and
strange indeed it would be, well-nigh incredible, if the profoundest
instinct of all in nature's highest product on the physical plane, if
that ineradicable instinct, that seeking after God and that thirst for
the Supreme, were the one and only instinct in nature for which there
is no answer in the depths and the heights around us. And it is not
so. That argument is strengthened and buttressed by an appeal to
experience; for you cannot, in dealing with human experience and the
testimony of the human consciousness, leave entirely out of court,
silenced, as though it were not relevant, the continual testimony of
all religions to the existence of the spiritual nature in man. The
spiritual consciousness proves itself quite as definitely as the
intellectual or the sensuous consciousness proves itself--by the
experience of the individual, alike in every religion as in every
century in which humanity has lived, has thought, has suffered, has
rejoiced. The religious, the spiritual nature, is that which is the
strongest in man, not the weakest; that which breaks down the barriers
of the intellect, and crushes into silence the imperious demands of
the senses; which changes the whole life as by a miracle, and turns
the face of the man in a direction contrary to that in which he has
been going all his life. Whether you take the facts of conversion, or
whether you take the testimony of the saint, the prophet, the seer,
they all speak with that voice of authority to which humanity
instinctively bows down; and it was the mark of the spiritual man when
it was said of Jesus, the Prophet: "He taught them as one having
authority, and not as the scribes." For where the spiritual man
speaks, his appeal is made to the highest and the deepest part in
every hearer that he addresses, and the answer that comes is an answer
that brooks no denial and permits no questioning. It shows its own
imperial nature, the highest and the dominant nature in the man, and
where the Spirit once has spoken the intellect becomes obedient, and
the senses begin to serve.

Now Theosophy, in declaring that this nature of man can know God,
bases that statement on identity of nature. We can know--it is our
continual experience--we can know that which we share, and nothing
else. Only when you have appropriated for yourself something from the
outside world can you know the similar things in the outside world.
You can see because your eye has within it the ether of w