e bears, historically, to
ourselves and the rest of the globe.

Do you remernber how Abraham haggled with the Lord over the
Cities of the Plain? Yahveh was for destroying them off hand for
their manifold sins and iniquities; but Abraham argued and
bargained and brought him down till if peradventure there should
be found ten righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord promised
he would spare them. But ten righteous there were not, nor
nothing near; so the Cities of the Plain went down.

I suppose the Crest-Wave rarely passes from a race without
leaving a wide trail of insanity in its wake. The life forces are
strong; the human organisms through which they play are but--as
we know them. Commonly these organisms are not directed by the
Divine Soul, which has all too little of the direction of life in
its hands; so the life-currents drift downward, instead of
fountaining up; and exhaust these their vehicles, and leave them
played out and mentally--because long since morally--deficient.
So come the cataclysmic wars and reigns of terror that mark the
end of racial manvantaras: it is a humanity gone collectively
mad. On the other hand, none can tell what immense safeguarding
work may be done by the smallest sane co-ordinated effort
upwards. If peradventure the ten righteous shall be found--but
they must be righteous, and know what they are doing--I will
spare, and not destroy, saith the Lord.

(He said nothing about respectabilities. I dare say there was
quite a percentage of respectable chapel-going Sabbath-observing
folk in the Cities of the Plain.)

And yet there must be always that dreadful possibility--which
perhaps has never become actual since the fall of Atlantis--that
a whole large section of mankind should go quite mad, and become
unfit to carry on the work of evolution. It is a matter of
corrupting the streams of heredity; which is done by vice,
excess, wrong living; and these come of ignorance. Heaven knows
how near it we may be today; I do not think Christendom stands,
or has stood, so very far, from the brink. And yet it is from
the white race, we have supposed, that the coming races will be
born; this is the main channel through which human evolution is
intended to flow.--We are in kall-yuga; the Mysteries are dead,
and the religions have taken their place: there has been no sure
and certain link, organized on this plane, between the world and
its Higher Self. Each succeeding civilization, under the