Theosophy - Theosophy and Christianity - by Annie Besant - Adyar Pamphlets No. 37
Adyar
Pamphlets No.37
Theosophy and Christianity
by Annie Besant
Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar. Madras. India
First
published as No.10 of the Benares Pamphlet Series
First
published as Adyar Pamphlet 1914, Reprinted 1932
[Page
1] ONE
of the saddest facts in human history frowns forth from the records of
the faiths of the world: that Religion — which by its name should
be a binding force has been the perennial source of discord and of division
among men. No hatred – it is a truism — is so bitter as religious
hatred, no wars so bloody as religious wars, no persecutions so cruel as
religious persecutions. The proverb as to the corruption of what is best
has been but too often verified, and it would seem as though the very effort
of man's spiritual nature to rise were the signal for the more furious outburst
of the brute nature which is his darker side. Men's Religions have been made
into walls of division, separating mind from mind, and heart from heart;
it would seem as though the effort made were to see how many could be excluded
from the pale, rather than how many could be included within it, and the
bread of life has too often been used by men, as Maurice sadly confessed,
as a stone to throw at their enemies.[Page
2]
Today
the religious field is a field of combat; rival Churches, rival war-cries,
rival Religions, and if Theosophy be but one more combatant, one more rival
sect, the world could well enough do without it. But the stately figure
of the ancient Wisdom Religion does not enter the field as a combatant
but as a peace-maker, not as a rival but as an explainer. " Sirs,
ye are brethren, why do ye wrong one to another? " is the expostulation
that falls from her lips. Truth may be sought by combat, and in the clash of
rival opinions bright sparks of verity may be forth-struck; controversy,
dialectics, keen questionings, sharp debates — all these are methods
by which intellectual truths may be wrought out with strenuous effort and
strong searching. But Truth may also be sought by cooperation, and
spiritual truths are best seen in the clear air of brotherhood and mutual
respect; each man may bring his contribution to the common store, and all
may study it, not to see how little truth there is in it, but how much; for
the atmosphere of love and sympathy has much to do with the growth of
spiritual insight, and it is the surface of the unruffled lake that mirrors
best the stars and the depths of space.
If
we ask what divides men in Religion, we shall find that it is the different
intellectual moulds into which they cast spiritual truths; the intellect is
the analytical, the separating principle, it is that which individualizes,
which makes each feel, " I am I ". [Page
3] The dogma is the intellectual
form into which a truth or a half truth is thrown, and this varies with national
habit, national tradition, the stage of development reached, the religious
history behind its enunciation. Now it is dogmas that divide religious bodies
from each other; it is they that differentiate one creed from another.
On the other hand
all Religions agree in their enunciation of some great moral verities, and
in their founding themselves on a spiritual, as against a material, conception
of the universe and of man. All alike proclaim the duties of purity, integrity,
veracity, kindness, forgiveness of injuries, self-denial, service to man.
These moral keynotes are struck again and again, and no higher note in ethics
has been sounded at the end of the nineteenth century after Christ than was
struck in the nineteenth century before him. So also with the conception
of the spiritual nature of man and of the universe ; all alike proclaim One
Eternal Self-Existence, the manifestation in time of an emanation therefrom,
the Root and Fount of all existence. Life, Will, Idea, in their highest,
most transcendental condition, Ormazd, Brahma, the Logos, the Word. This
Self of the universe is the innermost Self of man, the spiritual Root of
the Kosmos and the spiritual Root of Humanity. Under whatever phrases, under
whatever names, this idea lies at the foundation of every Religion, and the
methods of each are directed, however inadequately and[Page
4] however clumsily, to making
men realize this hidden spiritual life and evolve it into active manifestation.
At
the beginning of last century, to go no further back, Christendom regarded
this precious conception of spiritual life as peculiar to itself, and its
own method as unique. A partial exception was made in favor of the Jews
as the chosen people of God, the recipients of the one revelation, and
the predecessors of the Christian Church. With this partial exception,
all men lay in darkness, given over to false Gods and to ignorance, the
one lamp of salvation being placed in the care of the Hebrew people, and
after them of the Christian. Such a misconstruction of antiquity, such
a partial and one-sided view, is now no longer possible to any educated
man. The study of comparative Religion, the translation of Eastern Scriptures,
the researches of antiquarians, the recovery of the records of past civilizations,
have lifted the veil which hid the ancient world. Mighty Religions, sublime
Philosophies, pure Ethics, great practical achievements, these have
emerged out of the darkness under the wondering eyes of modern
students. None now believes that man's spiritual nature was latent or even
sterile during past millenniums, that Humanity was blind and without guide,
that all the world was outcast save the Jew. All admit that China, India,
Persia, Egypt, have much to teach us, and that the cradle of our ancient
Âryan[Page
5] race was rocked by mighty Sages
and blessed by lofty Saints.
Starting then with
this recognition of the grandeur of Humanity, seeing in every Religion one
of the guardians of man's spiritual inheritance, we may go on to see how
the Esoteric Philosophy is related to one of these exoteric creeds, the bearing
of Theosophic teaching on Christianity.
The
question which springs to the lips of the devout Christian on his first
acquaintance with Theosophy is: What is the teaching of the Esoteric
Philosophy as to the existence and nature of God; will it take away from
me my belief in God, my trust in Him as the Father of men?" Entwined as is
the idea of God with all that is loftiest in Religion, all that is most sacred
to the human heart, all that is dearest and most inspiring to many of the
purest and sweetest lives that have blessed the human family, those who
think they have some deeper truth than that held by the orthodox Christian
should be very careful how they deal with even the outer veil that covers
the profoundest mystery of Life. Let us see if it be not possible to approach
this question and to lead towards some suggestion of an answer, without
tearing one tendril of a human heart, or jarring the sensitive nerves of a
devout believer.
No idea has more
changed, deepened, and widened with the unfolding of man's mind than his
idea of the nature of THAT which men call God. [Page
6] When the mind is in
its infancy, a mere baby Ego, its God is the aggregate of all which to
it is desirable, enshrined in human form; always man's Ideal is man's God,
and he upreaches towards that Ideal, striving to approach it, to propitiate,
to serve. As he grows in experience, in range of thought, in nobility of
moral character, his Ideal rises with his own growth, until a grandiose
and sublime Ideal stands forth for man's worship, the Lord and Father of
spirits, the Creator and Ruler of the universe. In Christianity the practical
identification of the Logos, or Word, with God has rendered yet more definite
this anthropomorphic conception, and the unlearned, unlettered, Christian
finds his untrained brain and his warm heart perfectly satisfied with this
view of a personal God, lofty enough to stimulate his aspiration and his
devotion, but not too vast for his limited comprehension. But when we turn
to the more highly educated, and then to the philosophical, Christian,
we find ourselves in a wholly different atmosphere. The whole tendency
of liberal and philosophical Christianity is to strike away the limitations
with which ignorance has surrounded the Divine Idea, and to rise into regions
of abstract thought which leave far below the puny images of human personality.
The Christian philosopher realizes that the Divine Existence stretches
above, below, around him on every side, an illimitable ocean in which he
lives and moves and has his being, That which is All in All. And Science
steps[Page
7] in,
and unveiling further and further depths in the universe presents to our
dazzled thought a kosmos illimitable by our reason. To measure some of the
enormous distances in space — beyond which stretch other distances
unknown, immeasurable — she has invented a new unit of measurement,
for the little miles which may serve in our solar system are useless when
she comes to deal with interstellar space. Miles in billions convey no intelligible
concept, one billion or two billions merely means to us a vast and inconceivable
distance, and our halting imagination can sense no difference between
their relative values. So light has been taken, and the distance it travels
in a second has been made the unit of measurement. It travels 192,000 miles
per second, and thus takes but the eighth of a second to travel round the
globe; the distance from the earth to the sun is ninety-five millions of
miles, and light passes from the sun to us in 8'2 minutes; the solar
system has a diameter of fifty-three thousand millions of miles, and this
is traversed by light in about 7'5 hours. Now space is measured by light-years:
192,000
miles per second.
x 60 seconds
=
11,520,000
miles per minute.
x 60 minutes=
691,200,000
miles per hour.
x 24 hours =
16,588,800,000 miles
per day.
x 365 days per year =
-----------------------------------
6,054,912,000,000
miles per year.
[Page
8] Hence a light-year means
upwards of six billions of miles, a phrase that conveys no meaning whatever
to our minds. The astronomer then speaks of thousands of light-years as
separating us from some of the stars. With every improvement of our instruments
fresh stars come within the range of vision; faint nebulas are analyzed
into separate stars; every star is a sun, the center of its own system.
Let the mind plunge itself into these unfathomable depths of space; let
it try to traverse that measureless expanse; then, when it is dazed and
giddy with the effort, let it remember that the Life of the Universe sustains,
moves, guides all; that It shines in every sun, rolls in every planet,
holds balanced every system in these infinite fields of space, peopled
with innumerable globes; that It is the life of the atom as much as of
the system, that it pulsates in every animal, swells in every bud, dances
in minutest insect, as much as It burns in the kosmic central sun. All
this must be an aspect of what men call God; all this but the burgeoning
of that illimitable Existence. And then, when thought falls helpless, then
when mind sinks dumb, then remember that man, a half-evolved organism on
a grain of sand in space, dares to anathematize his brother, because his
conception of that ineffable Existence differs in human language from his
own.
What IT is no human
tongue may speak, no human mind may conceive. Only we feel we dare[Page
9] not limit, we dare not define,
we dare not use words of IT which are taken from our petty attributes, our
narrow limitations. Not by intellect may we know the Self of the universe,
much less THAT of which the Self is but a fragmentary expression. Only in
some moment of rarest and loftiest attainment, when some supreme
renunciation of self has riven for a moment the illusion of separateness,
when the Soul is poised in silence, and a stillness beyond earth's quiet
holds its very life in suspense, then, it may be, that through the stillness
will come a faint thrill of something mightier than Soul at its strongest,
gentler than Soul at its tenderest, and the answering thrill from
the deepest depths of our nature, sensed rather than felt, may remind us
that our Spirit is one with the Spirit of the universe, and that sometime,
somewhere, we shall reach a vision impossible today.
We have left the
region of controversy, we have passed into the sphere of Religion; and there
the Soul, striving upwards to its birthplace, cares not to wrangle over definitions
by which it may ostracize its brethren. Our conceptions of the Divine are
the wings of the Soul, but our wrangling over them the birdlime that glues
those wings uselessly to our sides. Let us discuss matters of human duty
and common effort; let each, in the sacred precincts of inner life formulate,
or refrain from formulating, as he will, his own conception of the universal
Life. All such conceptions, followed out,[Page 10] ultimate
in a profound Pantheism, and Christian and non-Christian philosophers recognize
equally the God that is the All. With each development the human mind widens
out its conception, and if each Soul be left to grow, the earlier conceptions
will fall, they need not be rent, away.
Closely
allied to the idea of a personal God is the view taken of Jesus, as the
incarnate Son of God. "What do you believe about Christ ?" is the
next question which comes from the Christian's lips. "Do you deny the
divinity of Christ ? " The answer comes straight and clear: "We do not
deny the divinity of Jesus; we affirm the divinity of every son of man".
Every world-religion
has its divine incarnations, its "Word made flesh";
in all ages this incarnation has been styled the Christ, the anointed, and
it is round this Ideal Man that the hearts of men have clung, instinctively
feeling that He is the promise of the future, and that where He stands in
the present all men shall stand in days to come. But if we want to understand
the difference between the Christian view of Jesus the Christ and the
Christs of Theosophy, we must take these views in connection with the
view of humanity as a whole of which they are severally the result. The
theory of popular and ecclesiastical Christianity (now being so rapidly
outgrown) regards mankind as a race essentially corrupt, cursed at its fall
by its incensed Creator, and thenceforth lying under the wrath of[Page
11]
God; in order that some of this
race may be saved, God becomes incarnate, and, suffering in the place of
man, redeems him from the consequences of the fall; out of the race some
are saved by this sacrifice, and the righteousness of the Redeemer is imputed
to the redeemed; man, naturally helpless, is rendered strong by the help
extended to him by his Savior, without whom he can do nothing. This is the
exoteric creed professed universally in the past by Christians, and professed
by the great majority today.
The Theosophic view
of man is the very reverse of this. It regards man as essentially divine,
but the divine in him crusted over with a thick veil of matter; this divine
essence in man is the Buddha, the Christ, and it is the
"light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world". Through
the veil of matter the light shines dimly, but in the lowest and the vilest
some gleams of light are seen from time to time. Every man is a potential Christ,
and the work of evolution is to render this potential Christ an active one;
man's strength wells up from the divine within him , it is an essential property,
not an external gift; the light is there — his work is to render his
lower nature translucent, and to let it shine.
That the Christ
is "God in man" ,
inclusively and not exclusively, might well be argued — for those who
take the New Testament as an authority — from
the Fourth Gospel. Neoplatonic throughout,[Page
12] this
view of the
meaning of the Christ comes out very plainly in chap. x. 34-36. Jesus had
been accused of blasphemy, in that He made himself God; His answer was
a claim to rank as God because He was man, and divinity was inherent in
humanity.
Jesus
answered them, Is it not written in your law, I
said. Ye are Gods ?
If he called them
Gods, unto whom the word of God came,
and the scripture cannot be broken;
Say ye of him, whom
the Father hath sanctified, and sent
into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I
am the Son of God ?
It
was not in virtue of a unique position, but in virtue of a common humanity
that Jesus is here made to claim to be divine; He identifies Himself with
man, instead of standing with a gulf between Himself and His race. And so
Paul, writing to his Galatian converts:
My little children,
of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you.
Men
have thought to exalt Christ by degrading man, whereas that which is the
Christ — not limited to an individual but the Soul triumphant — is
the very light and life of men. This is the esoteric truth that has been
hidden under the exoteric veil, and those on whom the beauty of this conception
has dawned will no longer have any sense that they have lost their Christ,
when they see Him incarnate in every son of man.[Page
13]
The
truth of the Hermetic maxim, "Demon est Deus inversus" is
borne in upon us when the Church lifts before our eyes the figure of the
great "Angel of Darkness", and we see that his symbols are
the same as those of the Christ. Satan has been painted as man's direst foe,
as his adversary and accuser, his tempter and would-be destroyer; Christ is
represented as the very antithesis of this; as man's most compassionate
friend, as his helper and defender, his guide and would-be redeemer. How,
then, comes it that two characters so diverse bear the same symbols, are
presented under the same image ? Lucifer is the Son of the Morning, the
star falling from heaven; Christ is the bright and morning Star. Lucifer is
the Dragon, the Serpent, twined round the Tree of Knowledge; Christ is the
Serpent lifted on the Cross, the Tree of Life. The characteristic attribute
of the Serpent — Wisdom — gives us the key of the allegory, for
both are types of the human mind, of the double-faced entity, by which alike
we fall and rise. For the Star that fell is our Divine Ego, that was the bearer
to animal man of the heavenly light, Lucifer, light-bearer, in very truth.
And entering into man, it became indeed his tempter, for the very powers it
brought made such evil possible as the animal could never know and, united
in man with animal desire, it brought memory and subtlety of enjoyment, and
anticipation of renewal, and so became man's ever present tempter,
plunging him[Page
14] into evil in its search
for sensation and for experience of material life. And then it became his accuser,
when evil brought suffering, and sensation brought satiety, and ignorant desire
worked out into pain; for it accused the body as its deluder when itself
had guided the body, and the man of flesh had been but the instrument
of the thinking man. Thus was the Ego the bringer of disharmony, for
its own will ruled it and it was ignorant in matter, and blindly eager for
experience, and its ignorance and eagerness wrought for pain and
hence for its education. And then it began to turn its face upward instead
of downward, and to aspire to the Divine instead of seeking for the brute,
until striving ever towards the Spirit it lifted animal man from
animality, and became his redeemer instead of his tempter, his purifier
instead of his degrader. For as intellect materialized is Satan, so is intellect
spiritualized the Christ, and therefore is it that both bear the same symbols,
and the Fallen Angel becomes the Angel of Light.
As these conceptions
of man's real nature become clear and definite, it is manifest that our whole
method of dealing with men will change, and the popular ideas of virtue and
vice, with heaven as the reward of virtue, and hell as the penalty of vice,
will appear to us to be at once puerile and inefficient. And here we come
into conflict with popular Christianity. For if man's heart be naturally
corrupt, if that which is deepest in him[Page
15] be
evil and not righteous, if he turn naturally towards the bad and can only
with difficulty be turned towards the good, then it seems reasonable to
allure him to the distasteful good with promises of future happiness, and
to scare him from the fascinating bad with threats of future pain. Whereas,
if man's nature be essentially noble, and the Divine Ego, which is his very
Self, be only blinded with matter, and even in its darkness seeks for light,
and in its bondage yearns for liberty, then all this coaxing with heaven
and threatening with hell becomes an irrelevant impertinence, for man's
innermost longing is then for purity and not for heavenly pleasure, his
innermost shrinking is from foulness and not from hellish pain.
What is virtue ?
It is being in perfect harmony with natural order, Nature being but the expression
of the Divine Thought. It is the complete unfolding of every faculty, the
full development of every power, and the subordination of all to the perfecting
of the whole, each unit in rhythmical accord with the rest. It is not a blind
submission to an external law imposed upon man by an extra-kosmic Deity;
it is the glad unfolding of the inner life in conscious obedience to an internal
impulse, which seeks expression in the external life. True and wise are the
words of a Hindu in agony:
Virtue is a service
man owes himself; and though there were no heaven nor any God to rule the
world, it were not less the binding law of life. It is man's privilege to
know the right and follow it.[Page
16] Betray
and persecute me, brother men! Pour out your rage on me, 0 malignant devils.
Smile, or watch my agony with cold disdain, ye blissful Gods. Earth, hell,
heaven, combine your might to crush me — I will still hold fast by
this inheritance. My strength is nothing — time can shake and cripple
it; my youth is transient — already grief has withered up my days;
my heart — alas
! it seems well-nigh broken now ! Anguish may crush it utterly, and life
may fail; but even so my soul, that has not tripped, shall triumph, and,
dying, give the lie to soulless destiny, that dares to boast itself man's
master. [Quoted from Conway’s Sacred Anthology, pp 340-341]
There speaks the
heroic soul, and what need has such a soul of promise of happiness in heaven,
since it seeks to do the right and not to enjoy ?
And in truth, there
is nothing that can pay virtue save continued opportunity for exercise, so
accurate is the old proverb that "Virtue is its own reward" .
Only virtue can reward virtue, for to be is all that it desires. Tennyson
caught a glimpse of this, and threw it into noble verse:
Glory of warrior,
glory of orator, glory of song,
Paid with a voice
flying by to be lost on an endless sea —
Glory of Virtue
to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong —
Nay, but she aimed
not at glory, no lover of glory she;
Give her the glory
of going on, and still to be
The wages of sin
is death; if the wages of Virtue be dust,
Would
she have heart to endure for the life of the worm
and the fly ?
She desires no isles
of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden
grove, or to bask in a summer sky;
Give
her the wages of going on, and not to die.
[Wages in Tennyson’s
Works][Page
17]
To become what it longs
for, to be what it adores: that is the goal towards which virtue strives,
and that only can reward it. You cannot reward selflessness with pleasure;
you cannot crown self-renunciation with gold; virtue asks naught at the
hands of any God or any man, for the joy lies in its own exercise and in
the opportunity of deathless service.
Some
will say that such stimulus is insufficient, and that natures that do not
respond to inspiration too lofty for them must have sanctions and threats
fitted for their lower powers of apprehension. None the less should this
Ideal be placed before them, for in them, at the core of their being,
lies the Divine, even though it be too thickly crusted over with evil for
the impulse to penetrate to it, or for it to respond. And experience proves
to us that it is ever the noblest Ideal that stirs man into most passionate
response, and even though he may be unable to emulate, he feels in him
the throb of yearning desire that is the first movement of the life within
him, as the babe not yet ready for birth stirs beneath the mother's heart,
and the movement is the prophecy of the future. Take any crowd, gathered
together at haphazard, of the degraded as well as of the noble, and see
what will move them to enthusiasm; you will find it will be the tale of
some heroic deed, the story of some great sacrifice — for the human
heart springs upward the Right as the plant strives towards the sunshine.[Page
18]
But let us grant
that something more than the presentation of a great Ideal is necessary to
stimulate the progress of the less developed souls. Then let us teach them,
and prove to them, that pain follows the evil-doer as his shadow, or as the
cartwheel follows the ox. Let us make them understand that they are in a
universe of law, in things moral as in things physical, and that suffering
and degradation are the fruits that are ripened from the blossoms of sin.
Not misery in a far-off hell, which they can escape at the last moment by
a prayer, but misery here on earth where the wrong was done, and where must
be restored the equilibrium they have disturbed. Let us teach them Reincarnation,
that brings the Soul back to the scene of its transgressions, and Karma,
the Great Law, that sets each man reaping the harvest he has sown. Thus may
be chipped away the crust of ignorance that hinders the shining forth of
the Light within them, and thus their responsiveness to the Ideal will increase.
Yet in this process, let us frankly admit it, we are not making them truly
virtuous, but are only destroying the ignorance which prevents the growth
of virtue. Not till the longing for the Right for its own fair sake rises
within them, can the step in virtue be made. For to do even the right act
from desire to gain happiness or to avoid pain is not virtue, but merely
enlightened and calculating selfishness; right
action[Page
19] must spring from right thought,
and not from selfish hopes or fears.
Apart from these
considerations, it may be well argued that the fear of hell has directly
worked for evil, and that it has proved to be a corrupting and degrading
influence. On this, after quoting some descriptions of hell from Christian
preachers, Canon Farrar has remarked:
There
is overwhelming evidence to show that the outcome of such delineations
taken alone — were they not rejected as they are by the
instinctive faith of man — could only be hysteria, terror, and religious
madness in the weak: indignant infidelity or incredulous abhorrence in the
strong. "From the fear of hell", says the Rev. Rudolph Suffield, after twenty
years' experience as confessor to thousands while working as "Apostolic
Missionary" in most of the large towns of England, in many portions of
Ireland, in part of Scotland, and also in France — we never expected
virtue or high motives or a noble life; but we practically found it useless
as a deterrent. It always influenced the wrong people and in a wrong way. It
caused infidelity to some, temptation to others, and misery without virtue
to most. It appealed to the lowest motives and the lowest characters; not,
however, to deter from vice, but to make them the willing subjects of sad
and often puerile superstitions. [Eternal Hope. Preface pp Ii,
Iii]
The
effect caused by descriptions of eternal torture by Christian preachers
can only be kept up by ever adding and adding to the horrors of the
pictures — as the doses of a drug must be increased for confirmed eaters
thereof — until at last we come to the hideous vilenesses of Father Furniss
and Father Pinamonti. [A Sight of Hell, and Hell Opened to
Christians] It is
good to know that in the[Page
20] Christian Churches many are
waking up to a recognition of the evil wrought by such teachings, and they
see that the other-world hell is an excrescence, that has grown on the tree
of their faith, fed by the poisoned sap of human malice and hatred, that it
is a travesty of the great truth that disregard of law is ever followed by
suffering, suffering that in its turn brings wisdom and obedience in its train.
Just as the Esoteric
Philosophy opposes the doctrine of hell, so must it needs oppose the exoteric
presentments of the doctrines of vicarious atonements, imputed righteousness,
and divine grace. For these strike at the root of human effort, and transfer
to an external source that which comes from the God in man. To teach, as
Christian teachers have taught, that Jesus Christ can make atonement for
the sins of men, that His righteousness can be imputed to them, His grace
give them salvation, is to remove man from the sway of law, to divorce effort
from improvement, and to introduce the artificial methods of human legislation
into the natural realm of inviolable order. As the incarnation of the Ego
in animal man is the esoteric truth underlying all legends of divine incarnations,
so the work of that Ego with its human tabernacle is the esoteric truth underlying
the doctrines of atonement, imputed righteousness and divine grace. The Ego,
uniting with itself the lower nature, gradually purifies it, makes it at one
with itself, and constantly pours its own strength into the human[Page
21]
personality, inspiring it, guiding
it, lifting it, glorifying it. The Christ is built from within by this
slow process through countless incarnations, every step being made by the
joint efforts of the higher and lower natures which, from being twain, are
gradually welded into one. Thus is taught a magnificent self-reliance, thus
is built up by ever-renewed effort a strong and perfect man; thus only can
the soul gain its independent conscious existence, acquiring
Individuality,
first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and self-devised efforts
(checked by its Karma), thus ascending through all the degrees of intelligence,
from the lowest to the highest Manas, from mineral and plant up to the
holiest archangel (Dhyani-Buddha). The pivotal doctrine of the Esoteric
Philosophy admits no privileges or special gifts in man, save those won
by his own Ego through personal effort and merit throughout a long series
of metempsychoses and reincarnations. [The Secret Doctrine,
volume1, page 17]
Here, perhaps, is
the strongest point of contrast between the Esoteric Philosophy and popular
Christianity, and as this touches conduct and the spirit of our life, it
is of the highest importance. Is man to rely on a force external to himself,
or is he to seek strength in himself ? On his answer to that question depends
his future.
One great service
that may be done by Theosophy to all religions is the softening of religious
animosities by the revealing of the basis common to all. It cannot be that
for ever the brotherhood[Page
22] preached by all
religions shall be denied in practice, and Theosophy will deserve well of
the world, if it can substitute knowledge for ignorance and peace for strife.