What is the position of the religious world to-day? First of all, there have been working in it now for many long years certain forces undermining the religion of the time; and when I speak now of religion, I mean the religion of the West, for I am speaking in the West; although I might show you that in other parts of the world as well the same forces are at work, though not quite so prominently, and have brought about there to some extent the same results. Now, it is not from the mouth of a Theosophist like myself that I would ask you to take the testimony as to the difficulties in which the religious world finds itself to-day, and on the most important points of which I shall touch, after drawing your attention to the destructive forces that have been undermining religion, I shall take my testimony from bishop and from clergyman in their published writings, which all may read who will. The undermining forces that I allude to are chiefly three, and each destructive; the absence of construction is one of the signs of the day that is closing. First, as you know well, the undermining which has been done by scholarship in Christendom, in which what is called the higher criticism has been tearing to pieces the documents on which historical Christianity has been built up—taking one after another, examining, studying, scrutinising, comparing one kind of language with another kind in the same document; pointing out marks of different ages where a single writer was supposed to have been speaking, and gradually collecting from all sides different readings, placing them side by side, and finding them to a very great extent mutually destructive. So far has that gone, as you know, that, not so very long ago, the whole of this line of investigation was condemned by the authoritative head of the great Roman Catholic communion. The higher criticism, the historical dealing with Church teaching and Church history, the analysing, scrutinising, investigating spirit of our own time—the whole of that, with all its results, has been condemned and forbidden to be taught within the teaching establishments of the great Roman communion; the results of historical criticism have been banned, and, most fatal of all policies, kept largely out of the knowledge of those who are to become the teachers of the generations that are to be born. Is there any wonder, if you look at it only from the outside point? For where religion is a matter of authority, of books, of successions, of historical events, there criticism must always destroy; the form changes, and cannot remain stable in a transitory world, and we find the ancient documents shorn of their ancient value; we find inspiration, limited and fettered to words instead of the spirit, failing to hold its own against the critical scholarship of the day. One defence after another is thrown up, only to be abandoned before the approaching tide, as children throw up castles in the sand, dreaming that sand castles can stop the flow