Let us pass from the world of religious thought, and pause for a moment on the world of artistic thought. Now to Art, perhaps more than in any other department of the human intelligence, the ideal is necessary for life. All men have wondered from time to time why the architecture—to take one case only—why the architecture of the past is so much more wonderful, so much more beautiful, than the architecture of the present. When you want to build some great national building to-day you have to go back to Greece, or Rome, or the Middle Ages for your model. Why is it that you have no new architecture, expressive of your own time, as that was expressive of the past? The severe order of Egypt found its expression in the mighty temples of Karnak; the beauty and lucidity of Grecian thought bodied itself out in the chaste and simple splendor of Grecian buildings; the sternness of Roman law found its ideal expression in those wondrous buildings whose ruins still survive in Rome; the faith of the Middle Ages found its expression in the upward-springing arch of Gothic architecture, and the exquisite tracery of the ornamented building. But if you go into the Gothic cathedral, what do you find there? That not alone in wondrous arch and splendid pillar, upspringing in its delicate and slender strength from pavement to roof, not there only did the art of the builder find its expression. Go round to any out-of-the-way corner, or climb the roof of those great buildings, and you will find in unnoticed places, in hidden corners, the love of the artist bodying itself forth in delicate tracery, in stone that lives. Men carved for love, not only for fame; men carved for beauty's sake, not only for money; and they built perfectly because they had love and faith, the two divine builders, and embodied both in deathless stone. Before you can be more than copyists you must find your modern ideal, and when you have found it you can build buildings that will defy time. But you have not found it yet; the artist amongst us is too much of a copyist, and too little of an inspirer and a prophet. We do not want the painter only to paint for us the things our own eyes can see. We want the artist eye to see more than the common eye, and to embody what he sees in beauty for the instruction of our blinded sight. We do not want accurate pictures of cabbages and turnips and objects of that sort. However cleverly done, they remain cabbages and turnips still. The man who could paint for us the thought that makes the cabbage, he would be the artist, the man who knows the Life. And so for our new Art we must have a splendid ideal. Do you want to know how low Art may sink when materialism triumphs and vulgarises and degrades? Then see that exhibition of French pictures that was placed in Bond Street some years ago, which attracted those who loved indecency more than those who loved the beautiful, and then you will understand how Art perishes where the breath of the ideal does not inspire and keep alive. And Theosophy to the artist would bring back that ancient reverence which regards the artist of the Beautiful as one of the chief God-revealers to the race of which he is a portion; which sees in the great musical artist, or the sculptor, or the painter, a God-inspired man, bringing down the grace of heaven to illuminate the dull grey planes of earth. The artists should be the prophets of our time, the revealers of the Divine smothered under the material; and were they this, they would be regarded with love and with reverence; for true art needs reverence for its growing, and the artist, of all men—subtle, responsive, sensitive to everything that touches him—needs an atmosphere of love and reverence that he may flower into his highest power, and show the world some glimpse of the Beauty which is God.

And the world of science—perhaps there, after the world of religion, Theosophy has most of value to offer. Take Psychology. What a confusion; what a mass of facts want arrangement; what a chaos of facts out of which no cosmos is built! Theosophy, by its clear and accurate definition of man, of the relation of consciousness to its bodies, of Spirit to its vehicles, arranges into order that vast mass of facts with which psychology is struggling now. It takes into that wonderful "unconscious" or "sub-conscious"—which is now, as it were, the answer to every riddle; but it is not understood—it takes into that the light of direct investigation; divides the "unconscious" which comes from the past from that which is the presage of the future, separates out the inheritance of our long past ancestry which remains as the "sub-conscious" in us; points to the higher "super-conscious," not "sub-conscious," of which the genius is the testimony at the present time; shows that human consciousness transcends the brain; proves that human consciousness is in touch with worlds beyond the physical; and makes sure and certain the hope expressed by science, that it is possible that that which is now unconscious shall become conscious, and that man shall find himself in touch with a universe and not only in touch with one limited world. That which Myers sometimes spoke of as the "cosmic consciousness," as against our own limited consciousness, is a profound truth, and carries with it the prophecy of man's future greatness. Just as the fish is limited to the water, as the bird is limited to the air, so man has been limited to the physical body, and has dreamed he had no touch with other spaces, to which he really belongs. But your consciousness is living in three worlds, and not in one, is touching mightier possibilities, is beginning to contact subtler phenomena; and all the traces of that are found in your newest psychology, and are simply proofs of those many theories about man which Theosophy has been teaching in the world for many a century, nay, for many a millennium.

And physics and chemistry is there anything of value along Theosophical lines of thought and investigation, which might aid our physicists and our chemists, puzzled at the subtlety of the forces with which they have to deal? Has it never struck some of the more intuitive physicists and materialists that there may be subtler senses which may be used for investigation of the subtler forces? That man may have in himself senses by the evolution of which he will able to pierce the secrets that now he is striving vainly to unveil? Has it never even struck a physicist or a chemist that, if he does not believe in the possibility of himself developing those subtler forces, he might utilise them in others in order to prosecute further his own investigations? They are beginning to to do that in France. They are beginning to now try to use those whom they call "lucid"; that is, people who see with eyes keener than the physical; they are beginning to use those in medicine, are using them for the diagnosis of disease, are using them for the testing of the sensitiveness of man, are beginning to use them to try to discover if man has any body subtler than the physical. And while I would not say to the scientific man: "Accept our theories," I would say to him: "Take them as hypotheses by which you may direct your further experiments, and you may go on and make discoveries more rapidly than you can at the present time." For there is many a clairvoyant who, put before a piece of some elemental substance, could describe it very much better than is done by your fractional analysis. And along other lines—chemical and electrical—surely there is something a little unsatisfactory, when a few years ago men told us that the atom was composed literally of myriads of particles, and during the last year it has been suggested that perhaps one particle is all of which an atom is composed. Might it not be wise to try to get hold of your atoms by sight keener than the physical, as it is possible to do, whether by the ordinary clairvoyant who is sometimes developed up to that point, or by an untrained sensitive whose senses are set free from the limitations of the physical brain, and from that sensitive try to gather something of the composition of matter which may guide you in your more scientific search? I realise that what one, or two, or twenty people see, is no proof for the scientific man; but it may give a hint whereby mathematical deductions may be made, and calculations which otherwise would not be thought of. So that I only suggest the utilising by science of certain powers that are now available, keener than those of the ordinary senses—a new sort of human microscope or human telescope—whereby you may pierce to the larger or the smaller, beyond the reach of your physical microscopes and telescopes, made of metal and not of intelligence showing itself in matter.

Is there anything of value in Theosophical ideas, shall I say to the science of medicine? Some say it is not yet a science, but works empirically only. There is some truth in that; but are there not here again lines of investigation which the physician might well study? For instance, the power of thought over the human body, all that mass of facts on which partly is built up such a science as Mental Healing, or what is called Faith Cure, and so on. Do you think that these things have been going on for hundreds of years, and that there is no truth lying behind them? "The effects of imagination," you say. But what is imagination? It does not matter of what it is the effect, if it brings cure where before there was disease. If you put into a man's body a drug that you do not understand, and find that it cures a disease and relieves a pain, will you throw the drug aside because you do not understand it? And why do you throw the power of imagination aside because you cannot weigh it in your balance, nor find that it depresses one scale more than the other? Imagination is one of the subtlest powers of thought: imagination is one of the strongest powers that the doctor might utilise when his drugs fail him and his old methods no longer serve his purpose. Suggestion, the power of thought. Why, there are records of cases where suggestion has killed! That which has killed can also cure, and man's body being only a product of thought, built up through the ages, answers more rapidly to its creator than it does to clumsier products from the mineral and vegetable kingdoms. Here again I only ask experiment. You know that you can produce wounds upon the body of the hypnotised patient, in a state of trance. By suggestion lesions are made, burns are caused, inflammation and pain appear by the mere suggestion of a wound. A blister is placed on a patient and forbidden to act; the skin is untouched when the blister is removed: a bit of wet paper is given by thought the qualities of the blister, and it will raise the skin, with all the accompaniments of the chemical blister. Now these things are known. You can see the pictures of wounds thus produced, if you will, in some of the Paris hospitals, for along this line the Frenchman is investigating further than the Englishman has done. And along that line also lies much of useful experiment to be brought to the relief of the diseases of humanity.

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

I pass from that to my last world, the world of political thought. Now Theosophy takes no part in party politics. It lays down the great principle of human Brotherhood, and bids its followers go out into the world and work on it—using their intelligence, their power of thought, to judge the value of every method which is proposed. And our general criticism on the politics of the moment would be that they are remedies, not preventions, and leave untouched the root out of which all the miseries grow. Looking sometimes at your party politics, it seems to me as though you were as children plucking flowers and sticking them into the sand and saying: "See what a beautiful garden I have made." And when you wake the next morning the flowers are dead, for there were no roots, but only rootless flowers. I know you must make remedies, but you should not stop at that. When you send out your Red Cross doctors and nurses to pick up the mutilated bodies that your science of war has maimed, they are doing noble work, and deserve our love and gratitude, for the wounded must be nursed; but the man who works for peace does more for the good of humanity than the Red Cross doctors and nurses. And so also in the political world. You cannot safely live "hand-to-mouth" in politics any more than in any other department of human life. But how many are there in the political parties who care for causes and not only for effects? That is the criticism we should make. We see everywhere Democracy spreading; but Democracy is on its trial, and unless it can evolve some method by which the wise shall rule, and not merely the weight of ignorant numbers, it will dig its own grave. So long as you leave your people ignorant they are not fit to rule. The schools should come before the vote, and knowledge before power. You are proud of your liberty; you boast of a practically universal suffrage—leaving out, of course, one half of humanity!—but taking your male suffrage as you have it, how many of the voters who go to the poll know the principles of political history, know anything of economics, know anything of all the knowledge which is wanted for the guiding of the ship of the State through troubled waters? You do not choose your captains out of people who know nothing of navigation; but you choose the makers of your rulers out of those who have not studied and do not know. That is not wise. I do not deny it is a necessary stage in the evolution of man. I know that the Spirit acts wisely, and guides the nations along roads in which lessons are to be learned; and I hope that out of the blunders, and the errors, and the crudities of present politics there will evolve a saner method, in which the wise of the nation will have power and guide its councils, and wisdom, not numbers, shall speak the decisive word.

Now there is one criticism of politics that we often hear in these days. It is said that behind politics lie economics. That is true. You may go on playing at politics for ever and ever; but if your economic foundation is rotten, no political remedies can build a happy and prosperous nation. But while I agree that behind politics lie economics, there is something that lies also behind economics, and of that I hear little said. Behind economics lies character, and without character you cannot build a free and a happy nation. A nation enormous in power, what do you know of the way in which your power is wielded in many a far-off land? How much do you know about your vast Indian Empire? How many of your voters going to the poll can give an intelligent answer to any question affecting that 300,000,000 of human beings whom you hold in your hand, and deal with as you will? There are responsibilities of Empire as well as pride in it, and pride of Empire is apt to founder when the responsibilities of Empire are ignored. And so the Theosophist is content to go to the root of the matter, and try to build up for you the citizens out of whom your future State is to be made. Education, real education, secular education, is now your cry. They tried secular education in France; they destroyed religious teaching; they tried to give morality without religion. But the moral lessons had no effect: they were too cold and dull, and dead. Is it not a scandal that in a country like this, where the vast majority are religious, you are quarrelling so much about the trifles that separate you, that the only way to peace seems to be to take religion out of the schools altogether, and train the children only in morality, allowing an insignificant minority to have its way? Why! we have done better than that in India, we Theosophists. Hindu Theosophists have founded there a College in which, despite all their sects and all their religious quarrels, they have found a common minimum of Hinduism on which their children can be trained in religion and morality alike. I grant it was a Theosophical inspiration that began the movement; but the whole mass of Hindus have fallen in with it, and are accepting the books as the basis of education. Government has recognised them, and has begun to introduce them for the use of Hindus in its own schools. That is the way in which we Theosophists work at politics. We go to the root to build character, and we know that noble characters will make a noble and also a prosperous nation. But you can no more make a nation of free men out of children untrained in duty and in righteousness, than you can build a house that will stand if you use ill-baked bricks and rotten timber. Our keynote in politics is Brotherhood. That worked out into life will give you the nation that you want.

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

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



Part IV

The Field of Work of the Theosophical Society

The Presidential Address delivered to the Convention of the British Section of the Theosophical Society, held in Essex Hall, London, 7th July 1907.



The Field of Work of the Theosophical Society.

It is my duty now to bring to a close this Convention, and to bid you all farewell, to scatter to your various places and to do, let us hope, with fresh courage and deeper knowledge, the varied works which you are called upon to perform. And let me, before I take up the subject upon which I am to speak—"The Field of Work of the Theosophical Society"—let me, ere beginning that subject, say one word of gratitude to her without whom the Theosophical Society could not till any field, nor sow any seed—to H.P.B., our Teacher and our Helper, let us offer our heart's gratitude; for without her we could not have met together, without her we could not have learned the Theosophical teaching. It may be that many of us have learned much since she first taught us, but she was the first Teacher, and the Bringer of the Light. It may be that some, since they met her, have known their Master face to face; but it was she who led them to His presence, she to whom the possibility in this life was due. It may well be that had she not come some other might have come to do the work, but that matters not to us; that she did it is her claim to our homage, and we, who live in the light she brought, may well pay tribute of gratitude to her.

What is the Field of our Society's work? It is sketched in our Three Objects; and those of you who have looked upon the Objects with care, in the various recensions through which they have passed, may have noticed that each one of them covers one of the aspects of human consciousness. In the first, that which declares the truth of the Universal Brotherhood, we have the field of work of the Activity aspect, the active principle of the consciousness, of the Spirit, which seeks expression in service to the race. In the second, the study of the religions and the philosophies of the world, we have the field of work for the Cognition aspect of consciousness, that which gathers together the fruit of knowledge; it is the Knower gathering the food by which he unfolds his powers. And in the third we have the field of work of the Will, the Power aspect of the consciousness, the deepest root of our being, that by which the worlds exist, as they are supported by the Wisdom, as they are created by the Activity. So that when we thus look at the objects of the Society and realise the relation that they bear to our conscious selves, we see that the field of the work of the Theosophical Society is wide as the world, and knows no limit where Will and Knowledge and Activity can make their way. And it is true, now and always, that everything which helps and benefits man is Theosophical work, and that nothing can be excluded from the sphere of our work which includes every aspect of consciousness. So let us take this natural, this scientific division of our work, and see what we may do in each field which offers itself to the appropriate power in our nature.

The first will naturally cover all active working for humanity, all service which one can offer to another; and it will be well, in the days that lie before us, if we realise that there is no scheme for human helping, no possible effort for human uplifting, which is outside the field of work of the First Object of our Society. Every Lodge of the Society should make it one of its activities to serve humanity in the place where the Lodge is founded; and the value of the Lodge should be in the knowledge that is there gathered with the object of spreading it. For Theosophy should be your touch-stone as to the value of every scheme, as to the tendency of every proposition. In all the countless schemes around us in these active times, some work only for the moment; others, based on sound principle, are preparing the world for a better and happier future. By your Theosophical knowledge you can judge the value of every such scheme, and throw yourselves into those alone which work on lines beneficial to the future, which are laying the foundations of a civilisation greater than our own. For among the many schemes and many methods there are ways in which each man inspired by the Spirit of Brotherhood may find work that satisfies his reason and is justified by his conscience. And there is no one particular method, no one special road, along which the Society, as Society, can go. It lays down the principle of Brotherhood as an active working spirit in the life of every member, and then it leaves the member free to use his own judgment and his own conscience as to which among the many methods recommends itself most to him as an individual. So that in speaking of that field of work, it is not for me to say: "This plan, that method, the other means, that is what you ought to follow"; but only that you are not carrying out the First Object of the Society, unless you are engaging your activity in some task which in your intelligence and conscience is working for the benefit of your fellow-men. That is a point I want to put to your Lodges; for when I see questions discussed as to giving new life to Lodges, vivifying Lodges, and so on, I know well that the only cause for the need of such discussion is because men allow the life to stagnate within the Lodge, instead of sending it forth a living stream to fertilise the place in which the Lodge is built. There would be no lack of life were it not that you keep it bottled up for your own advantage, for your own needs. The source of life is inexhaustible, and it only ceases to flow where there is stagnation, because it is not allowed to run out to the people who have need of it, but is kept within the narrow limits of a Lodge. If you worked as well as talked, if you labored as well as discussed, if you served as well as praised service, there would be no time and no need to discuss how the Lodges of the Theosophical Society shall be vivified.

Your Lodge should be your place of inspiration, the place where you learn how you are to serve, the place where you find the bread of life. But the bread of life is meant to feed the hungry, and not to surfeit those already filled, to feed the hungry crowds around you starving for knowledge, that life may be made intelligible and thus tolerable to them; and it is yours to feed the flock of the Great Shepherd, and to help those who, without this Wisdom, are helpless. And all need it; not the poor alone, nor the rich alone, but every child of man. For the one thing that presses upon all alike, the bitterness of life, is the sense of wrong, the want of intelligibility in life, and therefore a feeling of the lack of justice upon earth; that is the sting which pierces every heart; whether the heart belong to the rich or the poor, it matters not. When you understand life, life becomes bearable; and never till you understand it will it cease to be a burden grievous to be borne; but when you understand it, everything changes. When you realise its meaning, its value, you can put up with the difficulties. And our work with regard to those around us is to bring that knowledge, and by that knowledge to lift them to a place of peace. That is the work which demands to be done, and which your Lodges have the duty of doing. For there ought not to be one scheme for human helping, in any place where a Lodge of the Theosophical Society is established, where in that Lodge workers may not be found ready and eager to give labor to the helping of their brothers amongst whom they live. What is the use of prattling about Universal Brotherhood, if you do not live it? Sometimes, in discussions on Brotherhood, it is spoken of as though it only meant soft words and well-turned phrases, sentimentality and not reality. It means work, constant, steadfast, unwearied work, for those who require service at our hands; not soft words to each other, but work for the world, that is the true meaning of Brotherhood.

Pass from that to our next field of work, sketched out by our Second Object. Without that you cannot rightly work for Brotherhood, for you will not understand the knowledge already garnered. You must learn in order to teach, you must study in order to understand, and this Object is not carried on in our Lodges as effectively as it ought to be; for it is translated into one man studying, and pouring out the fruits of his study into the open mouths round him on every side. That is all very well in the beginning when the young bird comes out of the egg. It is necessary that the father and mother bird should pour food into the wide open beak; but some of you ought to have gone beyond that in the thirty-two years of life of the Society: you ought to be ready to help, and not only to be helped. And the life of the Society will not be healthy while so few are students, and therefore so few are fit to teach. Every Lodge should have its classes for study under this object. There are other ways in which you must learn as well as by the teaching of brother Theosophists, and there is a plan they are just adopting in the Paris Lodge for the work of the coming winter, which is a very good one; instead of Theosophists studying the books of scholars, and then giving out what they have learned, the French Lodge is inviting leading representatives of the various branches of thought, those specially interesting to us, in order that they may put their knowledge from their own standpoint, and that the Theosophist may have the advantage of listening to them at first hand. That seems to me a very admirable plan, and I know not why in some of the London Lodges you should not try to take a leaf out of our French neighbor's book, and why one Lodge at least should not try, if only for one six months, to bring to that Lodge some leader in the world of thought, who shall tell it what he believes, and explain the lines of his work. If you could persuade specialists along the many lines of study, religious and philosophical, to give you the fruits of their work, you would learn more rapidly, you would learn the spirit of a school in a more satisfactory manner, than when you are only studying books, and then giving out the books you have read. You value, and rightly value, the knowledge that Mr. Mead brings you along his special lines of study, but why should you not have that same advantage similarly from others who follow other lines of thought, and would speak similarly from first-hand knowledge? There is a life in it that there never is in second-hand knowledge, a vigor and strength in it that you can never get when it has only been learned second-hand, and then poured forth. Men who study deeply are glad to find audiences who are willing to listen to the results of their study, and who will give them glad hearing when they come out into the world from the study to tell what by labor and toil they have learned. And so I suggest that some of you should see whether you might not make your Lodges more valuable if, instead of always going round the same wheel of a few local lecturers, you tried to win to each locality now and again a really learned and well-trained man, and then, with your own Lodge as a nucleus of hearers, gather round them others also who would be only too glad of the opportunity that your Lodge would give in the place where it happens to be. You have Lodges in the suburbs, Lodges in the towns outside the area of London, and how glad many of these would be, if you made yourselves the channels for knowledge of that sort to be poured out amongst them. There is one line of work you might well take up, and the country Lodges might do the same, winning down from London now and again some thinker who would come and give the benefit of his study; and if you were known all over England as the places where such knowledge might be gained, and the bringers of such within the reach of your fellow-townsmen, the Society would profit by your labor as well as those who immediately benefit by the effort. And wherever you deal with the study of a religion, learn it from the lips of one who believes it rather than by the exposition of one who does not; for only so will you catch the spirit of the different religions. If you would learn about Roman Catholicism, win a Roman Catholic student or priest to come and tell you how his Church appeals to him; or if you want to learn about the Church of England, win some clergyman who will come and tell you what that Church means to him; or about Buddhism, win a Buddhist to come and tell you what his own religion is to him; and so with the Hindu, and on and on, all round the different religions. For none can really tell what a religion is to its followers who does not believe in it, and no one can give you its spirit who does not feel it. And it is in that way that your Theosophy should lead you into sympathy with every form of religious thought, learning it as it comes from the mouth of a believer, and not in the sort of warmed-up fashion in which one who does not believe it re-cooks it for his fellow Theosophists. There, it seems to me, is your field of work under the Second Object; and out of this study would grow literature, illuminating these various religions and philosophies, and from your classes should be evolved teachers, to carry to the different communities the results of their study on different lines, thus bringing the Second Object to the helping of the First.

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

Pass to the Third Object. There also we have work to do, and we cannot work for Brotherhood effectively without understanding the nature of man. And I feel that one or two who criticised the Society this afternoon on that point had the right to make the criticism that they did; for, while in the earlier days that Third Object was so carried out in the Society that it was the leader in the fields of all such research, it certainly now has fallen into the background, and is only a gleaner in the fields where others are reaping, and that is not right. The knowledge that you have in theory as to the constitution of man and nature, should be a guide to you in researches, and not simply remain theoretical knowledge. That which was said this afternoon about the Psychical Research Society is true. It goes into everything unusual with a prejudice against it, rather than with a feeling that there is something to be learned; but on the other hand, one is bound to say that during the last ten or twelve years that Society has done more to familiarise the public with these facts of the hidden powers of man than our own has done in practice, though we have done much more in theory. Now I am not in favor of much experiment preceding a study of theory; I believe that we need the theory in order to experiment wisely; but I also believe that having a true theory we should use it to guide our investigations, and thus to add to the knowledge of the world. A part of our work, it seems to me, that lies before us in the coming time, is to help the world to walk wisely along those roads of research on which it has entered now. You cannot prevent it going forward along them, knowledge is already too widely spread for that; but what you can do is to help men to walk wisely, and to avoid many a pitfall into which otherwise they would be very likely to fall. And along those lines there is very much to be done: plans to be worked out, methods of research to be planned and tested; and I hope before very long to see some groups in our Society that will take up this special line of work as part of their activities, and, headed by someone who knows practically something of that with which he is dealing, will then help the younger students to learn wisely and to experiment carefully. And in these matters it is well, so far as you can, to bring the more scientific members of the Society into touch with this work; for one of the reasons that Spiritualism fell into discredit for a time was because the scientific and the thoughtful abstained from it, and left it in the hands of the credulous and the unwise. The leaders of the scientific world who ought to have joined in the work which Sir William Crookes, Alfred Wallace, and others began, instead of following them and strengthening their hands, turned their backs on it all, leaving it to be carried on by those who knew far less than they, and who were not accustomed to accurate observation and careful recording of phenomena. Now leading scientific men are beginning to work at it. Along all lines of psychical research work should be done by us, if we do not mean to cancel the Third Object in our Society.

Thus, then, a great field of work opens out before us, so wide a field, so great, that you would have no need to ask for work if you would only begin to labor along these lines. And take that other line about which Mrs. Cooper Oakley spoke—the line of Historical Research into Mysticism. Has it ever struck you how much of the work of our forerunners remains unknown, because their work is not scanned by sympathetic eyes? How many of the pioneers in the past centuries lie under a heap of calumny, because none has tried to understand, none has tried to realise, the nature of their work? Men like Paracelsus, Cagliostro, and many another whose name I might mention, who are crying out, as it were, for research, and thought, and labor on mystical and occult lines. There again I have good hope that some really efficient work will be going on; for to my mind one of the purposes for which our Presidency should exist is to act as a centre round which every country may gather together, and thus communicate with each other, and form bodies scattered all over the world for mutual aid. The strength of our Society is in that unity of thought, which can only be brought about as one part of the Society realises that other parts are linked with it, as it ought to be, by the President of the whole. For the Presidency would be an idle show, if it is not to be a centre for inspiration and labor. The great work done by the late President is, as I have said elsewhere, practically complete; he has given the Theosophical Society an organisation by which it can work and live; ours to use the organisation that he made, ours to employ this splendid instrument which is now in our hands for world-wide labor and for world-wide helping. That is the work to which I would summon you now, and pray your help. Let us not stand apart one from the other, and work always along isolated lines; in addition to the isolated work, we should have the combined work; for many often can bring about a result which one cannot do. Take, for instance, the great libraries of Europe, far, far apart. It is very laborious for a person to travel all over Europe and labor alone in them all; but if we had students working in every great library, we should have feeders who would send in to a common centre the result of their work, which could then be shed over the world.

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

In this way, then, I would ask you to look at our great field of work. Laborers are wanted. There is more than work enough for all, and in this work the principle that must guide us is, as we have so often said, freedom of thought, freedom of expression. But let it be understood in the Society, for there is danger of this being forgotten, that there is freedom for those who assert as well as for those who deny; that all alike are free. Those who know have a right to speak, and there should be no outcry against them; those who do not believe have a right to say they do not believe, and there should be no outcry against them because they believe not But there is a danger lest those who believe not should think that they have the only right of speech, and that those who experience have no right to say out that which they know to be true. It is the danger which dogs the steps of Freethought everywhere. You can see it in France at the present time, where the Freethinker, smarting against the oppression of the Church, tries to silence the Church, as he has been silenced in the past; but it is a bad reaction, and we cannot have that within the Society—there must be liberty for all. I do not wish to impose my own beliefs on any man or woman in the Society, but I claim the right amongst you to speak the truth I know, and to bear witness to the reality of my Master whom for eighteen years I have served, without being attacked vehemently by those who deny my experience. I know whereof I speak. I ask you not to believe; that is your own choice. I ask you not to accept; that is for you to decide. But you have no right to try to stop my lips, nor to say that the assertion of my belief is outside the liberty allowed in the Theosophical Society. I, as President, will defend to the utmost the right of each to speak his thought—believers and non-believers of every type; but I will not recognise the right of any to impose upon the Society a dogma of unbelief, any more than a dogma of belief. Only by that liberty of all can we live and grow; only by the perfect freedom, and the recognition of every man's right to speak, no matter what he says, can the health of the Society be secured. For in the years that lie before us there is much new knowledge to be gained, many new facts to be discovered, many new experiences to go through, and we must not discourage the seekers and investigators by making it difficult for them to speak amongst us. We need every fact that any human being can bring to us. We have the right to challenge the fact and investigate it, and either to say: "It is fact"; or: "To me it is not fact"; but we have no right to say to any human being: "You shall not search nor speak," for that would be the death-knell of our liberty, that the denial of the foundation on which we stand.

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

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THE END