instead of tracing the light back to its divine source, and thus gaining entrance into the transcendent world.

It is a perilous journey through this maze of mirrors because there is, at every moment, the danger of our being fascinated by the image of ourselves in the mirror; when we have caught a ray of light, there is the danger of our halting on the way in order to admire the new luminousness thereby thrown upon our own faces; there is the incessant danger of self-praise and vanity.

It would seem that this inherent element of confusion is what is indicated in an often quoted phrase of Paul's, at the end of the chapter on charity; the phrase which the Authorized Version renders thus:

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known."

This translation suggests a comparison which, it would seem, was not at all in Paul's mind, namely, the difficulty of seeing through a dirty window, or an uneven, semi-opaque pane of glass, which distorts and disguises what is seen through it. But the thought in Paul's mind was really quite different. He was thinking, not of a pane of glass, but of a metal mirror, as the Revised Version recognizes. So that the phrase might be rendered correctly, even if somewhat awkwardly:

"For now we see by means of a metal mirror, enigmatically, perplexingly; but then face to face."

The enigma, the perplexity, arises from the inversion of the image in the mirror; as though, holding a mirror before our faces, we caught glimpses of something over our shoulders, seeing right and left reversed.

It remains to bring the matter to a focus; to speak of a particular danger which continually besets us. In essence, it has been indicated already, but we may make it more concrete.

The danger is this: we have come, let us say, to the point where we have recognized not only the killing burden of the images of the earthy, which we have heaped upon ourselves, but also something of the possibility of escape and redemption, some gleam of celestial light breaking downward to us through the clouds. We realize that the upward journey can be made; that there is a way, a path leading home.

That fairly describes, perhaps, the experience of nearly everyone who, in the almost fifty years since The Theosophical Society was founded, has joined its ranks and has caught some realization of its ideals. So many have caught a glimpse of the light. But so few remain.

Perhaps those who have not remained may be divided into two classes. First, those who quite lost faith in the light from above, and turned their entire attention once more to the images of the earthy in their psychical picture galleries. Second, those who, setting out toward the goal, catching some gleam of the heavenly light, yet lacked the purity of heart to make the journey, and were allured by the images in the

looking-glass world, the distorted pictures of the things which are from above.

With two aspects only need we deal: the psychical images of spiritual powers; and the alluring, corrupting image of oneself possessing and wielding these powers, to the admiration of oneself and others.

What takes place then is an abortive birth, a premature and delusive outburst of life, which does not belong to the natural world, but which likewise falls short of the spiritual world.

Take the old comparison of the divine life in us, to the sacred lotus. Rooted in the earth, it passes through the water, and blossoms in the air and sunlight. But what disaster, when the lotus blossom, instead of passing safely as a closed bud through the turbid water, prematurely opens beneath the water, soiling and rotting its petals, while the pollen, the symbol of the renewal of life, is washed away.

This is an exact picture of what happens in what we may call morbid psychical development; this is the danger of psychism.

It is, if you wish so to describe it, an inflammation of the psychic body; an inflammation expressing itself in two ways.

First, there is an inflamed interest in psychic powers which are, at their very best, only looking-glass distortions of the true spiritual powers; a peeping curiosity about clairvoyance, clairaudience, messages from the unseen world; an inflammation of the surface of the psychic body, a hyper-sensitiveness expressing itself in visions and voices.

It is difficult to say just at what point along this line insanity begins; in all likelihood the inmates of our asylums are people who see psychic pictures, and cannot distinguish them from physical things.

But this wandering in the shapeless land is only the lesser half of the penalty of psychism. The greater penalty is an inflamed and assertive vanity; the overpowering desire to set up as a teacher, in virtue of these voices and visions; the longing to pose as an authentic bringer of light.

To state the thing prosaically, these people not only announce that their voices and visions are Theosophy; they further announce that they themselves are the inspired leaders of the Movement.

This is not an essay in history. Yet it will not be difficult to apply what has been said to critical phases of the history of our Movement. It will not be difficult to identify psychism in action.

And it may be affirmed, in conclusion, that this single element has been the bane of the Theosophical Movement from the outset; that it, and its exponents, are the greatest obstacle in the way of presenting Theosophy in a sane way to a world that sorely needs it; that this same tendency of psychism, in one or other of its forms, is the menace in the future against which we must be ceaselessly on guard-not alone in others, but in ourselves also.

GAIN the voice called from long, long distances: Give ear,
ear; and I gave ear, and this is what it said to me.

A

give

In the immemorial ages man looked on vanity, and loving

it, departed from the truth, and departing from the truth, lost

all knowledge of the light, lost all knowledge of the Way; and living in the darkness he lost his eyes, and he lost his ears, and he lost his touch, and all his other senses, save a mistaken notion of them which led him further and further astray.

While in this living death he would have wholly died, save that the Great Ones in their compassion came, one after another one, and brought light into his darkness, and sound into his awful silences, and a quickening touch that stirred a sleeping memory. So that he heard a call, a call,—a voice calling from long, long distances, across the bridges of space, beyond the arches of time. This voice calling, was an agony to him, and he fought it in blind fury, cursing the pain of it, crushed by the sorrow of it. Then he tried to forget it in darkness again, pulling the covers of material life about his ears and striving to sleep.

But the Great Ones would not let him sleep; they goaded him with their call, they flashed their lights into his unwilling eyes, they gave him no rest from their harryings and pitiless reminders, they wrote upon the walls of his every feast:-Beware, O man, thou art immortal, and Eternity awaits thee. Thine enemy approaches, and thine house shall be desolate and ruined. Listen to the haunting strain of thy lost inheritance. Arise, the Father calls, turn home.

This is the history of the world as the Great Ones see it, looking across our bridges of space, looking through our arches of time. But one hears and follows, and another hears and follows, and then another one. Slowly they go, across the bridges of space, through the arches of time, dragging weary feet, and sighing heavily. Then-a rose-flush in the distant sky, a murmur, a pause, a cry of joy that rends the night. Those who hear only half believe-they were dreaming, they say.

Then the voice calls and calls again from long, long distances.

CAVÉ.

MATERIALISM AND SPIRITISM

T

O whatever extent a man's philosophy is his own, and not merely borrowed from another, it must be rooted in his own experience; and if we examine, in the light of this truism, the conditions which marked the western world in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we shall see how inevitable it was that they should have given rise to a materialistic philosophy. A long period of peace and prosperity, in which human life seemed more secure, and human comfort more widespread than ever before, enabled life to be lived with little thought of death or what might lie beyond it; and the amazingly rapid development of natural science, unequalled since the schools of Alexandria in the third century before Christ, was revealing such new and unsuspected material forces and potentialities, and so subordinating them to man's will and enlisting them in the service of his convenience, that his life seemed to rest at every point upon matter, and spirit to be little more than a metaphysical abstraction of an outworn age. When one might work so rich a mine, lying immediately at hand and with the ore outcropping over all the surface, there was little incentive to explore more distant fields or laboriously to tunnel to deeper levels.

But with the first decade of the twentieth century it became apparent that the same causes which produced this materialism must ultimately tend to undermine and wipe it away. The thrusting probe of science was penetrating into the hollowness of matter as through a thin and brittle crust. Breaking down the material atom before our sight, it foreshadowed the revelation of an inner world of force and substance, invisible and intangible, but immeasurably more potent than the material world which it interpenetrated and supported. And on the other hand, the increasing sense of dependence upon material things, and the continued confinement of intellectual and acquisitive energy to the material plane, had resulted in such loss of hold upon spiritual principles, and such blindness to any true vision of life's deeper values and purposes, that the war of conquest and plunder which Germany believed she could successfully wage against Europe, had come to seem to her people a small price to pay for the rapid aggrandizement of their material prosperity.

Thus materialism had but to be pushed sufficiently far to prove its own undoing, for no materialistic philosophy can meet the demands of the spirit which war entails on those who are unjustly attacked. It is not possible for a man to sacrifice all that materialism calls good, in obedience to an inner loyalty which materialism either denies or ignores, without becoming conscious of something in himself which transcends matter and which he feels death cannot touch. With the birth of this consciousness he enters a world of new needs and new values, for which

the old order of his thought offers no explanation. Materialism can no longer satisfy him, and he seeks instinctively for some deeper and broader view of life by which he may orient himself to the new facts of his experience.

Though prompted by the same need and directed to the same end, this search led to quite different results in France and in England; and the return to the Church, and the revivifying of the established forms of religion, which have marked these last years in France, have not been paralleled in England. As we recall to memory the character of the religious literature the war produced in these two countries, and choosing more or less at random from those which circulated most widely, compare such books as Donald Hankey's A Student in Arms with Antoine Redier's Comrades in Courage, Coningsby Dawson's The Glory of the Trenches with Ferdinand Belmont's A Crusader of France, or An English Chaplain at the Front with Priests in the Firing Line, we become aware of a contrast that does much to explain the failure of Protestantism where Catholicism succeeded. As Donald Hankey wrote, "In the hour of danger and wounds and death many a man has realized with a shock that the articles of his creed about which he was most contentious mattered very, very little, and that he had somewhat overlooked the articles that proved to be vital." The Chaplains of the Church of England seem largely to have forgotten that their creed included a belief in the communion of saints and the continued humanity of the Master. Institutionalism could not bridge the gap they thus left between God and man; and their own devoted self-giving, their own human love and touch, however deep and tender, could not lift the impersonality of their faith to the needs of those who craved a ministry of the spirit and the assurance of a companionship of the soul which death could

not sever.

It is perhaps true that something of this note of impersonality is inherent in the very genesis of the Protestant churches, but it is difficult to escape the conviction that it has been increased by an unconscious yielding to the materialism in which it has been immersed; and that the little emphasis it lays upon the continuation after death of that rich. warmth of personal love and companionship, which makes life dear to us, is in part due to a lessened faith. A generation ago men turned from the churches because of their "other-worldliness," and Protestantism sought to meet them with its new doctrine of the Kingdom which was to be brought down to earth. To-day, when the tide has changed, and it is other-worldliness that men seek, the churches seem to speak with uncertain voice, doubting and timid. Perhaps it is this, more than any other single factor, that explains why the reaction against materialism. in England and America has contributed so little to organized religion. It has proved easier for France to forget the Vatican than for England to forget vacuity.