ses which are, on the whole, in arresting contrast
to the actuality of life about him. Western devotion has been caught by
the mystic and poetical character of Pantheism and is, on the whole,
strangely blind to its actual outcome in the life of its devotees.

We all feel the suggestion of it in certain of our tempers. If we should
take out of much of our finest poetry suggestions akin to the
suggestions of Pantheism at its best, we should leave even Western
poetry strangely poor, and we have beside, particularly in the
contemplation of rare natural beauty, a feeling of kinship with the
spirit which clothes itself in dawn and twilight, or speaks through the
rhythmic beat of sea waves, or lifts itself against the skyline in far
blue mountain summits, which helps us to understand this old, old faith.
And if modern cults had done nothing more than appropriate the poetry of
Pantheism they would have lent only a touch of oriental colour to the
somberness of Western life.

But Theosophy and kindred cults have gone farther, since Pantheism
itself must go farther. Directly you have identified creation and the
creative power so intimately as Pantheism does, then you are under
bonds, if you have any curiosity at all or any speculative force, to try
to explain the ways in which a God, who is just to begin with all that
there is, has managed to reveal Himself in such an infinitude of minute
and sometimes ungodlike ways. So Pantheism has its own scheme, not of
creation, for there is no place in Pantheism for creation, but rather of
emanation. Eastern thought substitutes for the cosmogony of the Old
Testament which simply carries the world back to a creative God and
seeks to go no farther, and for the methods of Western science which
carries creation back to ultimate force and is unable to go any farther,
an entirely different system.

_How the One Becomes the Many_

A paragraph in Mrs. Besant's "The Ancient Wisdom" (page 41) may help us
here. "Coming forth from the depths of the One Existence, from the One
beyond all thought and all speech, a Logos, by imposing on Himself a
limit, circumscribing voluntarily the range of His own Being, becomes
the manifested God, and tracing the limiting sphere of His activity thus
outlines the area of His universe. Within that sphere the universe is
born, is evolved, and dies; it lives, it moves, it has its being in Him;
its matter is His emanation; its forces and energies are currents of His
l