of sky, as try to peg yourself out a special claim in these!  You cannot do it, and the first instinct of man should be that you cannot do it.  But lose sight of these Divine Things; lose the sense that perceives them, their essential universality, their inevitable universality;—­and where are you?  What are you to do about the inner life?—­Why, for lack of reality, you shall take a sham:  you shall hatch up some formula of words; or better still, take the formula already hatched that comes handiest; call it your creed or confession of faith; fix your belief on that, as supreme and infallible, the sure and certain key to the mysteries within and around you;—­ then you may cease to think of those mysteries altogether; the word-formula will be enough; it is that, not thought, not action, that saves.  I believe in—­such and such an arrangement of consonants and vowels;—­and therefore I am saved, and highly superior; and you, poor reptile, who possess not this arrangement, but some other and totally false one;—­you, thank God, are damned.  You are lost; you shall go to hell; I scorn and look down on you from the heights of the special favor of the Maker of the Stars and Suns:  as if I lay already snug in Abraham’s bosom, and watched you parched and howling.—­The Mysteries were gone; there was no Center of Light in the West, from which the thought-essence of common sense might seep out purifying year by year into men’s minds; Theosophy the grand antiseptic was not; so such tomfoolery as this came in to take its place.  You must react to this from indifference, and to indifference from this;—­two poles of inner darkness, and wretched unthinking humanity wobbling between them;—­so long as you have no Light.  What then is the Light?—­Why, simply something you cannot confine in a church or bottle in a creed:  and this is a proposition that needs no proving at all, because it is self-evident.  There was a fellow in English Wiltshire once, they say, who planted a hedge about his field to keep in the cuckoo from her annual migration.  The spirit of Cuckoo-hedging came in, in the first centuries A. D.

It was totally unknown to the Roman polity.  Whatever inner things any man or nation chose to bear witness to, said the Roman state, were to be supposed to exist; and might be proclaimed, were they not subversive of the public order, for the benefit of any that needed them.  There were two exceptions:  Druidism; we have glanced at a possible reason why it was proscribed in Gaul by Augustus; another reason may been that the Druids clung to the memories of Celtic—­and so anti-Roman—­great things forelost.  The other exception was the first historical world-religion that proclaimed the doctrine,—­Believe or be damned!