I suppose the Crest-Wave rarely passes from a race without leaving a wide trail of insanity in its wake.  The life forces are strong; the human organisms through which they play are but—­as we know them.  Commonly these organisms are not directed by the Divine Soul, which has all too little of the direction of life in its hands; so the life-currents drift downward, instead of fountaining up; and exhaust these their vehicles, and leave them played out and mentally—­because long since morally—­deficient.  So come the cataclysmic wars and reigns of terror that mark the end of racial manvantaras:  it is a humanity gone collectively mad.  On the other hand, none can tell what immense safeguarding work may be done by the smallest sane co-ordinated effort upwards.  If peradventure the ten righteous shall be found—­but they must be righteous, and know what they are doing—­I will spare, and not destroy, saith the Lord.

(He said nothing about respectabilities.  I dare say there was quite a percentage of respectable chapel-going Sabbath-observing folk in the Cities of the Plain.)

And yet there must be always that dreadful possibility—­which perhaps has never become actual since the fall of Atlantis—­that a whole large section of mankind should go quite mad, and become unfit to carry on the work of evolution.  It is a matter of corrupting the streams of heredity; which is done by vice, excess, wrong living; and these come of ignorance.  Heaven knows how near it we may be today; I do not think Christendom stands, or has stood, so very far, from the brink.  And yet it is from the white race, we have supposed, that the coming races will be born; this is the main channel through which human evolution is intended to flow.—­We are in kall-yuga; the Mysteries are dead, and the religions have taken their place:  there has been no sure and certain link, organized on this plane, between the world and its Higher Self.  Each succeeding civilization, under these circumstances, has run a greater risk.

Of what race are we?  I say, of no race at all, but can view the matter as Human Souls, reincarnating egos, prepared to go where the Law bids us.  Races are only temporary institutions set up for the convenience of the Host of Souls.

We see, I suppose, the results of such a breakdown in Africa.  Atlanteans were segregated there; isolated; and for a million years degenerated in that isolation to what they are.  But their ancestors, before that segregation began, had better airships than we have; were largely giants, in more respects than the physical, were we are pygmies.  Now they are—­whatever may be their potentialities, whatever they may become—­actually an inferior reace.  And it is a racial stock that shows no signs of dying out.  What then?—­I suppose indeed there must be backward races, to house backward egos;—­though for that matter you would think that our Londons and Chicagos and the rest, with their slums, would provide a good deal of accommodation.