s their idea
of bliss. Hence in most theosophists, as in all Roman Catholic converts,
you find this note of immaturity and monopoly. I say _converts_, because
those born in the Roman Catholic faith are on different ground. Their
spiritual life may grow and develop in spite of the creed limitations
into which Fate has cast them, but those who deliberately _choose_ such
limitations give the best possible proof of their own standpoint. And
the same may be said also of all strict creed religions.

They have their great and valuable uses, as prison bars have their uses
in a community which has not learnt to respect the rights and property
of its neighbours.

Withdraw these bars and you let loose upon society a pestilential crew
of murderers and marauders. Relax the bars of creed and you will find
the same result. But as bars are not necessary for the advanced souls
who recognise that to murder or defraud their fellow-creatures leads to
their own misery, apart from any detection or punishment, so creeds are
not necessary, under a corresponding evolution of the spiritual
instinct, which tallies with the social and moral instincts noted above.

And as treadmills and oakum picking can be dismissed in the one case, so
can much of the theological machinery for the discipline and punishment
of sinners against spiritual laws be dispensed with, in the case of
those who are, spiritually speaking, _coming of age_.

They come then into the full liberty of Sons of God, and shall be no
more treated as servants, _but as sons_, as the Apostle puts it.

This brings me to my special subject.

There are many things of great and transcending interest which we are
obliged to keep secret from our younger children, partly because they
would fail to understand, but still more because they would
_misunderstand_, and this to their own hurt and disadvantage; not to
speak of possible injury to others through them.

Spiritual Evolution is the true Doctrine, but it is not food for babes
in spiritual life.

To have an unlimited series of advancing lives and advancing experiences
unfolded before their eyes would not only dismay and bewilder, but would
also paralyse their energy for good, and terribly augment their capacity
for evil--for the _not good_.

Until they are sufficiently versed in spiritual experience to realise
the difference between purity and impurity, good and evil, God and the
world, fame and peace, pleasure and happiness, the peac