that a sufficiently magnificent task for the Theosophical Society? Certainly esoteric teaching opens up possibilities before the sight of ardent spiritual aspirants that suggest to some eager hearts the pursuit of an object—which if rightly understood may be more magnificent still, but which, as contemplated in the beginning may often be prompted by a relatively selfish motive,—the personal pursuit of Adeptship. But in its original purpose the welfare of mankind at large and not the enlistment of new recruits in the army of chelaship was as I read its design, the idea of the Theosophical Society. And how was that design to be carried out? This question seems to me to touch a point which it is highly important to keep in view at the present moment. The Theosophical movement did not begin by preaching _de haut en bas_ an all but impossible code of ethics. It began by the highly practical course of linking its operations with one of the most growing impulses in the most spiritually minded sections of the Western community. These were _not_ the merely good and pious representatives of still surviving, though decaying religious systems; they were not the hopeless however unselfish exponents of a barren philosophy that threw forward no light on the future; they were found mainly among people who in one way or another, and following various false beacons, perhaps, were realizing that discoveries were possible beyond the barriers that had formerly seemed to set a limit to the range of the human senses. The bold though bewildered pioneers of psychic inquiry were naturally marked out, indeed, to be appealed to first by the esoteric teachers. For them above all was the rudderless condition of modern religions thought a dark and threatening danger. Along the road they had set out to travel they would certainly not stop short. But readers of Theosophic literature will not require to be reminded where the study of occult phenomena un-illuminated by occult morality must ultimately conduct its enthusiasts. The classes referred to were best qualified to receive the new dispensation: and most urgently in need of it. To them therefore the Theosophical propaganda in the beginning was directed, and this is the consideration which will be seen to explain the mystery that has so frequently been discussed in more recent years—the free and so to speak the extravagant display of occult wonders and marvellous phenomena with which the advent of the Theosophical movement was heralded. Its directors as it were, had to put themselves at the head of the psychic movement generally, in order to direct its future course aright, and they could not do this without commanding the attention of persons already largely experienced in psychic investigation.