This is why certain nations, at the child point of development, must be treated as children. They don't realise the appeal to the spiritual, and will only misconceive you and your motives, and read cowardice in your attempt to treat from a standpoint they have not reached.
It is the same with certain religions, and this is the cause of much failure in mission work.
Theosophy and Roman Catholicism appeal strongly to comparatively immature minds.
Those who care more for form than for essence are always in the immature stage.
They love big words and mysterious sayings and doings. To have something apart from others—whether it be happiness or knowledge—is their idea of bliss. Hence in most theosophists, as in all Roman Catholic converts, you find this note of immaturity and monopoly. I say converts, because those born in the Roman Catholic faith are on different ground. Their spiritual life may grow and develop in spite of the creed limitations into which Fate has cast them, but those who deliberately choose such limitations give the best possible proof of their own standpoint. And the same may be said also of all strict creed religions.
They have their great and valuable uses, as prison bars have their uses in a community which has not learnt to respect the rights and property of its neighbours.
Withdraw these bars and you let loose upon society a pestilential crew of murderers and marauders. Relax the bars of creed and you will find the same result. But as bars are not necessary for the advanced souls who recognise that to murder or defraud their fellow-creatures leads to their own misery, apart from any detection or punishment, so creeds are not necessary, under a corresponding evolution of the spiritual instinct, which tallies with the social and moral instincts noted above.
And as treadmills and oakum picking can be dismissed in the one case, so can much of the theological machinery for the discipline and punishment of sinners against spiritual laws be dispensed with, in the case of those who are, spiritually speaking, coming of age.
They come then into the full liberty of Sons of God, and shall be no more treated as servants, but as sons, as the Apostle puts it.
This brings me to my special subject.