"What does it mean? What does it say? What does it sing?

"Or take this from the same review,-a poem by John Freeman, said to be 'one of the finest of the young English poets, a man who must be placed among the first half dozen singers of Great Britain':

I am a river flowing round your hill,

Holding your image in my lingering water

With imaged white clouds rising around your head;
And I am happy to bear your image still.

Though a loud ruffling wind may break and scatter
That happiness, I know it is not fled.

But when the wind is gone or gentled so
That only the least quivering quivers on,
Your image recomposes in my breast

With those high clouds, quiet and white as snow-
Spiritual company; and when day's gone

And those white clouds have stepped into the west;

And the dark blue filling the heavens deep
Is bright with stars that sing above your head,
Their light lies in the deep of my dark eyes
With your dark shape, a shadow of your sleep.
I am happy still, watching the bright stars tread
Around your shadow that in my bosom lies.

"The reviewer calls it 'mystical'. It is not mystical. It is a frantic effort to be mystical. Poets do not make frantic efforts to be anything. These men fail even to convey a suggestion of spontaneity. Yet, as the Historian said, it is not so much the authors as the reviewers of their work, which are noteworthy."

"Can it be," asked the Student, "that the war, with its tremendous and constant shocks, has left most people unable to respond to any stimuli which are not violent and unfamiliar? If so, there is no need to worry about present tendencies, because it should not take long for the world to react toward more wholesome standards, and particularly toward a love of normal and genuine beauty."

"I am not so sure," said the Scientist. "If a man is obliged to live on raw meat and Bombay Duck and pickles, for several years, he is not likely to return to a diet of bread and butter and their concomitants, until painful illness compels it."

"Even so," the Student retorted, "may it not be that we have already passed the climax of your 'painful illness', and that such a book as the Historian described to us, represents a temperature of 106° F, with the probability of sub-normal symptoms in the morning?"

"Have any of you read something that you really enjoyed?" the Recorder interjected.

"Lots of things", was the reply.

"That is more than I need! What particularly struck you?"—and the Recorder turned to the Historian, who had been ill, and who therefore had had more time for reading than most of us.

"I was deeply impressed by the last letter of Aubrey Beardsley", the Historian answered. "To my mind it contained the very essence of tragedy. He was in the South of France, dying of consumption. For months his letters had told of hemorrhages, and of dire poverty: ‘I am living with the pangs of constant fever, unceasingly tortured by the fear of a beggar's misery, a beggar's death'. 'In the name of Satan, send me de quoi vivre. I am begging this as a charity, not as my right'. He had lived himself to death,-not well or wisely. And he had used his talents as talents should not be used. The tragedy was that only at the very last moment did the real horror of it come over him. Then, on March 7th, 1898, he wrote: 'Jesus is our Lord and Master. On my bed of agony-. Dear friend, I implore you, destroy all copies of Lysistrata and all obscene drawings. Show this to Pollitt and implore him to do the same. By all that is holy, all obscene drawings. A. B.'

"Instead of destroying them, the man who received that letter sold those drawings to a Viennese collector. But that Beardsley, gifted as he was, should have waited until death 'had him by the hair': that is appalling, the more so, because his vision at the end, proves how much good there was in him".

"Yes, that is dreadful", the Engineer commented; "but thank heaven he saw what he saw, even at the last minute of his last hour. Strange that most of us learn nothing until we die".

"Why is it?" the Visitor inquired.

"Perhaps because, to learn anything, in the real sense, requires a tremendous effort of will. The lower nature does not desire to learn. Take sensuality: most men treat their sensuality as they might treat a pet animal; for even if they keep it chained up, they feed it with scraps, almost every time it opens its mouth at them. Literally, they do not want to kill it out. They can taste it while resisting it. They enjoy being tempted".

"Personally", commented the Sage, "I doubt if sensuality can be killed out. I think the force in it-the force of which it is a perversion— must be withdrawn from that pole, by means of intense activity at the opposite pole. Love of divine things, love of real beauty, must either well up spontaneously (which does happen), or must be cultivated with such energy and perseverance, that all the force of the nature is brought to flow in that direction, instead of into lower psychic moulds. Heaven knows I do not mean that temptation should not be resisted. It must be resisted. More than that, it must be avoided, as poison is avoided, or as a man instinctively avoids a snake. But that is, in part, a negative process, and I agree with the Engineer that few men avoid temptation in that spirit, until they have worked positively and constructively at the

other pole: until, in brief, they have established a good habit in place of a bad habit. Love of what is pure makes love of what is impure, impossible. But there must be no divided allegiance. There is profound truth in the saying that God is a jealous God".

"There is another aspect of the same subject which should not, I think, be over-looked", the Disciple suggested. "There are certain kinds. of temptation which ought to be avoided at almost any cost. There is only one thing to do: to run from them before they appear, or to spring back and to run from them the very moment they do appear, in the event that we have not been able to foresee their appearance. This is particularly true of all temptations which come under the head of 'sensuality'. But take gluttony, which may also be classed as a 'sensual' sin, and which is perhaps less dangerous than others: suppose the performance of duty requires a man to face that temptation, my belief is that he ought to rejoice rather than lament. And he ought to rejoice because it means that he has been given an opportunity really to serve,-really to mortify self, really to deny self, and therefore really to make a gift to the spiritual powers (his own Master, or the Lodge, or God, as he may personally prefer to express it) which alone can put force into his prayer.

"Assuming that he is striving to become a chela, a disciple, or even a worthy member of The Theosophical Society, it follows that the prayer of his heart must be, 'Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done,' no matter what those words mean to him. A Master longs to win all hearts which belong to him, which are on his 'ray', so that he can lead them to his own Master, that thus their joy may be full and the will and love of his Father be accomplished. The would-be disciple, in his turn, longs passionately that his Master's kingdom may come, and that the will of that Master, his spiritual Father, may be done on earth as it is done in heaven. The worthy member of The Theosophical Society, who does not necessarily believe in Masters, none the less longs to see the principles of the Society recognized and acted upon by his fellow men. In all cases, therefore, 'Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done', expresses the best of our desires.

"If a desire be sincere, we work for its realization. This involves effort, struggle, sacrifice. We discover that life is a battle. There are enemies to be overcome. And the first enemy to be conquered is within our own nature. Each man contains within himself, in miniature, the whole range of evils which the Masters fight in the universe around us. To help them in their fight, we must see to it that their kingdom comes, and that their will is done, in our own lives, in our own hearts and minds. Each one of us, in that sense, may do the work of a magician.

"Witchcraft will illustrate my meaning. You have read that one of the ways in which a supposed magician set to work to injure an enemy, or a client's enemy, was to obtain a picture and then to make a small model of the person to be injured. He would then concentrate his mind on this miniature representation, and would pierce its heart with some

sharp instrument, with the intention that the blow should act by repercussion and should kill the person attacked.

"Diabolical practice, in that case, was based on sound theory. Because we can affect the macrocosm by working on the microcosm,— especially if it be our intention to do so. And we do not have to make any miniature representation of our larger objective. We ourselves are living models and moving models of the battle that is raging, with the hosts of darkness on the one hand and the hosts of light on the other. Strike a blow there, with right intention-that is, with the purpose that the Masters may use it in their world-wide warfare-and we become, to that extent, magicians. The power of it is enormous.

"But we must aim high. Half-hearted or timid efforts can not score a victory. As an old writer put it: 'May I so renounce myself that Thou mayest reign in my heart without a whisper of a rebel voice'. If we want a King, we must make him King. Most of us are still at the stage of drafting Constitutions to limit the King's rights, to protect 'the people' from the King's possible intrusion! But my friends, what a chance for us this summer, when perhaps the pressure of outer work will lessen, to do all things with that intention! You remember the Bhagavad Gita: 'In thy thoughts do all thou dost for Me; renounce for Me; sacrifice heart and mind and will to Me',-that the will of the Lords of Karma, who are the Lords of Compassion, may be accomplished perfectly to the uttermost ends of the earth.” T.

None of you can be called a true believer till he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.-SAYING OF MOHAMMED.

God never imposes a duty without giving time to do it.-RUSKIN.

It is not enough to be good. You must appear good, and your goodness must be agreeable and even enviable.-P. J. STAHL.

DEAR

LETTERS TO STUDENTS

May 20th, 1911.

Thank you most sincerely for your very kind letter. I shall try to call upon you as soon after five as possible, and I feel sure that we should be able to help each other. I know you can help me . .

I do not wish you to feel that I am a wall of adamant or of anything else. I want you to feel perfectly free to come to me at any time, to ask me any question, to seek any kind of help. I shall often fail you because of my own limitations, but it will not be from lack of desire to aid.

On the other hand, I think you have expressed admirably my idea of what you need in order to take the next step forward. There are parts of the Path which we must travel alone, and this phase returns at each stage upwards.

When we are first attracted to the higher life we may and usually do get much help. We may and often do have some kind of a definite spiritual experience. This may be repeated once or twice in order to rouse us thoroughly. But once we have made a start, cannot you see that it is much wiser for us to be left alone until we reach up to the spiritual world and take what we want with our own power, instead of having gifts sent down to us which are given us in love and not of right? We must pay very heavily for such gifts, pay in suffering and pain from which no one can save us. Therefore in very mercy we are not given any more of such things than is absolutely necessary to keep us going forward.

Now you do not need such stimuli, and unless I am much mistaken you need not look forward to getting them until you yourself have reached up to the spiritual plane with your own power and can take them with full right. This you may be able to do in ten minutes or in ten years. That depends absolutely upon yourself. And remember that the Master is standing waiting, and longing, with an infinite longing, for you to reach this point. He will do everything he can, is doing everything he can, to aid and assist you, and if you could have even a faint realization of the happiness and joy that it will give him when you do struggle up to him, I think it would be a very powerful additional incentive and inspiration.

The experiences which

and others have, even when they power, and you do wrong

come from him, are signs of weakness, not of

to compare yourself with them to your own detriment.

You have passed out of their class entirely and I think you should realize this fully. We must not be unjust to ourselves any more than to another. In occultism the sin is exactly the same.