II

THE GROWTH OF A WORLD­ RELIGION

FRIENDS: Not very long ago I was speaking in Manchester on the same subject with which I am to deal tonight, and the question was raised by a very interesting letter that was sent to the Editor of The Christian Commonwealth, whether the truer view of a World-Religion was the view that I had put, a synthesis of all the world-faiths, or whether it would come by the triumph of a single religion - Christianity. Of course, when the writer spoke of Christianity, he used the word in the widest, the most liberal sense; but he said that he thought that each religion following another in the world’s history made an advance on those that had preceded it in religious evolution, and that, therefore, it seemed likely that Christianity, as the latest of the great religions, should be the crown of the whole, and thus the World-Religion. Strictly speaking, of course, Christianity is not the latest of the world’s religions, for the great [26] Prophet of Arabia, Muhammad, is later, reckon­ing by dates, than is the Christ.

I am going to try to show you this evening why it is that, looking to the World-Religion, I think we can see something of its outline, some­thing of the way in which it will present itself to the intellect and the heart of man; but, so far as all the religions of the world are concerned, I believe that the men of every religion will see in the World-Religion the soul of their own faith; that it will not be a question between this faith and the other, this prophet and the other, but that in every faith the noblest, the most liberal spirits, those who have most of the divine con­sciousness, and therefore most love for their fellow-men - that such in every faith will re­cognise in the World-Religion all that is noblest and dearest in their own, and that each will feel that it is their own faith carried to its highest, and will recognise in it the glory and splendour of their own.

And now I am going to try to trace, so far as I can, something of what, studying the past and looking at the tendencies of the present, we may gradually see unfolding around us as the religion of the world. Naturally, I do not pretend that my imperfect sketch can be all-inclusive, nor have within it all the wonder and the beauty which that world-faith will take on the lips of the World-Teacher. Not for me to hope to describe what His divine consciousness will reveal; only as the humblest of disciples [27] I will try to sketch for you something of the broad outline which He will sketch with a firm­ness of touch that only the World-Teacher shall possess, with a wealth of detail and of power to reach the hearts of men that can only come from Him who spake as never man had spoken nor can speak save from that pair of lips.

And in order to deal with our subject fairly clearly, let me put first of all the departments into which a religion naturally must fall, if it is to meet the many-sided necessities of men. First of all, evidently, it must be a Religion - I will define my terms as I deal with them separately - ­then it must be a Philosophy; then it must bring with it Art; it must also be a Science; and, lastly, it must be a Morality. Those are the great departments, it seems to me, under which all human needs may be included. Those cover human life, and under one or other of those names all human thought must fall.

I have put in the forefront, as is fitting, the word Religion. What is Religion, whether you look at religions in the plural or the essence of Religion? Religions in the plural mean God’s answer, through men in whom divinity shines out more than in their fellows - His answer to the search of man after Himself. Man is ever searching for the source whence he has come, searching for the life which is upwelling within him, immortal, nay, eternal and divine; and every religion is the answer from the Universal [28] Spirit to the seeking Spirits of men that came forth from Him. Just as water, flowing down­wards, rises again and will ever rise to the height of its source, save as obstacles come in the way, so man’s Spirit, being divine, rises ever to the height of divinity which he seeks to realise, and the strongest proof that man is fundamentally divine is his immemorial search after the God whence he comes. That is the true meaning of the word religion; not rites and ceremonies - man has made them and can make them again; not churches - man has built them, and were they all in ruins he could build them again; not even sacred books - for those also are written by human hands inspired by the God within the prophet, and were they all swept out of the world the power that wrote them could write them once again. But the essence of religion is the knowledge of God which is eternal life. That and nothing less than that is religion. Everything else is on the surface, is superfluous save for the needs of men. The essence of religion is the knowledge of God, and when God is known all else can be builded by man. And the World-Religion will in its very essence be a way of finding out the knowledge, and will proclaim as the foundation of its teaching the Immanence of God.

What is the Immanence of God? It is that in everything that lives, in a universe where all is living; there the Universal Life that is God is present, supporting and maintaining. It [29] is written in the Bhagavad-Gita: “There is nothing moving nor unmoving that can exist bereft of me”. And there is nothing in the whole of the mighty universe, imaging in its great immensity all that infinity of which it is an image, however imperfect; nothing in all the systems of worlds, in suns unnumbered, in space that knows no ending, in lives that know no numbering; nothing from the very lowest grain of dust to the very Logos of a system, that can exist bereft of the Life which is the root, the support of all. If you would bring this great truth closer - for the infinity of space is awe-inspiring, but does not warm the human heart - then think of all that most you love, all that most you admire, all that most you prize; the look of love in the eyes of husband or wife, the smile of the child, the steadfastness of the friend, the grandeur of external nature, the rolling of ocean, and the stillness of the star­lit sky; everything that is most beautiful, every­thing that is most splendid, everything that warms your heart and cheers your life; all that is God individualised in the living object, and all that is beautiful and exquisite is but the reflection of His smile and of His strength. That is what is meant by the Immanence of God, and that will be the foundation-stone of the religion of the future, the World-Religion that is coming. Every religion teaches it, but it has hardly the influence on life it ought to have. [30]

And after that great teaching will come the next; that there is one Teacher of the worlds, one Teacher of angels and of men, one mighty Instructor who reveals God to man and man to God. And that is the mighty Being whom in Christendom they call the Christ, whom in the East they call Him whose essence is Wisdom, the Lord of Compassion, the Lord of Love. Oh, there are many prophets great and dear to the human heart; there are many teachers, many helpers of the world; but above them all, as our sun throws the stars into invisibility, shines the Master of Masters, the Founder of every faith, the Inspirer of every prophet, the World-Teacher.

You think of religions other than your own, and you hear other names. You do not remember that in different languages one object is called by many names. Why, if you name a man, a metal, a stone, in different tongues, if you had not the object before you, you might deem that each name indicated a different thing. And so, when the Hindu speaks of the World­-Teacher, and the Buddhist speaks of the Lord of Compassion, then you do not realise that they are speaking of Him who is your Christ, and of none other. The names are different, but that Superman is the same. He loves all faiths, blesses them all alike, sends His Messengers to every one of them, and is the heart and life of each. Oh, is it not a greater thing, you who are for the most part Christian, [31] that the Lord whom you worship is worshipped in eastern lands as well as here? And what matters the name, when the Being is the same? What matters the word that our child-lips may utter, when all words ascend to Him who is but One? For when the Indian worships Shri Krshna, unknowingly he is worshipping One in whom the Christ was incarnate; when the Buddhist raises up his heart to the coming Buddha, unknowingly he is worshipping the Christ. Is it not better, fairer, more beautiful, that all the streams of homage centre in one mighty individual, and that the Divine Man of every faith is one and the same, although His children know it not and do not realise the unity which flows therefrom? And yet, when Christ came in the form you know, He spake words clear and definite enough: “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold; them also must I bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd”. And when He spake those words, ere Christi­anity as a separate faith was born, whom could He have spoken of save of those who followed the other great religions of the world? And mark the words: “Other sheep I have,” not “I shall have”.

And in the world-faith, as there is recog­nised the Immanence of God, so will there be recognised the one World-Teacher. And then will follow the recognition of the great company of those who look to Him as Master, [32] those whom we speak of as Masters, as Apostles, as the Prophets to many nations and many peoples; they are His disciples, they are His messengers, they carry His word abroad among many peoples, and they also are recognised in all the great faiths. The Theosophist is only treading there in the footsteps of the faiths of the world.

And the other great point in the World­-Religion after the three I have mentioned will be the Path of Holiness that leads to conscious realisation of Divinity, that leads to union with the Supreme. The great faiths speak of that in the West and in the East alike. And here again the difference of the name clouds and veils the identity of the teaching. Surely all of you must know that in the Christian Church there is a path, which they divide into three stages, that leads to what is called, in the Roman Catholic books, the Divinisation of man, Union with God. It is divided into three - the path of Purification, the path of Illumination, the path of Union. Those are the three divisions that the Christian makes. First, purification, which must come before all else; then illumination, when the divine light begins to flash on the darkness of the soul, until from flashes it becomes a steady light in which everything is seen; and then the third part, the realisation of God, the conscious union of the God within with the God without. The Hindu and the Buddhist teach the same path. Their path of Probation is the

[33] path of purification of the Christian; the Path of Holiness, marked by the five great portals of Initiation, that is the path of illumination, and also the path of union; they use the same name, Yoga, which means union. Oh, there is no great religion in the world which is left outside the greatest, the most spiritual teachings. And in the religion of the future that Path will be made clearer, will be again proclaimed, and will be seen to exist by all. And as in the old days, men will tread it; as in the past, men will enter it; and, though it be true that strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to that union with the Supreme, still in modern days as in the elder days there are men ready and willing to tread it, and they, through the study of the Mysteries, know the wonders of divine and human life, and realise as men realised of old, that the Union of Man and God is possible.

Those points, it seems to me, must be the points most salient in the World-Religion. They are the points which the religious consciousness has clearly and definitely marked out for ages upon ages. I know that sometimes people challenge the testimony of the religious con­sciousness. But why? The surest thing you have is your consciousness. That you exist is to you the one fact beyond all possibility of challenge, made firmer by no argument, and, unshakable by any argument. And in that, consciousness which is your life, that which has responded to Divinity, which has sought and [34] found Divinity, is a part which cannot be taken out of it. It is the most universal testimony of the human consciousness; in all times and ages and countries the religious consciousness has arisen, and claimed the knowledge which is today as of old the bread of life. When it is not admitted, when ignorance dwarfs it and blinds it, then it asserts itself as superstition, the most fatal enemy of man. Man will believe whether people tell him he should believe or not, and superstition, by its very degradation, shows how the religious consciousness strives to find an object, and will rather have a superstition than nothing. “Oh, but,” you say, “it drives people in different directions; here one person believes this and the other that.” Aye, but it testifies not to the names, but to the fact; it is not the labels, but the result on life. You may call God by what name you will; you may worship Christ under what title you please; you may talk as you like in your language about your faith; but if it makes you lead a noble life, if it turns you from evil to good and from selfishness to service, if belief in God under any name makes men heroic, then the consciousness is divine, and the names are matters of indifference when the result is the same.

Next, the religion of the future must have a Philosophy. What is a philosophy? It is an answer satisfactory to the reason to all the great problems of life. That is what is meant [35] by philosophy. It must satisfy the reason, and it must show the unity underlying the endless diversity of the facts that science observes. To see the One under endless forms, to realise the unity amid infinite diversity, and so to satisfy the reason, that is the function of philosophy. Broadly speaking, all schools of philosophy divide themselves into two, ma­terialistic and idealistic: the one sees in matter the source and root of all; the other sees in life the maker and the master of matter; under one or other of those two flags the philosophies evolved by the reason of the race group them­selves inevitably. Now there is no doubt that in the World-Religion the philosophy must be idealistic, for it must recognise Spirit as the basis of all, the immanent life of God as the foundation of all. Its answer to the great problems, roughly, we may run over. What is the constitution of the universe? The uni­verse is the manifestation of the divine thought; the thought of God embodies itself in the thought-forms that we call worlds. Bruno said once: “The act of the divine thinking is the substance of the universe”, and I doubt if any philosophy can go beyond that phrase. The substance that underlies all manifestation, that which shows itself with dual aspect as life and matter, Spirit and matter, that substance which underlies everything and is the final unity - that is the divine thought. If that thought were checked, all would vanish. It [36] is the substance, the Reality, that underlies the changing worlds. And when that idea is grasped, that the divine substance is the basis of all, then we realise that from that substance emanates, as it were, the dual force, Spirit and matter; Spirit the source of life, the source of all intelligence, individualising itself in the life of the object, and one in every form; matter, taking countless forms, innumerable shapes, the vast diversity of the worlds that fill space, but one in its essence. Forms pass and take one shape after another, change and make an endless panorama of bodies; but matter is ever there, changeless in itself, the one material of which all forms are but shapes and kinds; life one and matter one, life individualised and matter shaped into form - that is the worlds as seen by philosophy; they are the outcome of thinking, manifesting as the substance I spoke of, and all changes in forms, all diversities of life, are reducible to the one life and the one matter; for, as I said, philosophy seeks unity in every­thing, and only when diversity is reduced to unity is the reason satisfied, is the intellect at rest.

What is evil? Philosophy must answer that. Evil is only imperfection, that which is not complete, which is becoming, but has not yet found its end. And if for a moment you will think along a line that requires close atten­tion, you will realise that imperfection is neces­sary m a universe. For what is a universe? [37] Diversity of forms. But every form, not being the whole, must, of necessity, be imperfect; less than the whole, it cannot be identical with the whole, and being less than the whole and, there­fore, imperfect by itself, it shows imperfection or evil, and only the totality of a universe can mirror the image of God. Evil is not a positive thing; it is the absence of perfection, the state which is ever growing towards perfection. Evil is only absence of light, but the light is ever becoming. And so it ceases to be a trouble, to weigh upon the heart. And even in the form of evil that we call sin, that which is evil in man, we shall see in a moment that there also there is no reason for discouragement, that that also is on the way to good. But so far as the problem of evil is concerned, without taking humanity for the moment into consideration, it need not trouble you for a moment; for the very condition of manifestation is diversity, and the inevitable result of diversity is imperfection in the isolated objects. But let us come to man, for the answer will not be complete until we have dealt with him. How does philosophy regard man in the deepest, fullest, greatest sense? It sees in man the image of God, and therefore a triplicity: first, imaging the sub­stance, the highest, purest reason, the Self, as we sometimes say, in man; and then it sees, secondly, what is often called the human soul, aspiring to the divine above it, dragged down by the brute below it, the dual principle in man, [38] on which the growth and evolution of man depend; one hand stretched upward towards heaven, the other still clinging to earth. Bruno compared the soul to the moon that always has one side turned to the sun and the other turned to darkness. And you could not have a more vivid image of the soul in man. This is the reflection of the universal life; it is the indi­vidualised life incarnate in a form. And, thirdly, the body, representing the matter of the universe. Spirit, soul, body, that is at once the simplest and most philosophic view of man. There are other sub-divisions, but they are all classified under this great triplicity. And so you have the divine m man, which shows itself by thought; you have the soul in man, which is the individualised life; you have the body in which that soul is unfolding. And when you ask: What is sin? you have to answer: It is when the man is doing that which he knows to be the worser when a better is before him. That is sin. It has its root in ignorance, the only original sin in man. He grows out of ignorance into knowledge. Drunkenness, murder, theft; they are not sins in the savage who knows no better; they are sins in the civilised man, because he knows better, and allows the soul to be drawn downwards by the body, instead of rising upwards to the Spirit. And that is the true definition of sin; when knowing right you do the lower, ah, then you sin. Where there is no knowledge, sin is not [39] present. S. Paul said quite truly: “Sin is the transgression of the law”. When the higher law is known, then to transgress it is to sin. But even then it is not hopeless, for as the law changes not, as the law is inviolable, the law we disregard strikes us and suffering is the out­come of the attempt to transgress; and in that suffering lies the lesson, and in that lesson lies the remedy; for in a universe of law you must learn to harmonise yourselves with law, other­wise pain, misery, suffering are around you, and, weary of the suffering, you turn at last to the right. That is why we need not break our hearts over sin; we are growing out of it, passing beyond it, and every struggle - even that which ends in failure - is one step on the ladder by which the soul is climbing to the Spirit.

And what is the creative force in the universe? I have already said that the creative power in God and in man is thought. God’s thought makes universes; your thought makes your­self; thought is the one creative force, the one thing by which you shape, mould, build, your character. Thought everywhere is the creative agent, and it makes the road for the evolution of the soul. The soul grows by re­incarnation in bodies provided by nature, more complex, more powerful, as the soul unfolds greater and greater faculties. And so the soul climbs upward into the light eternal. And there is no fear for any child of man, for in­evitably he climbs towards God. [40]

And Art? I have said that a World-Religion must have art, and I often think that in the modern world men and women fail to realise the greatness of the influence of art on human life.

Beauty is no dead thing. It is the manifesta­tion of God in nature. There is not one object in nature untouched by man that is not beautiful, for God’s manifestation is Beauty. It shines through all His works, and not only in those that may give pleasure to man. If you take the diatom and look at it through the microscope, you find that invisible shell, invisible to human eye without artificial aid, traced in the most exquisite mathematical patterns, every line ac­curate, every angle perfect. The divine sculptor has carved it into beauty, although no eye see it save the eye of God. In every natural work there is beauty - it is the condition of manifesta­tion; and even when man makes ugliness, nature soon re-clothes his ugliness in beauty. And the artist? The artist is the priest of the beautiful, whose eyes see more of God than ours do. He is able under the form of nature to see the beauty that that form is veiling, and the duty of the artist is to show to our blinded eyes that which without his genius we cannot see; anything less than that is a profanation of art not worthy of the name. Colour is more to the artist than to you and to me; form is more to the artist than it is to us; melody is more to the artist than to our untrained ears. [41] And every form of beauty hidden in nature, it is for the artist to bring out and place before the eyes of men; he has to see the ideal under every form, the perfect under every imperfection, and his splendid mission is to show the perfect beauty to the blinded eyes of men, so that, seeing it, they may remodel themselves after it, and their lives may be beautiful as is nature which is the life of God. That is what art means. Greece understood it, but scarce a nation save Greece has known the divinity of art; but Greece knew that art is not a luxury as it practically is today. Art is wanted for the masses of the people far more than for you whose lives are fair on the outside. The slum in a great town is not only degradation to the people who live in it, but its hideousness lowers the vitality of the nation. All suffer because of its hideousness amongst us. When you see the face of the slum woman, lined and drawn and haggard, and often vicious, all womanhood is degraded by the misery of her. When you see a man rolling drunken out of a public-house in the East End of London, sodden, brutalised, disgusting, from the vice that is destroying him, all manhood is the lower for the horror that he embodies. And no man can be perfect while one man is brutal. And art is a way of purify­ing, of refining, of raising. You talk about the beauty of the Greek people. Why were they beautiful? Because they put beauty in their streets, because they had it everywhere for the [42] people to look upon, because their women who were to become mothers were surrounded by the beautiful on every side, and the unborn child took lines of beauty because beauty was the breath of life to Greece. And that we have to learn. When you have a statue too ugly to put in a gallery, you put it in the streets; when you have a picture you hang it always in a gallery, but the people who want it most do not go to galleries. I know things are getting better. I know that down in the East End of London efforts are being made to bring more art within the reach of the people; but is it yet understood enough that to show beauty, to make beauty a common thing in life, is to refine, to make more delicate, more gracious, the common life of man? Good music, good painting, good sculpture, these are among the educators of the race, and every object should have its own beauty. The common household objects should be beautiful. There is nothing to prevent it; but you would rather have a drawing-room crowded like a bazaar with use­less things, than have one beautiful object in a room that would make all its atmosphere pulse with delicacy and with life. And your schools for the children ought to be beautiful, for the child-heart and the child-brain are very plastic. And those hideous things you call Board schools, or Council schools, in London are enough to make the whole nation ugly. Whatever room in your house lacks beauty, do not let the [43] nursery lack it. You put miserable paintings there, the degradation of art. “It is good enough for the children.” There is nothing too good for the child, and the religion of the future will bring this bread of life into the home of everyone, and it will be realised that one home devoid of beauty condemns the luxury which wallows in it and shares it not with others.

And the religion of the future must have a Science; but it will not be a science restricted to the physical world, but including all worlds of matter; for just as philosophy is the recogni­tion of unity in diversity, so is science the observation of the diversity, the observation of the facts in nature. And the science of the future in the religion of the future will be a science of all worlds, and not only of the lowest and densest, those of the physical plane. It will observe the world of the emotions, clothed in subtler matter; the world of the mind, clothed in subtler matter still; the world of the Spirit, where matter is but the obedient expression of the life, and hampers it in nothing, being utterly plastic to the will. The science of the future will observe the facts, the forces and the laws of nature in all of the worlds in which man’s evolution is going on. It will study the laws of nature, not only physical, but moral and mental, so that evil-doing and evil-thinking will be realised as against the law of progress. And science must do it by observation, by observing the result of evil thought and evil [44] act, and so establishing in those worlds as well as in the physical that law of action and reaction that in the East is called karma. If you feel wrongly, you will think wrongly, you will act wrongly. If you desire wrongly, then thought and action will go along the same line.

What you think, you become inevitably. That is the law. And when science studies the three worlds of human evolution, it will be able to place that law on a definite scientific basis. We reap in one world what we have sown, not always in the same world; but in one world or another that which is sown we reap, and from that law none may escape. It will be the duty of the science of the future to do what only a few can do today - to observe the laws of human evolution, to see how that law works out in thought and character. And just as it examines the laws of nature in the three worlds, so it must examine the forces of nature in those worlds, and thus establish, on the basis of observation, that thought is the creative power. That is done now, I know, by those who are trained in the science that is called Occultism, but the ordinary science of the future will extend its ken to those subtler regions of our life, and then, observing the forces of nature, it will speak with authority on their scope and their results. It will not only examine the laws of nature and the forces of nature in all the worlds in which we are living, but the facts of nature as well in all those worlds. The inter-[45] mediate world beyond what we call death, the world beyond the intermediate world that is known as heaven - those will be as much subject to observation as the world of the physical body. And the science of the World-­Religion will give observation of laws, of forces, of facts, as the basis for the teaching of morality, bringing morality into the realm of law instead of it being the sort of chance subject that it is today.

And then that science will train men in study­ing as science trains men today in the way that they should use their apparatus and their instru­ments; only the science of the future will train the student in developing the powers that lie hidden within himself, and not only in shaping iron and brass and glass into instruments to supplement the senses. The finer bodies of men, the keener, subtler senses, those will be developed in man by that science which is the material side of Yoga. Man’s power to know will thus be increased. The bodies in which emotion and thought work will thus more swiftly be evolved, and just as surely as science, by studying animal and vegetable nature, has taught man how to evolve in a few years what nature, unaided, would take centuries to accom­plish, so shall that science of Yoga teach man to evolve his own bodies to fuller usefulness by an application of the laws of the subtler nature, by the quickening of the evolution along the lines on which ah cannot work today. [46]

And when this World-Religion has thus taught the essence of Religion, satisfied the reason with a true Philosophy, raised Art to its rightful place in life, and given a Science for the establishment of the basis of the whole, then it will finally crown its work by a noble Morality, applying the truths it possesses to the elevation of human life. It will teach man to live a noble life, and tell him why it is desirable. Remember what I said to you of the soul - one hand stretching upward to the Spirit, one clinging to the body, with all that the body means. Man will be taught to lead the heroic life, when he realises in himself the possibilities that lie before him and in the power of thought the instrument whereby his ideal may be realised. He will begin to understand that since the life eternal is inhabiting the body, all that is base, mean, animal, is below the height of his responsibility and his duty; he will begin to understand that the man who knows that life is one and that life embodied in himself can only live the life that is noble; for very shame’s sake he cannot live the life of the animal, whence his body is derived.

You must realise your own Divinity; realise what man really is, an evolving Son of God. You do not need threats, curses, anathemas. It is said that pleasure is easy and that good is difficult. That depends in what part of your­self you are living. Where is the centre of your consciousness? If it is in the body, yes, [47] then animal pleasures are attractive; but if you live ever in the mind, the animal pleasures shrink down into insignificance. Beside a splendid picture, beside a noble melody, beside a noble book, what are eating and drinking and the pleasures of sense? Man needs no threats, he only needs understanding. He needs no curses, he only needs illumination. Give him a chance of the better, and he will spring forward to it and embrace it and love it, for the highest pleasures are the most delicious, as the air of the mountain tops is pleasanter than the atmosphere of a slum.

And out of that growing nobility of the in­dividual, out of the same basis, the oneness of life, will grow the realised Brotherhood of Man. I have come back at the end to that with which I began. I spoke first of the Immanence of God. With that there must be Brotherhood of Man; for as a circle returns upon itself and, starting from one point and going round, you come back to the same point again, so the World-Religion, starting with the Immanence of God, His presence in every object, must fulfill itself in Universal Brotherhood, the recognition of the unity of life. And it means all that that word implies. Oh, if it were your brother, your sister, dying of starvation, rotting with disease, crushed under ignorance, hopelessly impover­ished, would you sit easily, comfortably, happily, in your better homes, in your pleasanter sur­roundings? Would not your own happiness [48] become intolerable while brother or sister was writhing in pain or anguish? And that is what Brotherhood means; it means holding every­thing for all, and using all you have that others also may share, and rise to where you are today. I t means sharing all willingly, not by com­pulsion of law, but by the more imperious com­pulsion of the Spirit within, which knows the unity of all. And Brotherhood realised means the lifting of the human race; it means the real becoming of man into God. And as you know the beauty of your own lives, that which you have around you to make life fair and pure, oh, when you realise that all are brethren, then you will be impatient of your enjoyments until you are working for the good of all. That is the lesson, that is the last that comes, that nothing is so great for embodied Divinity as service taken freely to all who are in need. If you are learned, share your learning; if you are pure, share your purity. There are women amongst you pure and clean and good; there are women in the streets who lack every virtue you possess. Oh, your purity would be brighter if you shared it with the impure, and tried to raise your sisters to that which is the blessing of your own lives.

And as the World-Religion comes with all the force that He will give it who is the World­-Teacher, these truths that stammeringly I utter will become full of the most inspiring power to your hearts. He will make living that [49] which I can only describe; He will make attractive that which I can only put to you in poor human words; for He will speak to your Spirit where I can only speak to mind and heart, and His voice will raise the world towards Divinity because Divinity will shine out so clearly from Himself. [50]