Part II Lectures to Theosophical Students

Lecture I The Sixth Sub-Race

I have chosen for the subject of my lecture to-night one which I think is important—the Sixth Sub-Race. Both outside and inside the Theosophical Society a certain amount of good-humoured ridicule has been cast on the way in which Theosophists talk about Races, Sub-Races, Root-Races, Cycles, Rounds, and so on, some people condemning such talk as exceedingly unpractical. Really that is not so. When our great teacher H. P. Blavatsky traced for us The Secret Doctrine, that wonderful panorama of the past evolution of the Races on our globe, she was not only giving us the story of the past, but also presenting us with the key to the future. And I propose to-night to try to show you how it is possible for the Theosophist who has carefully studied the principles underlying past evolution, to apply these to the evolution of the future, and so learn how he may best co-operate with the divine plan which is slowly working itself out. The advantage of Theosophical teaching is that it gives us a definite scheme into which the evolution of mankind, stage by stage, fits without difficulty and without blunder.

Now, if we think for a moment of what we call the larger and the smaller cycles, we can realise that the large scheme of the Races, the smaller scheme of the sub-races, and the evolution of man himself, all go along parallel lines. Understanding one, we can understand all. I will pause on the evolution of the Races, in order to remind you of the repetition, within the limit of each race, of the smaller sub-races. We need not go very far back. It will be enough to consider the Race that preceded our own, the great fourth Root Race, and our own. The fourth Root Race was the Atlantean. I only allude to it in order to remind you that from the midst of that race the Fifth Race, in its turn, arose. Now the choosing out of a new Race is the task of a particular Personage in the Occult Hierarchy, whose only name, so far as we know it, is that which has been borrowed from the Hindū, the Manu, the Man, or the Thinker, the ideal or typical man. The Manu forms in His own mind, after the master conception of the Planetary Logos, the plan of the man that is to be, which He will gradually realise along the lines of natural evolution. These laws of evolution are used by the Manu with scientific knowledge, and therefore with certainty. In the same way that a scientific breeder, dealing with the animal kingdom, can breed towards a desired type, so, on a higher plane, does the Manu of the Race mould by the same laws of evolution the physical form of the Race He desires to evolve. And always the type is formed in the matter of the higher planes before it is reproduced in the matter of the lower, the mental and emotional characteristics being first conceived, and then a physical body which will best express them. The Manu chooses the type according to the particular qualities which are to be evolved, which are marked out for Him by the basic plan of the constitution of man himself. Looking at your own nature, you have certain distinct departments: the physical body; the astral body; the mental body; the body of the higher mind, the causal; and then that of the pure, compassionate Reason, the buddhic. Now if we take those three types, the emotional, mental, and buddhic, we have the three with which we are immediately concerned. Desire, or emotion, was the great characteristic of the fourth Race. The mind was the slave of the lower feelings; that race had as its motive power the development of the desire nature. But in the sub-races of the fourth Race the other principles had also to be evolved, but to a very poor degree; and as time went on, the fifth sub-race of that began to develop the lower mind. Out of that fifth sub-race the selection of the Manu of the time was made, and He chose out certain families that He thought He could shape into the required type. The first choice was not successful, the people proving too stiff-necked and too little plastic to be moulded into the Race that was to be; but it left behind it, in the history of the world, that marvellously interesting people, the Hebrew, and that idea of being a “chosen people” survives even to this day. The second and successful selection had as its issue our own fifth Root Race. Now, side by side with the evolution of the sub-race, came the evolution of the Root Race which was to succeed, and that is why I have referred to the past. As the fifth sub-race of the fourth Root Race was developed, the beginnings of the fifth Root Race, the great Aryan Race, appeared one million years ago.

We can leave our fourth Race with its sub-races, having only regarded it for the purpose of throwing light on the present. The evolution of the fifth Race went on, and sub-race after sub-race was born. The earliest of all settled in Northern India, and gradually conquered that great peninsula, the first sub-race of the stock of the Aryans. There came out after that the second sub-race, which wandered westward, as all the later sub-races did; then came the third, the Irānian; then the fourth, the Keltic; and the fifth, the Teutonic. So far we have come in the history of the sub-races of our own fifth Root Race. Now, notice that these overlap each other as they develop. The first of these sub-races is still a mighty power in Asia, showing signs that its day is by no means done, and that the Indians, if they have behind them a civilisation of hundreds of thousands of years, have also before them a mighty future, the first signs of which are being seen in the India of to-day. Signs, some encouraging, some disturbing for a time, are being seen on every hand that new life is being poured into its veins, signs of the birth of a new Indian nation. Of the second sub-race we have not any nation at the present time. Along the Mediterranean Basin it has left many traces of its civilisation, which are being unburied by our archæologists; but so little mark, so to speak, did it leave on history that a large number of its wonders were deemed to be legends and myths. The next sub-race, the great Persian race, is almost outworn. The Persians of to-day have little in common with the Irānian of the past. The chief traces of them, in fact, are on the Indian continent, the Parsīs, a race which has dwindled and is gradually passing away. But when we come to the fourth sub-race, the Keltic, we see great possibilities in that still. It gave birth to the older Greece, the country of Beauty and Philosophy. It gave birth also to Rome, with her remarkable ruling powers. It spread over Europe, founding one nation after another from itself, and spreading into Ireland and Scotland, made there possibilities that have not yet all flowered into effect. In Ireland you have a strange mingling of the remains of the fourth Root Race with the fourth sub-race of the fifth; a great deal of the Atlantean influence still exists, many of the tutelary deities of Ireland, the gods of the mountains, being largely they who mingled with Atlantean life and thought, and are still exercising their potent influences over the younger though still ancient Keltic sub-race. There, again, we have great possibilities of revival and of growth, for the fourth sub-race and the sixth sub-race are necessarily interlinked. Just as the emotional nature stretches upwards and causes sympathetic action in the spiritual nature, so with the Races and sub-races that represent these principles upon earth; the fourth and the sixth Races, like the fourth and sixth sub-races, are closely intertwined. Ireland has not been kept apart for nothing; the separation between the Kelt and the Teuton is not without its meaning. We shall find among that Keltic people possibilities of spiritual power, and we may look possibly for some mighty influence to flow thence into the great Christian organisation of Rome, who is now on the balance as to whether she is to sink down along the line that the Papal Encyclical seems to trace for her and become the enemy of the Spirit of the Age, or whether the Modernist party in the Roman Church is to rise into power, purify and vivify that ancient Communion, and make her again what she ought to be, the Church of Saints, the type and symbol of the purest and loftiest form of Christian thought. It may be that Ireland will co-operate also in the great purification which I pray may come to the Roman Communion, and make its revival possible. And that is closely connected with the sixth Root Race, and therefore partly with the sixth sub-race.

Now, after the fourth sub-race came our own; and when we find that this fifth sub-race, the Teutonic, is carrying on so rapidly the development of the concrete and scientific mind, when we notice that it is beginning its last conquest, the conquest of the air, then, if we have learned the lesson of the past, we may learn to see the signs of the sub-race which is to succeed it. But these sub-races overlap each other, and it is at the moment of the zenith of the one that the next is born. Go back to the zenith of the fourth sub-race, when the fifth was beginning to develop, when Rome was mighty, then it was that the Goths in German forests were beginning to be born into Europe; and to draw together into tribes, which were to grow into nations. Quietly and silently the new sub-race was being born while its predecessor was reaching the highest point of the civilised world of its time. Slowly it began to develop its own peculiarities and powers, and from that day the Teutonic sub-race has grown stronger and stronger, more and more dominant, and, though a small minority compared with the population of the world, is dominating that world by the force of its scientific mind, spreading everywhere, and making itself the very crest of the advancing wave.

But let us turn away our eyes from the dazzling glow of the present to look for the quiet places where the birth of the future is beginning to appear. Just because the fifth sub-race is so strong and dominant, we look over the world for the beginnings of its successor, which shall rule the world not by the force of the concrete mind, but by the force of the pure and compassionate Reason, which will conquer not by power but by love, not by competition but by co-operation, and found, therefore, an Empire that will long endure. For it is true now as ever that “They that take the sword shall perish by the sword,” and the Empire that is to live will be the Empire that wins its way by love and benediction, that is a teacher and a defender, and not only a ruler. The sixth sub-race, the Coming Race, will be born with the sixth Root Race in it, which is to grow so much more slowly. The coming of the sixth sub-race you may almost begin to see around you. It is not to be born in a single place, not to belong to a single nation, for it is the type of humanity, of the unifying Wisdom, and out of all nations and all peoples and all tongues it will gather together its chosen for the new type of thought which is to be born. And what that type will be we can easily outline by thinking of the characteristics of the buddhic principle in man. What are those characteristics? First of all, union, and hence in the outer world co-operation. The very essence of all action in the sixth sub-race will be the union of many to achieve a single object, and not the dominance of one who compels others to his will. The work of the future will not be, “Do so-and-so and follow me,” but, “Let us advance together to a goal that we all realise as desirable of attainment.” If you are looking for the sign of anyone who is beginning to show the marks of that sixth sub-race to-day, you will find it in those who lead by love, sympathy, and comprehension, and not by dominance of an imperious will; for the qualities of that sub-race will be found scattered here and there through the sub-race which it is gradually to supplant. You may trace out the coming of the sixth sub-race in the scattered people found in our fifth sub-race, in whom tenderness is the mark of power. Anyone who desires to take part in the building of that race needs to develop now the power to work with others rather than against them, and so, by a continual common effort, to replace the spirit of antagonism and competition. It is a synthesising spirit which we shall find in the forerunners of our sixth sub-race—those who are able to unite diversity of opinion and of character, who are able to gather round them the most unlike elements and blend them into a common whole, who have that capacity for taking into themselves diversities and sending out again unities, and utilising the most different capacities, finding each its place, and welding all together into a strong whole. That is one of the characteristics which marks the type of being out of whom this sixth sub-race will gradually develop. A strongly marked characteristic will be compassion. That virtue is comparatively rare in the energetic, strongly individualised West. Compassion is that quality which is at once affected by the presence of weakness, answering to it with patience, with tenderness, and with protection. You may notice how very often amongst ourselves, taking the ordinary fifth sub-race type, the presence of weakness is provocative. It does not call out compassion, but impatience—very characteristic of the fifth sub-race. Quick to understand and grasp a fact, it is impatient with the weakness and mental dulness which cannot easily appreciate the differences which seem to it so clear. The typical fifth sub-race civilisation is a civilisation that sees in weakness a field to exploit, a thing to enslave, something to trample under foot, in order to rise on it, and not to help to exist for itself. “Inevitable,” you say, “in a bustling civilisation like this, that the weak should go to the wall.” I do not deny that it has been inevitable in the development of the strong individualism of the present. That individualism is a priceless result, cheaply bought even by the suffering it has caused. Without that strong individualism you would not have the foundation on which the great co-operative civilisation could be built. For you cannot synthesise weaknesses, and it was necessary to make the strong and patient individuality in order that you might have something to blend together into a harmony in the future that is yet to be born. It is a very shortsighted view of human nature which sees in the growth of a particular quality a thing which is wholly undesirable; for there is nothing which is wholly undesirable in the evolution which is guided by perfect Wisdom and perfect Love. The most unlovely product of the fifth sub-race civilisation will be one of the bricks that will be built into the foundation of the sixth sub-race and of the sixth Root Race. For out of the strong individuality the strong virtues can be built, and compassion is a virtue of the strong, and not of the weak. The feeble, sentimental sympathy that comes with the poor and undeveloped nature is not compassion. It has no power of healing in it, and no power of protection. The person who, seeing a suffering or wrong, or even a physical accident, goes into hysterics over it, is not the strong helper who heals and protects. It is not the skilful nurse who goes into hysterics over the agony of the patient in pain, leaving that patient to suffer while she is having the cheap luxury of sentimental tears. It is only out of the strong natures you can build up real compassion. The compassion which does not help is useless, and help can only be given where knowledge guides feeling, and understanding shapes the remedy. Hence out of these strong individualities, when their object has been changed and the greater Self has taken the place of the smaller self, out of those the sixth sub-race, which has pure Reason for its dominating principle, will gradually appear. When in yourselves you find the germs of compassion, and know that that is to be part of the dominating characteristic of the coming sub-race, then cherish these germs to the utmost. But remember that they must grow out of the germinal feeling of sympathy into the strong power to uplift and to save; for compassion is the great mark of the Saviour. And the Saviour is never weak, but strong, and out of his strength grows his compassion. You can test it for yourself. Having to deal with someone who is very slow, you are impatient. Why? Because you are weak. You are not strong enough to make a question clear with slow and deliberate intent, not strong enough to bear with the stupidity and feebleness.

The next great thing you want is the sense of unity, and that you can never have unless you are strong. There is nothing harder in the world than to pierce through a man’s weakness and his poor qualities, which are on the surface, and to see within the growing power of the God. Yet that is what you have to do if you would be truly wise. You see in the people around you to-day a large number of faults. How far do you see behind every fault the seed of divinity which will develop into a virtue? Has the old Platonic idea ever struck you, that there is no strong dividing line between the vice and virtue except the quantity which is present? The undeveloped virtue is a vice; the virtue in excess is also a vice. The golden mean between the two is the virtue. Take a common illustration—cowardice on one side, recklessness on the other. Courage is the mean between the two. And so in everything excess is vice, whether a defect or a surplusage, and the perfect equilibrium between them alone is virtue. If you would realise that for yourselves, wherever you see a vice in your neighbour, you will look through the vice to the virtue that shall be, and in the greatest faults of the present you learn to see the promise of the future. You find a person intolerant. He thinks you are a fool because you cannot see the same way as he. This is apt to wake in you a similar intolerance. But if you saw through the intolerance the growing though undeveloped love of virtue, if you saw through the intolerance the passionate desire to find the right and do it, the passionate hatred of all that does not seem right, you would be very patient; for presently the flower of the virtue will blossom out and show the beauty which all the time was within. You hear abuse, or slander, or calumny. You think it is hateful. But the person who is doing it in his ignorance is mistaken, and that is a reason for compassion, and not for anger. The more cruel the ignorance may make a person, the greater the demand for the compassion, which, because it understands all, overcomes all; nay, does not even overcome, because to overcome would mean separation; but realises the unity between oneself and another, and takes the weakness of another as one’s own. Now these things are well enough known in principle. Why not practise them? Why, in difficulties like those we have been passing through, should there be angry words on both sides? The Theosophist who understands has no room for anger, but only room for compassion. These are the things that in the sixth sub-race we shall want. All these must begin to grow now, and germinate in the heart of every one of you who would take part in the building of that coming sub-race. And hardest of all to develop, in a race where separateness has been the type of greatness, is the sense of unity. This sense of unity and of compassion will be a strength and power which is only one for service, which makes the measure of strength the measure of responsibility and of duty. And so your character will be marked—if you are a candidate for the sixth sub-race—will be marked by a great sense of duty, and a great indifference to what are called “rights.” There is a splendid word of Mazzini that “every right grows out of a duty discharged.” That is utterly true. It is the discharge of duty out of which inevitably the right grows, and then the right comes not by combat, but by the inevitable necessity of nature. Because where everyone discharges his duty, everyone enjoys his rights without conflict and without demand. The mark of our own sub-race is the demanding of our rights. But to those who know the law of karma there is nothing that need be claimed, because you possess all which is yours. The karma brings to you everything to which you have a right; and if what is called an injustice is done you, it is only the balancing up of an ancient wrong. You think people can hurt you. Then you do not believe in the law of karma. It is your own hand that strikes you, and no one else’s. No one can injure you or wrong you, no one can commit any injustice against you. The whole of that which you suffer comes out of your past. These people are mere puppets who come forward to claim the debt that you have to pay. If you really believed that, then the man who demands a debt from you would be your friend whom you would welcome; for karma’s debts are never demanded twice. There is no error in her account. But, as a matter of fact, hardly any of you believe it in actual life. What you profess does not make one scrap of difference. You do not believe unless you live what you say you believe. And if you believed it, you would know that no slander could wrong you, no injury hurt you, and that the words of the Christ on His way to His Passion were absolutely true: “You could do nothing at all against me except it were given you from above.” That is the secret of the patience of the Christs; they know the law, they live by it and accept it. And that utter belief in Law, and therefore the recognition of duty, that is another of the great marks of the race that is to be. Every one of you who works that out now in life, who, in face of an apparent wrong, is calm and receptive, who takes an injustice as a debt that is paid and cancelled, that man or woman is a candidate for the coming sub-race, and for the Root Race that shall be gathered out of its midst. For the sixth Root Race is to be taken out of the sixth sub-race that is now being born, and according to the qualities you make in yourselves will be the effectiveness of your candidature for both.

And now look at another side of that growing sub-race. I have laid most stress on qualities, because qualities shape form; but it is also true that the bodies of that sub-race will show a different type from the bodies of the present—will be far more sensitive to all the finer vibrations of matter, built up within the finer aggregations. And side by side with the development of the finer and more nervous physical body will be inevitably the greater organisation of the body that comes next, the astral, with its corresponding senses. Now notice how in the difference between the fourth and fifth Root Races it is the nervous system which is the greatest physical difference. Compare the nervous system of a Chinaman, or Japanese, with the nervous system of an Aryan, and you will see the enormous gulf that separates the two Races. A fourth Race man will recover easily from a tremendous laceration that would have killed a fifth Race man by mere nervous shock, and it is in your nervous system that there will be the great difference between the fifth and sixth Root Races, and the change will show in the sixth sub-race. You have to solve one of the hardest physical problems; to have a sensitive, delicate, complicated nervous system hand in hand with complete health. You can easily strain your system into sensitiveness, but that is different to refining it into sensitiveness, making it responsive to the most delicate vibrations from without, but with a perfect sanity and health. On that you can also work. By the deliberate use of meditation for the refining of the brain you can gradually build up—if you do not carry it to excess—an extreme sensitiveness, and at the same time perfect balance and sanity and health. You must not think that with fifth Race bodies you can bring about at once sixth Race characteristics; but within the limitations imposed upon you by your fifth Race bodies you can gradually develop an increasing sensitiveness which will react on the astral body, and organise and develop that at the same time. And you will find, if you will notice the people round you, that there are being born at the present time more and more children who show this delicate sensitiveness, hand in hand with generosity, with tenderness, with broadness of mind, with quick and keen intelligence. These are children who will gradually develop into the type of the new sub-race. When they become numerous, and become fathers and mothers in their turn, then they will gradually prepare for the birth of the children who will belong to the sixth Root Race. Within the one the other will be born. Hence all of you who are parents will do rightly and wisely to study carefully the characters and types of the children whom karma places in your hands for training. If you see in them the dawning powers of the coming sub-race, this greater sensitiveness, this tendency to see where many are blind, do not force it by unwise admiration, do not check it by equally unwise unbelief. Let the children of to-day grow up among the healthiest possible conditions, but also amongst the most refined that you can give them. Remember that in the training of the higher emotions beauty is an essential factor, and that without the bringing of beauty into home and daily life the birth and growth of the coming sub-race will be hindered. You have to war against the ugliness of the present-day civilisation. You have to strengthen the tendencies which are beginning to show themselves, and which make for beauty. You must realise that beauty is an essential part of utility; and that it is the most narrow-minded utility which thinks that beauty can be left on one side, and that the ugliness in daily life is not a retarding factor in the growth of the more refined sub-race that will partially take birth amongst us. These are very practical things. They deal with your daily life, with the home of every one of you, and the duties that fall upon you there. You must not let your Theosophy be outside your daily life. If Theosophy is to be the moulding force of the race that is to be born, it must show itself out in your lives, in your thought and action. It is the great privilege of the Theosophical Society to be the nucleus of that coming Root Race, and amongst our members there should be some at least ready to take part in the building of the sixth sub-race. You would not be amongst us if you had not had in you something to draw you along the lines of this swifter evolution. You hardly appreciate the forces of the past which have brought you into the Society. Some come in and drop out again. They are those who are coming in touch with it for the first time. Others come in and stay in for years, and then drop out. They are in a stage a little further on, and have been in it before, and will return to it in lives to come. There are some who, gripped by it from the beginning, never move again in their utter fealty to its ideals, whom no personalities can throw out of it, who belong to Theosophy rather than have Theosophy belonging to them. These are they who have been in it many a time before, and will come into it again, to live and die in it over and over again, life after life. Well for you who are here to-day that in the trials of the last few years you have not allowed personalities to blind you to principles, nor real or imaginary faults in persons to make you shrink in your loyalty to Theosophy itself. Persons die; principles live. Men and women pass away with their virtues and faults, but the Theosophical Society will endure generation after generation. Well for you if in the storm you have been able to stand firm; great the benediction that comes upon you that in the day of trial you have not denied your Master, in the day of suffering you have not forsaken and fled away.

Lecture II The Immediate Future

You may remember that when we last met I spoke to you about the sixth sub-race, and my speech this evening turns on the same set of ideas, although from a different standpoint, rather more special to the Society than to the world at large. In this lecture I am concerned rather with the view of the nature of the Theosophical Society which was held in its earliest days, dropped a little out of sight, and is now being very generally recalled, so that the Society should rise to the height of its opportunity and do the work that lies before it in the immediate future. If you will turn back to the days of H. P. Blavatsky in India you will find she was fond of dwelling on a particular relation held by two of the Masters, primarily to the Society, and secondarily to the coming civilisation of which the Society is the herald. She used to refer her Hindū friends to the statements in their own Purānas, in which it was said that two Kings would come at the end of the Age, and that to them would be given the kingdom of the new and opening Age. These statements, which are often repeated, raised in the hearers the inquiry, “Who are the two Kings?” and then she gave them a hint that the two Kings of the Purānas were the two Masters who were the real Founders of the Theosophical Society. That set the keen brains of the students to work. They promptly began to try and find out what were the names of the two Kings. One of these students found it, wrote a paper, which was published with H. P. Blavatsky’s approval, giving the names of the two Kings—Moru and Devāpi—two names mentioned in many of the Purānas in relation to the past history of the Hindūs, one of them, Moru, belonging to the Solar Dynasty, descending directly from Rāma, one of the Avatāras—that before Shrī Krshna—a great King, said to have retired from his throne and to have gone to Shamballa, there to wait until he was recalled to lead the human race; the other, whose name was given as Devāpi, was the elder brother of the famous King of the Lunar Dynasty, to which the next Avatāra belonged. He was the elder brother of the father of Bhīshma, and he similarly gave up his right to the crown, retired to the same place, and the same phrase is used with regard to him, that he was to wait there the coming age. Now H. P. Blavatsky was very much delighted at the ingenuity of her students, and said that the outline was correct, and it was published. H. P. Blavatsky often referred to this function of the two Masters who were responsible for the founding of the Society. As in these latter days that idea of the Masters as the Founders of the Society has been challenged, I may perhaps say I have myself seen that fact stated in the writing of the Master “M.” I have read the letter in which He says that He and His fellow Adept “K. H.” had taken on themselves the responsibility of a new spiritual movement in the world; that there was some doubt in the Lodge as to the wisdom of the movement at that time; and that they were allowed to take that step only on the condition that they should found and work the Society through others whom they could direct and control. Then He went on to say that He had chosen a disciple of his own, H. P. Blavatsky, and that He had sent her to America to look for another disciple, H. S. Olcott, and that these were the outer founders of the Society. Hence to me and to many others who believe that these letters are genuine the nature of the origin of the Society cannot be a matter of doubt.

Starting, then, from that standpoint, we find certain things were said by H. P. Blavatsky as regards the nature of the Society, and certain things by the Masters themselves. Both are very important for us in consideration of the immediate future. The first of these things was indicated by hints which the more advanced students could understand—that the inner purpose of the Society was to prepare the world for the coming of a new Race, and to be itself the nucleus of that Race; that one of the Teachers was to be the Manu of the race, the other the Bodhisattva. Now those exact facts were unpublished at the time, but they passed from one to the other among the more advanced students of that period. Coming into the Society in 1889, this particular fact did not come within my knowledge until 1895. After the Coulomb struggle the Society for a time dropped away from the occult path on which H. P. Blavatsky had started it, and these ideas fell out of sight and were forgotten except by a limited number. In 1895 they were re-communicated to myself by my own Master, and have since been passed on to the older members of the Theosophical Society.

Let us pause for a moment on the statement with regard to the Manu and Bodhisattva. Every Root Race has for its guide a great Adept, much higher than the great ones we call the Masters, and that office filled by a mighty Being is an office the name of which indicates simply the man, the thinker. The connotation is the ideal, typical man, making rather the emphasis on the article “the.” The name is peculiarly suitable, because each of these Manus at the head of the Root Race is the type of the Race over which he is to preside. The types of the seven Races are part of the plan of the Planetary Logos, and that plan is worked out, stage after stage, by the Manus of the races. It is left to the Manu Himself how He shall proceed with His work. He takes the responsibility of the method He chooses. When the time comes to plan out the new Race, then the coming Manu begins to take up His office, and always in connection with another great Brother of His own rank, who is called the Bodhisattva. The Manu of the Fifth Race, as you know, collected His people together out of the fifth sub-race of the Fourth Root Race, sent out messengers to call them together, brought them together, moulded them generation after generation, and at last evolved them to the necessary physical type. For the work of the Manu is double: to choose out those who show in consciousness the germs of the new stage which is to evolve in the coming Race; then, having chosen them out and stimulated that germ within them, to set to work to shape the necessary bodies. Now in that far-off time our own Manu of the fifth Root Race had to choose materials out of the fifth sub-race, and He did not choose at all those who were regarded as the best specimens of the day. Remember that the fourth sub-race, like the fourth Root Race as a whole, showed out very powerfully all the passional characteristics and the psychic qualities which accompanied them. It was the fourth sub-race, the Toltec, which made the great Empire, with the city of the Golden Gate as metropolis, that whose armies spread over the known world, conquering everywhere, and in that sub-race psychic qualities naturally played a great part. You will remember that at the earlier stage of great emotional and passional manifestation, psychic qualities are very largely developed before the development of the lower mind. That evolution belongs to the astral body as a whole, working not through the astral chakras, but through the astral centres connected with our physical senses. The fourth sub-race carried all that to the highest point. Children in the schools were picked out for their paths in life by clairvoyance; and in all matters of policy, statecraft, etc., clairvoyants were consulted, so that by the exercise of the psychic qualities they might get the best possible knowledge to be had at the time. Now the characteristics of the fifth sub-race were the diminution of psychic power and the germinating of the seed of mind, and these two things necessarily went together, so that, as that fifth sub-race developed, the people of it were rather looked down upon by the highly evolved psychic sub-race which preceded it. These people seemed to be inferior; they could not use the powers which put their predecessors in the very forefront of civilisation, and made this world and the astral world almost one and the same. The children born with very little of these psychic powers, the men and women who showed still less of it, were by no means thought to have within them the promise of the future. Yet out of these the Manu chose His material, because they showed the germ of the mind which was specially wanted as the characteristic of the coming Race. It did not matter that it was only a germ, or that they were much less effective than the people of the mighty civilisation in which they appeared. He was looking to the future, and so these people were by no means the people whom the Atlanteans of the day would have chosen if consulted in the matter. But the great people do not always consult with the smaller people, who are so very sure of the rightness of their own judgment. They have an uncomfortable way of following their own ideas; and, as the Master “M” once said of some people who remarked that He did not come up to their idea of an Adept, “The mark of the Adept is not kept at Simla.” And that sentence is rather a good one to remember. So also the mark of the disciple is not kept in London or in Chicago, but in a very different part of the world, and to that those who know something about it try to conform. So the choice of the Manu of the day would have been regarded as a very poor one by the wise folk of the time. Nevertheless he carried away his people and built them up into a great Race.

Now there is something very instructive in that when we try to understand the method of His choice in the light of the past, and the analogy of principles. For we can see that if the germs of a sixth sub-race—from which, later, a sixth Root Race will be born—are to be chosen out by Him from the materials that the fifth sub-race affords, then the nature of His choice probably will not be that which would be made by the leaders of that fifth sub-race itself. Theirs to carry on to the highest point the concrete, scientific mind, which is the glory of their sub-race. Theosophists sometimes ask: “Why do not the great men of Science come into the Theosophical Society?” Simply because they have their own work to do; and their work at present is not to build the future civilisation, but to lead to its highest point the present one. In the future, when they shall have led that civilisation to the highest point, and when it has taken its place at the head of the world’s thought, then will come the time for these great minds to be reborn into another race, and build on the splendid intellectual foundation they have laid. The work of the world is the end that the great Ones consider, and these strong scientific minds to-day are needed by the world to carry on the present civilisation to the highest point. How unwise it would be to take them away from the work that no one else can do, and set them to other work they would do badly, not having turned their energies to the particular qualifications that are wanted for it. And so in the wise plan of the Manu of the fifth Race, the flower of the fifth or Teutonic sub-race is taken in order that it may be raised up to the highest point of the mānasic civilisation, and be carried on to its zenith of splendour of scientific knowledge. But meanwhile it is His duty to help in the building up of the other types—still his Race is the sixth sub-race—and so to co-operate with His successor the Manu of the sixth Root Race. For remember the Manu of all the sub-races of a Root Race is the same. He is the Manu of the whole Race; when the time comes for beginning the new Root Race, then the Manu of the Race that is regnant co-operates with the Manu of the Race which is to come. Hence He who is to be the Manu of the sixth Root Race, the Master “M,” the Moru of the Purānas, He has begun His work. And He has begun it in a humble and insignificant fashion, as the world would say, by striking the keynote of Brotherhood, and by drawing into a Society those whose hearts thrill responsive to that note. And why? Because the higher emotion that answers to universal Brotherhood, to love of all, without distinction of race, sex, caste, colour, or creed—that is the emotion, that is the germ of the buddhic principle in man, the principle of unifying, of drawing the separated together, of blending into one separate individualities, and making them realise the spiritual unity which overshadows and underlies them all. Hence universal Brotherhood is the only thing which is binding on members of the Theosophical Society. Nothing else. The Theosophical teachings as to Karma, Reincarnation, or the Masters, are not binding on the mind or conscience of any member. This is an important point. It is not only because a truth is better seen by the unfettered intellect than by an intellect on which a dogma is imposed, though that is of importance; but because the material which can be moulded into the Coming Race is the material that can recognise the necessity and the beauty of universal Brotherhood, and if that be recognised, nothing else for the moment is necessary. Hence that is the only binding principle. Hence, also, the attempts to narrow it down, prompted by those Dark Powers who do not desire that the Society should grow and prosper for thousands of years to come, the attempts to put in a little restraint here and a little obstacle there, judging for the moment, and not for the future. That is the inner meaning of having that one thing alone our bond of union. And so the Manu made that the keynote to attract those who would answer, “Yes; that is the very thing I want to join in and help.” And so the nucleus of the great sixth Root Race began to be formed. But that is not an immediate future, although already beginning. The sixth sub-race is the immediate future; under the rule of the Manu of the fifth still, but co-operating with the Manu of the Sixth, in order that those who show signs of being fit material for the Coming Race may have a preliminary practise of the virtues of that race. Hence the stress that H. P. Blavatsky laid on this inner side of the working of the Theosophical Society; and hence the need, because the time is passing rapidly, to make public what has been kept private in the past of this inner purpose, which has really dominated the Society from within, although not recognised without.

Let us see how that immediate future should be recognised in its characteristics, and thus prepared for. First of all we must understand the words spoken long ago under the inspiration of the coming Bodhisattva, that the Theosophical Society was to be “the corner-stone of the future religion of humanity.” Now every sub-race has a special religion, as it were. The religion of the fifth sub-race is Christianity. What is the future religion of humanity in this sense? It differs from all that have gone before. It is no longer an exclusive and separatist faith, but a recognition that in every religion the same truths are found; that there is only one true religion, the Divine Wisdom; and that every separate religion is true just so far as it incorporates the main teachings of that Divine Wisdom. The one supreme religion is the Knowledge of God; to that everything else is subsidiary. Just in so far as any special religion puts within the reach of its followers the means for rising to that supreme knowledge, in so far is that religion worthy of its place. And when that supreme test is not thoroughly answered—when dogmas, and ceremonies, and rites become more important than this inner truth of the gaining of individual knowledge of the Supreme—then the religion becomes narrower, weaker, unspiritual, until a time comes when either the religion must die or a new impulse must be poured into it to bring it back to its original position, a channel for the knowledge of God. Now, in the past many religions have done their work and passed away, and we come to the present time, when certain great religions are living. And when the great new spiritual impulse came, it was not charged with the building of a new religion, but with the vitalising of those great existing religions, to make them realise their underlying foundation; they were vivified in order to help them to rise to a more spiritual and mystic interpretation of their teachings; and when that was done, they were to be blended together into a brotherhood of Religions, so that all should recognise the Divine Wisdom as their root. That was the first work of the Theosophical Society. It was done all over the world. See how in India Hindūism was revived; in Ceylon, Buddhism. Ask the ordinary missionary who comes over here, who is not generally very broad-minded, and he will tell you that the great opponent of Christianity in the East is the Theosophical Society. Then, if you press him and ask, “But are Theosophists antagonistic to you?” “No,” he will say, “but they strengthen the other religions, and thus prevent our making converts.” And that is true. It is not our business to convert people from one religion to another, but to try to make every one realise the splendour of his own religion. Naturally, in India—except in Travancore, where there has been a Christian Roman Catholic colony from the very early centuries of the Church—Christianity is an alien religion, and only grows by injuring the older religions of the land. Naturally, then, the missionaries look on the Theosophical Society as an opponent, because it has been the great factor in the revival of Hindūism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and is beginning to be a factor in the revival of Muhammadanism. Now, when you see that, and when you come to the West and see how the same influence has been widening the Christian Church, how mystical Christianity is spreading everywhere in a way that would have seemed incredible some three years ago—see how narrow it was, and look now, how everywhere the mystic thought is spreading, and see how, in the Roman Catholic Church, the spreading of this spirit has become so wide that the Pope is forced into fulminating against it, and in the Modernism that he condemns we find Theosophy mentioned as one of the forms—you will realise that that part of the work is almost done. I do not mean that we are not to continue spreading abroad more spiritual ideas, but that the work has been done so effectively already that it is almost passing into the hands of the religions themselves. The clergy are now preaching so much Theosophy that it hardly seems necessary to continue preaching the parts they have adopted. The Theosophical teaching as to the nature of the Christ in His birth in the human form, and His growth into Divine Manhood—how common a doctrine that is now within all the Churches of the West. The fact of Reincarnation is also becoming more and more widely accepted—a doctrine no longer to be laughed at, but to be carefully argued over, and forming a part of the deepest thought of the Christian world. So that while we must still go on with that part of the work, there are other parts of our work now that we ought to be ready to take up. That religion of the future which is to include all the religions as sects within itself, all of them going on into the future, but recognising themselves as a Brotherhood, that is to be the dominant religious thought of the great sixth Root Race, and in the sixth sub-race we shall find it spreading everywhere. Now, how mighty will be the advantage; because the moment all religions are seen to be branches of one stock, then each religion can share with others the specialty which it has been its duty to develop in the world. And nowadays, when the Christian goes to India, instead of trying to convert the Hindū, which he can never do, what he ought to do is to offer to share with him that great special characteristic of Christianity, the principle of self-sacrifice, and the helping of the weaker by the stronger—the dominant note of Christianity. It is the doctrine of the Cross, the emblem of self-sacrifice, of the coming down to the depressed in order to lift them, leading them up side by side with ourselves. That is the noblest thought of Christendom, typified in the mystic Christ; and that you might well offer to share with the Hindūs, for that does not come out so strongly in their great Faith. Rather will they bring to you in exchange the doctrine of the immanence of God. Two things, Dr. Miller has written, Hindūism brings to the world: the immanence of God, and the solidarity of man. When religions exchange their best instead of finding out each other’s weaknesses, then you have outlined the religion of the future. Our work in that future is to continue what we have so well begun, and spread this liberal, thoughtful, religious ideal through all religions, destroying none, but permeating all.

Next we have to consider what we ought to do in the training of the next generation; for there is great need that the Theosophical ideal of education should spread through Western minds, and especially through Britain and its empire. Religious education at the present time is in peril; how great that peril is may be measured by the Moral Education Congress gathered together in London last year to try to find a moral basis that should furnish education apart from all the sanctions of religion—a hopeless task, but none the less a sign of the peril of the times. Now, we have had secular education in India. It has been the English education the Government has given there. It could not give any other because of the different religions of the country, and it was bound not to help any one of these to the detriment of the others. The moral result has been disastrous. It has fostered selfishness, indifference to the country, lack of public spirit. It has given us a race of men who have acquired from the West its superficial qualities, but not its inner strength, not its inner capacity. And the troubles you have in India now are largely the result of this anti-religious education, which has made hundreds of the best Indian type skeptics, a thing which has only been checked with the growth of the Theosophical Society throughout India. We have turned back that irreligious wave, with the result that the Indian Government to-day regards the Theosophical Society as the most likely agency for training the youth of India along lines of freedom and order at the same time. They realise that we have put our finger on the weak point in their own system, and that our plan of giving to the child the religion of his parents is really the way to solve that religious problem in India. Now, over here you have to face the problem how to preserve religion while letting dogmatism go; how to find a common ground, a few common principles, which all Christians inculcate, leaving to a later time in life the special sectarian divisions which the young man and woman can acquire later if they wish. Now, in that the Theosophical Society may well play a great part in the immediate future, strengthening all the influences which make for the keeping of religion as an integral part of education, helping to soften the bitter sectarianism, and persuade the different denominations to remember that they are Christians more than that they belong to this, that, or the other denomination. If we succeed in that, then the service to the education of the empire will be supreme.

Along other lines we want, if we can, to persuade the public mind to become a little more receptive of new ideas; to lose a little of its pride, and learn a little humility. Unless we are quite sure that we are at the very top of human evolution, and that nothing greater than ourselves can be evolved, then it would be the part of wisdom to recognise that the next type, which is the type of the future, must be different from the type of the present, and, in the beginning of its evolution, new and strange. You may remember how J. S. Mill, in speaking of liberty, laid immense stress on originality, and complained that modern methods were tending to make all come to a single level; to do away with the eccentric, even with the original. Now, for growth, variety is wanted. Where there is no spontaneous variation in types, you have stagnation. And yet every one of us is so fond of our own particular line of thought that we take it almost as an offence if someone starts a new thought which we cannot at once fit into our own mental grooves. Now, we must try to correct that, first in ourselves, and then in the public at large, especially in view of the coming of that mighty Teacher I have spoken of. When He comes, the type of the sixth Root Race, He must be very different from all of us, otherwise He would not be the type of the new departure. How can we avoid treating Him when He comes exactly as our predecessors of the fourth sub-race treated Him when He came last to start the fifth? It is so easy for all of us, looking back to the mighty Figure of the Christ, to realize something of its splendour, but we see Him through the glamour of the religion which has made His name supreme in many of your hearts. Try and put yourselves back in time, and see how strange that new type would have then seemed to you, how against all your prejudices. So different was He that He raised an antagonism so bitter that they could not bear Him amongst them for more than three years, and then murdered Him. It is hard for us to realise that. We are apt to think, “If I had been there, I would have stood beside Him; I would not have been amongst those who slew Him.” And yet there is no particular reason to think we should not have done the same. It is a great lesson for the immediate future. For when He comes again to bless this beginning of a sixth sub-race, the buddhic, He will show out the qualities of Buddhi prominently, and those are by no means very acceptable to the modern world. Look fairly at your own minds and see how you stand on your rights. It is the spirit of the time. If you have not what you think your rights, you make a clamour for them. For the mānasic civilisation that is the proper way, but those who want to go on in the new future that is dawning have to throw all that aside. You must relinquish your “rights.” If you are trampled on, you must recognise that it is only yourself of the past trampling on yourself of the present: no one can trample on you except a person who embodies your own past injustice, and is working out that which you yourself have created. That is a very unpopular view, as unpopular as the Sermon on the Mount. And so along many other lines of that which is admirable from the popular standpoint—power, dominance, the spirit which tramples down all opposition. How different from that of the Wisdom which rules, but rules from within, “mightily and sweetly ordering all things.” And if you will think over this in detail and work it out, you will find you will have to change your ideal of what is admirable, and build up on ideal on the basis of Spirit and unity, and not on rights and claims. And that is one reason why the Theosophical ideals very often find themselves rejected in the outer world. Those are the qualities needed for the world as it shall be; and if we are to be builders of that immediate future, we must develop them in ourselves. But you may say: “Is it not rather a big assertion to make that this Theosophical Society is really a nucleus of a great Root Race; that it is the beginning of a sub-race? What right have you to make such a claim?” The answer is, that looking back to the last choice, we should expect to find the beginning of the new Race and new sub-race among those who were not the leaders of the present, but had in them the germ of the future. That is why our people are gathered not from the leaders and the thinkers, but from the loving, the compassionate, the brotherly. It seems a feeble thing, this power of Brotherhood. It is the mightiest thing in all the world. And although it is true that we cannot expect to find amongst us men and women of magnificent intellect and overwhelming power of thought, we may expect to find amongst us the compassionate, the gentle, and the loving, and those give the plastic material which will yield itself to the fingers of the Manu to be moulded into a new type, a higher evolution. Hence, from time to time the great shakings that take place to shake out those who are too purely intellectual, and who do not think the word Brotherhood is a word that ought to be heard so much amongst us. The Masters have chosen Brotherhood as our mark, and we cannot march in Their army if we will not bear Their sign. And so, if mind makes us too self-assertive, too sure of our own superiority, then we must be shaken out of this movement. So do not in this immediate future be troubled if we still continue to go along our own quiet road of attracting the loving and the gentle rather than those who are mighty in their intellectual power. The thing of vital importance is the Spirit of Brotherhood, and that we must never let go. And remember, in the whole of the struggles of the future, as in those of the past, that they must always rage round persons, and those who think more of personalities than of principles are inevitably shaken out. If you make a person’s presence or absence a reason for being in or out of the Society, you are showing the spirit of separation, which cannot realise a principle, but thinks only of the passing and transient personality. What can it matter whether any one of you agrees or disagrees with Mr. Leadbeater, or with Mr. Mead, or with anyone else? These are all persons. The principle of the Society remain unshaken. Presidents are elected and Presidents die, but the Society goes on. What folly, then, to give up a place in a mighty movement because the person temporarily at the head of it is a person who does not exactly fit into the shape you have made as your own particular ideal. It does not matter. The Society is not bound by its President any more than by anyone else. It is bound only by its great central principle of Brotherhood. And so all of you who have stood through the past shaking have shown that you care more for principles than for persons, and it does not matter whether, so to speak, you have agreed or disagreed with the President so long as you have stood firm within the Society; for there lies the principle, whilst the other is only personality. Cling, then, to that principle to which you have clung through the past storm; recognise that whether a person be right or wrong, noble or ignoble, great or small, that is a matter of secondary importance. The work of the future lies in the movement, and not in the hands of any particular individual who may happen to be here. Whether you or I come back to this great movement in other lives depends on ourselves, and not on the opinion that anyone else may happen to have about us. None can throw us out of it if we are worthy to remain in it; none can keep us in it if we are unworthy to be part of it. And realising kārmic law, realising the greatness of the movement and its work in the future, let us join hands, whether we agree or disagree with each other on any other matter save that of Brotherhood, and go forward into the future that is unfolding before us, brighter than ever the past has shone; go forward to the making of the sub-race out of which the Root Race shall spring, under the banner of our Manu and our Bodhisattva, the mighty Ones of years and millennia to come.

Lecture III The Catholic and Puritan Spirit in the Theosophical Society The Value and Danger of Each

I want to try to trace out the somewhat difficult subject of the place of the Puritan and the Catholic Spirit in our Society. I want to show that both types are necessary in every great movement; that both have their value and place, yet also their dangers. And if we realise that both are necessary, it may help each type to be tolerant as regards the other, and to see that each has its dangers.

Now, all the world over these two types are found; they are, in fact, two marked temperaments, intellectual and emotional, into which, roughly, you might throw almost all thoughtful and educated people, and even the thoughtless and ignorant, for those also will show similar types, although naturally less attractively, because more extreme, than they may be among the class of people who at least are seeking to understand themselves, and to gain some measure of equilibrium. Looked at from the outside, the Catholic type is certainly the more attractive, and therefore I want to impress upon you the value of the Puritan type; because, being less attractive, its value is more likely to be overlooked. If the Puritan spirit were completely lost, mankind would lack that vigour and strength and tendency to free thought and free judgment which are so essential to human evolution. Unfortunately, it has often been united with a very cold and forbidding exterior; and if we take the two types as we find them in the reign of Charles I., certainly the Puritan is not very attractive from outside—hard, rather sour, forbidding, and austere. But it is not quite fair to judge the Puritan by that type in the reign of the Stuarts. It is not fair to pick out a type at the moment where these two difficulties face it—danger to itself, and the extreme evil of the type it is opposing. It is hardly fair to take that moment for a judgment of the value of the temperament in itself. But even if you take the Puritan of the time of Charles I. and Cromwell, you can hardly help noticing, if you go beyond externals, the extreme moral value of that type amid those difficult and dangerous surroundings. Austere as it was, it was the austerity that was trying to guard itself against continual danger of pollution, and naturally it ran into extremes, as all reactions run, with the inevitable result that another reaction followed on the first, and you had the loose and profligate type of the Court of Charles II. It is the types I want to disentangle from these special manifestations, and, looking at them apart, from all conditions that may emphasise one characteristic or another.

Now, in what does the Puritan type exactly consist? It seems to consist in an attitude of protest and criticism rather than of ready acceptance of the prevailing thought of the time. The Puritan mind is essentially critical, and critical in the modern sense of the term, which, instead of making the critic a judge, makes him an opponent and condemner. We must remember, however, that the true critical spirit is absolutely necessary for human progress, even though it often slips into condemnation and cynicism. The Puritan is always intellectual (I am speaking of the purer type), a man in whom mind is predominant. He is of the type that tends to separation rather than unity; he stands alone, sufficient for himself (I say that rather than “self-sufficient,” the second form connoting a rather unpleasant quality). We must realise the strength of this type. The strength may slip into austerity, but that very largely grows out of the religion to which the Puritan may happen to be attached. You do not find him in his more aggressive form unless he is protesting against something he regards as dangerous and mischievous. Naturally, under these considerations he is thrown into the attitude of combat, and hence all that is harshest and most hostile inevitably comes to the surface. But that is not a necessary part of the Puritan spirit. Looking at him as the intellectual man in whom emotion in this particular life is comparatively weak, or if not weak, repressed; seeing that in him the mental qualities are those which in this incarnation he specially endeavours to develop; understanding that the mind can only be developed where the qualities of analysing, comparing, and judging are active, you can readily see how, in the face of opposition, these qualities would turn into antagonism and protest. But I do not think antagonism and protest are a necessary part of the Puritan spirit. In peaceful times your Puritan would be distinguished rather as the analytical or intellectual man, most valuable to any community into which he may be thrown at the time. For you cannot develop the mind without developing these analysing qualities: synthesis comes later, the one belonging to the lower, the other to the higher Manas. Both need to be developed. While the lower Manas is developing, you must have these qualities of analysis, comparison, and judgment without which it is not possible to lay a strong foundation for any belief. You must recognise the utter necessity for the challenging, questioning, even doubting and sceptical spirit. Only by means of this can error be detected, and the traditions that come down from the past be gradually purified of the accretions that have come to them during the ignorant periods through which they may have passed. To be sceptical is no fault, but rather a virtue. If there is to be progress at all, there must be challenging of that which has come down from the past, so that, testing, analysing, criticising, you may be able to separate the truth from the error. How would religion become ever more and more spiritual if men are only to inherit, and never to examine and understand? And since no religion or other form of thought can ever come down through centuries without picking up a large amount of error, if we had not this critical and challenging spirit all religions would grow into superstitions, and that which is most valuable for the race would gradually be covered under a mass of ignorant error. Hence at certain times in the history of the race a great outburst of the Puritan spirit is necessary. That alone will bring about fundamental changes, religious, moral, and social; that alone has the courage to go forward whilst in a minority, and test with the test of reason every belief and every tradition. We must not, then, blind ourselves to the immense value of this spirit in the intellectual development of man. For always, inasmuch as religious and social order has come by some great Teacher enormously beyond his own generation in religious, moral, and social development, inevitably his teachings, handed down generation after generation, will in many respects tend to be covered with superstition.

Let us pause for a moment and see what the word “superstition” means. I do not think I can give a better definition than my old one: “superstition is the taking of the non-essential as the essential.” I think that you will find that that covers all the cases which you would call superstitions—a truth originally; but in every truth there are necessary and accessory parts. As the understanding of the truth is clouded, the accessories take on too large a value in the minds of people, until at last the accessory is everything and the essential nothing.

I told once an Indian story which marks out clearly what is superstition. There was once a very holy man in the habit of offering a sacrifice by pouring butter into the fire—one of the ordinary Hindū ceremonies. Morning after morning he duly performed this rite. He was much admired by his neighbours, and the regularity of the discharge of his religious duties led them to consider him a model worthy of imitation. This good man happened to have a cat. As he was kindly-hearted and affectionate, the cat loved him, and used to come up and interrupt his religious service; so he put a collar round the cat and tied it to the bedpost to prevent interruptions. Time went on, a few generations passed, and then all of the people who copied this admirable saint not only offered the sacrifice, but also considered it a part of the rite to have a cat tied to the bedpost. Still more time went on, until at last all that remained of the original ceremony was the cat tied to the bedpost and nothing else. Now there is superstition: the harmless accessory had become necessary, until it occupied the whole of the worshippers’ minds. This is often the case in religions which have lasted long, and have had many ignorant adherents. They cannot distinguish between the inner meaning and the outer form; and gradually the outer form becomes everything, and the inner meaning disappears. Then comes the time when, superstition having taken the place of truth, there rises up the critical intellect of man, attacks the whole, and challenges the authority. Only sometimes the critic is not evolved enough to recognise the truth at the same time that he wars against the error. More often he takes the whole as superstition and tries to destroy it completely. There you have the history of many reformations. Take the great Reformation of the sixteenth century. If you look back to that you will see that an enormous amount of valuable truth was thrown aside in trying to get rid of the surface error with which the truth had been covered. And so in tracing down the growth of the Puritan spirit from the time of Luther, through Calvinistic Switzerland, up to Scotland with John Knox, and then looking at it as it spread over England, and became so powerful under James I. and Charles I., you will recognise that in the whole of that there is a gradual throwing away of everything that the mind could not grasp and understand, and consequently a great loss of the spiritual side of things. The result of that historically has been that the truth that was thrown away in the getting rid of the error came back again a little later. And so with certain fundamental tendencies in man, against which the Puritan of that time set himself utterly—the use of images in public worship, the use of music, the use of garments different from the everyday garments, and so on—all these points that he threw aside as part of the Papal abomination came back again, slowly, steadily, gradually spreading through the whole of the Anglican Church. So that you have this remarkable object-lesson, which it would be well for all Puritan-spirited people to remember. You may visit a cathedral to-day. Outside the cathedral you will see the statues which were broken by Cromwell’s soldiery; and inside the cathedral, on or round the high altar and chancel, you will see the modern statues placed there in order to help the devotional spirit in the congregation.

I have purposely taken the Puritan spirit outside the Theosophical Society so that you may look at it apart from any special question of interest to our own Society. If you see the value of that in religion, you will welcome its presence in the Theosophical Society. You will realise that that spirit is wanted in order to balance and keep in check what might otherwise be the excess of the Catholic spirit. You will realise that our critical friends are doing us an immense service in their criticism, and that it only becomes mischievous when the critical spirit grows into antagonism and dislike, which need not at all accompany it, and should not accompany it in a well-balanced and thoughtful mind. We must have that spirit amongst us, otherwise the enthusiastic will run away too rapidly and fall into error. The chill that sometimes it causes is a very valuable element for mental growth. We do not want to have nothing but chill—that will prevent growth altogether; but if we were more tolerant with each other, then we might have the advantage of the chill, which would keep the intellectual atmosphere clear and sharp, without having the very life chilled out of us by criticism.

Let us now pause on what we mean by the Catholic spirit. By that I mean the spirit which is reverent of tradition, which is willing to submit to reasonable and recognised authority, which is willing to take a great plan and co-operate in it, and realise that the presence of the architect of the plan, if He be a person highly developed, say a Master, is enough to give it authority, and that there is no lack of freedom or dignity in accepting the plan of a greater, and working it out to the utmost of one’s ability. It is the spirit which, largely emotional, when it rises into love of the higher and becomes devotion, causes sympathetic vibrations on the buddhic plane, and so begins the awakening of the Spirit above the intellect. Again, with this Catholic spirit you always find the love of beauty. It is artistic. It seeks to clothe thought in forms of beauty. It loves ceremonial, takes a pleasure in harmonised expression of thought, and desires that everything round it should be emotionally satisfactory as well as intellectually sound. Moreover, its mind is eminently teachable, where the Puritan is not. Hence it is far easier to lead it along the path of what is called Occultism. The Catholic mind very readily recognises that those above itself in development may be able by guidance and teaching to help it to reach knowledge which, unaided, it would be unable to achieve. The Puritan would walk alone; the Catholic would utilise every assistance that can be given in evolution, including the assistance of human beings more highly developed, as well as of spiritual intelligences. And so you have round it an atmosphere which readily responds to impulses from the spiritual worlds, and always with this spirit you find the tendency toward Occultism of various kinds. I do not think you ever find that tendency in connexion with the Puritan spirit. You may find with the Puritan spirit sometimes a lofty form of mysticism, a recognition of a Spirit as the Life of the universe, and an attempt to realise that Spirit within oneself. That you may reach largely by way of the intellect, and emotion is not necessarily concerned in it. Intellectually you may realise unity, and then pass into the mystical ideal of the One in the Many, to be recognised in each. And you do find occasionally in the great Puritans of the past a very noble, though somewhat stern and cold, form of mystical belief; whereas the moment you come to Catholic mysticism, you find yourself in an atmosphere charged with emotion. The Catholic Mystic is swept up in a great surge of emotion to the Object of his love; the Puritan Mystic calmly, almost coldly, recognises the greatness of the Object of his worship, intellectually tries to realise, and by that to some extent unifies himself with It. You have an example of the Puritan Mystic in Cromwell. Read his letters, read the letters of the man, wrung out of his heart by the strain of doubt and despair, and clinging, in spite of all temptation, to his belief in the reality of a Divine Power whose instrument he was. You will rise from that reading with a new idea of the strength of the man, and realise that with all that strength there was the recognition of the strength of God and of his own strength as being only an instrument in the divine hands. But you never find the Puritan Mystic the expression of love, of passionate affection, that are so common among the Catholic Mystics; and more than anything else is the difference marked when you come to deal with Occultism.

And there, in our own Society, is a point we ought to pause upon. The Catholic type amongst us will be one that will readily respond to the idea of the Masters, the Puritan less quickly. The Catholic mind in the Theosophist will not only recognise the ideal of the Masters, but will be fired with a desire to tread the path that They have trodden. There will be a looking up of reverence, an outstretching of the hand for guidance; a realisation that by that dependence more rapid progress may be made than along any other line. That which is invisible will exercise a potent attraction; he will always be trying to know something of the invisible worlds and their inhabitants, he will always be reaching out toward these worlds and trying to expand his consciousness into communication with them. He will be willing to train himself with that in view, and you will have in him the possibility of the Occultist which you will not find in the Puritan type. For you cannot begin this part of occult knowledge along the purely intellectual lines. The intellectual exertion will check at once the evolution of the other vehicles. The moment you begin to think: “What am I doing? Is it imagination? Is it hallucination?” you check the growth of the subtler faculties of the man. You are obliged for a time to go on without questions, feeling, sensing, groping, and refusing to allow the mind to come in with its analysing spirit, that chills everything down so much that these budding faculties, as it were, shrink back from the touch of the frost, refusing to unfold. “Well,” you say, “there is a danger. The person may become overcredulous, may be utterly led astray.” True. It is the necessary danger of all such research. Only step by step do you learn by experience to distinguish between the true and false, between the thought-forms created by yourself and the inhabitants of other worlds into which you are penetrating with half-opened eyes. But remember that distinguishing does not do away with the reality of the thought-form. Your own thought-forms which surround you when you first pass on to the astral plane are real forms in astral matter. They deceive you, yes, because they are your own creations, and only give you back the things you are thinking about. They repeat to you your own thoughts, and there lies the element of danger. But you can only outgrow that by experience, exactly in the same way that the baby learns that it cannot catch hold of the glittering thing at the end of the room, but, to reach it, must cover a great deal of space. You do not think it heartbreaking because the baby makes mistakes. You are content that he shall learn. Why not be as philosophical about yourselves? You know that they will grow out of their ignorance by experience. So will you. Those who always want to be right are people who will never make Occultists. The Occultist must be ready to plunge forward, and possibly tumble into a bog, but be ready to go on again afterwards, learning by experience to understand. Those who will not face this have not enough of the Catholic spirit to make Occultists, and had better leave it for another incarnation.

There is another danger, one especially seen here—the dependence upon another. I have often been asked: “How can you develop independence and judgment if you are always trying to do the will of another, whom you call your Master?” The answer is simple. You look to your Master for direction, and He may point you to some work to be done. You take the work because He told you to do it. So far you are the obedient servant; but your judgment, your reason, all your thought-power, all your initiative, are taxed to the utmost in the achievement of the task. A sensible Occultist never goes running to his Master and asking, “How shall I do this?” He knows that is not the Master’s work. The Master has done His part in saying “Do that.” How you do it tests you, and brings out your strength and weakness. And the Master is far too wise to prevent your bringing out your strength and discovering your weakness by doing for you what He has told you to do. Hence the Occultist develops all his faculties in the attempt to do his Master’s will. The two things work well together, and he does not become weak but strong in realising that the Master is greater than he, and knows far better the plan of the work, while he himself, in carrying out his own portion of it, finds full employment for every faculty of brain and heart.

It is scarcely possible for the typical Puritan to become an Occultist in the life in which this side is being so strongly developed. You cannot understand everything when you go into unknown worlds; and unless you are willing to be ignorant, there is no possibility of discovering new knowledge. Every pioneer of science—to quote, I think, Faraday—“runs about like a dog with his nose to the ground, trying to find out a trail.” That is exactly the way of the experimenter. You must search for yourself for the trace which will guide you to the desired knowledge; and if you will not do that, you must take the results of others, and be content with these results for this life.

But, now, how will these two types of spirit work when they come to, say, such a question as that of Mr. Leadbeater? You will have at once the working of the critical intelligence which sees faults more readily than virtues, and bad motives more readily than good. That is its weakness. But it also has its value in pointing out certain dangers into which the Society might otherwise slip. The Catholic spirit will be far more ready to take it for granted that one from whom they have learned much, whom they know to have far vaster knowledge than their own, may have some other reason which they do not see, which would justify to the doer what he has done, and they do not feel that curious sense that they must save their neighbours’ souls, whether their neighbours desire it or not. They are content to say, “This is my road, that is his”—a wider and more generous spirit. Nevertheless, I think we should do well also to recognise that the presence in the Society of the critical and even judging spirit has at some times its value. But it is not a foundation on which anything can be built, and that is sometimes forgotten. You cannot build an enduring edifice on the grounds of protest against someone else. It cannot endure. It is curious to notice that the same people who condemn personality when the tendency of the personality is love and devotion, are the people who show personality most strongly when they antagonise and dislike. I admit to the full that principle should guide, not personality; but I cannot admit that a love for a personality is wrong, whilst a hatred of a personality is right and admirable. Both may put persons above principles if the two come into clash. And it is putting a personality above a principle when you desert the Theosophical Society, forgetting the great principles which make it immortal, and leave it, protesting against it, because one or two people hold views with which you do not agree. It is the ne plus ultra of personality. Mr. Leadbeater and Mrs. Besant are both comparatively old, and cannot at the most live very long. What utter folly, then, to desert the great principles incarnated in the Society because of the antagonism of two transitory personalities! If Theosophy be anything at all, then it is everything in life, and is not to be given up for anyone, whether saint or criminal. Suppose a hundred murderers were members of the Society, is that any reason why you or I should go out of it? It seems to me that the fact that we disapprove of that so much is a reason for staying in the Society, in order to strengthen it in the hour of its peril and to carry it through.

We need in the whole of this to study our own nature first, and find out our weak points, and then to guard against that weakness in the time of storm and stress. And we need, more than that, to realise that very often when people oppose us, they oppose us because of their virtues, and not because of their vices. That is, that the people who are utterly against me now are against me because of their virtues. They are wrong in the view they take—they misconstrue; that does not matter. But the fundamental reason why they oppose is because they believe that I am condoning what is wrong. That is a good feeling and right. But it is not right when it goes into hatred and calumny, when people go about telling abominable stories of all kinds which are utterly false, using them as weapons to injure. But, none the less, the beginning lay in a virtue—the desire to guard the Society from harm; and that ought to be recognised even when it has run into excess. If we can do that, then, in the midst of struggle, we shall be learning the true Theosophical spirit, which sees the good first, and only recognises the excess afterwards. And my suggestion is: “Train yourself, in your ordinary thinking, to see first the good of a person or thing, and only afterwards allow yourself to see the weakness or evil.” Then you will get all the good of your critical spirit, and be guarded against much harm. But if you see the bad side first, you are likely not to see the good side at all. These things test our members, and show whether we are fit to go along this great path or not—show whether we are ready to be part of that great Sixth Race which is coming, or whether we are so wedded to our own opinions that outside those we can see nothing good.

The trouble is practically over, but we should remember its lessons—a wider tolerance, a sterner self-criticism, and a more charitable attitude towards our fellows. You cannot be too hard in criticising yourself, nor too tolerant and charitable towards your neighbour. Remember that in every one of us the Self is endeavouring to express something of himself. In our own case we have the right to criticise every obstacle put in the way of His manifestation, to be hard in our judgment of ourselves, pitiless in our condemnation of our every fault and weakness. But we cannot govern the manifestation of the Self in another; hence our criticism is useless and impertinent—does not help, but hinders; for if the other person is wrong, as you think he is, then your harsh judgment makes an added barrier in his way when the Self in him is trying to guide him back to the right, whereas your charity, your tolerant respect, will help him to realise the noblest in him. Hence the lesson of this great shaking should be criticism of ourselves and charity to all around us. Recognition of our own type, clear self-judgment, so that we may walk aright and help others as much as may be; and, above all, so to purify our own characters that we may be channels for the life that flows in the Society, and may not soil it as it passes through ourselves. The Society can never die by attacks from without, nor by desertions from within; it can only die when its members are careless of their own thought, their own character, their own ideas; that, and that alone, can make the Society unworthy of the guidance of its Teachers. It was once said: “So long as three men remain in the Society worthy of our Lord’s blessing it cannot perish.” That was a word spoken by a Master in the days when the Society was weak and struggling, and when the few people that belonged to it feared it would never survive the storm that shook it in the time of the Coulomb attack. Think of that if any other storm should approach us—although we are not likely now to have another for the next twelve years; but when a storm comes, remember that inspiring idea, that as long as three remain in the Society it cannot perish; and add to that the vow registered by the Higher Self: “If others depart, I will be one of the three.”

Lecture IV The Sacramental Life

I am to speak to you to-night on a subject of deep interest to those who regard the religions of the world from the standpoint of Occultism. In all the great religions we find what are called “sacraments,” to take the Western name; and in all religions the object is the same—the endeavour to spiritualise the ordinary life of man; to make it possible for men and women living in the world, blinded by their bodies, unable to rise above the material limitations—to enable those men and women to come into direct touch with higher worlds and higher beings, and so, from the definite sacramental act, to pass on until the whole life may become a sacrament by the radiation of spiritual life through the material coating.

Now different religions have different numbers of sacraments, although the essence remains the same. In Hindūism the sacraments are very numerous. Ten are recognised as of universal application, but the number will run up to thirty or forty if you take all the ceremonies that are distinctly recognised as having this character among the more orthodox Hindūs. The number, after all, is immaterial; it is the fundamental idea which is important. As knowledge of the meaning of the sacraments spreads, especially in the Western world, it will be found that many things that have been put aside as superstitious will come back with a new light and power. Certain ideas which were cast aside at the period of the Reformation were thrown aside rather by reaction than for any defensible reason. The way in which many of the thoughts and dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church were pressed among the people, the widespread ignorance of meanings while forms were carefully observed, not unnaturally brought about a powerful reaction when reason began to challenge the ceremonies. As occult knowledge had practically fallen into the background among the great mass of the Roman Catholic priesthood, there came rejection of that which could not be rationally explained. As we are able to see the justification for very much that then was rejected, however, we realise that many of these things will come back. And if we think, it is not unnatural that these should return. Going back to the early days of religion (I am thinking now of Christianity, but it is the same in all the great religions), we find the Founder and his immediate disciples who shape and mould the religion. As these men were men to whom the spiritual world was familiar, and as their duty was to make bridges between the ordinary mass of men and the great spiritual teachings of religion, it was inevitable that in the forms of worship laid down by them there should be in the background occult truths. Hence we find in the early Church the great institution of the Mysteries; and I shall want, later on, to show the relation between the Mystery, the Sacrament, and the great legend of the Holy Grail.