DUTIES OF THE THEOSOPHIST/PART 2

 

THE DUTY OF THE THEOSOPHIST TO SOCIETY

 

Friends :

 

In yesterday's discourse we came to the point that Religion must permeate every activity of a truly re­ligious man, that nothing could be outside his religion, that he could not divide himself up into separate compartments, partly given to God, partly given to business, partly given to the ordinary paths in life. The man is one whole, complete, spiritual Intelligence. The whole of him belongs to God and to man ; and Religion—which we saw meant the realisation of the Self, the realisation of God, the realisation of Unity—in its manifold aspects must necessarily imply service, help in every direction of life where man can need the assistance of man. That is our foundation. Whether we call it Theosophy,or Brahma-Vidya, or, as in the West, Mysticism, there is  no difference in the essential meaning of those terms.  And so, to-day and to-morrow, we are to try to work out into the practical, outside life of man that which  is to flow from his union with God. We are to try to  see how the Theosophist, the truly religious man,  will act in his outward activities and duties : his duty to Society, his duty to his Nation and to Humanity.

Those are the two  lines  of thought  that  we are to follow to-day and to-morrow.

Now, when I say the Theosophist, I am thinking of the man of any faith who has realised what his religion means  to him  by  seeing it rooted in the one Divine Wisdom, in that Para-Vidya of which yesterday I spoke. Sometimes, in fact very often, the religion that a man is born into, that surrounds him in his childhood, that  surrounds him  in his life, in the home, in the country, becomes too much a matter of form, too much a matter of course. Man belongs to his religion because he is  born in one country or another, in one family or another; his faith comes to him like his ancestral tradition and is taken, as they are taken, as a matter of course which  colours  his thoughts  and   his life. Whatever the religion may be, to some extent, that is true ; the child grows into it before he has power of thought and discrimination.    A child  is  born in a Hindu home, he grows up in Hindu life and among Hindu ceremonies ; he hears his father and mother talk of their faith and observe its rules, and so he is moulded outwardly into that form of Hinduism.    As he goes  to school and college, it takes a less pro­minent part in his life, his mind is turned outward; his home influence is less and the school and college influence more ; and when he grows  to manhood, unless  the home  be a truly  religious home, he is a Hindu more in  name than in reality, more in outer form  than   in  the  inner life. So, again, with the Christian: he is born a Christian, he grows up among the  Christian  habits  of thought,  he  lives  in  the Christian environment ; and when he comes to be a man, the religion is again a matter of form rather than of life, and, save in the minority, it does not to any extent influence the outer life of the Christian Nations. So, again, with Islam : the child grows up to reverence his great Prophet, to be proud of his faith, to breathe in its traditions, but with him also, as he grows to man's estate, there is apt to be a conventional acceptance more, perhaps, than real living faith. If any of these come across Theosophy, what does Theosophy do for them, bow does it make them Theosophists ? It begins with the man's own religion ; it deepens his love for it ; it widens his view of it ; the religion becomes more real to him, because he has drunk of the Divine Wisdom, and sees before him the path of the realisation of God. It makes the religion more spiritual, and brings a more living and individual acceptance of it instead of a hereditary belief; and that is the great service Theosophy does to the men of every faith. The Hindu becomes more Hindu when he is a Theo-sophist, and not less. It widens him, it spiritualises him, it fills up what were sometimes empty forms with the life of the Spirit Himself. The Musalman, again, realises more than before the greatness of his own Prophet, and His place in the Hierarchy of Teachers. He realises what Lord Muhammad came to teach, what he added to the knowledge of the then world. The Christian realises, when he becomes a Theosophist, that Religion is not a matter for this day or the other, for this place or the other, but the all-pervading power in the life which makes it a liv­ing reality. He breaks down the walls of separation, he realises the unity of religions, but he is a better Christian, a truer follower of Christ, when he has accepted the Brotherhood of religions, and sees his brethren in every faith that uplifts and consoles human life : so that really, if may put it so without offence, a Theosophist is a man who takes his religion in earnest. He wants to live it, not only to pro­claim it. He wants to identify himself with the spirit of his own Great Prophet.

 

But now, there is something more that a Theosophist must recognise : he must bring Religion into every part of his life ; he must see that nothing stands aside from it ; but in every activity he must realise that activity is to be an act of service and not an action which seeks for fruit. Unless the Theosophist can do that, he is no true Theosophist. The great teaching of the Lord's Song—the Bhagavad-Gita— what is the whole of that except a repetition of the same statement ?—Act, work, but remember that action binds, save action which is done for the sake of sacrifice. That is the central truth of action. Every action—good, bad, indifferent—binds you to the wheel of births and deaths. As long as you look for personal gain, as long as you look for individual profit, nay, as long as you work in order in any way to serve yourself, that action binds you, that action holds you firm in the grip of karma. How can you be free ? I have just given you the word of freedom : Sacrifice—that which is done for the sake of carrying out the Divine Will in the world, that which is done because you feel yourself part of one Life found in every one around you, equally dwelling. That which you do for the whole, not for a part, that which you do as living in God and doing God's work—that action alone does not bind the man, for it is an action that is sacrifice, and has no binding power ; and that sort of action is what we call Service. Service is that which is done for love's sake for another. It is not true service which is paid with wages. I know you call a man a servant, whose time, whose body, you buy for so many rupees a month ; that is the lower service, the service of those souls who are in the stage symbolised by the Shudra—-the younger souls. But the higher service which reproduces in the spiritual world the position of the Shudra here—the Sannyasi, the man who has given his life to Service, he is the highest because he is willing to be the lowest—that service, unpaid for, unrecompensed, done for the welfare of the world, that is the true service, and, that is the service that the Theosophist must give Service, then, is his note.

 

What, again, said Shri Krshna about liberation? " Our forefathers, seeking liberation, were intent" upon the welfare of the world "—not going away to cave or jungle, not isolating themselves in order to find Self-realisation. That is an earlier stage. Rut when the Self is found, when a man realises, however imperfectly, his unity with the Supreme, when he begins really to break the bonds of the heart, then it is that, seeking liberation, he becomes intent upon the welfare of the world. That is the great truth. Liberation does not mean that you do not return to this mortal world. It means that you are not obliged to return.    It means that you have become immortal, and that you choose your own road. It means that if the world wants you, you are willing to live in it. It means that wherever the world wants you, thither you are ready to go. It means that you are tied to nothing external ; only the will of God is your directing force. Yon may live in this or in another world, but wherever yon live, you are a liberated Spirit; there is nothing that can bind you ; there is nothing that can hold you ; there is nothing that can soil you ; you are God, living in the human form and carrying out the Divine Will among the activities of mortal men. That is real service ; only then can you give a perfect service, because you want nothing for yourself. You know how the world changes, when you begin to give up the desire for everything it can give. Perhaps in the past you have worked for money ; you give up all care for it, you only think of usefulness, you empty out your hands, you keep nothing in them; but those empty hands become vessels to receive everything that is wanted for the welfare of the world. Sometimes people say to me: "Where do you get all your money from ? You are poor ; we know your income ; we know how little you have. How is it you can do this, that and the other, for this school and for that ? Where does that money come from ?" And the Government suspects me for it. (Laughter.) The Income-tax Collector is always coming round and asking: " What is your income ?" I show my boobs and say : " Here is all ; you can see exactly what I earn, which is not much." "But where do you get it from ? First the Revenue man comes then the District Magistrate comes, then the neighbouring Collector comes from the town of Madras, and over and over again : "Where do you get it from ?" I say : " People give it to me." Then they do not under­stand. I believe sometimes they thought that I got it from the Germans. (Laughter.) So they shut me out of Bombay and they shut me out of the Central Provinces. (Cries of " Shame ".) It is rather funny when you come to think of it. What does it matter where I work ? Wherever I am, I do my own work, which is God's work. No Governor, no Chief Commissioner, can hinder one who only works for God. People give me money, and to me they are God's agents. Money comes because I do not want it for myself, and it is only the empty hands that are filled by God. As Shri Krshna said : " When I have stripped a man of everything, then I give him Myself." And where Shri Krshna is, there is power, there is wealth, and there is victory. That is what I mean by a life of Service.

 

Do not think that I mean that my own life of service is perfect ; it is not. I am but a learner in the Divine school ; but the lesson has gone far enough for me to be able to tell you that, by my own personal experience, I know that the promises are true. All of us can, better or worse, live that life.

 

I have said duty in Society and duty in the Nation and Humanity. What is the distinction ? The distinction is rather vague, but I will tell you what I mean. I mean by Society those social customs, that social environment which is not dependent on tile force of a definitely established law—the religion, the traditions, the habits, the -ways of life; and I include in that all those social arrangements by which men live when they draw themselves together into groups which are larger or smaller. By the Nation, I mean that body politic, in the wider sense, which is in the framework of human law, where the powers of compulsion are exercised, where you have an organism recognised as a separate entity, inform­ed by a National Spirit who gives it its shape and its characteristics.

 

To-day, then, under the head of Society, I will try to put to you, however roughly and imperfectly, how the Theosophist should act in his own social environment. It will differ in different Nations. I ' am thinking of India especially, because I am speaking to Indians. In Europe the social problems after the War will be different from our problems here. They will have to try to reconstitute on a different basis the relations of labour and capital. The soldiers, coming back from the larger life, will no longer be content with the cramped environments in which in the past they had led their lives. There has been a terrible dislocation of trade. All human industry has been turned to destructive activities instead of constructive. Only as much is done constructively as is wanted for the carrying on of the life of the Nation : its food, its clothes, its shelter. Some of the men must still give their labour to these. Women have taken the place of men ; women are working in the fields ; they are working  in  the  factory ;   they  are working where munitions are produced—a terrible work for women's fingers to make the bursting shells which shall kill the children of other mothers, and carry desolation into the homes. It is inevitable ; there is no blame on any. The Nations are in the grip of a terrible fate, and they are working oat the natural fruit of materialism, which had put God outside human life, and had tied Him into a steel framework of religion. The whole of that, then, has to be reconstituted. They will have to deal with the terrible dispropor­tion of the sexes. They will have to deal with woman's labour and child labour, which has taken the place of men's. They will have to deal with that complicated relationship between capital and labour, that had already almost brought England to the verge of destruction, you may remember, before the War broke out. They will have to deal with the whole question of criminality, and on that I have something to say for India. They have found one striking fact in the War ; viz., that the young men who tended to criminality, who were rough, who were what they call " hooligans," who recognised no social ties and no social duties—those have very often turned into men of courage, of vigour, who have distinguished themselves in this terrible War. There were some men set free from gaol who had been punished for offences against Society, who have won distinction on the field of battle, and that is valuable as showing that very often the nature which does not fit into a frame of rigid conventions, fails to fit into it not from any kind of sinfulness, but from over-abundance of  life and energy, which are not under the control of the conscience and the mind. That is what has been too much forgotten. They are beginning to recognise it in England now.

 

I read the other day in a great paper that the naughty boys, the boys whom nobody could manage, the boys who were always getting into mischief, were captured largely by the Boy Scout movement; those who were sometimes sent to reformatories, because they could not be managed—they had made very good soldiers, and the paper said that their high spirits, their physical vigour, their insubordination, are priceless National assets for the building up of the citizens of to-morrow. Oh ! that that idea might spread through our schools and colleges in India. Oh ! that men could see that boyish uproar, the boyish tendency to tumult, is very often nothing more than the overflow of animal spirits, without the sense and the reason to keep them within bounds ; that our teachers would understand that the high-spirited boy is not to be broken but to be trained, that we want those boys to make our Indian future, and to be the brave citizens of to-morrow, when they have learnt self-control and self-discipline; that is the educational ideal of to-morrow.

 

Three things you must remember as guiding prin­ciples, when you deal with social matters. Karma must never be forgotten. Reincarnation must never be forgotten. Brotherhood must never be forgotten. Let us apply those principles first to the large numbers of our people here, whom we call the submerged classes. People call them the depressed classes. Submerged   is  my  word. I  do  not  like depressed ; it sounds so dull, so sad, so miserable. I prefer submerged. They are down below the surface of happy society, and we have to lift them up. There lies the first great Indian duty of service. Every Nation has the same problem. Do not imagine that it is only you whose society is built upon a struggling mass of helpless people who are sacrificed for the sake of the rest. It is the same in England, wealthy as England is—though there are not so many of them. In England we speak of a submerged tenth, here of a submerged sixth. We have more. In England, we say that in every ten human beings in the population of London,, there is one who will die in the workhouse, in the prison, or in the hospital. They are men and women who are always on the verge of starvation ; a little push and they fall over the precipice. Every Nation from the far-off past has been built upon that mass of suffering humanity. The great Empires of Babylon, of Nineveh, of Persia, nay of Rome and Egypt—they were all built upon what was practically a slave class—generally chattel slavery, but always slavery. They have fallen because they were built against Brotherhood. They have fallen because they tried to go against the universal law of Love ; and just as you might make a building and build it without regard to the law of equilibrium and gravitation, and it will fall because you disregarded the law, so the Empires of the past have perished one after another, because they denied the law of Brotherhood, and built their security on the bondage of man and not on his liberty. Law is vindicated by destroying what is against it quite as much as by pro­tecting that which is done in accordance therewith. And they  have passed. Now, one  thing  has saved India, older than the oldest but living, while they are -only skeletons in the far-off sepulchre of history, dug up by excavators through  the  surface of the earth, who, burrowing below the surface, bring up frag­ments, showing how glorious were those civilisations, how mighty their power,  how deep their learning. And   what  is  it that  has  saved  India—India  that traded  with  Babylon,  that traded with Persia, that traded with Egypt, that traded with Rome ? The one thing  that  has  saved her is that she has never quite lost sight of the great principle of Brotherhood, for, as Manu taught, let the Shudra be the younger son in the household—a member of the family and not out­side the family pale. And although India has sinned grievously  in  this  matter,  she has not sinned unto death ;   although she has forgotten, she has not quite lost the memory of a more brotherly past: and through many  tribulations she has purged away her transgressions;   through   many   sufferings  she  has paid the  debt  of  her National Karma, and she has finally  expiated the debt  by being made the servant of another Nation, and thus has paid to the uttermost the  debt that she owed to the Karma that she had made. That is all.

 

Now our duty is to lift our submerged brethren on to the level of  National  consciousness, so that they may   know  themselves  as  part of a living Nation Sometimes   I  think that we  may  do that best if we realise  that  we owe to them everything that makes our physical civilisation clean and pure and comfort­able. We look down on these submerged men and women, but we are standing on their shoulders, and they keep us out of the mire in which otherwise our feet would be plunged. It is they who keep us clean, they who make our civilisation possible, they who make our homes healthy, they who by their sacrifice make our lives such as they are, refined, clean, and cultivated. Shall we despise them, or shall we not rather honour them ? Shall we look down upon them, or shall we not rather be grateful to them, and shall we not realise that we owe to them the culture that we possess, because their hands keep our civilisation clean by doing all those lower functions which we should have to do for ourselves were it not for them ? That is how I would ask you to look at these sub­merged classes. If they were not there, your brains would have found out forms of machinery by which all the more repulsive kinds of labour might be worked out. If they did not help you, intelligence would have made that labour unnecessary in a highly cultivated Society. And so at least to them you might all, from mere gratitude, do that which you can do-—every single one of you. You must treat them with respect, and not with contempt. You must speak gently to them, instead of harshly. I have heard good men but thoughtless men, of noble instincts and pure life but not realising what they were doing, by the force of habit, by their ordinary ways of speaking, speak to a scavenger, to a Chandala, to a Pariah—call him what you will—in a tone, in a manner, with an air of superiority and of pride, that wounded the sprouting self-respect in that man and made his uplift more difficult. No class cap rise until self-respect begins, and how can a man, always treated with contempt from childhood, respect himself ? It is no good your saying: " Let him respect himself and we will respect him." You must begin, you on whom the duty of the higher is thrown, for the higher is responsible for the lower, as the elder brother is responsible for the bringing up of the younger. These are our younger brothers and sisters. If we neglect them, how shall God think of and take care of us ? We are more below the Highest than they are below us. We share a common body, we share a common flesh and blood. Shall we not see the Self in the Chandala, and honour the One Life in the embodi­ment of the Pariah ? That is a duty of the Theo-sophist to the submerged classes—to begin with those he meets in his daily life, to say a kind word, to answer a salute. Sometimes one of these poor men bows humbly as his master passes, and his master walks with his head up in the air and gives no answer to the salute. Is that brotherly, is that Theosophical, is that following the command of Shri Krshna, that says that the man who sees the One Self in all equally dwelling, that is the man who knows ? I would ask you in your personal dealings to introduce the affectionate human factor that teaches a man to respect himself by showing respect first to him. My Hindu brothers, our brethren of Islam are in this respect better than Hindus. Once let a man embrace the faith of the great Prophet Muhammad, and he  is a brother to every other son of Islam, no matter what his birth was, nor what his upbringing may have been. That is one of the great lessons, I think, that Islam was sent to India to teach—a real brotherhood, and that is a lesson we must learn from Islam. I might put it on a more selfish ground that, if you do not treat them as your brothers as a Musal-man does, you are building up those who ought to be Hindus into followers of another faith ; but I do not want to put it on that ground, because that savours of selfishness. You know that a Panchama who becomes either a Christian or a Musalman has privileges among the Hindus that a Hindu Pariah does not share. That surely is foolish, silly, as well as criminal, for you are stabbing your own great religion in the back when you give to a Christian or a Musalman outcaste more courtesy than you give to a man who still clings to your ancient faith ; and I know nothing more pathetic, nothing that more touches the heart, than to see the way in which these ill-used outcastes cling to the ancient faith of their ancestors, although it treats them with more contempt and ignominy than the rival religions that live on the soil of India. There then lies your first social duty. Treat them kindly, helpfully, and make them understand that they are brothers—younger brothers, yes, that I grant—but the younger brother is more kindly treated than the elder. If anybody goes short in a household, it is not the baby that goes short—it is always the elders. Apply that to our social life and realise that those who are—many of them—children in, soul have a claim upon you, their elder brothers, as. We have claim on those Elder Brothers of humanity of whom yesterday I spoke. Respect is the first step, then education, then training in trade or profession, giving them every opportunity of rising.

 

Pass from that, for I have but brief time, and take another point which I must address again especially to my Hindu brethren. The social custom here is very early marriage. It is weakening. The marriage age is not as a rule as young as it was a few years ago ; but still we have, down in Madras, widows who have not yet Seen the last day of their first year of mortal life—babies who are widows because married in their babyhood. None of you would approve of that, I know, but the point you have to consider from the standpoint of the Theosophist—the man who really tries to live Religion—is that you should see written in the body of a boy and girl those laws of God that cannot be interpolated, that cannot be miscopied, that cannot be changed, as can written manuscripts or printed books. The girl who is married before she is physiologically fit to be a mother—now that does not mean what is called puberty, it means that she is not sufficiently devel­oped to bear a child normally, without special danger to the child, without special danger to the mother, and that is not the case with any girl until she has completed at least sixteen years of life—is married in disregard of those laws. You may say : "How do you know it is dangerous ?" The census shows it ; it is quite easy to see if you take the trouble to look. You will find that the death curve in Hindu  married girls rises  suddenly at the age of fifteen and drops again at the age of twenty-five. Between those ten years, from fifteen to twenty-five, your daughters die more rapidly than at any other age, because you have married them before they are fit for marriage, and put on them the burden of maternity before they are ready to bear a child. It is murder—that preventable death. You have no right to be fathers, if you throw your girl children into that likelihood of early death. God gave you those girl children to be the lights of the Hindu home, to be the companions of their husbands from youth to old age ; you marry them too young, you force them into the anguish of motherhood before their tender frames are fit to bear it, and they die under the strain that you put upon them, and you say it is karma. Yes, karma that they are born of men so ignorant that they put them in the way of death before their time. That is not the way to deal with these problems. You are the makers of karma. You create the karma of early death. It is the same with your boys ; but there you have orthodoxy clearly against you, while it is doubtful on the question of the girl. I have not dealt with the question from the shastraic point of view. I am not competent to do it ; but I find that great Pandits are on both sides. Great Pandits say that girls must be married before puberty, but others equally great say no, and that marriage after puberty is not against the Shastras. I leave that for the Pandits to settle, but I say that the law of God written in the body cannot be forged, while the Shastras  may be.    If the two clash, it is the natural law—God in Nature—that should overbear every law which has been at least spoken by human lips and written by human fingers. That is the ground on which I put it. I know that with regard to the boy it is clear. You have no right to marry a boy until he is out of student life. Brahmacharya is the rule for the student, and it has always been a puzzle to me why men who are so rigid in their orthodoxy will not practise the rule of Manu, but simply tear him to pieces and throw the rale aside when they are dealing with their boys at school, forcing them into the Grhastha Ashrama. What is the good of talking about Varnashrama Dharma, if you disregard the Ashramas ? The Ashrama of Brahmacharya is the protection of your sons. But you run into one the Ashrama of Brahmacharya and the Ashrama of Grhastha ; you use the brain of the box to pass crush­ing examinations, and the nervous forces of the boy to generate unhealthy children ; and then you wonder why your physical frames are unfit, why your educated men find nervous diseases so prevalent among them, why they suffer from early heart-disease, why they pass away from diabetes and heart-disease in what should be the splendour of their manhood, and why they are superannuated when the wisdom of age wants a strong body to enable it to be useful to the society in which they live. Look at our students, anaemic, so tired out at the end of their college course that they are not ready to take up the burdens of the world. Those boys ought to be full of vigour, "strong, healthy, eager to take up the world's burdens, bat  you have crushed them under early fatherhood and bound upon the shoulders of a schoolboy the responsibilities of the father of a family. I know that things are changing. Let the Theosophists among you hurry the change, make it go quicker, make it go forward rapidly, for your National life depends on later marriage for your sons and daughters.

 

Pass from that to another point. I told you that I must run over them rapidly. Take the treatment of criminals in this country. Now, there is one thing which is done here which is not done now in any other civilised Nation, and that is the flogging of a man for a petty, contemptible theft. Take the coolies who have to do with the storing of goods. A man steals a few ounces of tobacco—I do not say that he should steal, but I know that these men are often hungry and I am told, although I do not know from personal experience, that if you are hungry tobacco will partly dull the craving of the nerves. The man is caught, the tobacco is there, and he is sentenced to be flogged ; but that is a scandalous thing in a country that pretends to be civilised. Do you sup­pose that an Englishman would be flogged for steal­ing tobacco ? They say that it is degrading for an Englishman, but that which is degrading for an Englishman, who is often, in the lowest ranks of Society, drunken and brutal, is quite as degrading and more degrading for an Indian, who for the most part is gentle, docile, and has an understanding of life that you do not find in the western Nations of the world. He submits, I grant, but what else can he do—poor creature? That shameful punishment of flogging, also the brutal punishment of the stocks, are punishments that you should raise your voices against until you have absolutely swept them away. They have been swept out of other civilised Nations, and you are more civilised as a Nation than any other Nation in the world.

 

You think that is a strange thing to say with all the long lists of illiteracy; but reading and writing do not make civilisation.    I tell you from personal know­ledge that your ordinary peasant, unable to read, un­able to write,  knowing nothing of the larger world around him,  has  been cultivated in the real sense of the    word   by   teaching,   by   singing, by wandering Sadhus and Sannyasins, by training in the great doct­rines of  Reincarnation  and  Karma  that make him understand life   better than many a man with letters of a University Degree after his name. I heard some few years ago in Benares of an Englishman walking along with an Indian, and the Englishman, seeing men carrying bricks for building a house, spoke with some    contemptuous kindness as to the misery, poverty and ignorance  of these men. "Yes," said the Indian,  " let us stop and have a talk." They went  up to the bricklayer and a question was asked : "Why are you  laying bricks and poor and hungry, while this white man is comfortable and well off ? Is it not very unjust ? " "No," said the bricklayer, " it is my own karma ; I made myself a bricklayer in this life and he made himself a sahab ; if I do my work well, I shall be better off in another life, and if he does ill, he will be worse off." When Colonel Olcott died, my own servant, who only learnt to read and write some little time ago, looked at the dead body lying there, with crowds around it, throwing flowers on the ice-cold corpse, and looking at it and touching him­self said : " Little man, great man "—he was speaking of course in Hindi—" if a little man does his dharma, he will become a great man "—no jealousy, no envy, no unkind feeling. He is a servant with little duties to do, but doing them well ; he knew from his religion that he will rise in the social scale as the result of dharma well fulfilled. People who think like that, who face the world like that, are not savages, however illiterate they may be. They are men with understand­ing, who have touched at least the skirts of wisdom, and are capable of rapid acquirement of the ordinary tools of knowledge. I say that to strike, to beat, to flog such a man is worse degradation than if you flogged the ruffian of the London slum, and there ought to be one cry of antagonism in India against this abomination of flogging a man, because his skin is coloured—and coloured skin does not feel as much, I suppose, as white skin. These are some of the things which require change. Something can be done by going to the men in gaols, as many Theosophists are doing, and helping them when they come out. When a man has suffered for the crime he has committed, when he has gone through his imprisonment and the law sets him free, it is not right to leave on him a social brand which makes him a continued criminal, where he ought to be helped to rise to a higher and better life. In Burma it is said that people are very immoral because. they treat the  released  prisoner  exactly   as  one of themselves. But the Burman says to you: " The man did wrong and he has paid the penalty; why should he be punished after he comes out as well as when he is in the gaol ?" Remember the tie of Brotherhood when they come out to a life of freedom in a world that looks on them coldly and with suspicion, and help them back as you would help a younger brother who has fallen, and do not keep them in the criminal class because they have fallen into it in the course of a difficult and very hard life.

 

But it all comes back to Brotherhood, and I would say to you with regard to your general principle, to remember this for our society, our Indian society— Hindu, Musalman, Christian, Jain, Buddhist, taking all the religions—that so long as our younger brothers, so long as our lower classes, are not tenderly cared for, trained and nurtured, so long our Society cannot take its place in the comity of Nations. More is expected from you than from the younger Nations of the West. In a kind of rough and tumble way they have claimed their citizenship, but you are an ancient people ; you have thousands of years be­hind you ; God expects more from you than He expects from the western Nations, and He is calling on you to take your place as leaders in the civilisation of the world. India is destined to take the highest place in the advancing ranks of Nations, and I hope and pray, as I have hoped through all my Theosophical life, that England and India may go forward hand in hand as the leaders of the highest civilisation in the East and West together.    I hope that the wisdom of the East may permeate the rougher mind of the West, that the spirituality of the East, no longer dreamy but practical, as it was in the old days of India, may show that the spiritual man is not a sluggard, is not a dreamer, is not a visionary, but is the greatest force in the world for the uplift of Nations and for the uplift of man ; and this is because I know something of what India is. I do not pretend, to know her thoroughly—for who shall know the Mother of Nations, the Mother of civilisations, with her thousands and tens of thousands of years behind her ?—but I know her by twenty-three years of loving life among her people, I know her by my own incarnated past, and by the love of India, that makes me reckon nothing worth having in comparison with her service. I know her, I love her, I worship her, as I know and love and worship no other country on the surface of the earth, and therefore I would fain see her what she can be, what she is in reality, what she must be in the lives of the men and women born of her ; and because I believe that Theosophy is but your own Para-Vidya. come back to you in a modern phase, therefore I call on every Theosophist—whether a member of the Society or not—to yoke himself to the service of Indian Society and put it in the place in which it ought to be—an example, a model, which Vaivasvata Manu gave for the great Aryan Race, and which will be perfected in you, if you will add your ancient knowledge to the modern thought of the world in which we are.

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The Duty of the Theosophist to his Nation and Humanity-