disbelief, or the hopeless cynicism which thinks knowledge impossible, has penetrated far and wide among the cultured, the educated classes, and from them to the masses of the uneducated. That is the phenomenon of modern days alone, that man by hundreds and by thousands despairs of his own immortality. And yet the deepest conviction of humanity, the deepest thought in man, is the persistence of himself, the "I" that cannot die. And with one great generalisation, and one method, Theosophy asserts at once the deathlessness of man and the existence of God; for it says to man, as it was ever said in the ancient days: "The proof of God is not without you but within you." All the greatest teachers have reiterated that message, so full of hope and comfort; for it shuts none out from knowledge. What is the method? Strip away your senses, and you find the mind; strip away the mind, and you find the pure reason; strip away the pure reason, and you find the will-to-live; strip away the will-to-live, and you find Spirit as a unit; strike away the limitations of the Spirit, and you find God. Those are the steps: told in ancient days, repeated now. "Lose your life," said the Christ, "and you shall find it to life eternal." That is true: let go everything that you can let go; you cannot let go yourself, and in the impossibility of losing yourself you find the certainty of the Self Universal, the Universal Life. Pass again from that to another religious point. I mentioned ceremonies, rites of every faith. Those Theosophy looks at and understands. So many have cast away ceremonies, even if they have found them helpful, because they do not understand them, and fear superstition in their use. Knowledge has two great enemies: Superstition and Scepticism. Knowledge destroys blind superstition by asserting and explaining natural truths of which the superstition has exaggerated the unessentials; and it destroys scepticism by proving the reality of the facts of the unseen world. The ceremony, the rite, is a shadow in the world of sense of the truths in the world of Spirit; and every religion, every creed, has its ceremonies as the outward physical expression of some eternal spiritual truth. Theosophy defends them, justifies them, by explaining them; and when they are understood they cease to be superstitions that blind, and become crutches that help the halting mind to climb to the spiritual life.