learn to be reverent to the great; and if you can develop those qualities in you, then the coming Christ may be able to number you among His disciples, and the welcome that the earth shall give Him shall not again be a cross. Lecture VII The Larger Consciousness and its Value Friends: During the whole of the lectures, of which the discourse of to-night is the last, I have taken for granted the existence of a larger consciousness in man than that which we know at the present time as our physical or waking consciousness. Over and over again I have had occasion to allude to it, once or twice I dwelt for a few moments upon it, but I could not interrupt the course of what I had been putting to you by any detailed description of the larger consciousness, or of the instruments of that consciousness, the body or bodies of man. It seemed to me that the work I had been trying to do would remain somewhat imperfect unless I tried to place before you, ere quitting the subjects I had been dealing with, something with regard to this larger consciousness in man; a consciousness which exists in every one of us; which functions intermittently in all of us; which is in course of unfolding in humanity at the present time. And side by side with the unfolding of the consciousness there goes a continual evolution of the bodies in which that consciousness expresses itself, and it is that subject that I want to deal with to-night, trying to put before you clearly and definitely the theory which is studied by Theosophists with regard to this matter, a theory which some of us have proved to be true by our own investigations, and—which is a far more important thing—confirmed by the great Scriptures of the world’s religions, the testimony which has been given to man by seers, by prophets of the highest, the most inspired, order. Sometimes we are inclined to lay more stress on contemporary evidence than on the evidence that comes from the great Scriptures of the world. It seems to me as though that were a little along the line of hiding the sun by holding a plate quite close to the eyes. For it is quite clear, when you come to think of it, that testimony which may be given nowadays by half-developed students cannot in the nature of things be nearly as valuable as that of the great prophets and seers of humanity, embodied, however mystically and allegorically, in the great Bibles of humanity. In fact, the testimony of the modern-day investigator should be checked and governed by those mightier and wider revelations, and it is always a point of satisfaction, a point of confirmation to the modern and partially developed seer when he finds that his own investigations throw light on some of the statements of these Scriptures, and that the Bibles of the race become more illuminating in some of their obscurer passages by the light that he may have been able to gain by his own investigations. I am not, then, pretending for one moment that anything