of transitory phenomena, striving to realise its own eternity. It is
the Immortal, flung into a world of death, trying to realise its own
deathlessness. It is the white Eagle of Heaven, born in the
illimitable spaces, beating its wings against the bars of matter, and
striving to break them and rise into the immensities where are its
birthplace and its real home. That is religion: the striving of man
for God. And that thirst of man for God many have tried to quench with
what is called Theology, or with books that are called sacred,
traditions that are deemed holy, ceremonies and rites which are but
local expressions of a universal truth. You can no more quench that
thirst of the human Spirit by anything but individual experience of
the Divine, than you can quench the thirst of the traveller parched
and dying in the desert by letting him hear water go down the throat
of another. Human experience, and that alone, is the rock on which all
religion is founded, that is the rock that can never be shaken, on
which every true Church must be built. Books, it is true, are often
sacred; but you may tear up every sacred book in the world, and as
long as man remains, and God to inspire man, new books can be written,
new pages of inspiration can be penned. You may break in pieces every
ceremony, however beautiful and elevating, and the Spirit that made
them to express himself has not lost his artistic power, and can make
new rites and new ceremonies to replace every one that is broken and
cast aside. The Spirit is deathless as God is deathless, and in that
deathlessness of the Spirit lies the certainty, the immortality of
religion. And Theosophy, in appealing to that immortal experience,
points the world of religions--confused by many an attack, bewildered
by many an assault, half timid before the new truth discovered every
day, half scared at the undermining of old foundations, and the
tearing by criticism of many documents--points it back to its own
inexhaustible source, and bids it fear neither time nor truth, since
Spirit is truth and eternity. All that criticism can take from you is
the outer form, never the living reality; and well indeed is it for
the churches and for the religions of the world that the outworks of
documents should be levelled with the ground, in order to show the
impregnability of the citadel, which is knowledge and experience.

But in the world of religious thought there are many services, less
important, in