the power given by the conquering of self.  Otherwise how could they exist, even for an hour, in such a mental and psychic atmosphere as is created by the confusion and disorder of a city?  Unless protected and made safe their own growth would be interfered with, their work injured.  And the neophyte may meet an adept in the flesh, may live in the same house with him, and yet be unable to recognise him, and unable to make his own voice heard by him.  For no nearness in space, no closeness of relations, no daily intimacy, can do away with the inexorable laws which give the adept his seclusion.  No voice penetrates to his inner hearing till it has become a divine voice, a voice which gives no utterance to the cries of self.  Any lesser appeal would be as useless, as much a waste of energy and power, as for mere children who are learning their alphabet to be taught it by a professor of philology.  Until a man has become, in heart and spirit, a disciple, he has no existence for those who are teachers of disciples.  And he becomes this by one method only—­the surrender of his personal humanity.

For the voice to have lost the power to wound, a man must have reached that point where he sees himself only as one of the vast multitudes that live; one of the sands washed hither and thither by the sea of vibratory existence.  It is said that every grain of sand in the ocean bed does, in its turn, get washed up on to the shore and lie for a moment in the sunshine.  So with human beings, they are driven hither and thither by a great force, and each, in his turn, finds the sunrays on him.  When a man is able to regard his own life as part of a whole like this he will no longer struggle in order to obtain anything for himself.  This is the surrender of personal rights.  The ordinary man expects, not to take equal fortunes with the rest of the world, but in some points, about which he cares, to fare better than the others.  The disciple does not expect this.  Therefore, though he be, like Epictetus, a chained slave, he has no word to say about it.  He knows that the wheel of life turns ceaselessly.  Burne Jones has shown it in his marvellous picture—­the wheel turns, and on it are bound the rich and the poor, the great and the small—­each has his moment of good fortune when the wheel brings him uppermost—­the King rises and falls, the poet is feted and forgotten, the slave is happy and afterwards discarded.  Each in his turn is crushed as the wheel turns on.  The disciple knows that this is so, and though it is his duty to make the utmost of the life that is his, he neither complains of it nor is elated by it, nor does he complain against the better fortune of others.  All alike, as he well knows, are but learning a lesson; and he smiles at the socialist and the reformer who endeavor by sheer force to re-arrange circumstances which arise out of the forces of human nature itself.  This is but kicking against the pricks; a waste of life and energy.