Pass from that to our next field of work, sketched out by our Second Object. Without that you cannot rightly work for Brotherhood, for you will not understand the knowledge already garnered. You must learn in order to teach, you must study in order to understand, and this Object is not carried on in our Lodges as effectively as it ought to be; for it is translated into one man studying, and pouring out the fruits of his study into the open mouths round him on every side. That is all very well in the beginning when the young bird comes out of the egg. It is necessary that the father and mother bird should pour food into the wide open beak; but some of you ought to have gone beyond that in the thirty-two years of life of the Society: you ought to be ready to help, and not only to be helped. And the life of the Society will not be healthy while so few are students, and therefore so few are fit to teach. Every Lodge should have its classes for study under this object. There are other ways in which you must learn as well as by the teaching of brother Theosophists, and there is a plan they are just adopting in the Paris Lodge for the work of the coming winter, which is a very good one; instead of Theosophists studying the books of scholars, and then giving out what they have learned, the French Lodge is inviting leading representatives of the various branches of thought, those specially interesting to us, in order that they may put their knowledge from their own standpoint, and that the Theosophist may have the advantage of listening to them at first hand. That seems to me a very admirable plan, and I know not why in some of the London Lodges you should not try to take a leaf out of our French neighbor's book, and why one Lodge at least should not try, if only for one six months, to bring to that Lodge some leader in the world of thought, who shall tell it what he believes, and explain the lines of his work. If you could persuade specialists along the many lines of study, religious and philosophical, to give you the fruits of their work, you would learn more rapidly, you would learn the spirit of a school in a more satisfactory manner, than when you are only studying books, and then giving out the books you have read. You value, and rightly value, the knowledge that Mr. Mead brings you along his special lines of study, but why should you not have that same advantage similarly from others who follow other lines of thought, and would speak similarly from first-hand knowledge? There is a life in it that there never is in second-hand knowledge, a vigor and strength in it that you can never get when it has only been learned second-hand, and then poured forth. Men who study deeply are glad to find audiences who are willing to listen to the results of their study, and who will give them glad hearing when they come out into the world from the study to tell what by labor and toil they have learned. And so I suggest that some of you