e in process
of decay, for they are losing their hold on the educated minority; it
is still the case that in all countries the camps of orthodoxy include
large numbers of men distinguished by intellect and culture, but one by
one their numbers are diminishing. Five-and-twenty years only, in
Europe, have made a prodigious change. Books are written now that pass
almost as matters of course which would have been impossible no further
back than that. No further back, books thrilled society with surprise
and excitement, which the intellectual world would now ignore as
embodying the feeblest commonplaces. The old creeds, in fact, are
slowly losing their hold upon mankind--more slowly in the more
deliberately moving East than Europe, but even here by degrees also--and
a time will come, whether occult philosophy is given out to take their
place or not, when they will no longer afford even such faulty sanctions
for moral conduct and right as they have supplied in times gone by.
Therefore it is plain that something must be given out to take their
place, and hence the determinations of which this movement in which we
are engaged is one of the undulations--these very words some of the
foremost froth upon the advancing wave.

But surely, when something which must be done is yet very dangerous in
the doing, the persons who control the operations in progress may be
excused for exercising the utmost caution. Readers of Theosophical
literature will be aware how bitterly our adept Brothers have been
criticized for choosing to take their own time and methods in the task
of partially communicating their knowledge to the world. Here in India
these criticisms have been indignantly resented by the passionate
loyalty to the Mahatmas that is so widely spread among Hindus--resented
more by instinct than reason in some cases perhaps, though in others, no
doubt, as a consequence of a full appreciation of all that is being now
explained, and of other considerations beside. But in Europe such
criticisms will have seemed hard to answer. The answer is really
embodied, however imperfectly, in the views of the situation now set
forth. We ordinary mortals in the world work as men traveling by the
light of a lantern in an unknown country. We see but a little way to the
right and left, only a little way behind even. But the adepts work as
men traveling by daylight, with the further advantage of being able at
will to get up in a balloon and survey