Is not God's Universe a Symbol of the Godlike: is not Immensity a Temple; is not Man's History and Men's History, a perpetual Evangel? Listen, and for organ music thou wilt ever, as of old, hear the Morning Stars sing together. — Sartor Resartus
Nature has her own clock, and in these early hours of her New Year it is a spiritual tonic to hear the little birds singing and to have a robin actually sit at one's feet in a London park and sing to you, so much do the citizens now love them. And on inner planes the occultist knows that the glacial epoch of hatred, ignorance, and cruelty is thawing and the defeatism of mind, an outcome of the suppression of spiritual knowledge, will be conquered. The symbol of this new state of affairs might well be the smiling Bodhisattva of the East, defined in The Theosophical Glossary as: "he, whose essence (sattva) has become intelligence (bodhi)," rather than the Crucified Jesus, with its concomitant associations of defeat, sacrifice misunderstood, persecution, and death, in the Churchianity sense.
The present state of world affairs is no surprise to the occult student. To deal with such conditions the Theosophical Society was founded and its members have prepared themselves ever since to profit by the opportunities it brings. Man has spiritually starved during the period inaugurated by Constantine, because he cannot live by material bread alone, being essentially an immortal being using temporary bodies for experience. The time having now arrived for the cream of the race to step forward, led consciously by its Race Guardians, along the Brotherhood Path, it is inevitable that the world interests who profit only by the Un-brotherly Path marshall their forces to hinder the new spiritual regime. "Actions proceed from nature," and soldiers must fight, that's all.
The occult student takes care to exercise the greatest discretion in judging men and their actions at this time, for he knows that the Law is no respecter of persons, and the great forces of evolution flowing through men's minds will cause them to act in strange ways — to the advantage of all, where the individual is sufficiently evolved, often tortuously where the individual is hampered by his defective make-up. It is the business of the student to observe rather what influences men allow to use them — we fight against principalities and powers rather than poor misguided persons.
Theosophists recommend with knowledge for all those "who have a leaning towards the metaphysical" that guide to everyday life The Voice of the Silence, and the beautiful and extraordinary Bhagavad-Gita, translated so delightfully as The Song Celestial by Sir Edwin Arnold. Led by our scientists, we have dutifully given up our ideas of solid matter; led by our Teachers, we give up with pleasure our ideas of a solid, cast-iron world, passing by way of Shakespeare's "baseless fabric of a vision" to the occultist's "Divine thought in the Divine Mind," and Patanjali's dictum that: "the world exists for the sake of the soul's experience."
A world spoiled by the false intellectualism of past centuries of second-hand knowledge and college-information is invited by the Theosophical Society to learn from the sacred books of the highly evolved men of an earlier day. To learn once more the true nature of the Universe and Man, for the chaos of modern life speaks undeniably of the ignorance of these times and of oncoming destruction.
All great eras are inaugurated by great men and the great enterprise represented by the occult movement is always guided by great Souls for none others are of it, or belong to it. Presently the world at large will come to realize that this world is no silly playground of human lusts and fancies but a stern learning department of one small part of the stupendous Cosmos.