Chapter II: Part I: Lectures to the Public (2)

Pass on from that part of this terrible poverty which nothing apparently is able to touch to the next question that links itself very easily to what I have been saying—woman labour in general, and especially in many of the manufacturing industries. When women began to work at mills, and so on, it was looked upon as a good way for the women to add something to the comfort of the home. How has it worked? It has worked to drive down the wages of the men, and make the home more miserable even in money matters than it was before; and then the home has ceased to be a home, for there is no home where the mother leaves the children behind her, and goes out into the mill to earn the pence or the shillings wherewith those children are to be fed. It has been encouraged for the reason that a manufacturer gave very honestly and frankly before another Royal Commission. “Oh,” he said, “I prefer to employ married women because they are more docile.” That is true. The married woman is very much more docile because, when the question of any resistance comes, she thinks of the children who need food in the home. The baby hands are the hands that make her docile; it is the baby fingers feeling her bosom for the milk that will not come that makes the mother’s heart docile, yielding to everything for the sake of the little child. It has only made the complications of the labour market worse; it has only driven the men out to be unemployed in the streets, while they who ought to be mothers in the home are working in the factory instead. So the labour market only becomes more choked, the wages are rendered yet more miserable, and the men are thrown out while the women are employed, though the men cannot take the woman’s place in the home, and take care of the babies and look after the little ones; only a mother can do that, for nature has made mothers for that work, and the father cannot take their place, however gentle and loving he may be. So you get another problem there, hard to solve, difficult to set right, and one that is ever growing more and more pressing for solution, that is ever intensifying the misery of large numbers of the working population.

Pass on, again, from that—you see I am only touching each point—and take a question of national import, the deterioration of the physique of the people who live in our large cities. That has been going on now for generations, and it has been shown very plainly in the lowering standard of height for enlistment in the Army. On the other hand, if you look at the well-to-do classes you will find rather an increase in strength and physique amongst them, especially amongst the women, because these take so much more part in outdoor life than they did in the past, and so you find they are growing taller and stronger, but the great mass of the population is growing shorter and weaker. But it is that great mass of the population from which the majority of your nation comes. They reproduce most rapidly; they are the people who swell the Registrar-General’s returns; from them the future nation is most largely produced; and it is no good to have upper classes strong and vigorous and well-fed if the mass of your population is deteriorating in strength and vigour. There, again, you have one of these pressing problems which it is necessary to answer; for these problems are like the questions of the Sphinx: the Sphinx put the question, and if the man could not answer it, the Sphinx devoured him. And so with these problems in social organisation; the question is put, and the penalty for not answering is to be devoured, and for the civilisation to pass away.

Remedies of sorts are being put forward by doctors and sociologists; sterilisation of the unfit is one of the favourite nostrums or quack remedies of the day. But such remedies are worse than the disease, for they are brutal, and lead to deterioration of _morale_ as well as of physique. You must go down to the root of the causes that make these the unfit, and not bring them forth from the social organisation by the myriad, and then try to find means to check their numbers; and so on that side, again, this insoluble difficulty is facing us.

Even these are not all the problems which are set for us by our Sphinx for which solution is demanded. We have seen terrible poverty, we have seen the question of woman employment, we have seen the question of deterioration of physique and swift multiplication of the unfit: what about the criminal population? We manufacture habitual criminals at a very rapid rate. We take up young men or young women, and we send them to jail for a week, a month, a year, five years, ten years. It goes on accumulating until the habitual offender gets sentences which will outlast his physical life. But that has done nothing to cure the man, that has done nothing to turn him into a good and useful citizen. The law, when it grips him, ought to turn him into a better type of man. Instead of that, he comes back over and over again, until the very habitual criminality that the law has very largely made is brought up as a reason for the magistrate to inflict upon him a heavier penalty. But that is not wisdom; it is folly. Very often a bright, clever lad, full of spirit, falls into crime. It is only one chance in a hundred if he is rescued, and does not gradually drift into the ranks of the habitual criminal. Surely at this stage of civilisation there must be some better way; and there is a better way, as I shall try to show you when I come to deal with brotherhood applied to social life.

If we go beyond these extreme cases, and look at the ordinary questions of supply and demand, of production and distribution, notice how society is gradually coming to a point where things cannot go on as they are, and yet where to change them means the dislocation of our whole productive and distributive system. We can see it best, perhaps, if we go to America, because in America there are not the softening influences which to some extent at least still prevail here, where society was once based on a more human foundation, instead of merely on the question of cash. We see what our systems are if we go over the water to America, where they have full play, without anything to prevent their complete development. There are one or two things that strike us in America of a rather remarkable character. First, the growth of the man who builds his own enormous fortune on the deliberate wrecking of the small fortunes of others. Let me give an example. A large number of people, mostly rather poor, gather together into a company in order to build a railway that is wanted for the development of the country where they are. They want quicker communication, they want better carriage of grain, of goods, and they build a railway. It is working fairly well, it is paying, perhaps not very largely, but still fairly satisfactorily. A much cleverer man than those people comes along, and he sees that that particular district is one that is likely to open up to a very large extent—one where railways will become most valuable property. He sets to work to build another railway that runs over the same ground as the first; it is not wanted except to make him rich. He then begins to destroy the other railway by charging smaller fares and lower freightage; he goes on doing that, putting in his capital, because his rates do not pay, until the other railway is driven down to the impossible level at which he has fixed prices and fares: when the shares of that other railway have sunk down to nearly nothing in the market, he steps in and buys them all up; when he has bought them all up he lets his sham railway go to pieces, and the whole of the district is in his hands, and he piles up an enormous fortune. On the other side of his fortune is the loss to all the shareholders who put their money into that railway in order to improve the means of communication in the place where they were living. They have been sacrificed that he might make enormous wealth. Such men are called “wreckers” in America, but they are honoured in society; they build hospitals, and even churches; they do all kinds of things with fragments of the wealth that they have taken; but I tell you that, although not by the law of the country, yet by the law of righteousness, these men are worse and more to be condemned than the burglar who steals the jewels of a lady or the gold plate of a millionaire. He is punished heavily when he is caught, and he deserves to be punished; burglary is obviously wrong; but worse than that open burglary that the law punishes is the hidden burglary of the brilliant brain against the stupid brain, which robs people of the result of their labour in order to accumulate it within the wrecker’s store.

Other forms of this robbery are what are called “trusts” and “corners.” They have been trying, I see, to make a corner in wheat, and another speculator has been able to checkmate the original speculator by pouring in millions of bushels of wheat. But people are not fed any better whichever speculator wins; it is only a problem as to which of the two should be able to make the largest profits; and then the trusts are built up, whereby a few men are able to make enormous fortunes and kill out all the smaller men. Now our American brethren are getting a little tired of that, and they are trying to find out some way in which they can prevent it—some Act of Congress, some law which should prevent the trust. But what law can you possibly pass to prevent the trust, which is only the natural outcome of competition gone mad? What can you do to prevent that without crippling also every one of your industrial concerns which are based on the same principle of cut-throat competition? There is where the deadlock comes in again. The whole thing is built up on one man fighting against another, one man trying to overreach another, one man trying to make better bargains for himself, no matter what happens to his neighbour—that is the whole method of what we call our commercial system. If that be so, how are you going to interfere with its natural outcome, with the inevitable result which grows out of it?—the same principle, only carried a little to excess, and so shocking the conscience that was not shocked when people were ruined piecemeal, but is shocked when they are ruined by hundreds and by thousands; yet each one of those who were ruined piecemeal suffered as much, his lot was as unfortunate. How, then, can you cripple the excess without undermining the whole? There is another of the problems which are set, and yet in the very midst of it there is a gleam of a brighter future, for in that great alchemy with which the mighty Chemist of the world’s laboratory changes the forces that destroy into forces that construct, there are signs that these trusts which have grown out of the greed and selfishness of men will really be organisations of industry which will be useful to the community in the future, when Brotherhood has replaced competition, and when thought for others takes the place of only thinking for oneself. And so we see possibilities even in the midst of the troubles.

Let us glance at another side of this problem—the attempts which are being made to improve social conditions in newer countries, as they are called, say, Australia. In Australia the working classes have got everything that they are asking for here; it is called the working-man’s paradise. Every boy of twenty-one can vote; think of the magnificent freedom of it! Every girl of twenty-one can vote; what more would you have? No need of agitation there. But, unluckily, the boys care much more about football than they do about questions in Parliament, and the girls, perhaps, are thinking more of bonnets and hats than of the way in which their votes ought to be cast. They have all got the vote and they do not know what to do with it, and that is a very common thing. It does not occur only in Australia. Has it ever struck you that you are paying in happiness for what you call liberty, if you mean by liberty the right to cast a vote? No matter what your qualifications, that is quite outside the question; no matter whether you know anything about the questions, that is not of the least importance; no matter if your head is as empty as ever it can be, it counts just as much at the polling-booth as the head of the wisest statesman, thinker, most highly trained economist or historian. It is an admirable way of governing when you come to look at it from the outside standpoint. Let us see how it works in Australia where they have it: you have not got it yet; you are on the way to it. All these people have votes, and the great majority, as is always the case, are ignorant. There has been class legislation over here, and they have class legislation over there—it is not a good thing, only there it is just the other way up; and the effect of ignorant class legislation is even worse than the effect of educated class legislation. Let us see how it works. First, it works for a gradual diminution of efficiency along the ordinary lines of work, on which, remember, the whole prosperity of the country depends. The boy who is a free man does not care to be an apprentice, and it does not to do tell the boy he has done his work badly, because he is a free Australian, and off he goes, and he won’t work any more if you tell him he has not worked well. But, you know, nature is a very awkward thing to come striking up against in your political and social life, and her laws do not get modified as you might think they should. The boy who won’t learn becomes the workman who is wanting in skill, and so the level of efficiency in production is getting lower and lower. If they want a piece of good machinery they have to send over here to get it—although there is a very heavy price put upon importing it into Australia—because the work there is so badly done that the machines won’t work properly after they are made, and that is one of the results that we are seeing at the present time. Another one is, that unemployment is increasing. There are men in the streets there just as there are here, clamouring for work, and asking the Government to give it to them; and how do they get there? Very many of them because they must not work under a certain wage, which is not a possible wage to pay for the kind of work that they can do. Suppose you happen to have a little garden; you want to have your paths weeded and your grass cut. That is gardener’s work. Now a gardener must not work under 10s. a day, and your poor professional man who is at a discount in the matter of votes, and has a fixed income, cannot afford to pay 10s. a day to have his paths weeded, so he goes to weed them himself, and the would-be gardener goes out, and is unemployed in the streets, and calls on the Government to find him work. There is a very serious side to that beyond the question of unemployment. If you are going to make the men who should give better work to the country than the weeding of paths weed their own paths for themselves, then you are putting a check on the whole of the higher kinds of labour on which the nobler national life depends, for it is as true now as it ever was that man does not live by bread alone. If you are going to make every man do manual labour, you can get nothing more than the kind of paradise that you find in “Looking Backward,” which is more a paradise for the respectable suburb than for a nation that needs art and beauty, music and literature. Those things want leisure to produce and time to perfect. There must be education behind them before they can be produced, and it is a very bad arrangement to press all your nation down to a low level of comfortable eating and drinking and amusement, and forget the mightier things that make a national life—the products of genius, the creative exertions of thought. There is one of the greater dangers. You cannot blame the poor people. ‘As long as a man is hungry, a good meal is the one thing he wants, and that must be his ideal. But nations ought not to be built up on the crude ideas of the ignorant and the hungry. That is the duty of wisdom. But see how difficult this question becomes; see how it is even in this country, where still education is a very great weight in popular affairs, even though the vote ignores it. A man may know his own trade, and be able to give very good counsel and advice as to what is necessary for that one particular trade in which he is working; but a nation is not made up of one trade; it is made up of a hundred different occupations, every one interlinked and interrelated with all the others, and you cannot legislate nationally by simply looking at a single occupation or a single class. You must see how your law reacts on the whole of the complicated organism; otherwise you ruin your nation while you lift up a single trade, and that is what is happening in Australia. Certainly some of the trades are very well provided and arranged for, but the rest of the elements that ought to make a nation are disregarded, and life for them is made impossible; and even within the limits of a trade, sometimes things are marvellously stupid. Let me give you one example. Melbourne is a large city, and occasionally it has very hot weather. The trades unions there have made a law that milk shall not be delivered more than once a day on Sunday; the poor man wants his holiday, and it is very selfish of you if you want to make him work on Sunday, so that milk may only be delivered in the morning. Now the difficulty is that the cows have not yet come into the trades unions; they do not realise that on Sunday they are only to give milk once a day and not twice. Without the slightest regard for the beauty of social arrangements, they wilfully persist in giving milk in the afternoon as well as in the morning. But the unfortunate milkman must not sell it, because if he did he would be turned out of his trade union, and that would mean destruction. So he has to keep it; and if the weather is hot it is not quite so good in the morning, in spite of the boracic acid, as it was the night before. So he mixes up the fresh milk of the morning and the stale milk of the night before, and sells it all as fresh milk: and though you may not discover it in the milk-can, the baby discovers it in the milk-bottle, and the death-rate of the children goes up in the summer because of this admirable arrangement which has been made with regard to the distribution of milk. That is not the way that nations can really be governed; and there are all sorts of restrictions of that kind which constantly come up against you in the home, and make you feel that life is not in any sense free. Things of this sort can only succeed if certain conditions are willingly accepted by all the people who have to work under them, and not when they are imposed for the benefit of a particular trade or an unwilling and reluctant population.

Let us go one step further; we need not go out to Australia now. We have to replace competition by co-operation. You may say that is being very largely done. Certainly very much has been done in co-operative distribution; Lancashire and Yorkshire are full of successful co-operative works. How many are there of co-operative productive works? The idea has been tried a good many times, but it has always broken down for two reasons: first, that in production you want one clear, strong brain which is a despot over the production; you cannot do it by boards and committees and popular votes, and all the rest of it, because in that commercial production there are many things to think of; very swift changes may come about, and the one able man is able to seize the right moment and to lead his affair to success, where divided councils and delay and discussion spell bankruptcy. That is one of the difficulties with regard to this production. There is something still more serious—the want of trust. The people don’t trust each other; they are suspicious of each other. They suspect each other of personal ends, instead of honestly co-operating for the public good. So they change their officers continually, and there is no continuity of policy. That fault of want of trust, want of confidence, imputation of bad motives, is fatal and must remain fatal until people can grow out of it into Brotherhood. At the present time, when one man born among the working classes, as they are called, by ability and skill, eloquence and application, rises into the higher social ranks, his bitterest opponents are to be found in the class which he has quitted; and when he finds, as he must find—because again he strikes up against great natural laws—when he finds that Trafalgar Square remedies are not workable when you come to put them within the four corners of an Act of Parliament, then people call him traitor, deserter, renegade, and the best he can do will not win him trust and confidence. How is that to be dealt with?

Oh, you say, you will have to change human nature before your plans will work. Exactly; that is precisely what has to be done. Do you think it is impossible? Human nature is changing every day; human nature is continually in a state of flux. The human nature of the Middle Ages is not the same as the human nature of our own time. When knight-errants went plunging about, fighting and the rest of it, it might very well have been said: “Oh, you have to change human nature before you can get people to sit quietly down and submit to the law, instead of knocking their oppressor on the head.” Quite true; but human nature has been changing through those centuries, so that instead of riding out to right your own wrong, you call in the nearest policeman and submit it to the arbitration of the law. Why should not human nature go on changing? As a matter of fact it is changing before our eyes, and the changes that are coming in it are the unfolding of the divine Spirit in man; the outer forms change to embody the unfolding Spirit, and the lower human nature is always changing, and gradually producing itself in higher and higher forms. In the very midst of this struggle and competition, this misery and conflict, you can see, if you will open your eyes, the germs of a nobler, higher, more brotherly civilisation. How different is the social conscience from what it was even a century ago; how different the common feeling of responsibility when wrong things are done and misery is left unalleviated! How many more of the classes that are called comfortable cannot remain comfortable while they know misery is outside their doors; how many are beginning to recognise the great fact that whatever one has earned one holds as a steward, and not as an owner, in a world where all men are brothers, and where the duty of the family is the duty of each! That thought is spreading further and further, wider and wider; but the great change must come from above, not from below. Starving, ignorant men can make riots, sometime even revolutions; but only wisdom and love can build up a new civilisation that shall endure. I remember that one day, when H. P. Blavatsky was asked: “Are you a Socialist?” her answer was, “I believe in the Socialism that gives; I do not believe in the Socialism that takes.” There lies the keynote of the future. When those who have are ready to sacrifice, then the dawning of the new era will be seen in the sky that is over our earth; when wealth and education and power are held as trusts for the common good, ah! then will come the laying of the foundations of a better and a nobler State. When the educated man and woman remember: “This education of mine, bought by the ignorance of thousands who have laboured in order that I might be educated, really belongs to them, and I must give it back to them in service, in order to pay the debt that I have contracted to them”; when the wealthy man feels: “I am a steward, not an owner of this wealth which has come out of the labour of thousands; let it help the uplifting of thousands”—then Brotherhood is beginning to show itself upon earth. When the gentle and the refined realise that gentleness and refinement are meant to be shared, and not shut up away in drawing-rooms to guard them as though they were delicate Dresden china that must not be used for fear it should be broken—when that day comes, we shall be nearer the beginning of a great social change. It must be by renunciation, by self-abnegation, that the foundations of that great brotherly civilisation will be laid. In a family, the elders think of the youngers; and when food is short, it is the elders who go without it in order that the little ones may be fed. So in every social movement the note of the higher is renunciation, the note of the lower is love and co-operation; then they will blend together, and each will bring what he has to give, none will despise another, for everything is equally necessary for the building up of a nation. The strength of the navy, the genius of the philosopher, the skill of the worker, the keen brain of the organiser—the whole of these must make a common work; and none should either despise or envy, for it is one work which is being made by all for the good of everyone.

If you say to me: “That hope can but be a dream,” my answer to you is, that as man is divine there is nothing too great for him to imagine or too exquisite for him to achieve. Think highly of yourselves, highly of your divine possibilities; realise that you are Gods in the making, and that you can build anything to which you can aspire. Thought is the mightiest power; the thought-image first, and then its materialisation in the physical world. But it is not enough to think; the materialisation here has to be made; and there are signs of that in the great Christian civilisation which is still the dominant power in Christendom. For men are beginning to talk now not of heaven away beyond the clouds, but of heaven here on earth; of the kingdom of Christ on earth that shall surely come, not only in the ideal but in the actual; a civilisation based on brotherhood, wisdom, love. That is what is going to be done in the world just now opening up before us. Men are no longer content to be happy after death, they want to be happy on this side of death as well; and they shall be, unless the prayer that you who are Christians utter day by day is only a lip worship and not a reality: “Thy will be done on earth, even as it is done in heaven.” It is on earth the new great civilisation is to come, that Brotherhood is to be realised, that the nations of the future are to be built on the type of the family, and not on a type of a struggle of wild beasts in the jungle. That is the future to which we are looking; and if on this Sunday and last Sunday I have drawn the darker side, it is to show that because things are at a deadlock, therefore He who holds the key of every lock is near to His return on earth. In the Sundays that lie before us I hope to work out that second side of the subject, to show you how these things are passing away, and how it has been declared in the higher world, and the cry is echoing in the lower: “Behold, I make all things new!”

Lecture III

The New Doors Opening In Religion, Science, and Art

Friends: On the preceding evenings on which I have addressed you we have had our attention turned backwards to the past, or we were glancing at the present. We are now to turn our eyes to the future, and, starting from the basis of the present and of certain facts which are already showing themselves amongst us, to consider what new doors are opening in Religion, in Science, and in Art; what new avenues of knowledge are beginning to show themselves stretching to far-off horizons—horizons, in fact, which are not really the limit of those avenues, but only the limit to which we can at present pierce. I am chiefly concerned to endeavour to show you that this promise of the opening of new doors is a great reality; that the sounds are around us; that, as it were, the doors are already a little open, and we have the right to think that as man evolves a little further those doors will open wider and wider, so that the race may pass through them to a wiser and a happier future. In order to make this intelligible and clear, I shall have to ask you for a few moments to consider with me a certain view of man’s nature and constitution, a view which was practically universal among the ancient religions of the world, which is indicated, although not fully carried out perhaps in detail, in the more modern faith of Christendom, which is revived amongst us, and is being taught all over the world by means of the Theosophical Society; not a new view, but a very old one, clothed only in new garments in deference to the advancing mind of man. Now this view I must put roughly, but without that statement the method of the opening of the new doors would remain unintelligible. It is briefly this: That every human being is fundamentally a spiritual intelligence, appropriating to himself portions of matter in the various types of worlds in which he lives; that that spiritual intelligence commences the great world-cycle as a germ or seed of divinity; and just as if, where you had an ordinary seed, a grain of corn, that grain would not grow and develop the powers within it unless it were planted in the soil, the soil whose juices nourish it, unless it were rained upon, and unless the sun shone upon it, so is it with the divine germ, the human Spirit. It is planted in the soil of human experience, whose juices shall gradually enable it to unfold its divine possibilities. It is watered with the rain of human tears, the tears of sorrow and of pain; it is vivified, strengthened, enabled to grow by the sunshine of human joy and human delight; and out of the contact of experience, out of the rain of sorrow and the sunshine of joy, gradually, generation after generation, century after century, millennium after millennium, the divine germ becomes a divine man, perfect in the manifested powers of Deity enfolded within him from the first.

But in order that that æonian evolution and unfolding may go forward, it is necessary that this divine germ should come into contact with matter. Hence veil after veil of matter enwraps, is appropriated by, this divine germ, and he draws around himself—as he descends from the highest heavens down to the earth, through region after region of ever-densifying matter—and appropriates veil after veil, in order that by contact with that matter, which alone can give him experience, the powers within him may unfold and the matter that he appropriates may become his servant, his instrument of manifestation. So when we look at any one of ourselves at the stage that we have reached to-day, we find a spiritual being many of whose powers have unfolded, but some of whose powers remain not yet unfolded into manifestation, and we find, clothing, as it were, that unfolding Spirit, the veils of matter of which I spoke, no longer mere inchoate veils, but bodies more or less definitely organised for the purposes of the unfolding life. On our physical plane, in the world in which we are to-day, that appropriated matter is now highly organised, and has become the servant of the intelligence of the Spirit to a very large extent in the more highly developed human beings. It has had developed in it, age after age, those organs of knowledge that we call the senses; five in number at the present time, as mankind has passed through five of those great Races that I likened to the waves of the human ocean when I first addressed you on this subject. You may remember that then I spoke of ourselves as being in the fifth of those great waves, and also in the fifth sub-wave, as we may say, into which the larger wave divides itself. Even looking back along our experience in the present cycle of human growth, we can see these senses developing from their earliest inception up to the present point of keenness that they have reached, one sense developing in all its stages through one of the great Races.

In order that you may not think that that is quite removed from experience, let me ask you for a moment to look at a fairly prominent family of the fourth race, the one that preceded our own, which is now living in Burma, part of the Indian empire. In that fourth race as a whole the sense of taste was the one that was gradually evolving, the sense of smell being only germinal and rudimentary, not developed. Now if you go among the Burmans to-day and inquire into their diet, you will find that one favourite article of diet is fish; but not fish freshly drawn from sea or river, but fish that has been caught for some time, buried in the ground until it has become fairly aged, and then unburied, to form a delightful dish on the Burmese table. Certainly you can well realise the fact that in that fourth Race people the sense of taste is very different from what it is amongst yourselves, with perhaps one exception that I ought to make, that I believe even now in the sense of taste in some people finds gratification in game and venison that are euphemistically called “high.” Well, the fish that the Burman eats is very high; one might almost, if it were not rude, perhaps apply to it a word more like calling a spade a spade, and call it rotten. Now no one could eat such food as that and find it pleasant if the sense of smell, which has so much to do with the more delicate savours of taste, were already well developed among the people; and I take that as a striking illustration, one that has come also under my own observation, in order to make clear what I mean when I say to you that with each race one sense is developed and the next sense to it is only germinal, and shows itself out in the following race, through which it grows to higher and higher perfection. So that the mere fact of the five senses of the present is an indication of the point at which humanity is standing, and a proverb—and there is often much truth in proverbs—about a man being frightened out of his seven senses, although at present he has only five, may serve as an indication of the widespread and ancient tradition that man has two races still through which he will evolve, and senses which will be developed as those races gradually develop upon earth; so that in the sixth Race, with which I shall have to deal in these lectures this day fortnight, “The Coming Race,” we shall be looking for the development of a new sense, the sense which will make the next world on the other side of death as palpable to us in the physical body as the physical world is palpable at the present time. For in man that form of vision will be the next to develop; and as his next higher body, the astral, becomes rightly organised, then in the physical brain will develop _pari passu_ the organ whereby the knowledge of that world will come into the physical consciousness, and thus enormously widen our outlook, and make palpable what now is hidden from the eyes of most.

Taking this view of man, that he is an unfolding spiritual consciousness, we find that he creates for himself, as he unfolds, more highly organised bodies of matter, so that the double growth is going on in every one of us, higher stages of unfolding consciousness, subtler bodies of matter by which that consciousness can express itself clearly and definitely; to every change in consciousness a vibration in matter answering; to every vibration in matter a change in consciousness responding; so that there are side by side the unfolding of the Spirit and the development of a more delicate and more highly organised body, the difference showing itself in the nervous system as well as in the mere outer configuration of the body. Glance again at that fourth Race, study its nervous system, and you will find it very different from your own. While like your own in outer configuration, while the differences between the brain and the general distribution of the nerves to the body are not great, if you go into the question of the organisation of that nervous system you will find that an enormous gulf divides the fourth and the fifth great Races of mankind. Again, if you want a proof, look at the amount of pain or the amount of physical injury which can be endured, say, by the Chinaman, in comparison with what you can bear. Notice that an enormous laceration inflicted on the body of the Chinaman leaves him ready to recover rapidly, while a similar injury to you would kill you by nervous shock. It is not the question of the mutilation—that and the loss of blood might be the same in each—but the fifth Race man dies from nervous shock, where the fourth Race man with the coarser nervous system is able to recover, is able to re-establish the nervous equilibrium.

Another point you may notice among yourselves to-day, emphasising as you do in your own Teutonic sub-race the characteristics of the great Aryan Race to which all these branches that are spread over the West as well as in India belong. Looking at that, you will find, as you come into your own Teutonic sub-race, that nervous diseases increase; and they are increasing very rapidly at the present time, far more rapidly apparently than at any other period in human history. The strain on your present nervous system is beginning to be too great, for it is evolving a little more rapidly than the outer world is evolving to meet it; and hence, in order that you may not suffer from continual nervous diseases, it is necessary to begin to refine and to purify your lives, leaving the grosser passions behind you which in the course of evolution you now ought to have outgrown. As the next sub-race is born—and it is beginning at the present time—the nervous system will become more and more delicate, and keener sense-organs will appear in the children in larger and larger numbers. Our present organs of sense will first become intensified. Then, after much intensification, the newer organs will begin to show themselves—those which will unfold to us the world on the other side of death. To this world our astral bodies belong, and our nervous system will become finer, and thus make it possible to register our investigations more completely in our physical bodies. That will be one point that we shall have to bear in mind in looking for the new doors that are opening. But not only the physical body is growing finer, but in addition to that our next body is organising itself and gradually unfolding its powers, the body that we shall wear on the other side of death as well, the body that we are wearing now through which our emotions are showing. For when we pass through death we do not pass unclothed into another world; we throw off this denser garment of the physical body, but penetrating that, interfused with that, intermingling with that now is the finer matter of the world on the other side of death, growing ready for our use in that further world, and organising itself gradually for the experiences that there we shall meet. And in the next race, as I shall try to show you more fully hereafter, that body will become highly organised, greatly developed, a thorough vehicle of consciousness as the physical body is to-day, and by the growth and organisation of that the new doors will open before us in Religion, in Science, and in Art.

I.—RELIGION.

Let us see, first, how this will affect Religion. The unfolding of the deeper strata of consciousness will bring our inner selves, the Spirit, into more and more direct touch with the spiritual regions of our universe. I am now not dealing with the finer worlds of matter, but with the spiritual realities which belong to the spiritual life. The nature of God, the consciousness of His presence everywhere, the recognition of His life as an indwelling power—all these will become fundamental realities for the unfolding Spirit in man. I pointed out to you, when dealing with the deadlock in religion, with regard to the idea of God, that no amount of reasons addressed to the intellect could ever lead us to an absolute demonstration of the existence, the reality of God. Probability, yes; cumulative evidence, yes; but demonstration, no. When a thing is once demonstrated, no further challenge arises about it; when once a fact is demonstrated, no one any longer asks: Does that fact exist? and we have been in the region of arguments about God, and not of that spiritual knowledge of God which is eternal life. How is that to be reached? Not by any effort of the reasoning intelligence, not by any upreaching of the merely emotional nature, but by the unfolding in man himself of that Spirit which is divine in its essential quality, which, because itself divine, can respond to divinity without, and, because itself is God, knows that God of which it is the offspring. This is the ultimate truth of religion, the human experience of communion with God in the depths of the human Spirit; for religion is only a groping after God, a search after God; ceremonies and rites, churches and scriptures, they are all external; they can never reveal God to the Spirit, which is of His own likeness and image.

Only the Spirit can know Him, only the Spirit can find Him; while it searches through matter it can only hope He is, but the unveiled Spirit can feel the unveiled Godhead, and by the identity of nature can know that God is, and is itself. And as this inner spiritual life more and more awakens in the religions of the world, man will know the truth of that great saying of the Christ: “The Kingdom of God is within you.” As you go down into the depths of your own being, there shall you find Deity, the conviction that God is and must be. For you can strip away from yourself everything that is not He, until only He, the one Self of all, remains. You can mutilate your body and lose your limbs, but _you_ remain. Your emotions can grow worn out and be withered, but behind your emotions _you_ still are there. Your mind may grow weaker, feebler, may become, as it were, paralysed for reasoning, and yet _you_ are there, behind the failing mind; and if you are willing to pass on into spiritual experience, to let your emotions be quieted, to let your mind be still, then in the silence of the emotions, in the tranquillity of the mind, you shall find a deeper consciousness, a deeper life, a more real individuality; and as the emotions are still and the mind is silent, in the innermost depths of the Spirit you shall find yourself and God. And then, contemplating that mighty and eternal life, you shall feel that you share it, that you are part of it, that you cannot be separated from it, and, in a great gush of experience that never again you can doubt, you shall know the reality of Deity in finding the reality of yourself. That is the ultimate conviction that nothing can shake—that the human experience that many a man has had, that for him has transformed the world; that is the sure ground of the religion of the future, that the rock on which a true faith alone can be based; and it is written, and truly written, in an ancient Hindū scripture, that the only proof of God lies in the witness of the Self. On that rock religion will base itself, fearless of all attack, of all assault. No question of chronology can move it, for every man can gain that experience for himself; no criticism and destruction of scriptures can tear this in pieces, for it is ever renewing in the perennial life of the Eternal Spirit; no churches, in failing, can shake it, for it is this that made churches, to help in its own searching; nothing outside can touch it, for it lives in the innermost heart of man. And in that, ever-opening new experiences, fuller knowledge, deeper understanding, more abounding love, and unchanging peace and bliss. Everything else may go, but this remains unchanging; and as out of this all has come, the perishing of the transient matters not, for the Eternal Source remains.

But that is not the only new door, though the most important one, which opens to religion. You remember that I said, that with the unfolding consciousness a more delicately organised body was evolved. And so we find that new senses, new powers awake in the material tabernacle with this unfolding of the divine Spirit in man. The senses which belong to the higher worlds are very near to the opening in every one of you; and if you ask me why I say it, my answer is very simple, because, taking, say, any dozen of you, dulling the physical senses by what is called mesmerism, or hypnotism if you will, so that you cannot see physical things, cannot hear physical sounds, cannot taste or smell or touch so that the senses answer to objects outside—under those conditions in about ten out of every dozen these inner senses are able to make themselves manifest, are able to bear witness to the existence of a subtler world. Now when you find that by an artificial process of that kind an ordinary man or woman can be made what is called clairvoyant or clairaudient, or able to touch and feel things that the ordinary physical touch does not reveal; when you find that by stilling the physical these rudimentary senses are able to work—within limitations, but still to work—it is a fairly clear proof that man is on the threshold of unfolding those senses that now are rudimentary, and that need an artificial condition in order to show themselves. But they do show themselves under that artificial condition. If they were not there they could not show themselves, no matter how much you might paralyse the dense physical body; it is only because they are there that they can function. But when the rougher senses are active, those stronger vibrations dull the delicate vibrations of the rudimentary and dawning senses. It is only because they are present, but only partly developed that you are able to make them manifest in the great majority which might be taken from a meeting such as this.