may have happened after the crucifixion of Jesus. The three-dimensional body would behave in a manner altogether unaccountable to the two-dimensional watcher. The latter, knowing only length and breadth, and nothing of up or down, would see his three-dimensional friend as a line only. The moment the three-dimensional solid rose above or sank below his line of vision, it would seem to have disappeared like an apparition, although as really present as before. To the two-dimensional mind it would seem as though the solid were a ghost. Does this throw any light upon the mysterious appearances and disappearances of the body of Jesus? Here, then, we have a being whose consciousness belongs to the fourth-dimensional plane adjusting Himself to the capacity of those on a three-dimensional plane for the sake of proving to them beyond dispute that

Life is ever lord of death,

And love can never lose its own.

This seems to me the most reasonable explanation of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, and the impression produced by them on the minds of His disciples. In consonance with this idealistic

view of the subject the ascension becomes understandable; it simply means that when Jesus had done what He wanted, the body was dissipated."

Here is the essence of the New Theology. Now that we have come to the end of our analysis, it becomes evident that any detailed comment would be entirely superfluous. Every principle here put forward is familiar to all of us, and has been familiar for years. They are the self-same views that our own teachers gave forth a generation ago, and for which we have stood, through evil report and good report, through long years. It is not on the doctrines that we need to lay the emphasis. What we need to hold in mind is that these same age-old teachings are now breaking through, in the heart of the Christian Churches. We must be quick to recognize them there, and to welcome them. And we may further recognize, as very familiar to us, the inspiring spirit which is now speaking so clearly through this rather novel and unexpected channel. We may learn that there are many ways in which that spirit works, though working always toward the Great White Dawn.

I.

[NOTE.-The Editor of THE THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY has had the good fortune to receive from Mrs. Charles Johnston (née Vera Jelihovsky, and a niece of Madame Blavatsky), extracts from a number of letters which H. P. B. wrote to various members of her family in the years following the formation of the Theosophical Society in 1875. The letters, which are printed with the consent of the recipients, have been translated from Russian by Mrs. Johnston, to whom all our thanks are due for thus making available these unpublished writings of the foundress of the T. S.]

June 8, 1877.

. . . I have finished my article on Nirvana and the conceptions of the ancient Buddhists concerning God, the immortality of the soul, and cosmogony, as compared to the modern decadence of religious ideas. The Editor seems to be very pleased . . . To be sure, my Master helped me to write it, yet it took me only two evenings. I shall send it to you to look at; possibly someone will translate it for you. I wish Vera would translate it for the Russian press. The article is a good one. Its learning is so great that all the Orientalists will have tremblings in their legs. I also send you Turgenyeff's poem on "the game of croquet at Windsor." I have translated it and received compliments for it. Note please that your relative is called "an accomplished lady" in the editorial note. . . Life in this country is pleasant, just because you can abuse anybody with perfect immunity, not merely the Pope, but even the Editor of the Presidential organ, the New York Herald. Yet he is an untold power here. However, print will stand anything! . . .

Do not ask me, friend, what I experience, and how these things. come about, for I cannot explain anything clearly to you. I do not understand it all myself. One thing I do know: that toward my old age, I have become a bric-a-brac store for the accumulation of various disused objects of antiquity. Somebody comes, winding around me like a misty cloud, and then, in one turn sends me out of my body, and I am no more Helena Petrovna, General Blavatsky's faithful spouse, but somebody else, born in a different part of the world, strong and mighty; as to me, it seems as if I were sleeping meanwhile, or at least dozed; not in my body, but beside it, as if there was some kind of a thread only binding me to my body, and not letting me go more than two paces from it. At other times I see clearly everything done by my

body and I understand and remember what it says: I see awe, devotion, and fear in the faces of Olcott and others, and observe how the Master looks condescendingly at them out of my eyes, and speaks to them with my physical tongue, yet not with my brain but his own, which enwraps my brain like a cloud. I cannot tell you all, Nadya, and just because, though you are the best, most honest, and noblest of human beings, you are very religious, and you hold to the holy faith of your forefathers; as to me, though God sees that in reality I believe in the same things that you do, yet I believe in my own way. You are accustomed to believe in the interpretations accepted by the Church, and the dogmas of orthodoxy, and though I feel that I know them correctly, and firmly, I do not understand them from the human point of view, but from the spiritual point of view, metaphysically, so to speak. For me, all the symbols, great and holy as they are in the eyes of the Christians, are still merely symbols invented by erring humanity for the sake of a surer and more universal comprehensibility. But I look through them -not at them-at their very spiritual significance, and in order to come nearer to this meaning, I do not even notice that often do I overturn the objective in order to reach the subjective the sooner. In my ideal, Christ has incarnated, not in Jesus only, but in humanity in its totality; and as His flesh was crucified, so must all human flesh be crucified, before man-the inner man, the Ego,-gets a chance to become the real man, the Adam Kadmon, the Heavenly man, of the Chaldean Kabbala. Christ is the symbol of the highest spirit of man, not of the soul. The soul is one thing, the spirit is another. There is a soul (anima) in every animal, in every infusoria; but the human spirit is a direct emanation of the Universal, Boundless, Endless Spirit of God, about which we sinful creatures ought not even to think, unless it be in the depth of our hearts, locking ourselves in solitude in the inner chamber, pronouncing His Name mentally, and by no means aloud. (Matthew, VI, 5-23). The flesh is the devil, the only devil in the world. There can be no other objective devils of any kind; and the whole world-not our planet alone, but the universe, is divided into three parts: first, pure spirit; second, half-spirit, half-matter; third, gross matter, our flesh. Every atom of matter (flesh) whether it is earthly, or belongs to the human body, every grain of dust, before it reached its present aspect, was pure spirit, its own essence, so to speak. It is not in the crude material evolution of the physical world, as Darwin teaches it, that I believe, but in the double evolution, the spiritual walking hand in hand, and having always so walked, with the physical. In this I believe completely, just because I believe in the one Universal God, and the immutable logic and necessarianism of His laws, established once for all. This is why I do not believe in the creation of the world ex nihilo, nor in miracles, as the foundation of which we have to accept a temporary

stoppage of these immutable laws. Do not be angry, but understand me. I believe in the miracles, the so-called miracles of both Christ and the Apostles, but I do not believe that the Supreme Power in Its own person, brought natural laws to a stoppage for their sake. These laws I do not understand in the sense of our foolish learned folk; for they have not yet dreamed of a tenth part of them, and it is not of natural, physical law I am speaking, but of spiritual laws which become manifest in all their power only when man, having become like unto bodiless spirits, has reached, like some miracle-workers, the divine point of his individuality. It is because of this that their own spirit, rid of every trace of the flesh and the devil, acquires the faculty apparently to work miracles. Can't you see that the basis for the springing up of all kinds of heresies consisted exactly in the fact of the Fathers of the Church having anathematised the ancient philosophical conception of the triple individuality of man, and the emanation of the Spirit of man from the essence of Divinity itself. This triple individuality was upheld and believed in by Origen, for which he was exiled, and even Irenæus, in 178 A. D. Perchance it may be said that Origen was once upon a time a Neo-platonist, but Irenæus hated this school, and for him the philosophers and Eclectics of Alexandria were even worse than the Gnostics themselves, whom he so persistently fought. Yet what does he say? -"Carne, anima, spiritu, alteri quidam figurant, spiritu altero quod formatur, carne. Id vero quod inter hæc est duo est anima, quæ aliquando subsequens spiritum elevatur ab eo, aliquando autem consentiens carni in terrenos concupiscentias" (Irenæus V. I.). In other words, the altogether perfect man consists of body, soul and immortal spirit; the Soul stands as intermediary between them; 'Soul' in the Old Testament is Nephesh, which word, without either choice or sense is translated indifferently, 'Soul, life, blood' and various other terms; and when this soul, by the power of its own highest aspirations, holds more to its Supreme Spirit, well and good; but when it is more in sympathy with the flesh, the latter absorbs it in itself, and will ultimately bring it to perdition. Per se, the soul is not immortal. The soul outlives the man's body only for as long as is necessary for it to get rid of everything earthly and fleshly; then, as it is gradually purified, its essence comes into progressively closer union with the Spirit, which alone is immortal. The tie between them becomes more and more indissoluble. When the last atom of the earthly is evaporated, then this duality becomes a unity, and the Ego of the former man becomes forever immortal. But if whilst still in the flesh, the man has failed to prepare himself to part with joy from his perishable body, if the man has lived only his earthly life, and the fleshly thoughts have strangled all trace of spiritual life in him, he will not be born again; he will not see God (John iii, 3). Like a still-born child, he will leave the womb.

of earthly life, his mother, and after the death of his flesh he will be born not into a better world, but into the region of eternal death, because his Soul has ruined itself for ever, having destroyed its connection with the Spirit. The flesh has triumphed, and the soul is carried downward, not upward.

And so not all of us human beings are immortal. As Jesus expresses it, we must take the Kingdom of Heaven by violence. Alas, my dear Madam, there are not many of the great parables of Christ which have been understood. Read in Matt. xiii, the parable of the seed, some of which fell by the wayside and the birds devoured them, and some brought forth a hundred fold, because their roots struck deep into their own spirit. As to the grains that were lost forever, they are human souls. Have you never met people who have long ago parted with their soulspeople who have nothing left but their animal souls, and of whose spirit there is no more trace? I have met such. When their bodies die, these people will die forever. No resurrection for them, no future life, and not the strongest mediums could call them back any more, because they are nowhere to be found any more. Origen says the same thing. Consequently we are all trinities. Plato, Pythagoras and Plutarch all taught this; but so far these philosophers have been so little understood, that all their terminology is dreadfully mixed up. Both nous (immortal spirit), and psyche (soul), have been rendered by the same word, "soul;" in the Acts of the Apostles you will find the same thing. St. Paul clearly speaks of two principles; the soul and the spirit, but the translators have distorted everything. Look up the epistle of James, Our Lord's brother (Ch. iii. 15).

I do not know how it is translated in Russian, but in the Greek text you will find that James points out directly the kind of thing our soul is, by the following words: this wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, psychical, devilish. The human spirit (man's spiritual individuality) lights up the earthly man, the Adam of the second chapter of Genesis, from above, touching more or less his head only, and the soul (Nephesh) has its seat in the blood and bones, throughout the body The soul is the spiritual man, merely in the physiological sense. When the soul is imprisoned in a sinning body, it is as if in jail, and in order to get rid of its chains, it has progressively to aspire upward toward its spirit. The soul is a chameleon. It becomes a copy either of the spirit or of the body. In the first case, it acquires the faculty of separating itself from the body with ease, and of setting forth, traveling all over the wide world, having left in the body a provision of vital forces, or animal, instinctive mental movements.

For it, there are no obstacles of either distance or matter. In the measure of its union with the spirit it becomes more or less clairvoyant. It may even become all-seeing and omniscient for a few earthly moments,