O the great benefactor who points the Way! To Triptolemus have all men erected temples and altars, because he gave us food by cultivation; but to him who discovered truth, and brought it to light and communicated it to all--not the truth which shows us how to live _but how to live well_--who of you has built an altar for this, or a temple, or has dedicated a statue, or who worships God for this?--_Epictetus_ The final stitches are taken in the little garment which has stood for the evening's duty. It is folded and laid aside, to fill on the morrow a need as impersonal as the service that need inspired, silent tribute to a system of work so practical and so perfect in its conservation of energy that the world is already clamoring at Lomaland gates to be let into the secret. A pile of loved books--very tiny ones, _The Voice of the Silence_, the _Bhagavad-Gitâ_, _Patañjali_, and the rest--lies beside the sewing-basket, jostling the newspaper, which, because of the temporary need of another, at present has to be given room. But I brush it aside to take up one of the little writings--any one of them, from cover to cover, would hardly make up a newspaper page--thankful that if the frothy and distempered bilge-water of current crime and gossip _does_ have to lie before me, I do not have to drink of it; grateful that even in the present heyday of lower psychological influences I am free to drink what I will, free to pick my associates from among the immortals--if I choose. And so we parry, and give and take, question on my part and answer on his--small wonder that H. P. B. paid tribute to his philosophy and W. Q. J. to his life, this grand old Roman whose company for an hour any one would be proud to have--Epictetus! O the great benefactor who points the Way! This, a tribute to the Helpers of Humanity by one who was humbly, yet with the courage of Hercules, trying to fire the mind of his age with the torch-gleam of a true philosophy of life--Theosophy in fact, but adapted to the conditions of his time, a fevered and cruel time, though with gleams of nobility and spiritual splendor here and there. What a picture comes before one of this brave old Roman Socrates, banished in his last years from Rome by the Emperor Domitian--for the crime of being a philosopher! And then another picture--of the Epictetus as the Rome of Nero knew him, young but never strong, weakly, lame, the abused slave of Nero's profligate secretary; allowed by his owner to study philosophy because it chanced to be the fashion in wealthy Rome to number wise men among one's "possessions" as one numbered cocks and fine horses; Epictetus, a slave, often in chains, tortured at his master's whim--but a Torch-bearer of the Truth!