You may remember that when we last met I spoke to you about the sixth sub-race, and my speech this evening turns on the same set of ideas, although from a different standpoint, rather more special to the Society than to the world at large. In this lecture I am concerned rather with the view of the nature of the Theosophical Society which was held in its earliest days, dropped a little out of sight, and is now being very generally recalled, so that the Society should rise to the height of its opportunity and do the work that lies before it in the immediate future. If you will turn back to the days of H. P. Blavatsky in India you will find she was fond of dwelling on a particular relation held by two of the Masters, primarily to the Society, and secondarily to the coming civilisation of which the Society is the herald. She used to refer her Hindū friends to the statements in their own Purānas, in which it was said that two Kings would come at the end of the Age, and that to them would be given the kingdom of the new and opening Age. These statements, which are often repeated, raised in the hearers the inquiry, “Who are the two Kings?” and then she gave them a hint that the two Kings of the Purānas were the two Masters who were the real Founders of the Theosophical Society. That set the keen brains of the students to work. They promptly began to try and find out what were the names of the two Kings. One of these students found it, wrote a paper, which was published with H. P. Blavatsky’s approval, giving the names of the two Kings—Moru and Devāpi—two names mentioned in many of the Purānas in relation to the past history of the Hindūs, one of them, Moru, belonging to the Solar Dynasty, descending directly from Rāma, one of the Avatāras—that before Shrī Krshna—a great King, said to have retired from his throne and to have gone to Shamballa, there to wait until he was recalled to lead the human race; the other, whose name was given as Devāpi, was the elder brother of the famous King of the Lunar Dynasty, to which the next Avatāra belonged. He was the elder brother of the father of Bhīshma, and he similarly gave up his right to the crown, retired to the same place, and the same phrase is used with regard to him, that he was to wait there the coming age. Now H. P. Blavatsky was very much delighted at the ingenuity of her students, and said that the outline was correct, and it was published. H. P. Blavatsky often referred to this function of the two Masters who were responsible for the founding of the Society. As in these latter days that idea of the Masters as the Founders of the Society has been challenged, I may perhaps say I have myself seen that fact stated in the writing of the Master “M.” I have read the letter in which He says that He and His fellow Adept “K. H.” had taken on themselves the responsibility of a new spiritual movement in the world; that there was some doubt in the Lodge as to the wisdom of the movement at that time; and that they were allowed to take that step only on the condition that they should found and work the Society through others whom they could direct and control. Then He went on to say that He had chosen a disciple of his own, H. P. Blavatsky, and that He had sent her to America to look for another disciple, H. S. Olcott, and that these were the outer founders of the Society. Hence to me and to many others who believe that these letters are genuine the nature of the origin of the Society cannot be a matter of doubt.
Starting, then, from that standpoint, we find certain things were said by H. P. Blavatsky as regards the nature of the Society, and certain things by the Masters themselves. Both are very important for us in consideration of the immediate future. The first of these things was indicated by hints which the more advanced students could understand—that the inner purpose of the Society was to prepare the world for the coming of a new Race, and to be itself the nucleus of that Race; that one of the Teachers was to be the Manu of the race, the other the Bodhisattva. Now those exact facts were unpublished at the time, but they passed from one to the other among the more advanced students of that period. Coming into the Society in 1889, this particular fact did not come within my knowledge until 1895. After the Coulomb struggle the Society for a time dropped away from the occult path on which H. P. Blavatsky had started it, and these ideas fell out of sight and were forgotten except by a limited number. In 1895 they were re-communicated to myself by my own Master, and have since been passed on to the older members of the Theosophical Society.
Let us pause for a moment on the statement with regard to the Manu and Bodhisattva. Every Root Race has for its guide a great Adept, much higher than the great ones we call the Masters, and that office filled by a mighty Being is an office the name of which indicates simply the man, the thinker. The connotation is the ideal, typical man, making rather the emphasis on the article “the.” The name is peculiarly suitable, because each of these Manus at the head of the Root Race is the type of the Race over which he is to preside. The types of the seven Races are part of the plan of the Planetary Logos, and that plan is worked out, stage after stage, by the Manus of the races. It is left to the Manu Himself how He shall proceed with His work. He takes the responsibility of the method He chooses. When the time comes to plan out the new Race, then the coming Manu begins to take up His office, and always in connection with another great Brother of His own rank, who is called the Bodhisattva. The Manu of the Fifth Race, as you know, collected His people together out of the fifth sub-race of the Fourth Root Race, sent out messengers to call them together, brought them together, moulded them generation after generation, and at last evolved them to the necessary physical type. For the work of the Manu is double: to choose out those who show in consciousness the germs of the new stage which is to evolve in the coming Race; then, having chosen them out and stimulated that germ within them, to set to work to shape the necessary bodies. Now in that far-off time our own Manu of the fifth Root Race had to choose materials out of the fifth sub-race, and He did not choose at all those who were regarded as the best specimens of the day. Remember that the fourth sub-race, like the fourth Root Race as a whole, showed out very powerfully all the passional characteristics and the psychic qualities which accompanied them. It was the fourth sub-race, the Toltec, which made the great Empire, with the city of the Golden Gate as metropolis, that whose armies spread over the known world, conquering everywhere, and in that sub-race psychic qualities naturally played a great part. You will remember that at the earlier stage of great emotional and passional manifestation, psychic qualities are very largely developed before the development of the lower mind. That evolution belongs to the astral body as a whole, working not through the astral chakras, but through the astral centres connected with our physical senses. The fourth sub-race carried all that to the highest point. Children in the schools were picked out for their paths in life by clairvoyance; and in all matters of policy, statecraft, etc., clairvoyants were consulted, so that by the exercise of the psychic qualities they might get the best possible knowledge to be had at the time. Now the characteristics of the fifth sub-race were the diminution of psychic power and the germinating of the seed of mind, and these two things necessarily went together, so that, as that fifth sub-race developed, the people of it were rather looked down upon by the highly evolved psychic sub-race which preceded it. These people seemed to be inferior; they could not use the powers which put their predecessors in the very forefront of civilisation, and made this world and the astral world almost one and the same. The children born with very little of these psychic powers, the men and women who showed still less of it, were by no means thought to have within them the promise of the future. Yet out of these the Manu chose His material, because they showed the germ of the mind which was specially wanted as the characteristic of the coming Race. It did not matter that it was only a germ, or that they were much less effective than the people of the mighty civilisation in which they appeared. He was looking to the future, and so these people were by no means the people whom the Atlanteans of the day would have chosen if consulted in the matter. But the great people do not always consult with the smaller people, who are so very sure of the rightness of their own judgment. They have an uncomfortable way of following their own ideas; and, as the Master “M” once said of some people who remarked that He did not come up to their idea of an Adept, “The mark of the Adept is not kept at Simla.” And that sentence is rather a good one to remember. So also the mark of the disciple is not kept in London or in Chicago, but in a very different part of the world, and to that those who know something about it try to conform. So the choice of the Manu of the day would have been regarded as a very poor one by the wise folk of the time. Nevertheless he carried away his people and built them up into a great Race.
Now there is something very instructive in that when we try to understand the method of His choice in the light of the past, and the analogy of principles. For we can see that if the germs of a sixth sub-race—from which, later, a sixth Root Race will be born—are to be chosen out by Him from the materials that the fifth sub-race affords, then the nature of His choice probably will not be that which would be made by the leaders of that fifth sub-race itself. Theirs to carry on to the highest point the concrete, scientific mind, which is the glory of their sub-race. Theosophists sometimes ask: “Why do not the great men of Science come into the Theosophical Society?” Simply because they have their own work to do; and their work at present is not to build the future civilisation, but to lead to its highest point the present one. In the future, when they shall have led that civilisation to the highest point, and when it has taken its place at the head of the world’s thought, then will come the time for these great minds to be reborn into another race, and build on the splendid intellectual foundation they have laid. The work of the world is the end that the great Ones consider, and these strong scientific minds to-day are needed by the world to carry on the present civilisation to the highest point. How unwise it would be to take them away from the work that no one else can do, and set them to other work they would do badly, not having turned their energies to the particular qualifications that are wanted for it. And so in the wise plan of the Manu of the fifth Race, the flower of the fifth or Teutonic sub-race is taken in order that it may be raised up to the highest point of the mānasic civilisation, and be carried on to its zenith of splendour of scientific knowledge. But meanwhile it is His duty to help in the building up of the other types—still his Race is the sixth sub-race—and so to co-operate with His successor the Manu of the sixth Root Race. For remember the Manu of all the sub-races of a Root Race is the same. He is the Manu of the whole Race; when the time comes for beginning the new Root Race, then the Manu of the Race that is regnant co-operates with the Manu of the Race which is to come. Hence He who is to be the Manu of the sixth Root Race, the Master “M,” the Moru of the Purānas, He has begun His work. And He has begun it in a humble and insignificant fashion, as the world would say, by striking the keynote of Brotherhood, and by drawing into a Society those whose hearts thrill responsive to that note. And why? Because the higher emotion that answers to universal Brotherhood, to love of all, without distinction of race, sex, caste, colour, or creed—that is the emotion, that is the germ of the buddhic principle in man, the principle of unifying, of drawing the separated together, of blending into one separate individualities, and making them realise the spiritual unity which overshadows and underlies them all. Hence universal Brotherhood is the only thing which is binding on members of the Theosophical Society. Nothing else. The Theosophical teachings as to Karma, Reincarnation, or the Masters, are not binding on the mind or conscience of any member. This is an important point. It is not only because a truth is better seen by the unfettered intellect than by an intellect on which a dogma is imposed, though that is of importance; but because the material which can be moulded into the Coming Race is the material that can recognise the necessity and the beauty of universal Brotherhood, and if that be recognised, nothing else for the moment is necessary. Hence that is the only binding principle. Hence, also, the attempts to narrow it down, prompted by those Dark Powers who do not desire that the Society should grow and prosper for thousands of years to come, the attempts to put in a little restraint here and a little obstacle there, judging for the moment, and not for the future. That is the inner meaning of having that one thing alone our bond of union. And so the Manu made that the keynote to attract those who would answer, “Yes; that is the very thing I want to join in and help.” And so the nucleus of the great sixth Root Race began to be formed. But that is not an immediate future, although already beginning. The sixth sub-race is the immediate future; under the rule of the Manu of the fifth still, but co-operating with the Manu of the Sixth, in order that those who show signs of being fit material for the Coming Race may have a preliminary practise of the virtues of that race. Hence the stress that H. P. Blavatsky laid on this inner side of the working of the Theosophical Society; and hence the need, because the time is passing rapidly, to make public what has been kept private in the past of this inner purpose, which has really dominated the Society from within, although not recognised without.
Let us see how that immediate future should be recognised in its characteristics, and thus prepared for. First of all we must understand the words spoken long ago under the inspiration of the coming Bodhisattva, that the Theosophical Society was to be “the corner-stone of the future religion of humanity.” Now every sub-race has a special religion, as it were. The religion of the fifth sub-race is Christianity. What is the future religion of humanity in this sense? It differs from all that have gone before. It is no longer an exclusive and separatist faith, but a recognition that in every religion the same truths are found; that there is only one true religion, the Divine Wisdom; and that every separate religion is true just so far as it incorporates the main teachings of that Divine Wisdom. The one supreme religion is the Knowledge of God; to that everything else is subsidiary. Just in so far as any special religion puts within the reach of its followers the means for rising to that supreme knowledge, in so far is that religion worthy of its place. And when that supreme test is not thoroughly answered—when dogmas, and ceremonies, and rites become more important than this inner truth of the gaining of individual knowledge of the Supreme—then the religion becomes narrower, weaker, unspiritual, until a time comes when either the religion must die or a new impulse must be poured into it to bring it back to its original position, a channel for the knowledge of God. Now, in the past many religions have done their work and passed away, and we come to the present time, when certain great religions are living. And when the great new spiritual impulse came, it was not charged with the building of a new religion, but with the vitalising of those great existing religions, to make them realise their underlying foundation; they were vivified in order to help them to rise to a more spiritual and mystic interpretation of their teachings; and when that was done, they were to be blended together into a brotherhood of Religions, so that all should recognise the Divine Wisdom as their root. That was the first work of the Theosophical Society. It was done all over the world. See how in India Hindūism was revived; in Ceylon, Buddhism. Ask the ordinary missionary who comes over here, who is not generally very broad-minded, and he will tell you that the great opponent of Christianity in the East is the Theosophical Society. Then, if you press him and ask, “But are Theosophists antagonistic to you?” “No,” he will say, “but they strengthen the other religions, and thus prevent our making converts.” And that is true. It is not our business to convert people from one religion to another, but to try to make every one realise the splendour of his own religion. Naturally, in India—except in Travancore, where there has been a Christian Roman Catholic colony from the very early centuries of the Church—Christianity is an alien religion, and only grows by injuring the older religions of the land. Naturally, then, the missionaries look on the Theosophical Society as an opponent, because it has been the great factor in the revival of Hindūism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and is beginning to be a factor in the revival of Muhammadanism. Now, when you see that, and when you come to the West and see how the same influence has been widening the Christian Church, how mystical Christianity is spreading everywhere in a way that would have seemed incredible some three years ago—see how narrow it was, and look now, how everywhere the mystic thought is spreading, and see how, in the Roman Catholic Church, the spreading of this spirit has become so wide that the Pope is forced into fulminating against it, and in the Modernism that he condemns we find Theosophy mentioned as one of the forms—you will realise that that part of the work is almost done. I do not mean that we are not to continue spreading abroad more spiritual ideas, but that the work has been done so effectively already that it is almost passing into the hands of the religions themselves. The clergy are now preaching so much Theosophy that it hardly seems necessary to continue preaching the parts they have adopted. The Theosophical teaching as to the nature of the Christ in His birth in the human form, and His growth into Divine Manhood—how common a doctrine that is now within all the Churches of the West. The fact of Reincarnation is also becoming more and more widely accepted—a doctrine no longer to be laughed at, but to be carefully argued over, and forming a part of the deepest thought of the Christian world. So that while we must still go on with that part of the work, there are other parts of our work now that we ought to be ready to take up. That religion of the future which is to include all the religions as sects within itself, all of them going on into the future, but recognising themselves as a Brotherhood, that is to be the dominant religious thought of the great sixth Root Race, and in the sixth sub-race we shall find it spreading everywhere. Now, how mighty will be the advantage; because the moment all religions are seen to be branches of one stock, then each religion can share with others the specialty which it has been its duty to develop in the world. And nowadays, when the Christian goes to India, instead of trying to convert the Hindū, which he can never do, what he ought to do is to offer to share with him that great special characteristic of Christianity, the principle of self-sacrifice, and the helping of the weaker by the stronger—the dominant note of Christianity. It is the doctrine of the Cross, the emblem of self-sacrifice, of the coming down to the depressed in order to lift them, leading them up side by side with ourselves. That is the noblest thought of Christendom, typified in the mystic Christ; and that you might well offer to share with the Hindūs, for that does not come out so strongly in their great Faith. Rather will they bring to you in exchange the doctrine of the immanence of God. Two things, Dr. Miller has written, Hindūism brings to the world: the immanence of God, and the solidarity of man. When religions exchange their best instead of finding out each other’s weaknesses, then you have outlined the religion of the future. Our work in that future is to continue what we have so well begun, and spread this liberal, thoughtful, religious ideal through all religions, destroying none, but permeating all.
Next we have to consider what we ought to do in the training of the next generation; for there is great need that the Theosophical ideal of education should spread through Western minds, and especially through Britain and its empire. Religious education at the present time is in peril; how great that peril is may be measured by the Moral Education Congress gathered together in London last year to try to find a moral basis that should furnish education apart from all the sanctions of religion—a hopeless task, but none the less a sign of the peril of the times. Now, we have had secular education in India. It has been the English education the Government has given there. It could not give any other because of the different religions of the country, and it was bound not to help any one of these to the detriment of the others. The moral result has been disastrous. It has fostered selfishness, indifference to the country, lack of public spirit. It has given us a race of men who have acquired from the West its superficial qualities, but not its inner strength, not its inner capacity. And the troubles you have in India now are largely the result of this anti-religious education, which has made hundreds of the best Indian type skeptics, a thing which has only been checked with the growth of the Theosophical Society throughout India. We have turned back that irreligious wave, with the result that the Indian Government to-day regards the Theosophical Society as the most likely agency for training the youth of India along lines of freedom and order at the same time. They realise that we have put our finger on the weak point in their own system, and that our plan of giving to the child the religion of his parents is really the way to solve that religious problem in India. Now, over here you have to face the problem how to preserve religion while letting dogmatism go; how to find a common ground, a few common principles, which all Christians inculcate, leaving to a later time in life the special sectarian divisions which the young man and woman can acquire later if they wish. Now, in that the Theosophical Society may well play a great part in the immediate future, strengthening all the influences which make for the keeping of religion as an integral part of education, helping to soften the bitter sectarianism, and persuade the different denominations to remember that they are Christians more than that they belong to this, that, or the other denomination. If we succeed in that, then the service to the education of the empire will be supreme.
Along other lines we want, if we can, to persuade the public mind to become a little more receptive of new ideas; to lose a little of its pride, and learn a little humility. Unless we are quite sure that we are at the very top of human evolution, and that nothing greater than ourselves can be evolved, then it would be the part of wisdom to recognise that the next type, which is the type of the future, must be different from the type of the present, and, in the beginning of its evolution, new and strange. You may remember how J. S. Mill, in speaking of liberty, laid immense stress on originality, and complained that modern methods were tending to make all come to a single level; to do away with the eccentric, even with the original. Now, for growth, variety is wanted. Where there is no spontaneous variation in types, you have stagnation. And yet every one of us is so fond of our own particular line of thought that we take it almost as an offence if someone starts a new thought which we cannot at once fit into our own mental grooves. Now, we must try to correct that, first in ourselves, and then in the public at large, especially in view of the coming of that mighty Teacher I have spoken of. When He comes, the type of the sixth Root Race, He must be very different from all of us, otherwise He would not be the type of the new departure. How can we avoid treating Him when He comes exactly as our predecessors of the fourth sub-race treated Him when He came last to start the fifth? It is so easy for all of us, looking back to the mighty Figure of the Christ, to realize something of its splendour, but we see Him through the glamour of the religion which has made His name supreme in many of your hearts. Try and put yourselves back in time, and see how strange that new type would have then seemed to you, how against all your prejudices. So different was He that He raised an antagonism so bitter that they could not bear Him amongst them for more than three years, and then murdered Him. It is hard for us to realise that. We are apt to think, “If I had been there, I would have stood beside Him; I would not have been amongst those who slew Him.” And yet there is no particular reason to think we should not have done the same. It is a great lesson for the immediate future. For when He comes again to bless this beginning of a sixth sub-race, the buddhic, He will show out the qualities of Buddhi prominently, and those are by no means very acceptable to the modern world. Look fairly at your own minds and see how you stand on your rights. It is the spirit of the time. If you have not what you think your rights, you make a clamour for them. For the mānasic civilisation that is the proper way, but those who want to go on in the new future that is dawning have to throw all that aside. You must relinquish your “rights.” If you are trampled on, you must recognise that it is only yourself of the past trampling on yourself of the present: no one can trample on you except a person who embodies your own past injustice, and is working out that which you yourself have created. That is a very unpopular view, as unpopular as the Sermon on the Mount. And so along many other lines of that which is admirable from the popular standpoint—power, dominance, the spirit which tramples down all opposition. How different from that of the Wisdom which rules, but rules from within, “mightily and sweetly ordering all things.” And if you will think over this in detail and work it out, you will find you will have to change your ideal of what is admirable, and build up on ideal on the basis of Spirit and unity, and not on rights and claims. And that is one reason why the Theosophical ideals very often find themselves rejected in the outer world. Those are the qualities needed for the world as it shall be; and if we are to be builders of that immediate future, we must develop them in ourselves. But you may say: “Is it not rather a big assertion to make that this Theosophical Society is really a nucleus of a great Root Race; that it is the beginning of a sub-race? What right have you to make such a claim?” The answer is, that looking back to the last choice, we should expect to find the beginning of the new Race and new sub-race among those who were not the leaders of the present, but had in them the germ of the future. That is why our people are gathered not from the leaders and the thinkers, but from the loving, the compassionate, the brotherly. It seems a feeble thing, this power of Brotherhood. It is the mightiest thing in all the world. And although it is true that we cannot expect to find amongst us men and women of magnificent intellect and overwhelming power of thought, we may expect to find amongst us the compassionate, the gentle, and the loving, and those give the plastic material which will yield itself to the fingers of the Manu to be moulded into a new type, a higher evolution. Hence, from time to time the great shakings that take place to shake out those who are too purely intellectual, and who do not think the word Brotherhood is a word that ought to be heard so much amongst us. The Masters have chosen Brotherhood as our mark, and we cannot march in Their army if we will not bear Their sign. And so, if mind makes us too self-assertive, too sure of our own superiority, then we must be shaken out of this movement. So do not in this immediate future be troubled if we still continue to go along our own quiet road of attracting the loving and the gentle rather than those who are mighty in their intellectual power. The thing of vital importance is the Spirit of Brotherhood, and that we must never let go. And remember, in the whole of the struggles of the future, as in those of the past, that they must always rage round persons, and those who think more of personalities than of principles are inevitably shaken out. If you make a person’s presence or absence a reason for being in or out of the Society, you are showing the spirit of separation, which cannot realise a principle, but thinks only of the passing and transient personality. What can it matter whether any one of you agrees or disagrees with Mr. Leadbeater, or with Mr. Mead, or with anyone else? These are all persons. The principle of the Society remain unshaken. Presidents are elected and Presidents die, but the Society goes on. What folly, then, to give up a place in a mighty movement because the person temporarily at the head of it is a person who does not exactly fit into the shape you have made as your own particular ideal. It does not matter. The Society is not bound by its President any more than by anyone else. It is bound only by its great central principle of Brotherhood. And so all of you who have stood through the past shaking have shown that you care more for principles than for persons, and it does not matter whether, so to speak, you have agreed or disagreed with the President so long as you have stood firm within the Society; for there lies the principle, whilst the other is only personality. Cling, then, to that principle to which you have clung through the past storm; recognise that whether a person be right or wrong, noble or ignoble, great or small, that is a matter of secondary importance. The work of the future lies in the movement, and not in the hands of any particular individual who may happen to be here. Whether you or I come back to this great movement in other lives depends on ourselves, and not on the opinion that anyone else may happen to have about us. None can throw us out of it if we are worthy to remain in it; none can keep us in it if we are unworthy to be part of it. And realising kārmic law, realising the greatness of the movement and its work in the future, let us join hands, whether we agree or disagree with each other on any other matter save that of Brotherhood, and go forward into the future that is unfolding before us, brighter than ever the past has shone; go forward to the making of the sub-race out of which the Root Race shall spring, under the banner of our Manu and our Bodhisattva, the mighty Ones of years and millennia to come.