PRICE ONE SHILLING
Few words are needed in sending this little book out into the world.It is the third of a series of Manuals designed to meet the publicdemand for a simple exposition of Theosophical teachings. Some havecomplained that our literature is at once too abstruse, too technical,and too expensive for the ordinary reader, and it is our hope that thepresent series may succeed in supplying what is a very real want.Theosophy is not only for the learned; it is for all. Perhaps amongthose who in these little books catch their first glimpse of itsteachings, there may be a few who will be led by them to penetratemore deeply into its philosophy, its science, and its religion, facingits abstruser problems with the student's zeal and the neophyte'sardour. But these Manuals are not written for the eager student, whomno initial difficulties can daunt; they are written for the busy menand women of the work-a-day world, and seek to make plain some of thegreat truths that render life easier to bear and death easier to face.Written by servants of the Masters who are the Elder Brothers of ourrace, they can have no other object than to serve our fellow-men.
Who does not remember the story of the Christian missionary inBritain, sitting one evening in the vast hall of a Saxon king,surrounded by his thanes, having come thither to preach the gospel ofhis Master; and as he spoke of life and death and immortality, a birdflew in through an unglazed window, circled the hall in its flight,and flew out once more into the darkness of the night. The Christianpriest bade the king see in the flight of the bird within the hall thetransitory life of man, and claimed for his faith that it showed thesoul, in passing from the hall of life, winging its way not into thedarkness of night, but into the sunlit radiance of a more gloriousworld. Out of the darkness, through the open window of Birth, the lifeof a man comes to the earth; it dwells for a while before our eyes;into the darkness, through the open window of Death, it vanishes outof our sight. And man has questioned ever of Religion, Whence comesit? Whither goes it? and the answers have varied with the faiths.To-day, many a hundred year since Paulinus talked with Edwin, thereare more people in Christendom who question whether[6] man has a spiritto come anywhence or to go anywhither than, perhaps, in the world'shistory could ever before have been found at one time. And the veryChristians who claim that Death's terrors have been abolished, havesurrounded the bier and the tomb with more gloom and more dismalfuneral pomp than have the votaries of any other creed. What can bemore depressing than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded,while the dead body is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent thanthe sweeping robes of lustreless crape, and the purposed hideousnessof the heavy cap in which the widow laments the "deliverance" of herhusband "from the burden of the flesh"? What more revolting than theartificially long faces of the undertaker's men, the drooping"weepers", the carefully-arranged white handkerchiefs, a