r Nature always has
a reward for the seeker into her secrets.

Spiritual and Temporal Authority

I am to speak to-night, as you know, on "Spiritual and Temporal
Authority," and I have chosen this, with the other subjects, as
bearing on questions of immediate interest to the Theosophical
Society. But in dealing with each of these, as on the first occasion,
I want, if I can, to lift you above any controversy of the moment, and
to put before you broad outlines rather than mere details, and to lead
you to look at all these questions from the wider standpoint of the
experience of the past, trying to apply that experience as far as you
can to the questions, the difficulties, of the present. And this
question that I have chosen for the subject of our thought to-night is
one which carries us back into the very beginnings of human history on
our globe, which we may trace downwards through civilisation after
civilisation, and we can then study, as it were by contrast, many of
our modern civilisations. And out of all this it may be that we shall
learn some lesson for our own small affairs of the moment. For local
affairs are only really interesting as we see them as manifestations
of the great principles which work out in the history of humanity; and
we can only rightly, I think, understand the power of the
Theosophical Movement, if we see it in its proper place in history,
and not as a mere bubble on the water of the present.

Now, far, far back--I suppose some people will say "not in history," for
the time I am speaking of is what would be called "prehistoric"--when
the great Lords from the planet Venus came to our globe to guide and
train the humanity which just then had come to the birth, we find a
group of Teachers and Rulers, not belonging to our humanity at all, but,
as I said, coming from the planet Venus, from the far more highly
evolved humanity living in that world. They came for the specific
purpose of making the evolution of the new humanity more rapid than
otherwise it would be. For, as you know, at that time humanity was
facing a very terrible danger. The bodies had evolved up to a certain
point, the brooding Spirit was over each body, but the intellectual
evolution had scarcely begun to dawn; mind, as we know it now, had
scarcely asserted itself; only mind, as we see it in the animals, had
been slowly unfolding its powers in the upward-climbing towards the
light. And as it is always true that any force w