at
same method the distinct assertion of the survival of the human Spirit
after death. It is only in very modern times that that has been
doubted by any large numbers of people. Here and there in the ancient
world, like a Lucretius in Rome, perhaps; like a Democritus in Greece;
certainly like a Charvaka in India, you find one here and there who
doubts the deathlessness of the Spirit in man; but in modern days that
disbelief, or the hopeless cynicism which thinks knowledge impossible,
has penetrated far and wide among the cultured, the educated classes,
and from them to the masses of the uneducated. That is the phenomenon
of modern days alone, that man by hundreds and by thousands despairs
of his own immortality. And yet the deepest conviction of humanity,
the deepest thought in man, is the persistence of himself, the "I"
that cannot die. And with one great generalisation, and one method,
Theosophy asserts at once the deathlessness of man and the existence
of God; for it says to man, as it was ever said in the ancient days:
"The proof of God is not without you but within you." All the greatest
teachers have reiterated that message, so full of hope and comfort;
for it shuts none out from knowledge. What is the method? Strip away
your senses, and you find the mind; strip away the mind, and you find
the pure reason; strip away the pure reason, and you find the
will-to-live; strip away the will-to-live, and you find Spirit as a
unit; strike away the limitations of the Spirit, and you find God.
Those are the steps: told in ancient days, repeated now. "Lose your
life," said the Christ, "and you shall find it to life eternal." That
is true: let go everything that you can let go; you cannot let go
yourself, and in the impossibility of losing yourself you find the
certainty of the Self Universal, the Universal Life.

Pass again from that to another religious point. I mentioned
ceremonies, rites of every faith. Those Theosophy looks at and
understands. So many have cast away ceremonies, even if they have
found them helpful, because they do not understand them, and fear
superstition in their use. Knowledge has two great enemies:
Superstition and Scepticism. Knowledge destroys blind superstition by
asserting and explaining natural truths of which the superstition has
exaggerated the unessentials; and it destroys scepticism by proving
the reality of the facts of the unseen world. The ceremony, the rite,
is a shadow in the world of s