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Duet

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.
 Part II
Lectures to Theosophical Students

Lecture I
The Sixth Sub-Race

I have chosen for the subject of my lecture to-night one which I

think is important—the Sixth Sub-Race. Both outside and inside the
Theosophical Society a certain amount of good-humoured ridicule
has been cast on the way in which Theosophists talk about Races,
Sub-Races, Root-Races, Cycles, Rounds, and so on, some people
condemning such talk as exceedingly unpractical. Really that is not
so. When our great teacher H. P. Blavatsky traced for us The Secret
Doctrine, that wonderful panorama of the past evolution of the
Races on our globe, she was not only giving us the story of the past,
but also presenting us with the key to the future. And I propose to-
night to try to show you how it is possible for the Theosophist who
has carefully studied the principles underlying past evolution, to
apply these to the evolution of the future, and so learn how he may
best co-operate with the divine plan which is slowly working itself
out. The advantage of Theosophical teaching is that it gives us a
definite scheme into which the evolution of mankind, stage by stage,
fits without difficulty and without blunder.
Now, if we think for a moment of what we call the larger and the
smaller cycles, we can realise that the large scheme of the Races,
the smaller scheme of the sub-races, and the evolution of man
himself, all go along parallel lines. Understanding one, we can
understand all. I will pause on the evolution of the Races, in order to
remind you of the repetition, within the limit of each race, of the
smaller sub-races. We need not go very far back. It will be enough
to consider the Race that preceded our own, the great fourth Root
Race, and our own. The fourth Root Race was the Atlantean. I only
allude to it in order to remind you that from the midst of that race
the Fifth Race, in its turn, arose. Now the choosing out of a new
Race is the task of a particular Personage in the Occult Hierarchy,
whose only name, so far as we know it, is that which has been
borrowed from the Hindū, the Manu, the Man, or the Thinker, the
ideal or typical man. The Manu forms in His own mind, after the
master conception of the Planetary Logos, the plan of the man that
is to be, which He will gradually realise along the lines of natural
evolution. These laws of evolution are used by the Manu with
scientific knowledge, and therefore with certainty. In the same way
that a scientific breeder, dealing with the animal kingdom, can breed
towards a desired type, so, on a higher plane, does the Manu of the
Race mould by the same laws of evolution the physical form of the
Race He desires to evolve. And always the type is formed in the
matter of the higher planes before it is reproduced in the matter of
the lower, the mental and emotional characteristics being first
conceived, and then a physical body which will best express them.
The Manu chooses the type according to the particular qualities
which are to be evolved, which are marked out for Him by the basic
plan of the constitution of man himself. Looking at your own nature,
you have certain distinct departments: the physical body; the astral
body; the mental body; the body of the higher mind, the causal; and
then that of the pure, compassionate Reason, the buddhic. Now if
we take those three types, the emotional, mental, and buddhic, we
have the three with which we are immediately concerned. Desire, or
emotion, was the great characteristic of the fourth Race. The mind
was the slave of the lower feelings; that race had as its motive
power the development of the desire nature. But in the sub-races of
the fourth Race the other principles had also to be evolved, but to a
very poor degree; and as time went on, the fifth sub-race of that
began to develop the lower mind. Out of that fifth sub-race the
selection of the Manu of the time was made, and He chose out
certain families that He thought He could shape into the required
type. The first choice was not successful, the people proving too
stiff-necked and too little plastic to be moulded into the Race that
was to be; but it left behind it, in the history of the world, that
marvellously interesting people, the Hebrew, and that idea of being
a “chosen people” survives even to this day. The second and
successful selection had as its issue our own fifth Root Race. Now,
side by side with the evolution of the sub-race, came the evolution
of the Root Race which was to succeed, and that is why I have
referred to the past. As the fifth sub-race of the fourth Root Race
was developed, the beginnings of the fifth Root Race, the great
Aryan Race, appeared one million years ago.
We can leave our fourth Race with its sub-races, having only
regarded it for the purpose of throwing light on the present. The
evolution of the fifth Race went on, and sub-race after sub-race was
born. The earliest of all settled in Northern India, and gradually
conquered that great peninsula, the first sub-race of the stock of the
Aryans. There came out after that the second sub-race, which
wandered westward, as all the later sub-races did; then came the
third, the Irānian; then the fourth, the Keltic; and the fifth, the
Teutonic. So far we have come in the history of the sub-races of our
own fifth Root Race. Now, notice that these overlap each other as
they develop. The first of these sub-races is still a mighty power in
Asia, showing signs that its day is by no means done, and that the
Indians, if they have behind them a civilisation of hundreds of
thousands of years, have also before them a mighty future, the first
signs of which are being seen in the India of to-day. Signs, some
encouraging, some disturbing for a time, are being seen on every
hand that new life is being poured into its veins, signs of the birth of
a new Indian nation. Of the second sub-race we have not any nation
at the present time. Along the Mediterranean Basin it has left many
traces of its civilisation, which are being unburied by our
archæologists; but so little mark, so to speak, did it leave on history
that a large number of its wonders were deemed to be legends and
myths. The next sub-race, the great Persian race, is almost outworn.
The Persians of to-day have little in common with the Irānian of the
past. The chief traces of them, in fact, are on the Indian continent,
the Parsīs, a race which has dwindled and is gradually passing away.
But when we come to the fourth sub-race, the Keltic, we see great
possibilities in that still. It gave birth to the older Greece, the country
of Beauty and Philosophy. It gave birth also to Rome, with her
remarkable ruling powers. It spread over Europe, founding one
nation after another from itself, and spreading into Ireland and
Scotland, made there possibilities that have not yet all flowered into
effect. In Ireland you have a strange mingling of the remains of the
fourth Root Race with the fourth sub-race of the fifth; a great deal of
the Atlantean influence still exists, many of the tutelary deities of
Ireland, the gods of the mountains, being largely they who mingled
with Atlantean life and thought, and are still exercising their potent
influences over the younger though still ancient Keltic sub-race.
There, again, we have great possibilities of revival and of growth, for
the fourth sub-race and the sixth sub-race are necessarily
interlinked. Just as the emotional nature stretches upwards and
causes sympathetic action in the spiritual nature, so with the Races
and sub-races that represent these principles upon earth; the fourth
and the sixth Races, like the fourth and sixth sub-races, are closely
intertwined. Ireland has not been kept apart for nothing; the
separation between the Kelt and the Teuton is not without its
meaning. We shall find among that Keltic people possibilities of
spiritual power, and we may look possibly for some mighty influence
to flow thence into the great Christian organisation of Rome, who is
now on the balance as to whether she is to sink down along the line
that the Papal Encyclical seems to trace for her and become the
enemy of the Spirit of the Age, or whether the Modernist party in the
Roman Church is to rise into power, purify and vivify that ancient
Communion, and make her again what she ought to be, the Church
of Saints, the type and symbol of the purest and loftiest form of
Christian thought. It may be that Ireland will co-operate also in the
great purification which I pray may come to the Roman Communion,
and make its revival possible. And that is closely connected with the
sixth Root Race, and therefore partly with the sixth sub-race.
 Now, after the fourth sub-race came our own; and when we find
that this fifth sub-race, the Teutonic, is carrying on so rapidly the
development of the concrete and scientific mind, when we notice
that it is beginning its last conquest, the conquest of the air, then, if
we have learned the lesson of the past, we may learn to see the
signs of the sub-race which is to succeed it. But these sub-races
overlap each other, and it is at the moment of the zenith of the one
that the next is born. Go back to the zenith of the fourth sub-race,
when the fifth was beginning to develop, when Rome was mighty,
then it was that the Goths in German forests were beginning to be
born into Europe; and to draw together into tribes, which were to
grow into nations. Quietly and silently the new sub-race was being
born while its predecessor was reaching the highest point of the
civilised world of its time. Slowly it began to develop its own
peculiarities and powers, and from that day the Teutonic sub-race
has grown stronger and stronger, more and more dominant, and,
though a small minority compared with the population of the world,
is dominating that world by the force of its scientific mind, spreading
everywhere, and making itself the very crest of the advancing wave.
But let us turn away our eyes from the dazzling glow of the
present to look for the quiet places where the birth of the future is
beginning to appear. Just because the fifth sub-race is so strong and
dominant, we look over the world for the beginnings of its successor,
which shall rule the world not by the force of the concrete mind, but
by the force of the pure and compassionate Reason, which will
conquer not by power but by love, not by competition but by co-
operation, and found, therefore, an Empire that will long endure. For
it is true now as ever that “They that take the sword shall perish by
the sword,” and the Empire that is to live will be the Empire that
wins its way by love and benediction, that is a teacher and a
defender, and not only a ruler. The sixth sub-race, the Coming Race,
will be born with the sixth Root Race in it, which is to grow so much
more slowly. The coming of the sixth sub-race you may almost begin
to see around you. It is not to be born in a single place, not to
belong to a single nation, for it is the type of humanity, of the
unifying Wisdom, and out of all nations and all peoples and all
tongues it will gather together its chosen for the new type of
thought which is to be born. And what that type will be we can
easily outline by thinking of the characteristics of the buddhic
principle in man. What are those characteristics? First of all, union,
and hence in the outer world co-operation. The very essence of all
action in the sixth sub-race will be the union of many to achieve a
single object, and not the dominance of one who compels others to
his will. The work of the future will not be, “Do so-and-so and follow
me,” but, “Let us advance together to a goal that we all realise as
desirable of attainment.” If you are looking for the sign of anyone
who is beginning to show the marks of that sixth sub-race to-day,
you will find it in those who lead by love, sympathy, and
comprehension, and not by dominance of an imperious will; for the
qualities of that sub-race will be found scattered here and there
through the sub-race which it is gradually to supplant. You may trace
out the coming of the sixth sub-race in the scattered people found in
our fifth sub-race, in whom tenderness is the mark of power. Anyone
who desires to take part in the building of that race needs to
develop now the power to work with others rather than against
them, and so, by a continual common effort, to replace the spirit of
antagonism and competition. It is a synthesising spirit which we
shall find in the forerunners of our sixth sub-race—those who are
able to unite diversity of opinion and of character, who are able to
gather round them the most unlike elements and blend them into a
common whole, who have that capacity for taking into themselves
diversities and sending out again unities, and utilising the most
different capacities, finding each its place, and welding all together
into a strong whole. That is one of the characteristics which marks
the type of being out of whom this sixth sub-race will gradually
develop. A strongly marked characteristic will be compassion. That
virtue is comparatively rare in the energetic, strongly individualised
West. Compassion is that quality which is at once affected by the
presence of weakness, answering to it with patience, with
tenderness, and with protection. You may notice how very often
amongst ourselves, taking the ordinary fifth sub-race type, the
presence of weakness is provocative. It does not call out
compassion, but impatience—very characteristic of the fifth sub-
race. Quick to understand and grasp a fact, it is impatient with the
weakness and mental dulness which cannot easily appreciate the
differences which seem to it so clear. The typical fifth sub-race
civilisation is a civilisation that sees in weakness a field to exploit, a
thing to enslave, something to trample under foot, in order to rise on
it, and not to help to exist for itself. “Inevitable,” you say, “in a
bustling civilisation like this, that the weak should go to the wall.” I
do not deny that it has been inevitable in the development of the
strong individualism of the present. That individualism is a priceless
result, cheaply bought even by the suffering it has caused. Without
that strong individualism you would not have the foundation on
which the great co-operative civilisation could be built. For you
cannot synthesise weaknesses, and it was necessary to make the
strong and patient individuality in order that you might have
something to blend together into a harmony in the future that is yet
to be born. It is a very shortsighted view of human nature which
sees in the growth of a particular quality a thing which is wholly
undesirable; for there is nothing which is wholly undesirable in the
evolution which is guided by perfect Wisdom and perfect Love. The
most unlovely product of the fifth sub-race civilisation will be one of
the bricks that will be built into the foundation of the sixth sub-race
and of the sixth Root Race. For out of the strong individuality the
strong virtues can be built, and compassion is a virtue of the strong,
and not of the weak. The feeble, sentimental sympathy that comes
with the poor and undeveloped nature is not compassion. It has no
power of healing in it, and no power of protection. The person who,
seeing a suffering or wrong, or even a physical accident, goes into
hysterics over it, is not the strong helper who heals and protects. It
is not the skilful nurse who goes into hysterics over the agony of the
patient in pain, leaving that patient to suffer while she is having the
cheap luxury of sentimental tears. It is only out of the strong
natures you can build up real compassion. The compassion which
does not help is useless, and help can only be given where
knowledge guides feeling, and understanding shapes the remedy.
Hence out of these strong individualities, when their object has been
changed and the greater Self has taken the place of the smaller self,
out of those the sixth sub-race, which has pure Reason for its
dominating principle, will gradually appear. When in yourselves you
find the germs of compassion, and know that that is to be part of
the dominating characteristic of the coming sub-race, then cherish
these germs to the utmost. But remember that they must grow out
of the germinal feeling of sympathy into the strong power to uplift
and to save; for compassion is the great mark of the Saviour. And
the Saviour is never weak, but strong, and out of his strength grows
his compassion. You can test it for yourself. Having to deal with
someone who is very slow, you are impatient. Why? Because you are
weak. You are not strong enough to make a question clear with slow
and deliberate intent, not strong enough to bear with the stupidity
and feebleness.
The next great thing you want is the sense of unity, and that you
can never have unless you are strong. There is nothing harder in the
world than to pierce through a man’s weakness and his poor
qualities, which are on the surface, and to see within the growing
power of the God. Yet that is what you have to do if you would be
truly wise. You see in the people around you to-day a large number
of faults. How far do you see behind every fault the seed of divinity
which will develop into a virtue? Has the old Platonic idea ever struck
you, that there is no strong dividing line between the vice and virtue
except the quantity which is present? The undeveloped virtue is a
vice; the virtue in excess is also a vice. The golden mean between
the two is the virtue. Take a common illustration—cowardice on one
side, recklessness on the other. Courage is the mean between the
two. And so in everything excess is vice, whether a defect or a
surplusage, and the perfect equilibrium between them alone is
virtue. If you would realise that for yourselves, wherever you see a
vice in your neighbour, you will look through the vice to the virtue
that shall be, and in the greatest faults of the present you learn to
see the promise of the future. You find a person intolerant. He thinks
you are a fool because you cannot see the same way as he. This is
apt to wake in you a similar intolerance. But if you saw through the
intolerance the growing though undeveloped love of virtue, if you
saw through the intolerance the passionate desire to find the right
and do it, the passionate hatred of all that does not seem right, you
would be very patient; for presently the flower of the virtue will
blossom out and show the beauty which all the time was within. You
hear abuse, or slander, or calumny. You think it is hateful. But the
person who is doing it in his ignorance is mistaken, and that is a
reason for compassion, and not for anger. The more cruel the
ignorance may make a person, the greater the demand for the
compassion, which, because it understands all, overcomes all; nay,
does not even overcome, because to overcome would mean
separation; but realises the unity between oneself and another, and
takes the weakness of another as one’s own. Now these things are
well enough known in principle. Why not practise them? Why, in
difficulties like those we have been passing through, should there be
angry words on both sides? The Theosophist who understands has
no room for anger, but only room for compassion. These are the
things that in the sixth sub-race we shall want. All these must begin
to grow now, and germinate in the heart of every one of you who
would take part in the building of that coming sub-race. And hardest
of all to develop, in a race where separateness has been the type of
greatness, is the sense of unity. This sense of unity and of
compassion will be a strength and power which is only one for
service, which makes the measure of strength the measure of
responsibility and of duty. And so your character will be marked—if
you are a candidate for the sixth sub-race—will be marked by a
great sense of duty, and a great indifference to what are called
“rights.” There is a splendid word of Mazzini that “every right grows
out of a duty discharged.” That is utterly true. It is the discharge of
duty out of which inevitably the right grows, and then the right
comes not by combat, but by the inevitable necessity of nature.
Because where everyone discharges his duty, everyone enjoys his
rights without conflict and without demand. The mark of our own
sub-race is the demanding of our rights. But to those who know the
law of karma there is nothing that need be claimed, because you
possess all which is yours. The karma brings to you everything to
which you have a right; and if what is called an injustice is done you,
it is only the balancing up of an ancient wrong. You think people can
hurt you. Then you do not believe in the law of karma. It is your
own hand that strikes you, and no one else’s. No one can injure you
or wrong you, no one can commit any injustice against you. The
whole of that which you suffer comes out of your past. These people
are mere puppets who come forward to claim the debt that you have
to pay. If you really believed that, then the man who demands a
debt from you would be your friend whom you would welcome; for
karma’s debts are never demanded twice. There is no error in her
account. But, as a matter of fact, hardly any of you believe it in
actual life. What you profess does not make one scrap of difference.
You do not believe unless you live what you say you believe. And if
you believed it, you would know that no slander could wrong you, no
injury hurt you, and that the words of the Christ on His way to His
Passion were absolutely true: “You could do nothing at all against
me except it were given you from above.” That is the secret of the
patience of the Christs; they know the law, they live by it and accept
it. And that utter belief in Law, and therefore the recognition of duty,
that is another of the great marks of the race that is to be. Every
one of you who works that out now in life, who, in face of an
apparent wrong, is calm and receptive, who takes an injustice as a
debt that is paid and cancelled, that man or woman is a candidate
for the coming sub-race, and for the Root Race that shall be
gathered out of its midst. For the sixth Root Race is to be taken out
of the sixth sub-race that is now being born, and according to the
qualities you make in yourselves will be the effectiveness of your
candidature for both.
And now look at another side of that growing sub-race. I have laid
most stress on qualities, because qualities shape form; but it is also
true that the bodies of that sub-race will show a different type from
the bodies of the present—will be far more sensitive to all the finer
vibrations of matter, built up within the finer aggregations. And side
by side with the development of the finer and more nervous physical
body will be inevitably the greater organisation of the body that
comes next, the astral, with its corresponding senses. Now notice
how in the difference between the fourth and fifth Root Races it is
the nervous system which is the greatest physical difference.
Compare the nervous system of a Chinaman, or Japanese, with the
nervous system of an Aryan, and you will see the enormous gulf that
separates the two Races. A fourth Race man will recover easily from
a tremendous laceration that would have killed a fifth Race man by
mere nervous shock, and it is in your nervous system that there will
be the great difference between the fifth and sixth Root Races, and
the change will show in the sixth sub-race. You have to solve one of
the hardest physical problems; to have a sensitive, delicate,
complicated nervous system hand in hand with complete health. You
can easily strain your system into sensitiveness, but that is different
to refining it into sensitiveness, making it responsive to the most
delicate vibrations from without, but with a perfect sanity and
health. On that you can also work. By the deliberate use of
meditation for the refining of the brain you can gradually build up—if
you do not carry it to excess—an extreme sensitiveness, and at the
same time perfect balance and sanity and health. You must not think
that with fifth Race bodies you can bring about at once sixth Race
characteristics; but within the limitations imposed upon you by your
fifth Race bodies you can gradually develop an increasing
sensitiveness which will react on the astral body, and organise and
develop that at the same time. And you will find, if you will notice
the people round you, that there are being born at the present time
more and more children who show this delicate sensitiveness, hand
in hand with generosity, with tenderness, with broadness of mind,
with quick and keen intelligence. These are children who will
gradually develop into the type of the new sub-race. When they
become numerous, and become fathers and mothers in their turn,
then they will gradually prepare for the birth of the children who will
belong to the sixth Root Race. Within the one the other will be born.
Hence all of you who are parents will do rightly and wisely to study
carefully the characters and types of the children whom karma
places in your hands for training. If you see in them the dawning
powers of the coming sub-race, this greater sensitiveness, this
tendency to see where many are blind, do not force it by unwise
admiration, do not check it by equally unwise unbelief. Let the
children of to-day grow up among the healthiest possible conditions,
but also amongst the most refined that you can give them.
Remember that in the training of the higher emotions beauty is an
essential factor, and that without the bringing of beauty into home
and daily life the birth and growth of the coming sub-race will be
hindered. You have to war against the ugliness of the present-day
civilisation. You have to strengthen the tendencies which are
beginning to show themselves, and which make for beauty. You
must realise that beauty is an essential part of utility; and that it is
the most narrow-minded utility which thinks that beauty can be left
on one side, and that the ugliness in daily life is not a retarding
factor in the growth of the more refined sub-race that will partially
take birth amongst us. These are very practical things. They deal
with your daily life, with the home of every one of you, and the
duties that fall upon you there. You must not let your Theosophy be
outside your daily life. If Theosophy is to be the moulding force of
the race that is to be born, it must show itself out in your lives, in
your thought and action. It is the great privilege of the Theosophical
Society to be the nucleus of that coming Root Race, and amongst
our members there should be some at least ready to take part in the
building of the sixth sub-race. You would not be amongst us if you
had not had in you something to draw you along the lines of this
swifter evolution. You hardly appreciate the forces of the past which
have brought you into the Society. Some come in and drop out
again. They are those who are coming in touch with it for the first
time. Others come in and stay in for years, and then drop out. They
are in a stage a little further on, and have been in it before, and will
return to it in lives to come. There are some who, gripped by it from
the beginning, never move again in their utter fealty to its ideals,
whom no personalities can throw out of it, who belong to Theosophy
rather than have Theosophy belonging to them. These are they who
have been in it many a time before, and will come into it again, to
live and die in it over and over again, life after life. Well for you who
are here to-day that in the trials of the last few years you have not
allowed personalities to blind you to principles, nor real or imaginary
faults in persons to make you shrink in your loyalty to Theosophy
itself. Persons die; principles live. Men and women pass away with
their virtues and faults, but the Theosophical Society will endure
generation after generation. Well for you if in the storm you have
been able to stand firm; great the benediction that comes upon you
that in the day of trial you have not denied your Master, in the day of
suffering you have not forsaken and fled away.

Lecture II
The Immediate Future

You may remember that when we last met I spoke to you about
the sixth sub-race, and my speech this evening turns on the same
set of ideas, although from a different standpoint, rather more
special to the Society than to the world at large. In this lecture I am
concerned rather with the view of the nature of the Theosophical
Society which was held in its earliest days, dropped a little out of
sight, and is now being very generally recalled, so that the Society
should rise to the height of its opportunity and do the work that lies
before it in the immediate future. If you will turn back to the days of
H. P. Blavatsky in India you will find she was fond of dwelling on a
particular relation held by two of the Masters, primarily to the
Society, and secondarily to the coming civilisation of which the
Society is the herald. She used to refer her Hindū friends to the
statements in their own Purānas, in which it was said that two Kings
would come at the end of the Age, and that to them would be given
the kingdom of the new and opening Age. These statements, which
are often repeated, raised in the hearers the inquiry, “Who are the
two Kings?” and then she gave them a hint that the two Kings of the
Purānas were the two Masters who were the real Founders of the
Theosophical Society. That set the keen brains of the students to
work. They promptly began to try and find out what were the names
of the two Kings. One of these students found it, wrote a paper,
which was published with H. P. Blavatsky’s approval, giving the
names of the two Kings—Moru and Devāpi—two names mentioned
in many of the Purānas in relation to the past history of the Hindūs,
one of them, Moru, belonging to the Solar Dynasty, descending
directly from Rāma, one of the Avatāras—that before Shrī Krshna—a
great King, said to have retired from his throne and to have gone to
Shamballa, there to wait until he was recalled to lead the human
race; the other, whose name was given as Devāpi, was the elder
brother of the famous King of the Lunar Dynasty, to which the next
Avatāra belonged. He was the elder brother of the father of
Bhīshma, and he similarly gave up his right to the crown, retired to
the same place, and the same phrase is used with regard to him,
that he was to wait there the coming age. Now H. P. Blavatsky was
very much delighted at the ingenuity of her students, and said that
the outline was correct, and it was published. H. P. Blavatsky often
referred to this function of the two Masters who were responsible for
the founding of the Society. As in these latter days that idea of the
Masters as the Founders of the Society has been challenged, I may
perhaps say I have myself seen that fact stated in the writing of the
Master “M.” I have read the letter in which He says that He and His
fellow Adept “K. H.” had taken on themselves the responsibility of a
new spiritual movement in the world; that there was some doubt in
the Lodge as to the wisdom of the movement at that time; and that
they were allowed to take that step only on the condition that they
should found and work the Society through others whom they could
direct and control. Then He went on to say that He had chosen a
disciple of his own, H. P. Blavatsky, and that He had sent her to
America to look for another disciple, H. S. Olcott, and that these
were the outer founders of the Society. Hence to me and to many
others who believe that these letters are genuine the nature of the
origin of the Society cannot be a matter of doubt.
 Starting, then, from that standpoint, we find certain things were
said by H. P. Blavatsky as regards the nature of the Society, and
certain things by the Masters themselves. Both are very important
for us in consideration of the immediate future. The first of these
things was indicated by hints which the more advanced students
could understand—that the inner purpose of the Society was to
prepare the world for the coming of a new Race, and to be itself the
nucleus of that Race; that one of the Teachers was to be the Manu
of the race, the other the Bodhisattva. Now those exact facts were
unpublished at the time, but they passed from one to the other
among the more advanced students of that period. Coming into the
Society in 1889, this particular fact did not come within my
knowledge until 1895. After the Coulomb struggle the Society for a
time dropped away from the occult path on which H. P. Blavatsky
had started it, and these ideas fell out of sight and were forgotten
except by a limited number. In 1895 they were re-communicated to
myself by my own Master, and have since been passed on to the
older members of the Theosophical Society.
Let us pause for a moment on the statement with regard to the
Manu and Bodhisattva. Every Root Race has for its guide a great
Adept, much higher than the great ones we call the Masters, and
that office filled by a mighty Being is an office the name of which
indicates simply the man, the thinker. The connotation is the ideal,
typical man, making rather the emphasis on the article “the.” The
name is peculiarly suitable, because each of these Manus at the
head of the Root Race is the type of the Race over which he is to
preside. The types of the seven Races are part of the plan of the
Planetary Logos, and that plan is worked out, stage after stage, by
the Manus of the races. It is left to the Manu Himself how He shall
proceed with His work. He takes the responsibility of the method He
chooses. When the time comes to plan out the new Race, then the
coming Manu begins to take up His office, and always in connection
with another great Brother of His own rank, who is called the
Bodhisattva. The Manu of the Fifth Race, as you know, collected His
people together out of the fifth sub-race of the Fourth Root Race,
sent out messengers to call them together, brought them together,
moulded them generation after generation, and at last evolved them
to the necessary physical type. For the work of the Manu is double:
to choose out those who show in consciousness the germs of the
new stage which is to evolve in the coming Race; then, having
chosen them out and stimulated that germ within them, to set to
work to shape the necessary bodies. Now in that far-off time our
own Manu of the fifth Root Race had to choose materials out of the
fifth sub-race, and He did not choose at all those who were regarded
as the best specimens of the day. Remember that the fourth sub-
race, like the fourth Root Race as a whole, showed out very
powerfully all the passional characteristics and the psychic qualities
which accompanied them. It was the fourth sub-race, the Toltec,
which made the great Empire, with the city of the Golden Gate as
metropolis, that whose armies spread over the known world,
conquering everywhere, and in that sub-race psychic qualities
naturally played a great part. You will remember that at the earlier
stage of great emotional and passional manifestation, psychic
qualities are very largely developed before the development of the
lower mind. That evolution belongs to the astral body as a whole,
working not through the astral chakras, but through the astral
centres connected with our physical senses. The fourth sub-race
carried all that to the highest point. Children in the schools were
picked out for their paths in life by clairvoyance; and in all matters of
policy, statecraft, etc., clairvoyants were consulted, so that by the
exercise of the psychic qualities they might get the best possible
knowledge to be had at the time. Now the characteristics of the fifth
sub-race were the diminution of psychic power and the germinating
of the seed of mind, and these two things necessarily went together,
so that, as that fifth sub-race developed, the people of it were rather
looked down upon by the highly evolved psychic sub-race which
preceded it. These people seemed to be inferior; they could not use
the powers which put their predecessors in the very forefront of
civilisation, and made this world and the astral world almost one and
the same. The children born with very little of these psychic powers,
the men and women who showed still less of it, were by no means
thought to have within them the promise of the future. Yet out of
these the Manu chose His material, because they showed the germ
of the mind which was specially wanted as the characteristic of the
coming Race. It did not matter that it was only a germ, or that they
were much less effective than the people of the mighty civilisation in
which they appeared. He was looking to the future, and so these
people were by no means the people whom the Atlanteans of the
day would have chosen if consulted in the matter. But the great
people do not always consult with the smaller people, who are so
very sure of the rightness of their own judgment. They have an
uncomfortable way of following their own ideas; and, as the Master
“M” once said of some people who remarked that He did not come
up to their idea of an Adept, “The mark of the Adept is not kept at
Simla.” And that sentence is rather a good one to remember. So also
the mark of the disciple is not kept in London or in Chicago, but in a
very different part of the world, and to that those who know
something about it try to conform. So the choice of the Manu of the
day would have been regarded as a very poor one by the wise folk
of the time. Nevertheless he carried away his people and built them
up into a great Race.
Now there is something very instructive in that when we try to
understand the method of His choice in the light of the past, and the
analogy of principles. For we can see that if the germs of a sixth
sub-race—from which, later, a sixth Root Race will be born—are to
be chosen out by Him from the materials that the fifth sub-race
affords, then the nature of His choice probably will not be that which
would be made by the leaders of that fifth sub-race itself. Theirs to
carry on to the highest point the concrete, scientific mind, which is
the glory of their sub-race. Theosophists sometimes ask: “Why do
not the great men of Science come into the Theosophical Society?”
Simply because they have their own work to do; and their work at
present is not to build the future civilisation, but to lead to its
highest point the present one. In the future, when they shall have
led that civilisation to the highest point, and when it has taken its
place at the head of the world’s thought, then will come the time for
these great minds to be reborn into another race, and build on the
splendid intellectual foundation they have laid. The work of the
world is the end that the great Ones consider, and these strong
scientific minds to-day are needed by the world to carry on the
present civilisation to the highest point. How unwise it would be to
take them away from the work that no one else can do, and set
them to other work they would do badly, not having turned their
energies to the particular qualifications that are wanted for it. And so
in the wise plan of the Manu of the fifth Race, the flower of the fifth
or Teutonic sub-race is taken in order that it may be raised up to the
highest point of the mānasic civilisation, and be carried on to its
zenith of splendour of scientific knowledge. But meanwhile it is His
duty to help in the building up of the other types—still his Race is
the sixth sub-race—and so to co-operate with His successor the
Manu of the sixth Root Race. For remember the Manu of all the sub-
races of a Root Race is the same. He is the Manu of the whole Race;
when the time comes for beginning the new Root Race, then the
Manu of the Race that is regnant co-operates with the Manu of the
Race which is to come. Hence He who is to be the Manu of the sixth
Root Race, the Master “M,” the Moru of the Purānas, He has begun
His work. And He has begun it in a humble and insignificant fashion,
as the world would say, by striking the keynote of Brotherhood, and
by drawing into a Society those whose hearts thrill responsive to that
note. And why? Because the higher emotion that answers to
universal Brotherhood, to love of all, without distinction of race, sex,
caste, colour, or creed—that is the emotion, that is the germ of the
buddhic principle in man, the principle of unifying, of drawing the
separated together, of blending into one separate individualities, and
making them realise the spiritual unity which overshadows and
underlies them all. Hence universal Brotherhood is the only thing
which is binding on members of the Theosophical Society. Nothing
else. The Theosophical teachings as to Karma, Reincarnation, or the
Masters, are not binding on the mind or conscience of any member.
This is an important point. It is not only because a truth is better
seen by the unfettered intellect than by an intellect on which a
dogma is imposed, though that is of importance; but because the
material which can be moulded into the Coming Race is the material
that can recognise the necessity and the beauty of universal
Brotherhood, and if that be recognised, nothing else for the moment
is necessary. Hence that is the only binding principle. Hence, also,
the attempts to narrow it down, prompted by those Dark Powers
who do not desire that the Society should grow and prosper for
thousands of years to come, the attempts to put in a little restraint
here and a little obstacle there, judging for the moment, and not for
the future. That is the inner meaning of having that one thing alone
our bond of union. And so the Manu made that the keynote to
attract those who would answer, “Yes; that is the very thing I want
to join in and help.” And so the nucleus of the great sixth Root Race
began to be formed. But that is not an immediate future, although
already beginning. The sixth sub-race is the immediate future; under
the rule of the Manu of the fifth still, but co-operating with the Manu
of the Sixth, in order that those who show signs of being fit material
for the Coming Race may have a preliminary practise of the virtues
of that race. Hence the stress that H. P. Blavatsky laid on this inner
side of the working of the Theosophical Society; and hence the
need, because the time is passing rapidly, to make public what has
been kept private in the past of this inner purpose, which has really
dominated the Society from within, although not recognised without.
Let us see how that immediate future should be recognised in its
characteristics, and thus prepared for. First of all we must
understand the words spoken long ago under the inspiration of the
coming Bodhisattva, that the Theosophical Society was to be “the
corner-stone of the future religion of humanity.” Now every sub-race
has a special religion, as it were. The religion of the fifth sub-race is
Christianity. What is the future religion of humanity in this sense? It
differs from all that have gone before. It is no longer an exclusive
and separatist faith, but a recognition that in every religion the same
truths are found; that there is only one true religion, the Divine
Wisdom; and that every separate religion is true just so far as it
incorporates the main teachings of that Divine Wisdom. The one
supreme religion is the Knowledge of God; to that everything else is
subsidiary. Just in so far as any special religion puts within the reach
of its followers the means for rising to that supreme knowledge, in
so far is that religion worthy of its place. And when that supreme
test is not thoroughly answered—when dogmas, and ceremonies,
and rites become more important than this inner truth of the gaining
of individual knowledge of the Supreme—then the religion becomes
narrower, weaker, unspiritual, until a time comes when either the
religion must die or a new impulse must be poured into it to bring it
back to its original position, a channel for the knowledge of God.
Now, in the past many religions have done their work and passed
away, and we come to the present time, when certain great religions
are living. And when the great new spiritual impulse came, it was
not charged with the building of a new religion, but with the
vitalising of those great existing religions, to make them realise their
underlying foundation; they were vivified in order to help them to
rise to a more spiritual and mystic interpretation of their teachings;
and when that was done, they were to be blended together into a
brotherhood of Religions, so that all should recognise the Divine
Wisdom as their root. That was the first work of the Theosophical
Society. It was done all over the world. See how in India Hindūism
was revived; in Ceylon, Buddhism. Ask the ordinary missionary who
comes over here, who is not generally very broad-minded, and he
will tell you that the great opponent of Christianity in the East is the
Theosophical Society. Then, if you press him and ask, “But are
Theosophists antagonistic to you?” “No,” he will say, “but they
strengthen the other religions, and thus prevent our making
converts.” And that is true. It is not our business to convert people
from one religion to another, but to try to make every one realise the
splendour of his own religion. Naturally, in India—except in
Travancore, where there has been a Christian Roman Catholic colony
from the very early centuries of the Church—Christianity is an alien
religion, and only grows by injuring the older religions of the land.
Naturally, then, the missionaries look on the Theosophical Society as
an opponent, because it has been the great factor in the revival of
Hindūism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and is beginning to be a factor
in the revival of Muhammadanism. Now, when you see that, and
when you come to the West and see how the same influence has
been widening the Christian Church, how mystical Christianity is
spreading everywhere in a way that would have seemed incredible
some three years ago—see how narrow it was, and look now, how
everywhere the mystic thought is spreading, and see how, in the
Roman Catholic Church, the spreading of this spirit has become so
wide that the Pope is forced into fulminating against it, and in the
Modernism that he condemns we find Theosophy mentioned as one
of the forms—you will realise that that part of the work is almost
done. I do not mean that we are not to continue spreading abroad
more spiritual ideas, but that the work has been done so effectively
already that it is almost passing into the hands of the religions
themselves. The clergy are now preaching so much Theosophy that
it hardly seems necessary to continue preaching the parts they have
adopted. The Theosophical teaching as to the nature of the Christ in
His birth in the human form, and His growth into Divine Manhood—
how common a doctrine that is now within all the Churches of the
West. The fact of Reincarnation is also becoming more and more
widely accepted—a doctrine no longer to be laughed at, but to be
carefully argued over, and forming a part of the deepest thought of
the Christian world. So that while we must still go on with that part
of the work, there are other parts of our work now that we ought to
be ready to take up. That religion of the future which is to include all
the religions as sects within itself, all of them going on into the
future, but recognising themselves as a Brotherhood, that is to be
the dominant religious thought of the great sixth Root Race, and in
the sixth sub-race we shall find it spreading everywhere. Now, how
mighty will be the advantage; because the moment all religions are
seen to be branches of one stock, then each religion can share with
others the specialty which it has been its duty to develop in the
world. And nowadays, when the Christian goes to India, instead of
trying to convert the Hindū, which he can never do, what he ought
to do is to offer to share with him that great special characteristic of
Christianity, the principle of self-sacrifice, and the helping of the
weaker by the stronger—the dominant note of Christianity. It is the
doctrine of the Cross, the emblem of self-sacrifice, of the coming
down to the depressed in order to lift them, leading them up side by
side with ourselves. That is the noblest thought of Christendom,
typified in the mystic Christ; and that you might well offer to share
with the Hindūs, for that does not come out so strongly in their great
Faith. Rather will they bring to you in exchange the doctrine of the
immanence of God. Two things, Dr. Miller has written, Hindūism
brings to the world: the immanence of God, and the solidarity of
man. When religions exchange their best instead of finding out each
other’s weaknesses, then you have outlined the religion of the
future. Our work in that future is to continue what we have so well
begun, and spread this liberal, thoughtful, religious ideal through all
religions, destroying none, but permeating all.
Next we have to consider what we ought to do in the training of
the next generation; for there is great need that the Theosophical
ideal of education should spread through Western minds, and
especially through Britain and its empire. Religious education at the
present time is in peril; how great that peril is may be measured by
the Moral Education Congress gathered together in London last year
to try to find a moral basis that should furnish education apart from
all the sanctions of religion—a hopeless task, but none the less a
sign of the peril of the times. Now, we have had secular education in
India. It has been the English education the Government has given
there. It could not give any other because of the different religions
of the country, and it was bound not to help any one of these to the
detriment of the others. The moral result has been disastrous. It has
fostered selfishness, indifference to the country, lack of public spirit.
It has given us a race of men who have acquired from the West its
superficial qualities, but not its inner strength, not its inner capacity.
And the troubles you have in India now are largely the result of this
anti-religious education, which has made hundreds of the best
Indian type skeptics, a thing which has only been checked with the
growth of the Theosophical Society throughout India. We have
turned back that irreligious wave, with the result that the Indian
Government to-day regards the Theosophical Society as the most
likely agency for training the youth of India along lines of freedom
and order at the same time. They realise that we have put our finger
on the weak point in their own system, and that our plan of giving to
the child the religion of his parents is really the way to solve that
religious problem in India. Now, over here you have to face the
problem how to preserve religion while letting dogmatism go; how to
find a common ground, a few common principles, which all
Christians inculcate, leaving to a later time in life the special
sectarian divisions which the young man and woman can acquire
later if they wish. Now, in that the Theosophical Society may well
play a great part in the immediate future, strengthening all the
influences which make for the keeping of religion as an integral part
of education, helping to soften the bitter sectarianism, and persuade
the different denominations to remember that they are Christians
more than that they belong to this, that, or the other denomination.
If we succeed in that, then the service to the education of the
empire will be supreme.
Along other lines we want, if we can, to persuade the public mind
to become a little more receptive of new ideas; to lose a little of its
pride, and learn a little humility. Unless we are quite sure that we
are at the very top of human evolution, and that nothing greater
than ourselves can be evolved, then it would be the part of wisdom
to recognise that the next type, which is the type of the future, must
be different from the type of the present, and, in the beginning of its
evolution, new and strange. You may remember how J. S. Mill, in
speaking of liberty, laid immense stress on originality, and
complained that modern methods were tending to make all come to
a single level; to do away with the eccentric, even with the original.
Now, for growth, variety is wanted. Where there is no spontaneous
variation in types, you have stagnation. And yet every one of us is so
fond of our own particular line of thought that we take it almost as
an offence if someone starts a new thought which we cannot at
once fit into our own mental grooves. Now, we must try to correct
that, first in ourselves, and then in the public at large, especially in
view of the coming of that mighty Teacher I have spoken of. When
He comes, the type of the sixth Root Race, He must be very different
from all of us, otherwise He would not be the type of the new
departure. How can we avoid treating Him when He comes exactly
as our predecessors of the fourth sub-race treated Him when He
came last to start the fifth? It is so easy for all of us, looking back to
the mighty Figure of the Christ, to realize something of its splendour,
but we see Him through the glamour of the religion which has made
His name supreme in many of your hearts. Try and put yourselves
back in time, and see how strange that new type would have then
seemed to you, how against all your prejudices. So different was He
that He raised an antagonism so bitter that they could not bear Him
amongst them for more than three years, and then murdered Him. It
is hard for us to realise that. We are apt to think, “If I had been
there, I would have stood beside Him; I would not have been
amongst those who slew Him.” And yet there is no particular reason
to think we should not have done the same. It is a great lesson for
the immediate future. For when He comes again to bless this
beginning of a sixth sub-race, the buddhic, He will show out the
qualities of Buddhi prominently, and those are by no means very
acceptable to the modern world. Look fairly at your own minds and
see how you stand on your rights. It is the spirit of the time. If you
have not what you think your rights, you make a clamour for them.
For the mānasic civilisation that is the proper way, but those who
want to go on in the new future that is dawning have to throw all
that aside. You must relinquish your “rights.” If you are trampled on,
you must recognise that it is only yourself of the past trampling on
yourself of the present: no one can trample on you except a person
who embodies your own past injustice, and is working out that
which you yourself have created. That is a very unpopular view, as
unpopular as the Sermon on the Mount. And so along many other
lines of that which is admirable from the popular standpoint—power,
dominance, the spirit which tramples down all opposition. How
different from that of the Wisdom which rules, but rules from within,
“mightily and sweetly ordering all things.” And if you will think over
this in detail and work it out, you will find you will have to change
your ideal of what is admirable, and build up on ideal on the basis of
Spirit and unity, and not on rights and claims. And that is one reason
why the Theosophical ideals very often find themselves rejected in
the outer world. Those are the qualities needed for the world as it
shall be; and if we are to be builders of that immediate future, we
must develop them in ourselves. But you may say: “Is it not rather a
big assertion to make that this Theosophical Society is really a
nucleus of a great Root Race; that it is the beginning of a sub-race?
What right have you to make such a claim?” The answer is, that
looking back to the last choice, we should expect to find the
beginning of the new Race and new sub-race among those who
were not the leaders of the present, but had in them the germ of the
future. That is why our people are gathered not from the leaders
and the thinkers, but from the loving, the compassionate, the
brotherly. It seems a feeble thing, this power of Brotherhood. It is
the mightiest thing in all the world. And although it is true that we
cannot expect to find amongst us men and women of magnificent
intellect and overwhelming power of thought, we may expect to find
amongst us the compassionate, the gentle, and the loving, and
those give the plastic material which will yield itself to the fingers of
the Manu to be moulded into a new type, a higher evolution. Hence,
from time to time the great shakings that take place to shake out
those who are too purely intellectual, and who do not think the word
Brotherhood is a word that ought to be heard so much amongst us.
The Masters have chosen Brotherhood as our mark, and we cannot
march in Their army if we will not bear Their sign. And so, if mind
makes us too self-assertive, too sure of our own superiority, then we
must be shaken out of this movement. So do not in this immediate
future be troubled if we still continue to go along our own quiet road
of attracting the loving and the gentle rather than those who are
mighty in their intellectual power. The thing of vital importance is the
Spirit of Brotherhood, and that we must never let go. And remember,
in the whole of the struggles of the future, as in those of the past,
that they must always rage round persons, and those who think
more of personalities than of principles are inevitably shaken out. If
you make a person’s presence or absence a reason for being in or
out of the Society, you are showing the spirit of separation, which
cannot realise a principle, but thinks only of the passing and
transient personality. What can it matter whether any one of you
agrees or disagrees with Mr. Leadbeater, or with Mr. Mead, or with
anyone else? These are all persons. The principle of the Society
remain unshaken. Presidents are elected and Presidents die, but the
Society goes on. What folly, then, to give up a place in a mighty
movement because the person temporarily at the head of it is a
person who does not exactly fit into the shape you have made as
your own particular ideal. It does not matter. The Society is not
bound by its President any more than by anyone else. It is bound
only by its great central principle of Brotherhood. And so all of you
who have stood through the past shaking have shown that you care
more for principles than for persons, and it does not matter whether,
so to speak, you have agreed or disagreed with the President so
long as you have stood firm within the Society; for there lies the
principle, whilst the other is only personality. Cling, then, to that
principle to which you have clung through the past storm; recognise
that whether a person be right or wrong, noble or ignoble, great or
small, that is a matter of secondary importance. The work of the
future lies in the movement, and not in the hands of any particular
individual who may happen to be here. Whether you or I come back
to this great movement in other lives depends on ourselves, and not
on the opinion that anyone else may happen to have about us. None
can throw us out of it if we are worthy to remain in it; none can
keep us in it if we are unworthy to be part of it. And realising kārmic
law, realising the greatness of the movement and its work in the
future, let us join hands, whether we agree or disagree with each
other on any other matter save that of Brotherhood, and go forward
into the future that is unfolding before us, brighter than ever the
past has shone; go forward to the making of the sub-race out of
which the Root Race shall spring, under the banner of our Manu and
our Bodhisattva, the mighty Ones of years and millennia to come.
 Lecture III
The Catholic and Puritan Spirit in the Theosophical Society
The Value and Danger of Each

I want to try to trace out the somewhat difficult subject of the

place of the Puritan and the Catholic Spirit in our Society. I want to
show that both types are necessary in every great movement; that
both have their value and place, yet also their dangers. And if we
realise that both are necessary, it may help each type to be tolerant
as regards the other, and to see that each has its dangers.
Now, all the world over these two types are found; they are, in
fact, two marked temperaments, intellectual and emotional, into
which, roughly, you might throw almost all thoughtful and educated
people, and even the thoughtless and ignorant, for those also will
show similar types, although naturally less attractively, because more
extreme, than they may be among the class of people who at least
are seeking to understand themselves, and to gain some measure of
equilibrium. Looked at from the outside, the Catholic type is certainly
the more attractive, and therefore I want to impress upon you the
value of the Puritan type; because, being less attractive, its value is
more likely to be overlooked. If the Puritan spirit were completely
lost, mankind would lack that vigour and strength and tendency to
free thought and free judgment which are so essential to human
evolution. Unfortunately, it has often been united with a very cold
and forbidding exterior; and if we take the two types as we find
them in the reign of Charles I., certainly the Puritan is not very
attractive from outside—hard, rather sour, forbidding, and austere.
But it is not quite fair to judge the Puritan by that type in the reign
of the Stuarts. It is not fair to pick out a type at the moment where
these two difficulties face it—danger to itself, and the extreme evil of
the type it is opposing. It is hardly fair to take that moment for a
judgment of the value of the temperament in itself. But even if you
take the Puritan of the time of Charles I. and Cromwell, you can
hardly help noticing, if you go beyond externals, the extreme moral
value of that type amid those difficult and dangerous surroundings.
Austere as it was, it was the austerity that was trying to guard itself
against continual danger of pollution, and naturally it ran into
extremes, as all reactions run, with the inevitable result that another
reaction followed on the first, and you had the loose and profligate
type of the Court of Charles II. It is the types I want to disentangle
from these special manifestations, and, looking at them apart, from
all conditions that may emphasise one characteristic or another.
Now, in what does the Puritan type exactly consist? It seems to
consist in an attitude of protest and criticism rather than of ready
acceptance of the prevailing thought of the time. The Puritan mind is
essentially critical, and critical in the modern sense of the term,
which, instead of making the critic a judge, makes him an opponent
and condemner. We must remember, however, that the true critical
spirit is absolutely necessary for human progress, even though it
often slips into condemnation and cynicism. The Puritan is always
intellectual (I am speaking of the purer type), a man in whom mind
is predominant. He is of the type that tends to separation rather
than unity; he stands alone, sufficient for himself (I say that rather
than “self-sufficient,” the second form connoting a rather unpleasant
quality). We must realise the strength of this type. The strength may
slip into austerity, but that very largely grows out of the religion to
which the Puritan may happen to be attached. You do not find him
in his more aggressive form unless he is protesting against
something he regards as dangerous and mischievous. Naturally,
under these considerations he is thrown into the attitude of combat,
and hence all that is harshest and most hostile inevitably comes to
the surface. But that is not a necessary part of the Puritan spirit.
Looking at him as the intellectual man in whom emotion in this
particular life is comparatively weak, or if not weak, repressed;
seeing that in him the mental qualities are those which in this
incarnation he specially endeavours to develop; understanding that
the mind can only be developed where the qualities of analysing,
comparing, and judging are active, you can readily see how, in the
face of opposition, these qualities would turn into antagonism and
protest. But I do not think antagonism and protest are a necessary
part of the Puritan spirit. In peaceful times your Puritan would be
distinguished rather as the analytical or intellectual man, most
valuable to any community into which he may be thrown at the time.
For you cannot develop the mind without developing these analysing
qualities: synthesis comes later, the one belonging to the lower, the
other to the higher Manas. Both need to be developed. While the
lower Manas is developing, you must have these qualities of
analysis, comparison, and judgment without which it is not possible
to lay a strong foundation for any belief. You must recognise the
utter necessity for the challenging, questioning, even doubting and
sceptical spirit. Only by means of this can error be detected, and the
traditions that come down from the past be gradually purified of the
accretions that have come to them during the ignorant periods
through which they may have passed. To be sceptical is no fault, but
rather a virtue. If there is to be progress at all, there must be
challenging of that which has come down from the past, so that,
testing, analysing, criticising, you may be able to separate the truth
from the error. How would religion become ever more and more
spiritual if men are only to inherit, and never to examine and
understand? And since no religion or other form of thought can ever
come down through centuries without picking up a large amount of
error, if we had not this critical and challenging spirit all religions
would grow into superstitions, and that which is most valuable for
the race would gradually be covered under a mass of ignorant error.
Hence at certain times in the history of the race a great outburst of
the Puritan spirit is necessary. That alone will bring about
fundamental changes, religious, moral, and social; that alone has the
courage to go forward whilst in a minority, and test with the test of
reason every belief and every tradition. We must not, then, blind
ourselves to the immense value of this spirit in the intellectual
development of man. For always, inasmuch as religious and social
order has come by some great Teacher enormously beyond his own
generation in religious, moral, and social development, inevitably his
teachings, handed down generation after generation, will in many
respects tend to be covered with superstition.