London Lectures of 1907 Part 4

If you could persuade specialists along the many lines of study, religious and philosophical, to give you the fruits of their work, you would learn more rapidly, you would learn the spirit of a school in a more satisfactory manner, than when you are only studying books, and then giving out the books you have read. You value, and rightly value, the knowledge that Mr. Mead brings you along his special lines of study, but why should you not have that same advantage similarly from others who follow other lines of thought, and would speak similarly from first-hand knowledge? There is a life in it that there never is in second-hand knowledge, a vigor and strength in it that you can never get when it has only been learned second-hand, and then poured forth. Men who study deeply are glad to find audiences who are willing to listen to the results of their study, and who will give them glad hearing when they come out into the world from the study to tell what by labor and toil they have learned. And so I suggest that some of you should see whether you might not make your Lodges more valuable if, instead of always going round the same wheel of a few local lecturers, you tried to win to each locality now and again a really learned and well-trained man, and then, with your own Lodge as a nucleus of hearers, gather round them others also who would be only too glad of the opportunity that your Lodge would give in the place where it happens to be. You have Lodges in the suburbs, Lodges in the towns outside the area of London, and how glad many of these would be, if you made yourselves the channels for knowledge of that sort to be poured out amongst them. There is one line of work you might well take up, and the country Lodges might do the same, winning down from London now and again some thinker who would come and give the benefit of his study; and if you were known all over England as the places where such knowledge might be gained, and the bringers of such within the reach of your fellow-townsmen, the Society would profit by your labor as well as those who immediately benefit by the effort. And wherever you deal with the study of a religion, learn it from the lips of one who believes it rather than by the exposition of one who does not; for only so will you catch the spirit of the different religions. If you would learn about Roman Catholicism, win a Roman Catholic student or priest to come and tell you how his Church appeals to him; or if you want to learn about the Church of England, win some clergyman who will come and tell you what that Church means to him; or about Bud?d?hism, win a Bud?d?hist to come and tell you what his own religion is to him; and so with the Hind?u, and on and on, all round the different religions. For none can really tell what a religion is to its followers who does not believe in it, and no one can give you its spirit who does not feel it. And it is in that way that your Theosophy should lead you into sympathy with every form of religious thought, learning it as it comes from the mouth of a believer, and not in the sort of warmed-up fashion in which one who does not believe it re-cooks it for his fellow Theosophists. There, it seems to me, is your field of work under the Second Object; and out of this study would grow literature, illuminating these various religions and philosophies, and from your cla.s.ses should be evolved teachers, to carry to the different communities the results of their study on different lines, thus bringing the Second Object to the helping of the First.

I had a letter the other day from a good member of the Theosophical Society, and the writer said, being a Christian, that Christian lines of work attracted her, and she thought she ought to leave the Society in order to help people along those lines. But what sort of Theosophy is that? You who are Christians, or believers in any other faith, you should become Theosophists to help your own religions, and to bring them the life, not by leaving the Society, but by learning in the Society to help them; that is the duty of every believer in whatever religion you may happen to believe. For you should be messengers to the various religions, helping them to understand more deeply than many of them do to-day; and if you would understand that that is part of your duty, to help your own faiths, to enlighten those who will not come to the Theosophical Lodge but yet will listen to the fellow believer offering them the knowledge that in the Lodge he has gained, then the spread of our doctrines, rapid as it is, would be far more rapid and along healthy lines. For we do not exist as a Society simply to study, but to spread the light, and every religion should be the richer and the fuller in proportion to the number of Theosophists that it enrolls amongst its followers.

Pa.s.s to the Third Object. There also we have work to do, and we cannot work for Brotherhood effectively without understanding the nature of man. And I feel that one or two who criticised the Society this afternoon on that point had the right to make the criticism that they did; for, while in the earlier days that Third Object was so carried out in the Society that it was the leader in the fields of all such research, it certainly now has fallen into the background, and is only a gleaner in the fields where others are reaping, and that is not right. The knowledge that you have in theory as to the const.i.tution of man and nature, should be a guide to you in researches, and not simply remain theoretical knowledge. That which was said this afternoon about the Psychical Research Society is true. It goes into everything unusual with a prejudice against it, rather than with a feeling that there is something to be learned; but on the other hand, one is bound to say that during the last ten or twelve years that Society has done more to familiarise the public with these facts of the hidden powers of man than our own has done in practice, though we have done much more in theory. Now I am not in favor of much experiment preceding a study of theory; I believe that we need the theory in order to experiment wisely; but I also believe that having a true theory we should use it to guide our investigations, and thus to add to the knowledge of the world. A part of our work, it seems to me, that lies before us in the coming time, is to help the world to walk wisely along those roads of research on which it has entered now. You cannot prevent it going forward along them, knowledge is already too widely spread for that; but what you can do is to help men to walk wisely, and to avoid many a pitfall into which otherwise they would be very likely to fall. And along those lines there is very much to be done: plans to be worked out, methods of research to be planned and tested; and I hope before very long to see some groups in our Society that will take up this special line of work as part of their activities, and, headed by someone who knows practically something of that with which he is dealing, will then help the younger students to learn wisely and to experiment carefully. And in these matters it is well, so far as you can, to bring the more scientific members of the Society into touch with this work; for one of the reasons that Spiritualism fell into discredit for a time was because the scientific and the thoughtful abstained from it, and left it in the hands of the credulous and the unwise. The leaders of the scientific world who ought to have joined in the work which Sir William Crookes, Alfred Wallace, and others began, instead of following them and strengthening their hands, turned their backs on it all, leaving it to be carried on by those who knew far less than they, and who were not accustomed to accurate observation and careful recording of phenomena. Now leading scientific men are beginning to work at it. Along all lines of psychical research work should be done by us, if we do not mean to cancel the Third Object in our Society.

Thus, then, a great field of work opens out before us, so wide a field, so great, that you would have no need to ask for work if you would only begin to labor along these lines. And take that other line about which Mrs. Cooper Oakley spoke--the line of Historical Research into Mysticism. Has it ever struck you how much of the work of our forerunners remains unknown, because their work is not scanned by sympathetic eyes? How many of the pioneers in the past centuries lie under a heap of calumny, because none has tried to understand, none has tried to realise, the nature of their work? Men like Paracelsus, Cagliostro, and many another whose name I might mention, who are crying out, as it were, for research, and thought, and labor on mystical and occult lines. There again I have good hope that some really efficient work will be going on; for to my mind one of the purposes for which our Presidency should exist is to act as a centre round which every country may gather together, and thus communicate with each other, and form bodies scattered all over the world for mutual aid. The strength of our Society is in that unity of thought, which can only be brought about as one part of the Society realises that other parts are linked with it, as it ought to be, by the President of the whole. For the Presidency would be an idle show, if it is not to be a centre for inspiration and labor. The great work done by the late President is, as I have said elsewhere, practically complete; he has given the Theosophical Society an organisation by which it can work and live; ours to use the organisation that he made, ours to employ this splendid instrument which is now in our hands for world-wide labor and for world-wide helping. That is the work to which I would summon you now, and pray your help. Let us not stand apart one from the other, and work always along isolated lines; in addition to the isolated work, we should have the combined work; for many often can bring about a result which one cannot do. Take, for instance, the great libraries of Europe, far, far apart. It is very laborious for a person to travel all over Europe and labor alone in them all; but if we had students working in every great library, we should have feeders who would send in to a common centre the result of their work, which could then be shed over the world.

Along those lines the Society will become respected, when it is known for honest and useful work in all departments of human activity. There is no good in glorifying it by words and saying what a splendid thing it is, unless we justify ourselves to the world by the work which we contribute for the world's helping.

In this way, then, I would ask you to look at our great field of work.

Laborers are wanted. There is more than work enough for all, and in this work the principle that must guide us is, as we have so often said, freedom of thought, freedom of expression. But let it be understood in the Society, for there is danger of this being forgotten, that there is freedom for those who a.s.sert as well as for those who deny; that all alike are free. Those who know have a right to speak, and there should be no outcry against them; those who do not believe have a right to say they do not believe, and there should be no outcry against them because they believe not But there is a danger lest those who believe not should think that they have the only right of speech, and that those who experience have no right to say out that which they know to be true. It is the danger which dogs the steps of Freethought everywhere. You can see it in France at the present time, where the Freethinker, smarting against the oppression of the Church, tries to silence the Church, as he has been silenced in the past; but it is a bad reaction, and we cannot have that within the Society--there must be liberty for all. I do not wish to impose my own beliefs on any man or woman in the Society, but I claim the right amongst you to speak the truth I know, and to bear witness to the reality of my Master whom for eighteen years I have served, without being attacked vehemently by those who deny my experience. I know whereof I speak. I ask you not to believe; that is your own choice. I ask you not to accept; that is for you to decide. But you have no right to try to stop my lips, nor to say that the a.s.sertion of my belief is outside the liberty allowed in the Theosophical Society. I, as President, will defend to the utmost the right of each to speak his thought--believers and non-believers of every type; but I will not recognise the right of any to impose upon the Society a dogma of unbelief, any more than a dogma of belief. Only by that liberty of all can we live and grow; only by the perfect freedom, and the recognition of every man's right to speak, no matter what he says, can the health of the Society be secured. For in the years that lie before us there is much new knowledge to be gained, many new facts to be discovered, many new experiences to go through, and we must not discourage the seekers and investigators by making it difficult for them to speak amongst us. We need every fact that any human being can bring to us.

We have the right to challenge the fact and investigate it, and either to say: "It is fact"; or: "To me it is not fact"; but we have no right to say to any human being: "You shall not search nor speak," for that would be the death-knell of our liberty, that the denial of the foundation on which we stand.

And so let us go forward to a future, I hope, fairer than anything we have in our past. Let us welcome all thought, all refusal of thought, all investigation, all speech, however different it may be from our own speech and thought, and doing this with full respect of each for each, full recognition that minds are different, and that each mind has its own sphere in which it can do useful work for all, let us encourage in our Society every school of thought, every form of opinion, every expression of thought which is in a man's mind. And out of all that clash of opinion, out of all that discussion, Truth should come out stronger, richer, larger than ever. And never mind if sometimes falsehoods are spoken; never mind if sometimes mistakes are made. An old scripture says: "Truth conquers, not falsehood"; for G.o.d is Truth, and nothing that is not drawn from His Life can live, nothing that is drawn from His life can die; and realising that, we can go forward fearlessly into the unknown future, sure that to brave hearts and true lives every experience, every failure, every mistake, is only another rung of the ladder by which we climb from ignorance into knowledge, from the bondage of matter into the liberty of Spirit.