that it will be immensely unlike the past.  Whatever we have learned or failed to learn, large opportunities are given us daily for discovering those inward regions whence all light shines down into the world.  Genius is one method of the Soul’s action; one aspect of its glory made manifest.  We are given opportunities to learn what invites and what hinders its outflow.  To all common thinking, it is a thing absolutely beyond control of the will; that cannot be called down, nor its coming in anywise foretold.  But we know that the Divine Self would act, were the obstructions to its action removed; and that the obstructions are all in the lower nature of man.

Worship the Soul in all thoughts and deeds, and sooner or later the Soul will pour down through the channel thus made for it; and its inflow will not be fitful and treacherous, but sure, stable, equable and redeeming.

This is where all past ages of brilliance have failed.  Cyclically they were bound to come:  the fields ripened in due season; but the wealth of the harvest depended on the reapers.  The Elizabethan Age, with all its splendid quickening of the English mind, was coarse and wicked to a degree.  All through the wonderful Cinquecento, when each of a dozen or more little Italian city-states was producing genius enough to furnish forth a good average century in modern Europe or America, Italy was also a hotbed of unnatural vices, lurid crimes, wickedness to stock the nine circles of Malebolge.  So too Athens at the top of her glory became selfish, grasping, conscienceless and cruel; and those nameless vices grew up and grew common in her which probably account for the long dark night that has spread itself over Greece ever since.  It is a strange situation, that looks like an anomaly:  that wherever the Human Spirit presses in most, and raises up most splendor of genius, there, and then the dark forces that undermine life are most at work.  But we should have no difficulty in understanding it.  At such times, by such influxes, the whole inner kingdom of man is roused and illumined; and not only the intellect and all noble qualities are quickened, but the passions also.  The race, and the individual, are stirred to the deepest depths, and no part of you may have rest.  What then will happen, unless you have the surest moral training for foundation?  The force which rouses up the highest in you, rouses up also the lowest; and there must be battle-royal and victory at last, or surrender to hell.  Through lack of training, and ignorance of the laws of the inner life, the Higher will be handicapped; the lower will have advantage through its own natural impulse downward, increased by every success it is allowed to gain.  And so all these ages of creative achievement exhaust themselves; every victory of the passions drawing down the creative force from the higher planes, to waste it on the lower; till at last what had been an attempt of the Spirit to lift humanity up on to