Part 8

The higher souls of men are closer to men now than they have been for ages. The doors have been opened. Grief and terror and pain and devotion to ideals of duty have raised the race of men in three and a half years as it could not have been raised in a hundred years of peace. If the race falls back now, it will be a lost opportunity. But the race will not fall back.

LETTER XXVIII

A RITUAL OF FELLOWSHIP

_February 8, 1918._

I HAVE been waiting for you half an hour, as you sat sewing a seam and thinking of your friends in France. It warms the heart now to think of France. The tie between the two great republics is being drawn closer and closer.

Shall I tell you an occult secret? The French mixed their blood with ours long ago, and we have loved them ever since. We are now mixing our blood with the blood of France, and France will love us in the days that are to come.

It is a ritual of fellowship, that mixing of blood. English and French and Americans and Italians, Irish, Scotch, and all the others. Is there not a foundation for brotherhood? The blended blood cries from the ground for love.

I see in the eyes of the French their feeling for our men as they march by, or help in the little ways to which American boys are accustomed. Never again will they look upon us as queer people from beyond the sea.

We have travelled in their country and spent our money and swaggered and talked through our noses; but now we are living and dying with them, and we are brothers of mixed blood.

Yes, go back to France when you can. They always loved you because you loved them, but now you will see that they also love your native land.

LETTER XXIX

RECRUITING AGENTS

_February, 1918._

FOR a day or two after America declared that a state of war existed, I spent most of my time in going about this country, studying conditions in both worlds. Even before that survey I had a general idea of how matters stood in those worlds; but I wanted to freshen my memory, for I had a great idea. Many times during my life on earth I had told myself that I had a great idea, and sometimes I put it into execution, and sometimes I failed in doing so. But this time I was determined there should be no failure.

When I had seen from my survey that the materials were all at hand, I sought out a great man, spirit, or whatever you choose to call him.

Then together we mapped out our campaign. Here are the main points of it:

Conservation--where the negative forces should be applied.

Construction--with our positive forces.

Coordination--with the synthetic forces.

We marshalled a group of those strong-minded, strong-willed men and women who had been out here long enough to know not only their way about, but how to impress their thoughts upon material-bodied men and women. These were dispatched here and there, to think, think, think, in the neighborhood of senators and congressmen, chiefs of industry and members of the general public. The burden of their impressed thought was conservation of food, conservation of expenditure, conservation of all material that would be needed for the activities of war.

Others who were filled with a great love for the land of their latest birth, America, went about in bands instilling their patriotic enthusiasm into the hearts and minds of those millions who had too long taken America as a matter of course. They sang patriotic songs, and though they could not be heard by the ears of earth, the spirit of their singing could be felt, and they accomplished much.

Then others, the wisest among old leaders of men, were busy in quelling disorder, in suppressing discontent with the war. Wherever a group of wild-eyed, peace-prating “idealists” got together to talk twaddle, there was one or more of these unseen auditors to put the brakes on responsive enthusiasm to the dangerous principles enunciated.

I will not bore you by giving all the details of this plan of help which we labored to make effective. But there were enrolled more than one million beings out here who have pledged themselves to serve until their services are no longer required. That may not seem to you a great number to help invisibly a nation of more than one hundred millions; but one to every hundred is enough among the active workers, for each is free to choose assistants among those younger in earth experience.

To the one who acted as our commander-in-chief, the generals of this auxiliary army made reports, and many were the strange orders he gave them. But no one questioned his wisdom, and the results have proved it over and over.

One time when I wanted to go North, he sent me to the South, and in Mobile I learned why my course was changed.

It is a wonder that the legislators at the various capitols have not “seen ghosts” during the last months. Perhaps they have. But men are becoming accustomed to the idea of us now. That is one of the good results of the war. In looking across the border for their loved ones, they may encounter the Teachers, even the angels of their loved ones, and be enlarged in mind.

I had an amusing experience in the city of ----. There is a “pacifist” there who has a considerable influence among the members of a certain set, and I found that when he began one of his “philosophic” talks to one or more persons, for he has not lectured publicly, I could bewilder him by speaking in his ear and answering his questions in a way that made him wonder. For, strange to say perhaps, he could hear me. But not believing in the possibility of communication between the worlds, he thought he was having “clairaudient hallucinations,” and consulted a doctor who told him that he had been brooding too much about the war. The doctor, who was not a pacifist, advised our friend to take up ornithology.

Yes, he is young--and will be young for many incarnations.

We have also done our share of recruiting. Those who were later called by the draft were merely encouraged; but there were others who needed only the dream we sent, or the thought we whispered, to move them in the right direction; and when a young man’s country is at war, the right direction is generally towards the nearest recruiting station.

There was a boy in ---- who had been reading about France and the fighting in France with a tightening at the heart, a tightening of horror. He feared the draft. He was not a husky fellow. His labors as bookkeeper in a bank had not developed his leg muscles, and he had a capricious digestion. So he told himself that he would be a failure as a soldier.

But one time when in sleep he came out into our world, I met him and invited him to take a stroll with me. Do you think I took him to a battlefield? Oh, not! I took him to an exercise ground. You may wonder how I could do that at night; but it chanced that he had fallen asleep in the daytime. And I made it easy for him to see down into the world he had temporarily left--to see the exercise ground. It interested him.

And next day the labor over the ledger seemed duller and more monotonous than usual. And he overheard a girl say to a friend at the paying teller’s window, that a sallow faced clerk was not her ideal of a man, that she liked the soldier boys.

When he went for a walk after banking hours, I went along with him, and drew his attention to some marching soldiers who had a good band. The boy went home and looked at himself in the mirror and found that he was sallow, and he reminded himself that he was a clerk.

So he enlisted.

You may wonder why I took so much trouble to gather one uninteresting young man into the fold of Uncle Sam’s army, when we had so many subordinate workers at that business. But I had known the boy’s father twenty years before, and something he had said influenced _me_ towards a decision that enlightened my whole after life.

When that boy returns he will be no longer sallow-faced, and he will be a hero--not a clerk.

I like to pay my debts.

LETTER XXX

THE VIRUS OF DISRUPTION

_February 16, 1918._

“FREEDOM with self-restraint and social responsibility” would be a good motto for Americans in the years that are before them.

The underground and overground propaganda of Bolshevism, Anarchism, etc., inspired and fed by the forces of destruction, can be successfully combated by the spirit of order, of restraint, of responsibility to the body politic.

The end of this war will not be the end of confusion. The world-soul has been inoculated with the virus of disruption, and it will need the wills of millions working together for a common end to expel the poison and restore the body of humanity to health and security.

America as we know it was born of protest against oppression, and the love of liberty, father and mother, positive and negative, in the old days. If now the protest against oppression degenerates into the protest against all restraint, and if the love of liberty degenerates into the love of license, then I may tell you that those who cannot govern themselves have to be governed from outside.

The human race is passing through a period of initiation. The morally weak and the weak of will are always in danger of being carried away. The spirit of destruction finds them ready tools with which to work its will.

The kingdom of heaven is not immediately at hand, and full seven years will be needed to _settle the consciousness_ of mankind after the shaking-up it has received. The dregs, as usual in such cases, have risen and diffused themselves throughout the fluid of the cup.

If there were only a dozen people in the United States who understood or could be made to understand the _occult forces_ behind the present universal unrest, and if those twelve could work together with unity of purpose, some here, some there, with the pen, the voice and the will, under a leader, those twelve might lead the people out of the wilderness. But where are they? Every leader knows that in unity is strength.

And I may mention the opposite law, that in disunity is disintegration.

Bolshevist and anarchist! Finding the world not to their liking, and being unable to adjust to environment so as to satisfy their love of power, or their love of ease, these people have devoted themselves to destroying the society in which they are unsuccessful. They believe themselves right. There is so much of the divine in almost the worst man, that he has to believe he is working for the right even when he is working evil. It is necessary for a murderer to justify his act in order to do it, unless he is swept away by blind passion, and then he seeks to justify passion itself.

The heart of man is superior to the brain of man. Almost anyone can feel a good impulse; but the man who can think independently of his passions is rare and isolate. Popular education does not mean universal reasoning power. But popular education is the beginning; it is the seed out of which will grow the tree of world-intellect.

I have told you of the reign of love that is at length to comfort the hearts of mankind; but I have not told you that it is coming to-morrow or the next day.

If you can get away from the personal and the temporary, and see life and the movements of cycles in perspective, you will see how temporary unrest is only a stage by the way.

He who adjusts to environment adjusts even to unrest. Remember that. The supple tree feels the wind, but its roots cling tight to the soil and the rock of individuality.

Be like the supple tree, America. In the wind that sweeps across the world, cling tight to the soil of freedom and the rock of _social responsibility_. You can save the world if you do not lose your hold on the soil and the rock that have steadied and sustained you.

The anxious eyes of a Europe in conflagration are turned in your direction, your friends with hope, your enemies with dread. When you threw the weight of your strong young body into the scales of justice, you changed the destiny of the world. Yes, it was your destiny to do it.

All you who have studied “occultism,” which merely means knowledge too profound to be understood by the material-minded,--you who have studied occultism know that to the candidate for initiation come trials and tests, and that without them he cannot go on. Think of the human race as a candidate for initiation. If your mind is developed beyond the minds of your fellows--you, and you, and you--do not forget that you are united to them by an indissoluble bond. You cannot break away from the race. You may rise above it as the Master does, or sink beneath it as the lost souls do; but the link between you and those other fragments of God can only be broken at your peril.

The Master works for the race, knowing well that he cannot safely ignore it. Even if he made himself equal with the gods and desired to build a world of his own, he would have to take the substance for it from the common reservoir of substance. If like a spider he could spin his world-web from himself, he would have to eat the common substance to sustain himself in his power.

You may as well love the race, for you cannot escape it altogether. Even if you rise and dwell in the thin air of the kingdom of the mind, you will feel the wind-currents from your fellows above and below. Some will deny this, but I have made the test.

I recently sought a high place for rest. But the needs of the world pulled me back.

The greatest need of the world for the next few years will be the knowledge of the law of conservation. Retain, O world! the treasures you have labored for throughout the centuries, and discard only the worn-out garments and utensils. The wooden plough and the wooden shoe are no longer needed in a wisely ordered world; but the sciences and the arts you will need, and the Gothic cathedrals you destroy can never be replaced.

LETTER XXXI

THE ALTAR FIRE

_February 18, 1918._

ALWAYS the pull of the opposites! In all the talk of internationalism, let us not forget nationalism. The enemy of the present hour made great use of it, but he did not reckon with its opposite. It is not true internationalism to support spies as commercial agents in all the countries of earth.

America of all nations is best fitted to carry on her standards: Each for all, and all for each.

But in her love for other races, for other nationalities, let her not forget to strengthen and uphold her own.

“My Country, ’tis of Thee!” As that sentiment grows ever stronger in your heart, so will your justice to other nations make you recognize that their countries are of them. For your country was not built upon the idea of world domination, but of freedom--for yourselves and for all men.

Your president has been called a maker of phrases. That is good. A man who can make phrases that shall carry themselves around the world can influence the thought of the world.

“To make the world safe for democracy.” Those words will go down the centuries.

You Americans who love the storied lands of Europe, do not underestimate this land that gave you birth. It is great as the greatest now, and its clock has not yet struck twelve noonday. It is still morning in America. The present day American is the ancestor of the man of the Sixth Race. From many stocks he will spring, and his blood will be blended from that of all the races which have preceded him. He will be unique in his qualities. No man of the older races can imitate him, for his consciousness will be his own.

A man is not, as you have so often said, so many pounds of flesh and bone and blood and sinew, but a man is a state of consciousness. It is because you recognize their state of consciousness as being themselves, that men and women reveal themselves to you.

If--or when--you go back to Europe to live, do not forget your country. Do not remain too long away from it, lest you lose touch with that unique consciousness which shall flower in the Sixth Race.

Yes, a great art will grow up in America. After another fifty years it will be ripe. Let us hope it will not begin to rot thereafter, but like a sound American apple preserve its solidity for a long time.

This war is good for America. It is not well for a race to have so great a material success without some pain and struggle. It is pain that mellows the heart.

America has not yet found her soul, but she will find it. Those Americans who are now broken-hearted are finding their souls.

France found her soul a long time ago, and she is now finding her divinity. Would she have found it but for suffering? The Christ upon the cross is greater than the Christ at the marriage supper in Cana of Galilee.

If I had not wanted you to write this book, I should have sent you back to London, that you might experience the strain of air raids and insufficient food. I should have sent you back to France, that you might see and touch and minister to the wounded.

Though you have endured the strain of the astral world at war, you have not yet seen and touched and tasted the agony of physical suffering that the women of France have seen and touched and tasted. But you cannot live and suffer in too many worlds at once.

Do you not think that our American boys who are fighting now in France will be greater for the experience--whether they live or die? Life in material form is not the only life, and those who make the great sacrifice will gain more than they lose. It is sublime to die for an ideal. “To make the world safe for democracy.”

America is better known to Europeans now than she has been before. Many of you will go and come, as you have done in the past; and a few of you will vitalize the mutual understanding between America and Europe. But you can do that only by glorifying your own nationality in your hearts. I do not mean flaunting it. Let it burn as an altar fire, in the secret temple of your being.

THE END

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.