Theosophy : Some Problems of Life by Annie Besant : AnandGholap.Net

CONTENTS	Page
FOREWORD	5
PROBLEMS OF ETHICS	9
PROBLEMS OF SOCIOLOGY	32
PROBLEMS OF RELIGION	72
SOME DIFFICULTIES OF THE INNER LIFE	117

AN attempt is made in the following pages to discuss some of the Problems of Life and Mind that exercise the brains and wring the hearts of thoughtful people. These problems will be studied with the aid of the light thrown upon them by Theosophy, that Divine Wisdom which enlightens us just so far as we are able to receive it. There is no idea in my mind so ambitious as that of solving these problems: I only seek to offer to my fellow students some thoughts that have been helpful to myself and may also be serviceable to others.

Theosophy, from its very nature, cannot form a new religion, a new church, or even a sect separate and apart. It is a unifier, not a divider; an explainer, not an antagonist. Whenever a Theosophist is aggressive, combative, denunciatory, he is failing in his high mission, for the “wisdom that cometh from above is first pure then [Page 5] peaceable." He is bound to be tolerant even with the intolerant, knowing that no evil can be destroyed save by its opposite good. Hence in seeking solutions for life's problems he does not vehemently assail the solutions already suggested, but seeks to distil from each any trace of truth it may contain. In all the schools of thought around us, ethical, sociological, scientific, and religious, some aspect of the truth is being set forth, and the fact that its exponents regard it as the whole truth does not lessen the intrinsic value of the particular fragment they present. Any view which has been held by large numbers of people, for long periods, over wide areas, recurring time after time, showing a perennial life, has in it some truth which preserves it; it is the duty of the Theosophist to seek for this truth and to bring it to light, freeing it from the errors which have enveloped it. Whenever human hearts and lives attach themselves to any view, they are not attracted by the errors which compose its form but to the truth which is its life. The failure to appreciate this distinction between the life and the form which temporarily envelops it has given rise to the bitterness of controversy, to the extremes of intolerance that we find in the history of thought. The Divine Wisdom which includes all truth cannot be hostile to any fragment of itself, whatever may be the transitory form in which it is set. The student of the Divine Wisdom, then, must recognise and revere it under every veiling form, as Isis recognised and reverently gathered [6] up the torn fragments of the body of Osiris the beloved. Thus may the errors which belong to Time fall away, while the Eternal Truth endures, manifesting itself with ever-increasing fullness.

In our study, then, of the problems which surround us, we must search diligently in each school of thought for the truths which it is seeking to express, for the facts in nature which underlie its teachings. If this search be conducted successfully, the various schools will to a great extent be unified, Theosophy synthesising their different fragments. Quarrels arise because each school regards its partial truth as the whole, denying the truths of its neighbours while affirming its own. Peace will brood over the world when all schools concern themselves with the duty of outlining as perfectly as possible the aspects of truth which they perceive, and refrain from censuring as falsehoods those aspects which are invisible from the standpoints they severally occupy. "Men are usually right in that which they affirm, wrong in that which they deny," once quoth a philosopher, and his remark might be printed in golden letters over the desk of every student.

THE problems of Ethics are concerned with the relations which exist between man and man, between nation and nation, and between man and the non-human world. Ethics has been called the Science of Conduct, therefore the Science of Relations, and its aim is to regularise and render harmonious the relations between an individual and his fellows, human and non-human. A man is not an isolated unit, but a part of an organic whole; Ethics considers him as such a part, and lays down the laws by which that whole may accomplish its orderly evolution.

Every system of Ethics, if incomplete, may be brought in a final analysis under one or other of three heads - authority, intuition, utility. Anyone of these three offers itself as a separate foundation on which a system of Ethics may be erected, and only a complete system [9] recognises the value of each of the three, and sets each in its place as a corner-stone in the pyramid of conduct.

Those who base Ethics on authority appeal to some revelation given by a divine Being, or to some teachings of highly developed men, sages of the past, whose knowledge was greater than that of their contemporaries or of subsequent generations, and who spoke with the authority derived from that knowledge. These teachers - Prophets, Rishis, Magi, call them by what name we may - were men who knew the worlds beyond the physical, and laid down definite precepts out of their wide experience; these precepts were submissively accepted by the nations among whom they lived, they themselves being regarded either as directly inspired by God, or as sharing the divine nature. All the Scriptures of the world, the Bibles of our race, serve, each to the believers in it, as the foundation of morality, each laying down a certain code of ethics; this code is regarded as of direct and binding authority, not depending on reason but on the possession by the teacher of higher knowledge, whether that knowledge were due to his inspiration by some divine Being or to his own evolution into Deity.

The second great ethical school declines to submit itself to any external authority, and founds itself on the existence in man of an interior faculty akin to Deity - intuition. Intuition is variously defined; some identify it with conscience, and declare that conscience is the voice of God speaking in the human soul; others, [10] shrinking from so extreme a position, and admitting that conscience is liable to error, and varies with the evolution of the individual, regard intuition as a faculty belonging to the spiritual nature, thus as being inherently superior to the physical, emotional, and intellectual natures, and therefore the proper guide of conduct.

The third school of Ethics bases morality on utility, appealing to reason as the authority which judges the facts and tendencies of life, traces the results of actions, and deduces from them a moral code, seeking to found its precepts on the generalised experience of the race. This school has many divisions, but they all found themselves ultimately on experience, and regard conscience as the product of evolution, as the moral instinct.* [ * Instinct has been defined as accumulated racial experience, and this is a true definition, whether we consider it, with the materialists, as transmitted by the modification of the organism, or with the Theosophists, as stored in the group-soul, the over-soul of a group.]

However various may be the ethical opinions found among men, they may all, in the final analysis, be reduced to these three: the authority appealed to is (a) divine, of the nature of a revelation; (b) spiritual-human, depending on intuition; (c) rational-human, based on the recording of experience and the logical deduction of rules of conduct therefrom.

In studying these three great ethical systems it is necessary to consider the attacks made on each of them by their opponents, as well as the principles relied on by [11] those who accept them. We shall seek in each for an aspect of Truth, which will contribute to the elucidation of ethical problems, seeing in each a value which may not rightly be overlooked or discredited. Each affords a partial guide for conduct and treating them theosophically we can unify them, antagonistic as they have been held to be, and as their supporters believe them to be.

( a ) What is revelation? It is a teaching generally given in the early days of a race, in order to mark out a path for humanity not yet sufficiently evolved and trained to rely safely for guidance on either its intuition or its reason. The object of this authoritative declaration is the rendering of progress more rapid than it would be were the race left to make experiments unaided in matters of right and wrong. Many blunders would be made, many blind alleys entered, in the vague gropings of primitive man, driven by the imperious instincts of his animal nature, without experience to guide or reason to restrain. We may put aside all the aspects of revelation which deal with the inner constitution of man, with the relation of Deity to the universe, and with other weighty matters - aspects found in the great Scriptures of the world; we will confine ourselves to those parts of revelation which deal with morals, for it is against these that attacks are levelled by those who assail revelation as a foundation for an ethical system, and who refuse to the world's Scriptures any place in building up a sane morality. Every student is struck, [12] when he considers any of the earlier codes of morality - nay, it is not necessary to be a student to be startled by it - by the presence of precepts which to him are immoral, not moral. Yet, if he accept occult teaching, he believes that the Scriptures containing these precepts were given by men who possessed very lofty and wide knowledge, men of the noblest morality, of very high spiritual development. Further, he comes across such precepts in books that contain hints as to God and man fragrant with pure and sublime spirituality, so that they give a painful jar to the mind intent on higher things. True, some of them might, nay would, be ejected by the analytic hand of critical scholarship, and would stand confessed as interpolations of later date. But however far historical criticism may go, that criticism, guided by occult knowledge and not merely by scholarship, must confess the salient fact that these ancient Scriptures contain teachings from men who were giants, spiritually and morally, above the men of the present as they were far above the men of the past. Fragments at least of their teachings have come down to us in these Scriptures, no matter how much of alien matter may have crept into them in the efflux of time and by the ignorance of successive generations. And among these teachings are some of the precepts which jar on us as unsuitable to their noble surroundings and as unworthy of the great instructors from whose lips they fell.

To solve this problem aright we must grasp the necessary corollaries of evolution, and place clearly [13] before the mind some of the conditions inevitably bound up with the growth of a race from moral nescience to moral perfection. In far-off antiquity we see an infant humanity strong in its passions, but weak in its reasoning powers, plunging wildly at the entrance to the path of morality. It begins in blind ignorance of all distinctions between right and wrong. The first training could be but in broad principles, and withal these very principles must not press too harshly on the hitherto uncurbed animal nature. Many an action that would be a step backwards for us now was a step forwards for it then. On the infinite ladder of progress each rung is trodden in its turn, and we call the rungs below us “evil" and the rungs above us “good." Evil and good are relative: they appertain to progress, to growth. Our good of yesterday is our evil of to-day, and our good of to-day will be our evil of to-morrow. In the world there is a steady purpose that may be seen in the light of the history of human evolution. Souls in their infancy, ignorant of right and wrong as we now recognise them, gradually learn by experience, and looking backwards over the growth of humanity, we see that saints and sages have trodden the path up which these souls in their turn are climbing. We perceive that men are living in the world and are treading this long ascent in order that the soul may evolve. This soul is to be a self-conscious and self-moving intelligence; it is to develop a will that is free, which shall learn to choose the highest. This will is never to be coerced into choosing the best, but is to be [14] left free to take what it will, under the sole condition that having taken it shall keep, having chosen it shall abide by its choice. As we watch the evolution of this growing intelligence we find that it is learning to choose between that which makes for progress, and that which makes for retardation. We perceive that the very things which at one stage helped it on its way upwards at a later stage pull it backwards, and, persisted in, would hold it in a lower state of being. When a soul is at a very low stage of evolution there is many an action that is right for it, because it carries it a step onwards, that becomes wrong for it after that step has been taken. Lifting forces are right, down-dragging forces are wrong. This study leads us to the conclusion that what is “right" at any period of the world's history is that which aids in lifting the soul into a higher condition than that in which it is at the time, and thus works in harmony with the divine will for the growth of the soul, helping it to become nobler, purer, wiser, more rational. That which is “wrong," on the other hand, is anything which goes against the current of evolution, anything which keeps the soul stationary or drives it backward against the upward tendency of the whole. “Evil" is the setting of the will of a part against the will of the whole, the separating oneself from the purpose of the world and going against it instead of helping it on. The kosmos is evolving from the inorganic to the organic, from nescience to omniscience, and any part of it which dislocates itself from its connections, which puts itself into antagonism [15] to that movement, which for its separate purposes strives to delay the coming of that

Let us take a few cases in which commands were given which jar on modern thought. We may imagine a race given to cannibalism, commanded to take the flesh of animals as food; assuredly a step forward would be taken by the substitution of animal for human flesh. As soon as the nation had entirely outgrown the eating of men and slaughtered animals only for food, the teacher would try to gradually lead it away from that barbarous custom by allowing the use of flesh only in connection with religious services, permitting to be used as food only the flesh of animals offered as sacrifices, and encompassing these sacrifices with burdensome conditions so as to restrict their number. To put together the slaughter of animals in sacrifice respectively to certain deities and to man's palate may strike many as a strange and incongruous juxtaposition. Yet some, not all, of the commands with respect to animal sacrifices were given for this very purpose. Among people who slaughtered all kinds of living things for food, it was an advance to restrain their killing to certain times and seasons, to surround it with rigidly enforced ceremonies. If, as in some cases, a man was not allowed to kill an animal without a year of preparation during which no flesh might be taken, if he might only eat flesh which had been offered [16] in sacrifice, it is easy to see that such a man was being weaned from flesh-eating, and was learning to break off an evil habit. During his year of preparation the habit of living on flesh would be conquered, and the very restrictions surrounding the final ceremony would tend to make him reverence sentient life and regard its sacrifice as a solemn act, not lightly to be performed. Although to the modern mind the sacrifice of animals as a religious act appears to be brutal and degrading, one cannot but ask oneself whether it marks a lower stage of national immorality to slay animals only for sacrifice than to slay them wholesale for the gratification of the palate; whether the rare holocausts in Solomon's temple, for instance, were more degrading to the public conscience than the daily slaughterings in Chicago. The restrictions which in some civilisations of the past surrounded the slaying of the brute would press heavily on our modern western civilisations, and those ancient nations were at least learning that recklessness of animal life was a sin. People who disfigure their streets with the bleeding carcass of animals hung up to attract buyers should not look down too contemptuously on the ancient temple.

So with other points of conduct, which, rightly condemned to-day, were yet in the past sanctioned, even commanded by ethical teachers. Polygamy, for instance, introduced relations between the sexes far better than the promiscuity which preceded it. Among people at the lowest stage of sexual relations polygamy [17] was a step upwards and therefore was right, not wrong. When the soul evolves, polygamy gives place to monogamy. As a rising from promiscuity polygamy was an advance; as a sinking from monogamy polygamy would be a degradation.

Such cases show us in what sense morality is, and must be, relative for evolving souls, and we see that any teacher who understands human nature, and who is more anxious to help his younger brothers than to express his own full thought, may rightly, in training a people, give ethical precepts that would now be degrading in practice. Looking at ancient ethical codes in this way, we can solve many of the difficulties that press on believers in their own Scriptures; the recognition of the principle of relativity in morals makes the way clear, and we understand that ethics is an advancing science, evolving with the evolution of the soul. We see that we must not swathe the limbs of the present with many of the bands useful in the past; that while the sublime spiritual truths contained in them give the world's Scriptures an eternal value, many of their precepts belong to a stage now outgrown. We must not dwarf the conscience and drug the moral sense by defending as perfect, because within the limits of a “revelation," precepts which were good for their own age but would be mischievous in ours. We make the Bibles of our race clogs instead of wings if we treat past commands as now binding, or if we explain them in a non-natural sense because they shock the more highly developed [18] moral instinct which is the very result of that moral training through which our souls have passed. Enough if such precepts were ahead of the moral practice of their time, if they struck notes higher than the people could themselves utter, if they put before them an ideal not so lofty as to be impossible to strive after, though sufficiently lofty to exercise over them an elevating power. Unless we can thus throw ourselves backward in thought into those times of ignorance, we shall fail to grasp the meaning and the wisdom of the teachers, and may cast aside other teachings of inestimable value because they are mingled with instructions suitable for their own age, though not for ours. For let it never be forgotten that the very books which contain passages that now jar on us contain also ethical precepts of a character so sublime that while we are now able to recognise their exalted beauty we stumble feebly along the lower stages of the road of which they are the goal. The use of a revelation is to set before a race knowledge it is as yet unable to compass for itself, knowledge of dangers from which it warns, of possibilities which it holds out as encouragement. A revelation is the knowledge of the elder brothers placed at the service of the younger, one of the most effective means of lifting the world, of hastening the evolution of the soul.

( b ) Repelled by these moral difficulties which surround revelation and may even be said to be inseparable from all revelations given to a primitive people, many of the [19] most thoughtful and cultured people of our day reject it altogether as of authority, and regard conscience as the direct arbiter in morals; some go so far as to declare that it is the voice of God in man, and ought to be obeyed as a divine authority. This ethical school has been effectively attacked by the blunt pointing out of the fact that conscience is a very variable quantity - varying with civilisation, with intellectual development, with public opinion, with the general tradition and training of a nation. Further, that conscience in one man contradicts conscience in another, so that a person acting conscientiously may do things which another person as conscientiously condemns. Thus conscience speaks with many voices, yet always preserves the note of authority, of imperious command, and tortures with remorse the man who disobeys. When a man listens to conscience he feels himself to be listening to something that comes from outside or beyond himself, something that does not argue but asserts, that does not plead but commands. This voice, with its imperious "Do this," “Avoid that," seems by this very imperiousness to claim unquestioning obedience, and this has led to the ascription to it of divine authority. Yet if - as is clear from a study of the facts of human history - it sometimes commands crimes, we cannot rightly describe it as the voice of God. The inquisitor was sometimes conscientious when he racked and burned his brother man for the glory of God and the salvation of the souls of others who might be inclined to follow that heretical [20] brother; he acted with a clear conscience, honestly believing himself to be doing service both to God and to man. Yet we can scarcely admit that in his case conscience was an infallible guide, or regard it as the voice of God speaking in the human soul.

The question, then, arises: What is this conscience which arrogates to itself such supreme authority, speaking as though it ought to be obeyed without challenge? Here Theosophy steps in and explains the genesis of conscience, and hence the limitations that surround it in the evolving - the not yet evolved - man. According to theosophical teaching the human soul, or intelligence, is a growing and developing quality, evolving by the experience gathered in life after life. Born into the world utterly ignorant and therefore without knowledge of good or evil, the soul at first could not recognise any difference between right and wrong. At that early period every experience was useful simply as experience, and everything encountered in life had some new lesson to impart to the infant soul. Whether an action were right or wrong, in our sense of the terms, it was equally useful to the soul, for only by the results which followed could knowledge of law be obtained. It was found that happiness followed some actions - those that were in harmony with the laws of nature - and that misery followed others - those that were in contravention with these laws; by these results the soul slowly learned to distinguish between the actions that made for progress and those which made for retardation. As the soul [21] passed through incarnation after incarnation, it gathered a large store of these experiences of actions and their results: these experiences were increased by those reaped in the intermediate world, wherein the soul sojourned for awhile after leaving the earth, and found that suffering followed on the heels of the physical yielding to the impulses of the animal nature. Continuing its pilgrimage and arriving in the heavenly world, the soul rested and looked back over these varied experiences, and cast up the ledger of the concluded life-cycle. Certain classes of actions had led to happiness and growth, other classes to unhappiness and delay. The first classes, it decided, were those which it was desirable to repeat, while the latter should be entirely avoided. When the time had arrived for the return to earth, and the soul was employed in making for itself a new mind, it wove into this new mind the conclusions on desirable and undesirable actions to which it had come when reviewing its previous earth-life. Some of these were clear and definite: “That course of action led to sorrow, this course to joy; performing that deed I reaped misery, performing this I found content and peace. In the future I will avoid that, and I will do this." These decisions it implants in the mind it is forming, to be utilised in the coming life, and when it comes into the world in a new body these conclusions appear as innate ideas. The events from which the conclusions were drawn remain in the memory of the soul but are not imprinted on the mind; for the latter [22] the conclusions themselves are enough, and they form a summary sufficient for guidance, unencumbered with a mass of unnecessary and burdensome detail. These conclusions form what we call conscience, or moral instinct, which responds at once to external impacts; when the parents or the teacher tells the child, “This is right, that is wrong," the mind of the child promptly acquiesces in the statement, if it fall within the limit of the registered results of its own experience; if it do not, the mind of the child remains bewildered and unconvinced, and withholds the inner assent although it may yield an outer obedience. Here comes in the value of education; the innate ideas may lie latent, if not aroused and brought out by external stimulus, however promptly they may respond to that stimulus when it is applied. Further, the weaker among them are strengthened when a statement of results is made externally beforehand, and the results follow the course of action described.

Regarding the nature of conscience in this way, we arrive at an understanding of its limitations. When anything comes before the soul similar to its past experiences, the registered decision asserts itself and the “voice of conscience" is heard; but when new circumstances arise, and no registered decision is available, conscience is dumb, and the man is compelled to rely wholly on the judgment then formed by the reason. Such a judgment will be largely influenced by the atmosphere in which he lives, by the customs and [23] traditions of his time, by the prepossessions arising from racial and religious prejudices and from his own personal idiosyncrasies.

As the soul develops and gains fuller and fuller control over its vehicles, it is able to utilise more fully the experiences of the past, and to draw upon its memory for help beyond the well-digested conclusions registered in the mind as innate ideas of right and wrong. When it seeks to influence the lower vehicles, its communications must always have in them the note of authority, for the mind-consciousness can only know that some thought or impulse comes to it from a hidden and unexplained source, and there is nothing to approve to the reason that which is yet felt to possess compelling power.

When we study the subject from this standpoint it is easy to see why conscience, lacking experience, should make wrong decisions and give wrong commands, and we can accept the fact with equanimity, since the very experience of the sorrowful results that accrue from the mistake will give the soul wider knowledge, and thus ensure a wiser decision under similar circumstances in the future. Further, we see that the saying that a man should follow conscience is true, for even supposing the dictate of conscience be mistaken in any given case, it is none the less the best available judgment possessed by the individual, and its faultiness being due to insufficiency of experience it will be partly corrected by the results of the obedience rendered. The soul grows [24] in the dark hours when a problem of action is presented to it that it is unable to solve. For the fairly moral person no difficulty arises in making the choice between the clearly wrong and the clearly right; to see is to decide. The problems which rack our brains and wring our hearts are those which arise when, standing before two courses of action, both seem right or both seem wrong, so that duty appears to be divided. The theosophist, finding himself in such straits, understands why he is thus groping in the darkness, and sets to work to do his best with a calm and steady mind-the result of knowledge. He puts before himself as fully and clearly as possible the two courses of action and their probable results, and brings to bear upon them his best powers of reason and judgment; he tries to eliminate as far as possible "the personal equation," to ignore the bearing of the alternative courses on his own wishes or fears, likes or dislikes, and to free himself from bias and prejudice; he then, with the whole force of his heart, wills to do the better of the two, seeking the illumination of spiritual intelligence; having thus done his best, he chooses, and fearlessly advances along the selected path. He may have chosen amiss, but even then, his intention being pure, that good intent will prevent the arising of any very serious harm; he will suffer for his mistake, and will thus increase his knowledge and be able to choose more wisely in the future, but the powers which "make for righteousness” will use his pure will to neutralise the [25] results of his intellectual blunder. Results are guided more by motives than by actions, for the force liberated by a high motive is more potent than that generated by action, and will produce more good than the mistaken method will produce harm. Further, the motive works upon character, while the action only brings results on the physical plane. Thus, trusting to the Law, relying on the Law, we may act fearlessly even when darkness enshrouds us, for we know that the Law to which we commit ourselves will break in pieces our mistakes, while conscience will grow wiser through the exercise of our highest faculties, and will become stronger by the very conflicts through which it passes.

Conscience then - or moral intuition, as it is sometimes called - is not an infallible guide, but it has a place in directing our conduct; it does not decide between right and wrong without experience, but yields at any time the decisions arrived at by the study of experience by the soul. Thus understanding it we can use it, without being greatly troubled when it fails us at the hour of our sorest need, and in these cases of failure we must fall back on our best judgment to form a decision, abiding contentedly by the results.

( c ) Let us consider utility as affording the basis for ethics, and see how far this ground commends itself to our reason. The formula often given, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," needs, as every thoughtful utilitarian declares, some explanation for its due application. The nature of the happiness meant [26] must be defined, both as to quality and quantity of duration; the higher must not be sacrificed to the lower; nor the lasting to the transient. Utilitarianism stated partially and without due discrimination lays itself open to effective attack as selfish and calculating, but put as the theosophist might put it, in the deep and wide sense, it is sound and philosophical. It should mean that if we act in accordance with law we must be acting for ultimate happiness; that ultimate happiness and ultimate right are inseparable, since we live in a world of law; that in this world, where every law is an expression of the divine nature, obedience to law in bringing about harmony must necessarily bring about happiness, and must at the same time be identical with the highest good. When we see that the law of the world is a law of progress, that we are evolving towards a more perfect condition, that the divine will is bringing about the perfection of all, that in perfection there can be no disharmony and therefore no suffering; when this is seen, we see also the underlying truth of utilitarianism beneath the partial expression, and that in the ultimate analysis there is no distinction between virtue and happiness. We are often blinded to this important truth by the fact that in the process of evolution the following of virtue repeatedly brings pain; and this must be until the lower nature is wholly transcended, until we have wholly outgrown the brute in us, and let “the ape and tiger die." We gradually learn that nature incessantly demands pleasure - i.e., harmonious and adapted co-operation - but that when the [27] pleasure is attached to the possession of a form that breaks into pieces, such pleasure is followed by pain; we learn that in following the lower pleasures we are grasping at things which pierce us in the grasping, that such pleasures are delusive, and that all that is against the law - and therefore “wrong" - must inevitably lead to pain. We learn that we are the higher, not the lower, nature, and must transfer our centre of consciousness from the animal self to the divine Self; that we are not the body, as many think, nor the mind, as more highly developed people imagine, but the Self which is unity, in which all live and move. Evolution emphasises, strengthens, makes strong and defined the individual in order that he may become a centre of consciousness able to endure as a centre amid the keenest and strongest vibrations after the protective scaffolding of the individuality has been removed. The progress of man is from consciousness to self-consciousness through all the stages of selfishness and self-assertion, until self-consciousness can persist without losing memory and identity and all that is valuable as giving stability, while casting aside the limits that prevent interpenetration of numberless self-consciousnesses; nay, it is to expand to all-consciousness without losing its centre, expanding and contracting at will. In the course of this progress each man learns by sad and bitter experience the intangible unity of all beings, finding that nothing that injures one can be good for any, that that which brings happiness to all can alone bring happiness to each. Not the happiness of the [28] greater number but the happiness of all is necessary for the happiness of one.

Oneship is not in the lower but in the higher, not in the body or the mind but in the spirit, the divine, the eternal life. Virtue and happiness are ultimately the same, because virtue is that which serves the life of all, not the separated life, and it is virtue merely because it aids evolution and is lifting the many towards the One. If in utilitarianism anything less than unity be postulated, if any point be set up short of that eternal oneness which is hidden in us and is being brought into manifestation, then the system is incomplete. No system can be really rational unless it be spiritual in its foundation and recognise the one Spirit as the life in all.

These three systems then, of authority, of intuition, of utility, contain truth and should be mutually helpful; they are complementary, not antagonistic, and each brings its useful lesson for the teaching of man. No system of ethics can be sound if it do not recognise the evolving life of the soul as its foundation and inviolable law as the condition of evolution. These two fundamental principles, so familiar to us as reincarnation and karma, are the basis of ethics, and without these no ethical problem can be solved.

One divine Life, given as a seed for the life of man; that seed growing by reincarnation, the infolded powers of the Spirit becoming the unfolded powers of the man made God - such is the secret of evolution. Those who in the early days of humanity gave to it revelation dealt [29] with the early stages of the human soul, stimulating its growth; those who appealed to intuition recognised the growing soul which possessed a harvest of experience; those who spoke of happiness and virtue as one - if they knew the inner truth of their teaching - were grasping after the oneness of all things and the perfect happiness that lies only in the development of all. Thus the human soul develops out of ignorance into partial knowledge, out of partial knowledge into divine life, where the highest good is the highest bliss. On one or other stage of that ladder everyone of us, readers mine, is standing; the problems we meet in daily life belong to our stage of growth, and we solve them by knowing and by living. Sometimes a wiser and an older soul brings its experience to the helping of the younger, and by speaking out its knowledge for the guidance of the less advanced makes their evolution more rapid; the very proclamation of a law makes the recognition of that law the easier. Such souls are the Revealers, and all such teachings are of the nature of revelation. For such helping divine Teachers, liberated souls, remain among us, bearing the burden of the flesh; by their spoken words they quicken our nascent intuition, and by this revelation of truth aid us to climb more swiftly towards the light. From that Brotherhood has ever come revelation, the revelation of fragments of the Divine Wisdom. They send out their disciples as messengers, who repeat the truths they in humbleness have learned, in order that the world may evolve more rapidly. But never let it be forgotten [30] that we progress more by living than by studying. As we destroy separateness and live compassion our eyes will be opened to the visions of ideal beauty. Now, as ever, is it true that only those who do the will shall know of the doctrine, and in no age of the world more than in the present has it been possible for man to be truly "taught of God." [31]

Few questions, perhaps only those that are connected with religion, rouse as much hot feeling as those of sociology. Enthusiasts of any school can see no good, can scarcely admit common honesty, in enthusiasts of another. Folly or knavery, deliberate or invincible ignorance, is held to be the only conceivable explanation of views in antagonism to those cherished by the speaker. "Of course, no decent person can be a socialist," says one. "Of course, no humane person can be anything but a socialist," says another. And so on, with all the pairs of opposites into which sociology is divided.

Needless to say that here, as everywhere, the extremist is in the wrong, and truth lies in the golden mean. The great schools of sociological thought are none of them based on a fundamental error, but each on a partial [32] truth; each manifests an aspect of the truth, necessary for social well-being, and denies other aspects of the truth because of the limitations of its exponents. The heat shown by the combatants may very well be excused in view of the importance of the issues at stake; for sociology is concerned with the external happiness of people everywhere, with their condition, their welfare, their comfort, their daily lives. Some, moved strongly by sympathy with the suffering before their eyes, will plunge headlong along any road that promises immediate relief; others, further-sighted and recognising hidden dangers, oppose vehemently all reform, lest while bringing a transient good it should result in deeper ill. These two tendencies lie deep in human nature, and by their interplay work for gradual evolution. Separated, as they generally are in action, they are wont to precipitate social catastrophes. Looking at human history, we often find it difficult to say which of these two classes-those who would have change at all hazards, or those who would stand on the old paths at all hazards - have most contributed to revolutions; whether these have been brought about mostly by the violent advocacy of those desiring change, or by the stubborn obstinacy of those who refused in any fashion to alter with the changing circumstances of man. If the two forces could be united in harmonious co-operation, progress would be at once rapid and safe, but while our limitations remain as narrow as they are at present, the hasty action followed by reaction, the forward rush [33] and hasty retreat, are likely still to alternate in social affairs.

No person in whom heart and brain are developed can look at modem social conditions without recognising the intellectual ineptitude and the moral obliquity that have brought modem nations to their present pass. Not order but disorder, not government but anarchy, face us on every side, and we find everywhere unrest and discontent, the eloquent witnesses to the failure of modern civilisation. The air is full of confused murmurs, of inarticulate complainings, and despite the efforts of the unselfish and the growing sensitiveness of the social conscience, the hatred bred of a dull sense of injustice faces the repression bred of suspicion. The brotherhood which is a fact in nature is daily contradicted and defied in social life, and the friction generated by disregard of natural law threatens to burst into flames which will consume society, and leave the ground clear for another attempt to build a civilisation, or possibly, if men be sufficiently evolved, for the construction of a system ordered in accordance with facts.

All are agreed that the present state of things is unsatisfactory, and the century has been rife with proposals for change. These may be classified under three heads: political, dealing with the external organisation of society; economic, dealing with the production and distribution of wealth, and hence with ownership of the means of production; and at the close of the century, Theosophical, dealing with the broad principles [34] under-lying all human relations. The politicians deal with the fabric of society, and political remedies can but concern themselves with externals that can be dealt with by legislation; none the less there must arise under this head a question of vast importance - the root of the authority swaying national affairs. A very large and increasing party, comprising many of the broadest-minded among the young thinkers of our time, entirely turns its back on politics, declaring that political arrangements are not at the root of the troubles of the day. These thinkers say that we shall never get rid of our troubles - poverty, ignorance, class antagonisms, recurrent strife between capital and labour - by working from the political standpoint; that below the political basis is the economic, and that politics can only deal with the surface of things. Let political arrangements be as good as the wit of man can devise, nevertheless with an unsound economic system misery must continue. A third party, small in numbers at present, says that even when we have reached the economic basis we have not yet touched the social bed-rock. They admit that economics go deeper than the questions which agitate the political world, but they allege that there is something that underlies both politics and economics, and that is human nature. They say that until human nature is understood, with its fundamental, ineradicable tendencies; until a study is made of man as man, both as an individual and in his social relations with his fellows, man in the past, the present, and the future, with [35] his weaknesses and his powers; until this be done, we shall never be able to build a society which will endure. The people who talk in this strain are usually called Theosophists. All Theosophists certainly would agree in this, however much they may differ as regards present-day politics and economics. Whether or not they take part in political or social questions, they always hold these to be subsidiary to that which they regard as basic - a wide view of humanity as composed of souls evolving through vast ages of time under a definite law of growth. Hence they recognise the necessity for understanding the constitution of human nature and the conditions necessary for its evolution.

Yet theosophical teachings lend themselves with peculiar force to the elucidation of the very problems that politics and economics propound. The theosophical view of life must profoundly modify the atmosphere through which these problems are seen, since it presents men as evolving souls - under whatever political and economic condition they may at anyone time be born coming back to this world over and over again, inheriting their past and building their future while living in their present. Looking further backwards and further forwards than any political or economic system, theosophical teachings deal with man as an evolving entity, creating his future environment by his present activities, and modifying his present surroundings according to his place in the scheme of evolution. Theosophy applies the principle of evolution to society in a more radical [36] fashion than does any school of thinkers, seeing in society not only an evolving organism - as do many others - but an evolving organism made up of souls, each one of which is also evolving. Those who see each man evolving during millions of years must necessarily look on all political and economic schemes as partial and temporary - as local and parochial, if the phrase may be permitted. Any political and economic system can but represent a passing phase in the vast evolution of humanity. Hence the Theosophist tends to a peaceful attitude of mind towards the different conflicting parties in the State; he is not inclined to rush wildly with one or the other, but sees that each embodies a principle necessary for the well-being of the whole, serving as a temporary vehicle for a fundamental tendency in human nature. He sees that the solution of problems will lie in the wise blending of principles and methods that are now in antagonism to each other, so that the total experience of humanity may be utilised in the social structure.

It may be well to remark, in order to avoid mistake, that theosophical teachings with reference to sociology have not yet been clearly formulated, and that any attempt to state them will certainly be coloured by the idiosyncrasies of the particular thinker concerned. The most that can just now be done is to indicate certain salient points and to make a tentative effort to apply these broad principles to present-day problems; with the help afforded by the history of the past, as we [37] learn it from theosophical teachings, and the revelation of the occult side of nature in those same teachings, it should be possible to shed some light on the conditions necessary for a satisfactory solution, and to see the place and working of the tendencies now in collision that should be brought into harmony. The conservative and the liberal in politics, the socialist and the individualist in economics, severally represent necessary factors in social evolution, and the man who could utilise them all, putting each into his own place and holding all in balanced stability, would be a veritable saviour of society. This was done of old, we have learned, by the King-Initiates, who in far-off ages gave to humanity its earliest lessons in social construction, and it may be - nay, the time shall surely come - that in another Golden Age it will again be done, in a fashion suited to more highly evolved souls and to a humanity grown out of infancy into manhood. Society must again be based on a recognition of the fundamental laws of brotherhood, reincarnation, and karma, for these alone can unite progress with order, assign social functions with justice, and ensure abundance of material goods with propriety of distribution. Ignorance of these facts has brought about anarchy; knowledge will give right government, and the content that springs from justice.

Let us consider, first, the political problem: What should be the government of a nation, what its external organisation? A large body of thoughtful people, though far less in number now than in the early days [38] of the century, concern themselves mainly with politics, regarding political order as the chief factor in national happiness. In considering the political aspect we will exclude the economic from view for a time, for the sake of clearness, and confine ourselves to the fashion of the instrument with which the law works in the nation. We are not here concerned with details, such as the political parties of any given time, or the way in which two or more sets of people may struggle for the direction of the government of a country; our study lies with the fundamental question of national organisation: "Where is the root of government, the source of authority?" This question must be answered in principle in one of two ways; however much the answer may be hedged about with qualifications, it can be ultimately reduced to a basic idea - that of monarchy or of democracy. At present among ourselves authority is supposed to grow from two roots, a limited monarchy and a limited democracy - a manifest compromise, a transitional state. Under monarchy comes all the varieties of personal rule, wherein the ruler is ruler by virtue of some quality pertaining to himself, some inherent natural qualification acknowledged by the ruled as giving him sovereignty over them. Under democracy come all the varieties of national organisation based on some system of the election of the government by the governed, those in which the root of power lies in the ruled, not in the ruler. The executive may be called a monarch, a president, a dictator, a council, or anything [39] else, but he or it wields merely a delegated authority derived from the subjects, and resumable in the last resort by those who gave it.

Most people would probably say, at this point, that no discussion can arise in the present day between the principles of monarchy and democracy thus defined, and certainly very few persons would now accept the basic idea of monarchy, and frankly say that they believed in the "Divine Right of Kings." Yet, considering the part played by this idea in the history of the world, its endorsement by religion, and its acceptance by the wisest and best of our race in the past, its origin cannot be without interest. It comes down to us from the days of Lemuria and Atlantis, when perfected men belonging to an earlier humanity dwelt among our infant races and guided their earliest steps. They ruled the nations without question, in virtue of their manifest and unchallenged superiority, as a father rules his children; by their wisdom, compassion, and justice they enthroned the idea of monarchy in the hearts of men, and knit together in their minds religion and royalty, being in very truth to their peoples the representatives of God upon earth, embodying in their rule so much of the divine order as was suitable to the place and the time. There was no doubt in the minds of any as to the innate difference between the primitive kings and the nations that they ruled; they gave to the people their arts, their sciences, and their polity; they were at once their teachers and their guides; they built the outer fabric of [40]

the nation, and nursed its dawning life. From those heroic figures of antiquity, encircled still with the magic of their deeds, enshrined in myth and poem, there has come down an ideal of kingship in which the king was greater, wiser, nobler, diviner, than the people over whom he ruled, when his valour was their buckler and his wisdom their enlightener, where selfishness played no part, self-seeking held no place, when he gave himself and his life to the people, toiled that they might rest, waked that they might sleep, fasted that they might eat, when kingship meant supreme self-surrender in order that the nation might be guarded, taught, and raised.

When our own Aryan race was segregated, its Manu was naturally its king, and in his direct line were incarnated the mighty souls who carried on his work under his immediate supervision. The purest physical heredity, maintained by these great souls, afforded suitable encasement of flesh for these early monarchs, and the physical heredity remained when, in process of time, Initiates of lower rank incarnated in his family to continue the royal duties. Thus the divine right of kings became wedded to the idea of hereditary birthright, and for tens of thousands of years the connection of the two was maintained - a view quite intelligible as a tradition from these earlier times. The King-Initiate did not become possessed of "divine right" because he was born in a given family; but having in himself the necessary qualities, he took birth in that given family as [41] the recognised and convenient method of obtaining the fealty of the nation, and the conditions suitable for training the new body and mind in which he was to function during that incarnation. An experienced and highly developed soul was chosen as a ruler of a nation by the great spiritual hierarchy that guides the evolution of humanity; there lay the recognised root of supreme authority, that hierarchy being the vehicle of the LOGOS in the department of His realm we call our world. Hence such a soul came as ruler, dowered with the right divine to rule, delegated by the hierarchy that was the expression of the ruling life of the LOGOS, chosen for his fitness, his capacity, developed through hundreds of incarnations in all the ascending grades of a past humanity. The taking birth in a particular family was merely a convenient way of publicly designating the chosen ruler, so that the kingship might pass from one personality to another without confusion, jar, or strife. To the people for many ages that birth gave the right to rule them, they knowing not the facts behind the veil; only a tradition was handed down of a golden age when kings were gods, and the hereditary kings of later millenniums traced their ancestry back to some divine King; Son of the Sun, Son of Heaven - some such name was the proudest of their royal titles, until in the efflux of time the title was regarded as a superstition, the fact on which it was based being lost in the night of the past. As the soul that incarnated in the Aryan race to finish their human evolution passed on into loftier [42] regions, less developed souls stood at the head of humanity, and gradually, as the karma of the race accumulated, there was less and less direct interference by the Great Ones. The nursling had become the child on his own feet.

Less removed from their subjects in development, and not having yet outgrown the human weaknesses of selfishness, ambition, and pride, the kings began to use their unrestricted powers for their own advantage instead of for their people's good. Losing touch with their superiors in the invisible world, they lost the sense of responsibility to them, and gradually came to regard themselves as independent, and as arbitrary "lords over God's heritage." Then the people, misruled, began first to rebel against and later to limit the authority of their kings - feeling, truly enough, that monarchs who used their unbounded power to ensure enjoyment for themselves instead of welfare for their people, were no longer true incarnations of divine right. In Europe, the disappearance of the idea of reincarnation and karma intellectually involved the disappearance of the idea of hereditary divine right, while its practical destruction was brought about by the wickedness or mediocrity of the kings themselves. And yet if the idea of monarchy be admitted at all, we are brought logically to the view that the king must derive his authority from some invisible spiritual superior, who delegates to him the administration of a department in the divine world-government, and to that end invests him with the authority necessary for the [43] effective carrying on of the administration. There is an impassable gulf between the hereditary being ruling a nation for life and the minister elected by the nation to a certain post, with power revocable at will. A monarch who is not a monarch; a ruler who does not rule; a supreme head (in name) of a nation who at every point of activity is precluded from action; such a personage may be a most useful and admirable functionary, worthy of all respect, but his office is in a transitional condition and cannot permanently exist. He is too great not to be greater; too small not to be smaller. If he be "king by the grace of God" he should have the power and the responsibility of kingship as well as its name; if he be “king by the will of the people," holding his office by virtue of an election by the nation - an election declared and revocable by some assembly representing the nation - and deprived of all reality of power, the title of king is somewhat too splendid for the limited reality.

If we look back some thirty years, we shall find in England a fairly strong party representing the republican ideal. Anyone who took a share in the political movements of that time will remember that a definite feeling in favour of republicanism was very widely spread, more especially among the manual workers, who displayed distinctly anti-monarchical sentiments. That feeling - as popular waves of feeling often are - was due to causes that had not in them the elements of permanency, and that have for the most part disappeared during the last [44] twenty years. Philosophic republicans there have always been, and they will continue to be, but we are concerned here with practical problems rather than with academical debates. The popular feeling which showed itself against the heir to the crown was chiefly due to what we are bound to admit was the lamentable example of reckless extravagance and carelessness of life shown by the then young man who stood highest on the steps of the throne. This feeling has subsided as years have brought dignity and sobriety in public life. Another thing that has contributed to make republicanism in England a practically dead issue is the obvious failure of that system alike in France and in the United States. In the latter country the failure is the most marked. The interference with private life, greater there than here; the increasing wars between capital and labour, waged with a terrible bitterness unknown in older lands, and with a violence on both sides that shocks humanity; the poverty which holds in its grip a huge population surrounded by natural advantages; the corruption and police oppression that are rotting municipal government; the withdrawal from public life of the most thoughtful and refined people, in consequence of the intolerable conditions connected with it, conditions such that the very name of "politician" has become a reproach; all these and other causes have brought about a complete disillusion as to republicanism in action, whatever arguments may be adduced for it theoretically by those who believe in human equality. [45] Men who twenty years ago were concerned in questions of government have now for the most part passed on into questions of economics, and declare that whatever may be the form of government, it is a sound economic system which is needed to make a nation prosperous, contented, and happy.

We may then put aside the issue as between monarchy and republicanism, as not coming within practical purview. And as though to mark its unreality there stands the wonderful celebration of the year 1897, acclaiming the conclusion of the sixty years of rule by our present monarch. Everyone admits - no matter what may be his personal opinions or prejudices - that we witnessed an unexampled uprising of sentiment in every part of the English-speaking world, an uprising that submerged for the time every other feeling. England and all her colonies were swept by one wave of enthusiastic devotion to the sovereign who sits on the throne of this vast empire, and all observers were struck by the strength and the passion of the sentiment, the hold it had on the popular heart, the transfiguring effect on the object of that devotion. The truth is that, deep in the heart of nations, despite all the crimes that evil kings have wrought, there lives a passionate desire to look up and see as the Head of the nation one human being who incarnates all it has of greatness, of glory, and of power, who stands as its symbol to the world. This tendency in human nature seems to be ineradicable, and its strength is witnessed by its survival through all strain [46] of royal crimes. History testifies to the fact that extremity of misery and despair has ever been needed to goad a nation into revolt.

Rebellion is not the natural tendency of the human brain and heart. Man desires with a passionate longing to be taught, to be guided, to be ruled, as is shown by the pathetic inextinguishable loyalty of the masses to one man after another who rises into power on their shoulders. But man also demands that the one who claims to teach shall be able to teach; that the one who stands as guide shall be able to guide; that the one who is crowned as ruler should be able to rule. In this country, amid our political parties, there is no one man who stands out as leader, whom all would unitedly acclaim as great, who incarnates the ideal of a nation's Head. Were it possible that in a royal House a man should be born with the genius of a Ruler, with the power to awaken popular enthusiasm, with the brain to guide the nation, and the heart to love the people with a wise and all-embracing tenderness, seeing their sufferings, understanding the causes, and applying with a firm unflinching hand the sufficient remedies, then should we see what loyalty means in the heart of a nation, and the power that such a one would wield, amid glad assent, to eradicate wrongs and establish better conditions, with all the concentrated force and directness of an individual will, guided by a keen intellect and a noble heart. Government would no longer be a series of compromises arrived at by decisions depending on the varying strength of parties, but a [47] clear rational application of definite principles to definite ends.

In our own days the study of economics is leading many into various forms of Socialism. These forms are all democratic, and are based, explicitly or implicitly, on the assumption of the basic rights of man, and the counting of heads. The majority of heads is to fix the form of government, no matter what the contents of the heads may be. Empty ones, if the hands connected with them can scratch a cross on a ballot-paper, are to count as much as full ones, the drunken profligate is to balance the noblest sage. Truly it is said that under a proper system there would be no empty heads and no drunken profligates; but the proper system is yet to be established, and social derelicts are meantime to have an equal hand in making it, and to form part of the materials out of which it is to be constructed. "The sovereign people" cannot logically exclude any. This is the rock on which democratic socialism must split. It is the condition of success in all compulsory or voluntary groupings of men for the attainment of an object, that the head of the association shall be superior in faculty knowledge, and grip of the whole situation to those who compose the active constituents of the working body; if he cannot rule and they cannot obey, disaster is certain. Hence the manifold failures in co-operative production. The head of a business, the captain of a ship, the general of an army, the principal of a college, the father of a family - each of these must be superior to his subordinates in the [48] matter in hand else chaos results. Only in a democratic State are the ruled supposed to elect the ruler, an equal to govern equals.

It is argued that a man might be elected to a position of authority and be vested with full power during the period of his official status; it is, however, very difficult for the official superior to impose a strict discipline on and to control effectually those to whom he is ultimately responsible, and by whom he may be ejected; the prompt obedience necessary to success is also not easily yielded by those in whose hands is the power of throwing off their chief. Even were these difficulties overcome, greater ones remain behind; in voluntary associations trust must be given to the elected officer, while he must be ruled by a sense of keenest honour to do his duty to the full; these qualities are lacking both in men and their chosen leaders for the most part, as is evidenced by the bitter suspicions of his fellows, that have broken many a labour leader's heart after fettering his energies for years, and by the failures in integrity among officials that have so hampered trade organisations. Trust and high honour are among the noblest and rarest of human qualities at the present stage of evolution, yet without the general diffusion of these democratic Socialism must fail.

If we look at governing bodies belonging to the State - such as socialistic communities would organise - we see staring us in the face the hideous difficulty of corruption. Men elected to office are continually found using their office for personal gain. In democratic [49] America municipal and other public bodies are sinks of corruption, and there is scarcely any attempt to hide the fact that officials must be bribed when any undertaking is in question with which they are able to interfere. Where are we to find the men who may be trusted with office and will not turn it to their own ends? Such men are found where office is accepted for love of country and from traditional sense of obligation to the public service, but - until human nature be changed - such qualities are not to be found often in those who seek elective office as a means of livelihood.

That a noble form of Society is possible in which all the forces of the State shall be organised to subserve the general good, and in which all the plenty and happiness for which Socialists are rightly yearning shall be realised, is indeed a truth, as we shall presently see. But it will not be what we now call democratic, for democracy runs counter to the all-compelling laws of nature.

The fundamental error on which this system is based is the idea that "men are born equal," the keynote of the "declaration of the rights of man," which was the legacy of the last century to the present. Truly if men were born into this world but once, this fundamental error ought in justice to be a natural truth, and each man should be as good as anyone else, and have equal rights in the community. If the soul be newly created when it comes into the world in a new body, or if, as some think, man is only a body; if everyone now living in England was born for the first time during the present century [50] and will pass away from earth for ever when the grave closes over his head or the fire consumes his body; if our only experience of earthly life lies in this brief space which stretches from the cradle behind us to the grave in front of us; then we might expect that one man should not be innately wiser or better than another, one fitted to rule, another only fitted to obey.

As we know by observation, men are not born equal but very unequal; some with tendencies to virtue, others to vice; some with genius, others with narrowest intellect. Never can a stable society be built if we start by disregarding nature, and treat as having right to equal power the ignorant and the wise, the intellectual and the stupid, the criminal and the saintly; on that uneven ground no edifice that will endure can ever be based. Yet if man be born but once, it would be unjust to build on any other foundation; for it would be a shocking injustice to subordinate one man to another, save by his own free choice, if both come freshly to the world, neither having learned anything, nor struggled, nor experienced, in former lives. In such case it would seem as though everyone had an equal right to everything, and should have his equal turn at governing among the rest; ignorance should have as great a voice in the guiding of a nation as wisdom, and a free fight and free scramble should give each man his chance in so irrational a world.

Nor are matters mended if "equal" be translated to mean "should have equal opportunities," for to give [51] equal opportunities to the unequally equipped is to condemn the weaker to perish in the struggle for existence. We have, in our selfishness, left the weaker as a prey to the stronger, instead of training the stronger to regard his strength as imposing on him heavier responsibilities - among which are the helping and protecting of the weaker. Our economic system is one of free combat, with the inevitable "Woe to the vanquished." In former days it was a battle of bodies, now it is chiefly a battle of minds, but a battle none the less. We have learned that a man must not use his muscles to plunder his neighbour; we have yet to learn that he must not use his brains to the same end. It is no more right to trample on others because we are cleverer, smarter, shrewder than they, than in the days that are called barbarous it was right for a man to use his strength to rob, to crush, to enslave. The free combat that we call “civilisation" is not a state that can endure. I am not denying the necessity of passing through this stage in evolution, in order that the individual may be developed, but am looking to the next stage, for which we may rightly begin to work.

No one with a human heart in him can go through one of our great cities, seeing the condition of thousands of our people, realising the hopelessness of them for those who are born into them, without feeling a bitter pain, even if he think the state of things to be without remedy. To see into what surroundings children are born, how they grow up, how their parents live and die - [52] these things are enough to break the heart if it be not wise enough to understand, and strong enough to labour. And I, for one, cannot have harsh condemnation for words, however wild, and schemes, however ill-considered, that spring from suffering, misery, and starvation, embittered by ignorance alike of causes and of ends. I have seen too much of the life of the poor, of the wearing anxiety and blinding pain, of the brutalisation and crushing out of hope and energy, to feel aught but tenderest compassion for their woes and sympathy with the motive that underlies all honest efforts for their relief. The wildest words are often but cries of pain, half-inarticulate, born of the blind feeling that something is wrong and of ignorance how to change, of the despair that grows out of patience long outworn and breaking hearts that find no help in man or God.

The worst of all is that this is of modern development and belongs especially to western lands; it is not of more than a century and a quarter's growth, and dates from the substitution in general use of machinery for handicrafts. The huge aggregations of population brought about by the methods of production are the superficial cause of much of the degradation; another of these causes is the crushing out of individual faculty. In the older days those who were employed in supplying objects needed by the community were men who, to a great extent, had joy in their work, the joy of the creator in his finished product. The craftsman of days not long gone by was an artist in a humble way, and his faculties [53] were drawn out by the effort to invent, to improve, to adorn his work. Looking back even a couple of hundred years to the things in common use amongst us, we find everywhere traces of the individual hand and fancy. Farmhouses are still found where treasures of oaken tables, dressers, chests, &c., have come down in the family for generations, and these things in common use are eagerly bought up by connoisseurs, though but the work of ordinary craftsmen, often of "farm-hands," who in the long winter's evenings - as still in Norway and Sweden - would carve rough copies of flowers and twisted stems, adding a leaf or a bud or a tendril as the whim suggested itself, or some onlooker put in his word.

It is not, of course, possible to turn back the wheels of time and bring back the era of handicraft, even though it was more conducive to widespread comfort and development than the era of machinery in which we live. Machinery is here, and is here to stay, and we must adapt our society to the new conditions. As yet we have taken no steps to meet the difficulties caused by it, nor to make up for the deprivations imposed by it on manual workers employed on it. More and more in our modern life the man who tends a machine is becoming a machine himself, a flesh and blood lever of the things of steel and iron. He is deprived of the joy of the artist and becomes an automaton, turning out millions of fragments, say the heads of pins, but never an entire thing in which he can take delight or pride, into which he can put himself, which makes him feel himself to be a living man [54] and not a mere hand to produce. The brains of a large number of those from whom the bulk of the nation is born are thus being partially atrophied and the physical development of the workers is injured.

Not without incurring a national Nemesis may a nation allow millions of its workers to be thus arrested in their growth. Into the lower physical types born of parents thus stunted can only come souls of low development, for nations, like individuals, reap that which they sow. If men's faculties are no longer, under modern conditions, cultivated in their labour as they used to be, then the enormous increase of the powers of production due to machinery must be utilised to give more leisure to the machine-workers, so that their faculties may be cultivated outside their labour. The English workman of the past was more of a man than is his compeer of to-day, and if we would not see the nation composed of souls of lower types it is necessary to redress the balance. The stunting of the mind in mechanical work is the justification of the cry for shorter hours of labour, and should be met by the co-operation of all classes of the commonwealth in bringing them about. It is not labour that takes the heart out of a man, but the dwarfing, stunting, deadening labour to which so many myriads are now condemned. Where such labour is necessary it should be brief, and should be balanced by the cultivation of faculties at other times. Otherwise our system tends to the dissolution instead of to the evolution of society.

The Theosophist, believing in reincarnation and [55] karma, is able to see the roots of our social troubles and their remedy, and to work patiently in sure dependence on the law. He sees that the ideals of society must be changed, and that the Socialists are aiming at a right end - the general happiness - by mistaken methods. And he finds in the history of the past social conditions brought about, and for a time superintended, by Adepts, that they realised the most beautiful dreams of the idealist Socialist, while the basis and the methods were entirely different from those of the modern schools. Ere considering these, let us see the ideals which are created by a belief in reincarnation and karma.

Reincarnation implies the evolution of the soul, and when evolution is recognised equality is seen to be a delusion. Evolution is as a ladder up the steps of which humanity is climbing, and all men do not stand on the same rung. As evolution is a matter in which time plays the greatest part - at any rate until a late stage of growth - difference of stage in evolution implies difference of time during which the evolving entity has been climbing up the ladder. In other words souls, while eternal in their essence, are of different ages in their individuality, and herein lies the fundamental natural truth on which a stable human society must be based. For the ideal then of organisation based on the mutual contracts of individuals of equal age, each born with equal rights, we must substitute the ideal of a family, the members of which are of different ages, each born into duties dependent on the faculties they bring with them. The [56] family, not the chartered company, is to be the ideal of the State; the discharge of duties, not the enforcing of rights, is to be the keynote of the individual life.

As evolution of the soul comes to be recognised as a factor which must enter into the organisation of society, the corollary that evolution is by law will also be accepted - karma will accompany reincarnation. Then the faculties with which a man is born will mark his stage in evolution, and will therefore determine his position in the State. And as the law guides the soul into the environment it has rendered necessary by its past actions, so in a State that was a living natural organism instead of a legal machine, souls would be as normally guided to the social grade fitted for the working out of the results of their past and their own further evolution, as in the building of the human frame the necessary materials are guided to where nerve or bone is required. Abnormal cases would appear, owing to the complexity of the causes generated by the past, but could be met, as we shall see, by special methods.

From this way of regarding the State, as an organisation based on natural laws and intended to aid and further the progress in evolution of every soul entering into it, certain principles of conduct will flow. In the family the heaviest burdens are borne by the elders and not by the children; the youngest are carefully trained, tenderly guarded, shielded from trouble, anxiety, and undue strain. If food run short, it is not the children who are first stinted; if anything be lacking, the elders [57] bear the suffering and strive to let the children feel no want. Their greater strength is regarded as imposing on them responsibilities and duties, not as giving the right to plunder and oppress. These principles are to be worked out in the solution of social problems, and we may now turn to the question of their practical application in sociology.

In the early systems of sociology, imposed by authority on infant races by their initiate Rulers, all that modern Socialism aims at for the benefit of the masses - and far more - was definitely secured. Provision was made for the abundant production of all the necessaries of life, for the training of varied types of mind to the best advantage, for the full evolution of all the faculties brought by each with him into the world, and for the direction of the energies of each into the channel best fitted for their utilisation and development. The conception of the social scheme was due to the divinely illuminated wisdom of perfected men, and its administration was confided to the most advanced souls of our own humanity, working in graduated order under the immediate direction of the King-Initiate. The basic principles of this scheme may be thus stated: government is a task demanding the highest human qualities, spiritual and intellectual, and to be rightly carried on must be undertaken in the spirit of entire self-abnegation and of devotion to the common weal, the highest being most completely the servant of all; the more highly developed the man the more highly placed [58] should he be in the social order, and the heavier therefore his responsibilities; further, the smaller will be his personal demand on material resources, his nature expanding itself chiefly in the mental and spiritual worlds, and being related to the material for service rather than for enjoyment; the governing class should therefore consist of the wisest, the purest, the most self-denying of the nation, those who can see the farthest and who ask for themselves the least, who have their hearts set on the common good, who count no labour heavy that promotes the general growth and happiness, who seek nothing but give everything, who are wise by ages of experience, and who having learned the lessons of the world are able to apply them to the circumstances of the day. The first duty of the government is to maintain in comfort, prosperity, and suitable conditions for progress, the less developed types, needing for their happiness abundance of material goods; these things are requisite alike for their evolution and their contentment, and the smaller their resources within themselves the larger are necessarily their demands on the outer world. Abundance can only be provided by labour, and to avoid waste of energy the labour must be carefully organised, directed into the most fruitful channels, and guided to the most efficient co-operation. This can only be done by those who have the whole field under their eyes, and can thus dispose of the available energies to the best advantage. The undeveloped must yield labour and obedience in exchange for comfort and absence of [59] material care; by this labour and obedience their mental and moral qualities are evolved and trained, fitting them in later birth to take a higher position in the State.

Avoiding details, which varied at different times and places, the general scheme placed the responsibility for the organisation and direction of labour within a given area on the officials administering the area; each governmental unit formed part of a larger unit, and training in the smaller units prepared for the administration of the larger; famine or any scarcity of the comforts of life, discontent, uneasiness, crime, ignorance - these things being regarded as due to the fault of the administrators, each ruler was called to account by his immediate superior for the prevalence in his district of any of these evils, rightly regarded as evitable. The ruler was there to direct labour, to ensure education, to equalise distribution, to repress violence, to decide disputes, to keep order, to promote happiness; if he could not do these things he was unfit to rule and must give place to a better man. He might be the ruler of a village, of a town, of villages and towns aggregated into a province, of provinces grouped into a viceroyalty, but whatever the size of his district, he was responsible for its good government; and all were thus held responsible, from the pettiest village official up to the highest governors holding directly from the monarch, the monarch answering to the occult hierarchy only. He appointed some as his viceroys over grouped provinces, these in turn appointed the rulers of provinces, and these again the [60] subordinate officials, and so on to the end of the ladder; thus was ensured a graduated and orderly administration, which served at once as a government machinery and a training ground for the evolving souls who constituted it, its highest and most responsible members being Initiates. It will be observed that this whole system made the lower and less evolved subordinate to the higher and more evolved throughout; each rendered obedient to his superiors and received it from his inferiors, and the responsibility of each was to those above him, never to those below. Hence "rights" had no place, "duties" only were recognised, but these duties imposed on the more evolved the obligation to provide for the less evolved everything that could conduce to their growth, their happiness, and their improvement. All was given, nothing was snatched, and consequently there was order and contentment instead of struggle. The land belonged to the monarch, but was divided as to control into definite portions, assigned to the different classes. One half was set aside for the producers engaged in active work and for their families; the second half was again divided, one portion of it going to the monarch, and supporting the whole governing class, and such imperial charges as the defence of the nation, the keeping up of internal communications, and similar necessaries for the people as a whole; the administration of justice, like the rest of the work of this governing class, entailed no direct charges, all the officials being supported from this land. The second portion of the [61] half of the land went to the priesthood, who formed a class apart, side by side with the governing class, and were charged with the public education; the whole of this education, again, for children and youths, entailed no direct charges, the priests being the teaching class of the nation; this land further supported all sick and incapable persons, and all - outside the governing class - who had passed middle age, generally fixed at about forty-five. The period of labour extended over only about twenty-five years; before it, the youth was educated, and after it his time was given to the leisurely development of whatever faculties he had evolved. The admirable organisation of labour rendered it so productive that this ample leisure could be secured to all the producing class, thus ensuring their definite evolution in each life-period. The half of the land used for the governing and priestly classes was cultivated by the manual workers, this labour being their contribution to the State. Among the institutions maintained by the land of the priesthood in each province were central agricultural colleges and experimental farms, where professors and students were constantly engaged in the scientific study of agriculture; it was their duty to improve the methods of cultivation, to make experiments in cross-breeding plants and animals, to search for new ways of utilising natural forces, of enriching the soil, &c. Any discovery was tested on these government farms, and all the information gathered was circulated among the cultivators by popular teachers; improved breeds of cattle, grains and [62] seeds were distributed through the province, and all that science and trained intelligence could devise was placed at the general service, being freely imparted to the workers. Agricultural work was further assisted by the publication throughout the year of the best times for the various field and garden operations, astronomy and astrology being utilised for the prediction of the changes of the weather, early and late seasons, favourable and unfavourable magnetic conditions, &c. All this work was demanded from the official class as their contribution to the State, even more rigidly than labour was exacted from the manual workers, for the pressure of opinion and the accepted code of honour prevented dereliction of public duty. One principle of administration was significant of the spirit in which the business of the nation was carried on: in times of scarcity of grain, the land of the priests was first sown, then that of the people; lastly that of the king and officials; if irrigation failed, the water was supplied in the same order. The children, sick, aged, and superannuated, considered as the weakest members of the national household, were those whose needs were the first to be supplied; burdens must fall on the elder and the stronger, not on the feeblest.

The products of a district were gathered into central granaries and storehouses for distribution as needed, the methods of distribution varying much with time and place. In good seasons the surplus products were stored for use in times of scarcity - a custom we find [63] surviving in Egypt in historical times. This centralising of the products of a district and their careful distribution enabled the results of improved cultivation and of mineral discoveries to be shared among all, the whole family, as it were, profiting by any advance. Further, a competence was assured to each and harassing anxiety as to the means of subsistence was unknown - that anxiety which breeds desperation in the undeveloped soul, and renders impossible the evolution of higher qualities.

Education was universal, but was adapted to the life that was to be led; reading and writing were not, as now, considered indispensable, but all who showed capacity for study were instructed in these instruments of learning and were then sent on from the primary to the secondary schools; thus children born into any class could rise out of it if they brought with them into the world capacities fitting them to rise, but not otherwise. The bulk of the population were trained in technical schools for agriculture or handicrafts, according to their tendencies, the capacities of the child deciding his walk in life, but a sound knowledge of his work was always imparted to him, so that he might perform his duties intelligently and with pleasure. The children of the governing and priestly classes, together with the pick of the working population, boys and girls, received a careful educational training, specialised to meet individual tendencies after the broad and deep foundation had been laid. Religious, moral, and physical education was universal, varying in [64] character according to the capacities and future work of the pupil, and no pains were spared to develop to the utmost the intellectual, moral, and spiritual faculties of those destined to guide and rule the community; above all were they trained to regard duty as all-compelling, and self-abnegation and hard work as the inevitable accompaniments of high station; this austere training and this rigorous exaction of duty from the young who were to be highly placed may be found recounted both in fourth and fifth race literature, and those who fancy that ancient rulers were mere luxurious idlers might well correct their ideas from the extant accounts. The hours of work for the labourer were short, his life was free from anxiety, and he was discharged from hard work ere old age overtook him; but the ruler must work as long as any needed him, all the responsibility of the welfare of the community weighed on him, and death alone lifted from his shoulders the burden of duty to his people.

Looking back to that ancient time and comparing it with the present, we naturally ask why so noble a system faded away, and why man passed into a state of struggle. As souls less highly evolved succeeded to the post originally held by the Divine Kings and the Initiates of various grades, the powers wielded by the rulers were prostituted to selfish purposes instead of being devoted to the common good. Rulers failing in their duties, discontent took birth among the peoples, tyranny bred hatred, and oppression begot rebellion. [65] Was this a necessary stage in human evolution? It would seem so. Man in his early days was child, not man; he was in the nursery and the school, and the troubles of his manhood lay in the future. Between the stage when humanity was an infant, guided, taught, and trained by divine Teachers and their immediate pupils, and the stage of divine Manhood when each shall have the law within him instead of without him, there stretches a long and weary struggle, a time of hopes disappointed, of efforts continually frustrated, of attempts breaking down, of experiments and failures. This is a time of transition, like that of early manhood, and humanity is like the young man or woman who thinks that he can set everything right in a moment, that the wisdom of the ages is as nothing beside his keen insight, that only the sloth and stupidity of his elders stand in the way of the abolition of every abuse and the righting of every wrong. Everybody else has failed, but he will succeed; he will solve in a moment the problems of ages, and in a few years the world will be happy. So the surging democracies of modem days are very young; one moment all will be right if we get rid of a king; next moment all is saved if an Established Church be crushed; yet again, happiness is secured if capitalists be destroyed. All superficial enough truly, as we see as experience ripens and we recognise that our difficulties are rooted in the lack of development in our own natures. Yet may it not be that through these very struggles, these shiftings of power, these [66] experiments in government, these failures of the ignorant, the experience may be gained which shall again place the hand of the wisest on the helm of the state, and make virtue, self-sacrifice, and high intelligence indispensable conditions for rule? Passengers do not take turns on the bridge of the ship to navigate the ocean; the skilled workman does not entrust his delicate machine to the loafer; the crossing-sweeper is not called in to perform a delicate surgical operation. And it may be that by failure and by social revolutions, if by no other way, we may learn that the guiding of a nation, politically and economically, is not best done by the ignorant or even by amateurs, but demands the highest qualities of head and heart.

In economics also it is probable that this stage of competition and misery was necessary for the evolution of individuality, and that man needed to grow first by combat of bodies and then by combat of brains, by the constant claim of the individual to plunder according to his powers and his opportunities. None the less it is true that this stage shall be outgrown, and we shall learn to substitute co-operation for competition, brotherhood for strife. But we can only outgrow it by cultivating unselfishness, trust, high character, and sense of duty, for we must improve ourselves ere the body politic of which we are constituent parts can be healthy.

But how to find a motor power to bring about such changes? While steadily disciplining and training ourselves, we can place before our fellows ideals which shall [67] be so wise, so well considered, that they shall win the allegiance of the intellect as well as satisfy the cravings of the heart. We must change our estimate of the relative value of things, and substitute intellectual and spiritual wealth for material riches as a standard of social consideration. May it not be possible to influence public opinion to value men and women for greatness in intellect and virtue, in self-surrender and devotion, and not for wealth or luxury? - making the multiplicity of material wants the recognised mark of inferior development, and simple and pure living hand in hand with richness of the higher nature the title to honour. May not the wealthy learn that it is an essentially infantile view of man to value him by his show instead of by his worth, by the number of his material wants rather than by the grandeur of his spiritual aspirations? Wherever the ideal is the possession of material goods combat must be the social condition, since material goods perish in the using, and possession by one excludes possession by another. Intellectual, artistic, spiritual wealth increase in the sharing, each who shares adding to the store. This is the fundamental reason why progress towards peace and contentment must be towards intellectuality, artistic development, and spiritual life, and not towards material splendour and the vulgarity of outer ostentation. These are for the undeveloped, the others for the developed. And inasmuch as the ignorant will copy the more advanced and the lowly the highly placed, the example must be set by those who lead the social and intellectual [68] world. Moreover they would themselves gain by the change in so far as they lead luxurious lives, for the pampering of the body is even more fatal to the growth of the higher nature than is the stern discipline of poverty. Man need demand from the outer world no more than absence of harassing anxiety; sufficiency, not luxury; beauty and harmony, not ostentation; leisure, not exhausting toil; time and opportunity to develop the God in him, not the overfeeding of the animal.

Further, we must have faith in humanity and appeal to what is best in man, not to what is worst. It is not true that it is necessary to build society on selfishness and to rely on selfish instincts. That which is deepest in man is not the animal, and to mould society for the brute that man is outgrowing is to build on a sinking foundation. It is a curious illustration of this that even with men of poor moral development honour is more compelling than law, and social opinion than legislation. A man will ruin himself to pay a "debt of honour" while he seeks to evade a debt enforceable by law - a perverted sense of duty, truly, but still eloquent of the important truth that more can be done by appealing to a sense of obligation imposed by the social opinion surrounding a man than by compulsion of an impersonal law. If the sense of honour, of duty to a class, can be expanded to include the nation, we shall have at work in our midst the most binding form of obligation. Duty will become the keynote of life, each asking “What do I owe?" instead of “What can I successfully demand?" [69]

It seems possible that in the future we may arrive, even by the slow method of failure, at some scheme of government in which the wisest shall hold the reins of power, and obedience shall be gladly rendered to recognised superiors; and at some economic system in which wealth shall be distributed according to needs. Then the maxim will be acted upon - noblest of all maxims when given by love, not grasped by hate - "From every man according to his capacities; to every man according to his needs." That which has been the battle-cry of men maddened by suffering shall become the axiom of distribution in the rational human family.

Most certainly the putting forward of such ideas as are here suggested will not change social conditions in a moment, but no permanent improvement can be wrought in sudden fashion. Yet are they on the line of progress, of the upward evolution of man. The majority of men on the earth to-day are men of the fourth race, but the fifth race - the keynote of which is individualism - is leading human development. The dawn of the sixth race is yet afar in the future, and of that the keynote will be unity not individualism, brotherhood not combat, service not oppression, spirit not intellect. And the birthmark of the spirit is the longing to pour itself out in sacrifice, never asking what it can take but only what it can give. The fundamental unity of mankind is the central truth of the coming race, and the nation which first grasps and practises that great conception will lead the future, humanity falling into line behind it. Those [70] who see it, who teach it, may fail for the moment, but in their failure is the seed of inevitable success.

It is for us who are Theosophists, who hold as truth the spiritual unity of mankind, to put our belief into practice by teaching peace, brotherhood, the drawing together of classes, the removing of antipathies, the recognition of mutual duty; let the strongest do the best service, the wisest the loftiest teaching; let us all be willing to learn and ready to share; so shall we hasten the dawn of a better day, and prepare the earth to receive the coming race. [71]

To the true Theosophist every man's religion is a sacred thing, and he would not consciously jar on the feelings of any; for whether a statement of religious truth be adequate or inadequate, crude or well-considered, it is sacred for the one who accepts it as embodying his special ideal. We may rightly use our keenest intelligence and our most patient thought in searching for the wisest and most adequate presentations of things spiritual; but on the other hand we do well to remember that spiritual truths are so many-sided that the utmost the intellect can do at one time, is to present a single aspect of such a truth. Even when that aspect is given in a crude form, it but shares the crudity of all intellectual statements of spiritual truths, the difference between the crude and the polished being but a difference of degree, not of kind. We might put side by [72] side, for instance, the crudest idea of God that might be obtained from the most ignorant costermonger and the subtlest conception formed by the loftiest philosopher, and might be struck by the wide discrepancy; yet if that same subtle conception could be compared with the adoring thought of a lofty spiritual Intelligence, able to live consciously in the splendour of the LOGOS, we might realise that any thoughts of God that can express themselves through the physical brain can only represent degrees of inaccuracy, grotesque in their inadequacy. Even the greatest of spiritual Seers must fail when he seeks to lisp in mortal numbers the glory of the Vision that blinds his raptured gaze; much more then, when we are dealing with the ideas of Deity formulated by half-developed men and women like ourselves, may we learn humility and charity in criticising - if we must criticise our brother's faith. It is wiser to seek, even in the strangest view, for a faint suggestion of an aspect that we may have missed, than to use our critical fangs to rend in pieces an ideal which is helping some human soul to rise, and is evolving in some undeveloped intelligence the germs of aspiration and worship.

Therefore in dealing with some of the Problems of Religion, I shall seek at least to deal with them reverently, careful to avoid jarring on human feelings, and mindful of the maxim, “Nothing that is human is alien to me." In indicating the lines along which, in the light of Theosophy, solutions seem possible, I would not force on any reader ideas which are unacceptable to [73] his own reason and intuition, for the thought on religion which a man originates is far more helpful to him than the parrot-repetition of words that do not represent his individual conception of truth.

There are five problems of religion which stand out as of perennial and universal interest, and while each might well demand a volume for itself for adequate treatment, it may not prove useless to present them with brevity, showing how the theosophic method is at once suggestive and illuminative; for very often in religion, as in ethics and sociology, it reconciles the adherents of opposing schools by harmonising concepts that are superficially discordant, proving them to be facets of the same truth when their mutual relations are seen. These five are as follows: the nature of God in manifestation; the existence and growth of the human soul; freewill and necessity; the place of prayer in the religious life; the atonement.

First let us take up the problem of problems, that of the existence of God and the conceptions of Divinity formulated by man. There is one fundamental principle that must be recognised in approaching this problem - the unity of existence. If God and man be regarded as basically different, a mighty unspanned gulf stretching between them, then the problem of the divine existence and of man's relation thereto seems to frown upon us as defying solution. But if God and man be seen as of one essence, humanity as an offshoot of the one Tree of Life, and as one of myriad offshoots, sub-human and [74] super-human - one radiant arch of beings, each instinct with divine life - then the question as it affects man appears as by no means a hopeless one. The West, tending to the former conception - that of a fundamental difference of nature between "the Creator and the created" - has swung between the unacceptable extremes of crude, anthropomorphic Monotheism and philosophic Agnosticism; the East, founding its religions on the second conception - that of unity - has contentedly accepted a religious Pantheism as intellectually necessary and as emotionally satisfying. Pantheism in the West has hitherto been an exotic, and has appealed strongly only to the highly intellectual; its God has remained a cold abstraction, intellectually sublime but emotionally chill. In the East, Pantheism, while asserting as clearly as possible the One Existence, meeting all intellectual difficulties by the affirmation of the universality of that Existence - God is everything and everything is God - yet passed naturally into the recognition of endless gradations of Beings expressing very various measures of the divine Life, some so lofty in their nature, so vast in their power, so far-reaching in the range of their consciousness, that they include every element that Christian Monotheism has found necessary for the satisfaction alike of the intellect and of the heart.

It is apparent in reviewing Christian Monotheism that anyone who approaches the study of the divine Existence from the standpoint of the intelligence is sure ultimately to land himself in Pantheism; if he does not openly [75] reach it, it is because he shrinks from formulating the logical conclusion from his premises. No better example of the inevitableness of this conclusion can be found than the Bampton Lectures of the late Dean Mansel; following purely metaphysical lines, he saw himself led more than once into the “dreary desolation of a pantheistic wilderness," and so passionately did his heart revolt against a view that robbed him - as he misconceived Pantheism - of his Father in heaven, that he flung aside the irresistible conclusions of his logic and took refuge in the dicta of revelation, as a shelter from the arid glare of an empty sky and a barren land. The Eastern Pantheism - which, as already said, posits a universal existence in which all beings are rooted, and accepts to the fullest the belief that in God “we live and move and have our being" - recognises also that the divine Life manifests itself in modes of existence which bridge over the gulf between man and God manifesting as God. It acknowledges mighty Intelligences who rule the invisible and visible worlds, the presiding Gods who guide the order of nature and watch over the destinies of men, the agents of the supreme Will in every department of life, the fitting objects of reverence and of worship. Just in proportion as the existence of these great Beings is recognised and enters practically into human life - whatever may be the name given to them - is religion strong against the attacks of Agnosticism and unbelief. For these ranks of spiritual Beings, rising in ascending hierarchies till they culminate in the supreme God of the [76] system to which they belong, give to men intelligible ideals of divinity, which rise as they rise, expand with the expansion of their consciousness, and meet at every stage of evolution the craving of the human heart for some superior Being far above itself, whom it can love, trust, reverence, worship, appeal to for aid when human help is far. It makes possible and real the “Father in heaven" for the child and the peasant as well as for the philosopher, presenting for adoration the concrete Being with enlarged faculties and powers that the heart is ever seeking. The just arguments of the metaphysician and the logician, against the existence of a God at once infinite and personal, have shattered themselves time after time against the immovable conviction of the spirit in man that it is akin to, is the offspring of, some mighty divine Being, and man has doggedly refused to surrender his conception of such a Being - however illogical it might be - until a higher conception was offered including everything he was seeking in the lower.

This view of the life-side of the cosmos is one that in no way outrages reason or transcends possibility; on this the statement of an avowed Agnostic may help us; “Looking at the matter from the most rigidly scientific point of view, the assumption that, amidst the myriads of worlds scattered through endless space, there can be no intelligence, as much greater than man's as his is greater than a black beetle's; no being endowed with powers of influencing the course of nature as much greater than his, as his is greater than a snail's, seems [77] to me not merely baseless, but impertinent. Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. If our intelligence can, in some matters, surely reproduce the past of thousands of years ago, and anticipate the future, thousands of years hence, it is clearly within the limits of possibility that some greater intellect, even of the same order, may be able to mirror the whole past and the whole future; if the universe is penetrated by a medium of such a nature that a magnetic needle on the earth answers to a commotion in the sun, an omnipresent agent is also conceivable; if our insignificant knowledge gives us some influence over events, practical omniscience may confer indefinably greater power."* [ * ‘Essays upon some Controverted Questions’, by T. H. Huxley, p. 36, ed. 1892. It is not pretended that Dr. Huxley believed that things are so; wise men, he thought, would say "not proven," and be agnostics." ] This possibility of the learned Agnostic is known as truth by the Seer, and moreover it represents the life-side as corresponding with the form-side delineated by science. For the worlds around us are at various stages of evolution and are grouped in an ascending order. Our own planet is part of a group of planets, having their common centre in the sun; our solar system is part of a group of systems, having their common centre in a distant star; probably [78] that group of systems, again, has a common centre with other similar groups of systems, and so on and on. Thus the universe is seen as made up of departments, each successive unit forming a section in a wider department - graded hierarchies of forms. The analogy of nature thus leads us to look for similarly graded hierarchies of living Intelligences, guiding the forms, and we are thus brought face to face with the Gods.

Occultism teaches us that over each department in nature there presides a spiritual Intelligence; to put the matter in a more concrete form, over our solar system presides a mig