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FRIENDS: I am to speak to you to-day on the Lessons of the War, and in doing that you will naturally understand that I am speaking as a Theosophist on the application of Theosophical teachings to the problems of our own time; for truly the use of all knowledge is to illuminate the path of action. Knowledge is sterile where it is not applied to the direction of conduct, and the use of Theosophical teachings - studied so long by so many all over the world - is to illuminate the problems of the present critical time. For thirty years and a half I have been a student of those teachings, and during that long time I have never found them fail to irradiate the darkest obscurity, and to keep the heart at peace, whether in the storms of public life or in the trials of private life. But in speaking on the lines laid down by those teachings, I would ask any of you who may not know it to remember that no member of the Theosophical Society is bound by what I saw. We have so firm a belief in Truth that we do not desire to make it a barrier in the fellowship of fellow - students of the Truth, and, therefore, there is no teaching of Theosophy which is binding on the members of the Society which really exists to spread those teachings. We believe that Truth is recognised the moment the eyes reach the position whence that Truth is visible. We do not desire to us? any Truth we have, as Robertson of Brighton once said, turning the Bread of Life into a stone to cast at our opponents. On the contrary, we leave every member of the Society absolutely free to accept or to reject any Theosophical teaching, and although I happen to be President of the Society, I have no more power than the youngest member of it to bind any other member to my interpretation of its teachings. And so, if any of you, members or non-members, should disagree with anything I say, please remember that I am speaking as one who has studied but not as one who desires to convince, unless the Truth is spoken and exercises its own convincing power; for no Truth is true to you or to me unless we have assimilated it, made it part of ourselves. That can never be done by the speech of another: it must be gained by the effort of the individual intellect, by the intuition of the heart. Now, with regard to the War and its Lessons, let me first point out to you what, it seems to me, is the part that War plays in the evolution of mankind. The Divine Wisdom regards this world as part of a series of worlds, regards humanity as one of the grades of an ever-ascending series of the developing divine life. Many are below us in that ascent; many are above us; and the events which take place on the surface of our globe are events which are really shadows thrown down from the great ideas which rule in the Higher World, and gradually translate themselves into action on our own physical globe - on many other globes as well, but I am concerned with our own. Looking then at this great series of worlds of living beings, we would see in war the physical result of the conflict of great principles and great ideas in worlds other than our own; so that it comes to mean to many of us not a mere struggle of kings and of armies, not even a struggle of nations, but fundamentally the means of transition from one phase of principle, of idea, to another succeeding phase....

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