Now, these things are so to an ever-increasing number of our own race at the present time; they will become general as evolution proceeds. And the result of that will be that very many of the secondary teachings of religion will become palpably true to the great majority; not only the question of the life after death and the conditions that rule there, but also the value of many church rites and ceremonies that the sceptical and materialistic mind of the moment looks on with scorn and contempt as ancient superstitions. There is such a thing as the sacramental life; there is a bridge between this world and the next in those sacraments of the Churches possessed by every great religion, and not by the Christian alone. Much of that has been lost to western Christendom by the Reformation, which rejected the occult because it had been abused, and superstition believed without understanding. But, none the less, in the great sacraments of the Church there remains a potency which without that sacrament you cannot reach, a real communication of the spiritual to the material, a real down-flowing of the higher life: a thing which is visible to the eye of the seer, although invisible to the normal worshippers in the churches. And gradually, as these senses become common, those ancient traditions will again be justified in the minds of all, and men will again know that in those divinely given offices of religion there is a mighty potency, a living spiritual reality. You do not need them when you have opened up your Spirit to the higher realities of the spiritual world, but how few there are who are really open to these in their daily lives; the sacraments are the bridges that unite the worlds, and it is foolish to throw them aside until you have built a perpetual bridge within yourself. All along those lines you will readily see how many doors will open in religion where knowledge will justify what humility and faith have received. And along those lines religion, without ceasing to be spiritual, will be rational and scientific as well, and you will realise that Occult Science justifies religion, and can make a rational and scientific defence for many of its rites and ceremonies, for many of its teachings that now rest on authority and tradition. I have not time to go further along that line; I have indicated to you the ways along which the doors are opening both in the spiritual unfolding to the higher realities, and the unfolding of the higher senses which will gradually bring the next world within man’s ken. II.—SCIENCE.