nipotence a satisfactory resting place. God is great enough to do
what has been done and the detail of it is rather an affair for God than
man. Scientific speculation generally has gone back as far as it can go
in the resolution of its forces and laws and recognized its own
limitations, leaving the rest to the theologian and the philosopher. The
result has been a gap which has not been bridged over. Theosophy has
undertaken to bridge that gap. But, examined more carefully, one sees
that the abyss has been crossed by nothing more solid than a fabric of
cloudy speculation. True enough these speculations are ingenious and
touched with suggestive light, but they are strangely insubstantial.
After all they do absolutely nothing more than our Western affirmation
of the immanence of God in life and force and law, and our Western
thought has the advantage alike in simplicity, in scientific basis and
reverent self-restraint.

We might as well recognize, and be done with it, that there are
questions here which in all human probability are insoluble. There are
elements of mystery in life and the universe beyond our present and
likely our future power to definitely resolve. In the end faith can do
nothing more than rest in God and accept as an aspect of life itself the
necessary limits of our position. Our organized knowledge all too
quickly brings us to regions where faith and faith alone completes the
inquiry. But on the other hand, a faith which too far outruns either in
the reach or audacity of its speculation those elements which organized
knowledge supplies and reason validates, loses itself in futilities or
else misleads us altogether. Eastern speculation is too far beyond
either ordered knowledge or right reason to be of any practical use in
the fruitful conduct of life. Believing too much does just as much harm
as believing too little.

Theosophy's seven planes and ascending emanations and sevenfold veils
and all the rest really explain nothing. On the other hand they tempt
their faithful to take conjecture for reality; they create a credulous
and uncritical temper; they are hostile to that honest dealing with fact
which is just one condition of getting on at all. A brave confession of
ignorance is often more truly reverent than knowing too many things
which are not so. As we approach more nearly the reality of things as
they are we find them always unexpectedly simple. The burden of proof is
always upon the murky and the