on and on.  All these were apparently sincere searchers after truth, and passed in the world for respectable persons.  Externally, they were fairly eligible as candidates for Chelaship, as appearances go; but “within all was rottenness and dead men’s bones.”  The world’s varnish was so thick as to hide the absence of the true gold underneath; and the “resolvent” doing its work, the candidate proved in each instance but a gilded figure of moral dross, from circumference to core.

In what precedes we have, of course, dealt but with the failures among Lay Chelas; there have been partial successes too, and these are passing gradually through the first stages of their probation.  Some are making themselves useful to the Society and to the world in general by good example and precept.  If they persist, well for them, well for us all:  the odds are fearfully against them, but still “there is no impossibility to him who Wills.”  The difficulties in Chelaship will never be less until human nature changes and a new order is evolved.  St. Paul (Rom. vii. 18,19) might have had a Chela in mind when he said “to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.  For the good I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.”  And in the wise Kiratarjuniyam of Bharavi it is written:—­

     The enemies which rise within the body,
     Hard to be overcome—­the evil passions—­
     Should manfully be fought; who conquers these
     Is equal to the conqueror of worlds. (XI. 32.)

(—­H.P.  Blavatsky)

Ancient Opinions Upon Psychic Bodies

It must be confessed that modern Spiritualism falls very short of the ideas formerly suggested by the sublime designation which it has assumed.  Chiefly intent upon recognizing and putting forward the phenomenal proofs of a future existence, it concerns itself little with speculations on the distinction between matter and spirit, and rather prides itself on having demolished Materialism without the aid of metaphysics.  Perhaps a Platonist might say that the recognition of a future existence is consistent with a very practical and even dogmatic materialism, but it is rather to be feared that such a materialism as this would not greatly disturb the spiritual or intellectual repose of our modern phenomenalists.* Given the consciousness with its sensibilities safely housed in the psychic body which demonstrably survives the physical carcase, and we are like men saved from shipwreck, who are for the moment thankful and content, not giving thought whether they are landed on a hospitable shore, or on a barren rock, or on an island of cannibals.  It is not of course intended that this “hand to mouth” immortality is sufficient for the many thoughtful minds whose activity gives life and progress to the movement, but that it affords the relief which most people feel when in an age of doubt