Yet words are the only masonry-stuff at hand, and so build we must with them. Hearts that respond to the finer harmonies of life and nature, and minds that have touched understandingly to a degree the great problem of woman's work and woman's true place in life, will quicken and respond.
At Isis Theater, San Diego, on the evening of Monday, February 19, and again on February 27, Anno Fraternitatis Universalis XIV, Katherine Tingley looked into the eager, upturned faces of more than a thousand women, respectful, waiting, aspiring, dead-in-earnest women. Both meetings had been called for women only. As I glanced over pit and gallery while the strains of music announced that the meeting was about to begin, the words which Mr. Judge once used in reference to right action and the altruistic life, seemed to sing out in tones of unmistakable triumph from the very bosom of the air: "It is better than philosophy, for it enables us to know philosophy."
Nothing in this world of unity can be rightly judged if conceived of as an isolated something, just a fragment. "A primrose by the river's brim" is far other than "a yellow primrose ... and nothing more" to the rational, open mind. It is a part of all the rich nature-environment which, when we think of it in parts, as some mosaicist might think of his design, we call river and bank and forest-wildness and sedge and shimmer and sky. The distant mountain is no mountain, merely, but part of a noble panorama, its base melting into gentler slope and foreground at just what point no living soul can say, its heights suffused in sunshine, its edges softened and purpled and cooled and warmed in the shimmering atmosphere, its stature rising grandly undefined against the misty, illimitable Beyond of azure or gold or gray. No more can the artist in color say "Here, definitely here, the foreground or distance end and the mountain begins," than the artist in life can say, "Here we will mark off and limit truthfulness, and next to it, virtue, and beyond the next hard dividing-line, compassion, and a goodly collection of such separate items we will call character." Ah no, life is no rag-bag of scraps and shreds and patches, nor is nature. It is one grand whole and no part can be understood, or even seen as it is, unless looked at and studied in its relation to all the other parts which with it constitute the whole.
So also with historic truth. The mountain-peaks of history, rising as they do above the plain and level of general human action, never rise separate to the philosopher's vision from all that lies behind them, nor are they ever wholly unsuffused by the glow or the dimness that speaks to the prescient mind of glories or of disillusionments ahead.
There could be no question, in the minds of those whose duties led them both before and behind the scenes of action at the two meetings referred to, that the twentieth century call for women had come. Katherine Tingley, in inaugurating this work, issued a challenge to all the nobler possibilities of womanhood. Those who could look beyond the present into the dim aerial distance and adown the vistas of the past, knew the Event for what it was and made no mistake in prophesying wonderful things for the future from the glow of promise which fell upon it. It was part of the past, yes, but a nobler than the common part; one felt that it had somehow swung out from old limitations, as some great glorious member of a star group might be conceived of as swinging out into space, into a greater orbit and an orbit of its own. It was as a new note sounded in the long, ascending gamut of woman's evolution, a gamut in which there are, here and there, glorious notes, royal notes, with echoing overtones of soulfulness and strength, but which has, alas! its burden of discord to carry, as well.
There has been no unity of soul in past efforts, as a whole, and the keynote struck by Katherine Tingley had a ring of newness, somehow, on very real lines. Which does not mean that women have not worked together, often in large bodies, as we see them doing today. But both their aims and the quality of result that grew from these showed that real unity on lines of soul-strength and soul-effort has been lacking. For example, we have today the apparently united body of women who are storming council-chambers and invoking hand-to-hand battles with policemen; and yesterday we had their prototypes in old Rome, excited groups of fad-ridden women who even barred the approaches to the Forum as an argument in support of their demands for political equality—and Roman homes going to pieces by the hundred for lack of true womanhood at the helm. Oh, if women would read history in a new way!
Efforts characterized by a certain outer binding-together, while of real inner unity there was none, there have been in all ages. But, strange to say, until the inauguration of Theosophical work for women in this year of the twentieth century, the true note has been sounded, in most cases, by some one woman who was more or less unhelped by the women about her. History inspires us with the virtues of Alcestis, that peerless wife; of Antigone; of that perfect exemplar of motherhood, Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi; of the queenly Thusnelda; of Cleopatra, Semiramis, and Zenobia; and let us not forget the peasant girl of Domremy, whose simple purity and absolute self-forgetfulness did more for the "woman movement" of the ages than even her generalship did for France.
Yet these are isolated types. Barring Sappho and her woman pupils, Birgitta of Sweden and her wonderful work for and with the women who flocked to the home centers that ecclesiastical enemies fortunately did not prevent her from establishing, history has little to say as to women who have worked together for some truly spiritual cause, in which the noblest they had was placed on Humanity's altar.
