with graceful interpretations of its symbolism, parts of which may have seemed to require apology, when ignorantly taken at the foot of the letter.  But this is merely the beginning of the attack.  If occult philosophy gets before the world with anything resembling completeness, it will so command the assent of earnest students that for them nothing else of that nature will remain standing.  And the earnest students in such eases must multiply.  They are multiplying now even, merely on the strength of the little that has been revealed.  True, as yet—­for some time to come—­the study will be, as it were, the whim of a few; but “those who know,” know among other things that, give it fair-play, and it must become the subject of enthusiasm with all advanced thinkers.  And what is to happen when the world is divided into two camps—­the whole forces of intellectuality and culture on the one side, those of ignorance and superstitious fanaticism on the other?  With such a war as that impending, the adepts, who will be conscious that they prepared the lists and armed the combatants, will require some better justification for their policy before their own consciences than the reflection that, in the beginning, people accused them of selfishness, and of keeping a miserly guard over their knowledge, and so goaded them with this taunt that they were induced to set the ball rolling.

There is no question, be it understood, as to the relative merits of the moral sanctions that are afforded by occult philosophy and those which are distilled from the worn-out materials of existing creeds.  If the world could conceivably be shunted at one coup from the one code of morals to the other, the world would be greatly the better for the change.  But the change cannot be made all at once, and the transition is most dangerous.  On the other hand, it is no less dangerous to take no steps in the direction of that transition.  For though existing religions may be a great power—­the Pope ruling still over millions of consciences if not over towns and States, the name of the Prophet being still a word to conjure with in war, the forces of Brahmanical custom holding countless millions in willing subjection—­in spite of all this, the old religions are sapped and past their prime.  They are in process of decay, for they are losing their hold on the educated minority; it is still the case that in all countries the camps of orthodoxy include large numbers of men distinguished by intellect and culture, but one by one their numbers are diminishing.  Five-and-twenty years only, in Europe, have made a prodigious change.  Books are written now that pass almost as matters of course which would have been impossible no further back than that.  No further back, books thrilled society with surprise and excitement, which the intellectual world would now ignore as embodying the feeblest commonplaces.  The old creeds, in fact, are slowly losing their hold upon mankind—­more slowly in the more