Chapter VII: Part I: Lectures to the Public (7)

Those, roughly, then, are the conditions: meditation for the consciousness, purity for the evolution of the instrument. If you are willing to accept those conditions, then the path of the higher evolution opens before you, and according to your courage, your perseverance, and your ability will be the rapidity with which you can tread that path. The object before you should be the helping of others, the gaining of these powers in order that you may be more useful, not in order that you may be greater than your fellow-men. Of the purity of your motive there is only one test: are you using the powers you have now for the helping of your race? If you are not, then no profession that you will use the higher powers for good will be effective in bringing you help in their unfolding. I have met many a man, many a woman, who is anxious to be an invisible helper—that is, a worker on the astral plane—but I do not always find that those people are visible helpers as far as their present powers go. And I do not understand why people should want to go about in astral slums when they keep carefully away from the physical slums which are already within their reach. So far as you can go by your own power you have the right to go, but if you ask for help from those more highly developed—from the great Teachers of the race—then you have to bring in your hands the proof—and that proof is life, and not words—that as you are using well the talent you have you deserve to be helped in the gaining of others. There is the underlying meaning of those strange words ascribed to the Christ, that he who has much, to him shall be given. Those who have used well that which they have, those alone have claim to be helped in gaining more; for by their life they have shown that they do the best with what they possess, and that is the guarantee that with more they will utilise that also for the race. And so in the old rules of discipleship it was said that when the disciple came to the Teacher he must bring with him in his hands the fuel for the fire; it was the fire of sacrifice, and the fuel was everything that the pupil possessed in mind, body, and estate; and he brought that in his hands as offering to the Teacher, and then alone was he accepted by the one who knew. And so in these days also that higher evolution, quickened by the power of the great Ones, can only be opened up to those who bring in their hands the fuel for the fire of sacrifice; you must be willing to give up everything you have, and own nothing, material or immaterial; you must hold everything you have and everything you are at the service of the great One from whom you ask the gift of knowledge. When that is brought the gift is never refused; when that door is thus knocked at it never remains closed. True it is that the gateway is narrow; true it is, now as of old, “Strait is the gate, narrow is the way, and few there be that find it.” But the fewness does not depend on the grudging of the Teacher—it depends on the want of self-surrender by the disciple. Bring all you have and all you are, lay it at the feet of the Master of the Wisdom; He will open the gateway, He will guide you along the path. But dream not that words are heard in that high atmosphere where the Master lives and breathes: only high thoughts can reach Him, only noble acts can speak the thoughts you have conceived; for voice there is the life that is lived, and only the life that speaks of sacrifice can claim the teaching at His hands.

Lecture VIII

The Place of Theosophy in the Coming Civilisation

_A Public Lecture delivered in the Queen’s Hall, London, at the British Convention, July 2nd, 1909._

It has been my lot now for many years to visit England either every year or every other year, in order to try to spread throughout the country the truths of the ancient wisdom which in these days we call by its Greek name of Theosophy. This year it has been my special duty to place on record in the capital of the empire a certain line of teaching with regard to the changing conditions of the times, to draw the attention of the thoughtful to the signs all around us of a changing civilisation—signs of an age that is passing—signs of a dawning civilisation that may be seen on the far horizon of our day. And I had thought that I should only reach as to this the few thousands that may be gathered together Sunday after Sunday in a London hall, but by the generous kindness of the _Christian Commonwealth_ these lectures have been spread far and wide. To-night I am taking up something of the thought that there has been more fully expressed, with the special intention of showing you the part that Theosophy will play in that coming civilisation, the nature of the work that it is doing in preparation for the civilisation on the threshold. I have worked out in those lectures in some detail what here I must only state, that just as you can find in watching the evolution of a man that at different ages of his life he is dominated by different parts, as we may say, of his consciousness—as we find emotion dominating him in youth, mind dominating him in his maturity, the wisdom of the Spirit in his age—so we may see, in glancing abroad over the civilisations and the races of men, that a similar succession may be observed, and that hence an indication of the future may be obtained. For we can see in the race that preceded our own, and still is living and active, the great Keltic race, how high emotion is the dominant note, and how the expression of that emotion finds itself best in poetry and in art. We can see that in the Teutonic race intellect is the dominant note, and that mind in all the spheres of its triumph shows itself out among the peoples who grow from that stock, of which our own nation is a branch. That being of the past and the present, it is not irrational to look now in the unfolding humanity for the growth of the next principle, the next mark in the opening consciousness, the development of the spiritual nature in man, which succeeds the intellectual as inevitably as that succeeds the emotional, and places the crown of wisdom and all-embracing love on the brow of the humanity which has passed through youth, is passing through its manhood, is going onwards to the full maturity of its evolution. So in the coming civilisation we shall expect to find spirituality the prevailing mark, dominating religion, dominating science, art, and society, and we may rationally look, as spirituality grows, and shapes and moulds the coming civilisation, that in the sphere of religion we shall see ever-increasing unity; in the sphere of science we shall find new methods of investigation, new powers to use in thought; that in the sphere of mind we shall find nobler ideals, more inspiring power; and in society we shall find spirituality showing itself, laying the foundation of society in self-sacrifice, building it up by self-control, and marking Brotherhood as its ultimate goal and achievement.

Such, very roughly, are the signs that we think will mark the coming civilisation. What has Theosophy to do with that civilisation: what its place, its part, its duty? That is the question that I am to try to answer to-night. And fairly the questions might be asked in speaking of Theosophy by those who know little of it save the name—and how little of it is known we can often see in the allusions we find to it in our daily Press—naturally the questions might arise: What is Theosophy? Whence does it come? Briefly, those preliminary questions, then, should be answered. Theosophy, in the first place, as its name implies, is the declaration that man as a spiritual being can directly know God who is Spirit. It is the proclamation of the ancient Gnosis as against the agnosticism of the closing years of the nineteenth century. Secondly, it is a body of doctrines which are common to all the great religions of the world; doctrines which we find explained, more or less perfectly and fully, in every great religion of the past as well as in every great religion of the present; a collection of teachings, spiritual in their nature, universal in their spread, endeavouring to guide man along the way to perfection, training him in life, illuminating him in the hour of death. It does not deal with any special rites, any special ceremonies, any special part of the teaching of religion which is not universal, which is not everywhere to be found. So far as those are concerned, the specialties of every religion, it studies them, it explains them, it shows the occult meanings which often lie behind the outer garment of ceremony, behind the ordinary rites of worship, behind the symbols that you find in every faith; but while it explains them, illuminates them, enforces their real value, it does not strive to persuade people to adopt one religion rather than another, but, instead of giving up their own religion for another, it counsels them to find in that religion the deep truths that all faiths have in common. Hence it endeavours, where religion is concerned, to bring peace instead of war, to make religion a healer rather than a divider, a peacemaker rather than a battle-cry among men. And in searching out these essentials of every religion, and drawing these out and setting them before the minds of men, it justifies its claim to its name of the Ancient Wisdom, of that Divine Wisdom in which all the great religions have their root.

Such, very roughly and briefly again, is Theosophy in its essence: a Gnosis as regards the relation of man to God, a statement of fundamental spiritual truths common to the great religions of the world. In a moment, in dealing with its work in the religion of the future, I will mention those doctrines one by one, so that you may see for yourselves how they may be traced in all the scriptures, living and dead, and in all the religions of the world. I put first the blunt statement of what Theosophy is, in order, if possible, to clear away the clouds which ignorance and prejudice have spread around it.

Taking it, then, that the coming civilisation is to be spiritual, that this Theosophy is to have a definite place and work therein, let me try to point out to you the nature of the work, the lines along which Theosophy labours to prepare the way for, as well as to influence, that coming civilisation for which we look; and when I say to prepare the way for, it is because we believe that every great religion has a civilisation attached to it, and according to the nature of the religion the civilisation that it moulds will be; and because we also believe that at the beginning of every civilisation a great Teacher appears in the world to give the impulse to that civilisation and to shape the religion that will mould it. Hence, with our looking for a coming civilisation, we look also for the manifestation of a great, a divine Teacher.

But I said, people might ask not only what is Theosophy, but—Whence does it come? It is the latest—I do not say the last—of the great impulses which, one after another, in the long past of history, have founded the great religions of the world. Those impulses ever come from a mighty Brotherhood of Teachers made up of the past Founders of religion, presided over by the Supreme Teacher who rules and guides and inspires them all—a mighty Brotherhood of Teachers of the world, coming from time to time to found a religion, to shape a civilisation. Such impulses were often repeated in the past, to be again repeated in the century which now is running its course amongst us, history in very truth repeating itself, and bringing at the appointed time a new civilisation, preceded by a new spiritual impulse.

That impulse on this occasion has differed from all that went before it in that it founds no new religion, builds no new barrier, does not mark out believers and unbelievers, does not try to proselytise, but only to inspire. For, as I just said, Theosophy goes to all religions as a peacemaker, and does not strive to draw away from any faith those whom the law has brought to birth beneath its shelter. So its first work in preparation for the coming civilisation is to try to bring about a brotherhood of religions, not destroying any, not trying to make any less potent than they were before, but endeavouring to transform them from rivals to brothers, so that each religion may recognise its kinship with other religions, and they may become one mighty family, instead of warring and separate creeds. Now, to that high end it brings the knowledge of facts which have largely been used against religion, but ought really to be used in its service. Those of you who have reached even middle age will remember how in the latter part of the nineteenth century there grew up among the sciences of the time a science which was named Comparative Mythology. You will remember how that science grew; the oldest among you may remember its very beginnings. It sought out of the past religions, as well as out of the present religions, to prove that religion grew up out of ignorance, and only became refined as it grew older and spread among more cultivated people. It used the researches of the archæologist, the discoveries of the antiquarian, as weapons against the religion which dominated Christendom, where science was most powerful and most active. It took up doctrine after doctrine of the Christian faith, and pointed to the existence of those doctrines in other times, in other civilisations, among the religions of the past, both living and dead. It brought information from the open tombs of Egypt, and gathered together the fragments of Egyptian knowledge as they were traced on the papyrus, on the leaf that was put on the bosom of the mummy. It gathered them together, and out of those scattered fragments it made what we know well as the Egyptian _Book of the Dead_. It did the same with Chaldæa, the same with Nineveh, the same with those replicas of Egyptian temples that were unburied in far-off Mexico—temples thousands of years older than the Aztecs, who slew their worshippers and destroyed their civilisation, the Aztecs, who themselves were thousands of years old when Cortez and his Spaniards treated them as they had treated their forerunners. It brought from those unburied temples similar teachings and similar ideas. It gathered, again, similar teachings from the books of China, with its immemorial traditions; from the scriptures of India, from the fragments of the Zoroastrian tradition, from the books of the Buddhist nations, from Greek and Roman. Piling up all the evidence it had gathered, it made out of that the science of Comparative Mythology. It was the deadliest weapon that was ever forged against dogmatic Christianity, because founded on knowledge of facts that none could deny. Then it was that it became the duty of Theosophy, just then born into the world, to come forward to acknowledge the truth of the facts, and to add many others to the store, but to point out that instead of Comparative Mythology there should be built a science of Comparative Religion, showing that that which had been universally taught was truth, and not lies; was verity, and not delusion. It defended every religion by the universality of religious beliefs; and it pointed out that a truth did not cease to be a truth because it was ancient, did not cease to be a truth because it ruled in ancient times as well as now; it justified religion by the very arguments that were used to discredit it, and traced it to a universal Ancient Wisdom, instead of to the ignorance of the savage, refined in modern days. It brought to that contention many an argument on which I have not time to dwell, but that you can very easily read for yourselves, if it be unknown to you, in the many publications that have been written along these lines. And now, in order to utilise that for the coming time in the building of the Brotherhood of Religions, we proclaim in every country, to every faith, among the people of every religion, the common heritage, the spiritual verity, the primary doctrines that are found in every faith. What are they? They are but few, although far-reaching. They could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and even than that, so few are they.

The first great doctrine that every religion teaches is the unity of God; the second, that God in manifestation is ever triple. In philosophy they speak of three qualities or attributes; in religion they mostly personify, and speak of a Trinity or a triple form. But whether philosophical, or personified in religion, you have ever Power or Will, Wisdom, Activity, and you can find those in the Trinity of every nation, whether you take in the Christian creed the Father, the embodiment of Power, of Will, the Son, the Wisdom everlasting; the Spirit, the creative Activity by which the worlds are made. Or you might take it equally well in Hindūism, and there you would see the order reversed: the Creator, who is the embodiment of Activity; the Preserver, the embodiment of Wisdom; the Regenerator, the embodiment of Power. And so might I take you to ancient and dead religions, and to ancient and living religions, and show you ever the same. For those primary truths of God are everywhere proclaimed, one in His nature, triple in His manifestation. And then, after those first two truths, you come to the third: the vast family of the Sons of God, the great hierarchy of spiritual intelligences—archangels, angels, shining ones; call them what you will—that mighty family of Sons of God, amongst which humanity finds its own place in process of evolution. Then you come to the fourth great teaching: that you have the unfolding of consciousness going on continually, and shaping ever finer and finer bodies for its own expression; that which science calls evolution, but which religion has ever called reincarnation, the method of perfecting the germinal seed of divinity into the divine man, when the human evolution is complete. Then, fifthly, the worlds in which these changes go on: our earth, the intermediate world, and the heavenly; and man, with bodies of matter belonging to all the worlds, so that he may be in contact with each. And then the sixth great teaching of universal law—law in the world of mind as well as in the world of matter; law which builds character as well as builds the outer world; law unchanging and inviolable, which, because we can know, we can utilise to the building up of ourselves into noblest ideals. And then, closing these doctrines that are common to every religion, we find the idea of the Teachers who preside over human evolution, who inspire religions, who guard the spiritual progress of mankind. Those are the truths universal, those are the teachings which every religion has had and has; and so we find in these religions, by their unity of teaching, the reality of Brotherhood that we seek everywhere to spread. For of what avail to change from one faith to another if in the new religion you only find the same old truths, though ceremonies and rites may differ? And we see in this Brotherhood of Religions one value to mankind which one religion only could never have given to us. Just as you see the light of the sun broken up into many colours, and those colours giving all the beauty to earth which you see in the nature around you; just as you know that those colours that constitute white light can be recombined again into the white light whence they sprung, so is it with religions. The great truths, the great virtues are as one—the great white light of truth; they are broken up by the prism of the intellect, and the many religions ray out, each with its own colour; they are recombined by the prism of the Spirit, and once again are blended into the unity of truth.

If you look at religions you will see how true that is. Every religion has a note of its own, a colour of its own, that it gives for the helping of the world. Go back to ancient Egypt, and you find the note of the Egyptian religion is knowledge, so that Egyptian religion became the mother of Egyptian science, and science spread from Egypt westwards over Europe. Go to the Far East, and you will find in India that the special note of Hindūism is the all-pervading nature of Deity, and the all-compelling duty which is the law for every individual. Go to Persia in her ancient days, and there the note of purity was struck—purity of thought, of word, of act. Go to Greece, and you will find her note was beauty—beauty in architecture, beauty in sculpture, beauty in painting, beauty in the perfection of her philosophy, which made the Beautiful of equal rank with the True and the Good. And in Rome you find the note of law, law all-compelling; and in Christianity the note of self-sacrifice, which has in it the promise of the future; and in Islām the proclamation again of the divine unity. And so every religion with its own note, every religion with its own colour; blended together they give the whiteness of truth, blended together they give a mighty chord of perfection.

Now that you could not have had with one faith and one creed. Human thought is too narrow, human brain cannot grasp at once this many-noted chord of perfection; and so many religions, each with its own characteristic, as though the Divine Name were to be spelt out by the religions, and each gave a single letter, all the letters together making the name of the Blessed One. When you look on religion in that way you realise how mighty a thing it is, how its strength is in unity expressed in diversity; how each religion should learn from others and share with others that which is its own specialty. And surely that does not lower religion, but makes it greater; surely it does not make it less compelling, but more attractive. Is Christ less when He taught “Love your enemies,” because we know that the Buddha said, six hundred years before Him, “Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love”? Or is it not more beautiful to see in the Buddha and the Christ proclaimers of the one eternal law, coming at different times to different nations, but ever with a single truth, ever with one code to teach to men?

Now in trying to do this work—which, of course, is taken in detail when one is dealing only with that side of thought—Theosophy is preparing for that common spiritual religion, the one Divine Wisdom, of which all the religions of the world shall see themselves as branches, while the trunk and root of truth are one. That is the great work, then, in the coming civilisation, which it is the duty of Theosophy to labour at; and hence, in one of its early teachings, it was said it was to be the corner-stone of the religion of humanity. For the religion of humanity will be the Brotherhood of Religions that I have been describing, where no religion can be spared, for each has something special, but where all religions will be seen as one, because they give similar truths in different forms.

Let us pass from that, and ask what Theosophy is to do in the coming civilisation, in the science of that time. Science in the coming days will pass into subtler worlds, or subtler matter. It has practically conquered the grosser, denser forms of matter; it is now going onward to the subtler and the finer. And there lies its difficulty: that the methods which did for the grosser, the apparatus that measured the grosser, are not applicable for the subtler. And when I say “the gross,” think how fine even its apparatus is, for quite lately I had sent to me an article in a scientific journal which spoke of an apparatus that could measure the forty-millionth of an inch, and yet that is coarse compared with the subtleties of the matter that lies beyond that, which science must conquer in the coming days. Now of what value can Theosophy be there? It is bringing, by training, the possibility to man in our modern days of quickening his own evolution, and running ahead of the slow working of the laws of nature unguided by human intelligence. It is bringing, and proclaiming everywhere, a system by which man can more rapidly unfold the powers of his consciousness, and also may more rapidly develop the organs of finer matter that are related to those worlds of finer matter which science will soon enter and begin to conquer. It is telling people how to develop the finer senses, and showing them the line along which the very few have gone in the past, but along which myriads shall tread in the future, the next great stage of human evolution, the organising of the finer body in man. It is bringing that to the help of science in order that by the evolution of the finer body the finer world may become the object of observation, exactly on the same lines, exactly by the same laws, that your grosser physical bodies to-day enable you to investigate the grosser physical world around you. There are eyes that are keener than these organs evolved from the pigment spots of the medusa; there are ears finer and subtler than those of our body, exquisite as they are in their mechanism and in their delicacy; there are organs of sense transcending the physical. Within the physical brain is an organ evolving which shall be the connecting link between those finer senses of the finer body and the grosser senses of the body of flesh that we wear; an organ that many of our scientists think is an organ that is passing away, because it is larger in the earlier stages of evolution than in the highly developed man; it is the pituitary body. It is not a question of size, but of inner complexity of organisation; and that organ is not simply what science calls it, a vestigial organ—that is, one belonging to the evolution of the past—it is truly a rudimentary organ, one belonging to the evolution of the future. And the fact of that has been proved by bringing life-currents, electric currents, to bear on that particular organ, so that the results of the finer senses are communicated to the brain, and we bridge what some people think the gulf between the world of physical matter and the world that is called that of astral matter.

Those experiments are now so familiar to some of us that it is impossible for us to agree with the notion that that organ in the brain has no future, as we find it can be stimulated and organised more finely, and used in this definite fashion; we know that what a few are doing now many shall do to-morrow, and those who have done it are only a step in front; others are treading on their heels, and may outstrip them soon in evolution. But here comes the difficulty, especially for the nations of western Europe, who, from climatic and other reasons, have taken so very largely to a diet of flesh, in which also alcohol plays a large part. Now flesh and alcohol are not suitable materials for building up the body of our ordinary life, which is to be made sensitive enough to receive the vibrations from the finer matter of which I have been speaking. Doctors have just discovered what was published by Madame Blavatsky many years ago—that alcohol has a direct effect on the pituitary body, and poisons that body, tending to cause inflammation. Have you ever wondered why it is that alcoholic excess leads to what is called delirium tremens, in which people see things that do not exist to the ordinary people around them? It is because they have poisoned that very organ by which vibrations come from other worlds; and although what they see is largely abnormal and irrational, it is none the less the result of action on these irregular and poisoned bodies, which vibrate under the stress of poison instead of under the stress of thought, as they should do. And that which doctors now have discovered and are publishing as a warning to people, that has ever been known in occult science, and one of the conditions of giving the details of the methods whereby that body may be rendered active, has been abstinence from alcohol, and for the simplest reason. So long as you are not using any of these methods, it does not so very much matter whether that body be poisoned or not. You may live long with a poisoned pituitary body; but the very moment that you begin to work upon it, to make it active, to throw into it new currents of life and energy, then the poison and the energy together bring about inflammation of the most intractable kind, causing severe pain, as well as brain mischief. And it is for that reason that the methods have not been publicly given, and are only given to those who are pure from the taint of alcohol. Along those lines, then, you will very likely come up against rules that many of you will not care to adopt. We do not say adopt them; we only say they are the conditions of the finer organisation. Natural laws do not change for people’s wishes and whims. If you want electric sparks from a machine you must make the conditions; you must have dry air, not air full of moisture. It is no good saying that dry air is not so comfortable to breathe as moist air. You are not obliged to have electric sparks, but if you want them you must conform to the conditions laid down by nature, and not follow your own whims. And that is true everywhere. Presently people will find that it is true when they want to investigate some of the spiritualistic phenomena; they have not discovered that yet. They think they can lay down the laws, and then get the results which can only be gained by obedience. The other day I was reading a rather curious report of investigation into spiritualistic photographs; and when I saw they had not obtained any, I could not help wondering how many physical photographs they would be able to get if they made it a rule that they should not put a dark cloth over the camera, and that, above all, they should not take the photographs away into the dark room, because that gives all possibilities of cheating and of fraud. Presently you will find out that finer nature has her laws quite as much as grosser nature, and that you can no more get results without obedience to those laws than you could get your photograph if your plates were exposed to the light. When that is learned, progress may be more rapid.

Along that line, where these rules are laid down for the organisation of the finer bodies, there is another matter that comes in: it is of no use to develop the finer bodies, unless the consciousness of the higher worlds is unfolded, and the only way to do that is by the old way of strenuous and regular meditation. Theosophy brings to the Western world the yoga of the East, by which the man who practises so trains and refines his brain that he makes it sensitive without making it diseased. There is where the difficulty is found in the West. Sometimes, when a great rush comes down from the higher worlds into the body of some great saint or some great genius, there is brain trouble and brain disturbance; hysteria is found. Naturally, because you are overstraining your instrument. And if you want to be able to receive those great downflows from the higher world, then you must begin to tune your instrument to vibrate to the swifter vibrations that come down. You can do it, and there is no danger unless you go to excess. If day by day you would give even ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, to strenuous thought and careful concentration, you would gradually make your brain constitution more complex and finer than it is. Thought is really the creator of the brain. As you think, your brain grows; just as if you exercise your muscles, your muscles grow and develop. It is all law, and thought is the force which renders the brain more complex in its organisation. The Indian yogi practises that, and by practise year after year, builds up the brain of the coming race out of the brain of the race that is. He makes it finer, subtler, more responsive, and he does it without the sacrifice of physical health; and that is a thing that any one of you may begin, if only you will be moderate and not excessive. Never concentrate to the point of making a feeling of dulness and heaviness of the brain; never concentrate to the point of pain; dulness and pain are the danger-signals of nature, that you are trying to change matter more rapidly in its arrangement than is possibly consistent with health. Therefore you need moderation; but, given moderation, nothing but good can come out of the practise of meditation and concentration; and by that you will not only make your brain more sensitive, but also keep it sane and healthy, and you will have none of those miserable hysterical symptoms which have so blurred the value of the knowledge that has come through the seer or the saint. Along those lines, then, Theosophy works with science to show the road of development of science in the coming civilisation.

What has Theosophy to do with regard to art in that civilisation? Glance at the results of your civilisation to-day on the beauty of the land. Go to Sheffield, which is built in what was one of the loveliest valleys of the Midlands; notice, as you come near it, the beauty of the countryside, the wooding of the undulating land, the exquisite beauty of rivulet, of forest, and of grass; and then, out of all that beauty of Nature, you plunge suddenly into the hideousness of Sheffield. You find the atmosphere thick with black smoke. No tree will grow in many of the districts, no flowers even on the sills of the houses of the poor. The atmosphere poisons vegetation; what do you think it does to the men, women, and children who breathe it? And Sheffield is not alone. Go to Glasgow; see the hideousness of that, the second metropolis of Scotland. Go to Birmingham, to Manchester, to any of these great cities that so largely make the wealth of England. But sometimes it seems to me that what you pay in beauty is too heavy a price even for your wealth, and that England was happier as well as healthier when she had fewer millionaires, but also fewer stunted and deformed specimens of humanity in her slums. Look at the faces of the men, women, and children of one or two of those cities I have mentioned. Look at the faces of the Glasgow crowd as it tramps back from its labour to the slum. Those faces are not civilised; they are brutal, many of them—animal, more than human. Oh, you who think that beauty is only a luxury, look at the humanity you breed, where ugliness is the mark of the cities, instead of the beauty that has been destroyed. You must learn to understand what beauty means. It moulds the body, and ugliness does the same. Out of your hideous cities a hideous humanity grows up. The restoration of art is a matter of life and death, not a matter of luxury and of enjoyment. Artists are wanted in our towns much more than on the walls of our galleries. Only a few go into the gallery, but men, women, and children live in the town. Until the town is beautiful, as in Greece it was beautiful, the coming civilisation will lack one mark of the civilised man. And Theosophy teaches reverence for beauty, whether it be natural beauty or beauty formed by the skilful fingers and keen brains of men—reverence for the human body. No nation has a right to breed the bodies that we see in the population of the slums. It is all very well that in the richer, the upper classes you find men and women healthy, strong, magnificent to look at; but if they can be what they are, all ought to be able to share in the conditions that create that beauty. And art will not do its duty until it holds up for all to see the power that resides in beauty, and its moulding influence on civilisation; art should be ever painting and holding up to us the ideal in its beauty, for it is the ideal that makes the real. The artist should show the ideal, and the craftsman should reproduce it; and until your craftsmen honour their labour, there will be very little hope for art to thrive amongst us. Art is no art when it only paints the commonplace and the ugly. Sometimes, on the walls of a gallery, you come across a picture made up perhaps of a piece of cheese, and a boiled lobster, and a string of onions, and one or two corpses of birds thrown in for the sake of their plumage. That is not art. Art is beauty, and to paint things like that is to degrade art, no matter how well they may be reproduced. “Oh,” I have heard a person say, “how beautiful that cheese is. I could cut it!” You can cut cheese anywhere; and you don’t want to go to a gallery, and an art gallery, so-called, in order to see it. Put this beside the pictures of the ancient masters, and see what art means and what the travesty of art. Theosophy has to try to breathe into the artist the idea of the splendour of his calling, the divinity of his power. He can see what we cannot see, and hear what we cannot hear; let him give us what we cannot reach for ourselves, and be again the priest of the Beautiful for men. Then shall the civilisation grow into beauty, human as well as inanimate, and the right place of beauty shall come into our civilisation, the place it held in ancient Greece.

And what shall Theosophy do in the coming civilisation for society?—society as we see it to-day, which is a battle, not a social order; which is an anarchy, not an organism. I know it is often thought that changes will only be brought about by the menace of the starving, by the dread of revolution. Oh, it is not thus that Theosophy looks on man, in whom it sees the growth of a spiritual, a divine nature. You will think me a dreamer, perhaps; and yet I tell you a truth when I say that not by the uprising of the miserable, but by the self-sacrifice of the comfortable will the future society be realised on earth. I know that that is not the idea of to-day. I know that, amongst those who suffer, such a sentiment would be met with ridicule and scoff; but it is not those who suffer misery who can build a wise and happy social system. It wants the best brains and the best hearts; it wants leisure to think out and to plan, and love to carry into effect. You can make a riot, you can make a revolution by starving desperate people, but there is no stability in that which follows revolution. You cannot take, but you can give; and the spirit lives by giving, and knows the joy of sacrifice. Do you imagine that sacrifice is painful, that sacrifice means sadness and gloom? I tell you there is no joy on earth like the sacrifice of the lower nature to the higher, and the giving to others of the higher, that asks nothing for itself. Along those lines our Social Redemption will come, along the lines of those who are willing to give and willing to sacrifice, for the gift that is compelled by law or force is always resented, and is resisted as much as possible. Outer compulsion is met by violent resistance, but the inner compulsion that is the compulsion of love, that meets with no violence in resistance; it pours itself out in joy. And there lies the future, there the basis of the coming civilisation.

I said, in the beginning, it would be built on self-sacrifice, and that was the thought that lay behind the words. I see, spreading through the comfortable, through the rich, those who are well dowered with the goods of earth, a spirit of noble discontent, not for themselves but for others, not for themselves but for the poor. I come across the rich and highly-placed who ask, “What can we do to relieve the misery we see?”—who suffer by sympathy, not by compulsion; and it is from them the redemption of society will come. It seems, perhaps, to-day a far-off dream, but man grows faster than we are apt to realise. There is nothing too noble, nothing too beautiful, nothing too divine for man to achieve; for man is growing godlike, however slowly, and the seed of Deity within him is beginning to flower in some hearts. Wherever one who does not suffer is unhappy for those who do; wherever a human brain that might amuse itself finds joy in labour for the helping of the nation; wherever a human heart which has all that love can give it cannot be happy, but goes out in love to the outcast—there lies the promise of the future. Such brains and hearts were counted by units, perhaps, even a century ago, by tens a little later; they are beginning to be counted by hundreds now, and to be found in places where none may dream that there are those who are longing to give and strive for a better social state. In those who are growing into the spiritual life; in those who cannot be happy while others are miserable; in those whose meals are rendered bitter by the starvation of the poor; in those whose luxury is a burden because of the want of the miserable—in those will you find the builders of the new civilisation, those who shall sacrifice that others may be happy. That is the future to which we look, that the future for which we labour, proclaiming everywhere the ancient words that “joy lives in giving, and not in taking”; repeating again the old message, “It is more blessed to give than to receive”; saying once again the old truth, that only where self-sacrifice is found, there is also found a religion and a civilisation that can endure.