English
And from them some definite information on the subject filters down to those who from our own level are struggling upwards and already in contact with Adept instruction. Evi- dently it would be impossible to convey to incarnate intelligence—imprisoned in flesh and working within the limitations of consciousness as it functions on the THE ELDER BRETHREN OF HUMANITY. 349 material plane—very much concerning the attributes of such a Being. But the recognition of His existence is a step in the direction of a comprehension of the whole spiritual hierarchy. People who make a hard and fast barrier in their imaginations between God and Man—-treating human- ity, as of a horde of final units, each with an eternal personality as limited in its scope, as compared with Deity, as the nine-pins a boy may play with compared to himself,—are not merely degrading the human personalities in question, but are making nonsense of the whole Natural design. It would have no ulterior purpose or meaning if the conventional view were in correspondence with the fact. On the other hand, when we not alone accept the principle that there must be higher destinies open to human creatures than those which are bounded by the mystery of physical death, but realise that those higher destinies may assimilate Man to God-like knowledge, wisdom and power, and elevate him at last—if he makes himself worthy—to play a part in the spiritual government of his race, then surely we must feel that we have grasped a really lofty conception of the design to which humanity belongs. And in the light of that idea we may go considerably further, even, than the doctrine of Re-incarnation takes us in appreciating correctly the pathetic mistake which in conscious or unconscious submission to the dictates of a narrow and incomplete theology many people make in contemplating the brevity of each individual physical life. Especially do those aspiring lovers of 350 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. Nature, who most reverently study her laws,—true men of science,—fall a prey to the gloomy delusion that when the brain they have trained so carefully shall dissolve in the earth, there is an end of the futile labour they have gone through. Conventional religion gives them a hope indeed of some sort of consciousness here- after; but the heaven of crowns and harps and unin- telligent rapture before ‘“‘ the throne ’’—the heaven of ignorant and empty-headed priests, good and good- hearted though they may sometimes be—affords a prospect of drivelling ennu: to the man who is already in this life highly developed in knowledge and intel- lectual energy. Men of such a type turn from it with distaste if not with scorn, and forgetting that the pfiests may be echoing a great truth in promising future consciousness, though distorting it into nonsense by furnishing it forth with detail on a level with their own intelligence,—they, the true priests of Nature, her eager students and worshippers, fall back on a forlorn kind of altruism and try to take comfort in the thought that their successors will carry on the mighty quest when they themselves are dust and their thoughts as the light of yesterday that has faded into darkness and ceased to be. The mere first steps in esoteric teaching should hold out a thrilling prospect in exchange for this dreary expectation. The persistence of individual conscious- ness—the Re-incarnation of each transient personality with the knowledge and training of each life stored as so much potentiality of further advancement, as so much intellectual faculty ready to spring once more THE ELDER BRETHREN OF HUMANITY. 351 into activity.—that is the first great law of spiritual evolution which rebukes the insult to Nature involved in the idea that his science is extinct when the man of science ‘‘ dies.’’ But there is really a far loftier possi- bility before him in the progress of ages, if he wakes to a perception of the higher science that may link his knowledge with that of Nature’s great evolutionary plan, and summon him to the task of so exalting his own individuality that he may pass on into the ranks of those I have described as playing a ministerial part in the government of the world. He will not do this, of course, by the concentration of faculties on the phenomena of this one facet of many-sided Nature that we call the physical plane. However ardent and intelligent that concentration may be, such an exercise of faculty can develop but one of the many potenti- alities of development which lurk in the nature of the Man who must be more than what we habitually mean by the phrase a man of science, before he can win a place in the Divine kingdom. Knowledge itself of the kind we chiefly deal with in this life, may be a splendid stimulant to spiritual evolution, but a diet consisting of stimulant entirely is not conducive to health. We must study other laws of Nature besides those that have to do with physics before we can utilise and control the forces of the spiritual plane. Man does not live by bread alone; the soul is not exalted by knowledge alone (in the sense in which knowledge is limited to the same natural plane as the bread). The man of science who would claim the inheritance that Nature has pro- vided for him must appreciate her design before he can 352 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. be appointed to assist in working it out, and must assimilate his aspirations to the spirit in which that ‘design is conceived. When he has done this, though not till then, the Elder Brethren of humanity will be ready to receive him into their midst. THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES. , 353 CHAPTER XII. THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES. I HAVE already endeavoured to show what is the dis- tinction between Theosophic and Religious teaching, and why, though widely different in some respects, they are not in any real sense antagonistic. A further step along the same line of thought, leads us to the conclusion that till a recent period of the world’s his- tory, Theosophic and Religious teaching went hand in hand—that one was the complement and crown of the other. That the teachings of what used to be called Initiation in the era of the Egyptian and Grecian Mysteries were closely identified with what we now call Theosophy, is a conclusion that reveals itself with something approaching certainty when the records that we possess, such as they are, concerning the ancient Mysteries, are examined in the light of now current expositions of Theosophic doctrine. Nor must we be misled in estimating the importance of this fact by the easily suggested idea that the Mystery teaching may have been superseded by the Christian revelation— though all very well in its way, while the world at large had to be content with heathen polytheism. The Mystery teaching was not superseded by the Christian revelation, for the author of that revelation constantly z 354 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL, alludes to it as embodying a higher instruction than that offered to the multitude even by Him. The supersession of esoteric teaching by that of modern Christian doctrine was effected not by the original Teacher or his disciples, but by the Church when that became a State organisation with worldly interests to serve, and arrogated to itself a spiritual despotism, by pretending to a monopoly of spiritual knowledge. This pretence has been emphasised more and more in modern centuries in inverse proportion to the spiritual knowledge really possessed by the priesthood. And, indeed, in looking back on the claims to superior spiritual knowledge evidently advanced by the priest- hood in early ages of the world, we are apt to measure those claims by reference to the painfully familiar fact that priests in modern centuries have not been at all remarkable for the possession of knowledge in advance of their lay contemporaries. On the contrary, the early European Church has been in the rear of intelligence in almost all respects, and the claims of its hierarchy on the reverence of the multitude have depended on appeals to a very crude superstition or on mundane tyranny. As our survey, however, is pushed back further and further into the past, we get well behind the records of an ignorant and worldly church to periods at which the priesthood was evidently regarded as actually invested with an insight into the mysteries of Nature far transcending that generally diffused throughout secular society. The priests of ancient Egypt were real spiritual teachers, and the THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES. 355 inferences of those who study Egyptian antiquities by the light of modern inquiries into occult science will surely tend in the direction of recognising them as endowed with the spiritual enlightenment that carries with it-an abnormal control over natural forces. We do not know, or at all events we are not helped by literary and archeological research to know, very much about the “‘ Mysteries’”’ and initiations of Ancient Egypt, and Sir Gardner Wilkinson frankly concedes that our only clue to their character and significance is to be sought for in the somewhat fuller information we possess concerning the Greek Mysteries of Eleusis, which were evidently copied from Egyptian practices. But it is quite plain that Egyptian initiations were so serious in their character—hedged round from profane intru- sion with such jealous care, and approachable only through probations and ordeals of so formidable a description that the outer world must have been entirely sure of the broad principle that the Hierophants of the temples were on a truly superior level of know- ledge and power, as compared with the multitude.