For our attitude to man and to nature, expressed or not, has something of the effect of ritual, of evocation.  As our aspiration so is our inspiration.  We believe in life universal, in a brotherhood which links the elements to man, and makes the glow-worm feel far off something of the rapture of the seraph hosts.  Then we go out into the living world, and what influences pour through us!  We are “at league with the stones of the field.”  The winds of the world blow radiantly upon us as in the early time.  We feel wrapt about with love, with an infinite tenderness that caresses us.  Alone in our rooms as we ponder, what sudden abysses of light open within us!  The Gods are so much nearer than we dreamed.  We rise up intoxicated with the thought, and reel out seeking an equal companionship under the great night and the stars.

Let us get near to realities.  We read too much.  We think of that which is “the goal, the Comforter, the Lord, the Witness, the resting-place, the asylum and the Friend.”  Is it by any of these dear and familiar names?  Alas, our souls are becoming mere bundles of theories.  We follow the trail of the Monad, but often it is only in the pages of The Secret Doctrine.  And we talk much of Atma, Buddhi, and Manas.  Could we not speak of them in our own tongue and the language of today will be as sacred as any of the past.  No wonder that the Manasa do not incarnate.  We cannot say we do pay reverence to these awful powers.  We repulse the living truth by our doubts and reasonings.  We would compel the Gods to fall in with our philosophy rather than trust in the heavenly guidance.  We make diagrams of them.  Ah, to think of it, those dread deities, the divine Fires, to be so enslaved!  We have not comprehended the meaning of the voice which cried, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” or this, “Lift up your heads O y gates.  Be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.”  Nothing that we read is useful unless it calls up living things in the soul.  To read a mystic book truly is to invoke the powers.  If they do not rise up plumed and radiant, the apparitions of spiritual things, then is our labor barren.  We only encumber the mind with useless symbols.  They knew better ways long ago.  “Master of the Green-waving Planisphere, .....  Lord of the Azure Expanse, .... it is thus we invoke,” cried the magicians of old.

And us, let us invoke them with joy, let us call upon them with love, the Light we hail, or the Divine Darkness we worship with silent breath, hymning it in our hearts with quietude and more enraptured awe.  That silence cries aloud to the Gods.  Then they will approach us.  Then we may learn that speech of many colors, for they will not speak in our mortal tongue; they will not answer to the names of men.  Their names are rainbow glories.  Yet these are mysteries and they cannot be reasoned out or argued over.  We cannot speak truly of them from report,