The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909Besant, Annie
Religion
The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909
Besant, Annie
Theosophy; Theosophy -- Study and teaching
Now, all the world over these two types are found; they are, in fact, two
marked temperaments, intellectual and emotional, into which, roughly,
you might throw almost all thoughtful and educated people, and even
the thoughtless and ignorant, for those also will show similar types,
although naturally less attractively, because more extreme, than they
may be among the class of people who at least are seeking to understand
themselves, and to gain some measure of equilibrium. Looked at from
the outside, the Catholic type is certainly the more attractive, and
therefore I want to impress upon you the value of the Puritan type;
because, being less attractive, its value is more likely to be
overlooked. If the Puritan spirit were completely lost, mankind would
lack that vigour and strength and tendency to free thought and free
judgment which are so essential to human evolution. Unfortunately, it has
often been united with a very cold and forbidding exterior; and if we
take the two types as we find them in the reign of Charles I., certainly
the Puritan is not very attractive from outside—hard, rather sour,
forbidding, and austere. But it is not quite fair to judge the Puritan by
that type in the reign of the Stuarts. It is not fair to pick out a type
at the moment where these two difficulties face it—danger to itself, and
the extreme evil of the type it is opposing. It is hardly fair to take
that moment for a judgment of the value of the temperament in itself.
But even if you take the Puritan of the time of Charles I. and Cromwell,
you can hardly help noticing, if you go beyond externals, the extreme
moral value of that type amid those difficult and dangerous surroundings.
Austere as it was, it was the austerity that was trying to guard itself
against continual danger of pollution, and naturally it ran into
extremes, as all reactions run, with the inevitable result that another
reaction followed on the first, and you had the loose and profligate
type of the Court of Charles II. It is the types I want to disentangle
from these special manifestations, and, looking at them apart, from all
conditions that may emphasise one characteristic or another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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