riment carefully. And in these matters it is well,
so far as you can, to bring the more scientific members of the Society
into touch with this work; for one of the reasons that Spiritualism
fell into discredit for a time was because the scientific and the
thoughtful abstained from it, and left it in the hands of the
credulous and the unwise. The leaders of the scientific world who
ought to have joined in the work which Sir William Crookes, Alfred
Wallace, and others began, instead of following them and strengthening
their hands, turned their backs on it all, leaving it to be carried on
by those who knew far less than they, and who were not accustomed to
accurate observation and careful recording of phenomena. Now leading
scientific men are beginning to work at it. Along all lines of
psychical research work should be done by us, if we do not mean to
cancel the Third Object in our Society.

Thus, then, a great field of work opens out before us, so wide a
field, so great, that you would have no need to ask for work if you
would only begin to labor along these lines. And take that other line
about which Mrs. Cooper Oakley spoke--the line of Historical Research
into Mysticism. Has it ever struck you how much of the work of our
forerunners remains unknown, because their work is not scanned by
sympathetic eyes? How many of the pioneers in the past centuries lie
under a heap of calumny, because none has tried to understand, none
has tried to realise, the nature of their work? Men like Paracelsus,
Cagliostro, and many another whose name I might mention, who are
crying out, as it were, for research, and thought, and labor on
mystical and occult lines. There again I have good hope that some
really efficient work will be going on; for to my mind one of the
purposes for which our Presidency should exist is to act as a centre
round which every country may gather together, and thus communicate
with each other, and form bodies scattered all over the world for
mutual aid. The strength of our Society is in that unity of thought,
which can only be brought about as one part of the Society realises
that other parts are linked with it, as it ought to be, by the
President of the whole. For the Presidency would be an idle show, if
it is not to be a centre for inspiration and labor. The great work
done by the late President is, as I have said elsewhere, practically
complete; he has given the Theosophical Society an organisation by
which it can