ion of religion forces which it must always be the business of
religion to subordinate and control.

Along with all this has gone a grotesque mythology and an inconceivable
multiplication of divinity. Since no one but an expert can hope to
understand the complexities of a faith like this, the East has developed
a priestly class which bears harder upon its devotees and at the same
time more contemptuously separates itself from them than perhaps any
priestly class in the world. If the East is to return upon the West in
substituting a refined and more or less mystic Pantheism for the sterner
forms of Western faith, we ought at least to understand what it is
which, with all its implications, is beginning to set up its altars
amongst us. No one can follow the theosophic religion of the West
without recognizing how largely Western Theosophy avails itself of
Western science and informs itself with what Christianity has given to
the West. If these were taken out of it it would be hopeless. Since,
therefore, its speculations carry us beyond reason or science, since its
solution of the problems of life is far too complex, since whatever is
good in it may be found more richly and simply in what we already
possess and since the practical outcome of it in the East itself is an
arrested civilization which has many depths but few heights, one must
inevitably conclude that Theosophy has no real meaning for those who
possess already the knowledge which we have so laboriously gained and
the faith and insight which Christianity has brought us.

X

SPIRITUALISM

Practically all the newer cults are quests in one general direction but
down more or less specific roads. Christian Science and New Thought are
endeavours after health and well-being and the endeavour also to
reconcile the more shadowed experiences of life with the love and
goodness of God. Theosophy and kindred cults are quests for illumination
and spiritual deliverance along other than the accepted lines of
Christian "redemption." Spiritualism is practically the quest for the
demonstration of immortality through such physical phenomena as prove,
at least to those who are persuaded by them, the survival of discarnate
personality.

All these movements involve in varying degrees the abnormal or the
supernormal. They imply generally another environment for personality
than the environment which the ordered world of science supplies, and
other laws than the laws of which