and bids us love our fellow men and serve them; it enjoins the assertion of will as against desire, to this extent enjoining selfcontrol.

But the aim proposed is not the regulation of desire; it is its destruction, whether the desire be good or bad. It seeks not improvement but extinction. Theosophy is a philosophy of suicide. Theosophy fails to satisfy either mind or heart. Its fundamental postulates successive incarnation and the necessity to extinguish all desire are certainly not self-evidently true, neither are they proved to be true. They are conjectures and nothing more. The science and philosophy connected with Theosophy are of a doubtful and limping character.

Nor does Theosophy satisfy the heart. It fails to get rid of sin, and attacks only one kind of sin, namely, selfishness. Other sins-disbelief of God and rebellion against His holy law, falseness and deceit, sloth, etc.-it leaves out of account. In his difficult warfare against sin and supernatural enemies, man is left by Theosophy without divine aid. Theosophy does not teach him that God is Love, nor lead him to love God because God has first loved him. To get rid of pain (even if possible) is, as the supreme end of a joyless life, not a particularly noble aim. As a rushlight pales before the sun, Theosophy pales before Christianity. Not Theosophy, but Christianity, restores man to fellowship with God. Not Theosophy, but Christianity, gives communion with Infinite Love in the presence where is fulness of joy and pleasures for evermore and satisfaction.

Additional remarks by Mr. COLES:

Mrs. Sharpe quotes the words of Christ. "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold"; but is it not in the same Gospel of St. John that the Lord says that "He is the Resurrection and the Life," and that all judgment has been committed to Him? And is it not in this same scripture that we are told that He is the "Logos" by whom all things were made? The Good Shepherd gave His life for the sheep. How is it possible for any theosophist to accept the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, Anna Kingsford and Annie Besant and then to profess to believe the teaching of Christ as given in the Gospel of St. John?

In a paper on the "Masters" of Theosophy by Annie Besant written less than a year ago, we read: "Those who are named M.

and K.H., in The Occult World, by Mr. Sinnett, were the two Masters who founded the Theosophical Society, using Colonel H. S. Olcott and H. P. Blavatsky, both disciples of M, to lay its foundations; and who gave to Mr. Sinnett the materials from which he wrote his famous books-the one named above Esoteric Buddhism—which brought the light of Theosophy to thousands in the West. H. P. Blavatsky has told how she met the Master M. on the bank of the Serpentine, when he visited London in 1851.

“... And there is the Venetian' and the 'Serapis,' who taught Colonel Olcott for awhile, and the one visited in his Nilgiri retreat by Sabba Rao and C. W. Leadbeater-some eighty miles from Adyar, where he lives secluded. These are some of the Masters, more or less publicly known and to be known more publicly ere the present century is numbered with the past. They aid in countless ways the progress of humanity. From the highest sphere they shed down light and life on all the world.

"During the present century one of those great crises in the history of humanity will occur, which mark the conception of a new civilisation. He whom in the East men call the Wisdom-Truth, the World-Teacher, and whom in the West men call the Christ, will ere long return incarnate upon earth and move once more among the busy crowds of men. With Him will come several of the Masters, to aid His work and spread abroad His message."

We see then, on the authority of Mrs. Besant herself, that the Theosophical Society is being inspired and promoted by superior beings, who are said to be the "Lords of Karma" and "The Shining Ones."

Is it not clear then, as Dr. Schofield said, that it is now a question of the inspiration of the Word of God, or the inspired teaching of Modern Theosophy?

That many educated and thoughtful people among theosophists have been deceived by these inspired communications is indeed a more terrible indication of the dangerous days in which we are living than any other of the startling "Signs of the Times."

Let us express an earnest hope that some, at least, who have been entangled in the meshes of the "Masters may escape from the snare when once they realise who is the real "Logos" of Theosophy.

511TH ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING.

HELD IN THE ROOMS OF THE INSTITUTE ON

MONDAY, JANUARY 23RD, 1911, AT 4.30 P.M.

GENERAL HALLIDAY (VICE-PRESIDENT), IN THE CHAIR.

The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and signed and the following elections of Associates were announced :—

E. A. Dubois, Esq.; Mrs. Percy Smith; The Rev. T. P. Stevens. The CHAIRMAN introduced Dr. Whately, who then read the following Paper :

THE DEMAND FOR A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY.

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By the Rev. A. R. WHATELY, D.D.

T the Church Congress last autumn, Professor Sorley called our attention to a remarkable fact, and let it be added -crying need. "There does not exist," he said, "at the present time any living systematized body of Christian philosophy." And he went so far as to say that whereas in the realm of activity the present tone of the Christian world is "positive, aggressive, flushed with the confidence of victory, in the realm of thought it is timid, compromising, apologetic, and apologetic in the modern and popular, as well as in the literal, sense. The reference is not, of course, to popular polemic or exposition, but to those Christian writers who really represent modern thought, and are really sensitive to its spirit. And who shall say that he is not right? The Christian theologian of to-day, when he preaches and when he directs his efforts and his life on the lines of his creed, treats that creed as a datum, an ultimate, a point of reference and centre of authority that, ideally at least, controls the whole machinery of his mind. But face to face with rival systems and alien currents of thought, his attitude is too often different. It is not that he hesitates; and if he is open-minded and sympathetic, surely that is all to

The Official Report of the Church Congress, 1910.

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the good. What is lacking may be easier to feel than to define. As a thinker he holds truth; as a worshipper and worker he is held by it. The Christian faith has not for him that same commanding and determinative position on the plane of reflection as it holds on the plane of emotion and activity. In this latter sphere the Ego has found its cosmocentric point; in the sphere of the higher thought, the shadow of his own subjectivity haunts him on the clearest uplands where all other shadows are left behind.

Surely there is something wanting here. Though we have been thinking only of a small part of the Christian world, and of only a certain section of the life of each individual that belongs to it, yet we must remember that neither is the individual divided into "water-tight compartments," nor yet the Church. The Christian philosophy of any given age must be related by action and reaction with the whole of life, and with the life of the Whole.

I have said "Christian philosophy." But Professor Sorley speaks, in this connection, not merely of Christian philosophy in that general sense in which it must always exist while Christianity itself exists, but of a philosophy specifically Christian, a system of thought embodying as such the central specific affirmations of the Christian creed. I think he would admit such an interpretation of his words; but it cannot be taken for granted that he would go the whole length with Dr. Garvie in his pronouncement that "Theology need not adopt any metaphysics, for it can beget its own." And again, “Christ has made such a difference, that Christianity cannot borrow, but must create its own metaphysics. None of the philosophical systems which, within the Christian era, have come into being with more or less conscious dependence on Christianity, seems to him (the writer) to be so thoroughly Christian as to justify the dependence of Christian theology upon it.'

These remarks, I think, are absolutely sound; and they may be accepted as such without in the least underrating the value of the work which the great philosophers have done, or the large amount of truth in their systems. Indeed, a Christian philosophy, if such there is to be, must occupy not an isolated, but a central, place among other systems, and thus be better able to do justice to them than they to each other.

The subject before us is of course an immense one, and

*The Ritschlian Theclogy, pp. 69 and 393.

certainly I shall make no attempt even to outline such a philosophy as I have indicated. It will be enough to put before you a few considerations, first as to its necessity, and secondly as to the direction in which it will have to look for its material. These questions are so intimately connected that we will not attempt to discuss them apart. They may be combined in one formula: the relation of philosophy to the Christian Gospel.

Let us glance at the phenomena which normal and naïve Christianity, not yet worked over by speculation or accommodating theories, presents. We have two starting-points before us, the individual and the historic or social; and at both we find what claims to be a definite experience of Divine action or intervention. Speaking from the point of view of those who accept this experience as real-as I shall throughout-we have to ask whether or no such are to be called upon to translate, if they can, the doctrines which for them most directly express their faith into general abstract principles, and base them upon, or prop them against, speculative explanations of the universe. And if not, may we claim that faith, brought face to face with intellectual problems, will itself develop its own intellectual resources?

Christianity certainly came into the world as a message, a Gospel, a proclamation; and it is most significant that the Church should have so long held the pagan philosophy at arm's length, and have used abstract reasoning under protest and for the purpose merely of defining itself against the heresies. So far as this was so-and I think this is the essential truth of the matter-Christian philosophy may be said to have come into being just as the background of a geometrical pattern forms itself into a correlative pattern without the artist specially observing it, through its being defined against the design he draws upon it. The unauthorized teachers together defined and systematized the ecclesiastical doctrine in defining their own positions and pressing them upon the notice of the orthodox theologians.

Now the experience of the reality of the saving grace of God in those who recognise the reality of that experience, gives the key to the interpretation of the history. As a simple matter of fact, it is not the human greatness of Christ that lastingly stamped itself on the mind of the Church, but the divine; not His witness to the Divine sonship of all men, but the sense of the uniqueness of His own. When the individual Christian finds an objective experience the very centre and foundation of

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