the
Maker of the Stars and Suns: as if I lay already snug in
Abraham's bosom, and watched you parched and howling.--The
Mysteries were gone; there was no Center of Light in the West,
from which the thought-essence of common sense might seep out
purifying year by year into men's minds; Theosophy the grand
antiseptic was not; so such tomfoolery as this came in to take
its place. You must react to this from indifference, and to
indifference from this;--two poles of inner darkness, and
wretched unthinking humanity wobbling between them;--so long as
you have no Light. What then is the Light?--Why, simply
something you cannot confine in a church or bottle in a creed:
and this is a proposition that needs no proving at all, because
it is self-evident. There was a fellow in English Wiltshire
once, they say, who planted a hedge about his field to keep
in the cuckoo from her annual migration. The spirit of
Cuckoo-hedging came in, in the first centuries A. D.

It was totally unknown to the Roman polity. Whatever inner
things any man or nation chose to bear witness to, said the Roman
state, were to be supposed to exist; and might be proclaimed,
were they not subversive of the public order, for the benefit of
any that needed them. There were two exceptions: Druidism; we
have glanced at a possible reason why it was proscribed in Gaul
by Augustus; another reason may been that the Druids clung to
the memories of Celtic--and so anti-Roman--great things forelost.
The other exception was the first historical world-religion that
proclaimed the doctrine,--_Believe or be damned!_

Over the portals of the first century A.D., says H.P. Blavatsky,
the words "the Karma of Israel" are written. Judaism had never
tried to impress itself on the world, as the religion that was
born from it did.--It is rarely that one finds sane views taken
as to Jewish history; it is a history, and a race, that provoke
extreme feelings. A small people, originally exiled from India,
that had had eight thousand years of vicissitudes since;
sometimes, it is necessary to think, high fortunes;--no doubt an
age of splendor once under their great king Solomon, or some one
else for whom the traditional Solomon stands; oftenest, perhaps,
subjected to their powerful neighbors in Egypt, Babylon, or
Assyria, and latterly Rome: you may say that no doubt they were
in the long run no better and no worse than the rest of mankind.
They had great qualities, and the fa