g itself. Just in the same way in which we read in the
_Bhagavad-Gita_ that by the efflux of time this yoga
disappears, and then some teacher comes in order to restore vividness
to the life, so it is over and over again in the case of every great
spiritual movement.

Now when we apply these manifest principles and facts to the latest
spiritual movement, that which gave birth to the Theosophical Society,
we find that we are running through, in a very short time, the same
series of facts as characterised the religions of the past. Here also,
as with them, a great outburst of phenomena in the earlier days;
H.P.B. living in a cloud of phenomena and those who came in touch with
her bathed in phenomena of all kinds. You can see the result of that
early training in our late President, Colonel Olcott, to whom
phenomena in connection with the Theosophical Society were the most
natural things in the world. He had no hesitation in talking of them,
was always bubbling over with his experiences of them in the past. You
must remember, when he was over here, how much he thought about them,
the pleasure he took in recalling his earlier experiences, and of
showing the material articles produced phenomenally in those earlier
days; and you cannot take up _Old Diary Leaves_ without finding
yourself face to face with every-day happenings of phenomena. Life
then seemed to be made up of the abnormal, in the sense in which that
word is used. The normal for the time being had disappeared. If a
duster had to be hemmed, an elemental did it. If pencils were needed,
a hand was put forward, twisted the pencils about, and there were
twelve in place of the one, and so on. Much greater people than H.P.B.
were concerned in producing these phenomena. Colonel Olcott tells us
how H.P.B. on one occasion drank some lukewarm water which a Master
drew from a water-skin on a camel, and magnetised, and made her
believe it to be coffee. On his removing the magnetism before she had
finished drinking, she found to her disgust that she had been drinking
this lukewarm water. The present-day Theosophist would probably have
objected to such playfulness, but such things were continually
happening in the early days. When Colonel Olcott came into the Society
he came straight from the investigation of spiritualistic phenomena--a
thoroughly well-trained observer, beginning with a good deal of
scepticism, and beaten out of it by his own observations in
innumerable spiritual