found on earth. All this indicates her chelaship to Them, but in no way lowers her to us or warrants us in deciding that we are right in a hurried or modern judgment of her.

Now some Theosophists ask if there are other letters extant from her Masters in which she is called to account, is called their chela, and is chided now and then, besides those published. Perhaps yes. And what of it? Let them be published by all means, and let us have the full and complete record of all letters sent during her life; those put forward as dated after her death will count for naught in respect to any judgment passed on her, since the Masters do not indulge in any criticisms on the disciples who have gone from earth. As she has herself published letters and parts of letters from the Masters to her in which she is called a chela and is chided, it certainly cannot matter if we know of others of the same sort. For over against all such we have common sense, and also the declarations of her Masters that she was the sole instrument possible for the work to be done, that They sent her to do it, and that They approved in general all she did. And she was the first direct channel to and from the Lodge, and the only one up to date through which came the objective presence of the Adepts. We cannot ignore the messenger, take the message, and laugh at or give scorn to the one who brought it to us. There is nothing new in the idea that letters are still unpublished wherein the Masters put her below them, and there is no cause for any apprehension. But it certainly is true that not a single such letter has anything in it putting her below us; she must ever remain the greatest of the chelas.

There only remains, then, the position taken by some and without a knowledge of the rules governing these matters, that chelas sometimes write messages claimed to be from the Masters when they are not. This is an artificial position not supportable by law or rule. It is due to ignorance of what is and is not chelaship, and also to confusion between grades in discipleship. It has been used as to H. P. B. The false conclusion has first been made that an accepted chela of high grade may become accustomed to dictation given by the Master and then may fall into the false pretense of giving something from himself and pretending it is from the Master. It is impossible. The bond in her case was not of such a character to be dealt with thus. One instance of it would destroy the possibility of any more communication from the teacher. It may be quite true that probationers now and then have imagined themselves as ordered to say so and so, but that is not the case of an accepted and high chela who is irrevocably

pledged, nor anything like it. This idea, then, ought to be abandoned; it is absurd, contrary to law, to rule, and to what must be the case when such relations are established as existed between H. P. B. and her Masters.

WILLIAM Q. JUDGE.

HURRY.*

HAVE heard of a man who was born in a hurry, who lived in a hurry, who married in a hurry, who repented in a hurry— instead of at leisure, as so many do-who died in a hurry, and who went in a hurry-to another state of consciousness. His was undoubtedly an extreme case, and yet is not this element of hurry the curse of onr Western civilization? What is it that reduces us to clamor for "rapid transit" as the crowning grace of life, and prevents our recognizing any element in a journey as superior to that of speed? As the now-famous old Indian said: "We have all the time there is": what, then, are we trying to secure? Nevertheless, how many people we all know, who enter a room as if borne on the wings of the whirlwind, who keep every particle of the atmosphere in a state of restlessness while they remain, whose brows are wrinkled with anxiety, whose voices are sharpened with care, and who, having fidgeted through a brief call, are borne away again in a tempest of haste!

Another class of people are always in a hurry because they are always behindhand. At some time or other they have lost a golden half-hour, and the rest of their life seems to be spent in its fruitless pursuit. I have a friend of this class who is always unpunctual, and who scatters the time of other people with most reckless prodigality. She explains her dilatoriness by saying that she is always so much interested in what she is doing now, that she forgets all about what she has to do next; an excuse more satisfactory to herself than to those who are waiting for her. And another disappoints people because she always tries to do the work of two hours in fifty-nine minutes, and never gets over the fond delusion that she will yet accomplish it. This is the vain hope that betrays most of us, I think, and is the cause of much of that nervous restlessness so generally charged to the much-abused American climate.

*Read before the Seventh Annual Convention American Section at New York.

Yet there are those who live within its baneful influence, and are as unaffected by it as the dwellers on a mountain top are by the miasma of the valley far below. These are they who are in the world but not of it. Look at the clear and placid faces of the Sisters of Charity, of the Society of Friends, of those whose pursuits keep them far from the madding crowd and its constant and harassing interruptions. There are certain people whose presence is a benediction, whose coming brings with it a sense of repose that rests the weary spirit and seems to lift one above the petty turmoil of the world. These people are never in a hurry. It is impossible to associate the word with their gracious presence. When they enter, the busy wheels of existence stop, and the whirr does not begin again till they depart. Somehow they have lifted us above our carking cares, and when they leave us we awake, bewildered, from a beautiful dream of peace. It is not that they are careless of time, for that would interfere with the convenience of others, but they manage to be its masters, not its slaves.

Behind the superficial aspects of our hurry, however, there must lie a deeper cause, and I think we find it in the element of Greed. The machinery of our modern civilization has Mammon for its stoker, and "making haste to be rich" for its watchword. All trade is corrupted by the money-getting instinct, and in the mad race for wealth the devil generally gets the foremost rather than the hindmost. Men are so absorbed in the pursuit of riches that they can give no thought to the cultivation of the mind or the elevation of the soul. Home represents to these galley-slaves of money only a dormitory where they may snatch a few moments of rest from their toil. Their sons follow the same routine; their daughters are carefully educated because it is the fashion, and when these young girls emerge into the world and look for the men they are to marry, what do they find? Men who have no time to think, much less to read, who snatch a few hours for a hasty courtship between the figures of a dance or the courses of a dinner, and then, as the brief honeymoon wanes, the inevitable gulf widens between the two and another tale of domestic unhappiness begins. For the fever born of greed spreads into every realm of life. It keeps the man grinding at the countinghouse, it keeps the woman toiling over what she calls her "social duties", born of the same greed for more prestige, more fine raiment, more display than her neighbors.

Nor is the desire for riches and social position the only form of greed; there are others more subtle, less objectionable on the

face of them, but all, nevertheless, forms of desire for the. advancement or aggrandizement of self, and all productive of that element of hurry which is the bane of modern existence. We, as Theosophists, profess to believe in reïncarnation: but were it a real belief, it would, I think, give us that wide and far-reaching conception of life which alone should have weight to calm our excitement, and to make us say with Walt Whitman:

"Whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait;

My foothold is tenon'd and mortised in granite;

I laugh at what you call dissolution;

And I know the amplitude of time".

That is the great lesson the doctrine of reïncarnation should teach us, to know the amplitude of time. Why should we fume and fret because we are "not so far advanced" as some one else, not so highly developed as we think we ought to be, "desiring this man's art and that man's scope"? We are set in the midst of Eternity, not time, and are in a truer sense than perhaps Tennyson thought, "the heirs of all the ages". These years of life that we cling to so fondly as they sweep past us are but insignificant portions of our existence, and each existence is but a lightningflash across the dial of Eternity. All the phenomena of dreams and of hypnotic conditions teach us that time and space are illusions of this plane of consciousness which we call the waking plane, and that upon other planes all the relations of time and space are changed. We need to take this lesson to our hearts, then, of the uselessness of hurry, and, indeed, of its worse than uselessness. It is in the still liquid that the beautiful crystals form; the perturbed waters will bring forth nothing but idle foam. "Grow as the flower grows, unconsciously, but eagerly anxious to open its soul to the air". But there must be no hurry, no eager desire for growth, or the longing is frustrated and "you harden by the forcible passion for personal stature". And the Light on the Path, from which these words are taken, says further: "The peace you shall desire is that sacred peace which nothing can disturb, and in which the soul grows as does the holy flower upon the still lagoons".

Nor does this quietude necessarily involve idleness. "Without haste" but also "without rest" is the watchword of the stars, and the elimination of hurry does not imply inactivity. It is always better to do three things well than to do thirty things badly, and if we wish to purge our lives of the element of hurry, we must take as our rule two golden maxims: Never to try to do more in a day

than we can do well; and when sure we can accomplish a thing in half an hour, always to allow ourselves forty minutes. Then we

are able to move serenely through the bustle of life, and although each day we seem to have accomplished very little and to have relinquished very much, at the end of many days we shall find that on the whole we have done more and have done it better than when we grasped with both hands at the hedge-flowers, and tore away few blossoms and many thistles.

For, indeed, much of our hurry arises from an overwhelming sense of our own importance. We are too sure that if we are not on the spot everything will go wrong; that the work will not be properly done unless we direct it; that no one else can conduct a certain difficult transaction, or fill with any sort of satisfaction our own vacant place. But some turn of fate compels us to step aside, and lo! the wheels of the universe manage to roll on just as well as if we had been there. Let us, then, lay this lesson also to our hearts-there never was a man yet whose place could not be filled, and we shall have plucked another fruitful seed of hurry from our lives. A hundred years at least before Columbus discovered America, the "Good Counsel" of Geoffrey Chaucer was given to the world, and part of that good counsel read:

"Paine thee not each crooked to redress,

In trust of her that turneth as a ball;
Great rest lieth in little business".

And Shakespeare's keen insight recognized the root of much of our striving when he made Pembroke say:

"When workmen strive to do better than well,

They do confound their skill in covetousness".*

In that very delightful book containing the philosophy of Chonang-tsu, the Chinese mystic, there is a chapter called "Autumn Floods", wherein the Spirit of the River converses with the Spirit of the Ocean, and confesses that having seen the ocean he at last realizes the existence of something far greater than himself. To which the Spirit of the Ocean replies: "Now that you know your own insignificance, I can speak to you of great principles. Dimensions are limitless; time is endless. Conditions are not invariable; terms are not final. Thus the wise man looks back into the past, and does not grieve over what is far off, nor rejoice over what is near, for he knows that time is without end".

In a deeper sense, then, than was even in the thought of the wise old Indian, "we have all the time there is", and when once the idea of reïncarnation shall have become a living reality to us, it will

*King John, iv, 2.