct tamed by art.

It is Dr. Santayana's own materialism which makes him unable to distinguish
between the self-will of the animal personality and the higher spiritual will of a
creative and creating spiritual universe. He is writing solely of the personal,
selfish, will-to-live, to be, to have. German philosophy is a glorification throughout
of this lower will, — selfish, sensual, devilish; and Nietzsche is its chief prophet.
The refinements of art to such a will are merely raising the degree and intensity
of gratification by a species of self-control and restraint, calculated to give a
higher form of pleasure. Nietzsche pretends to "drop the distinction between good
and evil and transcend ethics altogether." Dr. Santayana comments that "Such a
thought would not have been absurd in itself or even unphilosophical." We realize
how far this is apart from the laws of the spiritual will when we remember that
Christianity came not to destroy the law but to fulfil it, and that sacrifice is the
cardinal principle of all spiritual, as also of all noble, courteous, and honorable
living.

This book then, criticizes German philosophy for one form which its evil
expresses, while defending another and, in a measure, a subtler form of exactly the
same source of evil. False principles of German thinking are criticized by another
set of false principles, which are a by-product of the very same root from which
German philosophy springs. The final impression, therefore, is thoroughly unsatis-
factory; and on a careless or unguarded reader the book might well have a dis-
tinctly pernicious influence, despite the Tightness, in a way, of its primary intention.
Though Dr. Santayana disclaims a direct philosophic contribution, the present
volume appears to fail in being such far more by reason of its inconsistent think-
ing, than by any lack of studied brilliance or desire to address the professional
philosopher. Perhaps its most disquieting feature is the new demonstration it
offers of the subservience of even so-called independent American philosophy, to
the German models which it has for so long admired.

JOHN BLAKE, JR.

Readers of THE THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY are invited to send questions to
be answered in this Department, or to submit other answers to questions already
printed where their point of view differs from or supplements the answers that
have been given.

QUESTION No. 204 (Continued). — What are the first steps toward becoming
conscious of the invisible world f Is there not something that one may do to develop
the vision for and the powers to function in the spiritual world?

ANSWER. — There are several worlds now invisible to us, but of these it is only
one that we should strive to become conscious of, viz., the inner world, or the
"Kingdom of God." And the first steps toward that end are plainly stated in all
great religions of the world. It can, without exception, be summed up in these
words : "Purify your heart" ; because it is only "the pure in heart" that shall see
God. This first claim on all who want to scale the heavenly ladder it is very
difficult for people of the present age to comply with, because it doesn't commend
itself to our lower nature, nor is its indispensableness much understood. But unless
it is met to some considerable extent, it is not only futile but in some cases even
dangerous to try to climb higher. In some unexpected place of the ladder a step
is rotten, and the climber will fall down and injure himself, or perish. Therefore,
give full attention to the fulfilment of this first demand. Keep the commandments,
—"live the life" ; live up to your highest ideal of the perfect man, — or strive ear-
nestly to do so always ; and in time you will come to stand high.

Certainly there is something that must be done in order to develop the vision
for and the powers to function in the Kingdom of God. Meditate! Meditate!
Meditate! Unless you have acquired the power of continual meditation no vision
for, nor any powers to function in that world can develop. And while striving to
improve your meditation, you are strengthening your moral nature, thus making
it easier to keep your heart clean ; — "for you have no conception of the pozver of
meditation." In this way the heavenly ladder is gradually ascended, and when the
disciple at last enters the Kingdom he will find that all powers, needed in that
world, have developed while he was climbing.

Needless here to describe any special course of training in order to attain to
continual meditation, since it has often been exceedingly well expounded in detail.

T. H. K.

ANSWER. — Some of these first steps have already been taken although not
clearly recognized, perhaps, at their true value : there is one's consciousness of
the now visible world, which has been achieved in the past ; this, surely, is the
first step, is it not? Then there is knowledge that the invisible world exists; not
proof to silence the noisy mind, but direct knowledge of that world which we
consciously enter through meditation or in prayer ; this knowledge is the second step.
The third step is a very long one, even though it is necessarily and logically

•93

294 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

derived from the second step ; the invisible world is not somewhere else, con-
sciousness of it is not gained through some queer, fourth dimensional telescope;
the invisible world is here and now, and we are living in it at every moment.

By the grace of our Masters, it is not necessary to make the entire conquest
of each one of these steps before passing to the next ; indeed, there can be true
vision of the outer world only after consciousness of the inner world is attained,
for the outer is but the vague and distorted shadow of the inner reality. If this
be true, if the material world is but a maya, an illusion, what must be said of
the psychic world which is, to most of us fortunately, a part of the invisible world?
Light on the Path describes this psychic or lower astral world as a plane of
unequalized forces where confusion necessarily prevails : A disciple, truly, would
not expect to gain vision of eternal things by contemplating this psychic scrap-
heap where the counterfeits and shams of the universe are piled in chaotic
profusion.

It is a very definite part of the invisible world of which we wish to develop
clear, personal consciousness ; the spiritual world, the world of the Masters, these
are but clumsy terms for designating a very definite and purposeful way of life,
but, at least, they convey the impression of a world where wisdom and order
prevail. The fourth step is the ordering of our lives so that they may be in
rhythm with the life of those Beings in the spiritual world who are eager to aid
us with their heritage of wisdom and of transcendent joy.

Does this seem somewhat vague and indeterminate, then ask some older
student at what point you should begin, or write to the Secretary T. S., or to
any of the contributors to the QUARTERLY with whose methods of expression you
feel sympathy and understanding, addressing the contributor in care of the Editor.

Why should there not be something of personal guidance when an earnest
student desires personal consciousness of the invisible world? Is it not conceivable
that this is the goal of all previous lives and experiences?

We have been told that the Masters understand our problems and difficulties
because they have passed through every one of them. If this be true, it seems a
fair deduction to assume that there is an unbroken line of earnest students and
disciples reaching from the newest member of the T. S. all the way up through
the different grades of self-conquest and of knowledge to our Masters themselves.

There is, then, a point in the personal consciousness where contact may be
made with the world where the Masters unceasingly work for humanity. This
point is probably overlaid with much rubbish of careless thinking and self-centred
action, but the point is there, and that the Masters are occasionally able to make
connection with our minds through this point, in spite of the rubbish, is perhaps
proven by the question itself. P.

QUESTION No. 218. — How can one cultivate the right kind of intensity of feel-
ing and how learn to distinguish between the important and the unimportant things
of the average life so as to avoid expending feeling on trifles?

ANSWER. — Cultivate the practice of referring all things to the Master as a
centre. In His eternal light, many of the fretting details of every day will fall
away into their due perspective of insignificance. Study His standard of value —
insensibly it may become your own. J. H.

ANSWER. — Would not a good test of the "right" kind of feeling be to ask
oneself what the Master's feeling would probably be and to follow this same idea
on and ask oneself whether this or that particular thing would be considered
important or unimportant by the Master? If this were faithfully carried out I
should think it would be one of the first steps towards learning to ask the Master
directly and gaining the power to hear his answer. T. M.

295

ANSWER.— Feeling is a reward, not an end. When it is not spurious it springs
from love and love comes from obedience — obedience to the highest that we can
see. If we loved the Masters as we want to love them, we should obey their least
wish with eager gladness. Our duties are the Master's will for us, that is what
makes them duties. The testimony of all who have really tried it, is that the way
to gain love is to act as if we loved as we want to love. Then, in time, the love is
given.

True feeling is a precious gift and one not to be wasted. To learn to dis-
tinguish the important from the unimportant requires a sense of proportion and
perspective, and this in turn requires a fixed point to which to refer all things.
What is the purpose of your life and what your true desire? When that question
is answered truly, if all things be referred to that fixed point, the important and the
unimportant will assume their proper proportions. J. M.

ANSWER. — Let us suppose the questioner is a Republican, or a Democrat,
and very loyal to his or her cause — could he or she not feel intensely, yet maintain
a true balance between the important and unimportant things? Let a loyal
political partisan become a candidate for office — would not his political intensity
govern his least acts, without necessarily interfering with them? Is the Cause of
Christ less important? G. WOODBRIDGE.

QUESTION No. 219. — What is the rationale of intercessory prayer? I have
thought that the answer to prayer must depend for its operation on the suppliant's
own will? How can the will or petition of one man affect the will of another?

ANSWER. — Here is a crude illustration that may be suggestive. A man, knowing
that his friend is in a financial strait, may deposit a sum of money, with his
friend's creditors. The strain is thereby relieved ; but the friend may not be aware
of the generous act, merely enjoying the freedom from the creditor's pursuit.

I believe that intercessory prayer is similarly effective, and that individual as
well as national catastrophies are averted or lessened by such prayer. Monasteries
and convents exist in order to maintain perpetual prayer of intercession.

S. M.

ANSWER. — The rationale of intercessory prayer would seem to be that of all
vicarious atonement. There are a number of answers bearing on this point in the
January, 1917, QUARTERLY, Question No. 210, in particular, one of great value, by
Cave.

No man lives to himself alone and it is a matter of every day experience that
what one man is and does affects those with whom he comes in contact, making it
easier or harder for them to do right. In other words, the action of his will affects
the action of their wills. Prayer is an act of will and is a great power. We know
that the Masters are always eager to help a man when they can do so without
reactions that do him whom they would help more harm than good. May it not be
that prayer makes force available on this plane which they can use without such
harmful reactions?

Mr. Judge, in Volume III of the Path has an interesting article on the Astral
Light as a great mirror from which the thoughts of men are thrown back to earth,
thereby influencing all men to a greater or less extent. This, if we add the intelli-
gent guidance of the Masters, may contain a hint as to the mechanics of inter-
cessory prayer. J. M.

ANSWER. — Having read this question, the thought occurs to me of an answer

296 THEOSOPKICAL QUARTERLY

of a nine-year-old to his father, when asked why he expected the father to do
something for him that the youngster wanted very much. "Because you're my
Father." That small boy, it seems to me, may have had a clearer understanding
of intercessory prayer than most of us grown-ups. He did not depend upon any
rational processes. He accepted a situation and sought to benefit therefrom. How
many of us accept as a fact-situation that the Master loves us far more than the
best of human fathers may love? Even grown-ups ask for what they really want.
The inquirer may find his or her will affected by the answers to this question —
if effort be made to utilize them. Would this not be a case within the confines of
the final clause of the question? How much trust and confidence and childlike
faith does the inquirer put into the question of prayer? And in praying is St.
Chrysostom's wise qualification — "as may be most expedient for them" kept in
mind and heart? G. McK.

ANSWER. — What do you believe? When you were a child did you never appeal
to your father for aid? If you wanted something that was good for you did he
not give it to you — if he could, but, if you had starved your pet hawks to death,
could he bring them back to life? Had he been able to use the Law, to do so,
would it have been wise — would it not have made you even more careless? If you
merely had thought or whispered a request, could he have heard you? If you
had not put intensity of desire behind a request, would he have given it active
attention? Did you never ask another to intercede for you in home or school or
business? Like all analogies these are crude, but they may prove suggestive. We
should remember too that by our sins and neglect we have builded walls between
us and our Heavenly Helpers. Will and sacrifice are pick and shovel. Try using
them. G. WOODBRICGE.

CORRESPONDENCE

New York, December 17, 1917.
Editor THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY:

"Parenthood and Discipleship," by Mercy Farmer, an article which appeared in
your last issue, contains a statement which, in my opinion, is not in accordance
with the facts. It is alleged: "Nothing could have pleased the Devil more than
to see those splendid, undisciplined, unorganized young Englishmen whose lives
were so unhesitatingly thrown away in the second stage of the war — those days
oi the first of Kitchener's Army, when the British regulars were wiped out, holding
the lines imperilled by their gallant, undisciplined comrades" (p. 162).

Granting that the Devil would have been pleased if the writer's premises
were correct, the best proof that they are not correct lies in the fact that Kitchener
himself allowed those men to fight; and he would not have allowed it if they
had been undisciplined and unorganized : he would not have thrown away their
lives. They had received longer training and discipline than the majority of men
in the British army who now, for the first time, go to the front.

The writer's misstatement is an echo (of course unintentional) of the present
tendency in the press to disparage Kitchener. The time will come when Great
Britain, and even France, will recognize that they owe their continued existence
to him, and that, though quite incidentally, the capture of Jerusalem and the
success in Mesopotamia are due primarily to his insight, which, in its turn, was
the fruit of his self-sacrificing devotion and theosophic breadth of vision.

AN OLD MEMBER, T. S.

APRIL, 1918

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 LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF THEOSOPHY

"The Knowers of the Eternal tell of the Light and the
Shadow ..." : — Katha Upanishad.

MAKING a comparison between Eastern and Western Psychology,
last summer, the writer retold an ancient tale from the Chhan-
dogya Upanishad which records that "the Devas and the
Asuras, — the angels and the demons — both of them sprung
from the Lord of Beings, strove together." That self-same struggle has,
we believe, continued ever since.

A great many times, in the long cycle of Theosophical writings, it has
been pretty plainly said that, at the recurring periods when Cyclic Law
makes it possible for the Masters of Wisdom to open the door of the
heavens to mankind, they invariably have to weigh and consider a certain
contingency: the fact that, as soon as the Lords of Light have sent forth
a mighty current of spiritual power into the world, the Brothers of the
Shadow are thereby enabled to release a commensurate power of the
forces of evil ; so that every great spiritual movement invariably has its
shadow ; every revelation has its counterfeit. It is as though the devils,
having failed to stop the spiritual outpouring, were yet allowed to handi-
cap and check it, by instantly producing a travesty of it, like enough to
deceive all but the wise, and so charged with elements of disintegration
that, in its dissolution, it would almost certainly besmirch and discredit
the work of the Lodge of Masters.

The Western Avatar gave his disciples the fullest warning of the
imminence of this danger, this dark shadow menacing his own work,
saying to them: "Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall
come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many . . .
For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great
signs and wonders ; inasmuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive
the very elect. Behold, I have told you before ..."

20

•97

298 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

It would be of immense interest and value to trace the invariable
working of this law, in the case of each of the great spiritual movements
which, having their origin in the Lodge, have resulted in the foundation
of the historic religions; to see, let us say, how the teaching of the
Buddha, that the lower self is an unreal wraith, was followed by a
"shadow" teaching, that the Self is unreal, a teaching leading to the
mechanical and materialistic cast of the whole of Southern Buddhism ; to
see how the luminous teaching of the great Shankaracharya, concerning
discernment between Self and not-Self, was gradually distorted into a
system in which the discernment between Brahmans and non-Brahmans
led to the strongest and most arrogant priestcraft in the world.

To follow this up, would be of high interest and value; but, for the
present, we shall limit ourselves to examining certain manifestations of
the same law in the history of The Theosophical Society during the last
forty years. When we have once gained a clear view of its operation,
we shall find that many things, which may have seemed enigmatic and,
perhaps, disturbing, will become very much more intelligible, and may
even appear to have been inevitable. Demon est Deus inversus.

Many of us hold that Mme. H. P. Blavatsky was the fully qualified
and accredited Messenger of the Lodge of Masters, entrusted, in the
years following 1875, with the high and splendid task of setting forth to
the world a certain portion of the Secret Teachings. Many of us believe
that she accomplished this great task with superb courage, selflessness
and devotion ; and, further, with a scrupulous avoidance of any claim of
"personal" authority, either for herself or for her writings. No great
writer was ever more genuinely humble.

But just because, as we believe, so powerful a stream of the force of
the White Lodge did, in fact, pour forth into the world through her work
and writings, it became practicable for the Lodge of the Shadow — the
Asuras of our Upanishad fable — to let loose an equal force, not this
time of Light, but of delusion and Maya ; to set up travesties of the
Messenger, who, at first announcing themselves as mouthpieces, soon
arrogated to themselves the authority of spiritual despots, at whose nod
all Theosophists must tremble, as before the thunderbolts of Jove.

One well-known instance of this is Mrs. Annie Besant, who is the
president of a society which calls itself theosophical, but which is com-
monly referred to as the Adyar Society because its headquarters is at
Adyar, India.

This Adyar Society, which is a travesty or psychic counterfeit of The
Theosophical Society of which THE THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY is the
organ, is constantly producing little psychic counterfeits of some phase

NOTES AND COMMENTS 299

of the real movement. Thus, in a pamphlet entitled "Theosophy and
Pseudo-Theosophy," written by a member of the Adyar Society, we
learn of a travesty so obviously a travesty that even the blind, who as a
rule follow the blind unquestioningly, are forced to cry out that this must
be of Satan, — not of God.

The writer of the pamphlet says: "You have seen in the August
Messenger the announcement of the establishment of the Order of the
Brotherhood of Service, of which Mrs. Besant is the 'Brother Server.'
The idea is an excellent one, but one reads that members must pledge
themselves to carry out the commands of the Brother Server without
equivocation, and turn over all their property to the Order, to be disposed
of as the Brother Server may direct. To take such a pledge means simply
to recognize the Brother Server as an infallible autocrat, in other words, —
a pope . . . . "

The writer closes his pamphlet with this paragraph : "It is high time
that Theosophists, even at the cost of sacrifice of devotion to their leaders,
should wake to the fact that the devil, when he cannot make use of the
snares of the world and the flesh, cannot tempt with personal ambition,
still has many a tool for turning the disciple from the Path, and I am
convinced, this whole movement, backed though it is by Adyar, is one
of them. It is one of the most subtle devices of 'Satan the Counsellor.' "

We do not think that disciples are likely to be turned from the Path
by any such crude device as that ! But we do know that the Powers of
Delusion and Confusion strive by all means to blur and mislead the
thought of the world, and that the existence of this so-called Order of
the Brotherhood of Service will make it more difficult for genuine seekers
after truth to find and identify the spiritual realities which such psychic
counterfeits travesty.

Another distressing perversion of great names and great truths is to
be found in the Adyar Society's exploitation of Christianity. By some
means or other they have formed branches of the "Old Catholic Church,"
an entirely respectable organization, the headquarters of which is in Hol-
land. These branches, once established, seem in no way to be under the
control of the Dutch hierarchy. In any case, Adyar has provided itself
with Bishops, Priests and Deacons. We read of "Bishop" C. W. Lead-
beater and of "Bishop" Wedgwood, of the Adyar Old Catholic Church,
both of whom seem to officiate in America as well as in England. In all
our experience we have rarely if ever heard of such vulgar and degrading
travesties of religion as these representatives of Adyar are producing.

The writer of the pamphlet already quoted (and for his own sake,
as for the sake of the protest he is making, we must regret his style),

300 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

begins his exposition of what he imagines to be new tendencies in the
Adyar Society, by criticizing one of "Bishop" Wedgwood's lectures. He
writes : "I myself heard him describe the process of spiritual rain-making,
by which a properly 'ordained' priest, who has been spiritually vaccinated
by some other priest — he assured us that this was necessary, but that the
private character of the man was a minor consideration — can, by clothing
himself in certain vestments adorned with brass fringes and ornaments
for 'conducting the current' and by repeating certain prescribed formulas,
produce a rain of spiritual power which would 'affect people for miles
around,' including those engaged in secular pursuits at the time. I have
always heard that God sends his rain on the just and the unjust, but this
is the first time I have heard it seriously claimed by one pretending to
be a Theosophist that he does so at the instigation of a man in
livery ..."

We take the same exception to the tone of the following passage,
though, as the writer is a member of the Adyar Society, it is inevitable,
perhaps, that his style should be as it is. "It need hardly be pointed out,"
he writes, "that this method of having an 'ordained' person dress up in
colors and repeat rituals in order to get the Divine Cow to let down its
milk for your benefit, while you go about your ordinary vocations and
amusements, is glaringly in conflict with the law of Karma, which teaches
that 'Every man is his own absolute lawgiver, the dispenser of glory and
gloom to himself, the decreer of his life, his reward, his punishment.' I
take it that while the term Theosophist is a pretty broad one, one can
hardly be a Theosophist who either denies Karma or teaches some
mechanical way of getting around it. That is what this whole ritualistic
tomfoolery is for ; to provide a cheap and easy way of dodging the results
of one's own actions, of indulging in spiritual sensualism by bathing in
a shower of spiritual power produced by magical processes, the only
evidence for the existence of which is the ipse di.rit of certain clairvoyants.
I say tomfoolery, for here is the process actually described by the Bishop.
The influence of the ritual pronounced by the ordained priest is gathered
by an attendant of the astral or some other plane and carried up to the
reservoir of 'power.' The power is then sent down through the priest,
flowing along the brass fringe on his left sleeve and pours out of the
brass ornament on the back of his gown ! The Divine Love is clearly a
sort of electricity which flows along wires. This, according to these neo-
Voodooists, is Theosophy ; this is the divinely appointed way by which
the Lord blesses those who happen to be somewhere 'miles around,'
instead of the old way of entering into one's closet and seeking Him."

"All of this," the Adyar protestant goes on to say, "comes from the
influence of C. W. Leadbeater and other clairvoyants who have succeeded
in deluding themselves and in persuading others to accept as gospel truth
whatever they put forward. It comes from the tendency to take up

NOTES AND COMMENTS 301

psychism and to preach it on every possible occasion, and to neglect the
teachings and warning of the Founder of the Society and of books like
Light on the Path, and, I may add, of the New Testament likewise
. . . I have quite a little to do with the circulation of Theosophical
literature and I know just what sort of stuff Theosophists read and are
advising others to read. . . . You simply can't get them to read any-
thing worth while. [And again the QUARTERLY must protest against such
misuse of the words Theosophy and Theosophists]. They are after three
things: knowledge (supposed) of the invisible world; learning how to
become Invisible Helpers, which means doing while you are asleep what
you are too lazy or selfish to do while you are awake ; and finding some
new and easy way of feeling good and happy. According to recent
announcements, Bishop Leadbeater — for he is now a Bishop of the Old
Catholic Church as well as a leader of the (Adyar) T. S. — is prepared to
furnish the various centers of the Star in the East with a very effective
ritual. ..."

But, lest we be accused of forming our view of this new movement
in the Adyar Society from a criticism of it which is evidently not too
friendly, we shall quote one or two passages from a pamphlet on "The
Occult Investigation of the Mass and Anglican Orders, by the Rt. Rev.
C. W. Leadbeater," which has recently been distributed among the clergy
of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

"We who are students," says "Bishop" Leadbeater, "have often heard
of the great reservoir of force which is constantly being filled by the
Spiritual Hierarchy in order that its contents may be utilized by members
of the Adept Hierarchy and Their pupils for the helping of the evolution
of mankind. The arrangement made by the Christ with regard to His
religion was that a kind of special compartment of that reservoir should
be reserved for its use, and that a certain set of officials should be
empowered by the use of certain special ceremonies, certain words and
signs of power, to draw upon it for the spiritual benefit of their people.
The scheme adopted for passing on the power is called ordination. . . ."

One passage more : "Bishop" Leadbeater tells us that his attention was
first called to the magical distribution of divine power "by the celebration
of the Mass in a Roman Catholic Church in a little village in Sicily. Those
who know that most beautiful of islands will understand that one does
not meet with the Roman Catholic Church there in its most intellectual
form, and neither the priest nor the people could be described as especially
highly developed ; yet the quite ordinary celebration of the Mass was a
magnificent display of the application of occult force. At the moment of
the consecration the Host glowed with the most dazzling brightness; it
became in fact a veritable sun to the eye of the clairvoyant, and as the priest
lifted it above the heads of the people I noticed two distinct varieties of

302 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

spiritual force poured forth from it, which might perhaps be taken as
roughly corresponding to the light of the sun and the streamers of his
corona. ..." "Bishop" Leadbeater goes on to describe the effect of
these forces on "the three higher subdivisions of the mental world, the
first, second and third subdivisions of the astral," and even the causal
bodies, of the Sicilians. . . .

Now having our material before us, let us draw from it a certain
number of conclusions. In the first place, we cannot fail to be struck with
the fact that, while pretending to describe a spiritual process, this "vision"
is, in reality, extravagantly materialistic ; what is seen, is seen through a
dense, distorting psychic veil; or, more accurately, what is seen, is not
a spiritual reality, but a grotesque fancy, a nightmare dreamed upside
down and backwards, amid the waves of the psychic sea. There is not
in it a grain of real spirituality ; there is nothing in it that could conceiv-
ably arouse a true spiritual impulse or inspiration.

One result of such a travesty must necessarily be to bring discredit
on the name "theosophical," and, in that way, to render measurably more
difficult the work of The Theosophical Society and the genuine attempts
being made to show, in the Light of Theosophy, the deeper side of
Christian teaching. And this, in our view, is exactly the purpose of the
Powers of the Shadow, of the Brood of Confusion. Perpetually they
foster and strengthen these psychic counterfeits of the teachings given
forth by the Masters of Light.

Particularly in recent years, invaluable light has been thrown upon
the doctrine and purposes of the Western Avatar. Those whose memory
of THE THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY goes back far enough, will remember
that, perhaps a decade ago, a concerted effort was made to realize one
of the ideals implicit in the Theosophical platform. We have, from the
beginning of The Theosophical Society in 1875, advocated and practised
the comparative study of all religions. In the old days, the formula was :
"Aryan and other Eastern religions" ; the purpose of this phrasing being,
to turn the main attention of Theosophical students away from Chris-
tianity to the great religions of Egypt, India, China, Persia. And for this
reason : only by thus renovating their religious sense, so to speak, could
these Theosophical students possibly bring clear and fresh minds to the
study of Christianity.

In the year 1895, our Second Object was re-worded, thus : "the study
of ancient and modern religions" ; the significance of the change probably
being that, after The Theosophical Society had completed the first twenty
years of its eventful life, the process of renovating the religious sense
of Theosophical students had been so far completed, that a fuller attention

NOTES AND COMMENTS 303

might now be paid to the study of Christianity, not only with a fair hope
of avoiding the pitfalls dug by old mental habits and prejudices, but with
a still larger hope of reaching very definite and affirmative results.

Some ten or a dozen years ago, the tendency thus indicated began to
bear fruit ; and those who have followed THE THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
through this somewhat protracted period will remember that much has
been said of the Western Avatar; of the place which his work holds, in
the larger work of the Lodge; of the relation of the Christian Orders
and Rules to the training of Chelas; and much more, supported at
every point by explicit quotations from The Secret Doctrine. For in the
pages of that wonderful book, Mme. H. P. Blavatsky had presciently
furnished all the material for the esoteric study of Christianity, which
was in fact destined to take form only eighteen or twenty years later,
long after Mme. Blavatsky's death.

One may illustrate this prescient provision of material by quoting
a few sentences from The Secret Doctrine (edition of 1888, Vol. I, page
574) : "This was known to every high Initiate in every age and in every
country; 'I and my Father are one/ said Jesus (John x. 30). When He
is made to say, elsewhere (xx. 17) : 'I ascend to my Father and your
Father,' it meant that which has just been stated. It was simply to
show that the group of His disciples and followers attracted to Him
belonged to the same Dhyani Buddha, 'Star,' or 'Father,' again of the
same planetary realm, as He did."

More than may at first sight appear, concerning the Western Avatar
and his work, is implied in this brief passage ; but a wise pondering over
it, and a careful study of many kindred passages in The Secret Doctrine,
will reveal much to the thoughtful student, concerning the place of the
Western Avatar in the Lodge — and, incidentally, concerning Mme. H. P.
Blavatsky's clear understanding and revelation of that place and work,
a work which, as in the case of every Member of the Lodge of Masters,
is of necessity continuous — is, in fact, going on now.

So it comes that, during the last ten or twelve years, as an essential
part of the work for which The Theosophical Society was founded, much
has been brought to light, much has been accomplished. Inevitably, there-
fore, the dark shadow appears, the travesty, the counterfeit, the Maya
unfolded and developed by the Powers that make for confusion, — perver-
sions of Theosophy, perversions of Christianity, and perversions of the
real developments taking place within the Church Universal, in which
certain members of The Theosophical Society are playing a vital part;
developments to which attention has been called in THE THEOSOPHICAL
QUARTERLY — at least in such a manner that those who have the knowledge
or intuition could divine the nature of the information being conveyed.

LODGE DIALOGUES

D. R. T.: Now you may ask your question, Little One.

L. O. : I have two questions.

D. R. T. : Ask me the first one.

L. O. : I want to know how, in the outer world, where the clouds of
illusion are forever circling and whirling, one may preserve truthfulness.

D. R. T. : There is a greater difficulty than the clouds of illusion. In
the outer world the minds of men are not one-pointed ; one door opens to
the east and one to the west, and so soon as one of them is opened the
other swings shut, so that but half a truth is visible at any time to their
comprehension.

L. O. : (eagerly) : Then I would place a large wedge in one door so
that it could not shut, before the other opened !

D. R. T. (laughing) : Then the draft would blow out the little candle
within.

L. O. (after a pause) : Tell me then how to preserve truthfulness.

D. R. T. : There is but one way in which you can preserve it, and
that is from within without — never from without within. That is why
those who have no fixed centre of their own never can be truthful, no
matter how hard they try. Therefore the secret of truthfulness is
loyalty, — loyalty to your own highest faith and principles, loyalty to your
chosen cause, loyalty to those who are part of that cause. If you see
yourself, your words, your actions, only as they are reflected back to you
from the surrounding mirrors of other minds, you will find confusion,
multiplied reflections, reversals, fanciful vistas and superimposed images.
Your own knowledge of truth will be lost in bewilderment, and beginning
with self-deception you will inevitably deceive others. Closing your outer
eyes and opening wide your inner, you will discover the facts of your own
nature and heart, — relative always until you have attained — but real and
honest of themselves. Loyal to these and to all connected with them,
loyal if need be to the death, refusing compromise or quarter to all that
contradicts and injures them, you will preserve truthfulness.

L. O. : Then of all virtues loyalty is the highest.

D. R. T. : The French have an old proverb : Loyaute passe tout.

L. O. : I have heard that Metchu Chan said that humility was the
greatest of the virtues.

D. R. T. : No, Metchu Chan repeated the occult teaching that

304

LODGE DIALOGUES 305

humility is the foundation of all the virtues ; the virtue without which all
the other virtues are spurious. Think it out for yourself, Little One, you
will see.

L. O. : I can see that without much thinking: — where self-love and
self-seeking enter in, the virtue disappears.

D. R. T. : What is your second question ?

L. O. : You are answering that without my asking. What you said
of loyalty answered it. I did not know that my two questions were one
at the root. When we had finished with what I had thought to be my
practical question, — and I asked that first because I know you like them
best — then I intended asking the question of my own preference : — Which
is the greatest of the virtues, as the man once asked which was the greatest
of the Commandments.

D. R. T. : And the answer, little brother ?

L. O. : The answer was love, love of the Father, then love of what
the Father loved — (meditatively, while the other watched him) and that
seems so close to what great Paul said in his letters here (indicating his
book) — "The greatest of these is charity."

D. R. T. : Go on, you are working it out. But you see this : Love
without loyalty is not love, — loyalty is of its essence. Also you see this :
Charity without loyalty easily degenerates. It has no centre or circum-
ference, and overflows into sentimentality. Loyalty regulates these floods
since it reflects the central sun ; is the manifest that shines with the light
of the unmanifest. Loyalty springs from the radiant heart of Buddhi,
and is the enclosing sphere of all the virtues.

As D. R. T. ceased, the sun sank suddenly, and the air grew chill.
They turned from the wide expanse of the desert. In the deep silence
that fell, one became aware of the distant booming of cannon. The Little
One turned.

Good-bye, Great Brother, he said; some day, when I have learned
your lessons, I shall help over there in the West. M.

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS

VIII

DOMINICANS (continued)
St. Catherine of Siena, Part I

RECORDS of the Saints have this in common with the Stanzas
of Dzyan — they are sealed to the multitude. They occupy no
inch of the world's precious four-foot bookshelves. Antiquarian
minds that stray upon such records toss them away as mediaeval
and morbid. They are outside even of the large and charitable circle
of the cultivated man with his motto : "nihil humani," etc. The Rousseaus
and Tom Paines and Piers Plowmans of history and of belles lettres have
their own places, together with Napoleon and Dante, in the world's esteem.
But in any usual History of Civilization, the great Saints, Loyola, Teresa,
Gertrude, might receive not so much as a foot note of consideration.
They are thought to be outside of life — mere stereotyped stone figures
for the ornamentation of church altars and portals.

In a very limited sense, this judgment of the world's is correct. The
records of the Saints are a portion of the "hidden wisdom"; they are
esoteric. A special training, the equivalent, perhaps, of technical prepara-
tion, is necessary in order to read them profitably. As one begins to
understand them, he understands also the reason of the world's disesteem.
The writings of the Saints are not a portion of this world's goods because
they are a bridge leading out of this world to larger and finer realms
of life.

There are, however, exceptions in this esoteric communion of Saints.
Two, notably, have been secularized — St. Francis of Assisi and St. Cath-
erine of Siena.

These two names are widely known through that secularizing proc-
ess. But the two Saints themselves are really still as unknown and as
esoteric as any others of their community. For, just as a spiritual fact
cannot be truthfully expressed in mental terms — the portrayal, clear and
attractive as it may be, being mental while the fact itself is spiritual — so a
Saint and secularization are incompatible. The secularized product may
be a gracious figure, but it cannot be a faithful likeness of the Saint. It is
easy to see how ludicrous the failure is in the case of Jeanne d'Arc, for
example. We may be unfamiliar with history but we have an instinct
that the masquerading suffragette is a wretched caricature of that divine
Messenger. The present popular and widespread notions of St. Francis
and St. Catherine are equally erroneous. Those Catholic and cloistered
souls are accredited as "social workers." They are venerated as antici-

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS, VIII 307

patory points of light in mediaeval darkness, premonitions of the floodtide
of science and sympathy that in our day has poured into city slums. The
rescue of these two ardent Catholics from "the holy horde of saints,"
as Swinburne puts it, in order to present them as contemporary humani-
tarians is a falsification. It denatures them.

Until we study her life and her writings, St. Catherine seems out of
place in the Dominican Order — the Order which has as its motto:
"Truth"; and imposes upon its members the obligation of study and of
learning.

"Truth" is the motto of many celebrated universities to-day. It is
engraved on their seals and charters. It means, for the faculties and
students of those universities, the sum total of things that the eye can
measure and the mind compute. Generation after generation of profes-
sors and students grind away in libraries and laboratories upon the
confused mass of things knowable; their lifelong efforts only entomb
them deeper in the prison of materialism, and do not effect the liberation
which the university motto promises : "Veritas vos liberabit."* It may be
that modern Dominicans have not entirely escaped the materialistic infec-
tions of the age. Their long study of Aquinas's philosophy and theology
may savour of intellectual rather than spiritual effort. The result may be
somewhat barren. It is this prevalent academic conception of truth, out-
side and inside the religious Orders, — a narrow and distorted conception —
that at first clouds our perception of St. Catherine's fitness in the Domin-
ican Order. In fact, she is, like her own later American disciple, St. Rose
of Lima, the inevitable blossom upon that parent stem. Her low class
origin and her illiteracy may seem to separate her widely from the high-
born and learned St. Thomas and St. Dominic. Despite those external
differences, she is their true daughter and sister.

In the article on St. Dominicf mention was made of his and St.
Thomas's method of study. They studied, literally, at the foot of the
Crucifix, in conference, in union with their Living Lord. He was the
"Truth" they were striving to discover — the goal of all their endeavour,
the motto of the Order. St. Catherine calls Him "the Sweet Primal
Truth." Secular learning is valued by the Dominicans because, when
unpolluted by materialism, it is like rays of light that emanate from Him.
Followed back, these rays lead to His centre ; or, finding Him as centre,
His disciple can then proceed along any of these rays free from the
erroneous conclusions that invalidate so much of the work of materialistic
scholars.

The latter method was St. Catherine's. She reached union with the
Master through the Cell of Knowledge.

St. Catherine's Cell of Knowledge is an apartment of two rooms ;
but no wall separates those rooms. One is the cell of self-knowledge;
the other, the cell of the knowledge of the goodness of God. For sound

' "Truth will make you free." This is the motto of Johns Hopkins University,
t Number VII in this series.

308 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

health, the soul must dwell in both rooms at the same time.* This double
cell of Knowledge is a fundamental principle with St. Catherine. She
repeats it to her disciples, and to people of the world with whom she
came into contact. In a letter to a niece, she explains her teaching, with-
out metaphor. "We cannot attain this virtue of humility except by true
knowledge of ourselves, knowing our misery and frailty, and that we by
ourselves can do no good deed, nor escape any conflict or pain ; for if
we have a bodily infirmity, or a pain or conflict in our minds, we cannot
escape it or remove it — for if we could we should escape from it swiftly.
So it is quite true that we in ourselves are nothing other than infamy,
misery, stench, frailty, and sins ; wherefore, we ought always to abide
low and humble. But to abide wholly in such knowledge of one's self
would not be good, because the soul would fall into weariness and confu-
sion; and from confusion it would fall into despair: so the devil would
like nothing better than to make us fall into confusion, to drive us after-
ward to despair. We ought, then, to abide in the knowledge of the good-
ness of God in Himself, perceiving that He has created us in His image
and likeness, and re-created us in grace by the Blood of His only-begotten
Son, the sweet incarnate Lord ; and reflecting how continually the goodness
of God works in us. But see, that to abide entirely in this knowledge of
God would not be good, because the soul would fall into presumption and
pride. So it befits us to have one mixed with the other — that is, to abide
in the holy knowledge of the goodness of God, and also in the knowledge
of ourselves : and so we shall be humble, patient, and gentle."

Her spiritual interpretation of the word cell does not indicate indiffer-
ence to or condemnation of the advantages derived from a cloistered life
within convent walls. Her choice of the third degree of St. Dominic's
Order might lend countenance to an assertion that she disfavoured mon-
astic seclusion. The Dominican Third Order — Tertiaries, the members
of it are called — exists for men and women who wish to lead a religious
life without abandoning their social or family or business duties. In the
case of St. Catherine, whose life seems in large part directed from a
higher plane, one cannot always offer reasonable explanations — the influ-
ence that determined her acts was sometimes from above, and sometimes
it was a perfectly natural and legitimate influence of this world. Her
family so vigorously objected to her becoming a Tertiary, and her mother
made such constant complaint about her daughter's duty as Tertiary, that
one can believe they would have prohibited absolutely her entrance among
cloistered Dominican nuns. On the other hand, she appears such a servant
of the Lodge that, the sacrifice of incarnation once made, it may have
been expedient for her to live the open life she did. Be that as it may,
she appreciated fully the advantages of seclusion, and advised many of

1 "These are two cells in one, and when abiding in the one it behooves thee to abide in the
other, for otherwise the soul would fall into either confusion or presumption. For didst thou
rest in knowledge of thyself, confusion of mind would fall on thee; and didst thou abide in the
knowledge of God alone, thou wouldst fall into presumption. These two, then, must be built
together and made one same thing." — Letter to Monna Aleaa.

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS, VIII 309

those who sought her counsel to test their vocation in one or another of
the contemplative orders. She instructed her close friend and companion,
Alessa, in the doctrine of the cell of Knowledge, and she advised her to
find an actual cell also, "that thou go not running about into many places,
unless for necessity, or for obedience to the prioress, or for charity's
sake." St. Catherine herself was in cloistral seclusion from her seven-
teenth to her twentieth year. The active opposition of her family to her
wish for a religious life ended when, at sixteen, she was accepted in the
third Order of St. Dominic, a Tertiary. Thereafter they left her to her
own way of life. With the consent of her spiritual adviser, a Dominican
Father, she arranged for her abode a tiny room in the basement of her
father's home. The window was screened so that nothing of the outer
world might be seen. There she withdrew even from her family, speaking
only with her adviser, and occasionally with a few other persons at his
direction. She left the house only to go to Mass. She slept there on a
bare wooden board. She gradually reduced her food, until water, salad
leaves and bread crumbs became her diet — though her physical system
was also able to adapt itself to long fasts, unbroken save for the wafer
taken in Communion.

This three-year period of withdrawal from all worldly interests and
activities culminated in the event which is known, by name, to people of
cultivation, because it is a favourite subject with artists of all nations,
Flemish as well as Italian — the event known as the Mystic Marriage of
St. Catherine.

As the vocabulary of the Saints is still a foreign tongue to many, it
may be expedient to make an effort to describe, without metaphor, this
very significant event, which proved a turning-point in her life. We shall
find assistance for this undertaking in the life of St. Rose of Lima, a
South American girl, part Indian in blood, who, at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, moved by religious aspirations, took St. Catherine as
her model and ideal. . The life of St. Rose is a record of miraculous self-
sacrifice and achievement that seems impossible and incredible, even
repellent, to a mind familiar only with mundane life. The official judges
of St. Rose's life seem to have been men who were versed in the Science
of the Saints, and competent to observe and rightly to pronounce upon
phenomena of the spiritual life. In the private annals of the Dominican
Order, an opinion of St. Rose's contemporaries is preserved — it is the
judgment rendered by the theologians at the University of Lima. They
agreed, in conference, unanimously, that "Rose, by a most direct method,
attained to the prayer of union, almost without traversing the way of
purgation, since the Master had drawn her Heart to His own from her
infancy." It is not difficult to translate these facts concerning St. Rose
into the language of theosophical metaphysics. We might say that,
through a pure Karma, the personal Manas, acquired by her spiritual
Monad when that Monad was reborn on earth at Lima, was so clean
and docile that its incorporation with the Higher Manas, and with the

310 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Higher and Eternal Principles was an easy and speedy process. Through
the high grades of contemplation Rose came into union with spiritual
Principles. As those Principles are not diffuse and vague forces, but, as
forces, emanate from Individual Entities, we may say that Rose ascended
to conscious and direct knowledge and union with the Master proper to
her in the Celestial Hierarchy.

St. Catherine's "Mystic Marriage" is only an effort to describe the
life of union in words that may be apprehensible and suggestive to men
and women who have entered upon the beginning of the Path. The three
years of solitude in that basement room were a retreat for St. Catherine
from affairs of outer life and a training for her in the ways of the inner
world. They seem to correspond with the years St. Paul spent in the
deserts of Arabia, after his call by the Master. For Catherine, it was
a period of purification ; not purification in an elementary sense, but in
the thorough way suggested by the precepts in Light on the Path.
"These vices of the ordinary man pass through a subtle transformation
and reappear with changed aspect in the heart of the disciple. It is easy
to say, I will not be ambitious : it is not so easy to say, When the Master
reads my heart he will find it clean utterly. The pure artist who works
for the love of his work is sometimes more firmly planted on the right
road than the occultist, who fancies he has removed his interest from self,
but who has in reality only enlarged the limits of experience and desire,
and transferred his interest to the things which concern his larger span
of life."

Many of her experiences during those three years are fortunately
preserved to us in the letters she afterward wrote to other aspirants ;
when necessary, she corrects or encourages them with facts from her own
training, though she usually presents these facts as happening to a third
person. What a lesson in purification of motive is taught by the follow-
ing letter ! It indicates, without any uncertainty, that St. Catherine had
progressed to the point of loving Divine things with an unadulterated
love, free from admixture of self-love or seeking after spiritual things
because of personal advantage they bring. The letter narrates that, to a
soul in great distress and temptation, the devil once said : " 'What wilt thou
do? for all the time of thy life thou shalt abide in these pains, and then
thou shalt have hell?' She then answered with manly heart and without
any fear, and with holy hatred of herself, saying: 'I do not avoid pains,
for I have chosen pains for my refreshment. And if at the end He
should give me hell, I will not therefore abandon serving my Creator.
For I am she who am worthy of abiding in hell, because I wronged the
Sweet Primal Truth ; so, did He give me hell, He would do me no wrong,
since I am His' (creature). Then our Saviour, in this sweet and true
humility, scattered the shadows and torments of the devil, as it happens
when the cloud passes that the sun remains; and suddenly came the
Presence of Our Saviour. Thence she melted into a river of tears, and
said in a sweet glow of love : 'O sweet and good Jesus, where wast thou

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS, VIII 311

when my soul was in such affliction?' Sweet Jesus, the Spotless Lamb,
replied : 'I was beside thee. For I move not, and never leave My creature,
unless the creature leave Me through mortal sin.' " It is evident to what
extent St. Catherine had carried the purifying process since she obtained
the promise given to the pure in heart — "the Presence of Our Saviour."*
The appearance of the Master to her and His converse with her was not
limited to this one occasion. Her spiritual director drew from her the
reluctant admission that the Master came frequently: "most times He
came unattended, and conversed with her as a friend with a most intimate
friend; in such wise that ofttimes the Lord and she recited the Psalms,
walking up and down in her room, as two religious or clerics are wont to
say the office together."

The famous paintings by Bartolomeo, Memling and by others have
popularized this experience of Catherine's. But as we are striving for a
clear understanding of it, let us go back to the account given by her
spiritual adviser, one Father Raymond. Father Raymond received the
facts from Catherine herself. One day, during her meditation, the Master
said to her: "I will this day celebrate solemnly with thee the festival of
the betrothal of thy soul." Father Raymond then continues : "Whilst the
Lord was yet speaking, there appeared the most glorious virgin, His
Mother, the most blessed John the Evangelist, the glorious apostle Paul,
and the most holy Dominic the father of her Order; and with these the
prophet David, who had the psaltery set to music in his hands ; and, while
he played with most sweet melody, the Virgin Mother of God took the
right hand of Catherine with her most sacred hand, and, holding out her
fingers towards her Son, besought Him to deign to espouse her to Himself
in Faith. To which graciously consenting, the Only Begotten of God
drew out a ring of gold, which had in its circle four pearls enclosing a
most beauteous diamond; and, placing this ring upon the ring-finger of
Catherine's right hand, He said: 'Lo, I espouse thee to Myself, thy
Creator and Saviour, in the Faith, which until thou celebratest thy eternal
nuptials with Me in Heaven, thou wilt preserve ever without stain.
Henceforth, My daughter, do manfully and without hesitation those
things which, by the ordering of My providence, will be put into thy
hands ; for, being now armed with the Fortitude of the Faith, thou wilt
happily overcome all thy adversaries.' Then the vision disappeared, but
the ring ever remained on her finger, not indeed to the sight of others,
but only to the sight of the virgin herself; for she often, albeit with bash-
fulness, confessed to me that she always saw that ring on her finger, nor
was there any time when she did not see it."

Let us grant that the names Catherine gave to those persons present
with the Master need not trouble us at all. She gave to the spiritual indi-
viduals she saw the names that were most familiar to her — just as the
Jewish disciples gave the names of Moses and Elias to the Masters or
Chelas who visited Christ on the occasion of what is known as the Trans-

* "Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall see God,"

312 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

figuration. Is not the account a sober one? It has none of the high
coloring of romance. Is it not entirely credible, if we believe in a spirit-
ual world and spiritual citizens of that world? It would mark the attain-
ment by a mortal of a high consciousness of that other world and of its
people. It signifies, as in the case of St. Rose, the transfer of conscious-
ness from lower Manas to the Higher Principles. Those Principles are
embodied in the Master, — as the lower Principles, and those only, are too
often manifested through humans. St. Catherine is told to act manfully,
without hesitation, "armed with fortitude." She is to act for the Cause
which the Master represents. She has become united to Him, her mind,
heart and will, her entire life being one with His.

This union was achieved at her twentieth year. Her life preceding
her seventeenth year was largely a struggle against the misplaced affection
of her family — they opposed her religious vocation. She was the youngest
child of a prosperous tanner — the youngest of his twenty-five children.
As often happens in families, this youngest child was the darling of her
parents. Her attractiveness of face and her joyousness of mood seemed
prearranged to realize their ambitions for her. But to their gifts of orna-
ments and fine clothing, and their suggestions of a promising marriage,
Catherine replied with the obligations of a vow she had made in her
seventh year — the vow of a virgin life. This vow was made — she was
ignorant of its meaning — as the result of the Master's appearance to her
one day at the Dominican Church of Siena. That appearance was her
call to the religious life. Her family tolerated her pieties and austerities —
perhaps as childish exaggeration and folly — until these religious habits
came into conflict with their kindly-meant plans for her marriage. To
break her habits, and to bend her will, the family refused her any privacy,
and gave her a servant's tasks to perform in the house ; this was in order
to deprive her of time and place for prayer. But she was instructed
interiorly, that, even without a private room, she could pray in the cell
of her own heart. One of the most sympathetic of St. Catherine's modern
biographers, Mrs. Aubrey Richardson, suggests that this punishment was
a "bluff" on the part of the parents — that prosperous tanners, with social
and political aspirations, would not have risked the comeliness of their
marriageable daughter by imposing a scullion's work upon her. What-
ever their intention, however, Catherine accepted their commands with
entire sweetness, and carried the religious atmosphere into her tasks, by
playing that her mother was the Blessed Virgin and the brothers and
sisters of the household were the disciples and friends of Our Lord. In
time, the parents yielded to her quiet perseverance.

The next opposition Catherine met was that of the Dominican Ter-
tiaries. The evangelizing zeal of the Dominicans had attracted her to that
order. But the Tertiaries were women of maturity and were averse to
putting their habit upon a girl of sixteen. They too finally yielded. Cath-
erine was ill. Her mother had been negotiating with the Dominicans,
and probably was not an over-zealous advocate of the daughter's cause.

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS, VIII 313

Catherine alarmed her mother one day, in a state of extreme weakness,
by declaring that St. Dominic would take her out of the world altogether,
if the mother did not obtain the desired permission from the Sisters.
Thus spurred, the mother gained the consent of the authorities, on condi-
tion that the applicant be not comely. The long illness had done Catherine
the service of altering her joyous features, and she passed successfully
the scrutiny of her interrogators.

Her three-year seclusion immediately followed. She was born in
1347. In 1367 she began to change her solitary mode of life and to go out
into the world as a missioner of souls.

SPENCER MONTAGUE.

(To be concluded)

A Source of life and strength! Many of thy mercies do we plainly
see, and we believe in a boundless store behind. No morning stars that
sing together can have deeper call than we for grateful joy. Thou hast
given us a life of high vocation, and thine own breathing in our hearts
interprets for us its sacred opportunities. Thou hast cheered the way
with many dear affections and glimpses of solemn beauty and everlasting
truth. Not a cloud of sorrow, but thou hast touched with glory; not a
dusty atmosphere of care, but thy light shines through. And, lest our
spirits should fail before thine unattainable perfections, thou hast set us
in the train of thy saints who have learned to take up the cross of
sacrifice. Let the time past suffice to have wrought over our own will,
and now make us consecrate to thine. — James Martineau.

21

WHY I JOINED
THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

THREE times in my life a Hand has fallen on my shoulder and
irresistibly pushed me where I would not go. The first time I
was six years old, the second time I was sixteen, and the third
was when I joined The Theosophical Society.
These letters should be popular with those writers who enjoy rem-
iniscence for they offer an orgy of it, and if one is commanded to
reminisce it is idle to apologize for egotism — I want to go back half a
century and talk about that first spiritual experience, the first time I
felt the Hand on my shoulder, because, of course, I began to join The
Theosophical Society then, although I did not know it. On my sixth
birthday our Rector sent me a volume of Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."
It was very large and expensive, very purple and gold — my first grown-up
possession. There were many pictures. Inscribed on the fly leaf were
the words "To my little fellow pilgrim." The book was a door opened
in my life. I finished learning to read on it. I pored over the strange
and piquing pictures for hours, till its allegory sank into my soul and
became part of me. Then the inscription was my warrant — I was a
pilgrim too ! I decided to be perfect — there should be no more naughti-
ness, my burden had fallen from me, and sin was a thing of the past.

No one could now convince me that it was not a genuine experience
— a call. For weeks and months I really struggled with my lower self,
really gained some victories. The atmosphere of the nursery was not con-
genial to this task. A beautiful, amused young mother who disliked "early
piety" and an elderly nurse who liked it all too well, made up-hill going.
The latter (who slapped us, poor thing, when we could not remember
"Gentle Jesus, meek and mild") furnished an impossible standard from
a dreadful little book, in which a preposterous early Victorian infant, on
a couch of pain, discoursed to its elders without let up or hindrance, of
things in general and religion in particular. There was a peculiarly dis-
gustful woodcut in front, in which was depicted, simultaneously break-
fasting in bed and admonishing her parents, a little girl who robbed piety
of all charm. Nevertheless, for a time I really forsook a life of open
crime, really modified myself, really knew what it was to be happy inside.
Sometimes the inner happiness swept me along like a great wave. It was
always easy to be good out of doors. There was a great copper beech
on a lawn and then an ivied wall crowned with broken glass in the genial
English way. Sometimes one might have soapsuds and a pipe under the
beech tree. On still days the bubbles would float and float till they
passed over the old wall and disappeared over the graves on the other
side. Then in the beauty some secret was whispered, and help was close,

314

WHY I JOINED THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 315

and life and death, gardens and graves, equally unterrifying. Surely that
wind of the Spirit that bloweth where it listeth swept me then !

It is wonderful to look back into one's own childish soul and realize
how much children know that they could give no account of. It is
possible at six years old to be quite (though inarticulately) positive that
one's elders are making a tragical mess of things, are pawing about among
delicate spiritual mysteries with rude or silly hands, and that one is a
pawn in a badly played game. In these days of fastidious infant psychol-
ogizing it is hard to remember that only fifty years ago most children
were artlessly divided into the good or the bad according to whether they
did, or did not, aggravate the adult world. There were generations of
children at the mercy of kindly and well-meaning people, who yet held
immutable views of God, of death, of immortality, that would make a
Hun blench. The end of my poor little saintship came in one great slam-
bang backslide. I always lied more easily than I spoke the truth, but
I never confused the weaving lie of fancy with the unclean lie of policy —
although at six, and often afterwards, I availed myself of both. The
ruler of the nursery paused for no such subtle distinctions — a lie was a
lie and the Lord abominates a liar. "What are Dominates?" "It means
to hate." "Not love me any more?" "No." I accepted my fate, what
could I do else ? It was long before I learned once more that the Master
was other than a nervous, irritable being, whose love waned if you
banged the door, and waxed if you kept your pinafore clean. So much
for the first time the Hand touched me.

The next time I was sixteen and living in a boarding school, a well-
meaning and, in many ways, an excellent school, with a high moral code
and record of which it was justly proud. If it had stopped there and
not tried to mix its moral code up with its misconception of things spirit-
ual, we might have done very well. I remember best the awful Sundays,
when, the blessed restraint of classes removed, our headlong, emotional
principal had her wild way with us. One of her tenets, and a wise one
within reason, was "store the youthful memory with spiritual words."
This she did regardless of the youthful spiritual digestion. There were
prizes offered to the girl who could say the whole Gospel of St. Matthew
first ; to the girl who could repeat fifty hymns without a break ; to the
girl who could best write the sermon from memory. Sunday was one long
weary verbal competition. Even the servants came under the harrow —
"Oh, miss! 'ow we do 'ate them 'ims" was the wail of the kitchen. Our
walk through the lovely English village to the incomparable Norman
church was our only interlude of peace.

England is the queen of my heart. I would have her without spot
or blemish. When I remember what her Church can be at its best it makes
me ill to know how far short she can fall. The living in that particular
village was held by a bird-brained kinsman of the autocratic, choleric,
godless old lord of the Manor; he was a harmless enough idiot, ruled
with a rod of iron by his patron; if there were any hungry souls among

316 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

his people hungry they remained so far as his personal ministrations were
concerned. Sunday morning service was a joy to us, but a sinful joy.

When Lord C loudly cleared his throat and said "a-hem" it meant

that something was wrong with the panic-stricken organist, or the scuf-
fling school children, or the awed villagers. When he wheeled right about
face and stared f rowningly at the sheepish young ploughmen in their
clean smocks, they visibly gave themselves up for lost ; and when he gave
three imperative raps with his gold-headed cane, we nudged each other to
watch the clergyman start, redden, and bring his feeble discourse to an
abrupt close. We naturally regarded the service as a dramatic interlude
in a dreary day, but being starved of spiritual food in church and stuffed
like Strasburg geese with it in school is not exactly the road to spiritual
health.

Then, in the midst of all this, the Hand touched me again. There
came a letter from a friend a few years older than myself telling me she
was about to go as a missionary to Africa. There were a few words of
grateful consecration, through which her joy shone like a lamp, and a
prayer that I, too, might find a path for my life. I read the letter twice
and when I looked up the world was swinging round the other way. The
moment is indelibly printed. I can see the great bare school room, with
its crowd of chattering, tiresome girls and distracted under governesses.
Huge box trees crowded close to the windows. They made a greenish
light, summer and winter, and we detested them. Suddenly I saw them
for the first time and loved them — "every bush and tree's afire with God !"
The girls had grown real — infinitely real and infinitely lovable. All values
had shifted like glass in a kaleidoscope. A school-room maid came in
with a great tray of bread and butter. This was always a signal for an
outbreak of mordant school-room wit and tonight it was greeted with
the usual bitterness. I did not join because I was seeing bread and butter
for the first time. How beautiful it was ! How good God was ! What a
world to wake in ! I was limp with gratitude. There was no trace of
priggishness in it — yet — that woke later — but that night I was newborn —
newborn and innocent and I walked with God. Sudden conversion cannot
be ac sudden as it seems. That letter could only have been the match
to light a fire my unknown Self had laid in readiness, while my outer self
led the life of a rebel? I only know it happened and that for months
utter rapture ruled me. Not only rapture, but a determination to change,
to work with fear and trembling for salvation. Father Benson in his
story "An Average Man" tells of a sudden conversion that surely rings
true. In it the convert is also an utterly commonplace person, but some-
thing is done to him, an irresistible force takes him in charge, and for
a while there is no world, no flesh, no devil — they are held back that an
act of recognition may be made. Then they are released again that the
conflict may begin — the conflict that is to decide if the called is also the
chosen. But the shock of conversion is so dynamic that the most invet-
erate backslider must move by its propulsion for a time.

WHY I JOINED THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 317

For many months I lived this wonderful new life. I formulated, and
abided by, strict rules. I wore a footpath of prayer through the jungle
of my nature. I aimed at perfection and struggled for it. The gov-
ernesses were charmed — the most aggravating girl in the school had
suddenly become manageable. The girls watched, at first with ribaldry,
then with a sort of awed embarrassment, and finally with a frank division
into those for me and those against; and a wave of religious emotion
swept the school up to the Christmas holidays. These, my first real test,
damaged me considerably. I wore my first trained skirt and was allowed
to put my hair up and the world was too much with me. With the
renewed discipline and social isolation of school some of the lost ground
was regained, but not the first fine rapture and with each return to the
entrancing outer world I slipped further and further. Backsliding is one
of the saddest things to remember — it is so ungrateful and there is such
a miserable sameness about it. The worst of all is the lying — the pre-
tending to oneself that it has not happened, that the spirit has not left
the forms. It was a great relief after a year or two to renounce the
pretense and come out frankly with my new shibboleth — "With the best
will in the world it is clear that I have no genuine vocation." After all a
little moderation was best. I would start afresh and eat my cake and
have it too, just like everyone else!

What a pity it is there are not enough saints to go round. They are
such helpful people for beginners to watch. One saint might have saved
me then. I knew in my heart that the religious life is not a matter of
minor modifications, a trimming off a little here and adding on a little
there, but a forsaking, a turning away from, a volte face. I thought then
and think still that I was unfortunate in the so-called religious people
around me. I heard the language of extreme religious fervor spoken by
those who, to my cruel young eyes, were not sufficiently hard at work on
their own characters. Over-emotional Sundays were followed by very
peevish Mondays. I grew weary of people who could so easily resist my
temptations, so glibly question my cakes and ale ; of people who accepted
the Bible with a mulish verbal insistence based on ignorance, and who,
while professing to yearn for an eternity of bliss, clung to the things of
this life like cats to a hot brick. I found an impudent formula for it all
that relieved me immensely — "They spend their days resisting the sins
that do not tempt them." Being young and silly I thought this was an
epigram and repeated it ad nauseam. That I was not lynched goes to
prove that my elders were further advanced morally than I gave them
credit for. I am ashamed to have to tell all this. My heart melts when
I recall how good they were after all and how much I owe them. But
that is the way I reacted to them and in that mood I turned my back on
grace.

Then came a season of being "clever," as one of a group of young
people who loftily discussed philosophies, rearranged the universe, and
tried not to be too unkind to the Deitv. With many polysyllables we "fled

318 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Him down the labyrinthine ways" of our silly little minds, as is the way
of young people who think themselves clever. Dates elude me, but
somewhere about this time a book on Theosophy came my way. I
accepted the twin doctrines of karma and reincarnation with delight — or
rather recognized them with delight — and then pigeonholed Theosophy
as something that would come in handily by and by, when this entrancing
business of being young was finished with. To "experience" was my
cry, to make haste and get a lot of living done. Life took me at my
word. Sorrow came and loss, as well as much joy; it is natural to me
to be consciously happy and the faculty rarely failed me. I fear this is
contrary to all accepted rules — that I should have been haunted and
restless with the sense of all I missed, but I am trying to tell the truth,
and truly my cup ran over. The Master was very patient with me ;
He knew I would come back ; He knew that it was written.

About ten years ago a friend tossed me the "Ocean of Theosophy"
with a careless — "Have you time to waste on a pipe dream?" I read, and
once more the world was swinging the other way — it was the Hand again !
The immediate result was a renewal of the old rapture, a setting to the
old task, and — an orgy of books. The reading was not done for the sake
of conviction — as far as I understood I accepted. I cared nothing about
the squabbles of societies, or that my friends called me a Buddhist and
many worse names, neither was I curious about magic and mysteries.
There was one objective in all my search — where did my own religion
come in? What think ye of Christ? The books I read! Christian
apologetics are a branch of literature I abhor, but needs must when one's
angel drives — what about miracles? what about creeds? what about
prayer? With no one to help me I was in a bad mess. So-called occult
books will furnish tons of rubbish. Devotional looking volumes with
mystic runes on the cover were found to contain rules for adding to one's
income ; for overcoming one's fellow man with the power of the glance ;
for increasing one's social fascinations. Other books were quite beyond
my understanding. I tried "Isis Unveiled" and decided that that way mad-
ness lay ; I waded through various scholarly but unsympathetic books on
Buddhism and found counsel darkened ; read the "Voice of the Silence" —
it might have been Choctaw. My husband said, "You have carte blanche
on books, but I entreat you not to join any of these societies, I implore
you not to discover that you are Cleopatra or the Queen of Sheba." He
need not have feared — such things intrigued me not — the golden thread
led somewhere — to someone — what think ye of Christ?

My debt to certain books must be acknowledged. The "Creed of
Buddha" and Mrs. Besant's "Esoteric Christianity" both brought light.
Two lines from the "Light of Asia" kept me happy for weeks :

"Slow grows the splendid pattern that He plans
His wistful hands between."

It was like stepping back a few paces from a puzzling impressionist pic-
ture and seeing the splotches of paint fall into order and beauty. Then
the word "wistful" there, how perfect it is! Of all books the one that
helped most then and helps most still is Charles Johnston's translation of
the "Gita," with its incomparable commentary. Here was struck the note
that my soul longed for — not the difference but the likeness-, not new
dispensations, but one eternal divine intention; the certainty that for us
men and our salvation God ever becomes man that man may grow to God.
God bless those who bring us the old, old scriptures and show us that
God has always "so loved" the happy world.

There are more ways than one of being an idiot. In all my new
happiness my cry of triumph was "Praise be, I don't have to join any-
thing." I had watched so many people in their dizzy maze of joining and
unjoining — this, that, and the other cult ; had seen so many names signed,
and diplomas handed out, an.d little badges worn, and withal so little
regeneration, so little spiritual health. "As for me," I said fatuously, "I
am a free lance." But God be thanked I was not free. The Hand on my
shoulder was irresistible. The Master had prepared a place for me.

There is a beautiful house with an ugly door; nothing marks it
exteriorly from its dreary fellows but the Cross it holds aloft ; it is a school
for saints. It extends a grave welcome to spiritual dunces, being used
to them. It has no bonds — the ugly door opens easily, but the beauty of
holiness enmeshes. The new scholar there, moving about in worlds
unrealized, is apt to proffer what he calls "help." This is accepted with-
out a smile, and his lumbering efforts are directed. Who shall say what
magic is in that house ? Or what love ? The peace that passeth under-
standing reigns in the dim basement and bare halls. One's feet may find
on its many stairs the small old path that leads to the Eternal, and in the
midst of it there blooms like a golden flower the Altar of the Living
Christ, for that school has for Master Jesus Christ — the great Theosophist
— the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.

It is good to be even the dunce in that school. There the age-long
question "What think ye of Christ?" finds reverent answer, and back-
ward souls are taught their letters. My prayer is that I may waste no
more time, but that, even at the eleventh hour, learning to love much,
much may be forgiven me. L. W.

"Let a man be true in his intentions, and the point is gained, whether
he succeed or not." — Carlyle.

ALSACE AND LORRAINE

PART II.

THE problem of the history of Alsace and Lorraine is distinctly
a problem of nationality. We have seen that neither race nor
language determine nationality. What, then, does? Or, more
precisely, what made France a nation ; what were her distinctive
characteristics ; and why did Alsace and Lorraine share those, rather than
incline to her German conquerors ?

This question must receive a definite and adequate answer before
the German claims about France in general, and Alsace-Lorraine in
particular, can be met and refuted. Nor can the total irrelevancy of the
German position be made clear without in some measure settling this
question. Granted even, for a moment, that the racial and linguistic
claims of Germany be true (which they are not) — the question of Alsace-
Lorraine would still in no way have been settled if these provinces
declared and knew themselves to be members of the French nation. That
they have explicitly so declared themselves gives a final emphasis to this
argument.

But the Germans will not state the problem in this way. They have
systematically reconstructed and rewritten the history of France in order
to demonstrate that in the beginning the whole of France was not merely
German racially and in feeling, but also politically a part of Germany ;
and that as time went on, and the personal ambition of "German kings"
in France led to the separation of French territory from the "German
Empire," border peoples, such as Alsace-Lorraine, clung as long as they
could to the German Fatherland, so that not till Louis XlVth were they
finally torn from the homeland of their choice (17th century). This
"German Empire" is the Frankish realm of Charlemagne ; and the
Germans claim that the Franks were German — i. e. of Germanic race —
and that Charlemagne spoke German, and had his capital in the German
town of Aachen

If this had been so, it would still have to be asked — what made
France different from Germany, and why does all France go back to
Clovis and Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver, as the founders of their
nation ?

The answer to this question cannot be found with any definiteness
by referring to the standard English encyclopedias, which are practically
committed to the German interpretation of the history of France. In
the Britannica, for instance, Charlemagne is described as king of the
Franks and Roman Emperor, and in this article he is not called specifically
German, the author of it being a Frenchman. But if we turn to the
article "Franks," we find that they are sweepingly designated "a group

3*o

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 321

I

of Germanic peoples ;" while the New International Encyclopedia speaks

of them as "a confederation of Germanic tribes which appeared in the
lower and middle Rhine in the third century after Christ." The inevitable
impression from this reading is that Charlemagne made himself king
over a confederation of German peoples, which first appeared on the scene
of history shortly after 200 A. D. And the article on "France" confirms
this idea, frequent reference being made to the German elements in her
early population, as contrasted with the "Gallo-Roman."

This general impression is reflected in popular opinion, which believes
Charlemagne to have been a German Emperor, and that somehow France
grew out of the French part of his Empire. But such a construction of
the facts of history is not accurate, nor is it to be found in the majority
of French historians. Duruy's popular text-books of French history
give no such picture. German text-books of French and German history
do. And it is a fact that the German version of the early periods of
French history have been accepted in this country as the authorities.
(For proof, see the extensive bibliographies cited by writers in our
encyclopedias and text books. Most of our scholars have German degrees,
not French).

There is a school of French historians, founded by Fustel de
Coulanges, born in 1830, and represented by no less brilliant and perhaps
somewhat more poised scholars such as Gabriel Monod (d. 1912), Jacques
Flach, and Louis Dimier, who repudiate this interpretation of history as
"hostile prepossessions," and who try by a rigid adherence to the actual
facts of history, as far as we possess them, to write the truth about early
French history. The works of these men have never received much
recognition outside France, though their accomplishment is acknowledged
as "most remarkable," and as showing thorough scholarship. Fustel, to
be sure, reacted against the distortions of the extreme German school
too far in an opposite direction, but his research is substantially sound,
and has never been seriously refuted.1

This problem, then, is not a question of championing France as
against Germany ; it is a question of scientific accuracy and historic fact.

1 Fustel de Coulanges, Institutions Politiques de L'Ancienne France, 6 volumes; Nouvellts
Recherches; and two articles in Revtte Historique, vols. II, p. 460 ff., and III, p. 3 ff.

Jacques Flach, Origines De L'Ancienne France, 3 vols., and Les Affinites franfaises At
L' 'Alsace Avant Louis XIV, the latter a very suggestive little book.

Gabriel Monod, Source De L'Histoire Merovingienne and Etudes critiques sur les source*
de 1'histoire carolingienne. See also two articles, one in the pub. of the Ecole Pratiques DCS
Hautes Etudes for 1896 — Du role de I'opposition des races et des nationality dans la dissolution
de I" empire carolingien — very valuable; and the other in the pub. of L" Academic Des Sciences
Morales Et Politiques for 1899 — La Renaissance Carolingienne. cf. Lecon, XXIV in Guizot's
Histoire de la civilization en France, p. 249 ff. for the first departure from the racial theoriei
supported in France by Augustin Thierry, Michelet in the first volume of his Histoire de France,
and many other French historians. Fustel ignored apparently his predecessor Guizot. For
indefinite compromises between the two theories, see the brilliantly worded chapters of Klein-
clausz and Luchaire in Tome Deuxieme of Ernest Lavisse, Histoire De France. It is this
indefinite position which, reflected in the encyclopedias, probably accounts for the pro-German
result. The Germans are never indefinite.

Louis Dimier, Les Prejuges Ennemis de L'Histoire De France, 2nd ed. 1917. Thii
book most nearly represents my point of view on the Franks. Its basis is Fustel.

322 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

The basis of the feeling which persists today that Alsace and Lorraine
are French and not German, goes back step by step to the very roots of
their existence in the past. Rodolphe Reuss, perhaps the most eminent
historian of Alsace, himself an Alsatian, writes in his L' Alsace au XVI lie
Siecle "It is not today nor yesterday that this French influence has
made itself felt in our province ; it was discretely proposed, then invoked,
then imposed decisively by a natural development and, so to say, forced
by the general history of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries. The begin-
nings were accidental, the first developments modest, and the origins have
not yet been sufficiently studied in an impartial and critical manner up
to this time" (1897, Vol. I, p. 42. Itals. mine). These origins, if pushed
back through the maze of the Middle Ages, lead directly to the Empire
of Charlemagne, of which Alsace and Lorraine formed the heart and
center. And since the Germans with absolute unanimity proclaim Charle-
magne and the Franks to be German, and therefore the whole bias of
Alsatian and Lorraine thought and feeling to be naturally pro-German, the
falsity of this claim must be exposed, as has been the ethnological claim.

The universality of this pro-German bias in America — the belief that
Charlemagne and his kingdom of Franks were German — is the outcome
of a combination of causes. The primary one is, of course, the calculated
and successful dissemination of the German attitude. This has been
rendered easy by the further, notorious, fact that American scholars have
received their training in German universities, where degrees are far
more easily obtained than in France.

But at the heart of the Germanized formulation of French history
lie certain facts of German scientific methods and scholarship which,
once more, it would be well to realize. It is to the point, therefore, to
survey for a moment the work of German historians and scholars, in
order to discover the circumstances under which their version of history
came to be written.

The traditional, uncritical belief which was held in France till the
17th century was that the Franks originated somewhere in Pan-
nonia,1 and were related to the Latin race. This tradition in itself is
witness to the extent to which the French did not feel themselves to be
German, and is traced all the way back to Gregory of Tours (d. c. 594),
the great contemporary historian of the Franks, and to the chronicles
of one who calls himself Fredegarius, and who traces them through Virgil
to Troy (Aeneid, i, 246 ff. See M on. Ger. SS. Mer. II, Liber II, 4a and
III, 2a). Beginning in the 17th century, German research proved con-
clusively that the Franks first appeared (the usual word used is "origi-
nated") in north Germany, and while not Teutons, were most probably
of Teutonic race. They thereupon claimed to be the originators of France,
— and, through other tribes also German, to be the regenerators, and
therefore the best, in every nation in Europe.

1 Gregorii Turoneruis Episcopi, Historic Froncorum, Liber II, last par., sec. 9.

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 323

Now German scholarship, such as it is, has recently been in many
instances the first to expand a given field of research. The search for
and determinization of sources as the last word in scientific procedure,
is preeminently a German characteristic. This natural mental process has
been methodically developed into a science by Germans ; and it has been
carried by them to extreme and ridiculous lengths repeatedly, as every
student knows. Nevertheless, it has resulted in the discovery and editing
of countless invaluable manuscripts, and the resurrection of rudimentary
information about the past.

In the patriotic reaction that followed Prussia's recovery after Napo-
leon's defeat in 1815-18, Baron von Stein inaugurated a collection of
documents and sources relative to German history from its inception,
which bears the imposing title of Monumenta Germania Historica, and
which now exists in thirty-seven large folio, and eighty-two, seven hun-
dred page, quarto volumes, or one hundred and nineteen in all. This
tremendous work, which is indeed a monument to German industry in
itself, is a most important source for modern scholarship on related sub-
jects, since it reproduces and edits manuscripts spread all over Europe,
and not readily accessible.

But this work is typically German in its tacit assumptions and pan-
German comprehensiveness. It claims to be an expression of truth-loving,
truth-seeking science, unprejudiced and unbiased. But its motto engraved
on a sort of heraldic device is Sanctus amor patriae dat animum — The
sacred love of the Fatherland giveth the spirit, — truly a noble device, but
hardly in conformity with scientific detachment. Indeed, Stein quite
plainly intended that this work of scholarship should arouse a patriotic
spirit in Germany by turning the attention of teachers and students to
the greatness of "Germany's" past. J. R. Seeley, M. A., an English
author, makes much of this brilliant idea. He describes Stein as "the
regenerator of the Prussian Monarchy and the founder of the doctrine
of German unity" (Life and Times of Baron -von Stein, vol. II. Pt. IX,
chap. II, p. 456), and quotes letters written by Stein explaining his pur-
pose. To Count Munster, Stein wrote (Nov. 20, 1812), "My wish is that
Germany should become great and strong, that she may recover her inde-
pendence, her self-government, and her nationality, and may assert them
in her position between France and Russia ; that is the interest of the
nation and of all Europe" (Pt. VII, chap. I, p. 172). In 1815, in a letter
to the Bishop of Hildesheim, he wrote : "Since my retirement from public
affairs I have been animated by the wish to awaken the taste for German
history, to facilitate the fundamental study of it, and so to contribute to
keep alive a love for our common country and for the memory of our
great ancestors" (p. 457). The society to accomplish this work was formed
in 1819, and Seeley points out that "the significance" of the above-chosen
motto "can hardly be understood by those who have observed how new
and fresh was the feeling of patriotism at that time in German breasts"
(p. 458). Pertz himself, its famous editor, writes of his first interview

324 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

with Stein (April 18, 1820), — "he presented the idea of the undertaking, —
that of awakening patriotism through a knowledge of national
history . . ."(p. 461).

This spirit would not of necessity bias the almost mechanical editing
of texts, but it does apply directly to the choice of manuscripts to be
included. The interpretation of ancient history depends absolutely on the
texts used, and used in a right spirit of proportion. No one could object
to undertaking scholarly work from motives of patriotism ; but to permit
these motives to misuse or distort facts, and to evolve theories of history
based on a desire to aggrandize one's own country is dishonest.

The outcome of the attitude of Stein and the scholars who followed
his lead was that the Monumenta confound French with German history.
Based on the false premise that race or language determine nationality,
they tacitly claim as German history nearly a thousand years of French
history. There are detailed collections of MSS. dealing with the so-called
Germanic tribes which invaded Gaul and other parts of the Roman Empire ;
but there is no presentation of the long history of Gaul preceding these
invasions. With the presence of Teutonic tribes in Gaul, Gaul apparently
became quite of a sudden Germany, and the 1500 years of Celtic and
Roman civilization is manifestly considered incidental and unimportant.
At least, that is the logic of the selection of facts presented by the Monu-
menta. To gain in any degree an accurate or complete basis for the study
of this whole period, recourse must be had to the splendid French collec-
tions, as Bouquet, Migne, Guizot, and Duchesne. The Monumenta are
neither fair nor historic in their assumptions. Pan-Germanic schemes
were afloat even in Stein's day.1

The fact is that Teutonic tribes were first known through contact
with Rome in Gaul and tvest of the Rhine. The Merovingian and Caro-
lingian dynasties covered in their northern part what is now the eastern
and southern portion of the German Empire; but then, before a German
Empire had been conceived, they were Frankish kingdoms carrying on
almost continuous warfare with Teuton marauders and invaders. The
center of these kingdoms was not trans-Rhine in Germany, but was in
Gaui. The fact is that trans-Rhine history at this time was practically
non-existent for the simple reason that north Europe was a wild and
uncouth wilderness. As Lorenz and Scherer admit in their Geschichte
des Essasses (History of Alsace) the clash between Romans and Germans
at Belfort — then a Celtic town — was the first detailed and authentic his-
tory of the Germans, and "Here on the floor of Alsace, German History
has its beginning" (p. 1). Be it noted that it was as invaders. France
had had a continuous civilization several hundred years before this, — at
base Celtic and completed by a Roman superstructure. German history

1 Though source-worshippers, the German students of the history of Germany in Gaul (!)
do not attempt, as a rule, to go back of Theodosius the Great. See any source guides, as Potthast,
Molinier, Wattenbach, Ebert, and Gross. A study of this earlier period would detract from
German accomplishment, revealing, at the same time, the disruptive and destructive activities of
most of the invaders, cf. C. H. Hayes, Germanic Invasions, p. 7, etc.

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 325

proper can hardly be said to emerge out of the vaguely reported vicissi-
tudes of wandering German tribes until after the break-up of Charle-
magne's empire. The northern portions of this empire were Prankish
conquests of Germans, whom Charlemagne clearly recognized as his most
dangerous enemies. This northern and eastern section broke, or was torn
away from the regnum Francorum after Charles the Bald (d. 877), became
more and more German, and throughout the ages has continued to be
France's hereditary enemy. German national history began long after
French, and to add to this history that of all the countries fought over by
German tribes would be as logical as to incorporate, let us say, all Chinese
or Mexican history into that of the United States because our armies and
emigrants once set foot on their respective soils.

The Monumenta have no more right to include this Gallo-Frankish
period and people as integral parts of a German Nation (though they did
profoundly affect the first Germanic Empire when it first took shape as
the Holy Roman Empire under Otto I, a Bavarian king) than, let us
imagine, a future democratic England might claim President Wilson as an
early and illustrious English president, and our generation an English and
wnAmerican generation. Clovis was as much a Frenchman of his time,
and not German, as President Wilson is an American of our time, and
not English.

To be consistent the Monumenta should have collected with equal
zeal documents relating to other kingdoms, conquered and ruled over by
Teuton tribes much more directly German in point of time and in feeling
than the Franks. The Visigothic kingdom in Spain (507 to 712), with its
high state of culture and civilization, and its splendid legal code, might
have proved almost as great an ornament to Pan-German exclusiveness as
that of the Franks. But France was nearer ; the history of the border-
lands— Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine — was always a debatable question ;
there was a semblance of fact, — in that the Franks originated in Ger-
many,— to uphold the claim ; and after all, the Franks, and Clovis, Charles
Martel, and Charlemagne, must have been German because they were
great ; — so all these reasons led to the assumption being made automatic-
ally and almost unconsciously, as it were, that with the Franks France
was German. And there has been an endless output of "scholarship" to
prove this impossible hypothesis. German vanity could not bear to part
with nearly a thousand years of what she calls her history, and particularly
to yield that history, with all its great personages, to France.

But the facts are against her. French national spirit was born when
Roman genius unified her Celtic civilization. It was the first in Europe
in point of time and in point of civilization ; and the German was, and is,
the last.

We have instanced the Monumenta as typical of German Egotism
because it is merely a skeleton of history, with practically no opinions
expressed. But German histories prove the case by the very use they
make of the Monumenta and by their outspoken, unblushing pro-German
bias. Dahn's eleven volumes on Konige der Germanen is an accomplished

326 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

example. Wetzer and Welte's Kirchenlexicon speaks of Charlemagne
directly as the first great German Emperor. Instances such as this might
be multiplied to the limit of one's reading capacity of German histories.
They are all alike in kind, differing amongst themselves only in degree.1

This German interpretation of French history has for some reason
never been offset in the popular belief either by the French histories, or
by an adequate study of the facts. Popular books as well as school
histories and encyclopedias are responsible for this in part. Bryce, in his
Holy Roman Empire, describes the Franks in the same terms as the
Saxons, Alamanni, and Thuringians (p. 34). In speaking of the appeal
of Pope Gregory the Third to Charles Martel, he says, "It is at least
certain that here begins the connection of the old imperial seat with the
rising German power" (p. 39). But the word "German" here is mislead-
ing, and the confusion is representative. It refers back to the original
"loose confederation of Germanic tribes," and forward to the Holy Roman
Empire as represented by Otto the Great, Bavarian king (crowned 962
at Rome), and his successors. Now the first reference bridges a gap of
at least five hundred years, longer than this country has been known
to Europe. During that time the West Franks had settled northern Gaul,
mixed with the Celts, accepted Roman civilization, and became Roman
citizens. Surely no one could correctly describe the product of these
centuries in the same terms as the original immigrants. Otto the Great
was possibly an East Frank of Bavaria, but was more probably a Swabian
(Suevi). In either case, his generation were, comparatively, but new-
comers from the German forests ; he fought France for the possession
of Alsace and Lorraine, with only partial success ; and he did not belong
in any way to the French people, nor share their already distinct national
traditions. And he lived two hundred years after Charles Martel.

Such loose uses of the term German are responsible for much that
amounts to inaccuracy in scholarly as well as popular thinking; and the
only excuse that can be offered for scholarship outside Germany is that
preconceptions and prepossessions are the most insidious foes of scientific
accuracy and judgment. Nor is there a more confused period politically
i.i history than this late Carolingian. But the key to interpretation may be
sought in the rise of national consciousness, which but few even of the
French historians have attempted to trace seriously (cf. Monod and Flach,
op. cit. Also Guizot).

The unique position of the Franks in its true light has few champions
outside France. Madison Grant, in his chapter on European history,
already quoted as saying that Europe had become "superficially Teutonic,"

1 Cf. the quiet use of UHS and unser in Heinrich von Sybel's Kleine Historiche Schriften;
first three paper*. For some of the most illustrious parallels on this phase of the German
historians, see Mullenhoff, Deutsche Altertumskunde; V. A. Dederich, Der Frankenbund, with
Louis Will's use of him in Le Grande Encyclopedie, vol. xvii; E. Dummler; Waitz in his eight
volume Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte; O. Gutsche and W. Schultze, Deutsche Geschichte von
der Urseit bis au den Karolingern, 2 vols. ; and W. Junghans, trans, by G. Monod under the
title Histoire Critique des regnes de Cliilderich et de Chlodovech. cf. Fustel's acute criticism, in
Chap. Ill of La Monarchic Franque, of Junghans' misreadings.

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 327

says with a bland lack of logic, and with typical carelessness, two pages
later (op. cit. pp. 162-4-5), "Charlemagne was a German Emperor, his
capital was at Aachen, within the present limits of the German Empire,
and the language of his court was German. . . . Europe was Ger-
many, and Germany was Europe, predominantly, until the Thirty Years'
War" (1618+). His widely-circulated book was published in 1916, and
shows the degree to which American science has gone to school in Ger-
many. As an earlier example of the typical success attending Germany's
method of popularizing the pristine glories of her "Empire," Walter C.
Perry's book, The Franks, published in London. in 1857, might be cited.
This book is referred to in the bibliographies of German encyclopedias.
"If the Greeks and Romans are rightly called the people of the past, the
Germans, in the wider sense of the appellation, have an undoubted claim
to be considered the people of the present and the future. To whatever
part we turn our eyes of the course which this favoured race has run,
whether under the name of Teuton, German, Frank, Saxon, Dane, Nor-
man, Englishman, or North American, we find it full of interest and
glory. . . . For many obvious reasons, and among others from the
circumstance that the French preceded the Germans in the field of litera-
ture, it has happened that the great leaders and monarchs of the Frankish
nation have been far more closely connected with modern France than
is warranted by historic truth. It will be observed that in the following
pages we everywhere speak of the Franks exclusively as Germans, as one
of the many offshoots of the mighty Teutonic race, which for more than
a thousand years has been steadily advancing towards universal dominion
over the political, social and moral world" (pp. 1-4-5). Truly this "Bar-
rister-at-Law" had learned his lesson well, for we read on the title page
"Doctor in Philosophy and Master of Arts in the University of Got-
tingen" ; and he quotes freely from the then published volumes of Pertz'
Monumental

How "exclusively" the Franks are Germans will now briefly be exam-
ined,— it being remembered that Alsace and Lorraine were for centuries
Frankish territory.

Somewhere between three hundred and one hundred B. C., several
tribes, probably belonging to the ancient Istaevones of Tacitus, settled
about the northern reaches of the Rhine.2 They were probably a van-
guard which had been driven before the advancing Saxons, Alamanni,
and Suevi (Sweben-Bavarians. Cf. Brockhaus' Konversations-Lexicon,
vol. VI, "Franken"). The Franks, as they came to be called, did not

1 Cf. The Franks, by Louis Sergeant, 1898, — a standard handbook. The author says that
"the Franks were not a tribe of Teutons, though they were indisputably Teutonic" (p. 11), and
he considers the Frank kingdoms to be Germanic. His book is typical; he has read the sources
unintelligently, and speaks of their history as "rich in fable but poor in history." Monod, on
the contrary, considers the Carolingians are "more clearly characterized than the majority of
historic periods" (L'Histoire Carolingienne, p. 2).

'Tacitus, De Moribus Germanorum, II. Cf. the Historiarum and Annalium throughout
Cf. the monograph of V. A. Dederich, Der Frankenbund, esp. pp. 42-44. Also Waitz, Deutsche
Verfassungsgeschichte, esp. Vols. I, II and III. Waitz is a thorough German. Cf, also
summaries in encyclopedias.

328 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

actually clash with the Empire until 240 A. D. Before that time
there were interchanges between them and their Celtic neighbors, running
over a period of at least two hundred years, or about as long as the United
States have had interchanges with Canada.

Now the essential point, and one totally ignored by the German
writers as to its primary importance, is the fact that France as a self-
conscious unit was already in existence at the time when the Franks finally
entered Gaul.1 The loosely scattered CV/fic-speaking, non-Teuton, tribes
of the first century B. C. in Gaul were by no means to be dignified by the
name of Empire, as an over-enthusiastic Celtic scholar, M. d'Arbois de
Jubainville tries to demonstrate ;2 but they had been spread all over France,
Belgium and Holland, Alsace-Lorraine, and even well beyond the Rhine
since a thousand years B. C., and had a well-developed type of civilization
and religion. Because of this superior culture they had overcome and
absorbed the primitive Iberians and Basques. The prominent character-
istic of this people, and that which Caesar noted, was their spirit of
independence. Local tribes rarely combined, except for temporary con-
federations in order to overcome a mutual enemy, and were sure to
separate in time. The country for that period was populous and pros-
perous, but there was no political stability on which to found a sense of
nationality.

It took the conquest and co-ordinating genius of Caesar to fuse this
body of loosely organized tribes into a nation, and Caesar is in a certain
sense the founder of the French nation. By giving the Gauls the political
unity of the Roman Empire, by making them a self-governing, practically
independent group in the body of nations which composed the Roman
Empire ; by arresting to a large extent internecine strife and by defeating
decisively the common enemy — Teutons — ; by introducing Roman laws,
Roman culture, Roman ideals — Caesar turned the spirit of independence
of the Gauls into the positive creation of a new self-consciousness of
unity, power and worth. This creation dated, be it noted, shortly after
58 B. C. South-east France had been a Roman province as far back as
the 2nd century B. C., and Aix had become a Roman center in 123 B. C.,
Narbonne in 118. The Roman policy of according complete liberty,
requiring only military service and a tax, soon led the people to seek for
themselves the superior Roman institutions, and the great Pax Romano,
followed over all Gaul almost immediately upon the successes of Caesar
in the north and in Britain. Administrative centralization and municipal

1 Cf. Walter Schultze, Deutsche Geschichte von der Urseit bis zu den Karotingern, Vol. II,
p. 3. "Hardly in another province of the World-Empire had the Roman nature (Wesen) per-
meated so fully and so decidedly, had the native national Elements made themselves so dependent
and useful, as in the quite late-conquered Gauls." But this admission bears no fruit; the Franks
are "planted" in Gaul perhaps from the year 8 (p. 38), but because they belong to the great
German stem, they are unaffected by centuries of Roman culture and Roman assimilation, they
are still as German as the latest comers out of Teutonic fastnesses, in fact, as Hindenburg him-
self; which is, at least, the logic of his claim, and is typically German.

*Cf. chiefly Premiers Habitants de I' Europe. 2 vols. — esp. Vol. II, Chap. Ill, pp. 254, 297 ff.,
and pp. 386, 387. All M. d'Arbois' voluminous writings on the Celts should receive careful con-
sideration.

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 329

autonomy, religious ties, brotherhood in arms, prosperity — these made
Gaul whole-heartedly loyal to Rome for more than five centuries— or for
nearly four times as long as the United States have had individual exist-
ence. All the emperors favored Gaul ; Lyons, the political capital, became
the center for the great Roman roads, Caligula visited Gaul and founded
literary competitions there. Antoninus (A. D. 138-161) came from Nimes,
Claudius and Caracalla from Lyons. The last-named emperor extended
Roman citizenship to all Gaul, and the people felt themselves to be, and
called themselves, Romans, and their language Romance. In the fourth
century there was a "veritable renaissance" in Gaul, literature flourished
everywhere, the best specimens being the polished verse of Ausonius and
the refined panegyrics of Eumenius.1 Christianity entered Gaul from the
very start ; — tradition declaring that it was the Marys and Lazarus who
first brought it there.

It was as an integral part of this state that Alsace and Lorraine
formed the bulwarks against successive incursions across the Rhine of
Teutonic barbarians — who were still mostly nomadic tribes without his-
tory or culture. For this very reason, and because its own soldiers as
Roman Legionaries defended the Empire, their patriotism showed more
intensity, and "the Alsatian population lost, naturally all independent polit-
ical existence, and absorbed itself into the powerful universal empire"
(Histoire d' Alsace, pp. 15-16. Rod. Reuss).

The West, or Salian, Franks, began raids across the Rhine about the
middle of the third century, and finally were introduced, and planted
definitely as a colony in Gaul, in the year 277. They lived beyond the
Meuse, and on the lower reaches of the Scheldt, entered into alliance with
Rome, became thoroughly Romanized, assisted the Roman armies, and
remained a peaceable center for nearly tzt'o hundred years, while the great
tribes of East Germany were in motion. It was from these Romanized
Franks, at the end of the fifth century, that came Ae'tius and the army
that at last broke the power of Attila the Hun (451), and later Clovis,
whose people, originally half Frank, half Celto-Roman, were and had been
an integral part of the Roman Empire for longer than all but the oldest
American families have inhabited the United States. "The idea of race,"
says Fustel de Coulange, "does not occupy a single place in the thought
and spirit of that time, and we can practically affirm that it is absent from
it" (La Gaule Romaine, p. 108). These Romans, for Romans they con-
sidered themselves, had all their interests in Rome, regarded the German
influx of Alemanni, Burgundians, and Visigoths as their worst enemies ;
and it was as an agent of Rome that Clovis took up arms in the defense
of his people.

The weakening of the Roman power and the withdrawal of Roman
legions left these outlying people to shift for themselves, the Roman
authority being loosely maintained at this time by Syagrius, son of a for-

1 T. R. Glover, Life and Letters in the 4th Century, Chap. 5, on Ausonius, etc. Also J. W.
Mackail, Latin Literature, III, Chap. VII.

22

330 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

mer Roman governor, over virtually the whole of France and Belgium
north of the Loire. This power Syagrius had assumed on his own initia-
tive, and Clovis, his rival and much the stronger man of the two, raised
an army of maybe 3000 men, and in A. D. 486 overcame Syagrius ; and
soon thereafter made himself ruler of the whole of France.

Now there are certain points to keep clear in mind. These Franks
who formed the first cradle of the French kingdom, were not conquerors
of Rome, did not invade the Roman Empire, and did not break with the
central Roman power, the Emperor. They were an integral part of the
Roman Empire, which, because Roman troops and generals were needed
elsewhere, had to protect and govern themselves. They exercised in the
name of the Empire the military authority. In 476 the succession of the
Western emperors ceased ; following Gibbon we speak of the Eastern
Empire, but in fact at the time no such distinction was made. The
Emperor Anastasius sent Clovis the insignia of a Consul from Constanti-
nople, which he assumed with great solemnity at Tours.1 He died a
Roman Consul. The Frank money was stamped with the head of the
Emperor as before, and continued to be so until, in the north, Theodebert I
substituted his name in 593 (which act Procopius called "audacious),
while in Marseilles Clotaire II (613-629) discarded the superscription of
Heraclius (610-641) and substituted his own (La Grande Encyclopedie,
Vol. XVII, p. 1137).

Nor did Clovis convert Gaul to Christianity (Greg. Tur. op. cit. II,
30-31). It had been Christian for more than two centuries. Gregory
of Tours describes the conversion of Clovis himself and the baptism of
amplius tria milia, — more than three thousand — of his soldiers. The real
significance of this act was in the deliberate dedication of France to
Christianity, the acceptance of Christ as the real King of France. The
Merovingian kings were hereditary monarchs as far back as we have any
traces of them, they believed God to be the source of authority and power ;
and Pepin d'Heristal "each year, at the commencement of Lent, went
barefooted in search of the hermit Wiro at Mons Patrius, where he puri-
fied his conscience and asked him, in the silence of a retreat, how he
might rule his kingdom in a manner agreeable to God." (Dictionaire de
Theologie Catholique, Witzer & Welte, trans, by I. Goschler, vol. IX,
p. 153. Cf. also La Monarchic Franque, chap. II, of Fustel de Coulange,
with the sources).

Clovis conquered in rapid succession his neighbors, colonies of Visi-
goths and Burgundians who had at first attacked, and then settled in,
south-west Gaul and Aquitaine respectively. Both these also had been
incorporated parts of the Empire for more than half a century in some-
what the same way as the Franks ; and in subduing them Clovis not
merely overcame hereditary German enemies in the persons of the rulers,
but put a temporary stop to civil war and rebellion within the Empire,

1 Greg. Tur. Hist. Francorum, II, 38. See Fustel's thorough and convincing study in
L'Invtuion Gtrmanique, p. 499 ff.

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 331

and protected the large mass of the people who were Gauls and Roman
citizens like himself. His real war was against the newly arrived Ala-
manni, trans-Rhine German barbarians ; and he led a well-trained, Roman-
modelled army against them. Their defeat was sealed at the famous
moment when Clovis accepted Christ. Clovis was king of all Lorraine
as well as Alsace, and he himself built the wooden church at Strasbourg
in Alsace, on whose site is now the cathedral. Charlemagne rebuilt its
nave, and Louis the Debonnaire placed it under the protection of the
Virgin (Grandidier, P. A., Histoire de I'eglise et des eveques princes de
Strasbourg, I. p. 154, 162 ff, and 258 ff. ; and Essais historiques et topo-
graphique sur I'eglise cathedrale de Strasbourg, pp. 5, 10 and 11).

The impulse Clovis gave brought the whole of Alsace and Lorraine
within the direct sphere of his influence, protecting them from German
invasion, and establishing anew Roman institutions. Though Clovis' king-
dom broke up into many parts, and the German invasions met with success
at many points, yet it was the Frank power which grew, and it was the
Frank laws, religion and kingdom which finally reached its climax in
Pepin and Charlemagne.

The underlying reason for this is not far to seek. The great upheavT
als of the period were political upheavals. Conquests by an army do not
permanently alter a race of people. The Frank kings and their armies
fought with each other or with German invaders, as with the Danes, Avars,
and later the Moslems ; but though they overthrew the imperial adminis-
tration, they did not alter the internal organization of the cities. As Mr.
George Burton Adams says in his exceedingly interesting and clear, but
not always reliable book, Civilization During the Middle Ages:

One fact of very great importance for all this long period of
conquest, but one easy to be overlooked in the history of more stirring
events, is that the life of the provincial, on the country lands and
in the towns, goes on much the same as before. He is subjected to
a rapid change of masters ; he is deprived now and again of a part
of his lands; he must submit to occasional plundering; life and
property are not secure. But he lives on and produces enough to
keep the world alive. He takes himself no part in the wars. He has
apparently little interest in the result; indeed, the coming of the
German [include Frank here] may be often an improvement of con-
dition for him. He had not been altogether prosperous or secure
before. At any rate he keeps at work, and he holds to his language,
and to his legal and economic customs, and to his religion, and he
becomes thus a most important but disregarded factor of the future
(Chap. IV, p. 76).

In the foregoing paragraphs an attempt has been made to disprove
'the German claims about the early history of France, and to show that
Germany's assertion that the Franks are German, Charlemagne a German,
France German, Alsace-Lorraine German, is a distortion of the truth
absolutely unwarranted by the available facts. And these pretensions
spring directly first, from the general extravagance of the German racial
claim, and second, from the necessity of creating a support to inflate the

332 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

nevvly-created German patriotism of 1820, led by Prussia. And the result
of this was to foster a colossal self -appreciation, with its direct corollary
arising from the Napoleonic era — the disparagement of France. The
quiet assumptions of German histories that the presence of German tribes
on the soil of France warrants the appropriation of centuries of French
history could not even be justified if France had been in the same inchoate
and barbaric state as Germany itself; but this is not the fact. For a
thousand years Gaul had known itself as Gaul, and despite the political
upheavals incident to the German invasions, occurring throughout the
Merovingian and post-Carol ingian periods, Gaul remained distinctively
itself, and, overcoming these disruptive factors, evolved one of the
greatest empires in history.

Alsace and Lorraine, therefore, had formed this age-long association
with France, and it is as such that they entered upon the long vicissitudes
of the Middle Ages. Charlemagne's Empire was divided into three strips,
running roughly north and south. The name Lorraine is derived from
Lothaire, grandson of Charlemagne, who received the "middle" kingdom
of the three partitions of the great Emperor's dominions at the Treaty
of Verdun in 843, though the actual date when the Latin name took form
was from the second Lothaire in 855. (Cf. for treaty of Verdun, Nithard,
in Patrologia Latin, vol. cxvi, col. 45-76. Cf. Amiales Bertiniani, an. 843.
The Rhine, as usual, formed the boundary between Alsace and the Eastern
Kingdom.) Present-day Lorraine is but a piece out of the heart of this
great kingdom, which extended from the North Sea clear to the center
of Italy, including the Netherlands, Rhineland, Switzerland, and Lom-
bardy ; though the "regnum" of Lothaire II comprised only the northern
part of this Middle Kingdom.

The treaty of Verdun did not in the least degree separate Lorraine,
with the Middle Kingdom, from France; rather it divided the Empire
of Charlemagne into three kingdoms ; and after the further division in
855 between the son of Lothaire I and his great uncles, Lorraine still
remained the central seat of government and the residence of the king.

At the death of Lothaire II, Charles the Bald, king of Western
France, received the throne of his great-nephew by election, following an
ancient French custom. Since the Pope Adrian II sustained the cause of
Charles' brother, Louis, called the German, the Lorraine bishop stated that
the king of France was "the elect of God and of the people," their unani-
mous choice, the "legitimate" heir to the throne, chosen because he had
Carolingian blood. So Charles the Bald was solemnly crowned and con-
secrated king of Lorraine on the 9th of September, 869, in the cathedral
of St. Etienne in Metz, and was also recognized by Alsace (see the
Annales Bertiniani, M. G., SS. I, p. 483 and ff. ; and Melchoir Goldast,
Collectio constitutionum imperialium, vol. I, p. 195).

Louis the German seized by force part of this kingdom, which
Charles renounced in the Treaty of Mersen (he. cit. 870), but the three
original kingdoms were again reunited under Charles the Fat. This whole

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 333

sequence of historic events, culminating in the seizure of Louis, is con-
sidered by Germans to prove the incorporation of Lorraine into "the
German Empire," though that Empire did not exist till William I created
it with the help of Bismarck. If you dispute this fact — so speaks German
logic — then in any case Charlemagne and his Empire were German, so
however you look at it Lorraine is German !

The threads of the subsequent history of these provinces are so
tangled that a detailed analysis of them would take several pages. Conflict
between the sorely harassed French kings and their Germanic enemies
led frequently to the erection of independent kingdoms, or duchies; at
one time directly favorable to France, at others — the result of an occupatio
bellica — under German dominion ; but at all times tending to create one of
those feudal estates which were the outcome of this complexity of peoples
and unbalanced sway of forces which was typical of all Europe at this time.
The Dukes of Lorraine became vassals of the Counts of Champagne. They
were also, at times, vassals of the Holy Roman Empire for some of the
smaller feifs, and by virtue of that feudal connection, frequently appeared
at the German Diets. But essentially in their ducal capacity the Lorraine
sovereigns were free. At the same time the powerful bishops of Toul,
Metz, and Verdun were "princes of the empire on behalf of their ecclesi-
astical sees, and they were quite independent of the ducal sovereigns in
the midst of whose possessions their cities were located." (Ruth Putnam,
Alsace and Lorraine, p. 105.)

Essentially, the result of six hundred years, from 950 to 1550, was
to emphasize in both Alsace and Lorraine two fundamentally important
principles. The first is that the native peasants tended throughout to
reproduce the original, indigenous Celtic and French stock, the German
and foreign element fading out ; so that Alsace as well as Lorraine in 1871
were less German than they had ever been. This follows well-recognized
ethnological law, and accounts in part for the systematic way that Ger-
many today massacres or deports the populations of conquered nations ; —
experience having shown that the native stock always reasserts itself in
time to the detriment of the conqueror. The second principle is that
feudal serfdom, and the incessant conflicts which perpetually raged on
the land of these border provinces, developed in the peasants and towns-
men alike a desire for complete independence from any imperial authority.
Practically, this was attained by many of the cities or landed "free-holds,"
and the suzerainty of the Holy Roman Emperors was much of the time
purely nominal. The less prejudiced German historians Lorenz and
Scherer even admit this aspiration on the part of Strasbourg (op. tit.,
3rd ed., p. 221).; while there were ten free imperial cities known as the
Decapolis, which were virtually self-determining bourgeois republics. A
typical controversy illustrative in every way of Lorraine feeling, took
place at Nuremberg in 1542 (Aug. 26). Duke Anthony of Lorraine, son
of the Rene whose countship had been raised by Francis I to a dukedom,
protested the rights of the Empire, and denied any feudal obligations to

334 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

the Emperor (Charles V) ; but rather that Lorraine was "free and inde-
pendent" and would "remain so forever," which, to make it emphatic, is
repeated three times in the text. On the payment of a small sum of
money, this agreement was ratified by Ferdinand I ; later again, at Spire,
July 28, 1543, by Charles V; and renewed by the Emperor Rudolph at
Prague, Jan. 2, 1603.1

In 1552, at the Convention of Friedwald in Hessen, German Protes-
tant princes ceded Metz, Toul, and Verdun to Henry II, King of
France in exchange for subsidies to carry on war against Catholic Austria.
In the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, Alsace was ceded to France after
being conquered by the German Prince, Bernard de Saxe- Weimar for
France, and in the interest of a Protestant Germany, arrayed against the
Catholic Emperor and the Archduke of Austria. Louis XIV was slow to
push his claims in Alsace, and his policy of tact and forbearance did more
to inflame pro-French feeling than even renewed contact with French poli-
ticians and peoples. In 1681 Strasbourg, a free, independent city, opened
her gates to Louis without resistance, and became under his tolerant rule
a strong French center. The republic of Mulhouse, a part of Helvetia,
asked, and received, incorporation into France in 1798.

This bare sequence of events does not indicate the strength of the
pro-French undercurrent which had definitely set in, and which the suc-
cesses of Louis XIV brought to immediate realization. These two prov-
inces, when not independent, had been bound by loose ties to the Holy
Roman Empire, of which the House of Austria was the head, and no por-
tion of them made any part of the so-called "German Empire." This
Empire, founded in 1871 by Prussia, had to put Austria out of Germany
in 1866 before it cleared the way to the Rhine, and approached either
Alsace or Lorraine.

In 1871 these provinces had been an incorporated part of France for
over two hundred years; Lorraine fully three hundred and twelve (1559,
Treaty of Cateau Cambresis), and large parts of Alsace, since 1648,
or two hundred and twenty-three years. Canada, once French, has
belonged to Great Britain since 1760, or sixty-six years less than the least
time which Alsace-Lorraine have formed a part of France, yet, said the
Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeituttg recently, "In taking back Alsace and
Lorraine Germany accomplished an act of supreme national and historic
justice." (Quoted in the New York Times.) Would the world today
accept a like statement as adequate from France if she were to seize
Canada ?

To sum up, then, the purpose of this section has been to show that

1 Heinrich von Sjrbel, the well-known German Historian, in Deutschtands Reclit auf Elsass
und Lothringen, extracts a diametrically opposite meaning from this text. He is certainly wrong
as to the date, 1539. Kleiite Historische Schriften, p. 470. Cf. the scholarly, careful, and able
discussion of H. A. Godron in Memoirs de la societe d'archeologie, Lorraine, 1874, 3rd series,
Vol. II, p. 252 ff. Especially pp. 277, 278, and 280. Sybel's work, published in 1880, written
in 1871, is aggressively pro-German, and cleverly inaccurate.

ALSACE AND LORRAINE 335

the German claims are fundamentally false as regards their interpretation
of the history of Alsace and Lorraine, and false on four major counts.

1. The affinities of Alsace-Lorraine are a problem of nationality,
that is, of national sentiment and feeling.

2. France, inhabited by a highly civilized non-German peoples —
the Celts — existed historically for a thousand years before the Teuton
invasions affected the population, and was a self-conscious unit for half
that time under Roman leadership.

Alsace-Lorraine formed an important part of this unit.

3. The Franks, who gave the name to France, while possibly of
Teutonic origin though not themselves Teutons, were for 500 years an
integral part of this Celtic civilization ; and it was they, and not invading
Teutons, who formed the Frank Empire and established the nationality
of France.

Alsace-Lorraine was the heart of that Empire, sharing completely its
national feeling.

4. The Teutons, who did conquer Alsace-Lorraine and large parts
of France for a time, were displaced ; and they were barely related to
the modern Prussians, who in their turn are at least 40 per cent Slavs.
It is the Prussians who for three generations have claimed these provinces
for themselves on the grounds of their Germanism. The Prussians first
entered France in 1792.

Alsace and Lorraine, then, by racial inheritance and geographic set-
ting, first developed into independent national communes, with an indi-
vidual patriotism, and a strong national consciousness ; and, then, as time
went on, and because of their long-established affinity with the French, —
by temperament and habit, by mutual self-respect and the intimacy that
is born of insight and understanding, by the need France had of a
boundary and the need the provinces had of a Mother country, by all the
blood ties created by comradeship in arms and association through long
centuries of governments and peoples, the spirit of both Alsace and
Lorraine grew into the corporate body of the Kingdom of France, just
as had the Normans, the Bretons, or the Provengales before them.

ACTON GRISCOM.
(To be continued}

"In comforting others shalt thou be comforted; in strengthening
others shalt thou find strength; in loving shalt thou be loved." — Amiel.

EASTERN AND WESTERN
PSYCHOLOGY

VI
SALVATION THROUGH LOVE

WE have taken as a simile of the work of Salvation the period
when, as is supposed, a multitude of living beings, that had
hitherto dwelt in the water, came forth, in virtue of a tremen-
dous concerted effort, an extraordinarily forceful response to
the powers of Evolution, and, passing through the neutral zone between
low tide and high tide, finally established themselves as dwellers in the air,
in the sunlight. And we have seen that our problem is exactly like that ;
it is a question of raising ourselves, of co-operating with the powers that
are striving to raise us, from this world of our material desires to the
spiritual world, where we are to establish ourselves, dwellers in a finer air,
in a sunlight that shall be everlasting. That finer world is there already ;
we do not need to create it, any more than our supposed aqueous
ancestors needed to create the open world under the blue dome of the
sky; and, not only is it there, but strong spiritual forces, already estab-
lished there, are ceaselessly urging and aiding us to emigrate thither, just
as the older forces urged and aided the water-dwellers to come forth into
the light. And, as we have seen, the unanimous testimony of the world
is, that these forces invariably meet us with the touch of consciousness,
of personality, of enlightened and solicitous love.

The practical question then arises — and it is the only really practical
question in the world : How are we to respond to these upraising spiritual
powers? How are we to gain a hold upon them, in order that we may
effectively pull ourselves up? By what part of our being are we to take
hold? Or, since it is absolutely certain that the effective part of the lifting
must be done by these spiritual forces, how are we to arouse and urge
ourselves to co-operate with them, to such a degree as will make their
task possible?

We shall find many answers ; but, on looking closer, we shall find
that they are all but variants of the one answer. They vary, because our
temperaments and moods vary, and one answer will appeal to one temper-
ament, while another answer will apply to another. But we shall find that
what is actually accomplished, is identical in all cases: it is, to arouse
and enkindle in us that divine power which springs from the very unity
of all Life, from the oneness of the Universe itself ; that power which
draws together, draws toward that unity, all the temporarily scattered
fragments of divine Life, so that they may once more enter into unity. It
is said that love is strong as death ; but this divine Love is infinitely

336

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY, VI 337

stronger than death, since death is but an accident of Time, while Love
is an expression of that divine oneness which is the very essence of
Eternity.

As these practical methods came to take form in the East, they
grouped themselves into three "ways," with a fourth "way" which syn-
thesized them, and brought the essence of them all together into a single
"ambrosia," a single quality of "living water."

The first of these three "ways," as they are enumerated, is the Way
of Works; that is, salvation through the perfect performance of all the
Works of the Law, which include not only all the steps and details of the
ritual of worship, but also the whole of the moral and social law, every
part of which was made to flow out of, and depend on, the ritual of
worship. Thus the whole life, and every detail of life, was made to
depend on the spirit of religion ; every act of life became an act of
worship, so that all life, from before birth to the hour of death, and after
death, was turned into worship. The ideal purpose was, in this way to
make every act of life a conscious part of the operation of the infinite
divine Life ; to link every act of man with the larger acts of God, and, in
this way, through infinitely multiplied efforts and exertions of the will,
to develop and train that will at all points into active and energetic
co-operation with the will of God. In this way, precisely that vigorous
co-operation would be brought about, whereby we should help the divine
powers to help us to rise to the spiritual world, to enter into the Life
immortal.

This Way of Works, this doctrine of Salvation by Works, is, it seems,
the essence of the Vedic hymns and ceremonies, which one may call the
Old Testament of India. It is also, though in a less luminous form, the
essence of the Old Testament of the Jews. And in both, the form grad-
ually overwhelmed the spirit; the Works of the Law were gradually
crystallized and darkened, until they became, not inspiring forces of Life,
but "burdens grievous to be borne." The cause of this degeneration was
the gradual and insidious infusion of egotism.

How was this corroding egotism to be conquered? The answer, in
India, was : by illumination, by light, by the Way of Wisdom. The cor-
roding force of egotism rested on a delusion. To go back to our simile,
the beings which were emerging from the water had undertaken a series
of efforts and exercises to urge them forward, to fit them to dwell in air
and sunshine. But, their whole natures still saturated with the habits and
tendencies of sub-aqueous life, they had gradually and by subtle degrees
perverted these exercises, until they simply reinforced their water-life,
instead of raising them to air-life. What was necessary, then, was to
break up that whole mood of pre-occupation with the old water-life, and
to replace it by a firmly held vision of the coming air-life in the sunshine.
It was necessary completely to displace the sense of the self of water-life,
to replace it by a clear and inspiring vision of the new self of air-life, the
self that should dwell in the sunshine. So the Way of Wisdom, of Illu-

338 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

mination, was added to the Way of Works; the Way of Illumination,
whose main purpose is, to enkindle a vision of the higher Self, a vision
that shall have such driving power as will raise the whole life-force to
that higher Self, or, to put the matter truly, a vision that shall make it
possible for the solicitously waiting spiritual Powers to carry out the
great transformation. This is the message of the Upanishads, of the
Vedanta, which is, if one wishes so to call it, the New Testament of India.
The Indian Way of Wisdom corresponds very closely to the Way of
Faith, which Saint Paul so sharply opposed to the Works of the Law,
whereby, he said, "can no living man be justified."

Another method, another "way," was developed in India, which one
may call the Way of Yoga, the way of union with the Divine, through
the development of mystical powers. But it is not really a different
"way," it is simply a different presentation of the one everlasting Way.
For, as we saw that the Way of Works, in its purity, means simply the
blending of man's will, at every point and in every least or greatest act,
with God's will, to the end that man may be blended with God; so the
Way of Wisdom is an enkindling and illumination of man's consciousness,
until, at point after point, it shall become one with God's consciousness,
man thereby once again being blended with God ; and the Way of
Yoga is in no way different; it is a transformation of all our present
powers into their divine counterparts and originals, whereby, exercising
the powers of God, man is thereby blended with God. So all "ways" lead
to God.

But, just as, in the Way of Works, a subtle infusion of egotism
gradually perverted and corroded and, we may say, fossilized the whole
series of efforts and exercises, producing, in its last degeneration, a furious
Phariseeism ; so, corrupted by the same egotism — the love of the old self —
the Way of Wisdom was perverted by vanity and conceit, into a sense, not
of the splendid vision of God, but of the superiority of one's own illumina-
tion, with a patronizing or a haughty contempt for the blindness and
ignorance of others ; and so, in like manner, the Way of Yoga, the way of
mystical powers, tended to become a way of self-admiring mountebanks,
of "Yogis of the market-place," as they are called in India; the whole
assemblage of self-advertising prophets of the psychic world. For it is
an inevitable law that this infusion of egotism corrupts the growth of
spiritual powers and turns them into psychic counterfeits.

So the practical question arises : Is there any way in which this many-
sided degeneration can be hindered? Can we find some new way of
expressing the powers of Life, which shall fight directly against the force
of egotism, a prophylactic against the degeneration which egotism invari-
ably causes ?

The answer, as India found it, is given in a quaint, old-world tale,
concerning Narada, (the Son of Brahma the Creator), and that mysteri-
ous personage, Vyasa, who, it is said, collected the Vedic hymns and set
in order the great poem of the Mahabharata, in which the Bhagavad Gita

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY, VI 339

is enshrined. Narada, says the tale, going forth on his divine way, visited
Vyasa, the mighty Seer and Sage, who was dwelling in his mountain
hermitage, the Ashrama, or holy retreat, of Badarika. With due rites,
Vyasa welcomed him, bade him be seated, and asked him this :

"O thou Prophet of the Mighty ! The soul of man seeks to escape
from the grasp of allurement and pain, and craves deliverance from the
bondage of this world. But the Karma Marga, the Way of Works, does
not lead directly to the goal. The Way of Wisdom, Jnana Marga, truly
does. Nevertheless, without the leaven of devoted Love, Wisdom accom-
plishes but little indeed. Devoted Love is the only true way of salvation !
Therefore I humbly pray Thee to teach me the doctrine of devoted Love,
the Bhakti Marga !"

The divine Narada, looking into Vyasa 's heart, replied :

"Great Sage and Seer ! Thou hast come down to earth for the redemp-
tion of mankind. Thy present question is inspired by that desire alone.
Through thy disciple Jaimini, in the Book of Vedic Rites, thou hast dis-
coursed on the Karma Marga, the Way of Works ; and in the Vedanta,
thou has thyself completed the inquiry into the Way of Wisdom. And
now thou askest of devoted Love. Therefore I shall declare devoted Love
to thee."

And so Narada sets forth "that Love, which is inspired by the enthu-
siasm of selfless devotion to the Master, the Lord." One version of
Narada's teaching is found in the little tract, called the Bhakti Sutras of
Narada, which follows this essay, and from which we may, in anticipation,
quote a passage or two :

"This way of devoted Love (Bhakti) is higher than the way of ritual
Works (Karma), higher than the way of Wisdom (Jnana), higher than
the way of mystic Powers (Yoga). For, while ritual works, and wisdom,
and the search for mystical powers have each a further goal, devoted
Love is its own reward. And devoted Love is better than these, because
the Lord hates the proud, and loves the lowly and the humble.

"But some say that wisdom is the cause and source of devoted Love,
while others say that devoted Love and wisdom depend upon each other.
But Narada says that devoted Love is the source and fruit of devoted
Love.

"So it is in the King's house : there are those who serve the King as
his Ministers, or for the sake of reward ; there are those who love the
King for Love's sake. And those who serve the King for the sake of a
reward, neither bring to the King delight, nor to themselves assuagement
of their hunger for reward. Therefore let those who seek for salvation
firmly choose the way of devoted Love."

So far Narada, Son of Brahma. By one of those happy coincidences
which wait on spiritual reading, immediately after transcribing these
words of the divine Kumara, we came upon the following passage :

"The Lord being Greatness itself, he that succeeds in pleasing Him,
possesses true nobility, and enjoys the most enviable favor in this life.

340 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

How greatly do not worldlings feel themselves honored, when they draw
upon themselves some mark of attention, some sign of good will from a
monarch, from some great personage ! A soul in the state of grace should
esteem far more the happiness of pleasing God. We can do so with a
pure intention, and this is what we should wish most of all and should
look upon here below as an inestimable treasure. And, in fact, our most
ordinary actions being thereby consecrated to the service of God's infinite
Majesty, become acts of divine love, and deserve for us eternal rewards.
How important, therefore, is it not, to offer to the Lord not only our
meditations, our spiritual exercises, but also our work, our leisure time,
our conversations, our sleep, our meals ?"

Is it not clear that we have between these two passages not so much
a close resemblance as an identity, not only in the spirit of the teaching,
but even in the details and similes ? Yet I think that neither is the Belgian
Redemptorist Father Bronchain under obligations to Narada the Kumura,
nor is Narada the Kumura under obligations to Father Bronchain. But
both are under obligations to the eternal Spirit of Love.

There is a very vital side of the Indian doctrine of devoted Love,
which we may introduce in this way : Father Bronchain elsewhere writes :

"When the Saviour appeared on earth, charity was practically extinct,
but He spread it throughout the world as much by His example as by His
doctrine. His love for us not only induced Him to come down from
heaven to perform a mission of clemency and forgiveness in our regard,
but, during His whole life, He preached to us by His conduct the kindness
and benevolence we should show our fellow-men. How tenderly did He
not love His Disciples ! He treated them patiently, forgiving their faults,
instructing them patiently, putting up with their ignorance and defects,
going even at night, relates Pope St. Clement, to visit them asleep and
carefully cover them to secure them against the cold and the inclemencies
of the weather ..."

We have found that W7orks without devoted Love, Wisdom without
devoted Love, the search after mystical powers without devoted Love, are
all faulty and destined to fail. How is devoted Love to be enkindled?
How is the revelation of divine Love to be made in such a way that it
will cause our hearts to take fire and burn with the same divine flame?
The answer, in East and West, is the same : by a divine Incarnation, an
Incarnation in human form, of that very principle of divine Love, the
Love of the Eternal ; the Power, that is, which rests upon the everlasting
Unity ; the Power which, kindled in our hearts, will draw them into unity
with their source, so that all shall be "united in the One."

This doctrine of the divine Incarnation, the Avatar doctrine, is the
very heart of the Bhakti Marga, the Way of devoted Love, as it is under-
stood in India. Many of its aspects are so full of wisdom and inspiration
that it will be well to set it forth at some length, so that a broad com-
parison with the same teaching in the West may be possible.

The One Eternal (Parabrahma), says the Indian teaching, should be

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY, VI 341

viewed in three Aspects: the Creator (Brahma), the Preserver (Vishnu)
and the Transformer (Shiva). It is the Second Aspect, the Preserver,
who is manifested in divine Incarnation, the Avatar. Or, to give the same
teaching in its Western form, as phrased by Father Louis Lallemant in
his Spiritual Dostrine:

"From the three preceding properties of the Son we may conclude
that it was He who was to become incarnate, and not the other two
Persons of the Holy Trinity.

"God was pleased to be made man that He might make men children
of God. It was the Son, therefore, who was to take human nature, in
order to associate it with His own divine Sonship, and make it partaker
in His heritage.

"God was pleased to be made man that He might give to men in a
Man-God a visible model of a holy and divine life. It was the Second
Person, therefore, who was to clothe Himself with a human body, in
order to serve as a model of perfection to men, since it is this Person who
is properly the image of God the Father.

"God was pleased to be made man that He might teach men the truths
of salvation. It was to the Logos, therefore, that is to say, the Word of
God, that it belonged to come into the world to teach mankind . . . "

There are certain sides of the Eastern doctrine of the divine Incarna-
tion, the Avatar doctrine, which are admirably set forth in the treatises
on Bhakti Marga, the Way of Devoted Love ; and these teachings have
been brought together by George A. Grierson, in a translation of the
Bhakti-rasa-bodhini of Priya-dasa, which he has enriched with a lucid
commentary, largely drawn from works on the Bhakti Marga. From this
valuable essay, I shall draw details concerning the Avatar doctrine, with-
out making specific references.

Each Avatar, says Priya-dasa, is a boundless sea of bliss, and each
semblance, or form, in its whole expansion, was taken only for the salva-
tion of souls. When the thoughts of a believer are steeped in any one
of these forms, so great a devotion awakens in his heart, that it has no
limit. Each incarnation, or Avatar, is co-existent and co-eternal, and
meditation upon them, even in this Kali Yuga, or Age of the Devil,
illumines the whole inner being. Nay, he who knows their essence is
full of joy, like a mendicant who has found a priceless treasure.

The eternal existence of an Avatar is a vital point in this doctrine.
It is taught that, when an Avatar has carried out his work and fulfilled his
mission, he is not again absorbed into the Bhagavat, the Logos, but retains
personal existence forever. Thus Rama-chandra, though he has long left
this earth, is still Rama-chandra in Heaven, looking down upon his people,
guiding them and keeping them from harm and sin.

It is taught, too, that, in past world-epochs, the incarnating Preserver,
Bhagavat, took many humble forms. This was to show that in the sight
of the Lord, all men are equal ; the Lord regards not caste or tribe. "The
keynote of the Bhagavata system of belief is that Bhagavat or the Ador-

342 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

able, Himself descends (avatarati) to this earth for special reasons, such
as : to create the universe, to help the Faithful, to relieve the world from
sin, or to spread the true religion. On this all the rest of the theosophy
depends." (Grierson.)

The Deity, besides the usual personal names, Bhagavat and so forth,
is, as such, known as Para or Parat-para, the Supreme. He is a pure
Spirit, and it is "at His feet," (that is, in His presence) that the soul
abides, immortal and eternal, in perfect bliss, and with a personal identity,
when it has been released through bhakti, or devoted Love, from the
weary round of reincarnation.

The Supreme is pure Spirit. Therefore a necessity is felt for con-
necting links between the spiritual and the material. These links are
supplied by a series of graduated phases of conditioned Spirit (Vyuhas).
The Bhagavat, as Avatar, first takes conditioned personality, and in that
phase is called Vasudeva, (that is, the Manifested Logos). From Vasu-
deva proceed Prakriti, or indiscrete Primal Matter, and a secondary
phase of conditioned Spirit ; from these two proceed cosmic Manas or
Mahat, and the power called Pradyumna or Mighty, who is identified with
Sanat-kumara ; from Manas and Pradyumna proceed Self-consciousness
and the power called Unrestrained, who is called "the son of Kama";
from these proceed the Great Elements.

This series, besides giving an account of the emanations from Spirit
to Matter, further outlines the complex nature of the Avatar, exactly
corresponding to the teaching concerning the Western Avatar: that He
at once possessed Deity, a divine soul,, a human soul and a human body.
He existed, and exists, on each plane, in a form belonging to that plane.

But, besides a plenary Incarnation (Purna-avatara) of the Preserver
or Bhagavat (Logos), such as that of Rama and Krishna, there are
Incarnations of a part only, such as the Matsya Avatar ; of a digit only
(a digit being that part of the growing moon which is each day illu-
minated), like the Divine Swan Avatar, or the teacher, Kapila ; there are,
further, Avatars, Incarnations, of a single Power of the Logos, or of some
purpose (karya) of the Logos; or there are overshadowings, such as was
Vyj.sa. Then there are Avatars of governance, like that of Narada or
Manu, the purpose of which is, to manifest the power and love of the
Bhagavat (Logos), and to spread the true teaching.

Finally, the power called Antaryamin, the "inner constrainer in the
heart," is an Avatar of the Supreme; he is God, dwelling in the soul of
every animate creature. This is exactly the teaching of the fourth Gospel
concerning the Logos as "the True Light, which lighteth every man that
cometh into the world."

But the word Avatar is sometimes given a much wider sense. Thus,
it is said that the whole Manvantara, or period of cosmic Manifestation
is an Avatar; that Sacrifice is an Avatar: "The Adorable Bhagavat,
the Sacrificial Man, in the sacrifice inaugurated by Brahma, of golden
complexion, full of Vedic inspiration, full of sacrifices, the Atma

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY, VI 343

of the deities, from the breath of whose nostrils the Vedas were created."

The twin teachers of Narada, Nara-Narayana, who are the sons of
Dharma and Ahinsa (that is, of Righteousness and Innocence), and who
are famed for their passionless austerities, are held to be an Avatar. The
same is taught of the mysterious Datta, whose name signifies "I have
given myself to thee," the very essence of the Avatar's sacrifice.

Then there are the four (or seven) Kumaras, of whom it is said:
"Owing to the offerings of Brahma's austerities (Sana meaning "offer-
ing"), for the creation of the different worlds, the Adorable Bhagavat
(Logos) became the four Sanas, (Sanaka, Sananda, Santana, Sanat-
Kumara), the types of perpetual youth and innocence. Becoming thus
incarnate, He fully recited, in this present age, the truth concerning
Atma, which had been destroyed at the dissolution of the preceding Aeon
— a truth which the Saints (Munis), when they heard it, recognized
within themselves." Everyone, therefore, while preaching the true faith,
is, to that extent, an Avatar.

But the primal purpose of an Avatar, a divine Incarnation, is, to
manifest the Deity in a form that will enkindle devoted Love, thereby
imparting to the soul the divine fire of immortality. There are progressive
stages in this growing Love, which are thus divided by the Indian
teachers :

First comes acceptance ; or, as it may be, in our experience, resigna-
tion, which may be accompanied by fear, by thoughts of sorrow, by a
heart-broken turning from all earthly things. This acceptance, which is
somewhat like the feeling of the ship-wrecked mariner, cast up almost
lifeless on the beach, who hardly does more than accept the fact that he
is still alive, and which is the transition line of conversion, gradually
grows to obedience, the "obedience of the slave," as the Indian teaching
calls it. From this gradually develops the love of the friend and com-
panion. From this comes tender devotion. And tender devotion finally
flames forth in passionate Love.

How is this path of growing Love to be entered? There are two
classes of driving powers or "excitants" : the essential, and the supporting
or enhancing; and these are applied systematically to the five stages of
growing Love that we have outlined, as follows :

The essential excitant of the first stage, Resignation or Acceptance,
is the recognition of the Adorable Bhagavat, or His Incarnation; an
excitant, relatively less perfect, is the knowledge of the divine Powers,
like Brahma or Shiva, or of Saints who have practised resignation ; while
the enhancing excitant is study of the Upanishads. There will result a
"flavor" of the mind and heart which is called "resigned," and there will
ensue concentration of mind, unselfishness and freedom from passion.

Of the second stage, Obedience, the essential excitant is once more
the Adorable Bhagavat or His Incarnation ; relatively less perfect is the
study of the lives of the Saints who were noted for obedience. An
enhancing motive is a consideration of the graciousness of the incarnate

344 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Lord to all those who serve Him. This brings the flavor of the mind and
heart which is called "obedient," and there ensue from it obedience to the
commands of the incarnate Lord, and a pure life ; also such practices as the
use of rosaries.

The third stage, Friendship, likewise has, as its excitant, the Adorable
or His Incarnation ; with the study of the lives of Saints famous as
friends of the incarnate Lord, as a less perfect excitant. The thought of
the- gentleness of the incarnate Master, the sweetness of Rama's voice,
will enhance these excitants. There will result the flavor of heart and
mind called "friendly," and joy will follow, in the feeling that the incar-
nate Lord is ever near.

As excitants of tenderness, the essential one, as always, is the Lord
and His Incarnation, and especially the consideration of His childhood,
whether as Rama or as Krishna; the Mother of the Lord will bring an
added fervor, to be enhanced by remembering the baby graces of the
Lord, whether as Rama or as Krishna. The mood of heart called "tender"
will arise, and there will follow a joyous celebration of the day on which
the incarnate Lord was born, with devotion to the Lord as a Child, and
with an ardent love of all children, for the Child Lord's sake.

There remains the fifth stage, Passionate Love, to be aroused by
drawing near to the Lord and His Incarnation, with remembrance of
those who have passionately loved Him. To this passionate Love, the
beauty of Springtime should minister, with the songs of birds, and all
that tells of omnipresent Love. The flavor of heart and mind will be that
called "passionately loving," which will have its fruition in passionate
adoration of the Lord.

So far, in mere outline and with something of the dryness of any
systematic analysis, is the Indian Way of devoted Love, of growing Love
for the incarnate Master, rising to a vivid and constant sense of His
nearness, His tenderness, His solicitous watchfulness and care. And this
very Love, it is held, is the supreme and perfect driving power, which will
enkindle the spiritual will in us, enabling us to make the effort needed, in
order that we may fully co-operate with the greater effort which the once
incarnate Lord and the spiritual Powers that work with Him, are making
to raise us up from this world to the spiritual world of our immortality.
And we have seen that this Indian teaching insists that it is the former
Avatar Himself, as a personal spiritual Being, who makes this ceaseless
effort to lift us up into spiritual life.

So striking is the likeness of this whole system of the Way of devoted
Love to all that is most essential and characteristic in Christianity that,
as soon as the Sanskrit texts were translated, a group of scholars with
Professor Albrecht Weber at their head declared their conviction that
the whole system of Bhakti, or devoted Love, had been borrowed by India
from the Christian teachings ; and the traditional mission of Saint Thomas
the Apostle to India, in the first century, was supposed to be the source
of this communication. It was further laid down as self-evident that

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY, VI 345

books like the Bhagavat Gita and the Bhagavata Purana must of necessity
be later than the beginning of the Christian era, just because they con-
tained these "evident borrowings from the New Testament."

But these scholars, in their desire to claim for Christianity, as they
understood it, an exclusive possession of the Religion of Love, proved
a great deal too much for their own case. For it becomes evident that, if
it shall be proved that these Indian Scriptures and the Bhakti Yoga system
are in fact older than Christianity, then the likeness on which was based
the claim of their derivation from Christianity cannot be denied, and the
exclusive claim made by these sectarians — in a spirit which is really quite
contrary to the true spirit of Christianity — that Christianity alone teaches
the religion of Love, will fall to the ground.

And this is exactly what has happened. Not only has the whole sense
of Orientalists turned away from the view of Professor Albrecht Weber
and his school, but quite specific proofs have been discovered, which show
that the doctrine of devoted Love, the worship of the Adorable Bhagavat,
was fully developed in the days of Alexander the Great's invasion of
Northwestern India, three centuries before the foundation of Christianity.
This fact, established by the writings of the Greeks who visited India, is
corroborated by ancient inscriptions in India. For example, at Besnagar,
in the Bhilsa district of the principality of Scindhia, in Central India, a
pillar inscription in the most ancient characters, recently deciphered, reads
thus:

"King Chandradasa caused this Garuda banner of Vasudeva, the God
of gods, to be made here by Heliodoras, a votary of the Bhagavat, who
came from the great King Antalcidas." And the great King Antalcidas
flourished in the period B. C. 175-135.

It is quite clear, therefore, that the teaching of devoted Love, to be
kindled by adoration of the incarnate Lord, arose independently in India,
and had reached its full development at least two centuries, and, in all
likelihood many centuries, before the incarnation of the Western Avatar.
And, further, that this teaching habitually and consciously employed many
methods, such as a particular devotion to the Mother of the incarnate
Lord, or to the divine Infancy, which are thought of as peculiar to Chris-
tianity, nay, as peculiar to Catholicism. Even the sacrifice of the Divine
Man by the Creator goes back to the days of the Rig Veda.

If the religion of the Bhagavat is thus demonstrably not indebted to
the life and teaching of the Western Avatar, are we to say that Chris-
tianity may be indebted to the religion of the Bhagavat? In a certain
sense, yes ; but in a spiritual sense only. In view of the action of spiritual
power and spiritual law, it would seem certain that the long and devoted
worship of the Adorable Lord in India, with the generation of spiritual
force which that worship must of necessity represent, would make meas-
urably easier the work of the Western Avatar, in teaching, and exempli-
fying, that devoted Love. But, if there be a question of derivation, it is,
in both East and West, a derivation, not of one teaching from another, but

23

346 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

of both from the eternal majesty of divine Love, from the Love of that
Divinity who, again and again, has manifested Himself, to bring the very
essence of divine Love to the hard, loveless world, so that mankind may
be lifted up into the kingdom of immortal Love.

THE INDIAN TEACHING OF SALVATION BY LOVE ACCORDING TO

THE BHAKTI SUTRAS OF NERADA

Beginning here, we shall set forth the teaching of devoted Love. That
devoted Love is of the nature of supreme attachment to the Adorable
Lord; it is as the living water of immortality. He who possesses this
devoted Love, has already attained ; immortal, he has gained his heart's
desire. When he has gained this devoted Love, he longs for nothing and
laments nothing; he hates not, nor exults, nor is aught left, for him to
strive after. When he has known this devoted Love, he is rilled with
ecstasy, with stillness, rejoicing in the holy Spirit (Atma).

This devoted Love is not tormented by desire, for it brings cessation
of desire. And the cessation of desire means the consecration of all acts,
both worldly and spiritual, to Him. It is a single-hearted devotion to
Him, an overcoming of all that is inimical to Him. This single-hearted-
ness is a surrender of all refuges but Him. And the overcoming of all
that is inimical to Him is accompanied by the due performance of all acts,
both worldly and spiritual, that are in harmony with Him, not flowing
contrary to the current of His will.

The commandments of the Scriptures must be kept, even after the
heart has firmly resolved to devote itself altogether to Him. For other-
wise through pride one may become a castaway. Worldly works must
be carried on only so far as they are in harmony with Him. But the
right care and nurture of the body must be continued so long as we bear
the burden of the body.

And now the distinctive marks of devoted Love will be set forth, as
the minds of many devoted lovers of Him have recorded them.

Parashara's disciple, Vyasa, declares that devoted Love will manifest
itself in the ardent performance of all acts of the worship of Him. Garga
says that devoted Love will show itself in speaking of Him, in hearing of
Him. Shandilya declares that acts of worship, and speaking and hearing
of Him must not displace the heart's joy in His holy Spirit. But Narada
says that devoted Love is, to rest all our acts in Him, to grieve if He be
absent from our thoughts. And there have been saints who have done
all these things perfectly, as maidens of Vrindavana, who gave their
hearts to Him.

But even in the heart's joy, it must be remembered with reverence
that He is a mighty Master. For without this reverence, Love cannot be
pure. And in impure love, there is lacking the feeling of happiness in
the happiness of the other.

This way of devoted Love (Bhakti) is higher than the way of ritual

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY, VI 347

Works (Karma), higher than the way of Wisdom (Jnana), higher than
the way of mystic Powers (Yoga). For, while ritual works, and wisdom,
and the search for mystical powers have each a further goal, devoted Love
is its own reward. And devoted Love is better than these, because the
Lord hates the proud, and loves the lowly and the humble.

But some say that wisdom is the cause and source of devoted Love,
while others say that devoted Love and wisdom depend upon each other.
But Narada, Son of the Creator (Brahma-Kumara), says that devoted
Love is the source and fruit of devoted Love.

So it is in the King's house : there are those who serve the King as his
Ministers, or for the sake of a reward ; there are those who love the
King for Love's sake. And those who serve the King for the sake of a
reward, neither bring to the King delight, nor to themselves assuagement
of their hunger for reward. Therefore let those who seek for salvation
firmly choose the way of devoted Love.

The means for gaining devoted Love are thus declared by the Mas-
ters:

Devoted Love requires renunciation of worldly ends — renunciation
of all attachment to them. The allurement of worldly aims is to be con-
quered by unflinching devotion to Him.

Even in the midst of the world, devoted Love springs up from hear-
ing and praising the virtues of the Adorable Master. As He has said :

"I dwell not in the farthest Heaven, nor in the hearts of saints alone.
I dwell, O Narada, wherever My lovers praise Me !"

But devoted Love comes most of all through the compassion of the
Great Ones; from the touch of the compassion of the Adorable Lord.
But the company of the Great Ones is hard to win, nay, it is well-nigh
unattainable ; yet, when it has been gained, it can never fail. And that
company even is gained only through the compassion of the Lord, since
there is no division between Him and His own. Therefore strive for
devoted Love ! Therefore strive for devoted Love !

In every way, contact with the evil must be shunned, since it nour-
ishes desire and wrath, forgetfulness of Him, loss of vision, loss of all.
These evils, beginning in tiny ripples, grow, through attachment, to a
stormy sea.

Who is he that crosses over, that crosses over Maya's delusions ? It
is he who puts away attachment to evil, who lovingly follows the Great
Ones, who is without covetousness or conceit; he who dwells apart, he
who breaks the bonds that bind him to the world, who turns from the
threefold world of desire, who puts away the lust of possession ; who
looks not for a reward of his good works, who dedicates all his acts to
the Master, thereby escaping from expectation and dread, from exultation
and pain ; he who consecrates even all spiritual reading to the Master, he
who has gained a pure, continuous flow of passionate Love for Him ; — it
is he, it is he, who crosses over Maya's delusion, and likewise leads others
safely across. CHARLES JOHNSTON.

THE LESSON OF
THE GARBAGE PAIL

Meditate on things you want to know . . . Seek all
knowledge within yourself, do not go without. You understand
wliat is meant by this; not that books should be neglected, but
tliat information obtained from them should be drawn within,
sifted, tested there. Study all things in this light and the most
physical will at the same time lead to the most spiritual knowl-
edge.— Fragments, Vol. I., p. 43.

MY beloved Mentor wrote me, inviting me to the Camp. I little
thought, when I accepted with almost vociferous joy, that one
of the cherished memories I should carry away would be
centered about a blue agate-ware, white-lined garbage pail.

Even as I write these words, I realize how shocking it would have
seemed — before my visit — to conjoin my Mentor and his associates with
a garbage pail. Yet what I have written is a "cold fact," demonstrable
even to our old and never-to-be-forgotten friend, Mr. Gradgrind. Fur-
thermore, and do not think that this is literary emphasis, nor exaggera-
tion, had I a private sanctuary, I should be glad to place on the steps
of its shrine that self-same garbage pail.

There were no servants. There might have been any number. My
host and hostess and their associates, for reasons best known to them-
selves, preferred to have none. They did their own work.

My host was the chief cook. On a day towards the end of my
delightful visit, he asked me, his very happy guest, to empty the garbage
pail. The guest forgot his assignment for a time, becoming absorbed in
the talk about the War and its spiritual phases. So, as it happened, the
task was neglected until all had scattered for the afternoon period of rest
or quiet in the several quarters of the camp. He went alone into the
empty kitchen — left in spotless, nicely-exact, good order by the hostess
and her aids, when the dish-washing and pot-cleaning had been finished.

The guest carried the pail out and emptied it, which was all that
he had been asked to do — or, perhaps it should be said, had been given
the privilege of doing. He brought the pail back and set it down. Then
he started to put on the cover. As he bent over, the insistent question
popped up in his mind, like a child's grinning Jack-in-the-box, "Why do
they do this menial work, and do it as if it were a pleasurable privilege?"
Indeed, it did seem strange that these charming, well-bred people should
be spending their time on such work.

At that moment the guest noted a piece of potato peeling, clinging
with determination to the rim of the garbage-pail. It was like a sudden,

THE LESSON OF THE GARBAGE PAIL 349

discordant noise, breaking in upon some delicious, and deliciously quiet,
symphonic movement. It was just as foreign and as discordant, in the
perfected neatness and immaculate cleanliness of that kitchen, still remi-
niscent of the gathering barely over.

As the potato peel was clearly out of place, the first reaction was to
flick it down into the pail, under the hovering cover that was still
held aloft. Somehow this did not lessen the discord. Rather it served to
emphasize the undeniable fact that the pail was dirty and, therefore, still
making a discord. Defiantly the guest grabbed up the pail, dropping the
cover, and strode out to a nearby hydrant. Filling the pail, and emptying
it out, several times, did not suffice to bring satisfaction. Rather did it
bring it out, still more poignantly, as one might say, that the pail was
essentially unclean. Something, perhaps the standard of that immaculate
kitchen, seemed to advertise that the pail was grease-lined ; unpleasantly
so lined, at that.

Putting the pail down in the sun, the guest gazed at it in sorrow.
Certainly that pail was in no condition to go back into the kitchen. When
he had taken it back before, he had been unconscious of its true condi-
tion. From Fragments, Volume I, came back "Insight brings responsi-
bility." Now that he had realized the condition of the pail, in its contrast
to the cleansed utensils, so carefully placed by the hostess herself, he
would assume for himself the dirtiness of the pail if he did nothing
about it. He felt sorry for the chela or saint who accepts a would-be
disciple or follower.

Since something had to be done, the guest got a stick. He filled the
pail with water and put in some soap powder. The vile-looking com-
pound was stirred to increasing unpleasantness, the guest taking pains
to keep his hands out of the mess. He worked up a high and a foul
lather. Then, with relief, and with face averted, he emptied the pail.
He emptied it hopefully ; even with the beginning of joyous respite. He
turned to look at his craftsmanship. There were many scratch marks
to be noted on the lining of the pail. His gingerly efforts had only served
to emphasize its condition and not to afford a remedy.

The blue of the exterior was normally a really lovely hue — now to
his opened eyes it appeared as marred with soap sloppings and streaked
with grease. The pure white lining was sadly soiled. The lining even
appeared as if scarred, with its cross-hatching of scratches from the
puddling stick. The guest looked at the pail and shuddered. Then he
thought of his hostess' hands, which he had seen, so short a time before,
handling greasy plates. He began to get angry. Was he to consider
himself finer than that gentlewoman? Was he not just a plain coward?
Did his Mentor and the latter's associates stop short at the sight of the
unpleasantness in him? Did the Master shirk His tasks merely because
they were so vile, and the objects of His cleansing so foul?

The guest grabbed that pail once more; giving it, as must be con-
fessed, a vicious wrench. Pail in hand he fairly stalked into the kitchen.

350 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

He went to the sink. A large kettle of boiling water was lifted off the
stove. Its contents were poured into that objectionable pail. Soap pow-
der was added. An old discarded cloth was retrieved from the box
where such things were cast out; a box located in the woodshed, adjoin-
ing the ash barrel. How the guest recalled its existence he cannot even
now state, unless it be that his determination to get that pail clean had
sharpened all his senses. This may be the case. At more than one
Branch meeting of the T. S., he has heard it said that acts of volition are
strengthening to all mental processes. This is also set forth by such
mystics as St. Ignatius and St. Teresa. Did not the Blessed Margaret
Mary consider it important to her soul's progress to make herself eat the
cheese which was dispensed from her diet by the settlement arranged by
her brother when she entered the Convent?

Equipped, as he felt, materially and volitionally, the guest went to
work. One last spasm of repugnance to overcome and his hands went —
souse ! into the water, still hot and now greasy. He went to work. It
was messy, but he stuck to it. He tried to shut out the picture of his
immediate discomfort, and tried to substitute a picture of his hostess'
keen interest in and close attention to similar tasks, which were done,
most unmistakeably, without thought of self.

At last the job was, as he thought, done. But he found no exaltation.
Rather came keener insight. The work was not perfectly done. Some
grease from the morning's cooking was caked on, and all but caked in.
It took time, patience, sand soap, "elbow grease," repeated rinsings, and
many close observations, to make even a start towards that standard of
perfected cleanliness which the hostess daily and continually set. Deter-
mined, at last, the guest settled down to real and loyal work towards a
definite goal. At all hazards, and at whatever cost to himself, that pail
must be cleansed, until it should be as spotless as any other utensil in
those hallowed precincts.

As this thought formulated itself in the guest's mind, something
within him became suddenly alert, and reminded him of the insistent
query that had so troubled him. "Hallowed precincts" ? the guest repeated
to himself. "Why do I say hallowed?" As he worked away, working
with close attention to his set task, he pondered on this. What was it
that made him regard a kitchen as "hallowed." Was it not because of
the silent keynote — Light on the Path says that spiritual truths must be
expressed in paradoxes — the silent keynote underlying all the work in the
kitchen, as elsewhere? What was that keynote? A keynote must be
simple. Yet the guest thought of many similies and analogies. Out of
these, by a process of meditative selection, as he kept on working, and
working with increasing attention to his pleasurable task, he seemed
to sense a co-ordinating unity in his many illustrations. Perhaps he might
express that keynote as love of and service for a Master. Love and
service for a real Master — not some hazy Spirit, a phantasy from a
dream — but a real Master: Who loves one, helps one, trains one — yes,

THE LESSON OF THE GARBAGE PAIL 351

and Whom one loves. Then came a painful thought — painful as all self-
reference is painful — how would one seem to such a Master. A particu-
larly hard spot of particularly unpleasant and most sticky grease held the
guest's entire attention for a moment : long enough for him to become filled
with an awesome thought, that seemed to come to him almost from without
himself: Were there just such spots on him? Did not the Master, yes,
and those who worked for Him, and, in all probability, with Him, find
such spots as unpleasant as the guest found those on the garbage pail?

As the guest worked away on the pail, he reviewed the process in the
lights of this thought, that had come to him. Why was he doing this
work ? Was it not, in the first place, in an endeavor to live up to a stand-
ard that had been set for him? What sort of a standard was he setting
others ?

Next, he asked himself, why it was that he had not taken the pail
out to one of the men employed on the ditching work? For a quarter
the Italian would have been glad to do the work. The Italian, moreover,
would not have reacted from the messiness of the job. He would have
thought only of the quarter — the reward from his work. Why had he not
done this? The guest saw that he had wanted to experience, to share,
the feelings of those whom he admired — why not be honest and Gallic? —
those whom he loved. For this, he had to do the work himself. Was this
all ? If so, was he essentially above the Italian labourer, in his desire for
a tangible reward? Probing deeper, as he worked away with sand soap
and scrubbing cloth, he found that he had recognized that he could clean
the pail better than the Italian, because his insight had given him a higher
standard, as part of the increased responsibility.

Was this all? No; there was the further reason that he wanted to
give pleasure to his host and hostess. Was this, too, a selfish motive?
Perhaps in its outer coating, but, within, it was prompted by a simplicity
that was not tainted by selfishness. Of this he dared to feel rather certain,
because he saw that it was, in essence, the same sort of feeling that
prompted his little sons, when they did childish, yet loving, things in an
effort to give him pleasure.

A spot, that he had prepared to abandon, as a case of hopeless
dyeing of the enamel, now began to give signs of waning. He redoubled
his manual labours, in the determination to overcome even its insidious
tainting. "Insidious tainting" — were his motives not becoming tainted
with self-reference? He changed his line of thought, or it changed itself
for him — he dares not now say which. What did the Master think of
this kind of work? Indeed, of this particular job? Would He be satis-
fied with anything short of perfection in the cleansing of this pail? In
the cleansing of one's life? Why would the Master, presumably, prefer
to have the guest cleanse the pail, rather than to have had the Italian hired
to do it? Perhaps, because it would be better cleansed by the guest.
Possibly, even, it might be for the guest's own sake; and this did not
seem self-reference, when one was trying to understand the Master's will,

352 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

in regard to a piece of work which one had undertaken. How was it to
the guest's advantage? In terms of St. Ignatius, was it not a tribute of
sacrifice from love? It had been hard to undertake, but it had been
undertaken, and had been stuck to, and stuck to until it had become a
pleasure to do it aright. Was this not a Wartime need: To learn to do
hard things joyously?

"Hard things" — again the guest's thoughts turned, or were turned, to
the Master's own tasks with human beings. How like a garbage pail is the
ordinary human mind (lower manas, as it is called at the Branch meetings)
filled as it is with waste, which ferments, if it be not emptied out, and the
vessel cleansed. Did the garbage pail smell unpleasantly at first? Was
it nasty to touch? What was the effect of the ordinary human mind
upon the Master's highly developed sensibilities? Yet we are always
taking it as a matter of course that the Master welcomes our appeals to
be cleansed. Something within us is certain that the Master will respond
to our appeals. Even the lowest of savages shares this conviction with
high chelas and great saints. What parallel was there in the experience
of cleansing the garbage pail?

The guest had grown to recognize that one cleansed the garbage
pail, in part, because one gave pleasure : Did this not indicate, at the least,
a latent desire to know that pleasure had been given ? It was not exactly
"working for reward." Was it not more an unformulated desire to attain
somewhat of a consciousness of unity, of brotherhood ? Could it be that
the Master Himself might be nerved to persist in such seemingly hopeless
tasks of cleansing as He undertakes by a hope of such a recognition of
consciousness with Him, on the part of the human garbage pails He
cleans? Could it be, even, that the Master Himself might welcome appre-
ciation of His efforts, on the part of the human garbage pails ? The guest
put down the pail — it looked brave and spotless : it seemed even glad. If
its inanimate simulation of a pleasurable reaction from his efforts rejoiced
him; how would the Master feel in regard to real thanks from those
whom He served? Should he not immediately thank the Master for
working away so patiently at his streaks, caked dirt and messy spots ?

The guest lifted out the pail and wiped it off with loving care. He
took it back to its place. He started to put on the cover. Behold — the
pail was no longer clean. The soiled cover, which he had neglected,
spoiled the whole effect. To be clean one must be entirely clean — inside
and out, and even to the outer trappings and trimmings. One spot
infected the whole being and tainted it. Thus came the thoughts, as the
cover, in turn, was scrubbed and polished. The cover was perhaps two
per cent., or even less, of the whole unit, yet so long as it was befouled,
the effect of the whole unit was one of unpleasant uncleanliness.

How about life? Could a Master Himself rest until a child of His,
upon whom He was working, was wholly clean? Would He not have
to, actually have to, let life itself scrub and scrub, until all spots, at all
points, had been cleansed, and the unit, as a whole, thereby, been per-

THE LESSON OF THE GARBAGE PAIL 353

fectly cleansed? So long as the desires of the lower mind were not, at
all points, in consonance with the highest standards, could there be any
true unity with the Master Mind?

The garbage pail — vessel, cover, and bail, from the bottom to topmost
tip, — was now clean and gay. The guest stood up and surveyed his handi-
work. He realized that he had passed a happier, more helpful time than
if he had hired the Italian to do the work. He had offered something in
the sacrifice of service. He had learned, though only to a minute extent,
to appreciate something of what the Master has to do, and keep on doing,
for him. He bent over again, and shook the bail gently, as if it were the
hand of a friend.

Warmed, as it were, by this pleasurable emotion, the guest went out,
reaching within his pocket for his tobacco pouch. Suddenly a mnemonic
vision came to spoil his satisfaction. A picture of the sink, as he had just
left it, came into his mind. Paralleling this came a picture of the sink as
it had been left by the hostess, when she had finished her own labours.
The contrast was saddening, all but disheartening. A condition existed
that could not be ignored. There was only one thing, in that atmosphere,
that could be done. The guest turned back. He re-entered the kitchen.
It had suddenly grown hot once more.

The guest went at that sink. It was in a chaotic condition. He
began to work. Then he found that he had displaced a number of
utensils that he thought he could easily re-locate, for he had had daily
opportunities to observe how and where things were placed — always in
due order to save waste of time or needless effort. It did not prove a
simple task. He realized, even as he endeavored to do right, that he was
making mistakes. The disciple's quality of recollection may be tested
in the affairs of daily life, he had often read and been told. He did not
pass this test with credit. He could not create a power he had neglected,
merely because he felt a sudden need to use it. That evening, to tell the
whole truth, he could see that both the cook with his assistants and the
dish-washing party, were inconvenienced, and both time and effort were
wasted, as the result of his poor recollection and the mistakes that he
had made in his efforts at replacement of the utensils he had disturbed.

A co-contributor to this magazine, who was at that particular house-
party, has been good enough to go over the Ms. (but, pray remember,
no responsibility was thereby assumed) and made this comment:

"Why don't you say, right here: 'In so doing he (the guest) had
sinned against one of the unspoken canons of that marvelous place — which
was that everyone should do thoroughly and completely whatever he
undertook, and in such a manner that he did not make more work for
anyone else.' "

"Good;" I declared, "I will say that." But, please note how that
Camp atmosphere gets into one's system (but don't judge it by this guest's
actions or efforts — please. That would be unfair. Praise the atmosphere
while pitying him that he could not better have taken into himself its life.)

354 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

In this article the guest has undertaken to tell the truth. To do it "thor-
oughly and completely" how may he venture to claim that neat phrasing
as his own? He dare not do it — hence the use of the quotation marks,
however anathema they be to the proof-reader.

But it is time to return to the Laboratory experiment. After the
guest had emerged from the kitchen for the second time even his awak-
ened conscience pronounced the experiment completed. He considered
the garbage pail episode as closed. He lighted his pipe and pushed on
down to that part of the place where he knew that his host was going to
work in the corn field. Soon his host came, and asked what the guest
had been doing so long in the kitchen.

The guest told this story of the garbage pail and its teaching, as he
worked, hoe in hands and in action, down rows paralleling those on which
his host was working. The guest closed with the statement : "Doesn't it
sound crazy to say that one could learn so much from such an experience?
Wasn't it a piece of luck, though?"

Mentor straightened up, to smile at his guest, with that smile of
loving comprehension that unfailingly prevents his directness of speech
from ever once giving offence : " 'Luck,' you say — why do you suppose I
asked you to empty that garbage pail today ?"

That same co-contributor, who has been quoted, when looking over
the Ms., commented — at this point: "Good place to end." Then a few
truthful, kind and merciless remarks were added in regard to the two or
three pages of comment and elucidation, which the guest had written in
sequel to his host's remark and its connotations. Perhaps that well-liked
critic is best attesting a real friendship by this advice. Certainly those
pages had to go. They have gone. It is lucky that Charles A. Dana's
famous cat was not around. Even her seasoned appetite might have
revolted. But to do this article "thoroughly and completely" seems to
the whilom guest to require the rounding out of the chronicle by giving
the experimenter's deductions. Who would mark a test in physics, sub-
mitted without deductions in addition to a laboratory note book ?

The first deduction is the quotation from Fragments, which appears
at the opening of this paper. It seems rarely apposite.

The secondary experiment — the confirmatory lesson of the disordered
sink — seems to suggest that in endeavoring to help others there is unlim-
ited help to be derived from the Letters of the Master K. H., especially
in His warning against failing to consider all possible reactions, inter-
relations and correlations. Furthermore, if one really aims to help, one
must be prepared to assume responsibility. This, in turn, might well be
regarded as a warning that one must never let up in attention, recollec-
tion and detachment, for one may never tell at what point one may fail,
through the neglect of these precautions, thus harming others or one's
Teacher.

Another deduction is that the Hindu Gurus, St. Benedict and other
Founders know their business, the immortal business of helping others

THE LESSON OF THE GARBAGE PAIL 355

along The Path. Alike are they, in West as in East, in keeping their
students, chelas, novices and postulants and even their Regulars at humble
and even menial tasks — tasks which the Twentieth Century is too prone
to call a wastage of time.

But one borders too closely to being familiar — one of the unfor-
givable sins — in commenting on the reasons for a course of personal acts.
Conclusions will have to be drawn from the empirical point of view, if
the reader would seek for a fuller answer to the guest's own, original
query: "Why do they do these things?"

Along another line it seems safer to comment. That is on the matter
of the out-of-doors work. This may be done with propriety. This may
be done with safety, however, only if the reader will promise to remember
that these are personal deductions and not indirect quotations. No
explanations were offered. Had any been offered would not the labora-
tory aspect of the teaching have been lost?

It seems to the guest that the Camp illustrated the lost distinction
between relaxation and recreation. Everyone, who knows anything of
the powers of men, warns against relaxation, especially volitional relaxa-
tion, the slackening of the will. Volitional relaxation produces volitional
lesions, which are difficult to reunite, at the best, and which may be
permanent in their menace. If only we spelled and pronounced recreation
as "re-creation" the distinction referred to might be more obvious.

About this time of the year many of us begin planning for the sum-
mer. Perhaps the object lessons or laboratory experiments at the Camp
may be helpful. If this be true it may be doubly safe to give personal
deductions.

Science of even the driest and most material limitations recognizes
that in the summer, in this Northern Hemisphere at the least, there is a
great flowing in of physical vitality from the Sun. Men who turn to
golf and other exercises recognize this unconsciously; hence come their
efforts to turn the tide into safer channels. All physical nature, from the
trees to the restless little babies, feels this. But which is better, which is
really safer — the re-creation of real work on a farm or the relaxation of
a golf course ? Apply the test of Adam Smith's economic rule of produc-
tive values if the volitional aspect seem at all vague.

Again — mundane man seeks to strengthen the physical, while
would-be chela or disciple seeks to control it. ' Animals retreat from the
winter, the retreat ranging from hibernation to migration. Advanced
man alone welcomes the fighting stimulus of cold weather, with all its
physical handicaps, and awakens to activity. Does it not seem advisable,
therefore, that the spiritual-minded should seek for physical control and
even dormantcy in the physically-stimulating summer months, turning
within in quiet and even in silence? Would not this be along the line of
The Elixir of Life in Five Years of Theosophy ? According to a sermon
once preached by the Rector of a certain "little church" the great Chris-
tian church itself recognizes this in its selection of the summer months

356 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

for the Trinity season, that" period for burning in the lessons of the great
drama of Winter and Spring in the church calendar. Those of us who
know and love The Sermon in the Hospital will recall the lesson of the
pruning.

And as a last point — only this Spring day, months after the first sec-
tion of this was written, the ex-guest heard an address by the fighting
Bishop of Massachusetts, who was never neutral from the first day of
August, 1914, and whose courageous stand and wisdom warrants one in
bracketing him with churchmen of the Cardinal Mercier type. Bishop
Lawrence said : "I have heard Hell described as a place where one could
never be alone." If one has to stay in Hell, during most of the year,
while doing one's daily duties, why, deliberately, stay there in one's free
days or weeks or months?

All this may be rambling, though one may hope it is not. But could
personal deductions be otherwise? But let each reader make his or her
own deductions. Make them, however, only after trying a practical'
experiment. SERVETUS.

"Whatever we do is perfect in proportion to the self -possession with
which we do it, and that self-possession is proportioned to patience.
Nothing, however trifling, can be done well without good judgment.
Therj are fifty ways of doing anything, but only one perfect way. Nature
is always inclined to hurry, to run before judgment,, but grace is delib-
erate. To work fruitfully is to work with a patient will; fretful haste
damages both the work and the workman." — Archbishop Ullathorne.

V. A VENERABLE LEMURO-ATLANTEAN.

"^—j-^HUS," says H. P. Blavatsky, in The Secret Doctrine, Volume

? I, Edition of 1888, page 185, "Occultism rejects the idea that

X Nature developed man from the ape, or even from an ancestor

common to both, but traces, on the contrary, some of the most

anthropoid species to the Third Race man of the early Atlantean period.

. no 'missing links' between man and the apes have ever yet

been found. . . . Nor will they ever be met with. . . ."

This piece of information, published by H. P. Blavatsky, on the
authority of Occult knowledge, well nigh thirty years ago, has just
made its way through the dense clouds of scientific prejudice, and has
appeared so startling that it has been sent by cablegram around the world,
taking a prominent place on the front page of the leading newspapers in
America, in spite of the enormous pressure of war news and even of the
active fighting and casualties of American troops. It was sent by special
cable from London to the New York Times, on February 28, with these
sensational headings : "Says Man Was Ancestor of Apes : British Scientist
Calls for Reconsideration of Post-Darwinian Theory."

Students of The Secret Doctrine, who may remember reading the
passage quoted above when it first appeared, some thirty years ago, will
read, with deep satisfaction, and with a certain feeling of amusement, the
opening paragraph of the cablegram, which is almost identical with The
Secret Doctrine passage :

"That man is not descended from anthropoid apes, that these would
be in fact more accurately described as having been descended from man,
that man as man is far more ancient than the whole anthropoid branch,
and that compared with him the chimpanzee and orangutan are new-
comers on this planet, were assertions made by Professor Wood Jones,
Professor of Anatomy in the University of London, in a lecture yesterday
on the origin of man.

"The professor claimed these assertions were proved not only by
recent anatomical research, but that they were deducible from the whole
trend of geological and anthropological discovery.

"One of the most interesting references in the lecture was to recent
reports by Dr. Stewart Arthur Smith of Sydney on the Talgai skull
discovered in 1889 in Darling Downs, New South Wales, but never
seriously investigated until 1914.

" 'This undoubtedly human skull, very highly mineralized,' he said,
'was found in a stratum with extinct pouched mammals, and probably is

357

358 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

as ancient as the famous Piltsdown skull, whose human nature was so
hotly disputed just before the war. In deposits of the same age as those
in which the Talgai skull was unearthed were found bones of dingo dogs,
and also bones of extinct pouched mammals gnawed by these dogs.

" 'Until the arrival of Captain Cook in Australia (1770) no non-
pouched animals were ever introduced upon the Australian continent. It
is geologically certain that Australia has always been surrounded by the
sea since the evolution of pouched mammals. Had it not been so, it is
almost certain that many non-pouched mammals in the neighboring con-
tinents would have migrated thither.

" 'How then can the presence of the Talgai man and his dingo dogs
alone among these be accounted for? The conclusion deducible is that
he must have arrived there in boats with his family and his domestic
dogs, and the astounding fact emerges that at a period in the world's
history when only a year or two ago the most advanced anatomists were
satisfied that man was scarcely distinguishable from his brute ancestors, a
man already so highly developed as to have domesticated animals and to
be a boat builder and navigator was actually in Australia, and, to an
astonishing degree, the reasoning master of his own fate.'

"In view not only of this," the cablegram concludes, "but of even
more convincing evidence gathered from man's own anatomical structure,
Professor Wood Jones made a moving appeal for the reconsideration
of the whole post-Darwinian conception of man's comparatively recent
emergence from the brute kingdom. The missing link of Huxley, he
asserted, if ever found, would not be a more ape-like man, but a more
human ape."

This is, of course, only a telegraphic summary; but, pending the
receipt of a fuller account of this lecture, — without which it is impossible
to form any opinion as to whether the lecturer's undoubtedly sound con-
clusions were based upon equally sound premises — it may be interesting
to add a few details concerning the venerable Lemuro-Atlantean, who
seems to have helped this intuitional anatomist to take so long a step
towards the acceptance of the Occult teaching.

The highly mineralized, and therefore extremely old, Talgai skull,
which furnishes Professor Wood Jones with so strong an argument, was
found in the bed of the Talgai Creek, near Clifton, on the Darling Downs,
by a ranchman, who picked it up and took it home, without any great
understanding of its significance. It appears to have been washed out of
the black soil of the Darling Downs. A few miles from the spot where
the skull was picked up, bones of many types of extinct mammals of
Pleistocene age have been discovered, and, as the Talgai skull is in at
least as advanced a stage of fossilization or mineralization, as the bones
of the Diprotodon, Nototherium and others, in adjacent regions, it may
be provisionally assumed (says a preliminary report to the British Asso-
ciation, dated 1914) that this human skull is also of Pleistocene age.
The distortion caused by steady pressure due to the weight of an original

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA, V 359

thick overburden of clay is in harmony with the evidence as to the high
antiquity of the skull. While there is a strong probability of the fossil
skull being of Pleistocene, perhaps early Pleistocene, Age, its exact age
obviously cannot be determined until further evidence can be adduced
which may directly connect it with the mammalian bone-bearing clays of
the Darling Downs; certainly it is far older than any aboriginal skulls
that have ever been obtained in Australasia, and it proves that in Aus-
tralia man attained to geological antiquity.

In 1914, the year referred to in our cablegram, the British Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Science met in Australia, Dr. Arthur
Stewart Smith of Sydney being one of those taking part in its meetings.
The highly mineralized skull from Talgai Creek was produced, very care-
fully examined and reported upon by a Section on Anthropology; and
from its report, tantalizingly brief, the preceding paragraph is taken.
Clifton appears to be, not in New South Wales, as described in our cable-
gram, but in Queensland, some thirty miles north of the N. S. W. border,
and eighty miles inland from Brisbane on the coast, with which it is
connected by rail.

One word more as to the age in years of our Lemuro-Atlantean
from the Darling Downs. In Prehistoric Man, by W. L. H. Duckworth
(1912) the Preface contains this suggestive paragraph: "I regret to be
unable to affix definite dates in years to the several divisions of time now
recognized. To illustrate the difficulty of forming conclusions on this
subject, it should be noted that in 1904 Professor Rutot assigned a dura-
tion of 139,000 years to the Pleistocene period, while in 1909 Dr. Sturge
claimed 700,000 years for a portion only of the same period. Evidently
the present tendency is to increase enormously the drafts on geological
time, and to measure in millions the years that have elapsed since the first
traces of human existence were deposited."

CHARLES JOHNSTON.

"There are two things to be considered in every man, and these two
things have to be well and carefully distinguished from each other; wliat
the man is of himself, and what he is by the superadded gifts of God.
Every man ought to subject what is purely his own to what is of God,
whether that which is of God is in- himself or in another.

"This is the principle of humility in its exercise towards our neigh-
bor; it i-s not a reverence given to human nature, but to the gifts of God
within that nature." — Archbishop Ullathorne.

TWO QUESTIONS

ONE of the inimitable pages of London Punch portrays two
Englishmen at their club, the one very excited, the other quite
cool. Between them there is a brief dialogue that may be com-
mended to the thoughtful consideration of all of philosophic
taste.

''I tell you Russia is doomed — doomed."

"What do you mean by doomed?"

"Never mind what I mean. It is not what I mean that matters. It
is what I say."

All our lives we have been using certain great terms : Christianity and
Theosophy, love of God and of man, Brotherhood and Karma, justice and
self-sacrifice, good and evil. Do we know what we mean by them ? Have
we ever deemed it important that we should know, — till as now, in this
world war, we are brought face to face with the great facts of life and
death and of the human spirit ; and reality itself challenges our formulas.

There is a sense in which we rightly may hold that not what we mean
but what we say is of moment. For our words may point to a fact that
we may know we do not understand, and it is the fact and not our under-
standing of it that is vital. We may say: I do not know what it means
or what I mean, but there is a reality that presses upon my consciousness,
that I see acting in life and in me — and its action, deep, mysterious,
unfathomable, is as doom itself, unescapable, all compelling. It — it, the
thing I point to with my words, though I do not know their meaning or
its — is vital beyond all else. It matters — and it alone. Pay heed to it.
Never mind my lack of knowledge, my failure to comprehend. Act. Act
upon it.

But when we say this, it is obvious that we are also saying that to
understand better is our crying need — and today we find this need on
every side — in every department of our own thinking and in the thought
of the world at large. It is reflected in two questions which lie before
me, and that demand a fuller treatment than can be accorded them in the
Question and Answer department.

1. If through the action of the Karmic Law, the victims of
German bestiality and infamy were but reaping what they had sown,
presumably in former incarnations, is the feeling — one of the deepest
in our nature, and stronger as our love of righteousness increases —
that these things ought not to be, a right or wrong one ?

Will not this feeling inevitably be dulled, if we believe that they
who perpetrated these horrors were but the instruments of Karma,
and indeed, that it is the Moral Law which is being vindicated ?

Does not mutual forgiveness from this standpoint (see the

360

TWO QUESTIONS 361

THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, October, 1917, page 109) become some-
what less unthinkable?

2. Is there any evidence, other than $rom occult sources, that
all the events of outer life are the outcome of the past, and not rather
the preparation for specialized service in the Body of Humanity ?

It will be clearer to deal with these two questions as one, — for the
second contains a thought that is essential to the right understanding of
the first.

The literal meaning of Karma is action. The law of Karma is the
law of life's action — the way life acts or works. On pages 89 and 90 of
Mr. Judge's Ocean of Theosophy, we find it described as "The universal
law of harmony which unerringly restores all disturbances to equilibrium."
This equilibrium is not a static thing. It is dynamic. It is like the
equilibrium of a revolving wheel or a flowing river. It is the stability of
the infinite current of universal life — the unbroken, undeviating evolution
of Being. In this view, the law of Karma is the law of cohesion, that
causes each atom or fragment of life to move with the movement of the
whole. As the waves of the sea rise and fall, yet must advance or recede
with the tides ; or as drops of spray are thrown up from a mountain brook
yet fall again into the current of the stream, so the individual human
life is moved by its human will, but is brought back always — in accordance
with the law of its inmost essence — to the course of the Divine Will.
Karma is the action of the Divine Will in life and in man, and this Divine
Will is man's only real and lasting will. As he lives only by the divine
life manifesting through him, so he can will only with divine will. Turn
this will as he may, he can never alter or destroy the nature of its ultimate
essence. To turn it back against itself — to will evil — is to necessitate the
destruction of that evil. More than this ; however he may blind himself
to it, in the inmost essence of his being, in the very nature of the will
itself, he must hate the thing that he has willed, and will the undoing of it.
He must will his own repentance, the turning back of his will ; or else his
personal destruction, the sweeping away of that which deflects the current
of the divine life that is his life.

The man who wills evil is thus divided against himself — the house
that cannot stand. In the Maya of material life, the sense of his own
individuality — the reflection in him of the oneness and wholeness of
Being — passes into the sense of separateness ; and his sense of self-iden-
tification becomes limited to that portion of himself (his personality)
which he sees as separate from other selves. Identifying himself with
this portion only, he seeks to wield with it, and to bend to its uses the
powers of his full being. He claims the will as his will — as of his person-
ality— to be used and directed as his personal desires or judgment may
dictate, ignorant or careless of its own divine nature and of the greater,
deeper self that lies beyond the personality — beyond his consciousness
of separateness. But though he be blind to this deeper self, or in conscious

24

362 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

rebellion against it, it is none the less his true self ; nor is he able to alter
or corrupt its nature. As Krishna says to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita,
"With a single portion of myself I created the whole universe, yet remain
separate," so the Eternal Man creates the personality and ensouls it, yet
remains separate from it in just so far as the personality regards itself as
separate, — in just so far as the personality wills what the Eternal Man
does not will. The thought of separateness creates separateness. Yet it
is the Eternal Man that is the personality's true self and being; and the
Eternal Man wills, and can only will the good. He wills the undoing of
the evil that the personality does ; he wills the turning back to good of that
portion of his own will that the personality has claimed and turned to
evil ; he wills the restoration of harmony and "at-one-ment" ; he
wills the repentance of the personality or its destruction. It is the
action of this will of the man's true and deepest self — at one with the
divine — that we call the man's Karma. When he is inwardly unresponsive
to it in his personal consciousness, it presses upon him from without —
through circumstances and events, through the whole action of the infinite
current of life. A man's Karma is his own deepest will.

If this is seen, the answer to the second of the two questions before
us will be clear. There is no evidence, either from "occult" or any other
sources, "That all the events of outer life are the outcome of the past and
not rather the preparation for specialized service in the Body of
Humanity," if these two alternatives are regarded as alternatives, mutually
exclusive.

The theosophical teaching of Karma is wholly misunderstood if it be
interpreted only in the light of the past and not of the future. The misun-
derstanding is, perhaps, easily explainable, for this teaching has been set
over against views of life which saw in the circumstances and events that
bring men happiness or misery, either the play of blind chance, or the
arbitrary will of an "extraneous and inaccessible God" in whose dictates
neither consistency nor justice was discernable, and which had no discov-
erable relation to what had gone before. Men rightly felt that such a
universe or such a God was intolerable and unthinkable. The present, in
which they enjoyed or suffered, could not be arbitrarily separated from
the past. Life must be consecutive, causal, just ; and this required that
the present should depend upon the past.

But it is equally necessary that it should depend upon the future.
Every movement, every action, whether of life, or of the will, or of a
material object in space, cuts across the divisions of past and present and
future. It is one act, one movement. The threefold division is not in it,
but in the mind that looks upon it ; for strive to separate it into parts, and
each part alone is meaningless. We cannot conceive of movement in a
present that has no past or future. The present is but a cut — a cross
section in the flow of being — and in that section all is static, no movement
possible. Life — and life's action, Karma, — is not static but dynamic. It
is a flow from the past through the present, into the future ; and in it past,

TWO QUESTIONS 363

present and future are taken up and made one. If we would understand
any act — if we seek any comprehensive grasp of life — we must lay hold
upon its unity ; and though, from the nature of our mind, we must divide
it into past, present, and future, we must not be misled by that division
into believing that these three aspects of a single unity can stand separate
one from the others. We can never understand the past or present until
we see in them the future, or comprehend our own wills until we see that
to which, as well as that from which and through which, they move. The
doctrine of Karma is no less concerned with the future than with the
present and the past.

To quote once more from Mr. Judge's Ocean of Theosophy, "No
spot or being in the universe is exempt from the operation of Karma, but
all are under its sway ; punished for error by it, yet beneficently led on,
through discipline, rest and reward, to the distant heights of perfection."
Here, surely, "the distant heights of perfection" are no less stressed than
the punishment "for error." Punishment, apart from the perfection to
which it tends, would be meaningless, and could be willed by none. And
movement toward perfection, apart from the imperfection from which
that movement passes, would be also meaningless. The two are one.

It must now, I think, be clear that the two views, which are set as
alternatives in the second of our two questions, are not alternatives but are
rather two aspects of a single fact — the will of the real and eternal man,
moving in the present, from the past, to the future. Life is one; your
life and mine; the life of the "Body of Humanity," and the life of the
Eternal and Divine. Life is action. To live is to have "within one an
activity of one's own arising from an inward principle, which is capable
of developing itself by its own action and of possessing its own develop-
ment." Unity in action is service. And there is no service that is not
"specialized service," nor is there any service which does not include, as
part of itself, the preparation that made it possible, and that does not, in
the same way, constitute the preparation for further service. The service
of the soldier lies no less in his months of training than in the day of
battle. It moves to victory ; but it moves from every fault and weakness
and lack of discipline that were present in him on the day of his enlist-
ment. To understand the will that moves him — the embodied, united will
of army life — to see the meaning of the circumstances of that life, the
daily routine of drill and labour, hardship and recreation, it is essential
to look both back to fault and forward to victory. It is the same with
the events of our own outer lives, — with the discipline that is laid on
us — with the will of the Eternal Man that is our true self and that
leads us from the failure or half-successes of the past to the full victory
of the future.

So much, then, for the second question. And now, for the first. I
know no better answer to it than that which may be found in the first
three chapters of an ascetical treatise of the early seventeenth century by
Jeremias Drexelius, a translation of which into English has recently been

364 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

published under the title of The HeKotr opium, or "Conformity of the
Human Will to the Divine." He quotes freely from the early Church
Fathers, as well as from the Bible, passages whose meaning should be
clear to every student of Theosophy, and he joins these together and
develops their theme with an insight and skill that are rare. And yet
he does not pretend to make all things plain to the mind of his reader.
"Thy judgments, O Lord, are a great deep." He who says that there is
no mystery in life, says only that he is ignorant of its mysteries. There
are mysteries, beyond whose veil the mind cannot penetrate.

"Wouldst thou bound the boundless?
Set limits to the infinite?
Or seek to hold within thy cup
The waters of the whole?
Desist O Lanoo !
Such is not the teaching of the wise."

But the heart can lay its hold on truths the mind cannot dissect, and
it is to the heart that Drexelius primarily addresses these three chapters —
despite their dialectic skill.

He teaches us that all things are from God ; good and evil alike the
result of His will. Yet there is a will of permission, and a will of active
desire ; and though both good and evil come to us from God, yet the one
is good and the other evil ; and here he quotes from St. Augustine :

' 'Therefore, thou sayest, if one slay an innocent man, doth he justly
or unjustly? Unjustly, certainly. Wherefore doth God permit this?
Thou desirest to dispute before that thou doest anything, in consideration
whereof thou mayest be worthy to dispute, why God hath permitted this.
The counsel of God to tell to thee, O man, I am not able. This thing
however I say, both that the man hath done unjustly that hath slain an
innocent person, and that it would not have been done unless God per-
mitted it ; and though the man has done unjustly, yet God hath not
unjustly permitted this.'

"And in the same way he speaks of the death of our Lord : — 'Accord-
ingly, my brethren, both Judas, the foul traitor to Christ, and the persecu-
tors of Christ, malignant all, ungodly all, unjust all, are to be condemned
all; and, nevertheless, the Father hath not spared His Own proper Son,
but for the sake of us all He hath delivered Him up. Order if thou art
able ; distinguish these things if thou art able.' "

If we think of Karma as anything but the action of the inmost will
of the divine in man, we surely cannot hold that it was Christ's Karma
to be reviled, and scourged and spat upon ; to be crucified as a malefactor
by those he came to save. Yet we can believe that it was his own deepest
will — an act made necessary to him, being what he was, by the sins of
the world, an act of "preparation for specialized service in the Body of
Humanity," an act which, though his personality shrank from it, in the

TWO QUESTIONS 365

fulness of his perfect stature and the unity that was his, he willed in his
personality as in his divinity.

May there not be those in Belgium, in France, throughout the allied
nations, today, who in their real selves will to follow where Christ led?
To prepare themselves also for "specialized service in the Body of
Humanity"? To give their lives that men may learn the lesson of the
reality and terrible power of the evil to which the world has so lightly
given entrance — that the world has, in itself, so easily condoned? Need
we think that "the victims of German bestiality and infamy were but
reaping what they had sown"? Surely net, if we mean by this that the)
were but justly punished for past sins — and that now the account is
closed. If this were the meaning of Karma, Karma would be false.
For self -sacrifice, self-giving, the love that lays down its life for its
friend, the hope that looks forward, the will that acts forward, the
courage that endures and pays the price of its desire, the loyalty that
knows no swerving — these are facts. And the will of the Eternal Man
presses on to gain by them — for himself and for the whole "Body of
Humanity" that is his greater self, "the distant heights of perfection."
To ignore these, to look only backward to fault and not forward to
victory, is wholly to fail to understand the action of life. The will to
victory is also sown, and also has its harvest. It, too, is part of Karma;
its fulfilment part of the Law, part of God's justice and God's love.

If we see this, can we be in any doubt as to whether "the feeling —
one of the deepest in our nature, and stronger as our love of righteous-
ness increases — that these things ought not to be is right or wrong?"
Were our concept of Karma the narrow and misleading one that deems
it only a mechanical balancing of past debts — it is possible that our feeling
against the perpetrators of these infamies might be dulled through seeing
in them only the instruments by means of which the moral law is vindi-
cated. To this I will return later. But seeing Karma as it is — life as it
is — surely our feeling against the Germans, against everyone who has that
taint upon him, for this unspeakable evil and infamy to which they have
sold themselves, must be intensified a thousand fold. To awaken us to
its true horror a million men have died. Unnumbered thousands of
women and children have surrendered their lives to shame and fear and
anguish to teach us to hate and loathe it from the depths of our souls
and in every fibre of our body. Can that sacrifice be in vain? Are we
incapable of hate? If so then we are indeed dead and lost. For no man
can love righteousnesss who does not hate with fierce, undying hatred
all that is evil. Can we say we love Christ and not hate that — in
ourselves and in all the world — that nailed him to the cross?

But I do not wish to appear in any way to avoid the issue, and to
substitute a question that was not asked for the actual one before us.
If a true concept of Karma must include the will to service and sacrifice,
it must also include punishment aand expiation for the past, — that the
evil of that past may be turned from and the will of the Eternal Man be

366 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

done. It is with this aspect of Karma that the question deals, and though
we cannot grant that it is a picture of Karma in its wholeness, yet it is a
picture of something Karma includes.

It is tragically easy to fit much of Belgium into this picture. Which
one of us does not fit into it, when we look only to the past of the
personality and are blind to the will of the soul? There is the Belgian
Congo — a stain such as we thought few nations could endure till Germany
showed us that men could glory in infamies so black that these seemed
white beside them. It is easy to say that Belgium is being punished — is
expiating and atoning. But does the perception of the need for Bel-
gium's atonement — the recognition of the horror of the evil that she
must expiate — make us condone the Germans who repeat that evil on a
greater, deeper scale — even though, in the eternal goodness, that repetition
be made the means of Belgium's expiation? Let us once more quote
from Drexelius — or use his quotations from St. Augustine and others :

"God has judged it better," St. Augustine says, "to work good out
of evil, than to allow no evil. For since He is supremely Good, He would
in no way allow any evil in His Works, unless He were as Omnipotent as
Good, so as to be able to bring good even out of evil."

"And here we must reflect," as Theophilus Bernardinus admonishes
us, "that all who hurt us (in whatever way the injury is done) support a
two-fold character. One in which they have wicked intentions towards
us, and devise no common mischief against us ; the other in which they
are able to effect what they have devised, and are the instruments of the
Divine Justice which punishes us."

It is an obvious absurdity to ascribe to the wicked intention the good
that divine mercy uses it to accomplish — to credit the Germans with Bel-
gium's expiation. Here, too, Drexelius is wholly explicit :

"But understand from this that no man's sin merits pardon the more
because God brings forth the greater good from it ; — for man affords the
occasion of good alone, not the cause ; and even the occasion he does not
afford himself, but through the abundance of the Divine Goodness. If
some wicked person has set fire to the cottage of a poor man, he has not
on this account committed the less sin because the poor man has borne
his loss patiently, or some prince has erected in its place a ten times
better house. Another person's virtue and a happy circumstance do not
wipe out the guilt of the incendiary; and so sin does not acquire any
excellence because it has afforded opportunity for doing good."

And again, quoting both from St. Augustine and Isaias : "In this way
God instructs good men by means of evil ones. Thus it is that the Divine
Justice makes wicked kings and princes its instruments, as well for
exercising the patience of good men, as for chastising the forwardness
of bad. Examples of this are ready at hand from every age, in cases
where God works out His Own Good Pleasure through the wicked designs
of others, and by means of the injustice of others displays His Own just
Judgments. And just as a father seizes a rod, and strikes his child, but

TWO QUESTIONS 367

a little while afterwards throws the rod into the fire, and becomes recon-
ciled to the child, so God threatens by Isaias and says (chap, x, 5, 6) :
'Woe to the Assyrian, he is the rod and the staff of My anger, and My
indignation is in their hands. I will send him to a deceitful nation, and
I will give him a charge against the people of My wrath, to take away the
spoils, and to lay hold on the prey, and to tread them down like the mire
of the streets. But he shall not take it so, and his heart shall not think
so ; but his heart shall be set to destroy and to cut off nations not a few.'
How plainly does God declare Himself to be the Author of such great
evils ! 'My indignation' He says 'is in their hands. The rod of My
fury is the king of Assyria, for punishing the abominable wickedness of
the Jews. I have sent him that he should carry away spoils, and should
bring down the surpassingly insolent and inflated minds of those who
have cast aside their faith and worshipped the idols of the Gentiles with
a mad service. But the king of Assyria himself will have far different
thoughts, and will not come to chastise, but to slay and utterly destroy
them. But when I have chastened My people by the Assyrians, then woe
to this rod! woe to the Assyrians! for as the instrument of my anger will
I cast them into the fire! "

There is no possibility of confusion in this — and there should be
none in our thought of the German infamies. The Germans have not
come to chastise. They have "far different thoughts," and for their
murder and their rapine — their depth of cruelty and calculated torture —
the flames of hell await them. Let us be done forever with this weak,
maudlin sentimentality that fears to hate as God hates. Do we think
it Christian? Turn to Christ's own speech and act — the whip of knotted
cords, the unsparing invective, "Oh generations of vipers." We cannot
love until we learn to hate — and our fear of hate is but our own
coward consciousness of the sin we still treasure for ourselves. There
can be no condoning of sin. There is no forgiveness for it.
Look where you will — turn to what race or time or scripture
you will — nowhere will you find a teaching of palliation of evil, forgive-
ness of sin. Hatred, constant warfare, eternal destruction are the only
measures than can be meted out to evil. It is the sinner, not the sin, that
may be forgiven — but this forgiveness is possible only as and when he
turns from the sin and is loosed from it. So long as he identifies himself
with it so long is he the enemy of God and of all who love God — the
enemy of all of life — yes, of his own true self. And as that enemy, hate,
unsparing, uncondoning, unlessening hate, must be his portion — meted out
to him by us, his brothers, as by his own real self. Let us be quite clear
on this. Brotherhood is but a name unless we wage war on that which
wages war on our brother — unless we strive, not to pardon, but to
destroy the enemy that has usurped his true place and nullified his real
will. The German people as they are today are not our brothers — in
them the life of the Eternal Man is turned against itself. They are our
brothers' enemy and ours.

368 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Let us remember, also, the passage from the Secret Doctrine with
which Mr. Judge closes his chapter on Karma — "The western Aryans
had every nation and tribe like their eastern brethren of the fifth race,
their Golden and their Iron ages, their period of comparative irresponsi-
bility, or the Satya age of purity, while now several of them have reached
their Iron age, the Kali Yuga, an age black ^vith horrors. This state will
last . . . until we begin acting from within instead of ever following
impulses from without. . . . Until then the only palliative is union
and harmony — a Brotherhood in actu and altruism not simply in name."

What do we think a Brotherhood in actu and altruism would be?
What would we do when we have learned to act from within? What is
the feeling and will of the soul toward the German evil let loose on
Belgium and on France ? What does "mutual forgiveness" mean between
the soul and this. H. B. M.

"Let it be plainly understood that we cannot return to God unless
we enter first into ourselves. God is everywhere, but not everywhere to
us. There is but one point in the universe where God communicates with
us, and that is the center of our awn soul. There He waits for us; there
He meets us; there He speaks to us. To seek Him, therefore, we must
enter into our own interior." — Archbishop Ullathorne.

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME

THE CAUSES AND CONDUCT OF THE WAR

PART II (Continued)
THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR

IT would be easy to fill volumes with a recital of Germany's crimes
in France. But every day brings further public record of them. A
few headlines from the New York Times will serve to remind most

people of what they have read already. "German Cruelty seen by
Gerard. Tells Canadian Club of War Prisoners put in camps with
typhus-stricken Russians. Children taught Savagery. Ambassador saw
them shoot prisoners with arrows tipped with nails" (April 10th, 1917).
"German Retreat a Vandals' Orgy . . . Graves defiled, buildings
razed and Women mistreated by the Teuton invader. Saw-tooth swords
found. Serrated blades bear evidence of brutal soldiery" (April 15th,
1917). "Whitlock depicts Belgians' Misery. Calls deportation of natives
'One of the foulest deeds that history records'" (April 22nd, 1917).
"Belgians tortured to compel labor. Deported Civilians tied to posts
and exposed for days in German camps" (July 13th, 1917).

The United States Committee on Public Information, consisting of
the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy,
and Mr. George Creel, is publishing some excellent pamphlets about the
war, one of which, entitled German War Practices, contains a fairly
complete statement in regard to deportations and forced labor. It can
be obtained, free of charge, on application in writing to "The Quarterly
Book Department, P. O. Box 64, Station O, New York.

Many books are being published, giving the first-hand testimony of
those who have fought in the trenches or who have had opportunity to
visit, in France, the scenes of German outrages. Among others there is
a book entitled German Atrocities, by the Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis of
Brooklyn. More convincing, if that were possible, than the catalogued
testimony of official reports, is the evidence of these observers. Thus,
Dr. Hillis relates (p. 53) that English officers and a French Captain were
resting in a dugout at the foot of Vimy Ridge. The Englishmen were
speaking of leave, and of the prospect of spending a few happy days with
their families. The French Captain could not conceal his agitation.
Questioned, he exclaimed: You Englishmen do not understand! Go
home! To what could I go? The Germans have been in my country for
a year and more. My town has gone, my home has gone. My wife is
still a young woman. My little girl was quite a little girl. And now our
priest writes me that my wife and my child will have babes in two months
by those brutes. "And then the storm broke."

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370 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Major Corbett-Smith, in The Retreat from Mons (pp. 169, 170),
tells us:

"Then it was that our men first saw a little of the hideous
work of the invaders upon the civilian population, and if anything
more were needed to brace them up to fight to the last man,
they had it in that brief hour in the recaptured town. . . .
Up the main street everywhere was horrible evidence that they
had been at work. Mingled with dead or wounded combatants
were bodies of women and children, many terribly mutilated,
while other women knelt beside them with stone-set faces or
gasping through hysterical weeping. From behind shutters or
half-closed doors others looked out, blinded with terror. But
there was one thing, which for men who saw it, dwarfed all
else. Hanging up in the open window of a shop, strung from a
hook on the cross-beam like a joint in a butcher's shop, was the
body of a little girl, five years old, perhaps. Its poor little hands
had been hacked off, and through the slender body were vicious
bayonet stabs."

Frances Wilson Huard, in My Home in the Field of Honour, and the
Right Reverend Monsignor John Bickerstaffe-Drew ("John Ayscough"),
in French Windows, both speak of the loathsome and perverted bestiality
of the Germans, who, whenever compelled to retire from the invaded
districts, deliberately befoul, in ways quite indescribable, cooking utensils,
bureau drawers, and the personal linen of both ladies and peasants.

Monsignor Bickerstaffe-Drew tries indirectly to whitewash the Ger-
man soldiers who are Catholics, though it is notorious that the Bavarians,
who are Catholics, have been as brutal and as vicious as the Prussians,
during all stages of the war. But he tells what he saw as two French
peasant women showed him the homes of a village which the Germans
had just evacuated (pp. 86, 89, 92).

"The staircase was only a steeper variant of the hall, a ladder of
shame and shamelessness. The upstairs rooms were much worse . . .
Up here there were fouler and more sickening smells," which his two
guides interrupted their silence to explain in "language that English
worren would have been shy of." "I said, 'Devils'; what do you call it?
That filth ..."

German officers had left their imprint there.

In the poorer sections of the village, where German privates had
been quartered, —

"There was the same ruin, and havoc, and filth, and devil-
ment; only more crowded, and more striking, and more visibly
damnable for being crammed into so much smaller spaces and
for being the ruin of a poorer, slower effort at decency and order
and comfort. The garments were sadder, I think, because they
had cost so much less money, so much more time, so much more
labor. There was little here that had been superfluous ; little that
had stood for sheer ornament ; by slow degrees the things that
make the difference between poverty and ease of life had been
earned and added to the home. All alike, now, lay soiled,

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 371

battered, trampled, derided, desecrated. Children's garments,
fashioned by tired hands after the children had been laid to bed ;
men's garments patched and mended, with frugal care; the
mother's own fete-clothes, saved from year to year, and never
despised as out of fashion ; all dragged about, fouled, torn,
ruined; the bits of furniture, gathered at slow intervals, the
strictest necessaries first, then the few witnesses of a late-won
prosperity — an arm-chair, an escritoire — all broken, thrown
down, insulted . . ."

He went forth to explore further. Speaking of himself as "the
Ancient," he writes :

"He found a street of villas, each overlooking the valley, and
each with a pretty garden ; all empty. It was easy to enter, for
the Germans had been there, and had broken the doors open.
From one to another the Ancient passed, finding in each the same
ruin, havoc, spoiling, desecration, filth, and shame; you would
say that bands of malevolent apes had been holding spiteful,
senseless, ingeniously destructive Carnival there ; as though, long
kept under by the superiority of Man, they had seized a moment
of anarchy for revenge — not revenge of an injury, but of Man's
hated superiority. So they had outraged Man's sense of decency
and reverence ; had marked for peculiar insult and desecration
the things Man holds sacred by nature — the privacies of his
women-folk, the play of his children, the shrine of his hearth."

But the Germans regard such behavior as "Knightly." It is the
word the Kaiser selected as descriptive of his conduct of the war. They
do not use words as we use them.

"Like some Satanic sacrament, the thing against which we
battle has an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual
evil. This sign is what the Prussian terms 'frightfulness.' He
has given civilization abundant examples of what this means —
murder of old men, of women, and of children ; rape and pillage ;
arson and sacrilege ; nameless mutilations ; bombardments of
defenceless towns and of harmless watering-places; sinking of
passenger-ships and of vessels which carry the wounded or
endeavor to aid the unhappy victims of his own sin ; poison gas
and liquid flame ; attempts to disseminate germs of disease among
man and beast [as at Bukarest] ; incitements to treason and plots
against those whose bread and salt he still enjoyed — nothing too
vile or too low to serve his purpose" ("Prussian Frightfulness
and the Savage Mind," by Louis H. Gray, a most suggestive
psychological study in Scribner's Magazine for March, 1918).

It is strange indeed that with such facts now so generally known,
there can be people in this country, and a few even in England, who talk
about negotiating peace with Germany. How can you negotiate peace
with a criminal who glories in his crimes ! And when will people realize
at last that it is the nature of a German to make a promise, to break it,
and then to laugh uproariously at the gullibility of the man who believed
him? When will they understand that the only difference between a
German and an Austrian is that the latter will not laugh uproariously,

372 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

but that he also will make a promise, will break it, and will then smile
politely, and occasionally with pity, at the man who was so incredibly
foolish as to have accepted his word about anything ?

Does it still seem too remote, this world war, to warrant the sacrifices
we are making? If to Americans, Germany seems far off, to Germans,
America seems quite near ; and perhaps it is that which counts ! "America
had better look out after this war," and "I shall stand no nonsense from
America after the war," was the Kaiser's repeated warning to Ambassa-
dor Gerard in October, 1915 (My Four Years in Germany, p. 252). No
one can say that America was quick to take the warning; but that is no
reason why anyone should still refuse to take it.

Who are the people who ask — Must this war still go on ? Is it worth
while ? Ought not peace to be brought about somehow ?

There are men with hobbies (and some who use their hobbies as a
means of livelihood), who hate the war because it distracts attention from
their pet "reforms," from "social betterment," from "uplift" propaganda.
They are not Pro-German ; they are not exactly Pacifists : but they do
everything in their power to suggest that the real difficulty which confronts
us is not the conquest of Germany, but how to attract the attention of the
public from the war to the "graver" issues underlying it. "Make
democracy safe for the world," is their present slogan.

They may be fanatics ; they may be self-seeking fanatics. In either
case they are miserably blind. If Germany were to conquer the world,
these would-be reformers would find themselves in a chain-gang, mining
coal in Pennsylvania or digging canals in Asia Minor, as the German
Imperial (or Socialist) Labor Bureau might decide. Their "reforms"
would be chained up with them. In their blindness they think such
dangers non-existent, just as in England, before the war, many well-
meaning people, mightily exercised over Old Age Pensions or similar
foibles, laughed at Lord Roberts when he told them they were not safe
from invasion, and that there would be no old people left to pension, once
the enemy were to land on England's shores.

Dr. Robert E. Speer, representative of this group, who is Chairman
of the General War-Time Commission of the Churches, has gone so far
as to suggest at a public meeting, held under Y. M. C. A. auspices, that
the social and international sins of England and America are as bad as
the sins of Germany, citing in proof of this, some violated treaties with
American Indians and the outpourings of a Pacific Coast newspaper
against the Japanese! (See protest by Professor H. B. Mitchell in the
New York Times of February 23rd, 1918).

Once such talk is recognized for what it is, all decent people will
react from it with the contempt and hatred it deserves.

But for Roman Catholics, it is not so easy to react vigorously and
with clear vision, when their Irish priests insinuate, in Dr. Speer's best
manner, that it would be "unchristian" to think harshly of Germany if
England in consequence were to be hated less! An insane hatred of

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 373

England, based upon ignorance and jealousy, and strangely fostered by
our Public School teaching of history, is as much the hobby of many
a Catholic priest, as "social uplift" and the desire to force men in his
own pet mold of righteousness, is the hobby of his Nonconformist
counterpart. The priest should beware, however, lest he lose the best of
his people, including the best of the Irish, by too flagrant a sacrifice of
truth and justice on the altar of his cherished hatred. This war is so
real ; is so completely Christ's war, that like Him it may be said to have
come "that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed," and, because
of its coming, "now they have no cloak for their sin."

There is another class, with no particular hobby except that of its
own intellectual superiority, and which is less demoralizing than the first,
because more transparent. It affects to see the world conflict in a remote,
detached way, as if observing a struggle of animalcula through a micro-
scope. It finds gentle interest in the contortions of the participants. A
few university professors and some very young students are among the
leaders of this group ; but it is represented in all classes of society, down
to the point at which one mechanic says to another, "I don't think much
of this war, does you, Bill?"

It is an attitude of superior boredom, but occasionally it becomes
paternal and even solicitous, as if to say, "Now my dear children, are you
not going a shade too far?" People of this group, in so far as they can
be said to approve of anything, nodded wise understanding when President
Wilson, in January, 1917, talked of "peace without victory."

It is difficult to say whether there is hope for them, — for these very
superior people. Dante placed them on the wrong side of the door where
"Abandon hope" was written. Still, when their sons or brothers are
crucified by Germans, they may wake up.

A third and much larger group consists of those who are so sound
asleep spiritually, that they are as incapable of an active belief in evil as
of a clear perception of its opposite. Their impressions on both sides are
blurred. Nothing is very evil and nothing is very good. More than that,
because they find nothing in themselves which they can classify as very
good or as very evil, they refuse to believe that things "can be quite as
bad as all that," even when the brutal facts are presented to them. For
no other reason, they dismissed the Bryce Report on German atrocities
as incredible, just as today they dismiss anything which is "too" this or
"too" that as incredible. That Germany would, if she could, conquer
America and enslave them and their children: No, that is incredible!
The words have no meaning for them. To say that they are sound asleep
spiritually is only another way of saying that their imagination is inop-
erative. They cannot see what they have not experienced. Both Hell and
Heaven for them are empty words. There is only one thing in the world
that can save them, and that is suffering, because suffering is the only
thing in the world that can rouse them from a sleep more terrible than
that of Arctic death.

374 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

The "Internationals," who constitute the fourth group, are of two
kinds. There are the Bolsheviki whose purpose is to deprive everyone of
power that they themselves may possess it, and who believe in the use of
force to gain their ends. Chaos, confusion and license (Satan's own
brood) are their weapons, and they love these so dearly that often they
sacrifice their goal for the delight of playing with their means. We have
seen them at work in Russia. The I. W. W. represent them in America.
But there are Socialists everywhere who are proud to claim the title of
Bolsheviki.

Then there are the Bolsheviki, Socialists and others, who would
repudiate the title, though their purpose also is to deprive everyone of
power so that they themselves may possess it. They differ from the first
kind in so far as they do not openly advocate the use of force to gain
their ends. They believe intensely (and rightly) in the disintegrating
power of words. They thrive on discontent. They foster "class con-
sciousness." They make it their business to convince the workingman
that he is the victim of capitalistic intrigue ; that he is an oppressed slave
(we read in today's papers — March 15th — that many workers at the Hog
Island shipyards are making from $6,000 to $7,000 a year). These
Bolsheviki of the tongue do not sneer at patriotism. They would lose
supporters if they did. So, by means either direct or indirect, depending
upon their audience, they preach the gospel of Internationalism, as the
"larger" attitude.

The editor of The Survey, Paul U. Kellogg, is an adept at that sort
of insinuation. "It is hoped to keep alive," he writes, "in spite of the
somewhat narrow nationalism naturally engendered by war conditions,
something of that 'international mind' which has always been cultivated by
the churches" (Survey, March 16th). Incidentally, casually as it were,
he gives a glimpse of his own mind — the 'international mind' par excel-
lence— in his account of a Radical Labor assembly at Nottingham, Eng-
land. With real unction he describes the "very evident resurgence of
feeling of working-class brotherhood." The delegates, he tells us, "began
with singing Connell's familiar Red Flag, which was distributed by the
Labor Herald. They did not balk nor turn a hair at the second stanza,
which runs :

"Look round — the Frenchman loves its blaze ;
"The sturdy German chants in praise ;
"In Moscow's vaults its hymns we sung ;
"Chicago swells the surging throng.

"With one accord," he continues, "they gave the full-throated chorus
for a seventh and last time at its close, singing it standing, heads up, in a
great rolling bass:

"Then raise the scarlet standard high!
"Within its shade we'll live or die;
"Tho' cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
"We'll keep the Red Flag flying here."

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 375

That Englishmen could sing such words, with Belgium still bleeding
beneath the heel of the German brute, he does not see as shameful, but as
commendatory, because the Englishmen who sang were Socialists, and
because "the sturdy German" who "chants in praise" of the Red Flag is
also, presumably, a Socialist. That is to say, they both belong to an inner
circle which is above the limitations of nationality and whose only real
enemy is the class which believes in the principle, Noblesse oblige — or
defende, as the case may be.

It was in The Survey of March 9th, 1918, that that lucubration
appeared; and The Survey is supposed to be the organ of the United
Charities of New York ! The worst of it is, the ignorant are deceived, —
the feeble-minded who make up so large a percentage of every popula-
tion. Thus, in The Churchman of February 23rd (an organ of the
Protestant Episcopal Church), we find an editorial note: "Every issue
of The Survey brings to The Churchman office valuable material which
we would like to share with those who perhaps have not the privilege of
reading that invaluable paper."

"Internationals" of the second group are far more dangerous than
those of the first. "Sit down and talk it over with the Germans ; appeal
to their good sense and better nature," — is what their words appear to
suggest. Superficially the suggestion, in spite of its obvious folly, might
be considered harmless — even "Christian." But what bitter mockery of
Christ it is in fact ! For beneath the surface of the words you are asked
to condone evil ; you are asked to compromise with wickedness and vice ;
you are asked to regard a German workman, simply because a workman,
as belonging to a privileged class ; you are asked to forget the outraged
and mutilated women, the murdered and mutilated children, of Belgium
and Serbia and France ; you are asked to believe that God has forgotten
these light peccadillos of the past (though they are of today and tomorrow
and of eternity until those shameless criminals repent), and therefore
you are asked to cultivate the 'international mind' which is above differ-
ences and above frontiers and above such things as sin.

It is one of the hideous perversions of true brotherhood, under-
mining of all righteousness and making peace impossible because God
would spew such peace out of His mouth. Yet in some cases these
"Internationals" are not so intentionally corrupting as they are in actual
effect. Incurably provincial and self-complacent, they are often the
victims of their early environment, — refugees from places like Kalamazoo,
where the editor of The Survey was born and where he won his spurs as
a journalist. They are twin to the mujik who thinks America is a part
of Germany. He is emancipated. He knows. Travel merely deepens
the impression !

And now we come to the question: Why is it so grievous a sin,
fraught with such evil consequences, to forgive or to forget a crime until
the criminal has repented ? The answer is to be found in the command-

376 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

ment: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so
to them ; for this is the law and the prophets."

If you had committed some awful crime, would you wish to be treated
as a comrade, as a man of honor, by men of honor? Would you wish
your offence to be ignored, to be forgotten, before you had repented and
before you had tried to atone for your sin ? Many people, unthinkingly,
would answer, Yes! But that is because, first, when you ask them to
imagine themselves as criminals, they shrink automatically from crime
and induce in themselves a condition resembling penitence. Unable to
imagine themselves as shameless, they very properly infer that they would
be entitled to forgiveness, because they woiftd forgive anyone who had
truly repented. Ask them if, having committed a crime in a moment of
passion, they would wish to continue a life of crime, — and they would
answer at once in the negative.

In the second place, no one could answer in the affirmative who
believes really in the existence of the soul, and in character as more
important than worldly credit or success. The welfare of the soul, and
the improvement, instead of the deterioration of character, should, for a
Christian, be matters of supreme moment. To make light of sin is to
encourage sin, both in oneself and in others. A child naturally wishes
to smooth things over with his parents, regardless of contrition. But no
parents worthy of the name will permit matters to be smoothed over,
until their child is sorry for his wrong doing. Even if he is not as yet
able to understand, for instance, the enormity of lying, he must at least
be made to realize that his parents regard lying as an ugly and dishonor-
ing offence. Unable, perhaps, to repent of having lied, he must be made
to repent of having offended his parents. And if his parents fail him in
this (as parents, through laziness or cowardice, often fail their children),
they have failed to do unto him as they ought to wish that their parents
had done unto them.

There is vital need to understand this principle clearly, because all
the arguments of Pacifists are based, in effect, upon failure to under-
stand it. Do unto others as you would be done by. Treat them as souls,
not merely as bodies. Think of the desire of their souls, not merely of
the desire of their personalities. Think of their eternal welfare, not
merely of their transitory good pleasure.

Suppose that, in a moment of madness, you had killed your mother
and two out of five of your brothers. Would you wish to be treated as
Pacifists advocate, thus leaving you free to murder the survivors too? Or
would you wish to be shot dead before your madness could carry you
further? It is because you would wish to be killed, if possible before
you had murdered anyone, and certainly before you had murdered the
three who had so far survived, that it is a moral and a religious duty,
at this time, and until Germans collectively and individually repent of
their unspeakable crimes, to kill as many of them as you possibly can,

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME 377

and, if you are not in the Army or Navy, to do everything in your power
to provide the sinews of war for those who fight for you.

Forgive your enemies, — of course. It is mean and small not to do
so. But this refers to your personal enemies, not to the enemies of Christ,
not to the enemies of righteousness and truth and honor. If a man insult
you, it may well be your duty to overlook it, particularly if in your
opinion his welfare is not your primary concern. But if a man insult
your wife or your mother, would it be "Christian" to invite a repetition
of the offence ? No one who thinks so has the slightest understanding of
Christ.

No one can love righteousness who does not hate evil. Not to hate
the iniquity which Germany embodies and therefore perpetrates, is to
declare oneself not only unchristian but inhuman. As a central com-
mittee of Protestant churches recently declared:

"Love is fierce as well as tender. Love alone can make a man capable
of indignation like that of Christ against the selfishness and brutality
which throws aside sentiments of honor and humanity for intrigue and
f rightfulness. It was Christ who looked into the faces of men and called
them children of the Devil ; who said of those who mistreated children
that it were better for them that a millstone were hanged about their necks
and they were cast into the depths of the sea ; who uttered the amazing
invectives of the twenty-third chapter of Saint Matthew. It is the duty
of the church to express and arouse the conscience of the nation against
the acts of the German forces in captured territory and on the high seas."

Cardinal Mercier and hundreds of prominent Catholics have said
exactly the same thing. "We will revenge and punish, if it shall take
seven upon seven crusades to do so," said one of the best-known of
Catholic laymen, Mr. William D. Guthrie, at a mass meeting of the Parish
of St. Patrick's Cathedral, held on March 10th, 1918. And he spoke for
the human conscience, not for his own Church only.

The Pacifist will quote : "Vengeance is mine ; I will repay, saith the
Lord." But mercy and justice are His also, and even as He requires
us to execute justice and to extend mercy on His behalf and in His name,
He requires us likewise to revenge the befoulments of His own being
which Germans of all classes have found delight in committing. To
leave God to revenge Himself would be as unchristian as to withhold
mercy on the ground that mercy is His prerogative.

German- Americans, if any still feel that such fiends are their brothers,
should be the first to wish them punished. No man, at that stage, repents,
until long-continued suffering compels him to seek for its cause. He
will never find the cause, which is his wickedness, unless human justice
inflicts upon him publicly the punishment which fits the crime, and main-
tains the pressure of that punishment, steadily and relentlessly, until the
lesson has been learned and effect traced back to cause. A child who
steals and who persistently steals, must discover that whenever he steals
he suffers. Otherwise you confirm him in his thievery.

25

378 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Pacifists who desire peace (and we assume that is what they desire)
should be the first to insist upon punishment. Can a city be at peace if
murderers get off scot-free? It takes two to make peace.

Do Pacifists want this war to lead to another and a worse one?
Germany is already preparing for her next war. General von Freytag-
Loringhoven, Deputy Chief of the German Imperial Staff, in his Deduc-
tions from the World War (Putnams), tells us all about it, or as much
as he thinks it would be good for us to know. "Will not the general
exhaustion of Europe," he asks, "after the world conflagration, of a
certainty put the danger of a new war, to begin with, in the background,
and does not this terrible slaughter of nations point inevitably to the
necessity of disarmament to pave the way to permanent peace?" To
which he replies : "World-power is inconceivable without striving for
expression of power in the world, and consequently for sea-power"
(p. 150). And the German Majority Socialists are as mad for world-
power in their way, as von Freytag-Loringhoven and the German Crown
Prince are, in theirs. Power in both cases is their goal. Might makes
right, in both cases is their creed. If there is one human being whom
the German Socialist despises above all others, it is the Socialist of
America, or of England or France: a non-German imitation of himself.
To make peace with a socialist Germany would be to make peace with the
Kaiser's left hand instead of his right, and to make peace with either
would be to make peace with Hell.

If politicians were to concoct a "peace" tomorrow, there would be
no peace in the world so long as Germany and Austria are free. They
must be captured and hand-cuffed. If the rest of the world is not strong
enough to do it now, the rest of the world must either accept the over-
lordship of Germany, or must arm to the teeth for a final life and death
struggle. Every student of German history ; everyone who knows the
German nature, realizes that that and no other would be the choice. No
agreement will bind her. She has proved that. Nothing but force,
ceaselessly exerted, will keep her in her place. Pacifists may take their
choice. But every man worthy of the name, and certainly every Theoso-
phist, would rather give his life many times over than see the world- wide
triumph of treachery and outrage over honor and justice and truth.

T.

"When things are at their worst according to the world, if the
calamity is rightly used, they begin to be at their best according to God."

— Archbishop Ullathorne.

ELEMENTARY ARTICLE

THE NEED FOR SELF-EXAMINATION

DR. PUSEY introduced several useful Catholic practices into the
Anglican Church, or, rather, he taught his adherents to use sev-
eral useful practices, which, before his day, were almost unknown
outside of Catholicism. One of these was Self-examination.
Of course every religion pre-supposes the need of the examination
of one's conscience, morals, ideals, and general condition, at least occasion-
ally, but, so far as I know, no Protestant sect makes a point of this. They
certainly do not inculcate it as a systematic practice and as necessary to
a healthy religious life.

To find experts in the religious life we must go, with very few excep-
tions to the Catholic Church. Of course I am referring only to Christian-
ity, for the mass of the really great experts are of the East. But,
wherever they are, experts long ago found out the paramount value of
the great Hermetic axiom, "Man, Know Thyself"; and that, if we are to
obey this injunction, the only way to do so is by means of the most
systematic, detailed, and repeated self-examination. Casual and general
examinations of conscience are practically valueless, for at the best, it is
exceedingly difficult for us to determine our real faults, our real motives
for doing anything, let alone arriving at any actual understanding of our
natures, of ourselves. It is said most positively that, at the beginning
of the way, no one understands himself in the least. He has faults he is
unaware of; his real weaknesses are likely to be just where he prides
himself upon his strength ; he has no knowledge whatever of his besetting
sin. Indeed, few people know what is their besetting sin. You will have
travelled quite far towards self-understanding before you will be capable
of so profound and subtle an analysis of yourself as to reveal to your own
understanding, what actually is your chief weakness, and, previous to
that, if some one else should tell you, you would not believe it.

Nor is it easy to diagnose the condition of others. We can often
see outstanding faults in our superiors ; at least we think we can, but we
are quite incapable of any real judgment of their condition. The most
that can be said is that we are nearly always wrong when expressing an
opinion of a superior; we may occasionally guess right about an equal;
and, if trained by experience, we may have a fairly reliable judgment
with regard to those below us on the spiritual ladder.

37»

380 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

One reason for all of this is fairly simple. Suppose a disciple already
almost a saint is sent into incarnation to learn self-confidence and self-
reliance. This is often necessary, for nearly all disciples lose their proper
self-confidence while having false self-confidence beaten out of them.
What happens ? They are put into an environment where they must accept
responsibility and where they must be aggressive. They are urged, by life,
or by actual and definite advice from their spiritual director, to culti-
vate self-confidence, to take the initiative, to accept responsibility, not to
be afraid, etc. Such a person goes through life giving the impression of
being aggressive, domineering, forceful, self-reliant, while all the time, the
Master, and perhaps a few others in the secret, know that the exact
opposite of what appears to be the case, is the actual besetting sin of that
disciple. No ; it is not easy to understand others.

The reason why self-understanding is difficult, is still simpler. One
of the chief punishments of sin, of any form of self-will, — of self-indul-
gence, is obscurity. Just in so far as we are bad, do we create veils
between our consciousness and the Divine Light. The ultimate wages of
sin is death, truly, but the proximate wages of sin is ignorance — blindness.

The reason why it is so hard to convert sinners is that sinners,
because of their sin, have surrounded themselves with a cloud of mis-
understanding which prevents their realization of what seems to others
to be obvious and self-evident truth. Who has not felt that intense
exasperation with some friend who, we feel, will not see the truth we are
so anxious to give him? Who has not dashed himself in vain against
that fatuous self-complacency, which is the common armour of unright-
eousness? Who has not grieved over the sterility and lack of vision
which is the concomitant of self-indulgence ? We meet every day, we each
know scores of people ; friends, relations, associates, many of them charm-
ing, intelligent, agreeable, good in the common acceptance of the word,
estimable people from almost every point of view, who yet lack something
we consider vital ; they have no interest in religion, or in a really personal
spiritual life. On the contrary, they fight shy of it as something uncom-
fortable and upsetting, and they smile benignly, yet with irritation very
near the surface, upon our tentative and usually ill-advised efforts to draw
them into the net. We think it a pity that such nice people do not make
more of their lives, do not have serious interests. Their opinion of us
runs all the way from thinking us weak-minded bores, to having a secret
respect for us, which makes them uneasy and which they endeavour to
conceal.

The trouble with such people, and their name is legion, is not so
much that they do not want to be religious, as it is a genuine and honest
inability to see and understand. They have by past sinning of some kind,
perhaps by what we are almost inclined to call innocent sins or harmless
self-indulgences, as if there really were such things, (the tendency to
think of any form of self-indulgence as harmless is an evidence of our
blindness) put themselves outside the pale of understanding. They have
cut themselves off from a whole department, and the most important and
fundamental department of life. They no longer have any sense of spirit-
ual values ; they are incapable of responding to religious stimuli.

Of course, this is not a permanent condition, or at any rate, it need
not be so. They have inhibited their faculty of spiritual perception, not
permanently and not completely, but to the point where they do not
respond to ordinary incentives. It takes a very heavy jolt to wake them

THE NEED FOR SELF-EXAMINATION 381

up. In ordinary times, as the Divine Powers are very merciful, such
people are slowly trained, by life and experience, out of this dangerous
condition. When the world gets too full of such people, and the people
get too sound asleep, as was the case in recent years, we have a hideous
catastrophe, like the Great War, which jars many millions out of their
spiritual lethargy, — and so becomes the greatest of blessings.

But we must come back to our theme. Each one of us is also full of
blind spots; we too have spiritual myopia. We are lucky if we haven't
also astral astigmatism. We not only do not, but also, we cannot, as we are
at present, understand ourselves ; and yet we must. It is, in a sense, the
same old spiritual paradox. We cannot cure our faults until we know
we have them, and we cannot know we have them because they have so
dulled our perception that we deny their existence. It would be a hopeless
impasse if it were not for that gift of the Divine Powers called Grace.

We are picked bodily out of the black little hell each one has made
for himself and carried up into a cleared spot where there is light enough
for us to make a beginning. We begin to want to be good, and we see
dimly a few of the things we must try to accomplish; we see faults to
correct ; we see habits to get rid of ; we see qualities we lack and must
try to acquire. Then, with each step forward, comes more light, a greater
self-understanding. Every conquest of self lifts a corner of the veil.
Years of effort result in a real penitence, and finally, as we begin to be
saints, we realize that we are miserable sinners. Only the Saints under-
stand how wicked they actually are. The higher we climb, the more
contemptible we find ourselves. We start thinking ourselves pretty good,
when we really are very bad, and we wind up knowing ourselves to be
very bad, just as we are beginning to be pretty good. There is no
hypocrisy or false humility about it ; it is a sober fact. The ordinary man,
who keeps the Ten Commandments, thinks himself a very decent sort
of person, a credit to himself, his family and his country. Lots of people
think it of him, and even tell him so. His clergyman, for instance, will
point him out as a shining example. But after that man has spent a few
incarnations trying to live a religious life, he will begin to get a conviction
of sin, and by the time his poor "cribbed, cabined and confined" soul has
a chance to breathe, he will know himself to be saturated through and
through with evil. About the time others begin to speak of him as a Saint,
he will see himself as a sink of iniquity, for he will be comparing himself
with a clear vision of what he ought to be and can become, and will know
how very far he is from this ideal. He no longer contrasts himself with
other people, which is the comparison we all make in order to comfort
our uneasy consciences, for that no longer interests, or concerns him;
it is the yawning abyss which separates him from what he ought to be,
that fills him with a genuine humility. He sees that he is ten thousand
miles from his goal. That others around him are ten thousand and ten
miles away, no longer comforts his vanity. They may, and many will,
by extra effort, overtake and pass him.

But our theme is Self-Examination, and its great need, because we
have blinded ourselves by sin, by self-indulgence. The last Elementary
Article spoke of the way we deceive ourselves, but our present point is
that even when we want to be honest and understand ourselves we are
incapable of doing so because we have lost the faculties which should
enable us to understand. The cure for this condition is, like everything
else in the spiritual life, a question of effort. We must make a beginning,
we must try. How to do so will be the subject of the next article.

C. A. G.

A few days ago I was reading in one of the New York papers an unusually
intelligent and acute account of certain phases of the present condition in Russia,
the writer described among other things the mujiks' views on the United States.
"I learned," he says, "a number of interesting things from the mujik concerning
the United States: — that it is an English colony; that it is a part of France; that
the masses are starving and a great Bolshevist revolution is in progress here; that
America and Japan are now at war with Russia; that the United States itself is
torn in Civil War, involving the distressing consequence that Mexico has revolted
or withdrawn from the Union ; and quite commonly that America is a bourgeois
aristocracy where workmen are worse off than slaves." These impressions, if I
might so style them, are somewhat bewildering and amazing, and are truly comic,
in that the pathos of their ignorance brings the tears that mingle with our laughter.

THE THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY has received for review a slender book, attrac-
tively bound, entitled The Work of the Masters, by C. Lazenby, and reading it just
now, the recently awakened mujik and his United States came cheerfully into my
mind. The writer appears sincere and well meaning — one has been led to believe
the same of the mujik by those who profess to know him — but in what depths of
the ocean of Avidya both are submerged, while equally placid in their naive confi-
dence,— the greater in our astounding little book, because so frankly simple in its
acknowledgment of lack of complete information. "I make no claims to finality,"
the author assures us in his Introduction ; "And I hope my readers will bear con-
stantly in mind that my statements are to be considered in the light of hints for
thought, not as statements of exact knowledge." "Hence I hope no one will make
a dogma of my utterances concerning our great Comrades," he adds further on in
the same paragraph, — a hope which we all must fervently echo ! For this book
is nothing less than the biographies of ten of the Masters, some of the names used
being those best known and loved by all members of The Theosophical Society. We
read rtrange things — the veriest kaleidoscopic maze of fancy and fable shot through
here and there with a glimmer of fact, but so misplaced and misunderstood as to
be hardly recognizable in its garb and company. One feels in one's giddiness
that astral gyrations could hardly move more breathlessly; and one has just
enough intelligence remaining when the last page is turned, to realize that a sense
of humour, even a little sense of humour, could have saved the whole situation.
Laughing weakly, in an effort to establish one's own sanity, one suddenly had
visions of H. P. B. reading the book, and one was sobered instantly at the sense of
the consequences. No, under no circumstances, one said ; never let it fall into the
hands of H. P. B.!

It is hinted more than once, however, that we are not dealing with astral or
psychic things: "not with any mayavic or spook forms." Certainly we are not
dealing with "spooks" in the sense suggested that it may be no more than an "ani-
mated photograph," for no semblance of any photograph is here — animated or
otherwise ; but it would seem that we are dealing with those concentric semi-
luminous whirls of psychic substance which are simultaneously cause and expression
of psychic impulse.

REVIEWS 383

I said we read strange things. Here are a few of them. We are told that
we may "look upon the Scranton Correspondence schools and Cambridge University,
the manual training schools and Leipzig University, the technical schools and
Harvard University, as all parts and centers of the activity of K. H."! — (One
wonders why Oxford, Yale and Chautauqua were omitted.)

We learn that another great Master will teach men in time to be au dessus de la
melee, and to have "the great pride in humanity as a whole, which they now feel
for a flag or a Country." (Behold the astral serpent coiled!)

Hilarion was a highly educated Englishman of the best social position thirty-
five years ago, we are informed, who "had a good deal to do with keeping alight
the fires of spiritual knowledge in Cambridge University." The mystery of the
intervening years is not explained, but in compensation it is stated plainly that he is
a reincarnation of lamblichus 1

The Master of Vibrations is telescoped with the Rajah, and the Rajah is
spoken of as "this great Nirmanakaya" ! — and so on, and so on.

One leaps from amazement to amazement on each page, until the distressing
loss of Mexico is as nothing in comparison!

But we cannot altogether forget another side, — the pity, the infinite pity of it:
that good intention, minus intelligence and understanding, should lead any form of
spiritual search into such a morass as this, and, living in the midst of it, should still
see it as spiritual! Better far the mujik, whose religion and philosophy are merely
matters "of crossing himself whenever he encounters an icon." And there is
something akin to indignation, drowned only by our pity and a certain human
contempt, that even ignorance can blindly strive to drag to such low levels, if only
the names of those whose splendour and loftiness place them beyond the reach of
trivialities and travesties like these.

Then there is the scarcity of paper and the need for retrenchment I

G.

The Fruits of Silence, by Cyril Hepher, published by the Macmillian Co. Mr.
Hepher was an editor of The Fellowship of Science, and is one of a group of
Anglicans who have been closely associated with the Society of Friends and cer-
tain Theosophists. This book is an admirable, if limited, appeal for the right use
of meditation, and for the need that there is to-day for a discovery in one's own
heart of the Master's presence. "Christianity is Christ," Mr. Hepher says, and we
cannot find Christ in the world until we have discovered Him in our own souls.
It is to the silence of our "closet" that we must go, and it is the "Father which
seeth in secret" whom we must find. In the steadily growing demand for reality in
religion, men are discovering that religion and religious consolation are not to be
found in the forms of religious worship, in prayer-meetings, in divine service, in
Communion, unless there be attached to that form the spirit of religion, unless
within that form there is a breath of divine reality, unless the Master is perceived
and known directly.

This reality may most readily be achieved by entering into silence, especially
"a corporate silence. It is a Fellowship of Silence, and silence in fellowship is the
easiest of all silences. In it we help one another. As we seek God together the
Divine Life indwelling each separate soul overflows our individual separateness,
and reaching forth unites soul with soul in the unity of the One Spirit" (p. 17).

The Fruits of Silence are first "the sense of the Presence," next, "the sense of
His voice and His will." These fruits come only with the actual "living of the
life," come only when the heart and mind are concentrated whole-heartedly and
with determination. The Inner Light is there to be found — "more than the light of
conscience." And this Inner Light can only be perceived by entering into the inner
darkness and mastering the power of spiritual vision latent within as. "The evo-
lutionary transition from the faintest sensation of light to the miracle of the

384 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

human eye is as nothing to the interval that lies between the sensitiveness to the
Light of God in the soul of the savage and the soul of a saint."

But one glimpse of this Light and the soul turns toward it, — penitent. "No more
sins" was the first cry of St. Catherine of Genoa. With penitence comes a new
power, the first great active fruit of Silence, and that is the power to intercede,
the power to help others. "The Intercession of Silence" is at once the main theme
and the lesson of Part II; for it should be the prayer of the non-combatant half
of the Christian Church to-day. Intercession can be learned ; it is a vital necessity,
and therefore must be learned. "Sacrifice is the stuff of which great prayer is
made" (p. 149), but there is the sacrifice of intercession as well as the soldier's gift
of his life. "The Church must be England's penitent before she can be England's
intercessor." The sacrifice of the intercessor is a sacrifice of will — it is the essence
of sacrifice, "the will to give oneself wholly and without reserve to God and
man" (p. 157). "Not words but longing is his prayer." "Our capacity to influ-
ence others is in proportion to our capacity to focus and concentrate our whole
unified being, first upon God, and then upon those we desire to help" (p. 48).

"First upon God" — that is the lesson which men must learn. All other com-
mandments depend upon the "first and great." Our ability to help our brother, to
love our brother, depends on our love of God, upon our self-dedication to God.

Mr. Hepher has had experience, and he speaks with the assurance and the
tolerance of genuine conviction. "Repetition, when it is not vain repetition, is
half-way along the road to silence" — thereby uniting the Buddhist prayer-wheel
with the Rosary. "Any man can make an occasional effort in prayer, but persever-
ance in things spiritual demands discipline. In any campaign it is the steady dis-
ciplined work of the trained man that turns the scale. Such discipline is as vital
to the soul, and as essential in the spiritual task as in the industrial or military."
In this recognition we find the justification of the religious Orders of the Church.
"The Church needed a spiritual Kitchener to recruit and train its army of inter-
cessors." What the world does not yet realize is that Kitchener could have taught
the world how to pray better than most accredited religious teachers.

This little book reveals a very mellow spirit, and is earnest and sincere. It has
also the merit of definiteness. "Spiritual things are spiritually apprehended, and
only spiritually. Spiritual truth is not unfolded to the intellect without the
Spirit" (p. 30). The silence of meditation is a means to an end — "it liberates the
spiritual in man," — it is the path of union with the Voice of the Silence.

One thing we regret. "What is the attraction of Theosophy and Christian
Science to so many minds? Certainly not the astonishing dogmas that they pro-
pound. It is, I believe, the method of spiritual development, the initiation into
the mysteries of meditation, and the strong emphasis on the presence of God in the
soul rind upon the immanence of the spiritual within the material, that is the secret
of their power" (p. 121). We deplore the fact that Mr. Hepher has evidently come
in contact with one of the many pseudo-theosophies, not with Theosophy itself, —
otherwise he could not have spoken of its "dogmas," nor have coupled it with
Christian Science.

The constitution of the Society reads (Article V, 2) "Every member has the
right to believe or disbelieve in any religious system or philosophy, and to declare
such belief or disbelief without affecting his standing as a member of the Society,
each being required to show that tolerance of the opinions of others which he
expects for his own." By-Law 38 reads: "No member of the Theosophical
Society shall promulgate or maintain any doctrine as being that advanced or advo-
cated by the Society." On the back cover of the QUARTERLY will be found the
words: "The organization is wholly unsectarian, with no creed, dogma, nor per-
sonal authority to enforce or impose . . ." Mr. Hepher is right in stating that
the attraction to Theosophy cannot and never will come from "dogmas." In the
very fact of their being dogmas, they cease being Theosophy. Theosophy may best

REVIEWS 385

be described, perhaps, as an attitude and a life, and its power comes truly from the
"immanence of the spiritual within the material." But the recognition of this, if it
be expounded as a dogma, is cramping and limiting the reality into forms and
words. There can be no dogmas that hold life, for soon or late life will expand,
and outgrow or burst the form. Societies or people who use the name of Theos-
ophy and at the same time dogmatize, in the very nature of things belie the name
they use. The light they have obtained from experience will be so distorted and
colored as to mislead and darken rather than to illumine.

Mr. Hepher's book is to be recommended to readers of the QUARTERLY.

JOHN BLAKE, JR.

The Vision Splendid, by John Oxenham, published by George H. Doran Co.,
at $1.00, is a book of poems inspired by the war. They are religious in the widest
and best sense. Read unmoved "The Ballad of Jim Baxter" — if you can. Read
"One Mother," and see what the war has taught. But of the author himself one
says, — A man who has suffered, and who has found the Eternal. The Vision
Splendid, he says, is the Cross Victorious. H.

The United States and Pan-Germania, by Andre Cheradame, the author of
The Pan-German Plot Unmasked, is published by Scribners at 50 cents. The author
again sets forth the vitally important facts which his earlier work called to public
attention — knowledge of which is essential to an understanding of the war — and
then shows why it is that the United States, for its own protection as well as for
righteousness' sake, must throw its full weight into the conflict and must never turn
back until Germany and Austria-Hungary have been brought to their knees. More
specifically, he shows that there can be no peace in the world so long as Germany
is allowed to keep in subjugation the Slavs, Czechs, Poles, Roumanians and Italians
whose misfortune it is to live within the Austrian Empire, and that the people of
that Empire, which is Germany's base for her Berlin-Bagdad-World-Dominion
programme, must, for the world's preservation, be set free. H.

A Crusader of France, by Captain Ferdinand Belmont, with an Introduction
by Henri Bordeaux, is the English translation of Lettres d'un officier de Chas-
seurs Alpins. It is published by E. P. Dutton & Co., at $1.50, and is one of the
best books written about the war. The author, who was killed in action in 1915,
was a deeply religious man. But he was also by nature a poet and a philosopher.
His letters give a moving and illuminating picture of his own inner development,
as the war beat upon him and as he re-acted to its tremendous claims. He attained
an astonishing detachment, but, as M. Bordeaux says, warmed and purified it "in
the flame of charity and divine love." "He himself had gradually loosened the
bonds which held him to the earth, and when God called him, He found him free."

H.

Meditations Dans La Tranchee, by Lieutenant Antoine Redier, may be remem-
bered by readers of the QUARTERLY as having been referred to, more than once, in
the "Screen of Time." It has now been translated into English and is published
by Doubleday, Page and Company, under the title Comrades in Courage, price
$1.40. It is an admirable and most interesting record, not only of the growth
of a human soul but of the broadening and deepening of a human intellect as the
result of life in the trenches.

There is much in it that will be displeasing to Socialists, Bolsheviki, and people
with similar obsessions ; because the author has come face to face with the facts of
life, and is honest enough to recognize the lessons which such facts instil. H.

QUESTIONS

ANSWERS

QUESTION No. 220. — What can we learn from the Great War about Karma
and its workings?

ANSWER. — As Karma is the working of inner things out to the surface, we
might think of this war as the working out to the surface of all that the different
nations have been building into their national character. And as the nation is
made up of individuals, it would appear that the small everyday choices which
determine the character of the individual, must have been potent in ranging the
nations, some on the side of the White Powers, some under the control of the
Black Forces, the powers that make for Evil. Can those who regard Karma as
absolute compassion, as an expression of love, mercy, and "poetic justice," recon-
cile this view with the position in which the Central Powers are now placed? One
answer might be that mercy would be exemplified by making conditions such that
the impurities within those nations and their peoples might be allowed to work out
(no matter what form that took) instead of being allowed to stay within their
natures, thereby producing corruption and death. Would it be their good or their
bad Karma that lead them into such a plight? In that question we have the state-
ment of one of the paradoxes surrounding this whole law of Karma ; from the
point of view of Higher Manas whatever made for purification would seem to be
good, no matter what the pain or the loss ; from the point of view of Lower Manas
the opposite conclusion might be reached.

We have been told that in order to understand the War it is necessary to look
at it as one moment in that everlasting conflict between Good and Evil that must
endure until the whole world is redeemed ; it is waged ceaselessly in the inner
world, and occasionally externalized as at the present. In 1914, men were appar-
ently so convinced of everlasting peace that they had given themselves to fox-trot-
ting, speculation, and social reform; war was declared, and they were rudely
awakened from their dreams. As viewed by the Lords of Karma the only change
in th~ situation then must have been the extent to which men had become aware of
it ; to which they willed to enter into it.

What brought about the externalization of the war? We can only surmise
that under cyclic law the time had come when the Lords of Karma could risk
bringing the conflict to the surface — where man's active cooperation was demanded,
where his course might be temporarily decisive. It is interesting to speculate as to
the length of time by which their decision preceded the outbreak of hostilities. We
can image to ourselves the situation when the forces of Evil discovered that there
was to be open contest in this external world, which they must regard as peculiarly
their own domain ; we can see the devils exultantly seeking out their own in each
country, whispering into every attentive ear the false doctrine of Socialism, saying
in many different tongues, — "Lo, we are all brothers 1" We ask ourselves, was it
necessary that some nations should have been found to represent their cause?
Was Germany doomed, by its past Karma, to be their tool? What turned Eng-
land's wavering of early August, 1914, into a brave declaration for the right? It
was Russia's determination, in July, 1914, to mobilize her forces that was made
the ostensible occasion for the entry of Germany into the quarrel between Austria

386

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 387

and little Serbia — thus precipitating Europe into war. How does it happen that
Russia, then so determined, is now a great disintegrating mass, dangerous alike to
friend and foe? When Russia saw her duty clearly, our own country was deep
in the drugged sleep that looked like the sleep of death. How was it that this
country was finally aroused, in time to gain the chance to fight side by side with
the Heavenly Hosts? There is the once lordly kingdom of Spain, taking no part
in this contest. Is its present ease, its freedom from toil and suffering, the measure
of its past good Karma? Or might we venture the conclusion that the amount
which a nation is permitted to suffer for the Master's Cause is, as in the individual
case of Joan of Arc, a gauge of its worthiness rather than of its offences? What
quality has made the French the leaders in this warfare, and through what past
experience was that vision and that ardour gained? It has been hinted in the
QUARTERLY that France is the chosen land of the Master Christ? Might the
triumph of the cause to which she is so completely giving herself mean the estab-
lishment of His outward and visible kingdom upon the earth ? Would this mean the
externalization of a part of the spiritual Hierarchy? Is the cycle of the Adept
Kings to return?

There are endless questions that present themselves about the part played long
ages ago by the souls that now guide the destinies of the warring nations. How
did they then align themselves; how did they make the Karma which has placed
them where they are to-day? We may not lift that veil as yet, but as this conflict
advances we do see thrown into wonderfully vivid colouring that web of Karma's
weaving which "binds together men and nations in a pattern of marvelous beauty."
Intricate relations which are usually open only to the eyes of the spiritual powers
are by this conflict made clear for those who care to see. Indeed so much is now
forced to the surface, consequences follow so quickly and so unmistakeably on the
heels of action, that we should be wise to study and store up for use in future lives
the revelation of spiritual law now so openly made.

Take the case of Belgium, whose very name breathes honour. A few years
ago she stood calmly by, first conniving in and then sharing in, the unspeakable
cruelties which her mad king inflicted on the natives of the Congo. By what act
of "poetic justice'" was that Belgium galvanized into the Belgium of King Albert
and Cardinal Mercier? At which period in her history can we imagine that she
would seem richer, happier, more fortunate in the eyes of the Lords of Karma?

Where could we find a more vivid picture of rapidity of Karmic action than
in Russia? Hurried into war, lacking guns, ammunition, in fact everything save
men, that goes to the making of a great army, — how splendidly she fought and sacri-
ficed so long as she saw this as a contest to be waged for God and Czar and home 1
Then we see the idealists listening to voices that bade them centre their efforts at
home, and seize this time of confusion to right the governmental wrongs that their
people had suffered. They probably did not see this as treachery to their Allies,
but dreamed of the quiet and peaceful establishment of a better form of govern-
ment for Russia, while all eyes were fixed on the world war. So they raised the
old battle cry of "liberty, freedom and equality" which has never failed to make its
appeal to the baser passions of men — and shortly Russia was on fire ; Socialism
was rampant; then, so quickly did the fire run, Socialism was too conservative for
the masses who, forgetting everything except their greed, opened their gates
to Anarchy and the Bolsheviki — who at least dared to put into practice the theories
which Socialists the world over had proclaimed. In the name of the Brotherhood
of Socialism we hear them calling upon their German fellows not to advance upon
Russia, consistently exemplifying the principles of their common cause. It is
evident that this cry has been answered by an uneasy stirring in Germany, but the
German army's advance was not halted. Instead we have another object lesson on
the big screen of current history, showing again that the Brotherhood of the dark
powers, based upon selfishness and aggression, holds firm only when it is to the

388 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

separate advantage of each participant that it should ; only when no sacrifice of one
for the others is demanded. Already there are signs that the Socialists of America
are questioning the position of their brothers in Germany, charging them with being
untrue to the cause of Socialism, although to us it might seem that German Social-
ists were showing out consistently the evil wishing on which their theory of govern-
ment is based. Is it possible that the contrast between true and false Brotherhood
may yet be made so plain on the steppes of Russia that all the right-minded, true-
hearted people of every nation may be rallied in conscious recognition of the issues
really at stake in this episode of the great spiritual war — may finally, and deliber-
ately take their places under the banner of the Master for the external conquest of
this world, for the establishment of His kingdom, outwardly a part of the Kingdom
of the Heavens?

Several writers in the THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY have declared that the Theo-
sophical Movement has in this century accomplished what it has never been possible
to do before — that the impetus brought by the Lodge Messenger in the last quarter
of the 19th century has been carried over the turn of the century. This would
imply that in maintaining outer connection with the White Lodge the Theosophical
Movement must also have attracted the special notice of the Black Lodge ; seeds of
evil, lying dormant in men's hearts, must have been quickened by the same outpour-
ing of force that has quickened the seeds of aspiration and devotion. In some
sense, therefore, we might find warrant for saying that it has been the Karma of
the Theosophical Movement to bring into the world this greatest of all world wars.

C. H.

QUESTION No. 221. — // all true religion is based upon theosophical principles,
why is it that the church (or some church) does not formally acknowledge and
teach Theosophy, and be the center of all theosophic thought, instead of the Theo-
sophical Society?

ANSWER. — The form of this question would be improved by the omission of its
first word, "if"; because the hypothesis, suggested by the "if," is not a hypothesis
at all, but solid fact. Why then do not the Churches make themselves centres of
the Theosophical teaching? Because the Churches, to their great loss, in most
cases, shake upon the sands of conjecture and speculation instead of standing firm
upon the rock of Truth.

The Theosophical Society is a small piece of leaven working silently and hidden.
In time, through the work of the T. S. the Churches will become centres of Theo-
sophical teaching. The T. S. may then be able to disband, possibly.

C. D.

ANSWER. — Theosophy is not a body of dogmas. It means "divine wisdom," and
is "practically a method, intellectually an attitude, ethically a spirit, and religiously a
life." If every truth ever enunciated at the meetings of the Thesophical Society were
to be formally acknowleged and taught by the churches there would be no less need
for the Society. As a sphere cannot be mapped on a flat surface without distortion
so Truth cannot be cramped into formulas and dogmas, nor can it be contained in
any one mind. Each man sees from his own angle his own little piece. For any-
thing approximating a true view, the synthesis of many minds and many view-
points is required. The Theosophical Society has no dogmas and by its constitution
can have none. It is and must be kept a free platform where opportunity is given
for such a synthesis. It is "a missionary organization for the conversion of men
to their own ideals." It makes the Buddhist a better Buddhist and the Christian a
better Christian. It does not seek to make the Buddhist a Christian, or the Chris-
tion a Buddhist.

Two travelers start for New York, the one from Washington, the other from
Albany. Their goal is the same yet the one goes north and the other south and
both are right. The Theosophical Society would have each man follow his own

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 389

highest light, that "dim star that burns within" till it leads him to his own Master
and his own immortality.

ANSWER. — Theosophy and the Theosophical Society, by H. B. Mitchell, obtain-
able from the Quarterly Book Department, contains the answer to this question and
much else of great value.

ANSWER. — A house rests on one foundation, but each room may be different.
For convenience, each room will be different in arrangement, furnishings and even
decoration. For any church to assume the position of the T. S. would it not have
to include all churches? Would there not result a distinct loss, in the failure to
give racial, and even individual, expression. I try to be a follower of Christ,
because I belong in the West. Had Karma made me an East Indian perhaps I
should use the room in the mansion dedicated to Gautama Buddha. But whichever
church I belong to, I may still be a loyal F. T. S. Is the mass ready to take this
position? Would not an Army lose if regimental pride were wiped out? Yet all
soldiers are loyal to the Army.

G. WOODBRJDGE.

ANSWER. — Has any church ever avoided dogma? Is there any church that is
not an organization with some form of discipline or rule? These questions may
suggest answers to this question. Holmes, in either the Creed of Christ or the
Creed of Buddha (books well worth reading, by the way), points out that the Soul
being infinite cannot be limited ; hence cannot be defined, and, therefore, cannot
be proved, but, once cognized, ratiocination will then work and strengthen faith.
A church must insist on the existence of the soul as a matter of dogma — there
would be no other basis for its discipline or rule. The T. S. insists only on toler-
ance— unflinching, never-failing tolerance. P.

ANSWER. — Study of the teachings of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in comparison
with the teaching of the Lord Siddartha, or the Lord Krishna, seems to develop
a marked similarity; yet there is not duplication. There appears to be a drawing
upon a common source of teaching ; yet there is not identity of expression ; nor
of application. Each Great Teacher seems to have recognized a different phase of
understanding in the multitudes addressed, however close may be the inner Teach-
ing to disciple, chela or lanoo. Would a typical citizen of Chicago enjoy the same
form of worship ; the same angle of truth, that would suit a typical resident of
Benares or Hyderabad? Could a church face these differences without weakening
its position? Is not a church an organization of people of similar tastes? Is not
Theosophy what Professor Mitchell calls it in "Theosophy and the Theosophical
Society" (which the inquirer might well write for to the Book Department)?
Could a church so extend its limits? Could a church rest on so universal a plat-
form— and have any strength of organization left? S.

390 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

NOTICE OF CONVENTION

To THE BRANCHES OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY:

1. The Annual Convention of The Theosophical Society will be
held at 21 Macdougal Alley, New York, on Saturday, April 27, 1918,
beginning at 10.30 a. m.

2. Branches unable to send delegates to the Convention are earnestly
requested to send proxies. These may be made out to the Assistant
Secretary, Miss Isabel E. Perkins, 349 West 14th Street, New York;
or to any officer or member of the Society who is resident in New York
or is to attend the Convention. These proxies should state the number
of members in good standing in the Branch.

3. Members-at-large are invited to attend the Convention sessions;
and all Branch members, whether delegates or not, will be welcome.

4. Following the custom of former years, the sessions of the Con-
vention will begin at 10.30 a. m. and 2.30 p. m. At 8.30 p. m. there will
be a regular meeting of the New York Branch of the T. S., to which
delegates and visitors (members and non-members) are cordially invited.
On Sunday, April 28th, at 3.30 p. m., there will be a public address at
the Little Thimble Theatre, northwest corner, 8th Street and Fifth Avenue,
open to all who are interested in Theosophy. The regular Notice of the
Convention, sent to the Branches in February, was in error in stating that
this lecture would be at the Hotel St. Denis, which is no longer available.

ADA GREGG,
Secretary, The Theosophical Society.

159 Warren Street, Brooklyn, N. Y.
February 28, 1918.

INDEX TO VOLUME XV 391

INDEX TO VOLUME XV

PAGE
Alsace and Lorraine ; Acton Griscotn 244, 320

Bakti Sutras of Narada, The 346

C.A.G 62, 188, 286, 379

Cave 11,115

Checkering, Julia 259

Clark, C.C 14, 116

Crusades, The ; Julia Chickering 259

Cyclic Law in Art ; C. C. Clark 116

Don't Blame Me ; U. G 138

EASTERN AND WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY ;C.J 23, 128, 265, 336

ELEMENTARY ARTICLE ; C. A. G 62, 188, 286, 379

Farmer, Mercy 151

FRAGMENTS; Cave 11, 115

FROM THE HIGHLANDS OF LEMURIA ; C. J 36, 164, 235, 357

Griscom, Acton 244, 320

H.B.M 360

Heart of France, The ; C. C. Clark ^ 14

Hearts of Men, The ; G. McClemm 32

Higher and Lower Nature ; C. A. G 286

/ 172

Johnston, Charles 23, 36, 128, 164, 235, 265, 336, 357

Lesson of the Garbage Pail, The ; Servetus 348

LODGE DIALOGUES 304

McClemm, G 32

Mitchell, J. F. B 140

Montague, Spencer 210, 306

M. 304

Need for Self-Examination, The ; C. A. G 379

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

Theosophy and War

The Peace Message of Benedict XV J

The Karma of the Russians 20]

The Lights and Shadows of Theosophy 297

ON THE SCREEN OF TIME:

The Causes and Conduct of the War.

Introduction: Part I. Causes of the War 44

Part II. Conduct of the War. . . . 178, 273, 369

392 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Paracelsus ; J. F. B. Mitchell 140

Parenthood and Dicipleship ; Mercy Farmer 151

Preparedness ; 7 172

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 70, 195, 293, 386

Recollection and Detachment ; C. A. G 62, 188

RELIGIOUS ORDERS, THE ; Spencer Montague 210, 306

REVIEWS :

Comrades in Courage ; Lieutenant Antoine Redier 385

Crusader of France, A ; Captain Ferdinand Belmont 385

Egotism in German Philosophy ; George Santayana 290

Fruits of Silence, The ; Cyril Hepher 383

God the Invisible King ; H. G. Wells 67

Is God Dead ? Newman Floary 67

Heliotropium, or Conformity of the Human Will to the Divine

Will, The ; Jeremias Drexelius 193

Inner Life, The ; Rufus M. Jones 66

United States and Pan-Germania, The; Andre Cheredame . . . . 385

Vision Splendid, The ; John Oxenham 385

Work of the Masters, The ; C. Lasenby 382

Servetus 348

T 44, 178, 273, 369

Two Questions 360

T. S. Activities 73, 199, 390

U. G 138

Why I Joined the Theosophical Society 169, 224, 314

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