hoary; it does not rest on authority, however dignified; it rests alone on human experience of the eldest and of the present days. It is not a creed; it is a method. It is not a collection of doctrines, but an attitude towards life — the attitude of the man who deliberately, consciously evolves himself, who, instead of waiting for the slow evolution of nature, works for his own self-unfoldment, recognises within himself powers divine, and faces life with the determination to use it for the unfolding of those powers, and to know himself consciously a citizen of more worlds than one.
Basing religion thus on human experience, the facts gathered by that experience form a certain body of teachings like any other science. You collect a number of facts and put them together as the science of chemistry, and another number as the science of electricity, while facts of the spiritual consciousness form the essential body of religious teachings. But we assert that these facts may constantly be reverified by everyone who follows that conscious self-evolution of which I have just spoken. Now these facts, discovered by human experience and reverified thereby, lie at the root of every great religion. They are not in consciousness because religion has revealed them; they are the foundation of religion because human consciousness has discovered them. That is the difference of position between the Theosophist and many believers in the various religions of the world. Those main facts are — I but recite them — the Unity of the One Life whence all lives are drawn; the revelation of that life in any world system as a Trinity; the existence of countless hosts of non-human intelligences who have to [ page 8] do with the working out of the laws of Nature in every world, and the guidance of the destinies of humanities in the many worlds; man himself as one rank in that great hierarchy, unfolding the Spirit within him; this by repeated sojourns in the three worlds, earth, the world beyond, and the heavenly world — Re-incarnation; and that carried on under a changeless law, Karma, in which every cause created by desire and thought and action brings about certain effects, in their turn again becoming causes; so that in this great scheme of changeless law the human consciousness evolves from step to step, beginning its climbing as the lowest mineral, and never ending it till it reaches the all-embracing force of the consciousness we call Divine.
In all religions these doctrines are found. There is nothing new. Whether in the East, to the Hindu or the Buddhist; whether in the West, to the Christian, or, midway between the two, to the child of Islam, we bring nothing that is new to the great religions of the world. Sometimes one part of the teaching has slipped out of sight. Then is it the task of Theosophy to restore what has been forgotten. But more than that. Many of these truths are hidden in such great jungles of literature that the impatient modern mind can scarce find them in the elder teaching. Take that doctrine of re-incarnation. It is not taught in Hindu scriptures in the way you teach a scientific doctrine in one of the text books of your universities, but by hints here, allusions there, suggestions in another place, everywhere scattered over the vast surface of that great literature. But it makes no impression thus taught on the modern mind. Come nearer home, to the literature of Greece and take the teachings of Plato. It is well known that he teaches there the same doctrine; but when Jowett deals with Plato, does he deal with the doctrine of Re-incarnation as a doctrine that the modern mind would for a moment look upon as worthy to be considered? On the contrary, he throws it aside with others as the strange superstitions which clouded a mighty [Page 9] mind. Re-incarnation passed unheeded by the modern world of thought, though always embedded in familiar literature, but during the last thirty years, since Theosophy has been teaching it up and down the world, how changed is its position! It is now being discussed as a rational hypothesis, 