re brought to bear on
us by others will show that this must be so.
A disciple will fulfil all the duties of his manhood;
but he will fulfil them according to
his own sense of right, and not according to
that of any person or body of persons. This
is a very evident result of following the creed
of knowledge instead of any of the blind
creeds.

To obtain the pure silence necessary for the
disciple, the heart and emotions, the brain and
its intellectualisms, have to be put aside. Both
are but mechanisms, which will perish with the
span of man's life. It is the essence beyond,
that which is the motive power, and makes man
live, that is now compelled to rouse itself and
act. Now is the greatest hour of danger. In
the first trial men go mad with fear; of this
first trial Bulwer Lytton wrote. No novelist
has followed to the second trial, though some
of the poets have. Its subtlety and great
danger lies in the fact that in the measure of a
man's strength is the measure of his chance of
passing beyond it or coping with it at all. If
he has power enough to awaken that unaccustomed
part of himself, the supreme essence,
then has he power to lift the gates of gold,
then is he the true alchemist, in possession of
the elixir of life.

It is at this point of experience that the
occultist becomes separated from all other men
and enters on to a life which is his own; on to
the path of individual accomplishment instead
of mere obedience to the genii which rule our
earth. This raising of himself into an individual
power does in reality identify him with
the nobler forces of life and make him one
with them. For they stand beyond the powers
of this earth and the laws of this universe. Here
lies man's only hope of success in the great
effort; to leap right away from his present
standpoint to his next and at once become an
intrinsic part of the divine power as he has
been an intrinsic part of the intellectual power,
of the great nature to which he belongs. He
stands always in advance of himself, if such
a contradiction can be understood. It is the
men who adhere to this position, who believe
in their innate power of progress, and that
of the whole race, who are the elder brothers,
the pioneers. Each man has to accomplish the
great leap for himself and without aid; yet it is
something of a staff to lean on to know that
others have gone on that road. It is possible
that they have been lost in the abyss; no
matter, they have h