CONTENTS.
| PAGE. | |||
| CHAPTER | I.— | [The Universal Belief in Them] | 5 |
| CHAPTER | II.— | [Some Modern Instances] | 9 |
| CHAPTER | III.— | [A Personal Experience] | 18 |
| CHAPTER | IV.— | [The Helpers] | 25 |
| CHAPTER | V.— | [The Reality of Superphysical Life] | 34 |
| CHAPTER | VI.— | [A Timely Intervention] | 39 |
| CHAPTER | VII.— | [The “Angel” Story] | 42 |
| CHAPTER | VIII.— | [The Story of a Fire] | 50 |
| CHAPTER | IX.— | [Materialization and Repercussion] | 56 |
| CHAPTER | X.— | [The Two Brothers] | 63 |
| CHAPTER | XI.— | [Wrecks and Catastrophes] | 72 |
| CHAPTER | XII.— | [Work Among the Dead] | 78 |
| CHAPTER | XIII.— | [Other Branches of the Work] | 92 |
| CHAPTER | XIV.— | [The Qualifications Required] | 97 |
| CHAPTER | XV.— | [The Probationary Path] | 108 |
| CHAPTER | XVI.— | [The Path Proper] | 118 |
| CHAPTER | XVII.— | [What Lies Beyond] | 129 |
| [INDEX] | 135 | ||
INVISIBLE HELPERS
CHAPTER I.
The Universal Belief in Them.
It is one of the most beautiful characteristics of Theosophy that it gives back to people in a more rational form everything which was really useful and helpful to them in the religions which they have outgrown. Many who have broken through the chrysalis of blind faith, and mounted on the wings of reason and intuition to the freer, nobler mental life of more exalted levels, nevertheless feel that in the process of this glorious gain a something has been lost—that in giving up the beliefs of their childhood they have also cast aside much of the beauty and the poetry of life.
If, however, their lives in the past have been sufficiently good to earn for them the opportunity of coming under the benign influence of Theosophy, they very soon discover that even in this particular there has been no loss at all, but an exceeding great gain—that the glory and the beauty and the poetry are there in fuller measure than they had ever hoped before, and no longer as a mere pleasant dream from which the cold light of common-sense may at any time rudely awaken them, but as truths of nature which will bear investigation—which become only brighter, fuller and more perfect as they are more accurately understood.
A marked instance of this beneficent action of Theosophy is the way in which the invisible world (which, before the great wave of materialism engulfed us, used to be regarded as the source of all living help) has been restored by it to modern life. All the charming folk-lore of the elf, the brownie and the gnome, of the spirits of air and water, of the forest, the mountain and the mine, is shown by it to be no more meaningless superstition, but to have a basis of actual and scientific fact behind it. Its answer to the great fundamental question “If a man die, shall he live again?” is equally definite and scientific, and its teaching on the nature and conditions of the life after death throws a flood of light upon much that, for the Western world at least, was previously wrapped in impenetrable darkness.
It cannot be too often repeated that in this teaching as to the immortality of the soul and the life after death, Theosophy stands in a position totally different from that of ordinary religion. It does not put forward these great truths merely on the authority of some sacred book of long ago; in speaking of these subjects it is not dealing with pious opinions, or metaphysical speculations, but with solid, definite facts, as real and as close to us as the air we breathe or the houses we live in—facts of which many among us have constant experience—facts among which lies the daily work of some of our students, as will presently be seen.