t knowledge to lift them to a
place of peace. That is the work which demands to be done, and which
your Lodges have the duty of doing. For there ought not to be one
scheme for human helping, in any place where a Lodge of the
Theosophical Society is established, where in that Lodge workers may
not be found ready and eager to give labor to the helping of their
brothers amongst whom they live. What is the use of prattling about
Universal Brotherhood, if you do not live it? Sometimes, in
discussions on Brotherhood, it is spoken of as though it only meant
soft words and well-turned phrases, sentimentality and not reality. It
means work, constant, steadfast, unwearied work, for those who require
service at our hands; not soft words to each other, but work for the
world, that is the true meaning of Brotherhood.

Pass from that to our next field of work, sketched out by our Second
Object. Without that you cannot rightly work for Brotherhood, for you
will not understand the knowledge already garnered. You must learn in
order to teach, you must study in order to understand, and this Object
is not carried on in our Lodges as effectively as it ought to be; for
it is translated into one man studying, and pouring out the fruits of
his study into the open mouths round him on every side. That is all
very well in the beginning when the young bird comes out of the egg.
It is necessary that the father and mother bird should pour food into
the wide open beak; but some of you ought to have gone beyond that in
the thirty-two years of life of the Society: you ought to be ready to
help, and not only to be helped. And the life of the Society will not
be healthy while so few are students, and therefore so few are fit to
teach. Every Lodge should have its classes for study under this
object. There are other ways in which you must learn as well as by the
teaching of brother Theosophists, and there is a plan they are just
adopting in the Paris Lodge for the work of the coming winter, which
is a very good one; instead of Theosophists studying the books of
scholars, and then giving out what they have learned, the French Lodge
is inviting leading representatives of the various branches of
thought, those specially interesting to us, in order that they may put
their knowledge from their own standpoint, and that the Theosophist
may have the advantage of listening to them at first hand. That seems
to me a very admirable plan, and I know not why in some of