soul is fundamentally identical with the Oversoul, there will be, for each soul, a progressive unfolding of divine and spiritual powers, until all the powers of the Oversoul are attained and revealed in it. And, with this unfolding of the soul will come a progressive insight into mystery after mystery of nature and nature's hitherto unexplained laws.

When these Objects were phrased, in the seventies or early eighties of last century, the word psychic had not gained a sense which it has since acquired, as distinct from spiritual. Psychic was used rather as the antithesis of material, as it is habitually used by many French writers, such as Bergson, perhaps because the word "spirituel," in French, does not mean exactly spiritual, but rather intelligent, clever or witty. If we were to rephrase the third Object today, we should be inclined to speak of the spiritual powers latent in man, rather than the psychical powers.

So that in each of the three Objects there is thus an underlying principle; and these three principles find their unity in the Oversoul.

This may seem like a doctrine, even a dogma. But The Theosophical Society does not require the acceptance of any doctrine or dogma, or even the acceptance of such underlying principles as have been outlined. On the contrary, it is expressly stated in the Constitution, in the Article on Membership, that every member has the right to believe or disbelieve in any religious system or philosophy. That is already going far; but the Constitution goes even farther, for it adds that every member has also the right to declare such belief or disbelief, without affecting his standing as a member of the Society, each being required to show that tolerance of the opinions of others which he expects for his own.

This is a broad and generous provision, the very perfection of intellectual charity. But it is something more. It is an implicit expression of the conviction that every true inspiration, whether of religion, philosophy or science, is a partial revelation of the Oversoul, a ray of light of the Logos, a thought in the Mind of God.

This word which has just been used, the Logos, is the Greek original of Verbum, the Word, as used in the opening verse of the Gospel according to Saint John: In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.

Perhaps it would be better to translate the first words: In the primal principle, rather than: In the beginning, as indicating a source rather than an origin in time.

It seems to be generally held that Saint John owes his use of this word to Philo, who is summing up a main current of Hellenic philosophy, which goes back through the Stoics to Heraclitus, who spoke of the Logos as the universal principle which animates and rules the world.

For Philo, the Logos is the Mind of God, very much in the spirit of the ancient Chinese phrase, used nearly four thousand years ago in the Shu King: I will examine these things in harmony with the Mind of God.

Perhaps we shall get a clearer view of the significance of the use

of this word, the Logos, by John, if we remember that Matthew and others of the disciples, seeking to express their understanding of the divine personality of Jesus, thought and spoke of him as the Christ, that is, the Anointed, the Messiah: the Lord long looked for, of the Messianic hope, the king of royal David's line. John, interpreting the same divine personality, took the expression, the Logos, thus announcing Jesus as the incarnation of the Mind of God. The word Messiah, the Anointed, in its Greek equivalent, Christos, is used in the Septuagint, the Alexandrian Greek version of the Old Testament, in a more general sense. Thus, when Isaiah speaks of the anointed, Cyrus, the word used in the Greek is Christos. But in the New Testament, the word Christ has gained a deeper significance. Christ is the Messiah. Christ is also the Logos, the incarnate Mind of God.

It may be valuable to consider this word, Logos, as it was first used by Philo of Alexandria, writing about the fifteenth year of our era, on the Creation of the World as given by Moses. Philo was gathering together the three threads represented in the population of his native city, Alexandria, where he lived most of his life and wrote, though he went on one occasion to Rome and, in all likelihood, went also to Jerusalem, to the great festivals of the Jews.

Alexandria had its Greek, its Jewish and its Egyptian population. Philo gathered together the thoughts of all. He had some knowledge also of the spiritual life of India, as it became known to the western world through the expedition of Alexander the Great to India. Through Megasthenes and others, a considerable knowledge of India thus found its way westward, and it would be possible to fill a small book shelf with Greek writings on India which we owe to Alexander's expedition. Thus we find Philo saying of the Indian Gymnosophists, or Sannyasis, that their whole existence is a lesson in virtue.

Alexander's expeditions drew a circle, one may say, round the three centres of wisdom, Greece, Egypt and India, with Jerusalem in the centre; and, in Alexandria, Philo's city, these threads of wisdom came together.

Philo undertook to expound the records of the Old Testament along the lines of allegory, as in his book, the Allegories of the Sacred Laws, that is, the Laws of Moses. And he expounds them in the light of the philosophical thought of Plato, so that it was said by an early Christian writer that it is difficult to say whether Philo Platonizes, or Plato Philonizes.

And as the foundation of his exposition, he takes this teaching of the Logos, the Mind of God.

We may condense as follows the first passage in which this thought is developed, in the exposition of the Creation of the World:

When a city, says Philo, is founded by a great king, who is also a man of brilliant imagination, a skilful architect whom he employs, seeing the advantage and beauty of the situation, first of all sketches out in

his own mind nearly all the parts of the city, the temples, gymnasia, markets, harbours, docks, the arrangement of the walls, the situation of the dwelling houses and the public and other buildings; he carries in his heart the image of a city perceptible only by the intellect. We must form a somewhat similar opinion of God and His creative work. The world first existed only in the Mind, the Logos, of God.

It may be an interesting surmise, which has, perhaps, been made before, that Philo had here in mind, not an imaginary town, but his own city of Alexandria; that the great king of his parable was Alexander, who, in the year 332 B. C., commanded Deinocrates, the wise architect, to plan the city Alexandria, with its walls, harbours, temples, streets, markets, its many public buildings. Everything which Philo says, describes his own city. It does not exactly describe, let us say, Jerusalem, which, though it had walls, had no harbour, nor Rome, the two other great cities which Philo is likely to have known.

Therefore Philo thinks of the plan of the universe to be created, as first formed in the Mind of God, in the Logos. And, if we accept this great, fundamental thought, a plan of all life, must it not follow that there is, in the Mind of God, a plan for each life, a life-plan for each one of us, in the Logos, in the Mind of God?

The plan, for each one of us, is to be discerned through prayer, through meditation, through the illumination of that Light of the Logos which, as Saint John has so beautifully said, lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

But, since the life of each of us is a divine gift, it carries the quality of divinity, the gift of free will, which the Divine Power cannot and will not revoke. We have the right to choose, either to follow the plan of the Logos, led by the Light of the Logos, or to refuse. With free will must the plan be worked out; it cannot be worked out, except through the free energy of creative will, realizing in succession the thoughts in the Mind of God.

We come thus to the word, Theosophy, used by Saint Paul in his first letter to the disciples in Corinth, in the twenty-fourth verse of the first chapter: Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God, Theou sophia.

It is worth noting here that there are two Greek words meaning wisdom: Gnosis, as in the name of the Gnostics, and this word Sophia, with a somewhat different shade of meaning. Gnosis appears to mean rather illumination, the immediate light of divine inspiration, which the Gnostics aspired to reach; while Sophia is wisdom applied to the conduct of life.

We can see this in the name Sophist. It carries an unpleasant flavour, but in the period before Plato, the Sophist was, or aspired to be, a teacher of the highest and best of human things, as Plato says, speaking of Protagoras. And a modern writer on the Greek Genius says of the

earlier Sophist, that "he came nearest, perhaps, to a university teacher, glorified, extended, and brought into contact with practical life."

Paul divides the word into its two parts, Theou sophia, the wisdom of God. It seems to occur first as a single word in the Miscellanies of Clement of Alexandria, who speaks of solving problems "theosophically," that is, in the light, and through the power, of the divine wisdom in us. After Clement, the word is found often in the intervening centuries, coming into all modern languages.

So at last we reach The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 and taking this honourable and ancient name, and, in fact, using Theosophy as the wisdom of the Divine in us, wisdom applied to the conduct of life. By this road, therefore, we come back to our fundamental thought: the conduct of life in the light of divine wisdom; the seeking, through prayer, through meditation, for the immemorial Light in the soul, the Light of the Logos, the leading of the Mind of God.

Here we have our immediate practical application. We are reverently and humbly to seek that Light in the soul and, striving to follow the Light, through effort and sacrifice, undaunted by failure, we are to work out. the plan of the Logos, to realize creatively the ideal of our lives as it exists in the Mind of God.

Yet we must have the humility to remember that at first but one ray of the Logos shines into our hearts, a ray refracted and beclouded by our minds; and that the same immemorial Light has illumined reverent hearts, in all lands, throughout all times.

These illumined sages and saints have recorded their experience in seeking and following the Light, in the sacred books of all races, in every age. With this unity of spiritual experience in view, The Theosophical Society, in its second object, suggests the study of ancient and modern religions, philosophies and sciences, as a check on our own experience. To ignore this gathered wisdom, or to treat it superficially, would be the unpardonable folly of vanity, and could lead only to confusion.

The scientist respects the stored experience, the careful experiments, of all his predecessors. The mystic, if he be a true mystic, reveres the experience of those who have gone before him, and seeks among the living for those whose experience is wider and deeper than his own.

Therefore we study the records of all spiritual experience: the Bibles and prayer books and hymnals of all religions. We seek to supplement and correct our own experience by every available revelation of the Light.

If we follow this course, with reverent seeking for the Light, and with heroic valour, two results would seem to follow. First, wholly occupied with the quest and the creative effort, we shall find our purpose and inspiration in these, and shall never fasten with hungry thoughts upon the result, the personal reward. This is the wise precept of the Bhagavad Gita (2, 47): "Thy authority, thy right, is in the work, never in the fruits, the personal rewards." The motive of life will be progressive illumination, the continuous exertion of creative will, in obedience

to the inward light; a ceaseless striving, through innumerable failures, to realize the splendid plan in the Mind of God.

Besides this disinterested aspiration and sacrifice, as itself the purpose and the reward of life, there will be a second result, not less inevitable. Each one of us, fighting our way forward along the path toward the Logos, will find no time to look backward at the debris of the task, the things already accomplished and done with. It will be even less possible for one to fasten hungry eyes on the results of another's work, the things which, even for him, already belong to the past. Anything, therefore, like envy, like covetousness, becomes wholly impossible to anyone following this life of inspiration and effort, unless it be envy of the finer valour, the completer sacrifice of another. But envy in the common sense, the envy of another's possessions, is unthinkable. It can have no possible place in that benignant light.

But, if envy of the possessions of another be impossible, since each is altogether bent on treading the path that leads to the celestial light, the fullest sympathy is not impossible. Comprehending love is, indeed, of the very essence of the undertaking, an inalienable element in the Great Adventure.

Each one of us strives to follow the inward light, in the spirit of the Vedic prayer: "Let us fix our souls upon the excellent light of that divine Sun, and may it lead our souls forward." But, since these are rays of the same divine Sun, the Sun of wisdom, it is the one Sun that illumines us all. As we draw near to That, we draw nearer to each other, just as the spokes draw closer together when they approach the nave. The power to understand, the power to help, are, indeed, the fruits of that divine Light, coming as the reward of sacrifice and aspiration.

We come thus to the essential Theosophical thought of co-operation in the search for spiritual light and life. Each of us has, perhaps, his unicoloured ray; only when united, can they form the white radiance of Eternity. Each has his own note, but harmony comes through the blending of contrasted notes. So students of Theosophy work together, striving through aspiration and sacrifice to build the nucleus of the divine humanity.

We have already drawn illustrations from East and West, from the Gospels and Greek philosophy and from the Indian books of wisdom. And necessarily so, since this teaching of the Logos is fundamental in all religions. We have found the ancient sage of China, nearly four thousand years ago, endeavouring to think in harmony with the Mind of God. And Tao, the fundamental principle of Lao Tse, some twenty-five centuries since, is so close to the same thought, that the great French Sinologue, Rémusat, thought that Logos was the fittest word to translate it. And we are told by a recent student of the Tao Teh King, Dwight Goddard, that, when Christian scholars came to translate the Logos of Saint John, they were satisfied to use the word Tao.

From China westward, we can trace the same great thought through