Let your deeds be the real translation of their meaning.
Economic questions will not attract hearts. The love of God alone will
attract them. Economic questions are most interesting; but the power which
moves, controls and attracts the hearts of men is the love of God.

24 July 1912
Talk to Theosophical Society
The Kensington
Exeter and Boylston Streets, Boston, Massachusetts

Notes by Edna McKinney

In the world of existence there is nothing so important as spirit, nothing
so essential as the spirit of man. The spirit of man is the most noble of
phenomena. The spirit of man is the meeting between man and God. The
spirit of man is the animus of human life and the collective center of all
human virtues. The spirit of man is the cause of the illumination of this
world. The world may be likened to the body; man is the spirit of the
body, because the light of the world is the human spirit. Man is the life
of the world, and the life of man is the spirit. The happiness of the
world depends upon man, and the happiness of man is dependent upon the
spirit. The world may be likened to the lamp chimney, whereas man is the
light. Man himself may be likened to the lamp; his spirit is the light
within the lamp. Therefore, we will speak of this spirit.

The philosophers of the world are divided into two classes: materialists,
who deny the spirit and its immortality, and the divine philosophers, the
wise men of God, the true illuminati who believe in the spirit and its
continuance hereafter. The ancient philosophers taught that man consists
simply of the material elements which compose his cellular structure and
that when this composition is disintegrated the life of man becomes
extinct. They reasoned that man is body only, and from this elemental
composition the organs and their functions, the senses, powers and
attributes which characterize man have proceeded, and that these disappear
completely with the physical body. This is practically the statement of
all the materialists.

The divine philosophers proclaim that the spirit of man is ever-living and
eternal, and because of the objections of the materialists, these wise men
of God have advanced rational proofs to support the validity of their
statement. Inasmuch as the materialistic philosophers deny the Books of
God, scriptural demonstration is not evidence to them, and materialistic
proofs are necessary. Answering them, the men of divine knowledge have
said that all