s, and sketch the squalor, the misery, and the degradation, but shows amid them sweet flowers of human purity, of human charity, of human tenderness, which makes even the slum a garden of the Lord, and shows how humanity can redeem even the vilest of social conditions. For we want our literature to inspire, and not to make us desperate. Far better paint a Utopia which inspires men to effort, than paint some rotting graveyard which tells only of the decay of death, and not the life that inevitably springs therefrom. And so I would have Theosophy everywhere proclaim the ideal in Art and in Literature, as it proclaims the subtle and invisible in Science, and doing this it will have its part in the great movement which is sweeping the world onwards to a nobler and a greater civilisation.
These ideas you may call " theosophical " if you will, for so they are, provided you do not limit them to the Theosophical Society. They are theosophical, but they belong to humanity, to the WISDOM, and not to a single organisation. Once I heard a Theosophist use a phrase that I was very sorry to hear: " our ideas." Ideas are the property of no men or body of men. They are free to every mind that can grasp them. T have heard it said: " The clergy are beginning to steal our ideas." But they are not ours any more than they are theirs. There is no theft in the commonwealth of thought; all belongs to everyone. Did we invent these ideas ? Did we discover them ? Have we any patent rights in thoughts old as the world and great as humanity itself ? Nay, they belong to the world, and glad and joyous the day will be when there is no longer the need of a Theosophical Society, because everyone will have embraced the truths which it is endeavouring to spread. Enough for us, my theosophical brethren, if we be allowed to act as pioneers of this movement so much greater than ourselves. Let us rejoice with joy ever deepening every time a great truth comes to human hearts clad in the garb most familiar and most welcome to them. Let us rejoice when Theosophy is [Page 16] taught under any name, in any form. Let the ideas flourish; what matters it what becomes of the organisation ?
And if I work for this movement all over the world, it is because I hope for the day when such work shall no longer be necessary, when there will be no " mine " and "thine" in theosophical ideas, but everywhere men will see them as they see the sunlight, and feel the fanning of the breeze. For Divine WISDOM can own no favourites, can make no special choices, can belong to no one exclusively. It is inclusive of all humanity, belongs equally to men of every race and age. And the work of Theosophy in the world is only to help in the unfolding of man's divine nature, knowing that its very name may vanish when all men have become divine.