English
Whether a inan be a member of the Church of England, or a Roman Catholic, or a Baptist, or a Mussulman, if he conceives that his own creed suims up the actual truth of things and that the other creeds are false, he is in a state of mind which we must recognise, to say the least, as highly unintelligent. If he goes further, as many do, and believes that there is no salvation, outside the pale of his own creed, for the adherents of others, he stands before us as a reductio ad absurdum of sectarian folly. But however feeble may be his mental grasp of spiritual principles, even he—and, all the more, sectarians who are in various degrees less bigoted—may blend with their foolishness a great deal of genuine religious sentiment. They 40 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL, may set before their own interior sight a conception of Deity which they adore, a code of right and wrong which is, at all events, something divorced from the immediate dictates of selfish interest, and they may govern their lives on the principle that the destinies of the soul after death are of more importance than the transitory enjoyments of physical life. With that much Spirituality to begin with, advancing intelligence in progress of time may lead them into the path of real enlightenment. In a very much higher degree may religious sentiment of a more refined and intense order be directly calculated to prepare the mind for the supreme illumination of theosophic teaching, and however little modern popular creeds may seem adapted to develop ardent spiritual enthusiasm of a pure and refined character, we have to recognise the curious fact that in the present age of the world great numbers of religious people are immeasurably better and more spiritually intelligent than their creeds would lead one to expect. In fact, the growth of intelligence has permeated European religions to an extent that has honeycombed them, really, without apparently disturbing their external form: in other words, the refinement of feeling that general culture evokes, and the earnestness of spiritual aspiration among multitudes of people still professing some orthodox faith, have woven so beautiful a drapery of vague sentiment around the original doctrines— which it has never occurred to them to dispense with— that the ugly deformities thus hidden from view are effectually forgotten. If the outsider complains, ‘‘ Your OCCULT SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 4I doctrine says so and so,” the answer is, “‘ Not at all ; nobody of cultivated mind takes it in that sense; it really means this and that.’’ And then the ignoble statement, whatever it may be, is sublimated into something too ethereal to be controverted. This method of dealing with exoteric or popular religions may be supported or condemned along different lines of argument. Whether it hastens or retards the evolution of the popular religion into something higher is a question that cannot be easily decided. But at all events, the attitude of mind of people who in this way cling to and refine—for their own use, at least—the conventions of exoteric belief, may go hand in hand with a capacity to assimilate real spiritual knowledge. And the ardour of religious feeling which has in the first instance inspired their own interior development, must be distinctly favourable, in their case, to that practical application of the higher wisdom to the problems of human life and conduct which it is the great purpose of Theosophy to promote. Indeed, it is impossible, from the theosophical point of view, to be too earnest in repudiating the miserable misrepresentation of Theosophy that leads people sometimes to imagine it an aggressive and iconoclastic philosophy essentially hostile to religion. It would be as wise to assert that mathematical teaching is hostile to astronomy. Mathematics may from time to time have upset some popular idea on the subject of astronomy, but that has simply been so much the better for astronomy; and in the same way any religious idea—any idea, that is to say, which has become 42 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. encrusted on religion—which Theosophy may be in a position to discredit—will be got rid of by religion greatly to its own advantage. ‘Theosophy, in fact, stands to religion very much in the position of mathe- matics to astronomy; that last relationship is the relationship of the abstract to the concrete. The pure colourless truths of mathematical science lead us upwards to an appreciation of the sublime and soul- stirring panorama of the heavens. So does an under- standing of theosophic truth, however stern, scientific, and abstract it may seem in the first instance, lead the spiritual consciousness upward towards realms of glowing emotion, and eventually into the actual con- templation of spiritual realities, the glories of which may easily account for the way in which the illuminated theosophic student regards all familiar objects of mundane desire as contemptible trivialities beside the experiences of his interior progress. To repeat a phrase growing almost too hackneyed for use, but representing a truth that must never be forgotten, Theosophy is the essence of religion, and of all religions worthy of the name. Or in other words, it is the science of Divine things, as the word implies. Reverence for each specific religion felt by its adherents, may often blind them to the idea that there must be such an underlying science. The outer expression given to the views of exoteric religions concerning Deity and Divine relations with humanity must—for all but the most circumscribed intelligence—be recognised as at any rate falling far short of a complete explanation of those stupendous mysteries. There must be a prodigious OCCULT SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 43 complexity, so to speak, in the organisation of spiritual Nature, which very bald—however poetical—declara- tions concerning omnipotence, ommiscience, Heaven, and eternal life, fail to expound. Within the far narrower field of observation with which physical science deals, it will be seen on reflection that a great many broad generalisations are in the nature of an exoteric substitute for the declarations which more advanced knowledge might supply. The sun, for example, is for the popular Western understanding— a vast globe in the centre of the system of planets to which we belong, which shines with a bright light and gives out heat, generating organic growth, and providing for the recurrence of seasons, and so on. Other popular conceptions of the sun have anthropomorphised these ideas, more or less, and have imputed a self-conscious Divinity to the orb on whose influence the life and health of the world so manifestly depended. But underlying both views, there are certainly immense realms of complex intermediation that the popular understanding does not trouble itself about in either case. How does the sun make a plant grow ? It sends out light and heat, but that is a loose and ineffectual statement that takes us no forwarder. We can hunt down the physical elements concerned, and discern them, if not absolutely with the sight, with the eye of understanding—in their molecular simplicity. Heat may throw these molecules into motion, but that alone will not account for organic growth. Moreover, when we begin to examine into these things—how does the heat get here from the sun ? The sun radiates it! 44 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. That does not explain anything. By what intermedia- tion is the influence conveyed ? Science begins at this stage to be esoteric. Popular knowledge—the popular religion of the matter so to speak—is content with the statement— the sun emits heat. Even exoteric science finds it necessary to fortify and expand this crude statement, and brings the luminiferous ether into the field of observation. Ether, that marvellous medium of physical influences that can neither be seen, felt, nor examined by any instrument, is discovered by advancing know- ledge nevertheless, and science, in spite of its extremely cautious habits, begins to affirm certain definite proposi- tions concerning it. Then does “‘emission’”’ in the popular sense take place at all in connexion with the sun’s heat and light ? According to the very latest views of physical scieuce, such emission is actually suspected, though till the appearance of the electron on the scene, the tendency of modern thought was rather in the direction of assuming that all solar influences were transmitted to us as vibrations or peculiar conditions of the ether. That the sun does something to the ether, and that we feel effects in the ether round us, is undeniable; but esoteric science enables us to realise that the sun at all events is in control of forces infinitely more subtle even than those having to do with etheric vibrations, and already we can foresee developments of scientific knowledge in preparation for no very distant periods when the term “ physical science’’ will have to be discarded as an incomplete description of the knowledge accumulated by the Royal Society. OCCULT SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 45 Assuming eventually that students of solar physics come to something resembling complete knowledge of the chain of cause and effect between the sun’s influence and the organic life of the world, then solar physics would be to the broad popular statements on. the subject, just what theosophical knowledge—in its per- fection—is to popular religion. The analogy just employed is all the more inviting, because it suits the idea to be illustrated in more ways than one. Just as esoteric solar physics require us to investigate the properties of a medium imperceptible to exoteric senses, so in dealing with spiritual science we must range over fields of observation that lie altogether beyond exoteric understanding.