pillow-cases, letters on branches of trees, and so on. You would all do well to re-read the _Old Diary Leaves_ or _The Occult World_. Each one of you should deliberately ask himself: "Why do I believe these things to be true?" Because it seems to me that most members of the Theosophical Society are rather slipping into the position of the modern Christian, that in order that a miracle may be true it must be old, and if it happens nowadays it must immediately be discredited. That is not rational. But it is a perfectly rational position to take up with all phenomena to say: "I shall not accept one of them unless thoroughly satisfied with the evidence on which it rests"; that is a perfectly reasonable attitude; but what seems to me a little less reasonable is to swallow wholesale the phenomena of the early days, and to look very much askance at anything that happens now; to glance back proudly to the past, and to regard anything which might happen now as wrong, as undesirable. Because if that is the right position, then it ought to be applied all round; it ought to be applied to the early phenomena of the Society as much as to anything that may occur now; and the same rigid demand for evidence should be made as is made at the present time. But, on the other hand, if the evidence be as full and as satisfactory now as that which supported the earlier phenomena, then it does not seem quite reasonable to accept the earlier and deny the later. Let us for a moment see how far the Society has been going along the same line as that along which the other religions have gone--the gradual disappearance of phenomena and the substitution for them of teaching appealing to the reason only, and not to the senses, claiming its authority on grounds which appeal to the consciousness in man, as far as is practicable divorced from matter, or to that consciousness working through comparatively thick and gross veils of matter. After the Coulomb difficulty there was a cessation almost entirely of these phenomena in the Theosophical Society. Two reasons led up to that: first, the utter disinclination of H.P.B. herself to continue to expose herself to the attacks of people with regard to her good faith. She was so maligned and slandered, so many friends turned against her and spoke of the powers she possessed as fraudulent and as tricks, that when her Master raised her from the bed that might have been her death-bed, and would have been, save for His coming to her at Aḍyar, she made the condition that she should not be forced to produce phenomena in the way she had been forced before; that she should be allowed to put that aside. The consent was given. Lion-hearted as she was, she shrank from the storm of slander that broke on her. The other reason was that people belonging to the Society took fright. The pressure of public reprobation was so strong, the force of unbelief so crushing, that the members of the Society