hich the
waves are light; you can hear because your ear has in it the ether and
the air whose vibrations are sound; and so with everything else.
Myriads of things exist outside you, and you are unconscious of them,
because you have not yet appropriated to your own service that which
is like unto them in outer nature. And you can know God for exactly
the same reason that you can know by sight or hearing--because you are
part of God; you can know Him because you share His nature. "We are
partakers of the Divine Nature," says the Christian teacher. "Thou art
That," declares the Hindu. The Sufi cries out that by love man and
God are one, and know each other. And all the religions of the world
in varied phrase announce the same splendid truth of man's Divinity.
It is on that that Theosophy founds its affirmation that the knowledge
of God is possible to man; that the foundation, then, of Theosophy,
that the essence of its message.

And the value of it at the time when it was re-proclaimed to the world
was that it was an affirmation in the face of a denial. Where Science
began to cry "agnosticism," Theosophy came to cry out "gnosticism." At
the very same time the two schools were born into the modern world,
and the re-proclamation of Theosophy, the supreme knowledge, was the
answer from the invisible worlds to the nescience of Science. It came
at the right time, it came in the right form, as in a few moments we
shall see; but the most important thing of all is that it came at the
very moment when Science thought itself triumphant in its nescience.
This re-proclamation, then, of the most ancient of all truths, was the
message of Theosophy to the modern world. And see how the world has
changed since that was proclaimed! It is hardly necessary now to make
that affirmation, so universal has become the acceptance of it. It is
almost difficult to look back to the year 1875, and realise how men
were thinking and feeling then. I can remember it, because I was in
it. The elder amongst you can remember it, for the same reason. But
for the younger of you, who have begun to think and feel in the later
times, when this thought was becoming common, you can scarcely realise
the change in the intellectual atmosphere which has come about during
these last two-and-thirty years. Hardly worth while is it to proclaim
it now, it is so commonplace. If now you say: "Man can know God," the
answer is: "Of course he can." Thirty-two years ago it was: "I