Theosophy is rapidly pushing its way through journalistic and other channels, and is cropping out in regions and hamlets the most unexpected. Its expansion during the last few years has astonished even those who best know its merits, and every day brings new
Theosophy is rapidly pushing its way through journalistic and other channels, and is cropping out in regions and hamlets the most unexpected. Its expansion during the last few years has astonished even those who best know its merits, and every day brings new indications that it is soon to be in the forefront of the questions of the age and the interest of the religious world. For, in truth, it supplies the very desiderata for which earnest men have vainly sought, and finds welcome in exact proportion as those meeting it are intelligent, open-minded, and devout. A system which insists on including every fact which research can grasp, which harmonizes each fact and each department of its vast philosophy, which solves the piteous puzzles in every human life and lot, which nerves to the most patient endurance and the most hopeful endeavor, is one which cannot be indifferent to those who think and feel and aspire.
Theosophy is not only exhaustive in its inclusions, it is most ingenuous in its methods. It waives aside all cajolery or special pleading, and asks no one to give his assent to its statements unless his reason is thoroughly convinced. Any other adhesion would be half-hearted, insincere, superficial: none such is congenial to a system which cares only for truth, and for perception of truth, and for honest avowal of the perception. Unless a man finds its teachings upheld by his judgment and his moral sense, it frankly tells him that he cannot rightfully accept them.
But in order for the judgment to act, Theosophy furnishes copiously the material. The philosophy may be divided into two parts, — the facts and laws wholly beyond the reach of us ordinary mortals, the facts and laws measurably within our reach but needing elucidation by the former class. These it expounds with fulness, fortifying itself with the discoveries of science and the best exercise of reason. Those it presents as upon the evidence of extraordinary mortals, men whose larger acquisitions of faculty enable them to transcend our limits and explore vast realms beyond. Then it connects the two and exhibits a consistent scheme explanatory of all life seen and unseen, and by the beautiful harmony and relation of all parts depicts a whole which is worthy of its Divine Author.
As knowledge of matters outside our ken can only be communicated to us through one of ourselves, Theosophy avows that certain individuals have from time to time been used as channels of these higher truths, the sources being above them, known to be such, avowed to be such. Sometimes in sacred writings recognized as "Scriptures", sometimes in scientific expositions of advanced grade, sometimes in moral or spiritual disquisiti