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Has it occurred to you to wonder why, in that epochal sixth century B.C., when in so many lands the Messengers of Truth were turning away from the official Mysteries, and preaching their Theosophy upon a new plan broadcast among the peoples, Pythagoras, after wandering the east and west to gather up the threads of wisdom, should have elected not to return to Greece, but to settle in Italy and found his Movement there?
Christian Science saves the justice and affirms the love of God by making Him just a God with apparently no concern for and no participation in the shadowed side of life. New Thought saves the love and justice of God by discovering in pain and unhappiness our lack of harmony with Him. Theosophy meets the whole shadowed order along its full front and explains everything in terms of compensation.
Theosophy defends them, justifies them, by explaining them; and when they are understood they cease to be superstitions that blind, and become crutches that help the halting mind to climb to the spiritual life. Let us pass from the world of religious thought, and pause for a moment on the world of artistic thought.
They were split up into different sects, according as they approached more nearly the Eastern theosophy or the platonic philosophy; but in general the Eastern conception, with its symbols and unlimited fantasy, remained dominant.
Theosophy begins at the top and comes down, at least until it reaches our present world; it also begins at the inside and works out. We think of our physical bodies as the instruments, on one side at least, through which the physical world communicates with us, but for the theosophist they are only instruments through which we communicate with the world.
For the fame of this Neo-Platonic Theosophy had traveled by this time right over the empire; and Plotinus in Rome, and in high favor with Gallienus, was a man on whom all eyes were turned. He proposed to found a Point Loma in Campania; to be called Platonopolis.
The brainless fool fulfils himself in low ways in alcoholic saturnalia, in salvation carnivals, in freethought hysterics, in political bombs. The Higher Foolishness expresses itself in aberrations of poetry and art, in table-rapping and theosophy, in vegetarianism, and in mystic calculations about the Beast." "It is you who are the fool," he replied shortly.
Theosophy is not represented by a very large number of organizations and members. But the movement has the sympathy of many who have not taken upon them its name; and the society, at the present time, is certainly in favour with a large number of the educated classes. Orthodox pandits, however, are thoroughly suspicious of the movement; and Mrs.
Theosophy does not speak of evolution as it attempts to account for our material world, it speaks of involution. Here it reverses what is most distinctive in modern Western religious thought as far as modern Western religious thought has accepted evolution.
Theosophy and a large share of what is called theology is simply a refining and subtilizing of mythology. The more difficult and abstract the thought, the more significance it is assumed to possess. The penetrative and exploring power of mere untested speculation is taken for granted.
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