shall continue to want it until final and unqualified victory repays us and repays our generous sons for the oceans of blood with which this country has been deluged.

66 6

'. . . In the narrow passages of their trenches, I have seen your seasoned troops, imperturbable, dryly humorous, placidly awaiting the onslaught of the enemy. I do sincerely hope that you will return the visit. Go and see our "poilus": go, I beg of you. What comfort you will find in the simplicity of their smile! They will speak to you of their "boches," inexhaustible subject of military gaiety. You must see them laugh at their wounds; must see them fall with, "I am content," on their lips. Believe me, your mission would not be complete if you were not able to take away with you, to those, no matter where, who may still be hesitating, some glimpse of a vision the splendour of which nothing could possibly surpass. Then you will be able to say to England: "We have seen it."

""Then, on your return from our trenches, you will once more pass through our public squares, where, as in your own, great bronzes record a history which we wish still further to ennoble, but not one detail of which either you or we would wish to disavow. And then, pause for one moment at the foot of the monument, all of gold, where, on her horse of gold, the little peasant of France goes forth to warthat little peasant of France who was, no one knows how, all to herself, an army-nay, all the armies of France in one. Speak to her, oh friends of today and for ever if we prove worthy of our destiny! Speak to her! She will hear you, and, reversing the legend of the man of stone, she will bow her head in token of uttermost reconciliation. In that hour your noble pilgrimage will truly be accomplished, and you will have obtained from all of us that which you came to find.

"... I have said enough of the feeling with which your visit will be returned. At Fontenoy our fathers said to yours: "Messieurs les Anglais, fire first." On this occasion, you came first with hands outstretched. Messieurs les Anglais, it will not be forgotten.'"

"M. Clemenceau himself would probably say that, in referring to his own past, he was using poetic licence, or that he was momentarily identifying himself with his race for oratorical purposes. I should dislike to think that he spoke more wisely than he knew, though it is something which the best and wisest often do. Perhaps he would say the same thing of his reference to Joan of Arc,-that that also was mere rhetoric. But it was in fact far more than that. It was the inspired recognition of a truth eternal in the heavens. She does hear. She does answer. Otherwise what a mockery life would be! She knows Georges Clemenceau. She has often prayed for him. She has tried to reach his inner ear, to inspire, to encourage, to warn, to check. As a rule he has been too busy with himself and his own thoughts to listen; but there have been other times when he has heard and when he has followed her wise counsel, often thinking it his own. Loving France as she does

-her soul in some sense the very soul of France-the wounds of France piercing her heart so deeply-is it not inevitable that she should watch over a man who, with all his faults, has an ideal of patriotism so closely resembling her own? The soul of Joan of Arc counts him as one of her friends of that we may be certain, and so might he be if he would care to listen, even now, at least in this his day. I suspect he knew her as Joan, centuries ago. Not that I have the faintest glimmer of an idea who he was! Perhaps a Bishop, too narrow-minded: for it would be like the cynicism of Fate to have made him an associate of Combesreaction from his own past the directly governing cause. Extremes very often result in opposite extremes. A woman, now the pink of prudery, may easily have been a far too promiscuous flirt in a previous life. Yes, I think we shall have to locate M. Clemenceau as the excarnation of a self-willed, dictatorial, narrow-minded but genuinely patriotic Bishop, whose support of Joan, so truly a messenger from Heaven, perhaps saved his soul and came through into this life as the truest devotion of his heart. In any case, so far as my experience goes, we usually were the person we should most hate to have been!"

"Well," said the Student, "I do not blame him and the others for their opposition to Roman influence in France. They were both foolish and cruel in their expression of it. They made real martyrs-always an unwise as well as unkind thing to do. But if the Church in France. were a French Church, instead of what it used to be, a government within a government, I believe you would find such men as Clemenceau among its most ardent and faithful adherents."

"I agree with you," broke in the Gael at this point; "but there is one other aspect of this whole question which I should greatly like to emphasize. . . . You have spoken of the agony of souls. You have pointed out, though indirectly, that personal crucifixion, which should lead to eternal life, is one thing; and that the crucifixion of the soul, through the sins of the personality, is quite another thing. But you have not spoken of the crucifixion of God.

"I use that word in a Christian sense. But you can replace it, if you choose: the Supreme Self, or the Logos, or the Masters who embody the Logos in life,-any one of these will carry us far enough. And then, how about the outrages committed against them! Outrages almost beyond belief have been committed against humanity; but are not these crimes merely one aspect of the total crime committed? What unthinkable grief for those who have given all, even Paradise, to bring the race to an understanding of truth and justice and honour, to an appreciation of love and beauty and goodness, to have been compelled to cast out devils into swine, foreknowing that these purgations of Hell, instead of running violently down a steep place into the sea, would hurl themselves with fire and sword and monstrous obscenities upon an innocent people, and upon all women and children and defenceless creatures in their path. What woe unimaginable! Sin upon sin and crime added to

crime! And yet it had to be permitted. Men cannot be deprived of their own free will. If they adopt the code of devils, they invite their own obsession. And the Black Lodge, unseen, unrecognized, is far more dangerous in fact than when the whole world turns in horror from the monsters it extrudes. We have at last been compelled to see evil as evil. The disguise, the trappings, the glamour have been thrown aside, and evil stands forth as vile, as hideous, as revolting. That much the White Lodge has already gained. Surely we shall live to see that sin destroys itself. But meanwhile, as I said before, what agony for those whose love, seeing all suffering and each detail of every sin, feels the crucifixion of persons and the crucifixion of souls as its own, intensified a million-fold, not merely because love identifies itself with each ache and heart-throb of those to whom it is given, but because it looks up as well as down and sees above itself, in ever-ascending degree, the infinite grief of the Love of God.

T.

P. S.-This postscript ought to have a separate title. It should be called Messages from Heaven. Its purpose is to call attention to the second volume of Fragments, by "Cavé," which our Book Department announces will be ready for distribution on April 15th, in ample time for Easter. So many of us will be glad to give it—and to receive it too! -as an expression of Easter greetings. "Christ is risen," exclaim the Russians, as they embrace one another on what is for them the happiest day of the year. And we, students of Theosophy, who recognize in the life of a Master an immediate and personal significance which escapes the narrower view of theologians,—we, surely, should find a deeper joy (as we find deeper meanings) in the fact of Christ's resurrection from the dead.

Much of that deeper joy and many of those deeper meanings are to be found in this second volume of Fragments. If we have ears to hear we shall find proof positive that Christ is risen indeed. More than that, we shall find that others have risen with him, and that we too may rise to eternal life and to eternal consciousness from the tomb of the personal self.

"Messages from Heaven": what else can these Fragments be called Read this, for instance, as word sent by one who has attained, to one whose fight is still against the devils in himself:

"You cannot enter into communion with me without suffering, for my life is a life of suffering; nor can you otherwise know its transcendent joys, for joy is its fruit. To go half-way is misery; but all the way is heaven."

Or this, as the testimony of a student whose devotion has resulted in knowledge:

"The Path to the Masters is the path of likeness; there is no other

way to go. Jesus said, 'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no man cometh unto the Father but by me.' He spoke then as the Christ. Only as we conform ourselves to the Master's image can we come to know him -for by what sign or means shall we know that which is beyond the reaches of our consciousness? If he seems abstract, vague, is it not that he inhabits another world, utterly different and removed from our own? But so, mark you, only because of our limitations. For in reality he lives in the same world, sees the same sky and the same fields and flowers, only it is so much vaster and more luminous! As the stones and plants and animals live also in our world, each in their place and degree, but without sharing our consciousness; so we also in the Master's world see and yet not see, touch and yet never feel.

"When we awake sufficiently to realize with St. Augustine that we are 'afar off in a cloud of unlikeness,' then we perceive the lack, the deficiency in ourselves; then we turn our faces toward him, and our hearts; then we have entered on the path; then, as we conform our minds, our acts to his, seeking to follow as he bids us follow, we learn to catch the flutter of his garment as he makes the turn before us; we see the fresh foot-prints in the path ahead, and tones of his voice are blown back to us, growing clearer as the distance lessens.

"Seeking, seeking; conforming without lessening zeal-so eager is the search—we grow into that marvellous consciousness, partake of some small corner of it, and there know face to face communion with him, growing deeper, stronger, fuller day by day, as love and faith and obedience draw us closer to his heart, until at last no friend is so near as that friend, no communion so complete, no realization so vivid and so constant. "But the path is the path of likeness, for which we must strive with virile power. Only in unlikeness can we be afar off from a love so

perfect as his."

But the book is a gold-mine of theosophic, occult and mystic truths. We have quoted only to stimulate desire for more. As said already, it is to be published on April 15th. The binding is the same as that of the first volume. The price also is the same,-sixty cents postage prepaid.

T.

A holy man, nearly a year before the war, is reported to have said: "The world has become profoundly corrupt. There will surely come some great scourge. It will be necessary to have a generation brought up by mourning mothers, and in a discipline of tears."-The Messenger.

T

X.

THE MASTERS

HE very rough sketch of the evolutionary process outlined in the last article is woefully incomplete without including the vital and essential part which the Masters play; and yet one stands appalled

at the mere idea of attempting to put into words what the New Testament describes in part. Perhaps the best thing to do is to set down quite simply, in a series of dogmatic statements the essence of what one knows or understands about this vast subject.

The first thing that has to be kept in mind is the hierarchical principle in the universe. The universe is one; it is a uni-verse, not a duoverse, or a multi-verse. Every soul is a part of the Oversoul, a spark of Divinity, a ray from the spiritual center of things; but they are not all equal. Some are nearer and some are farther away from the innermost heart of the universe, and they rank, as souls, according to their distance away, according to their position along the evolutionary stream.

In the Secret Doctrine there is a beautiful phrase, "Time lay asleep in the bosom of infinite duration"; but it does not always lie asleep. When the hour strikes and a Great Day of Brahma dawns, every 311,040,000,000,000 years or so, there issues forth from the Absolute a whole universe, which gradually unrolls in manifestation. The early stages of this vast unfoldment do not concern us. Suffice it to say that in due time, the process reaches the point where solar systems, and then earths are born, and again, in due time, in stretches of time which dwarf our geological periods into insignificance, these earths are prepared for human evolution, and mankind appears. The picture I wish to present is that this process, taking thousands of millions of years, is a succession of steps or stages, and that every step or stage has its appropriate form of life. Most of these are so inconceivably remote from man that the wildest stretches of our imagination does not give us even a glimmer of their nature and functions. We only know, from analogy, that such beings must exist.

It is not until we reach the world itself that the human mind can begin, vaguely, to concern itself with the higher forms of spiritual life, and to hope to begin to understand a little about them. In order to sug