spite of all temptation, to his belief in the reality of a Divine Power whose instrument he was. You will rise from that reading with a new idea of the strength of the man, and realise that with all that strength there was the recognition of the strength of God and of his own strength as being only an instrument in the divine hands. But you never find the Puritan Mystic the expression of love, of passionate affection, that are so common among the Catholic Mystics; and more than anything else is the difference marked when you come to deal with Occultism. And there, in our own Society, is a point we ought to pause upon. The Catholic type amongst us will be one that will readily respond to the idea of the Masters, the Puritan less quickly. The Catholic mind in the Theosophist will not only recognise the ideal of the Masters, but will be fired with a desire to tread the path that They have trodden. There will be a looking up of reverence, an outstretching of the hand for guidance; a realisation that by that dependence more rapid progress may be made than along any other line. That which is invisible will exercise a potent attraction; he will always be trying to know something of the invisible worlds and their inhabitants, he will always be reaching out toward these worlds and trying to expand his consciousness into communication with them. He will be willing to train himself with that in view, and you will have in him the possibility of the Occultist which you will not find in the Puritan type. For you cannot begin this part of occult knowledge along the purely intellectual lines. The intellectual exertion will check at once the evolution of the other vehicles. The moment you begin to think: “What am I doing? Is it imagination? Is it hallucination?” you check the growth of the subtler faculties of the man. You are obliged for a time to go on without questions, feeling, sensing, groping, and refusing to allow the mind to come in with its analysing spirit, that chills everything down so much that these budding faculties, as it were, shrink back from the touch of the frost, refusing to unfold. “Well,” you say, “there is a danger. The person may become overcredulous, may be utterly led astray.” True. It is the necessary danger of all such research. Only step by step do you learn by experience to distinguish between the true and false, between the thought-forms created by yourself and the inhabitants of other worlds into which you are penetrating with half-opened eyes. But remember that distinguishing does not do away with the reality of the thought-form. Your own thought-forms which surround you when you first pass on to the astral plane are real forms in astral matter. They deceive you, yes, because they are your own creations, and only give you back the things you are thinking about. They repeat to you your own thoughts, and there lies the element of danger. But you can only outgrow that by experience, exactly in the same way that the baby learns