always rage round persons, and those who think more of personalities than of principles are inevitably shaken out. If you make a person’s presence or absence a reason for being in or out of the Society, you are showing the spirit of separation, which cannot realise a principle, but thinks only of the passing and transient personality. What can it matter whether any one of you agrees or disagrees with Mr. Leadbeater, or with Mr. Mead, or with anyone else? These are all persons. The principle of the Society remain unshaken. Presidents are elected and Presidents die, but the Society goes on. What folly, then, to give up a place in a mighty movement because the person temporarily at the head of it is a person who does not exactly fit into the shape you have made as your own particular ideal. It does not matter. The Society is not bound by its President any more than by anyone else. It is bound only by its great central principle of Brotherhood. And so all of you who have stood through the past shaking have shown that you care more for principles than for persons, and it does not matter whether, so to speak, you have agreed or disagreed with the President so long as you have stood firm within the Society; for there lies the principle, whilst the other is only personality. Cling, then, to that principle to which you have clung through the past storm; recognise that whether a person be right or wrong, noble or ignoble, great or small, that is a matter of secondary importance. The work of the future lies in the movement, and not in the hands of any particular individual who may happen to be here. Whether you or I come back to this great movement in other lives depends on ourselves, and not on the opinion that anyone else may happen to have about us. None can throw us out of it if we are worthy to remain in it; none can keep us in it if we are unworthy to be part of it. And realising kārmic law, realising the greatness of the movement and its work in the future, let us join hands, whether we agree or disagree with each other on any other matter save that of Brotherhood, and go forward into the future that is unfolding before us, brighter than ever the past has shone; go forward to the making of the sub-race out of which the Root Race shall spring, under the banner of our Manu and our Bodhisattva, the mighty Ones of years and millennia to come. Lecture III The Catholic and Puritan Spirit in the Theosophical Society The Value and Danger of Each I want to try to trace out the somewhat difficult subject of the place of the Puritan and the Catholic Spirit in our Society. I want to show that both types are necessary in every great movement; that both have their value and place, yet also their dangers. And if we realise that both are necessary, it may help each type to be tolerant as regards the other, and to see that each has its dangers.