The Theosophical Movement Heralds a New Era

William Quan Judge · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 29 pages

Twenty-nine pages with an abstract and train of thoughts, opened by introductory notes from the series editor. The text is built around Judge's third letter, pages 73 to 76 of the original. *It answers a question a reader might well ask* — why a movement drawing on Eastern teaching should have been started among Western people at all.

Judge's answer is that it was started among Western people by Western people, in the country where the preparations for the new root race are already going on. The object of the movement then runs along two parallel lines, and he numbers them: first, the union of West with East by reviving in the East the towering eminence that was once hers; second, the development in the West of the occultism appropriate to it, so that the West may in its turn uplift the Eastern fatherland of virtues. The most practical observation in the file is about institutions rather than doctrine, and it has aged well: organisations, like men, tend to fall into ruts of mental and psychic action which, once established, are difficult to obliterate. From that follows his comparison of the two audiences, which is the passage worth reading the file for. It is more difficult, he argues, to touch the heart of those who, crippled by metaphysical dogmatism, have built a hard shell around themselves and contradict in advance whatever clashes with their encrusted notions, than to warm the cockles of the occidental heart — which is neither encumbered with deeply entrenched opinions resting on a foundation of oriental mysticism, nor buttressed with a pride inherited from the past. The closing section moves from strategy to the thing itself: Heaven's Light always shines in the heart of every man, that Light is our true Master, and all other Masters are but servants of the same Light.

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