rished. The Druids were magicians;
and now it was the dark magic and its practitioners that remained
among them,--at least in Gaul. So of course Augustus proscribed it.

Remember how France has stood, these last seven centuries, as the
teacher of the arts and civilization to Europe; and this idea
that she might have been, and should have been, something far
higher to the Roman world, need not seem at all extravagant. I
think it was a possibility; which Caesar had been sent by the
kings of night to forestall. And so, that Augustus lacked that
reinforcement by which he might have secured for Europe a unity
as enduring as the Chinese Teachers secured for the Far East.

And yet the Lodge did not leave Rome lightless; there was much
spiritual teaching in the centuries of the Empire; indeed, a new
out-breathing in each century, as an effort to retrieve the great
defeat;--and this has been the inner history of europe ever
since. This: raidings from the Godworld: swift cavalry
raidings, that took no towns as a rule, nor set up strongholds
here on hell's border; yet did each time, no doubt, carry off
captives. Set up no strongholds;--that is, until our own times;
so what we have missed is the continuous effort; the established
base 'but here upon this bank and shoal,' from which the shining
squadrons of the Gods might ride. Such a base was lost when
Caesar conquered Gaul; then some substitute for Gaul had to be
found. It was Greece and the East; where, as you may say,
abjects and orts of truth came down; not the live Mysteries, but
the _membra disjecta_ of the vanished Mysteries of a vanished
age. With these the Teachers of the Roman world had to work,
distilling out of them what they might of the ancient Theosophy.
So latterly H.P. Blavasky must gather up fragments in the East
for the nexus of her teaching; she must find seeds in old
sarcophagi, and plant and make them grow in this soil so
uncongenial; because there was no well-grown Tree patent to the
world, with whose undeniable fruitage she might feed the nations.
This was one great difficulty in her way; whe had to introduce
Theosphy into a world that had forgotten it ever existed.

So,--but with a difference,--in that first century. The
difference was that Pythagoreanism, the nexus, was only six
hundrd years away, and the memory of it fairly fresh. Stoicism
was the most serious living influence within the empire; a
system that concerned itself with right